Ayahuasca: Between Cognition and Culture

Front matter

Antropologia Mèdica, 32 Antropologia Mèdica AYAHUASCA BETWEEN COGNITION AND CULTURE Perspectives from an interdisciplinary and reflexive ethnography Ayahuasca between Cognition and Culture.

Perspectives from an interdisciplinary and reflexive ethnography. Tarragona

Medical Anthropology in Tarragona Medical anthropology at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (until 1991, the University of Barcelona at Tarragona) has a history going back more than 30 years. In 1981, the first medical anthropology course in Spain was offered here as part of the undergraduate degree program in anthropology; in 1984, a medical anthropology course was offered here for the first time in a Spanish university as part of the degree program in nursing; and in 1986, medical anthropology became part of a Ph.D. program here for the first time in a Spanish university. A required course in medical anthropology has been part of the URV undergraduate program in social anthropology since 1993, and will remain so until this program is phased out in 2016.

Section I. Ethnography In Latin America

CHAPTER 1. THE FIELDWORK BEFORE THE FIELDWORK My investigation of ayahuasca’s networks started years ago, maybe the first time I drank the brew. The different perspectives, questions, and core ideas presented in the study I conducted in Catalonia cannot be separated from my earlier activities and the studies I made in Latin America, which started with my first experience with ayahuasca in Montevideo, Uruguay, the city where I was born. So it has been a long journey, in both time and physical space, but also in the inner space created by my direct participation in the ceremonies. As an agnostic, those experiences helped me to better understand not only ayahuasca’s spiritualities and religions, but also religions in general, as ayahuasca allowed me to experience a world which initially I thought was only a creation of systems of beliefs, and not something that could be experienced phenomenologically by the people who believe in them.

My first experience with the brew was in the year 2008. At that time, I had just finished the two degrees I was studying: anthropology and psychology. In anthropology, my final ethnographical study had dealt with the arrival of Buddhism in Uruguay, so I was already interested in the study of religions. In psychology, I was interested in the study of mental health treatments in psychiatric institutions, and anthropology provided me with different ways of understanding them from a cross-cultural perspective, so the crossroads between religion and mental health was of great interest. The colleague with whom I investigated the Buddhist schools was going to Céu de Luz, a Uruguayan center affiliated to Santo Daime/CEFLURIS. His stories about the experiences during the ritual were quite amazing, and I started to feel curious. But my friend was reluctant to put me in touch with the Church, since he felt – I guess – that his experiences were too personal and intimate, and he wanted no interference with his inner work. Finally, however, he left the Church, and the path was clear for me. He gave me the phone number of the leader of the Uruguayan Church, Ernesto.

Fieldwork Diary, Monday 7 April 2008 As expected, it was difficult to find [the Church], since it is located in the rural suburbs, a few kilometers from the city [of Montevideo]. I found the house and rang the bell, but nobody answered. The dogs of the house started to bark at me, and I decided to go back a few steps, but they came closer and closer, behaving aggressively. At that moment a woman of almost 40 years old came and calmed the dogs. I told her who I was and why I had come. She answered with a gentle smile and friendly words, telling me to park the car near the Church, just behind the house.

I got out of the car and start to look around. There was a big circular building under construction. The sun had started to go down and there were mosquitos everywhere. A man, no less than 30 years old appeared. He was thin, with an intense face, but simple and warm manners. He presented himself as Martín, and said he had been a follower of Daime for a year. He showed me the place. First, the new church under construction, with photographs and ornaments. Then the old church, smaller and rectangular. Martin told me that they had built the constructions themselves. He also spoke about how he was destined to be there, and how all his past was a prelude, a one-way road that had led him to Daime. “Incredible things happen here. I would tell you, but it cannot be expressed in words. If you have the experience you will see… Miracles happen! Here I realized that you can change the past itself. ” Martín invited me to drink tea in a humble house nearby. He had been living there for a few months. Although he did not say so, it seemed to me that he was alone, close to Daime, doing some kind of “spiritual retreat” in that house. More than once he told me he was there to heal himself […] We drank the tea and continued talking, while a little mouse ran and hid between the kitchen and the wall, and mosquitos were swarming around our necks […] After a while we went to the new church. In the middle of it there was a table with candles, ornaments, and a bottle of water with glasses. We sang hymns with other people, accompanied by a guitar and some percussion. The songs were in Portuguese. I sang with them using a little book that Martin gave me. At the end, a woman came with Ernesto. […] He asked me the usual personal things, but he already knew the essentials. […] He invited me to participate in a “concentration” on 15 April […] I am a little bit worried about what might happen. I fear the experience could be too overpowering for me. I am also concerned about how my secular beliefs will cope with this ritual experience. There are mystical Christian symbols everywhere.

