Abstract

MONTANI, Rodrigo. La construcción material de la persona entre los Wichís del Gran Chaco. Avá [online]. 2013, n.22, pp.00-00. ISSN 1851-1694.

Wichí people sometimes declare that the body is a kind of garment characteristic of every species, which wraps spiritual elements that humans share with some animals, plants, and spiritual owners. At least in metaphorical terms, the body is for the person a laqo, that is “his/her clothing”, “his/her possession”, or “his/her thing”. In this paper I try to study the referential scope of the expression laqoy (plural of laqo), and to show how these artifacts (and their verbal conceptualizations) contribute to the process of material building, maintaining, and transformation of Wichí person in his/her cosmological, ethnic, gender, age, and “professional” dimensions. After describing the roles of different laqoy in the different categories of the person ordering them in terms of the vital cycle (babies, children, boys and girls, men and women, elderly people, shamans, mourning relatives, and heirs), I draw some considerations about the meaningful link between body, person and artifact.

Keywords : Wichí; Person; Artifacts; Life Cycle; Body.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )