"Performance-investigación colaborativa. Vol. 1. Confluencias transdisciplinares entre las ciencias sociales y las artes" (2024), Silvia Citro, 
"Cuerpos contemporáneos, subjetividad y emociones", libro compilado por Margarita María Uribe Viveros de la Institución Universitaria de Envigado (PYCIS), Colombia. Descarga gratuita en 
La publicación “Devenires del canto de las mujeres qom del Chaco argentino. Del espacio doméstico indígena al espectáculo híbrido intercultural”, de 
This first journey contains a provocative hypothesis – namely, there is a common experience of corporality with two dimensions. One is the indivisibility of the subject from the world, stated by Merleau-Ponty in his study of body perception, and the other the recognition of the body as the locus of the force that drives the subject to transform the world, described by Nietzsche in his studies on the power of will. Citro finds these experiences in her ethnography of the Toba – the first in their representations and the second in their ritual dances.
The second journey takes us through the main historical processes of the Toba in order to explain their present situation. Rather than ethnohistory, it is a genealogy of the Toba bodies and imaginaries which helped in the successive formation of four imaginaries (hunterswarriors, rural workers, evangelios, and Peronist) identified by Citro as the foundations to understand the past and present identitary disputes of these groups, and revealing the symbolic matrix on which they are based.
The hypothesis here states that the aboriginal religious movement called Evangelio has favored the conflictive social reproduction of the qom, in a pendular oscillation between integration with and autonomy from the white world.
The third journey describes and explains the role of the meaningful bodies in Toba ritual performances and everyday life. Her hypothesis is that the ancient aboriginal rituals have coalesced at present in the evangelio rituals, while these cults also allow the appropriation and reelaboration of different elements from mainstream society. As a complement to this hypothesis, Citro claims that the conflictive diversity of the Evangelio churches causes a dynamic complex of relationships and power
struggles according to the ritual role of each gender and age group. Because age and gender roles are crucial in their celebrations, this last journey moves through the adult-elders, youngsters, and women performances in the Evangelio rituals. Although among the Toba the elders are the natural political and religious leaders, both youths and women dispute their power. Therefore, Citro points out that while those four imaginaries are key to the self-adscription of Toba identity, they are constantly in question, producing peculiar appropriations of these meanings that are inscribed on the perception of their corporality: “powerful” elders, “interstitial” youths, or “threatening” women.
“The Comeback” is the epilogue of this journey. Just as the book starts with the words of a Toba interviewee (Pablo Vargas), it ends also with a fragment on the history of his people written by him. Citro explains why. In the Hegelian system the final synthesis is attained through a comeback on itself. In ethnography this implies a return to the fieldwork, and that is why her book ends at the point where Vargas starts. And they (not the author) are telling us here that it is time to quit contemplation and do something so that the voices of others may be heard.
This work is most relevant not only for the so called “Anthropology of the Body” but also for anyone interested in cultural dialogue and leveling social disparities.
However, if this text has an impact on us, we know we must wait for the others’ synthesis.
by Rodolfo Puglisi
Publicado en Antrophos Journal, Anthropos 105.2010