British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
Why Mapuche Sing
Dr Magnus Course
This paper explores the ways in which Mapuche people of southern Chile conceptualize songs as inhabitable experiences of other people's lives. Approaching these songs as sign, icon, and index simultaneously, I suggest that they both represent and instantiate a specific kind of social relation - that of affinity. I go on to explore how the fixed nature of the songs, their insistence on first person pronouns, and their emphasis on the unique and singular identity of their initial composer allow them to be 'inhabited' by singers other than the initial composer, and thus move through time and space. I finish the paper by reflecting on the relation between the nature of this aesthetic form and the nature of a Amerindian 'ontology' broadly conceived as directed towards relations of potential affinity.
Magnus Course's research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power and language in the context of Native South American socialities. He completed his PhD on kinship and personhood among the Mapuche of southern Chile at the London School of Economics in 2005, and the ensuing monograph is to be published as Mapuche Ñi Mongen: Individuo y sociedad en el sur de Chile in March 2008. He is currently working on a British Academy-funded project entitled: The Changing Value of Linguistic Forms among the Mapuche of Southern Chile, which seeks to combine insights from both social and linguistic anthropology in the analysis of Mapuche sociality.