A Sermon for a Mapuche spiritual conquest

the proposition of Luis de Valdivia: XVII century

Abstract

According to luis de valdivia, through his approach on the defensive war in the early 17th century, the conquest of the mapuche people rebels against spanish people should be spiritual, which implied to convince the indigenous regarding the supremacy of christianity. one of the texts proposed as a model of sacred oratory to obtain this form of mapuche evangelization is “sermón en lengua de chile” (“sermon on language of chile”) (valdivia, 1621). the nine sermons of this work are characterized by the intercultural relations among the participants of the communicative circuit and elements of the argumentative dimension of the discourse, as the sermons’ objective is to convince and persuade. nonetheless, in this article we argue that the enunciator does not understand completely the mapuche culture, as two of the aspects of a successful communication (interculturality and argumentation) are not achieved.