Social motivations in Mapuche trafkintu: toward cosmology,recovery,and critique

What, why, and how?

This article is about trafkintu (exchange), a contemporary form of exchange exercised by the Mapuche (Indigenous people of southcentral Chile and southwestern Argentina: literally, people of the land) living in Chile and Argentina. The questions of Indigenous exchanges have historically been approached within academia by way of economic anthropology and with a substantial part of this discussion centered around a dual debate between economic and social motives, what is commonly referred to as a debate between a formalist and a substantialist position (Polany, 2001). The formalist position argued for a universalist or formalist approach, through which Indigenous forms have been seen as motivated by a narrow economical frame of barter, corresponding in the classical liberal argument to an economic activity indicating a market structure and a corresponding division of labor. In this logic, the question is often framed from an objectivist position, to be or not economic. The substantialist position, on the other hand, argued from a more contextualized and social-culturalist perspective where the economic motivation and activity was seen to be embedded into the framework of a social activity and motivation, hence leaving open the possibility to go beyond the limiting arguments of the formalist position. One of the principal questions within this debate then was about human motivation when it came to economic matters, and to what degree such motivation was influenced by social noneconomical aspects. While the substantialist position can be seen to open up the field for more diverse interpretations, it often does not do so radically, for example with regard to spirituality, which is a limiting problem when it comes to the capacity to understand contemporary Indigenous realities. The article will capitalize on the openness of the substantialist position, by moving beyond it to engage several motivations that are not envisioned within it.

The article will begin with a historical recounting of the dual debate between the formalist and the substantialist position, as well as a partial validation of the substantialist position. By asking about social motivation in trafkintu, the article will argue for five different social motivations in trafkintu, four of which we will group together into two pairs.

The first two social motivations are reciprocity and solidarity. This is what comes closest to the classical substantialist position as exemplified for example by Mauss (2002) and Sahlin (1972). Likewise, when asking Mapuche people about trafkintu, it is often the most immediate and continuous answer given. The third motivation is cosmological motivation, which is an immediate casting off from the substantialist position as well as the common and limiting Western differentiation between the secular and the religious spheres. While religious and spiritual motivation may in some analysis be considered part of what constitutes the social, it is rarely given center stage. Rather it is frequently assumed that all humans are endowed with the same psychology and rationality, a kind of sociological Esperanto (the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language; literally, one who hopes) within which religion and spiritual motivations are deemed irrelevant precisely because they are not considered real (Latour, 2004; Teillier et al., 2017). The correspondent anthropocentric perspective centered on the world is one where we all live in the same objective-ontological world (Aoki & Moreira, 2016; Querejazu, 2021). These commonalities are often contested when it comes to the study of exchanges in other Indigenous contexts (Awomi, 2015; Mika et al., 2022). This differentiates on a general plane the common academic perspectives from the Indigenous, precisely because when consulting Indigenous perspectives, the cosmological is often given center stage as part of a more holistic approach. If a Mapuche perspective proposes a cosmological motivation as primary, might it not indicate, either, that the social could be seen as embedded into the cosmological, just as the economical can be seen to be embedded into the social, or that we need to amplify the social to include the cosmological.

The fourth and fifth refer to the motivations of recovery and critique, motivations that are not part of the traditional dual discourse either. These motivations counter the colonial problem of seeing Indigenous activity and exchanges as something of the past, something that is economically and socially irrelevant to the present. Posing the question of trafkintu in a contemporary context must necessarily ask about the current context of resistance and status of trafkintu. What are the critical perspectives that motivate these processes? The motivations of recovery and critique contextualize trafkintu in the present by constructing it as a heterodox alternative, for example, to hegemonic economy when faced with the onslaught of market mechanisms. What motivates the habits that allow for trafkintu to continuously reproduce itself in a contemporary and colonial context? We will argue that the motivations of recovery and critique have a strategic similarity to other heterodox discursive formations by sharing a common critical stand. We will specifically discuss its strategic similarity to the part of economic anthropology that is also critical of contemporary and hegemonic economical thinking and practice, the part that strives for positions of economical heterodoxy. In this sense, trakintu can be seen as a contemporary position of economic heterodoxy.

In summary, beginning from the dual debate between economic and social motives, the article will attempt to open and pluralize this initial debate by presenting different interpretative avenues of motivation. First, we will take on reciprocity and solidarity, which are somewhat partial to the substantialist argument. This will be followed by an argument on the cosmological motivation of trafkintu, leaving behind the dual debate altogether. In the last part we will present the motivations of recovery and critique, which, although not part of the dual debate, and certainly must be seen in light of colonial practices, we will argue contain a strategic similarity to other heterodox and critical formations elsewhere, such as heterodox economics.

