The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru

by Bonnie Glass-Coffin

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.

246 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1998

Reviews

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from thesis:

In reflecting on my notes, I ventured on the analysis of how one studies the self, all the time being aware of how my person relates to the story that is being told, and hence not detaching myself but being rather engaged in the narrative (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013)

Reality, essentially, is not “observed or recorded, it is lived!” says Glass-Coffin in this book.

The willingness to publicly expose one’s self-scrutiny requires courage, but it is important to take such risks for the study as well as for bettering ourselves and the world

[Elizabeth Desrochers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have studied with dona Isabelle & Olinda in Northern Peru, they are awesome! I wish the book spoke more of them and their work.