THE POLITICS OF WITCHCRAFT AMONG THE BANIWA
OF THE NORTHWEST AMAZON
Robin M. Wright (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil) & Luiza Garnelo
(Universidade Federal do Amazonas)
1
The Arawak-speaking Baniwa, of the frontier region between Brazil, Venezuela,
and Colombia, distinguish three specialists in matters of sickness and death: shamans, or
maliiri, or sometimes malikhai iminali, "owners of shamanic knowledge"; "chant
owners", ñapakathi iminali, or spell-blowers, who may perform spells either to benefit
and cure, or to harm in which case they use sorcery; and "poison owners", or manhene
iminali, which can be translated as witches. Each controls specific types of knowledge,
grounded in mythology and ritual practices, and utilizes cosmic powers in distinct ways.
“Poison” and poisoning incidents are an important part of Baniwa culture, central to their
representations of sickness and death. Witches, in particular, specialize in the preparation
and use of poisonous substances (plants, berries, resins, ash, etc.) to kill, and are
attributed dangerous powers associated with spirits of the dead and ancestral sorcerers. In
the ethnographic literature dedicated to the Baniwa people, almost exclusive attention has
been given to the shamans and chant owners. In this paper, we will show that together
they form a system which has shaped and continues to exercise a major influence on
internal and external socio-political relations.
This specialist system extends to various neighboring indigenous peoples of the
Northwest Amazon, such as the Guahibo, Piaroa, Cubeo, Tukano - and also urban
mestiços who have introduced the traditions and techniques of Afro-Brazilian sorcery, or
macumba, into the region - involving them in a region-wide dynamic of aggressive and
defensive actions. Guahibo shamans of the Vichada of Colombia, especially, have
historically served to counteract or undertake vengeance, called iupithatem, on Baniwa
witches and sorcerers.
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To illustrate the micro-dynamics of this system, Part I of this paper will give
attention to a case history of a single witch who, together with his cohorts, operated in a
large Baniwa village for over 20 years, nearly destroying it, until his death in 1999. The
objective of this case history is to understand the sociological and political contexts of
conflicts and aggression based in witchcraft accusations within a single community, as
well as the discourse on motives, the mechanisms for dealing with accusations, and
actions taken over time. What we seek to show is how witchcraft accusations represent a
discourse that reflects real interpersonal conflicts and tensions in community relations, a
discourse that attributes both real and supposed occurrences to ‘marked’ individuals.
While agnatic kin may in fact be held to be immediately responsible for real or supposed
deaths by witchcraft, ultimately vengeance is deflected to more distant categories of
social relations, especially affines, invariably represented in mythic discourse as
treacherous witches.
Part II of this paper seeks to understand the internal relationships of political power
among the Baniwa, focusing on the present-day ethnopolitical movements and organizations
coordinated by young Baniwa leaders. Our research shows that power relationships are
regulated, among other ways, through notions of sickness produced by witchcraft and curing,
which help political agents explore the ressignification of cultural norms, seeking on the one
hand to manage internal conflicts and priorities, and, on the other, to meet new needs generated
by the present situation of contact. Such new needs and demands expose political agents to
witchcraft attacks which seem to operate as a mechanism to control, if not erase, social and
political differentiation in Baniwa society. We present one case study of a political leader who
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has sought to introduce changes to benefit Baniwa society but who, as a result of his political
visibility, has been victimized by witchcraft attacks.
The Baniwa live on the frontier borders of Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia. The
majority live on the Brazilian side, a total of approximately 4,100 people distributed in 93
communities along the Içana River and its tributaries, the Cuiary, Aiary and Cubate; in
several communities of the Upper Rio Negro; and on the lower Xié and Uaupés rivers. In
Venezuela and Colombia, where they are known as Wakuenai and Curripaco, their
population is approximately 6,000 living in communities along the Guainia and its
tributaries, and the upper Içana. The name ‘Baniva’ also refers to another Arawakspeaking group with a distinct language located on the Guainia but, since early colonial
times, it has been applied to all Arawak-speakers in the region of Brazil defined above.
Horticulture and fishing are their principal subsistence activities, although a long
history of contact has involved them in various forms of production for markets and
extractive labor. Their society is organized into approximately a half-dozen exogamous,
phratries, such as the Walipere-dakenai and Hohodene located on the Aiary and Içana
rivers. Each phratry is associated with distinct territories and consists of four or five patrisibs ranked according to a mythic model of agnatic siblings. In the past, sibs were
organized into a system of ritual roles – chiefs, shamans, warriors, and servants. Today,
these roles have very little importance. Sibs vary in size from a few members to very
large groups such as the Hohodene which is nearly equal in population to the Waliperedakenai, the largest sib on the Içana.
4
Part I. Power and Witchcraft on the Aiary: 1900 – 1970s We begin our study
with the broader social, political, and historical contexts of witchcraft on the Aiary River
as a whole, in order to understand the dynamics of witchcraft and sorcery in the large
village of Uapui.
