Ana Mariella Bacigalupo | SUNY: University at Buffalo (original) (raw)

Books by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/bacigalupo-thunder-shaman As a “wild,” drumming thunde... more https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/bacigalupo-thunder-shaman
As a “wild,” drumming thunder shaman, a warrior mounted on her spirit horse, Francisca Kolipi’s spirit traveled to other historical times and places, gaining the power and knowledge to conduct spiritual warfare against her community’s enemies, including forestry companies and settlers. As a “civilized” shaman, Francisca narrated the Mapuche people’s attachment to their local sacred landscapes, which are themselves imbued with shamanic power, and constructed nonlinear histories of intra- and interethnic relations that created a moral order in which Mapuche become history’s spiritual victors. Thunder Shaman represents an extraordinary collaboration between Francisca Kolipi and anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, who became Kolipi’s “granddaughter,” trusted helper, and agent in a mission of historical (re)construction and myth-making. The book describes Francisca’s life, death, and expected rebirth, and shows how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession, drawing on ancestral beings and forest spirits as historical agents to obliterate state ideologies and the colonialist usurpation of indigenous lands. Both an academic text and a powerful ritual object intended to be an agent in shamanic history, Thunder Shaman functions simultaneously as a shamanic “bible,” embodying Francisca’s power, will, and spirit long after her death in 1996, and an insightful study of shamanic historical consciousness, in which biography, spirituality, politics, ecology, and the past, present, and future are inextricably linked. It demonstrates how shamans are constituted by historical-political and ecological events, while they also actively create history itself through shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms.

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/bacsha.html “The book argues that the bodies of machi shaman... more http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/bacsha.html
“The book argues that the bodies of machi shamans, their desires and gendered performances, and their possession by and control over spirits become sites for local conflicts and expressions of identity and difference between Mapuche and non-Mapuche people-the places where power, hierarchy and healing are played out. This is a complex and demanding menu. It assumes deep and intimate ethnographic knowledge of her subject, a subtle sense of Chilean history, and agility with theories of gender, performance, and ritual, a tough project but she brings it off. The book comes come in a brilliant final chapter where Bacigalupo and her informants debate her mention of “witchcraft” and “homosexuality,” foregrounding the difficulty of generalizing between machi and the stakes of different machi in presenting themselves and being represented by clients, anthropologists, the Chilean nation, and a New-Age Audience.”

“This is a significant contribution to the field, first as a detailed and complex presentation of machi shamans and as a challenging confrontation of any simple generalization about gender and spirit possession. As a work of ethnography, it sets a high standard for both depth of on the ground knowledge of machi lives, and for its ability to relate those lives to a complex history and politics. The book transcends Chilean or Latin American ethnography. I read it as a scholar with general interest in shamans and gender and can recommend it without hesitation to others with the same broad interests.”
Dr. Laurel Kendall
Curator, American Museum of Natural History

“The book is well timed as a rich case study to complement Barbara Tedlock’s overview, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, which draws on Bacigalupo’s work among others.”

Substitute the term “culture” for “kultrun” and one might well sum up Bacigalupo’s dialogic ethn... more Substitute the term “culture” for “kultrun” and one might well sum up
Bacigalupo’s dialogic ethnography about the lives, and the hearts and minds of seven Mapuche machi as “The Voice of Culture in Modernity.” Indeed, the kultrun is more than merely a traditional ceremonial drum played by the machi (shamans) in their therapeutic sessions to aid them in ridding their patients from ills that include modern ailments such as stress, depression, lovesickness, alienation, economic problems, AIDS, and cancer. The machi’s drum embodies
the very rhythm through which culture is fashioned and refashioned as it is constantly reinvented by the Mapuche. In light of this, Bacigalupo achieves a new definition of the concept of culture, not as a form of collective corpus, but as an instrument whose tuning and timbre can be changed and whose ragas or tunes are not as much replayed, as they are played with, or can be (re)created on any new occasion. But the tuning obviously needs the tuner, and here the role of the individual (and the Machi, more specifically) in this conception of culture is emphasized. The same malleability is extended to concepts like
identity and tradition, for the author states at the very beginning of her book: “identity, culture, and tradition are dynamic and arise in dialog,
contradistinction, and identification with the other” (p. 9). Nevertheless, one should not mistakenly think that “dialog” here means some kind of rapport or colloquia between two ways of seeing the universe (one traditional, the other modern), for the author shows very clearly that her use of the term preserves the original Greek meaning of multivocality and multireferentiality. Bacigalupo’s book is one of the first truly Bakhtinian ethnographies to be published on ethnomedicine and shamanism.
Marcelo Fiorini, Hofstra University

Articles in English by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

American Religion, 2024

The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in... more The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame them as struggles to build a new world order both against and otherwise than frameworks. Exploring the materiality of these struggles across several dimensions-of the earth, of religious objects and rituals, and of the sovereign body-we describe the constitution of what we call the "flesh of justice" and probe its subversive effects. Drawing on the distinctive tradition of Latin American Marxism to contest the separation of the subaltern "otherwise" from the domain of modern politics, we offer two analytics for engaging with the flesh of justice in Latin America: subversive cosmopolitics and theopolitics.

Journal of Anthropological Research , 2024

Judge Karen Atala framed her child custody case against the Chilean Supreme Court within Indigeno... more Judge Karen Atala framed her child custody case against the Chilean Supreme Court within Indigenous Mapuche "shamanic justice," the "spirit of the law," and human rights. We analyze what Atala's case contributes to the literature on sexual diversity, sorcery, and the spirit of the law in both Chilean and Mapuche histories of justice. The case engages the spirit of the law in two senses. First, it reveals the lack of separation between religious and secular law, demonstrating that religion is profoundly embedded in the law, both for the state and for the Mapuche. Second, it refers to the intention behind the law and its interpretation and enforcement, which haunts even the most literalist, fundamental, secular visions of law. After her spiritual transformation, Atala practiced the spirit of Mapuche customary law in the courts but formally justified her judgments using the letter of the Chilean law, demonstrating a fluidity between law and spirituality.

American Religion, 2024

Pan-Indigenous Peruvian norteños respond to political corruption, climate change, and environ... more Pan-Indigenous Peruvian norteños respond to political corruption, climate change, and environmental devastation by engaging Indigenous sentient landscapes as leaders of environmental movements and cocreators of a pan-Indigenous world. They challenge social models of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between the human and more-than-human and promote human exceptionalism. Scholars of political ontology have considered radically different forms of more-than-human persons and their plural ways of being in the world embedded in relations with the state. I argue that more-than-humans are not just alternative ways of being in the world, but frames through which norteños engage in subversive politics to challenge the justice of neoliberal capitalism and the state. By working beyond the theoretical limitations of ontological approaches (ways of being) and the state’s definition of politics, and within the realm of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, I show how the historical dichotomies of Western thought, Western politics and their effects can be disrupted. I also analyze the difficulties of ontological politics in a milieu that does not ascribe to scholarly and political fantasies of Indigenous purity from modernity. Specifically, I analyze the conflicting ways in which norteños engage with more-than-human landscapes to provide a model for radical ethical-environmental-political action, in which community and well-being are defined as humans in relationship to place-as-persons and d the earth is resignified as an anchor for social and climate justice.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2024

Campesinos (peasants) and norteños (northerner entrepreneurs) in highland Huamachuco, la Libertad... more Campesinos (peasants) and norteños (northerner entrepreneurs) in highland Huamachuco, la Libertad, northern Peru-reconcile their mining within Andean practices about the perceived sentience and agency of mountain-ancestors (apus). They do so by engaging in two different types of apu cannibalism that are antithetical to each other. I analyze how the conflict between Andean campesino communities who practice small-scale underground mining on the apu El Toro site, and, the Summa Gold open-pit mining company (owned by former campesinos now norteño) also on apu El Toro, reshapes, on both sides, relationalities with mountain-ancestors and capitalism. I explore miners' practical moral economies with apus, the local government, and legal authorities to secure economic and political benefits as their worlds are transformed by capitalism. I also analyze how the power inequality between campesino and norteño miners shapes these exchanges, their ability to control the limits of extractivism, and the rhetoric around mining contamination.

