The Problem

The ayahuasca drink is made from the stem of the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi. Sometimes, but rarely, the drink is made from the ayahuasca vine alone; almost invariably other plants are added. These additional ingredients are most often the leaves of any of three compañeros, companion plants—the shrub chacruna, Psychotria viridis; the closely related shrub sameruca, Psychotria carthaginensis; and a vine variously called ocoyagé, chalipanga, chagraponga, and huambisa, Diplopterys cabrerana.

Snuffing yopo

It is in fact the companion plant that contains the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine. But DMT, when taken orally, is inactivated by peripheral monoamine oxidase-A, an enzyme found in the lining of the stomach, whose function is precisely to oxidize molecules containing an NH2 amine group, such as DMT.

There are thus two ways to ingest DMT or plants containing DMT. The first is by parenteral ingestion—using a route other than the digestive tract, such as smoking, injection, or inhalation—which bypasses the MAO in the stomach lining. For example, a number of indigenous peoples around the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela inhale a snuff called epená, made from the resinous fluid in the inner bark of several trees in the genus Virola that contain large amounts of DMT (Schultes 1954; Seit, 1967; Schultes & Swain, 1976). Similarly, the Guahibo Indians of the Orinoco Basin use a snuff called yopo—also called cohoba, vilca, and huilca—made from the DMT-rich beans of the plant Anadenanthera peregrina (De Budowski, Marini-Bettòlo, Delle Monache, & Ferrari, 1974; Mckenna & Towers, 1985; Ott, 1996, p. 164-165).

Drinking ayahuasca

But it is also possible to mix the DMT with an MAO inhibitor that prevents the breakdown of DMT in the digestive tract. And that is just what the ayahuasca vine contains—the beta-carbolines harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine, which are potent inhibitors of MAO-A. Combining the ingredients of the ayahuasca drink allows the DMT to produce its hallucinogenic effect when ingested orally—a unique solution that apparently developed only in the Upper Amazon. The gastrointestinal effects of the beta-carboline MAO inhibitors additionally make the ayahuasca drink a powerful emetic and purgative.

These facts raise two highly controverted and interconnected puzzles. How in the world did indigenous peoples in the Upper Amazon come up with the idea of combining DMT with an MAO inhibitor? And when and where did they first do it?

I have the answer to these questions. We do not know.

Popular Estimates

Writers on ayahuasca have often proposed that the use of the drink is very ancient; the date of about 5000 years BP recurs frequently. Anthropologists Ana María Llamazares and Carlos Martínez Sarasola (2004), for example, write that the use of ayahuasca “is so deep-rooted in the native philosophy and mythology that there is no doubt about its great antiquity, as a part of aboriginal life. Archaeological finds in Ecuador show that the indigenous Amazons have been using it for about 5000 years.” Anthropologist Jeremy Narby (1998, p. 154) states that ayahuasca “belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amazonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years.” Anthropologist Peter Furst (1976; p. 45-46) says that “we are probably not far wrong in suggesting that [the ayahuasca drink] is at least as old … as 3000 BC or even before.”

The claim that the ayahuasca drink has been used for 5000 years has become formulaic. A quick search of ayahuasca tourist and related websites reveals virtually identical statements of this claim: “The use of Ayahuasca has been recorded over 5000 years ago by the natives of Amazon and surrounding areas,” “Ayahuasca has been known to people for over 5000 years,” “This plant medicine has been used for over 5000 years throughout the Amazonian basin,” “Ayahuasca has been used for over 5000 years.” These examples could be multiplied.

And this claim is, in fact, remarkable. Just for perspective, the date of 3000 BC would make the origins of the ayahuasca drink as old as the founding of the first Egyptian dynasty, five centuries older than the reign of the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, and almost ten centuries older than the earliest South American devices yet discovered for the ingestion of DMT-containing plants—two pipes found in association with Anadenanthera seeds in northwest Argentina, which have been radiocarbon dated to 2130 BC, and which had residues that tested positive for DMT (Torres, 1995, p. 312-314).

And while it is true that the parenteral ingestion of DMT-containing plants is of considerable antiquity in South America, there is no corresponding archeological or documentary evidence prior to the eighteenth century for the combination of a DMT-containing plant with the ayahuasca vine for oral ingestion.

But first: Why such extraordinary claims for which support is so thin? I think there are two reasons. The first is that, in an attempt to legitimate ayahuasca use, its proponents invoke the culturally resonant trope of a millennia-old indigenous wisdom. The second is the odd affectation of European colonialism that indigenous people are without history—that, unlike Europeans, they are unchanging in their isolation and innocence. It then follows that the practices of present-day indigenous peoples must reproduce the practices of thousands of years ago. Both reasons, I believe, malign the creativity, adaptability, and ingenuity of indigenous cultures.

The Use of DMT-Containing Snuffs

Chavín decorated mortar

Archeological evidence—ranging from the discovery of distinctive snuffing devices to the identification of plant residues in snuffing kits—points to a long history of indigenous South American peoples parenterally ingesting DMT-containing plants by both snuffing and smoking (for an excellent survey, see Torres, 1995; see also Wassén, 1967). As we noted above, such inhaled DMT is unaffected by the MAO-A in the gastric tract, and thus acts as a hallucinogen without the addition of the ayahuasca vine—and thus too without the gastrointestinal effects of the ayahuasca beta-carbolines.

The Heart of Chavín

The earliest known snuffing devices in South America come from central coastal Peru—whale-bone snuff trays and bird-bone tubes, dated to approximately 1200 BC (Torres, 1995, p. 298-299, 320). The use of snuffed DMT-containing plants later became—along with the use of the San Pedro cactus—a central feature of the Chavín culture, which occupied the northern Andean highlands of Peru, about halfway between the tropical forests and coastal plains, from approximately 900 to 200 BC.

Chavín head with fangs, wide-open eyes, and nasal mucus

Elaborately carved mortars, presumably used to grind Anadenanthera beans, have been uncovered (Burger, 1995, ill. 217), as well as bone tubes (ill. 96), decorated spoons (ill. 219), and elaborately carved snuff trays (ills. 85, 86), although I am not aware of any chemical analysis of residues on these snuffing devices.

Particularly striking is artwork at Chavín de Huantar that shows figures with wide-open eyes and streams of mucus running from their nostrils, presumably as a result of snuffing; some of these heads appear to be half human and half feline or half bird (ill. 144; see generally p. 157-159; Torres, 1995, p. 301), perhaps depicting a form of shamanic transformation (Cordy-Collins, 1977).

