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2 books match the query 'Neoliberal Chile'
Sentient Lands
Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal ChilePiergiorgio Di Giminiani
University of Arizona Press, 2018
In 1990, when Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year military dictatorship ended, democratic rule returned to Chile. Since then, Indigenous organizations have mobilized to demand restitution of their ancestral territories seized over the past 150 years.
Sentient Lands is a historically grounded ethnography of the Mapuche people’s engagement with state-run reconciliation and land-restitution efforts. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani analyzes environmental relations, property, state power, market forces, and indigeneity to illustrate how land connections are articulated, in both landscape experiences and land claims. Rather than viewing land claims as simply bureaucratic procedures imposed on local understandings and experiences of land connections, Di Giminiani reveals these processes to be disputed practices of world making.
Ancestral land formation is set in motion by the entangled principles of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, two very different and sometimes conflicting processes. Indigenous land ontologies are based on a relation between two subjects—land and people—both endowed with sentient abilities. By contrast, legal land ontologies are founded on the principles of property theory, wherein land is an object of possession that can be standardized within a regime of value. Governments also use land claims to domesticate Indigenous geographies into spatial constructs consistent with political and market configurations.
Exploring the unexpected effects on political activism and state reparation policies caused by this entanglement of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, Di Giminiani offers a new analytical angle on Indigenous land politics.
Sentient Lands is a historically grounded ethnography of the Mapuche people’s engagement with state-run reconciliation and land-restitution efforts. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani analyzes environmental relations, property, state power, market forces, and indigeneity to illustrate how land connections are articulated, in both landscape experiences and land claims. Rather than viewing land claims as simply bureaucratic procedures imposed on local understandings and experiences of land connections, Di Giminiani reveals these processes to be disputed practices of world making.
Ancestral land formation is set in motion by the entangled principles of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, two very different and sometimes conflicting processes. Indigenous land ontologies are based on a relation between two subjects—land and people—both endowed with sentient abilities. By contrast, legal land ontologies are founded on the principles of property theory, wherein land is an object of possession that can be standardized within a regime of value. Governments also use land claims to domesticate Indigenous geographies into spatial constructs consistent with political and market configurations.
Exploring the unexpected effects on political activism and state reparation policies caused by this entanglement of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, Di Giminiani offers a new analytical angle on Indigenous land politics.
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Viscous Performances
The Persistence of Creative Resistances in Neoliberal ChileMaría José Contreras Lorenzini
Duke University Press, 2026
Viscous Performances examines the endurance of creative protest performances in Chile from the 2011 student mobilizations to the aftermath of the 2019 social revolt. Drawing from performance theory, feminist new materialisms, affect studies, and decolonial perspectives, María José Contreras Lorenzini situates Chilean practices of resistance within a global conversation about the politics of performance while attending closely to the historical and material specificities of the Chilean context. Case studies include student interventions, feminist mobilizations, and commemorative actions that unfolded along a two-kilometer stretch of Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda. Contreras Lorenzini argues that repeated creative resistances that insistently occupied this same urban corridor generated a sticky, persistent, and affectively charged antidote to neoliberalism’s slow violence. These temporally dispersed acts territorialized the urban space as a site of resistance where echoes and reverberations of repertoires accumulated, thickened, and remained available for reenactment. By theorizing resistance as viscous rather than fleeting, Viscous Performances challenges neoliberal framings of dissent that privilege visibility and spectacle and highlights the quieter, less visible practices of care, collaboration, and imagination through which communities sustain long-term struggles.
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