Re-Politicizing Magic: Shamanisms and the State in Late Colonial to Post-Modern Brazilian Amazonia (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Western Antropological Construction of Shamanism. Reflections from the Notebook. Personal view.
Don Bosco Media Communication Kep Province, 2024
Today the term Shamanism is popular and attracts a lot of attention, especially in relation with Indigenous communities. But the topic is vast, and it includes the western anthropological construction of the concept, the influence it has in contemporary indigenous communities and their challenges to defend their own culture and identity, the intervention of new spiritualities and systems such as new age, neo-colonialism and western research in psychedelic plants and how indigenous communities are left behind and no recognized. It explores also the way of missionaries approaching indigenous communities through the history of colonialism and the reflection that the church is doing currently to a change of paradigms.
The State of the Arts of the Study of Indigenous Religions in South America.pdf
This article reviews the principal tendencies in the contemporary studies of indigenous South American religious traditions. It divides the field into studies of socioreligious formations (particularistic and universalistic formations, more specifically) and studies of cosmologies or worldviews (so-called perspectivism). It then discusses two recent, pioneering biographies of South American shamans which, more than any other in the field, offer original approaches to understanding shamanic historical consciousness, cosmopolitics, the constant struggles of shamanic spirits to sustain the cosmos against sorcery spirits that threaten to undermine the cosmic order.
In Darkness & Secrecy - The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, pp.51-82, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (Duke University Press), 2004
In this paper we analyze and compare the role of sorcery and witchcraft in contemporary local and regional politics in Guyana and the Venezuelan Amazon in order to illustrate the way in which occult forces have been incorporated into the regional and national political process. In general terms this has recently been the subject of study by both Taussig (1997) and Coronil (1997) who, in different ways, consider how the ‘magic’ of the Venezuelan State is established through its association with occult powers, particularly the popular spirit-cults. In a broader frame of reference it is evident that Voudoun has played a similar role in the establishment of the Duvalier regime in Haiti (Diedrich 1970, Ferguson 1989) and it will be suggested here that Obeah has also been used to enhance the political potency of the Forbes Burnham regime in Guyana. However, although we may have elegant and informative studies of the forms of ideology that the ruling elites have deployed to gain consensus for their projects of modernization and development, we have little sense of how those process played out in the margins of ‘national’ political culture, or what broader cultural forms are harnessed in the process of occult government, in particular those that invoke indigenous powers or ‘indigeneity’ in general. Thus Taussig (1997) for example, discusses the ideological power of the “Tres Potencias” but does so through an exclusive consideration of the ‘Spirit Queen” - the latent and darkly mysterious spirit force of “El Indio” is left without commentary. This chapter is partly intended to correct that lack through a consideration of how native dark shamanism, by kanaimàs, pitadores and false prophets, has fed the political imaginary and practice of post-colonial Guyana and Venezuela.
Native Central and South American shamanism
Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, Vol. 1. Walter, M.N. and E.J.N. Fridman (Eds.). Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 365-370., 2004
Vast and rich, harboring tremendous biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity, and heirs to a glorious and tragic history, Central and South America have given rise to some of the most ancient, enduring, and spectacular examples of shamanistic practice documented. The Asiatic peoples who migrated to the Americas during the Pleistocene appear to have brought with them a ritual complex that integrated religious and medical functions, centered around trance states, and may have involved hallucinogenic plant use. As in the case of the Siberian cultures to whom we owe the etymology of the term “shaman,” native societies throughout Central and South America distinguish ritual specialists who enter trance to commune with the spirits for purposes of healing, divination, and other matters of individual and collective well-being. Because of the presumed Asian origins of Amerindians, and partly because the Siberian term happened to gain wide usage, certain west Asian traditions and similar Arctic and North American examples have been treated as original or more “pure” versions of shamanism than their Central and South American counterparts. Yet recent archeological and genetic evidence suggests a much more ancient date for the arrival of humans in the Americas than had previously been assumed. Keeping this fact in mind, native Central and South American shamanism should be seen not as derivative of or secondary to “classic” Asian shamanism, but rather parallel, largely independent, and equally ancient bodies of practice that have evolved and diversified in response to heterogeneous ecological, sociocultural, and historical conditions.
Indigenous Religious Traditions, 2023
I adapt Michel Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self to carry out a comparative analysis of two ethnographic cases of contemporary South American shamanisms. In these cases, their cosmological and ritual frameworks display ontological thresholds acceded through specific technologies of the self that contest current assumptions about both the Christian and the scientific hegemonic worldviews. In the first case, I review an indigenous ethnic shamanism rooted in Qom/Toba tradition in Argentina’s Chaco region. In the second one, I analyze Santo Daime, a Brazilian ayahuasca religion that displays shamanic traits. To contextualize these cases, I introduce historical data of the constitution of Argentine and Brazilian socio-religious fields, within which these forms of shamanism would emerge. I provide ethnographic data about the history and main religious features of these shamanisms and my analysis stresses the technologies of the self unfolded to achieve a direct connection with the numinous.