Magnus Course
Biographic Data
| ID | 3589355 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Magnus Course |
| GIVEN NAMES | Magnus |
| FAMILY NAME | Course |
| SIGNATURE | COURSE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 185 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Foro sobre el libro Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile
"Marginal to Whom? Reflections on Gow's "Purús Song
This paper constitutes a personal exploration of the impact of the work of Peter Gow on my own attempts to think through specific ethnographic problems, both in the Mapuche communities of Southern Chile and the Gaelic communities of Western Scotland. I focus in particular on how Gow’s lesser-known essay “Purús Song” inverts received wisdom about the relationships between center and periphery, and between nation-state and Indigenous people. I see …
The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives
Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through…
Houses of Uist: Memory and dwelling in the Outer Hebrides
This article constitutes an ethnographic exploration of the salience of houses - both ruined and lived in - on the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist. While I describe houses as both sites of memory and sites of dwelling, my argument is that the latter - dwelling - encompasses and subsumes the former - memory. This argument is situated in a historical and political context where, despite over 4,000 years of human habitation, dwelling cannot be …
Words beyond meaning in Mapuche language ideology
Changelings: Alterity Beyond Difference
Drawing on historical and ethnographic data from Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, as well as data from contemporary Chile, this talk explores the phenomenon of changelings. Changelings are cuckoo-like imposters, left in the place of humans abducted by fairy captors, and identical in almost all aspects to the humans they have displaced. Yet small indices of difference – voracious appetite, rapid ageing, and fear of fire and iron – lead kin to suspect …
The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction
While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally 'sacrificed sacrifice,' for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice - whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between - remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environme…
Andrew Canessa, Intimate indigeneities: Race, sex, and history in the small spaces of Andean life . (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Speaking the Devil's language: Ontological challenges to Mapuche intersubjectivity
The Apple is Grown, the Grape is Given: Two Modes of Mapuche Exchange
Este trabajo explora el contraste entre dos modos sociales de beber entre los Mapuche del Sur de Chile: el implicado por la chicha, y el referido al vino. Mientras que la chicha es producida y compartida sin mayor elaboración, el intercambio de vino aparece como altamente elaborado y es entendido como el acto paradigmático para la creación de una relación social. Mi análisis sugiere que esta diferente estimación de dos tipos de bebida, superficia…
The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns
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: as…
The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority
This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman-all present in the Mapuche nggillatun fertility ritual-from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emer…
O nascimento da Palavra: Linguagem, Força E Autoridade Ritual Mapuche
Este artigo procura abordar os papéis de sacerdote, chefe e xamã - todos presentes no ngillatun, ritual de fertilidade mapuche - da perspectiva de seus modos diferenciais de travar relações por meio da linguagem. A linguagem, conforme entendida pelos Mapuche do meio rural chileno, não emerge exclusivamente das intenções de falantes individuais, mas igualmente da força (newen) constitutiva da totalidade do ser. Sacerdotes, chefes e xamãs recorrem …
Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile
This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first comple…
Los Géneros Sobre el Pasado en la Vida Mapuche Rural
This article challenges the widely-held assumption that many rural Mapuche people somehow lack "historical consciousness" and that this lack is an obstacle to full participation in the "Mapuche movement." In response, I seek to demonstrate the richness and diversity of rural Mapuche engagements with the past. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and genre, I suggest that different forms of addressing the past carry different assumptions of …
Of words and fog: Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology
This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own research among the Mapuche of southern…
Mapuche y Anglicanos: Vestigios fotográficos de la Misión Araucana de Kepe, 1896–1908 by André Menard Poupin and Jorge Pavez Ojeda, eds
Why Mapuche sing
This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features ofül- their use of first-person pronouns, their entextualiz…
Estruturas de diferença no palin, esporte mapuche
Combinando dados históricos e etnográficos, este artigo explora a importância dos vários níveis de oposição dentro do esporte do palin e as práticas sociais que o cercam, nas comunidades indígenas mapuche, no sul do Chile. Empregando o conceito de afinidade potencial, procuro analisar de que modo a oposição entre identidade e diferença toma formas distintas - como a guerra, o ritual ou o intercâmbio - em níveis distintos de análise, tais como os …
Shamans of the Foye tree: Gender, power, and healing among Chilean Mapuche - By Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Courage tastes of blood: The Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean state, 1906-2001 - By Florencia Mallon
Death, Biography, and the Mapuche Person
The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to 'complete' the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be 'completed,' and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's c…
Of words and fog: Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology
This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own research among the Mapuche of southern…
The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority
This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman-all present in the Mapuche nggillatun fertility ritual-from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emer…
The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction
While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally 'sacrificed sacrifice,' for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice - whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between - remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environme…
Death, Biography, and the Mapuche Person
The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to 'complete' the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be 'completed,' and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's c…
The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns
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: as…
Speaking the Devil's language: Ontological challenges to Mapuche intersubjectivity
Why Mapuche sing
This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features ofül- their use of first-person pronouns, their entextualiz…
Words beyond meaning in Mapuche language ideology
Estruturas de diferença no palin, esporte mapuche
Combinando dados históricos e etnográficos, este artigo explora a importância dos vários níveis de oposição dentro do esporte do palin e as práticas sociais que o cercam, nas comunidades indígenas mapuche, no sul do Chile. Empregando o conceito de afinidade potencial, procuro analisar de que modo a oposição entre identidade e diferença toma formas distintas - como a guerra, o ritual ou o intercâmbio - em níveis distintos de análise, tais como os …
Los Géneros Sobre el Pasado en la Vida Mapuche Rural
This article challenges the widely-held assumption that many rural Mapuche people somehow lack "historical consciousness" and that this lack is an obstacle to full participation in the "Mapuche movement." In response, I seek to demonstrate the richness and diversity of rural Mapuche engagements with the past. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and genre, I suggest that different forms of addressing the past carry different assumptions of …
Houses of Uist: Memory and dwelling in the Outer Hebrides
This article constitutes an ethnographic exploration of the salience of houses - both ruined and lived in - on the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist. While I describe houses as both sites of memory and sites of dwelling, my argument is that the latter - dwelling - encompasses and subsumes the former - memory. This argument is situated in a historical and political context where, despite over 4,000 years of human habitation, dwelling cannot be …
Changelings: Alterity Beyond Difference
Drawing on historical and ethnographic data from Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, as well as data from contemporary Chile, this talk explores the phenomenon of changelings. Changelings are cuckoo-like imposters, left in the place of humans abducted by fairy captors, and identical in almost all aspects to the humans they have displaced. Yet small indices of difference – voracious appetite, rapid ageing, and fear of fire and iron – lead kin to suspect …
O nascimento da Palavra: Linguagem, Força E Autoridade Ritual Mapuche
Este artigo procura abordar os papéis de sacerdote, chefe e xamã - todos presentes no ngillatun, ritual de fertilidade mapuche - da perspectiva de seus modos diferenciais de travar relações por meio da linguagem. A linguagem, conforme entendida pelos Mapuche do meio rural chileno, não emerge exclusivamente das intenções de falantes individuais, mas igualmente da força (newen) constitutiva da totalidade do ser. Sacerdotes, chefes e xamãs recorrem …
The Apple is Grown, the Grape is Given: Two Modes of Mapuche Exchange
Este trabajo explora el contraste entre dos modos sociales de beber entre los Mapuche del Sur de Chile: el implicado por la chicha, y el referido al vino. Mientras que la chicha es producida y compartida sin mayor elaboración, el intercambio de vino aparece como altamente elaborado y es entendido como el acto paradigmático para la creación de una relación social. Mi análisis sugiere que esta diferente estimación de dos tipos de bebida, superficia…
Death, Biography, and the Mapuche Person
The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to 'complete' the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be 'completed,' and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's c…
Estruturas de diferença no palin, esporte mapuche
Combinando dados históricos e etnográficos, este artigo explora a importância dos vários níveis de oposição dentro do esporte do palin e as práticas sociais que o cercam, nas comunidades indígenas mapuche, no sul do Chile. Empregando o conceito de afinidade potencial, procuro analisar de que modo a oposição entre identidade e diferença toma formas distintas - como a guerra, o ritual ou o intercâmbio - em níveis distintos de análise, tais como os …
