Becoming Mapuche

Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile

Magnus Course

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 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.

PART ONE

1

Che

The Sociality of Exchange

In this chapter, I advance two arguments that are central to my argument as a whole: first, that personhood is necessarily predicated on relations with others, and second, that a privileged mode of these relations with others is that of exchange, what I term the “sociality of exchange.” I start by introducing the Mapuche concept of che, a concept roughly translatable as “true person.” This step is a necessary prerequisite to the rest of the book, which goes on to explore the ways such persons construct, and are themselves constructed by, different modes of sociality. In the final part of the chapter I describe the sociality of exchange—the first of the three modes of sociality through which personhood is realized. The notion that persons are themselves constructed by social relations might suggest that the person is a somewhat arbitrary point at which to start the discussion. But whereas for the Melanesian person described by Strathern (1988, 1992) there is a congruity and commensurability of the person and the relations that compose the person, for the Mapuche this is not the case. As I shall argue throughout this book, there is a certain irreducibility of the Mapuche person that makes it always more than the sum of its initial component parts.

Personhood from a Mapuche perspective is not an essence as such but a status attributed by others through both linguistic and nonlinguistic practice. The two criteria on which people base their attributions of personhood—human physicality and the capacity for productive sociality—are conjoined. Only when those possessing human physicalities are seen as having the capacity for productive sociality are they seen as che. This capacity for productive sociality—for creating productive relations with others—may consist in the adult exchange of objects such as wine or meat or simply in the infant’s exchange of a smile. This constant movement of the self toward others gives Mapuche life a centrifugal dynamism that is most clearly manifest in the alter-focused forms of sociality that are evident in such large-scale events as the game of ritual hockey and the ngillatun fertility ritual (see chapters 5 and 6).

The mode of sociality in which the attribution of che emerges most clearly is that which I term the sociality of exchange, of which the paradigmatic form is the relation between friends (wenüy). This mode of sociality differs in a fundamental way from the relations each person has inherited from his or her mother and father. This is because whereas these initial relations with parents are necessarily prior to the person, relations with friends must be created through each person’s own volition. All humans are born to two parents, but only those who go beyond these initial relations to forge their own relations can truly be considered che.

Persons and Other Kinds of Humans

What do Mapuche people mean when they describe someone as a “true person”? An analysis of activities such as greeting, sharing, and hospitality reveals the two distinct yet interrelated aspects of che: the presence of human physicality and the capacity for productive sociality manifest in autonomous thought, intentionality, and the capability of social action and reaction.

CHALIN: THE IMPORTANCE OF GREETING

On waking each morning, the individual members of a household make their way to the kitchen, which contains the hearth, the focal point of every Mapuche home. As each person arrives, he or she greets those already present with the Spanish salutation Buenos días. Those negligent in this act are reminded of the norm by having Buenos días yelled sarcastically at them by the rest of their family. A similar scene takes place at night as one by one the members of the household file off to sleep, always calling out Buenas noches before they go. These greetings, at morning and at night, are the parentheses of the social interactions that make up every day, marking the beginning and end of the daily routines of speech, sharing, exchange, and cooperation. But perhaps more important, the act of greeting, chalin in Mapudungun, serves to define and acknowledge the entities with whom such sociality is carried out as fellow persons, as che. Here I explain why.

The connection between the act of greeting and the attribution of personhood is revealed most explicitly in the greetings that take place outside the household. On arriving at any gathering where people from households other than one’s own are present, a Mapuche person will greet everyone in attendance. The new arrival moves in a counterclockwise direction, shaking each person’s right hand and greeting them in Mapudungun with the words mari mari, followed by the appropriate term of address. A similar process occurs when social gatherings break up. As each person departs, he or she once again moves around the group in a counterclockwise direction, shaking hands and bidding farewell to each person present with the Mapuche pewkallel or Spanish chau. Even in situations such as public meetings where large numbers of people are present, new arrivals still go to great pains to try to greet everyone individually. For the act of missing someone out can be taken as a sign that the omitted individual’s personhood is somehow being denied. Someone skipped over in a greeting will frequently exclaim Chengelan iñche? (“Am I not a person?”) To refuse to greet someone, or to refuse to accept someone’s greeting is more than denying the existence of a social relationship; it is denying the very prerequisite of such a relationship: shared personhood. Let us explore the reasons why certain people might not be greeted.

