The Gran Chaco is currently experiencing unprecedented rates of deforestation as expansion of agriculture and beef cattle production accelerate. Infrastructure development has been central to this boom, facilitating new extractive frontiers. Inspired by Tim Ingold’s (2007) concept of wayfaring, this presentation explores the historical movements of mestizo settlers - small ranchers and hunters - in Paraguay's northern Chaco, arguing that mobility was a constitutive practice through which they came to know, inhabit and forge the landscape. Against dominant narratives that portray road infrastructure as integrating an "isolated" region, these life stories reveal a dense network of paths and trails that linked places while also sustaining social relations, seasonal work cycles, and more-than-human entanglements. Tracing these trajectories shows how landscapes have long been organized through movement and invites us to rethink mobility as a culturally and ecologically situated practice that unsettles contemporary infrastructural logics.
Speaker: Paula Casanova is Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty at UT Austin's Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and prior degrees in Human Ecology and Germanic Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Asuncion (Paraguay). Since 1998 she has carried out research in Paraguay with Pai Tavytera, Mbya, Ayoreo, Guaraní-Occidentales and Nivaclé communities, and more recently with Mennonite immigrants and mestizo populations. Her work focuses on gender and sexuality, Indigenous-state relations, Indigenous urbanity, and political ecology.