Free Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon by Stephan V. Beyer Page A

the songs that leave the body as
sound and smoke. An ayahuasca healing session enacts the physical materiality of the human body-nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, sucking, gagging, belching, blowing, coughing up, spitting out; perfume, tobacco smoke, rattling,
whispering, whistling, blowing, singing, the taste of tobacco and ayahuasca,
the imagery and ritual of the body, conflict, mess.
    Similarly, in the ayahuasca ceremony substances traverse body boundaries,
reminding us of our penetrable and leaky borders. Excrement and vomit are
ejected, magical darts are sucked out through the skin, internal substances
are spit out through the mouth, magical phlegm is transferred from shaman
to disciple, tobacco smoke is blown into the body through the crown of the
head-the body exaggerated, vast excretions, ferocious corporeality. Reminders of the darker side of human existence constantly lurk in the margins of shamanic performance-dangerous ambiguity, broken boundaries, ambivalence, transgression, disorder.

    THE SOCIAL AMBIGUITY OF THE SHAMAN
    The territory occupied by the shaman is suffering, hope, failure, envy, spite,
and malice. We are stricken by the resentment of others; we are betrayed by
those we have trusted; our successes are stalked by illness and death. In this
landscape, the shaman occupies a position of dangerous power and ambiguous marginality. Native American writer Gerald Vizenor says that "shamans
can be treacherous, unstable, and touchy."39 The idea is the same in the Amazon: the shaman is "ambiguous, suspicious, ... fundamentally distrusted,"
says one anthropologist;4° "dangerous, disquieting," says another.4' "Once
one is known as a shaman," writes anthropologist Marie Perruchon, herself
an initiated Shuar shaman, "trust is forever gone."42 Even shamans do not
trust each other. As one mestizo shaman puts it, "The only shaman you can
really trust is yourself."43
    People see that the shaman can heal, which means that the shaman can
also kill.44 Social anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones points specifically to
the ambivalent nature of the shaman in Amazonia; shamans may use their
power for good or evil.45 Anthropologist Mary Douglas calls this the theory
of the unity of knowledge-that those who can cure can kill.46 Among the Napo
Runa of Amazonian Ecuador, for example, to proclaim oneself a yachac, possessor of yachay, shaman, is to endanger not only one's life but the lives of
one's family. Shamans are thought to have the power to harm as well as to
heal, doing the former sometimes through their mere anger. Because most
sicknesses and deaths are thought to be caused by the ill will or anger of a
shaman, to reveal oneself is to risk being associated with and attacked for the
tragedies of others.47
    In the Amazon, the power of the shaman to heal is the same as the power
to harm. As pioneering ethnographer Alfred Metraux points out, the shaman is able "to draw magic substances from his body in order to heal or to
harm. In many cases, the power that infuses a shaman's being and resides in
his body is identical with poison capable of killing.1148 The same theme is repeated throughout the Amazon. Among the Desana of the Upper Rio Negro,
the Yagua of eastern Peru, and the Aguaruna of the Rio Maranon, shamans
and sorcerers, curing and killing, come from the same source.49 Healing and
sorcery are two aspects of the same process. "A particular plant," says don Javier Arevalo Shahuano, a Shipibo shaman, "has a spirit which can either
heal or

    Anthropologist Steven Rubenstein, speaking of Shuar shamanism, puts it
this way: "One cannot help others unless one works within the same framework that hurts others. The power to kill and to cure is the same because it is
embodied in the same instrument"-the tsentsak, the shaman's magic darts.5'
As one Shuar puts it, "There are bad shamans and there are good shamans,
but they are all
    The very nature of shamanic power is believed to invite malfeasance on