"Somos contemporáneas de historias diferentes ...". Etnografiando la vida social de los Aymaras del norte de Chile desde la perspectiva de los estudios de género y de las etnicidades.

Abstract

This thesis exposes the results of an investigation whose purpose was to know the social inequalities based on gender condition in the Aymara community of northern Chile. It applies the notions of gender and ethnicity to understand the dynamics of the Aymara community in the last fifty years, a context in which the structures of domination have produced cultural, economic, social, political and psychosocial continuities and discontinuities. The analysis of ethnographies, life stories, interviews, analysis of texts and census data from the year 2002, facilitates the understanding of the role played by gender regimes in the dynamics of depeasantization, deagrarianization and urbanization. On the one hand, the effects of the free market and the westernization of sociocultural practices are deepening the unequal distribution of work, since the economic agency of women is central to the reproduction of domestic units and because the feminine represents fertile life. The husband-wife relationship implies norms and values that organize their behavior and legitimize the control of women's work by men.