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CHAPTER 4
How to Charge a Voice with Power?
Transmuting Nonhuman Creativity into Vocal
Creations in the Western Amazon
BERND BRABEC
! ! !
Introduction
Vocal creation, in the sense of a manifestation of innovation and creativity,
is regarded central in many traditional and Indigenous communities. For the
South American Lowlands, many academic publications have been dealing
with myth-telling, poetry, song, chant, or ritual speech among a variety of In-
digenous groups (see, among many others, Basso 1985; Brabec de Mori 2009,
2012, 2019; Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013; Cesarino 2008; Hill 1992;
Illius 1999; Lewy 2012; Olsen 1996; Seeger [1987] 2004; Senft and Basso
2009; Werlang 2001). Much of this work, including some of my own, is de-
voted to meaning, structure, and function of such utterances, as well as change
occurring in times of contact, modernization, marginalization, or folkloriza-
tion. In this chapter, I will almost entirely skip these aspects, because I will
focus on the main technique used by the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous peo-
ple to access an essential pool of creation: the beings and places that emerge
from mythological and ritual space-time. As I argued elsewhere (Brabec de
Mori 2016, 2019), the traditional forms and functions of utterances can be
understood as the results of creative processes, which can only be grasped by
means of a set of abstract tools very diff erent to those devoted to understand-
ing non-Indigenous, “Western,” creative processes in art or literature. A “tra-
ditional” non-Indigenous, or naturalistic view on creativity places this process
within an author’s psyche, whereas inspiration denotes outside infl uences on
the same psyche. Creativity, as such, is then conceptualized as somebody’s abil-
ity to transform or combine inspiration into an artful output. is admittedly
superfi cial summary of the vast literature1 on creativity and inspiration in the
context of (Western) art should serve here exclusively for the purpose to very
generally contrast this raw outline with what I would call an Indigenous way
of innovation: to co-create vocal utterance together with nonhuman entities.
In Ernst Halbmayer & Anne Goletz (eds., 2023). Creation and Creativity
in Indigenous Lowland South America. Anthropological Perspectives,
pp. 99-123. Oxford & New York: Berghahn.
100 Bernd Brabec
Such entities do not “inspire the author,” instead they are actively consulted
and acknowledged for being the main creators, while the human speaker or
singer co-produces, reproduces, or transmits this creation to her human audi-
ence. e resulting performance, by its own right, shapes the reality of those
present—the one who utters, the listeners, onlookers, or ritual participants,
and the nonhuman beings involved.
is shaping of realities involves the notion of control—human life would
be subjected to the capriciousness of any forces present in the rainforest and
riverine surroundings if not for those creative methods and techniques that
reinforce and affi rm humanity and human ways of life within a largely hostile
environment that poses a constant threat to human form. Uncontrolled trans-
formation of the human into the chaotic reminds of dissociation, of psychosis
and death, while on the other hand, controlled transformation from chaos
to order under the auspices of human form eff ects well-being, beauty, and
health.2 e example case I am going to treat in this chapter provides an ex-
ample of how episodes that may be reminiscent of psychosis are performed in
a way suggesting that despite some similarities in phenomena, the professional
evocation of altered states is not bound to psychotic vulnerability: the profes-
sional techniques I am going to elude can be learned by anyone who endures
the training, and a certain approximation to altered states can also be achieved
by nonprofessional lay people. e Indigenous concept of transformation,
however, maintains that uncontrolled, accidental, or induced (by witchcraft)
transformation results in dire problems, and that controlled transformation is
understood as the prototypical means for healing and other forms of purpose-
ful manipulations, like for hunting preparations, weather summons, warfare,
or sorcery.
Creativity, in these contexts, has to be understood as double-layered: while
the vocal techniques I will describe reveal creativity by themselves, the main
creative act is achieved by those nonhuman beings whose “art” is transmitted to
humanity by the human ritual specialist, or even by a lay singer. In order to un-
derstand how this second-layer creativity may unfold, I understand fi rst-layer
creativity (speaking, singing, performing) as a Deleuzian abstract machine,
diffi cult to grasp, which allows for the mobilization of another creativity—
second-layer creativity localized in mythical space-time—that is thought to
originate beyond the human. e whole of vocal utterances creates an entity
I call an abstract machine, in the sense like a working assemblage of organs
creates a body. is “body” composed of utterances engenders a becoming-
active of nonhuman agencies, which in turn, instruct the human what to utter.
is abstract machine can be circumscribed by the techniques developed by
the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous people to charge their voices with power.
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 101
What Voices Are
In Amazonian Indigenous thought, an essential “reality,” in the sense of a na-
ture independent from any perception, is not assumed to exist. If any defi nite
“reality” is conceptualized, it is conceived as a highly fl exibly structured and
contingent “Real World” that hides behind the appearance of things, a world
beyond sensual perception. e world as sensually perceived is understood as
being but the “tunic of things” (Santos-Granero 2003). In order to talk about
any South American Indigenous “reality”—as conceived by Indigenous people
themselves—the one who talks has to fi nd ways how to transmit knowledge and
creative faculties from a “Real World” that is located beyond sensual perception
into sensually perceivable items in the “human” world. ese items most often
show sonic, narrated, or musical characteristics, and interspecies communica-
tion—between humans, animals, and spirits—seems largely to depend on sonic
techniques, especially when the active crossing of boundaries is involved.
In a previous paper, Anthony Seeger and myself suggested that the auditory
domain, by its implicit properties, provides facilities for making apparent invis-
ible beings (Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013). Indigenous groups in the South
American Lowlands use techniques we would call “musical” in a European con-
text, for example changes of pitch register, timbre, or variation of motifs during
performance, in order to let the spirits speak: what is often called music, among
these groups is rather considered “the spirits’ voices” (Illius 1997: 216). ere-
fore, such “musical” utterances are a delicate issue and have to be performed
with care. Within this music, the spirits may manifest, and so does their agency:
“Although in general it is rather assumed that the bobinsana [plant]-person or
the kawoká-spirit do not exist in a literal, ‘physical’ sense, they are evident as
musical motifs or music-inspiring agents. ey manifest themselves in sound
transmission and execute agency via music performance” (Brabec de Mori and
Seeger 2013: 282).
Based on the same idea, Carlo Severi (2014) attempts an anthropology
of thought, thereby concentrating on semiotic processes of translation and
transmutation. Following the work of Jakobson (1959), the processes of trans-
mutation Severi analyses comprise visual and sonic creations of the South
American Lowland Indigenous groups Yekwana (specifi cally their weavings),
Wa y a n a ( t h e i r p a i n t e d a n d l i k e w i s e w o v e n i c o n o g r a p h i e s ) , a n d Wa y a m p i ( t h e i r
music). He explains that in the Wayampi “anaconda suite” (taken from Beaudet
1997), a sequence of instrumental fl ute pieces he studied:
such an exceptional being as the spirit of the anaconda is described not by its
acoustic appearance, but by a series of acoustic signals related to the diff er-
ent beings that indirectly designate its invisible presence. In both visual and
102 Bernd Brabec
acoustic images, the passage from verbal to iconic signs (or from one nonver-
bal code to another) mobilized by transmutation . . . of words in images (be
they visual or acoustic) makes the presence of supernatural beings indirectly
perceivable through the appearances of other beings. (Severi 2014: 59, italics
in original)
us, a musical sequence provides the means for deploying a chain of indexes
or other signs (which can be iconic, or symbolic) pointing to a series of beings
related to these indexes within local auditory knowledge. All these persons,
spirits, or gods execute important agency on humans and the human world,
from a realm of powerful beings, the “Real World” beyond ordinary human
perception, inaccessible for lay people. e transmutation Severi refers to is
the “translation” of the names and roles of these beings as defi ned in narratives
(myths) into nonverbal signs like visual art or music. ese nonverbal signs
provide certainty—as conceived by the people—of both the mythical beings’
existence as well as their agency of transmitting creativity. When transmutated
into the visual domain, these beings become temporarily stable but still intangi-
ble. When transmutated to the sonic domain, on the other hand, they become
immanently present and tangible, albeit for a limited time, by being performed.3
e vision- and tactus-centered dualism of physicality (“body,” clothes,
habitus) and interiority (“soul,” mind, culture) as distinguishing features of
human ontologies as proposed by Philippe Descola (2005) does not provide
a defi ned space for sounds. Specifi cally sounds uttered by the voice: Do they
pertain to physicality, as they are quite “exterior”? Or are they part of interior-
ity, so closely related to thoughts, which are defi nitely interior? Lewy (2015,
2018), while analyzing sound utterance and knowledge transfer among the
Venezuelan Pemón, suggests creating a “third space” for the auditory domain,
a third entity beyond physicality and interiority. is helps to explain why the
auditory domain and especially the voice is so often used for intercultural but
likewise interspecies communication, and in addition, why sonic techniques in-
cluding the voice escape Descola’s ontological categories (animism, naturalism,
totemism, analogism): these categories are built upon the dichotomy of physi-
cality and interiority. e voice can, consequently, be used for contact-making,
alterity-creating, and creation-transmitting among, or across, these diff erent
ontologies. e way the voice is used in, for example, an animic ontology does
not necessarily diff er from how it is applied to work within an analogic, or even
a naturalistic collective. is is why Lewy proposes an ontological approach
to sonic phenomena that goes beyond and at the same time complements ani-
mism and perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1996), an “Indigenous sonorism”
(Lewy 2017) that concentrates on the use of sonic techniques in order to com-
municate with, or transform into, nonhuman beings (see also Brabec de Mori
2012).
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 103
Within the sonic domain, however, things are not uniform either. e ways
of listening we can apply may be called indexical, structural, and enchanted
(see Stoichiţă and Brabec de Mori 2017). Commonly, though by no means
exclusively, indexical listening is employed when listening to the environment
without detecting lexical or musical meaning. We tend to infer existence of
an object or being from such a perception: you hear barking, for example, and
infer that there is a dog around; we also tend to infer inner states of objects or
beings in this way, as if by the sound of the barking we may distinguish whether
the dog is happy or feels threatened. e inference of a happy dog (both its
existence and its condition) from a certain sound of barking works similarly
across Descola’s ontologies. Structural listening focuses on a structure beyond
mere sound, and it is most often used when listening to a language one under-
stands. One hears meaning, apparently stripped of sonic characteristics: we do
not hear sounding phonemes, but pronounced morphemes and consequently,
meaningful sentences. Contrarily, enchanted listening adds properties that are
not present in the acoustic appearance, for example emotional or relational
properties (a sad melody, two voices going in counterpoint, we hear groupings
of rhythmical patterns, and so on). erefore “enchanting” extends the sonic
object within a space that is diff erent from the space construed upon other
modalities: the space where a motif “goes upwards” or a melody “runs,” or even
“touches you” is a peculiar auditory space.
While structural listening is defi nitely confi ned to certain codes like lan-
guage4 and therefore limited to intracultural consensual understanding, index-
ical and enchanted listening may transcend boundaries commonly understood
as “cultural” and likewise “ontological,” even boundaries between species. Al-
though the three alternatives denote certain postures of listening, sound pro-
duction and utterances can be modelled in a way that suggests to a listener to
obtain one of these alternative postures. Commonly, an utterance includes the
speaker’s expectation of how it will be heard by potential listeners; potential
listeners include present humans, animals, microphones, and any other being
thought to possibly receive the message. is results in a preference for sounds,
sonic events, and utterances as modes for establishing, negotiating, and cross-
ing interspecies boundaries, in particular by employing ways of uttering that
expect enchanted listening.
Voices, in an Amazonian environment not limited to humans, are therefore
the perfect media for interacting across Descola’s animic, or Viveiros de Cas-
tro’s perspectivistic categories. As noted by Lewy (2012), seeing may lead to the
perception of diff erence while hearing brings to the fore possible similarities.
Not only humans have voices: so does the wind, so does the tree, the jaguar, the
spirit of the dead. All of them utter and expect to be understood. Voices are
the basis for creating sonic environments perceptible to a multitude of beings.
104 Bernd Brabec
e sonic environment is shared not only by humans but likewise by nonhu-
mans (see also Brabec de Mori 2012; Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013). Most
nonhumans are conceived of as persons and therefore as being able to hear in
a way similar to how human persons hear. Hearing is not confi ned by perspec-
tive. Sonic environments allow for the world to be understood as a polyphonic
succession of sonic events, creating a sounding world beyond the visual bound-
aries erected by perspectivism and interiority/physicality-based ontologies.
What Voices Do
Our built-in sonic emitter device—the voice—enables us to do things that are
not restricted by an ontological conception (e.g., an animic cosmos) but that en-
able us to shape the sonic environment in a rather unique manner as compared
to e.g., visual or olfactory “things we can do.” is doing environment enables
the emitter to create and manipulate entities contained in, or attributed to, the
auditory space. Auditory space sometimes overlaps with the space constructed
by other sensual-cognitive means (e.g., you hear barking from your left, from
behind your neighbor’s house). In other cases, these spaces may partially over-
lap, for example in dance, when people move their bodies “following lines” that
are drawn in auditory space. e spaces may also exist independently: imagine
a ritual specialist singing while sitting, scarcely moving, while his melodies you
are listening to move up and down, come close, or even touch you.
Vo i c e s c o m m u n i c a t e . is is a rather commonplace affi rmation of a com-
plex phenomenon. People can talk to each other in thousands of diff erent lan-
guages and therefore understand each other or not, dependent on the mutual
intelligibility of the language(s) used. Understanding, however, also depends
on social intelligibility. Many academic papers, though written in English, can
hardly be understood by average English speakers. Understanding likewise de-
pends on emotional consensus, consider for example, irony, a method to make
one understand things nobody said. But understanding is a prerequisite for
communication.
e example of irony illustrates that structural listening is often insuf-
fi cient for understanding. Structural listening extracts morphological and
consequently syntactic and semantic information from the sonic event. is
information equals written language in many ways: “I am sure you understand
perfectly” is a sentence that in its structural form is precise and conveys a quite
defi nite content. However, it can be uttered in a way that communicates the op-
posite meaning to those who understand the code used in prosody (and often
also in nonlinguistic signs like a gaze, for example, or certain facial or gestic-
ulated expressions; see Gibbs and Colston 2007). In our model of listening
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 105
modes (Stoichiţă and Brabec de Mori 2017), indexical listening does not only
provide for inferring the existence of something from a hearing experience but
also the inference of a state of being, including inner (emotional or other) states
of persons. Semantic content structurally extracted from an utterance can com-
municate, but also a sonic quality like the grain of voice or prosodic elements
allow for an index, a causal link to be constructed upon hearing, between this
sonic quality and the (presumed) inner state of the speaking person.
is is why we often have the impression that we can infer the emotional
state of a talking person although she may use a language unknown to us. Some
studies in cognitive sciences indicate that certain qualities of utterance in con-
nection to emotional states are probably interpreted similarly among many, if
not all, human collectives (tempo, pitch, timbre, and prosodic ambitus, see for
example Balkwill and ompson 1999; Gobl and Ní Chasaide 2003; Patel et
al. 2011). Likewise, it seems that such qualities of utterance are not too diff erent
between collectives that adhere to an animic, totemic, analogic, or naturalistic
ontology. Consequently, such qualities of utterance may likewise transcend the
boundaries between “Real People” (in the following case the Shipibo-Konibo
Indigenous people) and other “people” (like neighboring collectives, animals,
certain plants, spirits, ancestors, and so on). e following case study high-
lights the use of certain sonic and other-than-sonic techniques and shows how
a human voice can be equipped for such interspecifi c interaction, which in turn
is required to mobilize creativity beyond the human. Most of this is nonse-
mantic or even nonlinguistic, as will be demonstrated. erefore, utterances
that urge for listening structurally (mostly “normal use” of language) are scarce,
while utterances that suggest to be heard indexically or enchantedly abound.
Shipibo-Konibo Techniques for Charging Voices
Level I: A. Speak!
“To speak”: In the Shipibo-Konibo language this is glossed yoiti. e Shipibo-
Konibo (in the following called Shipibo) are an Indigenous people living
mainly on the shores of the Ucayali River in the Peruvian lowland rainforest.
ey comprise an estimated 50,000 individuals, many of them dwelling in
medium-size settlements (between 200 and 1,500 inhabitants) organized in a
more or less traditional village community structure around a matrilocal core
family; along with many families who had moved to the regional capital city
Pucallpa or to the national capital Lima and adopted an urban lifestyle. ey
speak a language of the Pano family with some slight regional diff erences be-
tween the upriver people (rebokia jonibo) and those from downriver (chiponkia
jonibo).5
106 Bernd Brabec
e term yoiti (to speak) is composed from the stem iti which means “to
be, to exist” or “to do (for intransitive processes),” and the prefi x yo-. Following
Illius (1999: 41–42), this prefi x stands for something “charged with power
[energiegeladen]”: this author provides a list of words prefi xed with yo-, for
example yo-ina, “wild animal” (as opposed to iná, “domesticated animal”); yo-
shin, “demon, spirit” (from shin, “in darkness” or shin(-an) “thought, feeling”);
or yo-bé (a dart magician or “shaman,” probably from bero, “eye”). erefore,
“to speak,” yo-iti can be translated literally as “a mode of being charged with
power.” Illius comments on the verbs yoiti (to speak), yocati (to ask), and
yonoti (to order), that “any form of verbal communication is considered a ‘so-
cially relevant’ application of psychic energy” (1999: 42, my translation). One
who speaks, heightens one’s condition of merely existing to an existence as a
Real Person (jonikon), as being part of the community of those who speak the
Real Language (janakon). is applies, from the Shipibo perspective, mainly
to those who speak the Shipibo language. However, also non-Shipibo beings
can talk, and this talk is likewise considered as yoiti, “to speak,” or yoyo iti, “to
talk.”6
Speaking therefore serves as a distinction of two modes of existence: the
nonpowerful living in the sense of mere existence while using one’s voice for
indexical directions or communication of inner states (what many beings
do), as opposed to the power-charged mode of existence when speaking. e
ability to speak is attributed of course to the Shipibo people (in case they
are not “demons’ children,” yoshin bake, meaning that they are born unable
to speak properly or suff er any other form of severe innate disability), but
also to those other people who are considered homo sapiens by naturalistic
sciences. Further on, Shipibo people attribute the ability to speak to certain
animals: most naturally, to parrots, but also to animals like jaguars, peccaries,
tapirs, and in general to most mammals and birds, and to many spirits and
other beings of the surroundings. All these, including foreign humans, are
able to speak in their own language which is commonly unintelligible for
Shipibo lay people.7
erefore, speaking is the fi rst level of charging one’s voice with power: from
a mode of mere “existence,” the act of using one’s voice for speaking transports
the speaker into a mode of being “charged with power.” is power is indexed
by the use of the prefi x yo-. In the literature, this power is often termed “sha-
manic power.” I refrain from using the term “shaman” in all its forms and deduc-
tions, because of its blurry associations with exoticist imaginations infl uenced
by popular literature (see Martínez Gonzáles 2009). Here, it becomes obvious
that it does not make much sense to introduce something “shamanic,” because
any person is able to speak and therefore wields this power of self-enhancing
one’s own mode of existence.
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 107
Level I: B. Get drunk!
Another way, seemingly based on a very diff erent view on the human, to en-
hance one’s mode of existence is to get drunk. Various ethnographies from the
South American Lowlands indicate that the condition of heightened conviv-
iality during collective festivities defi nes a mode of being understood as ide-
ally suited for Real Humans among Indigenous people (see e.g., Gow 2001
for the Peruvian Yine; Illius 1999 for the Shipibo-Konibo; Sarmiento Barletti
2011 for the Asháninka; or various contributions in Overing and Passes 2000).
Although alcohol, in particular manioc beer or maize beer, is also considered
dangerous (all aforementioned sources also tell of the dangers of emotional
outbursts and sometimes bloody fi ghts regularly occurring during festivities), it
likewise fosters sociability and represents the ideal of being together among the
extended family and invited people. When drunk,8 people also share food, tell
jokes and are funny, sing and play, fl irt and initiate relationships, thus resem-
bling the very foundation of humanity, because relationships engender being,
and talking to each other puts everybody into a “mode of existence charged
with power.” e conviviality experienced during festivities is generally ideal-
ized (Overing and Passes 2000; Brabec de Mori 2015a: 159 passim), as for
example also observed by Weiss for the Asháninka (“Campa”):
[I]t is the intense albeit transitory institution of the masato [manioc beer]
festival that we fi nd the reigning diversion of the recreational organization.
e women devote much time to the preparation of masato for these festi-
vals, neighboring communities taking turns as host. e ideal psychic state of
the River Campas is one of inebriation, and it is at such festivals that convo-
cations of Campas achieve this ideal. (Weiss 1975: 243)
Further on, many Indigenous people hold the opinion that one cannot sing
when sober. Illius writes about singers in a Shipibo community who, while
rehearsing for a contest, “worried most about the possibility that at the con-
test in Masisea it could eventually be forbidden to drink alcohol, because all
the singers are convinced that one cannot sing when sober” (Illius 1999: 233,
my translation). is opinion is also valid for many practitioners of magical
singing who do rituals for healing or sorcery. My research associate Armando
Sánchez once told me that I could only record his curing songs during a session
involving the ingestion of the hallucinogenic drink ayawaska, because he could
only sing when “drunk.” Please note here, that he used the same term for being
drunk from alcohol and suff ering the eff ect of the hallucinogenic ayawaska; in
Shipibo language, both conditions are called paena, “drunk,” from pae, designat-
ing fermentation. is synonym is further illustrated by Armando’s response
to my question if he would then be unable to heal people when there was no
ayawaska available: he said that “when there is no ayawaska, you drink tobacco
108 Bernd Brabec
juice, or you can also drink Agua Florida.9 If you don’t have Agua Florida either,
aguardiente [distilled sugar cane liquor] is also good. If there is no aguardiente,
you can still drink some gasolina [petrol]” (pers. comm. 2001, my translation).
It seems fairly radical to actually drink petrol in order to get drunk (and I never
witnessed that), but it highlights the importance of altering one’s condition,
one’s mode of being in order to be able to sing properly.
us, alcohol as consumed collectively at festivities or in the solitude of a
curing ritual and the hallucinogenic ayawaska and other psychoactives provide
the means to also heighten one’s mode of being, and therefore enable one’s voice
to make more powerful utterances. e danger at festivities consists of the
heightened power of insults and provocations, the procreative potential of the
same events depends on the more powerful fl irting and teasing among poten-
tial partners, enabled by voices of at least moderately drunk people. e curing
power of the singing healer’s voice likewise seems to depend on the drunken
state of the singer.
Level I: C. Diet!
While speaking is almost always available to those who can speak, alcohol is
confi ned to certain events, as are ayawaska, tobacco, and other psychoactive
substances, which are traditionally consumed only by healers or sorcerers
during ritual. at is, the heightening of the power of the voice is temporary
and passes away as the inebriated person returns to her normal, everyday state.
However, there is also an (almost) permanent way to charge one’s voice—and
other aspects of the human being—with power; this is called samati in Ship-
ibo, dietar in regional Spanish, that is “to diet.” “Dieting” in this sense is applied
mainly to change a condition understood as bad or inappropriate into a con-
dition regarded good and proper: for example, an ill person may “diet” in order
to be healed, a toddler should “diet” so he or she may grow well and become a
proper Real Person, a hunter often “diets” in purpose of enhancing his skill, a
woman lacking inspiration can “diet” in order to become creative in artwork.
at said, anybody who wishes to learn and acquire knowledge and abilities
“d i et s .” E sp e c ia ll y fo r h ar ne ss i n g t h e m a gical arts of healing and sorcery, one has
to “diet” for extensive spans of time to be successful.10
“To diet” in this context is transitive, one has to “diet something.” at is,
for example, to “diet” the plant preparation iwi waste,11 means that a preg-
nant woman would ingest the prepared liquid a few times, usually once a day,
while refraining from eating improper food, having sex, and drinking alcohol
for about two weeks. e strictness of the taboos and the time required vary
greatly, but the overall idea is always the same. With this procedure, a certain
quality contained in (or attributed to) the applied substance is thus incorpo-
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 109
rated by ingestion and fortifi ed within the body by the lengthy diet: here, the
quality of the ray fi sh—who can “give birth” to hundreds of tiny rays without
any obvious suff ering—is inscribed into the pregnant woman’s body.
Any “diet” is actually considered a general strengthening of the “dieter’s” per-
sonal power shinan (cf. Illius 1987; LeClerc 2003). As any person in the West-
ern Amazon probably has “dieted” at least a bit at some time, everyone possesses
more or less “diet” power (samá). Commonly, healers and sorcerers have most of
it, as acquiring the necessary abilities is said to be especially lengthy, diffi cult,
and strict. But others like hunters, artists, whoever has “dieted” for quite some
time, also “has some.”
A general outcome of any “diet” is an enhanced power of one’s voice. Let me
illustrate this with an anecdote: on a very rainy day in 2001 I travelled on a
small riverboat together with a Shipibo research associate and a dozen other
passengers. At this time, the regional marine forces were trying to enforce some-
thing from the government—the details escape my memory—and were there-
fore harassing (“controlling”), stealing from (“confi scating suspicious goods”),
and even kidnapping (“protecting”) innocent people on the river. When bad
luck occurred and our boat was captured and towed to a marine speedboat,
my research associate started to talk to the captain (a huge, not-so-friendly
looking man) in a way one would instruct a child, mixed with some troubled
mother’s lamenting. She talked for a few minutes, with the captain surprisingly
listening to her sermon, and then, as she instructed him to do so, he ordered
his men to unfasten the boat and wished us a good journey. It was hilarious,
I was staggered. Other Shipibo travelers were less surprised: “of course, she is
boman koshi,” s he o wn s th e boman power (see also Brabec de Mori 2009: 132).
As a renowned artist and herbalist, she had done quite a few “diets” in her life-
time and thus her voice has become so powerful to be highly manipulative and
irresistible, boman.
ere are certain plants that boost the boman power. It is said that mainly
sorcerers “diet” these “demon trees,” yoshin jiwi, because the boman skill is said
to be especially important for sorcery. Anyway, any “diet” strengthens the gen-
eral human mental power shinan and the voice’s power boman. Consequently,
there is a continuum ranging from people who do not have boman because they
did not “diet” enough, to those who wield an immense manipulative potential,
mostly renowned healers and feared sorcerers (who can, by the way, be one and
the same person).
Level II: Sing!
We should, however, not take too literally what was exposed by Armando and
others: that one has to get drunk in order to sing. Singers can sing sober, both
110 Bernd Brabec
magical or secular songs, although they seem to generally prefer not to do so.
During my own fi eld research, many people produced songs in intimate set-
tings when only the (most often sober) singer, my research assistant, my re-
cording device, and myself were present, and these songs actually constitute the
main body of my recorded corpus. So maybe it is more the “singing in public”
which is confi ned to being drunk.
Anyway, singing by itself means doing something with the voice that is
“more” than talking. It is not entirely clear where the boundary between speech
and song can be located, or whether a clear boundary can even be found or not.
Anthony Seeger treated this topic in the chapter “From Speech to Song” in
Why Suyá Sing ([1987] 2004: 25–51), describing a gamut of Suyá vocal genres,
forms of communication showing diff ering grades of formalization, ranging
from “normal” speech to “musical” song: “speech (kapérni), instruction (sarén),
song (ngére) and invocation (sangére)” ([1987] 2004: 25). Seeger found that in
ngére (song), there is a “priority of melody over text; time, text and melody [are]
fi xed by [a] nonhuman source” ([1987] 2004: 51, Figure 1). Notably, nonhu-
man entities intervene here but not in other genres. When the Suyá talk, recite,
tell, or invoke, they do this among themselves, among Real People, while song
extends the scope of action to nonhumans.
is coincides well with what was said before: Shipibo people consider
many “species” of beings capable of speaking, but this is always confi ned to
the boundaries of intelligibility. ese respective collectives understand what
is said in “their language” but not what is said in a foreign tongue. However,
when speech is makea, “made to sound melodically” (approximate translation,
see Brabec de Mori 2015a: 432), the picture changes, and meaning becomes
interspecifi cally intelligible, at least for specialists. Shipibo specialists do not
explicitly state in public what exactly a nonhuman or spirit understands when
some meaning is sung as opposed to spoken. But what can be observed is that
Shipibo people usually refrain from singing in the woods, at the river shore or
in a canoe because any song could attract the “owners” (ibo) of plants, animals,
or rivers as well as any spirit who is near; in general, Shipibo people are reluc-
tant to sing outside of the secure framework of festivities.12
is means that the enhancement of a spoken message with formalized
prosody, rhythmicity, or a certain degree of melodization results in the pos-
sibility that the message could attract the attention of nonhuman beings, in a
way spoken language does not. erefore, these items of enhancement seem to
carry an interspecifi cally intelligible quality, but it remains unclear how this in-
telligibility is created. Reversing the point of view—reversion being a popular
process in ontological Indigenous studies like in perspectivism—does not ex-
plain much more either: certain animals, specifi cally birds are prone to sing in
a way that can also confer messages to listening Shipibo. Birds of omen do this,
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 111
but notably, rather by simple “calls” (keotai) that warn, for example, of snakebite
or other looming dangers, than by complex birdsong, which also can be heard
regularly, especially after rainfall. Further on, Shipibo people can hear, for exam-
ple, the groaning of jaguars, the hissing of anacondas, the grunting of peccary,
all of them animals that—following Shipibo concepts—possess the faculty of
speech, and consequently, song. But what does an anaconda’s song sound like?
Would Shipibo people be able to understand the song of an anaconda?
If you pose these questions to a Shipibo person, she will most probably an-
swer something like “I do not know, you must ask a médico,” referring to a spe-
cialist for magic and dealings with nonhumans. erefore, the only people that
perceive (and then, yes, do understand) anacondas’ or other nonhumans’ songs
are magical specialists in the state of transformation. ese are also apt to
translate nonhuman songs into Shipibo songs (Brabec de Mori 2013; see also
Gow 2001 and Seeger [1987] 2004 for other collectives). is will be the topic
of the next section but let us still conclude here that the transition to formal-
ized speech that a Westerner would understand as “music” carries the potential
of extending the sphere of potential listeners to the nonhuman realms. As a
Figure 4.1. ree levels of charging one’s voice with power.
112 Bernd Brabec
way of charging one’s voice with power, singing (Level II) can be combined with
all the aforementioned techniques (Level I): speaking (this would mean here
to sing in human, that is Shipibo, language), being drunk, and fi nally disposing
of “dietary” power. With that we can understand how singing can provide even
more power to the voice of somebody who has had many years of acquiring
knowledge and is currently under the infl uence of alcohol, tobacco juice, or
ayawaska (or petrol, if you really want).
Level III: Transform!
e idea of transformation is paramount in Amerindian ontologies and much
has been written about it. e paradigmatic reversion in perspectivism, how-
ever challenged by many scholars, explains how in a multicultural society—
that is, in naturalistic ontology—people are thought to possibly transform
their interiorities (as often refl ected in political discourse about immigration
aff airs), while in an animist, multinaturalistic society people are supposed to
be able to change their physicalities, which means their bodily forms. However,
outside mythological narratives, dreams, and drug-induced altered perception,
“evidence” of actual bodily transformations is rare, if not absent. One hundred
years ago, eodor Koch-Grünberg stated that “when the magic doctors [Zau-
berärzte] are drunk, they transform into jaguars without themselves taking
notice. — Akū
´li recounted how, during a big dancing festivity at the Roraima,
he transformed into a jaguar in the dancing house, before the eyes of all people
present, who fl ed the scene and barred up the house” (1923: 201, my transla-
tion, italics in original). He also cites another observation from Dobritzhoff er:
“they [the village’s population] instantly moan, being besides themselves from
fright: look! how he already gets tiger’s spots, how claws already grow out [of
his body]. . . . eir fright alone makes them see things that occur nowhere”
(cited in Koch-Grünberg 1923: 201, footnote, my translation). Reading these
and many later accounts, one notices that most authors doubt the face-value of
such transformations and conclude that they occur in the people’s imagination
only. As one would expect, there are no photographic or fi lmed images available
that would document such processes. is means, in order not to accuse our
research associates of lying or of being incredibly naïve, we have to reframe the
question, and shift our attention from the physical to the auditory. For exam-
ple, Shipibo master healer Pascual Mahua told me that he could transform
into a jaguar, insisting “nekebi!”, that is “here, in this world!” in a literal sense.
His account shows surprisingly similar tropes with Koch-Grünberg’s quote: he
said that one night he got up and left the house, strolling, and returning in the
morning. His wife was scared and reluctantly told him that she saw how a tigre
(term locally employed for the jaguar, panthera onca) left the bed and went out
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 113
of the house. at is, like Akū
´li, Pascual was unaware of his transformation.
is confi rms Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, because the jaguar persons
perceived themselves as “Real People”: when Pascual was in jaguar state, he still
thought he was human. But he also was scared: in case this accidental trans-
formation occurred again, he feared that the villagers would shoot him, feeling
themselves threatened by the feline.
During ritual, on the other hand, specialists like Pascual train the ability to
transform intentionally. Healing (and sorcery) rituals usually take place during
nighttime, when darkness inhibits visual identifi cation of the specialist’s physi-
cal shape. e healers sing, most often starting with songs in “their” voice, simi-
lar to their speaking voice, calling for the power to come, summoning spirits or
other beings. When ritual transformation occurs, the voice changes, very often
into a high-pitched falsetto, but also into other voice masks, for example into
a low-pitched staccato phrasing performed with high diaphragmatic pressure.
In any case, the transformation takes place in the sonic domain, and people
(patients, kin people, visitors) who are present register the voice change and
correlate it with a physical transformation of the singing specialist. ey “ob-
serve” the spirits or other nonhuman beings manifesting “within,” or rather “as”
the singer’s voice. By being present as voices, these beings become tangible.13
Only people with high samá (diet) power are able to achieve this. Pascual,
for example, explained that virtuoso high-pitched singing (in the way he per-
formed his magical songs) would be acquired by continuous “dieting.” Trained
singers may be able to produce such virtuoso singing also when sober, but all
Shipibo singers prefer to do this in an inebriate state; in cases of magically
effi cient singing when intoxicated by tobacco, or in most cases, ayawaska. One
of the main features of powerful magical singing for healing or sorcery is trans-
lation: if the transformed healer perceives himself as a jaguar, for example, he
is supposed to sing “normally” in the jaguar people’s language. However, as a
ritual specialist, he manages to sing along with nonhuman beings, listening to
them from within the nonhumans’ realm, but to pronounce the lyrics in human
“Real Language” (janakon). is translation may also be omitted (cf. Brabec
de Mori and Seeger 2013). Among the Shipibo, this omission may occur in
two possible situations: fi rst, the specialist may go “too far,” temporarily lose
the connection with the human world, and therefore sing in unknown spirits’
tongues. is can be evaluated positively, when the singer is so powerful to be
able to “entirely travel” to the spirits’ realm, in order to eff ectuate his dealings
(e.g., for healing purposes) there; it can also be considered negatively, assuming
that an unexperienced singer loses control of the situation, “forgetting” to trans-
late. Second, singing in unknown tongues is often related to sorcery, because it
suggests that the singer intends to obscure the meaning of his song, in order to
achieve something that he wants to pass unnoticed by listeners.
114 Bernd Brabec
erefore, the ideal song for magical manipulation, especially healing, is
sung by a specialist who pronounces lyrics in “Real Language” (Level I, A), who
is in a state of inebriation ideally with ayawaska (Level I, B), and who owns a
maximum of “dietary” power, that is the boman voice (Level I, C). He performs
the song in a correct way of building melodic and rhythmic patterns logically
connected to skillfully designed lyrics, that is, in an intraculturally positively
valued virtuoso singing style (Level II). By the virtue of his “diet” power (ani
shinan, see Illius 1987), his knowledge of the “correct” songs learned from the
nonhumans, and his mastering of the inebriate state, he transforms into a non-
human being, manifest in voice masking (Level III). With that, a high-impact
magical song is being performed.
Conclusion: Powerful Voices and Nonhuman Creativity
ere are mainly two things that shall be achieved when uttering some mean-
ing using a voice charged with power: one is directed towards the singer and
passes through himself into the subjectively perceived realm of nonhumans;
the other is directed toward the world of humans (where human listeners are
located), likewise trespassing this world’s boundaries and resounding in the
“Real World” beyond the world known by humans. e address is in both
cases not a human audience but the spirits, plant- or animal-owners, demons,
or other beings situated beyond everyday experience.
e singer uses song (and only “correct” singing, which requires long train-
ing and many “diets”) in order to achieve controlled transformation. Here, in
a certain sense, the power of the voice is redirected towards the singer him-
self, recursively strengthening his multiple positionality in the shifting worlds
as he transforms. e song appears to him as kano, as a path, framework, or
even landscape perceived multimodally by the singer himself (considerably
helped by the hallucinatory properties of the ayawaska brew, see also Brabec
de Mori 2012, 2013). By changing the voice’s quality, the perceived environ-
ment changes, and thus the place where the singer is positioned changes, too.
By singing in high-pitched and clean falsetto, he may fi nd himself positioned
within the realm of benevolent entities, like for example the legendary “Inka”
people who own high-tech healing facilities like x-ray or blood-cleaning ma-
chines (Illius 1987, 1999; Brabec de Mori 2019) that may be put at his disposal
for healing purposes. By employing a shrill and highly nasal falsetto, he may
perceive himself located within a river among the spirits of the water, sirens,
dolphin-people, and other nonhumans that often show qualities of sickness
and madness—qualities he may also use for sorcery. He will sing for summon-
ing and binding these entities and sending them back to where they belong in
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 115
case the patient suff ered from a related illness.14 e voice’s quality “material-
izes” in the perception of the singer, providing not only diff erent environments
but likewise diff erent abilities of the singer’s respective “body”: if he sings “as an
Inka,” his possibilities of manipulating his personal environment are diff erent
from these obtained when singing “as a siren.”
e second reason for sounding a power-charged voice is aimed at the sing-
er’s listeners: as indicated above, listeners—given they share the knowledge
culture of traditional Shipibo—perceive the singer as yoshina, “transformed
into a spirit.” Here, the employment of voice masking indicates the presence
of nonhuman entities to the knowledgeable public. e changing qualities of
the voice can be heard “objectively” (that is, they can easily be recorded, and
comments by research associates on such recordings can be collected). ey
can be heard despite the invisibility of the singer in dark night, and despite the
nonphysicality of the entities associated with the voice and the lyrics, and they
can be heard by all people present (who can initiate discussions about these
qualities). e “reality” of “physical” transformation of Indigenous specialists
should be rethought against this backdrop. e singing suggests listeners to
hear it in an “enchanted” way (as exposed above and in Stoichiţă and Brabec de
Mori 2017). at is, the perceived sonic events are enhanced with an agency of
their own and located in a space that does not, or only partially, overlap with
the space the singer and listeners are situated in as perceived by other sensual
modalities like vision, albeit much hindered by darkness, but also tactile and
equilibrium-related sensations. Listeners can imagine by enchantedly listen-
ing to the power charged song, how an environment unfolds in auditory space
with “musical” agents playing together or against each other. us, listeners can
follow the singer’s magical actions (most perfectly if the singer does not omit
translation of the text he performs, so listeners can understand the lyrics) set
into motion by the song, by the resounding voice. ey are aware of the criteria
of power-charging and judge the eff ectiveness of the singing by these criteria.
