Credit: Gretel Echazú and Carl Carew.
The present chapter has been written from an anthropological, decolonial and feminist approach. It is also robustly oriented toward the building of theoretical enquiry through the labor of ethnographic fieldwork. We present here four critiques of the emergent field of Amazonian Ayahuasca Shamanism, utilizing the approaches of several different fields of knowledge, such as gender studies, religious studies, medical anthropology, and studies on shamanism. We present the construction of the idea of a “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” as a myth that holds a strong political meaning in the context of power relationships between people mediated by plants. We expose the four nodes that interweave within the concept above as being: 1) the male, 2) the shaman, 3) the one who heals, and 4) the ayahuasca.
Firstly, we evaluate the over-representation of the masculine gender in the field. Secondly, we discuss the limits of the concept of “shamanism” as a tool for grasping the actual reality of the Peruvian curanderos. Thirdly, we analyze the over-focalization by current studies in the field on the therapeutic aspects of ayahuasca, an over-focalization that fails to represent the local diversity of uses of this plant, such as witchcraft, production of diseases, and spells. Finally, we argue that ayahuasca is far from being at the core of the traditional health system in the Peruvian Amazon Lowlands.
The critiques elucidated here are aimed to assist other researchers in exploring the field with tools for self-reflection, and for careful attention to the ethics, history and the cultural contexts. On the one hand, we can see how shamanism is being produced as a political myth; while on the other, local realities diverge enormously from it. We advocate here for the dynamic construction and reconstruction of theories based on ethnographic practices, thereby setting the stage for more local understandings of the knowledge and political struggles in the Amazonian field of curanderismo.
Our approach is based on the deconstruction of a mythical image. We understand myth as a political construct activated by determined social actors in specific historical scenarios. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss interpreted myth as a pristine manifestation of the world’s structures, fixed on “cold” societies (Charbonnier, 1991). Here, myth is linked to the resistance of a society to change, a refractivity that expresses itself in its tendency to continuity and self-preservation. On the contrary, we insert the concept of myth into our contemporary society, understanding it as a tool that enables a certain political use of history. With this perspective, a myth can be seen as a construct based on historical contingencies and political struggles. To be able to build the image of the myth, we allow ourselves to create an intellectual exercise of imagination, of exaggeration, and of satiric spirit, designing the portrait of a contemporary political myth.
Through bibliographical research, ethnographies of shamanic tourism, formal and informal communication with local specialists, and participation in local, national and international meetings related to the dynamics of the ayahuasca in the Amazon, we observed a persistent tendency by scientists and writers, who were “foreigners” to Peru, to construct a richly designed narrative about the uses of ayahuasca in the Amazon forest. This narrative claimed the treatment of those illnesses considered incurable by biomedical approaches; highlighted the heroism of the local curanderos viewed as shamans; and tried to illuminate the mysteries of an ancient tradition around the ayahuasca plant in the Amazon.
It is necessary to stress here that the construct of the “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” is a concept that has not previously been instrumentalized. It is an artifact elaborated here, a type of analytic loupe, designed by the exaggeration of the traces of quotidian reality. In this way, diverse aspects that we have observed are continuously repeated, and this repetition is revealed in the present caricature. This portrait has a strong ideological message that constitutes the dimension of the political myth. The myth can be read from its epistemological, ethical, theoretical, and methodological dimensions, all of them being transversal to the very constitution of the mythical image under scrutiny.
We provide a systematic critique of the four aspects included in the political myth of the “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca”:
Next, we will develop a wider explanation of each of these nodes, with further reflection on key points of the social, political, and cultural contexts where these dynamics are produced.
As we researched the practices related to plants for medicinal and magic uses in the Peruvian Amazon, we came across a semantic vacuum relating to the lack of representation of women in the literature about shamanism and ayahuasca. In the same way, it is possible to observe that this field has been documented predominantly by men who wrote about ayahuasca and, in doing so, represented masculine subjects linked to this universe. A privileged “active” point of view, based in this exclusive masculinity, put women on the opposite side of the stage, in a place of “passivity.” From the standpoint of a feminist epistemology, it is possible to question both aspects of this (under)representation: both who sees and then writes, and who is seen.
