Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a Peruvian anthropologist. She is a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught throughout the USA and in Chile. Her research primarily focuses on the shamans or machis of the Mapuche community of Chile, and the ways shamanic practices and beliefs are affected by and influence communal experiences of state power, mythical history, ethics, gender, justice, and identity.

Bacigalupo's research encompasses a number of topics including shamanism, social and historical consciousness, environmental humanities, transformational politics, decolonizing methodologies, social and environmental justice, climate justice, cosmopolitics, the Anthropocene, more-than-humans, power dynamics in colonial politics, death, self and personhood, gender and sexuality, historicity, Indigenous histories, social memory, religion, and medical anthropology. She uses anthropological and social theories including new materialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and embodiment, and phenomenology. She primarily studies the Global South, Indigenous Latin America, the Mapuche people, Chile, and northern Peru.

Her recent research focuses on forms of power and the politics of the Indigenous views of sentient landscapes, spirits, and other ‘more-than-humans’. The Mapuche communities have been her focus of study, observing their lifestyles from the perspective and guidance of her 'spiritual grandmother,' Francisca Kolipi, a Mapuche Shaman. Her major works regarding the Mapuche have been published since 1996 with the most notable being Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche and Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia, both published respectively in 2007 and 2017.

Over more than twenty-five years, Bacigalupo has carried out ethnographic and archival work with indigenous Mapuche shamans of southern Chile and Argentina, and has been working with curanderos in Northern Peru since 2016. That work has been focused on cultural transformation, as well as systems of knowledge and power, from the perspective of these shamans and their communities. This includes her publications, which have focused on the operation of narrative, subject formation, agency, and power within different spiritual-political economies, gendered paradigms, historicities, ecologies, cosmologies, and healing systems. Bacigalupo is particularly interested in how, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, philosophies of power and knowledge produce disparate subjects and modes of action, historical narratives and imaginaries, notions of illness and death, techniques of the body, and therapeutic ritual forms.

Bacigalupo has published five books and more than sixty sole authored articles and chapters. Her sole authored books include Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Patagonia (2016); Hybridity in Mapuche Healing: The Practice of Contemporary Shamans (1996). She also co-authored Modernization and Wisdom in Mapuche Land (1995). Bacigalupo is completing a sixth book titled The Subversive Politics of Sentient Landscapes: Collective Ethnics and Environmental Justice in Northern Peru. She has served on the editorial boards for Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; Latino Cultural Studies; Cultural Citizenship: The New Centennial Review; and Acta Americana .

Work about Mapuche Shamanism

Books

La voz del kultrun en la modernidad: Tradición y cambio en la terapéutica de siete machi Mapuche (The Voice of the Drum in Modernity: Tradition and Change in the Healing Therapies of Seven Mapuche Shamans) Source: Bacigalupo investigates the multivocal and multireferential concepts of tradition and modernity as they are negotiated in the complex relationships between Mapuche shamans and their patients. Mapuche shamans, called machi, treat “traditional” illnesses—such as soul loss and sorcery—alongside “modern” illnesses like stress, depression, lovesickness, alienation, economic problems, AIDS and cancer. Machi present themselves as “traditional,” Bacigalupo argues, in order to respond to the demands of their non-Mapuche patients, but they incorporate into their practices powers and symbols from biomedicine and Catholicism, among other traditions. Florencia E. Mallon Social Science and Medicine Michael Winkelman Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America These shamans variously reproduce, challenge, and transform three paradigms of gender behavior that are at once colonial and indigenous: the male-female binary based on biological claims; the sexual-penetration paradigm of penetrating men and receptive non-men; and the ritual performances of masculinity, femininity, and co-gendered identities. Bacigalupo argues that discourses that polarize gender identities and fix gender referents in Chile also enable machi to move between male/female dichotomies, collapsing or fusing them through ritual practice. Shamans use paradoxical discourses about gender to legitimate themselves as gender-shifting ritual healers and as modern men and women.

