The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, AD 1000-2000 (Critical Perspectives in Identity, Memory & the Built Environment)

The Ecology of Power CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES IN IDENTITY, MEMORY, AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT HELAINE SILVERMAN, UNIVERSI...

Author: Michael J. Heckenberger

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The Ecology of Power

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES IN IDENTITY, MEMORY, AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT HELAINE SILVERMAN, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, SERIES EDITOR Places in Mind: Archaeology as Applied Anthropology edited by Paul A. Shackel and Erve Chambers Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes: Tiwanaku Cities through Time John Wayne Janusek

The Ecology of Power Culture Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon AD –

Michael J Heckenberger

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2005 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. All author’s royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Associação Indígena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heckenberger, Michael. The ecology of power : culture, place, and personhood in the southern Amazon, AD 1000-2000 / Michael J. Heckenberger. p. cm. – (Critical perspectives in identity, memory, and the built environment) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-94598-4 (hb : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-415-94599-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Indians of South America–Brazil–Xingu River Valley–History. 2. Indians of South America–First contact with Europeans–Brazil–Xingu River Valley. 3. Indians of South America–Brazil–Xingu River Valley–Social life and customs. 4. Chiefdoms–Brazil–Xingu River Valley. 5. Xingu River Valley (Brazil)–History. 6. Xingu River Valley (Brazil)–Colonization. 7. Xingu River Valley (Brazil)–Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. F2519.1.X56H43 2004 981’.72–dc22 2004015651 ISBN 0-203-48662-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57708-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

Dedicated to my parents, Mary and Victor and Afukaká, teacher, friend, and “brother.”

Contents Preface

xi

Illustrations

xix

List of Tables

xxv

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1

Broken Mirrors: Amazonia as Imagined World Lost Civilizations, Again? History, Ecology, and Power

PART I

Visualizing Deep Temporality

CHAPTER 2

Culture and History: The Longue Durée

The Southern Amazon The Southern Periphery Xinguano Cultural Schema

CHAPTER 3

6 14 19

29 37 42 56 60

Traces of Ancient Times

Basic Chronology A Tale of Two Towns: The Western Complex The Eastern Complex

vii

67 68 75 103

viii • Contents

CHAPTER 4

Social Dynamics Before Europe

113

A Thread of Ariadne Ancient Xinguano Regime as Galactic Polity War and Peace in the Age of Inka

117 124 133

CHAPTER 5

In The Shadow of Empire: Colonialism and Ethnogenesis

A Brief History of “Contact” The Construction of Xinguano Pluralism Demography and Social Change

PART II

Body, Memory, and History

CHAPTER 6

Landscape and Livelihood: The Ethos of Settled Village Life

Making a Living Basic Diet Objects as Subjects Pottery Productivity

CHAPTER 7

In The Midst of Others: Landscapes of Memory

The Mirror World of Dawn Time The Skin of the Land Village and Countryside Place and Place-Making: The Sites of Memory Visualizing Landscape: Memory and Representation

CHAPTER 8

Houses, Heroes, and History: The Fractal Person

Xinguano Social Memory: Enchainments Chiefs and Others Village as “House”

143 147 152 163

179 191 192 198 201 209 216

223 227 230 236 242 250

255 258 269 284

Contents • ix

CHAPTER 9

The Symbolic Economy of Power: Plazas as Persons

The Xinguano Plaza Making Chiefs Socio-Ethnophysics Plazas as Persons The Symbolic Economy of Power

291 293 296 302 306 312

CHAPTER 10 Conclusion: The Pedigree of a Contradiction

319

Persons Large and Small Chiefdoms, or What? Big-Men, Great-Men, Chiefs, and Others The Structural Contradiction and the Theater State Notes

322 325 331 336 349

Bibliography

361

Orthography and Glossary of Indigenous Terms

385

Index

397

Preface Amazonia is one of the last earthly frontiers of the modern imagination. New species, in complex webs of biodiversity, seem to turn up as quickly as biologists and botanists go out to look for them. Many scientists, in fact, feel that the cure for a whole host of world ills, everything from cancer to climate change and ecological well-being, may well be found as the Amazon yields its secrets. It is among a handful of places where “isolated” indigenous groups still stride into the consciousness of the “civilized” world (the distant second being New Guinea, according to the New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1999). It is no surprise the region is shrouded in mystery, because the lush tropical forests that dominate this vast area, which is easily the size of Europe, pose significant challenges to intruders: explorers, colonists, and scientists alike. It is a place where Western travelers and voyeurs still hope to encounter refuges of unknown or “extinct” species, untouched islands of natural biodiversity, untapped fonts of valuable resources, as well as our own alter egos, isolated pockets of “Stone Age” tribes, something preserved from ancient times: lost worlds. It is ironic that we Western observers often look to Amazonia to encounter our “living ancestors,” some archaic state of nature or orientation of society, because the past—the Amazonian past—is an enigma. Recent scientific attempts to characterize, classify, and catalogue the present nature of the Amazon forest or its people too frequently assume that present conditions characterized the past, creating an image of a primordial nature or human condition. Yet, such assumptions generally lack supporting evidence; all too often they lack even a shred of corroborating history or archaeology. Even so, old views die hard, and the centuries-old portrayals of the tropics as a torrid zone inhabited by primitive peoples and filled with jungle still pervade the scientific and popular

xi

xii • Preface

imagination. We see them time and time again: an early condition of nature and humanity, a Garden of Eden, or a Green Hell. The majority of native Amazonians today live at the margins of the increasingly globalized world, but was it always so? Was Amazonia always so “marginal,” held in place by some ecological or social imperative and distanced from the pulses of imperialism that have washed across the continent for over five hundred years? The point of view taken in this work is that native Amazonian societies, considered against the backdrop of a deep history that extends beyond 1492, were far more “advanced,” in terms of their cultural achievements than typically assumed. Like other Native American peoples, Amazonians faced centuries of colonialism, and the size and often fugitive nature of social groups in the twentieth century must be seen as the result of this European colonialism impacted heavily upon the indigenous peoples of the region, no less so than elsewhere, but we are still ill-prepared to consider the magnitude of colonialism’s impact or, particularly, of what came before. Certainly, nothing as massive as the Inka empire ever emerged here, but the long popular view that an adaptation to the environment or some social contract prevented population growth or social complexity also is no longer tenable. Amazonian civilizations were every bit as complex, in terms of actual human lives and the changes they experienced, as temperate Europe, North America, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Civilization in Amazonia over the past few thousand years must be measured on its own terms, and not on the Procrustean bed of Western historical experience, in comparison to European or Mediterranean examples of towns and cities, temples, palaces, and marketplaces. Writing Amerindians as active agents in complex histories, rather than as “pristine” bands and tribes who are today “caught, like gamebirds, in the trap of our mechanistic civilization,” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 42), has gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. Amazonia boasts a wide range of ethnographic studies from the late twentieth century that permit anthropologists to consider in detail the native peoples of Amazonia during this recent episode in their histories. Still, we know relatively little about their histories prior to this time, particularly their deep histories. The situation is compounded by the fact that in those few areas where we do know something about archaeology or early colonial periods, there are generally no indigenous populations, and detailed studies bridging this gap are generally lacking in regional anthropology. Twentieth-century science had seemingly dashed any hope of finding, hidden in the Amazon, ancient civilizations, heralded by lost cities, forgotten pyramids and temples, such as those that explorers found hidden in

Preface • xiii

the forests of Mesoamerica, Peru, or Southeast Asia. Without such studies it is easy to portray Amazonia as a stronghold or refuge of “archaic” societies, timelessly preserved, both environmentally and socially. Yet, we increasingly see that such a view is historically unwarranted. Although still largely circumstantial and based on generally small bits of information from widely disparate locales across Amazonia, mounting archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence from the past two or three decades makes such a view untenable. The gap is widening between a social science that focuses on the present, including the radical changes of the late twentieth and twenty-first century and based on a survey of living peoples, and the vision provided by a deeper history, which suggests that much of what we call nature is anthropogenic in origin, much of what we call “traditional” is a response to colonialism, and much of what is considered “simple” is actually a strategic political response to aggression and the historical consequences of the “Great Dying”. It is little wonder that contemporary settlements and monuments are small, and that communities are highly mobile and technologically austere. Amazonia offers unique challenges to students of indigenous history, as it lacks much in the way of early written documents or archaeology. Native Amazonian civilizations are not “hidden in plain sight,” as Kehoe (1998) has eloquently suggested of Native American civilizations like Cahokia. Rather, relics of the past grandeur of Amazonian civilizations are perhaps awaiting discovery beneath the forest canopies or in the bodies of living indigenous peoples, if we know how to look for them. What little we do know suggests, as we might today expect, that the “rise of the State” in Amazonia, the transition from kinship and political autonomy to class and political domination was a long, gradual process. Indeed, the coercive power of martial force and economic alienation came late if at all in this process, like much of the world in 1492, the political apparatus of the “full blown” bureaucratic state was absent here. Yet, the “idea of the State” (a term borrowed from Yoffee 2001), the evolution of the symbolic simplicity that underlies hierarchical social organizations throughout many world areas—“heroic societies,” as Sahlins (1985) calls them—was no more foreign to Amazon peoples than to societies elsewhere. This work aims to describe, in necessarily broad brush strokes, the cultural history of a genuinely Amazonian complex society: the Upper Xingu of southern Amazonia (Brazil), over the past circa one thousand years. The Upper Xingu is precisely one of these areas that, when considered over the long run, reveals a grandiose and complex culture history, for which there are no better words in English than “polity” and “civilization” to describe it. This book aims to bring some ethnographics clarity to the

xiv • Preface

currently ill-formed debates over what constitutes “complex society” in Amazonia. It entreats issues of “statehood,” specifically if initial expression in “chiefdoms,” as such societies are commonly called in ancient Amazonia and elsewhere in the non-Western world, and it attempts to reveal some of the historical processes relating to them, such as ancient diasporas, as large as any on the planet, colonialism, and power. This (hi)story is not the only possible one, not even necessarily the best; others will undoubtedly see things very differently. However, my intention is not to convince readers that this is the right view, or correct in all its parts, but instead to provoke regional specialists to ask certain questions that are unavoidable at present. It is meant as a starting point and will change in the reading and retelling of it (I could already rewrite it myself, but auto-critique can wait). Xinguano cultural history is a story worth telling and, although I do not attempt to speak for Xinguanos themselves, it is important that we attempt to give some voice to a history—the ancient history and the deep temporality of contemporary Amazonian peoples—that has hitherto been unheard in any form. The approach is necessarily amphibian: part archaeological and part ethnographic, past and present. It is an historical ethnography (which I take to mean a contextual or direct historical approach) aligning, to the degree possible, alternative histories, and combining an archaeology, sensu stricto, with an archaeology of the body, of language, and of spatiality and landscape. With this said, this is actually two books. Several people have suggested to me that the work be broken up. They have pointed out that it is too eclectic, too confusing with its cojoining scales, and that my analyses just scratch the surface. From the start, I have rejected this because of the utility and novelty, in my opinion, of a holistic, multiscalar perspective. This demands the examination of the long, sociocultural trajectory now known from the region from start to finish, through whatever means possible. This work represents a synthesis of ideas partially presented elsewhere, in my dissertation (1996) and Os Povos Indígenas do Alto Xingu: História e Cultura (Franchetto and Heckenberger 2001). To my counselors, along with my thanks, comes the promise that this is not the last word, and that problems outlined here will be further pursued by myself and others in more detailed ethnographic and archaeological accounts. Thus, The Ecology of Power is divided into two parts. Part I attempts to construct a basic historical framework for the Upper Xingu, a chronology and description of the major historical themes and periods. It is an attempt to “read” history through the lens of regional anthropology. It is about significant historical personages, including settlements, settlement clusters, and regions over various time periods—generations, centuries,

Preface • xv

and even millennia. It explores the deep history of the Arawak diaspora (a model or idea about a historical trace found in some Amazonian bodies), that is speakers of Arawakan languages and related peoples, such as those who dominated the southern Amazon, and the Upper Xingu within it. Part II is a an attempt to “read” anthropology through the lens of this history, to take what I know of the present based on previous ethnographic work including my own (eighteen-month) residence in the Kuikuru village between 1993 and 2003. In this effort, I have tried to make sense out of certain anthropological elements in the present that seem important or unexpected in regional ethnology, notably settled, agricultural life, regional patterns of sociality and polity, and social hierarchy. This is based on knowledge of certain homologous cultural artifacts, that serve as windows on the past, including material culture and technology (ceramics and subsistence), settlement patterns (plazas, roads, and “galactic” clusters of them), and landscape (the highly constructed or “domesticated” landscapes typical of the southern Amazonian (principally Arawak) chiefdoms. The title is a hint at the overall aim of the book, which is to provoke us to question our assumptions about sociality and polity as they relate to Amerindian societies, their ecology, and their symbolic content. All things are not equal, from a historical point of view, both things and persons must be defined as such only relative to scale and resolution, perspectives. Fortunately, the self-scaling properties of human cultural systems provide the means to consider social bodies or persons at different sizes and time frames. The “fractal person” is the apt metaphor Wagner (1991) uses for this holographic technique. In this sense, ecology, comes to mean more than simply the interactions between humans and the natural environment, and includes the dynamic interplay between technology on one hand, and power (the deployment of technology) on the other, this refers to the uniquely social, cultural (or symbolic), and historical nature of resource, flows and trophic exchanges, ecofunctionalism, and economic determinism cannot hope to address the variability of symbolic content and social traffic in similar “ecologies,” much less the topology of change, for instance, with respect to colonialism. The findings of archaeology and early ethnohistory, in regard to ancient Amazonians, requires us to directly confront issues of power, the social and political techniques of its expression, and its imprint on human bodies. Regional specialists have yet to map out, even in a preliminary sense, some of the major developmental limens of “power” across time and place in the region. Chapter 10 discusses this disciplinary power, as it is codified in the structure of the central plaza. This, of course, is a model or metanarrative of the long term and the large scale, but it equally applies to the

xvi • Preface

consideration of the nature of sociality and polity at any moment in time, whether that moment be yesterday or a day (one thousand years) before. Inquiry into the history of Xinguano peoples is an ongoing endeavor, now entering a new phase of collaborative research with colleagues at the Museu Nacional in Brazil, Bruna Franchetto and Carlos Fausto. Most recently (2002–2004), the archaeological research team has been aided by graduate students Joseph Christian Russell, Joshua Toney, Morgan Schmidt, David Mead, Luís Claudio Symanski and Mark Donop. The present work is thus something of an interim report on a decade (1992–2002) of research. It raises more questions than it answers, as, until recently (2002), it has been largely the work of a single researcher (and many Kuikuru assistants). Still, the intention in entering this new “transdisciplinary” phase is to foster dialogue to answer some of these questions. It was essentially completed a decade from when I first set foot in the Parque Indígena do Alto Xingu (PIX), the Upper Xingu, and began my first in-residence fieldwork with the Xinguanos, when I spent about a year (January to December 1993) with the Kuikuru community. Of the many people who have helped me along the way, only a few can be acknowledged here. In the early stages of my research, my dissertation advisors, Jim Richardson and Jerry Sabloff, provided invaluable support and guidance. Throughout this time and afterward, Jim Petersen and Bob Carneiro provided continuous support and inspiration, which profoundly affected the course of my studies and thinking on Xinguano peoples. In Brazil, Bruna Franchetto, Sandra Wellington, and Irmhild Wüst were critical to the conduct of the research. My thinking also has benefited immensely by conversations over the past decade with colleagues in Brazil, most notably, Carlos Fausto, Eduardo Neves, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; and in the United States and elsewhere, Bill Balée, Clark Erickson, Peter Gow, Patrick Menget, Anna Roosevelt, Terry Turner, and Neil Whitehead. Carlos Fausto, Bruna Franchetto, and Jim Petersen kindly commented on the final manuscript. Figures 3.6, 3.10, 3.16, 3.17, 3.19, and 4.1 were drafted by Jim Railey, and photos in Figures 2.3, 6.10, 8.3 (1995), 9.1, and 10.1 (1994) were taken by Jim Petersen. Joshua Toney’s assistance, Richard Tressider and the editorial team at CRC Press (Boca Raton) and the Frame Team at Datapage were invaluable in improving the final manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the institutional support of the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, the Museu Antropológico da Universidade Federal do Goiás, and the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, and, at the latter, especially the support of Edithe Pereira, Vera Guapindaia, and Denise Schaan. The Brazilian National Research Council

Preface • xvii

(CNPq), the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), and the Institute of Historical and Artistic Patrimony (IPHAN) were all exceedingly gracious in evaluating and authorizing various episodes of research. The support of special friends, including André Melges, Jim Petersen, and Bill Hillman, and my brother Brian was critical to the success of this work. I extend my deepest appreciation to the Kuikuru community, especially my adoptive brothers and their families, Afukaká and Tabata Kuikuru, and many other Xinguano people who extended innumerable kindnesses and help throughout the project. I dedicate this work to my parents, Mary and Victor, and Afukaká, my dear friend, teacher, and host, without their constant support, none of this effort would be possible.

Illustrations Figure 1.1 Map showing location of Upper Xingu. Figure 1.2 Satellite Image (Landsat 6 TM, 1992; 5-4-3) showing limits of Parque Indígena do Xingu and Kuikuru study area (box), with inset showing position in Brazil. Figure 1.3 Contemporary Kuikuru village 2002. Figure 2.1 Atugua (whirlwind) masks in Ipatse village (1993). Figure 2.2 Front door of small round “radio,” subsidiary to household of primary village chief (1993). Figure 2.3 (a) Fish-spirit dance in Xinguano village in 1887 (from Steinen 1894) and (b) at Ipatse village (1995). Figure 2.4 The Arawak Diaspora showing distribution of primary contemporary Arawak language groups (1–10; after Aihkenvald 1999). Figure 2.5 The Southern Amazonian Periphery. Figure 3.1 Distribution of archaeological sites in Upper Xingu. Note white unstippled areas are generally, forested (see Figure 1.2) Figure 3.2 Distribution of archaeological sites in Kuikuru study area, showing large fortified settlements (large circles), sites unfortified with peripheral ditch but with plaza/road earthworks (small black circles), unclassified sites (small open circles), and probable Eastern Complex sites (triangles). Figure 3.3 Xinguano Tradition radiocarbon chronology. Figure 3.4 Ipatse cluster sites (from north to south: X6, X13, X18, X19, X20) connected by the “north-south” road, lying on high-ground forested areas: other cluster sites of X22 (located above the Legend) and X17 (located above the middle curve of the Culuene, where upland forest contact river margin at

xix

2

24 25 38 39 40

43 56

69

70 73

xx • Illustrations

upper right) are also shown. Note (1) galeria forest and oxbow lakes associated with the Culuene River active floodplain (upper right), (2) Ipatse stream in the low-lying area (dark) east of the sites (relict floodplain), and (3) wide, marshy Angahuku River bottoms to west of sites (dark), flanking (lighter) upland forest. 80 Figure 3.5 GPS overview of Ipatse cluster sites X6 (north) and X13 (south). Note contemporary village (white dot) adjacent to Ipatse Lake and X13 (south) on peninsula of upland forest. 81 Figure 3.6 GPS plan of Nokugu (ditches noted by thick black lines and road/plaza shoulders by thin lines). 82 Figure 3.7 Nokugu plaza berm (hatched white line). 84 Figure 3.8 Excavation of trench one (1993; top) and trench 10 (2002), both bisecting ditch two at Nokugu. Note trench 10 was 5.2 meters deep from the base of the narrow funnel-shaped basal portion (≅ 1 meter wide), a possible seat for palisade trunks, to the top of the inside berm. 85 Figure 3.9 Profile of excavation trench 1 (adjacent to inner “gate”). 86 Figure 3.10 Schematic reconstruction of inner “gate” of road 4 at Nokugu (excavation trench one bisects the ditch and berm adjacent to the earthen overpass. 86 Figure 3.11 GPS plan of Heulugihïtï (ditches noted by thick black lines and small reservoirs are filled in). 92 Figure 3.12 GPS plan of Akagahïtï (ditches noted by thick black lines and road/plaza shoulders by gray). 94 Figure 3.13 Plan of Sekú superimposed on satellite image (Landsat 7 ETM, 1999); the plaza of Maijeinei (X21) is at lower right. Note the anthropogenic vegetation scar correlated to site area and large low-lying (seasonal) lake to the east of the forest margin. 96 Figure 3.14 Kuhikugu cluster sites, including the first-order center of X11 and the smaller secondary centers of X33 and X28 (dot placed between two), X34, X35, and X36 (dot between two) and X38 (clockwise from upper left) adjacent to black dots (inset is map of X11 earthworks, with historic period villages shown by closed circles). Note pronounced anthropogenic vegetation scars. 98 Figure 3.15 Plan view map of Kuhikugu (X11) showing ceramic distributions from collection transects (small black dots), mapped road and trench earthworks, and historic period villages (c. 1860–1960), demarcated with closed circles. 99 Figure 3.16 Schematic reconstruction of Kuhikugu paired ditches, and outer gate of road 1 and of the intersection of road 1 with the plaza (excavation units are marked by large grey dots). 100

Illustrations • xxi

Figure 3.17 Schematic reconstruction of (top) Nokugu (X6) and (bottom) Kuhikugu showing major earthworks. Note the similar alignments in relation to major waterbody (dark). Figure 3.18 Eastern Complex sites at Lake Tafununu. Figure 3.19 House compound at Kuguhi (top), showing circular houses (dark) and abandoned Kuikuru dwellings (lighter grey), and reconstruction of House 1 at Tehukugu. Figure 3.20 Ipatse locality (top) and reconstruction of House 1 at Ipatse (bottom). Figure 4.1 Reconstruction of Kuhikugu Village, circa A.D. 1500. Figure 4.2 Aerial photograph of Yakare (X7) (1967). The plaza and cruciform radial roads of the ancient village are visible in the interconnected gardens located in the center of photo; the plaza is in the center of an oval of secondary forest that abuts the eastern margin (right) of the large (> 1km) airstrip. Figure 4.3 The North-South road as it passes from X6 to X13 and contemporary Kuikuru village (X12 locality) and its radial paths situated adjacent to Lake Ipatse. Figure 4.4 Satellite overview of Kuhikugu (X11) area showing dramatic anthropogenic forest alteration. Note GPS mapped earthworks at X35 and X36 (lower right) and X21 (upper left). Figure 4.5 Schematic of Ipatse and Kuhikugu Cluster (black circles are primary centers, dark gray are secondary centers, and small plaza communities denoted by light gray circles). Figure 5.1 Photograph of 1887 expedition campsite (from Steinen 1896). Figure 5.2 1777 map by Bonné showing approximate location of Upper Xingu tributaries. Figure 5.3 1852 Warren’s Atlas Map showing fairly accurate placement of Upper Xingu (although wrongly depicting them flowing east to west). Figure 5.4 Population movements, 1700–1950 and schematic of the ethnogenesis of Xinguano nation. Note: Arawak = A; Carib = C; Y = Yawalapiti; Kamayura = KM; Aueti = AU; Trumai = TR; Bakairi (Carib) = BK; Suyá (Gê) = SU; Manitsaua (Tupi) = M; Arawine (Tupi) = AW; Yaruma (Carib) = YR; the latter three were extinct by the mid-1900s. Figure 5.5 Map of PIX showing location of 1993 villages (numbered) and traditional “homelands” over the past century (underlined). Figure 5.6 Depopulation of Xinguano villages, 1880s–1990s. Figure 5.7 Composite depopulation, 1880s–1990s.

101 104

105 110 115

118

119

122

127 146 148

148

157 158 167 167

xxii • Illustrations

Figure 6.1 Woman carrying manioc to house in tatahongo basket (1993). Figure 6.2 Woman cooking piquí fruit (1993). Figure 6.3 Fish weir (ataca) across Angahuku River (1993) Figure 6.4 Woman fishing with kundu trap in reservoir along Ipatse stream adjacent to X13 in dry season (1993). Figure 6.5 Man sitting on tafite, with three large ahukugu (Form IA) manioc cooking pots from (Steinen 1896). Figure 6.6 Drawing of ahukugu form ceramic sherd from excavated prehistoric context (top) and contemporary made vessel (actual sherd from which top is reconstructed is shown in Figure 6.7 and the bottom vessel is shown during manufacture in Figure 6.12, top left). Figure 6.7 Large ahukugu form (IA) sherds, which preserve red exterior slip. Note use-wear notch from manioc processing using wooden staves (apo), like today (lower left). Figure 6.8 Small effigy bowl (atange) from Steinen (1896). Figure 6.9 Late prehistoric adorno. Figure 6.10 Jaguar effigy pot showing differential red slip, buff (unslipped) black-painted designs and black-painted vessel interior (1995). Figure 6.11 Thin-walled prehistoric vessel from excavation trench one. Figure 6.12 Ceramic making (A–B; 1993). Figure 6.13 Wooden-hafted stone axe from Steinen (1896). Figure 7.1 Canoe launch (from Steinen 1896). Figure 7.2 Anaconda basking in the sun on the Tafununu outlet stream (1993). Figure 7.3 Etching of “father of the forest” spirit (Ahasa) and jaguar (from Steinen 1896). Figure 7.4 Jakuikatu wooden masks representing water spirits (itseke) (from Steinen 1896). Figure 8.1 Inside of house under construction (1993). Figure 8.2 Hierarchically organized conceptions of otherness, including the distinctions between (1) Xinguanos (kuge) and other indigenous peoples (ngikogo) and “Whites” (cagaiha); (2) the otomo/telo series (following Franchetto 1986: 110); and (3) chiefs and non-chiefs, the former subdivided into great or “true” (ekugu), lesser (nsono), and female (tango) chiefs. Figure 8.3 Kuakutu (1995). Figure 8.4 Kinship diagram of southern House (1993).

194 194 197 197 204

206

206 207 207

208 212 213 218 239 247 248 249 256

262 268 274

Illustrations • xxiii

Figure 8.5 Kinship diagram of northern House (1993). Figure 9.1 Oilape and other ornaments draped over painted kuarup (egitse) trunks, topped with sun diadem headdresses (1994). Figure 9.2 Kuarup elders singing facing the tafite of the recently deceased anetï heir, and men of all ages perform on the “dancing ground” (1993). Figure 9.3 Chiefly redistributive payment for services rendered by the community at large (1993). Figure 9.4 Map of first Ipatse village (1972–1982; Franchetto’s 1986 map included in inset). Figure 9.5 Map of second Ipatse village (1982–present) in 1993. Figure 9.6 Map of Ipatse village in 2002. Figure 9.7 Flyover of Kuikuru village (2002) showing plaza village at edge of anthropogenic forest and relict low-lying floodplains of Culuene River (seen in top center); the two primary radial roads lead off to the Culuene River and Angahuku River (exiting to left). Note another primary road leading off to Lake Ipatse in the east (to right) and another to the south (bottom). Figure 9.8 Flutists with sunlike diadems playing atanga flutes commemorating deceased anetï (1993). Figure 10.1 Afukaká Kuikuru on stool with author (1994).

274 297

299 300 307 308 309

309 310 346

List of Tables Table 3.1 Chronological Periods. Table 3.2 Ipavu Phase Archaeological Sites. Table 3.3 Radiocarbon Dates from Nokugu (X6) and other Sites in Southern PIX Kuikuru Area. Table 5.1 Demographic Estimates for Upper Xingu Villages, 1890–1995. Table 5.2 Morbidity and Mortality of 1954 Measles Epidemic. Table 6.1 Correlation of Ceramic Forms. Table 7.1 Select Soil Chemistry Data from Kuikuru/Ipatse I Village and Nokugu (X6). Table 7.2 Village Fissions, 1860–2002.

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71 76 87 166 170 214 240 244

CHAPTER

1

Introduction Loffty and lucrative are the “revelations” which these young men draw from those enemies of Society—savages, snowbound peaks, bottomless caves, and impenetrable forests—which Society conspires to ennoble at the very moment at which it has robbed them of their power to harm. “Noble” they are today, but when they were really the adversaries of Society they inspired only terror and disgust. Claude Lévi-Strauss 1961: 42 The end of the fifteenth century marked a beginning in the Americas, at least in the historical sense, of continuities and ruptures. For many indigenous groups, it was the beginning of the end as European colonialism, notably the onslaught of imported diseases, resulted in rapid cultural disintegration and depopulation across broad regions. Native peoples had witnessed rapid change before Europe invaded the Americas, but the magnitude of social and cultural disruption and the staggering population losses in the aftermath of 1492 makes the contact period circa 1500 to 1750, stand out as a signal episode of cultural change throughout the hemisphere. For most native peoples, “contact” was not the beginning of the end but merely a beginning, a conjuncture in native histories. Change often occurred over many generations and centuries, often in the absence of any direct foreign influence. Most indigenous peoples survived and, although many lost their lands, their unique cultures, and a staggering number of lives, they were not helpless to turn the tides of change. They actively sought to cope with and comprehend their “new world,” to resist the forces of domination, and to capture the economic, spiritual, and

1

2 • The Ecology of Power

political power of the foreign interlopers. In many areas, such as the humid tropical forests of Amazonia, however, the complex histories of native peoples are hidden, indigenous voices muted, due to a general lack of archaeology, early written documents, or indigenous memories that pertain to the “olden days” of early or even precolonial times. This work considers the long term history of an Amazonian people, the Xinguano or Xingu nation of southern Amazonia, Brazil (Figure 1.1). They are exceptional in this part of the world as a living cultural tradition that extends back in time not only over a few generations, but over centuries and even millennia. Xinguano cultural history can be traced over the past one thousand years in the Upper Xingu region, which refers to the basin formed on the northern flank of the central Brazilian plateau

Fig. 1.1 Map showing location of Upper Xingu.

Introduction • 3

by the headwater tributaries of the Xingu River, one of the four southern tributaries of the Amazon.1 Xingu history is reconstructed by focusing on patterns that can be observed in similar recognizable forms but at different levels of historical analysis. In other words, the plot of the (hi)story is based on correspondences and correlations between things that can be concretely visualized in the present and the past, such as material culture, community spatial organization, and landscape. Consideration is given to both the embodied cultural memories of individual persons, made present in bodily dispositions and preparations, as well as the expressions and traces of these individuals in broader “communities of practice”. The idea of personhood and the definition of social persons—as singularities or collectivities—are thus seen to vary depending on context, scale, and perspective (Strathern 1991, 1999; Wagner 1991). Like the terms “culture” and “place,” the idea of personhood employed here refers to a dynamic and polyvalent process, rather than a unit or entity that can be frozen in time and space and precisely defined. This topic is covered in detail later in Part II, but suffice to say that, although individual human bodies can perhaps be perceived in the singular, as autonomous or fixed physical objects, social persons or bodies (subjects) cannot: social persons are defined by relationship and, by extension, plurality and multi-dimensionality. Thus, families, houses, and broader communities are iterations of personhood, each with unique life histories and spatial and temporal characteristics. Indeed, as Braudel (1987: xxiv) so eloquently argued, even broader landscapes and regions can be seen as “historical personages” in the long-term perspective. The history of Xinguano peoples extends deeper still, beyond the frontiers of the Upper Xingu basin itself, deep into the roots of South American cultural history. Xinguano history can be traced back to a critical turning point in continental history, back to the origins of the great diaspora of tropical America, when several linguistic groups, notably early speakers of Arawakan languages, spread across vast portions of the Amazon lowlands and adjacent areas. This dispersal was more or less coeval with that of several other language families (Carib, Tupi-Guarani, and Gê, among other smaller families). In particular, the Upper Xingu is a geographic endpoint of the Arawak diaspora, the most widely dispersed of these language families. The initial dispersal of Arawak peoples is tied, I believe, to the emergence of what Giddens (1984) calls the structural contradiction: the rise of rank consciousness.2 Arawak speakers colonize much of the southern peripheries of Amazonia, where the closed tropical forests of the lowland Amazon break up into more open parklands of central Brazil and


the Gran Chaco, by A.D. 500, and reach the Upper Xingu no later than A.D. 800. The newcomer Arawak peoples in the Upper Xingu incorporated local autochthonous peoples, currently unknown archaeologically, and established the cultural tradition that lives on today, which over the centuries also has incorporated into its midst both Carib and Tupian peoples, ultimately giving rise to the uniquely hybrid sociocultural entity today known as the Xinguano society or nation. In light of such a deep history, extending long before 1492, unique sociological and humanist problems emerge. These are often quite different than the problems that dominate discussions of the recent past, the “ethnographic present,” or what we can see or interrogate directly, in person. Questions of economic and demographic scale, for instance, or power and rank within so-called middle-range societies (societies that are neither autonomous villages nor bureaucratic states), are raised by recent archaeology and ethnohistory along the Amazon (Roosevelt 1991, 1999). These societies were largely destroyed in initial colonial periods, and it is therefore difficult to understand the nature of sociality and polity among these ancient complex societies vis-à-vis contemporary peoples. Xinguano peoples, however, maintain a way of life that is settled, hierarchical, and regional, and provide a unique glimpse into the nature of a genuinely Amazonian complex society in the past and today. Considered over the long term, Xinguano sociality and polity represent a modality of social power based upon the political institution of the chieftaincy, wherein chiefly individuals and kindreds are ranked according to notions of ancestral (“sacred”) chiefly authority. Such a structure of power is perpetuated “on the ground” through a dynamic ritual process specifically aimed at the (re)production of chiefs and ancestors, an Amazonian variant of what Sahlins (1985) coins “the heroic mode of lineage production” or what Clastres (1987) referred to as “the One.” These chiefly societies, or “chiefdoms,” as such small to medium-sized polities are often called, were common worldwide in 1492 (Mann 1986). In the Upper Xingu, as is not uncommon in other parts of the South American lowlands and elsewhere, such power was based on hierarchical notions of value and sociality. According to these notions, all persons are ranked relative to one another. Such a power, based on social hierarchies themselves, were rooted in idioms of “divine” ancestry. In Amazonia, questions of chiefly power, the “ritual phase of political economy, as Southall (1999) calls such a modality of power in Africa, have yet to be asked, as traditional views either deny that such a thing ever existed in the region outright, or that it was a rare and late mutation of the traditional pattern of generally small, semisedentary, egalitarian,

Introduction • 5

and atomistic Amazonian social formations. Or else, it is viewed as an entirely postcolonial creation, and that political coercion and economic exploitation were absent prior to 1492. This book is a life history, so to speak, of a genuinely Amazonian chiefdom, a term I use heuristically to draw our attention to certain critical issues that have yet to be adequately addressed in regional ethnology.3 First and foremost, the idea of the chiefdom or complex society implies power. Specifically it involves that form of political power variably referred to as structural, tactile, and disciplinary power—not direct physical coercion or economic exploitation between discrete social actors—that is manifest or contained in the control of the ritualized spaces, knowledge, and bodily dispositions. This power, in turn, links certain social actors more directly to founding ancestors and communal properties. This does not imply that “all culture is about power” but instead is meant to provoke debate regarding issues critical to developing a deeper historical understanding of native Amazonian peoples: The ecology of power refers to the complex interplay of techno-economic, symbolic, social, and political forces in discrete geohistorical contexts and, specifically, the deep temporality of local groups in the unique and highly constructed landscapes of the Xingu, landscapes that over the past one thousand years have changed as much because of political as ecological factors. In the present context, the idea of deep temporality as it relates to ecology or power raises problems relating to how bodies or persons are defined, a topic of great relevance in recent discussions of Amazonian and general anthropology (e.g., Gregor and Tuzin 2001; Lambek and Strathern 1998; Viveiros de Castro 2001). Bodies and persons come in different sizes. Therefore our discussions must address the topology of bodies as scale and perspective change from small to large or short to long-term, as well as the traffic-sociality among like bodies, contemporaneous if not equal, or the perspectives that persons have of other persons. This discussion of scale, particularly as is relates to issues of personhood, may be extended to include not only human beings but houses, communities, landscapes and even larger socio-historical persons. This work seeks to problematize the body and person in such a way as to include, rather than exclude, Amazonia’s past, the persons of yesterday. This inclusiveness requires direct attention to questions of cultural memory and how it is tied to human social bodies, (i.e., how bodies are objectified in practice, in real-world settings, material culture, domestic life, public ritual, landscape), and also how we, as anthropologists, visualize these elements across time. The move to consider Xinguano cultural history through ideas of memory (rather than text), the body


(rather than language), and persons (rather than individuals or groups) is obviously strategic. As an experiment in historical ethnography (which I take to mean the study of an “ethnos” through time, through whatever means possible), issues of scale and perspective are central. Particularly important are problems of scale-shifting and self-similarity across scales, what Wagner (1991) has aptly called the fractal person. The enterprise is, by necessity, interpretive and contextual. The task then is not to select the appropriate terms, questions, methods, or even instruments of measurement beforehand, but instead to find correspondences between things that can be visualized at different scales within the same sociohistorical context. In other words, to measure patterned relations we must freeze either time or space, but to get the picture moving again requires not measurement but translation and interpretation. “What falls within the space, or along the line, of diachrony,” as Thomas (1989: 103) puts it, is “an unsystematic residue, which is not exactly amenable to rigorous [quantitative] analysis.” This history of Xinguano peoples is provisional and incomplete, a first attempt really to reveal a very complex cultural history, and one that extends deep into Amazonian antiquity. It focuses on certain characteristic or “essential” features of Xinguano culture through time (i.e., continuity), notably their settled way of life, social hierarchy, and regional patterns of politico-ritual integration and sociality,5 knowing full well that diversity and discontinuity become apparent from other perspectives. Like all interpretations, these reconstructions are formulated, as Strathern (1999: 235) points out, from “a world already occupied by ‘societies’” and, “inevitably, descriptions from one society thus lodge in another, as though the substance of particular ethnographic cases were flowing between the texts.” Before considering Xinguano history, specifically, a brief discussion of the history or intertextuality of Western representations of Amazonian peoples and, how existing societies have lodged themselves in our descriptions, is useful. Particularly the idea that Amazonian peoples are and always have been small, simple, and representative of a “primitive” or “archaic” human condition, has very deep roots in the Western historical imagination, almost an archetype, that lingers today.

Broken Mirrors: Amazonia as Imagined World The native people of the neotropics play a crucial role in Western formulations, both scientific and popular, of the “primitive other.” Tropical countries, Lévi-Strauss (1961: 49) once remarked, “must be that exact opposite of our own,” and what more tropical country than Brazil or more

Introduction • 7

tropical place in it than Amazonia. “Tropicality” is what Suzanna Hecht (personal communication, 2001) calls this unique form of Orientalism, where the “other” is not only subordinate and backward but truly archaic and unchanging—naturvölkern. Not surprisingly, the Amazon fits so well the evolutionary schemas of Western philosophy, as it was here, as much as anywhere, where modern notions of the “primitive” were born. Amazonia exemplified that pre-civ il condition of societ y (societas) that is paradigmatically opposed to European visions of itself, civil society (civitas) and how could it be otherwise: humans define themselves through “others.” What is truly remarkable, however, is the resiliency of this image of the Amazon as wilderness and its people as archaic, if not natural, that, as Henley (1996: 229) notes, “has remained remarkably consistent over 400 years.”

The Amazon, the Tropics, and the Historical Imagination It is no surprise that the Amazon is so deeply rooted in the Western imagination, because it was Amazonians—once removed—who met Columbus in the Caribbean and Cabral in coastal Brazil at the end of the fifteenth century. The Taíno, the native peoples who dominated the West Indies in the 1490s, were the progeny of Arawak-speaking peoples that colonized the islands from the mainland South America some twenty-five hundred to three thousand years ago. The coastal Tupi, who ventured out to met Pedro Cabral off the coast of Brazil in 1500, were likewise an offshoot of an Amazonian cultural lineage—the Tupi-Guarani—who colonized the coastal tropical forests (the “Mata Atlántica”) around the time the earliest Arawak peoples entered the Caribbean sea. As two of the largest tropical diasporas of the ancient world, rivaling those of Africa (Bantu languages) and the Pacific (Austronesian languages), their close cultural relatives were encountered time and again across much of the lowland tropics. Images of these Amerindians flowed across Europe by word of mouth and official reports decades before Cortes ever set eyes on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan or Pizarro landed in northern Peru, and launched his campaign against the mighty Inka empire of Tahuantinsuyu. The chronicles of Columbus and other early voyages told of many strange races, of cannibals, and “men with only one eye and others with dogs’ snouts” (Lestringant 1997: 15), and, of course, warrior women—Amazons. Although exotic, these images were by no means unfamiliar to Western minds. They were the same savage races, the hoi barbaroi, that had animated European mythology and geography since before Homer’s time—the archetypes of Europe’s “others.” Homer believed, of course, that the Amazons lived just up over the mountains


from Greece in Asia Minor, but, in 1541, Friar Gaspar Carvajal, the priest who accompanied and chronicled Orellana’s expedition, the first to descend the river, located them, once and for all, in the vast, unexplored wilderness of tropical America, just where so many of Europe’s other legendary races, dwarves, giants, cyclops, and other monstrous beings were turning up. By 1576, the vast region between the Amazon and the La Plata was, at least according to Sebastian Münster’s Cosmologie Universalis, the land of the “Canibali.” The Caribbean itself, of course, owes its name to this Arawak word for its archetypal “others”—the “wild Indians”or the cannibals, their alter egos, before the more dangerous and strangely “other” men, the Europeans, sailed abruptly into the Amerindian imagination. The general vision of primitive society derived from the Americas and other far-away places, as a mirror to European civil society, was easily transformed into an imagined past through which Western peoples had passed in ancient times (Fabian 1983): “In the beginning, all the World was America” (Locke 1690, cited in Kehoe 1998: 55). Non-Western peoples represented earlier stages of man, a pristine condition of humanity. This viewpoint crystallized during the Enlightenment as Europeans struggled to make sense of the unexpected variation of human cultures, seemingly untenable under biblical explanation. Thomas Hobbes was among the first to explicitly posit a stage of human development, a “state of nature,” which was not only “other” and inferior to but prior to European Society. He, of course, painted a rather bleak picture of this place: where everyman is Enemy to everyman. … there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain … no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. Some low level of civil government and science, he admits, were present in the empires of Peru and Mexico, but, in general, “the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families … have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.” Hobbes marks an important shift in political theory, seeing political development as occurring in evolutionary stages rather than being rooted in the idea of the fixity of species and races laid down by divine design in earliest times. The differences between “races” were seen as stages of human histories, and one set of conditions (the family, anarchy, and struggle) inexorably gives rise to the other, polity, order, and civility,

Introduction • 9

except where it is prevented from doing so by some cultural or natural defect or deficit. The theory builds on Machiavelli’s ideas of manifest destiny, progress, and divine mandate. However, through a clever allegorical twist, what Fabian (1983) calls “the denial of coevalness,” that turns differences in space into differences in time, social hierarchy was deemed not only divine but natural, a managerial improvement over the virtual chaos of nature: I authorize and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on the condition, that though give up they right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather … of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence…. And he that carryeth this person, is called SOVERAINGE, and said to have Soveraigne Power. (Hobbes 1996: 120) This assessment of the State as a managerial improvement has been popular among evolutionary minded social scientists. Many commentators would stridently disagree with Hobbes’s assessment of “the natural condition of mankind” as a barbaric condition marked by strife and shortage, a condition only overcome by the appearance of order and progressive change heralded by the rise of a “monarch.” But, even for those such as Rousseau, who saw the rise of the state as the corruption of natural society (equality), and who emphasized “natural” harmony and beauty, deeply stirred by the eyewitness descriptions of Las Casas, Léry, and Vieira, among others in the Americas, non-Western peoples were no less savage, “archaic,” for being noble: “noble they are today, but when they were truly enemies of [Western] Society they only inspired terror and disgust” (LéviStrauss 1961: 42; see also Clastres 1987). Either way, places like the Americas were an ontological mirror or prism for the West, reflecting its own values and preoccupations, alternatively its dark or luminous faces.

Nature, Culture, and the Historical Fallacy in Amazonia There was a significant gap between the earliest explorers of the Amazon, eager to bend fortune to their wills, ostensibly in the name of God and country, and the natural historians who took to the river in the late 1700s, ostensibly in the name of science. By the time the first scientists arrived in most areas, circa 1750–1850, the juggernaut of European colonialism had already swept across the Americas. Not only did many living populations become increasingly small and fugitive, “regressed” from the settled and


productive agricultural economies of before (Balée 1995), but many were simply wiped out as discrete cultural entities. By 1750, in fact, the worst was already over in most areas, at least in terms of the overall numbers of people. Regional populations everywhere were severely denuded, and by the time “science” discovered the Americas, the anthropological object was already, unavoidably, an artifact of the ravages of colonialism. European colonialism, although it did not erase indigenous culture, did generally speed the rate of change. Thus, the period after 1750 is perhaps not the best vantage point to consider many aspects of “traditional” Amazonian cultural patterns, at least among the more settled, hierarchical, and regionally integrated of them. In the Americas, our understanding of early colonial and precolonial periods has increased dramatically in many areas, such as the Caribbean, North America, Mesoamerica, and Peru, particularly in the context of the Columbian quincentennial. As the dimensions of change after 1492 become apparent, it also becomes inescapable that even the areas most isolated from direct colonial activities, like Amazonia, were not insulated from the major historical flows set in motion by sixteenth-century European colonialism. Coverage is still spotty, however, and even in better known areas, critical details, events, and periods are poorly known. The humid equatorial forests of South America, Amazonia, are particularly recalcitrant to outside invasion and exploration. In part, this lacuna is an artifact of difficult access and low visibility: the tropics are difficult to penetrate and explore, whether for goods, labor, or knowledge. There are few eyewitness accounts from early colonial periods and archaeological sites remain hidden in the deep terra firme forests and seemingly endless labyrinth of bottom lands. Nevertheless, Amazonia, like equatorial Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and other tropical forest regions, is still commonly seen as the perfect “ethnographic laboratory” to study the “primitive society.” In Africa, Vansina (1990) notes this bias, the “voids and blinders” of Western historiography, or, in other words, the gaps of historical knowledge and biases of its authors. His commentary rings equally true for Amazonia: … there exists in Africa a huge area—as large as the arable part of Africa to the west of the lower Niger, as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, almost as large as Western Europe—which remains terra incognito for the historian. … Why has this part of the world remained without a historiography? Some blame only the lack of historical sources. Others held and still hold that the peoples living there “were too busy surviving in such a hostile

Introduction • 11

environment” to change. Peoples there supposedly still live today as they have done for centuries or millennia. In other words, environment determines history and the unlucky peoples here have no history because they never changed. In Amazonia, commentaries commonly adopt a profoundly naturalistic imagery. One form is the “Edenic narrative,” as Slater (1996) calls it, based on the European tropes of a primordial garden and human groups living in a pristine condition of natural harmony and abundance. Conversely, many authors speak of the region as a “green hell,” a riverine world of unimagined proportions (for Europeans) and brimming with pestilence and disease in an endless maze of hostile, dark, and hopeless places, and filled to excess with water, plants, toothy, dangerous animals and, of course, cannibals and other “savages.” One is tempted to call them Stygian narratives. The two narrative moods, or tropes, come down to the present in the form of evolutionary ideals, built upon the archetypes of Western historical discourse discussed earlier, which view progress or stasis as the result of some demographic imperative. By the mid-1900s, most anthropologists were fully convinced that native Amazonian peoples were precisely what Hobbes, Rousseau, and others had thought: “primitive,” our contemporary ancestors. Twentiethcentury science had seemingly dashed the hopes that anything like the great tropical civilizations of Mesoamerica, Peru, or Southeast Asia were awaiting discovery in the overgrown forests of the Amazon. Most commentators—and here we can include most anthropologists and historians—were confident in their belief that, by and large, the image that has come down to us over the centuries (i.e., small-ish, relatively self-contained, and egalitarian social groupings “at one” with nature) is, for one reason or another, a reasonably good representation of Amazonian peoples. So confident were they, in fact, that the very notion of native cities, regional bureaucracies, kings, priests, slaves, and the like—in other words, the State—seemed startling, if not wholly untenable, the idle dreams of wanderers and adventurers. The State was an entity imported to Brazil only after 1500 as part of the “Columbian exchange” that accompanied the expansion of the European World System into the Americas. The question that guided inquiry then, was not if they were primitive but why. Were the “archaic” peoples of the Amazon and elsewhere best seen as noble savages in a primordial condition of natural abundance and harmony, and simply chose to stay that way? Or were they hapless primitives stalled in a state of demographic and evolutionary stasis because of natural misfortune? In Amazonian anthropology, the idea of a typical cultural pattern was canonized in the Handbook of South American Indians


(Steward 1946–1950). The “tropical forest culture” was the quintessential example—a type case—of the small, acephalous type of society that, by the 1960s, became generally known as the “tribe” (Fried 1967; Service 1962; Steward and Faron 1959). Regional specialists were polarized into two camps. The first of these were the North American cultural ecologists, inspired by the ecofunctional and evolutionary paradigms of Julian Steward, Leslie White, and Marvin Harris, and focusing on general characteristics of techno-economics and demography. The second camp included the Franco-Brazilian structuralists, exploring the domains of mythology and cosmology, kinship and exchange, warfare and shamanism, and symbolic ecology, following the lead of the French master Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g., Gross 1985; Henley 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1996). The questions of whether or how nature imposes order on culture or, conversely, how culture orders nature, in “primitive” or “archaic” society has colored much critical debate. However, in the end, both sides seem to agree that some dynamic equilibrium is maintained between the two—between nature and human culture—keeping social groups relatively small, productivity relatively low, and social inequality minimal and contingent. The question anthropologists have most commonly asked, then, is not why complex societies emerged in the region, but why not: the all-too-handy answers being that either the natural environment is unable, or that society is unwilling to support the necessary transformations in society. Indigenous notions of time, history, and society seemed to lack, if not impede, any marked expression of the type of social inequality that concentrates resources and political power in the hands of a few. Moreover, not only did wheels of history move slowly, according to the measure of world historical schemas, but Amazonians themselves denied it. By the 1970s, the image of Amazonian homogeneity was eroding in the face of more detailed studies of the human ecology, history, and prehistory of Amazonian peoples.4 These studies document that, before Europe’s expansion into the New World, there were large and densely settled societies along much of the Amazon River, at least many of which were organized into hierarchical, regionally integrated polities (chiefdoms). The recognition of large, sedentary societies in portions of the Amazon floodplains (várzea), forces us to radically revise our general images of Amazonia (Chernela 1993; Hugh-Jones 1995; Roosevelt 1980, 1994a; Viveiros de Castro 1996; Whitehead 1994, 1996). Indeed, several anthropologists have long noted the “laconic” evidence of Amazonian civilizations, and recognized the value of the earliest documents, rare as they are, to indigenous history (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 271, 1993), but the more common tendency was to ignore them as uniformly unreliable as a basis for scientific study.

Introduction • 13

Early accounts and archaeology from the Amazon River have had only a limited impact, however, on general ethnographic and popular portrayals of Amazonian peoples. The “complex” societies of the Amazon floodplains (várzea) region are seen as a unique and highly restricted mutation of an otherwise egalitarian pattern that is ubiquitous throughout the rest of Amazonia. The transition from personal equality and local autonomy to hierarchical authority, political economy, and regional integration, was the result of extraordinary conditions of superabundance (and population growth) or diffusion. Some technological or extratechnological mutation, commonly attributed to the propitious and unique, ecological conditions of the várzea (less than 5 percent of greater Amazonia), transformed the underlying structure of these Amazonian societies and provided the basis for large settled populations, sociocultural complexity and inequality—the initial rumblings of the State. Otherwise, aside from this extraordinary case, hierarchy is (or was) foreign to the Amazonian social body. The reasoning for the “várzea model” is well rehearsed: unique demographic and economic conditions propelled floodplain societies, as a group, along a sociohistorical trajectory radically divergent from their hinterlands neighbors, who, also as a broad group, continued to follow a more “aboriginal” Amazonian pattern. In other words, some technological or extratechnological mutation, a rupture, enabled or compelled floodplain societies to increase in size and density, settlement permanence, and sociopolitical complexity. But, an unanticipated (and unfortunate) consequence of our broadened understanding of Amazonian history (or prehistory) has been to create an image of many past Amazonian societies that seems, quite simply, “non-Amazonian.” There is something wrong with this historical picture, however: it is backward. Generalized anthropological images of Amazonian peoples— for example, as small to medium-sized, impermanent, autonomous (even isolated), and egalitarian communities—are, after all, largely distillations of what we know about the present or recent past. The exception is the ancient, and now largely extinct, societies that inhabited the sliver of floodplain land along the Amazon (the várzea), who are known solely through archaeology and ethnohistory. It is, of course, a historical fallacy, and we ought to be skeptical of a comparison that places a várzea “derived” social form, only existing in ancient Amazonia, alongside a “primitive” or “aboriginal” form, known almost entirely from recent times. This is not to say that, in some respects, such comparisons are erroneous, but merely that this is a historical problem and not something that can be distilled from contemporary distributions alone. So, have we questioned thoroughly enough, from a deeply historical perspective, our ethnographic stereotypes?


Lost Civilizations, Again? An unintended consequence of “revisionist” perspectives on Amazonian history has been to create a rift between ethnographic and historical perspectives. Where there was once common ground, albeit infirm (based on the myth of the tropical forest tribe), the new “syntheses” (cf. Roosevelt 1994) posit a rupture or discontinuity between, on the one hand, the regional, hierarchical chiefdoms of the Amazon “várzea”—things of the past and known exclusively though archaeology and early colonial ethnohistory— and, on the other hand, the autonomous villages or “tribes” of the “terra firme”, which are known largely from the ethnography of the past century or so. In other words, few surviving indigenous groups remain in those areas where there is evidence of social formations during the hundred years or so before and after 1492. Cultural continuity between diverse “mixed blood” peoples and indigenous populations of the Amazon is clear (e.g., Parker 1989), but many deny their Indian roots and, at least, most anthropologists have dealt with these peoples as artifacts of colonialism, and not as the descendants of First Nations peoples. Conversely, in those areas where intact native communities have survived into the twentieth century, in the so-called terra firme, there is precious little known about early colonial or pre-1492 times. This situation is compounded when Amazonian peoples are placed into larger comparative frameworks and world historical schema. For instance, Gregor and Tuzin (2001: 337–338), perpetuate naturalistic views on “tropical cultures,” as uniquely determined by ecological determinants and expressive of basic human nature: In large part the Amazonia-Melanesia similarities consist of, or are traceable to, the limited possibilities imposed by conditions of tropical rainforest adaptation. Thus, many societies in both regions display the following characteristics: subsistence systems based on swidden horticulture and supplemented by fishing, hunting, and foraging; a pronounced sexual division of labor; dispersed settlements rarely containing more than a few hundred inhabitants; and egalitarian ethos disfavoring heritable rank, let alone stable social, political, or economic hierarchies; social relations based on marriage and kinship alliances, along with other forms of gift exchange; descent groups nonexistent or of weak corporate constitution, with flexible membership rules; warfare and raiding as the normal state between enemy and stranger groups; and elaborate ritual and mythical traditions, often centered on concepts of the body, procreativity, and secret men’s cults.

