Studies in T ravel W riting 7 (2003): 29–45 © 2003 The White Horse Press Patagonian Peripheries Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe In the late nineteenth century, Perito Moreno, deeply influenced by Charles Darwin, constructs Patagonia and its inhabitants as peripheral to civilisation, yet also integral to an understanding of the past and of the self in the present. A wed by the vastness of geological time that Patagonia’s landscape evidences, he is all the more startled when faced with the existence of indigenous peoples who put into question his own Darwinian views of the evolution of humanity from primitive to civilised and metropolitan. T he Indians’ imminent extermination is Moreno’s rationale for characterising them as part of the past, but their synchronic existence undoes the temporal structures that he attempts to construct. In his 1879 Un viaje a la Patagonia austral , Francisco P. Moreno, an Argentine explorer and naturalist, mentions a friend of his, a Tehuelche Indian named Sam Slick. This Indian enjoys the liquor and gifts that Moreno and his men bring and even allows himself to be photographed but will not, under any account, let Moreno measure his head. Moreno cannot understand what ‘strange preoccupation’ makes Sam Slick so mistrusting as to suppose that Moreno ‘wanted his head’. However, it becomes disturbingly obvious that Sam’s misgivings are in fact prefigurations of his ‘destiny’. Upon Moreno’s return to Patagonia on a later trip, he discovers that the Tehuelche was murdered in a raid, so Moreno finds his tomb and exhumes the body by moonlight. He then donates the skeleton to the Museo Antropológico de Buenos Aires and justifies the theft by calling it ‘a sacrilege committed for the advancement of osteological study of the Tehuelches’. 1 In Moreno’s system of knowledge, the discipline of anthropology oscillates between ethnography and forensics. Temporally speaking, his descriptions of the present move, through death, into a liminal space of the future – the bones retrieved for the future of the museum – and the past – because these bones are part of a continuum of artefacts that trace the genealogy of the Indian tribes into prehistory. Ancient prehistory can be seen as synchronous with the present, since ‘primitive’ nineteenth-century humans live in the