Bacigalupo argues that, together with their relation to spirits, the machi's performances of gender enact power, hierarchy, and healing, making their bodies conflictual sites that express identities and differences between Mapuche and non-Mapuche people. Perceptions of “sexual deviance” and “sorcery” engender change because they are linked to fractures in a community that develop when people take up different positions in relation to capitalist ideologies. Bacigalupo analyzes the relation of shamans’ bodies to the body politic, tracing how the increasing shamanization of indigenous politics contributes to current discussions of identity, resistance, and agency—as well as to the structure and practice of power itself.

Shamans of the Foye Tree focuses on the shamans and discusses the importance of the foye tree and specifically discusses about gender. Mapuche shamans or machi are greatly influenced by sacred trees called Foye trees. Foye trees are a “symbol of office for both male and female machi and the place where the machi's spirit resides”. So machis could be seen as a community of people who don't only communicate with humans but also want to be able to communicate with other aspects of the universe(spiritual, natural and human) by means of the Foye trees.

Foye trees also emphasize that machi rituals are co-gendered because the flowers are specifically hermaphroditic. Hence Mapuche Shamans have no gender restrictions in order to engage in the rituals. Most of the machi's are female because women usually provide fertility to the land which helps promote agriculture and ultimately helps the community survive.

Reviews Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, And Healing Among Chilean Mapuche was reviewed in a number of journals, including: Publication Author Magnus Course AAA Section for Feminist Anthropology Joanna Crow Anthropologica Anne Lavanchy Journal des Americanistes Sabine Kradolfer Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde Lioba Rossbach de Olmos Chungara, Revista de Antropología Chilena Bacigalupo argues that Mapuche shamanic biographical narratives challenge conventional Chilean history by expressing their past in terms of shamanic historical understandings. In these narratives, the Mapuche fuse cyclical stories of creation, transformation, and destruction with the linear, chronological narratives of the recent past that produce a sort of history that Westerners find familiar. In mythologizing historical shamans, the biographies also rehistoricize and politicize myths in new contexts. Francisca and her community were constituted by the historical events of their lives, yet they also reconstituted those events through shamanic temporalities. By prioritizing the agency of spirits and shamans who can be reborn, these biographies reverse the Mapuche's subordination to the Chilean state, presenting them as the spiritual victors of history. The Mapuche thereby use shamanic biographical narratives to convey their own native historical agency and to promote political mobilization based on the transformative capacities of their spiritual power.

In this book, Bacigalupo argues that Mapuche engage in the subversive use of archival documents, maps and bibles, transforming them into an objects of power to subvert the dynamics of oppression between Mapuche and forces of colonialism. She argues that these non-Mapuche textual objects, have come to play a central role in the constitution of indigenous Mapuche shamanic identity, history, and power. Bacigalupo examines how and why Francisca, a non-literate Catholic Mapuche shaman, performs rituals using the community's land title and map to try and restore lands usurped by colonizers, and how she cleanses her patient's illness using Catholic bibles. Bacigalupo also analyzes why Francisca charged Bacigalupo to write ethnography about her in the form of a “bible.” Francisca saw this “bible” as a way to store her shamanic power as text, allowing her to speak to an audience in the distant future. Rodrigo Moulian Tesmer Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Matthew Peter Casey The Journal of Religion Rachel Carbonara Shaman Evgenia Fotiou Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute César E. Giraldo Herrera Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft She analyzes the Mapuche belief that the spirits of victims are partially perceptible beings trapped between life and death in the specific places where their bodies were killed. While memory studies and national commemoration focus on pastness and the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead represent the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed at different times in one place. They are agents who create an alternative localized history, not simply remembering suffering but acting upon past events to reshape them in the present.

In her LGBT custody case, Atala appealed publicly to an international human rights court with authority over the Chilean state. For Judge Atala, shamanic justice became a sexual and ethnic minorities subject to violence and discrimination by the Chilean state and the Catholic Church. They challenge social models of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between the human and nonhuman and promote human exceptionalism. Scholars have considered radically different forms of nonhuman persons and their ways of being in the world. By working beyond the theoretical limitations of ontological approaches (ways of being) and political ecology, and within the realm of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, Bacigalupo shows how the historical dichotomies of Western thought and their effects can be disrupted.

Fellowships, Grants, & Awards Bacigalupo received funding for her works involving Mapuche shamanism from the International Federation for University Women, Fundación Andes, Fundación Conycit, the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University , the Max Planck Institute, the National Humanities Center (Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities), the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Senior Fellowship (declined), the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation , the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University's Divinity School.

