Identity in Mapuche communicators

Culture theorists and analysts have been reconsidering the concept of identity, since it is difficult to establish operational definitions which serve to clarify its complexity. The perspective which is gaining the upper hand in the intellectual debate refers to the impossibility of reducing identity to a monolithic, static, essential phenomenon. Identity is constructed in a continuous process of adjustments and readjustments, responding to psychopolitical mediation between sociohistorical subjectivities and grammars.

The epistemological and semantic charge of the concept “identity” has encouraged the search for other theoretical-conceptual categories which help to capture and understand the complexity of identity phenomena. This is why authors like ^{Silva (2013)} and ^{Grimson (2011)} opted to problematize these phenomena from the category “cultural identifications”, which breaks away from essentialist reports and investigates in detail the identity implications that collectivities generate in contexts of intercultural relations.

In the case of Mapuche communicators, identity definitions are organized along three axes of identification: territory, ethnic affiliation and otherness. We will focus only on the first axis, leaving the other two for future studies.

In terms of identification with territory, the communicators state that they take part of a political, cultural and geographical location which differs from the territorial administration and the imaginary imposed by the Chilean Nation-State. The policy of systematic despoilment exercised since the 19th century by the Nation-State against the Mapuche people (^{Nahuelpan, 2012}) emerges as the central argument in the discourses analysed, positioning territorial adherence as an identification tactic through differentiation, resistance and the projection of autonomy. The communicators live in Mapuche -not Chilean- territory from a logic of territorial, mnemonic and political positioning with a marked stance of insistence on demands, coherent with the project to reconstruct the Mapuche Country that the movement for Mapuche autonomy seeks to materialize in order to recover the sovereignty suspended by colonizing actions (^{Caniuqueo, Mariman, Millalen & Levil, 2005}; ^{Tricot, 2013}).

This identification axis is deployed in two interlinked signification systems: the first one in terms of geographical localization and position; the second in terms of subjectivity and political tactics. Some of the statements recorded demonstrate this proposal:

D.M.: I would like to note that we are in territory that was historically Mapuche: Wallmapu. And that is the basis for our view, which is associated with how we settled here, with a projection for the future, bringing together elements of the Mapuche culture; but also understanding the current contexts in which we exist, a context which the Chilean world, since it took over the territory, has transformed (in favour of) the hegemonic, dominant society.

J.C.: I like this idea of Mapuche territory, the idea of Wallmapu; I subscribe to the idea of Wallmapu. In fact, considering how Chile is organized, it is tremendously necessary for the distribution of economic resources to recognize the different local autonomies that exist, not just the autonomy of Wallmapu, not just the Mapuche people.

The statements reported here reflect the value of adherence to a territory as a central matrix of the system of identification and identity differentiation. It is interesting to note that the overlap between place and political subjectivity goes beyond the monotopical design imposed by modernity through its “discontinuity” (^{Giddens, 2011}); as ^{Zibechi (2007b)} and ^{Escobar (2005)} say, one of the central features of current social movements in Latin America, and particularly the indigenous movement, is the growth of identification with, and demands to recover, territory, as a central component of an agenda which revitalizes the local as a political and identity-related space from which to project models of social organization “from the bottom up”.

The logics of territorial identification associated with identity construction demonstrate the permanence of externalities which cannot be subjected to the hegemony of institutions imposed by modernity (^{Escobar, 2005}). Territory as such emerges as a category associated with the need to subscribe to a place from which to exercise the right to be different, and therefore to communicate from that difference; a locus for proclamation from which to resist colonial actions, and to exercise autonomy as a right to difference and political-territorial sovereignty. In other words, from a mental territory in the process of psychopolitical emancipation (^{Ouriques, 2009}).⁶

Indigenous territoriality, as ^{Escobar (2005)} says, incorporates “a community life project” (p. 183), becoming a category alluding to the process of material and symbolic appropriation of space from which to exercise practices of difference, and thus from which it is possible to communicate in/from difference.

Technological identifications

There can be no doubt that the proliferation of studies in communications devoted to digital culture, cyberdemocracy, net-activism, etc., reflect the central position of digital technologies in the configuration of social life today, showing the structural mutation experienced by hypermodern societies at the material and symbolic level (^{Cuadra, 2008}).

