SEARCHING FOR

DEVELOPMENT

State Relations and Local Aspirations

among Rural Mapuche in Neoliberal Chile

Martine Greek

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of PhD in Social

Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway

December 2019

I

ABSTRACT

As an indigenous farmer living on a small island in the southeast of Chile and lacking basic

services and economic security, how does one seek to improve one’s conditions of

livelihood? Despite sporadic sources of income to supplement their monthly pension

payments, most people in the indigenous community of Isla Huapi live precarious lives.

Because of this, many islanders are eager to participate in the government’s development

initiatives aimed at economic enhancement and infrastructural improvements, such as potable

water and electricity. Given a history of state neglect and discrimination, this readiness to

engage with the state is worthy of attention.

Based on nearly one year of ethnographic fieldwork on Isla Huapi, an inland island home to

125 Mapuche farmer families, this dissertation examines the ways in which the relationship

between the state and the indigenous community of Isla Huapi plays out. Encounters between

islanders and development actors are based on difficult negotiations, which often engender

social tensions within the community. Looking at the way in which different actors

participate in state-led development programs, I argue that such engagement with the state

presents people with a series of paradoxes, which I will demonstrate, and some of which I

believe are inherent to neoliberalism and surface through practices of neoliberal development.

As a policy of poverty reduction, state-led development programs aim at creating

entrepreneurial, self-responsible citizens who are independent of state support. However,

these programs require a high degree of state presence, allowing for a state which appears

both intimate, yet on the retreat. While altering some existing relations of dependence,

development programs cause new ones to arise. For example, reduced reliance on state

pensions may be replaced by social bonds of interdependency with state and state actors.

Even though these programs enrich some islanders, they can also lead to increased inequality

and exacerbate already tense relations in the community. Additionally, either by treating

subjects as individuals or by treating communities as singular collectives, the general focus

on individuality inherent in neoliberal development challenges people’s conception of a

“common good” as opposed “self-interest” in its negative connotation. Drawing on

II

theoretical concepts of state effects (and affects) and neoliberal development, and hope and

aspiration as analytical tools, I examine the way in which islanders and state actors alike

negotiate contradictions of “neoliberal state development” in their everyday lives.

III

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to people on Isla Huapi who let me

stay with them and agreed to let me inquire into their everyday lives. I am forever grateful for

the trust you have in me, which I hope to honor in this dissertation. I am particularly

beholden to my hosts who taught me so much. Not only did we share moments of laughter

and joy, worries and sorrows, but moments of intriguing discussions as well. I would also like

to thank the PDTI team as well as various INDAP employees who contributed to making this

research possible.

I am also deeply appreciative of the guidance that my supervisor Professor Marit Melhuus

has provided me throughout the past four years. Thank you, Marit, for close readings,

constructive feedback, challenging discussions and, importantly, your patience and support.

Professor Penny Harvey, who has been co-supervising this project, has also been crucial to

my work. Your knowledge and clear thinking have provided precious contributions,

particularly in helping me to grasp the story in this dissertation. I am indebted to Professor

Christian Krohn-Hansen who four years ago encouraged my effort to become a PhD fellow.

Additionally, I want to thank Professor Piergiorgio Di Giminiani at the Department of

Anthropology at Pontifíca Universidad Católica de Chile who contributed to the realization of

the fieldwork on which this dissertation is based.

Furthermore, I owe a debt of sincere gratitude to colleagues and fellow PhD students in the

Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and elsewhere. Thank you for

having read and commented on my work, and thus pushed me forward. I have also benefitted

greatly from courses, research groups, workshops and inspiring professors. Thank you:

Elisabeth Schober; Theodoros Rakopoulos; Marit Melhuus; Christian Krohn-Hansen; Ingjerd

Hoëm; Cris Shore; Kenneth Bo Nielsen; Andrew Mathews; Marianne Lien; Christian Vium;

and Line Dalsgård.

I am also grateful to the administrative staff at the Department of Social Anthropology who

have provided support and order in moments of confusion.

IV

Thanks to Clara Han and the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University for

having me as a visiting PhD-scholar. In this context I would also like to thank Veena Das for

letting me follow her course on Michel Foucault.

Thanks also to Stephen Blair for thorough proof-reading work.

This research has been funded by the University of Oslo and the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young

Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF) who funded my exchange at Johns Hopkins University.

Last but not least, I would like to direct heartfelt gratitude to dear friends and family who

have supported me throughout this process and who, importantly, have provided me with the

space I have needed to see this work through.

Thanks for all the encouragement and understanding!

V

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... I

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................... III

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................ IX

PART I........................................................................................................................................... 1

1. INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND PRECARIOUSNESS ON

ISLA HUAPI ................................................................................................................................ 1

A SENSE OF PRECARITY ALLOWING FOR STATE PRESENCE ............................................... 6

STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS ............................................................................... 13

“How are you going to manage without the PDTI program?” .................................................. 17

LAND LOSS AND MARGINALIZATION – A HISTORICAL OUTLINE ...................................... 21

CHANGES IN CHILE’S POLITICAL ECONOMY (FROM 1930 TO 1990 AND BEYOND) ....... 26

PUTTING NEOLIBERALISM INTO PRACTICE – THE CHILEAN EXPERIMENT ................... 29

RECOGNITION OF INDIGENOUS RIGHTS (TO NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM) ..... 32

CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 35

2. ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NEOLIBERAL STATE

DEVELOPMENT ..................................................................................................................... 37

AN INFRASTRUCTURE TAKING FORM ON ISLA HUAPI ....................................................... 38

APPROACHING THE STATE ...................................................................................................... 41

NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT AND PARADOXES OF NEOLIBERALISM ............................ 46

Value realms in the wake of neoliberalism ............................................................................... 53

HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS ........................................................................................................ 56

3. REFLECTIONS ON METHOD AND ETHICAL CONCERNS ............................................. 63

AN OUTSIDER ENTERING THE ISLAND .................................................................................. 63

POSITIONINGS ............................................................................................................................ 69

VI

ETHICAL CONCERNS ................................................................................................................. 77

SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS AND THE STORY FROM HERE .................................................... 79

PART II ...................................................................................................................................... 85

4. TRACES OF A PAST: THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY OF ISLA

HUAPI AND INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY .................................................................... 85

THE MACHINERIES AND THE TRACTOR SHED – NEGOTIATING NOTIONS OF

PROPERTY, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE STATE ........................................................ 87

PRODUCING THE COLLECTIVE: FROM CO-OPERTAIVE LABOR TO PAYMENT OF DUES

...................................................................................................................................................... 93

RECONSTITUTING THE COMMUNITY, ESTABLISHING NEW AUTHORITIES .................... 95

MAPUCHE: “PEOPLE OF THE LAND” AND PROPERTY OWNERS .................................... 102

FENCING OFF INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY ............................................................................... 106

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 108

5. SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES: THE WORKINGS OF A STATE

INITIATED DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM .............................................................. 111

AN ISLAND OF PROGRAMS ..................................................................................................... 112

PDTI – A SOCIAL POLICY OF MARKET RELATIONS............................................................ 116

“GOVERNANCE OF HOPE” .................................................................................................... 119

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE THROUGH RELATIONS OF DEPENDENCE ................... 122

ASPIRING TO PDTI-ENROLLMENT ........................................................................................ 125

WHEN PROJECTS FAIL ............................................................................................................ 129

TERESA’S DOMOS – A DIFFERENT WAY ............................................................................... 134

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 139

6. “¡NO HAY AGUA!”: DIFFERENTIATION PROCESSES AND

PROMISES OF A WATER IRRIGATION SYSTEM............................................ 143

A HEATED MEETING ............................................................................................................... 144

A PROJECT FRAMED WITHIN POLICIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE ..................................... 147

VII

EXPECTATIONS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE ............................................................................. 149

“NO HAY AGUA” – AN ISSUE OF COMPREHENSION? ....................................................... 150

UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION OF ACCESS TO WATER ................................................................ 159

EMERGING FORMS OF INEQUALITY – AN AFTERNOON AT ROSA’S ............................... 161

ASSESSMENTS OF SUCCESS ................................................................................................... 165

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 168

7. “LA POLÍTICA”: NEGOTIATING INTERESTS ........................................... 171

A TIMELY INAUGURATION ..................................................................................................... 172

POLITICS AND “LA POLÍTICA” .............................................................................................. 176

PLACING SARITA IN A LANDSCAPE OF “THE POLITICAL” .............................................. 181

THE FIRMA DEL CONVENIO AND THE INAUGURATION OF THE IRRIGATION SYSTEM

.................................................................................................................................................... 184

THE WAKE – ENACTMENTS OF INTERESTS ......................................................................... 190

AFTER ELECTION ..................................................................................................................... 193

WELCOMING A NEW MAYOR .................................................................................................. 196

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 197

8. CONCLUSION: PARADOXES OF NEOLIBERALISM ............................. 201

A FINAL NOTE ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND NEOLIBERALISM ............................................ 205

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 209

VIII

IX

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CEPI Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples – Comisión Especial de Pueblos

Indígenas

CIFES National Center for Innovation and Promotion of Sustainable Energy – Centro

Nacional para la Innovacíon y Fomento de Energías Sustentables

CONADI The National Corporation for Indigenous Development – Corporación

Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena

CONAF National Forest Corporation – Corporacíon Nacional Forestal

CORFO Production Development Corporation – Corporacíon de Fomento de la

Producción

FOSIS Social Investment Fund – Fondo de Solidaridad e Inversión Social

ILO International Labour Organization

IMF International Monetary Fund

INDAP Agricultural Development Institute – Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario

MINAGRI Ministry of Agriculture – Ministerio de Agricultura de la República de Chile

ONEMI Ministry of the Interior and Public Security – Ministerio del Interior y

Seguridad Pública

OTEC Technical Training Organism – Organismo Técnico de Capacitación

PEL Program of Local Enterprise – Programa de Emprendimientos Locales

PDTI Indigenous Territory Development Program – Programa de Desarrollo

Territorial Indígena

SENCE National Training and Employment Service – Servicio Nacional de

Capacitación y Empleo

SERNATUR National Tourism Service – Servicio Nacional de Turismo

SUBDERE Undersecretary for Regional and Administrative Development – Subsecretaría

de Desarrollo Regional y Administrativo

X

Map 1: Retrieved from Google Maps, edited by me.

XI

Map 2: Retrieved from Google Maps, edited by me.

Map 3: Retrieved from Google Maps, edited by me.

PART I

1

1. INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND

PRECARIOUSNESS ON ISLA HUAPI

Twice a day the ferry Epu Huapi traveled back and forth across the lake, connecting the

island, Isla Huapi, to the mainland. From the window in my hotel room, which I had been

able to choose freely as I was the only guest there, I watched the passengers as they gradually

congregated around the port. As soon as the ferry appeared, approaching the mainland from

afar, they gathered their groceries – most likely purchased some hours earlier in the small

town of Futrono – and walked out onto the concrete gangway that sloped into the water. In

the time it took the crowd to board the ferry, which was no more than a few minutes, the port

was deserted again. Except for the moments before arrival and departure, the small port from

which the ferry departed for the island felt abandoned. Apart from the concrete gangway and

a sign that read “Puerto Futrono”, the only indication that you were standing in a port was a

worn-out aluminum plate mounted on a large, decaying wooden board, displaying outdated

ferry timetables. Rusty nails protruded from its corners. Next to the timetables, the aluminum

plate bore the insignia of the Chilean government: blue, white and red, the colors of the

Chilean flag. Like a Polaroid photograph, the blue and red had faded, which lent it an almost

mournful quality, while the white background had turned slightly brown. Alone except for

the sight and sound of the rain pouring down, I was looking down on the empty port and the

aluminum placard. It was as if the placard was refusing to give in. It was as if it persisted in

representing the body of authority, the Chilean government, that many years ago had

connected the long-neglected island of Isla Huapi to larger Chilean society by providing the

needed infrastructure of ferry transportation. This had been during the early 1990s.

One day in early March 2016, I joined the crowd of ferry passengers myself, accompanied by

a government-employed engineer whose mission was to check up on an infrastructure project

on the island. Disembarking on Isla Huapi, I felt that the desertion and ghostliness of the port

contrasted sharply with the atmosphere on the island. In the immediate vicinity, I observed a

newly painted weather shelter connected to a brand-new water tower. The ground beneath it

still bore the signs of construction. Next to the road leading away from the port, I noticed

garbage bins placed in a shiny red storage shed, each bin designated for a specific type of

2

waste. Landing on the island, I also noticed a map with the main tourist attractions and the

roads that would lead you there, and as I passed I saw the entrance to a gated fairground. A

wooden sign stood next to the entrance: “Feria Costumbrista de Isla Huapi” (“Isla Huapi

Traditional Fair”). It was only open during the summer months of January and February – the

peak of tourist season. Even though the fairground had just closed and the visitors had gone

their separate ways, the port area on the island had a sense of inhabitedness. The Chilean

government and affiliated state agencies were visible everywhere. In contrast to the worn-out

aluminum poster at the Futrono port, the reds and blues of these signs were fresh and bright.

Here the Chilean state seemed not a fading memory, but a vivid presence. Surely, the

engineer next to me contributed to this sensation. As I would later learn, the ferry

transportation was only the first of many governmentally funded development initiatives

pertaining to the island community that allowed for a high degree of state presence. These

manifestations of the state on Isla Huapi are my subject – people’s experiences of the state as

it appears, absent and abstract, yet immediate and tangible.

Ranco Lake is located in the fertile, lush landscape at the foot of the Andean mountain range

in the southeastern part of Chile. Isla Huapi, the island where I carried out my ethnographic

fieldwork and which forms the basis of this dissertation, is the largest island in this lake. It is

located approximately 10 kilometers or one hour’s ferry ride from Futrono, the nearest town

and municipality to which the island belongs for administrative purposes. The first part of the

island’s name, isla, means island in Spanish. The second part of the island’s name, huapi1,

points to the indigeneity of its inhabitants: this, too, means “island”, but in Mapudungun, the

Mapuche language. In a combination of Spanish and Mapudungun, the name Isla Huapi thus

means “island island”.

Mapuche is the largest group of indigenous peoples in Chile. As many as 9.9 percent of the

total Chilean population claim to belong to a so-called pueblo originario, an original or

native people, of which there in Chile are more than ten. 79.84 percent of these claim

Mapuche affiliation2 (INE, 2018). Isla Huapi hosts around 500 of these people who, like most

1 Terms I here refer to as Mapudungun words, like huapi, mapuche and huilliche, are in fact

themselves written Spanishizations of Mapudungun words. 2 “Pueblos originarios” is a concept that embraces different ethnic groups and people who are

native to territories today included into the national territory of Chile.

3

rural Mapuche people, are farmers. In 1995, inhabitants of the island formally established the

Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi.

In fact, the Mapuche of Isla Huapi are not Mapuche per se, but Mapuche-Huilliche. While

mapuche means “people of the land”, the second denomination huilliche means “people of

the south”3. Apart from those who have migrated to the capital, Mapuche peoples inhabit the

southern parts of the Chilean territory. The denomination huilliche places Mapuche peoples

in the southern areas within this territory. However, people on Isla Huapi just call themselves

Mapuche people or gente mapuche. Most commonly still, they call themselves “islanders”

(isleños) or “farmers” (agricultores). In terms of religious orientation, they are, with few

exceptions, Catholic or Evangelical Christians, although with varying degrees of

congregational commitment. However, the fact that they are rural Mapuche farmers who live

on an island is crucial to their perception of themselves as historically disconnected from

technologically advanced, modern society. This notion of disconnectedness would come up

when islanders talked about poverty and lack of development in their community, which they

attributed to a history of neglect by the state. However, over the last decades they have

experienced increasing state presence on the island. In this dissertation, I focus on the relation

between the Chilean state and the island society of Isla Huapi. In so doing, two questions

emerge: What is “the state” and, in particular, how does “the state” appear?

On Isla Huapi, the state is closely intertwined with the lives of islanders. In particular, the

state tends to assume two distinct forms. First, as a historically informed, non-social and

external force. In this capacity, it comes to be expressed through legal regulation of land and

definition of indigeneity, both of which are embedded in processes colored by the history of

aggressive neoliberalism in Chile. Secondly, the state appears as a negotiator intimately

involved in development initiatives. Brought about through government agencies and

institutions as well as their representatives, state-led development materializes on the island

largely in the form of training programs and infrastructural projects. A common thread

running through these programs and projects, as I will show, is the neoliberal logic inherent

to them: their purpose is to empower indigenous farmers to increase production, thereby

enabling them to alleviate their poverty. These initiatives are realized through collaborative

3 In chapter 4, I return to a discussion of the way in which people on Isla Huapi relate to the

land and how land becomes significant to them in accessing governmental support.

4

efforts among islanders, island authorities and the state, which in turn bring governmentally

and municipally employed development workers to the island. I therefore approach the state

as, on the one hand, an absent and external force, and on the other hand, one that fosters

collaborative encounters between itself and islanders.

In contrast to opposing the state or being against the state’s presence in the community,

islanders place hope in it and “hope for the state” (Jansen, 2014). By participating in

government-sponsored programs and collaborating closely with various state actors, they call

on the state. Not because they want political intervention but rather because they want

infrastructural development as well as greater economic opportunities. Thus, they call on a

particular mode of state manifestation, or, perhaps, materialization, namely an apparatus that

holds the promise of ordering structures and efficiency – one that can stimulate material and

economic development in the community and provide people with better lives. Therefore,

islanders are eager to participate in government-sponsored programs. But how does such

participation play out on the ground? Through what politics? Through which emotional

registers? Generally, in what ways do people of Isla Huapi engage the neoliberal state

through participation in state-led development? Additionally, in what ways do state actors

and agencies attract such participation? Guided by these questions, I examine the ways in

which the state asserts itself and plays out on the island. While exploring how such programs

allow for neoliberal governance, I also focus on the ways in which islanders draw on the state

to provide them a better future. By engaging the neoliberal state through participation in

government-sponsored development programs, islanders are constantly negotiating

paradoxical relations between dependence and independence, state presence and state retreat,

individual and collective interests, as well as other tense oppositions. Inherent to

neoliberalism, these paradoxes affect everyday life and shape the community.

It is characteristic of inhabitants on Isla Huapi that they do not greatly involve themselves in

political activism. In many places, particularly in the politicized urban areas of Temuco and

Santiago, Mapuche people’s relation to the state is colored by political conflicts that lead, in

some cases, to violent fights. Much of the attention on Mapuche people in media news,

international as well as national, has focused on demonstrations and violence (see, for

example, Youkee, 2018). These confrontations center around Mapuche claims to ancestral

territories taken from them first by European settlers, later by the Chilean military.

Meanwhile, Mapuche people’s struggles for rights to political self-determination and

5

recognition further fuel the conflicts (Di Giminiani, 2013; Richards & Gardner, 2013). These

issues have produced a vast body of research (see, for example, Di Giminiani, 2018b;

Kowalczyk, Motta, & Ferguson, 2013; Mallon, 2005; Richards, 2013; Studemann Henriquez,

2018). Interestingly, the issue of political self-determination is not greatly emphasized by the

residents of Isla Huapi themselves, and the restitution of ancestral land still less. Rather, they

tend to underline the importance of maintaining good relations with outside authorities by

“maintaining the dialogues”, as one islander put it. I have heard of only one instance of

political mobilization in which Isla Huapi residents were involved. Concerned about

environmental pollution, particularly the water of Lake Ranco, they joined forces with people

from Mapuche communities in the surrounding areas on the mainland to demonstrate against

companies that were encouraging aquaculture development. Other than this, I saw no signs of

collective political mobilization in the community. Compared to Mapuche people living in

rural communities further north, it seemed that residents of Isla Huapi had a less strained,

albeit ambivalent, relationship to the Chilean state.

This has partly to do with the place in which they live: unlike many other Mapuche

settlements, these people live on an island, a geographical unit recognized by the Chilean

government as indigenous territory. According to the local inhabitants themselves, people

have been living on Isla Huapi for more than 300 years. Due to lack of proper documentation

on the matter, I have found it hard to identify when exactly the island became inhabited.

However, in his history of the Mapuche people, José Bengoa (1987) makes one specific

reference to Isla Huapi. He recounts a story he was told about a Mapuche family who came to

the island seeking refuge from the violence perpetrated by the Chilean military as it sought to

displace Mapuche people and relocate them onto indigenous reserves. Because of the island’s

inaccessibility, he writes, the family was able to escape the ongoing depredation of the

surrounding areas (Bengoa, 1987, p. 359). The displacement to which Bengoa is here

referring, and to which I will return later in this chapter, took place during the second half of

the 19th century. Whether the island first became inhabited as a result of these processes or

was already inhabited at the time, the island became a governmentally recognized Mapuche

reserve in 1916. Since then, several shifts in the legal regulation of the island territory have

threatened residents’ right to live there.

In 1940, president Pedro Aguirre Cerda proposed a law that would authorize expropriation of

the territory for the purpose of establishing a public national park ("Ley N° 6694. Declara de

6

Utilidad Publica y Autoriza la Expropriacion de Terrenos en la Isla Huape," 1940). In return,

islanders were promised land of equivalent size and value – but this, as it turned out, was to

be located in one of the remotest mountain areas of Chile. Islanders refused to move, and in

the end the motion fell through (Orellana, 2016). Subsequent legal regulations of indigenous

land have had an equally decisive effect on the lives of islanders, but were perhaps less

duplicitous than Cerda’s motion. While historical processes of land regulation have posed

threats to islanders’ territorial rights – another topic to which I return later in this chapter –

they are not currently being deprived or threatened with deprivation of territories they

consider their own.

I suggest that this leniency on the part of state authorities results from the fact that inhabitants

of Isla Huapi do not make political claims to restitution of ancestral land, or indeed claims to

political self-determination made by many Mapuche settlements elsewhere. Rather, as my

ethnography suggests, it seems that islanders engage with the state through development

negotiations. In doing so, the Mapuche community of Isla Huapi seems to be entwining itself

more closely with the state, rather than making efforts to withdraw from it.

Why? The islanders’ calling on the state as a provider of development is partly a consequence

of precarious living. The inaccessibility of the infrastructure and technology available on the

mainland adds to the sense of disconnection and isolation, while also encouraging hopes and

aspirations for better lives. But what exactly does this precariousness consist in? In what

ways do they hope to improve their lives? What is their everyday life like?

A SENSE OF PRECARITY ALLOWING FOR STATE PRESENCE

Like most rural Mapuche, people on Isla Huapi spent their days carrying out various farming

and farming-related activities in addition to attending various social events. It took me some

time, however, to understand what exactly people were actually spending their days doing.

When I first arrived on the island, I would take long strolls along the narrow dirt roads

stretching the four kilometers or so from north to south. To meet people along these roads

was almost a rarity, except when children from the local school were walking home in the

afternoon. Only occasionally would a car pass by. There were few cars on the island, as the

uneven, stony roads unfit for driving testified. To get around, and particularly to transport

7

heavy loads, people hired Marcelo. He was one of the relatively few islanders who owned a

car – a small, rusty van with disproportionately tiny wheels. Living on the south side of the

island, he would use this car to transport passengers from their houses on the south side to the

north side of the island. On the north side were the children’s school (which functioned as a

community meeting

place), the health care

center and, until recently,

the only port. These were

the only municipal

institutions on the island.

Families who owned bulls

(bueyes) would also use

these to transport heavier

loads. They would hitch

their two bulls to a

heavily loaded wooden

wagon, which the bulls

pulled while the owners

themselves walked

alongside it. Except for

the few households with

access to a well, which

was connected to a water

tower, people lacked

clean, potable water.

Transporting huge blue barrels brimming with lakewater was thus one of the most common

activities for which people used the bulls and wagon. Those who had no bulls of their own

and couldn’t borrow them from a friendly neighbor had to carry the barrels by hand from the

lake to the house, often uphill.

During these walks, I only occasionally caught glimpses of people next to their modest

houses located alongside the road. The houses were wooden constructions, but had been

repaired using sheets of corrugated iron plated in zinc, similar to the material used for the

roofs. It was typical of the 125 households spread around the island that the house itself

8

would sit amidst the adjacent fields owned by the inhabitants. So, in most cases, the fields

formed a spatial buffer between the road and the house, particularly as the fields tended to be

fenced in. As they moved about, the people I spotted vanished behind trees and other plants

along the fields’ edges as abruptly as they had appeared. Except from an occasional bark

from dogs guarding the fenced off properties, I remember thinking it was strikingly quiet:

there were rarely people or cars on the roads, there was no music playing, and, in general,

there were hardly any sounds of people at all. Because the houses were located far from each

other, they took on a solitary appearance.

Accompanied by the call of the treile, the southern lapwing characteristic of the region, and

the sound of wind blowing through the treetops, I trudged my way up to the very north side

of the island. There I would turn around and walk to the south side, before going back to

where I was living: in one of Ana’s two cabins that she had had constructed for purposes of

tourism, using the financial support of a government development agency.

9

Ana, an industrious woman in her fifties, shared her household with her husband Daniel who

was about the same age. He was one of few islanders who taught at the local children’s

school. Together, Ana and Daniel had raised two children, both grown now. Like other

couples’ children, when Ana and Daniel’s came of age they moved out of the house they had

grown up in and away from the island altogether. With Daniel engaged in work at the school

and the children gone, I usually returned from my long strolls to find Ana by herself, either in

the vegetable garden or in the kitchen. Sometimes there would be other people present, either

clients of her business or guests from the island – often neighbors. Most days, though, she

was alone.

Unlike most islanders, Daniel and Ana had potable water. They also enjoyed the luxury of

flush toilets connected to a septic tank buried in their garden and electricity generated from

two solar panels. In that sense, they were better off than many other families. Devoted to

developing her business, Ana took a shrewd approach to the support available through

development programs. In many ways, she had done well for herself and Daniel. Many

islanders had gasoline-driven generators, but due to the generators’ tendency to break down

and the high fuel costs, they were expensive to run. As source of light after the sun set, most

families used candles. Not only did they barely give off enough light to see, they were also

dangerous. More than once, candlelight had caused fires in the drafty wooden houses.

Ana’s workload was heavy and time consuming. Like other women, she repeatedly had to

fetch firewood to keep the fire going, and with it the stove she used for cooking. All the

laundry was done by hand, but unlike other women, Ana did not have to fetch the water from

the lake. In addition, she had to care for the animals – feeding the chickens and taking the

cows to the lake to drink – and on top of this she had to maintain a large vegetable garden and

a greenhouse. The produce she had to harvest and conserve in various ways. Although Ana

and Daniel owned both a refrigerator and a freezer, the appliances only worked when there

was energy stored up in the batteries of the solar panels. Yet even this limited access to

electricity saved Ana from some of the preservation work in which most other women on the

island had to invest a significant amount of time and energy. Once a week, Ana would have

Daniel drive her to the port in his car, a large yellow van that he also used for school

purposes, to take the ferry to Futrono. There she would buy her groceries: milk powder, flour,

cooking oil, butter, mate herbs, coffee and other things she could not get on the island, or

which she found too expensive to buy in the small island negocios (shops). Because she had a

10

more-or-less functional freezer and more money than others had, she would also buy meat in

Futrono. Unlike most of the meat from the animals on the island, the meat she bought in

Futrono was certified, which meant that according to legal regulations she was allowed to

serve it to tourists.

Like other women, Ana was frequently occupied with chores in and around the house.

Because she enjoyed access to running water and solar power, her chores were slightly easier

to handle than other women’s. Still, as she ran a cabin and restaurant business as well, she

had plenty to do. Periodically, Ana hired her neighbor, Mauricio, whom she paid on a day-to-

day basis, to work the fields for her. Others were not so fortunate as to be able to afford this.

It was quite common for women to live by themselves when either they had separated from

their husbands or their husbands had died. If their husbands were still around, they would

commonly take care of the animals and the field: cutting the fiercely growing mora

(mulberry), repairing fences surrounding the property or chopping firewood. When it was

time to cultivate the fields, women helped, if needed. Most commonly, islanders cultivated

potatoes, a crop ideally suited to the ecological conditions. But more active farmers grew

wheat and oats as well as potatoes, often supplemented by beans. Others grew grass to

pasture their livestock. While planting and sowing commonly took place once a year at a

specific time, the harvest was done over a longer period. They practiced cultivación escalada,

as they told me – seasonally scaled cultivation. Most active farmers cultivated a variety of

crops that ripened at different times. While farmers brought some of the produce to Futrono

to sell at the small farmer’s market there, which once a week was reserved exclusively for

farmers from Isla Huapi, most of it was for self-subsistence. Due to a widespread and well-

known struggle with alcohol abuse, a significant number of islanders – mostly men, but also

women – were not particularly productive when it came to farming. It was evident from

looking at the island landscape that many fields were lying barren – clearly unattended to,

uncultivated and overrun with unmanaged weeds. This impression was confirmed by Ana and

others who criticized their neighbors of being lazy (flojo) referring to the barren fields. But

even for the most industrious farmer and animal keeper, the income generated from sales was

still bleak.

First, opportunities to sell produce were limited – a point I will discuss further in chapter 5,

where I examine the particular workings of a state-led development program. Second, of the

approximately three hectares of land belonging to each household, the arable portion was

11

generally quite small. Some islanders, like Ana and Daniel, were more fortunate

economically than others. But they did not generate their income through produce sales.

In recent years, the stream of tourists visiting Isla Huapi has swelled, partly as a result of

outside tourist agents promoting visits to the island as a chance to “travel back in time”,

partly due to support from governmental agencies. To meet the rising demand, several

individually run tourist businesses have appeared. When I left the island in December 2016,

there were at least four such businesses on the island that offered lodging to tourists. In part,

this development of moderately financially successful businesses has allowed for greater

access to paid work, as some islanders occasionally worked for others. Typically, carpenters

living on the island built cabins and the like for rising entrepreneurs; at the same time, those

who had their hands full running their tourist business, like Ana, would hire workers to take

over the farming labor they would otherwise have been doing themselves. Additionally, the

municipal institutions on the island, namely la posta (the health center) and the children’s

school, employed a handful of islanders like Daniel. Some islanders also rented out parts of

their land to neighbors in need as some grew crops and keeping animals more actively than

others. Finally, children who had moved away and made a living elsewhere occasionally sent

money back to their parents who still lived on the island.

Except for a few islanders who had taken jobs working for wealthier patrones on the

mainland (typically in construction), the most important cash flow actually came from

monthly state pensions. Although the amount of money that islanders received through these

pensions was barely enough to make ends meet, it allowed for a steady, reliable source of

cash. Among islanders, the pension was known as el pago (the payment), and its distribution

constituted a crucial monthly event.

If you gazed across the lake on a certain day during the second week of the month, you might

have seen the ferry as it approached the island carrying a big, steel-plated yellow van. This

van contained the pension money. When it arrived at the north port, the driver took the hilly

dirt road to the school’s gym where two functionaries handed out the money. In front of the

gym entrance, a crowd of people had normally gathered even before the ferry docked.

12

While some arrived the gym carrying boxes of food, clothing and small quantities of other

items they hoped to sell off to fellow islanders, others arrived only with their identity cards in

hand necessary to cash out the money. The amount that each household received from the

pension arrangement was normally 80,000 pesos (approximately 120 USD in 2016). This was

not much money to sustain a household throughout the month. Using a generator – itself a

very costly investment – for three hours a day cost approximately 15,500 pesos a week. If the

generator broke down and needed professional repair, the money did not suffice. However,

the amount of the pension varied according to the recipient’s age and number of children as

well as the physical and mental state of the recipient and the members of their household.

Any disability made one eligible for a slightly greater amount. These payments represented

nearly the entire income of some islanders.

Despite sporadic sources of income to supplement the monthly pension payments, most

people lived precarious lives. This precariousness expressed itself not only in the poor

economic situation, but also in the lack of infrastructure and basic services. For a long time,

potable water and electricity had been greatly desired infrastructures. For this reason, many

13

islanders, when faced with the government’s development initiatives aiming at economic

enhancement and infrastructural improvements, were willing to participate and, in some

cases, even demanded to do so. Yet, encounters between islanders and the state’s agents of

development were based on difficult negotiations and, from time to time, led to social

tension. This tension did not only occur in the relationships between development workers

and the island community, but also among islanders themselves.

STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

With the term “state-led development program”, I am designating several widely diverse

types of programs represented by different government agencies. The Agricultural

Development Institute (INDAP), under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture

(MINAGRI), was the main government agency to provide development programs on Isla

Huapi. Since its establishment in 1962, INDAP has offered support tailored to small-scale

farmers – or, to speak more precisely in terms of economic units, family farmers

(agricultores familiares). The support has, since the early 1960s, appeared either in the form

of micro-credit arrangements, or as training and technical assistance. In his book Toda una

vida (2017), in which he recounts the history of INDAP, Sergio Faiguenbaum writes that it

was through the combination of these two forms of support that INDAP attempted to reach its

goals: “To elevate productivity and improve the quality of life among farmers (that is, larger

incomes)” (Faiguenbaum, 2017, p. 44, my translation). To this day, INDAP’s modes of

support and its target group remain the same. Through a corps consisting of governmental

authorities, functionaries, companies providing technological services, consultants and

agricultural organizations, INDAP continues to offer technological assistance, training

programs and micro-credit arrangements.

The programs offered by INDAP today share the goal of reducing poverty, ostensibly

equipping poor farmers with the means to improve their lives. But different INDAP-programs

are designed to do this in different ways. One of the programs that INDAP provided on Isla

Huapi, probably the most significant one, was the Indigenous Territory Development

Program (PDTI)4. This program is specifically designed to target indigenous people living in

rural areas. It works in an “associative” (asociativo) as well as in an “individual” (individual)

4 In chapter 5, I return to a more detailed description of the PDTI program as I examine the

different ways in which the program plays out on Isla Huapi.

14

capacity, which means that it targets indigenous communities as a collective as well as

individuals within the community more directly5.

The PDTI program thus offered funding on two different levels: to the Indigenous

Community of Isla Huapi, as a collective, and to individually registered members of the

Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi (socios). Individual farmers could apply for a five-year

membership in the PDTI program. It allowed up to 95 members from Isla Huapi. As

individual members of this program, islanders were in principle eligible to apply for

microcredit earmarked specific, individual projects that they designed themselves. An

example of one such project is the construction of a quincho (restaurant). Individual farmers

used these project designs, including a description of the project and a budget, to participate

in open funding competitions (concursos). If they “got” the project, as they said, they would

receive access to credit. The amount of credit varied according to the size and character of the

project, but a certain share of expenses tied to the project could be subsidized by the agency6.

On the individual level, the funding aimed at advancing a particular person’s income-

generating activities. Funding that INDAP, through PDTI, granted the Indigenous

Community of Isla Huapi as a collective, on the other hand, were to benefit all members

(socios) of PDTI equally. This could, for example, be money for fertilizers or to cover costs

of new equipment for the communal tractor.

The municipality of Futrono through which INDAP channeled the resources necessary to

carry out the PDTI program hired a so-called extension team, or technical team. The team

consisted of three men: Ricardo, Ariel and Helmuth7. On Isla Huapi, they were known as the

PDTI team or simply “the PDTI”. Ricardo was a trained agronomist and head of the PDTI

team. Like the other two, Ricardo lived on the mainland, in the agricultural area surrounding

the small town of Futrono. He had been born and raised there and had settled down in the

area with a family of his own – a wife and two young children. He was not Mapuche himself,

but he knew the island and the people living there quite well. For more than five years, the

5 In chapter 4 as well as in chapter 6, I discuss different notions of the community, including

the notion of “community as collective”. 6 As mentioned in the previous footnote, I will get back to the specificities of these

arrangements in chapter 5, but I will also get back to them later in this chapter. 7 All names that appear in this dissertation are pseudonyms, except from names of public

figures such as politicians.

15

municipality of Futrono had employed him to execute the PDTI program in Mapuche

communities surrounding the town of Futrono, including the community of Isla Huapi. Thus,

through his position as head of the local PDTI team, he tried to bring national policies of

agricultural development to the island. Ricardo and his team did this quite literally by visiting

the island – often more than twice a week – to promote development projects or concursos.

The PDTI team also helped islanders to apply: to fill out the application papers correctly, to

work out the project description and to write a budget.

If an islander had an idea to a project she wanted to carry out, she would contact Ricardo.

From time to time, Ricardo also approached islanders with ideas for projects that he found

suitable for this or that islander, depending on factors such as property location or the will, as

he saw it, to work hard. For concursos on the individual level, Ricardo encouraged islanders

to apply for money to finance small-scale projects that showed the promise of increased

production either in farming (such as the construction of a greenhouse) or in the maintenance

or expansion of an individually run tourist business. Alongside individually run projects,

islanders were also engaged in other development initiatives. They attended workshops,

courses, and other training programs designed to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit. In

many cases, these initiatives were partially or fully funded by INDAP, and the PDTI team

always played a part in the organizational arrangements. However, the municipality, regional

ministry offices or people from other state offices8 were often also involved in funding or in

another organizational capacity, at both the individual and the collective level.

When Ricardo had information about project competitions at the collective level – i.e.,

projects, such as the construction of a community center, from which the Indigenous

Community of Isla Huapi as a whole could benefit – he would take the ferry to the island and

arrange a so-called community meeting, at which he would inform and encourage the

Community to apply for funding. However, he did not convoke or run the meetings alone, but

in cooperation with la directiva – the island Community Board. In 1995, when residents of

Isla Huapi came together to form an officially recognized Community, they were obliged to

establish such a Board. While I take a closer look at processes of social organization, island

authorities, and notions of community in chapter 4, the point I want to underline here is that

8 Such as the Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), the Ministry of Public Work (MOP), or

The Ministry of the Interior and Public Security (ONEMI).

16

the Board’s task upon its establishment was to represent the community as a collective unity

– the Community with a capital C – and work for the “common good”. As such, the Board,

democratically chosen as they said, became a new body of authority representing the

Community. Thus, before presenting the socios (Community members) at the meetings with

the questions of which competitions they might engage in and which development projects

they should pursue, Ricardo first referred these questions to the Board. When individuals

within the community disagreed or showed dissatisfaction with a specific project at the

Community level – as in the case of the irrigation project addressed in chapter 6 – they

tended to blame the Board.

In general, forms of interaction between islanders and the state were numerous and frequent

and centered around the notion of development (desarrollo), which was conceived either as

technological and infrastructural development or as increased production and economic

enhancement. One way or another, islanders were often engaged in state-led development

that affected internal dynamics within the island community.

State-sponsored development, however, could lead to tensions wherever there was conflict

between the interests of individuals on the one hand and the collective Community on the

other. These conflicts often involved the Board. Different islanders represented diverse

interests and interest groups. First, there were controversies about the degree to which the

Board represented the “common good” of society or whether they “se preocuparon por ellos

mismos” – cared only about themselves. Such controversies created a specific form of

political dynamics within the island community, namely política – accusations of

manipulations and lies – that I discuss further in chapter 7. Second, as development workers

such as Ricardo approached and collaborated with individual islanders to the exclusion of

others this caused friction to arise between islanders themselves, allowing some to access

resources not available to others. Thus, as I will show throughout this dissertation, an

increase in state presence spurred tensions between the notion of the “common good” and

individual self-interest, while also leading people to question island authorities. While the

desire for proper infrastructure in the form of electricity and potable water sustained a

collective hope in the community, money channeled through individually targeted, state-led

development programs has enhanced the economic situation for a specific sub-ground of

aspiring islanders: the emprendedores (entrepreneurs). The concept of entrepreneurs here

embraces aspiring individuals whose engagement with development initiatives has led to a

17

certain degree of economic enhancement and, to some, infrastructural development – in their

own households and on their own properties. Hence, as I will show, these are islanders who

seem to be better equipped than others to pursue a collaboration with state agencies who, on

their part, encourage islanders to take advantage of their ethnic identity as Mapuche to access

the market and that way improve precarious living (a point to which I return later in this

chapter).

The relationship between state actors and islanders, between development initiatives and the

Community did not always play out smoothly and was, in fact, a source of recurring internal

conflicts and growing differences. Still, I experienced a general will on islanders’ behalf to

attract the state in a developmentally focused capacity. By demonstrating a will to collaborate

with state agencies and their agents, they called on the state to make good on yet-unfulfilled

promises to modernize material, infrastructural surroundings. At the same time, it was in the

interest of state and municipal employees to make their presence felt and impact the island

society with developmental strategies that went beyond infrastructural improvements.

Through various programs, state agents wanted to increase the efficiency of income-

generating activities such as agriculture and tourism, hence empowering islanders to break

free from economic precariousness through entrepreneurial endeavors. Surely, the

relationship between the state and the island community was a two-way street that demanded

willingness and investment on both parts. Thus, it was not only islanders who called on the

state. The state also intensively labored for its own relevance to people on the island. The

PDTI program and Ricardo himself were central to this work on Isla Huapi. Meanwhile,

state-led development also held the threat of failure and, to islanders, still worse living

conditions.

“How are you going to manage without the PDTI program?”

Together, Ricardo and I had been driving all over the island, visiting farmers to vaccinate

their sheep. His job required him to identify and address the various demands and necessities

of farming activities in the community (such as keeping the animals healthy) as well as to

keep an eye out for development potential in these areas. We had finished the last round of

vaccinations when he told me we had one more stop to make before he could take me back to

my lodging. After driving for some minutes, he stopped the car on the top of a small hill,

turned off the engine and glanced outside the window before turning to me. “Can you see a

18

greenhouse down there?” he asked. I peered outside the window looking for a greenhouse at

the foot of the hill, but all I could see was the little, slightly crooked house in desperate need

of a coat of paint. “No, I don’t,” I answered. “Why?” Ricardo filled me in on our mission

here.

Apparently, the man living in that house had received money through the PDTI program to

build a greenhouse. That had been six months ago. The farmer in question had exceeded the

limited time frame and thus breached the contract through which he had been given the funds.

Ricardo needed to talk to him, he said, and got out of the car. I followed. While walking

towards the house, he called the man’s name. This, I had discovered, was a common way in

these parts of announcing your visit. Upon several failed attempts to locate the man, a woman

stepped outside. Ricardo greeted her as señora: it was his wife. She came over to us, and

Ricardo explained the reason for his visit: he had come to collect photographs, receipts and

signatures to document the construction for which they had received the money.

The man’s wife told Ricardo that they had not yet gotten around to building the greenhouse.

She said that, because her husband had been working, there had been no time. Ricardo kept

his eyes riveted on hers, but soon she dropped her gaze and stared at her folded hands. She

said nothing more. I felt bad for her and thought Ricardo had been unusually harsh in his

approach. I felt embarrassed by my presence – that I, a stranger to her, was there to witness

this delicate conversation. Ricardo then stepped over to a tree throwing shadow over a small

patch of grass and sat down. Together with the woman, I sat down next to him. In a much

milder tone (to my relief), and with a voice in which I could sense concern and empathy, he

asked her: “How are we going to solve this? How are you going to manage (lograr) without

the PDTI program? This money is a credit, not a subsidy, so you’ll have to pay [it back].”

She had no answer to this. All she said was, “I don’t know.” Ricardo asked her to visit him at

the PDTI office with her husband; they would have to figure something out. Then we left.

Back in the car, I asked Ricardo if it was true what he had said, that this woman and her

husband would have to pay back all the money and if they were really going to be expelled

from the program. Given the general poverty prevailing on the island, and to judge from the

shabby look of their home, even with a down-payment plan they were probably struggling to

19

make ends meet. There would have to be some penalties, Ricardo responded, but he added

that he was certain they would find a solution.

Ricardo felt the need to clarify that the money was part of a credit arrangement. Money for

individual projects like the greenhouse was initially given as loan, with the potential of

turning 90 to 95 percent of it into a subsidy if the recipients adhered to the terms built into the

loan contract. For a greenhouse, this would amount to approximately 700,000 pesos

(approximately 1000 USD in 2016). If they did not adhere to the terms, the loan did not

become a subsidy. It looked as if Ricardo felt the need to remind the family of this, since the

fact was that, far from receiving a gift, they had entered into a credit agreement by which

they were now indebted to INDAP. The way Ricardo approached a situation in which a

family had failed to adhere to the terms of the lending agreement, to which I return in chapter

5, demonstrates the diversity of his roles and responsibilities. While Ricardo was there to

offer support in a developmental capacity, he was also a friend who cared for the islanders’

well-being. Additionally, he was an employee who depended on his position at the

municipality to maintain a steady income. Although I never had the chance to learn what

penalty they agreed on, I knew Ricardo would be eager to find a solution to the problem that

satisfied different needs. While he did not want to put this family in a vulnerable position by

increasing economic precariousness, he also needed to navigate the delicate bureaucratic

obstacles that a failed project created as carefully as possible. In fact, he probably found that

these motives coincided with his interest in keeping his job. Making the situation look good

on paper – that is, not having to register unpaid installments – was crucial. He knew that the

reports he had to write would be used to assess his work and suitability for the position after

the upcoming municipal election (a topic to which I return in chapter 7). Thus, many

considerations had to be carefully negotiated as part of his work as head of the PDTI team,

and he was constantly juggling different interests: those of the development agencies as well

as those of islanders. Succeeding in his work meant successfully negotiating at times

conflicting or, at least, ambivalent interests.

This vignette takes me to some of the principal questions motivating the present project:

namely, how islanders participate in state-led development, and how state agents engage

them in it. It takes me to the everyday politics of development programs through which the

Chilean state appears in indigenous societies. Organized through state-led development

programs such as PDTI, government initiatives to fight poverty through intensified

20

agriculture and market-based policies have driven a process of transformation in targeted

communities. Isla Huapi’s inhabitants struggled for decades with poverty and state neglect

resulting, for instance, in the lack of basic services such as electricity and sanitized drinking

water. Today, by contrast, the presence of the state on Isla Huapi is tangible. In some way or

another, almost every farmer on the island is involved in a governmental development

initiative. Hence, the government is also heavily involved in islanders’ lives. How relations

between the state and island community plays out through development initiatives is far from

forthright. Not only is it characterized by a history of state neglect and violence. It is also

ridden by contemporary tensions brought about, as I argue, precisely through engagement

with neoliberal development. Thus, this is a relation that calls for ethnographic exploration.

My ethnography will show that, on certain levels, state-led development brings about

opportunities for enhanced living conditions. At the same time, however, new patterns of

social and economic differentiation emerge, which bring forth new sets of questions. Why do

some families benefit more from state-led development than others? In what ways do people

become increasingly dependent on state development initiatives? In what does this

dependency consist? How does state engagement allow for new modes of governance?

Finally, as islanders become increasingly tied in with the state, how does this relation

generate conflicts of representation and lead to questioning of authority?

State-led development programs are founded on the principle of development through

support or assistance (apoyo). Yet they are also based on relations of credit and on economic

as well as social dependency. To put oneself and one’s family, or to be put by one’s family,

potentially in debt to the branch of the Chilean state that funds the PDTI program could have

devastating consequences. These are particularly acute for poor people, like most rural

Mapuche. In addition to the threat of indebtedness, expulsion from the PDTI program would

in itself bring challenges. For their hope to find a solution to their economic difficulty, the

family in the vignette above was entirely dependent on Ricardo’s willingness to help them.

As the PDTI program has become fundamental to livelihoods on Isla Huapi, maintaining

good relations with functionaries working with the community is crucial for those who live

there. As I will show, the livelihoods of many of them depend on it. In what ways, then, are

social and economic relations of dependence on state-led development programs, their

employees, and the infrastructures they produce part of that unfolding reality on Isla Huapi? I

argue that people on Isla Huapi engage the state collectively as well as individually through

development programs because they yearn for better lives. Islanders’ sense of the urgent need

21

for infrastructural development, of getting electricity and potable water to the island, as they

said, but also for economic enhancement is expressed through their hopes and aspirations for

and, consequently, their demands on the state. Although restitution of ancestral land is not an

issue for inhabitants of Isla Huapi as it is for other Mapuche settlements, the history of

marginalization and deprivation of ancestral land adds a crucial historical perspective to the

understanding of contemporary precarity on Isla Huapi.

LAND LOSS AND MARGINALIZATION – A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

In light of the region’s past, the extensive presence of the Chilean state on Isla Huapi can

seem quite puzzling at first. Due to a history of more than 200 years of discrimination from

non-Mapuche authorities and the larger society alike, many people living in rural Mapuche

settlements meet Chileans or other non-Mapuche outsiders – winkas – with a certain

skepticism or hostility. At the same time, they take pride in the Mapuche ideal of hospitality,

on Isla Huapi as elsewhere (Bacigalupo, 2007, p. 41). The state makes itself relevant to and

its presence needed in the island community. Thus, it calls on the islanders as much as

islanders call on the state. Yet islanders’ longing for the state presents us with an interesting

case based on their relation to it, particularly as the state itself has played a central part in

creating the very precariousness from which they rely on the state to escape.

How, then, did Mapuche people’s situation in Chile, on Isla Huapi and elsewhere, become

precarious – economically, socially and politically? The history of major land deprivation and

state discrimination has left Mapuche peoples throughout Chile with little land to make a

living, which in turn has made them more dependent on the state to survive. While this

history has mobilized many rural Mapuche in current struggles over self-determination,

recognition, and the restitution of ancestral territories (Di Giminiani, 2015; Richards &

Gardner, 2013), this is not the case on Isla Huapi. As I have pointed out, they engage the state

in other ways and through other means: namely, through state-led development programs.

However, against the background of historical land deprivations, they are today a politically,

socially and economically marginalized society. Like other rural Mapuche communities, Isla

Huapi was shaped as a society on the margins of the state (Das & Poole, 2004), disconnected

from the economic and technological advances elsewhere in the country as well as from the

political center in the capital of Santiago. This production of inequality began many centuries

ago.

22

Prior to the Spanish invasion of Mapuche territory that started in the mid-16th century,

Mapuche peoples populated major parts of the country we now know as Chile. They lived in

forested areas from the Bío-Bío River in the central valley of Chile, south of the capital

Santiago, to the very southern parts of the continent. Some Mapuche populations also lived

across the border of today’s Argentina, where many still live (Bengoa, 1987). Although the

Spanish managed to establish alliances with some Mapuche leaders in various regions, the

conquistadores struggled to take total control of the Mapuche region and people. In spite of

major land deprivation as a result of warfare, the Mapuche people fought back the attempts

by the Spanish to conquer them. In 1641, the Spanish Crown recognized the Mapuche people

as a sovereign political order. For their refusal to surrender they have become known as the

people, “el pueblo”, who resisted Spanish conquest for more than 250 years (Bengoa, 1987;

Faron, 1968). However, when Chile gained independence from the Spanish Crown (1810-

1818), the process of confiscating and colonizing large areas of southern lands started yet

again. Little by little, the Chilean military acquired new territory.

