THEMATIC PAPER

The State of the Arts of the Study of Indigenous ReligiousTraditions in South America

Robin M. Wright1,2,3

Received: 27 February 2017 /Accepted: 7 April 2017 /Published online: 16 May 2017# Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Abstract This article reviews the principal tendencies in the contemporary studies ofindigenous South American religious traditions. It divides the field into studies ofsocioreligious formations (particularistic and universalistic formations, more specifi-cally) and studies of cosmologies or worldviews (so-called perspectivism). It thendiscusses two recent, pioneering biographies of South American shamans which, morethan any other in the field, offer original approaches to understanding shamanichistorical consciousness, cosmopolitics, the constant struggles of shamanic spirits tosustain the cosmos against sorcery spirits that threaten to undermine the cosmic order.

Keywords Shamanism . Ethnohistory . Amazonia . Cosmopolitics

Introduction

This essay examines recent (within the last half-century), scholarly approaches to thestudy of indigenous religious traditions in South America. I argue that these can beunderstood on two levels: the first refers to modalities of social and religious processesand the second, modalities of thought and belief. These are not necessarily exclusive;rather, they complement each other, being manifest along a continuum of greater orlesser prominence. I begin this discussion by looking at the social and religiousprocesses, following which I consider complementary cognitive processes, and I

Int J Lat Am Relig (2017) 1:42–56DOI 10.1007/s41603-017-0002-9

* Robin M. Wrightrowrightrobin@yahoo.com

1 Department of Religion, University of Florida – Gainesville, PO Box 117410, Gainesville,FL 32611, USA

2 Department of Anthropology, University of Florida – Gainesville, PO Box 117410, Gainesville,FL 32611, USA

3 Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida – Gainesville, PO Box 117410,Gainesville, FL 32611, USA

conclude with a reflection on two very important and recent biographies of SouthAmerican shamans, both of which are outstanding advances in understanding thesereligious specialists. With one notable exception, this essay does not consider theburgeoning literature on plant psychoactives and their religious use among traditionaland non-traditional peoples.

Dialectic of Internal Harmony and External Conflict

Recent studies of socioreligious processes among South American native peoplesdemonstrate, on the one hand, the importance of indigenous aesthetics and emotionallife which are intimately linked to knowledge and moral value and in which an ideal ofBharmonious conviviality^ is expressed, that is to say, a deliberate effort in indigenouscommunities to promote an ethic of sharing and caring among relatives (Overing andPasses 2000). This ideal, however, is described as a constant struggle, a BSisyphussyndrome,^ in which every effort to establish this ideal of harmony runs up againstnegative forces—such as sorcery, symbolic or physical violence, conflict—that preventthe realization of the ideal. Seen this way, there are two ways of understanding thesocial and religious lives of Amazonian indigenous societies: one, the so-called moraleconomy of intimacy (represented by British social anthropologists, led by JoannaOvering and her students) in which societies seek to establish harmonious convivialityamong consanguineal kin groups by restricting the abuses of power, for example; andthe second, the so-called symbolic economy of alterity as developed by the Braziliananthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his students which emphasizes thesocial category of affines (in-laws) as a potential source of conflict and hence as adynamic force in social and religious processes (Viveiros de Castro 2002a, b, c). Thesecond model focuses on processes of symbolic exchange, such as warfare andcannibalism, predation, hunting, shamanism, and funerary rites.

These theoretical models are not necessarily exclusive and, interestingly enough, anexponent of the first school, has found both socioreligious idioms, differentially definedmorally, within a single ethnic group -the Amuesha—of the eastern Peruvian Amazon,about whom Fernando Santos-Granero wrote an important monograph, The Power ofLove (Santos-Granero 1991): on the one hand, the relatively restricted field of ashamanic religious specialist, whose relations are expressed through a Bpredatory^idiom and whose morality is considered ambiguous (he is both healer and sorcerer);and on the other, a wider field of a priestly religious specialist, who constructs his fieldof influence through a discourse of Bintimacy^ with the gods, and whose powerfulknowledge renders him a morally unambiguous figure (he seeks collective well-being).

At the same time, the material from Amazonia shows that specific ecologicalconditions shape, to a certain degree, the dialectic that oscillates within a single groupbetween Bpredatory violence^ and harmonious conviviality. The distinctive cycle ofalternating dry and rainy seasons determines alternation in forms of sociality betweenBdispersion^ (social Batomization^), a kind of centrifugal movement, during the dryseason, when small autonomous core groups live away from the main village—to hunt,gather, fish, and plant gardens; and Bconcentration,^ or centripetal movement, duringthe rainy season when the whole community lives together in the village, following theplanting of new gardens and coinciding with the harvesting of the previous year’s

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gardens. Both of these basic ecological situations shape not only different economicactivities and political relations, but also different ritual activities. In principle, periodsof dispersion would emphasize predatory violence, while periods of concentration,harmonious conviviality. Paradoxically, the reverse may also be true: intense conviv-iality (or centripetal movements) may produce conflictive situations or celebratepredatory violence while dispersion into autonomous groups may temporarily suspendrestrictive kinship regimes and celebrate harmonious conviviality with categories ofother, non-consanguineal peoples.

