Reorganizing Indigenous-State Relations in Chile: Programa Orígenes and Participatory Governance

Abstract

Indigenous-state relations in Chile are being reconfigured around a political rationality and productive logic of “calculative choice,” through the government-run participatory development program Programa Origenes. Financed by the Chilean state and the Inter-American Development Bank, Origenes is broadly designed to address productive development, bilingual education, health care, and public services in rural indigenous communities. The technologies of Origenes include participatory planning, planning tables, and audit. I argue that bureaucrats and indigenous peoples who participate are subjected to subject-making technologies that are integral to a rationalizing and transformative neoliberal assemblage of legal and policy instruments and practices.