Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (26 page)

There has been very little research on sexual relations between shamans and
plant spirits. Certainly the spirits can be muy celosa, very jealous, about sexual relations between shamans and human persons. Relations with the spirits may imply both sexual abstinence with humans and sexual alliance with
the spirits. There are reports of erotic ayahuasca visions;, regular ayahuasca
use apparently does nothing to abate-and, by report, may significantly
enhance-sexual desire and performance. Psychologist Benny Shanon notes
that ayahuasca drinkers "often detect a sensuous, even sexual flavor in whatever surrounds them," including the eroticization of plants and trees; he reports
his own visions of semi-clad women dancing erotically and lasciviously.2 Ethnobotanists Richard Schultes and Robert Raffauf remark, rather dryly, that
"erotic aspects often reported may be due to the individual differences of the
participants."3 Don Agustin Rivas reports that, while following la dieta, a
beautiful strange female spirit, named Yara, would appear to him at dawn, lift
his mosquito net, and lie down with him. He would awake just before having
sex with her.4

Here is an example. I was drinking ayahuasca with don Romulo and his
son, don Winister. They were both singing icaros at the same time, but different ones, producing a decidedly eerie effect. Suddenly in front of me I saw
a beautiful green woman, lying back on a couch or bed; her arms and fingers
were long; her body was covered in some kind of gauzy material. The moment was intense, erotically charged; I leaned forward and kissed her. Whoa!
said my rational mind. Is this all right? Are you allowed to have sex with plant
spirits? The embrace was arousing; I wondered what my wife would say. The
woman faded away, leaving me with a feeling of relief and disappointment.

Among indigenous Amazonian peoples, there are widespread reports of
sexual relations between human persons and other-than-human persons. Anthropologist Elsje Lagrou tells the story of a Cashinahua woman shaman who
married the snake spirit, who came to make love to her at night, and, because
of her new spirit husband, no longer had sex with her human husband. One
of the signs of her alliance with the spirit world was her deformed mouth,
eaten away by the spirits, people said; another was her successful healing of
fever in small children.5

Among the Napo Runa, the supai, the forest spirits with whom the shaman
interacts, enter into sexual relationships with humans, often long term; one
shaman was taught by a supai huarmi, female spirit, and his wife was made
pregnant by a supai runa, male spirit.' The daughter of a famous Napo Runa
shaman told an interviewer, "My mother gets angry when she wants to sleep
with my father. The supai huarmi gets between them and doesn't let 117
Napo Runa women who give birth to deformed children are said to have been
impregnated by supai and, when the child dies, often become shamans.'

The Shuar tell stories of men who have sex with tsunki women, the shamanically potent underwater people, a manifestation of Tsunki, the primordial
shaman, and get power from them; a female shaman has reported a vision of
having sex with a male tsunki.9 Widowed or unmarried Achuar women mayalthough this is rare-become shamans, and maintain exclusive sexual relationships with Tsunki.i° Ashaninka apprentice shamans suck tobacco paste
until they transform into jaguars, fly through the air, and couple with the
spirit of tobacco in the form of a woman, whereupon they become shamans,
united with the tobacco spirit, traveling the forest as a jaguar."

Who was my Green Lady? What should I have done?

The conditions for which a mestizo will seek the help of a curandero are not
coextensive with what a North American would consider a disease. What we
normally consider to be diseases are, in Amazonian mestizo culture, merely a subset of the misfortunes, the sufferings, and the intentionally inflicted
harms-fever, pain, bad luck in business, bad relationships with neighbors,
an unfaithful spouse, infertility, malaise, accidia-which are all, in some
sense, sicknesses requiring cure by a healer. Just as important, these sicknesses are almost universally caused by the malevolence of other people, by
jealousy, envy, and resentment, sent in the form of a dart into the suffering
body, to be sucked out and healed by the mouth of the healing shaman.

DISEASE AND ILLNESS

I have used the term sickness with some deliberation. There is a now wellestablished ethnographic distinction between disease and illness., Disease is
biological and biochemical malfunction; illness is impaired functioning as
perceived by the patient within a particular cultural context.' Disease is not
limited to humans; we can speak, say, of a diseased apple. But, as medical anthropologist Byron Good puts it, "Disease occurs, of course, not in the body,
but in life."3 Thus the use of the term illness for the social, lived experience
of suffering, something innately human.4 Eric Cassell, a physician, makes a
similar distinction; he uses the term illness to stand for what the patient feels
when going to the doctor and disease for what the patient has on the way home
from the doctor. Disease, he says, is something an organ has; illness is something a person has.5 This distinction has been proposed for its heuristic value. The distinction between disease, as a phenomenon seen from the perspective
of the medical practitioner, and illness, as a phenomenon seen from the perspective of the sufferer, "aspires to reorient medical practices in society. "I

Corresponding to this distinction is one between curing and healing. Curing is the successful treatment of a specific biomedical condition, such as a
duodenal ulcer; healing is the making whole of a person seen as an integrated
totality with physical, social, and spiritual dimensions.? Stereotypically, biomedicine cures a disease, and ethnomedicine heals an illness.'

But ethnomedicine-just like biomedicine-always involves a mix of curing and healing.9 Dona Maria and don Roberto are as eager to cure specific
diseases, such as malaria, as they are to heal sociospiritual conditions such as
bad luck or soul loss; as Byron Good notes, "AU medicine joins rational and
deeply irrational elements, combining an attention to the material body with
a concern for the moral dimensions of sickness and suffering."" To a cynical
observer, it might appear that the partitioning of roles between the curing biomedical specialist and the healing shaman is a way of preserving the role of
the shaman in the face of biomedical doubt as to whether the shaman is able
to cure any disease at all.

