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Soul-foods as pharmaka: female bodies and poisons in the Upper Rio Negro

Alimentos espirituais como pharmaka. Corpos femininos e venenos no alto rio Negro
Des aliments spirituels comme pharmaka. Corps féminins et poisons dans le haut Rio Negro
Pedro Lolli et Geraldo Andrello
Traduction de David Rogers
p. 65-92

Résumés

Cet article explore les origines, les propriétés et l’usage rituel d’un ensemble de substances psychoactives chez les peuples indigènes du haut Rio Negro. Partant de la genèse mythique du tabac, de la coca, du paricá et du caapi (ayahuasca), nous examinons dans un premier temps la relation de ces substances avec des aspects ou des parties du corps féminin et leurs pouvoirs reproductifs, suggérant qu’ils peuvent être considérés comme des pharmaka, dans la mesure où ils peuvent servir aussi bien à augmenter la force vitale qu’à nuire ou tuer. Leurs effets reposent sur l’usage d’incantations magiques soufflées visant à provoquer ou à guérir des maladies. Ce lien souligne l’importance des notions de force vitale, de parole et de souffle comme moyens par lesquels les corps s’affectent les uns les autres.

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Notes de la rédaction

Manuscrit reçu en février 2023, accepté pour publication en mars 2024.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Although some areas of controversy exist, this diversity is generally organized around three large (...)
  • 2 Goldman 1963, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, Reid 1979, Bidou 1983, Jackson 1983, Hugh-Jones C. 1979, Hug (...)
  • 3 An aspect also noted in other regions of the Americas, especially in relation to tobacco (Wilbert  (...)
  • 4 S. Hugh-Jones also highlights the close relationship between female bodies and poison when he ment (...)

1In this article, we set out to explore some aspects of the ritual use of psychoactive substances among indigenous peoples from the extensive Upper Rio Negro regional system, classically described as a network of matrimonial, ritual, and material exchanges and characterized by a large linguistic and ethnic diversity.1 Past studies of these substances have approached them as part of the region’s shamanic complex, based around four psychoactives: tobacco, coca, caapi, and paricá.2 Christine Hugh-Jones uses the term “soul-foods” (1979, p. 203) to refer to this set of foods of the ancestral spirits, while Patrick Bidou calls them “other world food” (1983, p. 15) and Stephen Hugh-Jones “anti-food” (1995).3 Here we set out to complement these studies by highlighting other elements central to the primal genesis and contemporary utilization of these substances, which in turn allows us to explore a series of analogies between these substances, medicines, and poisons, on the one hand, and between them and female bodies, on the other.4

  • 5 For analyses of the use and relationship between coca and tobacco, see the pioneering article by S (...)

2We emphasize that we will not deal with the preparation methods and forms of ritual use of these substances, even though this is a relevant and essential aspect for a broader approach to the topic. It would, in any case, be impossible to include all aspects associated with the problem in the space of an article. Furthermore, where we carried out our ethnographic research, paricá and caapi have fallen into disuse since the intensification of missionary work throughout the 20th century. Tobacco and coca are still widely used throughout the region, especially the former, but it should be noted that native tobacco is being replaced by industrialized brands. Coca continues to be cultivated and processed according to traditional methods in many locations.5

  • 6 Gutierrez-Choquevilca 2017a, 2017b; Aparício 2015, 2019; Shiratori 2019.

3It is also noteworthy that the topic of poisons has been extensively explored in South American ethnology, especially curare and timbó, hunting and fishing poisons respectively.6 We do not deal with them here, since the substances we will explore are not usually classified as poisons. By bringing them closer to this category, our intention is to draw attention to their potentially beneficial and/or harmful effects in relational contexts. In this sense, their lethality in this specific context would be more potential than effective, as we intend to show.

  • 7 Paricá is made from the Virola sp. and/or Piptadenia peregrina trees, also called yopo or calcium (...)

4Here we approach the theme by examining fragments from the extensive mythic narratives and the shamanic verbal formulas derived from them, followed by a discussion of sickness and poisons. Substances like tobacco, coca, caapi, and paricá7 enable access to the forces that gave shape and appearance to the present-day world, allowing them to be activated to assist human reproduction and combat the afflictions and dangers resulting from interactions with other beings. Recent ethnographies produced by native anthropologists from the Upper Rio Negro region have reiterated the close association between ritual speech and the use of psychoactive substances, suggesting that an entire system of shamanic knowledge is expressed in verbal genres that are chanted or spoken in combination with the use of tobacco, coca, caapi, and paricá: the bahsesé (enchantments), basa mori (songs), and kihti ukusé (histories, myths). Each of these genres also involves different shamanic specialties (see Barreto, Azevedo and Sodré Maia 2018; Barreto 2018, 2020; Diakara 2019).

5To explore the association between these substances and the curing processes engendered by enchantments, we adopt a pharmacological perspective. In his discussion of the Greek pharmakon in the work of Plato, Derrida proposes apprehending the term as poison and remedy simultaneously: “This pharmakon, this ‘medicine’ […] both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence” (2005, p. 14). Our intention in citing this work is not to apply Derrida’s concept to our material directly, but rather to use it to elucidate a “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2004) based on the diverse pragmatic encounters that we experienced during our field research. As a work of translation, it is always partial, undertaken in both directions where the meanings mutually affect each other, both from our own perspective and from that of our interlocutors.

  • 8 The actors and/or social units that interact in the region’s ritual complex, whether male initiati (...)

6A pharmacological approach not only reveals how poison and medicine cannot be treated in isolation but also reveals the analogy existing between the pharmaka and female bodies—an analogy, it seems to us, yet to be fully considered. Setting out from origin myths that recount how these substances—essential for the men of a patriclan8 to experience ritual contact with the ancestral past—are identified with female bodies, we argue that contemporary agnatic same-sex relations are effectively preceded and made possible by various cross-sex relations (Strathern 1988), particularly those formulated in mythic discourse. Here we emphasize the central place occupied by gender differentiation in the production of kinship among Upper Rio Negro peoples, as well as their complex articulation with other-than-human powers, mobilized in their verbal arts and rituals.

7These substances and female bodies are shown to be central ingredients in the production of human kinship, as well as factors that can lead to the destruction of kinship—or to anti-kinship—when improperly activated. This ambiguous trait becomes clear in diverse mythic episodes that describe the genesis of the universe: in these narratives, various incidents leading to the emergence of a true humankind also produce a parallel series of potentially deadly substances.

8We attempt to extract the implications of these relations over the course of the text. In so doing, our focus gradually shifts from Tukano and Arawak myths to Naduhup conceptions of sickness and the verbal formulas used in contexts of curing and protecting—formulas through which these forest peoples simultaneously manipulate, activate, and neutralize the regenerative effects of the remedies and the degenerative effects of the poisons. In sum, the effects of the pharmakon.

Pharmacogenesis

  • 9 S. Hugh-Jones has drawn attention to the question of artifactual insemination (2009, 2017) and, mo (...)

