Business with identity: State, entrepreneurship and socio-ecological dilemmas in indigenous Southern Chile

• In Event: The Banality of Neoliberalism: Precarious Lives, Ordinary Lives in Chile

Abstract

In the last decade, a vast number of state programs have been designed to promote micro-enterprises among indigenous Mapuche farmers in Chile. These programs are part of the broader celebration of the entrepreneurial subject in Chile as a solution to economic precariousness affecting impoverished sectors of society. In Indigenous Communities, they have generated high expectations concerning independence from employment in rural estates and cultural revitalization, since entrepreneurial activities focus on the sale of products and services, such as eco-tourism and organic food, associated with indigenous representations.
In this paper, I set out to analyse the impact of entrepreneurial programs on existing forms of sale and uncertainties concerning the future in Mapuche rural settlements. Drawing on instances of engagement with micro-enterprises, I hope to show that the formation of entrepreneurial subjects promoted by State programs is neither absent as a consequence of incommensurability between indigenous and non-indigenous moral economies, nor overarching as a result of the materialization of dominant neoliberal discourses. Rather, I am arguing that Mapuche farmers engage with ideal forms of entrepreneurship as responses to existing concerns over social and ecological crisis in Mapuche rural areas. I focus on the broader limitations and possibilities of entrepeneurial programs in fostering autonomy over powerful patrons, as a fundamental aspiration in Mapuche rural settlements. While hopes for autonomy can materialize as a consequence of micro-enterprises, state run entrepreneurial programs work to impose a form of temporality and an image of the future shaped around the principles of project-making, which are evidently at odds with local understanding of land and subsistence farming as a stable base for life. Paradoxically, in generating hopes of alimentary sovereignty and economic autonomy, state entrepreneurship programs reinforce dependency on the state among indigenous people.

Author

• Piergiorgio Di Giminiani