The Cosmic Serpent Read Free Page B

here now. Then, he would swallow his tobacco. Meanwhile, I would watch him and ask him what he was doing. The first time I saw him cure, he said: ‘Very well, bring me the sick baby.’ First, he touched the baby, then took his pulse: ‘Ah, I see, he’s in a bad way. The illness is here.’ Then, he started sucking the spot [suction noise]. Then, he spat it out like this: ptt! Then, again, and a third time: ptt! There, very good. Then he told the mother: ‘Something has shocked this little one, so here is a herb to bathe him. After that, let him rest.’ The next day, one could already see an improvement in the baby’s health. So I took a liking to it and decided to learn. Ooh! The first time I had tobacco, I didn’t sleep.”
    â€œHow old were you?”
    â€œI was eight years old. I thought tobacco was sweet. But it was so bitter that I couldn’t even swallow it. My uncle said: ‘That’s the secret of tobacco.’ Then, he showed me everything. He gave me a tobacco gourd. Little by little, I learned to take it and to resist. Fairly quickly, I stopped vomiting.”
    â€œDid your uncle also teach you how to use ayahuasca?”
    â€œNo, I learned that later, with my father-in-law. ...”
    Over the following months, I recorded approximately twenty hours on the meanders of Carlos’s life. He spoke Spanish better than anybody in Quirishari; in the past, he had taught it to other Ashaninca in an Adventist school. However, his grammar was flexible, and he talked with unexpected rhythms, punctuating his sentences with pauses, gestures, and noises that completed his vocabulary nicely, but that are difficult to put into written English. Furthermore, his narrative style varied from a first-person account to the commentary of a narrator who also plays the roles of the characters. This is no doubt more appropriate for oratory, or radio plays, than for a text.
    By taping Carlos’s life story, I was not trying to establish the point of view of a “typical” Ashaninca. Rather, I was trying to grasp some specifics of local history by following the personal trajectory of one man. In particular, I was interested in questions of territory in the Pichis Valley: Who owned which lands, and since when? Who used which resources? As it happens, the overall history of the Ashaninca in the twentieth century is closely defined by the progressive expropriation of their territory by outsiders, as Carlos’s life story reveals.
    Carlos’s birthplace, the Perene Valley, was the first Ashaninca region to undergo colonization. By 1940, the majority of indigenous lands in the area had already been confiscated. Ten years later, Carlos the young orphan had followed the mass migration of the Perene Ashaninca toward the Pichis Valley, where the forests were still free of colonists and diseases. After living twenty-six years in this new homeland, Carlos had been elected to the presidency of the congress of the Association of the Indigenous Communities of the Pichis (ACONAP). The goal of this organization was to defend indigenous lands from a new onslaught of colonization. Carlos was forced to abandon his position after four years when he was bitten by a snake. At this point, he retired to Quirishari to cure himself “with ayahuasca and other plants.” When I appeared five years later, he was living like a retired politician, satisfied with the tranquillity, but nostalgic for yesteryear’s struggles. He did not seem displeased at the idea of confiding his memoirs to a visiting anthropologist.
    Over the course of our conversations, I often asked Carlos about the places he had lived, directing the conversation toward the solid ground of social geography. But he would regularly answer in ways that pointed toward shamanism and mythology. For example:
    â€œThe earthquake in the Perene, was that in 1948 or 1947?”
    â€œ1947.”
    â€œAnd were you there at the