Specters of Cahuín

Abstract

The word cahuín has conveyed different and varying meanings: a Mapuche social unit, binge, intrigue... We argue that the logic that possibly connects these various meanings may be based on the ethnographically identified link between revenge and binge. Cahuín, revenge and binge would work as mechanisms of time production and as a form of social bond in stateless societies. Also, revenge introduces the problem of spectra that survive exchange equivalence and function as a sort of historicity or heritage energy that can be managed by both, state societies and stateless societies in their own ways. Finally, it is argued that the cahuín, as a polemical version of the social bond, would continue working in modern state societies by the shaping of a spectral community that erodes the basis of sovereignty legitimacy.