I met Miguel on a September afternoon in a café in downtown Santiago.1 A friend in common put us in contact. I was hoping Miguel could help me to find gatekeepers and key informants in my intent to enter the field in the Araucanía region, 500 miles south of Santiago. Miguel was a doctor in his early forties who, at the time I met him, was working as a radiologist in a public hospital in the northern area of Santiago. Miguel’s father was born in a Mapuche rural community in Puaucho, Araucanía. Like many other Mapuche throughout the twentieth century, Miguel’s father migrated to the capital in search of better job opportunities. Like most Mapuche today, Miguel was born in Santiago, far away from where his paternal family was originally from.
Miguel started the conversation by explaining that he was awingkado (Westernized) and, thus, did not think he could be of much help for my research. I had to look for people who really knew about Mapuche spirituality and medicine, Miguel suggested. He went on to explain that among urban Mapuche migrants, an Indigenous identity used to be a source of shame and discrimination. Therefore, his father did not speak to his sons in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, and did not teach them anything about Mapuche culture. Quite the opposite, his father tried to conceal the fact that he was Mapuche. Later, I heard numerous similar stories both among urban and rural Mapuche. Parents and grandparents tried to protect their children from discrimination by not teaching them the language or any other aspect of Mapuche culture and, thus, concealing their identity. Unlike his father, Miguel said he was not ashamed of being Mapuche. In fact, he stated that it was a pity his father, now deceased, did not teach him Mapudungun. He wished he could speak it. He had even tried to learn a bit. Miguel thought it was sad that Mapuche knowledge had ceased to be transmitted from parents to children, adding that he had friends who were Mapuche descendants and were trying to learn Mapudungun and become engaged in Mapuche ritual life and spirituality. These friends were not raised as Mapuche but were now trying to “know more about their culture,” as Miguel put it.
Miguel was amused by my interest in Mapuche medicine. He thought it was unusual for a doctor like me because most doctors discard Mapuche medicine as superstition or just placebo. In fact, like any other doctor, Miguel was skeptical regarding the efficacy of Mapuche medicine. He confided in me that he once went to see a machi, or a Mapuche shaman, because he was experiencing a skin rash. This occurred on one of his regular trips to visit his aunt, his father’s youngest sister, in Puaucho, Araucanía. Miguel’s aunt took him to the local state-sponsored Mapuche medical center. There, Miguel received lawen (remedies) from a machi in the form of medicinal herbal infusions. He laughed when stating that the remedy did not have any effect. Miguel thought his rash was due to stress and, therefore, psychological support probably made more sense to him as treatment. Miguel’s skepticism was something I expected. However, what he said next was unexpected: “But not all machi are real machi, you need to be careful with machi, you need to know the right people who can tell you who to talk to.” A “real” machi, I learned, was someone with the spiritual gift (Spanish: don) to heal. This gift is obtained through a machi’s pülli (lineage spirit). Therefore, people who become machi because they were trained or went to a machi school were fake machi: they do not have a spiritual gift. Miguel thought that, perhaps, he had not been healed because the machi who treated him was not a real machi. Also, he suggested I needed to know the right people who could recommend a real machi to me; that is, people who have already been treated satisfactorily by a machi, or people with more experience of dealing with machi.
In retrospect, my first encounter with a Mapuche person already contained the two elements at the heart of this ethnography. The first one was driven by my own theoretical preoccupations regarding medical efficacy and was elicited due to the questions I asked and the themes I wanted to talk about. Miguel also wanted to talk about the efficacy of Mapuche medicine, and he phrased this concern, for the first time, as many friends did later: some machi are real and some machi are not. Some machi can cure ill people while others are just pretending. The second element Miguel put forward was not elicited by my questions. Rather, I encountered it recurrently throughout a twelve-month period of fieldwork. Miguel introduced me to a narrative based on feelings of loss and nostalgia regarding a Mapuche culture that was never taught to him and, thus, he did not know. Feelings of loss and dispossession and the necessity to recover what was lost were a core theme among my Mapuche interlocutors.
This book is based on a doctoral thesis in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. The research presented here was funded by the Government of Chile through the state agency ANID (Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo). This ethnography is the product of a twelve-month period of fieldwork mostly in the coastal area of the Araucanía region, between September 2016 and September 2017. However, a strict delimitation of a geographical field site would be misleading. This is so because machi usually travel long distances to treat patients, and patients also travel long distances to seek the help of a machi. At the same time, the distinction between urban and rural is blurred, since people continuously move from rural communities to towns and cities (and vice versa). The continuity of rural and urban spaces, in the Mapuche context, has already been described by other authors (e.g., Bacigalupo 2007; Bengoa and Caniguan 2012). Therefore, although most observations presented here happened in rural areas, some occurred in towns and cities.
I entered the field in Araucanía through two different entry points. The first entry point was through scholars in the Intercultural and Indigenous Studies Centre (Centro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas) at the Institute of Sociology of the Catholic University of Chile, whom I contacted in Santiago. Through these scholars, I was able to meet other scholars on the Catholic University campus in Villarrica, a town located east of Temuco, in Araucanía. Once in Villarrica, and while being housed by the local campus of the Catholic University, scholars there introduced me to the Mapuche team working in a state-funded Mapuche medical center. The Mapuche medical center was located west of Temuco, near the coast. I was also introduced to someone who later became my Mapudungun teacher and provided significant insight into Mapuche medicine throughout my fieldwork. My Mapudungun teacher used to collaborate with scholars at the Catholic University on different projects and lived in a rural area near Lake Budi.
After being introduced to the medical team working in a state-funded medical center, I explained my research project to them, and they accepted my presence as an ethnographer at their workplace. Thus, I moved from Villarrica, in the mountains, to the coast. I conducted a three-month ethnography in the Mapuche medical center while renting a room in a house in the local town. During that period, I spent every day, from Monday to Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the medical center. However, this is not a hospital ethnography. Rather, I strategically used the medical center to generate relationships with key people and machi. Later, I moved from the medical center to the communities. Thus, most of the observations provided here describe medical practices carried out at private homes and communities.
My second entry point was through my friend, Miguel, whom I already mentioned. Miguel put me in contact with his family in the south. In fact, in the first meeting we had, he called his aunt, Amelia, so I could talk to her and ask her whether I could stay at her place. Amelia was a widow who lived with her two teenage daughters, and she became a dear friend. Amelia and her family introduced me to neighbors and the extended family, with whom I spent plenty of family and social occasions. Throughout a year of fieldwork, I spent a couple of days at Amelia’s place in Puaucho at regular intervals of about two or three weeks.
