Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (71 page)

In addition, Judge Michael R. Murphy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Tenth Circuit has noted that the commentary was drafted by a single author,
was published five years after the convention was negotiated, and is ambiguous on whether the ayahuasca drink-as opposed to the chacruna from which
it is made-is prohibited by the convention.84 Because the commentary was
not written by the negotiators or signatories to the convention, it would not
seem to be the sort of negotiating and drafting history, or postratification understanding of the parties, upon which courts traditionally rely in interpreting
an agreement.85

Similar issues arise for the Schaepe letter. The secretary is not a voting
member of the International Narcotics Control Board, and it is therefore not
clear whether the letter expresses the opinion of the board or the personal
opinion of its secretary. Indeed, it is apparently not up to the INCB, as an
enforcement agency, to decide what substances are or are not controlled under the convention. On such grounds, Judge Murphy has pointed to "serious
questions as to the relevance of the Secretary's opinion" regarding whether
the ayahuasca drink is covered by the convention.86 Even the Dutch court to
which the letter was originally proffered refused to consider it, "because it is
not implied by the Convention that the interpretation of the Convention by the
United Nations International Narcotics Control Board must be regarded as official and binding. 1117 While the interpretation of an international treaty by the
agency charged with its negotiation and enforcement is usually given great
deference by the courts, that agency in the United States is the State Department, not the INCB.88

Although the Supreme Court has clearly ruled that the ayahuasca drink is
covered by the convention, the Court left unresolved the issue of unmodified natural plant hallucinogens, such as the chacruna leaves for which Alan Shoemaker was arrested. The commentary, the Court held, was irrelevant to the
case before it, since what was at issue was the ayahuasca drink, not the chacruna leaves from which it was made. "To the extent the commentary suggests plants themselves are not covered by the Convention," the Court stated,
"that is of no moment-the UDV seeks to import and use a tea brewed from
plants, not the plants themselves, and the tea plainly qualifies as a 'preparation' under the Convention. "19 The question awaits resolution.

NATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE

Another recent development may have legal implications. On June 24, 2008,
the Peruvian National Institute of Culture declared that indigenous ayahuasca
rituals-"one of the fundamental pillars of the identity of Amazonian peoples"-are part of the national cultural heritage of Peru and are to be protected, in order to ensure their cultural continuity. The declaration was then
published on July 12, 2008, in the Boletin de Normas Legales, Bulletin of Legal
Regulations, the official government journal.9° The National Institute of Culture is charged by statute with recording, publishing, and protecting the Peruvian national cultural heritage.

Ayahuasca, the institute says, is "a plant species with an extraordinary
cultural history, by virtue of its psychotropic qualities and its use as a drink
combined with the plant known as chacruna." This plant, the institute continues, "is known to the indigenous Amazonian world as a wise or teaching
plant, which shows to initiates the very foundations of the world and its components. The effect of its consumption is to enter into the spiritual world and
its secrets."91

But note that it was not the ayahuasca vine itself that was declared a national heritage but, rather, its traditional knowledge and uses. The declaration
specifically distinguishes the effects of ayahuasca from those of other hallucinogens, due in part to "the ritual which accompanies its consumption, which
leads to a variety of effects which are always within culturally defined limits,
and with religious, therapeutic, and culturally affirmative intentions." Although the declaration vindicates the spiritual nature of the ayahuasca experience, it does so solely within the context of its role in traditional indigenous
rituals. Strikingly, the resolution explicitly differentiates the traditional use
and sacred character of indigenous ayahuasca rituals from "decontextualized,
consumerist, and commercial western uses. "91

SORCERY AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Napo Runa Indians who regularly go to work for the oil companies often have
themselves cleansed with tobacco smoke by a shaman when they return to
their villages. They are having themselves healed of wage labor; they are being
cleansed of capitalism., This is a small act of cultural resistance, affirming the
validity of their traditional values over against those of their white employers.

Shamans are the knowledge-bearers of their cultures, repositories of
myths, symbols, and values. The shaman thus embodies a cultural tradition,
and may function as a catalyst for cultural resistance against oppression and
assimilation.2

This should not be surprising. Shamanic power is involved in all community affairs; it is therefore inevitably involved in aggression, warfare, and the
struggle for political and economic power.3 Dark shamanism and assault sorcery especially have been viewed as acts of political resistance and thus as, essentially, acts of cultural healing. A dominant strand in the interpretation of
South American shamanism has viewed it as resistance against the brutalities
of colonialism, as an indigenous struggle for autonomy in the face of state
control, and as a discourse about modernity-gun violence, slave trading,
debt peonage, missionaries, epidemic disease, "the white man's materiality
and spirituality."4 Sorcery-like all shamanism-is political.

In this view, shamans play a role in resisting, ameliorating, and influencing the course of colonial contacts and history; they become the source and
symbol of an indigenous culture capable of defending itself against colonial power and the national state.5 As one Putumayo shaman reportedly told
anthropologist Michael Taussig, "I have been teaching people revolution
through my work with plants."' And the resistance can be more direct.

