Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (28 page)

In fact, the trunk is essentially a giant hollow cylinder filled with balsa-like
pith; the tree also has a distinctive smooth reddish papery bark. Its evil nature
affects everything it touches. One can, for example, harm an enemy simply by
spreading the victim's clothing around the base of the tree .5 One can put a bowl
of tobacco juice in a hollow of the tree and leave it overnight, so that the spirit
of the tree allows its poisonous sap to run into the pot, turning it into a magical
poison.' One can also use the tree for countersorcery: take skin from the heel of
a sorcerer's dead victim and bury it in a hole in the tree, whereupon the stomach
of the unknown sorcerer will swell and burst?

The red lupuna can also grant the power of sorcery through contact. Dona
Maria taught me how to make a packet of tobacco, place it into a cavity in the
tree, and plug the hole with clay. After eight days, I should check the tobacco; it
should now be full of worms. I should then put it back into the hole in the tree,
plug it up again, and wait another eight days. Then I should remove the packet,
mix it with water, and drink it, if I could; this would turn me into a powerful sorcerer. Interestingly, Luna gives a similar method for putting a bowl of tobacco
juice in a remocaspi as the way to follow la dieta with this tree.' In both cases,
apparently the spirit of the tree passes into the tobacco to be ingested by the
shaman.

It is because of its power that this tree is an ally of sorcerers, and that is precisely the reason why a healer should make the pucalupuna an ally as well, by
ingesting it as part of la dieta in the jungle, by learning to call it for healing with
its icaro, its magic song. The tree is used to inflict suffering; that makes it the
best medicine for the suffering that others inflict.

NOTES

1. Luna & Amaringo, 1993, pp. 54 n. 92, 116 n. 167.

2. Luna, 1986c, p. 120.

3. Calvo, 1981/1995b, p. 211.

4. Luna & Amaringo, 1993, p. 108.

5. Duke & Vasquez, 1994, p. 47.

6. Luna, 1986c, p. 7o n. 26.

7. Chevalier, 1982, p. 378.

8. Luna, 1986c, p. 69.

Faced with sickness, the sick person will examine his or her relations with
relatives and neighbors in order to identify in his or her recent or past conduct the signs of an enmity that could possibly explain the sorcery attack.7°
As Taussig puts it, envy is a "constantly charged scanner" of implicit social
knowledge-an organizing principle for understanding misfortune, a theory
of the evil inevitably flowing from perceived inequality, "the dominant signifier of perturbation in the social bond. 1171

THE FIGURE OF THE SORCERER

The figure of the evil sorcerer represents the antithesis of proper social behavior. Nobody has the courage to scold a sorcerer, people say, for he would
put poison on you and you would die. If you make fun of him, he will kill you;
if you are stingy with him, he will kill you; if you refuse to have sex with him,
he will kill you. The sorcerer does not eat meat and does not smell any perfume. When he kills someone he spends a month without talking to anyone;
he cannot touch a woman.72 The sorcerer is in fact the type of nasty old man
who would not be tolerated in any village, epitomizing solitary retentiveness
and lack of reciprocity-lonely, demanding, querulous, abusive, miserly, and
vengeful.

Conversely, sorcery implicitly defines what is socially appropriate, good,
beautiful, disciplined, moral, and human. Sorcerers are precisely what humans ought not to be-individualistic, self-serving, and opportunistic. Sorcerers lack empathy for other humans and act for purely personal motives of
jealousy, envy, resentment, and revenge. The killing of sorcerers-through
countersorcery, the magical return of pathogenic darts, or vigilante justiceis a political drama, the social equivalent of the shaman sucking the magical pathogen from the body of a patient.73 Indeed, in some Amazonian cultures, the sorcerer has ceased to be human altogether. A Baniwa poison owner
is considered to be "no longer like a person" but is, rather, a monkey, one
whose "only thought is to kill." A shaman sees the poison owner as having
fur all over his body.74 "These are the brujos," says Shipibo shaman don Javier Arevalo Shahuano, "who come back from the forest with eyes red like the
huayruro."75 The Cashinahua say the same: a sorcerer who has just killed has
red eyes, because he is full of the blood of the victim.76

