Speaking the Devils language: Ontological challengesto Mapuche intersubjectivityMagnus CourseSocial Anthropology, School of Social & Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD,Scotland, United Kingdomarti cle i nfoArticle history:Available online 21 December 2012Keywords:MapuchePerspectivismIntersubjectivityAmerindianChileabstractThis article describes what at rst seems a paradox in the way Mapuche people in ruralsouthern Chile conceptualize intersubjectivity. For on the one hand, people are confrontedwith the problem of how to make a connection to another subject, yet on the other, theystrugglepreciselytodisentangleoravoidjustsucharelationasalreadygiven. Throughethnographicdescription, Isuggestthatthesetwoproblemsactuallycorrespondtotwodistinctplanesof intersubjectivity. I seektodemonstratethatthedissonancebetweenthese two planes of intersubjectivity necessarily entails ontological questions, about boththe entities involved, and the world (or worlds) towards which their interaction refers. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The goal of this article is to describe ethnographically what at rst sight seems a paradox in the way rural Mapuche peo-ple in southern Chile conceptualize intersubjectivity and the particular conundrums to which this conceptualization givesrise.1In some contexts, local people describe the difculties of ever truly knowing what other people are thinking and experi-encing, and furthermore, bear a certain skepticism towards the capacity of language to reliably encode such information. Thisapparent spectre of solipsism corresponds in certain ways to what Robbins and Rumsey have referred to as the opacity of otherminds, a conceptualization of intersubjectivity of which versions occur in a great variety of ethnographic contexts (2008, p.222). Yet this understanding of intersubjectivity as a problem of making a connection across distinct entities co-exists in ruralMapuchelifewithanotherunderstandingofintersubjectivityaspreciselytheinverseproblem, howtodisconnectentitieswhich are in a certain wayalready connected, an understanding rooted in what has been called the perspectivalquality ofmanyAmerindiancosmologies. RuralMapuche, then, appeartondthemselvesconfrontingtwodistinctproblems, bothofwhich give rise to a certain degree of confusion, ambiguity, and even anxiety. For on the one hand people are confronted withthe problem of how to make a connection to another subject, on the other, they struggle precisely to disentangle or avoid justsuch a relation as already given.Through ethnographic description, I suggest that these two problems actually correspond to two distinct planes of inter-subjectivity (cf. Danziger, 2006; Duranti, 2010). At its mostly broadly conceived, all subjects can be said to be in an intersub-jectiverelationinthesensethatthepragmaticpre-requisitesforanintersubjectiveinteractionsharedattention, turntaking, the capacity for speech are already in place. Yet full intersubjectivity which presumably requires a condencethat the world to which such shared attention is directed is the same world is not shared by all beings, but only those withwhomacertaindegreeofconnectednesshasbeenreached. WhatconstitutesconnectednessintheMapuchecontextis0271-5309/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2012.10.003E-mail address: magnus.course@ed.ac.uk1The Mapuche are an indigenous group of approximately one million people, most of whom live in Chile, but some of whom live across the cordillera inwestern Argentina. The Mapuche heartland is the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth regions of southern Chile, although due to urban migration, over half of the Mapuchepopulation is now resident in the Chilean capital, Santiago. My own research is based in rural communities sandwiched between Lago Budi and the PacicOcean in southern Chiles Ninth Region (Course, 2011). People there survive through a mixture of government subsidy and subsistence agriculture, and do notlive in villages, but in scattered, often quite isolated homesteads. The majority of the people I work with are bilingual in Spanish and the Mapuche language,Mapudungun, a presumed linguistic isolate. See Zuiga (2000) and Smeets (2007) for recent descriptions of Mapudungun.Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316ContentslistsavailableatSciVerseScienceDirectLanguage & Communicationj our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ l angcomultimately measured by the degree of corporeal ow between the two parties to any intersubjective relation. For it is onlywhen such a relation of shared corporeal substance exists that the parties to an intersubjective relation can be sure of theworld to which their words refer. I seek to demonstrate that the dissonance between these two planes of intersubjectivitynecessarily entails ontological questions, about both the entities involved, and the world (or worlds) towards which theirinteraction refers.While any Mapuche interaction can be understood as providing evidence for both connectedness and disconnectedness,what is emphasized in local accounts of such interactions differs.2For example, people frequently state one cannot know whatanotherpersonisthinking(kimngelayi rakiduam)andthushesitatetospeculateonpeoplespastorfuturemotives. Yetthrough singing other peoples personalsongs, l,they seek to make a connection,tosee the world asthe songs composersaw it. On the other hand, according to reports of conversations with the Devil, shared pragmatic conventions form the basisfor an assertion of dangerous a priori connectedness, which for the unwary can obscure the incommensurability of the objectsof lexical reference. Intersubjective connections and disconnections, then, appear as two sides of the same coin, two facets of agure ground relationship, drawn upon in the elaboration of ontological questions of difference and similarity.I start the essay with a description of the rst problem, that of how to make a connection across distinct entities. Such aproblem arises from a conceptualization of personhood as a continual process of self-creation and singularization. In becom-ing a true person people necessarily move beyond pre-existing consanguineal connections and seek to make connectionswith non-consanguineally related others, primarily through the idioms of friendship and exchange. I then turn to focus ingreater depth on the second problem, that of how to avoid mistakenly entering fully into an intersubjective relation withan inappropriate subject. Such a problem emerges from certain assumptions about subjectivity within what has been calledtheperspectival qualityofAmerindianontology(rhem, 