‘Was I an indio?’: Ambivalent self-ascriptions, gatherings and scatterings in the trajectory of a Ranquel man in central Argentina

Abstract

This article presents Eugenio’s life story, which begins with his youth in the 1940s as a puestero ‘among the Indians’ in western La Pampa (Argentina). The narrative traces his migration to the city, his incorporation into the labor market, his involvement in union life, and finishes with his current participation as a werken in a Ranquel community. As I argue, for Eugenio and other Ranqueles I have worked with, the central axis of articulation of identity and difference, continuity and discontinuity is not anchored in a particular culture to recover. Rather, it is situated at the level of relationships, in the alternation over time between periods of ‘being all together’ and periods of desparrame or scattering. Eugenio’s life story follows the paths of kinship, friendship, and neighborhood, and introduces multiplicity, hiatuses, and contradictions, while providing clues as to how Ranqueles themselves name, characterize and explain ethnic processes usually labeled by anthropologists as ‘ethnogenesis’ or ‘re-emergence’.