Re-Politicizing Magic: Shamanisms and the State in Late

Colonial to Post-Modern Brazilian Amazonia

Maria Faciolince

A reflection that links together two convoluted and problematic themes

in Latin American cultures – the colonial penetration and shamanic practices –
opens a discussion that prompts interrogations on the focal role that forms of
inspirational religious practice recognized as “shamanism” have occupied in
academic studies. Anthropological literature has long engaged in a project of
characterization that exhibits a partiality toward the medical, psychological
and symbolic aspects of shamanism. Such essentialization of shamanism has
rendered it, for the most part, as more of a “romanticized inversion of Western
rationalism”, or an “archaic form of religious activity” (Thomas and Humphrey
1994: 2, 4) than an analytical category that can sustain academic inquiry. This
magical attraction of the shaman and the Indian that the project of
characterization stimulates has also helped perpetuate the docility that has
been conceded to indigenous peoples since colonial times. As Michael
Taussig (1985: 171) has pointed out, it is not only a “cunningly wrought
colonial objet d’art”, but it is also a revitalized one that does not fall far from a
“neo-colonial reworking of primitivism”.

If the concept of shamanism is to serve as an analytical paradigm,

however, it must be conceived as a dialogical category constructed through
interaction between actors with diverse discourses and interests (Langdon &
Rose 2012: 37). The continual excavation of history by social historians can
guide a renewed deconstruction of shamanism. Departing from this long-
standing anthropological preoccupation with the essential character of
shamanism, the present project is one to re-conceptualize and historicize
shamanic activities by understanding their manifestations as results of
historical processes. This is an imaginative endeavour already embarked by
some after a fresh impetus in 1960’s anthropology that reflected changing
analytical interests towards understanding the dynamics of shamanism,
particularly in interethnic contexts (Langdon and Rose 2012: 39).

However, history does not go unproblematized in having served, and

still serving, as a site of Truth that often goes unquestioned. Some
academics, notably historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and anthropologist
Eric Wolf (1982), have recognized this and observed that Europe has
remained the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories. Discussing
historical Truth – if we can even call it that, considering the plurality of its
voices – thus calls for problematizing our ways of knowing about other
societies. In this autopsy, an ethnohistorical approach that uses both
ethnographic and historical data as its basis allows us to tread history such
that neither the voices of colonialism nor the voices of the native shamans are
represented as monolithic or stable systems of meaning.

If we were to historicize Amazonian shamanism starting from the

colonial context, it would implicate engaging with analyses that negotiate
between modes of power and mediate historically constituted social
contradictions and resistances. It follows, therefore, that a re-historicizing
project catalyzes a “re-politicization” of shamanism, in which shamans and
other inspirational practitioners are approached as political agents and
mediators. This allows us to ask questions about the role that shamanic
knowledge and activities have played in providing contexts or focuses for
anticolonial protest, and about how they have mediated differences between
the indigenous and the intrusive, the central and the peripheral in colonial and
post-modern Brazil. Acting as a compass for this analytical trajectory, we can
borrow the eloquence of Taussig (1985: 465) in articulating that magic acts as
“a gathering point for Otherness”. Here, questions arise: who determines this
Otherness? Does the hegemonic culture correspond to the ‘state’? How are
magic and cult activities internalized by this state? At least in Brazil, shamans
and their knowledges have long been held as iconic of what is traditionally,
and ‘authentically’, indigenous (Langdon & Rose 2012: 38). Given not just the
semantic but also the historical complexity of the implicated terms –
‘indigenous’, ‘shamanism’, ‘state’ –, a reflexivity towards notions of exoticism
and authenticity necessarily percolates through the discourses in this
investigation. In an effort to develop some axes that will permit a fecund
study, the approach to this topic necessarily brings forth the notions of
transformation and continuity. Magic, thus, can be used as a concept to ‘think
with’ in order to productively probe intersecting issues in the complex tangle of
historical narratives about Amazonian identity politics.

