THE TWO FACES OF KOYONG

Mapuche people translate the term koyong into Spanish as payaso, meaning simply “clown.” The masks worn by the clowns, made of either leather or wood, are also called koyong. Koyong masks take one of two forms: bull masks (torü koyong) or white people masks (winka koyong).Footnote ⁴ Only the latter is still in use around Lago Budi where I conducted my fieldwork.Footnote ⁵ Both leather and wood masks are first lightened by scraping their surface, after which horsehair is added to provide long, flowing hair and a drooping moustache. In addition to their distinctive masks, clowns dress in ragged, worn-out clothing, and they often increase their dishevelment by stuffing straw into tears in their clothes. By contrast to the abject poverty of their dress, koyong ride hobbyhorses (kawell) bedecked with bright “silver” tack made of cardboard covered in aluminum foil.

The sight of a koyong's muddy, unshod feet sporting shining silver spurs presents a bizarre juxtaposition of utter poverty and immense wealth, and indeed these two phenomena—being barefoot and silver horse jewelry—are the primary idioms in Mapuche discourse for describing generalized states of poverty and wealth. The period of intense and abject poverty in the mid-twentieth century is referred to not so much in terms of hunger or illness, but as a time when people had no shoes. Wearing shoes, along with being able to speak Spanish, are local markers of having become “civilized” (civilizado). The zenith of Mapuche power in the mid- to late nineteenth century, when Mapuche control extended from the Pacific almost to the Atlantic, is spoken of as a time of silver, when women were adorned in so much of it that they literally could not walk. Men's silver was displayed on their horses in reigns, bridles, stirrups, and spurs. Therefore, a barefoot clown wearing silver spurs is not only hilarious but also meaningful in terms of the stark contrasts it evokes for Mapuche people. The last piece of the clown's outfit is his sword, usually a piece of bamboo wrapped in aluminum foil or a piece of wood cut roughly to shape. The physical appearance of koyong seems to be quite uniform across Mapuche territory and throughout the photographic record back to at least the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁶ Yet while constant in their physical appearance, we will see that the behaviors and actions of koyong vary dramatically according to the contexts in which they appear.

All of the clowns I have known were drawn from the most marginal sections of rural Mapuche society, a society itself already marginal from the perspective of the Chilean state. Moreover, they have tended to be the most marginal people of those marginal sections—unmarried and frequently alcoholic men who are, as locals say, a bit “crazy” (wedwed lonko). One reason such men are sought out as clowns is that they will not have to be paid for ritual performances, and will act as clowns for alcohol alone. Beyond economic considerations, there is a sense in which clowns must be this kind of person. “No, no, a rich man could never be koyong,” my neighbor Sergio told me, “A clown will always be poor, he will always suffer.” While the poverty and marginalization of these men make them suitable to be asked to clown, their acceptance of the clowning role dooms them to remain poor and marginal. The causal links between clowning and misery remain implicit and indirect. Alfredo's suicide, for example, was explained by a number of competing theories ranging from witchcraft to romantic failure, yet it was his status as a clown that made his tragic end seem preordained.

Image 1.

“Kollones.” Two Mapuche clowns in 1928. Photographer unknown. Photographic archives of the Musee du Quai Branly. Courtesy of Scala Archives/ Musee du Quai Branly.

I remain unclear as to what motivates such men to accept clowning and the tragedies it necessarily implies. Although all of the clowns with whom I spoke were happy to discuss the practicalities of their ritual activities, they were reticent regarding their motivations for accepting such a role. The closest I ever got to a response was when Ramón, a clown in his early fifties, stated simply in Spanish, “Soy así, no más—I'm just like that.” Men usually start clowning in their late teens and remain recognized as clowns until their deaths. Even men who have not acted as masked clowns in ritual contexts for many years are still referred to as koyong. In fact, a crucial aspect to understanding Mapuche clowns is that their identity is by no means restricted to their ritual performances. While koyong may use masks, these masks do not serve to successfully “frame” their wearers, in the sense intended by Bateson (Reference Bateson1972), of bracketing off their clownish antics from their everyday personae. This means we cannot fully understand koyong from analyzing their ritual activities alone; a clown is not simply a role that a man performs, but rather something that he is, a permanent state of being, or perhaps more appropriately, of becoming, a point to which I shall return.

