Ancestral Women and New Women. Social representations of gender in development interventions aimed at indigenous women of the Argentine Chaco

Abstract

The article analyzes the social representations of gender present in the meeting spaces created between pastoral agents and indigenous women during the 1980s, when a gender perspective began to be incorporated into development projects aimed at the Chaco indigenous people. These development interventions are framed in the actions of a network of indigenous pastoral missions that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s and spread throughout the eastern part of the province of Salta and the center-west of the provinces of Chaco and Formosa, Argentina. Methodologically, it uses documents from the time and ethnographic interviews carried out with the pastoral agents and indigenous women involved in the aforementioned projects.