Abstract:

This paper stands on the direction manifold inquiries have followed all over Latin America, by dealing with the conditions in which anthropologies emerge and develop in our continent. Particularly, among those efforts that have strived for inscribing subalternized regional anthropologies within nationwide anthropological circuits. It aims to make evident what we may call “a production of absences”, and to relieve an experience forgotten in the discourse and historization of anthropology in Chile, putting a spotlight on the need to decenter the look, and to transcend narratives built at “metropolitan” circuits. In this line, this paper analyzes the process of academic institutionalization of anthropology at Chilean Pontificia Universidad Católica’s Temuco location, between 1970 and 1978. Several aspects related to the creation of a research center and two educational programs are presented, bringing background related both to the emergence social context and to the research team, theoretical-methodological approaches, and formation curricula used by those programs.

Keywords: institutionalization, academic anthropology, scientific anthropology, subaltern anthropologies.