The Hohodene, Walipere-dakenai, and Maulieni are the principal sibs on the
Aiary. Among the Hohodene the local descent group at Uapui is considered the “eldest
brother” of the sib. The Hohodene consider themselves to be the “owners of the Aiary”,
that is, its most ancient and numerous inhabitants. According to their political history, the
sib nearly became extinct during the period of Portuguese slavery and relocations in the
18th Century, but their ancestor chief fled from the lower Rio Negro where the entire sib
had been taken and returned to the Içana. Later, the Walipere-dakenai made an alliance
with the Hohodene chief by offering a daughter in marriage. Thus, the Walipere became
the Hohodene’s principal affines. In the Northwest Amazon, marriage is followed by a
period of uxorilocality, a relation of temporary power of the wife-giving group over the
wife-receiving group, the daughter’s husband owing a period of bride service to his
wife’s father which includes the cutting of gardens, building of houses, etc. This lasts
until the birth of the first child when the natal family return to the husband’s descent
group community.
In the case of the ancestral Hohodene chief, he and his wife went to the
headwaters of the Quiary River, a tributary of the lower Aiary, and had ten children. Over
time, the Hohodene settlements grew in number occupying both the headwaters of the
Quiary and Uaraná rivers. Through an accord they made with the Walipere-dakenai,
these also occupied the Quiary and eventually both began making settlements on the
5
banks of the Aiary. The Hohodene chief was killed by the Walipere-dakenai with poison,
manhene, confirming the extreme ambiguity, already mentioned, perceived to be inherent
in affinal relations: on the one hand, solidarity (dance-festivals, marital ties, mutual
support) and, on the other, enmity and treachery (poisoning through witchcraft, and
sorcery).
By the time of the first extensive ethnographic reports on the peoples of the Aiary,
by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg in 1903, the main riverbanks were
inhabited by the Maulieni sib of the Hohodene phratry, at the headwaters, and the
Walipere-dakenai and Hohodene from the mid- to lower river. The Walipere-dakenai
were at that time the most important politically, with their center at the large and
prosperous longhouse of Cururuquara on the mid-Aiary. The chief of Cururuquara,
according to Koch-Grünberg, was considered to be the “general chief” of the Aiary,
served as an intermediary between the Indians and the rubber patrons; and was
considered a powerful shaman. Undoubtedly, the combination of these factors
consolidated the power of the Walipere-dakenai of the village of Cururuquara over other
sibs and villages of the Aiary.
Yet, it also exposed them to the “envy” and witchcraft of other communities.
During Koch-Grünberg’s visit, he witnessed the death of a Hohodene man in
Cururuquara which the Walipere chief attributed to poison, manhene, given by “hidden
enemies” from the man’s “kin upriver” (most likely, the Maulieni). The Hohodene in the
late ‘70s said that in fact there had been a long history of witchcraft killings between
Walipere of Cururuquara and the Maulieni upriver – each giving poison to the other, in
the context of dance-festivals. The situation reached such a critical point that, according
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to one man, “the people of Cururuquara were nearly finished off.” Indeed, when the
ethnographer Curt Nimuendajú passed through Cururuquara in 1927 on a reconnaissance
visit, he noted that the population had been reduced to about half of what it was in the
beginning of the century.
Eventually, the survivors abandoned the longhouse and formed a new village
slightly upstream, Kuichiali numana, which over time recovered its population so that
today, it is again one of the principal Walipere-dakenai villages on the Aiary. The
important point is that witchcraft is seen as the principal cause of the reduction of a large
and prosperous village, a political center, to a few survivors. Envy at the prosperity and
success of large villages and treachery between affines are certainly among the principal
declared motives for such historic witchcraft wars. On the other hand, it is important to
note that external factors were also responsible for an increase of internal conflicts, for
the early 20th Century was a period of extreme violence with the rubber boom and the
aftermath of the bust as well as epidemic diseases (see Wright, 1998: Part IV).
Similar processes may be seen at work in the history of the village of Uapui, with
the difference that, surprisingly, witchcraft literally tore away at the community from
within, among descent group “brothers” (parallel cousins) although affines were both
originally ‘behind’, or eventually drawn in to the village conflicts and finally, openly
accused as having acted as key intermediaries in witchcraft assaults. It is a paradigmatic
case of the devastating role that witchcraft can have in the history of a community; it is
also exemplary for understanding how actors understood that it escaped control; and it
raises key questions about the nature of witchcraft accusations, and their correlates with
tensions in different levels of social relations. Finally, it illustrates the relations between
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external, imposed change (in this case, missionary intervention) and interpersonal
conflicts which came to be expressed though witchcraft.
