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ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how hegemonic fields and the forms of contention they generate are active forces in the production of places. I focus my analysis on an indigenous group of the Argentinean Chaco, the Toba of the Pilcomayo River, and their recent struggles to gain control over the municipality of the region, locally known as la comuna. I examine how these struggles reproduce and simultaneously contest forms of state hegemony and, in so doing, define the contours of la comuna in tension with another place: the surrounding bush where the Toba focus their hunting and gathering practices. Because of the hegemonic values that inform these struggles, I argue that in this process the bush is being reconfigured in a contradictory way: on the one hand, as a locality gradually undermined by the influence of productivist discourses and, on the other hand, as a place of autonomy from "the government." This tense spatial configuration, in turn, informs Toba political discourses and practices. A central point of this article is that hegemony has spatial dimensions that are crucial in the unfolding of processes of ideological domination, accommodation, and resistance. [Key words: hegemony, place, ethnic politics, Argentina, Gran Chaco, Toba]
In reality one can "scientifically" foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement.
-Antonio Gramsci (1971:438)
What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?
-Henri Lefebvre (1991:44)
WHEN ONE ARRIVES at the village of Pozo de Maza, in the dusty hinterland of the Argentinean Chaco, three scattered public buildings capture one's attention: the primary school, the post of the gendarmeria (military border police), and the building of the municipality. For anyone unaware of local politics, the latter looks absolutely ordinary: a small, unpretentious brick house. Moreover, even for a village of only 500 inhabitants like this, the building does not look like the site of a municipality at all. Rather, it seems to capture the apparent sleepiness of this region of the province of Formosa, one of the poorest in the country, with little infrastructure, wide spaces...