The Challenges of Kambô Conservation

We know from the ethnographic literature (Tastevin,1925) that the use of secretions from the kambô frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) is a traditional practice among several Indigenous peoples in the southwest Amazon, especially among Pano-speaking peoples such as the Noke Koĩ, Yawanawá, Matsés, Huni Kuĩ and their neighbors of different linguistic groups along the Peru-Brazil border region (Lima, 2009). Local uses have also been recorded, to a lesser extent, in other regions of the Amazon, such as among the Tikuna people in the border region between Brazil and Colombia (Nimuendajú,1952) and among the Waiãpi people between Brazil and French Guiana (Lima, 2014). In these indigenous contexts, the substance is used mainly as an emetic, tonic, and stimulant for hunters.

Before gaining fame and spreading globally, kambô had already expanded beyond its original context among caboclo or riverine populations and among rubber tappers who learned about its use from Indigenous people. According to journalist Leandro Altheman Lopes (2000), who documented the expansion of kambô throughout Brazil in the late 90s, and who is currently my colleague in the master’s program in anthropology at Federal University of Paraná, a pioneer in this process of expansion was the former rubber tapper Francisco Gomes Muniz, or Shimbam. He lived among the Noke Koĩ people in the vicinity of Riozinho da Liberdade (a tributary of the Juruá river in Acre), and learned about the use of the “frog vaccine” from them. Subsequently, he moved to Cruzeiro do Sul and began administering kambô to non-Indigenous people there for therapeutic purposes, a reinterpretation of Indigenous practices in an urban context. In the 1990s, he began to travel to larger Brazilian cities administering kambô within the ayahuasca religious communities of União do Vegetal (UDV) and Santo Daime, since he himself was a member of one of these religions.

After the death of Francisco Gomes in the early twenty-first century, the practice expanded within other neoshamanic and New Age circuits, especially those linked to “alternative therapies.” The substance began to be disseminated almost as a panacea, capable of curing ills of all kinds, whether physical, psychic, or spiritual (Lima & Labate, 2007; 2008). Currently, kambô circulates around the world mainly among holistic therapists and neoshamanic networks focused on the use of so-called “forest medicines”: ayahuasca, tobacco snuff, sananga, and kambô.

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By Filipe Ribeiro, MA for Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

#psychedelics #indigenous #nature