Paper short abstract:

For the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon, certain categories of people are at risk of turning into jaguars and attacking their own kinsmen. This paper focuses on how local social meanings and multispecies engagements activate more widely shared Amazonian concepts of human-animal transformation.

Paper long abstract:

For the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon, certain categories of people are at risk of turning into jaguars and attacking their own kinsmen: for example, men who use a particular species of the psychoactive plant Brunfelsia, intended to improve a hunter’s aim. However, in recent times, the people most likely to become were-jaguars have been elderly people (especially women) in advanced stages of dementia and physical decline. The Matsigenka typically revere their elders, so why is it that this most cherished, frailest segment of the population is viewed as a mortal threat, literally turning into the most feared predator of the forest? The phenomenon of human-jaguar transformation is attested in the mythology, shamanism and iconography of diverse South American and Mesoamerican indigenous societies. Human-animal transformation in Amazonia is associated with fluid concepts of personhood and a “perspectival” cosmology. The Matsigenka verb for the process of jaguar transformation is “maetagantsi,” literally, ‘growing fur’, focusing on the surface of the body as the site of transmogrification. And yet understanding this phenomenon is not complete without also appreciating the jaguar life cycle: jaguars, too, become old, weak and toothless, hanging around villages to kill easy prey such as dogs and chickens. The Matsigenka’s justified fears of old jaguars become enmeshed with ambiguous feelings towards infirm, elderly loved ones. This paper brings sensory ecology and the “science of the concrete” to bear on multispecies engagements, focusing on how local social meanings and specific ecological interactions activate more widely shared concepts of human-animal transformation in Amazonia.