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Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers: Intersubjective

Cosmos and Personhood
ROBIN M. WRIGHT
University of Florida
Department of Religion
P.O. 117410
107C Anderson Hall
Gainesville, FL 32611

SUMMARY This article presents an outline of a complex and dense “nexus” of

meanings inherent to religious power and knowledge in the traditions of the Baniwa, an
Arawak-speaking indigenous people of the Northwest Amazon. It demonstrates how
Baniwa cosmology can be understood through the notion of intersubjectivity in which
the deities and spirits, the religious specialists, and sacred instruments form an inte-
grated whole. “Matter” and “Spirit” combine and separate in a myriad of ways in
Baniwa cosmogony, cosmology, ontology, and eschatology. “Spirit” inhabits all forms,
while ancestral “power and knowledge” are transmitted across generations through the
living “owners” (or, “keepers”) and “masters” of religious traditions. The vehicles of
meaning through which the universe came into being and is reproduced for all times, or
can be destroyed by enemy outsiders are homologous in their material forms (bones,
elongated tubes, flutes). These forms are infused with powerful, nonmaterial lifeforces
(fluids, such as blood, saliva; breath) of the deities and hence of the origins of the cosmos.
Ancestral knowledge and power together are critical to creating, reproducing, or
destroying the universe; they are embodied and “emplaced” throughout the Baniwa
sacred geography, as sources of life that are constantly circulating in fluid forms
throughout the cosmos, renewed through ceremonial specialists and their sacred instru-
ments. The notion of cosmic intersubjectivity allows us to understand how the whole
universe is considered to be a living being, materialized through a variety of sacred
instruments. [cosmology, Northwest Amazon, lifeforce, intersubjectivity,
shamanisms]

This article discusses the interrelations among the several kinds of sacred
“knowledge and power” kept by shamanic and ceremonial specialists. Each
kind of “knowledge and power” is featured in sacred narratives that relate how
the ritual knowledge and power were acquired in the primordial world and
transmitted in material form for posterity. When these narratives are considered
altogether, the interconnections among various kinds of “knowledge and
power” become clear in the contours of a living Baniwa cosmos for which the
shamanic and ceremonial specialists serve as guardians and keepers.
Each kind of knowledge and power is represented through material “instru-
ments” that can be shown to be homologous in form (the shamans’ snuff-bone,
the sacred flutes and trumpets, the sorcerers’ bone container of poison, the
chanters’ cigars of tobacco, sacred ceramic bowls containing sacred pepper, the

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp 156–176, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.
© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01126.x.
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 157

jaguar-tooth necklace belonging only to the jaguar shamans, and dancers’ whips
that are used in initiation rites). All combine fixed, material forms and fluid,
nonmaterial powers in such a way that sacred knowledge and power can be
transmitted across generations. The deities and demiurges of the Baniwa pan-
theon themselves embody these distinct kinds of knowledge and power in
Baniwa religiosity through their various attributes, actions, and qualities.
This article in short seeks to explore Baniwa shamans’ understanding of
knowledge and power that connects distinct levels of reality, propitiates trans-
formational experiences and creative thought, and sees the relations among
divinity, cosmology, and society as one of unity in multiplicity. Knowledge and
Power are “embodied” and “emplaced” (Vasquez 2009) in the Baniwa universe
replicating the “body,” “soul,” and “knowledge” of the principal divinities.
Relationality then refers to intersubjectivity not only between persons but also
among what nonindigenous peoples see as “objects.”
The ideas developed in this article have benefited enormously from the
discussions published in an issue on “Amerindian Modes of Knowledge,”
edited by Fernando Santos-Granero and George Mentore, in Tipiti, Journal of the
SALSA (2006), as well as the “Flow and Fixity: the Question of Intersubjectivity
in Amazonia” symposium, organized by George and Laura Mentore, at the
American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana,
November 17–21, 2010. The basic idea of the 2006 volume was to explore the
different “connections between mind, body, soul, and emotion” that typify
non-Western theories of knowledge (Santos-Granero and Mentore 2006:3).
Indigenous knowledge is grounded in “ontological and metaphysical assump-
tions about the world” that differ from “Western,” Aristotelian-based theories
of knowledge.
One important way these different assumptions about the world can clearly
be demonstrated is in what I am calling the Baniwa “nexus of religious knowl-
edge and power.” By this, I am referring to the cohesive relations among
seemingly distinct kinds of “knowledge and power” represented by images,
actions, and material forms.
This article is part of a much more extensive discussion in my upcoming
book, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans (in press). The book is the fourth I have
written or organized together with Baniwa elders (1998, 2005; with Wright et al.
1999 being a collection of sacred narratives organized by the anthropologist and
four or five Baniwa shamans) and translators that, altogether, provide a full
picture of their complex religious traditions and perspectives on history. The
result of three decades of learning from knowledgeable elders and specialists,
the most recent book presents an in-depth ethnography of Baniwa cosmology,
focusing on the question of transmission and continuity of shamanic knowl-
edge and power. It also documents “sacred geography,” or what I call the
Baniwa “mythscape,” that consists of the creation narratives remembered in
petrified inscriptions left by the first ancestors so that future generations could
not only understand but more importantly, live by ancestral ways. Many of
these “sacred sites” are considered to be living sources of cosmic power that the
spirits and deities still inhabit and imbue with their presence.
The Baniwa shamans represent the cosmos in their drawings as an ordered
and interconnected series of “worlds” (kuma) arranged in such a way that they
158 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

