Crafting Indigenous Oral Histories: Social Scientists and Non-government Organizations in the Production of Oral Archives and Sources in Chile, 1990–2011

In this paper, I use historical analysis to study the production of indigenous people’s oral narratives and memories of violence during the transition to democracy in Chile in the 1990s and 2000s. I look at approximately forty-five hours of interviews with indigenous people that anthropological researchers working in Chilean human rights NGOs conducted during that time. I draw especially on the theoretical and methodological frameworks of oral history to show how those anthropologists  implemented projects and initiatives during the transition to democracy intending to reveal hidden or forgotten experiences of state violence in indigenous and peasant communities during the dictatorship. They also provided technical support and advice on human rights, and reparation policies to these people. In doing so, they created a cluster of archives and reports that built knowledge and power relationships with their informants and subjects of study. By analyzing these interviews, I found that indigenous informants contested and antagonized their interviewers. I show how anthropology as discipline framed and produced competing narratives and interpretations of historical processes such as the dictatorship and transition to democracy within oral narratives’ frameworks.  This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach not only by studying the power relationships in the production of knowledge about indigenous and peasants in rural Chile: I also explore cultural anthropology as a framework of analysis in my own work as an historian.