Paper short abstract:

This paper examines practices and discourses of land ownership in indigenous Mapuche settlements. The entanglement and unresolved tension between indigenous and legal understandings of land connections rotates around the dilemmas of property, as both a mean of colonial assimilation and a defense against it.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines practices and discourses of land ownership among indigenous Mapuche people in Chile. Attention is paid to local historical accounts of land formalization, a process the started in 1930 and concluded in 1980s. These accounts expose the shortcomings of both modernist and communitarian teleological interpretations of the introduction of private property in indigenous settlements. By simultaneously embracing and contesting property theory, rural Mapuche residents demonstrate the entanglement and unresolved tension between indigenous and legal understandings of land connections. The historical adoption of property technologies has elicited quandaries concerning the role of this phenomenon as both a historical strategy of colonial assimilation and a mean of defence against it. I explore the dilemmas of property by focusing on the significance of land connections in ideas and practices of self-making and identity. In order to preserve land connections on which Mapuche personhood is built, the adoption of elements of colonial culture is necessary. The current pervasiveness of property relations in Mapuche social life reveals how the inclusion of colonial otherness is necessary and yet dangerous. While allowing for protection against encroachment and land grabbing by winka (non-indigenous people considered usurpers), the restructuring of social practices as property relations has contributed to transformation into winka. Far from an unproblematic domestication of difference, other-becoming in indigenous southern Chile is a process inextricable from the prospect of assimilation.