Military speech and chilean national identity

Abstract

This article studies the discourse from the military on the Chilean national identity. The article states that national identity is a permanent and open-ended process of social construction that is not evident in all itsaspects. For this reason, the study of identity requires not only to reveal discourse’s practices and manifest contents, but it must also examine its latent content to identify the various mechanisms that come together in its production. For this, it proposes the complementarity of qualitative content analysis, structural analysis of discourse and the analysis of the morphology of discourse. The conclusion is that despite important changes, the military discourse on national identity has maintained its conservative trait and its essentialist social ontology.