Knowledge Cultures 4(3), 2016

pp. 15–30, ISSN 2327-5731, eISSN 2375-6527

KNOWLEDGE EMBODIMENT THROUGH DANCE:

A STUDY CASE AMONG THE COLOMBIAN SIKUANI

FLOR ANGELA BUITRAGO ESCOBAR

[email protected]
Universidad de los Andes
HERMES GAITÁN QUINTERO
[email protected]
Universidad Externado de Colombia

ABSTRACT. The transmission of shamanic information through words is not

enough: the em-bodi-ment of knowledge acquires central importance. This paper
introduces the testimony of a sikuani shaman named Clemente Gaitán. In
Clemente’s childhood memories, participation in the “Way of the Gods” dance
(Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto) appears as a turning point. It is a collective dance
that is clearly differentiated from those known as feast dances, which are held at
harvest times, and from those performed during itomo, the second burial ceremony.
The Way of the Gods dance integrates the ancient traditions and the tangible
experience of healing and transforming the world through the embodiment of
knowledge in the sentient body of a dance-thinker. Dance is not only movement but
the actual embodiment of information.

Keywords: Sikuani knowledge; indigenous dancing; embodied memory;

dance-thinker

Introduction
The main question addressed in this article is how knowledge is sedimented
in the body through dancing. The case of the Sikuani people offers us an
answer: the knowledge is embodied, because it is not just transmitted
through the oral, but through a sensorial experience which connects the body
with the knowledge.
The Way of the Gods dance (Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto) synthesises
the relationship between ancestral knowledge and the inscription in the body.
On one hand, this kind of dance is a “knowledge experience” that links the

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magic efficiency of performance as an original creative act together with
traditional stories about the origin of the world. On the other hand, the
dancer here is a dance-thinker who is conscious not only of his or her
corporeal movements and his or her own perceptions, but also sediments the
knowledge in the body. We use the concept of embodied memory to explain
how dance, knowledge and the sentient body are linked together. In this
article however, we hope to revalue the Sikuani meaning of knowing,
because ancestral knowledge should not be considered to be transmitted
solely through the oral, but also through embodied experiences such as
dancing.

Dance as a Vital Experience

“The purpose of a shaman is not just to treat patients, but to heal the world,”
explains Clemente. “Knowledge remains in the body. The knowledge that
stays is known as Pejamatabüliwaisi:1 the heart’s thought… it settles in the
body but above all in thought,” affirmed Clemente Gaitán in August 2015 to
Flor Angela, co-author of this paper, when she was interviewing him about
the theme of this paper.2 Clemente was involved in the process of thinking
about the ideas of this article, since it began in January 2015. His son
Hermes had many meetings with Flor Angela to talk about the ideas related
to dancing and knowledge. “It’s the same with healing,” Clemente continued
explaining, “we [shamans] cure from our thought, which means, from our
heart.” As he said this he put his hand on his chest (not his head.) The way
he thinks about things could be likened to the English language expression
“to know by heart”: that which we won’t forget; it dwells in our heart, not in
our brain. This is the same for the Sikuani people.
The indigenous Sikuani people live in the Orinoquia region, which covers
both Colombia and Venezuela. There are 14,700 Sikuani people living in
Venezuela and 24,000 in Colombia, in 61 reservations, which are lands
designated by the state as inalienable collective property. Some of the
reservations are huge, such as Selva de Matavén, which has an area of
1,850,000 ha and 10,000 inhabitants who live far from any town or city, and
others are small, such as Wacoyo, with an area of about 8,000 ha, home to
1,200 people and located 12 km from the town of Puerto Gaitán. The Sikuani
traditional way of life has changed drastically in the past ten years, mainly
due to the influence of the oil and agro industries. There are nevertheless
activities such as dancing whereby people still keep their ancestral traditions
alive. It is the dance that transforms the landscape, the history, and the
people. It links dancers to the cosmos, building a nexus between the dancer
and the Gods. In fact, dancers become Gods: “We dance to become the

