The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  NOTES

  1: FOREST TELEVISION

  1 According to La Barre (1976), an anthropologist known for his studies of the indigenous uses of the peyote cactus, Castaneda’s first book “is pseudo-profound, sophomoric and deeply vulgar. To one reader at least, for decades interested in Amerindian hallucinogens, the book is frustratingly and tiresomely dull, posturing pseudo-ethnography and, intellectually, kitsch” (p. 42). De Mille (1980) calls Castaneda’s work a “hoax” and a “farce” (pp. 11, 22).

  2 The projects were carried out despite an independent evaluation done in 1981 for the United States Agency for International Development, which showed that all the “uninhabited” areas the Peruvian government proposed to develop and colonize were actually occupied by indigenous people who had been there for millennia and who, in some cases, had already reached their territory’s carrying capacity—see Smith (1982, pp. 39-57).

  3 A large majority of Ashaninca men living in the Pichis Valley in 1985 spoke fluent Spanish.

  4 Toé is Brugmansia suaveolens. According to Schultes and Hofmann (1979, pp.128-129), Brugmansia and Datura were long considered to belong to the same genus, but were finally separated for morphological and biological reasons. However, their alkaloid content is similar.

  2: ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND SHAMANS

  1 In this paragraph, I simplify the possible ingredients of ayahuasca. Building on the work of Rivier and Lindgren (1972), McKenna, Towers, and Abbott (1984) show that the Psychotria viridis bush (chacruna in Spanish) is almost invariably the source of the dimethyltryptamine contained in the ayahuasca brew prepared in the Peruvian Amazon, while in Colombia the Diplopterys cabrerana vine is used instead. The only constant in the different ayahuasca recipes is the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, containing three monoamine oxidase inhibitors, harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine, which are also hallucinogenic at sufficient dose levels. As Luna (1986) points out, the basic mixture is often used to reveal the properties of all sorts of other plants; thus, “the number of additives is unlimited, simply because ayahuasca is a means of exploring properties of new plants and substances by studying the changes they cause on the hallucinatory experience, and by examining the content of the visions” (p. 159). According to McKenna, Luna, and Towers (1986), ayahuasca admixtures constitute a veritable “non-investigated pharmacopoeia.” It should also be noted that the Banisteriopsis caapi vine is commonly known as “ayahuasca,” not to be confused with the brew of the same name of which it is a component. See Schultes and Hofmann (1979) for further information on these different plants. Concerning the endogenous production of dimethyltryptamine in the human brain, see Smythies et al. (1979) and Barker et al. (1981)—though Rivier (1996 personal communication) warns that current extraction procedures can lead to chemical transformation and that the presence of dimethyltryptamine in extracted cerebrospinal liquid does not prove its endogenous existence; it could simply be the result of the transformation of endogenous tryptamines, such as 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin). According to the archeological evidence gathered by Naranjo (1986), Amazonian peoples have been using ayahuasca for at least five thousand years. The quote in the text is from Schultes (1972, pp. 38-39). Finally, Lévi-Strauss (1950) writes: “Few primitive people have acquired as complete a knowledge of the physical and chemical properties of their botanical environment as the South American Indian” (p. 484).

  2 The use of hallucinogens is by no means uniform across the immensity of the Amazonian Basin. Out of approximately 400 indigenous peoples, Luna (1986) lists 72 who use ayahuasca and who are concentrated in Western Amazonia. In other parts of the Amazon, dimethyltryptamine-based hallucinogens are also used, but are extracted from different plants, such as Virola—which is snuffed in powder form (see Schultes and Hofmann 1979, pp. 164-171). Some peoples use only tobacco, the hallucinogenic properties of which have been documented by Wilbert (1987). Finally, in some Amazonian cultures, shamans work with dreams rather than hallucinations (see Perrin 1992b, Kracke 1992, and Wright 1992). See Schultes and Raffauf (1990, p. 9) for the estimate of 80,000 plant species in the Amazon.

  3 Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971, 1975, 1978), Chaumeil (1982, 1983), Chevalier (1982), Luna (1984, 1986), and Gebhart-Sayer (1986) are exceptions.

  4 Darwin (1871, p. 197).

  5 The word “primitive” comes from the Latin primitivus, first born. Regarding the foundation of anthropology on an illusory object of study, see Kuper (1988).

