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Judge Karen Atala framed her child custody case against the Chilean Supreme Court within Indigenous Mapuche "shamanic justice," the "spirit of the law," and human rights. We analyze what Atala's case contributes to the literature on sexual diversity, sorcery, and the spirit of the law in both Chilean and Mapuche histories of justice. The case engages the spirit of the law in two senses. First, it reveals the lack of separation between religious and secular law, demonstrating that religion is profoundly embedded in the law, both for the state and for the Mapuche. Second, it refers to the intention behind the law and its interpretation and enforcement, which haunts even the most literalist, fundamental, secular visions of law. After her spiritual transformation, Atala practiced the spirit of Mapuche customary law in the courts but formally justified her judgments using the letter of the Chilean law, demonstrating a fluidity between law and spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pan-Indigenous Peruvian norteños respond to political corruption, climate change, and environmental devastation by engaging Indigenous sentient landscapes as leaders of environmental movements and cocreators of a pan-Indigenous world. They challenge social models of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between the human and more-than-human and promote human exceptionalism. Scholars of political ontology have considered radically different forms of more-than-human persons and their plural ways of being in the world embedded in relations with the state. I argue that more-than-humans are not just alternative ways of being in the world, but frames through which norteños engage in subversive politics to challenge the justice of neoliberal capitalism and the state. By working beyond the theoretical limitations of ontological approaches (ways of being) and the state's definition of politics, and within the realm of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, I show how the historical dichotomies of Western thought, Western politics and their effects can be disrupted. I also analyze the difficulties of ontological politics in a milieu that does not ascribe to scholarly and political fantasies of Indigenous purity from modernity. Specifically, I analyze the conflicting ways in which norteños engage with more-than-human landscapes to provide a model for radical ethical-environmental-political action, in which community and well-being are defined as humans in relationship to place-as-persons and nature is resignified as an anchor for social and climate justice. Resumen: Los norteños o peruanos de la costa norte del Perú, son un grupo de personas con descendencia indígena y migrantes indigenas de la zona andina y amazónica del norte. Ellos responden a la corrupción política, al cambio climático y a la devastación medioambiental comprometiéndose con apus o montañas abuelos como líderes de movimientos ecologistas y cocreadores de un mundo panindígena. Desafían los modelos sociales del capitalismo neoliberal y el colonialismo, que se basan en la distinción entre lo humano y lo más-que-humano y promueven el excepcionalísimo humano. Los estudiosos de la ontología política han estudiado formas radicalmente distintas de montañas abuelos como personas más-que-humanas y sus formas plurales de estar en el mundo en las relaciones con el Estado. Yo sostengo que los más-que-humanos no son sólo formas alternativas de estar en el mundo, sino marcos a través de los cuales los norteños se comprometen en una política subversiva para desafiar la justicia del capitalismo neoliberal y del Estado. Al trabajar más allá de las limitaciones teóricas de los enfoques ontológicos (formas de ser) y de la definición estatal de la política, y dentro del ámbito de una política medioambiental y espiritual local, basada en el lugar, muestro cómo se pueden desafiar las dicotomías históricas del pensamiento occidental, la política occidental y sus efectos. También analizo las dificultades de la política ontológica en un entorno que no suscribe las fantasías académicas y políticas de la pureza indígena frente a la modernidad. Específicamente, analizo las formas conflictivas en que los norteños se relacionan con montañas abuelos más-que-humanos para proporcionar un modelo de acción ético-ambiental-política radical, en el que la comunidad y el bienestar se definen como seres humanos en relación montanas personas como un ancla para lograr la justicia social y climática. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame them as struggles to build a new world order both against and otherwise than frameworks. Exploring the materiality of these struggles across several dimensions—of the earth, of religious objects and rituals, and of the sovereign body—we describe the constitution of what we call the "flesh of justice" and probe its subversive effects. Drawing on the distinctive tradition of Latin American Marxism to contest the separation of the subaltern "otherwise" from the domain of modern politics, we offer two analytics for engaging with the flesh of justice in Latin America: subversive cosmopolitics and theopolitics. Resumen: La introducción a este número especial sobre "Religión subversiva y materialidades más-que-humanas en América Latina" conceptualiza la fuerza transformadora de prácticas muchas veces nombradas como "religión popular", incluyendo rituales indígenas, negros o campesinos, así como catolicismos o pentecostalismos vernáculos. En lugar de tratar estas prácticas como manifestaciones de una alteridad esencial frente al estado moderno o al "Occidente", las entendemos como luchas para construir un nuevo orden mundial en contra de y también de otro modo que esos marcos. Al explorar la materialidad de estas luchas en varias dimensiones—de la tierra, de los objetos y rituales religiosos, y del cuerpo del soberano—describimos la constitución de lo que llamamos la "carne de la justicia" e indagamos en sus efectos subversivos. Recurriendo a la tradición distintiva del marxismo latinoamericano para rechazar la segregación de la "otredad" subalterna de la política moderna, ofrecemos dos analíticas para aprofundizar en la carne de la justicia en América Latina: la cosmopolítica subversiva y la teopolítica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanism and the idea of sentient landscapes interacting with humans have been theorized in multiple ways, although rarely with an eye toward environmental justice and collective ethics. Poor mestizos in northern Peru offer a new model that transcends the