Witchcraft in Uapui: 1970s – 1999 . As Cururuquara was gradually losing its
political strength in the 1920s and ‘30s, Uapui was emerging as a new center, but of the
Hohodene. In the early 1920s, Marcellino Euzébio, grandfather of Mandu (or Manuel da
Silva) – one of the principal actors in our story -, cleared the woods on the banks of the
rapids of Uapui and built the first longhouse there, larger than the one at Cururuquara.
The place had not been occupied for many generations although people often went there
to sharpen their stone axes on the rocks of the rapids. Uapui for all Baniwa was and is the
sacred “center of the world, umbilicus of the world” where there are numerous
petroglyphs which refer to the stories of creation. While it is a sacred place of origin, it is
paradoxically also a place of “poison”; in the dry season, when the river is low, numerous
holes appear in the rocks of the rapids, inside of which there are various kinds of poison –
carbon, ash, “little stones” - that, according to the shamans, anyone but most especially
witches may gather and combine with their plant poisons obtained from certain hills in
southern Venezuela to produce an arsenal of weapons to kill.
By the 1950s, Marcellino Euzébio, the “owner of the house” and chief at Uapui
had died, it is said, because of manhene given by the Walipere-dakenai. His sons had
constructed three or four other longhouses on the locale thus giving the place an air of
prosperity. Yet, with the second rubber boom, many of Marcellino’s sons migrated to
Venezuela, leaving only three in the village: Keruami, Seraphim, and Joaquim. Salesian
missionaries sought at this time to gain a foothold on the upper Aiary in order to stop the
advances of Protestant evangelicalism, then a fast-growing movement among the Baniwa.
8
Seraphim’s sons (Mandu and his brothers), Joaquim, and Keruami, then chief of the
village, allied with the Salesian priests against the Protestants for, as Mandu said, the
Catholic priest was a “worker” and sent them material to build new houses.
In the early 1970s, the Salesians sent an itinerant missionary to Uapui to start a
grade school for the children of the upper Aiary. Many people from the upriver
communities sent their children to the school and even built houses in Uapui to occupy
during the school year. Uapui thus became a political, social, and economic center of the
Aiary. It was also a religious center, with five shamans and some of the most
knowledgeable Hohodene elders who had protected their traditions against the onslaught
and repression of the Protestants.
Yet, as in the case of Cururuquara, this prosperity became vulnerable to the envy
of those on the periphery, affines in particular. But in this case, it was the youngest son of
Joaquim, Emí, who for various reasons exiled himself from the rest of the community and
resorted to witchcraft to eat away at the prosperity of his own “brothers” (parallel
cousins). In 1976, Emí had publicly declared his intent to take vengeance against the
entire community of Uapui, apparently in return for the death of one of his children in an
accident in the rapids and specifically against Mandu and his family in return for a severe
sickness (probably tuberculosis, but which he interpreted as manhene) which nearly
killed his eldest son.
Emí was thereafter marked as a witch, manhene-iminali, who had poisoned
several people in Uapui. Whether all of the accusations leveled against him were based in
fact was of less importance than that, due to his public declaration, he became the
principal suspect of any deaths. It was only after Emí had died of his own excesses in the
9
1990s, that the Hohodene explained in greater detail the uncontrolled chaos provoked by
his actions and the deeper and more sinister means he used to realize his objectives.
Summarizing briefly the events (related in detail in Wright, 1998: 164-75), Emí
had a long-standing enmity with the chief Mandu, which went back to the time when they
were boys, and which was aggravated by a dispute over succession to the position of
village capitão in which the Catholic missionaries had intervened supporting Mandu.
Emí, by traditional right of succession, had been capitão, but people complained to the
missionaries that he was always away fishing and did nothing for the community; rather,
the community worked for his personal projects. Hence the missionaries decided to
remove Emí from his post and put Mandu, then vice-capitão in charge.
During the decade of the 1970s, eight people were supposed to have been
poisoned with manhene, seven of whom died (all close relatives of Mandu) and one
survived though severely debilitated. In all cases, Mandu and other shamans suspected
Emí; in several cases, the dying victims confirmed these suspicions by “telling” other
family members who had given them poison. As Mandu said in 1977, following the death
of his father, “he [Emí] has given manhene to six people already. He is the only one in
Uapui who has manhene. His only thought is to kill (manhekada lima). He wants to kill
us all, so that only he remains. He sees the world that way and always has.” Besides
being a clear statement of Emí’s having lost control over his thought and ability to live
together in the community, it was a clear reminder of the myths of the Eenunai, powerful
witches who sought to kill all of the creator/transformer Nhiãperikuli’s, kin in the
beginning of time. Despite Mandu’s skillful politics, none of his strategies (e.g., calling
Emí to participate in community activities) seemed to work in controlling Emi’s
10
unbounded desire to ruin the community, creating a generalized climate of fear and
terror. It was only when two shamans decided to seek vengeance for their father’s death
years before, by going to powerful Guahibo (or Wanhíwa) sorcerers in Colombia, that
Emí backed off on his campaign, but only temporarily (i.e., their voyage had nothing to
do with seeking vengeance against Emí since their father – a powerful prophet – had been
killed by other shamans; nevertheless, since their intentions were not made public until
much later, it served as a warning to Emí).
