Peccaries and the dialectics of desire among the Kulina

History and Anthropology · 2026-02-05

Conversion and “Community” in Amazonia

University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 10 citations

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Ecology

Subjectivité droguée, altérité intoxicante : consommation rituelle de substances psychoactives chez les Madija

Cygne noir · 2022 · 2 citations

• Humanities
• Humanities
• Art

Cet article explore l’usage de substances psychoactives par une communauté d’Autochtones madijas (aussi appelés Kulina) du Brésil occidental. Je suggère que l’intoxication des Madija au moyen de l’alcool, du tabac et de l’ayahuasca se comprend mieux si elle est conçue comme une forme d’appropriation sémiotique de l’identité cosmologique des « autres », incluant des esprits animaliers, des êtres créateurs, d’autres groupes autochtones et des Brésiliens. Je m’intéresse à la manière dont les pratiques d’incorporation, telles que la chanson et le mouvement physique, amplifient l’expérience d’être un « alter », qui est facilitée par les altérations dans la conscience que produisent les drogues psychoactives.

Siblings and Sorcerers: The Paradox of Kinship among the Kulina

Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

• Sociology
• Genealogy
• Sociology

Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity

Ethnohistory · 2018-04-01

Thomas Alberts offers a deeply researched and insightful take on shamans and shamanism, in particular the “homogenizing universalism” that has generalized the image of the shaman and the diffuse set of practices and beliefs we now call “shamanism” in Western discourse on indigenous identity (58). Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity does not pursue an ethnography of shamanism so much as, first, a kind of Foucauldian archaeology of the concept and, second, an exploration of the ways in which shamanism as a kind of expanded symbol intersects with modern discourses on environmentalism and neoliberalism, as a model of and for indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the commodification of religion.Alberts opens with a useful exploration of the Western discovery of shamans in Siberia in the late seventeenth century, surveying a wide range of primary and secondary source material, and he traces the expansion of the label shaman beyond those original ethnographic boundaries, ultimately leading to the use of the term for almost any kind of indigenous religious practitioner. Alberts resists explicit criticism of this semantic expansion, but instead is interested in the conditions that authorized it and the functions such an expansion serve.Alberts then shifts to a consideration of the recent, late twentieth-century appropriation of shamanism in the construction of indigenism, environmentalism, and neoliberalism, all of these stimulating extensions of some of the implications of the emergence of shamanism as a kind of signifier. He traces the changes in approaches to indigenous rights, for example, in ways that implicate shamanism as sine qua non of indigeneity. His survey of the legal issues in international forums is impressive.Alberts’s exploration of the recent history of environmentalism follows the same strategy. At the risk of doing damage to his rich ethnography of environmentalism, I’ll note briefly that he shows how shamanism comes to stand for a general model of indigenous interaction with the world, and in turn comes to be an essential component of that interaction. It is not merely that shamanism, in this modern environmental discourse, is part of any culture’s interaction with an environment and ecosystem; shamanism is virtually implicated in modern understandings of indigenous environmentalism. If it didn’t already exist in this broadly discursive form, shamanism would have to be invented as part of modern environmental movements.Shamanism’s links to modern neoliberalism are obvious—the emergence of global shamanic businesses is the clearest form—but Alberts wants to dig deeper into the conditions of the possibility of such a neoliberal field. While his analysis is interesting, I found his speculations on the nature of labor and markets to be the least compelling part of this otherwise brilliant and persuasive book. The processes of commodification and their impact on the self as a source of labor and value have been explored in a variety of forms, from the emergence of the “free agent” in sports to the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, and I am not sure that Alberts’s analysis of shamans, especially New Age shamans, offers a more productive alternative to, say, a Weberian framework. Nonetheless, the general issue for anthropologists—the fact that shamanisms “on the ground” are intensely local and culturally specific (assuming that we agree to call them shamanism to begin with), but New Age shamanism is predicated on the universality of beliefs and the general effectiveness of practices of “shamanism”—is approached by Alberts through his lens of discursive modernism in a way that I found intriguing even if not perfectly persuasive.Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity is a challenging study, but one that bristles with insights that every anthropologist and specialist on religion will find essential.

