¿Qué hace un camino? Alteraciones infraestructurales en el Sur de Chile

Abstract

In this article we offer an account of the socio-material transformation that has triggered the building of roads in the indigenous worlds in southern Chile. Taking our starting point from Bateson’s theory of the “immanent mind”, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. By means of our ethnographic explorations, we propose that the road does not make alterations possible simply by promoting contact, interconnections, and intercultural relations, but also by altering the world materially, promoting “inter-socio-material” relations determined infrastructurally. Finally, we suggest that the material alteration of the world produces uncertain results, including possibly its own destruction. In this sense, this article discusses ethnographically the problem of ontological selfdetermination in infrastructural terms