shamanism and politics in late-colonial Ecuador

shamanism and politics in late-colonial Ecuador

FRANK SALOMON-University of Wisconsin, Madison

”Overemphasized in explaining crisis cults, the political has been curiously neglected in most studies of shamanism,” observes Weston La Barre (1970:301) in The Ghost Dance. “Both North American and Siberian shamans . . were often leaders as well as protectors of their groups; and South American shaman-messiahs commonly combined political and magical power over men and cosmos alike.” In numerous South American lowland societies lacking states or hereditary chieftaincies, intragroup conflicts were commonly expressed and political preeminence established through a complex of magical aggression and cure that pitted rival shamans against each other as poles of faction formation and leadership Shamans were also paramount in fighting between stateless groups indeed, in forest zones bordering the Andes today, great shamans are still accorded the Quechua title kuraka, which the Inca and Spanish governments used to designate state-endorsed ethnic lords or chieftains (Porras 1979:28; Oberem 1971:226; Whitten 1976:141-163, Harner 1972 77-1 33, Robinson 1972).

What i s the relation between such stateless forms of political process and the governance of empires or nation-states? When conquerors impose centralized, hereditary, or bureaucratic regimens on the periphery of their domains, do stateless modes of political ac - tion inevitably wither or do they flare up sporadically in the guise of crisis cults? Or might they acquire new functions that confer durability and even special potency under the new order? If the latter, we may ask what impact their persistence has on interethnic relations in the state orbit.

This essay concerns the political importance of magical aggression at the margins of the later Spanish Empire in parts of what are now Ecuador and southern Colombia On the evidence available from these places it appears that shamanic politics can well survive the imposition of the state and indeed affect its subsequent evolution. The reasons for this are sought both inside the affected ethnic groups and in interethnic relations.

Study of Jllth-century “witchcraft” trials from the Audiencia de Quito indicates that many acts of magical aggression and defense belonged to the South Ameri- can tradition of shamanic combat but that the conflicts provoking them derived from specifically colonial stres5es. Due in part to the poor f i t between jurally mandated institutions of colonial governance and the dynamics of native communities, shamanic achievement continued to be a route to indigenous power. The failure of Spanish administrators to interpret such facts politically had the paradoxical effect of accrediting shamans’ magical potency in European eyes and strengthening the conviction that peoples of the colonial periphery were ungovernable and dangerous. [sham an ism , Andes, E c u ador, e t hno h i story]

Copyright 0 1983 by the American Ethnological Society 0094-0496/83/030413-l6$2 1 Oil

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Leadership accrued to colonial shamans in part because colonially imposed de jure institutions of governance showed limited ability to respond to de facto shifts of indigenous power. State functionaries assigned colonial offices by criteria derived from the state’s own institutions (status lineages, bureaucratic schooling, etc.), but these corresponded to no local standard of legitimacy. Unless otherwise reinforced, colonial offices deteriorated in- to paper titles. Shamans and their clienteles acted more effectively as factions capable of adjusting power relations, and they adapted to the colonial situation in varying ways. They counteracted and immobilized jural authorities by forming adverse, but not always overtly mutinous, factions; or, they infiltrated and preempted colonial offices. Sometimes, colonial officers placed themselves at the mercy of shamans or sought to become shamans.

These facts regularly affected relations between governments and stateless minorities. When local crises became visible to them, state functionaries became aware that de facto power flowed through legally invisible channels. Within imperial belief systems, the effects were eminently interpretable as magical. By trying offending shaman-politicians for demonological, not political, crimes, colonial magistrates accredited shamanic powers as real and efficacious. But the effort to remove individual shamans was not efficacious in shoring up weak colonial institutions of native governance; the net effect was to reinforce shamanism as a technique for acquiring office. Governors attributed magical power as de- fined in their own cultural tradition to members of exotic groups (Silverblatt 1979a:176; 1979b:28). It became a characteristic belief of dwellers at state centers that ethnicities of the periphery, who resisted political definition, possessed magical powers that struck across ethnic and class boundaries. This idea i s often evident in ideological elaborations of centerjperiphery, capitallfrontier, and civilizedlsavage oppositions. In various forms it is a common warrant for aggression against, or avoidance of, stateless peoples. In South Ameri- ca, such instances occur from lncaic through colonial to republican times, and the phenomenon may be common to other colonial or “internally colonial” societies.

The cases in point concern four 18th-century “witches” (brujos, mohanes, or hechizeros in the vocabulary of Quichua-Spanish courtroom interpreters) whose trials are preserved in Ecuador‘s Archivo Nacional de Historia.’ Several related Peruvian cases from the same era have been studied by Millones (1979). While a much earlier stage of jural confrontation between Christian and non-Christian Andean religion i s documented in Duviols’s (1972) work on the “extirpation of idolatries” during the 17th century, the historic dimension i s still obscure. This paper i s offered as an exploratory treatment of shamanic power-state power confrontations.

During most of the 18th century the Spanish crown ruled aboriginal America through a system of hereditary colonial chieftaincies and native magistracies. The colonial chiefs, who had inherited the Quechua title kuraka (ethnic lord), were more commonly called caciques (the term used here). Throughout the Andean highlands to the Colombian border, the Inca state, and later the Spanish, regulated the accession to chieftaincy by members of status lineages; under Spain, primogeniture was the theoretically legitimate title. By 1700 caciques everywhere found their role as intracommunal leaders and spokesmen to be in conflict with their role as intermediaries and tribute guarantors for the Spanish state. Their titles were the jural equivalent of Spanish hidalguia (nobility) and they normally adopted a Hispanicized lifestyle likely to alienate them from their indigenous subjects. They often ex- ercised their privileges through exploitative business relationships with the governed. In regions peripheral to the empire, even graver obstacles militated against any tight integration of ”cacical” governance with local social structure. One such obstacle occurred in peripheral groups which were often noncentralized small societies lacking the institution of status lineage. In such instances “chief” status was arbitrarily imposed by the Spanish. Another obstacle was presented by the many peripheral groups that by 1700 had absorbed

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a multiethnic variety of displaced persons and emigrants unlikely to recognize any single lineage as rightfully privileged. In general, the institution of the cacique did not flourish outside of what had formerly been Inca-administered lands.

