On the 4th of June 2015, somewhere near Bogotá, Colombian authorities detained Taita2 Orlando Gaitán, a well-known neoshaman who, under his self-denomination as a traditional indigenous physician, led yage sessions as part of his provision of therapeutic and spiritual services in various cities around the country. He was detained due to allegations of sexual assault made by a number of women, among them, minors belonging to the Comunidad de Paz de Pensamiento Bonito [Community of Nice Thoughts], a group created and led by Gaitán in Bogota in the beginning of the 1990s. The allegations very rapidly echoed through the media, which had no qualms about stating that the assault was due to the “irresponsible consumption of hallucinogens” by unwary followers of false gurus who promised hope.
Taita Orlando, as he was known in certain circles, had declared himself the last descendant of the Carare Indians, and he had founded his career as a therapist and spiritual leader on asserting his indigenous authenticity as a source of power. He had been at the head of an organization called Fundación Carare for at least 15 years prior to his detention. The organization dedicated itself to many activities, among which included the promotion and provision of “traditional indigenous medical” services and psychological and spiritual healthcare in Bogota and cities such as Sogamoso and Medellín. A few years later, the neoshaman’s numerous followers – urban men and women; mostly middle-class professionals who later also drew in friends and relatives – came together as the Comunidad de Paz de Pensamiento Bonito (CPPB). If, on the one hand, the Fundación Carare served as a legal entity for the Taita’s activities, the CPPB became consolidated, above all, as a center of identity for the group of followers and, in Bogotá, had more than 200 followers at the beginning of 2010.
Ritual yage consumption in Latin America has extended to many very diverse scenarios. This expanding field stretches through the traditional therapeutic practices of the peasant farmers and indigenous people of Amazonia to neoshamanic tourism that attracts hundreds of enthusiasts from the Global North to the jungle and from the host of ayahuasca churches in different countries to the diversity of neoshamanic movements inspired by the New Age that include yage rituals.
In Colombia, the expansion of the yagecero field over the past 20 years is linked to the urbanization and elitization of yage consumption (a recognized practice of indigenous origin) promoted by the appearance of an urban spiritual therapeutic market led by indigenous and non-indigenous specialists known as “taitas yageceros.” This opening of the traditional field is profoundly permeated by the effects of the introduction of multiculturalism as a state policy in Colombia with the promulgation of the Constitution of 1991. The constitutional recognition of indigenous cultural difference opened a new legal section of differential rights for these populations. The expansion of yage consumption is given within this context of the legitimations of indigenous identities and of the recognition of their cultural manifestations. This is why, in Colombia, the legitimacy – and the legality – of yage consumption is given mainly in terms of a therapeutic practice belonging to the cultural sphere of certain indigenous traditions, in contrast to countries such as Brazil, where it is recognized for its religious nature of mestizo origin (Labate, 2004). The appearance of new specialists or “new yagecero taitas” in a kind of interface between the yagecero tradition of the Amazon and the ritual innovations aimed at the urban public has, over the past 15 years, markedly transformed the yagecero field, together with its operational dynamics and logic.
Thus, in light of the allegations of sexual assault by Taita Orlando Gaitán, we would like to explore the recent evolution of this interface in order to propose a number of clues that can help us understand the risks and threats of the current yagecero field. This work is based on my research as an expert advisor for the Prosecutor’s Office for this case, and it is supported by the data from a previous study (Caicedo, 2015), as well as new information gathered in interviews carried out with people close to the CPPB, its followers and former followers, between 2015 and 2016. It should be made clear that the judicial inquiry is still underway and to date there has been no official judgment on the case. I will therefore not delve too deeply into direct information from the allegations.
Orlando Gaitán is a well-known taita belonging to this generation of interface specialists who have legitimized themselves as traditional physicians, claiming that they are a continuation of the indigenous yagecero tradition, and asserting their “mission” to be that of propagating yage throughout Western society. According to his own statements, he was initiated as a taita under the guidance of reputable curaca3 of the Putumayo lowlands, who taught him the secrets of the plants of power. As he relates it, it was the legacy of his Carare Indian grandmother that gave him the power to heal. The real story of Orlando Gaitán is much more complex. Of rural origin, he became known at the end of the 1980s as a member of a renowned peasant organization that was awarded the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. He then began to work as a public official for the Ministry of Health, a position that allowed him to explore vast regions of the country, among them Putumayo in the Amazon foothills, considered quintessentially a territory of yagecero tradition. The friendships he built with some of the most renowned elder curacas in his travels as a public official were what permitted him to ensure, years later, that he had been initiated in the art of curing under the tutelage of these yagecero teachers.
