Unexpected places: land, words and silence in a Mapuche family trajectory of (dis)placement

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between land, words and silence, and the ways they are articulated in biographical trajectories. In the context of displacement and successive home-making, it follows the spatial and temporal trajectories of a Mapuche family, their non-linear routes through the experience of exile, and the process of dwelling in the elsewhere. Exile is addressed here as a condition of being, a tension between presence and absence that involves loss, and that is negotiated through the interplay between words and silence, leading to the meaningful emergence of what I call ‘unexpected places’. At the core of this argument is a recognition of the intersubjective and hermeneutic borders that exist between persons in relation to speech and silence, in this case my partial understanding of the word ‘land’ (mapu), which disclosed the limits of language and the specificity of one’s lifeworld, and thus the boundaries of anthropological knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Mapuche
• biographical trajectories
• place
• displacement
• words
• silence

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to Rafael, Rosa and the Railaf Zuñiga family without whom this article would not have been possible. Thank you for trusting me and sharing your stories with me. This article was originally a contribution to the ‘Spaces of the political’ Conference at Warsaw University (10-11 June 2016), I am very grateful to Mateusz Lasczkowski and Andrew Irving for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to two anonymous reviewers for their critical reading and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Chacha is a Mapuche term used to address old people as a sign of affection and respect.

2. This expression is indebted to Povinelli’s well-known concept of ‘spaces of the otherwise’ (2001). I use ‘unexpected’ for it conveys a sense of astonishment key in the analysis I propose.

3. We recorded a number of interviews (lasting one to three hours, between two to six for every family member) in order to give coherence to what usually emerged during the sharing of everyday life, family meals and celebrations, political and cultural activities. We also went through the family photo-albums and private archive, a collection of documents, newspaper articles and letters. The ethnographic work with the Railaf Zuñiga family was part of my PhD (2011–2014).

4. The last one of these, Camilo Catrillanca, was shot by the police on the 14th of November 2018.

5. For fundamental works on diaspora and transnationalism, see (Glick Schiller and Levitt 2004; Faist and Bauböck 2010; Juris and Khasnabish 2013).

6. With the notable exception of Chihuailaf reflections (2005) and Claudio Alvarado Lincopi's work on the urban context of Santiago (e.g 2016). For a broader debate about indigenous spatiality, see (Basso 1996; De la Cadena 2015; Johnson 2012).

7. The Manuel Chavarría Reservation was established under the name of the local cacique (lonko), through the Título de Merced (title of mercy) n. 415 of 1908, the legal document dividing the former indigenous territory into reservations. The assigned land was then reduced due to usurpation by adjacent landowners, as recorded in the historical memory of the community. While it is not possible here to go deeper into this fundamental issue of Mapuche spatiality, I refer to Di Giminiani’s work (2018), especially Chapters 1 and 4.

8. For the analysis of these processes that is not possible to provide here for reasons of space, see Casagrande (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant Agreement MAPSURBE n° 707537.