9In this section we cite excerpts from publications by Ettore Biocca, S. Hugh-Jones, and Robin Wright, as well as various volumes of the Coleção Narradores do Rio Negro, which bring together Tukano, Tariano, Baniwa, and Desana myths, published over recent years by Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro (FOIRN). These texts allow us to discern the specific circumstances under which coca, tobacco, paricá, and caapi—substances that already figure in the first scenes from the account of the genesis of the world as aspects or parts of the bodies of the first ancestors—acquire existence in the form of cultivated plants bequeathed to future humankind. In these initial scenes from the mythic narratives, tobacco and coca constitute an indissociable relationship and are both contained inside the instruments used by these primal ancestors. Coca is always mentioned as the content filling a gourd of life, while the tobacco cigar regularly appears slotted into a carved wooden fork, artifacts that form the body-thought of the first beings, along with stools, gourd supports, and rattle lances (Andrello 2006). This composition of substances and artifacts led S. Hugh-Jones to assert that the reproduction of the first beings occurred in artifactual form (2009, p. 44). It is important to add that everything that came to exist during this phase—humans, animals, plants, and objects—originates from this same engendering technology, inaugurated by the so-called “instruments of life and transformation” (Maia and Maia 2004). In this phase, tobacco and coca had yet to appear as cultivated plants but were manifested in their already prepared form: as we shall see later, the mixture of coca powder and tobacco smoke results in a substance capable of inseminating bodies.9

10The origin of tobacco and coca as cultivated plants is recounted in two segments of a Barasana myth included as an appendix to the book The Palm and the Pleiades by S. Hugh-Jones (1979): “Yeba,” the “first man,” the son of a jaguar-woman and Sun, was produced without sexual intercourse. Looking for a wife, Yeba refuses the women offered to him by terrestrial animals but ends up wedding a fish-woman whose father later gives him the first cultivated plants, including fruits and manioc. But the myth also goes on to describe Yeba’s acquisition of coca and tobacco, which, in turn, originate through a sexual conjunction of the bodies of the fish-wife, Yeba, and his younger brother. These passages are concise but contain details important to highlight here.

  • 10 A Yuhup version can be found in Lolli (2010) and a Hupd’äh version in Ramos (2018), both of which (...)

11First, coca can be said to result from an “anti-pregnancy” since the seduction of Yeba’s younger brother by the fish-wife while working in the swidden causes him to die just at the moment he ejaculates. From his body emerges a line of coca plants. Although the animal-spouse intervenes, she does not give men anything not already virtually contained in their own body: the orgasm figures in this episode as an inverted and fatal insemination, since it does not entail the absorption of substance but a liminal and mortal bodily experience. Here we can identify an implicit association between the female sex and poison. Significantly, it is the same heroine who will later hand Yeba the tobacco sent by her own father, Fish-Anaconda. In her husband’s eyes, however, the tobacco cigar looks like a smoked fish and has such a pleasant aroma he cannot resist eating it, despite his wife’s warnings. His belly swells up, followed by strong diarrhea. From his feces sprouts the tobacco plant.10 But this incident ruins Yeba’s relationship with the fish-woman and fish-father-in-law. The woman later turns into kampô, the giant tree frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor), whose secretion is used to alter the coloring of bird plumage (a technical process known as “tapiragem”), and she becomes mother of dance adornments, central artifacts in male rituals. In sum, whether as a result of the relations between genders or as the object of an exchange with non-humans, the powers of coca and tobacco are expressed in the form of a younger brother’s death and his older brother’s sickening, both of them in an interspecific relationship with a fish-woman. The association made between tobacco and smoked fish also reveals the widely commented on relation between these substances and food. More specifically, this association indicates that the difference between food and anti-food is primarily a question of perspective.

12Now we examine other narratives that associate tobacco with breastmilk and thus, implicitly, the act of smoking with breastfeeding. As for coca, the episode from the Barasana myth cited above can perhaps be interpreted via a small fragment of a Tukano myth describing the world’s origin (see Maia and Maia 2004, p. 33). In this version, a female divinity, the Grandmother of the Universe, intercedes with Thunder, the Grandfather of the Universe, on behalf of the two brothers who will be responsible for leading the emergence of the future humankind (commanding the canoe-snake that will transport them along the course of the rivers). The brothers receive a set of ceremonial adornments from Thunder, which later transform into people during the passage from the aquatic to the terrestrial world. These decorative elements are obtained when the two brothers visit the celestial abode of Thunder, accompanied on their journey by the Grandmother of the Universe. At the end of their stay, Thunder tells the brothers that by the door of the house they will find a coca plant, a specimen containing all the different varieties of this cultigen. He instructs them to take the newest leaf and place it under their tongue so that their speech will sound pleasant to the members of the groups they will later lead. However, the Grandmother of the Universe overhears the conversation between the siblings and Thunder and, preempting the brothers, tries the coca before them. The narrative explains that this is why some women speak before their husbands, a behavior deemed excessive that defines and combines the traits of avidity and oral incontinence as female attributes. It is as though the sexual avidity of the fish-wife of the Barasana myth is echoed in the female oral avidity highlighted in the Tukano myth, expressed in the future life of humankind as oral-verbal incontinence. In any event, the implicitly incorrect use of coca by the woman in the Tukano myth clearly indicates the undesired effect that this substance can generate: in addition to producing pleasant male speech, the substance also virtually produces a female behavior seen as antisocial from the male point of view, albeit endowing women with the power of speech too.

13On the topic of tobacco, there is a more specific Tariano myth collected by Biocca in the 1940s (Biocca 1965) in which Thunder, the same “Grandfather of the Universe” (called Ennu in the almost extinct Tariano language), is himself created by a woman, “young and virgin, who lived alone in empty space,” before the earth existed. The creation of Thunder by the woman, called Koadidop, is expressed as follows: “She removed the tobacco from her own body, prepared a large cigar, and then squeezed milk from her own breast onto the cigar.” Koadidop would also make two other women appear using tobacco and milk: these were Kaisaro and Paramano, “her companions,” with whom she would share a future terrestrial existence while the Thunders remained on the celestial plane. Later, the Thunders seek to create new people, trying to make themselves pregnant with tobacco and coca-abiu (the sweet and sticky fruit of the species Pouteria camito L.). But their attempts are futile and they succeed only in making the muscles of their arms and thighs grow, for which they are mocked by the women. The narrative continues with the Thunders using the same means to impregnate Koadidop’s companions, opening a vagina in their bodies using the tip of the forked cigar holder. This leads to the first birth, from which Jurupari emerges, a topic we explore later.

14Other versions of the Tariano myth reiterate this association between tobacco and maternal milk. In more recent tellings narrated by people from younger generations of the same clan (Koivathe) with whom Biocca worked in the 1940s, we encounter another kind of cross-sex relationship associated with these substances. While the aforementioned Barasana and Tukano myths feature the pairs husband/wife, brother-in-law/sister-in-law, and grandmother/grandsons (the demiurge brothers), here a pair of opposite-sex siblings is involved. This also suggests that the relationship between Koadidop and the Thunders is one of cross-siblinghood (here we can note the absence of any sexual intercourse between them). Turning now to the Tariano myths, we find a sister giving her brother a tobacco cigar, which she removes from her own breast: these siblings are Kui and Nanaio, created not by a female divinity but by Thunder and tasked with promoting the appearance of humankind. This is the narrative:

  • 11 Made from a single piece of sculpted brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata).
  • 12 TN (translator’s note): Phenakospermum guyanense, a broad-leafed plant whose leaves are often used (...)

