1 Pollock (1985a, 1992, 1993, 1996, 2003, 2004, 2016). Because it was originally presented at the 56t (...) 2 “Violent Delights,” paper read at the Robert Murphy lecture at the 20th Annual South American India (...) 1Shamans and Siblings gathers a series of articles that anthropologist Donald Pollock, Associate Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Buffalo (USA), has devoted, throughout his career, to the Kulina people of southwestern Amazonia. Of the eight articles in the book, seven have already been published in Anglophone books, working papers, or journals between 1985 and 2016,1 while one, presented at a conference in 1996, has remained unpublished to this day.2 The texts, which retain their original titles, are presented in chronological order of publication or presentation, and are preceded by an introduction. The book includes one map and twelve black-and-white photos, mostly portraying Kulina people.

The aim of the book, as Pollock establishes from the outset, is to make his work easily accessible by bringing it together in a single volume (p. 5). This statement of intent is followed by two clarifications: firstly, that the selection of texts is driven more by copyright issues than by thematic considerations (ibid.); secondly, that the editing work is deliberately minimal (ibid.) and pertains mainly to the spelling of Kulina words, a topic to which Pollock attaches much importance. Indeed, in a section of the introduction devoted to the “politics of language” (p. 12-18), he explains that his choices in matters of spelling are essentially a reaction to the systematization of the Kulina language proposed by SIL missionaries (Adams 1962; Boyer and Boyer 2018), and later adopted by CIMI missionaries (Silva and Monserrat 1984). As he explains, the SIL spelling system is based on the Peruvian Kulina dialect, whereas most Kulina are Brazilian and speak slightly differently (p. 13). Moreover, employing the SIL’s writing system would be tantamount to endorsing a colonial and hegemonic literacy process of which missionary organizations are promoters (ibid.). The result is the adoption of an alternative writing system that closely aligns with, without being identical to, those proposed by German linguist Stefan Dienst (2014) and, somewhat paradoxically given the above, German Lutheran missionary Frank Tiss (2004).

In the rest of the introduction, Pollock describes the bureaucratic and fortuitous circumstances that led him to work with the Kulina despite his initial plans to work with the Karajá (p. 6), and recounts the conditions in which he and his wife lived in the Kulina village of Maronaua (p. 8-10). He also offers some admirably honest reflections on the limitations of his fieldwork, mainly due to language barriers and challenges in social integration (p. 11-12). From the outset, the author declares that the collection might seem “a bit random” (p. 5). While this may hold true upon first glance, a close reading will reveal that at least three central themes emerge, interconnect, and traverse most of the articles comprising the book: kinship, shamanism, and gender.

Kinship is essentially analyzed through what Pollock calls the “paradox of siblingship” (p. 22), a formula employed to underscore the issues arising from the cognatic and simultaneously endogamous nature of Kulina social groups. These groups are ideally characterized by metaphorical siblingship among all members (p. 23), which, according to Pollock, raises the following dilemma when it comes to marriage: “What does it mean to be a spouse to one who is a sibling?” (ibid.). The Kulina dodge the problem thanks to the bifurcation between parallel and cross relatives made possible by their Dravidian kinship terminology (p. 22-25). Hence, the coexistence of two models of social organization, one socio-centric and cognatic, the other ego-centric and Dravidian, allows for non-incestuous reproduction by extracting affinity from a general substratum of underlying “siblingship.” According to Pollock, the former model is more ideologically significant and encompasses the latter. Consequently, the author concludes that for the Kulina, consanguinity encompasses affinity, and not the other way around, as it has been more generally argued for Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 2001). In other words, the Kulina do not make “kin out of others” (Vilaça 2002), but rather “others out of kin” (Lepri 2005; p. 27).

Yet none of the above implies that the “paradox of siblingship” can be resolved. On the contrary, it is destined to persist and manifest itself continually in various ways and areas of social life (p. 131). Furthermore, the tension inherent in being simultaneously “siblings” and potential affines appears to be, in one way or another, a driving force in social life, at least for the purposes of the author’s anthropological analysis. Indeed, in Pollock’s work, several aspects of Kulina social life can be boiled down to this paradox, or interpreted through it. It is the case, for instance, of certain acts of physical violence such as ritual whipping and various knife games that cause bloody wounds. These, besides being interpreted in a psychoanalytic key as the expression of “displaced Oedipal feelings” (p. 121), are also interpreted as collective expressions of the tension produced by the “paradox” (p. 131). Sorcery, for its part, embodies a dimension of the same paradox insofar as it is to shamanic healing what affinity is to consanguinity: just as siblings can become affines through marriage, benevolent shamans can potentially turn into sorcerers (p. 207). This becomes tangible when read against local theories of conception and reproduction. Pollock contends that Kulina theories of partible paternity (Pollock 2002), by enlarging the circle of siblings, also increase the risk of potential “intrusions” by affines, namely potential sorcerers (p. 221-222).

