Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (30 page)

In our culture, people suffering from general malaise and a variety of nonspecific symptoms may conceptualize their illness as, say, multiple chemical
sensitivity, and will search their memory for some relevant initiating chemical exposure; similarly, people who conceptualize their illness as susto will
search their memory for some relevant initiating fright. In both cases, what
might otherwise be a minor and forgotten incident becomes significant. In
both susto and multiple chemical sensitivity, perceived social and personal
failures are attributed to a culturally defined sickness.

SICKNESS AS IRONY

Such forms of sickness-as-resistance are forms of irony. Housewives' agoraphobia, for example, can be seen as both a ritual display of and a protest
against the cultural pressures and injunctions on women, especially those
that demand a restrictive domestic role. By overconforming to this stereotype,
a woman is able to dramatize her situation, mobilize a caring family around
herself, and at the same time also restrict her husband's movements, by forcing him to stay at home and look after her." The sufferer says, "You wish to
constrict my life choices? Well, look at this." Anorexia, apotemnophilia, multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, susto, and sorcery can all be seen, at
least in part, as ironic embodiments of-and thus microresistance to-states
conceptualized by the sufferer as forms of starvation, amputation, powerlessness, constriction, fear, and guilt.

THE SICKNESS NARRATIVE

Narrativization is a process of locating suffering in history, of placing events
in a meaningful order in time. It also has the object of opening the future to
a positive ending, of enabling the sufferer to imagine a means of overcoming suffering.'? One of the central efforts in healing is to symbolize the source
of suffering, to find an image around which a narrative can take place-what
medical anthropologist Byron Good calls "the struggle for a name."" Psychologist Theodore Sarbin proposes what he calls the narratory principle-that
human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures. This narratory principle "operates to provide meaning to
the often nonsystematic encounters and interactions experienced in everyday
life."19

This process is frequently called emplotment, a term derived from Aristotle
through philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Emplotment is an operation, a putting-into-the-form-of-a-plot-specifically, "the operation that draws a configuration
out of a simple succession" and thus "integrates into one whole and complete
story multiple and scattered events. 1120 Plot is a "synthesis of the heterogeneous."" The unexpected or unexplained in one's life becomes meaningful
when emplotted; actions are not random events, but become beginnings,
middles, and ends in a story: "In other words, we understand our own livesour own selves and our own places in the world-by interpreting our lives as if
they were narratives, or, more precisely, through the work of interpreting our
lives we turn them into narratives, and life understood as narrative constitutes
self-understanding. 1122

Types of Narrative

Emplotment-creating a narrative-can take different forms. Literary critic
and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, discussing causality in narrative, distinguishes between ideological narrative and mythological narrative. In the former,
events relate to each other as particular manifestations of a general law; in
such a narrative, isolated and independent events, even performed by different characters, reveal the same rule, the same ideological organization. In
medical terms, such a narrative would be a case study: the story of a sickness
would illustrate the general laws that apply to sickness of that sort. On the
other hand, in a mythological narrative, events enter into immediate causal relations with each other: the story of my sickness would trace a narrative thread
from the envy of my neighbor to the magical dart embedded in my throat.23 In
linguistic terms, ideological narrative is paradigmatic, and mythological narrative is syntagmatic.

Much of therapeutic interpretation involves efforts to turn the patient's
mythic narrative into an ideological account. Turning myth into ideology
serves several simultaneous functions-to give a specific kind of coherence
to the story, to give the healer technical control over the interpretation and
continuation of the story, and to reinforce the reality of the ideology from
which it draws its structure.24 While this account is intended as a critique of
biomedicine's ideological reduction of patient narratives, I think that-just as
with the idea of healing and curing-all medicine utilizes both forms of narrative. Dona Maria and don Roberto, certainly, conceptualize suffering both mythologically, as a patient's unique story, and ideologically, as subsumed under cultural and, ultimately, moral paradigms of mutuality, resentment, and
revenge.

