Dark Shamans: Kanaima and the Poetics of Violent Death

by Neil L. Whitehead

On the little-known and darker side of shamanism there exists an ancient form of sorcery called kanaimà, a practice still observed among the Amerindians of the highlands of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil that involves the ritual stalking, mutilation, lingering death, and consumption of human victims. At once a memoir of cultural encounter and an ethnographic and historical investigation, this book offers a sustained, intimate look at kanaimà, its practitioners, their victims, and the reasons they give for their actions.

Neil L. Whitehead tells of his own involvement with kanaimà—including an attempt to kill him with poison—and relates the personal testimonies of kanaimà shamans, their potential victims, and the victims’ families. He then goes on to discuss the historical emergence of kanaimà, describing how, in the face of successive modern colonizing forces—missionaries, rubber gatherers, miners, and development agencies—the practice has become an assertion of native autonomy. His analysis explores the ways in which kanaimà mediates both national and international impacts on native peoples in the region and considers the significance of kanaimà for current accounts of shamanism and religious belief and for theories of war and violence.

Kanaimà appears here as part of the wider lexicon of rebellious terror and exotic horror—alongside the cannibal, vampire, and zombie—that haunts the western imagination. Dark Shamans broadens discussions of violence and of the representation of primitive savagery by recasting both in the light of current debates on modernity and globalization.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Spirituality, History, Witchcraft

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2002

Reviews

[Ian]

I won’t deny that the sinister sounding title of this book initially attracted my attention, though at the same time the subtitle nearly put me off – The Poetics of Violent Death – what the heck did that even mean? It was perhaps foolish to try and read a book where I didn’t even understand the subtitle, but I pressed ahead anyway.

As the blurb suggests, kanaimà is a form of shamanism that exists amongst Amerindian peoples in the northeastern part of the Amazon basin. Its practitioners carry out murders, followed by a form of cannibalism of the victim’s corpse. The term kanaimà is used both for the practice itself and the practitioners. Not every kanaimà murder follows the full ritual, but where they are able to do so, the killers first overpower the victim and tie them up, after which the person is subjected to a prolonged and agonising death, with extensive mutilation. A lot more detail is provided in the book, but I’m not going into it in this review. On reading it my first thought was the expression, “Like something out of a horror film”, but as I read on I realised that no horror film could even approach the reality of kanaimà, as it’s described in this book.

The author lived amongst a people called the Patamuna, located in the interior of Guyana. He comments that kanaimà has not been much studied. One reason is simply that it’s dangerous to do so. The author himself nearly died from poison, that he suspected was administered by a kanaimà. Another reason is that it doesn’t fit with westernised ideas of shamanism, “oriented to the supposed psychic and physical benefits that shamanic techniques can bring”. The author argues that this represents “a recapitulation of colonial ways of knowing through a denial of radical cultural difference…”

That last quote illustrates one aspect of the book, the text of which switches between descriptions of kanaimà and academic discussion of it. The author notes that “Kanaimàs appear as hypertraditionalists, that is, as rejecting the tokens of modernity such as metal tools, guns, matches and particularly, clothing.” He continues by describing kanaimà as “an aspect of native self-affirmation in the face of a colonizing modernity” and “an authentic and legitimate form of cultural expression”. Hmmm. Would the victims feel that way, I wonder? At the same time, I can imagine that Patamuna society, taken as whole, might accept kanaimà as part of their world.

The author uses a lot of academic style jargon in the book, but he probably didn’t envisage it being read by laypersons such as myself.

I did feel, at the end of the book, that I was still a bit confused about kanaimà and its relationship with other local aspects of shamanism, such as one he called piya. The latter is a form of “curing” shamanism that mostly stands apart from kanaimà, but the boundary does not seem to be impermeable. The motivations around kanaimà also seem to vary. It may have begun as a form of defensive warfare against more powerful enemies. Sometimes it seems to include a revenge element; sometimes it is used for material and sexual gain; but in its purest form it seems to be pursued simply as a means of gaining shamanic power. It’s a hard concept for the western mind to grasp.

