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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Júlia Dias Carneiro in Rio

‘This is your mission’: why one Brazilian doctor is training to be a shaman

Smoke rises from a woman's cupped hands in a forest. She is wearing beads and a feather headband and has a facial tattoo. Her eyes are closed
Adana Omágua Kambeba demonstrates a shamanic ritual with a small piece of lit ‘palo santo’. Photograph: Marizilda Cruppe/The Guardian

Adana Omágua Kambeba was still a little girl when adults started coming to her for advice, asking how to deal with their problems. She liked to speak to plants and whispered to smoke, puzzling the elders. No one had taught her that – it came naturally.

When she reached adulthood, her grandmother told her that of all her grandchildren, Adana had inherited a place in the lineage of healers and shamans of the Kambeba group, also known as Omágua, “the people of the water”, which has communities in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon.

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