In the decades following 1810, the relationship between Mapuche populations and the

Chilean military was relatively peaceful, and border relations between Chile and Mapuche

territories were maintained. However, this relationship changed from 1850 onwards when

Chileans took an interest in Mapuche people’s land, which they wanted to use to extend the

nation’s agricultural production. In addition, there was a growing interest among Chilean

authorities in unifying the Chilean territory. This led to a shift in discourse and policy

towards Mapuche people (Richards, 2013). The subsequent occupation, usurpation and

penetration of Mapuche territory (see Bengoa, 1987) was legitimized by notions of the

Mapuche people as barbaric, uncivilized, and unable to exploit their land properly (Richards,

2013). The way in which they were subordinated to the larger society of European-descended

Chileans, in public discourse as well as in the sphere of national politics, left them both

economically and politically marginalized.

In the mid-19th century, the first tracts of confiscated land were auctioned off by the Chilean

state to European settlers. Mapuche people previously living on this land were confined to so-

called reducciones – reservations scattered throughout the southern regions. The resettlement

process took place through allotments of collective land titles (títulos de merced) – property

deeds. On the deed, a cacique was normally listed as the owner of the reservation territory.

23

The cacique was the head of the kinship lineage that originally formed the basis of a

Mapuche society or social grouping. As head of a social grouping, he was in charge of

distributing the land according to usufruct practices (Bengoa, 1987; Boccara, 1999). The

cacique was supposed to have kinship ties to those settling with him. However, as the

resettlements were forced through by bureaucrats, plenty of people without clear kinship ties

to the cacique, such as war refugees, nevertheless settled in his reservation (Mallon, 2005).

On Isla Huapi there were people from different, unrelated kinship lineages who settled,

fleeing the ongoing war. Yet, bureaucrats divided the island territory into only two

administrative units, granting títulos de merced to heads of two different lineages. Everybody

who lived on Isla Huapi lived in one of these reducciones, either the northern or the southern

reducción. The name of the cacique was not listed on either of them. Before the war, the

social organization of the Mapuche people had been different. They had been “structured

politically in a decentralized way, through a combination of lineage-based marriage alliances

and a fairly complex and flexible relationship among territory, kinship, and identity” (Mallon,

2005, p. 6 and 7). The establishment of reducciones forced the reworking of earlier forms of

kin-based organization and tended to invent smaller, more isolated organizational units as,

due to warfare and displacement from original lands, movement became limited (Mallon,

2005).

The invasion of Mapuche territory by the Chilean army and the subsequent resettlement

process became known as the “Pacification of Araucania”, Araucania being the northernmost

Mapuche region, located between Bío-Bío River in the north and river Toltén in the south.

The process left the Mapuche people with only five percent of their original land (Crow,

2013), as the reservations amounted to approximately 500 thousand hectares in contrast to the

original 10 million hectares of the prewar Mapuche region (Di Giminiani, 2015). The process

of displacing Mapuche populations from land where they lived onto designated reservations

to which they were given collective land titles marked the beginning of what many

anthropologists have referred to as the modern Mapuche era (Faron, 1964, 1968) or that of

the contemporary Mapuche (Bengoa, 1984). I will not here enter a discussion of the accuracy

of a historical marker pinpointing when the Mapuche people of Chile became “modern” or

“contemporary”. However, I would like to highlight the significance of what was happening

in Chile in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in particular, how Mapuche people from

this point on were forced to engage with Chile’s system of legal regulations concerning

property and to conceive of land not only as territory but also as property.

24

By displacing Mapuche people and introducing new notions of land, the Chilean government

attempted to assimilate and control Mapuche populations throughout Chile. Meanwhile, the

land deprivation continued throughout the 20th century. The land market was unregulated,

and many caciques either willingly sold their land to local settlers or were tricked into

signing land transfer agreements written in Spanish, a language they did not understand well

(Bengoa, 1987; Di Giminiani, 2015). Accordingly, many of the Mapuche political struggles

during the 20th century focused on protecting indigenous property rights. These struggles paid

off. During the period of agrarian reform (1962-73), landless farmers, including indigenous

Mapuche farmers, were given land through redistribution. Under the socialist government of

Salvador Allende, Law No. 17.729 was passed, which introduced land grants specifically

targeted at Mapuche people. Backed by the law, they were encouraged to take back lost

territories (Di Giminiani, 2015; Mallon, 2005).

However, in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet took power through a coup d’état and

subsequently reversed Allende’s law. Under Pinochet’s military dictatorship, large

landholders’ rights were favored over indigenous people’s land grants. As a result of

Pinochet’s counter-reform, Mapuche families ended up retaining only 16 percent of the land

recovered through Allende’s land grants (Richards, 2010). Furthermore, in 1979, through

Legal Decree 2.568, the military junta divided up previously held land titles (the títulos de

merced) and replaced them with individual land titles – títulos de dominio (Di Giminiani,

2015). By 1979, the time had passed when the cacique distributed undemarcated, in practice

communal land, according to usufruct practices in Mapuche reservations. The text of the

statute professes to aim at putting an end to discrimination and barriers to progress, and at the

same time at satisfying “the obvious aspiration of the indigenous to become individual

owners of the land” ("Modifica Ley N° 17.729. Sobre Proteccion de Indigenas, y Radica

Funciones del Instituto de Desarrollo Indigena en el Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario,"

1979, my translation). Through individual land titles or deeds, the military government

granted Mapuche people the chance to obtain credit and technical assistance provided by

state institutions such as the State Bank of Chile, the Production Development Corporation

(CORFO), and INDAP. The latter, in fact, was in charge of the process of individualizing

land ownership.

It proved hard to obtain information about the way in which land was actually divided on Isla

Huapi: “If you had a house they gave you the título de dominio”, as my host Ana simply

25

explained it to me. As the indigenous community of Isla Huapi, like other Mapuche

settlements, is characterized by sparse homesteads, homeowners were given documents

confirming the individual ownership of the land surrounding the house. How the size of each

individual property was determined remains to me unknown. Meanwhile, a set of formal

requirements to obtain individual deeds to the land are listed in the legal text. To meet the

demands, an applicant had (1) to be indigenous, (2) to be already occupying land on a

reserve, and (3) to register the property ownership in the Real Estate Registrar (Conservador

de Bienes Raíces). As the land was divided among present occupants, people who were not

there when the process took place lost legal rights to the land (Mallon, 2005, p. 176). The

new property regime did not allow households to own more than six hectares of land and

prohibited communal forms of land use (Rodríguez & Carruthers, 2008). However the

process of dividing the island territory took place, the two títulos de merced on Isla Huapi

were annulled in 1980. At this point, each head-of-household who was present at the time of

the division received their own deed, which granted them control over their own individually

held land.

However, as part of Pinochet’s and the military regime’s promotion of market development

in the southern areas, the individualization and privatization of property in Mapuche

settlements made islanders vulnerable to exploitation. At the same time as Mapuche

territories were being divided, privatized and made available for sale, Pinochet’s government

provided favorable terms not only for Mapuche people to take out loans, but also for large

companies to invest in developing the timber and forest industry in southern Chile. In fact, in

response to the individualization and privatization of land, political autonomy and claims to

collective rights of ownership surfaced as important political motives for Mapuche

organizations in the aftermath of the land division (Haughney, 2012; Rodríguez & Carruthers,

2008). Nevertheless, the military government did not back down on the issue of individual

land ownership, nor have later governments. In fact, the passing of Legal Decree 2.568 has

shaped the way in which Mapuche people relate not only to land, but also to the state and,

moreover, to each other (a topic discussed in detail in chapter 4). However, it was not only

the law itself that changed the way Mapuche people relate to the state. Rather, the aggressive

neoliberal politics adopted by the military regime were the decisive factor. In order to

comprehend the ways neoliberal political strategy affected and affects Mapuche people, I will

in the following provide an outline of the changes in Chile’s political economy from 1930 to

the present. I will then return to the relationship between Mapuche people and the state to

26

explain the ways in which Pinochet’s legacy continues to produce precarious conditions

within Mapuche societies through state-led neoliberal development programs.

CHANGES IN CHILE’S POLITICAL ECONOMY (FROM 1930 TO 1990 AND

BEYOND)

Facing the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Chilean government, in collaboration with the

United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America, tried to foster the growth of an

independent modern nation through the development strategy known as Import Substitution

Industrialization, or ISI (Pollack & Grugel, 1984; Taylor, 2006). In Chile, the ISI trajectory

was encouraged by the establishment of the Production Development Corporation (CORFO)

in 1939, which invested in raw-material industries and created public enterprises to stimulate

capitalist economic development (Paley, 2001). During the 1940s, industrial development

gained momentum and significantly reduced the massive rate of unemployment that had

marked the previous decade. Yet although the ISI strategy stimulated domestic growth and

aimed at the economic and political independence of the country (Pollack & Grugel, 1984), it

depended heavily on its integration into global capital circuits, and especially on the US,

which became Chile’s major export destination. The nation’s dependence on and involvement

in the global economy led to stagnation in the early 1950s. The pressure of escalating

inflation and the growing discrepancy between domestic and international prices for

industrial goods caused the government of President Carlos Ibáñez (1952-1958) to cut back

government spending, bringing about protests from labor unions and social activists and, in

general, a heightened degree of social conflict (Taylor, 2006).

After several governments’ attempts to stabilize the situation, President Eduardo Frei (1964-

1969) of the Christian Democrat Party (CDP) laid down a program of reform called

“Revolution in Liberty”. This program sought to create a “third option” that would provide an

alternative both to the full socialism employed by Ibáñes and to the unrestrained capitalism

attempted by President Jorge Alessandri (1958-1964), according to Paley (2001). Through an

expanded role of the state, “Revolution in Liberty” aimed to overcome economic stagnation

and the rural poor’s lack of integration within Chilean society as a result of their poverty.

Beyond intensifying the ISI-model, which mainly meant accepting more than $1 billion of

direct US aid, Frei’s reform program represented a political shift whereby the state sought to

incorporate the peasantry and the urban marginal masses into a societal project that was

27

believed to ensure social stability as well as accelerate national development. However, Frei’s

strategy proved unable to defeat growing political fissures and economic stagnation. Instead,

the failure of the “third option” led to the dissolution of Frei’s political middle ground and to

growing polarization even within the Christian Democrat Party (Taylor, 2006). By this time,

it was generally agreed that governmental powers were to manage the state’s regulative role

in the economic sector, securing market capitalism according to the Keynesian tradition.

In 1970, when the next election was arranged, the Christian Democrat Party did not manage

to stay in power. Instead, a coalition of leftist parties known as Unidad Popular (Popular

Unity), represented by Salvador Allende, won the election. His promises of securing social

welfare and improved living conditions through redistribution of income resonated especially

with the rural poor. Critical of Chile’s past, the Allende government implemented a

revolutionary program that sought to nationalize financial and productive sectors of Chile and

replace the market with extensive price controls (Valdés, 1995, p. 7). Thus, compared to

previous governments, Allende’s policies represented a rather drastic move towards

socialism. In contrast to the wealthier classes, the rural poor benefited greatly from Allende’s

“road to socialism”. During the early 1970’s, the state protected the peasantry’s rights

through subsidies and land grants so that small-scale farmers were not overrun by large

latifundia (Silva, 1990). Furthermore, as I have pointed out earlier, large areas of land once

seized by powerful settlers were also redistributed to the population’s most vulnerable,

namely rural Mapuche (Mallon, 2005). In fact, with regard to economic development, Chile

had become one of the most egalitarian Latin American countries by the early 1970s (Valdés,

1995, p. 4). However, Allende’s narrow victory reflected deep divisions in Chilean society.

Beyond redistributive policies and economic nationalism, the Popular Unity aimed at

consolidating a fundamental power shift within Chilean society (Paley, 2001; Taylor, 2006).

This was three years prior to Pinochet’s coup.

This power shift within Chilean society materialized mainly through three political measures:

(1) Nationalization of key industrial sectors; (2) prevention of monopolies by breaking up of

estates in which land ownership was concentrated; and (3) expansion and deepening of social

welfare programs. Facing severe economic problems and social tensions, Allende’s policy

widened the gap between the Chileans on the political left and those on the political right.

The inflation rate was on the rise again, and due to the government’s attempt to finance

public services the deficit was rapidly growing. Industrial production and agricultural

28

efficiency fell, and Chile started importing food in order to meet increasing demand (Taylor,

2006). This created political resistance and counter-movements among the Chilean middle

and upper class. The resistance is illustrated by the well-known demonstration of upper-class

women in December 1971, who marched through the streets banging on pots to protest the

decreased availability of food in their neighborhood (Paley, 2001, p. 58).

Opposition to the Allende government was growing internationally as well. Allende’s policy

was grounded in the idea of domestic growth through state ownership and control: “By 1973

companies within the state’s Social Property Area represented 39% of GDP, as opposed to

14,2% in 1965” (Taylor, 2006, p. 75). One year after taking office, the Minister of the

Treasury from the Popular Unity announced: “the nationalization of the banking system is

practically complete. The state now controls…90 percent of all credit” (quoted in Valdés,

1995, p. 7). This made international trade partners suffer, especially Chilean trade partners in

the United States. While the Chilean middle- and upper-class owners of production

companies demonstrated against the sitting Allende government by cutting off production,

the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank withheld loans

and foreign aid to Chile in an effort to destabilize the Allende government. In addition, the

CIA offered various forms of support to opposition groups within Chile that sought to

destabilize the regime (Paley, 2001).

As described above, in the early 1970s Chilean politics became increasingly polarized, and

political groups opposing the current rule of Allende were gaining in power. The wealthy and

the middle classes, businesspeople, and the political right supported a military intervention,

as did centrist Christian-Democrat politicians and parts of the Catholic Church (Paley, 2001,

p. 59). On September 11, 1973, the effects of the growing political opposition became

suddenly visible, although the events that transpired on that day were likely not what the

opposition had anticipated. On that day, the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace,

killed Allende, and replaced Chile’s constitutional government with a military government

led by General Augusto Pinochet. What happened in Chile over the following months and

years is still remembered by many of the nation’s inhabitants (Han, 2012). As head of state,

Pinochet sought to exterminate what could be interpreted as signs of leftist political support,

as he understood this as a critique of and danger to the sitting military rule. He did this

through acts of torture, abduction and murder carried out by the Chilean army, and so used

fear as a main tactic in his project to limit local political activity not in favor of his rule (Han,

29

2012; Paley, 2001). Atrocities by the military government were committed all over the

country, in urban as well as rural settings. People on Isla Huapi could testify to military

invasion and brutal violence in the southern countryside, where they were unjustly accused of

political mobilization. During the military regime, like other small-scale farmers, islanders on

Isla Huapi also suffered greatly in economic terms. The socialist reform favoring small-scale

farmers gave way to a neoliberal reform favoring exclusively large agricultural plantations.

The military government withdrew many state services in the agrarian sector. The number of

officials working in the Ministry of Agriculture was reduced to a fifth of the initial numbers

of employees in 1973. Furthermore, public expenditure in the agrarian sector fell by 54.6

percent between 1969 and 1975. The abrupt transition from state protection towards a

neoliberal policy of individualism within the agrarian sector led to the agricultural crisis of

1982-83. To encourage production activities, the Pinochet regime reintroduced fixed tariffs

on production and imports, as well as facilitating renegotiation of landowners’ debts

contracted with public and private banks. However, these reformulations of agrarian policies

favored only middle- and large-scale farmers. This left the majority of the rural population in

Chile, namely small-scale farmers, suffering under the neoliberal restructuring policies that

dominated the dictatorship period (Silva, 1990).

PUTTING NEOLIBERALISM INTO PRACTICE – THE CHILEAN

EXPERIMENT

While neoliberalism as a form of socioeconomic governance arose in many parts of the world

in reaction to the debt crisis of the 1980s, it took the stage in Chile years before: around 1975.

Aside from the violence and political acts of repression, Pinochet’s military government

became known worldwide for restructuring the nation’s economy by executing a neoliberal

“shock treatment” (Han, 2012, p. 8; Valdés, 1995, p. 3). After Pinochet had overthrown the

socialist government of Allende, he replaced previous government appointees with his own

people. Crucial to his government became the newly appointed economists known as the

“Chicago Boys”. These men had pursued their graduate studies at the University of Chicago

through an agreement of academic exchange signed in 1955 (Valdés, 1995). During the same

time, in the 1950s, in the Economics department of the University of Chicago, a new school

took shape, a group of like-minded quantifiers sympathizing with positivist methods. While

the “Old Chicago School” was already skeptical towards government intervention into the

30

sphere of economics, its later adherents, with Milton Friedman in the forefront, were much

more stridently opposed to statist solutions. In his genealogy of the free-market ideational

program, the political economist Jamie Peck writes that “under the influence of the

increasingly antistatist Friedman, Chicago would become the center of the first recognized

counterrevolution against Keynesianism” (Peck, 2008, p. 18). At the Economics department

of the University of Chicago, where the “Chicago Boys” were trained, Chicago-School

academics conceived economic theory as natural science, conforming to the laws of nature.

One of these natural laws was that a homo economicus would behave rationally (Valdés,

1995) – an essential fundament to the Chicago School’s free-market ideology.

However, the economic theories advanced by the Chicago School were not only positivist,

but also normative: its theory embraced a set of normative principles, as its models were to be

empirically tested and correspond to “reality”. According to Friedman himself, the Chicago

School stood for an approach that “takes seriously the use of economic theory as a tool for

analyzing a startlingly wide range of concrete problems, rather than as an abstract

mathematical structure of great beauty but little power; for an approach that insists on

empirical testing of theoretical generalizations and rejects alike facts without theory and

theory without facts” (quoted in Valdés, 1995, p. 65). According to this perspective (assumed

by the “Chicago Boys”, who were to obtain central economic posts in the military

government), economics could not be separated from the social domain. Rather, economics

was the essence of nature, encompassing all human action and sociality. Furthermore,

“economic models had explanatory power if they were predictive and could model a reality

construed as what should be natural” (Han, 2012, p. 6). Through this normatively neoliberal

approach to economics, the liberal revival that started out as an ideological project of the

Mont Pelerin Society – itself an outgrowth of a 1947 Swiss think-tank conference – was to

express itself in a variety of different practices of government. In Chile, this occurred through

shock therapy and market stimulation.

The “Chicago Boys”, strategically placed in economic posts within the military government,

applied the rules of Chicago-School economics to a developing country in crisis. Due to the

exaggerated protectionism and statism of the previous socialist government (the new regime

claimed), individual actors had been alienated from their “natural” function as homines

economici. Therefore, they set out to “normalize” the economy through aggressive structural

adjustments (Han, 2012, p. 8). The military government started the restructuring process by

31

liberalizing trade, removing earlier price controls, privatizing state companies, deregulating

the financial sector and reducing state functions (Valdés, 1995). During the financial crisis of

the early 1980s, the state-owned Central Bank bailed out the suffering private sector. Three

years later, in 1985, Chile received a three-year structural adjustment loan from the World

Bank and made a three-year agreement with the IMF. Turning public assets into private

wealth, the government sold out the Central Bank to national and international

conglomerates. The result was that transnational companies bought into public utilities such

as electricity, water and mining companies. Through these efforts, the military regime

managed to pay off large amounts of the debt it owed to external creditors. For this, the

privatization of fiscal responsibilities, Chile became famous and enjoyed privileged treatment

by the World Bank and IMF as well as from commercial banks (Han, 2012; Valdés, 1995).

The “Chilean miracle” was a reality. What started out as a macroeconomic doctrine grew into

a regime of policies and practices associated with the doctrine.

Neoliberal policies during the Pinochet era continued to shape socioeconomic policies in

Chile even after the transition to democracy in 1990. In many ways, as Julia Paley (2001) has

duly examined, this was an inevitable development. As a result of the political negotiations

prior to the plebiscite in February 1988, the legacy of Pinochet’s institutional framework was

secured. In particular, the pact of national development agreed upon by both sides of the vote

– the military regime and the oppositional politicians aiming to end the dictatorship – was

instrumental to securing the continuity of Pinochet’s neoliberal policies. Paley writes:

In this final pact, opposition politicians agreed to leave the basic economic model –

characterized by an export-driven open economy, private and foreign investment,

regulation by the market, an independent Central Bank, and protection of private property

– intact. Under the pact, macroeconomic policies would be preserved, and neither domestic

nor international investors would feel threatened. (2001: 98)

This turned out to be a crucial historical moment considering Chile’s political and economic

history, as it would come to shape the nation’s neoliberal economy for years. The Chilean

political scientist and sociologist Tomás Moulian (2002) has written a critical analysis of the

social transformations associated with Chile’s change in economic model. He writes from the

time of the post-military regime and argues that the transition from dictatorship to democracy

amounted to putting old wine into new bottles: The neoliberal economic model was secured

32

in the constitution laid down by Pinochet in such a way that the democratization process of

the early 1990s served, in fact, to consolidate Pinochet’s legacy. This led Moulian to propose

the term transformismo to explain how the basic structures of the previous government

remained intact through the democratic transition. This reality is partly what Paley refers to in

the title of her book Marketing Democracy (2001): namely, how free-market economies have

influenced and shaped democracy as Chileans know it today. The successful inscription of

neoliberal logic into democratic institutions reflects its capacity to adapt to social and

political challenges (see Peck, 2008), including the arrival of democracy. The adaptability of

neoliberal doctrine is also a reason why neoliberalism must always be understood through

locally grounded policies and practices – a point that I elaborate extensively in the discussion

of neoliberalism in the next chapter.

The obvious question, then, becomes: In what kind of local practices does neoliberalism play

out? This question demands ethnographical evidence, which is precisely what I will provide

throughout this dissertation. I will show the ways in which state-led development programs

reveal themselves as inherently neoliberal, both in design and execution. I will also show how

islanders, in effect of a neoliberal past and present, are forced to grapple with a series of

paradoxes that occur precisely through engagement development initiatives. The island

society of Isla Huapi’s relationship to the state is tied in with the history of neoliberalism in

Chile. The triangular relationship among Isla Huapi, the state, and the history of

neoliberalism becomes even more pertinent when looking at the history of (neoliberal)

development in small-scale farmers’ societies, in particular among small-scale Mapuche

farmers.

RECOGNITION OF INDIGENOUS RIGHTS (TO NEOLIBERAL

MULTICULTURALISM)

Upon the transition to democracy in 1990, the center-left coalition known as the

Concertacíon sought to establish laws and institutions to secure indigenous peoples’ rights.

Through these measures the coalition aimed to improve the strained relationship between

indigenous people and the Chilean state and to make amends for past injustices (Haughney,

2012; Richards, 2010; Rodríguez & Carruthers, 2008). Through a discourse of participation,

the Aylwin government engaged indigenous leaders as representatives in the newly created

Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples (CEPI). CEPI’s mandate was “crafting

33

legislation for a new indigenous law, developing institutional recognition for indigenous

peoples, and securing Chilean ratification of International Labour Organization (ILO)

Convention No. 169, concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries”

(Rodríguez & Carruthers, 2008, p. 5). CEPI’s work culminated in the passing of the

Indigenous Law (Ley Indígena 19.253) in 1993, and, in accordance with the law, the

establishment in 1994 of The National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI),

whose mandate was to promote indigenous cultures and development (Rodríguez &

Carruthers, 2008) and protect indigenous land (Haughney, 2012). The Indigenous Law

stipulated that indigenous land could not be sold to non-indigenous parties. Through

CONADI, a fund was established to provide subsidies for the purchase of additional land for

indigenous communities (Richards, 2010). Yet whatever hopes these political initiatives

sparked among indigenous people were soon to be replaced by feelings of disappointment

and betrayal, ultimately culminating in protests, which the government invoked the

Aniterrorist Law in order to suppress (Rodríguez & Carruthers, 2008). What had happened to

the post-dictatorship government’s promises to secure indigenous rights?

President Aylwin himself heavily influenced the authority that CONADI, as an institution,

exercised, as he personally appointed the director and several of the councilors (Haughney,

2012). Furthermore, the ratification of the ILO-Convention was repeatedly rejected and, in

fact, not ratified until 2008, during President Bachelet’s first governmental period. The post-

dictatorship government – the four governments known as the Concertacíon (1990-2010) –

did make ethnic diversity and cultural rights part of the political agenda. Meanwhile,

indigenous people’s demands for collective rights to territory and political self-determination

were repeatedly dismissed, as these demands were understood to challenge notions of

nationhood and the unitary state, as well as, significantly, corporate interests (Haughney,

2012).

The Concertacíon governments perpetuated the neoliberal policies of the earlier military

dictatorship. By promoting and heavily subsidizing industrial development projects instigated

by transnational companies, they secured an open international economy as well as private

and foreign investments. The Concertacíon not only supported and carried forward projects

begun by the military government, including large-scale industrial forestry and construction

of hydroelectric plants, but also presented them as crucial to national economic growth

(Rodríguez & Carruthers, 2008). The demands of Mapuche people for collective rights to

34

territory and self-determination were irreconcilable with the completion of these projects,

many of which were situated in the southern regions of Chile, where most Mapuche people

resided. Both Eduardo Frei (1994-2000) and his presidential successor, Ricardo Lagos (2000-

2004), portrayed the development of the logging and hydroelectric industries as necessary for

national security. When Mapuche organizations responded to the neglect of their demands

and the refusal to ratify the ILO-Convention with mass protests and nonviolent land

occupations, the government convicted several protesters under the Antiterrorist Law

(Haughney, 2012).

The conflict between Mapuche political organizations and the Chilean government resulted

from the discrepancy between the government’s approach to indigenous peoples’ rights –

based on notions of diversity and culture – and the rights for which indigenous peoples

themselves made demands on the government. In an effort to address the growing conflict,

both the Frei and Lagos governments formulated indigenous policies in socio-economic

terms, rather than addressing Mapuche demands for self-determination, collective political

representation and territorial rights. Instead, these government policies presumed that the

tense situation could be improved through developmentally oriented solutions such as land

subsidies, education, technical assistance, and training programs (Richards, 2010). After

President Bachelet was elected in 2006, she finally forced through both the approval of the

United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and, more significantly, the

ratification of the ILO-Convention. Still, the political initiatives she put in place in favor of

the indigenous peoples of Chile fell short of Mapuche demands for recognition of collective

territorial and political rights (Haughney, 2012). The ILO-Convention requires informed

consent from indigenous people whose land might be affected by development of industry

and large-scale projects. Yet this principle has only once been invoked in a legal decision

(Haughney, 2012). The Chilean government still fears that granting rights to collective land

ownership and self-determination might hamper national economic development.

If inhabitants of Isla Huapi are not concerned with rights to territory and political self-

determination, and in recent history have participated only once in a demonstration against

the development of a mega-project, then how does the history of indigenous rights pertain to

them? Or rather: Preoccupied as islanders are with “maintaining the dialogues” with state

authorities, how do national policies concerning indigenous rights affect their lives?

35

Over time, indigenous policies in Chile have focused increasingly on cultural diversity on the

one hand, and equal rights on the other. The concept of “equal rights” is here treated in the

neoliberal sense, implying equal rights for individuals, in contrast to conceptions of equality

based on such collectives as the Mapuche people (Haughney, 2012). Thus the government

today seeks to provide rights to Mapuche people throughout the country by engaging a

variety of state agencies to offer programs designed to alleviate poverty by increasing

indigenous individuals’ access to the market. Many indigenous development programs in

rural Chile, most of which are provided by INDAP, encourage people to take advantage of

their ethnic identity as Mapuche to access the market: for example, by starting an “ethno-

tourism” business. Another example of this is the local market in Futrono, Huerto Lindo,

where only Mapuche farmers are allowed to sell their produce, and where you can buy

traditional Mapuche products such as mudai (fermented wheat drink). Some scholars have

termed this combination of cultural diversity with neoliberal policies “neoliberal

multiculturalism” (Hale, 2006; Richards, 2010). The history of indigenous rights in Chile is

significant to contemporary life on Isla Huapi precisely because it has paved the way for a

socioeconomic policy of poverty reduction that centers around the notions of the individual

and the market. This has allowed for the state-led neoliberal development programs in which

most islanders participate.

CONCLUSION

The precariousness of life on Isla Huapi is undoubtedly related to the fact that its inhabitants

are Mapuche – indigenous people who, throughout history, have been systematically

suppressed and manipulated, most significantly through land loss and displacement.

Moreover, their demands for indigenous rights and recognition were rejected for decades, as

some Mapuche people’s demands for collective rights to territory and political self-

determination still are. Additionally, their precariousness has to do with the fact that they live

on a relatively inaccessible island where modern infrastructure is more expensive to develop.

People on Isla Huapi often talk about how the state does not care about them (preocupar)

enough even to provide the necessary infrastructure for potable water and electricity – “basic

services”, as they told me. Moreover, they complain about the lack of proper roads and other,

more essential material needs, such as a properly working healthcare center. In addition to, as

well as because of these infrastructural failures, many islanders are barely able to make ends

meet. This economic and material precariousness is what makes islanders call on the state to

36

bring development to their society. Engagement with development agencies and their agents

offers hope for infrastructure that does occasionally materialize. Participation in development

programs also encourages entrepreneurial aspirations and bring about economic enhancement

– for some. But what challenges does participation in state-led development programs

present? As I will show, and as the concept of “neoliberal multiculturalism” already

presupposes, state-led development programs are designed to cultivate the entrepreneurial

spirit. But internal relations of authority and the conflict between notions of self-interest and

the collective affect the way in which state-led development plays out. It is equally important

that these programs are funded and encouraged by the government, provided and partly

executed by state agents and, in general, central to governmental development policy. They

are materializations of the state, and thereby allow for a high degree of state presence on Isla

Huapi. They are also inherently neoliberal. This leaves us with the conundrum of a neoliberal

state that does not retreat but secures its presence through promises of development; a state

that, through neoliberal development programs, aims to create self-responsible individuals,

yet makes islanders increasingly dependent on funding accessed through the same programs.

How can we think theoretically about the paradoxical nature of “state-led neoliberal

development”? How can we make sense of the tension between relations of independence

and dependence that neoliberal development creates? Based on theoretical conceptions of the

state, of neoliberalism and of neoliberal development, as well as concepts of hope and

aspiration, the following chapter provides an exploration and a discussion of the analytical

perspectives through which I approach the ethnographical workings of “state-led neoliberal

development” on Isla Huapi.

37

2. ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON

NEOLIBERAL STATE DEVELOPMENT

How can we think theoretically about neoliberal state development for indigenous peoples

and the paradoxes inherent in such practices? Three main theoretical approaches guide the

analyses in the subsequent chapters. In this chapter, I introduce these approaches and, in

dialog with concepts central to them, I pose questions to my ethnographic material –

questions I seek to answer throughout this thesis. First, the centrality of the state in state-led

development necessitates an analytical approach to the state. In this regard, I follow

anthropologists who have theorized the concept and analyzed the state in terms of the effects

it has – in practice, discourse, as well as materially (Harvey, 2005; Krohn-Hansen & Nustad,

2005; Mitchell, 1991; Trouillot, 2001). Secondly, as I am here dealing with a particular kind

of state, namely the neoliberal, the analysis in the subsequent chapters are informed by

theories about the concept and practice of neoliberalism (Ferguson, 2010; Lemke, 2001;

Narotzky, 2015) and, in particular, neoliberal development. Neoliberal development is a

specific yet globally widespread approach to state-led development whose pervasive ideology

continues to have dramatic effects on very varied societies (Green, 2010; Han, 2012; Schild,

2007; Sharma, 2008). Finally, the concepts of hope (Jansen, 2014; Miyazaki, 2004) and

aspiration (Appadurai, 2004; Fischer, 2014) prove to be very useful analytical tools for

making sense of the social dynamics that unfold as a direct consequence of neoliberal

development programs.

Thinking in terms of “affective states” (Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2015), I hope to bring

together these three approaches to better understand the state, development, neoliberalism,

and affect. Borrowing from Ann Stoler (2004), Laszczkowski and Reeves take “the affective”

to be the substance of politics: “A complex, dynamic, and resilient reality that structures both

opportunities and challenges for political actors and is constitutive of the acting subjects

themselves” (Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2015, p. 2). Furthermore, the affective is a social force

that occurs with different intensities. These intensities are shaped, as I will show, by the

fleeting and fluctuating state by which promises of material development, economic

enhancement and infrastructural advancements are made, but also by conflicting values of

38

self-interest and a “common good”. Thus, affects are elicited by the state and formed by the

particular ways in which the state works. As a social force, affects also provoke people to call

on the state, which becomes particularly evident when looking at political discourses and

practices (chapter 7). Thus, the affective pertains, in some way or another, both to analyses of

state effects, development and neoliberalism, as well as to analyses of hopes and aspirations –

the latter being potentially powerful affects in themselves. Throughout this dissertation, there

will be a general focus – sometimes underlying, other times made more explicit – on the way

in which the affective plays out in everyday life on Isla Huapi as people constantly enter into

relations with the state.

One of the most evident aspects of life on the island is the preoccupation with progress,

modernization and, above all, development (desarrollo). The preoccupation with

development was widespread not only among islanders themselves, but also among the

representatives of the Chilean government and the executors of development programs,

whether hired by the municipality or employed by the state. I was struck by the degree to

which development, although in diverse ways, affected, almost pervaded, everyday talk,

practice and thought – social life in general. Therefore, it is pertinent to analyze the

contemporary empirical phenomenon of development on Isla Huapi as both discourse and

practice that occur in the ambiguous, fluid and shifting relation between state and society. I

begin this section, then, with an ethnographic piece to illustrate how development is woven

into social life on Isla Huapi materially, economically and emotionally.

AN INFRASTRUCTURE TAKING FORM ON ISLA HUAPI

In 2012, Isla Huapi was granted funding to carry out a major project through INDAP’s

regional Irrigation Program9. The project was meant to secure irrigation water to the

islanders’ plots and thus improve the farmers’ yields. The beneficiaries of the project were

initially the 95 participants in the PDTI program. When the municipality of Futrono

channeled additional funding into the project, thirty more islanders became enrolled as

beneficiaries. When I arrived Isla Huapi at the beginning of 2016, the construction was well

under way. Two pumps had already been installed, which were to siphon water from the lake

through the extensive system of subterranean pipes and onto the farmers’ plots. Ana’s house,

where I lived, was not located very far from the pump on the north side of the island. I was

9 I pursue an analysis of the irrigation project in chapter 5.

39

intrigued to see it for myself. To get there, Ana told me, I just had to keep walking north,

until I reached señora Isabel’s house, whom I at that point had never met. As I reach the end

of the dirt road leading northeast, I entered through a crooked wooden gate and passed a huge

water basin. Apart from the decomposed leaves covering the bottom, it was empty. I

continued walking and encountered, further ahead, a structure of steel supporting three rows

of solar panels. Cyclone fences enclosed the structure as well as the water basin. Attached to

the fence was a sign announcing the presence of INDAP – materialized as such in the very

construction at which I was looking. The sign declared its business: “Supporting the

productive development of family farming among our native/original peoples”10.

At this point, I seemed to be at the very end of the island. I stood for a while peering at the

lake, vaguely visible through the dense eucalyptus trees, wondering where señora Isabel’s

house was. Then, looking down the hillside in front of me, I caught a glimpse of something

resembling a path. It was rocky and steep. I followed along as it sharply turned in the other

direction down the hillside, and soon I could see smoke appearing from a chimney. I

approached the house and saw a woman standing in front of it. She was on the telephone, but

10 See chapter 1 (footnote 2) for explanation of the translation of pueblos originarios to

“native” or “original peoples”.

40

when she saw me, she took the phone from her ear, holding it with outstretched arms, and

said: “Buenas días”. I greeted her back, and asked her if this was señora Isabel’s house. The

woman (I later learned this was señora Isabel’s daughter) looked past me towards the house. I

turned around and noticed a woman standing on the rickety stairs leading up to a narrow

terrace bulging with plants, the front of which was sagging slightly under the weight. That

was señora Isabel. She was an older woman, supporting herself with her hand on the

bannister. Unlike her daughter, who wore jeans and boots, señora Isabel was dressed in shoes

with slight high heels, a skirt and a delicate blouse, over which she wore a cardigan. Her

feminine, meticulous mode of dressing contrasted with the red cap into which she had tucked

her hair. As I approached her, I could see that the cap read “INDAP”.

For reasons that remained unclear to me, señora Isabel was not a participant of the PDTI

program. As a result, she lacked access to numerous benefits that other farmers had. At the

same time, she escaped responsibilities that participation in the program entailed, such as the

commitment to invest time and money in farming related endeavors. However, she had given

up part of her property to provide a technically strategic space (in vicinity of the waterfront)

for the construction of a water basin, a solar panel park and a water pump installation. Since

she placed her property at INDAP’s disposal, she was compensated with inclusion as

participant in the irrigation project. Señora Isabel wanted, she explained, the benefits of

material improvements in which the irrigation project was expected to result. As Ignacio, the

head of the regional irrigation office and the man in charge of the irrigation project on Isla

Huapi, had informed me, the pumps were not operational. Shortly thereafter, neither were the

solar panels, the basin, or, for that matter, the rest of the irrigation system. The engineers had

miscalculated the fluctuation in the water levels in the lake, and the pump was now left

hanging in the air. Señora Isabel was discouraged about this, continually repeating that the

pump “no funciona” (“it doesn’t work”). Yet, as she rather optimistically told me on a later

occasion, Ignacio had reassured her that the contractors he had hired were going to reinstall

the pump, submerge it deeper down, and make it functional. She considered him a “good

man”, as she expressed it. He made the time to have a chat when visiting her property, she

told me, and, as if to prove Ignacio’s good intentions, she showed me what he had done for

her. Not only had he provided her with her own water hydrant outside her house, he had also

installed for her an indoor water tap, which accessed an extension of the subterranean pipes

for the irrigation system. Yet, for months there was no water in the hydrant nor water running

from her water tap.

41

I initially expected this project, the INDAP-funded irrigation works, to be the focus of my

fieldwork on Isla Huapi. However, it eventually became clear that irrigation prospects were

not people’s main concern when it came to development. Señora Isabel, like many other

islanders, was more excited about indoor plumbing, a side effect of the intended

infrastructural changes. Furthermore, the irrigation project amounted to only one of several

recent initiatives with which the Chilean government was seeking to develop Isla Huapi.

Moreover, this configuration of development practices was not the one with which people

were most preoccupied. Those islanders most actively engaged in PDTI-provided, small-scale

projects and training programs were busy developing their own businesses. Yet, people were

generally concerned with the promise of development, including the prospect of an irrigation

system, which they saw as a token of the government’s willingness to invest in their

community. Thus, islanders interpreted delays and stagnation in the construction process as

evidence of broken promises regarding development. There were also claims that resources

needed to complete the project were being reallocated away from the island. Thus, the

irrigation project became another example of a series of failed attempts to invest in island

infrastructure. This was particularly the case for some islanders who suffered more than

others from delays in construction. Access to the irrigation system, when it was partially up

and running, was provided to the “best” farmers first, while others were made to wait.

Ignacio, although perceived by señora Isabel as a good man, became the embodiment of these

promises and, by extension, these failures. Meanwhile, the PDTI team had to answer to the

islanders on the frequent occasions when Ignacio was not around.

Through projects such as the construction of an irrigation system, development proved a

social phenomenon that pervaded islanders’ everyday life and through which the state took

form. Yet, while projects look substantive from the perspective of the agencies providing the

services, they can seem quite abstract and fleeting on the ground. How do we theoretically

approach the state as appearing in abstract and external yet social and intimate ways? As

simultaneously present and retreating, and through these paradoxical workings evoke hope,

aspiration, frustration and indignation?

APPROACHING THE STATE

To make sense of the state on Isla Huapi as elsewhere, I here intend to look at the forms it

takes on, the practices through which it becomes visible, and the ways in which it asserts its

42

relevance to people and their lives. In an attempt to do this, I approach the state through a

governmental apparatus that makes it local and present (Abrams, 1988; Krohn-Hansen &

Nustad, 2005; Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2015; Trouillot, 2001), while simultaneously

appealing to an abstract fiction of the state as a force self-evidently external to society

(Mitchell, 1991). In order to understand local manifestations of the state as well as the state as

an external, non-social, intangible and seemingly absent force, I approach the state through

the effects it has and the affects it elicits.

What we encounter is not really the state itself, but its effects (Mitchell, 1991). In fact,

various thinkers have criticized the idea of the state as an object, an entity distinct from

society. In the preface to Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s African Political Systems

([1940] 1955), Radcliffe-Brown approaches the state as an ideological construct and, in fact,

rejects the idea of studying the state on the grounds that he understands it to be nothing but a

fiction. Yet, it is a powerful fiction, which is perhaps what Phillip Abrams (1988) realized as

he pursued the study of the state and attempted to demystify the state-idea. According to

Abrams, the idea of the state as a distinct entity masks the reality of what he calls the “state-

system” (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad, 2005, p. 5). By state-system, Abrams refers to various

government institutions that all seek to establish political authority and legitimacy. By

obscuring what it really is, namely a web of loosely connected ideas and practices, the state-

system seeks to be seen as part of a larger whole: the state. This way, in Christian Krohn-

Hansen and Knut Nustad’s (2005) words, Abrams approaches the state as “a diffuse field of

power relations where the state becomes an ideological object that is used by the state-system

to give it legitimacy” (2005, p. 5). Thus, the power of the state manifests in practices of

government institutions through which the state is given its legitimacy.

In the volume State Formation (2005), Krohn-Hansen and Nustad set out to offer new

insights into the ways in which anthropologists approach the state. Their starting point, owing

a debt to Radcliffe-Brown and Abrams, is precisely the rejection of the idea of the state as an

object of study. The authors call attention to power relations and compare Abrams’ (1988)

move away from thinking about the state in terms of sovereign power to Michel Foucault’s

(2004) concept of governmentality. Abrams and Foucault both reject the idea of sovereign

power in trying to understand how the state reproduces itself. As Krohn-Hansen and Nustad

(2005) point out however, Foucault’s approach to power, through disciplinary power and

knowledge as forms of social control, is precisely what Abrams warned against (2005, p. 6).

43

When Foucault focuses on internalized forms of social control and claims that power does not

really sit anywhere, he disregards the power inherent in practices of the state-system. To

Abrams, the power inherent in government institutions is crucial if one wants to grasp the

practices through which the state is legitimized. Pursuing new understandings, Krohn-Hansen

and Nustad draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2001) who, according to the authors, considers

these insights in his work on state effects.

According to Trouillot (2001), the state is linked to a number of national and government

apparatuses, but these do not themselves make up the state. Rather, the state is a set of

processes and practices to which these apparatuses are linked (2001, p. 127). How do we

recognize these processes and practices? Trouillot lists a number of effects through which he

claims the state becomes recognizable. These include:

(1) an isolation effect, that is, the production of atomized individualized subjects molded and

modeled for governance as part of an undifferentiated but specific “public”; (2) an

identification effect, that is a realignment of the atomized subjectivities along collective lines

within which individuals recognize themselves as the same; (3) a legibility effect, that is, the

production of both a language and a knowledge for governance and of theoretical and

empirical tools that classify and regulate collectivities; and (4) a specialization effect, that is,

the production of boundaries and jurisdiction. (Trouillot, 2001, p. 126)

Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (2005) ascribe the four effects listed by Trouillot to a specific state

formation, namely the capitalistically evolved European state. Thus, they underline the point

that state effects, although always a matter of establishing control over a population, are

matters of historical and ethnographical variation that should not be assumed a priori. Rather,

they state, we must be open to the possibility that different states create different effects

(Krohn-Hansen & Nustad, 2005). What do effects of the neoliberal state formation in Chile

look like when applied to the ethnographic context of Isla Huapi? What kind of collectives

are formed there, and on what grounds? Do processes and practices linked to development

programs produce a particular kind of subject through principles of entrepreneurialism? Do

these programs work as modes of governance? What effects do infrastructures have? Do they

work as technologies of governance by connecting people closer to the state, or what kind of

connections and disconnections do they create? Is it possible to identify certain specialization

effects? These are questions that I seek to answer in the subsequent chapters. Despite the

44

possible similarities between Trouillot’s state effects and the principles of neoliberal

governance in Chile, would it be wrong to confuse actual effects with those attempted,

intended or desired by government policy makers?

In his chapter contribution to State Formation (2005), Nustad stresses the need to

differentiate between intended and actual state effects. Studying an ethnographic case from

post-apartheid South Africa, Nustad analyzes the difficulties associated with the attempt to

transform the squatter settlement of Cato Manor into a stable, manageable population. As

state authorities attempted to produce the kinds of effects listed by Trouillot (2001), new

local bodies of authority were established in the process which, in turn, created confusion and

internal power struggles. The creation of a population was, in Nustad’s case, tied to a

development process. Therefore, conflicts arose surrounding the relationships among local

authorities and control over access to resources made available through the development

process. By focusing on a number of political processes, Nustad reveals the complexities

built into the attempt to create a stable, manageable population and suggests separating

intended effects from real ones, because “a focus on state effects creates a short-cut between

intentions and outcomes, and thereby creates too-dominant state agents” (Nustad, 2005, p.

91). An exclusive focus on state effects thus runs the risk of overlooking the agency of the

local leadership. This insight possibly also holds true in the case of Isla Huapi.

In my approach to the state as a government apparatus, I follow Nustad’s (2005) insight into

the complex workings of the relationships among state agents, local authorities and other

actors in the production of state effects. Rather than questioning the degree, for example, to

which the subject on Isla Huapi is successfully individualized, atomized, molded, and

modeled for governance, I approach the production of state effects more openly to include a

focus on alternative effects. What is the relationship between intended effects and outcomes

when islanders encounter a governmental apparatus that holds the promise of development?

For example, does it lead to a general increase in people’s well-being or does it rather create

difficult relations and social tensions?

Through her study of road construction in Peru, Penny Harvey (2005) reminds us that it is in

fact not only a question of intended versus actual effects. Sometimes, certain characteristics

might be attributed to people as a result of assumed state effects, such as the assumption that

contemporary transport systems in Peru have produced modern subjectivities (Harvey, 2005,

45

p. 125). What happens when state actors act upon such assumptions about subjectivities? On

Isla Huapi, what happens when state actors approach the Board as the local body of authority

on the island? When development workers such as Ricardo invest time and energy in what he

assumes to be an entrepreneurial aspiring family, what are the results?

However, on Isla Huapi the state does not only exist as an apparatus that one encounters

through state representatives. Additionally, it appears as a non-social and external force. How

do we make sense, empirically and conceptually, of a state that one does not necessarily

encounter? What is the abstract state and why is it relevant to people?

Through concepts and institutions seemingly enforced upon them by an invisible state

(chapter 4), people on Isla Huapi relate to an abstract state. In his influential article “The

Limits of the State” (1991) published in the American Political Science Review, Timothy

Mitchell addresses the troubling relationship between the conceptual and the empirical life of

the state. The state concept, he claims, depends on a distinction between “state” and

“society”. This creates the illusion of an external state boundary that does not exist on the

ground. In his article, Mitchell (1991) offers an alternative approach that recognizes the

elusiveness of the state-society boundary as central to the phenomenon of the state itself.

“Rather than searching for a definition that will fix the boundary”, he writes, “we need to

examine the detailed political processes through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction

between state and society is produced” (Mitchell, 1991, p. 78). He draws on Foucault’s

notion of disciplinary power, which allows Mitchell to argue that power relations internal to

the apparatus have always blurred the boundary between “state” and “society”. While there is

no structure that stands apart from the practices it frames, such as a political institution, the

technique of creating this appearance is what Mitchell identifies as a structural effect – an

apparatus appearing greater than its parts. Thus he argues that the state arranges itself as

external to society, but that the boundary this produces is in fact just an effect of such

arrangements (Mitchell, 1991). Following Mitchell’s call for a focus on the boundary itself,

what are the processes that blur and confuse the boundary between “state” and “society” on

Isla Huapi? Can political processes such as those tied to a municipal election contribute to

such blurring? Or, inspired by Akhil Gupta’s (1995) study of the way in which the Indian

state, through bureaucratic practices and a discourse of corruption, becomes “implicated in

the minute texture of everyday life” (1995, p. 375), do encounters between state actors and

islanders of Isla Huapi confuse boundaries of “state” and “society”?

46

Only by recognizing the neoliberal state effect of paradoxical relations, to which I will return

shortly, and the spaces through which islanders appeal to and encounter the state, can we

begin to comprehend the ways in which the state takes form and becomes meaningful to

islanders in the face of neoliberal development.

NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT AND PARADOXES OF NEOLIBERALISM

In Chile, development measures that specifically target indigenous communities, as distinct

from measures focused on small-scale farmers in general, were institutionalized only in 2001.

Various ministries and governmental agencies11 established the Origins/Natives Program

(Programa Orígenes) with the help of a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank.

INDAP, in collaboration with the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) and the

Indigenous National Corporation’s (CONADI) own fund, namely the Indigenous

Development Fund, was responsible for one of the program’s components: productive

development (Faiguenbaum, 2017, p. 222). Its objective was to:

Increase the income of families and communities through a diversification of economic-

productive activities, agricultural as well as non-agricultural, while safeguarding cultural

relevance through the participation of the recipients themselves (my translation,

Faiguenbaum, 2017, p. 222).

In 2009, through an agreement with CONADI, these efforts resulted in INDAP’s own

program that was directed exclusively at indigenous families and producers throughout Chile.

This program, namely the PDTI program, soon became, as I show in chapter 5, crucial to

farmers’ lives on Isla Huapi, generating hopes and aspirations for infrastructure and

economically improved futures and encouraging islanders to hope for greater state presence

(Jansen, 2014). The objectives currently stated in the official documentation of the PDTI

program are nearly identical to INDAP’s former program of productive development, quoted

above. That is to say, the discourse of development policies is the same. Placing development

agencies opposite receivers of development, the policy discourse provides a bifurcated

representation of the world. This is similar to the discourse of development that Arturo

Escobar outlines in his book Encountering Development (1995). In this volume, Escobar

11 Among them the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministries of Education and Health,

the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF), the Indigenous National Corporation

(CONADI) and INDAP.

47

describes how in the aftermath of World War II a global development project took shape, by

which the western world would provide technical and financial assistance to the non-western

world, so that the latter could replicate the success of the former. Particularly similar to the

post-war development project outlined by Escobar (1995) is the strong emphasis on economic

growth as imperative to development, as expressed in INDAP’s development program. Both

discourses represent the world as bisected into two groups, of which the one is already

developed, the other in need of financial assistance and modern technology transfer. The two

policies diverge regarding the participation of the recipients, as well as on the subject of

safeguarding cultural relevance, which is emphasized by INDAP. Here, the concept of local

participation points precisely to the new forms of development in which I am interested,

namely neoliberal development: a social and economic policy of participation, empowerment

and production of self-managing, responsible citizens. This is the policy through which Chile

has “shaken off underdevelopment” (oecdobservor, accessed 09.03.19).

In 2010, Chile became the first South American country to join the OECD. During the

accession meeting, the current President Michelle Bachelet stated: “what has happened over

the last 20 years is historic. Chile has shaken off underdevelopment and is well on the way to

achieving developed nation status in a few years’ time” (oecdobservor, accessed 09.03.19).

OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría, asserted on his part that “Chile has embarked on a

continuous effort to reform its economy. Over nearly two decades it has developed a strong

set of democratic institutions, and it has succeeded in combining robust economic growth

with improved social welfare” (oecdobservor, accessed 09.03.19).