Shamans of the Foye tree: Gender, power, and healing among Chilean Mapuche - By Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Courage tastes of blood: The Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean state, 1906-2001 - By Florencia Mallon
Mapuche y Anglicanos: Vestigios fotográficos de la Misión Araucana de Kepe, 1896–1908 by André Menard Poupin and Jorge Pavez Ojeda, eds
Why Mapuche sing
This article attempts to draw out some of the connections between the attraction of personal songs (ül) and ideas about personhood among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. Approaching these songs from both sociological and semiotic perspectives, I argue that they are constituted as imprints of the singular subjectivities of their initial composers. A focus on three specific features ofül- their use of first-person pronouns, their entextualiz…
Of words and fog: Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology
This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own research among the Mapuche of southern…
Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile
This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first comple…
Los Géneros Sobre el Pasado en la Vida Mapuche Rural
This article challenges the widely-held assumption that many rural Mapuche people somehow lack "historical consciousness" and that this lack is an obstacle to full participation in the "Mapuche movement." In response, I seek to demonstrate the richness and diversity of rural Mapuche engagements with the past. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and genre, I suggest that different forms of addressing the past carry different assumptions of …
The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority
This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman-all present in the Mapuche nggillatun fertility ritual-from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emer…
O nascimento da Palavra: Linguagem, Força E Autoridade Ritual Mapuche
Este artigo procura abordar os papéis de sacerdote, chefe e xamã - todos presentes no ngillatun, ritual de fertilidade mapuche - da perspectiva de seus modos diferenciais de travar relações por meio da linguagem. A linguagem, conforme entendida pelos Mapuche do meio rural chileno, não emerge exclusivamente das intenções de falantes individuais, mas igualmente da força (newen) constitutiva da totalidade do ser. Sacerdotes, chefes e xamãs recorrem …
Andrew Canessa, Intimate indigeneities: Race, sex, and history in the small spaces of Andean life . (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Speaking the Devil's language: Ontological challenges to Mapuche intersubjectivity
The Apple is Grown, the Grape is Given: Two Modes of Mapuche Exchange
Este trabajo explora el contraste entre dos modos sociales de beber entre los Mapuche del Sur de Chile: el implicado por la chicha, y el referido al vino. Mientras que la chicha es producida y compartida sin mayor elaboración, el intercambio de vino aparece como altamente elaborado y es entendido como el acto paradigmático para la creación de una relación social. Mi análisis sugiere que esta diferente estimación de dos tipos de bebida, superficia…
The Clown Within: Becoming White and Mapuche Ritual Clowns
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: as…
The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction
While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally 'sacrificed sacrifice,' for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice - whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between - remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environme…
Changelings: Alterity Beyond Difference
Drawing on historical and ethnographic data from Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, as well as data from contemporary Chile, this talk explores the phenomenon of changelings. Changelings are cuckoo-like imposters, left in the place of humans abducted by fairy captors, and identical in almost all aspects to the humans they have displaced. Yet small indices of difference – voracious appetite, rapid ageing, and fear of fire and iron – lead kin to suspect …
Words beyond meaning in Mapuche language ideology
Houses of Uist: Memory and dwelling in the Outer Hebrides
This article constitutes an ethnographic exploration of the salience of houses - both ruined and lived in - on the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist. While I describe houses as both sites of memory and sites of dwelling, my argument is that the latter - dwelling - encompasses and subsumes the former - memory. This argument is situated in a historical and political context where, despite over 4,000 years of human habitation, dwelling cannot be …
The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives
Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through…
"Marginal to Whom? Reflections on Gow's "Purús Song
This paper constitutes a personal exploration of the impact of the work of Peter Gow on my own attempts to think through specific ethnographic problems, both in the Mapuche communities of Southern Chile and the Gaelic communities of Western Scotland. I focus in particular on how Gow’s lesser-known essay “Purús Song” inverts received wisdom about the relationships between center and periphery, and between nation-state and Indigenous people. I see …
Foro sobre el libro Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile
Sociology (13 works) · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America (11 works) · Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics (11 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · History (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Art (5 works)