1981;ViveirosdeCastro, 1998). WewillseethatwhileruralMapuche do not profess to have a foolproof solution to either of these problems, they seek to address them as much throughan emphasis on conventional speech and bodily states, as through the postulation of another mind, a point which resonateswith other contributions to this issue. I nish the essay by concluding that a Mapuche theory of intersubjectivity should leadus to question certain implicit assumptions in much work on the topic: rst, that the subject of intersubjectivity is neces-sarily human, and second, that the world to which shared attention is directed is necessarily singular.1. Making a connectionMy description of this particular aspect of the problem is somewhat briefer than the description of the reverse problem ofhow to disconnect, which follows. This is because, rst, what could be called the solipsistic version of the problem has beenamply documented, not only in the ethnographic literature, but in the mainstream of Western philosophy and linguistics,and secondly, because I have described a Mapuche version of this problem and one of its possible solutions at length else-where (Course, 2009). Nevertheless, the problem of how to use language to connect subjects conceptualized on one plane asdistinct and separate clearly merits some discussion, even if only to present a counterpoint to the reverse problem of dis-connectiondescribedlater. Toapproachthisproblem, abriefportraitoftheMapucheconceptualizationofbothpersonand language is necessary. I start by describing the nature of relations between kin, before turning to the creation of relationswith non-kin.To be a true person, to be che, one must go beyond the relations one has with ones consanguineal kin, whether these bematernally or paternally-related. While these relations are chronologically prior, it is rst, the process of differentiating fromthese, and later, the voluntary creation of relations with non-kin that allows a Mapuche adult to be classed as a true person, acategory which is simultaneously a moral and ontological claim. The paradigmatic form of the relations through which truepersons emerge is the exchange of cartons of wine between adult male friends (weny) (Course, 2011). This exchange is ide-ally reciprocal and occurs at games of palin, a highly ritualized sport resembling eld hockey, at ngillatun fertility rituals, atfunerals, and in everyday interactions. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of friends as it is through the activa-tion of the capacity to form relationships with unrelated others that one becomes a true person. Although not ideologicallyelaborated in the same way, this is as true for children and women, as it is for adult men. Infants are not considered to be truepeople until they are able to exchange gestures and words with others, while women seek to create and maintain friendshipsthrough visits to neighboring homesteads involving the exchange of eggs, chickens, and garden produce. Both newborn ba-bies and drunk people are said to be chenglan, not true persons, for the same reason; their inability to enter into productiveexchange relationships with non-kin. This conceptualization of personhood is clearly open-ended and oriented towards oth-ers. Indeed, Mapuche personhood could accurately be described as both centrifugal and processual, a constant movementoutward, both in metaphorical terms of genealogical proximity and the literal meaning of geographical space.As we will see later on, the consanguineal relations from which all people emerge are understood to be fundamentallygiven and immutable, yet the relations of friendship forged with non-kin must be created and maintained through individualvolition.3It is precisely in the initiation of relations with non-kin that the intersubjective challenge of knowing exactly who or2The material I draw on in this essay is primarily ideological, that is to say, it consists mainly of what people say about linguistic interactions rather thandrawing on transcripts of the interactions themselves.3Itisquitestrikingtoobservehowreluctantmostpeoplearetoexchangewithconsanguineal kin. Suchexchangeswhentheydotakeplace, arenotelaborated or remembered and thus have a certain air of redundancy about them, which contrasts with the importance of exchanges with friends. See Course(2010b) and Santos Granero (2007) for accounts of the importance of friendship in lowland South America.308 M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316what the prospective friend might be appears. The limits to fully knowing others are often expressed by rural Mapuche peoplein statements to the effect that only a person themselves has full access to their thoughts and thus to the proper course of actionin any given situation. This opacity of other minds (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008) leads to a general reluctance to speculate onthe intentions of others, and, as we shall explore further below, even to give advice (nglam) to others as it is one alone whoknows (Golluscio, 2006). Even self-knowledge is seen in certain contexts as problematic. Thought (rakiduam) is often describedas having an existence apart from the self, thus it is common to hear people say not only, i rakiduam pienew . . . (my thoughtsaid to me. . .) but also, i rakiduam koylatuenew. . . (my thought lied to me. . .). These doubts about the possibility of fullyknowing self as well as others have to be understood in the context of the highly atomistic and individualistic nature of ruralMapuche life, where people live in widely-dispersed homesteads, and collective activities are few and far between.4Language (dungun), along with conviviality and commensality, is one of the means through which Mapuche people seekto address this specter of solipsism inherent in their view of person and society, and thus come to understand and createrelations with others while simultaneously becoming ever more different from them. This occurs through a variety of formalspeech genres such as chalintun (greeting), pentukun (statements about the health of ones kin), and nutramtun (reciting oflife history and genealogy) which allow speakers to locate themselves in social space and position themselves vis--vis theirinterlocutors. These discursive techniques of transmitting knowledge about persons continue even after death in the amu-lplln biographical funeral discourses which serve to complete (dewman) knowledge of the deceased and allow their spiritto move on (Course, 2007). Connections with others are made not only through the formal speech genres mentioned above,but also through the sociability of everyday conversation (nutramkan) in