Mapuche struggles to obliterate dominant history: mythohistory, spiritual agency and shamanic historical consciousness in southern Chile
Identities February 1, 2013 DOI: 10.1080/1070289x.2012.757551 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Keywords | Indigenous Agency philosophy Politics Consciousness Mythology Ethnology Anthropology Identity music Ethnic group Colonialism Gender studies Aesthetics Archaeology Social science Classics Law Epistemology |
| Citations | 10 |
| Key points | Argues that Mapuche biographical mythohistory, exemplified by Rosa Kurin, creates alternative indigenous histories by blending history and myth, prioritizing spiritual agency, and reversing colonial subordination. |
Abstract
The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in southern Chile in the late 1800s, expresses a ‘shamanic historical consciousness’ that advances current debates over the dynamic relationship between history and myth and between indigenous and national history. Biographical mythohistory is a mixed genre that mediates among different memoralisations of the past to obliterate dominant Chilean history and to create alternative indigenous histories. Mapuche shamanic mythohistories are simultaneously linear and cyclical: historical personages are transformed into mythical characters and sometimes back again, and mythical happenings manifest themselves repeatedly in historical events. Mapuche people create mythohistories by mythologising such shamans and historical outsiders, prioritising spiritual agency over political agency and narratively reversing the usual colonial dynamics of subordination. Mythohistories are, for rural Mapuche, a means of conveying agency, ethnic identity and ontology. They also offer a way to decolonise Mapuche history and have the potential for political mobilisation.