Light Pollution and Its Perception in Rural Contexts of North-Central Santa Fe, Argentina

Abstract

From the perspective of ethnoastronomy, this paper addresses the study of “customs” related to celestial realm present among farmers descendants of European immigrants or “settlers”, settled in towns and rural areas originated as agricultural colonies in the central-northern area of the Argentine province of Santa Fe, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Particularly here, and through our own fieldwork, we are incipiently investigating the relationships with the phenomenon of light pollution that cross the perception of the sky developed by these farmers. These relationships strongly articulate with traditional logics and schemes of classification of the sky linked to the productive tasks of current farmers and their immigrant ancestors who settled in the region during the aforementioned process of colonisation. These traditional ways of organising and structuring their perception, experience and representations of the celestial realm are characterised by a transversal aspect: the establishment of certain consonances between celestial and terrestrial phenomena. In fact, from this traditional perspective, the sky is presented as a space of signs that must be read to determine certain phases of different activities, processes or phenomena considered relevant in the terrestrial area. And as our fieldwork shows, it is in terms of signs that certain manifestations of light pollution present in the skies of the region covered here are read by these farmers. Therefore, the ethnoastronomical contribution of this paper shows how there is an important continuity in the habitus that structures the basis of perceptions, representations and practices linked to the sky within the framework of the agricultural activities of our interlocutors, even though the celestial phenomena or features to be structured have changed or are different. Likewise, this research clearly demonstrates something already pointed out by other authors: the tensions and conflicts that arise when we try to think through the notion of UNESCO’s heritage, the dynamic and multiple nature of conceptions and practices about the sky, as well as the pretended universality of the valuations surrounding the phenomenon of light pollution of the sky. In this sense, the concept of heritage of these international organisations tends to favour static, unchanging conservation. This would imply thinking in terms of “loss” of the cultural and social changes brought about by historical conjunctures, such as, for example, those linked to relations with new features of the sky that have arisen as a result of light pollution. The traditional ways in which the social group addressed here perceives certain manifestations of light pollution are not part of a process of “acculturation”, they are true cultural creations given in a particular historical context.