Fieldwork methods included participant observation, language learning (together with weekly lessons at my teacher’s home; I took a 24-hour course on basic Mapudungun at the Catholic University of Temuco) and the study of the literature written on the Mapuche from colonial times to the present day. Although I initially conducted some semi-structured interviews, which were recorded, I quickly discovered that it was more fruitful to engage in informal conversations. This was so because people talked more freely, and were easier to engage in informal conversations rather than recorded semi-structured interviews. Therefore, most of the observations presented here derive from unstructured, but persistent and immersive participant observation.
I closely observed the work of three female machi with whom I spent a considerable amount of time in their homes and communities. I also traveled with one of them to attend to patients in various areas of the Araucanía, Los Lagos and Aysén regions. I repeatedly observed the work of another three machi (one female and two male) because I was accompanying friends who were sick or because I was invited to a community ceremony or to a ritual healing event. In addition, I met two female machil (machi initiates).
The main purpose of this ethnography is to provide a rationale for positive experiential transformations (or lack of them) in the context of Mapuche ritual healing, from the perspective of the phenomenology of the body. I intend to give both an ethnographic account of what counts as positive healing transformations in the Mapuche context and to theoretically contribute to the discussion of ritual healing efficacy from a phenomenological perspective.
This ethnography examines how people know who is a real machi or a Mapuche shaman. Or in other words, who can really know, treat and prevent illnesses and misfortunes. This question, which preoccupied my interlocutors, is different to that of why a machi is popular or has a lot of clients. The popularity of a machi can be influenced by issues of power and status, such as wealth and ties with the local government; personality, such as charisma, empathy and self-confidence; family and community support; and, also, the skills and knowledge to exert positive healing transformations. The question of who is a real machi is also different to the question of authenticity, understood in terms of historical veracity and genuine traditions. Here, my main concern, and that of my interlocutors, is what defines a real machi in terms of their skills to use transformative techniques in the context of curative and preventive ritual healing. Admittedly, I cannot completely separate this question from the issue of popularity and authenticity (neither do my Mapuche interlocutors). However, focusing on transformative techniques and skills does imply an emphasis on bodily transformations when discussing medical efficacy. Thus, the question of who is a real machi is fundamentally an existential question touching on issues of what being healed (or transformed) through ritual action is.
I explore two main characteristics that, according to my Mapuche interlocutors, make a machi a real machi. First, a real machi must have the spiritual gift to “see” the illness or problem through different divinatory techniques. The spiritual ability to see is obtained through a pülli (lineage spirit), which differentiates machi from people who learn to be or are trained as healers. Therefore, I explore how it is that a machi can see, and different ways of seeing. In other words, how a machi can know an illness or problem and treat it. Secondly, a real machi has kimün (ancestral knowledge) regarding the Mapuche lifeworld. Significantly, machi achieve kimün not only through learning from elders, but also through peuma (dreams) and küymin (ritual trance). Machi are the only type of person who can experience küymin, a state in which a machi is possessed by their pülli who can, then, deliver a spiritual message. Thus, a machi is indispensable for the transmission of kimün and the continuity of Mapuche ritual life and spirituality. To do so, machi preside over traditional ceremonies that aim to prevent illnesses and misfortunes and maintain the lifestyle of the group. Therefore, being a real machi means both divining and treating illnesses and misfortunes effectively and presiding over traditional ceremonies effectively. In this way, machi have a role both as healers and as knowledge and community builders.
To address the second characteristic of a real machi, that of a person with kimün (ancestral knowledge) responsible for community building and transmission of cultural practices and knowledge, a phenomenological approach needs to be complemented. Ritual healing transformations not only have an existential function, but they also have a political function. Therefore, this work combines a phenomenological approach with careful attention to the social and political context. Specifically, this ethnography seeks to link healing rituals and individual bodily transformations with the politics of Mapuche identity. In that spirit, I deliberately begin this ethnography in Santiago, miles away from the area in which I conducted fieldwork, and with a conversation with a Mapuche doctor who thought he did not know enough about Mapuche medicine. In this manner, I try to do justice to a story of dispossession of land, knowledge and cultural practices that many friends, such as Miguel, were eager to talk about. Thus, this work attends to the role of machi and medical practices in generating and controlling both a collective Mapuche identity and a personal Mapuche identity based on shared feelings of pride and self-esteem.
My ethnographic exploration of how to know who is a real machi in the Mapuche context is related to broader anthropological preoccupations; namely, the problem of the efficacy of the so-called traditional medical practices. Although some have argued (e.g., Waldram 2000) that medical anthropology initially neglected the problem of efficacy, assuming that ritual healing and traditional medical practices inevitably produce socially predictable outcomes, this is not the case within the field of medical anthropology today. Efficacy has been widely problematized, but one should recognize that efficacy is not one single thing: medical efficacy can be defined in multiple ways. Efficacy, then, is plural, and multiple efficacies are not mutually exclusive. Here, following Csordas (1994a), I understand efficacy as ritually induced transformations of the self. The term “ritual” is significant since it denotes that healing transformations occur in a socially and technically demarcated time and space, from which ritual action reorganizes experience and has the potential to transform a problematic situation (Hsu 2015; Kapferer 2004; Lewis 1980). In addition, the self is proposed to be understood as the object of transformation of ritual healing (Csordas 1994a). The self is understood not only as a person with a defined set of characteristics, but also as the process of constitution of the person and their world. Csordas (ibid.) refers to processes of constitution of a person and their world as self-processes. Self-processes start in bodily pre-reflexive experience and end in an individualized self: a person with a differentiated set of characteristics. Csordas’ proposal is to center attention on ongoing processes of individuation or objectification, rather than starting from the already objectified self.
In this way, Csordas (1994a) emphasizes aspects of self-transformations, which occur at a level that is pre-reflexive or prior to conscious awareness. The use of the terms pre-reflexive/reflexive allows for a non-dichotomist division in which what is pre-reflexive is always accessible to becoming reflexive. Reflexivity refers to the human capacity to make something conscious (or the capacity for objectification). Thus, reflexivity refers to the capacity to cognitively (understood as a deliberative, effortful conscious process) take the self and others as objects, while pre-reflexive experience is pre-objective but available to objectification.
Why is pre-reflexive experience, as the starting point of self-processes, relevant in the Mapuche context? Machi are expected to “see” an illness or a problematic situation through divinatory techniques, such as the visual inspection of a patient’s bottled urine. Patients expect proof that the machi can see without them explaining. Here, the sense of vision is understood as having an objectifying and detaching quality. Seeing is also associated with knowing, and patients can only have proof that a machi knows if they name the illness or problem. Thus, seeing is the capacity to know the problematic circumstances of a person without the necessity of explanation, which is made apparent through the machi speech. Divination rituals are rich in pre-reflexive experience such as the direction of attention, the promotion of imagination, and the manipulation of the senses and the emotions. Through the technical elaboration of experience that is immediate (not mediated by deliberative, effortful conscious processing) and embodied, a skillful machi can see an illness or problem and also make it visible to the patient. After seeing, machi and patient can engage in a reflexive understanding of a problematic situation and its possible solutions. Therefore, reflexive understanding is grounded in bodily experience, which is largely pre-reflexive.