In his retrospective explanations, Mandu affirmed that things began to get out of
hand at the time when the itinerant Salesian missionary began to take up residence in the
village in the early 1970s. Before then, he said, there had been cases of manhene but they
were very few and under control. Shortly after the Salesian missionary began teaching in
Uapui, she hired an assistant, a Uanana girl from the upper Uaupés who was Mandu’s
mother’s brother’s daughter. It must have been during this time that one of Emí’s
children accidentally drowned in the falls and his eldest son suffered an attack of
tuberculosis. For, unexpectedly, someone in the village gave manhene to the Uanana girl
and soon after, she died in her home village on the Uaupés. Her father warned Mandu
that it was someone from Uapui who had given poison to his daughter and demanded that
something be done in retribution for her death. Mandu didn’t know who it could have
been. The girl’s father eventually took a lock of her hair to the Wanhíwa shamans at the
town of San José del Guaviare in Venezuela and paid them to take vengeance against his
daughter’s killer. According to him, the Wanhíwa ritually cooked her “filth”(exuviae) –
i.e., parts of her body or clothing which are used in counter-witchcraft killings - and
showed them who was responsible: Emí had undertaken the witchcraft in collusion with
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his affine, Júlio, a Walipere-dakenai, who had planned the killing with him and had
involved Júlio’s kin João, affine to one of the principal Hohodene shamans of the Aiary
.It was discovered that it was the son of Júlio’s kin João, also a Walipere-dakenai, who
had poisoned the girl. Júlio had given poison to João’s son, a schoolboy, to put in the
girl’s food; subsequently, the boy, an innocent accomplice to the crime, was killed by
iupithatem (shamanic vengeance by the Guahibo). João was also involved in the story, as
was clearly indicated by the Wanhíwa inquest. Once this became public knowledge, years
after the Uanana girl’s death, João was forced to leave Uapui. He decided to live for
awhile in São Gabriel da Cachoeira; later, he moved to the Orinoco and then to the town
of Puerto Ayachucho on the Atabapo River in Venezuela, where he lives today. Júlio also
went to the Orinoco (according to him, not because of the inquest, but because his son
had “gotten a sickness” in Uapui) but there, he was ultimately killed by shamanic
vengeance. In short, Júlio, a Walipere-dakenai, acted together with Emí and João in
plotting and executing the death of the schoolteacher’s assistant at Uapui.
Mandu believed furthermore that his father and all the others of his family who
had died or were poisoned in the 1970s and ‘80s were victims of this scheme. According
to Mandu, Emí was the first to use poison on others; then he began convincing Júlio to
join him in his plan to “ruin the community.” All the shamans of the upper Aiary,
including João’s and Júlio’s affines, knew who was responsible for the increase in deaths
at Uapui but could do nothing because of “fear” of reprisal by Emí and his cohorts
against their families; because Emí after all was a sib brother (although this evidently was
not a deterrent for Emí whose ‘thought’ – i.e., desire to kill - by then was completely out
of control); and because the trip to the Wanhíwa to seek vengeance is costly and
12
dangerous. Emí’s scheme was driven by vengeance against Mandu for Emí’s son’s
sickness, but also by pure envy because the itinerant missionary always called on Mandu
to undertake the mission’s plans. Later, when Mandu was able to get a paid job to keep
the airstrip clean behind the village of Uapui, Emí’s envy grew even deeper – how could
one become so wealthy and prosperous, while he remained forever in debt to the
merchants ? It is not difficult to see how Emí’s envy over time grew like a cancer
consuming his being with hatred and jealousy.
Thus, Mandu believed that it was for all of these reasons that Emí poisoned his
mother, then his father, then his uncle. As his father lay dying, he warned Mandu that
“this Emí has so much poison, if you don’t kill him, he will kill all of you. Only he has
manhene.” Even Emí’s elder brother, a shaman, confirmed this to Mandu: “Don’t you
know?” he said, “he is a poison-owner, he is full of poison.” But the only solution to this
was through the Wanhíwa for, as Mandu affirmed, “we of Uapui go to the Wanhíwa; it is
they who kill for us.” A local practice, according to Mandu for, the people of the
community of Ucuqui, a short distance upriver, go to the macumbeiros of São Gabriel
and even Cubeo shamans to perform such services. It took several years for Mandu to get
together the resources sufficient to make the journey in 1989 and even so, according to
informants, the Wanhíwa failed to kill Emí – the only sign that they sought vengeance
was that a stone fell on the roof of Emí’s house, nothing more. A full decade was to pass
before the case was finally settled.
