Graham Townsley

Song Paths The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic

Knowledge
In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n126-128. pp. 449-468.

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Townsley Graham. Song Paths The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n126128. pp. 449-468.
doi : 10.3406/hom.1993.369649
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439-4216_1993_num_33_126_369649

Graham

Townsley

Song Paths
The Ways and Means
of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge

Graham Townsley, Song Paths. The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic
Knowledge. This paper examines the nature of shamanic knowledge amongst the Yamin
ahuaof Southeastern Peru. It departs from the observation that Yaminahua shamanism
has grown and flourished at the same time as much of its traditional social and cultural
context has been eroded and transformed by the modern world. It goes on to question
the idea that shamanic ritual should be understood primarily as either expressive or
communicative of anything like a symbolic structure let alone a traditional one. The
paper chooses instead to focus on shamanism as a set of techniques for constructing knowl
edgefrom the visionary experience of shamans in the course of their ritual. It emphasizes
ways of knowing rather than a system of things known. It shows how the arena of
thought in which shamanism operates is constructed through certain core Yaminahua
concepts about persons, spirits and the non-human world. The paper then analyzes the
songs and elaborate song-metaphors through which shamans claim to bind these together.
Yaminahua shamanism, like shamanism everywhere, claims for itself a
host of extraordinary powers to cure and kill. All of these claims, howe
ver, rest on a prior one: shamans understand things in a way that
other people just do not. They understand them better and more profoundly.
They really know (tapiakoi), they see (ooiki). The idea of this paper is to take
this claim seriously and, without diving immediately into familiar anthropological
discourses of ritual and symbolism, ask what, exactly, this knowledge might be
like.
It is an attempt, then, to deal with some of the paradoxes which have always
confronted anthropologists when trying to go beyond a mere catalogue of beliefs,
songs and ritual actions to search for a cogent rationale which could reasonably
link these things together, not merely in the analytical space of the "symbolic
structure" but also in the space of real acts of cognition or understanding by
the subjects who perform them; something, in short, which might correspond
to the idea of knowing.
The most obvious and accessible parts of shamanic knowledge are the relatively
standardized discourses of tradition in which shamans tend to be experts:
L'Homme 126-128, avr.-dc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 449-468.

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GRAHAM TOWNSLEY

mythology, the various categories and beings of the spirit world and
cosmos. Not surprisingly these have been seized upon by ethnographers. This
is a recognizable form of knowledge, at least in the sense of a cultural invent
ory
of meanings. It is relatively systematic, it can be learnt, it can be explained
and, when analyzed as symbol systems, can in different ways be seen to reflect
social categories and salient aspects of social ideology.
There is now a growing body of literature on Amazonian shamanism which
has done just this, showing how shamanism is bound up with cultural
constructions of the body, society and the natural world, and how it is symbolica
lly
linked to ideologies of hunting, warfare and other features of its "traditional"
setting.
Now although shamanism obviously is, in some way, a construct of the
social worlds and ideologies in which it participates, and these analyses have
shown exactly how this is so, the view of shamanism' s rationale that has inevitably
tended to emerge is the classical one of ritual action as the mise en scne of
established, "traditional" discourses of meaning and order, and their
communication to other ritual actors.
This view runs into numerous problems. The first and most obvious derives
from the simple observation that in the face of the tide of colonialism which
has been overwhelming native societies for a very long time now in Amazonia,
"traditional" native discourses of meaning and order, whatever we might imagine
these to have been (and it seems clear that they were never as stable, static
and bounded as anthropology has tended to present them), are being brutally
and profoundly transformed. Nevertheless, shamanism thrives and grows. If
we have an idea of shamanism as too radically bound up in its traditional setting
and stable sets of cultural meanings, we are faced with the paradox that while
these traditional settings are disappearing and, in many cases, "traditional"
meanings abandoned wholesale, shamanism persists and even flourishes. The
remarkable efflorescence of shamanism in the interstices between indigenous
and non-indigenous worlds and, for instance, in urban centres throughout Peru,
is ample testimony to its adaptability and capacity to operate free of these
traditional settings.
The Yaminahua are a case in point. Contacts with Peruvians and
missionaries have profoundly re-orientated their social life and, inevitably, their
understanding of the world around them. Even though most Yaminahua groups
were only "contacted" in the last 30-40 years, a world without these modern
foreigners is already inconceivable to them. It is now over 100 years since
the Amazonian rubber boom brought the first non-indigenous populations to
their territory. Since that time the Yaminahua population has been more than
halved by the combined effects of epidemics and violence. Their local groups
have been fragmented and dispersed. They have been displaced from their
traditional territories in the headwaters of the Yurua river and have spread
out into a large area of the Brazilian and Peruvian Purus where almost all
now live in some sort of contact with mestizo populations and missionaries.