The center Céu de Luz was founded in 1996, and was ethnographically studied by the anthropologists Victor Sanchez Petrone (2006) and Juan Scuro (2012a, 2012b). It belongs to CEFLURIS/Santo Daime, and shares the ritual calendar and the general cosmology of the Church. As described by Andrew Dawson (2008), Santo Daime’s beliefs can be regarded as a Christian millenarian doctrine, in which the human spirit is cosmologically situated in an evolutionary process through different reincarnations. The final goal is to reach wisdom and purification, not only individually but as a community of believers. Although they have different spiritual authorities called mestres – “masters” or “teachers” in Portuguese – the most important one is Mestre Jesus . Last but not least, purification is not only circumscribed to the community of believers, but also to a universal battle of good against evil, manifested nowadays in various global crises. Through discursive and practical means, the ritual repertoire of Santo Daime situates the Daimista community and its members within a millenarian worldview framed by the cosmic battle between good and evil. Irineu Serra is the ‘Imperial Chief ’ of the army of ‘Juramidam’ and Mota de Melo his ‘General’ . Reflected in the use of ritual space, the ‘soldiers’ of ‘Juramidam’ are led by ‘commandants’ and organized into ‘battalions’ regimented according to sex, age and marital status (Dawson, 2008, pp. 184–185). Figure 4. Work in Santo Daime. Photograph taken by me, Céu do Mapiá, Brazil, January 2014. That is one reason why the practitioners talk about the ritual as a spiritual “work” (trabalhos in Portuguese). The trabalhos are formally directed, and the songs are compiled in hymnbooks (hinários in Portuguese), that are used according to the ritual calendar. The hymns are in Portuguese and express the moral and religious wisdom of the different mestres of the church. Although this worldview has its origins among the lower classes of the population, the rubber workers, the millenarian idea of salvation and struggle against a modern Western materialistic evil fit well with other discourses (for example, those of the New Age networks ) that were more common in the urban middle and upper classes. My fieldwork experience (Apud, 2013b) showed that participants at Céu de Luz are from the lower and middle class es, quite different from the higher economic level of the population of the New Age centers. This is reflected in the costs of participating in the Church: the monthly fee is even cheaper than the cost of taking part in a single ceremony in the neoshamanic centers (for a more detailed ethnographic account of the different centers in Uruguay, I recommend, Scuro, 2016).

Wednesday 16 April 2008 Yesterday I participated for the first time in a Daime ritual. […] The first thing I did when arriving was to go to Martin’s house, where I found him cleaning some clothes. He invited me in, and we started to talk, “Did you know that the stains of Daime do not disappear when you wash your clothes?” he told me, showing me a towel with a brown stain. Martin was cleaning the various things that were Figure 4. Work in Santo Daime. Photograph taken by me, Céu do Mapiá, Brazil, January 2014.

This is one reason why practitioners talk about the ritual as a spiritual “work” (trabalhos in Portuguese). The trabalhos are formally directed, and the songs are compiled in hymnbooks (hinários in Portuguese), which are used according to the ritual calendar. The hymns are in Portuguese and express the moral and religious wisdom of the various mestres of the church. Although this worldview has its origins among the lower classes of the population, the rubber workers, the millenarian idea of salvation and struggle against a modern Western materialistic evil fit well with other discourses (for example, those of the New Age networks) that were more common in the urban middle and upper classes. My fieldwork experience (Apud, 2013b) showed that participants at Céu de Luz are from the lower and middle classes, quite unlike the more affluent attendees at the New Age centers. This is reflected in the costs of participating in the Church: the monthly fee is even cheaper than the cost of taking part in a single ceremony in the neoshamanic centers (for a more detailed ethnographic account of the centers in Uruguay, I recommend, Scuro, 2016). Wednesday 16 April 2008 Y esterday I participated for the first time in a Daime ritual. […] The first thing I did on arriving was to go to Martín’s house, where I found him cleaning some clothes. He invited me in, and we started to talk, “Did you know that the stains of Daime do not disappear when you wash your clothes?” he told me, showing me a towel with a brown stain. Martín was cleaning the various things that were going to be used during the ritual. […] The deal he had with Ernesto was that he could stay there for free if he helped with the Church and the housework.

