This book is an analysis of shamanism through an auto-ethnography of Francisca Kolipi, a Mapuche healer from Araucania in central Chile. In a society ruled by men, Kolipi was a powerful and independent woman. The author first met the Mapuche as a child in Rio Negro, in Argentine Patagonia, where they traveled for seasonal work. With a degree in anthropology from UCLA, Bacigalupo is currently a professor of anthropology at SUNY Buffalo and author of Shamans of the Foye Tree and La voz de Kultrun en la modernidad. This new book combines biography, history, politics, religion, and ecology to explore how the Mapuche employ history, present and future, to counter outside threats. This book is a welcome addition to Indigenous History and Latin American Studies and will be very useful to scholars and graduate students in Anthropology.
Organized into eight chapters, the book analyzes shamanism through the story of Francisca Kolipi's life. The shaman and author conceived of their collaboration as a “bible,” Kolipi's term for a testament of shamanic consciousness experienced during the long interaction between the Mapuche and the Chilean state. Mapuche shamans embody spiritual forces and employ their past to counter outside threats by German colonizers, Chilean settlers, and logging companies. Between 1991 and 1996, the author interviewed Kolipi to document her life story and learn the role that shamanism has played in the historical consciousness of her life and people.
The second chapter explains how Germans and Chileans invaded and occupied Mapuche territory during the late nineteenth century, under the guise of spreading “civilization” to the “savage” Mapuche people. Shamans countered these attacks by collapsing outsiders who displayed prejudicial and racist views into one identity as “savage, immoral devils.” Despite Kolipi's stated commitment to divine and build a better future for the Mapuche community, her people had mixed reactions to shamanic powers. Factional divisions and tensions over the healer's individual gain, versus her work for collective good, tempered how Mapuche responded to her shamanism: people feared sorcery, but they also sought her healing skills. So differences between healers and shamans complicated their roles in the community.
Of particular anthropologic interest is the author's analysis of shamanic healing and divination practices, described as a combination of Western and traditional medicines with Catholic iconography. The Mapuche people also employ sacred texts to make political statements, narrate alternative histories, and circulate shamanic powers to counter official documents, hence the healer's urgency to write a “bible.” Through counter-sorcery, people employed state documents to complicate colonizers’ efforts to occupy Mapuche lands.
Historical changes for the Native people structure the narrative. The Allende years (1970–1973) socialized Chile and attempted to level sociopolitical relations in Millali, efforts that simultaneously undermined traditional hierarchical relations among the Native peoples and intensified community rivalries. The Mapuche rejected Allende, and Kolipi blamed socialists for failing to send medical assistance when her husband sickened and died, even though the military had ousted Allende the previous year. The healer's view of political changes, as well as her support for the brutal Pinochet military regime that followed, reflects contradictory perceptions of changing national politics and Native exclusion from the Chilean state. Healers nevertheless employed spiritual warfare to counter the neoliberal governments that followed, bringing the timber companies that deforested Mapuche lands. In her late years, Kolipi fomented goodwill and healing for members of her community suffering from pain, poverty, and violence. By contextualizing her own multicultural experiences within Mapuche reality, Bacigalupo opens a window into the life of a Mapuche shaman and her people's spirituality, history, and worldview.
