The opening lines of Urry’s The Tourist Gaze (1990, p.1), noting that tourism seems to have “nothing whatsoever to do with the serious world of medicine and the medical gaze that concerns Foucault,” give the reader pause when read in the context of discussions of ethnomedical tourism. In establishments like the one discussed here, visitors are apparently traveling to submit themselves to the gaze of indigenous medical–magical practitioners, as well as the reverse; at the same time, the significant differences between the shaman’s gaze and that of the Foucaudian medic must be noted, along with the need for a fuller theoretical approach to this question than is possible here. It is also worth noting that this form of tourism is neither “modal” nor, in most cases, what one could classify as a “rite of passage” (seldom, at least, with those life stages commonly associated with such rituals); arguably it represents a reaching for ritual as solution to a personal crisis, and, with its emphasis on the intervention of “supernatural” forces, is more akin to premodern pilgrimagemaking than modern bourgeois tourism (Graburn, 1983). One might argue that in contrast to MacCannell’s prototypical “pilgrim” who “attempted to visit a place where an event of religious importance actually occurred,” (1973, p. 593) those engaging in this form of ethnomedical tourism rather seek to experience such an event first hand. The liminal quality of the phenomenon is overdetermined: ethnomedical tourism lines in a zone between sickness and health, Western and native, real and imaginal, and in this case the a phenomenological account of the drama of the curing practices in question is further complicated by the immanent presence of the discarnate entities of Shipibo shamanic tradition, not to mention the induction of visionary states in both the indigenous and tourist actors. This liminality was also highly evident in the social context of the native participants’ involvement in the tourist industry.
The Shipibo2 today inhabit an example of the “polysemous, social space surrounded by tourism
2
Frequently referred to in older texts as Shipibo-Conibo, the term Shipibo will be used here, as it is by the people themselves, to refer to the now highly integrated group of Panoan-speaking peoples of the Ucayali and Pisqui valleys (Loreto, Peru) including the Shipibo, Conibo, and others. Tournon (2002) provides an excellent overview of the ethnohistory of the region, at least in post-Colombian times.