Sayings of the Ancestors
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Sayings of the Ancestors

The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians

John Holmes McDowell

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Sayings of the Ancestors

The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians

John Holmes McDowell

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About This Book

The Sibundoy valley of southwestern Colombia is the home of a unique Indian culture—one that blends Incan elements with those of the aboriginal natives. Moreover, Sibundoy bridges two domains, the Andean highlands and the Amazonian basin, and inter-mixed with all of these elements are European influences, particularly folk and orthodox Catholicism. From this cultural enclave, John McDowell presents here a body of oral material collected from the Santiago Ingano community.

This corpus of material is made up of some 200 "sayings of the ancestors, " proverb-like statements, many concerned with dreams and the forecasting of future events. From an analysis of these sayings emerges a cosmological view of the Sibundoy Indians, a glimpse of their spiritual world. It is a world where spirits constantly impinge on the activities of everyday life. It is a world where the sayings can both warn of spiritual sickness and offer the way to spiritual health. For the Sibundoy the sayings go back to the first people, the "ancestors, " who established for all time the models for a proper life. The study of the sayings is rounded out with references to the parallel fields of mythology and folk medicine as these contribute to a clearer understanding of their roles and functions in Sibundoy life.

Sayings of the Ancestors provides a fascinating body of original folkloric and ethnographic material from a unique cultural locus. It is also an engrossing demonstration that what seems a miscellaneous group of small beliefs can be seen as the components of a larger world-order. The book and its interpretive findings will be a valuable resource for folklorists, anthropologists, and many Latin Americanists.

