Drugged Subjectivity, Intoxicating Alterity

donald pollock
donaldkpollock@gmail.com

Omne ignotum pro magnifico—Tacitus

Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.

For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.—Wittgenstein

abstract
This article explores the use of intoxicants by a community of Kulina Indians
in western Brazil. I suggest that Kulina intoxication through alcohol, tobacco,
and ayahuasca is best understood as a form of semiotic appropriation of the
identity of cosmological “others,” including animal spirits, creator beings, other
Indian groups, and Brazilians. I consider how embodying practices, such as
song and physical movement, enhance the experience of being an “alter,”
facilitated by the alterations in consciousness produced by intoxicants.
k e y w o r d s : Amazonia, Kulina Indians, Ayahuasca, alcohol, intoxication, altered
consciousness

The use of consciousness-altering substances by Amazonian peoples has

been described extensively over the past 40 years or more (Furst 1972; Harner
1973); indeed, the use of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis sp.) and other psy-
chotropic drugs has become nearly synonymous with indigenous Amazonian
cultures through both professional and popular literatures and film (Schultes
and Raffauf 1992; Dobkin de Rios 1996). Anthropological and ethnobotanical
research on such substances in Amazonia—for convenience I will call them
“drugs” in this article—has focused largely on the ritual use of drugs in

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 27, Issue 1, pp. 28–50, ISSN 1053-4202, © 2016 by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12050

28
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 29

shamanism and shamanic healing (Harner 1973; Langdon 1979), and occa-
sionally on what might be termed the recreational use of drugs. This litera-
ture is organized around two major types of drugs: hallucinogens, in which
drug-induced visions are often associated with shamanic performance
(Dobkin de Rios 1972; Harner 1973); and tobacco, which may also be associ-
ated with shamanic performance, especially ritual healing, though less
through the visionary experience of communion with a spirit realm than with
more complex cultural logics linking tobacco to transformative power,
original creation, and so on (Wilbert 1987).
In this article, I discuss the use of such drugs by the Kulina Indians of the
upper Purus River in western Brazil. I have elsewhere described the Kulina
use of tobacco in shamanic curing (Pollock 1992, 1996) and some of the cul-
tural associations of Kulina consumption of the fermented manioc drink
these Kulina call koidza (Pollock 1985). In those publications, in common
with much of the other literature on Amazonian drug use, I focused on cul-
tural and social dimensions of those substances: their symbolism, their
“meaning,” and their role in social dramas. Here, I explore a different
approach, one informed by recent work on the anthropology of conscious-
ness, in which I consider how Kulina construct and interpret the subjective
experience of intoxication with the drugs they use. I consider how these
experiences gain cosmological significance and how the cosmological associa-
tions of drugs in turn shape the subjective experience of their use. An impor-
tant aspect of this cosmological dimension is the association between
particular drugs and a cultural geography of “otherness.” Drug use does not
simply provide access to worlds beyond the mundane life of the village; drug
use is part of a performance of alterity that has self-referential and metaprag-
matic dimensions that are highly sensitive to a political economy of “other-
ness” in the indigenous world of western Amazonia. Moreover, intoxication
through drugs is organized in various ritual contexts that must also be read as
performances of “self” as well as “alterity” (cf., Graham 1994).
Consequently, the use of hallucinogens and intoxicants by Kulina is only
one aspect of a more complex set of practices of selfhood or identity that
constitute subjectivity as, of course, a kind of internally experienced state but
also one that conveys to individuals a profound sense of participation in a
social collectivity, producing a particular kind of experienced self that is
shaped by the structure of Kulina social life. Terence Turner has discussed
the use of techniques du corps among the Kayapo Indians—body painting,
hair cutting—in the production of bodiliness that is structured by Kayapo
social life (Turner 1995). Drug use among the Kulina stimulates experiences
that may be understood in similar ways; just as the Kayapo body is a bound-
ary between the personal and the social, intoxication invokes forms of
subjectivity that become reified by Kulina as palpable entities that populate
30 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

the social and supernatural geography of Kulina cosmology; consciousness is

one of the fields through which the boundaries between self and other may
be breached. Moreover, such an approach suggests that Kulina drug use
should be treated as an integrated set of practices: no single intoxicating sub-
stance can be completely understood without considering the other major
intoxicants that Kulina use.

&

kulina drugs
The Kulina are an Araw
a language speaking group living in numerous
villages in western Amazonia, usually along riverbanks where they have
access to trade goods carried by passing boats. My research has been con-
ducted among the Kulina on the upper Purus River in the Brazilian state of
Acre, the western-most and southern-most expansion of Kulina in the region,
where they practice slash-and-burn horticulture, hunting and gathering. My
first research period included a year residence in the Kulina village of Maro-
naua, with two return visits to the region and other Kulina, communities,
engaged in traditional participant observation that focused on shamanism and
traditional healing.
Kulina use several types of drugs, substances that produce distinct forms of
alteration of consciousness: tobacco (in the form of powdered snuff); alcohol
(in two forms: cachacßa, a Brazilian rum; and koidsa, a mildly fermented
drink made of manioc); and ayahuasca (banisteriopsis sp.). The use of each
of these substances is also associated with distinctive social activities that have
cosmological significance and reference. I explore first the manner in which
each of these substances is linked to those distinctive realms of experience by
provoking forms of intoxication that Kulina associate with those realms. That
is, the phenomenal experience of intoxication with each substance comprises
what Kulina conventionally regard as the experience-of-being associated with
these realms. Moreover, such a view also suggests that “intoxication” in such
cases must be understood dialectically: the effects of using consciousness-
altering substances derive as much from the cosmological associations of
those substances as from their inherently intoxicating properties.
A brief example will highlight one important facet of this issue. One day
during my fieldwork with Kulina, a passing Brazilian trader left the remains
of a liter bottle of cachacßa in the village. That evening a group of men gath-
ered in my neighbor’s house and passed around the bottle; each man poured
what amounted to little more than a thimbleful of the liquor into a tiny cup
and drank it down quickly, mimicking the local Brazilian style of tossing
back shots of the raw stuff. There was not enough for each man to have a
single shot—closer really to a third of a shot, perhaps a quarter of an
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 31