Introduction • 15

The historical problem is not the inadequacy or incorrectness of this representation, which, notwithstanding the unwarranted environmental determinism, does describe the majority of groups studied in the twentieth century, the demographic nadir of Amerindian populations (the absolute low perhaps being reached circa 1950). The problem is that of representativeness: What precisely does the ethnography of upland or small riverine groups tell us about the variety and nature of large river and coastal peoples, most now extinct as discrete cultural entities? European colonialism and catastrophic depopulation are obviously important, but the apparent incongruity between ancient and recent social formations also relates to the assumptions that guide anthropological inquiry in the region. The comparison between Amazonia and Melanesia is revealing, as the latter is a mere fraction of the size and diversity of the former, but the homogenization of variance in Amazonia perpetuates the old view of cultural uniformitarianism, a uniformity that is largely isomorphic with the ethnographic present (i.e., the twentieth century). Where do pre-Columbian Amazonian societies fit within the universe of world populations, past and present, in terms of their size and sociopolitical organization? Also, what happens if we expand the comparison to include the past as well as the present, or expand the analysis to encompass geographic areas of similar size, such as Oceania? This begs the question, were there societies like those of Polynesia in ancient Amazonia? If so, then why are the sociopolitical features of such societies so conspicuously absent from the ethnographic record of Amazonia? Viveiros de Castro (1996: 194), for instance, notes an intriguing problem with “the picture of an Amazonia dominated by agricultural chiefdoms,” namely, that so much of what we know about recent social formations “points to the overwhelming ideological importance assigned to hunting in contemporary indigenous cosmologies (even those present in full-blown horticultural societies), a view of the relations with nature that privileges social and symbolic interactions with the animal world and in which shamanism is the central institution … and a widespread ideology of ontological predation as a regime for the constitution of collective identities.” For some groups, as Descola (1996a: 330) notes, it would be hard to imagine a way of life more antithetical than that apparently taken by the polities of the Amazon mainbranch. This paradox may be more imagined than real in two respects. First, there are symbolic and economic features that are characteristic of a wide range of non-Western complex societies, including aspects of political economy, ideology and ritual. The feature most germane to the current discussion is the chieftaincy, a hierarchical model of sociopolitics based on


hereditary rank. Second, the histories of the pre-Columbian societies that would best characterize these features are, as yet, little explored. After 1492, the fate of the structures of settled life and hierarchical patterns of sociality and polity was tied to decreasing demographic and economic scale. In other words, to conclude that political power—which is exactly what is considered critical about chiefdoms elsewhere—is unusual or even absent in native Amazonian societies is premature. It is precisely the question of power and how it is manifest and perpetuated in daily life and bodily conditions, ritualized actions, and ideology that has yet to be addressed. The cultural ecologists have generally found issues of sociality and politics “epiphenomenal” to deeper demographic, economic and technological causes (e.g., Carneiro 1970; Lathrap 1970; Roosevelt 1980, 1999). As noted earlier, however, understanding the parameters of production and settlement will not automatically resolve issues of social, political, ritual, or ideological systems. The origins, distribution, and nature of the complex societies remains unanswered, however, due in large part to a lack of well understood sociohistorical sequences. For many anthropologists following in a North American ecological determinist tradition (see Carneiro 1995), the problem is fairly easily resolved. Cultural evolution is determined or set in motion as a result of changes in broad demographic and technoeconomic conditions. Thus, the question is largely ecological: wherever environmental conditions (notably fertile alluvial soils and rich aquatic resources) are present that can support population growth and economic intensification. We can expect to find that more “evolved” social formations (chiefdoms), and less evolved populations (tribes) were held in demographic and, therefore, evolutionary stasis. Until recently, the debate has focused on the presence of large population aggregates and highly productive subsistence economies, generally based on intensive farming, foraging, occasional management of rich aquatic resources, and diverse supplementary terrestrial resources (here meaning nonextensive; see Denevan 1992, 2001). In other words, the principles that underlie political formation should be considered in and of themselves and do not correspond uniformly to the scale of demographic or economic conditions. Even if community populations commonly numbered into the low thousands and were densely settled in large regional populations (well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands), both along the Amazon and, as we know from cases like the Upper Xingu, away from the rich alluvial floodplains, this does not mean that we can assume that hierarchical social structures were present in all these areas as well. The coastal Tupi, for instance, who also lived in large, settled, agricultural villages, apparently lacked the types of rigidly hierarchical social structures

Introduction • 17

(i.e., hereditary or institutional inequality) commonly attributed to chiefdoms in many other areas (Clastres 1987; Fausto 1992). Surely ecological conditions are important factors in differential cultural development, particularly the generally higher productivity of riverine settings, but it is important to recognize that: (1) the ecological parameters of most parts of Amazonia, in terms of economic productivity, are poorly known; (2) highly productive ecological settings, that is, riverine settings with abundant resources, are more widely distributed than commonly assumed; and, particularly, (3) other factors, such as cultural choice, regional interaction, and specific histories, are also involved. We must also recognize that it has not been demonstrated through historical research (i.e., studies designed to examine what types of social groups were present in certain areas in the past, rather than what we believe ought to be present based on recent distributions) that Amazonian environments, generally speaking, are uniquely inimical to cultural development (Whitehead 1993). Cultural development in many world areas, it might also be noted, corresponds to a riverine-upland (or coast-interior) dichotomy. Furthermore, it can be clearly shown that some cultural groups, living in highly productive riverine and coastal settings, chose not to pursue a strategy that led to population growth, settled village life, or, particularly, hierarchical modes of sociality (Descola 1996; Fausto 1992; Viveiros de Castro 1996). Structuralist-inspired anthropologists, while suggesting that economic and demographic changes are necessarily preceded by symbolic and social reorientations, or changes in the relations of production (e.g., Descola 1996a: 330), have not generally explored the nature of these transformations. Like cultural ecologists, they see them as a thing of the past and restricted to a narrow range of environmental settings (see, for example, Clastres 1987; Descola 1988, 1996; Menget 1993a; Viveiros de Castro 1996). Overing (1981: 151), summarizing the consensus view of the 1970s, suggests that “for the Amerindians of South America, social time is not genealogical time: time depth is a notion the Amerindians tend to avoid and even war against, as a principle dangerous to their own social existence.” This view is still shared by many anthropologists today: “the societies of the tropical forest do not base their reason for being on an accumulation of events from a point of origin until the present, they do not stratify their pasts in accordance with a order of genealogical successions, or in more general terms, they do not order their accounts of past things following a chronology, not even relative” (Menget 1999: 153; author’s translation).


“To insist on dividing ‘primitive’ from ‘historical’ societies,” Ramos (1988: 230) argues, “is to add to the intellectual apparatus of domination, to build a sort of indigenist Orientalism.” But, in evaporating this Western duality, we must be careful not to extinguish the voices of the historical personages of ancient Amazonia, simply assuming that “at the root of the transformations triggered by contact … is the passage from a system characterized by the politics of persuasion to one defined by the politics of coercion” (Ibid.: 237). Although this is surely true in some respects, how can we fully know the origins and limits of coercive power in the region when the history of those peoples most likely to embody such a power, the societies of Amazonia’s distant past, are so little known. We must be careful not to perpetuate a naïve “tropicality” that negates the grandeur of ancient non-Western social forms, turning them into timeless caricatures of what we know from Western historical imaginings alone (Kehoe 1998): the “cannibal instincts of the historical process” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 42). The question that has yet to be posed, in any systematic way, is what kinds of power, coercion, or exploitation characterized Amazonian politics in 1492, and how did they differ from political systems in, say, A.D. 1100 or 1900 in, say, temperate Europe, North America, Peru, or within Amazonia itself. Before we investigate the causes of cultural complexity in Amazonia, we must consider what exactly is meant by “complexity” in the first place: what should we expect to find in the region. Certainly many ancient Amazonian societies of the várzea, coasts, and other areas exhibit demographic and technological characteristics that fit patterns of social complexity elsewhere, but do they share other cultural features of complex societies? It is precisely in the domains of sociality, politics, and conceptions of time and personhood that critical debate over images of Amazonian social complexity (i.e., the nature of these systems) has been least developed (Hugh-Jones 1995). It is particularly important to consider the entrenched views that Amazonian groups (1) maintain an “egalitarian ethos,” disfavoring heritable rank and lacking stable hierarchies, ancestor veneration, or descent groups; (2) base themselves on generally balanced exchange, that is reciprocity in a “gift economy” (i.e., lacking “property” or other “commodities”); and (3) tend not to develop strong patterns of political leadership, except in the context of warfare and shamanism, also construed as a form of reciprocal exchange between more or less equal social partners. Regional ethnology has consistently shown that demography, technology, economy, ecology, and so on, cannot be adequately understood abstracted from cosmology, ideology, and cultural aesthetics (i.e., the symbolic underpinnings of human actions), but interpretive approaches, which attempt to contextualize these diverse factors in specific

Introduction • 19

sociohistorical trajectories, have played little part in discussions of the Amazonian past The task that now faces us is to consider what, exactly, were the forms of sociopolitical organization of these large, regional societies. In other words, what precisely constitutes sociopolitical complexity and, thus, how we approach looking for it in the past or present.

History, Ecology, and Power Human ecology has been a leitmotif of Amazonian ethnology throughout much of the twentieth century, specifically focusing on the relationship of human populations to the land and nonhuman biota (e.g., Meggers 1996; Moran 1993). Most regional specialists agree that cultural variation correlates, in part, to ecological patterning, such as the presence of generally larger, more permanent communities along major rivers (see Carneiro 1995), a common pattern in many world areas. The relationship between ecology and cultural variability is far more complicated and historically contingent than has been commonly assumed. Specifically, it is increasingly recognized that human ecology cannot be defined according to a natural scientific model. Such an approach is too narrowly focused on the relationships between humans and the natural environment and defined in terms of energetics, trophic exchanges, or calories. A properly holistic approach must incorporate the symbolic, political and social dimensions of ecology into its analyses (e.g., Balée 1995; Biersack 1999; Descola 1992, 1996a; Erickson 2002; Ingold 2000). Increasing interest in historical ecology demonstrates the futility of any ahistorical analysis that does not consider the massive impacts of European colonialism on Amazonian peoples. Given the radical changes in the aftermath of 1492 and, particularly, the virtually wholesale destruction of settled, riverine populations, we must be extra careful of sampling bias in ethnographic comparison. Specifically, the actual nature of regional, hierarchical social formations in Amazonia is little known and little studied, in terms of the specific social and political relations and ideologies they involve. Minimally, regional specialists are well advised to consider first those groups that appear unusually large, regional, or hierarchical. In this smaller ethnographic universe, Arawak speaking groups, such as the contemporary Xinguano, northwest Amazon, Terena, and Yanesha, among others stand out. If we include ethnohistoric sources of peoples such as the Taino, Lokono, Caquetio, Achagua, Manao, Bauré, and Pareci, the contrast with many other Amazonian peoples is even more marked. The largely Arawak-speaking peoples of the southern Amazon (Xinguanos, Pareci, Bauré, and Terena, among others), at any rate, shared remarkable


commonalities, among which were their settled, regional and hierarchical life ways, as Schmidt (1917) noted nearly a century ago. It was here, in fact, that Oberg (1949, 1955) had first coined the English word chiefdom, a term later borrowed by Steward (and his students Sahlins 1958; Service 1961) and where he noted that the “men’s ceremonial house, based upon the Amazonian pattern, was magnified to state significance” (Steward and Faron 1959: 2). The social logic of these southern Amazon societies is precisely that so commonly noted among the minimally to moderately stratified societies commonly referred to as chiefdoms elsewhere in the world. As a heuristic device, the concept of chiefdoms draws our attention to certain things, most notably the emergence and nature of the political institution of the chieftaincy: a symbolic model of society that posits permanent “offices” of chiefs and some degree of hereditary succession to these offices, embedded within an ideology and ethos of “aristocracy” and regional social organization (cf. Kopytoff 1999). Divine chiefdoms and kingdoms sit at the opposite ends of a continuum, with significant variation in the nature of property and ownership, economic inequality and “tribute,” but they are both founded upon the same cultural principal: the elite are more directly descended from local ancestors, who are more closely related to older culture heroes, and, ultimately, the deities. In this sense, “chiefdom” refers not to some group of societies sharing a requisite list of invariant features, making them exclusive (a package) of other societies, but instead, it is used as a very general (and convenient) gloss for societies in which certain social, economic, and political flows seem to apply, notably tied to distinctive conceptions of history, place, and personhood. The Upper Xingu, specifically, is an example of an indigenous historicity, a type of history, where the inheritance of the past, genealogy, is a critical element conditioning social relations and is conceptualized according to principles of social hierarchy. Hierarchy is about how people define the status and role (identity) of other people within social formations, but it refers to two related but separate things: (1) an ordered segmentation of society, that may be purely symbolic; and (2) a structure of power. Hierarchy, such as described below for the Upper Xingu, refers specifically to an ideology that divides society into lower and upper social strata, in terms of rights and access to certain material and symbolic things, based in large part on genealogical “substance” (see Chapters 8 and 9). This is not to suggest that there is anything natural or given about it, that is, that such a cultural solution is inevitable given certain (usually techno-economic or demographic) conditions, nor is it meant to deny the multidimensional nature of power relations within and across genders and ages in all societies.

Introduction • 21

In other words, there is a fundamental difference between societies that divide themselves by hereditary rank, that is, by restricted and even exclusive access to valued resources as a result of birthright, and those that do not. Wherever such a hierarchy exists, it plays a singular role in the definitions of cultural identity and categories, as well as forming a primary dimension of power struggles. This mode of conceptualizing history may have been quite common in ancient Amazonia, particularly among the large Arawak and related societies that dominated many riverine areas in the southern Amazon and elsewhere, but the Xingu is one of the only areas where such a historicity can be clearly identified in more recent times. Xinguano history, at any rate, leads us, inexorably, to questions of power and the body, because—contrary to what we might expect from much twentieth-century ethnography—the latter seems so accustomed to the disciplinary manipulations of the former. There is much in Xinguano life that falls outside the realm of what I loosely call power, but its centrality is clear. The term “social complexity” means very different things to different people and most anthropologists agree that it involves diverse processes (McGuire 1983). Complex society or social complexity traditionally refers to the hierarchical division of society, a separation of people into upper (elite) and lower divisions within, and a composite (multicommunity), regional nature of their social structure. As Yoffee (2001) notes, however, this not only involves changes in economic and administrative functions— economic centralization, heterogeneity, and integration—that is, what is commonly seen as the evolution of social complexity. It also involves the evolution of conceptual simplicity, the “One,” as Clastres (1987) referred to it, which does not necessarily require economic and administrative hierarchy (i.e., classic central-place models). Most anthropologists accept that all societies have such ranked power or hierarchies (e.g., Godelier 1986), and no doubt the transition from institutional equality, where differences are based on gender, age, and personal characteristics, to inequality, that classlike form of difference that must, in large part, be tied to birth, bureaucratic inequality, meritocracy, from “primitive communism” and populism to patrimonialism and autocracy, is continuous as well as discontinuous. Surely power is multifaceted in all human societies, “heterarchical,” and characterized by a “duality of control,” as Giddens (1984) refers to this dialectic between coercion and resistance, and it is resistance perhaps that plays a privileged role in catalyzing change (Foucault 1980).5 But, there are important shifts, transformations, such as how birth-order and bloodline are symbolically transformed into cultural categories of rank and political power, and how


things, persons, and places are transformed into containers of power. The view of social hierarchy adopted here (essentially conforming to that described by Dumont 1970) does not to deny that multiplicity of power or the importance of resistance to dominant groups and ideologies, the “weapons of the weak,” to borrow Scott’s (1985) apt metaphor. However it does suggest that Amazonia was no different than any other major world area in 1492 insofar as a common modality of power was some uniquely Amazonian variant on a very typical form of political power in the ancient world: a “divine” authority rooted in the metaphors of kinship and ancestrality. For many regional specialists, this assertion would come as no surprise, but regardless of whether some form of social complexity is accepted or not, it still remains to be described in detail beyond the very crude and generic, if not pro forma, models of differential evolutionary pathways linked to ecological variability. The ecology of the Upper Xingu, however, cannot be reduced to any general Amazonian pattern. By way of introduction, the Upper Xingu refers to the large erosional basin or peneplain formed by the headwaters of the Xingu River along the northern flanks of the central Brazilian plateau (Planalto Central). It is surrounded to the south, east, and west by topographic highs created by the less eroded geological formations, which are characterized by savanna and parkland vegetations. The “cerrado,” as this vast parkland area is often called, or “sertão” as one goes from east to west, was almost exclusively occupied by Ge-Bororo peoples. To the north of the Xingu, which, like the basin itself, is dominated by closed tropical forest, was traditionally occupied by Tupian and, more recently, Kayapó peoples. The Xingu River is formed by the meeting of the headwater rivers, near Morená, the primary origin place of Xinguanos.6 Ridges that extend from the highlands to the east and west literally “pinch-off ” the basin at about this spot and the multiple headwater tributaries are forced into a bottleneck, which below Morená is the upper Xingu River proper. 7 This “bottleneck effect” is precisely what causes the large seasonally inundated bottom lands of the principal rivers that descend from the Planalto Central and the broad, marshy channels of smaller rivers that emanate within the basin.8 The ecology of the Upper Xingu is neither várzea nor terra firme, in the classic sense, but is something of a “halfway house” between the two (Carneiro 1995). In fact, the regional ecology is somewhat unique in Amazonia, with regard to the numerous large lakes, for instance. The Upper Xingu, like most of Amazonia, is a forest and river world, but, although tropical forest covers the majority of the area (roughly 80 percent), the region is a unique mosaic of distinctive ecological zones. These ecological zones are interpenetrating but can be generally grouped into

Introduction • 23

four major types, each more or less confined to areas with the same topographic, hydrological, and pedological conditions: (1) high tropical forest; (2) galeria forest on sandy levees of primary rivers; (3) marshy, waterlogged areas associated with secondary and tertiary steams, dominated by buriti palms (Mauritia flexuosa); and (4) natural savannas (oti). The high forest, is transitional between the humid forests typical of lowland Amazonia (called floresta ombrofila in Brazil) and the semideciduous forests in areas where there is a pronounced dry season (floresta estacional). Second to forest areas in importance are diverse wetlands, including rivers, streams, ponds, oxbow lakes, marshy wetlands, and, significantly, the presence of numerous natural lakes, many apparently quite deep, which is an unusual feature throughout southern Amazonia. A large portion, perhaps as much as 50 percent or more, of the upland (noninundated or terra firme) forests and adjacent wetlands have been dramatically transformed by human actions over the past millennium or so (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). One of the most critical features of the land, both forests and wetlands, is the degree to which it has been altered or “domesticated” by Xinguanos, creating vast anthropogenic landscapes (Baleé 1989). When I first lived in the Kuikuru (Xinguano) community in 1993, it took me some time to discard my own preconceived notions of tropical forests and realize just how constructed and artificial the landscape was. Unlike Marajó Island or lowland Bolivia, where major earthworks in open grasslands had been known for many decades (Denevan 1966; Meggers and Evans 1957), the ancient occupational remains in the Upper Xingu are entirely covered in forest. Nonetheless, the conclusion that much of the landscape was not only anthropogenic in origin but intentionally constructed and managed is inescapable the more the scale of ancient settlements and their “monuments” (e.g., plaza and causeway peripheral mounds and massive ditches) are investigated. Today, I would not assume that any part of the forest is “pristine” without a detailed examination on the ground. In place of small paths in the forest and minor openings related to plaza villages and gardens, I now envision tree-lined causeways, well maintained, broad roads, large, patchy tracts of agricultural fields leading out from the towns and villages that make up the skeleton of Xinguano history, and an equally well-constructed wetland environment, including major transportation canals, managed ponds, improved fishing, drinking and bathing reservoirs, raised causeways, wells, raised fields, and road systems, among other features. The scale and constructed nature of the Xinguano landscape also draws attention to the fact that the fixity and intensity of land use was


Fig. 1.2 Satellite Image (Landsat 6 TM, 1992; 5-4-3) showing limits of Parque Indígena do Xingu and Kuikuru study area (box), with inset showing position in Brazil.

Introduction • 25

Fig. 1.3 Map showing location of Upper Xingu.

higher in the past and that not only were populations significantly larger, but space was much more tightly controlled. Space is obviously an important element in the constitution of power and social control, and is always, in part, a reflection of spatial relations (Soja 1989). Hierarchical social relations in the Upper Xingu, for instance, are tied not only to where one lives, or what area of the village a house is located, but also tied to where one sits, or walks, or sleeps, in relation to other house and village members. Space and control over it is thus an important instrument of power and ritual centralization, even in the absence of economic or administrative centralization; it forms a distinctive aspect of power critical in many non-Western chiefdoms and states. Thus, power involves the “tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organisations of domains” (Foucault 1977), in other words, an ecology of power at local and regional levels. Power is a complicated subject and has diverse meanings (see Wolf 1999), and it will be taken up in greater detail later, but what is particularly important here is that the Upper Xingu represents a modality of power that, until now, has only been vaguely hinted at in Amazonia. Most political anthropologists would likely agree that “political succession in chiefdoms and early states is almost invariably hereditary” (Lewellen 1992: 85) and involves some form of social hierarchy. The multi-sited and reticulate nature of relations of power and knowledge, called “heterarchy” by many archaeologists, is a useful counterbalance to previous views that vertical hierarchy—the line from king to commoner—necessarily lies at the heart of political destiny (e.g., Appadurai 1988; Crumley 1987). Nonetheless,


many, if not most, ancient complex societies did base their political power in dominant idioms of social hierarchy. Thus, as Dumont (1970) notes, equality and hierarchy exist in all social formations, but in some hierarchical social ranking becomes the dominant, or encompassing, dimension in the structural distribution of power and authority, not because hierarchy depends on reliable reproduction of chiefly persons, families, and classes, but because it is a pervasive metaphor underlying all. Through time and space this is spatially and objectively concentrated in a point, the spatial center, or “central place” (plaza) and the end of a line (a line of power, if not substance from founding to future ancestors): the “head” of the house, of the community, or of the political body. In the Xingu, knowledge and power are also tightly associated with concepts of the body, notably the organization of houses and village, the spectacle of chiefly rites-of-passage, and the continuity of names, social persons, and places. Ritual, in particular, as customary memory aimed at activating collective remembrances and identities, is not only routinized, as habitus, but it also involves special observances, calendric performances, controlled by primary chiefly individuals. The Xinguano ritual cycle of chiefly rites of passage, are particularly important, include the boy’s ear-piercing initiation (tiponhï), which establishs an idealized succession by identifying future chiefs (when persons are constructed as future chiefs) and the great funeral ceremonies (egitse), the master ritual of Xinguano society and the key symbol of their identity (when chiefs become ancestors). “Replacing the ancestors,” is what Foster (1995) calls similar mortuary feasts among Austronesian chiefly societies of eastern Melanesia (near Oceania). As James Turner’s (1992: 292) critical discussion of the Fijian yagona ritual argues: “though they are analytically distinguishable, politics and ritual are inseparable in practice. Ritual is inherently political and, conversely, political power always dependent on ritual.” Ritual actions, like everyday habitus, deal as much or more with practical rather than discursive logic, as Bourdieu (1990) points out, and must be tied to what people do (performance) rather than what they say (discourse). As Turner (ibid.: 298–299) further notes, ritual “is a form of bodily discipline,” and hierarchic (high/low) distinctions that structure ritual are duplicated in the practice of everyday life: the “learning of this high/low distinction and, thus, the learning of the status differences it expresses, are inseparable from the process of achieving mastery of the body.” Ritual centralization involves the mobilization of labor or resources as a primary source of social power, in the context of major public events and spectacles, the basis of what Geertz (1980) has called the “theater state” in

Introduction • 27

Southeast Asia or simply the “ritual phase of political economy” (Southall 1999). This modality of power, tied to conceptions of sacred legitimacy, specifically through special claims to ancestral deities and heroes, are called “heroic societies” (Sahlins 1985), in their minimal form of “chiefdoms” or “petty kingdoms” (“inchoate states”). In southern Amazonia, specifically, Steward and Faron (1959) call such societies “theocratic chiefdoms.” Still other terms might be used—“middle-range,” “intermediate,” or “chiefly” societies—to refer to these regional social formations that are hierarchical (sensu Dumont 1970), insofar as they are based on a hereditary logic of social rank and elite class. This type of internally ranked and commonly cognatic social structure is sometimes glossed as a “conical clan” (Kirchhoff 1955) or, more recently, “House societies,” following Lévi-Strauss (1982, 1987). The proliferation of terms may seem awkward, but the terms are merely refractions of similar questions: each highlights a slightly different aspect of the problem,9 the birth of a disciplinary technique of power, commonly called “chiefly” or “kingly power.” It is precisely this question, not the assumption that it has or can be answered or summed up in a term, that is at issue. Here I assume that there is a modality or technique of power that we can gloss as “sacred authority,” a form of power that is expressed and perpetuated, cosmologically authenticated, in ritual performance and cultural aesthetics of strength, beauty, and value. Power has become a central issue in Amazonian ethnology, particularly in relation to age and gender domination, the “political economy of people,” and the special powers of shamans (e.g., Langdon and Baer 1992; McCallum 1994; Rival and Whitehead 2001). Most ethnologists remain convinced, however, that there is little in the ethnographic record that points to true political power. Social hierarchy, where it exists, is seen as symbolic and power is ritualized and subordinated to intimacy, whereas in political or economic arenas relations are seen as largely egalitarian. Once again, these viewpoints are reasonable as far as they go, but the problem is whether they go far enough from a historical point of view. Certainly, indigenous peoples themselves are no strangers to power struggles over the past few generations, but without evidence to the contrary, such things as centers, federations, or political power are too commonly seen as the result of influences of European contact. Another central element of regional ethnology relates to the production of social persons. Viveiros de Castro (1998) points out that in Amazonia “categories of identity—personal, social, or cosmological—are frequently expressed through bodily idioms, food practices and bodily decoration” (see also Seeger et al. 1986), and it is important to consider issues of the


body and personhood with respect to Amazonian “middle-range” societies. From a historical perspective bodies and persons come in diverse sizes, and thus the traditional ethnological definition of bodies or persons as more or less equivalent living individuals must be amplified to address past eras or “yesterday persons.” Thus, the traditional focus of sociocultural anthropology, which sees bodies as largely ahistorical and universal, constructed through relations (i.e, through traffic) with other like bodies, is too restrictive to address certain problems (Scheper-Hughes 1994: 229). Thus, whereas “the body is imagined, in various senses, by society” (Viveiros de Castro 1977: 32), it is also unimagined, taken for granted. It resolves itself into larger and larger moral communities and historical entities—historical personages—as the focus changes from the human body and living persons to embodied memories, through what Bourdieu (1977) called the dialectic of embodiment and objectification. This more generalized and multi-dimensional (fractal) notion of personhood is becoming increasingly popular in many non-Western settings (Lambek and Strathern 1998; Mosko 1985; Strathern 1999; Wagner 1991). The history of related peoples in the Upper Xingu involves the entangled histories of four of the major linguistic families of the neotropics: Arawak, Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Gê, and of other peoples who have come together. Indeed, it is one of very few places where these four great neotropical diasporas converge, near the center of the continent, and at the divide between the hot, humid, tropical forests of the north, and the temperate parklands, savannas, and forests of the south, the geographic center of Brazil. Today, Xinguano “society” is composed of four primary subgroups: the Caribs, including the Kuikuru, (occupying three settlements), Kalapalo (two settlements), Matipu and Nafuqua (one settlement each) dialects; the Arawaks, including the Yawalapiti (one settlement), the Mehinaku and the Waujá (each with one settlement); the Tupian Aueti (one settlement); and the Tupi-Guarani Kamayura (two settlements).10 To address the issue of history, particularly deep history, in the absence of written documents means that we must define history loosely and look for it in the myriad ways that human societies remember, outside of writing. In oral societies the boundaries between “cultural memory” (which is tied to lived experience) and “history” (the representations of the past) are blurred. This book focuses on cultural memory, the way history inscribes itself on bodies and places, in ritualized actions, space, monuments, and landscape, constructing or composing persons, and how disciplined bodies sediment themselves in the built environment, transforming themselves into other kinds of bodies or persons.

PART

I

Visualizing Deep Temporality As in other sciences whose subject-matter is the actual distribution of phenomena and their causal relation, we find in anthropology two distinct methods of research and aims of investigation: the one, the historical method, which endeavors to reconstruct the actual history of mankind; the other, the generalizing method, which attempts to establish the laws of its development. Franz Boas 1904: 513

Memory is life, borne of the living societies founded in its name. … History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Pierre Nora 1989: 8 In 1894, two years prior to the publication of Franz Boas’s seminal article “The Limits of the Comparative Method,” Karl von den Steinen’s Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens appeared. In this and his earlier work, Durch Zentral Brasiliens (1886), Steinen introduced his readers to an unknown region of central Brazil and its unique peoples. It was a pioneer work of the newly forming science of ethnology in Germany, soon followed by the works of other German researchers on the Xingu (e.g., Meyer 1896; Schmidt 1902). It was the first of its kind in Amazonia. Like Boas’ The Central Eskimo (1888), or Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1851),

29


League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois before it, it soon became one of anthropology’s first “classics.” The lives of the Xinguano peoples also are intertwined with many of the heroes of Brazilian history, beginning with the bandeirantes, who entered the basin in the mid-1700s during their campaigns to open the Brazilian interior, the sertão. The celebrated “March to the West,” notably the explorations of Rondon Commission, which established routes of communication throughout the southern Amazon in the early twentieth century, passed through the area (Naronha 1952). This was followed by a host of indigenistas, adventurers, journalists, and others. The Villas-Boas brothers are the best known, nominated for a Nobel Peace prize for their pioneering work in the 1950s and 1960s in establishing the “Parque Indígena do Alto Xingu,” the first indigenous reserve in Brazil, and the “crown jewel” of Brazilian indigenismo. Among anthropologists, the ethnographic history of the region reads almost like a “who’s who” of Brazilian ethnology. Perhaps nothing about the “índios do Xingu” is more ingrained in the popular and anthropological imagination than the great chiefly rituals, the rites of passage that transform boys into men and chiefs and deceased chiefs into heroic ancestors. The kuarup chiefly mortuary feasts, in particular, have been the subject of feature films, popular books, ethnographic monographs, and numerous shorter treatments (see, for example, Agostinho 1974a; Carneiro 1993). In fact, in 2000 it was suggested that the ritual be recognized as a Brazilian national monument. These rites of passage, discussed in greater detail in Part II, are critical markers of Xinguano culture and identity. Xinguanos prominently display their identities in hairstyles, body adornments, and body painting, upon their social skin (see Turner 1984). Likewise, in their rituals, as in their houses and villages and their vast inventory of material culture, they are unmistakable. But, has it always been so? And, what traces tell us so? As elsewhere in the Americas, our increased understanding of the history and prehistory of Xinguano peoples reveals the horrific impact of Europe’s expansion into the New World. The Upper Xingu, in fact, provides one of the clearest examples from lowland South America of the catastrophic depopulation now widely recognized as ubiquitous throughout the hemisphere. Changes in demographic and economic scale are obvious in light of what we now know of the size, density, and permanence of prehistoric villages and the transformation of their local surroundings. Although less obvious, substantial changes in social relations, political power, cosmology, and identity resulted from depopulation, territorial compression, and the increasingly pluralistic character of Xinguano. Western colonialism had a profound effect on all aspects of Xinguano cultural

Visualizing Deep Temporality • 31

life as local groups labored under the pressures of depopulation, violent encounters with “wild Indians” and white men, territorial compression, and, ultimately, the encapsulation of native peoples within the World System in the twentieth century. The centrifugal force of the expanding colonial frontier coupled with the centripetal force created by the exigencies of depopulation created a unique situation of cultural pluralism in the Upper Xingu. New social relations and identities developed as immigrant groups encroached on local communities, as Europeans battled and coerced their way into the area and, eventually, as Xinguanos became consciously aware of their juxtaposition with the profoundly “other” Western society. What is also clear, and perhaps even more surprising, is the longevity of many cultural practices, preoccupations, and predispositions: an historical perspective of sufficient time depth reveals an astonishing resiliency, or plasticity of basic cultural patterns or “structures,” even in the face of radical changes in demography, ethnic composition, economic scale, or the expression of political power and economy. While transformed by Western colonialism, this was not responsible for its creation: Xinguano society did not emerge in toto, during and after the so-called contact period. In many areas of the New World, societies survived because they were willing to move, to flee the destructive forces of colonialism and the vectors of disease, but the Xinguanos survived because they were predisposed to stay put. Not only did they stay put, but they readily accommodated and incorporated immigrants—individuals as well as entire communities. Flexible and diffuse social relations and malleable social identities enabled groups to adjust to depopulation in a regional context, proving to be highly adaptive in the face of acute population loss. In the face of such a complicated history it is difficult to separate the traditional from the invented and visualize the deep temporality or situatedness of these people in this place, in other words, how people carry their histories forward in collective memories, including monuments and traditions, and physical bodies and dwellings, and the landscape. The earliest Xinguanos, the ancestral populations of the indigenous peoples there today, arrived in the area by at least A.D. 800, colonizing a region with no apparent antecedents (although this may well be an artifact of sampling). Part I provides a brief introduction to this long-term history of the Upper Xingu, specifically with regard to three primary geotemporal levels: (1) the Upper Xingu in relation to Amazonia as a whole; (2) the more discrete area of the southern Amazon; and (3) the history within the Upper Xingu basin itself. These levels relate to three sociohistorical entities: the Arawak diaspora, the southern Amazonian periphery, and the


Xinguano cultural tradition—or what we might call historical personages in the sense of the master historian of the longue durée, Fernand Braudel. The Upper Xingu is unique in historical terms in that, within the Brazilian Amazon, it is among the few places where direct continuity between prehistory and ethnographic groups can be suggested. It is a very complex history that involves the emergence of the unique pluralistic (multilingual) society known from ethnography. It is important to recognize that “the idea of a longue durée does not imply that nothing can change—just that it has not” (Richlin 1997: 27). Continuity and discontinuity or change and stasis are ongoing processes, manifesting themselves relative to specific scales and perspectives. Thus, the view of the long term must necessarily glance over much variation and smaller scale discontinuities and change. The perspective of the long term, attempting to delineate the deep roots of specific human lifeways and ideologies, the deep temporality of practices, provides a counterbalance to what we have before our eyes: the presentism shared by quantitative generalists, adopting premises of uniformitarianism and seeking patterning in timeless space, and postmodernists alike. As Moore (1995: 53) notes, that “the valueless world of postmodernism thus threatens to return archaeology [cum anthropology] to a strange unmediated empiricism, and it is the self-evidential nature of the world as implied in this move which raises the question of time.” She goes on to say, “A past which is simply co-extensive with our present, as well as constructed in our own image, is a passive past, it lacks agency.” A past that is not isomorphic with the present, however, is a foreign past: “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” Hartley’s (1953) memorable and oft-quoted line reminds us, metaphorically, that anthropology and history (or an archaeology that attempts to combine the two) both attempt to establish correct meanings at a distance. The question is one of translation and calibration, not direct measurement and translation is tricky since it attempts to situate native meanings in a foreign context. In thinking about Xinguano history then, how exactly do we go about establishing correct meanings at a distance cultural and temporal? We are faced with the interpretive problem of establishing correct cultural meanings and practices—in a present, socially dynamic context—and the additional temporal problem of establishing a history of those meanings and practices, pushing the context back in time, or creating a cultural history. To construct such a history requires that we not only address meaning but systematically link meaning to actions and, then, extend our interpretation of meaningful actions backward in time by examining the residues or products of past actions.


So, what of “yesterday’s persons”? How do we attach agency to larger personages only resolved or resolving themselves at larger spatial scales, supralocal sociocultural “scapes” and the “skin of the land,” or at longer temporal spans of the longue durée. This is the question that guides the first part of this work and requires resolution of basic issues of distribution in time and space. Appadurai (1986: 5) notes that even though “human actors encode things with significance … it is things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” The idea of things-in-motion implies time and displacement, history, which requires a different set of observational tools than the study of stationary patterns, measured in days or years. The life histories of things, whether they are attached to specific persons and places, or move freely between them, often requires a historical point of view that extends beyond the life histories of objects or people and it is things-through-time that we must look toward for insight, which raises the question of visibility: what from the present can be visualized in the past. Viewing things through time involves more than understanding traffic between living or perceived persons or subjects, defined as like or dissimilar bodies, each with a perspective on the other, and more than an objective analysis of the spaces and objects that make up the built environment and material culture, but requires a topology, of sorts, aimed at revealing the self-scaling and transformation of bodies that are unrecognized or only vaguely recognized by present-day actors. In short, as Chartier (1989: 60) puts it, “There are no historical objects outside the ever-changing practices that constitute them, thus there is no field of discourse, no sort of reality that is defined once and for all, shaped definitely and traceable in all historical situations.” In Amazonia, history must proceed a little differently and the past, the deep temporality and historicity of native peoples, must be known through an eclectic mix of archaeology, indigenous oral history, linguistics, and ethnography. Archaeology is a “singular” approach to deep time history, for most past human groups anyway, but it is also the interpretive approach par excellence (Giddens 1984); its agency lies primarily in discovery not the repeated (or replicable) application of established questions, methods, or instruments. It is critically dependent on issues of visibility. Although perhaps less obvious, and therefore more commonly overlooked, issues of visibility are also pervasive in an ethnographic context. How do we understand the historical performance, resilience, or centrality of specific aspects or features of a cultural order without documenting their character, or even presence, in the past? It may be reasonable to generally assume that certain cultural features (e.g., symbols, principles,


practices, products, or institutions) are central or pivotal because of their apparent pervasiveness or perceived importance in a contemporary context, but it is nonetheless an assumption that they comprise deep-seated elements of the cultural pattern. Indeed, changes at “deep” or basic structural levels are rarely discernable over the short term, and only through studies that explore the movement of culture over long periods of time, extending beyond one or a few generations, can we begin to address issues of its structural stability or transformation (Ohnuki-Tierney 1991: 7). Extending analysis beyond the living and their memories requires some systematic approach to dealing with things out of a lived, systemic context. There has been much debate in archaeology, at least since Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology (1948), about how to give meaning to the static remains of the archaeological record—things that, although interpreted in the present, were made or pertain to the past. Historians, likewise, have long toiled over problems of interpretation, how to move analysis beyond simple chronicle and narrative to reconstruct the lives of yesterday’s persons (Collingwood 1926). The “contextual approach,” as Hodder (1996) calls it, has even more ancient roots; as Burns (2001: 8) notes, paraphrasing the seventeenth-century French scholar Jean Mabillon (1623–1707): “A person who has for years been acquainted with ancient documents could acquire the skill to make such judgments [of authenticity] which sometimes might reach a degree of probability tantamount to certainty, even though each and every piece of evidence in isolation might be of little weight.” The challenge is to develop valid and relevant analogies or homologies between the past and the present (a topic that has likewise been widely debated in archaeology) (e.g., Stahl 1993; Wylie 1985). The historical method involves taking things out of time, for comparison, but leaving them in place (in terms of geography or cultural tradition), developing historical analogies or homologies. The “generalizing method,” on the other hand, takes things out of place (context) but—generally—leaves them in (freezes) time. Historical analogies of a very general kind, that is, that generalize across Amazonia or broad segments of it (i.e., statements like “Amazonia is,” “Amerindians are,” “terra firme societies are”), have made important contributions within the dominant paradigms of North American cultural ecology and Franco-Brazilian structuralism. Typically, these analogies are derived from twentieth-century ethnology and therefore must rely, at least implicitly, on assumptions of uniformitarianism—in other words, some ecological or cultural determinism that overrides specific histories. The approach advocated here of historical ethnography or, even, ethnohistoric “thick description,” is commonly referred to as the “direct historical


approach.” It develops linkages between different levels of analysis and perspectives, finding correspondences. It also involves what Ingold (1993: 152) refers to as a “dwelling perspective,” which assumes that the “landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves.” Importantly, this view of “the temporality of landscape” situates archaeology and ethnography as forms of dwelling in the landscape, and thus moves us away from the narrow view that archaeology merely deals with “dead persons,” objects without subjectivity, or as Giddens (1984: 357) quips, the “bric-a-brac washed up on the shore of modern times and left there as the social currents within which it was created have drained away.”

CHAPTER

2

Culture and History: The Longue Durée Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow, and in hindering it shape it. Others wear themselves out more quickly. But all of them provide support and hindrance. As hindrances they stand as limits (“envelopes,” in the mathematical sense) beyond which man and his experiences cannot go. Just think of the difficulties of breaking out of certain geographical frameworks, certain biological frameworks, certain limits of productivity, even particular spiritual contraints: mental frameworks too can form prisons of the longue durée. Fernand Braudel (1980 [1958]: 31) The Upper Xingu is rich in history. However, Xinguano history has been hard for anthropologists to visualize, because inquiry has focused upon the present (i.e., the rhythms and movements of village life as experienced in an ethnographic context) and not the past. Harder still to grasp is “structural history,” in Braudel’s sense of the deep, recalcitrant undercurrents of the longue durée, revealed over generations or centuries, and regions. The reification of the present is, in part, the result of an analytical gap, because of a lack of adequate archaeology or documentary history. It also results from a general sentiment. For Western observers, generally speaking, the Xinguano way of life exudes an almost subliminal feeling of timelessness and ecological adjustedness, that apparent immobility and immutability often considered characteristic of “cold” societies. Inside a Xinguano house,

37


lying in a hammock looking up at the carefully placed rafters, an intricate latticework of posts, beams and crossbars, or at the wisps of smoke rising up from the central hearth, the kitchen, it is hard to imagine that things were ever any different: there are no obvious monuments of the past in contemporary villages (Figure 2.1). In other words, it has been easy to transform a state of mind and body, the anthropologist’s in an ethnographic present, into a state of affairs, a timeless Xinguano society. Reading Xinguano “history,” in Karl von den Steinen’s seminal works (1886, 1894), for instance, does not transform or broaden this image of the Xinguano variant of a generic Amazon person or “tropical forest culture.” Steinen’s copious graphics look like snapshots of contemporary village life, without the now ubiquitous bicycles, aluminum pots, soccer goalposts, and myriad others traces of Western culture (Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3). One has to read rather carefully between the lines to see deeper levels of change. The fact that beginning some time in the distant past, and continuing into the twentieth century, there has been a historical process of “intertribal acculturation,” obvious on linguistic grounds alone (i.e., Xinguano multilingualism), has been widely noted since Steinen’s time. Likewise, comparison of demographic patterns from the late 1800s to the present (e.g., some three to four thousand persons in some thirty villages in 1884, slightly over five hundred in nine villages in 1954, and nearly two thousand living in thirteen villages today) raises the alarm that things are not as unchanging as they might seem. Many authors have recognized

Fig. 2.1 Atugua (whirlwind) masks in Ipatse village (1993).

Culture and History • 39

Fig. 2.2 Front door of small round “radio,” subsidiary to household of primary village chief (1993).

these historical factors and several have more detailed commentary on the profound effects of depopulation (e.g., Agostinho 1972; Dole 1969, 1984a; Galvão and Simões 1966; Ribeiro 1970) or the formation of Xinguano pluralism (e.g., Bastos 1983; Dole 1993). By and large, though, previous studies are microhistorical, history writ rather small, in increments of one or a few generations, at most. The nature of what came before 1884 has been touched upon rarely and largely hypothetically.1 These observations are not intended as a criticism of a “presentist” methodology that focuses narrowly on direct observations in the present, but, instead, they try to emphasize that the anthropological (and popular) image of “Xinguano society” was forged during recent times, an extended “ethnographic present” (c. 1880–1980), and notably at a time when indigenous populations across the hemisphere, and certainly those in the Upper Xingu, reached their demographic nadir (c. 1940–1980). The image of Xinguano peoples that emerges when we look to the past, on the eve of European contact (c. 1500, for instance, when regional populations reached their apogee), differs dramatically from that of the ethnographic present. The great shock comes not so much upon realization of the massive physical scale of earthworks, almost ubiquitous in terminal prehistoric settlements, although that is indeed surprising. The real eye-opener is experienced when the ancient and sophisticated architectural plan is revealed in its entirety. The great fortified towns of the remote past, over ten times the size of contemporary villages, and vast deforested agricultural areas associated


Fig. 2.3 (a) Fish-spirit dance in Xinguano village in 1887 (from Steinen 1894) and (b) at Ipatse village (1995).

with them document an unexpectedly dramatic and intentional transformation of the prehistoric landscape. The distribution of settlements, roads, pathways, ports and other sites, demonstrates that in the past, like today, the built environment was integrated across a much broader area,


extending well beyond the village areas themselves. Across the region there were many of these villages, undoubtedly home to a large late prehistoric population, numbering in the tens of thousands, densely settled in large, permanent settlements, some likely numbering in the thousands, throughout much of the upper Xingu basin. Detailed studies of discrete sociohistorical trajectories with sufficient time-depth to evaluate long-term trends, particularly before circa A .D. 1750, are generally lacking from Amazonia. Thus, the Upper Xingu is a privileged locale for such a contextual or “direct historical” approach, since Xinguanos peoples are well-documented ethnographically (from 1884 to the present) and have a deep history within the area (spanning at least a millennia and likely two or more). Written history begins late, in 1884, and therefore our ability to define the major temporal outlines of Xinguano culture before this time depends largely on archaeology. The approach is ethnoarchaeological. However, it is not designed to put ethnography to work to better understand the past—for archaeologists to “do” ethnography to address their preexisting problems, nor is the approach intended to put archaeology (or history) to work to better understand the present. It attempts both by revealing visible links at varied analytical levels (i.e., relative to variable spatiotemporal scales), to create “genealogies” of certain ways of living or social philosophies, and to create a critical dialogue between alternative ways of looking at history. This “dialogue” requires fairly free movement, back and forth, between broadly defined ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological conceptual domains. It aims to integrate diverse levels of analysis, derived from ethnographic observation, indigenous narratives, and documentary sources, as well as the archaeological study of material residues created by past and present human action. The more detail and resolution of each level, the better, obviously; but variation at each individual level is often required to see patterns between levels, commonalities across scales. Relevant cultural patterns are reconstructed at various points along a historical continuum (“slices of time”), understanding the “system” (or significant parts of it) at different points in time and space, and concretely linking these through visible commonalities. The assumption is that continuity reflects not the autonomous persistence of disarticulated features of culture but more importantly the underlying structural principles or cultural order—a unity of meaning organized around culturally typical schemes or tropes. Either way the study is topological, and depends on our ability to recognize or visualize key symbols or schemas and social traffic at disparate spatiotemporal levels, after the fact through archaeological or textual analysis.


In the Upper Xingu, the endeavor of creating such a “holistic” cultural history is made much easier by the resilience of certain highly visible features or traces of Xinguano culture over time, most obviously manifest in settlement pattern and spatial organization (e.g., settlement layouts, locations, regional distributions), subsistence economy, and technology (e.g., ceramic industries, land use around villages). Continuity in these physical features, which are the products of repetitive social practices, and which are infused with comparable meanings, allows us to infer continuity in the underlying structural principles, or major aspects of them. Within such a contextual approach, interpretations are extended from the readily observable to the less observable, by “peeling back” layers of meaning and by placing things more fully into their diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts (Hodder 1996). These cultural tendencies (i.e., enduring cultural structures or schema) are glossed here as (1) an ethos of settled way of village life; (2) supralocal integration (regionality); and (3) social hierarchy. Even in the face of dramatic, radical changes or discontinuities between parts and their functional relationships, (e.g., the changes in settlement size through time or the correlation between changes in settlement size and mobility, subsistence regime, and so on, in recent times because of post-1500 depopulation), there is a remarkable continuity in the underlying structure of the whole—the symbolic “core” of Xinguano culture—not only within the Upper Xingu, but also within a deeper historical personage, the Arawak diaspora.

The Southern Amazon When Europeans first arrived in the southern peripheries of Amazonia, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they encountered numerous dense sedentary populations. Many, if not the majority, of these diverse settled peoples spoke Arawak languages, notably associated with three major blocks: the Guaporé (Bauré), the upper Tapajos basin (Pareci), and the Upper Xingu (Xinguano). The early explorers were impressed by the “civilized,” “docile” nature of these peoples, as well as the high level of engineering in their planned plaza villages, with ceremonial houses (“temples”), “idols,” elaborate ritual life (Block 1994; Pires de Campos 1862; Denevan 1966). Julian Steward called these societies the “theocratic chiefdoms,” with the exception of the Xinguanos, whom he felt fit the “tropical forest culture” model. This oversight was historical, as the theocratic chiefdoms were described based on composite early sources (c. 1650–1900), whereas the Xinguano “tribes” were only known only after 1884. The first eyewitness accounts of the southern Amazon peripheries (between circa 1690 and 1720) came at a time, as we will see later (in


Chapters 3 and 4), when populations in the Upper Xingu, the most remote from colonial activities, had already undergone episodes of catastrophic depopulation as a result of early colonial efforts in South America (at sometime between c. 1550 and 1700). Upon careful inspection, even in an area as culturally diverse as the southern Amazon, the connections linking Arawak groups are clear: they are sedentary farmers, living in large plaza villages, which are closely spaced together in regional “cultures,” (e.g., Bauré, Pareci, Terêna, and Xinguano). It is my belief that these are part of a larger sociohistorical entity or enchainment—what I call the Arawak diaspora—which also included the Arawak peoples along the Amazon, Negro, Solimões, and Madeira, as well as groups in far eastern and western Amazonia, ultimately linking these areas with areas even farther north, the “Circum-Caribbean” proper, Achagua, Lokono, Caquetio, and Taino (Figure 2.4) The idea of a diaspora, which is very much what both Schmidt and Lathrap had in mind, is based on the assertion that language and culture change in concert, not autonomously, even if only partially and sometimes minimally.2

Fig. 2.4 The Arawak Diaspora showing distribution of primary contemporary Arawak language groups (1–10; after Aihkenvald 1999).


Max Schmidt’s Arawak Expansion … the problem of knowing the point to which we are dealing with the productions of a certain aboriginal tribe or, on the other side, the point to which the culture we encounter is already imbued with an European air, principally through the expeditioners … even in the cases where an indigenous object does not exhibit a European mark, even where it does not manifest a European mode of thought, it could still very well be that this utensil or mode of thinking so became as it is as a consequence of contact with European culture, that for the indigenous person is so singular. Max Schmidt 1942: 268 (author’s translation of Portuguese translation of original [1905] text in German) Throughout much of his work, Max Schmidt (1942: 268) recognized a fundamental problem of historical anthropology: How can we concretely link the past with the present in light of the massive impact of European colonialism? Schmidt was a “diffusionist,” a protégé of Wilhelm Schmidt in the 1890s and steeped in the German tradition of historical idealism. Building on Steinen’s work and his own field experiences in southern Amazonia, particularly among the Pareci, Bakairi, and Xinguanos, Schmidt (1914, 1917) recognized the uniqueness and historical importance of Arawak peoples early on, as did Nordenskiöld and others working in Bolivia or other areas of the diaspora at about this time. He was keenly interested in the problem of culture change; separating the “traditional” from the imported was critical in the southern Amazon, where he concentrated his work, because these groups had been so altered in the centuries between “first contact,” circa 1700, and the ethnographic period in Amazonia, inaugurated by Steinen. His work in the Southern Amazon at the turn of the twentieth century provided a unique window into this problem, and into the cultural history of the continent, because, as he noted, these groups were related and, in some respects, formed a historical continuum, the Arawak diaspora, although he did not call it this. “Everywhere we find Arawakan tribes or their influence, they are agriculturalists, their life ways, while very diverse in form, are always found intimately linked with cultivation of the soil,” and, likewise, “their navigation arts,” and basic riverine or coastal orientations was of critical importance (Schmidt 1917: 15). It was, in fact, the “economic-administrative factors that elevated the ancient Peruvian cultures, in a manner similar to that of the Arawaks, to the [high] level in which they were encountered by European culture” (Schmidt 1917: 68–75). Such resiliency of symbolic


systems over time, especially within large diasporas, is demonstrated time and again throughout the non-Western world, and is widely suggested for other language families, such as Tupi-Guarani, Carib, and Gê (Basso 1977; Hill and Santos-Granero 2002; Maybury-Lewis 1979; Ohnuki-Tierney 1990; Viveiros de Castro 1992). Ancient tropical diasporas, such as Oceanic Austronesian or NigerCongo (Bantu) languages in Africa, provide exemplary cases today of how such historical processes might work. Schmidt’s work framed these same issues very early on, presaging later “phylogenetic” approaches (see, e.g., Kirch and Green 1987). Although imbued with the shopworn allegories of conquest, notably the idea of Arawak “high-culture” juxtaposed against “cannibal” enemies (Whitehead 2002), but something has stuck out in the minds of virtually everyone who has considered the historical distribution of Arawak peoples: they share certain things in common, such as material culture (ceramics and ritual objects), spatial organization and, especially the central location of plazas, a founder’s ideology tied to these places and the ancestors they contain, social hierarchy and political rivalry, as well as early root-crop agriculture. The same problem of separating phylogenetic from reticulate phenomenon, particularly in light of Western colonialism, that Schmidt notes, resonates with historical analysis within other tropical diaspora (Bellwood and Renfrew 2003; Kirch and Green 1987, 2001; Thomas 1989, 1994; Vansina 1990). Like his contemporary, Franz Boas, Schmidt felt that archaeology, in particular, would help reveal the traditional, “ancient ways of life,” but his own historical reconstructions, notably his treatise on the Arawak (1917), were based on very broad ethnological comparisons of individual traits across broad sweeps of time and space, the kind of grand diffusionist schemas of world history that fell into disrepute in post–World War I anthropology. In fact, his work was often overlooked by later culture historians, including those most engaged in the question of diaspora in the ancient Americas. Several elements of Schmidt’s argument merit mention: (1) Arawak societies constituted a hierarchical society, with lords, high art and science; (2) the temple/plaza basis of political power, which he compared to Tiwanaku; (3) his recognition of their economic base on root-crop agriculture and riverine adaptations; (4) routes of migration along water sources; and (5) the nature of conquest, having perhaps both military and “diplomatic” elements, but preferring the latter. At the risk of giving overdue credit to Schmidt over later authors, compensating perhaps for past oversight, his nascent recognition, if not clear exposition, of the


major features of the Arawak diaspora is noteworthy: he was on the right track.

