The patterns of Araucanian historical expression that I study find their origins in the late pre-Hispanic period and their transformative influences in the contact and colonial periods. I believe that Araucanian leaders, who reforged the nature of religious, demographic, and sociopolitical order to resist and defeat outsiders, used existing traditions and organizational structures and borrowed several ideological constructs from the Inka state to fashion a new geopolitical and religious model of society relevant to their day and needs. Of particular interest is how different aggregates and organizations of Araucanians, operating on diverse territorial and institutional levels, were drawn into more extensive religious and political units (e.g., ayllarehue, butanmapu) only to be reshuffled and repositioned into alternative arrangements (e.g., Fine 1984). It is the transformative process by which this new order matured in the form of a confederated regional polity, the selective archaism it practiced in adopting certain Inka (i.e., Andean) principles of organization to centralize politically the anticolonialism and emergent nationalism and ethnicity of the Araucanians that halted the Spanish empire in south-central Chile, and the involved conditioning and determining variables that interest me, as well as their changing expressions in the archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records.

Colonialism is widely recognized as an institution that produced enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges – the colonizer and the colonized, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, and the developed and the underdeveloped (Boccara 2000; Comaroff 1998; Cooper 2005; Prakash 1995; Stein 2005; Stocking 1987).