Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (8 page)

For both the mestizo and the !Kung shaman, the noises dramatize both
the risk and the mastery of the shamanic performance. Don Roberto's loud,
liquid burping sounds indicate that he is drawing his mariri, transmogrified
phlegm, up into his throat, where it will protect him from the darts, the sickness, the rotten putrid matter that he will be sucking from the patient. His
slurping and sucking sounds dramatize the struggle to draw the sickness out.
His gagging and spitting indicate the horrid nature of the sickness and his
own strength in overcoming its nauseating power and expelling it from his
body. The noises dramatize his struggle with the sickness, his own risk in
handling the dangers assailing the patient, his mastery, his victory. The noises-visceral, corporeal-symbolize the triumph of the shaman's mouth over
sickness and misfortune.

Sleight of Hand

We can approach this question by thinking about sleight of hand. Early anthropologist Martin Gusinde reports the following performance by a shaman
in Tierra del Fuego: "He put a few pebbles in the palm of his hand, concentrated on them, and suddenly the pebbles vanished. 1114 Can anyone with even a
rudimentary knowledge of sleight of hand believe that this wasn't a conjuring
trick?

One Siberian shaman showed eighteenth-century researcher Johann Gmelin how he pushed arrows through his ceremonial coat, piercing a bladder
filled with blood to give the impression that the arrow had run through his
body.25 Other feats have puzzled anthropologists unschooled in conjuring.
Russian anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras watched a Central Alaskan shaman, in broad daylight, wring out a fist-sized stone so that a stream of small
pebbles fell from it and piled up on a drum placed below, while the original
rock remained intact. Bogoras was convinced that it was a conjuring trick,
but he could not figure out how it was done, especially as the shaman was
stripped to the waist.ze Such performances demonstrate why shamanism is, in
such large measure, a skill to be learned.

Of course, some shamans are more skilled than others. Anthropologist
and ethnobotanist Weston La Barre tells the story of Lone Bear of the Kiowa, who was so clumsy a shaman that he could be seen fumbling red clay from
his pouch and chewing it in his mouth, later to be spit out as his own blood.27
Some sleight of hand requires some investigation to unravel. In 1986, anthropologist Philip Singer made a film of Filipino "psychic surgeon" Reverend Philip S. Malicdan, who claimed to be able to open a patient's body with
his bare hands, remove pathological material, and close the wound. Present
at the filming were a professional magician, an audiovisual specialist, and a
pathologist, who came to the unanimous conclusion that the psychic surgery
was a fraud .21

Singer, remarking on the psychic surgery that he had filmed, concluded
that psychic surgery is "cultural behavior learned by its practitioners, just as
it represents cultural behavior by those patients, Philippine and Western, who
accept it as a gift of the spirit." In this context, psychic surgery is adapted shamanism. Psychic surgeons, Singer says, have simply made a transition from
traditional shamanism-extracting leaves, seeds, worms, or hair from the
body-to a simulacrum of Western scientific medicine-extracting blood, tissue, tumors, or organs.29 While this is a cogent analysis, it does not move our
own inquiry forward; under this view, a fraudulent shamanism had simply become a fraudulent psychic surgery.

Skeptical Shamans

There have, of course, been shamans who were skeptical of their own practice, and their stories are of interest. The Winnebago Crashing Thunder, for
example, longed all his life to be a member of the Medicine Dance, who could
be shot and brought back to life.3° During his initiation, he says, "I was shown
how to fall down and lie quivering on the ground and how to appear dead. I
was very much disappointed for I had had a far more exalted idea of the shooting. `Why, it amounts to nothing,' I thought. `I have been deceived. They only
do this to make money.' . . . Now throughout the ceremony I felt all the time
that we were merely deceiving the spectators. 1131

Claude Levi-Strauss retells a fragment of the autobiography of a Kwakiutl
Indian from the Vancouver region of Canada, originally obtained by Franz
Boas, which tells a more subtle story. Quesalid began as a skeptic, eager to
discover and expose the tricks of the shamans. To that end, he began to associate with the shamans until one of them offered to make him a member of
their group. His story recounts his lessons in shamanizing-a curriculum that
included pantomime, conjuring, and empirical knowledge; the art of simulating fainting and nervous fits; the learning of sacred songs; the technique
for inducing vomiting; rather precise notions of auscultation and obstetrics; and the use of spies to listen to private conversations and secretly convey to
the shaman bits of information concerning the origins and symptoms of the
ills suffered by different people. Most important, he learned how to hide a
little tuft of down in a corner of his mouth, bite his tongue or make his gums
bleed, throw up the bloodied fluff at the proper moment, and present it to the
patient and audience as the sickness, extracted as a result of his sucking and
manipulations.

