Abstract

This article explores some approaches and views upon physical education in schools in Chile during the period immediately after the occupation of Araucanía. The aim is to reflect on the asumptions that this lore, embedded in the school institution curriculum had for the Chilean population in general and Mapuche people in particular. This implies analyzing its operations and links with the ideology of the Chilean State of the time; especially, with the needs and projections that the State defined for the population of the newly occupied territories. The theoretical framework takes as its main conceptual axes the notions of discipline, biopolitics andgovernmentality, proposed by Michel Foucault. Consequently, the methodology follows a qualitative orientation, and includes a design that privileges a synchronic vision of the period that is defined, seeking the fundamental relationships between the elements studied. In the period studied and from its specificity as knowledge, physical education contributed to the fulfillment of the State rationale. In this sense, it aligned itself -as many other lores- with a governmentality that, in broad, focused its action on the population. Likewise, internal aspects of their purposes are distinguished as aspects of disciplinary techniques designed to subordinate a subject into power structures. That is, as educational lore attached to a monocultural curriculum, physical education -expressed as “school gymnastics” - was one more device at the service of a State that sought to "civilize" the population; intervening in the bodies sought to discipline subjects to insert them into Chilean society.