The date October 06, 1999, remains marked in the minds of all those who suffered
and survived poisoning attempts by Emí, for it was when Emí died. According to Mandu,
Emí’s death was due to a severe infection in his stomach. Nobody could say how it
13
began. Months before his death, Emí discovered he had an ulcer and consented to be sent
to the hospital in Mitu, Colombia, where he was submitted to surgery. People say that he
was prohibited from drinking anything following the surgery but he disobeyed orders.
Also, when he left the hospital, he became, according to several people, “gluttonous”,
observing no restrictions on eating or drinking. He eventually returned to Uapui and there
resumed his previous way of life, again without observing any food restrictions (on
pepper, for example), drinking manioc beer, caxiri, and even doing heavy manual labor.
Expectably, he developed a new infection, this time external, which grew to the size of a
tumor. Advised that if he didn’t take care of it, he would surely die, he went to the
Protestant mission at Tunui on the Içana River, and later, the Casa do Índio of the FUNAI
(National Indian Foundation) in Manaus. By that time, the infection had generalized and
Emí shortly after died. The Delegate of FUNAI, who knew of Emí’s long history of
witchcraft in Uapui, paid to have him buried in Manaus in the FUNAI cemetery on the
banks of the Tarumã River.
As in life, Emí remained in death an outsider to his
community, this time permanently. He died, evidently, of his own excesses, not because
of iupithatem nor any other shamanic actions, or at least no-one cited this as the reason. It
was no doubt a relief to the villagers of Uapui that neither his ghost nor any part of his
being would affect their lives again.
It may be seen that Emí’s actions were driven by a series of motives that went far
beyond vengeance for the loss of a child and his eldest son’s sickness. After all, his elder
brother, a shaman, had suffered the loss of two sons by manhene, had discovered who
was responsible, took vengeance, and that was the end of it. Nor did it have to do with his
father’s death by sorcery which was attributed to the Cubeo and not to his sib-brothers.
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First of all, there was his incessant and intense hatred for Mandu which had a long
history going back to the time when they were boys - “they have always been enemies,”
people said. This enmity eventually extended to Mandu’s entire family, fostered by his
wife’s father, a Walipere-dakenai, who ‘initiated’, so to speak, Emí into the practice of
witchcraft, using the young man as fodder to avenge Mandu’s father’s failure to
reciprocate his gift of four daughters in marriage. Later, Emi’s hatred was fueled by his
“envy” that they were the most numerous and successful family of the village. It was
Mandu and his brothers who had expanded the village, who were supported by the
Salesian missionaries, and who had greater success in negotiating with the Whites. In
other words, they had greater access to economic and political power within the village.
Whenever people referred to Mandu, the majority of the villagers said they “waited for”
and “listened to” his words, his counsel, and assessments. They “followed” his orders to
do community work projects, for he always spoke with certainty and vision. Coupled
with his shamanic powers, which ranked him among the “true shamans” of the Aiary,
Mandu had an unequalled prestige which was in large part responsible for why Uapui
was for many years the political and religious center of the Aiary.
By contrast, Emí was neither successful in his relations with the missionaries nor
with the merchants, to whom he was always in debt. Ironically, he was in constant debt
because he would buy expensive new merchandise – such as battery-operated record
players – that he thought would attract more people to his house for parties. Instead, they
looked on him with wonder and pity – how would he ever pay his debts to the merciless
merchants ? It was this ‘pity’ which even some of the victims of Emí’s witchcraft cited
as motives for not taking vengeance against him immediately. Why else would the people
15
of Uapui allow this case to extend for so long, unless they were simply waiting for him to
burn up in his own excesses, which seems entirely plausible. And, after all, he was a
close kin, parallel cousin, and informants were adamant in denying that they would ever
kill a sib brother or parallel cousin with poison. For that reason, the expulsion of two
Walipere-dakenai, Emí’s accomplices, from the community and the deaths of two of
them by Iupithatem represented the vengeance that the family of Mandu sought.
Beyond their ‘pity’ for him, Uapui villagers sought to treat Emí with tolerance
and as an equal. For example, in helping him clear his gardens – as they did for anyone in
the village who requested – although they never “followed” nor “respected” Emí’s freelygiven assessments for, according to the villagers, he only acted in the interests of his own
projects not that of the community. Frustrated in his inability to become a center of
community attention, he resorted to resistance against Mandu by refusing to participate in
community projects or, if he did, by turning them into disorderly affairs which
accomplished nothing. In this resistance he had the support of his affine, Júlio, who
likewise often refused to follow or obey Mandu’s calls to participate in community
projects. Between the “community” and self-interests, there was always a rift between
those who followed and those few who resisted Mandu which produced considerable
enmity.
But Emí’s envy and hatred became an obsessive desire which would only be
satisfied when he had killed everyone in the village or, more specifically, everyone in
Mandu’s descent group. As Mandu said, “one after another, until only he remained.”
