Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile

Introduction

Introduction Marta walked through the small patch of broad beans at the side of the creek with a look of disgust on her face. Just the tall thin stalks remained; the pods were gone. Some had been taken by kamtrü, a bird notorious for raiding gardens. The rest of the beans had been stolen by Marta’s socia, her partner in the mediería arrangement in which one person contributes land and the other seed, and the two then labor jointly before splitting the fruits of the eventual harvest. “If there was no necessity, there would be no society. We could all just be on our own,” she spat. The “society” in question was the mediería institution itself, referred to in local Spanish as sociedad, yet Marta’s comment resounded with so many others I had heard from Mapuche people, comments casting doubt on the value of social relations, and exemplifying a stubborn skepticism toward that totality of relations so often called “society.” According to Mapuche people, such social relations necessarily involve various kinds of risks, many of which bear far graver consequences than the loss of a few beans. Since that conversation occurred, I have given much thought to Marta’s proposition, that of a life somehow without social relations, a happy solipsism untroubled by others. I have come to think that despite its fleeting appeal such a life, even if it were possible, would not be one that Mapuche people would choose. In this book I seek to explain why. the Focus of this Book In this book I explore the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations . Through an exploration of what it means to be che, a “true person,” I seek to draw out some of the different forms underlying the social relations in which Mapuche persons engage and through which persons are created. I refer to these forms as “modes of sociality,” a deliberately vague term that goes beyond “kinship” to include the symbolic value of all kinds of relations: those between kin, those between nonkin, those between persons and animals , and those between persons and spirits. This analysis of the Mapuche person and its concomitant modes of sociality allows for a reconceptualization , not only of the major social events of rural Mapuche life—funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the ngillatun fertility ritual—but also of the nature of social aggregates or groups and the role they play in the rapidly changing relations Mapuche people have with the Chilean state. In this book I therefore aim to address rural Mapuche life in both singular and plural forms, to say something about the dialectic of “person” and “people” that lies at the very heart of Mapuche lived worlds. In some ways, then, my primary focus corresponds to the relation between what have often been called the “individual” and “society.” Debates about the conceptualization of this relation clearly have a long history in anthropology and the other social sciences, and I would like to pause briefly to outline the position I take in this book. I do not intend to offer critiques either of Western thought or of the branch of Western thought we call anthropology. Nevertheless, I believe that certain assumptions underlying Mapuche ideas concerning social relationships are distinct from those underlying the implicit theoretical framework of much anthropological writing. An eminent British anthropologist once commented to me: “The problem with American cultural anthropology is that they haven’t read enough Durkheim.” It struck me that one could equally say that the problem with many exponents of British and European social anthropology is that they have read too much Durkheim.1 Either way, it seems clear that Durkheim’s influence on anthropology has been profound. In particular, anthropology has moved further and further away from the notion of presocial “individuals ” freely entering into society in a way once envisioned in the writings of Hobbes (1991 [1651]) and Rousseau (1968 [1762]). Indeed, the inheritance of Durkheim’s emphasis on the fundamentally social nature of human existence is one of anthropology’s greatest strengths. But it can also lead us to make certain assumptions concerning the a priori existence of some strange thing called “society.”2 I suggest that the problem with the approach first formulated by Durkheim is not so much that it is necessarily wrong but that it assumes the very thing we need to explain. Sahlins notes...