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Paper short abstract

Having “trace” as an analytical invitation, this paper reflects on the difficulties of describing memory through "ethnographic objects" across Mapuche life cycles. Thinking with decomposition and circulation, it remains with the tensions that permanence and its grammars produce for living relations.

Paper long abstract

Beginning with “trace” as analytical invitation, this paper reflects on the difficulties of describing memory through "ethnographic objects" while remaining committed to Mapuche life cycles. Rather than treating collections as residues of past events or as vessels of inherited or recontextualised meaning, the paper attends to how these material forms continue to participate in living relations that do rest as evidence, remains, or representations, yet operate memory differently.

Drawing on long-term collaborative work with Mapuche authorities and repatriation practitioners, the paper engages with mogen (living beings within Mapuche land) and wiñomapugetual (becoming land again) to explore memory as a material process enacted through transformation, decomposition, and redistribution.

Approached in this way, conservation and permanence introduce a persistent tension. By seeking to stabilise matter in time, they interrupt the life cycles through which memory takes place, producing forms of suspension that are neither simply loss nor continuity. The encounter between permanence and circulation signals a historical formation that has partially dislodged Mapuche land. The paper does not aim to resolve this tension or move concepts away from this ethical impasse. Instead, it remains with the friction that emerges when heritage permanence encounters land-based relations in which undoing, decay, and recomposition are ethical commitments. Staying with this difficulty allows trace to appear not as a category to be secured, but as a moment of hesitation—an opening for anthropological description to linger with forms of memory that endure not by remaining, but by becoming beyond description.