In Climate Politics and the Power of Religion edited by Evan Berry. Indiana University Press., 2021

Poor mestizos in northern Peru respond to climate change and environmental devastation by engagin... more Poor mestizos in northern Peru respond to climate change and environmental devastation by engaging indigenous sentient landscapes- with the capacity to sense, feel and act- as moral leaders of environmental movements and co-creators of an interethnic world. They challenge social models normalized by neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, which are based on the distinction between the human and non-human, culture and nature, and which promote human exceptionalism and environmental devastation. Scholars have considered radically different forms of non-human persons and their multiple ways of being in the world. This ethnography explores how local mestizos engage sentient landscapes ritually and politically to challenge governments and industries as leaders in movements for environmental justice and collective ethics. By working beyond the theoretical limitations of both ontological approaches (different was of being) and political ecology, and within the realm of a local, place-based environmental and spiritual politics, my research shows how the historical dichotomies of Western thought and their effects can be disrupted and displaced. I analyze how Peruvian mestizos engagement with sentient landscapes can provide a model for radical moral-environmental-political action. By defining “community” and “well-being” as humans in relationship-to-places as-persons, poor mestizos resignify “nature” itself as an anchor for social justice.

SUMMARY The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as pe... more SUMMARY The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as persons, remain trapped in the places of their deaths. They are both symbols of Mapuche rage against state-sponsored genocide and social agents who play central roles in Mapuche cosmopolitics and multitemporal memory making. While memory studies focus on pastness and national commemorations the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead foreground the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed in a place at different times and realize this trauma in Mapuche everyday lives. These morally complex undead call for justice through revenge and express trauma and cos-mopolitics through two different modalities: first, through vengeful spirits in the river who sow illness at two different massacre sites, accidents, and death indiscriminately among the bodies and spirits of locals to force remembering and call for revenge or repa-rations, even as they make Mapuche healing impossible; second, through the strategic use of revenge in the ritual field to reinforce ethnic cosmopolitics. Here, the undead act as ancestors who grant health to those who follow stringent social and moral norms and perpetuate violence among those who transgress their ethnic, ritual, and moral project. These undead combine spiritual, ecological, social, and political factors with realpolitik to subvert state and non-Mapuche development projects, demand justice, and create avenues for interethnic dialogue.

In 1960, 39‐year‐old Francisca Kolipi was struck by lightning during a devastating earthquake and... more In 1960, 39‐year‐old Francisca Kolipi was struck by lightning during a devastating earthquake and became possessed by the spirit of Rosa Kurin, a deceased thunder machi (shaman). 1 Although many people in her community of Millali came to Francisca for healing, others questioned her legitimacy because she had been initiated so late in life and had had no formal training. Some envied Francisca's wealth and power and called her a sorcerer because she violated Mapuche and Chilean patriarchal gender norms: she made her money independently outside the home, and some community members thought she did not distribute sufficient favors to the community; she refused to remarry when she was widowed; and she was considered by some to be manly, aggressive, and amoral (Bacigalupo 2010, 2014). Aware of these criticisms, Francisca feared that her spirit would not be reborn in a new shaman's body after she died. To make sure that her spirit would not be lost, she demanded during our first face‐to‐face meeting that I write her biography as a " bible. " Machi spirits not only carry history; they make history. These spirits become historical agents as they bring knowledge and power from past shamans into the bodies of new ones, who will also act in history. But spirits are also agents that are cleansed and reinvented in narratives that respond to, as well as shape, the changing social and political needs of the community over time. Machi biographical narratives, including Francisca's, are central to Mapuche engagements with temporality and to the construction of historical consciousness in multiple ways. Mapuche construct complex cycles of remembering and disremembering, and the personhood of spirits, both as historical individuals and as collectively mythologized figures, changes over time.