Forever suspicious that others might poison food they offered him, he was a master at
surprise attacks.
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Concluding this case history, the principal motives for witchcraft among the
Baniwa do not seem to be any different from those discovered by ethnologists in
numerous other societies of the world: envy, jealousy, love affairs, etc. And, as others
have observed and analyzed, these motives can certainly be related to ‘structural
tensions’ in society which would have to do, in the specific case of the Baniwa, with
questions of power and equality in gender relations (the struggle between men and
women over the ‘knowledge’ essential to social reproduction is a central theme in
Baniwa myths, and is the source of sexual tension and violence); and the accumulation of
political, economic, and symbolic power which is contradictory to a relatively egalitarian
society. In the recent history of Uapui, it was explicitly the case that the conflicts between
sib-brothers and the outbreak of witchcraft accusations were exacerbated when the
Catholic missionaries began to interfere in local politics, and assume a greater presence in
the village with their projects of a new school, increased production in artwork, etc.
Baniwa witchcraft, as we have seen, may assume proportions which, like warfare,
knows no limits in the sense that it may become a desire to kill without end, until
satisfied. In such cases, when hatred knows no bounds (when the only thought of the
person is to kill, manhekada lima), if the enemies belong to the same sib, as the case of
Mandu and Emí, then the witch is ‘marked’ by the community as a permanent outsider,
equivalent to a spirit of the dead, and he will utilize his affinal relations to realize his
deadly objectives of vengeance.
Another fundamental aspect of Baniwa witchcraft is its extreme secrecy. ‘One
doesn’t know’, ‘one can’t know’ who is responsible, although an observer easily deduces
that actors are perfectly well aware of all that is going on and even participate in the
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process of vengeance. ‘One doesn’t know’, the literal translation of manhene, is in a
sense a perfect cover which throws the responsibility of vengeance up to the level of
cosmological processes, i.e., ultimate causes, referring to the divinity who is responsible
for the origin of all witchcraft and sorcery, Kuwai – the archetype of witch and sorcerer
who is, at the same time, the primordial healer/shaman in disguise (see Wright, 1998) –
and who is also shrouded in secrecy. This secrecy is reinforced by symbolic violence, the
same reprisal that occurs if ‘the secret’ is told – i.e., a violent death by poisoning if the
sacred flutes are exposed in public or women and the uninitiated see them.
It is noteworthy that the Baniwa witchcraft and sorcery are part of a region-wide
system of vengeance exchange which extends from the Tukanoan-speaking peoples to the
east to the Guahibo to the north and, today, to the urban migrants and mestiços of São
Gabriel da Cachoeira. The means for undertaking vengeance through the use of the ‘filth’
of the deceased victim is a form that is found in cultures the world over and is common
among the neighboring Tukanoan-speaking peoples of the Uaupés. For the Baniwa,
however, what is distinctive is that the search for justice is initiated from within by the
kin of the deceased but realized from without, by distant and powerful sorcerers, beyond
the control of Baniwa shamans and witches. Behind this is a logic that also appears in
Baniwa myths. In order to realize vengeance for the death of his kin by his affines, the
creator Nhiãperikuli uses all manner of artifices to deflect the responsibility of vengeance
to the outside and unknown. Nhiãperikuli is a trickster who succeeds in killing his
enemies by feigning, through magical and secretive actions at a distance, just as the
Guahibo. Such artifices and deflection to external causes are likewise essential to Baniwa
witchcraft and sorcery.
18
Part II. Witchcraft in the context of the current ethnopolitical movement among
the Baniwa. Since the 1980s, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Amazon have been
engaged in a political movement of major importance. They have formed a pan-Indian regional
Federation and over 30 local associations. The Baniwa have several such associations. The
case study we shall now present is of a young Baniwa leader of one association who, due to his
great success in the movement, became the victim of witchcraft which put his entire career, not
to mention his life and the lives of his family, at stake
This case study thus focuses on understanding internal relationships of political power,
among the Baniwa today. Our research shows that power relationships are regulated, among other
ways, through notions of sickness due to witchcraft, and curing, which help political agents
explore the ressignification of cultural norms, seeking on the one hand, to manage internal
conflicts and priorities, and, on the other, to meet new needs generated by the present situation.
A case of manhene poisoning. Maurílio is the president of an important Baniwa
indigenous organization. In his activities he obtained considerable success and prestige, the
head of a very successful program of indigenous education, sustainable development and
commercialization of the communities' agricultural production. In the health field he has
led Baniwa participation in deliberative councils of public health policies, exercising
technical and pedagogic coordination and obtained a relative fame beyond his ethnic group.
In Brazilian
public health institutions, his work in the indigenous organization is
recognized as qualified, efficient and consonant with the communities' demands and needs.
In his interactions with the systems of health, education and sustainable
development, Maurílio has had access to a variety of educational resources about such
themes, and has had the opportunity to participate in several training courses; actually he
is one of the most qualified leaders of the indigenous movement of the upper Rio Negro.
