A01=Adelaida Barros
Author_Adelaida Barros
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=QRRT1
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
Medical Anthropology
Product details
- ISBN 9781807580223
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Berghahn Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
