Ash salts and bodily affects: Witoto environmental knowledge as sexual education

This letter is signed by a Witoto elder, Román-Jitdutjaaño, and an anthropologist, Echeverri, who have been working together for many years. Since 1995 our main endeavour has been the study of salt. The Witoto word 'salt' refers to the ash or vegetable salts, rich in potassium, obtained from plants, which are an admixture to the tobacco paste used by the People of the Centre (Witoto and other neighbouring groups who lick tobacco paste) of Northwest Amazonia.

Our attempt has been inter-cultural, meaning by this not so much a combination of different approaches—indigenous and scientific—on the same object (ash salt), but the recognition of the same condition (humanity) through the construction of different objects: an object of the positive sciences, salt, and the object of indigenous knowledge: the human body. An inter-cultural project is above all the construction of a social relation between persons with different capacities and knowledge, where an exchange of substances and services is established to attain some common goal. This relationship is precisely the object of indigenous knowledge: those substances and services—food, tobacco, money, tools—are the salt of the issue. This relation is comparable to the sexual relationship between a married couple, where substances are exchanged and lead to fecundity—the major focus of this knowledge.

From science's perspective the issue of our common research is salt, from the indigenous perspective what matters is the salt of the issue: the project, seen as a human relationship. This letter is about the latter. We want to show how the study of the human condition is carried out through a reading of the plant species that are used to extract ash salt, which are conceived of as coming from the body of the Creator and as an image of the human body.

Plant species show, in a conspicuous manner, bodily processes that are hidden to perception. This reading of the natural entities is meant to guide moral behaviour and develop a healthy, sociable and fertile human body. Quite unlike the knowledge of the objective and empirical sciences, the indigenous knowledge of biodiversity can be conceived of as a sexual education, understood as 'knowledge of the body' , that is, the control and management of bodily humours, affects and capacities, in order to attain fecundity.

By 'body' we do not mean anatomy and physiology, but a 'bunch of affects and capacities', an expression we borrow from Viveiros de Castro (2010) to translate the indigenous concept of 'salt'. We agree with Viveiros de Castro's (1998, 2002) perspectivist theory, which posits that the self is a 'deictic position'—the position of the subject—whose perspective is from the body, not from the spirit. Rather than conceiving of human nature as unique, with multiple human cultures deriving from it—as classic western multiculturalism does—Viveiros asserts that Amerindians would speak of a single (human) culture with multiple bodies and natures—an Amerindian 'multinaturalism'. Furthermore, we draw key inspiration for our analysis from Lévi-Strauss's (1962) ground-breaking work on the 'logic of the concrete', and from Descola's (2005) encyclopaedic discussion of the Amerindian modes of identification, relationship and categorization of natural entities.

The expression People of the Centre encompasses seven ethnolinguistic groups of the Witotoan, Boran and Andoque linguistic stocks, which share a number of cultural traits and have a common social and ceremonial organization (Echeverri 1997, Gasché 2009, Griffiths 1998, Karadimas 2005, Londoño 2012). Their ancestral territory spans the area between the Caquetá and Putumayo Rivers in south-eastern Colombia, along the border with Peru (see figure 1), with a total population of about 10 000 people (DNP 2010). What makes all these people form a single society, in spite of their spatial dispersion and linguistic heterogeneity, is their rich ceremonial order, revolving around the consumption of coca and tobacco and the ritual discourses generically called 'the language of the yard of coca' (see infra section 1). One key trait of the People of the Centre is their licking of tobacco in the form of a thick decoction mixed with ash salts, which is consumed by men and women in daily life and on ritual occasions. Men lick the tobacco paste, generously admixed with ash salts, together with coca powder (Erythroxylum coca var. ipadu; see Echeverri and Pereira 2005).

