Explore Articles Filed Under: Shamanism
We have discussed the idea, widely held in the Upper Amazon, that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans, and that the difference between a healer and a sorcerer comes down to a matter of self-control. And on that there hangs a story.
There is a theme woven through the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon — that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans. The difference between a healer and a sorcerer is that the former is able to bring these urges under control, while the latter either cannot or does not want to. Thus, what distinguishes a healer from a sorcerer is self-control.
The Spring 2008 meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness will take place at the Yale Divinity School from March 19-23, 2008. The theme of the conference, which is being co-sponsored by the Yale Divinity School’s Initiative in Religion, Science, and Technology, will be Consciousness and Spirit.
A virote was originally a crossbow bolt, brought to South America by the conquistadores. The Spanish term was then applied to the darts shot by the Indians with a blowgun. These darts were made primarily from two sources — from the spines of any of the spiny Bactris or Astrocaryum palms or from any of several Euterpe palms, whose very hard wood is used to make both bows and arrows. My jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, could whittle a usable dart from the wood of a Euterpe palm with his machete in less than a minute.
The shaman can see things that people who are not shamans cannot. The shaman may be able to find lost objects, know where game is plentiful, discern who has cast a curse, diagnose the location or cause of an illness. Many scholars, influenced by the work of Mircea Eliade, maintain that the characteristic activity of shamanism is soul flight — celestial ascent, ecstasy, out-of-body journeys to the spirit realm, almost always vertically, upwards, toward the sky. And it is true that, among some shamanic traditions, out-of-body flight is the way that shamans acquire the information that is their stock in trade. They travel through the air and go look. Shamanism in the Upper Amazon is, I think, different.
Mestizo shamanism of the Upper Amazon is closely associated with plant healing; indeed, anthropologist Françoise Barbira-Freedman speaks of vegetalismo as a syncretic mix of herbalism and shamanism. In this regard it is different from other Amazonian traditions, where shamans and herbalists occupy separate social and cultural niches. Shuar shamans, for example, have traditionally not used or prescribed plant medicine; such knowledge is widely distributed, especially among women, and herbal remedies have usually been tried before consulting a shaman in any event. Anthropologist Michael Harner, who worked with the Shuar in the 1950s and 1960s, is unequivocal: shamans, he says, never use herb remedies.
There is an often unspoken hierarchy among mestizo shamans. There is, first, a relatively informal ranking based on length of practice, the number and length of dietas, the number and types of plants that have been mastered, and the number and quality of icaros in their repertoire. Icaros become increasingly prestigious as they incorporate words from indigenous languages, unknown archaic tongues, and the languages of animals and birds; the more obscure the language, the more power it contains — and the more difficult it is to copy.
Documentary Educational Resources produces, distributes, and promotes ethnographic and documentary films from around the world. Among their offerings is a film by Georges Payrastre and Claudine Viallon entitled Brujo (Shaman), an exploration of shamanism and curing among the Mazatec of Oaxaca, Mexico, and among two groups of Maya Indians in southern Mexico and Guatemala.
There have been relatively few investigators who have studied the healing practices of the mestizos in the Upper Amazon. All of them — anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, medical anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, and Jacques Chevalier, an expert in social anthropology and political economy — have characterized the healers they worked with as shamans. And, indeed, my teachers don Roberto Acho and doña María Tuesta have been perfectly comfortable being called — and calling themselves — chamánes. This differs markedly from the attitude of many indigenous peoples in North America, who object strongly to having their traditional healers called shamans, as a term imposed from outside by the dominant culture.
While visiting one of my favorite websites, Bioregional Animism, and its accompanying blog, I saw some striking sculpture by Martin Bridge, an artist and teacher who lives in western Massachusetts. His website shows the range of his work — sculpture, installations, drawings, paintings, theater design, book illustration. He is a mask maker and a drummer, one of the founders of the Ritual Arts Collective, and he is a second-generation art teacher, head of the Visual Art Department at Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School, where he teaches Visual Art and Theater Design and Production.