Mujeres Indígenas: ¿un actor político? ¿Una fórmula neoliberal?

Abstract

This article examines the various forms that the NGO development policies aimed at women in indigenous communities of northern Argentina take. It focuses on the process that led to the establishment of an organization of native indigenous women and its articulation with local development agencies. The purpose of the article is to gain awareness of the conflictual and tense relationships among the state, NGOs, and indigenous communities—referred to as friction. Taking into account the risks and unexpected potentials that arise from heterogenous and unequal encounters, I use an ethnographic approach to ask to what extent the relationships and actions promoted by development agencies can be regarded as neoliberal interventions or whether they should be considered as giving rise to new configurations of power and culture. I assume that some interventions become diffuse, fragmented, and scattered practices, which, in the interstices, generate conditions to contest and confront established power centers. Without denying the contradictory and distorted effects produced by routinized governmental interventions, I seek to underscore the ways that people mobilize to resist the truths in the name of which they are governed and to change the conditions in which they live. [Argentina, development, ethnicity, indigenous people, NGO, social anthropology].