It is interesting that the two kinds of humans who are frequently not greeted are at best ambiguous in their status as true persons: drunk people and infants under the age of one who are still not able to fully respond to adult prompting. The phrase chengelan, “to not be a person,” is used frequently as a synonym for drunkenness. It is entirely acceptable to not greet drunk people or to greet them with a degree of sarcasm that would never be tendered toward a more sober person. This is because inebriety removes, according to local people, the capacity for certain characteristics—autonomy of thought, intentionality, and the capability of social action and reaction—that mark one out as a full person, hence the attribution of the status of che is temporarily withdrawn. Likewise young babies are not treated as persons in the usual sense.¹ Visitors to a house, though they may well show interest, will not see the need to greet young babies due to their inability to react in a coherent way, an inability that is attributed to a lack of intentionality and agency. As Miguel, the devoted father of ten children, said to me, “I don’t like little babies. They’re so boring. They don’t respond like true persons do. Once they get a bit older, then they’re interesting, but little babies I leave to their mother.” The time at which infants become persons is difficult to pinpoint, but it is generally thought to occur when they can sit up unaided and respond vocally, though not verbally, to stimulation. This change is marked linguistically by the replacement of the term llushu, which refers to newborn babies, by the term pichiche (literally “little person”), which refers to infants capable of social reaction. At the point of transition, mothers frequently act as advocates for their children, reprimanding people who fail to engage in the appropriate greeting. I remember well the couple of months when my neighbor Juana could be frequently heard saying of her daughter, “Greet her! Don’t you see that she’s a person now?”

A further aspect of personhood revealed through the activity of greeting is the importance of kinship ties. When time permits, the normal greeting is followed by a more or less standardized series of questions about the respondent’s family. Each question is answered and then asked in return of the original speaker. This semiformalized discourse of questioning is known as pentukun. Questioning takes place between people who have not seen each other for some time or between those who have never met before. When questioning occurs between older people who have never previously met, it can quite easily continue for several hours. The entire life histories of parents and all four grandparents (referred to metaphorically as meli folil, the “four roots”) are recounted. Furthermore, the speaker recalls the achievements of his or her own life: the places he or she has been, the friends he or she has made, and so on. This more formalized, elaborate questioning allows the two speakers to locate each other in a particular kind of social space—the social space of kinship. The everyday questioning, however, serves a slightly different purpose. It allows the enquirer to elicit information, and perhaps more important, the act of enquiry demonstrates one’s concern and respect for this aspect of an interlocutor’s life and person.

The importance of greeting, both as a social activity and as an acknowledgment of personhood, completely permeates everyday life, both within the household and outside it. It is therefore not surprising that the fundamentality of greeting to Mapuche notions of sociality is also expressed through the formalized greetings that play a central part in the major social events of Mapuche life: funerals, ritual hockey, and fertility rituals. The act of formalized greeting is referred to as chalintun (derived from the verb chalin) and, despite its grand scale and greater degree of solemnity, can be understood as a direct continuation of the everyday greetings that serve as prerequisite for the most basic social acts: speech, exchange, and sharing.

SHARING AND HOSPITALITY

Another form in which personhood is attributed, and simultaneously demonstrated, is through the act of sharing. Sharing serves to mark out both the giver and receiver as persons; the giver as it is a defining characteristic of che to give to other persons, the receiver as it is the right of che to receive in such circumstances. The emphasis given to the moral obligation to share is evident in the example of the sharing of wine given below. But sharing also occurs in many other instances: the sharing of blood at the killing of an animal (ñachi), the sharing of sweets among children, indeed, sharing in any situation when an immediately consumable product is available. As Woodburn has pointed out, such sharing cannot always be reduced to an economic transaction but is instead frequently a moral obligation (Woodburn 1982). I would add that in the case of the Mapuche, incorporation into an act of sharing also serves to delineate personhood.

Hospitality, too, can be understood as a modified form of sharing. Whenever a meal is served in a home, everybody present will be invited by the head of the family to sit and eat, regardless of their relationship to the rest of the household. It would be considered highly offensive to eat a meal in the presence of someone to whom food had not been offered. The memory of hospitality refused may become a bitter memory of which the offended party will complain extensively, asking “Am I not a person?” The typical response of the head of the offending household will be that at the time of the refusal of hospitality, the person refused was not acting as a person due to drunkenness; indeed chengelafuy, “they weren’t a person.” Mapuche people realize that such hospitality is not proffered by white Chileans (winka). As Miguel told me of his visit to Santiago: “We’re not like those white people. We’ll invite anyone into our homes, give them food, wine, beer—anything. But those white people, no, they don’t even greet you. They don’t treat you as a person.” Hospitality is offered to all people whether they are known or unknown, Mapuche or white people. Juan, a Mapuche man from Nueva Imperial, fifty miles east of Piedra Alta, worked on a mobile timber saw that traveled around the whole of the Ninth Region cutting pine in Mapuche communities. He told me that of the eight months of the year he spent on the road, he would never pay anything for food or lodging as he could rely entirely on the hospitality of the Mapuche he encountered.

