Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon by Stephan V. Beyer (review)

Steve Beyer has encyclopedic knowledge about Amazonian plant medicine, and his book Singing to the Plants is a must-read on the subject. Beyer covers many important aspects of ayahuasca shamanism: its predatory and ambiguous nature, the scarcity of women practitioners, shamans as performing artists, the mystery at the heart of shamanic performance, and the dangers to which shamans expose themselves. He provides important information about often-neglected plants and trees such as chiric sanango, camalonga, and lupuna. Beyer, himself an apprentice to this shamanic tradition, emphasizes how the human body is an instrument of understanding. Learning from plants means learning to listen to them; as plants speak a language of pure sound, this means learning to sing to them. As Beyer points out, practitioners receive these songs, or icaros, in different ways, and use them for many different purposes. Beyer explains how plant teachers teach their own secrets, such as how to sing to them and how to use them; he underlines the importance of diet, including sexual abstinence, social isolation, and time alone in nature. He also emphasizes self-control as a key trait of shamanic practice, as they stick to their diets and refrain from using their powers for selfish purposes.

To the basic question of how well shamans actually cure sickness, Beyer replies: “The answer is that no one knows” (149). His inquiry is factual and balanced, though he is willing to take more elaborate theoretical positions when required. For example, he states that addressing the question of whether spirits are metaphoric or real requires subverting the dichotomy contained in the question. Beyer also endeavors to consider the existence of several perspectives simultaneously, for example, explaining that from the shamanic perspective, all beings are human, so the claim that shamans turn into jaguars should also be understood to mean that jaguars are already shamans.

In such a detailed study as Beyer’s, one can of course find things to quibble with. For example, his claim that shamans do not drink ayahuasca to heal, but only to obtain information (this would come as a surprise to the practitioners who use it to see illness in the form of darts in patients’ bodies, which they then extract and expulse). Or the fact that Beyer quotes numerous indigenous practitioners, yet calls his study a guide to “mestizo” shamanism. Indigenous versus mestizo shamanism is one more dichotomy in need of subversion, as Beyer indirectly acknowledges by quoting a contemporary Shipibo shaman who says: “Right now in the Amazon, we can’t say that there’s any pure tradition. It’s mixed. Even the indigenous are fusing together different cultural beliefs” (281). Yet Beyer is right to point out that most anthropologists have neglected mestizos, or people of mixed blood.

With Singing to the Plants, Beyer joins an exclusive club of authors who have written important books about ayahuasca shamanism: Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (The Shaman and the Jaguar), Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (Voir, savoir, pouvoir), Luis Eduardo Luna (Vegetalismo), and Benny Shanon (The Antipodes of the Mind). One thing that all of these authors have in common is that they tell us precious little about themselves—in contrast to the slew of recent books about ayahuasca, in which we learn more than we need to know about the person writing the book. With ayahuasca, the subject matter is the self in general, as Benny Shanon has put it; but this does not mean that books about ayahuasca need to tell us all about the self of the author. In Beyer’s case, I was initially relieved not to have to read all about his personal motives and foibles. But I was finally left wondering just how his experience with ayahuasca had impacted him as a person and as a professional. A brief consideration of this would have strengthened the book...