Alejandro Acuto

FELIX ACUTO, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Sacred Non-human Entities, Ritual Practices, and Indigenous Territorial Claims: Developing an Engaged Anthropology and Indigenous Archaeology in South America. This project has explored the interactions that the indigenous communities of the Puna de Salta (Argentina) have established throughout history with the sacred, non-human entities that dwell in this territory. We have organized and conducted this project together with the indigenous organization Red del Pueblo Atacama, whose members seek to reconnect with their history and cultural forms, especially spiritual ones, after decades of socio-political and juridical marginalization and denial, discrimination, and repression of their identities and cultural practices by the national and provincial states. In a context of reemergence and reconstitution of indigenous identities and organizations in South America in general and Argentina in particular, but also in a context in which hegemonic groups, pursuing the appropriation of native peoples’ territories, deny the identities, pre-existence, and continuity of indigenous collectives in their territories, this project have sought to develop an engaged and activist anthropology/indigenous archaeology oriented to support indigenous territorial claims and to collaborate with the reconstitution of the cultural and spiritual practices that indigenous peoples were forced to abandon and that today they seek to reestablish. During this project, indigenous people have assumed a central role, conducting the field activities, collecting the data, and making suggestions that improved organization, schedule, and finances of the project.