“The illness of the world”: Bainwa shamanism against the pandemic

Abstract

This article explores how a healer (iñapakaita), Afonso Fontes, a Baniwa man of the Hoohodene clan, searches for a shamanic incantation against an unknown disease: Covid-19. The iñapakaita's quest is understood to be inventive, in terms of Wagnerian dialectics (2010), because it derives from his knowledge of the cosmos, of mythical and actual worlds, of non-human and human, and of indigenous and non-indigenous. The analysis of the verbal formulas contained in Afonso's incantation against the coronavirus describes their compositional character, making explicit the perspectives from which they are constituted, as well as the shamanic agency in reordering the cosmos. Finally, starting from a shamanic critique, the article speculates on the emergence of illnesses as connected to other collapses and associated with the way of life of non-indigenous people in the Anthropocene.

Keywords:
Baniwa; Northwest Amazon; Shamanism; Pandemic; Anthropocene