both Mapudungun and Spanish. Yet despite (or per-haps because of) the central role accorded to language in coming to know others, there is a high degree of skepticism andanxiety about both the possibility of ever truly knowing another person and about the reliability of language in achievingthis goal. These two issues the possibility of knowing others and the nature of language are distinct, but closely relatedproblems in Mapuche life.Like many, if not most, places in the world rural Mapuche life is rife with gossip and rumor. Both men and women may beparticipants in, and victims of, these discourses, but women in particular are prone to be victims of malicious gossip due tothe virilocal norm which means they live away from their consanguineal kin among strangers. Much gossip concerns thingssomebody might or might not have said, greetings avoided, slights perceived or intended, and so on. It is often not long be-fore such perceived slights are reformulated in an idiomof witchcraft (kalkutun). This possibility leads people to be especiallyaware of the iterability of every utterance, and the distinct possibility that subsequent iterations will bear little resemblanceto the intent, or indeed the words, of the original speaker. In short, people are hyper-conscious of the fact that what is meantplays only a small role in what is understood. This disparity or gap between the two the excess or superabundance ofsemiotic potential in language ispartly located intheill-will ofothers tomisrepresent fortheir own ends, butis alsounderstood to be an inherent quality of speech itself. For language is understood to be an intrinsically problematic phenom-enon, not just because people are prone to misrepresent the discourse of others through lying (koylatun), but more impor-tantly because speech itself is understood to be saturated with an excess of force (newen) which ultimately distances everyutterance fromthe control of its speaker. This excess force of language is evident in the capacity of utterances to effect resultsbeyond their speakers intentions. For example, to speak of the possible death of an ill person can be enough to cause such adeath to occur.5My intention here is certainly not to argue that rural Mapuche people have a wholly negative or fatalistic attitude towardslanguage. In addition to the positively valued establishment of social relations afforded by the formal speech genres men-tioned above, people take great pleasure in the esthetic and creative potential of language: jokes, riddles, stories, and songsare all central to the richness of rural Mapuche life. While the more formal and conventionalized genres, such as chalintun(greeting) and pentukun (conventionalized questions about kin) mentioned above, form the pragmatic pre-requisites for sub-sequentintersubjectivitytooccur, otherlessformalgenresallowforafargreaterimmersioninothersubjectivities. Anexample which I have explored in detail elsewhere is that of personal song (l) in which the iterability of language allowsfor a virtual iterability of subjectivity, as singers come to revive the subjectivities of long dead composers through singingtheir songs (Course, 2009). The key point, however, is that Mapuche ideas about language place people in a paradoxical sit-uation in which one must create oneself through language, while at the same time understanding language as characterizedby an excess of force only ever partially within ones control.To summarize the discussion so far: Mapuche people are born with a pre-existing connection to certain others consan-guineal kin but with a profound lack of connection with those non-consanguineally related others to whom they must be-friend to become true people. This kind of problem that of making a connection to separate subjectivities is more or lessfamiliar to students of cross-cultural conceptualization of intersubjectivity. Yet there is a further, apparently paradoxical fea-ture tied to the challenges of creating relationships with non-kin. For what is perhaps less familiar (but see Groark this vol-ume), is the problem to which I now turn: intersubjectivity conceptualized as a problem of not connecting in a cosmos inwhich all relations are already given.4By describing rural Mapuche society as individualistic, I am certainly not seeking to locate it within Western individualism, an ideology with a quitedifferent historical genealogy (Dumont, 1985; Mauss, 1985 [1938]). Rather, I am suggesting simply that Mapuche groups are effects of persons rather than theother way around, an argument I have advanced at length elsewhere (Course, 2011).5See Course (2012) for an elaboration on the relationship between language and newen.M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316 3092. Breaking a connectionRural Mapuche cosmology, like that of many other indigenous societies in the Americas, can be understood as at leastpartially perspectival, in the sense elaborated by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004).6Perspectivism refers to ontological congurations in which all animate entities are human to themselves, thus, for example,rural Mapuche say that ngen spirits see each other as human, get married, go to parties, and so on. Indeed, all animate enti-ties can be said to share one culture, or, if one prefers, one form of life (Wittgenstein, 2001 [1953]). However, what they seediffers, thus what to ngen spirits is wine and bread, is to che, to true people, urine and excrement. This is what Viveiros deCastro refers to as cosmological deixis; for in this form of deixis, it is not simply persons, places, or times that are indexicallyencoded, it is the very cosmos itself. The differentiation of perspectives is the result of different kinds of entities possessingfundamentally different bodies. In order to share the same perspective,and thus inhabit the same ontological plane, beingsmust have the same kind of bodies, hence the great emphasis throughout indigenous South America on commensality, con-viviality, and the control of substances. This emphasis on corporeal similarity as the foundation for full intersubjectivity (asopposedtojustthepragmaticpre-requisitesforfullsubjectivitysharedbyallentities)isatopictowhichweshallreturn.This universalhuman formoflife ofallanimate entities,hasits rootsinmyth, for,almostwithout exception, indigenousSouth American myths tell of a time before humans and animals were differentiated. These myths tell of the variety of mis-demeanours, errors, and betrayals which led various species to lose their human forms and become animals. As Viveiros deCastroputsit, Animalsareex-humans(ratherthanhumans, ex-animals) (2004, p. 