MAPUCHE CLOWNS FROM A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

This juxtaposition of clowns as simultaneously the forces of chaos in the game of palin and the enforcers of the social order in the context of the ngillatun fertility ritual, as both revolutionary and reactionary, seems at first sight bizarre, yet this strange duality of ritual roles is one of the most widespread features of indigenous ritual clowns in the Americas.Footnote ⁸ As Robert Brightman noted among the Northwestern Maidu of California, “The clown exhibited paradoxical characteristics, transgressing in delimited ritual frames against the authority and official morality of which he was otherwise the personification in both ritual and secular contexts” (Reference Brightman1999: 277). Julian Steward observed more generally that the indigenous clown, or “ceremonial buffoon” as he likes to call him, “is seldom purely a comedian” (Reference Steward1931: 190). We find what appears to be a similar pattern among the Gê-speaking Kanela of central Brazil, among whom the clown society is in certain contexts purely comical, but in others an essential part of sacred ritual practice and indistinguishable from other Kanela ritual societies (Nimuendaju and Lowie Reference Nimuendaju and Lowie1937; Crocker Reference Crocker1990). Likewise, during the koko naming ceremony among the Kayapo of central Brazil, ludic clowns serve the serious function of “activating” the sacred anteater masks (Turner Reference Turner and Peter Köpping1997).

A second feature of Mapuche ritual clowns is equally widespread throughout the Americas: their association with ethnic others, and more specifically, with “white people.” Steward describes indigenous clowning as a “burlesque of strangers” (Reference Steward1931: 196), and ritual clowns frequently parody white people in North America, among the Apache, Hopi, Tewa, and Navajo of the Southwest, the Winnebago and Iroquois to the east, and the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest (ibid.). Rodríguez describes how, in Taos pueblo, people employ real white people from neighboring communities to play the role of their ritual clowns, known as abuelos (Reference Rodríguez1991: 242). In South America, too, clowns or clown-like ludic roles in Waiwai (Howard Reference Howard, Viveiros de Castro and Carneiro da Cunha1993), Krahô (Morim de Lima n.d.), Kaxinawa (Lagrou Reference Lagrou2006), and many other societies are frequently associated with ethnic others, and white people in particular.

A third feature of ritual clowns that seems to be equally widespread through the Americas is an insatiability of their bodily desires, for both sex and food. As the Maidu clown says to the shaman, “You came to dance. I came to eat and gamble” (in Brightman Reference Brightman1999: 275). Through both stealing food and inappropriate sexual behavior, ritual clowns bypass proper social relationships of kinship in fulfilling their bodily desires. Both stealing food and inappropriate sexual behavior can in fact be understood as explicit denials of the mutual interdependence of bodily desires that, as Peter Gow (Reference Gow1989) has shown, forms the very heart of indigenous sociality—the clowns' actions express both material and social impoverishment. The absence of social relationships through which to fulfill these desires is linked to a fourth characteristic of indigenous ritual clowns that is found throughout the Americas: their abject poverty (Steward Reference Steward1931: 195).

As far as I am aware, these four fundamental features of indigenous ritual clowns—their dual ritual roles, their association with white people, their uncontrolled bodily desires, and their abject poverty—have never been brought into dialogue, and that is one of the things I want to do in this essay. I think that although these features of ritual clowning might not all be present in every case, we can nevertheless trace an underlying logic that connects them.Footnote ⁹ We have seen how in the context of dancing palin clowns act in an utterly chaotic manner, getting drunk, abusing people, fighting, and stealing food and wine. By contrast, in the ngillatun fertility ritual they enforce absolute submission to rigidly organized collective dances and prayers. At first glance, their activities in games of palin appear to be anti-social or inversionary, and their activities in ngillatun rituals social and conservative, or even reactionary. From a Mapuche perspective, though, both sets of behaviors are equally flawed and equally distant from the proper behavior of a “true person.” Perhaps the most important trait to understanding Mapuche as a moral category, as that of a “true person,” is the careful balance of respecting others while still asserting personal autonomy.Footnote ¹⁰ Respect (yewen) takes the form of always greeting, sharing, and reciprocating hospitality. It also involves never seeking to assert authority over others, never issuing a command or order. It is obvious why clown behaviors in games of palin—stealing food, abusing women, and hurling insults—might be interpreted as disrespectful. But Mapuche people also understand their behavior in the ngillatun ritual as in some ways lacking respect (yewelay), though they might appear to an observer to be enforcing the “social.” The very idea of commanding another person and threatening them with a big stick in any context other than a ngillatun ritual would fill most Mapuche people with horror for its blatant lack of respect.

