Mapuche

They appeared to investigate the camera, pulses of light rippling down their length like a nervous system in a state of excitement.

While the world sees a 2026 scientific anomaly, the local Mapuche community sees something very old.

They call them the Anchimalan.

In Mapuche lore, these bad lights, what that word means, are spirits or sentinels that guard the high places.

They're said to be born to the sun, capable of dazzling the eyes of the unwary and leading travelers deep into the mountains, never to return.

For centuries, these stories were dismissed as folklore.

End note.

Smith says that the medicine men of the Araucanians are well acquainted with the proper use of emetics, cathartics, and sudorophics.

For the purpose of injection they make use of a bladder, as is still commonly practiced among the Chilenos.

Oviedo says of the medicine men, conocían muchas hierbas de que usaban y eran oprobodias a diversas enfermedades.

This custom of the Australians does not obtain among the North American tribes, by whom the teeth, as they fall out, are carefully hidden or buried under some tree or rock.

At least I have been so informed by several persons, among others by Chato, one of the principal men of the Chiricahua Apache.

Molina speaks of the customs of the Araucanians, who, after torturing their captives to death, made war-flutes out of their bones and used the skulls for drinking-vessels.

The Abepones of Paraguay make the bones of their enemies into musical instruments.

Humboldt relates the interesting fact that, after the annihilation of a large part of the inhabitants of Cumaná by an earthquake in 1766, a season of extraordinary fertility ensued, in consequence of the great rains which accompanied the subterranean convulsions.

The Indians, he says, celebrated after the ideas of an antique superstition, by festivals and dancing, the destruction of the world and the approaching epoch of its regeneration.

The existence of such rites among the rude nations of South America is most important, as showing what effects may be produced by local catastrophes recurring at distant intervals of time on the minds of a barbarous and uncultivated race.

I shall point out in the sequel how the tradition of a deluge among the Araucanian Indians may be explained by reference to great earthquake waves which have repeatedly rolled over part of Chile since the first recorded flood of 1590.

The legend also of the ancient Peruvians of an inundation many years before the reign of the Incas, in which only six persons were saved on a float, relates to a region which has more than once been overwhelmed by inroads of the ocean since the days of Pizarro.

I might refer the reader to my account of the submergence of a wide area in Kutch so lately as the year 1819, when a single tower only of the fort of Sindri appeared above the waste of waters, if it were necessary to prove how easily the catastrophes of modern times might give rise to traditionary narratives among a rude people of floods of boundless extent.

They appeared to investigate the camera, pulses of light rippling down their length like a nervous system in a state of excitement.

While the world sees a 2026 scientific anomaly, the local Mapuche community sees something very old.

They call them the Anchamalan.

In Mapuche lore, these bad lights, what that word means, are spirits or sentinels that guard the high places.

They're said to be born to the sun, capable of dazzling the eyes of the unwary and leading travelers deep into the mountains, never to return.

For centuries, these stories were dismissed as folklore, atmospheric ghosts created by swamp gas or static electricity in the thin mountain air.

I was at a traditional bride price negotiation in a tiny village in South Africa, okay, 17 years where it ends with the ending of this negotiation with a traditional wedding and a white wedding or Western wedding in the same day.

What do we do the first thing in the morning? The family took a homemade brew, poured it at the base of the tree to summon the ancestors, okay? A year later, I'm on my fire-spitting expedition in Chile, and I go to see a Mapuche healer, an indigenous tribe that's one of the most storied in South America because they pushed back against the colonizers for centuries.

And before this Mapuche healer leads me on a ritual, he takes a brew, homemade brew, and pours it at the base of a tree to honor the ancestors.

How does that happen? There's no land bridge.

There's no internet.

But we've been working with Bedouins in Saudi Arabia, with the Blackfoot in the Western US, with Mongols in Mongolia, with Mongols in China.

We are about to set a program with Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and also with Mapuches in the Andes of South America now.

And all of them are within the relationship established by the people of the land and the land they inhabited.

In our particular context, we've seen that Maori is not a grazing culture.

However, now with agriculture and the Maori in agriculture may be or not influenced by modern agriculture or conventional agriculture or regenerative agriculture.

My team, and I'm advised by Professor Tekahutu Maxwell with Waikato University or even Hirini Matunga from here, is how we can learn from grazing cultures from other places.

like the Mongols, like the Sami in Norway that we got a project there as well, like the Blackfoot, you know, harvesting bison and being expropriated of those bison now by the modern cowboys, or the Mapuches herding guanacos and now dealing with goats and a merino sheep in Patagonia.

We asked one question to all our guests, and it's what is the last thing that made you curious?

In today's episode, we are going to discuss a book about conservation, settler colonialism, and a fundamental question.

What does it mean to be human in a time of increasing environmental uncertainty? Set in the forests of southern Chile, today's new book draws on more than a decade of fieldwork with smallholding settlers, indigenous Mapuche communities, environmental activists and entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists.

It shows how conservation politics take place amid the lasting efforts of settler-caused environmental depletion, completing ideas of care and being human, and different ways of relating to landscape and non-human beings.

I'm very glad to have the author, Dr. Piero Giorgio Di Gimignani, with us today.

As I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in these areas, the question of how different human societies have different ontological articulation of nature It was very clear from the start.

I mean, I was doing fieldwork with different, what we call communities, practice.

Communities are grounded in particular relation with the land, such as indigenous Mapuche communities, and also settlers in a different way.

So it's sort of like the old question of cultural difference came back to me.