The Paradox of Disremembering the Dead: Ritual, Memory, and Embodied Historicity in Mapuche Shamanic Personhood

SUMMARY This article examines how the processes of disremembering, the transformations of memory and personhood, and the rebirth of Mapuche shamans address and cloud issues of social persistence and cohesion in a community. My analysis is grounded in the broader culture of death rituals but also advances a reading of these rituals as expressions of an essentially historical consciousness: how Mapuche shamans such as Francisca Kolipi mediate indigenous engagements with history and historicity. Francisca's personhood was reshaped multiple times through contested processes of disremembering and remembering, and her multiple deaths were rescripted and rehistoricized. Community members erased the negative aspects of Francisca's spirit and merged it with the spirit of her machi predecessor, and Francisca was rehistoricized in a new context in anticipation of the rebirth of her spirit in a new shaman.