From the standpoint of a rural Mapuche “aesthetics of conviviality” (Overing and Passes Reference Overing, Passes, Overing and Passes2000), clowns' behavior is not as dualistic as it might at first appear. In both games of palin and ngillatun rituals, clowns push the outer boundaries of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior, but they cannot be reduced to the “anti social,” to the role of subversion and inversion characteristic of anthropological accounts of clowning. Witches, kalku, do perform this role, and they do so through a very precise inversion of everyday sociality. Witches replace the exchanges of wine that constitute positive sociality with exchanges of poison. What we could call the “social”—the everyday ethics of Mapuche life—and the “anti-social”—witchcraft—necessarily take place within the same moral grammar, with the latter simply inverting the forms of the former. Clowns, however, are at right angles to such an opposition, or perhaps on a different plane altogether. They seem to be so completely ignorant of social conventions as to be incapable of inverting them: they simply steal, fight, shout, and so on. Much the same can be said of white people, with whom clowns are so closely associated. Mapuche people frequently lament the fact that winka do not know how to be respectful. They frequently fail to greet properly, to share, or be hospitable, and worst of all, they try and tell other people what to do. From a Mapuche perspective, white people, like clowns, are forced to circumvent proper social relations in the satisfaction of their desires, living in poverty “just like orphans” (kuñifal reke), as my comadre María told me.

In this section I have explained how, at least in the Mapuche case and probably beyond, certain features of ritual clowns—their dual ritual roles and their association with white people—are not coincidental, but rather are systematically linked to their ambiguous location beyond any moral grammar of the social and the anti-social. Further features of clowns, such as their uncontrolled bodily desires and their poverty, have moral implications of their abject status and locate them beyond the bounds of “true personhood” (see Kristeva Reference Kristeva1982). In what follows, I ask how and why, despite the striking similarities between indigenous clowns throughout the Americas, the economies of alterity in which clowns are embedded can dramatically redraw the values of these ludic roles. To ask the question another way: under what conditions is clowning transformed from a critique of others into self-critique?

CLOWNS AND THE CONTROL OF DIFFERENCE

It is my contention in this essay that the context of engagement with alterity determines the nature of the ludic portrayal of others, and furthermore, that the status of those occupying these roles serves as a telling analytical index of this context. The collapse of an economy of alterity makes the “framing” of ludic portrayals of others impossible, and the ludic embodiment of others is relegated to marginal, low status people. To make this argument we must step beyond the bounds of Mapuche ethnography and turn briefly to accounts of the ludic portrayals of others among indigenous peoples elsewhere in the Americas.

Let us start with Keith Basso's classic account of ludic portrayals of white people among the Western Apache (Reference Basso1979).Footnote ¹¹ At the time of Basso's initial research in the 1960s, the boundaries between Apache and white seemed more or less impermeable. All Apache spoke Apache as a first language, and all were convinced from an early age of the superiority of the Apache way of doing things. Although Apache society was threatened economically and politically, it seemed resilient in terms of Apaches' understandings of themselves as Apache. While Apache sought to engage with whites in terms of medical provision and the acquisition of trade goods, the forms of this engagement appear from Basso's account to have been largely under Apache control. The boundary between white and Apache was maintained through ludic portrayals of whites in which senior men would comically berate others in the manner of a white person. Such portrayals focused on stereotypical white behaviors that contradicted and contrasted with Apache ways of doing things. Basso writes, “The image the joker presents of ‘the Whiteman’ is an image of ineffectively guided behavior, of social action gone haywire, of an individual stunningly ignorant of how to comport himself appropriately in public situations” (ibid.: 48). According to Basso, “‘the Whiteman’ is the symbol of what ‘the Apache’ is not” (ibid.: 64).Footnote ¹²