That was when Kui encountered yutica-yapú, a cigar holder in the shape of a fork,11 and Nanaio encountered katirí-miroró, a cigar of life. These instruments were found in Tabaco creek, an affluent of the Cuiari river, itself an affluent of the Içana river. Above this creek there is a mountain with a cavern where the two siblings discovered the fork and the cigar. The two instruments were made of white quartz and were approved by Thunder. Nanaio prepared this cigar with her own milk by dripping milk from her breast onto the tobacco and rolling it with sororoca leaves12 on her thigh. […]. Nanaio then passed the cigar to Kui, who slotted it into the fork-shaped holder. He lit the cigar and blew the smoke over Thunder’s lake. Thunder saw that Kui and Nanaio were managing to perform their task. (Jesus, Jesus, and Aguiar 2018, p. 62, our translation)

15The narrative proceeds to describe how the first Tariano ancestors appeared in the waters of the lake. After a long journey along the course of the rivers, largely coinciding with the trajectory taken by the canoe-snake of the Tukano peoples, they then cross over to the earth through a hole in the rock slabs of the Hipana falls on the upper Aiari river. This event is narrated in all the origin myths of the Arawak peoples of the Upper Rio Negro. In a version told by the Kamewa clan, the association between tobacco and the female breast is even more direct. The episode occurs in a later phase of the narrative in which the problem is defining an order of seniority between the ancestors of the first clans to emerge from Hipana. This centers on a dispute for primogenital position among the siblings who will subsequently form the Tariano clans. The solution is reached through a ceremonial dialogue held on Arumã island, a waypoint on the Tariano journey from the Aiari river to the Uaupés. The dialogue is between Kameda and Kurubi. This is how the events unfold:

On this island, Kameda and Kurubi began to converse. A row broke out between the two because Kurubi had emerged first and Kameda fourth. Kurubi said: “If you want to be in the first generation, fetch your cigar, bring it here and we’ll talk.” So Kameda left, walked to the kitchen and stood staring like a woman. Because of this, some men have lost any memory of their history. There in the kitchen was his sister, Naniô. She asked him: “Brother, what do you need?” “Sister, I need tobacco to be able to talk with Kurubi.” That’s when the first tobacco began to appear, inside this house on Arumã island. So, the woman squeezed her right breast and a cigar started to emerge. From the bone of her right leg she extracted a fork to hold the cigar and handed everything to her brother. This tobacco was for Kameda. From her left leg she also removed a fork for Kurubi. And so the men began to talk. “If you want to be the first generation, you can start to speak,” Kurubi said. Kameda then started to tell the entire history from the Old Testament [sic] to the New Testament and Arumã island. When he’d finished, Kurubi said: “Okay, you are going to be the first generation then and I shall be the second.” (narrated in Portuguese by a Tariano interlocutor, Raimundo Oliveira, to Geraldo Andrello, Iauaretê, 2003)

16In the origin myths discussed so far, coca and tobacco appear at distinct moments of the narratives. The fragments taken from the Barasana myths describe in considerable detail how these substances were bequeathed to humanity in the form of cultivated plants, while the Tariano myths point to their presence at decisive moments of these histories of transformation, showing that their effects are equivalent to the alimentary-reproductive capacities of the heroine’s body. In this case—which explicitly associates tobacco with breastmilk: the tobacco tempered with the milk or itself expelled from a sister’s breast—the dispute between brothers over primogeniture status is resolved in favor of the one who receives tobacco from his sister. Like the coca in the Tukano myth cited above, the tobacco here stimulates speech, allowing a rival to be supplanted via a formal/ceremonial dialogue. In other words, while the cigar acted like a remedy for one of the brothers, it acted like a poison for the other, again revealing the pharmakon quality of these substances. Mode of acquisition and mode of use seem to converge, therefore, in all the cases we have cited so far, determining the potentially generative or degenerative effects of the same substance. These associations also highlight the primary role performed by gender differentiation in conceptualizing the conditions of possibility for the emergence of humankind on the Rio Negro. We can also observe the close association between pharmacological substances and female bodies announced in our introduction. This association is revealed more explicitly still in a set of Tukano and Desana myths on the genesis of paricá (yopo) and caapi (ayahuasca) that we shall discuss shortly.

17First, though, we turn to a small passage from an account provided by the Baniwa—like the Tariano, an Arawak-speaking group—which lends further support to our suggestion. The passage refers to paricá and is taken from Wright (2009, p. 139):

… the brownish-red snuff was actually the menstrual blood of Dzuliferi’s daughter, and Nhiãperikuli took it from her vagina while she slept. Dzuliferi reprehended his brother for this act, as did all the primal shamans who collectively went away to live in the sky-world. It was Nhiãperikuli’s improper relation to a menstruating woman that produced the separation between him and his brother-shamans. But the association of pariká with menstrual blood has a counterpart in the way shamans refer to it today as “the blood, the first menstrual blood of Kuwai” …

18In this excerpt, we find the demiurge Nhiãperikuli—the supposed father of Kuwai, the name by which Jurupari is known among the Baniwa—extracting the menstrual blood (actually the paricá snuff) associated with the sacred flutes from his niece’s vagina, an act that also triggers a conflict between brothers. This association is reiterated in another Baniwa myth about the genesis of paricá (Cornelio and Wright 1999, p. 181), which relates how the first paricá was actually the blood of Kuwai, owner of the flutes and trumpets. In this narrative, a direct analogy is made between the two substances using a chromatic visual code: “it is through the inhalation of this powder, red like blood, that shamans traverse the time separating our world, hekoapi, from the other world, apakoa hekoapi” (see ibid., p. 181, note 164, our emphasis).

19When it comes to the Tukano and Desana myths, we can observe two divergences from the Baniwa schema. First, paricá originates from the blood of the umbilical cord of Jurupari, whose gestation—and this is the second point—was engendered by the mixture of coca and tobacco smoke. In other words, when processed within the female body, the substances whose attributes we examined earlier give rise to the other two pharmaka: paricá and caapi. Based on the evidence presented so far and in what follows, the analogy that the female body itself acts like the pharmaka appears consistent.

20Turning first to the Desana narrative (Galvão and Galvão 2004), we see the origin of paricá shift from menstrual blood to the umbilical cord blood of a new-born baby, here Jurupari himself, who gave rise to the wind instruments—flutes and trumpets—used in the male initiation rituals, prohibited to women, and around which the entire debate concerning sexual antagonism revolves. At the beginning of time there were three beings: the Grandfather of the Universe, Thunder, and his daughter, also known as Grandmother of the Universe. They were accompanied by Baaribo, the “owner of alimentation,” whose body already contained all the manioc plants to be cultivated by women in the future. According to the Desana narrators, Baaribo generated a sequence of brothers by impregnating the Grandmother of the Universe, although they did not have sexual relations. As women did not yet possess a vagina, he opened one between her legs using his gold-laminated ear decoration. Next he inserted the bone from his thigh so as to prepare her womb. He then blew tobacco smoke mixed with coca powder through this orifice and made her pregnant. The first of the series of brothers born from her was Jurupari: “Baaribo then cut the umbilical cord. This transformed into a box of white quartz. Blood seeped out, which he collected with a gourd, dried in the sun and stored inside the stone box. When dry, this blood became ye baari wmõ (people-eating jaguar paricá…)” (ibid., p. 29-30). This first son of the Grandmother of the Universe is given the names Miriá Porã Masú (Owner of the Sacred Flutes) and Gurumuye (Owner of Paricá). By associating the names of the sacred flutes and trumpets and the paricá with the same person, the narrators once again link the genesis of the Jurupari instruments with paricá.

21This first paricá identified by the Desana, known as “jaguar paricá,” is considered the most potent. Galvão and Galvão (2004) report that this paricá is no longer consumed today since nobody is strong enough to tolerate the fasting needed for its ingestion. If the fast is broken, terrible effects are produced on the body: “Blood seeps from the eyes, navel, ears, his entire body. His teeth crumble, his eyes fall out of their sockets” (ibid., p. 397).