This work is by no account an exhaustive study of trafkintu. It is based on a 10-month research period that focused on the configuration of the social in trafkintu using specialized literature as well as a small empirical study that includes 6 interviews. The six people interviewed were all mature adults with a mix of both genders as well as a mix of rural and urban backgrounds situated in two places, in the surrounding area of Temuco as well as in the surrounding area of Valparaíso, both mayor cities in Chile. The Mapuche interviewed were all considered by their fellow Mapuche peers to have kimün (knowledge) and as such to be knowledgeable in Mapuche ways. All the people interviewed agreed to be named by name in the article, the Mapuche people interviewed were: Exequiel Antilao Carilao (Lof [traditional Mapuche rural communities] Llufkentuwe), María Inés Millanao Ancavil (Lof Francisco Millanao), Iván Coñucar Millan (Lof We Folilche Amuleaiñ), Juan Cona Guzmán (Lof Antemapu de Quilpue), Elizabeth Catrileo Lefimán (Lof Antemapu de Quilpue), and Gustavo Huentecura (Lof Carrerriñe). The article is aware that it is not unproblematic to name sources. This choice was made because of a felt need by the mapuche and the author to avoid extractive forms of doing anthropology. Hence, the risk of extracting information without credit due overruled the methodological complications that can arise from naming sources.

The Mapuche from the areas surrounding Temuco were interviewed by a Mapuche academic and PhD student, Luz Marina Henchucoy Millao, whereas the people from Valparaíso were interviewed by the author. Luz Marina was picked for her intimate kimün of her culture and its etiquette, as well as her fluency in Mapudungun (the Mapuche language; literally, speech of the land). Rather than time constraints, this reflects the delicate nature of doing research in the Temuco area. Not only is the conflict between the Mapuche and the Chilean state very predominant in the area, but there is also a healthy decolonial skepticism toward Chilean academics that come knocking, whatever their questions and intentions may be. The interviews were semi structured (Tarrés, 2004) and incorporated according to three basic levels of questions, a descriptive level, a motivational level, as well as a level concerned with their experiences. The first asked about trafkintu in a descriptive and conceptual sense, the second about what motivated them to participate, and the third about positive and negative experiences with trafkintu. The interviews lasted around 30 to 40 min in general. To save space, we will paraphrase the interviews directly into English rather than including the translation as well as the Spanish original.

Economical anthropology

In Western academic discourses a phenomenon like trafkintu has traditionally been studied by the specialized subbranch called economic anthropology. Beside the inherently colonial and negative definition of a subsistence economy (Clastres, 1987), a classical problem within this discourse has been the discussion between a substantialist position and a formalist position (Polany, 2001). In the formalist position, the economic act is conceived as rational, utilitarian, and individual, and the theories are universalistic in scope, whereas in the substantialist position the economic act is social, cultural, and institutional and the theories are contextualized locally. The key issue here was how human economies had operated in the past; a historical question that tends to be ideologically related to what one argues should be the best economic system today.

The original liberal argumentation that grounded the formalist position relied on the historical argumentation of Adam Smith, who had proposed that humans had a natural disposition toward self-interest. To tame such self-interest, Smith had argued that humans had bartered with one another, which had led to the natural and spontaneous formation of the market as well as the first division of labor (Smith, 2013). Seen against the background of the enlightenment, Smith saw the market as the first social contract that safeguards against a Hobbesian war of everyone against everyone. Furthermore, Smith is accredited with being the founding father of the economic discipline itself, hence, the foundational narrative of economics relies on self-interest as the most essential of human motivations, as well as the market as the most natural of institutions. In institutional and disciplinary terms, it corresponds to the division of labor internal to the discipline of economics by way of limiting the object of economics to the market as the economic institution of a classical liberal society (Wallerstein, 2004). Smith’s original connection between self-interest and the market as the foundational myth of economics is the central part of what the argument of substantivism in the tradition of economic anthropology has been trying to dispel for the better part of a century. Fast forward to contemporary times and the most recent ideological banner which has carried forward the formalist argument is called neoliberalism, ideas that predominate hegemonic economy today (Graeber, 2014; Harvey, 2005).

