The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to 'complete' the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be 'completed,' and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeur's concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceased's person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than viewing the totalization which occurs in biography as a critique of such an approach, I see it as a solution to the ontological problem which such an approach describes.

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This essay takes the antics of ritual clowns, koyong, as an entry point into the ways in which rural Mapuche people in southern Chile come to understand and reflect upon the inevitability of urban migration and the “becoming white” which this migration is said to imply. Utilizing both my own ethnographic data and comparative data from elsewhere in the Americas, I explore the striking continuities in the associations of indigenous ritual clowns: associations with poverty, with uncontrolled bodily desires, with dual ritual performances, and perhaps most significantly, with white people. I suggest that the moral indictment of the “becoming white” instantiated by clowns in their ritual performances emerges from their identities as people who in everyday life are denigrated as “too Mapuche.” Thus, far from being yet another example of indigenous people's “agency” in mimetically co-opting the vitality of white others, I suggest that clowns are one of the means by which rural Mapuche people come to understand precisely their own lack of agency in the face of Chilean colonialism

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This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features of ül– their use of first‐person pronouns, their entextualization, and their musicality – reveals how they allow the subjectivities encapsulated within them to become ‘inhabited’ by others. I conclude by suggesting that this process of inhabiting distinct subjectivities through song resonates with and responds to a problem of epistemological solipsism grounded in Mapuche ideas about the singularity of human nature. Résumé Le présent article cherche à retracer quelques‐uns des liens entre l'attrait des chants personnels (ül) et les idées sur la personnalité chez les Mapuches ruraux du Sud du Chili. À travers une approche à la fois sociologique et sémiotique de ces chants, l'auteur avance qu'ils sont perçus comme des empreintes de la subjectivité singulière de leur compositeur initial. L'accent mis sur les trois caractéristiques spécifiques des ül (utilisation de pronoms à la première personne, entextualisation et musicalité) révèle la façon dont ils permettent aux subjectivités qu'ils renferment d'être « habitées » par d'autres. L'auteur suggère, en conclusion, que ce processus d'investissement de subjectivités distinctes par le chant entre en résonance et en correspondance avec un problème de solipsisme épistémologique, ancré dans les idées de singularité de la nature humaine des Mapuches.