Olivia Casagrande

The book addresses indigenous creative practices of storytelling as essential practices of world-making that both engage with and exceed place. Through an analysis constructed around the concepts of ‘interconnectivity’ and ‘saturation’, the book shed lights on the multiple ways in which contemporary indigeneity is negotiated, transformed and articulated, challenging the socio-spatial categories usually assigned to indigenous bodies and subjects. Deepening debates on race, ethnicity, territory, and inequality in Latin America, the book draws from eleven years of anthropological engagement with Mapuche lifeworld in contexts of displacement. Building on the analyses of a diverse range of texts, artworks, and materials, it stems from two related research projects, focusing respectively on the transnational trajectories of Mapuche exiles during the Pinochet’s dictatorship and its aftermaths; and on the Mapuche ‘urban diaspora’ in the Chilean capital. Through a writing that assumes and engages with the ‘awkwardness’ of anthropological authorship, the book is a multi-layered composition informed by multi-modal and collaborative research. Responding to recent calls for the decolonization and elaborating on the epistemological possibilities arising from the intersection of storytelling, collaborative ethnography, performance, and art-based methods, the book puts forwards the potentialities and unruliness of creation for the interrelational construction of knowledge.