Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the difficulties and possibilities of cultural translation in the mapuche frontier (southern Chile), specifically in the context of the fight against sorcery and witchcraft. The aim is debating about the frontier concept applied to contexts of exchange and religious semiosis.

Paper long abstract:

It is know that the "justicia ordinaria" in the hispanoamerican colonial societies, and specifically in Chile, were usually confronted to issues beyond their area of expertise. Conformed by members of the local "corregidores" and "capitanes", these lesser tribunals had to face crimes of "fuero mixto" (mixed jurisdiction) like "maleficio" and "brujería" (witchcraft), without the knowledge of specialized ecclesiastical tribunals. The "justicias" confronted the judicial process appealed to a mixed background of stories, texts (read and heard), and the oral tradition of their own local community, which we called "matrices of comprehension". Our previous works evinced that these matrices were capable of contain and organize most of the information provided by witnesses and defendants into coherent structures, being intelligible for most of them.

Although these matrices provide some epistemic consensus between the different members of the community, there were signs of incomprehension, signs of misunderstanding, registered in the processes but consigned to oblivion. Signs that express the boundaries of understanding between the hispanic justice and a core of indigenous religiosity. In this proposal, we will approach to the possibilities of the cultural translation through the analysis of a set of judicial documents from eighteen century. Specifically, we will focus on a witchcraft case conducted in the city of Concepción (Chile) in the year 1693, against a group of non-Spanish-speakers mapuche from the inland (tierra adentro). We expect this work could discuss some ideas about this complex idea of frontier: the physical or discursive frontier of Bio-Bio (southern Chile) and the epistemic frontiers of the justice comprehension matrices.