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Shamanism, Music, and Healing in Two Contrasting South American Cultural Areas
Abstract
Healing, as an aspect of shamanism, occurs in a variety of forms wherever it is practiced. Within a diversity of South American cultures and indigenous populations, supernaturally caused illnesses are cured by spiritually knowledgeable specialists (shamans) who, while in trance, encounter illness-causing spirits through dialogue or combat. This article focuses on two contrasting cultures from two widely different regions of South America: the Warao Amerindians from the rain forest of the Orinoco River Delta in northeastern Venezuela and the people from the desert of Peru's northern coast, some of whom are possibly descendants of Moche or other pre-Spanish Amerindians. As different as these two cultures are, however, there are bases for comparison of their shamanistic and musical healing practices, which can provide insights into general characteristics of shamanistic healing through music.
... Again, this description points to the importance of mind and body as a connected system. Many South American Indigenous and mixed-ethnicity groups use music as part of a host of techniques for healing involving the ingestion of plantbased preparations that alter their user's state of consciousness (Brown 2007(Brown [1987Olsen 2008;Whitten and Whitten 2008, 69-71). In this article, we investigate the role of music in a healing ceremony that is part of a combinatory therapy treating substance use disorders at Centro Takiwasi in the Upper Peruvian Amazon. ...
Research on psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy has shown that music affects therapeutic outcomes at a fundamental level. The development of such therapies calls for research on the use of music with consciousness‐altering substances, especially in contexts informed by their traditional use. Informed by ethnographic reports, our project answers this call, investigating the phenomenology of listening to icaros (medicine songs) during ayahuasca ceremonies as reported by addiction rehabilitation patients at Perú’s Centro Takiwasi. We found that icaros were therapeutically significant. They elicited experiences of healing by modulating patients’ emotions and the altered state induced by ayahuasca. They helped patients feel safe while guiding them through difficult memories and emotions, and facilitating experiences of healing and learning about their addictions. Thus, similar therapies must carefully consider how they incorporate music in their protocols. We suggest further research to better understand the synergistic, therapeutic effects of music and altered states of consciousness, especially in cross‐cultural environments.
In 2019 Beijing Normal University held an Asia Pacific congress on music therapy with a certain focus on culturally sensitive music therapy, the wealth of music therapeutic traditions, practices and methods in Asia and the Pacific area, and applications in public health, clinical areas and inclusive education. Although the COVID-19 pandemic inhibited further progress, since the end of 2022 vivid collaboration has been going on in this music therapeutically strong part of the world.
El presente trabajo se propone contribuir al estudio transdisciplinario del papel de la música en el trance a través de la revisión sistemática de investigaciones sobre esta temática que consideran en sus enfoques teorías pertenecientes al campo de las ciencias cognitivas. De los 60 artículos encontrados sobre música y trance solo ocho de ellos recurren a teorías sobre la cognición. Los resultados de esta revisión bibliográfica muestran que la conexión entre estudios etnográficos y cognitivos puede partir de diversas perspectivas: estudios próximos a disciplinas como la neurofisiología, estudios de la conducta cercanos a la psicología y estudios cognitivos apoyados en diversas teorías de la filosofía de la mente, como son el conexionismo, la Embodied Mind, el enactivismo, o las teorías sobre la consciencia. A pesar de las variadas aproximaciones y teorías cognitivas subyacentes, la mayoría de los trabajos coinciden en otorgarle importancia al cuerpo, a el entrainment rítmico, a las investigaciones neurológicas y al contexto etnográfico en la comprensión del trance y de experiencia musical. Asimismo, convergen en la conveniencia del estudio transdisciplinario del fenómeno. Palabras clave: música y trance, música y estados alterados, etnomusicología cognitiva, cognición musical corporizada, entrainment rítmico
In this article, I will focus on the processes of learning how to sing – that is, of acquiring curing songs – as well as on the musical phenomena occurring during the current performance. The native people’s communication with beings surrounding them is tightly bound to regarding these as self-reflecting, more or less intelligent agents. As I will show, musical learning and performance addresses such non-humans. A closer view on the singer’s subject positionality during the iteration of musical structures of curing songs can help to understand the role non-humans play in Shipibo ‘medicina’ and further on, in the Shipibo lived world.
In order to unfold my argument, I will first embark on a cultural analysis of the contexts, origins, and functions of the songs. Doing so, I will mainly refer to what the singers themselves told me about their art. These indigenous explanations provide a synthesis of my field research in the region. The fieldwork was conducted mainly from an intracultural point of view, combined with interethnic comparative data. The cultural analysis will include indigenous terminology with regards to cosmology and musical phenomena, an exploration of the ontological status of ‘a song’, and a detailed description of how the singers are supposed to acquire their songs from non-humans. Thereafter, I am going to present and analyze four Shipibo curing songs. Their melodic form, excerpts from their lyrics, and their performance modalities will be compared. Discussing the similarities and differences between these songs, I seek to explore if an analysis of performance could shed more light on the songs’ meaning than an analysis of their form.