Nikolas Stüdemann

(Wageningen University)

“Emancipation potentialities of an indigenous subject? The Mapuche ancestral-land-recovery processes and the policies of territorialisation in the Chilean neoliberal era.”

During Republican times, the Mapuche indigenous people in Chile lost much of their land in benefit to settlers and the state. Specifically, during the Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973 – 1989) hundreds of thousands of hectares of ´ancestral land` were transferred to private agroforestry companies. In contestation, the Mapuche historically have reclaimed the land from the borders of the Chilean society, based on a cultural complex that conforms an aesthetic regime in opposition to the dominant order. Currently, the democratic governments are deploying a process to partially return the land to indigenous communities – inserted in a logic of neoliberal territorialisation – to which the Mapuche have assumed diverse strategies: from following the legal rules to illegal land occupations and political radicalization. Based on ethnographic data in Arauco Province, we present existing cases of territory-recuperation, analysing them as part of a broad historical-political process of indigenous emancipation. Our main questions are: what is the role of the Mapuche cultural complex within the processes of land-recovering today? Are the Mapuche proposals standing in opposition with the neoliberal logic of land-control, or are they being negotiated/accommodated into this frame? We argue that the Mapuche, through an aesthetic of disagreement and in a process of appropriating governmental tools of territorialisation, are constituting a subject outside the dominant order.