  6 Tylor (1866, p. 86). The word “savage” comes from the Latin silvaticus, “of the forest.”

  7 Malinowski (1922) writes with satisfaction: “Ethnology has introduced law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish. It has transformed for us the sensational, wild and unaccountable world of ‘savages’ into a number of well ordered communities, governed by law, behaving and thinking according to consistent principles” (pp. 9-10).

  8 Lévi-Strauss (1963a), explaining the notion of “order of orders,” writes: “Thus anthropology considers the whole social fabric as a network of different types of orders. The kinship system provides a way to order individuals according to certain rules; social organization is another way of ordering individuals and groups; social stratifications, whether economic or political, provide us with a third type; and all these orders can themselves be ordered by showing the kind of relationships which exist among them, how they interact with one another on both the synchronic and the diachronic levels” (p. 312). Trinh (1989) writes: “Science is Truth, and what anthropology seeks first and foremost through its noble defense of the native’s cause (whose cause? you may ask) is its own elevation to the rank of Science” (p. 57).

  9 Anthropological discourse is not understandable by those who are its object, but anthropologists have generally not considered this a problem. As Malinowski (1922) writes: “Unfortunately, the native can neither get outside his tribal atmospheres and see it objectively, nor if he could, would he have intellectual and linguistic means sufficient to express it” (p. 454). Likewise, Descola (1996) writes: “The underlying logic detected by scholarly analysis seldom rises into the conscious minds of the members of the culture that he is studying. They are no more capable of formulating it than a young child is capable of setting out the grammatical rules of a language that he has, notwithstanding, mastered” (p. 144).

  10 Lévi-Strauss (1949a pp. 154-155).

  11 Rosaldo (1989 p. 180). Bourdieu (1990) writes: “Undue projection of the subject onto the object is never more evident than in the case of the primitivist participation of the bewitched or mystic anthropologist, which, like populist immersion, also plays on the objective distance from the object to play the game as a game while waiting to leave it in order to tell it. This means that participant observation is, as it were, a contradiction in terms (as anyone who has tried to do it will have confirmed in practice)” (p. 34). The published translation of Bourdieu’s paragraph is imprecise, and I have rectified it here; see the French original, Bourdieu (1980 p. 57) in comparison.

  12 Bourdieu (1977) was the first to explain the pernicious effects of the objectivist gaze and the immobilization of time it implies. See also Bourdieu (1990 p. 26) on the limits of objectivism. Lévi-Strauss (1963a, p. 378) writes that “the anthropologist is the astronomer of the social sciences.”

  13 Tsing (1993) talks of “disciplinary conventions that link domination and description” (p. 32). See also Lewis (1973) and Saïd (1978). Foucault (1961) first pointed out the will to power inherent in the clinical gaze of the social sciences. For the “unbiased and supra-cultural language of the observer,” see Bourguignon (1970, p. 185).

  14 Lévi-Strauss (1991a, p. 2).

  15 The word “shaman” comes from the Tungusic word saman, the original etymology of which may be foreign. Different authors have proposed a Chinese origin (sha-men = witch), a Sanskrit origin (sramana = buddhist monk), and a Turkish origin (kam)—see Eliade (1964, pp. 495-499). Lot-Falck (1963, p. 9) gives an indigenous etymology which she presents as “universally recogniz
ed nowadays”: the Tungusic root sam-, which signifies the idea of body movement. She concludes: “All the observers of shamanism have therefore been justifiably struck by this gestural activity which gives its name to shamanism” (p. 18). However, Lot-Falck goes on to write ten years later: “The term ‘shaman’ was borrowed from the Tungusic saman, the etymology and origin of which are still doubtful” (1973, p. 3). Meanwhile Diószegi (1974, p. 638) proposes the Tungusic verb “sa-” (= to know) as the origin of the word saman, which would therefore mean “the one who knows.” Surprisingly, several authors base themselves on Lot-Falck’s first text to claim that the word saman is etymologically linked to the idea of movement—see, for example, Hamayon (1978, p. 55), Rouget (1980, p. 187), and Chaumeil (1983, p. 10).