22We highlight this danger since it underlines paricá’s ambivalent quality and its poisonous strength. Fasting is necessary to prepare the body so that the paricá functions as a remedy not a poison. Under the substance’s effect, the shaman sees “inside the person’s body, just like an x-ray,” and can identify the agent causing the disease, a point of convergence with the Baniwa narrative cited above, which already highlighted the potentialization of vision enabled by paricá.

  • 13 TN: Bothrops jararaca, a highly venomous pit viper.

23Bodily preparation through strict alimentary and sexual abstinence thus ensures that the effects produced by paricá do not poison the body. According to Galvão and Galvão (2004, p. 395), in fact, the poisonous potential of paricá made it especially suitable for use against enemies: the first generations used it to hurl fever epidemics at rival groups. Their mythic ancestors also taught them how to fabricate the body of a jararaca viper13 and, by ingesting paricá, enter the body of this snake to attack their enemies. The effect of paricá as a medicine or as a poison thus depends as much on how the substance is made and handled as on the body through which it will act.

24Additionally, Galvão and Galvão (2004, p. 401) recount that the umbilical blood from the birth of Miriá Porã engendered another type of paricá called paricá carajuru, which can be used to cure. A third type of paricá was first made by Baaribo from the umbilical blood of the Grandmother of the Universe’s second son, Abe. This is known as sun blood paricá and is utilized to open the eyes of the jaguar (ibid., p. 33). “It is a paricá that illuminates the world for the shaman to travel and see at night” (ibid., p. 400). Finally, the narrators list other paricás that are derivations of these three paricás manufactured from the umbilical blood of the sons of the Grandmother of the Universe. As derivations, they are less potent. These are ash paricá or dirt paricá, Thunder daughter’s dirt paricá, flower paricá, rain paricá, bark paricá, and sakaka paricá (ibid., p. 400-401). Whatever its variety, though, paricá—unlike coca and tobacco, which enhance and amplify speech—seems to be unequivocally associated with the power to “see”: to see the world in its different planes and to see the affections of the body in its different materializations. In sum, paricá is the substance par excellence of those shamans who take on the task of translating the different forms of expression of the world and the distinct states of the person (Carneiro da Cunha 1998).

25We turn now, finally, to caapi (ayahuasca), whose genesis is the most directly connected to the Jurupari sacred flutes and trumpets. Here again, tobacco and coca figure as inseminating substances. In these new episodes, we encounter an equation between speech and sight in a narrative that reflects, therefore, on a synesthetic co-participation of the senses of hearing and vision in the genesis of humankind itself (Hugh-Jones S. 2017).

  • 14 We have seen that these instruments are called Miriá Porã in Desana and Kwai in Baniwa. In the Yuh (...)
  • 15 TN: Socratea exorrhiza, also called the walking palm, or paxiúba in Brazilian Portuguese.
  • 16 For a deeper and more detailed analysis of the pharmacological power of the Jurupari instruments, (...)

26First, we emphasize that the mythic cycle recounting the geneses of the Jurupari wind instruments—flutes and trumpets—is more widespread than the paricá genesis cycle, and is found throughout almost the entire area of the Upper Rio Negro social network.14 We cannot therefore do justice to the richness of this set of versions. Our focus here is on the ambivalent pharmacological value of Jurupari, recognizing that the engendering of the latter is simultaneously associated with a coca-filled gourd, a series of diseases, and, simultaneously, a series of remedies (Wright 2015; Hill 1993; Maia 2009; Lolli 2010; Ramos 2018). This ambivalence is also noted in many other versions—found among the Baniwa, Desana, Tukano, Barasana, and other peoples—to the point that S. Hugh-Jones defines Jurupari as a person who encompasses “life-giving/life-destroying powers, persons and substances—shamans and sorcerers; food and poison” (2017, p. 50). It is also important to note that Jurupari is initially engendered in the form of a person. Only when he is burnt on a bonfire does he transform into the set of flutes and trumpets. From his ashes sprout not just the cashapona palm trees15 from which the instruments are made, but also a series of poisonous plants, as the Baniwa recount (Wright 2009). However, it is not only this aspect that indicates the ambivalence of the pharmakon. Jurupari’s pharmacological power also derives from the sounds he produces. Whether these sounds emerge from the orifices of his own body or from the bodies of the flutes and trumpets, they can cure a body and make it grow, but also make a body sick and even destroy it.16 Here, though, we concentrate on the attributes of Jurupari’s twin brother, the boy caapi.

27The episode we describe below was collected among Tukano interlocutors who recount what transpired during the two most important stopovers of the canoe-snake, the mythic boat that carried the ancestors of the Tukano-speaking peoples along the Amazon, Rio Negro, and Uaupés as far as the Ipanoré waterfall, where they finally emerged as human beings.

  • 17 In the following paragraphs we reproduce arguments already explored in Andrello and Vianna (2022).

28The events can be summarized as follows.17 Over most of the journey, humankind grew by accompanying the fish spawnings, dancing in the subaquatic rituals of the fish, and making use of the piscine ceremonial songs and instruments to promote their own growth. Although this humankind initially spoke the same language, at a certain point, due to their use of caapi, they began to speak various languages. As a result, they transformed from being brothers to treating each other as brothers-in-law. Here we encounter the mythic correspondent to what the ethnographic literature has identified as the most characteristic trait of the peoples of the Uaupés: linguistic exogamy (Sorensen 1967; Jackson 1983). The diversification of the languages appears, therefore, as a mark of affinity. In Temendavi, on the Middle Rio Negro, the first house of the brothers-in-law, the travelers and the fish maintain an affinal relationship, while, in a second house upriver, on the Uaupés itself, affinity comes to substitute definitively for the sibling relationship previously existing between the crew of the canoe-snake. The humans followed the fish, visiting their houses, but without establishing matrimonial alliances with them (marriages with animals occur in the primal times of the myths) since their species—conceived as younger and older brothers—were reproduced internally within their respective groups without sexual intercourse. After leaving the first house, the canoe-snake continued its journey, taking only those who would transform into humans, those who thenceforth began to call themselves pamuri-mahsã, the transformation people. They left behind the waí-mahsã, the fish-people, on the Middle Rio Negro (Fernandez and Fernandez 1996). In the second house, now very close to their passage to the human condition, affinity marks the intra-human sphere in which the exchange of sisters and sexual intercourse becomes the means for them to continue to grow and reproduce. Notably, the diversification of languages also occurs in this second house, projecting the previous interspecific affinity to the interior of the human sphere as effective affinity.

29In both houses, the travelers encounter a gourd filled with coca. Its contents were presumably consumed by the ancestors of humankind, providing them with eternal youth through a change of skin in old age. The ancestors of humankind were supposed to taste the coca too, a substance that would guarantee them eternal youth through the ability to change skin when they became old. But since there were venomous insects on the rim of the gourd, the male ancestors hesitated and their two sisters tasted the contents of the gourd instead, preempting the men. The sisters immediately became pregnant. In other words, coca here functions like semen (Lana and Lana 1995; Maia and Maia 2004), an equivalence that also evokes the episode from the Barasana myth of Yeba cited earlier. In this case too, male participation involves the brothers opening the first female vagina. This act is performed using either the tip of their forked cigar holder or their laminated ear decorations, as in the Desana narrative recounting the origin of paricá and also the Tariano narrative of the first birth.

  • 18 TN: Iachnosiphon polyphyllus.

