Lessons from a Rain Forest
By Michael McQuaide
During the fall of 1997, I was preparing to enjoy a sabbatical
during the next semester. This was to be my third break from the
minutiae of professorial life. Goodbye to committee meetings,
long office hours, and the demands of academic advising. I focused
my reading on medical history, as this was to be the intellectual
emphasis of my time away from the classroom for the spring semester
of 1998. I love teaching my medical sociology course each year,
and wanted to shore up my knowledge of the early, pre-modern aspects
of healing. Among many other texts, I had read Mark Plotkin’s
Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice. This story of his
visit to the Amazon basin to work with indigenous healers fired
my own imagination to the point where I decided to reach as far
into that great unknown as I could.
So, in March 1998, I flew to Quito, Ecuador, to begin the most
outrageous travel of my life. Traveling has always been attractive
to me – the more remote and strange, the better. I got what
I was looking for during those 10 days in South America. I traveled
literally to the end of the road in Napo Province, Ecuador, before
leaving the vehicle to take a dugout canoe down the largest tributary
of the Amazon River. After some miles on the river, the indigenous
boatman pointed to the muddy bank and motioned for my guide and
I to begin our hike here. When my guide asked for directions to
our final destination, the indigenous man just said to turn left
whenever we were confused about the trail. We anticipated a three-hour
walk into the indigenous village of Rio Blanco. We made every
mistake possible during our walk that stretched all day and into
the evening. At places, the trail disappeared entirely into the
tangle of tropical growth. At one point, the trail simply appeared
to dead end at a tall mud bank. The guide made three attempts
to scale this wall of mud, sliding back to the flat ground each
time. It was only at this point that it dawned on me to ask him
how many times he had walked into Rio Blanco. “Never been
there, thought you had,” was his answer. We agreed that
the Quechua who regularly walked that path would not create a
trail that required them to crawl up that mud bank. Eventually,
we discovered that the trail followed a shallow stream for about
a quarter mile before becoming visible again. After dark, we arrived
in Rio Blanco and were greeted by the Grefa family who hosted
us for the next several days.
That trip took place just over 10 years ago and I have returned
to Ecuador more than a dozen times since then. My wife, Stacy
Bell, and myself have become good friends with the Grefa family
and were recently invited to the shaman Augustin Grefa’s
50th birthday party in the jungle. I returned to Atlanta after
that first trip in 1998 with an emerging idea to develop a sociology
course that would allow undergraduates the chance to visit that
awe-inspiring place and work with the Quechua who live there.
With the endorsement of the Oxford faculty and solid support from
then Dean Bill Murdy, I developed a course titled “Social
Change in Developing Societies.” The course was taught for
the first time in 1999 and has enjoyed full enrollment each spring
semester. During the classroom work in January and February, we
read and discuss issues relating to the pros and cons of globalization
and explore comparisons and contrasts between western medicine
and the types of healings we witness while in Ecuador. For 10
days over the spring break, we travel to remote areas in Ecuador
and work with people very far removed from what the students define
as normal. We return to Rio Blanco by the same route I first traveled
and learn from the Quechua how they survive in the tropical rainforest.
We walk through torrential rains and are sometimes turned back
from our original itinerary due to local labor disputes or washed
out roads. Through all of it, though, our groups maintain a positive
morale because we are all in it together and no one gets favored
treatment. We eat what the Quechua serve us and all get soaked
when the canoe leaks and fills with water. To date, more than
100 Oxford and Emory College students and faculty have participated
in this special academic course of study. Many have described
this course as the single most meaningful academic experience
of their lives.
We have spent considerable time trying to dissect why this course
has the demonstrated consequences that it does. From a purely
academic perspective, the students are told that they must write
the best 16-plus-page essay that they ever have, and the majority
of them do just that. Paper topics over the years range from the
many promises of globalization, comparisons between shamanism
and early Christianity, contrasts between North American birthing
practices and Amazonian midwifery, the role of the placebo effect
in shamanism and modern medicine to the relative status of working
women in South America and rural Ecuador. In the process of presenting
their papers, the students develop their seminar skills as we
discuss each paper and its implications.
In addition to these formal skills, the group spends much time
in conversation while in Ecuador. These conversations include
the history of indigenous knowledge and its appropriation by pharmaceutical
companies, the effect of American consumption on the rest of the
world, and the many ways in which our every decision, no matter
how private, has public consequences. These latent but social
consequences become apparent to us while we visit with the people
who are on the receiving end of American policies and practices.
In my view, this consideration of our effects on others is the
most important consequence of this study and travel program. The
students come away with a new understanding of conflicting arguments
on both sides of controversial issues. They begin to realize the
possibilities of a just and caring community that can transcend
the boundaries of nations.
Michael McQuaide is a professor of sociology at Oxford College.
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