Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
[6][7][4] This includes her publications, which have focused on the operation of narrative, subject formation, agency, and power within different spiritual-political economies, gendered paradigms, historicities, ecologies, cosmologies, and healing systems.
[1][8] Bacigalupo is particularly interested in how, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, philosophies of power and knowledge produce disparate subjects and modes of action, historical narratives and imaginaries, notions of illness and death, techniques of the body, and therapeutic ritual forms.
[8][1] Bacigalupo has now expanded her work to the coast and Andean valleys in Northern Peru where she analyzes the intersection of sacred, animated spaces, environmental justice and collective ethics.
[11] Bacigalupo is completing a sixth book titled The Subversive Politics of Sentient Landscapes: Collective Ethnics and Environmental Justice in Northern Peru.
[9][22] Mapuche shamans, called machi, treat “traditional” illnesses—such as soul loss and sorcery—alongside “modern” illnesses like stress, depression, lovesickness, alienation, economic problems, AIDS and cancer.
Bacigalupo argues that, together with their relation to spirits, the machi's performances of gender enact power, hierarchy, and healing, making their bodies conflictual sites that express identities and differences between Mapuche and non-Mapuche people.
[6][30][33] Perceptions of “sexual deviance” and “sorcery” engender change because they are linked to fractures in a community that develop when people take up different positions in relation to capitalist ideologies.
[6][29][30][31][32][33] In a separate article, published in American Ethnologist (2004), Bacigalupo identifies the challenge posed by Mapuche shamans to conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality.
By prioritizing the agency of spirits and shamans who can be reborn, these biographies reverse the Mapuche's subordination to the Chilean state, presenting them as the spiritual victors of history.
The Mapuche thereby use shamanic biographical narratives to convey their own native historical agency and to promote political mobilization based on the transformative capacities of their spiritual power.
[60] While memory studies and national commemoration focus on pastness and the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead represent the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed at different times in one place.
Alternatively, she shows how Mapuche conceive of the undead as heroes who sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the community and who seek avenues for healing and interethnic dialogue—thereby enabling a better future.
[60] As a research fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo for 2016–2017, Bacigalupo analyzes how in her LGBT custody case, Judge Karen Atala of Chile drew on the discourse of international human rights as well as the power obtained from a shamanic vision to challenge the Catholic moral criteria used by the Chilean Supreme Court to deny her custody of her children because of her lesbian sexuality.
Her case gives us a fascinating insight into tensions between rational secular discourses of the law and the reality of religious morality underpinning state legal practices.
[19] As part of this project, Bacigalupo analyzes the parallels between Mapuche co-gender shamans and the judges in the Inter-American court: charismatic figures who use persuasion, morality and their professional status in the pursuit of justice.
Karen Atala's case offers new insights into the connections and tension between shamanic justice, LGBT identities, and international human rights and broadens our understanding of law.
[1][3][63] Bacigalupo analyzes how norteños’ engagement with sentient landscapes provides a model for radical moral-environmental-political action, in which “community” and “well-being” are defined as humans in relationship to place-as-persons and “nature” is resignified as an anchor for social justice.
[1][69] Bacigalupo received funding for her work concerning the effects of state violence on Mapuche spiritualism from the Max Planck Institute for the study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
[1][70] She has also received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the SUNY Buffalo Community for Global Health Equity for her work regarding sentient landscapes and more-than-humans.
