shamanism and politics in late-colonial Ecuador

FRANK SALOMON-University of Wisconsin, Madison

”Overemphasized in explaining crisis cults, the political has been curiously neglected in
most studies of shamanism,” observes Weston La Barre (1970:301) in The Ghost Dance.
“Both North American and Siberian shamans . . were often leaders as well as protectors of
their groups; and South American shaman-messiahs commonly combined political and
magical power over men and cosmos alike.” In numerous South American lowland
societies lacking states or hereditary chieftaincies, intragroup conflicts were commonly ex-
pressed and political preeminence established through a complex of magical aggression
and cure that pitted rival shamans against each other as poles of faction formation and
leadership Shamans were also paramount in fighting between stateless groups indeed, in
forest zones bordering the Andes today, great shamans are still accorded the Quechua title
kuraka, which the Inca and Spanish governments used to designate state-endorsed ethnic
lords or chieftains (Porras 1979:28; Oberem 1971:226; Whitten 1976:141-163, Harner 1972
77-1 33, Robinson 1972).
What i s the relation between such stateless forms of political process and the gover-
nance of empires or nation-states? When conquerors impose centralized, hereditary, or
bureaucratic regimens on the periphery of their domains, do stateless modes of political a c -
tion inevitably wither or do they flare up sporadically in the guise of crisis cults? Or might
they acquire new functions that confer durability and even special potency under the new
order? If the latter, we may ask what impact their persistence has on interethnic relations in
the state orbit.
This essay concerns the political importance of magical aggression at the margins of the
later Spanish Empire in parts of what are now Ecuador and southern Colombia On the
evidence available from these places it appears that shamanic politics can well survive the
imposition of the state and indeed affect its subsequent evolution. The reasons for this are
sought both inside the affected ethnic groups and in interethnic relations.

Study of Jllth-century “witchcraft” trials from the Audiencia de Quito indicates

that many acts of magical aggression and defense belonged to the South Ameri-
can tradition of shamanic combat but that the conflicts provoking them derived
from specifically colonial stres5es. Due in part to the poor f i t between jurally
mandated institutions of colonial governance and the dynamics of native com-
munities, shamanic achievement continued to be a route to indigenous power.
The failure of Spanish administrators to interpret such facts politically had the
paradoxical effect of accrediting shamans’ magical potency in European eyes
and strengthening the conviction that peoples of the colonial periphery were
ungovernable and dangerous. [shaman ism , Andes, E c u ador, e t hno h i story]

Copyright 0 1983 by the American Ethnological Society

0094-0496/83/030413-l6$21Oil

shamanism and politics 413

 Leadership accrued to colonial shamans in part because colonially imposed de jure in-
stitutions of governance showed limited ability t o respond to de facto shifts of indigenous
power. State functionaries assigned colonial offices by criteria derived from the state’s own
institutions (status lineages, bureaucratic schooling, etc.), but these corresponded to no
local standard of legitimacy. Unless otherwise reinforced, colonial offices deteriorated in-
t o paper titles. Shamans and their clienteles acted more effectively as factions capable of
adjusting power relations, and they adapted t o the colonial situation in varying ways. They
counteracted and immobilized jural authorities by forming adverse, but not always overtly
mutinous, factions; or, they infiltrated and preempted colonial offices. Sometimes, colo-
nial officers placed themselves at the mercy of shamans or sought to become shamans.
These facts regularly affected relations between governments and stateless minorities.
When local crises became visible t o them, state functionaries became aware that de facto
power flowed through legally invisible channels. Within imperial belief systems, the effects
were eminently interpretable as magical. By trying offending shaman-politicians for
demonological, not political, crimes, colonial magistrates accredited shamanic powers as
real and efficacious. But the effort to remove individual shamans was not efficacious in
shoring up weak colonial institutions of native governance; the net effect was to reinforce
shamanism as a technique for acquiring office. Governors attributed magical power as de-
fined in their own cultural tradition to members of exotic groups (Silverblatt 1979a:176;
1979b:28). It became a characteristic belief of dwellers at state centers that ethnicities of
the periphery, who resisted political definition, possessed magical powers that struck
across ethnic and class boundaries. This idea i s often evident in ideological elaborations of
centerjperiphery, capitallfrontier, and civilizedlsavage oppositions. In various forms it is a
common warrant for aggression against, or avoidance of, stateless peoples. In South Ameri-
ca, such instances occur from lncaic through colonial to republican times, and the
phenomenon may be common to other colonial or “internally colonial” societies.
The cases in point concern four 18th-century “witches” (brujos, mohanes, or hechizeros
in the vocabulary of Quichua-Spanish courtroom interpreters) whose trials are preserved in
Ecuador‘s Archivo Nacional de Historia.’ Several related Peruvian cases from the same era
have been studied by Millones (1979). While a much earlier stage of jural confrontation be-
tween Christian and non-Christian Andean religion i s documented in Duviols’s (1972) work
on the “extirpation of idolatries” during the 17th century, the historic dimension i s still
obscure. This paper i s offered as an exploratory treatment of shamanic power-state power
confrontations.
During most of the 18th century the Spanish crown ruled aboriginal America through a
system of hereditary colonial chieftaincies and native magistracies. The colonial chiefs,
who had inherited the Quechua title kuraka (ethnic lord), were more commonly called ca-
ciques (the term used here). Throughout the Andean highlands to the Colombian border,
the Inca state, and later the Spanish, regulated the accession to chieftaincy by members of
status lineages; under Spain, primogeniture was the theoretically legitimate title. By 1700
caciques everywhere found their role as intracommunal leaders and spokesmen to be in
conflict with their role as intermediaries and tribute guarantors for the Spanish state. Their
titles were the jural equivalent of Spanish hidalguia (nobility) and they normally adopted a
Hispanicized lifestyle likely to alienate them from their indigenous subjects. They often ex-
ercised their privileges through exploitative business relationships with the governed. In
regions peripheral to the empire, even graver obstacles militated against any tight integra-
tion of ”cacical” governance with local social structure. One such obstacle occurred in
peripheral groups which were often noncentralized small societies lacking the institution
of status lineage. In such instances “chief” status was arbitrarily imposed by the Spanish.
Another obstacle was presented by the many peripheral groups that by 1700 had absorbed

