Rivista | Lagoonscapes
Fascicolo monografico | 2 | 1 | 2022
Articolo | From sagua’a to Ox-Dollars

From sagua’a to Ox-Dollars

Cattle and Human Assemblages in the Paraguayan Chaco

Abstract

In this article, we will focus on cattle-human relations in the colonisation of two different but connected regions of the Paraguayan Chaco: the Puerto Casado territory and the Mennonite colonies. In particular, we aim at showing how colonisation unfolds through multiple, unpredictable encounters, or what Tsing also calls “contingent lineages”. As these provisional encounters ‘take hold’ through time, they give birth to different worlds and bring different beings into existence. Building on Anna Tsing’s recent work (2015), we trace the historical evolution of these “vulnerable” and “shifting assemblages” of both humans – with their material and financial technologies – and non-humans (animals/cows/grasses). In so doing, we propose that colonisation – the “becoming-necessary” of these aleatory encounters, as Louis Althusser puts it –, rather than a fact accomplished once and for all, is constantly (re-)produced through an incessant flux of “precarious combinations”


Open access | Peer reviewed

Presentato: 25 Marzo 2022 | Accettato: 14 Giugno 2022 | Pubblicato 08 Luglio 2022 | Lingua: en

Keywords PlantationoceneCattle domesticationFeralityParaguayan Chaco


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