All Amazonian indigenous societies have suffered transformations, often catastroph-ic, since the beginning of the colonial regime (epidemics, demographic collapse,atrocities)—so severe that it is hardly imaginable that these have taken place withoutleaving deep and structural traces within their cosmologies and socioreligious processesas we have come to know them. So the Brelations of predation^ between humans andthe natural world, as well as among human groups—with all its connotations of(potential) violence in Viveiros de Castro’s model—must be thought of in intimaterelation to the historical realities of colonial violence and its social structures.

Indeed, the historical trajectories of Amazonian societies are marked by profoundcrisis, social and environmental Bpredation,^ against which they have activated theirstructural mechanisms, transforming their socioreligious formations through such pro-cesses as prophetic movements and even the more recent movements of conversion toevangelical/pentecostal denominations. This reaction to crisis clearly cannot be thought ofwithout relating it to processes deriving from the surrounding society, with its analogoushistorical and structural movements, like colonialism or development on a global scale.

So, how can we understand the dialectics of internal harmony and external preda-tion, dispersion, and concentration in which historical and ecological transformationsare taken into account? We may subsume both dialectics in a single model comprised ofthe complementary opposition between two socioreligious formations: one which wemay call Bparticularistic^ and the other, Buniversalistic.^ Different from the way theseterms have been used since Weber, both formations are inherent in Amazoniansocieties, and both can be seen to articulate with external historical and ecologicalcircumstances. That is, these formations are generative of, and are influenced by,historical dynamics; specific external historical influences may intensify—or exacer-bate—one or the other formation. Both necessarily involve relations of humans tonature as defined by indigenous cosmologies. I shall briefly examine each of theseformations more closely and then discuss the literature over the past half-century.

Particularistic and Universalistic Socioreligious Formations

Particularistic socioreligious formations are marked on the social level by their empha-sis on local kinship ties, conflicts with affinal or Bother^ groups considered non-kin,and mediation with spiritual and natural resources through religious specialists.Likewise, on the religious level, the cosmologies of traditional tropical forest agricul-tural societies are marked by life-generating (ritual) violence. The core idea in thesecosmologies (as both anthropologists and historians of religion—such as AdolfEllegard Jensen (1963)—have pointed out) is the centrality of death and regeneration,violent acts, as—for example—in the common motif of the killed and dismembered

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deity or primordial being, out of whose body parts sprout the important food plants,which is periodically re-enacted in rituals. This ideology with its implicit and explicitviolence explains rituals such as head hunting, cannibalism, but also fishing, hunting,and planting—all reiterations of the primordial act of killing. Translating these ideasinto contemporary ethnological theory, one would expect the idiom of predatoryviolence to be predominant, though evidently not excluding harmonious conviviality.Thus, we find, for example, in Amazonia the widespread association between themediating specialist and the jaguar, among other predators.

Universalistic socioreligious formations are characterized by the following elements:firstly, political and religious identity is constructed over greater social distances andinvolves universal constructs of identities (notions such as all we people, nation,indigenous people, etc.) These constructs supersede localized kingroup membership.Secondly, supralocal religious and political authorities (such as priests, pastors, proph-ets, federation councils, pan-indigenous organizations) seek to stimulate an effectiveintegration of extensive religious, political, and social units. Thirdly, access to spiritualand material resources becomes immediate, superseding the mediation characteristic ofparticularistic formations.

On the religious level, the universalistic socioreligious formations translate the threeelements I have mentioned in the following concrete ways:

Firstly, through priestly functions having to do with management of the dead and theancestors. Through this canonical knowledge, a universal construct of identity iscreated. As priests manage the dead, so they create the conditions by which societyis reproduced. Thus, their power transcends the more restricted powers of the jaguar-predator shamans.

Secondly, through prophetic functions, the essence of which is the tendencytowards a religious regime of Bworld transcendence,^ typically negating the realityof death (predation). Over the past four decades, a great deal has been written onindigenous South American prophetic movements, perhaps more than on any othertheme. Detailed studies have been made of the history and mythological founda-tions of prophetic movements in the Northwest Amazon, particularly among theArawak-speaking Baniwa people. Scholars have sought to understand them frommany different angles: as rebellions against colonial oppression; as grounded inmythological themes of world destruction and renewal; as historical traditions andnot merely outbursts of reaction to domination. Comparisons have been made withmovements among neighboring peoples of other language families. Likewise, thespiritual dimensions of prophetic eschatology have been explored, in opposition tothe characteristic social scientific Bexplanations^ of such phenomena in political,economic, or military terms; these spiritual dimensions include witchcraft accusa-tions, vested with mythological significance, and exacerbated by historical cir-cumstances (Wright 1983, 1992a, b, c, 1998, 2002, 2004a, b, 2013). In thesecontexts, the mediatory functions of religious specialists, have, we might say,become Bheated up^ (Viveiros de Castro 2002a)—that is, expanded, in the senseof transcending local differences and the limitations of mortality (i.e., they areconsidered immortal figures). In this way, prophets or Bwise men^ have emerged.Indigenous histories of these movements often pit the particularistic socioreligiousformations directly against the universalistic formations—yet, without necessarilyarriving at a clear-cut resolution. That is, prophets have not necessarily resolved

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the problem of witchcraft. But not for that reason can we conclude—as so manysocial scientists have—that prophetic (or Bmessianic^ or Bmillenarian^) move-ments have Bfailed.^ To argue this ignores the vibrant historical struggles ofindigenous religions to come to terms with the internal dilemmas posed by theirontologies when articulated with historical circumstances.

In this regard, it is worth recalling the well-known Guarani prophetic movementsand migrations in search of the so-called Land without Evil. Like the Tupian migra-tions, these were clearly post-colonial expressions of universalistic tendencies. Theywere initially ceremonies of cosmic renewal which became transformed in the colonialsituation to migratory movements in which the prophets (caraí) led followers in a questto reach a utopia, a land of immortality without having to endure the trial of death. As inthe ceremonies of cosmic renewal, at the moment of migration, social rules governingkinship were suspended and a regime of universalistic, immediatistic, comunitas wasinstalled. This dialectic can still be seen among Guarani groups of South America todayalthough it has obviously been drastically restricted by external circumstances, againstwhich the Guarani often seek other Bways out,^ such as conversion to Pentecostalism.

And thus, the third way in which universalistic formations may be seen is inconversion movements to evangelical Protestantism, and Pentecostalism, with itsBimmediatistic^ cultism. Up until recently, there were very few studies of the receptionof evangelical forms of Christianity among indigenous societies of Amazonia, and noneat all of their effects on man-nature relations. An exception were the volumes calledTransforming the Gods (vols. 1 and 2, 1999 and 2004). These were based on a critiqueof the narrow way in which ethnology analyzed the relationship between Indians andmissionaries, which often took the form of denunciations of the impacts of missionarypractices on indigenous cultures. Ethnology had paid little attention to the variety ofpossible relations between Indians and missionaries, or to the dynamic nature of the so-called process of syncretism, or to the historical production of indigenous forms ofChristianity independently of missionary interference.

The wide variety of ways in which indigenous peoples have interpreted andtransformed Christianity, in part depends on the type of Christianity introduced amongindigenous communities (of a fundamentalist nature, or theology of liberation, or evensimply through contact with non-indigenous peoples, in rural or urban areas), and inpart on the extraordinary varieties of religious concerns present in native traditions. Theconfiguration of each indigenous tradition clearly shapes the way in which the indig-enous communities, if they so choose, transform Christianity. It is this religiousdiversity that we seek to understand through the two volumes, which include casestudies ranging from total rejection of the Christian doctrine although expressing apragmatic interest in the assistance offered by the missionaries, to an absolute embodi-ment of Christian beliefs and practices, providing a field for the reformulation of socialand ethnic identity.

In 2009, a collection of articles was organized under the title of Native Christians:Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (Vilaçaand Wright 2009), another contribution to the growing field of the Anthropology ofChristianity. For Religion scholars, the book has value given its primary focus on howChristianity is conceived, received, and experienced by indigenous peoples acrossNorth America and especially South America. New insights are offered into both thediscontinuities and continuities of Catholic and Protestant forms of Christian faith as

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these are culturally, theologically, and practically adapted by indigenous Americansamidst the forces of modernization and even globalization.

Post-structuralism, Animism, Perspectivism

For a better part of the second half of the twentieth century, anthropological studies ofindigenous South American cosmologies were dominated by French structuralism, asdeveloped by Claude Lévi-Strauss. A considerable amount of scholarly discontent withstructuralist models led to some fundamental revisions, for example, in the notions ofBpersonhood^ which were radically distinct from the models that had been utilized untilthat time. Likewise, new studies of native ontologies (ideas on the nature of being) andmetaphysics began to consolidate anthropological thinking at the end of the century.These studies represented what has been termed the Bontological swing,^ as opposed tomore materialist studies of political economy.

An important feature of many indigenous cosmologies is the existence of multiplepoints-of-view about the nature of being held by different kinds of entities (humans,animals, fish, etc.). This Bperspectivism,^ the term coined by Brazilian anthropologistEduardo Viveiros de Castro to refer specifically to a modality of BAmerindian^ thought(Vivieros de Castro 1998, 2002a, b, c), is useful for understanding many Amerindianreligious traditions, although it is by no means a universal feature. The theory focuses oncertain kinds of relations among beings which are strongly characterized by the themes ofpredation (studied typically in rituals of cannibalism, warfare, sorcery, and mortuarysymbolism). Nevertheless, other forms of reciprocity—as in giving thanks, offerings tothe Creator, expressions of the Creator’s love for humans, and forms of divine sacrifice forthe well-being of humanity—are equally as important as the themes of predation.