414 arnerican ethnologist

a multiethnic variety of displaced persons and emigrants unlikely to recognize any single
lineage as rightfully privileged. In general, the institution of the cacique did not flourish
outside of what had formerly been Inca-administered lands.
Subordinate t o the cacique, the Spanish state created a category of native magistrates,
constables, and bailiffs who collectively formed a cabildo (community council) in each
jural community. These officers held varas (staffs of office) which rotated annually (here
collectively called vara officers). Theoretically, some of them had power to adjudicate in-
traindigenous affairs, but because of their short tenure and the very small measure of
authority invested in them, they seem to have acted mostly as agents in such functions as
tribute collection and as enforcers of noncontroversial moral codes. Unless people held
them as eminent for other reasons, vara officers exerted little leadership.
The Spanish interrogators seem t o have been somewhat familiar with the role of shaman,
although they couched their questions largely in terms of European concepts such as the
diabolic pact. Questions were sufficiently appropriate to elicit answers of a cultural rich-
ness rare in documents of the period. Nonetheless, as in all sorcery cases, the deeds of the
accused are difficult to ascertain. All we can be sure of i s the content of, and perceived
grounds for, the accusation. Even the confessions of the shamans are at times suspect
because of coercion and mistranslation. Nevertheless, modern ethnographic observations
in many cases confirm that witnesses were not deluded as to the doings of magicians
(Bolton 1974). This paper deals only with the political aspects of the trials.

shamanism among bad neighbors: Buesaquillo, 1727

The Pasto indigenous village of Buesaquillo, in the jurisdiction of the city of Pasto in
what i s now southern highland Colombia, was part of a poor region far from the centers of
colonial economy. Settlement by Spaniards was less dense than in most highlands, and
Buesaquillo was slightly outside the farthest margin of the Inca penetration zone (Romoli
1977-78; Moreno Ruiz 1971). Early records indicate a multiplicity of very small native
political units, some of which appear from the clustering of personal names to have housed
localized kindreds. The accused, Lorenzo Buesaquillo, derived his notoriety as a sorcerer
primarily from enmities between him and his neighbors within one of these localized units,
including his own kin. This local controversy might never have come to the attention of co-
lonial judges had not a corregidor (crown governor) given credence to the accusation that
Buesaquillo accepted payment from one Spaniard to kill another. In the course of his trial a
number of intraindigenous accusations surfaced. These instances provide good examples
of sorcery accusation in its most common highland manifestation, the prosecution of con-
flicts whose import to the collectivity i s “micropolitical” (Douglas 197O:xiv). They also
serve to introduce the cast of roles and beliefs omnipresent in shaman trials of the period.
Buesaquillo’s indigenous accusers blamed him for six acts of magical aggression. First,
they said, he killed a minor Spanish official by putting a green toad under the victim’s door-
way so that it would enter the victim’s body and madden or kill him. Second, witnesses said
that after brawling with his cousin’s husband, Buesaquillo infliced a sickness on the hus-
band that made his neck and throat dry up. A curing shaman from the Sibundoy valley diag-
nosed the maleficio (evil spell) and remedied it. Third, three witnesses averred that when a
neighbor whipped Buesaquillo’s children for stealing food from his fields, Buesaquillo
retaliated by poisoning the neighbor’s corn beer. A fatal disease then seized the neighbor’s
heart and “dried” his body to death in three days. The same Sibundoy curer diagnosed this
spell but could not break it. Fourth and fifth, Buesaquillo was blamed for the deaths of two
men whom he had threatened while they were drinking together. Sixth, a man who had

shamanism and politics 415

visited Buesaquillo to collect a debt soon found himself ill, and a Sibundoy curer (probably
the same one) administered to the sick creditor a vision-inducing drug that enabled the pa-
tient himself to see how Buesaquillo had injected vermin into his body:

A few days after what had happened (I e., the dispute over the debt). he had a very sharp pain in
the shoulder and it spread throughout his body; when [the curer] cured him and gave him a potion of
a forest vine, he expelled through the mouth, as vomit, something like egg whites, and then lizards.
bumblebees, and centipedes, which amazed everyone.

The Spanish judge took these accusations quite seriously and ordered Buesaquillo inter-
rogated on the rack. The trial record contains verbatim the questioning under torture:

When the magistrate saw that (Buesaquillo) did not want to say or confess anything, he ordered him
stripped naked to the skin except for some underclothes t o cover his shame, and thus stripped he
ordered him placed and tied onto the said rack, and ordered the torturer to tighten the cords, and
when they were thus tightened asked the said Lorenso if it was true that he had killed the people
mentioned in the trial with his spells and likewise if with his spells he had undone the sanity of the
Royal Constable as he had said in confession-[Buesaquillo] said he had not killed for Cod’s sake
sir, that he had not made the Royal Constable insane, sir, for the love of Cod, and [the magistrate]
ordered [the torturer] t o give another turn [of the rack], Ayayay, for the love of Cod, I did not do
what they are punishing [me] for (Inconsistencies of direct and indirect quotation are thus in the
original )