465). Indreams, shamanicvisions, andsupernaturalencounters, people re-enter themythic cosmos of inwhich animals,humans, and spiritsare again undifferen-tiated and thus reveal themselvesasall human. This isclearly complex stuff,but the key point is simply that through per-spectivism, what unites all entities is asharedculture, asharedwayof thinking, andsharedformof life, whilewhatdifferentiatesisdistinctcorporealities. ThisleadsViveirosdeCastrotoopposeAmerindianmulti-naturalism(oneculture,many natures), to Western multi-culturalism (one nature, many cultures), the idea that unied corporeality is differentiatedbydistinctwaysofthinking.The relevance or irrelevance of perspectivism as an analytical framework sparks erce debates among ethnographers ofSouth America.7Yet most of the objections raised by anthropologists working in Native South America, are relatively minorconcerns about ethnographic t, modications or renements, rather than critiques per se.8Many of these debates are rootedin the space between perspectivism as ethnographic phenomenon and perspectivism as analytical paradigm, the latter being anabstraction from the former.9We shall return to the relevance of perspectivism as an analytical paradigm for the conceptual-ization of intersubjectivity later on. For now, however, it will sufce to say that it seems to me clear that Viveiros de Castro iscorrect in pointing out that the key locus of differentiation in many indigenous societies, is neither at the level of culture northought, but rather at the level of bodies. A shared form of life is, in a perspectival cosmology, what encompasses all entities,rather than as in our own cosmology, what holds them apart. If we take intersubjectivity to be an existential condition that canlead to a shared understanding [. . .] rather than being itself such an understanding, as Duranti following Husserl asserts (2010,p. 22), then our starting point within a perspectival context must be that all entities, both human and non-human, are to someextent already in an intersubjective relationship, or at the very least, the pragmatic preconditions for intersubjectivity on oneplane are already given.I would like to demonstrate the relevance of perspectivism to the problem of intersubjectivity in the Mapuche contextthrough two brief ethnographic examples, one admittedly esoteric, the other rmly prosaic. I will start by discussing peoplesnarratives about the nature of pacts made with Devil, and then move onto that of the problems of seeking and receiving ad-vice from non-consanguines. In each case, I want to suggest that what is at stake is the inappropriateness of the subject withwhich the relation is realized. On this plane, then, the question of knowing what the other subject might or might not bethinking is actually preceded by a prior question of the ontological status of ones interlocutor. Whereas the problem de-scribed in the rst part of the essay related to whether it was possible to understand the intentions of another true personwith regards to a shared world, in the encounters described below, even the possibility of a shared world cannot be taken forgranted. For as I hope to show, even when the Devil and non-consanguines are acting in good faith one still might nd thatthe ultimate referents for their words are located in different worlds. As we shall see, what constitutes a lamb for the Devil,is something very different for che, for true people.6Thetermperspectival wasrstusedtodescribeaspectsofNativeSouthAmericancosmologybyrhem(1981)andwasdevelopedanalyticallybyViveiros de Castro (1998, 2004) and Lima (1996).7Forexample, LondooSulkinhaspointedoutthat, atleastfortheMuinaneinColombia, theperspectivesofvariousspeciesarenotall asperfectlyequivalent as the paradigmatic perspectival model would suggest (2005). While it is true that jaguars see themselves as human, live in villages, get married, anddrink beer, they diverge from true people in that they eat their own brothers. Likewise, peccaries see themselves as human, live in villages, get married, anddrink beer, but are hopelessly promiscuous. In this way, each species stands for a particular moral failing. Londoo Sulkin notes that What is most pertinent tothem about animals and other non-human beings humanity and Culture [. . .] is that they are intrinsically warped and morally and ontologically inferior totheir counterparts among Real People (2005, p. 20).8See Turner (2009) for a more wide-ranging critique of the entire perspectival paradigm.9For my own contribution to these debates, see Course (2010a).310 M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 3073162.1. Meeting the DevilA relatively large number of people whom I know are said by their neighbors, sometimes even by their friends, to haveforged pacts with the Devil, known as el Diablo in Spanish, and as wekfe in the Mapuche language, Mapudungun. Perhapsnot surprisingly, the narratives of these encounters with the Devil are always told by a third party. A person will be wander-ing along a road or path late at night, and will reach a crossroads, wedan rp, a universally-preferred site of diabolical meet-ings. There, a strange, tall man will offer the person his or her hearts desire, in return for a lamb to be given in 10 years time.As the person recounting the narrative will never fail to point out, the Devils perspective is fundamentally distinct to that ofche, of true people, by virtue of his possessing a different kind of body, and thus being of an ontologically-distinct kind. Thuswhat for the Devil, is 10 years, is for true people, but 1 year. And what from the Devils perspective is a lamb, is from theperspective of true people, a close patrilineal relative, usually a son.It is important to stress here that at no point is the Devil deliberately trying to mislead or lie or trick the person withwhom the pact is established. As is common throughout the Americas, the imposition of a Christian dichotomous moralityhas somewhat obscured the contingent or pre-moral nature of local supernatural entities. For local people, the MapucheDevil is perfectly amoral, beyond good and evil, a gure just as capable of compassion and generosity, as he is of ill-willand deceit.10In the case of meetings with the Devil, people often assert that the Devil is indeed speaking the truth, in the sensethat the terms of his utterance do correspond correctly to their referents in his world. The problem or danger arising from thesepacts results from the fact that the world to which the Devil belongs and thus refers, is not the world of true people. The Deviland his hapless interlocutors are of fundamentally different natures, not necessarily different frames of mind. A