This chapter builds on the previous one to explore the related phenomena of creativity and innovativeness. It starts with a discussion of the evolution of modern humans and how ideas of creativity and technological innovation have been bound up for centuries in our concept of what it means to be human. This case study leads into a discussion of creativity, grounded in recent archaeological research by Joanna Sofaer and linking back to earlier discussions of creative re-interpretation, re-combination and resistance. This is followed by a discussion of innovativeness – essentially creativity on a societal scale – that starts in models from psychology and organizational studies and contrasts these with a case study of Cornish miners in nineteenth-century Australia. These more contemporary examples are contrasted with evolutionary archaeological approaches that identify demographic pressure and population density as causal factors in innovative behavior in prehistoric societies. The chapter argues that these divergent approaches can by integrated through the application of non-anthropocentric models of social interaction, in which shifting makeups of heterogeneous networks of humans, non-humans, things, and places affect how individual people and communities navigate their world, leading to emergent innovativeness.

This chapter begins the analysis of the life-history interviews of the Aymara women who inhabit Arica (Chile). First, the initial work experiences of the interviewees are described, shedding light on the gender relations in their Bolivian Aymara communities. Then, we analyze the relationship between kinship and the obligation of mobility that weighs on women, which is illustrated through Casimira’s life history. The chapter also describes the economic and political macro-global processes that traversed these Aymara communities in Bolivia, exploring how the women act by transforming as well as reproducing communitarian kinship and gender structuring in contexts of social change. The last section returns to the debate on the elementary structuring of patriarchy, showing – now based on ethnographic data – how the constitution of a triad between the Aymara kinship systems, gender violence, and female mobility has shaped the transborder trajectories of the women.

The chapter offers a historical reconstruction of the relationship between gender, identities, and human mobility in the territories of the Andean Tri-border, focusing on the outskirts of Arica (Chile), where our ethnography was carried out. Based on a review of the previous literature, the chapter analyses historical elements to interpret the current experiences of Bolivian Indigenous women in these areas. It will start by characterizing some of the identity tensions of the territory in the Tiwanaku and Inca Empires. It also discusses how the colonial order (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) intensified patriarchal inequalities, increased gender violence, and imposed symbolisms and moralities that made native women inferior. Finally, the formation of nation-states (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is addressed, exploring how the wars that forged the borders between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia reinvented long-lasting identity conflicts. This war process further intensified patriarchal asymmetries, naturalizing the notion that border control enables the exercise of violence against women (especially if they are Indigenous).

This chapter summarizes the topics, hypotheses, questions, and theoretical proposals that structure the volume. It explains that the book results from an ethnographic study that inquired on the configurations of gender and kinship in Aymara groups and their relations with the transnational and transborder mobilities of the women of these communities in the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia). In that vein, it outlines the volume’s feminist anthropological perspective and its criticisms of the anthropological structuralist formulations on kinship and alliance in patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal communities. In doing so, it introduces the theorizing that links violence, kinship, and the mobility of women. The chapter also explains the ethnographic methodology adopted, outlining a feminist approach to the Extended Case Method. The fieldwork process is described, detailing the organization of the research team, its dynamics of reflection, the collection of empirical materials, the systematization of this data, and the analysis techniques applied. This is followed by a quick reading guide to the contents of each chapter.