“Going Native” and the Development of Indian Policy in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

• In Event: Identity on (the) Edge: Spatial and Social Frontiers in Latin American Narrative

Abstract

In his travelogue, Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870), Lucio V. Mansilla describes participating in traditional Ranquel toasts and eating without a knife to the delight of his indigenous hosts. Immersed in this peripheral setting, he questions the values traditionally assigned to the concepts of civilization and barbarism and finds himself happily adopting local customs. Later, the Italian-Argentine naturalist Clemente Onelli would have his picture taken dressed as the “Cacique O’nelli,” wrapped in furs and other indigenous garments. What was it about the spaces of the frontier that led so many nineteenth-century Argentine anthropologists and explorers to heed the call of the wild and “go native,” despite their frequent assertions from the urban spaces of Buenos Aires and Córdoba that the indigenous tribes were innately inferior?
In this paper, I examine several first-hand accounts in order to establish the mechanisms and vocabulary of going native. I then place these experiences in context in order to establish if, in the nineteenth-century River Plate, the act of going native ultimately permitted the emergence of new ways of relating to marginalized others or if it rather served to cement established boundaries and exclusionary ways of thinking. I conclude that while going native led to looser racial categorizations in the moment, it most frequently did not affect the theories and beliefs of the Argentine intellectual elite in the long run, thus tying sympathizing with the native tribes to a particular spatial context necessarily removed from the spaces of dominant culture.

Author

• Ashley E Kerr, University of Idaho