Narratives of Sickness

We have previously discussed the mestizo sickness narrative. Now we can begin to discern its function. The narrative of a sick person seeks, in Ricoeur's
terms, to "extract a configuration from a succession.125 A sickness narrative
describes the events of sickness along with their meaning for the person who
experiences them; Byron Good, adopting Ricoeur's term, says that they emplot
experience, revealing its underlying form .21 In this usage, plot is the underlying structure of a story, and emplotment is the activity of making sense of the
story.27 For the sick person, the sickness narrative sequence may be clear, but
may make no sense; it is told "from the blind complexity of the present as it is
experienced. 1121

To heal, then, is to rebuild the shattered lifeworld of the sick person. As
cultural anthropologist Thomas Csordas says of Navajo healing, the criterion
of success is that the patient come to "understand"-that is, to contextualize
life experience in terms of a particular philosophy, to change the "assumptive world" of the sufferer.29 "The decision to seek medical consultation is
a request for interpretation," says Leon Eisenberg, a cultural psychiatrist.
"Patient and doctor together reconstruct the meanings of events in a shared
mythopoesis."3° Anthropologist and ethnobotanist Daniel Moerman puts it
this way: "Meaning mends. 1131

Sickness implicates the subjective response of the person, and of those
around the person, to being sick; but, more than just the experience, it includes the meaning of the experience. To say that my sickness results from a
magically propelled pathogenic object is incomplete, inadequately emplotted.
The narrative-or story about how and why a person became sick-may include a wide range of events, including the actions of both human and otherthan-human persons, spread over a long period of time. Telling such stories of
sickness is a way of giving meaning to the experience of sickness, placing it in
the context of the lifeworld, and relating it to wider themes and values in the
culture.32

Thus, in the Amazon, the only useful diagnosis is not of the sickness but
of the identity of the person who caused it. As anthropologist Neil Whitehead
has noted, this is not to say that the physiological and epidemiological bases
for sickness and death are not understood; rather, the important questions remain even after the medical explanation has been given.33 In Amazonian
mestizo culture, this means asking the questions, Why has this happened
to me? Why now? Have I done something wrong to deserve this? Has anyone
caused me to be sick? Who hired the sorcerer who cast the spell? What have I
done to earn the enmity of a neighbor? What societal norms against ostentation or adultery have I violated?34

Segundo's Story

Anthropologists Donald Joralemon and Douglas Sharon, who studied healing
practice in the Peruvian Andes, present the following case, which may stand
for a large number ofdona Maria's and don Roberto's patients. Segundo came
to the curandero because, as he says, "I feel very bad in my work, bored, preoccupied, bad dreams, anger against my family, with my friends, arguments
with friends at work, with my closest companions. 1135 He thinks it could be
maldad, a curse, from a woman who used to be his mistress; he had a child
with her, but it died. The woman made a complaint against him to the police,
"and made me spend a lot of money to get out of this." She has continued to
threaten him.

Segundo worked as a fare collector on a privately owned bus. He spoke at
great length about the effects of envy on his life. People he knew who took the
bus envied him and expected that he would grant them special favors-for
example, not charge them extra for bringing on several loaded baskets. Even
his friends envied him for having a job.

On one occasion, a young drunk passenger tried to grab the money Segundo had collected in fares. Segundo pushed him out of the moving bus,
causing the man to fall and injure himself. Unfortunately, the young man's
mother was rumored to be a bruja, a sorceress. The woman said, "Now, these
problems you have, just wait, you'll see if all the time your job is going to last
won't pass fifteen days." The woman apparently cast a curse on him; shortly
thereafter, Segundo's boss accused him of stealing money from the fares and
fired him.

