Guaraní Territorialization: State Narratives and Indigenous Logics in South America’s Eighteenth-Century Borderlands

Abstract

This analysis presents key features of Guaraní territorialization over the long term. While official discourse increasingly circumscribed indigenous territory into a contiguous area, one that was discretely and homogeneously divided among different indigenous “nations” or imperial jurisdictions, indigenous territorial logic revealed the porosity of those limits, whether ethnic or imperial, based on strategies far removed from (or at times close to) normative and typological definitions. These indigenous logics were woven into dynamicsocial patterns that endured over long periods and outlived both the fall of the Iberian empires and the dissolution of the reducciones.