The Foerster machine and its three engines (between sacrificial transparency and historical opacity) | Revista Chilena de Antropología
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The Foerster machine and its three engines (between sacrificial transparency and historical opacity)

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No. 51 (2025): Primer Semestre
https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1472.2025.79328
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Abstract

The work of Chilean anthropologist Rolf Foerster is analyzed through the metaphorical figure of a machine powered by three engines: structuralism, historicism, and Jesuitism. His first engine, structuralist in nature and influenced by Lévi-Strauss, enables him to analyze Mapuche realities through a textual logic that integrates heterogeneous records, thus overcoming essentialisms and disciplinary boundaries. The second engine, historicism, allows him to move beyond structural formalism by emphasizing the historical contingency and transformation of meanings, while also surpassing the central analytical role given to the Christian figure of the victim by virtue of his third engine, the Jesuitic one. Within this framework, the theoretical importance of his thesis on “hybrid pacts” (of society and submission) between the State and the Mapuche is highlighted. In his more recent work on leprosy in Rapa Nui, Foerster turns to certain “raw images” as vectors of historical and political reality, in opposition to simplistic narratives of victim and perpetrator. In doing so, he manages to explore a space at the very boundary between what can and cannot be said.

Keywords:

Chilean anthropology , Mapuche , Rapa Nui , structuralism , historicism
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How to Cite
Menard, A. (2025). The Foerster machine and its three engines (between sacrificial transparency and historical opacity) . Revista Chilena De Antropología, (51), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1472.2025.79328
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