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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.
In the Amazon, plants and animals are ascribed the status of persons, who may differ corporeally from human persons but, like them, possess intentionality and agency. Indeed, other-than-human persons are believed to see themselves in human form, and thus to be self-aware of their own personhood. Among the Ashéninka, for example, a white-lipped peccary is held to perceive its own herd as a foraging human tribe, its wallow as a human village, and the wild root it eats as cultivated manioc.
Harry West is an anthropologist who currently teaches at the University of London. Back in 1994, he spent a year living with the inhabitants of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, studying, among other things, their ideas about sorcery. One of the things he learned was that, when the villagers saw a lion, they often speculated that it might not be an ordinary lion, but might instead be a sorcerer who had turned into a lion, or a lion that had been created by a sorcerer, and was in either case intended to eat the flesh of the sorcerer’s enemies, either through a physical attack or by causing chronic sickness.
In the Upper Amazon, people believe that there are sorcerers, and that much of human suffering — sickness, death, misfortune, bad luck and trouble — is caused by sorcerers, either from the sorcerer’s own malevolence, or on behalf of an embittered and resentful client. There is little that the ordinary state apparatus can do about sorcery. Alejandro Tsakimp, a Shuar shaman, puts the thought this way: “They killed my father with witchcraft and not with a bullet…. With killings like this, through witchcraft, there aren’t any witnesses. I can talk about all this, I can go to lawyers, but nobody will believe me.”
Mestizo shamanism is found in an arc from southern Colombia and Ecuador to northern Bolivia, through the present-day Peruvian departamentos of Loreto and Ucayali, westward along the Río Marañon, and spilling over eastward into western Brazil. This distribution is the result of historical factors, one of which was the great Rubber Boom — a period of about thirty-five years, approximately from 1880 to 1914, which transformed Amazonian culture in ways both profound and irremediable.
On the planet Sarkovy, one of the many imagined by science fiction writer Jack Vance, the inhabitants, called Sarkoy, are experts in the art of killing by poison. An adept of this art is called a venefice, and it is believed that a Master Venefice can kill a victim merely by walking past him. The venefices of Sarkovy are amateurs compared to sorcerers in the Upper Amazon. Throughout the Upper Amazon, people believe that they can be made sick through ingestion of noxious substances prepared by their enemies and put surreptitiously in their food or drink — bat saliva or phlegm, the burnt bones of dead humans mixed with the entrails of water snakes, the blood of a black dog.
There has been a lot of press lately about the discovery of a previously uncontacted tribe along the Peru-Brazil border. There are pictures of a village from the air, with painted indigenes aiming their arrows at the airplane. Quaint, childlike Indians! There is a rush now to protect them, like an exotic threatened species, the way we protect the rainforest itself, for our future use.
I have argued that the Upper Amazon is the center of a larger culture area uniquely characterized by the use of psychoactive plants and mushrooms in the practice of shamanism. A number of people offered the counterexample of iboga (Tabernanthe iboga) in the Bwiti religion as a shamanic use of a hallucinogen outside this extended culture area. Now, there is no question that psychoactive plants and fungi are widely used in indigenous cultures around the world. The question we are asking, however, is not whether they are used, but whether they are used by shamans for shamanizing. And that raises a number of considerations.
There are a number of places in the Upper Amazon which are particularly good for finding fish. Large and medium-sized rivers in low areas often form numerous meanders which, when the river changes course, become cochas, oxbow lakes. These cochas often have sediment settled on the bottom, relatively clear water, and high temperatures, and therefore rapid plant growth, which in turn supports quite large fish populations. Sometimes too you can see strips of clear and very slow water in a river. These are quiet places where plankton tends to grow; you can usually find fish downstream. You can also find fish under camalones, places where aquatic vegetation has formed a dense mat on the surface of the water. And fish love to move into the waters covering seasonally flooded forests.
Artist Luc Perez has completed a new eleven-minute animation entitled Shaman, to be released as a French-Danish coproduction from Danske Tegnefilms and 24 Images. The story begins in modern Copenhagen, where Utaaq, an old Inuit, sits at a bus stop. He sees a bird from his native Greenland — rare in Denmark — and he remembers a great battle he once had with a wicked sorcerer who used a tupilak — an avenging monster fabricated out of animal parts — to kill other hunters.