In what way did the combination of social improvements and economic growth to which

Gurria refers “shake off” underdevelopment in Chile? During the Pinochet era, the military

government placed major emphasis on large-scale production and export, backed by generous

subsidizing. While this allowed for national economic growth, it also caused great inequality

between the wealthy and the poor (Paley, 2001). Thus, upon transition to democracy in 1990,

the new center-left coalition government had a major task to address. How were they to

improve living standards among the poor? The answer was greater state involvement in the

social field (Faiguenbaum, 2017), a solution that ultimately furthered the neoliberal project in

two ways: as a political economy and as a mode of government. First, in order to create an

economically viable environment that could enable development in poorer communities, the

post-dictatorship government called upon actors in the private sector to involve themselves in

48

matters of social welfare. Second, these arrangements rested on the ethos of market as they

assisted people by transforming them into enterprising, empowered agents (Schild, 2007). As

a mode of government, neoliberal development exhibits a specific market-oriented way of

understanding what social policy consists in and how to provide it.

Notions of participation (participación) and empowerment (empoderamiento) are central to

neoliberal development in Chile and elsewhere (Di Giminiani, 2018a; Green, 2010; Schild,

2007; Sharma, 2008; Smith, 2017). Analyzing the workings of a women’s empowerment

project in rural India, the anthropologist Aradhana Sharma (2008) suggests that the term

“empowerment” has in fact replaced the term “welfare”. Referring to an opinion piece by Bill

Clinton entitled “How We Ended Welfare, Together”, Sharma shows how welfare implies a

relation of dependence. During processes of economic liberalization, the dominant classes in

rural India secured their success by exploiting poor people’s labor, thereby leaving them in

precarious situations and in need of welfare assistance. In an effort to end poor people’s

reliance on state largesse in India, “the neoliberal imagined empowerment logic seeks to

enable grassroots actors, and particularly women, to fulfill their own needs through market

mechanisms” (Sharma, 2008, p. xvi). Sharma traces effects of the neoliberal Indian

government’s move away from “welfare-style dependent development toward empowerment

style self-development” (2008, p. xvi). She deploys Foucault’s concept of governmentality

and understands empowerment as a self-regulatory mode of governance that, as a neoliberal

re-articulation, has replaced earlier notions of development (such as welfare dependence).

“Under neoliberalism”, she writes, “empowerment has quickly become a preferred tool with

which to produce self-governing and self-caring social actors, orient them toward the free

market, direct their behaviors toward entrepreneurial ends, and attach them to the project of

rule” (Sharma, 2008, p. xx), i.e. the neoliberal rule of governance. Historically, the emphasis

on empowerment in Indian social policies has been conflated with neoliberal restructuring

processes. However, Sharma writes, this is not what makes social policies of empowerment

neoliberal. In Chile, such policies were brought to the table only after the authoritarian

neoliberal regime of Pinochet ended. Applying Sharma’s insights to the ethnographic context

of Chile and Isla Huapi specifically, what relations of dependence do empowerment policies

imply? How does the policies that Sharma describes articulate with neoliberal principles? Or

rather, how does this alignment with neoliberal principles make social policies of

empowerment neoliberal?

49

Like Sharma (2008), the political scientist Verónica Schild (2007) has analyzed the way in

which neoliberal development in Chile, based on the concept of empowerment, shifts

responsibility for social welfare away from state institutions and onto citizens. Through

specific social practices and discourses, “passive” receivers of government welfare are

encouraged to transform themselves into active, empowered consumer-citizens. “In relation

to social goods”, Schild writes, “citizens are no longer assumed to have entitlements but are

instead encouraged to relate to them as goods to be accessed through market-like relations”

(2007, pp. 181-182). On the part of the citizens, since they must access social goods through

competition, this requires a capacity for choice and a responsibility for the individual self.

Furthermore, it requires the previously impoverished, exploited producer to reinvent herself

as both producer and consumer of social goods. How? This is supposed to take place through

innovative social assistance programs. Examining PRODEMU, a foundation that seeks to

alleviate poverty among women by providing various training and educational programs,

Schild shows how these programs teach poor women to autonomously access social

assistance and social services. Seen through the lens of governmentality, the capacity to act

and to access social goods through rational consumer-like behavior correlates with core

principles of neoliberalism. In fact, the creation of the socially independent actor who

rationally calculates the potential losses and benefits of a certain choice against alternatives,

equals the creation of neoliberal rationalities (Lemke, 2001, p. 201). Like Sharma (2008),

Schild understands neoliberalism not just as a political economic system, but as a collection

of political strategies that is “intent on re-regulating society through the rationality of the

market and that ultimately depends on techniques for the self-regulation of individuals”

(Schild, 2007, p. 180).

Both Schild (2007) and Sharma (2008) approach neoliberalism in line with Foucault’s notion

of governmentality and analyze how neoliberal development plays out on the ground: through

localized practices and discourses. Foucault himself insisted on the importance of such an

empirical approach to rethinking social policy (Ferguson, 2015, p. 32). Studying development

through an overarching approach to discourse leaves little room for investigating the

ambiguous and complex ways in which various actors engage with development initiatives on

the ground (Mosse, 2005; Nustad, 2005), which is the kind of investigations I present in this

dissertation. What exactly is the relation between policy and practice? Drawing on his own

experiences as research consultant for agricultural development in rural India, David Mosse

(2005) asks whether development practice is actually driven by policy. He approaches the

50

study of development through a critical analysis of discourse and practice and the relation

between the two. According to Mosse, research on development tends to employ either an

“instrumentalist” or a “critical” view of development policy. The former perspective includes

those analyses that portray the process from policy to execution as linear and straightforward,

assuming that policy dictates development practice. The latter view, Mosse argues, portrays

development policy as a seductive strategy to conceal the hidden purposes of power and

dominance (see Ferguson, 1994). Moving beyond these perspectives, Mosse sets out to

explore the “complex agency of actors in development at every level” (Mosse, 2005, p. 6)

and asks not whether, but how development projects work, and how success is produced.

Following Mosse, I study how development works on Isla Huapi and consider the relation

between policy and practice a question of ethnographic scrutiny. What are the ways in which

development work is assessed, by islanders and other actors alike?

If, following Ferguson’s (2010) caveats, we avoid letting the concept of neoliberalism

overshadow particularities of social practices, the concept becomes an analytical tool for

generating comparative analysis of the ways in which development is sought and affects life.

Ethnographic analyses of how development works or is designed to work according to

neoliberal principles of self-regulation and autonomy are not only valuable but necessary, as

this kind of development has become a worldwide phenomenon (Di Giminiani, 2018a;

Ferguson, 2015; Schild, 2007). Hence, the concept of neoliberalism deserves close attention.

Several scholars have tried to dismiss the concept of neoliberalism altogether (Kipnis, 2007;

Venugopal, 2015). Rajesh Venugopal, for example, asserts that “Neoliberalism is now an

overloaded and unwieldy term that occupies a fluid and growing terrain that expands and

contracts arbitrarily across several dimensions, but which increasingly lacks firm foundations

in real world referents” (Venugopal, 2015, p. 171). He reviews how the concept of

neoliberalism has been put to use since the 1980s, drawing especially on writings within the

political economy of development. Not only has the concept been too far removed from the

economic discipline out of which it grew: in addition, its meaning has been stretched out

along two axes. These two axes are “reach” and “depth”, which are themselves in conflict

with each other. Concerning “reach”, Venugopal cites recent criticism of scholars who apply

the concept of “neoliberalism” to such widely varying phenomena that patterns and

connections appear to emerge which are not really there. “Deep” neoliberalism, by contrast,

is a force so decentralized and context-specific that its heterogeneous outcomes do not admit

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theoretical generalization. (Venugopal refers to the governmentality-oriented approach as the

deepest). As an analytical concept, the critique goes, “neoliberalism” has come to bear too

many meanings.

It is true that neoliberalism has been a frequently used concept within the discipline of

anthropology in recent decades. At the 2012 annual debate of the University of Manchester’s

Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, neoliberalism was explicitly and critically

assessed as four scholars pursued arguments for or against neoliberalism as an analytical

concept. Consistent with Venugopal’s (2015) line of argument, James Laidlaw (2015)

claimed during that debate that everything everywhere seems neoliberal and that “any

concept of theory that purports to explain everything can only explain nothing” (in Eriksen et

al., 2015, p. 912). Meanwhile, in his contribution to the debate, Thomas Hylland Eriksen

argued that “the term is more specific than, say, ‘capitalism’ or ‘modernity’, while at the

same time being a genuinely comparative concept enabling comparison between contexts

which would otherwise only with great difficulty speak meaningfully to one another” (in

Eriksen et al., 2015, p. 916). The question then arises: What are we comparing? As James

Ferguson (2010) points out, we should be careful to use neoliberalism as an analytical

concept because it might mask what we actually want to unveil. That does not mean that the

concept is barren or unusable, as Venugopal and Laidlaw argue. Rather, as Ferguson urges,

we should specify what kind of processes or phenomena we are dealing with, so that these

can in turn be analyzed and made comparable through the concept of neoliberalism. Surely,

neoliberalism is not a single thing or system. Still, there are phenomena and processes that

can be profitably analyzed through the lens of neoliberalism, such as development on Isla

Huapi. As Ferguson points out, specificity is key – not only when dealing with social

phenomena, but also when approaching neoliberalism in relation to those phenomena. Hence,

the pertinent question is: What is neoliberal about the phenomenon I identified on Isla Huapi

as “neoliberal state development” (a question I answer in chapter 5, 6 and 8)?

Venugopal’s argument is underlined by Andrew Kipnis’ critique that neoliberalism, as an

overarching trope, contains two contradictory theoretical versions. One treats neoliberalism

as a social policy focusing on the retreat of the state, private property and free markets, which

he calls the neo-Marxian cultural neoliberalism of Comaroff and Comaroff (2000). The other,

to which he compares the former, follows Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism, and sees

“state intervention as central to the project of producing liberal, responsible, governable, and

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entrepreneurial citizenry, as well as properly functioning markets” (Kipnis, 2007, p. 385).

Central to the neoliberal project is the state apparatus that, in these two approaches, acts in

completely different ways. While one retreats, the other asserts itself in order to carry out its

agenda. However, Kipnis here approaches the two neoliberalisms in a rather rigid way. He

associates the first kind, the “neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher”, with the neoliberal

history of America in the 1980s. The other neoliberalism, the “governmentality school”, he

places within the historical context of post-Second World War German ordo-liberals, a policy

trend more sympathetic towards state regulation of capitalist markets. While both Jamie Peck

(2008) and Foucault (2004) have pointed out the importance of understanding neoliberal

ideals and praxis as historically contingent and plural, this does not mean that the concept of

neoliberalism equates ideology with governmental policy. Kipnis writes that while Comaroff

and Comaroff are concerned about the ironic effects of neoliberal culture, the

governmentality school focuses on how neoliberal governance functions and how it has

“successfully produced responsible and governable but alienated neoliberal subjects – you

and I” (Kipnis, 2007, p. 385). I am skeptical that anthropologists who employ neoliberalism

of governance as an analytical concept consider it their task to identify neoliberal subjects.

Significantly, I think, people can be part of neoliberal processes, or can act in ways that might

agree with neoliberal principles in one context or at one point, without thereby becoming

neoliberal subjects. Others might resist or not be given the opportunity to take part in

neoliberal processes or phenomena. Thus, a focus in this dissertation is on questions such as:

what are the neoliberal processes of which people on Isla Huapi are part? What are the ways

in which they engage or do not engage in such processes? For what reasons?

Critiques of neoliberalism see it as a peculiar conundrum that if the neoliberal government is

successful in its aim to create free, autonomous subjects who act in and for themselves, there

will then be nothing to govern. Instead, the government might have created subjects with will

and capacity to break free from the state, such as the indigenous populations incorporated

into the nation-state during colonial times of oppression. However, investigation of how

neoliberal development projects play out on the ground shows, at least in my ethnographic

cases, that this critique is misplaced. What Kipnis identifies as the problem of neoliberalism –

the inherent contradiction of a state apparently retreating while increasingly intervening – is, I

believe, precisely what constitutes it. The paradoxes which form the basis of his critique, are,

as I will show, the very paradoxes with which people on Isla Huapi grapple in their everyday

lives, and through which we can start to make sense of the seemingly contradictory concept

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of neoliberal state development. For example, in what ways do state-led development

programs demonstrate a sense of care while, simultaneously, work as forms of control?

Many development programs directed at poor indigenous communities in Chile are based on

the continuous flow of credit arrangements. If the market is the primary mode of governance

in neoliberal states, credit schemes must be effective means of influence and control?

Exploring moral and political subjects in post-dictatorship Chile, Clara Han (2012) analyzes

how the making of selves in a poor neighborhood in Santiago is strictly tied to indebtedness.

One of the reasons for this is the displacement of responsibility for care onto individuals. In

health and social policy, she writes, “discourses of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-

responsibility’…presume a self that is sovereign, morally autonomous, and transparent posed

against social determinations of ‘the poor’ who must divest themselves of such

determinations to be ‘free’ (2012, p. 5). Neoliberalism as a form of governance hinges on

techniques for the self-regulation of individuals – the rationality and moral of the

entrepreneur. That is why entrepreneurship requires training, to make people into responsible,

calculating agents. However, as Han writes, neoliberal development does not only pertain to

the political economy of rational production. Because values of personhood and citizenship

are tied to the ability to labor for self-care, there is another aspect of neoliberal development

to consider as well: namely, the moral economy. How do we deal with neoliberalism as both

a political and moral economy?

Value realms in the wake of neoliberalism

Through the concept of “flexible capitalism”, Susana Narotzky (Narotzky, 2015) proposes

that we pay attention to the emotions elicited at the boundaries between the intimate value

realm of the household and the public value realm of the market. Outlining historical

perspectives on labor and economic production, she shows how the two value realms to

which she refers have been treated as distinct from one another. One the one hand, the

intimate domain of the household has commonly been analyzed in terms of emotional, non-

capitalist relations of reproduction. On the other hand, analytical approaches to the market

have rested on notions of rationality and capitalist relations of production. As such,

anthropologists have tended to separate the moral from the political economy. An exception

to this is Marit Melhuus’ (1987) research on landless tobacco growers in the Corrientes

region of Argentina in the mid-1970s. Through household analyses, Melhuus showed how

54

economic value was created, circulated, and reproduced, and how the precarity of landless

tobacco growers was directly connected to structural conditions of economic exclusion.

Emphasizing the central role of the household in capitalist relations of production (1987; see

also Melhuus, 2018). Melhuus’ research resonates with Narotzky’s (2015) urge to move away

from understanding value production as only taking place within the different domains and

rather to be attentive to those values produced at the boundaries between them. Her appeal to

focus on boundaries between domains as blurred and porous, relates to the need to understand

the boundary between state and society in similar veins (Mitchell, 1991). Using two

ethnographical cases from Spain, Narotzky argues that a persistent aspect of capitalism is, in

fact, a productive emotional tension that occurs in the blurring of the boundaries between the

two value realms.

What Narotzky (2015) describes as “flexible capitalism” is analogous to the policies and

practices which I approach through the concept of neoliberal development. Focusing on the

liberalization of the labor market, she refers to a process in which “technical aspects of

productivity and competition focus on enhancing skills through endless training and

obtaining a flexible labour market through the elimination of legal or institutional protection”

(Narotzky, 2015, p. 180). Similarly, as already pointed out by Han (2012), the social policy

of neoliberal development in Chile shifts the moral responsibility of economic well-being to

the entrepreneur herself. Narotzky (2015) connects flexible capitalism not only to the value of

a morally autonomous self, but also to the moral values of trustworthiness and good character

that are required to participate in the labor market. Can the labor market to which Narotzky

refers, be translated into the funding competition market on Isla Huapi as it is inextricably

tied to social relations between islanders and development workers and thus to moral

evaluations based on this interaction? To what kind of value realms are notions of

trustworthiness and good character connected?

In contrast to the “disembedding” of the market from its human grounding in social

relationships and institutions (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]), flexible capitalism works in the

opposite direction. According to Narotzky, it destroys society by “pervasively embedding

capitalist objectives in all spheres of responsibility, blurring distinctions, inhibiting the

emergence of alternative value spaces and preventing struggle – in fact, by turning reciprocity

(a nineteenth-century concept) into social capital (a late-twentieth-century concept)”

(Narotzky, 2015, p. 195). What does she mean by this? Values associated with reciprocity,

55

namely the “social value of exchange relations” and notions of “care” and a “common good”,

are transformed into values associated with social capital, such as the “exchange value of

social relations”, “profit” and “self-interest”. By historically tracing the concepts of

reciprocity and social capital, Narotzky (2015) demonstrates that flexible capitalism blurs the

boundary between these value realms in such a way that it causes ambivalence leading to

anxiety on a concrete level, while allowing for exploitation on a more abstract level

(Narotzky, 2018).

Narotzky’s insights into the workings of value realms in what she calls flexible capitalism

point to several aspects crucial to the workings of neoliberalism and neoliberal development.

Like other scholars working on the topic of neoliberal development, she addresses the shift

not only in economic but also moral responsibility of well-being from state onto citizens. In

doing so, she opens up analytical possibilities by drawing on specific, conflicting concepts of

value, such as “self-interest” and a “common good”, and “care” and “profit”, which are

pertinent to my ethnography. Navigating the paradoxes of neoliberalism does not only entail

making sense of tensions between market and state, or between dependence and

independence. It also makes it necessary to negotiate value realms represented by conflicting

notions of a “common good” and “self-interest”, of “care” and “profit”. When farmers

engage in inherently neoliberal development programs, how are they enacting conflicting

realms of value?

So where do these theoretical insights that inform my analysis as well as the questions I ask,

take me? Is the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism what makes neoliberalism a useful

conceptual tool for making sense of state-led development on Isla Huapi? My analytical

project is neither to identify neoliberal subjects or the degree to which people can be

identified as such, nor to demonize the neoliberal project by demonstrating all the ways in

which people resist it. Rather, I am interested in the various ways it is encountered and dealt

with by different actors who are connected to the island in one way or another and affected

by the project of neoliberal development. Here I follow Ferguson’s (2010) attempt and wish

to understand the complex and ambiguous workings of neoliberalism as:

… A set of much harder to place arguments that link markets, enterprise, welfare, and social

payments in a novel way. It leaves us neither with something to hate, nor something to love,

but rather something to ponder … Let us try to hold in our minds the apparently paradoxical

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idea that a major policy initiative might be, all at once, “pro-poor”, redistributive, and

neoliberal (Ferguson, 2010, p. 178).

Following up on Fergusons’ appeal: How do neoliberal development projects empower as

well as disempower both individuals and the community? In what ways do they allow for

economic and social differentiation processes? However, there are another sets of questions

with which I am equally concerned. These have to do with the ways in which neoliberal state

development also fosters hopes and aspirations for economically and materially improved

lives.

The combination of a high degree of state presence, hopes and aspirations, and neoliberalism

is perhaps peculiar. A common notion surrounding neoliberalism is that the state retreats

from society in order to enable a free market to thrive in its absence. Writing about hope in

neoliberal societies, Ghassan Hage (2003) proposes that such a retreat of the state has

sometimes resulted in a corresponding retreat of hope. When he speaks of societies as

“shrinking”, he means that a society loses its ability to manifest the possibilities that life can

offer. Pushed to its extreme, this suggests that there is no hope in neoliberalism – particularly

for those who suffer under its rule in economically precarious situations. Nevertheless, on

Isla Huapi, the state has not retreated and hope has not diminished. Rather, it seems that state

presence, although neoliberal, still allows for the cultivation of new kinds of hopes and

aspirations. As documented by Katie Smith (2017) in her research on poverty and social

welfare policies in Britain, neoliberal development can create hopeful spaces in which social

and personal worth are recognized. How do the theoretical concepts of hope and aspiration

enable a better understanding of how “affective intensities” (Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2015)

make people willing to form intimate relations with the state? How does Stef Jansen’s (2014)

concept of “gridding” help me grasp the way in which, and perhaps also the reason why,

people call on the state?

HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS

Apart from a widely read piece by Arjun Appadurai (2004) and, building on this, Edward F.

Fischer’s work on “the good life” (2014), there is not much anthropological literature that

theorizes the concept of aspiration, particularly not in relation to the concept of hope.

According to Appadurai, the reason why anthropologists have been little concerned with

aspiration is that the concept has been assigned to “the discipline of economics, to the domain

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of the market and to the level of the individual actor”, and largely employed in discourses of

economic development (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67). In Appadurai’s estimation, culture has been

understood as a barrier to development, which has left aspiration to stand in opposition to

culture. However, culture should, according to him, rather be seen as a resource that

generates the “capacity to aspire”.

In an effort to account for “the good life”, Fischer (2014) takes up the idea of the “capacity to

aspire” and emphasizes in line with Appadurai (2004) the agency required to make

aspirations seem feasible. Appadurai and Fischer’s understanding of the concept of the

“capacity to aspire” differs from the neoliberal (moral) notion of aspiration: in the trajectory

of life, subjects should have goals for which they should aspire. In contrast, the “capacity to

aspire” is a concept that refers to notions of “self-improvement” and the pursuit of a “good

life”. It is a concept that is guided by cultural and ethical visions of the future but also by

notions of what is possible (Appadurai, 2004; Fischer, 2014). It could, for example, be about

maintaining status quo. In Fischer’s study of the pursuit of the good life, a comparative

ethnographic study of German middle-class supermarket shoppers and Maya farmers, he

finds that the market is a key venue. As he urges us to take into account other factors than

material conditions and include “the hopes, fears, and other subjective factors that drive

[people’s] engagement with the world” (2014, p. 5), the market venue becomes the material

and emotional locus of engagement in his interlocutors’ pursuit of the good life. For farmers

of Isla Huapi, the market venue constitutes only a small part of islanders’ locus of

engagement in their pursuit of the good life. Islanders seem to be much more concerned with

sate-led development programs. But for what? What is it about islanders’ life that make them

aspire for something better? What motivates such desires? How do they go about trying to

secure, for example, electricity infrastructure and what is this infrastructure really seen to

improve?

Contrary to the anthropological literature on the concept of aspiration, there is a vast body of

research that focuses on emotions such as desire, doubt, uncertainty and hope (Hage, 2003;

Kleist & Jansen, 2016; Miyazaki, 2006). I therefore draw on conceptualizations of hope to

propose the concept of aspirations not only as denoting goal-oriented desires, but also as the

bearer of negatively connoted values of “self-interest”, as people on Isla Huapi quite

frequently seem to make the connection between goal-oriented desires and “self-interest”.

With the concept of hope, on the other hand, I seek to embrace emotions that are connoted

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with the positive value of a “common good” – a notion employed in relation to infrastructural

development and modernization benefitting the whole community, but one that could also

embrace the value of steadfastness. Recognizing the cultural aspect of both hopes and

aspirations, people on Isla Huapi certainly maneuver state-led development in diverse ways

specific to the ethnographic context.

How do distinctions between hope and aspiration, neither of which are emic terms in the

sense I use them here, play out on Isla Huapi? Do they differ in their temporal reasoning and

orientation? Do hopes and aspirations give different shapes to ideas about the future and to

the ways in which islanders “hope for the state” (Jansen, 2014).

According to Stef Jansen (2016), the anthropological literature on the concept of hope is

largely characterized by two different tendencies. On the one hand, hope is conceived in

anthropological knowledge production as a vehicle for positive change. As Jansen (2016)

writes: “In a climate considered to be marked by relative hopelessness, phenomena are seen

to be hopeful to the degree that they contribute to the imagination and realization of certain

alternatives to a current order referred to as neoliberal, capitalist, racist, imperialist etc.”

(Jansen, 2016, p. 449). Thus, recognizing the emancipatory power of hope, the positive

change is the opening up of alternative realities rather than closing in on them (see Hage &

Papadopoulos, 2004; Miyazaki, 2004).

On the other hand, the more frequent way in which anthropologists have drawn on the

concept of hope is as an object of empirical study. Often, in these ethnographic analyses the

phenomenon of hope is tied to adjacent concepts, such as waiting, doubt, uncertainty or even

“stuckedness” (Janeja & Bandak, 2018), and especially to temporality. In connection with

temporality, hope has frequently been studied in relation to processes of capitalism,

neoliberalism, finance (Greenhouse, 2010; Miyazaki, 2006), and crisis (Jansen, 2014;

Narotzky & Besnier, 2014). Treating hope as an object of empirical research raises questions

such as: Hopes for what, and towards what end? For what do your interlocutors hope? Thus,

there are two overall trends in the study of hope: “one that locates hopefulness against all

odds and one that studies specific formations of hope and temporal reasoning” (Kleist &

Jansen, 2016). However, treating hope as an object of empirical study might simultaneously

elicit hopeful moments of positive change through which we can recognize the emancipatory

power of hope. As an object of empirical study, I mainly concentrate here on hopes that take

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shape in relation to the state and development initiatives, but I also touch upon other modes

and temporalities of hope (such as hopes of community, labor, adulthood, and parenthood).

For what do people on Isla Huapi hope? What are the social and temporal circumstances in

which they hope? How do hopes affect islanders’ relation to the state?

On Isla Huapi, it becomes evident that the community makes demands and places hope in the

future as well as in the state in a different way than individual islanders aspire to enhance

their economic situations. Yet, in both cases, islanders are seeking better lives or, in the

words of Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier (2014), to improve their own “well-being”.

Setting out to rethink practices of social reproduction, Narotzky and Besnier focus on life-

enhancing strategies among “ordinary” people. This term embraces people who suffer from a

lack in decision-making capacities but who are nevertheless capable of imagining alternative

futures and advancing strategies to enhance their “well-being”. They define this term as “the

accomplishment of socially reasonable expectations of material and emotional comfort that

depend on access to the diverse resources needed to attain them” (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014,

p. S4). Narotzky and Besnier are concerned with the processes in which people engage to

enhance well-being, and thus, with the practices of making a living – ways of living that are

meaningful. Combining the theoretical themes of crisis, value and hope, they try to grasp how

ordinary people enhance their own well-being to make “life worth living”. Their approach to

ordinary people’s struggle and their understanding of “well-being” resonates with my

understanding of hopes and aspirations as they take form on Isla Huapi.

To understand the ways in which islanders seek to enhance “well-being” and improve

conditions of life, we should separate hopes from aspirations. First, aspirations are concrete,

strategic, and rather goal-oriented ways to realize expectations about a specific future, such as

a grant of government money to repair a broken fence. More importantly, such goals or plans

are conceived of as viable and within reach: they are imagined to be plausible futures.

Second, to advance well-being, islanders orient themselves towards the near future and recent

past. Rhetoric of ethnic discrimination is absent in formulations of individual aspirations,

which are mostly articulated as aspirations in encounters with development workers (usually

the PDTI team). Finally, in order to obtain the resources needed to realize these aspirations,

the individual farmer must act in her own right. Thus, there are varying degrees of agency

involved in activities generated by aspirations and hope. However, as with the value realms

describes by Narotzky (2015) and the relation between state and society accounted for by

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Mitchell (1991), it is important to acknowledge the boundary between aspiration and hope as

one that is porous, shifting and, at times, can become quite unclear. This becomes particularly

evident when islanders accuse others of being too preoccupied with their own well-being, too

greedy, or when some islanders accuse the island authorities of acting for personal gains

without considering the common good of the society for which the authorities were elected.

People on Isla Huapi place hope in the state and aspire to better futures through its help,

although they do this with different levels of intensity and through the enactment of different

parts of the state apparatus. The analytical concepts of hope and aspiration cannot be

understood separately from state practices. This is not to say that people are exclusively pro-

state. Islanders are skeptical towards politicians’ promises and, at times, even the agenda of

the PDTI team. Statements such as “we don’t believe it until we see it” reveal an attitude

grounded in past (and present) experiences with politicians. However, individual islanders as

well as the community Board, representing the community as a singular collective (see

Koselleck ([1985] 2004) in Harvey, 2018a), all work together with the state, collaborating

with municipally employed functionaries, state authority representatives and other actors of

the state apparatus. Although they place hope in it, islanders’ relationship to the state is

ambivalent. How can I capture this ambivalence, which colors the ways in which state

capacities are enacted? What is the relationship between the state, hope, and the search for a

“life worth living” (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014)?

James Scott (1998) described how states attempt to organize society into “a standard grid

whereby it [can] be centrally recorded and monitored” (quoted in Jansen, 2014, p. 238). In

response, Stef Jansen criticizes anthropologists’ tendency to privilege an analytical position

against the state. While finding the concept of a grid fruitful, Jansen is critical of the way in

which Scott and other scholars treat the state as an imposed externality. As Jansen argues,

such an analysis tends to take one of two forms: either it aims at the unmasking of top-down

modern statecraft’s claim to promote enlightened progress while in fact creating victims, or it

focuses on people’s resilience and resistance to statecraft. One the one hand, we read about

people’s evasion of the state’s top-down disciplining schemes, and on the other about the

internalization of the state as an ideological construct. These two analytical paths make up

what Jansen calls the “Libertarian paradigm”, which assumes a position of hope (whether on

the part of the anthropologist or the interlocutors) against the state. This paradigm reinforces

the boundary between state and society, between “the insidiousness of modern statecraft and

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the beauty of resilience-in-authenticity” (Jansen, 2014, p. 241). Jansen wants to overcome

this boundary, as well as the one-sided approach against the state ostensibly shared by

anthropologists and interlocutors alike.

In his ethnography from a besieged Sarajevo suburb, Jansen finds that people suffering from

the effects of warfare during the early 1990s were actually hoping for what he terms “normal

lives”, which were to be realized partly through incorporation into a “functioning state”. He

found that people hoped for the same pre-war socialist state that at that time had put them in

great danger. Jansen looks at the way in which people, during the war and in relative isolation

in a besieged suburb of Sarajevo, collaborate to organize schooling initiatives for children.

He uses the concept of “gridding”, the process and practice of grid-matrix-making, in order to

highlight the effort people made to restore routines of “normal life” and thereby to make “life

worth living”, in Narotzky and Besnier’s terms (2014). Jansen sees people’s efforts to

organize classes and uphold the familiar rhythms and trajectories of the former school system

during the chaos of war as signs of a desire for ordering frameworks. Furthermore, he stresses

the attempts people made to “have local gridding vertically encompassed into gridding

understood to be higher and broader” (2014, p. 253). People in the suburb made an effort to

formalize the schooling according to socialist law, so that it might be recognized by the

formal educational system in the future. Thus, they expressed a desire for local gridding that,

through hopes of vertical encompassment, called the state into being. Rather than rejecting or

evading the state, they sought outward and upward gridding “to create conditions in which

‘normal lives’ could unfold” (Jansen, 2014, p. 257). This was a hope not against but for the

state.

Through the concept of gridding, Jansen (2014) here provides a new analytical tool that

might restrain anthropologists from rushing into the Libertarian approach. Importantly, by

uncovering his interlocutors’ desires for grids (in this case, state grids), he reveals

anthropologists’ tendency to employ analytical perspectives that go against the state. Desire

for a grid does not necessarily imply unabridged trust in, or devotion to, the state, for that

matter. After all, his ethnographic case was one in which his interlocutors were in a besieged

Sarajevo suburb.

Like people in war-torn Sarajevo, residents on Isla Huapi cannot be said to fully reject the

state, nor can they be said to completely embrace it. Furthermore, they do not necessarily

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conceive of the state exclusively as an imposed externality. Although skeptical of the

government, politicians and state interventions, people on Isla Huapi, as in Jansen’s case, call

on the state. Jansen’s use of the term “gridding” points to the process and practice of making

grids, which may also include more-than-human objects of analysis, such as infrastructure.

However, as in Scott’s analysis (1998), the concept of grid may also imply administrators,

maps and bureaucracy. In this way, the world of projects and programs and their planners and

executors on Isla Huapi can be fruitfully described with the concept of grid. When people on

Isla Huapi call the state into being through development programs, they call on grids – on the

state in its ordering capacity. When people hope for the state and aspire to better lives by

enacting it, the state “becomes a locus of affective investment” (Laszczkowski & Reeves,

2015, p. 7).

On Isla Huapi, gridding takes specific forms as the ordering capacity of the state is sought for

through engagement in state-led neoliberal development programs. When a project in fact

materialized, hope for the state coincided with demand for the state in a way that affected

islanders’ willingness to form intimate relationships with the state and its representatives.

However, gridding entailed affective investments of risk as hopes and aspirations –

particularly hopes – were quickly transformed into despair and disbelief. In order to

understand islanders’ relation to the state, it is therefore necessary to recognize the

uncertainty with which islanders encounter state-led neoliberal development programs. As I

will show throughout this dissertation, the state becomes relevant to inhabitants of Isla Huapi

as a force of fluctuating significance and as an apparatus moving in and out of sight as

development workers come and go and as infrastructural projects are begun, stagnate and

stop – and then start anew.

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3. REFLECTIONS ON METHOD AND ETHICAL

CONCERNS

In 1966, Hortense Powdermaker wrote that:

The anthropologist is a human instrument studying other human beings and their societies.

Although he has developed techniques that give him considerable objectivity, it is an illusion

for him to think he can remove his personality from his work and become a faceless robot or a

machinelike recorder of human events. (1966, p. 19)

Her insight is as valid today as it was when she wrote this more than half a century ago. The

topic she addresses, the influence that the fieldworker has on the research process itself,

deserves reflection. When doing long-term ethnographic research, the anthropologist herself

is the single most important instrument for data collection. Because anthropological

knowledge production is embodied, we are forced to recognize the impossibility of producing

objective, replicable knowledge. Thus, the most honest or “veracious” (A. Stewart, 1998)

approach is to be conscious of and highlight the partial, embodied perspective in which

anthropological knowledge production is grounded (Haraway, 1988). How can we go about

doing this? It is crucial that the anthropologist accounts for processes through which she has

collected data and attained her knowledge, to render visible what Alex Stewart calls the “trail

of the ethnographer’s path” (1998, p. 33). With whom did I spend my time? With whom did I

not spend much time? From what social settings have my data emerged? How? It is equally

fundamental to address who the anthropologist is: it is this body on which, in fact, the

research hinges. Moreover, we must reflect on who the anthropologist is at different times, in

different settings and to different people, and be aware of shifts that might occur throughout

fieldwork. What spaces and roles does the anthropologist occupy?

AN OUTSIDER ENTERING THE ISLAND

When I arrived on Isla Huapi in the beginning of March 2016, I had already spent over two

months in Chile. First, I had spent almost two months in the capital, then some days in both

Valdivia (a coastal city in the south) and Futrono. Closing in on Isla Huapi was a process.

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When I arrived in Chile, I was oblivious to the fact that I would end up spending ten months

on Isla Huapi. It was not my initial plan to carry out research there. In fact, my initial

research concerned the promotion of renewable energy measures in Santiago. When that

proved difficult to realize, I contacted the Ministry of Energy, which I knew worked with

renewable energy initiatives and funded projects that aimed at constructing solar power

infrastructure in remote areas. People I met with at the ministry’s offices in Santiago put me

in touch with employees of the Ministry of Agriculture. As those at the Ministry of Energy

had anticipated, the staff of the Ministry of Agriculture took an interest in my research and

were willing to help me find an ethnographic site to study renewable energy infrastructure.

On my own initiative, I also attended meetings with private construction companies, who,

according to their websites, had been assisting with solar-power projects in various rural

areas. However, during my second month in Santiago, I mostly met with various

governmental institutions and state agencies. Among these, I met with INDAP, which

informed me about a project they were engaged in on a remote island called Isla Huapi in the

south of Chile. There they were constructing Chile’s largest off-grid, solar-power-driven

irrigation system. If that was of interest to me, they said, they would contact Ignacio, who

was in charge of the project and would help me. Thinking it would be interesting to study the

social effects of this renewable energy infrastructure, I accepted their kind offer.

In some ways, it felt at first as if I were an extension of INDAP, or even INDAP’s delegate.

At INDAP’s offices in Santiago, they underlined the need for research on this project, since

this was the first off-grid, solar-power irrigation system on such a large scale. As the

institution with the overall responsibility for the project and for government investments in it,

they took great interest in its success or failure. This made it feel as if my project were to be

carried out as much for them as for the University of Oslo and myself. When I met with

Ignacio, he was eager to get insight, through my studies, into new aspects of the society on

Isla Huapi. While developing the infrastructure, he had apparently encountered “challenges”

connected to the social and cultural specificities of the island society.12 He thought I could

perhaps help him overcome these challenges. Consequently, it was hard to shake the feeling

that I was working for INDAP, and that I was dependent on INDAP and its employees. In

many ways, I had indeed been dependent on INDAP – a powerful state agency with direct

12 I return to these “challenges” in chapter 6.

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links to the island – to arrive on Isla Huapi at all. I think that many islanders also saw me as

part of INDAP, particularly at first.

When I visited Isla Huapi for the first time, Ignacio, who was head of INDAP’s regional

irrigation office, accompanied me. He was checking up to see how the construction of the

irrigation system was progressing. The owner of the construction company was there, too.

We drove from node to node in what proved to be an extensive infrastructural system of

water basins, pumps, solar panels and pipes. At one point, we stopped at the foot of a small

hill. Above us were two houses. One of them was the residence of the community president,

the other the house of the lonko – the traditional head of community. According to Ignacio, I

had to ask both of them for permission to stay on the island and do research. Those were the

island authorities, he said. While the lonko was not around, Ignacio took me to the house of

the president, Yessica. With Ignacio next to me, I explained my project to her and asked, as

Ignacio encouraged me to, for her permission to carry out my research on the island. She was

surprised to learn that I planned to live there for a whole year, as most outsiders stayed for a

short term or commuted, but she welcomed me anyway. We agreed that we would talk more

on a later occasion, and off I went with Ignacio. In light of the island community’s

ambivalent history with the Chilean state, which has been colored by relations of

discrimination towards Mapuche peoples (Crow, 2013; Mallon, 2005; Richards & Gardner,

2013), my affiliation with outside authorities might have been a contributing factor to the

lack of access and skepticism that I experienced in the first months of my research.

During my first weeks, I spent many days walking up and down the many dirt roads, trying to

obtain an overview of the island. As I explained in the first chapter, it was difficult for me

even to locate people on these walks, and even harder to engage them in conversations. When

I did encounter people on the road, they were mainly interested in knowing who I was and

where I was staying. Apart from this, they were also curious to know what I thought of the

island. Somehow, it seemed that they all wanted to communicate the same thing. They even

used the same phrase to respond to my answer that “yes, I liked the island”: they tended to

say, “It is very beautiful, this island”, before continuing: “Acá somos todos iguales; somos

Mapuche; gente humilde” (“Here we are the same; we are Mapuche; humble/poor people”).

After a while, as I encountered the phrase again and again, it appeared to me almost

rehearsed. It seemed to be something one would say to whoever visited from the outside. It

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proved difficult to elevate the conversation beyond these phrases. Others it was difficult even

to approach.

Sometimes, when I ventured towards a house by crossing the field in front of it, the person

standing in front of the house would turn around and go inside, closing the door behind her

when she noticed me. Others would not open up if I knocked (though I almost never did this,

as it felt intrusive). Most houses had fences surrounding their plots, which in many cases

therefore also encircled the house. In addition, islanders tended to keep dogs untethered in

their garden. Whenever I approached the fence, the dogs would bark aggressively until I left.

Some months into my stay, I asked Beatriz, a woman I had gotten to know, about this. She

smiled when she heard my question and told me that I made people embarrassed or ashamed

(dar vergüenza) of the poor condition of their houses, that they were probably messy and

dirty and that they did not want me, “como extranjera” (“as a foreigner”), to see them.

However, there were other factors that marked me as an outsider beyond the poor conditions

in which many islanders lived and their (rightful) assumption that I, as a white foreigner, was

accustomed to live in greater luxury.

People were rather hostile towards me in the beginning. To islanders – including, at first,

Ana, with whom I was staying – I was a white foreigner affiliated with state agencies.

However, I was also met with skepticism because I was a researcher, and in particular an

anthropologist. At first, of course, no one told me so. But later, during a minga (which they

translated as “voluntary community work session”), the community president, Yessica, was

talking about an anthropologist who would be visiting the island the next day, whom she “had

to accompany”. I asked her how she felt about researchers such as this one and myself

coming to the island. She thought about it for a second before replying, “más o menos”

(“more or less”). Her answer made me uncomfortable. Yessica seemed to notice this, because

when she looked up at me, she smiled and took care in explaining what she meant by “more

or less”. I sat there listening, together with the other women in the room. She started

explaining that the islanders consider themselves “humble/poor people” (gente humilde). For

that reason, they welcome everyone to the island and want visitors to have a positive

experience with their visit. This was why she would spend the next day with this

anthropologist. At this point, Yessica’s explanation took a turn. “But,” she said, “when

people come here to do studies, at times this makes us feel atrasados (backward)”. While the

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other women nodded, she continued to explain that they did normally not perceive their own

lives in this way. Normally, she said, they were content.

The other women sitting around the table joined the conversation. One of them, Esperanza,

said that people from the outside (de afuera) tended to know very little about actual

conditions on the island. She said that outsiders had prejudices against them. Esperanza was

quiet for a second before she seemed to remember something she had wanted to say. She

turned to Yessica and asked her for what purpose the anthropologist was coming the next

day. Before the president could answer, Esperanza continued: “Something about how we

raise our children, right?” Yessica confirmed this and added that the visit also had something

to do with the cleanliness of the lake water. Esperanza looked back at me: “See?” She had

made her point, which was that outsiders – anthropologists – questioned the ways in which

they lived. Her question (“See?”) implied a critique not only of the prejudices that Esperanza

identified as inherent to the anthropologist’s research. After considering a conversation I had

with a woman I here call Teresa, a conversation to which I return in the next paragraph, I

believe Esperanza’s question also implied a critique of outside researchers’ tendency to take

advantage of islanders’ hospitality without considering the effects in which this resulted – a

tendency that continued a long history of discrimination.

On a different occasion, expressions of open resentment toward researchers came to the

surface. On the día de mujer indígena – the indigenous woman’s day, an event organized by

PDTI – I got acquainted with Teresa. We were sitting at the same table, eating and drinking

mate (an herbal tea), when she asked me, in what I perceived as a quite confrontational

manner, what I was researching. I told her, as I had become rather accustomed to do by that

time, that I was interested in the relationship between the state and the community of Isla

Huapi. She asked me if I was not rather studying the irrigation system. I had not talked to her

before, but the word seemed to have spread. I replied that indeed I was, but as a

materialization of the relationship in which I was interested. She looked at me for a second. I

was nervous. Then, luckily, she said that it was “a good project”. Without elaborating on

what she meant by that, she continued talking. She was highly critical of the various

researchers that came to the island. Since the day that the island had been “opened up to the

world outside”, she said, researchers had come to study life on the island and then left, never

again to be seen by the islanders. At this point, another woman at the table chimed in saying

that researchers came to collect information with a view to promoting their own professional

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careers, and nothing more. The other women present at the table agreed. Now Teresa spoke

again. As an example to support the other woman’s claim, she told us about an anthropologist

who, while the women were still young, had taken photos of poor women cooking food for

their children. She had seen no trace of these photos or of the anthropologist since. Teresa

seemed worked up. She continued indignantly that they had lost their culture and had to

recover their customs and practices (rescatar los costumbres y raízes). After the island “was

opened up”, she said, they had lost them. Yet, in contrast to Esperanza and Yessica, by

focusing explicitly on the ways in which past injustices affected present needs, Teresa was

criticizing researchers’ engagement in exploitative relations that had contributed to their “loss

of culture”.

Teresa asked me what I would do after I took off from the island, after my stay was over.

With the aforementioned conversation fresh in my mind, I explained that I did not want to be

the type of person who came to the island, collected information for my thesis, and then left

without thinking about life on the island ever again. For this reason, I further explained, I

wanted to talk to the president and the community Board to get to know their work better and

see in what ways I in my position as a researcher might be able to support whatever cause

they were fighting for. Teresa seemed to accept this answer, as she nodded and repeatedly

said “good” (bueno). She did advise me, though, to attend community meetings and to visit

different houses on the island to engage in “personal conversations” (conversaciones

personales). That way, I could figure out the best ways to help or give support (apoyar). The

Board, she explained, did not actually represent the whole community. Ideally, it should have

been representative of every community member, which was not the case – and not because

that would have been impossible, she said. Teresa was here addressing a crucial point (on

which I elaborate in the next chapter as well as in chapter 6). The Board had been

democratically chosen to represent the community as a united collective. Even so, as she

quite accurately expected, far from every islander felt this way. A discrepancy existed

between the island authorities’ notion of the community as a polyphonic collection of

individuals and the alternative conception of the community as a singular, unified collective.

If I wanted to support the island community by addressing topics urgent to them, I would

have to talk to different islanders whose views on these matters diverged.

In various ways, islanders called the legitimacy of my own research and my intentions into

question. Significantly, I was also confronted with the way in which anthropologists work

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and how this work affects people in the societies in which we carry out research, both

historically and in the present. For a number of years, residents on Isla Huapi have been

subjected to research, which, I believe, affects the way in which they relate to academic

visitors. It is not uncommon to encounter contemporary effects of past relations of

exploitation and discrimination. Katharina Schramm, for example, has written about how she

was rejected as a “colonial master” at homecoming events of African-Americans in Ghana

(2005). Even though I was not rejected as a colonialist the way Schramm was, the unequal

relationship between researcher and interlocutors, experienced as such by some islanders,

undoubtedly echoes the colonial past of our discipline which continues, it seems, into the

present. As such, it also echoes contemporary concerns that surface in literature based on

anthropological research among indigenous peoples in Latin America. This literature deals

with the “extractivist” nature of ethnography and the need to “decolonize” ethnographic

practices and anthropological thinking (Burman, 2018; Harrison & Association of Black,

1991; Oliveira, 2009).

The aforementioned confrontations and my interlocutors’ reports of unpleasant experiences

with researchers raise methodological questions. How do we position ourselves in relation to

the people among whom – and about whom – we are theorizing and writing? Whom do I get

to know, and who gets to know me? Although the community in which I conducted my

research was a small one of 125 households, it is important to make clear that my data do not

represent everyone in the community equally. I got to know some people better than others,

in different ways and on different terms. Consequently, I positioned myself within the social

life of that community. In turn, my access to data reflects this positioning.

POSITIONINGS

I ended up living with Ana and Daniel. How did that come about, and who were they?

Ignacio had urged me to get in touch with head of the PDTI-team, Ricardo, to ask him for

Ana and Daniel’s phone number. Ignacio knew Ana and Daniel quite well, he knew that they

were a nice couple, as he said, and that their home would be a good place for me to live. Not

only was Daniel the principal at the children’s school, but he was also, according to Ignacio,

a very intelligent man. His wife, Ana, also ran a tourist business renting out cabins and

serving food. From time to time, when work required, Ignacio had lived at her place himself.

The owner of the private construction company and his employees, all working on the

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irrigation system, had done so, too. The island did not benefit from frequent transport

opportunities to the mainland, and thus it was more efficient to stay on the island. Ana and

Daniel’s place would be perfect for me, Ignacio thought. I therefore called Daniel and Ana

and arranged my housing situation with them. On Ignacio’s request, Ricardo escorted me to

Ana and Daniel’s house. When we arrived, Ana, who probably noticed us from the kitchen

window as we approached, was waiting at the front door with keys in her hand. They were

for the cabin located only some twenty meters below the main house, where she lived with

Daniel. The only question Ana had at that point was whether I preferred that she bring the

food to the cabin, or whether I would like to eat in the kitchen with them. Getting into the

ethnographic mindset, I knew I should be careful to make use of opportunities to get to know

people, preferably within the intimate sphere of the household, so I went with the last option.

It was not by coincidence, then, that I ended up staying with Ana. After some time, I learned

that there were other islanders, too, who were running tourist businesses and with whom I

could have stayed. It was merely due to Ignacio and Ricardo’s familiarity with Ana and

Daniel that I ended up there. I paid rent to her every month, and in return, I lived in one of her

cabins and she served me every meal in her kitchen. In this way I got to know not only Ana

and Daniel quite well, but also their circle of friends, workers they hired, and family members

who visited from time to time (such as their two children). Everyone present would eat

together, so that it tended to be particularly crowded in her kitchen at lunchtime. State

representatives, functionaries and other people would come to her place to eat as well. This

provided me with a social network as well as a degree of insight into current issues that

concerned islanders, which they would debate during lunch.

I spent a great deal of time around Ana. She became what one might call a key informant.

She was the first person I met when I got up in the morning and the last one I spoke to before

I went to bed. If there was something that I had encountered but did not understand, I would

ask her what she thought. Gradually, our conversations became increasingly intimate. The

fact that we were both women certainly contributed to this. She would share with me her

worries regarding her marriage, her children and life in general. I was similarly forthcoming.

After a while, she let me help her out in the kitchen and around the house. When she was not

around, I would make lunch for her husband or welcome guests. At times, she would even

send me off to community meetings and tell me to sign the attendance list – in her name.

Meanwhile, Ana became increasingly strict with me, an expression not only of her rising

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expectations, but also of her increasing care. One night, for example, she said I could not go

out because it was already dark and where I wanted to go was too far away. I remember

looking at Daniel, who grasped my confusion. “She’s worried about you”, he said. To him, he

explained, I had become like a daughter or student (hija o alumna) for whom he felt

responsible. Ana nodded to confirm that she felt the same way. “It’s the three of us now”,

Ana said. She added that this was what she said at the market in Futrono as well: “somos

tres” – “we are three”. A couple of seconds passed in silence before Daniel concluded: “Así

es” – “that’s it”. Then he added: “We’re used to having you around now. You can take

whatever you want. You have the spare keys. It’s your house, too”. After being treated

strictly as a guest for a long time, but particularly because I felt very much an outsider in

general, I remember this moment dearly. It felt nice being part of something, having a place –

being placed.

Being part of Ana’s family granted me access to activities and conversations that I otherwise

would not have had, largely due to her expectations that I should help her out. But it also

positioned me within the community. Certainly no one can be socially neutral. Yet it is

important to reflect that in most cases close relations open some doors while closing others. It

took a while for me to discern the social groupings, collectives and alliances along whose

boundaries the many conflicts within the community were aligned. It also took a while to

understand the ways in which being incorporated into the intimate space of Ana’s house

affected my access to certain data. Not only did the household responsibilities that Ana had

entrusted to me sometimes prevent me from venturing off elsewhere – to attend events or

visit other households – but also, my close affiliation with Ana and Daniel affected the ways

in which people related to me. Luckily, people were generally not afraid to make comments

or express opinions to me that reflected negatively on Ana and Daniel. In general, islanders

seemed to be quite outspoken about their opinions, whomever these concerned. However,

being affiliated with one family and their household meant that I established closer

relationships to certain parts of island society, while others remained spatially, socially and

thematically on the periphery of my data collection.

The islanders to whom I became close were for the most part Catholic. This was not a

conscious, methodologically grounded choice. It was a result of various factors. Ana and

Daniel were both Catholics and participated in church services (misas). In principle, the

misas took place once every second month in the only Catholic church building on the island.

