ABSTRACT

The disappearance of all but one Panara village, together with the peaceful and frequent contacts with other non-Panara indigenous villages, has led to a projection of witchcraft accusations onto these villages, while the positive powers of shamans, the flip-side of witchcraft, have been retained among Panará people. If hipe are conceptualized as a positive form of other within the lived world, then witchcraft and witches can be seen as the negative, internal aspect of otherness. Their existence and activities represent the sinister side of the panara existential condition. A note on terminology is appropriate at this point since both shamanism and witchcraft are terms that are much used in anthropology in a multitude of contexts. Furthermore, witchcraft is here understood as a phenomenon endowed with its own historicity. However, among the Panara at the time of fieldwork, witches were always associated with harmful, dangerous activities, while shamans were curers and extractors of witchcraft.