Zoom In Zoom Out Reset image size

The ash salts are obtained by burning plant material from selected vegetable species, filtering the resulting ashes to lixiviate the salts, and dehydrating the resulting brine to obtain the dried salts. Ash, vegetable or potassium salts, as they are variously called in the literature, are known by many peoples from Central Africa, Oceania and America (Godelier 1969, 1986, Lemonnier 1984, Portères 1950, Prinz 1993, Schultes and Raffauf 1990, Weller et al 1996). Detailed accounts of the technical process to prepare ash salts are reported in Lemonnier (1984), for the Anga people of Papua New Guinea, and in our own work (Echeverri et al 2001) for the Witoto in the Colombian Amazon. There are numerous reports of ash salts having been produced all over South and Central America in the past (see Echeverri et al 2001 for references), but the custom has disappeared in many parts.

Little research has been done on the mineral composition, uses and anthropological relevance of ash salts by the groups that still use it, like the People of the Centre. These people use the same techniques found in other parts of the world to extract vegetable salt. We did our study near the locality of Araracuara in the Caquetá River basin, Colombian Amazon (see figure 1). We collected vegetable material and processed ash salts from 62 species reported as sources of salt by the People of the Centre, using the same materials and techniques employed by the Indians. These 62 indigenous species correspond to 59 species of 19 families, as defined by scientific taxonomy. In most cases an indigenous species corresponds to a single botanical species; in two cases, however, a single botanical species is divided into several indigenous species, and in one case, two different taxonomic species are considered a single indigenous species (see table 1). We gathered botanical samples, identified the species, prepared ash salt from all of them, recorded the whole process of making salt, analysed the chemical composition of the salts (see Echeverri and Roman-Jitdutjaño 2011 for details), and recorded the indigenous discourse on salt in the Witoto language.

Table 1.  Salt plants and bodily affects. (Scientific names of plant species agree with the list of accepted names in The Plant List (2013). Identification of the botanical samples was carried out by botanist D Cardenas of the Herbario Amazónico of the Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas SINCHI (Bogotá, Colombia), and R Bernal and O L Montenegro of the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Specimens are kept at the Herbario Amazónico (SINCHI) and at the Herbario Nacional of Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá). Voucher numbers of the specimens are listed in Echeverri and Roman-Jitdutjaño (2011: 500–501).)

We now turn to this discourse, which reveals the profundity of the meaning of salt and the natural world in indigenous thought, and then we move on to the main purpose of this study: the ash salts as a reading of bodily affects—the salt of the issue.

The discourse on salt was uttered by the elder Enokakuiodo (Oscar Roman-Jitdutjaaño) from July 1995 to March 1998 and tape-recorded in 20 sessions, totalling 22:48 h (see figure 2). These speeches were all recorded at night in the 'yard of coca', where men gather to talk, lick tobacco and consume pulverized coca leaves. Enokakuiodo's speech was in a verbal genre called rafue, one of several genres of the uai 'language of the yard of coca'. Rafue, in its more general and public sense, means an ordered sequence of dance rituals performed by a Master of rituals (rafue naama). In the course of the preparation and celebration of a dance ritual several verbal genres are deployed: from the songs sung in group at the centre of the ceremonial house to several genres of highly formalized ritual dialogues that employ a specialized register of the language. What all these genres have in common and what allows them all to be called rafue is that they are not discourses about things but discourses that become things—power-discourses (ra 'thing, power', -fue 'spoken word'). Their linguistic function is performative rather than referential.

Zoom In Zoom Out Reset image size

Enokakuiodo did not deliver his rafue inside a ceremonial house or in the context of a dance ritual. However, the aim, setting and language of his discourse correspond to those of the ceremonial rafue. The rafue of salt, performed by a ritual Master, does not speak about the ash salts, but verbally (not to say 'spiritually') processes the filth and illness that are in people. Through his rafue, the Master is catching the spirits of animals in the form of salt species, which his ceremonial allies will later actually hunt, kill and bring back to the house of the Master, in the form of game and wild fruit. This is called 'to make the rafue dawn': to turn it into real things; through this, the illnesses of people get healed.

Enokakuiodo's rafue was delivered in a hut in one of his cultivated plots, deep in the forest. His words, however, followed the protocols of the language of the yard of coca: it took place at night, as the participants sat in a circle on small stools, surrounded by cultivated plants, consumed tobacco paste and coca powder, and women and children listened. Enokakuiodo's rafue was addressed to one of his sons and meant for his offspring and people 'from other yards of coca', that is, from other cultures and countries. His voice was recorded and he was aware of that. Thus, the rafue of salt was to be made to dawn by actually searching for the plants and also by text-processing the recordings.

