The Kuel and Ceremonial Fields as Places of Patriotism and Patriarchy

Abstract

This chapter presents the broader theoretical and historical significance of the Araucanian polity. Unlike many regions of the Americas where indigenous groups experienced rapid and often drastic changes from contact with and occupation by European colonialism, the intrusion of the Spanish in south-central Chile led to the formation and growth of an ethnic polity or proto-state, one that lasted for nearly 350 years. Also presented is the formation of this polity in terms of the telescopic shift of the Araucanian’s patrilineal and patriarchical organization to higher levels of geo-political integration to form a formidable and lasting resistance to the Spanish empire.

Introduction

Unlike many regions of the Americas where indigenous groups experienced rapid and often drastic changes from contact with and occupation by European colonialism , the intrusion of the Spanish in south-central Chile led to the formation and growth of an ethnic polity or proto-state, one that lasted for nearly 350 years. In the Estado area, the rise of the polity was immediately followed by a rapid reconfiguration of social, political and economic relationships during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This response of the area’s population to European contact differs from that of the majority of other ethnic groups in the Americas (exceptions are the Pueblo of the American southwest and the Lacandon Maya of Yucatan) in that they were occupied and eventually incorporated into the Spanish empire. Instead, the Araucanian people simply shifted their patrilineal and patriarchical organization to higher levels of geopolitical integration to form a formidable and lasting resistance to the empire.

Identifying the Araucanian response to Spanish contact is fairly straightforward in the early written records. Although sparse, these records provide details on the intersocietal relationships between the Spanish and the Araucanians (e.g., Ercilla y Zúñiga 1982 [1569]; Góngora Marmolejo 1960 [1575]; Gónzalez de Nájera 1889 [1614] ; Mariño de Lobera 1960 [1580]; Olaverría 1852 [1594] ; Rosales 1989 [1674]; Valdivia 1887 [1606]) . How the Araucanian population reconstructed social and political relationships is not always easy to discern, however. Unlike other situations of contact, the transition from initial contact to organized resistance is marked by local centralization of political power at the lof and regua levels but regional noncentralization at the ayllaregua and butanmapu levels. I say noncentralization because centralized political power among the Araucanians at the territorial level seemingly never existed. However, the archaeological presence of a settlement hierarchy (e.g., mound complexes, small to large domestic sites, defensive locales, and agricultural sites) clearly indicates the continuation and teleoscopic enhancement of some formalized social and political inequality prior to and during the Hispanic period. Intergroup ceremonialism and ritual , as reflected by the large kuel mounds, rehuekuel complexes, and ceremonial fields , became even more important, as indicated by both the archival and archaeological records (Dillehay 2007). Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, mounds were fewer in number, smaller in size, and associated with smaller and less dense domestic sites and rehuekuel complexes. These sites probably represent small-to intermediate-level societies engaged in exchange systems and perhaps occasional conflict among themselves.

In this concluding chapter, I focus on the social, spatial and political dynamics that connected ceremonial fields and kuel as sacred sites with people, both leaders and their grassroots followers, and with the Araucanian polity, keeping in mind that these localities were strongly related to domestic and other sites. Most archaeological studies of ceremonial and monumental sites treat them as inanimate architectural objects that reflect administrative hierarchy, elaborate burial of elites, extractive political economies, epiphenomenal ideological expressions, and so forth (e.g., Bradley 2000; Burger and Rossignol 2012; Milner 2005; Scarre 2002; Thomas 1998; Trigger 1990). As I argued previously (Dillehay 1986, 1990, 1992, 1999, 2003, 2007), the Araucanian monuments are considered to have been (and still are in a few Mapuche communities) animated beings like humans that have kinship relations among them and with living people and their ancestors . Like humans, kuel pray, contest, fear, and feel. However, unlike humans, they can communicate and transpose themselves from the living world to the sacred upper Wenumapu world. Kuel have feelings, thoughts, lives, and needs, including nourishment and care by the human communities living around and interacting with them. Even more significant is that these places are the conduits through which the living human population interacts and communicates with the Wenumapu world. These places register and sustain identity , memory and agency , which also is the case in many other regions of the Andes.

More specifically, to the modern-day Mapuche in the Butarincon area of the Purén and Lumaco Valley, kuel mounds are considered to be kinsmen that have specific life histories and that house the spirits of important deities , ancestors and shamans. In order to know how to interact with, read and communicate with kuel and to respect their life histories, people must be “mound literate” (or nauchi in the Mapuche language) , meaning they must know how to converse with and understand kuel. That is, people must respect and accept kuel and rehuekuel as members of a vertically and horizontally layered patrilineal network of social relations between the living, the mounds, and the ancestors and deities. This network is defined metaphorically by a proliferating kinship network of son–daughter and brother–sister mounds through which history is continually made, recorded, and perpetuated across the landscape of the living. Today, participation in public ceremonies (i.e., nguillatun, rucatun, coyantun) rekindles this network and provides solace and tranquility to the linkages among all participants. Ceremony is a concept and an activity that unites kuel and rehuekuel (and in the past the lof and regua or patrilineages comprising the ayllaregua) into a dynamic system of human interaction with history and sacred spaces across the landscape. These spaces, as represented by the kuel and nguillatun ceremonial fields , were and still are symbolically interactive, socially integrative in terms of real and fictive kinship structures, topographically bounded, and experientially holistic and meaningful (Dillehay 2007). However, the existence of kuel and the ceremonial fields was and is much more than just symbolic landscape and genealogical history. Their essence is not only both social and religious but also physical and cosmological. In short, kuel and ceremonial fields have their own personhood much like humans; they have names, locations and histories; and they have individual and collective rights , duties , and responsibilities similar to humans. These are some of the elements that make the Araucanian/Mapuche culture Andean in nature (Dillehay 2007). Others relate to basic religious, symbolic, and organizational structures (see Dillehay 2007).

What are these rights and duties? How did they relate to resisting or warring Araucanian populations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how can we infer the meaning of these issues within the broader context of the historical and archaeological records? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this chapter in an attempt to better connect the archaeological record to the known circumstances of the historical archives and to the inferred patriarchical social and political organization of the early Hispanic period Araucanian society. There are no known archival records that directly address the duties and rights of kuel and other sacred places of the Araucanian society, and it is obvious that archaeology cannot easily identify these kinds of attributes in the material record. Oral ethnography and history, however, can and has done this for the Mapuche residing in the Purén and Lumaco Valley today, as revealed through detailed shamanic rituals that I recorded previously at actively used kuel and nguillatun sites, in addition to numerous interviews with elders from several lof communities. Given the care and aesthetic architectural details of the kuel in this valley, it is obvious that these places had and still have great social, ideological and historical meaning to the local population. Along these lines, I draw on the present-day thoughts, feelings, memories and identities that local machi shamans and others have of these places to further infer, even speculate, on the broader role of kuel and ceremonial fields during the period of study here.

Presented below is a brief example of the ritual dialogues of machi who administer public ceremony at two actively used kuel in ceremonial fields in the Purén and Lumaco Valley. These dialogues reveal the special linkage between the living and the dead, the meaning of the kuel to the people today, and the rights and duties of the people and kuel towards each other.

Kuel are our brothers and sisters, they helped us and protected us in the past. They are important places that keep the spirits of the machi and they give us access to the deities Chau Chau and Pillan in the Wenumapu. The kuel know our history and remind us of it. They must be respected and given offerings of chicha, food, care, respect, and prayer. If not, then they become upset, sick and uncooperative, and they stop advising and protecting us. It is for this reason that the machi must work with the people to make the kuel feel wanted and respected. This is our duty to do this and these are the rights of the kuel, for us to do this for them. In turn, they have the responsibility to protect us and to give us advice. This is our right. But also, the kuel have their places of residence, their ñichi and the nguillatun fields where the lof come together to worship and to build community of differences (machi Lucinda and Juanita, Butarincon and Rucalleco, 2001 and 2010) .

The premise of public ceremony at and with kuel addresses both the needs of the Araucanians in the past and the Mapuche in the present to impose a social and cosmological order on patriarchical lof communities and also a unified understanding of what was partial and invariably fragmented in the early Hispanic period—the indigenous population at large. The archaeological and historical context in which the patriarchical model proves particularly illuminating is in the understanding of the sociopolitical organization, kinship structure, and order of public ceremony at kuel and ceremonial fields and their role in acting as nodes of intergroup cohesiveness during the course of the Arauco War. The intent was social continuity and political stability materialized primarily through the setting of the built monumental environment of kuel and fields within the Purén and Lumaco Valley and secondarily through the repeated use and rebuilding of domestic spaces in closely defined locations near these places. As material signatures upon the landscape , the kuel (and rehuekuel) and the fields reflect how and why greater continuity of and attachment to these places were achieved and remembered. This continuum still exists today both materially and symbolically between the individual family rucas and hearths in the kuel and the fields as places of spiritual residence and exchange and the individual family rucas or houses in the lof communities (see Chapters 4 and 5).

The materiality and permanence of the physical location of the kuel, fields, and community lands belie a fluidity in local household and lof composition and continuity. The physical ruca itself within both the fields and the living communities, along with the patrilineage names, origin stories, and ancestral memory attached to both places, provides a historical stability that cloaked and facilitated the social and economic mobility of fragmented groups in the past and their incorporation into local communities and their ceremonies. It is in the juxtaposition of social, economic, and ceremonial mobility, often with permanent location but impermanent community and kinship identity due to mobility that the unique character of social flexibility of the Araucanian society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emerged. Thus, mobility and flexibility within public ceremonialism and the patrilineal community structure was at the heart of what partially made the Araucanian society public and resilient. It is for these reasons that kuel, rehuekuel and ceremonial fields dominated and, in a few communities, still dominate the social and historical landscape of Purén and Lumaco. During the war years, the temporal and spatial replication of these single but united forms of kuel and ceremonial fields, were the manifestation of an ethos of patrilineal communities made up of both kinsmen and nonkinsmen individuals. These places thus signified the intergenerational aspect of each patrilineal community as well as expressed claims for patriarchical continuity and increased political order across a wider territory. (Even during the reduccion period of the terminal twentieth century and the twenty-first centuries, when lofs and communities continued to be fragmented due to political and demographic shifts, real and fictive kinsmen still united through public ceremony. Today, due to increased shifts resulting from governmental land purchases for the Mapuche, fragmented groups still move into and become attached to other, usually more stable, ordered communities by participating in traditional ceremonies or by joining evangelical churches, where the latter exist in acculturated areas.)