Precious Heirlooms

Snuffing bowl from Carriacou

Of similar antiquity are three ceramic snuffing bowls found on the island of Carriacou, near Grenada in the Antilles. These Caribbean islands were colonized from South America about 400 AD. In a study headed by Scott Fitzpatrick of North Carolina State University (Fitzpatrick, Kaye, Feathers, Pavia, & Marsaglia, 2009; see also Braun, 2008), petrographic analysis of the mineral content of the bowls indicated that they were not made using local materials, and thus were probably not manufactured on Carriacou, but rather imported from elsewhere. Moreover, a type of radioactive isotope analysis called luminescence dating placed the three snuffing bowls roughly between 400 and 100 BC—that is, somewhere between five and eight centuries before they were carried to the islands by migrants from South America.

Alas, no chemical analysis was done to determine what substance had been used in the recovered snuffing bowls; and, of course, we have no idea under what circumstances the snuffing bowls were used. But clearly they were important enough to be preserved, passed on for centuries, and carried by boat from South America to the Caribbean.

The Tiwanaku Conundrum

Much later in time, the site of Tiwanaku, recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important precursors to the Inca Empire, flourished as the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power approximately between 700 and 1100 AD. Here too we find clear evidence of the use of an Anadenanthera snuff, although the circumstances of this use, whether shamanic or recreational, remain unclear.

Snuffing kit from Tiwanaku

Tiwanaku culture produced a variety of small carved objects that included puma and jaguar effigies, incense burners, and highly decorated snuffing tablets and tubes. Many mummies and skeletons from this culture were buried with such tablets and snuffing kits. One archaeologist reported recovering 614 snuffing kits from a single excavation (Ogalde, Arriaza, & Soto, 2009).

Here we do have chemical analyses of samples of archeological snuff powders from such kits, which indicate the presence of bufotenine, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT. The presence of bufotenine suggests that the source of the powder was any of several DMT-rich plants in the genus Anadenanthera; small pouches containing Anadenanthera seeds have also been found in several burials. CAT scans of Tiwanakuan skulls have shown signs of chronic perinasal damage in some cases, likely caused by frequent snuffing of Anadenanthera (Torres, Repke, Chan, McKenna, Llagostera, & Schultes, 1991; Torres 1996).

Many psychoactive alkaloids accumulate in hair and other body tissues. Chemical archaeologist Juan Pablo Ogalde and his colleagues at the University of Tarapacá in Arica, Chile, analyzed the chemical composition of hairs from 32 mummies from northern Chile, dating to the Tiwanakuan expansion, looking specifically for harmine and 5-MeO-DMT (Ogalde, Arriaza, & Soto, 2009). But the results of the hair tests were surprising. None of the 32 mummy hair samples tested positive for 5-MeO-DMT, and two tested positive for harmine.

Stone snuff tray from Tiwanaku

These results certainly appear to be inconsistent with the results of the testing of snuff powders from archeological snuff kits at other Tiwanaku sites, which tested positive for 5-MeO-DMT as well as for bufotenine and DMT. However, as Trout (2008) points out, the absence of 5-MeO-DMT from the hair samples is difficult to evaluate, given our current ignorance of whether this tryptamine is detectable in hair at all.

Most interest, however, has centered on the reported presence of harmine. One of the two samples testing positive for harmine came from an adult male, who had a snuffing tablet in his grave, and a sclerotic process in the perinasal area; but the other was from a one-year-old infant, also buried with a snuffing tablet.

Why is there harmine in the hair of an adult male and a one-year-old infant? The hypothesis embraced by the authors of the study is that the likely source for the harmine in these two samples was the ayahuasca vine, which must have been imported, over some distance and rough terrain, from the Upper Amazon. The absence of 5-MeO-DMT in the hair samples would then indicate that the ayahuasca vine was consumed without the addition of a DMT-containing companion plant.

Stone figure from Tiwanaku holding two snuff tablets

But if the ayahuasca vine could have been imported over an apparently extensive trading network, then such companion plants would also have been available, and presumably would have been imported along with the vine if the ayahuasca drink was in fact being used at that time. One possibility is that the Tiwanakuans consumed the ayahuasca vine by itself medicinally for its emetic and purgative properties, or, without a companion plant, for its independent visionary effects.

Another possibility is that here we see the roots of the practice of combining the ayahuasca vine with a DMT-containing plant; even when the DMT-containing plant is ingested parenterally, the MAO inhibition provided by the ayahuasca vine can reportedly potentiate the visionary effect (Trout, 2008). So perhaps the Tiwanakuans, like the Guahibo today, combined sniffing Anadenanthera with chewing the ayahuasca vine (Torres & Repko, 2006, p. 73); or, like the Piaroa today, pounded shoots of the ayahuasca vine into a paste along with Anadenanthera seeds (Rodd, 2002). Given this finding of harmine, therefore, anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna found it “unlikely that the use of Banisteriopsis caapi, perhaps also with some additives, is only a recent phenomenon” (2011, p. 125).

But we must bear in mind that other sources for the harmine are also possible—tobacco smoke, for example, or well-cooked food, or a number of plant species (Jiménez, Riverón-Negrete, Abdullaev, Espinosa-Aguirre, & Rodríguez-Arnaiz, 2008; Janiger & Dobkin de Rios, 1973), including snuffs made from some species of Virola (Agurell, Holmstedt, Lindgren,& Schultes, 1969; McKenna, Abbot, & Towers, 1984; Lindgren, 1995, p. 347); or, as the authors of the study note, at least some forms of hair dye (Ogalde, Arriaza, & Soto, 2009, p. 470).

The Ayahuasca Drink

As opposed to the snuffing of DMT-containing plants, there is no archeological evidence for the combination of a DMT-containing plant with the ayahuasca vine for oral ingestion—that is, for the use of an ayahuasca drink. This may in part be an artifact of the way ayahuasca is consumed—from bowls or cups, just like any other drink. As anthropologist and ethnobotanist Constantino Torres (1995, p. 293-294) notes, the ayahuasca drink does not require any specific paraphernalia for its ingestion—unlike, say, the distinctive tablets and hollow tubes used for snuffing, or the pipes used for smoking, often made of materials that do not decay, and preserved in places, such as graves, where we can discover them.

The Quito Bowl

The Quito Bowl

Every claim of great antiquity for the ayahuasca drink—for example, the 5000-year claims by Narby (1998, p. 164) or Llamazres and Martínez Sarasola (2004)—ultimately seeks its support in a single article by archeologist Plutarco Naranjo (1986). But, as anthropologist and musicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori (2011, p. 24) points out, the article shows only that people in the Ecuadorian rainforests began producing small ceramic vessels about 2400 BC. Without chemical analysis of any residue in these cups, and without having independently established the use of ayahuasca in that culture, little can be inferred from the cups themselves.