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However, because the priest did not live on Isla Huapi but traveled to the island from afar

each time, the services were staggered and irregular. Apart from the misas, which I attended

the two times Ana and Daniel went during my stay, everyday practices did not seem to be

noticeably guided by their religious affiliation to the Catholic Church. Yet, in contrast to

congregationally committed Evangelicals, their Catholicism allowed them to participate in

the annual ritual of nguillatún.

This ritual, in which the participants pray for good harvests and health, is performed in

February every year. For weeks, the nguillatún congregation prepare for this annual

highlight. Relatives travel from all over the country to participate in the ritual itself, which

lasts for three or four days. Beyond doubt, nguillatún is the most important Mapuche ritual.

Still, of the 125 families living on the island, only 25 families come together every year to

perform nguillatún. The most obvious reason for this was religious affiliation.

A few members of the nguillatún congregation were not affiliated with any church institution.

Teresa was one of these. During nguillatún, she explained, she prayed to the Mapuche

creators – not to God. The (religious) head of community, the lonko, as well as the president

of the community Board, Yessica, were both members of the congregation as well, but their

religious beliefs were hard to place. They did not attend any of the Catholic church services

in which I participated, but they made references to “our God” – “nuestro Dios” – and had

their homes adorned with crosses. “We all have faith (fe) in God, independent of religion”,

the lonko once told me. Meanwhile, his focus on shared beliefs and cohesiveness, I believe,

had as much do to with his role as lonko as with his own religious conviction (a point to

which I return in the next chapter). In any case, the majority of the nguillatún congregation

was affiliated with the island’s Catholic church. Those who did not participate, as in fact the

majority of islanders did not, were prevented from doing so by their Evangelical church

membership and convictions.

Most inhabitants of Isla Huapi were Evangelicals. There are four Evangelical congregations

on the island. These are connected to different churches, three of which are located on the

island, while the last one is located in Futrono on the mainland. Being an Evangelical

Christian prescribes abstinence from certain activities. For example, consuming alcohol is

considered sinful. However, depending on their degree of devotion to the Evangelical mission

and on the frequency with which they attend Evangelical church services (cultos), many

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Evangelicals on Isla Huapi engage quite frequently in this activity nonetheless. While some

Evangelicals attend cultos three times a week, others are members of the religious community

merely by virtue of having been baptized in the Evangelical church. The latter group do not

necessarily comply with the strict precepts of the Evangelical church. Yet one activity from

which all Evangelical islanders refrained was the nguillatún ritual. In a conversation I had

with a pastor from one of the three Evangelical churches on the island, he told me about the

Evangelical mission of salvation of the human spirit. The Mapuche ritual, the practice of

ngillatún, was wrong in the eyes of God, he said, mostly on account of the sacrifices made

during the ritual. The sacrifice of a pig, of flour or of other produce from the land given them

by God was evidence of the material focus of their appraisal of the divine, the pastor told me.

He went on to say that another problematic aspect of the ritual was that people talked directly

to God without acknowledging the role of Jesus: the path to God had to be followed through

Jesus, he claimed. Being of Evangelical affiliation, then, was incommensurable with

participation in the Mapuche ritual of nguillatún. This view was shared by all Evangelicals on

the island, regardless of the other activities in which they engaged that might have been

deemed sinful by the church.

I arrived on Isla Huapi in early March 2016 and left the island in December the same year.

Because nguillatún was organized in late February, I did not get the opportunity to participate

in the ritual. However, I did participate in a smaller version of nguillatún held after harvest

season, namely pichitún. It was through my close relation to Ana and Daniel that I was

allowed to do that – as part of their family. Co-participation in this ritual and in the Catholic

church services established important social ties to this group as a social collective. Still,

social relations between people on Isla Huapi were not determined exclusively by

congregational collectives.

Ana’s sister and her husband, who lived in a house close by, were active members in one of

the Evangelical churches. Although I enjoyed the everyday company of Ana and Daniel’s

friends and family, which included Evangelicals, I did not attend Evangelical church services

or participate in their religious communities. I visited Evangelical pastors on the island to

conduct informal interviews with them, and at one point I considered the possibility of

spending more time in their churches and church communities. The island pastors were eager

for me to join their church services and spend more time with them. However, as they took

their missionary responsibilities very seriously, they made use of every opportunity to

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convince me to “let God into my heart”. It tended to get quite intense, particularly with one

pastor, and ultimately the situation became so overwhelming, in various ways, that I decided

not to pursue that ethnographic path.

I did not engage much in religious activities during my fieldwork. The Evangelical church

services, of which there indeed were quite many, seemed to make up most of the religious

activities of everyday life on Isla Huapi. For my ethnographical focus on the relationships

between the state, state-led development programs and the island community, there were

other everyday activities I considered to be of greater importance. Many of these took place

on the north side of the island, where I lived and spent most of my time. The two formal

institutions located on the island, namely the school and the health care center, were located

on the northern side. For a long time, this was also the location of the only port through

which islanders would have to pass to get the ferry to the town, Futrono, on the mainland.

Thus, it was the social and political hub of the community. In the school building, community

meetings were held, and the monthly pension payment was distributed. Written notices from

the Board would be displayed on the wall of the health care center, which was itself

frequently visited.

Although I enjoyed many conversations with men, particularly in the vicinity of the school

area and in Ana’s house, the data I collected through everyday practices became more or less

limited to female activities. For example, during the aforementioned minga, I was in the

kitchen with the other women cooking lunch for the men who were working to build a shed

for the community tractor outside. However, men and women alike participated in

community events, such as inaugurations. By accompanying functionaries, engineers,

constructors, and other “experts” who visited the island (as well as, of course, the PDTI-

team), I was able to join predominantly male practices. Although there was a certain

gendered division in everyday activities, women and men alike participated together in many

of them.

On Isla Huapi, social collectives did not appear to be formed exclusively along the lines of

religious conviction, location of residence, or gender. These factors certainly played a part,

but the island community was small. Everyone knew one another. Still, two factors in

particular tended to guide social alliances in the face of conflict: first, former patterns of

social organization, in which kinship played a significant part (see next chapter); and second,

75

current political struggles pertaining to positions of authority (see chapter 7).

Although I did not gain the same kind of insight into the life-world of everybody I spoke to, I

did get to know many different islanders. As time passed, people became increasingly kind to

me and happily disposed towards conversing with me. Once people had become acquainted

with me, it was much easier than it first had been to stop by their houses for a chat. They

would call their dogs off and invite me inside to drink mate. Still, people seemed eager to talk

to me only months into my fieldwork, and the tendency to challenge me, which I experienced

quite often, was nearly constant.

People were not reluctant to criticize me – particularly not those who were older and those

with whom I spent less time. Once, squeezed together with several people in a small boat, an

older woman whom I barely knew claimed I did not know what a domo was. She did not ask

me. In fact, it seemed as if she was not particularly keen to acknowledge my presence. She

talked as if I was not there. Even though Ana was there, she did not say anything. She rarely

stood up for me in these situations. I was on my own. However, I knew very well what a

domo was – a traditional Mapuche house. I interrupted the older woman, told her I knew and

followed up with an explanation. What happened next was that everyone started laughing

followed by Ana who, in a rather proud posture, said, “See, she knows” in a rather careless

way while shrugging her shoulders. Inherent in such criticisms, as I experienced them, was an

element of testing. They criticized or embarrassed me, but I quickly understood this to be a

social game in which I had to engage in order to integrate myself. Before I got to know her

better, Ana had done the same thing. The knowledge in which they would test me was

commonly related to the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, or to what they considered

Mapuche traditions. In some cases, I did not know the answer, but being willing to learn from

them became a way in which I could show respect.

Many took great pleasure in teaching me words in Mapudungun. One of the reasons was

probably that they themselves did not speak the language, only Spanish or Castellano as they

called it. I spoke Spanish before I arrived, but not fluently, and I was not particularly familiar

with the Chilean rural accent or agricultural terms. Nor was I yet versed in the bureaucratic

language of state development (concursos, capacitaciones, proyectos, postulaciones etc.)

used extensively by islanders. Therefore, they taught me not only words in Mapudungun, but

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also in Castellano – typically slang or agriculture-related words. Meanwhile, I had to ask

people to gloss for me the different terms related to development programs.

The first months of my fieldwork were difficult. People were cordial to me, but they kept

their emotional and intellectual distance. They seemed reluctant to share with me what

actually mattered to them. However, as time passed, this changed. When I came back to Isla

Huapi after a few weeks in Norway in July, I was surprised by people’s reaction to my return.

On the ferry back to the island, I recognized islanders that I had yet not talked to at that point

and whom I had experienced as being quite hostile or skeptical towards me. To my surprise,

they came over to welcome me back. They used my name, which I was surprised to learn that

they knew, and asked how Norway had been. One of them even said “you have come back to

your island”. I experienced this as a turning point. Slowly, they incorporated me into their

lives in their own ways. They would invite me into their homes to drink mate and ask me to

join various events – some even expected me to. When I shared these experiences with Ana,

she smiled at me, unfolded her arms, and said “Sure. You know us now. This is how we are.”

Through gossip I learned, as fieldwork progressed, what mattered to people. Gossip and talk

can give valuable insights into tensions and conflicts and, importantly, moral orientations (see

Melhuus, 1997; Wynne, 2016) that, on Isla Huapi, informed social interaction and shaped the

way in which social tensions played out. Ultimately, records of gossip constituted a

substantial part of my data material but it also came to form my research interests.

Considering what people talked about and seemed to care about, it dawned on me that the

irrigation system, for which I initially came to Isla Huapi to study, was not per se a great

concern. Rather, islanders were more concerned with the way in which access to this new

infrastructural opportunity was distributed, and how it produced or illuminated relations of

inequality (see chapter 6). Thus, my research focus increasingly centered on relations

between and among island authorities, politics, state presence and development programs.

Accordingly, from various discourses and areas of expertise I gathered data pertaining to the

degree of state presence, which, through various manifestations, I had discovered to be a

matter of great concern to islanders. Therefore, the data that I gathered through extensive

ethnographic fieldwork, informal interviews, conversations, participation in various activities

and everyday practices is heterogeneous. Thematically, it pertains to the entanglements of

everyday life with state-led development as it unfolded during the time I spent on Isla Huapi.

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I visited several offices in Futrono, including as the municipality, the PDTI-office, the office

of social work, and the offices of INDAP’s regional- and central-Santiago divisions. I

conducted interviews with authorities from the island as well as with those from outside, with

whom I did not share an intimate relation. I followed Ignacio and other engineers,

agronomists, technicos and similar “experts” in their work with the irrigation system and

analogous projects. I participated in training programs and other state-initiated courses that

aimed at developing the community. I also attended various community meetings at which,

more often than not, a regional or municipal body of authority from outside the island was

present. I participated, increasingly as my fieldwork progressed, in the private sphere of

several households. I attended, as already mentioned, Catholic church services and

participated in two wakes and funerals. I tried to do what others did. It was particularly

interesting for me to participate in spaces in which the state appeared in some way or another

– these turned out to amount to very many interrelated everyday spaces.

ETHICAL CONCERNS

Apart from the colonial background of our discipline, which my interlocutors implicitly

pointed out, my major ethical concern has been with the process of anonymization. Should I

anonymize? What should I anonymize, and by which means? More importantly, for whom do

we anonymize?

A possible way to make the people and the island unrecognizable and untraceable would have

been to merge and split identities, making up new ones, in addition to changing the name of

the island. I have chosen not to do that. If the purpose were to make the context of my

research unrecognizable for state representatives, functionaries and others in positions of

power, then this approach would have been ineffectual. After all, it was the state agency

INDAP that arranged for my arrival and, partly, my stay. From the very beginning, they took

an interest in my research. To follow up, I revisited the INDAP offices in Santiago before I

left the country. They were eager to learn about life on Isla Huapi and “the challenges” as I

saw them. I presented to them what I saw as the essential paradox of neoliberal state

development. Even though INDAP-employees in Santiago might not know the names of the

islanders, they do know the names of their employees. They also know about the island in

which they have invested large sums of money – particularly in relation to the irrigation

project. The island is in so many ways unique in the Chilean context that a pseudonym would

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not have been sufficient to anonymize it. Furthermore, while extensive anthropological

research has been conducted in Mapuche communities further north, there seems to be a lack

of ethnographical research in this area of Chile. I have kept the real name of the locations in

this dissertation as a regional contribution, and also in an effort to be true to my interlocutors’

wishes that I “tell the true story”.

When I talked to Ana about the prospect of changing names to make people and possibly

even the island unrecognizable to others, she expressed herself explicitly. First, she said that I

should do what was best (lo que queda mejor). Then, after thinking about it for a couple of

seconds, she changed her mind. She then said that I should keep the names in order to tell the

true story. I explained that when I write my thesis, that I would write a story about the

community – about the life she and others lived. I used an example from a recent conflict and

referred to harsh criticism that she and some other women had directed against a fellow

islander, and pointed out that if I did not anonymize, everyone would know who had said

what – including people outside the island. She looked at me and said, “claro” (“sure”).

“People know what is going on, what they [the islanders] say,” she added. Later, I put the

same question to Trini, who had been working on the island as an English teacher during

several different periods. She was also Mapuche, but from a different community located

further north in Chile. Her reasoning was the same. I should keep the names in order to tell

the truth, she said, and added that islanders might find it suspicious if I changed everything to

be unrecognizable. Nevertheless, I have decided against that, and have changed all the names

to pseudonyms.

Why? This move implies that I have gone against my interlocutors’ wishes to be featured

with their real names. Yet, I believe that changing the names does not affect the veracity of

the story that I am telling. I am not writing about topics that could incriminate anyone, yet I

do write about conflicts that might reveal what some would consider sensitive information.

Changing the names does make it harder for outsiders to revisit islanders and hold them

accountable for what they have done and said in private. Furthermore, as many islanders

cannot read, least of all a PhD dissertation, they are not themselves in control of what I write.

All they have agreed to is to tolerate me there as a researcher – talking, listening, observing,

participating in various more or less intimate activities, and taking notes. Thus, the question

to ask is: what purpose does anonymization serve? In this case, I have chosen to write about

people using pseudonyms in order to respect and honor the hospitality they granted me.

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Because there are not many lonkos, community presidents, or school principals, readers with

thorough knowledge of and familiarity with the community would be able to recognize the

identity of my interlocutors. But those readers to whom the interlocutors’ identities should

not matter, namely other researchers, would have to make an effort to trace them.

SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS AND THE STORY FROM HERE

Guided by the main question of how people on Isla Huapi engage the neoliberal state through

participation in state-led development programs, I set out in the following chapters to present

a series of ethnographically emerging paradoxes.

In chapter 4, the next chapter, I begin with an ethnographic vignette in which the lonko

arranged a minga (“community work session” or “”voluntary” community work”) in order to

construct a shed for a communal tractor and newly purchased machines. The case illustrates

tensions and confusions between the notion of the community as a moral collective under the

authority of the lonko and the Board. It also illustrates the sometimes conflicting demands of

individual needs and interests. Employing the concept of singular collective (Koselleck,

[1985] 2004 in Harvey, 2018a), I examine two transitions: (1) the legal constitution of the

island community in 1995, along with the establishment of new authorities, and (2) the

introduction of individual land ownership in 1979. While adopting a historical perspective on

issues of authority, control, social organization, land, religion, and state relations, I draw on

the concept of the singular collective as well as principles of individualization, as tied to and

maintained within neoliberalism, to examine the two aforementioned transitions. In what

ways have these allowed for a contemporary society in which islanders are trying to sort out

tense relations between themselves? What do the tensions look like and how do they relate to

values of self-interest and a common good? In what ways do islanders sustain a sense of

community? In the eyes of the government, I argue, the island collective needs to represent

itself as a single entity (The Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi) in order to receive

governmental support. Toward this end, individual land ownership is crucial. The principle of

individuality encouraged by these transitions works alongside core principles of

neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the island society acts as a collective, containing several and

diverse interests.

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The focus on individuality and self-interest leads me to the next chapter, chapter 5, in which I

analyze the inherently cumulative neoliberal logic of the PDTI program and how islanders

and development workers engage with it. I address Piergiorgio Di Giminiani’s (2018a)

analysis of how such state-led development programs offered rural indigenous populations in

Chile a “governance of hope” (2018a, p. 15). According to Di Giminiani, prospects of

entrepreneurship elicit powerful hopes for economic independence and, in turn, a higher

degree of political autonomy. Meanwhile, as actors are caught in the cumulative logic of

“getting projects”, their hopes are redirected away from political activism and towards market

relations. What is the relation between economic security, economic independence and

political autonomy among rural Mapuche on Isla Huapi? Analyzing relations of dependence

and independence as well as state presence and state retreat, I argue that islanders who

receive proyectos through the PDTI-program are aspiring to economic enhancement and

better lives, but not necessarily economic independence. Participation in the PDTI program

seems to elicit positive feelings of economic and social security – that is, for some.

Importantly, engagement in the PDTI-program undoubtedly allows for increasingly

precarious living and for economic and social differentiation, as some islanders are excluded

from the program (as was Flavio’s family, whom I introduce in this chapter). Meanwhile, as I

will show, rising entrepreneurs like Ana consider their relation to and engagement with the

PDTI-program to be favorable in various ways.

Instead of collective hope for economic independence and a higher degree of political

autonomy, people on Isla Huapi are preoccupied with infrastructural advancements. In

chapter 6, I address shared experiences of hope in relation to the construction of the off-grid,

solar-powered irrigation system. What connections to and disjunctions from the state do

infrastructural development projects produce? What differences do they create within the

island population? Initially, islanders did not much care about the construction of the

irrigation system. However, as people became aware that the same infrastructure could be

used to provide potable water, they began to view it as a desirable infrastructural connection.

There thus emerged a wish to be connected to the state, as a provider of infrastructure, based

on hopes for a better life. As these new plumbing possibilities were available to some but not

others, the irrigation system became the subject of conversations about inequality and

differentiation. Repeatedly, people would turn to experts and island authorities proclaiming,

“there’s no water!” – pointing to broken promises. One the one hand, I show how the

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construction of this infrastructural system highlights already existing relations of difference

and inequality. These relations are effects of state presence: through the logic of risk

assessment and accountability, state employed engineers decide the unequal allocation of

access to the irrigation system. On the other, I argue that infrastructural development projects

produce affective connections through shared hopes for better lives. When, however, these

hopes are shattered and islanders are subjected to a neoliberal logic of success emphasizing

individual differences, disbelief in the island democracy surfaces for islanders and “experts”

alike. How do islanders conceive of and performatively realize their community in the face of

tension between notions of equality and individual difference?

Facing the upcoming municipal election, which is mainly based in Futrono but affects the

island community in crucial ways, islanders negotiate competing interests in the face of

Mapuche ideals of equality and the state demand for collective unity. Meanwhile, the PDTI-

team, particularly Ricardo, ends up in a mediating position with ties both to islanders and to

the administrative apparatus, as the PDTI-team try to secure their own jobs in the face of

political uncertainty. With the election looming, the irrigation system newly inaugurated, and

a potentially lucrative contract under negotiation, allegations of neglecting the “common

good” were directed at islanders, island authorities, development workers and municipal

politicians alike. Looking more closely at these contestations, which are rendered explicit as

the election date approaches, I analyze in chapter 7 how islanders negotiate competing

interests through the moral discourse of política, whereby the virtue of the “common good” is

contrasted with the vice of self-interest. Furthermore, in the midst of these contestations,

islanders turn to the state and engage in state politics in an attempt to bring about order.

In the concluding chapter, chapter 8, I return to my initial overarching question about the

paradoxical nature of the neoliberal democratic state as it plays out on the ground. In light of

the many challenges that the people of Isla Huapi are facing, it becomes clear that their

everyday lives are characterized by a constant need to negotiate neoliberal paradoxes of

dependence and independence, state presence and state retreat, individual and common

interest, singularity and plurality, personal aspiration and collective hope. What does this

mean for the way we think about neoliberal development?

PART II

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4. TRACES OF A PAST: THE INDIGENOUS

COMMUNITY OF ISLA HUAPI AND

INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY

In what way did the legal constitution of the island community in 1995, along with the

establishment of new authorities, affect present-day life on the island? Similarly, how did the

introduction of individual land ownership in 1979 contribute to the shaping of contemporary

Isla Huapi? In this chapter, I examine how these transitions may account for tense relations

between different islanders as well as between conflicting values of self-interest and a

“common good”.

When the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi was legally constituted as such, a Board was

established. Consisting of four elected members from the community, the Board was to

represent the community as a “collective singular” (Koselleck, [1985] 2004). Reinhart

Koselleck (in Harvey, 2018a) refers to the “collective singular” as a philological event that

emerged with modernity. Late eighteenth-century Europe was characterized by human

intervention and notions of progress and development. Likewise, it was a period

characterized by uncertainty about the future. As a response to this uncertainty, simplification

and singularization emerged and historians moved away from “history in general” to

conceptualize History as a collective singular (Harvey, 2018a, p. 81). Penny Harvey draws on

Kosseleck’s philosophical concept of the collective singular to analyze infrastructure projects

in Peru, namely roads. Writing about the modern understanding of the future as one that

holds the potentiality for progress and change but one that also harbors uncertainty, Harvey

shows how infrastructure projects are tied to hope and, in particularly, expectations about the

“linear connection between the design and realization of a project” (Harvey, 2018a, p. 81).

The notion of “the project” as a singular collective, which is the way in which Harvey makes

use of the concept, resonates particularly well with notions of development projects on Isla

Huapi (as I will show in chapter 6). However, because the concept holds within itself not only

the tension between expectation and uncertainty but, moreover, the tension between the one

and the many, it is interesting to see what implications the Board and the constituted

Community, both as singular collectives, have on contemporary Isla Huapi. Particularly as

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the authority of the cacique was dislocated somewhere along the way– a change that, taken

together with the establishing of the Board, altered earlier modes of representation.

Meanwhile, another form of singularization had already taken place years prior to the

establishment of the Board and the constitution of the community, namely the introduction of

individual land ownership. According to statute number 2.569 of 1979 ("Modifica Ley N°

17.729. Sobre Proteccion de Indigenas, y Radica Funciones del Instituto de Desarrollo

Indigena en el Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario," 1979), as you might recall from chapter

1, the military government divided collectively held land into propiedades individuales

(individual properties). The military government then annulled reservation deeds and made

rural indigenous people all over Chile propietarios individuales (individual owners) of the

land on which they lived – as the statute reads. Thus, collective land holding was replaced by

individual land ownership. (This does not mean that these land owners can do with the land

as they please. There are conditions tied to ownership of land considered indigenous, such as

regulations preventing sale to non-indigenous parties). Nowadays, on Isla Huapi, land is

meaningful in everyday life primarily as individual property on the basis of which islanders

seek to secure futures through governmental funding.

While adopting a historical perspective on issues of authority, control, social organization,

land, religion, and state relations, I draw on the concept of the singular collective as well as

principles of individualization, as tied to and maintained within neoliberalism, to examine the

two aforementioned transitions. In what ways have these allowed for a contemporary society

in which islanders are trying to sort out tense relations between themselves? What do the

tensions look like and how do they relate to values of self-interest and a common good? In

what ways do islanders sustain a sense of community? I begin with an ethnographic case

illustrating these tensions, before moving on to an examination of former and current patterns

of land ownership, authority and control. Next, I look into some of the same legal regulations

that I touched upon in chapter 1, specifically focusing here on ownership and legal titling of

land and property and on how this affects the way in which land is meaningful to islanders.

Lastly, by drawing together issues of authority and representation with those of land and

property, I demonstrate how some of the social tensions playing out on Isla Huapi today bear

traces of past transitions to new forms of organization.

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THE MACHINERIES AND THE TRACTOR SHED – NEGOTIATING

NOTIONS OF PROPERTY, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE STATE

Community meetings (reuniones) took place at least once a week in one of the buildings

in the school area, on the north side of the island. “Community meeting” was a widely

used term that referred to different kinds of assembly, but the common denominator was

communication of some sort of information from one party to the rest of the community.

The community Board often called these meetings in collaboration with the PDTI team

or other state body representatives. The Board, to which I will return shortly, is a

formally recognized body of island authority. The elected leadership team representing

the community, consisted of Yessica, who was listed both as the community president

and as its legal representative, and two kin-related islanders, Isidora Leviñanco and

Joaquin Leviñanco, who held the positions of secretary and treasurer. Besides, the

lonko, Elmo, was Yessica’s brother and, in practice, a co-member of the Board. Yessica

and Elmo worked closely together. Meanwhile, community meetings were also called

and organized by engineers or other experts, such as Ignacio, who headed the irrigation

project. Some meetings were voluntary and not extensively attended, perhaps only by

fifteen people. At other meetings, attendance was in principle mandatory for associates

of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi – socios, whom in 1995 had come together

to constitute the Community. After these meetings, the attendees had to approach the

Board members and sign their names or furnish their fingerprints on a sheet of paper on

which all the socios were listed. However, it often happened that attendees signed in on

behalf of other socios who were absent: the mandatory aspect of these meetings seemed

to be taken rather lightly. However, what was not taken lightly, as I will show, was the

community members’ responsibility to pay dues – their share of community-related

expenses. General membership of the community is primarily based on a principle of

residency, which includes everyone that lives on Isla Huapi, socios as well as other

residents (see Di Giminiani, 2018b, p. 68).

During one of these community meetings, called by the Board and Ricardo from the

PDTI team, islanders were to decide what type of technological equipment they wanted

the Community to purchase. In the funding application, they had to list the specific

equipment they wanted to buy for the tractor that the community shared. Ricardo

suggested different types of tractor attachment that he thought would benefit the

farmers. These were as follows: a wheat-cutting machine, a combined plough and

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potato-planting machine, and, finally, a grass-cutting machine. Very many islanders had

shown up for this meeting, probably between twenty and thirty people. When they heard

Ricardo’s suggestions, they nodded and mumbled “yes”, and seemed to agree that these

were reasonable alternatives. Meanwhile, it turned out that some preferred a given

machine to the others depending on their personal agricultural engagements. When one

man suggested they buy the grass-cutting machine, he was contradicted by another man:

“No, I would prefer the potato-planting machine. I don’t grow much grass”. While some

families invested in animal husbandry and therefore wanted the grass-cutting machine,

other famers were more interested in the combined plough and potato-planting machine

as they were mainly occupied with growing potato crops. Although the majority of

farmers on Isla Huapi are engaged in diversified agriculture as well as animal

husbandry, their respective land provides them with dissimilar advantages and farming

options. This situation resulted in some disagreement when deciding on what purchase

to make. As decisions were made by show of hands, it became clear that most of the

people present at the meeting wanted the combined plough and potato-planting

machine. The total cost, Ricardo informed, would be 11,700,000 Chilean pesos,

approximately 22,500 USD. He continued to explain what this would mean. The state

would cover 10,000,000 pesos, while the community had to contribute the remainder of

1,700,000 pesos. Each family, Ricardo went on, would have to pay 11,700 pesos to

INDAP, close to 22.50 USD. Finding these numbers acceptable, the farmers decided to

apply for funding to purchase the combined plough and potato-planting machine.

As it later turned out, not everyone on the island community agreed that the plough and

potato-planting machine was worth the investment of 11,700 pesos. The community

Board, in charge of handing over the deductible to PDTI and, in turn, INDAP, faced

troubles collecting money from quite many households. Some islanders disagreed with

the specific choice of machine bought, while others disagreed with the claim that the

machine benefitted everyone in the community. (The latter claim was made by those

tasked with collecting the money, namely the community Board, and by the PDTI team

as well). To use the purchased equipment, one needed to use the tractor. Although the

tractor was communal, many inhabitants disagreed that all shared equal access to it.

The first issue was that, when not in use, the tractor was parked at the house of the

lonko, Elmo. Furthermore, only one person in the community was authorized to drive

the tractor, namely Elmo’s nephew. Some people therefore claimed that the tractor

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remained in the possession of Elmo’s family, which happened to include the president,

Yessica. Close kinship ties between people in positions of authority were alleged to

have fueled conflicts of interest. Such ties often formed the bases of critique regarding

experiences of injustice and inequality.

In conversations amongst friends, people had voiced dissatisfaction with the machine

purchase, and the situation was already quite tense when Elmo summoned the

community to a so-called minga. As already noted, minga denotes a Mapuche tradition,

namely (“voluntary”) community work. According to earlier literature on Mapuche

social and economic organization, “mingaco” or “minken” (which are other terms for

what they on Isla Huapi referred to as minga), means “to look for helpers and pay them

with food” (Augusta, 1916, in Stuchlik, 1976). It is described as institutionalized

economic help: an event that is tied to agricultural related activities; has one individual

organizer; and is a form of economic organization that depends on reciprocity. The

organizer provides food and drinking supplies to the helpers and the helpers provide

labor in return. In the pre-reservation period, as Milan Stuchlik (1976) describes, minga

was “collective work of a residential kin-group organized and directed by its chief for

the cultivation of his fields or for the performance of communal works” (1976, p. 112).

Later, during the reservation period, this changed. As Stuchlik further describes, any

household head could then organize a minga and call on people for that purpose, kin-

related or not. The minga I address in this chapter differs in some ways from the event

described by Stuchlik (1976) and others (see, for example, 1961). It was organized by

the Board and held at the lonko’s house, but the whole community was called on for

help – not only people from the lonko’s own kin-group. Furthermore, the patterns of

reciprocity were different as the participants themselves were expected to bring food

and drinks. They were even expected to contribute with materials. The purpose of this

minga was to construct a shed in which to leave the tractor and its additional equipment

so that it would be protected when not in use. Because the tractor was communal

property, hence under communal responsibility, the Board found the construction of a

shed to be a suitable purpose of a minga. Following the same logic, people in the

community would donate the materials needed for the shed. Elmo came forward with

this proposal. To him, this was a collective responsibility because “todos son

beneficiarios” – “all are beneficiaries [of the tractor]”. According to this logic, the

minga was a collective project.

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Meanwhile, the Board publicly announced the names of those islanders whose share of

payment for the plough and potato-planting machine had failed to materialize. The

Board put up a list of names on the wall of the local healthcare center, as displayed in

the photo below. According to the community president, Yessica, the list was placed

there in order for people to see what they owed. She saw it as a convenient

arrangement. For those listed – their names displayed next to the amount they owed –

the situation looked quite different. They claimed that the Board held them up to

ridicule and had embarrassed them all – “se dieron vergüenza”.

Many islanders did not perceive the tractor – nor, therefore, the recently purchased

tractor attachment – as a resource equally accessible to everyone. There were several

reasons for this. First, many plots were enclosed according to traditional agricultural

practices reliant on the use of bueyes, working bulls. This meant that the opening in a

fence surrounding a given plot was big enough to accommodate a bull’s passage, but

not necessarily a large tractor. This inconvenience, related to the design of fences,

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caused several farmers to continue working with their bulls, or to rent bulls from a

neighbor or family member for a day or two. Second, many plots contained stones of

such a size that they would cause damage to the tractor’s plough. The plough used with

bueyes was narrower, thus simpler and easier to maneuver around the stony plots.

Third, many people could not afford renting the tractor with the tractorista. During

another community meeting, Ricardo had decided that the cost of planting potatoes

with the tractor would be 1,500 pesos per sack. To plant one hectare required 15 sacks

of potatoes. To plant potatoes on a plot a bit smaller than one hectare, which was

common, would require perhaps 10 sacks. This meant that the tractorista had to be paid

15,000 pesos to plant potatoes, a considerable amount of money for many households

on Isla Huapi. Therefore, I was told, the tractor was too expensive for many people to

be considered a viable option for planting. Finally, families who were already critical of

the community Board, who they claimed “se preocupan por su mismo” (“cared for

themselves”), demonstrated their lack of support by refusing to use the tractor.

Furthermore, the same people blamed the tractorista, Elmo’s nephew, for tampering

with the list of names that determined the order of access to the tractor. They would say

that the nephew was liable to make changes to the list in order to benefit his own kin.

Thus, for material, economic and social reasons, many farmers were hesitant to make

use of the tractor and claimed that the tractor was not benefitting the community: rather,

it was a resource accessible only to some privileged families. For this reason, the same

people were hesitant to attend the minga. For their part, it seemed, the minga was not

considered a collective project.

When I told my host, Ana, that I was going to the minga and asked if she was going as well,

she shrugged her shoulders and said that she was not. “Es que no tengo la gana” – “I don’t

feel like it”, she told me. Like many others, she was annoyed by the fact that the Board had

decided to construct the shed on Elmo’s property. She saw it as yet another way for them, the

Board members, to concentrate their power. “She, the president, is the sister of the lonko, and

he’s the cousin of…Look, they are two families”, Ana said with an agitated voice before

continuing: “The whole community. They are Leviñanco or Teiguel. For this reason, they

decided the tractor will stay at his house”. When the reservaciones were established in 1916,

the lineage heads that were listed on the two deeds were Catrileo and Teiguel. According to

Ana, the Teiguel family still amounted to a numerous and powerful lineage. Leviñanco, on

the other hand, had not been listed on the deed. However, in addition to being numerous,

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Leviñanco was the kinship lineage of the lonkos, a role and position of patrilinear descent that

implied authority. Besides, the community Board contained exclusively Leviñanco members

who, moreover, collaborated closely with Elmo, who was lonko, and also Leviñanco.

On a different occasion, the topic of the name list came up once again. Ana had noticed

that her own name was listed next to an unsettled debt. The Board had not hesitated in

putting together the list, and Ana had not yet come around to pay. “The Leviñanco are

many (son artos)”, Ana said, before continuing: “We pay our dues not because we are

afraid of them, Yessica and Elmo, but because one day we will be asking for the

machinery”. Ana and Daniel were well off compared to many other islanders.

Additionally, Daniel’s property, on which they lived, had land for which it would be

efficient to use the tractor instead of working bulls. Ana paused for a moment and

added: “Yessica and her brother are difficult/dodgy (mañosos). When she walks with

her husband, he walks meters behind [her]. Like a boy.” To illustrate, she shook her flat

palm at hip-level to signal the height of a boy. She laughed. Ana was critical towards

the community Board and the ways in which they, according to her, used their positions

of authority to concentrate power among themselves and ensure control over resources.

Yessica and Elmo, as two of the four family-related members of the Board, embodied

the only political administrative body of authority on the island. Ana was neither

Leviñanco nor Teiguel. She was of a different lineage and had not married into either of

these. Still, in spite of her unease with the way Yessica and Elmo exercised their

authority, Ana expressed a certain will to comply with demands put forth by the Board

– even though she disagreed with their methods. Evoking a principle of reciprocity,

Ana claimed that the reason why she paid had to do with self-interest, stating that she

and Daniel one day might need the tractor. Was there after all a sense of caring for the

collective, through relations of reciprocity, that prompted her to pay the dues? To

substantiate the moral collective of the community? If she cared to support the

collective, why did not attend the minga? Attending the minga and paying the dues

were similar actions in the sense that they functioned to support the collective. Still,

how did the minga and the dues represent the community as a collective in different

ways?

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PRODUCING THE COLLECTIVE: FROM CO-OPERTAIVE LABOR TO

PAYMENT OF DUES

Minga is a traditional form of communal work that was described as voluntary. Yet, there was

a definitive sense that community members should attend the minga. When only fifteen

people or so showed up, Elmo was quite upset to learn that people were in their houses

instead of attending the minga. The customary arrangement of a minga, I was told, was that

everybody contributed materials, food and, of course, labor. While women prepared food, the

men took care of the task for which they had gathered – in this case, the construction of a

tractor shed. In many respects, the minga on Isla Huapi resembles the Andean practice of

faena, which is described as communal labor invested in activities considered public work.

Although faena is never voluntary as failure to attend is sanctioned with fees, it is public

work that produces a communally shared good. To access this good and to be able to claim

one’s share of that good requires, at a minimum, contribution of labor (Allen, 2002;

Brandshaug, 2019; Harvey, 2018b). As with the faena, the purpose of the minga is to gather

the community so that, through collaborative effort, with each investing their share of

materials, food and labor, they produce a good that benefits the community as a whole. In

turn, everyone benefits from this good: “es para todos” – “it’s for everyone”, as one of the

participants said – “everyone” supposedly meaning the whole community.

This process not only produces a communally shared good, but also a by-product which is

interlinked to the sense of community: namely sociality. In his book Becoming Mapuche

(2011), Magnus Course writes about the becoming of the true Mapuche person – che. In his

analysis, personhood is predicated on the production of social relations with others, and in

particular, the social relation between friends:

This mode of sociality differs in a fundamental way from the relations each person has

inherited from his or her mother and father. This is because whereas these initial relations

with parents are necessarily prior to the person, relations with friends must be created through

each person’s own volition. All humans are born to two parents, but only those who go

beyond these initial relations to forge their own relations can truly be considered che. (Course,

2011, p. 26)

Only when one is capable of producing relations with others, he writes, is one considered che.

Central to this production of sociality is the practice of exchange, particularly through sharing

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of food. Not only does sharing food constitute an exchange between two parties: it is also

linked to the activity of eating together, of commensality. As there is a moral obligation to

share with other che in one’s company, one will always forge social relationships with the

true persons with whom one is surrounded (Course, 2011, p. 29). The sharing of food during

minga adds a crucial perspective to the sense of production of a collective. Writing about

social obligations and responsibilities to different forms of collectives in the Southern

Peruvian Andes, Penny Harvey (2018b) explains the concepts of ayni and mink’a, two

dominant forms of exchange in the region. Mink’a denotes non-reciprocal labor that is not

expected to forge continuing relationships but whereby labor is compensated instantly. Ayni,

by contrast, is a form of short-term reciprocal relation of exchange that connects the bodily

effort of work with the consumption of food. Through this combination of engagements,

“ayni exchanges are affective forms of labour, oriented to the completion of specific tasks,

but also, and as importantly, ayni labor generates a sense of collective endeavor” (Harvey,

2018b, p. 124). In the minga, there is no one to be compensated because all are compensated

by the shared good which the participants produce together. They are not laboring for anyone

other than themselves. What mingas do generate however, similarly to ayni, are ongoing

social relationships and a sense of collectivity, produced through the collective investment of

labor, in addition to the sharing of food that, importantly, is consumed collectively.

The minga was indeed voluntary. Still, there was a sense of social obligation tied to the event

– an obligation to confirm the collective. When Ana and others refused to participate in the

minga, they rejected the reciprocal exchanges and ongoing relationships which the minga

invites, and thus the (re)production of collectivity with the participants. For what reason? Was

it an act of refusing relations, similar to what Keir Martin (2018) describes as taking place

through wage-labor in Papua New Guinea? Did payment of dues contribute to the separation

of labor from the person doing it so that it altered the sense of obligation to participate in the

minga?

It was clear that they did not believe that the good produced, the maintenance of the tractor,

was benefitting everyone. By not showing up, however, they questioned the authority not

only of the lonko himself, but also the community Board. They opposed the kin-based

concentration of authority that they believed governed according to self-interest13. The minga

13 An issue that feeds into the emic notion of política, which I discuss in chapter 7.

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and the tractor issue were, according to them, examples of that. They were, however, not

rejecting the collective per se, but generating a “dislocation of co-operative labour as the

affective grounds of social community” (Harvey, 2018b, p. 131). The refusal to participate in

the minga, signaled a replacement of co-operative labor as grounds of collective formation. In

this case, islanders’ membership in the community collective did not hinge on their

contribution of labor but, rather, on individual payments to the Board, consequently also to

the Community. Thus, modes of investments changed, it seems, with the institution in which

they invested. Both forms of investment (labor and economic) evoke reciprocal relations of

exchange but to different institutions. In contrast to laboring for the maintenance of the

community collective, islanders confirmed their commitment to the singular Community

through payments. By paying their debts, islanders confirmed their commitment to the

community as a legal constitution – an entity of engagement whereby governmental support

is secured. For the same reason, they did not oppose Ricardo, for example, when he decided

on the fee by which the tractorista was to be compensated.

The Board, the authority of whose members they were challenging, represented the

Community with a capital C. It was not the Board itself, as a body of authority, that some

islanders questioned. Rather, they challenged the moral intentions of its members. To make

sense of the tensions connected to the authority of the Board, I will in what follows outline

how the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi came into being and, with it, the first

community Board. To understand contemporary tensions related to island authorities, we

have to look into the relation between structures of authority on the island, the former and

current role of the lonko, and the community Board.

RECONSTITUTING THE COMMUNITY, ESTABLISHING NEW

AUTHORITIES

The role of the community Board, I was told, is to represent the collective of the Indigenous

Community of Isla Huapi. The members of the Board are to secure the “common good”

(beneficio de todos/lo mejor para la gente). The way there were to do this, according to

some, was by “listening to the opinions of ‘the people’ (la gente)”, as Teresa said, as opposed

to “caring for themselves” – what Ana and other islanders criticized the Board for doing. The

degree to which this Board worked for the “common good” was a contentious moral question

and the locus of tensions and conflicts that were developing at the time of my fieldwork. In

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many contexts, islanders associated feelings of injustice with the “authoritarian” way in

which the Board governed. I will start this section by outlining the way in which the Board, a

relatively new body of authority on the island, came into being with the formal establishment

of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi.

A couple of years after passing of the Indigenous Law, which was passed in 1993, islanders

organized in an effort to have the community reconstituted as a legally recognized Indigenous

Community under the new statute. In 1995, the National Corporation for Indigenous

Development (CONDAI) recognized the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi. Only by

reconstituting itself legally as an Indigenous Community would the islanders be able to

access governmental funding. However, islanders seemed to give other explanations for the

reconstitution. While some people on the island claim that the process of having the

community formally recognized was a decision made in order to mitigate a conflict between

two kinship lineages on the island, namely the Teiguel and the Leviñanco families, others

accounted for the event as a state governing strategy.

Sofía Catrileo was a rather young woman, probably in her thirties. She lived on the north side

of the island in her childhood family home. She shared the home with her parents and her

young son whose father was no longer in the picture. Sofía was one of those who did not

believe that the formation of a formal Community had to do with the mitigation of an internal

conflict. Rather, she claimed it was a result of suppressive state power. Sofía, who had taken

courses at the University Austral in Valdivia, was eager to discuss topics of political history

with me. During a conversation Sofía and I had about the democratization process that took

place in the late 1980s and early 90s, she pointed out that this period had proved to be of

great significance to the island – and not in a positive way. Until the period of

democratization, and even during the Pinochet regime, the island had consisted of two lofs,

two social groupings constructed around the idiom of kinship (familia was the term Sofía

used). The groupings to which she referred were the lofs formed around the Teiguel and the

Catrileo family respectively. When I, at a later point, looked at the two titulos de merced

granted to inhabitants of Isla Huapi, I discovered that Teiguel and Catrileo were the family

names listed on each deed respectively thus documenting ownership to each their

reservación. This made me wonder whether the reservaciones were related to the former lofs.

Did the organization of lofs on Isla Huapi coincide with that of the reservaciones?

Unfortunately, I was unable to figure this out due to lack in historical documentation that

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could testify to the issue. In any case, after the Aylwyn government (1990-1994) guided

Chile to democracy, Sofía explained, they pushed the island – meaning the people on the

island – to become a comunidad and thus legally reconstitute themselves. The concept of

“community” had not existed on the island prior to this moment, she said. The state had made

the island re-organize into what the state conceptualized as community – “un concepto del

estado”, as Sofia framed it.

Furthermore, part of this construct was also CONADI’s demand for a community Board – a

directiva – a group of islanders given authority to represent the new collective in dealings

with state affairs. In Sofia’s account, the legal reconstitution of the community and the

subsequent establishment of a Board amounted to a re-organization of authority instigated by

the Chilean state. Previously, the collective had been gathered under the authority of the

lonko at the time, namely the much respected Onofre Leviñanco. The establishment of the

Community and the Board undermined the respect and the until this point crucial role of the

lonko. Onofre Leviñanco, Elmo’s paternal uncle from whom he had inherited the role of

lonko, had himself not only been lonko but also cacique. Daniel told me that formerly (antes)

the cacique, Onofre Leviñanco, had been head of several lofs, including settlements outside

the island. He had had responsibilities that exceeded that of the lonko precisely because in the

hands of the cacique religious and political powers were conflated. With the establishment of

the Board as a body of authority to represent the Community in dealings with state

authorities, and specifically with governmental politics of development, the role of the

cacique had in crucial ways become somewhat superfluous. In the end, the re-organization

resulted in Onofre Leviñanco going “half mad”, as Sofía put it. Shortly after the founding of

the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi, Onofre Leviñanco had become mentally ill with a

disease described by Sofía as similar to Alzheimer’s disease. He had had to hand down his

role and duties (su cargo) to his son, Abel Leviñanco. While still on his deathbed, his father,

Onofre Leviñanco, had converted to Evangelicalism believing that God could save him.

Previously Catholic, Abel himself had become an Evangelical after his father passed away.

This made him unsuited to taking on the role as the community’s lonko – a duty normally

passed from father to son. For these reasons, it was Onofre Leviñanco’s nephew, Elmo, who

had ended up becoming lonko. Thus, with the inception of Community followed new forms

of relating to the state that, on Isla Huapi, allowed for the disturbance of former forms of

authority. The entry of Evangelicalism complicated the situation.

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When Sofía told me her version of the story of the origin of the Community, I made her

aware that not everyone shared this view. This was not news to her, and she confronted me

with the remark, “Of course, you’re living in the house of Ana. I’m sure she has a very

different story”. She was right: Ana did have very strong opinions that contradicted Sofia’s

story. “Look,” Sofia said, “I didn’t know these things before, but during my time away from

the island I studied and read things that many people here don’t know. The people were

tricked. We were ignorant.” She illustrated this with the fact that many of the elders on the

island at that time did not even know how to read. Nor did Onofre Leviñanco. Unable to

grasp precisely why the cacique was not elected as member in the first Board, I believe the

fact that he did not know Spanish might very well have been the reason. The administrative

tasks of the Board included, then as now, reviewing documents written in Spanish and

interacting with state representatives in Spanish. Nevertheless, these reasons would not have

prevented the current lonko, Elmo, from becoming a member of the Board. Yet he was never

formally listed as member of the Board.

Among residents on Isla Huapi, I came across different narratives about the transition to a

legally recognized Community. In Sofia’s story, the transition was forced upon them by the

state – the social organization of comunidad was, according to her, a state institution. Another

woman told me that it was a result of some islanders’ wish for power. According to the

narrative that my host, Ana, supported, becoming a Community was a decision that islanders

had taken collectively to cope with an ongoing conflict between the two lofs of Teiguel and

Catrileo. Yet, she never cared to explain what this conflict was.

Upon my return from Sofía, I went inside to have supper with Ana. Her husband Daniel was

out. Intrigued and confused about the whole topic I talked to Ana about the conversation I

had with Sofía. She was slightly annoyed by my inquiries about the event, remarking that

Sofía was not even a real member of the Community – she was not a proper socio who was

enlisted as co-founder of the Community. As far as she knew, she told me, Sofía and some

others were looking to establish a second Community on the island. In order to do this, they

would need a minimum of 25 votes – 25 residents to cofound a new community – which Ana

did not believe they would be able to gather. Ana shrugged her shoulders and seemed

uninterested in discussing the matter further. I could sense the tension. Ana, Daniel and

Sofia’s paternal uncle, Rafael Catrileo, had been close allies for many years. While Rafael

had been the president of the first community Board, Ana’s husband, Daniel, had also been a

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central figure of the first Board. He was elected legal representative, which was the title of his

post. According to several people with whom I spoke, Daniel had become one of the most

powerful people on the island. This was due to his double role as a member of the newly

established Board of 1995, which lasted for more than 20 years, and as the principal of the

children’s school, a position he held for even longer. The original Board had been replaced

only a few months prior to my arrival on the island. When I arrived, Daniel had been

removed from the Board along with the rest of its members, and had moreover lost his

position as principal, having been replaced by a non-Mapuche outsider from Futrono. The

power transition that these replacements entailed did not take place without certain

disagreements that evidently caused prevailing tensions.

Ana, for example, frequently expressed discontent with the second community Board. When

a state-sponsored project of some kind was realized, such as the irrigation project that

received much publicity, the lonko, Elmo, was the one who gave the local radio station

interviews. Sometimes, he also gave speeches at events. When he did, Ana would make

remarks about how the lonko, in his talks, never acknowledged the work of the previous

Board – efforts that had brought about these projects and subsidies. Instead, she claimed, he

reaped the fruits of Daniel and the other Board members’ hard work and made it look as

though this were the current Board’s achievement. With the same resentment, Ana talked

about the process by which a new headmaster had been installed at the island’s local school

to replace Daniel. In Ana’s experience, this was a political game led by the current mayor of

Futrono, whose jurisdiction included the island Community. Evidently, the mayor wanted to

secure votes for the upcoming election, and looked to the island for this. Thus, she had

replaced Daniel with an ally from Futrono. Daniel’s new position at the school was as an

ordinary teacher, which meant he had to take orders from the new principal, señora Yasna14.

Although not exactly happy with the new Board, several people expressed dissatisfaction

with the initial one as well. While I was having lunch with Teresa, her mother and their

neighbor, the topic of the replacement principal came up. Daniel, Teresa explained, had filled

the position as principal even when she was a child. In fact, he had been principal for as long

as she could remember, from the very beginning of the school itself – since sometime in the

14 I return to the topic of the election in chapter 7, re-addressing the controversies of

community Board’s endeavors in a discussion about the ways in which islanders negotiate

competing interests.

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70’s he had been in charge of everything there. In addition, she said, he had been a member

of the community Board for years and years. Through his position as principal combined with

his role on the Board, he had been a person with power (poder). To exemplify, they said

Daniel had procured school materials, such as chairs, for his own house, and that he had used

his relation to state representatives to channel potential customers Ana’s way – to strengthen

her business. The women sitting around the table continued talking about the previous Board.

The neighbor claimed that the members of the previous Board had all along acted in their

own interest. “Todo para ellos mismos” – “everything for themselves”, as she said. Daniel

especially showed no interest in the “common good” and sharing of goods with the rest of the

people on the island. Furthermore, the Board had apparently taken action on their own

without consulting or caring about what other people thought. For this reason, the people had

enough, and the Board had to step back (“la gente lo sacó”) and was replaced by a new one.

Neither the previous Board nor the new one, they claimed, was able to represent the

community properly by equally serving the interests of every person in the community.

The current president of the community, Yessica, also shared her opinions about the

differences between the former Board and the current one of which she was a member.

What was important to the current Board, she said, was “ser representantes de la

comunidad y escuchar los opiniones de la gente” – “to be representatives of the

community and listen to the opinions of the people”. This was the opposite of the

previous Board, she said, who had been focused on doing what they thought was right.

People did not even know what they were actually doing, she said.

It was hard for me to fully understand the way in which elections were carried out, and why

the re-election of Board members took place after twenty years, but I was told that the

community had decided it was time for a change – for new people on the Board. People who

had been on the Board or closely affiliated with the members in one way of another, like Ana,

told me that the re-election had been forced through by undemocratic means by people who

themselves wanted to be in power. Clearly, there was tension tied to the process of replacing

the previous Board with a new one. It was hard to pin down the exact reasons behind the shift

as people talked in general terms about it. Apparently, many people were unhappy about the

ways in which the Board had been representing the community, pointing to negative qualities

of selfishness and laziness of the previous Board. However, the same type of allegations were

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directed towards the current one. Additionally, dissatisfaction with the current Board was

notoriously expressed by pointing to its kin-based composition.