The Need and Condition for Order

Notions of the Araucanian’s need for an increased social, political, and domestic order organized around household, community, and public ceremonial remind me of aspects of Hodder’s (1999) conceptualization of the European Neolithic domus, which he employs as a conceptual metaphor for the “domestication of society.” Domus is the organizing place and concept that defined the Neolithic household, the family, the domestication of plants, animals, and the people living in and interacting with it. Hodder views the undomesticated, the natural or untamed, being controlled and processed through its involvement in the practice and place of activity in and around the domus. (This is similar to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, whereby practice organizes and influences the material and nonmaterial world.).

The key to understanding Hodder’s model is the notion of giving more order to the natural, cultural, and social worlds. This is done by increasing the control and organization of domestic sites by moving towards sedentism (for the Neolithic period) and by planning the layout of public and private spaces in communities. Planned communities are especially important because they reflect the voluntary agreement of people to live permanently in larger and more ordered communities. This requires “some degree of social constraint” by people and an “ideology and practice of the domus which is used to create stable, aggregated and long-lived social units” (Hodder 1999, p. 34) . As a result, families and households become more subjugated to these conditions and places, and this fosters more and larger communities and eventually centralized political control and, I would add, “governmentality” (sensu Foucault 1990; see Chapter 2). Hodder further believes that by rendering to this process and by “sacrificing the needs of small units to larger ones,” the eventual outcome is the development of a “social will to sedentism” and order (in Hodder’s case but an ordered intercommunity polity in the Araucanian case). Of equal importance for Hodder’s model are the social codes, rights and duties , and spatial boundaries that define differences between insiders and outsiders forming this collective action. That is, a more ordered spatial, architectural, and social environment leads to greater complexity, continuity, solidarity, and stability, as postulated by Hodder for the European Neolithic period and as I surmise for the Araucanian case.

Hodder’s wider implication is that society gives up something for security and order at a higher and larger level, and this, in turn, brings with it both rights for and duties of the members as well. Whether we agree with all aspects of the model or not, its implication is the connection between socially constituted and ordered environments and the potential for greater control, security, and goal obtainment through the construction of larger, more organized social and spatial units. His model focused on the Neolithic tomb as an extension of the house and revealed a continuum of the conceptual role of the house or domus in all aspects and levels of the wider or public society. In a somewhat similar vein, the Araucanian household or ruca was and is similar in representing the family and lof levels in public ritual and, by extension, the public ceremonies that entailed generations of kin-related kuel, ceremonial fields , and kinship layers, and the rights and duties associated with them, especially in times of stress, when more order and security were needed across communities as they resisted the Spanish invasion.

To continue these themes, presented below is a discourse on the meaning and role of the rights and duties as inferred from the chroniclers and ethnography, with the intent of providing the setting and condition within which kuel and ceremonial fields were used and had rights and duties. It is in this setting that we also can further infer the meaning and patterning of the materiality of these places, and how they fitted into the historical conditions of polity formation. This discussion also brings forward the conditions of these times to the present day, as the Mapuche still undergo political struggles in Chile (Dillehay 2003; Dillehay and Saavedra 2013; Dillehay and Rothhammer 2013).

Rights and Duties of Kinsmen, Kuel, and Ceremonial Fields

How did social and religious linkages between different households and communities help foster the formation of the Araucanian polity and how and why were the duties and rights of people, kuel, and ceremonial fields articulated? Public ceremonies such as coyantuns, nguillatuns, cahuins, and others were the places of a religiopolitical organization at all levels of the patrilineal society from the domestic household and lof to ayllaregua ceremonial spaces. They physically and organizationally enabled the recruitment and incorporation of outsiders and the social formation of compatriots as rights-claimants within warring communities (capable of being subjected or governed). I believe that the kuel and ceremonial field as the major public sites of religiopolitical organization is key to understanding the formation of the kind of subject that was a kinsman (fictive or not, the geographically wider kuga kin system; see Chapters 1–2) and a compatriot. The kuel and field also were the sites through which both the domestic and public lives of people were coalesced, organized, assembled, and rendered meaningful. Public ceremony also was the place through which socialization of old and new groups into local cohesive communities took place. I am using the term “through which” rather than “where” to indicate that the conception of the ceremony as the place of the religiopolitical does not only refer to its actual form with spatially enclosed structures such as the kuel mounds , rehuekuel complexes and the nguillatun fields but also includes its virtual form as kinship relations, symbols , imaginaries, material representations, categories, and ideas. That is, the ceremony was not a just a spatial container in which social relations happened. The ceremony also was a place through which social, religious, and political relations were produced, reproduced, and transformed, as evidenced by ethnographic research (Dillehay 2007) and the chroniclers (see Chapters 1 and 2; Dillehay 2007; Dillehay and Zavala 2013) . The significance of public ceremony as a place and activity of political solidarity especially has been repeatedly recognized and emphasized by all chroniclers and historians over the past four centuries (e.g., de Góngora Marmolejo 1990 [1575]; Mariño de Lobera 1960 [1580]; Olaverría 1852 [1594]; Rosales 1987 [1674]; Valdivia 1955 [1555] ; Vivar 1979 [1558]; Goicovich 2002, 2003; Bengoa 200; Boccara 1999, 2000, 2007; Dillehay and Zavala 2013; Leiva 1977; Zapater 1973; Zavala 2000, 2011; Zavala and Dillehay 2010) .

It is this relationship between the living lof communities and the deities and ancestors that entailed certain rights and duties of the kuel, the ceremonial fields, and the kinsmen, as revealed in the above statements by shamans from Butarincon and Rucalleco. To reiterate, just as people have a kinship status and have rights and duties as members of the community, the kuel mounds and fields also acquired a kinship status with duties and rights. It is this status that the status of the people who belonged to and resided near the kuel and fields were largely derived. What were the rights of the common or subject people? As discussed in previous chapters, they were and still are reciprocity and political obligation , access to public ceremony, rights to claim compensation, and rights to join other perhaps more stable residential groups via the kuga or other social networks (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, rights of the kuel and fields were to receive offerings, to be considered kin, to be maintained, and to be respected. The rights of the kuel and fields as sovereign, authentic and living entities conferred upon those who belonged to them, rights that otherwise they might not have accrued as individuals acting outside of the public ceremonial context. This principle of the rights of the kuel and fields is obvious in the narratives of the shamans performing healing and other rituals at kuel in the Purén and Lumaco Valley (see Dillehay 2007).

To provide a specific example of these rights and duties for both kuel and people, in 2001, one mound near Purén, Hualonkokuel (Fig. 11.1), was sick and had turned against the local community for not giving it offerings, prayers, respect, and medicine. A local machi was required to perform a healing ceremony to cure the sick kuel and to mend relations between it and the local community. The machi enacted a lengthy ritual narrative as part of her healing ceremony at the mound in the presence of the community (Dillehay 2007). Four pervading themes ordered the narrative. First, the shaman had been commissioned by the people to heal the sick Hualonkokuel. Second, the kuel was sick and had turned bad, failing to give the community advice and to bring good omens. It deliberately failed its duty, because people had neglected their religious duties and offerings to it; they had not been staging ceremonies with it, not offering it chicha, food and gold, and not recognizing its powers and its kin relations to them and to the ancestral Wenumapu world above. It was the duty of the people to do these things before and for the kuel in public ceremony. Third, the kuel was perceived as a living force and a kinsman—it prays, contests, fears, and feels, and also has its own rights and duties. However, unlike humans, it communicates and transposes itself from one world to another like the machi administering the ceremony. It also has multiple histories and multiple identities—it can even transform itself into a machi, which in turn, can transform herself into a kuel. The interchangeable gender identities between the machi shaman , her kindred spirit (fileu pullu), and the kuel are obvious throughout the healing narrative (see Dillehay 2007). The kuel and the Hualonko ceremonial field where it is located thus emerged as those spaces where loyalty, virtue, patriotism , respect, duties, and the discipline and order of community members were cultivated with the appropriate measure of the rights of the kuel.

Fig. 11.1

General view of Hualonkokuel mound, shaman’s rehue pole and rucas and the nguillatun field.

In much of their history, fields and mounds were articulated as belonging to the deities and ancestors and religiopolitical rights that derived from that belonging. In other words, the rights and duties of kinsmen who belonged to the kuel or fields were derived from the rights and duties of the kuel themselves which in turn, were derived from the deities and ancestors above. The difference between rights of the fields and kuel (involving attributes of tribute, loyalty, virtue, ancestral history, offerings, physical maintenance, mutual discourse, discipline, and prayer) and rights to the field (involving attributes of praying, public worship, knowledge, security, living history, and ancestral support) is key to understanding the fields and kuel as the sites that enabled the political formation of compatriots as rights-claimants during the early Hispanic period and even today as the Mapuche struggle with rights in the Chilean nation-state (Dillehay 2013; Dillehay and Rothhammer 2013).

Community autonomy, appropriation, difference, and security remain essential attributes of the rights to the fields even today. Yet, these attributes are not necessarily harmonious attributes. They engender tensions, as revealed in the ritual narratives (Dillehay 2007), and are the essence of the difference between rights of the fields and rights to the fields. The articulation and claiming of rights of the fields and rights to the fields also demanded different ceremonial practices. While rights of the fields essentially revolved around genealogical rights and historical attachment to the local landscape , rights to the fields involved religious and political rights and changes in residence and kinship affiliation. The kuel and fields thus were the sites of religiopolitical cohesiveness in this precise sense, both enabling the formation of old and new community members as claimants of rights that were not necessarily restricted to the rights of the fields and of making use of rights that originated from the fields regardless of their kinship affinity. The fields as the sites of the religiopolitical thus combined two distinct but related set of rights. This is a fundamental difference that enables us to see how the struggles for retribution, recognition, reciprocity , and obligation (which were the foundations of patriotism as claims to justice and survivability; see Chapter 2) were linked across the changing landscape of political resistance and took shape through the articulations of these rights and duties within the polity.

