Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T19:46:39.910Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2013

Magnus Course*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh

Abstract

This essay takes the antics of ritual clowns, koyong, as an entry point into the ways in which rural Mapuche people in southern Chile come to understand and reflect upon the inevitability of urban migration and the “becoming white” which this migration is said to imply. Utilizing both my own ethnographic data and comparative data from elsewhere in the Americas, I explore the striking continuities in the associations of indigenous ritual clowns: associations with poverty, with uncontrolled bodily desires, with dual ritual performances, and perhaps most significantly, with white people. I suggest that the moral indictment of the “becoming white” instantiated by clowns in their ritual performances emerges from their identities as people who in everyday life are denigrated as “too Mapuche.” Thus, far from being yet another example of indigenous people's “agency” in mimetically co-opting the vitality of white others, I suggest that clowns are one of the means by which rural Mapuche people come to understand precisely their own lack of agency in the face of Chilean colonialism

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Albert, Bruce and Ramos, Alcida. 2000. Pacificando o Branco: Cosmologias do Contato no Norte-Amazônico. Sao Paulo: Editora UNESP.Google Scholar
Alonqueo, Martín. 1979. Instituciones religiosas del pueblo mapuche. Santiago: Editorial Nueva Universidad.Google Scholar
Amaroso, Marta and Mahalem de Lima, Leandro. 2011. A Aculturação é um Objeto Legítimo da Antropologia. Entrevista com Peter Gow. Revista de Antropologia 54, 1: 517–39.Google Scholar
Ancán, José. 2005. Mapuche rurales v/s mapuche urbanos en el Chile del siglo XXI. Una contienda imaginaria. Boletín IFP, Mundo Indígena y Lenguas Originarias. At: http://www.programabecas.org/numero/10/10.8.htm.Google Scholar
Antileo, Enrique. 2010. Urbano e Indígena: Dialogo y Reflexión en Santiago Warria. Working Paper Series 31. Gothenberg: Ñuke Mapuforlaget.Google Scholar
Aravena, Andrea, Gissi, Nicolas, and Toledo, Gonzalo. 2005. Los Mapuches Más Allá y Más Acá de la Frontera: Identidad Étnica en las Ciudades de Concepción y Temuco. Sociedad Hoy 8–9: 117–32.Google Scholar
Babcock, Barbara. 1984. Arrange Me Into Disorder: Fragments and Reflections on Ritual Clowning. In MacAloon, John, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Towards a Theory of Cultural Performance. Philadelphia: ISHI, 102–28.Google Scholar
Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. 2007. Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1965. Rabelais and His World. Iswolsky, Hélène, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ball, Christopher. 2012. Stop Loss: Developing Interethnic Relations in Brazil's Xingu Indigenous Park. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, 3: 413–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bashkow, Ira. 2006. The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basso, Keith. 1979. Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Gerd. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bengoa, José. 1999. Historia de un Conflicto: El Estado y los Mapuches en el Siglo XX. Santiago: Editorial Planeta.Google Scholar
Boccara, Guillaume. 2007. Los Vencedores: Historia del Pueblo Mapuche en la Época Colonial. Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores.Google Scholar
Brightman, Robert. 1999. Traditions of Subversion and the Subversion of Tradition: Cultural Criticism in Maidu Clown Performances. American Anthropologist 101, 2: 272–87.Google Scholar
Briones, Claudia. 2007. “Our Struggle Has Just Begun”: Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self. In de la Cadena, Marisol and Starn, Orin, eds., Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg, 99121.Google Scholar
Canessa, Andrew. 2006. Todos Somos Indígenas: Towards a New Language of National Political Identity. Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, 2: 241–63.Google Scholar
Canessa, Andrew. 2012. Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Casamiquela, Rodolfo. 1964. Estudio del nillatun y la religion araucana. Bahía Blanca: Cuadernos del Sur.Google Scholar
Cepek, Michael. 2012. The Loss of Oil: Constituting Disaster in Amazonian Ecuador. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, 3: 393412.Google Scholar
Charles, Lucille. 1945. The Clown's Function. Journal of American Folklore 58: 2534.Google Scholar
Chihuailaf, Elicura. 1999. Recado Confidencial a los Chilenos. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.Google Scholar
Clastres, Pierre. 1987 [1974]. Society against the State. Hurley, Robert, trans. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Conklin, Beth. 1997. Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism. American Ethnologist 24, 4: 711–37.Google Scholar
Course, Magnus. 2008. Estruturas de Diferença no Palin, Esporte Mapuche. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social 14, 2: 299328.Google Scholar
Course, Magnus. 2010. Los Generos Sobre el Pasado en la Vida Mapuche Rural. Revista Chilena de Antropologia 21: 3958.Google Scholar
Course, Magnus. 2011. Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Course, Magnus. 2012. The Birth of the Word: Language, Force, and Mapuche Ritual Authority. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(2): 126.Google Scholar
