A society’s collective historical consciousness is greatly influenced by how it values literacy, argued Ana Mariella Bacigalupo in her presentation, “The Potency of Mapuche Indigenous ‘Bibles’ and Biographies,” on Friday. The presentation was delivered as the 15th annual Saler Lecture in Religious Studies, named for Prof. Benson Saler (ANTH), a Professor Emeritus who was in attendance.

Bacigalupo, an associate professor of anthropology at SUNY Buffalo, spoke about her research and life experiences while writing her most recent book, “Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia,” which is to be released in May 2016. The book centers on Francisca Kolpi, a shaman with the Mapuche, a group of people indigenous to Chile and Argentina. Kolpi adopted Bacigalupo as a “granddaughter” and as a spiritual helper in the 1980s and 1990s, and charged Bacigalupo with writing her “Bible” upon her death so that she might find immortality in Mapuche culture.

Kolpi, Bacigalupo noted, did not dream of a “celestial Bible” — which would make her something of a godlike figure — but instead wanted her shamanic legacy to be remembered on Earth after her death. Bacigalupo also spoke about how Kolpi appropriated both the Bible’s name and physical text for her legacy and her work. “This shamanic appropriation of text challenges some influential theories about oral cultures and the written word,” Bacigalupo noted, adding that even before the conquistadores brought the Spanish language to the Americas, “the indigenous people wrote, using their own systems of inscription and visual communication, in which alphabetic signs stood for reference, rather than sounds.”

Using Kolbi’s Bible and religious texts as a segue into a discussion on literacy and language, Bacigalupo asked the audience: “what counts as … literacy for indigenous people without their own systems of alphabetic writing, and why do shamanics’ subversive temporalities and literacies develop from a reaction against official documents and Bibles? I argue that official documents represent what Mapuche and their Shamans are up against: the Bible and the canonical power of the Church, the documentary power of the state, and Chilean national perceptions of positive historiography,” she proposed.

The Mapuche, she continued, view alphabetic languages — languages that use letters from the alphabet — as “designs with force,” and they distinguish between “Chilka La,” which are “dead” text without power — including gossip and advertisements — and “Chilka Newen,” which are “living” texts with power — like the Bible. “Writing then became a source of legitimacy for indigenous people, given the cultural and political power in allowing them to use official texts in unintended and adversarial ways.”

Bacigalupo then posited that the divination between traditional western religion and shamanic faith differs most in their treatment of the past and of the dead.

She contrasted the representation of angels in Western religion and shamanic faith, noting that Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s version of the angel is described as “looking back” on a ruined past while the Mapuche angel’s past “is not in ruins, and the dead are not absent.” She added that the dead and their legacies are incorporated and condensed into a larger shamanic narrative, which she argued expresses the ideological changes in the community’s identity over time.

“The future takes the form of the past, [incorporating] transformations in these new meanings of expressions and utopia dreamed of in the present,” she said. “So the way Francisca is being remembered and reintegrated into the community transcends both her life and her death, and illuminates how people … illuminate and reimagine the past and the present for future generations.”