Buesaquillo withstood the torture without confessing further. Nonetheless, he was ordered
to testify again, before the Audiencia (supreme tribunal), at the insistence of churchmen
who suspected that “a mixture of heresy” in his magic justified further investigation. N o
other records have been found.
In its simplicity, Buesaquillo’s case illustrates some popular expectations about in-
digenous sorcery cases as shared by Indians and Spaniards. The magical aggressor was felt
to have an adversary in the victim’s defender, a magical curer. Curer and killer were in-
variably described as very distinct roles. Curers were not credited with revenge killings, and
the curer was almost always a foreigner or outsider t o the victim’s own immediate group,
usually a member of a forest-dwelling ethnic group. Killers killed on their own behalf or for
clients.
Lorenzo Buesaquillo was accused of using the two most common magical weapons, the
magical dart and the disease bundle. A shaman in drug trance was thought to be capable of
shooting into his victim’s body ”darts” that engendered or contained harmful vermin
(Whitten 1976:145-163; Parsons 1945:72). Disease bundles, of which the toad was perhaps
the most common, had to be buried where the victim trod, usually under his doorway. In mod-
ern usage the toad is tortured beforehand as a proxy victim (Mac-Lean y Estenos 1940:304).To
prepare a disease bundle, modern killers sprinkle the toad with alcohol, tie it with colored
thread, wrap it in a piece of cloth belonging to the victim, and sometimes seal it in a pot
(Esteva Fabregat 1970:33). Both the dart and the bundle have distributions that span coast,
sierra, and Amazonia and extend from the northern to the southern extremes of the Andean
cultural province (Bastien 1978:160-167; Taussig 1980). This complex i s in latge part a New
World creation. The European witchcraft tradition, as recorded in Malleus Maleficarum
(Kramer and Sprenger 1971[1486]:137-148), employed buried disease agents, but the
elaboration of wrapping is probably related to the Andean technique of making despachos
(offering bundles) for benign purposes (Bolton and Bolton 1976). Magical darts are an
American tradition.
The Sibundoy curer also used techniques that appear almost invariant in the South
American tradition. The administration of a vine brew, probably Banisteriopsis, to the vic-
tim, enabling him to see disease agents, resembles, for example, modern Jivaroan practice
(Harner 1972). In most cases (see below) the dart i s sucked out. To neutralize a disease bun-
dle, the curer-shaman must find, unearth, and burn it. In all such techniques, prior prepara-

416 american ethnologist

tion of evidence easily allows the curer to execute in mystified form a collective aggression
against the person perceived as a threatening killer. Court records do not prove, but leave
open the possibility, that curers themselves buried the bundles they publicly excavated.
Interpreting the micropolitical sense of the Buesaquillo case, we note that Buesaquillo’s
conflicts with neighbors had been extensive He claimed to have moved outside of his
village in disgust at being blamed for its misfortunes. While we do not know the involved
parties’ exact relationships, we do know that all but one were close neighbors, all were
status equals (Pasto Indians of commoner rank), and most were relatives of the accused.
Three of six accusers were consanguines to Buesaquillo and one was an affine. I t i s prob-
able, therefore, that the root friction began within a close circle of neighbors-kinsmen.
Since crop theft played a part, we may suppose that agricultural insufficiency had some-
thing to do with this friction. Gade (1970) notes that crop theft is often a symptom of land
tenure crisis in the modern Andes. The aggressive expansion of 18th-century latifundia in
the Andes was a severe stress on Indian communities. The Buesaquillo household‘s seces-
sion could therefore have initiated a process of community fission or of residential disper-
sion. Witchcraft, which often serves as a mechanism for severing poisoned but strongly
legitimated ties (Middleton 1960; Mair 1969:116-159), could have served as a trigger mech-
anism for palliating economic or ecological stress by distributing land users away from the
most stressed area. Shamanism also seems to have served a political need that the colonial
jural order could i l l accommodate, since both Spanish administrative policy and the
economic interests of the caciques (Spalding 1974) militated for conserving and concen-
trating villages rather than fissioning and dispersing them.

shamanism and the self-transformation of a community: Paccha, 1705

A slightly earlier outbreak of shamanic combat in the west-slope rain forest (montaiia)
community of Paccha also mirrored colonial tendencies, but these derived from change on
a macroregional scale. Paccha belonged to the district of Zaruma, whose gold mines at in-
tervals had brought many highland laborers into a region of scarce aboriginal population.
During the 17th and early 18th centuries the Zaruma mines had declined; but large
numbers of highlanders still took to forest regions such as Zaruma in the hope of evading
tribute or escaping latifundia (Moreno Yanez 1976:395). Among these migrants, as among
modern colonos in similar regions, cattle raising brought fast profits, dominion over wide
terrains, and favorable integration with the market economy. At the same time the cattle
economy proved gravely disruptive of aboriginal forest society, as i t still does today
(Macdonald 1981). Taussig (1980:244) observes that the consequent conflicts not only pit in-
migrant cattle raisers against aboriginal forest groups but also create splits within the local
aboriginal groups-
Land disputes between colonists and Indians [in the Colombian Putumayo] lead to disputes among
the Indians themselves. Colonization forces Indians to adapt their land usage and landholding prac-
tices to those favored by the national market and national law. Disputes develop within Indian com-
munities as to whether to opt for individual private property holdings or communal land under the
aegis of the shaman.
C a t t l e raising has now become a troublesome preoccupation. It features dramatically in social con-
flicts, heightens preexisting animosities between people, and raises the risks and amount of money
involved in farming to a very high degree (1980:259).

Around 1700, Andres Arevalo, the universally feared killer shaman of Paccha, made it no
secret that he hated cattle-raising newcomers and those among his own people who fol-
lowed their example. O n one occasion, neighbors reported, he asked what right outsider In-
dians had to come to Paccha with one skinny cow and then give themselves the airs of

