Paper
Guaraní women's agency: rescue of ancestral knowledge and artisanal work in the Peña Morada community, San Martín department, Salta, Argentina.
presenters
Andrea Luján Gallo
Nationality: Argentina
Residence: Argentina
independent
Presence:Online
Keywords:
Indigenous women - crafts - rural tourism
Abstract:
In the Peña Morada community, as in the neighboring communities of Yariguarenda and Campo Blanco, the Community Rural Tourism project was launched a few years ago. It consists of offering a tourist alternative in the north of the Province of Salta from indigenous communities. Thus, each of the aforementioned communities offers tourists different “cultural products,” generating a Yungas tourism circuit. For this community it implies the possibility of generating a source of employment for young people in the community, who began training in the art of artisanal basket weaving, with the help of Francisca Mendoza, who has known the technique since she was a child. Those who work in the workshop receive fixed financial aid financed by an NGO. This is one of the many projects that Francisca manages to promote in favor of the community, revaluing ancestral knowledge in the creation of articles for domestic use and ornament with her own cultural techniques and resources from the environment through its transmission to women and adolescents.
This article derives from the research work for the degree in Anthropology and is framed within the search to contribute a feminist perspective to the methodology of the discipline.
Ethnography combines the activities carried out in Field Work for the
description of social events or phenomena from a reflective stance in all
the instances of ethnographic work (Guber; 2011). According to Castañeda Salgado (in
Blázquez Graf, Flores Palacios and Ríos Everardo (coords; 2012), said description
involves the problematization of the position of women in society to
consider them cultural creators and identify, analyze and interpret the orientations,
gender content and biases that place people in differentiated positions.