What subjects inscribe this knowledge in the territory of social visibility? Who does this represent? And to whom does the knowledge that is being considered belong? These factors are strongly related to the particulars of knowledge construction. In this sense, it is necessary to question whether this knowledge that is already inscribed in the social world holds a logic that distorts science through the silencing of female perspectives. We consider that field studies on Peruvian shamanism are part of a historical tendency to center history on men and male perspectives, and by so doing, the female perspectives are marginalized and absent from these studies.
The Greek anthropologist Evgenia Foutiu (2014) argues, “most early ethnographies we have on Amazonian cultures were written by men … [and] the ethnographers were focused on male activities” (p. 172). This story, like so many others in the development of the patriarchal system, is a story of men writing about men. In fact, most of the texts from botanists and medical doctors from the beginning of the twentieth century focus solely on male use of plants. Some of them place ayahuasca as an exclusive property of men. Richard Spruce, the English botanist who introduced the ayahuasca plant as a vegetal species to Western science, affirmed that children and women could not have access to it (Spruce, 1908, p. 425). The Canadian anthropologist Anna Marie Colpron (2005) states that studies on the field of shamanism in the Peruvian forest have been written almost exclusively by men. She refers to this as the “monopoly on representations about shamanism” held by male subjects.
The group of ethnographers and scholars who assumed the production of the ambitious Handbook of South American Indians, entitled “Tropical Forest Tribes” (Steward, 1948) was quite large. In fact, the project included the contributions of 15 specialists, two from Brazil, one from Argentina, one from France, and the rest from the United States. The Brazilian anthropologist Priscila Faulhaber (2012) reviewed the intellectual division of labor related to this enterprise, noting that specialists from South American countries tended to produce ethnographic data, while the building of theories remained in the hands of scholars from the US and France. Additionally, the book also had an invisible gender bias in which only one of the contributors, the US archaeologist Betty Meggers, was a woman. Not counting other problematic aspects of this initiative, we want to stress here that, despite the magnitude of the enterprise, there was minimal female participation in it.
Colpron (2005) quotes a “golden period” of knowledge production on Amazonian shamanism between the decades of 1960 and of 1970, with the remarkable influence of the contributions from French ethnologist Alfred Métraux (1967) with the Tupinambá tribe, and from Austrian-Colombian anthropologist and archaeologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972) with the Tukano people. More recent examples of ethnological studies on shamanism are the works of two other French ethnologists: Phillippe Descola (1986), with the Achuar ethnic group that today inhabits the frontier between Ecuador and Peru, and Pierre Chaumeil (2000), with the Yagua from the frontier between Colombia and Peru. This lineage of French male production of studies on shamanism in the Amazon has become hegemonic in the field and has shaped the approach of other scholars to the social subjects in question.
The global explosion of ayahuasca as a social phenomenon and a field of study arose from the 1990s on (Labate, 2011). In this context, the interest in Amazonian shamanism has grown, and perspectives have multiplied and diversified, inspiring studies of mestizo shamanism in cities from the political South (Martínez González, 2009) and New Age shamanism in cities from the political North (Donaldson, 1999).
However, the Amazon forest continued to be a mythical center of the production of knowledge and meanings. Some researchers from this phase approach the biographical trajectories of healers (Don Fernando, published by Mark Plotkin in 1993; Fernando Payaguaje, translated by Nathan Horowitz in 2008; José Campos, compiled by Geraldine Overton in 2011). Other contributions emphasized the wider scene where healers perform their practices; mostly, the urban-forest circuits that designate the commercial routes for shamanic tourism (Dobkin de Rios, 1977; Grunwell, 1998; Demange, 2002; Dobkin de Rios & Rumrill, 2008; Labate, 2011; as well as many other authors).
These studies are circumscribed by the dynamics of the hybridism of the ethnographic scene and tend to focus on the protagonism of the ayahuasca beverage in ceremonies. In these approaches, the Peruvian jungle is the most visited ethnographic space. Ecuador and Brazil appear marginal to this search for the origins: the assumed starting point seems to be between Colombia and Peru.
In her doctoral thesis, the Brazilian anthropologist Beatriz C. Labate (2011) interviewed six Shipibo indigenous shamans and six mestizo shamans. Her ethnography draws the transits of shamanic tourism, sketching in rapid movements strong impressions about some social actors of the shamanic field. In the section where she designs the itinerary of her fieldwork, she assumes that being perceived, not only as a woman, but also as a gringa, were problematic categories that she tried to appropriate in “the best way possible”3 (p. 12). During the interviews, she hears several male curanderos speaking about women who are healers, and also about women who participate in the ayahuasca ceremonies. Then she points out: “I did not interview shaman women, even though I have heard about some of them”4 (p. 88). Therefore, we see a woman writing about women, but in an indirect way: through the voices of male curanderos.
