Mapuche people and their intercultural communication system

Abstract

The Mapuche people in southern Chile, South America, have a system of communication organized upon a sacred mythical symbolic view of the world, a condition that implies a diversity of codes and languages working altogether to communicate in the different dimensions and entities that integrate this cosmos. Irruption of the western world and its hegemonic dominance have influenced and transformed these people‘s culture, trying to break it apart. Since the second half of the 20th century, Mapuche people have developed varied strategies to recover their land and cultural autonomy. The present paper holds that one of the main strategies against this hegemony is the creation of a macro system of intercultural communication, which derives from a complex metacognitive process supported by different phases and epistemic elaboration levels. This paper focuses on one of those systems: the artistic one, from which we describe the land areas and symbolic borders produced in relation to the western communication system.