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 Yaminahua of 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 knowledge from 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, however, 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.-déc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 449-468.