It is recognized that archaeologists dealing strictly with the materiality of these kinds of social relations, places, and monuments will have a difficult time accepting these assertions and interpretations because the material correlates are not vividly present in this study. However, we know from the archives and from oral traditions that these linkages and conditions existed during the war years, and we are obligated to study them and to attempt to infer their meaning regardless of the level of ethnographic extrapolation and the nearly invisible material record involved here. As mentioned above, it is granted that much of this is speculation and the wider and deeper meaning of these issues were likely somewhat different in the past, but the fact that the shamans in ritual discourse today still allude to the past times of warfare and address the grievances, duties, and rights of both the people and the kuel, indicates the memory , continued agency , and identity of the places and events with the historical past. Today, local informants report that the function and meaning of the kuel and ceremonial fields still facilitate and obligate opposing yet complementary sets of lof and invited outsiders seated in the rucas of the fields to gaze at one another, to share food, experience and knowledge across the open space of the U-shaped fields. People meet in the common space of the field between the rucas at the llangi llangi altar, which symbolizes the integration of related yet different groups participating across the landscape , as they give offerings, prayers and, above all, foster intergroup solidarity via the kuel and the dialogue of the shamans with the deities and ancestors above.

In the historic past, the affiliation and security that newly incorporated fragmented outsiders sought through participation in public ceremony must have threatened the appropriations of already formed or stable lof groups who received these outsiders. Despite any familiarity the outsiders may have had with the local material record, daily practices, and ceremonial beliefs, the valorization of any difference and diversity in communities formed by locals and outsiders probably sometimes resulted in increased tensions around security and access to local resources (see Chapters 2 and 3). It is through these tensions that the fields and the kuel probably became sites of social power and more struggles whose aims became articulating the rights of the outsiders to these places. Understanding the religiopolitical roles of the kuel and fields at any given historic moment thus involves an attempt to grasp the seemingly infinite multiple instances of inter-community fractures that might have been opened by these. These kinds of tensions must also have been some of the conditions of polity building during the time of war and conflict .

In the end, the kuel and fields helped to produce both local and outsider compatriots as rights-claimants. These rights would have defined local membership, which was likely bounded by, contained in, and expressed through a wider kuga—like territorial kinship jurisdiction. In turn, these rights must have defined translocal membership across nearly all communities, which due to the conditions of warfare with the Spanish, had to have been unbounded, unbundled, and extraterritorial. These themes of the rights of the kuel and fields and rights to the fields were probably neither complementary but often-conflictual “elements” that made the kuel and fields the important religiopolitical sites that they were and still are in a few communities. Today, those lof still involved in the politics of and policy towards the nguillatun fields practically and intuitively understand these tensions and know how to work through them.

In summary, by considering the coyantun, nguillatun , cahuin , and borrachera public gatherings at past and present kuel and ceremonial fields as the primary sites of polity formation, I have aimed to argue that participation in public ceremony by both insiders and outsiders at kuel and in the fields was fundamental in recasting not only the religiopolitical but also the social in lof (and regua) kinship networks as these basic social units developed into the larger ayllaregua and butanmapu levels. If the fields and kuel were indeed the primary sites through which all kinsmen’s lives hung together and higher levels of political organization were reached, the coexistence and codependence that this implies belied any demands being geographicallyand patrilineage-specific. They were social demands, arising from social situations of patriotism and producing social consequences of reciprocity and political obligation . These situations and consequences were inherently translocal and certainly had to have overflowed the local patrilineal boundaries that were set up to contain them, thus eventually allowing the formation of the larger-scale ayllaregua and butanmapu levels of organization.

Furthermore, I have already suggested that polity formation was social, religious, and kin-related before it was political during the Arauco War. Patriotism was social in the deep sense of that term as involving a way of coexisting and cosurviving that was inextricably kin codependent. If the kuel and ceremonial fields were the sites of the religiopolitical then public ceremony and patriotism were strongly related and this is more than just a historical contingency. I have also suggested that the mounds and fields were sites of social works insofar as they enabled the social formation of rights-claimants, the kuel, and the people, both capable of articulating entitlements, retributions, and demands. Yet, patriotism also involved duties . The themes of the rights of the fields and rights to the field then were and are essential elements of these places as the central spatial and material nodes of the religious and political obligation between leaders and the social reciprocity between patrilineage members during times of stress.

Last, it also is through the kuel and fields that individual leaders ontologically and publicly became obligatory and reciprocal (understanding individual and lof communities as codependent entities existing with others), and became religiopolitical because the fields were the grounds on which civic, social, and political rights became possible. As argued in Chapter 1, leadership was thus compositive and assimilative, given to combining many different groups and institutions rather than accumulative, the latter in terms of gaining wealth and status by controlling a prestige economy. Since codependence between leaders and communities both presupposed and engendered political solidarity as well as conflict and competition, questions of justice were inherent in a patriotic existence as revealed by the women demanding retribution from leaders for the loss of their husbands during the war (see Chapter 2).

From Domestic to Public: Teleoscopic Extension of the Patrilineal Family to the Lof Community to the Patriarchical Polity

It should be recalled that several chroniclers and historians refer to the absence of an Araucanian centralized political authority in late pre-Hispanic and early Hispanic times, although they do recognize the development of the more politically complex ayllaregua and butanmapu organizations as well as the Estado. Boccara attributes the development of this authority to responsive transformations towards a new ethnicity made by the Araucanians in times of war with the Spanish (see Chapters 2 and 4). He also recognizes the influence of a priori indigenous political structures in these transformations.

Like many of the populations encountered by the conquistadors at the frontiers of the great Inca and Mexica empires, and in Amazonia, the reche [the earliest term applied by the Spanish to the Indians living in the Araucania] were considered a people “without King, without faith, without law.” The term used repeatedly to describe the organization of those groups located on the southern frontier of Tawantinsuyu was behetria [meaning a free settlement whose occupants had the right to elect their own leader]. The principal characteristic of the settlement pattern of these groups was dispersal; their sociopolitical organization was acephalous, that is, characterized by the absence of obedience to a political figure, a chief, who had the means to exercise his authority (Boccara 1999, p. 427).

One of the noteworthy changes in reche sociopolitical and territorial structure [as a result of contact with the Spanish] was precisely the institutionalization of the ayllarehue and the futamapu, which from temporary units in prehispanic times became permanent political associations in the late colonial system with their own political representatives…Thus, the war of resistance brought with it the fundamental transformation of society, it was essentially a vector of acculturation (Boccara 1999, p. 434) .

In regard to Boccara’s notions of a transformed society and a new ethnicity (or as he called it, etnogenesis, in his publication of 2000), he did not have access to the current archaeological record, and even if he did, he likely would still refer to these changes as part of an ethnogenesis. However, I disagree with this idea and simply view these transformations as representing an ethnomorphosis rather than an ethnogenesis, that is, a change from one state of ethnicity to another. Most of these changes occurred politically, socially, and demographically in the region of the Estado and later in other regions. I oppose Bocarra’s idea because an Araucanian ethnicity already existed at the time of the arrival of the Spanish; afterwards, it simply intensified and changed into a more formal and politically and materially (archaeologically) visible entity. In the case of the written records generalized by Boccara, they are somewhat incomplete and overgeneralized, in my opinion, with respect to the acephalous nature of the late pre-Hispanic Araucanian society, because formal leaders had to have existed to organize the corporate labor necessary for public projects (e.g., rehuekuel, canals, and raised agricultural fields; see Dillehay 2007; Dillehay and Saavedra 2010). Furthermore, many of the chroniclers writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were often too myopic in their vision of the Araucanians, which has led many recent historians, over relying on the early archives, to be misled somewhat. What are the reasons for this? I suspect that many chroniclers had experiences in limited geographic areas of the Araucania, were basing their opinions primarily on the northern Araucanians in central Chile who were occupied by both the Inca and the later the Spanish, or visiting areas where there was indeed little to no formal political development (see Chapters 4 and 5). Although many of the more reliable chroniclers were in the Purén region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and observed many cultural practices there, they failed to describe the religious and political importance of the kuel and rehuekuel . Exceptions are Pineda y Bascuñán ([1673] 2003) who refer briefly to earth mounds over the tombs of leaders and Quiroga (1979 [1690]) who noted that upon entering the Valley of Lumaco from the north (Angol), he could see the “oraculos” of the Indians. He was referring to the kuel complexes at Butarincon, which still can be seen when entering the valley from the pass to Sauces to the north (Fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

View of the “oraculos de los indios” mentioned by chroniclers upon entering the valley from the north (arrows point to kuel).

Boccara also comments on the theme of political obligation and the recruitment , inculcation, and socialization of new members brought into the obligatory order of the butanmapu organization in the early 1700s.

We see here that the formation of this new macroregional sociopolitical entity [futumapu or butanmapu] was accompanied by the upswelling of a new sentiment of identity which transcended the simple local group formerly constituted by the rehue [regua, patrilineage]…we offer an example of how colonial institution or colonial power structure (the general assembly) could influence both political practice and indigenous awareness…At a purely formal level, holding regular assembly [coyan] required each group to elect individuals to represent it outside the community. Moreover, each futamapu [butanmapu] had to elect only one representative, which contributed still further to the concentration of political power and to the dynamic of the delegation of power. The assemblies became a political meeting obligatory for all the caciques of the Araucania…the different groups which participated in the general assembly were classified and distributed in space in a rigid fashion, thus creating among the Mapuche a vision of their sociopolitical space. Each futamapu was assigned its own place [in the assembly] and the groups [ayllareguas] called unaffiliated were necessarily integrated into this new representation and organization of space. Each one of the indigenous representatives had to find his place [within the ceremonial field] and remain within it. The elaboration of a political space ordered by clearly delimited districts was concomitant with the inculcation of cognitive structures and the diffusion of a legal-political norm without which all harmony between the objective order of things and the subjective order of consciousness would have been impossible (Boccara 1999, pp. 458–460).

