Research Catalog

The gift of life : female spirituality and healing in northern Peru

Title
The gift of life : female spirituality and healing in northern Peru / Bonnie Glass-Coffin.
Author
Glass-Coffin, Bonnie, 1957-
Publication
Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, [1998], ©1998.

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Details

Description
xv, 246 pages, 15 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations; 22 cm
Summary
  • This uniquely personal account describes the lives and healing arts of female shamans in northern Peru, alternating ethnographic description with the author's diaristic writings about her experiences of love, heartbreak, and childbirth. Analytical chapters 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.
  • Bonnie Glass-Coffin's personal essays recount her introduction to Peru as a high-school student, her traditional roles 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.
Subjects
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
1. Sorcery and Dependence. i. Families and Emotional Dependence -- 2. Madre, Mujer, Bruja. ii. Toward the Margin of Two Worlds -- 3. A Call to Healing. iii. Diagnosis and Prognosis -- 4. Healers at Work. iv. Anthropologist, Heal Thyself -- 5. The Spiritual Tools of Healing. v. Sowing Shadows in Sacred Lagoons -- 6. Gender, Healing, and Experience. vi. The Seguro as Embodied Self.
ISBN
  • 0826318924
  • 0826318932 (pbk.)
LCCN
98049887
OCLC
  • 60200573
  • ocm60200573
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries