On Cosmos and Technique in Body Transformations among the Qom of the South American Gran Chaco

Abstract

Based on an ethnography produced between 2012 and 2018, in qom communities located in the middle course of the Bermejo River, in the South American Gran Chaco, I explore the notion of technique involved in artifices through which qualities of the cosmos are incorporated into the human body. I start from the idea that the arts and their effects, before responding to evolutionary gradients or cultural variability, are linked to cosmopolitical articulations. In qom mythology, cultural attributes and arts come from an extra-social context and are acquired by humans in contingent situations thanks to the agency of non-human beings. This assumption of the externality of the sources of knowledge and practical skills reappears in the ways in which contemporary experiences of acquiring virtues for dance, singing, healing, hunting, and oratory, among others, are described. As in other lowland areas of South America, here technique emerges as a non-human attribute. These notions depart from the historicity contained in the idea of technology as a universal diacritic of the process of hominization and the distancing of humankind from the natural background. The experience of the qom people leads us to think of technology and its productive effects as an event that makes it possible to describe, more than the mode of concretion of one culture, the possibility of encounters between humans and non-humans, and through this to reflect on the virtues of the latter and the shortcomings of the former.