ounce—yet by the time the bottle had made its way around the group, the
men were reeling and swaying drunkenly. Their voices rose and they began
shouting; they were barely able to stand, and those who could staggered out
into the boroni, the central ritual area of the village, and shouted belligerent
taunts at rivals, at other indigenous groups, and at Brazilians in general.
I had seen one other drunken brawl in the village, and this new experi-
ence clarified what had puzzled me on that earlier occasion; these men were
experiencing a profound level of inebriation after consuming only a minute
amount of alcohol, and its effects lasted hours, well beyond the point at
which the psychophysiological effects of alcohol intoxication would have
worn off. It was suddenly obvious that their “drunkenness” was cultural, a
variety of learned behavior, an exaggerated form of which I was witnessing. It
was also obvious that the Kulina mode of drunkenness had been learned
from local Brazilians, indeed it is almost a parody of it; what differs is the
amount of alcohol each community believes necessary to provoke this state.1
Despite its resemblance to a m^el
ee or brawl, the Kulina participation in this
drunken event had many of the qualities of a ritual performance, including a
marked degree of coordinated action among the participants and aggressive
verbal expression of common themes that would be considered inappropriate
to voice in everyday social settings—together reminiscent of Victor Turner’s
notions of communitas and liminality—as well as a night-time setting, com-
mon for Kulina ritual performances. I want to consider how aspects of Self,
Other, and cosmology are articulated in such performances.

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self and performance

The subjective experience of one’s “self,” and the cultural and social shaping of
that experience, have been explored extensively in anthropology and cultural
psychology for decades (Shweder 1991), but those explorations tend to focus on
one or another of multiple facets of the notion. Moving in the 20th century
from “personality” to “subjectivity” (Good 2013) through notions such as “iden-
tity” and “self” (Van Wolputte 2004; Whittaker 1992), anthropology has parsed
consciousness and its cultural representations more finely than I find useful
here, but a few comments on the broader notion may be appropriate.
My argument here adopts the assumption that members of any culture
experience their own consciousness in ways that are shaped in some degree
by cultural beliefs and social practices, and in turn act in ways that repro-
duce the forms of subjectivity they experience. As Laura Graham noted in
an article on the collective singing of individual dream-derived songs among
the central Brazilian Shavante Indians, certain discursive practices that are
expressions of individual subjectivity also circulate within communities
32 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

through publicly interpretable signs (Graham 1994: 724–725). My approach

to the performance of intoxication owes much to Graham’s work on the per-
formance of dreams among the Xavante (1995), in which she stresses the fact
that performances of inner experiences are not merely a way of externalizing
those internal experiences but are also a way of socializing otherwise private
experiences so that expressive acts can constitute public sources of under-
standing of ways of experiencing. In the Kulina case of, say, ayahuasca
visions, the performance of intoxication, which involves songs in which the
phenomenal experience of intoxication and hallucination is expressed, also
serves as a social template for the understanding of what it means to be in
communication with the class of spirit beings one accesses through aya-
huasca. As Graham notes, the repetition of forms of performance are as
important as the messages revealed, especially in the creation of a sense of
continuity in the context of social changes that threaten the integrity of
indigenous communities such as the Xavante or the Kulina (1995:6). Building
upon Graham’s innovative work, I explore some of the ways in which a vari-
ety of “identities” are experienced and expressed in a single community,
some of those identities being “us” in form, other identities being “other” in
form, together capturing a dimension of the well-known “perspectivism”
found in many indigenous Amazonian communities (Viveiros de Castro
1998, 2004).
Like those Shavante dream songs, Kulina performances of intoxication are
aspects of both individually experienced subjectivity and its outward public
expression, dimensions of the production and reproduction of self, and at the
same time of alterity. Anthropologists since Mauss (1936) have attended to
the techniques du corps through which bodies emerge as cultural products;
my focus here is on one set of techniques du soi–m^eme through which selves
are produced as comparably cultural products.

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intoxication and subjectivity

The subjective experience of intoxication—how one “feels” while intoxicated—
has been explored most thoroughly for alcohol, especially in the Western
context, and to some extent for ayahuasca in Amazonia. The literature on
alcohol use reveals wide cross-cultural variation in the behavioral response to
alcohol consumption, underscoring again the likelihood that “drunkenness” or
inebriation is in some large measure culturally patterned and, indeed, that
considerable intracultural variation in forms of inebriation also exists.2
In contrast, the anthropological and ethno-pharmacological literature on
ayahuasca use offers complex results and conclusions. Though I cannot
review the whole of that rapidly expanding literature here, a few comments
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 33

