Healing ritual to save a boy in the womb: worlds at war and the Jarawara worldview in “The Aboni spirit of things”, by Itamar Vieira Junior

Abstract

In the southwest of the state of Amazonas, between the Juruá and Purus rivers, there lives an ethnic group from the Arawá linguistic family that is almost completely invisible among the Brazilian population: the Jarawara. In their worldview, the world, organized between four distinct spaces (earth, water, below the earth, and sky), is woven, in an abstract and concrete way, from the coexistence of all beings: humans, animals, plants, trees, spirits (inamati) and animals (yama). This animistic world, in the Jarawara conception, constantly presents itself as dangerous and at war, which is why it is necessary to establish ties with the spirits (Maizza, 2009; 2012). It is precisely the culture of these people that Itamar Vieira draws on in one of the narratives that make up his book Doramar ou a Odisseia. This is the short story “The aboni spirit of things”, in which the reader follows the saga of the warrior Tokowisa through the forest and the Amazon waters, in order to find an object (abatosi) that, manipulated by the village shaman, is capable of saving his wife and son (still in the womb) from a spell cast by the spiritual leader of the rival village, against which they are at war. Our objective in this text is to carry out an Ecocritical analysis of the story, appropriating aspects that characterize its plot and characters to weave correlations between the Jarawara worldview (relations in a constantly dangerous world, at war) and the ways in which the Bahian writer prepares his fiction.