Uzendoski, Michael A.

& Edith Felicia

Calapucha-Tapuy
2012 The Ecology of the Spoken Word:
Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism
among the Napo Runa. Urbana, IL : University
of Illinois Press.
Notes: xiv, 245 pages : ill. ; ISBN 9780252036569

Reviewed 14 May 2012 by:

Jack David Eller <david.eller@ccd.edu>
Community College of Denver
Medium:

Written Literature

Subject
Quechua mythology - Napo River Valley
Keywords: (Ecuador and Peru)
Quechua Indians - Napo River Valley
(Ecuador and Peru) - Songs and music
Storytelling - Napo River Valley (Ecuador
and Peru)
Shamanism - Napo River Valley (Ecuador
and Peru)

ABSTRACT: Translations and discussions of

Napo Runa traditional and modern story and song
illustrate the relationship between word, gesture,
context, and cosmology, all of which do more than
convey semantic meaning but establish and
maintain relationships and accomplish
transformations.

I was in the middle of teaching my Anthropology

of Religion course when The Ecology of the
Spoken Word arrived. I had been trying to show
students how anthropology emphasizes the
performative qualities, the cultural embeddedness
and embodiedness, and the efficacy of ritual
including verbal ritualand I was incredibly excited
to share this book with the students. Not since
Dennis Tedlocks Finding the Center, published
forty years ago, have I seen such an attempt to
render the spoken and enacted quality of oral
literature, and Uzendoskis book enjoys the added
advantage of being able to refer to online
recordings and images of the material (see
http://spokenwordecology.com/).

Via these multimedia resources, Uzendoskis goal

is to give a theoretical and experiential translation
of Napo Runa mythology and music which entails
translating myths and songs so that readers can
get a better appreciation for the beauty and
complexity of Amazonian Quichua poetic
expressions (p. 1). But as the author well knows,
wordsare only a small part of a total storytelling
reality (p. 2), and finally the technologyand the
theoryare catching up with the traditional
practice.
After a short but helpful introduction in which he
critiques the conventional treatment of oral
literature, citing Ruth Finnegans objection that
Western observers and translators have used their
own cultures assumptions about communication
(and specifically language) to construct a
hegemonic complex that explains away much of
the richness of other expressive systems as
inferior (p. 8), Uzendoski presents one of his most
important conceptssomatic poetry. The first
chapter explores this concept more deeply, defined
as multimodal art created by listening, feeling,
smelling, seeing, and tasting of natural
subjectivities, not just those emanating from
human speech or from the human mind (p. 23).
This is especially salient in the Amazonian context
because various scholars, most prominently
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), have argued
that such cultures exhibit a kind of perspectivism
in which many or all living things have their own
human-like perspectives or minds and speak with
their own voices. In fact, Carlos Londono Sulkin
(2005) has pushed the idea further, suggesting
that for the Muinane people immoral behavior in
humans is actually a non-human (animal or plant)
voice speaking in and through a human being. In
shortand no doubt not only for Amazonian
societiesbodies and places matter for
understanding speech and action.
This first chapter also introduces the shamanic use
of narratives such as vapor poetry, related to
kushnirina or a medicinal vapor sweat bath
designed to cure illness, cleanse the body, and
give strength (p. 25). As anthropologists have
come to understand, shamanic (and other
symbolic) cures tend to involve transfers of power
and transformations of the patients mind and
body; in this case, the bath ritual allows the healer
to transfer the power of the plants into the body of
the patient (p. 28). The words and the non-verbal
elements of somatic poetry then enable the

participants to experience a samay

interconnectedness to the primordial forces,
subjectivities, and myriad detailed and subtle
qualities of placea landscape inscribed with and
defined by unseen power (p. 33).
Most of the subsequent chapters are translations
and explications of particular stories, for instance
the tale of the great flood in chapter two. Often we
get more than one version of the narrative and,
more importantly, various visual devices to convey
something of the spoken quality, such as bolded
letters and even marginal drawings of facial and
manual gestures employed by the speaker.
Chapter three covers the stories of Iluku (a
nocturnal bird associated with the moon), the origin
of the sun, and an axis mundi that establishes the
relatedness among birds, people, rocks, rivers,
the wind, the landscape, and various other
presences [which] provides people with a deep
emotional and social attachment to the ecological
world around them (p. 59).
The fourth chapter deals with womens songs that
again display relationality and transformation,
including feminine shape-shifting relations
between birds and women, fish and women, and
similar mimetic transformations in history (p. 79).
The fifth chapter narrates the tale of The Twins
and the Jaguar, the central theme of which is
becoming a jaguar (p. 101). Chapters six and
seven continue the exposition of the twins or
Cuillurguna, Napo Quichua culture heroes and
mythological ancestors of all living people (p. 135)
and, more crucially, creative and artful world
makers (p. 136). The seventh chapter in particular
tells the final episode of the twins cycle (p. 157)
in which they ascend into the sky and relates that
story to some local petroglyphs.
Interestingly, the final chapter turns to
contemporary Amazonian music, especially Runa
Paju performances that feature a montage of
traditional Quichua symbols and meanings
articulated through the modernistic technologies of
vocal and instrumental amplification (p. 172). In
this practice, many dichotomies break down, such
as traditional and modern or Quichua and Spanish,
although it still evinces many qualities of premodern narrative and song. For instance, the lyrics
of Runa Paju songs often invoke the ways of
speaking of the elders; Runa Paju, in other words,
is a new tradition that is creatively linked to the
traditions of the past (p. 183). Even more, the

songs convey the moving and dynamic imagery of

reversal and transformation (p. 185) found in
traditional oral literature. In the end, Uzendoski
calls this cosmological communitas, a ritual
transformation where cosmology is experienced
collectively as a journey, and the cosmological
journeying elicited through Quichua music
displaces the master narratives of the nation-state
and modernity (p. 193).
The Ecology of the Spoken Word is a fascinating
and successful study of an oral tradition, with
implications far beyond the Amazonian context.
The translations and mythologies included in the
book will be of special interest to scholars of
Amazonian religion, but wider audiences should
enjoy and benefit from the idea of somatic poetry
and of the multimodal performance and relational
efficacy of song and story. It is finally clear that the
meaning of a myth or song cannot be reduced to
its semantics or to its grammar. The verbal
dimension of a narrative performance is only one
aspect of a fuller mental, emotional, and visceral
experience.
Reference
Londona Sulkin, Carlos D. 2005 Inhuman Beings:
Morality and Perspectivism among Muinane
People (Colombian Amazon). Ethnos 70 (1): 7-30.
Tedlock, Dennis 1972 Finding the Center:
Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians New York:
TheDial Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998 Cosmological
Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 4 (3): 46988.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association
recommends the following style:
Eller, Jack David
2012 Review of The Ecology of the Spoken
Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism
among the Napo Runa. Anthropology Review
Database May 14, 2012.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?
keycode=5127, accessed August 30, 2012.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Anthropology Review Database

(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)