Chapter I. The chagra in Ticuna culture: A social space for subsistence, worldview, and resistance

The chapter initially describes the territorial scope of the Ticuna people as a cross-border nation under a history of uprooting and cultural resistance. Through a historiographical analysis, it shows how colonization processes fostered the reconfiguration of the social, territorial, and even worldview organization of this indigenous people. Elements such as religious acculturation through covert evangelization, strategies of economic dependence like the rubber boom at the beginning of the 20th century, and the linguistic colonization of some Protestant missions and nation states led to a social and cultural destructuring of the Men in Black people. Faced with this situation, the Ticuna people have developed strategies of resistance and survival through the development of forms of religious syncretism, the appropriation of linguistic tools, the revitalization of their own knowledge through speaking circles, their own economic models such as the Chagra, fishing, and access to the global world through the development of community tourism and the trade of handicrafts. In this sense, the central element that allows us to understand these forms of cultural adaptation lies in the analysis and interpretation of the ethnographic collection and presentation of the community's origin myths. It is concluded that the origin myth, as a cultural symbol, has different semantic scales that reflect a cultural re-creation with adaptive and political purposes. Thus, the chagra and the maloca are the semantic axis of the interpretation of contemporary Ticuna culture, in the face of the challenges that such cultural re-creation in a globalized society poses to this indigenous people.