16
Tsamanimonae”, affirmed Clemente in March of 2015. Through this bond,
the ability to create and heal the world we live in strengthens.
Clemente Gaitán, who lives in Wacoyo, has taught Hermes and Flor
many details about Sikuani dances. Throughout his youth he danced many
times, and through the dancing he discovered a sense of life. When he was
six years old in about 1971, he met a great shaman woman called Laira:
She told us that there would come a time of war, with too many
sad people and machines flying in the air. She said: «Nejata
Tsamanimonae peliwaisi jawalia meta kasaütsanetsi» meaning that
we have to practice/follow the History of our Gods. Those who
want to be saved must follow the Way of the Gods and build a
spiritual world in order to change their train of thought.
I learnt this by listening to her. She sang while we danced. I
enjoyed being there a lot. Sometimes, when dancing around, I
would even forget to eat! As I listened to everything she said, I
thought to myself: «One day I would like to be like her.»
We danced in circles in an open place with palm leaf ceilings.
She sang sitting on a tapi [small bench, see Figure 3] and we
danced with our tsitsito [maraca, see Figure 1] If someone felt
tired, they could sit around for a while on benches. (Field notes,
January 2015)

Figure 1. An example of a tsitsito (maraca).

Property of Flor Angela, received during her sikuani shamanic studies.
17
Clemente also remembered when he danced with Leonor, the daughter of a
shaman known as Jayale. She had a dream in which Tsamanimonae [the
Gods] advised her to invite many people around to dance. It was a special
day, which he still remembers:
We [Clemente and his family] knew that «Diosobatsi Jayale
pexünatowayo Diosobatsi» [Jayale’s daughter was experiencing
the divine]. So we arrived at her house. She sang and we danced.
She asked her father to place some empty pots with lids near her.
When we finished dancing we sat around and opened the pots. The
smell was so incredible it was not from this world. She said we
could drink it. I remember drinking the smell, it was not liquid but
only smell, and we felt the scent of flowers, fruits; it was an
exquisite fragrance, out of this world. It is called Dana. It is
celestial, like malewa and yuno.3 Dana, malewa and yuno bring
power to the people who consume them. I remember that Laira
could catch malewa from the air, when she stood up amidst us, she
caught it from Heaven. (Field notes, February 2015)

Dance is not merely entertainment or an aesthetic experience. Dance is a

knowledge experience, produced by a dance-thinker (Brandstetter, 2007, p.
41). This term was also used to refer to a modern dancer:
While modern dance has always existed as a communicative art
form, I think the importance of the ‘who’ in who is
speaking/dancing has become more significant. In my own
experience, modern dancers’ identities are an equally if not
essentially important component of dance choreography, practice,
and performance. The construction of ‘dancer,’ has accrued a
definition that now includes an intellectual; a modern dancer is a
dance-thinker. (Judkins, 2011, pp. 10–11)

Nevertheless, we consider that this concept is the most appropriate to

understand the indigenous dancer because it is not about a body that
‘understands’, but about a being-thinker that dances and embodies the
knowledge. It is not repetition to commemorate divine actions registered in
the oral stories of the community, but knowledge experience that links to the
magical efficacy (Alcocer & Neurath, 2004) of dance performance. The
“Way of the Gods” dance, known as Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto, is a
creative act. Performance is a concept with a variety of meanings according
to the scope: daily life, arts, sports, business, technology, sex, rites and
theatre. The last two have had prevalence and also ‘special events’
characterised by rules and specific codes (Lewis, 2013). In this article we
use the following definition: “Performances mark identities, bend time,
reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories. Performances – of art, rituals or
ordinary life – are restored behaviours. … Something «is» a performance
18
when historical and social contexts, conventions, usage, and traditions say it
is” (Schechner, 2006, pp. 28, 38).

Indigenous Knowledge
The Way of the Gods Dance integrates the orally transmitted knowledge and
the tangible communion experience with the sacred. The dance-thinker is
aware of all these dimensions during the performance, and recreates the
experience in his/her own life, just as Clemente did every single time he can
remember. Yuweisi is the sikuani word that synthesises the traditional
knowledge: “Yuweisi is the ancestral thought which joins and condenses the
primordial strength that is exercised by the traditional medicine through waji
(sacred prayers) and the advice in Liweisi (the traditional stories)” (Agudelo
Blandón & Sanabria Rojas, 2015, p. 67). Hermes points out that not only
prayers and stories are important but also dancing because that primordial
strength is literally the heart of the performance.
Thomas Norton-Smith considers the Semantic Potency of Performance as
one of the common themes in American Indian philosophy (Norton-Smith,
2010). He explains, “performing with a symbol is the principal vehicle of
meaning in Native traditions… ceremonies and other sorts of performances
are the primary and the potent bearers of semantic content” (2010, p. 371
kindle). This concept can be related to Kaeppler’s definition of dancing
through linguistic terms:
In order to be understood as a dance (or some other special
movement category), movements must be grammatical, they must
be intended as dance and interpreted as dance. The grammar of a
movement idiom – like the grammar of any language – involves
structure, style, and meaning. (Kaeppler, 2000, p. 118)

We prefer to consider dance as poetic following the Brandstetter’s concept,

because she explains that it is necessary to know the “system” of movement
scenography. The rules of production; the poetry of the choreography are
comparable to the knowledge about the mitre of a poem or the rules of a
musical composition (2007, p. 44). However, we do not limit the poetic of
dance to choreography but keep in mind Kaeppler’s recommendation:
“Competence to understand specific pieces depends not only on movement
itself, but on knowledge of culture context and philosophy” (Kaeppler, 2000,
p. 118). We use a correlate of poetic as Bajtin (2005) understand autonomy
of voices; here the autonomy of dancing meanings in context.
The poetic of the Way of Gods sikuani´s dance is not only the set of
movements, music, rhythm, but also the context of performance and the
traditional knowledge at stake. The performance of the Way of the Gods

19
dance is a transforming experience for its participants. Clemente is aware of
this and he is now interested in sharing his experience with others. He will
not transmit it in the same way he received it, because the historical
circumstances have changed. In the 1980s, he went from a nomadic to a
sedentary lifestyle. He experienced vast changes by adopting a new lifestyle.
The wide walking paths throughout the savannah were restricted to a terrain
of a few hectares, in a region where soil conditions are inappropriate for
permanent agriculture. Clemente had to work for many years in cattle
ranches as a hired worker. Since the year 2000, he resumed his shamanic
activities and in recent years he has healed a lot of people, all around
Colombia and also in other countries. Recently, he received recognition for
his shamanic work and some Western people have expressed their interest in
learning his traditions.
Clemente has dedicated the last few years to preparing a group of
Western people to dance again in an appropriate place, with tapis decorated
with itane meaningful drawings, which is a kind of writing (Buitrago
Escobar, 2014). He has taught the traditional stories, the meaning of the
songs, and the corporal postures during the dance. He has also made the
restrictions clear: in ancient traditions, the body should be prepared through
a special diet (alcohol, sex, and some foods are forbidden) in order to gather
enough strength to receive the traditional stories and to embody the
knowledge. Knowledge tools (see Figure 2), as we decided to define them,
are the ritual elements used to think about the stories, the songs, and the
divine. But this practice is also for daily problems. For example, to think
how to finish and correct this article, Flor decides to use these tools to find a
better way to transmit the ideas about indigenous knowledge. For the
authors, Flor and Hermes, the sikuani knowledge tools, capi and yopo, are
active in their life to think about their life projects and to solve daily issues,
as well as to keep a spiritual connection with their beliefs.

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 Figure 2. Sikuani Knowledge Tools. Left: Roasted capi roots (Banisteriopsis caapi).
Centre: yopo powder (Anadenanthera peregrina) in a traditional wood serving dish
called pate, with a small wood pestle to grind yopo. Right: siripo, to inhale yopo.

