The Virtual Life of the Mapuche
A case study of Mapuche Internet sites
Introduction
The Internet is here
to stay. The net has grown deep roots into our lives and we definitely
owe to it blessings and headaches. However, this holds true for ‘its urban
and first world (…), masculine and white [English speaking users]. (Froehling
1997:293)
My intentions in this paper is to examine
the ways in which the Mapuche indigenous people engage with this new technology
and how they have both utilized and made sense of it. For doing this, I
used the approach suggested by Miller and Slater (2000) plus an additional
perspective I thought it was needed to gain a fuller understanding of the
dynamics involved.
Theoretical Background
There has been extensive writing on the Internet
and its various impacts on our lives, social structures or geo-political
views of the globe. This new space has come to be understood under various
lenses. On the one hand, one can think of it as ‘the portent of a technological
globalization that will invoke global citizenry to create a (…) new world
without boundaries.’ (Rheingold 1993 in Froehling 1997: 292). On the other
though we can also find studies that show how we reproduce social restrictions
in the supposedly free Internet environment (Slater 1998).
In this essay, I will shape my analysis with
the help of the theoretical framework presented by Slater and Miller (2000.
This approach reflects on the fact that the Internet is not a living entity
separated of our lives but rather people using it. It is in the end each
surfer sitting in front of a computer the ones that assemble what the Internet
is. Therefore, this approach looks at four dynamics in which people engage
with it. This follows the ideas of material culture which looks at how
people understand and use objects. (Miller 1987)
1. Dynamics of objectification
In this dynamic we will explore how people
can realize or recognize who they really are through the Internet. The
authors quite rightly point out that we do not have an inherent identity
that will be represented in the net. Rather we create our identity in terms
of our relation to the Internet.
This dynamic subdivides
itself into two: Expansive realization and expansive potential. Within
the limits of the first one, we will explore how individuals, societies
or groups can realize who they really are and enact their real self which
may or may not be possible in the ‘real world’.
‘One can enact – often in highly idealized form
– a version of oneself or culture that is regarded as old or even originary
but can finally be realized: through these new means, one can become what
one thinks one really is (even if one never was)’ (Miller and Slater 2000).
In the second subdivision
we can observe a slightly different phenomenon taking place in our contact
and virtual representation. We can find here that one not necessarily has
to enact a form of one self that is old or legendary. An individual can
envisage a version of one that is quite sublime and that would like to
achieve, and uses the net as a mean to enact a very idealized representation
of him or her self.
2. Dynamics of mediation
In this view, we concern our selves in how
we understand and assemble ‘our’ Internet. The point here is that the use
we give to it is highly personalized. The web-sites I visit are not the
ones someone else visits. My interaction with the internet confines itself
more with e-mail and newspaper reading while other people use it for pornography
or business. Hence, ‘our Internets’ are different. We engage with it in
not mutually exclusive ways but in different terms and thus, our understanding
of the potentials of it differ.
Nevertheless, this deconstructionalist analysis
should not make us forget of the concept of ‘a Internet’. Even though our
uses of it vary, there is still a central idea that there is something
we call ‘the Internet’ and hence, should not only treat it in a deconstructed
fashion.
3. Dynamics of normative freedom
The Internet has “both produced new freedoms
(of information and of speech) and has come to stand as a symbol of potential
freedoms.” (Miller and Slater 2000). The idea of normative freedom tries
to tell us that there is actually no real freedom in the net. We have tried
to regulate its use and capacities through different means, thus controlling
what could eventually be an anarchist paradise –absolutely no rules-. Furthermore,
we have developed ways of managing it such as passwords and have passed
laws condemning certain practices such as child pornography or hacking.
Studies have also shown that we recreate existing social rules in our ‘virtual
relations’ (Slater 1998). We can think of the Internet as a place where
our freedom has been expanded to new areas but we do so in normative ways.
We “should understand many tensions arising from the Internet not in terms
of freedom versus constraint but rather as conflicts between different
models of order and normativity.” (Miller and Slater 2000)
Our study in this particular study will focus
on how the mapuche have reacted in their websites to this newly arisen
normative freedom and how they have coped with new possibilities.
