Review of Steve Beyer’s « Singing to the plants: a guide to mestizo shamanism in the

Upper Amazon”

Steve Beyer has encyclopedic knowledge about Amazonian plant medicine, and his book
Singing to the plants is a must-read on the subject.

Beyer knows how to marshal the evidence. He covers many important aspects of
ayahuasca shamanism: its predatory and ambiguous nature; the scarcity of women
practitioners; shamans as performing artists; the mystery at the heart of shamanic
performance; and the dangers to which shamans expose themselves. He provides
important information about often-neglected plants and trees such as chiric sanango,
camalonga and lupuna. For Beyer, the human body is an instrument of understanding,
and learning from plants means learning to listen to them; and as plants speak a
language of pure sound, this means learning to sing to them. As Beyer points out,
practitioners receive these songs, or icaros, in different ways, and use them for many
different purposes. Beyer shows that plant teachers teach their own secrets, such as how
to sing to them and how use them; and he underlines the importance of diet, including
sexual abstinence, social isolation and time alone in nature. He also emphasizes self-
control as a key trait of shamans, as they stick to their diets and refrain from using their
powers for selfish purposes.

To the basic question of how well shamans actually cure sickness, Beyer replies: “The
answer is that no one knows”. He writes in plain English, and his inquiry is open-minded
and measured.

Beyer is willing to take fine-grained positions when required. For example, he states that
addressing the question of whether spirits are metaphoric or real requires subverting
the dichotomy contained in the question. This may seem complicated to some, but in my
view it is appropriate.

Beyer also does well to consider the existence of several perspectives simultaneously. In
this way he sees that from the shamanic perspective, all beings are human, so the claim
that shamans turn into jaguars should also be understood to mean that jaguars are
already shamans.

In such a detailed study as Beyer’s, one can of course find things to quibble with, for
example his claim that shamans do not drink ayahuasca to heal, but only to obtain
information (this would come as a surprise to the practitioners who use it to see illness
in the form of darts in patients’ bodies, which they then extract and expulse); or the fact
that he quotes numerous indigenous practitioners, yet calls his study a guide to
“mestizo” shamanism (indigenous vs. mestizo shamanism being one more dichotomy in
need of subversion, as Beyer indirectly acknowledges by quoting a contemporary
Shipibo shaman who says: “Right now in the Amazon, we can’t say that there’s any pure
tradition. It’s mixed. Even the indigenous are fusing together different cultural beliefs”).
Yet Beyer is right to point out that most anthropologists have neglected mestizos, or
people of mixed blood.

With Singing to the plants, Beyer joins an exclusive club of authors who have written
important books about ayahuasca shamanism: Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (The shaman
and the jaguar), Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (Voir, savoir, pouvoir), Luis Eduardo Luna
(Vegetalismo) and Benny Shanon (The antipodes of the mind). One thing that all of these
authors have in common is that they tell us precious little about themselves -- in
contrast to the slew of recent books about ayahuasca, in which we learn more than we
need to know about the person writing the book. With ayahuasca, the subject matter at
hand is the self in general, as Benny Shanon has put it; but this does not mean that books
about ayahuasca need to tell us all about the self of the author. In Beyer’s case, I was
initially relieved not to have to read all about his personal motives and foibles. But I was
finally left wondering just how his experience with ayahuasca had impacted on him as a
person and as a professional. A brief consideration of this would have strengthened the
book. My hunch here is that Beyer’s strength is also his weakness: as a lawyer, he knows
how to marshal the evidence, but he also tends to leave himself out of the picture.

I think Beyer could have further strengthened his book by clarifying his differences with
the other two in-depth examinations of mestizo shamanism, conducted separately by
anthropologists Marlene Dobkin de Rios (since the 1970s) and Luis Eduardo Luna (since
the 1980s). Though Beyer cites both authors extensively in his footnotes, he refers to
them only in passing in the main text, and refrains from criticizing either. At one point
towards the end of the book, he does compare their current positions on ayahuasca
tourism, describing Dobkin de Rios as “particularly bitter about such transactions” in
contrast to Luna, who “has become a healer himself, a ‘neo-ayahuasquero’”.
Unfortunately he leaves it at that. A consideration by the author of how his study builds
on the work of his two predecessors, and differs from it, would have been enlightening
for readers.

These are minor quibbles. Singing to the plants is a book of reference and Steve Beyer is
to be congratulated for his excellent work. People interested in ayahuasca will be happy
to have this instant classic on their shelves.