433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

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5). Second, there is too much evidence linking suffering to transgression and punishment in Matsigenka belief to justify leaving good and evil out of our description altogether. Matsigenka stories portray many sin-like behaviors (rage, greed, lust, envy), the bad consequences of which cause human suffering. If the sufffering is not unambiguously punishment for sin, it is at least the price of indulgence. In this sense, most Matsigenka folktales are morality tales. Early in fieldwork this moralistic side to Matsigenka character and culture largely escaped me. I wondered if I had come to a place where people had no concern with sin or with spirituality: Fieldnote 9-26-72 - People are quiet and largely unobtrusive, going about their business without displays. They paint their faces, but do so with a lack of ritual or careful design. Life does not seem to be imbued with the sacred, rather, the sacred and profane are not apparent to us yet. Without the elaboration of art and ritual, we feel they are less primitive (in the anthropological sense) than they really are. When I tried to explore the magical and mystical underpinnings of everyday reality, I found my informants prefering to give me ordinary explanations. Some of this was a reluctance to be open about spiritual beliefs, having been criticized for them by other virakochas, and being characteristically secretive about them. But part of it also reflects a real substrate of practical materialism (in the philosophical meaning of the term) in Matsigenka outlook, where many things just happen--a branch falls and breaks a man’s arm, a raft overturns in the river and a woman drowns, a child is bitten by a maiini ant--without any suspicion of spiritual causation. Farabee (1909: 128-9) long ago remarked on the absence of ritual and ceremonial among the Matsigenka. Because of their lack of ceremony with the dead--simply throwing the corpse in the river--he came to the conclusion that they have no fear of the dead, indeed, “no 462
elief in ghosts or in the return of the soul,” a startlingly erroneous conclusion. That he completely missed the richness of Matsigenka spiritual beliefs discounts his value as an ethnographic resource, but I have to sympathize. In this aspect of their lives, as in many others, they do not wear their hearts (or their souls) on their sleeves. In time I learned to appreciate how filled their world is with spiritual forces and beings. Despite the absence of public spectacle characteristic of many family level societies, the spiritual is potentially lurking almost anywhere, and can be activated suddenly and without warning. Most prominent and dramatic are spirit-beings that are, in effect, humans with exaggerated attributes and life-and-death powers. But there are also less personified powers or processes that might be called “magical forces,” roughly transitional between the materialistic world of mere matter and the personalized world of spirit beings. Magical Force: Accidents and Taboos. The first encounter I had with any Matsigenka spirit belief was when I tried to measure Javier’s garden and he refused, standing arms akimbo at his garden entrance, bow and arrows in hand. Simply by setting foot in his garden while the maize was in its vulnerable stage, I would have, without wanting or intending to, endangered his whole maize crop. Anyone who ate certain kinds of meat (especially howler monkey, shito monkey, deer, anteater, and charava fish) after helping him plant his maize would also bring about magical harm, but only to the maize plants the meat-eater himself had planted. This is typical of a host of mechanical magical effects that just automatically happen when someone breaks a taboo deliberately or even innocently by accident. Although no willful spirit is blamed for the harm, there has been a kind of disobedience or carelessness at fault, implying that punishment has taken place. Hunting is a major focus of magical concern, and loss 463
Page 1 and 2: Chapter Seven Cosmos Matsigenka rel
Page 3 and 4: egards Tasorintsi as a cover term f
Page 5 and 6: far more quickly than I could write
Page 7 and 8: The Matsigenka world is charged wit
Page 9 and 10: Words for smell are often built fro
Page 11 and 12: until the desired number (less than
Page 13 and 14: As I worked in field and forest wit
Page 15 and 16: whose hard outer wood is used in ma
Page 17 and 18: classificatory principle, I was tol
Page 19 and 20: very narrow scope. For example, shi
Page 21 and 22: of about 20 cm in length, whereas o
Page 23 and 24: east stomach heart liver intestines
Page 25 and 26: courteous but distant. They saw the
Page 27 and 28: that the badness of others is linke
Page 29: worlds, a material world and an “
Page 33 and 34: (shamans). Since both of the latter
Page 35 and 36: all my skills, knowledge and aspira
Page 37 and 38: (Baer 1979: 110-111). Itinkame look
Page 39 and 40: and came home. That night the serip
Page 41 and 42: pepper is to prevent another snake
Page 43 and 44: “You must spin now,” her mother
Page 45 and 46: leaned the tubers against the wall,
Page 47 and 48: come. But you said, ‘Eat her!’
Page 49 and 50: humans like game or seek them as sp
Page 51 and 52: A smaller number of animals, but st
Page 53 and 54: will kill you so that you cannot pr
Page 55 and 56: garden here. Now, never go upstream
Page 57 and 58: different now, not like the brother
Page 59 and 60: (Shepard 1998: 323-24). If we retur
Page 61 and 62: illness, and acquire guides for the
Page 63 and 64: In the folktale, Shintori “Peccar
Page 65 and 66: A seripigari is seen as a powerful
Page 67 and 68: wear shining armor and carry large
Page 69 and 70: Commands are issued over and over w
Page 71 and 72: cannot escape the human dilemma of
Page 73 and 74: Matsigenka religion is based on spl
Page 75 and 76: she will grow up to be one of those

433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

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