Lathrap’s Neolithic Revolution Lathrap expanded significantly on Schmidt’s hypothesis of an Arawak diaspora in two principal ways: (1) through explicit recognition of a widespread connection between “Barrancoid” ceramics and Arawak languages, providing the means to pursue historical roots through archaeology and (2) his elaboration of a “Neolithic revolution” model, building also on Sauer’s (1952) ideas about tropical agricultural origins and dispersals in riverine areas of the tropical lowlands. 3 The “Neolithic revolution” in Amazonia, as Lathrap (1970, 1977) called it, involved the emergence of “developed Tropical Forest agriculture” in the central Amazon (c. 5000 B.P. or before) and subsequent expansion of root-crop agriculturalists across the lowlands. This “developed agriculture” emerged out of an earlier “house garden” economy focused on industrial crops (nets and floats for fishing) and involved: “(1) gross genetic modification [of plants]; (2) rescheduling of human activities; and (3) patent demographic upsets” (1970: 15–17; 1977: 715). Demographic growth and ensuing population pressure and the “intensification of a system of cultivation of bitter manioc centered in the alluvial floodplains of Amazonia and northern South America,” together with “sedentism and an abundant supply of fish.” Lathrap saw things this way: “around 3000 B.C. the speakers of protoArawak were concentrated on the floodplain of the central Amazon … developed Tropical Forest agriculture was leading to increased populations which were putting a progressively greater pressure on the limited expanses of alluvial land … to relieve these populations pressures daughter colonial groups started to move out, looking for other available areas of alluvial bottom lands. These colonists would have traveled by canoe and moved out along all available waterways where further alluvial land might be encountered” (1970: 74). The process did not stall at this early time “back on the Central Amazon flood plain patterns of food production and food utilization meanwhile continued to increase in efficiency so that even greater population pressures began to build up. Between 1000 and 500 B.C. further waves of migration of peoples speaking Proto-Maipuran moved out along all routes followed by earliest colonists…” (1970: 75). Lathrap’s model, although elegant and compelling, and significantly altered through the years, suffers from unwarranted assumptions and overgenerality about ecological and demographic conditions and their influence over change. Culture change is seen to reflect the operation of large scale economic and demographic forces, and the influence or


variability of social, political, or ideological conditions is largely ignored: once people had adopted a pattern of sedentary floodplain settlement and “developed” root-crop agriculture, Lathrap (1970) felt, then demographic growth and expansion would ensue. Importantly in the present context, the Arawak diaspora was seen as part of a general process that began by circa 5,000 B.P. The Arawak (Lathrap’s Maipuran) were the 3,000–1,500 B.P. part of a process that operated uniformly over five millennia. They were perhaps the most successful expansionists, but they were preceded and succeeded by waves of diverse other groups, notably “proto-Arawakan” and “proto-Tupiguarani,” along the floodplains of the Amazon and its major tributaries. Lathrap’s narrow focus on ecological, technological, and demographic factors (the “working out of the Tropical Forest [economic] pattern” with respect to narrowly defined ecological conditions, notably alluvial soils and fisheries) put him squarely in line with an ecological determinist consensus (Lathrap 1970: 76, 1977; Lathrap et al. 1985; see Carneiro 1970, 1995; Ferguson 1989; Roosevelt 1980, 1991b): population pressure is the mother of change, in this case as a “pump,” and demography correlates more or less uniformly to major ecological variation, that is, the terra firme/várzea dichotomy. Plant a cultural seed in the rich floodplain (várzea) soils of the Amazon and a great social forest, dense and strong, will emerge, but place the same seed in the depauperate soils throughout the rest of Amazonia, that vast terra firme, will give rise to only sparse, small-scale groupings. Today, few would accept “relatively continuous population pressures, relatively constant rates of migration, and the search for a single kind of ecological niche, good alluvial soils” (1970: 75). Early dates for manioc and other tropical forest crops (approximately 8,000 to 6,000 B.P.; Pearsall 1989; Piperno et al. 2000), indicates that here, as elsewhere in the Americas, “domestication” and “cultivation” were processes that developed throughout the Holocene, at least. There does seem to be a technological innovation sometime long after manioc was domesticated, as evidenced primarily by ceramic griddles, perhaps concomitant with the first pulses of the early diaspora, but this remains to be demonstrated in empirical terms. It may have easily been other factors, such as rivalry between high-ranking persons in a hierarchical ideology, as so commonly witnessed in historical times (see Chapter 7), that was a more critical “motor.” Certainly, the horticultural mind-set4 was a critical component, providing a transportable technology widely applicable in the lowlands (manioc farming and fishing), but equally important is an ethos of exploration, a yearning, for one reason or another, to explore and colonize. Today, there


seems to be universal agreement that, on average, the first and ultimately largest and most “complex” of these “complex societies” appeared in the flood plains of the major rivers (principally the Amazon and Orinoco). This is to say little more, it seems, that to say that Amazonia is like every other area of temperate and tropical forest and rivers in the world, and certainly in all where states emerged (and arriving at such a conclusion, like recognizing the Arawak diaspora for what it is, requires no deterministic process, the ecofunctional “cause,” but merely represents a “historical fact,” correlation). It is now widely accepted and the Upper Xingu is one of the critical examples that complex societies existed more widely in Amazonia than was commonly thought in the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, the várzea model is, in part, an artifact of sampling and, in part, reflects the assumptions of cultural ecology. Cultural change depends on other more localized, contingent, and historical factors: the interplay of multidimensional social, cultural, and ecological factors that interact variably under contingent sociohistorical conditions. In other words, population pressure cannot be demonstrated, and rates or regularity of demographic patterns and trends cannot be assumed, no more than we can simply assume that cultural responses to demographic stress, such as residential moves, conquest, flight, invention, ritual, and so on will be uniform or predictable across the region. Specifically, scarcity or competition cannot be narrowly defined by the same, small set of “strategic” resources, notably arable lands, and competition for it in flood plain areas, nor can it be assumed that people moved into these areas the first chance they got, some did and some didn’t.

Pottery, Plazas, and Persons: The Amazonian Barrancoid Regardless of ultimate causes, whether the initial impetus was economic or demographic, as Lathrap suggested, or something else, it is hard to deny that something “revolutionary” happened, three to four millennia ago. Even specialists who doubt the cultural specificity of the process (i.e., the Arawak diaspora), agree that the early root-crop agriculturalists spread out far and wide along rivers and coastlines from a homeland somewhere deep in Amazonia (Roosevelt 1997). But, reconstructing something like the Arawak diaspora through recourse to human “biological distance studies,” as Roosevelt (1997: 174) suggests, seems dubious because by later pre-Columbian times most Arawak peoples were involved in widespread social relations with other groups. Many were poised to become the type of pluralistic regional society that became so common after 1500, and perhaps they already had undergone an ethnogenetic process of hybridization


in many of the areas before. That is, the diaspora includes many persons with non-Arawak biologies.5 In other words, it is precisely words and gestures, and the perspectives they entail, and not genes, that are the critical or essential feature of the diaspora. Remarkably, within the Arawak, words and gestures (technologies, of the body), commonly moved through time and space in partial unison. It is persons, not impersonal forces, that carry the process along, persons who utter words make gestures, and more or less imperfectly reproduce what they have learned and otherwise experienced. It is therefore a history of persons, revealing the continuity of personhood that we should endeavor to write. The idea of a diaspora postulates nothing more than this: that there is a nonarbitrary and nonautonomous relationship between words and gestures, that is reproduced as traces—other words and gestures—across time. At this macrohistorical level, one step down from simply being “Amazonians”, (part of the same macro-history of colonization and development of the Amazon beginning over 11,000 years ago). Xinguano histories are most obviously part of the Arawak diaspora that can be juxtaposed against other such traditions (Tupi-Guarani, Carib, and Gê). Culture areas are used in Amazonia for synchronic classification of Amazonian peoples, with little attention to genealogies (phylogenetic forces) or interaction (reticulate forces). To be convincing, this requires some recourse to archaeology, which in Amazonia has just appeared on the intellectual horizon. The diaspora, in this sense, is not only a spatiotemporal, linguistic, or geographic unit but also a sociohistorical entity, a “historical personage.” Spatial and temporal issues are tied to both the people who colonized the Upper Xingu, the southeastern endpoint of Arawak expansion, and the changing conditions locally within the Upper Xingu. In the Xingu, ontogeny does seem to recapitulate phylogeny, when, after initial colonization, circa A.D. 500–800, if not before there is an initially expansive period of “regional development” followed by a period of cultural fluorescence, the “classic” period, that is truncated by the deleterious effects of “contact”. In my view, it was the emergence of the hierarchical structure, the “idea of the state” in inchoate form (i.e., the incipient elitism with which a founder’s ideology is imbued, not to mention the hint of exclusive property rights), that was the critical lever or cause for the initial diaspora around years 4,000–3,000 years ago or soon thereafter. As a symbolic transformation within villages and regions of the proto-Arawak, it enters its initial “diasporic” period by 500 B.C., what I call the Amazonian formative, which spreads fairly rapidly across the neo-tropical lowlands by c. 500–1 B.C. By A.D. 500, it enters a new phase, as it has expanded nearly as


far as it ever will, and then regional growth and elaboration ensues, followed by the classic and post-1492 phases of the diaspora. The radiation of a new technological system may lie at the root of the rise of hierarchy, although this, too, must first entail a social transformation, perhaps turning people into objects, through control of their labor or through the symbolic fungibility of human bodies and wealth (Descola 1992, 2001; Godelier 1982). However, to my way of thinking, it did not likely cause the diasporic explosion in the first place; the revolution that had to be made, the line that had to be crossed was symbolic and social, not technological (meaning, the hierarchical structure did not await the technological innovation to express its internal energies in the diaspora). Late in his career, Lathrap published some of his earliest works, that is to say he transformed what were clearly ideas from his early years, inspired, like so many others, in the theoretical implications of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism (see Oliver 1991).6 One article, “Jaws,” stands out as a singular contribution to the prehistory of the hemisphere. As Ford (1969) had earlier suggested in his model of the “theocratic formative,” specifically, that monumentalism represented a shift in religious authority, which he felt was at the root of cultural change in the “Formative Cultures” of the New World. His work at Poverty Point in the 1950s, had earlier sparked Lévi-Strauss’s interest in framing his seminal discussion of plazas (1963; see, e.g., Hornborg 1990; Seeger 1976; Turner 1996; Zeidler 1984). Particularly, the emergence of certain modalities of power—of social containment—plazas, is a fertile area of contemporary research on the built environment and, particularly, plazas (Low 2000), as discussed in Part II. The weight of history as expressed in ritual, tactile memory, or other forms of knowledge conservation, such as structured use of space, material culture, and landscape, are “causal.” The claim of conservatism within the Arawak diaspora can be tied not only to ceramic technology and design, the Amazonian Barrancoid series, and its obvious correlations to economy (root-crop agriculture and fishing), but also to underlying cultural schemas that inform not only economic decisions and patterns but also the basic organization of social, ritual, and political life. Central plazas, and plaza centric ritual, including ceremonial structures, flutes, ball games, and other features. Although these features are not restricted to Arawaks, they are prominent in virtually all cases, and appear to be features of proto-Arawak culture, approximately 3,000 to 4,000 B.P.7 The question is twofold: (1) does Saladoid-Barrancoid relate to these early root-crop agriculturalists (Boomert 2000; Roosevelt 1997; Zucchi 1991); and (2) did the makers of Saladoid-Barrancoid speak Arawak


languages? We can at least say this, the two endpoints of the diaspora, the Antilles and the southern Amazon and adjacent areas, circular plazas are part and parcel of the known historical sequence, which based on the regional ethnology (Arawaks in plaza villages at contact) can be extended across the southern Amazon and the Caribbean–Orinoco corridor. What the Caribbean also tells us, assuming (as most do) that the earliest colonists of the region were Arawaks. The Caribbean (Saladoid) Arawaks already had their central place-plaza model, from 500 B.C. to the sixteenth century (Petersen 1996; Siegel 1999). Indeed, the vast majority of Arawaks live in plaza societies.8 I cannot fully elaborate here on these two claims, that Arawak people were unique in the plaza villages and Barrancoid ceramics and brought these across the lowlands. However, some greater detail is merited in the key areas, the Orinoco, the Caribbean, the central Amazon, and the southern Amazon: The Middle Orinoco: The Orinoco River and adjacent areas have long been an area of special interest in questions of ancient Arawak peoples. It is the area that the “Nu-Arawak” were first described by Gilij (1782) as a distinctive language group (Arawak and Maipure). It is also home to the type sites (Saladero/Barrancas) for Lathrap’s hypothesis of a “Barrancoid people and their dispersals.” Today, we known that it is one of the earliest if not the earliest examples of Saladoid/Barrancoid ceramics in the lowlands (Boomert 2000; Roosevelt 1997). Authors disagree on the cultural affiliations or dating of the initial ceramic industries (“La Gruta Tradition”), but there is some consensus that between circa 1000 and 500 a cultural group situated on the banks of the middle Orinoco had a broadly similar ceramic industry, generically called Saladoid-Barrancoid (S-B), composed of cooking griddles and a variety of pots decorated with incised-line, punctation, appliqué, modeling, and monochrome painting (usually white or black) on buff or red slips, and tempered with grit and sponge-spicule (cauixi), among other smaller frequency materials (Barse 2000; Boomert 2000; Lathrap 1970; Roosevelt 1997; Sanoja and Vargas 1978; Zucchi 1991). The sequence from the middle and upper Orinoco (together with the lower Orinoco sequence, Saladero-Los Barrancos-Barrancas, described by Rouse and Cruxent 1963), provides a well-documented sequence of early settled agriculturalists on the floodplains in the first millennium B.C. and development into regional polities, including rank-order settlement hierarchies, by A .D. 800 (Roosevelt 1980; Spencer and Redmond 1992; Zucchi 2002). The ceramic industries associated with these later prehistoric complexes are likely direct lineal outgrowths of the earlier S-B ceramic traditions (Roosevelt 1997). A continuity in technology and circular plaza


orientation from the late first millennium B.C. until after 1492 also can be suggested (Boomert 2000; Petersen 1996; Zucchi 2002). Regardless of their antiquity in the area, Arawak groups of the Orinoco clearly expanded into the Caribbean by circa 500 B.C., and, apparently, slightly later into areas just west of the Orinoco River, in northwest Venezuela (e.g., the Apure and Meta rivers and Falcón), precisely those peoples, the Caquetio and Taino, that so impressed Americanists as “CircumCaribbean chiefdoms” (Steward and Faron 1959). They moved into the area with the circular-plaza model that seems to characterize Saladoid, Cedenoid (Nericagua phase), and other Arawakan “peoples.” These cases, from the llanos and northern coastal areas that abut the northen Andean piedmont, are commonly seen as the result of Andean influence, but cultural continuity between early populations (c. A.D. 300–500) and ethnohistoric Arawakan groups in the area, such as Achagua and Caquetio, or related groups (Oliver 1988; Redmond et al. 1999) suggests that, whereas interaction was clearly important, these populations were fundamentally Amazonian. The Gaván period occupations in the Meta River (Venezuela) area provide a particularly well documented case of initial colonization of the region (A.D. 300), followed by significant in-filling by the small colonizing population, which over two centuries or so had developed into ranked regional polities, located around regional centers (as known archaeologically from approximately A.D. 500 on) (Spencer and Redmond 1992). These populations lived in large, settled, and sometimes fortified villages that gravitated toward central public space. So, although village patterns are poorly known for early S-B times, as the geographic area presumably ancestral to Caribbean Arawaks, it seems likely that the circular village pattern, documented in the Lesser Antilles by circa 500 B.C., was characteristic of Arawakan speakers in the Orinoco, as well (see Petersen 1996; Zucchi 2002). The Caribbean: Regional specialists generally agree that Arawak agriculturalists colonized the Caribbean from northern South America, namely the Lower Orinoco (see Boomert 2000; Rouse 1992; Wilson 1997). Radiocarbon dates from early Saladoid sites in the Lesser Antilles place initial occupation by circa 500 B.C. and slightly later in Puerto Rico, although the colonization of much of the Caribbean seems to have occurred relatively quickly (c. 500–200 B.C.) (Petersen 1996). These earliest occupations by ceramic-making peoples were apparently circular plaza villagers, transporting their manioc agricultural–fishing complex, including domesticated and other managed plants (manioc, bananas, etc.) and animals (Petersen 1996, 1997; Siegel 1999). They also brought with them in relatively intact form, the ceramic complex of incised, modeled, and


commonly bichrome (white pigment on red slip) ceramics, called the Saladoid series in the Caribbean. Few would disagree that these earliest Saladoid peoples, circa 500 B.C.–A.D. 500, were the proto-typical societies of the Arawak peoples who inhabited the area in 1492. The implication is clear: the Saladoid peoples with their white-on-red, modeled, and incised ceramics and circular villages, in the Caribbean were Arawak, and so, too, were the ceramics they made and circular plazas they derived from on the mainland. Perhaps nowhere is the idea of plazas as containers of power more obvious than in the Caribbean, where the various “Taino” subgroups at the time of contact are also well known for their rectangular bateys, such as those on Puerto Rico (Oliver 1998; Curet 2002). Central plazas continue into the early sixteenth century, as well, such as at En Bas Saline, the indigenous settlement in Hispaniola near where Columbus established Le Navidad in 1493, the first European settlement in the New World. (Deagan 1986; Wilson 1997). Caribbean prehistory is “shot through,” so to speak, with plazas from beginning to end. The genealogy of the central plaza in Amazonia and the Caribbean is shorter than that of the Southeast U.S. or Peru, but, as a symbolic storage device, it ultimately seems to have given rise to the “great plazas” of late prehistory. Here the “founding dynasts”are reborn and remade in the living chiefs: the unity of the house and the division of the state. One might wonder what the elite of Caquana (Puerto Rico Taino; see Oliver 2003) felt for the ancestral founder who successfully bent tradition from a circle to a square, a square in the form of a batey or ball court, as a result of traffic with the post-Classic kingdoms of the Maya (Alegria 1983): an Amazonian variant of the “foreigner king” perhaps. This concentration or “containment” of power, as social memory, is part and parcel of the Arawaks who first migrated into the Caribbean. At least, we must recognize that if we accept central plazas to be a major dimension of late prehistoric Taino power, then the historical question is topological: how was this symbolic of discipline embodied in the plaza transformed through the varied traffic of persons? Whatever settlement changes may or may not have transpired in the Orinoco after circa 500 B.C., those recognized in the Caribbean clearly point to the working our of preexisting structures of hierarchical power: the central plaza and regional integration. The Central Amazon: Research in the Lower Negro, an area dominated by Arawak groups historically (Métraux 1940; Sweet 1974), indicates a correlation between central plaza villages and generalized “modeledincised” ceramics, Lathrap’s “Amazonian Barrancoid.” Archaeological research at the Açutuba, near the confluence of the Negro and Solimões


rivers, provides a securely radiocarbon dated sequence of ceramic occupations of the region (the broad “confluence” area) from as early as 1000–500 B.C. into ethnohistoric times (Heckenberger et al, 1999). It was occupied continually (if not continuously) throughout much (if not all) of that span. The early portions of this sequence (from c. 920–360 B.C. to A. D. 920 radiocarbon years ago) are dominated by a local variant of the Amazonian Barrancoid (which by the latter end of the S-B sequence, after circa A.D. 800–900, become intermixed with Paredao materials) (Neves, personal communication 2004; Neves 2000; Petersen et al. 2003). Later ceramics, after circa A.D. 900, show clear continuities with the earlier Barrrancoid styles, although elite wares clearly relate to a variant of the Amazonian Polychrome styles, referred to as Guarita in the central Amazon. Innovation of elite wares does not therefore represent a discontinuity in the ceramic industry but a gradual transformation of local industries, particularly elaborate polychrome and other fine wares apparently a transformation in regional political economies, perhaps relating to increased regional exchange focused particularly on chiefly ritual and exchange (i.e., prestige building). Here, initial S-B ceramics appear by 360 B.C., if not before, and continue until circa A.D. 900, apparently in association with a central plaza village pattern characteristic of later occupations (Heckenberger et al. 1999). Perhaps this is an ethnogenetic event, wherein the intrusive Paredao peoples and the Barrancoid Arawaks merged and both were subsumed into a local variant of the late prehistoric, postA.D. 900 polychrome called Guarita. An even clearer example of an early circular plaza village with S-B ceramics, apparently coeval with Açutuba, has been recently documented beside a nearby terra firme lake, radiocarbon dated, with numerous dates, to between circa 200 B.C. to A.D. 800. The Osvaldo site is of particular relevance here. S-B ceramics are dated to the late first millennium B.C. until the late second millennium A.D. The Osvaldo deposits primarily occur in a roughly circular configuration around a lesser occupied central area, or plaza. They have been dated from circa 200 B.C. until as late as A.D. 850 at the Osvaldo site, matching the span of the contemporaneous and equivalent occupation at Açutuba (Neves 2000; Petersen et al. 2001). The distribution of Arawak groups in the central Amazon included a continuum along the middle and lower Negro by the late first millennium A.D., and perhaps included groups along the Solimões (Upper Amazon), such as Kokama-Omagua speaking peoples, as well as in the middle to lower Amazon, but this remains to be seen. In the central Amazon, like the Caribbean and Orinoco, there are similar changes from S-B to later ceramics (i.e., from Saladoid to post-Saladoid


in the Caribbean and Saladoid-Barrancoid to Arauquin in the Orinoco). Ceramic industries in the central Amazon do not show the type of dramatic alteration or discontinuity that would suggest a marked transformation of the ceramic industry, but instead only part of the overall industry is significantly transformed, notably what can be called the fine wares. In other words, the change is not from one “tradition” to another, precipitated by either an overall technological innovation or population replacement, but a transition in local and regional political economies, specifically in elite “prestige goods” exchange. In all three areas, there is a dramatic quantitative decrease in the ratio of finely decorated forms to utilitarian forms (i.e., a more restricted distribution of finely decorated and ritual wares—and a qualitative increase in the “fine-ness” and elaboration of the fine ware ceramics). This is also a concomitant increased in the sharing of ceramic styles—marked by significant similarities in form, iconography, decoration—that, in this case, has as much to do with interaction as common origins. So this would be a very widespread phenomenon in ceramic populations across the region, circa A.D. 800–1200. They are becoming more elaborate, “finer,” and more specialized, as well as apparently becoming more rare locally as part of a large vast interlinked political economy of symbolic and economic prestige goods up and down rivers, and between river and upland peoples, in a multicentric regional systems that integrated large regions. The Southern Amazon: Accepting a link between S-B ceramics and Arawak languages, which seems fairly certain for the Caribbean Arawaks and, by extension, their immediate progenitors in the middle Orinoco, the initial pulse of Arawak expansion (Lathrap’s proto-Maipuran) begins circa 1000–500 B.C. In the broad southern Amazon, archaeological distributions and dating are more tentative, but early first millennia B.C. dates from Bolivia may relate to an early Arawak occupation (Dougherty and Callandra 1981). Such a reconstruction is supported by ethnolinguistic distributions and apparent genetic relationships in the southern Amazon region, which point to the upper Madeira as a secondary center of dispersal. That is, the wide array of Arawak peoples spread across the “southern Amazonian periphery,” including the Xinguano, Pareci, and Bauré areas, at least, who shared a constellation of cultural traits, many also generally shared with Moxos, Terêna, Guana, Chané, and perhaps others as well (Figure 2.5). The Upper Xingu is particularly important since continuity of Arawak speakers can be demonstrated from circa A.D. 1000 through the present, based on continuity in the village spatial organization (circular plaza villages), regional settlement pattern, and ceramic technology (a variant of an Amazonian Barrancoid style) (Dole 1961/62; Lathrap 1970).


Fig. 2.5 The Southern Amazonian Periphery.

Characteristic features of S-B ceramics known from the above-mentioned areas (rim adornos, appendages, incised-line designs in parallel lines, chevron, and curvilinear designs, red slip, occasional monochrome painting, sponge-spicule dominant temper, “buck-pot” and griddle forms, in this case black) are diagnostic of Xinguano ceramic industries throughout cultural sequence in the Upper Xingu (c. A.D. 800–present). The Upper Xingu region represents the eastern extent of Arawak peoples in southern Amazonia and the correlation of S-B ceramics, circular plaza villages, and Arawak languages can be reconstructed over this continuum from the late second millennium until the present, as well (Heckenberger 1996). Over this millennium, Xinguano industries, languages, and lifestyles surely changed dramatically, but clear continuity between prehistory and the present in cultural groups, settlement patterns, and ceramic industries is apparent.

The Southern Periphery “Ever since Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques,” Viveiros de Castro (1992: 5) notes, “it has become increasingly evident that the sociological, linguistic, and cultural units of the continent are combinatory variants of a structure


that operates with the same basic symbolic materials,” that is, permutations on a very ancient symbolic structure. It also has become increasingly clear, as he forcefully shows in From the Enemy’s Point of View (1992), that the smaller sociocultural units, conveniently grouped, at least initially, by linguistic affiliations, can be characterized by unique (more recent) structures within a more exclusive symbolic reservoir. What defines a Tupian heritage, what distinguishes Tupians (and more specifically the TupiGuarani) from some other lowlanders, is an “other-worldliness”: “the focus is not on the central domain, humanitas but, on the other two, feritas and divinitas” (Ibid.: 25). The substantial variance in social morphology, settlement and subsistence pattern, and political practices of Tupi-Guarani peoples, in contrast to unity in underlying cosmological principles, makes them “strikingly similar to the likewise dispersed and ‘metamorphic’ Caribs” (Ibid.: 25; see also Basso 1977; Butt-Colsen and Heinan 1984; Overing 1993; Rivière 1984). The Xinguanos are notable precisely because so much of their ritual and daily life is dominated by humanitas, that is, social and politicoritual practice is guided by an ideology focused upon generalized exchange and an ontology focused not (or not primarily) on relations, alterity, with the “outside” (nature, supernature, and other “foreign” human groups)—an existential contradiction—but upon a structural contradiction, an internal alterity that exists between hierarchically ranked (upper and lower) social divisions (i.e., between center/periphery, older/younger, and chiefly and nonchiefly individuals), considered typical of “class-divided” societies (cf. Giddens 1984: 193–195). The image of Amazonia as a broad region characterized by egalitarian, atomistic societies that resist conceptions of genealogical time (i.e., descent), history, or political power, simply does not fit the historical reality of the majority of Arawak peoples. Many Amazonian societies, including many Tupi-Guarani, Carib, and other (e.g., Yanomamo, Jivaro) peoples might be described as autonomous, even atomistic, insofar as collective identities are constructed through symbolic opposition and exchange with “ontological Others,” where social fecundity depends upon the incorporation of the exterior through symbolic predation (Fausto 1999, 2001; Viveiros de Castro 1992). However, social reproduction among Arawak peoples is created not primarily through a symbolic alterity with the outside but upon affirmation of the inside, by way of the core of cultural values and institutions, reproduced through real and imagined ties with ancestors (through integenerational name transmission), the recreation of society (and social hierarchy) through intercommunity chiefly life-crisis rites, and elite (organized) exchange, including marriage


alliances. Nowhere is this distinctiveness of Arawaks more obvious that in the southern Amazon, where Tupi (and Caribs, who are like “metamorphic”) and Gê dominate the landscape and, from a regional perspective, show the Arawak in stark contrast. What has not been recognized is the place of the Arawaks in the southern Amazonian periphery, which in part must be related to an inability to recognize the diaspora for what it is (again excepting Schmidt; although the northern and western diasporas have received attention). In the southern Amazonian periphery there is a striking correspondence between the broad physioecological provinces of the southern Amazon (predominately tropical forest) and central Brazil, predominately parklands (cerradão) and savannas (cerrado) interspersed with gallery forest along rivers and streams (galeria). There is also a notable correlation between these ecological provinces and the cultures associated with them, predominantly macro-Tupi speakers in the former and Gê in the latter. The Gê societies that have historically occupied central Brazil, for at least a thousand years (Wüst and Barreto 1999), are characterized by a social structure, cosmology, and spatial organization recurrent, broadly speaking, across the region (Maybury-Lewis 1979). By late prehistoric times, the neighbors of the Gê across much of their range were largely Tupians, particularly TupiGuarani-speakers. Although more diverse in terms of settlement patterns and social morphology, the Tupian peoples, like the Gê, “hold together” as a closely related group of cultures, a macro-tradition, particularly with respect to their distinctive cosmology and “bellico-religious complex” (Viveiros de Castro 1992). Between these two macro-cultural “provinces” lies a third, what I call the Southern Amazonian Periphery, which minimally extends from the Upper Xingu in the east to lowland Bolivia in the west. Much of westcentral Brazil and lowland Bolivia, including the Pantanal and Chaco, the Llanos de Mojos, the Guaporé, as well as, the Southern Periphery, represent areas of contact between peoples of diverse language groups, what linguists refer to as a “sump” or “invasion” area (e.g., Kaufman 1989), as well as markedly varied environments. Conceptualizing the Southern Periphery within the context of such cultural diversity is therefore difficult; this difficulty is compounded by pronounced cultural fragmentation resulting from European contact. At first glance, against the colorful backdrop of Curt Nimuendajú’s ethnohistoric map (1981 [1944]), for instance, the Southern Periphery is hard to “see.” It is obvious not by what it is, but what it is not—the almost solid green of the central Brazilian Gê or the equally dominating gold of the southern Amazonian Tupi. What lies between is a mix of blues


(Arawak), pinks (Carib), browns, and others, as well as some of the green and gold. The reason for this visual example, which makes a tie between language group and color, is to suggest that as detail or resolution increases, larger patterns tend to become more confused amidst the diversity of colors (“peoples”), but as one moves back or takes his eyes slightly out of focus an overarching pattern emerges, the spatial distributions of large upland blocks of major riverine persons become apparent. The Southern Periphery, although forming a wedge between the Tupi (Amazonia) and Gê (central Brazil), is not simply an arbitrary convenience devised post hoc to describe those groups that happen to occupy the area between. To be sure, these other cultural provinces give shape to and mark the boundaries of the more culturally heterogeneous Southern Periphery, but upon closer scrutiny, and considered historically, a nearly continuous block of Arawak-speaking peoples is recognizable extending from the Upper Madeira and Montaña eastward to the Upper Xingu. The Southern Periphery has as much to do with history as geography, and, although the social body is diverse, the skeleton, or deep cultural structure, across much of the area is largely Arawak in origin. A full discussion of the origin or antiquity of the Arawak languages in southern Amazonia (e.g., Bauré, Mojos, Piro, Chané, Terêna [Guana], Pareci, and Xinguanos) is also beyond the scope of the present book, but it seems likely that most or all relate to an ancient migration or series of migrations into the region of the upper Madeira, from which they later expanded to the west (Acré and Peru), south (lowland Bolivia), and east (the Southern Periphery). Terêna (Guana) and Chané represent the southernmost and Pareci and Upper Xingu the easternmost extensions of this process. What is most important here is that the Pareci, broadly speaking (including, e.g., Kaxinití, Uaimaré, Kozaríni, Iránxe, Salumã/Enawenênawê), and the Xinguano Arawaks (minimally, Yawalapiti and Mehinaku/ Waujá/Kustenau)—the so-called Central Arawak (Urban 1992)—are very closely related and represent a movement of Arawaks into the Southern Periphery, arriving in the Upper Xingu, at least by circa A.D. 800–900. This conclusion is based initially on linguistic proximity, but preliminary correlations of anthropometric evidence (Santos and Coimbra, 2001) and, particularly, broad cultural similarities support this conclusion. Although internally diversified, similarities within the broad Tupian and Gê cultural traditions extend well beyond linguistic relatedness. Warfare is one cultural feature that unites diverse groups within each of these two cultural macro-traditions and, in fact, the prevalence of offensive warfare is one of the few cultural traits broadly shared by these two otherwise distinctive macro-traditions (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 5).


Bellicosity is a basic cultural value to both Gê and Tupian groups, and a critical element of cultural identity.

Xinguano Cultural Schema Cultural similarities across the Southern Periphery, in other words, are not simply the result of geographic proximity and interaction but also result from a common heritage: an ancestral or proto-typical sociocultural structure of the ancient Arawakan peoples of southern Amazonia (see Schmidt 1914, 1917). The initial Arawak (Maipuran) colonists in the Upper Xingu, arriving by circa A.D. 800–900 (see Chapter 3), carried this cultural model. It is a mistake, therefore, to consider the upper Xingu merely as a discrete, and isolated, cultural area formed by the unique conditions of symmetrical acculturation among diverse groups, and it is equally unwise to subsume it in some general tropical forest (i.e., Amazonian) or central Brazilian cultural substratum. In the Upper Xingu, this basic cultural pattern, although substantially transformed over time, for instance, leading to the establishment of the multilingual regional culture known today as Xinguano culture, has retained its basic form for over one thousand years; in fact, as noted earlier, it shares much with Arawaks and closely related peoples across South America throughout the diaspora (e.g., social hierarchy, regionality, sedentism and intensive “tropical forest” arming, concentric village patterns, “Barrancoid” ceramics), from the Antilles to the Southern Periphery (Heckenberger 2002). Arawak societies spread out along the Southern Periphery, specifically the “Central Arawak” or those peoples who have since moved in to the region and have come to adopt their ways (e.g., Bakairi, upper Xingu Carib). They stand out in the region by a constellation of cultural features that distinguish them from most of their neighbors, and constitute primary cultural schema of the southern Amazon chiefdoms (i.e., that subset of settled, regional, hierarchical societies that lives within the Southern Amazonian periphery). These cultural features include, for example: (1) large, more or less permanent circular plaza villages, densely distributed in discrete regions and interlinked by well developed road/path systems; (2) fairly intensive (fixed plot) agricultural economies, based on diverse crop plants but typically focused on manioc, with an emphasis on aquatic resources for animal (primarily fish) protein and significant modification of areas around settlements; (3) regional sociopolitical integration based on a common culture and ideology and developed patterns of exchange, especially generalized chiefly exchange (e.g., trade, marriage, visitation, and intertribal ceremonialism); (4) nonoffensive (nonpredatory) ideologies


and defensive military strategies, sometimes including sophisticated defensive structures; and (5) local political organization, the chieftaincy, based on internal social hierarchy and hereditary chiefly ascension. As is true of Amazonia, in general, these traits vary considerably among groups and each, viewed individually, is also shared by some non-Arawakan groups, for example, the circular villages of central Brazil. Nonetheless, when but considered in composite, these traits link the groups of the Southern Periphery and separate them from other groups of southern Amazonia and central Brazil. There is often some difficulty in accurately elucidating common structural traits, in any comprehensive way, because of a lack of historical and archaeological data and since most of the Southern Periphery peoples were radically altered by “contact” (e.g., Bauré, Pareci, Bakairi). There is sufficient information to suggest that these distinctive cultures are permutations of an underlying symbolic structure. In other words, these traits reflect broad cultural motifs or schema, the “root” or prototypical cultural categories, principles, and metaphors, carried by the ancient Arawaks who colonized the Upper Xingu and, although transformed, are still present today. Considered over the long term, several primary schema can be suggested, crudely defined here as sedentism, social hierarchy, and regionality and summarized below—a Xinguano habitus, pace Bourdieu, predisposed to reproduce: (1) large, fixed populations, fairly intensive subsistence economies, and landscape alteration (rather than mobility and low impact); (2) institutional social ranking based on bloodline and birth order; and (3) regional integration (particularly coupled with a social preoccupation with exchange and a cultural aesthetic that places great symbolic value upon foreign things including not only objects, but also relationships, names, songs, dances, among other esoteric knowledge.) and a foreign policy commonly characterized by accommodation and acculturation of outsiders. Sedentism: Xinguanos are settled village people, and an “ethos” of settled-ness permeates most aspects of Xinguano culture. Throughout much of the historical period, after circa 1750, at least, villages, ranging in size from under fifty to over three hundred individuals, were occasionally moved within fixed village territories (usually within a short radius of one or two kilometers from the original village, sometimes a little farther 5–10 km, but almost never beyond the limits of what are considered traditional community lands. Long-distance moves have been triggered by outside influence, for instance, because of early migrations of indigenous groups into the Upper Xingu, all in the context of conflict with incomers, indigenous groups and white men from outside the Xingu). Quite commonly,


satellite villages bud off from a mother village, and over time, either consolidate their independence or languish and remain attached to the mother village. These movements are conditioned by diverse sociopolitical and/or supernatural factors, notable among which is rivalry between highranking individuals that limit economic and social opportunities, witchcraft, changing external relations, or occasionally practical concerns (overlapping burials in plaza cemeteries). However, movements are not prompted by ecological degradation. In prehistory, villages were permanent and structurally elaborated through substantial earthen constructions. The sedentary, deeply situated nature of Xinguano culture (and the deeply layered or “saturated” landscape that lends itself particularly well to “thick description”) is not just a reflection of “settling-in” to rich local environments, changing from a less sedentary to a more sedentary pattern in situ because of adjustment to particularly propitious ecological conditions (see, for example, Carneiro 1978a; see also Erickson 2000a and b; 2001a and b). No doubt, the Xinguano chiefly societies rivaled many “complex societies” in the lowlands, such as other “theocratic chiefdoms” of various parts of Amazonia. Instead, the ethos of settled village life is part and parcel of Xinguano lifeways: from the time they first colonized the Upper Xingu throughout the known cultural sequence, it was viewed locally as the appropriate settlement pattern. Xinguanos have a very clear, concentric model of spatial relationships within villages to which they must conform, the core of which is the central plaza: the beautiful village amounts to a well laid-out and clean plaza, with a donut-shaped zone of houses (domestic sectors) around it, and impressive roads and other village wealth (men’s house, bridges, harpy eagle cages). The village also articulates with the local landscape and with other such villages in a very patterned way: villages are always positioned at the interface of noninundated terra firme forests with streams, small rivers or the broad flood plains of the major rivers. Villages are regularly spaced across the landscape, which is particularly apparent with respect to late prehistoric settlement patterns, when the area was more densely settled. They are interconnected through complicated systems of roads/pathways, bridges, ports, and overnight way-stations, which also form an integrated network within village territories. The village gradually intergrades with lessconstructed settings, including a broad zone of secondary forest and gardens extending out from the village margins. Land use around villages, village location and continuity in functionally-specific ceramic cooking ware document that local populations have maintained the same basic economic and ecological orientation, based on relatively intensive (fixed plot) manioc gardening and fishing, throughout the sequence.


Hierarchy: Xinguano hierarchy is based on a sociopolitical structure—a cultural model—of ranked kingroups and notions of hereditary succession to chiefly office. This hierarchical structure is founded on primogeniture and relations of genealogical superiority or dominance (man:woman :: parent:child :: elder:younger :: chief:commoner). These are reproduced at various levels, that is, family, household, and village, and are measured by the degree of “respect” or “shame” one has for a social superior. In the upper Xingu, social hierarchy had not apparently crystallized into stratified social classes, although several southern Arawak peoples (e.g., Terena/ Guana) may have had more rigidly defined (i.e., stratified) classes, perhaps because of the large-scale incorporation of captives and definition of a “slave class” (Oliveira 1960, 1968; see also Oberg 1949). Instead, in the Upper Xingu and, apparently, other parts of the Southern Periphery, as well, a two-tiered hierarchy (chief/commoner) was the norm. Members of high-status, cognatic chiefly lines maintain special access to ideological (symbolic) and, by extension, political and economic resources, and the highest-ranking individuals (particularly males) derive status from their relative positions in the chiefly hierarchy. Polygamous marriage is a common privilege among chiefly individuals. There is a tendency for marriage within and between chiefly lines (i.e., rank endogamy), through cross-cousin marriage and strategic marriage alliances between villages, but the effects of depopulation have undoubtedly weakened these patterns (Dole 1969; Ireland 1996, 2001). Claims to chiefly status (legitimacy) are highly contested and provide a primary basis for opposition or factionalism between rival chiefly lines. Thus, while at any one time the apex of the chiefly hierarchy is focused on one or two primary chiefs, second-in-line positions are diffusely distributed within and between chiefly lines. And here it is important to distinguish between the underlying, constitutive structure of local hierarchies and its manifestation in practice, the actual realization of this structure: that is, between the permanent office of chief(s) and the actual officeholders, at any one time, and between the fixed hierarchy within chiefly lines or houses and the specific relations between them in the overall local hierarchy, which are continuously negotiated and redefined (cf. Comaroff 1985: 44). The chiefly hierarchy is isomorphic with the kindreds of the primary sitting chiefs, those who receive other chiefs, because the community at large reckons descent in relation to the sitting chiefs. Such a structure of internally ranked kin groups, simultaneously creating a structural contradiction between chiefs and nonchiefs, and incorporating both in a unified genealogical structure, is recognized in a diverse range of hierarchical societies. From a comparative perspective


similar hierarchical structures are variously described as “ramages” (Firth 1936, 1957), “status lineages” (Goldman 1955, 1970), or “conical clans” (Kirchhoff 1955, 1959) in Polynesia. Lévi-Strauss (1982, 1987; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000) coined the term “house societies” to refer to societies that have hereditary ranking but without rigidly defined classes, territories, or property rights (i.e., the bureaucratic state) as in Indonesia, the Northwest Coast, as well as feudal Europe and Japan. What is critical here is that political power inheres in persons not property, as Geertz (1980: 24) notes of the “theater state” of medieval Bali. But what is also critical to remember is that a relatively common, if not typical, cultural model (and social structure) underlies these “house societies”. This model remains only vaguely specified: clan ancestors are heroes in the originary lore of Xinguano society, and it is these “heroic” figures and their entailments with living persons, through powerful chiefly names and the right to use them, that legitimizes the expression of political power through labor mobilization or resource (including prestige) concentration. Regardless of what we call it, a social structure similar to the conical clan is common, if not typical, in the minimally to moderately hierarchical societies that dominated Oceania, Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas before 1492 (Kirchhoff 1955; Sahlins 1968: 24). Chiefly hierarchy is manifest through mobilization in ritual contexts, for community projects, through control of ritual and public activities in general, and through control and ministration of external contacts. Chiefly hierarchy is objectified in the centralization of public political and ritual activity in the village plaza and in the spatial organization of the house; it is subjectified in chiefly “ownership” of the village, the village lands, the chief ’s house, the plaza, the men’s house (sometimes by the same individual). It is also embodied in aspects of the body, esoteric knowledge, chiefly speech and ornaments, and other markers of elevated chiefly status. Thus, I suggest that: (1) an idiom of hierarchy, not equality, underlies most social relations; (2) social actors are differentially transformed (constructed) based on the symbolic and ritual objectification of this hierarchy; and (3) weighty actors, those who can accumulate a surplus of symbolic resources (a “fund of power”), transform these into economic capital in the form of wealth and labor, thus providing the basis of a fully political economy (Heckenberger 1999a). Hierarchy has a “lateral” or horizontal dimension, based on concentric and asymmetrical fields (or categories) regarding the use of space and social identities, even more so than among the Gê-Bororo, where such spatial metaphors have long been a major topic of interest (e.g., Fabian 1992, 1998; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Seeger 1976; Turner 1996). The Xinguano


concentric spatial model, as discussed in more detail later, is particularly hierarchical in that it not only concentrates core public activities and rituals in the plaza center, but the space itself is controlled (“owned”) by the primary chiefs and, through them, chiefs in general. In short, the Xinguano model of both physical and social space comes to a point: the tip of a pyramid and the center of a circle. Regionality: Xinguano patterns of sociality have a well-developed and necessary supralocal dimension that extends to virtually all aspects of sociocultural life. Many Amazonian societies are justifiably characterized as atomistic, autonomous, and as defining and reproducing themselves through symbolic opposition or alterity to the outside (human or not). However, the communities who inhabit the upper Xingu are a regional society reproduced through a network of elite ritual exchange and ceremonial interdependence, and diffuse patterns of sociality and interaction within this network. Xinguano sociality is founded on an ideology that demands coparticipation (village interdependence) in core ritual elements of social reproduction, most notably tied to major life-crisis (successional) rituals affirming both past, existing and future chiefly individuals. In other words, Xinguano culture is necessarily regional, and participating communities represent a moral “body” or “person” (Menget 1993), a nation or, as discussed below, the largest scale (fractal dimension) at which we can talk of Xinguano society as a “House,” one big family of chiefs, all distant brothers and, often, recent brothers in law. This ethos both promotes and is based upon intravillage and intervillage interaction, hospitality, and accommodation. It is played out against a backdrop of rivalry and “uneasy peace” that characterizes relations between villages, alliances and at least a shallow hierarchy at regional levels and a recognized regional chief or chiefs. Xinguano identity is self-defined through reference to a common system of meanings and values (the “inside”). The boundary between the exterior and interior categories, although more or less clearly demarcated at any moment in time, is permeable and somewhat graduated (concentric). However, while the exterior is continuously redefined, in terms of social identities, the symbolic core (the shared meanings and values) of the system show remarkable resiliency. This social philosophy is anything but xenophobic (atomistic or predatory) but, instead, is accommodating and, as historically demonstrated in the Upper Xingu and elsewhere (see Schmidt 1917), strongly acculturative, readily absorbing cultural things and people from the outside. This pattern, which may have been already present in the ancient Arawakan substratum, in part explains the ethnic/linguistic heterogeneity


of the Southern Periphery. It is not presently possible to reconstruct prehistoric patterns of intermarriage, trade, or intercommunity ceremonialism, which provides the basis of regional relations, but it is possible to suggest that “regionality” was present in the prototypical Arawakan structure. Regionality is suggested not only by the proximity of prehistoric villages but by the prehistoric plazas (loci of supralocal interaction) and road systems observed within prehistoric villages that, like today, undoubtedly connected villages across the region. The regional organization of these settled, populous, and hierarchical peoples is rather different, in many respects, from what we might expect from our understanding of other areas, particularly our own Western historical experience, where cities and capitals are the critical elements of the civil landscape. Xinguano villages are intricately interconnected with major roads, innumerable pathways, rivers, and myriad aquatic canals, highways, that are “tended” by peoples, as described in Chapters 3 and 4, but the critical politico-ritual center pin—the plaza—occurs in all, although there are clearly variations. In other words, there is a gradient of ranking between villages both in terms of political and economic weight and the kin relations between chiefs (village chiefs are often kinspersons of chiefs in other villages, as wife-takers or wife-givers). Other than this each village has its own chiefly ancestors buried in the plaza.

CHAPTER

3

Traces of Ancient Times … by studying carefully this history, in the general sense of the word, which contemporary Indian authors try to give us of their own past, by not considering this history as a fanciful account, but by trying extremely carefully, with the help of a type of salvage archaeology—excavating village sites referred to in the histories —and by trying to establish correspondences, inasmuch as this is possible, between different accounts, and by trying to find what really corresponds and what does not correspond, we may in the end reach a better understanding of what historical science really is. Claude Lévi-Strauss 1978: 42 The history of human occupation in the Upper Xingu begins well over a thousand years ago, perhaps more than two thousand years. This is late in relation to the deep cultural histories of surrounding areas in southern Amazonia and the Central Brazilian plateau, each boasting well-known sequences dating from the late Pleistocene, circa eleven thousand years ago,1 although this may well be an artifact of sampling. What the Upper Xingu lacks in time depth, it makes up for in veracity, however, as the period from A.D. 1000 to 2000 in the Upper Xingu is among the best known ethnographically and archaeologically in Amazonia.2 The known cultural history of the region begins by circa A.D. 500–800, and perhaps much earlier, with the colonization of the region by Arawak peoples.3 In this chapter, a basic chronology and description of major places is offered as a prelude to consideration, in Chapters 4 and 5, of the major tendencies and flows of Xinguano history over the past approximately five hundred years.

67


Currently, there is no clear evidence of preceramic groups in the Upper Xingu basin, perhaps due to the general absence of caves and rockshelters throughout most of the basin, the preferred occupation sites of the early central Brazilian traditions (Wüst 1990).4 One cave site with parietal rock art, Kamukuaka, is known on the upper Batovi River, near the southern margins of the basin (Ireland 1990). This is the mythical origin place of the boy’s ear piercing ritual, tiponhï. It also may represent an early occupation affiliated with the preceramic (Itaparica tradition) or early ceramic period (Una tradition) cave and rockshelter sites in central Brazil, but this is uncertain. Regardless of the nature of earlier remains, it is clear that the known sequence represents a single evolving cultural tradition: the Xinguano regional tradition. The boundaries of this tradition, although somewhat flexible over time and not precisely delimited at present, appear to roughly correspond to the limits of the Upper Xingu basin (Figure 3.1). Settlement patterns, notably circular plaza village patterns, together with the unique ceramic industry of the Xinguanos, are perhaps the most obvious enduring features of Xinguano culture due to their high visibility, but long term continuity is evident in the overall use of the landscape, for instance, the location of village, special activity site, paths, bridges, and canoe ports. Ceramic occupations beginning circa A.D. 800, at the latest, are associated with a single industry, what Simões (1972) referred to as the “Ipavu Phase,” and that relates to what has variably been called the “Incised-rim,” “Incisedmodeled,” or “Amazonian Barrancoid” traditions.5 The Xingu is the easternmost extent of Arawak expansion in southern Amazonia. It seems likely that earlier, more ephemeral occupations by non-Arawak peoples also were present, based on broad regional culture histories,6 including perhaps the ancestors of contemporary Xinguano Carib-speakers, who appear to be present in the area by circa A.D. 1500, at the latest. After A.D. 1500, numerous others groups have occupied the Upper Xingu side by side with these Arawakan and Carib peoples, and some have come to adopt their ways.

Basic Chronology Archaeological and ethnographic investigations conducted in the Upper Xingu by the author from 1993 to 2004 provide the empirical basis for the proposed chronology and associated interpretations.7 Many conclusions agree with those of previous researchers (see, particularly, Agostinho 1988, 1993; Becquelin 1978, 1993, 2001; Carneiro 1957; Dole 1961/62, 2001; Simões 1967), but the present study enables us to place the reconstructions of the prehistoric (pre-1884) past on more solid empirical grounds, including a well-controlled sequence of radiocarbon dates, systematic mapping and distributional studies of entire sites, detailed analysis of

Traces of Ancient Times • 69

Fig. 3.1 Distribution of archaeological sites in Upper Xingu. Note white unstippled areas are generally, forested (see Figure 1.2)

prehistoric technologies, and a “regional” site survey (within a study area approximately 1000 km² in size that corresponds to the Kuikuru traditional territory; Figure 3.2). Within the Xinguano tradition, several significant periods of transformation can be recognized, based primarily on observable changes in settlement patterns and ceramics technology, ethnohistorical evidence, and a sequence of radiocarbon dates (Table 3.1).8 These provide the basis for the division of the continuous cultural sequence into two major cultural phases: the Ipavu Phase (c. A.D. 500–800 or earlier than 1600) and the Xinguano Phase (c. 1750–present), separated by a transitional phase (proto-Xinguano Phase) (Figure 3.3). Each of the phases are further subdivided into an early and a late stage to address observable changes.


Fig. 3.2 Distribution of archaeological sites in Kuikuru study area, showing large fortified settlements (large circles), sites unfortified with peripheral ditch but with plaza/road earthworks (small black circles), unclassified sites (small open circles), and probable Eastern Complex sites (triangles).

Precolonial occupations are further subdivided within the Ipavu Phase into technological complexes, including the Western Complex, referring to the large fortified plaza villages ocupied by ancestors of the Xinguano Arawaks, and the Eastern Complex, smaller, circular house occupations related to Xinguano Carib speakers. Parenthetically, Yawalapiti (Arawak) oral history recounts a time, likely before circa A.D. 1700, when their ancestors occupied sites below (north of ) the Xingu confluence, between Morená and Diauarum, an area later dominated by the Kamayural

Traces of Ancient Times • 71 TABLE 3.1 Chronological Periods. Cultural Period

Date (A.D.)

Prominent Events/Characteristics

Early Ipavu

800–1250

- Arawak colonization - population growth and expansion

Late Ipavu “Galactic Period”

1250–1650

- structural elaboration of Xinguano villages - population growth and nucleation in villages - establishment of “galactic cluster ” regional organization - earliest known Carib occupations - first effects of indirect European contact, including initial population decline (perhaps precipitous)

Transitional

1650–1750

- initiation of direct contacts in central Brazil and southern Amazon - depopulation - geographic compression of Eastern and Western Complexes - Tupian groups enter the region - first direct contact between Xinguanos and whites

1740–1770

First Unrecorded Contact: Pires de Campos Filho

1750–1884

- rapid destabilization of regional systems through increased regional conflicts and depopulation - appearance of Trumai, Bakairi, Suya - appearance of peripheral Carib (Yaruma, Ikpeng) and Tupian (Manitsaua? and Arawine) groups - ethnogenesis and multiethnic consolidation (18201880)

1884

First recorded contact: Karl von den Steinen

1884–1950

- Early German expeditions (Steinen, Meyer, Schmidt, Hintermann) - Increase in national and international interest (Rondon Commission, Fawcett, Dyott, American missionaries, Quain, Petrullo) - demonstrable catastrophic population loss from epidemics (1884–1960s)

Early Xinguano

Late Xinguano

72 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 3.1 (Continued) Cultural Period

Date (A.D.)

