The shepherdess and the Condor: from the antagonisms between nature and culture to gender antagonisms

Abstract

We mean to analyse a story classified as tale by its narrator, and which we have called ‘the shepherdess and the condor’. The plot of this account describes the vicissitudes of a female shepherd keeper of some sheep and goats who was deceived by a condor –who looked like a handsome man- and practically kidnapped her and took her to his cave. In the condor’s dwelling the young woman suffered from the isolation in the high mountain, from her impossibility of cooking and from feeding only on raw meat. It seems that this conflict inexorably recalls the theories about raw and cooked in structuralism; however, we are going to take another reading of the chosen text, derived from the analysis made by the female workshop participants. It is a qualitative ethnographic work in a workshop on oral history in adults’ primary education, in an area of onion production and migration from Bolivia to the south-east of Buenos Aires province, in Argentina. The main conclusion we have reached is that we could see as this tale depicts the condor as an emblem of the authoritative man and it was the starting point to talk about gender antagonisms and to discuss about subjective experiences on affective and sexual rights of the women.