Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (27 page)

Sorcery, evil spells, exogenous aggression, exogenous pathogenesis, human malevolence, malice, spiritual violence-these terms are found again and again in the ethnographic literature on the sources of sickness and death in the Amazon.
Anthropologist Neil Whitehead puts it clearly: "In Amazonia, death and
sickness are always the consequence of the enmity and ill-will of others.1138
Reading reports of assault sorcery in the Amazon, one is struck by common
themes: sickness and death are caused by human intention; sicknesses are
attributed to invisible attacks and are associated with bodily invasion, putrid
smells, rotting from the inside-all symbols of secret uncontrolled aggression. Throughout the Amazon, humanity is not pictured as loving but, rather,
as individuals full of contradictions and ambiguities, who can, out of envy,
resentment, anger, lust, or vengeance, bring suffering and misfortune to others, even those with whom they have had a relationship of love.39

MOTIVES OF SICKNESS

Why do people-sorcerers or the clients of sorcerers-cause other people to
become sick? One of the key terms in Bona Maria's sickness discourse is envidia, a word that encompasses such concepts as envy, jealousy, spite, and resentment. The word is in many ways the opposite of confianza, trust, mutuality,
intimacy. In fact, envidia is often the result of a perceived breach of confianza;
the outstanding occasion of envy and resentment is "failure to reciprocate and
treason in friendship. "4° In the contemporary culture of the United States, it is
considered admirable to arouse envidia in others, to be envidiado, envied; we
live in large houses without walls to hide them, we park our large expensive
cars in the driveway where our neighbors can see them. In the Upper Amazon,
such behavior would be foolhardy; to be envidiado is to invite sorcery. In the
Amazon, a prudent person will never boast of accomplishment or wealth so
as not to arouse the envy and resentment of others.4' When a sick person is
diagnosed as suffering from sorcery, magically inflicted harm, then the root
cause is likely to be envidia; someone has so envied and resented the sufferer
as to invest in the services of a sorcerer.

Envidia is remarkably constant among mestizos in the Peruvian Amazon.
There is great surface politeness; people address each other as hermano, brother, and hermana, sister-even hermanito and hermanita, the diminutive used as
a term of endearment. There is little overt interpersonal physical violence. But
there is also a subsurface wariness, a constant checking on relative status and
advantage, great quickness to perceive unfairness in the position or actions
of others, and a constant readiness to resort to sorcery to redress perceived
imbalances. It is a world filled with hidden plots and counterplots, both real and imagined, and incessant gossip about who has cast a curse on whomwhose business failure is due to hechiceria, a curse, purchased by a competitor,
and whose marital discord is due to pusanguerfa, love magic, purchased by a
lustful or jealous rival. Relationships of confianza are easily ruptured by suspicion, and perceived wrongs are avenged through sorcery.

This is true throughout the Upper Amazon. Prestige, status, wealth, success-however temporary or qualified-arouses envy and resentment among
neighbors, relatives, and others not so lucky or successful.42 A description of
the Palmar Quiche puts it this way: "The poor man envies the rich man, and
the rich man envies the richer man. Those without skills envy those who are
skillful. Those who do a good job are envied by those who do not. The ugly
or plain person envies the handsome one, and so forth. If a person allows his
envy to fester, he may be driven to malicious extremes." As the second richest
Palmar Indian told the investigators, "In all the world, there is envy. "43

Anthropologist Bonnie Glass-Coffin, speaking of Andean shamanism
in northern Peru, notes that accusations of sorcery are made most often not
against strangers but, rather, against those with whom the accuser has maintained the closest and most necessary relations of confianza-almost always,
she says, family members, neighbors, and friends: "And it is envy which is
the principal motive for wishing harm to those who are most dear. "44 Michael
Taussig has much to say about envy in the Putumayo. Sensitivity to envy is "as
ever-present and as necessary as the air we breathe."45 "One can be envious
of just about anything, so it seems," he writes. "And the envious person is
dangerous, so aroused by envy that she or he will try to kill through magical
means. "46

