Representaciones del pueblo mapuche en la promoción turística de la región de La Araucanía: un análisis multimodal y comparativo de los discursos mapuche y los discursos estatales de Chile.

Abstract

The aim of my study is to compare the discourses concerning mapuche tourism in the region La Araucanía, Chile. The growing industry of ethnic and ecotourism can be seen as a way for indigenous peoples to participate in the global economy while maintaining their traditions and culture. The mapuche are the most numerous of the indigenous peoples in Chile. Together with the Metropolitan region, La Araucanía has the highest density of mapuche population. In the region lies an historic and current territorial conflict between the mapuche and the Chilean state, rooting in who has the rights to the land, and how it should be used. The conflict has resulted in stereotyping and prejudice discourses being produced in the media and in Chilean society that connect the mapuche to violence and terrorism. Since relatively little has been said about the representations of and discourses about the mapuche people in the field of tourism, this study strives to reveal the ideologies behind the discourse about the mapuche people in tourist websites to an international receptor and as a form of intercultural communication. I analyse and compare 4 tourist websites, 2 that belong to mapuche entrepreneurs and 2 that are official Chilean tourist websites with governmental support. The hypothesis is that the two sets of actors, the mapuche and the official, produce different discourses, have different objectives and emphasize different aspects as they belong to different discourse communities. Previous research has often taken a purely linguistic approach to the discourse analysis. The multimodal analysis used here confirms that it is not only the written text itself that communicates with the receiver but so does the visual resources i.e. pictures, videos, colours and designs. I part my analysis from the approach of Kress & Van Leeuwen (2006) to the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of language by Halliday (1985), and the recontextualization of social practices using visual and textual resources by Van Leeuwen & Wodak (1999). The analysis has shown that the two sets of actors use the visual and textual resources in different ways to represent the mapuche people and the mapuche tourism. The official discourse giving more importance to the activities, while the mapuche discourse gives more importance to the intercultural meeting.