Other authors stake out possibilities of the area in an almost impatient way, vindicating the androcentric bias in the research: “I will use male forms throughout, because about 93 percent of practitioners I encountered in the field were male” (p. 200), states another contemporary researcher of the Peruvian field (Brabec de Mori, 2014). In general terms, lack of time, lack of people available to interview, and lack of information about the matter are alluded to. But there is more to it than that. The Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato (1998) calls it “the law of the invisible masculine” (p. 10), an historically built norm that permeates every knowledge field in a subtle, but persistent, way. This set of assumptions tends to define the grid of intelligibility of the feminine and masculine domain, modeling the perspectives that make some things visible while others remain invisible.
Every hegemony exhibits, in a latent or a manifest way, contra-hegemonic movements. From the start of the twentieth century until the present time, scholarship about plants and plant specialists in the Peruvian Amazon is being revisited by new studies in the area. Of special importance here has been the contribution of female anthropologists from Peru, as well as from other countries.
We can observe, therefore, that who is writing changes what is being written about. Other subjects have started to appear in the field. A new point of entry to the multiplicity of practices from the Amazon field has been defined by this interest in the feminine and, indeed, in gender itself. We believe that the introduction of a gender perspective potentializes a new specificity, and at the same time, helps to propagate the inner intricacies of the broader field.
We recognize that gender has been an ignored code, under which light the production about social relationships between human and plants in the Amazon can be reviewed. In our research, de-codifying this set of rules became an exciting and intriguing activity that actually pushed us to redesign our prior understanding of the field. The rumination around gender issues and the standpoint that being linked to gender issues encourages allowed us to visualize other dimensions that are also sensitive to the social construction of power, such as the dynamics of racial, ethnic, and national oppression.
Some researchers refer specifically to this lack of gender perspective in the literature of the field of the ritual usages of plants (Colpron, 2005; Herbert, 2010; Espinoza, 2013; Cavnar; 2011) and have started to register the gendered approach from subjects to plants: the feminine, the masculine, the transits between them, and the social construction of both. The Canadian researcher Ann-Marie Colpron (2005) vividly narrates the experience of the onaya ainbo, a group of women who heal and perform magic amongst the Shipibo ethnic group.
In her 2011 thesis, the North American psychologist Clancy Cavnar approached the way gays and lesbians perceive their own bodies and build their gender identity after exposing themselves to ayahuasca experiences. In 2011, Canadian-Ecuadorian scholar and coach Yalila Espinoza also presented a doctoral thesis on the field of East-West psychology that analyzed the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca in the building of female identity.
The US anthropologist Daniela Peluso published an interesting article (2014) about the sexual seduction of women by male Peruvian so-called “shamans,” and the above quoted author, Evgenia Fotiou (2014), wrote about the relationship between the feminization of ayahuasca and shamanic tourism, showing how a wider participation of women healers in this context can be linked more to an external need of the “foreigner” ayahuasca consumer than to an inner process of democratization of access to healing arts through ayahuasca by the local communities.
There seems to be an increased awareness of the risks of aggression and sexual abuse in the context of shamanic tourism, and to drink ayahuasca in ceremonies guided by women is perceived as minimizing that threat. The link between gender and ayahuasca and the risks of shamanic tourism were subject of two special sessions in the 2nd World Ayahuasca Conference held in October 2016, in Rio Branco, the mythical capital of the State of Acre in Brazil. This appears as being an explicit field to be explored from now on, one that will certainly bring an essential awareness about the multiple inequalities – gender, but also race-ethnicity and nationality-based – of the field.
This term is the second node of the “Male-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” myth. It is known that the noun “shaman” was given to local healing practitioners from the Tsunki tribe, in Siberia and had been used locally for centuries (Sidky, 2010). What kind of historical contingencies spread this concept to apply to any other native healing specialist around the world? The Mexican anthropologist Roberto Martínez González (2009) presents an insightful genealogy of the term in the Western culture.
