Confronting the archive's rumour: Milcíades Vignati, Liborio Justo and the indigenous issue in Argentina

Abstract

This work is part of a larger project that seeks to compare the points of convergence and the differences in the conceptions of the indigenous legacy and of racial and cultural miscegenation, present in the works of divergent figures (coming from anthropology, from the national interpretation essay and from literature, from the cultured as well as the popular circuit; and from dissident political perspectives), in the period between the first Peronism and the beginning of the sixties. In this context, this articleexplores two divergent interpretations of the indigenous world that were produced in twentieth-century Argentina: the analysis carried out by the anthropologist Milcíades Vignati on a corpus of photographs taken of survivors of the so-called “Campaña al Desierto” (Desert Campaign), and the critical reading of the same “Campaña”, carried out by the historian Liborio Justo, from a Marxist perspective. Our perspective focuses on the opposing hermeneutics that both authors deploy on the documentary archives, exhuming the traces of state violence, which can be perceived in the bodies, in the photographs and in the texts of the past.