Anthropologica
January 1, 2000
Hope Maclean
4 citations
Huichol Indian yarn painters in Mexico understand their art as spiritually inspired, but the process is not simply replicating a vision or dream. Based on interviews, the author shows that the Huichol concept of the soul is central: the heart is the source of shamanic inspiration and the vehicle for communicating with gods. The study builds on Mesoamerican ideas about the soul and its relation to the body, questioning assumptions about contemporary ethnic and tourist arts that arise from shamanic traditions. It suggests that indigenous artists work from their own assumptions about both process and product, not just copying images seen in visions.
Anthropologica
August 29, 2022
Nehemias Pino, Michael A. Uzendoski
1 citation
The article examines contemporary imaginaries of rubber in the late 19th and early 20th century Napo region within the Native Community of Angoteros. It develops a theoretical discussion to understand a tangled memory that, the authors suggest, exists in a phenomenological textuality within a perspectivist Amazonian world. Ethnographic material presents the metaphor of the yakuruna's boat, generated in ayahuasca rituals, as an analogical text that accounts for the relationship between Angoteros people and commercial dynamics during the rubber boom. The imaginary of master spirits, including the yakuruna's boat, is understood from the perspective of a phenomenological text on rubber memory.
Anthropologica
July 15, 2026
Martha Rojas Zolezzi
Matsigenka religious conceptions about the destiny of the vital principle, commonly called the soul, are central to their worldview. This work describes the death of shamans, a topic previously unaddressed in ethnographic literature. Based on participant observation, interviews, and mythological recordings in the Lower Urubamba region and its tributaries Picha and Camisea (Megantoni district, Cusco) from 1996 to 2006 and again in 2018, the final destination of shamans after death is to inhabit the sky inoku with their auxiliary spirits saankariite.
Anthropologica
December 16, 2025
Doriane Sabine Slaghenauffi
The rise of 'shamanic tourism' in Shipibo-Konibo communities and urban areas has increased vernacular witchcraft practices, now integrated into the commercialization of local vegetalista shamanism. This climate provokes witchcraft attacks on rival shamans and on tourists seeking shamanic and hallucinogenic experiences, some of whom become subjects of witchcraft rumors. These occult practices and interpretations are both forms of resilience built by Shipibo shamans to cope with and benefit from the ongoing transition to capitalism, and manifestations of frustration and anxiety over the appropriation of local shamanism by global culture, symptomatic of traditionally ambiguous ties between kirinko (foreigners) and indigenous people.
Anthropologica
February 2, 2021
Juan Carlos Molano Zuluaga
The article proposes a theoretical and methodological provocation grounded in the intercultural listening experience of Colombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco during the 1970s with Emberá Chamí shamanic practices. It raises questions about Vasco's field positionality regarding listening—an ear that attended to and translated certain auditory meanings into cultural parameters. These ethnomusicological interpretations are confronted by the author's participation in an ayahuasca ingestion event at the Emberá Chamí reservation of San Lorenzo. The discussion explores indigenous imagination and conceptualization of sound, which could problematize theories such as Amerindian perspectivism. The author introduces an ontological concept called "sonic perceptionism," attributed to perceptions of a soundscape and its territorial intangibility, potentially complementing perspectivism's focus on visible corporeality.