For Viveiros de Castro, perspectivism is thus:

Ba term for a set of ideas and practices found in many parts of indigenousAmerica and to which we can refer as though it were a ‘cosmology.’ Thiscosmology imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies,human as well as non-human, each endowed with the same generic type of soul,i.e., the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of asimilar soul implies the possession of similar concepts, which determine that allsubjects see things in the same way; in particular, individuals of the same speciessee each other (and each other only) as humans see themselves; that is, as beingsendowed with human shape and habits, seeing their bodily and behavioral aspectsin the form of human culture. What changes when passing from one species ofsubject to another is the ‘objective correlative,’ the referent of these concepts:what jaguars see as ‘manioc beer’ (the proper drink of people, jaguar-type orotherwise), humans see as ‘blood;’ where humans see a muddy salt-lick on a riverbank, tapirs see their big ceremonial house, and so on. Such difference ofperspective—not a plurality of views of a single world, but a single view ofdifferent worlds—cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the commonoriginal ground of being; such difference is located in the bodily differencesbetween species, for the body and its affections (in Spinoza’s sense: its capacitiesto affect and be affected by other bodies) is the site and instrument of ontological

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differentiation and referential disjunction. [Accordingly, Amazonian myths dealmostly with the causes and consequences of the species-specific embodiment ofdifferent pre-cosmological subjects, all of them conceived as originally similar to‘spirits’, purely intensive beings in which human and non-human aspects areindiscernibly mixed.] (Viveiros de Castro 1998).

Viveiros de Castro’s thesis is consistent with the school of the Bnew animists,^which includes eminent scholars such as Graham Harvey, Philippe Descola, KajArhem, Nurit Bird-David, and others. In North American anthropology, this theoryhas an important forerunner in William A. Hallowell, whose work among the Ojibwa(Anishnaabe) demonstrated clearly the linguistic foundations for the belief in animatebeings—many of these in Bnature^—who populate the Ojibwa worldview but whichwould be considered inanimate objects by the Euro-American worldview. The subjec-tivity of these beings implied, among other things, acts of reciprocity which are adefining feature of Native American religiosity. Viveiros de Castro argued that theseanimate beings are endowed with distinct points-of-view or perceptions of the world,due to their bodily differences, although all beings share in the same cultural patterns.

An important article by Terence Turner titled BThe Crisis of Late Structuralism,Perspectivism and Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Bodiliness and Spirit^,published in the journal Tipiti, Journal of the Society for the Anthropology ofLowland South America (2009), assessed the legacy of Lévi-Straussian structuralismfor Amazonian Ethnology and discussed the two main derivative theories that emergedin response to the Bcrisis^ in which late structuralism became embedded: Descola’sBnew Animism^ and Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism. Both vertents developed newinsights on indigenous Bmodes of thought^ in relation to other-than-human beings.Both scholars revitalized and re-shaped old ideas about the Bspirit^ of indigenouspeoples and its omnipresence in the world, ideas about the Bnon-human otherness^of the animals, which pointed to a reformulation of the categories of nature andBculture.^ Turner’s constructive critique of perspectivism, moreover, led him to apositive assessment of the nature/culture dichotomy when reformulated, alongMarxist lines, to include productive activities.

I have attempted to show that this way of conceiving structure1 can serve tointegrate Marxian concepts of productive praxis as well as interpretationist andsemiotic approaches with the valuable contributions of Lévi-Straussian structur-alism and its more recent epigones (2009, p. 39).

Along lines based in South American Ethnology’s longtime research on the notion ofpersonhood among native Amazonians, a collection of articles edited by FernandoSantos-Granero, titled The Occult Life of Things: Amazonian Notions of Personhoodand Materiality (2009), offers a very stimulating collection on the also-well-knownconcept that native Amazonians make of Bobjects^ as being imbued with Blife and spirit.^We cannot call any Btool^ or Bartwork^ an Bobject^; rather, many such entities are imbuedwith subjectivity, and in some cases, agentivity, independently of their Bowner.^

1 B…as a series or group of transformations internal to the developmental process of entities, ranging fromindividual symbols or tropes to bodies and spiritual identities^ (2009, p. 39).

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The authors in this collection examine the relations between body and artifact, e.g.,the sacred flutes of the Northwest Amazon, body ornaments, hammocks, and bowls;how fabricated materials are transformed into animate beings which may displaymodalities of existence that differ from humans; and finally, indigenous theories ofthe status of materialized subjectivities, as in the occult nature of sacred flutes, thepowers that objects have to do things.

