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Magnus Course blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this superb ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, Becoming Mapuche takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploring their way of life, the book situates the Mapuche within broader anthropological debates about indigenous peoples in South America._x000B__x000B_Comprising around 10 percent of the Chilean population, the Mapuche are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Americas. Despite increasing social and political marginalization, the Mapuche remain a distinct presence within Chilean society, giving rise to the burgeoning Mapuche political movement and holding on to their traditional language of Mapundungun, their religion, and their theory of self-creation. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, Course also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life--eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun.

This article constitutes an ethnographic exploration of the salience of houses - both ruined and lived in - on the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist. While I describe houses as both sites of memory and sites of dwelling, my argument is that the latter - dwelling - encompasses and subsumes the former - memory. This argument is situated in a historical and political context where, despite over 4,000 years of human habitation, dwelling cannot be taken for granted. Current pressures of depopulation, unemployment, poverty, and ever-tighter conservation legislation are perceived as continuous with the tragedies of the Clearances and beyond. The ethical and political claim for Uist as a place of human dwelling is made, both implicitly and explicitly, through a continuity of human occupation indexed by the material presence of houses. Cet article constitue une exploration ethnographique de la place des maisons (en ruines comme habitées) sur l'île de South Uist, dans les Hébrides extérieures. Si l'auteur décrit les maisons comme des sites à la fois de mémoire et de l'habiter, son argument est que l'habiter englobe et subsume la mémoire. Cet argument se situe dans un contexte historique et politique dans lequel, malgré plus de 4000 ans d'occupation humaine, l'habiter n'est toujours pas une évidence. Les pressions actuelles du dépeuplement, du chômage, de la pauvreté et d'une législation sur la protection de l'environnement de plus en plus stricte sont perçues dans la continuité des Clearances du XIXème siècle et d'autres drames. La volonté éthique et politique d'affirmer Uist comme un lieu d'habitation humaine est à la fois implicite et explicite dans la continuité de l'occupation, marquée par la présence matérielle des maisons.

This essay takes the antics of ritual clowns, koyong, as an entry point into the ways in which rural Mapuche people in southern Chile come to understand and reflect upon the inevitability of urban migration and the “becoming white” which this migration is said to imply. Utilizing both my own ethnographic data and comparative data from elsewhere in the Americas, I explore the striking continuities in the associations of indigenous ritual clowns: associations with poverty, with uncontrolled bodily desires, with dual ritual performances, and perhaps most significantly, with white people. I suggest that the moral indictment of the “becoming white” instantiated by clowns in their ritual performances emerges from their identities as people who in everyday life are denigrated as “too Mapuche.” Thus, far from being yet another example of indigenous people's “agency” in mimetically co-opting the vitality of white others, I suggest that clowns are one of the means by which rural Mapuche people come to understand precisely their own lack of agency in the face of Chilean colonialism

This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman-all present in the Mapuche ngillatun fertility ritual-from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emerges not solely from the intentions of individual speakers, but equally from the force-newen-constitutive of all being. Priests, chiefs, and shamans all seek to align themselves through speech to this force which instantiates itself through them. Such an observation forms the basis of a critique of both Clastres' understanding of the relationship between chiefs and language, and of the recent post-humanist rejection of the so-called \"linguistic turn.\"

Este artigo procura abordar os papéis de sacerdote, chefe e xamã – todos presentes no ngillatun, ritual de fertilidade mapuche – da perspectiva de seus modos diferenciais de travar relações por meio da linguagem. A linguagem, conforme entendida pelos Mapuche do meio rural chileno, não emerge exclusivamente das intenções de falantes individuais, mas igualmente da força (newen) constitutiva da totalidade do ser. Sacerdotes, chefes e xamãs recorrem à fala para alinhar-se a essa força, que por meio deles se atualiza. Uma tal observação lança nova luz sobre o entendimento de Clastres quanto à relação entre chefia e linguagem. Se, acompanhando os Mapuche, enfatizamos as qualidades indexicais da linguagem, em detrimento das simbólicas, vemos que se torna um tanto problemático analisar a linguagem dos chefes em conformidade com um modelo de “troca”, como faz Clastres.

This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features of ül -- their use of first-person pronouns, their entextualization, and their musicality -- reveals how they allow the subjectivities encapsulated within them to become 'inhabited' by others. I conclude by suggesting that this process of inhabiting distinct subjectivities through song resonates with and responds to a problem of epistemological solipsism grounded in Mapuche ideas about the singularity of human nature. /// Le présent article cherche à retracer quelques-uns des liens entre l'attrait des chants personnels (ül) et les idées sur la personnalité chez les Mapuches ruraux du Sud du Chili. À travers une approche à la fois sociologique et sémiotique de ces chants, l'auteur avance qu'ils sont perçus comme des empreintes de la subjectivité singulière de leur compositeur initial. L'accent mis sur les trois caractéristiques spécifiques des ül (utilisation de pronoms à la première personne, entextualisation et musicalité) révèle la façon dont ils permettent aux subjectivités qu'ils renferment d'être \"habitées\" par d'autres. L'auteur suggère, en conclusion, que ce processus d'investissement de subjectivités distinctes par le chant entre en résonance et en correspondance avec un problème de solipsisme épistémologique, ancré dans les idées de singularité de la nature humaine des Mapuches.

This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman—all present in the Mapuche nggillatun fertility ritual—from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emerges not solely from the intentions of individual speakers, but equally from the force—newen—constitutive of all being. Priests, chiefs, and shamans all seek to align themselves through speech to this force which instantiates itself through them. Such an observation forms the basis of a critique of both Clastres’ understanding of the relationship between chiefs and language, and of the recent post-humanist rejection of the so-called “linguistic turn.”

In recent years a significant body of literature has arisen concerning the particular assumptions made by photographers of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and the colonial projects of which their photographs were a part. Readers are privy to images of young people learning skills such as carpentry and bee-keeping, the local chiefs who ceded the land on which the mission was built, and the regional assemblies of these chiefs, still reeling from the aftermath of military defeat to the Chilean state in 1881. The editors highlight aspects of mission Ufe which resonate with anthropological concerns of the moment: an emphasis on literacy as a means of conversion, on labor as a means towards economic integration, and on individual responsibility as a vehicle for political emancipation.