Paper short abstract:

Through an analysis of accounts of the politicization of visionary knowledge among indigenous Williche people in southern Chile, I will suggest that ethnographic research on relational modes of knowing the invisible realm reconfigures problems of access and participation.

Paper long abstract:

The southern Chilean coastal region where I worked with indigenous Mapuche-Williche farmers was described to me by a main informant as an irreducible "enigma." Peripheral even to the more prominent Mapuche to the north, the Williche have endured greater cultural loss, and once-common modes of knowing through dream and vision have become "invisibilized" in everyday rural life. This was an enigmatic invisibility: however hidden the invisible realm and its meta-human powers often seemed, in rare moments most people had stories to share about premonitory dreams or risky encounters with strange apparitions. Yet in recent years the powers of the invisible realm have become visible in earthly affairs with growing divisive force. As ritual practitioners known as maestras de ceremonias have begun to "revisibilize" sources of ancestral knowledge through direct visionary connection with nearly forgotten place-based divinities, charismatic machi shamans have gained newfound political and ritual prominence. Notwithstanding ensuing disputes over relative authenticity, the cosmological configurations of the two kinds of ritualists differ to such an extent that their simultaneous presence in a ritual space provokes an existentially disturbing dissonance of energies. As an ethnographer I was peripherally positioned in relation to such visionary irruptions of invisible agency in the visible realm, but will suggest that due to the inherent relationality of visionary knowledge, inseparable in Amerindian ontological terms from experience and being, I could not avoid the ethical implications of participation as I became drawn into my informants' accounts of their relations with beings of the invisible realm.