30The women give birth to Jurupari and the boy caapi, either condensed into the same person, or as twin brothers of the same woman, or as children born of the two sisters. In this version, Jurupari is taken soon after birth to a celestial house where his mother can no longer see him; she can only hear him cry, which is like the sound of a flute (Maia and Maia 2004). With the birth of the second child, caapi is engendered. It was on this occasion, under the spell of the trance caused by caapi, that intra-human differentiation occurred. As we shall see, these ancestral brothers (not the new twin brothers Jurupari and caapi) began to speak different languages. It is the trance provoked by the blood of childbirth, especially the blood contained in the umbilical cord, which causes the ancestors to see a series of images that correspond to the designs of the arumã18 mats woven to receive the baby. The scene is described as one of total confusion: the ancestors could no longer understand each other since each had acquired their own “speech,” u’ukunsehé—as the narratives tell us, a condition appropriate to the relationship between brothers-in-law. Finally, the brothers share the parts of the child’s body among themselves, each acquiring a variety of caapi with a specific intensity and a variable power to produce visions. These caapi-induced visions are then reduplicated in a synesthetic multiplicity of sounds, languages, and varieties of speech (Hugh-Jones S. 2017). Significantly, one of the Desana versions specifies that caapi originated from the boy’s head and members, while his trunk—acquiring the form of a penis—shoots into the sky: this is Jurupari, who will later come back down to earth to initiate the children of humankind (see Fernandez and Fernandez 1996).

31In one of the Baniwa versions, Jurupari, soon after birth, is passed through a sieve—commonly used to strain grated manioc—by his mother, which enables her to separate the child from the blood spilled during birth. As the boy grows, the collected and decanted blood produces a powerful poison, capable of causing the death of both men and women, by bleeding in childbirth for the latter (Journet 1995, p. 270). In the Tukano accounts, though, Jurupari is born from the later pregnancy, already mentioned in the cycle of the canoe-snake, through the ipadu that will enable the change of skin and the eternal youth of the men. However, comparison with the Baniwa narrative shows that caapi, Jurupari’s twin, can be conceived as a low-intensity poison. This is a poison which, administered in just the right amount, so to speak, will give rise to a specific language, or a distinctive speaking power, characteristic of groups that turned from brothers to brothers-in-law.

32This poisonous quality of caapi will appear once more, and in even more explicit form, in the Yuhup enchantments, which we examine in the next section.

Poisoned remedies

  • 19 The material analyzed here corresponds to the enchantments recorded among Yuhupdeh groups by Lolli (...)
  • 20 Called kój, although it was not possible to identify scientifically the exact species.

33We turn now to excerpts from Yuhupdeh verbal formulas in which poisons appear prominently.19 We begin with the enchantment for an aching arm (Lolli 2010, p. 161-163). At a certain point in his exegesis of his enchantment, one Yuhupdeh healer revealed that the pain in the patient’s arm increased with the action of a snake-person called Éd sáp, whose poisons heat the arm and cause pain. This poison is made from a mixture of the venom of fire ants, scorpions, spiders, and fire caterpillars.20 This pain is also exacerbated by the action of other poisons. Such is the case of the venoms of wasps, black bees, and the päj, taw, boh, and wääh bees. These insects produce their venoms from the flowers on which they feed. The poison from shavings of vines—typically used to fish (timbó) and hunt (curare)—and the poison from manioc roots also cause the arm pain to increase. According to Justino, an old Yuhup specialist who described this enchantment, all these poisons contain pepper, which makes the arm sting. Here we can clearly discern the intimate relationship between poison and pepper, which are linked here by their capacity to sting and induce burning heat. Consequently, the healer, when performing the enchantment, must cool this poison-pepper fire. He extinguishes the fire of Éd sáp’s poison, the venom of the bees and the fire cooking the vine shavings. He calls all these poison-peppers “fruit juice” to sweeten them and thus reduce their stinging heat.

  • 21 A kind of cockroach, though the exact species was impossible to identify.

34In an enchantment used to treat toothache and jararaca snake bites, we also find a poison with a multiple composition and its association with people. The principal agent causing toothache is Taɨg sáp, a spiritual being, who makes a poison from various species of pepper—didit kow, boyo puh kow, út kow, kirëh kow—which is smeared on the patient’s teeth. Jararaca venom is made from a mixture of pepper, toad venom, and the venom of pói.21 Jararaca (Dahah) also uses the venom of bats and owls, which is why the pain worsens at night. Jararaca poison is very strong and causes considerable thirst owing to the fact that when the snake was a person, it drank a lot of caapi. Exegesis of the enchantment for the jararaca bite also highlights another aspect of the multiplicity of the composition of the poison. According to Pedro, an another old Yuhup specialist who described this enchantment, the potency of jararaca venom is linked to the place where it lives. The venom of the swidden jararaca, for example, is increased by the strength (pë’) of sand, clay, manioc, and leaves, while the venom of the river jararaca is boosted by the strength (pë’) of the beach sand and leaves in the river. Among other actions, as we mentioned earlier, the healer must cool down the heat of these poison-peppers and call them “fruit juice” to sweeten the poisons and thereby weaken their effects. In the enchantment for toothache, the healer makes—in his thought—a broth of timbó vine poison mixed with caapi and offers it to Taɨg sáp, who dies on drinking it since this concoction is poison to him. This procedure is revealing since it clearly evinces the pharmacological property of caapi. It also adds further consistency to our proposal to explore these effects as pharmaka.

35Whether a pharmakon acts as a poison or a remedy depends not only on how it is used but also, and above all, on the body in which it will act. This highlights the need for us to pay attention to the effects produced by pharmakon substances and consequently to “what is capable of affecting our body, what is capable of destroying it.” Along these lines, a “poison is something which diminishes a body’s power to act and a remedy is something which increases its power to act” (Lolli 2013). In this sense, something which is a remedy from one perspective may be a poison from another. In other words, what acts as a remedy for one body can act as a poison for another body—so while the timbó and caapi broth has a poisonous effect on Taɨg sáp, diminishing his strength to act, it has a remedial effect for someone with toothache precisely for this reason.

36Pharmaka should thus be treated in relational terms—as an encounter between bodies—and not as substances per se. The heterogeneity of the composition of poisons reinforces this point insofar as the idea of a pure (universal) poison is effectively inconceivable. This impedes any categorization based on a biological taxonomy of species, poisons, and venoms—something that becomes even more evident when we recall the Yuhup specialist Pedro’s comment about the jararaca viper increasing the potency of the poisons distributed in its Umwelt. Here the poisons traverse specific and generic bodies, combining and increasing their potency, their power of life and death—in sum, their pharmacological qualities. To explore this ambivalence a little further, we can return to the point where the enchantment associates poisons and peppers, and both with caapi.

37As we mentioned, the connection between poison and pepper involves heat and, when associated, their respective potencies for action are augmented. Not only poison and pepper possess this heat-fire (të́g-hö́n). In the case of Taɨg sáp, the heat is contained not just in his pepper-poisons but also in the adornments that he possesses (Lolli 2010, p. 171-172). In the case of the enchantment for flu, the healer cools and extinguishes the fire of a series of manufactured objects belonging to the outside world. These objects include clothing, hammocks, beans, coffee, salt, pans, engines, writing material, outboard motors, generators, machete handle wire, aviator helmets, steel hats, sewing machine spools, and so on (ibid., p. 164-165). In the enchantment for childbirth, the healer cools the fire of the vine used to bind the house beams, since the heat of the vine possesses caapi, which stings the new-born child’s eyes—once again evoking the visions produced by the birth of the caapi boy. In the enchantment for the new-born’s first bath, the healer cools the fire of the river since the river also contains caapi and pepper. We could continue to cite other enchantments that highlight these sources of heats as causes of disease and the actions of cooling and extinguishing performed by the healer, but the above examples are sufficient for us to obtain an idea of the varied manifestations of this fire-heat.

  • 22 A total of 14 enchantments were documented; these are analyzed in depth in Lolli (2010).

38Analyzing the documented enchantments as a whole,22 it can be observed that the heat of fire is associated with the appearance of various beings in the world, with processes of food preparation, and with the manufactured objects that these beings produce—beings whose life forces are both constituted and expressed by this fire. Buchillet (1988, p. 34), referring to the work of C. Hugh-Jones, calls attention to the fact that:

Through the ingestion of a food, the individual consumes not only the attributes and characteristics of the substance (which transform into “weapons” and attack the insides of the individual’s body), but also all the processes (and materials used, as well as the form of the fabrication) involved in its acquisition and culinary preparation, incorporating too the mythological associations to which the food in question refers. (Hugh-Jones C. 1979)

39This leads us to think of fire-and-heat as a pharmakon too since although its activation in excess causes sickness and even death, there is also apparently no life without it. The forces of life thus imply death. Whether their effect engenders life or death is something that can only be known through the context of their actions and the affections produced in a determined body (or bodies). In the Yuhupdeh case, one of the notions central to understanding these life forces is dääw-wág, which can be translated as “life of the universe,” where dääw means to be alive, possess life, and wág means universe, cosmos. Dääw-wág can be understood as the force that engenders life in general and is intimately connected to another notion, hãg-wäg, more commonly translated as soul, heart, vital principle, which itself can be understood as an individuation of the däaw-wág force. This is because the hãg-wäg force is always expressed through a personal name that forms part of the stock of names belonging to a specific group. When someone from a determined group is born, a shaman executes a naming enchantment through which he travels, via thought, to the group’s place of origin to take the name hãg-wäg kept there and take it back to insert in the baby’s body, where it will grow as the person grows or diminish when he or she sickens or ages. In the Tukano language, the equivalent to the Yuhupdeh term hãg-wäg is erehi-porã, literally “son of breath,” also translated as soul or heart and associated with the person during the naming ceremony. For Tukano, this life force (kahtisehé) manifests itself in speech, more specifically in the blown or intoned speech of enchantments, u’ukunsehé, that quality acquired by Tukano ancestors under the effect of caapi.

40We highlight these points to show that a discussion about pharmakon on the Upper Rio Negro cannot be limited to the materiality of substances: it must also take into consideration the materiality of discourse. Words here also act as poison or cure. This provides further support to our decision to approach the problem from the perspective of the pharmakon, as proposed by Derrida, since in the latter case too the notion also applies to speech. This enables us to affirm the impossibility of separating either poisons and poisonous breaths from remedies and enchantments, or material substances (coca, tobacco, caapi, paricá, female blood) from immaterial substances (verbal formulas, the sounds of the Jurupari instruments).

41The ambivalence of these material and immaterial life forces is emblematically revealed by exploring the Yuhupdeh notion of pë’—a sickness and vital force at the same time. This is the purpose of our third and final section.

Pharmaka and diseases

42To discuss the association between the pharmaka and diseases, we start with the notion of disease, based on its designation in the Yuhup language, pë’ (Silva and Silva 2012), and examine its semantic field in association both with other Yuhup terms and with Portuguese words utilized by our indigenous interlocutors. It should be emphasized that the work of our interlocutors in translating into Portuguese is embedded in our effort to understand the question of disease from their perspective. From a methodological point of view, this translation—which is two-way but not symmetric, as Wagner (2010) points out—is approached through the notions of controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) and pragmatic concordance (Almeida 2013), as we announced in the introduction. It is necessary, therefore, to avoid simply assuming that when our interlocutors use the notion of disease—or medicine or poison—they mean exactly the same thing that we understand. In other words, when we reach an agreement, for instance, on the use of the word disease, this does not signify that we—ourselves and our interlocutors—are attributing the same meaning to the word but that we are disposed to participate in a pragmatic concordance between partially shared worlds (ibid.). In this sense, rather than a point of arrival, concordance is the moment that enables a zone of mutual understanding, but also a space in which differences become more visible. Let us explore this point further.

  • 23 Etymology taken from the Houaiss dictionary of Portuguese, also found in the English term “dolorou (...)

43In the case of the word pë’, the most common translations made by Yuhupdeh interlocutors into Portuguese were: doença (illness/sickness/disease) or estar doente (being ill/sick); dor (pain) or estar doendo (feeling pain); or forte (strong) or estar forte (being strong). In relation to the first two meanings—disease/sickness and pain—we have little problem creating a mutual zone of pragmatic concordance between the semantic fields of the words pë’ and doença (disease) since the etymology of the word doença traces back to the Latin word dolentia,23 an abstract noun derived from the neuter plural participle of doleo, signifying “that which hurts.” However, the third meaning creates a distance between the semantic fields of the words pë’ and disease/sickness: this reveals other associations and contexts in which the word pë’ is used and which do not correspond to a situation in which someone is sick and/or in pain.

44This is the case of the use of the word pë’ in the sense of strong or being strong, which is extremely common in festivals where caxiri is consumed. When this fermented manioc drink has a high alcoholic content, the Yuhupdeh call it ag pë´a´ (strong caxiri). This means that the drink will make people very drunk. Another common use is in relation to pepper: when this is very hot, people say kow pë’ ah (the pepper is strong). Finally, another use is associated with poison: when this is very strong, the expression employed is níw´ pë´ mih nɨgi. The semantic field of translation needs to be expanded, therefore, beyond the meaning of disease and pain to examine what kind of strength is implied by the word pë’. We can begin with the fact that the meaning of strength in Yuhup is not limited to the word pë’, but is also linked to two other words: pɨm and tawak. This indicates that pë’ contains a specific idea of strength whose meaning can be discerned by exploring the associations with caxiri, pepper, and poison. In all these cases, the overlapping of the notion pë’ refers to the power of intoxication possessed by these substances. The stronger the caxiri, pepper, and poison, the greater the potential for intoxication and action. Hence the idea of strength contained in pë’ is connected to the effects of a substance on a determined body. The notion of effect thus proves highly productive in terms of understanding the meanings of the word pë’ and describing the complexity of the situations of disease. In other works, Lolli (2010, 2013) has shown the pertinence and yield of the use of the notion of effect. Here we wish to return to the discussion and explore the idea through the notion of pharmakon substances and their expressions as remedy and poison.

  • 24 TN: An indigenous-derived term for vine-based arrow tip poisons, used throughout Amazonia.
  • 25 TN: A lingua franca spoken in the Amazon region, based on Nheengatu (a Tupi-Guarani language).