In the same vein, machi are expected to make evil spirits visible in the context of ritual action directed at illnesses caused by evil forces. The invisible nature of evil spirits and the incapacity of biomedical testing to visualize them (or to visualizes their negative effects on people’s bodies) is the source of their power according to some of my interlocutors. If a machi makes evil spirits visible, then people have proof that evil spirits are indeed the agents of affliction. Moreover, healing action can be directed against evil forces once they have been seen. Machi promote the visualization of evil spirits through different sensory modalities such as vision, sound, touch, and negative emotions such as fear. As in divinatory techniques, ritual actions targeted at evil spirits organize sensory experience and the emotions so that the evil spirit can be objectified and, then, neutralized and disposed of.
Machi are also expected to make benign spirits present or embody the spirits of the ancestors. As stated previously, a machi’s ability to experience küymin (ritual trance), or the ritually induced possession of a machi by the spirit of a deceased shaman, is important for the continuity and transmission of cultural practices and the Mapuche lifeworld. Through küymin, a community of people can communicate with “spirits from the past,” which is fundamental in struggles to recover kimün (ancestral knowledge) lost in the process of colonization. To make the spirit present through küymin, collective ritual action is directed both at the machi’s body and the communal body. Dancing, playing music, shouting, and drinking together are bodily skills and acts that make the spirits come. When the spirits are finally present, only after laborious and concerted ritual action can they deliver an important message to the community, usually in the form of a sung prayer on the part of the machi. The message is later discussed and interpreted in conversations during and after a ceremony. The embodiment of the ancestors is fundamental in creating and maintaining a Mapuche way of knowing the past and engaging with the present and the future.
In this manner, both in divinatory techniques, ritual healing directed at evil spirits, and ritual trance, agents of afflictions or spirits from the past are objectified through self-processes. For instance, an evil spirit is visualized in the form of the scream of a child, an illness is revealed in a patient’s urine, or an ancestor warns of possible natural disasters if people stop celebrating Mapuche ceremonies. I propose to understand these techniques as directed at self-processes through which objectification of a problematic situation occurs. The process starts in a layer of experience that is immediate and embodied, and upon which a reflexive elaboration of the cause of an illness or a problem and the exploration of possible solutions is built. Thus, the reflexive understanding of an illness or problem and its solutions is grounded in the body and its practices and skills. Stated differently, reflexive elaborations grounded in the body become experientially meaningful through ritual healing acts.
To explore how reflexivity is grounded in the body, I draw on Csordas’ (1994a: 74–87) understanding of imagination as a mode of self-process or as a mode of orientation toward the world. Here, imagination is both a form of doing and orienting the body in the world and a way of reflexively engaging with a problematic situation. Stated otherwise, imagination is a human capacity through which self-processes move from indeterminacy to orientation, from the pre-reflexive to reflexive understanding and objectification. Thus, through imagination, the subject can engage with the world and others in meaningful ways. Phenomenologically, imagination is something that the body does, an act (Sartre 2004), or the bodily simulation of possible experiences of imagined objects (Jansen 2018: 686). To imagine something, then, is to relate to that imagined object and not only to a mental image that represents something absent. Thus, imagination, understood as a bodily act, presents an existential situation. At the same time, the content of imagination represents a cultural meaning and, as such, imagination belongs to the order of representation. Csordas proposes the complementarity of the semiotic and the phenomenological understanding of imagination (1994a: 80–81) by claiming that imagination is culturally intelligible since it belongs to the semiotic order, and, also, performatively efficacious as it is a mode of orientation toward the world or the active engagement of the body with its world.
In this way, I follow Csordas’ reflections on imagination to postulate a complementarity between symbolic and phenomenological approaches to ritual healing efficacy. Thus, an understanding of efficacy as ritually induced transformations of self-processes does not try to compete with or replace a symbolic understanding of medical efficacy. Rather, my focus on pre-reflexive experience and its relationship with reflexivity is an attempt to ground symbols in the body and, thus, portray how symbolic formations become existentially meaningful. In this way, I can explore the paradox that while Mapuche ritual healing is largely relying on techniques that are nonverbal and embodied, at the same time the final objective of ritual action is knowing or seeing. For example, when consulting a machi, people expect them to produce the correct visualization of an illness in a patient’s bottled urine, which is revealed through speech. Or the multisensory and affective experience of collective ritual action aims to make the spirits come, so they can deliver a message to the community. The message is received with careful attention, and later discussions and interpretations of what a spirit said while a machi was in trance occur at the end of a ceremony and continue to develop for some time after a ritual occurrence.
The understanding of the self as a constitutive process occurring every time the subject relates to someone or something that is significant to the study of healing. The self, in this way understood, is susceptible to transformations through treatment. However, self-processes occur under cultural and historical constraints that explain both the continuity of the sense of self and the limits of ritual transformations. Although there is space for transformations to occur, we cannot completely create a novel self regardless of its past and cultural context. To explain these constraints Csordas (1990) turns to Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus to complement Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In this way, careful attention is placed here on the political context in which the Mapuche engage in acts of healing. Healing actions are embedded in political discourses and practices that are aimed at recovering kimün (ancestral knowledge) to create and recreate the küme mongen (wellbeing, literally good living) of the Mapuche and their world vis-à-vis the Chileans.
The Mapuche are Indigenous peoples of Chile and Argentina. In Chile, 1,623,073 people identified themselves as Mapuche in the last census of 2024, which corresponds to almost 9 percent of the total Chilean population and 76 percent of the Chilean Indigenous population (INE 2025). Most of the Mapuche population today lives in Santiago, which is the consequence of rural-urban migration throughout the twentieth century. However, Araucanía remains the region in Chile with the highest demographic proportion of Mapuche in the country, relative to the general population (23 percent of the total Araucanía population). Araucanía is the region in Chile with the highest rate of poverty and rurality and the lowest rate of population growth. Other regions in Chile with an important Mapuche population are Los Lagos and Biobío.
In Araucanía, most Mapuche live in rural areas, in the so-called Indigenous Communities, which are the consequence of war, historical displacement, and land loss. In these communities, most Mapuche live in patrilineal extended families (though it is not always the case that families living in the same communities are kin). Each nuclear family owns a plot of land, which is cultivated for subsistence and some small-scale selling or trade. Most Mapuche people living in rural areas of the Araucanía region have close ties to urban life, particularly Temuco, the regional capital, and Santiago, through relatives, work, and studies.
