Shipibo people
write books.
The literature on Shipibo medicine is dominated by outsiders, and so is almost everything written about it online. This page puts the Shipibo-authored work first, because that is the correct order and almost nobody uses it.
By Shipibo authors.
Guillermo Arévalo Valera, Las plantas medicinales y su beneficio en la salud Shipibo-Conibo (Lima: Ediciones AIDESEP, 1994). A Shipibo account of Shipibo medicinal plants, published by AIDESEP — the national Amazonian Indigenous federation. It is cited in the academic literature and almost never in the enormous popular literature on ayahuasca, which is telling. If you want to know what Shipibo people say their own plants do, this is where to look before any anthropologist.
Pilar M. Valenzuela, Tesoro de Nombres Shipibo-Konibo. A compiled treasury of Shipibo-Konibo names — the kind of resource that only exists when a linguist works long-term with the community rather than about it. Valenzuela is the leading linguist of the language and her work with Shipibo speakers underpins much of what is now teachable.
Valera, Pinedo, Pinedo and Yahuarcani, Antiguamente en el monte los animales, las plantas y otros seres eran gente: tradiciones orales de las naciones shipibo y uitoto (Lima: Casa de la Literatura Peruana, 2019). Oral tradition of the Shipibo and Uitoto nations, gathered and told by Indigenous authors and published by Peru’s national literature house. The title is itself a piece of cosmology: in the old days the animals, the plants and the other beings were people.
This list is short because it is honest. There is more, much of it in Spanish, much of it published by AIDESEP and by regional federations rather than by universities, and much of it hard to find outside Peru. Send us anything we have missed and we will add it — Shipibo-authored material goes to the top of this page automatically.
What we have used, and how much weight it carries.
Every citation on this site comes from one of these. They are useful and they are not neutral, and we would rather show you the shelf than pretend the knowledge arrived from nowhere.
Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote: Cosmology in the Amazon Basin (Rutgers, 1982). The fullest published account of Shipibo cosmology, and the source of the myths we retell. Roe taped named people on the Ucayali — Manuel, Ibarista, Eduardo, Inesia — and their words are the valuable part. His own contribution is a pan-Amazonian structural theory that occupies most of the book and which we have almost entirely left alone. He says himself that his cosmological reconstruction is a reconstruction, assembled after missionary influence had already broken up whatever system existed. Read the testimony; be sceptical of the model. What we took from it →
Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2 (2004). A physician-anthropologist writing from village fieldwork begun in 1969. Compressed, confident, and frequently the only place a particular fact is recorded — the name jonibo, birth practice, the collapse of the fishery. The framing is epidemiological because he is a doctor. He is also relaying women’s knowledge as a man from outside, which is why parts of his entry are logged in our files and not published here. What we took from it →
Rafael Karsten, Studies in the Religion of the South American Indians East of the Andes (1964), reaching us through Roe. The oldest layer, and the source of the single most important idea on our plants page: that every plant has a mother. Correspondingly the least verifiable. What we took from it →
Gonzalez, Cantillo, Perez, Carvalho, Aronovich, Farre, Feilding, Obiols & Bouso (2021), “The Shipibo Ceremonial Use of Ayahuasca to Promote Well-Being: An Observational Study,” Frontiers in Pharmacology 12:623923. Peer-reviewed, open access, and — importantly — not about Shipibo people at all. It measures 200 Westerners at a retreat centre. Its value to us is that it publishes the practitioners’ own account of how a series of ceremonies is structured, states plainly that the ceremonies have been adapted for Western participants, and reports that 36% of participants credited the healers above the brew. What we took from it →
Angelika Gebhart-Sayer (1985) on kené as a codified visual system used in ritual. Enormously influential — most of what you have read online about “sacred geometry” descends from it, usually without attribution and usually flattened. Later scholarship has debated rather than confirmed it. We treat it as a contested thesis, not a fact. What we took from it →
How we decide what goes on this site.
- A living teacher outranks any book. Where a Shipibo teacher contradicts a source, the source is wrong and gets struck.
- One spelling, ours. Historical transcriptions — a 1982 typewriter’s attempt at a sound — stay in our source files. What appears on the site is the spelling our course and our teachers use.
- Nothing enters the language database from a book. Vocabulary is speaker-verified or it is marked as pending. A build check fails if an unsourced Shipibo token appears in the course.
- Some things are recorded and not published. Initiation rites, reproduction and contraception, infant death, sexuality. They exist in the sources; they are not ours to present. If they belong on this site they will arrive in Shipibo voices.
- Every claim carries its origin. If a paragraph came from a 1964 Finnish ethnographer quoted by a 1982 American anthropologist, the page says so, so you can weigh it yourself.