Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE PROSPECTS AND PATTERNS
- PART TWO ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
- SEVEN CONTACT, FRAGMENTATION, AND RECRUITMENT AND THE REHUEKUEL
- EIGHT RECURSIVENESS, KINSHIP GEOGRAPHIES, AND POLITY
- NINE EPILOGUE
- Appendix One Ethnographic Ritual Narratives at Hualonkokuel and Trentrenkuel
- Appendix Two Radiocarbon Dates and Thermoluminescence Dates
- References Cited
- Index
SEVEN - CONTACT, FRAGMENTATION, AND RECRUITMENT AND THE REHUEKUEL
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE PROSPECTS AND PATTERNS
- PART TWO ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
- SEVEN CONTACT, FRAGMENTATION, AND RECRUITMENT AND THE REHUEKUEL
- EIGHT RECURSIVENESS, KINSHIP GEOGRAPHIES, AND POLITY
- NINE EPILOGUE
- Appendix One Ethnographic Ritual Narratives at Hualonkokuel and Trentrenkuel
- Appendix Two Radiocarbon Dates and Thermoluminescence Dates
- References Cited
- Index
Summary
Contact with the Spanish in the middle 1500s produced a domino effect along the Bio Bio frontier that altered social formations in several ways, creating bounded areas, shifting exchange patterns, formalizing informal and contested indigenous hierarchies, promoting local leaders to paramount warlords, and forming a regional polity of different types of rulers. In this chapter, I am interested in how Araucanian society responded to contact, how it was organized politically, and how it was represented spatially and materially by the mounded landscapes in the Purén and Lumaco Valley, an early center of contact with and resistance to the Spanish.
I stated in Chapters 1 and 3 that the Araucanian case represents an emergent confederated regional polity in which central authority, often of a military nature, was paired with a religious power structure that was diffused, segmentary, hierarchical, and heterarchical (this latter term is nothing more than many various kinds of hierarchies), as well as groups in which considerable complexity was achieved through horizontal differentiation, consensus building, and incorporation of fragmented groups. The distribution of power among several corporate entities (i.e., patrilineages, ceremonial groups, military alliances) was a tactical strategy that successfully resisted the invasion by the Spanish, the Chileans, and, perhaps earlier, the Inka for more than 350 years. This case also provides clear historically documented examples of secular and sacred agents practicing negotiations between different groups in times of intermittent warfare and peace to intentionally restructure the society and to gain individual power.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Monuments, Empires, and ResistanceThe Araucanian Polity and Ritual Narratives, pp. 335 - 369Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007