The Gift of Life

Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru

Bonnie Glass-Coffin (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

246 Seiten

1998
University of New Mexico Press (Verlag)
978-0-8263-1893-0 (ISBN)

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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.

Bonnie Glass-Coffin is an assistant professor of anthropology at Utah State University in Logan.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	30.3.1998
Zusatzinfo	Illustrations, map
Verlagsort	Albuquerque, NM
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-8263-1893-2 / 0826318932
ISBN-13	978-0-8263-1893-0 / 9780826318930
Zustand	Neuware