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Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Mapuche epew, oral narratives blending myth, ethics, and ecological knowledge, are reinterpreted today to address environmental and social challenges, fostering relational care and ecological imagination.
Paper long abstract
The Mapuche epew are oral narratives passed down through generations, weaving together myth, ethics, and ecological knowledge. Often featuring talking animals and magical beings, epew teach relational ways of inhabiting the world, emphasizing connections among humans, non-humans, and the land.
This paper explores how epew are being re-signified in contemporary narratives, where ancestral knowledge is mobilized to address current environmental crises and socio-cultural challenges in Mapuche territories. In particular, we focus on Visiones del Pitrantu, a site-specific performance in southern Chile, where the character Meli Pilun, a clever Ngürü (fox), draws on epew to share with participants lessons of loss, resilience, and care amid the colonial dispossession of Mapuche territory, illustrating how storytelling transmits cultural memory while responding to social and ecological disruptions.
Through oral, written, and performative forms, epew function as a narrative commons, fostering collaboration, ethical engagement, and intergenerational learning. Drawing on insights from Ursula K. Le Guin and Mapuche thinkers such as Elicura Chihuailaf, we examine how these narratives can cultivate foresight and care, rather than heroism or conquest.
By situating epew within broader discussions of storytelling, speculative imagination, and ecological ethics, this exploratory essay highlights how these narratives, both traditional and contemporary, mediate human–environment relations, sustain memory, and open possibilities for multispecies futures. Imagining the future through epew is a radical ethical act: stories do not merely describe the world, they create it, cultivating care, resilience, and collective responsibility in times of planetary transformation.
Narrative ecologies: folklore, fiction, and cultural response to climate change
Session 1 Saturday 13 June, 2026, -