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CHAPTER 5 The Struggle for Machi Masculinity: Colonial Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Power One long winter evening in August 1629, in a hamlet headed by Longko Maulican south of the Bio-Bío River in Chile, a machi weye, or male shaman , healed a bewitched native boy with the help of ancestral spirits and a foye tree. Longko Maulican’s slave, Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascu ñán, a twenty-two-year-old of Spanish descent, born in Chile, watched wide-eyed and terrified in a dark corner. To him, the machi weye’s appearance and spiritual practices were those of a puto, or male gender invert, a perverse sodomite engaged in devil worship:1 An Indian with such a horrible figure entered. His outfit, his perverse face and shape expressed what he was . . . His features, dress, and body made him look like Lucifer because he was not wearing pants but was a weye. Instead of pants he was wearing a puno—a cloth that is wrapped around the waist and is used by women with a long shirt on top. His hair was long and loose while others wear their hair braided, and his nails were so deformed that they looked like spoons. His face was very ugly, and he had a cloud in his eye that understood everything. His body was very small, his back was broad, and he limped. Just looking at him caused horror and gave me to understand his vile exercises . . . Those that take on the role of women are called weye, which in our language means nefarious ones and, more precisely, male inverts [ putos] . . . They become machi because they have a pact with the devil. (Núñez de Pineda y Bascu- ñán 1863:107, 157–159 [hereafter, Núñez 1863]) The sick boy lay on a sheepskin on the dirt floor of his father’s thatch hut. A sacred foye tree had been planted at the boy’s head to serve as a conduit for spirits who descended into the machi weye’s body. They gave him 112 Shamans of the Foye Tree knowledge about the circumstances under which the boy had been bewitched , about the required treatment, and about the final outcome of his illness. Several laurel (triwe) branches were placed beside the foye to lower the boy’s fever. The machi weye’s drum hung from the foye, and a lamb was tied to its base. While several women sang and played drums, the machi weye slit open the lamb’s chest, placed its still-beating heart in the foye tree, and began periodically to suck blood from it. Next, he blew tobacco smoke over the boy’s chest and stomach and then slit them and sucked some of the venom out of his body. Miraculously, the boy’s wounds healed immediately, leaving no scars. The machi weye then became possessed by a helping spirit. His eyes rolled back and his body bounced like a ball on the floor while his drum imitated its owner, jumping beside him. He told the participants that an enemy had poisoned and bewitched the boy during a drinking party, that the venom had spread throughout the boy’s body, and that soon it would reach his heart and kill him (Núñez 1863:159–160). Young Francisco was deeply affected by this experience: “I commended myself to God . . . and after I saw this horrible spectacle, my soul became anguished, my hair stood on end, and I was sure that his [the machi weye’s] body was possessed by the devil” (Núñez 1863:160). Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán wrote the only eyewitness account of an encounter between a colonial agent and a machi weye and the only known seventeenth-century narrative by a Chilean criollo, a locally born person of Spanish descent. Colonial agents were either Spanish or criollo, but it was the former who wrote most of the seventeenth-century chronicles. Born in Chillán, Francisco lacked the power and prestige of Spanish-born authorities, yet he drew on Spanish understandings of gender , religion, and power, which linked shamans’ bodies with devil worship , gender inversion, and perverse sexuality. He saw the native weye’s body as deformed and repulsive. He interpreted the machi weye’s long hair and nails and his waist wrap as effeminate and linked them to sodomy and perversion. Finally, he read the weye’s possession and divinatory abilities, his miraculous surgery, his jumping drum, and...

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