shamanism and politics 417

hacendados (estate owners), instead of paying respect to him. Against such people Arevalo
often lashed out with dark threats; his favorite was t o tell his enemies that they would not
live to see their bones mature. He claimed the jural chiefdom of Paccha, but it was taken
from him by a nonkinsman hostile to him and friendly t o the cattle raisers. Similarly, the
hierarchy of vara officers, who had formerly carried out his orders, came to resent his in-
timidation and finally turned against him in order t o defend aggrieved forasteros (outsiders,
immigrants). I t was a regidor (minor vara officer) who finally carried their complaint to the
Spanish magistrate in Zaruma.
The testimony that unfolded at the resulting trial depicts a community terrified of
Arevalo's magical vengeance. Even the witnesses called for his defense found, once on the
stand, that they could think of nothing to exculpate him. Twenty-four acts of magical ag-
gression, bringing death to 18 people and an unspecified number of cattle, were attributed
to him. Many of the 18 accusers believed themselves to be survivors of Arevalo's attacks,
attributing their survival to the work of a forastero curing shaman, Juan Vallejo, who had
made a veritable campaign of detecting Arevalo's magical darts and unearthing his disease
bundles. These witnesses provided remarkably frank and detailed descriptions of shamanic
behavior as they understood it.
According to a witness who spied on Andres Arevalo and his wife, Certrudis Quenca, the
couple sat in their house at night before a mesa (array of power objects; Sharon 1976) lit bv
two candles. A stone object described as a losa (title or plaque)-probably the square stone
used by modern shamans t o cover the effigies of victims (Bolton 1974:209ff.)-stood on a
field of four cloths of different colors (Reichel-Dolmatoff and Reichel-Dolmatoff
1961:281). In daylight Andres Arevalo was seen t o steal into the houses of his enemies and
to leave carrying the sort of personal effects used in casting spells. Once he was also ob-
served stealing a stalk of bananas from a victim's house. Unaware that he was being
watched, Arevalo carried the fruit to a lonely hilltop, where he dismounted and walked
around the hill while chewing and spitting tobacco and espingo (Iriarte Brenner 1975; Cob0
1964[1653], 1:195).As he called out to unseen persons in the distance, he threw bananas to
them and then rode away. After the rite the field was littered with bananas and medicine
quids. The witness, who had watched from the bushes, said the rite was so long that he had
become famished, but his terror was so great that instead of eating the fruit he piled it up
and defecated on it. On other occasions Arevalo was observed staring at mountaintops and
talking to them. His nocturnal, indoor ritual closely resembles modern reports of Andean
rites for killing enemies (Bolton 1974). The outdoor rites in all likelihood refer to use of
psychotropic plants to achieve rapport with the "mountain mothers," considered to be
sponsors and benefactors of shamans.
Arevalo's accusers also reported finding in his house a package of magical objects which
they called pacha pacari; the probable translation of the Quechua phrase i s "world origin"
(Conzalez Holguin 1952 (1608]:267).The package contained a collection of pre-Columbian
artifacts, among which were several sacred objects of marine origin, including mullu (Spon-
dylus beads, the preferred offering to many deities) and the special conch trumpet used by
mullu couriers. These objects clearly demonstrate that Arevalo identified with the marine
sources of sacred potency and with pre-Christian antiquity.
Arevalo allegedly attacked people, livestock, and crops. Some witness-survivors had
found themselves "drying up" because of magical darts such as pieces of charcoal, tobac-
co, or owl tripe, toads, and snakes that lodged in parts of their bodies. Most, however, felt
themselves injured by disease bundles. The curing shaman Vallejo dug up and displayed
assemblies of dangerous materials found in the doorways, hearths, water sources, and cat-
tle pens of the victims, attributing them to Arevalo. They contained various items con-

418 american ethnologist

sidered dirty (feces or rotten matter), imbued with spiritual danger (bones of the dead, parts
of ill-omened animals), or likely to bring humans into contact with spirits (psychoactive
plants) Cattle-killing bundles, placed near salt licks and corral gates, contained similar im-
mundicias (impure substances) Witnesses said that for killing crops Arevalo made bundles
of a distinctive kind of red and yellow pepper pods, which he flung among the healthy
plants to sicken them He was also credited with the ability to make worms devour a garden
of corn, or even to make the garden wither simply by tossing earth into it.

The Spanish authorities at Zaruma found Arevalo and his wife guilty. Ignoring the vic-
tims’ fevered pleas for capital penalties, the judge sentenced the two to be whipped in the
streets, stripped of their modest goods, and exiled for six years to the highland town of
Alausi where they were to do unpaid penal labor in a textile workshop. Arevalo appealed
his case to the Audiencia in Quito, and the Protector of Natives (a state-paid officer) made
a spirited defense on the grounds that Arevalo was really a harmless maisincho (seer) and
not a sorcerer But the judges of the Audiencia, convinced that even a rumor of his return
t o Paccha would cause the community to disband entirely, imposed an even stiffer
sentence than the first. They condemned the couple to lifelong exile and also ordered pros-
ecution of the curing shaman Vallejo.
The political nature of the episode was clear to the parties involved, although they did
not use political terms to describe it. The crucial issue was that a locally dominant practi-
tioner of lowland shamanism had set his face against the ascendancy of an immigrant
ranching population that preferred governance along highland lines. In his bid to win their
”respect,” Arevalo behaved with the fierceness proper to the killer-leader. By doing so, he
not only drove the newcomers into the arms of the Spanish authorities but even alienated
members of his own kindred. Seven of the alleged victims, including three who died, were
his deudos (relatives). The upshot was a consensus against him that crossed the divide be-
tween locals and immigrants and welded them into a new political alliance. In this situa-
tion the vara authorities, although holders only of delegated and temporary power, were
able to act as mediators of an alliance between the aggrieved and the Spanish authorities in
Zaruma. One notable facet of the case is the very weak role of the jural chieftaincy in the
controversy. I t i s likely that hereditary chieftaincy in this region had never been strong prior
to the ranchers’ immigration. I t did not become stronger afterward, partly because the
newcomers were, in effect, refugees from it and partly because hereditary chieftaincy was
not likely to be easily stabilized among the ethnically heterogeneous immigrant popula-
tion. I t is almost impossible to imagine a controversy of this magnitude occurring in the
more colonized highlands without the hereditary chiefs playing a crucial role.
I t would be interesting to know more about the role of Juan Vallejo, the forastero curer.
We do not know where he came from or what became of him, but he evidently played a
crucial role in the transition. In a sense, the collectivity as a whole was his patient (Turner
1967:359-373). Faced with the task of reconstructing the local economy, the people of Pac-
cha availed themselves of ritual t o reconstrue social institutions and reevaluate them.
Household by household, Vallejo taught Paccha that the former social order, exemplified
by the dominance of the killer shaman Arevalo, was an ”illness” that could be ”cured,”
that is, extracted from self and soil and thereby expelled. Spanish authorities seemed to be
unsure how to respond t o Vallejo. In Zaruma his achievement and potential for leadership
were apparently treated with equanimity, perhaps because they would in the short term
reinforce vara authority. But the higher authorities in Quito feared he might become
another local tyrant. How a successful shaman might in fact take command of legal institu-
tions becomes clearer in the following case.

