Find in Library

The Tapieté have always represented something of an anthropological enigma because they speak Guaraní but lead a culturally Chacoan way of life. Anthropologists have alternatively proposed that they are either a «Guaranized» population of Chacoan origin or, inversely, a «Chaqueñized» population of immigrant Guaraní. The present essay suggests a re-reading of ethnohistorial sources pertaining to the Chaco and argues for a guaranization «in two epochs» of some Chacoan groups. This process would have begun in the sixteenth century and been carried out via intermediaries: Chané groups, themselves previously guaranized, forced by colonial-era dynamics to flee from their homelands into the relatively inhospitable Chaco. The essay concludes that the case of the Tapiete is paradigmatic of the broader dynamic of ethnogenesis in the Chaco and its periphery, a dynamic that remains to be reconceptualized in new investigations by emerging analytic tools and theories.