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451

Many Yaminahua men are periodically involved in some form of paid labour,
and the western goods they receive as a result are an integral part of their economy.
These events have inevitably transformed not only the internal fabric of their
communities but also the discourses of meaning and structure which formerly
bound all aspects of the human and non-human worlds together in a dual,
"totemic" organization. Their traditional moiety organization has effectively
disappeared and much of their ritual organization along with it. Former political
systems, so closely tied to symbolic and ritual forms, are also undergoing a process
of atomization as the authority of village headmen and elders, along with the
values they represent, are progressively eroded by involvement in the modern
world.
Yet, paradoxically, Yaminahua shamans and shamanism have not only
survived in this present-day context of rapid social change, they have done rather
well from it. Traditionally, it seems that they were excluded from political power
in the community. The roles of headman (diyaiwo) and shaman (yown) were
clearly distinguished and never occupied by the same person. With the decline
of the old political organization there has been a noticeable tendency for shamans
to take on the role of headman so that these spheres of activity are tending to
be merged.
One factor contributing to this has been the success of shamans as brokers
between the Yaminahua and the non-indigenous world. Shamanism is probably
the only aspect of native culture which is valued and supported by non-native
society. The mestizo world is both horrified and fascinated by the "primitiveness" of Indians. It constructs them as animal-like and close to be the forces
of nature. The corollary of this construction is the belief that Indians control
strange powers of the forest. Many segments of mestizo society have a fervent
belief in the supernatural and have frequent recourse to Yaminahua shamans
in order to cure illnesses, help them in their love affairs and dispose of their
enemies. Shamanism thus receives a certain positive support from the nonindigenous world and is probably the only aspect of their culture to do so.
There are other sociological reasons for the persistence and growth of Yamin
ahuashamanism in this transformed setting, but these fall beyond the scope of
this paper. The important point here is that all this leads us to re-question the
idea that what shamanism is really about is the manipulation and communication
of traditional meanings bound to a traditional social order. This is even truer
given the fact that the artifacts of modernity outboard motors, radios, shot
guns and the like now thoroughly permeate shamanic imagery, just as they do
the real lives of the Yaminahua. In fact Yaminahua shamanism has shown an
almost infinite capacity to absorb and accommodate imagery and ideas from
the non-indigenous world, re-fashion them and build them into the core of its
own practice.
This creativity and radical openness to the new leads us back to the theme
of knowledge. If shamanic knowledge is not only knowledge of already
constituted discourses of meaning, then what type of knowing is it?

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In this paper I want to look more closely at Yaminahua ideas of knowledge

and, finally, at the ways in which shamans construct meanings from the actual
experience of their ritual. Although it will first be necessary to discuss some
of the basic Yaminahua ideas about the constitution of the world which provide
the framework for shamanism and attribute particular significances to its
experiences, my focus will, in the end, be upon its practice. The central idea
of the paper is that Yaminahua shamanism cannot be defined by a clearly
constituted discourse of beliefs, symbols or meanings. It is not a system of
knowledge or facts known, but rather an ensemble of techniques for knowing. It
is not a constituted discourse but a way of constituting one. Chief amongst
these ways and techniques of knowledge are those of song.
Yoshi
The central image dominating the whole field of Yaminahua shamanic knowl
edge is that of yoshi spirit or animate essence. In Yaminahua thought all
things in the world are animated and given their particular qualities by yoshi.
Shamanic knowledge is, above all, knowledge of these entities, which are also
the sources of all the powers that shamanism claims for itself.
Everything about the domain of yoshi is marked by an extreme ambiguity
not only for the outside observer, but for the Yaminahua themselves. For
most Yaminahua they are things associated with the night, the half-seen and
dreams. They are called upon to explain a host of events that seem uncanny,
strange or coincidental. However, their significance goes far beyond this; they
are implicated in all the literally vital questions of human existence: birth, growth,
illness and death. For humans too are animated by yoshi, entities just like
the essences of other things, which grow with the body through life and finally
cause its death by leaving it and travelling to the land of the dead. The relation
ship
of the yoshi to the body in life is a tenuous one. It is said to wander
and be subject to the influences of other yoshi. It is these influences which
are used to explain all illness and constitute the field of shamanic activity.
The basic parameters of shamanic knowledge are thus formed around this
highly ambiguous relationship of animate essences and bodies. The source
of the ambiguity is that while yoshi are very much a part of nature and the
bodies they animate, they are at the same time quite beyond them, in a realm
where even the yoshi of trees and insects live intelligent, volitional lives.
All bodies are suffused with their yoshi and the logic of most dietary
restrictions is formed by this simple idea. Thus pregnant women should not
eat any fish that hides itself in palisades or any animal that lives in the ground,
because these characteristics and ways of behaviour are contained in some
essential form in their flesh, would be communicated to the woman by eating
them, and make her childbirth a difficult one. Jaguars and anacondas should
never be eaten by anybody but shamans because their yoshi are too "strong".

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453

Apprentice shamans learning to sing must not eat animals that are mute but
are obliged to eat songbirds, whose flesh will give them their voices. For the
Yaminahua, it is the reality of yoshi which transforms relationships that for
us are ones of metaphor and analogy between unrelated domains into substantive
connections which can be worked upon to actually transform the state of
things.
In one way, then, a yoshi is simply all the empirical characteristics of the
thing with which it is associated, hypostatized and raised to the status of some
independent being an essence. This at least accounts for the very high degree
of empirical knowing involved in shamanism. To know the yoshi of somet
hing is to know in detail the appearance, behaviour and characteristics of the
thing it animates. This fine-tuned empiricism is evident throughout shamanic
practice and in the shamanic songs to be discussed later.
But Yoshi are much more than this. They also have an intelligent, volitional
existence in a supra-sensory realm. It is this fact which, for the Yaminahua,
makes them so hard to know. The only established discourse about this realm
is that of mythology. The creation myths which tell how, out of the original
chaotic flux of the "time of dawnings", the things of this world came to be,
are not simply regarded by shamans as tales of some distant past. The powerf
ul
flux of the "time of dawnings" is regarded as in some senses still present
in the spirit world. It is precisely these mythical, transformational powers with
which yoshi are charged and that shamans see themselves as tapping. Origin
myths are seen as providing "paths" into this spirit world and true accounts
of the nature of yoshi. This is why shamans will sometimes chant origin myths,
transformed into the elliptical language of shamanic song, because these are
"the paths which take you to a yoshi". The Yaminahua are only too aware
of the extreme ambiguities and paradoxes surrounding yoshi. All accounts
of them stress their mutability and the fundamental difficulty of knowing
them. As a shaman, who like all shamans claims to see and deal with them
directly, said to me: "You never really know yoshi they are like something
you recognize and at the same time they are different like when I see Jaguar
there is something about him like a jaguar, but perhaps something like a man
too and he changes ..." For the Yaminahua there is no possible unitary
description of a. yoshi. They are always "like . . . and not like", "the same . . .
but different". This profound duality marks not only all accounts of them
but is reflected in all shamanic and ritual dealings with them. As I will discuss
later in this paper, these are consciously and deliberately constructed in an
elliptical and multi-referential fashion so as to mirror the refractory nature of
the beings who are their objects.
As far as the Yaminahua are concerned, the key to the nature of this yoshiworld is the dream. Dreams, of course, are precisely understood as the
wanderings of the human yoshi in this ordinarily unperceived world. Perhaps
the best image we can have of the way they view their knowledge of this world
is the one the Yaminahua use themselves when they refer to both myths and