may be appropriate. Ayahuasca use has been explored by anthropologists

working in indigenous communities for at least 60 years (e.g., Harner 1973),
but more recent research has focused on “urban shamans” in cities such as
Iquitos, where Dobkin de Rios conducted her innovative research (1973), and
on the emergence and spread of new religious movements such as Santo
Daime that are based on ayahuasca use among the non-Indian populations
that migrated to western Amazonia, starting with the late 19th century rubber
boom. Now-classic research by anthropologists such as G. Reichel-Dolmatoff
(1975) often focused on visual hallucinations and the apparent similarity of
ayahuasca-induced hallucinations among Amazonian peoples; these apparent
similarities were usually explained in terms of the neurochemistry of the
drug’s effects. More recently, A. Kjellgren et al. have proposed a generalizable
model of the subjective experience of ayahuasca they have called the Tran-
scendental Circle (2009) that resembles Frank Echenhofer’s “Creative Cycle
Process Model” of the ayahuasca experience (2012), both of which bear simi-
larities to the psychoanalytic process (cf. Winkelman 2005; Lewis 2008).
The issue of the universality of ayahuasca hallucinations is complex and
may be somewhat tangential to my concerns in this paper, except to under-
score the cultural plasticity of subjectivity. Kjellgren et al. and Echenhofer
were working with Western subjects whose commitment to a form of post-
modern self-actualization and “growth” seems apparent, and their respective
models foreground this process. I am unaware of any characterization of the
ayahuasca experience among indigenous Amazonians—certainly not among
Kulina—that corresponds very closely to these models. Nonetheless, it points
to the reasonable possibility that there are neurologically deep or basic
responses to drug consumption that are similar among users, but it does not
controvert the fact that these responses are further shaped, experienced, and
(in particular) understood and interpreted in ways that are essentially cultural
in nature (Dobkin de Rios 1996: 218). As Fotiou has recently suggested
(2010), the anthropologically interesting issue in ayahuasca use is not simply
the experience but the interpretation of that experience. Moreover, it has
often been noted that “ayahuasca” is a complex brew; at the very least, con-
centrations of psychotropic chemicals vary significantly from batch to batch
(Rivier and Lindgren 1972).3 It is perhaps ironic that some anthropologists
cite the cultural shaping of variable alcohol effects as a potent illustration of
nurture over nature and culture over biology but appeal to the chemical
composition of ayahuasca as an explanation of the reported consistency of its
effects (cf. Shanon 2002, 2003).
On the other hand, descriptions of visual hallucinations might add little to
an understanding of the subjective or phenomenological experience of
ayahuasca intoxication (cf. Shanon 2003: 111). Laurent Rivier and Jan-Erik
Lindgren noted that Sharanaua and Kulina indigenous informants’ after-the-
34 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

fact reports of ayahuasca hallucinations were fairly impoverished by compar-

ison to the elaborate imagery described in songs sung while intoxicated (1972:
110). Likewise, accounts by Western anthropologists, researchers and other trav-
elers in Amazonia are of only minimal help. Some writers have reported feel-
ing little more than mild intoxication, whereas others revel in the full spectrum
of hallucinatory experience that is reported in traditional ritual use. These are
hardly a set of controlled experiments, and in any event they are described by
Western visitors who lack a lifetime of socialization into a set of specific expec-
tations about what the experience will be like (Fotiou 2010, 2012).
My simple working assumption in this article is that the forms of subjectiv-
ity experienced during ayahuasca use reproduce dominant forms of culturally
patterned subjectivity among users of the drug (cf. Luhrmann 2006). Western
notions of a self that is always in a state of coming into being seem to offer
the experiential ground for the forms of subjective response analyzed by
Kjellgren et al. and Echenhofer; mestizo and caboclo use of ayahuasca in
managing spirit attack, mystical/spiritual harm, and spiritual healing are con-
sonant with the forms of subjectivity often associated with limited-good soci-
eties in which jealousy, envy, the evil eye, and other forms of mystical
danger are just under the surface of social relations. Anthony Wallace
identified cultural factors that shape hallucinatory experiences some years ago
(Wallace 1959), and Luhrmann has made a similar point in a recent study of
hallucinations, in which she suggests that “the particular dimensions of the
way mind is imagined in any society—what one might call that society’s ‘the-
ory of mind’—will shape the incidence and modality of sensory overrides and
psychotic hallucinations” (2011:77).

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kulina drug use

Kulina use of intoxicants usually takes place in ritual contexts, events in
which the qualities and characteristics of performance are foregrounded. I
describe briefly the settings of drug use, their cosmological associations, and
the major performance dimensions of each setting.

Tobacco
Tobacco, tsina in Kulina, is a ubiquitous part of Kulina life, especially for
men who regularly use it in the form of a powdered snuff. Tobacco is grown
in small quantities in gardens, but contemporary Kulina find it more conve-
nient to obtain cured tobacco from passing Brazilian traders in exchange for
rubber or meat from game animals. Whether home grown or bartered,
tobacco is considered an indigenous substance, and it plays a central role in
shamanic ritual. The snuff is made by heating tobacco carefully until it is
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 35

