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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Quality of Life of the Guaraní Community

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description

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished two forms of clustering of base: community and society, defining the community as that form of socialization in which subjects, according to their common origin, local proximity or shared values, had attained a degree of implicit consensus. Currently, it can be understood as locality and as a group relationship, emphasizing the first a physical/geographical proximity and the second, interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, considering quality of life, Tonon (2007) points out that its study concerns the material and psychosocial environment, recognizing two areas of well-being: the social and the psychological, the latter referring to the experience and assessment that people make of their situation, including positive or negative findings and a global vision of their life called life satisfaction. Taking into account the above mentioned, the present work considers the Guarani of Salta, self-proclaimed Ava-Guarani, which belongs to the linguistic family of the Tupi Guarani, usually known as Chiriguanos. Originated in the Amazonian jungles, have migrated and settled in the eastern slopes of the Andes, in the current Bolivian departments of Chuquisaca and Tarija, in the Bolivian Chaco (Izozo). It was a migrant population for centuries, in search of farmland for its main food source, corn and cassava. This population could not be conquered by the Incas, but neither exceeded the limits of its borders. Since the eighteenth century, the Franciscan missions settled in almost all their territory, with very few groups beyond their control. To 1919, the missions were secularized, clashed with the Bolivian army, and people were forced to seek work elsewhere while many increased their migration to Argentina where, toward the end of the nineteenth/early twentieth century there was an economic boom in the Northeast, primarily to work in sawmills and sugar mills. The Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay generated other migratory peak toward the Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy. Such migration would continue for a long time, corresponding both to individuals and families until recent, always in search of land for crops or different forms of access to monetary income. In this long migration, they were accommodating to various forms of activities as means for their survival. According to the above mentioned, this work intends to analyze the Guarani’s own sense of community and the characteristics of their notion of a good life.