SUMMARY This article examines how the processes of disremembering, the transformations of memory ... more SUMMARY This article examines how the processes of disremembering, the transformations of memory and personhood, and the rebirth of Mapuche shamans address and cloud issues of social persistence and cohesion in a community. My analysis is grounded in the broader culture of death rituals but also advances a reading of these rituals as expressions of an essentially historical consciousness: how Mapuche shamans such as Francisca Kolipi mediate indigenous engagements with history and historicity. Francisca's personhood was reshaped multiple times through contested processes of disremembering and remembering, and her multiple deaths were rescripted and rehistoricized. Community members erased the negative aspects of Francisca's spirit and merged it with the spirit of her machi predecessor, and Francisca was rehistoricized in a new context in anticipation of the rebirth of her spirit in a new shaman. [personhood, disremembering, memory, shaman, death, history] In 1960, thirty-nine-year-old Francisca Kolipi was struck by lightning during a devastating earthquake and became possessed by the spirit of Rosa Kurin, a deceased thunder machi (shaman). Although many people in her community of Millali came to Francisca for healing, others questioned her legitimacy because she had been initiated so late in life and had no formal training. Some envied Francisca's wealth and power and called her a sorcerer because she violated Mapuche and Chilean patriarchal gender norms: she made her money independently outside the home, and people thought she did not distribute sufficient favors to the community; she refused to remarry when she was widowed; and she was considered by some to be manly, aggressive, and amoral (Bacigalupo 2010, 2014). Aware of these criticisms, Francisca feared that her spirit would not be reborn in a new shaman's body after she died. To make sure that her spirit would not be lost, she demanded during our first face-to-face meeting that I write her biography as a " bible. " Machi spirits not only carry history, they make history. These spirits become historical agents as they bring knowledge and power from past sha-mans into the bodies of new ones, who will also act in history. But spirits are also agents who are cleansed and reinvented in narratives that respond to, as well as shape, the changing social and political needs of the

Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and performances—some of which take the form of “bibles” and in... more Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and
performances—some of which take the form of
“bibles” and involve shamanic literacies—play a
central role in the production of indigenous history
in southern Chile. In this article, I explain how and
why a mixed-race Mapuche shaman charged me with
writing about her life and practice in the form of
such a “bible.” This book would become a ritual
object and a means of storing her shamanic power
by textualizing it, thereby allowing her to speak to a
future audience. The realities and powers her “bible”
stored could be extracted, transformed, circulated,
and actualized for a variety of ends, even to bring
about shamanic rebirth. Ultimately, I argue, through
their use and interpretation of this kind of “bible,”
Mapuche shamans expand academic notions of
indigenous history and literacy. [shaman, text,
Bible, mestizo, history, literacy, Mapuche, Chile]

Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and performances—some of which take the form of “bibles” and ... more Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and
performances—some of which take the form of
“bibles” and involve shamanic literacies—play a
central role in the production of indigenous history
in southern Chile. In this article, I explain how and
why a mixed-race Mapuche shaman charged me with
writing about her life and practice in the form of
such a “bible.” This book would become a ritual
object and a means of storing her shamanic power
by textualizing it, thereby allowing her to speak to a
future audience. The realities and powers her “bible”
stored could be extracted, transformed, circulated,
and actualized for a variety of ends, even to bring
about shamanic rebirth. Ultimately, I argue, through
their use and interpretation of this kind of “bible,”
Mapuche shamans expand academic notions of
indigenous history and literacy.

“The book is well timed as a rich case study to complement Barbara Tedlock’s overview, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, which draws on Bacigalupo’s work among others.”

