The 'Long 19th Century' among the Chiquitano: Ethnogenesis, Ethnic Definitions and Social Change

• Applicant: Dr. Cecilia Gabriela Martínez
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555102621

The general objective of this project is to study the Chiquitano people from an ethnohistorical perspective. To achieve this, the proposal is to work with information from written documentation that, through an ethnological and ethnohistorical reading, will allow an understanding of the socio-cultural, migratory, territorial, and historical trajectory of the Chiquitano Indigenous people. The project focuses on the "long 19th century", which extends from the last decades of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The chronological delimitation correlates with the missionary regime's secularization after the Jesuits' expulsion and the rubber crisis. Broadly speaking, the project aims to develop a reconstruction of the history of the Chiquitano people that challenges the static image of their identity associated with the Jesuit-missionary canon and reverses the indifference that the classification of 'Bolivian Indians' implies for the group that inhabits Brazilian territory. By describing, analyzing, and interpreting evidence from the "long 19th century", the project seeks to transcend the epistemic constraints imposed by their current affiliation to the nation-states of Bolivia or Brazil. It also aims to study their socio-cultural profile through their participation in historical processes resulting from the advancement of white colonization on both sides of the border area delimited by the Upper Paraguay River. Given that the methodology of working with documents and interpreting data requires the combination of tools from history, ethnography, and ethnohistory, the recovery of the ethnohistory of the Chiquitano people proposed here combines two possible conceptions of the thematic and problematic domain of the discipline. On the one hand, it involves reconstructing the history of the Chiquitanos in a broad, linear, and chronological sense as a chapter in a more general history. On the other hand, it is a matter of identifying those elements that make it an ethnohistory, that is, an indigenous way of conceiving and managing situations of change and interacting with other groups and actors, indigenous or white, in accordance with a worldview and a specific concept of the social. The logic that gives meaning to the social structure and worldview that identifies the Chiquitano Indigenous people and brings them closer to other Amerindian groups is derived as a synchronic element from the abovementioned diachrony. Therefore, in terms of conceptual, theoretical, and heuristic reflection, the project aims to contribute to the development of ethnohistory in the lowlands of South America, from the peculiar casuistry of an area long reserved to the field of ethnology and thus to the field of ethnohistory, long identified almost exclusively with the study of Andean societies.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position