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Ancestors can be a source, as well as the genealogical practice can be a tactical devise to obtain a passport, which enables people to move easier in a hierarchic global space. In the Argentinean case, on the one hand, the number of genealogical researches to apply for an Italian second citizenship raised up, on the other hand, the practice of the genealogy itself has become more popular, above all along the middle classes, whereas a basic genealogical knowledge has spread within the young generations. Using interviews, as well as bibliographical and statistic data, this paper aims to mark the complex connection, not only the instrumental one, between different genealogical practices produced by Argentineans of Italian descendant, Italian citizenship applications and the new Argentinean migration flows to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the study focuses on what position and structure the Italian kinship shows in different genealogical-kinship representations, produced by Argentinean descendants of the Italian immigrants. It also considers the differences and the connections between active and activable kinship networks, genealogical memory and genealogical practice. An ethnographical fieldwork was carried out to gather data in the South-eastern Province of Córdoba, one of the richest and most productive areas of Argentina, where Italian settlers arrived since the second half of xix century. Two case studies, based on interviews and graphical reconstructions of genealogies show diverse types of representations. One focuses on the contemporary time and includes the active kinship network. The other develops along the vertical axis of the time in search of past and ancestors, starting from such migrants that became the heroes of the pampa-colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shepherds and shepherdesses inhabiting the Jasimaná highland, province of Salta, in northwestern Andean Argentina, perform several rituals such as self protection and healing rites, offerings to the Mother Earth, agro-pastoral rites, person's life cycle rituals, processions and pilgrimages with the Saints. In order to go beyond both the ecological functionalistic approach to the Andean rites and the cultural symbolic one to the indigenous animistic cosmology, this article follows the environmental theory of Tim Ingold (2011) who conceptualizes the environment as a "set of ecological relationships" including human and non-human elements. Using this perspective and focusing on practices, it will be possible to show how different rituals materially produce environmental relations of intimacy, but also risky ties, involving people, objects, animals, spirits, dead souls and the powerful entities of the Andean landscape as the Mother Earth, called Pachamama. In this article ritual practices are conceived as sequences of material actions that make the 'relationality' between different human and non-human elements and agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]