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shamanic songs as "paths" (wai). These are the hunting paths which radiate
out from every Yaminahua village into the vast surrounding forest. Near the
village the paths are open, wide and well-trodden. These are the myths, the
shidipaowo wai, the "paths of the old ones who went before", transitted by
everyone and well known.
These paths, however, soon become smaller ones, often only known to the
one or two hunters who use them, which thread their way deep into the recesses
of the forest. These are the songs. As a hunter walks along these paths in
search of game, very little is revealed to him directly. He relies on signs: tracks,
the chewed remains of jungle fruits, droppings, smells and, above all, sounds,
as the only indications of the presence of game. Usually, until the very last
moment, this remains hidden from him in the shadowy depths of the
forest. Finally, his only way of locating it is by calling. Hunters imitate the
calls of their prey with remarkable accuracy and it is only through this imitation
that game animals can be made to reveal themselves by responding.
This mimicking, through which humans momentarily gain control over the
non-human by becoming like it, thus creating a shared space of communication,
is precisely the goal of the shaman's song. "My songs are paths" said a shaman,
"Some take me a short way some take me a long way I make them straight
and I walk down them I look about me as I go not a thing escapes my
notice I call but I stay on the path."
The image of the hunter on his path sums up perfectly the types of knowl
edge shamans use, and their context. Firstly, the vast and detailed empirical
knowledge; the understanding, achieved by constant practice, of the things of
the forest, their forms, colours, sounds, habits, the places they frequent and
the foods they eat. Secondly, the knowledge of signs; the ways to interpret
the traces left by things that rarely reveal themselves directly (the interpretation
of dreams and visions is a fascinating and vast topic which I will not treat
here, but it is worth mentioning that beyond the direct communications shamans
claim from yoshi, they also interpret all aspects of their visions movements,
colours, formal distortions as indirect, coded communications). Finally,
shamanism is also knowledge of the paths, the myths and, above all, the songs.

Knowing
Given that shamanic knowledge, beyond its empirical and mythic content,
is constituted as a set of ideas and techniques related primarily to dreams,
controlled hallucinations and all that a European would call the imaginary,
it seems important to consider the Yaminahua model of cognition which frames
this knowledge and gives it its particular weight. One of the keys to this knowl
edge and, more widely, the whole question of the so-called "primitive mind"
which shamanism has so often been taken to exemplify, seems to me to lie
exactly in an image of the person and knowing subject which, paradoxically,

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455

has no place for a "mind" and associates "mental" events with animate essences
which can drift free from bodies and mingle with the world, participating in
it much more intimately than any conventional notion of "mind" would allow.
The person, in Yaminahua thought, has three significant components: one
of which is physical, the body or flesh (yora), and the other two of which are
non-physical the diawaka and the wroyoshi. It is this latter which is a yoshi
of the same type as those of other things in the world. The former is somet
hing possessed only by humans.
Both the diawaka and the wroyoshi are present in germinal form in or
around the body at birth, grow with it throughout life and finally leave it at
death. The wroyoshi, always prone to wanderings away from the body and
promiscuous minglings with the non-human, actually causes death by its final
flight to the land of the dead. It becomes one of the bai iri yoshiwo (floodland-spirit-people), who live eternally "beyond the edge of the world", "where
the water comes from" and have little interest in the living. Their land is
"beautiful" (sharakoin) , "fragrant" fini) and they cannot stand the stench of
this one, where everything rots and decays. The diawaka on the other hand,
after death clings to the flesh and the human world. It is said to be griefstricken, disorientated and highly dangerous. The form of funerary rites is
largely dictated by the need to placate this spirit, make it "lie down", "cool
its anger", and finally banish it.
The diawaka is the "shadow"; the word means shadow and expresses metap
horically
the idea that in life it is closely and continuously attached to the body.
"The diawaka", said a Yaminahua explaining the idea, "gives ideas tells me
what to do. When I think, when I decide to do something all that is the dia
waka."
In a simple way, most aspects of everyday consciousness, the thoughts
and actions that make up everyday life, are considered to be the province of the
diawaka. It is the seat of intentional thinking and reflection. Clear thought,
speech and action are all considered to be manifestations of the diawaka. In
ways too complex to explore here, it is the source of all that is distinctively social
and human. It is associated with the names that place every Yaminahua in
a determinate position in the kinship order. Just as these names are reproduced
according to fixed rules in every second generation, so every Yaminahua is
considered in certain important ways to be the reincarnated diawaka of a parti
cular grandparent. As the representation of death makes clear, the diawaka
clings to the human world. Above all, it is the bearer of language, and in
funerary rites is addressed, cajoled and pleaded with in ordinary language.
All this is in absolute contrast to the wroyoshi, an entity which is, perhaps,
much closer to a European idea of soul. It is a person's vital essence, the
thing that animates and gives life. "Without the wroyoshi", the same Yamin
ahua
explained to me, "this body is just meat." It is the wroyoshi that causes
death by finally abandoning the body and travelling to the land of the dead. I
say "finally" because unlike the diawaka the connection of the wroyoshi to
the body in life is tenuous. It is said to wander and be subject to a host of

