ABSTRACT
Music is widely thought to possess healing powers in Amerindian cultures and countless ethnographies describe the use of song, rattle, drum or other sound-making instruments in medicine. It is this view of sound as energy, or as the animating quality of living things and of the cosmos, that is explored in this chapter. The sound of this trumpet was said to be rich in animu, a word it discusses in detail, serving to resuscitate the moon or in other contexts to inspire warriors with courage and energy in territorial battles (chajwa) (see ). The chapter addresses the use of sound in healing in an Andean community and demonstrate how, 'as a symptom of all-pervasive energy', it is seen to animate bodies and is shaped in music. It is based on several years of fieldwork, spread over the last decade, in a rural hamlet of ayllu Macha, northern Potosi, Bolivia.
