Neither Witches Nor Charlatans

Abstract

As a result of the rapid development of shamanic tourism in Western Amazonia, Shipibo-Konibo women shamans have gained a new visibility. Now hypermediatized, they can easily be found with a few mouse clicks on Google, YouTube or Facebook, featuring prominently in the advertising of tourist retreats specialized in taking ayahuasca ( Colpron 2021 ). This visibility contrasts with the difficulty I had in finding them when I undertook my fieldwork in the early 2000s, researching them to address an empirical gap in the regional ethnographic literature. At the time, the haziness of data on women shamans reflected a situation found in the field, where information about them was hesitant and contradictory. Indeed, it was only after visiting a large portion of the Shipibo-Konibo territory, guided by hearsay, that I met a dozen women shamans ( onánya )—many, I think, were missed by my inquiry due to the difficulty in locating them—and collected first-hand data presented in previous works ( Colpron 2004 , 2005 , 2006 ). The radical turnaround of these women—from invisible to hypermediatized—prompts me to revisit this theme since recent literature attributes their very existence (and not just their visibility) to the impacts of tourism and globalization (Brabec de Mori and Silvano de Brabec 2009, 2014, Herbert 2010 , Slaghenauffi 2019 ). Although tourism has led to a new visibility of Shipibo-Konibo women shamans, it is nonetheless reductive to limit the possibility of shamanism practiced by women to this fact ( Colpron 2021 ). 1