The truth of experience and its communication: Reflections on Mapuche epistemology

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues for the existence of a substratum of continuity and similarity that allows language to be a point of commonality between different human beings, stating: ‘If everything were absolute diversity, thought would be doomed to singularity … there would be no language. If language exists, it is because below the level of identities and differences there is the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions, and natural criss-crossings’ (2002: 132). In Foucault’s view, if such a foundation did not exist, every encounter, understanding, communication and, on an even broader scale, ‘society’ would be impossible.

Foucault’s observation makes explicit a key assumption that underlies not only the discipline of anthropology, but also Western thought in general. Recognizing this, I aim to explore through this paper how rural Mapuche philosophy calls into question just such an assumption. More specifically, I intend to show how and why rural Mapuche philosophy sees nothing absurd in maintaining, pace Foucault, that since experience is indeed absolute diversity, thought is fundamentally doomed to singularity. Let me start by recounting a story that I was told several times during my 15 months of fieldwork with rural Mapuche people in Elicura, a small valley in southern Chile: ¹

Carolina left early in the morning, as usual. She took her car and headed towards Tirúa before dawn. The weather was awful, and the heavy rain made it almost impossible to see just a few metres out from the vehicle. Struggling in these conditions, Carolina drove a few kilometres until her car stopped suddenly. The engine was still working, but there was something blocking her way, something that ‘pushed her back’. Intrigued, Carolina got out of her car to see what was in the way. Only then was she able to see it. Standing with its arms resting on the car’s bonnet, a witranalwe seemed determined to prevent Carolina from proceeding. A chill immediately ran down her body, and she frantically returned to her car, turned it around, and, as fast as she could, drove back home. ²

Carolina’s story was just one of many similar narratives I heard while in Elicura. Indeed, in rural Mapuche life, events that may be deemed ‘rationally unexplainable’, such as the appearance of witranalwe, occur quite frequently. Furthermore, most accounts of these events are treated as unquestionable, regardless of where and when they occurred. This, however, was not the case with Carolina’s story. Although some believed the story to be true, other people had their doubts. But these doubts, contrary to what one might expect, were often not directed at the experience itself: No one questioned the existence of witranalwes or the possibility of crossing paths with one. Rather, the scepticism centered on the person who claimed to have had the encounter. Put simply, what made the story questionable was that Carolina, the person who experienced it, was not Mapuche, but rather a chiñurra (‘non-Mapuche woman’).

In this paper, I attempt to follow recent arguments for the need to turn ethnography into an ontographic exercise (Holbraad, 2003, 2011). As I see it, this implies thinking of ethnography as an open-ended reconceptualization that aims not only to comprehend other people’s worlds, but also to pay special attention to the particular underpinnings sustaining those worlds (cf. Toren, 2006). My goal, therefore, is to explain why some Mapuche people questioned Carolina’s story, while others held it as indisputably true. In doing so, I intend to challenge the multiculturalist premises of Western thought, on the grounds that its presuppositions are ‘incompatible’ (Nadasdy, 2007) or ‘incommensurable’ (Povinelli, 2001) with those underpinning rural Mapuche epistemology.

Despite my best efforts, during my fieldwork I always struggled to believe in the fantastic beings and parallel realities often described by the inhabitants of Elicura. As time passed, I realized that this disbelief was not mine alone, but was also shared by several others across the valley. As a friend once told me, when trying to provide a plausible explanation: ‘The problem here is that people drink a lot [of alcohol]. That’s why they imagine and say weird, funny things’. In those days, I thought that anyone who did not share my disbelief was simply not questioning the veracity of the stories. However, after a few months it became clear that my assumption was mistaken. Indeed, the fact that someone did not share my doubts did not imply that they did not doubt. My error was in supposing that the only way to doubt was by focusing on the possible reality of these kinds of phenomena. To the contrary, scepticism towards the contents of narratives was rather common among the Mapuche whom I lived with. Nonetheless, they did not situate their scepticism in an external reality, but instead doubted whether each person really had experienced what he or she claimed. In short, to paraphrase Wagner’s (1981) famous depiction of his interaction with the Daribi, it was not that they did not doubt, but simply what was doubtful for them was not the same as what was doubtful for me.

