y schools and those assimilated the most to the dominant Western culture, that achieve the greatest success in this system. These people most frequently become the upper class and set up a neo-colonial form of rule in which they imitate the values and lifestyles of the former colonists. It is taught and grounded into the minds of the natives that they must assimilate or else will live an invaluable, pointless life. In essence, it was to the point where there minds became jaded and they began to believe it. Finally, it is the role of healer-patient relationship essential to shamanism that was affected by the colonization process in South America. It would seem as if the shaman would be used by the patient for healing power, wisdom and other powerful aid. While that is true, the shaman also relies on the patient heavily. The patient needs the shaman to see, while the shaman needs the patient to act as his voice in all that he sees. The shaman uses the body of the patient as almost an intermediary for divine intervention. “Yet both figures, that as the shaman of certainty and the patient of doubt, only acquire this configuration by their coming together, because both contain within themselves, taken as individuals, the same vexation with the guard to the credible impossibilities that course through life’s contingencies as much as through the ambiguities of social relations”(Taussig, 462). In actuality, Shamans become shamans to eventually heal themselves, but there is a patience that needs to be had in order for this to happen. The role of the shaman became a part of the dominant world as much as the shaman used the white man, as healer, for his own benefit. The use of the yage in shamanism is important and necessary to understand. The use of yage is to see, to cross over into the death space, to use information that is not merely physically existing, but is spiritually existing too. “The healer-patien...
