Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of this article is to analyze, from the theoretical perspective of social imaginary, the use of the press as one of the most used mechanisms to produce identities that are essencialized and as a way of constructing a social reality that produces otherness based on the elaboration of stigmata. This topic is related to one of the most numerous indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Mapuche People, in a context where the positioning of mass media in relation to the conflicts that oppose the Mapuche people to forest enterprises is showed. As well as reveling the imaginaries as a network of constitutive meanings of social reality we seek to explain the way in which the imposition of dominant social imaginaries, regarding one type of social identity, that of ethnic identity, is performed by the resource of the symbolic violence. This is achieved as a sophisticated form of language that can express and reproduce multiple representations and then validate and legitimate them intersubjectivelly at a social scale. Keywords: social imaginaries, symbolic violence, Mapuche identity, the press.