Magnus Course

Of words and fog Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology

This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own research among the Mapuche of southern Chile, I suggest that the analogy of subject and object suggests to speakers of European languages a radical discontinuity and therefore obscures the subtleties of the transformation at stake. Through the presentation of alternative grammatical paradigms present in Amerindian languages themselves, I suggest that grammars necessarily contain implicit ontologies which, when used analogically to represent non-linguistic phenomena, may seriously distort the ethnographic data they are intended to clarify.

The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority

This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman—all present in the Mapuche nggillatun fertility ritual—from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emerges not solely from the intentions of individual speakers, but equally from the force—newen—constitutive of all being. Priests, chiefs, and shamans all seek to align themselves through speech to this force which instantiates itself through them. Such an observation forms the basis of a critique of both Clastres’ understanding of the relationship between chiefs and language, and of the recent post-humanist rejection of the so-called “linguistic turn.”

Death, biography, and the mapuche person

Abstract The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to ‘complete’ the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be ‘completed,’ and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtins concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeurs concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceaseds person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than viewing the totalization which occurs in biography as a critique of such an approach, I see it as a solution to the ontological problem which such an approach describes.

The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns

The last time I saw Alfredo was in the orchard behind his mother’s house. White apple blossoms stuck to his black hair, and tears cut white streaks through the dirt on his face. A blue nylon rope bit taut around his neck, and his feet brushed the muddy ground as they swung. A crowd of people slowly gathered and stared. Luis turned away, muttering, “This is what becomes of clowns.” For, according to the rural Mapuche people with whom I lived, behind the hilarity, joy, and chaos of their ritual actions, the lot of the clown, koyong, is not a happy one. Within each clown lies his inevitable downfall. Abject poverty, illness, alcoholism, and depression are his constant companions, and an untimely death his usual fate. In this paper, I want to explore the lives of these clowns in both ritual and everyday contexts. In particular, I want to focus on their close symbolic association with white people, and thereby to take clowning as a kind of “reverse anthropology” of Mapuche people’s relation with the Chilean white majority (see Wagner 1981; Kirsch 2006). I want to suggest that taking seriously the implications of this reverse anthropology constituted by clowning should

The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction

While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.

Changelings: Alterity beyond difference

Abstract Drawing on historical and ethnographic data from Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, as well as data from contemporary Chile, this talk explores the phenomenon of changelings. Changelings are cuckoo-like imposters, left in the place of humans abducted by fairy captors, and identical in almost all aspects to the humans they have displaced. Yet small indices of difference – voracious appetite, rapid ageing, and fear of fire and iron – lead kin to suspect that the people in their midst might not be whom they seem. What intrigues me, however, is that not just difference, but similarity too, comes to index alterity in surprising ways. The question then becomes not just an epistemological one of how we can know others, but an ontological one of what kinds of others do we think we know. This shifting configuration of similarity and difference within the changeling encounter reveal a micropolitics of alterity that I suggest resonates beyond the historical and folkloric record to find parallels in contemporary debates about kinship. In particular, the perpetual presence of alterity within the kinship relation might lead to a reconsideration of Marshall Sahlins’ recent insistence upon ‘mutuality of being’ as the essence of ‘what kinship is.’