Another collection of articles, BThe Religious Lives of Amazonian Plants^ (Journalof the Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture Wright, ed. 2009), byanthropologists and religious studies scholars, explores how plants are imbued withagency and subjectivity. Plants do not share the qualities of predation that Viveiros deCastro practically finds necessary for his theory. Rather, plants are considered to beprimordial sources in the fabrication of humanity. They are treated as kinds of other-than-human beings, which has implications for such activities as gardening practices.Plants considered to be sacred, such as ayahuasca and pariká, have powers that go farbeyond providing sustenance, powers related to healing, shamanic soul voyaging, andtransformation. As sources of musical instruments and edible fruits, Amazonian palmtrees present particularly potent images of connections between the ancestral world anddescendants, as in the image of an umbilical cord.

These works well illustrate some of the principal theoretical tendencies in the studyof indigenous societies in Lowland South America. They are connected by a commonthread in the modes of conceptualizing indigenous Amazonians’ understanding of theBnature/culture^ (Western) dichotomy that involves the ontological and cosmologicalstatus of objects and plants. They speak to issues of continuities and discontinuities inindigenous spirituality vis-à-vis different forms of Christianity.

I turn now to two studies of South American shamans that illustrate quite novelapproaches to autobiography and biography of these religious specialists. If the debatesover social and religious processes, along with the discussions of the ontological swing,brought anthropological studies of indigenous South American religious traditions upto a certain point in understanding collective categories, the biographies showed thesame categories in motion through the lives of individuals whose job it is to articulatethe categories of thought and action in order to heal, or to invoke the spirits intoengaging in the political process.

Two Recent, Exemplary Case Studies of South American Shamanism: TheFalling Sky and Thunder Shaman

The Falling Sky (Kopenawa and Albert 2014) is an extraordinary and highly acclaimedbook and the product of a long-term collaborative effort of more than 30 years betweenthe Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa from the Demini River region in northernAmazonas State, Brazil, and the French ethnologist and indigenist Bruce Albert, whohas worked with the Yanomami since the 1970s.2 It is a narrative of Kopenawa’s lifestory and his views on the catastrophic situation that Western society and its large-scale

2 The Yanomami have a population of approximately 17,800 living in settlements along the borders of Braziland Venezuela. They are still the indigenous population with the largest number of uncontacted communitiesin the Americas.

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Bdevelopment^ programs have created over the past 40 years for the Yanomami peoplein Brazil and Venezuela. It presents a passionate appeal for the rights of the Yanomamipeople and a condemnation of the damage wrought by missionaries, gold miners, andwhite people’s greed. By extension, Kopenawa presents a prophetic vision of theYanomami shamans regarding the imminent future of the Amazon rainforest and itspeoples, as well as of the world as a whole. It is a piercing critique of the Western wayof life from the perspective of one who was born and reared in the Yanomami tradition,and who, from an early age, experienced the devastating invasion of this way of life bythe colonizing frontier that rapidly moved into Yanomami territory pushing away ordestroying everything in its path. Above all, it is the story of a remarkable leader whogrew to recognition throughout the world for his tireless work in changing the way inwhich non-indigenous societies view the rainforest and its peoples.

There is much that can be learned from this complex work that will interest thesciences, including social sciences, and the humanities. In addition to the phenomenallydetailed autobiographical narrative, we are presented with nothing less than the firstsystematic spiritual ecology of the Amazon rainforest from a native’s point of view.Kopenawa weaves a poetic and intimate vision of the connections among all livingbeings in the cosmos as the Yanomami understand it. With knowledge accumulatedover the millennia, this viewpoint is an invaluable complement to Western scientificassumptions about the interconnections between humans and nature in the Amazon.

In the Chapter titled BWords Given,^ Kopenawa explains why he and otherYanomami shamans insisted that the book should be written:

I would like the white people to stop thinking that our forest is dead and placedhere without reason. I would like to make them listen to the voice of the xapiri[spirits] who play here incessantly dancing on their glittering mirrors. Maybe theywill want to defend it with us? (p. 12).

Kopenawa ends the over-400-page text by again invoking the BWords of Omama,^the Yanomami creator, whose ancient sayings are received and assimilated by theshamans at initiation. These words are constantly Bgrowing,^ being fed by theshamans’ psychoactive yakoana powder, eventually turning the initiate into a wiseand powerful elder similar to Kopenawa’s father-in-law, Lourival, who was one of hisprincipal spiritual and political mentors. BWords of Omama^ provide a frame for theentire book on Yanomami spirituality, a tradition that Kopenawa is also struggling topreserve against the inroads made by technological change. As long as the traditioncontinues, it is believed, the xapiri spirits will serve as guardians of the cosmos for thebenefit of the Yanomami and the white people alike, against the beings that bringdrought, floods, and other environmental calamities.

