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  “I was simply fascinated by that when I was a little girl, and even then I felt that I wanted to do something working with indigenous peoples”

  Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

  Associate Professor of Anthropology

By KEVIN FRYLING

Published: February 11, 2009

Anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo traces her main research interest—the Mapuche shaman of southern Chile—all the way back to a childhood spent growing up in countries across South America.

An associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Bacigalupo says her grandfather owned a farm in Argentina that was run by a foreman whose brother later became head of a Mapuche Indian community. It was this contact that led to her lifelong interest in the indigenous people of Chile.

“Ever since I was a little girl, we would spend all our summers with my grandparents, who lived in southern Argentina near the border between the provinces of Neuquén and Rio Negro,” recalls Bacigalupo, who also lived in Peru, Colombia and Chile before finishing high school.

“The Mapuche live on both sides of the border between Chile and Argentina,” she adds, “and when the [economic] situation in Argentina was better, all the Chilean Mapuche,” including the families of the foreman and his brother, “used to go to Argentina for the harvest in the summer. So I was still just a child when I met all of the people that I began working with after I decided to do research in Chile.”

Bacigalupo recalls earlier experiences with indigenous populations as well, including youthful encounters with Andean Peruvian Indians her father met through his job as an agronomist involved in rural development projects.

“I was simply fascinated by that when I was a little girl,” she says, “and even then I felt that I wanted to do something working with indigenous peoples.”

The recipient of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and ethohistory, respectively, from Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, and master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from UCLA, Bacigalupo is now the author of four books—one in English and three in Spanish—on the Mapuche people, most of which focus on the traditional practices of the Mapuche shaman.

In fact, Bacigalupo says, she has participated in many Mapuche rituals herself, assisting in healing ceremonies and collective fertility rites.

“I was told ‘You’ve watched me perform all these times, you know how I work, you know the kind of knowledge I use, and now I want you to help me out,’” she says of her introduction to these rituals by a shaman. “This has involved things like mixing the right herbs in different bowls, rubbing them on a patient at different times, playing sleigh bells, telling the family we’re visiting when they’re to bring water—these are the sort of things that facilitate the healing process.”

Bacigalupo is writing a fifth book about the role of spirits in the construction of Mapuche memory and historical consciousness—a topic her friends in the Mapuche community urged her to tackle in her next scholarly work. As a community not normally written about, especially in English, she says the Mapuche look to her as someone who can act as a liaison between cultures and communicate their experiences to the world. These include their struggles against deforestation, which continues to ravage their homeland; misunderstandings about their shamanic practice; and Mapuche attempts to recover their territories and gain recognition as a nation.

“They tell me what they think is really important,” says Bacigalupo, who returns to Chile every year to work with the Mapuche. “The community really wanted me to write this book because they wanted someone who understands their view of history. They don’t really see the past, present and the future as separate things, but as clearly interrelated,” she notes. “The past—and the spirits from the past—play a central role in their contemporary realities and their politics.”