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The basic political unit of traditional Amazonian society is the village, larger than an extended family, but still never larger than a few hundred inhabitants. These villages are politically autonomous entities, often widely separated, several days walk from each other. When the population of a village grows too large, a portion will split off and form its own village elsewhere in the jungle.
Significant among the tools used by shamans in the Upper Amazon are piedras, or piedras encantadas, magic stones, sometimes called just encantos, charms; such stones are called inkantos by the Machiguenga and Shipibo. My teacher doña María Tuesta told me that her father was a tabaquero who kept two magic stones, one male and one female, in a jar filled with a mixture of tobacco and water. When doña María was about eight years old, while her father still lived with the family, she saw him work with the stones twice. She could see the spirits of the stones: they both had very dark skin and long black hair.
In 1998, a man named Donald Topping wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies entitled Ayahuasca and Cancer: One Man’s Experience. Topper was a retired professor of sociology and linguistics at the University of Hawai’i, a proponent of drug policy reform, an advocate for medical marijuana, and a founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Hawai’i. He had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and been treated, apparently successfully, with surgery. But, in September 1996, he was told that the cancer had metastasized to his liver; the next month, the right half of his liver was surgically removed. A long-time believer in alternative medicine, he refused follow-up chemotherapy.
For some time, Thomas McKinnon and AyasminA — that’s her name — have been working on a still uncompleted documentary film, entitled In Search of the Divine Vegetal, about the healing power of ayahuasca. AyasminA describes the project as exploring “the nexus between Western and Indigenous cosmologies in relation to plant intelligence.” The goal, she says, is to “help nurture a species of hybrid consciousness consisting of Western science, Indigenous magic, phytospirituality, and the Great Unknown.”
It’s actually not a bad idea for a television reality show. Get several very minor celebrities, pack them off away from their home comforts, and subject them to a range of programs that claim to enhance inner peace, happiness, and understanding. That at least was the premise of a short-lived BBC program called, naturally enough, Extreme Celebrity Detox, on which the guest celebrities performed t’ai-chi exercises in the Slovenian Alps, practiced Taoist sexual yoga in Thailand, did body-cleansing hatha yoga in the Himalayas — and drank ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon.
We have spoken, briefly, about Takiwasi, the Center for the Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Addiction and the Research of Traditional Medicines, located in Tarapoto, and its techniques for healing addiction using ayahuasca and other traditional Amazonian medicines. Takiwasi — the name means House that Sings — was founded and continues to be directed by French physician Jacques Mabit. Whatever you may think of his methods or his claimed results, there is no doubt that Mabit is a fascinating guy.
Why is it called the Amazon River? The first occurrence of the Greek word Amazon is in the Iliad, two times, both with the same epithet: ‘Αμαζονας αντιανειρας, Amazons who fight like men. In the centuries following, there were many additional references to armed and mounted women, fierce warriors, fighting the Greeks. Indeed, the αμαζονομαχιες, the battle between Greeks and Amazons, became a favorite theme with vase painters and sculptors of friezes.
Andy Graham at HoboTraveler has pointed to an article in the Pucallpa newspaper Diario Ahora, dated June 5, 2008, with the headline Indígenas de Yurúa señalan que no existe población no contactada, Indigenous People of Yurúa Say There Are No Uncontacted Populations.
Indigenous people all over the world are already embedded in global modernity, whether anyone likes it or not. There is no turning back, no way to disengage from the modern world, nowhere for indigenous peoples to retreat. And I think it is fair to say that indigenous people are, generally, worse off in many ways since this change than they were before. Still, there are aspects of modernity — modern dentistry, for example — which could be of benefit to indigenous people if they had access to them.
There is an ambiguity inherent in shamanic practice, where the dangerous work of healing and sorcery intersect. Because shamans possess spirit darts, and with them the power to kill, the boundary between sorcerer and shaman is indistinct. Such shamanism, says social anthropologist Carlos Fausto, “thrives on ambivalence.” In the Upper Amazon, life and death are inextricably intertwined, and the cosmos is conceptualized in terms of predator-prey relationships.