Heaven on Earth: Inter-Ethnic Dialogues with Sky Entities

Abstract

For the Moqoit of the Argentine Chaco, the cosmos is modeled by the human and non-human societies that inhabit it. That is why the link with the sky is conceived as the establishment of relationships with the entities of this region. These relationships are part of a complex network of inter-ethnic links with various human and non-human groups from different areas of the cosmos. In this work, we intend to explore in this key the links of some Moqoit communities with a powerful celestial woman in their connections with water, the meteorites of Campo del Cielo, the world tree, the serpent, the criollos, and Christianity. We seek to show how the Moqoit sky makes much deeper sense when it is considered in the general frame of their cosmo-politics.