Life is perceived as a zero-sum game. To receive more than a fair share of a
good is necessarily to deprive another. A loving husband or wife, a household
free of rancor, a steady job, having a healthy baby-such things can arouse
resentment in one who has a cheating spouse, who has just lost a job, whose
baby has died. Many times, even after a man and woman have separated and
are living with others, resentment is felt at the supposed happiness of the former mate, a sentiment not unknown in North America.47

SORCERY

Motives for harm can be many, but almost always center on envy, jealousy, and
resentment-refusal to give or to lend something, competition over women,
frustrated love affairs, personal rejection. The outcome of envy is brujeria,
sorcery; dano, magically inflicted harm; hechicerfa, the casting of a curse; shitana, sorcery. As medical anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios affirms,
case after case of sickness in the Amazon is attributed by the sufferer to evil
caused by others. Either an envious person has resorted to hechicerfa, throwing earth from a cemetery across the threshold, for example, or dropping vulture feces mixed with water at the doorstep; or a specialist-a brujo, a sorcerer-has been hired to cause sickness, misfortune, or death through sorcery.48

Bad luck does not happen by chance but is the result of envy. Sickness,
frustration, and difficulty are not attributed to individual responsibility or to
abstract economic causes but to the resentment of relatives or neighbors.49
Under the influence of ayahuasca, sufferers may see who has cursed them,
caused the misery they endure; a visionary drama unfolds, as the sufferer
watches the neighbor or relative consult a brujo, throw an evil mess across
the doorstep, and laugh. Above all, I was told, the perpetrator laughs-maliciously, gleefully, vindictively.

THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF SORCERY

Concern about envidia-which is the same as concern about sorcery-is an
enforcer of social norms of reciprocity and generosity. To own more goods
than another-especially productive resources such as shotguns, motorized
boats, or motorized pumps-arouses envy and the risk of sorcery; to avoid
this risk, such commodities must be lent to others when requested. The same
is true for consumables such as food, which one must share when asked.s°
Fear of sorcery governs other social interactions as well. Face-to-face confrontations are rare; except for drunken brawls, there is little interpersonal
violence. People are afraid to provoke sorcery, and people resort to sorcery instead of confrontation. Competition for resources perceived as scarce-power, affection, success, prestige-results in sorcery where open conflict is not
sanctioned.

Amazonian sorcery is thus what James Scott, a political scientist and anthropologist, calls a "weapon of the weak," as when women in the northern
Andes use sorcery and love magic as instruments of resistance to challenge
male privilege.5' That is why envy, expressed as sorcery suspicions and accusations, increases when distribution of wealth becomes more unequal. Among
the Shuar, for example, a contemporary increase in accusations of sorcery apparently correlates with increasing urbanism, consumerism, and inequality in
the distribution of goods.52

Pusangueria, love magic, is used to subvert class lines as well. Mestizo
men tell stories of using love magic to seduce women of higher classes-the sort of women who refuse the offer of a Coca-Cola because they think that
the man is lower class, arrogant women with long fingernails who refuse to
dance with someone at a fiesta-forms of transgressive sexual discourse not
unknown in our own culture.53 Conversely, a woman can bewitch and dominate her husband-make him manso, tame-by mixing her menstrual blood,
urine, or vaginal secretion into his coffee. 54

And the means are always available, even in the absence of a professional sorcerer. Anyone can take, for example, two huayruro seeds, fry them in
fat, and stick them with a needle while pronouncing the name of the victim,
whose eyes will first burn and then burst. Or one can use a photograph of the
enemy, stick the eyes ten times with a needle, and bury the picture facedown
in a well-hidden place; the enemy becomes thin, dries up, and dies. 55 One can
steal a piece of a woman's underwear, defecate on it, and bury it; the woman
will bleed, as though menstruating, without stopping.56 One can harm an enemy simply by spreading the victim's clothing around the base of a pucalupuna tree.57

People also believe that they can be made sick through ingestion of noxious substances prepared by their enemies and put surreptitiously in their
food or drink-bat saliva or phlegm, the burnt bones of dead humans mixed
with the entrails ofwater snakes, the blood of a black dog.58 Similarly, noxious
substances can be thrown across the threshold of a house-vulture feces, for
example, or cemetery dirt-or buried at a threshold or along a path where the
victim walks.59 Yagua shamans keep pieces of glass, called transparent stones, in their stomach, which they can regurgitate and place in the beer gourds of
their victims; when swallowed, the glass cuts up the body from the inside.b°

