Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (66 page)

Don Roberto believes that gringos tend to bring him mental problems for
healing, while Peruvians bring physical problems; gringos, he says, are interested in spiritual matters, while Peruvians are seeking to heal illnesses or to
gain information, such as who is sleeping with a spouse or who has cursed
their business affairs. Don Roberto has treated Peruvians who are deprimido,
depressed; but gringos come to him with dolores inconcidos, undiagnosed illnesses. Gringos, he says, seem primarily to have problems in their lives
related to their childhood-deprivation, problems with their parents. He is
astonished at the number of gringos who say that they were physically or sexually abused as children.

Other shamans who have worked with gringo clients have formed the same
conception about gringos and their families. "Many of them suffer from depression," says Guillermo Arevalo, a Shipibo shaman from Puccalpa. "Many
have been badly treated by their family ... often from their fathers' behavior
toward them.... There are other cases where women have suffered from rape
trauma, caused by a father, brother, or friend." When asked how many of his
clients have suffered rape trauma, he answered: "In my estimation, 8o percent
among women. This causes me to think a lot about what goes on in developed
countries 52

These are things for which the gringos have been unable to find cures at
home, don Roberto says, so they come to him to receive the medicine of the
plants. The plant spirits have told him to treat such illnesses as if they were
susto, manchari, soul loss. Don Roberto's innovation in treating gringos is
not that he creates new techniques but, rather, that he extends existing techniques to embrace new problems.

CREATING THE RAIN FOREST

For five hundred years, the Amazon has been one of those "dark unruly spaces of the earth" that serve as a Rorschach test of the European imagination.,
First, the jungle is "an emphatically nonparadisal space."2 Novelist Barbara
Kingsolver describes the jungle like this:

The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals
overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate,
poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their
own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a
mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for
their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their
necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. The forest
eats itself and lives forever.3

Every space is filled with life, she says-poisonous, ravenous, copulating, strangling, biting, sucking. Poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman speaks of the rain
forest as a "world of cunning and savage trees," where she finds "a vibrant
aqua-blue-and-yellow arrowhead frog" covered with poisonous mucus, "tiny
but pungent with death."4 German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who filmed
both Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo in the rain forest west of Iquitos,
says that the jungle is "fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting
for survival and growing and just rotting away."5 These are the tropes of the
jungle in the European imagination: the jungle is disordered growth, unrestrained, sexual; the jungle is rank decay, cunning, savage, poisonous.

But, second, there is also another jungle in the European imaginationEdenic, virgin, a source of medicines. If the word jungle, with its connotations
of dense impenetrability, is the key term for the savage wilderness, the word
rainforest is the key term for the Edenic wilderness. Since the 197os, the tropical rain forest has become the most powerful modern icon of unfallen, pristine, sacred land, acquiring ever stronger Edenic overtones, and has become
increasingly synonymous with Amazonia;' so positive is its connotation that
the adjective rainforest has become a marketing tool for cosmetics, theme restaurants, "ruggedly elegant outerwear," and gourmet ice cream. The rain forest is beautiful and radiant, a living cathedral enshrined in lavish coffee-table
books.? But while the rain forest is beautiful, it is intensely vulnerable. Thus
the jungle is savage and must be tamed; the rain forest is fragile and must be
preserved. In either case, the land requires the intervention of European attitudes and technologies.

I do not understand any of this. My jungle survival teacher, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, taught me that the jungle is less dangerous than Lima. The jungle
is filled with voracious, struggling, and triumphant life; you cannot go hungry
in the jungle, Moises told me. And humans have always lived here, barefoot
people happily raising babies where I had to be trained to survive.

In any current dialogue regarding tropical forests, the Amazon Basin is
usually mentioned as a vital area to be left untouched and protected; yet archaeological, historical, and ecological evidence increasingly shows not only
a high density of human populations in the past but also an intensively managed and constantly changing environment.' In much of Amazonia, it is difficult to find soils that are not studded with charcoal-clearly the result of
human slash-and-burn agriculture.9 During the early 199os, McDonald's
Corporation put out a brochure describing the company's rain forest policy,
featuring a photograph of a shimmering grove, bright light slanting through
tall trees, bare trunks soaring to the sky. The problem is that the photograph
is not of a rain forest at all but, rather, another kind of woodland-"actually
temperate conifers completely alien to the tropics."I° A real rain forest, with
parasitic lianas and epiphytes covering the trees, the canopy blocking the sky,
was apparently insufficiently radiant for corporate advertising purposes.