The concept was introduced in the scholastic context as early as 1765 by the French philosopher Denis Didérot, who built his assumptions about Siberian specialists upon secondhand narratives. At this time, he put shamans in the same category as impostors: people with strategic abilities to cheat innocent people and manipulate others through their magic and healing rituals. Since then, the term shaman itself entered dictionaries, which started to be prolifically edited during the period of the European Enlightenment. In contrast to Enlightenment ideals, the concept was a way to depict Otherness. The South African researcher David Chidester (2004) asserts that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “while allegedly serving the devil and his demons, shamans were also represented as fakes, frauds or imposters, thus combining genuine evil with deception” (p. 44).
Over time, the term “shaman” was progressively reinterpreted: not without suffering, on each appropriation, an increasing hygienization. The French anthropologist Roberta Hamayon (2004) introduces some aspects that are key to understanding the further expansion of the term:
The word shaman … extended to the world on the nineteenth century … the term came to be used liberally in literature to replace a series of European terms deemed unsatisfactory (sorcerer, diviner, healer, magician, juggler, and the like). It was used with no reference to a well-established definition and rather served as a term that could be all encompassing: a shaman could be both sorcerer and healer, with no contradiction between these two activities.
(p. 142)
In fact, the moral condemnation of the Enlightenment writers shifted to a moral ambiguity in the usages of the terms. From the nineteenth century on, scholars of psychology, medicine, theology, history of religions, arts, and anthropology used this concept as an explicative key to interpret the most diverse ethnographic realities. But it was ultimately the proposal of the theologist and philosopher Mircea Eliade that made the term globally acknowledged by linking it to the field of religious studies. The idea of shamanic journey in his book Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, published in 1951, is one that has been continuously revisited and that is today considered a milestone in contemporary studies on shamanism. Eliade defined the shaman as the archaic technician of ecstasy, associating the practice with a simple, direct, and natural connection to divinity.
In the 1960s, the concept shifted once again from the field of religious studies to the field of psychology and neuropsychology, through the modeling of consciousness as a scientific concept. The concept of the universal existence of shamans in each society then became of special interest. A further contextualization was constructed, especially by intellectuals and artists from the Beat Generation, through experimentation with psychedelic experience.
The modern paradigm has built a narrative for the origins of every practice performed during modernity. Thus, from such concepts as human family to the very idea of disease, a mainstream evolutionary story has been repeated: it starts in ancient times in which People were simple and connected to nature, and then develop along a growing path towards increased complexity and greater distance from what is understood as “natural.” In the case of the psychedelic experiences celebrated by the Beat Generation, scholars took the same path as the logic of modernity does with any other cultural trace. They located shamanism as the simplest, the purest, the most authentic way to connect with divinity and nature, in a frame where religion was allegedly personal, arbitrary, and not dogmatic. By so doing, they projected their interest in the archetypical character of the shaman by taking it out of historical context and, by the same move, identified themselves with its archetypical image. This picture was nevertheless detached from the social context; a context that the intrinsic criticism of the generation wanted to be distanced from. In this way, shamanism turned into an individual set of practices forcefully linked to the human origins of modified states of consciousness and attached to the consumption of psychoactive substances.
Another consequence of the appropriation of shamanism as a concept was the strong connection of the very idea of shamanism with organic, cellular and enzymatic processes, read on a level of molecular biology. A connection between the micro level of cells and the macro level of the cosmic order has been spectacularly demonstrated in the documentary DMT, Spiritual Molecule, directed by Mitch Schultz in 2010, and inspired by the perspective and research of the psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist Rick Strassman. Within the framework of a wider interest in the dialogue between science and spirituality, Strassman proposes a connection between the life of cells and the life of universe, and by so doing, he tends to disregard the importance of the intermediate layers where history, society, and culture arise.
However, the “shamanic turn” has demonstrated a specific appropriation of those micro-biological aspects. As the American-Brazilian anthropologist Jean Langdon (1996) suggests, the search for the past in the present drove scholars to pay new attention to rituals, healing methods, and ancient concepts from traditional cultures. Their interest in modified states of consciousness came together with an attention to an ethnography that would re-discover the archaic technique of the shamans. This curiosity for experiences in contexts of radical alterity drove scholarly trained eyes to the arts of magic and healing practiced in traditional scenarios, increasingly understood under the mythical mold of shamanism.
