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Seats of Power in the Tropical Forest Cultures of the Amazon
From: The British Museum
| By:
Colin McEwan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
One of the most fascinating aspects of the ancient culture of the Amerindians, or Native Amazonians, is the spiritual resonance of seating rituals. While the full history is not known to historians and the material evidence is limited, it is known that a carved wooden stool played an indispensable role for shamans, chiefs and warriors. Curator Colin McEwan of The British Museum provides a comprehensive introduction to seating rituals and means of access to the spirit world among these peoples. |
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| Modelled representation of an imposing male figure seated on a low stool. | |
 he tropical rainforest lowlands of South America are drained by a labyrinthine network of rivers that eventually join to form the mainstream Amazon. Most of Amazonia is in Brazil, but the neighbouring countries of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador all share the tropical environment and culture typical of the rainforest. |
The vast reaches of the Amazonian rainforest have been lived in and shaped by human hands for thousands of years. Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas this deep history of human interaction with river and forest gave rise to enduring cultural traditions and sophisticated art styles. Today people's lives are closely intertwined with the plants and animals of the forest, for their practical value as well as their symbolic significance. |
Native Amazonians, or Amerindians, belong to a multitude of different ethnic groups with their own languages and cultures. Within these societies shamans and elders have been the guardians of esoteric lore since time immemorial and special wooden seats or stools count among their most treasured possessions. |
The origins of seats in the South American lowlands
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| A rare example of a modelled ceramic stool or headrest. | |
The distribution of seats and stools in South America embraces a complex mosaic of regional archaeological and ethnographic traditions. These span an enormous area of the tropical forest lowlands that includes much of the Amazon basin and extends into adjacent areas of lower Central America and the Caribbean. Anthropologists have long recognized that wooden stools are one of the key diagnostic traits of these lowland societies, but it is only relatively recently that the great antiquity and unexpected complexity of tropical forest culture have become apparent. The bluffs, floodplains and even the 'deep forest' of the middle and lower Amazon and its principal affluents once supported powerful chiefdoms engaged in continuous competition for territory, resources and prestige. The arrival of Europeans inflicted successive epidemics and disruption on indigenous societies with devastating consequences. As the vast network of competing polities disintegrated, so too did their regional systems of social organization, ranking and rulership. At least some contemporary tropical forest societies appear to represent the marginalized and relatively impoverished remnants of what were once much more complex social structures. |
An idea of the role that formal seating rituals may have played must therefore be pieced together from disparate sources: the corpus of archaeological figurines, ethno-historic descriptions given by European travellers from the seventeenth century onwards, and later, more methodical nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic studies. Although the vestiges of ranking in a much-truncated form have been documented by anthropologists, the rapid dissolution of the more elaborate forms of ritual practice means that the full range of social and political contexts in which seats were used was never well recorded. It seems likely that wooden seats and benches would have served to mark rank and status in ways at which we can now only guess. The ruptures in the social fabric were paralleled by a reduction in the range and diversity of artistic output. The corpus of wooden stools in ethnographic collections, as well as those still being made today, may not represent the full range of forms originally employed. |
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| This Xinguano stool is modelled on a powerful predator. | |
No examples of wooden seats have yet been recovered from excavated archaeological contexts in the Amazon basin, but occasional small modelled ceramic seats or headrests have turned up in museum collections. One example has designs executed in a combination of incision and excision that parallel some of the motifs and symbols found on vessels from the Marajoara and lower Amazon traditions. A distinctive kind of small circular ceramic stool or headrest, with carefully structured designs incised on the upper surface and around the pedestal base, is also known for Marajoara culture. Miniature modelled ceramic stools have been recovered from archaeological contexts elsewhere in the tropical forest lowlands dating as far back as the third millennium BC. The fact that the archaeological distribution of seats throughout the riverine lowlands of South America corresponds closely to their ethnographic distribution implies that they have a long history of use among tropical forest groups. The seats arguably form a single related macro-tradition, which has undergone divergent evolution. Inevitably we must turn to ethnography to gain the kinds of insights into tropical forest cosmology that are vital to a fuller understanding of the social contexts in which seats are used. |
Seats, seating and axiality in tropical forest culture
The notion of being seated embodies core precepts and beliefs and carries profound connotations among tropical forest peoples. A myth told by the Desana of the north-west Amazon tells how 'the Sun ... had his stool and his rattle staff. He had the gourd rattle and carried the hoe on his left shoulder ... everything that the shamans (payes) now have, the Sun had.' The Sun referred to here is the Sun Father or Primal Sun (ave page), which is the true source of all cosmic energy and is invisible to human eyes. The Day Sun (erne abe), on the other hand, is the visible sun that forms part of our earthbound experience, radiates heat and light, and disappears at dusk. Shamans who ascend to the upper cosmos find perpetual light from the feather crown of the Primal Sun who has remained invisible in this realm from the very beginning of creation. The close relationship between seating and the Sun Father in his role as ultimate progenitor is a recurring theme in tropical forest cosmology. Other key actors in creation myths are the culture heroes of ancestral time. In order to think the world into being, they are said to have been seated on their stools like shamans, with head in hands and elbows on knees. A carved wooden stool is therefore a powerful, not to say indispensable, possession for shamans, chiefs and warriors alike. |
