Analysis of a process of ethnogenesis: the case of the Reche-Mapuche of Chile in the colonial era

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of political, economic and social reestructurations produced among the reche groups of south-center Chile as a consequence of the plurisecular and polymorphous contact with the Hispanic-creole. Ww will see that this objective transformations were contemporary to changes in the subjective order of self perception and in the construction of the figure of the other, ending in totally new ways of defining identity. The history of the Hispanic-indigenous encounter can be interpreted as an ethnogenesis process through the slow transformation of the central reche groups in a new mapuche ethny, appearing as such in the second half of the XVIII century.