The ruin(s) of Chiloé?: An ethnography of buildings de/reterritorializing

Jacob C Miller

doi:10.1177/14744740211029280

Abstract

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

Highlights

Buildings, rather than passive features of a lifeless background of everyday life, exert force
In a place like Chiloé in southern Chile, architectural geography tells a lot about cultural geographies and the forces of commodification reshaping them today
As some traditions of Chiloé transform along with the recent flows associated with post-dictatorship neoliberalism in Chile – namely, elements of an advanced corporate retail apparatus – there is happening simultaneously another commodification of Chiloé itself, and not just its waters and natural resources

Summary

Introduction

Buildings, all with different intentions and surpluses of meaning that might be more or less explicit, more or less powerful?. The paper moves into the geographies of Chiloé and how the tension between the shopping mall and the church correspond to two interlinking processes of de/ reterritorialization – colonialism and neoliberalism – and how these further coincide today with two circuits of commodification: tourism/heritage and corporate retail. A sprawling heritage industry has grown around what might be or become “ruins.” Much scholarship exists on ruins and ruination, pointing to all the ways that materials like buildings are often coded as such, but continue to hold fugitive and even subversive energies.[24] This paper examines several historic buildings, and responds to a kind of ruinous imagination at play in the architectural geography of Chiloé. There are problems with naming the recent changes as only ruination.[25]

Methodology

Conclusion