In this article, I attempt to show that for many rural Mapuche people, the veracity of an experience does not depend upon how congruent and plausible it is with regards to a transcendent reality. Rather, it is something that lies in the very process of personal experience. ³ To comprehend this, it is crucial to understand that rural Mapuche people see experience as a strictly personal affair, one that is, by necessity, available only to the person who has lived it. At first glance, one would think that such a claim is nothing new, as it is widely accepted that experiences are self-referential and that ‘we can only experience our own life’ (Bruner, 1986: 5). Yet what I suggest here is that for rural Mapuche, there is nothing beyond the subjects themselves that influences personal experiences; that is to say, there is a lack of a supra-subjective continuity which would allow us to claim any a priori similitude between experiences lived by different persons. Although rural Mapuche people claim that experience is something personal, when they do so they are not assuming that this is because our individuality allows us a particular personal experience of one univocal reality (e.g. Keck, 1998). On the contrary, they are claiming that the very process of being-in-the-world, developed by each person, forms reality (Ingold, 2000: 99–100). This eventually implies a radically multivocal notion of reality, one that posits reality as something that is different for each specific person.

I will present my argument in three sections. Firstly, I will address why, from the standpoint of rural Mapuche philosophy, there is an inextricable link between personal experience and truth. Secondly, I will explore the social implications derived from this connection and how these are linked to a ‘doctrine of the opacity of other minds’ (Robbins, 2008; Robbins and Rumsey, 2008). Finally, I will discuss how rural Mapuche people think the truth of personal experiences can eventually be shared.

The truthfulness of personal experiences

As elsewhere in lowland South America (e.g. Gow, 1991), many rural Mapuche people are deeply concerned with determining a narrative’s source before it is told or listened to. Often, the narrator does this by directly stating whose experience the narrative depicts. If this is not possible, it is at least established who told the narrative to the current storyteller. This clarification, however, does not obviate the need for an ‘original source’, which is still referred back to, albeit sometimes only vaguely. Despite this, people generally confine themselves to narrating their own experiences. ⁴ The main concern behind knowing a narrative’s source is to make crystal clear which person actually lived each story. It appears that every possible detail one can provide about a narrative’s source is worth knowing. This is also true for accounts of experiences from the more distant, or even remote, past. In these cases, the empirical source identified is usually one of the storyteller’s ancestors (e.g. ‘My grandma said …’). When referring to a more distant experience, such as from ancient times, the source named is vaguer: ‘The ancient ones said …’ (‘Los antiguos decían …’).

Even though I heard Carolina’s story several times, I never had the chance to hear it from her own lips; it was always related to me by others, who carefully respected the ways in which Carolina had originally narrated the story. They were always emphatic in identifying Carolina as the person who had lived the experience that they were then recounting. They also maintained that a deep connection existed between the experience and the person who had lived it. Stories, apart from always being empirical descriptions, were inseparable from the persons who had lived them. This connection between narrative and experience was so deep that people frequently considered as worthless any narrative not rooted in an individual’s experience.

The link between personal experience and narrative is fundamentally connected to how rural Mapuche philosophy conceives of experience, namely as a personal and autonomous act. Rural Mapuche articulate this concept in a rather simple maxim: the only way to really know something is to experience that thing directly. ⁵ I think this premise, which I call the singularity of personal experience, is key in any attempt to understand rural Mapuche lived worlds, because through it one may appreciate why personal experiences for rural Mapuche people are (almost) always inherently truthful.

There were many instances in which people openly asserted the importance of the singularity of personal experience. Here I will describe the two most frequent examples. The first is related to the way the people whom I engaged with during my fieldwork were generally reluctant to give advice (ngülam), something which appeared to hold true even when they were directly asked for it. The invariable answer I received, when asking most of my friends for guidance, was: ‘I don’t know, you’re the only one who can know that’ (cf. Course, 2011). In this sense, one might say that the general reluctance to give advice among rural Mapuche people occurs primarily beyond the boundaries of the consanguineal kin-group (fundamentally agnatic kin), a group of people who are said to be of ‘common descent’ or, as in Elicura, of ‘the same blood’ (González Gálvez, 2012).