One day he was summoned to the hut of a sick person who had dreamed
that Quesalid was to be his healer. To Quesalid's surprise, this first healing
was a success. Quesalid was puzzled that the healing was successful; it must
be, he reasoned, because the sick person "believed strongly in his dream
about me."

Not only did Quesalid discover that his conjuring worked, he found that his
conjuring worked better than that of shamans with less dramatic skill. While
visiting the neighboring Koskimo Indians, he saw that their shamans, instead
of spitting out the sickness in the form of a "bloody worm," as he did, merely
spit some saliva into their hands and claimed that it was the sickness. He requested and received permission to try his own method in a case where theirs
had failed; the sick woman declared herself cured. Quesalid was troubled. The
Koskimo shamans were even less honest than he was. At least he gave his clients some value-the sickness in its repulsive and tangible form. The others
did nothing.

Meanwhile, the Koskimo shamans were discredited and ashamed before
their people. They arranged a meeting with Quesalid and discussed their theory of illness with him. Sickness takes the form of a person, they said; when
the soul of that person is extracted, its body disappears inside the shaman.
What is there to show? When Quesalid performs, how does "the sickness
stick to his hand"? Quesalid refused to say. He maintained his silence even
when the Koskimo shamans sent him their allegedly virgin daughters to try to
seduce him and discover his secret.

When Quesalid returned home, he was challenged to another healing contest by an elder shaman of a neighboring clan. This shaman healed by placing the invisible sickness into his headring or his rattle, which would then, by
the power of the illness, remain suspended in midair. Once again, Quesalid,
with his trick of the bloody worm, healed where the elder shaman could not.
Again, the old shaman, ashamed and despairing, sent his daughter to beg
Quesalid for an interview. "It won't be bad what we say to each other, friend,"
the elder said, "only I wish you to try and save my life for me, so that I may not
die of shame, for I am a plaything of our people on account of what you did last night. I pray you to have mercy and tell me what stuck on the palm of your
hand last night. Was it the true sickness or was it only made up? For I beg you
have mercy and tell me about the way you did it so that I can imitate you. Pity
me, friend."

In exchange for this information, the elder explained his own sleight of
hand-a nail driven at right angles into the headring and rattle, which he held
between his fingers to make the objects look as if they were floating in the air.
He was a fraud; he admitted to being "covetous for the property of the sick
men." Once again, Quesalid remained silent. That night, the elder shaman
disappeared with his entire family, to return a year later, both himself and his
daughter gone mad. Three years later, he died.

So Quesalid pursued his career. He continued to heal, using the trick of the
bloody fluff, defending his technique against those of rival shamans. "Only
one shaman was seen by me," he said, "who sucked at a sick man and I never
found out whether he was a real shaman or only made up. Only for this reason
I believe that he is a shaman; he does not allow those who are well to pay him.
I truly never once saw him laugh. 1132

At the end ofLevi-Strauss's account, Quesalid had come to recognize that,
despite the fraudulent nature of shamanic healing, it was still magical and
effective. And so he continued to practice his healing. This conclusion may
reflect Levi-Strauss's own conviction that, from the shaman's point of view,
magical power is identified with effectiveness, which does not depend on
honesty or even purity of intention.33 I am not so sure. Quesalid was a complex and intelligent person; he was far from being a cynical fraud. I do not
think that his healing was independent of his intention-certainly not, if his
intention was to heal.