Boccara refers to the ordered obligatory spaces of public ceremony in reliopolitical ceremonial fields such as the coyantun, the nguillatun , and others (see Chapter 2). In essence, he and other authors (cf., Bengoa 2003; Zavala 2008; Goicovich 2003; Barros Arana 1884) address issues of social structure and governmentality. Over time and with population growth and renewed political development, the Araucanians eventually honed the “art of government” (Foucault 1991) into the more specific and higher levels of the ayllaregua and butanmapu structures. This organization primarily identified with a complex of institutions, prevailing philosophies, traditional codes of conduct and belief (admapu) , rights and duties , and tactics that an effective pan-Araucanian government developed (cf., Bengoa 2003; Zavala 2008). This in turn allowed it to administer the warring populations at large and build a more secure political economy that catered both to the perpetuation of the government and to the welfare, security, and satisfaction of the governed. It is assumed that as the polity government evolved from local lof and regua patriarchies led by patrilineage leaders to the administrative patriarchy of the developed butanmapu and higher level meli-butanmapu, it developed this complex of faculties as a response to the growing needs and expectations of the governed during the war years. Ayllaregua and butanmapu were thus not only expository and compulsory organizations but also strategies. As this ensemble of four domains of the Estado was a need-based strategy itself and as leaders of the Estado understood needs within their own independent logic, an effective government utilized the web of faculties and ideas it developed to condition the warring population to act in ways conducive to the perpetuation of patriarchical political organization and to the needs of the governed.

Both the ayllaregua and butanmapu thus precipitated the constant transformative development of the understanding of the wider political environment of the war as constructed by governmentally created religiopolitical power and indigenous knowledge systems as manifested through public ceremony and the infrastructure of the war machine. Practically, this meant that in the same way these organizations allowed war leaders to manipulate considerations of political issues, people facilitated specific conceptions of issues through a combination of experience and response, which generated certain moral, patriotic, social, and political responses. Effective local and regional government via the lof to butanmapu network, then, created self-regulating, local to regional leaders who preserved a cycle of political discourse with particular premeditated attitudes with which the polity wide philosophy was eventually permeated (see Bengoa 2003; Zavala 2008; Dillehay and Zavala 2013) . Not known are the details of how families, sub-lineages, lofs and reguas were transformed socially and economically to compose higher levels of religiopolitical community organization, although this transformation is statically visible in the archaeological record and described in the archives.

Reflections on the political security of communities thus reveals not only the ways in which Araucanian patriotism developed and the need, therefore, to centralize thinking around the new ethnicity (sensu Boccara) and ethos of the polity , but also the need to critically investigate the conceptualization of the polity as the container of the religiopolitical. Thus far I have referred to the way patriotism increasingly or telescopically involved new and higher levels of configurations of power and collaborations of inter- and intra-patrilineage governing. This included the harmonization of alliances among indios amigos in the north along the BioBio River, the shift of local power to larger and more powerful regional actors like the ayllaregua organizations, and finally, a shift towards governing through broader arrangements like butanmapus that controlled and disciplined at the site of the individual regions. I also have argued that, taken together, these changes in governing suggest that ethnicity, patriotism, and polity were becoming a regionalizing regime of the Araucanian political organization (see Leiva 1977) .

The first insight that emerges from these considerations is that the security of patriotism towards the war effort did not necessarily lead to the reentrenchment of traditional notions of strong local leaders and polity-based notions of widespread security. Rather, security processes actually helped to transform patriotism into a regionalizing regime of government by enabling new inter-patrilineage relationships, involving a range of different groups and locations within, between, and across various lof and regua patrilineal territories. The second insight that emerges is from a regionalizing regime of patriotism that must be understood not just in terms of unified polity patrilineal territories but through the interregional flows of safe spaces or refugio communities as an integral part of a regional order and polity development under these conditions. From an archaeological perspective, the mixtures of different ceramic styles and paste types at sites and the standardization of sediments in the upper levels of mounds in the valley during the early Hispanic period is a result of this interregional flow of different people (fragmented groups or outsiders) into and across different local domestic and public or ceremonial spaces, as argued for the Purén and Lumaco Valley. By considering the governing practices of these flows, a more complex picture of Araucanian politics emerges than the one we are more familiar with, which is a vision of religiopolitics based on interactions between contiguous, spatially separate, and territorially bounded lofs, reguas, and ayllareguas. This more complex view suggests that if we want to understand how ethnicity , patriotism, and community membership within the forming polity was changing, and the new developments in governing and forms of politics that they engendered, we need to think of patrilineages in terms of overlapping, interpenetrating, and intermingling spaces. Or in terms of “space as flows,” as the geographer Massey (1994, p. 5) puts it, that are created out of, or by, these very governing practices themselves. From this perspective, patriotism is more than the condition and institution of Araucanian ethnic rights and membership located within a bounded, separate container of ethnic space that we call the Estado or polity. Patriotism was a regime of practices enabling the recruitment and governing of individuals, groups, and populations that created a resisting polity space, and not as a bounded territorial container but as an assemblage of overlapping patrilineal governing relations involving a range of actors and forms of political relations, knowledge, and powers from the local lof community to the interregional butanmapu level. This was the Araucanian polity.

The Teleoscopic Polity: Reciprocity and Obligation

The inquiry of this study into the coalescence of a teleoscopic formation from lof to the interregional butanmapu has concentrated on three interrelated factors: (1) the coalescence of a notion of patriarchical family and community interests and political security; (2) the elaboration of an interior religious, ceremonial and ethnic conscience (a public ceremonial community); and (3) the topographical location of ceremonies (e.g., cahuin, coyan, nguillatun) in key places (kuel, rehuekuel) , the primary archaeological sites under study here. All of these factors involved the constitution of the categories of “obligation” and “reciprocity” over and against each other; both must have displayed the tendency to replicate teleoscopically from the local realm of the family household to the wider society and vice versa in order to have facilitated ongoing intergroup cohesion. I argue that this type of teleoscopic growth and integration facilitated resistance to the Spanish and the resilient mobility, coordination and incorporation of fragmented groups across the countryside.

What were the social conditions that related to these changes in the relationship between leaders, kinsmen, and nonkinsmen as these developments took place? One way to perceive this question is through the notion that obligation was deeply embedded in a religious, political, social, and cultural matrix of practices whose guidance suffused daily experience and encouraged reciprocal relations on the local social and economic levels. The early war experience was an explicit and self-conscious awareness, characterized not so much by the way it saturated people’s social practices but by the way it satisfied the canons of Araucanian epistemology (admapu) , which imposed on political obligation the test of self-justifying self-sufficiency, a test that must have been presented numerous times to leaders and their patrilineage followers whether to engage in warfare , disengage and act neutral, or join the Spanish (cf., Bengoa 2003; Zavala 2008; Faron 1962, 1964; Guevara 1913; Latcham 1924; Medina 1952; Silva 1983; Villalobos et al. 1982; Villalobos 1995) .

Because of these and other developments, the management of the patrilineal family and household and of the household economy of the lof communities had to be transformed into a model for the management of the greater regua and ayllaregua communities—that is, for the political economy and infrastructure of the war—whose implications and scale of operation were different from those of the analogy between the family and the lof community levels. A number of factors were probably involved in this process. In the pre-contact era, food production was organized around the household and the lof through mingaco labor reciprocity (Zapater 1973, 1992) . With intensive agriculture of the wartime, the mingaco of economic production was extended from the private household and lof levels and undertaken for the public regua and ayllaregua levels, as was the case in the domain of Tucapel, which produced food for and with the Purén domain (see Chapters 2 and 3). At the same time, the function of the household was greatly altered and augmented as a contributor not only of food for subsistence and public ceremony but also of goods and warriors (see Bengoa 2003; Martín García de Loyola (1598)) . This increased responsibility of and engagement in food production, defense, and large-scale public ceremony is clearly manifested in the archaeological record of these domains, as evidenced by the presence of the raised agricultural fields, the terraces, canals and fortresses, ceremonial fields, and rehuekuel complexes, respectively.

In the foregoing, we can observe three principles in operation that have bearing on the relation between the domains of political obligation and socioeconomic reciprocity. The first principle, that of teleoscopic unification, consisted in the way the traditional habit of distinguishing between leaders and followers gradually became concentrated into all motives to unite them at ever increasingly higher and geographically extended levels of political and religious cooperation to resist the Spanish. Absolute as it may appear to be, however, this first principle is complicated by a second principle, that of obligatory recapitulation. This second principle concerns the way the momentum of governing was carried over to its products, relativizing the linkage between public gatherings and private households by successively discovering within each domain of the Estado, the components of the old distinction between lofs and reguas—and their incipient cohesion at the ayllaregua level. This recapitulation is most evident in the development of upward and outward mobility of political obligation , which begins with the outgrowth and coalescence of the ayllaregua from the patrilineal lof and regua segments of the society and, which transported the family and lof from lesser to greater spheres in responsibility and interaction: paradigmatically, from the economic to the political and from the domestic private to the public. Evidently as a process of obligation, this is also one of “upwardness” and “externalization” insofar as a solution to political problems in the greater Araucania sphere was programmatically sought within the lesser sphere, that being the local lof—level of community production and ever wider participation in the war effort. This shift and upward scale again is evidenced archaeologically by the presence of larger domestic sites located near agricultural fields, terraces and rehuekuel complexes (see Chapters 7 and 10).

Broadly speaking, the transformation from the local lof patrilineage and the wider regua network to the regional ayllaregua thus was a political movement first “inward” to solidify each patrilineage and then “outward” to unify all of them at the ayllaregua and butanmapu levels, through the realms of the political authority structure and the society at large, the religious and wider public spheres, the polity and the family, domestic labor, mound architecture, gender differentiation, cohesive and reinforcement communities, and subjectivity. This process also involved a movement from the domestic to the public realms of political obligation . This trajectory also considers this coalescent process as a social teleoscopic movement “upward,” a progressive attachment of the normatively absolute patrilineage head authority to its presumed locale in patrilineal absolutism and its relocation in the cause and public sphere. Yet, even as this principle of the absolute was translated inward and then extended upward, the increasingly domestic spheres of the family and lof experience in which it took root eventually consigned them to the realm of the public ayllaregua and butanmapu. This was, in other words, part of the extended teleoscopic process of polity formation and sovereignty. Inward and then outward coalescence through the patrilineages was the key to forming a sovereign patriarchical society.