From what I exposed in the section on charging the voice, it seems possible
to identify the entity the singer is embodying (or rather, ensounding) by listen-
ing and applying a catalogic knowledge of entities and “their” voices. However,
this is usually neither possible nor pursued by listeners or singers. e voice at
least identifi es categories of beings. For example, I correlated two voice masks
with the Inkas and water spirits, respectively. is is about the maximum of
accuracy possible. It does not indicate whether a siren or a dolphin spirit is
singing, and “Inka” is quite general here for “good, powerful helping spirit.” e
lyrics provide additional information, and sometimes the entities in question
are mentioned, named, or hinted at through metaphor and complicated codes
(see Tournon 1991; Townsley 1993; Illius 1997, 1999). Commonly, however,
the entities are not named in order not to blow the disguise or disclose the
116 Bernd Brabec
singer’s current identity. Much of healing is achieved by trickery and battles
with spirits or sorcerers. is is where Severi’s transmutation comes in: hints
in the lyrics as well as the sequence of voice changes and melodic sequences
deploy a series of indexes that can be understood by knowledgeable persons
(usually only well-trained specialists). e indexes point to places (e.g., the un-
derwater world), sets of entities (like water spirits), interactions (attraction,
seduction, battle, betrayal), and eff ects (healing, dispatching, cleaning, and so
on). erefore, what I called fi rst-level creativity, the poetic mastery of lan-
guage and virtuosity in “correct” singing styles is employed by the singer in
order to set in motion the creativity of the entities in the nonhuman realms,
the spirits, Inka, or sirens the performer “sings along with.” e series of songs
performed during a ritual with changing qualities of melody, pitch, and tim-
bre lay out a pattern, like a procession of nonhuman beings that fi nally allow
well-trained listeners to trace—e.g., in case of a curing session—the original
cause of the illness, the way the patient was aff ected by it, the entities sum-
moned by the sorcerer as helpers, entities embodied by the healer in order to
trick and overthrow them, and entities ordered to protect the patient or to
pursue the receding original causer of the problem. e songs thus display a
panopticon of nonhumans and their interactions with “Real People” as well as
among themselves. is “procession” perceived through correct singing (fi rst-
layer creativity) is the “Real” power behind the result (the complete sequence of
songs performed throughout the ritual). e entities whose agency lies beyond
the human can be perceived, initiated, and transmitted by the knowledgeable
singer, are those who fi nally create (second-layer creativity) what is considered
impressive, powerful, and in many senses, innovative, by Indigenous listeners.
is is achieved through indirect perception: while people hear and listen, the
mentioned processes enable perceptions and create certainties about creative
events occurring in the “Real World” which is usually removed from sensory
experience. By transmutating these events into sonic occurrences, the singer
makes them hearable, perceivable, and consequently real.
is is applicable to magical, high-level charged songs of magical specialists
but also to apparently nonmagical songs performed with low-level voices. For
example, a song performed at a drinking festivity for courting a partner is usu-
ally performed in human language (Level I, A), being drunk (Level I, B), and
being well sung (Level II, see the “laypeople branch” in Figure 4.1). erefore, it
is thought to be eff ective when it is not “just said,” but it is uttered in the spirits’
language, and it thereby extends its agency beyond the human, thus acquiring
an air of inevitability. e entities named and summoned in a common festive
love song may be certain birds that indicate certain behavior by the addressed
people (see also Brabec de Mori 2011: 172 and 2015a: 670 passim). If such
a song at a party is performed by somebody who has some “diet power” and a
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 117
slightly boman voice, and the singer succeeds in conquering the beloved, it is
said that this is due to the more powerful voice. If a renowned médico, a magical
specialist, performs the same love song at a party, people already “know” that he
will take the girl home—of course, as his voice is irresistibly powerful.
In this last example, again an implicit assumption is made: the nonhuman
persons, in that case certain “love-bird-persons” are set in motion by the trained
singer, and these bird-persons are the agents that are fi nally responsible for
initiating relationships among humans (see also Piedade 2013 for a similar in-
fl u e n c e f r o m kawoka-spirits on human behavior). Consequently, human life, in-
cluding such initiation of relationships, for example, is thought to be eff ectively
subjected to the creative energies of powerful beings of myth; energies that
incidentally may manifest in a constructive sense for humans, but are usually
feared for their devastating chaotic qualities. is is why we need the abstract
machine: speaking, invoking (bomán), singing, and transforming—fi rst-layer
creativity—mobilizes the second-layer that originates from nonhuman beings
to become manifest, to guide and conduct the singing and ritual doings, in a
controlled and orderly fashion, so that the powerful beings of myth, like the
Inka, sirens, dolphins, anacondas, or spirits, deploy their creative acts in a phil-
anthropic manner: by creating humans that are able to create song, artwork,
and knowledge.15
It is, however, still unclear why nonhumans are mainly said to react to sing-
ing, or more generally, to power-charged voices. Following the basic assump-
tion of animism, that nonhumans like animals, plants, and spirits perceive
themselves as humans (in a human or humanoid shape), they own the same ca-
pacities of interiority, that is the same, or similar faculty of hearing and under-
standing. As humans (within their realm of human existence), they are able to
follow sonic indexes and therefore infer inner states of human (or nonhuman,
from their perspective) beings through qualities of human voices, in the way
“we” infer from the sound of barking if the dog is happy or frightened. While
speaking human voices sound to them just like a sequence of nonlexical utter-
ances, singing human voices provide additional chains of indexes (melodies,
timbres, pitches, and so on) to infer not only inner states but also sequences
of beings and interactions. By listening in an enchanted way, the nonhumans
are likewise able to follow forms, shapes, and interactions in sonic space, move-
ments that can be correlated with beings and actions. ese beings—from
the listening nonhumans’ perspective—are diff erent from themselves, maybe
known through myths or other narratives or other modes of knowledge (see
Kohn 2013 for a diff erently designed but similarly interspecies take on semiot-
ics beyond the human). us, compared to a speaker, the singing human pro-
vides more to be understood by nonhuman agents as these are conceived in the
Indigenous ontology.
118 Bernd Brabec
It is still speculative to assume what is heard and understood by nonhuman
agents in Indigenous, animic, or analogic ontologies (but see Menezes Bastos
2013; Piedade 2013; Lewy 2012, 2015; and Brabec de Mori 2015b for ethno-
graphic examples and discussions). Shipibo conceptions of the human voice,
however, open a fi eld of inquiry of how nonhumans are addressed, summoned,
and therefore consequently conceived to understand in order to react upon and
in turn creatively conduct human “musical” interventions. While the branch of
charging a voice with power from nonlexical utterance to speaking, to getting
drunk, and to singing is open (and, considering the possible involvement of
nonhumans, also risky) for almost any human being, the higher-level branch
involving samá and boman powers and the art of transformation is reserved for
trained people. A voice such charged is probably perceived by nonhumans as
likewise charged and maybe easier to understand, at least for nonhuman mag-
ical specialist persons (e.g., jaguar, anaconda, or river dolphin people). Follow-
ing the doubled (or multiple) positionality of performing specialists in ritual
setting, it is likewise possible to assume that their power-charged singing is
even lexically understandable for nonhumans. My research associate Roberto
Mori, for example, explained that in ritual he was singing along with e.g., the
Inka people, who would sing in their own language, including him in their cho-
rus, although the song sounded like Shipibo language in the translated sonic
occurrence emerging from him as being heard by listeners and recorded by
technical devices. Similar to Akū
´li in Koch-Grünberg’s account and Pascual
Mahua as he told me, both unaware of their double positionality as jaguar and
human person, Roberto was unaware of singing his songs in two languages
simultaneously.
