ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses area of ancient province of Maynas across upper Amazon regions of Peru and Ecuador, which was target of early Spanish colonization and space of ethnic and cultural miscegenation through colonial and postcolonial times. It uses ethnographic material from the upper Amazon to elucidate the tenets of this ideology that, the author argue, underpin shamanic practice in Amazonia. The author highlights close association between diet, tobacco and shamanic agency in relation to gender. In animistic ontologies all entities in cosmos are perceived as potential subjects, endowed with intentional agency and points of view. The actions of blowing and sucking out, both mediated by tobacco smoke, are central to shamans’ ambivalent agency through a specific sensory repertoire that links hunting and shamanism. In the chapter, the author uses ethnographical material from the upper Amazon to draw attention to the actions and sensory repertoire related to tobacco use in relation to animistic cosmologies among hunters and shamans.