In fact, diseases are themselves constructs that vary according to the specialty of the medical practitioner, the context, the audience, the type of condition, the personal characteristics of the doctor, and the doctor's position
in the medical hierarchy.- Tuberculosis, for example, is often taken paradigmatically as a disease, caused by an identifiable pathogen, responsive to
streptomycin; yet tuberculosis is a complex of symbolic associations and social meanings that are irreducible to a disease, from its romanticization in the
nineteenth century to its resurgence in the twenty-first, in combination with
that other highly symbolic complex, HIV. Is soul loss an illness or a disease?
Is anorexia nervosa an illness or a disease?

That is why I propose to use the term sickness-an attempt to evade the
culturally loaded dichotomy between illness and disease. Anthropologist and
epidemiologist Robert Hahn defines sickness as "a condition of the self unwanted by its bearer."" That is the definition, broad enough to be useful, that
I will adopt here.

TYPES OF SICKNESS

There are several overlapping ways in which mestizos categorize sickness.
One category is variously labeled as natural, God-given, a curse of God, a punishment
of God-just a condition of everyday life.13 Such natural sicknesses respond to store-bought medicine, antibiotics, injections, and hospital treatment; they
do not require-or do not respond to-the intervention of a shaman.

There is not a lot of agreement as to which sicknesses fall into this category. Generally, natural sicknesses include colds, sore throats, skin infections, malaria, and parasites. Shuar shaman Alejandro Tsakim Suanua refers
eye problems, amoebas, infections, and cataracts to a biomedical physician;14
mestizo shaman don Agustin Rivas refers any sickness caused by microbes or
requiring surgery;15 don Roberto refers cases of stroke or cancer. Among the
Shuar, natural sicknesses include those associated with white people, such as
cholera.,'

But accidents-falls, snakebites, a tree falling on someone, a bad machete
cut-are not natural.'? And some sicknesses are noticeably odd from the outset: the symptoms begin suddenly, the pain is focused and affects a particular
part of the body, the patient deteriorates rapidly, there are bad dreams, there
are inscrutable changes in bodily function and affective states, and the instruments of Western medicine are unavailing.,' Sometimes what might otherwise seem a natural sickness-whooping cough, for example-has virulence
far beyond the ordinary.19 In such a case, the sickness is not natural, but has
been inflicted by a person-a brujo, sorcerer, or an enemy employing any of several well-known forms of folk sorcery. Such sicknesses are caused, not by microbes, but by a failure of right relationship with a human being. Alejandro
Tsakim calls such sicknesses, induced by human sorcery, wicked sicknesses.20
The work of the shaman is to reveal these human acts of evil against other
human beings.21

Often the shaman has considerable input as to whether a sickness is natural or wicked. Achuar shamans claim that pathogenic projectiles have the appearance of bundles of light, while natural sicknesses appear like a bronze
vapor arising from the affected organ. Most sicknesses they see are wicked,
since presumably measures against natural sickness have already failed.22
Conversely, don Dionisio Moron Rios says that if he cannot cure a patient with
traditional medicine, then he tells the patient to go buy medicine at the pharmacy-that he knows it will make the patient better, because the spirits have
told him so.23

Sometimes wicked sicknesses overlap with biomedical diagnoses. Dona
Maria suffered what the biomedical doctors in Iquitos called a massive stroke,
from which she eventually died; yet many of her friends claimed that she was
in fact the victim of virotes, magical darts, projected into her body by a specific person, a brujo, for reasons of greed and resentment. It is in this sense, perhaps, that don Agustin Rivas considers cancer, heart attacks, and ulcers to
be-at least sometimes-capable ofshamanic healing.24

CAUSES OF SICKNESS

Beliefs about sickness can be classified as internalizing or externalizing.25 In
many ways these beliefs correspond to the distinction between biomedicine
and ethnomedicine. Thus, internalizing explanations focus on pathophysiological processes in the development of illness. Externalizing explanations,
on the other hand, look to causes that lie outside the body-mal de ojo or the
evil eye, for example, or brujeria, witchcraft or sorcery, with these often, in
turn, traced to social causes, such as resentment or envy. A similar distinction
may be drawn between naturalistic and personalistic etiologies.21 In naturalistic
systems, illness is explained in impersonal, systemic terms-caused by an excess of the cold humor, for example, or by the intrusion of bacteria into the
body. In personalistic systems, illness is due to the purposive intervention of a
person, whether human or other-than-human.27

Amazonian mestizos frequently resort to externalizing and personalistic
explanations for their sicknesses. Nor are they unusual in the Amazon in doing s0.28 Among the Xinguana of southern Amazonia in Brazil, "nothing is
more firmly rooted in the mind ... than the notion that most of his afflictions
are directly due to sorcery, and that a number of persons he comes into contact with every day are witches. 129 Among the Campa, "misfortunes of various
sorts, from a swollen leg to bad luck in hunting, are understood as resulting
from evil spells cast by vengeful enemies."3° According to the Desana, the
majority of their sicknesses are due to exogenous aggression-either to attacks by other-than-human persons of the waters and jungle or to human malevolence.31 In Tukano culture, "death and disease are always regarded as the
consequence of evil magic exercised by an enemy, 1132 and "usually malice lies
behind an individual's illness or accident. 1133 For the Cubeo, "most deaths, illnesses, and misfortunes are products of human malevolence. 1134 The concept
of sickness that prevails among the Yagua is of exogenous pathogenesis: the
sickness always comes from outside; all harm is imputed to the malevolence
of another and has a supernatural source.35 The Waiwai believe that all death
results from the intentional implementation of spiritual violence and the presence of the dark shaman.36 Among the Marubo, sorcery is held responsible for
the majority of sudden and unexplained deaths.37