ИСТИНА

The problem of heritage and ethnicity have always been present in the life of people all around the world but is most noticeable in Latin America. In this study, based on the examination of a series of population censuses from Chile (years 1570, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1779, 1992, 2002, and 2017) Peru (2017), and Bolivia (2017) and using our own survey (2017, 2019), we show how political and economic factors are reflected on the Amerindian component of the population of these three studied countries and its changes over time. Main Results. 1) among the subjects from Peru, not a single person was noted who did not know about the ethnicity of themselves or their ancestors. This reflects a completely different attitude towards indigenous people between Chile and Peru. If in Chile it was considered for a long time almost shameful to define oneself as an Indian, and most of the indigenous population hid that, in Peru, there has never been a clear discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. 2) People who identify themselves or their ancestors as "Quechua" are found only among the participants from Cusco, and the frequency of this answer is quite high, 66.1%. Probably, it is this ethnic component that has the greatest influence on the anthropological characteristics of the inhabitants of Cuzco, which distinguishes them from the Chileans. 3) The fact that the northern regions of Chile previously belonged to Peru and Bolivia explains the increased frequency of descendants of Africans – although black slaves were not imported into Chile during the conquest and the first European settlements, for Peru it was a custom practice. 4) A significant increase in both the Araucanians and the Amerindians from the Northern Chilean territory from 2002 to 2017 is shown based on census data. There should be many possible reasons for this phenomenon, but the most probable one can be considered the appearance during this period of a large number of privileges, financial aid, the obtaining of certificates for the use of lands of indigenous peoples, and other benefits. We also discuss how the concept of the word “ethnology” differs among the people and anthropologists, specifically ethnologists. For example, in the Bolivian census of 2017 among the possible ethnic groups, we can see the option “farmer”; although one of the characteristics of an ethnic group is having their own religion, over 80% of Mapuches are either Catholics or Protestants.