Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to interpret the modes of the photographic representations of the Mapuche world from 1870 to 1930, and the re-creation of its material culture represented and shown within a picturesque and fictive framework, and affirmed in its alterity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes to interpret the modes of the photographic representations and the re-creation of the material culture of the Mapuche world. It is based on an analysis of the photographies taken to illustrate this community from 1870 to 1930, dates marked by the first artistic/ethnographic works done by the photographer Christian Enrique Valk (1826-1899), and then the French Hippolyte Janvier (1892- ?), as well as some anonymous captures. Most of them are today at the musée du Quai-Branly (Paris). Those photographies emerge in a historic context accentuated by the legitimization of a nationalist discourse and the progressive affirmation of the civilizing story of the modernity.

This paper focusses on how the Mapuches have been represented and shown within a more or less fictive framework (in their rites, rituals, movements, clothes et symbolic aspects). By becoming an icon, even a cultural model, the indigenous inhabitant has been represented in his difference based on his alterity. The challenge is therefore to define the meaning of these pictures and their identity, to examine how the « ethnological » photography has reconfigured a landscape and dawned up a symbolic portrait. The photography plays here the role of distributor of « authenticity », or even more, shows a significant ideal - of what is « Mapuche » - and contributes widely to install, in the scenario of the collective sensitivity in the early XXth century, the paradoxical or even controversial picture of a branch of the ancestors of the Chilean and Argentinian nation.