In 2003, Orlando Gaitán began to host yage sessions in Bogotá. In the beginning, he presented himself as an apprentice of Taita Antonio Jacanamijoy, an Ingano Indian from Santiago, Putumayo, whom he recognized as the person who had given him the power to heal. But soon, any reference to his teacher disappeared. He called himself “taita” and took up the ethnic name “Carare” as the mark of indigenous lineage that he claims today, and that legitimizes him vis-à-vis his followers. Taita Orlando’s reputation grew, and with it came recognition in the media and by state bodies and academia.
He had many loyal followers who had been close to him ever since he began to host yage sessions and officiate as a taita yagecero in Bogotá. As the years went by, through Fundación Carare, the taita and his disciples bought land on the outskirts of Bogotá, where they built the maloca4 that they called “El sol naciente” [The rising sun]. For many years, they hosted at least two yage sessions per week that were open to the community and the interested public and a group that was formed with a strong internal hierarchy built around the taita’s leadership was consolidated.
The CPPB can be characterized as a neoshamanic movement (Hamayon, 2003; Vazeilles, 2003) whose main purpose was to “reach a state of physical and spiritual wellbeing through the path of yage opened by Taita Orlando.” From this point of view, his work is based on at least three principles. In the first place, the New Age inspired the movement. That is, a kind of secular religiousness typical of Western urban societies that is founded on the idea that humanity is sick and needs to be healed. The modality of healing, par excellence, is the individual transformation of one’s consciousness through a number of different corporal and ritualistic practices of different origin that each individual can combine as they wish (Teisenhoffer, 2008; Hanegraaff, 2001; Champion, 1989). The New Age is broadly extended through Europe and North America and has even made its way to the urban middle and upper middle classes in Latin America. Many of the neoshamanic practices recapture the indigenous rituals from different traditions: yage, peyote, San Pedro, inipi or temazcal consumption, vision quests, medicine wheels, etc., but they also recapture Eastern practices, such as yoga, Reiki, Ayurveda, and meditation. Given that healing is the main goal of the CPPB, the therapeutic work is its most important activity, and yage sessions are considered the nucleus of the therapeutic process. However, in addition to the yage sessions, the community has also embraced corporal rituals and techniques from different origins that take place within and without the actual yage session. This is important, given that the multiple cultural references make it almost impossible to determine the adequate and legitimate uses of such practices, as the activities of the new taitas are not supported by a single source of legitimation, but rather by several sources (Caicedo, 2014). This grants the specialist a certain degree of power to reconfigure the ritual scenario as he sees fit, providing him a strategic ambiguity before the sources of legitimation. We will come back to this point later on.
Another founding principle of the CPPB is its promotion of the indigenous yagecero tradition as a model to follow. In such contexts, what is understood by “indigenous tradition” is a representation of what the urban middle-class followers conceive as the “indigenous,” and less so as what these people’s traditions really are. Behind the idea of an “indigenous tradition,” there is an amalgamation of representations that are historically constituted on the Otherness of the nation (Segato, 2004), intertwined with representations of Indianness as construed by the global media (Caicedo, 2015). The representations of Indianness that guide these neoshamanisms shed light on a profound idealization of the indigenous, founded on the basis of an ignorance of its realities. This idealization also involves the circulation of social imaginaries and representations at different levels, as well as the use of sources of information such as the New Age-inspired cultural industry. Such imaginaries consider Indianness an ontology opposing the socio-industrial society and its values that is morally superior and an example of a source of possibilities for spiritual evolution. The idealized image of the indigenous in such contexts is easily identifiable in the added value given to anything – elements, symbols, and practices – that can be aesthetically qualified as “authentically indigenous.”
