Migrar y seguir perteneciendo: intimidad, ausencia eclesiástica y competencia lúdica en la Anata-Carnaval aymara de Chiapa (Chile)

Abstract

The article analyzes the Anata-Carnival festivity celebrated in the Andean town of Chiapa in the Tarapacá Region, Great North of Chile. I suggest that this celebration constitutes one of the main events that promote the reproduction of feelings of local belonging, as well as of processes of identity resignification for the vast majority of those who have migrated from this town to cities addressed here through ethnicization and communalization mechanisms. Adopting an observant participation methodology mediated through my role of photographer of Andean festivities, as well as through a multi-sited ethnography that allowed to conduct in depth interviews with people who live permanently, stationary or have returned to this town, I reveal the implications that the Anata-Carnival has for the collective identity-construction of the people of Chiapa, under the hypothesis that migration does not break with community membership. I propose that the characteristics of this holiday: intimacy; absence of the church; and the ancestral playful competence of Mankazaya (partiality from below) and Arakzaya (partiality from above), allow for the reproduction of Aymara dynamics that translate for those who migrated to citys in the Great North of Chile in the possibility and responsibility of maintaining community ties and continuing to belong.