The Mapuche maintained political and territorial autonomy south of the Biobío river throughout the Spanish colonial administration of what is today Chile (since the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century). After the arrival of the Spanish, the Mapuche became cattle ranchers and developed an extensive network of commerce with the Spanish (and later the Chileans), with whom they traded livestock and textiles for iron, wine, and silver, among other goods. The political and territorial independence of the Mapuche as a people continued for decades after the Chilean War of Independence (1810–1818), and only came to an end through war three or four generations ago (Bengoa 1996, 2002; Cayuqueo 2017).
The current state of the Mapuche in Chile has its origins in the occupation of their territory by the Chilean army, a military campaign started in 1861 and completed in 1883. After the war, surviving Mapuche were displaced to reservations (S: reducciones), where they were forced to make a living out of subsistence agriculture. From a territory that covered 10 million hectares and stretched from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Mapuche were “reduced” to a territory of approximately 500,000 hectares (Bengoa 1996, 2002). As Bengoa (2002: 61) argued, this is the colonial origin of the current poverty and marginality of the Mapuche rural world.
The state of Chile handed over property rights to the defeated Mapuche through a legal instrument called Merced Titles (S: Títulos de Merced). The Chilean state handed 3,078 Merced Titles between 1884 and 1919, which corresponded to about 500,000 hectares and benefited 78,000 people (Bengoa 2002: 356). According to Bengoa (ibid.), this was a slow and bureaucratic process that resulted in many Mapuche groups not receiving property rights. Instead, they were forcibly displaced by national and foreign colonists (S: colonos) who were eager to appropriate Mapuche lands. Moreover, many Mapuche who did receive property rights subsequently lost their titles due to forced displacement and legal trickery. Bengoa (ibid.: 69) points out that 200 communities with Merced Titles disappeared in the first decades of the twentieth century and, with them, Mapuche lands, which passed into private hands. These lands, which were handed to the Mapuche by the Chilean state and later ended in private hands through illegal means, are being claimed today by Mapuche activists who refer to them as usurped lands (S: tierras usurpadas).
There is a vast amount of academic literature on the Mapuche, whose exhaustive review exceeds the scope of this book. Thus, I focus on relatively recent works that have had influence on our current understanding of the Mapuche. Most scholars on the Mapuche would agree on the fundamental contribution of the historian José Bengoa. His work Historia del pueblo mapuche (History of the Mapuche People), first published in 1985 and followed by numerous re-editions, inaugurated a new interest in the Mapuche by both scholars and the Chilean public. Bengoa portrays the Mapuche as complex social actors, with internal divisions, struggles and differences, trying to resist or make alliances with both the Spanish and, after the War of Independence (1810–1818), the Chileans. In addition, this historian gave the Mapuche a history of their own vis-à-vis the history of colonial Chile and the Chilean Republic. Remarkably, Bengoa relied on oral narratives (as well as written records) as valid historical sources, giving voice to current Mapuche.
The publication of this foundational academic work was closely followed by Mapuche political mobilization with the advent of democracy in 1990 (this is discussed further later). Moreover, in 2002, Bengoa published a historical essay entitled Historia de un conflicto. El Estado y los mapuches durante el siglo XX (History of a Conflict: The State and the Mapuche in the 20th Century). Unlike his 1985 book, aimed primarily at historians and academics, this book is an enjoyable and easy-to-read essay directed at the general public. In this way, in addition to his academic contribution, Bengoa has contributed to the political debate in Chile and his findings as a historian are known beyond the confines of the academy.
Other Chilean historians and social scientists joined the renewed interest in the Mapuche. Organizaciones, líderes and contiendas Mapuche (Mapuche Organizations, Leaders, and Contests), by Rolf Foerster and Sonia Montecinos, published in 1988, was also influential in promoting the interest of scholars and the broader public in the Mapuche. The book is a historical and sociological account, based mostly on the review of newspapers, of the varying Mapuche political organizations of the first half of the twentieth century and how they negotiated with the state. In the same vein, Pinto’s La formación del Estado y la nación, y el pueblo Mapuche. De la inclusión a la exclusión (The Formation of the State and the Nation, and the Mapuche people: From Inclusion to Exclusion) (2003) is an account of how Mapuche were excluded from nation-building discourses and practices in the second half of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the preparations of the military campaigns aimed at conquering Mapuche territory. The exclusion of the Mapuche from the nation, together with military aggression, displacement, and expropriation, as Pinto argued, occurred after a colonial and republican period in which the Mapuche border and autonomy were accepted and conflict was contained through commerce and diplomacy.
Two historians who have published more recently, and in English, are Florencia Mallon and Joanna Crow. Mallon’s Courage Tastes of Blood (2005) narrates the history of the Mapuche community Nicolas Aillío. The historian also relies on oral narratives to construct the history of a Mapuche community entangled with significant national events, such as the agrarian reform of the 1960s, the repression and brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), and the recovery of democracy in 1990. Crow’s The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History (2013) focuses on varying cultural productions, such as Mapuche poetry and museums, as well as political discourses from both Mapuche and Chilean leaders, to trace conflicting Mapuche and Chilean discourses regarding Mapuche and national identity. Significantly, this book challenges the common assumption that indigenismo, as a political ideology, has been absent from nation-building discourses and practices in Chile.
Another significant event in Mapuche scholarship is the emergence of Mapuche scholars. A collective study group called Comunidad de historia mapuche (Mapuche History Community) was founded in 2004 and initially started publishing articles and books online both in Spanish and Mapudungun. The publication of the book ¡… Escucha, wingka …! Cuatro ensayos de Historia Nacional Mapuche y un epílogo sobre el futuro (Listen, wingka! Four Essays on Mapuche National History and One Epilogue About the Future) (Marimán et al. 2006) by a prestigious national editorial (LOM) made the group well-known among academics and activists. The authors defined their work as a ‘cry of the colonized towards other colonized, and at the same time, toward the colonizer, in order to rewrite history to place in it one of the least heard voices’ (ibid.: 10, my translation). Another prolific Mapuche journalist, writer and activist is Pedro Cayuqueo, published the book Historia secreta mapuche (Secret Mapuche History) (2017). This book is a chronicle about Mapuche history based on the work of historians, anthropologists, and other academics, and, also, on the journalistic report that Cayuqueo made in museums, archives, and libraries in Chile and Argentina. Significantly, this book explores the war against the Mapuche by both the Chilean and Argentinian armies, together with the role of Mapuche political leaders in resisting the invasion. Cayuqueo’s intention is to demonstrate that this war, which occurred only three or four generations ago, is the origin of the current political conflict between the Mapuche and the Chilean and Argentinian nation-states. This is in line with Bengoa’s (1996, 2002) and Pinto’s (2003) work, as detailed previously.
