Notas acerca de los dispositivos de poder en la sociedad colonial-fronteriza, la resistencia y la transculturación de los reche-mapuches del Centro-Sur de Chile (XVI-XVIII)

Abstract

The mapuche or Araucanians of South-Center Chile are famous for their ferocious and plurisecular resistance to the Spanish invader. This traditional image of the indomitable, brave and warrior Indian and the vision of the Colony as a permanent period of war have been criticated by the Estudios Fronterizos. This historical movement who emerged in Chile at the beginning of the 1980's proposed a new interpretation of the «encounter» between Spanish and southern indigenous people in order to take into account the pacifical contacts and the frontier relationships. Nevertheless, we will demonstrate that in their will to escape from the warfare paradigm, the Estudios Fronterizos have made another mistake which consists to speak about peace when it seems more appropriate to see transformations into the power devices. What is more, we will understand that their ethnocentrical point of view impeded them to see one of the most important concequence of the conquest: the emergence of a new ethnical group and the construction of a new mapuche identity through a long process of ethnogenesis which changed the reche of the 16th century into the mapuche of the 18th century.