The order of memories. Discourses analysis about Diaguitas rural locality past

Abstract

This paper analyses the memory's role as a discursive practice in the constitution of the communitarian identity, using the case of the Diaguitas rural locality (Elqui Valley) as an example. Through a rhetoric analysis of the discourse applied to a corpus of interviews, the accounts which give sense and continuity to the local history were identified, along with the identifying recounts they articulate. Memoirs and identities that emerged from them are used as political answers before the corporate globalization process, de-legitimizing this social order and questioning the notion of evolutionary and linear history, by going back to the remote indigenous past in search for new sources of meaning.