Emotion and identity in biographical narratives of young Mapuche a the beginning of the XXI Century

Abstract

Following up on debates on urban Mapuche identity that became part of the public agenda in spring 2017 in Argentina, this essay explores the place of emotion in autobiographical narratives of young Mapuche from the city of San Carlos de Bariloche, recorded in the first decade of the twenty first century. These narratives provide a venue to the different ways in which these youngsters made sense of themselves at the beginning of the century. They also constitute a means to approach the place of emotion in understanding experience and ethnic and age based identities. Finally, they bring to light the political processes in which these youngsters took part in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The essay focuses, especially, on the place in which emotion is located in order to explain processes of Mapuche identification within a context of symbolic violence developed throughout the incorporation of the region to the national state at the end of the nineteenth century. The theoretical framework is based on the notion of emotion as a mediator between the individual and the collective, therefore it gives form to sensitivities that organize collective social experiences within biographical narrative.