The two of us, plus one of Enokakuiodo's son (RIP) spent nearly 200 days over a period of 4 years text-processing the entire transcribed corpus (81 837 words in Witoto). This textual corpus is the basis of what we present next. We intend to show what the object and nature of this discourse are, the logic with which it functions, and the characteristics of its verbal and gestural performativity.

'...all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning...patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing.... If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery which the world is filled with, even in its smallest things'. (Rilke Letters to a Young Poet IV.)

What is salt? Enokakuiodo's answer is straightforward: salt is sex; and the rafue of salt is sexual education—a way of thinking evoked by Rilke's quotation above. The ash salts originate in the search by the Father Creator for sexual development (komuiya uai, literally 'word of life'). Enokakuiodo introduces it right at the beginning of the rafue of salt (excerpt 1 in table A.1):³

The Father Creator searches for sexual development, for a ground to cast his semen on. At that time, the semen of the Father Creator is salt.

The Creator searches for sexual development because there is no life, everything is evil and sterile. He attempts to fecundate a ground with his saline essence. He endeavours to heal himself because he is full of salt-semen (excerpt 2 in table A.1).

At that point, the Father Creator is full of salt. He gets ill and he casts out that power. That is the origin of the salt plants. He then speaks: 'The future generations will have this power of mine, they will drink it, this milk, this brine, and with this they will have children'. On saying this, the Father Creator transformed himself into the salt of this earth (sexual drive). And he adds: 'Later on, when sexual development arrives to them, they will fecundate, because this is something lovely, this is something they will never forget'.

It is something 'lovely' (Enokakuiodo's translation into Spanish: 'muy amoroso') and is also something dangerous. When it is not managed correctly it may 'corrode' the person (excerpt 3 in table A.1):

We were all born powerful. That power (salt-sex) is dangerous because we all have it in our bodies. If one abuses it, it drains you, it corrodes you. That is why that salt-sex is kept in the body, because it is like milk from the breast. It is the milk on which the Father Creator fed, and from it men will breast-feed when they need it.

Men will season the blood of women—represented as the tobacco paste—with that salt (excerpt 4 in table A.1):

That salt (semen) is to be seasoned in the tobacco paste (woman's blood). 'In the same way, when our words are seasoned, they are endearing', he (the Creator) then said. On throwing it onto the woman, it was incorporated into her. There it became human, it became a teaching, it is the birth of a weapon; it is a stone of power, a true spirit, a true simulacrum (i.e. offspring).

This is the true processing of salt: offspring. But, again, one has to be careful, because the same processing applies to other entities and not only human beings. The power of salt can be made to form true humanity, but also can bear evil beings and diseases. That is why the Creator establishes an order and a law (excerpt 5 in table A.1):

He thus kept them in careful order, the ash salts. From the part of the soul, with the water that was dripped we became human; but everything is very much alike, the spirits are alike, the diseases are alike, but a human is a human. Thinking of this, he left us this teaching.

That salt is dangerous; it is like an axe that cuts down, even though it appears as 'fascinating'—in Enokakuiodo's translation. It is also the power of women: their clitoris, named as an axe (excerpt 6 in table A.1):

This is something fascinating, what you call 'fascinating'. From it we were born, from it we came about, but it is like an axe (clitoris). It has serious consequences, it may chop you down, it may destroy you.

That is why the rafue of salt is chiefly about the sexual education of the body, because this salt (sexual drive) may have 'serious consequences'.

The object of the rafue of salt is the body. The world and the natural entities are said to be the body of the Father Creator, and that body is the image of the human body. Moreover, the world and body we perceive through the senses are split from the primordial body-world before this world dawned and before we were born. That dawning (of the world) and that birth (of our body) constitute a rupture with the primordial body. We do not guard a memory of our formation in the womb; we were separated from that world when the umbilical cord was severed, and from then on we came to live on this ground. There, 'in another planet', as the elders say, we were floating upside down in a salty sea from which we obtained all we needed. We know nothing about that world, although it is the root of our formation and the source of our most fundamental yearning: to return there and feed from that salt. As we cannot, we keep searching for it on this ground, in food, in sexuality, in power, in the possession of objects, in war.... This path leads to life and procreation or to loss and death. To find our way we need to read the signals in our body and in nature, which is the body of the Creator, because the world was formed in the same way as our body. Natural entities exhibit the signs of the formation of the human body and serve as a guide to understanding life and conduct. This is what the rafue of salt would be 'about'.

More than talking about, the rafue of salt performs and re-enacts the history of creation. At the beginning, the Creator had everything in himself. He was full of salt—full of semen—and had nowhere to expel it. He became ill because of that salt. Searching for sexual development he blew his nose and expelled the saline mucus which sickened him. That mucus became the world. In his search, the Creator continued to suffer and cast out the illnesses that sickened him; those potent and polluted substances from the Creator were the proto-substances of a former world that became the source of plant and animal species once this world dawns. Each time the Creator expelled a substance from his body, he performed a verbal and a technical gesture. On the one hand, he uttered—in the voice of the elder—a dictum for 'the future generation of life', i.e. humanity, and, on the other hand, he processed the illness he threw out by means of fire, leaving an example for future generations, who will imitate that gesture when processing ash salt. That purifying fire is the Mother, who receives many names: Mother of the Processing Fire, Mother of the Humanizing Fire, Mother of the Sweet Fire, Mother of the Delivering Fire, Mother of the Cool Fire. It is by means of these gestures that the Creator signals the path of the future generation of human life. These primordial gestures are called the First-Text (bini).

Once the world dawned, those proto-substances from the Creator took the form of vegetable and animal species and organs and humours of the human body. These entities show traces of their formation in visible signs and in the names they receive. This is responsible for associations between quite dissimilar entities: a tree, insect, herb, mammal, bodily humour or illness. This is called the This-Text (bibe).

2.1. Reading the indices of biodiversity

2.2. Bodily affects and capacities

Those are the names of the salts. These names gather together all the evils in this world and at the same time represent the milk from the mother's breast. Enokakuiodo states (excerpt 7 in table A.1):

The (ash) salt is named as an opossum, is named as a snake, and when casting a healing spell on a baby, it is named in the same way.

That is, the child is named in the spell as 'my snake', because it was formed with the essence (salt-semen) of all the experience and evil things that the father accumulated in his body, just like the ash salts come from the powerful and polluted powers of the Creator.

The rafue of salt performs a narrative of human affects and capacities through the reading of ecological, biological, cultural and linguistic indices from the set of ash salt plant species. Each one of those species provides an appraisal of the body of the Creator and of the human body. These plants narrate the story of the formation of healthy, engendered and fertile human bodies. What the rafue of salt does discursively is mimicked technically in the actual processing of salt. Rafue is a power-discourse; it is verbal performance and technical processing. This performativity is what turns the primordial affects into food (salts) and knowledge (counsels), which are meant to form human bodies through sexual reproduction. This is sexual education because that biodiversity is the same body of the Father Creator, who in his search for sexual development left the traces of his formation in the formal, sensory and linguistic characteristics of natural species. This is what we have attempted to represent in figure 3.

Zoom In Zoom Out Reset image size

In the figure, we represent the elements of the This-Text—natural species, bodily parts and cultural object and institutions, on the one hand, and knowledge and food, on the other—overlapping the domain of the First-Text in a reflective, inverted and shadowy fashion. What in the This-Text are vegetal species (upper cell of the figure) may be regarded, through the indices, as bodily affects and capacities that originate from the salt-illnesses coming from the primordial substances of the Creator. Those primordial affects are verbally performed in the rafue as teachings on behaviour and technically processed as food: actual mineral salts obtained from the plants. These pieces of advice feed the spirit and those mineral salts teach the body to become fecund.