  16 For summaries and bibliographies concerning the anthropology of shamanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Eliade (1964, pp. 23-32), Lewis (1971, pp. 178-184), Delaby (1976), and Mitriani (1982).

  17 Devereux (1956, pp. 28-29).

  18 Lévi-Strauss (1949b), published in Lévi-Strauss (1963a, pp. 197-199).

  19 Lewis (1971): “The shaman is not the slave, but the master of anomaly and chaos. In rising to the challenge of the powers which rule his life and by valiantly overcoming them in this crucial initiatory rite which reimposes order on chaos and despair, man reasserts his mastery of the universe and affirms his control of destiny and fate” (pp. 188-189). Browman and Schwarz (1979): “Anthropologists use the term ‘shaman’ to refer to persons encountered in nonliterate cultures who are actively involved in maintaining and restoring certain types of order” (p. 6). Hamayon (1982): “On the other hand, what can distinguish the shamanic system is that it defines itself in terms of disorder, which is to be avoided, and not in terms of order, which is to be maintained” (p. 30). Hoppál (1987): “Shamans as mediators create order and reestablish balance within their groups such that their role is socially embedded in their cultures” (p. 93).

  20 In his 1967 article entitled “Shamans and acute schizophrenia,” Silverman writes that shamans and schizophrenics both exhibit “grossly non-reality-oriented ideation, abnormal perceptual experiences, profound emotional upheavals, and bizarre mannerisms” (p. 22). Since then, the view that shamans are mentally ill has withered, but has not entirely disappeared. Lot-Falck (1973) writes that “one can hardly contest that shamans are abnormal beings” (p. 4); Hultkrantz (1978) writes: “Our conclusion is, then, that the shaman has a hysteroid disposition which, however, does not provoke any mental disorder” (p. 26); Perrin (1992a) writes: “In other words, the first shamans would have been ‘real hysterics’ before the system they created became entirely accepted as a logical and formal representation, made up of elements of hysterical nature, but which are now semi-independent of their psychological origin” (p. 122). Finally, Noll (1983) provides a demonstration of the fundamental differences between shamanism and schizophrenia.

  21 Browman and Schwarz (1979, p. 7). See Halifax (1979, pp. 3-4) for a similar jack-of-all-trades definition of the shaman.

  22 Taussig (1987) writes: “But what would happen if instead of this we allow the old meaning to remain in the disorder, first of the ritual, and second of the history of the wider society of which it is part? My experience with Putumayo shamans suggests that this is what they do, and that the magical power of an image like the Huitoto lies in its insistently questioning and undermining the search for order” (p. 390). Brown (1988), in discussing the “anti-structural world of the Aguaruna shaman,” considers the latter’s work to involve “struggle, uncertainty, ambivalence and partial revelation.” According to Brown, the function of the shaman’s revelations is to “shift disorder from the human body to the body politic” (pp. 115, 103, 102).

  23 See Eliade (1964), p. 5 (“specializes in a trance”), pp. 96-97 (“secret language”), pp. 126ff. and 487ff. (vines, ropes, ladders), and p. 9 (“spirits from the sky”).

  24 See Hamayon (1990, pp. 31-32—latent mysticism), Delaby and Hamayon quoted in Chaumeil (1983, p. 16—detaching symbols from their context), Hamayon (1978, p. 55—Eliade’s mysticism mutilates and distorts the facts, obliterating the sociocultural aspect of the shamanic institution and practice), and Chaumeil (1983, p. 17—the mystical dead end into which Eliade locks the phenomenon). All these references are cited by Chaumeil (1983, pp. 16-19). Taussig (1992, p. 159) calls Eliade’s work “a potentially fascistic portrayal of third world healing.”

  25 Geertz (1966, p. 39). Furthermore, Taussig (1989, quoted in Atkinson 1992, p. 307) writes that “shamanism is . . . a made-up, modern, Western category, an artful reification of disparate practices, snatches of folklore and overarching folklorizations, residues of long-established myths intermingled with the politics of academic departments, curricula, conferences, journal juries and articles, [and] funding agencies.” The first anthropologist to criticize the concept of shamanism was Van Gennep, who protested, in 1903, against the use of an obscure Siberian word to describe the beliefs and customs “of the semi-civilized the world over” (p. 52).

