And Spanish chef Borja Blásquez, academic director of the Gastronomic Institute of Argentina, whose program on the El Gourmet cable TV channel is very popular in Latin America, told reporters in Arequipa that Peruvian dishes were “incomparable” — “the best in Latin America,” he said. “Peruvian cuisine’s fusions, and very especially its historic roots, are valuable things that can hardly be equaled by any other cuisine from this part of the continent.”

Fusion is the hot word among Peruvian chefs. Pedro Miguel Schiaffino — see biographies here and here — was one of the founders of what is now generally called Amazon fusion, which incorporates jungle ingredients into gourmet dishes. Schiaffino — the “young promise of Peruvian gastronomy” — studied at the Culinary Institute of America and at the Italian Culinary Institute, and he got practical kitchen experience under chefs Nadia Santini and Piero Bertinotti in Rome. Upon his return to Peru, he took charge of the kitchen at La Huaca Pucllana in Lima, creating what came to be called neoandina or nouveux Andean cuisine, and then opened the restaurant Malabar in Lima with the idea of offering a new fusion cuisine using jungle ingredients.

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.

The event was sponsored by PromPerú — the Comisión del Promoción del Perú para la Exportación y el Turismo — and was attended by several Peruvian dignitaries, including Mercedes Aráoz, the Minister of Foreign Trade, and Antonio Brack, Minister of the Environment.

The big hit of the show was Amazonian fruit — ubos, sapote, anona, camu-camu, guanábana, conoca, aguaje, guayaba. In addition to the fruit, there was yuca, of course, and fish — I wrote about Amazonian fish here — and meat of wild pig and deer. As far as I can tell they served no large rodents, such as capybara or agouti, both widely eaten in the Amazon, and no monkey or spiny rats. I do not know whether they served suri, the grubs of palm beetles, considered a special treat in the Amazon.

In other words, when people in Lima speak of Amazonian gastronomy, they do not mean what indigenous people in the Amazon actually eat. They mean European preparations of Amazonian ingredients as similar as possible to those already used in Eurpoean gastronomy.

In the same way, one press release speaks of the jungle fruits on display as having been produced with “only minimal traditional management,” as if the fruit had just magically appeared out of the jungle, ignoring the fact that both mestizo and indigenous Amazonian peoples are active and ecologically astute forest managers.

Although the coverage is sketchy, there seem to have been no actual indigenous Amazonians present, except as dancers, for entertainment. All the headline chefs had restaurants in Lima, and all of them had been trained in Europe.

One product of the festival was a new forty-recipe cookbook, with scrumptious photographs, entitled Frutas amazónicas, postres peruanos de vanguardia, written by chef Astrid Gutsche.

Gutsche, born in Germany, manages the restaurant franchise Astrid & Gastón along with her husband, Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio Jaramillo. They met at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and have opened a number of restaurants in Lima specializing in Peruvian seafood, Peruvian confections, and — their latest — Peruvian sánguches, sandwiches.

The desert book was originally the idea of photographer Walter Wust, who solicited the support of the Proyecto Perúbiodiverso of PromPerú, which hoped that the book would help to promote the the use and export of Amazonian fruit. The promotional material for the book speaks sensually of a “host of revolutionary desserts, unexpected flavors, and exotic drinks. The bright yellow of cocona, the promising camu camu, the delicate aguaje, the creamy shimbillo, among many others, open up a range of textures and colors that provide infinite combinations. Under its green cloak of secrecy, the jungle hides sweet pleasure.”

This is the jungle in the Peruvian imagination — erotic, seductive, its unmanaged treasures waiting to be extracted.

Filmmaker Keith Aronowitz

The ceremonies proved to be profound. “It was an incredible experience,” Aronowitz says, “and forever changed my life.” He also happened to have 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?

The film Aronowitz envisioned was deeply personal, so he wanted it to be completely self-funded and under his own control. He spent months teaching himself about documentary filmmaking, and he used the money he had been saving for Vietnam to purchase video equipment. Shooting the film was a challenge, especially because he was working by himself. He used a camera with night vision in order to film the ceremonies without compromising their integrity. But most of all, he says, the challenge was to translate the essentially internal ayahuasca experience into film.

After months of filming in the jungle, additional trips for supplementary footage, and about fifteen rough cuts, Aronowitz felt confident that he had captured the story he wanted to tell. The film, cut down to ninety-five minutes, was titled Metamorphosis.

Don Alberto Torres Davila

Then came more challenges — distributing the film. Once again, despite having a distribution deal, Aronowitz decided he wanted to do it himself. He began with small private screenings while he submitted his work to film festivals. At the 2009 Breckenridge Film Festival in Colorado, Metamorphosis won the award for Best Cinematography. He has shown the film at the Wild Project in New York, and at the Fifth International Conference on Amazonian Shamanism in Iquitos, Peru. He sells the DVD of the film online here.

Metamorphosis follows five westerners — ayahuasca tourists — on a nine-day retreat at the jungle lodge maintained by Blue Morpho Tours, where they participate in five ayahuasca ceremonies. The lodge is run by Hamilton Souther, who has been practicing shamanism for about seven years. “The spirits came along,” Souther says in the film, “and they said to me: You have to go into the jungle and drink ayahuasca.” Souther apprenticed under don Alberto Torres Davila and don Julio Gerena Pinedo, and they now all work together leading ceremonies at the lodge. The film tells Souther’s story, incorporates his explanations of the ceremonies, and portrays the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes through which he guides his guests.