shamanism and politics 419

a shaman who acquired colonial power:
Punta Santa Elena, 1786

Despite the drastic depopulation of indigenous coastal settlements during colonial times
(Tyrer 1976:66), the Pacific shore parish of Punta Santa Elena still housed in 1786 a native
community probably descended from Huancavilca seafarers. It was not a dramatically “In-
dian” group; no native language seems to have been in use and, with the abolition of the
jural chieftaincies in reprisal for the Tupac Amaru I I rebellion (Rowe 1954:39), i t had ap-
parently lost its last remaining institution of distinctively aboriginal politics. The vara
hierarchy had become the only theater of overtly political action by Indians. Nonetheless,
despite dependence on the Spanish church and state, and despite close supervision,
shamanism played a documented role in competition for vara office.
Sebastian Carlos Cavino, a literate Indian, was reputed among the Hispanic population
of that politically tense period to be a “seditious” person, hostile to the church and respon-
sible for fomenting “tumults and arsons.” He was known for aggressiveness in setting
himself up as a jurisprudente [legal adviser), encouraging litigious Indians; his ostentation in
owning lawbooks annoyed non-Indians. His allegedly loose sexual mores and his sideline in
treasure hunting on the wreck-littered beaches also made him unpopular among “whites.”
When he was elected to become the alcalde ordinario (a native magistracy similar to justice
of the peace) for 1786, the parish priest interrupted his ceremony of investment, withheld
his vara, and imprisoned him.
Soon afterward Sebastian Carlos was tried on charges of criminal sorcery. The local te-
niente (magistrate), an ally of the priest, found him guilty. Hoping t o rid themselves of
Sebastian Carlos before he might rouse his local allies, the authorities took him from his
cell at midnight and under close guard led him shackled onto the highway, where a convoy
was to take him to prison and exile in Quito. But indigenous friends learned of the plan at
once and set out for Guayaquil to lodge a complaint before the Protector of Natives. Mean-
while, on the road between Chanduy and El Moro, Sebastian Carlos managed to escape
from his captors, hide in a ravine, and flee overland. Shortly after, he appeared at the house
of the Protector, requesting appeal. When the Protector obtained a subpoena for the
original acts of imprisonment and trial, the local authorities at Punta Santa Elena mounted
so many delaying tactics that by the time Sebastian Carlos received a transcript of his own
trial, the term of office in question had already elapsed. Nevertheless, he pressed his claim.
From the record of this trial it i s clear that the Indian witnesses, with the sole exception
of the sacristan, would rather have shielded the nature of Sebastian Carlos’s dominance
from non-Indian eyes. Even his surviving victims yielded information grudgingly, and only
when browbeaten and threatened. Perhaps they felt the court was meddling in an in-
tragroup process that could better have settled itself; or perhaps they feared Sebastian
Carlos’s revenge.
The trial record also shows that, unlike Arevalo, Sebastian Carlos chose to involve
himself directly in colonial institutions and used them for unsanctioned ends. Not only the
power of law but also the magical power of the church could be appropriated for shamanic
purposes. In 1783 he prevailed on the sacristan to hide certain objects under the altar so
they would absorb magical force. The sacristan recalled the incident:

The said Carlos took to him 1i.e.. the sacristan] four rods of iron about one hand [i e., 21 cm] long,
and a (heron! goose?] feather with its forked tines at the tip and with the greatest deceptions and
supplications, he begged him to put them under the consecrated communion table, secretly, in
order that the priest not suspect it, so that on a certain feast day mass would be said over them. . .

Sebastian Carlos later used the rods to divine the location of buried silver from a shipwreck.

420 american ethnologist

Eventually the sacristan denounced this enterprise, but by that time Sebastian Carlos had
achieved considerable sway over the community.
One privilege of his position in the community was a longstanding illicit affair with an In-
dian neighbor, Marttina Suarez. She later confessed that she had asked Sebastian Carlos to
“stupefy” her husband by magic so as to continue the affair unhindered. But when she
broke off the affair, Sebastian Carlos appeared one day at her gate and said he intended to
”forget” her and ”see her corpse dead in church.” A short time later she became gravely ill
with vomiting, ma/ de madre (disorders attributed to menstrual blood rising from the
womb), and ventorras (unidentified). Her husband, Mariano Soreano, despairing of all
remedies from the pharmacy, sought out a well-known curer named Francisco Barzola Bar-
zola treated Marttina with massage and herbal medicines, producing some improvement.
Since the curer did not know that Sebastian Carlos had turned against the patient, and since
he himself was Sebastian Carlos’s compadre (co-godparent), he thought it suitable to talk
with him about the cure. Barzola had expected gratitude and a reward for bringing the
news that “the little lady Marttina i s well.” Instead, to Barzola’s astonishment, Sebastian
Carlos flew into a rage, vilified him, and warned him to back off the case Soon afterward,
Marttina’s husband came to Barzola imploring him to continue the cure, but Barzola said
he could not because of the warning his compadre had given.
When Sebastian Carlos was named alcade, i t became necessary to hide this incident
from the non-Indian authorities Sebastian Carlos called on his entire personal network,
suborning their testimony and instructing them in what to say about him. By threatening
further magical aggression he even forced Marttina’s distraught kindred to align with his
own faction. From his jail cell, after the affair surfaced, he was able t o use the other vara of-
ficers as couriers and to summon prospective witnesses t o his cell for briefing. His easy
escape also suggests that he had many allies. After the escape he appears t o have won
energetic backing from the Protector in Cuayaquil. Eventually, he probably would have
won his legal fight, because the case against him had not been well prepared. But the
benefice of Punta Santa Elena changed hands before the priest who was hostile to
Sebastian Carlos could renew his testimony, and his ally the teniente suddenly died at his
post. The case was dropped and presumably Sebastian Carlos soon consolidated his leader-
ship.
On the surface, Sebastian Carlos’s conduct appears to be heavily Hispanicized. Virtually
all the outward signs of his power-litigation, vara politics, fluent Spanish, perhaps his
system of divining-derive from Hispanic culture. Only the role antithesis of killer
shamanlcuring shaman offers an obvious parallel to the lowland tradition, and even here
the curer i s atypical in not being a known outsider. In its latent organization, however, the
episode shows some autochthonous aspects. For one, Sebastian Carlos’s career had the
characteristic trajectory of a lowland shaman He inherited what was believed to be a
hereditary magical talent from his mother. His sister, too, was a purveyor of occult potions
and a notorious bruja voladora (flying witch; the phrase may reflect both European stereo-
types of datura-induced “flight” [Harner 1973al and similar New World traditions [Harner
1973b:158-160]). Like any lowland shaman, however, he could translate the hereditary pro-
pensity into political power only by achieving evident victories. That the witnesses plainly
would rather have let him do so, and not confront the attack on Marttina Suarez publicly,
suggests they would have accepted the authority of a killer shaman wrapped in the insignia
of the vara hierarchy
From the viewpoint of indigenous interests this i s not inexplicable. The abolition of the
jural chieftaincies in the 1780s left Indian communities for the first time without any cen-
tralized leadership. Vara authority by itself served to enforce some social norms, but for the
most part it only executed the mandate given by nonlocal institutions; moreover, since it