The third principle at work in the linkage bears reciprocal relation to these first two. If obligation involved the systematic multiplication and authorization of patrilineal family entitlement and rights, duties , opinions, desires, and ethnical subjectivities—it was also obliged to reconceive the nature of the realm of leadership , which was obligated to acknowledge and comprehend the potential of the family to ascend to ever increasingly higher political levels. I speak now not of the ayllaregua and butanmapu polity structure of the seventeenth century—the institutionalized public realm of the Araucanian government and its apparatus—but of a category of nondomestic publicness that was as unprecedented prior to the arrival of the Spanish as the system of proliferating family and patrilineage connections it came to embrace. What was required of the wider public was the dynamic flexibility of a whole that accommodated an unlimited and perpetually changing number of interchangeable societal parts across and beyond the territory of the Estado, which I submit was made possible by the simplicity and standardization in the social and political structure of the four domains, ceremonial fields, kuel, ceramics and other artifacts that facilitated obligation by being stylistically and symbolically familiar and legible. The Estado was able to do this because it derived its own, virtual entity from these same standardized parts and places that composed it. Its primary boundaries were defined neither by space nor time nor leaders but by the affiliation and cohesiveness of its recursive, legible, and exchangeable individual parts. The parts were persons, actual individuals, patrilineal groups, and standardized ceremonial practices and material goods that comprised a population whose makeup shifted constantly according to the patterns of identity-making and breaking and alliance-building and breaking (e.g., either as indios amigos and indios enemigos) , mobility, and circulation that moved the exchangeable component parts through the warring and supporting system of recapitulation of a life of sporadic conflict . This movement also entailed the familiarity of the religious acts, the admapu , and the ceremonial fields and kuel. These sacred acts and places did not necessarily represent territorially contained and delimited spaces, but as such, something almost like a gravitational field around and through which fragmented and nonfragmented groups formed and reformed or, to continue the physics metaphor , orbited. Conceived in this way, it is impossible to envision ethnicity , patriotism and polity formation as just an expression of a territorial container such as Tucapel, Purén, Mareguano-Catiray, and Arauco.

A fourth consequence of my argument is that there were new and emerging practices that constantly interpolated new subjects into ways of acting that rendered them as rights-bearing or responsibility-owing individuals of the polity, which included not just persons but the kuel mounds and other sacred spaces. I have said that patriotism involved new subjects (scales, reversals, and sites; see the discussion in next section) and created a web of rights and responsibilities that stretched across already defined domains whether these were stable or unstable, territorialized or deterritorialized, and centralized or decentralized.

While local lof and regua authorities may have served to provide certain services (defensive, residential space, and economic) that were local, other services were translocal in character (surplus food for other areas, public ceremonial, and providing warriors and leaders) . This principle assumed a hierarchical and exclusive relationship between the various scales of administration from the lof to the butanmapu levels. Since the rights to such services for fragmented groups also inherited a translocal character, this also took the form of rights to all ceremonial fields within the polity as such rather than to a specific field or locality. For such rights they created “translocal authorities”—thus the guen-toqui and toqui war and hechicero ritual leaders. Such authorities came into being when a powerful patrilineage constituted itself by appropriating a kuel and field as the site of the social and religiopolitical and whose claims involved translocal rights: rights that could not be granted by the existing local jurisdiction. If we conceive translocal membership as those rights that are articulated as rights to the kuel and fields, then new and extended avenues begin to open up; in short, rights of mean local and rights to mean translocal. Those fragmented, mobile social groups that constituted themselves as translocal, could then claim both representation and power. Of course, how certain groups were recognized and formally constituted as translocal outsiders, what powers of representation they should have had, and their longevity are complex issues and should be seen as objects of political negotiation and deliberation for future study.

Much of the above discussion has implicitly turned on the linkage between local lof kin, nonkin recruits and war refugees (outsiders), specifically on the notion that the division between these categories was broadly coextensive with the transformation of the second and third groups into the first through such concepts as the kuga and fictive kinship systems (see Chapters 1 and 2). One of the key points in developing this notion is the way of articulating how historical change occurred within and across these systems. At the same time, the consideration of this change can suggest a once-and-for-all watershed between the traditional pre-Hispanic period and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Araucanian societies at which all that was once traditional pre-Hispanic became Hispanic-related (cf., Boccara 2000) but not necessarily Hispanic-influenced. The ongoing process by which the traditional became Hispanic-related was a local, multiple, irreversible, overlapping, and uneven development that must have differed according to a wide range of variables: geographical location, leadership , population density, economy, participation in public ceremony and the war effort, and so forth. The argument here is nonetheless based on the conviction that the figure of the pre-Hispanic traditional-rendered-Hispanic is justly concentrated on this historical period in particular, a conviction whose plausibility depended entirely on the conditions of warfare that nurtured these changes.

New Subject Categories of the Polity

The political institutions that made up the Araucanian polity were created as acts of collective embodiment and attachments of ever increasingly higher organizational levels of multiple patrilineages. They defined the extension of the polity and the social and economic institutions of the culture, the society at large and the polity—as one from the local family to the composite Estado. The parallel is instructive for two reasons. First, it reminds us that the family and polity shared the category “subject.” I invoke this notion in order to speak schematically of a shift in status from, on the one hand, that of political subjects who underwent “subjection” to the guen-toqui war authorities to, on the other hand, the status of ethnic and patriotic subjects, who probably reflected upon his or her condition of subject hood and thereby laid the ground for the growth of a reflexive and autonomous “subjectivity.” Being born into a preexistent local patrilineal family, it presumed involuntary subjection but voluntary involvement in the war effort.

The patriarchical society thus became discernible at the permeable boundaries that coalesced within these integral categories, boundaries between subject and leader, between warrior and supportive (reinforcement) compatriots , between family and emerging ethnicity , and between territorial inhabitants and Spanish outsiders. The use of the term family here is both narrow and comprehensive (see Chapter 4), implying both the immediate community of potential subjects and the larger, geographical, and sociological community of the warring Araucanian society. Indeed, the question of how the former was encompassed by the latter may be seen as the problem that the politics and modes of socioreligious organization we know as ayllaregua and butanmapu variously may encourage us in an analogical way of thinking about the relation of political obligation and socioeconomic reciprocity according to which pan-Araucanian politics and the patrilineal households are understood to have been and still are distinct and unequal versions of each other rather than separable entities.

The patriarchal analogy is thus not simply a metaphor linking these separate but integral entities; it defined the continuity between and the interpenetration of social, political, economic, and religious relations that were distinct but inseparable from each other as the dynastic patrilineages grew into the patriarchal ayllareguas and butanmapus. It also produced the material record presented in Chapters 7–9, 13–16. In a dynastic patrilineage, moreover, the analogy between the polity and the family was reinforced by their metonymic relationship: political sovereignty was a function of patrilineal descent (social kinship genealogy) and patrilineal ascent (political organization). Given this inward and upward trajectory, a question is why did the polity never attain a true centralized state development ?

A State Lost? Redistributive Politics and Translocal Patriotism

I have emphasized throughout this book that the Araucanian population was undergoing significant transformations and that these transformations have been well rehearsed in concerns over defense and security (cf., Bengoa 2003; Boccara 1999; Dillehay 2007; Leiva 1977; Zavala 2008) . If creating patriotism was the condition of making a polity, governing was a project of managing across emerging, shifting, and mutating subjects, ceremonial fields, both kin and nonkin, scales, and sites of a developing ethnic membership (what Boccara called ethnogenesis, 2000). This again reveals that polity formation was private, religious, and kin-related before it was public, civic, and political. It is not a new insight that Araucanian polity authorities had invested in subjects and kinship . However, the fact that polity authorities increasingly implicated themselves in governing kin and nonkin members through a growing number of reconstituted communities, initially from the lof and regua levels to the ayllaregua and the butanmapu levels, makes social governance or governing the social a significant object of politically governing the new polity within an ambiance of sporadic conflict and warfare (cf., Boccara 1999; Zavala 2008). As the historian Leiva has noted :

The Araucanians of that time appear to us as a case of the development of a culture beginning with a national spirit: resistance to domination and self-sufficiency. Moreover, we see that there arose among the Araucanians an increasingly intense and previously unknown national interest. Thus, we have proof of the tenacity of the link, of the nature of cultural traits with the land, of what Kroeber calls, “the capacity of a culture to absorb and resist at the same time.” Which, over many years, for all that cultural borrowings diffuse into its interior, succeeds in finding the dynamic principle to organize their society: warfare (Leiva 1977, p. 160).

As a result of warfare, the territorial polity of the Estado had a basic and distinctive interest in being able to control the flow of persons within and across its borders—in being able to compel, induce, discourage, or forbid the entry or exit of particular categories of persons—i.e., the Spanish outsiders and their allied indios amigos . However, what the Araucanians could never achieve in their thrust towards polity formation was complete territorial closure by occupying a centralized controlling position in the web of interregional interaction. Even within the Estado and its larger butanmapu structure, complete administrative closure was never achieved. A neutral or uncommitted community and an ever-changing indio amigo population prevented centralization. Leaders of the polity never succeeded in excluding these groups from their territory and from all associated goods and opportunities (see Zavala 2008, 2011; Dillehay and Zavala 2013) . However, these shifting groups also offered new opportunities of recruitment and alliance-making for the warring communities as well, since their loyalty to any group was often fleeting.

The recruitment and formation of translocal or transpatrilineal households fragmented by war engendered the formation of new subjects who constituted and entitled themselves to social and civic rights across different lof and regua boundaries. This complex respatializing of rights and kinship networks that resulted from demographic changes cannot be fully captured by terms such as elite lineages, royal subjects, or cosmopolitan forms of rulership and by the material and spatial patterns of the archaeological record because this respatialization created hybrid allegiances and loyalties rather than territorially contained and hierarchical identifications that might easily fit these terms. (Nonetheless, the diversity of ceramics at sites and the homogeneity of soil deposits in the early Hispanic levels of kuel support the notion of reconstituted hybrid populations; see Chapter 7 and 16.) Another effect of this respatialization was the transregionalization of patriotism across the four butanamapu divisions rather than passive recipients of a developing interregional regime somehow existing “beyond” them. Despite our understanding of patriotism as an Araucanian ethnic-polity regime of governing, it also became a pan-Araucanian regime of governing innumerable population movements and recombinations through practices of mobilization produced by the threat of conflict.