This is how indigenous tribes from all over the world, whose rituals and medicines were studied decades before by botanists, ethnographers, and folklorists, became the focus of renewed attention. And this is how traditional specialists linked to plants were re-designated shamans and their magic and medicine were understood as shamanic.
Additionally, the extraordinarily diverse set of discourses and practices of the New Age (Heelas, 1993), which grew from the base of a tireless search for the mythical origins of humanity, and, under a unidirectional, evolutionary perspective, drove an increased interest in the ideas and practices of indigenous and traditional cultures globally.
We agree with Jean Langdon (1996) when she says that, with this extraordinary generalization, the term shaman increasingly lost its historical specificity to become an aprioristic tool for research. Yet, it is important to call attention to the studies that have been neglected in research about local specialists because they do not adhere to the use of the term shaman.
Such contributions come from folklorists, anthropologists, and even medical doctors who documented the ideas and practices of local specialists who heal with plants. In many cases, its authors are Peruvian or Latin American scholars, and they are written in Spanish (Del Castillo Barda, 1963; Naranjo, 1969; Belaúnde, 2008; Cárdenas Timoteo, 1991; Valenzuela & Valera, 2005; Rengifo Ruiz, 2012). Even in this era of globalization, in which all kinds of cultural elements appear so mixed and hybridized, it is possible to visualize the limits between languages as a barrier to achieve wider scholarly reflections. Such a limit does not allow access to an enormously rich discussion for many scholars who are not familiar with reading in Spanish or Portuguese. Latin American social and cultural processes are being studied and constantly reviewed by Latin American academics from an intimate perspective. Such a perspective tends to be treated as non-existent or, at best, irrelevant. In fact, extensive material is being produced regarding Amazonian practices of healing and magic, and this material is written in the Latin American languages of alterity, and, most importantly, for this reason, this same production is overlooked. We can consider these three facts together as a colonial trait that affects Latin American scholars, and also North American and European scholars, and therefore the way they produce and expand their research and interlocution.
In Latin America, writing, from socially grounded data to the most insightful discussions about diverse contemporary phenomena, such as the post-colonial development of societies in Latin America or the critical review of our colonial history, has been written in Spanish and Portuguese. Because of the language in which they have been written, they are “naturally” banned at the symbolic frontiers of the mainstream Academy, which uses the standard codes of English or French language as a compulsory vehicle of expression for describing and interpreting reality. In this sense, the vivid, multicultural scenario of ayahuasca and its cultural meaning in Latin American societies appears limited by the resistance of the mainstream academy to incorporate Portuguese and Spanish languages; and, inevitably, their cultures.
It is here that we arrive at another important point of the discussion: the very idea of shamanism is linked to Anglo-Saxon and French culture, but not to so much to Portuguese or Spanish culture. A search with shamanism as a key word offers an enormously limited approach, which ignores and underestimates the prolific and persistent production of knowledge by local, regional, Peruvian, and Latin American intellectuals. In Spanish, a widely used word to describe the healing specialist is curandero (or curandera, in the case of women).
When we get closer to ethnographic contexts, we are able to find a myriad of local terms that grasps the diversity of categories related to curanderismo. In Echazú Böschemeier’s (2015) research in the Lowland Peruvian Amazon, it was possible to find around 12 categories linked to the art of healing and magic making. One of them, the one that appeared most recently and the one directly linked to tourism, was the concept of shaman. The others were linked to practices oriented towards the local communities. Curanderas and curanderos, curiosas and curiosos, vegetalistas, purgueras and purgueros, parteras and parteros, médicas and médicos tradicionales, hueseras and hueseros, sobadoras and sobadores, sobadoras and sobadores de lisiados, naturalistas, yerberas and yerberos were terms that showed, through local dynamics of categorization, how complex, rich, and alive this field is.
Thus it is clear that the uncritical usage of “shaman” as a concept to explain the diversity of healing practices in the Amazon has become an ethnographically, epistemologically, and theoretically poor research strategy that tends to perpetuate the field of studies of shamanism through knowledge operations that silence the local, the diverse, and the actual history of Peruvian specialists and their communities.
So far, the idea of a Male-Shaman that corresponds to a caricature, as well as to a political myth, has been developed. But masculinity and shamanism do not yet paint a complete picture of what our portrait intends. There are still two important elements that will add further nuance and implication to this analysis. The first is the idea of healing; the second is related to the use of ayahuasca. Let us start with the idea of healing.
Who heals? Can a person heal another person? Do people heal by themselves? Do bodies heal by themselves, despite the intentions of the subjects linked to them? The answers to each of these questions are diverse and certainly correspond to societies, historical moments, and religious and cultural contexts. The intellectual construction of the notion of “healing” itself brings with it a long history of contentions to define what healing means, who has the power to heal, and who deserves to be healed.
In Western contexts, the answer to the first question, what is meant by healing, has been modeled by centuries of hygienism, eugenics, and biomedicine. This is a factor that we must negotiate when we are confronted with ethnographic experiences in the Peruvian field. Can all local practitioners be called healers? What about the healers that also damage others through magic and sorcery? Should this be considered an “ugly” feature of Amazonian specificity?
An interesting point here is that sorcery, cannibalism, and other practices that are considered offensive to the Western eye have been richly documented by naturalists, ethnographers, and anthropologists since the eighteenth century. However, at the end of the twentieth century, when shamanic tourism started to build up circuits in the Peruvian Amazon, those practices began to be attacked, denied, or hidden from the eyes of tourists and scholars (indeed, frequently, many of them were both scholars and tourists).
The article “Cura, cura, cuerpecito” [Heal, heal, little body] from Beatriz C. Labate and Carlos Bouso (2011), and other contributions from the same compilation, stress the difficulties produced by the contemporary mainstream narratives related to ayahuasca. There, the socio-cultural aspects of healing have been undermined and the discussion tends to be decontextualized. The authors suggest that ayahuasca itself should not be understood as a cure itself, but as a “technology of self” (self-deconstructing, self-building, self-reinventing of an intersubjective identity). On the other side, the contribution to shamanism studies that are concerned with the so-called “dark forces” has been overlooked. Milestones in this field have been the writings of Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig (1986), whose work stresses the links between sorcery and colonialism in the Colombian Amazon; the Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto (2001), who presented an historical approach to sorcery and politics between a Tupi ethnic group, and a compilation edited by the anthropologists Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright (2004), who gathered different research studies in the Amazon that investigated assault sorcery, witchcraft, and injurious magic.
In all three cases, there are approaches that employ a political understanding of the Amazon as a colonial space that has been conquered throughout by continual violence, as well as an interest in historical tensions between ethnic groups and the colonial regime. However, in quantitative terms, and also in terms of visibility, this approach seems to be minimal. The most prolific and fashionable perspective from the 1800s onwards (with the so-called “ayahuasca boom”) is one that is focused on Amazon local specialists as shamans who heal and Amazon plants as plants that are designed to heal. In this framework, ayahuasca is the one that is most valorized.
In December 2014, a team of academic researchers produced a public document (Rush et al., 2014) stating their discomfort and preoccupation with the actions of the ESC (Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council), a non-governmental organization oriented to regulate the practices linked to ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon. This organization had accumulated $90,000 in donations from non-Peruvian citizens to regulate the practices linked to ayahuasca in Peru.
As it is highlighted in the collective denunciation organized by Brian Rush (2014), “The ESC project to ‘modernize’ and ‘sanitize’ indigenous uses of ayahuasca threatens to create an unnecessary and Western-imposed bureaucratization and professionalization/institutionalization of traditional medicine” (p. 1). What drove this initiative was actually the demands of a growing shamanic tourism that is looking for better control of the experiences at the heart of the forest. From physical security to emotional balance to spiritual healing, Western travelers are pressing the social landscape of the forest to adapt it to their needs.
Those needs are difficult to describe, and the task would exceed the possibilities of this chapter. However, what we want to point out here is that those needs are strongly related to a process of “cleaning up sorcery.” This can be understood as a significant part of the colonization of the Amazon and a cultural appropriation of its practices by Western society.
The previously quoted studies from Taussig, Whitehead, Fausto, and other researchers stress the importance of magic and sorcery for Amazonian tribes. Healing and magic are part of a dynamic complex, and it is impossible to separate them without affecting the existence of the complex as a whole. This complex has suffered from the impact and pressure of the colonial regime. One of the stronger forces directed to the destructuring of this complex was the extirpación de idolatrías, the extirpation of idolatries between the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the Americas, considered to be one of the most remarkable colonial genocides of local specialists linked to the cult of ancestors and forces of nature (Valencia, 2010).
Nowadays, it is possible to note this hygienization of the practices of local specialists by the persistent highlighting of the positive and socially integrative sides of the Amazonian curanderismo. This tendency neglects, or even denies, the more violent, damaging, and conflictive side of this complex of practices. We propose to rejoin the ideas of healing with magic, treating this idea just as the subjects of our ethnography used to do. Our ethnography shows that the same specialist who performs a healing act can also perform an act of damage and even kill a person, depending on the context of the work. In addition, an important investment in payment for services to curanderas and curanderos takes place, for which they will protect the patient from potential damaging acts performed by other specialists under the request of adversaries. The work of a specialist that acts through his contact with plants can reach diverse spheres as family, job, friends, enemies, and hobbies [see below Figure 8.1].
In this photograph, it is possible to see what has been written by a patient of a local curandero in the Lowland Peruvian Amazon, with the intention of performing a magic act. A few family names are listed on the piece of paper there, and immediately below, “love,” “health,” “happiness,” “money,” and the wish for the success of a favorite football club.
Reflection on the ambiguity of the local specialist’s performances is aligned with the ambiguity of the first known uses of the term pharmakon, from which derive our ideas of pharmacy, pharmaceutics, and pharmacology. In ancient Greek, pharmakon can be a remedy and a poison at the same time. The dosage, the intention that links the subjects, and the conditions of each subject itself will define the nature of this substance. Similarly, this occurs with plants that are chosen for human use in the Amazon; there is not any plant that is intrinsically “good” or “bad.” What seems to exist is a dynamic configuration of plants, people, and situations that will set different outcomes in each individual case.
Credit: Gretel Echazú and Carl Carew.
We point out the importance of the condition of ambiguity in the approach to this field: ambiguity itself is a quality that the practitioners in question hold as a performing tool. The erasing of the dimension of magic and the construction of the shaman as a subject who is oriented exclusively towards healing reproduces the colonial frame that sustains itself on the hygienization/civilization of the South American living landscape.
The resonance of the healing metaphor in the Amazon landscape is actually pervasive. Because of its important biodiversity, the Amazon has been called the “greatest laboratory in the world.” This is a metaphor that activates what can be perceived as an illegitimate element (the wild scenario of the forest) into legitimate terms (a laboratory oriented towards human leverage). However, there is an evaluative detail that needs to be noted: The forest does not need to be reduced to a laboratory as replacement for being treasured in itself. Its richness escapes the narrow conception of a laboratory. A laboratory is an exclusively human artifact, governed by logics of rationality, dissection, measurement, and analysis of complex living processes. Its value goes beyond what can be deemed as usable or able to be taken advantage of by humans.
In the same way, local specialists have been reduced to the role of psychotherapists or physicians: The shamans are deemed to be the primitive medical doctors and psychologists that each community holds. This can be actually an enriching point for psychotherapists and physicians, because it allows an understanding of the symbolic aspects held by both professions and also helps to relativize such professions, heavily positioned as the most dominant professions on the career scope. On the other hand, shamans viewed as psychotherapists or medical doctors can be part of a movement toward the legitimation of traditional, local, non-scientific healing practices. Jane Atkinson (1993) observes: “likening shamans to physicians and psychotherapists was a move that elevates the former and jocularly taunts the latter with the reminder that Western biomedicine too makes use of rituals, impression management, and faith” (p. 313).
This comparison, nevertheless, exhibits a political problematic grounded on cultural relativism when applied in lopsided contexts. Relativism focuses on cultural diversity and on the possible relationships between what is diverse. However, when practices or institutions from different contexts are compared, there is a whole historical dynamic that must be considered into the very terms of the comparison. When the comparison between Western and non-Western practices is made without giving attention to the intrinsic differences held by both of them, the comparison loses perspective and strength.
The Amazon forest can be understood as a potent metaphor that needs to be reshaped by creating local, regional, national, and diasporic references through a selective effort of deconstruction of the Western view. In this way, we could also draw a critique of the medicalized approach to traditional specialists. When both medical systems, as autonomous entities, are put into a comparative perspective, the operation creates the illusion of equivalency, which presupposes that both systems are horizontal and equally comparable. We assert here that if any comparison can be made between local specialists, on one hand, and psychotherapists and physicians, on the other, it should consider the historical dynamics and the actual situation of both as agents linked to historically, culturally, and politically embedded systems in the global contemporary society.
