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. 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. | Cover Title Page Copyright page Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part One 1. Che: The Sociality of Exchange 2. Küpal: The Sociality of Descent 3. Ngillanwen: The Sociality of Affinity 4. Eluwün: The End of Sociality Part Two 5. Palin: The Construction of Difference 6. Ngillatun: The Construction of Similarity Conclusions Notes Glossary of Terms in Mapudungun References Index | "Interesting, important, and challenging."—Anthropology Review Database
"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

"An insightful ethnographic account of the way the rural Mapuche person is constituted through different modes of men's sociality and how the centrifugal expansion of relations across time and space gives rise to collective social events. Course presents the stunning new political possibilities that emerge from a rural Mapuche class-based identity that challenges the ethnic perspectives held by urban Mapuche intellectuals and indigenous rights activists."—Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, author of Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche

|Magnus Course is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.