“Nos perdimos en el monte al regreso”: los viajes del Dr. Salvador Bucca a Formosa en los años sesenta

Abstract

Salvador Bucca was a Professor of Linguistics working as part of the School of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires between 1955 and 1983. He was trained as a historical linguist in Italy and in the United States at a time when structuralism was in its heyday. As an academic and director of the Center for Linguistic Studies, he repeatedly visited the Chaco region during the sixties to study the languages of the local communities. In this article we focus on his fieldwork trips to the province of Formosa in 1964. We point out the importance of his figure around the gestation of the first studies on indigenous Chaco languages. This work is part of a historical study project conducted on documents donated by the family of Dr. Salvador Bucca to the Archive of the Laboratory of Documentation and Research in Linguistics and Anthropology (DILA). Since 2019 a team at the National University of Formosa has been dedicated to the transcription of Dr. Bucca's field notebooks. The source we present corresponds to an excerpt from Notebook No. 4, where Bucca describes his journey through the predominantly rural province of Formosa in the winter of 1964, providing a picture of the problems he experienced with mobility and lodging, as well as the reluctance of some officials and members of the security forces to cooperate with the investigation. Precisely the opposite happened with missionaries of different Christian denominations, who contributed to his contact with their local informants.

Keywords

• Linguistics of the Chaco region
• travels
• archives
• indigenous groups