Conscious Choice: The Flip Side of the Rainforest

June 1999

The Flip Side of the Rainforest

by Jonn Salovaara

In case you thought native people untouched by civilization were always idyllic hunters, farmers, and shamans, Mark Andrew Ritchie presents an exception to that rule, in Spirit of the Rainforest. He does this à la Gertrude Stein, writing an "autobiography" of a Yanomamö shaman named Jungleman, who died in 1994. All the incidents in the story, says Ritchie, were relayed to him personally on his six visits to Amazonas over a period of 13 years.

Ritchie prefaces the story with a warning: "The story you are about to read is graphic in its portrayal of certain violent scenes. Though these are rare, they will certainly be too brutal for sensitive readers. Please do not make the mistake of taking this warning lightly." Indeed, the violence, which starts with one village against another, combines wholesale slaughter of warriors with rape and torture of women and children.

This violence, at least as depicted by Ritchie, is not the result of European influence. Rather, it seems to stem from Yanomamö ideas about spirits and their role in causing death, ideas inspired at least in part by snorting a mind-bending powder called ebene. When deaths from disease occur in a village, the assumption is that they were caused by spirits working with individuals in a different village. The relatives of those who died get revenge by raiding the "responsible" village. Intoxication by ebene not only permits warriors to "know" who is to blame for deaths in their own villages; it emboldens them to claim responsibility for natural deaths in other villages. So the cycle of misery and violence, raids and counter-raids, is in something like perpetual motion. Those familiar with the Balkans, Rwanda, and inner-city gangs will recognize some similarities.

Enter non-indigenous anthropologists, doctors, missionaries, and adventurers of one kind or another, all of whom advocate giving up the spirits and the trouble they cause — while introducing new items of trade and new weapons. On the one hand, the Yanomamö want the "nabas" to come live in their villages, to bring goods and to teach them a way out of their misery and violence, on the other hand, not all of these nabas are exactly scrupulous. Some of them cause as many problems as they solve.

As John F. Peters, Ph.D., remarks, this is "a story that opens the psyche of the Yanomamö like no other book." You will come to feel that you know this shaman, that you have lived his life with him, and that you have begun to understand the dilemma his people face for their future.

Note: Ritchie, when he isn’t writing and traveling, is a commodities trader who resides in Wauconda, Illinois. All royalties from the sale of this book go to the Yanomamö people.

Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamö Shaman’s Story, by Mark Andrew Ritchie, 1996, Island Lake Press: Chicago, IL, 271 pages, $14.95 paper.

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