This case illustrates the extent to which fear of the envy and magical aggression of others can shape a life. It also illustrates the direct linkage between envy and sorcery, whether related to adultery or economic uncertainty.
Segundo was constantly vulnerable to the hostility of others-his mistress,
his passengers, those he offended by his lack of mutuality. The goal is to create relationships of confianza, trust, in order to gain security and opportunity
in a world of uncertainty and frustration, to enforce expectations of mutual help and favors. If every disease is an indictment, "a punishment received by
the body or soul of someone who has caused damage with his body or his
soul," then Segundo suffered a failure of right relationship. 36

From the point of view of the drunken passenger's mother, Segundo was
fortunate-a steady job, a position of some power over others, the ability to
grant favors to his friends. From her point of view, pushing her son off the
bus was an act of social hubris-arrogant, excessive, ostentatious, arbitrary,
precisely what the threat of sorcery should have prevented. The same considerations apply to his mistress. We do not know, from Segundo's account, why
she swore out a denuncio against him, what she thought he owed her, in what
way she believed he had betrayed their relationship of confianza. The curses
these women purportedly cast on Segundo were their final weapon in their
battle against his male power and betrayal.

And so, what of the suffering of Segundo? His own suffering is symbolic as well, a comment on his own constrictions-social, economic, selfimposed. His exhaustion, misery, rage, and hopelessness are less individual
pathologies than socially significant signs.37 His malaise, alienation, bad luck,
economic misfortune, and failed relationships are embedded in his social situation; but his sickness shifts attention to his own suffering, relegitimates his
world. The healer takes his suffering seriously, but places it within the web of
Segundo's own choices and relationships, his infidelity, his anger, his failures
of mutuality.

Misfortune strikes Segundo repeatedly: he gets in trouble with the police;
he is accused of stealing and is fired from his job; he has bad dreams; he gets
in arguments with friends and companions; he suffers from boredom, discontent, preoccupation, and indolence. All of these are sicknesses and hence
indictments. He must undertake a searching inventory of his breaches of confianza: Who has reason to hate me?

THE HEALING PERFORMANCE

Remember that sorcery is not just a culturally meaningful construction of suffering, but also the focus for remedial action: magical harms can be healed. As
we have discussed, the field of the shamanic drama embraces not only healer
and patient but audience and community as well. The community knowledge available to all the participants in the drama includes not only who has
consulted with the curandero, but also who has expressed anger or resentment against the sufferer; who may have been motivated by jealousy or rivalry to consult a sorcerer; and what social injunctions against ostentation, or adultery, or lack of reciprocity the sufferer may have violated. This entire social context is part of the healing process.38

The shaman here has several roles-to validate the power of these weapons of the weak; to assume, at great personal risk, community conflicts as
personal duels;39 to affirm that breach of confianza, adultery, neglect, callousness, and cruelty produce their own suffering in the perpetrator; to demonstrate to the community the ways in which such breaches of social order are
both embodied and healed; and to explicate suffering as a moral drama, in
which the sufferers act out, in coded ways, the impossibilities of their own
social positions. "We do not only diagnose the flesh of the material body,"
says Cesar Calvo's fictional shaman, don Javier. "We do not limit ourselves to
watching over the palpable terrain of the patient, but with equal attention we
channel him in his secret blood, the timeless blood that circulates only during
the night when dreams awake. "4° Anthropologist Michael Taussig talks of an
ayahuasca healing session where what the patient talked about "was neither
confession nor his sins, but, on the contrary, of what scared him and what his
vomiting meant, namely the envidia that someone or ones had for him. It was
their envy that was in him and making him heave out the slime of his insides
into the frog-quavering night. 1141

EMPLOTMENT IN THE BODY

So we return to performance, to theater, to the sensory dimensions of the
healing ceremony. The healing is not explanatory; it is visceral-synesthetic
impact on the body, the gut, the skin, the eyes, the ears. We should not think
of Bona Maria and don Roberto as primitive psychiatrists. What they do has
more kinship with eleos and phobos, Aristotle's pity and terror. That this links
to katharsis-cleansing or purging-should come as no surprise. Ayahuasca
is, above all, and apart from our own cultural obsession with visions, la purga.
The shaman works through the moral themes of healing discourse not linearly but in performance.