Anthropologists have also contributed to recent accounts of the Mapuche. Regarding Mapuche healing practices, the work of Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is probably one of the most influential. Bacigalupo’s Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche (2007), is an ethnographic account of Mapuche shamanism. The book shows how shamanic practices and discourses construct ideas of gender, healing, and race by appropriating, and at the same time transforming and challenging, ideas, values, and aesthetics from Catholicism, the Chilean state and biomedicine. Bacigalupo’s more recent publication Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (2016) is a collaborative project between the anthropologist and the Machi Francisca Kolipi. In this work, Bacigalupo shows how machi construct history by their embodiment of the past. Machi embody the spirits of deceased shamans, and they ritually perform their ancestors’ memories and experiences. In this way, machi embodiment and performance of the past challenge positivistic understandings of history as progress and of time as linear.
The most recent published ethnography on Mapuche healing practices in English is Kristensen’s Patients, Doctors and Healers: Medical Worlds Among the Mapuche of Southern Chile (2019). This work is a study of Mapuche medicine and medical pluralism in the south of Chile, with a focus on medical narratives by patients. By exploring the motivations behind Indigenous and non-Indigenous people choosing Mapuche medicine, the author postulates that this choice is a way of expressing and transforming a social position of marginality, generating inter-ethnic solidarity bonds among marginal individuals, and expressing discontent with the Chilean public health system and its inherent inequalities.
This ethnography builds on the ones mentioned above in the sense that it considers Mapuche shamanism as a practice embedded in larger political contexts, which should be taken into consideration. In addition, this work seeks to expand on previous scholarship on Mapuche shamanism by focusing on healing techniques and their transformative capacities. In this way, Mapuche ritual healing is understood not only as a political strategy of resistance and subversion, but also as a world and people making practice, which can create the experience of both a collective and a personal Mapuche identity.
Machi are people with the spiritual gift (S: don) to heal and communicate with the spiritual world (Bacigalupo 2007; Cooper 1946; Faron 1997). Machi’s abilities derive from a pülli (lineage spirit) who communicates with a machi through signs, such as peuma (dreams), perimontun (visions) and küymin (ritual trance). A machi’s pülli chooses the most suitable member of a family to become a machi. If a machi’s pülli runs through a particular family, it will continue to endlessly produce new machi among members of the same lineage. A machi’s pülli is usually (though not exclusively) inherited from the mother’s side, after the last member of the family who possessed it dies. This can occur immediately after a machi’s death or it can take a long time if a spirit decides there are no suitable candidates in a generation of a family. In addition, some chosen people may refuse to accept the spirit. This refusal usually brings illness and misfortune both to the individual and the whole lineage. Succession, then, does not follow the logic of the firstborn, rather it can skip generations or choose descendants born in any order.
It is a well-known anthropological observation that spiritual healers undergo a long period of illness and misfortune as part of an initiation process. For instance, Lewis (2003: 62–63), following a famous phrase from T.S. Elliot, referred to shamans as a “wounded surgeon,” one who overcomes the painful experience of an arduous initiation process and emerges out of it empowered. This is also the case among machi. Usually, a young person, between the age of thirteen to twenty-five, receives a machi call (S: llamado de machi) indicating that they have been chosen by their lineage spirit to become a machi. The call occurs in the form of illness and misfortune, and also other signs, such as dreams and visions. What usually occurs is that the machi-to-be becomes very ill without apparent explanation. As is shown in the example that follows (and also in Chapter 4), young people called to be a machi are often sick for years and in a debilitating way. To recover health and wellbeing the person who is being called should accept the call to become a machi and start an initiation process with the help of an experienced machi. The duration of the initiation process varies but it usually lasts several years, including initial perplexity, confusion and reluctance to accept the machi call. Reluctance to become a machi derives from the fact that being a machi is risky, given that machi are constantly exposed to evil spirits, illness and death, and arduous, because it requires constant commitment.
A Mapuche woman, who was a university teacher, narrated the following regarding her sixteen-year-old daughter’s machi call and initiation process:
My eldest son became ill. He was studying to become a teacher at the university. He was throwing his books away, he couldn’t study. We took him to see a machi who said the boy was not meant to live in the city because the city is boiling evil [S: la ciudad es un hervidero de maldad]. [Instead] he must take care of the menoko [wetland], the mahuiza [forest], the mountains. That’s why he couldn’t finish his studies. The machi also told us that in this place a machi is going to be anointed [S:[se va a levantar una machi]. In this place, we will know about remedies, there is a machi pülli [lineage spirit] fluttering around. The machi did two or three jobs [S: trabajos] to my son. In one of those, my daughter went crazy [S: empezó a rallar la papa].
After this, my daughter became very ill. She used to tell me: “The teacher speaks but I am not there, I don’t want to know anything of what they are teaching me.” In that way, she started to hate what is not hers [Western education], to liberate what is her own [Mapuche knowledge]. She could not finish school. During the weekend, she was fine at home in the countryside. We used to send her to school [in the nearest town] and on Tuesday she was not able to go anymore.
My daughter started saying that a police officer was protecting her. I thought that was a good sign. But a papai [respected woman], who stayed at my place, told me that she saw a police officer standing by my daughter’s bed all night long. It was the devil. We took her to a private cardiologist who said she had nothing, the tests showed nothing. That helped us make up our minds. We took my daughter to a machi who had to do an exorcism. That was the first job we had to do to my daughter, to take the devil out of her, an exorcism. She resisted violently, she was begging us to take her home, but we had to understand that it was not her but the devil talking …
(Araucanía 2017, interview)
The narration above contains common traits of machi initiation processes. There is an initial sign that a machi will be anointed in a particular place, community or family. In this case, an experienced machi announced it when treating the eldest son of the family. Also, the vignette shows that the young initiate undergoes a period of illness and suffering. Noteworthy is the fact that the family’s conviction that the affliction was of a spiritual nature was enhanced by the fact that biomedical testing showed no alterations. The case also shows how a machi should renounce salient social activities, in this case, formal secondary education. To become a machi is a full-time occupation. The fact that the machi’s mother, who was a professional who completed higher education, was willing to give up on her daughter completing secondary education is striking. It shows how valuable machi are for families and communities and how committed a family can become in completing the initiation process of a daughter or a son.2
Machi divine illnesses and misfortunes and possess the spiritual knowledge to treat them. They deal mostly with spiritual afflictions, but they also treat common ailments to which naturalistic explanations are ascribed. The most common divinatory technique used by machi today is willentun or uroscopy (described in Chapter 2). It involves the visual inspection of a patient’s bottled urine with the aim of knowing or divining the patient’s concerns and troubles. Bacigalupo (2007: 32–33; 60–63) described other divinatory techniques, such as divination through drumming and trance. The most common lawen (remedy) prescribed consists of herbal medical infusions, which machi prepare at their private homes. The medicinal herbs used in these preparations are gathered by the machi and their family, received as a gift from friends and patients, and/or bought in local markets and shops.
