The Learning Earth

Yuxin, Rao and the Amazonian Body: A Complete Guide·Part G of 7

Synthesis

1. The jaguar drinks beer. All beings see themselves as humans. So the soul is the common and the body is the difference — inversely to the familiar scheme.

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25. How it all ties together

  1. The jaguar drinks beer. All beings see themselves as humans. So the soul is the common and the body is the difference — inversely to the familiar scheme.

  2. So the body is the important thing. Not a shell but equipment: what determines what you can see and what you can do.

  3. And therefore it is made. Food, fasting, paint, ornament, song, isolation. The human body is not given; it is an achievement maintained daily.

  4. Kinship is the same thing at social scale. Not inherited — cooked. And that is why the father fasts after the birth: they share substance.

  5. Food is a problem, because animals are persons. And the dangerousness scales with resemblance: the more something resembles you, the more dangerous it is to eat.

  6. The greatest danger is not death but transition. To begin seeing from the other side. So the central work is the maintenance of difference, not union with nature.

  7. The specialist is made the same way. The dieta does not teach — it constructs an instrument of perception, through years of isolation and deprivation. One plant at a time.

  8. And healing is aesthetic and acoustic. Design, cleanliness, alignment against tangle and murk; and the song that organises, directed at a specific body.

  9. The healer is dangerous of necessity. The capacity to extract is the capacity to send. There is no harmless version of the role.

  10. The valuable is on the outside, and is acquired by seizure and conversion. It is a cosmology of predation, not of harmony — and the second step, conversion into kin, is where all the work is done.

  11. The landscape is not virgin, and these societies are not primordial. They are survivors of a catastrophe, in a forest that bears the signature of their ancestors.

  12. And none of this is safe or quiet — not then, and not now.

26. The Awajún and the terms

The case

In the 1990s, a bioprospecting research programme — with an American university, a pharmaceutical company and Peruvian institutions — turned to the plant knowledge of the Awajún of northern Peru.

The initial reaction of their federations was opposition.

But instead of ending in rupture or in silent exploitation, the matter was renegotiated. The result included:

  • A licensing agreement for the knowhow — that is, explicit recognition that their knowledge is an asset, not a free resource
  • Advance payments independent of result
  • Provision for royalties in case of a commercial product
  • And terms of control over use

And the problems, because there were

It is not a rosy story. There was disagreement among the federations themselves about who had the right to consent on whose behalf. The economic return was modest. And the question of who “owns” a knowledge shared by many communities was not resolved.

But

It was among the first cases where an Amazonian people did not undergo a transaction, but set its terms.

And it did not remain isolated. The same communities have continued: resistance to extractive and oil projects, legal challenges, and in 2015 the neighbouring Wampís announced the formation of an autonomous territorial governance — the first of its kind in Peru.

And today

Indicative numbers: approximately 70,000 Awajún; around 35,000 Shipibo-Konibo; over 100,000 Shuar; approximately 38,000 Yanomami.

In total, the Amazon includes over 1.5 million indigenous people in nine countries, across approximately 400 peoples — and dozens of groups in voluntary isolation, who do not wish for contact, and whose territories are violated by illegal mining and logging.

The last thought

The central lesson of this text is not a technique and is not a plant.

It is a position about what you are:

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

And if this is true, then the question that has meaning is not “what can I take from this tradition?”

It is the same question that the tradition itself poses, from the first page to the last:

“What am I taking, from whom, and what will I do with it afterwards?”

APPENDIX — Glossary and sources

Glossary

Term Origin Meaning
yuxin / yushin Pano Interiority, capacity to be a subject — not only human
wakan Jivaroan The equivalent
couvade French term The restrictions of the father after birth
tipiti Tupi The woven press for manioc detoxification
huito / jagua — Genipa americana — black paint, lasts ~2 weeks
achiote / urucum — Bixa orellana — red paint
kené Shipibo The geometric designs; heritage of Peru since 2008
onanya Shipibo “One who knows” — the healer
meraya Shipibo The highest grade — rare
rao Shipibo Medicine-plant, teacher-plant
uwishin / iwishin Shuar / Awajún The healer — and sender of darts
payé Tupi The widespread term in Brazil
dieta / samá Spanish / Shipibo The isolation and deprivation that constructs a body
ikaro mestizo The healing song
tsentsak / virote Jivaroan / Spanish The invisible pathogenic darts
Nicotiana rustica — The strong tobacco — the foundational substance
tabaquero Spanish The tobacco specialist
ayahuasca Quechua aya “dead” + waska “rope / vine”
Banisteriopsis caapi — The vine — β-carbolines, MAOI
chacruna — Psychotria viridis — DMT
toé / maikua Spanish / Shuar Brugmansia — deliriant, dangerous
arutam Jivaroan The vision-soul that you acquire and lose
natem Shuar Ayahuasca in Jivaroan use
vegetalismo Spanish The mestizo healing tradition of the Peruvian Amazon
tsantsa Jivaroan The shrunken head
muisak Jivaroan The vengeful power of the killed
terra preta Portuguese The anthropogenic black earth

Sources

Theory

  • Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio” (1996); “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”, JRAI (1998); From the Enemy’s Point of View (1992)
  • Tânia Stolze Lima, for the Yudjá (1996)
  • Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (2005); Les lances du crépuscule (1993) — Achuar
  • Terence Turner and others — critique of perspectivism
  • Carlos Fausto, Inimigos fiéis (2001) — predation and familiarisation

The body and kinship

  • Seeger, DaMatta & Viveiros de Castro, “A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras” (1979) — foundational
  • Anthony Seeger, for body ornaments and the senses
  • Cecilia McCallum, Gender and Sociality in Amazonia (2001)
  • Beckerman & Valentine (eds.), Cultures of Multiple Fathers (2002)

Shipibo, song, design

  • Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, for the kené and the healing aesthetic (1985 onward)
  • Bernd Brabec de Mori, works on songs and on the dating of the ayahuasca complex — the critical voice of chapters 13 and 16
  • Luis Eduardo Luna, Vegetalismo (1986)

Jivaroan peoples

  • Michael Harner, The Jívaro (1972) — genuine ethnography; see also chapter 24
  • Descola, as above
  • Anne Christine Taylor, on personhood and memory

Substances

  • Johannes Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (1987)
  • Miller et al., PNAS (2019) — chemical analysis of a ritual bundle from Bolivia
  • Richard Spruce (observations ~1851); Villavicencio (1858) — the first European reports

Archaeology and landscape

  • Levis et al., Science (2017) — dominance of domesticated species near archaeological sites
  • Michael Heckenberger, Eduardo Neves, Charles Clement — anthropogenic Amazonia
  • Gaspar de Carvajal (1542) — the vindicated testimony

Contemporary issues

  • Brendan Tobin, Kelly Bannister — analysis of the Awajún bioprospecting case
  • Publications of organisations in the field on safety and abuse in ceremonies
  • Global Witness, annual reports on murders of land defenders

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