Crocker, William. 1990. The Canela (Eastern Timbira): An Ethnographic Introduction. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
De la Cadena, Marisol. 2005. Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities. Journal of Latin American Studies 37, 2: 259–84.Google Scholar
Dillehay, Tom. 2007. Monuments, Empires, and Resistance: The Araucanian Polity and Ritual Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Espinosa, Oscar. 2012. To Be Shipibo Nowadays: The Shipibo-Konibo Youth Organizations as a Strategy for Dealing with Cultural Change in the Peruvian Amazon Region. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, 3: 451–71.Google Scholar
Ewart, Elizabeth. 2007. Black Paint, Red Paint and a Wristwatch: The Aesthetics of Modernity among the Panará in Central Brazil. In Ewart, Elizabeth and O'Hanlon, Michael, eds., Body Arts and Modernity. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 3652.Google Scholar
Fausto, Carlos. 2001. Inimigos Fiéis: história, guerra e xamanismo na Amazônia. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Foerster, Rolf. 1993. Introducción a la religiosidad mapuche. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria.Google Scholar
Foerster, Rolf and Menard, André. 2009. Futatrokikelu: Don y Autoridad en la Relación Mapuche-Wingka. Atenea 499: 3359.Google Scholar
Gissi, Nicolás. 2001. Asentamiento e identidad mapuche en Santiago: Entre la asimilación (enmascaramiento) y la autosegregación (ciudadanía cultural). MA thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago.Google Scholar
Gissi, Nicolás. 2002. Los mapuche en el Santiago del s. XXI: Desde la ciudadanía política a la demanda por el reconocimiento. Revista Werken: Antropología, Arqueología, Historia, no. 3. LOM, Santiago: Universidad de Chile.Google Scholar
González de Nájera, Alonso. 1889 [1614]. Desengaño y reparo de la guerra de Chile. Santiago: Imprenta de Ercilla.Google Scholar
Goodale, Mark. 2006. Reclaiming Modernity: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and the Coming of the Second Revolution in Bolivia. American Ethnologist 33, 4: 634–49.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 1989. The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy. Man 24, 4: 567–82.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 1991. Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 2001. An Amazonian Myth and Its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 2006. Forgetting Conversion: The Summer Institute of Linguistics in the Piro Lived World. In Cannell, Fenella, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham: Duke University Press, 211–39.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 2007a. Clothing as Acculturation in Peruvian Amazonia. In Ewart, Elizabeth and O'Hanlon, Michael, eds., Body Arts and Modernity. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 3652.Google Scholar
Gow, Peter. 2007b. “Ex-Cocama:” Transforming Identities in Peruvian Amazonia. In Fausto, Carlos and Heckenberger, Michael, eds., Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 194215.Google Scholar
Handelman, Don. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Oxford: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Harris, Olivia. 1999. To Make the Earth Bear Fruit: Fertility, Work, and Gender in Highland Bolivia. London: Institute of Latin American Studies.Google Scholar
Hassler, Willy. 1979. Ngillatunes del Neuquén. Neuquén: Editorial Siringa.Google Scholar
Honigmann, John. 1942. An Interpretation of the Socio-Psychological Functions of the Ritual Clown. Character and Personality 10: 220–26.Google Scholar
Howard, Catherine. 1993. Pawana: a farsa dos visitantes entre os Waiwai da Amazônia. In Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo and Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, eds., Amazônia: etnologia e história indígena. São Paulo: USP-NHII Fapesp, 229–64.Google Scholar
Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1988. The Gun and the Bow: Myths of White Men and Indians. L'Homme 28, 106: 138–55.Google Scholar
Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1989. Waribi and the White Men: History and Myth in Northwest Amazonia. In Tonkin, Elizabeth, McDonald, Maryon, and Chapman, Malcolm, eds., History and Ethnicity. London: Routledge, 5372.Google Scholar
Jamieson, Mark. 2001. Masks and Madness: Ritual Expression of the Transition to Adulthood among Miskitu Adolescents. Social Anthropology 9, 3: 257–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2003. Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45: 228–48.Google Scholar
Kilaleo, Fernando. 2004. Mapuche urbanos: Un acercamiento desde lo politico. Azkintuwe, Temuco. At: http://www.azkintuwe.org/otras_ediciones.htm.Google Scholar
Kirsch, Stuart. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lagrou, Els. 2006. Rir do poder e o poder do riso nas narrativas e performances Kaxinawa. Revista de Antropologia 49, 1: 5590.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazar, Sian. 2008. El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1993. The Story of Lynx. Tihanyi, Catherine, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Londoño Sulkin, Carlos. 2005. Inhuman Beings: Morality and Perspectivism among Muinane People (Colombian Amazon). Ethnos 70, 1: 730.Google Scholar