The Sikuani knowledge can be shared but not sold as a commodity. If

somebody wants to learn it, then they should pay for it, “the same way you
pay when you want to learn a profession at a university. Once you graduate,
you can live well by practising this profession; in this case, by being a
shaman”, Clemente explains. But he also adds, “you cannot learn it just
through a book, you need an appropriate teacher”. How can you determine
whether a teacher has the appropriate knowledge or not? Clemente responds:
“His/her ability to cure”. It is true that the main purpose of shamanic
knowledge is not to heal but to think about the divine and to think about the
world, but the sedimentation of this knowledge is evident in the capacity to
heal patients. He also explains that there is good knowledge and bad
knowledge. The former heals the person; the latter makes the person sick.
Clemente is constantly worried by Western people’s “experimentation”
tendencies, particularly with illegal drugs and sacred plants. Good
knowledge that could heal people through sacred plants is trampled by the
anxiety of joy or pleasure to avoid daily problems. Clemente wonders what
kind of knowledge is taught in Western schools, as it seems that people do
not know how to think. He concludes by stating that Western schools teach a
brain-knowledge and not a heart-knowledge. That could be the reason for the
well-known sharp division between scientific and indigenous knowledge.
Hermes and Flor consider that both types of knowledge are seeking for the
truth through different ways of understanding the world.

21
 The way Western society understands indigenous knowledge has changed
over time. The mere idea of indigenous people has been transformed from
savages with incoherent beliefs to people with human rights, and coherent
and valuable knowledge that should be protected with laws of “property
rights” (Brush & Stabinsky, 1996). We are “in-between”: we consider that
this is neither an incoherent belief, nor a commodity that needs to be
protected as a potential product. In fact, there is not a homogenous
indigenous knowledge but a plurality of “knowledges” (Norton-Smith, 2010,
p. 198). Each indigenous group has established the way it should be
understood, through their own particular stories, traditions, songs, and
dances. When different indigenous people gather, they express that their
knowledge is underpinned by three concepts: spirituality, territory and
community (Restrepo Arcila, 2002; Viergever, 2011, p. 456).
López Ospina (2002) explains that those concepts should be understood
in a context of the Origin Law of each person. The Origin Law is the basis of
common law, characterised by the objective of uprising the human and
linking it to the divine. Fundamental pieces of this Law are the lands all over
the world, the Earth itself, considered as Mother Earth, where the origin of
everybody and every community lies. Therefore that territory has been
considered as sacred geography, inalienable, where the World’s order is
being kept through a set of rituals, including dancing.
Land, in particular native customary or ancestral lands, is
significant to indigenous people because it is the source of their
livelihood and the base of their indigenous knowledge, spiritual
and cultural traditions. (Viergever, 2011, p. 459)

From this point of view, a global problem for academia and science emerges,
because lands have been desacralized; so “local” solutions will not be
enough to solve the problems, particularly if there is not a change in the way
in which the world thinks. We agree with the words of Donaldo Macedo,
cited in the preface of What is indigenous knowledge?
It is only through the decolonization of our minds, if not our
hearts, that we can begin to develop the necessary political clarity
to reject the enslavement of a colonial discourse that creates a
false dichotomy between Western and indigenous knowledge. It is
through the decolonization of our minds and the development of
political clarity that we cease to embrace the notion of Western
versus indigenous knowledge, so as to begin to speak of human
knowledge. It is only through the decolonization of our hearts that
we can begin to humanize the meaning and usefulness of
indigeneity. (Semali & Kincheloe, 2011, p. 17)

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The main characteristic of indigenous spirituality considers that the world is
formed by complementary dualities and not by opposed ones as it is often
considered by Western thought, like masculine and feminine.
Complementarity, reciprocity and dialogue are the basis to recreate the
world’s harmony and to settle differences. When Clemente has to talk about
this, he explains the importance of spirituality in his life, and how spiritual
experiences through Way of the Gods dance has shown him a meaningful
life trajectory.

Sikuani Dances
The Way of the Gods dance differs significantly from other dances, such as
feast dances that have a celebratory purpose. Clemente explains:
It is a dance for knowing and for shaping the mind or healing the
body. We wake up our energy and we make our body vibrate.
While we dance, Mother Earth vibrates and our body vibrates with
Her (Field notes, August 2015).

The body vibrates because during the dance it is necessary to stamp the feet
on the ground with the rhythm of the music. When shaman Laira said:
“Those who want to be saved must follow the Way of Gods”, she referred to
a belief system and a dance named after Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto, Way
of Gods. It is a dance which was engraved in a sacred place, a rounded stone
path in Santa Rita, one of the nearest towns to the Selva de Matavén
reservation. Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto is one of the four sikuani dances.
The three others are Owewimataeto, Jalekuma, Katsipitsipi. Some authors
have reviewed sikuani dances (Monje Uscátegui, 2009; Queixalós &
Jiménez, 1991; Yépez, 1984), but Clemente offers the best explanation:
We [sikuani people] said that yaweiba refers to any kind of dance.
There are three main ceremonies which include dances:
Dujuaiwaji ceremony [Fishes’ Pray Ceremony to celebrate
menarche. See Bautista, Jiménez & Roelens (1994) and Ortiz
(1988), and Figure 3]. During this ceremony we dance Jalekuma
and Katsipitsipi. Those are feast dances, it is harvest time and
there is enough food for everybody. We dance Jalekuma yaweiba
in circles, women and men are interspersed and they touch each
other’s shoulders with their hands. Children can also participate.
Everybody sings, without using any instruments, someone begins
and the others repeat in a chorus-like manner. Katsipitsipi yaweiba
is in pairs, it is a ‘jumping’ dance and we almost run in circles. It
is also without instruments, just singing.
Itomo ceremony [Second burial Ceremony]. During this
ceremony we mainly dance Owewimataeto [Antler’ Stag]. This
23
 dance is in pairs; we organize ourselves in two lines, touching
each other’s shoulders; one line is in front of the other and then we
go forward and backwards. Children cannot participate between
the adults, they can organize their own lines. Men play the Antler’
Stag and women sing. Nowadays there are fewer antler’ stags
because of a shortage of hunting animals. We must not play this
instrument at anytime but only in the itomo ceremony, and if you
play it, it is bad luck because you would be calling death.
Tsamanimonae Petajunamuto is the Way of Gods dance, it is not
a feast dance, and nobody can laugh. It is special, because you can
get energy. We dance in circles, everybody with a tsitsito
[maraca]. Children can organize their own circle. The shaman is
outside the circles, he/she sits on a tapi, and sings “Heaven
songs”. We dance in circles because it was the way
Tsamanimonae [Gods] did it in Santa Rita. (Field notes, February
2015)

Figure 3. Tapi used in Dujaiwaji Ceremony of Jade, Clemente’s daughter.

The performance of the Way of Gods dance creates a connection with the
divine and depending on the preparation of the body, you can receive this
knowledge and sediment it through the dance. We can understand this
through the concept of mimesis, explained by Eduardo Subirats (2012). He
studies the original meaning to verify that ‘imitation’ is a restricted meaning,
inadequate to understand the relation between human and divine in myths
and rituals. The hierophant did not act as a god but transformed into the god
itself (Subirats, 2012, p. 55). He also specifies that “mimesis is the
experience of the unit of our existence with the real in the sacred or divine
aspect” (2012, p. 57).
Studies of indigenous traditional dances mainly focus in the participation
of the body (Cowan, 1990) and the movements as a knowledge system;
anthropological studies have “focused on system, the importance of
intention, meaning, and cultural evaluation” (Kaeppler, 2000, p. 120).
However, our intention is to recognize which kind of knowledge is being
performed, and how it is embodied by the dance-thinker.

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Embodied Memory
Remembering is an important part of personal storytelling:
Recent psychological studies of autobiographical remembering
emphasize that tracking the past is not necessarily its key function.
Remembering also plays an important and heavily context-
sensitive role in maintaining and renegotiation self-narratives, in
promoting social relations, and in directing future actions …
Personal narratives, social interactions, and future planning are
often expressed and embodied in rich social and material settings.
(Sutton & Williamson, 2014, p. 317)

This is particularly evident when Clemente recalls his memories: not just by
telling the event but by re-embodying the discourse in the present. During
yopo ceremonies in 2014 he presented himself as “I am a sikuani…”. Since
January 2015, Flor has been interviewing him about the dancing events of
his childhood and in August 2015 Clemente presented himself as: “My name
is Malabo, this is my spiritual name…”. His discourse has changed
significantly: at first, he made reference to belonging to a particular group,
and then he made reference to individuals, focusing on his particular
experiences. In 2014, he did not talk about dancing, yet in 2015 he
emphasized the importance of dancing to fuel our body with energy and to
connect us with the Gods.
From a phenomenological perspective “the body is the vehicle of being-
in-the-world” (Bermúdez, 2005, p. 298). It is a body aware of itself: its
conceptual representations (the set of belief that we all have about the
structure and nature of our body), the semantic way to name body-part, the
affective representations of the body and the homeostatic representation
relative to basic criteria of self-regulation and self-preservation (Bermúdez,
2005, p. 304). This perspective is accurate, but improved upon by Tim
Ingold, who reads Merleau-Ponty and Bateson, among others, to enable him
to talk about an Ecology of Life. Ingold acknowledges a body in the
environment, which includes human and non-humans, in a sentient body:
Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the
sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the
paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to
its ongoing renewal. (Ingold, 2011, p. 12)

Using this point of view, the sentient body of a dance-thinker is not only
aware of its movements and representations but it also interacts and shares a
neural base with the performed actions. The information in the neural net
travels across a pathway when it is sedimented in the body and the same
happens when it is remembered.
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 We have been referring to the sedimentation of knowledge in the body.
We adopted this word used by Paul Connerton who suggests that “memory
is sedimented, or amassed, in the body, I want to distinguish between two
fundamentally different types of social practice” (Connerton, 2007, p. 72).
These two types are inscribing practices and incorporating practices.
Inscribing practices are transmitted through devices for storing and
retrieving information: writing, photography, recording, etc. Incorporating
practices message is transmitted when the body is present in the activity.
Connerton considers that among incorporating practices we can include:
ceremonies of the body (ceremonious forms learnt to be displayed as
membership of an ancient group), proprieties of the body (the proper
behaviour or good manners) and techniques of the body (referential or
denotative gestures) (pp. 79–87).
It is evident that dancing is an incorporating practice, but it does not
belong to Connerton’s classification (ceremonies, proprieties or techniques
of the body). It is an incorporating practice because of the way in which the
body participates in the activity. We have seen that dances have “a special
power of evoking moments of enchantment, enthusiasm, or shock that render
‘speechless’” (Brandstetter, 2007, p. 43).
The evocation activates the memory. But what kind of memory? Subirats
considers two types: Mneme, the historiographical and objective memory,
and Anamnesis, the existential, communitarian and artistic memory of a
primordial time and a lived reality (Subirats, 2012, p. 63). But Mneme and
Anamnesis do not include emotional personal experience. Csordas has
suggested that emotion is a kind of cognition that is embodied in thoughts
(2002, p. 85). Emotions have been considered as a fundamental piece of
embodied memory, particularly those referred to trauma (Levine, 2010), as
well as experiences lived through the body as sports, dances, playing
instruments and manual know-how (Sutton & Williamson, 2014, p. 315).
We explore how memory works and how it links to the experience of the
body, according to Dijkstra & Zwaan. They explain that the metaphor of
memory as a network that connects concept-labels is a problem because it
does not explain the way in which memory works: “Mental representations
need to be grounded in perception and action; they cannot be a free-floating
system of symbols” (2014, p. 296). Mental representations have to be tied up
with perception and action, the neural net operates when we remember
episodes related to actions: those brain connections trace a pathway when we
acquire new information and whenever we remember this information,
neurones activate the same path: “In other words, the experience of an event
and the reconstruction of an event when it is being retrieved occurs in a
similar way and with the same brain activation and same systems involved
as during the original experience” (2014, p. 297).

