Overview
In this uniquely personal account of the lives and healing arts of female shamans in northern Peru, the author alternates diaristic writings about her own experiences with ethnographic description. Her analytical essays explore the concepts of sorcery, shamanism, and witchcraft, case studies of Peruvian women and their ritual healing techniques, the healers' religious and symbolic space, and the healing attributes unique to women. They alternate with chapters in which Glass-Coffin describes her introduction to Peru as a high school student, the traditional roles she adopted in her host family, the crisis that rocked her identity, her first ritual contact with a female healer, and her own tumultuous but ultimately rewarding healing journey under two female shamans. Male shamans, she concludes, sally forth into the spirit world to do individual combat with the sources of spiritual illness, whereas female shamans try to involve their patients more directly in their own healing.
Full Product Details
Author: Bonnie Glass-Coffin
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Imprint: University of New Mexico Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.30cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 21.40cm
Weight: 0.413kg
ISBN: 9780826318930
ISBN 10: 0826318932
Pages: 246
Publication Date: 30 March 1998
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
aGlass-Coffin's fully contextualized discussion . . . provides much illuminating material . . . [she] has contributed significantly to the discipline's ongoing conversation about our ontological and epistemological foundations.
Glass-Coffin's fully contextualized discussion . . . provides much illuminating material . . . [she] has contributed significantly to the discipline's ongoing conversation about our ontological and epistemological foundations. The Gift of Life is a sensitive and insightful examination . . . provide�ing� considerable ethnographic detail on healers and healing . . . Glass-Coffins fully contextualized discussion . . . provides much illuminating material . . . �she� has contributed significantly to the disciplines ongoing conversation about our ontological and epistemological foundations. a The Gift of Life is a sensitive and insightful examination . . . provide[ing] considerable ethnographic detail on healers and healing . . . aGlass-Coffin's fully contextualized discussion . . . provides much illuminating material . . . [she] has contributed significantly to the discipline's ongoing conversation about our ontological and epistemological foundations.
Author Information
Bonnie Glass-Coffin is an assistant professor of anthropology at Utah State University in Logan.
