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’. Using queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and new materialism, Bacigalupo looks at collective ethics, environmental justice, and social justice in the Anthropocene, and how colonial histories have both influenced and been contradicted by Indigenous knowledge. She studies interactions between shamans and more-than-humans, and how these practices can change the structures of power by critiquing colonial perspectives about the organization of nature and the world. One of her arguments is that shamans offer a useful perspective for conceiving of new ideas for the future and critique for the status quo. Many of these shamans are public figures in Indigenous communities, where they are intellectuals who can influence the political landscape.
At the State University of New York at Buffalo, Bacigalupo is the chair of the Religion and Spirituality section of the Latin American Studies Association. She also serves as the Program Councilor for the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
Education and career Ana Mariella Bacigalupo obtained her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for Anthropology. 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 now expanded her work to the coast and Andean valleys in Northern Peru where she analyzes the intersection of sacred, animated spaces, environmental justice and collective ethics.
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); Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche (2007); The Voice of the Drum in Modernity: Discourses of Tradition and Change in the Practice of Seven Mapuche Shamans (2001); 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.
Bacigalupo also has provided service to the anthropology profession. She served as co-chair of the “Religion and Spiritualities” section of the Latin American Studies Association. She is Associate editor of the journal American Religion and served as board member of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and the Advisory Board for the Indigenous Religions section of the American Academy of Religion. She serves on the editorial board for several journals in anthropology in the US and abroad including Anthropology and Humanism; Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology; Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft; Revista Chilena de Antropología; Scripta Ethnologica; Argus-a Artes y Humanidades. 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.
Awards received from the University at Buffalo include the Outstanding Young Investigator Award; the UB 2020 award for Excellence in Cultural, Historical and Literary/Textual Studies; the Milton Plesur Teaching Award; the Meyerson Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring; The Humanities Institute Research Grant; the Faculty Internationalization Research Grant; the Gender Institute Faculty Research Award; the Civic Engagement Fellowship; the Community for Global Health Equity grant; the Research Grant from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy; and the OVPRED/HI Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities grant.
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:
In her book 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 [Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2001]), Bacigalupo argues that the discourses and holistic healing practices of Mapuche shamans are forms of historical and social analysis in their own right. Challenging the multicultural legacy of colonialism that has construed Mapuche shamans as remnants of an “authentic traditional past,” she demonstrates that their shamanic practices are complex hybrid formations that participate in the same history that produced other manifestations of modernity. 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. This ambiguity enables machi to serve as savvy cultural mediators who respond to the traumatic legacy of colonialism and the postcolonial present in ways that serve the moral imagination of the community.
Reviews La voz del kultrun en la modernidad: Tradición y cambio en la terapéutica de siete machi Mapuche was reviewed in a number of journals, including: Publication AuthorAmerican Academy of ReligionSylvia MarcosAmerican AnthropologistMichael WinkelmanJournal of Latin American StudiesFlorencia E. MallonSocial Science and MedicineMichael WinkelmanTipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South AmericaMarcelo Fiorini
Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, And Healing Among Chilean Mapuche Bacigalupo's book Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among the Chilean Mapuche (University of Texas Press, 2007), comprises nine chapters that analyze the contested cultural politics of gender in the lives and practices of female and male transvestite and co-gendered machi. 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. In a separate article, published in American Ethnologist (2004), Bacigalupo identifies the challenge posed by Mapuche shamans to conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality.
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: