Abstract

This study analyses the economic-cultural responses of two small-scale fishing villages of the Aysén coast in the face of the processes of economic development and modernisation currently occurring in their territory. The framework in which the problem is defined is the expansion of the caged salmon production industry, and the local promotion of the business mentality by State agencies. In general terms, these two factors are observed in a process and in a wider spatial context in which various actors coincide. We have called this space the field of development. Although the consequences of the process described —environmental and territorial, socio-economic, socio-cultural and politico-cultural— may be associated with conventional perspectives, e.g. structural, or reflected in an objectivisation anchored in economic growth indicators, it is also significant to note the subjective aspects implied. We refer in particular to the dynamics of practical structuring, which reveal other —unconventional— anthropological dimensions to the process. Under this consideration we propose a horizontal hypothetical framework, in which we maintain that the decisive factors for economic development do not emanate solely from public policy and/or the structuring and/or destructuring forces of the market, since these capitalist modernisation processes are conditioned by dynamics of social and cultural structuring expressed in the coastal-local development space.