Randall Craig Burson II

RANDALL BURSON II, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was approved for funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Intercultural Medicine, Territorial Dispossession, and the Struggle for Health in Southern Chile,” supervised by Dr. Adriana Petryna. Since the 1990s, intercultural health programs have integrated Indigenous practitioners into state-run biomedical clinics across Latin America. However, over the ensuing decades, Mapuche Indigenous communities in Southern Chile have intensified their efforts not only to reclaim dispossessed lands but also to assert their rights to self-determination and collective well-being. As a result, intercultural healthcare — which intertwines Mapuche medicine with biomedicine — has become a key site where different visions of health and territorial governance converge in Mapuche-Chilean state encounters. This raises the question: how do Mapuche people understand and pursue health amid ongoing territorial dispossession? To explore this, the grantee conducted fifteen months of ethnographic research with Mapuche patients, biomedical and Mapuche health practitioners, and policymakers in La Araucanía, Southern Chile. Drawing on their MD-PhD training, the grantee examined plural medical practices, clinical operations, and engagements with spiritual ecologies to understand how Mapuche peoples reclaim health across bodily, clinical, and territorial domains. By analyzing how Mapuche peoples and allied health workers enact a plural politics and practice of health — both within and without intercultural clinics — this research highlights how Indigenous movements are redefining the grounds of healthcare as part of broader struggles for land and life.