One often-cited specifically ayahuasca-related archeological artifact is a decorated stone bowl preserved in the museum in Quito, Ecuador, which was first described, and connected with ayahuasca use, by Naranjo in 1983. The following is, as far as I can tell, Naranjo’s entire statement about this bowl:

El objeto mas antiguo que conocemos, con toda probabilidad, relacionado con el uso del ayahuasca, es una copa ceremonial, tallada en piedra, con ornamentación incisa, la misma que ha sido encontrada en el área de la cultura Pastaza (Ecuador amazónico) y que forma parte de las collecciones del Museo Etnológico de la Universidad Central. La mencionada cultura corresponde al períodico que va de 500 años A.C. a 500 años P.C. (Fig 28 y 29).

Figures 28 and 29 are very blurry black-and-white photographs of a decorated bowl. Other than the carved figures, however, we are once again given no reason to believe that the cup ever contained ayahuasca or any of the constituents of the ayahuasca drink, or even that the use of ayahuasca was a feature of this culture.

In fact, it seems that Naranjo later moderated this claim; in a 1995 article, he writes:

Another psychedelic plant with widespread use in the Amazon basin is ayahuasca or caapi, known as Banisteriopsis caapi. Due to the trans-Andean trade between the coast and the Amazon region of present-day Ecuador, first coca and later ayahuasca reached the coast…. In ceramics of the Milagro-Quevedo culture (500 BC to 500 AD), certain ceremonial vessels appeared, richly adorned with zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures (Figure 5). Known today as vasos de brujo or cocinas de brujo, these containers must have been used to cook or boil psychotropic plants.

The cited Figure 5 appears to be a much clearer version of Figure 28 in the earlier work. The figure caption reads:

Figure 5. A vaso or cocina de brujo. This ceramic container of the Milagro-Quevedo culture (500 BC to 500 AD) perhaps served as a collective vessel so that each participating member of the ceremony could drink part of the liquid.

It is hard to know what this bowl is in fact able to prove. The proposed dates for the bowl span a thousand years. The vessel is decorated with what may—or may not be—mythological figures, and that apparently is all we really know. To claim, in the absence of other evidence, that it must have held a psychoactive substance of any kind is purely speculative. As Torres (1995, p. 294) puts it, pointedly: “The verification of these practices solely on the basis of elaborate drinking vessels is practically impossible.”

Loud Silences

Apart from this stone bowl and the ceramic Ecuadorian cups, little substantive evidence has been offered for any early use of ayahuasca. What is striking, in fact, is the silence about the ayahuasca drink from those observers we might most expect to have taken notice of it.

For example, by the late 1400s the Inca Empire, under the Supreme Inca Pachacuti, had reached Ecuador, and presumably would have encountered the ayahuasca drink had it been in use there. The Incas had acute observational skills and a keen interest in plants, their growing conditions, and their local uses—not only the new species they encountered, but all the local varieties of familiar cultivated plants, and were devoted to creating the ideal cultivar of each plant for every microclimate in their empire. Yet there is no Inca material that shows familiarity with anything like either the ayahuasca vine or the ayahuasca drink, and there is no sign of ayahuasca use or the memory of its use among highland Indians.

In the same way, Europeans had begun to explore the Amazon as early as 1541, and the ritual use of psychoactive snuffs was known to the Spaniards from the early days of their arrival in the New World. Along with the conquistadors there came chroniclers and explorers, often curious about the nature and practical uses of New World plants. For example, the Spanish chronicler Polo de Ondegardo, writing in 1571, records the use of vilca by what he called sorcerers, hechiceros; in 1582, the Relaciones Geográficas de la Provincia De Xauxa describes vilca as a bean used in conjunction with tobacco snuff (Torres, 1995, p. 297; Torres & Repke, 2006, p. 26). There are no corresponding descriptions of the use of either the ayahuasca vine or drink.

Similarly, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish missionary priests wrote vivid and horrified descriptions of the effects of snuffed DMT-containing Anadenanthera, as well as the snuffing and drinking of tobacco, but no similar accounts of ayahuasca. Written descriptions of ayahuasca use do not appear until the eighteenth century, apparently first by the Jesuit Pablo Maroni, published in 1737, and then by the Jesuit Franz Xavier Veigl, published in 1768, who writes of “the so-called ayahuasca, which is a bitter reed, or more specifically, a liana. It serves for mystification and bewitchment” (Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 32).

Nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of Shipibo healing ceremonies at the Sarayacu mission similarly describe ceremonies similar to those performed today, including the use of tobacco and piripiri (on which see Taylor, 2006), but with no mention of ayahuasca; only one account refers to “a lethargy produced by a narcotic,” not otherwise identified (Tournon, 2002, p. 70, 80, cited in Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 33).

The first ethnobotanical account of ayahuasca dates from 1851, although not published until 1873, when the English botanist Richard Spruce encountered the vine among the Tukano of the Rio Uapes in Brazil, who called it caapi. Two years later, Spruce again encountered the same vine in use among the Guahibo on the upper Orinoco, and, in 1857, among the Záparo in the area of the Pastaza river on the border of Ecuador and Peru, who cultivated the vine and from whom he first learned the name ayahuasca (Riba, 2003, p. 3-4).

Putting all of this together, it becomes a plausible hypothesis that the ayahuasca drink—the combination of the ayahuasca vine with a DMT-containing companion plant—originated, not 5000 years ago, but rather much more recently, perhaps in the seventeenth century. There is certainly considerable evidence for the much earlier use of DMT-containing plants by snuffing, and perhaps some small evidence as well for the use of the ayahuasca vine by itself, perhaps without companion plants, either for its emetic and purgative properties or perhaps for its own independent visionary effects, along with other sacred plants such as tobacco, the San Pedro cactus, and perhaps any of several Brugmansia species. But, before the eighteenth century, with regard to the ayahuasca drink, there is silence.

The Argument from Music

Perhaps it can be argued that the use of ayahuasca passed unremarked by waves of conquering and missionizing invaders because it was used secretly in the deep and inaccessible forest. Apart from the fact that this assertion, too, is without evidence of its own, anthropologist Peter Gow (1996) and ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori (2011) offer several affirmative arguments concerning the likely time depth of ayahuasca use.

One argument made by Brabec de Mori (2011, p. 35-42) is based on his ethnomusicological study of the ikaro, the song used in ayahuasca healing rituals. What is striking about these songs, he writes, is how similar they all are musically and structurally, even across cultures, while there are significant musicological differences among all other categories of indigenous song. In a recent article, he examined seven samples of these songs, and concluded that the examples “constitute sufficient musical evidence that the song structure called ikaro is truly recognizable between the Napo and Urubamba rivers” (p. 42).

