Photographic images of indigenous peoples in contemporary Chilean poetry

Abstract

This article analyzes the literary proposals De la tierra sin fuegos (1986) and Reducciones (2012) by the Chilean poets Juan Pablo Riveros and Jaime Huenún respectively; works in which the intersection between word and image is privileged in a deconstructive and questioning eagerness. The photographic image of native peoples that is materially incorporated into the textual body of the poems comes, on the one hand, from ethnographic/anthropometric archives, from the priest and ethnologist Martin Gusinde, and from the scientists Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, Herman Ten Kate, Francisco P. Moreno and Hans Virchow. Through this verbovisual assemblage, two different perspectives are presented regarding the procedures of scrutiny that the ethnologist/scientist follows when approaching the indigenous person and the reading he makes of him and his culture: the first becomes a fellow tribesman, while the others exercise a biosocial control over the indigenous person by freely disposing of his corporeality for scientific purposes. In this way, the texts resort to images to reflect on the materialization of ethnographic photography and the material and metaphysical "capture" of the indigenous; they problematize the photographic act, the revealing character of the image and its scenic implications in the exhibition of the indigenous in order to corroborate, denounce and give a face to these subjects. In addition, they point to the hunters and situate the historical context under which these takeovers take place, that is, they are images that violate the viewer by confronting him with the usurpation and death that weighs on the indigenous, particularly in contexts of internal colonization (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).