Abstract
Using ethnographic material, such as short descriptions of rituals and fragments of stories about the illnesses of encanto (enchantment) and susto (scare, shock), this paper investigates the sociocultural environmental experiences of the body-person in the indigenous villages of the Andean Northwest of Argentina. To better understand the susto and enchantment, the concepts of “experience” and “bodyperson” are proposed as possible points of contact between hermeneutic-interpretive theoreticalmethodological approaches, on the one hand, and cultural-environmental phenomenological approaches, on the other. After retracing the anthropological debate on the notions of experience, body and person, drawing on ethnographic sketches and on references to the Andean anthropology studies on the notions of health and illness, the experience of the loss of life force in Andean Argentina will be associated to the embodiment of an environmental relationality that includes the living beings of the Andean landscape, such as the Mountains and the Pachamama-Santa Tierra.