Social Imaginaries and Intersubjective Construction of Otherness. The Written Press and the Mapuche Question in Chile

Résumé

This article aims to analyze, from the theory of social imaginaries, one of the most widely used mechanisms, the written press, as a means of producing identities that are essentialized and as a way of constructing a social reality that builds otherness based on the elaboration of stigmata. The foregoing, in relation to one of the most numerous indigenous peoples of the American continent, the Mapuche People, in a context where the positioning of these media regarding the conflicts that oppose the Mapuche people to the forestry companies is evident. Together with the explicitness of the imaginaries as a framework of meanings constitutive of social reality, it seeks to make explicit the way in which the imposition of dominant social imaginaries, with respect to a type of social identity as it is the ethnic identity, it is realized through the resource of symbolic violence. The above, as a sophisticated form of language that allows expressing and reproducing multiple ideas and then validating and legitimizing them intersubjectively at the social level. The construction of alterity is thus the subject of this analysis, particularly in the case of an Other situated at the center of the ethno-national problem.