Incorporation and the Morality of Profit in the Business of Cultural Activism

Abstract

Typical scholarly analyses of ethnic incorporation draw on cases where older, preexisting political entities and their forms of citizenship become the basis for new entrepreneurial corporate identities structured around a set of legal profit-making practices. But what about the cases of ethnic incorporation where ethnicity articulates with legal incorporation without any such prior collective political entity to graft onto? This article draws on ethnographic research with indigenous Mapuche cultural activists to describe and analyze the place of private for-profit and not-for-profit associations in the State-sponsored market for indigenous cultural development work in Chile. Examining the dilemmas that Mapuche activists in Chile face as they pursue legal incorporation in order to access public funds and provide a firmer economic footing to their organizations, it explores the ways that activists negotiate the moral controversies surrounding the place of money, and private-law organizations, in the pursuit of Mapuche collective interests.