Abstract

This study deals with interethnic relations, understood as specific types of social relationships, in which the interacting subjects maintain social positions of ethnicity. The authors concentrate their analysis on social actors, their subjectivity and the practices they bring into play in spaces of interethnic encounters. These interethnic relations are structured by social systems and by historical processes that form and transform them. The case of Chilean Aymara analyzed here corresponds to a reality of recently constituted interethnic relations, with the convergence of colonial history and the modern construction of citizenship. The surge of Aymaran ethnicity, as is also the case with the other Andean first peoples, is closely related to the policy of affirmative action started in the early 1990's by Chilean government agencies. This policy created a recursive link between indigenous actors, who became ethnified, and public agencies, which built policy in relation to these ethnified actors. This explains why the greatest frequency of interethnic relations occur precisely where public officials interact with persons, groups and organizations that self-identify as belonging to first nations. In other social contexts and with other subjects, especially in urban spaces, relations have less interethnic content, and this tends to be less frequent, irregular, contingent or optional.