National and international researchers led various presentations challenging the public, politics, and academia in the fourth edition of the Latin American Summer School on Social Issues.
Manuel Prieto, Shelene Gomes, Fernando Pairican, Juan Carlos Cayo, and Guillermo Salas were responsible for closing each day of LASI 2023, a school that took place at the University of Tarapacá in Arica. The theme of the event was “Recurrent Social Issues: Crisis, Continuity, and Demands for Change in Latin America”.
Political economy in the lithium industry: production of aridity
Manuel Prieto, an academic at the University of Tarapacá and researcher at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies CIIR, gave the keynote address focused on destabilizing the imaginaries of the Atacama Desert as a hostile, empty, and adverse territory for life, sharing his work at the Millennium Nucleus in Andean Peat Bogs (AndesPeat).
The researcher showed how the high plateau of the desert harbors a type of high-altitude wetlands called bofedales, ecosystems of high ecological value and rich in cultural traditions. Along with the effects of extractive industries, he explored a less-studied aspect: the role that herders play in the management and conservation of these ecosystems.
He also referred to Critical Physical Geography, a theoretical-methodological perspective that addresses the lack of “ecology” in socio-environmental studies, by combining critical social theory and methodologies typical of physical geography to formulate research questions that can only be addressed transdisciplinarily.
Racialized anthropologists in the Southern Cone
From its origins, anthropology has had a reflective and critical component regarding the conditions of knowledge generation. Research has indicated that the discipline is organized in geopolitical and hierarchical terms from the “Global North” with national and native variants in the “Global South.” To address this issue, Antropología UC PhD candidates Loreto Tenorio and Luis Briceño organized a panel discussion with Shelene Gomes, who addressed the capitalist-colonialist connection in the historical and social construction of race in the conference “Racialized Anthropologies and Their Effects: Background and Critical Perspectives from Present-Day Chile.”
“How are anthropologists and ethnographers racially coded?” asked the professor from The University of the West Indies to the audience. Just as local subjects have been turned into “others” (to be studied), anthropologists from the Global South also become “native” and/or “racialized” anthropologists, and it is important to consider these implications and their impact on research.
Constituent process from an indigenous perspective
After the rejection of the first constitutional process that attempted to enshrine the collective rights of indigenous peoples, Chile concluded a second stage where the presence of an indigenous perspective – in terms of participation and final content – was drastically reduced. In this context, the VioDemos researcher, CIIR academic, and UC Anthropology School advisor Fernando Pairican and the National Institute of Human Rights INDH Councilor, Juan Carlos Cayo, participated in a panel to analyze this phenomenon.
“The first constitutional process was, from my perspective, the most representative of Chile, but there was also a political agenda that attempted to be consensual internally. There, the organized Mapuche needed to achieve representation. Rarely does our country open its doors to such democratic possibilities. Therefore, this process was unprecedented,” explains Pairican.
Both speakers agreed that the indigenous world came very prepared to the discussion for a new Constitution: since the 1980s a political project has been developed among peoples, with concrete agendas and unity of purposes, where their legitimate differences enriched the discourse.
However, this was not seen in the same way by the rest of the population: “The Mapuche people are characterized by their internal diversity, but it has happened to us that non-indigenous society observes the mapuche space in a monolithic way, that is, as a single entity of people who are supposed to think alike. Therefore, the differences that enrich indigenous peoples are seen as division,” pointed out Pairican.
Another aspect that was the center of disputes and misinformation was the concept of plurinationality. Cayo explained that it is key to understand that plurinationality “is not a decorative issue, it also intervenes in the distribution of power,” it is not just a legal category, it represents the ethnic-indigenous recognition of the State to Latin American diversity.
“In this way, we can see plurinationality in cases like the disappeared USSR, in the Spanish Constitution of 1978, in the United Kingdom, in the organization of Belgium, in the recognition of the first nations in Canada”, Pairican and Cayo pointed out. Still, plurinationality was distorted to the point in which it became perceived as “new privileged class,” the indigenous peoples, who “wanted to take everything” and whom it was necessary to “attack.” And that’s when racism appears, widely disseminated through the notion of “indigenist Constitution.”
In response to this, for Cayo there is something that has not permeated the rest of Chilean society and that is that “it must be explained that we are not only people who speak a strange language or dress in a particular way, but we have a specific way of understanding life that enriches the country.”
Processes of indigenization of politics in the Peruvian Andean south
Quyllurit’i is the largest pilgrimage in the Peruvian Andes, which takes place at the foot of the Ausangate snow-capped mountain, a sanctuary located at the foot of a glacier eighty kilometers from the city of Cusco in the province of Quispicanchi (Peru). Considered Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, this festivity encompasses a great variety of cultural expressions and offers a meeting place for communities settled at different altitudes of the Andean Cordillera, including the eight local indigenous “nations”: Paucartambo, Quispicanchi, Canchis, Acomayo, Paruro, Tawantinsuyo, Anta, and Urubamba.
In the final presentation of LASI 2023, Guillermo Salas, academic at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, positioned himself in this pilgrimage to present two conflicting scenarios that shed light on how processes of indigenization of regional politics have developed in the southern Andean Peru.
During 2016 in the city of Cusco, the Council of Pilgrim Nations organized a protest demanding the cancellation of mining concessions adjacent to the sanctuary of Quyllurit’i. On that occasion, implicit forms of indigeneity were at the core of linguistic and dance performances that gave it a distinctive peculiarity from other protests.
At the same time, on a second occasion, the Council of Pilgrim Nations opposed the appropriation of the dancer pablito/ukuku, a central figure in the pilgrimage, by a regional political party during the Cusco municipal elections of 2014. For Salas, this conflict and the growing electoral appeal of indigenous symbols are intertwined with two processes: the slow democratization of regional society since the seventies, and the emergence of global indigeneity and its instruments.
