Los imaginarios de la indianidad hoy

Diversidad y convergencias

Abstract

The imaginaries of indigenousness today. Diversity and convergence. The western imaginary of indigenousness has been historically constituted by various changing sets of representations; a series of histories, at once convergent and divergent, constructed by different dominant social and political actors: churches, governments, anthropologists. In this article I propose to examine the contemporary forms which this imaginary has acquired vis-à-vis what can truly be called an “explosion” of discourse and representations of indigenousness, in the context of the “taking of the floor” by indigenous representatives, both in tribunals and in socially legitimate institutions. An older imaginary of indigenousness as an administrative practice of an assistential nature aimed at policies of integration, is replaced in the present by an indigenous nationalism which questions the very limits of political power as defined by the State.