Makarius, Linda. 1970. Ritual Clowns and Symbolic Behavior. Diogenes 69: 4473.Google Scholar
Mallon, Florencia. 2005. Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailio and the Chilean State, 1906–2001. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Marquéz, Jimena. 2006. Isolation and Poverty among Mapuche. Red Cross, Red Crescent: Magazine of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent 3. At: http://www.redcross.int/en/mag/magazine2006_3/10-11.html.Google Scholar
Mitchell, William. 1992. Introduction: Mother Folly in the Islands. In Mitchell, William, ed., Clowning as Critical Practice: Performance Humor in the South Pacific. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 357.Google Scholar
Morim de Lima, Ana Gabriela. n.d. Hoxwa: imagens do corpo, do riso e do outro. MS.Google Scholar
Ñanculef, Juan. 1993. El palin: deporte integral mapuche. Temuco: Comunicaciones Xeg-Xeg.Google Scholar
Nevins, M. Eleanor. 2013. Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nimuendaju, Curt and Lowie, Robert. 1937. The Dual Organizations of the Ramko'kamekra (Canella) of Northern Brazil. American Anthropologist 39, 4: 565–82.Google Scholar
Oakdale, Suzanne. 2004. The Culture-Conscious Brazilian Indian. American Ethnologist 33, 1: 6075.Google Scholar
Overing, Joanna and Passes, Alan. 2000. Introduction: Conviviality and the Opening Up of Amazonian Anthropology. In Overing, Joanna and Passes, Alan, eds., The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London: Routledge, 130.Google Scholar
Pereda, Isabel and Perrotta, Elena. 1994. Junta de hermanos de sangre: un ensayo de analisis del nguillatun a traves de tiempo y espacio desde una visión huinca. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología.Google Scholar
Platt, Tristan. 1992. Divine Protection and Liberal Damnation: Exchanging Metaphors in Nineteenth-Century Potosi (Bolivia). In Dilley, Roy, ed., Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 131–58.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rodríguez, Sylvia. 1991. The Taos Pueblo Matachines: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations. American Ethnologist 18, 2: 234–56.Google Scholar
Roe, Peter. 1988. The Josho Nahuanbo Are All Wet and Undercooked: Shipibo Views of the Whiteman and the Incas in Myth, Legend, and History. In Hill, Jonathan, ed., Rethinking Myth and History: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 106–35.Google Scholar
Rosales, Diego de. 1989 [1674]. Historia general del Reino de Chile. Santiago: Editorial Andres Bello.Google Scholar
Rosengren, Dan. 2003. The Collective Self and the Ethnopolitical Movement: ‘Rhizomes’ and ‘Taproots’ in the Amazon. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, 2: 221–40.Google Scholar
Santos Granero, Fernando. 2009. Hybrid Bodyscapes: A Visual History of Yanesha Patterns of Cultural Change. Current Anthropology 50, 4: 477512.Google Scholar
Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Steward, Julian. 1931. The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian. Alma, Mich.: Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, vol. 14, 1930 (repr.)Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Fox, Richard, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1744.Google Scholar
Turner, Terence. 1997. The Poetics of Play: Ritual Clowning, Masking and Performative Mimesis among the Kayapo. In Peter Köpping, Klaus, ed., The Games of Gods and Man: Essays in Play and Performance. Hamburgh: LIT Verlag, 173–90.Google Scholar
Viatori, Max. 2012. Loss and Amazonian Otherness in Ecuador. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, 3: 435–50.Google Scholar
Vilaça, Aparecida. 1997. Christians Without Faith: Some Aspects of the Conversion of the Wari' (Pakaa Nova). Ethnos 62, 1–2: 91115.Google Scholar
Vilaça, Aparecida. 2005. Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, 3: 445–64.Google Scholar
Vilaça, Aparecida. 2006. Quem Somos Nós: Os Wari' Econtram Os Brancos. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ.Google Scholar
Vilaça, Aparecida. 2007. Cultural Change as Body Metamorphosis. In Fausto, Carlos and Heckenberger, Michael, eds., Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 169–93.Google Scholar
Vilaça, Aparecida and Wright, Robin, eds. 2009. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1991. From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1996. Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 179200.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, 3: 469–88.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2001. GUT Feelings about Amazonia: Potential Affinity and the Construction of Sociality. In Rival, Laura and Whitehead, Neil, eds., Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2007. Transversal Shamanism: Form and Force in Amazonian Cosmopolitics. Paper presented at Cambridge University, 31 Oct.Google Scholar
Wade, Peter. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, Roy. 1978. Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Warren, Kay and Jackson, Jean. 2003. Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Weismantel, Mary. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Whitten, Norman and Whitten, Dorothea. 2008. Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Winthrop. 1993. Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar