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This paper is about the representations, practices and cultural expressions carried out by groups of Bolivian immigrants and their descendants in the cities of Olavarria, Tandil and Azul in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. For this purpose, the three case studies presented are analyzed based on the theoretical notions of identities and ethnic groups proper to the field of social anthropology. It thus seeks to contribute to knowledge about the construction of the identities of Bolivian immigrants in Argentina and, especially, to the discussion of those perspectives that propose the cultural assimilation of these groups into the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper defends the validity and relevancy of ethnography/historiography as a specific modality of knowledge production. It does so by presenting and discussing the cases of an archaeologist who says he is one thousand years old, of an anthropologist who decided to make a poem about his ethnography, and of and ethnographer-historian who analyzes, under the name of "history", the production of Nasa and Cumbal memorialistas. The central argument is constructed around a commitment to the ethnographic/historiographic truth. It uses the metaphors of inside/outside with which Joanne Rappaport analyzes the commotion she goes through in her relationship with Nasa intellectuals. This inside/outside topic is read initially as the transit between the field and the archive. The outside is taken as the "conceptualizing knowledge" positioned between two forms of socio-historic reality, one existing within the discourse and the other without. The first takes in, describes and re-describes the second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]