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Introduction
Tucked away in its mountain fastness, the Sibundoy Valley of Colombia houses a fertile plain that has nourished the evolution of a remarkable South American civilization. The Sibundoy natives are renowned for their agriculture and weaving, for their colorful indigenous carnival, and for the prowess of their native doctors. This inquiry examines the spiritual life of these peoples, which enters into all facets of the daily routine and imposes a distinctive orientation to reality. The natives of the valley inhabit a world charged with spiritual presence, where the intervention of animas (souls of the departed) and sacha huayra (spirits of the forest) settles the fortunes of individuals and families. The conventional beliefs associated with this pugnacious spirit realm are codified in traditional sayings that circulate throughout the indigenous communities, surfacing in conversational settings as people strive to forecast their futures and to account for events already witnessed.
The following chapters make available an annotated collection of one corpus of sayings, gathered from members of the Santiago Ingano community, and locate this corpus within the context of Sibundoy cosmology, so that the prescriptions and proscriptions of the sayings acquire a plausible heritage and logic. In addition, we will explore the process of implementation, which inserts the wisdom of the sayings into the day-to-day affairs of Sibundoy natives. Fulfillment of these objectives entails a systematic presentation of texts and commentaries, in conjunction with a discussion of mythology and folk medicine as these contribute to a clearer understanding of the sayings.
The sayings of the ancestors are proverb-like belief statements that capture the spiritual connotations of empirical signs, thereby casting light on a pervasive cosmic order underlying all human experience. They bespeak a world saturated with spiritual agency, conceived as a dynamic interiority to the surfaces of ordinary experience. They alert people to the insistent activity in the spirit realm, which constantly threatens to wreak havoc in the fragile course of human lives. Directly or indirectly the sayings warn of huayra, or ‘spirit sickness’, and they provide an irreplaceable guide to the maintenance of spiritual health, a blessed condition conferring invulnerability to the ravages of misfortune. Those who possess spiritual health are said to be ‘strong,’ and the Inga word denoting this quality, sinchi, is also one of the terms used to name the native doctors, whose principal mission is conveyed by the term, sinchiyachiy, literally ‘to make strong’.
The central thesis of this study is that the sayings are the practical component of a folk religion localized in the Sibundoy Valley but with analogues in many parts of indigenous South America. I use the term folk religion to designate a religious system conserved in the everyday practices of a community rather than in the canonic forms of organized worship. Don Yoder (1974: 11) provides (among several alternatives) a definition amenable to the Sibundoy case, invoking “the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion.”
Following this line of reasoning, the religiosity of the sayings stems from their preoccupation with the place of humanity in the cosmic design rather than from some association with an established church. The sayings conserve fidelity to the example of the first people, who established for all time the guidelines for a civilized life. They encourage the pursuit of spiritual health by aligning the contemporary frame of events with this eternal ancestral model. The American philosopher and poet George Santayana (1922) defines religion as that which “tunes human actions to an envisioned cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience.” The sayings of the ancestors, in their roles as signifiers of spiritual reality and harbingers of individual and collective spiritual health, promote just such an integration of the cosmic and the human.
The aboriginal Sibundoy religion survived the Spanish conquest and colonization by working out an intricate accommodation of indigenous America to folk and institutional Europe. The emergent folk religion displays elements widely distributed throughout indigenous South America: a pan-Andean cosmological bedrock, featuring the celestial deities, the actions of the culture hero, and the displacement of a previous race of “heathens”; a tropical forest charismatic shamanism, featuring the use of visionary hallucinogens, the dramatic performances of native doctors, and a reciprocity between human societies and the “masters” or “owners” of the natural world; and an infusion of elements taken from orthodox and folk Catholicism, especially beliefs concerning the wandering souls of purgatory. The sayings activate a syncretic consciousness, enlisting the Catholic rosary and cross, as well as signs drawn from dreams and the natural world, in the struggle to monitor the spirit realm for evidence of deteriorating spiritual health.
The sayings of the ancestors are a multipurpose genre, and their connection to an underlying folk religion is not immediately obvious. Perhaps their most apparent function is the enculturation of children into the traditional native lifeways. Some of the sayings are strictly pedagogical in character and are used to instruct or reprimand children. Consider saying 167 and a rationale provided for it:
If you stick your head into a jar,
your breathing will be obstructed,
and you will not be able to run.
“We tell the children not to be drinking from the earthen jar. ‘If you drink sticking your head into the jar, when it is time to run you will not be able to; like a dog with its tongue sticking out you will be running, trying in vain to climb a hill.’ ”
In this manner children are deterred from the unseemly (and unhygienic) practice of drinking directly from the large jars housing the family’s water supply. At the same time they are being initiated into the proper way of doing things, a balanced and harmonious way of life chartered by the example of the ancestors.
The pedagogical function of the sayings is prominent in some native accounts of the genre, especially accounts that are directed to an outside audience. Consider the following introduction to the tradition provided by Domingo Tandioy Chasoy, a native of the Santiago Ingano community who has assembled and published a small compendium of the sayings (Tandioy Chasoy, n.d.):
The sayings, proverbs, and recipes of the indigenous Ingas of Santiago that are presented here are still conserved in the tradition of the old folks. The young people are influenced more and more by modern civilization, and because of this we have already forgotten many of our traditions.
As far as many of these sayings and proverbs are concerned, it seems that they do not actually reflect the beliefs of the ancestors, but rather that they used them to educate or to form a mentality of respect among young people, since they had no other method than actual illustration.
Domingo Chasoy’s commentary highlights the pedagogical intent of the sayings and plays down the belief element. There can be no doubt that the corpus of sayings plays a major enculturative role, one that is not limited to the instruction of children. There are sayings in circulation addressing concerns and problems endemic to all stages of the life cycle. A great many sayings move beyond the parent-to-child framework and offer assistance to parents in raising their children, as in saying 162: “It is bad to tickle the bottom of a child’s foot, because he will not be able to cross over the bridges.” Foot travel within and between the native settlements entails crossing numerous log bridges, so this piece of advice deals with a topic that is important in the making of a competent adult.