Not all indigenous people are the same; they do not necessarily think alike or have the same practices, nor do their values necessarily oppose the techno-industrial society. Moreover, not all of them consume yage. Even so, in such circles, the cultural practices of certain groups with a yagecero tradition, such as the Ingano and Kamentsá of the Putumayo highlands, and the Siona, Kofanes, Coreguajes, and Inganos of the Putumayo lowlands, are considered metonymies of the indigenous world. Now, in the case of neoshamanic yagecero groups such as CPPB, one has to bear in mind that the fact that Taita Orlando claims to have been trained by renowned indigenous yagecero curacas has allowed him to use the different forms of relationships that he built with some of them as a source of legitimation with the urban public. The legitimacy granted by having had renowned indigenous teachers is something that has multiple uses for the new taitas.
The third founding principle of the CPPB is the conception that yage is a sacred plant whose ritual consumption allows healing. The ingestion of yage is considered a form of healing that consists of “cleansing” physical, mental, and spiritual disease. Through yage, people can access a special state of consciousness – a “connection” – whereby the patient can “cleanse” himself through the pinta,5 or vision. This acceptation of healing contrasts with that of the yagecero traditions, whereby it is the specialist that extracts the disease from the body of the patient through ritual practices codified in techniques such as blowing, ritual chanting, and the use of the wairasacha or ritual broom (Garzón, 2004). In this case, what we observe is that, for the members, both conceptions of healing coexist, despite their contradictions.
In Colombia, there are a number of neoshamanic groups that are guided by similar principles of belief. Most work harmoniously and have adapted themselves to urban life without any significant inconvenience. In this context, however, the CPPB presents particular and significant characteristics. In recent years, the evolution of this group has exposed characteristics that provide clues to the context in which the allegations of sexual assault arose. In the following section, we propose an exploration of three characteristics of the CPPB that can help clarify the panorama; first, the ritual practice and recent configurations; second, the centrality of Taita Orlando as a charismatic leader; and third, the therapeutic model that guides the community’s practice.
The ritual practice of the CPPB provides a rich and complex scenario for exploring the reconfigurations promoted by the expansion of the yagecero field. Tradition and innovation merge and acquire different weights. For the followers of these neoshamanisms, the strict adherence to the “indigenous yagecero tradition” in ritual practice is an essential condition. By brandishing indigenous authenticity as the model to follow, it is possible to conserve what can be considered the traditional format of yage sessions. This means that the ceremony is presided over by the taita, it is carried out exclusively at night, the principle of the exclusion of menstruating women is maintained, and it includes the three basic moments: preparation, where the ritual space is ordered and the ritual time is initiated; the taking of yage, which begins with the yage spell or prayer, the distribution, drinking the yage; the follow-up; and, finally, the healing with which the ritual ends. These characteristics can be considered the basic framework of the ritual within which the ritual action is improvised (Losonczy, 2006) in the traditional mestizo and indigenous contexts of the Colombian Amazon foothills. The yage sessions set up by the CPPB have different modulations and new corpus rituals that have been introduced within the basic scheme throughout the years: ritual dance, the celebration of a Catholic Mass, therapeutic techniques, and corporal practices that are incorporated into yage sessions. Yage sessions can be open or closed to the public according to their purpose, in turn, modifying the repertoire.
The ritual activity that is exclusive to the community is, however, much broader and involves a varied range of appropriated and invented practices ordered into a sophisticated ritual calendar. In addition to the yage sessions, there were periodic rituals in which other plants of power were ingested, such as the coca leaf, and the shishaja (Gaultheria strigosa). Rituals were also carried out to pass on knowledge, as rites of passage, to observe advancement in the group’s internal hierarchy, and for collective healing and forgiveness rituals, among other purposes. Every ritual takes place at a specific time and fulfills a particular function within the order and hierarchy of the CPPB. What is clear is the role played by Taita Orlando in the definition of the community’s entire ritual activity. As the central authority, he was the only person who could decide on the type of rituals to be carried out, how and why, in what ways they should be modified, and the correct or incorrect way of carrying them out.
