Tehuelche Religion
TEHUELCHE RELIGION. [This entry discusses the religious system of the Aónikenk, or southern Tehuelche Indians.] Known as the Aónikenk ("southerners"), the southern Tehuelche Indians inhabited the region of Argentine Patagonia, which extends east and west from the Atlantic Ocean to the foothills of the southern Andes and north and south from the Chubut River (43° south latitude) to the Strait of Magellan. The ethnographic data used in this essay come primarily from fieldwork done in the 1960s, when the surviving Aónikenk population was estimated to number about two hundred, although barely seventy were still speaking their own language, which is part of the Araucana-chon family.
Until their final biological, social, and cultural annihilation—due to pressures exerted by the Araucanian peoples to the north and to European conquest and colonization during the nineteenth century—they were nomadic hunters with set patterns of movement, encampments, and territories. Their displacements were subject to seasonal variations: summer hunting in the coastal region was accompanied by a certain social dispersion, whereas the western areas of Aónikenk territory were associated with more stable winter settlements and some degree of population concentration. The Aónikenk were subdivided into three groups, with a varying number of exogamous patrilineages; their residential pattern was patrilocal.
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