Historical and Contextual Overdeterminations in the Origin and Configuration of Chilean Social Work

Abstract

This article proposes an examination of the Chilean socio-historical context that enabled the emergence of a discipline such as Social Work. It identifies and critically analyzes four conceptual tensions or antinomies that have overdetermined the discipline and that may shed light on the contemporary challenges of Chilean social work as it moves through the twenty-first century: authoritarianism/authority; emerging developmentalism/oligarchic extractivist or rentier economy; the tension between State and civil society; and, finally, the essential tension between science and ideology. From an analytical synthesis standpoint, it is argued that the socio-political fabric has shaped the discipline since its origins, constituting a field of contradictory forces that has continuously placed its various actors within a dynamic of production, resistance, and reproduction underpinning contemporary social work.