Altérités intimes, altérités éloignées : la greffe du multiculturalisme en Amérique latine

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Intimate Alterity, Remote Alterity : Multiculturalism Transplanted to Latin America This article examines the most common accounts of multicultural reform in Latin America as well as the principal analyses of the Indian movement in this same region. The positions adopted by three generations of native informants regarding official assimilation (1920-1980) and diversity (2000-2010) policies are described on the basis of an historical and ethnographic survey carried out in a rural area of Mexico, Milpa Alta, where the population has been identified as descended from pre-Columbian inhabitants. The article argues that multicultural policies, international human rights legislation and, often, native political discourse are in tension with national systems of alterity. In the case studied here, multicultural policies are grafted on to a configuration which situates native populations in an archetypal position of alterity. It is, however, an endogenous alterity since it is imagined to be a constitutive part of a larger national “us” conceived of as uniformly mestizo. Its specificity notwithstanding, the Mexican example allows us to consider the importance of the exogenous or endogenous character of alterity in discussing the consensus today enjoyed by the multicultural model. ?