4. Dynamics of positioning
Here we are concerned on how we locate ourselves
in the wider world. “the internet is destabilizing territorialization”
(Froehling 1997:294). The net has given us the opportunity to think of
ourselves not only in terms of our local communities but also as global
actors. This makes us wonder what role we have on a global scale and how
we enact and portray our place in it. This new dimension to our lives has
given us the opportunity to feel cosmopolitan, engage with different cultures,
portray ours at a global scale, join international movements and struggles
and provide us with the feeling that the world is getting smaller. In a
way, it has the potential to deterriolize us. Where is the Internet? Everywhere
and nowhere. Where do we position ourselves in it? What role do we play?
A note about methodology
In this study, I have deliberately chosen
to study only web pages. This follows a very simple reasoning behind. I
wanted to study the representation of the Mapuche in the Internet as a
separated reality from their everyday lives. I did not go into how the
Mapuche came to think of using the Internet or how they think of their
virtual representation. I only used what they choose to show us. I am interested
in seeing the feeling I get of what it means to be mapuche only by looking
at web pages which is what most people would do if unable to travel to
Chile.
This approach of course brings a lot of limitations
with it and I recognize that I cannot pretend to have an answer to mapuche
identity by only looking at web representations. However, this study can
complement other studies of ‘real reality’ to give a more full explanation
of what it means to be mapuche both in the virtual and real world. In terms
of methodology, it’s actually quite simple. I just read web pages. I started
by typing into a search engine the word mapuche and about 2440 matches
showed up (I used Yahoo). From here I started looking into some pages and
I followed their links to a virtually endless list of related sites.
The Virtual life of the Mapuche
Now that we have a sense of the theoretical
approach we will be using in this study, I shall start looking at how we
can make sense of Mapuche virtual reality within those parameters. Throughout
the discussion of my data I will not refer every aspect to a specific web
site since in many cases I am making generalizations of many sites. However,
in order to reference them properly, I will provide in the bibliography
a comprehensive list of the web sites I visited.
Dynamics of objectification.
The difference between expansive realization
and expansive potential is quite small and at times they overlap in many
ways. I found it at points very difficult to distinguish which expansion
I was encountering.
The Mapuche people have a unique history
that differentiates them from any other indigenous people from Latin America:
the Spanish never conquered them. This fact appears in almost every page
I went into and it seems almost a cornerstone of their identity. Their
name as a people tells us a lot too about who they are. Mapu means
land and che means people, thus Mapuche means people of the land.
This is quite true about their traditional forms of life in the southern
part of Chile. Nowadays though a significant segment of their population
lives in urban centers to which people started emigrating in the 1930s
in big numbers. In the 1992 census, 44% of the Mapuche people lived in
Santiago, the capital of Chile. (Ancan 1997) Many of them do not speak
their traditional language, mapudungun, anymore and they have joined mostly
a working lower class in urban centers. It is important to highlight the
fact that the Mapuche people have faced constant racism from the mestizo
and/or the upper classes and it is because of this that many of them have
used as a strategy of survival the repression of their own cultural practices
such as their language which would clearly differentiate them from the
rest. (Lincolao 1980) Nevertheless, in their Internet representations I
hardly found any references to their urban existence except for one site
dedicated exclusively to Urban Mapuches and some articles here and there
about the problematics of urban life. Most of the references where to the
traditional way of life in the rural areas. In a way I felt it portrayed
it as the ‘true’ mapuche life whereas their urban existence is hardly mentioned.
I would suggest that the mapuche are presenting the ‘ideal’ mapuche in
the Internet. The one that they once were and should become. There is an
emphasis in most Internet sites to have an ‘arts and culture’ section where
the surfer will find tales, dances, foods, cosmology and other aspects
of the ‘true’ mapuche. One very important aspect in this area is their
language. I found almost in every web site I went to some reference to
mapudungun. Many sites had Spanish-Mapudungun dictionaries or small explanations
of the structure of it (many of these studies are by linguistics. There
is even a whole Stanford-hosted web site dedicated solely to mapudungun).
Nevertheless, the surfer will rarely find mapudungun writings in the Internet.