reduced to an ash; the ash is scooped into small vials or tubes, one of which
every adult man carries. On a day-to-day basis the snuff is used by placing a
small quantity between the lower gums and the lip; in powdered form the
tobacco does not form the large bulging wad that is familiar among, for
example, Yanomami, but is detectable mainly from the continuous spitting it
provokes among men who use it. This daily use of tobacco is not considered
intoxicating, but it is part of a complex of adult male gender practices. As I
have noted elsewhere, the “logic” of tobacco use as a male gender practice
lies in the associations of tobacco with strong smelling substances that are
considered “wild”—wadi—and potentially dangerous.
The ritual use of tobacco is considerably different from this everyday
consumption, in particular in its ability to produce trance. The primary ritual
setting of tobacco use is the tokorime curing ritual in which shamans snort
tobacco snuff into their noses, transforming them into tokorime spirits who
will undertake the cure of a sick person.4 In the tokorime ritual, two or more
shamans are “fed” the tobacco snuff by women. After they snort the powder,
they fall into a coughing, spitting, sneezing fit, followed by trance. In this set-
ting the use of tobacco is said to effect the transformation of the shaman into
the various tokorime spirits that emerge from the forest to cure the sick per-
son (Pollock 1994, 1996). Tobacco possesses this property by virtue of its
strong, pungent odor; other “strong” smelling substances similarly possess this
transformative property, which is especially heightened in the case of
tobacco. The nasal route of administration may be a kind of metonymic
enhancement of this effect as well.
The cosmological associations of the trance induced by tobacco snuff are
under worldly—shamans are able to visit the underground world of the nami
budi while transformed into tokorime spirits, where they interact with the
spirits of dead Kulina who have been transformed after death into white-
lipped peccaries, the hidzama. Shamans use this tobacco-induced trance to
call these hidzama forth from the nami budi into the forest, where they are
hunted as game. I have described the cyclical incarnations of spirits from
their human form to after-death forms as hidzama tokorime elsewhere
(Pollock 1993). My point here is to stress the linking of tobacco with the
underworld nami budi and with the spirits of forest animals.

Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, called rami by Kulina, using the term common among local
Panoan language speakers, is consumed during nighttime sessions. As far as I
am aware, and unlike a number of other Amazonian cultures, Kulina do not
consume ayahuasca to accomplish any particular ritual task such as curing or
initiating or responding to shamanic attack but rather use ayahuasca in what
might almost be termed a recreational manner; Rivier and Lindgren found
36 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

this to be the case among the Peruvian Kulina in 1968, noting that the
Kulina do not use ayahuasca in the “traditional” manner (1972: 102). Still,
the use of ayahuasca proceeds according to a ritual script: in the cases I
observed, a small group of men (and from time to time a few post-menopau-
sal women) gathers at the house of the individual who collected the vine
and who has prepared the brew of psychotropic plants; sitting in a circle,
each person gulps down a gourd of the drink, often two or three times in
turn, and sits quietly waiting for the drug to take effect. Ayahuasca can be lit-
erally nauseating, and people may walk to the edge of the house to vomit at
this time. As the drug begins to produce its hallucinations, usually after 15 or
20 minutes, each person sings a series of high-pitched songs, the songs of the
spirits with which he or she is communicating. Each person sings a different
song, and, if I understand my data correctly, each person sings a different ser-
ies of songs in each ayahuasca ritual. The overall effect is striking: between
five and a dozen voices singing simultaneously, not really disharmonic or a
cacophony, but neither coordinated nor in harmony or related keys.
Domingos Bueno da Silva, a Brazilian ethnomusicologist, has offered the
most detailed account of Kulina ayahuasca songs, or “mariri rami” (Bueno
da Silva 1997), noting that they tend to consist of groups of three lines or
stanzas repeated three times, with fairly simple lyrics. The following song is
typical:
The boy goes walking and singing on the path.
The woman goes walking and singing on the path.
The girl goes walking and singing on the path.
[Bueno da Silva 1997:52]
Kulina describe the experience of ayahuasca intoxication as a series of
encounters with spirits, specifically with spirits of the sky. In the short song I
quote above, the boy is Rami Dsabitso, or Ayahuasca Boy (dsabitso is an
adolescent boy), and the girl is Ahi’e Dsuwato, or Song Girl (dsuwato is an
adolescent girl) Labate (2012) and Labate and Pacheco (2010) have explored
the musical dimensions of ayahuasca use more generally in this region of
Amazonia. Unlike the subjective effects of tobacco snuff, which causes sha-
mans to become transformed into particular spirits, ayahuasca takes its user
into the sky where spirits are encountered. From this place in the sky Kulina
also say they can see the future: future events are conceived of as moving
toward the village, and the vantage point of the sky allows one to see these
events approaching: visitors, rains, or game in the forest. Every time I have
arrived in a Kulina village, I have been told that I was “seen” days earlier
through ayahuasca. The predicate is significant: when a visitor is approaching
the village by boat, the motor can be heard many hours away, and the predi-
cate “to hear”—mittade—is used to announce the anticipated arrival. To use
the predicate “to see”—qquide—to describe a future event is a way of mark-
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 37

ing the perception as literally “seeing” through the ayahuasca journey to the
sky. I believe that the use of the verb “to see” also conveys or connotes a
level of uncertainty when used to predict events. Shamans, who “see” pecca-
ries in the forest and direct hunters to find them, do so with that qualifica-
tion, and any failure to locate the expected game animals can be attributed
to the uncertainties and inaccuracy of sight.
Both ayahuasca and tokorime rituals include singing by the intoxicated par-
ticipants, and a brief detour on Kulina aural and oral media may be useful for
locating this practice. I have suggested elsewhere that one of the most com-
mon modes of expression of self and person among the Kulina is sound, espe-
cially the use of speech styles and facility at “hearing” (Pollock 1995). This is a
common theme among indigenous cultures of Amazonia (Urban 1991), and
among the Kulina it includes the assumption that senior adult men are able
to use especially “strong” forms of speech to compel others to work or to hunt,
whereas adolescents are assumed to be awkward and hesitant in speech. Sing-
ing is a special form of speech, used often to display an alter, another self or
being into which one has been transformed by tobacco snuff, for example. I
have compared Kulina songs to masks: both are techniques that draw upon
conventional media of self-presentation to display another identity (Pollock
1995). In contrast, seeing a future event in ayahuasca hallucinations conveys
or connotes a level of uncertainty of prediction. As I noted, shamans who see
peccaries in the forest while experiencing tobacco-induced visions, and direct
hunters to that location, are hedging their predictions, and indeed it often
turns out that the herd of peccaries is not in fact found.