SELLING THE NATIVE

Rain forest environmentalism sees the rain forest native as sharing the purity of the rain forest-closer to nature, less affected by the evils of the world,
demonstrating the integrity of the unspoiled. The native of the rain forest is a monolithic figure, the keeper and companion of the plants and animals, an
instrument to criticize our own civilization. That purity becomes associated
with a wisdom we once had but have lost, and which we need to recover in
order to rebuild what our technology has destroyed. Thus, the native is our
guide-"our guide to nature, or our guide to the prehistoric past."" The wisdom of the rain forest stands ready to be reappropriated by the dominant
culture.12

In 1982, the home furnishings department of Macy's in San Francisco had
a show of primitive art from the Amazon. The display was set in a darkened
area on the seventh floor, with jungle noises piped in through the sound system. Shoppers could read a brochure predicting how valuable the art would
become and describing the perils faced by Macy's buyers in acquiring it. The
brochure reiterates a number of themes that characterize popular attitudes toward Amazonian culture that persist today.13

First of all, as we might expect, the jungle is dangerous-or at least uncomfortable. It has "pesty to poisonous insects and snakes, piranha-infested
waters dotted with colonies of crocodiles, unbearable heat and humidity
and virtual isolation from the rest of the world. With these things in mind,
the crew proceeded-carefully." Second, this dangerous jungle is filled with
friendly, childlike natives. "There are twenty-three known Amazon cultures,"
the brochure says, incorrectly, "each one as diverse as the environment itself.
But what was common to all was the warmth and excitement that greeted the
crew when they arrived at the river banks.... The local chief would receive
the travelers and then they would visit the houses to select the pottery, tools,
baskets and other wares."

Moreover, these natives were innocent of commercial motives. "All of the
pieces were made by traditional methods utilizing materials indigenous to
the lush jungle environment.... Most importantly, these items were made
for personal use, not commercial export, making them uniquely representative of tribal lifestyle and tradition." These pieces, the brochure repeats-the
"pottery, baskets, weapons, tools, ceremonial masks and objects"-were not
made for commercial purposes "but created by the Indians for their daily and
ritual uses. 1114

Childlike, noncommercial-one wonders just what these Indians were paid for
their crafts. Note the combination of tropes, designed to move merchandise:
the savage wilderness braved; innocent natives eager for American consumers to possess their goods. This innocence has been projected on the Amazon Indian since the Spanish and Portuguese conquest; their indifference to
commodities such as gold made them appear like children in the eyes of their conquerors.15 As anthropologist Bernard McGrane expresses it, "The Other is
inferior to the European because he is not, as the European is, capable of having a responsible relationship with the gold that surrounds him, and hence
the European appropriation of it is justified. This formulation we may term
the Other-as-Child."16 The perception of the colonized culture as fundamentally childlike feeds into the fantasy of the colonial civilizing mission, which is
quite self-consciously fashioned as a form of tutelage-"a disinterested project concerned with bringing the colonized to maturity.117

Presenting these indigenous household goods as items for American interior decoration creates what Margaret Dubin, an expert on Native American
art, calls "a pervasive sense of disjuncture," a sense that these objects are out
of place and unable to serve their original functions.,' Once removed from
their cultural context, Chippewa artist David Bradley says, such objects lose
"their real value and their reason for existence. They are flat; they have become
the possessions of collectors. "19 The stereotype of innocent natives obscures
their modernity, ensures their disappearance as human subjects :20 "Relegated
to the silence of premodernity, living artists are transformed into objects, like
mannequins in a museum diorama. 121

Like the Edenic rain forest, Edenic childlike natives need our protection.
It is not that our culture will corrupt theirs, as an adult might corrupt a child.
Rather, they have no culture-they are in a state of nature-because their culture
has been reduced to a contextless set of pan-Amazonian household goods.22
They are the same as their environment; one is an idealized embodiment of
the other; instead of a "multiplicity of worlds," complex groups and individuals with varying needs and desires, they become an endangered species.23

THE AYAHUASCA TOURIST

Ayahuasca tourism has brought new attention, new money, and new problems to traditional healers and their communities, and has created a market
for the misrepresentation of traditional practices and the exploitation of eager
and innocent tourists.24 The marketing of ayahuasca shamanism is in many
ways akin to the marketing of Amazonian household goods at Macy's-the
dangerous yet pristine landscape; the spiritual natives eager for American
consumers to possess their wisdom; the chance for the tourist, in imitation
of the archetypal Cordova Rios, to bring back the redemptive secrets of the
Edenic rain forest, as decontextualized as an indigenous basket on a suburban
wall.

A typical promotion for an ayahuasca trip to Peru promises "personal
cleansing and transformation ... a deep connection to Nature, and the opportunity for release on inner levels we may not have touched into before
... a safe place where people can come for ceremony and healing ... deep
healing we can find in this jungle retreat. "15 Another ayahuasca tourist Web
site speaks of "jungle shamanism, mysticism, and spiritual transformation
through personal experience ... transformation and personal growth ... the
mystery and transformational power of sacred traditional rituals. 1126

Key terms in such descriptions are healing and transformation. Cultural geographer Arun Saldanha has described the trance dance and drug culture he
explored in Goa, India, in terms of a set of hedonistic practices-drugs, art,
ritual, travel, the risky, the exotic, spiritualities borrowed from other populations-used by cultural outsiders for purposes of self-transformation. And
this transformed self, he writes, is primarily a state of mind-consciousness,
enlightenment, a liberation from modern bourgeois rationality, from the
weights of home, work, school, church, aging, pain, and discipline.27