Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a Peruvian anthropologist. She is currently 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, identity, and much more.

Education & Career

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo prior to her position at SUNY Buffalo had obtained her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for Anthropology.[1] For over 20 years, her experiences and observations on the Mapuche communities has become her main 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.

Work about Mapuche shamanism

Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits In Chile And Patagonia

This work completed in 2016 by Baciagalupo details the experience she had living with and studying the Mapuche people under the guidance of Francisca Kolipi.[2]

The primary objective of this book is to demonstrate the resiliency the Mapuche communities and machi had against the multiple forces of colonialism and dictatorships via the fluidity and spiritual guidance of the sages. By connecting themselves to the forces of nature around them, as shown by the machi, the Mapuche have been able to both preserve their ways of life and to empower both male and female members, with the guidance of women often being the predominant factor whilst placing emphasis on the concepts of mobility in both the spiritual and physical worlds.[3] Bacigalupo primarily attempts to show how their worldview and interactions with nature and environment helped to both sustain and refine the resiliency of the Mapuche via the gender fluidity and spiritual experiences seen within Chile.

Mapuche machis

Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, And Healing Among Chilean Mapuche

Bacigalupo has written a book called Shamans of the Foye Tree, where she 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.[4] Foye trees are a “symbol of office for both male and female machi and the place where the machi’s spirit resides”.[5] So machis could be seen as a community of people who simply don't only communicate with humans but also want to be able to communicate with other aspects of the universe. They are able to communicate with the different aspects (spiritual, natural and human) of the universe by means of the foye trees.[6]

Foye trees also emphasize that machi rituals are co-gendered because the flowers are specifically hermaphroditic.[7] Hence Mapuche Shamans have no gender restrictions in order to engage in the rituals. Most of the machi's are female because women usually tend to provide fertility to the land which helps promote agriculture and ultimately helps the community survive.[8] So women could be seen as important people within the machi community because they are the ones who keep track of resources for the sake of everyone's well-being.

Other research

In addition to her extensive work with Mapuche shamans, Bacigalupo's research has also extended to three other areas:[9]

  1. Developments in Mapuche spirituality, the telling of history, and political activity in connection with historical and ongoing Chilean state violence against the community:
    • A crucial feature of this development has surrounded disembodied beings known, among other names, as "los no-finados (the unfinished or undead ones)", which are Mapuche individuals killed by the state who remain in this world to inflict pain (e.g. disease, blindness, death) on the living - Mapuche and non-Mapuche alike. According to Bacigalupo, these undead, besides creating various taboos and restrictions on everyday life, play two important purposes in contemporary Mapuche society. Firstly, they are conceived of as moral agents who enact retributive justice against the immoral (within and outside of the community), thus demanding action of the community against injustices within and against their community in order to rectify the moral order. Second, their infliction of suffering serves as a reminder of the continuum of historical violence perpetrated by the Chilean state from the nineteenth-century wars to annex Mapuche territory, through the especially violent period of the Pinochet dictatorship, to the present day and into the future, thus uniting Mapuche of the past, present, and future as one community.[10]
  2. Climate change's transformation of social values, politics, and activism, particularly in regards to the emerging ethics and politics of vulnerable and poor Peruvian mestizos that stress the significance of the environment for human communities and nature's moral agency
  3. Law, morality, and human rights in the context of "shamanic notions of justice" and Chilean Catholic and LGBT families

Awards, accolades, & grants

Bacigalupo has earned several fellowships:[11]

  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
  • Radcliffe Institute Fellowship
  • School of Advanced Research fellowship
  • National Humanities Center fellowship

Bacigalupo has also earned a few awards:[11]

  • Outstanding Young Investigator Award
  • UB 2020 award for Excellence in Cultural, Historical and Literary/Textual Studies
  • Milton Plesur Teaching Award from the University at Buffalo (2007)

Bibliography

Among the works which Bacigalupo has written and to which she has contributed can be found the following:

Books
  • 1995 (with Armando Marileo, Ricardo Salas, Ramón Curivil, Cristián Parker, Alejandro Saavedra): Modernización o sabiduria en tierra Mapuche? [Modernization or Wisdom in Mapuche Land?] Santiago: San Pablo.
  • 1996: Adaptación de los métodos de curación "tradicionales" Mapuche: La práctica de la machi contemporánea en Chile. [Hybridity in Mapuche “Traditional” Healing Methods: The Practice of Contemporary Mapuche Shamans.] Santiago: PAESMI.
  • 2001: La voz del kulturn 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 Practice of Seven Mapuche Shamans.] Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile.
  • 2007: Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
  • 2016: Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Pantagonia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Articles

See also

References
  1. "Ana Mariella Bacigalupo Associate Professor of Anthropology University at Buffalo, The State University of New York". Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University. Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
  2. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2016). Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits In Chile And Patagonia (1st ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. pp. 5–10.
  3. Baciagalupo, Ana Mariella (2016). Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits In Chile And Patagonia (1st ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. pp. 111–125.
  4. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2007). Shamans of the Foye Tree. Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 1.
  5. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2007). Shaman of the Foye Tree. Texas, Austin: University Of Texas Press. p. 275.
  6. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2007). Shamans of the Foye Tree. Texas, Austin: University Of Texas Press. pp. 1.
  7. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2007). Shamans of the Foye Tree. Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 3, 4.
  8. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2007). Shamans of the Foye Tree. Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 134.
  9. "Ana Bacigalupo - Department of Anthropology - University at Buffalo". www.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-01.
  10. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella (2018). "The Mapuche Undead Never Forget: Traumatic Memory and Cosmopolitics in Post-Pinochet Chile". Anthropology and Humanism. 43: 2–3 & 7.
  11. "Speakers - Ana Mariella Bacigalupo - Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University". societyoffellows.columbia.edu.
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