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of chants, and allow their spirit/soul matter to be put at the service of the
healer. Repetition was a key part of successfully using
ujñarone
. The short
lines were repeated between two and five times, the stanzas punctuated
by conversation, massaging the patient, spitting on the skin or blowing
away offending spirits. The entire
ujñarone
, uttered in arcane, guttural,
and rapid-fire diction, was repeated various times, and it was said to be
effective only when used in specific groups. Often these
ujñarone
groups
were ordered according to kinship ties between Ancestor Beings. Such re-
lations remained apparent in the physical properties of the visible, non-
human forms taken by Ancestor Beings after they transformed. Those
who were related often had similar transition narratives, spiritual power,
and physical features.
40
Nearly all
ujñarone
cures climaxed with a series of
sounds that channeled the actions of Ancestor Beings and catalyzed their
healing activities within the patient's body. The universal use of the first-
person pronoun and these vivid onomatopoeias completed the healer's
transposition with spirits he or she embodied through the utterance of
the
ujñarone
. This transposition was the core of the healing chant.
41
The performance of an
ujñarone
chant was successful only if it could
realign the relationships between the First World of Ancestor Beings, the
linear time of human experience, and the inverted time of death. It re-
quired the healer, the patient, and the audience to be transformed by
contact with the powerful spirit of an Ancestor Being. The power of such
ujñarone
did not derive from a projection of the past into the present.
Rather, the chants were a fluid genre that reconstituted the relationships
of past, present, and future through the flexible medium of the healer's
body. When Simijáné was teaching me how to use
ujñarone
chants, he
directed me to add additional lines and phrases based on my own sense
of or relation to the
adode
events. He corrected me only when my refer-
ences contradicted the primary elements of the story. Simijáné himself
never repeated any
ujñarone
in exactly the same way. The point seemed
to be less about formal repetition than about the creation of a space in
which original transformations could be summoned and further used to
transform those in the present—a process that could also alter the past
events that were being channeled.
In Simijáné's teachings, the very practices that ethnographers have
identified as constituting “traditional Ayoreo ontology” depended not
on stable cosmological orders but on a radical break with continuity, on
a constantly shifting world, on the capacity to recreate the past, present,
and future. These practices took for granted the fluid nature of humanity,
the moral distinction between human and nonhuman, and the power of
spoken words to move backward as well as forward through time to cause