Prominent Events/Characteristics

1950–1980

- renewed ethnological interest under auspices of Museu Nacional (1950s–1960s) - creation of PIX (1961) - relocation of Ikpenge, Kayabi, and Panara - “pax xinguana” - rudimentary medical assistance and vaccinations - arrest of demographic “free-fall” - increased ethnological interest (1970s to mid-1980s)

1980–1990

- indigenous administration of PIX - rapid population recovery - emergent indigenism

1990–

- reestablishment of stable population patterns and fissions - development of indigenous politics and foundations - technology “revolution” (bicycles, motor boats, radios, etc., beginning 1980s)

(Tupi-Guarani) in the 1700s, the Suya (Gê), since the mid-1800s, and, more recently, the Kaiabi (Tupi), Panare, and Trumai (since the 1960s). The Yawalapiti migrated south into the nuclear Upper Xingu basin (above the confluence) prior to circa A.D. 1700. Although distinctive, the linguistic relatedness suggests a fairly recent divergence of Yawalapiti and Waujá/ Mehinaku perhaps within 1,000 to 2,000 years, as a guess. (Medeiros 1993; Payne 1991). The Eastern Complex refers to a group of much smaller villages, identified principally in the area of Lake Tafununu, that do not share the plaza configuration. Within Eastern Complex sites, circular structures (some of which can be confidently identified as houses) are apparent that, by and large, lack counterparts in the fortified villages to the west. Kuikuru oral history recounts that these eastern villages were settlements of groups ancestral to the contemporary Carib-speaking communities of the Upper Xingu. The basic rationale for the chronological periodization is as follows: (1) initial colonization represents the establishment in the area of the distinctive circular plaza villages and ceramic industry characteristic of Xinguano tradition occupations; this apparently represents the terminal eastward extent of the Arawak diaspora; 9 (2) early Ipavu Phase (c. 800–1400), the “developmental” phase of the Xinguano ancient regime,


Fig. 3.3 Xinguano Tradition radiocarbon chronology.

wherein major villages were reworked and integrated into clusters; (3) the late Ipavu Phase (c. 1400–1600), the “classic” ancient regime, is the epoch during which large fortified villages, described below, dominated the landscape; and (4) by the late Ipavu Phase, a distinctive set of sites, the Eastern Complex, was present in southeastern portions of the nuclear Upper Xingu basin (while the Western Complex corresponds to the large fortified villages identified to the west and north of Lake Tafununu).10 Contemporary Upper Xingu Arawaks are the descendants of these Western Complex groups, although the two Upper Xingu Arawak languages (Yawalapiti and Waujá/Mehinaku) may relate to a prehistoric north/south division of the Western Complex (i.e., sites below the confluence, extending north at least as far as Diauarum, are apparently closely related to Western Complex sites, but may represent a third distinctive complex). The Eastern Complex refers to smaller unfortified villages identified around Lake Tafununu, apparently comprised of one or a few circular structures (some of which can be confidently identified as houses), that seem to relate to groups ancestral to the contemporary Carib speaking


Xinguanos (Kuikuru, Kalapalo, Matipu and Nafuqua), as suggested by Carib oral history. The pattern of precolonial occupation, in turn, was rapidly altered because of the initial impacts of European contact, most notably depopulation and the disruption of macro-regional sociopolitical systems, between c. 1500 and 1600. During the transitional or proto-Xinguano Phase (c. 1600–1750), the maintenance of substantial village fortifications ceased, many fortified villages were abandoned by Western Complex (Arawak) communities, and, by the end of the period, Eastern Complex (Carib) communities migrated into some of the abandoned areas. After circa 1600–1750, the Eastern and Western complexes merged to form the basis of the multiethnic regional culture (Xinguano Phase) that continues to the present day. The period from circa 1720 to 1770 was again a period of pronounced tumult as Luso-Brazilian explorers/frontiersman (bandeirantes) entered Central Brazil and southern Amazonia as a result of gold strikes and the slaving of Amerindian populations. The early Xinguano Phase (c. 1750–1884) commenced with these faceto-face encounters between Xinguanos and Luso-Brazilians, graphically remembered in Xinguano oral histories (Basso 1995; Franchetto 1992). The Luso-Brazilian entradas were short-lived and in the subsequent century (late 1700s to 1884) Europeans apparently no longer entered the Upper Xingu basin. The early Xinguano Phase represents a period of cultural consolidation; that is, the merging of diverse cultural groups into the multiethnic/lingual regional culture known currently and historically. This process of social integration and acculturation into the Xinguano cultural system has prehistoric roots, as indicated by the interaction and geographic approximation of Eastern and Western Complexes (c. 1500–1750). The late Xinguano Phase (1884–present) is defined by the arrival in the basin of the German ethnological expedition led by Karl von den Steinen. Steinen documented a relatively stable regional cultural system, essentially identical (grosso modo) to that which exists today (Steinen 1886, 1894). As noted earlier, sites identified in the study area are divided into two subgroups: those on Lake Tafununu (Eastern Complex) and those to the west of Lake Tafununu (Western Complex). The primary characteristics, aside from geography, that distinguish the two complexes, are the presence of artificial ditches surrounding villages and/or intravillage curbed road and plaza systems (Western Complex) or the presence of circular twentytwo- to fifty-five-meter diameter structures (houses) with raised marginal (wall) mounds (Eastern Complex). Prehistorically and into the protohistoric period, there seems to have been a more or less mutually exclusive distribution of these two distinctive structural features. One round house


(twenty-two-meter diameter) dated to A.D. 1760 at (X12) was encountered in the area defined as the Western Complex and suggests that the abandonment of Lake Tafununu and migration to the west of the Culuene River recorded in oral history may have occurred at about this time. One or more other possible large circular raised-wall structures (roughly fortymeter diameter) were encountered adjacent to the plaza at Akagahïtï (see later), which has the Western Complex features of a peripheral ditch and curbed road/plaza system (perhaps these relate to a later occupation). Suffice it to say, however, that the author spent many hundreds of hours walking over, mapping, collecting and excavating at the Western Complex sites of Nokugu, Kuhikugu and Heulugihïtï, often sparsely covered with vegetation because of anthropogenic modification (i.e., artificial savannas), and was unable to reveal even one of these highly visible features.

A Tale of Two Towns: The Western Complex The investigation of Xinguano settlement patterns over time focused on a study area of about 1000 km², more or less coextensive with the traditional lands—or “territory”—of the Kuikuru. Within this study area, all sites known by the Kuikuru to contain anthropogenic soils (egepe), archaeological ceramics (egiho), and earthworks (Fitsi-fitsi gepügü) were recorded there.11 Twenty-six of the sites identified can be tentatively attributed to the period prior to circa A.D. 1750 (i.e., pre-Xinguano Phase), based on direct examination of archaeological materials through site visits and oral history about the presence of egepe, egiho, or earthworks (Table 3.2). Excavations and detailed mapping (with real-time GPS and a transit) has been conducted at X6, 11–13, and initial investigations, including extensive surface assessments and mapping is underway at X 14, 15, 17–26.12 All sites are important places in oral histories and are tied to the critical personages —culture heroes and ancestors—of Xinguano heroic history and these places are accurately positioned in narratives and collective memory in the overall landscape: that is, the Kuikuru were 100 percent correct in their assessments, although single persons may or may not be able to correctly assess them, and only children have never heard of the major places. Western Complex village sites are also easily identifiable on aerial photographs and satellite images, because of the degree of forest alteration associated with them. Two residential sites, Nokugu (X6) and Kuhikugu (X11), and a major plaza hub village related to Nokugu, Heulugihïtï (X13) were investigated in greater detail to accurately map the village layout, as defined by earthworks and artifact distributions apparent on the ground surface. Subsurface excavations in and around earthworks provided an excellent means to

76 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 3.2 Ipavu Phase Archaeological Sites. Site Number

Name

Major Earthworks

Comments

MT-FX-01*

Makahuku

?

OSA

X02

Ipavu I

?

OSA

X03

Ipavu II

?

OSA

X04

Ipavu III

?

OSA

X05

Noviari

PD, RPC

OSA

X06†

Nokugu

PD, ID, RPC, SP, WM

KV (1961–1972)

X07

Tuatuari

PD, RPC

OSA

X08

Miararre

no

OSA

X09

Yakäré

PD, RPC

OSA

X10

Naria

?

OSA

X11

Kuhikgu

PD, RPC

X12†

Ipatse

CH

X13†

Heulugihïtï

ID, RPC, SP, WM

X14‡

Tehukugu

CH

E. Complex

X15‡

Kuguhi

CH

E. Complex

X16†

Netonugu

RPC

X17†

Hatsikugi

PD, ID, RPC, SP

X18†

Akagahïtï

PD, RPC, WM, CH?

X19†

Séku

RPC, WM?

X20†

Séhu

RPC, WM?

X21†

Maijeinei

RPC, SP

X22†

Agikuangaku

RPC, SP

X23‡

Intagu

RPC

X24

Uagihïtï

PD?, RPC?

E. Complex? KV 1920–1940, 1973–

X25†

Agahahïtï/Magakange

RPC

X26‡

Tafununu

?

X27

Ehumba

?

X28

Gahangugu

RPC?

OSA

X29

Angahïnga

PD, RPC?

OSA

X30

Meinacu

PD, RPC?

OSA

X31

Waujá

PD, RPC

OSA

X32†

Kamakuaka

E. Complex

OSA, rockshelter

Traces of Ancient Times • 77 TABLE 3.2 (Continued) Site Number X33

Name

Major Earthworks

Ahugakugu

RPC?

X34

Kagaho

?

X35†

Asahïtï

RPC, SP

X36†

Ugotahïtï

RPC, SP

X37

Iña

?

Comments IK

IK

X38†

Kuhugupe

RPC, SP

X39

Apalaci

RPC?

X40

Sekuhai

PD, RPC?

IK

X41‡

Itsagahïtï

CH

E. Complex?

X42

Angahuku Lake

RPC?

IK

Key: (*) = designation in Brazilian site files, MT (Mato Grosso state) FX (Formadores do Rio Xingu), and site number is abbreviated here as X(site number); † = primary site features GPS mapped; ‡ site location GPS mapped; Major Earthworks designations: PD = peripheral ditch; ID = internal ditch; RPC = primary mounded central plaza and cruciform/multiple road complex; SP = secondary plazas; WM = wetland modifications; CH = circular house; Comments: OSA = outside Kuikuru study area; KV = Kuikuru villages between 1860–present.; IK = presently known exclusively through indigenous testimony. understand basic chronology (as earthworks were constructed over intact and often stratified cultural deposits from earlier occupations). Subsurface soil augering was conducted sporadically across sites to determine presence, depth and basic characteristics of egepe soils. Although investigations at Nokugu and Kuhikugu were the most comprehensive, basic mapping, surface collection, and excavation was also conducted at Heulugihitï and the Eastern Complex sites of Tehukugu (X14) and Kuguhi (X15), which were sketch-mapped and minimally sampled for surface distributions and subsurface excavations. Among the primary shared features of Western Complex sites, substantial artificial earthworks were invariably constructed around and within villages. These earthworks are of two major types: (1) semicircular excavated linear ditches, ranging from one to four meters in height from trough to berm, which originate adjacent to a body of water (lake, river, or stream), extend around the periphery of a village site and terminate adjacent to the same body of water, thereby enclosing the entire residential area and (2) raised linear mounds, ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 or more meters


in height, within the village confines, which form a continuous curb defining the edges of circular central plaza(s) and contiguous with similar “curbs” defining the edges of straight and wide (twenty- to fifty-meter wide) roads that emanate from the plaza. These radial roads often bisect the ditches over portals/bridges (infilled, unexcavated, or “scooped out” sections of the ditches corresponding roughly to the road dimensions) and extend out of the village in various directions, sometimes more or less continuously for several kilometers alongside principal roads between settlements. The Upper Xingu earthen works are of various types; the most common being the excavated ditches surrounding villages, single or paired, and the linear mounds placed at the margins of plaza(s) and alongside major radial causeways within villages. The ditches, up to about 15 meters wide and 2.5 km long, extend to known depths of up to 3 meters with additional height created by the interior berms produced by ditch construction overburden. The plaza and causeway marginal mounds reach heights of up to two meters (being generally higher as one approaches the plaza), but low mounds (less than a meter) continue along the roads that link villages within the galactic clusters. Without a doubt these works were constructed and functioned for some time as part of an integrated architectural scheme, which articulated with (in fact can be considered the “core” of) a broader culturally constructed landscape, including areas of intensive terra firme gardening, intricate pathways, and satellite sites (temporary special activity and likely residential sites and permanent ports, bridges, and other features). Radiocarbon dates related to these features in the three sites mentioned above, indicate that they were constructed after c. 1250, and more likely between 1250–1350 (Table 3.2). Other artificial earthworks, excavated or incised ditches (1.0–2.0 or more meters deep) leading to water sources, likely water retrieval/bathing paths and canoe ports were documented at several sites, including (X6), (X11) and (X13); in addition, raised roads (about 2.0 meters high, 10–20 meters wide) with adjacent possible artificial water storage ponds were encountered at X13 and X18. Significant wetland features, including raised roadways that articulate with the curbed causeways in villages, an apparent modification of the Ipatse stream channel, to create reservoirs for drinking water and bathing, and perhaps fish catchments. Also, embankments were constructed across Ipatse stream to facilitate trap and weir placements foot and canoe travel, and possible, small, low raised beds, apparently for some form of agriculture, have also been identified. In the Kuikuru study area, five sites (X6, 11, 17, 18, and X22), minimally have both village peripheral ditches and an intravillage curbed plaza/road


system, the latter two being significantly smaller than the former three, which appear to be “first-order” settlements. Another generally smaller site, with significantly less occupational debris is X13, which lacks the peripheral semicircular ditch but has the road/plaza system and a small interior semicircular linear trench. Other sites with ditch and road/plaza systems exist outside of the study area, including X1 (Yakaré), X5 (Noviari), X7 (Tuatuari), and AX-08 (Morená), among others are also known to have such features (Agostinho 1993; Becquelin 1993; Dole 1961/ 62; Simões 1972). Villas-Boas and Villas-Boas (1973:19) report that such ditches are present in almost all historical and present village locations. Fieldwork was concentrated at X6 and X13 in the Ipatse Cluster and Kuhikugu, the principal residential center and hub of the cluster of the same name.

The Ipatse Cluster The Ipatse stream emanates about 15 kilometers south of the lake of the same name, quite near the northwestern edge of Lake Lamakuka. The stream roughly follows the margins of the terra firme forests, where they drop into the broad relict floodplains of the Culuene River. Along Ipatse stream various settlements were occupied by late precolonial times (Figure 3.4). These settlements were tied to other major residential sites via the hub site of Heulugihïtï (X13); this integrated regional cluster fully dominated the Ipatse area and the adjacent stretches of both the Culuene and Angahuku Rivers, with access up to the Curiseu River (Figure 3.5). The Ipaste cluster dominated major portions of all the diverse macro- ecological zones: terra firme forest, flood plain forests, oxbows, etc., and was traversed by major roads, natural and artificial canoe canals, ponds and reservoirs, relict flood plains with ancient back channel lagoons, many modified and integrated into the overall landscape. In Chapter 4, this pattern is described as a “galactic polity,” meaning an integrated cluster of major residential nodes (X6, 17, 18, 22) and smaller satellites (X19, 20, 23), tied to the exemplary plaza center (X13). Nokugu, Place of the Jaguar Nokugu means “place of the jaguar,” referring to a jaguar spirit, an itseke or “super-being”,13 who is the “owner” (oto) of this place (actually Nokugu is pronounced more like ng) . In Xinguano cosmogonies, he is the elder of five brothers, the father-in-law of Sagakagagu, (who made Ehumba, Kuhikugu and Ipatse lakes and later the five major weirs (ataca) along Ipatse stream that are still used today (itseke). Heulugi was Nokugu’s younger brother.


Fig. 3.4 Ipatse cluster sites (from north to south: X6, X13, X18, X19, X20) connected by the “north-south” road, lying on high-ground forested areas: other cluster sites of X22 (located above the Legend) and X17 (located above the middle curve of the Culuene, where upland forest contact river margin at upper right) are also shown. Note (1) galeria forest and oxbow lakes associated with the Culuene River active floodplain (upper right), (2) Ipatse stream in the low-lying area (dark) east of the sites (relict floodplain), and (3) wide, marshy Angahuku River bottoms to west of sites (dark), flanking (lighter) upland forest.

Sagakagagu was also a spirit being, in the dawn time when all the creatures of the land were kin or affines, including proto-humans (see Chapter 7).


Fig. 3.5 GPS overview of Ipatse cluster sites X6 (north) and X13 (south). Note contemporary village (white dot) adjacent to Ipatse Lake and X13 (south) on peninsula of upland forest.

Nokugu overlooks a picturesque series of open channels and pools of the Angahuku River (or the “Buriti River”).14 “This river is a small, exceptionally clear, cool-water river composed largely of marshy areas, which are generally overgrown and dominated by dense stands of buriti palms (Mauritania flexuosa) or buritizals, and a complex network of small channels. Like so many of the major settlement places, Nokugu is situated at a critical “crossroads,” providing direct access to the savanna (oti) bottoms of the Culuene River (Figure 3.6), the rich freshwater fisheries, and dense stands of buriti palm along the Angahuku River, and the large tracts of upland (terra firme) 15 forest where settlement and agriculture are


Fig. 3.6 GPS plan of Nokugu (ditches noted by thick black lines and road/plaza shoulders by thin lines).

conducted. It is little surprise that the Nokugu locality dominated the cultural landscape in this area for at least eight centuries. Ahangitahagu, was a settlement in the 1960s, just north of the ancient fortified settlement of Nokugu. It lies approximately three kilometers directly west of the present-day Kuikuru village of Ipatse. The Angahuku is a fairly substantial waterway, one of the crystal clear-water rivers, with white sandy bottoms, that are typical of the rivers that more or less emanate from within the basin itself. These rivers are generally quite cool, perhaps because of their form and source, largely under the forest canopy, where things are always mercifully cooler. Like the Tuatuari, the Angahuku River is more like a variably flowing lowland, a marshy wetland with stretches of open river and occasional deep pools, much different from the well-defined channels of the major rivers that emanate to the south of the Upper Xingu basin (Culuene, Curiseu and Batovi Rivers). Scattered pools of deep, fairly still water are present along the river, providing the cleanest, coolest water in the area for drinking or bathing in the broad region. Nokugu lies beside one of these small pools, Ahanitahagu, actually large enough for the Kuikuru to classify it as a small lake (hagu). I knew of the place, Nokugu, long before I had heard of the jaguar Nokugu, the “master” (oto) of this place. I became aware of him only much later. One night, a shaman came out of a trance next to my hammock and told me of his


meeting with this jaguar spirit (itseke). The chief, Afukaká, had taken me there to see one of the “ditches” when we came to participate in the inauguration ceremony for the new community fish weir that was being built. The trail leading down to the fish weir across the Angahuku River (which was several hundred meters long) went over the outer ditch, as the trail descends from the high, flat ground to the rivers edge (where the current village, some 2.5 km east, and a previous Kuikuru village—Ahangitahagu (1961–1973)—sit a couple of hundred meters to the north). Because of its proximity to the village, most of the archaeology so far—several thousand person hours, thus far—has been at X6. It is a large habitation site demarcated by a semicircular artificial ditch (ditch 1) with two smaller ditches (ditches 2 and 3) situated within it at a distance ranging from one hundred to three hundred meters from plazas; the innermost ditch was converted into two roads leading from the Angahuku River into the plaza. These structures are interpreted as defensive ditches. Within the confines of the ditches, a road/plaza system was constructed consisting of a central plaza, with a smaller attached auxiliary plaza, and four roads radiating out from the central plaza that bisect the inner ditch (numbered clockwise from north to south). The plaza and road margins are defined by linear mounds (averaging 0.5 to 1.0 m in height), which connect the plazas and roads (Figure 3.7). Road 2 was without discernable marginal curbs, but was identified based on two raised areas (bridges) within ditches 1 and 2. This possible road did not bisect the plaza marginal curb and may have been a secondary road and/or may indicate that the raised plaza/road curbs were constructed after the ditches. Two of the roads extend outward well beyond the village margins (the outer ditch), and one (road 3), which enters the settlement and plaza from east to west, is truncated by the curb just beyond the eastern margins of the moated settlement area.16 The site has fifteen reliable radiocarbon dates (see Table 3.3). These dates were all obtained from carbonized botanical (wood) remains from ten excavation trenches (1.0 x 10 or more meters), which bisect major earthworks (Figures 3.8–3.10).17 A radiocarbon date of A.D. 1770 indicates that Nokugu was occupied well into the post–European Contact period. A Waujá (Arawak) village, lying immediately north of ditch 1, is reported in Kuikuru oral history and, based on this narrative, which places its occupation before the time of von den Steinen (1880s), appears to have been occupied sometime in the nineteenth century. Unlike earlier occuptions in or around Nokugu, the Kuikuru could pinpoint the exact location of the Waujá village site, which lies only slightly to the south of the Kuikuru village site of Ahangitahagu.


Fig. 3.7 Nokugu plaza berm (hatched white line).

Ceramic remains have been identified on the Waujá village site and confirm the location and approximate size suggested by the Kuikuru. This village site apparently represents the reoccupation of the area by Upper Xingu Arawaks after a period of abandonment (c. A.D. 1770–1850). As based on Kuikuru oral history, this was a short-term occupation of a Waujá splinter group that had moved from the area of the Batovi River in the late 1800s. A splinter group of Kuikuru from Lake Lamakuka occupied a village site (Atï) slightly south of ditch 1 at Nokugu, most likely in the early 1900s (c. 1920–1930). This village later moved adjacent to Lake Ipatse (in the area of MT-FX-12; see later) before it rejoined the Kuikuru in the late 1940s. The Nokugu locality was again occupied by the Matipu and later the Kuikuru, at a village called Ahangitahagu, after the establishment of the park in 1961. These historic period village movements in and around the Nokugu locality are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Domestic occupation areas at Noguku lie adjacent to the river where the often precipitous slope of the riverbank gives way, about three to five meters above the water level, to a more gentle slope and more or less level ground to the east. The terrain slopes upward another five to ten meters from the riverbank to the eastern apex of ditch 1 (some five hundred meters east), principally within the first 100 to 150 meters to the east of the riverbank. The entire site and surrounding areas rest on what was once terra firme forest, but today it is a mosaic environment characterized by anthropogenically created savannas, parklands, low secondary forest, and the cleared areas of recent gardens and occupation sites. Several stands of high forest are present, but these also represent a later stage succession


Fig. 3.8 Excavation of trench one (1993; top) and trench 10 (2002), both bisecting ditch two at Nokugu. Note trench 10 was 5.2 meters deep from the base of the narrow funnel-shaped basal portion ( 1 meter wide), a possible seat for palisade trunks, to the top of the inside berm.


Nokugu MT-FX-06 EXCAVATION TRENCH PROFILE West Wall 0 III Ditch Construction Overburden

50

A.D, 1250 +/− 70 II A.D, 950 +/− 60

100 V

150

I

A.D. 1770 +/− 70

IVB 200 250 300

I IVA

unexcavated

A.D. 1290 +/− 70 I

350 Key: Ceramic Sherd Charcoal Lense

Fig. 3.9 Profile of excavation trench 1 (adjacent to inner “gate”).

Fig. 3.10 Schematic reconstruction of inner “gate” of road 4 at Nokugu (excavation trench one bisects the ditch and berm adjacent to the earthen overpass.

apparently restricted to areas of deep terra preta. The primary forest (itsuni) lies well to the south of the site. At Nokugu, a total of 1,336 surface collection units (each 2.0 m²) along eleven collection transects provide a fairly good idea of very general artifact distributions across the site. Of these, 293 units (21.93 percent) contained artifacts, although these were spread widely across the area

Traces of Ancient Times • 87 TABLE 3.3 Radiocarbon Dates from Nokugu (X6) and other Sites in Southern PIX Kuikuru Area. Lab Number*

Conventional Radiocarbon

Unit

2E cal. AgeRange

Provenience

Historical Xinguano (A.D. 1700–) Beta 176142

X6/ET2

20±50

modern†

ditch 3 (S; ‡), upper ditch in-fill

Beta 72260

X6/ET1

180 ± 60

A.D.

ditch 2 (S), upper ditch in-fill

1520–1940

Terminal “Galactic” Period (A.D. 1400–1700) Beta 176137

X6/ET10

340 ± 60

A.D.

1460–1640

ditch 2 (N), upper ditch in-fill

Beta 81301

X6/ET1

360 ± 70

A.D.

1420–1640

ditch 2 (S), mid-ditch in-fill

Beta 176135

X6/ET3

440 ± 60

A.D.

1420–1480

small plaza (S), sub-curb intact

Beta 72262

X11/EU1

440 ±70

A.D.

1400–1650

north road, intact/ curb interface

Beta 176140

X6/ET3

530 ± 60

A.D.

1400–1430

small plaza (S), sub-curb intact

Beta 176139

X6/ET2

590 ± 60

A.D.

1300–1420

ditch 3 (N), basal fill

Beta 177724

X5/ET2

670 60

A.D.

1260–1410

ditch 3 (N), basal fill§

Beta 88362

X13/EU1

690±60

A.D.

1260–1300

cental plaza (NW) sub-curb intact

Beta 78979

X6/ET1

700 ± 70

A.D.

1230–1410

ditch 2 (S), subberm intact

Beta 176136

X6/ET4

710 ± 50

A.D.

1270–1300

ditch 1 (S), basal fill

Beta 72263

X11/EU1

900 ±60

A.D.

1000–1250

north road, subcurb, basal intact

Beta 88363

X13/EU1

910±80

A.D.

1040–1250

central plaza (NW) sub-curb, basal intact

Initial “Galactic” Period (A.D. 1250–1400)

Late Developmental (A.D. 900–1250)

88 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 3.3 (Continued) Lab Number*

Unit

Conventional Radiocarbon

2E cal. AgeRange

Beta 72261

X6/ET1

1000 ± 70

A.D.

950–1210

ditch 2 (S), sub-berm, basal intact

Beta 176141

X6/ET5

1030 ± 60

A.D.

980–1030

central plaza (SE), sub-curb, basal intact

Beta 176143

X6/ET2

1370 ± 60

A.D.

Beta 176138

X6/ET10

2110 ± 40

190–60 B.C.

Provenience

Initial Xinguano (pre-A.D. 900) 640–690

mid-ditch 3 (N), mid-ditch fill§ ditch (N), basal fill£

Notes: All dates are on wood charcoal; (*) Beta 176135-144 reported here for first time; (†) two additional modern dates: Beta 98978; Beta 176144 are considered bad, the former was redated with a sample slightly higher (Beta 81301); (‡) N = northern side of plaza and site; S = southern side; ditch 1 = outermost; 2 = middle; and 3 = innermost ditch; Beta 176139 is inversed with 176143 and is currently being redated; § redate from slightly higher in profile; £ uncorroborated and, like Beta 176143, could represent earlier materials mixed in ditch construction. enclosed within the ditches, but cultural remains are clearly concentrated within the confines of ditch 2 and in southern portions of the area between ditch 1 and 2.18 With respect to the collection transects and units, rough soil and vegetation cover characteristics also were recorded. The following soil categories have been defined: (1) “red earth” (similar to noncultural soils in the region); (2) brownish-red to reddish-brown soil; and (3) terra preta (“black earth”). Soil types 2 and 3 are clearly anthropogenically altered soils. Distributions of these soil types correlate well with the interior artificial earthworks at the site: type 1 (red earth) and some type 2 (red-brown earth) cover the area between ditch 1 and 2; type 2 (red-brown earth) is also located in road and plaza areas within ditch 2; and type 3 (“black earth”) covers most other areas within the confines of ditch 2 (although type 2 soils are interspersed with type 3 in places). Although these are ideal soil categories that in reality grade subtly into one another, a clear pattern of soil distribution is evident: the farther one moves from the plaza margin, the more reddish and compact the soil


becomes (i.e., the natural soil color/texture is maintained), particularly as one moves east away from the Angahuku overbank. This pattern is also clearly evident at Kuhikugu (described later). Several categories of vegetation cover were likewise defined, including: (1) high-forest, little ground cover; (2) low- to medium-height forest, little ground cover; (3) low- to medium-height forest, grass/scrub ground cover; (4) parkland (palm) forest, grass/scrub ground cover; and (5) no forest, grass/scrub ground cover. These vegetational types also correlate well with the site layout and distribution of soils, with vegetation types 1–3 (forest) concentrated in areas of type 3 soils and vegetational types 4 and 5 (parkland/grassland) corresponding with areas of type 1 and 2 soils (reddish earth). It should be noted that vegetation patterns have been affected by recent agricultural activities in some areas. These remains were relatively evenly distributed throughout the excavations, but several observations merit attention. In all cases, the artificial fill of earthworks, positioned as linear lenticular mounds over intact anthrosols around plazas and in roads, and the troughs of ditches were typically rich in cultural remains in central portions of Nokugu, most notably dense ceramics, occasionally in discernable layers of ceramics, distinctive sediments and charcoal apparent. Ditch construction overburdens seldom contained ceramics, except on the surface of the berm; instead, trash was apparently discarded in the ditch trough. Beneath earthwork, and notably the red soils of ditch berms, lenses of charcoal-rich sediment and distinctive soil lenses (slightly darker in color, more sandy in texture, and more charcoal infused in red-brown soils) are often detected in intact stratigraphy and likely represent discrete occupation components. No clear evidence of structural features (post-molds or linear stains/ deposits) associated with a palisade or fence were encountered in the six 1 x 10 meter excavation trenches bisecting all or part of each of the three concentric ditches. I am almost certain there was something positioned over one or another portion of the construction, particularly the berm area almost always located on the inner edge, although it seems certain that some form of above ground barricade was associated with the excavated ditch. Like in all other locations investigated at Nokugu and other Western Complex sites, ditch construction overburden was always mounded on the interior (plaza-facing) edge of the ditch, with little or none mounded along the outside edge. One of the most revealing results of fieldwork was the relatively accurate site plan maps of major earthworks and artifact distributions, which together with the soil and vegetational regrowth evidence allow for accurate assessment of site size and configuration. At Nokugu, two


plazas were connected by a nearly continuous linear mound: a central plaza (about 130 m in diameter) with radial roads extending out from it and a smaller (about 75 m diameter) cleared area or plaza connected to it with a short passageway. The marginal curb of the central plaza is connected to the raised curbs of roads 1, 3, and 4. Another probable road (road 2) did not have pronounced mounded curbs, but was recognizable by “bridges” (filled-in or unexcavated sections) through the ditches (especially ditch 1). The roads ranged in width from about twenty meters (road 1) to thirty meters (road 4). Only road 3 was oriented according to a cardinal direction (east). Given the limited distribution of terra preta within about two hundred meters around the plaza area, it is possible to suggest that this was the focal residential area for much of the occupational history of Nokugu prior to ditch construction. Likewise, the lack of terra preta in the central plaza area suggests that the plaza was an enduring feature of village spatial organization that conditioned the location of domestic units or sectors throughout much or all of the occupation of the site. The plaza position likewise conditioned the positioning of artificial earthworks constructed some hundreds of years after initial site occupation.

Heulugihïtï, Place of the “Horned” Jaguar The word heulugi refers to a type of pincer beetle, a “species” in the complicated and comprehensive ethnobiology of the Kuikuru, but Heulugihïtï (like all -hïtï’s or -kugus) refers to a place. In this case it is not the “place of beetle” or “beetle spirit” but of another jaguar spirit being, with tufts “like a pincer” on his head—this is his place. Heulugi’s father-in-law is Nokugu, which seems appropriate considering the apparent relations of the two prehistoric settlements (as discussed in Chapter 4). The archaeological site is situated adjacent to a shallow pool along the small feeder that empties into Ipatse Lake, about three kilometers to the north. The stream and pool are commonly used by the Kuikuru today, primarily for trap fishing in the shallow waters of the pool and its outlet. Several gardens were placed there over the past ten or so years. The trail that links the site to the present-day Kuikuru village is straight for over two kilometers leading out of the site toward Ipatse Lake, and then at nearly the southern end of the lake, the path veers left where it continues on about a kilometer, straight to the Kuikuru village. Groves of managed piquí fruit line several stretches of the road, but the distribution of piquí groves stops about halfway from the village along the straight-as-an-arrow Ipatse-Heulugihïtï road. Today, the area of the ancient central plaza is covered in scrub, small secondary trees, palms, and other disturbed ground colonizers, although most of this


seems not to be the simple result of “re-opening” by the Kuikuru (although this accounts for some of the alteration). Heulugihïtï remains an important node in contemporary settlement patterns, not only because it is an ancient site, remembered in Kuikuru histories as an important place, but also, as with other ancient sites, people sometimes place gardens there and harvest the general area for diverse natural resources invariably concentrated in areas of archaeological sites. It is also a crossroads. Two trails converge at the site: one leading to the pond adjacent to the site and to the oti (savanna) and the other to the forest and Akagahïtï, with its rich egepe soils where the Kuikuru plant fruit trees today. Prehistorically, the site precisely linked the four major, cardinal settlements of the Ipatse group (X6, 17, 18, and 22) (Figure 3.11). Additionally, it is important to note the three secondary plazas of the site, including one at the western edge of the formal E-W causeway, and the other two are along the “Agikuangaka road,” as one Kuikuru called it. These are interpreted, as is the one identified at Nokugu, as ritual staging areas. I visited the site many times because of its proximity to the Kuikuru village, but archaeological investigations focused on the creation of a site map and largely uncontrolled site walkover to evaluate ceramic distributions. One 1.0 m² excavation unit was excavated over the plaza marginal curb between roads 1 and 2. This unit revealed that initial occupations were roughly contemporaneous with Nokugu and Kuhikugu, based on a date of A.D. 1040 (910 +/- 80 B.P.) from near the base of the cultural deposits at about one hundred centimeters below the ground surface. Another date, A.D. 1260 (690 +/- 60 B.P.), was obtained from about fifteen to twenty centimeters below the interface of intact occupational deposits and the construction overburden of the plaza marginal mound the unit was positioned over. This places the construction of this linear mound and, most likely, the entire road/plaza marginal mound complex in its clearly recognizable form, roughly contemporary with those documented at Nokugu and Kuhikugu, that is after circa A.D. 1300–1400 or later. The intact dark earth below the plaza marginal mound overburden indicates that the site was occupied over long periods, if not more or less continuously, from circa A .D. 1000 onward. In the case of Heulugihïtï, intact dark earth (± 50 cm) encountered beneath the overburden of the plaza marginal linear mound (± 50 cm in height) suggests long-term domestic use of this area prior to mound construction and thus an expansion of the plaza area at the time of earthwork construction. Fieldwork at the site in 2002 included excavation of one trench (1 x 10 m) bisecting the plaza marginal mound between roads 2 and 3; and six 1.0 m² excavation


Fig. 3.11 GPS plan of Heulugihïtï (ditches noted by thick black lines and small reservoirs are filled in).

units were conducted. The trench revealed cultural deposits in subtly layered strata of cultural fill apparently accumulated from refuse disposal and road/plaza construction and maintenance activities to a depth of 1.2 meters. Archaeological ceramics were concentrated in an area of two hundred to three hundred meters around the central plaza. As in other areas, these mounds, which are covered in ceramics, may have been the privileged dumping site of individuals and families with greatest access to the village center. High-resolution GPS mapping across the entire site in 2002, (after clearing brush from the plaza and major roads and the curbs that rub alongside each). The low mound actually forms a nearly unbroken feature that extends across the landscape.


No peripheral defensive ditch is present at the site, although some above-ground village peripheral fortification may well have been present. A small (250 m long) semicircular ditch was encountered and was located between the plaza area and the major water source, a pond of standing water in the course of a small stream. The interlinked road and plaza system with raised margins is similar in configuration and size to those recognized at Nokugu and Kuhikugu. The curbed roads at Heulugihïtï, in contrast to those at Nokugu and Kuhikugu, very nearly correspond to the four cardinal directions. No occupations of the site prior to the westward Carib migration (c. A.D. 1750 or later) are recorded in native oral history, suggesting that it had been abandoned long prior to that time. The Kuikuru remember a Carib village at the site more recently (early to midtwentieth century) and several hamlets have occupied the area, the structural remains of a single house occupation associated with one of these hamlets were encountered there. Like the other sites, Heulugihïtï lies on a gently sloping area of terra firme abutting the marshy pond area of the stream, paralleling the high ground. The vegetation in the site area is likewise in various stages of successional regrowth.

Other Nodes and Satellites Hatsikugi (X17): Several days at Hatsikugi led to identification of two concentric linear ditches and large areas of dark earth (that contemporary Kuikuru use for gardens), and copious ceramic remains. The ditches were GPS mapped in 2002 and demonstrate that the site was a large settlement with peripheral ditches, slightly smaller than Nokugu and Kuhikugu. Two plazas with radial roads were located, one in the center of the inner ditch and one between the apex of the inner and outer ditch. Akagahïtï (X18, also known as Itsagahïtï), which means “place of the stork” (another itseke) is located near another area of standing water in the small stream course that also passes Heulugihïtï, to the north (Figure 3.12). It also is located where the stream contacts the terra firme forest margin. One large semicircular ditch (1.5–2 km or more in length and up to 3 m deep) has been identified. The semilunar configuration of the ditch is similar to those from Nokugu and Kuhikugu; that is, it begins adjacent to the standing water in the small stream, surrounds a large village, area and terminates again near the small waterway. The site has the typical plaza/road system, that is a central plaza with a peripheral linear mound connected to the linear raised curbs of the roads emanating from the plaza. Immediately outside of the plaza marginal curb, two mounded rings (about 0.5 m high and 40 m in diameter), possibly representing circular


Fig. 3.12 GPS plan of Akagahïtï (ditches noted by thick black lines and road/plaza shoulders by gray).

structures, were encountered on different, perhaps opposing, sides of the plaza. Interestingly, Upper Xingu Arawak oral history suggests that in the past, chief’s houses were large round structures (E. Ireland, personal communication, 1995). These two structures cannot be adequately interpreted because of the lack of data from them. A unique feature was identified at Akagahïtï, a raised roadway (causeway) leading obliquely from the low-lying area of standing water into the area enclosed by the defensive ditch. On the inside (village side) of this causeway, a depression was recognized that appears to be a reservoir. Either a low-lying area was simply partitioned off with the causeway, or more likely the area was at least partially excavated in association with construction of the causeway. This remains to be confirmed through


future work, but it is interesting to note that during the height of the dry-season (when I visited the site) the area of open water associated with the small stream is very limited, much more so than Heulugihïtï. The vegetation at the site is in an advanced stage of regrowth (highforest) which seems to indicate that it was either abandoned before Nokugu and Kuhikugu, and was less intensively or more briefly occupied than these other sites (i.e., the soil was less compacted). The lack of substantial Xinguano Phase occupations also accounts for the lack of unforested areas at the site. Ar present, the duration or intensity of occupations cannot be evaluated based on archaeological evidence. Based on the size and configuration of the earthworks, we can conclude that: (1) the site was quite large, comparable in size to MT-FX-06, 11 and 13; and (2) it was occupied contemporaneously with these other sites in late Ipavu Phase times. Séku and Séhu: Three sites located between Akagahïtï (X18) and the outlet of Lake Lamakuka/Kuhikugu are known in Kuikuru oral history and, recent brief Kuikuru occupations at these sites provide testimony of dark earth and archaeological ceramics. There are no ditches at these small tertiary settlements. Like X13 and 18, these four sites, from north to south, Séku (X19), Séhu (X20), Ahugakugu (X33) and Maijeinei (X21), are intermediate between the Ipatse and the Kuikugu clusters, with X19 and X20 as part of the former and X33 and X21 of the latter. All lie in predictable locations where the Ipatse stream that runs parallel to the terra firme forest veers westward and more directly abuts the forest. All three are clearly apparent in aerial photographs (Figure 3.13). Agikuangaku, Angahuku Lake and Intagu: Agikuangaku (X22), Intagu (X23), and Angahuku Lake (X42) show up only vaguely on aerial photographs, but the fact that the areas on the photographs are archaeological sites was confirmed by visits by several Kuikuru to each site over the past several years. One recent foray bagged an intact ceramic vessel, along with more sought after quarry: monkeys. Dark earth and archaeological ceramics occur at both sites, and a complex of plaza(s) and roads are present at both. X42 is an apparently large egepe site located adjacent to a large pool (like Ahangitahagu) along the Angahaku River. It has yet to be visited due to difficult access.

The Kuhikugu Cluster Kuhikugu, which means “place of the kuhi fish,” is of singular importance in Kuikuru narratives. It is the place where the Kuikuru, (Lahatua otomo or community) formed after splitting from the ancestral village of Óti, where the Kuikuru ancestors lived together with those of the present day Matipu


Fig. 3.13 Plan of Sekú superimposed on satellite image (Landsat 7 ETM, 1999); the plaza of Maijeinei (X21) is at lower right. Note the anthropogenic vegetation scar correlated to site area and large low-lying (seasonal) lake to the east of the forest margin.

(who became known as the Uagihïtï otomo) after the split in the mid1800s. Because of tensions that emerged over the construction of a tajïfe, or chief ’s house at Óti, several chiefly families, under the chiefs Nitsïmï, Amatuagu, and Hikutaha, decided to move to Kuhikugu, the area that had been long used by members of Óti after they had settled in the area west of the Culuene River in the eighteenth century. Hikutaha, an ancestral Kuikuru chief, had a hamlet (hihitsingóho) across the lake at Kuhugupe


(X38) at the time of the dispute and fission of Óti. The Kuikuru chiefs Nitisïmï and Amatuagu joined Hikutaha and they opened a new village at Kuhikugu in about 1850–1860. The Kuhikugu locality was occupied for several generations before they moved to their present location, between the Angahuku River to the west, and Ipatse Lake to the east, to be incorporated in the newly formed Xingu Park (PIX) in the 1960s. They were there when Karl von den Steinen ventured into the area in the 1880s, when Hermann Meyer visited them in 1896, and when Max Schmidt returned in 1902; they were there when the Villas-Boas brothers established a sustained presence in the Upper Xingu in the 1940s and 1950s. A hamlet was being established when I was first there in 1993. This became a single house hamlet in 2001 and today is a small satellite village of four houses: perhaps this is similar to the hamlet that Hikutaha established nearby 150 years before. Kuhikugu is both a galactic hub and a major residential site, in fact, the largest residential site currently known at fifty hectares of area enclosed within the paired peripheral ditches (Figure 3.14 and Figure 3.15). It lies on the eastern edge of Lake Kuhikugu and links to two sites, Maijeinei (X21), Kagaho (X34), and Kuhugupe (X38), on the western and northwestern edges of Lake Lamakuka, and two sites, Asahïtï/Ugotahïtï (X35/X36), and possibly a fifth site (Iña, X37) linked via road four located in the headwater stream of Lake Kuhikugu. The basic orientation, a cross centered on an “exemplary center” or hub within the regional settlement unit, recognized at Ipatse is the same at Kuhikugu. Other proposed nodes of the Kuhikugu cluster, Kagaho (NE), Asahïtï/Ugotahïtï (SE), Kuhugupe (SW), and Maijeinei (NW), apparently a satellite of Kuhikugu (and perhaps Kuhugupe) and a link to the Ipatse cluster sites of Séku and Séhu. However, major earthworks, including ditches and plaza/road curbs are present, and clearly the Kuhikugu roads link directly with these other sites. Kuhikugu (X11, called “Lamakuka” by Dole 1961–1962) is another large habitation site demarcated by two parallel artificial ditches. Ditch 1 nearly encloses the site on three sides and a second interior ditch, ditch 2, diverges from it and parallels it for about two thirds of the length of ditch 1 (Figure 3.16).The locations of the ditches (and historically occupied sites) are well defined by differential forest regrowth patterns clearly evident in aerial photographs. A similar pattern was recognized in the aerial photographs that cover the area around the site of Yakaré (Agostinho 1993). Like Nokugu, the ditches at Kuhikugu apparently served as defensive works. The ditches at Kuhikugu demonstrate a similar construction technique to that of Nokugu, that is mounded overburden on the interior berm of the ditch, as well as a similar overall orientation (Figure 3.17).


Fig. 3.14 Kuhikugu cluster sites, including the first-order center of X11 and the smaller secondary centers of X33 and X28 (dot placed between two), X34, X35, and X36 (dot between two) and X38 (clockwise from upper left) adjacent to black dots (inset is map of X11 earthworks, with historic period villages shown by closed circles). Note pronounced anthropogenic vegetation scars.

Kuhikugu lies on the eastern edge of Lake Kuhikugu/Lamakuka and domestic refuse is encountered from just east of the low marshy area (buritizal) that surrounds the lake across the entire area enclosed by the ditches. There is a slight upward slope from west to east; the total relief from the western margin of the site (at the edge of the buritizal) to the eastern margin (ditch 1) is over ten meters. The site is covered by secondary forest in various stages of succession, with parkland and savanna areas largely restricted to the area of two abandoned Kuikuru occupation sites within the confines of the ditches (Atïka [c. 1870–1890] and Kuhikugu [c. 1890–1930]). The site lies about eight kilometers southwest of the Culuene River. Access to the site is by a small foot path (today bicycles are often used) that commences near the mouth of the small outlet stream of Lake Lamakuka/Kuhikugu. Upon reaching the forest, the path becomes perfectly straight for several kilometers until the clearings of the abandoned Kuikuru villages (Lahatua I and II) become obvious. Within the confines of the ditches, a single central plaza with five radial roads was identified. These also were characterized by raised curbs along the margins of the


Fig. 3.15 Plan view map of Kuhikugu (X11) showing ceramic distributions from collection transects (small black dots), mapped road and trench earthworks, and historic period villages (c. 1860–1960), demarcated with closed circles.

roads and plaza (Figure 3.19). In fact, the plaza has a hollowed-out or bowl appearance due to the imposing height of the plaza-marginal mounds. Of the total of 1,949 surface collection units (2.0 x 2.0 m) surface collection units, 34 percent (668) contained cultural remains.19 Three 1.0 m² units were excavated in two areas of the site. The first, excavation unit 1, was positioned directly on top of the eastern marginal curb of road 1 near where it enters the plaza area. Two contiguous 1.0 m² units were positioned over the overburden associated with the construction of ditch 1. The unit was located slightly east of the road 1 bridge (i.e., an unexcavated portion of ditch 2).20–21 Charcoal was likewise distributed throughout the depth of the unit, also concentrated in stratum II, although two lenses with more dense charcoal concentrations were recognized. Samples from these lenses were selected for radiocarbon dating. Intact stratum II is bracketed by two radiocarbon dates of A.D. 1050 (lower stratum IIA) and A . D . 1510 (stratum II/III interface). The date of A . D . 1510, therefore, roughly corresponds to the period of road/mound construction. Nearly the entire area confined within the paired ditches was covered with terra preta, ranging from reddish brown to dark brown. Like at Nokugu, terra preta soils are darker in nuclear areas of the site (near the


Fig. 3.16 Schematic reconstruction of Kuhikugu paired ditches, and outer gate of road 1 and of the intersection of road 1 with the plaza (excavation units are marked by large grey dots).

central plaza) than closer to the ditches (with the exception of the central plaza area). The central plaza area also served as the plaza in a historically occupied Kuikuru (Carib) village (also called Kuhikugu), as well as the earlier prehistoric (Arawak) village. The entire soil profile of both units, excavated to depths of sixty centimeters, was characterized by homogenous


Fig. 3.17 Schematic reconstruction of (top) Nokugu (X6) and (bottom) Kuhikugu showing major earthworks. Note the similar alignments in relation to major waterbody (dark).

reddish-brown sediment, representing “red earth” excavated from ditch 1 (40–50 cm) and heaped over the original ground surface (also “red earth”) on the inside edge of the ditch. The stratigraphic division between the natural ground surface and the heaped overburden could not be detected. The presence of limited quantities of ceramics in the upper portions of the unit (overburden) indicates that this area of the site was occupied prehistorically, but the absence of “black earth” suggests that the area was the location of an ephemeral (short-term or village marginal) domestic occupation before ditch construction. Vegetational regrowth patterns at Kuhikugu are less revealing than those at Nokugu, because the location of two Kuikuru villages, Atïka and Kuhikugu, altered the observable vegetation pattern. However, it is clear that higher successional forest is largely restricted to the areas of richer terra preta soils surrounding the plaza (within about 200 m). Areas located farther from the plaza (nearer the ditches) and not associated with the Kuikuru villages are characterized by a low- to medium-height successional forest cover. Ipavu Phase ceramic distributions are mixed with later (1870–1920) Xinguano Phase (Kuikuru) materials in and


around the old Kuikuru villages of Atïka and Kuhikugu. Overall, the Ipavu Phase materials were not apparently redeposited by later Xinguano Phase occupations, except in those areas immediately adjacent to two Kuikuru villages, based on the recognition of numerous intact Ipavu Phase ceramic concentrations related to domestic refuse middens.

Other Western Complex Sites Óti (MT-FX-24), ancestral home of the Kuikuru where they split from the Matipu in the mid-1800s (c. 1870), lies outside of the study area. However, it is also clearly visible on aerial photographs. Several Matipu, more recently removed from the area of Óti (c. 1960) than the Kuikuru, reported that they were aware of excavated ditches there. An additional site, located on the southwestern edge of Lake Angahïnga, where the present Matipu village is situated, is reported to have dark earth, ceramics and ditches. Other more distant sites with dark earth, ceramics and ditches were reported at Lake Aiha, Lake Ehumba and Lake Angahïnga, also sites of early Xinguano Phase villages. An area of forest disturbance located slightly south of the contemporary Aueti (Xinguano Tupi) village is reported to have dark earth and ceramics as well. The old Carib Xinguano village site of Agahangugu, located far upstream from the study area off the left bank of the Culuene River, was visited by several Kuikuru in 1994. The site lies outside of the PIX and is currently deforested in some areas due to recent ranching. In one of these denuded areas, the Kuikuru report finding not only the abandoned Carib Xinguano village but also “ditches like those found at Nokugu.” Other sites with ditches, confirmed through recent visits by the Kuikuru and outsiders (researchers), are known from the mouth of the Tuatuari River (MT-FX-07), Noviari at Ipavu Lake (MT-FX-05), Morená (MT-AX08), Yakaré (MT-FX-09), slightly north of the Mehinaku village on the right bank of the Tuatuari River (MT-FX-30), near the Waujá village (MTFX-31) and other sites more distant from the study area, as well as at Diauarum (MT-FX-01) at the mouth of the Suia-missú River. Given the density of sites known from the study area, it can be assumed that numerous other Western Complex sites exist in the Upper Xingu basin. The area from the present-day Yawalapiti village to the mouth of the Tuatuari River (including the area of FUNAI Post Leonardo), has been the subject of several archaeological studies (Becquelin 1973, 1980, 1978, 1993; Dole 1961/62) and was examined in the course of this study over several days. Archaeological remains are widely distributed there, including a vast area covered with Ipavu Phase ceramics. Several linear ditches and raised earthworks roughly similar to those described here were noted,


as were various historic occupations (at least three old Yawalapiti villages, one old Kamayurá village and several garden houses). The Ipavu Phase site with ditches and linear mounds is apparently restricted to the area to the east of Post Leonardo; however, the widespread distribution of remains requires caution in designating site boundaries. Another Ipavu Phase site, Yakaré (MT-FX-09), with ditches and linear mounds, is known from the vicinity of the now defunct Brazilian Air Force base (Galvão 1953; Oberg 1953). Although the exact form of the earthworks must await confirmation through onsite examination, detailed descriptions can be made from the aerial photographs of the site (Agostinho 1993).

The Eastern Complex The rapid appearance of numerous large circular villages circa A.D. 800, suggests population movement into the basin, which I suggest represents the migration of Arawak-speakers, the ancestors of contemporary Xinguano Arawak peoples. Archaeological and Xinguano oral history agree about the cultural affiliation of the prehistoric Western Complex occupations with the ancestors of Xinguano Arawaks. As described in Chapter 5, oral history clearly recounts the movement of Tupian groups (Aueti and Kamayura), Trumai, Suya, and Bakairi into the Upper Xingu over the past two or three centuries. Immigrant groups who came to occupy the basin have undergone a general process of cultural sharing or “Xinguanification,” becoming increasingly acculturated into the distinctive regional cultural pattern established by the initial Arawakan groups in the region. Likewise the Kuikuru and other Carib groups recall a time when they lived on the southeastern edges of the region. The Kuikuru narratives, described by Carneiro (1978a), Dole (1984a), and Franchetto (1992), describe five ancient villages that pertain to a time in the mid-1700s, just before the ipa otomo, “people of Lake Tafununu,” moved eastward to the area they have occupied since (Figure 3.18). Three of these places, Tehukugu (X14), Kuguhi (X15) and Tafununu (X26), preserve evidence of the ancient occupations that are clearly distinctive from the large circular plaza villages, such as large circular houses, ceramic technology, and settlement organization. Two radiocarbon dates, provide a range of circa A . D. 1500–1700. Netonugu (X16) and Makegange (X25), the most westerly of the sites, appear to fit the Western Complex pattern. By circa 1500, there is evidence that another (non-Arawak) cultural group was present in eastern portions of the upper Xingu basin. These are the ancient ancestors of the Upper Xingu Carib. Around Lake Tafununu, located east of the Culuene River, three archaeological sites


Fig. 3.18 Eastern Complex sites at Lake Tafununu.

were investigated. The Eastern Complex sites are distinctive from the circular plaza villages of the Western Complex in terms of settlement pattern and ceramic remains. The area was traditionally the territory of Xinguano Carib groups, in particular, the ancestors of the Kuikuru/ Matipu (the villages ancestral to the Kalapalo and Nafuqua were apparently located farther to the south and perhaps west). The oral history of the Kuikuru identifies five ancient settlements, including the three archaeological sites. The archaeological site of Kuguhi is particularly revealing; radiocarbon dated to 340 ± 50 B.P. (c. 1600), this site very likely represents a single occupation, directly linking Carib oral history and archaeology. Not only does the size of the Eastern Complex sites contrast markedly with that of the contemporaneous fortified villages of the Western Complex, but also the form of the villages is distinctive. The circular houses were not situated around a large, plaza, like those of the Western Complex. This is suggested by the immense size of the Tehukugu house (roughly 55 m in diameter), radiocarbon dated to 440 ± 40 B.P. (c. 1500), and, more directly, by the fact that just outside the only door of the Kuguhi house there is a large trash midden. Although two large circular structures have been identified at the Western Complex site of Itsagahïtï, located on either side of the central plaza (immediately outside of the plaza-marginal mound), no other such


Fig. 3.19 House compound at Kuguhi (top), showing circular houses (dark) and abandoned Kuikuru dwellings (lighter grey), and reconstruction of House 1 at Tehukugu.

structures were encountered during the detailed investigations and mapping of surficial deposits at Nokugu, Kuhikugu, and Heulugihïtï. This suggests that the circular structures were special structures (e.g., chief ’s houses), nontraditional structural innovations, perhaps resulting from contacts with the Eastern Complex villages, or Eastern Complex


reoccupations of abandoned Western Complex villages. This question remains to be resolved, but it is clear that the two settlement systems were fundamentally distinctive: the Eastern Complex villages were organized around one or a few circular malocas, which housed the entire community, reminiscent of the pattern of Guiana Carib villages, whereas the Western Complex villages were characterized by a multitide of dwellings situated across broad areas but gravitating toward large central plazas. The ceramic industry of the Eastern Complex villages is likewise distinctive from both Western Complex and contemporary Xinguano industry. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Caribs of Lake Tafununu moved west of the Culuene, apparently in flight from hostilities by “wild Indians” or perhaps even Luso-Brazilian slavers (Dole 1984a). The Carib ancestors who lived east of the Culuene River undoubtedly had cultural relations with their Arawak neighbors. These were largely peaceful, it appears, going by their physical proximity and remarkably different scale, and seem to represent the initial stirring of Xinguano pluralism. However, prior to their westward migration (1740–1770), the Caribs and Arawaks were culturally distinctive, although they may have been interacting, as culturally linked but still “other” societies for a long time, perhaps since the time of Buddha or Christ, two thousand to twenty-five hundred years ago. Some linguistic evidence (Meira 2000; Rodrigues, personal communication, 1999) does support and ancient linguistic connection between at least some Carib groups and the ancient Tupi, that is, south of the Amazon. Perhaps Steinen (1894) was right after all, and the Carib family started in the south, and split into groups of southern Amazon Caribs: Xinguano, Bakairi, and Arara. From there it moved into the Guianas, where it dispersed widely. Carib movements are is archaeologically suggested by a short-lived Eastern Complex occupation, marked by a circular house (22 m in diameter) radiocarbon dated to 190 ± 60 B.P. (c. 1760), located near the contemporary Kuikuru village at Lake Ipatse. Interestingly, a late occupation of the Western Complex site of Nokugu, where no circular houses were encountered, is radiocarbon dated to 180 ± 60 B.P. (c. 1770). This is perhaps the final Arawak occupation of the site, after the defensive ditches had apparently been abandoned, but a Waujá (Upper Xingu Arawak) offshoot community resided immediately outside the confines of the site (adjacent to the outer ditch) in the mid- to late 1800s (before Steinen). Not only were they disrupted and in flight, but also the Carib’s move west put them in what was previously Arawak lands. Thus, not only did the Carib groups move west, occupying various areas netween the Culuene and Cureseu Rivers, but also the Arawaks had to abandon and relinquish


these areas, which further indicates peaceful interaction. Whereas there is no evidence that the Arawakan (Western Complex) villagers had ever lived on Lake Tafununu, the areas just west of the Culuene River were densely occupied by Arawaks for centuries. Eastern Complex sites first were identified based on Kuikuru oral tradition regarding their ancestral sites located on Lake Tafununu (see Figure 3.19a). These sites are the location of dark earth soils and therefore continue to be exploited by contemporary Kuikuru as choice locales for seasonal hamlets. They are well known to several Kuikuru who have lived on Lake Tafununu in recent decades. I accompanied the chief, his father in law, and his younger brothers on a brief trip to the lake to tend the middle brother’s recently opened gardens there and, had the opportunity to investigate three of the five primary sites remembered at the lake: Tehukugu (X14), Kuguhi (X15), and Netonugu (X16). Two other Lake Tafununu sites, Agahahïtï/Magakange (X25) and Tafununu (X26), were not visited, nor are they clearly visible in aerial photographs. In fact, unlike Western Complex sites, none of the Eastern Complex sites are clearly recognizable on aerial photographs. One additional site, Ipatse (X12), also appears to be related to the Eastern Complex, although it lies adjacent to the contemporary Kuikuru village within an area prehistorically dominated by Western Complex villages (e.g., Nokugu and Heulugihïtï).