The current Board had been in position since late 2015, and consisted, as already mentioned,

of the elected Community president Yessica Leviñanco, the treasurer Joaquin Leviñanco and,

lastly, the secretary Isidora Leviñanco. Four members are supposed to constitute the Board,

but Yessica, for some reason, filled both the position of president and that of legal

representative. Islanders talked about Elmo, the lonko, as the fourth member. In contrast to

the previous Board, then, the members of the new one were all paternal relatives. As a Board,

they were responsible for matters that concerned the community in general, particularly

mediating the relationship between representatives from different state bodies of authority

and the community. As lonko, Elmo participated in these dealings on the same level as his

sister, the Board president. However, he had additional responsibilities. He was head of the

annual fertility ritual, ngillatún, which meant he was responsible for what he called the

entrance of the ritual (la entrada). Using ethnographic research in Mapuche communities

centered around Lake Budi in the Araucanía region northwest of Isla Huapi, Course (2011)

asserts that there are two kinds of heads. On the one hand, there are the ritual organizers of

ngillatún – a group of people sometimes referred to as lonkos. On the other, there is the lonko

who is the head of a lof. Even though the roles of the ritual organizers and head of a lof might

be referred to by the same term, people differentiate between the two. The reason, he writes,

is that religious and secular authority should be kept separate: “ritual organizers should

refrain from entering into matters of politics and likewise headmen should refrain from

entering too directly into the initial organization of the ritual” (2011, p. 142). In contrast to

this, the lonko on Isla Huapi, Elmo, both occupied the role of religious head and dealt with

administrative island politics through his close collaboration with the Board. Elmo exercised

both religious and secular power. Thus, the two roles that Course differentiates were in

practice conflated in the community of Isla Huapi. When I asked the lonko about his role,

however, he insisted that his role (cargo) was not political. He was fighting for the people, he

said, for the island, for the community in which they were all the same – Mapuche; equal.

Meanwhile, those islanders who were critical towards the current community Board would

criticize the lonko for thinking of himself as a cacique when he was in fact a lonko. Such a

statement implied that he overstepped his role as lonko – as the religious head – and entered

into the domain of political affairs. While Elmo himself underlined that his cargo was not

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political, his close relation to the Board complicated this claim. According to many islanders,

his dual role as religious head and politically engaged Board associate was the reason why he,

in their view, did not enjoy the respect his uncle had. The meaning of the term “political”

complicates these views on the role of the lonko. In an emic sense, politics did not refer to

contestations of power. Rather, elements of manipulation and self-interest were inherent in

the concept. I address the topic of política, as islanders called it, more explicitly in chapter 6.

The point here is to illustrate the ambivalence with which many islanders related to the

community Board and the lonko.

Upon the constitution of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi, islanders were obliged to

arrange an election and establish a Board. Replacing, as Sofía suggested, the previous

authority of the cacique, the Board became the new body of authority on the island. As such,

they were to represent the community as a coherent collective subject. Here, Sofía had a point

when she explained the Community as a “state concept”, as a singularized institution

enforced upon the island community by the state. In order to make claims to rights to

governmental support, the island society had to work as a collective entity. Meanwhile, as I

have shown, the island society did not in fact amount to a (moral) collective unity, but

contained several interests. As a singular collective, it maintained within itself the tension

between the two. As outlined earlier in the chapter, co-operative, collective labor manifested

in the minga is not labor through which people make claims on the state. Rather, claims on

the state are made through payment of dues to the Community and, as I have shown, through

emotional engagement in the Board. Unlike previous understandings of community and

authority, the Board maps directly onto the Community. In addition to participating in the

singular collective of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi, ownership of or access to

individual property proves crucial in their everyday efforts to secure their futures. Combined

with the constitution of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi as a legal entity and, by

extension, the establishment of the Board, the individualization of property rights in 1979 is

significant to the shaping of contemporary society of Isla Huapi.

MAPUCHE: “PEOPLE OF THE LAND” AND PROPERTY OWNERS

Connection to ancestral land has proved to be of paramount significance to Mapuche people

(Di Giminiani, 2018b). Throughout my fieldwork, references to mi tierra – my land – were

common in everyday talk about belonging and origin. On several occasions, the meaning of

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the word mapuche was pointed out to me. In Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, mapu

means “land” while che means “people”. Islanders always told me that the land was what

made them Mapuche – being from and living on that land. The lonko, Elmo, for example,

took great pride in his claim that he “almost never” had lived outside the island. Ancestral

land, the land of Isla Huapi, is thus fundamental to their sense of self. However, what does

this mean? How does it affect their everyday lives? In what ways does land become

fundamental to people on Isla Huapi? When looking at everyday life on Isla Huapi, it seems

that land becomes significant primarily as a resource by which they secure their futures.

In anthropological writings about Mapuche people’s political struggle to recuperate ancestral

land, there has been a tendency to focus on the ontology of land, places and landscape (see

Bacigalupo, 2007; Course, 2011; Di Giminiani, 2013; Di Giminiani, 2015, 2016; Dillehay,

2016). Piergiorgio Di Giminiani’s recently published book Sentient Lands (2018b), in which

he traces rural Mapuche people’s and the Chilean state’s relation to land and property, is

illustrative. Based in Chile, Di Giminiani is an anthropologist whose research in large part

has been concentrated on Mapuche people and their relation to land. Concerning the “legal

property regime” (Di Giminiani, 2015) first introduced to the Mapuche people during the

second half of the 19th century through the títulos de merced, and later, under the Pinochet

military regime, through the títulos de dominio, Di Giminiani draws attention to the two-fold

workings of this regime. The very same property regime through which Mapuche people

were colonized, he writes, provided them with a means for self-defense against land grabbing

(Di Giminiani, 2015). According to Di Giminiani, “property” is a legal concept put to use by

the Chilean government allowing for the legitimization of processes of colonization, of land

grabbing and assimilation. Mapuche people use the concept of property and colonial

documents as a means of self-defense against those very same processes of oppression.

Crucial to successful outcomes of land claims by Mapuche people is the accumulation of

documents that one way or another demonstrate or suggest their occupancy of what they

consider ancestral land. Meanwhile, Di Giminiani writes, the dual connotation of property for

indigenous peoples might also allow for “the interiorization of ideas about the relation

between people and their land that might run counter to their own perspectives on the

environment” (Di Giminiani, 2015, p. 492). By bringing in “their own perspectives on the

environment”, Di Giminiani calls attention to how Mapuche people perceive land – their

ontological relation to their environment. What he means is that perceiving land as property,

to be bought and sold as a commodity, is divergent from an understanding of land as a

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specific site for self-making, which is thus crucial for the construction of identity. His line of

argument is similar to that of the American anthropologist Tom Dillehay.

Writing about Mapuche struggles for land, Tom Dillehay claims that land must be understood

as a transcendental concept:

It is not simply a plot of terra firma demarcated by a vague set of boundaries … Land is a

living, inalienable thing that serves as the basis for a community’s existence. Accordingly, the

Mapuche’s struggle for the land is not a campaign to gain property titles so they can farm it,

sell it, or build it, however they please. It is a conflict between two different worldviews, today

that of Mapuche and Chileans. (Dillehay, 2016, p. 698)

Like Di Giminiani, Dillehay draws attention to the relationship between Mapuche and the

environment and focuses on divergent understandings of land as property, and as a living,

inalienable thing. Many anthropologists writing about Mapuche have been particularly

concerned with this topic (see also Course, 2011; Foester, 1993) and draw on Mapuche

ontologies to make sense of the divergence. The relationship between Mapuche and their

surroundings, these authors claim, is a reciprocal one in which the environment must be

respected as a place where spirits live. Importantly, this understanding of the world gives way

to performative principles in Mapuche notions of place. Drawing on the anthropologist

Magnus Course’s work, Di Giminiani (2016) uses the concept of tuwün, meaning place of

origin, to argue that selfhood is made in interaction with physical surroundings. Through

tuwün, notions of sameness and otherness are articulated. This is done both in relation to

winkas, white Chileans as “the Other”, and in relation to Mapuche from different areas.

Identity is also predicated upon emplaced experiences of past and present. The substantive

and spiritual influence of matrilineage and patrilineage on the individual is understood to be

transmitted genealogically. However, tuwün presupposes the influence of physical

surroundings on the individual, in relational as well as genealogical terms. This is because

past dwellers have entered into relations with the same physical surroundings, which, in turn,

have been transmitted through descent. As such, elements of the landscape engage in social

relations with people dwelling there. The combined effect of all topographic features within

one’s tuwün is transmitted to those individuals with genealogical links to a particular place of

origin. Thus “tuwün is an essential feature of self-determination and a localized form of

belonging in Mapuche society” (Di Giminiani, 2016, p. 898). Di Giminiani is here careful not

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to fall into essentialist understandings of indigenous identities, and emphasizes that the notion

of tuwün should be understood as a potentiality of selfhood rather than its determination.

However, Di Giminiani’s argument about tuwün is of fundamental importance if we are to

understand the relation between land and the becoming of Mapuche selfhood.

Having done research in rural Mapuche communities, Course (2011), Dillehay (2016), and Di

Giminiani (Di Giminiani, 2013, 2015, 2016) approach Mapuche people’s relation to land

through phenomenology-inspired analysis that focuses on ontological understandings of the

environment. They argue that this understanding is crucial to making sense of the way in

which land becomes significant to Mapuche people’s lives.

I never heard islanders talk about or even mention tuwün. On Isla Huapi, few people knew

how to speak Mapudungun. Nor were there any particular everyday practices through which I

sensed engagement with landscape as an agential being in any way. Yet, they did underline

the importance of the island as crucial to their Mapuche-ness. Ana and her family emphasized

two things. In addition to being from the land, they underlined the importance of participating

in the ngillatún ritual, the annual fertility ritual. This made me wonder about the Evangelical

islanders’ sense of being Mapuche, as they considered ngillatún pagan practice. I asked Desi,

the pastor in one of the Evangelical churches, about the relationship between being an

Evangelical and being Mapuche. Being Mapuche, he said, had nothing to do with this.

Rather, being Mapuche had to do with being “people of the land” – “gente de la tierra”.

What seemed to make islanders Mapuche, was being from the land and living on that land,

regardless of religious conviction. However, in order to make sense of the ways in which land

is fundamental to people on Isla Huapi, one would (also) have to consider the way in which

they relate to the state through the conceptualization of land as property – as a means of

claiming rights to development.

In spite of divergent religious practices, both Catholics and Evangelicals consider themselves

Mapuche based on their relation to the land. As I have outlined elsewhere (chapter 1),

islanders are not preoccupied with land claims. Rather, they are concerned about securing

their futures so that they can continue living on the island. Although Di Giminiani (2018b)

suggests that perceiving land as property runs counter to an understanding of land as a

specific place for self- and identity-making, the concept of property seems to islanders a

means through which they seek to secure just that – a means by which to make claims on the

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state for development. Through an examination of everyday life on the island, it becomes

apparent that to inhabitants on Isla Huapi, land is primarily significant in the following ways:

as the grounds on which they were able to constitute a formally recognized Community, and

as individual properties from which they make a living and thus secure their place on the

island. When applying for funding through the PDTI program, it is crucial, first, to have a

visibly Mapuche last name; second, to be endorsed or recognized by an indigenous

organization, such as a Community; and third, to be able to document individual property

rights as a rural farmer.

FENCING OFF INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY

Individual property ownership is crucial to islanders’ claims to development initiatives. In

addition, the relation between individuality and land manifests and reproduces itself through

everyday practices, such as the labor invested in the construction and maintenance of fences

built to demarcate the boundaries of individual properties. In fact, islanders told me that the

municipality of Futrono financed the building of the first wooden fences on Isla Huapi during

the 1980’s. The municipality also financed materials for and construction of houses

throughout the island, which are still occupied today. (This is probably the reason why nearly

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all houses look alike.) Although there are traces of the wooden fences which have been

carefully maintained over the last decades, they have mostly been replaced with the more

cost-efficient, lower-maintenance cyclone or barbed-wire fences. Even so, the extensive

presence of fences– old or new – throughout the island serves as reminder of the shift in the

way people relate to land as individual property.

In general, people are very protective of their plots and aware of property boundaries. The

protectiveness and awareness materializes in these barbed wire fences. To keep intruders

away, many allow dogs to run loose within the fenced areas and to bark at people passing by.

Whenever I was sitting outside people’s houses, talking to them about the land they owned,

they offered an unsolicited clarification of the boundaries of their property. Pointing at their

surroundings, making a circular gesture, they said something along the lines of “todo esto

cercado” – all this fenced off. When they repaired fences, which was a very common

everyday activity on the island, people would say they were cercando – enclosing. The

boundaries between what was yours and what was mine were reinstated every day through

discursive as well as material practices.

Indeed, day-to-day conflicts on the island very often dealt with animal as well as human

trespassing. Tempted by freshly grown grass, apples or other produce, animals managed to

pass neighbors’ fences, which had been put up to protect the fields. At times, to feed their

animals, owners secretly let them into the neighbor’s bulging plot. Repeatedly I helped Ana

scare away intruding animals. Sometimes we also removed them by force, pushing piglets

back through the meshed cyclone fences, although they barely fit. At other times, people

were themselves accused of stealing produce from a neighbor’s plot. For instance, one early

morning I encountered Ana peering out the kitchen window, with her gaze fixed on

something outside. The sun had just risen, shedding light on the surroundings. When she

noticed me, she called me over to the window. “You see that?” she asked, frowning, pointing

towards the far corner of the property. Looking through the window, I saw our two neighbors

kneeling under the chestnut tree with a bucket next to them. They were collecting chestnuts

from Ana and Daniel’s property. “They know we have good chestnuts here. They gather them

to sell at the market in Futrono”, she claimed. But while upset about this occurrence, Ana had

bigger concerns. She was certain that one of her other neighbors had been stealing lambs

from her. Thus, to prevent more lambs from going missing, she went outside every evening,

gathered the flock and locked them inside the shed – adding to her already heavy workload.

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Ever since the introduction of individual land ownership in 1979 and the enclosure of land

(Thompson, 1968), people have fenced off properties in which the owner have invested labor

and money as a means to secure his or her future well-being. Even though many children of

current residents have moved away from the island, I was often reminded of their wishes that

the children one day would return. As such, fencing off property was a way to maintain

control over resources that would secure the future, “a life worth living” (Narotzky &

Besnier, 2014) – both in terms of economic and social reproduction.

CONCLUSION

Two transitions have taken place and contributed to the shaping of contemporary Isla Huapi:

first, the introduction of individual land ownership in 1979, and second, the legal constitution

of the Indigenous Community of Isla Huapi in 1995. Both these changes, particularly in

combination with the emergence of Evangelicalism in the 1950s, have worked to dislocate

the authority of the cacique, establishing the Board as a new body of authority, increasing an

awareness of the ethics of entrepreneurialism, to which individual property is central, and

thereby contributing to islanders’ increasing connectedness to the state. The principle of

individuality encouraged by these transitions works alongside core principles of

neoliberalism. The political currency of singularity is evidently still central to the (neoliberal)

modern state, expressed on Isla Huapi through the demand for a singular Community

represented by another singular collective, namely the Board. The value placed on singularity

extends to land regulation and individual property, legal concepts essential to the working of

neoliberalism and neoliberal development. People on Isla Huapi were trying to secure their

future, to create “a life worth living” (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014), by engaging with these

singular collectives, by paying their dues and by concurring with Ricardo’s authority during

the meeting, complying to the rules of the legal entity of the Community.

In the everyday process of trying to secure their own well-being in addition to the “common

good” of the island society, values are played against each other: values of co-operative labor

and payment of dues, the wishes and status of the Board, and the meaning of property as a

locus of self-interest must all be negotiated. The clash of values was illustrated when the

lonko, claiming to labor for the “common good”, was criticized for caring only for himself

and his own family by situating the tractor on his own property. Furthermore, what some

people accused the current community Board of failing to do, namely to care for the

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“common good” of all islanders, was exactly the moral motivation for the replacement of the

previous Board. The Community contrasts the reality of singular collectives with that of

individual islanders’ interests, and thus works to pit values against each other. In the wake of

neoliberal politics of land and indigeneity, values associated with social capital (such as profit

and self-interest) become entangled with values associated with reciprocity (such as mutual

care and the “common good”), creating blurred distinctions (Narotzky, 2015). In the

entanglement of these value realms, tensions emerge as some islanders use the notion of self-

interest to challenge the Board’s willingness to work for and interest in securing the

“common good”. Meanwhile, authorities draw on the very same notions to legitimize their

positions.

In the two following chapters I examine how islanders seek to secure their futures in

individually and communally oriented ways – through economic security (chapter 5) and

infrastructural development (chapter 6). Through state-led development programs, they

engage in entrepreneurial endeavors to enhance their economic situation, and thus secure

their own well-being. This strategy can be said to promote values of self-interest, the

individual and economic independence, complying with the neoliberal thrust of these

programs. However, in looking more closely at the ways in which islanders engage with these

programs, other forms of aspiration emerges. While islanders may aspire to economic

independence, they simultaneously aspire to closer ties to the state, rather than seeking a

higher degree of political autonomy.

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5. SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES: THE WORKINGS

OF A STATE INITIATED DEVELOPMENT

PROGRAM

Who promotes state-led development programs, and in what ways? What is attractive about

them? How do they work? In this chapter, I examine entrepreneurial endeavors among

inhabitants on Isla Huapi. In particular, I explore reasons for and ways of engaging in state-

led development programs that promote small-scale entrepreneurship. I mainly concentrate

my analysis on one such program, namely the Indigenous Territory Development Program

(PDTI).

Drawing on Piergiorgio Di Giminiani’s analysis of state-led development programs in Chile

and the “making of entrepreneurs” (2018a), I try to explain why islanders participate in

development programs. Di Giminiani bases his analysis on a notion of hope for economic

independence that, in turn, might allow for a higher degree of political autonomy for

Mapuche people. However, by engaging in continuous relations of debt and searching for

new funding schemes allowed for by the cumulative logic inherent to such programs, people

who participate in them come to rely on the state in a never-ending process of becoming

entrepreneurs. This leads Di Giminiani to argue that farmers enrolled in these programs

become subjected to a “governance of hope”. Prospects of entrepreneurship elicit powerful

imaginaries of economic independence. Meanwhile, their hopes are redirected away from

political activism towards market relations. What is the relationship between economic

security, economic independence and political autonomy on Isla Huapi? I argue that islanders

enact the state through these programs because they aspire to economically improved

situations, but not necessarily to economic independence. Thus, what Di Giminiani identifies

as a means to an end is, to some islanders, the end itself: to increase income by staying in the

PDTI program.

How do islanders stay within the program, and what happens to those who become unable to

do so? What roles does the PDTI team play in this process? Based on a neoliberal logic of

entrepreneurship and the making of self-responsible economic actors, the PDTI program, like

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other neoliberal development programs, calls for enhancement of economic production as a

means to alleviate poverty. While some islanders do enhance their economic production and

benefit economically from engagement in PDTI, others fail to stay within the program or are

unable to take full advantage of it. Based on the same cumulative logic that is supposed to

inspire islanders to become entrepreneurs, PDTI allows for processes of economic

differentiation.

When I moved to Isla Huapi to start my fieldwork, I was struck by the presence of programs,

projects, courses and other initiatives on the island. They all seemed to be related to the state

in some way or another. The dock, the health care center, the school buildings, and the fences

demarcating properties all hosted posters and placards displaying the red and blue insignia of

the Chilean state, together with inscriptions of some state agency and its associated ministry.

Some contained additional advertisement in the form of short, informative texts. These

tended to include words like apoyo (support), fomentar (promote/encourage), capacitación

(training) and emprendimiento (entrepreneurship), but always in combination with the word

desarrollo (development). As my fieldwork progressed, I discovered how present these

initiatives were even in everyday practices and discourses: as the topic of dinner conversation

or of community meetings. My surprise in encountering the high degree of state presence

resulted from the information I had received before I visited the island the first time. Ignacio,

the engineer in charge of the irrigation project, took me to Isla Huapi and introduced me to

the islanders (see chapter 1). He warned me about the general hostility with which, due to a

history of state violence and discrimination, people on the island met outsiders. For this

reason, I was astonished to realize that state initiatives and their executors were in fact not

met with rejection but with acceptance and widespread engagement.

AN ISLAND OF PROGRAMS

Governmental and municipal employees who visited the island all wore clothes carrying

particular logos and inscriptions indicating which body of authority they represented. The

abundance of authorities and representatives contributed greatly to the confusion with which I

first met everyday life on the island. The initiatives with which the Chilean government

sought to develop poor rural communities materialized in programs and in projects that were,

as explained in the introductory chapter, offered through these programs to the community

and to individuals within it. What I first perceived as a myriad of different programs became

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clearer to me as time passed. Throughout this chapter, I will focus on one development

program, namely PDTI. However, I start here by outlining some of the many programs that I

came across during my time on Isla Huapi.

There was the previously mentioned INDAP-funded Proyecto de Riego - Irrigation Project,

designed by INDAP’s regional irrigation department15. The goal of this project was to

construct a large irrigation system that transported water from the lake to the fields. A private

consulting company was in charge of the construction work. The goal was to ensure access to

irrigation water for (almost) every property, and hence to prevent potential drought that could

damage cultivation. This was a project offered to the island community by INDAP, and the

recipients were primarily islanders already enrolled in the PDTI program.

Next, there was a program called Comunidades preparadas frente a los incendios forestales –

Communities prepared against forest fires – arranged by the National Forest Corporation

(CONAF). Similar to INDAP, CONAF is organized through the Ministry of Agriculture

(MINAGRI). A team of three or four CONAF employees organized several workshops

through which they were to make the community aware of the risks involved in living in a

rural, forested area. They also wanted to change or modify islanders’ attitudes towards fire

and make them take more responsibility in the prevention of forest fires. Among other things,

they taught people how to build houses in a manner that would reduce the scope of fires if

they were to occur. They also instructed people how and where to store firewood. In their

workshops, the CONAF team engaged representatives from The Ministry of the Interior and

Public Security (ONEMI), the Chilean police force (Carabineros de Chile) and the military.

The mere presence of these authorities carried weight with regard to the seriousness of the

topic they addressed. Towards the end of the workshop series, the CONAF team appointed a

local community council (consejo comuntario), who were to follow up on preventive actions

in the community to limit the number of future fires. Additionally, they had the particular

responsibility to notify the proper bodies of authority in case of fire.

Importantly, the common theme of the programs on Isla Huapi seemed to be development.

They all aimed at improving conditions of life, yet in slightly different ways. The INDAP

15 In the next chapter, I look closer at this particular project as I analyze state connections and

disconnections that infrastructural development projects produce.

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irrigation project’s goal was to develop infrastructure that would transport water from the

lake to the fields, thus improving conditions for agricultural production. CONAF, on the

other hand, wanted to increase the local inhabitants’ awareness and knowledge of forest fires

so that islanders would experience the threats of fire less frequently or less severely in the

future. While the irrigation project’s goal was to construct infrastructure, the latter program

worked exclusively in an educational capacity. Of course, programs that aim to develop

active infrastructural equipment also offer some level of training so that islanders learn how

to operate it. However, with most governmental programs, education and training are the

initial goal. In fact, rather than being merely informative in their design, many programs are

oriented quite aggressively towards education and training – towards the increase of human

capital.

Take, for example, the course in assembling and installing photovoltaic solar panels. The

National Training and Employment Service (SENCE) provided Más Capaz, a governmental

program offering courses in competence building regarding income-generating activities,

with resources to petition for an educational program teaching the business of solar panels. A

private company approved by SENCE, a Technical Training Organism (OTEC), was then

hired to design and carry out the course. The course consisted of a series of classes that were

divided into three modules, or sections, addressing different topics. The first section, which

introduced the course, addressed questions concerning the national and global labor market as

well as the legal and normative aspects of being a Chilean laborer in these markets. The

participants were not only taught what the market was but also how to participate in it as

producers of goods. Among other things, the teacher taught them that punctuality,

responsibility, and integrity were personal qualities necessary in order to survive in the global

labor market. This section of the course was rather theoretical. In contrast, the second module

was practically oriented. In this module, the students were taught how to build solar panels

and were informed about the physical risks associated with this work. The last section

consisted of an English course. They needed English language skills, the teacher said,

because most of the solar power technology was produced in countries outside Latin

America.

In general, the aforementioned program aimed at training islanders to become entrepreneurs

engaged in the global solar power market. Course participants were subsistence farmers

without formal education and had a hard time relating to or taking an interest in the content of

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the course. Yet, they did appreciate the classes in which they were taught how to put together,

install and operationalize solar panels. Moreover, a couple of the course participants also

made an effort to benefit from the English classes. As they ran tourist businesses, they

thought some English skills could come in handy. Furthermore, those who signed up and

attended 75 percent of the classes received 3000 pesos for each day of attendance. The

teacher handed out cash every week and paid the students according to their attendance

assessment. The weekly payments were undoubtedly a great motivation for many

participants.

The design and content of the solar power course demonstrates the Chilean government’s

aim, as with many programs on Isla Huapi, to educate people within the field of

entrepreneurship. This was done by providing participants with the skills and knowledge

necessary to reinvent themselves as businesspeople who know how to take advantage of

fluctuating prices and market mechanisms to access the goods necessary to sustain

themselves through market-like relations (Schild, 2007). That way, they would improve their

own life conditions and become economically self-sufficient: that is, less dependent on state

pensions on which many poor people in Chile rely. The course in assembling and installing

photovoltaic solar panels is an emblematic example of the way the Chilean government

tackles poverty among its rural populations: by supporting them in efforts to improve their

own lives through neoliberal principles of empowerment and independence. This type of

socioeconomic policy is also rendered visible in the promotion of other programs.

In 2014, ONEMI and the Undersecretary for Regional and Administrative Development

(SUBDERE) initiated the Programa de Gestión Territorial para Zonas Rezagadas –

Territorial Management Program for Lagging Areas. The program targets populations who

live in territories that are estimated to be the poorest and most isolated (aislada) on a regional

as well as national level of comparison. On their webpage, SUBDERE explains that the

objective of the program is to “generate conditions for socio-economic development…with a

focus on productive development, the transfer of skills and the generation of social and

human capital” (SUBDERE, accessed 22.01.19, my translation). In 2018, SUBDERE entered

an agreement of collaboration with the National Tourism Service (SERNATUR). Together,

SUBDERE and SERNATUR now offer a course through which participants can become

licensed “intercultural” tourist guides. Like the solar panels training program offered by Más

Capaz, SUBDERE and SERNATUR here focus on educational training that increases human

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capital. In turn, according to this logic, islanders can use newly acquired knowledge about

productive business development to prosper economically and reach a new level of self-

support.

Above all, one program was central to life on Isla Huapi, affecting nearly every household:

namely, the Indigenous Territory Development Program (PDTI). In 2010, MINAGRI and

INDAP, along with the municipality of Futrono, initiated the PDTI program. The local

president of the island community at that time, Rafael Catrileo, said in an interview with a

national newspaper that he was grateful that the Chilean government had decided to

implement the program on Isla Huapi. It would help ensure economic development on the

island through agricultural production. The regional secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture

was also present at the inauguration of the program. He communicated President Sebastián

Piñera’s commitment to the agricultural sector and emphasized the link between the

competitiveness of farmers and the improvement of their quality of life (Lorca, 2010). The

intention of the program was, as with other governmentally initiated rural development

programs, to make agricultural activities more efficient, so that farmers could in effect

enlarge their production, and subsequently earn their living through market exchanges. At the

outset, in 2010, the program allowed 60 families into the program. By the time of my

fieldwork in 2016, this number had increased to 95.

Before taking a closer look at the social practices and mechanisms of the PDTI program on

Isla Huapi, I will clarify the way in which MINAGRI, through INDAP, markets this

development program – as a type of social policy that attempts to tackle poverty through an

orientation towards market relations and entrepreneurship in ways that resonates with

neoliberal development discussed in the second chapter.

PDTI – A SOCIAL POLICY OF MARKET RELATIONS

As I pointed out in the introduction, indigeneity in Chilean politics has, since the transition to

democracy, been treated largely as a topic that concerns rural poverty (Di Giminiani, 2015).

This has also been the case within INDAP, even after the establishment of the PDTI program.

In 2001, with a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank, various Chilean ministries

collaborated to establish Programa Orígenes – the Origins Program. Its goal was to improve

quality of life in rural indigenous communities. An important component of the Origins

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Program was executed by INDAP, namely that which focused on productive development.

While claiming to maintain “cultural specificities” (Faiguenbaum, 2017, p. 222), INDAP

sought to increase rural indigenous people’s income through a diversification of economic

activities, both agricultural and nonagricultural. Although the Origins Program proceeded for

the next ten years, until 2011, it was not until 2009, during the last year of the first Bachelet

administration, that the PDTI program was created. For the first time, there existed, at

INDAP’s disposal, a program exclusively directed towards indigenous producers and

families. It began with 2,570 participants, and expanded rapidly during the following

administration, reaching a total of 33,200 participants nationally in 2013. By 2017, the

number of national participants was close to 48,000 (Faiguenbaum, 2017, p. 205).

These numbers were proof to INDAP that they should continue working actively to try and

resolve the “problems of productive development among rural indigenous families” (INDAP,

2018, p. 8). Therefore, in 2015, MINAGRI and INDAP started the process of revising the

PDTI program in order to improve it. They organized 119 “participatory workshops” in

which 2,300 community representatives participated, and which resulted in the report El

Proceso de Mejoramiento del Programa de Desarrollo Territorial Indígena (INDAP, 2018).

The report explains the process by which they worked to gain new knowledge and presents a

plan to improve the program. The report concludes that the program should consider a higher

degree of participation among and empowerment of its users. Yet, the report asserts that the

overall aim of the program is still the same: “support the improvement of production and the

development of enterprises of rural indigenous families and their organizations, and through

this, contribute to greater development and good lives in the territories” (2018, p. 30, my

translation). This is in line with the way MINAGRI presents the program on their webpage,

stating that the aim is to strengthen economic strategies in the communities. By improving

and promoting people’s income-generating activities, MINAGRI, INDAP and PDTI thus

seek to increase people’s quality of life. It seems, then, that the Chilean government’s main

concern when it comes to the nation’s indigenous populations is still with increasing quality

of life.

INDAP takes ethnic and cultural discrimination into consideration primarily as a barrier to

development. Under the title “A final reflection”, INDAP writes in the aforementioned

report:

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The analysis made in the preceding paragraphs indicates that the phenomenon of

discrimination operates as a “hard” barrier for the purposes of the program itself. Extending

productive improvement, innovation and entrepreneurship among indigenous families and

their organizations, respecting their own vision of development, implies more resources and

better technologies (production and management), to which it is necessary to add relevant

work methodologies. (INDAP, 2018, p. 50, my translation)

Even though the attempt to improve the program considers users’ views and empowerment as

necessary measures, the scope of possible adaptation and improvement is still limited to the

policy framework of the program itself – its mandate of economic development and growth.

Securing the good life and improving quality of life are responsibilities given to MINAGRI,

the Ministry of Agriculture, and not to the Ministry of Social Development. However, as it

turns out, the Ministry of Social Development finances, through the Solidarity and Social

Investment Fund (FOSIS), part of the costs of PDTI’s work (INDAP, 2018).

In 1993, as I outlined in the introduction, the Chilean Parliament passed the Indigenous Law

(No 19 253) which formally recognized the Mapuche people as an ethnic minority. In the

wake of this, the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI) was

established. CONADI is a public body that operates under the Ministry of Social

Development, which, in turn, is responsible for promoting and executing indigenous public

policy. The PDTI-program is executed within the framework of an agreement with CONADI,

which in fact contributes 25% of the total budget by which the program operates (INDAP,

2018). This means that social policy directed at rural indigenous people in Chile is partly

executed through the PDTI-program. Since the program is designed within the framework of

economic development, focusing on increasing income-generating activities in a market-

oriented manner as a way to improve quality of life, social policy is treated as a question of

economy.

In fact, it seems to take the form of neoliberal (economic) development. As becomes apparent

through state agencies’ work on Isla Huapi and elsewhere, the ideology of neoliberalism in

contemporary Chile is associated with moral discourses on the enterprising and responsible

self. The new disbursing system introduced by the Chilean government through INDAP is a

case in point.

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Whenever a farmer on Isla Huapi received funding for an individual project (for example, to

build a greenhouse), INDAP extended to the farmer a certain amount of credit. During the

first part of my fieldwork, this credit could only be accessed and retained through purchases

in one of the agriculture-related stores in the small town of Futrono on the mainland. This

arrangement ensured that credit beneficiaries spent the money exclusively on the agricultural

goods for which the money was earmarked. Suddenly, however, this arrangement was

replaced by simple payments of the project money directly to the recipients. The beneficiaries

received a check to cash in Banco del Estado de Chile’s branch in Futrono. This

rearrangement was put into effect, Ricardo told me, because INDAP wanted to foster a sense

of responsibility among recipients of government money. Those who spent their cash on non-

agricultural products, as I will explain more closely in the following, were sanctioned by

INDAP while those who made proper investments and behaved according to the requirements

of the signed credit agreement were rewarded.

Practices like this articulate with principles of neoliberal development as a form of market-

oriented social policy that aims to make people economically and morally responsible for

their own lives and well-being (Han, 2012; Schild, 2007; Sharma, 2008). Moreover, as I will

show in this chapter, people who take part in project competitions (a term to which I return

shortly) through programs such as PDTI, are tied increasingly closer to market institutions as

well as to the state. But it would be as unfortunate to assume the effects of governmental

development policies a priori (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad, 2005) as it would to take for granted

that development practice is directed by policy (Mosse, 2005). Beyond the example just

provided, how does the PDTI program work in practice? How does it affect islanders? Why

do they participate in this program?

“GOVERNANCE OF HOPE”

In his research on the effects of rural Mapuche people’s engagement with small-scale

businesses and with governmental programs, Di Giminiani (2018a) finds that state

initiatives, such as PDTI, in practice amount to a particular form of governance – a

“governance of hope”. What does he mean by this? I will here explain the cumulative

logic of development programs, which is central to his overall argument as well as my

own.

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As in Di Giminiani’s (2018a) experience, projects were a central part of everyday life

on Isla Huapi. Funding was attained though state-sponsored open fund “competitions”

(“concursos”), which were state agencies’ calls for proposals, in which farmers could

participate as PDTI members. These went by the name of “projects” – proyectos.

Typically, an applicant received small grants, arranged as a credit loan, to finance the

construction a fence or a henhouse to increase agricultural production, or a cabin to

start or expand a tourist business. If they then succeeded in constructing whatever they

were to build within a limited timeframe decided upon by INDAP, the recipient had to

repay only 5 or 10 percent, depending on the competition in question, of the original

loan. If the recipient was unable to comply with the requirements built into the lending

agreement, they risked having to pay back the amount in total. Meanwhile, if the

recipient of the project money abided by the rules, they were rewarded by INDAP with

the transformation of potential debt into a gift amounting to 90 or 95 percent of the

loan. Without pending debts, they were eligible to enter open funding competitions

anew, and thus apply for more proyectos. As Di Giminiani points out, “getting“ one

project does not usually provide a farmer with enough means to sustain, much less

expand a business. In order to do that, the farmer is dependent on “getting” several

projects (Di Giminiani, 2018a). Islanders aspiring to entrepreneurial endeavors were

constantly on the lookout for more projects – more financial grants. Di Giminiani

argues that the projects are designed to impel subjects of micro-entrepreneurial

programs to “constantly seek projects in order to finance their commercial activities,

which means that their realization as entrepreneurs is constantly postponed” (2018a, p.

3) and that potential future entrepreneurs end up being caught “in the making”.

According to Di Giminiani (2018a), entrepreneurial aspirations among Mapuche

farmers and the will to establish a small business are directly linked to ideas about

progress and wishes to “move ahead” – “salir adelante”. Moreover, the notion of

moving ahead, Di Giminiani writes, is not only tied to imaginaries of an economic

potential that can be released through entrepreneurial endeavors. For some Mapuche

farmers, the notion of progress through entrepreneurialism also carries political

imaginaries that are related to struggles over land restitution and self-governance.

While some see entrepreneurialism as contributing to neutralizing political activism

under notions of “neoliberal multiculturalism”, others see entrepreneurship as an

integral part of their fight for increased political autonomy (Di Giminiani, 2018a).

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Entrepreneurial endeavors are thought to contribute to a higher degree of political

autonomy and self-governance not only by releasing an economic potential. Rather, a

higher degree of political autonomy, Di Giminiani claims, is sought through the

acquisition of economic independence. From what dependencies is it then that

Mapuche farmers, according to the author, seek relief? First, they seek relief from

increasing outmigration from rural to urban settings. Second, they wish to break bonds

of dependence with powerful market actors, in particular non-indigenous employers.

Third, they want to move away from reliance on the passive state assistance typically

known as asistencialismo (Richards 2013 in Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 2). Finally, and in

relation to the aforementioned forms of dependence, they hope to overcome subsistence

farming by making small-scale businesses the primary source of income-generating

activity. What they seek to become independent from, then, is state and market

governance, from a subordinate relation to the state and market alike.

The imagined emancipatory effect of entrepreneurship, according to Di Giminiani (Di

Giminiani, 2018a), is therefore tied to the realization of the independent,

entrepreneurial subject. Like numerous other scholars who write about social policies

of neoliberalism (Ferguson, 2015; Schild, 2007; Sharma, 2008; Smith, 2017), Di

Giminiani draws in his article on Foucauldian ideas about self-making under

neoliberalism (Foucault, 2004) and the making of the self-managed entrepreneurial

subject. Combining this approach with Miyazaki’s approach to the concept of hope

(2004, 2006), Di Giminiani finds that “becoming an entrepreneur is an unfinished

project of self-making that is sustained by the hope placed on entrepreneurship as a

political and economic means of self-realization” (Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 3). Through

development programs, the state elicits hope precisely about the emancipatory effect of

entrepreneurship. This is the promise that development programs hold. However,

according to Di Giminiani, it also becomes a means of governance. What happens,

then, is that while aspirations to become entrepreneurs are reproduced by the hope for

emancipation inherent to entrepreneurialism, new bonds of dependence are established

with market actors and the state. Hope is being capitalized upon by the state through the

creation of new bonds of dependence. Meanwhile, because hope can redirect people’s

knowledge about the world (Miyazaki, 2004, 2006), it also serves as a source of critical

knowledge for indigenous prospective entrepreneurs about their marginalized position.

This knowledge or awareness is what elicits interlocutors’ critical responses to notions

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of proyectos. As such, the “governance of hope” is the powerful effect, as Di Giminiani

sees it, of entrepreneurial discourses and state action – of neoliberal development. This

leads Di Giminiani to argue that Mapuche rural residents are unable “to reconcile their

aspirations of economic independence with the reality of having to depend on ongoing

welfare assistance” and that this situation “elicits critical understandings about

indigenous-state relations” (Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 3).

Based on my ethnography from Isla Huapi, it seems that most Mapuche farmers do not

consider the emancipatory power of entrepreneurialism to rest in economic

independence or in higher degrees of political autonomy. In fact, only one

businesswoman, Teresa, was concerned about the need for the island settlement to

become autosustentable – self-sustaining. Her tourist business, as I will show later in

this chapter, aimed at a more high-end clientele than other tourist businesses did and

was more successful in many ways. Meanwhile, Teresa was criticized for not being

“down to earth” and for being somehow insufficiently loyal to the island society.

Others aspired, in my assessment, to become entrepreneurs because they believed in the

emancipatory power of economic security in relation to the state, rather than

independence from it. What provided this security, socially as well as economically,

was precisely their participation and continuous enrollment in the PDTI program. Like

Di Giminiani’s interlocutors, people on Isla Huapi seek relief from relations of state

dependence that allow for precarious living and insecurity – such as outmigration.

While agriculturally focused businesses and the sale of agricultural produce hardly

provided islanders with the means of self-support, tourist businesses held other

promises. Nevertheless, most people who engaged in this business, mainly women,

wanted to stay within the PDTI program. Their motivation to continue relying on this

program does not rest in prospects of “getting more projects” in order to become

independent entrepreneurs. Rather, I believe that PDTI enrollment provided them with

the social and economic security they sought.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE THROUGH RELATIONS OF

DEPENDENCE

During the warmer months of the year, my host Ana spent large parts of the days in her

quincho – a restaurant that took the form of a big, wooden, six-sided house located by the

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driveway. The wood-burning stove in the kitchen that Ana used for cooking gave off an

uncomfortable heat on summer days. In the quincho, unlike the main house, the kitchen was

separated from the dining area, allowing us to enjoy the food at a cool and comfortable

temperature. But this was not the only reason why she preferred the quincho to the house this

time of year. Particularly during summer, there was always the chance that she would receive

a phone call informing her that there were guests heading to her restaurant. In that case, she

would already be settled in the quincho kitchen. How was Ana able to establish and run a

restaurant business? How was she, financially and socially, able to establish a network

providing her costumers?

As was the case with the two cabins in her garden, where she accommodated guests and

tourists, Ana was enrolled in the PDTI program and had received money through PDTI to

buy and transport materials to the island to construct the quincho. For the construction work,

she had put Jorge, her husband Daniel’s cousin and carpenter, on the job. Meanwhile, Ana’s

son-in-law installed the electricity. Not many families on the island enjoyed the luxury of

solar-powered electricity. However, by being able to save some of the money they received

from INDAP, by carefully selecting materials for construction, and by paying partially on

credit, Ana and her husband had been able to buy solar panels and batteries. Yet, this was not

the only thing they had done to increase the standard of their material surroundings. As they

were fortunate to have a well on their property, they had invested in pipes and a water tower,

which supplied the house, cabins and quincho with tap water. Furthermore, while most

families on the island used outside toilets, Ana and Daniel had gotten rid of theirs. A septic

tank having been buried in their garden, the quincho, cabins and the main house had flush

toilets. On an island that lacked infrastructure for electricity, sewage and potable water, Ana

and Daniel had done well for themselves.

Even though there were no guests this particular day, Ana, Daniel, and I had eaten lunch in

the quincho. Daniel had returned to work at the school to teach the afternoon classes, which

left Ana and me to ourselves. We were sitting at one of the long tables that Jorge, the same

man who had built the quincho, had finished just a couple of days before. We were sitting

together in silence drinking mate when Ana started stroking the tabletop with her hand,

seemingly satisfied with the result. “They are very nice, these tables, right?” she asked me.

Before I got around to answering her question, Ana, still stroking the tabletop, went on to talk

about how expensive it was to hire the workers needed to take care of the animals and to

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cultivate and maintain the fields. It appeared Ana was reflecting on life. Anyway, she said,

someone had to work the fields, since Daniel was busy with work at the school and she was

too busy keeping up with the daily chores around the house and her negocio – her business.

She looked up at me, saying that last summer there had not been enough cabins to cover the

tourist demand. Ana wanted to extend her business and have one more cabin built below the

two that were already there. “For the tourists?” I asked her. “Yes, for the tourists,” she said,

before adding: “and for the future”. Ana was in her fifties. She was not young and would not

get any younger either, she said, looking down at the mate drinking cup that she held tightly

between her hands. I sensed capitulation in her voice. She prayed to God, she said, this would

not be the case, but she had also considered the possibility that she or Daniel might end up

alone. Their two children had moved away with no intention of moving back. Nevertheless,

she and Daniel did not want to leave the island. So the tourist business was a way for her,

Ana explained, to prepare for the years to come. She had been careful to enter into

agreements with PDTI, INDAP and other agencies to secure herself (asegurarse). “We have

a lot of space now,” she said smilingly, taking stock of the room until her gaze rested again

on the tables. In the enlarged space, she saw enhanced business opportunities, increased

income and a viable future. At the same time, it was a proof of her (continuous) successful

engagement with PDTI and INDAP.

Ana’s business was turismo rural – rural tourism. It was for developing this business she

received funding. Drawing on imaginaries of the traditional rural life, and particularly of

Mapuche rural life, tourism has over the last three decades become a popular field in which to

promote investment opportunities (Di Giminiani, 2018a). Ana’s business allowed her to

aspire to an economically viable future that permitted her to stay on the island. The close

relationship she enjoyed with Ricardo and the other agronomists in the PDTI team

contributed to this in crucial ways. Due to his familiarity with and knowledge of the

community, Ricardo was often contacted to introduce the island and the people to newcomers

– like Ignacio, the engineer in charge of the irrigation project. If they needed food and a place

to stay, Ricardo would guide them Ana’s way. Furthermore, the PDTI team worked as

powerful distributors of information about funding competitions. As I will discuss in chapter

7, the work of the PDTI team is assessed by INDAP and the members of the municipality,

who audit the number of projects contracted by participants in development programs. To

secure future employment, PDTI workers would principally invest time and energy in

projects they considered potentially successful. To them, Ana was a reliable client. Therefore,

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it was both in Ana’s and in the extension team’s interest to nurse the social relationship they

had built over the years. Finally, the property of her husband on which Ana lived and which

she had at her disposal was strategically located close to the school, where most meetings and

receptions were held, and where her husband worked.

To recruit tourists to her place, Ana drew on the social network of her immediate

surroundings. Ana knew the owner and manager of the local radio station, Gastón. This

man’s sister worked at the hotel in Futrono. As a favor to Ana, Gastón’s sister used to

recommend Ana’s place to tourists at the hotel who wanted to visit Isla Huapi. Gastón also

owned quite a big boat with room for plenty of people. He would use this boat to transport

the tourists for whom his sister had arranged a trip to Isla Huapi and Ana’s place. For this, he

charged a certain fee. As such, it came to resemble a kind of business that benefitted both

Ana and Gastón. Without a doubt, Ana was a hard-working businessperson who seized

opportunities when they revealed themselves. This also enabled her to create work for others.

When she received funding from INDAP to enlarge the kitchen in her quincho, she employed

Jorge. Occasionally, she would also provide her neighbor with paid work when he had spent

his monthly pension and came asking for money. At times, Ana also bought fish from people

who stopped by her house with that day’s catch, even if she was in no immediate need for

food. She would store it in her freezer and save it for later.

ASPIRING TO PDTI-ENROLLMENT

The PDTI team celebrated Ana’s sense of business. They talked about Ana as a hard-working

woman willing to take risks and make an effort to succeed. During a meeting at the PDTI

office, Ariel, who worked with Ricardo in the extension team, explained how the PDTI

program worked. Ariel used people I knew to exemplify what he was saying. He said that the

program entailed a five-year involvement. During those five years, Ariel said, he and the

other two men making up the extension team would support and help every farmer enrolled

in the program to develop their business. Every other year, to stay in the program, islanders

had to apply for a project. Ideally, those enrolled would choose one business specialty, such

as egg production. If a given farmer one year received funding to build a henhouse, in the

third year Ariel would encourage this farmer to apply for funding to build a fence

surrounding the henhouse. In the fifth year, he would encourage a purchase of more hens.

This way, this farmer would have invested and specialized in one type of farming business

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and thus increased his chances both of earning money from it and, importantly, of receiving

funding from bigger programs than PDTI. Here, Ariel pointed to a central aspect of PDTI’s

activities and involvement on the island. To them, supporting the production of specialized

businesses was the aim of their work. To him, this represented the greatest challenge when

working with communities such as Isla Huapi, where diversified agriculture was the

traditional form of farming. No one wanted to specialize, he said.

Therefore, Ariel took great care explaining to me the signs, as he put it, of non-specialization:

The first year in the program, a person might want a henhouse. In the third year, the same

person might want seeds, and in the fifth year a toolshed. In this case, he said, when this

person wanted to apply for seeds, he would suggest that the farmer rather ask for material to

extend the fence around the henhouse so that she can keep more hens. If the person said “No,

I would rather have seeds”, Ariel would not press the matter further, but instead give her

seeds – precisely, he underlined, because PDTI supported the islanders’ traditions and

culture. If the applicant insisted on having potatoes, corn, hens, pigs and sheep, then so be it.

Yet, he said, the PDTI team tried to convince the farmers that the best option was to invest in

specialized farming – “to develop their production”. I asked him if “desarrollar” (“to

develop”), to PDTI, meant making greater yields. He looked at me for a second, as if I had

asked him something stupid, before responding: “Yes, of course!”

Although both Ariel and Ricardo tended to point to Ana as one of the more industrious and

open-minded islanders susceptible to their investment ideas, she found one of their

suggestions unsettling. She had already finished her five years’ engagement in the PDTI-

program, which had provided her with the quincho, two cabins and a certificate to serve food.

The next step would be to move to another, specialized program that could offer larger

funding grants than the general, small-scale PDTI-program. This would allow her to expand

her business. Yet Ana, as Ricardo told me, did not want to move on to another program. She

was comfortable with PDTI. When I talked to Ana myself, she said she was happy with what

PDTI had done for her. Besides, she added, these men knew her and they knew the island. “I

know Ricardo wants me to change program, but I don’t want to,” she said in a firm voice.

What was the reason for this? She had told me that she wanted another cabin: she did, then,

want to enlarge the scope of her business. What was Ana reacting to?

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When I talked to Ana about this, she emphasized her close relation to Ricardo and the rest of

the extension team. She did not want to quit the program, having to rely on someone she did

not know and, importantly, who did not know the island. Meanwhile, Ana was already

engaged in another program alongside PDTI, namely the Red de Turismo Rural – the Rural

Tourism Network. On one occasion, not long before Ricardo had talked to her about

transitioning to a different program than PDTI, she received a visitor from the Rural Tourism

Network. The visitor had come to take photos to publish on their webpage as well as to assess

Ana’s business and to consider opportunities. I had been out that day and returned only when

the employee from the Rural Tourism Network was about to leave. After she left, Ana sat

down at the table across from me. She shook her head and started describing the visit.

Apparently, several changes had been suggested to Ana. First, it had been recommended that

she should switch to white bedlinen in all rooms in the cabins in order to create a clean and

exclusive look. Currently, there were bedlinens of different sorts, because Ana used whatever

she had. “How am I supposed to keep white bedlinens white?” she asked me rhetorically,

with a somber expression in her face. Like other islanders, Ana did all her laundry by hand

because there was not enough water or electricity for a washing machine. Furthermore, she

put up the laundry to dry in the garden, which caused occasional spots from whatever the

wind or animals brought with them. In Ana’s opinion, the white bedlinen was a bad idea. She

had also been advised to weave blankets to adorn the six beds she offered her guests. Ana

carded the wool herself – wool that she used to knit and weave different garments. Some of it

she made for herself and for her husband to use, but she also tried to sell some pieces to

tourists and other visitors who stopped by her place. Anyways, it was a seasonal activity.

More importantly, carding and weaving were incredibly time-consuming. She was already

occupied large parts of the days and asked me, in the same rhetorical manner, how she was

supposed to find time to weave these blankets.

