Mapuche struggles to obliterate dominant history: mythohistory, spiritual agency and shamanic historical consciousness in southern Chile

Summary

Rosa Kurin's biographical mythohistory as a Mapuche-German shaman illustrates a unique blend of history and myth that challenges dominant Chilean narratives. This mixed genre highlights the transformation of historical figures into mythical characters, emphasizing spiritual agency over political agency among the Mapuche. By creating these mythohistories, rural Mapuche convey their ethnic identity and agency while offering pathways to decolonize their history and potentially mobilize politically.

Study at a glance

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.

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