Amazonia

Amazonia is the lowland forest basin drained by the Amazon and its tributaries, across what are now Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. It carries hundreds of languages belonging to unrelated families, and the atlas holds it as a region in its own right rather than folding it into South America or into The Andes.

The reason is practical rather than tidy. Andean religion is built around mountains as persons, around the ancestral dead kept and fed, and around a state tradition of terraced agriculture and centralised ceremony. Lowland Amazonian cosmologies are built around a different set of problems: the relation between human beings and animals, the transformation of one into the other, and the traffic between a specialist and the beings who own the game. Filing an Amazonian practice under an Andean heading produces a page that looks researched and is wrong, which is worse than leaving it unfiled.

What recurs across the basin, in societies otherwise very different, is a specialist who negotiates with non-human persons on the group's behalf, an understanding that appearance is unstable and that what looks like an animal may not be one, and the use of plant preparations as the means of seeing the arrangement as it really is. Peter Roe's comparative study of basin cosmology is a standard attempt to state what is shared without flattening what is not.

Colonial and missionary pressure, rubber-era violence and displacement have reshaped every one of these traditions, and none of them is a survival from before contact.

The twentieth century produced something in Amazonia that had not existed before: organised churches, with congregations, hymnals and constitutions, built around a plant preparation that had previously belonged to indigenous and mestizo specialists working one to one. Santo Daime was founded in the Brazilian state of Acre by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a rubber tapper of African descent, in the 1930s. Uniao do Vegetal was founded by Jose Gabriel da Costa in 1961. Both combine the Amazonian brew with Christian liturgy and a strongly congregational form of worship.

That congregational form is what carried the practice out of the basin. A church has members, officers, records and a doctrine that can be stated to an official, and those are the things a legal system can recognise. When Uniao do Vegetal's United States branch was blocked from importing its sacrament, the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which held that the government had not carried the burden the Religious Freedom Restoration Act places on it of justifying the ban as applied to that congregation.

Two things follow that are easy to run together and should not be. The churches are genuinely Amazonian in origin and they are not the same thing as the indigenous practices that preceded them; a Shipibo healer's work and a Santo Daime service are related by ingredient and by region, not by lineage. And the legal protection won by a church with a written constitution does not extend to practices held by peoples who never organised themselves that way.