The cultrun (from , and ) is a percussion instrument used by the Mapuche in ChileThe Mapuche People and Argentina.
Role in Mapuche culture
The cultrun is a ceremonial drum and the most important musical instrument in Mapuche culture. It is used by the machi (healer or sorcerer) for religious and cultural rituals. It is also used during the annual fertility rite of Ngillatun.
It is approximately 35 to 40 cm in diameter and has a height of 12 to 15 cm. The wooden body is made from laurel, beech or lingual, cut in winter to avoid splitting.
It can be played in two different ways, either held in the hand and struck with a drumstick or resting on the floor and played with two sticks. The cultrun is sometimes accompanied in performance by other musical instruments, such as the lolkiñ, a large, circular wind instrument.Orrego-Salas, J. A. (1966). Araucanian indian instruments. Ethnomusicology, 10(1), 48-57.
During rituals such as the ngillatun, sacred songs composed of non-men singing and dancing are performed.Ruiz, I. (2010). Musical Culture of Indigenous Societies in Argentina. Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History, 163-80, p.170. Machi will play the cultrun to guide the ceremony as a pulse, direct the dancing, and sing simultaneously.Ruiz, I. (2010). Musical Culture of Indigenous Societies in Argentina. Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History, 163-80, p.170.
In ceremony, the beating of the cultrun is a participatory musical process.Bacigalupo, A. M. (2001). La voz del kultrun en la modernidad : tradición y cambio en la terapéutica de siete machi mapuche (1. ed.). Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile. 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."Marcos, S. (2004). Review of La Voz del Kultrun en la Modernidad: Tradición y Cambio en la Terapeutica de Siete Machi Mapuche, by A. M. Bacigalupo. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72(1), 235–237, p.236. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005885
Mapuche epistemology is aural and oral.Bacigalupo, A. M. (1998). The exorcising sounds of warfare: The Performance of shamanic healing and the struggle to remain Mapuche. Anthropology of Consciousness, 9(2‐3), 1-16, p. 2. 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”.Bacigalupo, A. M. (1998). The exorcising sounds of warfare: The Performance of shamanic healing and the struggle to remain Mapuche. Anthropology of Consciousness, 9(2‐3), 1-16, p. 2. In this vision, scholars have asserted that the sound of the cultrun is of the utmost importance in Mapuche epistemology, because rather than passively transmitting a musical expression, it forms part of Mapuche ways of knowing and being.Bacigalupo, A. M. (2001). La voz del kultrun en la modernidad : tradición y cambio en la terapéutica de siete machi mapuche (1. ed.). Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile.
Origin
Most scholars on the cultrun posit that the instrument is Indigenous to the Mapuche, emerging before the Mapuche are thought to have contact with the Aymara or the later Inca Empire.Juan A. Orrego-Salas. (1966). Araucanian Indian Instruments. Ethnomusicology, 10(1), p.56. https://doi.org/10.2307/924185 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.Salvo, J. (2015). El origen africano del Kultrún mapuche. Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, (19), 1-22. Currently in Chile, none of the above proposals is widely accepted by both the Chilean population and the Mapuche or Mapuche/Tehuelche population since none of these grants more than conjectures by association, since due to the rapid degradation of the material, it hardly lasts over time in a climate like southern Chile, and unlike what is exposed in "El origen africano del Kultrún mapuche" the Mapuche culture has a long history of both crafts and music, so the theories of authenticity remain without unrefuted.