45The notions of remedy and poison can be found in the Yuhup language and prove to be intricately connected. The Yuhup word most commonly translated as remedy/medicine (Portuguese: remédio) is yõh. As a verb, the word means to “apply a remedy.” It is used to refer not only to traditional remedies but also to white people’s medicines. Additionally, it is used in the sense of poison, when, for instance, someone refers to applying venom to the tips of arrows. Although poison can be translated as yõh, there is another word in Yuhup more generally used to refer to the noun veneno (poison/venom) in Portuguese, namely níw’. More specifically, this term designates the hunting poison made from various kinds of vines and which is translated regionally as curare.24 The generic use of níw’ also indicates that the term does not just refer to a specific substance but is linked to the act of poisoning someone, as exemplified in the following phrase: ãh yuhup yap nuh níw’ no’ ni böí hë pari (they gave poison to my relative and he almost died). In the Tukano language, for its part, the generic word for remedy is bará (Barreto 2018; Ramirez 1997), which would be equivalent to the term puçanga in Língua Geral,25 that is, any substance used to attract, seduce, or even cause harm. In the latter case, the term bará may be followed by a much more specific Tukano term, one which denotes poison properly speaking: nimá. Thus Bará-nimá is a very specific substance with an unequivocally lethal power.

  • 26 In the anthropological literature, these notions and malevolent actions are interpreted in terms o (...)
  • 27 This reputation does not apply just to the individual concerned but may extend to an entire collec (...)

46In our view, these examples indicate an explicit etymological link between remedy and poison, pointing to a connection related to the complex of sickness and cure. Most diseases and deaths on the Upper Rio Negro are considered to have some relation to poison. Such diseases are generally provoked by malevolent actions more commonly called sopro (breath/blowing) and/or estrago (ruin/spoiling), which in this sense are a counterpart to the benevolent actions of the enchantments. The most common translation provided by Yuhupdeh interlocutors for döh were these two terms, sopro and estrago.26 Just as someone may be renowned as a healer, they may also have the reputation of being a blower of poisons.27 The same term appears in the Tukano language: doha are the breaths for spoiling and harming, while basesehé are the breaths for curing. According to Buchillet (1988), the former is stored in the belly of the shaman, precisely so that they do not impregnate his thought, while the latter are stored in his brain (kaí).

47Although not a topic discussed widely in public, in diverse situations we heard an interlocutor jokingly or seriously refer to someone else as a poisoner and thus as a dangerous person. As these accusations can and do result in conflicts, here we withhold the names of the people involved but we cite three ethnographic moments to exemplify these situations. The first case refers to the obtaining of a poisonous plant substance by a Tariano man from the Baniwa of the Aiari river to the north. The other two cases again come from the Yuhupdeh and show how the toxic power of poisons can be contained both in specific plants and in the body of a shaman.

  • 28 TN: Astrocaryum aculeatum.

48The first moment was a conversation with a Tariano man living in Iauaretê. He told the history of another, older Tariano acquaintance in Iauaretê who had traveled as far as the headwaters of the Aiari river to obtain poison, since the Baniwa of this region are renowned for making very strong poisons. The old man brought the poison inside a tucumã palm nut,28 which he kept tightly sealed. As the Tariano interlocutor remarked, merely leaving the nut close to someone is sufficient for the person to become poisoned by breathing in the powder/smoke it exhales. The old man became infamous after he entered the Iauareté boarding school to poison the children and was caught when he accidentally fell from the window. Two or three children eventually died. The son of this old man often says when he is drunk: “Today, nobody is afraid of me but my father was a poisoner.” In this case, it was not a shaman but an ordinary man who resorted to an unusual expedient to obtain a poisonous material substance, in a situation in which several groups, from various parts of the Uaupés river, were increasingly concentrated around a Salesian religious mission.

49The second ethnographic moment took place in a typical dabucuri—a food festival exchange—involving different Yuhupdeh groups. At a certain point, one of the interlocutors remarked that he had visited a neighboring community where he had been asked to perform a curing session. He boasted that he was an expert curer, which was why they had summoned him. This roused the envy of another local healer, who accused him of being a poison blower. He claimed that the real poisoner was his accuser and that he himself only ever performed cures. When asked how the poison blower causes harm, the interlocutor explained that his poisonous breath transforms things into poison, but immediately added that he himself did not know how to accomplish this transformation. Finally, he commented that the poison blower not only loves pepper but is also highly resistant to it, since this increases the power of his poison.

50The third ethnographic moment took place soon after the collective morning meal. Another Yuhup healer remarked that he had already been bitten five times by jararaca snakes without serious consequences. Someone who was by our side said that he was very poisonous, which explained why the jararaca venom had no effect on him. The healer smiled with an air of pride.

  • 29 Accounts of fights at festivals can be found in numerous works, a full list of which would be impo (...)

51Accusations and histories of poisonous breath are recounted in the majority of the ethnographies produced in the Upper Rio Negro region. Most estragos or accusations occur in situations involving conflict and tension between groups. One of the moments when these conflicts erupt is during the dabucuri festival,29 not just in the overt form of fights, but also in covert form when the hosts blow poison on their guests or offer them poisoned caxiri, coca, or tobacco. Although stories of accusations and the use of poisons by one group against another are widespread, it is difficult to explore their nuances since the topic is sensitive and shrouded in secrecy, especially when it comes to knowledge of the poisonous powers of the substances involved. Nevertheless, the above three examples reiterate the conclusion we reached in the previous section, namely that the powers of breathed speech also figure as pharmaka, precisely because their force produces effects like those of poisonous material substances. In their shared condition as pharmaka, the use of both presupposes care and knowledge regarding how to combine them properly.

52The Desana anthropologist Jaime Diakara also discusses the transformation relationship between pharmaka and words, more specifically, between caapi and speech. Under the effects of caapi, a vision appears “in the form of speech, a language in specific colours and shapes”; an image that provides “readings about the emergence of the universe and all its components, the earth and the rivers” (Diakara 2019, p. 34-35). In sum, it constitutes a device through which caapi induces the metamorphosis of the visual color palette and graphic patterns into the sounds of words, and in so doing renders the histories of the emergence of the universe visually intelligible and verbally influential.

Epilogue

53We took as our starting point the so-called “soul-foods”—tobacco, coca, caapi, and paricá—and were then led directly to female blood—vaginal blood or blood from the umbilical cord—passing through the Jurupari instruments, the verbal formulas for cures and protection, and finally arriving at the indigenous discourses on disease, remedies, and poisons. Along this journey, pursuing our pharmacological perspective, we were obliged to widen the initial set of pharmaka beyond the “spirit-food” substances and problematize the vegetal and alimentary category that unites them. Although these substances undeniably germinate and grow as plants on the terrestrial plane and need to be tended and later processed to be transformed into a form consumable by human bodies—and in this they resemble foods—the Rio Negro complex also emphasizes that these substances appear as fundamental and ambivalent ingredients in the generation of life through a female body, whether tobacco and coca as ingredients that act in the fertilization of the new-born, or paricá and caapi as substances-persons engendered in this birth.

54From a naturalist point of view, the inclusion of female blood—menstrual and/or umbilical—complicates the set of elements insofar as the distinction between natural and artificial substances loses its heuristic value. As revealed by the mythic episode of the first vagina being cut in the female body, menstrual blood is itself a made substance that, in turn, becomes a fundamental ingredient in the fabrication of paricá and caapi. We showed that these substances are also connected by their ambivalent effects of vital generation and degeneration. This also prompted us to include the Jurupari instruments in the set of phamarka and explore the topic without applying any distinction between material and immaterial substances that would place coca, tobacco, caapi, paricá, and female blood on one side and the sound of Jurupari instruments, verbal formulas, and speech on the other.

