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

the
part of the healer. Shamans have the power to call the spirits, the Sharanahua
say, and no one can be sure if they call them for good or evil; shamans enjoy killing.53 Indeed, increasing power often goes hand in hand with increasing ambivalence: more powerful shamans may be better healers but are also
potentially more dangerous.54 This ambivalence has been described either as
sociopolitical-shamans should kill their enemies in other groups and heal
their friends in their own group-or as the product of apprenticeship-shamans who master their emotions and aggressive desires use their powers to
heal, and others who fail to exercise self-control become sorcerers.55 It is in
fact much easier-requiring less time and suffering-to become a sorcerer
than a
    Outbreaks of sickness have often been the occasion for one village to attack another whose shaman is deemed responsible. Early Spanish incursions
into the Amazon, bringing epidemics in their wake, may in fact have caused
an increase in interethnic warfare.57 A raid by one Achuar village on another,
occasioned by high fevers in both, and blamed by each on the shaman in the
other, was recounted as recently as 1996.58
    Until recently, little attention was paid to dark shamanism-what has also
been called assault sorcery-or to the centrality and importance of dark shamanism to the overall spiritual and cosmological ideas ofAmazonian peoples
in general.59 There is an ambiguity inherent in shamanic practice, where the
dangerous work of healing and sorcery intersect. Because shamans possess
spirit darts, and with them the power to kill, the boundary between sorcerer
and shaman is indistinct.6° Social anthropologist Carlos Fausto characterizes
Amazonian shamanism as predatory animism, where some people can enter
into relationships with other-than-human persons, which permit them to
cure, to fertilize, and to kill. Shamanism, he says, "thrives on ambivalence.ift
    This ambivalence is nowhere more clear than among the Shipibo, who
clearly state that the healing act itself ineluctably causes harm-that to remove the sickness from one person is to cast it upon another who lacks the
power to repel it. Since the illness-causing substance cannot be destroyed, the
shaman, in curing one, always harms another.62 In the same way, Yagua shamans toss extracted sickness-causing darts toward the sun, where they reach
the subterranean realms of the people-without-an-anus, causing considerable harm. Even more, the harm multiplies. In reprisal, the shamans of the
people-without-an-anus fling balls of earth at the Yagua, on which their children sometimes choke.63 Similarly, in return for successful hunting, the Tukano shaman must pay a fee-the lives of living people, who are sent to serve
the Master of Animals. The shaman drinks ayahuasca and sees these victims
in the form of birds sitting on the rafters of the spirit's house. The lives are
those of people who live far away; when shamans learn that people have died
in some other place, they know that the debt has been paid.64

    In the Amazon, the dark and the light, killing and curing, are at once antagonistic and complementary; shamanic healers and shamanic killers represent interlocking cultural tendencies, and their battleground is the flesh of the
sick, the ambiguous heart of the shaman, the valley of the soul. Thus, the shaman's power is granted grudgingly by a society that both needs and fears it.
As Brown reports, in the Alto Rio Mayo, if one asks, "Do you have an ishiwin,
a shaman, in your community?" the reply is likely to be, "No, we get along
well here. We have no problems. "15
    THE DANGERS OF BEING A SHAMAN
    It is, in fact, dangerous-and I mean physically dangerous-to be a shaman,
for four reasons. First, since all shamans are themselves potential sorcerers,
and have the ability to kill if they desire, they are prime suspects when there
are deaths suggestive of sorcery, especially the deaths of their own