The Community-Building Mission of Kamsá Ritual Language

Abstract

The Kamsa Indians, resident in Colombia's Sibundoy Valley near the headwaters of the Putumayo River, confront the vagaries of human existence (which they define in terms of querulous spirits) through two complementary remedial measures, the blessing and the cure. Each pays homage to the ancestors (the "first people" or "grandfathers of our grandfathers"), finding in the ancestral period a formative moment in cosmic time, when the first people interacted directly with the celestial deities, when the spirits of plants and animals could take human form and speak as humans, when people could readily assume the form of animals, and when Our Lord and the saints and culture heroes walked the earth pronouncing judgments and setting precedents for all time. Blessing and cure hark back to this primordial epoch with its constitutive spiritual power as the key to health, happiness, and success in the modern world (see McDowell 1989).