This emphasis on the language shows us that part of being a ‘true mapuche’
is speaking mapudungun. Now, when we talked about expansive realization,
we tended to think that a people would realize them selves in the net.
With the Mapuche people this is slightly different since only a few of
them have access to it. As of now, I would assume that it will not play
a major role in the constant process of redefinition of a people. However,
it will surely influence the image a net-surfer has of what it means to
be mapuche. I would argue that by portraying their culture in a specific
way, even though a significant number of them do not surf their pages regularly,
they are reinforcing their own identity and envisioning of who they really
are in the eyes of the other. As an indigenous rights activist for example,
I will have a clear image of what the Mapuche believe themselves to be
and if it is in my reach, I will support them in that quest. From this,
we can see how the mapuche people have taken advantage of the Internet
in terms of an expansive realization of who they are or, more specifically,
who they know themselves to be.
In terms of expansive potential I found it
to be more connected to the geo-political struggle they are involved in
right now with the Chilean government. A significant part of the web pages
I visited were devoted to their struggle. In them, many articles explained
their position with the Chilean government and why they think they have
a legitimate claim over their demands, mainly lands. One could think of
this in two ways. We could argue that this is actually an expansive potential
since the return of these lands could be connected to a return to a traditional
style of life like the one represented in the expansive realization section.
Nevertheless, one could also argue that this is in fact expansive realization
since the Mapuche lived like that and some still do and it is only an envisioning
of the live the traditional Mapuche will live when things come to place.
This shows that the distinction between both approaches in this case proves
to be difficult and it would be easier to explain Mapuche objectification
in the net only in one way and not try to separate it into two aspects
that overlap one another.
Dynamics of mediation
In this approach we are looking at how people
assemble their own Internet. I will look at how the Mapuches assembled
their web pages. As I already discussed in the previous section, Internet
use is not a common thing among the Mapuche people. It is because of this
that I would argue that the assembling of their Internet is not done in
an endogamous fashion, rather in an exogamous way.
[1]
The fact that many pages have English versions and that some incorporate
European languages such as Dutch or German into them reflects this exogamous
attitude. It is important to note that at no point I found a page with
a full version in mapudungun. I could also not find a Mapuche chat and
I came across an interactive forum only once and it was not very active.
E-mail lists though were more common and I found two. Nevertheless, an
e-mail list is not necessarily a Mapuche-oriented tool. It can work both
in an endogamous and exogamous way.
Dynamics of normative freedom
The Mapuche people are in an open conflict
with the Chilean government. There have been massive protests, appropriations
of lands, hunger strikes and many other ways of protesting. The relation
with the state has passed by many ups and downs direct conflict with the
police has not been absent. In the middle of a conflict, it would be very
easy to use the Internet, a medium where the limits of freedom have not
yet been clearly defined, in a very chaotic and almost aggressive fashion,
which is the case with many pro Palestinian sites for example. The Mapuche
people do not fall though into an openly aggressive or confrontational
discourse in their web pages. They certainly present their struggle in
the internet and publish various articles related to topics such as interethnic
relations and the state, the oppressed nature of their culture, police
violence, etc, and also long lists of news that show their conflict with
the state. Nevertheless, this is done in a very orderly fashion in proper
links and very well presented. Most news, communicates or articles have
a small summary making the choosing of what to read much easier since the
amount of material is almost limitless. One could certainly spend months
reading all of the essays and news clips posted in some web sites. This
shows that the Mapuches are recreating in their virtual existence social
norms that in a way legitimize their struggle. I never came across a page
that had as a front headline something like “kill the Chileans” or violent
pictures of their struggle. Violence is certainly part of it but they present
it in a very controlled way. I found it very interesting that the Chilean
government, in its official web-site, does not make any references to the
Mapuches and their claims. Other states, such as the Mexican have engaged
actively in what has been called “a war of ink and Internet” with revolutionary
groups. (Froehling 1997).
One could also argue that this way of presenting
their views on the conflict protects the image portrayed in the ‘arts and
culture’ links of their pages that represent mostly peaceful people. A
second way of looking at this manifestation is from the point of view of
legitimacy. However, I will not go into this right now as I will address
this question later.
