Mapuche Shamans Spiritual Practices of Power and their Relationship with Mapuche Resistance and The Chilean State

In this article I explore Mapuche shamans' (machi) "political" role as attributed by some national Chilean discourses and those of Mapuche resistance movements and how machi's maintain a distinctive understanding of power and action based on the mapuche notion of newen. Newen is a broad notion of power based on relationships with the spirits of humans (living and dead), animals, and places in nature. I look at the ways gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct machi and the ways machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I also explore machi's diverse interpretations of political power. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, and especially machi's non-ideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved but on machi's public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.

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