Bélgica Dagua, "Pasu Spirit Woman Gardening Song."

In Western thinking we tend to make a strong distinction between cultivated fields or gardens and wild areas. In Amazonian thinking there really isn't a distinction like that because the forest is managed by spirit people. It's their garden. They manage the animals inside the mountains, inside the hills. They have the different kinds of animals—peccary, deer—inside their corrals, and they let them out for people to hunt in certain measured quantities. And so a space like this is imagined to be a garden—a woman's garden—even though it's not a human woman's garden. It's still a garden that's managed with the same kind of singing as a human woman would manage her garden. Even though manioc gardens generally grow—one could grow them, one would imagine with simply scientific technology—for Buna and Shuar women, a manioc garden grows with a lot of singing, and the ritual activity and thought that involves thinking about analogies between the plants, or between the plants and family, between the woman's body and the garden. This singing to the garden and singing to the land increases the affinity between the plants and the earth, and the woman brings them into a kind of relationship where the plants grow. And these songs are songs that a woman would sing alone in her manioc garden, and would probably learn from her mother or grandmother, when she was walking alone following her mother in the chagra. Songs that probably men wouldn’t usually hear, or that other women wouldn’t even really hear, because they're usually sung alone.