South America

Andes; knowledge passed across generations

The Kallawaya live in Bautista Saavedra Province, north of La Paz in Bolivia, in the valleys of the Apolobamba range around the small town of Charazani, at roughly 2,700 to 5,000 metres. Throughout the Andes they are known as travelling healers. According to UNESCO their roots go back to before the Incas, to the Tiwanaku and Mollo cultures. The oldest trace is a tomb at Niño Korin, close to Charazani, from the Tiwanaku period, roughly 600 to 1000 AD. It held snuff trays, tubes interpreted as enema syringes, a mortar and bundles of guayusa leaf that still contained caffeine after all those centuries. That leaf does not grow in the Andes but in the Amazon lowlands. According to the anthropologist Joseph Bastien the tomb also held a skull with three drilled holes around which the bone had grown back: the patient had survived the operation. Under the Incas the Kallawaya held a special place. According to the chronicles they carried the Inca's litter, and the chronicler Guaman Poma drew them doing so at the start of the seventeenth century. The historian Thierry Saignes searched the archives of La Paz, Sucre and Seville for their past. In his view the Kallawaya formed a chiefdom of their own before the Incas, on the eastern flank of the Andes, from the Carabaya and Apolobamba ranges to the warm hills towards the Amazon. Carabaya and Callawaya are two spellings of the same name; the Spaniards later split the area into a Peruvian and a Bolivian half. A Kallawaya chief, Ari Capaquiqui, is said to have found the Inca the way to the lowlands of the 'Chunchos' and was allowed to travel in a litter himself in return. Strikingly, no chronicler mentions the Kallawaya as healers. Only in 1766 did the canon Martín Landaeta describe men from Charazani who crossed the whole viceroyalty with sacks of resins, incense and medicinal herbs. Saignes therefore thinks the travelling healers arose only in colonial times, perhaps not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1889 the department of La Paz sent a list of the plants of the 'Callahuaya' to the World's Fair in Paris. Around 1900 healers from Chajaya and Curva travelled on foot, by train and by boat as far as Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Peru, and according to tradition some treated workers for malaria and yellow fever during the building of the Panama Canal. The French ethnographer Louis Girault heard that these were seven men from Khanlaya, who travelled through Peru and Ecuador and by steamer along the Colombian coast to Panama and stayed a few months. Stories that Kallawaya healed people in Tokyo, Paris or Rome, even a pope, his informants called inventions, although they did not mind them going round. As doctors and pharmacies spread during the twentieth century, the healers were opposed: some were arrested, others dismissed as witch doctors. In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed the "Andean cosmovision of the Kallawaya" a masterpiece of intangible heritage, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the representative list.

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An ancient Guaraní drink; shared today across parts of South America

The Guaraní have lived for centuries in the area of present-day Paraguay, north-eastern Argentina, southern Brazil and parts of Bolivia. Their language, Guaraní, is an official language in Paraguay alongside Spanish and is spoken by most of the population. Long before the Europeans arrived, the Guaraní drank an infusion of the leaves of maté (Ilex paraguariensis), ka’a in Guaraní. They used it as a drink, as a remedy and in rituals. In the seventeenth century Jesuits set up mission villages in this region, the reducciones, where Guaraní lived and worked. The Jesuits succeeded in cultivating maté, which until then had only been gathered in the wild, and sold the leaves throughout South America as “Jesuit tea”. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled, but maté drinking remained.

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Centuries-old knowledge; the machi still heals today

The Mapuche, 'people of the land', are the largest Indigenous people of Chile and also live in Argentina. Their land lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, with temperate rainforests, lakes and volcanoes. For a long time the Mapuche lived from a mix of small gardens, livestock, fishing and gathering. They cleared and burned a patch of forest for a garden and moved on when the soil was exhausted. What the forest, the coast and the mountains provided was at least as important as the harvest: fruits, nuts, roots, mushrooms, seaweed and wild grains. Spanish chroniclers often overlooked this gathering, because they paid attention mainly to farming. The Mapuche resisted the Spanish for centuries. After the great uprising of 1598, the land south of the Biobío River remained independent, and the Spanish crown made treaties with them. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Chile and Argentina conquer their land. The Mapuche were confined to small plots, the reducciones. Moving around was no longer possible, and much of the forest they gathered from disappeared. Their language and medicine were suppressed for a long time. Yet the medicine survived. The machi, the lawentuchefe and the midwives kept working, often in secret and alongside Chilean health care.

