From the Rubber Boom to Ayawaskha Tourism: Shamanic Initiation Narratives and the Commodification of Amazonia

Autores/as

  • Amanda Mignonne Smith University of California, Santa Cruz

Palabras clave:

Latin American Cultural Studies, Geocriticism, Ayahuasca Literature, Neocolonialism, Literature & Tourism, César Calvo, Manuel Córdova, Spatial Analysis

Resumen

In this article, I examine shamanic initiation narratives, the stories told by urban mestizo shamans in northwest Amazonia to explain their knowledge of Amerindian plant medicine, to illuminate the sociohistorical context in which they emerge. Using a geocritical approach to literary analysis, I interrogate the initiation narrative of renowed Iquitos shaman, Manuel Córdova Ríos, using the work of Peruvian poet César Calvo, the American forester Frank Bruce Lamb, and two local Iquitos publications. I argue that Córdova's narrative served to erase the urban shaman's involvement in the exploitative practices of rubber extraction. In so doing, he reinvented Iquitos and its surroundings as a place of purification, setting the scene for the commodification of shamanic healing in a new extractive cycle of magical plant experiences. The analysis offers a surprising example of the way that narrative shapes the way places are perceived, conceived, and lived.

Biografía del autor/a

Amanda Mignonne Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz

Amanda M. Smith is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a BA in Spanish and an MA in Hispanic Literatures from Michigan State University. She completed her PhD in Spanish & Latin American literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. Her fields of specialization include 20th and 21st-century Latin American literature and culture, with emphasis on the Andean and Amazonian regions, and the relationship between space and cultural production.

Descargas

Publicado

2017-05-24

Cómo citar

Smith, A. M. (2017). From the Rubber Boom to Ayawaskha Tourism: Shamanic Initiation Narratives and the Commodification of Amazonia. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 14(3), 1–22. Recuperado a partir de https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/1474

Número

Sección

Artículos / Articles