Despite the findings that critical investigation has started to identify in this field, the hegemonic narrative which orbits around technology, founded on an instrumental and neodifusionist rationale, appears to obviate the intersections presented by the latter with the socio-historical contexts of the agents who make particular social use of technologies (^{Sierra Caballero, 2013}). The superposition of the reigning technodeterminist discourse invisibilizes the external factors and technological appropriations which mediate in the construction of the social (^{Marí, 2011}).

On this basis, we have opted for a social focus on technologies, through which mediation is positioned from the point of view of the subjects and their relations with the socio-cultural contexts in which they live, since the reality observed in this study shows us that technologies are “appropriate” cultural elements for the sovereign exercise of “Mapuche technopolitics”.

We use the concept of technopolitics because “it assumes the reappropriation of technological tools and devices to impact the social sphere, creating multiple connections that make possible other types of organization and action to coordinate digital networks and mobilization in urban spaces” (^{Burgos, 2015, p. 433}). The technopolitics refers to human mediations and connections, rather than hardware and software, since the issue here is the capacity for action that social movements can deploy through the appropriation and use of technologies, in order to “connect, group and synchronise, through technological and communications devices and around objectives, the brains and bodies of a large number of subjects in sequences of time, space, emotions, behaviour and languages” (^{Toret, 2013, p. 20}). In these terms, it is not the technologies that determine the action of the subjects, far less ensure per se the development of groupings; it is the senses attributed to communications praxis that configure the relations between subjects, environment and technologies (^{Zallo, 2011}).

It is this premise that justifies the generation of “a shift that leads us from technologies as such to their modes of access, acquisition and use” (^{Martín-Barbero, 2004, p. 177}), and so verify the processes of “resistance, re-semantization and re-design” (p. 177) which emerge from the agency of multitudes of Mapuche who are connected in the age of digital interaction.

This concept is significantly expressed in the following fragment:

P.C.: I give great value to technology, and I believe that it allowed movements like the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to publicise their position and achieve the impact that they had. … I do not reject this component of globalization, I could not be anti-globalization, because globalization has many positive aspects …; technology is being globalized, justice is being globalized, human rights are being globalized … Technology is not a negative phenomenon, and for indigenous peoples it has been a tremendous communication tool.

As ^{Maldonado (2018)} emphasized, it is important to address the technology in the context of Mapuche communication as appropriation. In order to explore this notion more deeply, we extrapolate the category of “appropriation of media products” (^{Thompson, 2010}) to our study, understanding that the technological appropriation which supports Mapuche technopolitics operates in a very similar way to the principles that Thompson recognizes when considering the dynamics of the construction of meanings that audiences attribute to the symbolic materials which circulate in the context of the globalization of communications.

For Thompson, and in agreement with the opinion expressed in the interview cited above, the globalization of communications has not effaced the local dimension of appropriation. From the fragment cited we see that technology is valued as a function of the uses that the various collectives mentioned have developed in support of their particular political struggles, demands and projections. Because, as Thompson himself says, appropriation, as a localized phenomenon, implies that specific subjects, situated in particular contexts, use the resources at their disposal in order to incorporate them into their practices, insofar as the meanings attributed to them are coherent with the requirements of the context in which this process occurs.

The technological appropriation carried out by Mapuche communicators reflects the new types of manoeuvre available in a time of networks and virtualization. In this sense, technopolitics has become one of the fields of strategic action which social movements assume in the framework of territorial recovery processes, strengthening their projects for autonomy, affirmation of identity and demands for local forms of knowledge. Communication mediated by technology has become a space for the politicization of social movements (^{Gravante, 2016}), as well as situating technology as a cultural enclave in the production of information (^{Marí, 2011}):

J.P.: For me, technology is a possibility. If you are conscious of this and you can use it, that’s great. For us, technology has allowed us to palliate the lack of means available to indigenous people; it has allowed us to generate interactions with communicators from other latitudes, to exchange, support and reinforce experiences. But I also understand completely that it reaches other (non-indigenous) places where this reading (our reading) does not exist.