“In the Daime I try to contact my pure body, which is what I really am. Y ou are invaded by the world and bad things, and you start to think that these things are yours, but this is not true. We are light beings, pure beings who the world sickens, so we need to clean ourselves. ”

Finally, we went to the church. It was really, really cold. Minutes went by, and I met other people, all wearing Church uniforms called fardas in Portuguese. I greeted Ernesto and the other participants. One of them started to talk about his experiences with Daime: “I have been here for 5 years, ” he told me.

“That is a long time, ” I replied.

“Not at all, some people have been here for much longer. I came here because I was interested in the concentrations. They are really interesting. Of course there is a Christian background, you have to consider that… Why have you come here?”

“Oh, a few months ago a friend of mine used to come here. He gave me Ernesto’s phone number… ”

“OK. I suppose your friend told you all about the things that happen when you drink Daime. They are really hard to believe […] When I started to come here, one guy told me “This is a liquid made by God” , and I thought to myself “This guy is crazy!” But now, maybe I should tell you the same. This liquid is not of this world. It’s as if God is inside it. We sat down. The ceremony started with the Lord’s Prayer and an Ave Maria, all in Portuguese. Ernesto started to play the guitar […] At one point we stood up to drink Daime. Two small wooden windows opened. The women formed a queue in front of one; the men in front of the other. Behind the windows was Ernesto with a jar filled with a brown liquid. He started to pour Daime into a glass, one for everybody. The participants drank it with difficulty, as it was not very nice. When they were given the glass, they all made the sign of the cross. I got a little nervous. It was my turn and I drank it making the sign of the cross too […] Time passed and so did the chants, but nothing happened to me. […] The songs and the music started to annoy me. All that need for salvation, healing and protection! […] Then, everyone remained in silence and the lights were turned off so we could “concentrate. ” I was angry, because nothing was happening. I was bored and my body was really cold, and my actions, but not my thoughts, were respectful […] Furthermore, my atheist and secular worldview made me feel totally out of place.

Once the ceremony had finished and the lights had come on, I started to calm down. Martín was there. He had been so kind to me, like everyone else, from the beginning. The ceremony finished with applauses and hugs. I thought nobody had experienced anything at all. But I was wrong. They had had intense experiences, and they were very excited […] They asked me about my experience and I replied “Quiet, nothing out of the ordinary happened. ” They were surprised about my sober attitude, totally out of place considering the collective emotional effervescence […] I wanted to know what had happened to them. They had all experienced intense moments. […] One young girl told me: “I had to cleanse myself. This time I was afraid, but I also felt supported, mainly thanks to my friend [a girl who had come with her], but also the place […] I have also been in Amazonas, but I could never give myself completely to the force that comes, the Daime. And when it does, you have to give yourself to it completely, and it flows and… I needed to be healed, to be cleansed… […] I believe that it is like a force that arrives and starts to pass through the group and in some places it stops and does what it has to do… ” […]

Finally, I left the Church and went back home. It was late and, outside, the night was beautiful. The moon lit up the wide-open sky, and the stars finally seemed to comfort my need to lose myself… Although I had felt nothing out of the ordinary during this first experience, one thing is quite clear to me: most of the participants had had an intense experience, and it was a spiritual and purifying one. So it was a kind of healing practice, deeply emotional and physical. The woman’s experience of a “spiritual force” reflects a common idea expressed in Santo Daime and in other esoteric, mystical, spiritual and psychological traditions. Besides, it fits with the New Age idea of a spiritual energy, and the general rejection of the separation between the spiritual and physical realms. I went to Céu de Luz a few more times but since I felt nothing and I was not really researching into ayahuasca at the time, more than a year went by before I had another encounter with the brew in a ritual setting. The next time was not in a Church but in a Uruguayan holistic center for alternative therapies, closely connected to what other authors call New Age Networks.