Araucanian governing principles, in a nutshell, intentionally generated certain zeitgeists among the population at large, so that the population acted in ways conducive to a leader’s desired next steps as far as policy and strategy were concerned. The new political structure of the polity blended the primordial understanding of territorial defense with an increasing perspective towards management of larger, more composite patrilineal units made of both fictive and nonfictive kin, and it marked the transition necessary to a more complex style of political leadership , one not just given to security and protection but to cultural survivability, ethnic polity formation, and economic sustainability. In this sense, Foucault’s meaning of a state has implications. He believed that the purpose of a political structure was “to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants…a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods” (Foucault 1990, p. 92). This is what partially happened in the case here—for the first time, an Araucanian ethos of political economy formed during the Arauco War and took a more direct role in managing the populace, understood primarily in patrilocal family units, as a goal within itself, rather than regarding such management only as a minor tool strictly for territorial preservation. This political economy involved surplus production and extensive raised agricultural fields, terraces, and irrigation canals and intensified agriculture production in wetlands (Dillehay 2007; Dillehay et al. 2008). With the emergence of an Araucanian political economy also came the notion of effective local and regional political leaders as individuals who tended to the population with an individual yet still common governing interest in mind—what Guillaume La Perrière has identified as a movement of government towards “a complex of men and things” (cited in Foucault 1990, p. 93).

As the political economy matured from the late 1500s to the late 1700s, La Perrière’s notion of this man–thing complex can be seen as manifesting itself in what Foucault called an “art of government.” As of the late sixteenth century, the contemporary Araucanian political war leader was defined by his engagement not only with the physical security of his people as were his predecessors, but also with the economic development and food surplus of the society as a whole to support the war effort (see Bengoa 2003) . As this effort was uniformly and consistently increasing, leaders were thus forced to direct the focus of the political economy beyond the base unit of the local patrilineal family in order to contend with these new issues like epidemics or food supply for the fighting forces, which affected larger, more diverse segments of the population. The Araucanian government of the ayllaregua and butanmapu organizations thus expanded beyond a solitary agenda of a local military strategy and allowed room for the development of social and economic policy compatible with both the leaders and the governed. The “art of government” thus marked the penultimate stage in the metamorphosis of an Estado governance towards more complexity and signified the notion that as the role of the government became more complex, a proto-state ultimately operated on its own independent, utilitarian logic which changed over time to suit the specific understanding of and prerequisites for the survival and welfare of the warring population. However, despite all these coalescing governmental forms, a formal political centralization and true state organization never developed. It is for these reasons that I prefer the term proto-state or polity employed to describe the administrative system of the Estado (see Chapter 1). It also was the inability of the Estado to control its own population that hindered true state development . I also believe that another reason, albeit likely secondary, was the conflicting desire of many guen-toqui leaders to administer their own territories and their own affairs with outsiders, whether they be the Spanish or indios amigos , without a single leader presiding over them.

In the end, all forms of political closure presupposed some way of defining and identifying outsiders and the outside. Outsiders were defined and identified residentially as nonmembers, or directly, as bearers of some disqualifying attribute; they were Spanish and their allied indios amigos (Dillehay and Zavala 2013) . The indios amigos were excluded not because of what they were but because of what they were not—they were not recognized or acknowledged as allied insiders. Insiders were defined positively—as members of a family, patrilineage, and associated organizations. On the other hand, insider-outsider groupings may have had a narrower or a wider interactional and temporal span. At one extreme, they may have been ad hoc and ephemeral, linked to a particular and fleeting interaction in a particular local; at the other, they may have crystallized into a structured “groups” like reguas and ayllareguas, persisting over time and spanning a variety of interactional settings. In the first case, definitions of insider and outsider were narrowly context-bound: outsiderhood in one context had no connection with or implications for outsiderhood in another. This self-defined insider and outsider dichotomy is revealed in an early seventeenth century chronicle. In a passage referring to Utaflamme, a principal leader of the Purén Valley at the turn of the sixteenth century, Luis de Valdivia ([1606] 1887) states that:

[Utuflamme] spoke and in the name of his regua [sic] and of the province of Purén…and said, firstly, that all the land at war had received with great content the good news that His Lord, and I had sent, and although there were various opinions [expressed by conas (warriors)] and restless young captains during the interval while the four principal heads of the war were not united, but afterward they ended by uniting and agreeing, which concluded the three days. There is not, nor will there be any cona [warrior] or captain who dares to take up arms in the abereequas [ayllareguas], which at present were at war, and it will be very easy for them to be expelled from their lands as refugees and outsiders, native to the pacified {Spanish] provinces, fugitives from Arauco, Tucapel, and Catiray (cited in Silva 2001, pp. 11, 12).

Conflict with the Spanish was binding not only on its allied indios enemigos members, but, to a great extent, on all persons temporality or permanently present in the territory. Mere presence in the Araucanian territory made a person an object of administration by, a provider of resources for, and a subject of claims on the polity, while absence from the territory or alliance with the Spanish would undo these relations. Thus, social and kin membership was above all about redistributive politics. The interest shown by some leaders to recruit and engage fragmented communities and refugees as development residents represents an innovative form of conceptualizing a redistribution of patriotic obligations. Furthermore, one ruler’s gain was another’s loss: the cost successfully externalized by one was borne by another, all of which further prevented centralization.

The polity was thus committed to spreading and consolidating its authority to outlying regions. Araucanian leaders always sought to teleoscopically recruit and expand their population of control (see Bengoa 1998, 2003; Goicovich 2003; Zavala 2008) . Below, Bengoa describes the situation of leaders losing followers and their desperate attempts to recruit others and to biologically expand the size of their own group by encouraging women to mate with available young men.

Beginning in those years, indigenous society became obsessed with the problem of depopulation and the need for [a larger] population. Having many men to take up the lance was a requirement for freedom. Women were free to seek out young men [for reproduction]
…The chiefs recommended having many wives and sent their conas [warriors] to get creole women [criollas] also in order to have more children. At this time, polygamy became a necessity and a means of survival for the indigenous society…. (Bengoa 2003, p. 423)

By contrast, population movement and recruitment did not engage so directly the vital interests of personal polities, since a rule in these settings was exercised over particular sets of kin and nonkin groups, not always over territories: the mere presence of a lineage in a territory did not entail political, administrative, or legal inclusion. Space was not politically neutral or insignificant in the polity. However, since jurisdiction often depended on the personal status of the leader agent rather than the spatial coordinates of his action, movement was less consequential. As jurisdictional closure buffered such polities against the consequences of mobility, territorial closure was less urgent. However, and as importantly, insofar outside migrants increasingly holding multiple memberships, allies, and material and cultural embeddedness in more than one territory, migration and alliance shifting were forces that splintered, spatially dispersed, and complicated polity building.

In summary, in my opinion, several factors contributed to the absence of a centralized Araucanian state authority: (1) the shifting alliances of the minority population of indios amigos which made it difficult to more effectively control the allegiance of the internal population of the Araucania; (2) the constant adaptive organizational changes taking place within the governing apparatus of the Estado, which never coalesced into a centralized form of decision-making; and (3) although not discussed in detail above, the lack of a bureaucratic mechanism to regulate the interregional social, administrative and economic affairs of the Estado (see Spencer in Chapter 2), and to take a greater advantage of the diversity and hybridity of insider/outsider communities that constantly formed and reformed the Estado.

A Matter of State: Araucanian and Andean

I have argued that war, resistance , and resilience brought the Araucanians to form a regional ethnic polity during the late sixteenth century AD. The war provided fertile soil for the transformation of local community-level patrilineage subjects into an interregional polity-level patriarchy of compatriots . If our understanding of ancient Inka and Spanish state development has been polity-centered and assimilationist (e.g., D’Altroy 2003; Kolata 2013), the Araucanian development has been ethnic-centered, differentialist, and survivalist. Since ethnic sentiments were probably developing before the intrusion of the Spanish and the formation of the Estado, the Araucanian idea of the ethnic was not originally political, it was social, religious, and kin-related. The proto-Estado of the early sixteenth century AD must have been the product of several decades of polity building, perhaps initially in response to the presence of the Inca in the northern Araucanian territory of central Chile (Dillehay and Gordon 1988; Dillehay 2007) , and of the development of a growing ethnic consciousness within the spatial and institutional frame of the developing territory by Araucanians south of the BioBio River (Boccara 1999, 2000) . It is partially for these reasons that I do not believe that the arrival of the Spanish in the Araucania led to ethnogenesis as Boccara (2000) does; again, I see these changes as representing an ethnomorphosis of an existing ethnicity.

However, as discussed above, the scale, fragmentation , and fluidity of political authority in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, makes it difficult to identify Araucanian territory with the institutional and territorial frame of a centralized state. In the Estado, the “conceived order” or “imagined community” and the institutional realities of ethnicity and patriotism were likely fused. An ethnic field was an ethnocultural fact to the Araucanians ; to colonial Spain, it was a political curse. To the extent that talk of “identity and agency” make scholarly sense at all, the subjective identity and agency of the vast majority of the Araucanian population throughout the Arauco War was no doubt largely political on the one hand and religious on the other until at least the end of the nineteenth century. For most inhabitants local and regional lof and regua identities probably continued to be more salient than ethnic identity until late in the twentieth century. The point is both a structural and a social–psychological one. Thus, the political ethnocultural Araucanian coincided neither with the supraregional pretensions of the polity nor with the subregional reach of effective political authority . It was more difficult to distinguish polity and ethnicity, and therefore to imagine a specifically ethnocultural Araucanian state in the south-central Andes.

A second, closely related difference in patterns of ethnic self-understanding is also rooted in political and cultural geography. As noted above, the Inca and Spanish understandings of statehood and empirehood were more assimilationist, the Araucanian understanding was more differentialist and survivalist. The gradual formation of the Inca state around a single political and cultural center in Cuzco was the historical matrix for an assimilationist self-understanding. I suspect that the initial rise of the Inca state was similar to that of the Araucanian polity in the sense that it also teleoscopically transformed the social structure of the lower grassroots level of the ayllu and panaca kinship systems to higher levels of state and empire administration. It may be that this is a feature of earlier Andean states as well (e.g., Moche, Wari, Chimu). On the other hand, the conglomerative pattern of proto-state-building in the polycentric patriarchical Araucania was the historical matrix for a more differentialist self-understanding and self-identity of ethnicity and patriotism .