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influences of which the person's ordinary waking consciousness (the diawakd)

is unaware. Dream and hallucination are proof positive of these wanderings
of the wroyoshi, wanderings in which it comes into contact with other animate
essences. It is these contacts which are thought to be the root cause of all
illness and much serious misfortune. The wroyoshi' s association with dream
and hallucination, whose visions are taken to be those of the errant wroyoshi
itself, are clear evidence of its nature as something more than an abstract vital
essence. Like the diawaka, the wroyoshi has a role in conciousness. The
wroyoshi (literally eye spirit), the Yaminahua say, "is what sees", and, by
extension, feels. It is perception.
In their notion of the person, therefore, the Yaminahua have a simple tr
ipartite
schema: a body; a social, human self associated with reason and language;
an animate, perceiving self which is neither so social nor human, mingling easily
with the non-human yoshi who are beings of the same type. It can be seen,
then, how the Yaminahua have no notion of anything that would approach
our idea of "mind" as an inner storehouse of meanings, thought and experience
quite separate from the world. All that is "mental" is the property of entities
which, although closely related to particular bodies, are not permanently attached
to them. It is through the relationship between these two entities that the whole
arena of Yaminahua thought about the sameness and difference between the
human and non-human develops. And as should be clear by now, it is through
the idea of yoshi that the fundamental sameness of the human and the nonhuman takes shape, creating the space for the animal transformations of the
human and the attribution of mental and human characteristics to all aspects
of nature. This, of course, is the arena of shamanism.
Of the two human essences it is the wroyoshi, the seat of perception, whose
nature and relationship to the body is the key to shamanic vision. The diawaka
is not in the body but firmly attached to it; the metaphor of the shadow conveys
the idea well enough. The wroyoshi on the other hand is treated as not only
permeating the body, but also as an entity which can leave, wander, come back
and so forth. Whereas everybody's wroyoshi does this in the course of dreams,
it is only a shaman who has so developed both wroyoshi and body that he
can control the former's movements and perceptions. For the Yaminahua,
then, shamanism resides primarily, not in a type of thinking nor in a set of
facts known, but in a condition of the body and its perceptions. The physicality
of this shamanic knowledge is reflected in a multitude of song images which
picture the shaman's songs and powers gestating in his belly, coursing in his
veins, making his breath either strong and hot or fragrant and cool.
The point I am developing is that shamanism is in some senses a logical
consequence of a particular model of the person and cognition. Like any model
which tries to grasp the relationship between the physical and non-physical aspects
of personhood, it is permeated by paradox. Yet even this cursory treatment
of it allows us to be clear about some of the specific paradoxes it creates which
generate the space for Yaminahua shamanism. The first is of a faculty of

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457

perception which permeates the body and at the same time can float free of
it. The second is of a perceiving and vital self, radically mutable, which can
transform itself so as to participate in all non-human aspects of the world.
Shamanic initiation is aimed precisely at achieving this transformation.
There is no room here to go into the details of the long and complex procedures
of initiation, but their goal is conceived of as a radical transformation of the
body and wroyoshi of the person. He takes on something of the essence of
other animal species: above all, anaconda and jaguar, the most powerful of
shamanic animals. Above all, he learns to sing.

Singing
What Yaminahua shamans do, above everything else, is sing. Songs are
a shaman's most highly prized possessions, the vehicles of his powers and the
repositories of his knowledge. They are usually sung under the influence of
a hallucinogenic brew (shori) made from lianas of the banisteriopsis family and
a shrub, psychotria viridis. Learning to be a shaman is learning to sing, to
intone the powerful chant rhythms, to carefully thread together verbal images
couched in the abstruse metaphorical language of shamanic song, and follow
them. "A song is a path you make it straight and clean then you walk
it."
along
What a shaman actually does when he cures is sing. His singing will be
intermittently accompanied by the blowing of tobacco smoke on the patient
or a more rapid, vigorous and staccato blowing onto the crown of the patient's
head, but the effective healing power is thought to originate in the song. The
blowing effects a sort of physical transfer of the meaning and power of the
song into the patient. The word koshuiti has its roots in an onomatopeia:
kosh - kosh - kosh as an imitation of that controlled, staccato blowing sound.
The association of different types of breathing with shamanic action is a central
one. Thus in contrast to koshuiti we have shooiti, witchcraft songs, also an
onomatopeia: shoo - shoo - shoo as an imitation of the powerful, prolonged
breath which will "blow away" its victim's soul. The "power" of a shaman's
breath is seen as the foremost sign of his bodily transformation. One of the
reasons dolphins are feared as shamans is that they unmistakably breath in
these "powerful" shamanic ways.
Although these songs are usually sung under the influence of shori, I was
told on a number of occasions that the koshuiti of a really good shaman would
be effective even without the drug. Nevertheless, shori and shamanic song
are inextricably bound up together. It is shori that is always considered to
give primary access to the world of animate essences. Mot Yaminahua men
take shori regularly and they all sing to the yoshi visions which the drug
induces. The songs they sing, however, are not koshuiti', they are called rabiai
and have a different form, language and intention. They are sung in ordinary,

