The people behind
everything here.
Teachers, artists, guides, translators, cooks, boat operators — profiles appear as each contributor approves what is said about them, how their work is shown, and how they are paid.
“Shipibo” is not what they call themselves.
Worth knowing before anything else on this site, including its own title. The word Shipibo people use for themselves is jonibo — people, plural. Everyone else is nawabo: foreigner, stranger, not-people. The pair does the same work as most autonyms in the world: we are the people, and you are the others.
Shipibo came from neighbouring groups. It is built on shipi, the pygmy marmoset — the smallest primate there is, native to the eastern Peruvian Amazon and kept as a pet in Shipibo households — with the plural -bo. The marmoset people. A nickname from the neighbours that outlived every other name and ended up in the ethnographies, on the pottery labels, and on this website.
Upriver of Pucallpa the same people are called Conibo, speaking the same language. And there is a third word, Chama, still found in older anthropology: Shipibo people consider it a slur, used by the regional mestizo population to cast them as an underclass. It has no business in current writing about them.
We keep using Shipibo because it is the word the world searches for and the word the artists and teachers use when they deal with outsiders. But it is the outside name, and it is worth saying so out loud on the page where the people are.
The word comes back later in the same entry, and it lands differently. Asked about the growth and the pressure on their land — the traffic, the towns, the outsiders arriving each year — Shipibo people gave Hern a sentence he recorded as it was said: “Estaremos aplastado por los nawabo.” We will be squashed by the non-Shipibo. Whatever else it is, nawabo is not an abstraction.
Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” in Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures, vol. 2, eds. Ember & Ember, 2004.
The household runs through the women.
The internet’s Shipibo is a man in a ceremony. The ethnographic Shipibo is a woman in a house she is not going to leave.
Households are traditionally matrilocal and matrilineal. Daughters stay; as each comes of age a young man arrives as suitor or husband and joins her mother’s household. Sons go elsewhere to find a wife. A village is one extended family reckoned through the women, five or six nuclear families deep, up to four generations, each daughter with her own hearth. The man described as the most prominent in a community may be prominent precisely because of whose daughters he married.
In public life the record is careful and unambiguous. Community assemblies are attended by men and women both. Male leadership predominates. And Hern’s summary, after decades of sitting through them, is that the women state their positions vigorously and often prevail.
And the art — the thing the outside world actually knows this culture for — is women’s work. Roe, writing about a people he had studied for years, breaks his own academic register to say that the visual art that graces nearly every aspect of Shipibo material life is a product of the pride of the women, whose presence he could only describe as leonine.
This has a practical consequence for anyone dealing with Shipibo communities commercially. If you are buying art, you are almost certainly buying from a woman. If you are negotiating anything in a community, the room contains people whose agreement you need and whose names do not appear on the letterhead.
Warren M. Hern, Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004; Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, p. 41.
The placenta is buried under the house.
A Shipibo woman gave birth at home, attended by her own mother and by the women of her mother’s generation — aunts, close relatives, the ones she had watched do this since she was a girl. If the delivery went badly, the neighbours came, until she might be surrounded by every woman nearby, all of them offering advice at once. Through the contractions they kept up a chorus: push, push, push.
And afterwards the placenta was buried under the floor of her house. Not disposed of. Placed. The child begins life with something of itself already in the ground beneath the room it was born in.
There is a detail in the language that matters as much. Shipibo has no word of its own for the person who attends a birth. The words in use — curiosa, partera — are Spanish, borrowed. It was never a profession, so it never needed a title. It was any woman who had done it herself or been there while others did, and a woman with many daughters and granddaughters simply became, over years, the one people wanted in the room. That is not a gap in the vocabulary. It is a description of how the knowledge moved: not through training, but through being present.
Girls learned the same way, by watching their mothers and sisters and aunts, long before it was their turn.
Carried, watched, painted, then named.
An infant travelled on the hip in a shawl knotted at the mother’s neck while she went about the day’s work — the same woven cloth that turns up in the older accounts as a garment. The very young ones slept in a covered hammock in the daytime with a grandparent or an older sibling sitting beside it, usually weaving or making pottery while they watched. Nobody was assigned to childcare as a separate job; it happened alongside the work, within arm’s reach.
Children nursed for at least six months and often years, and a baby whose mother had no milk was nursed by a lactating relative. Sick children got round-the-clock care from a rotation of adults, and a child with a lasting illness had someone specifically given the job of helping them. Discipline was quiet talking and persuasion. On abandonment, the Shipibo view recorded by Hern was flat and slightly withering — it is not something that is done.
Somewhere in those first weeks the face was painted in huito with a geometric design, to turn away the yoshin and because it looked well. Only after a month or more did the child receive its janecon, its true name. Held, watched, marked, and then finally called something.
Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, eds. Ember & Ember, 2004. Recorded from village fieldwork beginning in 1969, and describing practice as it stood then — much of it will have changed. There is more in that entry about pregnancy, birth control and infant death that we have not published here, because it is women’s knowledge relayed by a male physician from outside, and it should reach this site in Shipibo women’s own words or not at all.
Janecon — the true name.
A Shipibo baby was not named at birth. The name came a month or more later, and the reason recorded for the delay is plain enough to stop you: neonatal death was likely, and you do not name a child you may lose. The Shipibo name is the janecon, the true name, and it is given first; a Spanish name with paternal and maternal surnames follows for the registry.
In the meantime the child is painted — face marked in huito with a geometric design, to turn away the spirit that brings illness, and because it looks well. Between the painting and the naming there is a month where a person is protected but not yet called anything.
One household, four generations.
The traditional village is not a village in the European sense — it is a single extended family reckoned through the women. Five or six nuclear families, up to four generations, the daughters staying and building their own hearths as they come of age while the sons leave to find wives elsewhere. The larger settlements you see on a map today are largely an artefact of 19th and early 20th century missions gathering scattered family groups into places that were easier to preach to.
Leadership was the curaca, the head of the largest extended family, holding an informal but permanent position. Today that sits alongside elected roles built to match the Peruvian state — jefe de la comunidad, teniente gobernador, agente municipal. What did not change is the assembly: men and women both attend, and while men do most of the formal leading, Hern’s note from decades of watching them is that the women argue their positions hard and frequently carry the room.
On their terms.
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