Tehukugu (X14): Three days of work at Tehukugu (X14) included: (1) a walkover to identify earthworks, such as ditches or linear mounds, and surface exposed ceramics or other artifacts; (2) surface collection in select areas; and (3) excavation of six 1.0 x 1.0 meter excavation units within an identified fifty-five-meter diameter structure (communal house?). The structure had a substantial peripheral wall mound (approximately 0.5 to 1.0 meter in height) with two open passages (doors) on opposing sides. Because of its conspicuous nature, the house was recognized by Kuikuru during their occupation of the site (three houses) in the early 1980s. An earlier Kuikuru hamlet occupation of the site, in the time of the Kuhikugu village (1890–1930), also was recounted to me by the oldest living Kuikuru, who was born there. The Kuikuru also remember a time when the site was occupied by the Kamayurá (Upper Xingu Tupians), who migrated into the Upper Xingu basin during proto-Xinguano times. The last great chief to occupy the site, Tamakafi, married with a “wild Indian” woman, undoubtedly to reduce the persistent threat of ngikogo attack, also recounted for this period (see Basso 1995). Three large boulders knee deep in the lake adjacent to


the site are considered by the Kuikuru to be the remnants of the chiefly stools that Tamakafi and his bride sat upon to gaze over the panoramic vista of the massive lake. The walkover and sporadic surface collections at X14 revealed a distribution of ceramics over an area of at least 400 x 300 meters. No artificial earthworks, except the circular structure, were identified, and given the coverage of the walkover it is very unlikely that any earthworks similar to the trenches and/or road/plaza systems of the Western Complex sites exist at Tehukugu. Although unconfirmed, several uncontrolled shovel probes and descriptions of the site by Kuikuru who had gardened there indicate that the site is covered by anthropogenic dark earth over much of its extent. Investigations were concentrated in the area of the fifty-five-meterdiameter circular structure. Six 1.0 x 1.0 meter excavation units were placed along a transect that bisected the wall mound and extended into the center of the structure (Figure 3.19b). Interestingly, the structure interior is underlain by reddish soils, while the wall mound is composed entirely of dark earth. This may have resulted from clearing dark earth soils from the structure interior during construction. The uniform height and width of the wall mound suggests that it was constructed at one time as part of the structure and was not the result of accretional deposition associated with domestic activities after the structure was constructed. The function of the circular (ring) mounds as structure walls is more clearly apparent at other sites (e.g., Kuguhi, described later). Due to possible mixing in the wall-mound deposits, the charcoal sample for C14 dating was selected from a cultural feature (feature 1) encountered beneath the structure floor adjacent to the wall. Feature 1 was a small pit, which may have served as a small refuse pit or a cache of some kind based on such practices in houses today. It returned a C14 date of 440 +/- 50 years B.P. (A.D. 1510). Excavation units 1–3, bisecting the structure wall, yielded copious cultural remains. By contrast, excavation units 4–6, located in the interior of the structure produced very few cultural remains, consistent with its proposed function as the interior of a large roofed structure. The structure is interpreted as a communal dwelling due to its similarity to the more unequivocal houses encountered at X15 and X12. Because of its size, a special purpose function (e.g., chief ’s house or clubhouse) must be considered. Other similar large circular communal houses are known from various parts of Amazonia, notably from the probable Carib heartland in the northern Amazon/Guianas areas.


Kuguhi (X15) Two days of fieldwork were conducted at Kuguhi, an ancestral Kuikuru village. Kuikuru oral tradition names Marika as the last chief who presided over this ancestral village. The site consists of one unequivocal and one possible circular house located in a recently felled and burned swidden garden. Based on information provided by the Kuikuru who had farmed at the site in the past and who opened the new garden, the dark earth associated with the site is fairly restricted (perhaps 300 x 200 m), but the actual extent of the anthropogenic soils (i.e., the archaeological site) are unknown. A previous Kuikuru farmstead and a lakeshore campsite are known from X15. House 1 at Kuguhi was twenty-eight meters in diameter, with a circular wall mound (about 0.5 m in height) and one western-facing door. To the south of the door was a borrow pit, likely associated with house construction, and a raised trash midden. Three 1.0 x 1.0 units were excavated. Two contiguous units were placed over the wall mound on the southwestern side of house 1 and failed to yield cultural remains. One excavation unit was located over the raised trash midden and yielded 210 ceramic fragments. A composite charcoal sample (combined from the three ten-centimeter levels of terra preta) returned a C14 date of 340 +/- 50 years B.P. (A.D. 1610). House 2 appeared to be about the same dimensions as house 1, but given that garden-clearing debris had been piled over this house; it was not possible to confirm its size or configuration. One interesting finding at Kuguhi relates to the process of terra preta formation. At many sites investigated in the Kuikuru study area, especially those of the Western Complex, terra preta is contiguous over large areas of the sites. At Kuguhi, as in contemporary villages, the terra preta is confined to areas outside of the house and, in particular, to a large trash mound located adjacent to house 1 and rich in cultural debris. The house 1 interior and wall mound are composed of reddish soil with very sparse cultural remains. This suggests that the house 1 wall mound was intentionally constructed and was not the incidental result of floor clearing or accretional refuse disposal. The Kuguhi structure represents a clear example of a house structure with an associated trash midden located directly outside the structure and adjacent to the westward facing door.

Ipatse (X12) A complex multicomponent site, MT-FX-12 is situated within the area defined as the Western Complex, but archaeologically it seems to correlate with Eastern Complex sites (Figure 3.20). Its late date (A.D. 1760) suggests


Fig. 3.20 Ipatse locality (top) and reconstruction of House 1 at Ipatse (bottom).


that the one or two houses found there correspond to the western migration of Carib (Eastern Complex) groups documented in native oral history. There are three discrete components at the Ipatse locality: a prototo early Xinguano Phase component and two late Xinguano Phase (modern Kuikuru) components dated to circa 1930–1950 and 1961–present. The first component, located slightly to the west of Lake Ipatse, consists of one circular house (of the raised wall mound variety as known from other Eastern Complex sites) and one possible circular house (13 m diameter). The unequivocal house is twenty-two meters in diameter, with a raised peripheral wall mound about forty to fifty centimeters in height and 1.0 to 1.5 meters in width. Sixteen 1.0 x 1.0 excavation units were placed in a contiguous line bisecting the wall mound and terminating with a 2.0 x 2.0 meter block in the house center (Figure 3.20b). Few archaeological remains (41 ceramic fragments and two lithic tool fragments) were recovered from the excavations, but an apparent hearth feature was located in the center of the 2.0 x 2.0 meter excavation block, corresponding more or less with the house center. This feature yielded the radiocarbon date of 190 +/- 60 years B.P. (A.D. 1760). The smaller possible house was also demarcated by a peripheral wall mound (10–30 cm. in height), but the low mound profile, virtually unrecognizable in places, and lack of excavations preclude conclusive attribution of this as a cultural feature associated with the house 1 occupation of Ipatse. A continuous distribution of surface ceramics between the two houses lends support, however, to the suggestion that they were contemporaneous houses. Both house 1 and possible house 2 lie at the margin of an area historically occupied by two successive Carib villages. These villages, called Ipatse and Itsuva, respectively, by the Kuikuru were occupied circa 1930–1950 by a group that had fissioned from the Kuikuru around 1920–1930 and moved to the site of Atï, located three kilometers to the west and adjacent to the site of Nokugu (X6), and later to the edge of Lake Ipatse. Ipatse house 1 and the ceramic scatter between house 1 and possible house 2 appears to lie outside of the primary occupation area of the Ipatse village. It is possible that houses1 and 2 mark the western boundary of a larger proto- to early Xinguano Phase (A.D. 1750–1884) village that was largely destroyed by the later Ipatse and Itsuva occupations. One ceramic sherd of a distinctive Eastern Complex ceramic type (Type i.e., described later) was surface collected from the area outside house 1.


Other Eastern Complex Sites Three additional sites were identified on Lake Tafununu based on oral history. Netonugu (X16) was briefly visited, allowing confirmation of its location and the presence of archaeological ceramics and terra preta. The site is medium-sized and, although no circular raised-wall structures were identified, a complex of small plazas (3) and roads were identified that seem to be clearly related to the Western Complex, perhaps linking the Tafununu sites to Hatsikugi (X17) via Itsagahïtï (X41). The site is considered an ancestral Carib site by the Kuikuru which at the time of abandonment was headed by a chief named Agaika. Magakange (X25), which is located a few kilometers up the Agahahïtï feeder stream, also follows the Western Complex pattern of large circular plaza and radial roads. Another ancestral Kuikuru site Tafununu, was identified through oral history and the presence of egepe and archaeological ceramics. Chiefs by the names of Matuagu and Ahiguata presided over Tafununu and Agahahïtï, respectively.

CHAPTER

4

Social Dynamics Before Europe Everywhere he went that seemed like a nice place to stay, Viti-Vití would make long, deep ditches and leave part of his people there, and he himself would continue traveling. He advised all of them to build their village outside [inside?] the ditch, within the semicircle described by it. The ditches were almost always arch-shaped, and one end always led to or away from water. The ditches, Viti-Vití, recommended, should be used when it became necessary to protect themselves against cold winds. In almost every habitable place he found, Viti-Vití left a few of his people and a ditch for shelter. Viti-Vití still lives today with some of his people on the shores of the great Kuikúru-Ípa lagoon, at the end of a ditch, where it meets the water. At night Viti-Vití’s footsteps can be heard. They make a dry sound when he steps on the ground with his pointed leg: toc, tim, toc, tim. Orlando and Claudio Villas-Boas 1973: 165 (Paraphrasing a Kuikuru tale) I have never heard of Fitsi-fitsi’s footsteps, as the Villas-Boas brothers describe, nor of his people, who settled in his footprints. I have no doubt that Fitsi-fitsi lives on today in the “mirror world” of dawn times ingilango, where all the Kuikuru culture heroes and ancestors, and other “dawn persons,” have come to reside over the ages.1 The Kuikuru travel in this mirror world in their dreams. Some shamans (hïatâo), trained in special techniques of the body and esoteric knowledge and able to enter a trance by smoking tobacco (Nicotina sp.), actually traffic with its inhabitants.

113


But I had not heard that Fitsi-fitsi resides today at Ipa Kuhikugu, at the end of the ditch there, where it descends into the lake. I know the place well, having spent many hours walking back and forth over the ditches and causeways, mapping and collecting across the ancient site with my Kuikuru collaborators, my field crew. I vividly remember, for instance, the day a rattlesnake struck (and missed) one Kuikuru assistant as we mapped the ancient great plaza—a big, scooped-out bowl with imposing peripheral mounds rising on all sides. Nobody mentioned that Fitsi-fitsi might live here, although they did say he had passed this way and left his signature marks, Fitsi-fitsi gepügü (“excavated hole”), as they call the ditches. Ipa Kuhikugu (actually two lakes, Kuhikugu and Lamakuka) is singular in Kuikuru cultural memory. It is their origin place. After splitting from the ancestral village of Óti, where the Kuikuru ancestors (ngiholo) had lived with the Matipu (Uagihïtï otomo) until the mid- to late 1800s, the great chiefs, Hikutaha, Nïtsïmï and Amatuagu had founded the old village site (etepe) of Kuhikugu.2 They were at Kuhikugu when Kalusi (Steinen) came in 1884.3 It was also here that Robert Carneiro and Gertrude Dole came to live in 1953–1954 as the Kuikuru’s first live-in “whites.”4 Today, some forty years after they left this place, the Kuikuru are still known as Lahatua otomo, “the people of Lahatua.” Carneiro and Dole lived in a tent just beside the northern terminus of ditch 1 when the Kuikuru lived in their penultimate village of this place (Lamakuka): a Kuikuru man found “Bobbie’s coffee pot” one day as we mapped the ancient Fitsi-fitsi gepügü. Our campsite—that of me and my Kuikuru field assistants—was very near the southern terminus, precisely where it descends into Lake Kuhikugu, near where the Villas-Boas brothers had heard that Fitsi-fitsi lived.5 Fitsi-fitsi was “a person … [and] had everything that people have,” as the Villas-Boas brothers (1973: 165) note, but that changed one day when he went out of the village to collect honey with his wife and brother-in-law and transformed himself into an itseke (a “monster,” spirit, or superbeing). Climbing a tree, presumably to collect honey, he honed his lower legs into sharp points and attacked his kinsmen with his spear-point legs. In fear of retaliation he fled and wandered aimlessly across the landscape, dragging his sharpened legs and incising the ground behind. Afukaká, the village chief and my adoptive brother, one of the most powerful persons in contemporary Xinguano political history and a singular figure in the Kuikuru village, told me the story of Fitsi-fitsi, again, one day on a visit to Nokugu. As Afukaká and I stood beside the ancient Fitsifitsi gepügü, not far from my first excavation trench, he asked me to tell “my story,” because, after months of almost daily work at Nokugu, I must surely have one to tell. I told him that I thought this place and others like it

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(Kuhikugu and Heulugihïtï) were ngiholó-ìtupe (place of the ancestors) and the ditches and linear mounds were the intentional constructions of ancient Xinguanos. The chief was in mourning for much of 1993, having lost his primary heir and another younger son early that year, and rarely had an opportunity to see what I was doing at Nokugu. He had heard my ideas before on historical places and personages, and the dark earths (egepe), pottery sherds (egeho), and, of course, the Fitsi-fitsi gepügü, that occur in the old village sites (etepe) and ancestor places. I had talked many times to him and other Kuikuru of archaeology, in both public and private settings, with my maps and other paper props. A month or so earlier the most powerful shaman of eight in the village, contracted to protect the chief ’s magic pot (kune), the traditional method to reveal and perhaps kill the witch, had entered a trance and in his out-of-body travels had encountered Nokugu. “The shaman explained, as best he could, having also heard some of my archaeology stories: Who is this cagaiha (whiteman)” he asked, “who is working at my home, what is he doing there?” That day at the site, I showed Afukaká my story. We walked the full length of ditch 2, nearly two kilometers, and then we diverged along the ancient causeway (“road 4,” the Nokugu-Heulugihïtï road) at the “bridge” where it is bisected by ditch 2, near excavation trench 1 (Figure 4.1). The features we see on the ground today, I explained, were likely coupled with palisades or other, perhaps natural, barricades to defend the ancient villages from nikogo (“fierce Indians”). We followed the causeway and entered the ancient great plaza, infested today with tall palms, a common colonizer of etepe and ngiholó ìtupe. Along the way, we looked at bits of patches of “terra preta do índio,” dark earth, filled with pottery, ancient refuse of the ngiholo. We noted how it was heaped in great linear mounds

Fig. 4.1 Reconstruction of Kuhikugu Village, circa A.D. 1500.


along roads or the plaza, where they were one to two meters high all around. We also dug up chunks of the hardpan terra roxa, or “red earth,” where the ancient houses, plazas, and roadways had been. Later I also showed him my excavation trench, the layered dark earths of ancient occupation surfaces and charcoal lenses within them (later C14 dated to between c. A.D. 950 and 1250) and the reddish (natural-colored) overburden thrown up over them on the inside berm. Beneath the thick stratum of in-fill that built up within the ditch, dated to circa A . D . 1500–1800, I pointed out the bright red natural soils. We “popped out” a big rim sherd (weighing about a pound) from the west wall, just above the base of the trough, which perfectly preserved the blood red exterior slip, the slightly grooved marks of quartz pebble burnishing, and the black interior paint (made of charcoal and the sap of a tree they call tiha), which in addition to form and construction are identical to present-day pots, particularly, the contemporary manioc cooking pot—ahukugu. Afukaká considered my arguments as we walked, and after some reflection he told me that he had another akiña (a legend or story) to tell me, one he had not thought of before with respect to Fitsi-fitsi’s gepügü. It was not a story of plazas or roads, parts of my story he understood quite well, like ancient trash middens and pot-sherds, as these are also primary features of contemporary villages, but of something altogether different: palisades. I paraphrase him here. Some time in the distant past, several Kuikuru were out hunting far away from their village. They were taken hostage by hostile ngikogo who brought them to their village, bound them, and chided the prisoners with threats of their imminent deaths. One of the Kuikuru was befriended by the chief ’s daughter who he convinced to untie him and, after telling his companions he would return to avenge their murders, escaped. He leaped a great palisade wall and ditch (maybe two walls) to flee the village. On his return, to avenge his kinsmen, he again leapt the village fortifications to open the village for attack, which was a decisive surprise attack on the enemy village. (see Basso 1995: 105–141 for a more detailed Kalapalo variant of this akiña) The Kuikuru do remember a more volatile time when conflict was more common and typical of macro-regional social relations (Basso 1995: 91–104), but they did not know the trenches at Nokugu were semicircular, that they incised great arcs across the high ground, extending from the water’s edge deep into the once (long ago) forested terra firme and sloping back down to the water. The form of the ditches was defined by Carneiro


and Dole, who lived beside one in 1953–1954. They had made a point of walking its length from one end, where their campsite was on the Lake Lamakuka side, to the other end, where my camp was on the Lake Kuhikugu side. The accurate (unpublished) map they made, and kindly shared with me, led them to the inescapable conclusion that these were ancient systems of defensive moats (Carneiro 1957; Dole 1961/62). Fitsifitsi’s footprints and the linear earthen structures built beside roads and plazas are present in virtually all the major settlement places in the Upper Xingu. The Kuikuru also note the correspondences between the ditches and egepe (dark earth) and egeho (ceramics), but they do not generally see them as ancestor places (ngiholó-ìtupe). I have encountered little surprise, however, when I say that I think they are ancestor places, it makes sense, since the features are much the same in ancient towns and modern villages. The Villas-Boas’s version of the legend (akiña) of Fitsi-fitsi is different from those I heard and, indeed, there is variation in every telling (see, especially, Basso 1984, 1985, 1995), but polysemic and fragmented as “historical” narratives often are, there is much that is often agreed on. I leave it to others more equipped than I to resolve where exactly Fitsi-fitsi resides, or what else his and other tales of heroes, akiña of ngiholo and itseke, tell us about the present.6 These stories tell us much of the ancient past, as well. As the Villas-Boas brothers (1973: 20) noted, “although different peoples and cultures succeeded each other in the region, a real thread of Ariadne holds them together throughout time, so that the most ancient events may be transmitted to us in mythical language.” Much has changed over the long history of the Xinguano peoples, with its many twists and turns, seams in the fabric of history, but a “real thread of Ariadne,” a clear storyline of continuity emerges, the inner-fixedness of traditional or “essential” culture, the “Xinguano way,” entailed in traditional practices and lore and the dispositions of the body in ritual and everyday life (Ireland 2001). The continuity of a historical personage we call the Xingu or Xinguano society, brings to mind Braudel’s (1980: 31) observation that, “within the domain of a particular civilization, the social content can renew itself almost completely without ever reaching certain deep-seated structural characteristics which distinguish it sharply from neighboring civilizations.”

A Thread of Ariadne The archaeological evidence described above defines an epoch of the Xinguano cultural tradition, circa 1400–1600, of unexpected grandeur: an ancient regime, on par with many of the small- to medium-sized polities that dominated much of the world at the time. It suggests a past very


different from what we might expect, given common representations of native Amazonians in anthropological literature and popular media. The Upper Xingu basin was home to a large regional population, numbering in the tens of thousands, extending over an area of at least 20,000 km². Settlements were densely distributed and far more so than during the past century or so. Many of these settlements, some over ten times the size of the largest historically known village (Figure 4.2),7 were structurally elaborated with intentional constructions, principally ditch complexes and the linear mounds (curbs) found alongside causeways and plazas.8 These settlements were integrated through a complex system of roads (curbed highways of at least ten meters wide) and paths, linking settlements through the region and individual communities with gardens, orchards of fruit trees, ports, bridges, camps, and fishing sites, among myriad other special places (Figure 4.3). Earthworks in and between settlements are graphic testimony of sophisticated engineering techniques and the “over-determined” nature of the built environment in ancient settlements, but they also suggest a significant concern for demarcation and defense against diverse “others.”

Fig. 4.2 Aerial photograph of Yakare (X7) (1967). The plaza and cruciform radial roads of the ancient village are visible in the interconnected gardens located in the center of photo; the plaza is in the center of an oval of secondary forest that abuts the eastern margin (right) of the large (> 1km) airstrip.


Fig. 4.3 The North-South road as it passes from X6 to X13 and contemporary Kuikuru village (X12 locality) and its radial paths situated adjacent to Lake Ipatse.

In many respects, ancient settlements and technologies are the same as today, just larger: the concentric and radial settlement pattern, the highly constructed landscapes, plaza rituals, and communal structures. Notably, these physical structures reflect the system of rank and chieftainship affirmed and perpetuated in rituals of world-renewal and chiefly rites of passage. Cultural continuity is clear in many basic ways of life including, housing, spatial organization, manioc agriculture, sedentism and large group size, sophisticated fishing technologies and navigation, regionality, and social hierarchy (principally, Xinguano, Pareci, Bauré, Chané/Guaná/ Terena). It is perhaps easy to lose sight of the massive changes that have transpired over the last millennium, given such dramatic continuity. Xinguanos, like Arawak peoples in the Southern Periphery, generally, practiced extensive wetland modifications to improve sources of potable and bathing water and, particularly, fishing. The Xingu was unique, however, in its lacustrine ecology, as there are few or no lakes in most regions of Amazonia. The entire Ipatse stream channel was a managed landscape, one that was built up over time and was actively maintained, carefully partitioned. The placement of the primary (five) weir embankments on the Ipatse stream (created by Sagakagugu five weirs,


atacas, which he gave to his five fathers-in-law, including Nokugu, who was given the ataca of Itsuva, the outlet of Lake Ipatse; see Chapter 7). The wet season lakes, little more than moist wetlands in the dry season, may well have been more permanent in the past. Against the backdrop of the region, southern Amazonia, the Xingu sequence also reflects very general changes that can be seen in other parts of the diaspora: initial colonization, development, climax, and post-1492 demographic collapse and ethnogenesis. The broad dichotomy created between regional, settled groups of the major rivers and the more mobile and autonomous upland peoples is rooted in the early diaspora and played out in diverse ways across the lowlands. In this case the alterity is often between large, settled Arawaks, such as the riverine Xinguano, Pareci, Bauré, and Guana, and the “predatory” groups that surrounded them, most notably the Tupi-Guarani and Gê speaking peoples (discussed later). The Upper Xingu was the easternmost extent of the Arawak diaspora, including, most notably, the southern Arawaks of the Southern Periphery (Bauré/Pareci/Xinguano) and the upper Paraguay River (Terena/Guana/ Chane). Why the Arawak groups migrated into the upper Xingu, in the first place, is uncertain. It was a significant overland migration between the headwaters of the Tapajos and Xingu rivers, unlike many Arawak movements that simply expanded along the major rivers, and would have involved significant travel in potentially hostile territory. Factionalism and rivalry within and between chiefly lineages, the most common cause of contemporary fissions, may have resulted in long-distance migrations. This schizogenetic process of fissioning, or copy-making at the level of otomo (community), is similar to the process among Austronesians that led Firth (1936) to coin the term “ramage” to describe the social structure underlying such “ramification.” Sahlins (1985) refers to this as “heroic segmentation,” common among non-urban complex societies, including Austronesian, Niger-Congo (Bantu), as well as the Arawak diaspora (Bellwood 1995; Bellwood and Renfrew 2003; Kirch 1984; Heckenberger 2002; McIntosh 1999; Vansina 1990, 1999). Although the exact forms of sociality that led to the colonization of the region by southern Arawak peoples are uncertain, it seems likely given what we know about Xinguano peoples, over the past century or so that status rivalry between “Houses,” within a conical clan-like structure, created internal pressure leading to fission (ramification). This produced a hierarchy between mother and daughter villages, although there is no evidence (archaeological or ethnographic), that local hierarchy and regional (symmetrical) integration was transformed into an enduring regional hierarchy. These competitive rivalries could relate to competition


over scarce economic resources, but in recent times the most common element of status rivalry is competition over power, not wealth. At present, there is no evidence of conquest or displacement of an established Xingu population, although Carib groups (Eastern Complex) may have already been present in the region when the Arawaks came into the area. Archaeological investigations at Tehukugu and Kuguhi (Lake Tafununu), radiocarbon dated to circa A.D. 1500–1600, suggest that both Caribs and Arawaks were not only present in the area together, at least by terminal prehistoric times, but maintained distinctive cultural traditions.9 They and other independent groups, for example, Kamayura, Aueti, Trumai, and Bakairi, among others, were gradually assimilated into the Xinguano (southern Arawak) cultural patterns, notably including plaza village orientation and plaza-rituals.10 Accommodation and acculturation, as Schmidt (1917) noted long ago, are common features of Arawak groups, suggesting that their expansion was commonly, if not typically, peaceful, based on an extension of kinship rather than conquest (Oberg 1949: 53; Pires de Campo 1862: 443). There can be little doubt that a circular plaza configuration was typical throughout the cultural sequence, at least of the earliest Arawak communities, since there are no southern Arawak peoples without them.11 The apparently rapid appearance of various large circular villages circa A.D. 800–900 may represent initial Arawak occupations of the basin or only the easternmost “wave” of colonization within the basin (although this may be an artifact of sampling, since there are several C14 dates pre-dating A.D. 500). Plazas and roads are defined by the large peripheral earthworks and show a lack of dark earth and ceramics in these cleared areas, based on a dozen or more excavations, many dozens of soil-cores, and intensive walkover inspections. A ring of domestic areas, partitioned by roadways, are indicated by the stratified dark earth deposits surrounding the plaza. Although the settlement model of plaza and radial roads, likely coupled with earthworking, was present since the first Xinguano occupations, major curb-building and ditch (re)construction are evident at circa A.D. 1250–1400. Clear evidence of a village with a fixed center throughout the period from after circa A.D. 1250 is available from Nokugu and Heulugihïtï, where intact deposits lying underneath plaza marginal mounds are dated to between A.D. 1000 and 1250, as is also true of ditch 1 and 2 at Nokugu, which were constructed after circa A.D. 1250.12 Thus, the ancient regime reached its climax form through massive reworking of occupations sites and the establishment of regional “galactic” clusters of sites, if this pattern had not already been in place in smaller scale in earlier times (Figure 4.4).


Fig. 4.4 Satellite overview of Kuhikugu (X11) area showing dramatic anthropogenic forest alteration. Note GPS mapped earthworks at X35 and X36 (lower right) and X21 (upper left).

Settlement reorganization and expansion is most obvious at Nokugu, circa A.D. 1250–1400, marking the final phase for precontact Xinguano society: the “climax” or classic ancient regime. This reorganization appears to be pervasive, and involved the construction of the massive ditches and road and plaza curbs over intact living surfaces, creating more or less the final pre-abandonment configuration (c. A.D. 1400–1650). In this reconfiguration, additional occupation areas were opened, notably major residential areas between ditches 1 and 2 in southern Nokugu. A similar galactic configuration characterized Kuhikugu in late pre-Columbian times, by circa A.D. 1500. By the 1400s, the beginning of the climax ancient regime, there was a substantial transformation of the basic cultural pattern manifested most clearly in the construction or, more likely, substantial “upgrading” of monumental earthworks in and around villages. The impetus for this may


have been local circumscription. In other words, the expansive phase of the diaspora had run out, and with no more suitable space (because the Xinguano settlement pattern is very discerning in terms of resources, security, symbolic and social norms, and geographic propinquity) to be opened. Opting to “vote with one’s feet” was restricted to residential moves between established settlements. Regardless of increases in village size related to population nucleation, the construction of substantial fortifications resulted in the physical segmentation of fortified villages. Existing patterns of social hierarchy became more embedded and formalized as higher status groups were better able to maintain their physical proximity to the center of village political and ritual life, the plaza. The social groups that coalesced with established villages and occupied areas some distance from the central plaza, for instance, would be more marginal than original occupants, both socially and physically. After the establishment of physical partitions within villages, social divisions were clearly and more or less permanently and prominently expressed in village spatial organization. The structural elaboration of villages is an extension of a cultural aesthetic of monumentalism, represented in a variety of community structures (e.g., plazas, roads, bridges, men’s houses, and chief ’s houses), but the construction of the massive late prehistoric earthen structures brought this aesthetic of constructing and controlling space to new levels, reaching truly monumental scale. In this context, we also can note that many of the primary “mound-building” cultures of the lowlands (e.g., the Llanos de Mojos, coastal Guiana, middle Orinoco, and the Greater Antilles) correspond to areas historically occupied by Arawak groups. That is to say, albeit speculatively, that the prototypical cultural models of the Arawak, the same that would explain the central plaza configuration characteristic of the southern Arawaks, predisposed local populations to earthworking, artificial landscaping, and other embellishments of the built environment—a monu-mentalité. Cultural memory is also preserved in the material culture, the human body, houses, ritual, village space, and landscape, specifically with respect to how institutional spaces create and recreate persons (as taken up in Part II). The earthworks themselves, however, are particularly critical for understanding late prehistoric societies. The settlement grammars, which in some cases, like Heulugihïtï, are truly crystalline and, like Southwest Pueblos or some Andean peoples (e.g., Nazca geoglyphs or the sacred valley and ceque system of the Inka come immediately to mind), show an over-determination of space that fits easily (in many respects) with the cosmocentric cultural models of Amazonian peoples designed on


idioms of the human body and the cosmos (Descola 2001; Viveiros de Castro 2001). The final major era of later prehistory, or proto-history, from 1492 to 1750, is marked by the collapse of “classic” polities of the ancient regime, the gradual colonization of the region by nonindigenous peoples, and the reconstitution of indigenous regional societies, part local, part foreign and some few entirely one or the other. By circa 1750, most of the major várzea and southern Amazonian chiefdoms had been largely wiped out as discrete sociopolitical entities and in their places were mission and boom-town centers, for extraction of canela (cinnamon), cacao, gold, rubber, and wood, and dispersed indigenous and newcomer populations. Thus, whether or not ethnogenesis was a dominant process in earlier times (pre-1492), as seems certain based on available archaeological evidence today, it was no doubt a predominant force of change in later, post-colonial times, it was the process quite typical after 1750, as discussed in Chapter 5. Regardless of what factors got them there and how exactly this was transformed, the early Arawak colonists established a cultural pattern that continues to the present day and into which other immigrant groups (Carib, Tupian, and others) have become acculturated; this is indicative of the powerful centrifugal (acculturative) force of the Arawak regional systems. This conclusion seems inescapable given a careful reading of the regional ethnology of the Southern Periphery, demonstrating the remarkable continuities between Arawak groups throughout the southern Amazon.

Ancient Xinguano Regime as Galactic Polity In several important essays, Tambiah (1985) describes the “galactic” nature of polity in Southeast Asia. Based on the imagery of the mandala as “geometrical, topographical, cosmological, and societal blueprints” (Ibid.: 253), the galactic polity stands “for an arrangement of a center and its satellites and [is] employed in multiple contexts” (Ibid.: 258). The galactic model, as a collective representation, not only describes a pattern of “satellites arranged around a center,” which could equally describe a settlement pattern conforming to the formal tenets of central-place models (following Christaller 1966), but it is a “radial mapping” that codes “in a composite way [the] cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features” of the polity (Tambiah: 252–258). Such “center-oriented constructs” situate sacred and political power in the marked and exalted human bodies, chiefly or kingly persons who act as the mediating link between the cosmos, composed of divine ancestors (culture heroes) and other ‘dawn time’ beings, and the earthly plane of humans and lesser beings


(Ibid.: 255–256). The polyvalent meanings of the construct cannot be disaggregated and as a totality, a “scheme that simultaneously has cosmological, ritual, sexual, and practical ramifications,” it “cannot be reduced to a simple causal explanation” (Ibid.: 253–255). Tambiah’s intent in framing the idea of the galactic polity, was an attempt to overcome a simple ecofunctional determinism, which requires no historical or cultural specificity and which sees sociality and polity as an epiphenomenon of (pure) bodily requirements of individual and social groups, including the “laissez-faire utilitarianism as portrayed by the ‘central place’ theory” (Ibid.: 280) and as such has important implications for considering cultural complexity in Amazonia. The issues of political power and how they relate to corporeal discipline and spatial organization are taken up in Part II, but it is important here to consider these in relation to the galactic structure of ancient regime settlement patterns that is unique in the Xingu cultural sequence. The model shares elements of other models of so-called divine or “kingly” power,13 but the galactic polity model, in particular, resonates strongly with the patterns observed for the settlement clusters of the Xinguano ancient regime. Particularly relevant is the regonition that the “wider encompassing polity as such is constituted according to an elaborate design of center and satellites and of successive bipartitions of various kinds” (Ibid.: 253) or, other words, that “the geometry of the galactic polity is manifest as a recurring design at various levels that the analyst labeled cosmological, territorial, administrative, politico-economic, but of which the accurate exegesis is that this recurring design is the multifaceted polyvalence built into the dominant indigenous concepts” (Ibid.: 280). Tambiah (Ibid.: 276) refers to this redundancy as stereotypy, the tendency of duplication, which he relates it to Weber’s concept of “typification.” This is discussed below in relation to the serial or “cascading” aspects of symbolic and social reproduction in indigenous cultural systems in Amazonia, what Wagner (1991) calls the “fractal person” in Near Oceania. Furthermore, the idea that the system represents, if not resolves, basic contradictions between unity and division, power and resistance is reproduced at levels of house, plaza, and the galactic polity itself (a topic considered in Part II): “On the one hand, there is a faithful reproduction on the reduced scale of the center in its outlying components, on the other, the satellites pose the constant threat of fission and incorporation in another sphere of influence” (Tambiah: 261). In fact, the idea of an exemplary center and a radial mapping also describes the basic nature of Xinguano plaza villages, whereby the nodes are the major houses at cardinal points of the large, circular plazas, and the exemplary centers are the core area of the plaza itself, the settings or stages


for ritual, public, and social drama, theaters “in the round” (Agostinho 1974; Gregor 1977; see Chapter 9). Contemporary Xinguano villages are by and large independent entities; however, in the Kuikuru case there is an informal hierarchy between the mother village (Ipatse) and its two satellite villages. Recently (2001–2002), for instance, there was debate over the burial place of a primary chiefly individual from the recent splinter village of Afukeri, founded in 1997. After some consternation on both sides, it was decided to bury him at Ipatse, the mother village. Today, there is also a small village at the old village site of Lahatua, consisting of three houses (in 2002). What seems to be critical here is the hierarchy established by the grandeur of the ancestors buried there, which creates a social and cosmological ranking of closely related villages. Today each village is its own master, and it is therefore difficult to envision (through analogy) how different plaza villages linked in the ancient regime integrated clusters. Nonetheless, the galactic ordering is clear: exemplary center and four major satellites, with secondary satellites linked to each, as represented in both the Ipatse and Kuhikugu clusters (Figure 4.5). Heulugihïtï is somewhat unique, in its apparent “vacantness,” with very limited residential debris restricted to the plaza marginal mound and adjacent road mounds and intervening areas. It appears to represent a gateway community or hub. It is not marked by a peripheral moat and is a small settlement in residential scale, perhaps some five hectares around the main plaza and in a few areas along major roads. It seems overdetermined for its residential size, only a fraction of the residential area of Nokugu or Akagahïtï. What is particularly striking about Heulugihïtï is the complexity and crystalline character of the road and plaza networks. It is a settlement largely of plazas and roads and little residential areas, and perhaps represents something like a sacred center of the Ipatse cluster. There is significant evidence of wetland modification along Ipatse stream where it contacts the site edge, but this is poorly understood at present and does not change the fact that the site is not only centrally located between the four major residential sites, with the cardinally oriented major roads leading to each.14 There was obviously a more fixed gradation of ritual activities and exclusionary tactics of ancient regime communities than in recent times, given the galactic configuration of regional clusters with a clear ranking order of settlements. The question of the institutional and social basis of these regional configurations is uncertain, but Heulugihïtï, at least, appears to be a unique settlement, a hub linking the four primary plaza communities and smaller satellite plaza villages. It is critical to understanding the galactic organization, as an exemplary core and cosmo-


Fig. 4.5 Schematic of Ipatse and Kuhikugu Cluster (black circles are primary centers, dark gray are secondary centers, and small plaza communities denoted by light gray circles).


logical center of a regional system, a plaza without a village, because it serves to link the major Houses of the cluster (X6, X17 and X18, at least). It is clearly different, with it over-determined monumentality and the crystalline cardinality of its orientations, more so than even much larger sites such as Nokugu, which seems to be the primary residential center of the Ipatse cluster. Akagahïti, Hatsikugi, and Agikuangaku are apparently secondary centers, smaller and less elaborated than the complex settlements of Nokugu and Kuhikugu, but large nonetheless (perhaps ten to thirty hectares of residential area). Tertiary centers like Séku, Séhu, and Intagu (perhaps three to ten hectares) apparently shared features of their basic economy, insofar as there is notable anthropogenic forest alteration, soil (egepe) formation and alteration, and areas of domestic archaeological remains. It is interesting to note that the relation between the two largest residential centers (X6 and X18) and the plaza is the same as between the two primary factions (chiefly Kindreds or “Houses”) in the contemporary village of Ipatse. This basic radial model is characterized by exemplary centers and satellites oriented to the cardinal directions in galactic polities and plaza villages. But, whereas the expression of this “ethnophysics” is today limited to plazas, “Houses,” radial paths, and countryside of single settlements the regional galactic pattern typical of prehistoric times, great and small plaza settlements, were linked by major roads and positioned at regular intervals, about every two to three miles. The cluster at Kuhikugu shows us a slightly different scenario, where the hub or gateway community, in this case the site of Kuhikugu (X11), is both the ritual and social center integrating through its radial road systems the other four major residential sites (X33 through X36). It is also the largest residential site in the cluster (larger even than Nokugu in the Ipatse cluster). It was a loose politico-economic hierarchy of beauty, value, genealogy, and affinity, a “political economy of grandeur,” (Sahlins 1990) rather than a politico-economic-administrative hierarchy of classic central place theory. Each of these settlements has plazas and, as ancestor grounds, the social prominence of these settlements was determined, to a large degree, by the prominence of the ancestors—which fixes in place the social hierarchies represented in the bodies of chiefly and other persons. Here, then, the question arises: Was Heulugïhitï the place of unusually great chiefly persons (the highest ranking ancestors), and as such the foundational site of the galactic cluster? We can only speculate presently, but the exceptional monumentality and lack of residential density suggests that it was substantially different and uniquely integrative within the regional galactic cluster. Nonetheless, ancient regime settlements were much larger and elaborate than those of today, which seldom exceed three hundred persons, and


there can be no doubt that economic and administrative inequalities existed and provided some foundation for differential political power. The “first-order” towns, for instance, can have several plazas, complicated networks in inner-village causeways and pathways, multiple bathing areas, earthen ramparts corresponding to entryways, and curbed or raised roads leading out across the landscapes to other villages and, ultimately, towns. Some of these settlements almost surely numbered in the low thousands, at least.15 The scale and intensity of communication between these villages, linked through a complicated road system in a virtually unbroken latticework across the Upper Xingu basin, is clearly evidenced by the and a common material culture and settlement pattern. The largest of the fortified villages was quite large, up to forty to fifty hectares, in the case of Nokugu (X6) and Kuhikugu (X11) and a little less (< 25 ha) in the case of Akagahïtï, Hatsikugi, and Agikuangaku, or the Kuhikugu cluster sites (Asahïtï/Ugotahïtï, Kaguho, Kuhugupe, Apalaci and Maijeinei). Tertiary plaza satellites like Séhu, Séku, or Intagu, each some five to ten hectares, lacked ditches.16 Earlier villages, prior to what we might call the galactic period, may well have been large and permanent, as well, but the scale of earthworks and the settlements physically defined by them leaves no doubt that the pre-Columbian societies that built them had substantial populations and no intention of abandoning their villages. Residential occupations, like today, gravitated toward and occupy virtually all sides of the central plazas, and are distributed across the entire area throughout the area defined by the ditches. Anthropogenic soils decrease in darkness and thickness as one moves from the central plaza towards peripheral portions of the settlement (to the point of being absent in many areas directly inside the peripheral ditches). This suggests that more marginal areas (away from the plaza) were likely occupied more briefly and less intensively, likely more or less coincident with ditch and causeway construction. The area between ditches one and two at Nokugu, for instance, appears to have been occupied late, perhaps after the construction of ditch one, radiocarbon dated to circa A.D. 1400.17 Nokugu and Kuhihugu, and similar large sites at the mouth of the Tuatuari or at Morená, would likely be called towns according to European standards of the day, within an urban ecology of the galactic clusters. The geometry of exemplary center, major nodes and satellites, is radically different from classic central-place models of economic and administration of basic resources, raw goods from the periphery and finished goods from the center, including regular secular taxation, but it seems just as likely that each node and satellite, like each village and to a large degree each household was independent economically, and administrative functions


were tied not to economic wealth but to the accumulation of symbolic capital through major rituals: if it is worth thinking of these clusters as an Amazonian variant of urbanism, and their raw numbers may well put them into the range (Flannery 1994 suggests five thousand for New World cities). The “galactic polity” model shares much in common with Geertz’s (1980) celebrated idea of the “theater state” in its focus on ritual as the integrating force of the state and the organization of the state according to exemplary centers and kingship, as opposed to the economic or administrative character of classic “central-place” models. It also shares features with Sahlin’s (1985) equally celebrated discussions of the “divine” (ancestral) authority of chiefs and kings or queens in the “heroic societies” of Polynesia and elsewhere. Indeed, such a “power from within” is likewise considered characteristic of the “ritual phase of political economy,” among the chieftaincies of sub-Saharan Africa (McIntosh 1999; Rowlands 1987; Southall 1999). Thus, the primary “glue” that holds the polity together is symbolic and social, as well as techno-economic heterogeneity and administrative integration. As Geertz (1980: 13) notes of the “theater state”: “court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of ritual.” Today there are a dozen large plaza settlements (i.e., ritually and politically autonomous) and very few smaller settlements, and it is easy to get the impression of limited or nonexistent social hierarchy, assuming that politics is “heterarchical.” But, while regional relations and settlement patterns do not fit the central-place model of ranked economic or administrative functional differences between centers and satellites, as originally described by Crumley 1987, we cannot lose sight of clear hierarchy of social values and symbolic difference marked, not in economic and administrative control or direct coercion (power over), but in ritual and ancestor places. In recent times, power centers have shifted from one community to another, in terms of their relative power (the clear influence of Western administrators, 1950–1990, is important to mention here). This asymmetry was temporary, and within the regional system villages exist in relative parity, although integrated through a formal pattern of peer-community interaction, including intermarriage, exchange, and particularly the intercommunity chiefly rituals. Nonetheless, same idea of an overarching chief—referred to as “our chief ” by the current Kuikuru village chief—is present. It is difficult to say why villages were structurally elaborated, although there is evidence of population growth and nucleation, but the structural changes directly reflect village segmentation, politco-ritual centralization,


and exclusivity. The construction of such durable divisions within villages, perhaps made social divisions less susceptible to redefinition. Undoubtedly, there was social mobility between groups and considerable factional rivalry between (or centered on) the more powerful chiefs and high- ranking families, but the capacity to control public activities, ritual and political process, already physically centralized, not only became more objectified or embedded through physical proximity of certain social groups to the plaza (the heart of village ritual and political life), but also subjectively preserved, through the capacity of chiefs to control access to the sphere of public affairs and ritual knowledge necessary to direct it and to pass this differentially onto others, such as their sons. The sons of chiefs were “groomed” by their fathers to take office and had privileged access not only to prestige but to the crucial information and esoteric knowledge needed to do so, and a regional dimension, insofar as chiefs mediate, if not control, interactions between the village and the external world. The symbolic hierarchy and rudimentary political economy that exists today, separating chiefs (anetï) from commoners, was more developed in the hands of the ancient chiefs. The concentration of symbolic capital in discrete “containers of power,” such as plazas and the major houses, was regionally ranked, including small, medium, and large plazas. Not only are centers defined spatially, according to a logic of the human body (right-left) and cardinality, but also personally, through reference to the persons the plaza embodies, buried ancestors and those ranking chiefs who are becoming ancestors, and who are, following Sahlins’s (1991) terms, “living ancestors.” The cascade of sacred rank and politico-economic might is graphically displayed in spatial idioms of centers, plazas, and roads, and surely the chain of command was more elaborately graded, if not rigidly defined, than today. There was, as is also characteristic of the “galactic polity” or “theater state”: “the relation of chiefs to shanans and other great persons, chiefs to the material world, and chiefs to other chiefs. In the Upper Xingu this involves the (generally private) cosmic power of shaman (and witches) juxtaposed against the (generally public) ancestral power of chiefs, the relation of ranking chiefs to their communities (otomo), in terms of their ability to mobilize labor and resources for major ritual, and the relations—always competitive—between chiefs and chiefly kindreds within and between villages, within the anetão (chiefly) rank. Thus, the critical thing being stored displayed, and redistributed is symbolic capital, not economic capital, and the “rank-ordering” is specifically tied to the cosmic rituals of chief-making, “replacing ancestors.” The symbolic economy of power is thus based on the ritualization that is meant “to ‘image’ to cosmological truths of the society” (Tambiah 1984:


317, citing Geertz 1980: 116). As Lévi-Strauss (1963) noted long ago, embedded in its very nature, the central plaza, concentrating as it does both cultural memory and physical resources in the form of symbolic and cultural capital, contains in itself contradictory principles of hierarchy and equality, unity and division, and is a succinct encapsulation of primary schemes of the body, gender, society, topography, society, and political economy. Although the kernel of this pattern, the central plaza, is retained in the contemporary system (see Chapter 9), nowhere in the Upper Xingu today is there anything as “galactic” as the structures of ancient regime settlement clusters, with multiple villages, getting smaller and smaller, as one moves from primary centers, like X6 or X11. The formal properties of central-place models seem out of place in Amazonia, even though some very notable cases of centers, if not capitals, are known in the region, such as the great plaza centers, like Santarem, Açutuba near Manaus, or Gavan in the western Orinoco, or the Marajoara mound clusters, with dozens of domestic mounds located up- and downstream from great central mounds groups (Heckenberger et al. 1999; Roosevelt 1991, 1999; Schaan 1997, 2004; Spencer and Redmond 1992). All show features of regional “centers,” nested amidst a variety of “satellite” communities. But, as Browder and Godfrey (1997) note, the formal central-place model, envisioned by Christaller (1966) and others based on feudal European city-countryside systems (Giddens 1984), seems out of place in Amazonia. Here we might note that both Service’s model of ecological variation and redistribution and Christaller’s central-place theory focus on the “functional role of towns as centers for the supply of goods and services to a surrounding rural population” (Browder and Godfrey 1997: 23). But surely their model of “disarticulated urbanism” does not seem to fit well the galactic system of ancient regime Xinguano polities, with its hyper-articulated centers and nodes. To measure Xinguano (or Amazonian, for that matter) settlement patterns according to a rank-order calculus derived from feudal or early modern Europe (e.g., cities, towns, villages, hamlets and wilderness) may seem inappropriate to describe the late precolonial Xinguano nation. However, in terms of hierarchies of persons (“heads”) or the town-countryside dichotomy as an organizing principle in the unequal division of resources and definition of status (i.e., power), the model is not inappropriate. What is in error is the assumption of economic-administrative centralization, rather than persons and the making and unmaking of them in the plaza ritual. Here, it seems that ritual, rather than economy, commonly, if not typically, underlies such a political economy, the “ritual phase of political economy” (Southall 1999), finds in “early” or “inchoate” states and chiefdoms.


The Inka, we might note, also made much over such mnemonics calculations; they, too, ordered their world with respect to a concentric and decimal logic. The quipu, the key to the accounting that underpinned Inkan bureaucracy and administration, was just such a “radial-mapping,” much like a circular plaza in visual qualities or form (Urton 2003). The “Land of the Four Corners” might also be seen as a galactic model, of sorts. The highland-lowland comparison has drawn the attention of many Americanists (e.g., Fabian 1992; Hornborg 1990; Isbell 1976; Lathrap 1985; Lathrap et al. 1975; Levi-Strauss 1961, 1963; Turner 1996; Zeidler 1998; Zuidema 1964, 1982, 1990) and in light of its central plaza, and the radial and quadrapartite partitioning of space, and sacred origin place (Morená), the Upper Xingu provides excellent parallels.

