Sacharuna Library

1.1_Where the subject matter of this book communicates itself...in the politics of epistemic murk and the fiction of the real, in the creation of Indians, in the role of myth and magic in colonial violence as much as in its healing, and in the way that healing can mobilize terror in order to subvert it, not through heavenly cathatses but through the tripping up of power in its own disorderliness. PPXiii

1.2_Killing and torture and sorcery are real as death is real. But why people do these things, and how the answer to that question affect the question-that is not answerable outside of the efects of the real carried through time by people in action. That is why my subject is not the truth of being, but the social being of truth, not wether facts are real but whate the politics of their interpretation and representation are.With walter benjamin my aim is to release what he noted as the enormous energy of history that lies bonded in the ‘once upon a time’ of classical historical narrative. The history that showed things ‘as they really were,’ he pointed out, was the strongest narcotic of our century. And of course it still is. PPXiV

1.3_To release this energy requires special modes of presentation whose aim is to disrupt the imagery of natural order through which, in the name of the real, power exercises its dominion. As against the magic of academic rituals of explanation which, with their alchemical promise of yielding system from chaos, do nothing to ruffle the placidsurface of this natural order, I choose to work with a different conflation of modernism and the primitivism it conjures into life-namely the carrying over into history of the principle of montage, as i learned that principle not only from terror, but from Putomayo shamanism with its adroit, albeit unconscious use of the magic of history and its healing power. PPXiV

2.1_Santiago and Ambrosia Mutumbajoy of the Mocoa river for[haling and swaping stories about healing], thereby making the mosaic of events, reminiscences, layers of meaning, and disgressions on which this book largely rests ("Its method is essentially representation. Method as a digression. Representation as digression...The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure

2.2_is its primary characteristic. Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation...Just as mosaics preserve their majecty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. Both are made up of the distinct and the disparate; and nothing could bear more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image and the truth itself. The value of the fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea, and the brillance of the representation depends as much on this value as the brillance of the mosaic does on the quality of the glass paste[Benjamin, The Origin of german Tragic Drama]).

3.1_......Timerman’s burden was double. he was not just a victim: he was a victim of what he himself had prescribed-military dictarship as the solution to the disorder afflicting the nation...And the result?A society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it-a death-space in the land of the living where torture’s certain uncertainty fed fed the great machinery of the arbitrariness of power, power on the rampage-that great steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order and without which order could not exist. PP4

3.2_The space of death is important in the creation of meaning and consciousness, nowhere more so than in the societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror fluorishes. We may think of the space of death as a treshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction. Sometimes a person goes through it and returns to us, to tell the tale, as did Timerman...And on his return from there, he found: "We victims and victimizers, we’re part of the same humanity, colleages in the same endeavor to prove the existence of ideologies, feelings, heroic deeds, religions, obsessions. And the rest of humanity, the great majority, what are they engaged in?"PP4-5.

3.3_This space of death has a long and rich culture. It is where the social imagination has populated its metamorphising images of evil and the underworld: in the WESTERN TRADITION HOMER, VIRGIL, THE BIBLE, DANTE, HIERONYMOUS BOSH, the Inquisition, Rimbaud, Conrad’s heart of Darkness; in northwest amazonian tradition, zones of visions, communication between terrestrial and supernatural beings, putrefaction, death, rebirth, and genesis, perhaps in the rivers and land of maternal milk bathed eternally in the subtle green light of coca leaves. With European conquest and colonization, these spaces of death blend into a common pool of key signifiers binding the transforming culture of the conquerer with that of the conquered. But the signifiers are strategically out of joint with what they signify. "If confusion is the sign of the times," wrote Artaud. "I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation." He wonders if it is that cleavage which is responsible for the revenge of things; " the poetry which is no longer within us and which we no longer succeed in finding in things suddenly appears on their wrong side." Marx pointed to the same disarrangement and rearrangement between us and things in the fetishism of commodities, wherein poetry suddenly appears on the wrong side of things now animated. In modern history the fetishism of commodities rejuvenates the mythic density of the space of death-with the death of the subject as much as with the new-found arbitrariness of the sign whereby a resurgent animism makes things human and humans things. it is in the terror of the space of death that we often find an elaborated explanation of what Artaus and marx, in their different ways, see as the rupture and revenge of signification. PP5

3.4_In miguel Angel asturias’s depiction of the culture of terror of the estrada cabrera dictatorship in early twentieth-century Guatemala, it is unbearable to read how, as people become like things, their dreaming power passes into things that become not only like people but their persecutors. Things become agents of terror, conspiring with the president’s need to sense the innermost thoughts of his subjects, who, once sensed, become not just objectsbut disjointed parts of objects. it is in the dictator’s sensing of peole’s inner worlds that terror makes nature its ally...PP6

3.5_Yet this space of death is preeminently a space of transformation: through the experience of coming close to death there well may be a more vivid sense of life; through fear there can come not only a growth in self-consciousness but also fragmentation, then loss of self conforming to authority; or, as in the great journey of the Divine Comedy...through evil, good. Lost in the dark woods, then journeying through the underworld with his pagan guide, Dante achieves paradise, but only after he has reached the lowermost point of evil, mounting the shaggy back of the wild man. PP7

3.6_...Yet here there is laughter too, puncturing the fear swelling the mystery, reminding us of Walter benjamin’s comment on the way in which romanticism may perniciously misunderstand the nature of intoxication. "Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena," he wrote, "presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic and fanatical stress on the mysterious sideof the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. PP8

3.7_...it is clear that cultures of terror are nourished by the intermingling of silence and myth in which the fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious fluorishes by means of rumor woven finely into webs of magical realism. It is also clear that the victimizer needs the victim to create truth, objectifying fantasy in the discourse of the other. To be sure the torturer’s desire is prosaic: to acquire information, to act in concert with large-scale economic strategies elaborated by the masters of finance and exigencies of production. yet there is also the need to control massive populations, entire social classes, and even nations through the cultural elaboration of fear...That is why silence is imposed and why Timerman, with his newspaper, was important; why he knew when to publish and when to keep quiet in the torture chamber. "Such silence" he writes, "begins in the channels of communication. certain political leaders, institutions, and priests attempt to denounce what is happening, but are unable to establish contact with the population. The silence begins with a strong odor. peopple sniff the suicides, but it eludes them. Then silence finds another ally: solitude. people fear suicides as they fear madmen. And the person who wants to fight senses his solitude and is frightened." Hence the neeed for us to fight that solitude, fear and silence, to examine these conditions of truth-making and culture-making, to follow Michel Foucault in "seeing historically how effects of truth are produced whithin discourses which are in themselves neither true nor false."...But surely at the same time, through "seeing historically," we strive to see anew-through the act of creating counter-discourse?PP8

3.8_If effects of truth are power, then the question is raised not only concerning the power granted or denied by organizations to speak and write (anything), but also as to what form that counter-discourse should take. this issue of the politics of form has been lately of concern to some of us involved in writing and interpreting histories and ethnographies. Today, faced with the ubiquity of torture, terror, and the growth of armies, we in the New World are assailedwith a new urgency. There is the effort to understand terror in order to make others understand. Yet the reality at stake here makes a mockery of understanding and derides rationality, as when the young boy Jacobo Timmerman asked his mother, "Why do they hate us?" and she replied: "Because they do not understand." And after his ordeal, the old Timerman writes of the need for a hated object and the simultaneous fear of that object-the almost magical inevitability of hatred...Hated and feared, objects to be despised yet also of awe with evil understood as the physical essence of their bodies, these are just as clearly objects of cultural creation, the leaden keel of evil and mystery stabilizing the ship that is Western history. With the cold war we add the communists...The military and the NewRight, like the conquerors of old. discover the evil they have imputed to these aliens, and mimic the savagery they have imputed...What sort of understanding-what sort of speech, writing, and construction of meaning by any mode-can deal with and subvert that? PP9

3.9_To counterpose the eros and catharses of violence with similarly mystical means is worse than counterproductive. yet to offer the standardized rational explanations of torture in general or in this or that specific situation is equally pointless. For behind the consciouss self-interest that motivates terror and torture, from the heavenly spheres of corporate search for profits and the need to control labor to the more strictly personal equations of self-interest, lie intricatelyconstrued, long-standing, unconscious cultural formations of meaning- modes of feeling- whose social network of tacit conventions and imagery lies in a symbolic world and not in that feeble "pre-Kantian" fiction of the world represented by rationalism or utilitarian rationalism. perhaps there is here no explanation, no words forthcoming, and of that we have been uncomfortably aware. Understanding here moves too fast or too slow, absorbing itself in the facticity of the crudest of facts such as the electodes and the mutilated body, or in the maddening maze of that least factitious of facts, the experience of going through torture. PP9

3.10_...we begin to see the magnitude of the task, which calls neither for demystification nor remystification but for quite a different poetics of destruction and revelation. PP9

3.11_[In Timerman’s book’s aspiration]couched by ...Antonio gramsci, with hismotto directed equally at the culture of capitalism as against the petrified dogmas of historical materialism: optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. PP10

3.12_Conrad’s way of dealing with the terror of the rubber boom in the congo, to quote karl, "fell midway between the two [King leopold’s and Casement’s], as he attempted to penetrate the veil and yet was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." PP10

3.13_The formulation is sharp and important: to penetrate the veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality. it eveokes and combines a two-fold movement of interpretation in a combined action of reduction and revelation-the hermeneutics of suspicion and of revelation in an act of mythic subversion inspired by the myhtology of imperialism itself. Naturalism and realism as in the aesthetic form of much political as well as social science writing cannot engage with the great mythologies of politics in this non=reductive way, and yet it is the great mythologies that count precisely because they work best when not dressed up as such but in their guise and in the interstices of the real and the natural. To see the myth in the natural and the real in the magic, to demythologize history and to reenchant its reified representation; that is a first step. Tp reproduce the natural and the real without this recognition may be to fasten ever more firmly the hold of the mythic.PP10

3.14_Yet might not a mythic derealization of the real run the risk of being overpowered by the mythology it is using?Is there not the sitinct desire in HEART OF DARKNESS FOR KURTZ’S GREATNESS, HORRIBLE AS IT IS?Is not horro made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book...?...But maybe that is the point: the mythic subversion of myth, in this case of the modern imperialist myth, requires leaving the ambiguities intact-the greatness of the horror that is kurtz, the mistiness of terror, the aesthetics of violence, and the complex of desire and and repression that primitivism constantly arouses. here the myth is not "explained" so that it can be ‘explained away," as in the forlorn attempts at social science. Instead it is held out as something you have to try out for yourself, feeling your way deeper aND DEEPER INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS UNTIL YOU DO FEEL WHAT IS AT STAKE, THE MADNESS OF THE PASSION. THIS IS VERY DIFFERENT THAN MORALIZING FROM THE SIDELINES OR SETTING FORTH THE CONTRADICTIONS INVOLVED, AS if the type of knowledge with which we are concerned were somehow not power and knowledge in one and hence immune to such procedures. The political artistry involved in the mythic subversion of myth has to involve a deep immersion in the mythic naturalism of the political unconscious of the epoch. PP11

3.15_[from heart of darkness] it is not a pretty thing when you look into too much...What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea-something you can setup, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to..." PP16

3.16_Charles reginald Enock and julio cesar Arana in the witness stand before the select committee,,,Perhaps both were wrong and wrong in mutually dependent ways...,as if each man repreented but the outer poles defining the limits of the field within which conquest and debt peonage functioned...Enock badly overstates the case: "conquest means obtaining labor by force"-as in english. Arana slyli dissimulates: "To attract the sympathies"-as in spanish. But when we put the two languages together it is not the blending of force with what Rocha called the art of verbal persuassion that results, but quite a different conception in which the body of the Indian, in the process of its conquest, in its debt-peonage and in its being tortured, dissolved those domains so that violence and ideology, power and knowledge, become one-as with terror itself. PP29

3.17_In the social relation of the spoken to the published word, and of gossip to newsprint, there often comes a time when the latter not so much dignifies, frames, condenses, generalizes, and affirms the former as it thereby holds up a mirror to the community as a whole- a means for making and fixing collective self0consciousness. in the case of the putomayo atrocities, this type of confirmation of reality through newsprint involved in the barely conscious tension of fascination and disgust, binding the fantastic to the credible. rarely do the two combine as they did so disturbingly inthe putomayo rubber boom where, to cite Peter Singleton-Gates’s...reACTION TO THE DENIALS of the peruvian Legation in london alleging that la Sancion and la Felpa were dishonest and that their published stories were fantastic: "Fantastic they were...their very authenticity made them fantastic"> PP33

3.18_We may feel obliged to ask what truth these stories had, and where in the chain of language binding experience to its expression did the melodramatic tone enter: in the expressing or in the events depicted-or in both? PP35 This chain of questioning assumes a world divisible into real facts and representations ofreal facts, as if the means of representations were a mere instrument and not a source of experience. "A whole mythology is deposited in our language," noted Wittgenstein, including, we might note, the mythology of the real and of language as transparent. PP35 To turn from the Vice-Consul, caught here between a wife and an Arana, to consul-General Casement’s evaluation, is to begin to appreciate the power of epistemic murk in the politics of representation. PP36

4.1_Whether or not his phrase let alone the very notion of ‘cotum’ were present before colonization we will never know. What seems certain is the viewpoint of the colonists that indians have ‘custom,’ that custom is the primitive equivalent of law, and that to rule Indians it is advisable to transmit colonial law not merely in the language of custom but by affixing to it the title and concept of custom./Contrariwise, Indians under colonial rule could deploy the colonized sense of custom to defend themselves. The Capuchin monk cited examples of thisfor Triana. Indians would say they couldn’t do this or couldn’t do that because it was not costumbre.PP42

4.2_"Surely the custom of whipping is not a custom that the indians would wish to conserve?" asked triana./"Don’t you believe it,"threw back the priest, continuing: "The punishment of whipping is probably the most difficult of all their customs to uproot. You’ve got to understand that the pain has a mysterious efficacy making people want it. I myself have noted that the Indians become very tranquil, even joyful and festive, after a whipping. It is obligatory that after the whipping the person whipped says ‘Dios le pague’ (God pays you/God be praised). If that is not saidthen the Governor [who is an Indian, agreeable to the capuchins] orders three lashes more, and so on, until the punished person loses anger and displays gratitude. Flogging thus maintains the principlle of authority, docility, and the purity of custom. Flogging is the basis of custom. PP43

5.1_The meticulous historian might seize upon the stories and fragments of stories, such as they are, to winnow out truth from distortion, reality from illusion, fact from myth. A whole field opens out here for tabulating, typologizing, and cross-checking, but what ‘truth’ is it that is assumed and reproduced by such procedures? Surely it is a truth that begs the question raised by history, in this case the history of terror and atrocity in the putomayo rubber boom wherein the intimate codependence of truth on illusion and myth on reality was what the metabolism of power, let alone ‘truth,’ was all about. To cross-check truth in this field is necessary and necessarily Sisyphean, ratifying an illusory objectivity, a power-prone objectivity which in authorizing the split between truth and fiction secures power’s fabolous reach. Alternatively we can listen to these stories neither as fiction nor as disguised signs of truth, but as real. PP75

5.2_In Rivera’s Vortex , the monstrous fears and uncanniness evoked by the jungle are as nothing compared to the reality of Arana’s rubber camps. Yet it is always the colonial view of the jungle that provides the means for representing and trying to make sense of the colonial situation. Emptiness and absence become assailing presences. he nebulous becomes corporeal and tanginble. And in this dreadful object-making, as shadows of things acquire substance, a veil of lifelessness, if not death, is drawn apart to reveal the forest not merely as animated but as human. PP77

5.3_[captain Whiffen] "The Amazonian forest brings no consolation. It is silent, inhospitable, cynical..." But it was not just cruelty. it was something more specifically vague, a miasmic subspecies of terror, the pressing in of somethingness in the nothingness. PP78

5.4_It is into nature...that fancy pours; into the forest and into the indians–not thinhs-in-themselves but things-for-us. And who can say even now, eighty years after Whiffen’s studies, that anthropology has been able to cease creating such things-for-us so that other things can stay in the greyness of in-themselves? PP78

5.5_[on Werner Herzog’s writting about the jungle]...It is nature conceived as pitting extremes of meaning, a deconstructing tropicality that implodes oppositions in the profusion of their rank decay and proliferating disaordered growth. the center is man and the center ceases to exist. What takes its place is dread, from which the word no less than the image arises and to which each returns. PP79

5.6_Eighty years before herzog, the Englishman ...Whiffen wrote about dread in its aspect of being abandoned and lost in the jungle...one wanders away. one is lost. And being lost from oneself, it would appear is the worst of all. then one oanics. The silence, he says, casts one back on oneself. perhaps, however, there is no such self. PP80

5.7_But of course it is not the jungle but the sentiments colonizing men project onto it that are decisive in filling their hearts with savagery. And what the jungle can accomplish, so much more can its native inhabitants, the wild indians who had been tortured and scared into gathering rubber. it must not be overlooked that the colonially construed image of the wild indian was a powerfully ambiguous image, a seesawing, bifocalized and hazy composite of the animal and the human- like nietzche’s satyr in the birth of tragedy./ In their human form or humalike form, the wild indians could all the better reflect back to the colonists vast and baroque projections of human wildness. and it was only because the wild indians were human that they were able to serve as labor-and as subjects of torture; for it is not the victim as animal that gratifies the torturer, but the fact that the victim is human, thus enabling the torturer to become the savage. PP83

