Abstract

VEZUB, Julio Esteban. Languages, territoriality and ethnicity: Valentín Saygüeque's Letters since 1880. Intersecciones antropol. [online]. 2006, n.7, pp.287-304. ISSN 1850-373X.

Between 1860 and 1881 Saygüeque counted on the assistance of literate secretaries. From his toldos in southern Neuquén he exchanged letters with other chiefs, authorities, and traders from Argentina, Chile, and Araucanía. In this paper, a manuscript preserved in the Archivo General de la Nación, sent to Álvaro Barros, the governor of Patagonia in 1880 in the context of the Argentine military campaigns, is transcribed and analysed. Saygüeque enumerated the list of caciques and capitanejos supposedly subordinate to his "Gobernación Indígena de las Manzanas." Data is included on the languages to which the names of the caciques belong, on kinship ties, and on the location of the chiefdoms included in the list. The onomastic methodology of the traditional ethnography of the first half of the 20^th century is put to the test, with the purpose of defining its limitations and contributions to the acknowledgement of the role of kinship, the use of languages, territoriality, and the processes of the political formation of ethnicity. The "Gobernación Indígena de las Manzanas" is interpreted as an unfinished project, a pluri-ethnic confederation of caciques and relatives under the chiefdom of Saygüeque, who exhibited the scope of his alliances, as well as the diversity and simultaneous construction of the "Manzanero" people as a local expression of a generic identity associated with the mapuche or indigena during the second half of the 19^th century.

Keywords : Manzaneros; Mapuche; Tehuelche; Patagonia.

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