War and Peace in the Age of Inka In the mid-1400s, contemporary with the galactic clusters of the Xinguano ancient regime, the first Inka, Pachacuti (“He Who Remakes the World”) emerged victorious in struggles for power in the central Andes and began his campaign of expansionism. By the time of Columbus’s voyages, the Inka empire was, by any measure of imperial craft and reach, one of the largest empires of the ancient world, much larger, in fact, than the kingdoms and principalities of Western Europe. Imperialism was not new to the South American continent, and nascent world systems had fluctuated in size as core theaters of power in Mexico and Peru (“nuclear America”) waxed and waned during the millennium before preceding European arrivals. As influence shifted, a cascading gradient of primary (under direct control), secondary (direct interaction) and tertiary (“tribal zones”) peripheries extended across much of the continent. Amazonia was a periphery, like North America (Kehoe 1998), and a distant one for the most part, and the lowlands was also a world unto itself, with its own multicephalic and diffuse systems of regional interaction, and its own historical personages and agents of change. The Upper Xingu was surely a “center” in the regional landscape of the southern Amazon, a “hot-spot”,18 although direct influence by Andean states in the southern Amazonian lowlands seems unlikely. Still, the political and military impact of expanding states on adjacent areas cannot be ignored. Interaction with Andean states, including the “Aymara Kingdoms,” and earlier Tiwanaku expansionism (Isbell and McEwan 1991; Kolata 1993), as well as the Inka, likely not only transformed, but likely intensified warfare in adjacent sub-Andean areas, both before and after the primary period of Inkan expansion (c. A.D. 1440–1520). This process of “warrification” likely impacted vast areas, because “the influence of states


typically extends far beyond their frontiers into a ‘tribal zone’ that is rife with conflict of various sorts” (Ferguson 1990: 239, 1995: 15). Furthermore, whatever barrier the tropical forest posed for Andean peoples (cf. Lyon 1981), much of lowland Bolivia, the Chaco and Central Brazil did not pose the same restrictions. Whether developments in the Andes or the Bolivian lowlands had any effect whatsoever on sociopolitical changes in the Upper Xingu is an open question. Indeed, it is very doubtful that the direct influence of Inka warriors, tradesmen, or diplomats had reached the southern Amazonian periphery. Direct archaeological indicators of long distance exchange, regional or interregional, are poorly known in the Southern Periphery, but rich deposits of precious ores and gems, which some groups used for ornaments (Nimuendajú 1948a: 310), and a wide array of goods, such as tropical forest bird feathers and fine hardwoods, that circulated in regional trade networks in later times suggests such networks were in place. Thus, although the possible influence of expansionist states—empires—on distant peoples certainly cannot be overlooked, given what we might expect in “tribal zones” (Dincauze and Hasenstab 1989; Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Kehoe 1998), late prehistoric interaction must be understood in the narrower social universe of the Upper Xingu and adjacent areas, particularly groups to the north (Tupi) and south (Gê). Concrete archaeological and ethnohistoric data from the southern Amazon are scattered and often ambiguous,19 but mounting evidence suggests that, on the whole, Amazonia was “heating up” politically by the time Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century (DeBoer 1981; Myers 1981; Porro 1996; Whitehead 1994). In other words, intense regional and interregional social interaction, including communication, exchange, alliance and conflict, were primary features of social landscapes across the lowlands. Data from the Upper Xingu demonstrate that prehistoric villages were not only large and permanent, but that they were tightly integrated into a large regional system of interaction that, in turn, articulated with similar systems in a broad regional context. We may not be able to attach proper names to the antagonists, but it is possible to generally elucidate the forces and players operating within the often capricious social universe of the Southern Periphery. First, the defensive posture and permanent villages of the Upper Xingu contrasts markedly with the offensive military tactics and more mobile settlement patterns of southern Amazonian Tupian and Central Brazilian Gê-Bororo groups. It seems likely that the prehistoric ancestors of these macro-cultural traditions were the ones who most directly impacted ancient Xinguano villages.20


The ancient Xinguano settlements were carefully engineered according to an overall plan of ditch, road, bridge and plaza placement that created an integrated system of defense. Defensive structures existed within settlements, as well as around them. Regardless of other functions, the raised road and plaza marginal mounds, interior ditches (including canoe ports) and perhaps other architectural features served as prominent barriers within villages. Thus, if an invading force succeeded in traversing the village peripheral ditch complex, the first line of defense, their movements within villages were restricted and, indeed, invaders could easily find themselves in a vulnerable “cross-fire” position between other areas of the site already alerted to the threat. The requirements of large-scale warfare and public works, including defensive features, undoubtedly promoted stronger patterns of leadership, political centrality and social hierarchy within villages than is known ethnographically (Carneiro 1993a, 1995; Dole 1961/62). Local political rivalry, revenge feuds or territorial disputes related to competition for resources (e.g., agricultural land and fishing areas) may well have occasionally escalated into violent conflicts between Upper Xingu communities. The proximity of the fortified villages (separated by as little as five kilometers) and their linkages through road and path networks indicates that the principal threat was not from immediate neighbors. Likewise, the lack of apparent village clustering or “no-man’s lands” indicates that warfare was not carried out by one allied group of villages against another such group. Furthermore, the non-offensive pattern of intergroup interaction, based in strategies of defense, avoidance, deterrence, and accommodation, has historically been a key feature—actually, the basic cultural pattern—of Xinguano regional society (Gregor 1990, 1994). Such an ideology of generally peaceful interaction, resorting to aggression only when provoked, would seemingly preclude the type of prolonged or pervasive conflicts (within the Upper Xingu basin) that would prompt the construction of substantial fortifications. This is not to deny the existence of conflicts between diverse local interest groups, including perhaps entire communities, but it seems much more likely that the pervasive threat that prompted village fortification pertained to culturally distinctive groups (external warfare) on the peripheries of the Upper Xingu basin and beyond. Thus, as Gregor (1996: ix) notes, even, “[a] non-aggressive culture faced with a warlike neighbor faces a bitter choice: submit or resist … [and, thus] war turns out to be catching,” even if that resistance is largely non-offensive. A Xinguano cultural ethos of accommodation is also suggested by the cohabitation of the Upper Xingu basin by Arawaks (Western Complex)


and Caribs (Eastern Complex) in the time just prior to European contact. The later contraction of the Arawak/Carib frontier, from east to west of the Culuene River, and the postcontact immigration of numerous other groups into the Upper Xingu, likewise provide other historical instances of what Schmidt considered a basic Arawak trait: acculturation. Although initially social relations between immigrant groups and Xinguanos were hostile, in many cases (Trumai, Aueti, Kamayura), social relations ultimately became more peaceful. Overall, this process leads to a reduction of social and cultural distance and brings to mind Lévi-Strauss’s (1976) general observation, based on Xinguanos (among other groups), that conflict (including threat or fear of violence) and exchange (i.e., peaceful interaction) are two faces of the same dialectic social process, a process that overall has an integrating effect. Thus, the dramatic defensive measures taken by late prehistoric Upper Xingu communities were not, I believe, the result of chronic warfare within the basin. Major internecine warfare is virtually unknown among Xinguanos over the past 150 years or so, and intra- and intercommunity aggression strictly involves raids within the internal witchcraft retaliation complex. The more prestigious or “larger” the offended person is, the larger the “social breach,” and within chiefly families, it may involve large execution or retaliation parties (Coelho 2001). Within closely linked clusters such as Ipatse and Kuhikugu, open conflict was likely rare and brief. Pre-Columbian Xinguano settlements, like contemporary villages, are regularly spaced along forest margins, and road linkages connecting all nineteen archaeological settlements in the study area also suggested continuity with the generalized “pax xinguana” in earlier times, as well. A lack of a “no-man’s lands” (such as was found at Séku, Séhu, and Meijeinei), between the Ipaste and Kuhikugu primary clusters, suggests that, although there may have likely been skirmishes, within the witchcraft-executionretaliation complex, there was no chronic warfare between neighboring settlements or settlement clusters. This does not mean that the earthen partitions built in prehistoric settlements, including the massive moats, were not also built to define social others within the orbit of each cluster and between galactic clusters, as well as individual settlements. Carib oral histories recount times of violent conflicts when they lived east of the Culuene River (c. A.D. 1500–1750). These oral histories clearly implicate both Tupian (“cannibals”) and Gê groups as the aggressors, as discussed in more detail later, although Carib groups, recently arrived in the southern Amazon (post-1500) also have raided the Upper Xingu villages repeatedly, in contrast to the Bakairi, who have always maintained kinship with Xinguanos. Although oral histories do not generally portray


Xinguanos (at least Carib and Arawak communities of the time) as the aggressors in these conflicts, the figure of the “bow-master” (tehaku oto, a special group of adept bow warriors) in local narratives suggests that these groups were prepared to retaliate against aggressors (Basso 1995: 91–141, 157–189). It is notable that Xinguanos do not use war clubs or other sole-purpose weapons so common among surrounding groups (Verswijver 1992). Peaceful relations were likely as tense and precarious as they are today (Gregor 1990), but there is no evidence for an offensive military strategy, such as that known in neighboring Gê-Bororo or Tupian groups, among either the Carib or Arawakan Xinguanos. What, then, can we say about Xinguano warfare, or that of the Southern Periphery, for that matter? The wrong question to ask, I think, is what caused it. Even if there is a primary correlation between the construction of defensive ditches and warfare, then the pattern was very long-lived, because the ditches were in use since the earliest Xinguano occupations one thousand years ago or more. A slightly better question is: what was the nature and scale of warfare? Attack forces may have ranged into the hundreds, as known from later times (c. 1750–1900) in areas adjacent to the Upper Xingu in Amazonia (Nimuendajú 1948a: 318) and Central Brazil (Flowers 1994: 261), if not thousands, although small “hit-and-run” raids on Xinguanos outside of their villages is surely possible. Xinguanos, like the southern Arawak peoples in general, are densely settled, nonpredatory, farming and fishing people, integrated into large regional societies along the major headwater tributaries of the Amazon. They have an ideology that promotes generally peaceful relations among themselves. Although the details of warfare cannot be currently defined, it is possible to address who they might have been defending themselves against: affines and enemies, outsiders. It is here that I would seek the “causes” of war, the varied ideologies that underlie the maintenance of collective identities, prestige, and inter-group interaction. The more fruitful question then is what warfare, or simply public works, tell us about sociality. It tells us much about the inside of society, the insides of settlements, their social synapses, and the skin of the land around them. It also tells us about social “others,” about affines, and potential affines, and about enemies, about others within settlements and others outside. To put a finer point on it: they are everything that predatory societies are not. As suggested by regional ethology and Xinguano oral tradition, Xinguanos were defending themselves, in all likelihood, against macro-Gê and macro-Tupians, since it was only these groups who have attacked them in living memory (except, of course, whites). Although internally diversified, similarities within the broad Tupian and Gê cultural traditions


extend beyond linguistic relatedness. Warfare is one cultural feature that unites diverse groups within each of these two (non-Xinguano) cultural macro-traditions and, in fact, the prevalence of offensive warfare is a cultural trait broadly shared by these two distinctive macro-traditions (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 5). In both cases, bellicosity is a basic cultural value and a critical element of cultural identity and well-being (Fausto 2001: 535). Attitudes regarding aggression and violent conflict, distinguish Xinguanos from both the southern Amazon Tupi and the central Brazilian Gê-Bororo. In sharp contrast to these groups, the concept of aggression and, particularly, the killing of other human beings, is repulsive and polluting, foreign to Xinguanos. In practice, Xinguanos have historically maintained a practice of “pacificity”; that is, nonpredation and accommodation are basic to Xinguano identity and are basic features separating Xinguanos from others. Xinguano peoples are committed to their villages and therefore, have adopted military strategies that reflected their sedentism. These included expending much energy on defense, furthering the commitment to a specific location, and perhaps adopting a “good neighbor” policy. The sedentism and defensive posture of Upper Xinguano groups can be related in part to their ecological adaptation to fishing and manioc agriculture. As Basso (1973: 27) puts it: In contrast to their Tupi- and Gê-speaking neighbors, who place positive value on eating meat, the pursuit of hunting, and an aggressive masculinity associated with that pursuit, the members of Upper Xingu society reject these values and adopt the opposite moral code: Fishing and agriculture, rather than hunting, are the proper male subsistence activities, and pacificity and generosity are the ideals of behavior. The interplay of these diverse aspects of sociocultural life, such as settled village life, fishing and manioc agriculture, and an ethos of pacificity not only define the distinctive Xinguano culture but distinguish it from Tupians and Gê, who are more mobile, place little or no emphasis on fishing or extensive agriculture, particularly in their cosmologies, and are notoriously bellicose (see Fausto 2001: 510-17 for one comparison). These differences in patterns of mobility and warfare, may be attributed to ecological variation (Gross 1979; Ross 1978; Zarur 1979; but see Bamberger 1967), but also relate to the specific cultural histories of these peoples, including their deep pasts (which may be traced through three large, separate diasporas) and the settling into regional systems of interaction—that cannot help but map over the ecological choices of initial settlers: Arawaks


are lowlanders and settled river people, Tupians and Gê are highlanders and often move widely across the landscape. The Xinguanos, in fact, are among the few ethnographic examples of “peaceful” societies worldwide (Gregor 1990), but historically their pacifism certainly cannot be attributed to an isolation from violence. Both oral narratives and especially archaeological evidence suggest that violent conflict was a paramount concern to prehistoric and historic communities in the region (cf. Basso 1995; Villas-Boas and Villas-Boas 1973). The fact remains, however, that historically the Xinguanos have been largely peaceful and accommodating towards their neighbors. As Gregor (1990: 106) notes, since 1884, “there is no evidence of warfare among Xingu groups … [although] there have been instances of sorcery killings across tribal [village] lines, and rare defensive reactions to assaults from the war-like tribes outside of the basin, there is no tradition of violence among the Xingu communities.” Most Gê-Bororo groups traditionally existed in a state of actual or potential conflict with most of their neighbors, including intra- and intergroup and long-distance aggressions, including with other Indian groups and neo-Brazilians alike (Flowers 1983; Maybury Lewis 1979; Nimuendajú 1946, 1967; Turner 1991, 1992). Alliances among Gê are common, but often temporary and not embedded in a necessary ritual and sociosymbolic integration (Crocker 1985: 71; Nimuendajú 1942: 74; see Chapter five). The well developed age-grades and special societies (i.e., warrior class) of most Gê-Bororo societies facilitated the rapid mobilization of these large war parties (Zarur 1986). Although revenge was often the explicit motivation for warfare, the entire adult population of an enemy village might be killed and the children taken captive (Nimuendajú 1942: 78). Regardless of the expression of intragroup animosities, all Gê-Bororo groups place “a high value on bellicosity” and are generally involved in conflicts with most of their neighbors (Maybury Lewis 1974: 306). Xinguano narratives describe attacks by “cannibal” peoples (Basso 1995), likely Tupian peoples that dominated the southern Amazonia uplands and, generally, were fairly mobile, often leaving their fixed villages during the dry season for hunting or raids against enemy villages. Fish and fishing are insignificant in the Tupian religious system, and men think of themselves as hunters, not as gardeners or fishermen, as Murphy and Murphy (1985) note for the Mundurucu. Most important, Tupian groups show a wide variety of social morphologies, unlike the Gê, but their patterns of offensive warfare, what Viveiros de Castro (1992: 274) calls the “bellicoreligious” or “predatory” complex. Essential to this is ritual “anthropophagy,” the taking of trophy heads or some symbolic equivalent


(Fausto 2001: 456–463; Menget 1993b; Murphy and Murphy 1985: 104–106); that is, an essential aspect of Tupian warfare is the transference of hostilities to outsiders. This not only creates an external outlet for hostilities, but, according to Murphy (1957; 1960: 149, 180), promotes internal social cohesion. Viveiros de Castro (1996: 11) has referred to this intergroup warfare as a “symbolic economy of alterity,” whereby there is a “strategic distinction between local endogamous networks and the politicoreligious structures of interlocal articulation.” This separates Tupian from Gê warfare insofar as the internal (intra-group) level of warfare is pronounced in some Gê groups (e.g., Kayapó, Shavante, Sherente), but seldom reported among the Tupians. The Tupians seek to “hunt” enemies for their heads or as captives, often killing and consuming the adult male prisoners. As is typical with Gê groups, Tupian villages form long-standing alliances for war or intervillage cooperation (Murphy 1960:127). The goals of warfare were not only the capture of one or a few individuals for ritual headtaking, but also the destruction of entire enemy villages (Murphy and Murphy 1985: 30). Mobility also distinguishes Xinguanos from their Tupian and Gê neighbors. Whereas Xinguanos and other culturally related Southern Periphery groups (e.g., Pareci, Bakairi), at least based on what we know of the past two to three centuries, are content, even intent, on staying put in permanent year-round villages, the Tupi and Gê groups often engage in raids and treks that take them away from their villages for months or even years. Although sometimes occupying large, relatively long-term settlements, these Tupian and Ge groups easily alter their settlement pattern and adopt more mobile patterns of trekking or “wandering” or inhabit smaller, shorter-term settlements (Flowers 1994). They have dramatically altered their subsistence patterns for increased mobility, for instance, growing crops that require a shorter growing season and/or less maintenance (Balée 1995; Viveiros de Castro 1992). Prehistoric patterns of warfare in southern Amazonia were clearly different than those documented historically, but it seems certain that the area north of the Upper Xingu was dominated by Tupian peoples and the south the Gê-Bororo. It is also reasonable to assume that the “bellico-religious,” or predatory, complex was, as Viveiros de Castro (1992) suggests, part and parcel of the Tupian mentalité throughout the region. And, indeed, evidence from all quarters suggests that the Tupi-Guarani diaspora, and other more restricted Tupian dispersals (principally, Mundurucu and Juruna), began in the southern Amazon, particularly in the area between the middle to upper Madeira and the middle to lower Xingu


rivers (Urban 1992: 92; Viveiros de Castro 1992: 36). These war parties sometimes numbered in the hundreds (Nimuendajú 1948a: 318). The Tupian groups and particularly the Tupi-Guarani are likewise renowned for their patterns of migration and dispersals. Tupian groups had long been dispersed throughout southern Amazonia (Brochado 1984; Viveiros de Castro 1992) and had migrated into central Brazil from the south by A.D. 1500 (Métraux 1927; Susnik 1975; Wüst 1994: 102). Regardless of actual territorial expansion, the capacity of both Gê-Bororo and Tupian peoples to raid over vast distances is well known historically. The foot warriors of central Brazil and the adjacent southern Amazon could amass large war parties, sometimes numbering in the low hundreds, and these ranged widely across the broad region, for instance, the longdistance raids of Mundurucu against colonial outposts over five hundred kilometers away (Lower Amazon) or Kayapó against the Juruna, both covering hundreds of kilometers (Murphy 1957; Verswijver 1982, 1992). Indeed, the well-known sixteenth-century Guarani raids and conquests of Guarani in Paraguai, Chaco, and into the Andean foothills potentially ranged over thousands of kilometers, and likely commenced long before European colonization (Métraux 1927, 1948; Nordenskiöld 1917; Susnik 1975). In historic times, many groups raided Upper Xingu villages; these notably included Gê peoples (e.g., Northern and Southern Kayapó and Xavante, among possible others) to the south and east, and Tupians (e.g., Kayabi, Manitsaua, Kamayurá, Aueti, Arawine, and others) to the north and west. Carib groups, distantly related to Xinguano Caribs (e.g., Yarumã and Txicão), also attacked Upper Xingu communities in the 1900s. Throughout historic times, there have been invasions by bellicose tribes in part because of geographic compression related to European expansionism. Many of these groups ultimately entered into more peaceful relations with the Xinguanos. The Xinguano pattern of accommodation (familiarization) and incorporation and a defensive or retaliatory (nonoffensive) martial strategy suggests that the threat largely emanated from outside the Upper Xingu basin. This is not to say that these communities were not prepared to mount retaliatory attacks, but that this posture differs from the offensive strategies, often with little regard for defense, of other historically known groups (e.g., Mundurucu and Macro-Gê) in the region.

CHAPTER

5

In the Shadow of Empire: Colonialism and Ethnogenesis Kingdom of the Parecis In those extensive plateaus live the Parecis, an extensive kingdom, and all the rivers flow north [into the Amazon]. These peoples exist in such vast quantity, that it is not possible to count their settlements or villages, [and] many times in one day’s march one passes ten or twelve villages, and in each one of them there are ten to thirty houses, and in these houses there are some that are thirty to forty paces across, and they are round and made like an oven [beehive shaped]. … their farming, in which they are untiring, and they are settled peoples, and agriculture is based on manioc, and a little corn and beans, potatoes, some pineapple, and uniquely admirable in the order of their plantings … these people are not warriors, and only defend themselves when they are threatened; their weapons are bows and arrows … these Indians also have idols; these idols have a separate house with many figures of varied forms, in which only men are allowed to enter … and women observe this law, who do not even look in such houses, and only the men are found in them on days of ceremonies, on which they participate in dances and are richly adorned … even their roads they make very straight and wide, and they keep them so clean that one will find not even a fallen leaf …. They raise macaws, parrots, and other birds … These people make objects of stone like jasper in the form of the Malta cross, an insignia only used by chiefs … This kingdom is so large

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and extensive that we know not where it ends; it is very full of people and very fertile due to the richness of its lands. Pires de Campo 1862 [1720]: 443–444; author’s translation1 Initial European colonialism in South America during the sixteenth century had predictable consequences for native peoples: catastrophic depopulation and cultural disruption. This is evident from all quarters of the New World where either early eyewitness reports or in-depth archaeology of terminal prehistoric occupations exist. In Amazonia, numerous native peoples, many dramatically different than any known today, were decimated by early contact situations (Porro 1996; Roosevelt 1991). Enslavement, punitive actions, forced relocations, and outright ethnocide prompted the dissolution or flight of many communities soon after initial contacts (Kiemen 1954). As elsewhere in the Americas, however, the vanguard of Europe’s expansion—the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Plague, Famine, War, and Death2—often ranged far ahead of the Europeans themselves. It was these indirect, invisible forces of colonialism more than direct interaction that shaped the destinies of most native Amazonians. Epidemic diseases, in particular, often diffusing unchecked even into areas remote from colonial activities, were responsible for staggering population losses (Dobyns 1983, 1993). The arrival of Europeans set in motion a chain of events with far reaching repercussions, but face-to-face encounters in many areas occurred centuries after initial European landfalls. In the Upper Xingu, contact spanned five centuries. Initial direct contacts in the mid-1700s were rapid and brutal, and consisted of hit-and-run raids on a few communities (Franchetto 1992). After these initial raids, Europeans seldom appeared in or near the Upper Xingu basin until the late 1800s. Sustained interaction between Indians and whites was established only in the mid-1900s, however. Xinguano peoples had undergone profound change long before initial face-to-face contacts occurred in the mid-1700s. In fact, archaeological evidence documents the precipitous depopulation preceding these early encounters, undoubtedly the result of early epidemics, even pandemics, that diffused across vast areas (Dobyns 1993). Likewise, the chain-effect of geographic displacement and territorial compression of indigenous groups set in motion in the sixteenth century impacted Xinguano communities by the early eighteenth century, if not before. Pires de Campos (1862) tells us much of the Pareci, at this late date, the 1720s, when the brunt of the collapse had already transpired throughout most of Amazonia, and certainly the Southern Periphery. What he described is much like the other Arawaks to the west, such as the Terêna

In the Shadow of Empire • 145

(Guaná), Chané, and Bauré, contacted not long before (before 1700), and certainly reads almost as an ethnographic account of the Upper Xingu, although at a smaller or larger scale. Pre-Columbian groups were even denser and larger, in the 1880s Xinguanos were smaller and more diffuse. This pattern of population reduction continued into the 1970s, when a definitive rebound occurred as basic vaccination programs took hold (still, epidemics in the 1950s and 1960s took ten percent of the population, even with basic medical assistance). From the broader region that comprises southern Amazonia, central Brazil and eastern Bolivia, there is better archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence of intensive warfare. In the northern Llanos de Mojos, for instance, fortified villages were concentrated between the Chiquitos highlands and the Guaporé River. Ethnohistoric sources describe various strategies related to the intensive warfare encountered there, notably including village palisades, moats, pitfalls and other defensive works among the Kanichana, Bauré, Tapacura (Block 1980, 1994; Denevan 1966; Métraux 1942). Francisco Altamirano (1700, cited in Block 1980: 59) provided a particularly detailed description of Bauré village defenses: The Bauré lived around a plaza … behind the houses rose a palisade of sharpened logs. … Deep moats dug outside the walls offered further protection … within, and pitfalls on nearby roads provided a first line of defense outside village confines. As is presently known, ditches and/or palisades, mounds, and other major public works have a restricted geographical distribution, forming an arc extending along the peripheries of the forested Amazonian lowlands between the Upper Madeira and the Upper Xingu. My reading of the ethnography and ethnohistory of the Terena-Guana, Bolivian Arawak and related peoples, and particularly, the Pareci and related groups (e.g., Salumã-Enawenê Nawê), leads me to believe that settled, agricultural lifeways, often including earthen structures and landscape modifications and developed fishing technologies, were part and parcel of proto-Southern Arawaks, as were social hierarchy and regionality. Similar patterns are also noted among the Bauré and Tapecura (Block 1980: 78–80; Métraux 1942: 69, 128–129). Like the Upper Xingu, the Pareci village “was ruled by an hereditary chief ” whose eldest son (heir apparent) enjoyed a privileged status; the heads of families formed a “kind of aristo-cracy” who “controlled a class of dependents, whose status was that of serfs” (Métraux 1942: 165). Pires de Campos (1862: 443) described the Pareci as nonwarlike and “merely defend themselves if one wants to take them away”. There was frequent visitation and active commercial


relations between villages (Métraux 1942: 163). The Pareci share numerous cultural features in common with both Bauré (based on more complete ethnohistory), and Terena and Upper Xingu groups (based on more complete ethnography). The earliest report of the Pareci (1720s) describes a dense regional population living in large plaza villages with “broad, straight, and perfectly clean highways” connecting them to other villages (Pires de Campos 1862: 442–444; Métraux 1942: 162–164, 1948b). Following Pires de Campos’s account (1862: 443): These people exist in such vast quantity, that it is not possible to count their settlements … on one days march one often passes through ten or twelve villages and in one of them there are ten to thirty houses, and … [some] are thirty to forty paces across… The houses were estimated to have some thirty to forty individuals, suggesting village populations ranging from about three hundred to over twelve hundred (Métraux 1942:163). Pires de Campos’s descriptions of the Parecí settlement and village patterns are remarkably similar to Xinguano patterns, including dense village distributions, oval “haystack” houses, plazas, broad roads and male-centric mask/flute houses and, likewise, bear a notable similarity to patterns from the Mojos area (Métraux 1942; Block 1980). The German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen was the first to record the societies of the Upper Xingu in the 1880s (Figure 5.1). Steinen and

Fig. 5.1 Photograph of 1887 expedition campsite (from Steinen 1896).


other expeditioners around the turn of the century were struck by the marked cultural uniformity throughout the region, despite considerable linguistic diversity (Ehrenreich 1890; Meyer 1897; Schmidt 1902–1904, 1905; Steinen 1886, 1894). By this time, the regional, multilingual sociocultural system known to ethnologists as Upper Xingu or Xinguano society, had stabilized, grosso modo, in its contemporary form. Similarities in subsistence, crafts, settlement, and cosmology, together with well-developed patterns of intervillage trade, marriage, and ceremonialism, were recognized as the result of “intertribal” acculturation in the past. Up to now, the general consensus has been that the region served as a refuge for numerous displaced indigenous groups: a “cul-de-sac” area characterized by cultural compression (Galvão 1953), but the process through which immigrant and established communities coalesced into a single cultural system documented from 1884 to the present still remains ill-resolved.

A Brief History of “Contact” The transitional location of the Upper Xingu basin, a tongue of Amazonian rain forest nestled between highlands of patchy forests and savannas in the central Brazilian plateau to the south, west, and east, has been a key factor influencing cultural interaction, both in prehistory and within the context of colonial and national expansion over the past five centuries. Given the scale, density, and fixedness of late prehistoric Xinguano settlements, it seems certain that the Upper Xingu was a pivotal point of articulation in the broad interaction networks operating at the time, although the exact nature of such regional systems is poorly known. Throughout the historic period the area served as a haven, a refuge area, for diverse cultural groups displaced as a result of Euro-Brazilian expansions. In short, it has been a primary node of broad interaction networks throughout the known cultural sequence, from the late first millennium A . D . to the present. Even in the mid-1700s, just after the Treaty of Madrid reapportioned the distributions between the Iberian monarchies and the de facto ruler of Portugal, the Marquis de Pombal, instituted his “directorate,” the fate of the indigenous world across much of South America was sealed. Gold seekers, slavers, and ranchers quickly multiplied to support boomtowns, such as Goyaz, Cuiaba, Diamantina, among others. The Bakairi had long lived in the area between the Xinguano and Pareci Arawaks (Figures 5.2 and 5.3), an interaction that likely extends deep into the past, given that they share the same origin myth (Pina de Barros 2001). To the south of this block of related Carib and Arawak peoples, were the much feared Kayapó and other bellicose Gê peoples. It was not until


Fig. 5.2 1777 map by Bonné showing approximate location of Upper Xingu tributaries.

Fig. 5.3 1852 Warren’s Atlas Map showing fairly accurate placement of Upper Xingu (although wrongly depicting them flowing east to west).

von den Steinen’s time, however, that relatively accurate regional maps portraying the Upper Xingu basin appeared. The region remained peripheral to colonial interests, and direct Western influences were sporadic throughout early historic times, only entering written history in 1884. Several major cataracts on the lower


and middle Xingu River and the dense forests of the region impeded early exploration of the area. Hostility toward Europeans by many neighboring indigenous groups was also a barrier to exploration. Although isolated, the Upper Xingu was not insulated from the expansion of the World System, and to understand local or regional transformations in the Upper Xingu requires us to first consider, albeit in very general terms, the external forces created by Luso-Brazilian expansion into central Brazil and southern Amazonia. Sustained direct contact with groups in the Lower Amazon, including the Lower Xingu, was established as a result of colonial enterprises by various European powers in the early 1600s, although sporadic encounters occurred earlier (Medina 1986 [Carvajal 1542]; Nimuendaju 1948b, 1948c; Porro 1993; Simón 1861). Indigenous populations were rapidly denuded by slave raiding, punitive expeditions, and forced relocations, primarily at the hands of the Portuguese (Keiman 1954; Sweet 1974). Attempts to “tame” and convert indigenous peoples resulted in substantial bloodshed, and numerous groups fled the areas of colonial activities to avoid enslavement, deculturation and/or death (Acuña 1859 [1641]; Oliveira 1968). By the late seventeenth century, direct contacts between Europeans and native groups became more common to the west, south and east of the Upper Xingu in south-central Brazil and Bolivia, resulting in hostilities, rapid depopulation, and cultural disintegration (Block 1994; Hemming 1978; Métraux 1942; Saignes 1990; Susnik 1975, 1978). By this time, profiteering explorers had penetrated the southern peripheries of the Amazon forest, and frontier “boomtowns,” such as Cuiabá, began to pop up in northern portions of the central Brazilian plateau in the early to mid-1700s. The discovery of gold deposits throughout central Brazil, in particular, triggered considerable interest by frontiersmen, or bandeirantes, from southern and eastern Brazil. Legendary capitães (bandeira leaders), such as Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva (Ahangüera) and Antonio Pires de Campos, among others, ravaged the countryside in search of Indian slaves, often under the dubious justification of “just wars” and Indian “reductions.” Both men ranged throughout the Araguaia River basin, adjacent to the Upper Xingu, after the 1670s. Their sons, B. Bueno da Silva, Jr. and A. Pires de Campos, Jr., and Miguel de Campos Bicudo continued these campaigns for minerals and Indian slaves into the mid- to late 1700s. The sustained European presence and increase in colonist populations, including an increasing missionary presence, more directly impacted on indigenous communities inhabiting more isolated areas, such as the Upper Xingu (Chiam 1983; Meireles 1989).


The bandeiras, while perhaps lured by the rumors of gold in remote interior regions, tirelessly plundered native villages to procure Indian slaves, as they had done in other parts of Brazil before. Bandeiras ranged widely throughout central and interior northeastern Brazil and, although seldom penetrating too deeply into the densely forested regions of Amazonia, they forced many indigenous groups (principally Gê) that had occupied cerrado and caatinga regions ever closer to the southern peripheries of the Amazon forests. Border disputes between the Iberian monarchies, in the area of the present-day Brazilian-Bolivian border, and the establishment of the Captaincies of Goiás and Mato Grosso in the mid-1700s created the conditions for more frequent encounters between natives and Europeans in central Brazil. The rapid exploitation of the region was viewed favorably not only by local officials, reaping benefits of gold and slaves, but also by the Portuguese crown, which exacted its one-fifth tax on all gold discovered. Lisbon had, in fact, recently altered its policies toward native groups for the worse, with the creation of the “Pombal Directorate” (Hemming 1987). Numerous reductions and slave raids were perpetrated in areas to the north and east of Cuiába, notably among the numerous villages of the Pareci and related groups (or groups misidentified as Pareci) (Pires de Campos 1862; Schmidt 1942, 1943, 1947). Vast numbers of Indians were “descended” as slaves from these areas on the peripheries of Amazonia. The Pareci (and apparently Bakairi) were favored targets since they were, according to Pires de Campo (1862:443–444), “docile Indians.” To the immediate southwest of the Upper Xingu, the Bakairi, first contacted in the mid-1700s, were in more or less permanent contact with whites by the early 1800s, and “with these contacts came disease and conflict” (Oberg 1953: 69; Steinen 1886). The Bakairi moved in the mid-1800s, as a result of these conflicts, some (the Eastern Bakairi) ultimately coming to occupy the Batovi and Kurisevo rivers in the Upper Xingu Basin (Oberg 1953: 69). To the southeast of the Upper Xingu, the Xavante had moved to the area of the upper Araguaia and Rio das Mortes by the early to mid-1700s, at least in part because of conflicts with or suspicion of colonists, missionaries, and bandeirantes (Flowers 1983). The Southern Kayapó also were in the area of the Rio das Mortes where Antonio Pires de Campos, Jr. attacked them in the 1730s with the aid of Bororo warriors; remnants of these Southern Kayapó villages may relate to the modern Panará who were present northwest of the Upper Xingu until the mid-1900s (when they were relocated to the Xingu Indigenous Park; see Schwartzman 1987). Pires de Campos, Sr., had already ventured at least as far as the “Ilha dos Caraja” (Bananal) and “Martirios”


above Bananal in search of gold; as usual Indians were the primary bounty reaped by the expeditioners and “[n]umerous captives were dragged off from here to São Paulo as slaves” (Ehrenreich 1965: 4). Northern Kayapó and Juruna (Tupi) groups moved into the middle Xingu by the early to mid1800s, also largely as a result of colonial encroachment (Lima 1995; Oliveira 1968; Turner 1991; Verswijver 1992). As gold sources became less productive in the late eighteenth century, colonial populations decreased in Goiás and northern Mato Grosso, and for a time fewer infectious diseases were likely introduced into remote regions (Chiam 1983; Flowers 1983). Missionary activities throughout the Captaincies of Mato Grosso and Goiás also had devastating effects on indigenous demography, as well as cultural integrity and distributions, but the direct effects, if any, of the missions on the Upper Xingu were apparently very limited, because they did not generally explore into remote areas in search of converts. Instead, they set up missions as attraction posts, many of which were of very short duration (see particularly Chiam 1983; Miereles 1989). The “Rubber Boom” again brought renewed interest into isolated areas of southern Amazonia in the mid-1800s, but rubber tappers never penetrated the Upper Xingu, where latex-producing trees (seringa) are not common. No written history records early expeditions into the Upper Xingu region, but Xinguano oral history vividly describes bloody encounters with Luso-Brazilians who attacked numerous villages in the remote past (Basso 1993, 1995; Franchetto 1992). There were likely several entradas during the mid-eighteenth century, although even earlier encounters (after c. 1670) are possible (Dole 1984, 2001). These narratives are graphic testimony not only of the profound effect of these raids but also of how little we know about the timing, frequency, or specific impact of early bandeirante raids on indigenous groups in southern Amazonia. Clearly, these initial direct contacts profoundly disrupted local communities, but the more significant forces behind cultural change were the indirect pressures of colonial expansionism. Colonial actions along the Amazon and in central Brazil created a “pincer” effect, which forced indigenous groups into ever diminishing territories. Likewise, without warning epidemics occasionally struck throughout the period from circa 1600 to 1884; even if only once or twice a century, these epidemics undoubtedly ravaged local communities in the Upper Xingu and elsewhere. More broadly speaking, the impact of colonialism was pervasive as the supralocal sociopolitical systems that articulated cultural systems across vast regions such as the southern Amazon were radically altered. Direct information bearing on these processes is scant, but we can roughly define the


major outlines of this conjuncture, that is, the formation of multilingual Xinguano society, at least chronologically.

The Construction of Xinguano Pluralism Things were astir in the southern peripheries of Amazonia in the eighteenth century. Direct, sustained European influence dramatically increased as gold was found and political and economic tensions increased. It was in the wake of this initial wave of colonial interest in central Brazil that a major conjuncture, or structural discontinuity (sensu Sahlins 1990: 28), in native Xinguano histories occurred. This “conjuncture” refers to the transformation of Xinguano society—here defined as the socially interrelated communities of the Upper Xingu basin who share a common system of cultural values, meanings, rituals, and cosmology—from ethnic homogeneity, composed of groups of near identical language and cultural heritage, to the pluriethnic culture documented from the late 1800s until today. It is today comprised of five major linguistic blocks: two Arawak languages (Waujá/Mehinaku and Yawalapiti); one Carib language (Kuikuru, Kalapalo, Matipu, and Nafuqua); and two Tupian languages (Kamayura and Aueti). It was above all a transformation of cultural meanings—the philosophies that informed social identity and action—and not of the material workings of the preexisting Xinguano society. Established communities came to accept foreigners as equal partners in Xinguano culture and immigrants came to accept Xinguano cultural norms above their own. Natives and Newcomers The temporal precedence of Arawakan speakers, followed by Carib and later Tupian peoples, has long been suspected (Agostinho 1970: 468, 1993; Bastos 1983: 51; Becquelin 1993; Dole 1961/62; Simões 1967), but only recently has sufficient oral historical and archaeological evidence become available to confirm the Arawak-Carib-Tupi historical sequence. Recent archaeological investigations by the author indicate that Arawak groups, ancestors of the contemporary Mehinaku and Waujá, and perhaps Yawalapiti communities, came to occupy the basin by the late first millennium A.D. through one or more migrations from the west. These early groups established the Xinguano cultural pattern, which has persisted, grosso modo, throughout the sequence. That is, the Arawaks established the prototypical cultural pattern from which the historically known Xinguano culture emerged. These prehistoric occupations extended throughout much of the basin by circa 1500.


By this time, a distinctive cultural group came to occupy the extreme eastern portions of the basin (east of the Culuene River). These occupations relate to the ancestors of the contemporary Carib-speaking Xinguanos, based on direct correlations between archaeological sites and Carib oral history. Linguistic distance from other Carib-speaking groups in northern Amazonia suggests that the Upper Xingu Caribs separated from this larger block long before their arrival in the Upper Xingu, although they continued to maintain the more typical Carib settlement pattern (villages of one or a few large circular communal houses, lacking circular plazas) until the mid- to late 1700s. Likewise, the linguistic distance between Upper Xingu Carib and Bakairi suggests a separation long ago, long prior to circa 1500 (Franchetto 2001). The Arara group languages (e.g., Ikpeng and Yaruma) may represent a later southern migration, after 1500 (Durbin 1977), but prior to their appearance at the margins of the Upper Xingu, their history remains unknown. In 1700, there were thus three major cultural groupings in the Upper Xingu: (1) the ancestors of the Yawalapiti; (2) the ancestors of the Mehinaku/Waujá; and (3) the ancestral Carib groups. The Mehinaku and Waujá are the living descendants of Arawakan groups (Western Complex) who have continuously occupied the Upper Xingu basin, above Morená, since prehistoric times; whereas the Yawalapiti are apparently descended from Western Complex villages below Morená, the area that they historically occupied prior to the eighteenth century (e.g., at a site, place of the yawala palm, from whence comes their name). After 1500–1600, there was a geographic contraction of Arawak occupied territory. Currently, we can suggest an abandonment of the most southerly and easterly areas, creating a vacuum into which the Carib groups expanded, and the most northerly areas (as far as Diauarum, at least), which came to be occupied by the Tupian ancestors of the Kamayura in the eighteenth century. The Carib groups maintained a distinctive cultural pattern (Eastern Complex) from the time that they are first documented (c. 1500) until after circa 1750, when they migrated west across the Culuene River, apparently en masse, or in fairly rapid succession, from Lake Tafununu south where they had lived from late prehistoric times. Although the two groups coinhabited the basin from late prehistoric times, the Caribs were concentrated in the southeastern peripheries of the basin (east of the Culuene River), apparently representing a single or rapid succession of migrations by one or a few closely related groups ancestral to all Upper Xingu Caribs (because of contemporary linguistic proximity). This ancestral Carib group split into three primary dialect groups prior to the mid-1700s: a northern group, the “people of the lake [Tafununu]”


(ancestors of the contemporary Kuikuru and Matipu); a southern group (the ancestors of the Kalapalo); and a western group (the ancestors of the Nafuqua). The primary split between Kuikuru/Matipu and Kalapalo/ Nafuqua happened some time earlier (Franchetto 1986). It is uncertain when Nafuqua speakers moved west of the Culuene, but it seems likely that the southern and western groups had split by the mid- to late 1700s, after Caribs had largely moved from areas east of the Culuene. The Caribs maintained lifeways different than the Arawak cultural pattern until the mid-1700s. The period surrounding the western movement of Caribs in the eighteenth century was tumultuous and Carib narratives describe numerous attacks on them by ngikogo and bandeirantes (see Basso 1995, 2001). Contemporary Carib and Arawak peoples do not recall divergent histories of colonization; that is, I encountered no histories that pertain to inmigration into the Upper Xingu basin among any Carib or Arawak groups. In similar fashion, they assume mutual cultural authorship of the original Xinguano cultural pattern. This undoubtedly reflects the antiquity of both Arawak and Carib groups in the region. Diverse Tupian groups, ancestors of the Kamayura and Aueti, for example, apparently entered the basin by the mid-1700s (Bastos 1983, 1989a, 2001; Coelho 2001). The Aueti and Kamayura also were fully integrated into Xinguano regional culture, but over time, the appearance of their ancestors in the basin, their early struggles with Xinguanos, and their incorporation into Xinguano society, are recounted both by them and by the Arawak and Carib Xinguanos (Coelho 2001). According to Kuikuru oral history, the groups ancestral to the Kamayura first entered into contact with them when they were living on Lake Tafununu (prior to c. 1750). The next concrete identification of the Kamayura ancestors places them in the area of Diauarum, apparently having descended down the Suia-Missu from its headwaters near Tafununu, and records their progressive migration from Diauarum to Ipavu, likely during the late 1700s to early 1800s. According to the Kamayura, they initially lived with the Waujá at Ipavu before the Waujá willingly relinquished the area to them. The Aueti also were present, in approximately the area they have occupied throughout historic times, when the Caribs occupied Tafununu. As Coelho (2001) notes, in the past the Aueti had relations with Bakairi groups, in areas southwest of the Upper Xingu. Xinguano oral histories indicate that the period between 1700 and 1800 (encompassing the movement of the Caribs west of the Culuene and the Yawalapiti and, later, Kamayura south of Morená) was characterized by frequent village movements (e.g., Basso 2001; Franchetto 1992), unlike the pattern of fixed village localities typical both before and after. By the early


1800s, Xinguanos apparently entered a period of internal stabilization, suggested by the reestablishment of permanent village localities. Carib Xinguano oral history, in fact, records group fission and the expansion of Carib groups into new areas, suggesting some degree of population recovery during the nineteenth century. In-migration continued throughout the eighteenth century with Bakairi, Trumai and Suyá communities entering the area by the mid-1800s, and Ikpeng, Arawine, and Manitsaua by the late 1800s, if not before (see Galvão and Simões 1965; Menget 2001; Monod-Becquelin 1975; Seeger 1981; Simões 1966). These groups were all drawn into the cultural orbit of the Xinguanos and, to one degree or another, entered into the process of acculturation, what Bastos (1983) has called “xinguanification,” that earlier Carib and Tupian groups had previously undergone. These groups remained peripheral or transitional to the Xinguanos, never becoming fully incorporated into the regional culture. As their demographic, economic, political, and territorial position has stabilized they have been able to assert their independent identity, vis à vis “core” Xinguano groups. It seems unlikely that we can find the first Carib plaza village (i.e., Arawak model), given the vagaries of the archaeological record, but something even more profound than a change in the physical form of the village (the stage) or even the existing patterns of direct interaction (the set) had to change in order for the Carib to become incorporated in the Xinguano regional culture. They had to adopt and become accepted participants in the inter-community rituals, that is, they needed to accept, in large part, the cosmology and ethos (the cultural script) upon which Xinguano culture is based. It seems likely that this transformation occurred in the hundred years or so between circa 1700 and 1800—during the hey-day of the central Brazilian bandeirantes, the regional gold rush, and the slaving boom. The next direct “picture” we have of the Caribs, or any other Xinguano group, is from Steinen (1886, 1894) and, by that time, the Caribs had adopted the cultural pattern characteristic of the Upper Xingu Arawaks, as had the Tupian Kamayura and Aueti. The Caribs abandoned their distinctive ceramic industry and their communal circular house settlement pattern, while the Tupians gave up their characteristic bellicosity and “virou gente,” or, in other words became Xinguano (kuge) (Coelho 2001). These diverse groups, the southern (Mehinaku/Waujá/Kustenau) and northern (Yawalapiti) Xinguano Arawaks, the Caribs, and the Tupians amalgamated into the plural, regional cultural system known ethnographically. This process transpired sometime between 1750 and 1884, most likely before 1800. Much of the cultural pluralism present in the Upper Xingu is a postcontact phenomenon, although the pressures of cultural compression and


social circumscription were already in force prehistorically, as documented by the appearance of Carib communities in eastern portions of the Upper Xingu basin by circa 1500. Diverse communities retained their cultural distinctiveness until the mid-1700s, but likely by the early 1800s they had coalesced into essentially a single pattern—the regional cultural system was fully in place by 1884. The period after circa 1750 can be pinpointed as the historical conjuncture during which diverse newcomer communities came to share the same physical space and essentially an identical cultural pattern to that among established Arawak populations (Figures 5.4 and 5.5). It was also at about this time that the ancestors of the Arawakan-speaking Yawalapiti, linguistically distinctive from the Arawakan communities ancestral to Waujá, Mehinaku, and Kustenau, who had traditionally occupied the nuclear Upper Xingu basin, migrated south along the Xingu River and came to reside in nuclear portions of the basin. The high degree of social integration and cultural uniformity witnessed by Steinen in the 1880s suggests that the multiethnic system had been in place for some time, as does the fact that various groups who had migrated into the area and established relations with Xinguanos during the generation or so prior to Steinen (e.g., the Bakairi, Trumai, and Suyá) had not been fully incorporated into the system.

Acculturation and Ethnogenesis Interest in the formation of the pluriethnic Xinguano society has intrigued and puzzled ethnologists since the initial German expeditions of the late1800s. Because of the isolation from direct colonial influences and a steady inflow of refugee populations, Xinguano society developed as a result of “intertribal” acculturation (Schaden 1964). Most authors see this as the inevitable outcome of increased proximity, interaction, and cultural sharing in an isolated “refuge” area or “cul-de-sac”; that is, through a pattern of symmetrical acculturation diverse groups became integrated into the multiethnic system that exists today (e.g., Basso, 2001; Bastos 1983; Galvão 1960; Gregor 1996, 2001). This view likely accounts for many of the changes in social interaction and the diffusion of individual cultural traits, but it does not adequately address the actual process of cultural fusion. Acculturation was clearly asymmetrical; immigrant groups were incorporated within the existing regional culture, apparently of their own volition or for lack of a viable alternative. Established communities retained, in large part, their traditional culture, whereas newcomers underwent profound and extensive cultural transformation in favor of the established Xinguano cultural pattern. In other words, “intertribal”


Fig. 5.4 Population movements, 1700–1950 and schematic of the ethnogenesis of Xinguano nation. Note: Arawak = A; Carib = C; Y = Yawalapiti; Kamayura = KM; Aueti = AU; Trumai = TR; Bakairi (Carib) = BK; Suyá (Gê) = SU; Manitsaua (Tupi) = M; Arawine (Tupi) = AW; Yaruma (Carib) = YR; the latter three were extinct by the mid-1900s.

acculturation was not responsible for the Xinguano pattern, but rather, its transformation from a monolingual to a plural regional pattern. Territorial compression, resulting from the expansion of the colonial frontier, often led to initial hostilities as newcomers encroached on established communities, but the local Xinguano response was ultimately accommodation, although relations remained tense (Gregor 1990). In part, local depopulation created a geographic vacuum into which immigrant groups could move without direct encroachment, enabling sustained interaction and reduced social distance, and resulting


Fig. 5.5 Map of PIX showing location of 1993 villages (numbered) and traditional “homelands” over the past century (underlined).

in greater cultural sharing. Likewise, links between villages were further strengthened by the stress, uncertainty, and population loss created in villages by epidemics. Exact patterns of interaction are difficult to reconstruct prior to 1884, but the numerous in-migrations of displaced groups and gradual incorporation of these into the regional cultural system is amply documented historically. We can suggest that three conditions characterized regional


social relations over at least the past five hundred years: (1) there was a dominant “Xinguano” cultural pattern which integrated diverse communities into a regional “moral community”; (2) there were always “wild Indian” (non-Xinguano) groups perched, geographically and socially, at the peripheries of this system; and (3) over time most of these peripheral groups were progressively drawn into existing Xinguano society. Karl von den Steinen’s visits shed light on the process through which strangers or enemies become friends (see also Gregor 1990). The appearance of Steinen and his companions created a great stir among local communities, and many fled at the mere sight of him and his companions. Early encounters with white men, although over a century earlier, left an indelible image of whites in the collective memories of these communities. A Kuikuru elder recounts that long ago (likely in the eighteenth century), the “ancestors of the Whitepeople always killed us” and “fleeing from them … many times”. (Franchetto 1993: 115 author’s translation; see also Basso 1995, 2001). Steinen came “in the time when the Whitepeople had become good” (Ibid.: 114). He was, in fact, the architect of a different image of the caraíba, unwittingly humanizing the white man in the eyes of his Xinguano hosts. Although still dangerous and unpredictable and still the master of awesome power (Gregor 1984; Ireland 1988), the white man was no longer included in the category of monsterous, typically evil beings or spirits (itseke). Steinen had stepped into the midst of the complex system of human relations that characterizes the Upper Xingu. At each encounter, Steinen announced his arrival by reassuring his hosts that he was good, that he was a “karaiba kúra” (good white in the Bakairi [non-Xinguano Carib] language of his guides). He saw that in the native mind, “All people were either good, ‘kúra,’ or bad, ‘kurápa’,” a distinction that he suggested was made according to mutual hospitality (Steinen 1894:69). As Steinen progressed into the Upper Xingu and news of his visits (and gifts) spread, his reception became more like any other formal visitor: he was received in the village center, given a stool, orated to by village representatives and even sometimes made to wait for a formal reception. Steinen placed himself closer to the core of the Xinguano relational system, a system that can be crudely construed based on a principle of exclusion, bounded categories of “us” (Xinguano) and “them” (nonXinguano), but better understood as a continuum of concentric and malleable social categories. At any given time regional social relations and ethnicity are defined in the context of discrete local identities. In historical perspective, however, Xinguano societies cannot be viewed as


tightly boundable social entities; to do so ignores the well-documented patterns of interaction, accommodation and incorporation so essential to regional social dynamics. Mutual good-will between local groups or individuals, then as now, was based on changing relations of exchange, alliance and hospitality and, indeed, these relations were essential to native definitions of us (Xinguano) as opposed to others, “wild” (hostile) Indians and whites. Native immigrant groups, like Steinen’s expeditioners, were regarded apprehensively at first and initial encounters often resulted in hostilities. Over time interaction became less tense through the establishment of exchange and alliance relations, and through the extension of kinship relations, in part through prisoner capture and adoption. As noted by Lévi-Strauss (1976), commerce and warfare were poles of a pattern of interaction that progressively has an integrating effect. By at least Steinen’s time, the ethnographically known system of exchange relations, involving formal prestations and trade between ethnically diverse villages and individuals partially based on village specialization and trade partnerships, had been established in more or less its present-day form. Intergroup exchange, also documented for prehistoric and early protohistoric periods, provided a means not only to reduce hostility but to gauge the intentions of others and respond to a potentially hostile social environment. Interaction with foreigners was risky, but it also held great payoffs, commercial gain for those who traded, political gain for those who orchestrated the contacts and, perhaps most of all, the reduction of threat. It is easy to envision the process through which Xinguanos came to accept outsiders as friends and kin, but this does not explain the cultural transformation of immigrant communities. For them it was not simply a social equation but required that they largely abandon their native ideologies and social philosophies and in their place adopt those of Xinguano culture. Furthermore, newcomers not only had to become the “other” (Xinguano), they had to be accepted as “us” by Xinguano communities. Sustained interaction, exchange, intermarriage, and visitation provide entrée into the regional system, but what distinguishes Xinguanos from non-Xinguanos is not the degree of exchange, but the degree to which groups share underlying systems of cultural meanings, values, and practices (e.g., nonaggression, generosity, diet of fish and manioc, fixed circular plaza villages). Xinguano identity depends not only on shared cultural practices, but, more important, the adoption of a distinctive cosmology and ideology, including a shared myth of origin and coparticipation in


intertribal rituals, notably the cycle of chiefly rituals centered on the kuarup ceremony. An essential step in the process of “Xinguanification,” therefore, is establishing the physical prerequisites necessary for the execution of core rituals: that is, newcomers needed to adopt the basic Xinguano settlement model of a circular plaza, central cemetery and men’s house. For the Tupian Xinguanos this may or may not have been a significant changes since plaza villages are present among several other southern Amazonian Tupian groups (e.g., Mundurucu, Tapirape), but among Caribs this transformation was dramatic, involving a change from the traditional maloca (nonplaza) settlement pattern characteristic of ancestral Carib Xinguanos (i.e., Eastern Complex) to the circular plaza pattern (the Ikpeng are a recent example). It is one thing, however, to have a plaza, the physical “stage” for core rituals but, rather, another to fully participate in them. The stage not only had to be set, requiring the social and cultural eligibility of coparticipants, but the cultural script had to be internalized as well. Hypothetically, an inmarried individual or even a captive could parent the son or daughter of chiefly blood, who would thus be fully eligible for chiefly status and burial, if not political office; likewise, newcomer communities could transform their own internal social matrices to “create” chiefly individuals and lines. To host the chiefly rituals, however, depends not only on having the appropriate space or persons, but above all, on an understanding and acceptance of the precepts, practices, and meanings inherent in the complex of chiefly plaza rituals. The “litmus test” is therefore not only social or material, but cosmological and ideological: accepting and being accepted as part of the core rituals of social reproduction and their conceptual underpinnings. As a Kuikuru chief once told me: “We don’t make war. We dance, we have festivals, we have the kuarup.” For the “wild Indians”, said to war is a festival (Gregor 1994: 247). Thus, although the boundaries of Xinguano identity are marked with respect to the exterior (to be Xinguano is not to be “wild Indian”) collective identity is constituted through the ritual affirmation (recreation) of the cosmological roots and order of Xinguano society itself: the locus of social fecundity is the interior. Foreign things are endowed with positive symbolic meaning, but there is no ontological necessity that requires the incorporation of “foreign substance” for the reproduction of society, as is the case for certain Amerindian societies (Fausto 2001; Henley 1996; Overing 1981, 1993; Saignes 1990; Viveiros de Castro 1992). The margins of Xinguano society are broad and permeable, and contextually defined: It is therefore possible to be within the orbit of Xinguano culture, but remain a “little wild.”


One thing is certain, a cultural ethos of accommodation (based on local hospitality and “good-neighbor” relations) and permeable social boundaries, resulted in the incorporation of things, concepts, people, families, even whole communities or, perhaps even, blocks of communities (e.g., positing a more or less simultaneous incorporation of Carib-speakers from diverse villages). But, what is also clear is that Xinguano communities did not actively draw other groups (or individuals) into their midst through conquest, prisoner capture, or proselytizing, but instead accommodated groups who appeared on the peripheries of the Upper Xingu. The regional nature of Xinguano culture and society is thus not an epiphenomenon of local history—an inevitable social fusion created by local conditions of multiethnic interaction and postcontact compression. Xinguano society was regional since prehistoric times. Parenthetically, it is worth framing a distinction that is often overlooked in regional studies: the difference between regional social systems, that is, interaction and alliance networks that link diverse communities (ubiquitous in Amazonia), and regional societies, that is, a “moral community” composed of multiple communities incapable of symbolically reproducing themselves independently of one another. Xinguano society is a very clear case of the latter: core rituals of social reproduction (chiefly rites of passage) and associated origin myths simultaneously depend upon and legitimize supralocal participation and integration. In this sense, Xinguano communities were preadapted, if you will, to not only accommodate but incorporate immigrant groups that were displaced in the context of Western expansion. Territories contracted, largely because of depopulation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, immigrant groups increasingly took over the abandoned areas, not only ensuring physical and social proximity but also drawing these newcomer groups into the orbit of Xinguano regionality. In fact, precisely because Xinguano society is necessarily regional in nature, meant that established communities that were suffering from severe depopulation may have been especially willing to assimilate newcomer communities. The centrifugal forces created by Luso-Brazilian colonialism combined by the centripetal acculturative force of Xinguano society, a force that, in fact, Max Schmidt (1917) long ago noted was common among Arawakan peoples, and redoubled by the demographic vacuum created by catastrophic depopulation, created unique conditions for the ethnogenesis of the pluriethnic culture pattern documented ethnographically.


Demography and Social Change For at least two centuries preceding Steinen’s expeditions, the social environment of the Upper Xingu was capricious, punctuated by severe demographic shocks that left communities in a state of crisis, if not anomie. The violence of bandeirante raids and conflicts with wild Indians is clear from indigenous narratives, but we can be less certain of the effects of epidemics. Nevertheless, the dramatic impact of epidemics, in particular, is clearly documented—a single epidemic could wipe out an entire village—and the secondary economic and social effects, not to mention political reorientation, were equally critical. The Waujá, for instance, vividly recount the 1954 measles epidemic: Suddenly in every household, people were sick and dying. … As the days passed, we were too weak ourselves to do anything but wait for death. There was no one to bury the dead. People died in their hammocks and their corpses began to rot in the same house where others lay dying. Infants lay against the bodies of their dead mothers. … People went outside to defecate and collapsed behind their houses. There they died, and there the vultures came to eat them. (Ireland 1988: 162) Undoubtedly, epidemic disease had similar catastrophic effects on Xinguano communities in prior unrecorded eras, as clearly indicated by the dramatic decreases in settlement size and regional density by the seventeenth century. Earthwork construction and maintenance had apparently ceased by at least the mid-1600s and, by the early 1700s at the latest, entire villages and large tracts of land were abandoned by Arawakan speaking peoples, suggesting that Xinguanos had labored under various epidemic shocks after circa 1550–1600. Although demographic history prior to 1884 is poorly known, these suggestive findings from archaeology conform to reconstructions of devastating depopulation throughout the period after circa 1500–1600 as a result of “pandemics” diffusing across much or all of the New World (e.g., Clastres 1987: 79–99; Cook 1981; Dobyns 1966, 1993; Newsom 1995; Thornton 1991). In fact, the radical changes in Xinguano settlement patterns are exactly what could be expected with demographic collapse (Ramensofsky 1987). The most obvious disease vectors originated to the south and west, from the Paraquai River basin and sub-Andean Bolivia, given the probable articulation of regional systems, including conflict, exchange, and long-distance movements of some individuals and social groups (e.g., Metraux 1927; Nordenskiöld 1917; Susnik 1972, 1978; Saignes


1990); In fact, settled populations formed an almost unbroken chain along the southern peripheries of Amazonia (e.g., Karajá, Xingu, Bakairi, Pareci, Terena, Bauré, Mojos, and others). Regardless of the source region, diseases expanded over vast areas, and once they entered into these populations, and exacted a ver y great toll among these densely settled populations (mordibity up to 100 percent and mortality over 50 percent is apparent from more recent periods, as decribed later). The proximity of European colonists, and thus disease vectors, to the Upper Xingu by at least the mid- to late-1700s, leaves little doubt that epidemics occasionally struck the area after this time. Village size in 1884 (and today) was a fraction of that documented for late prehistoric/early protohistoric (A.D. 1400–1600) villages. Although documentary evidence of epidemics in southeastern Amazonia is scarce, some references to specific epidemics do exist. In the 1700s, the nearby Xavante “were struck by an epidemic, allegedly measles which killed many and caused others to flee” (Neel et al. 1964: 55). Measles also took a high toll on the Karaja at about this time and by the early 1800s the area was in “wretched condition, after … disease had severely reduced local populations” (Ehrenreich 1965: 5). By the late 1700s, at least, dramatic depopulation had been reported across much of southern Amazonia (e.g., among the Bakairi, Pareci, and Bororo, among others) and many villages were already decimated by the mid-1700s (Chiam 1983, Hemming 1978, 1987). By the 1880s and 1890s, epidemics of infectious diseases, including smallpox, had been reported in the Middle and Upper Xingu (Nimuendaju 1948c; Ranke 1898: 130). Indigenous oral history records significant depopulation at the time of Steinen’s expeditions (Franchetto 1992; Ireland 1988) and, indeed, several of the expeditioners were ill during their stay in the Upper Xingu (Steinen 1894). The rapid depopulation documented in the Upper Xingu after 1884 is widely recognized and has been the focus of several commentaries (Agostinho 1972; Galvão and Simões 1966; Ribeiro 1970). During this period, the effects of epidemics and the pattern and effects of demographic “shocks” and overall depopulation can be more fully explored.

