Myths and countermyths of aridity: geographical imaginaries and water in Catamarca, Argentina

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationships with aridity Catamarca province (Argentina) during the 19th and, 20th centuries, from a historical and anthropological perspective. Aridity will operate as a category condensing a broader series of descriptors, including abandonment, poverty, backwardness, lack of culture, drought, laziness, misery. Through documentary research, we will try to demonstrate that these descriptors are consolidated as "obvious" spatial characteristics between 1870 and 1920, repeatedly diagnosed by contemporaries and understood by them as a fatality that weighs on the province. This process is closely linked to territorial practices and imaginations mobilized by actors associated with our local versions of modernity. In this framework, Catamarca will be increasingly linked to desert, not the Patagonian (conquerable) but to other “unviable” desertus (Benedetti, 2005), abandoned by civilization and nature, un-cultivated (in-cultus). We will argue that this set of categories, articulated and consolidated over time, constitute a geographical imaginary (Massey, 1999) and have the characteristics of a myth: a narrative with the power to organize time, space, practices and subjectivities.