Paper short abstract:

The integration of indigenous healing practices into public health system in Chile is analyzed through the ethnography of a mapuche medical service implemented in a Santiago suburb. We explore new popular and indigenous perspectives on healing emerging beside State regulation of traditional practices

Paper long abstract:

In the last twenty years, Chilean governments have implemented intercultural policies aiming at indigenous integration and including some programs focused on promoting their access to public health services, highlighting traditional medical knowledge and integrating indigenous healers in public health system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze such policies not only per se, but in their connection with the reconfiguration of Chilean health system in the last decades. Started in the dictatorship period, those changes brought to a harsh privatization of medical services and led to the exclusion of a large part of low incomes population to quality medical care.

We present an ethnographical return on a project of indigenous healing practices integration into public health structure, involving a mapuche association and the municipality of La Florida, a Santiago suburb, where a large part of mapuche population is settled. We aim at questioning political effects of intercultural health policies implementation, which seem to materialize in the imposition of a heavy bureaucratic framework and an administrative control over traditional practices. Nevertheless, beside these constraints, we also want to explore the connections emerging around this project between mapuche members of the service and these lower classes marginalized from public health care, which represent the very users of mapuche medicine in La Florida. This will allow us to question in which way mapuche and popular representations of health, care and ethnicity are crossing, building unexpected new spaces of dialogue, in the margins of State integration project.