Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights

Chapter 2. Contested Memories, Symbolic Violence, and the History of the Araucanía

33 Chapter 2 Contested Memories, Symbolic Violence, and the History of the Araucanía History and memory alike are socially constructed. As Barry Schwartz (2007, 588) has defined it, “collective memory refers to the distribution throughout society of beliefs, feelings, moral judgments, and knowledge about the past.” We say memory is socially constructed because, as Schwartz points out, while individuals may hold beliefs or draw judgments about the past, “they do not know (it) singly; they know it with and against other individuals situated in conflicting groups” (ibid.). Thus there is never complete consensus in collective memory. Memory is contentious, informed by social, political, economic, and cultural context and shaped by power and inequality (Stern 2004). Memory is also dynamic, as Nadje Sadig Al-Ali (2007, 2) has explained: “not static and frozen in time, but . . . alive, rooted in the present as much as in the past, and linked to aspirations as much as actual experiences .” Groups that hold competing narratives about the past also are likely to possess distinct visions for the future (ibid.). The telling of history can be understood as one vehicle for the expression of collective memory (Schwartz 2007). Different versions of memory and history yield different versions of 34 Contested Memories, Symbolic Violence, History of the Araucanía the truth, which may be wielded in defense of competing interests. Examining contentious narratives about the past can therefore provide important insights into the analysis of contemporary conflicts over rights and resources, such as those in the Araucanía. In this chapter I address history and memory, first providing the background necessary to understand Mapuche-Chilean relations and then turning to the memories that colonos, other local elites, and Mapuche recount in the Araucanía today. Mapuche remembrances serve to maintain a continuity of struggle, whereas the memories of local Chilean elites often serve to justify their relative wealth and presence in the region. As Florencia Mallon (2005, 58) has observed, in the Araucanía there is “a selective amnesia around the origins of regional fortunes.” Indeed, collective memory often involves the suppression of “memories of collective injustice” (Wolin 1989, 33) or “sustained collective forgetting” (Feagin 2006, 44). While Mapuche and local elites both used memories and historical narratives to justify contemporary positions vis-à-vis the conflicts and state-driven multiculturalism, local elites’ relative economic and social power meant that the very act of relating their memories frequently entailed symbolic violence. The multiple and contradictory mobilizations of memory, this selective remembering and forgetting, are important because, as Juliet Hooker (2009, 112) has explained, they are central to struggles for racial justice: “What a political community chooses to remember about its past determines what it considers to be just or unjust in the present.” As theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of symbolic violence focuses on how power inequalities are sustained not just through physical violence and repression but also through social and cultural norms and practices (Caron 2003; Wolfreys 2000). Symbolic violence refers to the process by which economic domination comes to be masked as wealth, status, prestige, and taste (or symbolic and cultural capital) and thereby legitimized (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). This transformation leads members of society to see wealth and power, as well as poverty and exploitation, as deserved rather than built on a system of domination. In this way domination and power inequalities are disguised and legitimated by cultural values that are understood as universal but are in fact socially constructed (Wolfreys 2000). Individuals with symbolic and cultural capital exercise symbolic violence over others, often unconsciously. At the same time, the dominated frequently participate in their own domination, as they misrecognize the power wielded over them (C. Williams 2006). In this way social structures of domination—the bases of systemic racism—are reproduced. Symbolic violence also can allow direct violence to be avoided, although in the Araucanía, the two are sometimes Contested Memories, Symbolic Violence, History of the Araucanía 35 used in tandem. It is those with symbolic capital who, in epistemological terms, are the “knowers,” the subjects of the social world. By virtue of their cultural and economic power, they are able to establish the privileged version of history and the rules, regulations, and norms by which shared existence proceeds. Symbolic violence is reflected in how different groups in the Araucan ía remember their collective past. But more important, memory does not just function as a form of symbolic...