As a scholar of indigenous religious traditions, I find Kopenawa’s narrative to be themost vivid and authentic account of shamanistic philosophy I have ever read. Theinfinity of xapiri spirits, with their magnificent power and dazzling splendor, isastonishing. It is impressive to learn of the constant work by Yanomami shamans toBkeep the evil spirits [in the form of epidemic diseases and the ‘Earth Eaters’] at bay ,̂and to warn of the imminent catastrophes faced by Western civilization. I join withother reviewers of this book in acclaiming it as a landmark equally in the literarytradition and anthropological production of native autobiographies. Kopenawa’s

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elaboration of shamanic ideas transcends anthropological concepts and creates a newgenre of native philosophical inquiry. Most importantly, like his ancestors, whosevoices will continue to be heard in the shamans’ songs after his death, DaviKopenawa has left his own powerful words that will be remembered by futuregenerations. This is ultimately the most important contribution of the book.

Ethnobotanists, zoologists, and other researchers of the Amazon will find in it anextraordinary encyclopedia of scientific knowledge about the forest (cf. also Muru andQuinet 2015). Many ecologists will recognize fundamental principles of viewing theforest and its resources both on the scientific and the spiritual planes. Researchers whowork in the areas of medicine and traditional healing will discover important explana-tions for diseases and their cures. Environmentalists will deeply appreciate both itsholistic view of the rainforest and its prophetic vision of the looming catastrophe thatawaits Western civilization on its suicidal path to destruction. Human rights activistswill finally hear, at length and in graphic detail, a Yanomami voice expressing all thetraumas of his people’s contact. The agents of Bsavage capitalism^ and Bcannibal gold^have not yet disappeared, making the shamans’ work ever more vital for the survivaland well-being of the Yanomami, their forests, and all peoples of the world.

Thunder Shaman

The author Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, anthropologist and scholar, was an apprentice/helper to a Mapuche3 thunder shaman named Francisca Kolipi, whose life historydeeply influenced the Mapuche of her southern Chilean community of Millali.Francisca always worked with a Bbible^ in her curing rituals. Before she passed, shemade an agreement with the author to write her (Francisca’s) bible, a book that wouldcontain her powers, explain where they came from, and how they were returned to theancestral shamanic spirit. Thunder Shaman is thus imbued with Francisca’s powers. Inreality, it is a blend of many powerful elements, for the author, with characteristicelegance and dedication, weaves multiple narratives and analytic modes/perspectivesinto a superbly crafted gem. The result is a tour-de-force in studies of shamanichistorical consciousness, Mapuche historicity, and machi (shaman) relations to theimages and processes imposed on the Mapuche by the Chilean state.

The author established her scholarly reputation in South American studies ofshamanism with Shamans of the Foye Tree (Bacigalupo 2007), a study of Mapucheshamans’ gender identities and performance, in which she examines the intersections ofspiritual, social, and political power. She deepens her inquiry in the present work byfocusing on a single machi. Francisca Kolipi, the machi portrayed here, is deeply linkedto the spiritual lineage of Mapuche thunder shamans and the interethnic conflictsbetween the ancestors of her community and historical agents of contact.

Since the early 1980s, ethnologists of Amazonia and Highland South America haveengaged in a tremendously fruitful dialog with history, initiated by the landmarkvolume Rethinking History and Myth (Turner, in Hill, ed. 1988). There, scholars went

3 The Mapuche people are the largest ethnic group in Chile and constitute approximately 10% (more than1,000.000 people) of the Chilean population. Half of them live in the south of Chile from the river Bío Bíountil the Chiloé Island. The other half is found in and around the capital, Santiago. There are also around300,000 Mapuches living in Argentina. (BWho are the Mapuche? People of the Land.^ by Mapuchefoundation FOLIL).

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to great lengths to deconstruct the ahistorical image of indigenous Amazonians stucketernally in cycles of time. Contact narratives, biographies, histories of the longuedurée, indigenous notions of historicity, and other forms of Bethno-history^ constitutedthe burgeoning field of Bindigenous history^ that developed throughout the 1990s andthe first decade of this century. For example, shamanic histories of the prophetmovements of the Tupi-Guarani, northern Carib, and the Northwest Amazon demon-strated that native societies engaged the circumstances of contact with nation states andthe structures of their creation stories, shaping and transforming histories according totheir ideals.

Bacigalupo advances the dialogs between highland and lowland ethnography, mu-tually benefitting both through the book’s perspective on Bshamanic historicconsciousness.^ Shamanic historic consciousness is about reshaping the events ofhistory through dreams, possession, narrative, and powerful objects. Shamanic histor-ical agency is a concept in which shamans blend narratives about the primordial worldwith the present and different moments of the past, within which the historical agencyof mythical beings, spirits, and humans intertwine. Shamanic histories convey thishistorical agency, the capacity for meaningful action both within and upon larger socialforces, and also express ideas about ethnic identity, personhood, and ontology.Mapuche shamanic narratives, the author argues, draw on a notion of spiritual agencythat underlies the transformative nature of Mapuche personhood and identity.

Mapuche thunder shamans are extraordinary individuals who have lived throughpowerfully transformative experiences.