Of course, following the proposals of ^{Martín-Barbero (2004)}, we must not fall into a fascination with technology based on the “voluntarist certainty that good will finally triumph” (p. 189), because, paraphrasing ^{Winner (2008)}, specific power models are projected in every technology. Nevertheless, redesigning the use of technology is possible, insofar as agents are conscious that they are entering the territory of the dominators, mutating the cultural potential of technological devices (^{Candón, 2013}; ^{Martín-Barbero, 2004}). This is what occurs with the meanings and uses that Mapuche communicators generate in the framework of the technopolitical struggle, a new space for political, identity and territorial resistance and autonomy.

Communication from Mapuche praxis

The discourses of the Mapuche individuals interviewed transcend the instrumental reductionisms which subsume communications in a technocentric approach, shifting to a conception which appeals to communication as a basic right, and through which the regimes of signification imposed by the racializing discourse which many modern institutions (media, justice, education, government) have installed around the “other” as truth-power can be reversed. This is expressed both at the material level, through the concentration of business ownership which rules the media in Chile, and through the uniformity apparent in symbolic production about the Mapuche (^{Del Valle, 2005}).

The possibility of creating autonomous communication through the appropriation and use of digital tecnomediation networks is part of a historical process which started with the publication of the bulletin El Araucano in 1926. To date, these communication experiments have functioned as complementary platforms to the political struggle of the Mapuche people (^{Gutiérrez, 2014}), as well as making possible the recovery of traditional communications practices, using new technological codes and formats (^{Cárcamo & Paillan, 2012}).

Thus, the interviewees assume communication as a space for struggle in which the ethnocentric social semiosis produced by the hegemonic-colonial discourse can be tensioned, offering an alternative narrative starting from interdiscursive tension by establishing a relation of opposition with the dominant media discourses:

W.P.: The media in Chile have held a particular view of the Mapuche, (which) has disqualified cultural difference. So the responsibility of making a stand against this constructed image filled you with enthusiasm; and it placed you in a very special disjunctive within the framework that at that time was already called the Mapuche conflict. You have to change this negative image that has been constructed. It’s a huge task.

However, Mapuche communication mediated by technologies cannot be reduced to simple cause and effect, in the sense that it does not depend exclusively on the agenda of the traditional media. It installs in the public space forms of knowledge, identity appreciation, definitions of justice, self-recognition, lexical-semantic repertoires in Mapuzungun (the Mapuche language), etc., which together take part of a system for the psychopolitical validation of the Mapuche people’s own epistemic, identity, linguistic, world-view and historical matrices, contributing to the construction of intercultural relations based on recognition, respect and appreciation of difference:

R.C.: We believe that communication is a right; and because it is a right we turn it into a tool to tell the world, and Chilean and Mapuche society, what our claims, our real demands are; and I believe that communication has been a basic tool in that respect. And for us as Mapuche I believe that this was what led us … to communicate. Although I didn’t have much knowledge; the little I had, I learnt during the process and from what I learnt about the everyday lives of our people …; I was able to document, teach, rescue our culture, our language, our religion, how our ancestors lived, how politics worked in the old days. So I believe that communication has been fundamental, and I believe that I am, in a way, the fruit of all that; because thanks to communication I can recognise myself as Mapuche and participate in this struggle through communication.

Taken as a whole, the discourses expressed by the Mapuche interviewees refer to the need to situate the voices of the subordinates as a source of conflagration, not necessarily to perpetuate a conflict but to dynamize a social semiosis which will help to break down the colonial-racial matrix which underlies the experience of being or not being indigenous in the imaginary instituted by the Chilean nation.

Communication, therefore, is a field in which the voice of the Mapuche emerges under a modality of the desire and the duty of one who has suffered at first hand the shut-in experience of being other. Mapuche communication mediated by technology is, today, a source for re-thinking the tensions, representations of otherness and functional intercultural models which still continue to reproduce the segregation and domination of racial and identity differences:

D.M.: People who have taken up a microphone, or a video or still camera, have played important roles in the visibilization of the conflicts that exist in the territories, the visibilization of the voices and the demands originating in the territorial or other organizations that are raising issues like the defence of territories, recovery of the land, etc. … The alternative media have offered this possibility, providing a view from the perspective that the mass media do not provide. The mass media have transformed the national demand of the Mapuche people into a gutter press demand, where the conflict is not portrayed as political but as a judicial or even criminal issue. So this is a fundamental role that these media have played, giving a voice to these people, these groups, who sometimes seem to lack a voice.