Ayahuasca, vegetalismo, neoshamanism and New Age networks Friday 4 September 2009 A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to the webpage of a center called Ayariri. There I found the e-mail of the director of the center, a woman called Merilena. I contacted her and we arranged a meeting at 8 pm on Thursday. […] I went 15 minutes early, and had to wait until the holotropic breathwork class finished. In the room there were drawings and paintings influenced by ayahuasca-induced visions. […] A minute later the door of the classroom opened, and Merilena’s husband, Hugo, greeted me. I introduced myself to both him and Merilena […] Merilena told me to go upstairs […] She told me how she had got in touch with Amazon shamanism years ago. I told her my personal and academic interest in the subject. She also described the procedures during the ceremony, and gave me some useful advice. Finally, she stressed the “spiritual” nature of the practice, in contraposition to “religious, ” and explained how the ritual brings support and safety to the participants, and that ultimately the experience is personal and individual. The comparison made by Merilena between spiritual and religious practice reflects the New Age criticism of doctrinal religions, and the defense of “experience” and “practice” over “doctrines” and “beliefs” (Heelas,

2006). Although usually no one wants to be regarded as a New-Ager, their discourse often fits the description of the movement. The reluctance of the participant to subscribe to this worldview is partly the result of the negative image that New Age gradually acquired in society over the decades. But it also reflects a misunderstanding of the movement, which is not a structured system of beliefs that people ascribe to or feel that they belong to. The movement is a variety of heterogenic practices and ideas, unsystematically propagated, and from different traditions under the same idea of recuperating other spiritual traditions. The New Age Networks, sometimes also known as psycho-mystic spiritualities (Champion, 1995; Champion & Rocci, 2000), are more an informal discursive practice than an institutionalized doctrine (Carozzi, 1995).

As Woten Hanegraaff has said, although the general ideas of the New Age Movement were already present in the 1960s – e.g. the coming of the New Age of Aquarius – the movement as we know it today has changed in several things. For example, the New Age of the 1980s was no longer characterized by the left-wing political beliefs of the counterculture: no Marx, no Che Guevara and no Mao Tse-Tung as referential thinkers (Hanegraaff, 1996). The collective struggle against social inequalities was replaced by the idea of healing the world by a personal change of consciousness during the shift caused by the astrological turn from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius (Hanegraaff, 2001). This change in the movement generated the usual criticism of its individualistic and mercantilist style. Michael Y ork (2001) regards the core features of the movement to be the commodification of religion and liberalism, understood as the freedom of practice, belief and consumption in the free market. The stress on individual responsibility rather than emancipatory collective goals could be considered to be part of the personalization process that Gilles Lipovetsky (1986) and J.-F . Lyotard (1979) associated with hyper/post-modern societies. But it is important to mention that the movement is not monolithic, and some authors have focused on how political commitment can also be present in the different groups and practices associated with these network (Viotti, 2011; Wallis, 2003). In the particular case of Uruguay, and as reported by Juan Scuro (2016), neoshamanic practices in the New Age Networks have been creating new forms of collective associations and social support, where individuals can also connect with collective goals and utopias.

The new spiritualities associated with New Age networks share their common rejection of Western materialism, and the return of a variety of Western and non-Western spiritual traditions (Hanegraaff, 2012). These characteristics are essential if the importance of holistic and alternative medicines in these networks is to be understood. Alternative medicine is an umbrella-like term that covers heterogeneous practices and beliefs, generally defined by their exclusion from the dominant biomedical profession (Kaptchuk & Eisenberg, 2001b). As Catherine Albanese (2005, 2013) reports, the roots of the holistic medicine movement can be traced back to the 19th century, through approaches that offered alternatives to the conventional medicine of that time (for example, herbalism, osteopathy, chiropractic, vegetarianism, hydrotherapy, mesmerism and homeopathy). At that time, the hegemony of biomedicine had not been fully established, and the plural medical situation of health care was a “war zone” (Kaptchuk & Eisenberg, 2001a, p. 190). In the so-called process of medicalization, these medical practices started to be regarded as illegitimate and quackery. After the success of the medicalization process, these medicines did not disappear, but remained in society as a variety of informal strategies. There is a continuity between these therapies and the new ones of the second half of the 20 th century, when the current form of holistic alternative medicine appeared. It was like a Freudian return of the repressed. The old ways of medicine had donned new clothes and converged in a heterogenic movement to confront the materialistic biomedical approach that had once kicked them off the gaming table.