The anthropological descriptions that try to undermine this argument goes all the way back to Malinowski’s (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific in which it is stated very explicitly; “the social code of rules, with regard to give and take by far overrides his natural acquisitive tendency” (p. 96). This is a consistent substantialist argument in economic anthropology, that is, the fact that social institutions play a far greater role in earlier human societies than any economic institution that revolved around material barter and exchange (Graeber, 2014; Mauss, 2002; Polany, 2001; Sahlin, 1972). Graeber (2014) argues that there is no evidence at all that such economic relations began the way Smith imagined them with barter between neighbors which then resulted in the institution of the market. Barter did occur, but when it did it was usually between strangers and not internal to a village or a cohesive group of people (Graeber, 2014). Instead, such internal economic systems most often relied on some sort of autonomy of the principal economic unit combined with different degrees of redistribution as well as reciprocal help between people. This means that there is no historical evidence for the foundational myth of barter the way Smith described it, and hence, nor is there any historical evidence for thinking self-interest as the most universal or essential of human motivations. Graeber (2014) argues nonetheless that this myth is so ingrained in economics that it has become common sense.

This is a critique somewhat shared with Karl Polany (2001), a critique that is based on the contrary assumption to liberalism, that markets and the self-interest that accompanies them are not natural phenomenon’s that spontaneously arose in history when humans were “left to their own devices.” Both arguments rely instead on the anthropological evidence that social codes and conducts are and have been the primary concern of humans, with the economic motivation and concern instead embedded within these broader and more important social motivations. Polany (2001) argues that the market ideology of (neo)liberalism throughout history has needed to subordinate the social sphere to the economic sphere for the contractual logic of the market to predominate in all economic relations. The result of this has been a very long historical process of attempted destruction of all kinds of social relationships such as kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed. Polany (2001) explains these processes roughly during the last 300 years, while Graeber (2014) takes a much longer 5,000 years approach. Polany’s (2001) argument is that if the market mechanism ever became the sole director of human fate, it would result in the demolition of society. However, while the market expanded continuously in modern history, it was constantly met with countermeasures that tried to limit its influence in the areas where it touched upon social relationships and motivations that were considered natural at the time. One of the principal goals of the market ideology therefore was to attempt to destroy the traditional embeddedness of the economic into the social, to be able to conduct economic affairs as impersonal and isolated affairs, isolated from any local social commitments, as is also reflected in a critique by Zygmunt Bauman (1998).

Trafkintu

Toward heterodoxy

Going beyond the dual debate, we have shown a diversity of motivations active in trafkintu. While reciprocity and solidarity seem to be somewhat in line with more classic economic anthropology and the substantialist argument by answering the immediate question of what is trafkintu motivation, this is not the case with the cosmological motivation, and especially not in the ways that the Mapuche theorize this relationship. To take seriously a Mapuche theory of how the che is connected and inspired by the spiritual, we need to take seriously their theory of how Mapudungun is related to kimün and how reciprocity and solidarity guide not only human-to-human relations, but also when appropriately, human-to-cosmos relations, such as in the nguillatun ritual. Seen from such a perspective, trafkintu exchanges are motivated both by human-to-human relations and by human-to-cosmos relations. From this perspective, even reciprocity and solidarity adhere to the cosmological motivation, which places them partially outside the dual debate of economic anthropology as well as outside the traditional Western fixation of separating the secular from the religious. To the extent that trafkintu reciprocity and solidarity find inspiration in trafkintu cosmological motivation, one might think of the social motivation either as embedded into a cosmological motivation, or perhaps instead, as a cosmological motivation taking center stage within a broader social motivation.

Since the mapu can be considered to represent land, cosmos, and also nature, there is also an ecological motivation which is present in the interviews, although not to the same degree as the other motivations, which is why we did not include it in our principal arguments. This motivation appears to reflect a balance in the human-to-nature and nature-to-nature relationship, often exemplified by a negative perspective of humanly induced imbalances or contaminations related, for example, to agrochemicals (Gustavo Huentecura) or simply to its commercial forms of being processed (María Millanao Ancival). The alternative to this is locally produced farm goods in correspondence to a healthy quality of life related to trafkintu by a motivation to take care of and reproduce original and unique seeds or rurally and locally produced products without synthetic processes being used. Considering contemporary ecological problems based on extractive economical models, it could be interesting to pose as a question to what extent such ecological motivation might be premised on the idea of a human-to-cosmos balance reflected in a human-to-nature balance, that is, to what extent spiritual motivations might play a role in ecological preservation.

