Jóvenes mapuche en movimiento: la metafísica sedentaria en foco

Abstract

The research inquiry on young indigenous mobility offers up for discussion three theoretical dimensions: the relation between space and social practice; the construction of aboriginality in different contexts; and age as a category that structures social life. Taking into consideration different situations that involve young mapuche from the province of Río Negro (Argentina), this essay approaches the discussion by putting in tension the sedentarist metaphysic that is inherent to national states, with a perspective centered on mobility as social practice involving multiple frictions. The analysis deals, in first place, with the differential fixations and mobilities produced throughout the historical process of incorporation of Patagonia to the Argentinean state. This process involved a specific territorial configuration in geopolitical and productive terms: all at once, it strengthened the articulation between state, nation, and territory and settled the duality between the rural and the urban. In second place, the essay approaches mobilities and frictions that, produced in every day social practices, are structured at the intersection between age, aboriginality, and gender. These mobilities enable –and struggle towards– certain transits that have effects in community territorial configurations.