Department of social anthropology seminar with Magnus Course

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Magnus Course from University of Edinburgh. He will present the following paper:


The Hill That Walked Away: the inconstancy of land in rural Mapuche life


Abstract
Much of the anthropological literature on land and landscape has explored the ways in which land can become imbued or even saturated with “meaning.” Cosmogeny, myth, history, kinship, and politics have all been described for a wide variety of ethnographic case studies as being inscribed upon or indexed by the land. While, at first glance, the richly detailed toponymical layering of Mapuche land suggests a similar saturation of meaning, in this essay I explore a different tendency: the indeterminacy and inconstancy of the land. Taking as my starting point a detailed case study of the 72 hectares comprising the Mapuche community of Konoko Budi in southern Chile, I describe how the land is punctuated, not by points of meaning but rather points of indeterminacy, places whose non-human inhabitants and moral proclivities are in a permanent state of flux. Thus from the perspective of many rural Mapuche people, to know the land is to be aware of the particular locations or sites of its greatest inconstancy, or in other words, to know the land is simply to recognize the epistemological limits of one’s engagement with it.



Bionote
Magnus Course focuses, in his research, on the relations between kinship, personhood, power and language in the context of Native South America. He is the author of Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile. In addition to new writings on clowns, cider, and language, he is working on an edited collection about new anthropological approaches to sacrifice.


All interested are welcome!