Thus, in a little less than 15 years of the CPPB’s existence, it displayed a kind of ritual fixation through which it structured itself and regulated and standardized all of the group’s ritual activities, and its procedures and hierarchies according to the leader’s personal decisions. This ritual fixation included the possibility of modifying and adapting the rituals, which happened alongside a standardization of the behavior of the followers that took place outside of the actual rituals. Various neoshamanic groups are characterized by a hyper-ritualization of the practices of their followers (Caicedo, 2015). Those who join movements of this nature tend to turn many of their daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, and bathing, into minor individual and collective rituals, granting them transcendental meaning associated with the idea of healing and spiritual evolution. This hyper-ritualization can lead to an excessive control of what people do and how they do it. In the CPPB, daily behavior has been the object of the reconfiguration of rules. The taita established these behavioral standards among his followers, who subsequently embraced them in full. Among other things, he codified greetings, dress, the way in which the taita had to be addressed, what should and should not be said in conversations, and the use of language, as well as regulating the followers’ diets, their private sexuality (e.g., avoiding or promoting sexual relations according to the calendar), and the type of physical contact allowed and prohibited among people of the same or opposite sex (e.g., no greeting with a kiss, no hugging) (Sánchez, 2015). All of the leader’s instructions on what to do and what not to do, and how to do it, were ultimately grounded on the idea that strict fulfillment of such rules was necessary for the achievement of spiritual evolution and that all the rules are part of traditional codes pertaining to the “path of yage.”
The CPPB is defined by its members as a unit. They tend to affirm that the group constitutes the body of the community, while Taita Orlando is its head. This metaphor on the figure of the body is telling of the taita’s role as a charismatic leader.
Orlando Gaitán ensures that he is responding to a call made by the taita elders who, according to him, chose him to open the doors to “indigenous wisdom” for the non-indigenous. The allusion to him being the “chosen one” served as a mark of authenticity and allowed him to position himself as the legitimate heir of the “indigenous tradition.”6 At the same time, this choice served to legitimize his condition as a bridge or mediator between two worlds, something he generally claimed to be his “mission.” The taita’s strong personality made his followers recognize him as someone who was extremely warm and, at the same time, particularly harsh. His harshness was explained as a test of the appreciation and commitment the community had for him. In this sense, it was not unusual that many saw him as a father figure; a father who they could trust, who they could follow blindly, and who imposed obedience at any price. For the followers, given his unique and personal relationship with the “invisible world,” Taita Orlando is the only person that can ensure their well-being. In fact, this was precisely his “mission.”
Thanks to his charisma, the taita portrayed himself as a model to follow, legitimizing himself as the only person able to judge the good or bad behavior of his followers. His power became so central that all of his decisions and actions were considered original and authentic, and, as such, incontestable. The authority granted to a leader by his group is undoubtedly the greatest source of power and manipulation (Luca, 2004). So, how did Orlando Gaitán become the charismatic leader he is today?
In the yagecero tradition, an apprentice receives from his teacher the waira – the bundle of leaves the shaman shakes in ceremonias – as a symbol of recognition of his power to heal through the auxiliary spirits that inhabit the world of yage (Pinzón, Suárez, & Garay, 2005). However, in the case of Taita Orlando, the type of initiation process he described was, at the very least, doubtful. On the one hand, the story about how he learned this art is ambiguous and imprecise; he presents all his teachers as highly reputable taitas who are already dead. On the other, he resorted to citification strategies for his qualification as a traditional yagecero physician that are not part of the traditional logic of yagecero learning. One example of this is the tendering of a legal certificate issued to him by an Ingano political authority as a diploma, copied from a legal diploma format. We highlight the use of original or copied official formats as a mechanism for indigenous authenticity, and as a new modality of legitimation for the yagecero field.
In the 1990s, when the first yageceros began to travel to the city to offer yage sessions to middle and upper-middle class intellectuals and academics, it was the latter that legitimized the indigenous practices in the city. Twenty years later, the equation is inverted. Currently, it is only a few elder taitas, recognized as political and medical authorities of their respective communities, who now serve as the sources of legitimation and guarantee for the practice of the new urban taitas like Orlando Gaitán (Caicedo, 2013). Taita Juan is a Siona yagecero who lives in the Amazon foothills. He met Taita Orlando a few years ago when he traveled to Putumayo, and they quickly became “companions” or “friends,” which, in the yagecero field, refers mainly to being allies in the exchange of medicinal plants. Thus, Taita Juan became the yage supplier for CPPB. For his part, Gaitán would take him to Bogotá every now and again as a special guest to guide yage sessions in the maloca. The presence of indigenous yagecero doctors like Taita Juan in the ceremonies reinforced Taita Orlando’s legitimacy.