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everyday speech. They are intended to stimulate and clarify the visions of
the yoshi from which knowledge might be gained but they are not credited
with any magical efficacy.
Koshuiti on the other hand are thought to have real efficacy and are only
sung by shamans. As already mentioned, their language is made up of
metaphoric circumlocutions or unusual words for common things which are
either archaic or borrowed from neighbouring languages. Each song is defined
by a core constellation of these metaphors. Songs do not have fixed and
invariant texts although, particularly in the case of songs constructed from myths,
they may have a minimally fixed narrative sequence of metaphors and
images. Beyond this, the actual performance of a song is dictated by the skill,
intentions and particular visionary experience of the shaman who is singing
it. Shamans are certainly aware of this element of individuality in the
performance of songs and, indeed, are proud of it. They also create new songs
and invent fresh metaphors, as is obviously the case with those to airplanes,
outboard motors and so forth. Nevertheless, they do not view even these
modern songs as a totally personal creation. In fact, they are adamant that
the songs are not ultimately created or owned by them at all, but by the yoshi
themselves, who "show" or "give" their songs, with their attendant powers,
to those shamans good enough to "receive" them. Thus, for instance, in their
portrayal of the process of initiation, it is the yoshi who teach and bestow powers
on the initiate; other shamans only facilitate the process and prepare the initiate,
"clean him out", so as to receive these spirit powers.
The songs are metaphoric in two distinct ways. They make very little direct
reference to the illness or to the real situation which the song is intended to
influence. Instead, they create elaborate analogies to it. Confronted by an
illness, a shaman sings a song to the moon, to an animal, or perhaps chants
a myth. This is the first way in which these songs are metaphoric: the overall
form of the song as a whole is constituted by an extended analogy to the real
context of the songs performance.
The creation of these types of extended analogy has, of course, been noted
by many studying ritual chants and other speech forms thought to have magical
efficacy. This pervasive use of analogy in magical formulas has commonly
been analyzed in terms of the ritual specialist's intent to communicate important
messages to other ritual performers, messages which will be made all the more
persuasive for being embedded in metaphors and symbols loaded with cultural
resonance. Thus Tambiah argued that the performance of these types of ritual
metaphor served to restructure and integrate the minds and emotions of other
actors in the ritual, directing them to certain perceptions and persuading them
of the truth of certain proper attitudes (Tambiah 1968).
Similarly, in a study much closer in its ethnographic content to the present
case, Lvi-Strauss analyzed the chant of a Cuna shaman in terms of an elaborate
metaphoric communication from shaman to patient. The patient in this case
was a woman suffering in a difficult childbirth, and Lvi-Strauss showed how

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459

the shaman's song built up a mythic narrative which could be read as an extended
analogy to the woman's condition and the process of childbirth. His idea was
that, comparable in some respects to psychoanalytic procedures, the provision
of alternative frames of reference through which the patient could view his
or her experience could restructure that experience and of itself produce the
"cure".
Both the classical approaches above proceed from perceptive and, it seems
to me, essentially correct observations about the communicative capacities of
metaphor to the inference that the motivating rationale for their performance
is the communication of important cultural truths to other ritual actors.
Although this inference might seem reasonable, and is possibly true in other
cases, it is certainly not so here.
Lvi-Strauss was undoubtedly correct to view the song as an extended analogy
to the woman's condition in the Yaminahua song which I will discuss later
this type of analogic structure is very obvious. However, at least in the Yamin
ahuacase, the idea that this use of analogy has its rationale in the intent to
change the patient's consciousness runs counter to the whole rationale of shamani
c
practice which, as we shall see, is intented to construct a particular type of
visionary experience in the shaman himself and a communication, not with other
humans, but with the non-human yoshi who populate that visionary experience.
The clue to this is given by the fact that most Yaminahua can barely understand
the songs. Many shamanic songs are almost totally incomprehensible to all
but other shamans. The reason for this is the extensive use of the other mode
of metaphorization mentioned. The actual language of the song, used to build
up the overall analogy, is itself densely metaphoric. Almost nothing in these
songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circum
locutions are used instead. For example, night becomes "swift tapirs", the
forest becomes "cultivated peanuts", fish are "peccaries", jaguars are "baskets",
anacondas are "hammocks" and so forth. Most Yaminahua are at a loss to
understand the sense of these esoteric metaphors.
The question of the types and modes of communication between shaman
and patient is a highly complex one. To be treated properly it would require
an account of the whole night-long ritual which is the context for the performance
of the songs, complete with the effects created both directly and indirectly by
its asides, comments and dramatic swings from the blazing intensity of the singing
to the delirious good humour of the joking which intersperses it. Obviously,
patients are moved in some way by all this, by the heightened experience of
themselves as afflicted and by the dramatic efforts of the shaman to cure
them. Many patients also understand something of the songs, some of which
could probably be decoded by most Yaminahua without much effort, as the
examples to be discussed later should make clear.
However the question which interests me here is the motivation of song
and song imagery for the Yaminahua themselves. This clearly runs counter
to any simple idea about the communication of "cultural texts" to other ritual

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GRAHAM TOWNSLEY

performers. Whatever it is that other actors understand, it is not such texts,

facts or truths, which would all be communicated much better if patients and
others could follow the imagery of the songs clearly. They can seldom do
this. In the course of trying to understand a number of the songs I had recorded,
I could often find no non-shaman, even among apprentice shamans, who could
make the slightest sense of them.
The important thing, emphasized by all shamans, is that none of the things
referred to in the song should be referred to by their proper names. One might
assume that these circumlocutions were not consciously metaphoric usages at
all, but culturally fixed equivalents which were learnt and employed automatically
with no awareness of their metaphoric content. This is certainly not so. In
every instance the metaphoric logic of these song words could be explained
with no hesitation. In every case the basic sense of these usages was carried
by finely observed perceptual resemblances between the song-word and its
referent. Thus fish become "white-collared peccaries" because of the
resemblance of a fish's gill to the white dashes on this type of peccary's neck;
jaguars become "baskets" because the fibers of this particular type of loosewoven basket (wonati) form a pattern precisely similar to a jaguar's markings,
rain becomes "big cold lean-to" because the slanting sheets of rain in a down
pour resemble the slanting roofs of the lean-to's which the Yaminahua build
for shelter when they are away from the village.
Shamans are clearly aware of the underlying sense of their koshuiti metaphors
and refer to them as tsai yoshtoyoshto "twisted language" (literally: languagetwisting-twisting). But why do they use them? All explanations clearly
indicated that these were associated with the clarity of visionary experience which
the songs were intended to create. "With my koshuiti I want to see singing,
I carefully examine things twisted language brings me close but not too close
with normal words I would crash into things with twisted ones I circle around
them I can see them clearly."
There is a complex representation of the use of metaphor and its capacity
to create immediate and precise images, contained within these simple
words. Everything said about shamanic songs points to the fact that as they
are sung the shaman actively visualizes the images referred to by the external
analogy
as"
the different
of the song,
things
but actually
that he does
named
thisby
through
the internal
a carefully
metaphors
controlled
of his"seeing
song.
This "seeing as" in some way creates a space in which powerful visionary exper
ience can occur. It is in this visionary experience that the magical efficacy
of the song is thought to lie. The song is the path which he both makes and
follows. It sustains and directs his vision. Whether or not the patient can
understand the song is irrelevant to its efficacity as far as he is concerned.
At this point it would be useful to consider an example of a shamanic cure
which will show how koshuiti and their metaphors are combined. Below is a
transcription of a koshuiti sung to cure a woman who had given birth two days
earlier and was continuing to lose blood. She appeared to be haemorrhaging.

Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge

461

For about half an hour the shaman sang to himself and to his yoshi helpers, calling
their songs to him ("It's not me who cures it's them I call them - they
come and sit by me show me what to do"). These introductory songs are
full of phrase sequences such as: "Here I am pushing in My shaman song
- I will go spilling them - Perfect first shamans - Their songs filling my mouth
From the sky's end - Filling my mouth Seeing everything I go - What
foreign yoshi here?" Like all koshuiti they have a declamatory style, stating
facts, declaring the songs beauty and power ("my decorated song", "my swift
song", "my perfumed song", etc.), the ways he is releasing them into the world
and onto his patient ("spilling them", "painting them", "lining them up", etc.),
declaring the shaman's vision and imposing the truth of what he is, or will be,
doing. They are chanted in a simple, monotonous and repetitive melodic phrase
mirroring the short and grammatically condensed phrases of the song. The
incessant and monotonous regularity of the rhythm of the song, along with the
repetitions of its declamatory phrases, have an important function in sustaining
the trance-like state of the shaman and his visions.
Then, with the woman lying in front of him in a hammock, he began to sing
a song to the moon over her. There are, of course, important mythic precedents
linking the moon to menstrual blood and all things related to reproduction and
birth. Most importantly, there is a central myth recounting the origins of the
moon and fertility. This myth is common throughout Amazonia. It tells how
the moon was originally an incestuous brother. Hidden by the night he would
creep into his sister's hammock and make love to her. To find out who he was,
she smeared dark, genipa dye on the face of her anonymous lover. When, next
day, she saw the marks on her brother's face, a train of events was set in motion
which culminated with the brother being decapitated in a hunting raid. Converted
into a monstrous "rolling head", begging for food and water which he cannot
digest, the brother is rejected by his relatives. Cursed for his insatiable appetites,
he rises into the sky to become the moon, vowing that he will continue to make
love to women. Still with the dark blotches smeared on his face by his sister,
it is Moon who makes women fertile by making love to them at night. Since
he ejaculates not semen but blood, they also bleed.
The Shaman sang:
Dawning people
Becoming used to being
Inside dawning hunting-blind
Woman, young woman
Swift dark tapirs
Her flesh-blood person came
Beside her the man
Touched uterus there
Here, I am going to watch it
Pungent tapir standing
Went gathering it

dtdawawo
iwodiwo wawra
dtshowo mrasho
wado shawaw
chshe awa sbeai
aw yora wawkai
takdika odiwa
a dati meki
e ddo onano
asho awa didya
wiwitai akasho

462

GRAHAM TOWNSLEY
Pungent tapir pressing
What type of person?
Touched my uterus?
Swift tapirs coming
That flesh-blood man
There coming creeping
There touching her uterus
That dawning person
His face there
Pungent tapir water
Smearing there

asho awa chiditai

aw dawa wkai
a dati ma
chsh awa wsowi
owa odi yorawo
ado kambebakai
ado dati mki
owa dtdawawo
aw wso kayan
asho awa dpa
ado kamwashatai

This, of course, is the opening section of the myth mentioned above, describing
the incest and the discovery of the brother's identity. It is couched in the "twisted
language" of koshuiti, in which house becomes "hunting blind", night becomes
"swift dark tapirs", Genipa becomes "pungent tapir", etc. In this fashion the
shaman sang the whole myth from beginning to end which, with all its detail and
the repetitions of its phrases, took about half an hour. It ended with the shaman
singing over and over again phrases such as "I have seen it all I am taking
it out foreign yoshi there now leaving making you leave my wonderful
song my shaman's song making you leave". He rewitnesses the myth by
chanting it in the power idiom of koshuiti and by doing this "knows", grasps
in the most absolute way possible, the yoshi whose origins it recounts. He then
banishes it.
Having followed this "path", one of the "wide paths" of the shidipaowo,
he then set out on another, singing to the sun. The transcription below lays out
the basic phrases of the song in their sequence. Once again, in the original these
were repeated many times and frequently broken up with fragments of song
referring to the shaman's own powers, how he was "seeing all this", "lining up
his powers", his "fragrant songs" and how he would "spill this fragrance" onto
her.
The song begins with an image of sunrise :
There height's skirt
White height's skirt
There at the skirt
The big fire
Huge ball of fire cotton
There height's small-of-back
There small-of-back
Big cotton-ball strolling
Comes strolling
There with painted crown
That huge fire

odo man chikan

osho mana chikan
chikanio odowaa
a chii wara
chii shapo wara
odo mana chrnao
chrnao akaw
shapo wa bshowii
bshonatiwrakii
odokam maowi
a chii wara

Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge

463

"Ball of fire cotton" is the sun and the image here is of the sun rising above
the horizon, metaphorically pictured as the waist band of the woman's skirt with
the small of her back as the lowest part of the sky. The song then goes on to
follow the sun's path through the sky in the course of a whole day.
Heart of fire cotton ball
Huge fire cotton ball
There height's crown painted
Passing crown painted
His fire scorching
There at the highest point
Fire comes looking down
Fire passes looking down

chii shapo datora

shapo wa chiiraa
odo mana maowi
maonati wowaki
aw chii rwa
odo kme kadio
chii wkwkaki
chii wkwoaki

