The women recovering in Salitre: relationship between body, matrineality and territory

Abstract

This study aims to understand and make visible how the leading role of indigenous women has been in the process of territorial recovery that has been taking place since 2010 in the Bribri territory of Salitre, located in the Southern Zone of Costa Rica. Moreover, through the voices of the women themselves, they seek to characterize what is the meaning of this fight in their lives and what the land and territory mean to them. The approach applied was the ethnographic through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The main findings were the following: the women perspective on the territorial dispossession in Salitre, its motives and conditions, secondly, the interpretation of the Iririan land violated in the narrative that explains the creation for the Bribris and this same land also being violated by non-indigenous people. Thirdly, the women relationship with the land through the concept of territory-body-land. Furthermore, it characterizes how the leading role of the women has been and how this leading role is linked to the idea of the matrilineality of the Bribri people as an ethnopolitical tool. One of the main conclusions is that in Salitre the fight for the territory is linked with the way of life, with the rights of future generations and with the conception of matrilineal kinship.