Frontier politics at the world's end

Abstract

The “world's end” or “el fin del mundo” is a very common representational figure used to describe the Fuegian Archipelago of South America. There are world's end hostels, coffee table books, and scientific expeditions, for example, and the phrase is widely used to describe the region's landscape and geography, Indigenous peoples, biota, and to signal precarity along several registers. In this article, I examine the world's end through the lens of the frontier, specifically focusing on how colonial imaginaries of Fuegian peoples as “lost” or lost to history are foundational to the region's territorial projects, including conservation efforts. Research for this paper stems from ethnographic fieldwork in the Fuegian Archipelago, between 2011 and 2018, as well as archival research on colonial settlement in the region.