Patriotism was a universal and distinctive feature of the political landscape among many but not all Araucanian populations (exceptions were indios amigos) . Nearly every Araucanian patrilineage defined its allegiance, whether it was with the warring Araucanians or the Spanish, publicly identifying a set of persons as its members and residually designating all others as nonmembers, or huinca outsiders. Every lineage attached certain rights, duties , responsibilities , and obligations to the status of lof and regua community membership. These attributes defined a region of equality and a political territory. Indeed, political territory as we know it today—bounded territory to which access was controlled by the polity—presupposed membership. It presupposed some way of distinguishing those who had access to the territory from those who did not, those who belonged to the polity from those who did not, and those who sided with the Spanish and those who did not. The Araucanian polity was simultaneously a grassroots territorial organization, starting with the lof and reaching the butanmapu level, a social and ceremonial association, and a political stigma. The Mapuche region has many of these same attributes and conditions today.

Unostentatious Materiality: Breaking Down Hierarchy and Difference

In this book, I have ranged quite freely through historical and archaeological time and space, especially in this chapter, treating Araucanian patrilineages to some extent as a unified ethnic group by blending material from my own anthropological work with earlier ethnographies and chronicles in order to summarize what I believe are the salient contextual dimensions to sixteenth and seventeenth century of patrilineality , patriarchy and, to the fullest extent possible, the archaeological materiality of the Estado. The main points I have been attempting to explore in this book are, first, that patrilineal communities of this time period were members of a wider Araucanian ethnic society and polity. Second, that material artifacts associated with this kinship practice and political structure form elements within a much wider material content, elements that are not easily identified in the archaeological record, and third, that the ideological premise to patriarchy, upheld, reproduced, and transformed through socially and ideologically sanctioned practices—is also grounded within this materiality. Fourth, while patriarchy confronted political emergencies and stresses, individuals and household groups within the wider society also had an important and active role to play in negotiating for their own general welfare.

I also have argued that the actions of patrilineages form but one, albeit major, dimension to a much wider dialogue between communities. In this broader field of communicative contact, the actions of creation, use, and deposition of material culture, primarily the kuel mounds, rehuekuel complexes, and the ceremonial fields formed the essential media of intergroup communication and polity formation. Places such as kuel and the patrilineal kinship structure were symbolic manifestations of the Araucanian polity. The kuel and rehuekuel were architectural landmarks and settings for the practice of public religious and political life. Understanding the nature and meaning of a patrilineal material record, that is, the information in primarily the mound and ceramic styles discussed throughout this book, is an important and different part of Araucanian identity and interaction during this period. A detailed analytical focus on the actions or material accouterments of patriarchy suggests that patriarchical practices need not leave clear archaeological remains. However, if the actions of the patriarchy are contextualized within a wider suite of historical and ethnographic practices, which have been detailed throughout this book, then a number of themes can be opened into a thicker physical description of the material dimensions to a patriarchical worldview, especially in regard to the sediments and clays comprising the mound and ceramic assemblages analyzed in Chapters 7, 9 and 16.

Boivin has considered the importance of the physicality and color properties of soils and other elements, their employment in architecture, ceramics, and other material dimensions, and their wider technological and aesthetic meaning within ancient societies. As she notes, “the material world impacts on the social world in a real way not just because of its ability to act as a carrier of ideas and concepts, but also because its very materiality exerts a force that in human hands becomes a social force” (Boivin 2004, p. 6). The diversity yet simplicity and presumed familiarity of the ceramic styles and the standardization and homogeneity of mound sediments in the early Hispanic levels of the kuel in Purén and Lumaco were clearly linked to much wider social forces within the Araucanian society. These elements also were social forces, especially the mounds which were and still are considered to be “kinsmen.”

As discussed in Chapter 7, the organization of these forces—corporate-patrilineal labor (regua)—in the physical construction of kuel and rehuekuel is similar to that of the building of and participation in nguillatun fields today, which is structured by the cardinal position of communities with respect to the ceremonial field (see Dillehay 2007). That is, patrilineages living to the east of a kuel pack sediment on its east side, those to the west on its west side, and so forth. The local patrilineage packs in the center (renin) and on all sides. Thus, the layers and different soils in a kuel are derived from different and distant patrilineal homelands that represent the wider social catchment basin of a deceased buried in a kuel through his/her extended marriage alliances and the perdurable social relationships between consanguinally related lineages. The kuel are, in short, spatial nucleations of “social soil” (Dillehay 1992, pp. 404–410, 2007). Therefore, the vertical and horizontal accretion of kuel relate more to principles of genealogical continuity, lineage perdurability, and residential contiguity on a landscape or homeland than to the direct socioeconomic power and prestige of local leaders and their constituents. The size of a mound thus depends upon the number of kin and fictive kin linked to the deceased through the kuga system and through his multiple in-married wives and marriage alliances established through his out-married daughters.

At TrenTrenkuel, Maicoyakuel, Rapahuekuel, and other excavated kuel, the early Hispanic levels contain homogenous sediments as compared to the late pre-Hispanic levels which are characterized by greater mixtures of soils and soil colors from many different local and nonlocal depositional environments. While this homogeneity of soil types in the early Hispanic period implies greater simplicity, standardization , and legibility similar to that documented in the early Hispanic ceramic wares, I believe it also is reflective of major shifts taking place in the social structure of local communities whereby they have become more fragmented, more receptive to receiving unattached outside groups who are fictive or new kin, and thus more diversified. These newly incorporated nonlocal, perhaps nonkin groups simply did not have access to the soils in their prior or original homelands, thus when participating in the construction of mounds in their new homelands—the Purén and Lumaco Valley in this case—they were obligated to collect local sediments and place them on the mound. That is, the newly incorporated “locals” gathered the soils within the immediate vicinity of the mound, their new homeland, along with real or “attached” locals. I believe that this action produced the homogeneity of sediments documented in the early Hispanic level of the mounds.

Rodning refers to the attachment to and longevity in a landscape as “emplacement,” which is “a set of practices whereby communities had attached themselves to a particular place through formal settlement plans, architecture, burial and other material additions to the landscape” (Rodning 2010, p. 629). In the Araucanian case, there was and still is an attachment to the original homelands and their sacred landscapes, but in only those places where a patrilineage has resided for several generations. It is the prolonged attachment of a patrilineage to a particular landscape, to a homeland, that establishes the access and right to place local soils in local mounds. When the demographic kinship structure of some communities was fragmented by war with the Spanish, people relocated elsewhere. They lost their sense of permanence or attachment to their original homelands, even though they were incorporated into local communities as fictive or real kin. Relocation gave them rights to a new homeland land and to its mounds and ceremonial fields. In return, these incorporated outsiders had socioeconomic duties and obligations, as described earlier.

What made this system work materially and socially was standardization of ritual practices, legible landscapes, and material styles. People moved into legible landscapes characterized by standardized forms and practices, which involved the creation and duplication of a set of inclusive residential rights and religious and social rules (i.e., admapu) that fragmented and reconstituted communities followed. Standardization and compliance in the seating pattern of families and patrilineages in ceremonial fields, in the usage of pan-Araucanian beliefs and symbols, and in the codification of symbols and messages in artifact styles and mound aesthetics were probably necessary for social integration in the absence of a strong centralized political authority with the power to coerce people.

Epilogue

How do early complex societies development and how are they expressed in different social and environmental settings? (I refer to development in the sense of more complex organization, not in the sense of one social form inevitably evolving from another (sensu Yoffee 2005)). Anthropologists have classified complex organization into contrasting schema based upon two traditional views of the formation of society: conflict and coercion (e.g., Carneiro 1970; Fried 1967) or consent and integration (Service 1962, 1975). More recent studies have argued for more attention to the complex negotiations and strategies that held polities together (see Chapter 2). These studies parallel recent efforts by political scientists to embed governing authorities within a sociologically broader account of local communities and how authorities drew grassroots communities into hegemonic relations (e.g., Migdal 2001; Mollenkopf 1992; Stoker 1996; Stone 1989).

In the parlance of political scientists, “strong” states are those that are able to extend effective authority in practice from center to periphery, and demonstrate legitimacy by building trust between the state and civil society (all nonstate corporate groups and commoners) throughout the body politic. Thus, state strength can in part be inferred by the degree to which leaders can mobilize a society’s elites, corporate groups, and the subject populace at large to act in the interest of the state—to enact through practice the image of the state (Migdal 2001).

Practice-oriented approaches (cf., Blanton and Fargher 2008; Yoffee 2005; Migdal 2001) make a useful distinction between the state or polity and the society. According to Migdal, the state is a “field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts [i.e., various components of the society]” (Migdal 2001, p. 16). State strength and effectiveness can in part be inferred by the degree to which leaders mobilize hinterland elites, corporate groups, and the populace at large to act in the interest of the state—i.e., to enact through the practices of all societal parts the image of the state. Migdal (2001, p. 124) also notes that the increasing heterogeneity and hierarchy of power forces within a growing state, and the pressures from power forces outside the state, can make it increasingly difficult for the authorities to maintain and propagate a coherent system of trust and effectiveness, as well as to project a stately image. It seems that the Araucanian case partially fits this type of circumstance whereby internal and external power forces constantly affected the strength and effectiveness of the polity and its capacity to grow and govern at all levels within and across the patriarchical organization of society.

In looking at the emergence and transformation of the ancient Araucanian polity, I have combined a bottom up or a grassroots approach, examining the upward extension of local patrilineal segments to form higher levels of social complexity, with an inter-community analysis of public ceremonial space, where both integration and division occurred. Consent was the main binding force of this extension, with benefits from military security and social order to managerial efficiency by regional leaders that drew local subject communities into larger religiopolitical associations that demanded political allegiance in return. This dynamic interplay between leaders and their followers, whereby social interaction developed as a strategy within the parameters defined by the warring system, and inter-community collective action are important to recognize. Guen-toqui war leaders were agents who were socially embedded and engaged in interactive and recursive relationships among the different levels and parts of the teleoscopic patriarchical structures. Although the Araucanian polity had the image of a strong Estado or polity to the Spanish Crown , especially the area known as Purén Indomito, what primarily prevented the polity from achieving a strong centralized political system were the weak and fleeting horizontal ties among local lof leaders that represented the varying conflicting groups of indios amigos , indios enemigos , and some politically neutral indios.

