Unpacking Power Dynamics in the Paraguayan Chaco through Indigenous Women’s Biographies: An Historically Informed Sociological Analysis

In this presentation, I discuss how I can explain current power dynamics in the Paraguayan Chaco by focusing on Indigenous women’s often marginalized life histories and engaging their collective and family histories. My analysis is based on two Indigenous women’s biographical reconstructions, which allows us to open up explanations beyond dominant discourses and static assumptions about the past. By adopting a historical and processual sociological approach, I assert that we can understand the complexities of colonial dynamics in the Chaco, starting with how Indigenous women experience, transform, and narrate them.

The two biographers currently live in Indigenous communities, where their families have established themselves over generations within the dynamics of colonization that started in the late 1800s, brought about by industrial work regimes, war, religious campaigns, and the transformation of their territory from forest to production fields. Each generation experienced these processes differently, transmitting them through their different strategies to survive, adapt, and reposition their perspectives, while transforming and contesting them.

Consequently, the biographers’ dialectical relationship with their collective and family past enables them to interpret a fragmented territory, the loss of native languages and/or cultural practices, and stories of collective violence. The biographers have internalized (and transformed) rules for preserving oral memory and frameworks of orientation which help them to (re)interpret their collective history and its dethematized topics, navigate ambivalences between tradition and colonization, and develop strategies for overcoming relations of domination. These processes reflect the power dynamics that shape the social structure of today’s Chaco.