Cigali Tikaiku, a view to the history of the catamarca diaguitas

Abstract

Although archeology, anthropology and ethnohistory have contributed much to further our knowledge on indigenous societies from the pre-Incan and pre-Hispanic periods, it is difficult to find pedagogical materials focusing on the philosophical and symbolic aspects of these cultures and allowing us both to approach the subject of the Andean worldviews and to imagine and understand how these societies were and the historical processes developed from the time of the conquest until the present. In the pedagogical search for an increasingly complex understanding of indigenous societies, the use of novels, documentaries, poems, etc., becomes a valuable tool that, even though it may not satisfy the need for historical or conceptual precision, has the virtue of working with the construction of imagination and everyday life on the knowledge of the past. Taking into account these difficulties and virtues, in this article we try to analyze how the work with a novel-fiction can help understand the specificity of two fundamental notions of indigenous thought, such as those of worldview and territoriality.