As others have pointed out, any exploration of magic must handle, or at

least acknowledge, its multiplicity of forms (Mello e Souza 2003: 90).
Definitional debates have hindered the investigation of the ways in which
shamanic agencies may constitute a political arena. Shamanism has often
mystified western classifications, habitually designated by binary categories
such as magical/religious and natural/supernatural, which generate further
contrasting divisions between magician/priest and doctor/sorcerer (Langdon &
Rose 2012a: 39). In fact, no single paradigm can embrace the plurality of
shamanisms (Langdon 2007: 28); there is no one generalized emic
designation in Amazonia that refers to ‘shamans’. These are figures that
appear in various historical accounts and modern ethnographies through
different, often overlapping, denominations like pajés, feiticeiros, and
caraíbas. It is crucial, then, to recognize the fluidity of shamanisms as a
concept, one which is open to redefinition by virtue of being products of an
inter-agentic and historical dialogue. The lineage of anthropologists who have
preoccupied themselves with the differentiations between magic, religion, and
science is long; but this debate, albeit still relevant, extends far beyond the
scope of historicizing and re-politicizing shamanic activities. At present, the
exploration will engage in a trajectory with special focus on the late colonial
period, and on postmodern Brazil since the second half of the twentieth
century in order to delineate the various points of intersection.

Hybridization and the ‘contact zone’ in eighteenth century

Amazonia
The ‘contact zone’ that arose from the colonial encounter between the
Portuguese and the Amazonian natives was fertile ground for processes that
involved the mixing and reshaping of cultural practices, symbolism and power
frameworks. This term refers to the space of interethnic interactions and
invokes the spatial and temporal co-presence of groups historically separated
whose trajectories now intersect (Pratt 1992: 6-7). It correlates with the similar
notion of ‘tribal zone’ in anthropological work on colonial warfare, which
makes reference to a conceptual area that radiates outside the colonial
borders but is indirectly and profoundly influenced by it (Ferguson &
Whitehead 2000: xii). Here, new boundaries between colonial state and other
societies are created, although highly permeable ones which allow symbiotic
processes that belie the exclusive colonial discourse of difference (Whitehead
1997). In both notions, the word ‘zone’ indicates the importance of seeing
Portuguese–native contact as generative of novelty, rather than simply a
matter of imposition. This becomes a space in which the colonized respond,
adapt, communicate, and contest.

By the mid eighteenth century, due to boundary negotiations with

Spain, the Portuguese Crown was obliged to strengthen territorial claims in
Amazonia (Sommer 2003: 420). Religion, and specifically Catholicism,
assumed importance in the culture of conquest and came to the fore as
another key instrument in establishing control by the late Portuguese colonial
order. The discrepancy between the Catholic and pagan Indian gained
ideological significance in facilitating the legalities of enslavement and the use
of military power (Taussig 1985: 142). In this structure, forms of ‘unofficial’
control such as shamanism posed a threat to the fixed colonial system in
several ways: in the symbolic economy of various shamanic practices which
incorporated Christian and local customs, through the promotion of practices
that the Catholic church did not accept, and by the fact that shamans were
sought after by whites as well as by non-whites. The mixing – of practices,
peoples, and symbols – that occurred outside of colonial control led to
haphazard situations that subverted colonial hierarchies of power and
generated fear.
 Some of these anxieties shine through in two of the testimonies against
shamans collected by a Portuguese Inquisitor who arrived in Pará to conduct
a ‘Visitation’ in 1763. One denunciation dated 1767 is against Sabina, an
Indian woman notorious for her healing powers, who cured the denouncer,
Raimundo Jose Bitancurt, from a “disease of the eyes” (Lapa 1978: 266).
Cultural and symbolic mixing permeate the healing rituals performed by
Sabina, which involved a blend of Christian symbolism – holy water, crosses
with index finger, penitence –, and other metaphysical traditions – muttering
incantations, blowing tobacco smoke in Raimundo’s eyes, sucking out
pathogenic objects like dead fish and shrimp eyes. This case elucidates a
process that contains both transformation and continuity in the ways that
Sabina’s curative practices subsisted in the colonial regime whilst
incorporating and drawing power from Christian symbols such as the cross
and the holy water, and in how magic and shamanic practices were
appropriated by the state through the participation of Europeans. Whilst
institutional control worked to support the colonial system and to serve an
elite, Sabina’s case sabotages it indirectly: a single Indian woman curing
Europeans in the Amazon grants her power despite being a highly marginal
figure.

