Radix
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a Peruvian anthropologist. She is a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught throughout the USA and in Chile. Her research primarily focuses on the shamans or machis of the Mapuche community of Chile, and the ways shamanic practices and beliefs are affected by and influence communal experiences of state power, mythical history, ethics, gender, justice, and identity.
Bacigalupo’s research encompasses a number of topics including shamanism, social and historical consciousness, environmental humanities, transformational politics, decolonizing methodologies, social and environmental justice, climate justice, cosmopolitics, the Anthropocene, more-than-humans, power dynamics in colonial politics, death, self and personhood, gender and sexuality, historicity, Indigenous histories, social memory, religion, and medical anthropology. She uses anthropological and social theories including new materialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and embodiment, and phenomenology. She primarily studies the Global South, Indigenous Latin America, the Mapuche people, Chile, and northern Peru.
Her recent research focuses on forms of power and the politics of the Indigenous views of sentient landscapes, spirits, and other ‘more-than-humans’. Using queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and new materialism, Bacigalupo looks at collective ethics, environmental justice, and social justice in the Anthropocene, and how colonial histories have both influenced and been contradicted by Indigenous knowledge. She studies interactions between shamans and more-than-humans, and how these practices can change the structures of power by critiquing colonial perspectives about the organization of nature and the world. One of her arguments is that shamans offer a useful perspective for conceiving of new ideas for the future and critique for the status quo. Many of these shamans are public figures in Indigenous communities, where they are intellectuals who can influence the political landscape.At the State University of New York at Buffalo, Bacigalupo is the chair of the Religion and Spirituality section of the Latin American Studies Association. She also serves as the Program Councilor for the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.