Thunder Shaman
Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia
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.
In this fascinating ethnography, Bacigalupo (anthropology, SUNY Buffalo) draws on decades of field research among the Mapuche, an Indigenous people in the Araucanian region of Chile.
...a well balanced and unique text. Readers interested in religion, memory, indigeneity, or modern Latin America will find themselves pushed in new and challenging directions.
[A] fascinating book on the embodiments of Mapuche history, shamanism, and continuity in changing contexts…One of the book's main strengths is the light it sheds on shamanism as active indigenous and gendered politics, rejecting the notion of machi as ahistorical and apolitical.
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.
It's not every ethnography that is so convincingly captivating—a book containing a shamanic spirit that makes the reader fall in also. The kind of anthropological connection Bacigalupo forged with Francisca Kolipi Kurin is rare and precious. We are fortunate to have a book that enables us to briefly lay our hand along that charged cord and thrill to it, too.
Thunder Shaman includes both the narrative and embodied dimensions of shamanism and is more personal as it weaves together the experience of shaman Francisca and the author. Students, scholars, and all who read Thunder Shaman will certainly be transformed as well. One cannot help but feel the power of Francisca being transmitted through the image on the cover and the illustrations throughout the book.
Thunder Shaman is an ambitious, engaging, multi-purposed text…should be of great interest to scholars of indigenous social movements, shamanism, and the Mapuche.
The author creatively uses the book’s focus on shamanism as a way to explore distinctive features of Mapuche personhood and think about the complexities of historical consciousness and history making.
Stunning . . . a coherent, thoughtful, and compelling work that advances our knowledge of shamanism, the processes of memory, and the construction of history. Thunder Shaman is a model for doing anthropology in the twenty-first century.
Bacigalupo's book is a tour-de-force in studies of shamanism, indigenous historicity, and relations of indigenous peoples to colonial histories.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a professor of anthropology at SUNY Buffalo. She is the author of Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche.
Permissions
1. Making History in Francisca Kolipi’s Bible
2. Mobile Narratives that Obliterate the Devil’s “Civilized History”
3. Multitemporal Visions and Bad Blood
4. Embodied History: Ritually Reshaping the Past and the Future
5. Shamanizing Documents and Bibles
6. The Time of Warring Thunder, the Savage State, and Civilized Shamans
7. Transforming Memory through Death and Rebirth
8. Reconciling Diverse Pasts and Futures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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