Bernd Brabec received his PhD in Musicology from the University of Vi-
enna. He specialized in Indigenous music from the Ucayali valley of Eastern
Peru, where he spent fi ve years among the Shipibo-Konibo. Since 2006, he has
worked at the Phonogrammarchiv, Vienna, as a research and teaching assistant
at the Centre for Systematic Musicology and the Institute of Ethnomusicology,
University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, and as Research Associate
at the University of Applied Sciences-Music Lucerne. He currently holds a
tenure-track position at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He has pub-
lished the book Die Lieder der Richtigen Menschen (Songs of the Real People,
2015), and edited several volumes, for example, Auditive Wissenskulturen (Au-
ditory Knowledge Cultures, 2018, with Martin Winter). His research interests
focus on Western Amazonian Indigenous music, arts, and history, as well as the
complex of music, ritual, mind, and body.
How to Charge a Voice with Power? 119
Notes
1. I refer here to concepts of creativity and inspiration in the arts (see e.g., Deliège and Harvey
2006), which emphasize much more complex and personal processes than, for example, the
treatment of creativity in industrial design (e.g., Han et al. 2017), or in experimental psy-
chology and neuroscience, whose methods rely on controlled and repeatable executive tasks
(e.g., Fink and Benedek 2019). I exclude aspects of creativity that relate to motivational
terms (one draws artfully because one enjoys drawing) and social recognition (one cooks
well because one desires a favorable social position).
2. In naturalistic-scientifi c creativity research, it is under debate if there is a relationship be-
tween psychosis and creativity. In Western environments, positive symptoms of schizo-
phrenia, bipolar disorder, as well as to some extent autism, are under investigation for
their possible contribution to innovation; see, for example, the interdisciplinary treatment
of these questions by Kaufman (2014). Likewise, the altered states of ritual specialists in
traditional and Indigenous societies, in Amerindia and elsewhere, are still compared to psy-
chotic episodes. During the 1980s, psychologist Richard Noll published various papers (see
the discussion in Current Anthropology, Noll 1985; see e.g., Cardeña and Schaffl er 2018 for
more recent inquiries especially regarding spirit possession and posttraumatic disorders).
Noll suggests that “shamanic” altered states are paradigmatic examples for the cultural con-
trol of otherwise possibly schizophrenia-like behavior. Some evolution theorists suggest
that “shamanism” and even “religion” result from creative control of psychotic episodes (e.g.,
McClenon 2012, but see Martínez González 2009, arguing otherwise).
3. Gell (1998: 122–30) explains that although a “god” may “possess” a visual or physical object,
the “worshippers” are still perfectly aware of the diff erence of the god and the statue; the
statue is not a representation of the god but rather a route to the god. In the sonic domain,
on the other hand, the functional similarity of heard sound and animate being (Stoichiţă
and Brabec de Mori 2017) enable a tangible manifestation in auditory space. For Amazo-
nian conceptions of the materiality, substance, or tangibility of sound and sonic utterance
see Brabec de Mori (2015c), and Menezes Bastos (2013).
4. Other such codes may apply, for example, when hearing a bird singing in a way as endowed
with specifi c meanings (omen), but also when hearing major-minor chord progressions in
a piece of music. All this cannot be done if one is not aware of the structure which is not
contained in the sonic event but coded in a specifi c sequence of occurrences within a given
social environment.
5. Much has been written about the Shipibo-Konibo people, among the most noteworthy
works are those by Tessmann (1928), Bergman ([1980] 1990), Illius (1987, 1999), Tournon
(2002), Brabec de Mori (2015a).
6. All linguistic (grammatical, lexical, etymological) considerations off ered here are mainly
based on the work of Faust ([1973] 1990); Loriot, Lauriault, and Day (1993); Illius
(1999); and Valenzuela (2003). In the following, reference indications are given only in
specifi c or questionable circumstances. Please note that some of the ideas proposed here
were formulated under a diff erent focus in Brabec de Mori (2012, 2013, and 2015a).
7. However, these languages can be translated by specialists, see Brabec de Mori (2013) for
animal languages, and Piedade (2013) for spirits’ languages.
8. During the last few decades, many Indigenous people moved to towns and cities and some
facets of urban lifestyle were also introduced to villages, including drinking alcohol alone or
in small groups. Traditionally, in the Western Amazon, alcohol (fermented manioc beer, as
120 Bernd Brabec
opposed to fresh, nonfermented manioc beer that can “always” be drunk, also by children)
was only ingested during collective festivities in a ritualized setting.
9. Agua [de] Florida is an industrially produced perfume of alcoholic basis that can be bought
for a very cheap price literally everywhere in Peru and many other Latin American and
Caribbean countries. It is often considered magically powerful.
10. e complex around the “diet” has been described to some extent in almost every publica-
tion about western Amazonian people, for instance see Illius (1987), Tournon (2002), Le-
Clerc (2003), and Brabec de Mori (2009, 2012) on the Shipibo-Konibo, or Frank (1994)
on the Kakataibo, among many others. Although with diff erent peoples, groups, families,
and persons, many particularities can be observed, the fact of appliance, the durations, the
overall modalities as well as expected results are fairly constant in the Peruvian lowlands.
11. Iwi waste, literally “ray [fi sh] waste,” Cyperus sp., is a sort of grass whose root is used as a
remedy for pregnant women to ease birth.
12. Festivities like the so-called ani xeati are protected from unwanted listeners by sonic means:
the noise of dry seeds and nutshells attached to women’s skirts is so loud that nonhu-
man potential listeners cannot understand the songs uttered “inside” the noise barrier (see
Schoer, Brabec de Mori, and Lewy 2014; Brabec de Mori 2015b).
13. I treated the topic of transformation more profoundly in prior publications (Brabec de
Mori, 2012, 2015a: 572 passim, and 2015b; see also Halbmayer 2012, 2013). e topic of
voice masking was fi rst raised and exemplifi ed by Olsen (1996).
14. For curing by trickery see for example Illius (1992) or Brabec de Mori (2012).
15. is has vast political implications: “preservation” of Indigenous traditions, folklorization
and traditionalism usually do not address the “preservation,” or future activation of this
abstract machine of Indigenous and nonhuman co-creativity (see Brabec de Mori 2016 for
further detail).
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