Whereas, as just illustrated, Pollock’s analyses link the “dark side” (Whitehead and Wright 2004) of shamanism, namely sorcery, to kinship, so they associate its contrasting counterpart, healing shamanism, with gender. Notably, this association between shamanism and gender was not commonly established when Pollock made his original proposal (Langdon 1992). His research underscores how women play a crucial role in shamanic healing rituals despite never assuming the role of shamans, which is an exclusively male prerogative (p. 49-50). This is because Kulina notions of personhood and illness are structured upon a framework of gendered dichotomies revolving around two key poles: the pole of masculine “wildness” and the pole of feminine “sociability” (p. 81). The former is associated with sperm, the pathogenic but power-giving shamanic substance called dori, hunting, raw food, the forest, and asocial and immoral behavior such as anger, violence, and hostility (p. 48, 81). By contrast, the latter is associated with milk, gardening, cooked food, the village space, and socially and morally appropriate conduct (ibid.). Illness therefore emerges as an imbalance between these two poles, or rather as the “improper intrusion of antisocial wildness into the life of the village” (p. 50). Recovery from illness is achieved through a rebalancing permitted by “the intervention of women who are able to tame or socialize” (ibid.) the destabilizing inputs of wildness (ibid.). Such intervention essentially materializes in the symbolic offering of cooked food to the shaman’s auxiliary spirits, who, in exchange, will expel the “wild” elements from the ill (p. 48).

For Pollock, it is no coincidence that mediation occurs through the symbolic offer of food: he highlights how all major Kulina rituals are based on the same structure, namely the offering (real or symbolic) of food to the men by the women, to which the men reciprocate by handling the wild substances (p. 49). The author thus suggests that food, and the ways in which it is exchanged and consumed, “constitute a kind of semiosis of maleness and femaleness for Kulina” (p. 49; Pollock 1985b). Moreover, without there being space to address this argument in depth, Pollock argues that food and consumption are also, and more generally, the mediating vector between the living and the dead (p. 59-66). This is how he interprets Kulina eschatological beliefs, according to which the dead would be eaten in the underworld by white-lipped peccaries, which would then become “the spirits of dead Kulina” (p. 62). These, once called back to earth by shamans, are hunted and eaten by the Kulina, thereby becoming the “souls or spirits” of the living Kulina (ibid.).

At this point, it is necessary to take a step back and, following Pollock, examine the implications of the Kulina’s use of concepts such as “wild” and “sociable” when speaking of persons. These are in fact metaphors of social conduct, meaning that the state of health of the person, namely the proper balance between these two concepts, is nothing more than the state of social harmony. Pollock’s perspective suggests that Kulina illness is less about the physiological state of the body, and more a manifestation of social tensions, conflicts, and distress. This would be proven by the fact that, in his field data, illness always arises following social conflicts of various kinds, even though the Kulina people themselves do not recognize this connection (p. 90). In the light of this, Pollock argues that it is more apt to interpret illness as a disruption in the social order, rather than as the “individual experience of sickness” (p. 99). Further supporting this view is his observation of curing rituals being performed in the absence of ill persons (p. 99-100; Conklin 1996). In conclusion, as he states, “illness among the Kulina is not merely a social commentary on bodily states and processes, it is also a kind of commentary bodies and spirits make on social processes” (p. 107).

While these themes constitute the bulk of the volume, Shamans and Siblings also addresses other topics, albeit less systematically. One article examines Kulina ethnicity and identity politics, offering a tentative history of their evolution throughout the 20th century (p. 137-167). This history is characterized by a shift towards emphasizing “territoriality” over language and culture as the primary basis for political claims. Furthermore, Pollock explores the topic of consciousness through an analysis of certain “intoxicating substances” used by the Kulina in both ritual and everyday life, such as ayahuasca, alcohol, and tobacco (p. 169-202). He argues that these substances serve as a means for experiencing and appropriating alterity, given the outmost importance of a “political economy of otherness in the indigenous world of western Amazonia” (p. 170).

It is likely that fierce readers and connoisseurs of Amazonian ethnographic literature will already be acquainted with the work that Pollock presents in this book. Yet its publication is certainly welcome, and will undoubtedly be of great use to anyone wishing to familiarize themselves with the study of Amazonian societies and, in particular, Arawan-speaking ones such as the Kulina. Although the author’s desire to republish his older works without substantial reworking is clearly stated in the introduction, the book would have probably benefited from a more thorough editorial work. One particularly feels the lack of a more general conclusive reflection that ties the various articles together in the light of the debates and innovations that have shaped Amazonian anthropology and Arawan studies since the original publication date of the articles republished here (e.g. Santos and Aparicio 2016). This would have allowed the author’s contributions to be put into perspective, and provided less experienced readers with some guidance.

3 SIL missionnaires, on the other hand, have been working with Peruvian Kulina since 1953 until 2018, (...) 11This does not detract from the ethnological importance of the book for the study of Arawan-speaking people, and of the Kulina more specifically, which must be evaluated also from an historical perspective. Indeed, at the time Pollock began his fieldwork, the Kulina had not been the subject of much anthropological research. With the exception of Isabelle Rüf, who spent eight months among the Peruvian Kulina of Zapote (Ucayali) in 1968 but published only one article based on her fieldwork (Rüf 1972) before leaving anthropology for a career as a literary critic, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who in 1978 spent two months in two Kulina villages in Brazil (Acre), including Maronaua itself, in order to write a report for FUNAI (Viveiros de Castro 1978) before devoting his career to the Araweté, Donald Pollock was the first professional ethnographer to work consistently on the Kulina.3 Indeed, his doctoral thesis (Pollock 1985c), in which some of the themes developed in the articles of the book are already addressed, was both the first on the Kulina and the first on an Arawan-speaking society. Shamans and Siblings thus bears witness to the genesis of professional Kulina ethnography.