The second example relates to the deep respect people hold towards what others think, a respect that manifests most clearly in their tendency to avoid imposing on others opinions that they consider their own. This issue is related to the high value people place on personal autonomy (cf. Goulet, 1998; Stasch, 2009). This was most evident when I had a long conversation about ‘Mapuche traditions’ with Alberto, a respected elder renowned as one of the most knowledgeable residents of Elicura. In the midst of a long discussion, I asked him: ‘What if I tell you that I’m Mapuche?’ Alberto beamed at me and calmly said: ‘That would be ok; then you’re Mapuche’. At first, I thought he was joking, so I asked: ‘How can that be? If I say I’m Mapuche, am I really?’ Alberto answered: ‘Of course, what you think is what you think, and nobody can mess with that. Each person owns his thoughts’ (‘cada persona es dueña de su pensamiento’). Then he took a deep breath, and very succinctly, as if to end our conversation, said: ‘You may think whatever you want; it’s your business … but what I think is a completely different thing’.

Before discussing Alberto’s statement any further, I would like to clarify a few basic ideas about the concepts rural Mapuche use concerning experience and some related notions. It seems there is no equivalent term available in Chedungun (‘language of the people’) for ‘experience’, but people usually employed mongen (‘life’) when I asked for a translation of the Spanish word ‘experiencia’. Simply by living, by experiencing, Mapuche people acquire what they call kimün (‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’), which is something one accumulates personally. Eventually, this kimün informs and provides the raw material for each person’s rakiduam (‘thought’), which at the same time allows people to conduct themselves in their ways of living. There is thus a continuity from experience to thought, a relationship of mutual creation that ultimately allows each person to enjoy fully autonomous living, knowing and thinking.

Now, given this relationship of continuity between experience, knowledge and thought, in my view, when Alberto says ‘each person owns his thoughts’, he is summarizing the radical singularity that characterizes rural Mapuche epistemology. At the same time, he is explaining why knowing who the person is that lived through an experience is as important as knowing the narrative itself. What each person experiences is unique, and no other person can replicate it. This is a key aspect of the rural Mapuche understanding of knowledge as something which emerges from a distinctly singular and personal phenomenology. This is why personal experiences are beyond the realm of contradiction. Their truth is found in people’s singular experiences, not in the possibilities of a transcendent world where those experiences are embedded. ⁶

On the ubiquity of uncertainty

This section deals with how the singularity of personal experience presented above becomes a problem when entering into social relations, and addresses the ways in which rural Mapuche people tackle this problem. I have established that, for rural Mapuche, the truthfulness of experience is not something found ‘out there’ as a shared dimension which everybody might have the same access to. Experiential truth is not necessarily something that is shared; we have not the same, but rather equivalent and differential access to it. When it comes to prioritizing the ‘external environment’ as the location of experiential truth, the Mapuche respond by personalizing the process. And thus, eventually, we realize that ‘the truth of the matter is that the confusion is often ours: it is we who assume this image of a single, unified world, and not they’ (Overing, 1990: 605).

With this in mind, we can comprehend the problem that rural Mapuche people see as intrinsic to sociality. To put it simply, because rural Mapuche emphasize the singularity of personal experience, sharing such experiences necessarily conveys an inherent sense of uncertainty. This is because there is a clear distinction between an experience and its ‘expression’ (sensu Bruner, 1986), which affirms the idea that one can be sure only about what one has experienced personally. When it comes to the Mapuche then, we may attest that, to a certain extent, language and communication present a problem of authoritativeness (Hill and Irvine, 1993). The fact that personal experiences are always truthful and respond to a personal phenomenology does not guarantee a person’s ability to relate his or her experiences truthfully to others. Rural Mapuche people usually allude to this situation by questioning the real meaning of the messages that others deliver. By doing so, they articulate their ubiquitous two-forked scepticism. Firstly, how congruent is the relationship between a person’s experience and the language he or she uses to describe it? (cf. Course, 2013). Secondly, how close is this person’s experience to one’s own experience? (A question that more directly addresses the task of assessing to what extent any narrated experience is valid to oneself).