At the time of Basso's research, “white” and “Apache” were clearly demarcated and opposed categories, and ludic portrayals of whites served to emphasize the superiority of Apaches. It is central to my argument here that the only people to attempt such ludic portrayals were highly respected senior men, the highest status members of Apache society. Here, the person occupying the ludic role is so clearly a person fully in control of any engagement with difference that his portrayal of a “white” can be nothing more than that: a portrayal or a representation. Yet one thing Basso's informants insisted upon was the “danger” of portraying whites: “Jokes involving imitations of Anglo-Americans are said to be among the most dangerous of all” (ibid.: 43). The explanation Basso proffers for this stated danger is that one risks offending the person at whom the clumsy, rude parody is directed. But reading between the lines of his ethnography reveals another, obscured possibility: that one is always at risk of becoming white, that the boundary between Apache and white is not as impermeable as it might at first seem. As an Apache father tells his son (ibid.: 31), “Don't be like white people. Don't even joke. It's no good. Leave it alone!” Even more telling is the epigraph to one of Basso's chapters, by the Apache poet David Martinez: “You must listen to old men // Not quite capable of becoming white men” (ibid.: 67). One wonders if now, fifty years later, it is still the most respected elements of Apache society who imitate whites? One suspects that amid deep-rooted concerns about the loss of Apache language and culture among younger generations (Nevins Reference Nevins2013), the joke may have come too close to the bone.

A further example of the ludic portrayal of ethnic others comes from Catherine Howard's ethnography of pawana, “the farce of the visitors,” carried out by the Waiwai in Guyanese Amazonia (Reference Howard, Viveiros de Castro and Carneiro da Cunha1993). Pawana refers to a ritualized ludic performance in which members of a Waiwai village act as “visitors” from ethnically distinct groups, either “savage” indigenous groups or equally “savage” whites. As Howard puts it, “The caricature plays with contrasting identities between the Waiwai and groups which are radically ‘Other’” (ibid.: 237). The “visitors” embody some of the classic tropes of indigenous clowning: they exemplify uncontrolled sexual behavior, they fail to recognize “real people's” food despite their hunger, and their ragged costumes pulled from the trash show their poverty. In short, they reject all of the carefully balanced exchange relationships that form the core of Waiwai society. Howard observes, “The ‘visitors’ take themselves seriously, but reveal themselves to be fundamentally ignorant, disorderly, and incompletely socialized” (ibid.: 242). Although any Waiwai may play the roles of “visitors,” what is essential is that their identities be reversed. Hence men play women, the young play the old, and so forth. Such reversals distance or frame each person from the character of the “visitor” being performed.Footnote ¹³

In line with my analyses of the Mapuche and Apache cases, let us consider the Waiwai “farce of the visitors” within the context of the economy of alterity in which it is embedded. The Waiwai form a central link in an extensive trading network that has for many centuries encompassed the majority of the Guianas. Howard writes, “This trading network has been operating for at least two centuries; it was supplemented, but not substituted, by exchange with missionaries, colonists, and governmental indigenous agencies in the several countries which the network encompassed” (ibid.: 236). The Waiwai form a crucial link between whites and isolated indigenous peoples: “The Waiwai see themselves as mediators between two categories of radically opposed non-Waiwai, both considered to be somewhat deficient beings, but nevertheless capable of being socialized and transformed into decent Waiwai” (ibid.: 235). So, unlike many rural Mapuche who see themselves as subject to an uncontrolled transformation into the Other, Waiwai understand themselves to be in the business of a controlled transformation of Others. This controlled engagement with Others is highlighted by the fact that any respectable Waiwai person may take on the role of a “visitor,” safe in the knowledge that their ludic antics are framed apart from their everyday personae. Howard argues that the pawana ritual “brings about the expansion of the frontiers of ‘Waiwai’ identity, thereby confirming the power of their culture as a conjunction of principles of transformation” (ibid.: 241).Footnote ¹⁴ My argument is precisely that once control of the economy of alterity has been lost, then the possibility of successfully “framing” ludic performances of Others is also lost, and such ludic roles are delegated to the most marginal people in society.Footnote ¹⁵ I turn now to expand on the form that the collapse of this symbolic economy of alterity has taken in the Mapuche context.