26
 This perspective offers a new way of understanding Clemente’s
explanations. During the dance, a neural pathway is created in the execution
of the action and probably whatever the performance implies: stories, songs,
people, and places. Every time he evokes ‘dancing moments of
enchantment’, all his neural nets are activated. This can be seen when
Clemente remembers the event: he stands up, moves his hand [as playing a
maraca], and his face reveals the happiness of that moment.
Connerton analyses how the past is preserved not only through words and
images but also through the body, considering that these incorporating
practices become habits which are defined as “a knowledge and a
remembering in the hands and in the body; and in the cultivation of habit it is
our body which ‘understands’” (Connerton, 2007, p. 95, emphasis in
original). Nevertheless, we disagree with the idea of a body which merely
“understands” since during his childhood and through dancing, Clemente set
his life trajectory as a dance-thinker, whose body sedimented the memories,
which are now remembered with a new meaning.

Conclusion
Sikuani knowledge has a strong link with the heart; Pejamatabüliwaisi is to
heart-think the ancestral stories and songs which are embodied to experiment
a celestial connection. This knowledge is at stake during remembering and it
has a new meaning during the re-embodiment in the present discourse. A
new storytelling emerges when the neural path is crossed again.
Through dancing, the dance-thinker sediments ancestral knowledge in the
sentient body with the purpose of changing his/her world and his/her life. A
reflexive thought springs of this spirituality because the performance
changes the history of the participant and the relations with others, mainly
with the cosmos because a nexus is made between the dance-thinker and the
Gods: the dancer becomes a God.
The poetic of Way of Gods sikuani dance is not just only a set of
movements, music, rhythm, but it also expresses the context of performance
and the traditional knowledge. Now you, the reader, have a prepared mind to
literally know by heart the Heaven songs of the Gods in Tsamanimonae
Petajunamuto.
Kuwei malewa [celestial malewa]
Kuwei yuno [celestial yuno]
Kuwei dopa [celestial yopo]
Kuwei juipa… [celestial capi]

27
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to our universities and government institutions
for the financial support: for Hermes, Universidad Externado de Colombia and
Icetex, and for Flor Angela, Universidad de los Andes and Colciencias. Flor would
like to express her thanks to the colleagues of the Doctoral Colloquium, directed by
Pablo Jaramillo, and to María Ferro, who provided lots of encouragement and
critical comments to complete this article.

NOTES

1. Heart: jamatabüütjü. Thought: jamatabükuene. Hermes, who is a sikuani

native speaker, explains: In sikuani language, we think with our heart not with our
head. Both words have the same lexical root: jamatabü. The word
Pejamatabü+liwaisi could be translated as “Thinking-hearting the traditional
stories” (liwaisi).
2. Hermes, co-author of this paper, learned shamanic traditions directly from his
grandfather José Antonio Casolúa, and his father Clemente Gaitán. Flor Angela, co-
author of this paper, has been learning sikuani shamanic traditions since 2006. Her
first teacher was José Antonio Casolúa, who passed away in 2011. Since 2012, she
has continued her studies with Clemente, who also has other Western shamanic
students.
3. Sikuani shamans chew capi (Banisteriopsis caapi) and inhale yopo powder
(Anadenanthera peregrina) as entheogens (psycho-active substances). Malewa is
considered to be a type of yopo that comes directly from Heaven. Yuno is a kind of
quartz crystal that emerge spontaneously in the hand of the shaman, when he calls it
through a waji, a specific shamanic song. Flor and Hermes have seen some yuno,
especially when José Antonio Casolúa (Hermes’ grandfather), a great shaman, called
it when he was still alive.

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Flor Angela Buitrago Escobar knows the Sikuani family referred to in the current
work since 2006. Even though she has no indigenous legacy, they embraced her first
as a shamanic student and then as a researcher during her studies towards Magister
in Literature and PhD in Anthropology, at Universidad de los Andes. Her current
subjects of study are ancient Sikuani knowledge, the education system for
indigenous peoples and associated public policies, and the life trajectories of young
indigenous university students.

Hermes Gaitán Quintero is a Sikuani member of the Wacoyo indigenous

reservation in Colombia. He is the son of Clemente Gaitán and the grandson of José
Antonio Casolúa, who are referred in the article. He is currently studying History at
Universidad Externado de Colombia. Among his research interests are the recovery
of stories told by the elders in his community, and their experiences during the times
of violence in Colombia.

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