This research focuses on the changing role of mobility within one
Pehuenche comunidad, Cauñicú, which is part one of twenty legally recognised
Pehuenche comunidades in southern Chile, South America. Working within an
interdisciplinary perspective, I use archaeological, ethnographic, and historical
sources, adopting a diachronic view to reflect on the processes of change that
this social group has gone through: from highly mobile pastoralist in the Colonial
period, to becoming validated officially as ´indigenous communities´ or
comunidades indígenas by the Chilean state in the current context of
globalisation. A defining characteristic of the Pehuenche has been the seasonal
movement of some families from their annual residence in the lower valleys in
colder seasons, to the highland pastures in summer, where they take their
livestock and collect pinenuts from the Araucaria trees. However, this seasonal
movement is in decline, and pinenuts may never have been as important a
resource as the ‘Pehuenche’ ethnonym suggests. This research includes original
ethnographic fieldwork to study how the socio-political organisation, economy,
and perception of the landscape and their own past, as well as state policies have
influenced the material culture and settlement organisation. This generates a
landscape in which present and past material culture co-exist and can be
explained from, and through, their cycle of mobility, with a strong sense of identity
embedded in these aspects of Pehuenche culture. This maintenance of practices
such as rituals, seasonal movements, and the material expressions connect the
present Pehuenches to past ways of life. This approach gives importance to the
historical processes of how mobile groups interacted with colonial societies and
responded to changes through their material culture. It also serves to reflect on
their collective identity, which is not only sustained through their current, more
limited, mobility in a context of a globalised wider society, but in certain
characteristics of their daily and ritual material assemblages
