Abstract
The Amazon region of the lower Oiapoque River, located on the border between Brazil and French Guiana, houses at least four Indigenous peoples: the Palikur-Arukwayene, Galibi-Marworno, Galibi-Kali’na, and Karipuna. Different Christian churches are present among them, the oldest being the Catholic Church, whose presence in the region dates back to the eighteenth century. The Seventh-day Adventist Church and two Evangelical Christian denominations, the Baptist Church and the Pentecostal Church Assembly of God, arrived in the region after the 1960s. This chapter will describe how the Indigenous peoples living in this region take ownership of the Christian churches present among them through shamanism, by either direct practice (in rituals, healing therapies or use of techniques) or a more diffuse shamanic notion present within the churches, especially in the form of ecstatic phenomena. The discussion here will show the centrality of the body (a highly transformational notion of body) in defining the different Christianities expressed by the indigenous peoples, as well as its central role in the relationship between these Christianities and the shamanic practices.
I would like to thank the book’s editor for their careful readings. I am also grateful for the readings by Ronaldo de Almeida and Oiara Bonilla, which helped to smooth out some edges. I emphasize that any inaccuracies are my sole responsibility. This research was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant n. 2019/18255-1.
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Notes
- 1.
In general terms, a white table is a religious doctrine that involves communication between the physical and spiritual worlds, directed by a guide and conducted around a table. A regulated form of this practice is present in Spiritism, but it is an open mediumship ritual that does not depend on religion.
- 2.
Such openness of the body and to different religiosities can be seen when the Karipuna shaman—mentioned in the epigraph of this text and the main character of an event that is ethnographically described below—states that her auxiliary spirits, which she receives into her body at alternating times during a shamanic session, are not all Indigenous and that she herself moves between different healing therapies, such as the white table.
- 3.
The references to shamanism here are not restricted to the specialized work of the shaman, but also include a number of ad hoc practices that involve incantations, blowing, herbal manipulation, among other techniques available to anyone, which constitute a way of dealing with shamanism widespread among the Indigenous peoples of the South American lowlands.
- 4.
Indigenous Land (Terra Indígena or T.I.) is a constitutionally guaranteed legal status which grants Indigenous peoples the permanent possession and exclusive use of the lands they traditionally occupy. The Indigenous Lands of the Oiapoque region (Uaçá I and II, Juminã and Galibi) total just over 500,000 ha.
- 5.
The additional name Arukwayene (people of the Arukwa River) was taken on more recently, marking the place that this people consider their homeland, the Arukwa River, or Urukauá in Portuguese.
- 6.
All data on population are from Enciclopédia dos Povos Indígenas no Brasil, available at https://pib.socioambiental.org/pt/c/quadro-geral, visited on August 14, 2021.
- 7.
For a more thorough reflection on the Christian inter-denominationalism lived by an Amazonian people, see the chapter by Opas in this volume.
- 8.
The Galibi-Kali’na also follow Catholicism; however, like their history in the region, their Catholicism is quite different (cf. Vidal 2000) and would require more space to be addressed.
- 9.
In 1996, I attended a festivity of Saint Mary in the Galibi-Marworno village of Kumarumã. It is based on this experience that I briefly describe its main elements.
- 10.
For a discussion of the main questions about shamanism present in ethnographies of the South American lowlands, see Óscar Calavia Sáez (2018).
- 11.
- 12.
For a history of the El Evangelio movement among other peoples of the Chaco region, see also the chapters in this book by Tola and Robledo and Ceriani Cernadas.
- 13.
The healer is a “shaman by birth.” Antonella Tassinari states that this fact is seen as a sign of the strength and sincerity of the Karipuna shaman (2002, 255–299).
- 14.
According to this protocol, if the local health system is unable to solve a case, the patient is referred to better equipped and specialized places: after the hospital in the capital, Cayenne, the patient may go on to a hospital in the islands of Martinique or Guadeloupe—which, like Guiana, are French overseas departments—or directly to metropolitan France.
- 15.
This island is located in a different Brazilian state, south of the state of Amapá and quite far from the lower Oiapoque River region, which expresses that on the cosmic plane no place is unreachable, as is poetically demonstrated in Kopenawa and Albert’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2013).
- 16.
The notion that it is human action that produces new human beings is a recurring concept in Amazonian literature, the process of conceiving a baby being a strong example of this. Thus, for many peoples, the formation of the baby in the mother’s womb is the result of the continuous injection of semen from the man into the woman throughout the pregnancy (Viveiros de Castro 1986, 437; Gallois 1988, 197; Vilaça 2002, 353; among others). For a more detailed description of the entire process of conception among the Palikur-Arukwayene, see A. Capiberibe (2009, 86–134).
- 17.
These fall into the category of “master-spirits” that the Palikur-Arukwayene call “grandparents” or “ancestors” (-hawkri), which, as Viveiros de Castro proposes, “function as hypostases of the animal species to which they are associated” (2002, 354). On these beings, see also Lesley and David Green (2013) and Lux Vidal (2007).
- 18.
This kind of inversion/subjection is akin to the idea behind the term pamoahiri of the Paumari from the south of the state of Amazonas, which designates the human form of a being—which can be an object, an animal, or a vegetable (cf. Bonilla 2016, 116).
- 19.
In the case of evangelizations undertaken by cross-cultural missions, such “putting to the test” is not a euphemism, as the new is often imposed in a violent and/or disguised way. For a recent reflection on the modus operandi of these missions, see A. Capiberibe (2021).
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Capiberibe, A. (2022). Indigenous Evangelicals, Adventists, and Catholics: Intersections of Christianity and Shamanism on the Brazil/French Guiana Amazonian Border. In: Capredon, É., Ceriani Cernadas, C., Opas, M. (eds) Indigenous Churches. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14494-3_5
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