In another denunciation from 1764, made by Giraldo Correia Lima

against the mameluco – child of Indian mother and white father – Pedro
Rodrigues and the Indian Marçal Agostinho, we encounter another case
underlined in the politics of shamanism in the colonial reality of the Boim
district in Santarém. Pedro Rodrigues, a recognized shaman, was accused of
teaching “false doctrines…totally opposed to all divine and human laws” by
encouraging the sacrilegious practice of abortion (Lapa 1978: 225). A history
of colonial Amazon (Domingues 2000) highlighted abortion and contraceptive
methods as forms of nativist resistance, which threatened Christian doctrines
about conception and the population-building ambitions of village directors.
Not only was this heretical in itself, but its legitimization through a creative
appropriation of hegemonic cultural forms and practices – the Virgin Mary and
acts of penitence – subvert colonial state power.

Similarly, popular protective amulets that Laura de Mello e Souza

(2003) has called bolsas de mandinga provided the most widespread
syncretic blending of cultural values. Men in Bahia filled cloth bags with bits of
altar stone, pieces of the host, a ribbon from the statue of Jesus, and candle
wax, and used these charms to strengthen their masculine power and
attractiveness to women (Sommer 2003: 422). They appear in another
denunciation made by Raimundo Jose Bitancurt against Indians in Beja in
1764 (Lapa 1978: 203-207), after finding his Indian slave had a package with
a host and pieces of altar stone in it. The effectiveness of these ritual objects
was linked to their symbolic affinity, albeit they were being used for ends that
the Catholic Church did not agree with.

While hybridization is evident in these three examples, it would be

imprudent to gloss Christian manifestations in the inquisitorial documentation
as simply assimilations, in ‘indigenous form’, of colonial Christianity.
According to ethnographers like Harvey (2008) and Vainfas (1995),
syncretism, or religious and cultural hybridization, may be one of the only
avenues whereby an effective native discourse of resistance can develop.
Indeed, the peppered invocation and use of Catholic figures and symbolism
may be seen as means to legitimize the otherwise diabolic curative practices
in the eyes of the Portuguese. Mello e Souza (2003: 237) further questions
whether this mixture took shape in response to Inquisitorial pressures, in
which expressions of Catholicism arose and assumed a role of defense
mechanisms. The acts of penitence as described in the denunciation made by
Giraldo Correia (Lapa 1978: 224-228) may in fact be consequences of
viewing shamanic practice, as ritual fasting, through the prism of Christianity.
The ‘authentically indigenous’ becomes an inevitable anachronism as
distinctions between ‘real’ syncretism and what Métraux (1985: 5) deems
mere imitation or “farce” are blurred. Granting the complexity of shamanic
forms and their analysis, the mythic space of the New World allows for the
creation of new meanings by combining, re-using and transforming the
indigenous with the adaptation of symbols originating from the dominant
colonial culture. Hybridization crafts a space for a “strategy of simultaneous
accommodation and resistance” (Harvey 2008: 207) in which bricolage
practices emerge to articulate a point of autonomy from certain modes of state
power, in this case the instituted religion.

Hybrid knowledges and the problem of “Indianness”