successful inter-action with the Devil therefore, necessarily involves an awareness of the complex parallel development of the communicativeframework across two distinct ontological realms. There can be no doubt that the true person and the Devil are in an inter-subjective relation, the very interaction is premised on shared concepts of such things as language, deals, contracts, and eventhe idea of interaction itself. The form of life in which the interaction takes place is shared. But at the same time we are a longway from a Husserlian take on intersubjectivity in which intersubjectivity means the condition whereby I maintain that theworld as it presents itself to me is the same world as it presents itself to you (Duranti, 2010, p. 21). It is precisely the fact thatthe interaction simultaneously refers to two distinct worlds that makes it so dangerous.11It is worth clarifying here that inter-subjective connection and disconnection are simultaneously occurring in the interaction, thus while the conversational prag-maticsononeplaneofintersubjectivityarenecessarilyshared(giventheperspectival formoflife acrossall entities)theobjects of lexical reference on the plane of full intersubjectivity the lamb/son, 10 years/1 year are not.2.2. Seeking AdviceLet me turn now to a slightly more mundane example of a very similar problem: the reticence people show at seekingadvice from anyone but close consanguineal, preferably patrilineal, kin. Many times over the years I have been struck whenMapuche people whom I consider close friends atly refuse my requests for advice. Otherwise generous people who willhappily give me food, sing me songs, and lend me money, turn cold when I ask for advice. Its you who will know, I am toldsternly. Nglam, advice, constitutes a recognized, indeed semi-formalized genre of speech.12At certain points in their lives,young men and women, will seek out the advice of friends and elders. Before getting married or before migrating to Santiago,people seek advice. What I eventually learned was that advice should only be sought and only proffered to close consanguinealkin, those with whom one shares kpal, descent.The anxieties and challenges of making a connection with non-kin described previously, must be understood as the gureto a ground constituted by a fundamentally given set of pre-existing connections with consanguineal kin from which eachperson emerges. For central to any understanding of the Mapuche person and the social aggregates to which it gives rise isthe concept known in Mapudungun as kpal, a concept translated by Mapuche people into Spanish as descendencia descent.Each infant is the product of the combination of their mothers menstrual blood and their fathers semen. Both of these sub-stances transmit both maternal and paternal kpal; semen thus links a child to both paternal grandfather and grandmother,whilemenstrualbloodcreatesalinktobothmaternalgrandmotherandgrandfather. Mapuchepeoplethusplacegreatimportance on theirmelifolil or four roots a metaphorical allusion to ones four grandparents. Kpal is understood tobe a given component of the person: xed, immutable, and permanent from the moment of conception. Its inuence is vis-ible in each persons physical characteristics, in their relations with spirits, in their capacity to fulll certain social roles, andin their moral behavior.As well as being an essential aspect of the person, kpal can also be understood as the basis of a relation between persons.Thus, someone can be said to share kpal with all of their consanguineal kin. Yet, although at one level kpal suggests atheory of bilateral or cognatic descent, in terms of sharing kpal, the term frequently takes on a distinct patrilineal bias. Avirilocal tendency means that men spend most of their lives with those with whom they share kpal, whereas married wo-men tend to be separated, both socially and spatially, from such people. Thus the bilateral concept of kpal becomes a pat-rilineal concept when its meaning is extended from a component of personhood to the level of the inter-personal relations.10See Bacigalupo (1997) and Quidel (2012) for accounts of the historical transformation of both God and Devil in the Mapuche context.11Such clashes of perspectives are a key feature of the predatory logic so characteristic of many indigenous South American theories of relations, see, forexample, Fausto (2007) and Lima (1996).12See Golluscio (2006) for a detailed study of nglam.M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316 311This co-residence of men, unmarried women, and children who share kpal leads to the idea of being of kie kpal, of onedescent.13Relations between those patrilineally-related co-residents who share kpal are predicated on a notion of similarityand identity which leads to an ethic of obligatory mutual assistance and solidarity. Yet, such relations are also often fraught withproblems, particularly as such relations often hinge on attempts to assert authority between and within different generations,attempts which challenge the fundamental social autonomy of the Mapuche person.Matrilateral relations are referred to as kpal uke ple, literally descent by the mother. These relations are characterizedby perceived difference and supposed equality. People enter into exchange relationships with their matrilateral kin, whereasthey very rarely exchange with their patrilineal kin. Relationships created through marriage often closely resemble thosewith matrilateral kin. Indeed, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (ukentun) was previously an idealized and preferred formof marriage. The concept of kpal thus refers to many things both to an essential aspect of the person and to the form ofcertain relations, to both patrilineal relations and cognatic relations.At one level then, the Mapuche life course is concerned with moving from intersubjectivity premised on one substance kpal to intersubjectivity premised on another substance, wine.14While those relations premised on shared kpal decline inprominence due to the fact that they are given, they are nevertheless the essential background to the creation of new relationswith non-kin through the exchange of wine, or equivalent substances. Put simply, the shared corporeality premised on kpal,while ideologically downplayed, is of a slightly more permanent and secure nature, than the contingent and temporary sharedcorporeality achieved through exchange.15Young people who seek advice from those who are not patrilineal relatives, perhaps teachers or priests or afnal kin, arewarned that any advice proffered may well be bad or inappropriate advice, weda nglam. Again, like the example of pactswith