Chañarales: symbolic space of healing and danger Essay carried out on ethnographic notes with peasants from Huarpe communities in the department of Lavalle, NE in the province of Mendoza (Argentina)

Abstract

The work manifests a first theoretical discussion framed in further research still in the process of healing knowledge and practices associated with plants in the region of “Guanacache” (northeast of Mendoza, Arg.), settlers from the 1990s came to personify a collective subject huarpe, with appreciation links biological, cultural and social continuity with the past indigenous populations. Under the assumption that the practices and transmitted knowledge involving the use of plants could not be referring only to natural elements formally ordered outside the social sense to give meaning and context, I propose from an ethnographic look to build the historical and contextual character acquire chañarales (native forests consist mainly of chañar: medicinal species botanically defined as Geoffroea decorticans) while tissue spaces of sociability in various ritual celebrations that take place: initiation of young people in the field, prosperity of future harvests, healing word to disease of plants and animals, among others. My focus of study are healing plants and by employing ontological theories hybrid society nature that try to explain the relational ways that chañarales would be called by the local people as areas of spiritual strength and material for the cure that synchronize alliances between past worlds and simultaneously present.