55The notion of the pharmakon allowed us to combine these elements in the same set and explore them through their analogies and ambivalences vis-à-vis the forces of life and death. This led us to avoid separating poisons and death from remedies and life—in large part because some mythic episodes on the origins of poisons and cures do not seem to make any such separation. One of the most emblematic episodes in this sense is perhaps the one in which venomous insects are found on the rim of a gourd filled with coca. Here we can recall that the insects consumed coca in order to change skin and thereby rejuvenate themselves. Moreover, it is through contact with this coca gourd that a woman first becomes pregnant and gives birth to a new generation. Here poisons—just as much as remedies—are shown to be a constituent part of the generative and regenerative forces of bodies, thus revealing their intrinsic relational value. No pure poisons exist. They are pharmaka whose values as poison or remedy are linked to specific bodies, recognizing that what is a poison for one body may be a remedy for another. In the aforementioned episode, the pharmacological force of these venomous insects resides in the coca-filled gourd and is renewed with each change of skin. The pharmacological force of humans is also contained in the gourd. However, it is not renewed through a change of skin but through the act of giving birth to a new generation via the female body—the primordial brothers became brothers-in-law, with different languages, reproducing through their mutual exchange of sisters. Human immortality differs from the immortality of stinging insects.

56Finally, exploring the ambivalence of the pharmakon also led us to another two notions central to understanding the generative forces of bodies: the ideas of fire-heat and the pë’ force. These forces contain the power to generate life when activated in moderation and sickness and death when activated in excess. While the fire-heat force appears to be inherent to all body-engendering processes, pë’ manifests as an individuation of this more general force insofar as it is expressed through the power of affectation of a pharmakon on a determined body. In this sense, the pë’ force is the force of all pharmaka, which, when activated with due care, provides the condition for generating and augmenting the life force, yet, if activated with anger and envy, leads to its diminishment and sickness.

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Notes

1 Although some areas of controversy exist, this diversity is generally organized around three large linguistic sets: Arawak, Eastern Tukano, and Naduhup, previously called Maku. On the Brazilian side, the most diverse set is composed of the Eastern Tukano groups, currently concentrated mostly on the Uaupés and Tiquié rivers, who differentiate themselves as the Cubeo, Desana, Tukano, Miriti-Tapuia, Tuyuka, Wanano, Bará, Arapasso, Karapanã, Pira-Tapuia, Siriano, and Makuna. The Arawak set is formed by the Baniwa, Warekena, Tariano, Kuripako, and Baré groups, who predominantly occupy the Rio Negro and the Içana and Xié rivers. Finally, the Naduhup set is composed of the following groups: Nadöb, who occupy the Middle Rio Negro; Dow, who live on the Rio Negro in areas very close to the urban center of the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira; and the Yuhupdeh and the Hupd’äh, who live along the course of the Tiquié river.

2 Goldman 1963, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, Reid 1979, Bidou 1983, Jackson 1983, Hugh-Jones C. 1979, Hugh-Jones S. 1979, Silverwood-Cope 1990, Buchillet 1983, Hill 1993, Chernela 1996, Wright 1998, Århem 1998, Maia 2009, Lolli 2010, Cayón 2013, Ramos 2018.

3 An aspect also noted in other regions of the Americas, especially in relation to tobacco (Wilbert 1987). To cite just a few of these regions, we find tobacco as a spirit food among the Witoto (Echeverri 2015), the Kanamari (Costa 2007), and the Yawalapíti (Viveiros de Castro 2002).

4 S. Hugh-Jones also highlights the close relationship between female bodies and poison when he mentions that the ancestral woman Romi Kumu contains “scorpions and biting ants in her vagina” (2021, p. 7).

5 For analyses of the use and relationship between coca and tobacco, see the pioneering article by S. Hugh-Jones (1995) and the more recent book by Ramos (2018).

6 Gutierrez-Choquevilca 2017a, 2017b; Aparício 2015, 2019; Shiratori 2019.

7 Paricá is made from the Virola sp. and/or Piptadenia peregrina trees, also called yopo or calcium tree in English. Caapi today is a drink made only from processing the Banisteriopsis caapi (ayahuasca) vine, which is prepared by cold maceration. Coca is made from Erythroxylum coca.

8 The actors and/or social units that interact in the region’s ritual complex, whether male initiation rituals with Jurupari wind instruments or rituals of exchanging food and artifacts (called Dabucuri), are gathered according to their respective patrilineal clans. These clans constitute inclusive exogamous groups (Tukano, Baniwa, Desana, Yuhupdeh, etc.) according to a hierarchical principle based on the relative age of their ancestors, from older brother to younger brother.

9 S. Hugh-Jones has drawn attention to the question of artifactual insemination (2009, 2017) and, more recently (2021), analyzed the theme in terms of same-sex and cross-sex relations and the problem of the reproduction of bodies without sexual intercourse.

10 A Yuhup version can be found in Lolli (2010) and a Hupd’äh version in Ramos (2018), both of which maintain the same structure highlighted here: an ancestor marries a fish-woman who fetches tobacco, the husband sees smoked fish, eats it, his belly swells, and from his feces or vomit sprouts what is seen as tobacco from the husband’s perspective.

11 Made from a single piece of sculpted brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata).

12 TN (translator’s note): Phenakospermum guyanense, a broad-leafed plant whose leaves are often used to wrap fish.

13 TN: Bothrops jararaca, a highly venomous pit viper.

14 We have seen that these instruments are called Miriá Porã in Desana and Kwai in Baniwa. In the Yuhup language, they are known as Tí’, while in Tukano they receive the same name given in Desana.

15 TN: Socratea exorrhiza, also called the walking palm, or paxiúba in Brazilian Portuguese.

16 For a deeper and more detailed analysis of the pharmacological power of the Jurupari instruments, see Lolli (2021).

17 In the following paragraphs we reproduce arguments already explored in Andrello and Vianna (2022).

18 TN: Iachnosiphon polyphyllus.

19 The material analyzed here corresponds to the enchantments recorded among Yuhupdeh groups by Lolli (2010).

20 Called kój, although it was not possible to identify scientifically the exact species.

21 A kind of cockroach, though the exact species was impossible to identify.

22 A total of 14 enchantments were documented; these are analyzed in depth in Lolli (2010).

23 Etymology taken from the Houaiss dictionary of Portuguese, also found in the English term “dolorous.”

24 TN: An indigenous-derived term for vine-based arrow tip poisons, used throughout Amazonia.

25 TN: A lingua franca spoken in the Amazon region, based on Nheengatu (a Tupi-Guarani language).

26 In the anthropological literature, these notions and malevolent actions are interpreted in terms of sorcery and/or witchcraft (Buchillet 2004; Wright 2004).

27 This reputation does not apply just to the individual concerned but may extend to an entire collective. Such is the case of the Maku groups, who are reputedly experts in poison because of their skill as hunters, and of the Baniwa groups also known as poison people. As a consequence, they are known as dangerous sorcerers.

28 TN: Astrocaryum aculeatum.

29 Accounts of fights at festivals can be found in numerous works, a full list of which would be impossible to cite here.

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Référence papier

Pedro Lolli et Geraldo Andrello, « Soul-foods as pharmaka: female bodies and poisons in the Upper Rio Negro »Journal de la Société des américanistes, 110-1 | -1, 65-92.

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Pedro Lolli et Geraldo Andrello, « Soul-foods as pharmaka: female bodies and poisons in the Upper Rio Negro »Journal de la Société des américanistes [En ligne], 110-1 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 septembre 2024, consulté le 15 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/22902 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ki9

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Auteurs

Pedro Lolli

Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), São Carlos (SP), Brasil; Orcid: 0000-0002-1010-700X

Geraldo Andrello

Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), São Carlos (SP), Brasil; Orcid: 0000-0001-7818-5445

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Traducteur

David Rogers

translator

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