Alcohol
Kulina occasionally acquire bottles of the Brazilian liquor aguardente, known
more colloquially as cachacßa, a clear, rum-like liquor distilled from fermented
sugar cane juice. As I suggested above, the consumption of cachacßa by Kulina
men, even in small amounts, produces a profound degree of inebriation.
Cachacßa use is sometimes informal, as in the case I described earlier, but
cachacßa is also the occasion for the Kulina version of Brazilian style “dances.”
These dances are held in the village schoolhouse, accompanied by music from
a battery-powered record player that plays recordings of accordion music dis-
tinctive of the musical tradition of Brazil’s northeast region. Everyone gathers
in the schoolhouse for these events, where men and women dance in what
Kulina believe to be the Brazilian style; needless to say, the fact that the school-
house was built by Brazilian missionaries is also relevant to its choice as a venue
for the Brazilian-style dance, whereas more traditional ritual dancing is con-
ducted in the cleared center space of the village, the boroni.
At least two aspects of Kulina alcohol use deserve comment. First, and as I
have suggested earlier, the ease with which Kulina men become deeply
38 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

inebriated when drinking small amounts of cachacßa suggests that here the
experience of drunkenness is learned and is patterned after the Brazilian
model. My assumption is that this form of inebriation is, at some level, sought
after, particularly as a part of a more complex system of intra-village violence
that can be distanced from one’s self and exculpated as the result of alcohol.
In this regard, Kulina on the upper Purus occasionally mentioned to me that
cachacßa resembled dori, the substance that shamans possess in their bodies
that gives them the ability to harm or kill others (Pollock 1993). The fact that
cachacßa can also be ignited is evidence of its power and its link to dori.
The second notable feature of alcohol use is the “dance” context in which
cachacßa is often consumed. Kulina generally express little interest in Brazil-
ian life and culture, and so I was rather startled initially to see Kulina mount
what they considered to be a Brazilian-style dance. While I do not want to
discount the possibility that such dances are simply recreational, their close
link to the presence of cachacßa in the village suggests that the “dance” is
more or less explicitly a context for the consumption of alcohol and is
selected as an alternative to the male-only context of drinking-induced
violence. I suspect, though my data are inadequate to document, that
cachacßa-induced violence is contingent upon a pre-existing level of social
tension in the village, whereas cachacßa dances provide a context for the dis-
posal of alcohol in the absence of such social tensions. This pattern would
be consistent with other cycles of tensions, violence and witchcraft, followed
by curing and re-establishment of harmony within the village, though I also
realize that it offers something of a procrustean bed for interpreting Kulina
actions. In the case with which I opened this paper, the arrival of the passing
trader who left the bottle of cachacßa coincided with a tense and potentially
violent situation of shared paternity, a possibility among Kulina, who believe
that all men who have sex with a woman are “biological” fathers of her next
baby (Pollock 2002). In this instance, Tsami, the “other father,” was too pub-
lic about his sexual exploits: Tsami’s wife blamed the mother of the child for
his infidelity and had fought with her briefly the day before; for his part, the
husband of the mother—the socially acknowledged father of the child—had
threatened Tsami that evening, waving around his machete while shouting
taunts and challenges in the middle of the village. As tensions ran high the
next day, the cachacßa gave men a drunken opportunity to voice the anger
and frustration that they projected on to local Brazilians, redirecting hostility
out of the village and averting violence within the community.
Nonetheless, it remains to be seen why Kulina would construct a distinctly
Brazilian-style context in which to consume cachacßa in a socially controlled
way. Kulina themselves contrasted the experience of cachacßa inebriation,
which they said was “too strong” for Kulina, with the ritual consumption of
koidza, the mildly fermented manioc drink that they described as a kind of
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 39

Kulina version of alcohol. A brief consideration of koidza use will help to sit-
uate both it and cachacßa within the spectrum of alcohol use.

Koidza
Koidza is a mildly fermented drink made of manioc that has been soaked in
water to soften the tubers and is then masticated before being mixed with
water to sit for anywhere from two or three hours to three days.5 Such bever-
ages are common in Amazonia; they are usually made of manioc or corn
(e.g., chica) and have a number of symbolic associations and positions within
various social performances. Judith Kempf and J. Ehrenreich have suggested
that the use of such fermented substances in Amazonia also has significant
benefits for populations with high loads of gastrointestinal parasites, and sev-
eral of my informants described koidza as having this emetic property against
parasitic worms (Kempf and Ehrenreich 2001). In the more quotidian terms
of daily diet, I have described koidza as the quintessential female food
(Pollock 1985) in the culinary practices of gender.
Koidza, like tobacco, has both daily use and ritual uses that draw upon the
same qualities attributed the drink. Koidza is prepared by women for the men
of their households to consume at the end of the day, shortly before dusk,
when men return from hunting, preparing new gardens, or from other activi-
ties that have taken them out of the village into the surrounding forest. Koidza
has properties that are described as calming or socializing; men who pass their
day in the forest absorb its wildness, and koidza tames or socializes them.
Koidza also plays a central role in periodic dry season rituals. Kulina at
Maronaua referred to these rituals only as mariri, a Portuguese term they
have adopted for a festival or ritual. Several days before the ritual one or
more large canoes (or logs hollowed out like a dugout canoe) are dragged
into the central ritual area of the village, where they are filled with koidza
that is allowed to ferment for several days. Patsy Adams and Patricia Town-
send comments that the Kulina in the Peruvian village of San Bernardo call
this ritual wabui porini, which I take to be a reference to the logs lying on
their side. On the day of the ritual, the women of the village symbolically
attack the men, who represent peccaries; the women hold cooking pots full
of the koidza that they feed to the men, who gulp it down and quickly vomit
it up. After several pots of koidza have been fed to each man, the roles are
reversed and the women are “hunted” by the men, fed pots full of the
koidza, and vomit it up in turn. Although the alcohol content of the koidza
is low, and much of it is vomited up, Kulina experience a significant level of
inebriation during the ritual; people stagger, reel, and collapse, and engage
in a long post-ritual period of horseplay and friendly wrestling in the muddy
ground. For some time after the ritual, too, people report feelings of exhaus-
tion, and mild disorientation.
40 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

