Education, cultural racism and national security: The intercultural school in contexts of violence

Abstract

The article collects partial conclusions of an ongoing project, financed by Fondecyt (no11140804) and Becas-Chile, and sponsored by the University of Chile, University of Sao Paulo, and the University of La Frontera. Its objective is to analyze the intercultural educational discourse in contexts of violence, taking as a specific focus of study the function that the intercultural school fulfills within the armed conflict that the Chilean State maintains with the Mapuche people in the Araucanía region. The theoretical-methodological perspective used is the Discourse Analysis from the contributions and possibilities opened by philosopher Michel Foucault, taking as a file of analysis two types of samples: documentary and ethnographic; the first, collected from the years 1990-2016; and the second, acquired during the last two years (2015-2016). In the first part, I will try to make visible those non-discursive practices involved in the destabilization of the extractivist and mono-exporting model in Chile, and its effects on the militarization of the Araucanía region. Then, I will briefly describe the characteristics of ethno-governmental rationality that operates in multicultural discourses and practices in post-dictatorship period, and then show how ethnicity processes work in educational programs on interculturality. In the last part, as a conclusion, I will formulate some reflections that intend to establish links between intercultural education programs, culturalism or cultural racism, governmentalization of the State, and security strategies of perception and construction of the internal enemy.