the Devil, what is in question is not the intentions, improper or otherwise, of the interlocutor, but rather what kindof being they really are, and what implications this has for understanding the referents of their utterances. This is not tosay that the question of others intentions is irrelevant, but simply that it is preceded by the question of others forms ofbeing. What is true for people of one patri-group, one kie kpal, might not necessarily be true for another. For example, mar-riage with ones parallel cousin, is usually advised against for being too close, yet other groups might do this, because fromtheir perspectives parallel cousins appear more as mna, as cross-cousins. These different perspectives are rooted in differentbodies of local patri-groups.16It is only those who share ones kind of body, and thus ones perspective, who can truly discernwho is and who is not an appropriate spouse. The point is not that concerns about the giving and receiving of advice are devoidof political and economic concerns, but rather that such concerns co-exist with (or even stem from) ontological ones.What I hope these two brief examples demonstrate is that from a Mapuche perspective, until we know what kind of beingour interlocutor is, we cannot map their utterances to referents in either the world created by their perspective or by ourown. In a cosmos in which most, if not all beings, are subjects, then the problem of intersubjectivity emerges as being justas much one of how not to connect as of how to connect. Or as anthropologists working in Melanesia have put it, how to cutthe network (Strathern, 1996; Wagner, 1967) The constant danger is that of mistakenly recognizing another kind of being asan appropriate interlocutor, as mistaking them for the same kind of being as ourselves. As Viveiros de Castro puts it: Ourtraditional problem in the West is how to connect and universalize: individual substances are given, while relations haveto be made. The Amerindian problem is how to separate and particularize: relations are given, while substance must be de-ned (2004, p. 476; cf. Wagner 1975). Yet rural Mapuche seem to struggle with both the Western and the Amerindianproblem simultaneously; with how to connect with distinct minds, and with how to disconnect from distinct kinds. The ques-tion of knowing other minds goes hand in hand with the question of knowing other kinds.3. Convention and corporealityConcerns about the dual problem of connection and disconnection become evident in rural Mapuche life in the great careall people both young and old, both male and female take with speech, both as speakers and listeners. From an early age,Mapuche children are taught to only speak when they really have something to say, to avoid speaking of those who havesuffered or are in danger of suffering illness or misfortune, and to always be aware of the identity of those to whom theyare speaking, especially if they are not those with whom they share kpal. Key to this is the notion that people who sharekpal share a relationship of similarity or identity in relation to those from distinct kie kpal; a notion dependent upon thetransmission of characteristics described above. Such groups are often referred to in speech by the shared paternal surnameof male members. Thus one frequently hears comments about the Painemilla or the Nancucheoand so on. This makessense in the light of the tendency toward shared moral and behavioral characteristics of these people sharing kpal notedpreviously. A similar idea is suggested in the frequent use of the rst person plural pronoun (inchi) as a meaningful termextendable to include those with a shared paternal surname. Further evidence for the idea that kpal encapsulates a relation13While the concept of kpal inuences group membership, it cannot be reduced to this alone. In this sense, kpal differs from the usual anthropologicalunderstanding of descent as primarily concerned with membership of corporate groups. I expand upon this point at length in Course (2011).14As mentioned previously, while wine is the most elaborated substance of exchange, other substances sugar, eggs, mate tea all serve a similar function inother contexts.15The degree of corporeal similarity achieved through sharing kpal crosscuts other forms of bodily identity such as gender.16This idea ofgroups ofkin asdifferent kinds and thus as subjectto differing degrees ofintersubjectivepossibility is also presentamong theApache asdescribed by Nevins (this issue).312 M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316of similarity is the common assertion that sexual relations between people sharing kpal result in deformed children. Peopleexplicitly state that such relations are too close between people who are too similar. This theory of incest would suggestthat in some contexts it is the body that can be thought of as the locus of similarity through kpal. The shared corporealityof those who share kpal is reinforced by the fact that it is such people who live and eat together. As Vilaa has argued forlowland South America more generally, kinship is a process of commensurating bodies and thereby commensurating per-spectives (Vilaa, 2002).Furthermore, speech is saturated with evidentials, disassociating the speaker from any direct commitment to the truth ofthe utterance.17As listeners, rural Mapuche are careful not to take any statement at face value, and more importantly, to beaware of the identity of the speaker. While it would be an overstatement to say that people assume every encounter with anon-consanguine might be with the Devil, it is accurate to say that when Mapuche people talk to strangers they do so withthe assumption that the world to which the strangers words refer might well not be the same as their own. The end resultis that rural Mapuche people can rarely be described as loquacious.Beyond this highly cautious approach to speech, rural Mapuche make use of strategies well-known to students of inter-subjectivity: conventional speech genres and corporeal identity. The importance of convention in the establishment of inter-subjectivity was made explicit in Rappaports approach to ritual (1999), and as Danziger has pointed out Once conventionsof meaning are in place, mutual and conscious intention guessing is not necessary for interlocutors to decode one anothersutterances (2006, p. 269). Such convention likewise guarantees for the Mapuche speaker a minimal level of intersubjectiveunderstanding. The main locus of this convention, as elsewhere in lowland South America, is in the act of greeting.18Greetingin rural Mapuche life is composed of two highly formulaic aspects, the initial greeting