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The Healing Machi: An Ethnography of Mapuche Medicine Efficacies

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Volume 23

Epistemologies of Healing



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The Healing Machi

An Ethnography of Mapuche Medicine Efficacies

Adelaida Barros

216 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-80758-022-3 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (October 2026)

eISBN 978-1-80758-023-0 eBook Not Yet Published


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Reviews

“This is a careful study of a classic question in medical anthropology, based on the case of the machi: the controversy over the assessment of non-biomedical healing practices in terms of both their cultural authenticity and efficacy. The author proves to be a sensitive ethnographer who takes her interlocutors seriously and is thus able to present an ethnographically rich and insightful ethnography of a mediumistic trial with its political implications and entanglements at the macro and micro levels.” • Ehler Voss, University of Bremen

Description

This book is an ethnography on Mapuche ritual healing transformations from the perspective of the phenomenology of the body. It explores how people identify a Mapuche shaman, or a “real Machi”, a person who can see illness and misfortune through divinatory techniques. These techniques produce changes in bodily and affective experience, which are not mediated by reconfigurations of symbolic meaning. Machi also experience küymin, or ritual trance, through which a group of people can receive a direct message from ‘spirits from the past’. Thus, embodying the ancestors, Machi can provide both explanations of illness and misfortune and moral guidance for future action.

Adelaida Barros is Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Head of the Unit of Psychosomatic Medicine, Catholic University of Chile. She holds a DPhil in Social Anthropology by ISCA, University of Oxford. She conducted her doctoral research on indigenous medical practices in Chile and is now developing projects concerning new forms of mind/body dualisms in patients with chronic pain.

Subject: Medical Anthropology
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean


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