Etnogubernamentalidad. La formación del campo de la salud intercultural en Chile

Abstract

In 2001, the Chilean State began to implement an ethnodevelopment program directed at the indigenous communities of its national territory. Called Origins, this unprecedented political initiative aims at establishing a new deal between the State and rural ethnic groups and claims to be based on the respect of cultural difference. This paper offers an interpretation of the nature of this new kind of indigenism through the analysis of the state-produced knowledge on indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and by focusing on the new power relations and subjectifying effects created by state agents in specific localities, on the other. I shall show, using a discourse and socio-ethnographic analysis of its intercultural health component, that Origenes represents a powerful device of subject-making and ethnification. I shall focus on the classifying, spatializing and hegemonizing effects produced by what I call, taking up on Foucault's approach on biopower and drawing on recent ethnographies of the neoliberal state, the multicultural governmentality. I shall finally contend that, closely intertwined with this new social engineering, indigenous counterhegemonic discourses, knowledges and practices are starting to emerge that fully contribute to the shaping of this new intercultural battle field. Therefore, this paper deals with the political dimensions of health, that is with the constitution of the indigenous body as subject and object of government.