Caminhos de luz: um breve ensaio sobre a transmissão de conhecimentos entre povos Pano e Aruak e a ocidentalização das dietas xamânicas tradicionais

Abstract

There are many practices performed by the Amerindian peoples to transmit shamanic knowledge. This monograph aims to briefly describe a variety of processes of shamanic initiation present in some Pano and Arawak peoples with respect to diets and other processes engaged during the initiation period, for the transmission of knowledge to take place. The description of shamanic practices also aims to verify that different diets produce different specialists to present such shamanic specialties and their fields of action. In addition, the similarities found between the practices of Pano and Arawak shamanism allow the analysis of these processes under the same light, raising interesting questions for discussion, such as the female shamanic formation, presented through some examples of women experts and how they acquire knowledge as well as their perceptions of what it is to be a shaman. In contrast to traditional dietary practices, a growing Western interest in ayahuasca and its native uses has been shown in the Peruvian jungles and, more recently, in Brazil, under the name of new age, neo-shamanism, vegetalismo, among others, bringing about changes in traditional practices in order to meet the individual needs and interests of each person or group, such as the prohibition of tobacco smoke, which disfigures the traditional uses of shamanic diets in their native context. On the other hand, Western curiosity about ayahuasca and traditional practices related to it, such as diets, has had repercussions on the greater interest of indigenous youths in rescuing their medicines and dietary practices, whose interest, after massive contact with the non-indigenous world, had declined. Thus, this monograph seeks to describe the traditional context of shamanic diets and the Western reinvention of the use of ayahuasca through the practices associated with it.