He Ora Ra¿a . Medicalización, procesos coloniales y políticas públicas en Rapa Nui

Identifier:  TDX:3276

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3276

Authors:  Fajreldin Chuaqui, Valentina

Abstract:
Rapa Nui a small island located in the cultural and geographical horizon of the South Pacific and that became Chilean at the end of the 19th century, since the beginning of its contacts with the western world it has undergone a set of changes associated with its health, illness and care that this thesis understands as a process of medicalization. Despite being the most geographically distant place on the planet from any other inhabited point, it is immersed in the same global processes of social, economic and political globalization that affect any territory. This thesis analyzes this long process, integrating bibliographic and documentary antecedents to the experience of this researcher in different moments of her already long field work of twenty-two years. I divide medicalization into five major stages, from the beginning of the 20th century to the current situation of the phenomenon. In them I distinguish: the geographical situation acting as a domain of domain of a certain colonial power; Chile's political and administrative dependency on health; the different ethnic character of the Rapanui with respect to continental Chile; the local effort to build a form of relationship with the world and the nation-state, which configures a survival strategy and which consists of overcoming the barriers implied by the previous ones. For the field of medical anthropology, Rapa Nui as an insular territory in extreme isolation in a certain sense until late in the second half of the 20th century constitutes a relevant case since it breaks the usual chronology and rhythm of known models of medicalization. The thesis reconstructs the history and the contexts and analyzes the processes in an anthropological key, proposing to observe the medicalization in and of the island as a phenomenon under construction and that needs to be articulated from decolonial political responses.