Other sayings leave behind the period of childhood and deal with all manner of subjects, for instance the care of a pregnant woman, the planting of crops, or the proper times and places for bathing. For example, saying 173 warns against placing a basket on the head of a pregnant woman (“it will be as if the baby in the mother’s stomach were held in a basket”), and saying 136 warns against bathing on the day after the full moon (“the rainbow will urinate on you, and leave you covered with warts”). Once a substantial corpus of sayings is assembled, it becomes clear that the tradition indexes beliefs and practices active in every domain of human experience. Its scope and breadth is such that it amounts to a comprehensive guide to native lifeways. In a style that is unselfconscious and practical, the sayings encode attitudes, values, and recipes for action defining the indigenous ethos in the Sibundoy Valley.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the sayings as mere tools of enculturation or as quaint curios of a South American ethnic life style. Nor can they be dismissed as sheer superstition, as empty holdovers from a previous belief system. One indication of a greater significance is their preoccupation with dream images and dream interpretation. When the large inventory of sayings focused on dream images is scrutinized, it becomes apparent that dreaming is valued as a direct channel of communication with the spirit realm. Moreover, the majority of sayings implicate a superhuman agency in some fashion, and most of them are concerned with divination as a means of insight into human destiny. A great many of the sayings center on the pivotal concept of huayra, the Inga word literally meaning ‘wind’ but signifying ‘spirit’ and ‘spirit sickness’. As I have already intimated, even those sayings dedicated to apparently mundane goals (such as raising children to behave properly) impose the prevailing moral order and draw implicitly on the wisdom of the ancestors.
Tandioy Chasoy’s downplaying of the belief component simply does not wash in view of the many proclamations to the contrary by members of the native communities. Characteristic is the following kind of statement: “What is foretold in the sayings generally comes to pass, if not right away then within a few days or weeks. Here in the valley we live by the proverbs.” Statements like these indicate a pattern of belief in the accuracy and validity of the tradition. In view of these considerations, I contend that the sayings, along with the surrounding complex of belief and practice, must be viewed as elements in a thriving folk religion whose overriding concern is the spiritual health of the individual, the family, and ultimately the entire indigenous community.
It will be apparent that this study is decidedly synchronic in character, assessing the place of the sayings within a conceptual and pragmatic system. This approach necessarily slights the important issue of the worldwide distribution of comparable beliefs and sayings. At the outer limit, the Sibundoy corpus of sayings possesses a universality, for it would be difficult to imagine a human society that did not share at least a few of these beliefs. Many of the sayings strike a familiar chord in Western thinking, and are common to numerous folk cultures around the world: among them, the idea that a pregnant woman must eat whatever food she craves, that the call of an owl foretells a death, or that the loss of a tooth warns of the death of a parent. This last belief, for example, is attested in Asia, indigenous America, and Europe (Seligman 1923: 188). To a considerable degree, this corpus of sayings captures a “natural” mode of human consciousness, a way of thinking that surfaces readily and quickly becomes reified as canonic folk belief.
At the same time, the sayings of the ancestors exhibit the peculiar stamp of their physical and cultural environment, of Amerindian, and most particularly, Sibundoy ethnicity. Tzvetan Todorov (1984) attributes to Amerindian societies a mastery in “the art of ritual discourse,” premised on the notion that “prophecy is memory.” He sees the preoccupation of Moctezuma and his priests with the interpretation of codified signs as a major factor in their inability to deal effectively with the Spanish presence. The central elements in the Sibundoy folk religion—the utilization of signs and portents from the dreamworld and from naturalistic observation, and an overwhelming concern with individual and collective spiritual health—are surely cornerstones of Amerindian consciousness (Kroeber 1902; Morgan 1932; Wallace 1958; Eggan 1966; Myerhoff 1974; Bruce 1975; Whitten 1976; Gregor 1981; Conrad & Demarest 1984; Marzal 1985; B. Tedlook 1987).
If we look for close parallels to the Sibundoy system, we find them in other indigenous communities of the Andes and the nearby lowlands, and in a more diluted form, among mestizos residing in the towns and cities of the Andean region. From this base, these orientations have flavored the cultural life of the Andean polity generally, as can be evidenced in the current wave of literary fiction emerging from the Andean republics. The closest parallels to the Sibundoy tradition are found, not surprisingly, in Indian societies of the Andes and their eastern foothills, where a preoccupation with the spiritual effects of huayra, and the reliance on dream images and wakeful signs to combat them, seems to be a commonplace feature, both currently and historically (Whitten 1976; Bastien 1978; Isbell 1978; Flores-Ochoa 1979; Conrad & Demarest 1984; Mannheim 1987). To cite only one example, the Canelos Quichua of Ecuador, who inhabit the eastern periphery of the Andes, maintain a system of dream interpretation that appears to replicate many features of the Sibundoy system. As in the Sibundoy Valley, these people arise each morning to discuss their dreams and formulate plans for the coming day on the basis of a traditional code of dream interpretation (Whitten 1976).
Compilations of similar, in some cases identical, folk beliefs in mestizo provinces such as Nariño, Colombia (Cabrera Rodriguez 1986), Cajamarca, Peru (IbĂ©rico Mas 1971), and Santiago de Estero, Argentina (Lullo 1944), demonstrate a considerable spillover of indigenous thought patterns in the formulation of a composite Andean popular culture. But certain key differences between mestizo and indigenous systems emerge: the mestizo systems often encode different values, and the folk beliefs persist largely outside of a validating cosmological framework. For example, in Cajamarca (as in Sibundoy) the dream of riding a horse is significant, but the polarity of connotation is reversed: whereas in Sibundoy this dream warns of spirit sickness (saying 45), in Cajamarca it foretells “the realization of a pleasant event” (IbĂ©rico Mas 1971: 140). These differences correlate to a contrasting value accorded the horse in these two settings (in the Sibundoy Valley, the horse is considered an alien beast). Moreover, the mestizo traditions appear to exist apart from an operative cosmology; in the absence of a cohesive mythical consciousness, these folk beliefs acquire the aura of superstitions, that is, beliefs held without any decisive rational foundation.
What is special about the Sibundoy case is that it favors the inspection of a corpus of traditional sayings within a cohesive framework of ideology and praxis. By relating the sayings of the ancestors to the cosmology enshrined in Sibundoy mythology and to the everyday quest for spiritual health, we can appreciate them as dynamic components of a living folk religion. The Sibundoy natives have indeed absorbed much from the European and mestizo cultures that have so profoundly altered their historical destiny; witness the presence of Catholic icons, such as the rosary, cross, and altar, in the corpus of sayings. At the same time, the Sibundoy peopl...

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