Explore Articles Filed Under: The Amazon
Fusion is the hot word among Peruvian chefs. Pedro Miguel Schiaffino was one of the founders of what is now generally called Amazon fusion, which incorporates jungle ingredients into gourmet dishes. Back in May, the first Festival Gastronómico de la Amazonía peruana was held for five days at the Hotel Meliá in Lima. I missed it. I had intended to bring some genuine Amazonian boiled monkey soup, but, as it turns out, it is likely the festival would not have been interested. When people in Lima speak of Amazonian gastronomy, they do not mean what indigenous people in the Amazon actually eat.
In 2006, Keith Aronowitz, then forty-four years old, was a filmmaker without a direction. He had been professionally involved in the film and television industry for more than twenty years, primarily as an editor working on what he calls “some pretty mindless stuff” — infomercials and reality shows. Now he needed a break. He decided to go to Peru and try something he had heard of called ayahuasca. He brought his camcorder and, just for something to do, he recorded some of the ceremonies and interviewed some of the people who had also journeyed to drink ayahuasca. When he shared his footage, the response was enthusiastic. So he thought: Why not make a documentary?
In 1975 Kenneth Good traveled to Venezuela to study the Yanomamö. After he had lived in the village for about two years, he found himself under increasing pressure to become betrothed. “What the hell,” he thought, “what would be so wrong in saying yes?” So he became betrothed to Yarima, who at that time was around nine years old. Then something unexpected happened. Good began to fall in love with Yarima. He consummated their marriage when she was about fourteen, and he was almost forty. Five years later, after having lived with the Yanomamö for more than twelve years, Good brought his now-pregnant wife back to the United States. Things did not work out as he had expected.
Do warfare and killing among Amazonian peoples have an evolutionary function? Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon claims that the culture of the Yanomamö of Brazil exemplifies a key principle of sociobiology — that males who had murdered during intervillage warfare had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as men who had not. In other words, he claims that violence is evolutionary adaptive behavior. Now a new study of violence and reproductive success, this time among the Waorani of Ecuador, has come to a different conclusion.
We have discussed before the strange ways that the jungle, and in particular the Amazon, has penetrated Western consciousness. Now I have found a new phenomenon to add to the list of odd hybrid cultural artifacts — Amazonia Barbie. Of course, Amazonia Barbie does not look anything like a real Amazonian woman. It is not at all clear that she is intended to. Her ethnicity is a stereotype built up out of fragments of an imagined culture.
Jerry Burchfield is a photographer without a camera. Instead, he uses a photographic technique that goes back to the nineteenth-century beginnings of photography — laying materials directly on a black-and-white photosensitive medium, and creating negative images of the shadow cast by sunlight passing through the object. Burchfield calls these lumen or light prints. The results are astonishing.
The term poder verde, green power, was first applied to cumbia amazónica — the boisterous sexy ironic kick-ass garage-band party music that first developed in the Upper Amazon during the oil boom of the 1960s. Now there is an equivalent in painting — an exhibition entitled Poder Verde, Visiones Psicotropicales, Green Power: Psychotropical Visions, which brings together the boisterous sexy ironic kick-ass visionary work of contemporary Upper Amazonian painters.
I have mentioned before that getting clean potable water can be difficult in many parts of the Amazon, including the larger cities. In fact, I strongly recommend against drinking any untreated water in the Amazon, no matter how clear and tempting it might appear. And that includes rainwater, unless you know that the containers in which the water has been caught and stored have been properly cleaned and maintained.
We have talked before about the image of the jungle in the European imagination. Part of that mythology is that the jungle — filled with what German filmmaker Werner Herzog called “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away” — has a mysterious power to drive Europeans crazy.
In order to become an ayahuasquero, one must be coronado, initiated, usually by receiving the phlegm of one’s own maestro ayahuasquero. Still, a number of mestizo shamans also report being initiated by dreams that announce — or confirm — their healing vocation. My plant teacher doña María Tuesta had such an initiatory dream when she was eighteen, in which the Virgin Mary confirmed doña María’s destiny as a healer. A small detail in the dream is of great interest. The fact that doña María is carried to heaven in her mosquitero, mosquito net, has significant symbolic resonance in the Upper Amazon.