Subordinate to the cacique, the Spanish state created a category of native magistrates, constables, and bailiffs who collectively formed a cabildo (community council) in each jural community. These officers held varas (staffs of office) which rotated annually (here collectively called vara officers). Theoretically, some of them had power to adjudicate intraindigenous affairs, but because of their short tenure and the very small measure of authority invested in them, they seem to have acted mostly as agents in such functions as tribute collection and as enforcers of noncontroversial moral codes. Unless people held them as eminent for other reasons, vara officers exerted little leadership.

The Spanish interrogators seem to have been somewhat familiar with the role of shaman, although they couched their questions largely in terms of European concepts such as the diabolic pact. Questions were sufficiently appropriate to elicit answers of a cultural rich- ness rare in documents of the period. Nonetheless, as in all sorcery cases, the deeds of the accused are difficult to ascertain. All we can be sure of i s the content of, and perceived grounds for, the accusation. Even the confessions of the shamans are at times suspect because of coercion and mistranslation. Nevertheless, modern ethnographic observations in many cases confirm that witnesses were not deluded as to the doings of magicians (Bolton 1974). This paper deals only with the political aspects of the trials.

shamanism among bad neighbors: Buesaquillo, 1727

The Pasto indigenous village of Buesaquillo, in the jurisdiction of the city of Pasto in what i s now southern highland Colombia, was part of a poor region far from the centers of colonial economy. Settlement by Spaniards was less dense than in most highlands, and Buesaquillo was slightly outside the farthest margin of the Inca penetration zone (Romoli 1977-78; Moreno Ruiz 1971). Early records indicate a multiplicity of very small native political units, some of which appear from the clustering of personal names to have housed localized kindreds. The accused, Lorenzo Buesaquillo, derived his notoriety as a sorcerer primarily from enmities between him and his neighbors within one of these localized units, including his own kin. This local controversy might never have come to the attention of colonial judges had not a corregidor (crown governor) given credence to the accusation that Buesaquillo accepted payment from one Spaniard to kill another. In the course of his trial a number of intraindigenous accusations surfaced. These instances provide good examples of sorcery accusation in its most common highland manifestation, the prosecution of conflicts whose import to the collectivity i s “micropolitical” (Douglas 197O:xiv). They also serve to introduce the cast of roles and beliefs omnipresent in shaman trials of the period.

Buesaquillo’s indigenous accusers blamed him for six acts of magical aggression. First, they said, he killed a minor Spanish official by putting a green toad under the victim’s doorway so that it would enter the victim’s body and madden or ki l l him. Second, witnesses said that after brawling with his cousin’s husband, Buesaquillo infliced a sickness on the husband that made his neck and throat dry up. A curing shaman from the Sibundoy valley diagnosed the maleficio (evil spell) and remedied it. Third, three witnesses averred that when a neighbor whipped Buesaquillo’s children for stealing food from his fields, Buesaquillo retaliated by poisoning the neighbor’s corn beer. A fatal disease then seized the neighbor’s heart and “dried” his body to death in three days. The same Sibundoy curer diagnosed this spell but could not break it. Fourth and fifth, Buesaquillo was blamed for the deaths of two men whom he had threatened while they were drinking together. Sixth, a man who had


visited Buesaquillo to collect a debt soon found himself ill, and a Sibundoy curer (probably the same one) administered to the sick creditor a vision-inducing drug that enabled the patient himself to see how Buesaquillo had injected vermin into his body:

A few days after what had happened (I e., the dispute over the debt). he had a very sharp pain in the shoulder and it spread throughout his body; when [the curer] cured him and gave him a potion of a forest vine, he expelled through the mouth, as vomit, something like egg whites, and then lizards. bumblebees, and centipedes, which amazed everyone.

The Spanish judge took these accusations quite seriously and ordered Buesaquillo inter- rogated on the rack. The trial record contains verbatim the questioning under torture:

When the magistrate saw that (Buesaquillo) did not want to say or confess anything, he ordered him stripped naked to the skin except for some underclothes to cover his shame, and thus stripped he ordered him placed and tied onto the said rack, and ordered the torturer to tighten the cords, and when they were thus tightened asked the said Lorenso i f i t was true that he had killed the people mentioned in the trial with his spells and likewise if with his spells he had undone the sanity of the Royal Constable as he had said in confession-[Buesaquillo] said he had not killed for Cod’s sake sir, that he had not made the Royal Constable insane, sir, for the love of Cod, and [the magistrate] ordered [the torturer] to give another turn [of the rack], Ayayay, for the love of Cod, I did not do what they are punishing [me] for (Inconsistencies of direct and indirect quotation are thus in the original )

Buesaquillo withstood the torture without confessing further. Nonetheless, he was ordered to testify again, before the Audiencia (supreme tribunal), at the insistence of churchmen who suspected that “a mixture of heresy” in his magic justified further investigation. N o other records have been found.

In its simplicity, Buesaquillo’s case illustrates some popular expectations about indigenous sorcery cases as shared by Indians and Spaniards. The magical aggressor was felt to have an adversary in the victim’s defender, a magical curer. Curer and killer were in- variably described as very distinct roles. Curers were not credited with revenge killings, and the curer was almost always a foreigner or outsider to the victim’s own immediate group, usually a member of a forest-dwelling ethnic group. Killers killed on their own behalf or for clients.

Lorenzo Buesaquillo was accused of using the two most common magical weapons, the magical dart and the disease bundle. A shaman in drug trance was thought to be capable of shooting into his victim’s body ”darts” that engendered or contained harmful vermin (Whitten 1976:145-163; Parsons 1945:72). Disease bundles, of which the toad was perhaps the most common, had to be buried where the victim trod, usually under his doorway. In modern usage the toad is tortured beforehand as a proxy victim (Mac-Lean y Estenos 1940:304). To prepare a disease bundle, modern killers sprinkle the toad with alcohol, tie it with colored thread, wrap it in a piece of cloth belonging to the victim, and sometimes seal it in a pot (Esteva Fabregat 1970:33). Both the dart and the bundle have distributions that span coast, sierra, and Amazonia and extend from the northern to the southern extremes of the Andean cultural province (Bastien 1978:160-167; Taussig 1980). This complex i s in latge part a New World creation. The European witchcraft tradition, as recorded in Malleus Maleficarum (Kramer and Sprenger 1971[1486]:137-148), employed buried disease agents, but the elaboration of wrapping is probably related to the Andean technique of making despachos (offering bundles) for benign purposes (Bolton and Bolton 1976). Magical darts are an American tradition.

The Sibundoy curer also used techniques that appear almost invariant in the South American tradition. The administration of a vine brew, probably Banisteriopsis, to the victim, enabling him to see disease agents, resembles, for example, modern Jivaroan practice (Harner 1972). In most cases (see below) the dart i s sucked out. To neutralize a disease bundle, the curer-shaman must find, unearth, and burn it. In all such techniques, prior prepara-

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tion of evidence easily allows the curer to execute in mystified form a collective aggression against the person perceived as a threatening killer. Court records do not prove, but leave open the possibility, that curers themselves buried the bundles they publicly excavated.

Interpreting the micropolitical sense of the Buesaquillo case, we note that Buesaquillo’s conflicts with neighbors had been extensive He claimed to have moved outside of his village in disgust at being blamed for its misfortunes. While we do not know the involved parties’ exact relationships, we do know that all but one were close neighbors, all were status equals (Pasto Indians of commoner rank), and most were relatives of the accused. Three of six accusers were consanguines to Buesaquillo and one was an affine. I t i s probable, therefore, that the root friction began within a close circle of neighbors-kinsmen. Since crop theft played a part, we may suppose that agricultural insufficiency had something to do with this friction. Gade (1970) notes that crop theft is often a symptom of land tenure crisis in the modern Andes. The aggressive expansion of 18th-century latifundia in the Andes was a severe stress on Indian communities. The Buesaquillo household‘s seces- sion could therefore have initiated a process of community fission or of residential disper- sion. Witchcraft, which often serves as a mechanism for severing poisoned but strongly legitimated ties (Middleton 1960; Mair 1969:116-159), could have served as a trigger mechanism for palliating economic or ecological stress by distributing land users away from the most stressed area. Shamanism also seems to have served a political need that the colonial jural order could i l l accommodate, since both Spanish administrative policy and the economic interests of the caciques (Spalding 1974) militated for conserving and concen- trating villages rather than fissioning and dispersing them.

shamanism and the self-transformation of a community: Paccha, 1705

A slightly earlier outbreak of shamanic combat in the west-slope rain forest (montaiia) community of Paccha also mirrored colonial tendencies, but these derived from change on a macroregional scale. Paccha belonged to the district of Zaruma, whose gold mines at in- tervals had brought many highland laborers into a region of scarce aboriginal population. During the 17th and early 18th centuries the Zaruma mines had declined; but large numbers of highlanders still took to forest regions such as Zaruma in the hope of evading tribute or escaping latifundia (Moreno Yanez 1976:395). Among these migrants, as among modern colonos in similar regions, cattle raising brought fast profits, dominion over wide terrains, and favorable integration with the market economy. At the same time the cattle economy proved gravely disruptive of aboriginal forest society, as i t still does today (Macdonald 1981). Taussig (1980:244) observes that the consequent conflicts not only pit in- migrant cattle raisers against aboriginal forest groups but also create splits within the local aboriginal groups-

Land disputes between colonists and Indians [in the Colombian Putumayo] lead to disputes among the Indians themselves. Colonization forces Indians to adapt their land usage and landholding prac- tices to those favored by the national market and national law. Disputes develop within Indian communities as to whether to opt for individual private property holdings or communal land under the aegis of the shaman.

Cat t le raising has now become a troublesome preoccupation. It features dramatically in social conflicts, heightens preexisting animosities between people, and raises the risks and amount of money involved in farming to a very high degree (1980:259).

Around 1700, Andres Arevalo, the universally feared killer shaman of Paccha, made it no secret that he hated cattle-raising newcomers and those among his own people who fol- lowed their example. On one occasion, neighbors reported, he asked what right outsider In- dians had to come to Paccha with one skinny cow and then give themselves the airs of


hacendados (estate owners), instead of paying respect to him. Against such people Arevalo often lashed out with dark threats; his favorite was to tell his enemies that they would not live to see their bones mature. He claimed the jural chiefdom of Paccha, but it was taken from him by a nonkinsman hostile to him and friendly to the cattle raisers. Similarly, the hierarchy of vara officers, who had formerly carried out his orders, came to resent his in- timidation and finally turned against him in order to defend aggrieved forasteros (outsiders, immigrants). I t was a regidor (minor vara officer) who finally carried their complaint to the Spanish magistrate in Zaruma.

The testimony that unfolded at the resulting trial depicts a community terrified of Arevalo's magical vengeance. Even the witnesses called for his defense found, once on the stand, that they could think of nothing to exculpate him. Twenty-four acts of magical aggression, bringing death to 18 people and an unspecified number of cattle, were attributed to him. Many of the 18 accusers believed themselves to be survivors of Arevalo's attacks, attributing their survival to the work of a forastero curing shaman, Juan Vallejo, who had made a veritable campaign of detecting Arevalo's magical darts and unearthing his disease bundles. These witnesses provided remarkably frank and detailed descriptions of shamanic behavior as they understood it.

According to a witness who spied on Andres Arevalo and his wife, Certrudis Quenca, the couple sat in their house at night before a mesa (array of power objects; Sharon 1976) lit bv two candles. A stone object described as a losa (title or plaque)-probably the square stone used by modern shamans to cover the effigies of victims (Bolton 1974:209ff.)-stood on a field of four cloths of different colors (Reichel-Dolmatoff and Reichel-Dolmatoff 1961:281). In daylight Andres Arevalo was seen to steal into the houses of his enemies and to leave carrying the sort of personal effects used in casting spells. Once he was also observed stealing a stalk of bananas from a victim's house. Unaware that he was being watched, Arevalo carried the fruit to a lonely hilltop, where he dismounted and walked around the hill while chewing and spitting tobacco and espingo (Iriarte Brenner 1975; Cob0 1964[1653], 1:195). As he called out to unseen persons in the distance, he threw bananas to them and then rode away. After the rite the field was littered with bananas and medicine quids. The witness, who had watched from the bushes, said the rite was so long that he had become famished, but his terror was so great that instead of eating the fruit he piled it up and defecated on it. On other occasions Arevalo was observed staring at mountaintops and talking to them. His nocturnal, indoor ritual closely resembles modern reports of Andean rites for killing enemies (Bolton 1974). The outdoor rites in all likelihood refer to use of psychotropic plants to achieve rapport with the "mountain mothers," considered to be sponsors and benefactors of shamans.

Arevalo's accusers also reported finding in his house a package of magical objects which they called pacha pacari; the probable translation of the Quechua phrase i s "world origin" (Conzalez Holguin 1952 (1608]:267). The package contained a collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, among which were several sacred objects of marine origin, including mullu (Spon- dylus beads, the preferred offering to many deities) and the special conch trumpet used by mullu couriers. These objects clearly demonstrate that Arevalo identified with the marine sources of sacred potency and with pre-Christian antiquity.

Arevalo allegedly attacked people, livestock, and crops. Some witness-survivors had found themselves "drying up" because of magical darts such as pieces of charcoal, tobacco, or owl tripe, toads, and snakes that lodged in parts of their bodies. Most, however, felt themselves injured by disease bundles. The curing shaman Vallejo dug up and displayed assemblies of dangerous materials found in the doorways, hearths, water sources, and cattle pens of the victims, attributing them to Arevalo. They contained various items con-

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sidered dirty (feces or rotten matter), imbued with spiritual danger (bones of the dead, parts of ill-omened animals), or likely to bring humans into contact with spirits (psychoactive plants) Cattle-killing bundles, placed near salt licks and corral gates, contained similar im- mundicias (impure substances) Witnesses said that for killing crops Arevalo made bundles of a distinctive kind of red and yellow pepper pods, which he flung among the healthy plants to sicken them He was also credited with the ability to make worms devour a garden of corn, or even to make the garden wither simply by tossing earth into it.

The Spanish authorities at Zaruma found Arevalo and his wife guilty. Ignoring the victims’ fevered pleas for capital penalties, the judge sentenced the two to be whipped in the streets, stripped of their modest goods, and exiled for six years to the highland town of Alausi where they were to do unpaid penal labor in a textile workshop. Arevalo appealed his case to the Audiencia in Quito, and the Protector of Natives (a state-paid officer) made a spirited defense on the grounds that Arevalo was really a harmless maisincho (seer) and not a sorcerer But the judges of the Audiencia, convinced that even a rumor of his return to Paccha would cause the community to disband entirely, imposed an even stiffer sentence than the first. They condemned the couple to lifelong exile and also ordered prosecution of the curing shaman Vallejo.

The political nature of the episode was clear to the parties involved, although they did not use political terms to describe it. The crucial issue was that a locally dominant practi- tioner of lowland shamanism had set his face against the ascendancy of an immigrant ranching population that preferred governance along highland lines. In his bid to win their ”respect,” Arevalo behaved with the fierceness proper to the killer-leader. By doing so, he not only drove the newcomers into the arms of the Spanish authorities but even alienated members of his own kindred. Seven of the alleged victims, including three who died, were his deudos (relatives). The upshot was a consensus against him that crossed the divide between locals and immigrants and welded them into a new political alliance. In this situation the vara authorities, although holders only of delegated and temporary power, were able to act as mediators of an alliance between the aggrieved and the Spanish authorities in Zaruma. One notable facet of the case is the very weak role of the jural chieftaincy in the controversy. I t i s likely that hereditary chieftaincy in this region had never been strong prior to the ranchers’ immigration. I t did not become stronger afterward, partly because the newcomers were, in effect, refugees from it and partly because hereditary chieftaincy was not likely to be easily stabilized among the ethnically heterogeneous immigrant population. I t is almost impossible to imagine a controversy of this magnitude occurring in the more colonized highlands without the hereditary chiefs playing a crucial role.

I t would be interesting to know more about the role of Juan Vallejo, the forastero curer. We do not know where he came from or what became of him, but he evidently played a crucial role in the transition. In a sense, the collectivity as a whole was his patient (Turner 1967:359-373). Faced with the task of reconstructing the local economy, the people of Pac- cha availed themselves of ritual to reconstrue social institutions and reevaluate them. Household by household, Vallejo taught Paccha that the former social order, exemplified by the dominance of the killer shaman Arevalo, was an ”illness” that could be ”cured,” that is, extracted from self and soil and thereby expelled. Spanish authorities seemed to be unsure how to respond to Vallejo. In Zaruma his achievement and potential for leadership were apparently treated with equanimity, perhaps because they would in the short term reinforce vara authority. But the higher authorities in Quito feared he might become another local tyrant. How a successful shaman might in fact take command of legal institutions becomes clearer in the following case.


a shaman who acquired colonial power: Punta Santa Elena, 1786

Despite the drastic depopulation of indigenous coastal settlements during colonial times (Tyrer 1976:66), the Pacific shore parish of Punta Santa Elena still housed in 1786 a native community probably descended from Huancavilca seafarers. It was not a dramatically “In- dian” group; no native language seems to have been in use and, with the abolition of the jural chieftaincies in reprisal for the Tupac Amaru I I rebellion (Rowe 1954:39), i t had apparently lost its last remaining institution of distinctively aboriginal politics. The vara hierarchy had become the only theater of overtly political action by Indians. Nonetheless, despite dependence on the Spanish church and state, and despite close supervision, shamanism played a documented role in competition for vara office.

Sebastian Carlos Cavino, a literate Indian, was reputed among the Hispanic population of that politically tense period to be a “seditious” person, hostile to the church and responsible for fomenting “tumults and arsons.” He was known for aggressiveness in setting himself up as a jurisprudente [legal adviser), encouraging litigious Indians; his ostentation in owning lawbooks annoyed non-Indians. His allegedly loose sexual mores and his sideline in treasure hunting on the wreck-littered beaches also made him unpopular among “whites.” When he was elected to become the alcalde ordinario (a native magistracy similar to justice of the peace) for 1786, the parish priest interrupted his ceremony of investment, withheld his vara, and imprisoned him.

Soon afterward Sebastian Carlos was tried on charges of criminal sorcery. The local teniente (magistrate), an ally of the priest, found him guilty. Hoping to rid themselves of Sebastian Carlos before he might rouse his local allies, the authorities took him from his cell at midnight and under close guard led him shackled onto the highway, where a convoy was to take him to prison and exile in Quito. But indigenous friends learned of the plan at once and set out for Guayaquil to lodge a complaint before the Protector of Natives. Mean- while, on the road between Chanduy and El Moro, Sebastian Carlos managed to escape from his captors, hide in a ravine, and flee overland. Shortly after, he appeared at the house of the Protector, requesting appeal. When the Protector obtained a subpoena for the original acts of imprisonment and trial, the local authorities at Punta Santa Elena mounted so many delaying tactics that by the time Sebastian Carlos received a transcript of his own trial, the term of office in question had already elapsed. Nevertheless, he pressed his claim.

From the record of this trial it i s clear that the Indian witnesses, with the sole exception of the sacristan, would rather have shielded the nature of Sebastian Carlos’s dominance from non-Indian eyes. Even his surviving victims yielded information grudgingly, and only when browbeaten and threatened. Perhaps they felt the court was meddling in an intragroup process that could better have settled itself; or perhaps they feared Sebastian Carlos’s revenge.

The trial record also shows that, unlike Arevalo, Sebastian Carlos chose to involve himself directly in colonial institutions and used them for unsanctioned ends. Not only the power of law but also the magical power of the church could be appropriated for shamanic purposes. In 1783 he prevailed on the sacristan to hide certain objects under the altar so they would absorb magical force. The sacristan recalled the incident:

The said Carlos took to him 1i.e.. the sacristan] four rods of iron about one hand [i e., 21 cm] long, and a (heron! goose?] feather with its forked tines at the tip and with the greatest deceptions and supplications, he begged him to put them under the consecrated communion table, secretly, in order that the priest not suspect it, so that on a certain feast day mass would be said over them. . .

Sebastian Carlos later used the rods to divine the location of buried silver from a shipwreck.

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Eventually the sacristan denounced this enterprise, but by that time Sebastian Carlos had achieved considerable sway over the community.

One privilege of his position in the community was a longstanding ill icit affair with an In- dian neighbor, Marttina Suarez. She later confessed that she had asked Sebastian Carlos to “stupefy” her husband by magic so as to continue the affair unhindered. But when she broke off the affair, Sebastian Carlos appeared one day at her gate and said he intended to ”forget” her and ”see her corpse dead in church.” A short time later she became gravely ill with vomiting, ma/ de madre (disorders attributed to menstrual blood rising from the womb), and ventorras (unidentified). Her husband, Mariano Soreano, despairing of all remedies from the pharmacy, sought out a well-known curer named Francisco Barzola Bar- zola treated Marttina with massage and herbal medicines, producing some improvement. Since the curer did not know that Sebastian Carlos had turned against the patient, and since he himself was Sebastian Carlos’s compadre (co-godparent), he thought it suitable to talk with him about the cure. Barzola had expected gratitude and a reward for bringing the news that “the little lady Marttina i s well.” Instead, to Barzola’s astonishment, Sebastian Carlos flew into a rage, vilified him, and warned him to back off the case Soon afterward, Marttina’s husband came to Barzola imploring him to continue the cure, but Barzola said he could not because of the warning his compadre had given.

When Sebastian Carlos was named alcade, i t became necessary to hide this incident from the non-Indian authorities Sebastian Carlos called on his entire personal network, suborning their testimony and instructing them in what to say about him. By threatening further magical aggression he even forced Marttina’s distraught kindred to align with his own faction. From his jail cell, after the affair surfaced, he was able to use the other vara officers as couriers and to summon prospective witnesses to his cell for briefing. His easy escape also suggests that he had many allies. After the escape he appears to have won energetic backing from the Protector in Cuayaquil. Eventually, he probably would have won his legal fight, because the case against him had not been well prepared. But the benefice of Punta Santa Elena changed hands before the priest who was hostile to Sebastian Carlos could renew his testimony, and his ally the teniente suddenly died at his post. The case was dropped and presumably Sebastian Carlos soon consolidated his leadership.

On the surface, Sebastian Carlos’s conduct appears to be heavily Hispanicized. Virtually all the outward signs of his power-litigation, vara politics, fluent Spanish, perhaps his system of divining-derive from Hispanic culture. Only the role antithesis of killer shamanlcuring shaman offers an obvious parallel to the lowland tradition, and even here the curer i s atypical in not being a known outsider. In its latent organization, however, the episode shows some autochthonous aspects. For one, Sebastian Carlos’s career had the characteristic trajectory of a lowland shaman He inherited what was believed to be a hereditary magical talent from his mother. His sister, too, was a purveyor of occult potions and a notorious bruja voladora (flying witch; the phrase may reflect both European stereo- types of datura-induced “flight” [Harner 1973al and similar New World traditions [Harner 1973b:158-160]). Like any lowland shaman, however, he could translate the hereditary pro- pensity into political power only by achieving evident victories. That the witnesses plainly would rather have let him do so, and not confront the attack on Marttina Suarez publicly, suggests they would have accepted the authority of a killer shaman wrapped in the insignia of the vara hierarchy

From the viewpoint of indigenous interests this i s not inexplicable. The abolition of the jural chieftaincies in the 1780s left Indian communities for the first time without any centralized leadership. Vara authority by itself served to enforce some social norms, but for the most part it only executed the mandate given by nonlocal institutions; moreover, since it


rotated frequently, it would not remain reliably in strong hands. One likely reason for Sebastian Carlos’s easy predominance is that he combined a strong command over local social networks, through his magical abilities, with a competence in dealing with Hispanic society that was equal to most jural chiefs’. Millones (1979) notes that the enhanced political importance of shamanic aggression in this period i s associated with the demotion of jural chiefs and with attempts to counteract the ascendancy of priests. I t is possible that the Santa Elena episode manifested the tentative emergence of a new style of leadership, a form of centralized power hidden from public view, at a time when colonial policy had undertaken to further depoliticize the native world.

One can easily see why Sebastian Carlos was obnoxious to the priest and teniente of Pun- ta Santa Elena. It is less obvious why they chose to prosecute him under the by then quaint law of witchcraft rather than as a political offender, as was common. One possible reason was to signal to the Indians that the shamanic use of power was not going unnoticed and that close intervention in intraindigenous affairs should be expected. There i s another factor to consider, however The record makes it plain that they fully believed in the accused man’s magical efficacy. This attitude, considered rather provincial by the higher judges at Quito (e.g., in their purely sociological arguments against freeing Arevalo), was common among local officials. The effective flow of influence within indigenous societies was in fact hidden from those who had to deal with it practically and therefore was eligible for interpretation as being occult. Their very determination to treat native societies as leaderless societies, save for delegated colonial roles, made it more difficult for them to explain leadership behavior except as an anomaly in need of esoteric explanation. These circum- stances aggravated the colony’s ineffectiveness in governing many Indian groups, and their “ungovernable” character in turn underscored their reputation among ”whites” as seats of magical potency. One paradoxical result, seen in the following case, was to make the conquerors feel themselves vulnerable to the malice of the conquered.

shamanism as a weapon in interethnic conflict: Otavalo, Intag, and Quito, 1703

In both lncaic and Hispanoamerican culture, the antithesis between highland cities and lowland forests is an element of cosmology that has conditioned political relations. High- land cities are associated with centricity, culture, civility, and the power of the state, while the forest stands for the primordial, uncivilized, and centripetal powers of nature, never subdued by the state. The shaman stands in opposition to the statesman as an exponent of a contrary kind of power. But the two roles are functionally complementary. Shamans, both colonial and modern, depend on the highlands for wealth (they travel into highlands to seek clients) and for legitimacy (to have traveled afar i s an important credential). High- landers, in turn, travel to the homes of lowland shamans seeking cures for disease and misfortune or to prosecute their vendettas magically. One concomitant of this mutual dependence is a substantial “vertical” exchange of goods; another is exchange of political power. We have seen, in the Ar6valo case, that state power and shamanic power were seen as countervailing forces and that the distressed parties to a shamanic conflict sought to avail themselves from afar of the state power centered in Quito. In the case of Juan Roza Pinto, we find an obverse example: the distressed party in a legal conflict in Quito availed himself from afar of a forest shaman’s services.

Juan Roza Pinto, born in the western montana Yumbo community of Cuagpi, near modern Nanegal, grew up in an area reputedly riven by shamanic rivalries; indeed, the eventual dissolution of Cuagpi village was attributed to them (Salomon in press). AltRDugh


his father was “white,” Juan Roza Pinto dressed as an Indian and spoke Quichua. In his youth he lived among the rnulatos or zarnbos (people of Indian-black descent) of Esmeral- das, an Afro-indigenous seafaring population on the Pacific shore. There he learned local magic and perhaps magic from overseas. His tutors were black sailors. He also received shamanic vocation through a vision: he repeatedly saw a bulto (hallucinatory presence) in the form of ”a Spanish boy with a golden crown, who, by night, changed into a moon and star that never separated from him although he did not talk to them.”

Afterward, Roza returned to the inland rnontaiia of his birth, making his home in the hamlet of Tulla, near Intag, in the tropical forest hinterland of an enormous chiefdom, the center of which was the densely settled highland around Otavalo. Here the local Indians, who called him ”the mestizo” because of his thick beard, pale skin, and fluent Spanish, esteemed him a powerful shaman. He was said to take prodigious amounts of coca The few Spanish residents also feared him and urged the lntag priest to keep him under special supervision, but it proved impossible in that remote country.

Among Roza‘s clients was a highland ethnic lord, Don Salbador Ango. Ango was a member of the great “cacical” dynasty of Otavalo, invested with two high vara offices (governor of Otavalo and alcalde of the large obraje [textile plant] at Otavalo). In 1703 Ango, desperate because he had received notice that he was sure to lose everything he owned as a result of his lawsuit against the Spanish general Don Sebastian Manrique, looked to the forest hinterland of his domain for help against the state. Among Ango’s subordinate vara officers was an agent who periodically went to the forest to collect a tribute in kind. Ango ordered this man on his next trip to bring Roza Pinto to Ango’s house. Later, Roza said that he had felt obliged to obey the summons because Ango was his corn- padre. But when Ango challenged him on his repute as a shaman to ”mold” the judge of the Audiencia to his purpose and to kill his courtroom adversary, Roza Pinto shied away-or so, at least, he claimed in his confession. Ango then persuaded him to carry out a com- promise measure. Roza agreed to inflict on Ango’s enemies a spell he had learned from the sailors of Esmeraldas. This spell, used primarily to bring down jaguars, pumas, vipers, and bears, required Roza to make three cigars and smoke them one after another at midday, blowing the smoke into the air with the intention of aiming i t at his client’s foes. The first was wrapped in tobacco leaf and was to undo their health. The second, wrapped in maize leaves, served to ”deprive them of force and sap their vigor.” The third, wrapped in paper, was to afflict the victims with attacks of fever and itching.

Roza performed the rite, and shortly afterward General Manrique fell gravely ill. It i s not known how his wife detected Roza’s involvement, but when Roza was brought to Quito to give testimony at the proceedings between Manrique’s wife and Ango, he was told that Ango, infuriated by Roza’s “failure,” had hired two other shamans to destroy Manrique. I t is likely that as a form of revenge Ango had betrayed Roza’s participation. The general’s wife, in turn, contracted a healing shaman who managed to partly restore the sick man’s health.

The Quito judge responsible wanted no part of the “witchcraft” accusation for several reasons, of which the chief one was caution lest he be accused of usurping jurisdiction in a case that might belong to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. If Roza were to be proven a true mestizo, and not an Indian, the case would have to be transferred to an ecclesiastical court A hearing was therefore arranged in Otavalo, where Roza Pinto’s acquaintances testified as to his ”true” ethnic identity. It turned out at this hearing that many members of the “white” landowning elite, as well as Indians, knew him. “Whites” and Indians agreed that despite his deep involvement in Indian society, including marriage to an Indian from Tulla, Roza Pinto’s “white” phenotype, bilingualism, and successful claim to tribute ex-


emption qualified him as mestizo. The case was presumably transferred to the Inquisition; no further records have been found.

From the viewpoint of indigenous politics, one salient point i s that the vara officer Ango, feeling himself limited to inferior stores of legal power, sought to compensate by using his access to superior stores of shamanic power. At the peripheries of empire, where the state was weak, lay reserves of potency peculiar to indigenous society and within Ango’s reach. Such a matrix of belief, common to Hispanic and indigenous members of colonial society, formed part of the web of unspoken assumptions on which Spanish-Andean political con- f l i c ts had long been interpreted.

Roza’s practice, however, was more complex than this antithesis alone suggests. His success apparently lay in his sophistication with regard to manipulating each local or ethnic group’s beliefs about the powers of foreign groups. To the inhabitants of the montaiia country both his capture of “white” mythic force (of which his white child spirit-companion may be a symbol), and his appropriation of Afro-American magical technique, validated him as a spirit voyager in a world enlarged beyond the indigenous to include the whole gamut of colonial ethnicity. His power had been achieved chiefly in specifically colonial contexts, and he was therefore a promising agent for the prosecution of an interethnic conflict.

Related phenomena appear repeatedly in the colonial record The Shuar attack on Logrolio in the upper Amazonian montaiia in 1579 was led by two mestizo shamans in In- dian dress (ACI/S Quito 8). and ethnically ambiguous mestizos or assimilated Indians figure prominantly as rebel messiahs in both the highlands (Klumpp 1974) and the eastern lowlands (Lehnertz 1972:113). Today, in Colombia (Taussig 1980), the shamans most feared by traditional magicians are those who acquire the largely European magic of highland mestizos. In many of these cases, the characteristic role of the magical mestizo is as the aggressor in interethnic conflicts.

Among modern shamans it i s considered obvious, and no discredit to the art, that magic only works on those who know about it (Taussig 1980). Modern shamans will not readily attack a blanco whom they consider to be unconnected with the network of magical com- munication. The mestizo Roza, because of his far-reaching knowledge of blacks and In- dians, was apparently credited with the ability to operate at the extremes of the network, extending it not only across space but through the various strata of colonial society. His competence in Hispanic culture enabled him to connect with culturally distant enemies and expand the shamanic ideology from the scale of intraindigenous politics to that of global colonial politics; the process seems to be a systematic inversion of colonial penetration.

conclusions

Even in areas where the tradition of centralized and dynastic ethnic lordship remained strong under Inca and early Spanish rule, the late-colonial demotion of the ”republic of In- dians” appears to have elevated the relative value of supernatural expertise as a political asset. This i s s t i l l more true in areas where ethnic dynastic and vara rule had never been strong. The rise of shamans to political power at the colonial periphery (Langdon 1981) can sometimes be correlated to specific colonial pressures within or upon native societies, pressures that jurally mandated leadership was ill equipped to relieve.

Such instances reflect the local impact of far-reaching social changes. In Buesaquillo, conflict between curing and killing shamans, and the expulsion of a veteran killer shaman, may have served to redistribute households brought into conflict by the land scarcity consequent on latifundium expansion. In Paccha, a curing shaman seems to have galvanized a


new class- Indian cattle ranchers-into collective action against the predominance of a killer shaman associated with a former socioeconomic order. In Punta Santa Elena, during the years when ethnic chieftaincy was decisively repressed, a killer shaman with bicultural competence overcame weak resistance from a curer shaman to seize the main vara office and thereby achieve a new mode of indigenous power wrapped in colonial legality. In In- tag, Otavalo, and Quito a triculturally competent killer shaman defended an old and en- dangered ethnic dynasty by attacking a Spanish litigant seen as legally strong but magically weak.

In each of these cases it i s notable that the dominant or established native political leader was perceived as a killer shaman and the insurgent or opposed party’s magical champion as a curer shaman. In any given instance these roles were rigidly antithetical; curers did not conduct revenge attacks. It i s possible that these roles were phases in political careers. Successful curers, by protecting clients from a person considered dominant and dangerous, and eventually by defeating that person, supplanted him and came to preeminence with a ready base of support. Later, perhaps, if their decisions proved harmful to some members of the community, they in turn would come to be seen as killer shamans whose presence demanded a cure. Insofar as such clienteles correspond to categories with collective interests, such a cycle could have constituted a political process hidden from view of the colonial state. Since outsider status was an attribute of curers, circulation of elites is a possibility.

The participation of Spanish judges also offers clues to the ideological aspect of interethnic political relations. One puzzling aspect i s the judges’ lack of curiosity. They did not undertake investigations similar to the visitas de idolatrias (inquiries into non-Christian religion) by which ecclesiastical judges had earlier sought to inform themselves. Evidently they thought they already knew what was at stake: familiar European manifestations of witchcraft. Their easy confidence in this matter, and the accompanying selective percep- tion, superficially spanned the political-ethnic r i f t between themselves and the Indian parties to the cases.

Because of a difference between Old and New World concepts of magical power, the judges failed t o perceive the political dimension. I t i s a peculiarity of European witchcraft belief, according to Lucy Mair (1970:27), that witches “are depicted as being in their actions and dispositions everything that was most abhorred . . . [their] whole life violates every decency.” European witchcraft was associated with deviance, secrecy, and outcast status and it was attributed to weak, poor, and disadvantaged persons. South American shamanic belief, by contrast, typically presents the shaman as one who commands an extraordinary share of what i s most desirable. In the Andes this quality was (and s t i l l is) often called sarni or sarnay (literally, breath, but more generally meaning the impersonal vital force that makes powerful people powerful); a shaman i s called sarniyuj (possessor of sarni). Far from being deviant skulkers, persons with sarni are said to be proud, potent, and influential. They are recognizable by their very success (Delran 1974).

This intercultural discord allowed a peculiar standoff between Hispanic and aboriginal groups. Considered on the interethnic plane, as part of a relationship between victors and vanquished, Indians’ magical behavior seemed to admit a European-style interpretation. In- terethnic magical aggression in that context might indeed be seen as the uncanny power of the weak. The possibility that on an intra-Indian plane it expressed the public powers of the strong remained out of view.

The specifically political corollaries of this standoff have proven most ironic. The dimly perceived flux of native political affairs was often screened from authorities’ eyes by of- ficially “real” colonial institutions of native governance, even where these were functional-


l y impotent. This tendency may have become progressively more notable from the 1780s onward, as institutions of ethnic leadership, such as they were, gave way to increasingly i l l adapted Bourbon and republican models (Millones 1979:121, 137). The resultant failure to govern the hinterlands effectively provided the degree of isolation necessary for intraindigenous shamanic political process to continue. Its endurance in direct contradiction to reigning ideologies of progress invested forest dwellers with a mystique of extraordinary potency. Such a system of misunderstandings provided the climate in which jungle shamans, stereotyped as backward and primitive, could at the same time appear to those at the very center of political power as extraordinarily powerful beings.

notes

Acknowledgments. The research on which this article i s based was made possible by a Tinker Foun- dation Field Research grant administered by the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. This help i s gratefully acknowledged.

’ The following are the main manuscript sources on which the present article rests (author transla- tions from Spanish): 1. Criminales contra don Salvador Ango por Haver Pretendido Quitar la Vida a Don Sebastian Man-

rique por Medio de un Hechicero. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, Indigenas 28. 18 September 1704.

2 . Don Andres de Arevalo, Cacique de Pagche lurisdiccion de Zaruma sobre Destierro por Crimen de Hechiseria. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 29 3 October 1705

3 Criminales sobre unas Brujas. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 45 18 May 1730. 4 Autos Seguidos por el Protector de Naturales por el Amparo del Yndio Sebastian Carlos sobre Im-

putarle de Brujo. Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, lndigenas 114. 9 March 1786 These are the only known primary sources on North Andean indigenous belief systems during the later colonial era (1680s-1820s). They bear comparison with approximately a dozen cases of magical aggression for political ends during the same period, conserved in Lima’s Archivo Arzobispal, and with a scat- tering of similar cases in highland Peruvian archives. Nonetheless, documentation of this type is, on the whole, scarce

The reason for the scarcity is probably not that indigenous beliefs had ceased to condition local political events but that following the end of systematic “extirpation” campaigns around 1660, they came to do so through syncretic or crypto-indigenous but outwardly Catholic forms useful for their superficial compatibility with church requirements (Marzal 1977:115). We know from Webster’s (1974-76:143-156) studies of a modern Quechua community that shamanic prowess is still a factor conditioning leadership, yet it has been integrated in a fashion that keeps it off the jural record In- deed, “the sorcery complex i s surrounded by greater secrecy and more intensive fear than any other aspect of Andean culture” (Bolton 1974.200). Cases In which shamanic leadership came to trial probably represent the minority of instances whereby parties offended by shamans’ actions could not or would not defend themselves within the de facto system by contracting counter-shamans (In some cases they went to court following the failure of such initial responses.) Cases where shamanic politics perpetuated itself smoothly within colonial systems are by that very fact unlikely to be documented. If we are to get at the shamanic past, we must make the best of the exceptions that test the rule

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