Being from the Land: Memory, Self and the Power of Place in Indigenous Southern Chile

Abstract

Connection with ancestral land is a central tenet of indigenous identity claims. In a departure from constructivist approaches to the role ancestral land in identity politics, this article focuses on the discursive and experiential manifestations of Mapuche theories of emplacement, according to which land is actively involved in the making of selves. By drawing upon the notion of tuwün, a term roughly translatable as place of origin, I argue that ancestral land acts as a potentiality of selfhood through the articulation of sameness and otherness within Mapuche society and with canonical others (winka). The ethnographic analysis of the relation between landscape and memory will illustrate how ancestral land works to situate the present between two poles of alterity, namely past dwellers and winka. Such a focus allows us to acknowledge the significance of ancestral land without resorting to genealogical and essentialist interpretations of indigenous subjectivity.

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