Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the linguistic and pragmatic devices used in the transmission process of ritual knowledge and the performance of shamanism among the Quechua-speaking indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the linguistic and pragmatic devices used in the transmission process of ritual knowledge and the performance of shamanism among the Quechua-speaking indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon. A comparison between two contexts of transmission reveals the recent invention of a new mean of transmission through writing papers among quechua-speaking urban shamans, contrasting with the traditional learning of ritual songs. The pragmatic analysis of two corpus of ritual songs (ikara or icaros), the first one exclusively oral from a ritual specialist from a remote community of the Pastaza River, and the second one partially written by a Quechua urban shaman, shows a deep evolution in the transmission and performance of shamanic knowledge. In both cases however, the memorization of ritual knowledge is linked to a personal experience of "direct" communication with spirits in a state of altered consciousness. This learning procedure allows the shaman to lend his voice to the spirits invoked during the curing performance, while the patient will be in his turn partially identified with the pathogenic agents invoked through ritual speech. A close attention is paid to the cognitive asymmetry characterizing the relationship between the shaman and the patient during curing ceremonies, and the uncertainty arising from this specific ritual context. Relying on detailed ethnography and pragmatic analysis of discourse, the analysis will focus on the polyphonic encoding of ritual action through the use of language and the multimodal expressions of shamanic agency.