Each salt 'is the spirit of an animal', say the elders. Ash salts are mixed with tobacco paste; tobacco is the image of the Mother, who defeated the evils of this world with her menstruation (see Molting). The spirits of the animals are captured by the power of tobacco and it is this mixture that gives flavour and voice to the tobacco paste. This combination of substances is explicitly compared to fecundation: ash salt is like semen and the tobacco paste is like menstrual blood. This sexual imagery serves as a model for other types of relationships: marriage, ceremonial partnership, cooperative labours—and may also include inter-cultural research projects like ours.

We stated above that our concept of 'inter-cultural' goes beyond the combination of different cultural approaches—the indigenous and scientific—to the same object: salt. In the Western view, ash salt (and its different associations) is the same object and its contrasting interpretations a matter of cultural differences. From the indigenous perspective, on the other hand, the fact that each culture is apparently talking about a different object (or objects) is irrelevant, insofar as the objects share a common condition: humanity. Indigenous knowledge on plants is a device to understand the perils and dangers (the salt-illnesses) of the relationship entailed by any political or scientific commitment—a sexual education.

Enokakuiodo's knowledge is not unique or singular. Experts such as Enokakuiodo are able to produce highly structured discourses in a specialized register of the language, but their underlying ontology and logic are broadly shared by the men and women of the People of the Centre (see Kronik 2010, for traditional knowledge of palms among Witoto and Muinane; and Griffiths 1998 on the Witoto relationship with cultivated and wild species). This ontology is what we mean when we speak of the 'real connection' that enables us to link the resemblance of the anus of the alligator and the flowers of a tree to a substance of the Creator in the First-Text. Indexicality involves spatiotemporal location, which depends on a system of co-ordinates—the 'indexical ground'—conveyed 'by the on-going practice of the ordinary world of our experience' (Sonesson 1999).

As Stephens (2012) stated in a recent issue of ERL: 'There is much to be learnt from the indigenous and local communities who depend directly on, value spiritually, and fight for, their biodiverse ecosystems'. As she remarks, such peoples not only value biodiversity for its utility but also and mainly because these natural entities, objects and species are their very same body.

In 1995, at the very beginning of our study of salts, Enokakuiodo wrote a text in the Witoto language, titled the Nabairiya or 'Agreement', in which he stated the aim of our common endeavour. We translate a few lines from it, that may give us a taste of the salt of the issue, to conclude (excerpt 8 in table A.1):

Seeking for fecundity on a dangerous border,

Looking for the coalescing of the fruits,

We protect each other to learn from each other.

Our teaching is great for many to look at,

Our power goes straight into other yards of coca.

Two oceans, two peoples,

Europe and America.

Each one speaks with its own voice,

Each one lives according to its origin.

Sexuality, however, is the same; it is dangerous, you have to know.

The mistress of sexual education (biodiversity) is the one who knows, because she has already experienced everything.

This study counted on the financial support of the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Colcultura (1996); the Earth Love Fund (UK, 1996–97); the Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia (1998); the Coama Program for the Consolidation of the Amazon led by The Gaia Foundation (UK, 1998–99); and the Imani Institute of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2000–2001, 2011). We would like to thank the biologists Olga L Montenegro and Dayron Cárdenas, curator of the HerbarioAmazónico of the Instituto Sinchi (Colombia), for the identification of the botanical samples; Jimmy Weiskopf, for revising the English text, and Anna Premauer for designing figure 3. We also want to thank the three anonymous referees of ERL for their helpful comments and observations that contributed greatly to improving this paper.

We dedicate this paper to the memory of Simón Román (1963–2008), Enokakuiodo's son, who participated in this study from its start.

For the transcription of Witoto words we use the graphic conventions adopted by the Witoto bilingual education schools in the Colombian Amazon, which are a slightly modified version of the one proposed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Minor and Minor 1987). Vowel sounds are approximately like those in Spanish or Italian, with the addition of , a central high vowel. Consonant sounds are similar to those in Spanish, with the following exceptions: f is a bilabial approximant, z is an interdental fricative, r is a flap in all positions (including word initial), ng is a nasal velar.

Excerpts from the rafue of salt is given in table A.1.

Table A.1.  Excerpts from the rafue of salt.