Spanish settlers took a particular interest in this instrument during the colonial period.Juan A. Orrego-Salas. (1966). Araucanian Indian Instruments. Ethnomusicology, 10(1), p.55. https://doi.org/10.2307/924185
In Scholarship
The only scholarly ethnomusicologal work that exclusively studies the cultrun is written by the Chilean music researcher Maria Ester Grebe.Salvo, J. (2015). El origen africano del Kultrún mapuche. Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, (19), 1-22, p.3. Grebe's research combines a deep dive into the cultrun and its significance and an explanation of how her approach to the cultrun can fill methodological gaps in ethnomusicology research.Grebe, M. E. (1973). El kultrún mapuche: un microcosmo simbólico. Revista musical chilena, 27(123-1), 3-42. Grebe argues that the largest methodological problem within ethnomusicology is that some ethnomusicologists solely analyze music without being in conversation with other cultural aspects, whereas others analyze cultural systems without richly analyzing musical elements.Grebe, M. E. (1978). Relationships Between Music Practice and Cultural Context: the Kultrun and its Symbolism. The World of Music, 20(3), 84-106, p.84. 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.Merriam, A. P., & Merriam, V. (1964). The Anthropology of Music. Northwestern University Press. p.17. Yet, the unsolved methodological questions for Grebe are twofold—that ethnomusicologists have not settled upon a system of cultural units to analyze the relationships between music and cultural contexts, nor have they settled upon methods or procedures to establish these relationships.Grebe, M. E. (1978). Relationships Between Music Practice and Cultural Context: the Kultrun and its Symbolism. The World of Music, 20(3), 84-106, p.85. 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.Grebe, M. E. (1978). Relationships Between Music Practice and Cultural Context: the Kultrun and its Symbolism. The World of Music, 20(3), 84-106, p.87. Her study analyzes the cultrun in order to demonstrate this approach: understanding the cultrun to be a micro-cosmos reflective of the Mapuche worldview and taking upon the layered analysis for which she advocates.Grebe, M. E. (1978). Relationships Between Music Practice and Cultural Context: the Kultrun and its Symbolism. The World of Music, 20(3), 84-106. With Grebe's work so highly cited in Indigenous South American ethnomusicology,Salvo, J. (2015). El origen africano del Kultrún mapuche. Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, (19), 1-22, p.3. much of the scholarship on the cultrun draws from this ethnomusicological approach.
Because of the expansive role of the cultrun in Mapuche epistemology, other ethnomusicologists have often challenged the framing of the Western ontological concept of “music” as being able to encapsulate the expansive nature of Mapuche music. Within the discipline, such debates have been a feature of ethnomusicological discourse since the late 1990s. 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.Tomlinson, G. (1999). Vico's Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno) Musicology. The Musical Quarterly, 83(3), 344-377, p.344. Ethnomusicologist-cum-sound studies scholar Deborah Wong furthers the critique by calling for ethnomusicologists to divest from the construct of music for its ethnocentrism, inherent links to aesthetics, and placement beyond sociality—instead relying upon a vision of music as a sonal phenomenon.Wong, D. (2014). Sound, silence, music: Power. Ethnomusicology, 58(2), 347-353. However, this view directly contrasts that of Merriam, who explicitly argues that “music cannot be defined as a phenomenon of sound alone”.Merriam, A. P., & Merriam, V. (1964). The Anthropology of Music. Northwestern University Press. p.33. By extension, such a framing contrasts the framing of Grebe's seminal work on the cultrun and those who heed this approach.
Ethnomusiciologists have indeed taken up such an approach. Ethnomusicologist Jacob Rekedal, who studies Mapuche music, argued that Mapuche “music” was beyond the boundaries of music as a cultural category.Rekedal, J. E. (2015). Warrior Spirit: From Invasion to Fusion Music in the Mapuche Territory of Southern Chile. University of California, Riverside. Carol Robertson-DeCarbo, whose studied the Mapuche tayil song, produced an early criticism of music as an ontological category insofar as the lack of a traditional concept of music within the Mapuche language.Robertson-DeCarbo, C. E. (1976). Tayil as category and communication among the Argentine mapuche: A methodological suggestion. Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, 8, 35-52. Robertson-DeCarbo's work extends, serving as a mounted criticism against the reliance of ethnomusicology on "music" as a conceptual category.Robertson-DeCarbo, C. E. (1976). Tayil as category and communication among the Argentine mapuche: A methodological suggestion. Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, 8, 35-52. These scholars Mapuche expressions typically understood as “music” are forms of communication—often, recitations of genealogies in combination with instruments and corporal movements that inform cosmovision–that the term music cannot encapsulate.Robertson-DeCarbo, C. E. (1976). Tayil as category and communication among the Argentine mapuche: A methodological suggestion. Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, 8, 35-52. Given this new, critical understanding, recent scholars of the cultrun—such as those of Bacigalupo,Bacigalupo, A. M. (1998). The exorcising sounds of warfare: The Performance of shamanic healing and the struggle to remain Mapuche. Anthropology of Consciousness, 9(2‐3), 1-16, Spanish musicologist José Velásquez Arce,Velásquez Arce, J. A. (2010). Pu trutrukatufe. Una aproximación a la concepción sonora y aspectos socioculturales presentes en su práctica ceremonial y cotidiana mapuche. or Chilean historian Juan Gustavo Núñez OlguínOlguín, J. G. N. (2010). Música, etnicidad e identidad mapuche. una mirada crítica al Chile multicultural. Historia Actual Online, (23), 147-154.—use the language of “sonority” to describe these expressions.