La enfermedad de todos en el cuerpo propio: Brujería y performatividad del Tribunal de la Raza Indígena en Chiloé

The records of the legal process undertaken against individuals that were signaled as practitioners of witchcraft in Chiloé at the end of the nineteenth century give account of discourses that, by sustaining a world in which its existence is plausible, created and realized an association of witchcraft, called Tribunal de la Raza Indígena, also known as the Recta Provincia. These discourses presuppose a distinction between an immanent and a transcendental dimension of the world, and a cosmos governed by laws of reciprocity. The Tribunal de la Raza Indígena, as it appears in these records, may be understood as an association of witches that used magical and divinatory techniques to compensate, through vengeance, episodes of violation of normative behavioral expectations that characterize reciprocal social relations. Such episodes were manifested in the form of sickness in the bodies of individuals. This gave way to the use of magical and divinatory techniques to compensate, through vengeance, the rupture of normative expectations of behavior.