The artifact and the route: transhumant technologies for imagining futures

The objective of this talk is to present the findings of a four-year study conducted with transhumant Andean communities in the Huemules de Niblinto - Laguna Laja Biological Corridor in northern Patagonia, Chile. The research has focused on documenting the material culture of the herders and the biocultural routes from the disciplines of design and social sciences, as a device for ancestral knowledge that links collective memory traced from science, or as pointed out by Melgarejo et al. (2023, #), processes of cosmo/science and inter/scientific practices in dialogue, thus their conceptions of nature and its interrelationships.

The research has developed an archival and narrative inventory that has been divided into three areas of knowledge: the cosmos (orientation through the stars and geological elements); the route (herbalism, GIS, KMZ); and matter (properties acquired by artisanal materials through laboratory test results), in an exercise to systematize the interdependence between the human and non-human environment in a rugged mountain context that provides solutions to contemporary problems such as generational change or the mitigation of the human footprint in mountain environments, highlighting the role of transhumant communities as witnesses to change.

The proposal includes the presentation of methodological tools used and adapted to the context, which have the value of being replicable when engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue with local knowledge as a means of reconnecting with nature, projecting the co-creation of fair and biodiverse futures from the perspective of the heritage of communities rooted in the landscape; To paraphrase Ingold (2012), this is an attentive way of being in the world and thus also of responding to it, recovering the relational dimension of knowledge and understanding that artifacts and routes are not just things or traces, but living networks that safeguard local indigenous knowledge for the regeneration and protection of mountain ecosystems.

Transhumance, Bioculturality, Interrelationality, Ancestral Science