Sound, Precarity, and Mapuche Reality in Urban Santiago

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of sound during the performance of the Mapuche ceremony llellipun in Santiago. It argues that ceremonial sounds create an immersive experience that facilitates intercommunication between humans, spirits, and the ecosystem amid an eco‐spiritually precarious space, thereby making audible a distinctively urban Mapuche way of thinking and being in the world. In establishing and rendering perceptible human, non‐human, and more‐than‐human relations, sound production and sensation reaffirm the often‐neglected presence of eco‐spiritual forces and entities in the city—central components of the Mapuche lived world. However, this lived entanglement of the anthropological, ecological, and cosmological orders facilitated by llellipun differs from that of rural Mapuche settings. Indeed, Santiago's ecological and urban precarity, which hinders communication with nature and spirits, turns llellipun into an essential means of Mapuche existence, allowing them to reactivate an eco‐spiritual relationality that urbanity has certainly obstructed but not yet destroyed.