Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (29 page)

Government intervention faces serious obstacles in controlling a sorcerer.
Accusations are often vague and unsupported by physical evidence. Magistrates in such circumstances may issue a peace bond signed by the complainants and the alleged sorcerer; then, at least, when the accusations continue, as
they often do, the sorcerer can be charged with having broken the peace bond
and, thus, the law.'°S The mere presence of a police garrison in a previously
remote area may limit the amount of assault sorcery.'o6 However, local officials may be caught in a dilemma between, on the one hand, their reluctance
to give credence to sorcery accusations and, on the other, their own concern
about offending a sorcerer.

There are, generally, three ways local authorities can bring a sorcerer under control. The first is to put the sorcerer in jail, even for a few days. Among
the Napo Runa, for example, this is considered a terrible punishment for a
shaman, for it cuts him off from his relationship with the forest spirits.'°7
One such incarcerated sorcerer managed to escape the jail by cutting through
a window, sought refuge in a church, and petitioned for help from federal
authorities.'08

A second sanction is to confiscate the sorcerer's magic stones. Of course,
it is difficult to know whether a stone surrendered by the sorcerer, or left in an
easily discoverable place in his home, is in fact the magic stone he uses in his
sorcery. Still, crushing a stone in the presence of the complainants may help
to calm down an explosive community situation.'°9 A third-and surprisingsanction is to give the sorcerer an electric shock. It is believed that this will
weaken and dispel at least part of the sorcerer's power."° It is understandable
that local authorities are often reluctant to do this. But there can be further
creativity: in one case, dating from 1942, a sorcerer was ordered, by special
decree of the local political lieutenant, to believe in God. That put an end to
his sorcery."'

More recently, community and shaman organizations have attempted to
mediate such controversies. Fernando Garcia tells of one such mediation.
The accused sorcerer had originally agreed to hand over his magic stones and
other shamanic tools but had failed to do so. Community members caught
the alleged sorcerer, gave him electric shocks with a generator, and put him in
the community jail, from which he-understandably-escaped. Finally, local
authorities invited all the parties to mediate, including the accused sorcerer's
elders, representatives of the Federacion de Organizaciones Indigenas del
Napo and a delegation from the shamans' organization Asociacion de Shamanes Indigenas del Napo. They all went to the community that had allegedly
been affected by the sorcerer, where the visiting shamans drank ayahuasca to
determine who was telling the truth. On the basis of this consultation, they
required the accused sorcerer to heal all those he had made sick, and then to
hand over his magic stones.112

Dona Maria and don Roberto are curanderos, healers, as opposed to brujos,
sorcerers. They are both very proud of this; they have not succumbed to the
temptations of easy power; they have maintained their purpose and discipline.
They are, for many in their community, the primary resource in cases of sickness. Additional resources, such as biomedical clinics or the regional hospital
in Iquitos, are often not readily utilized, because of fear, unfamiliarity, cost, or
the recognition that the sickness, such as soul loss or magical attack, may not
be susceptible to cure by biomedical approaches.

Amazonian mestizos see hospitals as places where people go to die, or
where the only treatment they receive is a little piece of paper, a prescription for drugs they cannot afford., We should not have an overly optimistic
view of biomedicine in the Amazon. The standard of care can be appalling"amazingly awful and absurd," one anthropologist has called it.2 If patients
want sterile syringes, they have to buy them themselves at a local pharmacy
and bring them to the hospital for the doctors to use. Sitting in Chachapoyas,
capital of Amazonas, a friend, a native of the city, told me of her stay in the
regional clinic, where supplies were so scarce that surgeons conserved their
gloves by turning them inside out for use on the next patient.

DOES IT WORK?

Ayahuasquero don Juan Tangoa Paima claims that he can heal cancer, AIDS,
epilepsy, heart disease, stomach and intestinal conditions, sexually transmitted diseases, depression, drug addiction, mental disorders, migraines, anxiety, and obesity-indeed, he offers the "complete and total healing of any and all
afflictions. "3

Now, these are staggering claims. If don Juan can do even a tiny part of
what he claims-cure breast cancer, for example-then by all rights he should
be an immensely wealthy man, teaching his techniques at major hospitals and
medical schools. Of course, the term healing is vague. Does he mean by the
word heal the same thing that, say, a clinical oncologist means by it?

Here is a story. I was sitting with don Roberto late one night when a canoe
pulled up on the riverbank. A man half carried another up to the house, asking
for help: his cousin was very sick, he said, with pains in the belly. Don Roberto
performed the usual ten-minute healing: he sang icaros; he shook the shacapa, leaf-bundle rattle; he sucked at the man's belly; he blew tobacco smoke
over him. I sat there thinking: What if this man has appendicitis? I asked don
Roberto and the man himself if I could touch him: no fever. I gently pressed
his abdomen: no rebound tenderness or guarding; no pain on the right side
when pressing on the left; nothing special in the lower right quadrant. But my
relief at these findings simply postponed the real question. Do I believe that
don Roberto can heal acute appendicitis?

So, before addressing the thorny issue of how shamans such as doh a Maria
and don Roberto heal, it is worth posing a logically prior question: Do they
heal? There are remarkably few data on this question. In particular, even moderately long-term follow-up is lacking. As anthropologist and medical doctor Gilbert Lewis puts it, "It is rare to find examples of anthropologists who
record the frequency of therapeutic failures, do follow ups, or find out how
many people do not bother to come back next time to the shaman."4 Robert Desjarlais, a psychological anthropologist, points out that most research
on ritual healing attempts to explain how it works, without demonstrating
whether-and in what ways-patients actually feel betters

So, how well do shamans actually cure sickness? The answer is that no
one knows. To a great extent the body heals itself without intervention; most
diseases are self-limiting. Other diseases, such as arthritis, can be cyclic in
nature, and can appear to get better before they get worse. Another answer is
a question: cured compared to what? It is difficult to devise a metric-return
to work? return to premorbid functioning? return for follow-up? consumer
satisfaction? We cannot even assume that people or cultures have unitary or
unequivocal resolutions of suffering, or that we can recognize a culturally
relevant resolution of suffering when it occurs. We do not know how long a
follow-up is useful, even if we knew what we were following.

SICKNESS AS PROTEST

We must not forget that there is a suffering human person who seeks out
the curandero for relief of pain, sickness, sorrow, or bad luck. As medical
anthropologist Arthur Kleinman forcefully points out, there are two ways in
which suffering may be professionally delegitimated. Physicians and psychiatrists may reify the lived experience of suffering as a disease, stripping it of its
irreducible existential quality, moral commentary, and political performance.
The misery that comes of poverty, inequality, and hopelessness is transformed
and distorted into major depressive disorder or posttraumatic stress-trivialized, dehumanized, and now subject to medical authority. But, in exactly
the same way, anthropologists may interpret suffering as the reproduction of
oppressive relationships of production, the symbolization of internalized
conflicts, or resistance to authority-a transformation of everyday experience,
says Kleinman, "of the same order as those pathologizing reconstructions
within biomedicine. "I Such grand narratives of sociopolitical resistance eventually undermine the genuine moral claims of indigenous suffering and, as
Kleinman puts it, disparage "the personal pains and distress that sick persons
bring to shamans, which shamans try to 117

Sorcery is a weapon of the weak, resistance against oppression, and a way
to maintain social norms of humility, faithfulness, trustworthiness, confianza, lack of ostentation, reciprocity, and generosity. At the same time, sickness is
resistance against intolerable life situations, itself an ironic commentary on
the resentment of others. As political scientist and anthropologist James Scott
puts it, "To see the causes of distress as personal, as evil, as a failure of identifiable people in their own community to behave in a seemly way may well
be a partial view, but it is not a wrong view. And not incidentally, it is quite
possibly the only view that could, and does, serve as the basis for day-to-day
resistance. "I The sick person has a story to tell too.

Local Moral Worlds

I think it is important to focus on what Kleinman calls local moral worlds, resistance in microcontexts, avoiding the false sense of inevitability conveyed
in a large-scale social analysis. It is in these micromoral worlds-particular,
intersubjective, and constituting the lived flow of experience-that the experience of sickness is constructed. Local moral worlds, he says, are not simply
reflections of macrolevel socioeconomic and political forces: "The microlevel politics of social relationships, in the setting of limited resources and life
chances, underwrite processes of contesting and negotiating actions." g

Persuasive examples of this last can be found in Kleinman's writings on
pain and resistance, where complaints of chronic pain are readily absorbed
into a language of complaint about "enormous pressures and perceived
injustices," authorizing "access to the moral devices of accusation and
restitution"-a way to relegitimate a world that has been delegitimated by
powerful others, to move from passivity in the face of suffering to an assertive
central orientation. "We resist," he writes, "in the micropolitical structure,
oppressive relationships."" This communicative subversive body remains an
only partially conscious, and thereby protected, form of protest. Sickness may
be many things, but it is often a refusal; the "complex, creative, somatic, and
political idiom" of sickness can express itself as refusal to work, refusal to
struggle under self-defeating conditions, refusal to endure, refusal to cope.This resistance may extract a price that seems, to an outsider, greater than that
of the original situation; but it can be a cry for those who have no other voice.12

Channels of Microresistance

Resistance itself takes socially prescribed forms, flows in channels laid out by
medical culture. Bioethicist Carl Elliott discusses a recent sickness-the peculiar condition known as apotemnophilia, the compulsion to amputate one's
own healthy limbs.13 The author applies to this condition the insights of philosopher of science Ian Hacking on dissociative disorders.14 Hacking argues
that psychiatrists and other clinicians in fact helped to create the epidemics
both of fugue in nineteenth-century Europe and of multiple personality disorder in late-twentieth-century America, simply by the way they viewed the
disorders-by the kinds of questions they asked patients, the treatments they
used, the diagnostic categories available to them, and the way the patients fit
into these categories. Hacking calls this the looping effect-the fact that people
are conscious of the way they are classified, and alter their behavior and selfconceptions in response to their classification.

Elliott applies this insight to apotemnophilia: once the diagnostic category
exists, people begin to conceptualize and interpret their experience in those
terms just as has happened, for example, with gender identity disorder, or
multiple personality disorder, or fugue or hysteria in the nineteenth century.
This same insight can be applied to culture-bound syndromes as well: in a
cultural setting where a particular diagnostic category exists-soul loss, say,
or the intrusion of a pathogenic object-both the experience and the behavior of the sick person will be shaped by that person's understanding of the
sickness. For example, when people believe that they are performing their social roles less adequately, according to their own criteria, than others in the community, the illness category ofsusto, soul loss, provides a framework within which to conceptualize their experience and seek appropriate healing.15
The very existence of an apotemnophilia diagnostic category, the availability
of Web sites and support groups, directs previously inchoate resentments
into a new-now medically validated-channel.