Enciclopedia Chilena and Quimantú: discourses, practices and representation

Abstract

In this article we review two cultural policies in the field of printed culture: Enciclopedia Chilena and Editora Nacional Quimantú. By analyzing the forms of representation of social class and its hierarchies, as well as the function granted to reading as a mechanism of democratization of cultural access, of subjective determination, as a tool for development or as a form of public relations. In adition, in the light of certain concepts and distinctions of the cultural history of books and reading proposed by Chartier, we explore a series of tensions and ambiguities that force us to rethink the linearity and apparent coherence with which we have tended to interpret the history of state interventions in the field of printed culture in Chile in the second half of the twentieth century.