Drugged Subjectivity, Intoxicating Alterity

Anthropology of Consciousness · 2016-03-02 · 6 citations

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

Shamanism

2015-10-26 · 1 citations

Shamanism has been regarded as one of the world’s oldest religions as well as one of its newest; evidence of shamanic practice has been found in Paleolithic cave art, and shamanic experiences are being cultivated in contemporary societies, especially in its “New Age” or neoshamanism variations. The narrowest conceptions of shamanism restrict the use of the term to a specific form of religious practice found in Siberia, where the Tungus religious practitioner called šamán provided the model; Mircea Eliade’s classic study of shamanism (see Eliade 1964, cited under History of Shamanism and Shamanism Studies) grants historical and conceptual priority to this form of belief and practice, and traces its spread from those Siberian roots. Alternatively, it has been argued that the concept of shamanism should be extended to a nearly universal set of beliefs about spirits, spiritism, and occult realms. Bean 1992, for example (cited under North American and Native American Shamanism), comments that “Shamanism is the religion of all hunting and gathering cultures, and it forms the basis of many more formalized religions that retain shamanistic elements” (p. 8). Anthropologists have often adopted this broader perspective, seeking similarities among overtly different traditions typically by linking them according to the social functions served by shamans (e.g., healing through spirit intervention, community protection from malign spirit attack, and the pursuit of community political goals through the medium of spiritism). This bibliography adopts the relatively broad view that “shamanism” is a useful concept to describe a set of religious phenomena of historical depth and wide ethnographic extent, and that there is value in considering how a range of beliefs and practices are related to a basic set of defining characteristics, along with their relationship to other social and cultural phenomena. “Shamanism” has been recently described as a form of interaction between a practitioner and spirits, one that is not available to other members of a community; the practitioner (a “shaman”) acts on behalf of that community—or on behalf of individual members of that community—to perform a variety of social roles that may include healing as well as harming, affecting the outcome of subsistence activities, and so on, by intervention with spirits or through knowledge gained by communication with spirits (see Webb 2013 under the Nature of Shamanism, p. 62). As such, shamans are found in a variety of cultures that are not traditionally associated with the concept, for example as spirit mediums in sub-Saharan Africa and through spirit possession in East Asia. This bibliography considers these themes through sections on the history of the concept itself, studies of the nature of shamanism, and analyses of shamanism in various cultures around the world.

Wright, Robin M.: Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon

Anthropos · 2014-01-01

Anthropos , Seite 354 - 355

Writers Talk Featuring Donald Pollock

2011-01-13

Multi-herb therapy has been widely used in Traditional Chinese medicine and tailored to meet the specific needs of each individual. However, the potential molecular or systems mechanisms of them to treat various diseases have not been fully elucidated. To address this question, a systems pharmacology approach, integrating pharmacokinetics, pharmacology and systems biology, is used to comprehensively identify the drug-target and drug-disease networks, exemplified by three representative Radix Salviae Miltiorrhizae herb pairs for treating various diseases (coronary heart disease, dysmenorrheal and nephrotic syndrome). First, the compounds evaluation and the multiple targeting technology screen the active ingredients and identify the specific targets for each herb of three pairs. Second, the herb feature mapping reveals the differences in chemistry and pharmacological synergy between pairs. Third, the constructed compound-target-disease network explains the mechanisms of treatment for various diseases from a systematic level. Finally, experimental verification is taken to confirm our strategy. Our work provides an integrated strategy for revealing the mechanism of synergistic herb pairs, and also a rational way for developing novel drug combinations for treatments of complex diseases.

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock Paranormal

2011-11-03