DISPUTES OVER IDENTITY AND MEMORY THE EVOLUTION OF THE CANON OF NATIONAL FOLKLORE AROUND THE 1973 COUP D'ÉTAT IN CHILE

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century Chile built the canon of folklore in a national key as a cultural response to the industrializing developmental process. In this construction, the State converged, through the academy, individual cultists and the market. Since the 1950s, folklore – especially in its musical expression – has become a field of dispute not only intellectually, but also ideologically, as a reflection of the political processes of the time. The Popular Unity patrimonialized and formalized a type of folklore functional to its political project and its cultural narrative. For this reason, the military junta that put an end to the government of Salvador Allende in 1973 was forced to intervene to reorient the canon of national folklore in the logic of its re-foundational project, based on the struggle against Marxism and against the internal enemy. The heuristic basis for this operation came from the theoretical and epistemological orientations that the academy had developed in the 1940s and 1950s and which focused on the bucolic vision of the traditional countryside of the Central Valley. However, left-wing folkloric expressions, especially musical ones, survived during the dictatorship, maintaining a continuum that until today accounts for the ideological-identity dispute of a divided country.