Entrepreneurs in the making: indigenous entrepreneurship and the governance of hope in Chile. Issue 3 (2nd September 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Di Giminiani, Piergiorgio
• Is Part Of: Latin American and Caribbean ethnic studies. Volume 13:Issue 3(2018)
• Page Start: 259
• Page End: 281
• Publication Date: 2018-09-02
• Subjects: Entrepreneurship -- indigeneity -- neoliberalism -- agriculture -- tourism -- Chile -- Mapuche; 305.8009729
• DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1463891
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2222

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Over the last three decades, national governments and international agencies have introduced a growing number of entrepreneurial programs as a panacea for problems of economic precariousness and exclusion. This article illustrates some of the effects of entrepreneurial discourses and state actions among Mapuche rural residents in Chile. I argue that becoming an entrepreneur is an open-ended process in which state-supported microenterprises consolidate imaginaries of individual self-realization and ethnic autonomy while effectively establishing new bonds of dependence with state and market actors. The effects of entrepreneurial discourses and state actions examined in this article constitute a type of power formation that I define as a 'governance of hope.' This term refers to a disputed political field in which hope is at once an object capitalized by the state apparatus and a source of critical knowledge about ethnic hierarchies within indigenous populations.