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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's focus. This book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations. The different forms of social relations may be referred to as “modes of sociality,” a deliberately vague term that goes beyond “kinship” to include the symbolic value of all kinds of relations: those between kin, those between nonkin, those between persons and animals, and those between persons and spirits. This analysis of the Mapuche person and its concomitant modes of sociality allows for a reconceptualization, not only of the major social events of rural Mapuche life, but also of the nature of social aggregates or groups and the role they play in the rapidly changing relations Mapuche people have with the Chilean state.

This chapter examines the aspect of the person referred to as küpal, a term Mapuche people translate as “descent.” As well as being the vehicle for the transmission of certain physical and behavioral characteristics, it is the sharing of descent that is the basis for relations between patri-relatives. It is these relations of patrilineality between those who share descent that are paradigmatic of what can be called “sociality of descent.” Such a mode of sociality is characterized by obligatory mutual assistance, shared identity, and the potential for inequality. The chapter then suggests that a full understanding of the importance of descent helps in reconsidering the complex and flexible nature of Mapuche social aggregates—a long-standing problem in the relevant ethnographic literature.

This concluding chapter argues that one of the key challenges facing rural Mapuche people is maintaining individual autonomy while entering into various kinds of social relations with others. It is in the very act of creating oneself as che, as a true person, that one runs the greatest risk of losing oneself, of slipping from being the autonomous author of one's own person to being the product of somebody else's intention. Mapuche life is therefore about the maintenance of a delicate balance, the careful judging of social relationships, a fulfillment of the need to enter into sociality enough to be a true person but not so much that one's self disappears in the process.

This chapter focuses on the ngillatun fertility ritual. The mechanisms by which Mapuche people set about achieving productive relation with certain divinities and with people from other ritual congregations are remarkably similar to the mechanisms by which they set about achieving productive relations in the everyday context. The communal nature of the ngillatun addresses a problem particular to societies in which forms of social organization occur primarily at a personal level, namely, that of how ideas about the construction of sociality come to be shared. However, this is but one facet of the meaning the ritual has for the people who participate in it. Its primary meaning is that which its participants hold it to be: an act of giving thanks and a request for providence in the coming year, as well as a party.