EthnoPoetics in the Amazon

One of the strangest oversights in "Technicians of the Sacred" (Jerome Rothenberg's big book of EthnoPoetics, first published in 1968) is the complete absence of material from the Amazon. However, now I have noticed that Rothenberg did pay attention to the region in the third issue of Alcheringa (winter 1971, all issues online here) with a 23-page mini-anthology. 

EthnoPoetics was a great, important and inspiring movement but it always suffered from two major problem. 1) It often failed to provide meaningful ethnographic context. 2) Texts from with different historical pedigrees are all translated (often with poetic freedom) into the idiom of avant-garde modernist poetry. Imagine Shakespeare, the King James bible, Coleridge and Tom Jones' Lalya translated into the hurried journalese of an Armenian self-publisher. EthnoPoetics assumes the right to take literature/poetry from every language of the world and reshape it in order to make it confirm to your own agenda. Some people find it colonialist, which I find too easy and too paternalistic. EthnoPoetics offers freedom but does not accepts its responsibilities. The result is often rote blandness where the uniqueness of languages and cultures should be. But let that not deter you from its achievements.

One of the songs in the anthology is a Jivaro shaman song recorded by Michael Harner which makes a nice addition to this earlier Jivaro Shamanic chant (recorded by Philippe Descola).    

FIRST SHAMAN SONG

I, I, I, I, I

I, I, I, I

I am ... like First Shaman
I am like First Shaman
When I drink natem
My whole body becomes cold
& I easily suck out that spirit-dart
I, I, I, I

I'm always above the clouds
& that's how corne I have power
Because I drank natem
I drank enough to have power
My whole body is cold
That's how I have power to suck out that spirit-dart
I, I, I, I

There's a very large body of water
So that I'm like a great body of water
I have a crown but it's gold
A crown & it looks so lovely
Lovely when I drink natem
That's why it's easy to suck out that spirit-dart
I, I, I, I

I'm always above the clouds
That's why I can cure so easily
I have the spirit-darts of natem
I'm seated but I do feel cold
There must be lots of breezes around me
I, I, I, I

My spirit-darts are like birds
& the wings & bodies are dreams
I'm. ready to start with them now
My spirit-darts are sitting all over me
& as I get to feel cold
I'll get to have power
I can easily suck out that spirit-dart
I, I. I, I

I'm. like som.e anaconda in the Napo River
That's why I have power to suck out that spirit-dart
I, I, I, I

Wait, wait a little
Now I'm. going to be dizzy
I'll be starting to see when I'm high

(pause, followed by sucking & dry vomiting)

Now I've sucked out that spirit-dart
Now the pain will soon go away

'Nature' does not exist for everyone

Achuar map of their territory.

In an interview with Phillipe Descola (earlier, earlier, earlier), published in the Tipiti journal, comes the following quote that is good to have on record as it explains how Descola came to see during his fieldwork with the Achuar that nature does not exist:

...what really made me marvel was the realization that, although the Achuar certainly recognized certain discontinuities between humans and non-humans, these discontinuities were radically different from our own. And this was a bit surprising in an expected way, but also in an unexpected one. I was expecting this because I’d read, of course, not only the South American ethnography, but also Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim and a few others pioneers of our discipline whose work was entirely devoted to resolve this bizarre scandal, that some people appear not to make distinctions between humans and non-humans. So, I was prepared to find that. I was prepared to find it at the level of, as we would say at the time, ‘representations’ at the level of ways of thinking about life. But I had no way of understanding how people would actually live with this idea and put it into practice, or really experience the world in this fashion. And this is the discovery. No? It’s not only what people say; their whole way of life revolved around the fact that they didn’t make a distinction between nature and society.

Periodic derangement of the senses [the twilight zone]

The anthropologist as a young man.

'Systematic derangement of the senses' is how Rimbaud's described his method to get himself psyched out into states of enlarged poetic awareness. "Long, intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized myself as a poet". William Burroughs cited this as his aim when he wrote Naked Luch, only later with the cut-up can he be said to have fully achieved it. And in mechanized form as well.


The following quote is from Philippe Descola's study of the Achuar Jivaro 'The Spears of Twilight'. It maps wonderfully well onto Rimbaud's sensual derangement as a beneficial state. French anthropologists tend to be erudite intellectuals rather than data-obsessed fieldworkers and in this context the influence of a poète maudit on an ethnologist are actually well rehearsed. James Clifford's Ethnographic Surrealism goes a long way to explain how French anthropology is almost a fully surrealist study with Debord and Bataille hovering over it with all their intellectual dominance. The quote itself affirms the connection by linking the psychogeographic, synaesthetic effects of twilight with Baudelaire, but what aesthetics was Descola thinking of exactly?   

Submerged in its green monotones, nature here is not of the kind to inspire a painter. Only at twilight does it deploy its bad taste, in line with Baudelairean aesthetics, exceeding the artifice of the gaudiest of coloured images. The inhabitants of the forest become exceptionally agitated during this brief debauchery of colour. The animals of the daytime noisily prepare for sleep while the nocturnal species awaken for the hunt, their carnivorous appetites whetted. Smells are almost definable now, for the heat of the long late afternoon has given them a consistency that the sun can no longer dissipate. Dulled during the daytime by the uniformity of the of nature's stimulants, the sensual organs are suddenly assailed at dusk by a multiplicity of simultaneous perceptions that make it very difficult to discriminate between sight, sound, smell. Thanks to this brutal onslaught on the senses, the transition between day and night in the forest acquires a dimension of its own as if, for a brief moment just before the great void sleep takes over, the human body is no longer separate from its environment.

Further commenting on the monotonous jungle where time seems to be non-existent Descola manages to write about the virtues of the bugs and pains as a form of home-making:

Time seems to be standing still, with neither depth nor rhythm, waiting for something to happen. Biological routines are all that lend a small measure of animation to our uneventful existence. The changes that they bring sometimes introduce a note of originality. An asphyxiating spice, a pretty caterpillar that inflicts an acid burn, mosquitoes that prevent you from sleeping, jiggers that eat your legs and abdomen, infected insect bites that suppurate, lice that infests your head, athlete's foot that makes your feet stink, colic that wrenches your entrails - in short, all the minor infirmities customary to the tropics combine to draw attention to, as it were, the alien nature of our own bodies in which these successive aches and pains find a home.