can be seen to replicate the spiritual forms of knowledge and power of the
specialists, with a suggestion of hierarchy among them (an idea first put forth
in Wright 1992a, 1992b). The deeper I have probed into the construction of the
cosmos in primordial times, the more certain I am that the coming-into-being of
the universe, remembered in the stories, is a fractal process that preserves at
every level the nexus of religious power and knowledge experienced and lived
in Baniwa society and culture. Warrior-shamans, priestly chanters, sorcerers,
dance-leaders, spirits of the dead, and shamanic spirit-auxiliaries altogether
form the pantheon that is the model of and for intersubjectivity that shapes
living experience.
One of the predominant sacred places in the Baniwa mythscape is the cosmic
“center” understood to be a connecting spiritual tube, called the “celestial
umbilical cord,” that links the primordial and eternal past in the “Other World”
with “This World” of the present, and the Underworld (“place of our bones”)
that connects the future with the primordial past in a huge circuit of water (from
the underworld river to the rains that fall from the heavens). The universe can
also be seen as a gigantic tree with innumerable concentric rings, forming a
relatively “fixed” material shape. The lifeforces that constantly transit among
the cosmic layers, are all “fluid” like rivers, sap, rains, life-giving blood, or saliva
that propitiate transformations and passages across spatial and temporal
boundaries by those who have been instructed in shamanic knowledge and
powers. The fixed forms used by human agents as sacred instruments (musical,
shamanic) resonate in their meanings with the material shapes and spiritual
forms of the cosmos. This is confirmed in the exegeses of the elders, the appear-
ance of the sacred instruments in narratives, and in other expressions of pri-
mordial art (the petroglyphs found throughout the mythscape). Material forms
are “animated” with the same lifeforces that flow throughout the universe. The
notion of intersubjectivity, then, implies spirit-imbued material forms that
become “subjects” which communicate and relate to other subjects on the same
or distinct layers of the cosmos (cf. Santos-Granero 2009).
I beg the reader’s patience if the following description seems dense, yet, the
end result is one of an integral wholeness shaping the magnificently artful way
in which, the Baniwa believe, their creator “saw the world come into being.”
Through this seamless whole, intersubjectivity takes on its particular expres-
siveness in multiple ways and layers. As I shall show, the cosmos is envisioned
as an interrelated set of primordial subjects, whose qualities, powers, and
attributes are transmitted by religious specialists to living subjects (humans,
nonhumans, elements) of “This World.” Seen this way, intersubjectivity refers to
the cosmos as collective, spiritualized self and the collective “world” (all
animate beings) is the singular, living cosmos.
My argument develops first, by establishing the “nexus” of religious power
and knowledge among the “specialists”; second, by elaborating on the primor-
dial “knowledge and powers” of the principal deities of the pantheon; and
third, by demonstrating the connections between “subjects” via the modality of
homologous and meaningful, material forms. During the elaboration of these
points, the links among between cosmos, personhood (self), and sacred instru-
ments in the contexts of rituals are shown to be, in themselves, forms of living
intersubjectivity. “Cultural transmission” is a form of continuously replicating
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 159

the primordial personhood of the cosmos in the cosmic consciousness of the

living person.
First, however, a brief ethnography of the Baniwa people and their
neighbors.

Baniwa Society and History

It is calculated that there are over 100 villages of the Arawakan-speaking
Baniwa and Kuripako, with a total population of 4,000 in northwestern Brazil;
on the Colombian side of the border, their population is approximately 6,000,
most of whom are Kuripako; and in Venezeula, the Baniwa and Kuripako (or
“Wakuenai”) have a population of approximately 1,200 (see Figure 1).
All of the societies in this region are patrilineal and patrilocal. The Baniwa say
that there are three main phratries—the Hohodene of the Aiary River, the
Walipere-dakenai of the lower Aiary and most of the middle to lower Içana
River, and the Dzauinai on the middle Içana. Beyond the ring of these central
groups, there are several other small sibs, fragments of other phratries, living in
villages further up the Içana.
Each of the principal phratries consists of anywhere between five and 10 sibs,
ranked according to a birth order of primordial ancestral siblings who emerged
from the earth in the beginning of time at the place called Hipana, which is the

Figure 1.
Northwest Amazon
(showing the most important of the sacred sites in Baniwa “mythscape”).
160 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