While the cosmological motivation seems to answer an important part of the question as to why trafkintu is important to the Mapuche, the social motivations of recovery and critique rather seems to answer the question of how, that is, how do they resist and how do they reproduce when considering a conflictual and contemporary context of market omnipresence. The critical motivation is slightly different from the motivation of recovery, even though they are somewhat intertwined and hard to separate. While its critical attention is directed toward hegemonic economic practices, the recovery is a teleological motivation that promises an alternative beyond current limitations by looking for inspiration in memory, in the past and in contemporary society. While the recovery and critique both make the social motivations stand apart from the tradition of economic anthropology by being firmly rooted in the present, they also, and perhaps paradoxically, gives them the potential to align with economical anthropology when it is at its most critical. Critical here means broadening economics and its ways of thinking human motivation into a more heterodox and critical science while valuing everyday human experiences on the same level as theoretical constructs from academia. Such attempts might see a strategic similarity between trafkintu and the critical parts of economic anthropology as well as other discursive formations that share in this critique.

The descriptions by Polany (2001) and Graeber (2014) of the destructiveness of the market ideology is perhaps the most relevant here, that is, its necessity to destroy forms of the social fabric that continuously resist the market transformations of labor, land and other relations into a contractual logic that can be inserted into the market. These are destructive forces with a similar goal but operating on a myriad of different social fabrics across times and cultures (Polany, 2001). It is not that the social fabric of 19th-century England is specifically like the social fabric of 21st-century Mapuche, but the destructive forces at play trying to transform both contexts into market relations are similar. Seen from an optics of resistance, or what Polany calls “countermeasures,” such basic similarity gives it a strategic potential which unfortunately seems to remain rather unexplored on a global scale when faced with negative impacts of capitalism worldwide. That is, distant local contexts of resistance do not seem actively prone to link up when facing the global onslaught of market transformations. Trafkintu, which is motivated toward safeguarding (recovery and critique) against the destruction of reciprocity, solidarity, and cosmological relations, can be seen as a strategic and potential equivalent to what Polany (2001) calls countermeasures. In this sense, the social fabric of trafkintu could be argued to have a strategic similarity to other contextualized countermeasures such as labor unions, whose primary goal is to protect basic human solidarity and dignity from the onslaughts of the market. Seen historically, the most destructive infliction point was probably the conquest by the Chilean state of Wallmapu (mapuche lands) in the end of the 19th century which resulted in the process known as la reducción (reduction-reservation process), where the Mapuche were ripped apart from their tuwün (ancestral lands), lands that then became incorporate into the marketplace. In the idea of Graeber (2014), to make something quantifiable and marketable, one needs to exercise violence and rip it from its context (2014), which seems to apply directly to this violent act by the Chilean state.

This strategic similarity is bound up with a few other ideas of resistance. One of these is the more general idea of the market not being the natural human state as described by Polany (2001) and Graeber (2014), and with its self-interest seen as the primus motor of human economic motivation. Judging by the social motivations of trafkintu, there seems to be something wholly unnatural about the market and the idea of self-interest being the most important human nature. Together with this one could argue for a last idea being the concept of embeddedness itself, that being the antithesis to the isolation of economics from the social, and with neoliberalism, from the political. Judging by Graeber (2014) and Polany (2001), such an isolation seems to be required for the market mechanism to transform social and economic life into market contracts, isolated from the forms of social fabric that provides resistance and countermeasures and moves in different economical directions. In terms of solutions, one might be tempted by the kind of hybrid post capitalism offered, for example, by Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b) and exemplified regarding trafkintu by Palomino-Schalscha (2015). This discourse is a lot more critical than say, indigenomics, as developed by Carol Anne Hilton (2021), which basically offers a kind of sterile inclusion of Indigenous people onto the economic table. The Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b) discourse tries to break up essentialism when seen as a dichotomized or dual economy by trying to find alternatives in everyday small-scale life. If you can’t beat capitalism on the grand scale of things, one must do it starting from the small but multiplied by diversity, to show how ordinary people and ordinary communities can construct local processes that are liberating socially and economically.

This is a valid point; however, it must be coupled with an awareness of the kind of radicality inherent in a specific hybridity or capitalist-alternative ontology and perspective (De La Cadena, 2015). The stronger the destructive forces are at play or are required to pacify a contemporary local context, as explained by Polany (2001) and Graeber (2014), the more likely the context is to hide radical alternatives. The further away historically the destruction operated—19th-century Britain versus 21st-century Mapuche, the more complicit and immersed the alternative hybrids are likely to be within a capitalist logic. Hence, when the destructive processes operate the strongest in a contemporary context, this is where we are likely to find the more radical resistance and alternative social processes still at large, such as, for example, trafkintu. As such, to find strategic similarities and recover social solidarity, we must learn from the periphery more than from the center, or from the south more than from the north, since this is where many alternatives and radical differences are still active, and incidentally, Indigenous worlds are at the center of this with motivations like reciprocity, solidarity, and the cosmological still active and strong.