Dynamics of positioning
I felt that if there is one point that is
surely influencing Mapuche reality is this. The Internet has allowed not
only the Mapuches but also many other indigenous groups around the world
to join in a collective struggle for indigenous rights. This affects quite
profoundly the way they view themselves and others since one feels not
as lonely struggler but as one in a larger movement where opportunities
for support and understanding arise. Examples of how the Mapuche people
are starting to see themselves as global players are many and quite varied
and I will work through them right now.
The first and most obvious way that they
are conscious of a larger international movement is the fact that their
web pages are in different languages. I cam across versions in Spanish,
English, Dutch, German, French and certain articles in Swedish. This also
suggests who is reading their sites. People in the north are increasingly
supporting indigenous rights and are willing to dedicate a part of their
time to these issues. Thus, making the material accessible is a very good
strategy to gain their support. Following this idea of support, one gets
the impression from their sites that they know that international support
is important, both in terms of funding and lobbying. In many web sites
I found sections where one could donate towards the cause, sample letters
to be sent to both the Argentinean and Chilean government, organizations
one can contact to get involved and so forth. In a few sites the surfer
can also find virtual shops where one can buy Mapuche crafts and clothing.
However, this seems to be an area that has not been fully explored yet
and that might be developed in the future.
On the same note, there are several international
documents backing up their cause. Repeatedly I found UN declarations or
statements by international bodies (such as the organizacion de naciones
y pueblos no representados (UNPO)) on indigenous rights and expressing
their support towards their cause. I found resolutions passed by the European
Union, documents presented to the Human Rights branch of the UN and to
the UN branch of indigenous issues. This shows that the Mapuche understand
that their conflict is not limited to the borders of the Chilean state.
They are very aware of international institutions and mediums to which
they can appeal for support and from the documents published in their web
sites, one gets the impression that they make use of them quite extensively.
This new global dimension can also be observed
in the letters of support towards other indigenous groups published in
their pages. There are letters supporting or explaining the struggle of
the Zapatista revolution in Mexico, the Saami people in Scandinavia, Australian
aboriginal groups and more in general, articles on neo-liberal economies,
multi-ethnic states and state-indigenous relations.
This aspect of their web pages seems crucial
since they can get increased support from outside sources and it seems
that they are aware of their existence.
There is one web site though that we could
see as a partial exception to what we have discussed so far. This is a
site called “Urban Mapuches”. It is a site created by Mapuches that live
in Santiago and, for various reasons, have lost connections to their ancestral
culture. The organization offers Mapudungun, dance, cooking and computer
workshops and also hosts monthly meetings, movie nights and other activities
geared to promote Mapuche culture. This organization differs from others
slightly as it presents them not as people who will eventually gain their
ancestral rights but rather as people who are struggling not to loose their
heritage in an urban, racist center. In this way, their engagement with
the dynamics of expansive realization differs somewhat from other sites.
Nevertheless, they make use of the new dynamics of positioning extensively.
Their web site as of now is in Spanish and German and there are links that
state that soon it will be also in French and English. It is also recurrent
in the descriptions of their projects that they face constant financial
problems and encourage surfers to support them. This shows that they are
very aware of the new positioning the Mapuche people have on a global scale
as an oppressed indigenous people that is striving to preserve its culture
and the help they can receive. A similar difference in how people engage
with the dynamics of objectification can be found in the school project
of the school ‘El Natre’ which aims to “get to know and appropriate part
of their roots, specifically recuperating dances”(Perez 1999 (My translation)).
There is a clear understanding for the surfer that the kids are presently
not necessarily leading a Mapuche existence and that through class projects
there is a conscious attempt to reintroduce these elements into their lives.
Legitimacy
I would like here to add another dimension
that I hope will enrich the 4 dynamics we already looked at. I already
mentioned it briefly and it is the question of legitimacy. The Internet
has been pointed out as a place where the flow of free information is virtually
limitless. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern
what is reliable from what is not. This presents a problematic to a group
like the Mapuches who have to find a way to present them selves in such
a way that they are taken seriously. Elison argues that when we look for
a web site, “we are looking for the most official site (…), a site whose
domain name ends in ‘com’ or ‘org’ or ‘gov’ and contains the name of the
group or government.” (2000). In the case we are concerned with here, there
is no such site as mapuche.com or mapuche.org. There is one site called
mapuche.cl (cl is the domain name for Chile). Nevertheless, in comparison
to other sites, this one is a medium size site. I could not find when the
site was launched but it surely will grow with time to the size of others.
