Constructed Identity and New Social Movements, The Presence of neoliberalism elements in the Mapuche Mobilization

Abstract

The theory of New Social Movements allows analyzing the indigenous people movements bearing in mindits cultural and identitarian aspects orits relationship with the hegemonic culture during the transformation towards a post-industrial Society and the dawnof a post-material culture. This results in the introductionof new cultural and identity patterns, which revealthe insufficiency of the prior institutions to respond to the new Society expectations and therefore creating the conditions for the return to the individual as an actor, thus creating personal individuals and cultural movements. In Latin America, dictatorships have brought the creation of new ways of political participation and sociability as changes in the social organization model. The economic and political crisis and the structural adjustment of the 1980 have meant the weakening of the workersunion movement and of the social cohesion. Also, the adoption of the capitalist system as the hegemonic system destroys any alternative of sociability. The neoliberal boom and democracy meant the creation of public spaces and the participation of the civil Society in a context of a reduced State, unable to guaranty its rights applying policies of exclusion. Moreover, the heterogeneity in the social composition and the construction of identity separates the indigenous from the non-indigenous, so that the cultural claims in Latin America return to colonial issues and multiculturalism as neo-communitarianism, where heterogenic groups vindicate individual cultural rights and cultural heterogeneity obstructs the emergence of a class conscience, growing away from the classic institutional system, such as social classes or political parties as a result of the separation between the definition of identity or socialization, of each individual and the identity definition of the‘institutional program’.