This shared structure, he argues, is consistent with a relatively recent common origin, rather than with a history of thousands of years (p. 36-37):

The musical structure of ikaro is the only song structure compellingly similar between the Río Napo and the Río Urubamba… If ayahuasca would be in use for centuries or even millennia among the mentioned groups, as it is often assumed,… it would appear rather illogical that especially the music connected to ayahuasca sessions would be the only music fairly similar among all the groups…. The only reasonable explanation for this phenomenon is that this music is rather new and was distributed among these groups from the same source.

The Argument from Quechua

A similar argument has been made from the singular importance and prestige of the Quechua language in contemporary ayahuasca shamanism. This argument connects the initial spread of ayahuasca specifically to the missionary camps or reducciones that were established in the Upper Amazon by Jesuit missionaries—for example, in Maynas, the old name for the northern Amazonian area in Peru and Ecuador, beginning in 1636 (Gow, 1996, p. 106; Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 32).

Indigenous people sought the protection of these camps from epidemic disease, depopulation, slave raiders, and the military threats of their neighbors (Gow, 1996, p. 106). Here they were forced to live in common compounds regardless of their tribal distinctions. The intention was that in this way the indios infieles could be more easily controlled and converted to indios cristianos; but the unintended consequence was to form a pressure cooker of cultural interchange.

The common intertribal language in these camps was northern Amazonian Quechua, the regional trade language of the area and the mission lingua franca (Gow, 1996, p. 106-107; Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 32). The fact that Quechua is the primary language of ayahuasca shamanism, Gow claims, argues for a relatively recent common origin and a spread through intertribal contact precisely at the Jesuit reducciones.

Ayahuasca shamanism shares a significant Quechua vocabulary across tribal lines. In addition to their own terms, all ayahuasca-using groups also share the Quechua term ayahuasca, even in discourse and songs in their own language (Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 34). Such terms as llausa, yachay, mariri, supay, shitana, manchari, arkana, and banku—and, of course, icaro—are known and used throughout the Peruvian lowlands, even in discourses and songs in non-Quechua languages (Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 36-37).

Among the Shipibo, Brabec de Mori points out (2011 p. 36), all songs are sung in the Shipibo language, with one exception—the ikaros, the songs used at ayahuasca sessions, the one song category that does not sound like other Shipibo songs, and the only songs that are sung in Quechua, or in vocables that, while not Quechua, are intended to sound like Quechua. In the same way, mestizo shaman Agustin Rivas would himself create the melodies of his songs; but so important was Quechua to his icaros that he would have their lyrics written by Faustino Espinosa, an expert on the Quechua language (Bear, 2000, pp. 133, 184).

And it is important to be clear that the Quechua terminology and song lyrics are all from contemporary Quechua, not archaic terms preserved from some 5000-year-old ancient or proto-Quechua, without any of the language changes that would be expected to have occurred over the course of millennia.

This origin in the Jesuit reducciones is also consistent, both Gow and Brabec de Mori argue, with the numerous and widespread Catholic features found in ayahuasca ceremonies among otherwise disparate indigenous and mestizo peoples—the way, for example, the shaman blows tobacco smoke over the cup of ayahuasca before it is given to each participant (Gow, 1996, p. 107), or the way the shaman blows tobacco smoke or perfume over the head, body, and—often folded—hands of each participant (Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 28).

Finally, the claim of vast antiquity for the use of ayahuasca is inconsistent with the number of Amazonian indigenous people who report that they have come in contact with the ayahuasca drink only recently and often within living memory—the Amuesha (Santos-Granero, 1991), the Arakmbut (Gray, 1996), the Matsigenka (Shepard, 1998; 2005), the Ese Eja (Alexiades, 2000), the Kulina (Pollock, 2004), the Kukama (Rivas, quoted in Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 46 n. 22), the Guarani (Langdon & Santana de Rose, 2012). It would be peculiar for there to be such latecomers to a tradition that was already fifty centuries old.

What is important about these arguments is that they allow us to infer a process of dynamic, innovative, and creative cultural interchange and adaptation over a relatively wide area over a period of perhaps hundreds of years. What they argue against is any idea that ayahuasca use has been widespread and static for fifty centuries.

Point of Origin

We come to the second part of our first question: Where did ayahuasca come from? Again the answer is: We do not know.

The rivers of the Upper Amazon

First, some geography. The Amazon river is formed, at a point about sixty miles southwest of Iquitos, by the confluence of two other great rivers—the Marañón flowing first north and then east, and the Ucayali flowing north. The Napo, running south from Ecuador, joins the newly formed Amazon at Iquitos. The Ucayali in turn is formed further south by the confluence of the Apurímac and Urubamba rivers. The Huallaga runs to the west of, more or less parallel to, and in the same direction as the Ucayali river, and joins the Marañón before the latter reaches the Ucayali to form the Amazon.

Brabec de Mori (2011, p. 24, 42), in his densely argued text, reports a scholarly consensus that the original homeland of the ayahuasca vine and its related shamanic practice is north of the Amazon in the valley of the Napo river, and that both the vine and the practice spread, over the course of several centuries, southward along these great river valleys, and from there eastward into Madre de Díos and beyond. That expansion is continuing today. Here are the arguments.

Wild Vines

Slash-and-burn garden

The Amazon rainforest is a mosaic of micro-ecosystems made up of species that are endemic to a very limited area. There are virtually no plant species in the Amazon that are widespread without having been spread by humans (Highpine, 2010a,b,c,d). When a slash-and-burn garden is cleared, the seedlings of useful trees are often spared and protected, to be utilized when the garden is left fallow. When the garden is abandoned to become new-growth jungle, the fallow area is planted with useful successor species, such as fruit trees intended to attract frugivore game animals (Beyer, 2010, p. 303-305).

The ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi)

In particular, the ayahuasca vine requires sunlight when young, and so is planted in fallow gardens, where it will get a head start in the sun before it becomes part of the forest. Ayahuasca vines that appear to be wild in fact often grow close to villages in such fallow gardens; and others are feral, where the people who originally planted them have moved away or died out (Highpine, 2010a,b,c,d).

Zuluaga (2004, p. 132), an expert on traditional Colombian medicine, claims that it is precisely in the western Amazonian lowlands around the Napo river where the ayahuasca vine can still be found in its wild form; elsewhere, he says, the vine is found only in cultivated form, grown from seeds carried by indigenous people and exchanged in trade. The claim, however, is difficult to evaluate. Zuluaga offers no references and no indication of the morphological or other criteria by which he or his informants distinguish wild from cultivated or feral vines.

Prestige Quechua

In addition, the Napo river region is precisely the area where northern Amazonian Quechua—which provided the prestige language and technical vocabulary for ayahuasca shamanism and its ikaros—has traditionally been spoken (Brabec de Mori, 2011, p. 43; Highpine, 2008). It was in just this area that Richard Spruce, in 1857, first heard the word ayahuasca (Riba, 2003, p. 4).

