west and to the upstream regions of the world above.
Women do not give birth in the longhouse, but in a garden
located inland, upstream, and behind the house—also the
west. The newborn baby is first bathed in the river, then
brought into the longhouse through the rear women’s door.
Confined inside the house for about a week with its mother
and father, the baby is again bathed in the river and given
a name. Thus, in cosmological terms, babies do indeed come
from women, water, the river, and the west.
In the Tukanoan view, masa, the word for “people,” is
a relative concept. It can refer to one group as opposed to
another, to all Tukanoans as opposed to their non-Tukanoan
neighbors, to Indians as opposed to whites, to human beings
as opposed to animals, and finally to living things, including
trees, as opposed to inanimate objects. In myths and sha-
manic discourse, animals are people and share their culture.
They live in organized longhouse communities, plant gar-
dens, hunt and fish, drink beer, wear ornaments, take part
in intercommunity feasts, and play their own sacred instru-
ments. All creatures that can see and hear, communicate with
their own kind, and act intentionally are “people”—but peo-
ple of different kinds. They are different because they have
different bodies, habits, and behaviors and see things from
different bodily perspectives. Just as stars see living humans
as dead spirits, so also do animals see humans as animals. In
everyday life, people emphasize their difference from ani-
mals, but in the spirit world, which is also the world of ritual,
shamanism, dreaming, and ayahuasca visions (ayahuasca
being a psycho-active liquid that is drunk on ceremonial oc-
casions), perspectives are merged, differences are abolished,
the past is the present, and people and animals remain as one.
In Amazonia, ritual specialists with special powers and
access to esoteric religious knowledge are often referred to as
“shamans.” In order to operate successfully in the world, all
adult men must be shamans to some extent. But those who
are publicly recognized as such are individuals with greater
ritual knowledge and a special ability to “read” what lies be-
hind sacred narratives; they are individuals who choose to use
their skills and knowledge on behalf of others, and who ac-
quire recognition as experts. With rare exceptions, ritual ex-
perts are always men, but the capacity of women to menstru-
ate and to bear children is spoken of as the female equivalent
of shamanic power.
Tukanoans distinguish between two quite different ritu-
al specialists, the yai and the kumu. The yai corresponds to
the prototypical Amazonian shaman whose main tasks in-
volve dealing with other people and with the outside world
of animals and the forest. The shaman is an expert in curing
the sickness and diseases caused by sorcery from vengeful
creatures and jealous human beings. Yai means “jaguar,” a
term that gives some indication of the status of the shaman
in Tukanoan society. The kumu is more a savant and a priest
than a shaman. His powers and authority are founded on an
exhaustive knowledge of mythology and ritual procedures,
knowledge that only comes after years of training and prac-
tice. As a knowledgeable senior man, the kumu is typically
also a headmen and leader of his community and will exercise
considerable authority over a much wider area. Compared
to the sometimes morally ambiguous yai, the kumu enjoys
a much higher status and also a much greater degree of trust,
which relates to his prominent ritual role. The kumu plays
an important role in the prevention of illness and misfortune.
He also officiates at rites of passage and effects the major
transitions of birth, initiation, and death, transitions that en-
sure the socialization of individuals and the passage of the
generations, and which maintain ordered relations between
the ancestors and their living descendants. The kumu’s other
major function is to officiate at dance feasts, drinking parties,
and ceremonial exchanges and to conduct and supervise the
rituals at which the sacred instruments are played, rituals that
involve direct contact with dead ancestors.The yearly round is punctuated by a series of collective
feasts, each with its own songs, dances, and appropriate mu-
sical instruments, which mark important events in the
human and natural worlds—births, initiations, marriages,
deaths, the felling and planting of gardens, the building of
houses, the migrations of fishes and birds, and the seasonal
availability of forest fruits and other gathered foods. The
feasts take three basic forms: cashirís (beer feasts), dabukuris
(ceremonial exchanges), and rites involving sacred flutes and
trumpets. The rituals involving sacred musical instruments
are the fullest expression of the Indians’ religious life, for they
synthesize a number of key themes: ancestry, descent and
group identity, sex and reproduction, relations between men
and women, growth and maturation, death, regeneration,
and the integration of the human life cycle with cosmic time.
(For a complete description and analysis of these rites, and
the symbolism of the sacred instruments, see Hugh-Jones,
1979.)
Effective missionary penetration among the Tukanoans
began towards the end of the nineteenth century with the
arrival of the Franciscans. The Franciscans, and the Salesians
who followed them, saw native religion through the lens of
their own closed religious categories. Without knowing or
caring about what Tukanoan religion meant, the missiona-
ries set about destroying one civilization in the name of an-
other, burning down the Indians’ longhouses, destroying
their feather ornaments, persecuting the shamans, and expos-
ing the sacred instruments to women and children. They or-
dered people to build villages of neatly ordered single-family
houses and send their children to mission boarding schools,
where they were taught to reject their parents’ and their an-
cestors’ ways of life.
If the missionaries were resented for their attack on In-
dian culture, they were also welcomed as a source of manu-
factured goods, as defenders of the Indians against the worst
abuses of the rubber gatherers, and as the providers of the
education that the Indian children would need to make the
most of their new circumstances. From the 1920s onwards,
the Salesians established a chain of outposts throughout theSOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST AMAZON 8623