Heterotopic oceans in Southern Chile: heritage, fisheries, and marine conservation

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which hierarchical social relations contribute to the social configuration of space in the seas around the archipelago of Chiloé, in southern Chile. Heritage projects, fisheries production regimes, and efforts to install marine conservation areas through scientific research, increased popular awareness, and legal means, all contribute to the growing number of overlapping oceanic spatial projects. Each project is examined for the ways in which racialized, ethnicized, and class social orders are exercised, and for how these processes work together to deepen spatialized social hierarchy and social order. The analysis illuminates the commonalities and resonances between different kinds of quotidian oceanic spatial projects, and provides an excellent example of the ways in which coastal and territorial seas are being socially reorganized in the contemporary world.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterotopia
• mestizaje
• heritage
• marine conservation
• marine fisheries
• Chile

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Tom Boellstorff, Sandra Brunnegger, and Carol Mitchell for their helpful suggestions, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley Law, where I was a visiting scholar during 2013–2014, and the people in Chile who generously spent time with me during my field research.

Additional information

Funding

Part of the field research for this article was supported by a 1998 University of California Pacific Rim Program research grant.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen M. Sullivan

Kathleen M. Sullivan is at the Department of Anthropology, California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90032 (Email: [email protected])