The holistic health movement appears to be the outgrowth of several other movements, particularly the counterculture of the late 1960s, with its emphasis on “getting back to nature” and disenchantment with mainstream culture, the human potential movement, humanistic medicine, the wellness movement, Eastern mysticism and medicine, 19th-century Western heterodox medical systems (e.g., homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy), the feminist movement along with the associated natural birthing movement, and the environmental movement. The hippie counterculture sought health care that was compatible with its values of egalitarianism, naturalness, mysticism, and vegetarianism. The “free clinic” movement of the 1960s and 1970s embodied many of these values. Concurrent with these trends, a growing portion of the general public experienced disenchantment with the high cost, bureaucratization, specialization, reductionism, and iatrogenesis of biomedicine. Many of these people were predisposed to the concepts and values of the holistic health movement. Foci of the holistic health movement have included stress and stress reduction, reliance on natural therapies, therapeutic eclecticism, the notion of the healer as a teacher rather than a medical authority figure, the belief that the body is suffused by a flow of energy, the belief in vitalism and individual responsibility for one’s health (Baer, 2003, p. 235).

As Menéndez (1990) points out, all these different movements found common ground and a common identity in their subaltern position to the mainstream biomedical system. But the idea was not necessarily the rejection of science itself, but the spiritual appropriation of scientific discourse (von Stuckrad, 2014). For example, the movement appropriated the idea of a connection between mind and body through neuro-immunoendocrinal interactions, using ideas that started to appear in the 1970s through different scientists interested in the psychophysiological effects of mystical and meditative practices (e.g. Benson, 1976; Davidson, 1976; Fischer, 1971; Gellhorn & Kiely, 1972). These models were considered to be evidence of the effectiveness of other healing practices such as the Indian chakra system, and the scientific explanation of the individual responsibility for illness, in consonance with the idea of karma and its New Age appropriation (Hanegraaff, 1996). In more extreme cases such as the Germanische Neue Medizin of Ryke Geerd Hamer, neuro-immunological connections were used not only to defend the determination of the spirit over the body, but also to confront biomedical treatments, blaming them for triggering iatrogenic mental responses through diagnosis, and disrupting the “natural program” of illnesses, which, if used wisely, naturally led to a healthy and beneficial resolution for the individual (Apud, 2013b). In contrast to this kind of antagonistic and dangerous rhetoric, nowadays some authors describe a third wave of alternative medicine, which is more integrative, because of the less hard-line attitudes of biomedical perspectives, more open to including alternative medicines in therapeutic health strategies (Kaptchuk & Eisenberg, 2001a).

In Uruguay, holistic and psycho-mystical spiritualities started to become popular in the mid-1980s, after the fall of the military dictatorship, the return of democratic institutions, and the arrival of globalization (Menéndez, 1997). Ayahuasca groups emerged in the 1990s, through different modes of religiosity, such as churches (e.g. Santo Daime), and neoshamanic/holistic centers (e.g. Ayariri, Red Path). As in other countries, the New Age networks in Uruguay usually attract people from the upper and middle classes, interested in self-help and New Age literature. Ayahuasca neoshamanic practices such as those of Ayariri can be considered one of the general transnational cultural phenomena described in countries such as Germany (Blazer, 2005), France (Leclerc, 2013), and Australia (Gearin, 2015; St. John, 2016). This is not surprising if we consider that, in the context of the New Age networks, ayahuasca ceremonies give their participants direct and fast access to spiritual experiences, fulfilling their urge for numen. Furthermore, holistic therapists believe the rituals to be excellent psychotherapeutic tools for both healing and evolving, in the sense given by the spiritual conception of the New Age worldview. In my ethnographical research, I focused on the Ayariri center (the term is taken from the Ashaninka language, meaning “spirit of the wind”). The center states that it is dedicated to healing through experiential work and the exploration of consciousness, offering alternative therapies such as Kundalini yoga, Chinese medicine, Grof ’s holotropic breathwork, and individual transpersonal therapy.