5.8_Here was also a quite different possibility buried in this colonial montage of indianness, and that was the possibility of magical healing, of whites going to Indian healers, ‘witches’ as did Father gaspar de pinell’s guide and the good father himslef. in any event the transforming properties of the reality constituting the savage were not mADE UP by the colonial artwork in harness with the violence and politics of rubber gathering alone. indian artwork contributed to the colonial fantastic. The frontier united as much as it divided. Rocha caught it nicely with the tigre Mojano , which he was told about by the whites and in which, he said, many of the m believed as much as the indians were said to–that magically empowered tiger that metamorphosed back and forth from stealth and death-dealing into the quintessense of indian ephemerality, the shaman. It was the same colonial artistry that went into the figure of the auca. PP92

6.1_With Goodyear’s discovery of Vulcanizatrion...the sap oozing from old tropical forests could be used as rubbery belts and tires to further propel the machines of the north. There are calculations of the number of congolese and putomayo bodies that went into each ton of that rubber. Vulcan was in Roman mythology the god of fire...Walter Benjamin suggested that the volcanic bursting forth of commodity production in the industrialized societies, from the nineteenth century onwards, was a bursting forth that entailed the reactivation of latent mythic powers now charged, so to speak, in the fitishisation of commodities appearing as self-powered dream images, the never-to-be realized realizations of desire built out of the misery of the exploited labor of the newly industrialized workforce...But in the colonies...what there?PP94

6.2_In the colonies labor was rarely detachable form the being of the worker. labor was not turned into a commodity as in the industrial heartlands of the imperial powers. Instead of a ploretariat ‘free’ to offer its services on a lobor market there existed a wide range of servitudes from slavery to debt peonage and refinements on feudal-like paternalism...The question to be raised, then, is, Under such conditions, might not the laborer as much as the commodity be fetishised by mythic allusions to an imagined antiquity? And if so, would it not for the main part be a locally derived mythology, created at the frontier where Indian and colonist came together in their reciprocating fabulation-as with the tigre mojano and the auca?PP94

6.3_It was a strange but typically exotic note that the french explorer Dr. Jules Crevaux inserted into the account of his journey up the Putomayo and down the caqueta in 1879. His canoe approached two canoes with Indians in them, and one of the canoes, with a naked woman and a baby in a tiny hammock, paddled away...Why had the other canoe fled away? Because, came the answer, the woman had just given birth. if the newborn had seen a white it would have fallen ill and died no matter what remedies were applied. All the indians of Guiana think the same, his black Guianan guide told him, and they emphatically refuse to show their babies to either blacks or whites. PP96

6.4_Simson...tells us...that...pure indians of the forest were divided by local whites and Spanish-speaking Indians into indios and Infieles- Indians and infidels. While the indios are Quechua -speaking, salt-eating, semi-Christians, the infieles, also known as aucas, speak other languages, rarely eat salt, and know nothing of baptism or ofthe catholic church. The term auca, ‘as commonly used now in the Oriente,’ he (foot-)noted, ‘seems to bear the full meaning it did anciently in peru under the incas. It includes the sense of infidel, traitor, barbarian, and is often applied in a malignant sense. In Peru it was used to designATE THOSE WHO REBELLED against their king, and incarnation of their deity, the inca.’...and in the Colombian putomayo today auca also connotes...the unrepentantly ‘other’ world of savagery down there in the jungles of the oriente. a world quintessentially pagan, whithout Christ, Spanish words, or salt, inhabited by naked, incestuous, violent, magical, and monstruous people, even wilder, perhaps, than the tigre mojano-animal, but also human, and unreal. PP97

6.5_...it is obvious that wild Indians are conceived to be so like animals that their animality partakes of the occult, thus inspiring a paranoid vision of evil lurking in the wilderness, encircling society. PP97

6.6_...the highland shaman with whom i have worked talks of the lowland shamans as aucas or as auca-like: ethereal interminglings of animal and human–presences potent with the magic of the hot forests below. With them he makes his spiritual pact because, inferior and subhuman as they are, they provide the power he needs to defy fate, to do battle with evil, and to cure his patients. farther down the mountain my Ingano shaman friend Santiago Mutumbajoy calls his curing fan of leaves waira sacha , ‘spirit of the forest’ or ‘brush of the wind’ With this fan beating into the night thorugh the whole night, he sings. The hallucinogen yagé brings the visions. With this fan of leaves imparting motion to the forest of envy and wildness that constitutes society and its troubled relationships, those relations are healed. it is by singing with this rustling fan that he majes his medicines and wipes the sick body clean of the sorcery or spirits that assailed it. One form of wildness, that of the wilderness, contends with another, usually that of envy, sometimes that of baneful spirits. in the body the battle wages, one form of wildness circling another, disorder tripping up disorder in its own disorderliness. Around and around darts the song, wordless, crying, full of the pain of human hearts, of frogs croaking in the slime of the forest. Sacha, says the son of the shaman ("as in Sacha gente-people of the forest") and he pauses, "like aucas," as if the wild auca-presence in the leaves of the forest in the fan of the curer provided the magical force required to xpel the auca-like demons lodged in the innards of the white folk who come to these Indian healers for cure-white folk who regard these Indian healers in the same way that Alfred Simson one hundred years ago said that aucas ware regarded by civilized indians "who stand in fear and respect them, but despise or affect to despise them as infidels behind their backs." PP99

6.7_It is crucial to grasp the dialectic of sentiments contained within the appellation auca, a dialectic enshrouded in magic composed of both fear and contempt-similar, if not identical to the mysticism, hate, and awe that timmerman discerns as projected onto him in the torture chamber. in the case of aucas, this projection, conscious or unconscious, is inseparable from the imputations of rebellion against sacred imperial authority and the further imputation of magical power possessed by lowland forest dwellers as a class and by their oracles, seers and healers-their shamans- in particular. Moreover, this indigenous (and in all-likelihood pre-hispanic) construction of wildness blends with the late medieval European figure of the magically savage and animal-like ‘wild-man’ brought to the Andes and the Amazon by the Spaniards and the portugese. Today, in the upper reaches of the putomayo...this colonially combined mythology of the magic of the auca and of the wild man underlies the resort to indian shamans by white colonists seeking cure from sorcery and hard times, while these very same colonists despise indians as savages. During the rubber boom, with its need for ‘wild’ Indians to gather rubber and with its equally desperate atmosphere of wild distrust and suspicion among the ‘civilized,’ this same ur-mythology and magic of colonial practices of signification nourished paranoia and great cruelty. Going to the indians for their healing power and killing them for their wildness are not so far apart. Indeed,these actions are not only intertwined but are codependent–and it is this codependence that looms in so startling a fashion when we consider how fine the line is that separates the use of indians as laborers, on the one hand, and their use as mythic objects of torture on the other. PP100

6.8_Putomayo terror was the terror of the fineness of that line as international capitalism converted the ‘excesses’ of torture into rituals of production no less important than the rubber gathering itself. Torture and terror were not simply utilitarian means of productions; they were a form of life, a mode of production, and in many ways, for many people, not least of whom were the indians themselves, its main and consuming product. PP100

6.9_...Bishop, who was an overseer for some six years, intimated that the indians hated and dreaded their masters and would kill them if they could.To the overseer none of this was too clear, and while he could be reasonably sure about the state of arms, he could not be sure about the state of mind, and it is in that state of wonderng betweens arms and mind where doubt locks horns with fantasy-the next attack, hidden things, the ambiguous multiplicity of things. PP101

6.10_Whatever it meant to Indians, cannibalism for colonial culture functioned as the supple sign for construing reality, the caption point without which otherwise free-floating signifiers wandered off into space as so many dissasembled limbs and organs of a corpus. cannibalism summed up all that was perceived as grotesquely different about the indian as well as providing for the colonists the allegory of colonization itself. in condemning cannibalism, the colonists were in deep complicity with it. Other ness was not dealt with here by simple negation, a quick finishing off. PP105

6.11_On the contrary, everything hinged on a drawn-out, ritualized death in which every body part took its place embellished in a memory-theater of vengeances paid and repaid, honors upheld and denigrated, territories distinguished in a feast of difference. In eating the transgressor of those differences, the consumption of otherness was not so much an event as a process, from the void erupting at the moment of death to the reconstituting of oneslef, the consumer, with still-warm otherness. in this manner colonization was itself effected. PP105

6.12_Ascribed to indians, cannibalism was taken from them as a cherished dream image of the fears of being consumed by difference, as we see in the case of joaquin rocha, who depicts the Jungle and the indians as devouring forces. just as important was the erotic passion this gave to the countermove of devouring the devourer. Allegations of cannibalism served not only to justify enslavement of Indians by the Spanish and portugese from the sixteenth century onwards; such allegations also served to flesh out the repertoire of violence in the colonial imagination./The interest the whites dislay is obsessive...He is frightened in the forest not of animals but of indians, and it is always with what becomes in effect the insufferably comic image of the person-eating Indian that he chooses to represent that fear of being consumed by a wild, unknown, half-sensed uncertainty. Among the whites, to stamp out cannibalism is an article of faith like a crusade, he says. Cannibalism is an addictive drug; whenever the huitotos think they can deceive the whites, ‘they succomb to their beastly appetites." The whites have therefore to be more like beasts, as in...killing all the Indians of a communal house down to the children at the breast for succumbing to that addiction. PP105

6.13_[commenting on songs at a cannibal festival written down by Preuss]...as we dwell on this world dedicated to the sun god, naming the names, the places, the actions, the animals, and the spirits, in short this affirmation of a world, do we not also have to consider that the company’s rites of torture also affirmed a world and did so in ways dependent on the colonist’s understanding of indian understandings of rites of cannibalism-of that fluttering forth in its heavy-winged adroitness of the great blue butterfly of sorcery into a world of bloody fire? In their mutilating, dismembering, and burning of Indians, and the burning of the alive in the peruvian flag soaked in kerosene, for instance, were not the employees engaged in the ritual reenactement of their own colonial world? Were they not thus constantly reproducing their world over and over again against the savagery on which their world depended and with which, therefore, it was complicit? Were they not thereby affirming their place as conquerors, their function as civilizing, and their aura as whites with a magic even greater, perhaps, than the sun god’s?

6.14_Something crucial about such complicity and the magical power of the company employees emerges from what has been said in recent times about Andoke Indians who claim that the rubber company had astronger story than the indians’s story and this is why, for example, the armed uprising of the Andoke yarocamena against the company failed...so disastrously.../By story (rafue) is here meant something more like tradition and the telling of tradition such that...the ideological and ritual conditions guaranteeing the efficacy of work are set in place. The telling of the story is a sort of necessary mediation between concept and practice that ensures the reproduction of the everyday world. Not just stories then but (in the Spanish phrase used by the aforementioned authors) HISTORIAS PARA NOSOSTROS-HISTORIES NOT OF, BUT FOR US.

6.15_Yet if the story of the company employees was stronger than that of the indians, one wonders why...one of the tortures inflicted by the company on Yarocamena’s followers was to cut their tongues–and then make them talk. PP107

6.16_...It was said that Don Crisóstomo would spend nights orating with indian men in their communal houses around the tobaccon pot, seducing them into doing his bidding with the power of his storytelling. PP108

6.17_Rocha strains both to blend and to distinguish the useof violence and the use of oratory. On the one hand he says that Don Crisóstomo used first oratory and later force, while on the other hand this distinction can only be maintained by deploying rethorical measures ensuring that not only are violence and oratory codependent as a type of power/knowledge but that both are in some way dependent upon maGIC AS WELL. Indeed, it is in their codependent difference that magic resides; Jacque’s Derrida’s "deconstruction" here applies with telling force. PP108

6.18_[Cannibalism was a] "way station," so to dspeak, a point of strategic convergence in the rubber station where the assumed forms of life of the savage met the savagery assumed by the trade. PP109

6.19_There were several such way stations where Indian and white society folded into the assumed otherness of each other, where what was taken to be an IndiAN PRACTICE met with what was taken to be a white one, where assumed meanings met with assumed meaniongs to form strange codependencies and culture itself- the culture of colonization. There were the rubber traders living with indian "wives"...;whites going to indian medicine men; whites 9so the tale goes) like Crisóstomo Hernandez out-orating the Huitoto orators and thereby bending them to the white’s will...; and, of course, the host of interwoven Indian and colonist assumptions about the rights and duties built into the debt-peonage relationship itself. /These vwere vitally important practical affairs. They were also ritual events./ As such they were in effect new rituals, rites of conquest and colony formation, mystiques of race and power, little dramas of civilization tailoring savagery which did not mix or homogenize ingredients from the two sides of the colonial divide but instead bound colonial understandings of white understandings of Indians to white understandings of indian understandings of whites./The colonists’ appropriation of IndiAN CANNIBALISM WAS ONE SUCH METARITUAL, NO LESS THANWAS THEIR FASCINATION WITH THE INDIANS’ TOBACCO POT. PP109

6.20_...ONE FINDS THE SAME COLONIZING EYE AT WORK IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUITOTO PEOPLE, the same display of the body as artifact to be srutinized for the mystery of its meaning–i.e., its meaning to us. Which is more poignant in this respect: Susan Sontag’s notion that in capturing reality through photography, the things thus represented is all the more irretrievably lost, or michel Foucault’s notion that the moder sciences of society and of the person depend upon a clinical way of seeing that comes close in order to distance itself in the orbit of control? PP113

6.21_...stories about the chupe del tabaco could be as mystically powerful as those related around it; in particular the story related by Rocha that brought the chupe into the very center of the charmed circle of cannibalism itself. Wildly extravagant and melodramatic, it certainly rings true, not necessarily regarding the cannibalism in question but regarding the poetics of fear and astonishment that i know from listening to colonists swapping yarns of the forest and its people...But never, in all my nights with indiANS in the foothills did i hear or overhear stories like these, spun with such fiendish and melodramatic pleasure derived from fear and mystery. PP119

6.22_It seems to me that stories like thesewere indispensable to the formation and flowering of the colonial imagination during the Putomayo rubber boom./ Far from being trivial daydreams indulged in after work was over, these stories and the imagination they sustained were a potent political force without which the work of conquest and of supervising rubber gathering could not have been accomplished. What is crucial to understand is the way these stories functioned to create through magical realism a culture of terror that dominated both whites and Indians./The importance of this colonial worjk of fabulations extends beyond the nightmarish quality of its contents. Its truly crucial feature lies in the way it creates an uncertain reality out of fiction, giving shape and voice to the formless form of the reality in which an unstable interplay of truth and illusion becomes a phantasmagoric social force. All societies live by fictions takes as real. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise philosophical problem of representation -reality and illusion, certainty and doubt- becomes infinitely more than a ‘merely’ philosophical problem of epistemology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. it becomes a high powered medium of domination, and during the Putomayo rubber boom this medium of epistemic and ontological murk was most keenly figured and thrust into consciousness as the space of death. PP121

6.23_The managers lived obsessed with death, Romulo paredes tels us. they saw danger everywhere...They thought...they live surrounded by vipers, tigers, and cannibals. It was these ideas of death, he wrote, that constantly struck their imagination, making them terrified and capable of any action. Like children they had nightmares of witches, evil spirits, death, treason, and blood. The only way they could live in such a terrifying world...was to inspire terror themselves. PP122

6.24_if it was the telling of tales that mediated this inspiration of terror, then it behooves us to inquire into the group of people who mediated this mediation; namely...the muchachos de confianza...What is at stake here is in many ways the linchpin of the company’s contro...the typical colonial ploy of using indigenous culture in order o exploit it. but of course, things are never quite so simple. Even the manipulators have a culture and, moreover, culture is not so easily ‘used.’ PP122

6.25_Mediating as semicivilized and semirational INDIANS between the savages of the forest and the whites of the rubber camps, the muchachos embodied the salient differences of the class and caste system in the rubber boom. Cut off from their own kind whom they persecuted and betrayed and in whom they often inspired envy and hatred, and now classified as semicivilized and dependent on the whites for food, arms, and goods, the muchachos typified all that was savage in the colonial mythology of savagery–because they were in the perfect social and mythic space to do so. not only did they embellish fictions that stoked the fires of white paranoia, they also embodied the brutality that the whites feared, created, and tried to harness to their own ends. The muchachos traded their colonially created created identity as savages for their new colonial status as civilized Indians and guards. As Paredes noted, they placed at the disposal of the whites ‘their special instincts, such as sense ofdirection, scent, their sobriety and their knowledge of the forest.’ PP122

6.26_Yet, unlike rubber, these savage instincts were manufactured from the white’s imaginations. All the muchachos had to do to receive their rewards was objectify and through stories give back to the whites the phantoms lying dormant in colonial culture. given the centuries of incan and spanish colonial mythology concerning the auca and the wild man, and given the implosion of this mythology in the contradictory social being of the muchachos, this was a simple task. The muchachos’s stories were but fragments of a more encompassing one that constituded them as objects in a colonial discourse rather than its authors/ The debt-peonage established by the putomayo rubber boom was more than a trade in white commodities for India Rubber. It was also a trade in fictitious realities, pivoted on the muchachos whose story-telling brtered betrayal of Indian realities for the confirmation of colonial fantasies. PP123.

