Living with the Enemy. Witchcraft and Disability in the Chaco Region of Salta (Argentina)

Abstract

Witchcraft as a causal agent of diseases and other misfortunes has been a subject
of recurrent interest in the studies of the Chaco peoples of Argentina. The aim of this article is to analyze from an existential phenomenological perspective how witchcraft is experienced by a young mother and her little disabled son every day and how this notion is shaped individually to find viable solutions to the problems this woman must face both in their own home and in the community. As part of the analysis, I have included the relationships these peoples have with the local public health system and with my own presence in the community as a physician but also as an ethnographer. In this sense, at a methodological level, the work takes into account the intersubjective dimension of ethnography and a detailed approach to the experience of the ethnographer and her interlocutors, taking into account the influence of the structures and the geopolitical order that mediate these experiences.