Such qualifications are not wasted for he exercises his knowledge in an inventive way,
19
demonstrating an enviable ability to create communicative processes and develop a type
of “intercultural translation” about public social policies in Brazil. In this way, he is
working to subsidize village leaders, aiding them to understand the proposals and
decisions taken by the authorities, which can influence the daily life of the indigenous
population.
His filiation to the Walipere Dakenai sib, a prestigious sib in the Walipere
phratry, gives him a privileged place in the Baniwa world. To this prestige, he has added
his political career and confidence resulting from the proper management of financial and
material resources, obtained through projects and partnerships with NGO and
government entities. In the Upper Rio Negro, many of the resources and actions of
government social policies have been administered through ethnopolitical entities,
qualifying them to obtain government resources for the execution of those tasks; beyond
these resources, the indigenous organizations control a certain number of employed
positions, mainly in the health field. The control of scarce and desired goods, makes the
leaders privileged mediators between the public power and the indigenous societies they
represent.
In spite of that career (or as a consequence of it) Maurílio was poisoned with
manhene. Physically he presented symptom such as diarrhea, digestive indisposition,
acute weight loss and intermittent headaches. Such symptoms are accompanied by others
of a more subjective character, such as nightmares, difficulties in concentration, sensation
of weakness, depression and an overwhelming certainty that he, or one of his relatives,
will succumb under the action of the poison.
20
The thematic content of his nightmares was shamanic aggression. The patient saw
himself, or some strange and menacing people, eating tapir heart, the totemic animal of
his sib. On other occasions he dreamed of objects that characterize his daily activities, in
danger of imminent destruction; for example, he saw the boat in which he usually
travels, turned over and sunk in the waterfalls.
During his sickness, the patient tried several types of treatment; initially he sought
domestic care such as the use of medicinal plants, later he went to the city where
consulted a “benzedeira” or folk healer from another ethnic group. She diagnosed his
sickness as a Iupinai [spirit of the forest] attacki. Showing no recovery, he appealed to
Christian prayers and to the owners of chants. All these procedures generated
improvement of the symptoms, but they didn’t cure his sickness. As a practitioner of
evangelical protestant religion, the patient hesitated in accepting shamanic treatment,
offered by a Puinave medicine man. That traditional therapist diagnosed the sickness as
due to the attack of a powerful shaman, hired to kill him with mánhene.
Besides the treatment sessions, the Puinave shaman prescribed the use of
medicinal plants and a severe dietary restriction. The patient improved, but he was forced
to interrupt the treatment, partly due to the high cost of the treatment and, partly, to the
impossibility of observing the prescribed diets, because he continued with his schedule of
trips, which did not permit the correct execution of the diet necessary for a poisoned
person.
The symptoms aggravated and he renewed the treatment with medicinal plants
which improved his health. Soon after, however, he attended an assembly of the local
indigenous movement; there he ate the meat of a furry animal, a type of food strictly
21
forbidden to a poisoned person. After this, the symptoms became aggravated and he went
from bad to worse within several months,.
Many months after the beginning of his problems he sought the care of a
Hohodene shaman, his maternal uncle. The traditional therapist identified the abdomen as
the focus of the sickness, and an area below the navel as the place of action of the poison;
the headache would be the consequence of the digestive lesion. Several sessions of
shamanic cure were done, partially alleviating the symptoms. The diagnosis of shamanic
aggression with poisoning was confirmed, but finally, the uncle pronounced himself
unable to cure his nephew completely if he continued with his ethnopolitical activities.
According to the shaman, the political ability and the successful work of Maurílio
made him a target of poisoners, who envied his influential position and the goods
obtained through his work. Even if the cure of the current episode of sickness could be
obtained, the prediction of the shaman was that other aggressions would happen. He
warned the patient that the action of the poisoners could also affect any member of his
family, if he
insisted on maintaining his work in the indigenous movement. The
poisoning would be “in retribution for” (likoada) or a “revenge” (in the form of envy and
aggression) for the differentiation, or inequality, produced by his political work.
This warning threw the patient into a dilemma: he had to decide whether to
maintain, or abandon the political work to which he had devoted all his efforts. In the
first hypothesis he would live with the perennial expectation of death or chronic
sickness for him or for a relative; in this case, added to the suffering of his own sickness,
he would be blamed for contributing, although involuntarily, to the death of a kin. The
second alternative would allow him to preserve his body and health, but in exchange for
22
the sacrifice of the ideals that govern his life and future plans for ethnopolitical work. In
his first option the risk was to lose his life, in the second, the risk was to lose the essence
of the political project that guides his existence.
