O Rio e a Floresta: articulações Huni kuin — Rio de Janeiro-Ayahuasca
Maicon Fecher, Elizabeth Pissolato
Revista do Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro June 6, 2019 DOI: 10.65625/qdf6m345 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Ethnography Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Huni Kuin ayahuasca masters (txanas/shamans) and Rio de Janeiro residents participating in nixi pae rituals |
| Topics | Ayahuasca |
| Key findings | Argues that exchanges between Huni Kuin ayahuasca practitioners and urban cariocas since the 2000s have transformed forest knowledge into a relational process, reshaping culture and generating alliances and controversies, with the city acting as an agent that blurs boundaries between forest and urban worlds. |
Abstract
This paper approaches the relationship that has been built since 2000’s among ayahuasca Huni Kuin masters (Western Amazon) — singers (txanas) or shamans — and locals from Rio de Janeiro city that are interested in the set of knowledges mediated by that and other forest medicines. We briefly follow up the relationship between Huni Kuin indigenous people and ayahuasca religions in Acre 1990’s years and the culture revival process that originated the shamanism-centered Pano festivals and presence of visitors from the urban centers to village. Next, we approach the rituals of nixi pae that happen in Rio de Janeiro and in the vicinity and their unfolding in alliances and creative experiments involving personal trajectories Huni Kuin and cariocas. In this process of comings and goings, the knowledge of the forest becomes the relation with other knowledge, the culture assumes new contours, multiplies controversies and gets representation by indigenous and non-indigenous in the city. The city itself, an important actor or actante (LATOUR, 2012) in the processes under way, makes its borders leak, multiplies connections between the forest and the city, sets in motion subjects and their worlds.