Part F: Practice and Cost

21. Ten practical principles

There is no such list in the region. Synthesis. Marking: [ethnography] from recorded practice, [theory] from anthropological synthesis, [modern] my own formulation.

1. The body is not given; it is made [ethnography]

What you are is the outcome of acts — what you ate, who fed you, what you fasted from, what was sung over you. And so it can be built better or allowed to decay. Its maintenance is work, not datum.

2. Kinship is act, not fact [ethnography]

You become someone’s kin by eating with them, caring for them, sharing substance — and you stop, if you stop. A relation that is not fed, atrophies. No rupture is needed to end something.

3. What enters does not stop at you [ethnography]

The logic of couvade: what you do to your body reaches those who share substance with you — and the most fragile first. The private choice is, in this scheme, less private than you think.

Paint, design, ornament: declare and reinforce what this body can do and in what state it is. The surface is not superficial.

5. Learning requires the construction of an instrument [ethnography]

The dieta does not add information — it builds a body capable of perceiving. For what really matters, the question is not “what should I learn?” but “what do I need to become in order to see this?”

6. One thing at a time [ethnography]

The strictest rule of the dieta. Two strong presences at once cut each other, and the result is not the sum but nothing.

7. Sound organises; healing is aesthetic [ethnography]

The categories are not energy and blockage, but design, cleanliness, alignment, tangle. And the song does not express — it directs, to a specific person, for a specific purpose.

8. The one who heals can harm [ethnography]

And not as a deviation: the capacity to extract is the same as the capacity to send. Do not seek kindness as certification of ability — and do not assume that ability implies kindness.

9. The valuable comes from outside — and must be converted [theory]

Nothing significant is produced purely internally. But seizure without conversion produces nothing: the second tempo — the feeding, the naming, the incorporation — is where the work is done.

10. And the limit: ask which tradition is being offered to you [modern]

Indigenous practice, mestizo vegetalismo, Brazilian church, or tourist retreat — four different things with different ages, different rules and different levels of protection. The question is not rudeness. It is the minimum.

The essential about the essentials

They are not ten. They are one, seen from ten angles:

You do not have a body. You make it — with others, from materials you took from elsewhere, and only for as long as you keep making it.

22. Safety

This chapter does not give instructions for safe use. It lists risks.

Drug interactions — the most serious

The β-carbolines are monoamine oxidase inhibitors. This creates real risk of serotonin syndrome, which can be fatal, in combination with:

SSRIs and SNRIs (antidepressants) — the most frequent dangerous case
Tricyclics, other MAOIs
Tramadol, triptans for migraine
Dextromethorphan (in common cough suppressants)
Stimulants, amphetamines, cocaine, MDMA

And there is a second mechanism: MAOIs in combination with tyramine-rich foods (aged cheeses, cured meats, fermented products, certain wines) can cause hypertensive crisis.

Discontinuation of antidepressants is not a simple matter and is not done alone — the discontinuation itself has its own risks.

Cardiovascular

Transient increase in blood pressure and heart rate. Significant for people with hypertension, arrhythmia or heart disease.

Psychiatric

Risk of triggering a psychotic or manic episode in individuals with personal or family history of psychotic or bipolar disorders
Documented prolonged difficult reactions — anxiety, depersonalisation, insomnia, weeks or months later
And the obvious: the experience is often intensely unpleasant, and there is no way to stop it

Toé

Toé (Brugmansia) contains tropane alkaloids (scopolamine). It is a deliriant, not a psychedelic: it produces real confusion with loss of contact, not altered perception with preserved judgement.

The margin between active and toxic dose is narrow. And there is a documented problem: it is sometimes added to preparations without informing participants, because it “strengthens the visions”.

Tobacco

Doses of Nicotiana rustica used in some practices can cause severe nicotine poisoning. Deaths have been recorded.

Deaths

There are documented deaths in tourist contexts in Peru and Ecuador — from drug interactions, from added substances, from medical emergencies without care, and in at least one case from violence during the ceremony.

A characteristic recurrent pattern: the centres are in remote locations, hours from medical help, without medical personnel, without screening of history, without emergency protocol.

In one known case, the death of a participant was concealed and the body was buried before anyone was notified.

23. Abuse and conflict

The institutional vacuum

The field of paid ceremonies operates, largely, without any regulation:

No certification. The title “shaman” is checked by no one
No oversight. There is no body to appeal to
Maximally asymmetric relation. The participant is in a foreign country, in isolation, in a state of altered perception, without language, without transport
And often has paid in advance and invested emotionally in the expectation

Sexual assaults

There are multiple documented reports of sexual abuse by individuals presenting themselves as healers, in ceremonies, against female participants.

Organisations working in the field have published safety guides and informational materials precisely about this — that is, the problem is recognised within the field, not an external accusation.

And the silencing mechanism is predictable: the victim is in a state where her own perception is contested, where the frame defines the experience as “therapeutic”, and where there is no one to report to.

Economic distortion

A healer can earn from one foreign visitor many times what he earns from his entire community.

The consequences are measurable: local patients are priced out; an incentive is created for the manufacture of credentials; and the long apprenticeship of chapter 11 becomes an obstacle rather than a prerequisite.

The Arévalo case

In April 2018, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, an elderly healer and cultural leader of the Shipibo-Konibo, known for her knowledge of the songs, was murdered in the Ucayali region of Peru.

A Canadian visitor was accused. Before he could be tried, he was lynched by a crowd — and his death was filmed and circulated.

The motives of the first murder remained contested.

The case became emblematic precisely because it does not permit a clean reading: a community under pressure, a stranger in search of healing, two deaths, and no institutional framework anywhere.

And intra-community violence

This does not concern only foreigners. Chapter 14 has direct consequences:

Witchcraft accusations lead to murders — documented, today, in many Amazonian regions. A healer deemed responsible for deaths can be killed by relatives of the victim.

And the greatest conflict

It is none of the above. It is the land.

Illegal gold mining and mercury contamination of rivers; oil spills; deforestation; and murders of land defenders, with Latin American Amazonia appearing consistently among the deadliest regions in the world for this activity.

In 2009, in Bagua in northern Peru, confrontation between Awajún and Wampís protesters and police — over decrees opening indigenous lands to investment — left over thirty dead on both sides.

This is the real context within which everything else in this document happens.

24. Harner and the invention of “shamanism”

The facts

Michael Harner did genuine ethnographic work: with the Shuar in the late 1950s and the 1960s, and with the Konibo of the Ucayali in the early 1960s.

His monograph on the Shuar (1972) is serious work — and in fact describes accurately the dart system, the dual nature of the healer, and the fear that surrounds him (chapter 14).

And then

In 1980 he published a book that changed everything, and in 1979/1985 he founded an organisation for the dissemination of his method.

The proposition: that behind all the shamanic traditions of the world there is a common core of techniques — drumming at a specific rhythm, “journey” to a lower and upper world, “power animals”, soul retrieval — that can be detached from any specific culture and taught in a seminar.

It was named “core shamanism”.

The critique

The supposed “global core” is largely a synthesis of Siberian and North American elements with its own framing — not an empirically documented universal
The claim of universality itself is not supported by comparative ethnography
And most essentially: exactly the difficult parts were removed — the years-long apprenticeship, the deprivation, the danger, the community, the responsibility to specific people, and the attack dimension

That is: chapter 11 and chapter 14 were removed — the two things that make this tradition what it is.

The conclusion

Most of what circulates in the West as “shamanism” descends from a 1980 book, not from any Amazonian tradition.

And the irony is that the author of it had correctly recorded what he later removed.