Toro Bardeci, Oscar Salvador; (2023) The mobility and identity of a Pehuenche community as expressed through their material culture (Alto Biobío, Chile). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This research focuses on the changing role of mobility within one Pehuenche comunidad, Cauñicú, which is part one of twenty legally recognised Pehuenche comunidades in southern Chile, South America. Working within an interdisciplinary perspective, I use archaeological, ethnographic, and historical sources, adopting a diachronic view to reflect on the processes of change that this social group has gone through: from highly mobile pastoralist in the Colonial period, to becoming validated officially as ´indigenous communities´ or comunidades indígenas by the Chilean state in the current context of globalisation. A defining characteristic of the Pehuenche has been the seasonal movement of some families from their annual residence in the lower valleys in colder seasons, to the highland pastures in summer, where they take their livestock and collect pinenuts from the Araucaria trees. However, this seasonal movement is in decline, and pinenuts may never have been as important a resource as the ‘Pehuenche’ ethnonym suggests. This research includes original ethnographic fieldwork to study how the socio-political organisation, economy, and perception of the landscape and their own past, as well as state policies have influenced the material culture and settlement organisation. This generates a landscape in which present and past material culture co-exist and can be explained from, and through, their cycle of mobility, with a strong sense of identity embedded in these aspects of Pehuenche culture. This maintenance of practices such as rituals, seasonal movements, and the material expressions connect the present Pehuenches to past ways of life. This approach gives importance to the historical processes of how mobile groups interacted with colonial societies and responded to changes through their material culture. It also serves to reflect on their collective identity, which is not only sustained through their current, more limited, mobility in a context of a globalised wider society, but in certain characteristics of their daily and ritual material assemblages.

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