major river rapids of creation for the Baniwa and for many other northern
Arawakan-speaking peoples.
Hipana is a place of great potency because many world-changing events took
place there. According to the sacred narratives, the universe was born there, and
everything focuses around that place as the center of the world. The very place
is full of signs of the ancestors, as I shall relate.
Among the Hohodene, the phratry with whom I have done most of my
fieldwork since 1976, there are five sibs ranked according to the birth order of
ancestral agnatic siblings: the firstborn is the “maku” or “servants’ ” sib; the
second born is the “chiefs” sib; the third born is the “warriors;” and the two
others are simply designated as “younger brothers.” This ethnomodel of phrat-
ric creation is one version of a story that varies almost with every narrator: there
is no strong consensus on overall hierarchy.1 There is a consensus, though, that
the Hohodene and the Walipere-Dakenai are two of the three most important
“Baniwa” phratries (the third being the Dzauinai). The Hohodene declare that
their “maku” are called the Aini-dakenai (Wasp-grandchildren) and Hipatanene
(“children of the foam of the waterfalls”). The Walipere-dakenai, Pleiades
Grandchildren, or “descendants of the Pleiades,” by contrast, listed upward of
nine sibs in their phratry, with themselves at the “head” of the Pleiades con-
stellation (Walipere), and the others arranged according to the order of the stars
in the constellation.
All along the Içana River, from the headwaters down to about Tunui Rapids,
the villages are predominantly evangelical Christians; a large part of the lower
Aiary is also mostly evangelical villages. As I have discussed in previous books
(1998, 2005), evangelical Christianity was introduced in the 1950s, and it quickly
turned into a mass conversion movement. It is believed that 80 percent of the
Baniwa population today is crente, or “believers,” baptized into the evangelical
church. This may be so, considering the introduction of other Protestant
churches such as the Presbyterians and the Baptists, along with evangelical and
Pentecostal churches.
In the early years of the conversion movement (the 1950s), there was bitter
fighting between the crentes and the “traditionals”—the latter consisting
mainly of the upper Aiary River villages, especially the two communities
of Uapui Rapids and Ukuki Rapids. Uapui is a village built on the banks of
the Aiary at the location of Hipana Rapids. Ukuki was built in the late
1970s at the Rapids of the same name on the Uaraná tributary of the upper
Aiary.
For a long time Uapui was a village of shamans—five when I lived there in
the 1970s. Today, shamanism is practically focused only in Mandu’s village. In
2009, the community was awarded funds from the Foundation for Shamanic
Studies, which enabled Mandu’s son and daughter to construct a “Shamans’
House of Power and Knowledge,” Marikaidapana, a large longhouse for the
purpose of instructing apprentices.2Around the same time, the people of
Ukuki, who have always been very traditional in their ways of living together,
constructed a new longhouse, Nakuliakarudapani, (House of Adorning) which
was basically intended to be a ritual dance house, for the celebration of fes-
tivals held periodically with other villages, and the all-important rites of ini-
tiation, Kwaipan.
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 161

Maliiri, Mandero, Mati, Kalidzamai

The principal Baniwa specialists in shamanic and ceremonial knowledge and
power are said to be “owners” or “keepers” (iminali), and “masters of” (thayri)
specific kinds of knowledge accompanied by certain powers. Taken as a whole,
the different shamanic and ritual “specializations” complement each other,
forming a “nexus of (religious) power and knowledge.” One body of knowl-
edge and power complements another, through (1) oppositional, confronta-
tional relations between the healing shaman who restores health, and the
assault sorcerer who destroys it; (2) particularistic relations to clientele that the
shamans have, versus the universalistic extension of knowledge and power to
communities over a wide geographical area that the priestly chanters exercise;
and (3) the production of harmonious, “egalitarian” conviviality through dance
festivals, essential to well-being and happiness, which celebrate ties of reciproc-
ity, among communities of the same or affinal phratries. The latter complements
the ceremonial reproduction of hierarchical relations during rites of passage, in
which the dance leader’s ritual knowledge and power complements the priestly
chanters’ tasks of reproducing new generations within the same phratry. All of
the ceremonial roles attributed to sibs of a phratry should be represented in
these rites.
There are four principal “owners” of “power and knowledge.”
First, the pajés (a lingua geral, the old trade language of the region, term for
shaman, maliri in Baniwa; see Figure 2), who heal and protect members of their
communities, the highest grade of which is the “true pajé” or “jaguar-shaman”
(Dzato Dzauika, “Snuff Jaguar”). In this article, I use the word pajé with greater

Figure 2.
Maliiri reach upward to the zenith of the sky where the center of the
“Other World” is located, to capture and bring the sickness down to earth
to cure.
162 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

frequency than the word “shaman,” except for the term dzaui malinyai, “jaguar-
shaman-spirit-others” referring to powerful shamanic spirits of the “Other
World.”
The Baniwa use the term malikai to refer to “the pajé’s knowledge and
power,” meaning that the pajé’s art does not consist of simply “knowing”
(ianheke) but, rather, it is knowledge that has remedial, protective, and trans-
formative power inherent to it. One can know a myth, but unless one knows the
orations or chants that go along with the story, then one cannot exercise the
“power” of the “knowledge” embodied in the myth to, for example, cure a
sickness that comes into being as a result of what occurs in the story.
Second, the sorcerers (manhene iminali, poison-owner) attack to destroy their
victims, individuals or entire families, by manipulating vegetal poison, or
harming women’s reproductive systems so that they will not have healthy
children, if they have any at all (hiwiathi iminali, owners of assault sorcery
chants). These assault sorcerers are also known as matís, a lingua geral term, and
dañeros, “harm doers,” a Spanish term. From the sorcerers’ points of view, their
actions are justified because they are redressing what they perceive to be an
imbalance of power or a personal loss, which they attribute to sorcery sent by
pajés or other enemies. Although any person can put sorcery on another, the
true sorcerer is—like the shaman—an Other being who can even work at a
distance to avenge a loss.
There are also the powerful sorcerers north of the Baniwa who can be paid to
avenge at a distance using the “filth” (fingernails, hair) of the deceased. There is
a firm belief in these long-distance sorcerers, although today, another danger
comes from relatively new kinds of sorcery in the urban areas of the Northwest
Amazon, such as macumba, introduced by Afro-Brazilian migrants in the 1980s.
The popular Catholicism of the caboclo mestiços from the northeast and other
areas of Amazonia adds to the configurations of spirits and saints that comprise
urban religiosity. There are also many families in the municipal capitol city of
São Gabriel da Cachoeira who have moved from the interior to the city because
they were expelled from their villages as a result of sorcery accusations. This
makes the city a major source of clientele for the urban shamans such as Mandu
who moved from Uapui years ago because of a history of sorcery against his
family in Uapui.
Third, priestly chanters are those who “own” (are “keepers of”) highly spe-
cialized chants called kalidzamai performed during the all-important rites of
passage in which they protect those people undergoing life transitions from all
potentially harmful places, spirits, animals in the world. These exercise a very
important function in Hohodene society, for through the chants, they “bless the
food” of the young initiates. In their chants, the priestly chanters recreate five
voyages (see Figure 3) that the primordial women (Amaru and the Inamanai)
made when they had the sacred flutes and trumpets in their possession and fled
from the anger of the men from whom the women had stolen the flutes. In their
“Thought Voyages,” the chanters remember exactly how the creator Nhia-
perikuli and his allies chased the women throughout the known world, stop-
ping at all places in the Northwest Amazon region to leave the music of the
flutes everywhere in the world. Besides being a “blessing” of food for the
initiates, the chants prevent any potential harm that might affect the initiates.
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 163

Figure 3.
The priestly chanters make five “Thought Voyages” throughout the world,
remembering when the women “opened the world” with the music of
Kuwai, to the ends of the earth, and back, bringing back the music and
sending it up to the Other World.

The enemy Others invoked in the chants are all annihilated so that the initiates
can eat with safety.
The chants also recall how the world “opened up,” expanded in a centrifugal,
concentric motion, to all the ends of the earth. The music of the child of the sun
called Kuwai was left at these endpoints, and then the chanters make a return
voyage “on tobacco,” blowing tobacco smoke over sacred ceramic bowls that
contain pepper and salt, heating them up, at the same time they “cook” the
ceremonial whips, which will break the skins of the initiates and make them
“grow quickly.” The moment when the elder priestly chanters give pieces of
manioc bread dipped in pepperpot to the young initiates, corresponds in the
myth of the origin of initiation rites with the moment when the great spirit
“Owner of Sickness” Kuwai was pushed into an enormous fire by his father
Nhiaperikuli. This was the sacrificial moment when Kuwai’s body transformed
into all of the sicknesses in This World, the sorcery plants, and everything that
kills humans in This World. Only fire could remove the danger that Kuwai
represents from This World. For Baniwa elders, this moment in the narrative
separated the material forms of sickness and misfortune from their spirit source,
Kuwai, who only the shamans can see today. Kuwai also left growth and
fertility, however, in the temporal and spatial cycles of reproduction in This
164 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

World—forest fruits and fishing resources, correlated with periods of fasting

observed by the initiates. Thus, the narrative takes place during a fasting period
of four dry seasons; a tragedy occurred when one of the initiates could not stand
the hunger and ate roasted forest-fruits. Kuwai then made a rainstorm—
suggesting the oncoming of the rainy season, when people do hold their ini-
tiation festivals. So, the story talks about both shamanic initiation and the
initiation of regular children; the first occurring during the dry season, while
the second during the rainy season. Either way, the shamans and the priests
both have an enormously important role in the reproduction of society during
the rites.
The dramatic moment in the narrative of the great fire that sent Kuwai off to the
Other World corresponds in initiation rites to the highly charged moment at
dawn, when the priestly elders teach the initiates how people are to live together
in This World. These are lessons of harmonious conviviality in This “Kuwai
World” (the qualities of which were “left” for the new generations); in other
words, they are society’s norms for how a good person should be: generous,
thoughtful, respectful, and never involved with poison. For the boys, they are
instructed to keep the knowledge of the sacred flutes and trumpets “secret” from
the women on pain of death. For the girl initiates, the priestly elder adds, “do not
depend on anyone, it is better to be independent,” which coheres with the idea
that the newly initiated girls will soon get married and move away to their
husband’s village where they must learn to live among affines.
It is of major importance that the manner in which the Baniwa jaguar-
shamans and priestly chanters imagine the universe through drawings and
discourse, coincides with the “body of Kuwai” and the principal sources of his
“knowledge and power,” as well as the connections among those sources. See
below for further discussion.
Fourth, and finally, the dance-leaders (mandero) who lead the dance-lines
with the correct patterns for each type of dance, upholding the collective,
aesthetic virtues of beauty, symmetry, and form. Although the dance-leaders
have been treated in the literature as “owners” of a kind of “secular” knowl-
edge, the term used for “dancers’ knowledge and power” is manderokai, the
suffix -kai referring to the “essence” of the knowledge and power they have to
make the dances effective instruments of sociality.4

The Knowledge and Powers of the Universe-Owners

The transformative powers of the nonmaterial “spiritual” elements in the
cosmos are intimately connected with the forms of “knowledge” (ianheke)—
with which the deities brought the universe into being, and the loss of which
brings on catastrophe. It is critical, then, to understand how the knowledge and
power of each of these deities is distinct but complementary to one another.
These forms of knowledge were passed down from the original “owners” to
their descendants who themselves became “owners” and “masters” of that
knowledge and power in This World.
The creator Nhiaperikuli’s knowledge is that of the warrior and creator pajé.
Stories of social conflict, poisonings, and deaths abound in Baniwa traditions
of Nhiaperikuli and his kin. There were numerous enemy “animal tribes,”
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 165

