What is it about?

Indigenous people have often been excluded from decision-making roles in Latin American nation-states. In Chile, multicultural policies have increased the scope for employing indigenous professionals to contribute to decision-making in the spheres of education, health and development. Using these state employees' words and insight, this paper examines the kind of power that they are subject to by working in the state, and the ways in which they can attempt to design policies with indigenous people as beneficiaries.

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Why is it important?

Multicultural policies and indigenous political activism have transformed the ways in which rights and programmes have been extended to historically marginal indigenous and Afro-Latin populations. However the positionality of the small number of indigenous and black state employees hired to implement these programmes is not fully understood. This paper aims to explore the perspectives of indigenous state employees in the education sector, looking at how they negotiate forms of exclusion and how they use wider social and political networks to shape implementation

Perspectives

This paper is co-authored with Andrew J Webb, with whom I carried out 3 years of intense fieldwork in southern Chile and in Santiago, concerning the experiences of Mapuche young people at school. As indigenous young people, the Mapuche teens we interviewed were transitioning to citizenship at a time when indigenous-state conflicts are visible in the media, and when the scope of citizenship has been strongly influenced by neoliberalism. I was interested in finding out how the educators and state education staff perceieved their role in these dynamics, and that's what this paper explores

Professor Sarah A Radcliffe
University of Cambridge

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This page is a summary of: Subaltern Bureaucrats and Postcolonial Rule: Indigenous Professional Registers of Engagement with the Chilean State, Comparative Studies in Society and History, January 2015, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0010417514000668.
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