limitations of both ontological cosmopolitics--which focuses on the radical alterity of sentient landscapes removed from modern politics--and a political ecology that does not consider sentient landscapes. None of these approaches addresses the ways that poor Peruvian respond to climate change and environmental contamination by turning to indigenous sentient landscapes as participants in an interethnic world. I argue that these mestizos challenge the forms of governance implemented by late liberalism: by engaging sentient landscapes as involved in local movements for environmental justice, collective ethics, and health. Despite an interest in values and moral selves, the anthropology of ethics has been less concerned with collective ethics, which serve as models for political change. I argue that poor Peruvian mestizos offer a model of collective ethics that attaches moral agency to the natural world for the purpose of social and environmental transformation, thereby opening a new kind of political debate. By defining "community" and "well-being" as humans-in-relationship-to-places-as-persons, poor mestizos resignify "nature" itself as an anchor for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY This article examines how the processes of disremembering, the transformations of memory and personhood, and the rebirth of Mapuche shamans address and cloud issues of social persistence and cohesion in a community. My analysis is grounded in the broader culture of death rituals but also advances a reading of these rituals as expressions of an essentially historical consciousness: how Mapuche shamans such as Francisca Kolipi mediate indigenous engagements with history and historicity. Francisca's personhood was reshaped multiple times through contested processes of disremembering and remembering, and her multiple deaths were rescripted and rehistoricized. Community members erased the negative aspects of Francisca's spirit and merged it with the spirit of her machi predecessor, and Francisca was rehistoricized in a new context in anticipation of the rebirth of her spirit in a new shaman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and performances-some of which take the form of 'bibles' and involve shamanic literacies-play a central role in the production of indigenous history in southern Chile. In this article, I explain how and why a mixed-race Mapuche shaman charged me with writing about her life and practice in the form of such a 'bible.' This book would become a ritual object and a means of storing her shamanic power by textualizing it, thereby allowing her to speak to a future audience. The realities and powers her 'bible' stored could be extracted, transformed, circulated, and actualized for a variety of ends, even to bring about shamanic rebirth. Ultimately, I argue, through their use and interpretation of this kind of 'bible,' Mapuche shamans expand academic notions of indigenous history and literacy. [ shaman, text, Bible, mestizo, history, literacy, Mapuche, Chile] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and performances-some of which take the form of ''bibles'' and involve shamanic literacies-play a central role in the production of indigenous history in southern Chile. In this article, I explain how and why a mixed-race Mapuche shaman charged me with writing about her life and practice in the form of such a ''bible.'' This book would become a ritual object and a means of storing her shamanic power by textualizing it, thereby allowing her to speak to a future audience. The realities and powers her ''bible'' stored could be extracted, transformed, circulated, and actualized for a variety of ends, even to bring about shamanic rebirth. Ultimately, I argue, through their use and interpretation of this kind of ''bible,'' Mapuche shamans expand academic notions of indigenous history and literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have challenged the distinction between orality and literacy. They have shown that indigenous people’s novel uses of texts expand and vary our notions of literacy, and that texts can be used ritual objects infused with power and agency independent of the Western way of reading and understanding the alphabet. I argue that Mapuche shamans or machi in southern Chile expand indigenous notions of literacy even further and tie them to shamanic notions of power and temporalities. I analyze how Francisca Kolipi-- a nonliterate mestiza machi-- embodied the past through ritual spirit possession, transformed this past in her rituals, and expected to be reborn in the body of a new machi when she died. Francisca saw written words as animated shapes and living entities, and bibles and official documents as ritual objects that store the power of the state and the church. She smoked and chanted over these texts to extract the historical realities and powers stored in them, and used them for healing and to bring about shamanic rebirth. I argue that in the constitution of indigenous Mapuche shamanic identity and power, a non-Mapuche textual object, the “bible,” has come to play a central role. I analyze why Francisca Kolipi, a nonliterate mestiza Mapuche shaman, charged me to write about her life and practice in the form of a bible—the physical manifestation of her power—within a larger set of engagements that center on temporality, text, biography, and shamanic force. I argue that shanamic performative literacies play a central role in the creation of indigenous historical consciousness and in the production of indigenous history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the life experiences of Marta, a Mapuche male transgendered shaman in Chile, I analyze how selfhood is gendered dynamically by individual desire and competing cultural and religious norms. Marta's unique identity as a divine heterosexual woman is based on a spiritual transformation, her manner of dressing, and her gender performances. It challenges conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality linked to sexed bodies. At the same time, Marta's self is shaped and constrained by the normative gender ideologies of the Virgin Mary, shamanic lore, the Mapuche, and dominant Chilean society. I analyze the negative effect that the imposition of homophobic norms of dominant Chilean society have on the life, identity, dignity and practice of machi Marta. These norms are implemented first by the prison guards, then by the media, and finally by Mapuche themselves. I explore how and why Mapuche have abandoned the older gender variant role of machi weye-machi that oscillated between masculine and feminine