Explore Articles Filed Under: The Amazon
The photograph on the left shows Wilindoro Cacique, original vocalist with the famed Juaneco y su Combo, masters of cumbia amazónica, and Judith Bustos, La Tigresa del Oriente, “making click click,” as one music blog put it — “kissing each other on the mouth like teenagers” and posing very affectionately for the photographers. “Hot-blooded,” said another, enthusiastically.
When Europeans first came to South America, they were awed by the grand civilizations of the Andes. The jungle, on the other hand, was for Europeans a place of dark and savage mystery, inhabited by primitive and ferocious warriors. Two interlocking assumptions about the Amazon have persisted to this day. The first is that the Amazon is a place of virgin wilderness, untouched by human cultivation or management; the second is that the people of the Amazon have always been — as they were found to be by twentieth-century anthropologists — small bands living by gathering, hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture.
The first thing I was taught by Gerineldo Moises Chavez, my jungle survival instructor, was how to build a tambo, a jungle hut. It wasn’t fancy, as you can see, but it kept me dry when it rained and kept me off the ground while I slept. In fact, all ribereño houses are built on exactly the same principles — a thatched house on stilts, built entirely of jungle materials, which may range in size from a small temporary hunting shelter, just large enough to sleep one or a few people, to an elaborate structure able to house an extended family.
Since we’ve been talking about the Amazon River lately, I thought we might listen to some Amazon River music. The story of this particular piece brings together three significant artists — the dance company Grupo Corpo, the instrumental group Uakti, and composer Philip Glass.
Among mestizo shamans in the Upper Amazon, the verb icarar means to sing or whistle an icaro, a magic song, over a person, object, or preparation, in order to give it power; water over which an icaro has been sung or whistled and tobacco smoke blown, for example, is called agua icarada. Another term for the same process is curar, cure; that which has been sung over is said to be curado, cured, in the sense that fish or cement is cured, ripened, made ready for use.
The Amazon Rafting Club, based in Iquitos, Peru, is once again hosting the Great River Amazon Raft Race. The three-day race will start in the town of Nauta on Friday, September 25, and finish in Iquitos on Sunday, September 27. Each four-person crew will paddle a raft they build themselves, the day before the race, from the balsawood logs that are provided. Each raft must use at least eight logs no less than five meters in length, and only single-bladed paddles are allowed.
I have spoken before about my plant teacher doña María Luisa Tuesta Flores. She was born in September 1940, in the town of Lamas in the province of San Martín, and she died, the victim of sorcery, in July 2006. She had begun her healing career as an oracionista, a prayer healer, and, even after she became an ayahuasquera, her icaros, magic songs, remained inflected with the rhythms and melodies of prayers.
As of January 2009, for the season running from February until December, Colegio Nacional Iquitos has been promoted from the Segunda Division to the Primera Division of Peru. This is very important news. Soccer — which is, of course, fútbol — is played and followed with almost religious intensity throughout Perú. According to sociologist Julio Cotler, soccer played a major role in forging a Peruvian national identity when, in 1970, the Peruvian national team surprisingly eliminated top-ranked Argentina to qualify for the Mexico Cup. For the first time, the games were broadcast nationwide, and soccer became a national passion.
I was staying with my teacher don Rómulo Magin in his hut in the jungle. He was playing an ancient transistor radio for me, barely bringing in the scratchy music of a distant station. The music was infectiously lively, and I asked him what it was. La música de la selva, he told me, grinning. Jungle music.
Anyone who has traveled in Peru knows about Inca Kola, the strangely phosphorescent carbonated drink that tastes like melted bubblegum. You may not know, of course, that Inca Kola has its own Facebook fan page with 2,790 fans, as well as a Facebook group, Inca Kola Lovers, with — I am not making this up — 10,475 members.