Anancy In The Great House, Vol. 136 Book

As one who has recently published a historical novel about the sixteenth century Spanish invasion of the land now called Chile, I have read over the years pretty much everything written on the aboriginal Mapuche, and as much as I could find about their culture, past and present. Unfortunately, this remarkable book was published late in my research on my novel, in which a sixteenth century machi is central. Early accounts of the Mapuche by the Spaniards describe some machi as homosexual, a heinous sin at the time. Bacigalupe's complex, rich and nuanced explanation of the spiritual sexuality of modern machi corrects, in my eyes, the blindered vision of the zealots of a time and place in which the priests were the scholars. It is worth pointing out that the cover of the book depicts a male Mapuche machi, or shaman, dressed as a woman.

This is definitely not light reading, but Shamans of the Foye Tree should be fascinating to anyone interested in gender studies, shamanism in general, and in particular, the Mapuche.