itself (chalintun), and then a series ofhighly-formulaic questions about ones kpal (descent) and tuwn (place of origin), known as pentukun.Now while this practice of highly-conventionalized greeting addresses the problem of bridging the gap between distinctsubjectivities, it does nothing to help the second problem described above of ensuring that the subject with whom one is inan intersubjective relation, is an appropriate subject i.e., a true person. This is because the pragmatics of greeting are part ofthe single culture or form of life shared by all entities. Thus, for example, the great ngillatun fertility ritual is basically an actof greeting, but with the supreme deity Ngenechen, rather than with fellow true persons. Exactly the same sequence of cha-lintuninitialgreeting, pentukunquestioning, andmeatofferingaremadetoNgenechen, asoccurinmeetinganyhumanstranger. One would have to assume that even the Devil himself knows how to greet. Thus while convention partially ad-dresses the question of making a connection, of not having to guess entirely an interlocutors intentions, it cannot addressthe ontological question of whether or not ones interlocutor is the right kind of subject. To address this latter question, thebody comes to the fore.The emphasis on bodily similarity as fundamental to intersubjectivity is not conned to the Mapuche, but is widespreadthroughout the Americas and beyond. Yet the role of corporeality in Mapuche intersubjectivity is not restricted only to a phe-nomenological sense of the mutual recognition of the physicality of being in the world (Csordas, 2008), nor to the notion ofthe body as a semantic medium from which messages about a subjects intentions can be read (Groark, this issue), althoughundoubtedly both of these factors are present. Rather, the body is central because, as we have seen in the discussion of per-spectivism above, it is the body from which perspective emanates, the body in which cosmological deixis is rooted. To sharethe same kind of body is to partake in the same world, to share a perspective. Hence the absolute emphasis on sharing food,living together to take up the same bodily habits, and maintaining the shared materiality of consanguineal kinship. As Apare-cida Vilaa has argued, such bodies are not given as naturally similar, but must be created and maintained. Indeed, the cre-ation and maintenance of a shared perspective through the control of bodies is precisely what kinship in lowland SouthAmerica is all about (Vilaa 2002, 2005; Seeger et al. 1987).Ultimately, then, the only utterances which can be condently interpreted in rural Mapuche life are the ones uttered bythose who have come to share the same kind of body, whether that be through the sharing of kpal xed at birth, or throughthe processes of eating and living together for an extended period. Only when this degree of corporeal similarity has beenattained can the subject of an intersubjective relation be considered fully appropriate, in the sense that it can safely be as-sumed, not that they see the world as we see it (for all entities see a world as we see it), but more accurately, that they seethe same world as we do.4. The scope of intersubjectivityThe ethnography presented above can be taken as referring to a set of beliefs about the world, and can be catalogued assuch, hermetically sealing them off from our theoretical endeavors. Or more likely, we will be tempted to take seriously thebits which t in with our theoretical ambitions, and to leave aside those bits which do not, a process Nadasdy has calledepistemological cherry-picking (2007, p. 37). There are two key benets from taking Mapuche theories of intersubjectivity17The unreliability of speech is itself encoded metalinguistically in the frequent use of the evidential sufx rke to mark events which the speaker knowsonly through speech, rather than having witnessed rsthand. This evidential distances the speaker from any commitment to the reported events veracity andthus places its epistemological status in question. When speaking Spanish, too, speakers premise such events with the ubiquitous Se dice que . . . (It is said that. . .) see Hill and Irvine (1993).18See for example, Surralles (2003) on the ontological bridge spanned by greeting among the Kandoshi, or more generally, the papers in Monod-Becquelinand Erikkson (2000).M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316 313seriously. The rst is that we cannot properly account for Mapuche interactive practice without taking into account the ideasthey hold about interaction. This point has been made before, especially by those interested in howlanguage ideology relatesto linguistic usage (Kroskrity, 2000). The obvious objection would be that the ideas people hold about interaction might not,indeed cannot, fully account for how they interact. Yet as Danziger has argued, local philosophies about the place of mind inlinguistic meaning cannot always be disregarded (2006, p. 263). Thus, for example, we cannot account for the reticence ofMapuche in seeking advice from non-patrilineal kin without taking into account their ideas about the role of shared sub-stance in the interactive frame. Yet if we limit ourselves to this reason, Mapuche ideas are taken into account only insofaras they serve to explicate behavior; they are not allowed to stand on their own, as it were.The second reason is that through taking native theories seriously we can reveal and transform certain assumptions pre-viously implicit in our own analyses. In the case of Amerindian perspectivism, this possibility has been phrased by Latour asthat of deciding whether perspectivism is to be understood as type or bomb (2009). In other words, is the perspectivalunderstanding of intersubjectivity described above, simply another ethnographic case study, another type, or can it be al-lowed to explode the way we theorize the issue? In the remainder of this essay, I argue that taking this perspectival under-standingofintersubjectivityseriouslyrevealstouscertainassumptionsinherentinthewayintersubjectivityhasbeentheorized.So what kind of assumptions in anthropological and linguistic analysis of intersubjectivity might be destabilized or re-vealed through taking seriously the Mapuche ethnography presented above? There are at least two: rst, the assumptionthat thesubject inintersubjectivityisnecessarilyhuman, andsecond, theassumptionthat intersubjectivityemergesthrough shared engagement with a singular, objective world. Thus in addition to asking how do two subjects align theirintentions towards the world, we also need to ask two prior questions: what is a subject?, and what is a world? Hopefully,the