  26 See Lévi-Strauss (1963b).

  27 Luna (1986, pp. 62, 66).

  3: THE MOTHER OF THE MOTHER OF TOBACCO IS A SNAKE

  1 See Swenson and Narby (1985, 1986), Narby (1986), Beauclerk, Narby, and Townsend (1988), and Narby (1989).

  2 Until recently, and for unknown reasons, Spanish speakers have called the Ashaninca “Campas.” The etymology of this word is doubtful. As Weiss (1969) writes: “The term ‘Campa’ is not a word in the Campa language” (p. 44). According to him, the word probably comes from the Quechua “tampa” (“in disorder, confused”) or “ttampa” (“disheveled”) (p. 61). However, there is no agreement among specialists on the word’s exact etymology—see Varese (1973, pp. 139-144). Renard-Casevitz (1993) justifies her use of the word “campa” as follows: “The term campa is not appreciated as an ethnonym, though it does present a certain convenience.... I use campa for want of a term with a comparable reach to designate the totality of the Arawak subsets who share a notable cultural trait: the prohibition of internal war, among all except the Piro” (pp. 29, 31). In the 1980s, one of the first demands put forth by the different Ashaninca organizations was that people stop designating them by a name that they do not use in their own language.

  3 See Weiss (1969, pp. 93, 96, 97-100, 201).

  4 See Weiss (1969, pp. 107-109, 199-226). The quote is on page 222.

  5 Weiss (1969, p. 200).

  6 For a more detailed account of this experience, see Narby (1990, pp. 24-27).

  4: ENIGMA IN RIO

  1 Eight indigenous land-titling projects were carried out successfully, covering a total of 2,303,617 hectares (23,000 km2 or 5,692,237 acres). Details concerning these projects can be obtained from “Nouvelle Planète,” CH-1042 Assens, Switzerland.

  2 The Rio Declaration states: “Indigenous people and their communities . . . have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize and duly support their effective participation in the achievement of sustainable development” (Principle 22). The Agenda 21 underlines the importance of the territorial rights of indigenous peoples and of their self-determination in matters of development (Chapter 26). The Statement of Forest Principles points out the importance of respecting the rights and interests of indigenous peoples and of consulting them on forestry policies (Points 2d, 5a, 13d). The Convention on Biological Diversity considers the importance of the knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples and calls for their equitable remuneration (Points 8j, 10c, 10d). The Rio conference was a spectacular turning point for indigenous rights. Just five years beforehand, the question of these rights remained largely ignored by most international organizations concerned with development or environmental matters.

  3 For example, The Body Shop and Shaman Pharmaceuticals, whose vice-president declared: “Shaman [Pharmaceuticals] is committed to providing direct and immediate reciprocal benefits t
o indigenous people and the countries in which they live” (King 1991, p. 21).

  4 These figures come from, respectively, Farnsworth (1988, p. 95), Eisner (1990, p. 198), and Elisabetsky (1991, p. 11).

  5 Estimates of the number of “higher” (that is, flowering) plant species vary from 250,000 to 750,000. Wilson (1990) writes: “How much biodiversity is there in the world? The answer is remarkable: No one knows the number of species even to the nearest order of magnitude. Aided by monographs, encyclopedias, and the generous help of specialists, I recently estimated the total number of described species (those given a scientific name) to be 1.4 million, a figure perhaps accurate to within the nearest 100,000. But most biologists agree that the actual number is at least 3 million and could easily be 30 million or more. In a majority of particular groups the actual amount of diversity is still a matter of guesswork” (p. 4).

  6 The Convention on Biological Diversity mentions the importance of “equitable” remuneration for indigenous knowledge, but fails to provide a mechanism to this effect. According to the Kari-Oca Declaration signed by the delegates of the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Territory, Environment and Development (May 1992): “The usurping of traditional medicines and knowledge from indigenous peoples should be considered a crime against peoples” (Point 99). Furthermore: “As creators and carriers of civilizations which have given and continue to share knowledge, experience and values with humanity, we require that our right to intellectual and cultural properties be guaranteed and that the mechanism for each implementation be in favor of our peoples and studied in depth and implemented. This respect must include the right over genetic resources, gene banks, biotechnology and knowledge of biodiversity programs” (Point 102). See also Christensen and Narby (1992).