6.27_Joaquin Rocha’s man-eating tale ends with the ...prisoner...beng eaten to the last bit, ingesting him so as to incorporate his strength and augment one’s war magic...,or to degrade him. ..If the torture practiced by modern states, as in latin America today, is any guide, these motives by no means preclude one another. PP125

6.28_In assuming the character of the cannibals who pursued them, as much if not more in their fantasies than when they were pursuing Indians to gather rubber, the whites seemed oblivious to the tale that the Indians would not eat them...A rubber gatherer familiar for many years with the Huitotos and their language told a judge that the indians feel repugnance toward the civilized, whom they call ...kinsmen of the monkey, whose nausiating smell precluded their being eaten, dead or alive./...in those stories recently heard by some anthropologists in the northernmost extremety of what was then Arana’s territory, is said by Indians that the whites in the rubber company were immune to Indian sorcery. It could not enter them because they, the whites, smelled so bad...At least that’s what some say. But the interpreting of such things is perhaps better left alone. For these Histories of Punishment and of Danger are for sorceres only. Indeed, so i’ve been told, it’s from interpreting of such stories that sorceres gain their evil power. PP126

7.1_For me the problem of interpretation grew larger until i realized that this problem of interpretation is decisive for terror, not only making effective counterdiscourse so difficult but also making the terribleness of death squads, dissapearances and torture all the more effective in crippling of people’s capacity to resist. The problem of interpretation turned out to be an essential component of what had to be interpreted, just as resistance was necessary for control. Deeply dependent on sense and interpretation, terror nourished itself by destroying sense. This the Putomayo texts about terror faithfully reproduced. PP128

7.2_Particularlywanting in this regard was the hard-bitten appeal to the logic of business, to the rationality of markey logic, viewing the terror as a means chosen for cost-effectiveness. In making sense this view heightened the situation’s hallucinatory quality. Cost-effctiveness and ‘scarcity’ could be computed any which way, and if rationality suggested killing off labor supply within a few years it was no less a sport to kill and torture indians as to work them. Ostensibly a means of increasing production, the torture of Indians was also an end in itself and the region’s most enduring product. In these outposts of progress the commodity fitishism portrayed by karl marx acquired a form that was both fantastic and brutal. Here, where labor was not free or capable of being turned intoa commodity, it was not merely rubber and European trade goods that were subject to fetishization. More important still was the fetishization of the debt of debt-peonage that these commodities constellated and in which the entire imaginative force, the ritualization and viciousness, of colonial society was concentrated. A gigantic piece of make-believe, the debt was where the gift economy of the Indian meshed with the capitalist economy of the colonist. It was here in this strategically indeterminate zone of exchange where the line between war and peace is always so fine that the conditions were laid for an enormity o effort no less imaginative than it was cruel and deadly. Indeed, it was in the cultural elaboration of death and the death-space that the fine line between peace and war was maintained. PP128

7.3_"Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but the rulers too". Thus wrote Brecht in exile in 1937...[During the Third reich] Given the immense power of the regime, its camps and torture cellars...Brecht asked, why do they fear the open word?PP129

7.4_In modern times this culture of terror depends upon primitivism, and the revolutionary poet will appeal to the magic of primitiveness to undermine it too..."But their Third reich recalls/ The house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortress/Which according to the legend, could not be taken by an army, but/When one single, distinct word was spoken inside it/Fell to dust. PP129

7.5_And if there was anything to that notion of Benjamin’s and T.W.Adorno’s concerning the resurgence of primitivism along with the fetishism of commodities (think for a moment of Adam Smith’s invisible hand as the modern version of animism), then it was in the theater of racist cruelty on the frontier unititng wildness with civilization that the fetish force of the commodity was fused with the phantoms of the space of death, to the dazzling benefit of both. I am thinking here not of steady incremental steps towards progress but of sudden eruptions of whitening the dark zones at the margins of the developing nations where the commodity met the indian and appropriated through death the fetish power of the savagery created by and spellbinding the european. here the Putomayo is but a figure for a global stage of development of the commodity fetish; think also of the congo with its rubber and ivory, of the genosidal bloodletting in tragic Patagonia-all around the same time. PP129

7.6_Little makes sence. Little can be pinned down. Only the Indian in the stocks, being watched. And we are watching the watchers so that with our explanation we can pin them down and then pin down the real meaning of terror, putting it in the stocks of explanation. yet in watching in this way we are made blind to the way that terror makes a mockery of sense-making, how it requires sense in order to mock it, and how in that mockery it heightens both sense and sensation. PP132

7.7_If terror thrives on the production of epistemic murk and metamorphosis, it nevertheless requires the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of realism, objectivity and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos.The image of the Putomayo here is not so much the smoothly vicious horror of the vortex...but rather the world frozen in death-dealing, as (in the story) when Don Crisóstomo, who held savages spellbound with the magic of his oratory, grasped for his gun in the frenzy of his death throues so as to die killing–the ultimate tableaux vivant. PP132

7.8_Here time stood still in an endless movement between banality and melodrama reproducing the terror represented...casemn’t rendition...so different from the histrionic testimony published by hardenburg, which includes material from the iquitos newspapers./In both modes of representation, the banal and the melodramatic, there is the straining to express the inexpressible, what at one stage in the struggle on the stage of Putomayan truth was dismissed as "fantastic credibility." Fantastic it was; its very credibility made it so, went the retort–pointning to both magical (fantastic) realism (credibility) and to brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, his ‘alienation effect’ aimed at alienating alienation, making the everyday strange and the credible fantastic. Perhaps either of these modes of representation, the magically real or the Brechtian, would have succeeded better in transmitting and transforming the hallucinatory reality of Putomayo terror than casement’s Foreign office’s authoritarian realism or hardenburg’s lavish melodrama. but it was the latter two forms that were selected out by the political culture for the task at hand; they were deemed truth, factual, reportage, nonfictional, and as such they may have achieved much. We will never know. PP133

7.9_But the question remains whether the banality or the melodrama were only a part of the act of representing or whether they were in the events represented. We shake ourselves clear. We insist on the distinction between reality and depictions of it. But the disturbing thing is that the reality seeped through the pores of the depiction and by means of such seepage continued what such depictions were meant only to be about. PP133

7.10_So it was with the stories circulating during the putomayo rubber boom in which the colonists and rubber company employees not only feared but themselves created through narration fearful and confusing images of savegery, images that bound colonial society together through the epistemic murk of the space of death. The terror and tortures they devised mirrored the horror of the savagery they both feared and fictionalized. PP133

7.11_Moreover, when we turn to the task of creating counterrepresentations and counterdiscourses –deflectonal, oppositional modes of arresting and diverting the flow of fear- we need to pause and take stock of the ways that the accounts reproduced by Hardenburg and casement, account which were critical in intention, were similarly fictionalized and aestheticized, drawing upon and fortifying the very same rituals of the colonizing imagination to which men succumbed when torturing indians. in their imaginative heart these critiques were complicit with what they opposed. PP133

7.12_From the accounts of casement AND TIMMERMAN IT IS ALSO OBVIOUS that torture and terror are ritualized art forms and that, far from being spontaneous, sui generis, and an abandonment of what are often called the values of civilization, such rites of terror have a deep history deriving power and meaning from those values. PP133

7.13_Father gaspar,...Capuchin missionary...On encountering what he called new and savage tribes n the forest his first act was to exorcize the demon who had held sway there for so long. The words of his exorcizing spell came from the pope. but where did his power come from? From God, or from the evil exorcized? His was a faith no less dependent on the antiself than that of the most brutal conquistador. PP134

7.14_What stands out here is the mimesis between the savagery attributed to the Indians by the colonists and the savagery perpetraded by the colonists in the name of...civilization, meaning business./The magic of mimesis lies in the transformation wrought on reality by rendering its image. In a postmodern age we are increasingly familiar with this ‘magic’ and no longer think of it as only ‘primitive’. in the notion of the changes effected in the world by carving and dancing with the spirit’s mask, in the naming and the singing of one’s enemy, in weaving into the magical cloth the image of the wildness as auca so as to tease and gain control over it-in all of this we see clearly how the word ‘magic’ magically contains both the art and the politics involved in representation, in the rendering of objecthood. In the colonial mode of production of reality, as in the putomayo, such mimesis occurs by a colonian mirroring of otherness that reflects back onto the colonists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savagery they yearn to colonize. The power of this colonial mirror is ensured by the way it is dialogically constructed through storytelling, as in the colonial lore retold by Captain Whiffen, joaquin Rocha....concerning cannibalism and the inevitability whith which the wild strives to consume as well as to distinguish difference. And what is put into discourse through the artful storytelling of the colonists is the same as what they practiced on the bodies of the Indians. PP134

7.15_Tenatiously embedded in this artful practice is a vast and vastly mysterious Western history and iconography of evil exemplified by the imagery of the inferno and the savage, which in turn is indissolubly welded to images of paradise and the good. We hear the voice of Timmerman, we see the torturer and the victim coming together, "We, victims and victimizers...collegeas in the same endeavor to prove the existence of ideologies...etc."PP134

7.16_Post-Enlightment EUROPEAN CULTURE MAKES IT DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLETO DRAW apart the veil of the heart of darkness without either succumbing to its hallucinatory quality or losing that quality. Fascist poetics succeed where liberal rationalism self-destructs. but what might point a way out of this impasse is precisely what is so painfully absent from the Putomayo accounts, namely the narrative mode of the Indians themselves. it is the ultimate anthropological conceit, anthropology in its highest, indeed redemptive moment, rescuing the ‘voice’ of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time. From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation. PP135

7.17_But this very same anthropology tells us that we cannot take our place in the charmed circle of men orating through the night around the tobacco pot, chewing coca. it is said that the stories about the rubber boom are dangerous, ‘histories of punishment’ meant only for sorcerers who, in interpreting such histories, gain evil power. There is no place for us here, and anthropology, the science of man, confounds itself in its very moment of understanding the native’s point of view. PP135

7.18_The lesson? Before there can be a science of man there has to be the long awaited demythification and reenchantment of western man in a quite different confluence of self and otherness. Our way lies upstream...where Indian healers are busy healing colonists of the phantoms that assail them. there in the jointness of their construction across the colonial divide the healer desentationalizes terror so that the mysterious side of the mysterious (to adopt Benjamin’s formula) is indee denied by an optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. This is another history, not only of terror, but of healing aswell. (It is not meant for sorcerers, as far as I know). PP135

8.1_...yagé grows in the rainforest of the lowlands and foothills...the Indians i know...say it is a special gift from God for indians and for Indians only. "Yagé is our school," "yagé is our study," they may say, and yagé is conceived as something akin to the origin of knowledge and their society. It was yagé that taught Indians good and evil, the properties of the animals, medicines, and food plants. Some Cofán Indians just south of the PutomAYO RIVER ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF YAG´E THAT ILLUSTRATES THE TENSIONS AS WELL AS THE MEDIATIONS BETWEEN INDIAN AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS: WHEN GOD CREATED THE WORLD HE PLUCKED A HAIR FROM THE CROWN OF HIS HEAD WITH HIS LEFT HAND AND PLANTED IT IN THE GROUND FOR THE INDIANS ONLY. HE BLESSED THIS WITH HIS LEFT HAND. THE INDIANS DISCOVERED ITS PROPERTIES AND DEVELOPED THE YAG´E RITES AND THE ENTIRE SHAMANIC COMPLEX. SEEING THIS GOD WAS INCREDULOUS. HE SAID THEY WERE LYING. HE ASKED AND WAS GIVEN SOME YAGE BREW. HE TREMBLED, VOMITED, DEFECATED, AND CRIED PROFUSELY, OVERCOME BY THE MANY WONDERFUL THINGS HE SAW. IN THE MORNING HE DECLARED, "IT IS TRUE WHAT THIS INDIANS SAY. THE PERSON WHO TAKES THIS SUFFERS. BUT THAT PERSON IS DISTINGUISHED. THAT IS HOW ONE LEARNS, THROUGH SUFFERING." PP140

8.2_Much later it became clear to me that Jose garcia was learning to be a healer as part of his being cured from a deeply disturbing affliction. In so doing he was going through a cycle of affliction, salvation, and transformation that seemed as eternal as humanity. yet the power of thisciycle stems not from eternity, but from the active engagement withhistory that affliction depends upon for its cure. Jose garcia is not to be historicized, for the past upon which both his affliction and cure depend is an active construction of the past original to every new present. And that applies to shamanism as well. PP142

8.3_The Christian emphasis upon the virtue of charity and denial of worldly goods engages with the healers necessity to attend the poor.../The subtext to this attending to the poor is the subconscious cosmic battlefield of vices and virtues in which the healer gains power through the struggle with evil. the healer’s power is incumbent upon a dialectical relationship with disease and misfortune. Evil empowers, and that is why a healer by necessity attends the ‘poor,’ meaning the economically poor and those struck by misfortune. it is possible to understand the relationship between god and the devil in this way, for they can stand not merely in opposition, but as a mutually empowering synergism. dante’s realization of paradise is only achieved by and after he has journeyed through the inferno and encountered Satan (...accompanied by a pagan guide -read ‘healer’ or ‘shaman’-from the pre-christian past). PP159

8.4_But this necessity to descend and immerse oneself in the struggle with evil can be self-destructive. A healer’s life is poised on the edge of this dialectic, and that is why a healer always requires an alliance with a more powerful healer...the more powerful healer however, might kill you. PP158

8.5_In assailing the sorcery of magia leveled against him many years ago, Jose garcia had become not only a healer, thereby transforming this evil, he had also become a rich man in the eyes of his neighbors. In a society where the pressures for individual capital accumulation are resisted by the counter-hegemonic force of envy, his entreprenurial carrer demanded at an ever-increasingly furious pace the development of his spiritual healing power so as to resist the brabs of that envy. but finally, as as he had said on an earlier occasion, the day had come when his father called him: "come mayordomo!Give me your account."PP159-160

9.1_The power of the imagery brought to life by misfortune and its healing in the sickness of Rosario and jose garcia is a power that springs into being where the life story is fitted as allegory to myths of conquest, savagery and redemption. It should be clear...that the magic and religious faith involved in this are neither mystical nor pragmatic, and certainly not blind adherence to blinding doctrine. Instead, they constitute an imageric epistemology splicing certainty with doubt, and despair with with hope, in which dreaming -in this case of poor country people-reworks the significance of imagery that ruling-class institutions such as the Church have appropriated for the task of colonizing utopian fantasies. PP165

9.2_[regarding surge of ‘magical realism’ in literary schools from the 1940s onward...]This awakened sensitivity to the magical quality of reality and to the role of myth in history is perhaps an indication of what Ernst bloch called ‘nonsynchronous contradictions’ and is ready-made soil for the sprouting of ‘dialectical images,’ in the terminology of Walter benjamin, for whom (quote from Buck-Morss...) "the dreaming collective of the recent past appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakened by the present generation, and the mythic power of both [the recent and the present generations’] dream states were affirmed, the world re-enchanted, but only in order to break out of history’s mythic spell, in fact by reaproppriating the power bestowed on the objects of mass culture as utopian dream symbols."PP166

9.3_The nonsynchronous contradiction comes to life where qualitative changes in a society’s mode of production animate images of the past in the hope of a better future. Fascism in germany channeled these images and hopes and, according to Bloch, the impoverishment of the Left in regard to revolutionary fantasy made it an accomplice in its own defeat. Benjamin similarly berated his companions on the Left; historical materialism could become the victor in ideological struggle "if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to be kept out of sight." He argued that to the persistence of earlier forms of production in the development of capitalism there correspond images that intermingle the old and the new as ideals transfiguring the promise offered yet blocked by the present. These utopic images, although stimulated by the present, refer to the past in a radical way-to what he called ‘prehistory,’ that is, of classless society.The fascists were willing and able to exploit these dreams, but that did not mean that myth and fantasy were necessarily reactionary. on the contrary, the images involved contained revolutionary seeds that the soil ploughed by materialist dialectics could nourish and germinate. PP166-167

9.4_In Latin America it has been, by and large, the political function of the church to harness these images and collective dreams to reactionary social purposes. It is here where Carpentier’s sensitivity to myth as the experience of history in the configuration of a changing present is so appropriate and necessary to the development of revolutionary culture and literature. This development stands in relation to the magical realism of popular culture as the only counter-hegemonic force capable of confronting the reactionary usage to which the Church puts the same magical realism in order to mistify it. PP167

9.5_...the colonial mythology of primitiveness... sees in it not only the sign of the pagan, but also the sign of power-in this case redemptive power?...it is not just that Indians and Blacks have been identified with evil in the depths of a class structure mediated by whites ascending to the godhead, but that from those depths springs power [in the colonial imagination at least]. PP168

9.6_As with their manual labor, skills and land, this power of the primitive can be appropriated...but unlike land and labor, this power did not lie in the hands of indians or blacks. instead it was projected onto them and into their being, nowhere more so than in the image of the shaman. In attempting to appropriATE this power, we see how the colonists reified their mythology of the pagan savage, became subject to its power, and in so doing sought slavation from the civilization that tormented them as much as the primitive onot whom they projected their antiselves./And here we are not so much dealing with ideas as with the body, mediated by the image-realm. In jose garcias’s search for peace...we see something more than how a construction of personal history intersects with this colonial fetishization and reification of savagery. We see something more than peasant colonists desirous of wealth in a political economy that uses the fear of envy to counter the ACUMULATION OF CPAITAL. WHAT WE ALSO SEE IS THAT AN ILLNESS OF THE BODY IS A BODILY ATTEMPT AT INSCRIBING A HISTORY OF OTHERNESS WITHIN THE BODY THAT IS THE SELF, A TENTATIVE YET LIFE-SAVING HISTORIOGRAPHY THAT FINDS THE dead hand of the past never so terribly alive as in the attacks by the spirits of the restless dead, ..or as in the sorcery of the envious. Through misfortune and its changing definition with aTTEMPTS AT HEALING, this picture of the bodily self as the locus of otherness ineluctable enters into the exchange of magical powers established between Indian shamans and the church, an exchange that operates with the powerful medium of visual images. Hallucinogens and points of rupture in every day life-illness, accident, coincidence, dusk-can make the image-realm manifest and manifestly empowering... PP168

9.7_In sanctifying an image such as the lord of Miracles, the Church sanctifies itself. The aura of hypnotic mystery now assumed by the image in the artificial darkness of the church both reveals and conceals this exchange, so common in societies like Colombia’s where the epiphanic discovery of saints and virgins is a frequent occurrence and a primary source for the regeneration of priestly power that sustains idoelogical reproduction and class oppression. But precisely because of this appropriation by the Church of a popular iamge , the image spreads through space and time as a member of the univarsal nation of saints awaiting the the day of judgement when the class struggle over the means of production and exchange shall include the means of image production and interpretation. official sanctification distorts and represses the political message latent in the image, but ensures the image a long life in its material form as a sculpture in which the afterglow of its popular creation keeps flickering with hope.PP169

9.8_Copies find their way into the homes of wageworkers and peasants, weaving a finely laced web of connections to the original. At times of crisis these images absorb the shock, to release it later on in household memories that reconstruct the history of the original to every new present. Folk healing respectfully takes Church doctrine from the priests, and icons from the walls of the church, reappropriating for its own use what the church has appropriated from popular mythology drawn from the dreams of the oppressed. Then the images otherwise petrified in paint and sculpture come to life from the opaque mystery in which the church has enshrouded and preserved them in collective memory. They become live beings. They enter into the vibrant and contradictory texture of social life. PP169

10.1_...Indians form a tiny fraction of the population...are also the poorest, most oppressed, and marginalized classes, and have a reputation for malice if not downright evil as well as ignorance and vrutishness...Why they should also be credited with magical power is therefore an intriguing question and ...a political one since the magic of the Indian is intrinsic not only to their oppression, but also to the web of popular religion and magical curing of misfortune throughout the society as a whole, not yo mention to the anthropologists who study it. This magical attraction of the indian is not only a cunningly wrought colonial object d’art; it is also a refurbished and revitalized one. it is not just primitivism but third-world modernism, a neocolonial reworking of primitivism. PP171-172

10.2_...wherever you go the great brujos are elsewhere. In out town of puerto tejada it is said that the brujos of the chocó are astounding. If you go to the Chocó they say the great ones are in puerto Tejada. And so it goes, the far away rubbed against the familiar, the primitive against the modern, the forest against the city, race rubbed against race in a magic-creating friction. These imputations of magic in otherness enchant the medley of difference in a poetics of place and race that is no less political and economic than it is aesthetic. Take servitude for instance, as some friends were telling me in a village close toPuerto tejada, daughters of peasant farmers, now mothers themselves, some working in the cane fields...and many as servants in the cities, close by or far away. Walter benjamin saw in the reunion of the returned traveler with those who stayed home, no less than in the artisan’s shop, the charmed occassion for spinning magical stories. In today’s third world there are far more servants than artisans, yet still the stories flow. "Some mistresses use magic to tie [ligar] their servants to the house and make them loyal and hard working," my friend Elbia was saying. "Some servants eneter into ploys with their mistresses to practice sorcery on the mistresses’ husband and ‘tie’ him deown!" And sometimes you hear of a servant who put a liga on her mistress! The servants from the Pacific coast are the one prone to this...PP181

10.3_[soem stories about magic have] ...been taken as evidence of the miracle mongering desperation of the poor and as an illustration of the ‘petty-bougeous individualism" of those making a living in the ‘informal sector’ of the economy. yet there is more to be said...To focus exclusively on the conscious economic interests of the individual is to lose sight of colonial mythopoesis working through the political unconscious. The contents of the dream as much as the dreamlike story as a whole refer us not only to the miracle-mongering of the individual, but also to the popular conceptions of the miraculous and redemptive secrets of alchemical knowledge lost to manifest history yet accessible through coincidence and misfortune in the form of the dream, wherein history...is made malleable through indian magic. PP185

10.4_...in the bookstores frequented by the middle classes and tourists...there are many books on indians...these books display Indians, exotic wild animals, and plants, all together as if they belonged to and constituted a single category. Such books are virtual fetish objects...Even the history texts used in schools have between one third and one quarter of their chapters devoted to indians...(yet barely a mention, let alone a chapter, on African slavery or black history-in a society whose economy has rested to a far greater extent on the backs of blacks and their descendents than on indians). Whether it is in the authoritative language of history, Anthropology, or archeology, or in the dreams of the poor, the image of the Indian casts a spell-a spell that is no less binding in the magic of the church and the epiphanic discovery of its miraculous saints and virgins. PP187

11.1_ As with the lord of miracles at Buga...it is the indian who is chosen by history to provide the civilized and conquering race with amiraculous icon. As slavery attends the needs of the master, so the conquered redeem their conquerors. In the case of the Wild Lady of the forest transformed into Our Lady of Remedies, her Church-writ mythology is strikingly clear as regards the contradiction constitutiong what jean barstow calls ‘the unsuspected power of the powerless’; the ambivalent moral status of Indians as pagan-Christians, indios barbaros of the wilderness blessed with an aboriginal spiritual kinship with the mother of the god of the conquering Christians. PP189

11.2_Together with the wildly differing testimonies provided not only by official but by oral history, this feature opens fresh paths of understanding the magical reality here at issue; namely that the reality of this miraculous Virgin as much as the miraculous nature of the reality is in curious ways dependent on contradictory histories circulating around her in living speech. it is this effervescent and contradictory listeningand talking surrounding the icon that need to be considered, if ever we are to grasp the ways by which the miraculous is everyday and the icon serves as a means for the experiential appropriation of history. PP190

11.3_...[in Church history] ...a clear distinction is made between two different groups or types of Indians, the Catholic Indians who help the Spanish, and the wild Indians who steal the virgin, assasinate the priest, and carry off his head. This distinction is important in that...it also represents the dualized character of ‘the indian’ as a social category and as a moralpersonage. For not only were there converted Indians and pagan indians existing as actual social groups, but the colonially propounded and still effervescent image of the indian depends precisely on this combination of opposites in which wildness and christianity sustain and subvert one another. PP192-193

11.4_[Double Visioning dialogue:two themes in an account of the virgin’s history}...Acknowledging that the miraculous virgin belonged initially to the indigenous people and that they palce great faith in her, the plantain seller notes that the indians don’t appreciate her properly. At her fiesta they get drunk; they lie in the guter like dogs. While the bestiality of the Indian is necessary for bringing the Virgin and her miraculous powers into the world, conscious awareness, appreciation, subsequent care and development of that power require a quite different sensibility, namely that associated with the non-Indian. there is here a racial division of spiritual labor in the creation of her spiritual of her miraculous power in which the bestial indian, pagan and wild, is necessary in the same way that a dog or a drunk can sense and attract influences to which a civilized, sober human is insensible. PP195

11.5_A second theme, the plantain seller’s account concerns the primordial importance of envy, reciprosity and illusion. The virgin stimulates envy on the part of other pueblos, just as she protects Caloto from the aggression of the envious. In both stimulating and deflecting envy she presents the dilemma basic not only to sorcery and magical healing, but to interpersonal relations in general...hallucination leaps from as much as pierces the breast of envy, causing or resolving it or both. moreover, the virgin’s modeof protecting her people from the envy she stimulates in others is to induce hallucination in the enemy in a confusing transformation of one reality into another. hallucination is said to have figured in the wars of Conquest, independence, the mid twentieth century violencia, etc. PP195-196

11.6_This is a saint of the Indians, she said. This land was all theirs. She protected them. When the spaniards came she made it seem as though there were immense number of Indian warriors and that frightened the spaniards away. What seems intriguing...here is that the magical power of the virgin to create a frightening reality through illusion is first deployed against the Spaniards, sustainig their myths and fantasies of indian powers. Moreover, the story acknowledges the illusory basis of this power imputed to the wild indian. At one and the same time this sstory speaks from within and without the spell of magic, thereby registering not merely a dualized but an interacting doubleness of epistemology, two univarses apart, each requiring the other, each demolishing the other. Such is the paradox, if you like, of the very notion of illusion-less real, equally real, more real than the really real and that which makes the real really real. Such is the faith composing the Virgin and her miraculous powers. PP196

11.7_behind the illusionary powers of the virgin, of course, lurks the illusion of the image of the Indian as composed and decomposed by the ebb and flow of colonial history. And in both instances, that of the Virgin-dependent Indians, the principle of adhesion to the reality of history is not unlike the principle of collage-in which presentation coexists with representation, each order of reality estranging if not mocking the other. PP196

11.8_...not only is faith in the Virgin’s miracle-creating power created and reproduced through such interweaving doubleness of story-fixed envisioning, and not only do the stories contradict one another, but they generally contest the official voice of the curch itself. I think this points to something more than simple negation, multiplicity or dialectics. Instead it seems as if the life of the icon and hence of the reality of the miracle depend upon the social reproduction of a constantly inconstant reality in which meaning both depends upon and destroys its opposite in a ceaseless confrontation with the formally institutionalized source of truth. To repulse the enemy and wrest victory from defeat, the image of the Virgin creates further images, said to be illusions. PP197

11.9_For while it is tempting to say that icons...may preserve myths of the origin of the colonial society, these accounts further indicate that the origin myth allows the originary point to slide or skip through time to represent different events. For...her origin is brought forward in time and situated in other fields of battle: in nineteenth-century wars of independence...the mid-tntieth century violencia. Rooted in a particular landscape as mythical as it is physical, rooted in a particular political party...the virgin is free to wander theough chronological time and fix memorable events with the freshness of her recurring genesis. PP197

11.10_In doing this she serves as a mnemonic of focal points in social history, points charged with the messianic time of persecution and salvation of the moral community. The mnemonic function replenishes the present with mythic themes and oppositions set into semiotic play in the theater of divine justice and redemption. PP197

11.11_This is a politicized class- and rece-sensitive hermeneutic process of semiotic play with the structure of signs established as images in social experience by the Spanish Conquest. Encrusted in colonial icons ...this structure is brought into everyday life not as an inert and fixed model, but, to the contrary, exists by means of spasmodic dialogical creativity as a range of interpretive possibilities. PP198

11.12_I have said ‘image’ when i could just as well have said ‘the community of persons among whom the image exists, the community of persons doinfg the imagining and therewith bringing the image to life over and over again.’ It is of course fetishistic to endow the image per se with the active role in what is a recprocating relation between viewer andviewed. PP198

11.13_...regarding subtlety, it can be indicated by referring to the image-making that occurrs in the relationship between Putomayo shamans and their patients, a relation that has much to teach us about the dialogical construction of soul-stirring and bodily effective image-making in general. For here the shaman is said to be the one who truly sees, and by virtue of this capacity provides the healing images-the pinta or painting- for the patient, the one who cannot see. Yet it is not so much the shaman as the patient who gives speech and narrative form to these images, images that not only perturb but also may change awareness, the record of a life, and social relitinships as well. it is thus in the combined activity of the one who sees but does not talk of what is seen, together with the patient who talks but does not truly see, that we see the crucible of socielly effective image-making–and this seems no less the case with mute icons such as the Virgin of Caloto who, like the shaman. provoke images (pinta) that otherwise sightless persons redeem for speech and story. In so doing they also redeem the messianic faith in the miracle, in focal points retroactively condensing in collage from the epic of imperialistic conquest, independence struggles, civil wars, and Violencia. PP199

11.14_[Dialectical Imagery and the Task of the Critic] This type of image-making and image-dependent historiography is also the subject of a pointedly eccentric contribution to the twentieth-century Western European theory of social revolution, namely Walter benjamin’s concepts of redemptive criticism and dialectical images. In his youth, in 1914, Benjamin argued for just the kind of historiography as is exhibited in the image-making provoked by the Virgin of Caloto. Contrary to the view of history as a progressive continuum, the young Benjamin advanced the notion that ‘history rests collected in a focal point, as formerly in the utopian images of thinkers. The elemments of the end condition are not present as formless tendencies of progress but instead are embedded in every present as endangered, condemned, and ridiculed creations and ideas." The historical task, he went on to say, "is to give absolute form in a genuine way to the immanent condition of fulfillment, to make it visible and predominant in the present." [Richard Wolin, Walter benjamin: An Aesthetic of redemption (New York:Columbia University Press, 1982), 49.]

11.15_The task of the critic of works of art is therefore to join with this task of redemption, in rescuing, as Richard Wolin puts it, "the few unique visions of transcendence that grace the continuum of history." Surely it is precisely this that the peasents...of caloto embed in every present with their renditions of their Virgin’s beginnings in the past? Only here the secular and theological fragments of that past stand in sharper, more concrete, less lofty, and more Brechtian formulation. it is the Indians’ land , for instance, as much as their elicitation of the messianic force of history, which the focal point of history here collects; it is the confusing din of battle, race wars and wars of civilizations, that hums through this vision of transcendance that graces the continuum of history. PP199

11.16_Later on in life when he refashioned redemptive criticism in order to engage it with his idiosyncratic attachment to marxism, Benjamin referred to thisstask as one involving the ‘dialectic at a standstill.’ The gallery of images of concern to the critic of high culture is now expanded to include imagery that fires the popular imagination. if by this expansion the history of art comes closer to the view of history as art, it should not be forgotten that for benjamin this is a class-conflict view of art, as well as a messianic one, entailing the notion that while the power of ideas and ideology lay more in the realm of images than in cincepts, and while there could be no intact revolutionary will without exact pictorial representation, this capacity of images was, except on rare occassions, blocked by ruling-class representations of the past that imagery evoked. ‘This leap into the past’ he wrote in refernce to the imageric evocation of ancient Rome by the French revolution, ‘takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands." However, the same leap ‘into the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.’ [thesis on the Philosophy of history] PP200

11.17_Inciting the critic to devise ways of freeing imagery from the deadening hand of tradition and the stronghold of the ruling classes, benjamin seems to suggest that images –or at least some images– lend themselves to this task. Hence the critic dedicated to the method of the ‘dialectic at a standstill’ is enjoined not to force dialectics into images, but to work with and nourish this destabilizing potential when and where it exists as a sign of a messianic cessation of happening. In his own words, close to the end of his life, where he more or less defined his task...:"Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic cessation of hapening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. he takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history –blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the life work." [also from thesis on the Philosophy of history]PP200

11.18_Yet despite his boldness, he hesitates. There is a failure of nerve in his concept of the dialectical image; toomuch emphasis on the task of the critic as activist and not enough confidence in the way that (at least some) images behave this way in popular culture by themselves. To elicit the dialectics of such images as these, in the third world, at least, the dialectic imagician’s wand need give but the faintest tap. PP200

11.19_Rarely was Benjamin able to wean himself from his infatuation with melancholia–no easy task for a soul so firmly wedded to the redemptive promise of a past whose quintessential feature lay in its premonition of catastrophe. Surrealism did, however, evoke in him an appreciation for the ways by which laughter could crack open the world, exposing the raw nerve-endings of the politicized imagician’s zone of struggle– where ‘the long sought image sphere is opened...the sphere, in a word, in which political materialism and physical nature share the inner man.’ For if surrealism tried to change that sorcery bundle of mythical representations on which western culture is based, and did so using images that levered wide contradictions opening the doorway to the marvelous, its own representation had to be both iconic and ironic–bringing to mind not only freaud’s analysis of the unconscious imagery mined and subverted by jokes, but also Michael Bhaktin’s and geroge bataille’s fascination with anarchist poetics blending the grotesque and the humorous in carnival-like upheavals of de-gradation and renewal. PP201

11.20_...I am thinking here not merely of the strumming of the string of defeat and salvation that creates multiplicity of versions concerning the Virgin, this jugglin with the semiotic of the miracle. I am also thinking of the way the heavy tone and mystical authority of the official voice of the past is brought down to earth and familiarized with gentle and sometimes saucy wit. The vidence indicates that the profusion of variation that knits and unknits a diverse reality is the work of play that deflates systematicity–a stratagem of paroles teasing, with all their multiplicity and double epistemologies, the pretensions of a master language not merely manifested but claimed by ruling classes. PP202

11.21_perhaps there is a secret life and a hidden Society of Saints and Virgins of which the Church is ignorant. Perhaps this society includes not only saints and virgins of fame...but also admits of popular saints...[such as] El negro Felipe and Jose Hernandez...In this society the saints seem more like us...a far cry from the impassive faces they stolidly present to the public when esconced behind the altar...And if people like to fill the lives of the saints and the virgins with all too human passiosn, displacing thereby the monologue inscribed by the Church, those same saints and virgins fill the landscape by the routes of their interrelations. Given that they are as human as they are sacred, it would not be correct to say they thus ‘sanctify’ spatial patterns, unless we endorse a notion of sanctity that endorses the strength of human weakness. If we do that then we can describe a ‘sacred’ contouring of land made from interconnected chips and fragments of place meanings. Pilgrimages, rites to cure misfortune, wandering herbalists and folk healers intermittently bring these contours and places to light, but in the main they are no more than implicit networks, smoky trails, manifested but indirectly in the cracks, dreams and jokes of everyday life. PP203

12.1_I am trying to reproduce a mode of perception-a way of seeing through a way of talking-figuring the world through dialogue that comes alive with sudden transformative force in the crannies of everyday life’s pauses and juxtapositions..Its is also a way of repreenting the world in the rundabaut ‘speech’ of the collage of things...It is a mode of perception that catches on the debris of history ...a mode of perception that foregrounds these fragments strewn upon the order reigning on the altar in the artificial obscurity of the Church proper/ It is an irregular, quavering image of hope, his inscription on the edge of official history, the ‘true’ and truly obscure Saint Michael, small and swordless, floating on outsized wings in the confines of the church’s back room. In a gust of sentiment we may wish to mutter encouraging and brave things about ‘resistance’ qnd so forth, emphasizing the fragility of such counterhegemonic voices and signifiers hugely winged and ready to fly. But that sort of response is more for us than for those voices. It is we who gain courage from thir confluence of strength and fragility, the strength in their fragility given to the weak and the defeated, inscribed into miracoulous icons, sometimes, AND INTO INDIAN SHAMANS TOO. PP210

12.2_AS WITTKOWER...EMPHASIZED IN THE CLOSING LINES OF HIS ERUDITE ESSAY, "THE MONSTER HAS BEEN CREdited everywhere with the powers of a god or the diabolical forces of evil". PP212

12.3_This imputationof mystery and the demonic by the more powerful class to the lower-by men to women, by the civilized to the primitive, by Christian to pagan, is breathtaking-such an old notion, so persistent, so paradoxical and ubiquitous. In our day it exists not only as racism but also as a vigorous cult of the primitive, and it is as primitivism that it provides the vitality of modernism. PP215

12.4_It is an interesting notion, is it not, that faith in the magic of the underclass is due to a ‘not very solid’ culture among the ruling class? There is a curious synrgism here between rulers and thosewho may sustain them magically as well as throug more material labor. And beyond the division of labor into those who rule and those who supply them with magic there is a picture of society as a whole with very different sorts of places for rulesr and ruled, cosmic spaces united vertiginously as in a dream of world history swooning. Despite the ‘advanced psychology’ of the whites in Cuba, writes Ortiz, ‘the superstitions of the blacks attract them, producing a type of vertigo so that they fall into those beliefs from the height of their civilization; as if the superior planes of their psyches first drown and then become detached, returning to primitiveness, to the nakedness of their souls." PP2117

12.5_In warning against the morbid and hallucinatory image that surrounds voodoo inHaiti, metraux advises us that this image is but a legend associated with the sorcery used by slaves against their masters. Whether such sorcery existed or was thought to exist is unimportant to the legend, which as Metraux writes, "belongs to the past. It belongs tothe colonial period when it was the fruit of hatred and fear. man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the aNXIETY WHICH GROWS IN THE MINDS OF THOSE WHO ABUSE POWER OFTEN TAKES THE FORM OF IMAGINARY TERRORS AND DEMENTED OBSESSIONS. THE MASTER MALTREATED HIS SLAVE, BUT FEARED HIS HATRED. HE TREATED HIS LIKE A BEAST OF BURDEN BUT DREADED THE OCCULT POWERS WHICH HE IMPUTED TO HIM. AND THE GREATER THE SUBJUGATION OF THE BLACK, THE MORE HE INSPIRED FEAR; THAT UBIQUITOUS FEAR WHICH SHOWS IN THE RECORDS OF THE PERIOD AND WHICH SOLIDIFIED IN THAT OBSESSION WITH POISON WHICH, THROUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, WAS THE CAUSEOF SO MANY ATROCITIES. PERHAPS CERTAIN SLAVES DID REVENGE THEMSELVES ON THEIR TYRANTS IN THIS WAY-SUCH A THING IS POSSIBLE AND EVEN PROBABLE-BUT THE FEAR WHICH REIGNED IN THE PLANTATONS HAD ITS SOURCE IN THE DEEPEST RECESSES OF THE SOUL:IT WAS THE WITCHCRAFT OF REMOTE AND MYSTERIOUS AFRICA WHICH TROUBLED THE POEPLE IN ‘THE BIG HOUSE’. PP217

12.6_TOGETHER WITH OTHER STUDIES OF EARLY CARTAGENA, BASED ON COLONIAL DOCUMENTS PREPARED BY INQUISITORS, PRIESTS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, LEA’S HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION there suggests that this chamber of mirrors was, from the colonizer’s point of view, a chamber conflating sorcery with sedition, if not in reaity, at least as a metaphor, as if the notion of an ‘underground’ took on a wide range of connotations, from the inferno worshipped by the followers of Satan to the underground of conspiracy and defiance of the social order. It is striking how important race and gender are as signifiers of this underground threatening to erupt through thecrust of white maleness incarnated in colonial authority. PP218

12.7_These official texts reproduce an inquisitorial vision of power, mystical and malevolent, surrounding and underminig the colonial terms of order. Fantastic as the vision is, if the Putomayan experience is any guide, it is a vision that becomes incorporated into the magic and sorcery of the subaltern classes. Such evil is not without allure. As bernheimer goes to some length to illustrate, the wildness of the wild woman and the wild man is constituted by bringig together the extremes of destruction and healing. PP219

12.8_In what does the healing power of wildness lie? It is true, as Wittkower aays, that the mosnters of the marvels of the East gave shape not only to the daydreams of beauty and harmony of Western man but also created symbols by which the horrors of real dreams could be expressed. Yet is there not an issue here that extends betond the shaping function of symbols and dreams?/Wildness also raises the specter of the death of the symbolic function itself. it is the spirit of the unknown and the disorderly, loose in the forest encircling the city and the sown land, disrupting the conventions upon which meaning and the shaping function of images rest. Wildness challanges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates a slippage and a grinding articulation between signifier and signified. Wildness makes of these connections spaces of darkness and light in which objects stare out in their mottled nakedness while signifiers float by. Wildness is the death space of signification. PP219

12.9_Bernheimer reminds us that wildness in the Middle Ages ‘implied everything that eluded Christian norms and the established FRAMEWORK OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY, REFERRING TO WHAT WAS UNCANNY, UNRULY, RAW, UNPREDICTABLE, FOREIGN, UNCULTIVATED"...surely ...the healing and nt only the evil magic of the wild folk is not unconnected with just this raw unpredicatbility and eliding of frameworks?PP220

12.10_Yet wildness is incessantly recruited by the needs of order (and indeed this is one of anthropology’s most enduring tasks and contributions to social order). But the fact remains that in trying to tame wildness this way, so that it can serve order as a counterimage, wildness must perforce retain its difference. if wildness per se is not credited with its own force, reality, and autonomy, then it cannot function as a handmaiden to order. The full implications of this paradox are submerged in the violent act of Domestication. PP220

12.11_The wildness here at stake tears through tired deichotomies of good and evil, order and chaos, the snactity of order, and so forth. It does not mediate these oppositions. Instead it comes down on the side of chaos and its healing creativity is inseparable from that taking of sides. Club in hand, battered by hail and tempest with lightning flashing the return of the dead, these creatures of the wild not only bear the burden of society’s antiself, they also absorb with their wet, shaggy coats the best that binary opposition can deliver–order and chaos, civilized and barbaric, Christian and Pagan, and emerge on the side of the grtesque and the destructive. "Their destructive aspect is stronger than their salutary one," writes Bernheimer with regards to the wild me of the Middle Ages, "and it would seem that whatever benefits their appearance may hold for the human community are ultimately derived from their macabre traits." PP220

13.1_It is this equivocation that i have emphasized, aimed at a zone of reality where pretense and possibility combine to create through the poetics of uncertainty a zone of power "deeply rooted in all classes of society, though seldom confessed," where the identification with and the disassociation from the wildness of the jungle and its people run through ritual into the desires and misfortunes of civilized daily life, and back again. PP223

13.2_Ten thousand Incan soldiers descended on rafts...After mighty skirmishes they subdued the chunchus who then served the Incas in further conquest of wild indians–a point i wish to emphasize as it is this taming of wildness, so as to use it for civilizing, that lies at the heart of the magical imputation and appropriation of wild power. PP225

13.3_...it was hardly an issue of true history versus dreams. The dreams were not without history. nor was the history without its fantasy. Wildness was a fantasy where pagan and Christian came together in the montaña, across which, back and forth, went medicine men disassembling order and disorder, the wild in the civilized, thereby making magic out of a moralized topography. The montaña made it real. The montaña made it natural. [Collahuayas] PP226-227

13.4_It is as if we are faced with an hallucinatory image of the shaman’s fabled art, the art of magic wherein mimesis and the power to transform run together, except that the image in question, the moralized topography of the Andes, is not the work of an individual artist but of popular culture itself, creating out of space and its distinctions one great difference separating wildness from civilization traversed by peripatetic medicine men prior to their traversing the woes of the nation. It is here that the earlies studies of binary opposition, as in Robert Hertz’s study of the preeminence of the right hand...come to mind....: "All the oppositions presented by nature exhibit these fundamental dualism. Light and dark, day and night, east and south in opposition to west and north, represent in imagery and localize in space the two contrary classes of supernatural powers: on one side life shines forth and rises, on the other it descends, and is extinguished. the same with the contrast between high and low, sky and earth: on high, the sacred residence of the gods and the stars which know no death; here below, the profae region of mortals whom the earth engulfs; and lower still, the dark places where lurk serpents and the host of demons. PP227

13.5_It is of course, this stunning contrast between high and low, this allegory of the heights, that concerns the myth-and magic making power of the Andes and the sea of rain and cloud forest which the spring. Yet is not this sociological Kantianism too consumed with its own mythology of the fundamental categories? Might not the cherished order of the ‘fundamental dualism’ itself be nourished by, if not dependent on, the allegory of the heights where order reigns supreme?Where can death and profanity, the sordid materiality of the below, the object in itself, gain an epistemological toehold in this towering organum of sublime knowledge? Perhaps the very magic of the shamans, or at least the magic attributed to the shamans, isgenerated by that question, and in the ruptures and breaks with experience it finds its toehold. In any event in the wildness attributed to the below there is this chance-of twisting out of reach of being nothing more than the height’s other. In this mimesis of the magicla art imputed by society to the lowland forest and its exotic powers, this chance glimmers, What georges Bataille...would pit as the "old mole" of Marxist revolution against the imperialist eagle of the idea , soaring resplendent in holy allience with the sun, castrating all that enters into conflict with it. PP228 [From visions of excess,,,Selectd writtings. PP32-44]

13.6_...Randall [Robert, in 1982 essay about Andean festival of the Star of the Snow, Collur Riti, in Bulletin de L’institut Francais des Etudes Andines 11, nos.1-2(1982):37-38] cites stories from the campesinos of the mountainsides saying that the chunchos are their ancestors...the naupa machu , ...[who] in their pride and strength scorned [the chief spirit of the local peaks’ offer], causing the peak’s chief to create the sun...turned the ancestors into stone-except for those few who fled into the dark chaos of the forests below. With this creation of the chunchos in the darkness below, the Incan order was created in the sunlit mountains above. PP229

13.7_Entire epochs of time are buried below, too. Like the flight of the ancients into the forests below, so great cycles of history are said to be buried underground from where, through ‘flowerings’ ...into the present they may exert a powerful influence on contemporary life. Such flowerings whereby an anterior epoch exerts its usually baneful influence on the present occur with the full or new moon, at dawn or at dusk- and we shall have reason to remember this flowering of an underground of time when we later consider the ways by which history itself acts like a sorcerer in the creation of la mala hora, the evil hour, in the Sibundoy valley in Colombia. There, also, connections are made with what seems like an underground of pre-Spanish conquest ‘other’time, and while while this buried epoch flowers in quasi-satanic form to bewitch the present, and even kill, this very same deposition of history can be appealed to for healing as well. PP229-230

13.8_As with mythic time, so for the chunchos east of Cuzco, too: inferior, wild and hostile, yet they are healers and bestowers of fertility.../We may wish to qualify this otion ind insist on some sort of ‘dialectical’ coalescence between upper and lower, mountain and lowland forest, order and disorder...but I do not think this substantially detracts from the unidirectional character of the attribution of magical power to the underclass by the elevated. nor does it detract from the characterization of that underclass as a force whose health-and fertility-bestowing capacity, no less than its danger, spring from its wildness. PP230

13.9_Wildness, fertility, magical healing, suppressed,repressed, contained below in the dark tangled forest–this wild underground of history can heave upwards in rebellions, messianic in tone, curing and fertilizing not just this or that person, or this or tat field but an entire society overlaid wrongly b another epoch. Such is the interpretation one can derive from the repeated assaults carried out during and against the Spanish Colonial era by forest dwellers, peaking [with] the movement headed by Juan Santos Atahuallpa in 1741 [and later with hugo Blanco in the 1960s]. In both instances highland leaders or ‘prophets’ went down from the high country into the lowlands...to find not merely a social base of support but to re-assert a mythico-historical one. The raw forces of wildness and disorder were recruited in the attempt to do away with the old order, and failed. yet the mythology lives on. Randall hismelf recruits the nostalgia of political failure to inspire a poignant identification with the demons of history and social renewal; while all the more securely consolidationg the triumph of the will to order; yet without chunchos and jungle...there would be no basis for order itself. Indeed, it is from this dependence that magic and fertility ‘flower.’

13.10_Salimon [in] the wold of Yumbo (as that world is created in the imagination of highlanders), the dancing brings out the polarities of an Indian versus a white America. With corpus christi, the ‘compass of existence’...rotates 180 degrees, and what Salomon calls the ‘effort of becoming’ is turned away from the city of hierarchy and whiteness, ‘returning not to the ancestral world-it is lost beyon recall-but toward the contrary alter, the jungle into which the powers of persecuted America have withdrawn." In his guide, Salomon continues, "a sense of ethnic distinctiveness deprived of its original ground survives as an electric tension between two equally unrealizable potential selves.’ [in frank L. Salomon, "Killing the Yumbo:A Ritual Drama of norhtern Quito," in Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten Jr. (Urbana:UNiversity of Illinois Press, 1981), 162-208.