ethnographic description of these questions in the rural Mapuche context outlined above, will have demonstrated thatsuch questions are more than obscurist pedantry; indeed, that is precisely these kinds of ontological questions which need tobe asked in order to understand the challenges which intersubjective interaction both produces and responds to.4.1. Who is the subject of intersubjectivity?In an inuential recent study, Tomasello et al. have argued that human beings, and only human beings, are biologicallyadapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint inten-tions) (2005, p. 676). I know of no Native American cosmology in either half of the Americas which corresponds to this state-ment. Indeed, despite the incredible diversity of indigenous experience throughout the Americas, one could generalize andsay that Native American life is premised upon the entirety of the cosmos participating in collaborative activities involvingshared goals and socially coordinated action plans. As Witherspoon noted for the Navajo, The world view resulting fromthese metaphysical presuppositions is an all-pervasive determinism in which all matter and energy, events and conditionsare ultimately controlled by the thought and will of intelligent or thinking beings (1977, p. 77). The perspectival ontologydescribed above is one particular variant of the fundamental idea that most beings are subjects capable of intersubjectiverelations. The question many indigenous people in the Americas face is that of the appropriateness of the subject with whichthey are interacting. In a great deal of writing on the topic, the question of to precisely what subject the subject in inter-subjectivity refers is left both unasked and unanswered. I suspect that the answer, should the question be asked from prop-erly anthropological perspective, will most likely vary, and will certainly not be restricted to the human in anystraightforward sense.19Perhaps the issue stems from the humanist foundations of anthropology as a discipline. Yet, it is not always shared by thepeople with whom anthropologists work. In many parts of the world, the boundaries of what is understood to constitutehumanity may be either far broader or far narrower than our own. Thus stones, salmon, and sunowers may all be consid-ered in some way human. To question this universal humanity has a dark side; many of the ills which anthropology hasrailed against, such as racism and sexism, are precisely limitations on the reach of shared humanity. Yet while to questionthe validity of somebodys claim to be human is untenable for anthropologists, it is something which people in many parts ofthe world do all the time. Put simply, any attempt to delineate a common core to intersubjectivity must take into account theimmense cross-cultural variation in what constitutes both a subject and an appropriate subject.4.2. To what world is intersubjective attention directed?A second assumption common to many studies of intersubjectivity is that the world to which the shared attention con-stitutive of intersubjectivity is directed, is singular. That is, that although there might be a multiplicity of distinct viewpoints,and a multiplicity of cultural formulations, there is but one objective world. This assumption has been revealed to be par-ticular to what Descola calls our naturalist ontology, one that necessarily sees the natural as what is shared by all entities,while the cultural (or its absence) is what differentiates (Descola, 1992, 1996). Such an ontology is clearly at odds with, forexample, the perspectival ontology described above, which posits a multiplicity of natures and of worlds. Yet the critiques of19Thisparadoxthatwhatconstitutesthehuman inmanyindigenousAmericansocietiesissimultaneouslyfarbroader(inextendingthehuman toanimals, plants, etc.) and far narrower (in restricting the human to the resident kin group) than what constitutes the human in the West is discussed inViveiros de Castro (1998).314 M. Course / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 307316the Western modernist naturalist ontology, come as much from within as without. Take, for example, Latours well-knownexposition of the modernist obsession with purication, with trying to maintain the boundary between nature and culture,between the singular and the multiple (Latour, 1993).20The ethnography presented this essay suggests that discourse may reveal that the world to which the shared attentionof the subjects in an intersubjective relation is aligned is not quite as stable as is frequently assumed. The Devil and his inter-locutor align their attention to the payment for a deal in which the latter will become rich, yet this object of their sharedattention is simultaneously two different objects; a lamb in the world of the Devil, and a son in the world of the true person.Each interaction thus involves, not simply an epistemological question of guessing the others intentions, but an ontologicalquestion of guessing to what world the others words refer.5. ConclusionMy purpose has been to provide a description of the problems rural Mapuche people confront in relating to others, boththe way they conceptualize the problem, and the solutions which they propose in practice. Such a description adds anothercase to the ethnographic catalogue of different conceptualizations of intersubjectivity. I have suggested that for many ruralMapuche people, questions of intersubjectivity occur on two distinct planes. First, on a plane of fundamental connectednessbetween all entities, human or otherwise, manifest in their shared culture and the shared pragmatic conventions of lan-guage. Such a formulation of intersubjectivity is closely related to what can be called the perspectival elements of Mapuchecosmology. On another plane, however, the problem of intersubjectivity appears as one of making sure that the points ofreference to any given interaction are shared, a problem which nds a partial solution in the similarity of bodies achievedmost emphatically through consanguinity, but also through the more ideologically elaborated sharing of wine, the exchangeof which marks people out as true persons. All interactions, then, occur in the context of these two planes of intersubjectivity,of apriori connectedness and unconnectedness. Furthermore, I suggest that the ethnography presented might reveal to uscertain assumptions about the way intersubjectivity has been dened, rst, the assumption that the subject of intersub-jectivity is human, and second, that the world to which perspectives are aligned is external to the intersubjective relationitself. 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