Historic Period Demographics Early Period (1885–1950): This period was characterized by the frequent amalgamation of village populations as a result of depopulation. More than half of the Upper Xingu villages ceased to exist as discrete communities during the years from 1884 to 1950. This fact and the relative lack of detailed historical accounts makes it difficult to estimate the rate of population loss for individual villages and little is known regarding the


exact timing, nature or magnitude of specific epidemic “shocks” during this period (Table 5.1; Figure 5.6). Epidemics of infectious disease were reported in 1896, 1918, 1946 and 1950 (Galvão and Simões 1966: 45; Ranke 1898: 130; Schmidt 1942: 242). It is possible to state with reasonable certainty that overall regional population was reduced by 75–80 percent or more between 1884–1950, largely as the result of disease (Agostinho 1972) (Figure 5.7), and others surely disappeared before 1884. In 1887, Steinen estimated thirty-one villages in the Upper Xingu with a regional population of twenty-five hundred to three thousand people. A decade later, Meyer (1897: 139) suggests a total of thirty-nine villages, with a total population of some three thousand (see also Ranke 1898). Eight of these were small villages (about twenty to fifty individuals each) of the Bakairi, who had entered the Upper Xingu in the mid-1800s (Oberg 1953). In 1896, Meyer reported that the Upper Xingu Bakairi were rapidly deteriorating and could hardly feed themselves, and they abandoned the Upper Xingu altogether by the early 1900s (Oberg 1953 Schmidt 1905). Excluding the eight Bakairi villages, there seems to have been twenty-three to thirty-one Xinguano settlements. These minimally included: five Tupi (four Kamayura and one Aueti); nine Carib (“Nafuqua”); seven Arawak (one Kustenau and two Waujá, Mehinaku and Yawalapiti); and two Trumai settlements (Steinen 1894). Meyer (1897: 194) reports fifteen Carib villages, three of which had dissociated by 1896. Halverston (cited in Carneiro 1957: 208) reports a total population of 1840 living in twelve to thirteen villages in 1926. By 1952 the total population was 652 in ten villages and in 1963 there were 623 in nine villages (Galvão and Simões 1966: 43–45). Thus, the average village size in 1926 was about 150 persons while in 1950 it was about 65. Today, village populations range from about 80 to 320 (Baruzzi et al. 1990; Heckenberger 1996). Because contact in the Upper Xingu can be described as peaceful over the past century, in the sense that the area was “never penetrated by the hostile or exploitative elements of the national society” (Turner 1988: 269), infectious diseases and their secondary effects can be singled out as the preeminent cause of depopulation (Agostinho 1972; Ribeiro 1970). The survival of local communities throughout this period depended on the ability of diverse groups to amalgamate in response to population loss. Thus, although one village might suffer great losses and perhaps dissociate, another village could sometimes maintain population levels through incorporation of new members (Galvão and Simões 1966). The net effect was increased social integration. The exact pattern of village dissociation or amalgamation after periods of extreme demographic stress is poorly understood. There was a strong

166 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 5.1 Demographic Estimates for Upper Xingu Villages, 1890–1995.* Year

1887

Village

Total

Kam

Awe

Kal

Nah/Mat

Kui

Wau

Meh

Yaw

Tru

216

–

270

192

–

171

154

–

–

3–4000

228

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

300

–

–

–

1896

–

–

–

–

1924

–

80

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

1934

–

–

–

130

200

–

–

–

–

–

202

1937

–

–

–

40

–

–

–

–

–

–

1938

198

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

43

–

242

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

1946

110

–

180

28

–

–

–

–

–

–

1948

110

30

155

18/ 16

144

98

110

28

25

734

1950

–

–

132

34

130

–

–

–

–

–

1952

110

27

148

44

148

95

56

12

18

658

1954

124

31

150

44

145

104

60

25

21

704

1954

94

23

110

35

130

78

60

25

19

574

1962

–

–

–

–

–

–

68

–

–

–

1963

115

36

100

51

118

86

55

41

21

623

1965

118

26

80

50

100

70

55

22

20

542

1967

118

40

109

55

118

62

57

34

22

615

1970

128

41

115

60

161

95

63

47

24

734

1971

130

44

120

–

150

115

–

60

26

–

1974

148

52

130

42

136

114

80

94

30

826

1976

–

–

–

–

–

–

77

86

–

–

1977

–

–

–

–

–

–

83

–

–

–

1978

170

50

165

40

170

110

80

100

20

905

1980

192

33

160

82

187

102

73

121

37

981

1983

192

52

139

55

210

131

95

117

52

1043

1984

207

36

191

74

221

146

95

135

71

1176

1987

239

66

229

84

240

168

112

148

70

1356

1989

279

80

249

102

279

140

121

187

78

1513

1995

326

91

311

72

327

218

144

165

85

1797

*

For full references see Heckenberger (1996: 288)


Fig. 5.6 Depopulation of Xinguano villages, 1880s–1990s.

Fig. 5.7 Composite depopulation, 1880s–1990s.


tendency for groups to merge with related linguistic groups, supporting Franchetto’s (1987, 2001) suggestion that several subsytems, which correspond to the major linguistic divisions, exist within the larger Xinguano cultural system. In several cases, villages that had split during the period between the late 1800s–early 1900s merged as a result of population loss (Heckenberger 1996). Nevertheless, the extensive kinnetworks that all Xinguanos maintain, cross-cutting linguistic and village boundaries, enabled displaced individuals/kin-groups to seek residence in one of many villages. The sequence of village dissociations can be, in part, reconstructed from historical records. For example, among the Carib groups, three Carib villages had already merged with the Kalapalo by 1896; the Anagahïtï, reduced to a handful of people, moved in with the Kalapalo in 1948 (Oberg 1953). The few remaining Ipatse moved in with the Kuikuru by 1951 and by 1954 the Kuikuru village included members of four extinct villages (Dole 1969: 110; Oberg 1953). The 28 Nafuqua moved into the Matipu village, itself reduced to sixteen people, in 1953 (Galvão and Simões 1966; Lima 1955; Oberg 1953). Of the at least nine Carib villages in the 1880s, only three remained by the 1950s. The Arawak-speaking groups have a similar history of village mergers. By 1948, the Kustenau were reduced to two individuals who joined the Waujá, who themselves had been reduced from two villages to one village by the early 1900s (Oberg 1953; Ireland 1988: 161). The Mehinaku were likewise forced to merge their two villages (Gregor 1977: 19). The Yawalapiti, who were numerous in Steinen’s time and had occupied two villages, were reduced to twenty-eight individuals scattered between various other villages because of a lack of marriagable women by 1948 (Agostinho 1972: 358–360; Oberg 1953). Of various Tupi-speaking groups who had entered the area after the Caribs and Arawaks, only the “Kamayura”and “Aueti” mixed villages remained by the early 1900s, other groups having merged (coalesced) with them (Bastos 1989b, 2001; Coelho, 2001; Villas-Boas and Villas-Boas 1973). The Kamayura who lived in four settlements in the 1880s, with perhaps as many as 300 individuals, were reduced to one village of 110 members in the 1940s (Galvão 1953). It is not possible to identify the exact factors that led to the dispersal of one village and not another, but differential population loss from epidemics seems to have been the most common cause. It has been suggested that communities with higher rates of population increase prior to 1884 were better able to recover from epidemics (Ribeiro 1970). The size and internal cohesion of individual villages was undoubtedly an important factor.


More isolated villages (those not on the major rivers traveled by early expeditioners) were perhaps buffered to some degree (Agostinho 1972). The Nafuqua, Kamayura, Kustenau and Waujá seem to have suffered greater losses due to their proximity to the major routes of access into the region (Carneiro 1957). Some villages suffered attrition through conflicts with neighboring groups of hostile ngikogo, “wild Indians” (e.g., Suyá, Juruna, Yaruma, Ikpeng and others), and through occasional raiding between Xinguano villages (Moennich 1942; Murphy and Quain 1955; Oberg 1953; Oliveira 1968; Steinen 1894). The Late Period (1950–Present): Because of more regular and complete demographic data after 1950, population trends can be more accurately described over the past 50 years or so (Table 5.2). These trends are somewhat different for more recent times, however. The numerous populations mergers documented prior to 1950 were not as characteristic of local population dynamics after this time. The effect of individual epidemics on individual villages can therefore be more clearly estimated. Demographic profiles for this period show that the pattern of depopulation cannot be simply conceived as a steady decline, although the nature of available evidence often forces this portrayal of post-European population decline. The overall decline in population was punctuated by specific shocks (related to individual epidemics) followed by periods of recovery, often quite rapid (cf. Thornton 1991). The general pattern of population loss would have undoubtedly continued if not for the intervention of Brazilian governmental agencies and the establishment of programs of medical assistance, namely rudimentary vaccination programs, after 1950 (Baruzzi et al. 1978; Mota 1955; Nutels 1968). Several epidemics are clearly recognizable after 1950, most notably a widespread measles epidemic in 1954 (Mota 1955) and another apparent epidemic in 1963–1964. An earlier influenza epidemic (1946) was recorded among the Kalapalo and Kuikuru, and undoubtedly other unmonitored groups, with twenty-five recorded deaths (Nutels 1968). More isolated epidemics occurred among several groups, such as influenza among the Kamayura and Kalapalo in 1950 (Carneiro 1957: 204; Nutels 1968: 70). The measles epidemic of 1954 is the best known of recent epidemics since medical personnel were in the area now known as the PIX (Parque Indígena do Xingu) at the time; in fact, the variable effects of that epidemic on individual villages can be explained, in part, by the availibility of outside medical assistance. Morbidity during this epidemic ran nearly 100 percent in most villages, with 114 total deaths recorded (16 percent of regional population). The impact of this epidemic was more far-reaching, however, as subsistence, child care and other activities were greatly disrupted,

170 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 5.2 Morbidity and Mortality of 1954 Measles Epidemic. Location/Community

Number Afflicted

Number of Deaths

Post Jacare (initial outbreak) Kamayura

09

09

Post Vasconcelos (Leonardo) 115

18

Aueti

Kamayura

31

08

Yawalapiti

25

00

Trumai

21

02

Matipu

18

00

Mehinaku

07

00

Waujá

07

02

Others

43

07

134

05

Kuikuru Before Assistance After Assistance Kalapalo (no assist.)

04 150

40

Waujá

97

19

Total

657

114

leading to further complications and general deterioration in community health (Mota 1955). If large portions of a village are affected by an epidemic, then long-term impacts on subsistence, hygiene and general health for the entire community are common (Polunin 1977). By the 1960s, most villages had experienced significant population recovery. Several of the smaller villages that were reaching critical levels in the 1950s had surpassed their pre-1954 levels. Although actual reports are unavailable, an epidemic apparently struck local villages in 1963–1964 with significant population losses. Nevertheless, some of the larger villages (e.g., the Mehinaku, Waujá, Kalapalo and Kuikuru) all reached their population nadir around this time. The creation of the PIX in 1961 and, particularly, the establishment of a more regular vaccination program after 1965 (Baruzzi et al. 1978) insured the minimal conditions for survival, and as a result, all Xinguano communities have undergone dramatic demographic rebound since the 1950s and 1960s. Relatively high mortality due to communicable diseases, including malaria, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis and others, and secondary complications such as pneumonia, have continued to plague local communities.


In recent years, these afflictions have seldom reached epidemic proportions, although a measles epidemic was recorded in the PIX in 1978 (Serra 1979). In 1993, at least four virulent outbreaks of the flu, several confirmed cases of malaria (still common slightly downriver from the Upper Xingu in the PIX), and possible cases of whooping cough and tuberculosis were recognized. There were seven deaths (five adults) in the Kuikuru village, several of which apparently were the result of communicable diseases or the complications from them. A prolonged outbreak of chicken pox began in the Kuikuru village by April 1993 with many reported cases in the Kuikuru and other villages until late 1993; one Kuikuru man who lived in the Yawalapiti village died of the disease in late 1993. The more recent outbreaks of infectious disease indicate that the secondary complications resulting from the actual diseases (conditions such as pneumonia, malnutrition, dehydration, diarrhea, etc.) are equally or more lethal than the actual diseases (Mota 1955; see Chagnon and Melancon 1983). Continued health problems leading to higher than normal mortality, including respiratory and other infectious diseases, as well as metabolic and chronic diseases, continue to plague the area, as elsewhere in Amazonia (Flowers 1983; Hern 1994), because of continuous contacts with outsiders in villages and through a continuous stream of Indian travelers to and from Brazilian towns and cities. The limited available data regarding population structure indicate that fertility rates were not significantly reduced by the physiological effects of poor health or by artificial means. In fact, among the Kamayura there was a dramatic increase in the proportion of the population under fifteen years old between 1949 and 1971 (Junqueira 1975, 1979). In composite, over 30 percent of the Upper Xingu regional population was below the age of ten in 1970 (Baruzzi and Iunes 1970). Demoralization in individual villages and raiding against and out-migration from weakened villages, apparent prior to 1950 (Murphy and Quain 1955), does not seem to have played a significant role in demographic profiles after 1950, although these factors undoubtedly affected populations in restricted contexts, as known elsewhere in the region (Baruzzi 1977; Vidal 1977). Population growth in many villages has, in fact, been very dramatic since about 1970. Many villages have attained the size of the 1880s villages (i.e., 200–300 people) and, indeed, several have undergone fissions (Kamayura, Kalapalo, Kuikuru, Matipu/Nafuqua and Mehinaku). In part because of their rapid growth, the village has fissioned twice in the past decade. The Kuikuru village population in 1994 (322 individuals) was the largest historically recorded village in the Upper Xingu before it split in 1997. The significant rebound is indicative of the fact that there are no


cultural or biological contraception mechanisms widely in effect, and there seems to be a dramatic tendency for demographic growth, even population explosion. It would be stretching it to assume that these conditions duplicate ancient demographic dynamics, but it does suggest that there is an internal cultural tendency to develop large, sedentary populations.

Demography, Structure, and Power Given the magnitude of disruption to local groups following epidemics, it is important to consider the social consequences of demographic shocks and prolonged demographic stress. Rapid depopulation led to significant deficits in personnel to fulfill various social roles, based on, for instance, the local division of labor, marriage and residence patterns, village leadership and shamanism. Many villages were also left with large numbers of orphans with ambiguous kin-networks (Basso 1973; Gregor 1977; Ireland 1988). High mortality among adults and especially elders resulted in the rapid loss of cultural knowledge, a widely documented effect of depopulation (Baldus 1974; Posey 1994; Wagley 1940, 1951; Vidal 1977). These related factors had immediate and often profound influences on the social reconstitution of villages after epidemics, a “founder’s effect” that created a context ripe for sociocultural innovation, or at least considerable divergence between structural “rules” and practical actions. In fact, during a crisis as traumatic as an epidemic, we might expect social action to be particularly experimental, negotiated, and dominated by contingency and strategy (cf. Lindenbaum 1979). In a broader perspective, the differential impact of epidemics on communities, locally disrupting economic, ceremonial and political patterns as key members became ill, died or mourned the passing of those who did, not only compromised or strengthened the position of individuals and kin groups within communities but also villages in a regional sociopolitical arena. The sheer number of deaths often forced individuals and kingroups to seek support or refuge outside of their local group and, in fact, whole villages dissociated and were forced to move to other villages. Kinship relations cross-cutting lines of village affiliation and language thus became more common, facilitated by the ambiguous kin and affinal relations and the necessary relaxation of preferred residence and marriage practices resulting from depopulation (Basso 1984; Dole 1969, 1984; Gregor 1977: 263). The ability of individuals and kingroups to respond to demographic shocks through extralocal residential mobility is, in part, because of a Xinguano cultural “ethos of accommodation” (Gregor 1990) that condemns antisocial behavior, such as argumentative and confrontational behavior and promotes hospitality within and between groups. An ethos of accommodation apparently characterized Upper Xingu social relations


throughout the contact period and perhaps before, in the form of a largely defensive posture in prehistory (like today), but this pattern was certainly reinforced by the exigencies of the post-European period, notably depopulation and territorial compression. Within the milieu of demographic shocks, the nature and direction of social change must be considered in the context of native perceptions of illness and death, notably witchcraft beliefs. For modern Xinguanos, illness and death are typically viewed as the result of intentional acts by malicious spirits or witches; deaths, however, are most commonly attributed to witchcraft. Morbidity and mortality are not seen as merely a reflection of biological or natural conditions, but instead emanate more directly from the supernatural. As Carneiro (1977:4) notes: … nothing is so firmly rooted in the mind of a Kuikuru than the notion that most of his [and his family’s] afflictions are directly due to sorcery, and that a number of persons he comes into contact with every day are witches. Outbreaks of disease are seen as symptomatic of local interpersonal hostilities and, as such, often prompt retaliation by affected parties in the form of witchcraft accusations and executions. Witches act out of malice, they are by nature malicious and bereft of human social feelings, but their actions are viewed as intentional attacks against specific individuals based on jealousy, vengeance, or simply spite. Furthermore, anyone can contract a witch to attack their enemies or political rivals. Thus, responses to illness and death were framed within the context of political action. But, witchcraft accusations are not simply born of local political strategizing. The interpretation of any incident of witchcraft is necessarily defined within the context of local politics, but it is sudden illness and especially death, not political strategy, that prompts witchcraft accusations. In other words, sociopolitical relations affect who one suspects—that is, who can be considered trustworthy or antagonistic—and influence whose word one believes, but accusations are based on real suspicions of who, in fact, is guilty. The primary motivation for witchcraft accusations and executions is to avenge the death of kin, and toward this end many individuals do not strengthen but compromise their social standing, and even place themselves in serious danger. The occurrence of witchcraft, including threats, accusations, and executions, directly correlate to patterns of morbidity and mortality (cf. Turner 1964), a fact that does not escape indigenous notice. As one Kuikuru elder puts it: But later, the deaths began. The witch-charms/illness (kugífe) had arrived. We became few. In the time when the Whitepeople first


came, they brought [back] the kugífe, they, the old ones, the witches. The kugífe (darts) flew. Many died. (Franchetto 1993: 114–115 author’s translation.) In the face of high mortality from infectious disease, fear and anxiety related to witchcraft becomes intense, as do local conflicts resulting in accusations, occasional executions, and residential movements (Basso 1973; Carneiro 1977; Gregor 1990:118; Ireland 1988). Surrounding outbreaks of epidemic disease (which at least for the period after 1884 were fairly regular), the threat of witchcraft or accusations of it colored all social relations and strongly influenced decisions regarding marriage, affiliation and residence, and factional relations (Basso 1984b). The fear of witchcraft, in a general sense, may dissuade individuals from overtly antisocial behavior, promoting social harmony and integration (Dole 1966). Nonetheless, suspicions and anger generated within villages, or closely related villages, by disease-related deaths, particularly in the context of epidemics, break down the social fabric and create instability within villages. In fact, heightened anxiety related to witchcraft can create a centrifugal social force within villages as individuals, households, or even factional groups look to other villages to escape threats or accusations of witchcraft. This force, coupled with exigencies of population loss, drew villages closer together by prompting out migration from one village to another to avoid threats or accusations of witchcraft. Epidemics, or following indigenous thought “epidemics of witchcraft,” must be placed in the broader context of indigenous medical systems, in which healing acts are closely linked with notions of disease causation classification (cf. Turner 1975: 159). Xinguano shamanism and witchcraft are two closely related elements of that system (herbalism and the harmful influences of spirits are others). As the invisible power of witches (read illness and death) increases, so does the actual power of shamans, the only individuals capable of divining the source of physical malady. This brings up a problematical issue: what transformations did demographic stress create in local relations of power, particularly with respect to the relative political power of shamans versus hereditary chiefs (e.g., Dole 1969)? As is clear from Dole’s description of the influential Kuikuru diviner Metsé, who was not of chiefly rank, shamans can play a very active role in political action, even eclipsing that of any local chief of high rank, including the primary village chief. But primary political power, that is, the primary mechanisms for social mobilization and control, lies not in the hands of the shaman but rather the chief. In fact, in the historical case of the Kuikuru that Dole describes (c. 1953–1954), the recent death of


the powerful chief, Afukaká (grandfather of the current principal chief), several years earlier (Carneiro 1994) had left a political vacuum that no powerful legitimate chief filled until decades later. There is no necessary link between shamanism and the political power of chiefs, contrary to the common (and often erroneous) assumption that in Amazonia “there is, generally speaking, no sharp dividing line between the office of chief and that of shaman” (Furst 1991: 108). In Xinguano society, as apparently in other Arawakan societies of southern Amazonia as well (see Métraux 1942), there is, in fact, a sharp dividing line between the two and, more generally, between chiefly status, political strategy, and influence in ritual and secular contexts and that of nonchiefly individuals and families. The difference is simple and fundamental: one is born to power and the other must earn it. Only those born of high chiefly rank have the requisite geneological substance (i.e., bloodline) to ascend to one of the two principal chiefly offices—the “village chief ” and the “plaza chief,” the latter typically being the more prominent in public political and ritual activities. Only high ranking individuals can officiate the major chiefly rituals of passage, can formally receive visitors, or can legitimately use chiefly adornments, be commemorated in chiefly rites, learn the chiefly language, or otherwise accumulate the symbolic capital upon which political authority is anchored. In short, a person of chiefly rank can rise to become a “true” (sitting) chief whether they are a shaman or not, but a shaman cannot become a true chief unless he is of chiefly blood. In most situations, shamans have limited influence in local politics or the structure of social relations, except insofar as these relate to the actions of witches (and to a lesser degree malicious spirits). Public political and ritual actions are dominated by chiefs, with other prominent individuals playing a secondary role. Here it is important to recognize that there are two major ceremonial complexes: (a) “spirit”rituals, centering on natural spirits and oriented toward sociality, play, and health, including masking rituals sponsored and conducted by any prominent individual, and soul-recoveries conducted by multiple shamans; and (b) chiefly rituals, overseen by chiefly individuals, which are oriented toward the symbolic reproduction of society and legitimizing past, present, and future hierarchical social relations (see Basso 1973; Gregor 1977 for fuller discussions). Shamans can, however, transform their situational influence, based on their abilities as healers and/or diviners, into lasting political prominence; medical practitioners, including “diviners” and “curers,” as well as herbalists, can also rise to prominence through economic gains (accumulated payments). It is widely acknowledged that these individuals


are often wealthier than average (being somewhat relieved of the ostentatious generosity demanded of chiefs). True political prominence—the ability to dominate and control the major instruments of political action (i.e., plaza ritual, external contacts, witchcraft execution, labor mobilization)—is as much a matter of blood as achievement, even today when bloodlines are mixed and political power diminished from depopulation. In this vein, the death of a powerful chief (and his potential heirs) is an inherently public and political affair, often with far reaching repercussions, whereas that of nonchiefly individuals is conceived as entirely interpersonal, interpreted not in the context of struggles for political power between rival factions or villages, but as the result of petty disputes. In other words, we are comparing distinctive, although interpenetrating, domains of power and inequality: one in which status is based on an inherent hierarchical (“elite”) ideology, that is, based on genealogy, and another in which status positions are based largely on personal achievement. Obviously, the distribution of power or struggles over it do not merely correspond to a hierarchy from highest chiefs to lowest commoners but also on a “heterarchy,” following Crumley (1987, 1991), of alternative and often competing centers of power ranked in diverse ways according to conditions (e.g., masculine/feminine, chief/non-chief, spiritual/practical). In this sense witchcraft (i.e., the assumed or invisible power of witches or those that contract them) and accusations of it, as well as shamanism (Descola 1988; H. Clastres 1975; P. Clastres 1987), as alternative sources of power, can represent forms of resistance or reactions to the accumulation or concentration of power, as well as a component of competition between politically powerful, or potentially powerful rivals (e.g., Ireland 1996). Contemporary chiefs, in fact, often feel acutely threatened by witchcraft (Carneiro 1977). There is little doubt that both shamanism and witchcraft, as broadly defined symbolic complexes, were significant among ancient Xinguanos, given their widespread distribution and similarities across the southern peripheries of Amazonia, and more generally throughout Amazonia and the New World (Furst 1976; Viveiros de Castro 1996). We also can assume, following the same comparative logic, that hereditary chiefs and chiefly hierarchies were also fundamental elements of prehistoric sociopolitical systems, an assumption that finds some concrete validation in the objectification of chiefly power in plaza rituals and symbolism together with the long term continuity of village spatial organization (Heckenberger 1996).


Although we cannot precisely evaluate relative changes in the power of shamans, witches, or chiefs as overlapping domains or dimensions of power, it seems certain that if we take the ethnographic period as our model, we are likely to overestimate the position of shamans and witches and underestimate that of high ranking chiefs in local power relations. In other words, we must be careful not to conflate the practice of a cultural structure at a particular moment with the limits of the structure itself, (as known though historical performance (Comaroff 1985). Ethnographic patterns are the topic of Part II.

PART

II

Body, Memory, and History In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and, indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. Emile Durkheim 1977: 11 If all societies and, significantly, all the ‘totalitarian institutions’, in Goffman’s phrase, that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such a store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of culture. Pierre Bourdieu 1977: 94 The last person to go looking for lost civilizations in the southern Amazon was Colonel Percy Fawcett, an English explorer who looked in vain for the lost cities of legend, the lost civilization of Mu or El Dorado. He mounted four expeditions in the Bolivian lowlands (1906–1913), exploring as far east as the Mamoré River in the central Llanos de Mojos, and later in northern Mato Grosso, Brazil (1920 and 1925). Fawcett was inspired by the spectacular nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries in tropical America, such as those in Mesoamerica and, particularly, Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. Only five years before, in 1906,

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Fawcett himself had scoured the countryside in the Andean foothills and lowland forests in search of the elusive Amazonian cities of “Indian stories.” In 1920, Fawcett turned his attention to the southern peripheries of the Amazon. He began in the Guaporé, the easternmost tributary of the mighty Madeira River and home to the once powerful “theocratic chiefdoms of eastern Bolivia,” as Steward and Faron (1959) later called them. The reports of his last expedition are scanty, because he and his two companions were lost in the Upper Xingu in 1925 (Fawcett 1953). In route to the Von Martius cataracts, which separate the middle and upper reaches of the Xingu River, he entered the Upper Xingu basin, and was never heard from again. His last letter, dated May 29, 1925, was from “Dead Horse camp,” where his horse had died and he turned back in 1920, somewhere around 11º 43’ S. and 54º 35’ W. It was here, on the border of the Xinguano lands, that the Western dream of lost civilizations in the southern Amazon died as well. Fawcett was not the first explorer to meet their demise in the Upper Xingu region. Xinguanos tell a tale, an akiña, of an earlier white man (cagaiha) who had invaded their lands, a bandeirante looking for slaves who had attacked multiple Xinguano communities long ago. He was killed by an arrow, around 1750, shot dead by a local bowman (Basso 1995). The story matches that of Antonio Pires de Campo Filho, who, following in his father’s footsteps (“Pai Piro,” as the Bororo called him), helped “open up” the frontiers of Brazil’s vast interior (the sertão). In Mato Grosso, the wilderness northeast of Cuiabá—a city his father helped to found in the 1720s—he was shot dead by an Indian arrow. Slaving was risky business. Pires de Campo, Jr., in fact, mounted an army of Bororo conscripts to march against the Southern Kayapó villages, perched on the northern margins of the Planalto Central, overlooking the Upper Xingu basin. As far as we know, Steinen was the next cagaiha to come to the Xingu, more than one hundred years later in 1884 and 1887, but his interest was not lost civilizations, but “naturvölkern,” a rudimentary social and historical form that twentieth century authors commonly called “primitive tribes.” Lost civilizations were not what I intended to find hidden in the forests of the southern Amazon. Now it seems inescapable to me, based on archaeology, regional ethnohistory, and oral history (summarized in Part I) and ethnography (summarized in Part II), that the Xinguano nation is a cultural history, a society, that is, in a word, complex. The Xinguano peoples, although not unique in the region, are distinctive from many native Amazonians in several important respects: (1) politics: they are notable in (a) the degree to which they reckon descent (and from it history) asymmetrically according to genealogy and “rank,” (b) in their regionality (the

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necessarily regional nature of sociality), and (c) their in-focused philosophy of social reproduction, centered on major intercommunity rituals, particularly chiefly rites-of-passage; (2) settlement: they are unusually sedentary, seldom abandoning a place once they have settled there; (3) staple economy: they have an Amazonian equivalent to a “meat ’n’ potatoes” diet, only in this case it is “fish ’n’ beiju,” with some fruits, nuts, minor crops, and a variety of other treats on the side; and (4) material culture: rather than technological austerity, they have a remarkable diversity of material culture, including wealth, payment, and specialization as critical elements of local political-economies. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that there were “minor civilizations” in the Upper Xingu, in 1492, if not today, as Kroeber (1947) once called the small- to medium-sized “complex societies” scattered across much of the Americas. Overall, the Xinguano social formations were likely every bit as large as those of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and circumCaribbean areas. The word “chiefdom,” in fact, derives from Arawakspeaking groups in the southern Amazon, closely related to the Xinguanos, the “theocratic chiefdoms” (Oberg 1949, 1955). They are the obvious descendants of pre-Columbian polities, historically contiguous with other major regional polities (or regions of polities) of the southern Amazon, such as the Pareci, Bauré, and Terêna. Xinguano culture is thus representative of a way of life not uncommon in 1492, settled, regional, and hierarchical social formations. But, assuming there were “chiefdoms” in the Upper Xingu in 1492, what do we then call Xinguanos now: Tribes? Simple? Small-scale? This might be rephrased to ask not if they were chiefdoms or why and when they became so, as if there is a priori agreement as to what constitutes one in the first place, but, instead, how are they or were they chiefdoms or chiefly societies. In other words, what would a genuinely Amazonian complex society look like if we stumbled upon it? How were they complex? What practices or principles made it so (complex)? What bodies or persons would make it (complexity) up? These questions must be asked at the “grassroots” level—that is, on the ground—how we visualize and measure bodies and persons as they actually move through time, not how they ought to. Before proceeding to questions of personhood, the body and cultural memory as they are reflected in local patterns of sociality, spatial organization, place, and the built environment, it is important to reassert that the question of complexity in Amazonia, when considered at all, has tended to be narrowly construed within the viewpoint of cultural ecology. As Robert Carneiro (1995: 47) puts it: “Ecological interpretations of Amazonian


culture history, with various ecological factors assigned either a positive or negative role, have dominated Amazonian research for the last halfcentury, with no other point of view being even a serious competitor.” In this view, evolution, whether general, biological, or cultural, is portrayed, relatively unproblematically, as an increase in organizational or functional heterogeneity and integration. “It is in the nature of things,” Carneiro (1987: 111) writes, “that simplicity precedes complexity,” or, in other words, “complexity has developed out of simplicity.” Quoting Herbert Spencer, an apical ancestor for such a view in social sciences, he notes that evolution is “a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.” The problem is that the reverse is also true: complexity creates simplicity. When seen is this light, a subtext of Amazonian culture history appears, what I call the “archaeology of the Amerindian imagination,” an enterprise dominated not by North American cultural ecology, inspired by Julian Steward, but the Franco-Brazilian tradition of structuralism inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss. There is a very powerful indigenous model, the “widespread social philosophy that defines humanity not by instrinsic properties but by its position in a whole series of contrast sets” (Descola 1992). The viewpoint espoused here shares elements of “Amerindian perspectivism”, as proposed by Viveiros de Castro (1996b, 1998; Lima 1996; Vilaça 1992, 2000), an example par excellence of the archaeology of the Amerindian imagination, which entreats how living Amazonian “persons” see other bodies and persons. The primary interest here is how we see Amazonian bodies, of all kinds, from a Western historiographic point of view: what bodies do we have to look at. The persons of the past are knowable, at least situationally, through their relations with other persons, and in their “visible” traffic in the world. So, as Marilyn Strathern (1999: 253) notes, while it is persons who hold perspectives in one another, what “transpires between persons becomes reified, graspable, ‘on their skins’, whether it is the skin of the land or the body or the clan with its universe of names.” It is here, in these reifications that the idea (or ideal) of an Amerindian perspectivism can be concretely extended to yesterday persons. In Part II, I attempt to draw some common ground between Amazonian ecology and the Amerindian imagination, recognizing the critical importance of both. The chapters focus on the ideologies and practices that underlie Xinguano sociality and explore the unique patterns of symbolic and social self-organization of Amerindian cultural systems and how these are manifest or iterate across different spatiotemporal scales, including the body, house, village, and broader landscapes. Such self-scaling


or cascading features of sociocultural systems provide critical comparative means to consider sociality, the built environment, and cultural memory through time. They also provide a means to compare Amerindian perspectives on the person and polity with those of other world areas. This serial redundancy (mimesis) or, in other words, the self-scaling quality of cascading sociosymbolic systems are widely noted in Amazonia (e.g., Descola 2001; Hornborg 2001; Viveiros de Castro 2001). Social hierarchy, as noted by Dumont (1970), is an exemplary case of such a cascade, simultaneously symbolic (a system of value), spatial (a system of ethnophysics and geography) and social (a system of sociality). It creates precisely the type of symbolic simplicity and “seriality,” in the face of great superficial differences in, for instance, economic, demographic, and technological scale, that seems to underlay many if not most “early complex societies.” Thus, it is “the evolution of (symbolic) simplicity” and the social ideologies tied to it, rather than the evolution of (functional) complexity, that is critical to the emergence and organization of most ancient kingdoms and chiefdoms. Based on a review of James Scott’s novel Seeing like a State (1998), Yoffee (2001) proposes that what occurs in these complex societies is “a tendency toward standardization, legibility, and simplification.” This evolution of simplicity is tied to the development or inflection of a discourse of power tied not only to inscription (on paper, stone, wood, or other medium) but also to the objectification of local cultural conceptions of human bodies and the built enviornment. In the Upper Xingu, what is being standardized, made legible, or simplified—what is being “gridded off ” or partitioned—is space. Specifically, the precise orientations of human bodies (of varying sizes) within spaces, such as houses, villages (plazas), and broader countrysides, organized in each case according to exact calculi of society, ecology, and the cosmos, although contingent and political due to the interplay between them. This codification and partitioning of space-time, embodied in houses, plaza communities, and landscape, is a critical element of the ecology of power. It is made obvious in the crystalline social and spatial calculi of Xinguano culture, notably in how bodies orient themselves in ritual, village space, and landscape. The raison d’etat, if we choose to use this term, are rituals, as Geertz (1980) so eloquently captures in his model of the Balinese “theater state”. And, in Amazonia, as in Bali, “[p]olitical power inhered less in property than in people,” and it is in the conceptions of personhood that we must look to develop a concretely Amazonian definition of political power, the “State,” and the appropriate local meaning of complexity. Personhood and the body are long-standing themes in Amazonia ethnology. As Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro’s (1987: 20) seminal


article on corporeality in Amazonia suggests, “The fabrication, decoration, transformation, and destruction of bodies are themes around which revolve mythologies, ceremonial life, and social organization” (see also Carneiro da Cunha 1978; Turner 1980). Amerindian societies, they go on, “structure themselves in terms of symbolic idioms that … do not speak of the definition of groups and the transmission of goods, but the construction of persons and the fabrication of bodies.” Fausto (1999: 934) elaborates: “birth and mortuary rites, initiations and naming ceremonies, shamanic and warfare festivals, seclusions and displays are all means for producing persons, for conferring on them singularity, beauty, fertility, agency, and the capacity to interact with external entities, like spirits, deities, animals, and enemies.” Thus, transformations of the body and social persona are seen as one and the same and “the categories of identity—be they personal, social or cosmological—are so frequently expressed through bodily idioms, particularly through food practices and body decoration” (Viveiros de Castro 1977, 1986, 1998: 479). The interest in the body and personhood in Amazonia, parallels the popularity of these topics in social theory, generally. The theoretical infatuation in the 1980s and 1990s with the body as representation of person and society, and the idea of “embodiment” as a primary social process does not necessarily correspond to a robust understanding of bodies, at least not all bodies (Csordas 1994; A. Strathern 1996, Turner 1994, 1995). Scheper-Hughes (1994: 232; expanding on O’Neill 1985), for instance, describes the diversity of bodies: the physical body, the communicative body, the world’s body, the social body, the body politic, consumer bodies, and medical (medicalized) bodies. She also notes that “what is missing in both the body social of the symbolic anthropologists, and in the bio-power of Foucault’s body politic, is the existential experience of the practical and practicing human subject” (Scheper-Hughes 1994: 232). Turner (1994: 38) is critical of Foucault’s inattention to the contextual and cultural specificity of actual human bodies: Population growth, or the body in its collective aspect, in short causes specific discourses, which in turn cause specific bodies—yet the reasons for the population growth remain outside the analysis —leaving it in effect a deus ex machina, or in other words yet another effect of the body as transcendental historical agent. Thus, although “suddenly omnipresent in academic literature” (Strathern and Lambek 1998: 5), theoretical treatments of the body—the proliferation of conceptual “bodies”—are seldom accompanied by in-depth treatments of how bodies change through time and space, not only in the


sense of the bodily metamorphoses and life-changes of individual human actors (Vilaça 1993; Fausto 2001), but also in terms of the agency of larger social groupings. These larger social bodies not only have different temporal, spatial, and material characteristics but also distinctive capacities for cultural memory and intentionality. In other words, there are diverse bodies at play, both in the lived world and the analytical world of the anthropologists. The question of which is appropriate for sociological or historical analysis, is context and problem specific, that is, dependent on the actual scale, form, or dynamics of bodies that can be visualized as they move through time and space. In recent decades, the whole language of social analysis has shifted from steady states or forms—bounded units, such as society, culture, or individuals—to notions of dynamic networks and hybrids, polyvocality and multidimensionality. Societies, persons, and cultures are thus moving targets in an “ecology of body and affect” (Devish 1998). Nonetheless, the problem Wolf (1982) noted of “turning names into things” often still remains. Herdt (1999) aptly coins the generic and uniformitarian categorizations of world and body (or mind) as “it entities.” These are taken as givens, assumed or fixed conditions of the body, the person, and human nature as of the “you know it when you see it variety,” such as the body with two arms and two legs. This shift to a more processual language is more pervasive: rather than society there is sociality, rather than culture there is the (re)production of meaning, rather than history or science there are perspectives, sites, and scapes and the list goes on, for example, conviviality, materiality, spatiality, corporeality, and, of course, temporality and historicity. This turn is no doubt critical but, although popular, such views are not, generally, tied to actual historical cases of how these processes played out over time. The popular discussion of a “politics of persons” in Amazonia for instance, referring to the idea that gender, age, and achieved qualities are not only dimensions of social division but also of inequality and political asymmetries, “takes for granted”, as Viveiros de Castro (2001: 23) notes, “exactly what it should not: that we know who the persons are, that every person on earth has more or less the same ideas about what qualifies as ‘people’ (and what qualifies people).” Changing the terminology, from “its” to “itys” will not in and of itself solve the ethnological problems that confront us today, which must be locally resolved, in each case, by asking: who are the persons and bodies of which we speak? Persons and bodies come in radically different shapes and sizes, when considered historically, which creates significant challenges for comparison. In other words, comparison involves issues of scales and the iteration


of bodies and persons across scales within specific contexts, as well as relations between similar-scaled bodies and persons that are the focus of traditional sociological analysis. M. Strathern (1992: 107; citing Keesing 1982) describes this as “Bateson’s problem”: “The problem was not how to fit together different parts of a society but how to fit together in an account different sources of an anthropological explanation.” The question is: “How do perspectives fit together?” and answers, obviously require “bridge-building” between partial connections. This was, of course, Boas’ (and Braudel’s) problem, as well, and it is basic to historical anthropology: how do we compare across different spatiotemporal scales within specific cultural histories. Maurice MerleauPonty (1961: 91) describes this as “varying the point of view while keeping the object fixed.” To understand bodies, language, ritual, or habitus from a historical point of view - to consider how things we can hear or see or otherwise experience translate into the past or in other words, to “know” yesterday persons, specific correspondences must be found between the past and the present: careful attention must be directed at how we develop analogies or, more specifically in this case, homologies within specific sociohistorical trajectories. This involves understanding indigenous Amerindian systems of thought and action in themselves, particularly the symbolic self-scaling so clearly evident in Amerindian systems of thought (i.e., the cascades that constitute what I discuss below and in Chapter 8 as the “fractal person,” a term borrowed from Roy Wagner, 1991). It also involves the way we, anthropologists “do” or “see” history, the way we write societies, cultures, bodies, or persons. For convenience’s sake, let’s say that “persons” are what humans see as other human bodies, in the largest sense of other individuals, families, and communities. Persons are who we want to get to know, but it is bodies that we must “sense” in order to do so. To suggest an archaeology of the body implies persons, but it automatically assumes physical bodies: houses, neighborhoods, communities, and larger aggregations and regions where persons exist, what bodily characteristics or changes we see in them, and how things cascade across (through) these levels. The focus on the body here is not, however, because “the privileging of the body in the mind/ body dichotomy reverses a bias in Western thought going back at least to Aristotle” (Richlin 1997: 25). The reason is simple: there can be no such thing as an archaeology or history of mind (memory) or person without an archaeology or history of the body, the movements of human beings and in larger social bodies through time and place.


Writing persons as active agents into our historical renderings requires ways to “see” bodies and how they concretely move through time, as well as how they are pieced together into persons by other persons, defined, through varied symbolic, spatial, and social processes commonly glossed as mimesis and alterity (Taussig 1993). Here we might note that, in terms of the construction of persons, “mimesis stands in contrast to a stable subject/object opposition [alterity] and describes embodied imitation” (Strathern and Lambek 1998: 11). What is in opposition at one level or from one perspective may be subsumed together at another. Alterity is about how persons “see” other persons, whereas mimesis is how alterity becomes inflected inward in the reproduction of the persons, or historical personages. Cultural history, the particular histories of particular peoples, has always been a central concern of anthropology. Nonetheless, there is still very little consensus on the methodological question of how to know the persons of yesterday, past personae. How do we animate, for the purposes of general understanding, what Marx called “dead labour”? Historical anthropology, or “doing history” as an anthropologist, requires the articulation of objective history, the history of objects (artifacts and texts) and places, with the subjective history of the actual human bodies, actions, memories, and understandings. It combines, we might say, archaeology sensu stricto, taking as its point of departure material culture (materiality), with an archaeology of text, an archaeology of the body, social practice, and language, and an archaeology of indigenous knowledge. In Amazonia, like many places, the motivations and accidents of yesterday persons are particularly poorly known, given the limited amount of work done there. We might even conclude that the traces of cultural meaning—the “bric-a-brac” of past social action washed upon the shores of modern times—are simply unknowable beyond the memories of the living. The (arbitrary) cultural schemes and symbolic meanings—local conceptions about the natural order of things and persons—are neither natural or given but are culturally constructed and relative, making translation as much as direct measurement the basis of comparison. All human action is meaningful, and meaning is often very it is hard to measure, count, or submit to statistical analysis (Turner 1974). However, as Gellner (1995: 50) suggests, “Things do have their reality and exercise constraints over us, and some ways of knowing them are more effective than others.” Thus, as Noyes and Abrahams (1999) point out, a narrow “symbolic [or linguistic] approach treating culture as text [or language] will not account for those bodily techniques of incorporation, in which memory is made


material and inalienable, something that cannot be transmitted to an outsider in words.” The focus of analysis changes from direct experience, to expressions and physical traces, or, in other words, the “crystallized secretions of once living human experience” (Turner 1982: 17). Since social space is a social product, as Lefebvre (1991: 26) noted long ago, “the spatial practices of a society secretes that society’s space.” In other words, patterned (generalized and repetitive) expressions include institutions, customs, dominant narratives, rituals, material objects, spatial relations, sediment themselves, in one way or another, into material residues, places and landscapes. Analysis focuses on how things flow and are sedimented in places, how material things are joined together, how expressions are inscribed in enduring ways, ways that determine human action, and how abstract ideologies acquire external or concrete expression that can be “recovered” by the outsider, from a later place and time (Bourdieu 1977: 87; DeMarrias et al. 1996). To speak of a history or archaeology of bodies and persons plunges us headlong into issues of memory, specifically the shared cultural memory of certain places, times, events constitutive of historical personages and collective identity. In particular, this requires the focus be upon “how societies remember” through the collective memory that is made present in commemorations, ritual, and bodily practice (Connerton 1989; Nora 1998) and inscribed or “written” on “the skin of the land.” The focus changes from cultural schemas, in and of themselves, “refering to the organized schemas for enacting (culturally typical) relations and situations” that “often take on an ordering function, achieving a degree of generality and transferability across a variety of social situations” (the cascades again; Ortner 1990: 60), to how these are instantiated in practice, through a dialectic process of internalizing the exterior and externalizing the interior, “fitting of body to world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962; A. Strathern 1996). The past is sedimented or inscribed in landscape, the arrangement of houses and villages, in objects, in the movements of the body, and in ritual cycles—in other words, in body memory as well as the memory of the imagination (Bourdieu 1977: 87–95). Cultural meanings, reproduced through discourse, ritual, and material culture, are “inseparable from the bodily activity of their production” (Ingold 1996: 152). Thus, like practices, some meanings and cultural schemas are clearly more resilient than others, sedimented through repeated cultural activities, which create patterns and trends that can be monitored and correlated though time. In other words, not only do some symbols and practices adhere over time, but these often covary with other symbols and practices. Obviously, this is because mind and body,


words and gestures, ideas and things are not autonomous but mutually pre-disposed, each implied, if not “pregnant,” in the other. This simple proposition, that words and gestures are not autonomous, underlies the proposition of the Arawak Diaspora (a spatiotemporal entity of a very large order), the Southern Amazonian Periphery (a smaller macroregional spatiotemporal entity within the diaspora), and the Xinguano Tradition (a still smaller regional spatiotemporal entity). Fortunately for anyone interested in pursuing an archaeology of cultural meanings, Xinguano culture stamps itself on just about everything in its midst. Even the most seemingly mundane, small things are invested with multifaceted but comparable meanings. This redundancy of cultural meaning—through metonymy and mimesis and alterity—enables us to relate village location, land use, spatial organization, technology, and subsistence economics, emphasized in part only on account of their visibility over the long run, to broader cultural patterns revealing a more basic, elemental continuity in a general Xinguano “way of being.” As discussed earlier, several enduring features serve as our guides: the circular central plaza with radial (spokelike) roads, the arteries linking the village to other villages and to other prominent features of the landscape; the distinctive ceramic industry, associated with these plaza sites. All these features clearly show not only cultural continuity from the earliest occupations to the present but also continuity in basic elements of the staple economy (manioc and fish) and settled lifeways. A simple comparison of the village layout of an ancient village, like Kuhikugu, with a contemporary village shows this clearly: the village “core,” the plaza, and roads/pathways exiting radially from it, are identical. Continuity in village placement is also obvious, that is, you need not go far from a contemporary village to run across an ancient one. The vast tracts of forests denuded in the age of the ancient villages, no doubt cleared in the past as today for manioc gardens, is the same pattern of fairly intensive landuse and landscape alteration witnessed around villages today - only once again the degree of alteration is much greater. Prehistoric pot sherds, the majority of which relate to several functionally distinctive items of cookware, are for all intents and purposes identical to present-day forms. Continuity in their function is also clear, not only because of conservatism in the industry but also the use-wear apparent on ceramic sherds. The response I once got when I asked a Kuikuru man about the pots sums it up well: “This [pot] is ahukugu, it is for cooking manioc, this pot [atange] is for cooking fish. This one manioc, and that one for fish” (and I could sense, if not hear “for the thousandth time”).


Describing where one type of body or memory ends and another begins, defining bodies, is subjective (perspectival) to the degree that anyone can only “see” certain things. Body memory bespeaks more than the reproduction of the everyday bodily dispositions (hexus), although this is an important part. The constitution of persons (and doxa) is an equally important element, which in this case relates to rituals of social reproduction (the simultaneous reproduction of the individual and the plural), similar to what Foster (1995) calls “replacing the ancestors” (New Ireland, Austronesians). The initiation rite, generally, can be seen as a bodily metamorphosis, or “transcorporeal” moment, whereby “the initiate … is moved to incorporate the essential dimensions of … culture,” an experience “at once tactile and corporeal, as well as verbal and visual” (see Devisch 1998; Fausto 2001; Vilaça 1992; for a general discussion of “feasting,” see Dietler and Hayden 2001). The rituals are also succinct encapsulations of what Wagner (1991) calls “the fractal person,” again in New Ireland: A genealogy is thus an enchainment of people, as indeed persons would seem to ‘bud’ out of one another in a speeded-up cinematic depiction of human life. Persons as human being and person as lineage or clan are equally arbitrary sectionings or identifications of this enchainment, different projections of its fractality. (1991: 163) In Part II, basic elements of Xinguano culture in recent times are used to illustrate fundamental elements of regional culture through time: an ethos of settled village life, a complex, holistic landscape, a hierarchical “House” type of social organizations, which is tied to the (re)production of chiefs, the (re)placement of ancestors, and the (re)construction of places through time. The Upper Xingu is critical to Amazonian ethnology because it represents a living example of a type of social formation, the small to medium-sized chiefly polity that was once common in the world but today is quite rare. It represents a genuinely Amazonian complex society, what Steward and Faron (1959) called a “theocratic chiefdom”. Its history can be traced deep into the heart of the broad history of tropical America—the roots of the American “formative period”—to a time when it, and other parts of South and North America were also flexing nascent political muscles that would become, sooner in some areas, such as coastal Peru, where small fledgling temple centers grew into great theaters of disciplinary power. It was a theater state, or some such appellation for a small- to medium-sized ancient complex society, a history that it has carried forward, amid diverse challenges, into the present.

CHAPTER

6

Landscape and Livelihood: The Ethos of Settled Village Life The Kuikuru and their neighbors probably had bigger villages, stronger chiefs, mobilized labor on a larger scale, and perhaps even had social classes. If manioc cultivation did not create this culture, it at least provided the economic foundation on which it could be reared. Robert Carneiro (1983:103) For Xinguanos, the good life is a settled life in a beautiful village (ete) with a large, open plaza and wide, straight roads extending to the horizon in one or two directions. The local landscape of the village expands into a broad countryside of manioc (kuigi) gardens; groves of piquí fruit (imbe) trees; wide open fields of sapé (inhe), an invasive grass that is critical as house thatch; diverse areas of secondary forest growth, which is graded from low (tahuga) to medium-sized (tahugape). These diverse features are tied together through a complex network of paths, roadways, ports, canoe thoroughfares and canals, and other constructions, such as bridges, weirs, fenced gardens, reservoirs, and other markers of human presence. As one passes through this complex, constructed countyside of manioc gardens (kuigi-anda), piquí groves (inka or imbepe), sapé fields (inhepe) and scrub forest (tahugape), one ultimately reaches the deep forest (itsuni), itself often in an advanced stage of regrowth, having once been within the direct sustaining area of the large ancient villages. Some constructions or

191


features are quite obvious, but many others only noticeable to the trained observer, marked by subtle changes in vegetation or the history of ancestral and spirit places. A small notch in a tree or the tell-tale machete cut of leaves and saplings, or a broken branch, are all unequivocal marks that someone has passed this way. Today, a significant portion of the Xinguano lands are covered in forest, but given the scale of prehistoric land use, it cannot be assumed that the forest is climax forest, rather than post-1492 secondary regrowth. Patches of “old stand” forest undoubtedly exist, but the land has been radically transformed over dozens of generations, over a millennium or more, and much of it turned into a cultural parkland. This is not to say that there was no forest five hundred years ago, as Xinguano life ways require plants, woods, and animals from the deep forest, some of which are critical to their symbolic and social lives, such as the jaguar or uengïfi tree, or the ancient grandparents of humans, as discussed later (Chapter 7). Not all of the land was under cultivation in 1492, but considering the generally long rotational cycles here and elsewhere in lowlands (Carneiro 1983, 1985; Denevan 2001), very little if any had never felt some managerial impact by Xinguanos. None of the landscape was entirely foreign either, and where forests remained, it was intentionally, as a resource (for woods, medicinal plants, animals, birds, snails, etc.) essential to Xinguano life: it was, in essence, a fully saturated anthropogenic landscape (Heckenberger et al. 2003). Today, less of the land is under use, since there are so fewer villages, so fewer people, than in 1492, but most of it is still familiar, symbolically and economically critical to “the people.” This deep intimacy and knowledge—this situated-ness in the land—is part and parcel of a techno-economic system and a worldview, a cultural aesthetic, of settled village life. Xinguanos, like the southern Arawak, in general, are settled, agriculturalists and fisherpeople, like so many past Amazonians, and an ethos of settled village life permeates their bodies, their culture and the land around them.

