Abstract

Numerous works have addressed the articulations between multiculturalism and neoliberalism in the Latin-American post-dictatorship context of the 1990s. Fewer are, by contrast, the studies that have focused on the ideological origins of what I would call differentialist Capitalism. My intention here is to fully comprehend how the “cultural” sphere was discovered, before being progressively colonized by the “economic” one. In order to do so, we will have to go back to the end of the 1970s, a period during which emancipatory ideas such as “cultural control” and “ethno-development” were taken over and resignified by the tenants of the neoliberal orthodoxy. An orthodoxy based on an anthropological credo that both reifies cultures and naturalizes the social order and managed to achieve massive hegemony within multilateral development agencies and the south-American elites.