Family farmers, and afterwards? The impact of the inclusion of indigenous organizations in the state structure

Abstract

In this article I examine the establishment in Argentina of the paradigm of what has been described, since mid-2000, as the Family Farming sector. From an ethnographic approach, I consider in particular the structure and functioning of the Family Farming Department, and I examine how this office related to the indigenous organization Qullamarka in the Salta province. I pay attention to the ways in which this organization was reformulated within a political context in which, to some extent, the emergence and development of grassroots organizations was favored, while at the same time there was a structure that limited and shaped its functioning. I observe the ways in which some indigenous communities were incorporated as family agriculturalists to public policies and how this reconfiguration modified their relation with the state, both at the provincial and national levels, as well as the impact that this had inside their own organization.