The in-between territory within colonial reality created and occupied by
inspirational religious practitioners is another plane of their cosmological
intermediary functions. In the sixteenth century inquisitorial accounts analyzed
by Vainfas (1995), Tupi shamans appear as men who communicated with the
dead ancestors and the demiurge of heroic mythology. Notably, in Manoel da
Nobrega’s account of Bahia in 1549, “Informaçao das terras do Brasil”, men
recognized as caraíbas, and sometimes described as pajés – the popular
Tupian term for shamans (Conklin 2002: 1051)–, appear gifted with the ability
to cure by channelling spirits and are recognized as the carriers of divine
messages (Vainfas 1995: 53). As important mediators between human and
spirit worlds, Amazonian shamans seem to operate in a cosmological and
ontological frontier. Brazilian anthropologists Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
(1998) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996) have written persuasively on
this matter, describing shamanism as a cosmic diplomacy devoted to the
translation between ontologically heterogeneous views, and calling shamans
‘diplomats’, ‘translators’ and ‘mediators’. As nodes of translation, part of the
sphere of competence of the shaman is to give the novel an intelligible place,
and to insert it in the order of things (Carneiro da Cunha 1998: 10). In creating
meanings out of a multiplicity of symbols and codes – old and new, local and
foreign –, the shaman acts an agent in truth-making and culture-making in the
fertile soil of historical encounter. Such works of re-interpretation and re-
configuration can be appreciated in the colonial documentation previously
discussed.

Moreover, that shamanism has served as an instrument for the

negotiation of conflict with extra-human alterities in indigenous political
dynamics can be extended to realms of action concerning the state as an
entity. In the conversation between Amazonian Indians and non-Native
people, now nearly five hundred years old, the experience of the Brazilian
state by natives has been variable. Here, a discussion of this relationship
would be incomplete without a reflection on the nature of the state. The ‘state’
must be conceptualized as such for there to be any sustained encounter that
we can qualify as a continuity. In using terms like ‘dominant national culture’
or ‘cultural hegemony’ we accept the state’s reifying rhetoric, effectively
embracing the reality of a Brazilian nation-state as an ontological truth (Brown
1993: 311). However, the experience of this ‘state’ by native Amazonians has
been fragmentary in nature. The unsystematic encounter with the state has
persisted until very recently, in which individual people with disparate agendas
have come to represent the constancy of the Brazilian nation. These have
ranged from government officials, soldiers, and traders, to anthropologists,
missionaries, miners and settlers (Ibid), as featured in the literature on
colonial documentation. In more recent times, the Fundação Nacional do
Índio (FUNAI) founded in early 20 th century, originally the Serviço de Proteção
ao Índio (SPI), is the government protection agency that establishes policies
relating to indigenous peoples in Brazil. Serving under the auspices of the
Ministry of Justice, it has been the designated entity to mediate contact with
outsiders.

Despite the lack of a cohesive thread that can trace the encounter
between Amazonian peoples and the Brazilian nation-state, a lasting feature
has been the Otherness of the Indian vis-à-vis the Brazilian citizen. This
problem of “Indianness”, as it has been called (Conklin 2002: 1053), and the
question of how to define native peoples’ place in the nation-state took a turn
in 1988, when the new Brazilian Constitution expanded the rights of
citizenship for indigenous people, and a legal right to upkeep different
identities and cultural practices. However, as wards of the state, legally
defined as “relatively incapable” (Conklin 2002: 1053), an Indian citizen in
Brazilian territory does not enjoy the same legal category as a Brazilian
citizen. The history of occupation during most of the twentieth century,
especially during 1940-70, was erected under the adage on the country’s flag:
“development and progress” (Ferreira 2002: 45). Considered obstacles to
economic development, imaginary lines have demarcated indigenous areas
that are often ignored altogether by illegal occupation of farming, mining, and
multinational companies.

José Maurício Andion Arruti (2000) offers a way to conceptualize this

socio-political paradox in describing the duality of indigenous identities as
both “remainders” and “emergent”. Whilst semantically contradictory, the
categories can be taken as historically complementary (Arruti 2000: 2) given
the trajectory of miscegenation at a biological, cultural, and social level. At the
heart of this emergent/remainder binary is the history of mixture, found, for
example, in discussions on religious syncretisms. Such duplicity in the political
reality of indigenous peoples has led prominent Brazilian anthropologists like
Alcida Ramos to call them “internal outsiders” (Ramos 1998: 95). In this
matrix of Otherness, shamanism features prominently as a marker of
difference.

