Mapuche struggles to obliterate dominant history: mythohistory, spiritual agency and shamanic historical consciousness in southern Chile

Abstract

The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in southern Chile in the late 1800s, expresses a ‘shamanic historical consciousness’ that advances current debates over the dynamic relationship between history and myth and between indigenous and national history. Biographical mythohistory is a mixed genre that mediates among different memoralisations of the past to obliterate dominant Chilean history and to create alternative indigenous histories. Mapuche shamanic mythohistories are simultaneously linear and cyclical: historical personages are transformed into mythical characters and sometimes back again, and mythical happenings manifest themselves repeatedly in historical events. Mapuche people create mythohistories by mythologising such shamans and historical outsiders, prioritising spiritual agency over political agency and narratively reversing the usual colonial dynamics of subordination. Mythohistories are, for rural Mapuche, a means of conveying agency, ethnic identity and ontology. They also offer a way to decolonise Mapuche history and have the potential for political mobilisation.

Keywords:

• shaman
• historical consciousness
• myth
• history
• Mapuche
• Chile

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was made possible thanks to funding from the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo. I began work on this article as a 2009–2010 Fellow at the National Humanities Center funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation and finished it as a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. I am indebted to all those Mapuche in the communities of Millali, Imilco, Chihuimpilli, Nahuelhual and Huenchual who shared their narratives about Rosa's mythohistory and spoke to me at length about Mapuche perspectives on time and history. I would also like to thank Claire Alexander, Michael Brown, Magnus Course, Matthew Engelke, Carlos Fausto, Peter Gow, Laura Graham, Jonathan Hill, Steven Rubenstein, Fernando Santos Granero, Helmut Schindler, Neil Whitehead, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.