Sorcery is the inverse of healing. Instead of extracting harmful objects from sick bodies, the sorcerer introduces theme instead of having relationships of confianza, the sorcerer is antisocial, dangerous, secretive.78
By forcibly intruding into bodies, sorcery is a form of human predation; the
sorcerer is an eater of human flesh.79 Stories among the Sharanahua explicitly
relate shamans to cannibalism. The shaman Ruapitsi, they say, ate one of his
wives; so powerful was his hunger for human flesh that he cut pieces from his
own thigh for food. His second wife killed him with an axe.80

Throughout indigenous Amazonian communities, there is often a cultural
connection among attack sorcery, hunting, warfare, and predation-particularly by the jaguar, the ultimate predator.', Shamans are often equated with
jaguars-indeed, are thought to become jaguars; "shamans and jaguars are
thought to be almost identical, or at least equivalent, in their power, each in
his own sphere of action, but occasionally able to exchange their roles. 1112
Strikingly, the Cubeo assert that all jaguars-or at least many-are actually shamans. The ferocity of the jaguar is not due to its being an animal but,
rather, due to its being a human.83 Don Roberto has a pink and purple jaguar
painted on the front wall of his house.

SORCERY AND GOSSIP

In some Amazonian cultures, suspicions of sorcery lead to confrontations,
accusations, murder, and blood feud. But among mestizos there is seldom
a public charge or confrontation or overt violence; rather, there is malicious
gossip, silent countersorcery, or secret vengeance.84 Behind the cordiality of
everyday relations there is an entirely hidden world of sorcery and countersorcery, ongoing unstoppable vendettas of individuals and families and, often,
their hired sorcerers and the families of the hired sorcerers-all in secret, the
subject of whispered gossip and the rumors that run along the rivers.

Despite the integrative functions of sorcery, fear of sorcery-along with
gossip and rumors and accusations of sorcery-can be socially disruptive.
Once, among the Kulina in western Brazil, a prominent elderly man became
ill with a respiratory infection just at the time he was visited by an old friend
from another village. When the elderly man died, despite two days of nonstop curing rituals, his friend and guest was accused of sorcery and clubbed to
death, and his body was thrown in a stream.85

Sorcery is political. It is profoundly emotional, having to do with envy,
resentment, fear, and hate; when sorcery is suspected or alleged, the atmosphere becomes charged, and divisions between individuals and groups
become accentuated. Sorcery accusations involve alliances, negotiations,
strategies-politics.86 Among the Arakmbut, for example, accusations of sorcery are directed at those the accusers fear or dislike, and therefore represent current lines of political cleavage. But those lines can shift. In one Arakmbut village, after the death of a prominent and respected shaman, sorcery
accusations were originally directed at non-Arakmbut outsiders. But within
months, the accusations turned toward persons with prestige, influence,
and position in the opposite halves of the village. Such sorcery accusations
within the community usually indicate that a political situation has reached
a breaking point, leading to bitter recriminations, physical attacks, and even
the death of an accused sorcerer. When relations break down in this way, one
party usually moves away.87

Accusations of sorcery, suspicions of sorcery, and gossip about sorcery
usually occur after something bad has happened-a death, a sickness, a business failure, a husband deserting his family. It is always misfortune that triggers accusations; whether someone is a sorcerer or not does not matter until
people start seeking an explanation for misfortune. The sorcerer may be the
Other-an other-than-human person, an enemy, another resident or ethnic
group, or in-laws-or the sorcerer may come from within the heart of the
community itself.88 Accusations may focus on an outsider, but not necessarily. Among the Achuar, the slightest tension between groups is enough to cast
suspicion on any shaman affiliated with any one of them.89 Among the Shuar,
sorcerers often come from within the group. Thus a Shuar dilemma: on the
one hand, it is useful to have a shaman in the family, since one can get quick
healing at reasonable cost; on the other hand, it is risky to have a shaman in
the family, since a shaman is likely to harm family members with sorcery.9°

Among Amazonian mestizos, the first to be suspected are those closest to
the victim-those most susceptible to breaches of confianza, those most likely to have a grudge. Such gossip may be seen as picking on someone to treat
as an outsider, thereby redrawing the boundaries of the community. Given the
sociological and moral dimensions of shamanic powers, the tendency in fact
is to look inside the local group or to a nearby household to try to discover the
guilty one.91

