Chilean Culture

Glottopolitics of Inequality: Ideologies on Mapudungun and Spanish in Chile (2009-2019) by Gabriel Alvarado Pavez Advisor: José del Valle This dissertation is an attempt to analyze contemporary discourses on Mapudungun and Spanish and their development within the political and economic context of Chile between 2009 and 2019. The object of analysis is the diverse array of linguistic ideologies displayed on both the hegemonic press (newspapers of nationwide circulation) and on Facebook, which helps provide a sociolinguistic profile of Chile from a glottopolitical perspective. This entails a point of view focused on power structures and their modes of (re)production and perpetuation, i.e. beyond the mere description of inequalities. Among the ideological frameworks detected here, there are some which had been previously described from the fields of linguistic anthropology and critical sociolinguistics, such as anonymity, authenticity, pride and profit. In the case of Mapudungun, other representations were also found, such as a vision of the language as sacred or untouchable, and cosmovisionism, that is, an attribution of metaphysical properties that depend on a unique connection between indigenous culture and the natural and spiritual world. This research reports the emergence of a Mapuche language institutionality that raises and discusses the problem of cosmovisionism as a central theme of linguistic planning, which occurs mainly on the digital environment. The peculiarity of the Spanish language in Chile is also observed, represented in a complex duality, where there is an unmarked, regulated, transparent, anonymous and transnational form (assimilated to the standard language) and another form marked specifically as Chilean, closely attached to national singularities, especially regarding social class. Institutions that rule the Spanish language (particularly, RAE and ASALE), while firmly retaining authority, they also leave room for gray areas for political maneuver by both these agencies and the upper classes. The predominance of the Spanish language comes into tension with emerging forms of cultural counterhegemony from the Mapuche world, but also from the intense influence of English (associated with the elite and global capitalism), and the emergence of political initiatives that seek to manage language (for example, feminism). With varying intensity, all these phenomena appear in the corpus. This dissertation shows a strong depoliticization and transparency of the Spanish language, which contrasts to an abundance of positive appreciations (ethic and aesthetic) of Mapudungun and a saturation of its political value. New positive visions of the Mapuche language, as well as of some traditionally subaltern forms of Chilean Spanish, inform of a political and historical moment where the dominant discourse must adjust its own notions of diversity within the framework of a liberal democracy that, nevertheless, is established in a society with immense inequality of distribution of economic and symbolic resources.

In this paper, I attempt to gain an understanding of the dynamics of the Es de roto Facebook page as an online space that brings together Chileans from different class backgrounds. With this, I intend to find if social class distances, so stark in Chilean society, are symbolically diminished by the collective representations of roto memes, or by people’s interactions with them. To do so, I analyse the page from three different but complimentary theoretical standpoints: social media, class, and nation. I find that people from diverse classes associate the page with something other than class: despite its name, they associate it with ideas of nation or ‘Chileanness’. Hence, though class differences are not negotiated, another type of collective identity arises in parallel, which, depending on the context, can be stronger or weaker than class affiliations, but due to is nature is transcendent of class.

Cinco años. Ese es el tiempo que se ha tomado el balneario principal de la Región de O'Higgins para cambiar de piel culinaria. De pasar desde un puñado de comedores de calidad, siempre con aire tradicional hasta lugares donde el comer se mira desde perspectivas variadas y refinadas. Las técnicas conectadas con el territorio y viejos saberes, se unen a sitios en los que el paladar global se impone. Una mezcla vivaz, amalgamada por el campomar y el influjo internacionalista del surf, que está creando un ambiente único en la costa chilena. TEXTO CARLOS REYES M. Y ANA MARÍA BARAHONA. FOTOS MACARENA ÁLVAREZ. Y AGRADECIMIENTOS VIÑAS PRODUCCIÓN CLAUDIA MALUENDA G.

El archipiélago de Chiloé (Chile) es un centro de diversidad de la papa (Solanum tuberosum L.). Durante siglos sus habitantes han estado ligados a este tubérculo, el cual constituye su alimento principal. El reemplazo paulatino de las variedades nativas por tipos foráneos llegó a hacer peligrar su supervivencia, pero su importancia agrícola, cultural y económica se ha comenzado a reconocer durante los últimos años, y su cultivo va en aumento. A través del saber de quienes lo cultivan y consumen en la zona, el objetivo del presente estudio es conocer el contexto cultural de dicho alimento, ampliando la información sobre los objetos relacionados con este en la colección del Museo Regional de Ancud.