Machi are the only individuals with the ability to experience küymin (ritual trance), which is the ritually induced spirit possession of a machi. While in trance, a machi is possessed by their pülli (lineage spirit), who talks through them in the form of a sung prayer and other actions. Ritual trance is usually carried out at the rewe (altar), which is a carved tree trunk set in the ground. The rewe resembles a pillar-like sacred altar and has an anthropomorphic face at its tip. While in trance, the machi usually climbs to the tip of the rewe, performing a machi’s ascent to the sky or spiritual world. Therefore, machi are considered bridges or communicators with the spiritual world.
The special ability of machi to deliver a spiritual message transforms them into a vehicle to know the Mapuche past and create Mapuche memory. Because Mapuche kimün (ancestral knowledge) has been widely lost due to colonization, it needs to be recovered. There are several ways to recover kimün according to my interlocutors: the content of the Mapuche language, which has resisted colonization; the wisdom of the elders, who remember how things used to be; and dreams, which constitute a social relation with ancestors and spirits. Among these varying forms of recovering kimün, machi’s ability to experience küymin (ritual trance) is highly valued. Küymin constitutes a direct relation with an ancestor, the spirit of a dead shaman, who can then become lived experience through ritual actions over a machi’s body. In this way, machis’ ritual actions are indispensable for the creation of a shared Mapuche memory. They are also a Mapuche way of knowing the past through ritual actions in the present.
What a friend told me regarding the initiation ritual of a young male machi is compelling. It shows the recreation of the past in the present so that the past can become a lived experience susceptible to transformation.
Today there is more stability. We overcame that moment when we were afraid that we [the Mapuche] would disappear. That was seen from above [the sky, heaven] and a couple of years ago many machi began to surface [S: empezaron a aparecer muchas machi].
There is a young machi with the spirit of Lautaro [a Mapuche warrior of the sixteenth century]. We think Lautaro was a machi. In a ceremony, he [the young machi possessed by Lautaro’s spirit] grabbed the wiño [a wooden cane used to play ritual hockey or palin] and started fighting. Lautaro left here in the middle of the war and now returned fighting! We had to calm him down and explain to him that we were in another era, that we had lost the war. He already understood and is calmer now. Many spirits from the past are coming back and they suffer from seeing us awingkados [Westernized].
(Araucanía 2017, interview)
My friend described the ritual performance of a famous Mapuche warrior from the sixteenth century, Lautaro, who was killed by the Spanish conquistadores in 1557, returning to the Mapuche world through possessing the body of a young male machi. Stated otherwise, the young initiate was possessed by the spirit of a dead shaman, in this case the famous Mapuche warrior Lautaro. Upon returning, Lautaro realized his people had lost the war and the society he knew no longer existed. He tried to keep fighting but convinced himself that the war was inevitably lost. As mentioned, the ritual in which this occurred was conducted as part of the initiation process of a young male machi. Before the ritual was performed, the young initiate was constantly irritated and enraged. I was told that, after the ritual, the young machi was calmer. So was his spirit, Lautaro, who was becoming reconciled with the new situation of the Mapuche as subjugated to the Chilean state.
There are two important changes that machi have undergone in the twentieth century and that coincided with the Chilean state domination of the Mapuche: machi emerged as predominantly female and as the primary Mapuche religious figure to the detriment of other religious authorities (Degarrod 1998). Nowadays, female machi outnumber male machi by far, to the point where some Chileans think machi are exclusively female. Some Mapuche scholars have emphasized that the feminization of machi in public discourse is related to the colonial association between femininity, witchcraft and Indigenous practices (e.g., Rodríguez and Quidel 2016). There is no consensus on whether the transition to a predominantly female shamanism was from a completely masculine (Cooper 1946) or a mixed gender (Faron 1997) one. There is also no consensus on the historical period in which men were marginalized from shamanism (Degarrod 1998). In her ethnography about Mapuche shamanism and gender, conducted during the 1990s, Bacigalupo (2007: 164–211) describes how male machi struggle to conform to normative ideas of masculinity through the identification with warriors, doctors and priests.
Until the twentieth century, the ngillatun or fertility ritual (described in detail in Chapter 2) was led by male longko (headmen) and ngenpin (male orators or masters of words). Nowadays, some ngillatun rituals are led by male longko and ngenpin (e.g., Course 2011: 138–59) while others are led by male or female machi (e.g., Bacigalupo 2007: 64–72). Machi presiding over ngillatun rituals is a recent occurrence in Mapuche history (ibid.: 70–71). As stated previously, it shows that machi have expanded their area of expertise and authority to the detriment of other religious and political authorities. Some of my interlocutors told me that exclusively male traditional authorities, such as longko and ngenpin, were perceived as fragile and have lost people’s trust.
Also, some male friends commented that it was possible that men had committed many moral and spiritual transgressions in the past, such as betrayals in their negotiations with the Chilean invaders. For this reason, female machi had to take control over ngillatun rituals. Bacigalupo (ibid.: 70) described two reasons why her informants thought machi took control over the ngillatun ritual: young men were no longer interested in becoming ritual orators, and machi, contrary to male orators, had God’s support.
Since the beginning of the democratic transition in 1990, Mapuche political activism has focused on the recovery of usurped lands, political autonomy and the recognition of a plurinational state. Mapuche activism has been received ambiguously by the Chilean state. On the one hand, there has been permanent police repression, including illegal prosecution and killing of Mapuche activists. The last tragic killing occurred in 2018 when Camilo Catrillanca was shot dead by the police while he was unarmed and driving his tractor.3 On the other hand, there have been some attempts to grant cultural rights and recognition to the Mapuche. For instance, Chile’s ratification of the International Labour Organization Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (or ILO-convention 169) (1989) in 2009, the implementation of intercultural education programs and, significantly for this work, the public financing of Mapuche medicine in general primary care centers and exclusive Mapuche medicine centers. In this way, the state is divided between the use of coercive force and the understanding of the Mapuche as the internal enemy and attempts to persuasively delimit and manage cultural difference.