During the course of the song numerous qualities of the sun are referred to,
both empirical and mythic. In a Yaminahua myth, the sun was originally much
lower and so hot that it scorched the earth and forced the ancestors to remain
in their houses. One day a small child wandered out and was burnt alive by
the sun. The furious ancestors rushed out with a long pole and pushed the sun
higher into the sky. The references to "harming" and "scorching" are to this
myth.
Heart of huge cotton ball
Up there shining
Making things shine
Huge fire lighting
Huge fire brings day
Huge fire cotton ball
His harming fire
His harming power
Our people there
His fire harmed
Harming is what he did
His fire made them hide
Fire cotton ball shining
Made everything shine

shapo wa datora
odo mana yoriwa
yoriwawawadiwaw
chii wa chashadii
chii wa pdadi
chii shapo wara
tdteba chiiwo
tdteba pawo
doko yora wawera
awe chii tdei
tdikadiwaw
aw chii radowi
chii shapo yoriba
yori badiwawra

The song proceeds onwards to sunset which, as we shall see, is the central
image that links the song to the woman's bleeding. It returns to the image of
the horizon with which it started. This image, the woman's waist, is of course
literally where the haemorrhage is taking place.
There at the height's skirt
There at the skirt
Cotton ball at the skirt
Fire going out
Fire cooling

Odo mana chikan

chikanio odowa
shapo aw chikan
Chii dokawaino
Chii batsiwaino

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GRAHAM TOWNSLEY

The crucial metaphoric link which the song establishes is between the woman's
blood and the red sky of sunset. This often appears quite dramatically in the
jungle as a band of deep red light rising above the horizon referred to in the
song as ' 'painted cliff ' . In his song the shaman seeks to establish the real identity
of the blood and the sunset, with the result that the woman's bleeding will
disappear just as the red of sunset inevitably fades with the approaching night.
There the height's skirt
Painted cliff people
It is real human blood
There height's small of back
Peoples real blood
Comes spreading up
It is real human blood
Falling on this earth
Their big blood
Has touched the woman's womb
It has touched your womb
There it is finishing
Woman's womb inside
Right there it is stopping
Real human blood
There I am cutting it off

odo mana chikan

dawa bawa kdya
dawa ibi kowikai
odo mana chrnao
dawa ibi kowikai
kyokoini woaki
rawa ibi koikai
da mai pakba
aw ibi nwane
wado shaki mea
bia shaki mea
ado pashpa akano
wado shaki mradowa
ado te ahano
dawa ibi kowira
ado trasiino

There is a complex and subtle play of images within the song mirroring the
progress of the shaman's visionary experience. He establishes the analogy be
tween
the woman's belly (the small of her back, the band of her skirt) with the
sky and then carefully envisions the sun traversing the dome of the sky from sunrise
to sunset; the dome of the sky which is all the while her belly. In twisted language
he enumerates all the characteristics of the sun, both empirical and mythical,
making his vision as accurate and complete as possible. Once again, his aim
is to envision the sun so directly, immediately and totally that he can know and
grasp it in some absolute way. Phrases like: "Here I am, seeing all this seeing
everything my beautiful songs", are constant refrains of the songs. Having built
up his vision and grasp on this yoshi he pulls together the two stands of his analogy
to make them one, establishing that the red of the sky at sunset and the woman's
blood are no longer just analogies, they are really connected, metonymically linked
as parts of the single whole forged by his vision. He thus binds her uncertain
condition to an absolutely predictable natural event so that the fading sun will
drag away her bleeding with it. His power as a shaman is thought to lie exactly
in a visionary experience intense and acute enough to be able to achieve this
transformation.
While the song is clearly aimed at the most precise and complete description
possible of the spirit being at which it is aimed, it rigorously avoids ordinary
naming of any of the elements of this description. Here, all its reference is
' 'twisted' ' . Faced with this complex play of metaphor we are obviously directed

Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge

465

to more familiar ideas of the relationship between word, image and the
imagination, in which metaphor and other tropes play such a large part. The
idea that the split-reference characteristic of metaphor has peculiar abilities to
create immediate and resonant images is a well established one. As Herbert Read
wrote, "A metaphor is the synthesis of several units of observation into one
commanding image; its the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, or by
abstract statement, but by a sudden perception of a. . . relation" (quoted in Basso
1976: 98). It is, of course, this ability to create and reflect images of great
complexity, in the direct and immediate fashion of a creative insight, that has
given metaphor its central place in, for instance, European poetic traditions, as
Ricur and many others have pointed out. It is thus not hard to see how, by
only using words which draw attention to the minute similitaries between
dissimilars, the shaman tries to sharpen his images at the same time as creating
a space in which his visions can develop. His statement that normal words would
make him "crash into things" conveys the idea well enough.
However, the whole context of thought surrounding this metaphorizing is
obviously radically different from that of the poetic metaphor, both in the degree
of reality attributed to the things imaged and in their capacity to affect the
world. Yoshi are real beings who are both "like and not like" the things they
animate. They have no stable or unitary nature and thus, paradoxically, the
"seeing as" of "twisted language" is the only way of adequately describing
them. Metaphor here is not improper naming but the only proper naming
possible. The whole strategy of the song is precisely to drag these refractory
meanings and images of the yoshi world out into this one and embed them un
ambiguously
in a real body. It is interesting in this context that the only thing
named by direct, as opposed to "twisted" language, is the woman's body itself
at
"crash"
the moment
into it,
in which,
effecting
precisely,
the realthecure.
images of the song are intended to physically
This conversion of the meaningful into the material is, of course, unthinkable
from the standpoint of a model of cognition which places all meaning operations
in a "mind", something interior to the person which leaves the material world
unaffected. From this standpoint, not even the often mentioned idea of
"illocutionary force", or of any speech act or narrative which changes the world
by redefining it or changing peoples perception of it, could possibly encompass
the sheer physicality of the transformations claimed by shamanism. As
mentioned before, from the very different standpoint of the Yaminahua model
of cognition, the idea that experiences and meanings can be embedded in the nonhuman world is a less problematic one. It is the concept of a type of perceiving
animate essence shared by the human and the non-human alike, creating for them
a shared space of interaction, which opens up this "magical" arena shamanism.
This formulation is, of course, only the starting point for the much more
extensive and complex analysis which would be necessary to understand the
extremely complex web of signification in Yaminahua thought binding the human

