The discourse of perceived discrimination amongst the Mapuches in Chile

Abstract

This work describes the discourse of perceived discrimination (PD) amongst Mapuches from two large cities in Chile: Temuco and Santiago. The critical discourse approach follows Merino’s (2006) four-level proposal of discourse analysis for perceived discrimination. Results reveal four main modes of PD: verbal, behavioural, institutional and macrosocial, the verbal being the most pervasive. Mapuche discourse of PD shows the structure of an argumentative narration based on "ngütram" the Mapuche prototypical discourse modality. It is mainly built upon expressive and use declarative speech acts and on the local semantic strategies of description, exemplification, irony, direct discourse reproduction and ancestral time reference.