Although the image of the four domains making up and representing the Estado may seem to have been similar, current archival and archaeological evidence suggests that the practice of each of the domains varied substantially, with a minority of leaders allied with the Spanish, others staying politically neutral, and a majority engaged in prolonged resistance. This indicates that there was less uniformity in the organization of and effective control by the polity (cf., Boccara 1999, 2000) . Again, a key then to understanding the strength and effectiveness of the polity is to decipher the manner in which it was organized and generated legitimacy, familiarity , legibility , trust, and patriotic image, to look for increasing evidence of hierarchical (and heterarchical) dissemination of authority , and to explore the movement of the different parts of the society at large (e.g., indios amigos) towards or away from a commitment to the four domains of Purén/Lumaco, Mareguano/Catiray, Arauco, and Tucapel and their individual centers of power—the kuel and rehuekuel ceremonial complexes.

Many archaeological studies have emphasized the social and strategic importance of ceremonial centers as foci for the growth of intra- and interregional interaction, as frameworks for the expansion of public ceremony and craft production, and as filters for the dissemination of new values and codes of conduct. Whether early or late in time, the processes of state formation in many parts of the Andes seem to have been elucidated through long-term patterns of continuity, interaction, and integration and through the intimate material practices through which social identities and leadership roles were constituted and reconstituted. The landscapes created by these interactions were increasingly filled by an ideology of the “other”—the outsider, the Spanish in the Araucanian case (Boccara 2000) , which can be seen eventually taking shape in the decoration of not only traditional, but restricted, exotic artifact types, such as trophy heads , ceremonial vessels, textiles, and other objects. Araucanian polity formation was the translation of late pre-Hispanic ceremonial authority into durable forms of institutional and political power (sensu Herzfeld, see Chapter 2), eventually centered upon the regulation of increasingly larger scales of human labor for military and economic production. Many of the technologies upon which new modes of agrarian production were based—such as intensive irrigation agriculture at raised agricultural fields and hillside terraces—had to have imposed a more complex division of labor upon the grassroots workforce. In this regard, the polity was constantly becoming more internally complex and hierarchically organized social and labor units, the integrity of which was identified, celebrated, and reinforced in public ceremonies and commensal politics at nodes such as the rehuekuel centers . It was within this growing complexity that many restricted forms of elite administration and grassroots subjectivity, including growing warrior and women support groups, as well as patriotism, were developed.

From the above perspectives, we can surmise that ancient polities can be seen as political associations that formed at the wider intersection of the horizontal ties between state authorities and elite-regulated institutions and the vertical ties to hinterland and grassroots subjects. Ancient polities generally were societies characterized by radical social differentiation at both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, by centralized institutional apparatus, and, according to Spencer and others (see Chapter 2), by a state-wide bureaucracy to manage affairs. Important to the formation of the state is how the horizontal ties among ruling institutions articulated with the vertical links to grassroots subjects. The specific linkages between the horizontal and vertical segments have received little attention from archaeologists, especially Andeanists, for instance. Most Andeanists have focused their studies of state development on elite control of the political economy, on military conquest, or on the spread of a hegemonic religious ideology to control hinterland populations (see Chapter 2). Little attention also has been given to the relationship between state institutions and the subjects and parts comprising them. In my opinion, this is where much of the critical work of the political construction and reproduction of ancient states and polities was accomplished. Another key to understanding the rise of ancient states is to decipher more thoroughly the manner in which they organized and generated their legitimacy and trust, to identify the processes that worked to undermine legitimacy and trust, to look for increasing evidence of heterarchy and the dissemination of authority , and to explore any movement of civil society away from trust in and commitment to state institutions. To study these issues, we must focus on all social segments of the society upon which the state or polity was built.

The Araucanian polity is a particularly interesting case study in the light of these points: it was comprised of several locally and regionally hierarchically nested parts made up of patriarchical elite and nonelite grassroots levels and complementary sacred and domestic areas; it employed a dynastic teleoscopic patrilineal structure to politically managed its administrative growth and development; it manufactured standardized and generally unostentatious architecture, symbols, and material goods to attempt to effectively manage the rapid incorporation of mobile and often fragmented groups into the system; and it projected the image (at least to the Spanish) of a more centralized and perhaps successful society than it really was. In considering the success or failure of the Araucanian Estado, it is obvious that it succeeded in many valleys throughout the region where new settlements and rehuekuel were built. In other valleys where there was less evidence of a polity presence, as expressed by the absence of these features, it is not known whether this paucity represents a successful, albeit materially inconspicuous, polity expansion, a case of independent resistance to the Spanish such as that which occurred in Villarrica and other areas (see Bengoa 2003), for instance, or simply the failure of the Estado to incorporate them. Whatever is represented by these instances, the Estado and neighboring regions always seemed to have had porous borders periodically infiltrated by the Spanish and by a minority of allied groups loyal to them.

To conclude, several points require attention. The Araucanian polity was formed by a contingent outcome of enduring traditions and strategies that developed rapidly over one to two generations. There were several interwoven strategies critical to this process. The Araucanians developed a defense ideology to coordinate multiple communities. This included a religion focused on deity and ancestor worship and on public ceremonial feasting and commensal politics. They developed complex strategies for incorporating different patrilineal communities from the local lof level up to the interregional meli-butanmapu level. They also strategically established marriage alliances with many groups, which created asymmetrical relations by distributing labor obligations that were reciprocated in territorial defense and public ceremonial events. This led to mobilized labor to intensify cultivation in certain areas such as Tucapel and Arauco. The Araucanians also strategically employed military action to establish a new social level of warriorhood and prestige. Overall, Araucanian strategies were differentialist, survivalist, and opportunistic and continually evolved to meet changing regional conditions.

Clearly, ancient states or polities like the Araucanian Estado were different from modern ones (cf., Trigger 1999). Modern polities build facilities and place state officials in local settings to administer their interests. Ancient ones did not always exact this strategy, but used local leaders and structures to manage affairs. In the case of the Araucanians, this strategy worked most of the time and in most places south of the BioBio River , depending upon local circumstances. Although the Araucanians may have found it necessary to initially commit or to achieve a centralized military node in one area—the Purén-Lumaco Valley—it seemed unnecessary to reconstruct and conspicuously manage local-level food production just for the sake of quality control and efficiency. Even the food surplus contributions made by the Tucapel and Arauco domains to Purén seem to have been only locally, if not subregionally, regulated. However, even these features were missing in many other areas of the polity’s territory (or perhaps not mentioned in the archives), which again suggest that the Araucanians may not have exercised the governing control we have presumed during the early war years.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century when the Araucanians more intensively raided and marauded in central Chile and western Argentina, the basic content and organization of the economy and polity became more of an emergent structure of negotiations between an array of autochthonous traders, migrants, Spanish and mestizo entrepreneurs, and various neighboring ethnic groups, including the Pehuenche, Tehuelche, and Huilliche (Zavala 2008) . At this point, the organization of the ayllaregua and butanmapu regulated the polity, but by then it also had become a confederated structure ruled by a larger consensus of guen-toqui and ulmen leaders who were usually involved in the long distance exchange of Spanish and other goods. While there was some convergence among Araucanians and other ethnic groups, there were also instances of difference, which necessitated accommodation and negotiation among them. By and large, those areas where the polity did not take root during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries coincided with the more porous geographic boundaries of the Araucania, where even less allegiance and loyalty existed, thus making it even more difficult to centralize and incorporate loosely organized groups.

Lacking the political commitment, perhaps manpower, economic resources and administrative apparatus to sustain a polity wide government and entire population directly, many ancient polities needed the assistance of allies from subject communities to assert their authority at the local and regional levels. They also needed tribute to sustain their efforts. The Araucanian polity never formally extracted tribute nor set up a formal bureaucracy to handle its affairs. Tribute primarily was loyalty and allegiance. The most dynastic patrilineages were those that held their alliances together. A defense ideology centered on deity and ancestry worship and religiopolitical solidarity had more holding power than craft production, long-distance exchange systems, and the accumulation and display of elaborate items. The idea of the polity was not the object but a defense ideology that survived the test of time.

The focus of the Araucanian polity also was the patriotic subject, the creation and performance of particular categories of complementary compatriots —leaders, warriors, food producers, cohesive communities, and support or reinforcement communities. This included the creation of a subjectivity that developed through interactions with others and engagement with familiar objects and symbols such as ceramic and textile styles, mound forms, and ceremonial fields. This also required explicit social interactions and engagement with the ideological, ceremonial, and warring worlds, a process that not only “made” individual subjects, but “made” the society and its reconstituted communities, and of interest here, “made” the polity. As Althusser notes (1970, pp. 49, 50), by way of idiosyncratic terminology, “ideology” interpellates individual human beings as subjects; persons who were born into, and were therefore socialized according to a particular cultural logic enacted in defined sociospatial settings. The process of creating community members, subjects, or ideal compatriots in the Estado was an ongoing project, an endeavor that required constant attention and willing (or coerced) participants. Part of this process involved teaching and enacting “proper” behavior, which emerged from habitus (Bourdieu 1977); these were incorporated into one’s way of being through social interactions in a particular historical moment in a particular community and/or social setting. That particular historical moment was the Arauco War.

Set in this context, it must be recognized that the disarticulation and disaggregation that affected indigenous groups elsewhere in most of the Spanish occupied America did not affect the Araucanians in the same way—in fact, the opposite seems to have transpired. Through preexisting political and social organization, the Araucanians aggregated, or came together more fully through long-distance kinship ties and religiopolitical practice in order to defeat Spanish forces and maintain political, social, and economic autonomy.

Last, besides an analysis of the Araucanian polity, this study also has been an exercise in rethinking the meaning of a particular type of archeological record—an unostentatious material record associated with an ancient complex society. This is not the only case of this type of record in world archaeology. However, if not for the written records, I would not have been able to interpret the material expressions of the place and period alone as a complex patriarchical polity. The discordance between the social and political complexity of the polity and its simple material expression, at least for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leads me to believe that some materially underrepresented polities in other parts of the ancient world were perhaps more powerful than we have imagined and that some materially overrepresented polities were perhaps less powerful than we have projected, but these are topics for future analysis.