Kathleen S. Fine-Dare

Anthropological suspicion, public interest and NAGPRA

This article asks why suspicion regarding the aims of anthropology has been heightened in an era when anthropologists are perhaps engaged in more advocacy work than ever.While it may seem contradictory or even ‘unfair’ that anthropology continues to get a ‘bad rap’, this perception (of and about all parties involved) is itself an important focus for anthropological reflection. In this article, I examine an event that has contributed to this issue in important ways - the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 - to illustrate why suspicions about anthropologists have taken on new dimensions, and to suggest what kind of approach anthropologists might take in responding to these issues.

Ritualized Dimensions of Personhood, Sociality, and Power among the Mapuche of Chile

Despite what might be viewed as an exotic, heroic history of resistance against first the Inkas (Dillehay 1990), then the Spanish, and for many years the Chilean state, the Mapuche have received surprisingly little attention in either the anthropology or indigenous studies classroom. Although assigned by Julian Steward in The South American Indians to the volume on ‘The Andean Civilizations’ (Bennett [1944]1963; see also Faron 1968; Steward and Faron 1959), the absence (although many dispute this) of classic markers of the Andean culture area have often left the Mapuche at the margins of South American teaching and scholarship. Falling in between rural and urban, Andean and Amazonian, and other standard categories, the Mapuche are usually given little more than brief mention in courses on Latin America and are rarely related to indigenous peoples in other parts of South or even North America (Course 2011, 4). This practice is changing, however, as seen in the recent proliferation of historical, anthropological, literary, and other studies on the Mapuche (see Briones 2007; Crow 2008, 2010; Mallon 2002, 2005; Reuque and Isolde 2002). The two books under review are particularly important in bringing wider attention to the Mapuche, as they provide extremely detailed ethnographic work to understanding contemporary Mapuche existence, and also link Mapuche social philosophies and other experiences to intellectual arenas that go well beyond Chile.

Hidden Histories of Indigeneity in Urban Andean Ecuador: Transubstantiation, Ceremony, and Intention in Quito

ABSTRACT Students of the South American Andes have long noted the extraordinary force of objects to traverse cosmic and psychic distances, fill (or empty) the living with power that is often exhibited through public dance, and serve as ‘transactors’ in senses socioeconomic, psychic, cosmic, and geographical. In this article, I examine substances and actions involved in a modified version of Holy Communion that took place in June of 2012 in a working-class neighbourhood located at the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador, to celebrate the nativity of St. John the Baptist. I argue that this act was specifically designed to expand the celebration of the Eucharist in a way that allowed a type of transubstantiation whereby the relatives and friends of former hacienda peons were able to transform their physical bodies into something some believed had long been hidden from them – their right to live in the city as persons of their own making, ones who could legitimately adopt the identity and corresponding histories, territories, and political rights of indigenous persons.