Even today, it is the north that is seen as the homeland of ayahuasca teachings. As part of his musicological research, Brabec de Mori (2011, p. 30-31, Fig. 2) traced the movements of contemporary ayahuasqueros of various ethnic origins along the Ucayali, and found that they either traveled south from their birthplace to teach ayahuasca shamanism, or north from their residence to study it (p. 30-31, Fig. 2).

I have never heard of any renowned ayahuasqueros on the Ucayali river who had been instructed by someone upriver, say, from the south, or from more remote areas. A survey of recent migrations of ayahuasqueros in the Ucayali valley reveals that almost without exception, the teachers came from downriver, and the students traveled toward the bigger settlements to meet them. After having learned how to use ayahuasca, the students traveled upriver again, or returned to more remote places where they carry out their practice.

In the same way, the Piro and Campa in the even more remote Lower Urubamba do not “see any continuity of knowledge between contemporary practice and their ancestral traditions” (Gow, 1996, p. 96). Rather, they—like the ayahuasqueros of the Ucayali interviewed by Brabec de Mori—look downriver for the source of shamanic power, to the shamans of the lower Ucayali and the Amazon river.

Prototype Shamanism

This reported consensus is based in part, I think, on a highly subjective sense that the ayahuasca shamanism of the Napo river valley is in some way prototypical. As early as 1858, the Ecuadorian geographer Manuel Villavicencio described the uses of ayahuasca by several indigenous peoples of the Napo region as follows:

To foresee and to answer accurately in difficult cases, be it to reply opportunely to ambassadors from other tribes in a question of war; to decipher plans of the enemy through the medium of this magic drink and take proper steps for attack and defense; to ascertain, when a relative is sick, what sorcerer has put on the hex; to carry out a friendly visit to other tribes; to welcome foreign travelers; or, at least, to make sure of the love of their womenfolk

—which is exactly the core of the way the ayahuasca drink is used throughout its current extent in the Upper Amazon, at least until ayahuasca was reconceptualized and repurposed by foreign tourists beginning in about 1995.

Taita Casimiro Mamallacta, Napo Runa shaman (photo by Gayle Highpine)

Moreover, the Napo Runa, the indigenous people of the region, are reputed to be in particularly close relationship with the plants. According to Gayle Highpine (2008), who studied traditional Amazonian agriculture in the Napo valley, the Napo Runa “are famous among anthropologists and recognized by other Indians for the exceptionally large number of different medicinal plants that they know,” with nearly 1600 plants documented with active medicinal use. Napo Runa women address medicinal plants in song as if they were lovers, manioc plants as if they were children. In ritual contexts the name of a plant species is often followed by the Quechua term runa, man, or warmi, woman. Plants are considered supai, spirits—frightening, deceptive, dangerous, attractive, and sources of life (Swanson, 2009, p. 37-38).

And the Napo Runa are reputed as well to have a particularly close relationship to the ayahuasca vine. Oral tradition, especially in Colombia, holds that ayahuasca comes originally from the Napo river (Highpine, 2008). Highpine reports (2009) that their ayahuasca drink, as compared with that made by other indigenous and mestizo people, uses a much higher proportion of the vine and relatively less of the companion plant—“as much vine as possible,” she writes, “as much fresh vine as can be crammed into a cooking pot.”

Pathways of Expansion

The Napo River

If the Napo river valley is the home of ayahuasca, then how did it spread? Travel and exchange have occurred throughout this since long before the arrival of Europeans. Cultural exchange has been facilitated by trade, by rules of linguistic exogamy, and by itinerant herbalists collecting and selling medicinal plants from the Pacific coast to the lowland jungle. What seems to the unfamiliar eye to be a vast undifferentiated landscape is in fact threaded with riverine highways navigable over long distances in dugout canoes.

And shamans have always been nodes in this interethnic network of social relations—caring for each other’s patients, training each other’s apprentices, and exchanging visions, songs, knowledge, and power objects, such as stones or feather crowns. Forcing indigenous people to live together in missionary reducciones simply accelerated the process, bringing together shamans from different tribes to share their practices and discoveries (Beyer, 2010, p. 282).

Brabec de Mori (2011, p. 31-32) proposes that ayahuasca-using groups fall into three categories—those who consider their own practice to be traditional and of long standing; those among whom there can be heard at least some stories about an introduction of ayahuasca from neighboring groups; and those who report that they have come into contact with ayahuasca only much more recently. These three groups, he says, have distinct geographic distributions. The first tend to be found to be among the indigenous and mestizo populations of the Peruvian north or along the big rivers in the south—the Marañon, Huallaga, and Ucayali; the second tend to be further away from the Napo river, in Madre de Díos, for example; and the third are those who have, until recently, been most isolated and remote. Such a distribution would then represent the historical spread of the ayahuasca drink—a diffusion that continues to this day.

Now all of this needs to be taken with considerable caution. The Upper Amazon is very large, its history and prehistory are complex, and the movement of peoples within it has been little studied. Epidemics, warfare, slavery, the rubber boom, and successive waves of Jesuit, Franciscan, and Capuchin missionaries have dramatically changed the indigenous landscape, many earlier groups have disappeared, others have had their populations decimated, some have migrated to other regions, and cultural exchanges have occurred that have not been well identified (Zuluaga, 2004, p. 130).

In fact, it is often difficult to decide whether two neighboring communities with similar customs and similar tongues constitute one ethnic group or two. Amazonian peoples typically identify with much smaller groups, such as their own village; the idea of ethnic identity is a relatively new and modern one (Highpine, 2008). As Brabec de Mori himself states (2011, p. 29), “the ethnohistory of western Amazonia is very complicated and poorly documented… reliable ethnohistorical comparative data is relatively rare.”

Combining the Plants

Now we come to the second puzzle: How in the world did indigenous peoples in the Upper Amazon come up with the idea of combining DMT with an MAO inhibitor?

Many shamans will claim, of course, that the plants themselves taught humans how to do this. Other commentators point to some mysterious ecological wisdom found only in indigenous peoples. If we put aside these explanations, then I think the answer may be simple. I think people were looking for a better way to vomit.

Cooking the ingredients of the ayahuasca drink

Emetics and purgatives are widely used among the people of the Upper Amazon, who periodically induce vomiting in their children to rid them of the parasitic illnesses that are endemic in the region (Dobkin de Ríos, 1972, p. 127); of the fifty rain forest plants discussed by Taylor (1998), twelve are listed as vermifuges. Vomiting is often induced using the latex of the ojé tree (Ficus insipida), which is widely ingested throughout the Upper Amazon as a vermifuge. Vomiting may be induced in children by giving them piñisma, hen excrement, mixed with verbena (Verbena littoralis) or ñucñopichana (Scoparia dulcis), along with other nauseating components, including pounded cockroaches and urine (Bear, 2000, p. 133, 21).