Mapuche political activism since the 1990s coincides with a continental phenomenon that Hale (1994, 1997) has described as the emergence of cultural politics of identity. As this phenomenon has been understood as part of a neoliberal form of governance, it has also been framed as neoliberal multiculturalism (e.g., Hale 2005). Several scholars (e.g., Collier 1994; Gabriel 1994; Hale 1994, 1997, 2005) have pointed out that there has been a historical shift in grassroots movements in the Americas. This has been a shift from the national-popular movements based on class divisions of the 1960s, to the construction of different identities as unique and differentiated and inherently endowed with fundamental rights. In this way, different political minorities such as women, Afro-descendant peoples, LGBT peoples, and Indigenous peoples advance a political discourse based on cultural difference and recognition. Emblematic of this shift was the surge of political activism by Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas on the Columbus Quintecenary in 1992 (Gabriel 1994).
As Hale has pointed out: “we can also note that indigenous peoples now increasingly advance their struggles through a discourse that links Indian identity with rights to territory, autonomy, and peoplehood – rights that run parallel to those of the nation-state itself” (Hale 1997: 571).
On the Columbus Quintecenary in 1992, the Mapuche joined the continental protests and participated in international meetings (Gabriel 1994). The resistance campaign was not only against the old conquest, but also against a new one led by foreign corporativism through the creation of new forms of dependence through trade agreements and extractivism. Since that moment, several Mapuche political organizations have proliferated. Most of these organizations advance a discourse based on the recognition of an Indigenous identity different from that of the rest of the Chilean society (Bengoa and Caniguan 2012). In its more radical expression, there have been some groups advancing the idea of a totally autonomous Mapuche state (though most groups advance the idea of political autonomy within one plurinational state).
Overall, Mapuche political discourse today shows a clear resistance to the idea of racial mixture (S: mestizaje) as the source of a unitary national identity (e.g., Cayuqueo 2017). Racial mixture had been at the core of nation-building discourses throughout the twentieth century and consists of the idea that Chilean people are all part of the same mixed race and culture. This mixed race and culture derives from the historical encounter between the Spanish and Indigenous peoples and is the origin of one homogenous nation. In contrast, Mapuche politics of identity consists of establishing a unique identity endowed with fundamental rights. Neoliberal governance has reinforced Mapuche politics of identity (and vice versa) and, thus, it has moved away from racial mixture as a nation-building discourse toward delimiting and managing difference (or toward a multicultural discourse).
The Mapuche resistance against the ideology of racial mixture had its peak of political strength in the election of the Constitutional Convention in 2021. The elected Convention was chaired by a Mapuche woman, Elisa Loncón, and included reserved Indigenous seats. The constitutional proposal issued by the Convention was rejected in 2022 by 62 percent of the Chilean voters. The proposal for Chile to become a plurinational state, made by both the Chilean left and Indigenous representatives, was probably one of the leading reasons Chileans overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional proposal. Thus, we have been witnessing a revival of the idea of racial mixture as a nation-building discourse. Some sectors of the traditional right and the far right continue to defend the idea of racial mixture (S: mestizaje) as the historical and racial origin of one Chilean nation. Therefore, they refuse to grant cultural rights to Indigenous groups, such as reserved seats in Congress or Constitutional recognition.
The shift from the idea of racial mixture (S: mestizaje) as a nation-building discourse to the idea of cultural identity and rights is a relevant political transformation. It has opened the door to new opportunities for negotiation that, although highly unequal, have allowed the Indigenous movements valuable conquests. In this way, the ideology of cultural difference has extended citizenship to those who were previously excluded from the state. In addition, multiculturalism has also transformed cultural difference into a commodity, through things such as tourism and arts and crafts, and is, thus, a vehicle and a consequence of the neoliberal market expansion (De la Cadena 2015: 163).
However, multicultural politics have been the object of fierce criticism. Viveiros de Castro (e.g., 2004) has famously argued that while multiculturalism is based on a Western distinction between nature and culture, where nature is one and culture is plural; Amazonian cosmologies imagine a world with “spiritual unity and corporeal diversity” (ibid.: 6), which was framed as multinaturalism. In turn, Viveiros de Castro’s idea of different ontologies between the West and, in the case at hand, Amazonian cosmologies, has been criticized on the basis of its essentializing nature of both the West and Amazonian cultures. De la Cadena (2010, 2015) has also asserted that multiculturalism is insufficient to understand Indigenous politics in South America today, given the fact that Indigenous movements propose a new understanding of politics that is not only based on the participation of different bodies marked by gender, race, sexuality or ethnicity, but also on the participation of non-human persons, such as a living sacred mountain whose life is threatened by a mining project. The participation of elements of nature as persons or “earth beings” (De la Cadena 2015) in political debates subverts the dichotomy of nature/culture at the heart of multicultural politics. Therefore, De la Cadena (ibid.: 31) stresses the way in which Indigenous politics supposes “an important challenge to the state politics [of] recognition and its incapacity of considering the being of what it does not know.” Instead of emphasizing the incommensurability of different ontologies, De la Cadena understands indigeneity in Cuzco as mutually and historically constituted with non-indigeneity. Thus, she conceives of things Indigenous and things non-Indigenous as “partial connections” (ibid.: 32): “intra-related” (instead of inter-related) collectives, which “resist being divided into parts and wholes” (ibid.: 32).
Mapuche medical practices and machi have been fundamental in Mapuche politics regarding territory, autonomy and identity. Already at the international meetings that took place on the Columbus Quintecenary, different Indigenous peoples of the Americas raised the need to gain state recognition for Indigenous medical practices (Gabriel 1994). Medical practices not only provide a unique identity and enact a collective memory but also allow the political participation of non-human actors such as spirits and ancestors. For instance, political discourses against extractivism are not only based on the need to protect local agriculture and tourism but also on the necessity of avoiding spiritual punishment by the ngen (spiritual guardians or owners) of rivers and mountains. In this way, extractive projects, such as mining or timber production, are understood as spiritual transgressions and, as such, are a common cause of spiritual illnesses and ailments that should be prevented not only through ritual healing action but also through political activism.
The development and implementation of intercultural health initiatives by the Chilean Ministry of Health has been one of the most important multicultural neoliberal policies. State-led intercultural health initiatives began in Araucanía region in the early 2000s and then expanded to other regions, including Santiago. At the time in which I conducted fieldwork, there were four intercultural medical centers in Araucanía. These intercultural medical facilities were in Imperial, Puerto Saavedra, Boroa and Makewe, and one was being constructed in Galvarino. They are funded through the regional office of the Ministry of Health, and they also receive funding through municipalities. These initiatives are the result of negotiations between Mapuche organizations and health authorities. These negotiations have not occurred without conflict, which has been centered around the degree of autonomy of Mapuche organizations in administering state-funded Mapuche centers (e.g., Vargas 2018). For instance, I attended a meeting in which a machi, who was also a founder member of a Mapuche organization administering a state-funded Mapuche medical center, said the following: “The State should finance, because it is our right, but it should not regulate.” Not surprisingly, state authorities disagreed and, instead, postulated that they should regulate what they finance due to issues of accountability.