Sorcery, as a weapon of the weak, may be turned against the colonial
oppressor just as it may be used to enforce internal norms of sharing and
generosity.? It can function as a form of direct resistance-poisoning, killing, subverting the authority of colonial or oppressive powers. An example
of such sorcery in the Guyanese Amazon is canaima;8 in fact, it was the investigation of canaima by Neil Whitehead, a University of Wisconsin-Madison
professor of anthropology, that initiated the current interest in what has been
called dark shamanism and especially the view of assault sorcery as, in some
sense, socially integrating and as a vehicle of resistance to political and colonial oppression.9

Among many indigenous peoples of the Guyanese Amazon, the term canaima refers both to a mode of ritual killing and to its practitioners, a form of
dark shamanism involving the horrific mutilation and lingering death of its
victim, who becomes, after death, the shaman's food. Whitehead places both
the belief and the practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "as a defensive magico-military technique to ward off the new and overwhelming gun
violence and slave trading"-a form of dialogue with and about colonizing
modernity that continues to serve a variety of cultural purposes.'° The targets
of this dark shamanism are the wealthy and powerful generally, but also, in
particular, avaricious whites and those who through contact with whites have
acquired an unusual wealth of trade goods, by selling rubber or working in
the mining areas." A canaima practitioner can be recognized in part by his
refusal to use Western-style clothing, matches, metal cooking pots, or guns .12

But such resistance may also involve multiple levels of irony. The colonizer,
as cultural outsider, projects on the indigenous shaman the colonizing culture's own presuppositions concerning sorcery and indigenous savagery. In
turn, to be effective, the colonized sorcerer must conform to the expectations
and presuppositions of the colonizer-indeed, for purposes of resistance,
may reinforce and enhance such projections by emphasizing just those features of indigenous sorcery the colonizer finds most gruesome, repugnant,
and therefore terrifying. Thus the colony becomes a heart of darkness-a
place, as anthropologist Neil Whitehead puts it, of "mystical terror and savage violence. 1113 And this is so whether the indigenous attack sorcery is actually practiced or is simply a form of accusation.

This is the way Michael Taussig interprets shamanic healing in the Putumayo region of Colombia-as hidden political resistance to the terror and
suffering experienced by the Indians during a brutal colonial history. Taussig
originally came to Colombia as a dedicated Marxist physician, intending to
minister to rural guerillas.14 While doing this work, Taussig became fascinated by the historical violence in the area-he became, he says, a violence junkieand intrigued by the fact that the Huitoto Indians, the most oppressed and
marginalized people in Colombian society, were credited with possessing
magical power, which they then made available to poor white colonists in the
form ofayahuasca healing sessions.

This power was in fact, he says, a projection by the white colonizers onto
the shamanic other; to the magic already possessed by indigenous shamans,
"colonialism fused its own magic, the magic of primitivism. 1115 The shaman
then took this projected magical power, this image of shaman as wild man, to
use in his own healing practice, which he made available to the civilized colonizer. And the shaman as suffering healer-suffering under the violence of the
colonial state-comported with the official discourse of the colonial church.,'

Thus the interaction of colonizer and shaman was not a one-way process
where Indian culture was passively acted upon by external forces; nor was
the result an organic synthesis or syncretism. Rather, the interaction was a
"chamber of mirrors reflecting each stream's perception of the other," which
"folds the underworld of the conquering society into the culture of the conquered, the peon, the slave."I7 In fact, these forces came full circle, with impoverished white colonists seeking redemption at the hands of the colonized
natives. Taussig describes this encounter as one in which an indigenous shaman "heals the pain in the souls of the civilized.",' So, through the sweep of
colonial history, the colonizers provided the colonized with the image of the
wild man-"a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it
not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic

We need to be cautious, however, in applying such a grand narrative to the
facts on the ground, and avoid-as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins expresses it-"translating the apparently trivial into the fatefully political.-, Social
anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, an expert on Mongolian shamanism,
sees the shamanism Taussig describes as uniquely "reactive, absorptive, and
frantically hyperaware of colonial powers and technology."" Anthropologist
Michael Brown, who studied the shamanism of the Aguaruna of northeastern
Peru, says that "society cannot be relegated to the conceptual status of a penal colony without ... violating the complex and creative understandings of
those for whom we presume to speak.",,

Reducing shamanism to political resistance, Brown says, also undervalues
the internal complexity of indigenous cultures, which have their own "internal fields of conflict and points of contention. 1113 To the extent that resistance changes the distribution of power, status, and wealth, he says, it may challenge the internal status quo as much as it challenges the power of outsiders.24
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner puts it this way: "Resistors are doing more than
simply opposing domination. They have their own politics.125 And indigenous
resistance to acculturation may be supported by those nominally the oppressor, for their own reasons-for example, wanting the natives to return to their
own environment, leaving them safe in their communal houses, rather than
living in the city and appointed, say, secretary of education.21