Horizontes Antropológicos
August 1, 2018
Els Lagrou
20 citations
In Huni Kuin ayahuasca shamanism, ritual image-songs reveal how embodied perception and synesthesia transform bodily sensations into vision, rhythm, and sound. The experience involves becoming-other: knowing by seeing through another's eyes, being covered with their skin or ornaments, and singing with their voice. This other-becoming, understood in a Deleuzian sense, situates lived experience between self and other. The phrase "you are what you eat" carries implications for health and for acquiring the agentive and perceptive capabilities of other beings. The ritual technique of "almost becoming" involves alternatingly producing and undoing temporary transformations through song.
Horizontes Antropológicos
August 1, 2018
Aline Ferreira Oliveira
7 citations
This article examines how the Yawanawa and Huni Kuin, Pano-speaking peoples in Acre, Brazil, engage with nawa ("whites"), particularly ayahuasca religions and (neo)shamanic movements. Some villages now host festivals to present their culture, receiving nawa with beauty and enthusiasm to celebrate and feel the forest's strength. The analysis focuses on expressive modes emerging from these encounters and their capacity to produce new arrangements. Festivals and ayahuasca are central to inventive cultural processes, evidencing translations between diverse worlds through multidirectional flows of understandings, categories, and festive-shamanic practices. The article traces the uses and transformations of the brew, referred to locally as "cipó"—in its ontological multiplicities as daime, uni, or nixi pae—through the diverse relationships Yawanawa and Huni Kuin establish with ayahuasca religions, especially Santo Daime.
Horizontes Antropológicos
August 1, 2018
Guilherme Pinho Meneses
7 citations
This work describes a recent movement around so-called forest medicines, particularly the nixi pae (ayahuasca) of the Huni Kuĩ (Kaxinawá) people. It traces continuous transits of nixi pae, shamans, and emerging ayahuasca groups between forest and city, revealing ontological connections and conflicts. The paper proposes viewing nixi pae as a connectivity technology from a cosmopolitical perspective, unfolding the semantics of terms like cure and medicine through the pragmatics of collectives (shamans, substances, spirits) in action. Nixi pae appears as a key piece in activating ontologically heterogeneous collectives, opening possibilities for encounters with alterity and attempts to compose spaces of coexistence.
Horizontes Antropológicos
August 1, 2018
Glauber Loures Assis, Jacqueline Alves Rodrigues
5 citations
This article examines contemporary neo-shamanic networks, focusing on the movement of people and artifacts, tradition and authenticity, heritage, shamanic technologies, pilgrimage and religious tourism, exchanges and alliances among diverse groups, as well as market relations, disputes, and inter-religious conflicts. Using the Second World Ayahuasca Conference as a case study—which brought together an unprecedented number of people and groups involved with ayahuasca, including anthropologists, indigenous peoples, NGOs, and religions—the authors argue that these networks are constituted amid power relations, conflicting interests, and multiple positions on culture and religion. They contend that a Brazilian ayahuasca field exists with many distinct visions, where prestige, social legitimacy, identity, and heritage are at stake.