When misfortune occurs, those who seek an explanation will tap into the
mills of gossip; sickness especially may set gossip in motion.92 The same
envy, resentment, and jealousy can feed into sorcery, gossip of sorcery, and
accusations of sorcery. The effects of sorcery can be vague-acute localized
pain, malaise, misfortune. Whether this condition is diagnosed as sorcery is
contextual. Anthropologist Donald Pollock, who has studied sorcery among
the Kulina of western Brazil, has noted that such aches and pains are generally ignored or considered not to be sorcery; but when there has been violence between households, diagnoses of sorcery become common.93 Thus, too, sorcery accusations can reflect institutional deficits, the lack of adequate mechanisms to mitigate disputes.94

SICKNESS NARRATIVES

There is frequently a pattern to gossip and accusations of sorcery: A asks B for
a favor; B refuses; A seeks revenge by sorcery. Misfortune is a trigger to search
one's memory for the instigating slight: Who has reason to hate me?

Here is a typical story. Don Agustin Rivas had an uncle, a policeman, who
watched over the lake. One day he found an Indian fishing without a permit,
so he took away the Indian's fishing spear. The Indian, unhappy about this,
cast a spell on the policeman, and, as a result, little holes appeared on the
policeman's buttocks, which itched unbearably.95 Here is another: At one time
Rivas ran a restaurant, and his friend William Guevara would come there to
eat. But Rivas did not charge him for the food, because Guevara was a maestro, a brujo. One day Guevara ordered beer. Rivas was in a bad mood because
many customers had not paid him, so he refused to give Guevara the beer.
Guevara became angry and told Rivas that he would lose customers and his
restaurant was going to fail. From that day, Rivas says, his business started to
decline rapidly.96

Pablo Amaringo also tells such a sickness story. Amaringo had insulted a
sorcerer by refusing to visit him in his home on the way back from the market.
The sorcerer hit Amaringo with a virote. Amaringo did not notice anything at
first, but he woke up in the middle of the night with terrible pain in his neck
and was unable to move his head. The next morning he was trembling with
fever, had hallucinations, and felt so bad that he went to see his grandfather,
don Pascual Pichiri, who removed the dart.97

Just about everyone has similar stories. We can call this the basic mestizo
sickness narrative: Someone acted superior to someone else, and look what
happened. But note the pattern, and then turn it around. The policeman has
a skin disease; Agustin Rivas loses business; Pablo Amaringo is stricken with
pain. The question then is: What failure of reciprocity, generosity, or openhandedness caused this effect? In each case, there is an answer, and there is
an agent-the Indian, the sorcerer, the shaman.

Similar stories are told throughout the Amazon. Among the Desana, a lack
of respect for a powerful shaman, even a refusal to give him something he
requests, may provoke him to sorcery. Epidemics of malaria or diarrhea that
have devastated whole communities have been attributed to the ill will of a shaman angered by lack of respect or because a member of his own family
had refused to give him something he requested.98

The concern runs in the other direction as well. People need to avoid becoming involved in serious disputes, quarrels, or similar situations that can
lead to being accused-or suspected-of sorcery. A reputation for kindness,
generosity, and cooperation decreases the chances of beings accused.99 To
stay off the list of suspects requires maintaining the bonds of confianza.

Sorcery thus has both an integrative function and a disintegrative effect.
Sorcery accusations may be in part a factor in the traditional dispersed settlement and frequent splitting found in such Amazonian societies as the Shuar
and Arakmbut.i°° If sorcery challenges inequality, then sorcery, accusations
of sorcery, and gossip about sorcery may be one cost of a more egalitarian
society.'°'

SORCERY AND THE STATE

There is little that the ordinary state apparatus can do about sorcery. Alejandro Tsakimp, a Shuar shaman, puts the thought this way: "They killed my father with witchcraft and not with a bullet.... With killings like this, through
witchcraft, there aren't any witnesses. I can talk about all this, I can go to
lawyers, but nobody will believe me.1102 There is never any tangible proof of
a crime. A person killed by sorcery may be given a medical diagnosis-acute
dehydration through diarrhea, for example, but such a diagnosis does not, of
course, explain why the sickness occurred.'°3 The first recourse for aggrieved
family or community members is most often to retain the services of another,
and hopefully more powerful, shaman. The final recourse is often the killing
of the offender-what political scientist Fernando Garcia, in his work on indigenous law among Ecuadorian Quichua, calls muerte social.'°4 Other disputeresolution mechanisms have traditionally been unavailable.