The Cosmic Serpent (22 page)

The indigenous people themselves are the first to realize what a disadvantage this gives them in a world defined by written words and numbers. Practically speaking, they know that they are often shortchanged when they sell their products on the market. This is why they want bilingual and intercultural education. However, for each indigenous society, speaking its own language, it is necessary to develop a specific curriculum and to train indigenous instructors capable of teaching it.
³
This costs approximately U.S.$200,000 per culture. In the Peruvian Amazon alone, there are fifty-six different cultures, each speaking a different language. For the moment, only ten of these have access to bilingual, intercultural education. Why so few? Because the small number of nongovernmental organizations supporting this initiative have limited means, and the institutions that are large enough to fund education programs for indigenous people seem to be in no hurry to do so. It is true that the results of such an investment can only be measured in generations, rather than in five-year periods.

 

AFTER WRITING the original French version of this book, I returned to the Peruvian Amazon and spent a week in Iquitos at a school for bilingual, intercultural education, where young men and women from ten indigenous societies are learning to teach both indigenous and Western knowledge both in their mother tongue and in Spanish. I spent several fascinating days observing from the back of a class, then the students asked whether I would tell them about my work. On my last evening I addressed a roomful of students and told them my hypothesis indicated there was a relationship between the entwined serpents Amazonian shamans see in their visions and the DNA double helix that science discovered in 1953. At the end of the talk, a voice called out from the back: “Are you saying that scientists are catching up with us?”

I also returned to Quirishari and met with Carlos Perez Shuma for the first time in nine years. He hadn't changed at all, and even seemed younger. We sat down in a quiet house and began to chat, making up for lost time. He told me about all the things that had occurred in the Pichis Valley during my absence. I listened to him for about an hour, but then could no longer contain myself: “Uncle,” I said, “there is something important I have to tell you. You remember all those things you explained into the tape recorder that I had difficulty understanding? Well, after thinking about it for years, and then studying it, I have just discovered that in scientific terms all the things you told me were true.” I thought he would be pleased and was about to continue when he interrupted. “What took you so long?” he said.

 

WE WESTERNERS have our paradoxes. Rationalism has brought us unhoped-for material well-being, yet few people seem satisfied.

However, we are not alone, and indigenous people also have their dilemmas.

First, in order to recognize the true value of their knowledge, they must face the loss history has inflicted on them. For the last 500 years, Western civilization has been teaching indigenous people that they know nothing—to the point that some of them have come to believe it. For them to appreciate the value of their own knowledge, they must come to terms with having been misled.

Second, there is money. Over the last few years, one of the main problems confronting the indigenous organizations of Amazonia has been their own success. Friends of the rainforest have poured money into the area, with the best intentions, but without rigorous controls. This has mainly caused corruption and division. The fault is also ours, because we trusted them in a paternalistic fashion. We thought that indigenous people were incorruptible, because we had romantic presuppositions. But this does not mean we should stop working with them; rather, we should insist on greater controls in the management of funds to avoid counterproductive generosity that draws its roots in romantic paternalism.

Finally, the creation of compensation mechanisms for the intellectual property of indigenous people will depend on the resolution of the following dilemma. In shamanic traditions, it is invariably specified that spiritual knowledge is not marketable. Certainly, the shaman's work deserves retribution, but, by definition, the sacred is not for sale; the use of this knowledge for the accumulation of personal power is the definition of black magic. In a world where everything is for sale, including genetic sequences, this concept will no doubt be difficult to negotiate.
⁴

 

I SPEAK OF “indigenous people,” or “Amazonian Indians,” and I oppose them to “us Westerners”—yet these words do not correspond to monolithic realities. Prior to European colonization, the inhabitants of the Amazon already made up a patchwork of diversity, with hundreds of cultures speaking different languages and enjoying more or less constructive relations among each other. Some indigenous societies did not wait for the conquistadores' arrival to wage war on each other.

The diversified reality of indigenous Amazonia was assaulted by European colonization, which decimated the population and fragmented territories. Indigenous cultures survive, strong here, less so there, necessarily transformed and hybridized. But appearances are misleading, and reality is often double-edged: Hybridization, mestizo-ization, which implies a certain dilution, is one of the oldest survival strategies in the world. The “true Indian” who has never left the forest, does not speak a word of Spanish or Portuguese, uses no metal tools, and wanders around naked and feathered exists only in the Western imagination. Which is just as well for the real-life Indians, because they already have a hard enough time leading their lives as they see fit.

Ayahuasca-based shamanism is essentially an indigenous phenomenon. However, it is also true that this shamanism is currently enjoying a boom thanks to the mixing of cultures. The case of Pablo Amaringo is eloquent in this respect. Amaringo is a mestizo ayahuasquero. He lives in the town of Pucallpa, his mother tongue is Quechua, and his ancestry is a mix of Cocama, Lamista, and Piro. The songs he sings in his hallucinatory trances have indigenous lyrics. Amaringo does not consider himself an Indian, though he recognizes the indigenous nature of his knowledge. For instance, he says the Ashaninca are the ones who know “better than any other jungle people the magical uses of plant-teachers.”
⁵

Meanwhile, the Ashaninca people I knew in the Pichis claimed that the best shamans were Shipibo-Conibo (who live in the same area as Amaringo). Ruperto Gomez, the ayahuasquero who initiated me, did his apprenticeship with the Shipibo-Conibo, and this conferred undeniable prestige on him. So it would seem that studies “abroad” are considered better and that the high place of Amazonian shamanism is always somewhere other than where one happens to be.
⁶

Shamanism resembles an academic discipline (such as anthropology or molecular biology); with its practitioners, fundamental researchers, specialists, and schools of thought it is a way of apprehending the world that evolves constantly. One thing is certain: Both indigenous and mestizo shamans consider people like the Shipibo-Conibo, the Tukano, the Kamsá, and the Huitoto as the equivalents to universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and the Sorbonne
⁷
; they are the highest reference in matters of knowledge. In this sense, ayahuasca-based shamanism is an essentially indigenous phenomenon. It belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amazonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years. In comparison, the universities of the Western world are less than nine hundred years old.

The shamanism of which the indigenous people of the Amazon are the guardians represents knowledge accumulated over thousands of years in the most biologically diverse place on earth. Certainly, shamans say they acquire their knowledge directly from the spirits, but they grow up in cultures where shamanic visions are stored in myths. In this way mythology informs shamanism: The invisible, life-creating maninkari spirits are the ones whose feats Ashaninca mythology relates, and it is also the maninkari who talk to Ashaninca shamans in their visions and tell them how to heal.

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another—thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations.

 

IN THIS BOOK I chose an autobiographical and narrative approach for several reasons. First, I do not believe in an objective point of view with an exclusive monopoly on reality. So it seemed important to expose the inevitable presuppositions that any observer has, so that readers may come to their opinion in full knowledge of the setting.
⁸

In this sense I belong to the recent movement within anthropology that views the discipline as a form of interpretation rather than as a science. However, even among my colleagues who work in this fashion, listening to people carefully, recording and transcribing their words, and interpreting them as well as they can, there remains a problem I have tried to avoid—namely, the compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines, which means that the discourse of a given specialist is only understandable to his or her immediate colleagues.
⁹
In my opinion, subjects such as DNA and the knowledge of indigenous people are too important to be entrusted solely to the focalized gaze of academic specialists in biology or anthropology; they concern indigenous people themselves, but also midwives, farmers, musicians, and all the rest. I decided to tell my story in an attempt to create an account that would be comprehensible across disciplines and outside the academy.

This decision was inspired by shamanic traditions, which invariably state that images, metaphors, and stories are the best means to transmit knowledge. In this sense, myths are “scientific narratives,” or stories about knowledge (the word “science” comes from the Latin
scire,
“to know”).

I was fortunate to choose this approach, because it was in telling my story that I discovered the real story I wanted to tell.

There was a price to pay for implicating myself in my work like this. I spent many sleepless nights and put a strain on my personal life. I was truly bowled over by working on this book. At the time, I felt sure it was going to change the world. It took months of talking with numerous friends to understand that my hypothesis was not even receivable by official science, despite the scientific elements it contains. Since then, I've calmed down and no longer talk away for hours.

We live in a time when it is difficult to speak seriously about one's spirituality. Often one only has to state one's convictions to be considered a preacher. I, too, support the idea that everybody should be free to believe what they want and that it is nobody's business to tell others what they should believe. So I will not describe in detail the impact of my work on my own spirituality, and I will not tell readers what to think about the connections I have established.

Here, too, I draw my inspiration from shamanism, which rests not on doctrine, but on
experience
. The shaman is simply a guide, who conducts the initiate to the spirits. The initiate picks up the information revealed by the spirits and does what he or she wants with it. Likewise, in this book, I provide a number of connections, with complete references for those who wish to follow a particular trail. In the end, it is up to the readers to draw the spiritual conclusions they see fit.

Is there a goal to life? Do we exist for a reason? I believe so, and I think that the combination of shamanism and biology gives interesting answers to these questions. But I do not feel ready to discuss them from a personal point of view.

The microscopic world of DNA, and its proteins and enzymes, is teeming inside us and is enough to make us marvel. Yet rational discourse, which holds a monopoly on the subject, denies itself a sense of wonder. Current biologists condemn themselves, through their beliefs, to describe DNA and the cell-based life for which it codes as if they were blind people discussing movies or objective anthropologists explaining the hallucinatory sphere of which they have no experience: They oblige themselves to consider an animate reality as if it were inanimate.

By ignoring this obligation, and by considering shamanism and biology at the same time, stereoscopically, I saw DNA snakes. They were alive.

 

THE ORIGIN OF KNOWLEDGE is a subject that anthropologists neglect—which is one of the reasons that prompted me to write this book. However, anthropologists are not alone; scientists in general seem to have a similar difficulty. On closer examination, the reason for this becomes obvious: Many of science's central ideas seem to come from beyond the limits of rationalism. René Descartes dreams of an angel who explains the basic principles of materialist rationalism to him; Albert Einstein daydreams in a tram, approaching another, and conceives the theory of relativity; James Watson scribbles on a newspaper in a train, then rides his bicycle to reach the conviction (having “borrowed” Rosalind Franklin's radiophotographic work) that DNA has the form of a double helix.
¹⁰
And so on.

Scientific discovery often originates from a combination of focalized and defocalized consciousness. Typically, a researcher spends months in the lab working on a problem, considering the data to the point of saturation, then attains illumination while jogging, daydreaming, lying in bed making mental pictures, driving a car, cooking, shaving, bathing—in brief, while thinking about something else and
defocalizing
. W. I. B. Beveridge writes in
The art of scientific investigation:
“The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the idea had not been thought of previously.”
¹¹