Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which a group of Mapuche women establish “odd” collaborations with the Chilean state, deepening in the radicalism that is present in the forging of their subjectivities and in the challenges they set to current developments on Mapuche personhood.

Paper long abstract:

After two decades of a strong multicultural emphasis in the social policies oriented to indigenous population, the Chilean State's objectives towards indigenous people remain far from unambiguous, in a context of increasing implementation of ad-hoc programs and benefits which are articulated with policies principally tackling poverty. By deepening in the relations that a group of rural Mapuche women establish with State institutions and professionals during early motherhood -mainly with health and pre-school services, but also with poverty plans including cash transfers- this paper focuses on the multidimensional ways in which these women establish "odd" collaborations with the Chilean state, deepening in the radicalism that is present in the everyday forging of their subjectivities.

Anchored in but also questioning their self-identification with "poor-Mapuche", women, mothers, rural people and citizens, I suggest that in their experimentation through collaboration and friction these women negotiate with the neoliberal State assuming a pragmatic, perceptive and movable attitude that is constitutive of these women's subjectivities. I discuss the ways in which these collaborations suppose challenges and also continuities with what Boccara has described as an openness to incorporate the Other in the dynamic construction of the One-self among Mapuche in which "the other does not appear as a limit but as a destiny" (Boccara 2003:35); as well as to the centrifugal principle of creation of social relations that is considered a fundamental capacity of Mapuche personhood (Course 2010).