Visiones Alter-Nativas Reflexiones sobre Multiplicidad Ontológica y Alteridad en el Sur de Chile

In this article, I explore the centrality of “vision” as the axis around which different healing practices – related to different ontologies – turn. I intend to demonstrate that, despite a long history of colonization, violent conflicts and contact between Chilean societies and indigenous peoples in Southern Chile, Pewenche rural worldsare predicated upon ontological premises that are not commensurable with multicultural health state programmes. This statement, however, does not obscure the ontological multiplicity internal to the rural indigenous world. Despite this internal multiplicity, however, I show how these ontological differences are predicated upon similar ontological premises about what ‘vision’ and healingentail. At a more theoretical level, the following
ethnographic account sheds light on unresolved tensions between the ways ontological difference has been conceptualized within the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and within the field of Science and Technologies Studies (STS), particularly regarding Actor-Network Theory (ANT).