This is the last node of our portrait, and one of the most powerful traits of the image of the “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” rests with it. The link between shamanic practices and altered states of consciousness has been constructed since Eliade’s writings. However, Eliade (1951) illustrated the access to altered states of consciousness with the ethnographic example of the Tsunki ethnic group, where a shaman´s access to other realities is reached through the repetitive act of drumming. As the same author points out, there are other groups that get to that realm by meditation, chanting, or repetitive manual tasks such as embroidering or sewing. However, since the expansion of the concept, elucidated above, shamanism has been increasingly linked to the ingestion of psychoactive drugs.
In this context, the relationship between the complex tradition linked to ayahuasca and the studies on shamanism became almost a natural one. In this way, ayahuasca is pushed to detach itself from the diversity of plants and plant usages in context, and is driven to become a subject unto itself. This subject can then be compared to other psychoactive drugs from different traditions from all over the world, like the Native American peyote (Lophophora williamsii), the Andean coca (Erythroxylum coca) or khat (Catha edulis), linked to Arabic culture.
Thus, the deep historical dynamic and the multiple cultural diversity that connects ayahuasca to manifold ethnic groups, as well as to wider mestizaje processes and even to specific Latin American nation-states in the Amazon, remain unspoken. The horizontal dialogue between ayahuasca, other plants, local practitioners, and even other beings of the forest (duendes, madres, dueños, encantados) is interrupted to create a new scenario for ayahuasca, where it gains an unprecedented autonomy, importance, and weight. Some scholars, as Dennis McKenna, James Callaway, and Charles Grob (1998), go even further by putting ayahuasca “at the center of a vast and largely unstudied folk pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants” (p. 1).
Our ethnographic fieldwork showed that ayahuasca is far from being at the center of the Amazonian medicinal system. On the contrary, ayahuasca is only one plant within a wide diversity of plants encompassed in a system where no specific plant is at its center. We assert here that the Amazonian multiplicity cannot, in fact, be reduced to any plant or plant usage. The indigenous and mestizo people from the Amazon took good advantage of the fact that the forest is a complex and dynamic system. They understood that it was futile to align the system based on a center. Instead, their strategic approach involves a multiplicity of itineraries, narratives, and life experiences. For instance, a specific specialist could design the map of his or her plant expertise by putting ayahuasca at the center. However, another specialist could produce a similar map with other plants occupying this central position as well, such as tobacco (Nicotina tabacum), ajo sacha (Mansoa alliacea), malva (Malachra alceifolia), or piñón negro ( Jathropa gossypifolia) [see Figure 8.2 below].
The malva (Malachra alceifolia) is a central plant used in the care and healing by many midwives and curanderas in the Peruvian Amazon. It is usually prepared by squeezing the fresh leaves in cold water with the hands and leaving them in the water for a few hours before drinking the liquid.
Even if it is possible to identify plants by their popularity for treating or preventing any kind of ailment, what makes them actually central in any system is how familiar the plant is to the specialist. In this way, a biographical approach to local specialists and a strong focus on the extent of their knowledge of plants through their own experiences can help place the problematic of Amazonian plant usages in a new perspective.
Credit: Gretel Echazú and Carl Carew.
The political myth of the “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” assumes the importance of a specific discursive trope, a point in discourse that is apparently unquestionable; that is, built on by aspects of reality that may repeatedly be seen and recognized as genuine for a community of observers. We observed that such a mythical perception was functional when it played out in reality: it activated the production of encounters of traditional medicine, books about shamanism, and prepared the discourse associated with the most prestigious lodges of shamanic tourism in the Peruvian forest. The legitimacy of this myth performed reality with the force of a fact, explaining phenomena, sustaining practices, and legitimating positions of power within the field conventionally known as shamanism studies.
An anthropology based on a special care for the meaning of ethnographic contexts, driven by the intricacies and particulars of specific cases, would bring life to a field that is being increasingly fulfilled by clichés; the one that put one gender, one specialty designation, one kind of practice, and one single plant at the center. The “Male-Shaman-Who Heals-With-Ayahuasca” is a political myth that, compelled by the Western appropriation of the ayahuasca plant usage out of local contexts, is turning an intensely rich, detailed, and diverse landscape of human practices and of the plants linked to them, into the drained caricature of a commodified world.
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