From this perspective, it seems clear that Orlando Gaitán’s legitimation strategy was supported by the ambiguity between what would be a process of initiation with a teacher, and the relations of the commercial exchange of yage that exists among the taitas of Putumayo. In this sense, the relationships between Gaitán and the yageceros of Putumayo did not only become decontextualized; they shed light on a kind of instrumentalization of the links and the existence of power relationships between himself and the indigenous taitas for whom the city represents power, recognition, and success vis-à-vis the urban public (Caicedo, 2015).
As head of the organization, Gaitán made all the decisions in all areas. However, his best known skill was always that of diagnosing diseases and identifying the particular treatments for all types of physical, psychological, and spiritual disorders. Until only a couple of years ago, the CPPB health center was working in Bogota, combining traditional indigenous medicine services with clinical allopathic medicine. The legitimacy and legality of this health center consisted in promoting the complementarity of health systems constitutionally guaranteed by the differential legislation for indigenous communities,7 as well as in the regular use of an increasingly standardized medical terminology. Thus, the center had a fairly large group of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other trained health professionals, all followers of the CPPB. In his position as a traditional indigenous physician and head of the center, Taita Orlando acted as the highest diagnostic authority, while the doctors were in charge of monitoring the patients. The treatments included different types of therapy and plant-based medicines, as well as yage sessions, with the understanding that yage allows one to “see” the ultimate cause of the disease, and provides the cleansing which makes healing possible. In this sense, one of the particular features of this treatment was that some of the diagnoses and therapies were actually carried out by the doctors and the taita himself during the yage rituals.
Taita Orlando Gaitán considers disease as the product of inadequate behavior, or a “badly managed emotion,” which refers to an interpretation of the healing process as a moralizing exercise (Caicedo, 2015). In this sense, the body constitutes a text in which to read the problem that is producing the patient’s disease. Reading the body as a whole or by its parts – asymmetries, pain, tension, weakness, etc. – allows the determination of the ultimate cause of the disease, which, despite having a physical manifestation, refers to a behavioral disorder; that is, it refers to the realm of social relations and emotions that the person may display in his or her daily life. Thus, the yage ritual allows the patient to “cleanse” the polluting effect of such relations, and healing is given when bad behavior or bad emotions are transformed.8
The CPPB health center had a significant number of female patients, mostly from the urban working and middle classes. Although it seems difficult to generalize why this is so, some research shows that complementary and alternative medicine is more popular among women (Ghasarian, 2002). Many women went to the center because they were having physical problems, but many more went because friends and family had recommended that they should.9 These friends and family members had usually attended the CPPB looking for cures for different types of pain; work, family, and relationship problems; because they had suffered a loss; to deal with issues related to self-esteem, depression, physical violence and abuse, etc. With this varied demand, it is interesting to see how problems associated to the womb (i.e., the uterus) seemed to be the most recurrent diagnosis. By analyzing samples in the laboratory, Taita Orlando determined the state of the patient’s womb and established the type of treatment to be followed. The aim of the treatments was to “cleanse” the female reproductive organ through therapies, sitz baths, incense and medicinal elixirs, and, of course, yage sessions.
According to Gaitán’s therapeutic model, the female reproductive system as a “creator of life” means that women have more body parts than men. This theory of the female body is founded on a differential conception of female and male forces, that, in the case of women, is determined by their capacity to conceive and by the power attributed to the menstrual cycle. Due to their condition – that of having more body parts – it is affirmed that women are more emotional than men and, as such, more capable of making mistakes in social behavior, making them more sensitive to disease. The theory underlying these representations sets out that the menstrual cycle is a time when the woman’s womb opens to allow the menstrual blood to flow out. This is considered a significant source of contamination, as it is precisely through the womb that the woman expels the negative energy of all the social relationships she has experienced during her 28-day cycle. In this sense, a diagnosis of the state of the womb allows the determination of the cause of the condition, while therapies performed on the womb cleanse the effects of the woman’s greater emotionality, and the yage sessions allow her to reassess her patterns of behavior in order to achieve physical, psychological, and spiritual healing.
Undoubtedly, finding a scenario that pays special attention to individual wellbeing, proposing a physical cure for non-physical pain – then a slippage of the idea of healing from the physical to the spiritual – makes CPPB’s proposal attractive for those women looking for some kind of solution to their personal dramas. The CPPB therapeutic model offers them a disposition of prise en charge in which their condition as women is recognized as a differential marker that establishes special healthcare guidelines.
