If Mapuche land claims in southern Chile reflect the incommensurability of local notions of place and the legal principles of property, they also reveal intersections between indigenous and legal ontologies of land. Property languages and technologies allow claimants to frame knowledge about ancestral territory in ways consistent with local significations of place as a sentient agent. Yet they also serve as mechanisms for codifying indigenous geographies in terms congruent with existing property regimes and market configuration. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming, I argue that understanding ancestral land formation requires an anthropological imagination that acknowledges the conceptual antagonism of state and indigenous geographies as well as their intersections in claimants’ actions. [land, state, property, indigeneity, Latin America, Chile, deterritorialization]

Sacred sites lie at the core of indigenous peoples' land claims and negotiations with the state. These sites are often subject to accusations of inauthenticity by state actors, which potentially lead to the delegitimization of claims over ancestral land. This article argues that misunderstandings in Mapuche land negotiations in Chile do not originate as strategic refusals to understand, but rather in a form of understanding which aims to make radical differences commensurable within the logics of statecraft and national society. In the process of cultural translation, the ontological principles that make certain places sacred in the Mapuche lived world are not recognized, resulting in the transformation of these sites into symbols of identity strategically employed for political ends.

Drawing on the experiences of caring in agriculture and forestry among Mapuche landholders of Chile, this article advances a definition of care as an act of relating intervening mutual articulations of vitality. Caring for nonhumans entails a reflexive awareness of the ontological and ethical limits of human care, limits made visible by the nonhumans’ potentials to respond to our actions and affect us. Reflections on the limits of care foster an attentiveness to the conditions responsible for nonhumans’ ability of enchantment, a term that in Bennett’s proposal concerns an awareness on the singularness and surprising character of life. First, this article characterizes care as a human intentional action targeting dependent nonhumans, such as crops. Second, it illustrates the recalcitrance of some nonhumans to human care, as in the case of forests in Indigenous southern Chile. Third, it shows how care emerges from ethical aspirations and concerns, such as those at the core of Mapuche engagements with cultural reclamation and conservation.

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Far from being inert materials activated by human ingenuity, natural resources come to be made and unmade through ongoing processes of translation, through which they acquire new potentialities and meanings. In this introduction, we review the key concept of translation for anthropology and explore some of its multiple analytical possibilities in the context of human-environment relations. Based on insights offered by the articles in this collection, we propose a twofold definition of environments as both translating subjects and objects of translation. In grounding our analytical definition, we focus on the enactment of material transformations (as the result of both relations of mutual determination with humans and processes of objectification of the environment), the implications of incommensurability and erasure in processes of (attempted) translation, and the indeterminacy that accompanies (re)configurations of materials, relations and values.

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