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by Camilla French
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
by Camilla French
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
by Camilla French
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
by Camilla French
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Shamanism has a rich and complex history which continues to transform as shamans move from the local to the global stage. Originally a religious phenomenon from Siberia, shamans have since been designated various roles, from healer and psychopomp, to politician and killer. But beyond all these definitions, it is widely accepted that shamans are ‘mediators’ between worlds, be it in a psychological, cosmological, or political sense. Shamanism continues to transform, as the worlds the shaman mediates between grow and expand. Amazonian shamans in particular, have navigated a history of intertribal warfare, interethnic violence, and most recently threats to indigenous land rights. In this article I will be focusing on Amazonian shamanism through an anthropological lens, giving examples of some of the worlds these shamans are mediating between and their techniques of mediation.
French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote several seminal papers on the healing practices of shamans and the symbolic dimensions of the human experience. His findings would open up important dialogues in the field of psychoanalysis around the Freudian theory of the subconscious. In TheSorcerer and His Magic (1963), he explores shamanism as a sorcerer’s magic, whose effectiveness relies on the belief of those involved. For him, there are three major complementary elements which contribute to a successful healing ritual; the sorcerer’s belief in his techniques, the patient’s belief in his power, and the audience’s faith in the procedure (1963:168). In The Effectiveness of Symbols (1963) Lévi-Strauss analyses the chant of aCuna shaman, Mu-Igala, who is aiding a woman through a difficult childbirth, and explores the effectiveness of symbols via mythical and physiological themes. Muu, is the powerful spirit responsible for creating the foetus, who has captured the purba or ‘soul’ of the woman. The shaman’s song represents a quest to retrieve her purba (1963:187) and he calls on spirit helpers to invade her uterus. These spirits must face dangerous animals like Uncle Alligator Tiikwalele, who personify the pain, and also cut numerous coloured threads which represent the tissues of the uterus (1963:196). These various obstacles end with a battle against Muu and her daughters who once defeated, will release the woman’s soul. The use of myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is to penetrate the subconscious with symbols and imagery, which the woman isfamiliar with from her own concept of the universe, and thus reframe her understanding of the pain so her body can tolerate the difficult labour (1963:197).He goes on to argue that there are many similarities between this type of therapy and that of the psychoanalyst, which also aims to manipulate the subconscious, but that in this case, the therapy serves to alter the organic functions of the woman (1963:200). In this example of mediation, Lévi-Straussis focusing on the relationship between shaman and patient, two opposite poles of affectivity and inexpressibility, and the assistance of the audience who sustain a belief in the ‘performance’. The cure is a result of the meeting of these worlds in the psychic universe (1963:182). Although Lévi-Strauss’s observations cannot be contested, for they are his own interpretation of the shaman’s mediation in that particular healing ritual, what Graham Townsley argue sin Song Paths (1993), is that the Yaminahua shaman is communicating with non-human beings that occupy the world around him. His world thus expands to incorporate other beings.
Townsley’s study of Yaminahua shamans in South eastern Peru allows us to traverse beyond the world of the ‘séance’ which Lévi-Strauss analysed in the previous example. Here, we are not dealing with magic, but with the idea that shamans do indeed know(tapiakoi) and see (ooiki) (1993:449), and that far from being a ‘performance’,the shaman’s objective is to communicate with non-human spirits called yoshi, who are effectively a spirit or essence, which the Yaminahua believe animate and give qualities to everything in the world (1993:452). Townsley’sdocumentary on the Yaminahua (1989), follows Curaka, an apprentice shaman whoas part of his initiation, is instructed to eat weaver songbirds to give him voice. By consuming yoshi, Curaka can thus transform the state of things. Opposite to Lévi-Strauss’s perception of the shaman’s incorporation of myth into ritual healing, yoshi are believed to be charged with these mythical, transformational powers which the shamans see themselves as tappinginto (ibid). ‘Shori’ (ayahuasca) and song are the means of mediation between worlds. Koshuiti songs are only sung by shamans and are made up of“metaphoric circumlocutions…which are either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages” (1993:460). In this sense no one but the shaman can understand the language of the songs. The objective here is not to tap into the patient’s subconscious, but to communicate with the yoshi and build a collection of song paths in order to reach them (1993:459). Townsley uses the example of a Koshuiti song which recounts the story of the origin myth[1].The shaman sings a song to the moon to cure a woman who is haemorrhaging, and describes the red sky of the sunset, “painted cliff”, which is the metaphoric link to the woman’s blood. His aim in the song, is to “envision the sun so directly…that he can know and grasp it in some absolute way”; his power lies in being able to build up this visionary experience, grasp the yoshi and achieve this transformation (1993:464). And just as the red of the sunset fades, so the woman’s bleeding will stop, “Right there it is stopping…I am cutting it off” (1993:464). Townsley’s detailed account demonstrates how shamans mediate between the yoshi-world of myth and this one, arguing that Yaminahua cosmology is “always a system in the making, never finished and always provisional” (1993:466). Indeed, shamans now have Koshuiti songs which incorporate non-indigenous imagery, including outboard motors(hard-fire-baskets) and engine oil (fire-sun-water). Whereas Lévi-Strauss focuses on the shaman’s methods of projecting origin myth symbology into the subconscious of the patient as something familiar, Townsley is pointing at the Yaminahua technique of creating ever changing songs, which are a means to mediate with another dimension of reality. The overlapping of worlds, between Yaminahua and non-indigenous, Townsley argues, has shown that Yaminahua shamanism “has shown an almost infinite capacity to absorb and incorporate imagery from the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build into the core of its own practice.” (1993:451). Shamanism, far from being negatively impacted by this collision of forces has in fact flourished in the face of change.