It is clear that Gaitán’s therapeutic model incorporates the conceptions of certain yagecero traditions, as well as those of some alternative medicines and of the practice of allopathic medicine. The taita, as an expert traditional physician, was in charge of diagnosing the disease and of telling the team which treatments and plant remedies to prescribe. For its part, the medical team acted as the taita’s collaborator in monitoring the patients but, above all, as the guarantor of his therapeutic practices to the clientele and the authorities, allowing the health center to function as an approved health service. This therapeutic model is a substantial example of the logics that bolster the interface between tradition and innovation; it is notable in that it is supported by records, each of which having its own particular forms of legitimation. However, for the actors involved, the taita’s eclectic logic in positioning himself as the authority was not to be challenged. We can therefore affirm that Orlando Gaitán displayed a strategy of cross-legitimation that consisted in resorting to diverse sources of legitimation that he was able to articulate in such a way that each source served not to legitimize a concrete practice, but rather, to legitimize the other sources, thus making them impossible to question.
The appreciation of the feminine is not excluded from this neoshaman’s therapeutic protocol. In many of the scenarios of the new yageceros, the female condition has a central importance within their discussions and practices (Caicedo, 2013; Peluso, 2014; Fotiou, 2014). Given that, within the traditional field, yage is associated with male power, these new urban spaces, considered heirs of the yagecero tradition in the city, adopt different mechanisms and strategies that include women at both discussion and practical levels, reconstructing the modalities of the ritual use of the psychotropic treatment.
In the traditional yagecero field, yage is considered male. The learning process of a curaca or taita consists in the accumulation of the substance that constitutes the shamanic power inside his body (Langdon, 1992). Only men retain the power of the teaching imparted by the yage, because only they can become curacas.10 However, the shaman’s power can also be lost, even that of a highly trained curaca. To maintain the power, strict rules of behavior have to be followed in daily life, as well as strict instructions insofar as contaminating substances that affect the power-substance. The main source of corruption to the power of a curaca yagecero is a woman’s menstrual blood (Amaya, 2008).11 In fact, it is quite common to hide yage from public view, given that a mere glance from a menstruating woman can damage it and make it useless. This is why yage is considered “celoso,” or guarded in the sense that it protects its own power by requiring to be hidden from public view when it is being prepared for use.
However, in the interface promoted by the new yageceros in the new urban scenarios, the association of yage with male power is reassessed. Among some neoshamanic groups, the modifications contemplate allowing the participation of menstruating women in the sessions; the inclusion of women that can be “initiated” as apprentices; the disregard of strict diets, and no restrictions concerning food and sexual relations, among other contraventions. Nevertheless, in more orthodox versions in which the exclusion of menstruating women does not enter into discussion, an interesting innovation of the field has to do with the appreciation of the female condition in the discourses of the followers of yagecero neoshamanisms. The power of women appears as a reference in the discourse associated with the sacred character attributed to nature, maternity, and menstruation; vital aspects that are, according to the followers, all undervalued by the techno-industrial society. This female power has also become a point of reference in various types of rituals (Caicedo, 2015). It should not surprise us that many neoshamanic groups have adopted rituals complementary to the yage sessions (the power of men) that are represented as ceremonies associated with the “power of women.” We must not forget that the followers of yagecero neoshamanism tend to share universes of meaning with followers of other currents associated with vast semantic fields of the New Age and its cultural industry.
The growing trend to make the feminine more prominent in the new scenarios could be read as an innovation pertaining to the broadening of the field. The sessions’ urbanization and elitization have shed light on the masculine nature of the yagecero tradition and opened a space to counteract the imbalanced participation of men and women in such practices. Considering the interested urban public and the social classes implicated, it would be very difficult to maintain such an imbalance. What is interesting about these innovations is that they not only establish complementary spaces or spheres for women, but that they have also gained increasing visibility among the urban public.
All these modifications are possible to the degree that the new taitas and their followers do not subscribe to the traditional networks that have historically been responsible for bolstering the field, and that do not respond to their forms of internal control, such as restrictions and prohibitions, attached to the hierarchies of learning and the exchange of power pertaining to yagecero shamanism (Pinzón & Suárez, 1991). In this sense, those who move through this interface can choose different traditional or non-traditional practices as they please and obtain legitimation when they are considered by their followers as authentically indigenous.
