Rituales de Género para el Orden Cósmico: Luchas Chamánicass Mapuche por la Totalidad

Abstract

The struggle for wholeness-the melding of all experience and knowledge of the world-is central to the practice of machi, or Mapuche shamans, in southern Chile. I explore how the gender and generational aspects of Mapuche persons are extended to the socio-cosmological order, to Mapuche ritual practice, and to the creation of a holistic machi personhood. I outline the application of holistic personhood in Mapuche cosmology and then analyze its performance in three kinds of Mapuche rituals. First, in divination rituals, gender difference is enacted by machi and dungumachife ("ritual interpreter for machi"), and wholeness is expressed through their ritual partnership. I demonstrate that ecstatic and formal discourses are gendered independently of the sex of the actors. Second, in community-wide ngillatun rituals, difference is impersonated by diverse actors, and wholeness is enacted collectively to integrate the ritual community. I demonstrate that both sex-based and performative dimensions of gender and generation are crucial for collective renditions of wholeness. Third, in individual healing rituals, difference is subsumed by the machi, who enacts wholeness as wellness, and the performative dimension of gender prevails over the notion of gender as linked to sex. Machi, both male and female, assume masculine, feminine, and co- gendered identities-moving between masculine and feminine gender polarities or combining them-for the purpose of healing. I conclude by analyzing the implications of ritual wholeness for theories of gender and embodiment and for Mapuche identity politics.