Hamilton Souther

The film does not flinch from depicting the sometimes overpowering physical and psychological effects of the drink. “Everybody who comes here suffers,” says Souther. Aronowitz puts this into his own context. “Fear is not the only thing that takes place,” he says. “You experience divinity. Universal knowledge through visions. Oneness. Love. Your heart opens. You feel connected to everyone and everything. I feel like I had to go to hell in order to get to heaven.”

Blue Morpho Tours specializes in what it calls all-inclusive shamanic workshops. The lodge is relatively comfortable, at least compared to the amenities available in local villages, and has hosted not only tourists but also journalists who have described their ayahuasca experiences in such widely read publications as the Houston Chronicle and National Geographic magazine.

Perhaps because of its success, Blue Morpho Tours has attracted both criticism and defense, largely concerning the commercialization of indigenous spirituality and the effect of ayahuasca tourism on local communities. “Blue Morpho is a unique place,” Aronowitz says, “because one of the shamans is a westerner. He left his life in America in order to learn this healing tradition in the middle of the Amazon. So he’s a conduit to helping other people heal through this tradition.”

Here is a trailer for the film. Additional clips are available here.

Cheryl Lynne Bradley has posted a lengthy interview with Aronowitz, and Adam Elenbaas has an interview on Reality Sandwich. The film has a Facebook page, and Aronowitz recounts his story here. There is an audio interview by Nick Zart on Radiohuasca which you can listen to here:

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/09/metamorphosis/feed/ 4 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/love-story/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/love-story/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:48:43 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=4054 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.
]]> In 1975 Kenneth Good, a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology, traveled to the headwaters of the Orinoco in Venezuela to live and study among the Yanomamö. He joined anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon for what was supposed to be fifteen months of fieldwork, funded by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation. But Good would end up living almost full-time with the Yanomamö for more than twelve years, sharing their lives, becoming fluent in their language, and marrying a Yanomamö girl named Yarima.

Yarima in 1992, from the film Yanomami Homecoming

After Good had been living among the Yanomamö for about two and a half years, he found himself under increasing pressure to become betrothed. The headman of the village was insistent. “I found myself thinking that maybe being married down here wouldn’t be so horrendous after all,” Good writes. “Certainly it would be in accordance with their customs.” The more he thought about the idea, the more attractive it became. “After all, what better affirmation could there be of my integration with the Hasupuweteri?”

It is common among the Yanomamö for an older man to become betrothed to a younger girl. Such betrothals are not consummated for some time — perhaps not ever. The Yanomamö understand that sometimes these relationships don’t work out. A girl might thus be betrothed several times before actually being married. The girl brings food from her mother’s fire to feed the man; he brings her his own gifts of food. They talk and joke together. Eventually, the girl feels comfortable being around his hearth and being around him. If things work out, they become friends.

When the girl has her first menses, the man and his betrothed hang their hammocks side by side, and they have sex for the first time. The girl thus has an instant husband and protector. Women beyond the age of puberty are routinely raped if they do not have husbands.

The Yanomamö have nothing like a formal ceremony comparable to marriage in American culture. Divorce is just as informal. The departing spouse simply removes his or her hammock from the space of the other spouse inside the shabono, the large communal house, and then resists or refuses reconciliation and reunification.

Good figured that the betrothal would not last, and presumably would never be comsummated. He was, after all, going to go home at some point. But he thought, “What the hell, what would be so wrong in saying yes?” So he agreed. “Good,” said the headman, smiling broadly.“Take Yarima. You like her. She’s your wife.”

At that time, Yarima was around nine years old. Good was thirty-four.

Valdir Cruz, Yarima (1996)

Good found himself becoming increasingly fond of his child bride. The community began taking it more seriously too. The women started calling Good yarima heorope. “Our relationship changed,” he writes. “Before, Yarima had been the cute little girl with the smile and the hello. Now it was something more than that and, as time passed, a good deal more than that.” Yurima had her first menses while Good was away on a long trip. When he returned, they hung their hammocks side by side, and they consummated their marriage.

Yanomamö do not keep track of their age. Good and Yarima were married shortly after Yarima’s first menstrual period. In a nonindustrial society, especially one like the Yanomamö, where obesity is virtually unknown, a girl would normally have her first menstrual period between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, much later than girls in industrial societies. A good guess is that the marriage was consummated when Yarima was about fourteen years old. Good was by then close to forty.

The marriage created problems in the village where Good lived with Yarima. Yanomamö attitudes toward women and sex were very different from his own, and, while he might normally regard these with anthropological detachment, his attitude was different when they were directed at Yarima. Good frequently had to be away from the village — for permits, visas, research funding. He made a public and very angry announcement that his wife was to be left alone while he was gone. Still, on one occasion when he went downriver on business, the village decided that he was dead, and Yarima was raped by a number of men. One of the men was his own brother-in-law, Yarima’s sister’s husband, with whom it was considered normal for Yarima to have sex. But Good was furious when he returned, and he berated the man publicly. Another time when he was gone, Yarima was beaten and her ear partly ripped off. Yarima’s brother could not understand why Good was so upset by all this. It’s just naka, he told Good, just pussy. What do you care?

These difficulties were eroding his relationships within the village. And now, too, Yarima was pregnant. Finally, in 1987, after living with the Yanomamö for twelve years, Good took his nineteen-year-old wife and went back to the United States. The couple moved in with Good’s parents in Media, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Here they were married in a civil ceremony, and here their first child, David, was born.

A Yanomamö shabono

The following year, in 1988, they returned to the jungle for a visit, taking David with them. Yarima was pregnant again, and, while they were there, Yarima gave birth to Vanessa, their second child. The visit cost Good about $23,000 for supplies, provisions, air fare to Venezuela, the flight to the interior, and the five- or six-day boat ride up the Orinoco River to Yanomamö country. If they were going to keep visiting Yarima’s people, Good would have to make some money.

In 1991, Good, along with author David Chanoff, wrote a book about his experiences among the Yanomamö entitled Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the Yanomama. The book also contained bitter criticism of Good’s one-time mentor, Napoleon Chagnon. It was a moderate popular success, and it continues to be frequently cited in discussions of Yanomamö culture. It also made the couple, briefly, international media celebrities. Good sold their story to Columbia Pictures for $50,000, and he says that he received a telephone call from actor Richard Gere, who was interested in playing him. The money helped Good finish up his doctorate — not under Chagnon, but under well-known anthropologist Marvin Harris at the University of Florida.

At about this time, author Ron Arias interviewed Good and Yarima at Good’s parents’ home. All the questions were passed through Good, who translated them into Yanomamö. “The Yanomamo live naked their whole lives,” Good told the interviewer. “When I first took her out of the jungle, it was a constant struggle to get her to keep her clothes on. If I turned my back on her or left her alone, off they’d come. One time I had to chase her down the street to cover her up.” Arias heard stories of how Yarima thought that automobiles were going to bite her, how she learned to make light by moving a little stick on the wall, how she had given up her hammock to sleep on a big soft box. Once slender, she was now short and stocky. “I see no joy in her face,” Arias wrote, “and I’m feeling uneasy because we’re talking about her as if she were an object or pet from another time.”

Inside the shabono

Finally, in 1992, Good found a job teaching anthropology at Jersey City State College — now called New Jersey City University — in Jersey City, New Jersey. NJCU is a small urban public commuter school, which began as a state teachers college and officially became a university only in 1998. The school has no department of anthropology, and until 2008 Good was the only anthropologist on the campus. It is not clear to me how Good wound up teaching at this school. He had his doctorate; he had worked for the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany; he had extensive — indeed, extraordinary — field experience; and he had published a significant memoir. Perhaps he was, at the age of forty-nine, considered too old for other entry-level positions. He had also quite publicly broken with the powerful Chagnon. Apparently Good was having trouble getting academic employment, and he and his wife found themselves in a small apartment in Rutherford, New Jersey.

The couple continued to attract media attention. Reporters were obsessed with Yarima’s exoticism, and made constant references to her alleged Stone Age origins, as if the Yanomamö somehow had no history. One reporter described the Yanamamö as “naked Indians who feast on termites and tarantulas and have yet to invent the wheel.” Another said that “modern devices such as washing machines, television and the telephone were as foreign to her as they would have been to Neanderthal man.” The same writer quoted Yarima’s English language teacher as saying that Yarima was four feet tall and had no concept of time. “She did not know if it was morning or afternoon,” the teacher told the interviewer. And she added, “One thing you noticed about her was that she could not coordinate colors.”

Yarima had grown up in a shabono, surrounded by people. Her day had been spent gathering fruit and fishing with her sisters and mother. They would make a fire, sit and talk, laugh, watch each other’s babies and take turns going off to gather food. Then they would go to the stream, wash their babies and themselves, and come home with flowers in their hair. In New Jersey, she lived in a small apartment — isolated, alienated, and bored. Running water, appliances, malls, and television were not enough. She spent the day listening to cassette tapes Good had recorded of Yanamamö voices and the sounds of the jungle, and watching the videos they had shot on their 1988 visit. One interviewer noted that Yarima did not leave the house unless Good went with her. They had no friends among their neighbors, whose houses were abandoned by working husbands and wives during the day.

Valdir Cruz, Yarima Breastfeeding Among Her People, Venezuela (1997)

Good also notes that Yarima began to view him differently once they were immersed in his culture rather than hers. He did not carry a shotgun. He obeyed the orders of police officers. When, after a minor traffic accident, a woman yelled at him and called him an idiot, he did not shout back and threaten her. Yarima thought he had lost his manhood.

And now Yarima had a third child, Daniel, to take care of. She did not understand why Good did not spend more time at home with his children, as Yanomamö fathers do, or why he had to leave her alone in the apartment every day while he went to work. “She didn’t understand meetings,” Good told an interviewer, “time periods, schedules, students sitting in class waiting for you, why I had to go every day.” Once, on a book tour together, to her dismay, Good said he was too busy to talk with his daughter on the telephone. Good dismissed her concern. “She can’t understand how it is I don’t want to talk to my own kids,” he said, his hands on her shoulders. “She’ll get Americanized.”

Both Good and Yarima thought it would be a good idea to visit her home village once more, but they could not afford the trip on his salary as an assistant professor. Finally, in 1992, National Geographic agreed to finance the trip if they could make a documentary film out of it, to be called Yanomami Homecoming. The magazine sent three boats full of people and equipment to the Upper Orinoco, but not — as they had apparently promised — either a doctor or medical supplies for the Yanomamö. The National Geographic filming, too, seems to have been something of a disaster, which was in turn captured on tape by a village Yanomamö who had acquired his own 8mm video camera.

While Good and Yarima were awaiting the film crew in Caracas, Good learned that his father had died, but decided to honor his commitments to the film crew rather than return to the United States. Yarima could not understand this; Yanomamö have very strict rules about obligations owed to deceased relatives. When she returned to her village, Yarima learned that her own mother had died, and her own intense grief only underscored what she perceived to be her husband’s callousness. Moreover, according to Good, members of the film crew, presumably in order to make more dramatic footage, encouraged Yarima to criticize him.

Valdir Cruz, Yarima and Son, Venezuela (1996)

Finally, Yarima simply ran away, apparently at the instigation of a member of the National Geographic film crew. This happened at the airstrip in Platanal, just as they were about to board the plane for a flight to Caracas. Good and Yarima had spent days in agonizing discussion about her wish to remain with her people, and she had agreed to give New Jersey one more chance. But she changed her mind at the last minute. She stopped, hesitated, and then just turned around and left.

For a while, Yarima appeared on talk shows in Caracas, discussing her decision to abandon the United States and her family. Then, at the end of 1993, she disappeared into the jungle. There were rumors that she was dead, or hiding in the hills.

In 1996, investigative reporter Patrick Tierney, accompanied by Brazilian photographer Valdir Cruz, while doing the research among the Yanomamö that would result in his scathing and controversial book Darkness in El Dorado, had his sleeve tugged by a woman who said, in perfectly good English, “Hello. My name is Yarima. What is your name?”

Tierney writes that Yarima was nursing a baby and looked, as he put it, radiantly healthy. She had married again, Cruz says, and had two more children. She told Tierney that her new husband was treating her well. She asked about her three children in New Jersey, adding, “Here good. Jersey bad.”

Tierney’s discovery of Yarima among the Yanomamö became as much of a news story as had been her life in New Jersey.The Times of London published three stories in 1997 about how Yarima had abandoned civilization for the jungle, and about a new expedition that would entice her back by playing tape recordings of her three children in the United States begging her to return. The expedition turned out to be nonexistent.

That is as much as I know. I have seen no additional reports of Yarima’s life in the jungle. Good and Yarima are divorced, and he continues to teach anthropology at New Jersey City University, where his students consider him a likeable if undemanding teacher, and enjoy his stories of life among the Yanomamö. A proposed sequel to Into the Heart has not appeared. I do not know if he has remarried. Yarima, if she is alive, would be around forty-one years old. Good and Yarima have not seen each other for sixteen years.

I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their noses.

These naked hideous men were Yanomamö, and, if you ever took an undergaduate anthropology course, you probably read that passage in Napoleon Chagnon’s incredibly popular ethnography, Yanomamo: The Fierce People — the best-selling anthropology text of all time. Chagnon chose the term fierce people for a reason. “The fact that the Yanomamö live in a state of chronic warfare,” he wrote, “is reflected in their mythology, values, settlement pattern, political behavior and marriage practices.” But over the years, Chagnon’s methods, fieldwork, and characterization of the Yanomamö have all been the subject of debate, often acrimonious and sometimes personal.

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomamö shaman and activist

Critics have maintained, among other things, that much of the aggression he observed was instigated, knowingly or not, by Chagnon himself, through his introduction of scarce trade goods, such as machetes and metal pans, into Yanomamö culture. Critics have claimed that his characterization of the Yanomamö as irremediably belligerent has been used to justify incursions and massacres by miners in search of gold in Yanomamö territory, and to justify attempts by Brazilian politicians to split up Yanomamö territory into several small reserves in order to reduce conflict — a plan that would have allowed more gold mining in the region.

And some critics have pointed out that Chagnon has failed to support the Yanomamö in their struggles for autonomy — first, by failing to share with them any of the significant amount of money, allegedly more than a million dollars, that he earned with his popular text; second, by failing to speak out against the misuse of his own work for political purposes; and, third, by publicly criticizing, in a popular Brazilian magazine, Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomamö activist and leader of the indigenous movement that helped to establish the Yanomamö reserve in Brazil.

Yanomamö woman with traditional face ornaments

Kopenawa himself speaks of Chagnon’s work with considerable bitterness. “So this Chagnon,” he says, “he said that the Yanomami are no good, that the Yanomami are ferocious. So this story, he made this story up… To make his book. To make a story about fighting among the Yanomami…. Because in his book he says we are fierce. We are garbage… He thought it would be important for him. He became famous. He is speaking badly about us. He is saying that the Yanomami are fierce, that they fight a lot, that they are no good.”

One of Chagnon’s most controversial claims is that Yanomamö culture exemplifies a key principle of sociobiology — that, among the Yanomamö, the most aggressive and murderous males have the most children. In an article published in 1988 in the prestigious journal Science, he reported that Yanomamö men who had murdered had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as men who had not. He claimed, in other words, that violence is evolutionary adaptive behavior, and that, as Kim Hill, an expert in human evolutionary ecology, puts it, “the willingness to use violence under some conditions is part of the human male psyche.”

But there are several methodological critiques of Chagnon’s study, of which I will mention just three.

Yanomamö at home

First, Chagnon used reported body count as an index of aggressiveness. But he had no way to determine with any accuracy the number of people killed by any individual Yanamomö. Chagnon did not himself participate in any raids, witness any killings, or count any bodies. When a Yanomamö man had killed a human, he underwent a relatively rigorous unokaimou purification ceremony, after which he was called an unokai. So Chagnon used participation in the unokaimou as a surrogate for having killed, and he asked raid participants for estimates of the number of their victims.

The problem is that such estimates could be wildly inaccurate, especially because the Yanomamö did not take human body parts as trophies. A raider might shoot several arrows at figures fleeing into the bush at twilight, and claim, rightly or wrongly, to have killed one or more of them. And a man might take part in the unokaimou ceremony when he claimed to have killed by less direct means — by stealing an enemy’s footprint, for example, or by sending a spirit animal to kill him, or by shooting an arrow into his dead body.

Second, for reasons that remain unclear, Chagnon did not count as tokens of reproductive success living children whose fathers were dead or whose fathers lived outside the villages in Chagnon’s study area. Presumably some number of these dead fathers had been killed while they were on raids, and some of those in more distant villages were there in hiding from retaliation for their own violence. Indeed, it was often the war leaders — that is, the most aggressive — who were targeted for death by their enemies, and being killed in one’s prime surely has an impact on one’s long-term reproductive success. If dead or absent unokai and their offspring had been included in the study, the number of offspring of all unokai might well have been lower.

Waorani man with traditional pierced earlobes

Third, the number of people killed and reproductive success might not be correlated with each other but rather with a third variable — age. The older a man grows, the more raids he will have participated in, and the more children he will have engendered. The study included a large sample of young unmarried males. Since younger unmarried men were unlikely both to have undertaken the unokaimou ceremony and to have fathered numerous children, this cohort skewed the relative reproductive advantages of the unokai, almost all of whom were over thirty. The study did no stratification by age.

And additional hypotheses do not seem to have been considered — for example, that, while members of the raiding party were off on a ten-day raid, their wives were back home being impregnated by the more peaceful males.

Hill, who is a supporter of Chagnon, says that Chagnon’s study is “preliminary and suggestive.” The precise cause of the association between violence and reproductive success, he says, “is not possible to determine from the data presented, and there are many possible interpretations.” An appropriate study would require, among other things. a design “that would eliminate age effects and other possible covariates of both killer status and fitness.”

Waorani women

And just such a study has now been performed by anthropologist Stephen Beckerman of Penn State University and his colleagues, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was specifically designed to explore Chagnon’s contention that reproductive fitness among men correlates with differences of aggressiveness, and to avoid the three methodological objections to Chagnon’s work that we discussed above. The study concludes that, among another Amazonian people, the Waorani of Ecuador, who at one time had the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology, more aggressive warriors in fact had lower indices of reproductive success than less aggressive males.

As part of the Waorani Life History Project, the authors interviewed 121 Waorani elders of both sexes to obtain genealogical information and recollections of raids in which they and their relatives participated. They also obtained complete raiding histories of 95 warriors, and they analyzed the raiding histories, marital trajectories, and reproductive histories of all these men. “We included in our sample of warriors both living and dead men,” the study states. “We ranked their aggression by the number of raids they participated in and not by a local term of contested meaning with which they are labeled. Our analysis is free of the problem caused by the inherent correlation of the warrior’s age with both participation in raids and reproductive success.”

Waorani family

The result: “Regardless of age category, the more zealous warriors consistently have lower reproductive success.” At each age interval, zealous warriors acquired fewer wives, produced fewer children, and had fewer surviving children.

There are two ways to interpret the reported differences between the Yanomamö and the Waorani. The first is that the disparate outcomes are due to differences in culture. This is the path taken by the authors of the Waorani study. They speculate that Yanomamö warfare cycles had peaceful interludes during which warriors could reap the benefits of their social status and accrue wives and children. The Waorani, on the other hand, did not incorporate peaceful interludes between raids. “We found no tradition of standing down,” the authors state, “even for a short period, after a rough balance of deaths was achieved. Indeed, a balance, although it might occur by chance, was never sought — the goal was to eliminate the other side.”

Another possibility, of course, is that the Yanomamö study was sufficiently affected by the bias introduced by its methodology that its results were incorrect.

We have discussed before — here and here and here — 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.

The official Mattel product description reads: “The Amazon is a natural source of beauty, bounty, and the mighty Amazon River. The Amazonia Barbie® doll celebrates this extraordinary paradise, dressed in a costume inspired by the native people. From the feathers atop her long dark hair to her tribal tattoos, this striking doll will captivate your heart.”

She joins Brazilian, Chliean, and two Peruvian Barbies in the Dolls of the World® South America collection.

