La Patagonia en postales fotográficas: Misioneros salesianos y construcción de imaginarios sobre selk̀nam, kaweskar y yámanas entre 1880 y 1920

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, Chile and Argentina occupied Patagonia with the goal of displacing or subjugating the indigenous peoples who lived there. Both countries commended the Salesian Mission with the task of evangelizing and "civilizing" these dominated groups, which entailed the construction of an image of "the other" or "the savage" by means of photographs which circulated in these two countries as well as in Europe. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Salesian Missionaries made postcards with such images and used them as "artifacts" to publicize their missionary work in "remote" and "exotic" locales. Their photographs of the Selknam, Kaweskar and Yamana peoples recreate mental images from their countries of origin which reproduce the old good and bad savage dichotomy. This discourse reveals certain aspects of the missionaries' social, economic and cultural reality and, at the same time, conceals, denies and provides a biased and partial view of that reality. The photographs analyzed in this paper are constructed from a Eurocentric and colonialist perspective.