Negotiating optimum distinctiveness: cognitive tendencies toward primordialism among Mapuche youth

Abstract

In recent years primordialism, as a model for understanding people's essentialist perceptions of ethnic similarity and difference, has returned to social scientific debates with a new degree of respectability and theoretical rigour. This article provides further evidence for why primordialism is prioritized by ethnic minorities as a cognitive mechanism for maintaining group distinctiveness, drawing on data gathered among indigenous youth in Chile. In the absence of traditional cultural tenets such as indigenous language and knowledge among the majority of the sample, criteria for membership are premised on perceived essentialisms of blood and surname. The result of categorizing others under primordial terms, however, is that it facilitates a space in which individual preferences of ethnic expression and distinctiveness can be negotiated. This brings the dichotomization of primordialism and constructionism under further scrutiny, suggesting that they may be compatible in the everyday practices of social life.

Keywords:

• Mapuche
• ethnic identity
• youth
• cognition
• primordialism
• moral values

Notes

1. This was premised on a misreading of Geertz's essay (1963) on ‘The Integrative Revolution’ in which he explicitly referred to these attachments as assumed givens.

2. Essentialism is a defining characteristic of primordialism and therefore for the purposes of this article, these terms are treated as interchangeable, albeit that there are other branches of essentialism, such as perennialism.

3. Or indeed any ethnic group for that matter. See Brubaker's (2004) work on ‘ethnicity without groups’.

4. Indeed the colonial significance of conducting research in schools is not lost on the author; these are sites that historically have been instruments of the state for de-indianizing the indigenous population (see e.g. Canessa 2000). The aim, however, was to examine how spheres such as schools could provide a glimpse into the everyday constructs of ethnicity among youth who on the whole were not politically driven in their narratives.

5. The IX Region of Chile is historically where the greatest concentration of Mapuche lived following the Spanish conquest, and where they maintained autonomy for 200 years.

6. Further research is currently being conducted by the author on this comparison.

7. Both pupils had two Mapuche surnames, but this alone cannot account for the choice of self-description since 54 per cent of the sample had this in common but self-defined themselves as Mapuche-Chilean or Chilean-Mapuche.

8. Terwindt (2009) refers to this as the ethnic image, defined as the normative content of the ethnic category that defines who is a ‘true Mapuche’ and who is not.

9. For similar work on the influence of dirt and soil in Latin American identities, see Orlove (1998).

10. The original fieldwork investigated how such inclusion was also negotiated with regards to notions of land, religiosity and experiences of discrimination. Spatial constraints prevent these from being discussed in this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Webb

ANDREW WEBB is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.