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Blainey, Marc

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Blainey, Marc Marc Blainey Ph.D. student, Anthropology Stone-Tinker Grant (Summer 2008) Terminal Report Despite some minor logistical difficulties, my one-month excursion to the Brazilian Amazon was a great success! For a time, however, it appeared as if the fieldwork I had proposed to carry out with the help of a Stone-Tinker summer grant would be negated by initial troubles I was having in acquiring a travel-visa from the Brazilian consulate in Toronto. After two very frustrating weeks where it looked like I would not be given a visa, I was fortunate to obtain one just a few days before my plane was scheduled to leave. This only occurred because two Tulane professors, Dr. William Balée and Dr. Christopher Dunn, were able to draw on their good standing with the Brazilian government. Without the support of these two Brazilianist scholars and the high regard that the Brazilian consulate has for Tulane as an institution, my summer research would have been impossible; I express my sincerest thanks to Dr. Balée and Dr. Dunn. After two days of riding on airplanes and sitting/sleeping in airports, I finally arrived in Rio Branco, a rubber-boom era town in the north-western frontier state of Acre that has now grown into a city of 265,000 people. After learning a lot about Brazil in classes during my first year at Tulane, I was astonished at how Rio Branco seemed to contradict the stereotypes of Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In exploring the city for the first week, I learned that the Acre state government has been habitually incorrupt for much of its history, and that the current government was rather well liked by most people I talked to. I visited museums, restaurants, and pubic plazas, but my main priority was to visit as many religious groups around the city with close affinity to the Santo Daime church I am studying for my Ph.D. work. The Santo Daime is one of three religious sects composed of a syncretic mixture of Catholicism, Afro-Brazilian spiritualism, indigenous shamanism, and the organized use of Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea that has been used by indigenous Amazonians for about 3000 years. Even though my long-term Ph.D. fieldwork will focus on a particular Santo Daime congregation in Belgium that belongs to the CEFLURIS line of the church, I went to Brazil to gain some experience in the region where all non-indigenous use of ayahuasca originated. That first week in Rio Branco, I had the chance to visit the tomb of Raimundo Irineu Serra (Mestre Irineu), the founder of the Santo Daime church. It was while visiting this sacred site that I happened to meet a young member of the Barquinha, another Ayahuasca religion whose distribution of churches is restricted to the Rio Branco area. I participated in two Barquinha ceremonies where I met devotees of other Ayahuasca sects, such as União do Vegetal (UDV) and Alto Santo (the original Santo Daime line). Through these contacts, I was able to secure invitations to ceremonies at these churches as well. In all, I visited with every type of ayahuasca church in Rio Branco. Although my proposal for the Stone-Tinker grant did not include these unforeseen investigations, these spontaneous fieldwork opportunities provided me with first- hand perspectives on the closest counterparts of the Santo Daime. These alternative viewpoints acted to enrich my dealings with the Santo Daime members that I lived with at the CEFLURIS headquarters in Céu do Mapiá. After my week in Rio Branco, I took the 13-hour motorized canoe ride deeper into the Amazon to reach my primary destination of Céu do Mapiá. Another unanticipated episode occurred when we left too late in the morning and had to spend the night with our hammocks in the middle of the jungle. The canoe driver, Marcel, made sure that we stopped multiple times along the way to meet some of his friends who were all rural peasant families. Although I experienced considerable culture-shock at the sight of their living conditions and the exotic food they fed me, I look back on such encounters as an important lesson in the unpredictability of ethnography: whereas happenstance acquaintances led me to come across people I would have otherwise never expected to meet, it is precisely these random occurrences that challenge one’s preconceptions about self and others. In the end, this is what anthropology is all about. The final three weeks in Céu do Mapiá were everything I had hoped they would be. I jotted down over 150 pages of observations in my notebook, which will be an indispensible resource for both my Latin American Graduate Organization (LAGO) symposium presentation and the dissertation that I will eventually write. I met many of the permanent residents of the community, as well as a number of visitors from elsewhere in Brazil and around the world. As my research will ultimately involve European converts to the Santo Daime, I concentrated my efforts on conducting 16 formal interviews with the internationals that had arrived from such countries as Columbia, Argentina, Chile, Japan, Spain, Ireland, and the U.S.A. I gathered some very interesting trends of ideological purpose shared by these pilgrims, including a common sentiment that their lives abroad had been devoid of spiritual meaning before they discovered the Santo Daime. I intend to discuss how this visit to Céu do Mapiá, especially the interviews and the major “festival” ceremonies in which I participated, had a decisive impact on the central issues I will now pursue for my doctoral work. In regards to the interaction with members of the Santo Daime at Mapiá as well as my own impressions while participating in the ceremonies, I am now convinced that the effects of the tea have a profound influence on the individual who imbibes it, giving them a greater desire for community and a heightened capacity for empathy. I think that what Europeans might be seeking in the Santo Daime doctrine is an alternative to the alienating self-centredness that many perceive to be the dominant theme of postmodern-capitalist Western culture. .
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