Exploring therapeutic and environmental processes with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia
This project, conducted with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia, explores how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes, particularly amidst environmental crises caused by extractivist policies. My research questions include: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health? This project focuses on traditional healers’ embodied attunements with more-than-human environmental relations, in alignment with Indigenous Andean-Amazonian philosophies and kinworlds. Given our current planetary milieu of environmental crises, probing the impacts of environmental change through expanding broader frameworks of ecologies of mind (Bateson 2000) and notions of health and healing to include larger environmental and psychosocial relations is a timely intervention.
Report:
I carried out preliminary fieldwork in Bolivia from May to August 2023, consisting of interviews with traditional healers in the Andean-Amazonian traditions and participant observation of their therapeutic practices. My goal was to explore how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes. My other research questions included: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health?
In the Andean capital of La Paz, I made trips to the sacred mountain sites of Guaqui and Pajchiri together with traditional Aymara healers for the purpose of conducting sacred rituals and offerings. These healers, locally known as yatiris or amautas (in Aymara and Quechua, respectively), traverse richly interconnected psychic, social, and ecological worlds where the permission and ability to heal is sourced from ancestors, earth beings, healing plants and their spirits cultivated through lifelong, reciprocal relationalities. In my findings, the importance of environmental processes to these healers was very clear – various environmental disruptions ranging from natural events such as eclipses to anthropogenic wildfires were interpreted as having negative impacts on human health and well-being. I also realized that it could be important to study the role of social media in influencing environmental knowledge and awareness. When I asked the healers where they got their information from, most said through social media. Many have also started sharing popular posts about environmental destruction in Bolivia through Whatsapp or Facebook stories, where they can reach many of their clients and followers. For my subjects, especially the younger ones in their mid-20s who identified as Indigenous, recuperating traditional spiritual practices was an important part of their identity, and they did not feel particularly aligned or connected to the state.
In Riberalta, a city in the Northeastern Bolivian Amazon, I conducted participant observation and interviews with an elderly Tacana shaman. He took me into the forest garden that is his backyard, and although it looked no different from a wild forest trail to my untrained eye, it is a carefully cultivated apothecary of medicinal trees and plants. I was reminded of a saying that I have heard from healers many times, “cada planta tiene su medicina” (every plant can be used as medicine). The healer and his community, who identify as non-indigenous campesino (peasant), rely on traditional knowledge of local plants for their health, livelihoods, and well-being. He also described to me how he came to learn the uses for plants while he was apprenticing under a senior healer. He described how plant spirits wearing white lab coats took him to a space he called a hospital, with gleaming walls and bright lights, where they showed him how various plants could be used to cure different illnesses. This seems consistent with mestizo shamanistic practices in the Amazonian region (Beyer 2009). It reinforced the close and reciprocal relationships that healers share with earth beings, and their vulnerability to ecological damage from extractivism.
I also found that it is comparatively more difficult to find traditional healers in the Amazon region. Speaking generally across Bolivia, the Aymara and Quechua communities in the Andean region have generally preserved cultural practices better. Officially, there are over thirty recognized indigenous peoples in the lowland Amazon region, but the majority are small and fractured communities due to regional histories of rupture and displacement, and it is more challenging to find communities that still have traditional healers actively working and practicing medicine. The role of regional histories of displacement should be foregrounded in this research to explain any potential gaps or absences in this regard.
One unforeseen obstacle to my fieldwork was scheduling difficulties with my subjects. While this might seem like a very basic fieldwork issue, it was arguably the biggest challenge to my fieldwork plans that I faced. The traditional healers are, by nature of their skill and work, very busy and in demand by clients, in addition to the demands of both regular family life and spiritual life. They don’t really operate on set schedules. Even if I have made an agreed-upon appointment in advance for an interview, our plans often would get shelved multiple times (e.g. due to a client emergency, or if they suddenly got called spiritually to travel to a faraway sacred site), which then made it difficult to schedule interviews with other subjects, too. Furthermore, in Bolivia, August is considered a sacred month when Pachamama (Mother Earth) is open to receiving ritual offerings, which meant that healers were constantly busy with clients. As a result, I managed to interview only ten traditional healers and their associates, which is at the low end of my goal. This illustrated the shortcomings of being limited to a short few months for summer fieldwork. This would not be as much of an issue with longer-term research of a year, for example, and I was forced to come up with alternative strategies, such as making up for a relative lack of interviews by spending more time doing participant observation during rituals, or renting a room in the house of a different healer, who was able to spend more time conversing with me during mealtimes or evenings. Although I had only planned to carry out fieldwork for two months, I ended up extending it to three months to make up for these scheduling difficulties.