In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia

474 Pages·2004·3.61 MB·English

by  Neil L. Whitehead

Edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright
1 Introduction: Dark Shamanism, Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright
21 The Order of Dark Shamans among the Warao, Johannes Wilbert
51 Dark Shamans and the Shamanic State: Sorcery and Witchcraft as
Political Process in Guyana and the Venezuelan Amazon, Silvia Vidal
& Neil L. Whitehead
82 The Wicked and the Wise Men: Witches and Prophets in the
History of the Northwest Amazon, Robin Wright
Sorcery Beliefs, Transmission of Shamanic Knowledge, and Therapeutic
Practice among the Desana of the Upper Rio Negro Region, Brazil,
Dominique Buchillet log
132 The Glorious Tyranny of Silence and the Resonance of Shamanic
Breath, George Men tore
157 A Blend of Blood and Tobacco: Shamans and jaguars among the
Parakana of Eastern Amazonia, Carlos Fausto
179 The Wars Within: Xinguano Witchcraft and Balance of Power,
Michael Heckenberger
202 Siblings and Sorcerers: The Paradox of Kinship among the Kulina, Donald
Pollock
215 Being Alone amid Others: Sorcery and Morality among the Arara,
Carib, Brazil, Mbrnio Teixeira-Pinto
244 Sorcery and Shamanism in Cashinahua Discourse and Praxis, Purus
River, Brazil, Elsje Lagrou
272 The Enemy Within: Child Sorcery, Revolution, and the Evils of
Modernization in Eastern Peru, Fernando Santos-Granero
306 Commentary, E. Jean Langdon
314 Afterword: Substances, Powers, Cosmos, and History, Andrew
Strathern & Pamela J. Stewart
321 Contributors
324 Index

Shamanism is a burgeoning obsession for the urban middle classes around
the globe. Its presentation in popular books, TV specials, and on the Internet is
dominated by the presumed psychic and physical benefits that shamanic
techniques can bring. This heightened interest has required a persistent
purification of the ritual practices of those who inspire the feverish quest for
personal meaning and fulfillment. Ironically, as Fausto points out in his essay in
this volume, given the self-improvement motivations that have brought so many
into a popular understanding of shamanism, two defining aspects of shamanism
in Amazonia-blood (i.e., violence) and tobacco-have simply been erased from
such representations (see also Lagrou, this volume). Such erasure is not only a
vain self-deception but, more important, it is a recapitulation of colonial ways of
knowing through both the denial of radical cultural difference and the refusal to
think through its consequences. This volume is intended to counteract that
temptation.
All of the authors whose works are presented herein are keenly aware of the
way in which salacious and prurient imagery of native peoples has serviced the
purposes of conquest and colonization over the past five hundred years. In
missionary writings, for example, ideas about "native sorcery" and the collusion
of shamans with "satanic" forces meant that such individuals were ferociously
denounced and their ritual equipment and performances were banned from the
settlement of the converts. In this context no distinction was made between the
forms and purposes of ritual practice: curers as well as killers were equally
persecuted. Thus, the rehabilitation of shamanism as a valid spiritual attitude and
a culturally important institution that has taken place over the past twenty years
through the enthusiastic, if ill informed, interest of the urban middle classes
might be seen in a more positive light-that is, as rescuing a form of cultural
variety that would otherwise be lost in the cultural homogeneity of globalization.
Nonetheless, such a rehabilitation through a positive, almost cheery, presentation
of the native shaman as psychic healer distorts the actual ritual practice of
Amazonians and other native peoples in a number of ways, as the materials
collected here will show. Moreover, the notion that shamanism should be
"rehabilitated" in this way misses the important point that it is the supposed
illegitimacy of shamanic practice that should be questioned, rather than trying to
justify cultural difference merely through the possible benefits it might have for
ourselves. Taking seriously cultural difference in this context means that we
have also to ask what other reasons there were for the colonial desire to repress
this particular facet of native culture. As the essays in this volume indicate, a
large part of the answer to that question must be the very centrality of shamanic
ritual power to the constitution of native society and culture, as well as the role
that "shamans" thus played in resisting, ameliorating, and influencing the course
of indigenous and colonial contacts and subsequent histories. The consequence
of this issue must also be to recognize that shamanic idioms are still very much
present in the exercise of political power from the local to the national levels and
that this recognition makes an understanding of all aspects of such ritual action a
fundamental project for an anthropology of the modern world.

What then is "shamanism"? Anthropological debate in Amazonia has
considered whether or not the term describes a unitary phenomenon, and has
persistently questioned its institutional existence and its presence as a defined
social role (Campbell 1989; Hugh-Jones 1996; Fausto, Heckenberger, Pinto, this
volume). Nonetheless, there is a utility to the term that has underwritten its
persistence in the literature and its continuing adoption in the present. This
utility consists in the fact that the performance of ritual specialists throughout
Amazonia shows a number of resemblances that, although they do not represent
a clear and distinct category of ritual action, nonetheless reveal ethnographically
a variety of symbolic analogies and indications of historical relatedness.
Moreover, native terms such as paj6 or piaii have passed easily from their
original linguistic contexts into the mouths of many different speakers across
Amazonia. Part of the reason for this may well be an apparent homogenization
of ritual practice in the face of evangelism by Christian missionaries or other
agents of colonial domination, but even if this were the only reason it would still
be an important ethnographic fact about contemporary Amazonian cultures.
Equally, anthropologists have tended to overlook or ignore the issue of violence.
No doubt this is partly due to cultural prejudice against the exercise of violence,
because it is held that its representation among others will only serve to lessen
the authority and validity of their culture differences as something to be