Naming the body in the colonial vocabulary for chilean mapudungun (17th-18th centuries)

Abstract

This article reviews and analyses the neologistic strategies developed in the three colonial Chilean dictionaries of Mapudungun concerning sexuality and the body/soul dyad. The dictionaries are understood as artefacts which employed interventionist strategies with regard to the native language. These strategies responded to the objectives of evangelisation and the consequent disciplining of bodies. The bilingual dictionaries are viewed as discursive social practices and we remark their historicity, heteroglossia and argumentative capacity, which model and distinguish their intervention strategies from the discursive network related to a specific historical moment.