poles and combined women's and men's behavior, dress, and styles as well as passive or active sexual acts with women or men or celibacy that would have legitimated Marta's identity and practice. I analyze to what extent the incorporation of the homophobic gender and sexual norms of mainstream Chilean society within Mapuche communities has transformed and undermined the gender duality of machi practice. This article calls for the acceptance of all gender and sexually variant roles, particularly those of machi. I show that it is precisely the dual gender roles of machi that allows them to perform as mediators between the human and spiritual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I draw on ethnographic and archival material collected between 1991 and 2008 to explore the story of a Mapuche shaman in her community in southern Chile and illuminate the ways in which particular marginalized groups see themselves in time. Francisca Colipi's unique position as both an anomalous, liminal outsider and a powerful mediator between internal community factions and ethnicities makes her biography a productive place from which to view Millali's conflicted history. Through Francisca's experiences in her community I explore how Mapuche shamanic historical consciousness is produced and mobilized, how shamanic narratives of the past construct the present and rewrite local history, and how change and its agents are conceived of in shamanic practice. An analysis of Mapuche shamanic historical consciousness through Francisca's life, death, and rebirth offers a new understanding of the relationship between indigenous agency and national history, remembering and disremembering, and individual and collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I show how spiritual kinships ties, spiritual marriages, and relationships of mastery between Mapuche shamans (machi), animals, and spirits in initiation and healing rituals reflect historical ethnic and national relationships, social and gender dynamics, and complex understandings of personhood. Machi's spiritual relationships are shaped by the gendered power dynamics of colonial mastery and domination, marriage and seduction, possession and ecstasy, and hierarchical kinship systems. These spiritual relationships reflect a complex understanding of personal consciousness in which they are agents of their actions but at the same time share self with the spirits and are dominated by them.Machi gain varied forms of knowledge and power through the exchange of bodily substances as well as through spiritual means. In doing so, they offer a new perspective to current discussions among anthropologists about embodiment, ensoulment, and personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyze Jorge `s case as paradigmatic of Mapuche sorcery in Chile because he epitomizes many of the contradictory ways in which Mapuche perceive and categorize people they believe embody evil and threaten sociality. Capitalist consumption and individual success are both desired by Mapuche and criticized as antithetical to spirituality, morality, and community values. Mapuche see sorcerers as people who (a) draw on older Mapuche notions of ambivalent shamanic powers rather than on Catholic moralities; (b) challenge local sociopolitical hierarchies and communal egalitarian ideals; (c) accumulate wealth and prestige through engagement with modern beliefs and practices, self-proclaimed political and religious roles, capitalism, and foreign influences; (d) are excessively poor or wealthy; (e) challenge dominant Chilean gender norms and are suspected of being sexually "deviant "; (f) challenge Mapuche norms of sociality through aggression, individualism, and amorality; and (g) commodify indigenous knowledge for their own benefit rather than that of the community. I show that sorcery engenders change because it is linked to fractures that develop within the community when people take different positions in relation to modernization, capitalism, and foreign influence. I show how the "traditionalizing" of Mapuche sorcery operates simultaneously with its modernization and how both were played out in Machi Jorge's life and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the selfhood that gendered dynamically by individual desire and competing cultural and religious norms. Conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality; Limitations on gender deviance; Inclusion of the different cultural representations of selfhood.

I show how spiritual kinships ties, spiritual marriages, and relationships of mastery between Mapuche shamans (machi), animals, and spirits in initiation and healing rituals reflect historical ethnic and national relationships, social and gender dynamics, and complex understandings of personhood. Machi' s spiritual relationships are shaped by the gendered power dynamics of colonial mastery and domination, marriage and seduction, possession and ecstasy, and hierarchical kinship systems. These spiritual relationships reflect a complex understanding of personal consciousness in which machi are agents of their actions but at the same time share self with the spirits and are dominated by them. Machi gain varied forms of knowledge and power through the exchange of bodily substances as well as through spiritual means. In doing so, they offer a new perspective on current discussions among anthropologists about embodiment, ensoulment, and personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish and criollo soldiers in what is now Chile viewed colonial Mapuche and especially male shamans (machi weye) as perverse sodomites engaged in devil worship. I analyze the gender identities of male and female machi in the colonial period by considering ethnic, gender, and power dynamics. I contrast colonial Mapuche (Reche) perceptions of machi as co-gender specialists having alternative sexualities with the discourses of sodomy, sorcery, and effeminacy used by Spanish and criollo soldiers and Jesuit priests. I explore the process by which the categories of the two groups gradually merge and how they shape contemporary Mapuche and Chilean majority discourses about machi as well as machi perceptions about themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes how machi discourse and the practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous others. Effects of Western notions of self and other and feminist rhetoric on Mapuche women and machi; Understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted; Relationship between self and other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism and womanism.