frequently affines (nalimathana), that sought to destroy the universe in the

ancient, “Before World,” but there are equally numerous allies (ikitchina)—
especially the birds—without whose help, Nhiaperikuli’s plots to thwart the
enemy animals’ attempts to kill him could never have been realized.
Dzuliferi, the first shaman and elder brother of Nhiaperikuli, is associated
with the priestly chanters; his knowledge consists of the spirit-names of all
beings in This World, the destiny of all humans—what will become of them,
when they will die, when they will come to earth as newborn. His knowledge
is more of the priestly, “canonical” type, defined by precision of language and
thought, which is essential for the reproduction of the universe. For this reason,
the shamans refer to Dzuliferi as “the Spirit of Power,” the essence of the
universe. Thus, the elder chanters at all rites of passage are considered to have
the most important function of annulling the dangerous power of spirit-names
for the new persons (natal family, new generation of adults, and postmortem
family) who have emerged from ritual seclusion (Hill 1993; Wright 1993).
Kuwaikaniri (or, Eeri, Mawerikuli) is the younger brother of Nhiaperikuli,
and is the unfortunate one who, acting on impulse, brings on not only his own
death but also the deaths of all people after him. If his brothers are known by
their foresight, vision, and precise knowledge, he is the “Unknowing One” the
tricked one, who, by his failure to foresee the consequences of his actions,
produces disaster. Humanity was condemned to die from then on, having lost
its immortality. It seems that, today, only pajés do not die “irreversibly,” or at
least the most powerful of them are believed to return as souls to stay by their
graves and give counsel to their kin.
From the beginning of the universe, women have exercised a vital role as
agents of change, intermediaries who frequently are from affinal tribes and are
spouses of Nhiaperikuli and his younger brother. Their connections with other,
often enemy tribes, place them in an intensely ambivalent position. As wives,
they bring about irreversible changes into the order of life; as elderly “aunts” or
“grandmothers” and kin of the Creator-brothers, they are salvific heroines,
guardians of powerful remedies, nurturing the dead back to life. Their most
important roles, however, are as mothers, especially of the child of Nhia-
perikuli, Kuwai, and of all the “White people” in This World.
The mother of Kuwai, Amaru, is remembered in the narratives as the source
of all flowing river water in the world which was produced from her menstrual
blood. She is also remembered for having taken away the sacred flutes and
trumpets, the body of Kuwai, from Nhiaperikuli, beginning a long chase
throughout This World when she became powerful adversaries to the men,
playing the sacred instruments everywhere, in the final opening up of This
World to its present-day size. According to the shaman Mandu, after the men
regained possession of the instruments, the first group of women, Amarunai,
remained at the “ends of the world”, Tsuwai, “where the waters no longer run”,
and there they made “industries” producing poisonous air that provokes con-
tagious sicknesses among humans today.
Kuwai is an extraordinarily complex and mysterious spirit deity who can
transform into various animals, spirits, and plants, one of whose avatars
is the black sloth wamu whose fur in reality contains an enormous variety
of insects, as well as fungi and a variety of bacteria and viruses. This is
166 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

undoubtedly one reason why the Kuwai black sloth, also known as Wamundana,
is the “Owner of Sicknesses” and the “Owner of Poison,” the power of sorcery.
According to the sacred story, at Kuwai’s fiery death, the “poisonous fur” of his
body “ran and entered” the fur of the black sloth. His liver transformed into a
leaf that looks somewhat like a liver, but probably a more important explanation
is that it is poisonous. Omar González-Ñáñez, well-known Venezuelan anthro-
pologist, was able to obtain a drawing of Kuwai by a jaguar-shaman, who used
to live on the Aiary River (I met him there in the village of Xibaru before he left
for Venezuela. He and his family used to live in Uapui, but for some reason,
they split and moved first downriver and then to the Guainia).
The jaguar-shaman whose name was Luiz Gomes, drew what he imagined
the “body of Kuwai” to look like (see below), a drawing that certainly had the
help of González-Ñáñez in determining the names of Kuwai’sd body parts
and the numerous holes in his body which correspond to what became the
sacred flutes. The body of Kuwai as drawn is notably similar in certain aspects
to the shape of the cosmos. Thus, cosmos, personhood, sickness forms, and
organs of Kuwai’s body can be shown to be homologous. Kuwai’s knowledge
and power speaks both to lethal kinds of sickness coming from sorcery, and
creative growth in the universe. This is no paradox; it simply means that
playing the instruments is a time when people become vulnerable to sickness
and hence they must observe restrictions. They become part of the forest-
world, the unseen world in which their understanding of the world as they
are taught the traditions. The music of Kuwai penetrates their heart-souls. So,
the initiates are vulnerable to sickness as they grow up. Other social ties are
formed when, in the final parade called the “coming-out festival,” the boys
present the girls with breadbaskets of their own making, like a marital rela-
tionship, which is one of exchange.
The last deity whose knowledge and power are fundamental to the cosmos
is Kaali, the “owner” and “master” of gardens; all knowledge related to cycles
of cultivation and the reproduction of cultivated plants belongs to the deity
Kaali, who sacrificed himself in primordial times. His body transformed into
productive garden land, from which women produce manioc bread, considered
to be the “body of Kaali.”5 Here again, the deity was transformed by a great fire
into the knowledge and power that sustains humanity. In the Other World that
preceded the “Kuwai world,” there existed a great Tree of Sustenance, (the
petrified form of which is located at the Rapids of Uacaricoara, on the upper
Vaupes River) that is called “Kaali ka thadapan,” the source of all cultivated
plants as well as the pajés’ sacred snuff dzaato.6 Here, we have the theme of food
and sustenance connected with shamanism, for the shamans’ snuff is kept
within a hole at the top of the Tree. The story is divided into three parts, the first
of which relates how Nhiaperikuli’s younger brother found malikai, the
shamans’ power to see-hear and recognize the Other side of the world, the
spirit-person side, not only the animal side.
In the “Before World” of the deities and great spirits, one personage could
assume the attributes and powers of another. Frequently, narrators will
begin the story about Kaali and, in the middle of the narrative, switch to talking
about Nhiaperikuli, admitting that one is “really the other.”7 In the Baniwa
pantheon, there are similar connections among all the major spirits–deities,
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 167

