Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how state run development programs affecting Mapuche people in southern Chile reinforce a model of agricultural entrepreneurship, which is turn actively reconfigured by recipients in terms consistent with their anxieties concerning social and environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract:

For the last two decades, a vast number of state run development initiatives, including extension programs and credit schemes, have been applied to Mapuche population in Chile to promote new forms of agricultural entrepreneurship among landowners. The expectations of these programs sharply contrast with the historic issue of land scarcity caused by land grabbing. Drawing on ethnographic research in South-Central Chile, this paper will show how the "entrepreneurial subject" promoted by development programs is not simply rejected on the ground of incommensurability of indigenous and non-indigenous moral economies, but are rather contextualized within existing concerns over social and environmental crisis. The socio-ecological crisis affecting Mapuche communities centers on the decline of the value of respect (respeto- yewen) towards humans and non-humans, which is epitomised by concerns over water loss and deforestation. Central to these anxieties is the conundrum of the need to exploit the environment in ways incompatible with customary values and thus conducive to cultural loss in order to avoid migration to urban centres and thus preserve the link with one's locality (tuwün) as crucial form of identity and self-determination in Mapuche society. In this sense, acculturation often looks as a lesser evil in order to remain Mapuche. By focusing on the implementation of state run agricultural development, this paper ultimately aims to illustrate the blurred relation between neoliberal and Mapuche subjectivities as well as their cosmological underpinnings.