Project Muse
May 17, 2016
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
17 citations
The book Thunder Shaman describes the life and spiritual work of Francisca Kolipi, a Mapuche shaman who traveled through time and space as a thunder shaman mounted on a spirit horse. She gained power to conduct spiritual warfare against forestry companies, settlers, and other threats to her community. As a civilized shaman, she narrated the Mapuche people's attachment to sacred landscapes and created nonlinear histories in which Mapuche become history's spiritual victors. The work is both an academic text and a ritual object intended to act as a shamanic bible, embodying Francisca's power after her death in 1996. It shows how shamans are shaped by historical-political and ecological events while actively creating history through shamanic imaginaries.
Journal of Anthropological Research
April 1, 2010
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
13 citations
The biography of a Mapuche shaman, Francisca Colipi, reveals how marginalized indigenous communities construct and mobilize historical consciousness. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work from 1991 to 2008, the account shows that Francisca's liminal position as an outsider and mediator within her community in southern Chile offers a vantage point for understanding how shamanic narratives of the past shape the present and rewrite local history. Her life, death, and rebirth illuminate the interplay between indigenous agency and national history, remembering and disremembering, and individual versus collective memory, providing new insights into how particular groups see themselves in time.
Anthropology of Consciousness
June 1, 1998
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
13 citations
Since the end of Mapuche guerrilla warfare in 1881, machis (mostly women) have incorporated traditional warring elements—guns, knives, war cries, and male pre-war bonding—into their shamanic healing and collective nguiUatun rituals. They use these to "kill" or "defeat" illness, evil, and the effects of acculturation, which the Chilean Mapuche often see as the root of illness, evil, and alienation. These forces are conceived as enemies threatening the Mapuche self from outside and harming physical and spiritual well-being. The warring complex in ritual and healing reinforces contemporary Mapuche identity, traditions, and wholeness by aggressively opposing self, tradition, and life against otherness, acculturation, and death.
Identities
February 1, 2013
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
10 citations
The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in late-1800s southern Chile, illustrates a 'shamanic historical consciousness' that blurs the line between history and myth. This mixed genre mediates different memories of the past, challenging dominant Chilean history and creating alternative indigenous histories. Mapuche shamanic mythohistories are both linear and cyclical: historical figures become mythical characters and vice versa, with mythical events recurring in historical ones. By mythologizing shamans and outsiders, Mapuche prioritize spiritual over political agency and reverse colonial dynamics of subordination. For rural Mapuche, mythohistories convey agency, ethnic identity, and ontology, offering a means to decolonize history and mobilize politically.
Revista Chilena de Antropología
May 2, 2016
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Mapuche oral shamanic biographies and performances, some taking the form of “bibles” involving shamanic literacies, are central to producing indigenous history in southern Chile. A mixed-race Mapuche shaman charged the author with writing her life and practice as such a “bible,” which would become a ritual object storing her shamanic power through textualization, allowing her to speak to a future audience. The stored realities and powers could be extracted, transformed, circulated, and actualized for various ends, even shamanic rebirth. The author argues that through their use and interpretation of these “bibles,” Mapuche shamans expand academic notions of indigenous history and literacy.