The importance of sharing is linked to that of eating together, of commensality. Mapuche families almost always eat together at the same table. Indeed, the term misako refers to the institution of several people serving themselves from the same bowl. Commensality in the Mapuche case is evidence of the shared personhood of those eating together. Once again, drunk people may not be offered food or will be given food to eat outside. Likewise, little babies will not necessarily attend meals, whereas slightly older babies will indeed do so, even if they are still breastfeeding. Yet such commensality is not, as has been argued for Amazonia (Storrie 2003; Vilaça 2002) and elsewhere (Carsten 1995), a direct factor in the construction of such shared personhood through the sharing of substance. It is, I believe, recognition of a shared state that lies not in physicality alone, but in the shared capacity for positive sociality. Thus it is the case that persons eat together because they are persons, and that they are persons because they eat together. It is at this point that I should like to turn to the question of humanity as a physical attribute and personhood as a social capability.

CHE: HUMANS AND PERSONS

The reader may have noticed that my analysis up until now has utilized an implicit distinction between the categories of “human” and “person.” I use the word “human” to refer primarily to the physicality of the human body, while I reserve the word “person” for the complex of social capacities that in normal circumstances coexists with such bodies. No such distinction occurs in Mapudungun; both terms would be translated with the single Mapuche term che. It could therefore be argued that making such a distinction imposes a false, or at least misplaced, logic onto Mapuche understandings. I do not believe that this is the case. In their desire to refute certain misplaced Western philosophical categories, many ethnographers have actually obfuscated a crucial distinction that some indigenous peoples (the Mapuche, at least) make between humans as physical entities and humans as social persons, a distinction that may not occur in indigenous linguistic categories but is nevertheless revealed through practice. The analytical distinction I make between “human” and “person” has many parallels with the distinction between sexual identity and gender identity. Indeed, just as such a distinction in Western culture was long obfuscated by the fact that the single terms “male” and “female” apply to both physical difference (sex) and relational difference (gender), so the distinction in Mapuche culture between physical identity (humanity) and social identity (personhood) is obfuscated by the single term che.

As noted, for rural Mapuche, to be a “true person” involves two things: a human physicality and a capacity for productive sociality. Both young babies and drunk people possess human physicalities, but lack, albeit temporarily, human sociality. If drunk people, small infants, and normal people all possess human bodies, what is the nature of the sociality that the first two lack that they should be “not persons”? By looking at the way people withhold attributions of personhood, I suggest that the missing aspects consist of the capacity for autonomous thought, agency, and social interaction based on language and exchange. These three aspects are seen as prerequisites to a capacity for productive sociality. While such features are not schematically outlined by Mapuche people, they are made apparent in responses to questions as to why someone is not a person. A frequent response would be “He can’t think, he can’t listen, he can’t even do anything.” But what of the inverse situation? What of those entities who possess the necessary prerequisites for productive sociality yet lack human bodies? Or, to phrase the question another way, what of those beliefs traditionally described as “animistic”?

NGEN: SPIRIT MASTERS

The Mapuche homesteads where I lived tend to be perched halfway up the small, low hills that pepper the terrain between the Pacific and Lago Budi. The uncultivable, densely wooded valleys running between the hills are the domain of ngen, the “masters” of the plants and animals. In general use, the word ngen implies a relation of both propriety and care; a husband may be described as ngen küre, “wife’s master,” and a mother may be described as ngen püñen, “child’s master.” But in its unspecified form, the word ngen can usually be taken to refer to the entities who correspond to the “masters” of natural phenomena, entities evident in the ethnography of both halves of the Americas (Århem 1996; Descola 1992, 1996a; Hallowell 1960, 1992; Viveiros de Castro 1998). Grebe defines ngen as “spirit masters of wild nature, whose role is to care, protect, shield and watch over—through balance, continuity, and wellbeing—the elements under their care” (1993: 50).

Different aspects of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustration
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary of terms in Mapudungun
• References
• Index