Rice Business - Global Field Experience (GFE) Santiago, Chile: Chilean Politics

Citizenship and Disadvantaged Groups in Chile seeks to overcome an existing void in the literature of Latin American studies addressing the impact of Chile's post dictatorial legal framework on its historically and structurally disadvantaged groups, concentrating on the various issues and challenges that affect them. Within its eleven chapters it explores the changing social and legal status of LGBTI people, the political disenfranchisement and the social exclusion that affects imprisoned individuals, the harshness of policing on poor and marginalized communities, the deprivation of indigenous peoples of meaningful rights, the vulnerability that affects workers as a consequence of the existing model of labor relations, the disenfranchisement that affects migrants seeking economic opportunities, the denial of citizenship to women involved in the prohibition of abortion, the unsatisfactory regulation of sex work, the prevalence of domestic violence, and the absence of adequate means for disadvantaged groups to institutionalize their political representation. This book offers a distinctive contribution, focusing on a specific country in the Global South that is presently undergoing a process of economic consolidation while facing many of the problems of traditional and unequal Latin American societies.

In 1990, when Augusto Pinochet's 17-year military dictatorship ended, democratic rule returned to Chile. Since then, Indigenous organizations have mobilized to demand restitution of their ancestral territories seized over the past 150 years. Sentient Lands is a historically grounded ethnography of the Mapuche people's engagement with state-run reconciliation and land-restitution efforts. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani analyzes environmental relations, property, state power, market forces, and indigeneity to illustrate how land connections are articulated, in both landscape experiences and land claims. Rather than viewing land claims as simply bureaucratic procedures imposed on local understandings and experiences of land connections, Di Giminiani reveals these processes to be disputed practices of world making. Ancestral land formation is set in motion by the entangled principles of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, two very different and sometimes conflicting processes. Indigenous land ontologies are based on a relation between two subjects--land and people--both endowed with sentient abilities. By contrast, legal land ontologies are founded on the principles of property theory, wherein land is an object of possession that can be standardized within a regime of value. Governments also use land claims to domesticate Indigenous geographies into spatial constructs consistent with political and market configurations. Exploring the unexpected effects on political activism and state reparation policies caused by this entanglement of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, Di Giminiani offers a new analytical angle on Indigenous land politics.