Description
Book SynopsisThe first study of how Mapuche shamans make history, this book challenges perceptions of shamans as being outside of history and examines how shamans themselves understand notions of civilization, savagery, and historical processes.
Trade ReviewIn 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. * Choice *
...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. * Reading Religion *
[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. * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
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. * The Americas *
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. * American Ethnologist *
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. * Tipití *
Thunder Shaman is an ambitious, engaging, multi-purposed text…should be of great interest to scholars of indigenous social movements, shamanism, and the Mapuche. * Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
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