Similarly, Achuar shamanism incorporates the ‘white’ world into its ritual healing.Anne-Christine Taylor’s study of Northern Jivaroan Achuar shamanism, explores Jivaroan warfare and healing, but another domain, mediated by the shaman in his healing ritual, is that of the Whiteman. Enemy Jivaroans will unleash“whitening” onto their victims, which is an attempt to destroy the Jivaroan’s identity and thus separate him from his group. The healing songs used by Achuar shamans, build up a world which is “a strange, dream-like space mixing elements of different times, places, and types of outsiders, above all Whites”, which has been interpreted as “the symptom of a discourse of resistance to domination and cultural dissolution, through the mimetic appropriation of White power.”(2014:104). Shamans will use tsentsak, ‘magic darts’, to counter attack enemy darts, and use healing songs which speak of ‘foreign’ landscapes, studded with icons of White power such as towns, hydroelectric dams, markets, churches, and motorised vehicles (2014:104). The shaman therefore mediates between thepatient, the enemy shaman and this ‘foreign’ world which he sees in the victim’s body. Taylor describes the Whiteman’s presence as more of an ‘environment’ rather than an ‘enemy’, but what is interesting here, is that the Whiteman’s world, although not visibly present, is able to permeate the physicality of Jivaroan men. This presence contains such force, that if the shaman’s healing powers do not work, his patient must abandon his Jivaroan identity and move into a lowland Quichua identity. It is the shaman, therefore, whose incorporation of this imagery, and mediation between worlds, allows him to play a key role in navigating the transformation and salvation of Jivaroan social identity.
As presented in the previous examples, shamans have a tradition of mediating between worlds. These skills of mediation are now playing a role in interethnic politics, as shamans become mediators between their people and the state, in disputes over land rights (Conklin 2002:1051). Just as Townsley observed that while traditional settings are disappearing, shamanism is flourishing (1993:450), in this case, shamanism is itself being redefined, with a new generation of bilingual shamanssuch as Davi Kopenawa, seen not only as an activist, but the bearer of a privileged form of valuable knowledge. (Conklin 2002:1050). Kopenawa, a BrazilianYanomami shaman and spokesperson, has an active presence on social media and onthe global stage and “draws on indigenous ideas and perspectives to develop innovative critiques of state policies, political economy, and Western attitudes towards nature (Conklin 2002:1051). He published his first book ‘The Falling Sky: Words of aYanomami Shaman’ (2013) together with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Written in first person, the book recounts his life story and initiation into shamanism in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as his journey into activism and personal observations made on his travels. Kopenawa presents Yanomami cosmogony through the origin story of Omama, creator of all people and also the powerful xapiri spirits who protect the forest and can only be seen by shamans after consuming the powder of the yãkoana tree.He undertakes a journey to Europe and the United States, describing the time he spends in capital cities, observing the white peoples’ dangerous relationship to materialism and consumerism, "The white people, with their mind set on merchandise, do not want to hear us. They continue to mistreat the earth everywhere they go, even under the cities they live in! It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much, it will finally turn to chaos.". Brazil’s indigenous peoples suffered enormous setbacks under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, intent on stripping them of their land rights. It is shamans like Davi Kopenawa who are drawing on their skills of mediation and the ability to mediate between present, past and future, to ensure indigenous rights are protected for generations to come. As he expresses in the foreword to his book “ The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat….We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”. In the face of colonialist violence and now global politics, shamanism has indeed continued to flourish. The shaman is not only mediator, but shapeshifter, able to transform and adapt to new and threatening landscapes as the world around him changes.
Bibliography
Conklin,B.A, 2002, Shamans, versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest. American Anthropologist, 104 (4),p1053-1054.
Kopenawa,D and Albert, B, 2013, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. CambridgeMassachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Sorcerer and his Magic. 1963. In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 167-185.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The Effectiveness of Symbols. 1963 In (ed.) C. Lévi-Strauss StructuralAnthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: BasicBooks. pp 185-205.
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 2014. Healing translations. Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism. Hau:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 95–118.
Townsley, G. 1993. Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. L'Homme, 33eAnnée 126/128: pp. 449-468.
Underthe Sun, the Shaman and His Apprentice,Graham Townsley and Howard Reid, BBC Worldwide, 1989.
[1]The moon was an incestuous brother who would creep into his sister’s hammock at night to make love to her, to find out who he was she smeared dark genipa dye on his face, and when he was discovered the next day, he was decapitated in a hunting raid. His lone head rises to the sky to become the moon, where he vows to make women fertile at night, and since he ejaculates blood, they also bleed.
Camilla French is a filmmaker and co-founder of Semantica Productions. She has an MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology