Culture as Resistance in the Chilean Andes: An Indigenous Community’s Struggle for Rights and Recognition
I
first heard about Likantatay more than 20 years ago. I was sitting in one of my undergraduate anthropology classes listening to my professor go on a tangent, telling us about a new community that was pretending to be indigenous in order to get benefits from the State. “How do you pretend to be indigenous?” I wondered in silence as my professor went on to explain that they were urban poor squatters who had gone as far as to plant crops like corn and alfalfa, raise animals such as pigs and goats, and practice some ceremonies for the Earth Mother just to be able to claim indigenous identity. My professor seemed very convinced about his interpretation, so I didn’t dare challenge him by asking him why he thought someone would even bother to engage in the hardships involved in farming and animal husbandry just to fake an identity. The tangent was over and class was dismissed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Likantatay. Our end-of-semester assignment was to write an evaluation of an applied anthropology project. I got my hands on a movie available in Santiago’s Pre-Columbian Art Museum’s film collection that documented a visual anthropology workshop that had been held and recorded not long before with representatives of seven Atacameño indigenous communities from the Loa River Basin (Likantatay, Lasana, Chiu Chiu, Cupo, Ayquina-Turi, Caspana, and Toconce). Two anthropologists had put together a project to run a documentary film-making workshop with seven indigenous people, teaching them how to use video cameras and some basic editing skills. The purpose was for them to document their customs and traditions. I thought it was a neat idea, but my professor was very critical of these other anthropologists. He argued that they were essentializing and romanticizing culture.
Furthermore, they were imposing their ideas of what was important to document: “tradition.” But what if, he pondered, the individuals from the participating communities wanted to document their kid’s birthday party, Western style with Lila Colamar (left) and Anita Carrasco in the Atacameño village of cake, candles, and Toconce, 2014 the dirt road that led to Likantatay, this balloons? When urban indigenous community located in my anthropology course was over, I a Calama mining town in the Atapromised myself one day I would visit cama Desert of northern Chile. When Likantatay to find out for myself if they I reminiscence about that day, I can were really farming, raising animals, and still smell the overpowering stench of practicing rituals to “stage” an indigfeces that the wind blew in my face. I enous identity. had been told about the nearby sewage Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale water processing plant and I thought Hurston once wrote about investigation: it was unfortunate to have to live right “Research is formalized curiosity. It is next to one. poking and prying with a purpose. It is This essay documents the story of the seeking that he who wishes may know Likantatay people’s fight for their rights the cosmic secrets of the world and and recognition in the face of mining. they that dwell therein” (Hurston 1942, But before I begin, I want to set the 174). Franz Boas, founding father of tone of this text by summoning the American anthropology and her advisor, words of sociologist Immanuel Wallerwhom she referred to warmly as Papa stein that feel to me especially fitting to Franz, had a genius for “pure objectivdescribe Likantatay’s struggle for culity,” she reported. By this she meant that tural survival: “People resist exploitation he outlined his theory, but if the facts as actively as they can and as passively as did not agree with it, “he would not they must.” warp a jot or dot of the findings to save his theory.” He simply instructed his In 1991, a group of 36 Atacameño imstudents to go to the field and find out migrant families from interior rural “what is there.” That is what I set out to villages, driven by the marginal condido. My curiosity about Likantatay didn’t tions in which they lived, decided to fade over the next five years, when I petition the Ministry of Government finally found the opportunity to visit the Property for land and started a squatter community, now with an elegant excuse: settlement in a former pasturing zone in my master’s thesis. the poverty belt of the city. It was barren land with no public services or houses I vividly remember my heart poundto live in. These families had to build ing with a mix of fear and excitement their homes from the ground up. Most when, for the first time, I set foot on Spring 2020/Agora
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PHOTO COURTSEY OF THE AUTHOR
by ANITA CARRASCO, Associate Professor of Anthropology