Unlike the alcohol-inspired m^el
ee I described earlier, the koidsa ritual cre-
ates a form of inebriation that is regarded as pleasant and happy, and despite
the violent imagery of the ritual—men and women symbolically hunting and
killing each other—everyone enjoys themselves, and the general air is one of
gleeful participation and fun. Vanessa Grotti has recently described a similar
position for manioc beer among the Trio Indians who live on the Suriname/
Brazil border (Grotti 2012), and she underscores the Trio use of manioc beer
to promote conviviality and “collective happiness” (2012: 194). Unlike the
Kulina, however, Trio also use manioc beer festivals to engage the subjectiv-
ity of local non-Indians, a role that western-produced alcohol such as
cachacßa plays for Kulina.

&

drugged cosmologies
The different intoxicating substances used by my Kulina informants demar-
cate a four-part cosmology that has both this-world social and other-world
mystical dimensions. Ayahuasca and tobacco link Kulina to the spirits of the
sky and of the underworld, respectively, a cosmological contrast that is also
temporal: the spirits of the underworld are one’s ancestors, there transformed
into peccaries; the spirits of the sky reveal the future. Koidza and alcohol
(quintessentially here in the form of cachacßa) are associated with the human
social world: koidza with Kulina (and secondarily with other Indians) as a
medium of sociability; alcohol with non-Indian “whites” or karia, with more
ambiguous social potential. These are, among other things, symbolic or, bet-
ter, semiotic links, associating the meanings or significance of intoxicating
substances with the meanings or significance of cosmological realms. Koidza,
for example, is associated with breast milk and is said to calm and re-socialize
hunters who have spent the day in the forest acting like wild hunting ani-
mals, especially the jaguar: solitary, dangerous, silent killers who need to be
“tamed” to re-enter the social life of the community. Tobacco snuff, as I have
noted, opens men up to transformation into a variety of spirit beings that
emerge from the underworld into the forest.6
These substances could have all of the symbolic or semiotic associations
that I have identified even without the additional property of inducing forms
of intoxication or the alteration of consciousness. My additional challenge is
to understand the specific forms of consciousness produced under the influ-
ence of each of these drugs in terms of the characteristics of the cosmologi-
cal dimensions they invoke. To do so, I will propose that the ritual use of
intoxicating substances involves what I will call the semiotic appropriation
of identity: that is, the use or appropriation of semiotic features of identity of
those “Others” or alters that are being embodied in drugged ritual. Semiotic
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 41

appropriation can be as simple as masking or costuming; my interest here is

exploring the ways in which Kulina semiotic appropriation of identity
through intoxicants involves a convergence of deeper, experiential forms of
subjectivity that create an especially powerful experience of altered conscious-
ness.
First, I should note again that Kulina grant semiotic and experiential prior-
ity to sound, especially oral and aural media, as primary channels of identity
and often erase or background visual media or channels. In daily life this is
expressed, for example, as the assumption that members of different identity
statuses produce different levels of speech: senior adult men produce a spe-
cial form of speech that is compelling in its directive force, often as “orders”
that other village members “hear and obey”—this form of speech is well-
known in Amazonia and is often called “plaza speech” by anthropologists
working in the region—whereas adolescent boys are expected to be hesitant
and tongue-tied while speaking in public forums. As I have described else-
where, song is a special category of oral performance that is used to display
transformed identity, typically by singing the songs of beings into which the
singer has been transformed. Song is so central to the display of such trans-
formed identities that I have compared Kulina song to masks (Pollock 1995);
Kulina do not need visual media to display such identities and instead rely
on oral and aural channels: speaking, singing, and hearing. I should be clear
that Kulina can and do use visual media, especially to signal entry into limi-
nal states. For example, the red facial and body paint made of urucu (Bixa
orellana) is used to conventionally signal liminality by close relatives of a
recently deceased person or, on a more daily basis, by adolescents. However,
there is no specific identity that is represented by such liminal signs, simply
liminality itself; display of an alter identity requires speech or song.
I opened this essay with a description of a violent m^el
ee provoked by
drinking a fairly small quantity of cachacßa, and I suggested that the critical
social context of this event was a case of paternal jealousy and marital infi-
delity that could have escalated into physical violence.7 I should explore for
a moment how the chaos of that night resembles the more mannered behav-
ior of the dances that form the more common context for Kulina use of west-
ern alcohol. First, in both cases, alcohol is the occasion for Kulina to act in
ways that they believe are distinctively Western, forms of action that are
uniquely Brazilian rather than “Indian.” Brazilian-style dancing is quite
clearly so, and Kulina treat the occasion of a Western-style dance as an
opportunity to adopt a variety of other “karia” traits such as Brazilian music
from a battery-powered record player and Brazilian clothing. The apparent
chaos of the m^el
ee I described is also understood by Kulina as distinctively
Western, both in the sense of the stereotypical violent response of Brazilians
to alcohol (at least in the Kulina view) but also in the content of the rants,
42 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

threats, and harangues of the drunken participants, which focused on owner-

ship of land, expulsion of outsiders, government deception, and so forth.
These are all versions of local Brazilian political discourse, which is resentful
of indigenous claims to large areas of territory, failed government promises of
support, and so on. In Kulina experience, Brazilians direct their drunken
rants against local Indians; they in turn direct much of their drunken rants
against local Brazilians.
Thus, small amounts of Western-produced alcohol provoke two distinct
social responses in this village, and my data suggest that each form responds
to the underlying level of social tension with the village. In the absence of
inter-household conflicts, alcohol such as cachacßa is an occasion to hold a
Brazilian-style dance; in the presence of inter-household tensions and con-
flicts, cachacßa use provokes a violent m^el
ee. In both cases Kulina feel that
they are acting like Brazilians; they adopt forms and styles of consciousness
that Kulina believe to be Western, non-Indian. Certainly, it should be appar-
ent that the use of cachacßa as a context for the expression of social tensions
is one familiar form of projecting inappropriate social hostilities onto
“others,” in this case the radically “other” Brazilians who are, in any event,
an ever-present threat to Kulina cultural and social well-being.
I have phrased much of this description in terms that will be familiar to
Western readers: a Brazilian-style “dance” or, as the Kulina said in their
limited Portuguese, a “festa,” a party, most striking to me because of the
Kulina miming of Brazilian dancing. But a key component of such a festa
is the music that accompanies it: in my experience Northeast Brazilian
accordion music, vinyl records played on a battery-powered record player,
music familiar to Kulina from local Brazilians who are almost all immi-
grants from the drought-plagued northeast of Brazil. Music and movement
are here powerfully embodying forms of the semiotic appropriation of iden-
tity in which alcohol intoxication opens up, if I may put it that way, the
community to the assumption of this form of alterity. Sound and move-
ment express but also enhance the subjective experience, the entry into an
“alter” identity as participants give themselves over to the rhythms and
sounds of the festa.
The same may be said of the ritual use of tobacco snuff. Shamans who
snort tobacco ash signal their entry into trance and their assumption of alter
identities through song, the songs of the animal spirits into which they are
transformed. As with Brazilian-style festas, sound is not the only medium of
embodiment in these contexts: the stylized movements of shamans as they
“dance” into the center of the village plaza, singing to the assembled women
of the community in rocking, back-and-forth dancing, create a powerful sense
of the “otherness” of these beings, certainly for on lookers and presumably
for the shamans themselves.
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 43

There is a growing anthropological literature on the common trope of hun-

ter and prey in Amazonian communities, developed especially creatively by
Carlos Fausto and colleagues (e.g., Fausto 2012a), which is in turn a feature of
the perspectivism that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has explored among these
communities (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004). Humans regard animals as prey
and animals regard humans as prey, but more important, humans may learn
to adopt the point of view of animals, for example, as shamans do when trans-
formed into the spirit forms of animals, gaining insight thereby into the under-
lying nature of a world that each species understands only partly. Fausto has
extended the notion of hunter and prey with the tropes of master and pet:
among many indigenous Amazonian peoples, the “symmetrical” relationship
of hunter/prey (each regarding the other as its opposite) is converted into
“asymmetrical relations of control and protection” (Fausto 2012b: 684).
Encounters with animal spirits or the spirit beings of the sky have been inter-
preted as indigenous efforts to control the power of such supernatural beings
but may also involve placing oneself in the position of client or even “pet” to
solicit the caring attentions of masters or patrons (Walker 2013).
Alcohol and ayahuasca use are similarly associated with alterity for Kulina:
alcohol use invokes the alterity of intrusive non-Indians who have invaded
indigenous lands, whereas ayahuasca invokes indigenous alterity, both the
“otherness” of other Indians and the otherness of the spirit beings who inhabit
the sky. In Kulina cosmology, both forms of alterity are linked to innovation
and culture change. For example, Kulina talk of all cultural innovations,
whether shotguns, canoes, or even ayahuasca itself, as items borrowed or
learned from other peoples, as though Kulina culture was largely the product
of extensive contact with a variety of other cultures. In this matrix of alterity,
spirits who reside in the sky, those spirits who are contacted in ayahuasca
ritual, are those who were responsible for the original creation of the Kulina
world and who have a privileged view, in a quite literal sense, of the past as
well as the future. It is access to that knowledge that Kulina often seek in
ayahuasca use (see Langdon 1979; 1992). Ayahuasca use is also surrounded or
filled with sound, with the spirit songs that participants sing. The intensely
individual performances, seemingly oblivious to the other participants in the
ritual, each of whom is simultaneously singing his or her own unique songs,
may be a kind of embodiment of the nature of the spirits contacted through
ayahuasca. Those spirits are named (e.g., the notable creator spirits Kira and
Tamako, among others, for example) and play central roles in Kulina myth;
they are “personified,” so to speak, individuals. In contrast, the animal spirits
into which shamans become transformed through tobacco snuff are generic or
collective: the white-lipped peccary spirit or the jaguar spirit. Their songs are
sung collectively in a coordinated call-and-answer form by shamans and the
women of the village during the tokorime ritual.
44 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

