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Papers by Magnus Course

Fluent Selves examines narrative practices throughout lowland South America focusing on indigenou... more Fluent Selves examines narrative practices throughout lowland South America focusing on indigenous communities in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, illuminating the social and cultural processes that make the past as important as the present for these peoples. This collection brings together leading scholars in the fields of anthropology and linguistics to examine the intersection of these narratives of the past with the construction of personhood. The volume’s exploration of autobiographical and biographical accounts raises questions about fieldwork, ethical practices, and cultural boundaries in the study of anthropology. Rather than relying on a simple opposition between the “Western individual” and the non-Western rest, contributors to Fluent Selves explore the complex interplay of both individualizing as well as relational personhood in these practices. Transcending classic debates over the categorization of “myth” and “history,” the autobiographical and biographical narratives ...

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2012

Comparative Studies in Society and History

This essay takes the antics of ritual clowns, koyong, as an entry point into the ways in which ru... more 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 under- stand 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

Language & Communication

This article describes what at first seems a paradox in the way Mapuche people in rural southern ... more This article describes what at first seems a paradox in the way Mapuche people in rural southern Chile conceptualize intersubjectivity. For on the one hand, people are confronted with the problem of how to make a connection to another subject, yet on the other, they struggle precisely to disentangle or avoid just such a relation as already given. Through ethnographic description, I suggest that these two problems actually correspond to two distinct planes of intersubjectivity. I seek to demonstrate that the dissonance between these two planes of intersubjectivity necessarily entails ontological questions, about both the entities involved, and the world (or worlds) towards which their interaction refers.

A review essay about ontology, representation, and Gary Witherspoon's Language and Art in the Nav... more A review essay about ontology, representation, and Gary Witherspoon's Language and Art in the Navajo Universe.

Anthropological Theory, Jan 1, 2010

This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description... more This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own research among the Mapuche of southern Chile, I suggest that the analogy of subject and object suggests to speakers of European languages a radical discontinuity and therefore obscures the subtleties of the transformation at stake. Through the presentation of alternative grammatical paradigms present in Amerindian languages themselves, I suggest that grammars necessarily contain implicit ontologies which, when used analogically to represent non-linguistic phenomena, may seriously distort the ethnographic data they are intended to clarify.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), Jan 1, 2009

This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal song... more This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül ) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features of ül – their use of first-person pronouns, their entextualization, and their musicality – reveals how they allow the subjectivities encapsulated within them to become ‘inhabited’ by others. I conclude by suggesting that this process of inhabiting distinct subjectivities through song resonates with and responds to a problem of epistemological solipsism grounded in Mapuche ideas about the singularity of human nature.

Cambridge anthropology, Jan 1, 2005

Ethnos, Jan 1, 2007

The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is sa... more The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to ‘complete’ the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be ‘completed,’ and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin’s concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeur’s concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceased’s person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability
and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than viewing the totalization which occurs in biography as a
critique of such an approach, I see it as a solution to the ontological problem which such an approach describes.

Mana, Jan 1, 2008

Combining historical and ethnographical data, this paper explores the importance of various level... more Combining historical and ethnographical data, this paper explores the importance of various levels of opposition in the sport of palin and the social practices that surround it in the Mapuche communities of southern Chile. Using the concept of potential affinity, I seek to analyse the way in which the opposition between identity and difference takes distinct forms such as those of warfare, ritual and exchange at different levels of analysis, such as that of the ethnic group, the local group and the person. This multiplicity of oppositions is related to the variety of historical contexts in which palin has been important. Focusing on the relevance of relations of alterity in palin, the article looks to apply to the domain of Indigenous sport the anthropological approach to Amerindian sociality, which has generally been restricted to kinship and myth.

… dissertation. London School of Economics. University …, Jan 1, 2005

Books by Magnus Course

A Special Issue of Ethnos: While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the lo... more A Special Issue of Ethnos:

While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.

Rather than relying on a simple opposition between the “Western individual” and the non-Western rest, contributors to Fluent Selves explore the complex interplay of both individualizing as well as relational personhood in these practices. Transcending classic debates over the categorization of “myth” and “history,” the autobiographical and biographical narratives in Fluent Selves illustrate the very medium in which several modes of engaging with the past meet, are reconciled, and reemerge.

Magnus Course blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in thi... more Magnus Course blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this superb ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, Becoming Mapuche takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploring their way of life, the book situates the Mapuche within broader anthropological debates about indigenous peoples in South America.

Comprising around 10 percent of the Chilean population, the Mapuche are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Americas. Despite increasing social and political marginalization, the Mapuche remain a distinct presence within Chilean society, giving rise to the burgeoning Mapuche political movement and holding on to their traditional language of Mapundungun, their religion, and their theory of self-creation. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, Course also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life--eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun.

"Interesting, important, and challenging."--Anthropology Review Database

"Well suited for both undergraduate introductory and area courses, and Course's individualist approach has the potential to generate much discussion about comparisons between the Mapuche and Western societies. . . . Well researched, well written and organized, and offers a unique and persuasive approach to the Mapuche that would be useful for other indigenous groups as well."--American Ethnologist

"A rich ethnographic account that deals with a question that has become central to studies of Amerindian groups; what does it mean to be a 'real' person? A strong contribution to the literature dealing with the complexities of identity politics and the politics of identity in Latin America."--Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"In Becoming Mapuche, Magnus Course asks a question at once anthropological and Mapuche: what does it mean to be a 'true person'? On a theoretical level, this question allows the author to skillfully traverse back and forth across the abandoned terrain between the categories of classical modernist anthropology and those of its postmodern critique. In choosing this analytical strategy, the author has produced a remarkably rich ethnography of a rural Mapuche community, one that touches on the themes of both phases of anthropological thought in a rich synthesis of themes. Further, in finding this systhesis, Course has surely begun to fulfill his own hope expressed herein, that of freeing Mapuche ethnography from its sub-disciplinary isolation and showing the way to comparisons with Andean and Amazonian societies and far beyond."--Peter Gow, author of An Amazonian Myth and Its History