Between recognition, reparation and assimilation

Tensions in the application of an employment policy in an intercultural municipality

Abstract

This article proposes an ethnographic approach to the Labor Directorate of the intercultural municipality of San Carlos de Bariloche, taking into account the discourses, documents, records, actors and policies that take place there and that account for the coexistence of multiple patterns of relationship between state and indigenous. The writing shows the complexity that relationship processes matter, exposing persistences, contradictions, overlaps and mixtures, both in the practices of state agents and of the subjects themselves questioned by them in an indigenist key. Methodologically, the writing is based on the analysis of empirical materials produced during work experience as a work management technique for one of us; in the analysis of archive materials, in the analysis of field records and in interviews with relevant actors in the implementation of the policy under study.