The truck in the Puna of Atacama (1930-1980)

Based on an interview and narrative corpus documented in the Bolivian,Chilean and Argentinian Puna,the article analyses the spread of the “truck” as a technical artifact in the Puna of Atacama from the 1930s to the 1980s decades. Three hypotheses are explored. From an historical perspective,the truck challenges the usual notion of a social and economic crisis induced by the ending of animal transport across the Cordillera. From an environmental point of view,the truck separates agriculture from transport and divides the pasture geography from the emergent geography of wheel transport. The truck disarranges landscape drying ravines,abandoning stops,di-technifying animals or turning them back to savagery: in short,the truck produces desert. From a technical standpoint,finally,this (first) entry of the wheel in the Puna encourages a quick series of knowledges,techniques and local uses of the truck that reconcile it with previous technical methods and also with a particular geography. In these three senses,therefore,the paper sketches a local anthropology of the truck.