The Piro believe that eating game leaves residues in the body, which accumulate with time, causing fatigue and depression; vomiting—especially by drinking ayahuasca—expels these residues from the body (Gow, 2001, p. 139). Communal vomiting is also found among indigenous Amazonian peoples. The Achuar Indians drink a hot infusion of guayusa (Ilex guayusa) as a morning stimulant, much as we drink coffee, after which all of them, including the children, vomit together (Duke & Vasquez, 1994, p. 92). Apparently the vomiting is not due to any emetic effect of the drink but, rather, is learned behavior (Lewis et al., 1991).

The beta-carbolines in the ayahuasca vine make it a potent purgative and emetic. Two of the common DMT-containing companion plants, chacruna and sameruca, belong to the same Psychotria genus as the species P. ipecacuanha and P. emetica, both of which are widely used emetics, the former in Brazil and the latter in Peru (Grieve, 1931/1971, pp. 432-434). P. ipecacuanha is, of course, the source of syrup of ipecac, at one time commonly used to cause vomiting in cases of accidental poisoning. A third companion plant, ocoyagé, when added to the ayahuasca drink in the Colombian Vaupés, is called by the Tukano “the ayahuasca that makes you vomit” (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992, p. 121).

If the companion plants have any emetic properties of their own, or resembled other plants with known emetic and purgative properties, it is plausible to hypothesize that the ayahuasca vine and its companion plants were first combined in order to synergize or modulate their emetic and purgative effects, with the serendipitous result of creating an effective delivery form for DMT.

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The Solar Phallus Man was actually a patient named Emile Schwyzer, diagnosed with what was then called paranoid dementia, who had been committed to the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich in 1901 after an attempted suicide. Schwyzer had been in and out of other institutions for decades. As Jung told it, he had begun treating this patient in 1906. Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination in which the sun had an upright tail — “similar to an erect penis,” Jung adds parenthetically — which moved back and forth when Schwyzer moved his head with his eyes half shut, and this motion caused the wind to blow. This is how, Schwyzer explained, he could control the weather.

Carl Gustav Jung in 1906

This hallucination, Jung says, remained unintelligible for a long time, until he became aware of remarkably similar symbolism in a Mithraic liturgy, part of the Greek Magical Papyri, that had not been published until 1910. Here the ministering wind was said to originate from an αυλός — a pipe or tube — hanging from the disc of the sun, which could be seen by looking from east to west. Schwyzer was a store clerk with no higher education, unlikely to have read or heard about such an esoteric symbol. Even more, he had described it to Jung before it had even been published. Where could it have come from if not from a collective unconscious?

Now this is a hell of a story, and we can understand why Jung enjoyed telling it. But the story has a number of problems.

Let’s start with the dates. Schwyzer’s vision had in fact been conveyed not to Jung but rather to Jung’s twenty-four-year-old student Johann Honegger, who had interviewed Schwyzer over two months in 1910, while Jung was in the United States, and three years after Jung had stopped treating the patient. Honegger presented the vision of the solar tail or penis — along with a great number of other apparently mythic visions and beliefs he had been told by Schwyzer — at the second International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg in March 1910. Apparently Schwyzer had told none of this material to Jung. Honegger unexpectedly committed suicide with a morphine overdose in March 1911.

Jung published the solar penis story in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in 1911. In that text, Jung credited the discovery of the hallucination to Honegger, and he cited two sources for the Mithraic liturgy it purportedly matched — a 1907 English translation and a 1910 German translation. In fact, as Jung subsequently discovered, the 1910 German translation was the second edition of a work that had first been published in 1903, and upon which the English translation had been based. After the original citation, Jung stopped referring to the 1907 English translation, and he never referred to the 1903 edition of the German translation at all.

In Jung’s 1952 English-language revision of Wandlungen, now entitled Symbols of Transformation, Honegger disappears altogether. Here it is Jung who “once came across the following hallucination in a sczhizophrenic patient.” As late as 1959, in an interview with John Freeman on the television program Face to Face, Jung insisted that he had heard the solar penis vision in 1906 and that the Mithraic liturgy was first published four years later in 1910. In this version, Schwyzer had grabbed Jung by the lapels and pointed at the sun, saying it had a penis. If Jung moved his head from side to side, he would see. It was this penis that caused the wind.

Klinik Burghölzli

It is true that, if Schwyzer was committed to Burghölzli in 1901, then he clearly would have had limited access even to the German translation of 1903. On the other hand, as Richard Noll has pointed out, the image of a solar penis had already been discussed in Friedrich Creuzer’s massive compendium of ancient symbolism and mythology, the third edition of which was published in 1841, and in Johann Bachofen’s 1861 text on matriarchy. Both of these books had a profound and enduring effect on German popular culture. And there is no way of telling what Schwyzer may have heard from other Burghölzli patients, many of whom were in fact well educated, and at least some of whom had interests, not uncommon among educated German speakers at the time, in ancient religions and symbolism.

But the disappearance of Honegger masks a more serious methodological issue. Shamdasani has recovered the text of Honegger’s 1910 presentation of the Schwyzer material, along with another unpublished article on the same case. Since Jung had by that time ceased his clinical practice at Burghölzli to pursue his mythological research, he had given Honegger the task of retrieving mythic material from psychotic patients at the clinic.

Honegger seems to have pursued this task with a vengeance. Schwyzer, Shamdasani notes, turned out to be “a veritable textbook of mythology.” He told Honegger that the deity was originally feminine, that the dead became stars in heaven, that the earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas, and that the sun had a penis — or perhaps a tail — that caused the wind. Honegger could not have been more pleased.

And there is good reason to believe that these were far from spontaneous utterances. They were, rather, the result of Honegger’s probing. How do you know that the seed body was always feminine? Honegger asked. Can you also make wind? How do you do it, when you want to make rain? Schwyzer, undoubtedly bored and lonely, would have been only too happy to oblige this interested and sympathetic listener. Indeed, given Jung’s admiration for the work of Creuzer, it is not unlikely that his student Honegger had himself read the book and its section on the solar penis.

Chains, straitjacket, cell belt, and covered bath tub formerly used to restrain patients at Burghölzli Clinic

Carl Meier, a psychiatrist who had known Schwyzer personally and had reviewed his entire medical file, said that he had never succeeded in finding out the function of the solar penis in Schwyzer’s hallucinations. In fact, he said, by the time he knew him, Schwyzer no longer even remembered it.

Putting all of this aside, the problem is that Schwyzer’s hallucination in fact provides no evidence at all for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

The most important thing about the unconscious is that it is… well, not conscious. How then do we become conscious of — forgive the spatial metaphor — its contents? For Freud, there is no such thing as nonverbal thinking; the unconscious is accessed through words. For Jung, on the other hand, the unconscious is accessed through images. These images appear to us in dreams, fantasy, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. These images are how the unconscious communicates with us.

