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Smoky Trails: On Taussig's 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man'

1987; Wiley; Volume: 3; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3033060

1467-8322

David Stoll,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

David Stoll is author of Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?, a history of the Wycliffe Bible Translators published by Zed Press and Cultural Survival in 1982, and is a graduate student in the anthropology department, Stanford University. Ethnography often has an autobiographical note: here1 we have the story of an anthropologist training to be a shaman. Michael Taussig was a refugee from the medical profession when he went to southwestern Colombia in 1970. His mind was not on yage, the hallucinogenic vine of the Amazon, as he settled down to fieldwork in the Cauca Valley. Instead, he immersed himself in the political struggles of sugar cane workers, descendants of escaped hacienda slaves who, in the 19th Century, had developed their own smallholder's economy and, on one occasion, sacked the nearby city of Cali. A hundred years later, most of these black peasants had been pushed into miserable barracks town for the plantations. Their farms had been swallowed by a monotonous green sea of agribusiness, broken only by cane mills on the horizon. At first, Taussig ignored the incessant efforts of his landlady to rid her house of sorcery. Unassuming little men, curanderos or healers, came and went with their magic spells and potions. But as he studied land tenure and proletarianization, the labour organizing of the early 1970s was being broken. The political economist turned to the study of myth and magic. Some of the folk healers Taussig met were blacks from the jungles along the Pacific Coast. Others were Inga and Sibundoy Indians from the easternmost chain of the Andes. They talked about miracles, saints and evil winds in a never-ending stream of the magical realism which Gabriel Garcia Marquez has turned into literature. The landscape of southern Colombia, Taussig learned, was teeming with magic and sorcery. The most powerful shamans of all were reputed to be wild Indians living far down the Putumayo River in the Amazon Jungle. With the help of his healer friends, Taussig followed those rumours into the Putumayo. In that now colonized and subdivided jungle, even settlers who despised Indians would come to indigenous healers for cures, of the sorcery which they feared their peons and rivals were directing against them. In yage visions of such men, the image of the wild and savage Indian was also an image of great healing power. Soon Taussig was tracing such images back to the rubber boom around the turn of the century, when thousands of Putumayo Indians died at the hands of the British-financed Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. This is where Taussig begins his new book. Citing travellers' accounts, he delves into the war of representations during the rubber era. Since the rubber patrons were, in effect, destroying their own labour force, the atrocities defy common sense. They contradict political economy as we usually understand it. That is what brings out the symbolic anthropologist in Taussig. Instead of explaining the Putumayo terror in terms of political economy, he argues that it obeyed a deeper symbolic logic, one which also constructed the very sense of what was 'real'. Taussig's first book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980, U. of North Carolina P.), showed how Colombian peasants engage in their own precapitalist critique of modern society. Among other things, they accuse greedy store-owners of turning souls into a commodity which they exchange with the devil. The new book continues the author's symbolic Marxist approach. Clearly a work of interpretation rather than scientific explanation, it reflects the increasing interest of interpretive anthropologists in literary criticism. But unlike some of this new work, it is populated by people as well as interpretive categories. The sometimes hallucinogenic prose, sharpened by the author's yage visions with his shaman friends, conveys the feeling of lived experience in a way which so much anthropology does not. It also creates a rich sense of the way in which reality is contested by different social classes, a sense missing from the omniscient symbolic anthropology of Clifford Geertz. Some readers may find Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man easier to read than to understand, however. One reason is that Taussig interprets his experiences in terms of Marxist aesthetics, particularly those of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, and assumes familiarity with such thinkers. One way to get around this difficulty is look on the book as a literary yage experience. If certain characteristics of yage trips are taken into account, the argument swims into view. The substance itself is a murky brown liquid whose first effect on truth-seekers, generally, is to make them vomit and lose control of their bowels. The violence of the purge tends to be accompanied by images of danger such as wild animals and devils: the yage drinker may fear that he is about to die. But if such trials are overcome, one may be rewarded with more appealing visions, maybe even a climb up to heaven to talk with God. The corollary to the puking, defecating and fear of the early stages of the yage trip are the stories of the rubber boom atrocities at the start of the book. Taussig's subsequent chapters on healing correspond to the yage pilgrim's entry into a magical healing experience of fantasy, of images out of the past and memories of the dead, which he refers to as the 'space of death'. Just as the rubber boom fed powerful images of danger into the collective unconscious, he points out, shamans pull those same images out of it in order to heal. Terror and healing therefore come out of the same 'epistemic murk', a sacred realm of confusion generating images of power. We are all familiar with the romantic strain in anthropology, the belief in the redemptive power of tribal and peasant peoples. Well, Taussig believes that, just as shamans exorcize evil from their patients, their example can help us exorcize the demons of our own culture and history. But this is not the shamanism of Claude L6viStrauss, who interpreted such figures as creators of order. Nor is his shamanism the rational science of divination discovered by Evans-Pritchard among the Azande, or a ritual intended to create a sense of seamless unity as suggested by Victor Turner. Instead, according to Taussig, shamanism is a practical joke. It is an endless series of pranks which break up the search for order, destabilizing and disrupting established categories, and through that leading to a kind of redemption. This is where Taussig finds Marxist aesthetics so illuminating, especially on the subjects of memory and 1. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago U. P., ?23.95)