Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis Page A

entangled in the challenge of adaptation.
    As Rufino told our story, we both took a great deal of coca, perhaps too much, for even as the last embers of the fire faded away, I lay awake in my hammock, unable to sleep. Everyone else had long since retired, and in the absence of voices, the maloca came strangely alive. The
interior was vast, perhaps one hundred feet long and sixty feet across, with a vaulted ceiling rising thirty feet above the dirt floor. The symmetry of the structure was exquisite: eight vertical posts spaced evenly in two rows, with two smaller pairs near the doors, crossbeams and a roof of pleated rows of thatch woven together over a grid of rafters. Still, even to me in a somewhat heightened state of attentiveness, it remained a building, curious and exotic, but a building nevertheless.
    Reichel-Dolmatoff experienced it through different eyes. He saw the longhouse as both the womb of the culture and a model of the Barasana cosmos. The roof is the sky, the house beams are the stone pillars and mountains that support it. The mountains, in turn, are the petrified remains of ancestral beings, the Mythical Heroes who created the world. Smaller posts near the doors represent the descendants of the original Anaconda. Overhead, the long ridge pole represents the path of the sun that separates the living from the limits of the universe.
    The floor is the earth, and beneath it runs the River of the Underworld, the destiny of the dead. The Barasana bury their dead underneath the maloca, in coffins made from broken canoes, and, going about their daily lives, they walk above the physical remains of their ancestors. To facilitate the departure of the spirits of the dead, the maloca is
always built close to water along an east-west axis, since all rivers, including the River of the Underworld, are believed to run east. The placement of the maloca adjacent to a running stream symbolically acknowledges the cycle of life and death, for the water recalls the primordial act of creation in the journey of the Anaconda and Mythical Heroes, and foreshadows the inevitable moment of decay and rebirth.
    Outside the longhouse is a world apart, the place of nature and disarray. The owner of the forest is the jaguar, and the demon spirits long ago transformed into animals that eat without thought and copulate without restraint. White people are like the animals, reproducing with such abandon that their numbers swell, spilling over into lands reserved from the beginning of time for the Barasana and the other peoples of the Anaconda. The wild is a place of danger, the origin of disease and sorcery, the realm where shaman go in dreams and where hunters walk each time they leave the protective confines of the maloca and surrounding gardens. When Rufino hesitated in the forest, he had reason to be afraid.
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    IN A CURIOUS sense, the deeper I delved into the esoteric realm of myth and religion, the closer I came to understanding both the raw challenges that confront Amazonian Indians on a daily basis and the cultural mechanisms
that allow them to overcome adversity and thrive in a forest homeland that is anything but benign. There is life on the material plane, scarlet macaws sweeping over the canopy at dusk, a field of manioc to be harvested, sweat bees buzzing about at noon. And there is the realm of the spirit, the place where jaguar go and lightning is waiting to be born. The two domains are never confused, nor are they kept apart. The mediator is the shaman, and it is his ability to slip between spheres that allows for the maintenance of the sacred balance, the harmony of social, religious and political life.
    To understand the role of the shaman, and to know anything of his genius in using plants, one must be prepared to accept the possibility that when he tells of moving into realms of the spirit, he is not speaking in metaphor. This was perhaps the most difficult lesson for me to learn as an ethnobotanist schooled in science. But