Again contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung maintained that, underneath this unconscious, there lay another unconscious, which he called first the phylogenetic and then the collective unconscious. As Shamdasani has demonstrated, the idea of such a phylogenetic or racial unconscious was congruent with so many elements of late-nineteenth-century European thought that it could, he says, almost have been regarded as a commonplace.

For Jung, this collective unconscious is not filled with images. It is filled with archetypes. Jung likened these archetypes to Kantian categories — that is, to a priori conditions for possible experiences. Jung proposed extending the Kantian idea of the logical categories of reason to the production of fantasy; the archetypes, Jung says, are “categories of the imagination.”

Archetypes thus are form without content; they are possibilities of images. Although they are themselves without content, they are often, on the basis of the images whose form they provide, named after mythological figures — the Hera archetype, for example, or the Wise Old Man archetype; or they may be named for some abstract theme, such as the archetype of engulfment or the archetype of rebirth.

We can distinguish archetypal images from ordinary images because archetypal images appear to us on a wave of emotion; they possess salience and depth; they are numinous and mysterious. It is these same archetypal images that appear as motifs in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, and art around the world, arising out of the same set of archetypes in the shared collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams.

Jung in 1910, standing outside Burghölzli Clinic

There is thus a distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image, a distinction that Jungians — and even Jung himself — have often failed to maintain consistently. There is no access to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; they are transcendental and unrepresentable. All we have are archetypal images, which conform to the a priori conditions imposed by their archetypes. The collective unconscious is a negative borderline concept, just as unknowable as the Kantian thing in itself. We know of the archetypes only through a form of transcendental deduction from numinous images.

Here is an example of how this works out in practice. In psychoanalysis, a dream narrative is analyzed. The patient tells the story of the dream, free associates from that material, relates the dream content to events in childhood. In Jungian analysis, dream images are amplified. The patient — often with active input from the therapist — explores the meaning of the images, not only personally but also historically and transculturally in myths, fairy tales, art, and literature. Amplification is thus a hermeneutic process — a quest for meaning that leads the patient beyond the personal to the wider human and cultural context of the dream material.

So important has this process been that it has had an institutional effect — the development of analytical psychology clubs in urban centers, which are essentially libraries of scholarly resources on myth and religion, where analysts and selected patients can jointly pursue amplification of the patient’s dream and fantasy images.

But it is when such amplifications are used — like the hallucination of Solar Phallus Man — to argue for the existence and nature of the collective unconscious that serious methodological and conceptual issues arise.

Methodologically, it is virtually impossible to find uncontaminated material. The clients of Jungian therapists, including those of Jung himself, have been largely self-selected. They enter Jungian analysis because they have read about its interest in myth and dream, and because this reflects their own often long-standing interests. Jungian analysts, too, actively participate in image amplification. That is why Jung considered the Solar Phallus Man so important. It was, he thought, a hallucination that could not conceivably be accounted for by cryptomnesia or forgotten outside sources.

And the idea that numinous images are somehow shaped by transcendental a priori archetypes raises a whole series of troubling conceptual issues.

The claim that the same image has arisen in people far separated in space and time — a Burghölzli patient in 1910, say, and a Mithraic writer fifteen centuries earlier — is meaningless without criteria for deciding when two images are the same and when they are not. Schwyzer’s sun is variously described as having either a tail or a penis pointing up; the Mithraic liturgy speaks of the sun as having a pipe or tube hanging down. There is no way to know whether this matters.

Jung in 1959, on Face to Face, telling the story of the Solar Phallus Man

Moreover, there is clearly no one-to-one relationship between archetype and image. A single archetype can give rise to any number of archetypal images; and a single archetypal image may — or perhaps may not — be of two different archetypes at the same time. If the relationship between archetype and image is many-to-many, then the relationship between an image and any particular archetype becomes indeterminate. In the same way, we have no criteria by which to rule out the possibility that the widely separated solar penis images were coincidentally similar images from two different archetypes.

Just how many archetypes are there? There appears to be no constraint on their number or nature. Steven Walker, a scholar of comparative literature sympathetic to Jung, says that “the list of archetypes is nearly endless.” There can be an archetype for just about any possible human situation, it seems; and conversely each archetype can produce an indefinite number of archetypal images. And apparently we can make up archetypes at will. Is there a solar penis archetype? That seems surprisingly narrow for a fundamental a priori category of the imagination. A few minutes thought can yield a dozen archetypal possibilities, from masculine generativity to magical control of the weather. In the endless list of archetypes, how do we decide?

And if the person who has produced the numinous image gets to decide with which mythic motif or fairy tale situation it most clearly resonates, then it is not clear why we need to postulate transcendental archetypes of the collective unconscious at all.

Psychologist James Hillman faced this issue squarely, and he chose to eliminate the noun archetype altogether, while preserving the adjective archetypal. The problem, he says, is that Jung moved “from a valuation adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes… Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.”

But we do not need to take the idea of the archetypal in this reified sense. Any image can be archetypal, Hillman says; it need only be given value — archetypalized or capitalized — by the person experiencing it. “By attaching archetypal to an image,” he says, “we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.”

James Hillman

This view informs Hillman’s approach to dreams, which is not hermeneutic, as it is for Jung, but rather phenomenological or, in Hillman’s term, imagistic, image-centered. “To see the archetypal in an image,” he says, “is not a hermeneutic move.” He thus sees little value in traditional amplification. “Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image.” Instead of asking how an image is related to an archetype, the patient begins with and concentrates on images in all their multiple implications — a process psychologist Stephen Aizenstat calls animation, “entering the realm of the living dream.” The idea is to personify the image, ask it questions, interrogate its purposes, engage it as a teacher — even identify with it and question its meaning as one’s own. Hermeneutics is replaced by imagination.

Still, if what we are looking for is the meaning of images — in dreams, visions, imagination, fantasy — then it is worthwhile, I think, to pursue that meaning wherever we can. We do not need to postulate a collective unconscious or the existence of archetypes to pursue that meaning across cultures and through history, or to place our own images in the vast context of human suffering and transformation. The purpose is to give our dreams and visions life-giving depth, overflowing with meaning and power — what Hillman calls “unfathomable analogical richness.”

Nor do we need to limit this pursuit to images from the unconscious. In a dream I see a smiling child, I stumble over a rock, I stand in the rain; and I seek out what these images mean, I engage them and seek their counsel. A smiling child, a rock, the falling rain deserve no less inquiry, no less depth, just because we have classified them as real.