Bacigalupo received funding for her work concerning the effects of state violence on Mapuche spiritualism from the Max Planck Institute for the study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She has also received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the SUNY Buffalo Community for Global Health Equity for her work regarding sentient landscapes and more-than-humans. For the Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training, she received a Faculty Internationalization Grant from SUNY Buffalo.

Selected publications

1995 “Renouncing Shamanistic Practice: The Conflict of Individual and Culture Experienced by a Mapuche Machi.” Anthropology of Consciousness 6 (3): 1–16. 1996 “Mapuche Women's Empowerment as Shaman/Healers.” Annual Review of Women in World Religions 4: 57–129. 1996 “Identidad, espacio y dualidad en los perimontun (visiones) de machi Mapuche” [Identity, space and duality in the visions of Mapuche shamans]. Scripta Ethnologica 18: 37–63. 1998 “The Exorcising Sounds of Warfare: Shamanic Healing and the Struggle to Remain Mapuche.” Anthropology of Consciousness 9 (5): 1–16. 1999 “Studying Mapuche Shaman/Healers from an Experiential Perspective: Ethical and Methodological Problems.” Anthropology of Consciousness 10 (2–3): 35–40. 2000 “Shamanism as Reflexive Discourse: Gender, Sexuality and Power in the Mapuche Religious Experience.” In Gender, Bodies, Religions, edited by Sylvia Marcos, 275–295. Cuernavaca: ALER. [Translated and published in 2006, Bedenler, dinler ve toplumsal cinsiyet, derleyen, by Sylvia Marcos. Ankara: UTOPYA Yayinevi.] 2001 “The Rise of the Mapuche Moon Priestess in Southern Chile.” Annual Review of Women in World Religions 6: 208–259. 2003 “Rethinking Identity and Feminism: Contributions of Mapuche Women and Machi from Southern Chile.” Hypatia 18 (2): 32–57. 2004 “Ritual Gendered Relationships: Kinship, Marriage, Mastery, and Machi Modes of Personhood.” Journal of Anthropological Research 60 (2): 203–229. Repr.,2010, Women and Indigenous Religions, edited by Sylvia Marcos, 2010, 145–176. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO/Praeger Press 2004 “Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11 (4): 501–541. 2004 “The Struggle for Machi Masculinities: Colonial Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chile.” Ethnohistory 51 (3): 489–533. 2005 “The Creation of a Mapuche Sorcerer: Sexual Ambivalence, the Commodification of Knowledge, and the Coveting of Wealth.” Journal of Anthropological Research 61 (3): 317–336. 2005 “Gendered Rituals for Cosmic Order: Mapuche Shamanic Struggles for Healing and Fertility.” Journal of Ritual Studies 19 (2): 53–69. 2008 “The Re-invention of Mapuche Male Shamans as Catholic Priests: Legitimizing Indigenous Co-gender Identities in Modern Chile.” In Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, edited by Robin Wright and Aparecida Vilaca, 89–108. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. 2010 “The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman: Remembering, Forgetting and the Willful Transformation of Memory.” Journal of Anthropological Research 66 (1): 97–119. 2014 “The Potency of Indigenous Bibles and Biography: Mapuche Shamanic Literacy and Historical Consciousness.” American Ethnologist 41 (4): 648–663. 2016 “The Paradox of Disremembering the Dead: Ritual, Memory, and Embodied Historicity in Mapuche Shamanic Personhood.” Anthropology and Humanism 41 (2):139-157. 2017 “The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman: Remembering, Disremembering, and the Willful Transformation of Memory “ In Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader, Second Edition edited by Antonius C.G.M. Robben, 276-292. Wiley-Blackwell. 2018 “Shamanic Rebirth and the Paradox of Disremembering the Dead Among Mapuche in Chile” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, First Edition. Edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 279-291. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2022 “Embodying, Reshaping, and Combining the Past and the Future: A Mapuche Shaman's Historical Agency in Chile.” In Spirit-based Traditions of the Americas, edited by Benjamin Hebblethwaite, University of Nebraska press.