The Paradox of Disremembering the Dead: Ritual, Memory, and Embodied Historicity in Mapuche Shamanic Personhood

Abstract

This article examines how the processes of disremembering, the transformations of memory and personhood, and the rebirth of Mapuche shamans address and cloud issues of social persistence and cohesion in a community. My analysis is grounded in the broader culture of death rituals but also advances a reading of these rituals as expressions of an essentially historical consciousness: how Mapuche shamans such as Francisca Kolipi mediate indigenous engagements with history and historicity. Francisca's personhood was reshaped multiple times through contested processes of disremembering and remembering, and her multiple deaths were rescripted and rehistoricized. Community members erased the negative aspects of Francisca's spirit and merged it with the spirit of her machi predecessor, and Francisca was rehistoricized in a new context in anticipation of the rebirth of her spirit in a new shaman. [personhood, disremembering, memory, shaman, death, history] In 1960, thirty-nine-year-old Francisca Kolipi was struck by lightning during a devastating earthquake and became possessed by the spirit of Rosa Kurin, a deceased thunder machi (shaman). Although many people in her community of Millali came to Francisca for healing, others questioned her legitimacy because she had been initiated so late in life and had no formal training. Some envied Francisca's wealth and power and called her a sorcerer because she violated Mapuche and Chilean patriarchal gender norms: she made her money independently outside the home, and people thought she did not distribute sufficient favors to the community; she refused to remarry when she was widowed; and she was considered by some to be manly, aggressive, and amoral (Bacigalupo 2010(Bacigalupo , 2014. Aware of these criticisms, Francisca feared that her spirit would not be reborn in a new shaman's body after she died. To make sure that her spirit would not be lost, she demanded during our first face-to-face meeting that I write her biography as a "bible."Machi spirits not only carry history, they make history. These spirits become historical agents as they bring knowledge and power from past shamans into the bodies of new ones, who will also act in history. But spirits are also agents who are cleansed and reinvented in narratives that respond to, as well as shape, the changing social and political needs of the