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/sacred-mushrooms-of-mexico/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/sacred-mushrooms-of-mexico/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:53:10 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=4174 Significant materials in the field of Mesoamerican ethnomycology have been newly collected and translated by Brian P. Akers in his book The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico: Assorted Texts. The work presents classic scholarship, previously unavailable in English, on Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Mixe, and other Mesoamerican sacred mushroom rituals — rich and detailed accounts of the place of psychoactive mushrooms in the lives of the peoples who use them. Plus a bonus — a classic 1960s television show.
]]> Ethnomycology is the discipline that studies the historical uses and sociological impact of fungi. While the discipline theoretically includes the study of fungi as food, medicine, and tinder for fire, its primary focus has been on the human use of psychoactive mushrooms, especially Amanita muscaria and mushrooms that contain, among other compounds, psilocybin.

Ethnomycologist Brian P. Akers

To date, more than twenty mushroom species, primarily in the genus Psilocybe, have reportedly been recognized as sacred and used in ceremony among various indigenous peoples of Mexico. Cultures in which some form of psychoactive mushroom use has been documented in modern times include the Chatino, Chinantec, Matlatzinca, Mazatec, Mixe, Mixtec, Nahua, and Zapotec. Apart from continuing interest in Mazatec shamanism, inspired in large part by the figure of María Sabina, there has been little general interest in sacred mushroom use by peoples elsewhere in Mexico, and scholarly work in this area has not been easily accessible.

But at least some of that situation has now been remedied. Brian P. Akers, an ethnomycologist, has collected a number of significant readings in his book The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico: Assorted Texts, which presents classic scholarship, previously unavailable in English, on Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Mixe, and other Mesoamerican sacred mushroom rituals.

In addition to gathering and translating these texts, Akers has provided a lengthy and valuable introduction to the history of ethnomycological scholarship in Mesoamerica. He also discusses issues of translation and transliteration of Mesoamerican indigenous languages. Each individual article in the collection, too, is preceded by a lucid and thorough preface that places the work in its historical and cultural context. Five of these articles are translations of relevant scholarly sources in Spanish, many published in relatively obscure journals and difficult to find even in their original language.

But to call these articles scholarly, I think, does them an injustice. They include rich and detailed accounts — what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called thick description — of the place of psychoactive mushrooms in the lives of the peoples who use them, and of the reverence with which these medicines, these santitos and hombrecitos, curers of sickness and givers of information, are approached by those who use them.

The sixth text in the book is a transcript of The Sacred Mushroom, a celebrated episode of the classic television show One Step Beyond, a series that began in 1959 and dramatized allegedly paranormal events. This episode, however, featured host John Newland, with doctors, scientists, and a camera crew, traveling into the mountains of Mexico in search of a fabled mushroom that “stimulates extrasensory perception, enabling the mind to become telepathic.” This program may have been the only show in network television history — it was broadcast on ABC in 1961 — in which the host ingested psychoactive mushrooms and let the effects be recorded on camera.

To complement the transcript, here is the broadcast in its entirety:

Akers, the editor and translator, has a PhD in mycology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He specializes in the genus Lepiota which, like the genus Amanita, includes species containing potentially psychoactive amanitins. He has published a number of scientific journal articles on ethnomycology and fungal systematics. A recent interview with Akers on his book is here.

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.

Brion Whitford, Ojibway filmmaker

Among tribes in southern Arizona, 29.3 percent of adults are diagnosed with the disease. Pima tribes in the state suffer from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. Fifty percent of the tribe between the ages of 30 and 64 have diabetes — more than 19 times the rate of an urban white population. In South Dakota, nearly every county that is home to a reservation has a diabetes rate higher than 10 percent. In Big Horn County, Montana, home to the Crow Reservation, 12.3 percent of the population has diabetes — the highest rate in the state.

Compounding these concerns is the fact that type 2 diabetes is increasingly being discovered in Native American youth. Forty years ago it was almost unheard of for teenagers to have this disease.

Type 2 diabetes “is a complex disorder with strong environmental and genetic components,” says Robert Williams, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University. While any genetic contribution remains unclear, the Native American diabetes epidemic was almost certainly triggered by an unfavorable change in environment since the mid-twentieth century. It is a disease of progress — fatty foods, sedentary lifestyle, and obesity.

The website of the American Diabetes Associations says, “Years ago, Native Americans did not have diabetes. Elders can recall times when people hunted and gathered food for simple meals. People walked a lot.” Mary Thomas, lieutenant governor of the Gila River Indian Community in southern Arizona, agrees. “Our diet was lean,” she says. “We ate fish and game, beans and quail. Then, with the white man, a new diet came.” One study estimates that the fat content of the Pima diet rose from 17 percent before contact with Europeans to 38 percent in the current diet.

Obesity is well recognized as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, and the incidence of diabetes among the Pima rises with the duration of obesity. Obesity is also associated with lower levels of physical activity. Other cultural factors may also be at work. Among the Pima, for example, for reasons that are not understood, breastfeeding for a period of at least two months is associated with a 50 percent reduction in rates of diabetes.

And then there are the effects — unmeasured and often ignored — of oppression, internal colonization, loss of cultural identity, and the slow dissolution of spiritual traditions.

In the documentary The Gift of Diabetes, Ojibway filmmaker Brion Whitford, with co-director John Paskievich, tells the story of his own journey through advanced diabetes.

In 2001, complications from the disease left Whitford with only fifty percent kidney function and blood sugar levels that were spiraling out of control. Raised in the city, he had grown up without knowing his cultural heritage. He was skeptical of traditional healing, but biomedicine was not controlling his disease, much less his long-term feelings of anger, hopelessness, and despair.

The film follows Whitford’s search for answers — a spiritual quest that takes him to Wounded Knee and an Akwesasne anger management workshop, to biomedical doctors and traditional healers, to a sweat lodge and a foot care clinic. In many ways, the film is structured as a vision quest, in which Whitford is seeking not only his own understanding but also for a gift that he can bring back for his people.

“While we are alive,” he is told by Kahnawake Mohawk activist Stuart Myiow, “we have the unique ability to decide what kind of ancestors we want to be.” Later, Whitford reflects, “I am doing this journey not only for myself but also for those who come after me. It makes me want to be an honored ancestor.”

His diabetes is a metaphor for what he describes as his “self-loathing and alienation from my people.” The disease is the physical form of a spiritual condition, a sickness of the soul; in finding his cultural roots, he is able to take on the discipline of controlling his condition. “All of a sudden it became clear to me,” he says after being hospitalized for a heart attack. “The teachings that I had been told led back to me and what I wanted in life. And I wanted to live.” He learns to honor the traditions he never knew; a ceremonial feast helps him to accept the death of his grandfather many years before. “Diabetes,” he says at the end, “has been a gift that has saved my life.”

Through the generosity of the National Film Board of Canada, I am able to place the entire hour-long film on this blog.