Cultrun

[5] Often, while Machi beat the drum, often to rid of evil spirits, herbal remedies will be prepared while animal protectors dance to the rhythm to initiate the healing process.

Thus, the cultrun’s beat marks a “dramatic performative ritualization of the fight against evil forces, illnesses, and death.

[7] As described by anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, in this worldview, “Sound is central to all thought and communication, and concepts like words cannot be picked up and attached to things but are continually passing in and out of existence”.

[10] Other afro-centric studies have provocatively suggested that the cultrun has an “undeniable africanness” and has origins in Mapuche interactions with Afro-Chilean populations during the colonial period.

[12] The only scholarly ethnomusicologal work that exclusively studies the cultrun is written by the Chilean music researcher Maria Ester Grebe.

[15] She references the work of foundational ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam, who argues that the “dual nature” of ethnomusicology as anthropological and musicological is a fact of the discipline, and that these aspects ought to be fused.

[17] To solve these dilemmas, she proposes that the concepts of worldview, myth and its ritual re-enactments, symbolic behaviour or objects can serve as the necessary units to establish these relationships, and that ethnomusicologists ought to carry out descriptive depth studies with layered levels of abstraction and analysis.

Musicologist Gary Tomlinson identifies music not as an “ideologically neutral, cross-cultural array of sounding phenomena”, but instead, a “constructed cultural category” whose emergence is eurocentric, largely undefined, and opaque.

[27] Given this new, critical understanding, recent scholars of the cultrun—such as those of Bacigalupo,[28] Spanish musicologist José Velásquez Arce,[29] or Chilean historian Juan Gustavo Núñez Olguín[30]—use the language of “sonority” to describe these expressions.

[31][32] Historically, much of the ethnomusicological focus on women’s musical activity has largely been descriptive and surrounded female initiation, child care, and birth.

During early periods of conflict with the Chilean state, many machi were male in order to evoke ancestral lineages related to war, which are traditionally masculinized.

[48] The ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday names the cultrun, because its symbolism is explicitly four-fold, masculine and feminine—that is, co-gendered—as an “essential tool” in this subversion.

[49] Performances of the cultrun have become popular in non-spiritual settings, particularly urban demonstrations, visible especially during Chile’s Estallido Social movement beginning in 2019.