Philosophy and historical archaeology

Abstract

This article addresses the application of a series of key concepts of Foucault’s thought, as developed in Discipline and Punish and other works, in the context of interior frontiers with Indians in nineteenth-century Argentina. It tests the premise that a particular technology of power existed in this historical context that operated on every social level, impacting strongly on the lower classes that inhabited the incorrectly named ‘desert’. Its implementation in the military field enabled the existence of an array of micro-powers that surrounded the gaucho-soldiers and their women’s lives. This schema was adopted in different areas: in the enrollment and discipline of the gauchos, in life in the fortlet-prisons and in the ritualism of power. The alternative chosen by soldiers to evade this technology of power and the fortlet-panopticons was escape through desertion. The utility of these observations is demonstrated with reference to the archaeology of the border regions in Argentina, and their wider applicability noted for other contexts with similar problems.