Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche

CHAPTER 3. Gendered Rituals for Cosmic Order: Shamanic Struggles for Wholeness

CHAPTER 3 Gendered Rituals for Cosmic Order: Shamanic Struggles for Wholeness I ask you to support me, take pity on me, do me a favor, Old Woman of the Morning, Old Man of the Morning. I ask you to lift my heart . . . Because my kin are not well, Father of the Sky, Mother of the Sky, I ask you to help me. Look at me, Young Father of the Sky, Young Mother of the Sky, Old Woman Who Lives in the Sky, who lives in the transparent earth, help me. Send me the help I need from the young earth, the transparent earth, the old earth. —excerpt froM A DivinAtion By MAchi José, DeceMBer 21, 2001 The struggle for wholeness—the melding of all the world’s experience and knowledge—is central to the practice of machi in Chile today. Mapuche people, marginalized by the Chilean state socially, economically, and politically , link individual and social order with cosmological order. Both social and cosmological relations affect individual health and illness. A healthy person and body offer a model of social harmony and cosmic wholeness. Disruptions or transgressions of social or moral norms and failure to fulfill commitments to kin, ancestor spirits, and the Mapuche deity Ngünechen produce individual and social illnesses as well as cosmological chaos.1 To help prevent or repair such disruptions, machi use gender and generational categories to link the human world with spiritual realities. By mimicking and manipulating the gender and generational categories inherent in the fourfold deity Ngünechen, machi unleash cosmic powers in an effort to convert illness into health, disorder into order, and scarcity into abundance. Theorists of “embodiment” have explored the symbiosis of mind and body in the person, the cultural meanings and concepts inscribed onto Gendered Rituals for Cosmic Order 45 bodies, and the interdependence of bodies and persons with social, cosmological , and political processes. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) distinguish between different dimensions of embodiment: the individual body as the lived experience of body as self; the social body, or the representational uses of the body as a symbol of nature, society, and culture; and the body politic as the regulation and control of bodies. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Thomas Csordas (1990) both view embodiment as the existential condition of the possibility of culture and self, whereas Michel Foucault (1977, 1980) is concerned with the body as a readable text upon which social reality is inscribed. Some researchers have viewed the body as a passive reflector of social and cultural values; others have focused on its active role in shaping personal agency. Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern (2001) explore the way in which the bodymind complex becomes a vehicle for the expression of values and relationships in the social and cosmological realm. People are both individual and separate from other creatures and consubstantial with or linked to these others in the realm of sociality and the cosmos. Bodies, bodily humors, and souls share the substances and qualities of social processes (Pollock 1996:320), are important in the physical and moral constitution of persons , and are linked to the cosmos. In this chapter I explore the ways in which the gender and generational aspects of Mapuche persons are extended to the sociocosmological order, to Mapuche ritual practice and the symbolic items used in it, and to the creation of a holistic machi personhood. After outlining Mapuche cosmology, I describe the ways in which its gender and generational attributes are symbolized in the drums, rewes, plants, and other items machi use as tools in healing rituals. Then I turn to three kinds of Mapuche rituals to illustrate the ways in which machi perform the holistic personhood that is intrinsic to Mapuche cosmology. First, in divination rituals, gender difference is enacted by machi and dungumachife (ritual interpreters for machi), and wholeness is expressed through their ritual partnership. A divination ritual performed by Machi José and his sister demonstrates how ecstatic and formal discourses are gendered independently of the sex of the actors. Second, in communitywide ngillatun rituals, difference is impersonated by diverse actors, and wholeness is enacted collectively to integrate the ritual community. A collective ngillatun ritual led by Machi José and Machi Norma demonstrates that both sex-based and performative dimensions of gender and generation are crucial for collective renditions of wholeness. 46 Shamans of the Foye Tree Third, in individual healing rituals, difference is subsumed by...