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5 Palin The Construction of Difference All the men sat and stared in silence at the mud on their boots. All the men, that is, apart from the dead man who lay stretched out in front of us, his eyes and face covered by a ragged felt hat. It fell to José to somehow give meaning to the deceased’s life, a life which according to popular opinion had had no meaning—and he was struggling. The mud on his boots seemed more interesting than ever. Then slowly he lifted his face, stood up, and said, “Muna kümey palife tufachi wentru em,” “This dead man was a great palin player.” Relief spread among us and the heavy silence fell away. Everyone had a memory of the dead man’s feats, his triumphs, and his defeats on the palin ritual hockey field. We were reassured that such a life had meant something after all. As we wandered away from the small smoke-filled house where the dead body lay, I turned to my compadre Raúl and asked him, “Chumngechi lay tufachi wentru em?” “How did this man die?” “Palin langümfi,” “Palin killed him,” he replied. = = = In 1674, in his Historia General del Reyno de Chile (1989 [1674]) the Jesuit priest Diego de Rosales published a detailed description of the Mapuche sport of ritual hockey (palin). While reading a copy of this work the year after I witnessed the discussion described above, I was surprised to discover that the game of ritual hockey as described by Rosales was identical in almost every way to the various games of ritual hockey I had observed in Piedra Alta and Huapi during my fieldwork almost 350 years later. In this chapter I attempt to answer the question why, despite many radical changes to the very fabric of Mapuche society, ritual hockey continues to maintain such a powerful hold over the rural Mapuche imagination. My answer lies in the proposal that ritual hockey is best understood as an institution constituted by a particular form of relation. More specifically, I put forward the notion that ritual hockey constitutes a realm of potential affinity reminiscent of the sociality of exchange I described in chapter 1. Yet while the sociality of exchange incorporates primarily the positive aspect of potential affinity—that of friendship—ritual hockey also encompasses the other aspect of potential affinity, that of enmity and danger. Of course, the identity of this potential affine depends on both the social and historical context in which it is situated. And it is here, I believe, that the genius of ritual hockey lies: it simultaneously encompasses and constructs a series of relations of alterity that occur at a number of distinct levels. It is the game’s capacity to create and open up these distinct kinds of relations to distinct kinds of potential affines that has assured its longevity and continuing relevance to Mapuche people. My analysis of ritual hockey is based on the identification of different levels of opposition between the “exterior” and the “interior” within the game and the social exchanges that surround it. Rather than understanding these as fixed categories in balanced opposition, I take them to be relations of asymmetrical difference that give rise to still further relations of difference.1 This rather abstract formulation will make sense as I go on to explore the various aspects of ritual hockey and the various historical and cultural contexts in which it has been practiced. To move from the abstract to the concrete: at its widest level the game of ritual hockey as a whole can be opposed to that which is outside the game. We can label the game the “interior” and that which is outside it as the “exterior .” Yet within the game itself, an opposition also exists, between the two teams, the same opposition between “interior” and “exterior.” In addition, there is yet a further relation of “interior” and “exterior” within each team itself: that between the person and the group. As Viveiros de Castro has noted in his discussion of concentric dualisms, “any arbitrarily chosen point of the ‘inside’ is a boundary between an inside and an outside: there is no absolute milieu of interiority” (2001: 27). It is important to understand that all of these relations of difference occur simultaneously but certain levels of difference become more salient than others, depending on the context. I suggest that it is this multifaceted potentiality that continues to make ritual hockey relevant to...

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