The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns

Abstract

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

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

“…Positive agency is inadvertently privileged in many anthropological studies, which tend to recast people's misery and desperation as productive acts of, for example, ritual efficacy and potent technologies of the self. For instance, the life of Mapuche clowns in Chile, whose adoption of stereotypically ‘white’ practices with their drunkenness and urban poverty tends to be framed as a ‘positive mimetic cooptation of the potency of white Others’ rather than a tragic outcome of Chilean colonialism, reattributes ‘agency where there is none’ and denies ‘indigenous peoples the very possibility of defeat and failure that makes them human’ (Course : 773, 790). Similarly, to brush aside the dervishes’ experience of abjection and their perceived incapacity to will themselves into ritual action would be to threaten the complexity of their being.…”

The becoming of ancestral land: Place and property in Mapuche land claims

“…The historical presence of biblical elements and Chilean flags in shamanic practices (Bacigalupo ) and the use of Chilean military uniforms by Mapuche caciques (Foerster and Menard ) are just two of many examples of the possible incorporation of Otherness in terms congruent with Mapuche cosmology, a prospect that evokes the general Amerindian phenomenon of “openness to the Other” (Lévi‐Strauss ). However, the adoption of documents is also associated with the phenomenon of becoming winkalike, a status consisting in the loss of essential Mapuche practices because of decades of discrimination and assimilatory policies in schools and workplace (Course ) . Significant to the scope of the present discussion, to be winkalike also entails the loss of the value of “respect,” which in my study area is generally associated with trust and reverence toward oral agreements.…”

The potency of indigenous “bibles” and biographies: Mapuche shamanic literacy and historical consciousness

“…Shamanic literacy, intertextual “bibles,” and the transformation of Francisca's memory indicate that she and people in Millali actively control their economy of alterity. Shamanic power has not decreased with ethnic intermixing, nor do Mapuche experience an “absence of agency” or the “collapse of the controlled engagement with difference” (Course :775). Rather, Francisca strategically manipulated alphabetic script for shamanic purposes and to legitimate her own mutable identities and the Mapuche moral order, all within a new context of literacy.…”