Anthropologist gets fellowships

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

Although UB anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo has had her doctorate for only six years, her work with the Mapuche-an indigenous people of Chile-already has received recognition from two major foundations.

An assistant professor at UB, Bacigalupo will spend the 2000-01 academic year as a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. While there, she will complete "Shamans of the Cinnamon Tree, Priestesses of the Moon: Gender and Healing Among the Chilean Mapuche," an ethnography that explores the role of gender in the ethnic identity, lives and ritual practices of Mapuche shamans, or machi, as they interact with local, Chilean national and global processes.

Bacigalupo will use a Latin American and Caribbean Fellowship awarded from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation during 2001-02 to finish the enthography and edit a volume written by Mapuche authors.

She says her study will challenge much of the conventional wisdom about the nature of shamanism, and will offer new ways of thinking about shifting gendered identities in relation to shamanic practice, ethnic identity nationalism, transna-tionalism and feminist discourse.

Machi, Bacigalupo notes, are women or feminized, cross-dressed men who assume multiple cross-gender and co-gender identities for the purpose of healing. Machi "become" men, both young and old, to exorcize illness, bad thoughts and suffering from their patients' bodies. They "become" women, again both young and old, to heal and reintegrate their patients back into their communities.

They also embody the four aspects of the deity Ngunechen-male, female, young and old-in order to transcend gender and "become divine" to create new world orders and gain spiritual power, she says. Gender is one of the metaphors used by machi to mark polarizations, boundaries and tensions between local and national histories, as well as a way to express integration and create broader understandings of humanity, health and healing, she adds.

Bacigalupo notes that as the local political power held by Mapuche men wanes and they gain prestige as external intermediaries with the Chilean state, machi have taken over local male political functions, she says. Machi now are a "legitimizing factor in local and national politics," she adds, with some participating actively in local Mapuche movements that oppose the Chilean government, while others accept invitations to the national palace.

Bacigalupo says her goal is to "examine such complex linkages between the Mapuche machi and the multiple worlds in which they practice in order to offer a more adequate portrayal of Mapuche shamanism than currently exists and to contribute to a more profound understanding of shamanism and its relationship to local, national and global contexts and feminism discourse."

The study also will contribute to the existing literature on transna-tionalism, globalization, post-colonialism and gender studies, she notes. "Mapuche shamans juggle different worlds, identities and genders, and in doing so, question traditional constructions of self/other, center/periphery and the notion of the boundedness of culture, identity and gender," she says.

"Current studies have drawn attention to the notion that the world is become a singular rationalized, modernized and highly industrialized place on the one hand, while noting the increasing importance of nationalism, inter-ethnic hostility and competing cultural meanings on the other.

"This study on Mapuche shamans will demonstrate that local practices reflect a diversity of popular, local and national discourses that resist and play back systematicity and order."