13.11_Yumbo dancing flourishes most, Salomon tells us, "where the headlong expansion of oil-rich Quito has brought a sudden and dramatic invasion of formerly rural commuities."[Ibid, 163]/ Which raises some points Benjamin essayed concerning the cultural effect of the leap forward in commoditization in baudelair’s Paris: first, the confrontation of the city’s discipline with its wildness (James Ensor liked to put military groups in his carnival mobs, and both got along splendidly–as the prototype," observed Benjamin, "of totalitarian states in which the police made common cause with the looters’[W. Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Charles baudelaire: A Lyric poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New left Books, 1973), 131.]), second, how the quantum leap forward in technology and the sway of the market inscribed a pathos of denied promise in commodities, stimulating through them visions of utopia drawn from fantasies of the primal past-such as the jungle and its fabulous yumbos, aucas, and chunchos./ And in relation to the cities of the first world, the third world city itself approaches the status of the auca. .PP236

13.12_To the scienticity of the archaeology ...we add the heroic passion of theshaman-led revolts of the lowlanders against the Spanish, and, so it is said, against the ..Inca Empire as well. To that we add the observation that highlanders, rich and poor, white and indian, urban and not so urban, go down to the lowlands seeking out shamans there for magical power-and it is we too, no lessdependent on the elusive distinctions wrought by myth through historical events in the landscapes, internal and external, that follow them down, observing, standing back, but ultimately, like those who descend, figuring the world ritualistically and no less beholden to the magic of the woods and the primitive, wild and first, as if myth inevitably reproduced itself in rituals that for some are healing and for others are called explanation. PP237

13.13_Salomon leaves us this powerful image: that wave after wave of people have conquered and sanctified the mountain city of Quito. The ab-original powers are extruded toward the periphery out and over the brim of the mountains into the refuge of the outer forests. ‘Thus, the forest becomes-is forever becoming- the refuge of the encient, the aboriginal, the autochtonous. it is a reservoir for the kind of knowledge which the powers of the center wish only to expel and replace’./ But how autonomous is that knowledge which the center extrudes? Does not the otherness with which the extruded is marked also mark it as desired and necessary to the center? Is not the magic of the wild zone created as much by the center as by the shamans who are made to act as the shock absorbers of history?PP237

13.14_He is the lowest of the low and the servant of all, the pongo , and he reappeared sleeping, the misti told Arguedas. he is also the servant of dreams and of the archaeology of racist myth curving into the present from the concealed interior of the mountanous earth, emerging asleep as dreamtime to redeem the señorial class of its self-induced sorcery.../In the midst of the techniques constituting these rites, there is a figure who provides the substantiality necessary to blind the flashing ephemera of attributions and counterattributions into a redemptive force. it is an imaginary figure, one constituted by that flashing field of othernesses-white’s representations of Indian’s representations of white’s representations of Indians. It is the figure of the wild woman and wild man, pagan figures attributed with magic to kill and magic to heal socially caused illness and misfortune by their thus-defined civilized superiors. these are the great artifacts:fetishized antiselves made by civilizing histories-the wildly contradictory figure of the Primitive, less than human and more than human...this is the pongo in his cave in the mountain healing mistis. This is the chuncho in the wilderness below the mountains. This is the shaman exorcizing jose garcia of the sorcery that other whites envious of his good fortune have imploded on him. These are images of wildness imputed to these slaves, ex-slaves, and pongos , then extracted from them drenched in the otherness this imputation so heightens, as if the fat extracted by the nakaq–power slippery and magical that can exorcize from the colonizing self the evil of having more. /We are all nakaqs. PP241

14.1_At dawn Pedro began to exorcise the evil from the sick people, one by one, with his curing fan of rustling leaves beating strongly to his chanting, viewing the interior of the body with his quartz crystal, his ‘lens’ or lente. he got the sick person to breathe into the lente, and every so often asked his to look into it and see the shadowy form of evil. he passed the fan of leaves over the body, in rhythm with the chant...gathering up the evil within. He sucked the bad stuff from patient’s body and spat it into a corner of the room with a lot of noise. PP252

14.2_"When you take yagé...you acquire the power of the shaman. The shaman gives you this gift and this is what cures people, cattle...everything, including sorcery of the soil and of the crops.’ He paused, bringing the magical exchanges together in the one enchanted landscape, "the highland shamans sing...and with that they call the spirit of the lowland shaman that taught them to come and help. They do this because he haas given the gift to them.’ [Pedro speaking] PP253

14.3_...it befalls the highland shaman, such as Pedro, to act as a medium not only for the spirits of the primal past buried in an underground of time in the fastness of the lowland forest. he also mediates the class struggle...We also appreciate another set of mediations alongside that: his mediating the dominant cultural force of the region, the mysteries and the authority of the catholic church, with sorcery and everyday imponderabilia. PP254

15.1_"Magic for hunting is wisdom and it includes money-making. Hunting magic is more powerful than magic for money because it brings everything, first animals and later money. magic for money is only good for money. The other pinta allows you to heal and have luck in getting money..."PP257

15.2_On the other hand were relatonships like Santiago’s and Esteban’s. in which the highland healer becomes the implacably envious enemy of the lowland shaman and may use not only the weapon of the sorcery bundle, the capacho , for which the highland shamans are notorious, but may also have access to magia as well, the noxious power that comes from making a pact with the devil from books of magic. That was what was said to have happened to Santiago when he refused to sell yagé to Esteban, his longstanding enemy from the highlands./ It seemed like a case where a man who had asked for hunting magic was being attacked by a man empowered with the magic to make money. So far the man who had asked for hunting magic has been able to defend himself, although there had been a time when it looked as though he would go under. PP258

16.1_It was as if magia and more precisely the book of magia , were a mythic prefigurement of not only what might be called the commodification of magic, but of the magic of commoditization too. What we are listening to in these accounts of tormented souls and the nuying of magical books is the uneven inscription into the social body of the meaning of being able to buy on a market. The vividness of this meaning is brought about by making magic the commodity under discussion, and by magic it should be here plainly understood that we are talking about knowledge and words, words and their ability to effect things. In effect we are talking about the marketing of a theory of signification and of rethoric, indeed not just of knowledge but of what is in a deeply significant sense the knowledge of knowledge that has to remain inaccessible for that knowledge to exist. PP262

16.2_As opposed say, to buyng a pinta from a yagé healer as a way...of becoming a yagé healer oneself, the buying of magic by way of buying a book is a quintessentially anonymous and individualistic act, a market transaction in which cash is turned over for standardized knowledge. By contrast, yagé knowledge is acquired throug immense privation and is quitessentially the accentuation or extension of the substance of the shaman, the donor. It is his pinta or part of him. moreover, it is the antithesis of standardized knowledge and draws its power from the ineffable, from the feelin-tone of the shadow and light, innuendo and sudden transformation. its power is in its style, not in substance. or rather, its substance is its style. PP262

16.3_Both powers are dangerous for their practitioners, whether in the acquiring or in the practice, but whereas in the case of yagé it is the envy of another shaman that is feared, with magia it is the personification of an abstraction, of evil itself in the emblem of satan that is feared, in keeping with the abstract power of market forces themselves. The struggle here is with the ubiquitous and omniscient effluvium of evil, with the miamic aura of the oppressive, not with this or that particula shaman for this or that concrete fear or envy. PP262

16.4_What is important here is not only the way that magia is identified by Indians as intrinsic to colonial culture, but also how what is in effect obtained through the purchase of magic books is the magic of the printed word as print has acquired this power in the exercise of colonial domination with its fetishization in print, as in the bible and the law. Magia so it sems to me, does not so much magicalize colonizing print as draw out the magic inherent in its rationality and monologic function of domination. PP262

16.5_The book of the Church, nature as the book of the lord, the books of law, writting, paper atop official papaerthese leak magic into the hands of people they dominate. The symbol of all that is civilized, christian, and the state itself, writting and books create their counterpoint in the magic books sold in the marketplaces by wondering indian herbalists and healers from the Putomayo. PP264

17.1_...everyone accorded the doctors great respect, and the faith, which indeed was a magical faith, in the medical wonders of modern science, was restrained only by the fact that few could afford it...PP276

17.2_Yet amazingly awful and absurd as they are, these services provided by the official medical system and its university-trained doctors, backed by the multinational corporations of ‘science,’ agribusiness, and pharmaceuticals, are sought by many. This optimistically desperate search is testimony to a magical attraction, in this case to officialdom and to ‘science,’ no less and probably a good deal greater than that involved in the magic of so-called magical medicine. PP278

17.3_Existing in the shadow of the economic and scientific might of the United states, this third-world cult of the modern illuminates the magical power inherent in that might and necessary to it. As in the relation between the magic that glistens as gold in the books fashioned by the heralds of Christ and the books of magia sold by Putomayo herbalists, so there exists in these modern agribusiness towns of landless laborers this curious and deeply magical relation of power between ruling-class reason and the dominated classes squeezing out the magic implicit in that reason, the magic that makes such reason socially effective. This squeezing out the magic implicit in the discourse of ruling reason is an art. PP279

17.4_The magic of science and industry expressed in brother Walter’s hospital [I.V. sets] and in the ult of the Brother José Gregorio is a magic that holds out the promise of the power and wealth of the modern world, a promise as yet denied the vast majority of their patients without whose labor and talent there would be little wealth. On the other hand, the magic of practitioners like Don benito and the Putomayo herbalists speaks to the beginnings of time, to primitiveness itself-as conceived by modernism. /Together these very different healers compose the spectrum of ritual efacement of misfortune afflicting agribusiness towns like puerto tejada; codetermining magics, the one cradeled in the hope of the future offered and simultaneously denied by the modern world, the other in the dream mythology latent in that hope, drawn on the imagined origins of things. PP282

17.5_In his incompleted manuscript on commodity fetishism and the modern European city, Walter benjamin wrote that ‘in the dream which every epoch sees in images the epoch which is to succeed it, the latter appears coupled with elements of prehistory-that is to say of a classless society. PP282

17.6_...it is interesting to note that in the stories about the wage-workers on the sugar plantations around Puerto tejada who allegedly make a pact with the devil to augment their productivity, and hence their wage, the pact is made with the assistance of a wooden doll [said to come from fiercely egalitarian blacks from the pacific coast]. The ‘primitive’ influence of the coast would seem decisive in this strange ritualization of the magic of large scale capitalist-production. With the pact with the devil the wage worker increases his wage without increasing physical effort. but the cane field is rendered barren, as are the wages. They serve only to buy what are considered luxuries and not fertile goods such as land or livestock. Neither women nor peasant producers are said ever to make such a pact, and there is reason for such a denial. Why would the peasant want to render her or his little plot barren, no matter how much they need money? Why would the women, peasant or landless, want such barren wages when it was her responsibility, so everyone says, to provide for her children, growing creatures? No! The demonic springs into being where the rapid making of a wage working class exposes and draws out the magic implicit in the commodity fetishism of capitalist culture and its organization of persons as things through the market mechanism. And it is here that the ‘primitive’ makes its strategic contribution–in the form of the black workers from the subsistence economy of the coast, ever sensitive to infractions of equality and to the fine calculus of growth and sterility embedded in the reciprocity economy:here on the coast (but not there on the plantation) one hand washes the other. On the coast there is food, but no money, wail the women. Here there is money but no food; hence ‘filth’[sorcery] and the magi of the modern, as Indian healers like Don Benito both fear and appreciate. PP283

18.1_These herbalists may also act as healers, transmitting, acquiring, integrating, patching together new words, new spells, new concepts, as they move from city to city, hamlet to hamlet, coast to coast, charging the new with Indianness. Like lightning conductors they absorb the envy and sorcery assailing small communities and neighborhoods of large cities. my mulatto healer frined Chu Chu was saved, he told me, by one such traveling Putomayo medicine man.PP285

18.2_Plants are not like the drugs one buys in the pharmacies. They come with a mystery and one has to pray and concentrate before picking and using them, he assured me. A well-traveled man by his own account...he had studied from the books of magic too. PP285

18.3_I guess it was the city that had taught him about astrology. And capitalism too. When he tried to explain more about yagé he would talk about the way it opened the body up, made it awaken by coordinating the bodily forces with those of the stars and minerals so that the person fused with the globo , the universe. But there wasalso the problem, he said, that capitalism is destroying the globo and that the leaders of the world are contaminating it. The people, he said, ...are in confusion and ruin. Now there are no more ties holding us together. "It all comes from the great powers when they constructed the weapons of war...They said this was for defense but in reality it was to destroy their very brothers and sisters who could serve later on. And not only in vietnam," he added, "its already closing in here." PP286

18.4_Referring to thisurban-inspired system of metaphisiscs, that wondrous mixture of yagee, astrology, and medieval organicism, he went on: "the human being has to implore the plants of the world to produce, and to produce for everyone. if they don’t, then we’re all shafted. Everything becomes infested, beginning with the roots. With the failure in the productive sphere there will be the failure of the creative one." PP286

19.1_I want now to ask about history and landscape, about the way men interpret history and recruit landscape to that task, and about the different but complementary ways that they gain power from these interpretations according to whether they are being carried or whether they are carrying other men over this landscape./The landscape i wish to depict is the oft-dramatized one of the Andean mountains souaring out of the rain forests in northern South America. It is also a landscape of the imagination, an image whose force as well as its form soar from the moral topography of power in society/ As I view this landscape created as much by social as by natural history I am forced to ask whether or not there is a poetics of imagery, sensuous and passionate, that is active in binding ruled to ruler and colonized to colonizer. can we understand the effects of truth in ruling ideologies without taking their poetics into account? PP287

19.2_Perhaps in Antonio gramsci’s notion of hegemony we find a starting point. Gwyn Williams notes that this notion emphasizes that in any sociopolitical situation philosophy and practice fuse or are in equilibrium, one sense of reality crucial to the oral character of social relations is diffused throughout society, and while it is implied that this sense is directed by the ruling class, such direction is by no means necessarily coscious. Gramsci’s concern is with the social basis of conviction , which can be reduced neither to interests (since conviction asks what is interesting about interests) nor to the forlorn attempt to separate truth from ideology, but which can be approached, as Micheal Foucault envisions, by ‘seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which are in themselves neither true nor false." PP288

19.3_The phrasing is important. "One sense of reality crucial to the moral character of social relations is diffused throughout society," The stress here is away from the clearly focused idea, the hard-edged concept, the Platonic form. It may well include such worthies but the accent falls on a modernist concern for knowledge that is notso clear-cut, explicit and conceptual–a senseof reality deliberatly vague, implicit and open ended–sense as in sense impression, sense as in common sensical implicit social knowledge/It is this very diffuseness that allows not merely for the oneness of the "one sense of reality crusial to the moral character of social relations diffused throughout society," but for the interplay of multiple perspectives, of submission and opposition as well./ We have to push the notion of hegemony into the lived space of realities in social relationships, in the give and takeof social life as in the sweaty warm space between the arse of him who rides and the back of him who carries. Even here...one glimpses how the poetics of control operates with imagery and feeling located in the subconscious realm of fantasy (and no less social or historical for so being).PP288

19.4_With his notion of a structure of feeling Raymond Williams points to something like the same political and historical force; a communal possession with all the firmness that structure suggests, yet operating in the most delicate and least tangible aspects of our activity and thereby eluding analysis couche donly in terms of the well scored categories of material life, social organization and the dominant ideas of an epoch. PP288

19.5_I take it that a modernist view would stress the possibilities for dysjunction, constradiction, and estrangement of structure from feeling, an estrangement in which the firm may yield to the soft but disruptive power of the "most delicate and least tangible aspects of our activity." Such a view would go a long way towards engaging the creative power of chaos underlying the healing artistry of the yagee-nights i know. But before we can appreciate that artistry we need first to work through the forms it butts against, namely the romance, the ecstasy, and the catharses of the fantasy of order by which the conquest of the New World has been constantly rendered. PP288

19.6_I am of course thinking of dante’s great epic and behind him an age-old movement from despair to garce through the descent into the world of the dead and of evil, a structure of antiphonies in which ideas were generally subordinated to a simple, passionate framework of imagery projected into spaceand, as northrop Frye...reminds us, confused and identified with it. Far from being restricted to poets and priests, as a vision experienced in trance and death-like states, it was frequent enough among the common people to constitute...an epidemic with an enormous influence upon the mental life of the Middle Ages. In this moral topography wherein the cosmos is divided into heaven, the human order, the natural order, and the depths of hell, a person’s place is poised on a moral brink from which one either falls into the abyss or rises to the lost garden of Eden. PP288-289

19.7_The early identification of indians with angels made by Columbus and the franciscans was soon inverted into their assuming the status of the demon, both subhuman and superhuman. Their function in the larger scheme of descent and salvation remained, calling to mind that it is only when he meets the devil and mount his back, that dante is carried to the terrestrial paradise. PP289

19.8_The [Capuchin] missionaries labored mightily to construct this road from Pasto...to Puerto Asis on the left bank of the Putomayo...The missionaries represented the road in imagery entailning passions no less fabulous than those of salvation. In their own published words they envisioned the road as the tie between civilized Colombia and savage Colombia, as the dantean descent into the mysterious world -the inferno of jungles enveloping the Indian in the darkness of infidelity (and in those forty-odd millon dollars cited by father Monclar). The road and the landscape it traversed configured an uncanny confluence of cathartically organized meaning, at once economic, religious, and nationalistic. In taking stock of this vision created by the Capuchins and materialized in the road we cannot but ask ourselves to what degree it may have blended with preexisting images of shamanic flight and salvation by local Indians, forming, as it were, through the mediation of the poor white colonists, an unacknowledged pact about marvelous and even therapeutic realities in which both colonizer and colonized played a role as creators and created. PP317

19.10_...just as the Indian became that against which one defined oneself as superior and civilized, so the Indian shaman could be a soyrce of esoteric power, a beacon of relief in a beleaguered world. PP320

19.11_HERALING THROUGH THE HALLUCINOAGENIC CREATION OF THE ANTISELF: THE ARMY OF GOLD AND THE INDIAN AS THE DEVIL-A COLONIAL DREAM DIALOGUE.

