ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

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.

— Paul Stoller, West Chester University, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology

Bacigalupo's book is a tour-de-force in studies of shamanism, indigenous historicity, and relations of indigenous peoples to colonial histories.

— Robin M. Wright, University of Florida, and author of Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon

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.

— 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 CONTENTS