which again demonstrates the existence of a “nexus of religious power and

knowledge” among the primordial “religious specialists.” The deities and great
spirits themselves all share in each other’s powers and knowledge in some way,
as well as in the iconic representations of their bodies, such as bone (Nhia-
perikuli), whip (Kuwai), and dance-tubes (or dance rattles such as Kaali). One
may transform into the other, but without ever losing their original perspec-
tives. As in the Before World, so in This World, the different “owners” of
spiritual knowledge and power can accumulate distinct functions, but only at
their own risk, for the sorcerers are there to provoke instability, destruction. For
this motive, the “wise people” (savants, prophets) of the Baniwa past have
refused their followers’ urging to centralize political power, becoming “chiefs
of all communities” extending their influence over vast regions of the North-
west Amazon (Wright 2004). They tried to eradicate sorcery, but couldn’t; it is
an ongoing battle, a no-win situation.

The Body of Kuwai–The Body of the Universe

Figure 4 is of Kuwai. Its complexity forces us to make only a few, brief
comments here. The most important of these is the correspondences between
the Body of Kuwai, and the drawings of the universe made by two Hohodene
jaguar-shamans of the Aiary River, the first in 1977, and the second in the year
2000 (see Figures 5–6). The first is a near exact reproduction of the shaman’s
original drawing diminished only in scale, and adding the names of its parts.
The second is based on the pajé’s verbal description and confirmations made
while I drew the forms in a way that approximated his and other shamans’
drawings. It is an idea that is far more elaborate than what’s presented in the
drawing, which features placement of the principal deities and their intercon-
nections. From the perspectives of the pajés, then, the “universe” contains a
multiplicity of “peoples” with a multiplicity of perspectives from top to bottom,
each with its own powers, features, attributes, and characteristics. Beings of the
Other World are overwhelmingly shamanic in that they are masters of trans-
forming, while those of the numerous layers in the “Place of Our Bones,” the
Underworld, have no capacity of transforming; they are either animal-souls or
“spirit-people” known by a single feature in an exaggerated form (“people with
large mouths,” “people whose chests emit light,” “people who sleep hanging
from poles,” etc.). Below them runs the underworld river that takes the souls of
the dead up to the Houses of the Dead in the Other World.
The parallels I wish to focus on are between three places of the universe and
the three most important parts of Kuwai’s body: umbilicus (hliepuhle), heart-
soul (ikaale), and crown of his head (thípale). These are the sources of Kuwai’s
“power and knowledge.” In the drawings of the universe, Kuwai’s umbilicus
corresponds to the connection between the Other World and This World, called
the “celestial umbilical cord” (hliepulekwapi eenu). Shamans describe it as the
spiritual connection between This World, the “center of the universe” (hekwapi
pamudzua) and the Other World. It is located at the rapids called Hipana, where
Amaru gave birth to Kuwai, where the great paxiuba tree from which the sacred
flutes and trumpets were made, once connected This World and the Other
World after Kuwai’s “death” by sacrifice, and where the boulder and holes of
168 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

Figure 4.
The body of Kuwai, as imagined by a Hohodene shaman, showing the
holes associated with primordial sounds corresponding to the sacred flutes
and trumpets (imaged as segmented, oblong or sticklike shapes), and the
sicknesses and remedies associated with parts of Kuwai’s body (umbilicus,
heart, liver, crown of the head) corresponding also with primordial
conduits or spiritual connections among central places in the cosmos.
(Reprinted with permission of anthropologist Omar Gonzalez Ñáñez
[2007], who obtained this drawing from a jaguar-shaman, Luiz Gomes,
originally from the village of Xibaru, on the Aiary River.)

the rapids are all interrelated through the story of Kuwai. The umbilicus is of
greatest importance as a connection between living generations and their first
patrilineal ancestors.
The “heart-soul” of Kuwai is the source of several of the most important
sicknesses–and remedies that the pajé takes from the Other World of the sky
(see Figure 2 above) to cure people in This World: spirit-darts–thorns, spirit
arrows–slivers of arrow wood, bleeding sicknesses, and spirits that penetrate
the bones (producing what the Baniwa understand as “rheumatic pain”). The
“heart-soul of Kuwai” corresponds in the universe with the place of Kuwai’s
village, the domain of the pajé, where cures are realized. Kuwai the Sickness
Owner can transform into the “shadow-soul of Dzuliferi” who requests that the
pajé cure him from poison. It is just a way to train the shaman but it reveals once
again the facility that deities can shift their perspectives. Finally, the “crown” of
Kuwai’s head is located at the place called “where the sky comes to an end,”
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 169

Figure 5.
The universe, according to José Garcia, Hohodene jaguar-shaman (field
notes, Robin M. Wright, 2000).

zenith of the universe, and is the source of pain, which takes the forms of stones,
hair, and illnesses related to vision, all part of sorcery and its cure.
From the top of Kuwai’s body down to his umbilicus, one can trace the shape
of the universe (hence the Baniwa use the phrase “Kuwai World” when refer-
ring to reality. The Body of Kuwai is homologous to the form of the universe,8
which is characterized by its porous boundaries (a body “full of holes”)
170 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

Figure 6.
The universe according to Hohodene jaguar-shaman Mandu (field notes,
Robin M. Wright, 1976).

modulated by cyclical changes between “open body” (during the rainy season,
when the initiation ceremonies take place) and “closed body” (the dry season,
when the pajés transmit their knowledge to apprentices). Thus, all of the types
of spiritual knowledge and power are manifest in the Body of Kuwai, the
transformations of which correspond with the distinct deities.

