Dr Magnus Course (University of Edinburgh)
Three Ways to Fail: clown / witch / usurper
This talk constitutes a narrative exploration of how thinking through archetypes of failure might offer glimpses of what it means to live well. Failure is something that we, as humans, do. Here I tell the story of how I learned to fail, or more accurately, how I learned to recognize the specific forms my failure took against a general absence of success. The talk is also about the Mapuche people, the indigenous people who have cared for and shaped the landscapes of southern Chile and Argentina for over a thousand years, and who continue that care in the face of the most brutally avaricious colonialism. Yet I don’t offer a romanticized portrait of a people living “at one” with their environment and each other. Rather, I present a set of reflections upon three distinct Mapuche archetypes of the ways in which people fail to live with their environment and with each other – the clown, the witch, and the usurper– and the relevance that these figures have had for me in thinking through my own failures.