Yet, with these changes, Ana was told she should increase the price of her services. Ana was

very reluctant to do this because “people have become accustomed to my prices, what I

charge”, she said. Finally, the Rural Tourism Network-employee had asked Ana to put up the

sign that they had given her – a sign promoting her business – by the dock or somewhere

visible to tourists arriving at the island. Without saying anything, Ana knew that this would

prove difficult. Why would other islanders allow her to put up such a sign on their property?

Others had their own businesses. A month later, the wooden sign with the inscription Domo

Nehuen: Cabañas, gastronomía y artesanías, was put up next to the property’s entrance. In a

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way, the reason why Ana was reluctant to move to another program is rendered visible

through the experiences she had with the Rural Tourism Network-employee. Moving on to a

different, large-scale development program meant that she would lose the frequent contact

with the PDTI team, who intimately knew not only Ana and what her aspirations looked like,

but also life on the island.

Ana attributed much of the success she had with her business to Ricardo, Ariel and Helmuth.

“They have helped me a lot, these guys,” she would say in a contemplative fashion, “they

always give me projects.” With a different program, Ana did not think she would be able to

get any projects. She was anxious. PDTI had significant value to her, both because of the

small-scale funding arrangements and because of the close relationships she enjoyed with the

extension team. To her, replacing PDTI with another, more ambitious program would mean

starting all over again – building trust. Furthermore, she would then have to deal with

bureaucrats who never visited the island, as she claimed herself. The knowledge that the

PDTI team had about the community and the people living on the island was crucial to her.

They had become the islanders’ friends and confidants. Ana, among others, trusted Ricardo.

Ana could very well have been an established entrepreneur. She already enjoyed a good flow

of income, and the tourist business was already her primary income source. Yet, Ana did not

aspire to become independent of the ongoing search for projects. For her, in contrast to Di

Giminiani’s interlocutors (Di Giminiani, 2018a), projects had a positive connotation. This

search, for which she notably received great support from the PDTI team who themselves

relied upon successful project recipients, was part of Ana’s plan for an economically secure

future. By continuing to search for PDTI projects and by maintaining close relations to

Ricardo and the rest of the PDTI team, she actively worked not to expand her business, but to

ensure the manageable flows of small amounts of money. She assumed that she knew her

clients, and did not want to run a fancy tourist business that required white bed linen and the

keeping up of a flawless impression. In many ways, Ana had succeeded at getting what she

wanted from the PDTI program. What caused her troubles and anxiety was the prospect of a

future without the social and economic ties to PDTI.

How does Ana’s entrepreneurial life relate to Di Giminiani’s notion of a governance of hope

that “consists of state ability to capitalize on indigenous citizens’ hopes of economic

independence while instituting new bonds of dependency linking them to market and state

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actors” (Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 18)? First, I believe it would be more accurate to frame

Ana’s emotional engagement in terms of aspirations. Di Giminiani, following Miyazaki

(2004, 2006), conceives of hope as a force that redirects knowledge about the world. In

engagement with neoliberal development in rural indigenous Chile, he asserts that his

interlocutors are made aware of their marginal position within a state apparatus. In contrast,

Ana’s experience with a state apparatus resulted in economic enhancement and

empowerment. Importantly, it is not any given state apparatus that matters, but specifically

the one that included Ricardo, Helmuth and Ariel. It is not only the program itself that she

wants to rely on, but also these three people who mediate the roles of friends and state agents.

As state agents, instead of encouraging her to operate without reliance on any program and

thus become independent, they tried to convince her to engage in large-scale entrepreneurial

programs. But Ana did not want to engage in another program with other state agents. Nor

did she want to be without. As such, she was subjected to a form of governance that works

through her aspiration to be able to rely on PDTI socially as well as economically. She did

not experience her engagement with PDTI as reinforcing a marginal position within the state

apparatus until she was told that she could no longer stay within the program. Thus, it was the

prospect of not being able to rely on them or on the program that, for Ana, elicited anxiety

about the future.

Meanwhile, not everyone shared Ana’s experience of success with PDTI. To some families,

engagement in the program had led them into economic precariousness, indebtedness and

ineligibility to apply for other projects.

WHEN PROJECTS FAIL

Flavio lived with his wife, Danissa, and their four children on Isla Huapi. That is, the two

youngest children, both teenagers, went to school in Futrono and were only home on

weekends. The other two children, the oldest, lived at home on the island. The daughter

living at home received help from her mother to take care of the baby to whom she had given

birth at the age of fourteen. The oldest child, Hernan, also lived at home and helped with

daily chores such as baking bread, cooking and cleaning. He was in his late 20s, but had

never finished school.

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Flavio had invited me one afternoon to have lunch at his family’s house. The house was

located in the shade of eucalyptus and fruit trees. The house was constructed from a

combination of corrugated iron and plywood, some parts painted while other parts were left

bare. It had been constructed and reconstructed with additions, giving it an overall patchy

look. The front door was not hinged correctly and could not close, allowing the many dogs

and cats on the property free entrance. Just outside the entrance was a table. This is where I

had been served food and drinks the last time I had visited. This afternoon, however, there

were no people, dogs or cats in sight outside the house. The table showed traces of a former

party: empty cardboard wine boxes had been left on top of it. I turned around and caught

sight of the blue water barrel filled up with water from the lake, which gave them easy access

to drinking and cooking water.

As I stood there wondering where they were, one of the daughters appeared from around the

corner of the house. She asked me to come with her. The lunch was prepared and served in

the family’s quincho this time, a wooden six-sided traditional house that served as a

restaurant. It was located further down on the property, closer to the waterfront. The family

had built the quincho themselves, they told me during the little pre-lunch tour. It was made

without project money – without governmental grants. Although it had taken a lot of time and

effort, they managed and were very proud. Materials for the construction had been financed

by the salary from Flavio’s job in Futrono, where he worked for a patron Monday through

Friday every week. His boss had been generous and helped him out with materials, Flavio

said. Flavio had also constructed a small house adjacent to the quincho, which, when

finished, was going to function as a two-room cabin for tourists. Currently, it served as

storage. From this part of their property, where the cabin and the quincho were located, we

had a clear view of the sunlit lake below the cliff. It was a stunning view that nurtured

nostalgic feelings about life on the island, particularly as this was a sunny day. This part of

the family’s property was a perfect place to set up a tourist business. Flavio, however, did not

formally own the property. He was not Mapuche, a requirement for owning land on Isla

Huapi. Nor did his wife, Danissa, own the property, although she formally qualified. She was

originally from the island, and, according to Chilean law, was rightfully Mapuche. But

Danissa’s mother, who was also their closest neighbor, owned it. Nevertheless, they went

about as though it were their property, and in practice it was.

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The business was slow. The small cabin still lacked basic attributes such as toilets and beds.

In one of the rooms, there was a toilet, but this was yet not connected to a septic tank. It just

stood there in the corner, dusty and detached. Although Flavio explained that this cabin was

supposed to be offered as a basic housing alternative to tourists, nothing fancy, it needed

more work. It needed greater investment – both in terms of labor and finance. Apart from the

little state pension Danissa received once a month, Flavio’s was the only income the family

had, and parts of it went to renting a place in Futrono where he stayed during the week. Why

did not Danissa, in similar veins as Ana, apply for funding through the PDTI program?

Once, Ricardo had engaged Danissa and Flavio’s family in a PDTI project that he had

information about. When I asked Ricardo from where he received information about funding

competitions, he said he had a friend who worked in a company. According to Ricardo, the

company had nothing to do with INDAP. As he received tips about various types of funding

competitions, he had to evaluate them individually and consider which family would benefit

from a certain project. He considered the various families’ areas of specialization, their needs,

and what projects they would be able to see through to completion. This required intimate

knowledge of the PDTI program’s subscribers. Without good knowledge, he said, you risk

wasting time suggesting the wrong projects for the wrong people. Though he did not know

the exact number, he convinced me that he had achieved great success with matching funding

competitions and applicants that year, helping them obtain successful projects. There was

only one exception: Flavio’s family.

He had decided to encourage them to invest time and labor in the fruit and berry business

because, over the last years, the price of these products had increased dramatically, according

to Ricardo. Partly, he was keen to have this family take on the project because of the location

of their property. Since the land was located next to the school where meetings were held, he

thought it would be the perfect place to organize future capacitaciones – training courses –

for other islanders in that type of cultivation. The result of the project, however, was an

overgrown plot that was supposed to be a fruit plantation and debt. Having failed to comply

with the institutional requirements upon receiving the financial grants, they were now

indebted to INDAP and ineligible to apply for future governmental funding.

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Ricardo was disappointed in himself that he had decided to go to Danissa with the fruit

project, thinking it could even work as a demonstrativo – a showcase. When he approached

the family with what he saw as a great opportunity that could not only benefit them but also

the community at large by organizing training courses on this demonstrativo, he had thought

that Danissa had the capacity to succeed. However, when Danissa found herself burdened

with the responsibility of her fourteen-year-old daughter’s child, her capacity to take care of

the fruit cultivation was drastically reduced. Furthermore, Ricardo said, her two sons were

too lazy to do it. They preferred drinking. Throughout the summer, he said, he had observed

these sons of Danissa down by the port just observing tourists. They had not cleaned the fruit

plot or made sure to water it, even though they had obtained access to the irrigation system.

Ricardo got upset when telling me this story. Still, he was mostly upset with himself, having

failed in providing this project opportunity to the wrong family. He should have gone to Ana

instead, he said.

Flavio and his family were in a somewhat unfortunate position compared to other households

on the island. Their income was low, and they could no longer rely on financial help from

PDTI to get their business up and running. Even though they had the quincho, they lacked

access to basic services, such as sanitized drinking water and electricity to run a refrigerator –

both formally required for hygienic reasons when serving food to tourists. Additionally, they

lacked the social network others had that would connect them to visitors coming to the island.

Outside of the summer months, the majority of visitors were related to a variety of state

institutions coming to the island to work. Work capacity was also limited, as Flavio was gone

most of the week and his wife, Danissa, had to take care of the house and the baby. Her

daughter and son helped her out, but Hernan, like his father, was fond of drinking. They were

lacking in financial and social resources, and lacking time to get things done.

While they were not able to “sacar proyectos” (“get projects”), others, like Ana, were, and

benefitted greatly from them. The only state subsidy that Flavio and other households like his

could rely on was the monthly pension of approximately 80,000 pesos (160 USD). Other

households applied for and received state funding for various individual household projects.

The most well-off households were those that received individual funding and were able to

invest this money in such a way that they could turn it into profit, normally through investing

in their individual businesses, such as cabin rentals or food sales. On Isla Huapi, the capacity

to generate profit and to prosper depended to a large degree on uneven access to resources

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inherent in one’s property and on the capacity to invest time and energy in a project; but it

also depended on the aspiration to succeed. The sense of this aspiration, I believe, increases

with the number of projects with which one has managed to succeed. The cumulative logic of

the micro-funding schemes of PDTI pertains, therefore, also to the sense of aspiration.

I asked Ricardo why he thought islanders did not take advantage of their plots by cultivating

them, harvesting and selling the produce to earn more money. “It is because they are

Mapuche, it is a cultural thing,” he replied. “Here, people do not care much about having a lot

of money, they care more about other things; drinking mate and talk. At least, this is the case

with the older ones,” he said. Ricardo did not convey this to me as a derogatory trait of

Mapuche people: his tone was more matter-of-fact. To him, it was a cultural condition that

made his job harder to perform. But market conditions for Isla Huapi farmers did not

contribute to encouraging the agricultural entrepreneurial spirit, either.

The local marketplace where Isla Huapi farmers sold their produce was in Futrono. They

called it Huerto Lindo. At first, it was a rather small marketplace and sparsely frequented by

potential customers. It had been created exclusively for Mapuche farmers from the

surrounding areas so that they would have a place to sell their produce. Prior to the

establishment of this marketplace in the early 1990s, they had sold their produce in the

streets, unable to sell directly to supermarkets as these were supplied with vegetables and

other produce from large-scale agricultural producers in the area. Access to the Huerto Lindo

marketplace was distributed evenly among three different Mapuche communities on a

rotating basis. Farmers from Isla Huapi occupied the place on designated days during the

week. Second, the infrastructure connecting them to the mainland, which allowed islanders to

visit Futrono and the marketplace, was the ferry. On some days, when the weather was bad,

as it often was during winter, the ferry rides were cancelled. Additionally, transporting the

produce all the way from the plot to the market place demanded investment of resources and

labor. Unless farmers were willing and able to travel by bulls and wagon, they would have to

pay Marcelo to come pick them and their produce up with his car and drive them to the port.

From there, they would take the ferry, which was a further expense, and finally, they would

have to pay for another cab ride from the port in Futrono up to the small town where the

marketplace was. As such, access to the market and the promises it held in sales and income

after a day’s work was rather limited.

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Thinking about what he had said for a moment – about the cultural traits of Mapuche people,

that they were not interested in earning a lot of money but preferred to invest their time

differently – Ricardo added: “Perhaps it is not the case with younger people. For example,

look at the woman who lives down at the Piedra Bruja”. He laughed. He was referring to

Teresa.

TERESA’S DOMOS – A DIFFERENT WAY

Teresa had done well for herself. Together with her five siblings, she had been born and

raised on Isla Huapi in a modest house with little money to live off. Somehow, she had

managed to create an impressive business for herself and her family. Her success materialized

most clearly in the two domos, two cabins built in a modern style. Both cabins were two-

storey domes and had windows in the roofs letting in beams of sunlight, so-called American

kitchens, and bathrooms with showers and flush toilets. Furthermore, they were connected to

the solar panels situated on the newly grown lawn behind the cabins. From the terraces in

front, one had a luxurious view of the lake, the beach and, just in front of the cabins, newly

planted flowers of all kinds.

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The domes stood out from other houses and cabins on the island, which were built with a

focus on functionality and cost-efficiency. Unlike Ana and others who had invested in

tourism on Isla Huapi, Teresa had received funding not from INDAP, but from the Program

of Local Enterprise (PEL). Whereas INDAP reaches out to farmers through programs such as

PDTI and the extension team, Teresa had reached out to PEL and oriented herself on her

own. The PEL-program is designed similarly to other large-scale programs financed by the

Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO). It was the latter program in which

Ricardo wanted Ana to enroll. Like PEL, CORFO offers programs targeted at indigenous

people with projects concerning development of tourism and renewable energy. One of the

drawbacks of PEL and CORFO in comparison to INDAP and PDTI is that successful

applicants receive the loan only when documenting already paid costs. This means that they

need to be already in possession of part or all of the capital necessary to carry out the project,

whereas beneficiaries of INDAP and PDTI projects receive funding in advance. Furthermore,

it is more complicated bureaucratically to apply for funding through CORFO. An employee

at the National Center for Innovation and Promotion of Sustainable Energy (CIFES), working

with funding to farmers all over Chile, told me that applying through CORFO required

knowledge that most small-scale farmers did not have due to their general low educational

level. It was aimed at more advanced entrepreneurs. Teresa came across exactly like that – as

more advanced and business-oriented than other entrepreneurs on the island.

In addition to being an outstandingly ambitious and enterprising woman, Teresa was oriented

outwards. While making regular trips to Isla Huapi, which she considered her home and her

land, as she expressed it, Teresa lived in Santiago. She had moved there when she was still

quite young (she was in her 40s now) and had at some point started her own business, which,

like herself, was based in the capital. There she sold Mapuche products with “original

identity”, as she said, such as jam made from berries native to Isla Huapi. The platforms she

used to promote her products were various fairs taking place in the municipality of

Providencia, one of the wealthier neighborhoods and commercial centers of Santiago.

According to Teresa, this business was surprisingly successful and encouraged her to start her

own brand of products, that of Antukuyen, meaning sun and moon in Mapudungun. Years

later, Teresa got the idea for the domes, turned her attention to island tourism, and started

planning and applying for funding to start a business on the island. For her businesses, both

the cabins and Antukuyen, Teresa has received several awards, local as well as national, one

of which resulted in a trip to Hawaii with the Indigenous World Business Forum. Her

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endeavors had resulted, among other things, in a social network that extended well beyond

Isla Huapi. Her sense of networking was noticeable also to me, with whom she wanted to

keep in contact for the purpose of expanding her range of potential business contacts, as she

said herself. On several occasions, she interrogated me about the possibilities of establishing

a platform in Europe. She did this in a rather formal and “professional” way, as though she

was presenting a business plan. Generally, her capacity for action was impressive. She saw

opportunities where others did not. Following the discourse of neoliberal development,

Teresa was a definitively seeking to divest herself of the determination to be poor (Han,

2012) by trying to become a self-responsible and self-managed (Foucault, 2004; Schild,

2007) person. Although it might be that she would have managed to succeed with her

business without support from state agencies, she kept engaging with development programs,

applying for projects. Like Ana, she aspired to become a successful entrepreneur. In some

ways, perhaps, she was a successful entrepreneur as her business seemed to constantly grow.

At her place, there was always something new going on – an expansion in the making. Thus,

although she was one of the few islanders who talked about the need for island society to

become autonomous, she was becoming successful in her entrepreneurial endeavors by tying

in with the state. Like Ana, she did not experience hardship in “getting projects”. Rather,

larger yields meant applying for larger funding grants. Although she was not dependent on

INDAP, the PDTI program or the PDTI team, she seized opportunities where she saw them

and aspired to larger-scale governmental funding (and yields) than other islanders.

While Teresa went to conferences, marketed and promoted herself and her business on

various digital platforms, lived in Santiago and was generally very ambitious, Ana favored a

simpler approach. She thought Teresa was overdoing it. On the Día de Mujer Indígena – the

Indigenous Woman’s Day – I sat next to Ana and her sister when Teresa took the stage.

Ana’s sister also lived on the island and had “gotten projects” through PDTI. Unlike Ana, she

applied for funding mainly to sustain her household economy. She raised hens and pigs that

she, from time to time, sold to other islanders. However, PDTI had arranged for this part of

the daylong event to take place at the children’s school in Llifén, not far from Futrono. From

a stage in this school, the PDTI team had invited entrepreneurs to present their businesses,

and Teresa had signed up. I noticed the two women next to me shaking their heads in

disapproval at Teresa’s entrance. On stage, Teresa presented her business – the domos. Using

a power point presentation she had made, she talked about her trip to Hawaii and showed

photos from the trip. Towards the end of her presentation, she also reflected on feminist

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aspects of her life as a businesswoman: being left to a life in the house, in the kitchen,

cooking for a man and raising children, was not her lot in life, she proudly proclaimed. When

I looked over, Ana put her head closer to mine and whispered: “Like we say, she is high

above (esta muy arriba), this woman. We like it better to be down here (estar acá bajo)”.

Ana used her hand to demonstrate, lowering her hand when talking about her sister and

herself. Ana and her sister were of the opinion that Teresa thought highly of herself in

comparison with them, and they criticized her for not being down to earth.

When Teresa had been granted funding to buy the solar panels with which she equipped her

domes, she had taken a photo of the solar panels constructed on her property. She posted this

photo on Facebook. When I saw the post on my Facebook profile, I showed it to Ana and

asked if she knew that Teresa had gotten solar panels. Ana looked at the post, remarking on

the comment beneath the photo that said “mis paneles” – “my panels”. She emphasized “mis”

while laughing. Then she turned to Jorge, who was sitting next to me, and said “this

woman… Growing up so poor. Now she wants it all.” She shook her head disapprovingly.

Ana compared Teresa’s way of being with that of Estefania, another entrepreneurial woman

on the island who had gotten solar panels at the same time as Teresa. They had both applied

for the same project. “Esa familia… Ellos no dejan para nada” – “This family… They don’t

give in for anything,” Ana said about Estefania, shaking her head. She went on talking about

the way Estefania and her family ran their business, which was located down at the port on

Isla Huapi: “Estefania in one place, this woman in another, then her daughter in yet another.

They are in every place, from Llifén to Futrono to Isla Huapi. In the summer, it’s worse.

They don’t make room for anybody else”, indicating that Estefania, trying to claim all

potential customers, was overly eager, cared mostly for herself, and did not even try to hide

it. With her son in Santiago, Ana explained, they look for projects where projects are to be

found, using every opportunity to apply for funding. Jorge was busy eating while Ana

rambled on, but he nodded eagerly in response to her discontent with Teresa and Estefania’s

way of doing business – that is, actively searching for projects beyond Isla Huapi.

For what was Teresa was being criticized? To make sense of Ana and her sisters’ critical

opinions that Teresa and Estefania wanted too much, there are several aspects to examine.

First, Teresa was relying neither socially nor economically on the island community to make

her business thrive. She did not rely on PDTI or on the social network that it or the

community provided, which held the potentiality of future customers. Rather, she had her

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own ways of obtaining funding and recruiting customers to her business. In some ways, in

relation to her business, this detached her from the sociality of the island community. She

was rarely to be seen in community meetings and she generally spent little time investing in

the social life on Isla Huapi. In his article about small-scale entrepreneurs in Chile, Di

Giminiani (2018a) refers to Monica De Hart (2010), who has done research on ethnic

identity, economic development and small-scale entrepreneurship in Latin America. Writing

about how ethnic difference is produced through neoliberal development policies, she

indicates that “the ethical dilemma that the subjects of ethno-entrepreneurship face is not

whether to participate in the market, but rather how to live with and participate in it in ways

that are complementary with other dimensions of their social lives and identities” (Di

Giminiani, 2018a, p. 10). I believe that Teresa was seen as not caring enough to enter into

reciprocal relations with the land and the community. Teresa lived in Santiago and visited the

island when she could – when she had business to look after. In that sense, seemingly treating

her affiliation with Isla Huapi in terms of business, and being independent of the means of

support that were necessary to others, was she becoming too individualistic? Was Teresa

engaging in social relations that oriented her away from her fellow islanders, and thus did not

care for the “common good”?

Alternatively, was it rather a question of jealousy? On Isla Huapi, tourists were not only a

limited resource, as Di Giminiani (2018a) also witnessed in the communities in which he did

research, but also perceived as an unequally distributed one. Danissa had access to land

overlooking beautiful scenery: the lake, the mountains in the back, and the sunset.

Meanwhile, she had not made it work with INDAP and PDTI. Ana, on the other hand, had

cleverly taken advantage of every opportunity given her by PDTI, and although her business

was located quite close to the island’s hub of activities, it was not as picturesque a location as

Teresa’s. Teresa’s domos, which were modern and comfortable while still “traditional” in

design, and which were likely to appeal to tourists’ imaginaries about rural Mapuche life,

were located by the waterfront next to a beach. Her social network extended far beyond Isla

Huapi, she promoted her business widely online, and she was overall successful in attracting

tourists on platforms where others were not. In fact, after I left the island, Teresa had a

national TV production team follow her down to Isla Huapi to do a story on her business.

Whatever the reason, Ana’s opinion echoed the voices of many islanders who did not want to

engage in a business that did not resonate with their sense of identity. Following up the idea

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that individual autonomy is inherent to the Mapuche production of personhood and thus not

tied to notions of belonging to an “ethnic” group, Course (2011) tries to place the

characterizations of Mapuche (rural) identity. Mapucheness, he writes, is “characterized by

being autochthonous, living off subsistence agriculture, being in a particular social relation to

a dominant society, and being poor” (Course, 2011, p. 165). He links Mapucheness, as

distinct from Chilean-ness and from being awinkado (having become more Chilean-like) to

notions of social class. This approach to Mapuche people’s sense of Mapucheness certainly

resonates with my own experiences from Isla Huapi. In positive and complimenting terms,

they would characterize others as being humilde. In contrast to a notion of being pobre

(poor), being humilde translates into being poor and humble, as opposed to flamboyant and

self-indulgent. In that sense, being humilde, which is a cherished and desirable trait among

islanders, is not compatible with the overtly self-centered, financially too successful, high-

end entrepreneur. Ana was not among the poorer islanders, as opposed to Danissa and Flavio.

I believe her criticism, rather, was that Teresa was not humble, in the sense that she had

forgotten where she had come from: the modest (and poor) farmer community of Isla Huapi.

CONCLUSION

In rural indigenous Chile, social policies of neoliberal development take form through a

discourse that enshrines the enterprising and responsible self. Development programs such as

PDTI and, by extension, the PDTI team, call this policy and discourse into being on the

ground. What, then, does it mean to be a successful entrepreneur responsible for one’s own

well-being, morally and economically, on Isla Huapi?

As I have shown in this chapter, being a successful entrepreneur implies, for the most part,

being able to pursue enrollment in development programs and to “get projects”. It entails

being on the search for governmental funding. Moreover, it implies aspiring to funding on an

increasingly large scale. When asked, many islanders called themselves entrepreneurs

(emprendedores) based on activities such as selling bread to fellow islanders from time to

time. These are nevertheless not the types of entrepreneurs I have written about in this

chapter. Rather, I have focused on those entrepreneurs who, in collaboration with state

agencies, have established “proper” businesses – mainly within tourism as this seems to be

the only possible sector on Isla Huapi within which an entrepreneur can expand and grow

yields.

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Becoming independent of development programs that provide governmental funding does not

seem to be the goal either of development agencies or of entrepreneurial islanders. Rather,

being in pursuit, searching for development with the state and in relation to the state, is what

seems to constitute self-generating economic activities. Searching for better lives through

entrepreneurial endeavors thus entails, in practice, a relation to development agencies, be it

Ana’s small-scale entrepreneurship or larger-scale entrepreneurial engagements such as

Teresa’s. In different ways, on different scales, Ana and Teresa represent the few successful

entrepreneurs on Isla Huapi – all of whom search for better lives with the state. What are the

results of these practices?

Engagement with neoliberal development programs undoubtedly allows for economic as well

as social differentiation as well as relations of indebtedness. Yet, it also allows people to

imagine less precarious futures. As such, I believe the programs maintain within them a

“governance of hope” (Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 3). While Di Giminiani claims that “Mapuche

rural residents’ inability to reconcile their aspirations of economic independence with the

reality of having to depend on ongoing welfare support informs their critiques of the

disempowering effects of indigenous social policies” (Di Giminiani, 2018a, p. 18), this is not

what I observed among tourist entrepreneurs on Isla Huapi. In contrast to Di Giminiani’s

interlocutors, entrepreneurs on Isla Huapi – engaged in development programs and proud to

be running established businesses – did generally not experience themselves as “in the

making”. First, they do not aspire to become economically independent of these programs,

but seek, as mentioned, continuous engagement with them as a strategy of securing the

future. Second, they do not perceive this as an opportunity to enhance a degree of political

autonomy. Seeking to alleviate poverty exclusively through neoliberal development

programs, the government leaves many rural farmers behind. Unable to take advantage of the

programs, many have to rely on monthly pensions. Islanders were discouraged about the

scanty amount of these pensions, which left them unable to alcanzar – to make ends meet.

This is where they directed their critiques of social policies. If entrepreneurs on Isla Huapi are

not “in the making”, but rather perceive themselves as entrepreneurs, then to what are they

aspiring? The entrepreneurs on Isla Huapi that I have written about in this chapter, those who

aspire to funding on an increasingly large scale, seek continuous engagement in the programs

in order to continue being entrepreneurs. In this context, state dependence thus elicits

powerful imaginaries of better lives, or lives worth living. It is through these imaginaries that

neoliberal development works on Isla Huapi as an effective means of governance.

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In this chapter, I have looked at how neoliberal development programs work as means of

governance on an individual level – by tying the individual, or encouraging individuals to tie

themselves, closer to the state. There is yet another means through which development

programs work to connect people to the state, namely through infrastructure. Large-scale

infrastructural projects, equally provided by neoliberal development programs, work on the

level of the community rather than with individuals. In the next chapter, I examine how

infrastructural produce connections to as well as disconnections from the state.

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6. “¡NO HAY AGUA!”: DIFFERENTIATION

PROCESSES AND PROMISES OF A WATER

IRRIGATION SYSTEM

In the previous chapter, I looked at the ways in which people are drawn into relations with the

state through engagement in development programs, a process that is spurred by aspirations

to better lives. In a similar vein, paying attention to development practices that elicit

imaginaries about the future, I focus in this chapter on relations between islanders and the

state. However, in this chapter I examine the way in which this relation plays out through

infrastructure or, more precisely, the process of constructing infrastructure. I am here

interested in infrastructure as material forms but also in the connective capacity of such forms

– as material conditions of possibility for human life (Harvey & Knox, 2015; Harvey, 2018 in

Venkatesan et al., 2018). Ethnographically, I examine the construction of Chile’s largest off-

grid solar power irrigation system on Isla Huapi and analyze the intertwining of emotional,

temporal, political and economic possibilities for human life that occur with it. In that

endeavor, I pay attention to receivers as well as providers (policy makers, technical experts

and mid-level administrators) of this infrastructure and focus analytically on the state

connections and disconnections that this infrastructural development project produces.

As I described in the introduction, islanders share hope for infrastructure and for

modernization as such. The irrigation system did not seem to be a development project for

which they cared much at first. It came to be a desirable infrastructural connection as soon as

islanders were made aware that they could use their connection to the irrigation system as a

source of indoor tap water – a long-desired amenity. As some islanders gained access to, i.e.

were connected to, the irrigation system before others, this infrastructure became a site of

political and economic struggle both among islanders themselves and between islanders and

state actors, experts and island authorities.

The struggle over access to water provided by the irrigation infrastructure highlights already

existing relations of difference and inequality that are aggravated by state presence. As I will

show, experts decide the allocation of access through logics of risk assessment and

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accountability. Meanwhile, they are themselves being subjected to the temporality of

infrastructural development and contingent relations of connection and disconnection as the

project’s financial resources run out. Starting out highly motivated, the experts involved in

the construction process end up frustrated and angry as islanders’ individual interests clash

with shared notions of progress and obstruct technological advances. In turn, they end up

appealing to islanders’ responsibilities to see this project through. Examining the social and

political life of infrastructure (Anand, 2017; Larkin, 2013), how it mediates time and space

(Anand, Gupta, & Appel, 2018; Harvey & Knox, 2015) as well as values of equality and

inequality, I show how the process of making an irrigation system and the promises this

infrastructure holds tie state and islanders together in particular ways.

A HEATED MEETING

During breakfast, Ana told me that there was going to be a meeting at the children’s school

that morning. I asked her if the meeting had been announced on the radio, but she told me

that her sister had called telling her that the PDTI team had been observed entering the ferry

in Futrono. They were on their way to the island. We were talking about going when Ana

received another phone call, this time from the women employed in CONAF – the National

Forestry Corporation. They were also on the ferry and had planned a meeting. They were

calling Ana to see if they could have lunch at her place after the meeting had ended. While

Ana agreed to this, securing income and continuity in her business, this meant she would not

be able to attend the meetings – neither that arranged by PDTI nor that by CONAF. Initially,

she had prepared a bean soup for lunch, which was already finished. Now, she said, she had

to prepare a new lunch. Facing customers, “hay que ser carne” – “it has to be meat”, she

claimed.

Arriving at the island’s school premises, I found Ricardo chatting with Ignacio and Enrique.

Ignacio, as mentioned, was the head of the regional department of irrigation run by the

INDAP. Enrique owned the company to which Ignacio had outsourced the job of completing

the project that he, together with his team, had designed, and of which he was in charge. The

project, as I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, consisted in the construction of

Chile’s largest off-grid (not connected to a central electricity grid), solar-powered irrigation

system. This, I understood, would be the topic of the meeting. As head of the PDTI team,

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Ricardo had helped organize the meeting, as he knew the people on Isla Huapi better than

both Ignacio and Enrique.

Half an hour after the meeting was supposed to start, Ignacio stood up in front of the little

crowd of people who had showed up. In a calm, but firm voice, he said that they had called

the meeting to update people on the irrigation project. The main network of pipelines, the red

matriz, as well as the first stage of the project was done, he said. He paused before

continuing: “What is missing are permits necessary to get the second stage going”. Talking in

a slow manner, stressing each word, he explained that for some families it would be

necessary to draw the pipelines through their neighbor’s plots or properties. For Enrique’s

company to do this job, they needed permits from the owners of the properties on which they

would lay down pipelines. So far, Ignacio said, they had received only a fraction of the

permits they needed to do this job. The work was planned to start in the beginning of

November, which meant that many only had four weeks to obtain permits from their

neighbors.

A woman raised her voice telling Ignacio that she faced a problem getting the permit because

her neighbor refused to give it to her, assuming that the pipelines would damage his plot and

crops. “For this reason”, she continued explaining, “you have to put the pipelines down along

the road to my plot instead of putting them down through his land”. Ignacio asked for her

name and Enrique, sitting on a table behind Ignacio, started searching in his papers.

Meanwhile, Ignacio responded to this woman by saying it would be too difficult and time-

consuming to dig up stones in the road and put down the pipelines all the way along the road

to avoid her neighbor’s plots. “The only solution here”, he said, “is that you obtain that

permit from your neighbor”. The woman got upset, repeating that her neighbor refused to

give it to her – what was she to do? Meanwhile, Enrique had apparently figured out what

property they were talking about and asked her if this neighbor was not her uncle. She

confirmed this, but added that he would not give her the permit regardless. Ignacio shook his

head and smiled. Slowly, while looking down, he walked up to the audience sitting on the

steps of the bleacher in the school’s gym where the meeting was being held. He crossed his

arms over his chest and looked up. Facing the audience he said with a loud voice: “Listen,

here we are all adults, aren’t we, who can talk to each other and find solutions. We [Enrique

and I] cannot go around to each and every one and do this job for you”.

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Ignacio was upset. He was angry. He went on to say that if they did not get the permits before

the beginning of November, they would have to find another contractor to do the job that

Enrique was now hired to do. This would be a very difficult task, finding a new contractor,

considering the small amount of governmental funding that was left to carry out the final

stages of the project. It sounded almost like a threat. Was there actually a possibility that the

project would not continue due to lack of resources? Or were Ignacio and Enrique tired of

islanders not being as invested in the project as they themselves had been? Continuing in a

load and harsh voice, Ignacio said: “We have done our job, now it is time you do yours. This

is not our project, it is yours,” he added before taking some steps back. Nobody answered.

Everyone was quiet. The echo of Ignacio’s voice resounded between the walls of the gym.

Then he turned around again and said that few people had shown up for the meeting. Still

angry, he asked, rhetorically, where the rest were. There were 95 beneficiaries – beneficiarios

– of this project in total, but he could only count 20 present. “So,” he said, “the question

remains: where are the rest?” Having kept quiet until this point, Enrique now spoke up as

well, saying he was tired of people not showing responsibility. Like Ignacio, he was clearly

upset: “It is okay for me to repair broken tubes, but when I have to spend money and time to

repair broken tubes because people apparently lack interest to take care of the things they are

given – with this I have a problem.”

This meeting took place in October. Over the course of the eight months I had lived on the

island, this was the first time that I witnessed Ignacio and Enrique directing their frustration

and anger towards the farmers directly. The project had already been stagnating before I

arrived in early March. Only the first stage of the project was completed when they were

confronted with a technical challenge causing a serious setback to the project’s schedule. The

frustrations and tensions related to the construction of the irrigation system had been building

up ever since and culminated in this meeting. What were the preconditions of this emotional

outbreak? To what new relations had the construction process given life?

Following the construction of what was to become Chile’s largest off-grid, solar-powered

irrigation system, I will in this chapter take a closer look at what occurs at the interface

between the recipients of infrastructural development and the experts, constructors and mid-

level administrators who represented the state. What are the expectations tied to this project?

What does it promise, and to whom? I argue that there is a difference in different people’s

expectations. Different actors involved have different perceptions of what the infrastructure

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promises. For national policy makers, the project appeals to proactive politics of climate

change. By developing environmentally friendly energy production schemes that coincide

with economic growth among small-scale farmers, the project is assumed beneficial for

everyone involved. For experts – engineers, consultants and administrators – the project is

expected to proceed temporally and financially according to the project plan. For islanders,

the planned infrastructure is tied to expectations of, or at least hope for, life-enhancing

material development that benefits all islanders equally. When expectations and promises

regarding infrastructure prove unfulfilled, as this ethnographical vignette suggests, we see

how notions of responsibility come to play a central role in the tense relations between

experts and islanders.

A PROJECT FRAMED WITHIN POLICIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

To return to the meeting with which I opened this chapter, it is evident that both Ignacio and

Enrique were frustrated and expressed this frustration with anger and accusations. As Ignacio

said, they had done their job, and now he felt it was time that the islanders did theirs. He

wanted them to get hold of permits allowing Enrique and his employees to continue the

construction work. But to many islanders it proved difficult to obtain these permits,

particularly as it demanded a neighbor’s permission to use his or her land. As I discussed in

chapter 4, islanders’ were quite protective of their properties and did not allow others to use

or occupy their land just like that. Appealing to their sense of adulthood, Enrique demanded

that they take responsibility and action. These demands, verging toward threats, would most

likely not have happened some months earlier, when the social adversity they experienced

among islanders had not yet taken a toll on their motivation to finish the project. Expressed

were accusations of irresponsibility, most clearly by Enrique saying he had a problem with

repairing pipes that had broken as a result of people lacking the interest to take care of the

things “given them”. What caused Ignacio and Enrique to believe that people did not care?

Before exploring this question further, I will dwell on the statement that this infrastructure or

project was “given” to the islanders. Who had given it to them and why?

In her presidential speech on May 21, 2008, Michelle Bachelet declared, “Climate change is

the great ethical issue for humanity of this century, just as peace was the issue of the 20th

century” (National Climate Change Action Plan 2008-2012, p. 6). In the subsequent

presidential period, the government of Chile took concrete steps to adapt to the effects of

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climate change. In 2010, the same year that Chile became the first Latin American country to

join the OECD, the Ministry of Environment was formed, as well as a national Climate

Change Office. In this context, the National Climate Change Action Plan (2008-2012) was

made. Acknowledging that the warming of the earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years has

been caused by anthropogenic emissions and thus by human activity, the main objective

outlined in the Action Plan was:

To minimize the adverse impacts of climate change through integrated actions that

determine the country’s level of vulnerability to climate change and identify the various

adaptation options to confront the impacts of climate change, while at the same time

mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (National Climate Change Action Plan 2008-

2012, p. 40).

With this objective to minimize impacts and make necessary adaptions, the Chilean

government aimed at fulfilling the commitment it made in signing the United Nations

Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Minister’s Council of the National

Environmental Commission, including Chilean academics and researchers, developed the

Action Plan. The policy outlined in the document and, as we shall see, the execution of it,

represented a top-down approach to tackle what is perceived as a high-pressure climate issue

of great national as well as international concern.

For the Chilean government to come to grips with the environmental challenges that lay

ahead in 2008, a series of adaptation measures were taken. Among these was the

development of technology to improve the efficiency of irrigation systems for crops with

high water demand as well as large-scale development of so-called non-conventional

renewable energy resources, which included wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass,

biogas and solar power. Among others, these political measures resulted in the financing of

Chile’s largest off-grid, solar-powered irrigation system, which was located on Isla Huapi.

The government initiated this project to cope with increasing water scarcity, which resulted

from decreasing rainfall. While the farmers of Isla Huapi depend on their agricultural

activities, deteriorating harvests did not seem to be their greatest concern. For decades, they

have fought the government, attempting to force it to provide the basic services of sanitized

drinking water and electricity. While islanders still lack these services, they have, ironically,

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been provided instead with a system aimed at transporting water from the surrounding lake to

their plots. Because of the government’s environmental concerns and its particular

conceptualization of water scarcity, the necessary adaptations to confront the impact of

climate change were made at the expense of the farmers’ requests for basic services.

Nevertheless, Ignacio and Enrique claimed that this was their, that is the islanders’, project.

On the level of national policy, the project intended simultaneously to address concerns about

climate change and economic growth, while still enhancing living conditions among rural

indigenous farmers living in materially and economically precarious circumstances. On the

ground, however, the project brought about specific relations of connections and

disconnections between the state and the island community.

EXPECTATIONS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE

In his review of anthropological literature on infrastructure, Brian Larkin notes that

“infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter … They are things and

also the relation between things” (2013, p. 329). They bridge distances and allow for time-

space compressions. However, the emergence of infrastructure takes time. If we pay attention

to this time and “think of infrastructures as unfolding over many different moments with

uneven temporalities, we get a picture in which the social and political are as important as the

technical and logistical” (Anand et al., 2018, p. 17). What relations resulted from the process

of constructing the irrigation system on Isla Huapi? When were they formed, and what

connections and disjunctions did they bring about? The process by which infrastructure

emerged brought together different actors, ideas, and spheres of knowledge, as well as

expectations about the future. As with other infrastructure projects (see e.g. Anand, 2017;

Harvey & Knox, 2015), the irrigation project was carried out over a series of delays, ruptures

and stagnations. Uneven temporalities affected all actors involved in the project in slightly

different ways. The expectations with which people encountered this project changed over

time.

Infrastructures, such as the irrigation system, elicit hopes for progress and modernization.

This is particularly true prior to construction, but during construction as well, when

infrastructural projects appear merely as promises about the future. Islanders consider the

lack of basic infrastructure on Isla Huapi a sign of longstanding governmental neglect and

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indifference to the citizens living there. In that regard, hopes for infrastructural projects to

materialize coincided with claims to state care. Recounting the moment when materials for

the construction of the irrigation system started arriving on the island, several islanders talked

about the relief with which they met this sight. It was not so much that they desired this

specific project: rather, it was a token of the government’s willingness to care for the island

by fulfilling their promise. They had kept their word. As infrastructural projects hold within

them potentiality and hopes for better lives, they also hold within them potentiality of failure

and disappointment. Because unforeseen connections and disjunctions are likely to occur

during the life span of an infrastructural project, such projects elicit a range of emotional

responses. In focusing, as I do here, on living alongside an infrastructural promise and a

construction process, it becomes clear that what matters to people and what the islanders are

concerned to negotiate are knowledge claims, distribution of resources and assessments based

on values pertaining to work ethic and success. This is what spurs emotional responses like

the frustration demonstrated by Ignacio and Enrique when things did not go as planned.

Why did Ignacio, as engineer and head of the project design and execution, blame islanders

for not taking responsibility? In what follows, I focus on the interplay between, on the one

hand, engineers and other professionals, and on the other, inhabitants of the community of

Isla Huapi. Paying attention to the temporal aspects of the irrigation system, I examine the

ways in which, when things do not go as planned, the construction process creates a need in

people to find answers. When they search for answers, notions of expertise, work ethic,

inequality and discrimination become interlinked. I will start by outlining different people’s

approaches to the problem in question, from the viewpoints both of those lacking access to

the irrigation system and those in charge of the project. The latter, and in particular Ignacio,

perceived the problem as related to islanders’ misunderstanding of the situation and their low

educational level.

“NO HAY AGUA” – AN ISSUE OF COMPREHENSION?

In 2012, as already mentioned, the Ministry of Agriculture set in motion the building of

Chile’s largest off-grid, solar-powered irrigation system – on Isla Huapi. The responsibility

for designing and carrying out the project was handed down to INDAP, specifically to the

regional irrigation department headed by Ignacio.

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After a meeting with INDAP in Santiago, I was put in contact with Ignacio. Before we went

to the island, I met with Ignacio at a hotel in Valdivia, a nearby city. The aim of the meeting

was for him to inform me about the irrigation project on the island. Furthermore, he wanted

to know more about my research. During this meeting, Ignacio explained basic technological

aspects of the irrigation system they were constructing. In principle, they had finished

building the system, but had encountered certain problems that affected the completion of the

project. The water level in the surrounding lake had decreased to such a degree that two of

the accumulators pumping water from the lake up into the system were no longer working. At

the moment, he told me, the pumps were literally hanging in the air above the water surface.

The large, black tubes visible in the photo below were supposed to be completely submerged.

This situation, which had to be solved, caused Ignacio’s department additional work. They

had to find financial support as well as a work force to rebuild the construction. The project’s

completion would therefore be significantly delayed. As we will see, this alteration of the

original plan provoked historically grounded reactions and strained relationships between

some islanders and engineers, reinforcing islanders’ ambivalent relation to the state.

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However, according to Ignacio, there were three reasons why the water level in the lake had

decreased more than their high-tech calculations had anticipated. First, the farmers living

alongside Río Bueno, a river connected to the lake, were extracting larger quantities of water

than they were actually allowed to do. Second, the capitalists behind the growing tourist

industry situated in the lake’s surroundings bought additional water rights to sustain their

green gardens and flower displays. Staying at one of these hotels on a couple of occasions, I

realized the gardens were indeed impressive, even magnificent in their color displays. Third,

during the short period of time when the irrigation system was operative and accessible to

some people on Isla Huapi, the farmers were tapping more water from the dams than they

were told they should. In other words, to Ignacio, the source of the error was not expected to

be found in their technologically advanced calculations of water levels. Rather, as their

calculations had not included social factors and actual versus projected water usage, Ignacio

focused his explanation on the multiple ways in which too much water was being transported

from the lake. Still, this problem was neither technically nor financially insolvable.

The social issues arising from the postponement of the project’s completion date had become

Ignacio’s main challenge. According to Ignacio, islanders did not understand the

technicalities of the construction process and had started complaining. Generally, he said,

most people on the island did not understand the explanations given them about the technical

functioning of the irrigation system. Even though Ignacio had offered explanations in simpler

language, as he expressed it, islanders did not grasp, for example, how the system could work

without batteries to store the energy that the solar panels produced – that it was a system that

operated “automatically”, as he said. Furthermore, Ignacio and his team of workers had

stumbled upon other issues. The farmers did not respond to the infrastructure as the engineers

had anticipated. His department had wanted to hire a social scientist to help resolve the

problems they encountered, but they were already on a tight budget. As I was an

anthropologist myself, he was content with the interest I had taken in this project. He wanted

me to help him out with what he called its social aspects.

According to Ignacio, one of the things many islanders did not seem to understand was the

process through which people gained access to the irrigation system. This had now become a

great source of conflict. The whole project had been designed to be executed in three stages.

The first one involved building the infrastructural technology and connecting it to the plots of

29 farmers. The rest of the farmers on the island were to be incorporated in the second and

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third stages. Before I arrived on the island, contractors had installed three solar-panel stations

on different sites on the island. These solar panels, operating automatically, that is, without

energy storage, provided two accumulators, one on each side of the island, with power to

pump water from the lake into the four dams. These water dams had been built at different

sites on the island – all mountaintops. A rather significant difference in altitude between the

sites of the water dams and the plots, was necessary in order to transport the water – it had to

flow. Leading out from the bottom of these water dams was an intricate system of

subterranean pipes spanning across the island – the main network. To the main network of

subterranean pipes, new pipes were connected – also underground. The latter sets of pipes

(like arms attached to the main body) carried water running in the main network down to

various farmers’ plots. Here, the water surfaced anew through water posts. Each property was

to have one water post. When I arrived on the island, the first stage of the project had already

been completed: 29 families’ plots had been provided with water posts and connection to the

main network of underground pipes. The second stage of the project, which they started

working on while I was still there, was to provide another group of farmers, the second

group, with the same connection. The third and final stage, in which the remaining

unconnected farmers on the island were to gain access to the hydraulic network, was still in

the planning phase. The reasons why Ignacio claimed people on Isla Huapi did not

understand this process seemed to stem from his experiences with the problem at hand.

People in the second and third stages of the project, those deprived of material advantages

others already enjoyed, would complain to him personally of not “getting their water”. They

would tell him indignantly “¡no hay agua!” – “there is no water!”

Ignacio seemed to be right in this regard: many people were complaining that there was no

water. One day, I ran into don Pablo as he was crossing the street dividing his garden from

the field in which his horses grazed. Don Pablo was an older man and, like many others on

Isla Huapi, he had lived his whole life on the island. When he asked me what I was doing

there, I said I was an anthropologist and that I had come to study the irrigation system and its

impact on society. Over the years, he replied, INDAP had come to the island with many

projects – not all of them functional. The irrigation system, he continued, had supposedly

worked for a day or two before it was shut down. Meanwhile, don Pablo informed me, he had

seen no trace of water. I frequently encountered such stories when I mentioned the irrigation

system, the essence of the complaint being that it did not work, and that there was no water

whatsoever.

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When Ignacio visited the island, as he would do from time to time (mainly to check up on the

construction process), he arranged community meetings with the help of the PDTI team. The

intention of these meetings, commonly announced on the local radio station, was to inform

people about the current state of progress. I participated in these meetings, and, just as

Ignacio had told me, what people wanted to know was when they would get water. Typically,

a person (man or woman) would raise their hand, explain where on the island they lived, and

say that there was no running water. They said they had been promised this a long time ago,

but that there was still no sign of water. In one meeting, after such a comment, Ignacio

keeping his eyes riveted on me, didactically embarked on his usual explanation about the

three-stage-design of the project, encouraging people to be patient. It was obvious to Ignacio

that people were complaining because they did not understand the three-stage principle of the

construction process, and that this three-stage process was the reason why they did not have

water.

In June, after taking part in several meetings and witnessing the same procedure in every

single one of them, I was invited to the small town of Río Bueno where the irrigation

department’s offices were located, an hour or two from Futrono. They wanted my advice on

how to better communicate with farmers so that they could solve some of the social issues

they were experiencing on the island. The whole department’s staff participated in the

meeting. They were six employees with expertise in agricultural engineering, some of them

with first-hand experience of life on Isla Huapi, in addition to the boss, Ignacio himself.

During the meeting, Ignacio explained the social aspects of how the project had unfolded: the

main challenge, as they saw it, was translating the three stage roll out of the irrigation system.

No matter how many times he explained it, Ignacio said, people did not seem to grasp the fact

that not everyone could receive water at the same time because it took time to construct the

system. Instead, he said, they kept complaining “no hay agua”. During the meeting, I

proposed that islanders’ complaints were mere expressions of the frustration they felt as they

were made to wait. Ignacio did not seem to care much for this proposal, perhaps because it

did not provide him with an answer that solved his problems. To Ignacio, the sad reality was

that they had encountered problems, among these the fluctuating water levels in the lake and

ruptures in tubes buried underground. Such problems caused delays and therefore economic

challenges, which, in turn, prevented them from carrying out the project within the projected

period. To those affected, postponing the completion of the second and third stages

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intensified the already existing experience of subordination to those included in the first

stage.

His temporal expectations, altered and readjusted several times already, were, according to

Ignacio, incongruent with the temporal expectations that the islanders had for the project. No

matter the language used, or how frequently he clarified it, people would approach him with

the same question: Why have I not received my water yet? Ignacio seemed to believe that the

farmers actually did not understand his explanations. He wanted my input on how to make it

easier for them to understand him – to overcome what he saw as a problem of low

educational standard among the inhabitants of Isla Huapi. He was of the opinion that if the

farmers had understood the challenging circumstances of the project and its progression, they

would not have asked him why they had not received their water – a question to which he had

given answers innumerable times.

The issue, however, was probably not one of comprehension. Rather, people seemed to

understand perfectly well that the construction process had been hindered by various

technical and, in turn, financial problems. When I asked people affected by the delay,

generally those in the second and third stage of the project who complained, they would

provide me with more or less the same explanation Ignacio had given during his meetings.

