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The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2013

Magnus Course
Magnus Course*
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University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

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 understand 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

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 771 - 799
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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