The Mapuche Undead Never Forget: Traumatic Memory and Cosmopolitics in Post‐Pinochet Chile

Abstract

Summary The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as persons, remain trapped in the places of their deaths. They are both symbols of Mapuche rage against state‐sponsored genocide and social agents who play central roles in Mapuche cosmopolitics and multitemporal memory making. While memory studies focus on pastness and national commemorations the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead foreground the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed in a place at different times and realize this trauma in Mapuche everyday lives. These morally complex undead call for justice through revenge and express trauma and cosmopolitics through two different modalities: first, through vengeful spirits in the river who sow illness at two different massacre sites, accidents, and death indiscriminately among the bodies and spirits of locals to force remembering and call for revenge or reparations, even as they make Mapuche healing impossible; second, through the strategic use of revenge in the ritual field to reinforce ethnic cosmopolitics. Here, the undead act as ancestors who grant health to those who follow stringent social and moral norms and perpetuate violence among those who transgress their ethnic, ritual, and moral project. These undead combine spiritual, ecological, social, and political factors with realpolitik to subvert state and non‐Mapuche development projects, demand justice, and create avenues for interethnic dialogue.