Misunderstanding the Ngen Kintuantü: a study from the legal pluralism of water rights in the conflict around Statkraft’s hydroelectric power plants on the Pilmaiquén River, Futawillimapu, Chile

Abstract

This paper draws analytical attention to the debates on legal pluralism to understand Mapuche-Williche expressions of water rights in southern Chile in the context of Chile’s environmental institutions, based on a case study of the long-standing conflict over the hydroelectric power plants developed by the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft on the Pilmaiquén River. The analysis focuses on the hermeneutical problems that emerge from the process through which the Chilean environmental institutions translated the dense cosmogony of the Mapuche-Williche communities around the Pilmaiquén River during the environmental assessment of the Osorno Hydroelectric Power Plant, through the category of a “site of cultural significance”, and the impacts that this process has had over time. I argue that, although the category of site of cultural significance made the meaning of water in the normative world of the Mapuche-Williche communities of this territory commensurable, understandable, and partially comparable, it deprived it of its complex meanings, giving rise to various equivocations that imply forms of epistemic injustice of a hermeneutic type.