The imaginary of horizontality as an instrument of subordination: the indigenous’ peoples health policy in Chile’s neoliberal multiculturalism

Abstract

This paper develops an analysis of documentary sources of chilean’s Public Health Policy of Indigenous Peoples from a critical medical anthropology standpoint. Understanding public policy as ideological productions, it analyses the axis of interculturality, equity and participation in the context of Chile’s governmental “Neoliberal multiculturalism”, showing the socioculturalism and voluntarism that guide their diagnoses and actions. From an analysis of hegemony/subalternity relationships, it shows how de-historization allows the production of horizontality imaginary in contexts of power asymmetry, fulfilling the ideological function to support intercultural health as an answer to the problem of health inequity, darkening the participation that this policy has in the process of the same inequity’s production. In the end, we conclude by asking the significance of a policy constructed from other ideological assumptions.