Amazonia Barbie’s belt, loin cloth, and “tribal tattoos”

Amazonia Barbie is, as they say, muy gringa — tall, thin, pale-skinned, and with a narrow nose, although she does have long straight black hair. Unlike many traditional Amazonian women, Amazonia Barbie wears a sort of tube top over her breasts, a complex heavy belt, and a loin cloth. She has on her arms and legs what the description calls tribal tattoos, but which are apparently modeled after body decorations drawn on the skin with the juice of the immature fruit of the huito, Genipa americana, which oxidizes to a very dark blue color. This body art is often on the face — you can see some photographs here — but I suspect that a Barbie doll with geometric designs on her face would have been unacceptable to the manufacturer.

I am not sure that I can draw any deep cultural lessons from this. Of course Amazonia Barbie does not look anything like a real Amazonian woman. It is not at all clear that she is intended to. The mold is the same as all the other Barbie dolls, perhaps with some variation in skin color, and her eyes appear to have been given a slightly Asian cast. If she is not an authentic representative of Amazonian culture, it is because she is not in fact intended to be a representation of any culture at all. Her ethnicity is a stereotype built up out of fragments of an imagined culture. She is an American doll playing dress-up.

Linda Kyaw (left) and Amazonia Barbie

The designer of Amazonia Barbara is Linda Kyaw, who is employed by Mattel Inc. to design Barbie Dolls, and then to promote them by appearing at Barbie Doll conventions. She also designed other members of the Dolls of the World Collection, including Scotland Barbie and France Barbie, as well as my personal favorite — a Barbie doll costumed as the goddess Aphrodite.

Apparently different Barbie doll designers develop individual styles that are instantly recognizable to connoisseurs. One collector complains Amazonia Barbie’s face is too typical of dolls designed by Kyaw, “with the same color shades and gold tones on their faces.” Another has complained that Amazonia Barbie is too pricey for an almost naked doll. It took me a moment to figure that one out.

Amazonia Barbie is available, among other places, at Toys”R”Us for $29.95.

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.

For his book Primal Images: 100 Lumen Prints of Amazonia Flora, Burchfield made three trips to the Amazon River basin to collect plants and other organic samples to create his lumen prints. He used outdated black-and-white photo paper, exposing the samples to sunlight on the bow of his boat. The results were unpredictable, dependent on the quality of the light, the changing temperature and humidity, the passage of rain and clouds, the translucency of the specimen, and the effects of chemical staining from the plant samples themselves. The process yielded an amazing array of colors on the black-and-white paper, surprising even to Burchfield himself.

Jerry Burchfield, Philodendron melinonii (2002)

Burchfield was thus unable to pre-visualize his photographs; he could only see how they had turned out after the process was completed. There could be no duplicate photographs. Each print was an original, the result of an extended exposure time rather than chemicals. The entire process was aleatoric, indeterminate, anarchic, producing a single unique outcome. Unmediated by camera or lens, the images came directly from the interaction of the plants with their own Amazonian environment.

Burchfield — a longtime environmental activist — is explicitly aware of the political meanings of his photographic method. Normally, nature photography is like an extractive industry: the ecotourist photographer masters the Amazon by bringing back documents extracted by sophisticated technologies that were invented elsewhere. Burchfield says that such photography has become a substitute for real experience; this tragic loss in turn contributes to the abuse of the environment. “I seek real experience,” he says, “and try to make work that connects directly with natural energies.”

Jerry Burchfield, Acacallis cyanea (2002)

Thus, Burchfield’s method does not seek mastery over nature, but rather a willingness to interact with the accidental and unexpected, to give up control to the spirits of the plants — to let the plants photograph themselves.

To that extent, Burchfield’s photographic method is ineluctably shamanic.

Primal Images contains a foreword by famed ethnobotanist Wade Davis and an introductory essay entitled Beyond the Importance of Objects by Jonathan Green. The photographs were originally exhibited at the University of California Riverside’s California Museum of Photography; a gallery of images is here, along with an excerpt of the Jonathan Green essay. An extended discussion by Douglas Stockdale is here.

José Asunción, Huarmiboa (2007)

Now there is an equivalent in painting — an exhibition entitled Poder Verde, Visiones Psicotropicales, Green Power: Psychotropical Visions, currently on display through April 9 at El Centro Cultural de España in Lima, which brings together the boisterous sexy ironic kick-ass visionary work of contemporary Upper Amazonian painters.

The Lima exhibit has clearly been a success. One newspaper calls it “a world vision defined by sensuality, abundance, and color.” Another says, “Opulent naked women populate several of the works of these artists, together with luxuriant fruits and wild animals that appear to enjoy the richness of the land.”

Luis Sakiray, Preciosa belleza amazónica (2006)

And it is indeed true that this is wonderfully exuberant, extravagant, and often wryly transgressive art. Famed visionary artist Pablo Amaringo is included, of course. But also represented are the lesser known painters Harry Chávez, José Asunción Araujo, Brus Rubio, Miguel Saavedra, Jorge Cabieses, Luis Sakiray, Roldán Pinedo, and Christian Bendayán.

These artists are, for the most part, not traditional gallery artists, but rather commercial painters, muralists, folk artists, their paintings inspired by posters, advertisements, magazine illustrations, ayahuasca visions, popular symbolism, figures from Amazonian folklore and mythology. Included as well are indigenous painters — Shipibo Roldán Pinedo and Bora-Huitoto Brus Rubio — “escaping from the anthropological museums,” as the catalog puts it, so that their work can be taken seriously as art.

