BACIGALUPO, Ana Mariella, Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia, 304 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Paperback, $29.95. ISBN 9781477308981.

Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a stunning, challenging, and outstanding book with great potential to be recognized, in the near future, as a seminal scholarly contribution not only to studies of shamanism(s) but also to anthropology in general.

In 1991, Mapuche thunder machi (shaman) Francisca Kolipi, inspired by Christian Bibles, asked Bacigalupo to write a bible about her. (1) It would be a bible that Francisca perceived as an alive, powerful, polysemic sacred object, storing and textualizing her power, and, at the same time, as a space that encompasses the potential to mediate between the different human and other-than-human worlds and groups. It would be a bible that, in the end, would narrate and rewrite the history of the Mapuche from a new and very different perspective.

Despite my deep appreciation of Bacigalupo's previous works, when reading about the author's intent to write Francisca's bible, I admit that I was skeptical. This book would be many things: a bible; an anthropological study; a ritual object to be used in the present and in the future, even after Francisca's death; a...