MAPUCHE AND WINKA

What does it mean to be Mapuche? Not surprisingly, there is no unitary answer to this question. On one hand, Mapuche appears as an essentialized “ethnic” identity fixed at birth, while on the other, Mapuche is a fluid and transformational category of becoming.Footnote ¹⁶ In some instances people attribute Mapuche identity on the basis of having two Mapuche parents, speaking Mapudungun, and “looking Mapuche.” Children of one Mapuche and one winka parent are referred to as champurriado, a transitional category that lasts for just one generation; there is no “mestizo” category as in other parts of Latin America.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the same people who define being Mapuche in these essentialized terms of genealogy, language, and phenotype will equally attribute the status of Mapuche to somebody who neither appears indigenous nor speaks Mapudungun if that person has been raised in a Mapuche community, has worked, lived, and eaten with Mapuche people, and, most importantly, behaves with respect in the manner of a “true person.” Here we are closer to the indigenous understanding of inherently transformational identities established through commensality, conviviality, and shared perspective, which result from and lead to a shared morality (Overing and Passes Reference Overing, Passes, Overing and Passes2000; Vilaça Reference Vilaça2005; Londoño Sulkin Reference Londoño Sulkin2005; Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro1998). While, depending on the context, rural people may draw pragmatically on both essentialized and transformational understandings to attribute or deny the status of Mapuche, of “true personhood,” it is always inextricable from moral comportment. Mapuche people's respect for others—through proper greeting, sharing, hospitality, and the avoidance of coercion—is simultaneously an ontological and moral state.

The moral value attached to being Mapuche does not signify that white people are simply relegated to either the “immoral” or the “anti-social.” I mentioned earlier that relations with winka are, in certain contexts, greatly desired. Contemporary patronyms such as Colihuinca (kelü winka, literally “red-haired white person”) and Curruhuinca (kurü winka, “black white person”) testify to the continuing salience of ethnic others (Boccara Reference Boccara2007; Foerster and Menard Reference Foerster and Menard2009). Furthermore, people's primary motivation in sending their children to school is so that they will learn to function in a winka world. A key point is that the desirability of engagement with winka, and the cooption of their sources of value both material and symbolic, should not be confused with a desire to become winka. For the Mapuche, and indeed for indigenous peoples throughout South America, any engagement with difference must always be balanced. A key theme in such engagements is therefore the reversibility of any transformative encounter with white people. For example, the Panará of central Brazil dress and act as whites when entering white society, but once back in their villages they reverse this transformation by reverting to Panará ways (Ewart Reference Ewart, Ewart and O'Hanlon2007). Likewise, the young Yanesha woman described by Santos Granero becomes white upon moving to the city, and then returns to being Yanesha after a few months back in her natal community (2009).

One local way of understanding what constitutes the “ideal” balance of difference in the Mapuche context is through two evaluative adjectives distinctive to Mapuche Spanish: awinkado (to become too winka) and mapuchado (to become too Mapuche). People said to be more mapuchado speak little Spanish, are obsessed with witchcraft accusations, and are poor even by local standards. Those who are less mapuchado speak good Spanish, are less concerned about the threat of witchcraft, and are usually more economically stable. This sliding classification is crosscut by that of being awinkado—heavily influenced by white Chilean society. Being more awinkado does not necessarily correspond to being less mapuchado. Many of those who hold roles as guardians of Mapuche traditions and values, such as lonko headmen or ngenpin ritual organizers, would not be described as mapuchado since they can speak good Spanish, do not exaggerate the threat of witchcraft, and are prosperous (Course Reference Course2012). In other words, to be properly Mapuche is to be neither mapuchado, “too Mapuche,” nor awinkado, “too white,” but instead to maintain a careful balance between the two. Yet for reasons to which I now turn, this balanced engagement with difference is no longer possible for many Mapuche.

