Becoming Mapuche

Abstract

This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.