Here we can return to make some associations about the role of

shamanism in this ethnohistorical tangle. As a socially recognized
intermediary that negotiates between the realms of spirit and pragmatic
realities, shamanism and its magico-religious Otherness are moving into new
spheres of interethnic politics and indigenous struggles in Brazil (Conklin
2002: 1051). In dealing with magic and traversing ontological realms to cure
illness, shamans have historically played key roles in intergroup relations. The
role of mediators and translators is being potentialized as shamanic
knowledge and imagery are invoked in mediating relations with the state.

Re-politicizing and shamanizing the Amazonian Indian

The increase in shamans’ political presence has been noticeable in the
numerous court cases since the second half of the twentieth century over
ancestral territories and environmental issues. Two shifts have marked a
change in the postmodern political relations of indigenous peoples with the
state: an emphasis on positive imagery, and an advocacy of national
interests. A shift away from imaginings of chiefs and warriors as indigenous
leaders has coincided with a recent increase in shamans’ political presence
(Conklin 2002: 1053). Indigenous militancy was taken as a symbol of
government opposition during the dictatorship from 1964 until early 1985. The
need for less militaristic tactics in the post-modern history has been reinforced
by the bureaucracy of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working on
indigenous rights causes that have proliferated in the past decades. Now,
incontemporary “information [societies]” (Strathern 1999: 160), knowledge has
progressively displaced practice in the formation of indigenous identities. Up
until the last decade of the twentieth century, territorial claims were framed on
a moral case, which is now being redefined under the vocabulary of
Amazonian peoples’ “valuable knowledge in the service of biodiversity”
(Muehlebach 2001: 418). This recognition of indigenous knowledge as cultural
property is allowing the focus to fall on their utility for wider national and
international interests. As such, Amazonian natives are increasingly
repositioning themselves as protectors of the national patrimony and
consequently as citizens of the Brazilian state.

This political repositioning has been largely monumentalized by the

shaman and what he has come to represent. The shaman as a figure has
been the point of intersection for various strands in interethnic politics: the
‘exotic’ or Other, the locus of indigenous knowledge, and the arbitration
between distinct ontological realities. A paradoxical synthesis of Otherness
and political adequacy has crystalized in shamanism, which we could refer to
as a “shamanization” of indigenous identity in the eyes of Brazilian policy-
makers and the greater international audience. Native activists are drawing on
appealing public images to construct new narratives about indigenous
peoples’ identities.

Many native activists self-identify as shamans, and the public –

advocates for indigenous rights as well as the media – consider shamans as
emblematic of their people and the ‘indigenous’ in general (Conklin 2002:
1050). This is nothing new; as Manuela Carneiro da Cunha notes, the
contemporary flourishing of shamanism in the public sphere is the most recent
expression of an enduring pattern that has observed an upsurge of
shamanisms in contexts of social change and colonial domination (Carneiro
da Cunha 1998: 8). Interethnic contact since the colonial encounter has
promulgated a re-emphasis of existing cultural forms, such as shamanisms. In
addition, the failure of Portuguese settlers to deal with illnesses may have
afforded a momentum to the emergence of alternative modes of power (Gow
1994: 108).

Documented since the sixteenth century, already in a context of

widespread cultural transformations, shamanic agencies have been seen to
re-emerge and comprise a sphere of political agency that reacts to state
power. In an analysis of inquisitorial documentation by Vainfas (1995, 2005),
light is shed on a culturally hybrid insurgent idolatry which erupted in southern
Bahia around 1580 called santidade. The movement was composed mostly of
Tupinambá native slaves, led by caraíbas, or shamanic prophets, who
preached of a time of freedom and encouraged followers to practice rituals
through which they achieved a state of holiness: santidade (Vainfas 2005: 50-
58). In Manoel da Nóbrega’s pioneer record of Tupi ceremonials in the late
sixteenth century, he describes men who were self-declared shamans arriving
from ‘faraway lands’ and ceremonially received by entire communities
(Vainfas 1995: 53). Albeit his narrative is permeated by Eurocentric
judgments, which qualify the Indian prophet as a sorcerer or diabolic servant,
several indications about the specifics of the rites are noteworthy.

