Araucanization, Nation: A Century Inscribing Indians in the Pampas

LAZZARI AXEL; LENTON DIANA

Contemporary Perspectives on the Native Peoples of Pampa

Greenwood Publishing Group

Lugar: Westport; Año: 2002; p. 33 - 46

Our interpretive hypothesis sees "araucanization" as a discursive formation crossed by a national narrative. This narrative articulates the (supposedly) recent penetration of a (supposedly) foreign ethnic group or culture into a complex of space, time and ethnic/cultural identity that refers to the ever-existing figure of the nation. Such a formation fosters an hegemonic inscription of certain entities (yesterday, "Araucanians"; today, "Mapuche Indians") into the text of the Argentine nation as ethnic-indigenous groups, to be known as "invaders", "foreigners" or, in the best of cases, "newly arrived peoples". Moreover, the inscription of the Araucanian element in Pampa/Norpatagonia could be seen as an attempt to trace differences not only between ethnic-indigenous and national entities, but also between various ethnic groups along a line of alochthony/autochthony. In this paper, we will explore this hypothesis through a corpus of texts published along a century, though emphasizing on the period from the 1920s through the 1980s. We will present the genesis of  "araucanization" as an academic discourse and describe its function as an historical-ethnological genre, as well as its relation to historical culturalism. We will go on to analyze some of its imagined entities and enunciative components. And finally, we will relate the discourse of  "araucanization" to the semantic resources inherent in the national narrative of Argentina.