shamanism and politics 421

rotated frequently, it would not remain reliably in strong hands. One likely reason for
Sebastian Carlos’s easy predominance is that he combined a strong command over local
social networks, through his magical abilities, with a competence in dealing with Hispanic
society that was equal to most jural chiefs’. Millones (1979) notes that the enhanced
political importance of shamanic aggression in this period i s associated with the demotion
of jural chiefs and with attempts t o counteract the ascendancy of priests. I t is possible that
the Santa Elena episode manifested the tentative emergence of a new style of leadership, a
form of centralized power hidden from public view, at a time when colonial policy had
undertaken to further depoliticize the native world.
One can easily see why Sebastian Carlos was obnoxious to the priest and teniente of Pun-
ta Santa Elena. It is less obvious why they chose t o prosecute him under the by then quaint
law of witchcraft rather than as a political offender, as was common. One possible reason
was to signal to the Indians that the shamanic use of power was not going unnoticed and
that close intervention in intraindigenous affairs should be expected. There i s another fac-
tor t o consider, however The record makes it plain that they fully believed in the accused
man’s magical efficacy. This attitude, considered rather provincial by the higher judges at
Quito (e.g., in their purely sociological arguments against freeing Arevalo), was common
among local officials. The effective flow of influence within indigenous societies was in
fact hidden from those who had to deal with it practically and therefore was eligible for in-
terpretation as being occult. Their very determination to treat native societies as leaderless
societies, save for delegated colonial roles, made it more difficult for them to explain
leadership behavior except as an anomaly in need of esoteric explanation. These circum-
stances aggravated the colony’s ineffectiveness in governing many Indian groups, and their
“ungovernable” character in turn underscored their reputation among ”whites” as seats of
magical potency. One paradoxical result, seen in the following case, was to make the con-
querors feel themselves vulnerable to the malice of the conquered.

shamanism as a weapon in interethnic conflict:

Otavalo, Intag, and Quito, 1703

In both lncaic and Hispanoamerican culture, the antithesis between highland cities and
lowland forests is an element of cosmology that has conditioned political relations. High-
land cities are associated with centricity, culture, civility, and the power of the state, while
the forest stands for the primordial, uncivilized, and centripetal powers of nature, never
subdued by the state. The shaman stands in opposition to the statesman as an exponent of
a contrary kind of power. But the two roles are functionally complementary. Shamans,
both colonial and modern, depend on the highlands for wealth (they travel into highlands
to seek clients) and for legitimacy (to have traveled afar is an important credential). High-
landers, in turn, travel to the homes of lowland shamans seeking cures for disease and
misfortune or to prosecute their vendettas magically. One concomitant of this mutual
dependence is a substantial “vertical” exchange of goods; another is exchange of political
power. We have seen, in the Ar6valo case, that state power and shamanic power were seen
as countervailing forces and that the distressed parties to a shamanic conflict sought to
avail themselves from afar of the state power centered in Quito. In the case of Juan Roza
Pinto, we find an obverse example: the distressed party in a legal conflict in Quito availed
himself from afar of a forest shaman’s services.
Juan Roza Pinto, born in the western montana Yumbo community of Cuagpi, near
modern Nanegal, grew up in an area reputedly riven by shamanic rivalries; indeed, the
eventual dissolution of Cuagpi village was attributed t o them (Salomon in press). AltRDugh

