Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (review)

Continuing her work with the Mapuche peoples, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's Thunder Shaman details the life history and mythology of the late Francisca Kolipi, the titular "thunder shaman." Bacigalupo uses Kolipi's life as a case study to showcase the multifaceted nature of the Mapuche shamanic tradition, and with it the challenges that Mapuche thought may pose to notions favored by the conventions of the Global Nortḥ The book exposes the ongoing political struggles of the indigenous peoples of Chile, and the social and emotional impact that Francisca Kolipi's life and shamanism had on her friends, her family, and herself. Bacigalupo strives to honor the emergent Mapuche textual tradition of biography as scripture, aiming to preserve the power of Mapuche prophets and shamans for the future. The book thus unites the nature of academic text and ritual object.

Both for shamans and ordinary Mapuche, identities are constructed in a way that allows self-conception to blend naturally into the conception of larger collectives. According to Bacigalupo:

[n]otions of personhood and individuality in the Global North differ from Mapuche notions, in which biographies are conceived as an oscillation between singular lives that condense the experiences of others and collective lives that incorporate the experiences of others and represent the collective. Shamans' personal narratives make connections among different times, worlds, and beings by placing dreams and altered states of consciousness in the context of colonization, missionization, and urbanization (12).

The theme of individual-collective oscillation underlies every facet of Bacigalupo's text. The person as both fundamentally individual and collective is evident in the way the Mapuche live and conceive of the lives of both human and non-human others. A singular shaman is at once an individual human with a limited, linear history, and a collective of other shamans—humans throughout time who have and will share the powers of a particular shamanic spirit, its allied plants and animals, and that spirit itself. A shaman is thus an entity composed of phenomena scattered throughout time and space. At the same time the shamanic spirit is grounded at any particular moment by its instantiation in the current shaman embodying this complex multispatial, multitemporal entity.

The shaman's collective nature is an extension of the collective nature of the ordinary Mapuche, whose individual identities and histories are often similarly merged and split. Much in the same way that the individual shaman is all ofthe shamans who have carried the particular shamanic spirit, individuals are associated deeply with their families and clans, so that individuals throughout a stretch of time who carry the same name may be amalgamated into one person in the oral history of the community. There is a sense in which every collective comprises an autonomous consciousness just as much as an individual possesses an autonomous consciousness, and these consciousnesses are not only part of the social structure of living humans, but also extend to historical conceptions of the land, the dead, and all human and non-human others that live in association with their human collective.

Political struggles in Mapuche society engendered by colonialism and maintained by the Chilean government are framed as wars of collective essences that act through individuals as well. The conflict between wingka ways (the ways of those outside of Mapuche society) and the Mapuche way of life is framed throughout the book not just as a conflict between cultures, but a conflict between times, which ought not to be thought of as fixed points on a timeline, but rather living agents comprised of collective histories which act upon the present as it unfolds: the time of civilization is one of chaos, war, and strife; the time of the spirit masters of the forest is one of order and sovereignty of nature. The latter is seen as the...