Lucila Bugallo

The workshop's aim is to bring together anthropologists and archaeologists from different countries working on relations between humans and other animals in southern South America to discuss such relationships with broader classes of living beings in distinctive highland and lowland environmental settings. We aim to overcome traditional separations between these settings and to go beyond anthropocentric views, exploring how people and other animals together transform their mutual relationships in specific environments. By taking into account connections or contrasts between highland and lowland societies –including human and non human beings- we will debate new modes of approaching these relations. Our objectives are to discuss human-animal relations and transformations based on ethnographic fieldwork and ontological perspectives, employing properly informed comparison between ethnographies in different regions. This comparison/contrast between geographical areas and subject matters allows us to cast light on specific modes in human/nonhuman animal relationships, and of these with other powerful beings of the cosmos. It also permits discussion of our materials in the context of a multispecies anthropology and an anthropology of life. The workshop's scope is to further our understanding of relations of predation, symbiosis and commensality, considering variables such as hunting/being hunted, caring for (herding)/being cared for (herded), nurturer or being nurtured, and the series of transformations that arise, crucially, as contemporary issues for developing anthropological theories.