Critical cognitive discourse analysis about the mapuche people in official history school texts

Abstract

Abstract

The present work seeks to evidence conceptual representations conceived with ideological purposes in the historic discourse around the Mapuche indigenous people in the Chilean ministry of education‘s school textbooks. This is done from the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Wodark & Meyer, 2001; Van Dijk, 2008) and its interaction with cognitive linguistics (Hart, 2011), specifically, through the conceptual operation of schematization (Hart, 2014).

There is CDS work on the subject of the oppression of the Mapuche in Chile that treat the problem of education as perceived discrimination (Merino, 2007) and others that approach it more broadly as part of the existing racism in the country‘s different media discourses (Van Dijk, 2003).

The study integrates the conflictive context of the relations between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people inside multicultural neoliberalism (Richards, 2010). Through the conceptual operation of schematization, we analyze the conceptual representations that linguistic constructions incite in readers by referring to different energetic interactions –be it physical, cultural, economic, etc.- in which Mapuche people are involved.

As a result, the analysis of the linguistic constructions present in the school textbooks evidences that the representations promoted in readers vary ideologically according to the scene presented.

Keywords: CDS, School textbooks, Mapuche People, Cognitive Linguistics.