The Mapuche People in Post-Dictatorship Chile

Abstract

If WERE TO SUM UP the general idea of this paper in fashionable terms, I would say that in the last decade the Mapuche people of Chile have been trying to recover control over their cultural and natural resources, and that in the process they have developed an "alterna tive modernity" or perhaps an "alternative to modernity," producing local knowledge that undermines the dominant euro-american global design. In spite of the pervasiveness of the "coloniality of power," their discursive and non-discursive practices show that it is possi ble to think differently "from the border" and to construct an alternative to the world viewed from the perspective of "colonial difference." (Escobar 2002; Mignolo 2000, 2001) In this paper, I address the broad topic of the socio cultural and political dynamics of the Ma puche people in post-dictatorship Chile. The central argument is that the Mapuche social movement that has developed since the 1990s has both challenged the very basis of the dom inant political and ideological order, and con tributed to the process of rethinking the way of doing politics and building democracy and citizenship.