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Out of the Amazon...and Into the Museum

Having not been to the Museum of Natural Science in a long time, I was quite excited for our trip to HMNS for the Out of the Amazon: Life on the River exhibition. And I was pleasantly surprised.

To be completely honest, not at first. The exhibit looked quaint, tucked away in the back corner of the  top floor of the museum. But you better think twice if that doesn't look good enough for you.

The selection of artifacts available to see on display is, for a lack of a better word, stunning. The museum boasts that they have attained one of the largest collections of Amazonian artifacts in the world, and from seeing the exhibit, I can believe it.

Because of the Amazon's sheer size (four times the size of Texas), many of these cultures, being so far away from one another, have developed completely different lifestyles, religions, and taboos. All of their traditions were fascinating to me, from "stinging-ant" ritual ceremonies (more on that later) to their mythologies.

I scoured the exhibit searching for shamanistic items, something that I personally found the most fascinating. I certainly wasn't disappointed.

Something that has been fascinating to cultural anthropologists for a long time is the ritual ceremonies that many of these cultures possess. What I'm mainly referring to here are the "stinging-ant" ceremonies that seems to relatively common across many cultures in the Amazon. Often used as a coming-of-age ceremony, young members of the tribe (often usually male) must endure the excruciating pain of multiple ant stings, many times those of the bullet-ant, named after the gunshot-like sensation of their stings. It is usually seen as a sign of entering adulthood being able to withstand the pain.


 However, what I found the most intriguing (and as I scour others' blog posts, I can see that I am not the only one) was the Wartime ceremony of the Piaroa tribe. After the men of the tribe are separated from the women to make ceremonial masks, the tribe believes that the completed masks are then infused with a "soul", meaning that they are not merely masks, but a gateway to the spirits of the forest. A large contributor to the spirituality of the men and (and shamans, those experienced with connecting to spirits and gods, who often initiate and manage rituals) are the crushed beans of Anadenanthera peregrina, a plant whose powder, known as yopo, produces psychedelic effects in the human brain, contributing to the culture's belief of the spirit world.

Assortment of masks used in the ritual

Shell necklaces, used to make sound in ritual use

The exhibit taught me quite a lot of just how sophisticated these cultures really are. In my mind, I knew that they had done some incredible (at least to me) things over millennia, but the fact that they have learned to adapt to their environment so well using far less complex tools that we have available at our fingertips, and yet still are ahead of us in so many ways, is truly something that must be seen to be believed. This is truly a wonderful exhibit.
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