Francisca was struck by lightning during the devastating earthquake of 1960 inChile. At that time, people in the rural community of Millali said that the spirit of athunder shaman named Rosa Kurin from southern Argentina struck 39-year-oldFrancisca with a lightning bolt and possessed her, thereby transforming her into amachi. Francisca recalled to the author:

My stomach felt as if they had cut it off, I ripped off my sweater and my shoes. Iwas like crazy. My head was drunk… The sky opened and I was hit by lightning.[The spirits] brought me down my kultrung [drum]. Then I looked upward andthey gave me all the remedies I should use. They got my right arm and gave itpower. I drummed and prayed and the earthquake stopped. I saved the world(Bacigalupo 2016, pp. 1–3).

Soon after, Francisca had a dream with a Catholic reference:

I went up a big thick pole to the Wenu Mapu [Mapuche sky]. Just like on the dayof Saint Peter, the sky opened up … And they gave me clover, beans, maize,potatoes, wheat, lentils … As I was coming down an old man with a longmoustache said, ‘I am going to give you luck (pp. 3–4).

Like all shamans, Francisca acquired the powers to transcend human time, not onlyin the sense of moving in between primordial and present-day realities, but also byconstantly working in multi-temporal realities: her spirit was of the past, living in thepresent, yet of the future as well (p. 71). This book is, in large measure, an elaborationof the meanings and repercussions of this multi-temporality.

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There is another, notable way in which the narratives of Thunder Shamans resonatewith the literature on shamans of lowland South America that focus on hybrididentities. Francisca was a Bchampurria,^ a bi-cultural mestizo (like the book’s halfQuechua author) and, as other well-known and powerful lowland shamans, she was amediator between the worlds of Indians and foreigners, the living and the dead,bridging sociopolitical, ethnic, and spiritual divides for the benefit of her community.She resembles the Quechua-speaking prophet/messiah Juan Santos Atahualpa, and theArawak-speaking Venancio Kamiko, a Baniwa jaguar shaman educated by a blackCatholic Bpriest.^ Both had spiritual knowledge that allowed them to foretell the futureand oppose the world of whites. Both Baniwa and Mapuche conceive colonization bywhites through the idiom of sorcery. And, like Francisca’s spiritual mentor Rosa,Venancio Kamiko and his spiritual Bson^ Uetsu4 believed they were stronger than thewhites and waged war against sorcerers in moments when new social relations werebeing forged, ritual activity proliferated, and millenarian concerns and the desire toBavoid the whites^ was spreading (Wright 2013). Juan Santos Atahualpa ledAmazonian Arawakan and Panoan peoples in a revolt to throw off Spanish rule andexpel Franciscan missionaries. He transformed Christianity and argued that Spanishpriests should be replaced by native clerics. Venancio Kamiko took on a priestly roleand assumed the title of BChristu,^ arguing that Arawakans could perform their ownrituals and had no use for missionaries.

The narrative of Rosa, Francisca’s mentor, is unique among South Americanindigenous shamanic leaders in that she did not incorporate and reshape aspects ofChristianity Bto meet the spiritual needs^ of her community, nor did she propose areversal of the dominant order of foreign settlers in favor of a Mapuche one. TheMapuche in Millali place Rosa in a sacred space and time and see her as creating a newinterethnic order.

Machi are mounted spiritual warriors who ride on horses carrying messages betweenhumans and the divine. This is a wonderful metaphor of the sorts of Bmobilenarratives^ and spiritual vehicles discussed in the book. Such narratives do somethingsimilar to Bmessianic myths^ (Turner, in Hill, ed. 1988), challenging colonizers’notions of Bcivilization,^ subjecting them to shamanic logic, and thereby annullingthe history of colonization. In the particular case of Rosa who, like her spiritualBdaughter^ Francisca, was of mixed Mapuche-German identity, mobile narrativesincorporate historical German colonizers as agents of cosmic chaos into the logic ofmachi shamanism and then Bobliterate the Devil’s ‘civilized history’^ (p. 31).

The Bmulti-temporal visions^ in machi dreams, visions, and trance states Ballowmachi to switch between and combine time periods to produce and reshape history^ (p.71). Machi are not alone in multi-temporal positioning; however, since Mapuchesorcerers can also utilize multi-temporality to work their influence in, for example,dreams. By comparison, sorcerers in Amazonia appear in the dreams of their victimswith the spiritual bodies of primordial sorcerers in order to steal their souls, while thesorcerers described by Bacigalupo Bpromote factionalism, destroy knowledge andfamily^ (p. 71).

4 In the jaguar shaman tradition of the Northwest Amazon, one Bwise person^ transmits his extensiveknowledge to a chosen one, his spiritual son, among his apprentices (Wright 2013).

