Dominating through participation? The shaping of neoindigenism in post-dictatorship Chile

Abstract

Since the democratic restoration in 1990, the Chilean state has been concerned with its connectedness to the civil society and nowadays, participation and empowerment are political buzzwords that are omnipresent in politicians’ debates and the marketing of democracy. An especially important issue in this regard is the emergence of the so-called multicultural citizenship and the widespread recognition of cultural diversity accompanied by the will to empower disadvantaged, discriminated against and marginalized indigenous peoples. Since the beginning of the 1990s, cultural diversity has become the new universal, and there is a novel interest in the indigenous community as a self-generating formation capable of governing itself. Nevertheless, it is worth observing that this will to improve the fate of the natives through new forms of citizen’s participation, cultural dignifying and the implementation of an IDB-funded ethnodevelopment program called Origins, is intrinsically connected to the neoliberal agenda of the postcorporatist state and new forms of social domination. In this paper ...