Unraveling State governance in the Chilean Cordillera: Privatization, precariousness, and arrhythmia

This article discusses how communities from the Chilean cordillera negotiate their presence and reproduction with the Chilean State. We analyze people and animals' mobility through a multisite ethnography, which took place between 2021 and 2022. In this context, communities seem independent while facing the weak and inconstant State presence. However, processes of change concerning extractive economies, decreasing State aid, and consequences of climate change complicate the practices once thought to be autonomous in the mountain range. The State appears to favor certain degrees of independence through arrhythmic governance. Such an arrangement allows a fluctuating and unstable relationship that, despite the grip of the State, translates into emergent forms of autonomy that nonetheless end up being a specific type of precarization. In this sense, mountain communities maintain, complicate and, on occasion, deepen the relations of dependence towards a State that they either ignore or elude. Finally, the intertwined movements of neoliberalization, environmental stressors and precarious State governance are elements that deepen the production of an arrhythmic State movement; which also redistributes agency among actors on the terrain.