Contemplating his problem, the patient recollected that he has always had a great
concern for not accumulating goods for himself and for his family, in order to avoid a
perceptible differentiation in the Baniwa way of life. He tried to avoid the infractions
of behavior that, in his culture, bring on people's envy and thus deflect aggression by
mánhene. However, he knows that although his actions were governed by his concern
for redistributing, in an egalitarian way, the goods obtained by the entity he
administers, the prestige and financial and administrative success of his organization
would be enough to generate that type of reaction. Although he did not retain any
resources for himself nor for his nuclear family, he incurred the displeasure of other
leaders; for instance, he was forced to negate an important chief’s expectations,
member of his phratry, who wanted to obtain a privileged quota of resources for
himself, in exchange for the political support rendered to the sick leader, who was at
the beginning of his career.
The final result of the case: the leader obtained a cure from the symptoms through
biomedical treatment, but he expects a new poison attack which in his opinion, may
happen at any moment; such expectation altered his habits of sharing meals with other
Baniwa. In order to confront the perennial threat, he took an unexpected decision: he
discussed the problem in an assembly of the villages of his area, speaking publicly about
a theme that had only been approached in secrecy by shamans, patients and relatives.
23
The example described synthesizes Baniwa conceptions of sickness, conflict and
social order (see also Garnelo & Wright, 2001). Native ideology, which puts poison onto
the plane of alterity, is contradicted by the data that indicates that the possible aggressors
– (never publicly identified) - were consanguineal kin of the victim. Manhene, a key
element in the social structure of the group, which offers an explanatory model and a
means for action in managing the disputes of ancestral hostilities, is updated in the
context of the appropriation of goods and services generated by public policies, in the
dispute for employed positions, industrialized products and in the alliance
with
institutions and non-indigenous spaces of power.
The sick leader is stuck on the crossroads of history. On the one hand he is inserted
into the wider context of the Brazilian ethnopolitical movement, that seeks to provide
Amazonian indigenous people with native mediators, capable of generating creative
solutions for the improvement of public policies which are established slowly on
indigenous lands. On the other hand, however, he is a member of a specific culture, that
is governed by the inhibition of social inequality; his culture has in manhene, an
important support for egalitarianismii. Poison appears as an efficient form to control the
individualization and
the accumulation of symbolic and material power, obtained
through the increment of the capacity to interfere in public politics. Surprisingly manhene
is an element with a deep insertion in tradition, that becomes a safeguard for such
contemporary initiatives, as the ethical use of resources obtained through ethnopolitical
initiatives.
In this case, the use of poison can be considered as a form of political intervention
which normalizes the relationships and guarantees social reproduction; appeasing or
24
suppressing the transgression represented by the individualization and autonomy of the
younger generations. However, the strategy that impedes differentiation - and maintains
one of the pillars of Baniwa social order - also hinders the actions of innovative
members of the group, who are internal sources of social transformation. As, we may
add, it did in the case of Mandú and his family. The changes brought about by the
ethnopolitical movement, although desired and successful,
contain
subversion of a social order which tries to protect itself, through
the seeds of
strategies like
poisoning.
The Baniwa face new situations and new contradictions that demand political agents
to overcome the limits of the old categories of understanding reality and guide people to
develop creative and satisfactory schemes of action. The characteristics of contemporary
indigenous politics demand singular and innovative subjects, capable of leading new
interaction forms into the non-indigenous world. The execution of a path like that
implies, necessarily, the induction of difference and individualization. In the current
moment, the terms of this equation seem to be mutually exclusive and the impasse has
been solved by the sacrifice of individual change agents. However, the participants of
that social drama are clear about the need to accommodate the two possibilities, subject
to the penalty of perpetuating, or deepening their historical exclusion of social benefits.
References
Garnelo Pereira, Maria Luiza. 2002. Poder, Hierarquia e Reciprocidade: Os caminhos da
política e da saúde no Alto Rio Negro. Doctoral thesis. Universidade Estadual de
Campinas, Campinas, S.P.
25
Garnelo Pereira , M.L. & Robin Wright. 2001. Sickness, Health and Health Services:
social representations, practices, and demands among the Baniwa. Cadernos de Saúde
Pública. 17 (2): 273-284.
Wright, Robin. 1998. Cosmos, Self and History in Baniwa Religion. For Those Unborn.
Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Wright, Robin & Neil Whitehead. 2004. In Darkness and Secrecy. The Anthropology of
Assault Sorcery in Amazonia. Duke University Press.
i
Iupinai are spirits of the forest, who lost the condition of proto-humans for they transgressed the rules of
shamanic learning indicated by Kuwai; the sicknesses caused by them are an aggressive response to the
disputes between them and the mythical ancestors of the Baniwa, for the use of animal and vegetable life,
of which they are the guardians. Such conflicts are today reproduced by humans.
ii
It is worth noting that other Baniwa leaders that have been outstanding in ethnopolitical activities, have
been so at the expense of physical and emotional distance from their group of origin; all of them recognize
poison as a permanent threat to their lives and careers.
26