Machi, commonly defined as Mapuche shamans, symbolise ‘indigenous traditional culture’ for Mapuche and non-Mapuche Chileans, and represent therefore Otherness in a paradigmatic sense. As their shamanic practices articulate masculine as well as feminine characteristics, they both illustrate and challenge gender norms and representations. Drawing on her fifteen-years-old collaboration and friendship with male and female machi, Bacigalupo addresses the notions of co-genderism and shamanism, as well as the role of gendered figures in constructions of Chilean national discourses.

The volume offers an insightful analysis of the binaries that structure discourses of and about machi. The first is the idea of a male-female dichotomy that rests upon biological (genital) status. To show how machi articulate this dichotomy, Bacigalupo describes ritual practices to restore individual, relational and collective wholeness. She stresses that Mapuche shamanic practices do not fit into the polarised categories of ‘possession’, labelled in classical shamanic research as a feminine trance state because of its supposed passivity, and ‘ecstatic flights’, defined as spiritual fight against negative spirits.

A central and very original contribution is Bacigalupo's account of historical narratives to understand another set of binaries, based upon the paradigm of penetration. The author analyses how Spanish conquistadors interpreted shamanic performances of both feminine and masculine identities as a mark of deviant sexuality, a monstrous fusing of male and female, generating confusion of sexes and therefore chaos in society. The politics based on such representations led to a gradual separation of political and spiritual power of the former machi, the realm of spirituality becoming more and more feminine, and female machi more numerous. But even so, female as well as male machi put on distinctive gender identities during ritualised moments. They adopt what Bacigalupo name co-gendered identities. Nevertheless, if male and female machi experience both relational and individual modes of personhood inside ritual contexts, they have to comply with the gender norms of mainstream Chilean and Mapuche society in their everyday lives. That is why male machi have to find strategies to draw a clear frontier between themselves and passive women and non-masculine men. To reaffirm and gain social legitimacy, they use mainstream society male figures like priests and doctors.

Bacigalupo analyses the use by Chilean national discourses as well as by Mapuche resistance movements of the images of female machi. She shows how, as presumed bearers of tradition and spirituality, they serve political agendas that promote and reinforce national gender restrictions, and how the feminisation of spirituality justify the paternalism of the state. A point of peculiar interest is Bacigalupo's portrayal of various female machi and their strategies to position themselves as modern and traditional women. Those who have chosen to stay in rural settings see themselves primarily as daughters, mothers and wives, all categories linked to the idea of domesticity. But the female machi she worked with transgress gender norms, looking for ways to show their special status, that allow journeys away from home and to express themselves in the public sphere. Anyway, female machi see marriage and mothering as central to gaining a better social status, even if it may be interfering with their spiritual power. Female machi use their shamanic beliefs, in which political ideology does not prevail, to redefine power for their own end. To some extent, where male machi have to deal with homophobic suspicion, female machi have to face witchcraft accusations. However, it remains unclear what these witchcraft accusations represent. Bacigalupo generally insists upon their connection with colonial stereotypes, even if she also affirms that witchcraft is necessary to maintain the ‘wholeness’ of Mapuche society. As a matter of fact, wholeness is ensured by the tension between health and illness, life and death, individual gain and reciprocity, as well as normality and deviance.

Such ambivalences in Bacigalupo's analyses surely serve as illustration for the complexity, diversity, pluralism and creativity of Mapuche people in general and machi in particular. Anyway, one can regret what seems to be a lack of precision on various aspects. For instance, on an analytical level, it remains unclear to what extend some English notions used by the author are shared by her machi friends. This appears also in the haziness of her transcription of mapuzungun words. Furthermore, it would be interesting to have more details/descriptions about the concrete social context of the machi. Bacigalupo often speaks of the opposition between Mapuche society and what she names sometimes the Chilean, sometimes the wingka one. If this construction of the Mapuche as, in some aspects, the ‘non-Chilean’ is common in Chile, it would be necessary to question more precisely those categorisations. Finally, the fact that machi seem to find their patients not as much within as outside their community (another term that should be discussed) might have lead Bacigalupo to increase her reflection about the local social context. What kinds of relationships exist between machi and members of comunidades, a legal category imposed and defined by the Chilean state? What does the imperative to marry and to bear children mean for women in general, and not only for female machi? To what extent do Mapuche gender categorisations correspond with non-Mapuche ones?

In spite of those remarks, it remains a real pleasure to read Bacigalupo's book, as she understands how to make a proper use of her own experience as a machi helper and patient. Her honest and intelligent writing helps to gain a deeper insight into this peculiar world that questions the mainstream gendered categories of homosexuality, heterosexuality, transvestism, transgenderism and normality. In that sense, her choice to take the foye tree, a tree with hermaphrodite flowers used during rituals, as a thread to illustrate the gender fluidity of the machi, is appropriate, as is her conclusion that distinctive machi fill different needs in Mapuche society.