Lying, truth, and distance evaluation

When introducing Carolina’s story at the beginning of this essay, I pointed out the different kinds of doubts that it raised. I stressed the fact that I doubted something that was undeniable for many of my Mapuche friends. Whereas I was sceptical, my friends were acting on the awareness of something they knew simply because they engage in social life.

With this in mind, I now turn to address how rural Mapuche people, even when maintaining the singularity of personal experience, think personal truths can be effectively shared. To understand this, we should consider how, in rural Mapuche life, people conceive of similarity as being fundamentally subordinated to an open-ended creation, rather than something given, static and determined. In this sense, although some Mapuche recognize there are certain substances that allow pre-social similarity between people – usually understood through the idea of sharing ‘one same blood’ – they simultaneously emphasize that these alone are not sufficient for achieving close similarity. Instead, close similarity can only be reached by cultivating social relations, sharing environments, and, in particular, developing intimate and close social bonds within one’s home. ¹⁰ Close similarity is thus only recognized if created by carefully handling relatedness (González Gálvez, 2012). ¹¹

Here we may find the opacity doctrine’s limits among rural Mapuche. It also explains why advice is usually proffered only among close kin. Close kin, besides sharing similar substances, often share many of the different spheres of life. As a result, their personhood is similar. There is an ancient Mapuche proverb recorded by Tomas Guevara: Koila ngunen nieifui (‘Lying is astuteness’). In Guevara’s words, this phrase was employed because ‘according to Mapuche moral notions, lying is judged as a skill, as an art of deceiving the ones who are not relatives’ (1911: 20). Contrary to what Guevara thought, I believe this art of lying was not restricted to non-relatives for moral reasons. More simply, it was because lying to close kin – to the people with whom one shares substances, intimacy, and therefore experience – would be almost impossible.

Bearing in mind this conception of similarity, I will now attempt to introduce what I call the evaluation of the distances of experiential truth. Simply put, this is a process by which singular persons measure how similar they are to other singular persons, in order to know how valid their personal truths are to each other. To explore this subject, I will now revisit Carolina’s story.

When recounting Carolina’s story, I had mentioned a fact differentiating this narrative from the many similar stories told on a daily basis in Elicura, a fact which allowed people to call into question the story’s veracity. The problem was that Carolina, the story’s central character, was not Mapuche, but rather a chiñurra. A German settler’s descendant, Carolina moved to Elicura just a few years ago after developing a deep interest in what she thinks of as ‘Mapuche culture’. Since then, for instance, she and her husband acquired some traditional Mapuche clothes and wear them on a daily basis, unlike most Mapuche people, who usually reserve such attire for special occasions. Her obsession has elicited various reactions from the residents of Elicura. Many found it suspicious because they did not understand why Carolina and her husband put so much effort into being Mapuche. ‘They are always going to be Winka (‘non-Mapuche’), no matter what they do’, someone said. Others thought they were trying to obtain some of the benefits that the Chilean state grants to Mapuche people, intended as compensation for the historical bad treatment of indigenous peoples during their forced integration into the Chilean state (see Bengoa, 2004). There were others, nevertheless, who did not see anything strange in how the Winka couple acted, and they continued maintaining relationships with them.

Did this questioning of Carolina’s story have anything to do with the diverse reactions she and her husband provoked in Elicura? Yes, but perhaps not in the way one would imagine. Setting aside those people who, like me, doubted the existence of witranalwes, there were those who questioned the story because of the narrator’s ontological status. To them, witranalwe encounters only happen to Mapuche people. Furthermore, many asserted, these spirits had abandoned Elicura Valley a long time ago, precisely due to Winka intrusion. Thus, if they did decide to reappear, it would obviously not be to a chiñurra, but to a Mapuche.

But one could also find people who neither questioned the experience nor the person it involved. My friend Juana put it in the following terms: ‘People here in Elicura are quite awinkada (‘Winka-like’). Maybe that’s why they say it’s a lie [Carolina’s story]. But she seems to be much more Mapuche than many people who have Mapuche blood. Perhaps that’s why she can see those spirits.’

These different reactions to Carolina’s story show, firstly, that the possibilities of experience are directly linked to what one is. What one is, however, should not be understood as something already determined, but rather, as Juana points out, as something constantly created through conviviality (sensu Overing and Passes, 2000) and inhabiting the same environments with other people. Secondly, and related to this point, people value differently the relevance of substance in one’s singularity. While for some it is a determining component, for others it can be moulded and overcome by people’s social engagement. From there, thirdly, by sharing spheres of life, people may begin to create similitude, sharing in turn similar perspectives. It is from this premise that people can judge the distance between themselves and others. Indeed, by doing so, people can assess the distance between their own personhoods and those of others and, at the same time, assess how closely matched other people’s truths are with their own. Juana, like many others, claimed that Winka people were not capable of experiencing witranalwes. Nevertheless, paradoxically, she also asserted that it was perfectly possible for Carolina to have had the experience as she claimed. What happens is that Juana’s assessment of Carolina was not based on fixed substances but on the relationship she and Carolina maintained. It is this relationship that, according to Juana, had made Carolina, regardless of any substantial ontological barrier, become ‘a Mapuche’, a person similar to her.

Conclusion

‘Sharing a world’, wrote Pina-Cabral recently, ‘is an essential condition, not only for thinking and speaking, but also for interpreting, and thus it is an unavoidable condition of the ethnographic exercise’ (2011: 166). In line with the quotation from Foucault that I used to introduce this article, Pina-Cabral is supporting a principle of continuity that makes the anthropological enterprise possible. Without such continuity, there would be no way of approaching or understanding the other. In this paper, without denying the possibility of that continuity, I showed that for rural Mapuche people it should not be taken for granted, but rather thought of as being created through the establishment of social relations. ¹² That is the only way rural Mapuche people think it possible to struggle against what they see as our fate of singularity.

When rural Mapuche people conceive of experience’s truthfulness as something personal, truth is detached from any transcendent veil, and instead assumes a radical immanence. If, in Foucault, truth appears as something beyond persons and univocal, to which each person has the same access, for the rural Mapuche, who lack that principle, truth appears as something strictly personal, generally formed by multiple lines of ongoing personal experience. Importantly, these lines are not necessarily expected to converge. If that occurs, it would be due to an overlapping of experiences and/or persons (similitude of being), and not necessarily because there is something ‘out there’ allowing this to be the case.

To gain a deeper understanding of this premise, I drew on a Mapuche distinction between two senses of truth. On the one hand, we have a pre-social truth (re) that refers to how things ‘really’ are. On the other, we have a fully ‘social truth’ (mupin). This truth is the opposite of a lie (koyla), and is crucial to understanding why rural Mapuche social life is characterized by a ubiquitous uncertainty. In these terms, one pre-social truth would be, for instance, the premise of the singularity of personal experience. An example of a ‘social truth’ would be Carolina’s story. ‘Social truths’ refer to how, most of the time, it is impossible to really know the congruence between what other people say and what they think.

Finally, this whole exploration has led me to believe that in order to understand rural Mapuche concerns, it is first necessary to question our own premises. This issue requires us to be aware that our own ontology is not universal, but simply one possibility among many. That is why it is essential to stress that, as Viveiros de Castro (1998) would say, anthropology should not merely concern itself with how we see the same world differently. The rural Mapuche epistemology I attempt to introduce here is different from others not because it is another solution to the same old problem, but rather because it addresses a different problem altogether. Personal experience for rural Mapuche people is a defining process, one that is far from subjectivism and objectivism. It is, simply, the outcome of a conception of life that, with its own foundations, is radically respectful of the singularity and autonomy of persons.