The founder of the center, Merilena, is a Uruguayan woman who studied in the Holotropic Breathwork School of Stanislav Grof, and started to consider certain stigmatized drugs as traditional healing tools in psychotherapeutic treatment. On a journey to Peru, she encountered Takiwasi, a famous center for the treatment of addictions founded by the French psychiatrist Jacques Mabit. After this experience, she travelled to Peru to meet different curanderos – in Spanish, “traditional healers” – who use ayahuasca and other plants, in a tradition that is usually called vegetalismo. surprising if we consider that, in the context of the New Age networks, ayahuasca ceremonies give their participants direct and fast access to spiritual experiences, fulfilling the ir urge for numen. Furthermore, holistic therapists believe the rituals to be excellent psychotherapeutic tools for both healing and evolving, in the sense given by the spiritual conception of the New Age worldview. In my ethnographical research, I focused on the Ayariri center (the term is taken from the Ashaninka language, meaning “spirit of the wind”). The center defines itself as dedicated to healing through experiential work and the exploration of consciousness, offering various alternative therapies such as Kundalini yoga, Chinese medicine, Grof’s holotropic breathwork, and individual transpersonal therapy. The founder of the center, Merilena, is a Uruguayan woman who studied in the Holotropic Breathwork School of Stanislav Grof, and started to consider certain stigmatized drugs as traditional healing tools in psychotherapeutic treatment. On a journey to Peru, she encountered Takiwasi, a famous center for the treatment of addictions founded by the French psychiatrist Jacques Mabit. After this experience, she started to travel to Peru to meet different curanderos – in Spanish, “traditional healers” – who use ayahuasca and other plants, in a tradition that is usually called vegetalismo.

Figure 5. Concoction of ayahuasca by day, ceremony by night. Photographs taken by me in the Sachamama center of Francisco Montes, Iquitos, Peru, January 2014. Vegetalismo is a sociocultural mix of indigenous and Spanish beliefs and practices that belongs to the riverside mestizo Amazon culture (Beyer, 2009; Dobkin de Rios, 2011; Luna, 1986; MacRae, 1992). Under this animistic worldview, plants are looked on as intelligent beings, from whom the curandero learns a variety of techniques to combat witchcraft and treat certain diseases . The ceremonies at Ayariri learn from this tradition, but adapt the ritual design to the urban context of Uruguay, and the cultural conceptions to the New Age milieu. But I did not know any of this the first time I went to a ceremony there.

Figure 5. Concoction of ayahuasca by day, ceremony by night. Photographs taken by me in the Sachamama center of Francisco Montes, Iquitos, Peru, January 2014. Vegetalismo is a sociocultural mix of indigenous and Spanish beliefs and practices that belongs to the riverside mestizo Amazon culture (Beyer, 2009; Dobkin de Rios, 2011; Luna, 1986; MacRae, 1992). According to this animistic worldview, plants are intelligent beings, from whom the curandero learns a variety of techniques to combat witchcraft and treat certain diseases. The ceremonies at Ayariri learn from this tradition, but adapt the ritual design to the urban context of Uruguay, and the cultural conceptions to the New Age milieu. But I did not know any of this the first time I went to a ceremony there.

A mystical experience triggers a research project Saturday 12 September 2009 I received an e-mail from Merilena on Tuesday, telling me not to take drugs or alcohol during the week, to eat something light the days before the ceremony, and to fast the day of the ceremony, on Friday. And so I did, hoping to be more “receptive” this time to the effects of the substance, something that had not happened a year ago, when I went to Santo Daime. But also the idea was to respect the taboos, and self-suggest a little bit more about the practice and its magic. A friend of mine, Andrés, who went to the same ritual a few weeks ago with Merilena, told me he had had such an intense experience that he had been shocked, so I tried not to underestimate the ritual. I left work at 8:30 pm and walked to the center, carrying a bag with a blanket and a bottle of water. In her email, Merilena had said that both things were essential for the ceremony. She also wrote about the “purpose” of the ceremony, which was not very clear to me. At one point I thought “ …maybe it would be nice to have a vision about life and death, ” which I took lightly, but it was a big problem during the ceremony I guess […] I arrived at 9:45 pm. There were about 20 people there. […] The room was big, like two halls connected with no separating wall. The participants were sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall. Each of us also had a pillow and a basket in case we had to throw up. We also had the blanket and the bottle of water that we had brought. On one side of the room was Merilena and a woman helping her, and on the other side two men, one of whom, Fernando, had an instrument called a tumank [a kind of bow with a cord tied to each end; like a berimbau, but without the pumpkin].