The river decides
almost everything.
Where people live, what they eat, when they plant, how far a voice carries, and what the stories are about. Start here and the rest of the culture stops looking mysterious.
River people. Not jungle people.
Search for Shipibo and you will get canopy — dense green, filtered light, the interior of a forest. It is the wrong picture, and the ethnographic record says so bluntly. Roe’s note from the Ucayali is that the Shipibo avoid the forest and stay close to their river.
The real landscape is water and sky. Settlements on the banks and on cochas, the oxbow lakes left behind when the river changes its mind. Wide exposed beaches in the dry season, on which a crop of black-eyed peas gets planted because the ground is only there for a few months. Canoes. Long sightlines. Fish as the base of the diet, not game — and the year organised around the mijano, the great upstream migration of July and August. Interior groups existed and lived differently, more from the forest and from hunting, but the main body of Shipibo life has always been riverine.
This is not pedantry about photographs. It changes what the culture is about. A people whose protein comes from a river read the water for a living, and their myths are full of what lives in it — the anaconda as mother of all water creatures, the dolphins that are never killed, the seducers who come up out of the lake. The forest in those stories is the dangerous elsewhere. The river is home.
It also explains what is happening to them now, because a people whose life is a river are undone by what is done to the river.
Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 34–35; Warren M. Hern, Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004.
Two seasons, and everything follows them.
The Ucayali rises and falls, and that single fact organises the calendar. In the dry months the water drops and wide beaches appear — ground that exists for part of the year and then is gone. People plant on them anyway. Chiclayo, the black-eyed pea, goes into the exposed river sand in the dry season, harvested before the water comes back for it.
July and August bring the mijano, the great upstream migration of fish. Historically this was the abundance the rest of the year was built on: caught in quantity, salted, sun-dried, and kept for weeks or months. A dry-season hunt on high ground brought deer, peccary, tapir, monkeys, large birds, large rodents and land turtles. Then the wet season, the flood, and the whole pattern inverted.
Away from the main river some groups lived differently — interfluvial, further into the forest, more dependent on game than on fish. The riverine pattern described here is the majority one, not the only one.
What a garden and a river give.
The staples are carbohydrate crops from the chacra, the garden, and protein from the water. At least two varieties of manioc — atsa in the older record — plus plantain, paranta, and a large purple sweet potato. Rice and maize came later and are grown for market as much as for the table.
Two drinks recur through every account of a gathering: masato, the lightly alcoholic manioc beer that takes about three days, and guarapo, fermented cane juice that takes about two weeks in the great jars. A feast is planned backwards from those fermentation times.
And a detail that says more about the diet than a list can: the weaning food is stewed ripe plantain, mashed to the consistency of liquid oatmeal. A child’s first food after milk is the same plant the adults live on.
A vocabulary you only get from a working day.
Buried in the 1970s accounts is the kind of word list no phrasebook produces, because it comes from describing an actual event rather than a topic. Preparing for a feast, the record names the chomo — the great jar; cane juice is boiled and poured into them to ferment, twelve or fifteen jars of it, for about two weeks. There is a size term for a jar, ani for the big one, and a middling one is a chomo anitama. People drink from a quënpo. Men carve quënán, thigh-supports, in pairs out of a single balsa log, hollowed into two half-cylinders. Guests arrive playing paca and tiati; the women in the sterns beat the water with their huinti, their paddles, as the canoes come in.
Half of those are objects a person could hold up and name today. It is exactly the kind of vocabulary we are asking teachers to record — the things in the room, not the things in a curriculum.
Terms as written by Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 97–98, in his own 1982 spelling. They are logged as questions for teachers, not published as course vocabulary.
What a day of fishing used to bring back.
It is easy to write about a culture as though it sits still. Here is the sentence that stops that, from a doctor who watched the same river for thirty years: a small group of men could once leave the village before dawn and be back by noon with several canoes full of fish — enough to feed a large extended family across several households for days. Now two brothers may fish all day and come home at dusk with a basin of small fish, enough for one family for one day.
What changed is not the Shipibo. Pucallpa held about 3,500 people in 1944, when the road came over the Andes. By 2002 its metropolitan population was past 300,000. Commercial refrigerator ships now work the river with drift nets for 200 kilometres below the town. The mijano — the great upstream migration of the dry months, July and August, when fish were caught in quantity and salted and sun-dried to last for weeks — has crashed.
Deforestation did the rest. Hotter dry seasons, lower rivers, stagnant ponds and gastrointestinal illness in children, dust off the exposed beaches and smoke off the burning. In the wet season nothing holds the rain, so it runs off fast and the floods sit longer and take the crops and the animals with them. Game moves inland. It becomes hard to find firewood, hard to keep clean, and hard to find ground dry enough to bury the dead.
This is the context every word on this site is being recorded in. Not a culture that faded on its own — a river that was fished out from under a people who were living well on it.
Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004. Hern ran a baseline health study at the village of Paococha in 1969 and worked on the Ucayali and the Pisqui for decades after.
What is happening to that river now is the subject of its own page.
Shipibo and regional words on this page — and every other — are defined in one place. The glossary →