Since the cessation of Mapuche guerrilla warfare against Chileans in 1881, machis who are predominantly women, have progressively incorporated aspects of traditional warring into their shamanic healing and performance of collective nguiUatun rituals. Guns, knives, war cries, and male pre‐war bonding acts are used by machis to "kill" or "defeat" illness, evil, and the effects of acculturation on their patients and the community. Acculturation is often seen by the Chilean Mapuche as the root of illness, evil, and alienation. All three (...) are conceived as enemies that threaten the Mapuche self from the outside and are detrimental to the physical and spiritual well‐being of the individual or group. While ritual played an important role in gaining supernatural help to strengthen warriors in the past, the warring complex in ritual, and healing in particular, is crucial in reinforcing contemporary Mapuche identity, traditions, and wholeness. I analyze the performance of spiritual warfare in healing and collective ritual as the Mapuche way of aggressively advocating the opposition between self, tradition, and life on one hand, and otherness, acculturation, and death, on the other. (shrink)

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism (...) and Womanism. (shrink)

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism (...) and Womanism. (shrink)

: I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, (...) feminism and Womanism. (shrink)

This article analyzes the conflict between traditional beliefs, cultural roles, and the search for individuality through the study of Fresia, a young Mapuche woman who renounced shamanistic practice. Her case demonstrates that the social transmission of traditional beliefs and symbols is not in itself enough to ensure the commitment of shaman/healers who must also internalize their cultural beliefs and attach personal meaning to them through their dreams, visions, and ritual practices. If this does not occur, as in Fresia's case, individuality (...) emerges and may contradict ideal cultural representations even in contexts such as that of the Mapuche where the concept of the person is inextricably bound up with one's role in the social system. (shrink)

Anthropologists who "study" religious practitioners are always confronted with both an ethical and a methodological problem. Our traditional training asks us to remain detached from our "informants" and their beliefs in order to collect "data" whose content will be analyzed according to academic agendas and theoretical trends, translated into anthropological jargon and published in ethnographies that will be accepted, published, and read in the academic world. On the other hand, the purpose of our anthropological research is to gain a deeper (...) understanding of the "other" from the "inside." Experiential anthropology has searched for a deeper understanding of religious practitioners and their beliefs. This includes focusing on native epistemologies and experiences and personal engagement with informants that sometimes involves the ethnographer's apprenticeship and initiation into the religious traditions that are beingstudied. This experience involves our commitment and respect towards those we study. Drawing on my own experience with Mapuche shamans in southern Chile I discuss the ethical and methodological problems anthropologists have in bridging professional interests with the personal commitments made with those whom we study. I discuss the ethical problems in using apprenticeship and initiation solely for professional purposes and the problem of cultural appropriation, the limitations that an exclusively academic model has on what can be written about, how it should be conceptualized, theorized, and represented, and the problems anthropologists undergo in having to simultaneously maintain professional detachment and be committed to those with whom we work. (shrink)

The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru. Bonnie GlassCoffin. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 246 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).