This site though could effectively become a melting and point of departure
site for surfers interested in the Mapuche people. In it, I found two e-mail
lists, radio shows that can be played with the application real player
and sounds of traditional Mapuche instruments. This site has an immediate
advantage since most people will start their search for Mapuche presence
with URLs like mapuche.cl. Other more developed web sites such as the Mapuche
Inter-Regional council have more complicated URLs. In this case, its address
is
http://hometown.aol.com/mapulink/index.html
making it very unlikely to arrive to that site, unless directed with a
link. There is however a resource and links section in most Mapuche web
pages and there is one page dedicated exclusively to be a resource center
not only for Mapuche web sites but also for people interested in the topic
and organizations that do not have a web site.
Another way to gain legitimacy apart from
a legitimate URL I would argue, is to have versions of the site in different
languages. From the point of view of a reader, this shows that there is
a considerable amount of effort from the hosts to provide information.
Also how easy it is to surf the web site and how neat it looks help in
gaining legitimacy and makes it more likely that the person will spend
time in it rather than moving on to another site.
In the case of the Mapuche, one could argue
up to a certain extent that there is a third element that plays a role
in the question of legitimacy, more specifically who hosts the site. A
number of them are run by foreign NGOs or by Mapuches living abroad. This
is the case with the biggest web sites. The editorial note of mapuche.cl
was written in Denver, USA. The Mapuche Inter-Regional council has two
addresses, one located in Chile and the other in England. The Rehue foundation
is a Dutch NGO that runs projects with the Mapuche people and the Documentation
center Ñuke Mapu is run by a Chilean sociologist in Sweden. I do
not want not to give equal importance to other smaller web sites, which
I am sure had a lot of work going into them but it seems almost a rule
that the biggest web sites had some sort of international connections.
One could argue that a more serious Mapuche researcher in the Internet
will start paying attention to these details and will grant more legitimacy
to sites that have some sort of international connections. It is also important
to point out that except mapuche.cl, all of these sites incorporate two
to three languages. However, I would also suggest that the occasional surfer
will not pay much attention to this and will focus the questions of legitimacy
more in the URL issue. Miller and Slater point out a fourth way in
which a web site can gain legitimacy which is by putting a counter that
shows the number of ‘hits’ the site has received or to have a guest book
(2000). This also plays a role in the Mapuche sites. I found that many
have counters and one has a guest book. Nevertheless, there are quite a
few that do not use these methods to gain in legitimacy. Mostly, it is
big sites that use these. I would suggest that, especially with the counter,
it is a double-edged knife. If the count is not high, the site looses legitimacy
whereas with a big count the site wins. The bigger sites, such as Ñuke
Mapu had more than 100,000 hits already whereas smaller web-sites such
as the personal site of Aukanaw has so far only 600 hits.
Conclusion
The Mapuche people have incorporated themselves
into this technological revolution without any doubts. It is my hope that
the four dynamics analyzed plus the question of legitimacy will help to
illuminate an understanding of the virtual existence of the Mapuche.
I would like to point out that my suggestions
in regards to the study of the Mapuche and the Internet are based on the
current reality of the web sites. The Internet is an ever-changing medium
and what I found today does not mean it will be there tomorrow. This study
was limited mostly to exogamous sites. In a few years this might well not
be the case and it would have been about chatting for example.
Within the limits of this study, I hope to
have covered some aspects of their virtual life. I do not pretend that
I have covered everything possible since it would require enormous amounts
of time to do a detailed analysis of the subject. I therefore encourage
further investigation into this fascinating topic which surely fascinated
me.
Bibliography:
Ad-Malen y Kaxawaiñ
http://mapuches-urbanos.tripod.com/
Ancan, Jose 1997. Urban Mapuches: Reflections on a Modern Reality in
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http://www.uchile.cl/mapa/artesamapuche/
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http://liwen_temuko.tripod.com/liwen.html
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