Shamanic Defenses

At the same time, there are shamans who defend the authenticity of their practices. The "shaking tent" is a ritual widespread among indigenous peoples of
North America, during which a shaman is tightly bound within a darkened
lodge; the structure shakes violently; the shaman-and sometimes the audience as well-converses with spirits who speak and sing; and the shaman,
when light is restored, is revealed to be unbound and sitting comfortably, apparently untied by the spirits.34

As professional magician Eugene Burger has pointed out, Native American shamans performing the shaking tent ritual had long been aware of the
skepticism of traders and missionaries and of their assumption that the shaman was responsible for both the shaking of the lodge and the voices of the spirits. Therefore, it is interesting to hear the comments of shamans who had
been converted to Christianity. The performers were unanimous in denying
trickery. One said:

I have become a Christian, I am old, I am sick, I cannot live much
longer, and I can do no other than speak the truth. Believe me, I did not
deceive you at that time. I did not move the lodge. It was shaken by the
power of the spirits. Nor did I speak with a double tongue. I only repeated to you what the spirits said to me. I heard their voices. The top of
the lodge was filled with them, and before me the sky and wide lands lay
expanded. I could see a great distance around me, and believed I could
recognize the most distant objects.35

Other shamans as well have argued for the authenticity of their performance. The healer don Antonio, of the Otomi Indians of Mexico, worked with
anthropologist James Dow. His healing performance is strikingly similar to
that of don Roberto:

The patient uncovers the part of the body where pain or discomfort
is felt. The shaman massages the area to work the object loose. He may
first magically draw up the object from deep inside the body to just below the surface with a crystal. Then he places his mouth on the skin of
the patient and sucks against it strongly. He clears his throat forcefully
and then spits a substance into a cone of paper.... He chews tobacco
in his mouth and sucks so hard that there is some blood mixed into the
mass of mucus and tobacco shreds that he spits out. The substance he
spits out is so loathsome and the retching sounds he makes are so unpleasant that I have seen no patients examine what is in the paper cone
when invited. Most are content to take his word about what it is.

Dow comments, dismissively, that "obviously the skin is not broken and he
doesn't really do it. This is a magical procedure the effect of which is to reduce
pain and discomfort by psychological suggestion." To don Antonio, however,
there is no cognitive dissonance in the fact that the object sucked from the
body into his mouth does not actually pierce the patient's skin:

When I suck objects I spit them out into a paper cone, because the
stuff is so rotten. Sorcerers implant cow meat, pig meat, sardine meat,
chicken meat, or whatever meat there is. They implant it, and so these bits of meat are cooked inside the body of their victims by the heat of the
blood. So when you're about to suck out this stuff, you won't be able to
stand its foulness. So this is why you use cigarettes.... At the moment
that the illness is about to surface in the body, put a piece of cigarette
in your mouth. If a piece of flesh is coming up, its rottenness will not
be able to resist. Spit it out.... With this you pull it up. Pull it up with a
crystal. This you'll have. But, the thing will not pop out on the surface of
the skin. It's inside the flesh. It's below the surface, and then it comes
up into your mouth.36

The Cultural Context

Neville Drury opens his book on shamanism by talking about Than shaman
Manang Bungai, who used monkey blood to fake a shamanic battle with an
incubus. Drury claims that this is not "true shamanism," which is "characterized by access to other realms of consciousness. 1137 But, apart from the unseemliness of an outsider anthropologist acting as neocolonial arbiter of the
authenticity of someone else's tradition, it is worth pointing out that Manang
is not a fake on his own terms or in the eyes of the culture in which he practices. The use of monkey blood in his shamanic performance requires a more
subtle analysis than a simple European dichotomy into the authentic and the
fake.

One theory we may call the trophy view. Anthropologist Marvin Harris, for
example, writes that such conjuring has a persuasive healing purpose, producing the evidence needed for achieving a therapeutic effect, "although from
the shaman's point of view the real business of curing involved the removal of
intangible spirit-world realities. 1131 Michael Harner distinguishes between the
spiritual essence of an illness, which may appear, in the "shamanic state of consciousness," to be, say, a spider, and its manifestation, in the physical plane,
as a "plant power object"-some twigs, say, which the shaman may hide in
the mouth and then display to the patient and audience, who are in the "ordinary state of consciousness," as evidence of the extraction.39 Lawrence Sullivan says that shamans "must make available to the naked eye what they see
in their clairvoyant penetration of the spirit domain. By means of miraculous
performances and shamanic miracle plays, the audience is able to see reality
reflexively, the way shamans see it." Dramatic curing performances "provide
for the public what ecstasy offers the shaman: a visible encounter with the
forces at work on other planes of existence. "4°