Paper short abstract:

The history of commercial whaling in Chile distinguishes three foreign whaling traditions installed on a local pre-existing tradition: processing of stranded whales. This sequence of overlapping processes has been narrated and evaluated by contemporary witnesses in the turn from XIX to XX century.

Paper long abstract:

The history of commercial whaling in Chile distinguishes the presence of three foreign whaling traditions, "Yankee", "Norwegian" and "Japanese", that are installed on a pre-existing tradition: the passive whaling or processing stranded whales, conducted not only for indigenous peoples but also by Europeans and their descendants. This assemblage of traditions configures a sequence of overlapping processes that has been narrated by a group of contemporary witnesses of the facts. The revision of their texts show different conceptual constructions about whales (like "monster", "resource" and "scarce resource") and the whalers (as "heroes", as "professionals" also as "monsters"), linked to technological developments (passive, traditional and modern whaling) in Chile. In passive whaling people saw the whale as "monster" and its presence on the Chilean coast was a "spectacle". Traditional whaling thinks the whale as a "resource" and the whaler as a "hero". Modern whaling and its impact on whale populations leads to the emergence of the whale as a "scarce resource" and the transformation of the whaler into a "professional". Luis Castillo builds a consistent ethnographic narrative of whaling in the first decades of the 20th century on the coast of Chile. He reminds the old Chilean whalers: "In those times, the animal was catch with a reckless audacity, really inconceivable for a time as cowardly and colorless as the present. They were other times, of less professional expertise but more wisdom". The use of "retrospective ethnography" allows us to reconstruct the dynamics of these processes.