I’ve decided not to give this a rating. The book was a compelling read, but I can’t exactly say that I “liked” it.

[Michele Giacomini · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best recent ethnographic works (2000- onward) I would probably will ever read. Written like an academic and anthropological exploration of the darkest, most violent and by outsiders, for sure, incomprehensible side shown by a portion of humanity, but to be read like a Cosmic Horror tale.

[Elfie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since I had embarked on my own enquiries into shamanism I felt I also needed to look at the dark side. It has been generally accepted that shamans can both heal and harm (although some people like to turn a blind eye to the latter).
Amongst the Patamuna of the Guyana highlands exist three different shamanic practices - piya shamans have both the power to cure and kill, but are primarily sought out for curing; alleluia shamanism which only developed at the end of the 19th century and was influenced by contact with missionaries and kanaimà, the latter being ritual assault sorcery "involving the mutilation and lingering death of its victims and as such clearly involves criminal activity".
Like most shamans practitioners of kanaimà also go through initiation (unless they come from a family that already has a kanaimà member) and training in isolation, they can shape-change and have a great knowledge of plant forms and their magical use and a special affinity with a particular plant spirit (piya shamans and other practitioners of magic also have great plant knowledge, but not this orientation to a plant spirit). However, they only kill and never cure. An origin myth and altogether a world of predatory gods and hungry spirits helps to shed some light onto this dreadful practice and Whitehead explains its historical emergence.

The book is not easy to get through and one may not agree with all, but it is a book that makes you reflect on violence and human malevolence and the fact that both existed and still exist in one form or another throughout time and space.

[Savonna · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you're into anthropology, sociology or psychology or just interested in shamanism I highly recommend this book. It's an ethnography that reads like an H.P. Lovecraft novel. It explores assault sorcery of Kanaima of Amerindian groups in Guyana and how/why ritual violence and death plays a social and cultural role for these groups. As well, it's a historical account of encounters with Kanaima and the latest contemporary Western responses in examination of the concepts of mimesis and alterity in the theatre of Western development being pushed into the Guyanese interior.

[Elton Mesquita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad ("glad" is perhaps too strong a word, considering) that I decided to go against my lifelong prejudice against books subtitled "the poetics of something", because this is one of the most fascinating (and disturbing) works I've ever encountered. In fact I almost think that this bland unimaginative subtitle was chosen as a warding device, something to make your eyes glaze over in boredom and make you return the book to the shelf, thus preserving your innocence and sanity.

What makes this book unique is that it is nothing more than an academic work of anthropology, written within the stylistic constraints of the genre, completely tethered to real world, but if you didn't know it was based on the real-life experiences of its author, the two first chapters ("Introduction" and "The Ethnographer's Tale") could easily pass as a work of horror fiction. It's a study of "kanaimà", a term which describes both an extremely depraved practice of ritual murder and mutilation and its practitioners, which takes place among the indigenous tribes of Guyana and Venezuela near the Brazilian frontier (I won’t describe what these acts of ritual violence entail; suffice to say they would not be allowed to show them in the “Hellraiser” films).

The kanaimàs are humans that learned the use of different plants to acquire superhuman powers, which they use to hunt, torture and kill their victims and later… consume the “sweet” blood of the putrefied corpses. Through the practice of their craft, the kanaimà become mysterious hybrid entities, both mundane (as people with names and addresses who live in the same communities as their victims) and fantastical, that seem to leave a wave of mutilation – sorry, I mean: a miasma of contagion, disease, poison, violence and death in everyone they touch.

Being an ethnographic report, the book naturally falls neatly into the “found literature” genre where much of lovecraftian horror happens (the dry analytical text from diaries, letters and scientific reports through which the story becomes known). It certainly checks a lot of lovecraftian boxes: there’s old reports from European navigators that tell of the first white victims of the strange kanaimà; ancient wood engravings showing natives beset by protean demons; references to "predatory cosmologies" in the origin of the kanaimà killers; 19th century texts describing the region where the story takes place as a “demon landscape” (and much more).