By the early twentieth century, the Mapuche population, which had survived military defeat in 1883, had outgrown the limited land allotted to it under land titles.Footnote ¹⁸ During the 1960s and 1970s, this land shortage, coupled with a rapidly growing population, became so acute that many Mapuche people had little choice but to migrate to Chile's urban centers, sometimes the regional centers of Temuco and Concepcion (Aravena, Gissi, and Toledo Reference Aravena, Gissi and Toledo2005) but more often the capital Santiago (Antileo Reference Antileo2010; Gissi Reference Gissi2001; Reference Gissi2002; Kilaleo Reference Kilaleo2004). Of the Chilean Mapuche population of about one million, it is estimated that over half a million now live in Santiago.Footnote ¹⁹ Young rural Mapuche realize from an early age that such a move is often inevitable. If one's family owns just one or two hectares, it cannot support seven or eight adult children and their families. In most cases all but one of a family's children are upon reaching adulthood forced to leave the Mapuche heartland of the rural south. Many young Mapuche people I know are, not surprisingly, excited about moving to the big city, possibilities of economic and romantic success, and freedom from parental constraints. However, while the allure of the city tends to diminish with time, the factors preventing people's return to the rural south do not. There remains a deep sadness among many young people with whom I spoke because they are unlikely to ever be able to return south except for fleeting visits.

So, what becomes of Mapuche people in Santiago?Footnote ²⁰ Much important work has been written about the urban Mapuche organizations that hold ngillatun rituals, organize games of palin, and stage marches against the oppression of Mapuche communities in the south (Ancán Reference Ancán2005; Antileo Reference Antileo2010; Gissi Reference Gissi2001; Reference Gissi2002; Kilaleo Reference Kilaleo2004; see also Warren and Jackson Reference Warren and Jackson2003). Yet these authors see that only a minority of Santiago's Mapuche residents take part in these activities. As Enrique Antileo writes about Santiago, “Our research was always concerned with experiences of Mapuche involved in associations, but it is recognized that their number is extremely low in comparison to the non-organized Mapuche world.” He goes on to ask, “What happens to this [non-participating] section of the Mapuche diaspora” (2010: 80)? There are of course multiple answers to this question reflecting the multiple ways of being Mapuche in the twenty-first century. Claudia Briones has detailed tensions between those Mapuche in Argentina who seek to return to a purified culture, and Mapuche who embrace new cultural forms from a distinctly Mapuche perspective, such as those involved in the punk (Mapupunky) and heavy metal (Mapuheavy) scenes (Reference Briones, de la Cadena and Starn2007).Footnote ²¹ But again, participants in these movements in the Chilean context constitute a relatively small proportion of those Mapuche who reside in Santiago. A short answer to Antileo's question is that many of the non-organized segments of the Mapuche diaspora simply become part of Santiago's working classes. Or to phrase it in the terms of rural Mapuche who remain in the south, the urban migrants have, quite literally, become white.Footnote ²² They are spread throughout the city rather than in specific districts, they frequently marry white people, and work in their homes. They no longer speak Mapudungun, their trips to their natal communities in the south become less and less frequent, and perhaps most tellingly, they no longer refer to themselves as Mapuche but rather as sureños, “southerners.” In his discussion of the transformational nature of indigenous cosmologies, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has pointed out that for the jaguar shaman who successfully transforms into a jaguar, the term “jaguar” becomes meaningless, for this is exactly what he has become: “As soon as the human turns into a jaguar, the jaguar is no longer there” (Reference Viveiros de Castro2007: 16). In a similar fashion, for the many urban Mapuche who become winka, the very notion of winka ceases to be meaningful since this is now the very position from which their perspective emerges. Although in the south rural Mapuche people's conversation is peppered with references to winka and their strange ways, the term winka is rarely if ever used by these same people once they become established, long-term residents of Santiago.Footnote ²³

