Ulutun : sound, materiality and power in a Mapuche ritual

Abstract

In this article I reflect on sonic power in a Mapuche healing ritual guided by a machi (Mapuche ritual specialist): the ulutun. Through her prayers, songs and instrumental performance, the machi revitalises the affected person, their family, and their environment and frightens away ‘the bad’. If the machi and, to a certain extent, Chaw Ngünechen (Mapuche god with attributes of totality) are responsible for the production of sound, their power additionally comes from newen, the immanent force of the world, its beings, and objects. From a Mapuche conception of sound, this does not consist only in vibratory force, but rather also in a manifestation of newen, and the change in its vibratory qualities constitutes the expression of more or less newen. This double comprehension of sound, as both vibration and newen, aligns with ethnomusicological and affect theories and contributes to research focused on other cosmologies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.