One of the many perverse pleasures the book offers is witnessing the centuries-long ethnographic tradition (with its cartesian underpinning of purported objectivity and precision, its self-questioning gaze, always alert to the slightest whiff of colonialism and prejudice, its implicit program of humanitarianism) marshal all its powers of scrupulousness and categorization as a feeble buffer against an ancient unalloyed evil of a kind that actually elicits from one of the anthropologists the statement: "There are some things better left alone" (another box checked).

After the intensity and pitch-perfect horror vibes of the first two chapters, the book goes into a more subdued tone as it gets somewhat bogged down in the minutia of field work and sociology, where it most closely resembles a normal boring academic work – until a jump scare happens, like the sudden glimpse of a murdered and mutilated child (the kanaimà are not picky eaters), a shotgun blast to the face of a killer, or the story of the poor fellow who became smitten with a girl and married her only to realize afterwards that he had inadvertently married into a family of monsters. Despite the stretches of duller fare (standard sociological explanations and contextualization that never venture away from the accepted postcolonial wisdom and dialectical historicism) where one almost forgets the bleakness of what's being discussed, the book is suffused in an atmosphere of dread and menace that occasionally comes to a head in a bubbling cauldron of paranoia, poisonings, curses, wasting deaths, nocturnal campaigns of terror, hyper sadistic killings and what comes after.

The book follows the prevalent ideological position in the humanities, which veers left, and the author actually says that “kanaimà violence is an authentic and legitimate form of cultural expression (...) mimetically linked to the violence of economic and political ‘development.’”, which elicited a spontaneous chortle from me after everything I had been reading (a welcome humorous relief for which I’m thankful). In its heavier theoretical passages, the book abounds in tired academic shibboleths which I find really hard to take seriously. Kanaimà is even described as a “dialogue with colonizing modernity” at a certain point, which at my most charitable I must liken to the vacant speech of a victim of trauma-inducing shock. In the end, this disconnect between the fantastical and horrible things being described and the matter-of-fact tone in which they are reported creates a strange mood that is both hallucinatory and sinister. In this sense, the book ends up enacting one of the biggest tropes in horror, where we as an audience are fully aware of the danger which the protagonist refuses to acknowledge until it’s too late.

It’s hard to read this book without being reminded of the famous quote by William S. Burroughs: “America is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.” I don’t know if he meant only the US, but the saying certainly applies to the entire continent. In this book, the ancestral South-American forest assumes the sinister character of a diabolist’s temple, its dense canopies serving as a screen under which all sorts of dark traffickings and awful experiments take place since immemorial times (the forest also creates the many different vampiric plants of power that demand their share of the blood of the kanaimà victims).

As pertains to the origins of such extravagance of evil, I’m left with two equally baffling possibilities: either such knowledge was imparted from the other side, by hostile entities that want to debase and violate mankind… or it was developed methodically by trial and error via mere human imagination and intelligence. I don’t know which answer is the more terrifying one.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this study of kanaima, a tradition of ritually-enacted murder practiced by a self-selected class of Amazonian shamans, Whitehead disentangles its cultural significance as the embodiment of cosmological principles of predation from its socio-political appropriation as a practical implement of personal and communal vengeance. At the same time, however, attention is continually returned to the role that its 'vulgar' uses have played in shaping the historical development of kanaima, both as practiced and as imagined. Conceptions of kanaima, both emic and etic – and often belonging to individuals who had (or believed they had) encountered its depredations first-hand – from the 17th century up to the present day, in turn constitute the ethnographic material from which Whitehead constructs his account. This is not a neatly structuralist delineation of a cultural complex, but rather a necessarily complicated and ambiguous presentation of a set of historically-predicated practices which nonetheless legitimates itself by reference to a timeless cycle of violent tribute to the gods themselves.

[Sarah]

Whew! The stuff of nightmares! Sort of made me re-evaluate how interior Guyana does stay, make me just a little bit more apprehensive.... not enough to stay away though!