Abstract

This work is an anthropologic approach to the territory and the social construction of time in the Interior Sea of Chiloé, Chile. It is a maritime and coastal territory filled with ports and places of arrival, in which different maritime routes find confluence among islands and populated sectors that structure paths and dynamics fixed in memories of the past and imageries of the future. The maritime territory space of Chiloé, while territorial and patrimonial system in which diverse relations have come together among pragmatic factors, makes the reproduction of paths of economies and coastal symbolisms possible, which in its set inscribes and projects different configurations of the time. We support the hypothesis that the continuous processes of “presentification” of the past in the interior sea of contemporary Chiloé, expressed in coastal memories of handcrafted fishermen, and the processes of “futurization” of the past, demonstrated in territorial imaginary, reveal the forms in which the time is constructed socially in this space. For this we surmise that the coastal memories, on having explored the past of routes and paths, realize a real retrospective trip; thus, the experience gained across the routes and paths along the time implies that the fishermen develop daily strategies that, supported on the memory and the strength of their experience, allow them to adapt to the processes of modernization.