422 american ethnologist

his father was “white,” Juan Roza Pinto dressed as an Indian and spoke Quichua. In his
youth he lived among the rnulatos or zarnbos (people of Indian-black descent) of Esmeral-
das, an Afro-indigenous seafaring population on the Pacific shore. There he learned local
magic and perhaps magic from overseas. His tutors were black sailors. He also received
shamanic vocation through a vision: he repeatedly saw a bulto (hallucinatory presence) in
the form of ”a Spanish boy with a golden crown, who, by night, changed into a moon and
star that never separated from him although he did not talk to them.”
Afterward, Roza returned t o the inland rnontaiia of his birth, making his home in the
hamlet of Tulla, near Intag, in the tropical forest hinterland of an enormous chiefdom, the
center of which was the densely settled highland around Otavalo. Here the local Indians,
who called him ”the mestizo” because of his thick beard, pale skin, and fluent Spanish,
esteemed him a powerful shaman. He was said to take prodigious amounts of coca The
few Spanish residents also feared him and urged the lntag priest to keep him under special
supervision, but it proved impossible in that remote country.
Among Roza‘s clients was a highland ethnic lord, Don Salbador Ango. Ango was a
member of the great “cacical” dynasty of Otavalo, invested with two high vara offices
(governor of Otavalo and alcalde of the large obraje [textile plant] at Otavalo). In 1703
Ango, desperate because he had received notice that he was sure to lose everything he
owned as a result of his lawsuit against the Spanish general Don Sebastian Manrique,
looked to the forest hinterland of his domain for help against the state. Among Ango’s
subordinate vara officers was an agent who periodically went to the forest to collect a
tribute in kind. Ango ordered this man on his next trip to bring Roza Pinto to Ango’s house.
Later, Roza said that he had felt obliged to obey the summons because Ango was his corn-
padre. But when Ango challenged him on his repute as a shaman to ”mold” the judge of the
Audiencia to his purpose and t o kill his courtroom adversary, Roza Pinto shied away-or
so, at least, he claimed in his confession. Ango then persuaded him to carry out a com-
promise measure. Roza agreed to inflict on Ango’s enemies a spell he had learned from the
sailors of Esmeraldas. This spell, used primarily to bring down jaguars, pumas, vipers, and
bears, required Roza to make three cigars and smoke them one after another at midday,
blowing the smoke into the air with the intention of aiming i t at his client’s foes. The first
was wrapped in tobacco leaf and was to undo their health. The second, wrapped in maize
leaves, served t o ”deprive them of force and sap their vigor.” The third, wrapped in paper,
was to afflict the victims with attacks of fever and itching.
Roza performed the rite, and shortly afterward General Manrique fell gravely ill. It i s not
known how his wife detected Roza’s involvement, but when Roza was brought to Quito to
give testimony at the proceedings between Manrique’s wife and Ango, he was told that
Ango, infuriated by Roza’s “failure,” had hired two other shamans to destroy Manrique. I t
is likely that as a form of revenge Ango had betrayed Roza’s participation. The general’s
wife, in turn, contracted a healing shaman who managed to partly restore the sick man’s
health.
The Quito judge responsible wanted no part of the “witchcraft” accusation for several
reasons, of which the chief one was caution lest he be accused of usurping jurisdiction in a
case that might belong to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. If Roza were t o be proven a
true mestizo, and not an Indian, the case would have to be transferred to an ecclesiastical
court A hearing was therefore arranged in Otavalo, where Roza Pinto’s acquaintances
testified as to his ”true” ethnic identity. It turned out at this hearing that many members of
the “white” landowning elite, as well as Indians, knew him. “Whites” and Indians agreed
that despite his deep involvement in Indian society, including marriage to an Indian from
Tulla, Roza Pinto’s “white” phenotype, bilingualism, and successful claim to tribute ex-

shamanism and politics 423

emption qualified him as mestizo. The case was presumably transferred to the Inquisition;
no further records have been found.
From the viewpoint of indigenous politics, one salient point i s that the vara officer Ango,
feeling himself limited t o inferior stores of legal power, sought t o compensate by using his
access to superior stores of shamanic power. At the peripheries of empire, where the state
was weak, lay reserves of potency peculiar to indigenous society and within Ango’s reach.
Such a matrix of belief, common t o Hispanic and indigenous members of colonial society,
formed part of the web of unspoken assumptions on which Spanish-Andean political con-
f l i c t s had long been interpreted.
Roza’s practice, however, was more complex than this antithesis alone suggests. His suc-
cess apparently lay in his sophistication with regard to manipulating each local or ethnic
group’s beliefs about the powers of foreign groups. To the inhabitants of the montaiia coun-
try both his capture of “white” mythic force (of which his white child spirit-companion may
be a symbol), and his appropriation of Afro-American magical technique, validated him as
a spirit voyager in a world enlarged beyond the indigenous to include the whole gamut of
colonial ethnicity. His power had been achieved chiefly in specifically colonial contexts,
and he was therefore a promising agent for the prosecution of an interethnic conflict.
Related phenomena appear repeatedly in the colonial record The Shuar attack on
Logrolio in the upper Amazonian montaiia in 1579 was led by two mestizo shamans in In-
dian dress (ACI/S Quito 8).and ethnically ambiguous mestizos or assimilated Indians figure
prominantly as rebel messiahs in both the highlands (Klumpp 1974) and the eastern
lowlands (Lehnertz 1972:113). Today, in Colombia (Taussig 1980), the shamans most feared
by traditional magicians are those who acquire the largely European magic of highland
mestizos. In many of these cases, the characteristic role of the magical mestizo is as the ag-
gressor in interethnic conflicts.
Among modern shamans it i s considered obvious, and no discredit to the art, that magic
only works on those who know about it (Taussig 1980). Modern shamans will not readily at-
tack a blanco whom they consider to be unconnected with the network of magical com-
munication. The mestizo Roza, because of his far-reaching knowledge of blacks and In-
dians, was apparently credited with the ability t o operate at the extremes of the network,
extending it not only across space but through the various strata of colonial society. His
competence in Hispanic culture enabled him to connect with culturally distant enemies
and expand the shamanic ideology from the scale of intraindigenous politics to that of
global colonial politics; the process seems to be a systematic inversion of colonial penetra-
tion.

conclusions

Even in areas where the tradition of centralized and dynastic ethnic lordship remained
strong under Inca and early Spanish rule, the late-colonial demotion of the ”republic of In-
dians” appears to have elevated the relative value of supernatural expertise as a political
asset. This i s still more true in areas where ethnic dynastic and vara rule had never been
strong. The rise of shamans to political power at the colonial periphery (Langdon 1981) can
sometimes be correlated to specific colonial pressures within or upon native societies,
pressures that jurally mandated leadership was ill equipped to relieve.
Such instances reflect the local impact of far-reaching social changes. In Buesaquillo,
conflict between curing and killing shamans, and the expulsion of a veteran killer shaman,
may have served t o redistribute households brought into conflict by the land scarcity con-
sequent on latifundium expansion. In Paccha, a curing shaman seems to have galvanized a

