I’ve always had a fascination for rainforests. In early 2007, I spent a couple of months at a research station in Amazonian Peru. While there I met a prominent ethno-biologist studying indigenous tribes in the area. We got to talking about the origins of Voodoo in the area. These notes first appeared in my Travelogue:
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Voodoo. There are many indigenous tribes in the rainforest. Some of these remain uncontacted by western civilization, while others have been exposed heavily. I met a famous ethnobiologist and anthropologist at the research station and we had an interesting conversation about one of the tribes he had studied well: the Machiguenga.
The concept of voodoo did not exist in these tribes before contact with western civilization. Back then, the spiritual aspects of their life was intricately connected to the rainforest. In those days there were relatively stable and equal communities. If there was any inequality, it was connected to such things as how many more boars a hunter killed relative to his peers. The inequality was a couple of standard deviations from the mean at the most.
Once the tribe was exposed to the western world and associated material goods, inequality increased considerably and suddenly. The anthropologist gave the following example:
- Person A goes to town and buys himself a radio. This is a highly desirable object and his social status shoots up immediately in the community.
- Person A sees Person B giving him the evil ! eye for some reason.
- Person A happens to fall ill.
In the earlier days, the illness would have been explained away with the suggestion that the rainforest gods were angry or some such explanation. Now, however, with his increased social status, Person A invokes Voodoo and basically explains the illness by saying: “Person B was so envious of me and my new found radio, that he cast a voodoo spell on me.”
This belief is held very firmly. When the rainforest gods were invoked, a quick herbal remedy would be found to heal the illness. Now that Voodoo is considered the cause, no serious attempt is made to cure the illness. Instead, Person A casts a Voodoo spell on Person B and a tit-for-tat revenge cycle begins. All this even though Person A will readily admit that he hadn’t actually seen Person B do any real voodoo to begin with.
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Note the shift from Mediocristan to Extremistan and the impact on the search for causality. We don’t want to make the same mistake and announce that one caused the other, but the shift is interesting nevertheless.
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