466

GRAHAM

TOWNSLEY

to the non-human and the mental to the material. Nevertheless, it is this starting
point, emphasizing the cultural construction of the knowing, cognizing subject,
which I have been interested to consider in this paper. This is congruent with
the move away from seeing ritual as a mise en scne of anything like a symbolic
or social structure and the move towards seeing it as a set of techniques for
inducing certain types of experience, and asking about the types of significance
attributed to these experiences.
In showing how shamanic visions and song-images are constructed and
sequenced, how the "paths" are made and followed, criss-crossing the boundaries
of the yoshi-world of myth and this one, I hope also to have shown how the
descriptions of the world contained in an Amazonian cosmology are actually
known and constructed. This emphasis on the techniques of knowledge helps
us to see how such a cosmology, far from being a complete and ready-constituted
system of things known is, for the Yaminahua themselves, always a system in
the making, never finished and always provisional. It certainly has stable
reference points fixed by tradition, such as the "wide paths" of the myth-songs,
however there are not very many of these and once off them, the song-paths
followed by shamans are multiple and idiosyncratic. In this context we should
pay attention to their own image of their knowledge as a network of paths. These
paths are tenuous and impermanent, threading their way through a vast and
refractory space of signs and images which, like the forest and the dream, offers
the occasional glimpse of something, but is fundamentally opaque.
Yaminahua shamans have no certainty about what this space contains and
are always ready to discover something new in it. It should not be surprising
that they have been so ready to embrace the experiences of the transformed setting
of their modern-day existence. Yaminahua shamans have now made koshuiti
to almost all aspects of this world. There are songs to outboard motors (hardfire-baskets), good for curing headaches and working on the resemblances be
tween
the sound of a distant outboard and the throb of a headache; to engine
oil (fire-sun- water), good for children's diarrhoea and working on the remarka
ble
similarities between the used oil of an outboard and a child's diarrhoea; also
to airplanes, shot-guns, cinemas, radios, sunglasses and much more. "When
we first saw these things we examined them carefully, asked ourselves what their
y os hi were like, and then found their song." These are viewed as welcome and
important additions to their repertoire.
Like good bricoleurs, Yaminahua shamans have found a use for every
thing.
Along with the social circumstances paradoxically favourable to them,
it is this creativity of Yaminahua shamanic knowledge which has contributed to
its growth in the modern context of violent social transformation.
London School of Economics

Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge

461

Acknowledgements
The fieldwork on which this paper is based was made possible by grants
from the SSHRC of Canada and the Horniman Foundation. Subsequent
research has been funded by the British Academy and the Fyssen Foundation. I
am pleased to acknowledge the support of these institutions. Above all, thanks
are due to the Yaminahua and, in particular, to Komaroa and Raondi. I would
also like to thank Carlo Severi, Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, Anne Christine Taylor
and Vigdis Broch-Due for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this
paper.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Basso, K. H.
1976 "Wise Words of the Western Apache", in K. H. Basso & H. Selby, eds., Meaning in
Anthropology. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press: 93-122.
Lvi-Strauss, C.
1963 "The Effectiveness of Symbols", in Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth, Penguin
Books.
Tambiah, S. J.
1968 "The Magical Power of Words", Man, n.s., 3 (2): 175-208.

RSUM
Graham Townsley, Des Itinraires chants. Formes et moyens de la connaissance chamanique yaminahua. Cet article tudie la nature du savoir chamanique chez les Yaminahua
du Prou sud-oriental. Constatant que le chamanisme yaminahua s'est considrablement
dvelopp en dpit de l'rosion de son contexte socio-culturel, l'auteur met en cause l'inte
rprtation
du rituel chamanique comme moyen d'exprimer une structure symbolique ,
a fortiori traditionnelle, prfrant aborder le chamanisme comme un ensemble de techni
quespour laborer une connaissance partir de l'exprience visionnaire du chamane. L'accent
est donc mis sur le chamanisme comme manire de connatre plutt que comme corps de
connaissances. Enfin l'auteur montre que l'espace de pense o se dploie le chamanisme
est construit partir de notions cls concernant la personne, les esprits et le monde non
humain ; il analyse alors les mtaphores et les chants par lesquels les chamanes disent mett
re en rapport ces diffrents domaines.

468

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TOWNSLEY

RESUMEN
Graham Townsley, Itinerarios cantados. Formas y medios del conocimiento chamnico
yaminahua. Este artculo estudia la naturaleza del conocimiento chamnico entre los
Yaminahua del Per sudoriental. Constatando el desarrollo considerable que experimenta
el chamanismo yaminahua a pesar de la erosin del contexto socio-cultural, el autor pone
en tela de juicio la interpretacin del ritual chamnico como medio de expresin de una
estructura simblica , a forteriori tradicional, y prefiere abordar el chamanismo como
un conjunto de tcnicas para construir el conocimiento a partir de la experiencia visionaria
del chaman. Asi pues el chamanismo sera considerado como una manera de conocer mas
bien que como un conjunto de conocimientos. El autor muestra como el espacio del
pensamiento en el que se despliega el chamanismo esta construido a partir de nociones
claves que conciernen a la persona, los espritus y el mundo no humano ; analiza las metforas
y los cantos por medio de los cuales los chamanes creen poner el relacin esos diferentes
dominios.