Pablo Amaringo, Aya-Mayuywayra (2005)

Luis Sakiray Macuyama, for example, has been principally a muralist for Chinese restaurants, chicken shacks, and cebicherías, where his art links the succulence of the food inside to visions of curvaceous women and a bountiful landscape. José Asunción Araujo, another self-taught painter, has specialized in the decoration of Iquitos bars, nightclubs, and whorehouses.

Christian Bendayán, curator of the exhibition, said that jungle culture has always been “lively, garish, colorful, quite different from the rest of Peru, which has even looked upon it as immoral.” Surprisingly, the swirling visionary art of Pablo Amaringo appears quite at home in this company. Indeed, the exhibit takes a broad view of the visionary. “Mediated through drunkenness, sexuality, wisdom, psychotropics,” says the catalog, “the result is an aesthetic that reclaims our hallucinations, our dreams, our visions.”

Christian Bendayán, Recuerdo de tu hijo (2006)

Fittingly, the exhibit includes performances of cumbia amazónica by groups such as Los Chapillacs, and, of course, Juaneco y su combo. Opening night featured Los Hijos de Lamas — “entertainers for weddings, funerals, divorces, and suicides.”

The catalog concludes, “It is green power, the return to roots, the snake of life that gives us these psychotropical visions, to intoxicate us with their lights and colors. Thus art and life, imagination and reason, dream and reality become one. Now we are able to see again, be again, be born again.”

The complete exhibition catalog is here.

Even when you get water through a pipe, the quality of the water depends on where the water comes from and whether the pipe has any cracks or leaks. In addition, the single most important cause of gastrointestinal illness in the wilderness is oral-fecal contamination from dirty hands. Sure, you wash your hands after using the latrine, but does everyone who handles your food and water?

So, if you are thinking of heading into the jungle, here are some survival tips.

There are three sorts of waterborne microorganisms that can cause human illness in the wilderness — viruses, bacteria, and protozoan cysts. Bacteria in contaminated water may include Escherichia coli, Shigella, and even Salmonella; protozoa may include Giardia and Cryptosporidium — all potential contaminants whenever animal or human fecal material gets into your water source. It is worth bearing in mind that just about any gastrointestinal infection you get from contaminated water can do more than just spoil your trip.

Apart from packing in your own bottled water, there are four ways of treating water in the jungle.

Boiling is completely effective against protozoan cysts, nontoxic bacteria, and viruses. Bringing the water to a rolling boil is enough, except at higher altitudes, where longer boiling is required because the water boils at a lower temperature. If you are backpacking, there is nothing extra to carry, since you have a pot and stove anyway. On the other hand, boiling takes time and uses up your fuel. Boiling also does not remove sediment, but filtering the water through a bandana usually takes care of that.

Halogens such as iodine or chlorine kill bacteria and viruses, but may not kill all protozoan cysts. Iodine tablets such as Potable Aqua and saturated iodine solutions such as Polar Pure are readily available, inexpensive, and lightweight. You can make your own water treatment kit by putting iodine crystals in the bottom of a small bottle, filling it with water, and using capfuls of the resulting saturated iodine solution to treat your drinking water. If you just keep refilling the bottle with water, the iodine will last indefinitely.

Some people dislike the iodine taste of treated water, but the taste can be eliminated by adding some vitamin C, as in powdered fruit drinks; in fact, the Potable Aqua “taste neutralizer tablets” are simply ascorbic acid. Another drawback is that the halogen must be given time to work before you can drink the water — anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on how cloudy or cold the water is. Pregnant women and people with thyroid conditions may have adverse reactions to iodine.

Mechanical filtration forces the water through a finely porous internal element inside the case in order to physically strain out solid materials, including fine sediment and most — but not all — microorganisms. Bear in mind the difference between a filter and a purifier. A filter mechanically removes protozoa and bacteria from contaminated water. A purifier goes a step further and eliminates viruses as well, by passing the water through either a matrix containing iodine, which kills them, or a filter medium that carries an electrostatic charge, which traps them. A device must inactivate 99.99 percent of viruses to be labeled as a purifier.

There is spirited debate about the relative merits of filters and purifiers. Portable filters and purifiers are compact, relatively speedy, efficient, and you can drink the water immediately. On the other hand, they are heavy, a chore to operate, occasionally cranky, and easily become clogged with sediment.

Ultraviolet light, if strong enough and applied long enough, destroys the DNA of microorganisms, making them unable to reproduce and cause illness. A small portable ultraviolet light source, weighing less than four ounces, called the SteriPEN Adventurer is designed to be inserted into a wide-mouth water bottle, and is supposed to take about fifty seconds to purify sixteen fluid ounces and about ninety seconds for a liter. It is said to be effective against viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, and it leaves no iodine taste.

A drawback is that the device is operated by batteries, and batteries require recharging or replacement, which may not be feasible in wilderness conditions; and the device’s performance is significantly affected by the quality of the batteries used. You can get the device with a solar panel battery charger storage case, but it can take two to five days to recharge two cr123 batteries, depending on sun conditions. The device does not remove sediment, but, as with boiling, you can prefilter with a bandana.