19.12_In the lowland Indian’s vision it is primarily the image of the splendor of the Colombian army in the highland city that provides the shaman with powers to heal–to exorcise destructive spirits, to undo sorcery, and ultimately to gain for florencio the blessing of the Chrurch. The image of the army is decissive. Its beauty, its gold, its arms, its music and dancing constitute a picture transforming evil. He tries to enetr into this picture in order to sing and dance with the soldiers. It is the shaman who passes on this image./ "Seeing this they are able to cure, no?And they pass this painting to the sick person. And he gets better! And I said to the shaman who was curing me, I said to him, "Seeing this, you know how to heal?" "yes," he told me, "Thus seeing, one can cure no?". /By contrast the white colonist undergoes his transformative experience by meansof the image of the shaman as devil. He dies at that point, ascending to the godhead of redemption. This process of death and rebirth swings on the pivot of wildness, as invested inthe storming hurricane, light and shade, wild pigs, snakes coming in and out of oneself, and, finally, the metamorphosing trinity of tiger-shaman-devil. PP327

19.13_Here colonization becomes a replenishing of grace through immersion in the wild evil apportioned to people of the forest. That evil magic invested into colonized people and so useful in creating colonial hegemony is here pictured into the world to serve as the means by which the colonizer gains release from the civilization that so assails him./ On the other hand, in Florencio’s vision, it is the splendid image of the army that creates magical power./ The two visions are uncannily complementary, each pivoting on the glory of the antiself as colonially contrived, each thereby drawing its fund of magical potency. So perfect is this complementarity that we could think of it as a dream dialogue, underlying colonial reality./ How often have we been told that rites enforce solidarity, bringing people together affirming their unity, their interdependence, the commonwealth of their sentiments and dispositions. But whate are we to make of rites such as this wherein the indian heals the souls of the colonist? Surely the healing here depends far more on the existence, the reproductionand the artistry of difference as otherness and as oppression than it does on solidarity? And how the odds are tilted! The magnitude of the difference involved here-the magnitude necessary for the heasling power to emerge and flow, the colonized turning back to the colonizer the underside of his hate and fear congealed in the imagery of savagery. PP327

19.14_How often have we been told that ritual’s function brings spirit and matter into a divine unity as with the romantic understanding of the symbol (the understanding implicit in anthropological discourse). How often have we been told that the rites, especially healing rites, recruit the passions in order to consolidate the cake of custom, sustaining the normality of the norm, the internalization of convention (and so on). But here with the shaman healing the pain in the souls civilized, where lies the divine unity? Surely it lies in the divine creation of evil? Both manuel’s visions and the published texts of the Putomayo Capuchins are committed to a poetics of racists exploitation in which racism and redemption work hand in hand./ No doubt this attempt to harness the savagery to the divine task of redemption existed long before the Capuchins missionized the Putomayo. but no doubt they added something important–the magic of ruling class authority and rulin rituals endorsing, explicitly, in print and in sermon, the fantasy of the redeeming savage. no less important was the transcendental meaning of the entire Amazonian adventure that these few self-effacing Capuchins undertook for Colombia, for world markets, and for God./And no doubt the ease with which the capuchins exploited and elaborated the image so central to this imperialistic mission, the image of the inferno and the Indian as its denizen, wasautomatic. Deconstructing the mystery of grace in evil was for them second nature, their ritual art, their poetics of catharsis. At the edge of the jungle the poor white colonist Manuel reproduces this beautifully. In his shit and in his vomit his soul flows for us all./ But with the elderly Indian Florencio, things don’t flow so smoothly. With him the process of painting a tapestry of images creating healing power proceeds jerkely, like cards pulled out of a shuffled pack, one tableau put on top of the other or side by side. Otra Pinta Another painting. And here there is no obvious catharsis of rebirth through the colonial encounter with death and evil. Florencio’s painting seems epic while the colonist’s is dramatic as Bertold Brecht defined and experimented with the differences in formal construction, differences that for him, one of the foremost innovators of theater in the twentieth century, were intimately connected with the overthrow of capitalism. The dramatic entailed/ strong centralization of the story, a momentum that drew the separate parts of the story into a common relationship. A particular passion of utterance, a certain emphasis on the clash of forces are hallmarks of the dramatic [think of manuel’s theater: the lightning of the hurricane, the tiger, the shaman, the devil, death...]. The epic writter Doblin provided an excellent criterion when he said that with an epic work, as opposed to a dramatic, one can, as it were take a pair of scissors and cut it into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life.[Bertold brecht,"Theater for pleasure or Theater for Instruction," Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willet ed. and trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 70.] PP328

19.16_Alejo carpentier, trying to depict a shaman’s song in the venezuelan forest in his novel The Lost Steps,/there arose the Word. A word that was more than word...this was something far beyond language and yet still far from song. Something that had not yet discovered vocalization but was more than word...blinding me with the realization that I had jut witnessed the birth of Music. {Alejo carpentier. The Lost Steps (first published in Spanish in 1953), Harriet de Onis (new York:Knopf, 1974), 184.] PP329

19.17_Hugo ball’s diary on march 5, 1917, planning an event for the Cabaret voltaire in Zurich:/ The human figure is progressively dissapearing from pictorial art, and no object is present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance has become ugly and outworn, and that the things which surround us have become objects of revulsion. The next step is for poetry to discard language as painting discarded the object, and for similar reasons. Nothing like this has existed before. [Hans Richter, Dada:Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 41.]/...certainly it is not the poetics aflame in the colonists’ vision, the classical harmony of moral aesthetic as in dante’s uplifting adventure, the journey of the soul through sacred space and time that sustains the Christian church. PP329

19.18_Florencio’s vision engages with this soulful journey and disengages it from its beautifully contrived scaffolding of orderly time and orderly space bound to great authorities, Church and State. he does this with respect.. it is a sacred disengagement. but he cannot fiend the yield in dying nor the profit in evil that belongs to the colonist. What he finds instead is the pinta that the shaman passes on to the sick, a passing on wherein Florencio becomes the voice for the shaman’s wordless imagining and song without words, the Word that is more than words, poetry that had discarded language. PP330

19.19_And Florencio has put this into words, for us, while the colonist’s relation to the shaman is not to give voice to the pinta that the shaman passes on but to use the shaman himself as an image and, in a way tht merges the literal with the metaphoric, climb to heaven on his back./ And if the poor colonist finds he did not really die, the old indian finds he really understands. Their different dreams pressupose a common colonial history pressuposing in so many ways the magic of each other’s otherness in what is, in effect, a joint construction across the colonial divide. the very jointness of these visions tajes us into what could be called the nether regions of racial class war where the struggle with sorcery locks horns with the search for redemption in virulent and fantastic forms. These visions plunge us into an oneiric underworld of colonialism whose passionate imagery makes no less a claim on the colonized than on the colonizer, and no less a claim on the seignoral class than on the poor colonist one. PP330

19.20_We cannot here rest easy with the noton that opposites have been reconciled, contradictions assuaged; our dante has not found his beatrice, nor has the sacred been redeemed by the profane. on the contrary, this poetics of staggering frenzy speaks to the power that conceals the dependence of the exploiter on the exploited...PP333

19.21_To imbue a landscape with moral and even redemptive significance is for us nothing more than a romantic fantasy. but there are occassions when to travel through a landscape is to become empowered by raising its meaning. Carried along a line is space, the traveler travels a story, the line gathering the momentum of the power of fiction, as the arroe of time moves across a motionless mosaic of space out of time, here primeval and divine. So it is today that Indian medicine men of the putomayo, those who stay at home no less than those who wander, arouse the slumbering meaning of space long colonized by the white man and carry him through it to uncover the hidden presence not only of god but of the sorcerer. PP335

20.1_The more shamanic, mystic, and wild the Indian becomes as a way of exploiting the exploiters, the more tightly is the noose of ethnic magic and racism drawn. PP343

20.2_Yet there exists one feature to ponder that does perhaps dirupt this interlocking structure, and that is the two senses of the comic represented in the vision journeys by whites on the one side and by Indians on the other. PP343

20.3_For dante... the comic moves from a foul and horrible beginning to a desirable and joyful end...as with the passion of christ...this is the mode of salvation at work in the visions of jose garcia and manuel...paints the underside of the world in tones melodramatic and mysterious in depth. it is this artistry of the uncanny and of the mysterious side of the mysterious that distinguishes their evocations in story and gesture from those of the indians i know, wherein a rippling teasing sets the world on its oscillating course. This quite different sense of the comic is doubtless bound to colonizing poetics too...[we are} searching for an alternative to the heavenly catharses of colonizing narrativity.PP343

20.4_[In santiago mutumbajoy’s house] Every day or second day a new patient arrived, from nearby or far away, and in discussing his or her problems with the others, no matter how obliquely, so the world of sorcery was empowered, and the shaman’s house became a discursive fount circulating this social knowledge./ The daily coexistence of the patients and the shaman’s family in the shaman’s house also demystifies and humanizes, so to speak, the authority of the shaman. Inlike the situation of a priest or university-trained doctor, ...the situation in the shaman’s house is one where patients and healer acquire a rather intimate knowledge and understanding of each other’s foibles, toilet habits, marital relations, and so forth. by andlarge i think it fair to say that the therapeutic efficacy of the shamanism with which i am acquiented owes as much to the rough-and-tumble of this everyday public intimacy as to the hallucinogenic rites that allow the shaman to weave together the mundane and the extraordinary. PP344

20.5_Santiago talked about his chant. the gun-shot clicks of the tongue were so that the song of yagé would penetrate better. He did not learn this from anybody-he learned it from yagé itself. When you chuma bien, when you get really high, then you fly into the sky and the spirits of yagé teach you all this. They have their faces and limbs painted. they have musical instruments and they dance. Seeing and hearing this, you too can learn the same. They teach it all. These "yagé people" or yagé spirits have beautifully painted tunics, cusmas, like Santiago’s only better, feathers on their heads, feather caps, and shoes that are pure blue. but not even Santiago sees them often. PP348

20.6_[Santiago] couldn’t conceive the notion that envy as a malicious wounding force capable of even killing people did notexist in the places where i came from. years later I began to see how right he was, especially with regard to academics, PP349

1.1_among [Santiago’s] greatest interests and ,indeed, an obsessive concern: namely, shaman-teachers envying a promising pupil, and the way in which envy netween shamans can be channeled by one of them to kill or seriously impair the pupil of the other...Santiago tirelessly reiterated his father’s councel that the only way to become a shaman was by learning directly from taking yagé alone and not by acquiring the pinta of a teacher-shaman.. His father almost lost his life and was forced to forget his yagé knowledge when he got caught in the rivalry of two shaman-teachers, one of whom was his very grandfather, Casemiro, the man who turned into a Tiger in the following tale.../And this turning into a tiger? The shaman heals but he can also kill. magical power is just that doubleness. Even when teaching the shaman may kill the pupil. PP358

1.2_Santiago told me that the shaman turns into a tiger when he wants to be alone. This tiger is ‘pure spirit’ and must not be attacked or killed. On another occassion when i asked why it was the tiger and not some other animal, he replied that it’s because the tiger is the wildest of all animals. ‘Why do shamans want to be the most wild?’ I asked. ‘To ensorcell’ was his answer. later on he said that in this state the shaman thinks like a tiger. In discussing the ritual adornments of the shaman, a slightly different idea was expressed. the crown of feathers, he said, is to promote wisdom and a good yagé night–provided the feathers are cured and hence concecrated– then ‘one knows that with such feathers one will be helped in seeing all those birds, singing and warbling and thus helping you." By contrast, the consecrated necklace of tiger’s teeth helps the shaman to see and mingle with wild beasts and with one’s enemies. PP360

2.1_It is not with conscious ideology but with what I call implicit social knowledge that i am here concerned, with what moves people without their knowing quite why or quite how, with what makes the real real and the normal normal, and above all with what makes ethical distinctions politically powerful. And in stressing the implicitness of this knowledge, which is also part of its power in social life, i think we are directed away from the obvious to what Roland Barthes called obtuse meaning in his analysis of images and their difference from signsWhereas the obvious meaning in an image is taken from a common stock of symbols and is forced upon like a code "held in a complete system of destination," the obtuse meaning seems to barthes..."greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely. I even accept for the obtuse meaning the word’s pejorative connotation: the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or easthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival. [Roland barthes, "The Third meaning," in Image, Music, Text, trans. stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 54-55.] PP366-367

2.2_It is with imagery in the constitution of power/knowledge that the putomayo world I am looking at is much concerned. And it is very much this obtuse and not the obvious meaning of imagery that leap to themind’s eye -as in the sliding stops and starts of the phantasmagoria of the yagé nights, no less than in the social relations embedded in sorcery and in the trances that wander through rulers’ minds as they are being carried over mountains./ I take implicit socialknowledge to be an essentially inarticulable and imageric nondiscursive knowing of the social relationality, and in trying to understand the way that history and memory interact in the constitution of this knowledge, I wish to raise some questions about the way that certain historical events, notably political events of conquest and colonization, become objectified in the contamporary shamanic repertoire as magically empowered imagery capable of causing as well as relieving mosfortune./ The connetion between history and memory here invoked would seem to have little in common with the historicist view of events unfolding progressively over time. On the contrary, we are startled by an image from the past, a magically empowered image flashing forth in a moment of danger-bringing to mind those lines of Walter benjamin written in his moment of dabger facing the conflation of fascism and Stalin: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again...Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger."[Walter benjamin, "Theses on the philosophy of history," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-64] In which event, then, historical materialism bears an unexpected kinship not only with shamanism, in its colonized form, but with history as sorcery. PP367

2.3_History, Memory, and Dialectical Imagery/ In her analysis of the resurfacing of witch mythology in contemporary European feminism, Silvia Bovenschen argues that the resurgence of this image illustrates not so much the historians knowledge of witches and their persecution, but instead a more direct "preconsceptual" relatinship between the image of the witch and the personal experiences of today’s women. She points out that this sort of experiential appropriation of the past differs from the professional historian’s assumed modus operandi in that it incorporates historical and social fantasy sensitive to the underground existence of forbidden images. in turning to such images, people are reflecting on their symbolic potential to fulfill hopes for release from suffering. Related to this is the proposition that the blocking of experience by political oppression and psychic repression can entail a subsequent process whereby the experience becomes animated and conscious by means of myths. I wish to suggest that this process is also involved in the European conquest of ‘primitive’ societies and in the colonial decomposing of their religions. however, the "bits and pieces" that remain of these religions are not testimony to the tenacity of tradition, as the historicist may argue. Instead the are mythic images reflecting and condensing the experiential appropriation of the history of conquest, as that history is seen to form analogies and structural correspondences with the hopes and tribulations of the present. In noting that this sort of appropriation of the past is anarchical and rebellious in its rejection of chronology and historical accuracy, bovenschen stresses its redemptive function, citing Walter benjamin: "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one." [Benjamin, "Theses," 254] PP368

2.4_yet surely this secret agreememnt, despite its messianic promise, is also subject to conflict. indeed benjamin finds in such conflict favored terrain for revolutionary praxis because ...he believes that it is where history figures in memory, in an image that flashes forth unexpectedly in a moment of crisis, that contending political forces engage in battle./ "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger, Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. the danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. the same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a comformism that is about to overpower it. The messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist. only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmply convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enem if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.[Ibid.,255.] PP368

2.5_In provocatively probing into hitherto little-explored zones of political control, benjamin was also urging fellow Marxists to ponder more deeply their own implicit faith in a messianic view of history, to face up to that faith in a conscious fashion, and to consider for their activism the power of social experience, imagery, and mood in constructing and deconstructing political consciousness and the will to act politically. Another way of putting this is to point out that he didn’t place much faith in facts and information in winning arguments, let alone class struggle, and that it was in the less conscious image realm and in the dreamworld of the popular imagination that he saw it necessary to act. "To convince is to conquer without conception," he wrote in "One way Street." F. Gary Smith says that in place of concepts Benjamin presents us with images, "whose conceptual dimensions, however, are as clearly legible as the outline of the ‘sails’ in which the dialectitian captures ‘the wind of world history’ by his manipulation of them."[F. gary Smith, "The Images of Philosophy: Editor’s Introduction," The Philosophical Forum 15 (Fall-Winter 1983-84):iii.] He is thinking of that note of Benjamin’s: "What matters for the dialectician is having the winds of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set sail. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts." [From "Konvolut N" of the Passagen-Werk here entitled "Theoretics of knowledge, Theory of progress" The Philosophical Forum 15 (Fall-Winter 1983-84):21.] PP369

2.6_What benjamin came to advocate was a sort of surrealist technique using what he called ‘dialectical images’–an obscure yet compelling notion better left to example than to exegesis: what his friend Theodore Adorno referred to as ‘picture puzzles which shock by way of their enigmatic form and thereby set thinking in motion." Picture puzzles is of course how freud referred to the manifest content of dream imagery, and if it was to the manifest and not to the latent level that benjamin was drawn, that was because of the way such images defamiliarized the familiar, redeeming the past in the present in a medley of anarchical ploys. Unlike current modes of deconstruction, however, the intent here was to facilitate the construction of paradise from the glimpses provided of alternative futures when otherwise concealed or forgotten connections with the past were revealed by the juxtaposition of images, as in the technique of montage- a technique of great importance to Benjamin. Indeed Stanley mitchell tells us that "Benjamin came to regard montage, i.e., the ability to capture the infinite, sudden, or subterranean connections of dissimilars, as the major constitutive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of technology."[Stanley mitchell, introduction in Walter benjamin, Understanding brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (london, new left Books, 1973),Xii.] The understanding we are led to is that the ‘dialectical image’ is in itself a montage, both capturing the aforementioned connections between dissimilars and also that which is thereby captured. PP369

2.7_What was at stake was the graphicness in marxist method, and with that the whole way not only of representing history but of changing it. As benjamin wrote in another note: "A central problem of historical materialism, which ought finnally to be seen: must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily come at the cost of grphicness? Or: by what route is it possible to attain a heightened graphicness combined with arealization of the mARXIST METHOD? The first stage in this voyage will be to carry the montage principle over into history. That is to build up the large structures out of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural elements. Indeed, to detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the simple, individual moment. To break, then, with historical vulgar naturalism. To grasp the design of history as such. in the structure of commentary." [Benjamin, "Theoretics of knowledge, Theory of progress," 6.

