Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (7 page)

Don Roberto creates his healing performance with music, movement,
props, plots, comedy, poetry, and dialogue.2 Like all shamans, he is audienceoriented; his performance is designed to engage and affect audiences.3 Historian Ronald Hutton puts it this way: all shamans are performing artists.
If shamanism is partly a craft and partly a spiritual vocation, he writes, it is
also an aspect of theater, and often a spectacularly successful one.4 Indeed,
performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena says that, throughout the years,
he and his friends have become regular audience members of brujos or shamans. "Being performance artists ourselves," he says, "we view them as
colleagues."5

But don Roberto's performance is not mere spectacle. It is also high drama. The healing ceremony is staged as a battle; the episodes of cure develop
a plot with the same revelatory structure as myth. The shaman struggles with and for and through the patient's body in order to find the disease and cast it
out. The drama is to go into the patient's body and carry away the disease.' It is the
descent into the underworld, the perilous journey, the struggle against otherthan-human enemies waged by a person along with other-than-human allies,
ultimate confrontation, victory, triumphant return carrying a trophy-the illness, the magic dart, the envy and resentment, the disruption in the social fabric, sucked out of the body of the victim and spit, gagging, onto the ground.

Risk and Mastery

If don Roberto's healing ceremony is a performance, it makes sense to turn
to an expert on theater for insight. Richard Schechner, founder of the Performance Studies Department at New York University, has proposed a form of
nonmimetic theatrical work he calls an actual. Nonmimetic performance features a performer, in his or her own identity, doing something appreciated
for its own sake. Actuals thus include sports events, stunts, circus acts, acrobatics, speeches, lectures, and some kinds of performance art. As Schechner
says, "The idea of danger is exploited by the circus; that of excellence is the
kernel of athletics. The combination of risk and mastery is asked of the performer of actuals."7

Indeed, risk and mastery constitute the essence of the shamanic performance. The risk is in the confrontation, especially, with the powers of sorcery
that have caused the suffering being treated; the participants cannot know
whether or when a more powerful sorcerer will turn upon the healer, especially a healer who has appeared to be initially successful and thus is an affront to
the sorcerer.

Performer, Audience, Participants

Writing as a theatrical theorist, Schechner sees the force of any performance
in the very specific relationship between performers and those for whom the
performance exists.' Spectators are well aware of the quality and artistry of a
performance, and can sense the precise moment when a performance takes
off, when a presence is manifest, when something has happened. When the
performers have touched or moved the audience, then a collective theatrical collaboration is born.9 Many participant observers recall being swept up
in the intensity of a ritual performance; in fact, anthropologist Victor Turner
has famously used the term communitas for that which is induced by a wellperformed ritual.'°

The shaman's task is to constitute all the participants into an active presence with which a dynamic relation can be created. The shaman keeps the audience active and interested by providing enigmatic commands and riddles,
mysteries that engage the audience. Because life is at stake-both the patient's and the shaman's-the risks are high, and much depends, not on the
meaning of symbols, but on the performative competence of the shaman. In
such rituals, risk becomes a measure of the importance and value attached to
the performance. When a life is at stake, the healing ceremony must be challenging; otherwise the life is undervalued.-

Figure 5 provides a much simplified map of the dramatic field within
which don Roberto's healing performance takes place. There is, first of all, a
one-to-one relationship between the shaman and the patient-the shaman as
entrepreneur and the patient as consumer. This relationship is itself related
to an audience, present not as neutral or even interested bystanders but as a
kind of Greek chorus.12 Members of the audience both stand apart from and
participate in the dramatic action. They assist, comment, criticize, participate, and evaluate; they move in and out of the action; sometimes they occupy
the foreground and sometimes the background. They may sing along with
the icaros, comment on the action, or ask the shaman questions in the course
of the treatment.13 They are critics of the shamanic performance, a source of
future clients, and friends and enemies of the shaman and patient. They are
deeply implicated in the struggle; their own lives hang on the outcome, on
whether the shaman's power is sufficient to overcome the divisive evils that have manifested themselves in the body of the sufferer. One of them may even
be the secret inflictor of the very harm the shaman now seeks to cure.

FIGURE 5. The field of the shamanic performance.

But, even if not physically present, the enemy-the inflictor, the sorcerer,
the envious one-is a presence within the dramatic field. The spirits and powers that the enemy uses to curse are a reflection of the spirits and powers that
the shaman uses to heal. The tools are the same; sorcerer and healer contest
each other with the same weapons. The enemy of the patient-or the sorcerer
engaged by the enemy of the patient-is the enemy of the healer as well. Victory in this battle invites retaliation in another; the humiliated sorcerer will
seek revenge against the healer. And here the moral ambiguity of the healer
becomes manifest, choosing whether to defend or attack, protect or harm,
add the extracted magic darts of the sorcerer to the healer's own protective
power or turn them back, counterattacking, to sicken or destroy.

The spirits are also active participants in the drama. The healer has built a
relationship with them during years of interaction and now, in the drama of
healing, seeks to enlist their aid as allies of the patient. The strength of the
shaman lies in the strength of these relationships. Yet the allies of the healer are ambiguous, necessary and feared, sharing the same ambiguity as the
healer-agents of good, possessors of menacing powers, jealous, potentially
arbitrary, capable of abandoning the healer to solitary defeat.