This article describes the importance of the Chilean urban cueca as a source of Santiago de Chile’s urban memory. The main argument explains how cueca lyrics transmit a sense of place that brings back a memory of friendship and fraternity, and also how these friendship songs are narratives of urban landscapes strongly connected with old memories and “performed maps,” that is, musical performance pathways of the past 50 years in the city. Interviews and nonparticipant observations are taken from two periods of fieldwork in Santiago de Chile between 2008 and 2009. Theoretically based on the concept of music scene, Edward Soja’s idea of vivid space and José Bengoa’s analysis of the lost community, the article concludes that memories form a counterdiscourse that criticizes the notion of progress or the Chilean way to global capitalism, turning upside down the created imaginary of a modern and developed city.

Libro publicado el año 2011 que fue convertido en página web, mejorado y aumentado. El libro contiene más de 600 hitos de la historia de la cueca chilena. Me decidí a ponerlo en la web porque considero que toda esta información puede ser útil para clases de música, baile, instrumento, historia relativas a la cueca. Prácticamente todo lo dicho sobre la cueca está aquí. Espero que les sirva a todos.

Trabajo realizado en conjunto con el sitio Cancionerodecuecas.cl dirigido por Felipe Solís Poblete, quien es autor además de decenas de hitos del texto.

The figures of 'roto' and 'huaso' are considered popular types of the chileanity. The researcher Santa Cruz Achurra points out that during the Chilean cinema of the 1940s we can find greater presence of the huaso in relation to the roto on the movies. From this information, our objective in this article is not to seek answers to this phenomenon, but to analyze how the figure of the roto became an important element present in the Chilean cultural industry in the first half on the 20th century, and thus it was absorbed by the local film production. Finally, we will focus our studies on the comic actor Eugenio Retes, specifically in the film "El gran circo Chamorro" (1955), directed by José Bohr.

Glottopolitics of Inequality: Ideologies on Mapudungun and Spanish in Chile (2009-2019) by Gabriel Alvarado Pavez Advisor: José del Valle This dissertation is an attempt to analyze contemporary discourses on Mapudungun and Spanish and their development within the political and economic context of Chile between 2009 and 2019. The object of analysis is the diverse array of linguistic ideologies displayed on both the hegemonic press (newspapers of nationwide circulation) and on Facebook, which helps provide a sociolinguistic profile of Chile from a glottopolitical perspective. This entails a point of view focused on power structures and their modes of (re)production and perpetuation, i.e. beyond the mere description of inequalities. Among the ideological frameworks detected here, there are some which had been previously described from the fields of linguistic anthropology and critical sociolinguistics, such as anonymity, authenticity, pride and profit. In the case of Mapudungun, other representations were also found, such as a vision of the language as sacred or untouchable, and cosmovisionism, that is, an attribution of metaphysical properties that depend on a unique connection between indigenous culture and the natural and spiritual world. This research reports the emergence of a Mapuche language institutionality that raises and discusses the problem of cosmovisionism as a central theme of linguistic planning, which occurs mainly on the digital environment. The peculiarity of the Spanish language in Chile is also observed, represented in a complex duality, where there is an unmarked, regulated, transparent, anonymous and transnational form (assimilated to the standard language) and another form marked specifically as Chilean, closely attached to national singularities, especially regarding social class. Institutions that rule the Spanish language (particularly, RAE and ASALE), while firmly retaining authority, they also leave room for gray areas for political maneuver by both these agencies and the upper classes. The predominance of the Spanish language comes into tension with emerging forms of cultural counterhegemony from the Mapuche world, but also from the intense influence of English (associated with the elite and global capitalism), and the emergence of political initiatives that seek to manage language (for example, feminism). With varying intensity, all these phenomena appear in the corpus. This dissertation shows a strong depoliticization and transparency of the Spanish language, which contrasts to an abundance of positive appreciations (ethic and aesthetic) of Mapudungun and a saturation of its political value. New positive visions of the Mapuche language, as well as of some traditionally subaltern forms of Chilean Spanish, inform of a political and historical moment where the dominant discourse must adjust its own notions of diversity within the framework of a liberal democracy that, nevertheless, is established in a society with immense inequality of distribution of economic and symbolic resources.