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Thousands of years; hundreds of peoples with their own knowledge

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. It stretches across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Hundreds of Indigenous peoples live there, each with its own language and its own knowledge of the forest. People have lived here for at least ten thousand years. They also changed the forest: they grew cassava, palms and fruit trees and made fertile black earth, terra preta. In the western Amazon, in present-day Ecuador, cacao was used more than five thousand years ago. After the arrival of the Europeans many people died from disease and violence. Around 1900 the rubber boom again took a heavy toll: in some areas whole peoples were forced into labour and massacred.

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Roots in the Moche culture (100–800); a living tradition

Northern Peru runs from the coastal desert around Trujillo, Chiclayo and Piura through dry forest and mountains into the Amazon. Few regions in the world have such a rich medicinal flora. The Peruvian anthropologist Lupe Camino called the north part of the 'health axis' of the Andes, an area from southern Ecuador to northern Bolivia where healers have long gathered and traded plants. The tradition is old. Archaeologists have found remains of the San Pedro cactus at sites that are thousands of years old. The Moche, who lived on this coast between about 100 and 800, depicted healers on their pottery, as well as the San Pedro and the seeds of cabalonga and of ishpingo. Remains of such plants have been found in the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, a Moche ruler. Moche pottery also shows a mysterious, comma-shaped fruit with a large calyx, which researchers call ulluchu. It hangs from the belts of warriors and messengers and floats around priests and sacrificial scenes, and real fruits have been found in graves. Nobody knows for certain which plant it is. Bussmann and Sharon think of a Guarea, an Amazonian tree whose seeds contain poisonous alkaloids, and suspect that the Moche used them in sacrifices and perhaps as a snuff. That is a hypothesis not yet confirmed by chemical analysis. The name is uncertain too: the archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle used it in the 1930s, but it does not appear in the dictionaries of Mochica. After the Spanish conquest, Indigenous medicine blended with Catholicism and with Spanish ideas about illness. In the 1780s Bishop Baltasar Martínez Compañón of Trujillo had everything in his diocese described and painted, including the useful plants. According to the botanist Rainer Bussmann and the anthropologist Douglas Sharon, about 40 per cent of those plants are still sold in the coastal markets. A third is now used only in the Amazon, and the rest fell out of use. At the same time many new plants were added. In their view, healers in Peru could experiment more freely than in Ecuador, where traditional medicine was persecuted for a long time.

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In the Sibundoy valley in southern Colombia for centuries; a living tradition

The Sibundoy valley lies at more than two thousand metres in the Andes of the Putumayo department, in southern Colombia. To the east the mountains drop steeply to the Amazon lowland. Two peoples have lived side by side there for centuries. The Kamëntšá, also called Camsá, speak a language related to no other. The Inga speak Inga Kichwa, a form of Quechua. That language may have come with the Incas or later with the missionaries, and the Inga see themselves as related to the Incas. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the 1960s Capuchin missionaries governed the valley. They took much of the land of the Kamëntšá and Inga, made them work for the mission and fought their customs. Yet the knowledge of the healers survived. The healers of Sibundoy are called taitas. Throughout Colombia they are known as travelling herbalists who sell plants and treat patients in the markets of Bogotá, Pasto and Quito. From the 1940s the botanist Richard Evans Schultes worked in the valley with the Kamëntšá taita Salvador Chindoy. His relative Pedro Chindoy also became known far beyond the valley.

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In the Vaupés in the northwest Amazon; a living tradition

In the northwest Amazon, along the Vaupés, the Apaporis, the Pirá Paraná and their tributaries, on the border of Colombia and Brazil, live the Tukano peoples. They speak related languages of the Tukanoan family: the Tukano themselves, who call themselves ye'pâ-masa, and the Desana, Barasana, Makuna, Wanano, Kubeo and others. A man marries a woman from a group with another language. As a result children grow up with their father's language, their mother's and often more, and several languages are heard in a single maloca, the great communal house. According to their stories the first people came from the Milky Way in a canoe drawn by an anaconda: a man and a woman with three plants, manioc, coca and yajé. On their way upstream they founded the places of the peoples. At the mouth of the Pirá Paraná in the Apaporis, close to the equator, a large rock engraving marks the place where they arrived. From the nineteenth century traders, missionaries and above all rubber seekers came into the region. The German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who lived there from 1903 to 1905, found abandoned villages on his return and wrote about murder and abuse by the rubber barons. Yet much of the Vaupés stayed inhabited by the peoples themselves, protected by waterfalls and rapids.

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