As much as the healer's allies and the powers of the enemy, the sickness
itself is a presence at the shamanic drama. As historian of religion Lawrence
Sullivan puts it, shamanic medicine involves personal engagement with the
forces of sickness that afflict the patient; the healer steps into the path of the
attacking spirit in order to do battle with it.14 The medicine of the healer fights
the sickness with the weapons and the cunning of the sickness itself: the
same plants that are used to harm can be used to dispel the harm; the magical phlegm of the healer protects against the flemosidad, the phlegmosity, of
the illness. The disease, as Schechner puts it, is an embodiment of the community's curses, hatreds, and aggressions; the sickness is "whatever the community dislikes, fears, holds to be taboo, resists, resents, cannot face. -5 The
sickness, the community, healer and patient, ally and enemy, are all bound
together in a great and uncertain struggle, a battle between trust and resentment that mirrors the struggle of the entire community.

From this point of view, drama permeates the performance-the healer
as ambiguous hero, maintaining doubtful alliances, facing an enemy of unknown powers, threatened with retaliation, exposed to the noxious gagging
sickness, relying, ultimately, on skill and strength and knowledge, the outcome always in doubt.

LEARNING TO PERFORM

Healing is often, in our culture, attributed in greater or lesser part to inherent personal qualities of the healer. The book Healers on Healing compiles a
number of candidates-empathy; nonpossessive warmth and personal genuineness; compassion and intentionality; trust, faith, love, and humility; and
"simple presence.",' None of the pieces in the collection specifies an ability as
a performer.

We will have occasion to discuss the social ambiguity of the shamanthat shamans may be considered treacherous, unstable, and touchy, and thus
be suspect, feared, and distrusted.'? I myself would hesitate before characterizing shamans generally-even just the small group of shamans I have
known-as empathetic, warm, compassionate, loving, and humble. But they
are all performers. Not all in the same way, of course; don Roberto is dramatic, forceful, flamboyant; dona Maria is warm, solid, comforting; don Antonio
is sly, sensual, funny; don Romulo is professional, impassive, controlled. Shamanism, writes anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones, is like acting or playing
music-received knowledge and training combined with originality, skill,
and performance. To know what you are saying and doing, you must learn
from others; but to be any good, you must add something of yourself,' Such
stylistic differences can be seen between don Roberto's practice of chupando,
sucking, placing his mouth directly on the body of a patient-noisy, dramatic,
flamboyant-and dona Maria's equivalent practice ofjalando, pulling, drawing out the illness or intrusion from a distance-quiet, altogether more dignified, more ladylike.

Not only does each shaman have an individual performing style, but the
style may vary from performance to performance. Every shaman is an individual performer, writes historian Ronald Hutton, "with a personal mode of operation which could be varied to suit each occasion." Hutton cites pioneering
ethnographer Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, who said, "In almost every
shamanizing, there is something new.-9

Shamanic performance is a skill, and skills are, at least in part, learned.
There are tricks to shamanizing-conjuring, sleight of hand, poetry, gravitas,
all aspects of the performing art. Laderman and Roseman ask a series of compelling questions: What kinds of skills are necessary for a performer-healer to
command in order to be accepted in that role? What is involved in the performative creation of presence, verisimilitude, and social effectiveness? How is
spirit presence created and convincingly sustained?20 We must be careful here
to avoid a dichotomy between true inspiration and pure performance-the sort of facile distinction expressed by anthropologist Andrew Strathern when
he says, "Indeed, it is difficult ... to be sure that we are dealing with an altered state of consciousness as against a dramatic performance."" Rather, as
anthropologist Laurel Kendall has demonstrated in her account of the training of Chini, a Korean shaman, a healing performer cannot naively assume
that the spirits will move her tongue for her: "She was repeatedly prompted in
performative business that would transform the passive stuff of visions, inference, and intuition into an active spiritual presence. 1122

Don Roberto's son Carlos, of whom don Roberto is immensely proud, is
training to be a shaman like his father. Now in his early twenties, he attends
all his father's healing sessions, sitting at his father's side, wearing, like his
father, a white shirt with Shipibo designs, observing, singing along, helping.
Carlos does healings of his own, under his father's eye, singing his own icaros, shaking his bunch of shacapa leaves, blowing tobacco into the crown of
the head. He does this now the way his father does, yet slowly and hesitantly
developing a style of his own.

CONJURING AND PERFORMANCE

Is don Roberto a fraud? He says he sucks things out of the body; he performs
sucking things out of the body; yet, obviously, the skin is not broken, what
he sucks out is not clearly visible, mixed with phlegm, charged with power,
dangerous to examine too closely. And the belching, the gagging, the retching, the slurping, the spitting-isn't that just show, performance, a sort of
sleight of hand, drawing attention away from the fact that he is doing, really,
nothing?

Dramatizing

Part of what is going on is simply effective drama. The !Kung shaman, too,
pulls illness out of the patient's body, accompanied by sounds intended to
convey the risk and seriousness of the process:

The pain involved in the boiling of the healers' num (spiritual energy), in the putting of that num into the one being healed, in the drawing
of the other's sickness into their own body, and in the violent shaking
of that sickness out from their body is acknowledged by the healers by
crying, wailing, moaning, and shrieking. They punctuate and accent
their healing with these sometimes ear-shattering sounds. As their
breath comes with more difficulty, until they are rasping and gasping, the healers howl the characteristic kowhedili shriek, which sounds something like "Xsi-i! Kow-ha-di-di-di-di!" Some say the shriek forcibly expels
the sickness from a spot on the top of the healers' spine. Others say the
shriek marks the painful process of shaking the sickness out from the
healers' hands .23