American Religion, 2024

Journal of Anthropological Research , 2024

American Religion, 2024

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2024

In Climate Politics and the Power of Religion edited by Evan Berry. Indiana University Press., 2021

Scripta Ethnologica Nueva Epoca, 2023

Los norteños de la costa peruana responden a la corrupción política, al cambio climático y a la d... more Los norteños de la costa peruana responden a la corrupción política, al cambio climático y a la devastación medioambiental comprometiéndose con los Apus indígenas como líderes de movimientos ecológicos y cocreadores de un mundo interétnico. Desafían los modelos sociales del capitalismo neoliberal y el colonialismo de colonos, que se basan en la distinción entre lo humano y lo no humano y promueven el excepcionalismo humano. Los académicos han considerado formas radicalmente distintas de personas no humanas y sus maneras de estar en el mundo. Al trabajar más allá de las limitaciones teóricas de los enfoques ontológicos (formas de ser) y del activismo político y dentro del ámbito de una política medioambiental y espiritual local, basada en el lugar, muestro cómo pueden desbaratarse las dicotomías históricas del pensamiento occidental y sus efectos. Analizo las dificultades de la política ontológica en un contexto que no se adscribe a las fantasías académicas y políticas de la pureza indígena frente a la modernidad. Analizo las formas conflictivas en que los norteños se relacionan con paisajes más-que-humanos para proporcionar un modelo de acción moral-ambiental-política radical, en el que la “comunidad” y el “bienestar” se definen como humanos en relación con el lugar-como-personas y la “naturaleza” se resignifica como un ancla para la justicia social.

Mitologicas Vol. XXXV, Bs. As., pp. 155-180, 2020

La mitohistoria biográfica de Rosa Kurin, una machi mestiza mapuche-alemana del sur de Chile de f... more La mitohistoria biográfica de Rosa Kurin,
una machi mestiza mapuche-alemana del
sur de Chile de fines del siglo XIX, expresa una
‘conciencia histórica chamánica’ que anticipa
los debates actuales sobre la relación dinámica
entre la historia y el mito y entre la historia
indígena y la historia nacional. La mitohistoria
biográfica es un género mixto que media entre
diferentes memorializaciones del pasado para
borrar la historia chilena dominante y crear
historias indígenas alternativas. Las mitohistoriaschamánicas
mapuche son simultáneamente
lineales y cíclicas: los personajes históricos se
transforman en personajes míticos y a veces
nuevamente en históricos, y los acontecimientos
míticos se manifiestan en repetidas ocasiones
como sucesos históricos. Los Mapuche
crean mitohistorias mitificando a chamanes y
a personas históricas de afuera, priorizando la
capacidad espiritual de accionar por encima de
ANA MARIELLA BACIGALUPO
179
la capacidad política de accionar, y revirtiendo
desde la narrativa la dinámica colonial habitual
de subordinación. Las mitohistorias son, para
los Mapuche rurales, una manera de expresar
la capacidad de accionar, la identidad étnica y
la ontología. Por otro lado, ofrecen un modo
de descolonizar la historia mapuche y tienen el
potencial para la movilización política.
Palabras clave: machi; conciencia histórica;
mito; historia; Mapuche; Chile.

LAS LUCHAS MAPUCHE (...)The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in southern Chile in the late 1800s, expresses a 'shamanic historical consciousness' that advances current debates over the dynamic relationship between history and myth and between indigenous and national history. Biographical mythohistory is a mixed genre that mediates among different memoralisations of the past to obliterate dominant Chilean history and to create alternative indigenous histories. Mapuche shamanic mythohistories are simultaneously linear and cyclical: historical personages are transformed into mythical characters and sometimes back again, and mythical happenings manifest themselves repeatedly in historical events. Mapuche people create mythohistories by mythologising such shamans and historical outsiders, prioritising spiritual agency over political agency and narratively reversing the usual colonial dynamics of subordination. Mythohistories are, for rural Mapuche, a means of conveying agency, ethnic identity and ontology. They also offer a way to decoloniseMapuche history and have the potential for political mobilisation.