The symbolic hybridity present in later colonial accounts previously

reviewed in this essay is similarly exemplified in the petim rites. These were
Tupinambá tobacco rites, in which tobacco leaves were smoked though reeds
such that its smoke conveyed the holiness initially to the caraíbas and then to
the mass of fans. Caraíbas and followers alike would be induced into a trance
and begin to dance as they received the espírito da santidade (Vainfas 2005:
68). A certain follower of the sect said that upon drinking the tobacco smoke,
God would come from heaven to deliver them from bondage (Vainfas 1995:
137). In using the word santidade in the descriptions of Tupinambá rites,
Nóbrega created a certain analogy with a mystic ecstasy to then deny it,
deeming it false or diabolical. The esoteric quality of this magical knowledge,
extraneous and incomprehensible to Portuguese eyes, generated the
anxieties that emerge in the Portuguese voices that protagonize the colonial
documentation.

Renewal in political discourse

The obscurity of shamanic knowledges has historically existed in a
paradox of both Othering and incorporation by the non-natives, who equally
participated and resorted to shamanic healing practices. The Inquisition
persecuted settlers – including some important personages – who followed
the santidades in late sixteenth century (Vainfas 1995), and in the Inquisitorial
denunciations, for example that against the Indian Sabina (Roller), we
observe another example of assimilation by the functionaries of the state. The
spiritual wisdom and power associated with indigenous people is a coin with
two sides, of which the positive facets are being underlined as political tools.

Ancestral knowledge is being deployed as a claim to historic priority

and, consequently, to assert authority. One notorious example has been the
case of Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, an influential spokesperson for Brazil’s
Yanomami Indians. He was invited as a representative of Brazil’s native
peoples to various countries during the 1980’s and 90’s, and to the United
Nations’ “Earth Summit” on environment and development in Rio de Janeiro in
1992, where he gained legal demarcation for the Terra Indígena Yanomami
(Kopenwa & Albert 2013: 4). Davi Kopenawa’s legitimacy in the public arena
was reinforced by his status as a shaman (Kopenawa & Albert 2013: 4). In his
autoethnography, co-authored by French anthropologist Bruce Albert, Davi
Kopenawa conjures images of shamans’ long-standing diplomatic function in
dealing with outsiders: “our long-ago shamans were already talking about the
white people long before they reached us in the forest!” (Kopenawa & Albert
2013: 184). Such access to a treasure chest of ancestral wisdom is an
awesome claim to privileged knowledge and spiritual power. The impetus of
indigenous movements has summoned that the state should acknowledge
native groups as a historically prior and autonomous sphere of political rights
(Yashar 2005: 292). Making direct reference to this, Davi Kopenawa gave a
coherent declaration of his – and all shamans’ – ontological antecedence
during an interview:

President Bush thinks that he is the owner of the

world, but the shamans are the ones who have the
knowledge. He is not the first world. We are the first
world. (Multinational Monitor 1992).

Moreover, a journalistic account of the Earth Summit reports that the

Yanomami leader performed a “religious ritual by blowing hallucinogenic
nose” and “danced for half an hour, fighting the spirits that menace his
people” (Rabben 1993:14). Such a performance of ‘authentic’ indigenous
identity served, in part, to attest the knowledge base of the Yanomami – or,
generally, indigenous – claims to the outside world. Shamanic knowledge may
be described as esoteric, or at least obscure to Western knowledge systems
(Conklin 2002: 1055) that may witness such performances with as much
apprehension as with respect and awe. The public ritual act performed at the
Earth Summit invokes conventions of the romanticized Indians, and conjures
such codes active in the collective imagination for an inventive politics of the
exotic. We may suggest that Davi Kapenawa exploited the Western
representations of ‘tribal’ – esoteric, exotic, non-Western – knowledge for his
own strategic purposes. Indianism, a pan-Indian ideology that symbolizes a
counterpoint to Western civilization (Brown 1993: 307) is effectively
underscored by the relationship between the search for indigenous
authenticity and the process of cultural revival. As Alcida Ramos argues, “in a
phenomenon similar to what happened to the term Indian[…], they have
instrumentalized exoticism and turned it into a decoy to first attract national
attention and then put across their own message” (Ramos 1998: 99).

