Abstract

Adopting as an example the Chiloé archipelago, located in the Los Lagos Region, in Chile's south, this article presents a critical reflection on ways of understanding territory that have developed in the nation. The case of Chiloé is particularly relevant. It is an area that has historically been represented as poor, isolated, peasant and traditional and therefore requiring state intervention to promote modernization and development. These circumstances have resulted in interventions performed according to a mainland logic that fails to consider demands and idiosyncrasies that derive from the archipelago's territorial specificities. We propose a paradigm of complexity and critical humanism as an epistemological approach capable of obviating such historical faults and favouring a territorial recomposition of the archipelago directed by future imaginaries.