This dissertation examines the cultural constructions of information and communication media by Indigenous peoples in Chile. It includes a critical investigation into the emergence, current practices and future prospects of Mapuche media within situated and culturally mediated social space. The research is informed by current anthropological interests in indigenous media and locates indigenous media theory and practice within three different, though overlapping fields of cultural production: applied visual anthropology, alternative media activism and new media theory. The research emphasizes the idea of a poetics of media, as a way of identifying the indigenous processes of making culture visible through media practice. The thesis uses a multi-sited and cultural constructivist methodology to examine the ways in which indigenous media is understood as socio-technical ensembles of social relationships. The idea of imperfect media, central to the argument of the thesis, refers to the way indigenous media practitioners are able to work outside the constraints of industrial modes of media production, circulation and consumption. Instead, the technological, aesthetic, and production strategies of ’imperfection” of indigenous media allows for the possibility of Mapuche liberation, not subjugation. The theoretical, historical and pragmatic concerns of the thesis lie primarily in the media processes that are contextualized by several instances of ethnic resurgence. Indigenous narratives are located at the centre of various forms of cultural activism and are being conceived as tactics in the construction of divergent imaginaries and oppositional public spheres. By concentrating the study on the Mapuche context, I clarify the process by which these practices transform social structures in the struggle for political self-determination, cultural autonomy and social recognition.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.