Living in Motion: Muleteer Corporalities and Territorialisation in the Maule Mountains, Chile

Abstract

This presentation presents the reflections that emerged during a doctoral research project that investigates, from a mobile ethnographic perspective, livestock mobility in the Maule Region, Chile, also known as arriería (muleteering). The methodological proposal allows the body of both the researcher and their collaborators to be placed at the centre of a mobile way of life.

The mobile living of muleteers posits an everyday life in which the moving body is the protagonist: the actors lead their animals along mountain routes, sleep under trees, cross rivers, ride for hours or days, and flood the landscape with sounds, presences, and emotions. Muleteering practice constitutes an embodied practice that weaves a strong relationship with the spaces they dwell in, which are not only travelled but become territories laden with meaning through ongoing practices and relations. Following Ingold (2012), we understand the environment as a work in constant construction, in which both humans and non-humans interact, generating a sensorial experience that shapes the way we dwell in it.

Thus, the mobile living of the mule drivers questions the classic categories of domestic space, workspace, and the rural, as it is redefined in the experience of mountain mobility. In parallel with ways of life increasingly influenced by virtuality and urban sedentarism, muleteering remains a living practice, strengthening the embodied and relational experience with the environment.

This article invites us to rethink territorialisation from the perspective of the bodies that walk, ride, and feel, proposing an ethnography that moves with its interlocutors and gives rise to situated and embodied forms of knowledge.