Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile

3. Ngillanwen: The Sociality of Affinity

3 Ngillanwen The Sociality of Affinity If the relations of friendship and equal exchange that I characterize as the sociality of exchange could be considered “potential affinity” (Viveiros de Castro 2001), I turn in this chapter to explore two aspects of what we could call “actual affinity.” First, I focus on the maternally derived aspect of personhood and the relations to which this gives rise. Second, I explore the relations created by marriage, which for a number of reasons are closely related to the maternally derived aspect of the person. Through an ethnographic account of these two forms of relations, I attempt to answer a question central to understanding the interplay of different modes of sociality: how do Mapuche people make sense of matrilateral relations, those relations that are simultaneously affinal and consanguineal? Matrilaterality and the Person I have described how a theoretically bilateral concept of descent, küpal, came to take on a patrilineal bias when extended from an aspect of personhood to a form of interpersonal relations. I have argued that through this transformation the sharing of descent comes to stand for identity and solidarity among coresident men. So why is there no space for matrilateral kin in this understanding of consanguinity? What becomes of the descent received from one’s mother and shared with one’s matrilateral relatives? To what kind of relations does this küpal ñuke püle, this maternal bond, give rise? matrilaterality as difference In Conoco Budi nearly all men, unmarried women, and children share one paternal surname, and all can trace descent back directly to the reservation founder. This sharing of descent in its patrilineal form is the reason for their coresidence and their obligation to help each other. We can therefore say that descent in its patrilineal form is a source of similarity. The fifteen household heads united by one patrilineal descent are linked by maternal descent to eight different groups of “one descent” localized outside the comunidad indígena. Thus in contrast to patrilineal descent, the matrilateral aspect of personhood is what differentiates rather than what unites. Relatedness through the mother is therefore, at least within each descent group, a source of difference rather than identity. As Evans-Pritchard pointed out long ago, in patrilineal societies where virilocal residence is the norm, matrilineal descent paradoxically becomes more significant (1940). This matrilineally inherited difference is manifest in rural Mapuche life in differences in spatial organization, prosperity, economic cooperation, and witchcraft accusations. The difference is exacerbated by the effect of the widespread existence of polygyny in the preceding generation. All but one of the household heads of the older generation are children of polygynous marriages. The group of six brothers who form the core of Conoco Budi are children of one father, Esteban Painemilla, and three different mothers of distinct descent groups. In Mapuche society, each of the wives of one husband will usually have her own house where she brings up her children. This leads to a spatial segregation of half-siblings that frequently endures throughout their lives, as land is usually inherited on a usufructory basis. Furthermore, there is frequently a status difference between cowives. The first wife (unan küre) is preferred over subsequent wives (inan küre), a difference reflected in the inheritance of land. Thus the children of Esteban Painemilla’s first wife hold an average of 11 hectares, while those of his second wife hold an average of 7.1 hectares and those of his third wife an average of only 2.2 hectares. When one of the brothers seeks to emphasize identity with one of his half-brothers, he will talk of their father; if he seeks to distance himself, he will talk of his mother. As one neighbor pointed out to me, “Yes, those people are my brothers, but they’re not like me. That’s why they all live over there on the other side of the creek. Their mother filled them with bad things, while my mother filled me with good. They’ve always been envious of me.” While maternal difference is a key factor in relations within each descent group, it is paternal difference ngillanwen: the sociality of affinity · 69 that is key in relations between descent groups. Thus despite the bad relations that exist between Julio and some of his half-brothers, they rushed to his aid to defend him from being killed in a fight with a...