Chacapa

A chacapa is about as simple as a ritual instrument gets. Leaves are gathered, dried, and bound at their stems into a bunch or a flat fan that fits one hand. There is no resonator, no membrane and no shell. Shaken, it makes a dry rushing sound, closer to rain on a roof or to wind through undergrowth than to the sharp report of a gourd rattle, and it can be played very quietly or worked up into something continuous and enveloping.

The leaves most often named for it belong to grasses of the genus Pariana, though what is used depends on what grows nearby. The bundle is made rather than bought, costs nothing but the gathering, and wears out with use, which means a chacapa is a consumable rather than an heirloom. That is a different relationship from the one a practitioner has with a drum or a costume, and it shows in how the object is treated.

In use the rattle is not held still. It is moved: over a person, around them, close to the head, along the length of the body, so that the sound arrives from changing directions. Practitioners describe the sound as the thing that acts, which makes the instrument closer to a tool than to an accompaniment.

Because the bundle is soft it can be brought right up against a body without harm, which a gourd rattle cannot, and much of its use is at very close range.

The best documentation of the chacapa comes from Luis Eduardo Luna's work in the 1980s among vegetalistas, the plant specialists of the mestizo river towns of the Peruvian Amazon around Iquitos. That setting is worth being precise about, because it is routinely misdescribed. Vegetalismo is not an untouched forest tradition. It is an urban and riverine practice that grew out of indigenous, African-descended and Iberian folk elements in a region reshaped by the rubber boom, and it has been in contact with the wider world for its entire existence.

Luna recorded practitioners who named their teachers, described their apprenticeships, and worked in towns with patients who arrived by boat. The chacapa sits in that world: a cheap made object in a practice that was already, when it was described, thoroughly mixed and thoroughly modern.

Since then the instrument has travelled a very long way. The international spread of ayahuasca practice from the 1990s onward carried the chacapa with it, and leaf rattles are now sold worldwide, made in the Peruvian Amazon for export and made elsewhere in imitation. Whether that is continuity or something else is a live argument among the people who work with it, and it is not one this atlas will settle.