Material Forms, Passageways, Conduits of Spiritual Transmission

The connecting tube from top to bottom is the “universe way” (Hekwapi
iapuwa), a passageway, which to the pajés is a “stairs,” over which their heart-
souls journey up or down. It appears to coincide with what is known as the
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 171

“celestial umbilical cord” (hliepulekwapi eenu) that passes through the center
of each world, beginning in the world of Nhiaperikuli, and extending down to
a river of cold, fresh water (uni hapepawani) at the bottom of the universe. A
single form can have many parallel meanings, in this case, for each form con-
sists of a variety of spiritual connections. Thus, the single tube form connecting
all worlds may be, at the same time, a winding “stairway” for the pajés; a
celestial umbilical cord going down, which the souls of newborn children
descend at birth; a tube (called Dzuli-apo, corresponding in material form to the
mawi paxiuba palmtree) through which the souls of the recently deceased
journey to their soul-houses in the Other World; or the sacred flutes and trum-
pets themselves, originally a gigantic paxiuba palmtree uniting earth and sky
that was cut into pieces to become the material instruments that still exist today
(Wright 1998:208). All are tubular connections in this space–time assuming
many analogous material shapes having to do with life-transmitting processes.
The bone is one of the most significant of the tubular forms through which
the narratives of creation present the construction and reconstruction of the
universe. The bone is one more manifestation of elongated tubes; whatever is
inside it, or goes through it, is a life-giving principle or life-taking power that
lies at the heart of shamanic malikai and of the universe.
It is perfectly in keeping with the death-and-rebirth theme of shamanic
imagery that the story of how Nhiaperikuli—who in his first appearance was
the “child of the universe”—is later reborn from a dismembered body, a piece
of which is thrown into the waters of the river. Nhiaperikuli, or “Inside-the-
bone” (the literal translation of his name), the bone itself, came back to life in the
form of three crayfish joined together (exoskeleton and “bone” are understood
by the same word, liapi), which then transforms into three crickets, later two
types of woodpeckers, and finally, emerges as a fully grown person. This story
is perfectly consonant with the combined shamanic knowledge and power of
the three creator brothers. The bone was the three hekwapinai, universe-people.
From one orphan child (Hekwapi Ienipe), three brothers (elder-middle-younger)
were regenerated, a triad of “knowledge and power.” In the universe, the three
brothers can be seen as dwelling in the three highest layers (see drawings).
In comparing all the most important forms of bone or tubes and their rela-
tions to themes of birth, death, and rebirth in Baniwa stories, cosmology, and
shamanic practice, it follows that:

The very first tube of creation was the umbilical cord of the sky, hliepulekwapi
eenu, which came into existence at the birth of the universe, when there was
no division between worlds, before generational differences came into exist-
ence. Like the universe, the first soul a newborn child has when she or he
enters This World is the hliepule, umbilical cord soul, which is believed to
connect the newborn to the original, celestial umbilical cord, and thus with
all other living beings through the one collective Hwepule, “Our Umbilical
Cord Soul,” the celestial umbilical cord at Hipana, the Center. At a person’s
death, the first soul to leave the deceased’s body and return to the Other
World from which it came is the Umbilical Cord Soul, which follows a tube
parallel to, but going in the opposite direction to the umbilical cord of the
sky, up to the Houses of the Dead in the Other World. It is a spiritual cord,
172 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

invisible to all but the shamans, which is always there at Hipana, and that
connects This World with the Upper World.
The pajé’s snuff-blowing bone (maliapi) is the tube through which dzaato (or,
pariká) is blown, and pariká is the means by which the pajé’s soul travels back
and forth through time (see Figure 3). The pariká opens the pajé’s vision to
the trails that lead through the Other World of the Dead, the first Ancestors
and deities.
The original paxiuba tree is a hollow palm tree that is the source of the sacred
flutes and trumpets, collectively called Kuwai, which are parts of the body of
the great spirit Kuwai. Breath is blown through these tubes, bringing Kuwai’s
voice back to life, the ancestral music that makes the forest fruits, and
children, grow, connecting primordial past with all future generations;
Human bones are the elongated tubes through which a person’s soul (ikaale)
circulates. The heart-soul together with human bones give life and mobility to
a person; at death, the person’s heart-soul detaches from its bones and makes
a journey vertically upward to the Other World of the past while the bones are
laid to rest horizontally in the “Place of Our Bones,” in the Underworld;
The sorcerers popularly known as Mati, it is said, hide their poison, manhene,
inside a bone, buried at the bottom of local streams. It is said that the sorcerer
can fly with this bone to wherever he or she wants to go to strike a victim
with the poison;
The collective Umbilical Cord Soul is the only “soul” that chanters can
invoke to revert the destruction of assault sorcery (manhene).