They would tell me that the accumulators, the water pumps, were left in the air unable to

pump water into the basins, and that this problem cost money to solve. They understood very

well that there were technical and economic challenges to overcome before the construction

of water pipes could continue. However, they were frustrated not by the prospects of not

having their plots irrigated, but rather that the opportunity to get water transported to their

houses had been put on hold. Expressing this frustration, several islanders added that “they

who are coming here”, the engineers, had too little knowledge about the fluctuations in the

lake’s water level. If the engineers had cared to talk to them earlier on in the process, they

said, already at the stage of planning, they could have informed the engineers about the

fluctuating water levels, which they claimed to be a case of periodic, seasonal change.

Islanders with whom I talked blamed the engineers for not considering their local experiences

with the workings of nature. As one man told me: “We have lived on this island for many

generations. We have much experience and know the lake, but they the engineers did not

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listen to us. They come, take pictures and leave without talking to us”. Meanwhile, Ignacio

explained his team of professionals’ failed calculations by pointing to reckless water

extraction done by owners of large-scale businesses in the surrounding area. In turn, Ignacio

found it difficult to make islanders come to terms with the delay that this (according to him)

unforeseen problem had created. Ignacio was clearly inclined to assume a causal relation

between inadequate appreciation of his explanations and low educational levels. Hence, as he

saw it, the tendency to repeat the same questions or to state the obvious (“¡no hay agua!”).

This causality did not exclusively originate from the experiences he had with farmers’

requests for water. There were other, to Ignacio, coinciding signs that farmers did not seem to

understand the technical aspects, as he called them, of how the irrigation system worked.

I was invited to join Ignacio one day when he came to the island to assess the progress of the

construction. We were eating lunch at Ana’s house when I asked Ignacio about the difference

between the aspersor- and goteo-systems, two distinct methods of irrigation between which

the farmers could choose. The Spanish word aspersor means “sprinkler”, while goteo

signifies “drop”, as in water dripping. The two systems irrigate plots differently. When I

asked Ignacio about the difference, he told me first about the sprinkler system. This system

was apparently that which most farmers wanted, because, according to Ignacio, it looked and

seemed most efficient. When he told farmers that this was not necessarily the case, that only

75 to 80 percent of the water sprinkled was absorbed in the ground due to winds and general

evaporation, they did not grasp the difference. Even though he explicitly recommended

farmers to choose the trickling irrigation system, the goteo-system, since this was the most

efficient if one did not cultivate fodder, they would insist on the sprinklers, the aspersor-

system. Probably, Ignacio said, it was because the sprinkler system resembled rain, so that

people were more comfortable with it – “it resembles something they already know”, he

concluded. Islanders, on the other hand, claimed that the aspersor-system was the most

efficient regardless of what you cultivated and thus chose this system.

On inspection day, Ignacio checked the condition of the water posts (hidrantes) that workers

from the construction team had installed in plots all over the island. They were central to the

functioning of the irrigation system because whenever farmers wanted to irrigate their plots,

these water posts served as the main connection point to which they attached metal tubes

distributing water throughout the plot in question. Some of these water posts, firmly

grounded with cement and connected underground to the intricate system of subterranean

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pipes spanning across the island, had come loose from the foundation. Furthermore, it turned

out that the subterranean water pipes had ruptured or cracked. Apparently, destroyed water

posts as well as ruptured and cracked underground pipes were common finds during these

inspections, and demanded repair. The damage to the infrastructure was commonly caused by

the activities of heavy and fierce cattle who grazed where the water posts were. During one

inspection, Ignacio, noticing damage to a water post, strictly demanded that the farmer who

was present at the inspection and whose plot they were inspecting take his cattle to graze

elsewhere, out of reach of the water posts. The farmer nodded in agreement, but kept quiet

while Ignacio explained to the farmer, in his didactic manner, that regardless of the numerous

reparations the infrastructure would continue to be destroyed unless he removed his animals.

The farmer, like others, owned more than one fenced plot, so Ignacio suggested he let the

animals graze on one of the others. Without more being said, we left the farmer and walked

back to the car parked alongside the dirt road. Ignacio mumbled that he could not understand

how he was going to make the farmers care (cuidar) for the irrigation system. Again, he

assumed it had to do with inhabitants’ generally low educational level. They just did not

understand. This is why, he said, INDAP did not invest in the latest and most expensive

technology for this project.

Experiences like these led Ignacio and his co-workers to believe that there was a

communication barrier caused by lack in formal education, which, in turn, created major

social issues and made it hard for him to do his job – to complete the project. Repeatedly, due

to what Ignacio conceptualized as social issues, he had to make new calculations – financial

as well as in terms of scheduling – and work out an updated plan of operation. The ongoing

maintenance frustrated Ignacio because he, like the islanders, understood the infrastructure to

be a linear process which steadily progressed towards an end point: the completion of the

infrastructure, and thus of the project itself. However, infrastructural projects repeatedly

prove to be open-ended works-in-progress. Infrastructure is, as Akhil Gupta approaches it

through his focus on the relation between infrastructures and their futures, a process

“characterized by multiple temporalities, open futures, and the constant presence of decay

and ruination” (Gupta, 2018, p. 62). The divergence between temporal expectations for

infrastructural building initiatives as planned projects on the one hand, and as an open-ended

processes on the other, is partly what causes the frustration experienced by Ignacio, Enrique

and the islanders themselves. The promise of infrastructure as the result of singular projects

is, as Penny Harvey (2018a, p. 82) points out in relation to road constructions in Peru,

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tenuous. They might be perceived, at times even expected, to take place on the ground as

single operations. In reality, however, infrastructural projects do not take place in a linear

fashion, nor in the form of a single operation. Rather, “what emerges on the ground appears

in fits and starts. Some aspects of a project appear long before others, while some

components of a system might begin to fail or decompose before others have even begun”

(Harvey, 2018a, p. 82). The experience of temporal disillusionment with the irrigation project

among engineers, construction workers and islanders alike generated a contestation of

knowledge and knowledge claims. The irrigation system, perceived and presented as a

singular project, revealed itself to consist of a multitude of different ones that emerged at

different times. Temporal expectations fell apart and the promise of infrastructure cracked.

As a result of temporal disillusionment, knowledge of the technical experts came to stand in a

conflictual relation to knowledge held by local inhabitants. While Ignacio found that many

islanders were incapable of understanding not only the project’s temporal design but also the

need to care for the infrastructure in order for it not to break down, islanders thought Ignacio

paid too little attention to their own knowledge about the environment. The engineering

practices that went into the project carried with it a normative configuration of knowledge.

Ignacio had the engineering expertise necessary to produce the infrastructure that not only

brought farmers water but also contributed to the modernization of the island which islanders

sought. Ignacio’s knowledge as a civil engineer, however, was necessarily confused with

notions of social and moral improvements. To him, it was clear that the infrastructure would

not become functional unless the islanders learnt how to care for it, a sense of care that

harbored notions of responsibility – and perhaps Ignacio had a point. After all, there were

repeated ruptures to the underground pipes and the water posts as fierce cattle trampled over

and rubbed against them.

The project itself was launched as one that, in environmental friendly ways, would increase

the yields of agricultural production. Moreover, in line with the development programs that I

examined in the previous chapter, the irrigation system was to encourage the self-managed,

entrepreneurial spirit of the farmer. In practice, the irrigation system was not easy to operate.

Particularly not for farmers who had chosen the sprinkling system (the aspersor-system).

Each household received a number of pipes. Each time they wanted to irrigate their field,

they first had to carry these pipes from their houses to the field in question (sometimes

located quite far away). Secondly, once there, they had to put together these pipes, which

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were long and heavy, according to a specific pattern that optimized irrigation. Then, thirdly,

they were to connect these pipes to the water post. When done irrigating, they finally had to

reverse the process and carry the pipes back to the house for storage. The process was

complicated and inconvenient. However, the specific problem that this infrastructure aimed

to solve through engineering expertise was not the same problem that occupied most

islanders and to which they sought a solution. To most people, the irrigation system held

potential value primarily as an infrastructural means to provide not their plots but their homes

with running water. It is in this capacity that the infrastructure rendered them political

subjects contesting uneven distribution of access to the system.

UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION OF ACCESS TO WATER

As a mode of government, modernist development of infrastructure is a well-known device

(Harvey & Knox, 2015; Mitchell, 2009). Writing about hydraulic infrastructure and

citizenship in Mumbai, Nikhil Anand (2017) focuses on the myriad more-than-human

relations which make up this infrastructure: steel, cement, “nature”, laws, social histories, and

political practices. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), Anand seeks to theorize the

social life of infrastructure and suggests that it is a “… social-material assemblage that not

only constitutes the form and performance of the liberal (and neoliberal) city but also

frequently punctures its performances” (2017, p. 6). Infrastructure entangles efforts of modes

of government, shaping the role between political subjects and state in specific ways.

However, this relationship is never complete. As Anand points out, infrastructure comprises

processes always in formation. Infrastructure is not only a material becoming but also a

sociopolitical one. With infrastructure, new sociality and politics are always emergent, which

means that there will always be political negotiations. Furthermore, as infrastructure breaks

down, so do efforts to govern through infrastructure – what is elsewhere called liberal

government (Mitchell, 2009). Anand’s ethnographic site is the city of Mumbai, very different

from the rural context of Isla Huapi. Nevertheless, with regard to the social life of

infrastructure, there are striking similarities in the workings of infrastructure that Anand

describes and those that I witnessed taking place on Isla Huapi.

Anand demonstrates how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control,

maintain, and manage the city’s water systems – its infrastructure. Examining negotiations of

citizenship through social histories offers a fruitful entry to understanding political

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negotiations of water access on Isla Huapi as well. Like Anand (2017), other anthropologists

have studied the relationship between people and the state through a focus on the social life

of infrastructure, for example Antina Von Schnitzler (2013, 2016). In her book, Democracy’s

Infrastructure (2016), she focuses on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters in post-

apartheid South Africa. Instead of focusing on negotiations of citizenship, she explores the

ways in which democracy takes shape through techno-political forms. Nevertheless, what

both Anand and Von Schnitzler do is to examine how political subjects come into being

through a focus on infrastructure and subsequently in relation to the governing state. The

irrigation system provided a new connection – the unfinished relation between islanders and

the state. Through prospects of a better life and experiences of uneven distribution of access,

the irrigation system generated certain politics that contested notions of equality.

What most farmers were eager to obtain was the irrigation system’s byproduct. After decades

of fighting for their right to electricity and sanitized drinking water, they finally received

water – just in a different form. To mitigate this divergence, farmers were encouraged by

Ignacio, but especially by the PDTI team, to use the irrigation system as an infrastructural

means to transport water into their houses. As soon as the irrigation system was up and

running and they gained access to the hydraulic network, they could connect self-purchased

pipes to the water post in their plots and in this way transport water to their houses through

the pipes. While irrigating plots was not something they had done manually, relying instead

on the rain, transporting water from the lake to the houses was. The hardship of everyday life

resulted not from the precarious conditions of rainfall, but from the lack of access to water

taps in the household. In some households, water taps were already installed and in use as

they were connected by pipes to wells. However, the wells were too few and benefitted only

those people who had a well on their own property or their neighbor’s. Furthermore, this

required great investment in materials, as an overhead water tank was needed to ensure

pressure. Thus, the need to carry water manually on a daily basis involved hard work that hit

the poor hardest. Those claiming there was no water thus held Ignacio equally responsible for

reifying structures of social inequality within the island community. This becomes apparent

when taking a closer look at the everyday life of Rosa.

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EMERGING FORMS OF INEQUALITY – AN AFTERNOON AT ROSA’S

I had meant to visit Rosa many times, but I had not been able to locate her house. With

careful instructions from one of her neighbors, I was eventually on the right track. In order to

transport material, the engineering company that was building the irrigation system had

improved most of the island’s roads. However, there was no improved road leading to Rosa’s

house. Even from the material surroundings, it was clear that Rosa’s place was not one of the

prioritized households in the state’s process of developing infrastructure on the island. If that

had been the case, as with other households I knew of, a newly constructed or improved road

would have led there.

From one of the main roads, then, I had to make a left turn up the grassy hillside. When I

reached the top, I could see traces of a road that was now overgrown. I followed this path

leading down the northern hillside of the island until I reached a barbed wire fence. On the

other side of the fence, two dogs came running toward me followed by Rosa’s daughter,

whose attention the dogs’ barking had caught. The young girl looked happy to see me; she

said her mother had been waiting for me. When I reached the house, I saw Rosa through the

doorway. She was working on a dough that she would use to make bread.

After her husband died, Rosa, still in her thirties, became a single mother of two, a girl and a

boy, now both in primary school. For a while, she enjoyed the company of Alejandro, her

boyfriend. He had taken on paid work at the farm where I lived, and it was through him that I

had gotten to know Rosa. After Alejandro’s brother died and left him with a farm and

additional livestock down in Osorno, Rosa had once again found herself alone with her two

children. This happened recently. Before he left, Alejandro had built the house in which they

now lived, but because Alejandro had to leave, it was still unfinished inside – lacking doors, a

wall and painting. Without Alejandro, Rosa had no income aside from the sparse state

pensions she received once a month and the little money she would earn from occasionally

selling bread to other islanders on such occasions as the monthly distribution of the state

pensions. It is safe to say that she found herself in a precarious situation, in many respects.

Together with her children, I helped her get the bread done on this day. Halfway into the

baking, the gas ran out. In order to get the rest of the bread baked, we moved the activity

down the hillside to the old house in which she had lived before moving to the new one.

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Here, she had a wood-fired stove she would use when gas ran out and there was no money to

buy more. While we walked around the property searching for wood to maintain the fire, she

was comparing the older house to the new one. Even though the old house was dirty and had

started to fall apart, at least it was painted, she said. She was planning to paint the new house

yellow, she continued. She looked content when talking about plans for the future. She had

already purchased the paint, but she would not be able to paint it until she had gotten access

to the irrigation water. Her faced hardened as she went on to explain that they, the engineers,

had told her repeatedly that the water would arrive soon, but they had said the same thing for

a long time. “Es pura política”, she claimed, pointing to manipulation and lies with which

politicians in many cases were associated.

Generally, mistrust was placed in the business of politics and people would not hesitate to

term something política. While I examine more closely the phenomenon of política in the

next chapter, it suffices for now to note that whenever promises were made in which islanders

did not believe or that did not benefit people the way they had expected, they deemed it a

case of política. In a similar vein, people would say son palabras no más, meaning that these

were empty words resulting in no action. These expressions were used in daily conversations

about the irrigation water project. All families included in the project had been promised

access to water through the irrigation system. But these promises had been made a long time

ago – in 2012, when the project began – and at present, only 32 of the families enjoyed a full

operative system. Discussing different approaches to the study of infrastructure, Brian Larkin

(Larkin, 2013) notes that, in general, the building of infrastructure creates expectations of

progress and freedom. Contrary to progress and freedom, what Rosa and others expected was

to be let down. While hopes were betrayed, expectations of la política were fulfilled.

Rosa’s was one of 68 households that were still lacking access to water, which an operative

irrigation system would provide her. To her great frustration, there was no water running

through the pipes passing her territory. Her animals – the two dogs, some chickens and a

duck, which was very persistent in its wish to enter the house – tracked dirt onto the floor and

stained it with animal excrement. To the fleas invading her house, this created excellent

breeding conditions. Every day, Rosa would bring two barrels of 26 liters each down to the

lake. If the weather allowed, she and the kids would have a bath before filling the two barrels

with water and carry them back up to the house. Although this daily routine provided her

with water in the household, the amount of water she managed to carry up the steep hillside

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from the lake every day served only for cooking and drinking: it was just enough to cover

basic needs. Hence, the floors remained unwashed. Access to water and, in particular,

sanitized water had become an urgent matter to Rosa after social services had started paying

her house visits.

I helped Rosa fetch water on this day while the dough was rising. The children came along.

We had finished with the bath, and I was standing knee-deep in the water, concentrating on

keeping the barrel under the surface so that it would fill with water. While I struggled, one of

the children advised me not to pour too much water in it, because it would be too heavy to

carry back. Their mother was strong, they told me, but normally they themselves would carry

less. Rosa glanced at me with an expression I understood as worried, before she continued

filling her own barrel with water. We wrapped up and started the 400 meters’ climb back to

the house. Rosa was moving at an impressive pace, while I was struggling some 20 meters

behind her. The children offered their help, but I turned down the offer, thinking that they

were only children, while I was an adult and should manage this on my own. I reached Rosa,

who had taken a break while waiting for me to catch up with her. She advised me to carry the

barrel on my shoulders, saying this was easier. Then she paused, making no sign of getting up

from the barrel on which she sat. She looked at me quickly before turning her face downward

and looking into her lap. Sitting like this, she asked me if I thought she treated the children

badly by having them help her in the kitchen and with the heavy work of fetching water. I

told her no, explaining how I had had to help my mom all the time when I was a child,

especially after my father left and we had to do everything ourselves. Besides, I said, I know

many parents on the island who have their children help them out. She nodded and said that

she was herself of the opinion that her children had to learn how to manage. It was not only

that she needed their help. Perhaps one day she would not be around anymore, and then the

children would have to know how to make bread or fetch water. No, they would have to learn

how to manage on their own, she repeated.

The reason why she had asked me, she explained, was that some time back two social

workers from Futrono had come to her house. They were both concerned whether Rosa was

able to provide her children with the healthy environment young children needed. They had

not only questioned the fact that she made them work, but also the hygienic conditions in

which they lived. They had pointed out the poor quality of the water they used both for

cooking and for drinking. Furthermore, they questioned the unhygienic state of the household

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in which these children were growing up. In her defense, Rosa had told them that the water

they drank was boiled in order to eliminate possible bacteria, and that the food she served her

children was cooked. The first of the two social workers was, according to Rosa, the worst

one. She was uptight and had no understanding of life on the island: the social worker, she

said, failed to understand that it was impossible for Rosa to keep the house clean with the

infrastructure available to her. Furthermore, it was not her fault that the irrigation water she

had been promised had not yet arrived. Luckily, another social worker had taken over the

case. Despite the fact that it was hard to reach Rosa on her phone, as the battery was usually

dead due to lack of electricity, Rosa blamed the social workers for showing up unannounced

and accused them of trying to catch her doing something wrong. Up to this point, Rosa had

told the story with a certain resentment and anger. All of a sudden, she started smiling.

The story was about to take a turn. One day, Rosa said, the social worker who had taken over

the case from the last one, came to visit when Rosa was about to go fetch water from the lake.

The woman had offered her help. Ironically, Rosa continued telling me, this woman was not

able to carry the barrel even one meter after they filled it with water. Rosa, then, had carried

the two barrels herself, one on each shoulder, while the social worker had struggled just to get

up the hillside carrying nothing but her own weight. She was not fat or anything, Rosa added.

When they finally reached the house, the woman had said she understood Rosa’s struggles

and that she would not be bothering her anymore. This was the last time she saw her. When

the story reached this point, Rosa slapped her thigh and roared with laughter revealing her

missing front teeth. You see, she asked me – “viste?”

What Rosa wanted me to see was that in order to understand her situation, one had to realize

the daily struggles her life entailed. She also wanted to make a statement about the prejudices

and ignorance with which people from outside arrived on the island. Over the previous

decades, the island has undergone significant change with regard to infrastructural

development, enhancing immediate contact between islanders and the outside societies.

Inhabitants of Isla Huapi differentiate between antes and hoy en día, meaning “before” and

“nowadays”, blaming people who live in the communities surrounding the island for thinking

of islanders as backward and old-fashioned. They would ascribe to outsiders the prejudice

that islanders were dirty, a prejudice with both mental and material bearings. According to

the islanders, this might have been the case before. Nowadays, they themselves told me,

islanders were much more developed. What Rosa pointed out to me with her story about the

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social workers was, among other things, that outsiders came to the island expecting the same

material conditions they enjoyed themselves. Even though her house was not clean and the

drinking water was not sanitized, this did not mean she and her children were dirty or that

they did not pursue practices of cleanliness. Rather, to Rosa it meant that the material

resources available did not allow her the same degree of cleanliness as others. The unequal

distribution of material resources was visible not only in relation to conditions outside the

island, but also compared to other households on the island. Within the community of Isla

Huapi, the material development of infrastructure had become a daily reminder of unequal

distribution of and access to available resources. Emerging infrastructures carried with them

emerging patterns of inequality.

ASSESSMENTS OF SUCCESS

Who were those islanders complaining about not having their water yet? These were mainly

farmers scheduled to receive their water in the second and third stages of the construction

process – those left behind in the temporal allocation of access. That some households, those

included in the first stage of the project, had already been granted access to the irrigation

system and enjoyed its fruits, probably made the issue more delicate. It meant that some had

been left behind while others had progressed. Despite some exceptions, those progressing

were typically the wealthier families on the island – like Ana. Those being left behind in the

process, on the other hand, were families who were already lacking material and economic

resources. On what grounds, through what assessment techniques, had access to the irrigation

system been distributed? By whom? In deciding which families to include in the first stage of

the project, calculations of risk were made according to moral and economic valuations of

success. These valuations reinforced political and social as well as economic inequalities on

the island.

One day, I was out driving with one of the engineers working for the company to which the

building of the infrastructure had been outsourced. He explained to me how they had decided

on which families to include in the first stage. His boss, Enrique, and Ignacio had talked to

employees in the PDTI program as they had already been working for many years on the

island in a similar capacity – developing agriculture. The PDTI team had notified Enrique

and Ignacio which farmers were good farmers with a high degree of work ethic, deserving to

be considered serious people. He used terms like buenos agricultores (good farmers),

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agricultores serios (serious farmers) who are not flojo (lazy). These were the farmers that

Ignacio and Enrique decided to include in the first stage, and those who would be the first to

receive irrigation water. When I asked him what it meant to be a “serious farmer”, he would

list criteria such as not drinking, or possessing the largest cultivated plots, and consequently

producing the largest yields, which they were able to transform into economic surplus.

Ana was already enjoying running water in her house due to a well located on the property.

Nevertheless, she was one of those fortunate enough to get the underground pipes and the

water post installed as part of the first stage of the project. Ana used it from time to time,

similarly to other islanders who had received access to the irrigation system early on.

However, each time was a laborious process. Ana needed help from me or Daniel to put

together the long, heavy, and, in general, very cumbersome water pipes. To irrigate, we had

to carry these pipes from the house (under which they were stored when not in use) and over

to one of the larger plots or to her vegetable garden. Having brought the pipes to the

vegetable garden, we had to install them correctly, according to instructions that created a

specific irrigational pattern, without destroying any of the plants in her abounding garden.

The tedious process of installing the irrigation pipes was then followed by an equally energy

and time-consuming process as the pipes had to be removed after use. It was true that she was

a hard-working woman. She was not only resourceful in terms of working capacity, which

increased with mine or Daniel’s help or with hired labor. Importantly, Ana, like others

included in the first stage, had large plots with rich soil at her disposal: this meant that she

and Daniel were in possession of basic means of production. Ana did not sell her produce at

the market. Instead, in various ways, she channeled resources from farming into her tourist

business. Unlike Rosa, she was in many respects provided with favorable conditions for

making a living through economic investments, and consequently for success.

The information that PDTI provided Enrique and Ignacio about Ana made them regard her

household as successful. For that reason, she was included in the first stage of the project.

Others, those who were not in possession of the means necessary to be portrayed as “serious”

farmers, that is, farmers with a certain potential but whom nevertheless evinced a “good work

ethic”, were sorted in the second and third stages. Such assessment practices thus work

according to certain notions of economic success or potential thereof. Meanwhile, as

elaborated in the previous chapter, the value of being humilde has a strong position among

Mapuche people. This runs counter to the ways in which technical experts such as Ignacio

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construct an image of being economically successful and hard-working as performances

necessary to secure a connection to the irrigation system.

Ignacio and Enrique were concerned with islanders’ personal success, particularly with the

way in which the irrigation system could contribute to this. Because they wanted a better life

for them, but also because it reflected their own success. Ana and other islanders’ capacity to

succeed in caring for and taking advantage of the irrigation system mattered because Ignacio

and the other engineers were also evaluated in their jobs as technical experts. As such, the

risk in their assessment lies with them as responsible and accountable for the overall success

of the project. In order for Ignacio to do his job successfully, he had to calculate

performativity; he was thereby employing practices of risk assessment central not to

neoliberalism itself but to the functioning of neoliberal governance (Di Giminiani, 2016). The

same went for Ricardo, whom we met in the previous chapter. Failing to successfully

calculate Danissa’s commitment and capacity to carry out the fruit and berries cultivation

project, he wished he had engaged Ana in that project instead, because he knew that he

himself would be audited. Audits make development workers’ success, or lack thereof,

legible to powerful state agencies such as INDAP. Who is most likely to profit from

providing farmers on Isla Huapi with material resources? This question invites a certain

assessment whereby the experts not only calculate farmers’ capacity to succeed but also the

risks they take. During audits and inauguration events, a phenomenon that in Latin America

seems to harbor efforts to mobilize political support (Harvey & Knox, 2015; Salinas, 2016)

and to which I return in the next chapter, experts’ success is on display. Farmers who fell

short in assessments of success simply had to do as Ignacio told them – to wait.

The devaluation of Rosa’s capacity to succeed and the position she was ascribed in the

temporally ordered scheme of resource allocation made an already precarious living situation

even more so. Her house and property were located on the outskirts of the rocky north end of

the island. Her place was in many respects cut off from the little infrastructure that existed, as

evidenced by the missing road connection to her property. She was also cut off in other ways.

Due to a lack of labor resources, it was difficult for Rosa to apply for governmental funding

to carry out potential projects. She had no children of age, nor a husband to help her out with

this task. If she received funding, she would according to the INDAP guidelines have a

limited timeframe in which to carry out the project. If she did not succeed, she could end up

being indebted to INDAP and prevented from applying for funding on a future occasion.

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Even though Rosa was not indebted to INDAP at the moment, she was vulnerable to this

threat.

Her everyday frustrations were not hard to grasp. She suffered in many ways from the

hardships of not having water and was among those who showed up at every community

meeting to remind Ignacio that there still was no water running through the water pipes

running across her property. Access to the irrigation system and possibly tap water was of

great concern to Rosa. In addition to getting her vegetable garden irrigated, she would be

relieved of daily struggles dominating her life. Not only would she be relieved of the burden

of carrying 52 liters of water up a steep hillside every day. She would also be able to clean

her house of animal excrement and, with different hygienic conditions, keep away the fleas

living in mattresses and in the clothes that lay on the floor due to a lack of storage

opportunities. Importantly, this would, according to Rosa, assuage the social workers’ doubts

as to whether her household was fit for children to grow up in. After all, she lived in constant

fear that they would be back some day to take away her two children. Furthermore, as a

single mother, the new infrastructure would provide her with much needed time to make

additional income. In the context of island society, she was in a particularly precarious

condition. While Alejandro was still on the island and working for Ana, Rosa would at times

come by to help out Ana while her children attended school. According to Ana, however, the

main reason Rosa visited were the meals Ana then served her. When she left, Ana would say

something along the lines of “pobrecita, sufriendo tanto” – “poor thing, suffering so much”.

And it was true – she was suffering in her struggle to survive, to provide for her children as

well as her mother, who was sick. She had a sister – but, being a mother of two and married

to a man with a drinking problem, her sister suffered from the same hardship of everyday life

as Rosa. Rosa knew how to sustain life and somehow make ends meet. Nevertheless, when it

came to the resources that make economic prosperity possible, Rosa had been dealt a bad

hand. She wanted to provide her two children with higher education, she said, but such

prospects were rather bleak. To Rosa, the prospect of obtaining access to the irrigation system

contained hopes to be able to aspire to a better life, for herself and her children alike.

CONCLUSION

The irrigation project was intended to bridge the government’s concern for climate change

and economic growth while simultaneously enhancing living conditions among farmers on

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Isla Huapi, who are living under materially and economically precarious conditions. On the

ground, however, the way in which the project was carried out and the proceedings of the

construction process altered engineers’ expectations for it and islanders’ placement of hope in

the project.

In the vignette with which I began this chapter, frustrations were revealed. The issue at hand

for Ignacio and Enrique was islanders’ seeming unwillingness to take responsibility and to do

what Ignacio and Enrique considered their part of the job – to obtain permits from their

neighbors and care, in many senses, for the infrastructure. For the common good of the

project, individual islanders had to take responsibility. Ignacio and Enrique’s appeal to

responsibilization and participation, but also to care, echoes the moral discourse of neoliberal

development in which values associated with reciprocity becomes confused with those of

social capital (a point which will become more explicit in the next chapter). Regardless of

whose project it was, it became clear during the meeting that Ignacio at this point felt the

pressure to complete the project on which he had so eagerly embarked four years earlier.

Since then, Ignacio had been forced to alter the initial project plan and design, as well as

repeatedly to commence smaller repair operations. In addition, the governmental funding was

about to run out. The issue of the permits was real. However, his frustration had piled up over

the last months, during which he had encountered one obstacle after another. This was not

how he had expected the project to proceed. The complex social values always enmeshed in

technical engineering work (Harvey & Knox, 2015) were not part of Ignacio’s temporal

expectations. What he wanted to treat as a technical project was rendered an uneven temporal

and socially contingent process.

Instead of addressing the unequal distribution of resources, Ignacio explained the problem by

complaining of islanders’ actions (or lack thereof) through their lack in formal education. In

fact, he was thereby foregrounding stereotypical, racialized imaginaries about the Mapuche

people as “backward” and as “lazy” – lacking a proper work ethic (Crow, 2013; Di

Giminiani, 2018a). In reviewing Rosa’s situation, however, it should be apparent that this

was not the case. What drove her to complain was not her lack of formal education. Rather,

what compelled her complaints was the precarious life situation from which she believed that

the irrigation system could offer her some relief. The stoic calm that Ignacio and other

experts called for was incompatible with the issue at stake: she risked losing the right to care

for her children. What Rosa and others in her situation responded to was the experience of

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precarity, unequal distribution of resources among the island inhabitants, but also a

diminishing sense of aspiration, which compelled many islanders, including Rosa, to

complain.

Infrastructure connects the potential for technological and social progress with hopes for

better futures. Being excluded from the imaginary of progress through experts’ assessments

of risk, Rosa appealed to a vocabulary of broken promises. The infrastructure was there, on

her property, but no water ran through its pipes. The uneven temporality of infrastructure and

its relation to future imaginaries illuminate how the state alternately materializes and

disappears and, along the way, give way to affective forces. The hope for infrastructure

allows for the articulation of certain aspirations, as in Rosa’s case, but these aspirations

dwindle with the uneven connections of infrastructure and hope gives way to disappointment

and uncertainty. This brings me to the next chapter, in which I examine the inauguration of

the irrigation system as well as the promises made about another infrastructural element to

demonstrate how material relations are intrinsically political.

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7. “LA POLÍTICA”: NEGOTIATING INTERESTS

In this chapter, I present events that unfolded on the island during the time leading up to the

election of a new mayor in the municipality of Futrono. While the municipality’s offices, as

with other state offices, are located outside the island – in the small town of Futrono on the

mainland – the island itself and the people living on Isla Huapi are under the administration

of the municipality of Futrono. This incorporates islanders into the body of voters for the

municipal election. As I outlined in chapter 4, there are two formally recognized bodies of

authority on the island. First, there is the Board, which was established in 1995 when the

community was legally constituted as an indigenous community. The second authority is the

lonko who, during the time of my fieldwork, worked closely with the Board. The fact that the

island and its inhabitants are under the administration of the municipality of Futrono enforces

a relation between island authorities and municipal politicians. What does this relation look

like, and what importance does it have to islanders? What significance does the mayor have

to the people who live on Isla Huapi? In what way is the election of a mayor of Futrono

relevant to everyday life on the island? The structure of government by which the

municipality, as an extension of the state, manages the island through island representatives

lends importance to the island authorities themselves, or rather, to the question of which

islanders are actually represented and in what ways. How do positions of authority and

representation play out?

What is analytically interesting to me about the municipal election is not so much the event of

the election itself as the life to which the election process gives rise. What emerged

alongside, or rather in direct relation to, the upcoming election was the discursive practice of

política, a phenomenon that I mentioned in the previous chapter. Política is a form of moral

discourse whereby people not only evaluate the saliency of promises made about

development and modernization but also the relation between values of self-interest and a

“common good”. As you might recall from chapter 4, Teresa and others framed what I call

the common good as notions about that which benefits and secures equal opportunities for all

islanders, saying that all islanders want to “be heard”. They are here referring to what we

might frame as notions about an ideal of equality or equal distribution of power. The body

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responsible for safeguarding the value of the common good and acting accordingly on behalf

of the community as a singular collective is the community Board in collaboration with the

lonko.

However, as I showed in chapter 4, islanders question the interests of the people who make

up the body of the Board. Looking more closely at these contestations, which are rendered

explicit as the election date approaches, I analyze in this chapter how islanders negotiate

competing interests through the moral discourse of política, whereby the virtue of the

common good is contrasted with the vice of self-interest. Furthermore, in the midst of these

contestations, islanders turn to the state and engage in state politics in an attempt to bring

about order.

A TIMELY INAUGURATION

It was just a couple of months before the municipal election date. Interest in the upcoming

election had grown significantly, and tensions within the island community were accordingly

rising. During this period, the lonko and the president, his sister, summoned a community

meeting that was going to cause a stir. At the meeting, the PDTI-team and an INDAP-

representative were also present. Unusually, many people had shown up – the classroom was

crowded. The topic to be addressed, of which people had been informed on the local radio,

was the upcoming inauguration of the water irrigation system. Standing in the front of the

crowded room, next to the president, the lonko, Elmo, announced that the municipality of

Futrono had suggested having the inauguration on September 16, a couple of weeks later.

Meanwhile, he also informed us that the municipality and INDAP would cover most of the

costs associated with the event. Yet, all members of the community still had to contribute

4000 pesos each to cover the rest. Additionally, he asked for volunteers who could prepare

and serve food after the inauguration ritual itself was over. In accordance with the island

tradition, they had planned a barbeque. I noticed some murmuring of discontent among the

crowd during the lonko’s announcements, but when asked to contribute financially to the

event, people started speaking up.

First, a woman spoke up from the back of the room. She informed the lonko that she was

prevented from attending the inauguration event altogether. Together with other parents from

the island, she was going to spend this particular day outside the island with the children. The

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parents were volunteering as chefs at an event in Futrono organized by the school. Why

would they pay 4000 pesos for something they would not attend? she asked. People nodded.

This remark upset Elmo. He compared people’s hesitation to pay for the inauguration with, as

he saw it, their reluctance to pay for mechanical additions to the tractor. There was a general

trend on the island, he claimed, of refusal to pay for the common good. People have to pay

their dues, he explained, by which he meant their share of costs. “Sooner or later, all people

will benefit,” he said in a somewhat resigned manner. This was not the first or the only

meeting at which he expressed this sentiment. When the crowd continued talking amongst

themselves about the injustice of paying those 4000 pesos, Elmo spoke up once again. This

time his voice had hardened: “Well, then I won’t give the authorization [to take the children

to Futrono]. They [the children] are not from Futrono, they are from here.” It seemed that the

lonko, by trying to prohibit the parents from taking their children to Futrono, wanted to

neutralize the argument from their absence as a reason not to pay up. Sitting next to me was

Marisa. She was angry at the lonko and said aloud; “Before, with don Rafael, you never paid

for anything. Now, we have to pay and work voluntarily.” She was referring to the former

president of the community, don Rafael, and the community Board which he then headed.

Elmo shot her a glowering look but did not respond.

In spite of the general unwillingness to pay and Elmo’s threats, every community member

ended up paying those 4000 pesos, even those volunteering as chefs the day of the

inauguration. It was Yessica who collected the money, checking off names from a list that

she showed me. While those who had obligations in Futrono on this day went and did not

participate in the inauguration, they still paid their individual share of the inauguration costs.

The conflict that evolved during this meeting was a symptom of conflicting interests that had

escalated over the last few weeks. By this time, I had become aware that some islanders were

critical of the current community Board and the lonko. In fact, it was not the first time that

people had questioned their suggestions and decisions. As I discussed in chapter 4, some

islanders questioned the Board’s legitimacy since the power invested in it was concentrated

in the hands of a few people who also shared kinship relations. Furthermore, they were

dissatisfied with the lonko. They pointed towards a certain discrepancy between his inherited

role as religious leader and the political role (cargo político) he had taken on after becoming

such a close affiliate of the Board. Elmo and the Board were accused of not working for the

common good, but instead securing their own interests. The inauguration, people claimed,

was not in the interest of the people but rather of the authorities themselves, who used the

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occasion to nurture their personal relationship to outside authorities – to the mayor of Futrono

in particular. That is why they did not want to pay for it – particularly not when they were

going to be working as volunteers, too. What took place at the meeting then, was an

articulation of resistance directed toward those who constituted the bodies of authority within

the community and toward the way in which they were seen to govern with self-interest in

mind.

Opposition and discontent of this kind were usually not acted upon in community meetings,

but rather articulated in less public spaces. However, increased public demonstration of

discontent with island authorities was a sign of the general trend I witnessed on the island

around the time leading up to the election. Practices of contestation and negotiation of

interests became increasingly visible.

The irrigation system was, at the point of inauguration, not yet operating fully. That is, only

for some. During lunch with Ana and Jorge, who worked for her as carpenter those days, the

topic of the upcoming inauguration came up. Jorge claimed that having the inauguration at

that specific time was a decision of the community. “The community accepted it. It was a

political decision (decisión política)”, he said. By the “community”, he was referring to the

community Board and those members of the island community who supported the current

island authorities. Ana followed up on his comment saying that Sarita, the current mayor of

Futrono who was running for re-election, was in a hurry to have the inauguration. She wanted

to bask in the glory of the irrigation system. By virtue of being the mayor at the time of

completion, present at the inauguration, she would gain political momentum. As Harvey

(2018a) notes: an inauguration of infrastructure “conflates the promise of a technology with

the promise to deliver a public good” (2018a, p. 95). According to Ana, Sarita wanted to be

the face of this promise. It had to do with the election, Ana concluded. Since the current

community Board including the lonko supported the re-election of Sarita, Ana thought, they

had approved having the inauguration before the election date. She was convinced they did it

to increase Sarita’s chances of winning the election with the current Board and lonko as

allies. Disagreements between island authorities and some of the community members such

as Ana were symptoms of wider issues at stake. It had to do with politics or political

decisions, as Jorge put it. However, politics of contestation did not only concern island bodies

of authority and the current mayor of Futrono. Other authorities, such as authorities of

INDAP, were also affected by and gave momentum to the critical discourse of política.

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An INDAP-employee by the name of Mario was also present at the aforementioned meeting.

He was rather new to the community. He asked the lonko, Elmo, how many people from the

island would be joining the inauguration event. Approximately 200 people, Elmo predicted.

Mario then concluded that there would be 250 people in total attending the event. This

seemed to surprise the lonko. He frowned and gave Mario a scrutinizing look before he asked

who these 50 people were. Mario went on to list people whom INDAP would invite to the

event: the municipality, the mayor, the Ministry of Agriculture, and people from INDAP’s

regional as well as national division. Elmo looked at him quietly for a while. Then he asked,

“For whom is the inauguration?” At first, I did not grasp the sarcasm but then, after some

seconds of complete silence, Elmo added that these were políticos (politicians), politicians

who did nothing but lie to them. In an apologetic turn, Mario said that it was for publicity and

that “we are obliged to invite them”. Nobody said anything. Then, Mario gesticulated widely

and added half smilingly, as if he was nervous, that these people would be helping the

community in the future. “Soon”, he said, “we will have light, electricity, and…bingo!”. Not

only did he inappropriately position himself with the islanders using the pronoun “we”. He

also suggested that if they just accepted the order of things, everything would be sorted out

perfectly and their decade-long wishes for development of electrical infrastructure would

materialize. While he smiled, no one laughed, commented or said anything. The whole crowd

had fallen silent, but the atmosphere was tense. Standing in the corner, next to the door in the

front of the room, I noticed Helmuth and Ariel from the PDTI team. They looked down,

straight-faced.

While there were tensions between the current Board and certain members of the community,

the relationship between the Board, particularly the lonko, and those he called “politicians”

appeared equally strained. In the category of politicians, it seemed that Elmo referred to

everyone on Mario’s guest list – including INDAP-employees. Still employed at the time by

the municipality in positions funded by INDAP, was the PDTI team an exception to this?

What was the lonko’s relationship to them? For their own part, Helmuth and Ariel’s reactions

to Mario’s comment indicated their sympathy with the islanders. They knew very well that

Mario had presented the lonko with far from reliable future prospects of technological

advance. To islanders present at the meeting, Mario’s claim was most probably an expression

of politics in the way that they perceived it – as manipulation and lies that served self-

interests.

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POLITICS AND “LA POLÍTICA”

Reflecting on the anthropological study of politics, Christian Krohn-Hansen (2013)

encourages us to approach politics in a broad sense. By that, he means we should concentrate

on trying to grasp that which constitutes “the political”, namely everyday contestations over

power, meaning and history. Rather than treating “the political” as a domain, he encourages

us to treat it as “articulations between power relations, cultural processes, and historical

trajectories” (2013, p. 19). In addition, he writes, categories and meaning play such an

important part in how people understand their life and the positions they find themselves in,

that a focus on negotiations of meaning should be incorporated into studies of political life.

Following Krohn-Hansen, I suggest that contestations that constitute “the political” on Isla

Huapi are two-directional. One the one hand, drawing on a longue durée of broken promises,

a past that goes on and on and whose manifested trajectory is hard to change, islanders

contest the interests of outside authorities. One the other, the interests of island authorities,

the lonko and the Board are contested as well. What should be the roles of the lonko and the

Board respectively? Comparing the former Board to the current, several islanders draw on the

past to question the present. Articulations of these contestations, focused in two different but

complementary directions, both within the island community and beyond it, are what interest

me here.

I never heard islanders term other islanders políticos. Only outside authorities were políticos.

Meanwhile, actions were often deemed política. Dismissing a statement as a lie, something in

which they did not believe, they said “es política no más” – “it’s just politics”. This term

applied to actions undertaken by políticos and islanders alike, and implied a certain criticism.

Calling something política was a way to write off actions on moral grounds, in the sense that

these actions served someone’s self-interest while pretending to serve the common good. Ana

and Jorge accused the Board of taking a political decision – desición política – because it was

a decision that would strengthen their alliance with the current mayor of Futrono and,

possibly, benefit themselves. In trying to grasp how “the political” plays out on Isla Huapi, I

focus here on the concept of and articulations of política. This allows me to unravel mundane

but complex relations between an administrative apparatus and competing interests within the

island community.

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Writing about the implementation of development policies in the Argentinian province of

Misiones, Cecilia Salinas (2016) looks at the practices of política. She discovers that the

term works to denote spectral relations between the visibility/invisibility and

accessibility/inaccessibility of power negotiations. Among the indigenous people, tobacco

growers, and state representatives with whom she worked, the term points to a wide array of

power negotiations taking place across the political and administrative apparatus. These

negotiations, she writes, are accessible to some, only visible to others, but elusive to many.

Where Salinas worked, such power negotiations were off-record, illegitimate practices of

alliance building. To her informants, the term política embraced hidden power negotiations

that dictated networks of support, and the (unfair) channeling of resources. They concealed

actors’ real interests and made policy fail. “At the community level”, she writes, “política

was what negatively shaped people’s continual and recurring everyday struggle, and

positively shaped the life of those who were part of the world of política” (Salinas, 2016, p.

95). Those who were part of política in Salinas’ ethnography were people who concerned

themselves with or were part of the political sphere from which power was exercised. Those

who initially were outside the political sphere but wished to influence political decisions had

no choice but to get their fingers dirty and become part of “the political”, where change

potentially could be made. Política was something that could affect anyone – like a dirty

force, as Salinas writes. However, as change could only be made in the tainted sphere of

politics, it placed people in a double bind that made counter-hegemony difficult to achieve

(2016, p. 93).

In many ways, this approach to the concept of política resonates with what I witnessed on

Isla Huapi. First, however, in writing about the concept of política on Isla Huapi, there is a

need to differentiate between politics as an emic and etic term. When I interviewed the lonko,

Elmo, about his role (cargo), he was offended by my suggestion that the role he performed as

lonko was political. Repeatedly, trying to explain his role, he underlined the point that it had

nothing to do with politics. On the contrary, he had inherited an apolitical role – a role that

concerned religious administration of important Mapuche rituals; it “was about the entrance

to nguillatún”. Meanwhile, it was obvious to me that his role was political and that he

engaged in everyday political practices. Likewise, when I approached the president of the

community and asked her whether the Board functioned in a political fashion, she responded

with a distinct “No!”. I had asked that question merely as a conversational entrance and was

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certain she would confirm. She did the opposite. Then she added, “That was the previous

Board. They had a political agenda, in opposition to what we have”.

After several incidents like the aforementioned ones, it became quite clear to me that

islanders and I operated with two different understandings of the same term. When

suggesting that a decision or role was political, I pointed to the inevitable everyday discursive

practices through which authority and power are negotiated. For islanders, and as an emic

term, política were negotiations of a particular kind placed on an ethical spectrum, cast in

opposition to notions of the common good – the moral good. Similar to what Salinas (2016)

observed in the province of Misiones in Argentina, política on Isla Huapi carried a shady,

immoral connotation. Inherent in the discourse of política were negatively valued notions of

self-interest. Through the discourse of política, the administrative apparatus, whose work

people wanted to be performed according to a notions of equality, was criticized as being

tainted by negatively valued dynamics of politics that aimed at securing self-interests.

In their book Roads, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (2015) examine preconditions and

effects of corruption stories. These are stories that register moral and ethical ambiguities and

occur alongside state-led development projects in Peru, more specifically highway-building

projects. Because private interests and hidden resource extraction are assumed or expected to

alter the planned process of construction, regulatory instruments are installed to prevent

corruption. Meanwhile, the authors find that nobody believes that the regulatory instruments

function according to the purpose for which they were established. What is it, then, that these

instruments achieve? What the regulatory practices do, Harvey and Knox write, is that they

“generate deep uncertainties, which are manifest in the absolute and shared conviction that

public works are always steeped in corruption” (Harvey & Knox, 2015, pp. 135-136). Still,

uncertainties and fears are not produced only in relation to rumors of corruption. Rather, the

authors show how temporal, economic and social uncertainties that commonly emerge

alongside and in relation to infrastructural projects, which I also addressed in the previous

chapter, are “gathered into the discussions of corruption and the sense that things do not work

out as planned” (Harvey & Knox, 2015, p. 137). Since corruption is expected, the same

regulatory instruments of transparency and accountability proactively put into place to

prevent corruption are precisely the sites in which rumors of corruption occur. As with

política in Salinas’ ethnography, rumors of corruption tainted the faith in infrastructural

development in Peru.

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Several similarities can be drawn between Harvey and Knox’s (Harvey & Knox, 2015)

analysis of corruption stories, as an energy that occurs with infrastructural state-led

development projects, and stories of política on Isla Huapi. First, both types of stories register

moral and ethical ambiguities, and aim at revealing the way in which public, common goods

have transformed into personal gains – a transformation that carries the negative notion of

self-interest. Secondly, they occur with experiences of a social and political terrain of

uncertainty. Thirdly, as construction projects bring together engineers, workers, managers,

politicians and local residents, Harvey and Knox discover that corruption occurs in morally

ambiguous spaces that are created in relation to the state. However, what differentiates the

discourse of política from that of corruption is the rather mundane character of política.

Stories of corruption are stories of theft and embezzlement – just as much on Isla Huapi as in

Peru. When islanders told stories of corruption, they talked about large-scale economic frauds

and scandals that occurred on the national scene of politics, involving political actors such as

members of congress. This is very different from política, which did not necessarily concern

allegations of theft or powerful politicians. Nevertheless, what these two discourses have in

common is the negatively charged insinuation of self-interest, in addition to the ways in

which they undermine trust, when employed to raise doubt about the relation between

administration and politics as a negative force. This is particularly clear when política as “the

political”, emically, is contrasted with an administrative apparatus whose role, as many

islanders saw it, was to represent them on equal terms. Islanders used the concept of política

to question the motives with which people entered into political relations. Did it serve the

common good, or did it serve individual interests? Was it a relation to state actors that would

provide the island community the common good, or was it a relation that amounted to

nothing but política?

The community Board, often in collaboration with outside authorities and municipal

politicians in Futrono, frequently made decisions that concerned and affected the collective –

the community. For example, they decided the date of the inauguration and demanded that

every member of the community pay up to cover part of the costs. They also decided which

projects to apply for on behalf of the community and, as I showed in chapter 4, how resources

were to be managed, such as the tractor. Excluded from spaces of decision-making, people

were alert to the question of whose interest a particular decision really served. The

elusiveness of the politics of the Board together with the close kinship ties between those in

positions of authority created room for uncertainty and speculation. If there were doubts

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whether a particular decision was taken in the interest of the community as a whole or rather

seemed to mostly serve members of the Board, this could easily be deemed a case of política.

As a means of moral assessment, the discourse of política worked to criticize people in

positions of authority that were supposed to take decisions that benefitted the community as a

whole. In this sense, to those outside the decision-making loop and to whom the intentions of

the decision-makers appeared elusive, it was fairly easy to apply the term política if a

decision was regarded as not serving the common good of all islanders but individual

interests of Board members. When the carpenter Jorge questioned whose interests the

inauguration served, for example, he called it a decisión política. His allegation did not only

target Sarita, the mayor and municipal politician running for reelection, but the president of

the island community and the lonko, too, whom Jorge assumed personally benefitted from the

decision.

However, not only the Board was affected by the morally charged discourse of política.

Fellow islanders were as well. For example, when people talked about the ongoing

construction of a road that led up to Ana’s neighbor’s house, in which a woman named

Alexandra lived, they said it was a case of política after someone had seen Alexandra in a car

with the mayor of Futrono, Sarita. To some, that served as a proof that Alexandra had

befriended the mayor to exchange political support for personal gains. Thus, política

encompassed moral assessments that islanders commonly applied to criticize what they

expected to be personal gains extracted from relations with authorities, regardless of whether

these were island or outside authorities. More interestingly still, Alexandra was married to

one of the Leviñanco kin-members, and her affiliation with the mayor fed into the narrative

of kin-based political alliances, which posited self-serving relations of politics that escaped

the light of day but that everyone knew about nevertheless. As Salinas (2016) points out,

política is located on the spectrum of visibility/invisibility as well as

accessibility/inaccessibility. Política applied to everyone who acquired resources for personal

gains by manipulating others to believe there were no personal interests at stake – resources

that should perhaps have been invested in the collective instead. Obviously, then, actions

called into question through the discourse of política also applied to outside authorities

considered to be doing politics, including politicians and non-politicians alike. It applied to

people who were believed to exploit their mandate of doing public good to advance personal

interests, for example to ensure a position of authority. In fact, it might seem that islanders’

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sense of política as shady play stemmed from their experiences with public policy initiatives

and politicians who failed to implement those initiatives in a satisfying way.