The way in which this process of massive urban migration and resulting shifts in identity is conceptualized in rural Mapuche communities provides the context in which ritual clowns must be understood. Recall that despite their radically different forms of comportment in palin hockey and in ngillatun fertility rituals, in both cases clowns failed to act as proper Mapuche people because they lacked respect. This same accusation of lacking respect (yewelay) is frequently leveled at those long-term Santiago residents who make occasional trips back to their communities. They are accused of bossing people around, demanding wine and food without reciprocating, failing to be generous with their wealth, and refusing to speak Mapudungun. In short, from the perspective of rural people, they have ceased to be Mapuche in a morally meaningful way, firmly ensconced as they are in the ways of white people. In some cases they themselves acknowledge their transformation. At a funeral in my fieldsite of Piedra Alta I met an elderly man who had lived in the city of Concepción for over fifty years, who told me, “I used to be Mapuche, but that was a long time ago.”

“Acculturation” is a dirty word in the contemporary anthropology of lowland South America, first because it negates indigenous agency in effecting particular transformations, and second since it implies a transformation of a unidirectional and irreversible nature.Footnote ²⁴ The critics of acculturation theory are surely right in identifying long-term patterns of willed transformation and agency where they have been previously overlooked or obscured, and in highlighting the frequent reversibility of indigenous transformations (Gow Reference Gow, Fausto and Heckenberger2007b; Santos Granero Reference Santos Granero2009; Vilaça Reference Vilaça, Fausto and Heckenberger2007). But this is not to say that there is no room for an understanding of “acculturation” within indigenous logics (Gow in Amaroso and Mahalem de Lima Reference Amaroso and Mahalem de Lima2011). Indeed, this is exactly how many rural Mapuche left behind in the south, with little option other than to watch their children move to the city without possibility of return, come to understand their situation. Given the deictic grounding of Mapuche and other indigenous cosmologies (Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro1998), acculturation is necessarily something that happens to other people. It is only those who understand themselves as remaining Mapuche who can lament the awinkamiento, the “white-becoming,” of others. Following Gow's interrogation of the term “ex-Cocama” (2007b), we can see that while a concept of “ex-Mapuche” would be meaningless to “ex-Mapuche” themselves, it remains a bitter reality to those left behind.

In their desire to counter stereotypical accounts of indigenous peoples as passive recipients of externally induced transformations, anthropologists have sought to reinterpret such transformations as revealing of indigenous agency.Footnote ²⁵ As Santos Granero rightly puts it, “Cultural change is not only the consequence of external pressures or coercive socioeconomic structures but also the result of a conscious indigenous attempt to incorporate the Other into their sphere of social relations” (Reference Santos Granero2009: 479). The anthropologist's task, he asserts, is “to restore a sense of native historical agency” (ibid.). I fully agree, but it seems to me that in their desire to restore agency anthropologists must be cautious not to preclude the very possibility of an indigenous concept of failure, specifically the failure to balance difference in the face of the realities of forced and irreversible transformation. We must not overlook the salience and poignancy of indigenous self-critique or indigenous discourses about precisely their own lack of historical agency. By attributing agency where there is none, anthropologists can deny indigenous peoples the very possibility of defeat and failure that makes them human. Instead, we need to be open to the creative, perceptive, and even empowering ways in which people come to understand their own lack of agency. If we take analyzing all phenomena as examples of indigenous agency to be an a priori concern, then we will fail to be open to how indigenous peoples might come to terms with their own perceived powerlessness in the face of colonialism, with their own sense of failure and decline. As it stands, there is a lacuna in the anthropological literature on indigenous South America and in anthropology generally concerning failure and decline.Footnote ²⁶ This essay is an attempt to engage with an indigenous experience of perceived failure and decline from within, without reducing it to tired tropes of hegemony and acculturation.