As famed Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett said, before his final expedition, “We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies.” The term men presumably did not apply to those indigenous people who actually lived under the conditions he was describing.

There can be little doubt that this mythology is founded on a hierarchic colonial discourse, in which the colonial Other was seen — often contradictorily and inconsistently — as lazy, aggressive, violent, sexually promiscuous, bestial, primitive, innocent, and irrational, and the colonizers feared contamination by absorption into indigenous life and customs. But more, this colonial discourse was permeated by sexuality. Going native meant, above all, transgressive, interracial sex, with its attendant deterioration and degeneracy — the “abominable practices,” the “monstrous passions” of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The promotional material for a recent book on Amazon exploration speaks of a history in which countless explorers, irresistibly drawn into the green hell of the jungle, “have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad.” Note the mythic conflation of death, madness, and assimilation into the indigenous. All three fates are essentially the same.

Klaus Kinski

In Aguirre The Wrath of God, directed by Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski plays conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro on a doomed quest for El Dorado, the city of gold, in the impenetrable jungles of Peru. The story is based on a historical expedition in 1650, as recorded in the journals of a priest who accompanied the mission. The conquistadors, greedy and cruel, face an environment whose cruelty is equal to their own — hostile natives, disease, starvation, and treacherous waters.

The opening shot shows a long line of men and animals snaking their way down a trail on the eastern slope of the Andes into the jungle; the final shot — one of the most unforgettable in cinema – has the camera swooping around the insane Aguirre drifting down the river on a raft filled with corpses and monkeys. In the beginning, Aguirre is rational and careful, surrounded by all the useless trappings of triumphal European civilization, carried on the backs of native porters; in the end, firing his cannon uselessly into the jungle, he is stripped of everything but transgressive sexuality, muttering about how he will conquer Mexico, marry his own daughter, and found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.”

Bulle Ogier

The Valley (Obscured by Clouds), produced and directed by Barbet Schroeder, follows a different set of European invaders — a group of hippies searching for paradise in the jungle of Papua New Guinea. The beautiful Bulle Ogier plays the bored and self-centered Vivian, married to the French Consul in Melbourne, who is in New Guinea searching for feathers of the near-extinct Bird of Paradise, which she plans to send back to Paris to sell in her boutiques. She falls in with a ragtag bunch heading for the interior to search for an unknown valley, obscured by clouds and thus invisible from the air, where the natives believe that the gods live.

What follows is not entirely clear. The feckless group heads into the jungle, Vivian has sex with the leader, they are welcomed by a primitive people wearing mud masks, they abandon their horses, and finally, at the point of death, they think they see a valley — and the movie ends.

The cruel conquistadores and the ineffectual hippies both fall prey to the madness that the jungle inflicts on Europeans. Both movies express this process in dreamy psychedelic soundtracks — by Popul Vuh in Aguirre and Pink Floyd in Valley. Both films enact the European myth of jungle madness; both sets of invaders are stripped bare, absorbed into the jungle, assimilated, finally, into primal fornication and death, gone native entirely.

It is worth taking a moment to compare the endings of the two films.

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. The dream, as she told it to me on several occasions, was long and complex, and sometimes changed in the telling. But it always began with a beautiful young woman coming and sitting by her side. “Today we are going to go upward,” the woman says, “and see everything that is happening on earth.”

María and the woman go into María’s mosquito net, which carries them up into the clouds to a beautiful green meadow. This is paradise, filled with angels — men and women, adults, children, and babies — wearing brilliant white robes and crowns of sweet-smelling flowers. All the angels start to pray the Ave María and the Pater Noster, holding hands and dancing in a circle around her. As María marvels at the sight, the young woman tells her that she is in paraíso terrenal, the earthly paradise. There are thousands of angels, holding beautiful brightly lit candles, holding up their hands and saying amén in a single voice.

In the dream, doña María sees many more miraculous things and is dressed by spiritual doctors in the white robes of a healer. But that is a story for another time.

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. In crowded households, the impenetrable cotton mosquito net is a refuge of privacy. Even more, shamans of the highest order work secretly within their woven mosquiteros — as pioneering ethnographer Robert H. Lowie says, “in complete darkness under a mosquito net.”

Pablo Amaringo, Spirits Descending on a Banco (detail)

The ability to enter a mosquito net and disappear, or to converse under the mosquito net with the most powerful spirits, is one of the things that distinguishes the Shipibo meraya shaman from the lesser onanya. The mosquito net within which the meraya retreats after drinking ayahuasca is called a bachi, an egg.

Don Francisco Montes Shuña says that the banco — the highest rank of shaman — enters a mosquito net in the middle of the house, lying face down, while all the disciples remain outside. Then the spirits come to the banco from below to talk to him, and to speak through him. Pablo Amaringo has painted a picture of a banco lying beneath his mosquito net while three spiritual beings — a wise old king and two princes — descend and sit on his body. The shaman is here the banco, the bench, for the sprits descending into the mosquitero. Others wait outside the mosquito net to hear these spirits speak through the shaman’s mouth.

A mestizo who heard doña María’s dream would understand, from the mosquito net reference, that she was experiencing an initiation of a very high order.