Como en un panal de avispas
expression du relator shawi ; « comme dans un nid de guêpes »
To describe the shape of the world, the Shawi of Peruvian Amazonia don’t first turn to a map or the sky: they say that *el mundo es ovalado como el panal de las avispas*, the world is oval like the wasps’ nest. The image isn’t decorative. A wasps’ nest is enclosed, honeycombed, made of communicating cells; so the Shawi world is a closed volume, covered by an immense bluish layer of “earth” from the sun, where each space—water, the underground, rain, wind, the moon, the sun, the dead—is an inhabited cell, each with its own “mother” (*a’shin*). For a Shawi, to inhabit the world is to know oneself lodged in one of these cells of the same populated body. The wasps’ nest isn’t a poetic comparison: it’s a cosmological model—a geometry of the world, not an ornamental metaphor.
Los indígenas shawi creemos que el mundo es ovalado como el panal de las avispas y que está cubierto por una inmensa capa azulada, hecha de “tierra” de sol, dentro de la cual se mueven y se trasladan la luna, el sol y las estrellas.
The word is not a Shawi word, but an image that the storyteller Nahwiri Rafael Chanchari Pizuri uses in Spanish to convey, in a single stroke, the entire shape of the world: como el panal de las avispas, like the wasps’ nest. He inherited it from his grandfathers, who would call him outside on moonlit nights to tell him about the world. “That’s how we know what the world is like,” he says.
What the image conveys, a Westerner mishears if they take it for nothing more than a pretty comparison. A wasps’ nest isn’t round: it’s ovalado, oval, and above all, it’s enclosed. A casing holds it—here, una inmensa capa azulada, hecha de « tierra » de sol, an immense bluish layer made of “earth” of sun, through which the moon, the sun, and the stars move. The earth, within, is wrapped in water. The Shawi world is thus a finite volume, held from above, not an open space that would leak away in all directions.
And like a wasps’ nest, it is honeycombed. Chanchari’s account is the patient exploration of these cells: the space inside the earth where live the men without anuses; the space of water, soil, rain, wind, moon, sun; the space of the dead. Each cell has its “mother,” its a’shin: mother of the lagoon, mother of the river, mother of the mountains, mother of the rain. No cell is empty. The world is not a stage where man would be the sole tenant: it is a whole body, partitioned and peopled, where humans occupy one compartment among others held by others.
From this comes a way of dwelling. You do not take a tree, a fruit, an animal from the monte without asking permission of the spirit that guards it; otherwise, “it harms you.” To know yourself in a cell is to know yourself a neighbor—thus indebted. This kinship among the inhabitants of a shared, enclosed world echoes the animism that other Amazonian peoples name in their own way; it resonates with the more-than-human world, where the human is but one person among others.
Yet two pitfalls must be avoided. The Shawi wasps’ nest is not the Yanomami urihi, that “earth-forest” which breathes and can fall ill: the Shawi image speaks first of a form, a geometry of the world—enclosed, oval, partitioned—where urihi speaks of a living being to protect. And it is no ornamental metaphor, one of those added for beauty’s sake: it is the very model by which the world is conceived, traversed, and respected. You do not live near a wasps’ nest. You live inside it.