Almost two years after the detention of Taita Orlando Gaitán for allegations of sexual assault from various women from the CPPB, legal action is still underway. Beyond the indignation caused by the news and the solidarity felt with the claimants, official investigation has shed light on the enormous difficulties faced by the authorities in understanding what the CPPB and its therapeutic-spiritual practice actually consists of. It is difficult for the average citizen to understand, using common sense alone, a phenomenon such as neoshamanism, which resumes indigenous practices, including the use of a psychoactive substance, but whose followers are non-indigenous people who belong to the urban middle class and professional circles. In addition to this, the sparse media coverage of the case insists on presenting it as the consequence of an irresponsible use of “hallucinogenic products,” morally sanctioning yage consumers. But, beyond this, the case faces two new circumstances: on the one hand, as the procedures advance, certain CPPB followers will not report or testify against the leader, as they fear his shamanic power of retaliation. On the other hand, the accusing entity has not been able to find competent authorities to help it determine whether Taita Orlando is a traditional indigenous doctor or not, whether the practices of the CPPB are legitimate or not, and whether ritual yage consumption is legal outside of the indigenous communities and territories.
In this sense, my intention is to present the idea that this case should not be understood in a flat and generic fashion as a simple phenomenon brought about by the commodification and expansion of the consumption of “psychoactive drugs,” as has been suggested by a number of media sources. On the contrary, the case sheds light on the complexity of the reconfiguration of the yagecero field as part of the historical field of inter-ethnic relationships specific to the Colombian nation. This inter-ethnic field involves the common sense of the average citizen, that of the authorities and that of the urban neoyagecero. In the same way, the case speaks of a particular moment in which the changes in the way yage is used have led to the formation of an interface whereby traditional practices and innovations coexist. Such transformations are the product of processes of urbanization and elitization, crossed by the flows of the global market, but that, at the same time, respond to the multiculturalist policy of the Colombian state. The case also expresses a progressive trend towards the deregulation of this interface as a consequence of the changes in the legitimation regimens for yage consumption, as well as the emergence of new forms of legitimation based on romanticized representations of Indianness and on cross-legitimation strategies. Finally, this case also reveals that, despite the fact that most neoshamanic practices are harmless, some can display the features of sectarian danger, such as those of the CPPB, that evolved in a community of believers guided by a charismatic leader (Luca, 2004).
Let us now take a closer look at this interface. The complex relationship between tradition and innovation that activates the interface is not exempt from tensions and contradictions. The new taitas have broadened the field towards new audiences, but they have, at the same time, dislocated themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, from the traditional yage networks. The forms of legitimation of their practice seem to adapt with increasing ease to a logic of self-regulation and self-healing advocated by the New Age discourse as a means of wellbeing and spiritual evolution. This also implies stopping the recognition of external forms of authority and the mechanisms of legitimation or replacing them with others that appear authentically indigenous or authentically “Other.” The historical logic behind the amplification of the field, founded on processes of learning with curaca teachers and on an adscription to the yage exchange networks that establish positions within the hierarchy of power derived from the jungle, is slowly losing force (Pinzón & Suárez, 1991). In the case of this taita, his instrumentalization of friendship and commercial relationships with the yagecero curacas of Putumayo as a tool to gain legitimation in the city can also be read as a sort of relation of power, which, at the same time as allowing him to use the social representations of indigenous authenticity in his favor, begins to exclude the curacas from the interface.
On the other hand, the new taitas play with multiple therapeutic registers from different, and very diverse, traditions, ranging from allopathic medicine, to yoga, reiki, inipi, circles of words, etc., and they reconfigure the tradition into new versions; for example, by positioning a new rituality for the female public, while their practice does not rely on the formal recognition of external authority for its legitimation. On the contrary, they themselves become their own authority. In this sense, they have a great flexibility in terms of combining therapeutic practices and rituals but, above all, they use self-legitimization strategies. Who has the authority to decide who is and who isn’t a traditional yagecero physician in a field where recognition has historically been a scenario of dispute for power? And who could define it in a field where power and recognition are self-allocated with a certain degree of effectiveness? These are some of the contradictions we face. In fact, the reconfigurations that lead to this interface have progressively generated a deregulation of the field in terms of a trend towards the dilution of consensual models of authority that define who the specialists in the field are, of what their practice consists, and how this knowledge – synonymous to (shamanic) power – is transmitted.