Cambo Climático y el Poder de la Religión. Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (UARM), Pp. 29-61 Lima Perú. , 2018

El humanismo y la idea de paisajes sentientes que interactúan con los humanos han sido teorizados... more El humanismo y la idea de paisajes sentientes que interactúan con los humanos han sido teorizados de múltiples maneras, aunque raramente con un enfoque en la justicia ambiental y la ética colectiva. Los mestizos pobres del norte de Perú ofrecen un nuevo modelo que trasciende las limitaciones de la cosmopolítica ontológica, que se centra en la alteridad radical de los paisajes sentientes alejados de la política moderna, y de la ecología política que no considera los paisajes sentientes. Ninguno de estos enfoques teóricos aborda las formas en que los pobres peruanos responden al cambio climático y la contaminación ambiental recurriendo a los paisajes sentientes indígenas como participantes en un mundo interétnico. Planteo que estos mestizos cuestionan las formas de gobernanza implementadas por el liberalismo tardío: involucrando a los paisajes sentientes como parte de los movimientos locales en pro de la justicia ambiental, la ética colectiva y la salud. A pesar del interés en los valores y el yo moral, la antropología de la ética se ha preocupado menos por la ética colectiva, que sirve como modelo para el cambio político. Yo sostengo que los mestizos peruanos pobres ofrecen un modelo de ética colectiva que vincula la agencia moral con el mundo natural con el propósito de la transformación social y ambiental, abriendo así un nuevo tipo de debate político. Al definir la "comunidad" y el "bienestar" como humanos-en-relación-a-lugares-como-personas, los mestizos pobres resignifican a la "naturaleza" misma como un ancla para la justicia social.

Los no-finados mapuche, asesinados por el Estado chileno pero sin funeral para completarlos como ... more Los no-finados mapuche, asesinados por el Estado chileno pero sin funeral para completarlos como personas, permanecen atrapados en los lugares donde murieron. Son tanto símbolos de la furia mapuche contra el genocidio patrocinado por el Estado como agentes sociales que desempeñan roles fundamentales en la cosmopolítica y la construcción de la memoria multitemporal mapuche. Si bien los estudios sobre la memoria se centran en lo pasado, en las conmemoraciones nacionales y la celebración de mártires individuales, los no-finados traen a un primer plano el trauma colectivo de todos los Mapuche muertos en un lugar a lo largo de diferentes épocas y hacen realidad este trauma en la vida cotidiana de los Mapuche. Estos no-finados moralmente complejos exigen justicia a través de la venganza y expresan el trauma y la cosmopolítica mediante dos modalidades diferentes. En primer lugar, a través de espíritus vengativos en el río que siembran enfermedad, accidentes y muerte indiscriminadamente entre los cuerpos y espíritus de los locales para forzarlos a recordar, y piden venganza o reparación, incluso aunque tornen imposible la sanación mapuche. En segundo lugar, a través del uso estratégico de la venganza en el campo de masacre ritual para reforzar la cosmopolítica étnica. Acá, los no-finados actúan como ancestros que otorgan salud a los que cumplen con estrictas normas morales y sociales y perpetúan la violencia entre los que transgreden su proyecto moral, ritual y étnico. Estos no-finados combinan factores políticos, sociales, ecológicos y espirituales con realpolitik para subvertir proyectos de desarrollo estatales y no mapuche, exigir justicia y crear avenidas para el diálogo interétnico, lo que abre la posibilidad de un futuro mejor para todos.

In this article I show how Mapuche from the Araucanian region in southern Chile engaged the colo-... more In this article I show how Mapuche from the Araucanian region in southern Chile engaged the colo-nialist power embedded in official documents and Bibles by avoiding, subverting, and exceeding the limits of the Chilean state archive in ritual and political ways. Mapuche sometimes have avoided census takers and mapmakers to prevent discrimination, conscription, and other perceived threats to their autonomy. At other times they have subverted the archive by using different names and by feeding officials false information to protect the community and for personal benefit. And Mapuche have exceeded the official archive by creating their own records and by appropriating the state's legal language in order to produce documents denouncing settlers and requesting land restitution. Some Mapuche consider these petitions analogous to acts of countersorcery. I show how Mapuche also produce their own bibles to create shamanic literacies, store shamanic power, and promote shamanic rebirth, which challenges outsiders' perceptions of Mapuche shamans or machi as nonliterate and ahistorical.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Death

In this article I analyze how Mapuche in southern Chile reinterpret older achronological times of... more In this article I analyze how Mapuche in southern Chile reinterpret older achronological times of civilization and savagery through the lens of thunder shama...

Women's Studies International Forum, 1996

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2001

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001

... Consider the claim on page 235 that Quetzalcoatlnot, say, Cinteotl is the Mesoamerican cor... more ... Consider the claim on page 235 that Quetzalcoatlnot, say, Cinteotl is the Mesoamerican corn god, or the Classic Maya-Postclassic Aztec equiva-lence drawn on page 116: The Origin of the Cosmos and the First Tasks of (Hun ... catherine wilkinson zerner, Brown University ...

Climate Politics and the Power of Religion

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007

Resumen es: Este articulo explora la relacion ritual entre la enfermedad, la curacion, la realiza... more Resumen es: Este articulo explora la relacion ritual entre la enfermedad, la curacion, la realizacion y la historia. Muestro como los mapuche entienden la enfermedad...

I show how spiritual kinships ties, spiritual marriages, and relationships of mastery between Map... more I show how spiritual kinships ties, spiritual marriages, and relationships of mastery between Mapuche shamans (machi), animals, and spirits in initiation and healing rituals reflect historical ethnic and national relationships, social and gender dynamics, and complex understandings of personhood. Machi's spiritual relationships are shaped by the gendered power dynamics of colonial mastery and domination, marriage and seduction, possession and ecstasy, and hierarchical kinship systems. These spiritual relationships reflect a complex understanding of personal consciousness in which machi are agents of their actions but at the same time share self with the spirits and are dominated by them. Machi gain varied forms of knowledge and power through the exchange of bodily substances as well as through spiritual means. In doing so, they offer a new perspective on current discussions among anthropologists about embodiment, ensoulment,

Anthropology and Humanism, 2018

The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as persons, r... more The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as persons, remain trapped in the places of their deaths. They are both symbols of Mapuche rage against state‐sponsored genocide and social agents who play central roles in Mapuche cosmopolitics and multitemporal memory making. While memory studies focus on pastness and national commemorations the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead foreground the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed in a place at different times and realize this trauma in Mapuche everyday lives. These morally complex undead call for justice through revenge and express trauma and cosmopolitics through two different modalities: first, through vengeful spirits in the river who sow illness at two different massacre sites, accidents, and death indiscriminately among the bodies and spirits of locals to force remembering and call for revenge or reparations, even as they make Mapuche healing impossible; second, through the strategic use of revenge in the ritual field to reinforce ethnic cosmopolitics. Here, the undead act as ancestors who grant health to those who follow stringent social and moral norms and perpetuate violence among those who transgress their ethnic, ritual, and moral project. These undead combine spiritual, ecological, social, and political factors with realpolitik to subvert state and non‐Mapuche development projects, demand justice, and create avenues for interethnic dialogue

Anthropology and Humanism, 2016

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2004

... of drums andfoye trees (Drymis winteri) and felt chronic pain in her bones and stomach. ... a... more ... of drums andfoye trees (Drymis winteri) and felt chronic pain in her bones and stomach. ... a language understood by all; two yegulfe, women helpers to heat the skin of the ... personalities, consciousness, and self/soul (Halliburton 2002), in which people possess not only bodies but ...

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