Honhat. The Name of the Land

Abstract

“You can enter into the Chaco; you can leave it”, so say the people living on the banks of the Pilcomayo River, which divides Argentina from Paraguay. As if where the paved road ends and the forest begins, a world is replaced by another: the Land, that the Wichí people call “Honhat”, the most precious and precarious thing for indigenous people and campesinos who inhabit the semi-arid region, affected by decades of political struggles to obtain the legal title of the lands where they live.

Honhat is an ongoing project that is a part of a large ethnographic research about the restitution land process that I started conducting from 2009 in Salta Province (Argentina).