Somatic Poetry in Amazonian Ecuador MICHAEL UZENDOSKI Department of Anthropology Florida Sate University 1847 W. Tennessee St. Tallahassee, FL 32306-7772 SUMMARY In this article, I explore two healing experiences, one in Amazonian Ecuador and the other in Amazonian Peru. I argue that these experiences can be theorized through the idea of “somatic poetry,” which I define as the process of making and experiencing beauty so that life and the story become part of the same thread. I discuss how somatic poetry involves drama and coauthoring with nonhuman natural beings, including spirits. I also explore how somatic poetry works textually in inter- connecting past lives, history, myth, the body, and the myriad and various subjectivi- ties of the Amazonian landscape. [Keywords: ethnopoetics, Ecuador, Quichua, Napo Runa, healing] In Amazonia, communicative action is not limited to humans but also includes spirits and beings from the nonhuman natural world. Throughout Amazonia spirits, plants, and other nonhuman beings possess communicative agency, but these beings communicate with humans through dreams, ritual states, feelings, visions, telepathy, or other means besides language. 1 This Ama- zonian religious philosophy, which has been written about extensively, is com- monly glossed as “perspectivism” (Viveiros de Castro 1998), a philosophy of life that attributes agency, souls, and subjectivity to all living things, including some inanimate things. Most of the literature on perspectivism is densely pack- aged theory. 2 But what happens when the Amazonian world, through its aston- ishing presence, overflows the bounds of theory and begins to dissolve the comfortable boundary between self and other in researchers’ lives? What happens when ethnographers become overwhelmed, and they begin to dis- cover that their own life experiences are becoming part of the stories, and the reality, that they study? I want to explore two healing experiences I had, one in Amazonian Ecuador and the other in Amazonian Peru. I reject a priori the notion that such experi- ences can be adequately described or explained, especially through words (Grindal 1983; Harvey 2006:904; Mentore 2007). As an alternative approach, I argue that Amazonian healing experiences be viewed as a kind of poetry, a “somatic poetry” that involves listening, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting of natural subjectivities, not just those emanating from human speech or from the human mind. In my usage of “poetry,” I draw on the ancient Greek notion of poiesis, which conveys “making” or “creating” something of beauty (Heidegger Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 33, Issue 1/2, pp 12–29, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2008.00002.x.