424 american ethnologist

new class- Indian cattle ranchers-into collective action against the predominance of a
killer shaman associated with a former socioeconomic order. In Punta Santa Elena, during
the years when ethnic chieftaincy was decisively repressed, a killer shaman with bicultural
competence overcame weak resistance from a curer shaman t o seize the main vara office
and thereby achieve a new mode of indigenous power wrapped in colonial legality. In In-
tag, Otavalo, and Quito a triculturally competent killer shaman defended an old and en-
dangered ethnic dynasty by attacking a Spanish litigant seen as legally strong but magical-
ly weak.
In each of these cases it i s notable that the dominant or established native political
leader was perceived as a killer shaman and the insurgent or opposed party’s magical
champion as a curer shaman. In any given instance these roles were rigidly antithetical;
curers did not conduct revenge attacks. It i s possible that these roles were phases in
political careers. Successful curers, by protecting clients from a person considered domi-
nant and dangerous, and eventually by defeating that person, supplanted him and came to
preeminence with a ready base of support. Later, perhaps, if their decisions proved harmful
t o some members of the community, they in turn would come to be seen as killer shamans
whose presence demanded a cure. Insofar as such clienteles correspond t o categories with
collective interests, such a cycle could have constituted a political process hidden from
view of the colonial state. Since outsider status was an attribute of curers, circulation of
elites is a possibility.
The participation of Spanish judges also offers clues to the ideological aspect of inter-
ethnic political relations. One puzzling aspect i s the judges’ lack of curiosity. They did not
undertake investigations similar to the visitas de idolatrias (inquiries into non-Christian
religion) by which ecclesiastical judges had earlier sought to inform themselves. Evidently
they thought they already knew what was at stake: familiar European manifestations of
witchcraft. Their easy confidence in this matter, and the accompanying selective percep-
tion, superficially spanned the political-ethnic rift between themselves and the Indian par-
ties to the cases.
Because of a difference between O l d and New World concepts of magical power, the
judges failed t o perceive the political dimension. I t i s a peculiarity of European witchcraft
belief, according to Lucy Mair (1970:27), that witches “are depicted as being in their actions
and dispositions everything that was most abhorred . . . [their] whole life violates every
decency.” European witchcraft was associated with deviance, secrecy, and outcast status
and it was attributed t o weak, poor, and disadvantaged persons. South American shamanic
belief, by contrast, typically presents the shaman as one who commands an extraordinary
share of what i s most desirable. In the Andes this quality was (and s t i l l is) often called sarni
or sarnay (literally, breath, but more generally meaning the impersonal vital force that
makes powerful people powerful); a shaman i s called sarniyuj (possessor of sarni). Far from
being deviant skulkers, persons with sarni are said t o be proud, potent, and influential. They
are recognizable by their very success (Delran 1974).
This intercultural discord allowed a peculiar standoff between Hispanic and aboriginal
groups. Considered on the interethnic plane, as part of a relationship between victors and
vanquished, Indians’ magical behavior seemed to admit a European-style interpretation. In-
terethnic magical aggression in that context might indeed be seen as the uncanny power of
the weak. The possibility that on an intra-Indian plane it expressed the public powers of the
strong remained out of view.
The specifically political corollaries of this standoff have proven most ironic. The dimly
perceived flux of native political affairs was often screened from authorities’ eyes by of-
ficially “real” colonial institutions of native governance, even where these were functional-

shamanism and politics 425

l y impotent. This tendency may have become progressively more notable from the 1780s
onward, as institutions of ethnic leadership, such as they were, gave way t o increasingly ill
adapted Bourbon and republican models (Millones 1979:121, 137). The resultant failure to
govern the hinterlands effectively provided the degree of isolation necessary for intra-
indigenous shamanic political process to continue. Its endurance in direct contradiction t o
reigning ideologies of progress invested forest dwellers with a mystique of extraordinary
potency. Such a system of misunderstandings provided the climate in which jungle
shamans, stereotyped as backward and primitive, could at the same time appear t o those at
the very center of political power as extraordinarily powerful beings.

notes

Acknowledgments. The research on which this article i s based was made possible by a Tinker Foun-
dation Field Research grant administered by the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies. This help i s gratefully acknowledged.
’ The following are the main manuscript sources on which the present article rests (author transla-
tions from Spanish):
1. Criminales contra don Salvador Ango por Haver Pretendido Quitar la Vida a Don Sebastian Man-
rique por Medio de un Hechicero. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, Indigenas 28. 18
September 1704.
2 . Don Andres de Arevalo, Cacique de Pagche lurisdiccion de Zaruma sobre Destierro por Crimen de
Hechiseria. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 29 3 October 1705
3 Criminales sobre unas Brujas. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 45 18 May 1730.
4 Autos Seguidos por el Protector de Naturales por el Amparo del Yndio Sebastian Carlos sobre Im-
putarle de Brujo. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 114. 9 March 1786
These are the only known primary sources on North Andean indigenous belief systems during the later
colonial era (1680s-1820s). They bear comparison with approximately a dozen cases of magical aggres-
sion for political ends during the same period, conserved in Lima’s Archivo Arzobispal, and with a scat-
tering of similar cases in highland Peruvian archives. Nonetheless, documentation of this type is, on
the whole, scarce
The reason for the scarcity is probably not that indigenous beliefs had ceased t o condition local
political events but that following the end of systematic “extirpation” campaigns around 1660, they
came t o do so through syncretic or crypto-indigenous but outwardly Catholic forms useful for their
superficial compatibility with church requirements (Marzal 1977:115). We know from Webster’s
(1974-76:143-156) studies of a modern Quechua community that shamanic prowess is still a factor
conditioning leadership, yet it has been integrated in a fashion that keeps it off the jural record In-
deed, “the sorcery complex i s surrounded by greater secrecy and more intensive fear than any other
aspect of Andean culture” (Bolton 1974.200). Cases In which shamanic leadership came to trial prob-
ably represent the minority of instances whereby parties offended by shamans’ actions could not or
would not defend themselves within the de facto system by contracting counter-shamans (In some
cases they went to court following the failure of such initial responses.) Cases where shamanic politics
perpetuated itself smoothly within colonial systems are by that very fact unlikely to be documented. If
we are t o get at the shamanic past, we must make the best of the exceptions that test the rule

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Submitted 22 January 1982

Revised version received 30 April 1982
Accepted 6 May 1982
Final revisions received 26 April 1983

428 american ethnologlst