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Machi perception of illness and healing are extensively discussed in relation tohistories of ethnic conflict. The notion of Bembodied history^ is critical here, referringto Bsensory bodily cultural memories^ (Stoller 1995) that are translated in the machis’bodies as postures, gestures, and movements that in turn convey and Beven producehistory, power, and knowledge^ (p. 100). The analysis challenges Bclassic phenome-nological approaches to shamanism^ by arguing that shamans’ experiences of alteredstates of consciousness can be linked to Balternative modes of historicization^ (ibid.) inwhich the past is mediated by the body of the possessed [machi] and comes into thepresent, thereby allowing for the healing of historic wounds left by ethnic conflicts.Divination, ritual sacrifice, and other modes of multi-temporality are embodied strate-gies for such healing.

How indigenous peoples produce written sacred texts, use them to make politicalstatements, narrate alternative histories, and thereby circulate shamanic power arequestions analyzed throughout the text. The author explores the intersection amongspiritual agency, literary practices, and history. The analysis explicitly questions thedichotomy of written and oral cultures that so often parallels the contrast betweencivilized and primitive (p. 139). Through the production of their bibles, machi subduethe hegemonic Bother^ using the cultural tools at their disposal (p.151).

As a whole, the book challenges both Mapuche and non-Mapuches’ construction ofhistory and contemporary representations of historical continuity. Bacigalupo’s narra-tive about Francisca makes evident the discrepancy between the history of Millali atdifferent times—a Bdiscontinuous series of presents that are now all past^—and thecurrent ethnography of Millali in which the community Bcreates a seamless, mytholo-gized narrative about the past from the present^ (p. 232). Through the constantinterplay of narratives from the primordial past, the recent past, and biography, thebook captures the ways in which the Mapuche machi are Bconstituted by historical-political events, while they actively and imaginatively constitute those same eventsthrough shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms^ (p. 11).

A central question accompanies the reader throughout the narrative: the intertextualityof author and machi. Thunder Shaman is the realization of the shaman’s wish, but the textis interwoven with the author’s anthropological analyses. Mapuche notions of history, thesacred, and bibles themselves are thereby explored. The Mapuche expected not only theintertextuality of Francisca’s words and the author’s analysis, but also the Bintertextuality^of their spirits. How was this possible? Mapuche have relational personhoods, andFrancisca and others conceived the author’s relationship with her in those terms. Thebible is thus conceived as a joint project. The ethnography of Francisca’s life history andpractice between 1991 and 1996 is the author’s personal commitment to her, which shefelt she needed to fulfill so that Francisca’s individual spirit would completely disengagefrom the author and become an autonomous machi spirit. There is a collective recognitionof this spirit as the blending of Rosa Kurin’s and Francisca Kolipi’s powers. The positiveimpact this work will have on the community will become part of community history,enabling the spirit to be reborn in the body of a new machi.

Bacigalupo’s role as anthropologist/ritual helper certainly went a long way towardstransforming Milali community members’ ways of telling their history and reshapingMapuche perceptions of shamanism and writing. The co-production of a bible withFrancisca analyzes why Mapuche retold Francisca’s story in a particular way; itincludes the history of the production of these narratives and the refashioning of

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Francisca’s subjectivity over time. Francisca, on the other hand, viewed the bible as apotent shamanic object with a performative function (153): it would store and textualizeher power, circulate it through time and space, heal, and enable communicationbetween the living and the dead.

How is this work distinct from the magisterial narrative constructed by theYanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa, and his ethnologist interlocutor, Bruce Albert(2013)? Kopenawa’s objective was to raise political consciousness in the West and toprovoke a deeply transformative experience in readers, including the anthropologicalBspecialists^ whose analytical voices have until now drowned out the voices of thenative. It is hardly a bible in the sense of Thunder Shaman, though both texts makeenormous strides in advancing the genre of politically and spiritually motivatedshamanic statements.

Francisca Kolipi surely seems to be speaking the words that her spiritual daughter inlife left on paper for her—a spiritual legacy that lives on, transforming, guiding,shaping, healing, as she wished. In that sense, the author and the shaman have giftedus with their spiritual journeys, making a significant advance in the interlocutoryprocess in which both shamanic spiritual and analytic objectives work together in asingularly creative way.

Conclusion

In this review, I have endeavored to highlight salient trends in the recent literature onindigenous South American religious traditions. Without trying to be comprehensive, Ihave given emphasis to the notion of relationality in both action and thought.Relationality refers to both internal and external dynamics (social and/or political) thatare translated into idioms of spirituality and mediated by religious specialists.Relationality is conceptualized in cosmologies. Through this lens, we may betterunderstand such phenomena as conversion to Christianity, forms of cosmologicalpredation (sorcery), as well as harmonious conviviality and cosmological order.

Two pioneering biographies of South American shamans illustrate the pervasivenessof cosmological interconnections, the key role shamans and shamanic spirits have insustaining the cosmological order, and the imminent threat of cosmological collapsedue to predators. The studies illustrate the nature of shamanic historical consciousnessthat can heal past wounds and transform aspects of ethnic identity through the shaman’smulti-temporal identity. In both cases, the external predator is most often the stateagainst which shamans act as vigilant sentinels and through whose visions, theindigenous peoples exercise their powers to shape their people’s histories.

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