H uayru ro

Huayruro seeds are about the size of a chickpea and are commonly drilled and
threaded for beadwork in necklaces, bracelets, and earrings; they are considered to bring good luck and protect against sorcery., The trees from which they
come, found throughout Central and South America, have straight, cylindrical
trunks, buttressed when large, and are used in construction and carpentry. In
the Upper Amazon, the seeds are considered to have male and female forms,
which are in fact different species: the solid red huayruro hembra, the female
seed, is Ormosia macroca(yx; the strikingly red and black huayruro macho, the
male seed, is O. amazonica 3

NOTES

1. Bussmann & Sharon, 2007, p. 293.

2. Duke & Vasquez, 1994, p. 125.

3. Waymire, n.d.; photographs can be found at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, 2oo6a, 2oo6b.

This sort of contamination shades over easily into poisoning. Throughout
the Amazon, poisoning is perceived as widely practiced. Cultivated or wild
plant poisons are put into the victim's food or drink, especially at festivals.',
The Cubeo claim a wide variety of poisoning methods-infusing poisonous
plants into the victim's drink; placing poison in the victim's urine stream so
that it enters through the urethra; spilling or dripping poison on the skin; inserting poison on the end of a stick into the nostrils of the sleeping victim;
dropping poison onto a bench, where it enters through the victim's anus .12
The Cashinahua are famous for their knowledge of poison.63 A sorcerer can
destroy a whole village with the smoke of a poisonous leaf burned over a fire,
they say, or kill a woman by hiding poison in her skirt.64 The great Yawanahua warrior and shaman Antonio Luis-who obtained many wives by raiding
against his enemies, and was a founder of the Yawanahua people-was finally
killed by a Cashinahua sorcerer who added poison to his tobacco snuff. 65

There is also folk countersorcery. One can take skin from the heel of a
sorcerer's dead victim and bury it in a hole in a pucalupuna tree, whereupon the stomach of the unknown sorcerer will swell and burst." Among the
Desana, relatives can take body parts of the deceased victim-hair, nail clippings, bodily excretions, facial or bodily dirt-and cook them in a pot along
with pitch and peppers. As the contents boil, the sorcerer suffers stomach and
abdominal pains; if the boiling continues, the sorcerer dies.67 Note that such
methods do not require visionary information of the sort provided by ayahuasca, through which one may see the identity of the sorcerer; the sickness
and death are identification enough.

The interactions of envidia and brujeria, envy and sorcery, can be seen
as both resistance and social control. Magic is the next step beyond gossip,
which turns "hard words" into an act of secret aggression that can always be
disavowed. "Witchcraft," writes Scott, "is in many respects the classical resort
of vulnerable subordinate groups who have little or no safe, open opportunity
to challenge a form of domination that angers them. In a society that practices magic, those who perceive a lively resentment and envy directed at them
from below will easily become convinced that any reverses they suffer are the
result of malevolent witchcraft."" Anthropologist Michael Taussig, who studied shamanism and sorcery in the Colombian Putumayo, tells of one couple
walking with their son at dusk past poorer neighbors in the deepening shadows, and their fears of their neighbors' envy and readiness to deploy sorcery against them.19 Sorcery is a form of social control, enforcing norms of humility, lack of ostentation, and generosity.

Pucalupuna

The pucalupuna is a very powerful plant. It is also called lupuna colorada, red
lupuna-the word puca means red in Quechua-and must be distinguished from
the white lupuna, called lupuna blanca, lupuna, or kapok.

The red lupuna is considered to be an evil tree. Its sap is believed to be poisonous. It is also called lupuna bruja, sorcerer tree; there is even a verb, lupunear, that means to inflict magical harm with the lupuna. The base of the trunk
is hollow and often looks swollen; hence the belief that the tree can cause a victim's stomach to swell.' It is believed to harm those who approach it without the
proper protection; that is why poet Cesar Calvo says that the spirit of the tree is
so dangerous: "If he finds you in his territory, he makes your belly swell, and you
die with destroyed intestines."3 Pablo Amaringo says that the pucalupuna tree is
possessed by a powerful magician from another dimension.4