The first shaman's stool is said to have been carved out of rock. While rock is the hardest and most enduring substance in the visible world, it is merely the material representation for the most enduring thing of all, which is non-substantial essence or soul matter. The cosmologies of tropical forest groups are infused with ideas of this parallel invisible world. Among the Yekuana of the upper Orinoco, for example, each village is referred to as a house (atta) and is not only conceived of as a self-contained universe but is actually constructed as a replica of the cosmos. Each Yekuana house is modelled on a pyramidal mountain in the centre of Yekuana-land, although it is short-lived compared to this mountain abode of the culture hero. In turn, the mountain itself is only an ephemeral representation of an invisible, spiritual house essence that is everlasting. A similar set of ideas is found among the Barasana of the north-west Amazon where a mystical house, visible only to shamans, is held to be located in Jaguar Seat Mountain, near the River Pira-Parana. Likewise the supreme gods of the Warao in the Orinoco delta are said to reside on world-mountains situated at the four cardinal points. Anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones describes how the He-house initiation rites among the Barasana imply a state of being prior to, and now parallel with, human existence: |
All living creatures have their He or spirit counterparts which live in stone houses, the rapids in the rivers and the mountains and outcrops of rock. Human beings too have their He counterparts that live in stone-houses (masa yuhiri wi). The souls of new-born babies come from these houses and the souls of the dead return to them. The power of creation is set in the distant past but it is also an ever-changeless present that encapsulates human society. Wooden stools form part of a core suite of objects that accompany the creation of human beings from spiritual origins. These same cultural objects are an essential means of access to the hidden sources of life. A range of sculpted and painted seats from regional Amazonian traditions feature caymans, turtles, jaguars and raptorial birds of prey. Many are powerful natural predators of river, earth and sky on which men model themselves. The seats are traditionally made from very dense tropical hardwoods, prized for their durability. Jet black wood such as guayacan is often favoured for its colour and lustrous qualities when polished, and even the medicinal properties of the wood can be an important factor in its selection. Seats are carved from a single block of wood and have either a single pedestal, bilateral feet or four legs supporting the sitting surface. The seats are portable, usually ranging between 30 and 60 cm high and between 50 and 100 cm wide, and are mostly used in and around the communal long-house (maloca). The sitting surface may be a simple horizontal flat slab or a carefully sculpted shallow depression designed to accommodate the sitter's buttocks. A few larger seats and benches show twin arrangements, or extended surfaces that could have supported several individuals. Many seats are unadorned, while others are embellished with dense abstract patterns painted in pigments of different colours. Double-headed seats are known, some with the heads of different animals on either side, creating a hybrid creature that finds counterparts elsewhere in tropical forest art. |
The centre of the painted weaving pattern on some stools is deliberately emphasized by the insertion of a diamond-shaped element. Others are bisected by an axial line running from back to front and therefore aligned with the orientation of the person seated. Notions of axiality are inextricably bound up with seats and seating in tropical forest cosmology, and much of the discussion that follows will revolve around how these ideas find visible material expression in cultural objects. The concept of finding or centring an object is generally related to creative acts and plays an important role in myth and ritual. Among the Tukano the centre is associated with a female principle and is also the spot where an axis mundi can be placed, a connecting link between the earth and other cosmic levels that may lie above or below it. Any object that serves as a symbolic axis mundi--be it a baton or staff, a cigar holder, a house beam as centrepost, a tree or a vine serving as a ladder--itself becomes a means of communication and, in another sense, a phallic axis of fertilization. |
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| Tukanoan elder sitting on a low wooden stool. | |
Modern ethnographies of Tukanoan speakers, including the Barasana and Desana of the Uaupes drainage in the north-west Amazon basin, give us some of the best insights into the significance and use of seats in specific social contexts. In these societies stools are reserved almost exclusively for use by males and are the one item above everything else that a shaman must acquire before he can practise his art. Stools are called shamans' things (kumuno) and are identified with mountains, the abodes of spirits and the houses of spirit humans and animals that are referred to as people's waking-up houses (masa yuhiri wi). The word for canoe (kumua) shares the same root, and while canoes are used to travel on water, stools are what shamans use on land to embark on their soul journeys through the different levels of the universe. The stools of ordinary men have four legs, while the shaman's stool has two legs that are said to resemble the forked tail of the swallow-tailed kite, regarded as a shamanic bird. Talismanic birds, caymans, jaguars and turtles are all held to act as mediators between the human and spirit worlds in tropical forest mythology. |
Access to this spirit world was actively sought by exploiting a profound knowledge of the special properties of certain tropical forest plants accumulated in the course of countless centuries of experimentation and use. These were carefully prepared and ingested in a variety of ways in order to induce altered states of consciousness. |
The principal plants were, and still are, tobacco (Nicotiana spp.), the jungle vines genus Banisteriopsis, yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina), vihó (Virola sp.), coca (Erthroxylon coca) and several species of Datura. Anthropologists have documented the widespread use of these powerful stimulants and hallucinogenic drugs, especially in connection with shamanistic practices. The shaman must be seated in order to begin contact with the spirit world, hence activities such as smoking tobacco, consumption of Banisteriopsis infusions and inhaling snuff are all associated with seats. Sitting on a stool is to sit 'high up' and is considered an essential element in the shaman's quest for visionary powers because it symbolizes a central, axial point of reference from which the shaman mediates, divines, chants or performs his rites and hearings under carefully prescribed conditions and at the appropriate times. |
Other objects are also closely associated with the preparation and consumption of certain of the hallucinogenic substances described above, and the symbols and motifs inscribed and painted on these objects express key aspects of the ideas, beliefs and experiences involved in their use. The accounts of the ways in which seats and stools are used by contemporary Amazonian groups help bring alive a sense for the role that they play in ritual practice and especially at important stages in the human life cycle, such as when young boys are to be initiated into adulthood. While the upper and lower layers of the mythical cosmos are not directly accessible to ordinary experience, it is especially during initiation that they are brought within reach. When seated, an individual, whether he be shaman, elder or novitiate, occupies a liminal space--on the earth but not of it. |
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