I have given some idea of the ways in which rural Mapuche people understand what it means to be Mapuche and what it means to have become winka. While such understandings differ between young and old, and men and women, the concern with shifting moral identity is the axis on which these differences turn. Thus, while there are disagreements over whether it is men or women who are most prone to “become white,” both men and women agree that “becoming white” bears a negative moral evaluation. More generally, I have shown that becoming winka is not something strange or esoteric, but rather what actually happens to many Mapuche people, perhaps the majority of the younger generation. This becoming white is premised on an understanding of identity as necessarily transformational, a process of becoming evoked through conviviality, commensality, and the sharing of a moral perspective. Such an understanding of transformational identity is now solidly within the mainstream of Americanist anthropology. Where the becoming white of Mapuche migration differs is that it is far from being the result of willed indigenous agency, from being yet another example of an “openness to the Other,” it has been imposed by a structure of colonial domination that has destabilized the symbolic economy of alterity. I strongly suspect that this is also the case for many other indigenous peoples. Vilaça describes the Wari attitude toward whiteness as a desire to experience difference while simultaneously preserving that difference (2007: 188). But despite the vibrancy of indigenous resistance in many parts of the Americas, the history of the continent has in many ways been a story of failures to preserve this difference, of the loss of control of the symbolic economy of alterity.

Given the politics of representation currently in play, it is no surprise that indigenous accounts of this process have been largely ignored or underplayed in the contemporary anthropology of lowland South America.Footnote ²⁷ I am sympathetic to anthropologists' critiques of acculturation theory, and I am certainly not arguing for a return to a paradigm in which external global forces shape passive indigenous lives. But I do contend that any attempt to take indigenous understandings seriously cannot be limited to those cases where indigenous agency in balancing sameness and difference wins out. As I have argued elsewhere, rural people's understanding of Mapuche as a contingent moral rather than “ethnic” category is intrinsically limiting when it comes to the politics of recognition demanded by both national and international actors (Course Reference Course2010; see Povinelli Reference Povinelli2002).

Neither has my purpose been to argue against the legitimacy of the many new ways of being Mapuche emerging in both urban and rural areas. I simply want to create a conceptual space in which rural narratives about “becoming white” are not dismissed as the iteration of state ideologies or “false consciousness” but are instead taken seriously as profound statements about morality, agency, and power.

I want to finish by turning to moral and emotional readings given by Mapuche people of such a failure, of the irreversible “becoming white” of so many people, this intrinsic transformational capacity to become winka. To do so I return to the clowns, taking them to be an instance of what Wagner (Reference Wagner1981) calls “reverse anthropology,” a Mapuche account of this transformative capacity to become white, to become winka. Throughout this essay I have argued for the importance of extending the analysis of ritual clowns beyond their ritual performances. One reason for this is that, as I have described, the identity of clowns, their status as koyong, is not confined to their ritual actions. Being a clown is a permanent state that moves through intense ritual and also less intense everyday periods. While in their ritual performances clowns have become “too white” (awinkado), in their everyday lives they are “too Mapuche” (mapuchado), drawn as they are from the most marginal sections of Mapuche society. In both cases, they stand for the failure to control and balance the requisite engagement with white Others, a quality that goes hand in hand with the proper moral comportment of a “true person” (che). Thus their ritual antics can only be understood in terms of the perceived misery and inevitable tragedy of their everyday lives.

The encompassment by koyong of two opposed or contradictory principles, of their being “too white” in ritual and “too Mapuche” in their everyday lives, corresponds to Handelman's general account of the clown, in which “the clown type combines, subsumes, and decomposes unlike attributes in its composition—and therefore remains in-between all of them” (Reference Handelman1998: 241). Whereas the “true person” is able to achieve just the right balance of Mapuche and winka, of sameness and difference, the clown “moves between alternative realities without solving these paradoxes of transition” (ibid.: 243). It is precisely their unbalanced encompassment of opposed states, this internal oscillation, which, according to Handelman, leads to clowns “being in motion, but unfinished and incomplete” (ibid.). Mapuche clowns, then, are truly abject, permanent embodiments of the implications of unbalanced and uncontrolled engagement with difference. Rather than a representation, they are, in both ritual and everyday contexts, a particular state of becoming, frozen and framed as a state of being.