2.8_From examples thAT Benjamin presents of this graphicness in action in the ‘dialectical image’ as in his ‘One Way Street,’ we can see that such images are created by the author but are also already formed, or half-formed, so to speak, latent in the world of the popular imagination, awaiting the fine touch of the dialectical imagicin’s wand –not unlike victor turner’s description of the central African herbalist and curer whose adze, in chopping bark off the chosen tree, arouses the slumbering power of material already there awaiting the copula of the magician’s touch. PP370

2.9_This notion of the activist acting on something ready to be activated is well conveyed where benjamin writes that "opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour oil over it; one applies alittle to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know."/ But how does one know?/ It is with that question that i turn to consider the slumbering power of the imagery of the dead in their redemptive relation to the living in shamanic ritual. PP370

2.10_The Magic of Precolonial Pagans./ Here the whites are the superior caste: they bury their dead in the part of the cementery nearer the church and memorialize them in brick and mortar, while the Indians make do with that section of the cementery farthest from the church, marking their graves with small wooden crosses that time soon turns to dust./ Even further from the church however, in the countryside and monte surroinding the town, and specially in the mountains enclosing it but for the narrow trail uniting the paramos with the hot lowlands, lie, so it is said, the bones of the ‘ancient ones," infieles (pagans, heathens, infidels). who lived here in some vagueky detailed but definetly ‘other’ time prior to european conquest and Christian time, and today are feared as causing illness and even death through "evil wind" (mal aires).

2.11_Now of all the ethnomedical distinctions here, none ould seem as basic and all-encompassing as that between sorcery and evil wind, which in effect are moral and metaphysical principles dividing the causes of misfortune into two great domains. Sorcery...is preeminently the domain of active human agency, the result of the conscious intention of the envious other. Evil wind, however, is not. it "can be said to be an impersonal agent," as haydée Seijas writes in her treatise on the medical system of the Sibundot indians. PP370-371 [Haydeé Seijas, "The medical System of the Sibundoy Indians of Colombia," unpublished PH.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1969, p.124]

2.12_While sorcery is personal ad moral and inheres in the constantly generated inequality and envy of social ties, evil wind by contrast is amoral and asocial, preponderantly affecting through fright and shock the very young, i.e., those who are not held to be morally or socially responsible. As its name suggests, evil wind appears like a force of nature, emanating beyond the tortured confines of the envious social relTIONS OF THE LIVING. PP371

2.13_If we inq uire further into its origin...we may hear of its links to the dead, especially if the misfortune seemed to stike at the time of la mala hora, the ‘evil hour’-the time or times of the day that nobody is quite sure about or in agreement about with anybody else, when the dead wander in the streets and public spACES to haunt the living. PP371

2.14_Some dead seem more dangerous than others, and the evil wind associated with them may kill. Such are those who according to Catholic doctrine are damned–an indictment that claims those whose deaths offend doctrinal purity, such as those who died in accidents without the sacraments of confession and Absolution, suicides and so forth, as well as those whose lives, and no the circumstances of their deaths offended christian doctrine, condemning them to thedomain of the devil himself. PP371

2.15_Society itself dies a little with each individual’s death, suggested Robert Hertz in his now classic essay, "The Collective Representation of Death," published in 1907: "Thus when a man dies, society loses in him much more than a unit," he wrote, "it is stricken in the faith it has in itself." [Robert hertz, "The Collective Representations of Death," in Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960), 78] He saw funeral rites and mouring as society’s way of restoring life and intengrity to the social bond itself, to what we might call the very principle of being social and being constituted by the collectivity. /Nevertheless, Hertz noted, there were certain deaths that society could not contain: "Their unquiet and spiteful souls roam the earth forever" he wrote in reference to thos epeople who died a violent death or by an accident, women who died at childbirth, and deaths due to drowning, lightning, or suicide. the normal funeral rites are suspended for such deaths, he observed, and in scanning the customssurrounding death in many very different societies it seemed to him what he called the "intermediary period" between death and the final abode of the soul (similar to what I call the space of death) is a period that "extends indefenitely for these victims of a special malediction and that their death has no end."/It is as if, he speculated, these deaths were endowed with a sacred character of such strength that no rite will ever be able to efface them. As to the nature of this sacred chARACTER, HE WAS BOTH OBSCURE AND UNSURE. It seemed to him that its strength lay in the "sinister way" these people were torn from society and that this was engraved in an ineradicable image of the death itself"as he was when death struck him down, which impresses itself most deeply on the memory of the living. This image, because of its uniqueness and emotional content, can never be completely erased."[Ibid. 86.] PP371-372

2.16_ia it possible that, as with the image so firmly impressed on memory of an individual struck down by violence, accident, drowning, childbirth, or suicide, so the ghost or evil winds of a whole society, struck down by Spanish conquest, could exist as unquiet, spiteful souls roaming the earth forever? Indeed, we might be told in the Sibundoy valley that evil wind issues forth not jut from the dead, whether condemned or not, but quite specifically from the dead pagans of preconquest times –as if dthose ‘other’ times, prior to the violent arrival and colonization by the Spanish, constitute an entire epoch of damnation in not so much a spatial as a temporal hell located in a fermenting, rotting, organic, underground of time. "Wkhere does evil wind come from?" echoed an indian shaman friend of mine who lives and works in the town of Sibundoy, "from the streams that flow with movements of the air, clouds all joined together like strands making a skein of wool, from the spirits of the infieles, the ancient people that lurk in the earth in certain speciaL PLACES AROUND HERE THAT CHRISTIANS CANNOT OR SHOULD NOT enter" Or, on another occassion: "Evil wind is caused by the bones of these infieles buried around us in the countryside. In those times there were no churches with graveyards. As the corpses and bones pulverize in the earth, so heat and vapors ascend, as evil wind, to harm people, susceptible people with weak blood. PP372

2.17_As we listen to this it surely dawns on us that there ARE GRAVE DIFFICULTIES IN THINKING OF THE EVIL OF EVIL WIND AS IMPERSONAL AND ASOCIAL IN ORIGIN. NOR IS ITS WIND STRICTLY PHYSICAL. ON THE CONTRARY, THESE PRECONQUEST PAGAN DEAD SEEM TO ACT AS "DIALECTICAL IMAGES," DECONSTRUCTING THE CONSCIOUS CATEGORIES OF THE LIVING. LISTEN, AGAIN, TO THE PICTURES EVOKED BY THESE EVIL WINDS:...weare no invited to entertain as in carnival and in primary-process thinking a metamorphosizing network of associations intertwined with a variety of coexisting possibilities. e.g.: •That these pagan dead mediate the social relations of the living with nature’s elements, with earth, wind, and wATER, AND BEYOND THAT./•THAT THESE DEAD MEDIATE THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF THE LIVING WITH PERCEIVED RELATIONS IN NATURE, with anature seen relationally as a system of structure of relationships, primarily of contrasts –not merely earth, wind and water, but with dialectically opposed contrasts of mountain and lowland forest, highland and lowland, until we exhaust the very categorical system on which this mediation is based, namely, that dividing society from nature, with the pagan preconquest dead as its intemediaries, and entertain the succeeding semantic horizon./ •That these preconquest pagan dead come back to make a mockery of the distinction between sorcery and evil wind; that these categories themselves change once the whiff of death and heresy passes through them and that nature is not only a biological entity, but is also something whose distinctions are used by the mythic imagination to think with–so that this nature is also enchanted and echanting landscape in which the history of the conquest itself acquires the role of the sorceerer. /Evil wind can thus seem like a type of sorcery employed by history to bewitch the living and created by the sort of agreement obsessively bewitching Benjamin too; thaT "SECRET AGREEMENT" (OF REDEMPTION) BINDING PAST GENERATIONS TO THIS ONE. PP373

2.18_THE SPACE OF DEATH/ In pondering the implications of this concept–that the history of conquest can itself acquire the character of the sorcere- we must not lose sight of the fact that the space of death is of necessity a zone of colonization and also a colonizing zone. just one example of this, inviting inquiry and speculation into one of the great unwritten histories of imperialism, is the way that the "ancient people" the infieles or pagans of that other (preconquest, pre-European) time, have been enfolded and iconocized into the bowels of the christian Cosmos as Antichrist figures-so that they live on forever rustling the leaves of memory in the colonially constructed space of death. it is here where the great signifiers of death and the underworld, drawn from Spanish, indigenous new World, and West African sources, blended in harmony and in conflict in the process of conquest and formation of the culture of conquest. PP373-374

2.19_The colonized space of death has a colonizing function, maintainig the hegemony or cultural stability of norms and desires that facilitate the way the rulers rule the ruled in the land of the living. yet the space of death is notoriously conflict-ridden and contradictory; a priviledged domain of metamorphosis, the space par-excellence of uncertainty and terror to stun permanently, yet also revive and empower with new life.. In Western tradition we are well aware of how death and life, and evil and salvation are therein conflated. So in Northwest Amazonian indigenous tradition the space of death is a priviledged zone of transformation and metamorphosis. Only here, of course, the terms of order are quite different. PP374

2.20_And with what tenacity the dead call the living to join them in the space of death! ...because the patient [suffering from evil wind] was going to the other world (that of the dead) ...she or he has to be called back./Just as the winds from the dead (...therefore of the past) are to be reversed by the curer in an elegant contrapuntal movement drawing the patient back to the society of the living, so it would seem that the magnetically attractive power of the pagan has to be counterposed-as in the use of quintessentially christian signs accompanying the [curing] song...sprinkling of holy water...PP374

2.21_For it is not history understood as the passage of time that here acquires the character of the sorcerer, but history as an opposition in meaning that the passage of time marks and about which the victors and the vanquished of history array their cosmos. herein lies the magical attraction of the evil wind of history, in the tension between the prehistory of the new World pagan and the succeeding history of class and racial struggle between the conquering Christians and those whom, because of the success of their conquest, they were able to name in memory of a geographic fantasy as "Indians."/ It is from this dualism as embedded in figures of savagery and in memories of figures of savagery that magical power is drawn; from the ancient people, the pagans of preconquest times fermenting in the earth, to the aucas, Huitotos, and other fantastic pagans and chuncho-like beings supposedly living in the lowland forests today. PP374

2.22_Savage Memories/ I say memories of figures of savagery advisedly, because not only is it as memory that the ancient ones, the preconquest pagans, evoke the evil winds, but this sort of memory image played an important role in the politics and theory of the conquest itself –in the intertwining of the memories of the victors with those of the vanquished. PP375

2.23_[Oviedo on Hispañiola in the chapter entitled "Images of the Devil Possessed by the Indians...and the Form by Which They Retain in Memory the Things They Desire to Be Remembered by Their Descendants and Their People,"..."In this island, as far as I can ake out, it is their singing that is their book or memorial, which from person to person remains, from parents to children, and from those in the present to those to come...And I have found in this generation nothing more anciently painted and sculpted, or more revered, than the abominable and wicked figure of the Demon, painted and sculpted in various ways with many heads and tails, deformed and monstruous, with ferocious teeth..."/ ...the figures of the cemi, "which is the same as what we call the devil" Oviedo notes, and they are attended upon by special men who are diviners, great herbalists and healers. The faculty of divination is given to these men, insists Oviedo, by the cemis , and this art is of necessity blended with medicine and magic because medicine is a most saintly and excellent thing. With the hopes and promises it raises it becomes tied to the force of religion. That is why, in our parts of the Indies, he declares (with what could, with equal force, be applied to the montaña region of the Andes, too), the principal healers are also priests and diviners and it is they who conduct the idolatrous and diabolical ceremonies. PP375

2.24_In this ceremonies the form of singing, together with dancing and drumming, is the effigy of the accord of things past [that] the Indians wish to be communicated to children and adults so that they will be well known and fixedly sculpted in memory." PP376

2.25_...It is these sorceres who stimulate uprisings against the Spanish– a charge reiterated time and again by the missionaries...who at times associated these shaman-inspired rebellions with the holding of mortuary rites and the drinking of the ashes of the dead. /Bearin in mind this association...iy=t is illuminating to hear the bishop further expound on the intertwining of memory and the flesh in the moral constitution of the Indian’s soul. "It is normal for the Indians in their pagan state to be idolatrous and superstitious. utilizing his malign astuteness, it was easy for the devil to set up his tyrannical empire among them, for they are people brutish and ignorant, whom it is easy to deceive And thus when the Spanish first came to this land, they found that these barbarians since time imemorial had been worshipping the devil and other creatures through various superstitions and abominable rites, solicited by the devil and his ministers, making them believe in an infinite number of errors./ This evil seed planted such deep roots in the Indians that it appeared to become their very flesh and blood so that their descendants acquired the same being as their parents, inherited in their very blood and stamped in their souls. Hence today although they have had preachers, teachers, and priests, for 135 years trying to erase their errors, they have not been able to erase them from their hearts. [Alonso de la Peña Montenegro (Obispo del Obispado de San Francisco de Quito), Itinerario para párocos de indios (Madrid, Oficina de padre marin, 1771[first published 1668]), 185] PP376

2.26_What seems crucial about this ancient pact with the devil is not just that it is inherited in the Indian’s blood (and with their mother’s milk), but that the memory of the pact is also neessary to its transmission as a reality into the future. hence the mnemonics of that pact –anything that keeps it alive in memorymust be extirpated.PP376

2.27_"They venerate their memories constantly with great love," wrote the bishop in connection with the way the Indians treasure their ancestors in "the hidden depths of their hearts," and he repeatedly emphasizes the need to prohibit Indian dances and songs because "in these they have the memory of idolatry and sorcery." It is also necessary to destroy the drums, deer heads, antaras, and feathers, because these are the instruments of their evil and bring on the memory of paganism. PP377

2.29_Primer Tribu. When he sings into the yagé just prior to our drinking it, my ...shaman friend, Don Pedro, frequently appeals to the primer tribu or first tribe. With this he invokes two streams of tradition, the ancient people and the sacha gente, the people of the forested lowlands. The two streams are blended into one; the ancient with the savage, the lowlands with the beginning of time. From this stream comes power to divine and to heal. PP377

2.30_Yagé only grows in the lowlands and it too is connected by Don pedro...with the ancient pagans of long ago. "They lived in the monte and there they wondered," he told me, "planting remedies, including yagé. You go there today and you hear someone singing. There is singing there. All the visions are there, singing. Singing his song, the song of yagé, no? And then you exclaim to yourself, ‘there wanders a shaman’. PP378

2.31_Huitotos./ My shaman friend explained to me: "What this word "Huitoto" means is that I have to call on the people from below, for they are strong and have the strong remedy of yagé. But I also have to call on the masters from up here, to defend myself. Those of below are hot, very hot, and feel nothing, while those from here, from above, are also strong and have suffered cold, cold on the plateaus. Thus you have to make a compact with the ones above and those below./ We are civilized. We have clothes andhousing. We eat salt and we know about God andthe Devil. But the Huitotos don’t know, and they are with the devil, just as they are not Christians. They are like dogs. They have no soul. But sensibility! that they have! like animals. And as animals they can see the invisible. For instance a bad spirit comes here. We don’t see it, but the devil.....theat is to say, the dog, the dog sees. "PP378

2.32_Tied to the devil as they are, the Huitotos have no moral sensibility. Like animals they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. But like animals they are powerful and have sensibility and knowledge possessed by no human./ The relationship between the highland shaman and the Huitotos, and scored in the curing song, is lika that of a master to a well trained dog...it is the highland shaman’s function to clean the eyes of these lowlanders and in so doing appropriate their vision and sensibility, fusing it with the aid of the lowlanders yagé to the power and reason of the Christian civilization that not only defines but imputes such awesome power to otherwise inferior savages. PP379

2.33_From Sign to Image: The Obvious and the Obtuse and the tripping Up of the Disorder of Power in Its Own Disorderliness./ [referring to Claude levi=Strauss explanation of Cuna Shaman’s curing song]...do we not dicover this very analysis to be a magical rite too-albeit one adorned in the garb of science?...The controlling figure here is that of the anthropologist or critic ordering menaing into the disordered, passive, and forever female vehicle of the text–so as to ‘permit’ the release of new meaning rescued from the blockage of disorder. PP390

2.34_But what would happen if instead of this we allow the old meaning to remain in the disorder, first of the ritual, and second of the history of the wider society of which it is a part? My experience with putomayo shamans suggests that this is what they do, and that the magical power of an image like the huitoto lies in its insistently questioning and ndermining the search for order. To the extent that the Huitoto image in the highland shaman’s song might embody a narrative of redemption from colonial terror, it functions as an allegory tripping up the disorder of misfortune in its very disorderliness–bringing to mind the techniques implied in benjamin’s "dialectical images" as well as these shamanic rituals’ artistry with montage, and laughter. So much laughter. "It belongs to the family of pun" wrote barthes with reference to the obtuse meaning of images."It is on the side of carnival." PP390

2.35_Chptr 25. Envy And Implicit Social Knowkedge

2.36_Chptr 26. The Whirlpool

2.37_ Cptr 27. Montage