This essay examines various aspects of the sociocosmology of the Ikpeng, an Amerindian people of southern Amazonia. Through an attempted absorption of various Ikpeng concepts into its analytic vocabulary, it explores the convergence of the notions of affect (not relation) and becoming (not transformation) of this people on a sociopolitical plane composed by a mixture of peoples and species (not persons). On this plane, the shaman figures as a species anomaly, a position achieved via his exposure to multiple deaths, a radicalized version of the self-intoxication experienced throughout a subject's lifetime. Sustained by an animistic/shamanic cosmology, these conceptions prove incompatible with the humanistic models of sociopolitics predominant in contemporary anthropology. Following this indigenous line of thinking also exposes a non-organic modelling of sexual difference, intrinsic to the trans-species compositions involved in Ikpeng rituals, but whose first points of emergence are the shamanic initiation of boys and the menstruation of girls.
Amazonian Ethnology; Shamanism; Menstruation; Cosmology