It is for all these reasons that the Bone of Nhiaperikuli’s name refers to a
tubular form inside of which the creator-life principle is reborn. The sacred
flutes and trumpets are said to be the body parts, especially long bones, of
Kuwai, the child of Nhiaperikuli through which the “powerful sound that
opened the world” (Hill 1993) is blown, as the Hohodene say “limale-iyu,” the
sounds produced by “bursts of breath” (Hill and Chaumeil 2011) that made the
miniature, primordial world grow to its full size. The bone of the pajé, maliapi,
transmits the psychoactive dzaato, called the “blood” of Kuwai that, when
blown through the bone by a powerful “burst of breath” allows the Other,
Before World to show itself to the pajé, and opens the way for his soul to go
inside. When shamanized pariká is blown through the pajé’s eagle bones,
shamans transform into jaguars who traverse boundaries between present and
past, This World and the Other.
Ancestral blood and breath blown through fixed tubular forms propitiate the
transformation from the material to the spiritual worlds. By contrast, deadly
plant substances contained within a bone accompany the sorcerer’s transforma-
tion and flight to kill or maim victims in This World, or mutilate an enemy
shaman’s soul. Sorcery destroys the blood and breath of victims, turning them
into total opposites of what healthy, fully cultural beings should be. Finally, at a
person’s death, the soul inside the bone separates from the body and journeys
to the transformative worlds above, while the body goes down to worlds of
“stasis” (Sullivan 1988). All of these meanings together form the nexus of
religious meaning that involves spirit and matter combining and separating in
a myriad of ways.
Wright Fixed Forms and Fluid Powers 173

A great many of the stories focus on the deadly threats represented by the
animal-tribes, especially those called the “Thunders.” Nhiaperikuli is
“married” to a female of one or another of these tribes. They are extremely
treacherous, especially their chief who is carried around in a woven sieve and
tries various times to kill the Creator, but Nhiaperikuli uses his extraordinary
vision, knowledge, and skills in turning back the enemy, making the killers lose
their chief. Nevertheless, the animal-tribes are powerful sorcerers who kill two
of his younger brothers, and despite Nhiaperikuli’s using his shamanic powers
to transform the day into night, to kill off all the animals, the one Thunder who
escapes returns to introduce evil omens of impending death to the community.
Actually, this story is highly relevant to Mandu da Silva (the chief jaguar-
shaman still alive) who is known to have warned his kin in the Venezuelan
town of Maroa, to beware of losing their traditions because, he said, without the
traditions, the enemy will take over, and the indigenous culture will be totally
lost. Especially true was this of the shamans who seemed to be selling their
souls to local politicians to get them elected or to doing their dirty work. Mandu
gave his full support to the construction of the House of Shamanic Knowledge
and Power as a way of encouraging the continuity of these traditions.
The knowledge and powers of the religious specialists, like their primordial
ancestors, however, are put at risk by the modalities of change inherent to the
dynamics of the universe; these changes threaten to be irreversible and the bone
structure of the universe then borders on collapse. At those times, the sentinels
of tradition, the savants, seek to restore order. The healing of an individual, the
healing of the cosmos, and numerous other processes put the living religious
specialists in communication with the primordial lifeforces in a never-ending
struggle to sustain cosmic balance (see Figure 7). There are no “objects”
involved here; all are subjects or pieces of subjects that (however inanimate they
may seem to our perspective) contain circulating lifeforce, spirit, and form part
of a larger whole in which every piece contributes to intersubjectivity.

Notes
1. Similarly, for the related Kuripako people, in Colombia, confer with Journet (1995).
2. See Wright 2012.
3. The rocks and boulders at Hipana are inscribed with the memory of the origin of
the universe, as well as the bodily impressions of the first people. These inscriptions, or
petroglyphs, were left intentionally by the first beings, so that the future generations,
walimanai, would always remember how it was in the beginning.
4. The societies of the Northwest Amazon are well-known for their “ceremonial
hierarchies,” especially among the Tukanoan-speaking peoples (see, e.g., Chernela 1993;
Goldman 1963; C. Hugh-Jones 1989; S. Hugh-Jones 1989). There is little actual ethnog-
raphy on the Arawakan-speaking peoples’ ceremonial hierarchies (except Hill 1993;
Journet 1995); Vidal has proposed historical models of “federations” in early colonial
history (1993, 1999, 2002). Evangelicalism and the labor market were two factors that led
to the disruption of regional phratric organizations.
5. Compare with the “Dema deity complex” (Jensen 1963), which Justin Shaffner,
working with Marind speakers in New Guinea where the concept originates, has studied
but from the vantage point of cosmological perspectivism (personal communication,
May 2012).
6. Throughout the territory of the Baniwa, there are dozens of such sites where events
that took place in the primordial world are remembered by petroglyphs, inscriptions
174 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

Figure 7.
Jaguar-Shaman “Opening” the sky-door at the beginning of a cure. In his
right hand, his rattle (kutheruda, the shaman’s “soul”), in his left hand,
tobacco cigar and the eagle bone for blowing shamans’ snuff (dzaato).
(Photo by Wright 1976.)

believed to have been made by one of the creator-deities at the completion of a certain
act, then remembered for all times. The entire geography corresponding to Baniwa
territory is in this sense a “mythscape.” This embedding the land with the divine body
(-ies) bears resemblance to areas such as Australia and the south coast of New Guinea (cf.
Rumsey and Weiner 2001) where ancestral peoples “left their marks in the landscape in
the form of rock formations, eddies, rivers, etc.” (thanks to Justin Shaffner for this
comparison; personal communication, May 2012).
7. This apparent switching of subjects, so common in the primordial times, can be
understood as the capacity of the spirits and deities to assume other shapes, the
“shadow-souls” (nadamini) of the Other, whom the original wishes at that moment to
appear like, to trick, deceive, or represent certain functions that are characteristic of the
Other, but without ever losing the original deity’s or spirit’s “essence.”
8. That is, the Body of Kuwai is fractal or holographic (see also G. Mentore this issue;
L. Mentore this issue), similar in ways to cosmological thought among Melanesian
peoples, as interpreted by Mimica (1988) and Wagner (1991, 2001).

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