The Mapuche scholar, Andrés Cuyul (2013, 2015), proposes a critique of multiculturalism in health policies in Chile. He argues that the ideology of “tolerance” in intercultural health policies contributes to making health disparities and unequal power relations invisible. Cuyul (2013) has also argued that machi working in state-funded medical centers bureaucratizes machi practices and, thus, transforms them into “clinical” practices instead of “socio-spiritual” ones. Moreover, Cuyul (ibid.) is concerned with possible health consequences for machi who work in public clinics, given the fact that this is a transgression susceptible to negative spiritual consequences in the Mapuche cosmogony.
This book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 is a theoretical chapter that seeks to locate this ethnographic account of Mapuche healing transformations in the context of a relevant anthropological problem. I seek to provide a theoretical rationale for healing transformations that can account for the complementarity of embodied and symbolic transformations. In the first part of the chapter, I draw on developments within anthropology (e.g., Csordas 1993; Hsu 2005, 2015; Ots 1994; Ozawa-De Silva 2006), which demonstrate that at least some aspects of healing transformations are non-symbolic. Non-symbolic healing transformations occur in the form of reorganizations of sensory experience, affective states and bodily habits. In the second part of the chapter, I explore how symbolic elaborations are grounded in the body. To do so, I draw on Csordas’ (1990, 1994a, 1994b) phenomenological understanding of the self as an indeterminate and relational process that starts in pre-reflexive bodily experience and ends in mental representations. Also, I attend to imagination as a mode of self-process or a mode in which the self moves from indeterminacy to objectification.
Chapter 2 explores ethnographically what my informants explicitly considered made a machi a real machi: to see and treat illnesses and misfortunes effectively and to preside over ngillatun rituals (and other community ceremonies) effectively. The chapter is mostly based on ethnographic observations of one machi’s practice: a popular and successful healer whom I call Machi Carmen. I also make comparisons to the practice of other machi. The first part of the chapter focuses on the pewtun ritual or uroscopy, which is a divinatory technique. Pewtun is a ritual in which the machi “sees” the illness or problem in a patient’s bottled urine and is, then, able to prescribe lawen (remedies) and other solutions. Pewtun techniques promote the patient’s imaginative engagement with the therapeutic procedure through the manipulation of attention and the emotions. Thus, for a successful pewtun to be accomplished, a machi needs to promote the active participation of the patient. In the second part of the chapter, I explore the role of Machi Carmen as the presiding ancestral authority of the ngillatun ritual. The effective performance of the ngillatun ritual gives an opportunity for the exchange of feelings of belonging and shared self-worth. In this way, Machi Carmen can strengthen her role as a healer and community builder, preventing illnesses and misfortunes through her ability to enter küymin (ritual trance) and deliver a message from the spirits to the community.
Chapter 3 continues to explore how machi can see illnesses and misfortunes. Here, I focus on illnesses and ailments caused by wekufe (evil spirits). Healing techniques described in this chapter aim at making the evil spirit visible and, thus, exteriorizing it, weakening it and making it vulnerable to ritual healing actions. The preferred sensory modality of “seeing” is vision, but other modalities, such as touch and sound, are also relevant. Machi use different techniques to promote the imaginative seeing of evil spirits, which include the circulation of negative emotions, such as fear, the manipulation of attention and the effect on the senses of different bodily techniques such as massage or chanting. The chapter discusses two ritual events directed against evil spirits. The first one corresponds to a case of witchcraft in which a family, with the help of a machi, searches for a buried object attached to an evil spirit (S: entierro) left in their courtyard by a witch. The second case refers to unintended consequences when dealing unsuccessfully with evil spirits. It tells the story of Rosa, a woman who was hospitalized for a diabetic coma and had to be reintegrated into her family life after a long absence. Both cases illustrate the significance of imaginative seeing through varied healing techniques in ritual healing performative efficacy.
Chapter 4 explores doubts and failure in ritual healing to further enrich the understanding of Mapuche ritual healing efficacy. Here, I explore ethnographically events in which doubts are expressed regarding the efficacy of a particular healing action or the authenticity of a healer. I follow ideas on ritual healing failure as a performance failure or imperfection (Grimes 1990; Schieffelin 1996, 2007). I focus on two case studies. The first case relates to a machi, Ana, who had lost the ability to heal because her spirit had abandoned her. To make the spirit return to the machi’s body, a zatun ritual was performed. The machi’s performance was judged by many of the participants as indicative of her inauthenticity as a machi, a concern expressed as doubts regarding whether Ana was, in fact, a real machi. These doubts originated in a series of mishaps among which the most significant one was the deployment of inappropriate emotions while in trance (i.e., the machi cried while in trance). The second case study describes the difficulties of a machil (machi initiate), Marta, in satisfactorily completing her initiation process. Unlike the case above, Marta’s difficulties in becoming a machi were not explained by an imperfect performance, but by her reluctance to perform. In turn, her resistance to perform derived from what she perceived as a lack of spiritual inspiration or her inability to understand the spirits’ messages.
Finally, Chapter 5 links ritual healing bodily transformations with Mapuche politics of identity. Specifically, this chapter seeks to link ethnographically embodied and discursive practices regarding the wetripantü ritual or the “Mapuche New Year” and its interaction with Mapuche struggles for identity, memory and authenticity. Here, I follow Csordas’ (1999) methodological proposition of examining the links between ritual healing and identity politics at a political, social and individual level. At a political level, wetripantü celebrations discursively create a Mapuche identity that is unique and, thus, different to the rest of Chilean society. The fundamental Mapuche claim is that to celebrate the New Year in December is “scientifically” wrong in the Southern Hemisphere, a claim derived from Mapuche ancestral understanding of nature. At a social level, wetripantü celebrations allow for negotiations between conflicting Mapuche identities, such as gender and religious identity. In this way, ritual practice not only enhances difference from the rest of society, but it also articulates difference and conflict within Mapuche society. Lastly, I describe the perspective of a Mapuche man who participated in a wetripantü celebration. At an individual level, ritual engagement facilitates making sense of various individual difficulties in relation to a shared Mapuche identity, which is a source of dignity and self-worth. In this way, ritual healing does not only have an existential function but also a political one, which is manifested through the ways in which Mapuche actors attempt to control Mapuche identity at a political, social, and individual level.
In conclusion, this ethnography examines Mapuche healing efficacy through a phenomenological perspective, with careful attention to the social and political context. The aim is to understand how a machi can see an illness or problem and prescribe remedies and solutions that can be perceived as efficacious. Thus, the focus of this work is on healing techniques that can allow machi to see an illness or a problem and transform a problematic situation. In addition, this work explores the significance of Mapuche medical practices in collective struggles for memory, identity and wellbeing.