Ultimately, it appears to be this combination of sound and movement (in

most cases songs and dances) that provides the semiotic phenomenal ground
of the experience of being an alter consciousness, aided, one might say, by
the intoxicating substances that I have described here. Kulina assume that
drugs create these other identities or open up access to the spirit beings that
inhabit the cosmo-geographic realms in which they reside, and from a phe-
nomenal perspective the difference may be minor.
The emphasis on sound is consistent with Kulina notions of knowledge
itself, transmitted through speech and hearing rather than vision; Kulina say
omitani (“I hear [and understand]”) where English speakers conventionally
say “I see” as a synonym for understanding. The physicality of identity is also
manipulated in drugged alterity, especially through a Kulina matrix of quali-
ties that give consumable substances power: odors, for example, especially
strong or sweet smells that transform identity, and pungency, associated with
wildness and danger. Movement, too, is enrolled in the experience of one’s
self and its public display, starting as children, when mothers scratch a child’s
legs causing bleeding that promotes growth and strength; stylized movements
in performance are semiotically significant displays of identity, whereas the
absence of movement is a sign of death.

&

concluding remarks
Kulina use of several intoxicating substances is a complex set of practices of
alterity rather than multiple means to attain a single goal or outcome of
intoxication. To achieve these effects, Kulina engage in what I have termed
the semiotic appropriation of identity of those “other” beings into which they
become transformed, becoming or miming “others” rather than simply com-
municating with them, be they spirit beings, ancestral creator figures, or even
local Brazilians. Intoxicating substances do not simply reveal these alters but
effect a kind of transformation into those alters, catalyzing the phenomenal,
experiential assumption of critical facets of the identity of those other beings.
Alterations of “consciousness” in this sense are dialectic. The experience of
intoxication is shaped by and is understood to be a transformation in a way-
of-being that mimics or reproduces the way-of-being of various alters that
populate the Kulina social universe, from remote spirit beings who created
the world to local Brazilians who threaten Kulina well-being. Moreover, the
Kulina experience of intoxication from drug use must also be understood as
part of a more complex set of practices of selfhood, practices that include
sound (especially music and singing) and movement, embodied forms of
experience that enhance and are enhanced by various drugs. This is most
evident in the shamanic use of tobacco, in which shamans are transformed
d ru gg e d s ub j e c ti vi t y, i nt ox i c at i n g a lt e ri t y 45

into the spirit forms of animals, and this form of drug-assisted transformation
of consciousness and identity guides the understanding of the use of other
intoxicating substances to invoke forms of consciousness that Kulina conven-
tionally associate with other kinds of “others.”
Accounts of the use of consciousness altering substances have often
focused on the ways in which drugs “open” the user to communication with
spirit others, but the Kulina practice is to produce forms of consciousness
that reproduce forms of consciousness associated with others: to produce the
experiential sense of what it is to be an alter of this or that sort. Understand-
ing how that is achieved, especially the semiotic mechanisms through which
otherness is experienced, offers, I believe, a richer account of the experience
of drug use and intoxication within a complex social geography of self and
other.

&

notes
1. Psychological research on the effects of alcohol consumption suggest that it is use-
ful to distinguish “inebriation” from “intoxication”; the former refers to learned or
culturally shaped behavior, whereas the latter refers to physiological effects (e.g.,
reaction times, coordination) that are independent of the subjective state of drunk-
enness. I find it convenient here to use the term “intoxication” to refer to the
broader class of subjective experiences produced by alcohol, hallucinogens, and
other drugs, because the associations of “inebriation” may be restricted to the
effects of alcohol use. MacAndrew and Edgerton’s classic work, Drunken Comport-
ment (1969), documents the culturally constructed nature of drunkenness. See also
Becker (1967) and Room (2001).
2. Intracultural variation is sometimes thought of as a product of psychological rather
than cultural factors; at this level it is necessary to bracket off the vexed question of
whether there is any meaningful difference. See Heller (2013) and Marshall et al
(2001).
3. American experiences with LSD may be instructive; even when purity and
dosages are carefully controlled, people report a range of forms of experience.
4. I have seen museum displays that include nasal tubes, identified as Kulina. I am
unaware of the use of such tubes by Kulina on the Purus, but it is possible that
other Kulina communities use this technology for taking tobacco snuff.
5. Kulina on the Purus River use the term koidza for this drink. Among other
Kulina groups the term may refer to a ritual in which the drink is consumed.
Kana
u and Monserrat define “coidsa” as a traditional ritual—“festa tradicional”—
(1984:12) in their dictionary based on a dialect spoken on the Envira River. See
also Lorrain (2000). Adams, who worked with a Kulina community on the
46 anthropology of consciousness 27.1

Peruvian Purus River, translates “cohuidsa” as “La bebida fermentada” (Adams

1962: 184).
6. The rich literature on “perspectivism” is relevant here. Viveiros de Castro has
explored extensively the common view among Amazonian Indians that animals
see humans as animal prey, the fermented manioc drink as blood, and so on,
inverting or reversing the perspective of humans at each critical point. Kulina cos-
mology is “perspectival” in exactly this way, beginning, so to speak, with the belief
that human spirits become transformed into peccaries after death in the under-
ground world of the nami budi.
7. I should stress that Kulina regularly engage in extramarital sexual activities, some
of them even ritualized, and happily discuss multiple paternity. In the case I
describe here, the “other father” insulted the social father by being too public
with his announcement of his (additional) paternity; the literature on the “cou-
vade” suggests that when men engage in such ritual behaviors it is to stake a pub-
lic claim to paternity, and a Kulina husband is insulted when “other” fathers do
so in regard to his child.

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