While I would argue that every islander engaged in politics in the etic, analytical sense,

everyone on Isla Huapi would reject an interpretation of their own actions as political in the

emic sense. Meanwhile, during the time leading up to the election, established relations of

authority were contested through claims about fraud and manipulation. I will outline some of

these articulations before unraveling them as contestations of authority.

PLACING SARITA IN A LANDSCAPE OF “THE POLITICAL”

Sarita Jaramillo, whom I have already introduced, represented the center-left Party for

Democracy, and was the current mayor of Futrono when I arrived on Isla Huapi. She was

running for re-election. Claudio Lavado was the competing candidate, representing the right-

wing Independent Democratic Union. He held the position as head of the local INDAP office

in Futrono.

One day, when Daniel came back to the house from work to have lunch, he and Ana outlined

the election candidates for me. While Sarita took the position of the pueblos, they said,

Claudio took the position of the comunidades. I asked what they meant by this distinction.

“Well,” Ana started, “the other day, Claudio came here to the island to visit us to talk to us

about our needs (necesidades)”. She smiled, clearly satisfied. Behind her, on the kitchen wall,

was a calendar displaying Claudio’s face – campaign material that he had brought with him. I

was still not sure that I grasped the difference between the meaning of the concepts pueblo

and comunidad. According to Daniel, it concerned a difference between rural and urban

inhabitants of Futrono. While Sarita supported the urban inhabitants, Claudio supported the

rural populations, he said. Sarita, Ana continued, had promised that the island would have

electricity by the end of that year – in only two or three months’ time. She shook her head.

“That is pura política (pure politics),” she said. She believed these were promises given to

generate votes but that would remain unfulfilled. In contrast to the president of the

community and her brother, the lonko, both Ana and Daniel were strong supporters of

Claudio – of change.

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Ana and Daniel expressed their support for Claudio, or rather their dismay about Sarita, in

relation to another case of política. Ana and Daniel were critical of Yasna, whose entrance as

the new principal at the children’s school had pushed Daniel down the hierarchical ladder of

employment positions. Being replaced as principal, he now worked as a regular teacher.

Although this probably weighed on the grudge that both Ana and Daniel held against Yasna,

other islanders questioned her intentions, too. It was well known throughout the community

that Yasna had been campaigning for Sarita during Sarita’s previous election – which she

won. Some people said they were close friends. Therefore, the same people claimed that

Yasna had gotten the position as principal in order to gather votes for Sarita prior to the

upcoming election to help Sarita secure her second term in office.

During a visit to Roxana, I asked about Yasna. Roxana was one of the few younger women

who had not yet moved away from the island. I had become acquainted with her after several

community meetings, for which she always showed up, and after passing by her house on the

north side regularly she started inviting me inside. I wanted to know how Yasna had become

principal at the school. Yasna’s work, Roxana proclaimed, was “a compromise, for sure!”.

Yasna, she started explaining, had probably been promised a different, luxurious position if

the mayor were to be re-elected. The compromise to which she referred was a deal she

believed had been made. Because Yasna sacrificed her time working as principal at the

island’s rural children’s school, she would be compensated once Sarita was re-elected. With

her eyes narrowed into a scrutinizing look, Roxana looked at me closely and asked: “Think,

why is she here?”. Some seconds passed, and Roxana replied herself in a matter-of-fact way:

“She doesn’t like the island”, she said and shrugged her shoulders. She turned away from me

and resumed the task of making a fire. Yasna, she continued, was someone who was used to

having a lot of money. Her father was in fact the owner of the bus company Cordillera Sur,

which made him a very wealthy man. “She is not like us”, Roxana said before backing up her

claim with an example: One morning, the woman working at the health center – la posta –

located next to the school, had been passing by Yasna’s office. There, through the doorway,

she had seen her with a hairdryer doing her hair. The school building had electricity, supplied

by solar panels. However, as Yasna knew very well, it was prohibited to use this electric

source for other purposes than for teaching. It was she herself who had said so. Yet, she used

the electricity to do her hair. In addition, Roxana added, it was clear that Yasna did not like it

much on the island because she would go to Futrono every chance she had – every weekend.

According to Roxana, Yasna was an accomplice of the mayor.

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Jorge, the carpenter, had also talked to me about the school principal. According to him, she

had received money from the municipality that was supposed to benefit the school. However,

no one had seen this money and, meanwhile, Yasna had conveniently gone on sick leave.

Thus, it was not only stories about empty promises and vote-generating strategies that

circulated, but also stories about fraud.

By placing Sarita in a landscape of la política, islanders simultaneously positioned

themselves in relation to island authorities. To administer the relations between the state and

the island community, in particular regarding questions of development, the municipal office

of Futrono had collaborated closely with the Board over the past year. This meant that Sarita,

as head of the municipal office, had been collaborating with the lonko, Yessica and the rest of

the Board. To represent the interests of the island community as an administrative unit was,

after all, the purpose of the Board. Ana and others suggested that Sarita’s promises about

electricity were self-interested: these suggestions contested the authority of those in power as

much as the suggested political collaboration between Sarita and Yasna did. What they

contested, I believe, was not only the capacity but also the will or intentions of the Board and

the lonko to secure the common good. Ana and Daniel believed that Claudio, who was

already working for INDAP and for the farmers, as they put it, would offer an alternative

reality. They believed that he could reshuffle power and influence within the island

community. How? In what way could Claudio affect and change the way in which island

authorities, allegedly, cared for themselves and made decisions that served their own

interests? Since this was not an election of Board members, why did it matter who was the

mayor of Futrono? What is the administrative force of the Board in relation to that of the

municipal administration, and what is the affective force of política?

The frequency of events that, one way or another, pertained to development projects

increased in the period prior to the election. These events were displays not only of

development and material progress but also of the collaboration between island authorities

and the current mayor. The events displayed how this relation had brought about these

developments. Meanwhile, such inauguration events also work to mobilize political support.

As I will show, it was not only Sarita’s position as mayor that was in a vulnerable state of

future existence.

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THE FIRMA DEL CONVENIO AND THE INAUGURATION OF THE

IRRIGATION SYSTEM

Ana believed the promise of electricity to be a case of política. That meant a promise that

would remain unfulfilled but was put forth by Sarita to win political support for personal

gains. However, it seemed that the signing of an agreement that promised resources to be

allocated to develop this particular infrastructure transformed Ana’s doubts into beliefs, and

her hopes into expectations.

The firma de convenio (signing of agreement) came as a surprise. Although I had heard talk

about the agreement for quite some time, the specific content of this particular document and

the event itself were sudden news. The event was announced on the radio and took place one

week prior to the inauguration of the irrigation system. The document to be signed on this

day was the Local Development Plan for 2016-2018. The document itself was a material

manifestation of a planned cooperation between national, regional, and municipal actors

alike, who in the act of signing this document promised to provide development. The signing

held promises of development of infrastructure, agriculture, tourism, employment, education,

health, as well as cultural and social development. More specifically, it promised to fund the

development of electric infrastructure. The Sub-Secretary of Social Services visited the island

together with other authorities, such as the governor of the province of Ranco, representatives

from various development programs and the mayor herself, namely Sarita Jaramillo.

Representing the island community in this signing were the lonko and the community

president.

The event was held in the largest building on the island, namely in the school’s gym. When I

entered the building accompanied by a crowd of islanders who were equally eager to witness

the signing, I noticed that efforts had been made to transform the gym hall into the sort of

formal room suitable for a signing. Along one of the long sides of the interior, opposite the

concrete bleachers covering the other side, two tables were pushed against each other and

covered with dark blue tablecloths. On the right side of these tables two flags hung heavily –

the Chilean and the Mapuche flag. Two speakers, one on each side, contributed to the spatial

centering of these two tables in the gym hall. From the material and spatial arrangements I

grasped the significance placed in the moment that was approaching. There, standing behind

these tables facing the audience, the actual signing was to take place. Facing these tables,

chairs were arranged in several rows, but not enough for everyone present. While various

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outside authorities and journalists, in addition to the lonko and the president of the

community, sat down on these chairs, the rest of us took our seats in the bleachers behind the

railing in the back of the room. When everyone had found their seats, Yasna appeared

through a door on the right flank, marched across the floor and made a halt in front of the

crowd sitting on chairs. She gave a signal to a man who seemed to be in charge of the stereo

before she, whilst facing the audience, placed her right hand on her chest. A moment later,

the speakers emitted a crackling sound and the national anthem rang out: “Puro, Chile, es tu

cielo azulado, puras brisas te cruzan también, y tu campo de flores bordado, es la copia feliz

del Edén” – “Pure, Chile, is your blue sky, pure breezes flow across you as well, and your

flower-embroidered field is the happy copy of Eden”. Everyone around me sang along, and

some people held, as Yasna did, their right hand to their chest. When the song finished,

authorities representing different bodies walked up to the table, bent over the documents that

were placed there and signed several copies of the agreement. When they stood back up and

started shaking one another’s hands, the audience applauded, and then the ceremony was

over. As sudden, it seemed to me, as it had been announced.

On the other side of the gym hall, in a horseshoe formation, more tables had been pushed

against each other with chairs on each side. They had been covered with tablecloths, too. The

whole morning, islanders, volunteering as chefs, had prepared food financed by the

municipality and served by islanders to the authorities after the signing ceremony was over.

Here, too, in the horseshoe formation of tables, there was barely room for anyone to sit other

than the numerous authorities and journalists present. While some islanders left the place,

with food heaped high on plates that they had brought from their houses (there were not

enough plates for everyone), others resumed their seats in bleachers, using their laps as

improvised tables. While the lack of space at the tables upset some islanders, they were

thrilled about the signing of the agreement. Finally, they said, electricity will come to the

island (la luz vendrá a la isla).

On the local radio the next day, they talked about the firma de convenio. Listening to this,

Ana commented that this was truly una cosa histórica – a historical thing – for the island. I

asked if this was the first time the community had entered such an agreement, or if she was

commenting on the interview with the lonko in which he himself called it historical. Ana

informed me then that this agreement was signed every two years, but what it said on the

agreement, the promises it held, was different from one signing to the next. What was

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historic, therefore, was not the agreement in itself, but the written promise of bringing

electricity and water to the island. Since she was a child, Ana explained, she had heard talk of

la luz (the light), but it had never materialized. The previous years, there had only been words

of promise, Ana explained. The previous project that had promised to bring electricity to the

island through an aquatic tube had, for example, fallen through. While the project was still in

the stage of planning “they” had decided against it as it proved too expensive to see through.

And then, “they” said that the money was lost (perdieron la plata). Now, on the other hand

(Ana continued), there was a written agreement – an agreement between the municipality of

Futrono and Isla Huapi. Furthermore, Ana explained that what had been written in these

agreements before had actually materialized: the port on the south side of the island, which

had been built during my stay, the ferries and the rehabilitation of the road from the Futrono

port and up to the pueblo center had all been completed. According to Ana, these were

examples of fulfilled promises of development, just as she now expected the promise of

electricity to be.

Regardless, Ana was of the opinion still that Sarita’s role in this was political (in the sense

that it represented política) as she, according to Ana, was taking advantage of this historical

moment. As hopes for electricity and beliefs in future development were materializing

through the signing of the agreement, Sarita, in Ana’s view, hoped to use the occasion to gain

political support. But it was not only Sarita whom Ana accused of engaging in la política.

She also claimed that the Board, the president and the lonko in particular, did the same – that

they laid claim to being honored for this achievement when, in fact, Ana considered her

husband and Rafael – the previous Board – to have been responsible for driving forth the

process that had now led to the signing. Furthermore, that this signing had taken place at this

particular moment in time, just prior to the election of mayor, was not a coincidence, Ana

said. She took it to be a political move to gain voters’ support. The current Board and the

lonko were for their part equally eager to be the faces of beneficence in the community and to

tend to their relation with the mayor, as this would benefit their own future interests. What

the firma de convenio shows is that política is not only a moral discourse through which the

saliency of promises of development are evaluated. It is also, or perhaps more so, a discourse

through which interests are negotiated. This becomes even clearer when looking at the

inauguration of the irrigation system, to which I will now return before I unravel the

connection between la política, the Board, the mayor and the upcoming election.

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In contrast to the firma de convenio, through which electricity was believed to materialize,

there were more doubts and controversies connected to the inauguration of the irrigation

system. The construction of the irrigation system had not been completed at the time of the

inauguration. According to many islanders, this detail proved the inauguration to be a case of

política. Inaugurations are, as Harvey and Knox (2015) point out in relation to their

experiences of similar work in Peru, “rituals in which politicians forge visible associations

with new infrastructural systems, delivering the valuable electoral currency of public works

to the media and, through them, to the electorate” (Harvey & Knox, 2015, p. 188). The

inauguration had to be held at this point because of the municipal election that was

approaching. To hold the inauguration at that particular moment, surrounded by various

journalists, was certainly a political move. Such rituals provide the seemingly benevolent

funding politicians with the opportunity to make claims about fulfillment of promises about

progress and development that, more than anything else, benefit their political agenda.

As one of the voluntary chefs, I started the day early peeling a countless number of potatoes

together with four other women. We were sitting in the hallway of the school’s gym building,

surrounded by plastic barrels brimming with potatoes. Those present were keen to point out

that many of those who had signed up did not show, thus leaving us with a heavy workload.

This was particularly true for the other women, since my peeling skills were not very

elevated. I ended up cutting off not only the skin, but bigger parts of the potato, too. Perhaps

this was the reason why they encouraged me to join INDAP-employees and a municipal

councilor, who, upon their arrival to the island, suggested I come with them to pick up señora

Isabel. She had donated land for the construction of the irrigation system and was therefore

treated as a guest of honor during the inauguration ritual. Sitting in the back of the truck

parked on the plateau above her house, I saw her figure emerging on the edge of the field.

She had replaced the INDAP-cap with a hat for the occasion, but was still overwhelmed by

the honorable treatment she received. Señora Isabel smiled from ear to ear as the municipal

councilwoman took her arm and accompanied her across the field to where the truck was

parked, holding the umbrella over señora Isabel’s head. We drove across the island to where

the inauguration ceremony would take place. Approaching the location, we passed numerous

trucks. Never before had I seen such a congestion of cars on the island, parked as close they

could get to the huge field on which the event was to take place. Combined with the rain that

poured down on this day, the heavy trucks made the dirt roads rough. While many islanders

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had their shoes and pants soaked with mud from walking on the roads, señora Isabel, myself

and outside authorities avoided this by sitting in the car.

Arriving at the location, we noticed the tent that had been put up to protect the spectators and

the electronic equipment from the rain. Although the tent did not fit that many people, about

forty chairs occupied the ground under the tent. INDAP, who had made these technical

arrangements, had made sure that everyone would hear the speakers from the rostrum in the

front. The Minister of Agriculture, the national director of INDAP, along with the current

mayor, Sarita, were all present to declare the irrigation system open. In addition, many

journalists had found their way to the island this rainy morning. Compared to the number of

outside authorities, there were relatively few islanders present. Under the tent that INDAP

employees had put up between a row of solar panels and a water basin, one authority after

another gave speeches emphasizing the groundbreaking significance that the irrigation system

would have for farmers on the island. In his speech, the Minister of Agriculture talked about

the needs that existed on the island and said that this project, the irrigation project, was only a

part of the improvements they were already planning. “We want to move up the date when

the inhabitants on Isla Huapi will have the same services and the same rights that inhabitants

of Futrono have, that inhabitants of Valdivia have, and that inhabitants of Santiago have.

Because we are actually (efectivamente) equal and we are all the same”. Then he continued,

appealing to the islander’s responsibility to contribute to the progress, “This part of our

country is a part in which people work every day. In which they make an effort (esfuerzo)

every day to generate a livelihood, to produce beans, potatoes, wheat, vegetables, allowing

them to sell [the produce] here, sell it in Futrono, and by that sustain a family”. Meanwhile,

on the other side of the island, islanders were already well on their way preparing for the

minister’s meal. The minister’s speech was about to come to an end: “Hopefully, this

[project] will improve the quality of life, the incomes … This island has a grand, an

enormous potential. With specific and general support and development, we can improve

lives. Because this is what it is all about. This project will change lives. It will deliver

improvement in education, health, security, and conditions to produce more and better. Juntos

salimos adelante – together we move forward/advance!”

That development for which they had been waiting was finally a reality, the speakers

proclaimed. The lonko spoke too. He acknowledged the irrigation system as a grand gesture

which they, the island community, had long awaited and for which he directed his thanks to

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the mayor and the other authorities present. “It will help us improve our cultivations”, he

said. No one mentioned the fact that the system was yet not operating. That detail seemed

irrelevant. Meanwhile, this inauguration formally signified that, in relation to this project,

engineers’ and investors’ responsibility had ended and, in the neoliberal spirit, was handed

over to the farmers. Throughout the event, emphasis was given to the opportunities that the

irrigation project granted the poor farmers on Isla Huapi.

Not only did this inauguration, similarly to the firma de convenio, provide opportunities for

politicians like Sarita to mobilize a voting body – a point to which I return shortly.

Additionally, inaugurations such as this one provide politicians the opportunity to make

claims about future hopes, generated through that infrastructure. Meanwhile, these hopes

transfer the responsibility of progress from the technicians and engineers, as well as the state,

onto the receivers who are encouraged to make use of the infrastructure to “produce more and

better” and “improve their lives”, in the words of the Minister of Agriculture. As Harvey and

Knox (2015) eloquently point out: “Inaugural ceremonies mark new beginnings under good

omens and seek to render the work auspicious. But auguries also mark uncertainty, and there

is a tacit acknowledgement that while the project might be successful, it might also fail”

(Harvey & Knox, 2015, p. 194). Whether it fails or not is a responsibility handed over from

the state to the consumers of the infrastructure. In line with neoliberal principles, this makes

the subjects morally and economically responsible for their own futures (in similar veins as

with the development programs discussed in chapter 5).

Meanwhile, through her presence as the bodily representation of the new infrastructure, Sarita

forged associations of progress and modernization in addition to hope for a future of

increasing economic security. Like the politicians and other state authorities, the community

president and particularly the lonko played central parts during the inauguration ritual. For

whom was the inauguration arranged? Most islanders were not present. Many of them were,

in fact, on the other side of the island. In the vicinity of the school, where formal events were

normally held, they were preparing for the next part of the inauguration program, namely the

serving of meals to these authorities. Others simply had no interest in being there. Rather than

being organized for the islanders, the ritual was an orchestration of benefactors and

benevolence. There had been other inauguration rituals before this one, too, including the

inauguration of the south port. This event was announced on the radio the same day as the

inauguration took place, leaving only the lonko and the community president with the

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information and thus also the opportunity to attend. Daniel and Ana had seen photos of it in

the local newspaper the next day, they said, before claiming that the president and lonko

treated them like “nosotros no hay” – “we don’t exist”. There had been three such “bad”

(mala) inaugurations they said, in which the lonko had not informed the people (la gente).

They were all inaugurations of infrastructural developments. Ana got upset talking about this.

“Nos miren como pollos, como pollitos sin pluma” – “they [the lonko and the rest of the

Ñancumil family] view us like chickens, like small chickens without feathers” she said. I

asked her what she meant by this. “Como una persona que no sabe pensar” – “like a person

who doesn’t know how to think”, she explained. By insinuating that the lonko and the Board

regarded other islanders who were not closely affiliated to them, islanders such as Ana, as

smaller and less significant, she criticized them for thinking highly of themselves – as if they

mattered more.

Política permeated the intimate and public spheres and was a discourse through which the

practice of power and influence was evaluated according to the morally informed notion of a

common good. Inaugurations and other public events that aimed at demonstrating

development and progress or the promise thereof opened up intimate spaces for interaction

between state representatives and citizens, but mostly spaces available to local authorities. As

such, they were spaces that allowed for differentiation between islanders and the state, as well

as between political alliances within the island community.

What is at stake and to whom? Slowly, a pattern of social alliances appeared to me. Those

people who disapproved of the school principal, Yasna, equally disapproved of the Board and

did not support Sarita’s re-election. Members of the Board, many of whom were related

through kinship bonds, did not want Claudio Lavado to be elected next mayor. Some of these

alliances became evident during a wake which Claudio attended to pay his respects to the

deceased – a much-respected man in the community of Isla Huapi.

THE WAKE – ENACTMENTS OF INTERESTS

The deceased man’s closest relatives, his wife and children, hosted the wake at their place.

Because the deceased was a highly respected man, a knowledgeable Mapuche who had

fought for the community against the military dictatorship, many people attended the wake.

People traveled from outside the island, from afar, to attend the wake – people whom I had

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never met before. Normally, these wakes lasted for three or four days and those attending,

particularly relatives, would stay overnight, cooking and keeping the fire going. While the

hosts took great care in providing visitors with food and drinks, visitors would similarly

attend to and take care of the hosts – helping them out with the realization of the wake.

As the deceased had been sick for a long time, I had unfortunately not been able to meet him

before he passed away. However, I knew his two daughters quite well. Still, I remember

feeling uncertain about attending the wake – not knowing whether they would appreciate my

presence or find it imposing. Ana invited me there, made it sound like I should, so I decided

to go. When I arrived, I was struck by how their yard had transformed. Amidst tables, chairs,

cooking equipment, and barrels of chicha – fermented corn drink – there were people

everywhere. Many of them had gathered around a huge fireplace set up for the occasion.

Following Ana, Daniel and their children with whom I arrived, I made my way over to the

hosts and waited in line to greet them. I was nervous about their reaction. Nevertheless, what

I encountered was their loving embraces and words of appreciation that I was there with

them. Even the mother, the deceased’s wife, received me the same way she received those

before me. She held me tight and cried for her loss. It was all overwhelming, and I cried with

her.

After being served a glass of chicha, Ana, Daniel, their grown children and I were seated at

the table next to the fireplace. During wakes, it was customary that a guest be served food

upon arrival. As soon as you were done eating, you gave up your place to the next person in

line, to those who had arrived after you. When I got up from my place at the table, I noticed

the whole PDTI team in the driveway accompanied by Claudio. They were drinking chicha.

However, unlike the other guests, they were not invited to sit down at the table to eat. I was

walking over to the PDTI team when I noticed the community president, Yessica. She was

engaged in a conversation with Claudio. They were standing by themselves. She seemed

upset. Ricardo also seemed a bit weary, like he was not really present and not too eager to

talk to me. I was standing there next to the PDTI team when Claudio returned from his

conversation with Yessica. When he greeted me, a woman standing next to me said, “there’s

no need talking to this one, she doesn’t vote”. Then she left. The atmosphere felt somewhat

uncanny. I went over to help out with the dishes and when I turned around a bit later, both the

PDTI team and Claudio had left already.

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Some days later, I talked to Ana about this and asked her if something had happened. She

started by telling me that the relationship between Claudio and Yessica was troubling. She

added that it was easily discernable that Teresa, the deceased’s daughter and one of the hosts

(and the industrious entrepreneur we met in chapter 5), was in favor of Sarita, too. During the

wake, Ana explained, Yessica and Teresa did not want to serve Claudio food. Normally, Ana

said, authorities are served first. In this case, however, the community president claimed they

were afuerinos – outsiders – and thus, not to be served. “They had to leave without being

served!” Ana cried out. She shook her head, clearly displeased. By refusing to share food

with Claudio and the PDTI team, Yessica distanced herself and the hosts from them. It was

an enactment of interests that did not align with but rather opposed those interests Claudio

somehow represented. Meanwhile, Ana found the treatment that the PDTI team and Claudio

had received disrespectful and connected it to the upcoming election.

The relationship between the Board and Claudio was unsettling. Ana said that at some point

Claudio had told her that he was not sure how he would manage to work with the Board if he

was elected mayor. Apparently, they were hostile towards him and showed no signs of

willingness to collaborate. “The community Board is not functioning. That is why we have

talked to Rafael about asking for the votes from the election of the current Board. We want to

get rid of them (botarlos)”, said Ana. By “asking for the votes”, she meant asking for the

voting slips from the election of the current Board to see whether they had, in fact, received

the majority of voters or if the election was somehow rigged. This was the first I had heard of

these plans. I was sitting at the kitchen table, observing her baking skills one evening not long

after the aforementioned wake. Ana probably noticed the surprise with which I received this

news, so, while kneading the dough for the evening bread, she continued: “The president let

her personal problems get in the way so that she is not capable of doing her job, to represent

the whole community”. By “personal problems”, Ana was here referring to the difficult

relationship between Yessica and the PDTI team, for which it seemed that Ana blamed

Yessica. She paused before adding that “now, she is just representing one group of the

community.” She was referring to the extended family of the community Board. Then she

said, “The money from the bingo for example, have you seen any of this money? The

empanadas were also very hard (bien duros)”. The accusations were piling up. The Board

had organized a bingo – a lottery – a month earlier to raise money for the community. The

PDTI team even contributed lottery prizes, namely wheat and concentrates to feed the

animals. The Board managed to raise a substantial amount of money, but no one had yet

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benefited from it. The empanadas that Ana referred to, were made by one of the members of

the Board and sold at the lottery as an additional mode of raising money. That they were

hard, and not fluffy like good empanadas should be, was to Ana a sign that the Board had

ripped them off.

While I knew there were tensions between some islanders and the Board, I had not grasped

their gravity, but the suggestion to get rid of the current Board members left no room for

doubt. Nor had I grasped how difficult the Board’s relationship to the PDTI team was. This

surprised me. I was not even able to really comprehend the exact reason why. However, what

I found interesting was the way in which the discontent with the Board was explained. In line

with the discourse of la política as an ethical valuation of acts considered to favor personal

gains over a notions of the common good, the Board was said to work for themselves instead

of representing the whole community. This was exactly what Yessica, the current community

president, considered the previous Board to have done. Teresa had also made the same

remark: that Daniel had taken advantage of his role as Board member to secure goods for

himself and his family.

AFTER ELECTION

Ana was in a good mood when I entered the kitchen after a visit to Valdivia, the nearest city

to Isla Huapi. Not only did she happily inform me of Claudio’s election victory, she could

also inform me that Claudio’s party, Vamos Chile, had won in five municipalities in the

district. She smiled, evidently happy about the election results. In the days that followed,

there was talk about who had voted for whom. The community president engaged in it, too.

One day, when Daniel came by for his regular coffee break, he told me that he had run into

Yessica at the school. She had asked how people at home were and he had told her about

Ana’s tooth pain and my stomach pain (which I was suffering from at that point). Yessica’s

response to this had been “se pasa el dolor” – “the pain passes”. While telling the story,

Daniel underlined that it was a joke. He appeared to like the joke as he laughed. When

hearing it, Ana laughed too. The source of humor was that Yessica had voted for Sarita – and

lost. Therefore, she was jokingly talking from experience when saying that the pain will pass

as she had just experienced the “pain” of losing.

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For Ricardo and the rest of the PDTI team, the aftermath of the election seemed to create a

situation slightly more serious than it appeared to be for Yessica. For them, the stakes had

risen after it became clear that Claudio had won. Rarely did they take the time to have lunch

at Ana’s house after community meetings on the island. This was something they otherwise

always did. One evening, before I went to bed, Ana asked me to join her the next day.

Together with others, she was visiting a fellow islander who had become ill quite suddenly.

When the next day arrived, she could not figure out how to get to the ill person’s house.

Daniel could not drive us, as he normally did, and walking did not seem like an option. Then,

while we were trying to figure it out, Daniel called from school. He had talked to Ricardo,

who had said he could pick us up and drive us there.

When Ricardo arrived, he sat down to have a coffee. He told us he would be vaccinating

sheep the whole day. He looked at me and asked me if I wanted to help him. Ana thought that

sounded like a good idea and encouraged me to join him. We drove Ana to the ill person’s

house and I joined Ricardo for the day. It turned out that vaccination was not the only chore.

Ricardo’s primary goal for the day was to catch up with PDTI business on the island,

including vaccination.

We visited numerous houses that day. For every visit, Ricardo (who you can see in the photo

below assessing a farmer’s construction of what was to become a shed) checked off his list

displaying an overview of unfinished work or undocumented projects. He needed to close the

open PDTI project files. For that, he needed to gather bills proving the purchase of materials

for specific individual projects, the signatures from those in question who had gotten projects,

and he also needed photos of the constructions. These photos would legitimize money

channeled from INDAP through PDTI to individual farmer’s development projects. However,

far from everyone had constructed the things they had received money to build. Ricardo was

frustrated, and he was in a hurry.

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At several points throughout this day, we ran into the other two PDTI workers. I was

surprised to see Ariel, one of the three functionaries working in the PDTI team. He had not

been particularly present since his breakup with Valeria and preferred to engage in work in

other indigenous communities than Isla Huapi. Valeria was one of those younger islanders

who had not moved away from Isla Huapi but who stayed working as a teacher at the

children’s school. Ariel and Valeria had met on Isla Huapi but, apparently, he did not get

along very well with her family and her mother in particular. As Valeria lived with her

mother, this eventually became a problem. Nevertheless, he had to contribute on this day by

gathering all the information they needed, as they were in a hurry. When we ran into Ariel, he

greeted me but did not seem particularly eager to talk. Instead, he compared his to do-list – a

list of people to visit – with Ricardo’s and concluded that they did not have much time.

“Do you want to know why I am doing all these things now?” Ricardo asked me. We had

taken a break and sat on the ground in front of a woman’s greenhouse. We were eating

chocolate that the dueña of the last house we visited had given us. “Well, for the political

change (cambio politico)”, he said. He stared into space. He looked tired and worried. “They

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have decided to dismiss 50 percent of PDTI. I don’t know who that will be”. With the

election, Ricardo was scared that the municipality had decided not to renew his contract. As

with his fellow PDTI workers, he was employed on short-term contracts. Naturally, he

wanted to be up-to-date with the PDTI economy, deals and projects before the election so that

he would be prepared for the upcoming assessment of their work. He wanted everything to be

in place. For this, however, he needed the people who were in the PDTI program, 95 families

on the island, to comply with the demands PDTI had placed upon those who had gotten

projects. This way, he wanted to try to secure his future job as head of the PDTI team. He

needed to gain trust and merits that would enhance his credibility in the eyes of Claudio, the

new mayor, and those politicians who now worked for him.

Ana seemed to share this concern. She did not like the idea that Ricardo and the others might

be replaced. At the same time, she did not seem as stressed about this possibility as Ricardo

was. “I don’t think they will change these positions. I hope not. The farmers have asked them

not to”, she said. I asked her who the farmers were that she referred to – if she perhaps meant

the Board. “No”, she said, “just the farmers”. She then explained that it could not have been

through the Board because the president, Yessica, did not talk very well with Ricardo.

“They’re of old ideas (ideas antiguas). They don’t work very well with Ricardo, nor

Claudio”.

WELCOMING A NEW MAYOR

The newly elected mayor, Claudio Lavado, had invited all islanders to celebrate his victory.

He wanted to thank islanders for voting for him, but also to create a space for people to air

their concerns and wishes for the future of the island.

Ana went to Futrono on that day to buy materials for the quincho with the money she had

recently received from a project that she had gotten (sacado). Thus, I went with Daniel down

to the feria costumbrista, the fair down by the port established by island entrepreneurs and

PDTI members in 2011. It was located next to the northern port. Claudio and the islanders

had organized a convivencia, a get-together in which participants each bring their

contributions to share. Daniel and I brought vegetables that Ana had asked me to bring, in

addition to gasoline and firewood. When stepping out of Daniel’s car I caught a glimpse of a

boat approaching. It was Claudio and three of the future councilmembers. I was standing

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there waiting for the boat to approach when Daniel asked me to go see if the women needed

help in the kitchen. Inside in the small kitchen booth, I found Sofia and her mother. They

were already well under way preparing everything but were happy to see me. They wanted

help, that was right; but first, Sofia’s mother told me, we had to go outside to greet our next

mayor. On our way over to the port, they chatted about the way in which they should greet

him. They agreed that they would not greet him now as alcalde (mayor) – just Claudio.

Meanwhile, when he took office, they said, they would have to call him by alcalde, the more

formal term.

Observing the greeting procedure, it surprised me to see that Claudio apparently knew people

better than I had first assumed. What I had taken for election flattery seemed in retrospect

instead to have been sincerity stemming from relationships closer than I had assumed. When

Claudio held his speech on this day, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only did he direct

thanks to everyone, calling several people by their proper names, for their votes and promise

them hard work and devotion, he also talked about his history with Daniel, with whom he had

played football and gone to school with for years. He underlined his close relation to Isla

Huapi. While looking one after the other in the eye, he said, with an emotionally charged

voice: “for me, Futrono would never be Futrono without Isla Huapi”.

The councilmembers followed up with promises of hard work before one of the islanders

requested the microphone. With a good grip around the microphone, he moved to the middle

of the semicircle that had formed. He turned towards Claudio and said, “Last night I had a

dream. I dreamt that all roads were repaired and improved. That the electricity for which we

have been waiting for a long time finally arrived. That all this arrived with the new candidate

and his councilmembers. That the work done for the island would be para todos, para el

grupito – for everybody, for the little group”.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I have looked at the distinction between politics and política, and showed how

the election process included both. The discourse of política refers on Isla Huapi to an act

that is undertaken in self-interest for personal gain. The efforts that Ricardo undertook when

he was desperately trying to finalize and close project files that were overdue in order to

secure his job can be said to be an act of self-interest that aims at personal gain. However, it

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is not política. There are more components that must be in place for an act of self-interest to

be deemed “political”. First, política carries an element of manipulation and lying – not

necessarily real but perceived. In Salinas’ (2016) terms, la política is placed on a spectrum of

visibility/invisibility – as elusive. Political negotiations between authorities were not visible

to islanders, less so intentions behind decisions that were made. What were really their

intentions and whom did they serve? Tied to a moral discourse, this propelled rumors and

allegations which, in turn, cultivated doubt and distrust. Second, política often involves

promises, which is perhaps why the term is often used in relation to development projects,

and, third, it is placed on the spectrum of accessibility-inaccessibility. Formal political

decisions were mainly a responsibility of the Board who, in their role as representatives of the

community, negotiated with outside authorities. Thus, access to the sphere of power

negotiations was limited to Board members and were as such inaccessible to most islanders.

That is why these authorities or people closely related to them often became subjects of

política. They are in a position in which they can more effectively take advantage of the

power that this position allows. Authorities are put in place to represent the community as a

whole and to work according to a notion of doing good for the community. When they are

thought to take advantage of this position in order to work for personal gain instead, as by

spending time trying to finance a development project that benefits themselves or their own

businesses, they might be accused of doing “politics”. Therefore, the term speaks as much to

the moral character of intentions as to the act or outcome itself. Based on gossip, what

política does is that it reveals tensions – social forces of affect that are produced in the

intersection between different value realms. Política goes to the heart of tensions between

self-interest and the common good.

Notions of self-interest embedded in the concept of política are thrown in opposition to

notions of the common good: that which benefits and secures equal opportunities for all

islanders, and that different interests are taken into account. Those authorities who are

criticized for doing politics, in the emic sense of the word, are criticized of favoring personal

gains over a care for the common good. Thus, they are blamed for prioritizing self-interests

when these negatively affect the collective as a whole. Just as the previous Board was

assumed to do “politics”, so is the current Board. As such, the discourse of política blurs the

boundary between values of care and a common good and those of profit and self-interest,

and is, through this blurring, an effective means of political negotiations.

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As I have shown in this chapter, política also reveals tensions tied to the way in which the

community plays out as a singular collective (Koselleck [1985] 2004, in Harvey, 2018a). As

a singular collective, outlined in chapter 4, the community holds within itself the tension

between the one and the many. Just as the singularized Community is instigated by the

government, so is the singularized Board whose task it is to represent the community.

However, this singularity is impossible to produce from the inside – the singular community

is an administrative unit rather than a collective of people and interests. The notion of the

common good cannot be realized and perceived as such for everyone. As I have shown in

previous chapters, resources such as water infrastructure and governmental funding do not

give islanders equal opportunities as there will always be some who are better equipped to

make use of these opportunities than others. On Isla Huapi, there will always be negotiations

of competing (political) interests that seem to occur precisely in the relation between

community as singular and collective – diverging notions of community as administration

and community as lived. In order to sort out competing interests, revealed through the

discourse of política, islanders turn to agents within the state apparatus. The election of the

mayor becomes relevant to everyday life on Isla Huapi as different islanders turn to different

state actors outside the community in order to secure personal interests. This shows how

islanders aspire to build alliances upwards in the state apparatus rather than within their

community. While islanders connect closer to the state, the connection (to which the

municipal apparatus proves important) also confuse and blur the boundary between the state

and the society of Isla Huapi.

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8. CONCLUSION: PARADOXES OF

NEOLIBERALISM

I started this dissertation attempting to draw a picture of the way in which the state

materializes on Isla Huapi through development programs, how this presence resonates with

current forms of precarity that are historically produced, and how attempts to come to grips

with precarious living conditions result in islanders’ search for development. Throughout the

dissertation, then, I have attempted to illustrate the way in which islanders engage state-led

development programs by negotiating conflicting values and interests – between state and

island community, between state actors and islanders, and between islanders themselves.

These negotiations surface in relation to notions of property, organization of labor, relations

of kinship and authority, and value regimes. I have also attempted to look at the effects that

this engagement has on the relationship between the state and the island community of Isla

Huapi.

In general, state-led development programs articulate neoliberal principles and promote

privatization, individualization, entrepreneurialism, and self-responsible citizens independent

of state-support. What they aim at in the end, as I have shown, is to render the individual

responsible for their own well-being. Islanders are expected to make use of the life-enhancing

opportunities provided by the state though productive means such as infrastructure and

funding regimes to improve their own lives. Thus, taken together with the individualization

of property ownership and singularized organization of community, not only do these means

work as technologies of government: they also work as a social policy of poverty reduction

through which the state withdraws responsibility and hands it down to the individual. (This

individual may be the community as an individual entity, or the individual subject within that

community.) This tendency of transferring the responsibility of welfare from the state onto

the citizens by means of the market is a well-documented effect of neoliberal statecraft, often

conceptualized in terms of “empowerment” (Han, 2012; Schild, 2007; Sharma, 2008; Smith,

2017), or, more explicitly, “empowerment style self-development” (Sharma, 2008).

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Because state-led development programs enrich some people, they propel processes of

differentiation and moreover inequality. Contributing to this is the logic of entrepreneurial

success and work ethic along which lines resources are allocated, resulting, for example in

Ana’s enrichment and, by contrast, the economic precariousness of Danissa and Flavio’s

household. The temporal aspect of resource allocation that allows some farmers to benefit

from the irrigation system before others, leaving islanders like Rosa behind, adds to the trend

of increasing inequality. Development projects are treated both by state actors such as Ignacio

and by islanders as a singular transformative event, without the acknowledgement that “the

time of infrastructure has its own plasticity” (Harvey, 2018a, p. 82). This creates frustration

and indignation, adding to the sense of inequality among islanders. By engaging development

through state-led programs, islanders replace reliance on state pensions with other relations of

interdependence – with the state and its actors. Consequently, the sense of uncertainty that

manifests itself in this relation becomes pertinent.

Through islanders’ engagement in development programs, neoliberalism is subtly woven into

the fabric of everyday life on Isla Huapi as they search for better lives. As I argued in the

second chapter, inherent to neoliberalism is the seemingly contradictory principle of state

presence and state retreat – a contradiction that is in fact built into neoliberalism and which

makes it paradoxical. Furthermore, there are the values of reciprocity, collectivity, and a

common good that coexist with the contradictory values of human capital, exchange,

individuality, profit, and self-interest. A central purpose of this dissertation has thus been to

show the ways in which this paradox of neoliberalism plays out on the ground through the

engagement in state-led development programs. However, it has also been important to me to

show how these conflicting interests and values do not in fact make up movements towards

and resistance to neoliberalism. Rather, I show that is how neoliberalism and neoliberal

development work on Isla Huapi. The islanders’ tendency to call upon the state substantiates

this claim.

It has been a central ethnographic discovery that islanders makes the state – that is, its

apparatus, or what Jansen (2014) calls the state grid – significant. They draw the state into

being as much as the state makes itself useful for them. An important driving power behind

islanders’ efforts to call the state into being is precisely their sense of being inclined to

material development.

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Living under precarious conditions – economic, political, spatial as well as material,

particularly compared to material conditions on the mainland – islanders hoped for the arrival

of electricity and potable water infrastructure. What they hoped for by means of this

infrastructure was an increased capacity to aspire to a general sense of well-being

(Appadurai, 2004; Fischer, 2014) and a “life worth living” (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014). It

was as if the infrastructure for which they all hoped would make it possible to believe that the

future they wanted could actually manifest itself – realizing the pursuit of a better life.

However, as I have shown throughout this dissertation, state presence is not without

ambivalence. Tying oneself in more closely with the state and its apparatus means that the

community is also presented with other faces of the state than the positive outlooks of new

infrastructure.

In the last chapter, through the signing of an agreement, islanders’ hopes were suddenly

transformed into beliefs. Why? In this signed document, the promise of electricity

materialized. The historical signing of the agreement granted Isla Huapi 4,000,000,000 CLP

(approximately 5.9 million USD in September 2016) for the construction of solar-power

infrastructure to generate electricity for each and every household. In a newspaper interview

(Orellana, 2016) with the lonko right after the signing had taken place, he reminisces about

the first time when solar panels were installed on the island in connection with the irrigation

system project. Then, in 2014, two years prior to the inauguration event I outlined in chapter

6, the President of the Republic at that time, Sebastián Piñera, granted Isla Huapi a visit to

inaugurate the newly installed solar panels. In the aforementioned interview, the lonko talks

about the presidential visit: “He landed with a lot of guards as if we were criminals, terrorists

as they call us”. Apparently, the President had arrived the island in a helicopter surrounded

by guards that would not permit the lonko to greet him in the traditional way – on horseback.

He had been asked to step down from the horse, but had nevertheless not gotten permission to

greet the president. Suddenly, the President had taken off as fast as he had arrived: “He has

his house in Bahía Coique (a place at the Lake Ranco waterfront just outside the town of

Futrono), but we don’t know him. For us he was like a water bird (pájaro de agua), he landed

with his flock of escorts and left. We were left looking at each other: shoot, the President of

the Republic passed by and nobody talked to him!” With these words, the lonko raises

awareness about the intangible yet concrete presence of the President – close, but out of

reach. Reflecting, it seems, on the marginally situated island of Huapi, the lonko says

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according to the quote in the interview: “we have always been the backyard of the country”

(Orellana, 2016).

Here, the lonko paints a clear picture not only of the alienating effects of the presidential visit,

but also of one of the ways in which the state comes into being on Isla Huapi in fleeting and

unpredictable ways. While the president’s visit to the island reaffirmed the island’s existence

and inclusion into the nation state, the way in which the visit took place likewise reaffirms

the marginality of the island community which islanders experience through its lack in

material development. For whom or what purpose did the presidential visit take place? This

visit, as with the inaugurations, workings and effects of development programs in general,

presents us, as much as the islanders, with a paradox surrounding the contradictory workings

of the state (here embodied in the president himself): present and close, yet absent and

unreachable, awe-inspiring yet degrading. At the same time as the state comes into being, it

unmakes itself by retreating and keeping its distance. This resonates with islanders’ historical

experiences with state support and, in particular, promises of development and modernization

that at times materialize but rarely in accordance with the temporal expectations tied to them.

Despite a history of neglect and discrimination, or perhaps because this past makes

inhabitants on Isla Huapi feel marginalized, they continue to hope for the state – for its

ordering capacity and for its capacity to provide material development. Hope as well as

indignation and feelings of injustice are elicited in relation to the state. At the same time,

these emotions are forces that undergird islanders’ drive toward development, as illustrated in

chapter 5 and 6. The way in which the affective (neoliberal) state works through emotional

registers is made particularly visible in relation to politics, as in the last chapter, where

conflicting values of self-interest and a common good are negotiated through the emic notion

of politics – política. In this chapter, we witness the affective charge that the state has and

how powerful emotions are not epiphenomenal to but rather the substance of politics: “a

complex, dynamic, and resilient reality that structures both opportunities and challenges for

political actors and is constitutive of the acting subjects themselves” (Laszczkowski &

Reeves, 2015, p. 2). For better or worse, the state carries with it powerful emotions at the

same time as the force of affects contribute to the state’s emergence on Isla Huapi.

The presidential visit on which the lonko reflected took place in 2014, but the interview to

which I refer was undertaken and published in 2016. From the interview it becomes clear that

205

the lonko expected the promise of money allocation inherent in the agreement, then recently

signed, to concretize in one year’s time – in 2017. In March 2018, it did. A little over a year

after my return to Norway from Isla Huapi, I read newspaper articles about the arrival of

electricity on Isla Huapi and talked to islanders who are now able to charge their phones

inside their homes. Promotions of islanders’ tourist businesses were all of a sudden popping

up in my Facebook feed. Photo posts allowed me to witness the modernization they had so

long yearned for. In another newspaper interview, one in which the lonko was interviewed in

the context of the arrival of electricity on the island, he said: “For centuries, our light was the

sun during the days and the moon during nights…It was like time was not advancing for us;

but now this is going to change our way of life” (Riquelme Bracho, 2018).

Precarity takes form in a relational manner and is as such not a category but a relationship

(Harvey, 2018b; K. Stewart, 2012). On Isla Huapi, as I have tried to show, precarity exists as

a historically informed relation to the state. It is from a sense of precarity that the inclination

to demand material development stems. Thus, the relation between precarity and affect

occurring in state encounters is what drives islanders’ search for development and

modernization. The affective register includes uncertainty and insecurity, but also senses of

hope and opportunity – beliefs in the future. While the state regenerates itself through the

spatial margins (Navaro-Yashin, 2002), the backyard of the country as the lonko put it, so too

does the community of Isla Huapi regenerate future prospects of well-being and aspirations

for economic security in relation to the state. While the relation between the island

community and the state is thus one of interdependence, islanders depend on the state to

(materially) “change their way of life”, as the lonko said. As such, the neoliberal state

monopolizes hope for modernization and is therefore able to govern the community through

affective means. The question pertinent to islanders is not whether or not to engage the state

through neoliberal development programs, but how. This question influences the ways in

which fellow islanders relate to one another, the state and its actors.

A FINAL NOTE ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND NEOLIBERALISM

This dissertation has presented an ethnography of neoliberalism and neoliberal development.

Nevertheless, this is not an ethnography of suffering, but one about rural indigenous farmers’

uncertainties as they hope for well-being, a good life, and economic security. It is an

anthropology of the dark, but also of the good, and combines the two tendencies of

206

anthropology to foreground the hopeless and the hopeful (Ortner, 2016). It has posed

questions such as “How do people search for the best way to live?” (Ortner, 2016, p. 59);

“What is a life worth living?” (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014); “What is their capacity to aspire?”

(Appadurai, 2004; Fischer, 2014) and “In what ways do they hope for the state?” (Jansen,

2014). Consequently, this is not a story of the good life, either, but one about the search for it,

colored by the framework of neoliberalism within which this search takes place and by which

it is formed.

In a HAU journal article titled “Dark anthropology and its others” (2016), Sherry B. Ortner

outlines the theoretical and ethnographic trends in anthropology since the eighties. She

identifies a general move away from theories of Durkheim and Weber towards those of Marx

and Foucault, and relates this shift in theory use to the ethnographic interest in and awareness

of the dark world – relations of suffering, inequality, exploitation and governmentality caused

by the global paradigm of neoliberalism. Since the eighties, she writes, dark anthropology of

neoliberalism has dominated the discipline. The way in which anthropologists have addressed

and studied neoliberal realities has been to focus on the impact of neoliberalism, uncovering

and emphasizing “the harsh, violent, and punitive nature of neoliberalism and the depression

and hopelessness in which people under neoliberal regimes are often deployed” (Ortner,

2016, p. 65). The first part of Ortner’s article truly conveys bleak outlooks on the world.

However, towards the latter part of her text she asks: “What is the point of opposing

neoliberalism if we cannot imagine better ways of living and better futures? How can we be

both realistic about the ugly realities of the world today and hopeful about the possibilities of

changing them?” (Ortner, 2016, p. 60). Reminiscent of Miyazaki’s (2004) call for

hopefulness, to use hope as a method to imagine alternative futures where there is less

exploitation and inequality and more happiness, Ortner turns her focus towards “the

anthropology of the good” as opposed to “the anthropology of the dark”. In contrast to the

dark, the good here encompasses well-being, happiness, morality and ethics. In line with the

questions she poses, outlined above, she identifies a scholarly countermovement that deals

with cultural critique, rethinking capitalism as well as ethnographic studies of resistance.

Resistance appears in multifaceted forms, but most classically, perhaps, through the study of

social movements against the neoliberal rule (feminist and environmental movements,

movements for racial justice and indigenous rights, etc.).

207

Surely, ethnographic accounts of the myriad ways in which people resist neoliberal regimes

are important, as they challenge an existing political and economic order that causes suffering

for many people. By focusing on resistance, hopefulness is situated in the alternative to the

current order. However, it is equally important to recognize hopefulness that resides not only

in acts of resistance but also in acts that do not necessarily resist neoliberalism. In the

conclusion, Ortner does recognize this point to a certain extent:

In some cases authors frame work on the good in opposition to work on oppression and

inequality (dismissed as “misery porn”), and in other cases they simply ignore the larger

contexts of power and inequality in play. In response to that I tried to emphasize the

importance of keeping these two kinds of work, or more broadly these two perspectives, in

active interaction with rather than opposition to, one another. (Ortner, 2016, p. 65)

However, she envisions the interaction between perspectives on the dark and the good by

thinking in terms of how they co-exist and how the former restrains or threatens the existence

of the latter. With reference to Joel Robbins (2013), Edward F. Fischer (2014) and Michael

Lambek (2010), Ortner identifies the countermove towards “the anthropology of the good”

through studies that focus on topics such as value, morality, well-being, imagination,

empathy, care, the gift, hope, time and change. Narotzky (2015) points to the same values in

her writing about flexible capitalism. Under regimes of flexible capitalism, Narotzky claims,

the boundaries between different value regimes are blurred. This blurring threatens to replace

values of reciprocity and care with darker values of profit and exploitation.

How is the integration between the dark and the good expressed on Isla Huapi? Following

Ortner (2016), I believe it is pertinent to acknowledge the integration of dark and hopeful

outlooks. People rarely live in states of exclusive hopelessness. Looking at my ethnography, a

sense of hope must be situated within the order of neoliberalism. However, as I just

mentioned, hope does not necessarily take the form of resistance. People on Isla Huapi place

hope in the state and call on the state apparatus, not for political intervention, but to create

order and efficiency through development of infrastructure. They generally do not perceive or

relate to the current political and economic order as something to resist or overcome. It might

be that the reason for this is because the neoliberal state monopolizes hope for a better future.

Nevertheless, in looking at the way in which state-led development plays out on the ground,

it has become clear that hope is built into neoliberal rule and makes neoliberalism (sadly)

208

effective. On Isla Huapi, hope and aspirations and the search for the good life exist as an

integral part of the dark age of neoliberalism. If we fail to realize the role that hope plays for

people who relate every day to the neoliberal state and for whom neoliberalism is not

perceived as something to overcome, then we run the risk of overlooking a seductive aspect

of neoliberalism which, in turn, stifles our efforts to create alternative futures.

209

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