The contradictions and tensions of the interface show that this is not reduced to the relationships between tradition and innovation. In the case of the CPPB, the centrality and authority reached by the charismatic leader and his ability to manage rituality as a planning and control device, the implementation of a therapeutic model aimed at a female clientele, and, above all, the possibility to compose cross-legitimation mechanisms, are conditions that jointly allow the generation of a space propitious for abuse, even if they do not in themselves explain it. As shown by Peluso (2014), similar conditions can be identified in other contexts in which abuse has been reported. In fact, we could even speak about a pattern of risk within the broader interface.
CPPB activities convoke very diverse social actors (taitas, middle-class followers, doctors, women, curacas, auxiliary spirits, etc.) who act in different dimensions (during the ceremony, in the surgeries, state institutions, social networks, etc.) and through different mediations (yage pintas, treatments, women’s rituals, state policies, representations of Indianness, etc.).
The relations of differentiation and exteriority are central to the power of healing in the same way as in traditional yagecero shamanism (Taussig, 2002; Chaumeil, 1999, 2003; Pinzón & Suárez, 1991). Difference represents power. The yagecero’s power grows as he captures the power of the “Other” and puts it at his own service. Chaumeil speaks of a shamanism of variable geometry that identifies elements of power in differences or in exteriority (2003). If we assume that the difference is not an essence, but rather that it depends on the position of the subject – in this case, the yagecero and those that participate in the ritual – the forms of Otherness depend on their position in the social field. In other words, their power (which is, in part, the power of difference) depends on the historical, social, political, and symbolic context in which they are inscribed and on their ethnic origin, gender, class, generation, etc.
The new scenarios of yage consumption relate the forms of difference and inequality, both within and without the ritual session. Thus, for example, during the healing ritual, the specialist – the taita or yagecero – plays an active role when he sweeps away and extracts the disease from the patient’s passive body. This structural inequality given during the therapeutic process involves the patient’s trust and the power he delegates to the taita who he presumes has particular expert knowledge. In this sense, the inequality is legitimate. On the other hand, in these new contexts, the figure of the taita has been deeply idealized by his followers. The romantic image of the wise healer-shaman that has circulated in the global information and consumer networks has filtered through to urban social sectors that access such representations. Thus, even more power is conferred to this idealized image.
The forms of difference at stake are, in turn, forms of power in context that act according to the logic operating within the yagecero field, but also according to the hegemonic logic of the broader field of the social sciences. During the healing sessions, as the differences between the taita and the patient are active, so are the ethnic and cultural differences (and inequalities) of all the participants (Indians, urban mestizos, gringos, etc.); differences between the urban and rural as part of a broader hegemonic geopolitical logic; class differences (between new urban middle- and upper-class followers, and the traditional popular class followers); generational differences (reflected in aspects so elementary as the authority of those followers with more experience, who know the leader since he began to practice with regards the younger, newer followers); and, last, but not least, gender differences in which the established patriarchy works effectively on bodies and desires, placing women, younger ones in particular, at a disadvantage. In fact, according to the therapeutic model, they are the main source of pollution and risk against the taita’s power and, at the same time, they constitute the ideal patient to diagnose, treat, and cure.
The convergence of these multiple differences is a condition of the healing process; or, in other words, healing, when it happens, is the metabolism of difference that, when healing is not produced, leads to the detonation of the power of difference, generating chaos. In this sense, the allegations of sexual assault are related to a pattern of social relations of difference – to the multi-relational nature proper of the yagecero field of power, to the strategies of cross-legitimation and a trend towards the deregulation of the interface – more than they are to the psychoactive effects of yage. Thus, the risk of abuse – not just sexual, but any kind of abuse – can be latent, despite the attempts to regulate the sources of legitimation that allow it.
Several authors have expounded on the existence of radical differences between traditional shamanism and neoshamanisms (Vazeilles, 2003; Perrin, 2000). Cases like this one reveal that, despite the distinctions between the type of actors, meanings, and purposes, yagecero shamanism and neoshamanism coexist within the same field of power where the power of difference is more active than ever.
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