In this contemporary shift towards shamanic knowledge, rather than

practice, images of healing have in many cases outshined the apprehension.
Trends in environmental advocacy and panindigenous movements have
resounded with metaphors that construct positive images of renewal, vitality,
and empowerment (Conklin 2002: 1057). These are becoming effective
symbolic tools for reconsidering contemporary indigenous identities. Some of
these representational manoeuvres that shamans are deploying can be
ascertained from examples of court cases. Ferreira (2002) has analyzed
cases involving shamanic figures regarding the Xingu Indigenous Park (XIP),
inhabited by groups that represent four major linguistic stocks in Brazil: Tupi,
Awuak, Gê, and Karib (Ferreira 2002: 43). In line with Carneiro da Cunha’s
(1998) contention on the proliferation of shamanisms during times of social
change, Ferreira delineates an intensification of shamanic power in the XIP
since the 1970s, when organized indigenous movements formalized, and after
the institution of the latest constitution in 1988.

In his analysis, Ferreira notes that shamans portray themselves as

powerful and sentient beings, talking in the language of anacondas, jaguars,
humming birds and other creatures. In a case of Suyá land usurpation by
farmers, a shaman attended the Javari ceremony to open the initial phase of
investigation dressed as a jaguar (Ferreira 2002: 46). There, he conjured the
energies and attributes of the spotted jaguar that he wished the officials would
utilize in their mandate. The versions of the world this particular shaman
evokes and discloses in Brazilian jurisprudence comprise a synthesis of
human and animal beings, evocative of Amerindian perspectivism as coined
by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996). The term refers to a belief in a plurality
of worldview – where ontological partitions between humans, animals and
spirits coexist and overlap –, which recognizes the complexity of indigenous
cosmology. As such, in appealing to transformative energies of human and
non-human beings, this Suyá shaman attempted to renovate an original
synthesis. He, as other shamans, is positioned as renewer of the cosmic
contract that assumes, among other things, the establishment of a positive
reciprocity between the different ontological realities. Anchored in hybridity,
such attempts lend shamans the role of a “bricoleur” (Ferreira 2002: 51) who
creates and restores meanings within a system. Here we reinstate Carneiro
da Cunha’s suggestion that shamans are agents of cosmic re-configuration
(1998: 10), emphasizing their historical role as mediators and translators.

Final considerations
The present discussion has aimed to break with an insistence on the
coherence of societies, as well as its forms of representation, to consider how
indigenous shamanisms were transformed and how they, in turn, have
transformed colonial and contemporary reality. In viewing the problematic
through a prism that takes transformation and continuity as parts of the
selfsame process (Toren 1999), the common Western mythology about
Amazonian shamanism is reviewed by showing it not to be an “authentic”
Indian discourse but one formulated in reaction, in response, and in parallel to
historical events such as colonialism and modernity. In this exploration, the
ethnographic perspective is privileged to study the place shamanism takes in
the political dynamics of historical encounter. Ultimately, of most
anthropological significance are the processes of meaning- and culture-
making in Amazonia. These processes have involved confrontations between
inspirational and institutional styles, inter-group interactions where shamanism
may operate as a marker of ethnic difference and can mediate resistance, the
dynamics of Brazilian citizenship, and the reformulation of indigenous
identities. Such have been the points at which ambiguities necessarily arise,
given the project to de-essentialize shamanism through an ethnohistorical
approach.

The intricate web of relations across time – first with colonists, now
Brazilian politicians and FUNAI – has been studded by political irony. The
historic role of shamans as mediators, operating at a cosmological frontier,
has (re)emerged as a political agency in ontological frontiers of many other
kinds, including ethnic, cultural, and linguistic. Such has been the nature of
their continuity and transformation across time: from the magical space of
subversive practices in the New World, to a renewed identity politics that has
reaped their symbolic potential for indigenous and national interests. In this
trajectory, perhaps more than being reconfigured and deployed, shamanisms
have attested the elasticity of the term in the first place. This depicts
shamanisms as constantly emergent phenomena, created and recreated
through interactions between various actors in a postcolonial and postmodern
world.

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