Genealogy of the Indigenous as an Enemy: Critique of Moral, Criminal, and Neoliberal Reason in Chile

Abstract

The cultural industry, especially the hegemonic media and dominant literature, constitutes a complex system specialized in the production of enemies. This process of enmity has a historical, systematic, planned, institutionalized, and ideological character, whose primary purpose is to build the Indigenous image as a discredited, marginalized, and excluded condition. Original peoples and later Indigenous movements have been portrayed in an economic-political framework through which the moral, productive, and political interests of those who exercise power prevail. Different theoretical and empirical works show the predominance of civilizing rationality and a colonial matrix of power. This focuses on the process of enmity through different strategies, such as stereotyping, stigmatization, criminalization, and entrepreneurship. There are various theoretical-conceptual perspectives, such as (a) critical structuralist, (b) deconstructivist, (c) postcolonial, (d) decolonial, and (e) spectral. They have relentlessly tried to explain the presence of the Indigenous otherness about a hegemonic “us.” This is a complex empirical journey full of evidence ranging from extermination to dispossession. From a historical perspective, there are three significant milestones: (a) a moral-civilizing mode of production and reproduction throughout the 19th century, (b) a criminal-punitive mode during the 20th century, and (c) a neoliberal-productive mode during the 21st century. These rationalities, with their apparent transitions and overlaps, converge in the fabrication of the Indigenous person—Mapuche people in the Chilean case—as an enemy whose mask changes according to the sociopolitical and economic context threats.