Making a Living Native Amazonian agriculture and settlement patterns have been a topic of great interest to anthropologists and ecologists alike. Native lifeways are typically portrayed as exemplary of extensive tropical cultivation, so-called swidden or slash-and-burn horticulture (nonplow, nonirrigated, and noncontiguous). Limiting factors, such as low soil fertility, game scarcity, and ecological uncertainty keep populations and productivity low or, alternatively, indigenous peoples, seen as “ecologically noble” societies, keep it so (Descola 1996a; Meggers 1996). This is seen to explain why

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Amazonian peoples, generally, “underproduce” and live in small, fairly mobile, autonomous communities. This is often seen to inhibit the development of stable regional sociopolitical structures as well and instead supralocal systems of interaction involve fluctuating alliances within small fragmented regions but not integration in regional societies.1 There is, of course, another possible explanation why Amazonian societies are small, dispersed, and autonomous: colonialism. Max Schmidt noted the profound impacts of contact that destroyed much of what he called Arawak “high culture.” Robert Carneiro (1957), Donald Lathrap (1970), and William Denevan (1966) represent the first generation of contemporary scholars to note the massive impacts of Euro-American colonialism and, thus, the difficulty of using contemporary groups as a proxy for past Amazonian peoples. Robert Carneiro’s (1957, 1983, 1985) research in the Upper Xingu has been central in debates over Amazonian agriculture, political evolution, and human ecology. Carneiro was just finishing his doctoral fieldwork when Meggers’s seminal article “The Environmental Limitation on the Development of Culture” (1954) appeared, which suggested that political development was determined by environmental limitations, most notably the productivity of soils for agriculture: Amazonian soils were of the worst variety for agriculture, and hence political evolution, except for those essentially impossible to farm. Carneiro refuted this hypothesis, with respect to Amazonia, based on his fieldwork with the Kuikuru in 1953–1954, and amplified in 1975, which suggested that a larger population could be supported by the existing technology, notably based on manioc, fishing, and piquí fruit (Descola 1996a; Gross 1975). He and others, including Lathrap (1970, 1977, 1985; Lathrap et al. 1985), Denevan (1966, 1976, 1992, 1996), and, more recently, Anna Roosevelt (1980, 1987, 1989, 1991a, 1994a, 1999), did not doubt that cultural development was determined by ecological factors but saw possibilities in many parts of the Amazon, where certain ecological patterns prevail.2 Xinguanos stand out in Amazonia as farmers. They subsist primarily on manioc and fish, which makes up some 80 to 90 percent of their diet (Carneiro 1994). Manioc is typically eaten as dry flatbread (kine) with turtle meat or eggs, monkey, and, particularly, fish—the only steady meat supply and usually abundant throughout the year. Manioc is also dissolved in water (lisiñï), sometimes with the pulp of piquí, the other “staple” crop (of much lesser importance) (Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2) Almost everyday, almost everybody eats some fish. The Kuikuru do not traditionally drink much else other than water with fine manioc cake crumbled up in it. The “juice” of bitter manioc processing (water filled with suspended manioc


Fig. 6.1 Woman carrying manioc to house in tatahongo basket (1993).

Fig. 6.2 Woman cooking piquí fruit (1993).

particles), needed to remove toxins, becomes a watery porridge after boiling for several hours. Kuigiko, as it is called, is a sweet-tasting treat, although it spoils overnight. It is one of the few “sweets” in the Kuikuru diet, and I, like most of the Kuikuru, would often visit friends and neighbors when they had some.3 Although manioc provides the singular staple in the diet, the Kuikuru, like other Amerindian peoples, consume a wide diversity of


animals, insects, fruits, nuts, berries, honey, and most notably, piquí, which is the second crop of importance. In the Upper Xingu today, corn is also considered a treat, as are peanuts, sweet potato, banana, and, today, a host of imported plants, banana, legumes, melons, citrus, and manga trees are also available. These are planted far and wide across the landscape, but this does not change the fact that the Xinguanos maintain the Amazonian equivalent of a “meat-and-potato” diet, only in this case that means manioc and fish since they taboo almost all red meat. Xinguanos, as farmers, are the kind that do not move around much, as Carneiro (1957, 1985) notes. They stay, more or less fixed in place and practice swidden agriculture in a long-term rotational cycle. In fact they almost define it, envisioned by many as the typical riverine pattern (Denevan 1996, 2001; Lathrap et al. 1985; Roosevelt 1980, 1994). The Xinguanos entered the region as part of the Arawak diaspora, and, like their protoArawak ancestors, these initial Xinguanos already raised manioc, had pottery, and lived in river settings. They kept doing so in more or less the same places, building these places up physically through their earthworks and soil alterations. In many ways, they are typical Amazonian forest farmers, in that they opened up large, contiguous tracts of agricultural land, denuded of original forest and which were cultivated in long-term rotational cycles that include manioc gardens, planted in a new place every few years. Only rarely do plots return to high forest, some become piquí groves (inka), others are let go to sapé fields (inhepe) grass, many others just grow up as scrub and low forest tahuga, or tahugape (taller), and some stands of high forest (itsuni), unless they abandon an area or population is reduced. The landscape is built up over millennia of human occupation (Balée 1989, 2002), with complicated mosaic patterns of soils, hydrology, vegetation, and animal life, and among other things, a patchiness that results from the intentional construction of massive landscape features, engineered settlements, major roadways, bridges, and dikes (for weirs), and what we see today is the product of abandonment and reuse at highly reduced levels of population. Roosevelt’s (1980; 1994) contention that the agricultural base of the great várzea chiefdoms was maize or some indigenous cereal crop, rather than menioc or other root crop, is convincing in several parts of the region, at least after circa A.D. 1000 (see also Lathrap et al. 1985). However, the southern Amazonian chiefdoms, including Xinguano, Pareci, and Bauré, were based on manioc. Fish was the real issue, as it served as the primary protein source of most Amazonians. Root-crops were the staples and did not require significant “improvements” to the land or longer cropping


periods (Carneiro 1970, 1986; Lathrap et al. 1985). Throughout the southern Amazon, Arawak groups, at least, had highly sophisticated fisheries: Polynesians are somewhat akin, once again, as they, too, commonly subsist on fish and root-crops. Hastorf (2002) calls this a “horticultural mind-set,” a cultural penchant or predilection some peoples have for tending and growing things. It is hard to imagine, in fact, an Amazonian people that did not have some “mindset” of growing things, tending them, selecting for them, weeding the forests and the garden patches. The Amazon is one of those tropical, riverine settings, as Sauer (1952) recognized, where the overwhelming intimacy of plants and people led to an early, coevolutionary process of domestication. This supports Lathrap’s (1970, 1977) view that the Neolithic revolution was the long term expansion of a tropical agriculture system that involved growing a wide range of things and likely had been in place for some time, but beginning some four thousand to three thousand years ago, some groups became focused on staple root crops. Xinguanos, at any rate, have such an “agricultural mindset,” and a concomitant ethos of settled village life, and because of this, they tend to be very “hands-on” with the local environment, in building and modifying many things, and in making a clear and indelible mark on the land, and, this, in turn, only makes them more settled, by choice. The “agricultural mind-set” is perhaps best summed up by noting that there are two ways to “starve” in the Upper Xingu: not having enough manioc (kine) or not having enough fish (kanga). There is no life without them. Although less important in recent times than in the past, Xinguanos are also fish-farmers, ponding water and building major fish weirs that fill to brimming as the water level decreases from February to August. They artificially construct or modify various features that serve primarily or solely for fish harvesting. There are high-water weirs (ataca), which are great pole and thatch structures with a few to several dozen conical traps (today) (Figure 6.3), and low-water ponds where funnel traps (utu), dunk basket traps (kundu), and scoop baskets (kusu) effectively capture large quantities (hundreds of kilos). In short, the fisheries of the Upper Xingu are remarkably diverse and productive, and the Xinguanos have a technology that can capitalize on virtually all these resources (Carneiro 1986; Oberg 1953) (Figure 6.4). Weirs, fishing, and other elaborate perishable fishing technologies are a widely shared Arawak feature, present among the Enauene Naue (Saluma), Pareci and among Bauré (e.g., Denevan 1966, 2001; Erickson 1995, 2000a; 2001a). Carneiro (1957) noted this settledness inherent in the Xinguano way of life, in that they seldom moved their villages.4 They do not move their


Fig. 6.3 Fish weir (ataca) across Angahuku River (1993)

Fig. 6.4 Woman fishing with kundu trap in reservoir along Ipatse stream adjacent to X13 in dry season (1993).

villages easily, usually only a short way (within a kilometer or two at the most), and often settlement relocations involve splits, most commonly because of the political tensions in larger villages, and not village


abandonment. This is a very deep characteristic as well, and most likely part and parcel of proto-Southern Arawak. The Xinguanos do not trek, although they do make long distance trips, rapid trips to Brazilian cities and neighboring indigenous groups in order to trade things and esoteric knowledge. In terms of bodily movement, this practice is similar today to past travel within the Xinguano lands. Chapter 7 more closely examines these patterns, but for now it is critical to further develop the methodological bridge between the past and present, in this case through material culture and the likelihood of continuity in basic economic patterns.

Basic Diet The Xinguano diet is comprised primarily of a wide range of cultivated plants and fish, supplemented by a wide variety of wild plants and animals but, clearly, as Carneiro (1983: 103) notes, manioc is the “economic foundation” of Xinguano culture. Cultivated plants make up some 85 to 90 percent of the diet. The vast majority of calories is derived from some 46 varieties of bitter manioc (Manihot esculenta spp.) (Carneiro 1983, 1994: 207). (For a more comprehensive general description of Xinguano subsistence, see Basso 1973; Carneiro 1957, 1983; Gregor 1977). The second largest food crop is piquí fruit, which is harvested in the fall in large quantities from groves and individual plantings around villages, each owned by the planter or his male heirs. The piquí is like an avocado, only with a substantially “fleshier” skin around the core, which is scraped off after boiling (or occasionally bitten off raw) to be stored in large, subaqueous basketry tubes. The central mechanism of domestic economy is “householding” (see Halperin 1994, following Polanyi 1944, 1957), not reciprocity, is commonly viewed as characteristic of Amazonian peoples (see Chapter 8). Nor is it chiefly redistribution, as suggested among minimally to moderately hierarchical societies elsewhere. There is also an element of “feast-andfamine,” so that different foods come into season for a brief time, throughout the year, but the most critical foods—manioc flour and fish—are both most common in the dry season, when people put on weight. Yearly low periods (January to May) are never very low and people could collect more manioc and fish, but often they just don’t, and slim down instead. Major fish weirs, individually owned and communal, are productive precisely during high water, which insures that there is a steady supply of fish. I know of only a few cases where manioc flour was “traded,” in both cases related to the demands of outside filmmakers hiring up much of one or another community. Manioc is commonly shared with housemates and close relatives in adjacent houses (who also routinely give one another fish).


Larger chiefly households collect a surplus by first-fruits rights on piquí and manioc contributions for the major chiefly rituals, which rotate between the several major chiefly houses in the village. Large households also have the means to produce significantly more, and these extra quantities are used to sponsor prestige building activities (rituals and public works). Manioc is processed and cooked through a sophisticated process that is unique to the Upper Xingu, including its specialized ceramic vessels (Dole 1978). In brief summary, manioc processing proceeds through the following general steps: (1) tubers are collected from gardens and brought to the village; (2) tubers are peeled (traditionally using a shell); (3) peeled tubers are grated using a wooden grater (iñagi); (4) grated pulp is rinsed through a mat stainer (tuafi) over a large ahukugu vessel separating the pulp into a fine fraction (which passes through the strainer) and a heavy fraction (which does not pass through the strainer is removed and dried as a small loaf or timbuku); (5) the water from the staining process is removed and boiled for several hours to remove toxins and produce a thick beverage called kuigiku; (6) the fine fraction precipitate is removed from the bottom of the pot in sections and dried; and (7) the dried sections are ground into flour (kuigiñu); timbuku are sometimes ground into flour but only if the kuigiñu runs out (for more detailed descriptions of manioc processing, see Carneiro 1983: 96–99; Dole 1978). Numerous other domesticates, including maize (Zea mays), sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), hot peppers (Capsicum sp.), pineapple (Ananas comosus), squash (Cucerbita maxima), peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) and many recently introduced nonnative cultigens are planted for consumption. Several nonfood native crops, such as gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), cotton (Gossypium barbadense), tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), and urucú (Bixa orellana) are also used from the Upper Xingu. A variety of palms, including buriti (Mauritia flexuosa), macaúba (Acrocomia sclerocarpa), and others, as well as piquí (Caryocar brasiliense) and other fruit trees, for example, goiába (Psidium guajava), cajú (Anacardium occidentale) and mangába (Hancornia speciosa) are also exploited for their fruits. Some of these, notably piquí and macaúba, are likely semidomesticates since they occur primarily in areas of past habitation sites (see Balée and Moore 1991; Carneiro 1978a). Salt is manufactured from the ashes of water hyacynth (aguapé) and from burned tree termite nests. Parenthetically, buriti palm (Mauritia flexuosa), which grows in low ground wet areas, is of primary importance not only as a fruit palm but also for its industrial value. It is perhaps the most important industrial plant, as its leaves and stalks are used for myriad purposes (e.g., cordage, mats, seats, skirts, internal house walls, and occasionally house thatch).


Sapé grass (Imperata sp.), a disturbed ground colonizer, is also of singular importance as house thatch. The house frame is constructed using select forest trees (Carneiro 1978b). Innumerable other wild plant products are used for industrial purposes, medicines, and other things. Second to agriculture in terms of subsistence activities and dietary importance is fishing. Carneiro (1994: 207) suggests that fish (including at least eighty to one hundred species) provide about 10 to 15 percent of the diet, and constitute the primary source of animal protein. Traditional Xinguano fishing technology, which includes varieties of traps, weirs, nets, poison, bow and arrow, and lances, provides the means to exploit virtually all of the diverse fishing areas in the region. These include small streams and rivers, major rivers and standing bodies of water, ranging from small “mudholes” to expansive and deep lakes (Basso 1973: 37–39; Carneiro 1957: 126–131). In recent times, hook-and-line fishing, a Western introduction, has become increasingly important. Two primary traps, utu and ataka, are placed in linear pole and thatch weirs. Weirs are constructed by using a stick or pole frame with palm leaf thatch placed between the wooden braces below the water line. Weirs built by the Kuikuru range considerably in size; the largest, cutting off the Anahuku River at Ahanitahagu, was a tall (over three meters) community built pole and thatch weir nearly a kilometer in length and containing some forty conical ataka traps; smaller, squat weirs with one or a few ataka or utu traps were constructed by individuals or a related group of men for their private use (such as one present at Heulugihïtï). Weirs are also placed across more or less standing bodies of water to facilitate fishing with poison (inté) or with a plunge basket trap (kundu). Small temporary camps (nonovernight) are a common feature of these special activity sites, where harvesting is prolonged. Other forms of animal protein are exploited, including: wasp larvae, saúva ants, several species of grasshoppers (sometimes taken in large quantities), water turtles and their eggs, one type of monkey (Cebus sp.) and several species of birds, including jacú (Penelope sp.), and several species of Cracidae (Penelope sp., Mitu sp., and Crax sp.) and one smaller dove species (Leptotila sp.). Monkeys and birds are especially sought during times when individuals are under dietary restrictions that preclude the consumption of fish, since red meat is usually strictly avoided (see Carneiro 1957:116–125). Xinguanos (especially Carib and Arawak groups) have strong restrictions against the consumption of “red” meat from the terrestrial animals which abound in the area (including, tapir, peccary, deer, sloth, paca, capyvara, coati, agouti, armadillo, sloth, tortoise, cayman, among others)


(Basso 1973; Carneiro 1957; Carvalho 1951). Dietary restrictions (taboos) vary slightly from village to village depending on location and, especially, among ethnic groups (the Kuikuru, for instance, would often say that “we don’t eat that but so and so does”). Xinguano food taboos are among the most restrictive known in Amazonia, and most authors, following general discussions in the region (e.g., Ross 1978), view them as functional adaptations to natural resources, notably “conservation” of generally scarce terrestrial game. Xinguano taboos also clearly relate to symbolic blood “pollution,” which sees any contact with blood (menstrual blood, human blood spilled through aggression and killing, and animal blood through butchering) as highly dangerous. The aversion to blood can be tied to Xinguano origin myths, which characterize human aggression according to the consumption of blood offered by the creator (Tuangi or Giti, the Sun) to all human groups: white men (kagaiha) and “wild Indians” (ngikogo) drank of the bloodfilled gourd and are thus violent, wheras Xinguanos refused to do so and are therefore peaceful. If conservation of scarce terrestrial game is the “function” of the food taboos, Xinguano strategies are so effective as to have created truly park-like conditions for some game (deer, agouti, paca, and others that concentrate in anthropogenic areas). In fact, many animals are attracted to and concentrated to the “cultural forests” as well. Carneiro (1978a) provides a model to explain the emergence of such restrictive food taboos: when Xinguanos first moved into the basin, they were primarily hunters, but became increasingly settled because of the abundant aquatic resources and were therefore faced with the decision to restrict hunting around settled villages to conserve animal populations or to revert to a more mobile lifestyle. Although logically compelling, such a model does not seem to fit our current understanding of Xinguano histories, in that Xinguanos appear to have colonized the area as settled agriculturalists and fisherpeople (as described in Chapter 3). However, the reason for the taboos is equally symbolic and social, a cultural value (see Chapter 7).

Objects as Subjects The Kuikuru, like other Xinguanos, normally begin their day by bathing and collecting fresh water for the day’s activities. Often, members of the household disperse soon after bathing to conduct their basic economic activities in the cool morning hours: women travel to the gardens to collect manioc tubers, men go to the gardens with them or alone to conduct the clearance, planting, or maintenance of the fields. Usually as the household members return from bathing, women set about roasting


manioc flatbread (beiju) for consumption throughout the day. Some beiju, a particular thin variety, is prepared to mix with fresh water and eaten; the rest, a thicker variety, is made to be consumed dry. Like many Amazonians, Xinguanos live in a world of rivers and forests. Unlike the floodplain peoples of the Amazon proper and some of its major tributaries, who often position their settlements next to the major rivers, Xinguano peoples generally prefer areas somewhat removed from the major rivers and instead settle beside the numerous smaller steams and lakes. Water means life, it is the source of basic foods and provides a vast network of riparian pathways, and the Xinguanos are seldom far from it, but villages are always positioned in terra firme forest, regardless of distance to water. These areas do not remain forests long, however, and instead are converted quickly into mosaic parklands of secondary forest, manioc gardens, sapé grass fields, and piquí orchards. In fact, for much of the past one thousand years much of the Xinguano lands have been touched in this way. Many of the men will have already set out early each day, perhaps bathing on the way, to tend manioc gardens, to fish or, less commonly, hunt, or to collect any number of other valuable resources, they go out onto the land regularly. These “places”—gardens, baths, ports, bridges, roads—form an intermediate area (still largely constructed or anthropogenic) that leads farther and farther into the natural world lying beyond the boundaries of the village. It is wrong to assume that this is a natural world, however, because even deep in the forest there are hamlets, campsites, special procurement sites, crossroads, “special places” of spirits and ancestors, or at least the marks of previous land use (dark earth, ceramics, certain trees and plants, and certain animals). The saturation of the landscape is most obvious by just looking at the path networks that go just about everywhere. As so frequently noted about indigenous conceptions of nature (Descola 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1998), the domestication of nature erases any sharp physical or material break between nature and culture as well. The land is peopled by many “others,” as discussed in Chapter 7. The basic local unit of Xinguano society is the plaza village, with outlying seasonal hamlets. Some families, depending on their social relation to core groups in the village itself, may spend more time in hamlets away from the village. By in large, it is the heads of households who “own” hamlets away from the village, often as retreats. Xinguano technology is extremely diverse and a detailed examination of it is not possible here. It includes utilitarian tools and perishable goods (generally soft organic remains, e.g., baskets, cordage, animal skin, feathers), semidurable goods (hard organic remains, e.g., shell, wood, bone), and durable goods (generally nondecomposable manufactures, e.g., stone


tools, pottery). Perishables far outnumber durable and semi-durable goods, although ceramics are ubiquitous elements of household material culture. In particular, the Kuikuru make a wide assortment of basketry, in which they carry and store manioc, catch, carry, and store fish for a day or so. Also, they use baskets to make salt, store piquí pulp, store such valuables as cotton and spindle whorls; they weave baskets enclosing large gourds in which they stored piquí oil. They carry manioc in a large, specially made plaited basket (tatahongo). The mats (taufi) used for processing manioc, the large wheel-shaped plaited seives, and even the big silos in which the flour is stored, are all an assemblage of industrial baskets acutely related to the manioc agricultural economy. As is the case with ceramics, there is no better sign of the Xinguano focus on manioc agriculture than the degree to which it also defines a very precise material culture. Manioc processing also includes a shell (freshwater mussell) used for peeling tubers and for scraping piquí fruit off the husk, a wooden grating board (peppered with buriti palm splints, seated into perforations made with “dog-fish” fangs, and cut into pointed little teeth with piranha teeth), and the two or three wooden staves (apo), placed over the large manioc processing pot (ahukugu). Processing manioc involves an assembly of baskets and pots. Nonetheless, the manioc kit, while ubiquitous, by no means dominates among the wide diversity of perishable artifacts, considering other nets, cords, baskets, masks, and other perishable artifacts. Indeed, as LéviStrauss (1961: 198) notes, “those houses were not so much built as knotted together, plaited, wove, embroidered, and given a patina by long use … [and] reacted immediately and with great flexibility to their [human] presence, their every movement”. Baskets, in fact, make up the majority of the material culture inventory, together with wood, which is critical for making digging sticks, benches, and masks, among other objects and constructions. Perishable artifacts are followed by the industrial product par excellence, ceramics, discussed below. Traditional adornments come in several varieties: featherwork, cotton string armbands and belts, woven belts, shell belts/necklaces, occasionally with stone pendants, jaguar skin headdresses and belts, jaguar claw necklaces, and cotton and bark leggings and piquí-net ankle rattles. There are no clothes, per se, except those that are worn with masks. (Note: today mourners cover their bodies with Western clothes). In addition to hammocks, which tend to dominate the domestic sleeping quarters, at the ends of houses, the Kuikuru have racks, carved benches, and other wooden furniture in their houses. They are not discussed here, but the inventory of Kuikuru ritual paraphenalia includes, among other things, five types of


bamboo flutes, one wooden flute, and over ten varieties of woven and carved masks. These are generally stored in the central communal structure (kuakutu), often known as the “men’s,” “mask,” or “flute” house. Shamans and other types of specialists also have special “tool kits,” chiefly accouterments and paraphernalia are discussed below, as are the structures associated with chiefliness—the chief ’s house (tajife), the kuakutu, the sepulture (tafiti), and the kuarup trunk, the “idol” of recently deceased chiefs (Figure 6.5). The weaving habits of the Kuikuru hint at a deep history hitherto undescribed by ethnographers. Consider the patterns in which they spin their cords, methodically, down to the right (S-spin, S-twist, and S-weft slant), tie their knots, and weave their baskets, and, in fact, construct nearly everything within their remarkably large repertoire of material culture (by Amazonian standards) according to some very clear guidelines (Petersen et al. 2001b). Like we tie our shoes almost unthinkingly, such motor habits become second nature, internalized, and taken for granted (Adovasio 1977). Again, these details of culture and culture history are often overlooked in late-twentieth-century ethnological treatments. They are markers of identities and histories that sometimes span across wide stretches of time and space.

Fig. 6.5 Man sitting on tafite, with three large ahukugu (Form IA) manioc cooking pots from (Steinen 1896).


If ethnographers have often ignored materiality, the movements of things, the paths of things in motion (Appadurai 1986; Weiner 1992), archaeologists, for their part, have generally been more interested in change rather than conservativism, either for the business of chronology or cultural process. Just as the domestication of place perpetuates certain practices, so, too, do the movements of the working body, related, for instance, to the planting, processing, cooking, and wielding of manioc effects. In Kuikuru industrial technology, it is through these baskets and ceramics, and these alone, that raw foods, bitter manioc, fish, and piquí are “domesticated,” cooked and made into food. However, what interests us here, for the moment, are kitchen utensils, the most basic, everyday things that the Kuikuru keep next to their hammocks, their food preparation items, notably the one item they cook in, ceramics, and what they tell us about what people eat. The indoor kitchen is composed of several features, most notable of which is the large manioc griddle, alato, propped up by three supports (undagi), next to the montigoho, and always there are a couple of supports around to put a smaller, although sometimes still quite large, fish cooking pot, atange. There are often small roasting racks here as well. Their other utensils include other ahukugu pots, used for manioc processing (big ones like the montigoho) and water storage, and large mortars made from large tree trunks set in the ground. It is important to mention that function, which distinguishes the pots in native classification, is my taxonomic point of departure: they process and cook manioc in the large buck-pots—ahukugu and montigoho (what I call Type IA, see later)—and cook fish and other things in the atange (Type IB) (Figures 6.6 and 6.7). There is actually only a very small difference, in most cases, between the two, except in the rim and appendages. The rims of the fish-cooking atange are out-turned to provide a handle (Figures 6.8, 6.9, and 6.10). Another primary atange form has a straight (direct), unthickened rim with zoomorphic adornos or other appendages (e.g., end handles). The atange pots are used for storing, serving, and, particularly, cooking fish, and get quite a bit smaller than the smallest ahukugu, which get quite a bit larger than the largest atange. Overall, Types IA and IB are very similar pots in form and manufacture. As for the ahukugu cooking pot, it stays put, since there is no need to move it in manioc cooking. Much of what we know about Xinguano ceramics comes from the one primary pottery-making village of the Waujá, and their related families in other villages. Native lore has it that human beings, kuge, make ceramics in the way given to the Waujá by Tuangi, imitating the divine ceramics littered about in the dawn time (See “The Mirror World of Dawn time”


Fig. 6.6 Drawing of ahukugu form ceramic sherd from excavated prehistoric context (top) and contemporary made vessel (actual sherd from which top is reconstructed is shown in Figure 6.7 and the bottom vessel is shown during manufacture in Figure 6.12, top left).

Fig. 6.7 Large ahukugu form (IA) sherds, which preserve red exterior slip. Note use-wear notch from manioc processing using wooden staves (apo), like today (lower left).


Fig. 6.8 Small effigy bowl (atange) from Steinen (1896).

Fig. 6.9 Late prehistoric adorno.

section of Chapter 7 for more on the origin of Tuangi.). There is no exact formula or recipe other than that passed down for generations, learned by watching, and listening, and touching pottery and clay. This way is clearly known, as well as if it were written in a manual (so it would seem anyway, given the continuity in the basic procedure over more than


Fig. 6.10 Jaguar effigy pot showing differential red slip, buff (unslipped) black-painted designs and black-painted vessel interior (1995).

a thousand years). It is simply the way. We know this not because, or not only because, some Xinguano told us it is so, but because in ancient and recent villages we run across ceramic remains all the time in archaeological sites. We find sherds in trash heaps behind every house or sometimes littered about. Every house own has its own varied set of pots and often spares in storage. Pottery, benches, and hammocks constitute the primary furnishings of the traditional house (the Xinguano hammocks, I might add, are identical to those of the Pareci, some five hundred kilometers west). Ceramic-making is largely the domain of Xinguano women. Just as methodically as they make ceramics, or weave hammocks (tige) and the all purpose tuafi mat, so too do the men carefully paint the pots, the kuarup trunks, and the murals of chief ’s houses, tajïfe. Women produce utilitarian objects and manioc flour, whereas men build structures, improve land, make wooden tools and household furniture (benches, racks, manioc silos [kuigi-ingï], and piquí underwater storage baskets, [imbene-ingï], nets, baskets, and traps (except the women’s fishing trap kusu), and the myriad paraphernalia of ritual and shamanistic life. Men produce virtually all objects of a ritual nature. Some men are alogi, master craftsmen, knowing how to make most everything and how to make it well. Chiefs are commonly alogi, a status restricted to very few people, and one that serves as an important means of gaining prominence (although not in and of itself). The skills required to make some items (e.g., utu fish trap, kagutu flutes) are known by only one or a few people. As elsewhere in Amazonia, the most obvious remains found in archaeological sites are ceramics. Second, the terra preta, indicative everywhere


they occur in the Xingu of pre-Xinguano habitation sites, are another highly visible feature of the archaeological landscape. So far these two features, ceramics and black-earth, have always been found together, and together they form the basis upon which Xinguanos identify these ancient sites, sites typically interpreted as being of divine origin, and therefore important elements of the landscape.

Pottery As noted above, the Xinguano ceramic industry shows remarkable continuity from the earliest occupations until the present and therefore can be treated as a single evolving ceramic tradition, genetically affiliated with other members of the Amazonian Barrancoid (“Incised-Rim”) tradition. However, minor influences from both of the major várzea traditions of late prehistory, the “Incised-Punctate” (i.e., Santarem and Konduri) and Amazonian Polychrome are evident. The anthropomorphic urn or figurine leg fragments, for instance, are similar to those with ankle adornments known elsewhere in the Amazon area (cf. Meggers and Evans 1957: Plate 18). Ceramics from Lake Miararré, likely contemporary with the mid- to late occupations at Nokugu, Kuhikugu and the other sites, show clear affinities to the so-called IncisedPunctate (Konduri-like) ceramic tradition.5 The following discussion focuses on Pre-Columbian ceramic artifacts and, in particular, those associated with the primary Western Complex sites of Nokugu and Kuhikugu. The ultimate aim is to adequately describe the primary aspects of the prehistoric ceramic industry and compare them to the contemporary industry. Because of the ease of characterizing the contemporary industry, based on observation of contemporary potterymaking groups (Arawakan Xinguano), a detailed attribute analysis was not conducted for the essentially modern Xinguano Phase materials. A summary of the results of the detailed analysis conducted on key portions (rims and some bases and other diagnostic fragments) of the pre-Columbian assemblage is presented later. There are four primary ceramic vessel forms associated with both ancient and modern occupations (Heckenberger and Toney, n.d.). These include: (1) small to large open-mouthed and flat-bottomed vessels (Form I); (2) constricted-mouthed small to large jars (Form II); (3) open- to slightly constricted-mouthed globular bowls (Form III); and (4) manioc cake (beijú) griddles (Form IV). Cylindrical solid pot and griddle supports (28 examples from MT-FX-06; 44 examples from MT-FX-11) also are common in Ipavu Phase deposits and historic Xinguano Phase sites. In all known cases, the technique of manufacture of Ipavu Phase vessels is similar


to that of contemporary Xinguano potters, the Arawak-speaking groups, principally the Waujá.6 Prehistoric vessels were manufactured by paddle and anvil modeling and/or slab/block construction. In some cases, the slabs are thick strips of clay, but there is no evidence of coiling (the spiral, additive process of wall construction using thin cylindrical strips, or coils, of clay). After initial forming and prior to firing, excess paste is removed with a scraping tool and pots are scrubbed with a sandpaper-like leaf (lixeira) when they are largely dry. Modeled adornos are attached to the rims of some pots (notably Form IC, described below). Incised decoration is sometimes executed on the inside (upward-facing) rim and is often coupled with rim lip punctation (notching). Commonly a red slip is applied prior to firing across the exterior or parts of it, particularly in large manioc processing/ cooking vessels (Form IA, decribed below). Often the interiors and slipped portions of the exteriors are burnished with a small pebble, after excess material has been removed with a scraping tool. Both Ipavu and Xinguano Phase potters relied primarily on cauíxi (sponge spicule) as a temper, but two varieties of tree-bark (caraipé), among other tempers, were also used, often mixed with cauíxi.7 Today, pots are placed in the firing position (upright on the ground surface) and sherds are placed around them to form a rough oven (reducing environment). Bark from one preferred species of tree is forced between the cracks and all around the enclosure, ignited and left to burn for thirty minutes to over an hour. Some pots are fired more than once to remove “firing clouds.” As would be expected of this technique of firing, when prehistoric (or modern) sherds do not have a fairly uniform light gray/cream core coloration, sherd cores have a pronounced single gray core and lighter exterior. After firing, the exterior of pots is sometimes painted with black pigment in unslipped areas. The same pigment is used as a surface treatment on the interior of all pots. The pots analyzed from prehistoric contexts showed ample evidence that the same basic manufacturing procedure was used prehistorically; some prehistoric vessels show a control over the medium notably higher than today’s standards, however. Two manufacture “clumps,” with characteristic textile/basket impressions and in one case actual fingerprints, were recovered from the excavation trench at Nokugu. These manufacture clumps are consistent with the oblong clumps of clay formed by contemporary potters after mixing raw clay with cauixi tempering material (which generally varies between about 40 to 60 percent of the paste). Two small quartz burnishing stones, similar to those used by contemporary Waujá potters were also recovered from the excavation trench and surface collection at Nokugu.


Several differences between prehistoric and contemporary manufacture techniques are notable: (1) zoned red slipping is used today for decoration on some vessels, although this decorative technique was not identified on Ipavu Phase sherds; (2) black paint is applied by contemporary potters for designs on unslipped areas of vessel exteriors; prehistorically there are only two examples of black-on-red painting; and (3) exterior white slip was used in rare Ipavu Phase examples. It should be noted, however, that most prehistoric sherds found on the surface and many from excavations were heavily eroded, including slip and paint (frequencies of slipping by type would therefore be misleading). Changes in the decorative incised/ punctate motifs used on rim interiors and lips were also recognized and are described later. In considering the overall Western Complex inventory of ceramic forms presented above (a total of 688 forms), one thing is clear: Form I dominates the ceramic assemblage with 584 forms (84.88% of the total Western Complex typed vessels). Of the Form I forms, the 363 Form IA vessels constitute 62.2% (52.8% of typed vessels) and the 182 Form IB vessels 31.2% (26.5% of typed vessels). Form II vessels constitute about 2.0% of typed vessels, and Form III and IV about 6.5% each. Although unquantified, preliminary analysis of the Eastern Complex and modern Xinguano ceramic assemblages indicate a similar preponderance of Form IA and IB forms (85% seems about right for the contemporary Kuikuru), with lesser quantities of Form II, III and IV forms also present. Several ceramic forms distinctive to either the Eastern or Western Complex have been identified, although there are significant similarities in technology, form, decorative styles and inferred function, suggesting interaction between the two. Forms IG (“false-rim” vessels) and IIB (mid-body carinated bowls) are restricted to the Eastern Complex and Form IIC large shouldered jars are absent from the Eastern Complex. Given the large size of the Western Complex ceramic assemblage (7,000+ sherds) vis à vis the Eastern Complex (700+ sherds), the repeated occurrence of distinctive forms in Eastern Complex sites is likely not the result of sampling bias and supports the distinction between the Western and Eastern Complexes suggested by settlement pattern data (circular mounded-wall houses, lack of village earthworks in Eastern Complex sites) and oral history (Eastern Complex being the ancestral homeland of Carib-speaking Xinguanos).8 The primary prehistoric ceramic forms, notably including the Form IA and IB varieties of open-mouthed cooking/storage, and Form IV griddles, differ little from analogous forms in the contemporary Waujá industry (Figures 6.11 and 6.12). These “core” elements are virtually identical in terms of their form and size range, the preponderance of cauixi temper,


and the paddle anvil (slab/clump) manufacturing technique. Techniques of surface treatment (exterior red slip, interior black pigment, and burnishing) and decoration (rim incising, punctation and rim adorno applique) are also essentially the same today as they were in the past. The “core” elements of the prehistoric industry have direct correlates in the contemporary industry which the Kuikuru classify according to several mutually exclusive varieties: ahukugu and ahukugu-gugu (smaller) forms (equivalent to Form IA vessels); atange and atange-kusïgï (smaller) (which includes the everted rim form [Form IB] and direct rim form [Form IC]); and alato (Type IV griddles). Size and rim form are the primary characteristics the Kuikuru use to distinguish between Type IA (ahukugu) and IB (atange) forms. Ahukugu forms are decorated only by painting, whereas atange forms are decorated by adornos, incision, punctation and painting. This “core” vessel inventory is especially well adapted to the unique subsistence economy of the Upper Xinguanos, focused on cooked fish and manioc products. Cooking continues to be dominated by ceramics vessels, especially Form IA (for cooking the water/broth produced after processing manioc and fish), Form IB (for cooking fish) and Type IV (beijú, griddles), although the introduction of aluminum and plastic vessels has resulted in the near total replacement of ceramic vessels for water carrying and storage and many food processing activities. Manioc processing and cooking

Fig. 6.11 Thin-walled prehistoric vessel from excavation trench one.


Fig. 6.12 Ceramic making (A–B; 1993).

in the Upper Xingu, well described elsewhere (Dole 1978), is based on a technique that is unique to the Upper Xingu within Amazonia. Form IA ceramics, and of course griddles, are especially well suited to the processing of the manioc tubers and the cooking of their byproducts, testified to by the reluctance of contemporary Xinguanos to abandon the traditional ahukugu (Form IA) or alato (Form IV griddles) for cooking manioc, even when metal forms could easily be substituted today. Aside from these few notable exceptions, the two industries are closely affiliated, at least representing communication and/or trade, demonstrated by the presence of the primary Ipavu Phase forms (Forms IA, IB, IIA, IIIA, IIIB, and IV). All major prehistoric ceramic types (I-IV) have been identified in contemporary industries (Table 6.1). In fact, almost the entire range of variability known from Xinguano ceramic industries after 1884 falls within the range of variability of the prehistoric industry, although the reverse is not true. For instance, the Form IIA pedestal base pot (Figure 6.11) has no exact contemporary analog (as pedestal bases have been abandoned and no contemporary pots reach the fineness/thinness of this pot), although cruder generally similar examples have been documented by the author. The principal change between prehistoric and historic Xinguano ceramic industries has been a reduction in the overall

214 • The Ecology of Power TABLE 6.1 Correlation of Ceramic Forms. Ipavu Phase Western Complex

Ipavu Phase Eastern Complex

Xinguano Phase

Type IA

X

X

X

Type IB

X

X

X

Type IC

X

?

X

Type ID

X

–

–

Type IE

X

X

?

Type IF

X

–

X

Type IG

–

X

–

Type IIA

X

X

X

Type IIB

–

X

–

Type IIC

X

–

–

Type IIIA

X

X

X

Type IIIB

X

X

X

Type IV

X

X

X

Pot supports

X

–

X

Form

diversity and sophistication of the industry, a predictable development given the severe disruption and depopulation these groups have suffered after A.D. 1500. It is worthwhile to mention that ceramic use-wear patterns on Form IA ceramic vessels correlate well between the Ipavu Phase and Xinguano Phase assemblages. The two most informative wear patterns are: (1) significant erosion on the inside rim and vessel interior, likely because of the processing or cooking of bitter manioc notable for its acidic toxins; and (2) wide notches worn into the rim lips of large Form IA vessels, resulting from the cross-bars placed over the pots to process manioc. Only Arawak-speakers have made pottery historically in the Upper Xingu basin (Figure 6.12). Other Xinguano groups, like the Kuikuru, generally trade with the Waujá for their ceramics within living memory. The Arawaks likewise recognize Form IA, IB/IC and IV as primary forms, which the Waujá call kamalupï (kamalupï ti = small), makula (makula ti), and (heshe tay), respectively. The constricted-mouth jars (Form II) and castellated open-mouthed vessels (Form ID) are not widely used by the


Kuikuru, but are used by the Arawakan groups. Form IF castellated jars, referred to by the Waujá as yanapï, are reserved for ritual contexts. Griddles (alato to the Kuikuru) are widely used by all Xinguano groups and are sometimes formed from the bottoms of Form IA vessel bases, as was true for prehistoric groups as well. In fact, the initial stage of manufacture of Form IA vessels, that is constructing the base, is the same as that for manufacturing a griddle. Pot stands or supports (undagi) also were used widely by all Xinguanos in the recent past, as well as by Ipavu Phase communties, but they have become less common in recent years. They are not commonly present in contemporary Kuikuru households. Minor changes in stylistic preferences occurred from the Ipavu Phase to the Xinguano Phase, for instance: (1) a change, by the eighteenth century, from parallel incised line/lip nicked to chevron design decoration on Form IB rims (commonly a large variant of Form IB, designated Type 3 by Dole 1961/62); (2) a possible shift in painting technique from black-on-red to black on unslipped areas; (3) differential use of red slip in contemporary times; (4) modification of certain forms, notably Form IC rim adornos becoming more robust and elaborate (baroque) in recent years, by some potters to accommodate the tourist trade; and (5) abandonment of the pedestal base. By and large, however, the overall industry has remained the same in terms of form, construction technique (paddle and anvil/slab and block), temper (cauíxi, with small amounts of other tempering materials), surface treatment (pebble burnishing, exterior red slip and interior black pigment) and decoration (incised-line and sometimes punctation on the rim/lip, black line and blackened-zone painting, rim adornos). What is most striking about the ceramic industry is how little the overall industry has changed from the earliest ceramics (documented in direct association with the earliest radiocarbon dates) to contemporary industries. In other words, contemporary Arawakan potters (Waujá/Mehinaku linguistic group) are the descendants of contact period (late Ipavu Phase, A. D . 1500–1800) and earlier (post-A. D . 950 at least) Arawakan-speaking ceramic making groups. The demonstration of long-term continuity in the local ceramic industries has great implications for reconstructions of culture history and sociohistorical process locally and across the broad region. Cultural continuity, demonstrated by the conservatism in Upper Xingu ceramic industries (from c. A.D. 950–present), continuity in village spatial patterns (circular plazas with radial roads) and regional settlement patterns (i.e., continued use of select terra firme marginal settings for village locations), provides the concrete basis for discussing change or continuity within other aspects of culture.


Productivity In the Upper Xingu, intensification of subsistence practices apparently involved increased productivity of the primary food sources, manioc and fish, as suggested by the continuity in basic utilitarian ceramic technology. The real issue, then, is levels of production, rather than intensification per se (i.e., technological innovations to improve productivity), as the basic mode of production appears to have been in place throughout the cultural sequence (i.e., a largely domestic mode of production using the same basic technology). It is not that they did not intensify, but more that, as far as we can tell, the major features of this came with them to the area. So, although things were surely more intensive in 1492 than a thousand years earlier, and certainly much more so than today, it did not involve radical innovation, such as the introduction of some new cultigen or technical invention: it was instead an improvement, streamlining, and elaboration of the production system. Many of the subsistence and industrial resources of the Kuikuru, in fact, can be used or produced at much higher levels than ethnographically known (see Beckerman 1979; Carneiro 1957). The very fact that there were late prehistoric villages much larger than today and many more of them necessitates that overall production must have been much higher than today. This does not necessitate that individual families produced more than contemporary Xinguanos or that the domestic mode of production characteristic of contemporary villages was transformed into a more generalized communal mode of production. Nonetheless, it is important to note, that the partially constructed and managed wetlands of Heulugïhitï, Akagahïtï, and other sites along the upper Ipatse stream (and undoubtedly elsewhere), raised causeways and embankments and managed reservoirs all fit traditional models of agriculture (irrigation is less of a problem in Amazonia, even during the dry season from June–September). Carneiro (1960, 1983, 1985) has demonstrated how agricultural productivity within a domestic mode of production similar to today could be increased far beyond historically known levels. Likewise, as noted earlier, the productivity of fisheries and other native resources could be significantly increased above contemporary levels. Storage and the creation of a surplus, at least seasonally, undoubtedly provided additional means to increase productivity in prehistoric times. Manioc, for instance, can be produced, processed, and stored in great quantities (Carneiro 1957, 1983, 1985) and piquí is likewise processed and stored as pulp under water. As noted, the unique ceramic complex of the Xinguanos today is essentially identical (although steam-lined) relative to pre-Columbian ceramics. In fact, the major vessel forms, notably including the ahukugu,


alato, and atange forms, correspond exactly to the primary forms in the prehistoric assemblages (Types IA, IV, and IB, respectively) that we can assume served the same relatively narrow primary function: processing and cooking of manioc (ahukugu and alato) and fish (atange). Obvious manioc-processing use-wear on contemporary manioc pots is identical with that seen on past pots (i.e., notches worn into the rim by the placement of wooden staves over the vessel to support manioc straining mats and erosion on the vessel interior related to processing acidic bitter manioc). Carneiro’s suggestion that a technology essentially identical to today’s, based on manioc agriculture, fishing, and supplemented by diverse secondary resources, could support village populations as high as two thousand persons. Although questioned by some authors (Descola 1996a; Gross 1975), his theory is supported by the fact that there were villages many times larger than contemporary villages in the past, not to mention the fact that there were quite a few more of them across the region than today (see also Beckerman 1979). Furthermore, the amount of once denuded land, as evidenced in aerial photographs in the area of Nokugu and Kuhikugu, for example, provides ample evidence for the scale of deforestation prehistorically (dramatically higher than anything known historically). As discussed in Chapter 3, it appears likely that prehistoric manioc farmers did not shift their fields as frequently as contemporary groups do and they used areas adjacent to villages more intensively, that is to say there was longer cropping and shorter fallows in prehistoric manioc gardens. Contemporary gardens are opened in areas of primary or secondary forests, used for two to five years and then abandoned; the plot usually stands fallow for more or less ten to thirty years, although sometimes fields continued to be use as sources for sapé grass (Imperata sp.) or for harvesting cultivated piquí trees (Caryocar brasiliensis) planted while the plot is still producing manioc (Carneiro 1983). As noted for Amazonia generally (Denevan 1992), the limitations of a stone-axe technology would have made felling stands of primary (climax) forest considerably more difficult than today using metal axes (Carneiro 1974) (Figure 6.13). Contemporary gardens, used for short periods, abandoned and reused usually after more than a decade of fallow, quickly return to scrub forest (after 10 to 30 years) and primary forest (50 to 70 years) (Carneiro 1983). Recent studies provide evidence that traditional views often underestimate the nutritional status of manioc (Dufour 1994, 1995). Highly processed bitter manioc is not nearly as nutrient deficient as analyses of unprocessed or minimally processed sweet manioc tubers (from which many studies of manioc are based) suggest (Dufour 1994, 1995), but manioc would not provide for a balanced diet unless supplemented by


Fig. 6.13 Wooden-hafted stone axe from Steinen (1896).

significant quantities of animal protein. In contemporary villages, the primary protein source is fish, with other supplementary protein sources including turtles and turtle eggs, insects (e.g., ants, grasshoppers and wasp larvae), birds and plant products (notably palm fruits and other fruits). Many of these resources can also be harvested at levels far surpassing contemporary levels using a technology essentially identical to those of the present-day Xinguanos. Xinguanos presently possess the means to harvest fish using native technologies from all nearby habitats, and fish can be harvested in great numbers, in community and individual weirs, through fish poisoning and traps, and in fishing expeditions organized by chiefs in preparation for major rituals, such as the kuarup and tiponhï or community projects, such as the construction of the chief ’s house (tajife) or men’s house (kuakutu). In contemporary villages, prominent individuals are able to organize communal labor projects that require fishing by a large group of related men and production and preparation. For instance, several hundred kilograms of fish were captured from the shallow waters at Heulugïhitï by the Kuikuru using kundu dunk traps for one ceremonial payment; the Kuikuru community also maintained a nearly one kilometer long weir with some forty conical ataka traps at Nokugu from February to May 1993 that routinely


produced ten to fifty kilos of fish on an almost daily basis. This weir is not rebuilt every year, but has been rebuilt three times over the past ten years and each time it was “owned” by a different person. Little attention has been paid to issues of increasing productivity of aquatic resources in lowland economies, especially in broadly terra firme areas (cf. Garson 1980; Limp and Reidhead 1979), but the Upper Xingu case demonstrates the vast potential of these resources. It is important to point out the seasonal variation of fishing productivity; contemporary villagers must expend considerably more effort on fishing during times of the year when water levels are at their highest (typically from March to June). This economic depression in fishing resources is offset, however, by the large quantities of stored resources (e.g., manioc flour, piquí pulp, and nuts) and numerous resources that are of only secondary importance during other times of the year. In fact, there is significant variation in body weight over the course of the year, with many individuals losing several kilos during the “leaner” months. What is clear is that fish can be captured anytime, and usually in large quantities: when the water is low some fisheries and techniques are available, when the water rises others become available. Thus, while fish become more scarce in high water, generally, other foods are available, including stores of manioc flour (kuiginhu), that can range from about a half a meter to over a meter in diameter and are two to four meters high (I have seen three of the large ones, that hold a ton or more of manioc flour, in a single chief ’s house), roasted piquí nuts (minga), roasted corn (ana), and piquí pulp (stored subaqueously in basketry tubes ranging from handbag-sized to well over a meter long and nearly half a meter in girth), and secondary sources, such as roasted piquí nuts (minga) and roasted corn, which is only sporadically used. Native cultivated plants other than manioc, including maize, piquí, sweet potato, peanuts, peppers, among others, also can be collected in large quantities and many of these food stuffs are storable for long periods of time. Seasonally available fruits, including several varieties of palm fruits (available in different seasons), mangaba, and others, turtles (sometimes kept in pens or tethered with a string through the carapace) and turtle eggs, as well as a variety of insects/larvae are harvested in quantities which, although large, do not approach availability. As Beckerman (1979) also suggests, the range of plant and nongame animals available for exploitation throughout the lowland forests provides a vast store of foodstuffs with diverse nutritional value. Piquí is particularly noteworthy and, in fact, Carneiro (personal communication, 1994), reports that he witnessed over eleven thousand


piquí fruits collected by the Kuikuru in preparation for a single egitse ceremony the following year. The suggestion that the Upper Xingu subsistence economy could be significantly intensified, does not accord well with some reconstructions of the productivity of the “tropical forest” economy in terra firme settings. The general argument suggests that: “[u]nder extensive management systems, the increased labor time cost of subsistence production provides a strong incentive for groups to keep their settlement density low and move about frequently (5–20 year intervals)” (Gross 1983: 429). Gross (1983: 445) represents the long-held majority position when he states that: “There are alternative strategies, crops and techniques, but no study has yet suggested that upland horticulturalists can long exceed the limits imposed by Amazonian nutrient cycles.” But the question still remains, what exactly are those limits in one area of Amazonia or another? And here we might note that archaeological research conducted since the 1970s suggests the presence of large, settled villages in various portions of Amazonia, including the Upper Xingu, that imply the existence of highly productive resource management strategies. In sum, given the general paucity of studies that precisely characterize the parameters for human economic exploitation of Amazonian environments, we must exercise caution in suggesting limitations posed generally by Amazonian biotic regimes on human development or projecting the conditions of contemporary peoples, who have undergone significant depopulation, disenfranchisement, and marginalization over the past five hundred years (Beckerman 1991; Roosevelt 1989), onto past social formations. In light of the recognition of large population aggregates, the question that archaeology and early ethnohistory pose is not if past resource management strategies could support large, settled populations, but how. The historical circumstances of depopulation and cultural change over the past five hundred years, the creation of the indigenous park (PIX) in 1961, and the increasing engagement of local communities with the national political economy, demand caution in any attempt to reconstruct “traditional” Xinguano cultural patterns, such as settlement or economy. Indeed, considered in composite (i.e., including Arawak, Carib and other groups), Xinguano settlement patterns have been in a nearly continual state of flux throughout much of the cultural sequence. As villages became fewer and smaller due to depopulation, numerous discrete village merged with others between the late 1800s and mid-1900s (some two dozen or more villages were reduced to eight by the late 1940s and population was reduced from 3,000 to 4,000 in the 1880s to nearly 500 between 1955 to 1965). Lately, after 1970, village populations began to rebound in numbers, largely due to the effects of vaccination programs and medical assistance


initiated in the early 1950s (Nutels 1968); several villages have split (e.g., the Kalapalo, Matipu/Nafuqua, Kamayurá and Kuikuru), facilitated by the availability of past settlement areas, abandoned early on after the “conquest” of the Americas and a reduced threat of warfare (cf. Carneiro 1987b). Nonetheless, enduring features of Xinguano settlement patterns and land use also are obvious, both on the ground and from remote-sensing data, and provide the basis for comparison, if not unbroken links, between past and present patterns. It is one of the strongest cases in Amazonia for such a homological experiment in constructing, aligning, and reconstructing cultural histories: the direct historical, or phylogenetic, approach. A crucial aspect of Upper Xingu settlement patterns: villages are more or less permanent and, although houses within villages are rebuilt every 5–10 years, whole villages are seldom moved (Carneiro 1960). When villages are relocated they seldom move far, generally within a kilometer or two of the old village. When villages are moved greater distances it is for supernatural or political reasons (notably, in recent times, the creation of the PIX). Village fissions typically involve the establishment of a new community, but the two generally remain close. Thus, the basic settlement pattern is a permanent village area (locality) of about one to three kilometers, with satellite residential and special activity areas within a loosely defined village territory (5-10 km around the village). After circa A . D . 1600, circular plaza villages became much smaller, fortifications were abandoned, and linear mounds no longer divided the plaza or roads from domestic areas within villages. This reformed pattern, a ring of houses around a large circular plaza, is what we know from 1884 onward, shared by all of the major constituent groups of the Xinguano nation. In historic times (after 1884), permanent villages (ete) have consisted of a few to over twenty houses. As noted above, the Kuikuru village (1993) of 330 people in twenty-three to twenty-four houses is the largest historically known village, although numerous villages numbering well over two hundred have been noted. Smaller villages with as few as three or four houses have been reported, but apparently reflect depopulated villages or recently fissioned groups. The large village is the normal pattern and considered quite “beautiful” and it is a source of great pride among its members. In recent times, Xinguano villages generally constitute discrete language communities, each speaking a distinctive language. These include TupiGuarani Kamayurá, macro-Tupi Aueti, Arawak Yawalapiti and Mehinaku/ Waujá (dialects of the same language), and four dialects of Upper Xingu Carib (Kuikuru, Kalapalo, Matipu and Nafuqua). Other communities, for instance, Carib-speaking Yaruma, Ikpeng, and Bakairi, and Trumai, an


“isolated” language, have also formed part of the Xinguano regional cultural system, but they are always less fully integrated into it (as discussed more fully in Chapter 4). Language is an important factor conditioning social relations and residence patterns, and supralocal clusters, within the broader regional system, according to speech communities. In fact, as Basso (1983: 211) notes, “Relatives who live in different villages but speak the same language are socially closer … than are relatives who belong to village groups speaking different languages” (see Franchetto 1986; Gregor 1977).

CHAPTER

7

In the Midst of Others: Landscapes of Memory Human beings are human only to the extent that they are in the midst of others and clothed in symbols that give purpose to their existence. André Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 313) Sitting in a plaza village, in the center (hugogo) or in front of the house, the observer has a panoramic view in all directions and is able to see all the big, well-built longhouses (üne) in a great ring and all the major entry points to the village. From some vantage points the observer can see for kilometers along the principal roads, past houses, and occasional fences (or low curbs), and off to the distant horizon. The plaza is an observatory, a vantage point, from which the movements of people or the land can be surveyed, but it also serves as a powerful metaphor that spatially represents relations between humans and all others kinds of social beings, a metanarrative of the universe. In the plaza, people create, interact with, and decompose others persons, as consanguines and affines, as chiefs and common folk, as humans and their “potential affines” (i.e., nature) and with their ancestors, “potential consanguines” (i.e., gods, heroes, and tricksters). The plaza village is the center of life, not only where community (otomo) identity and sociality are made and remade but where, in doing so, all the social relations are marked and remarked in space. As discussed in Chapter 9, the plaza serves as a cartography not only of space and geography, but of sociality and personhood. It is a metaphor of society,

223


which maps out relations within and between otomo (a polyvalent indigenous concept discussed in Chapter 8), and relations between “the people” (kuge) and diverse “others.” It is where relations with social others are instantiated and resolved, including relations with “potential” and real, ancestors and affines. The plaza is also a history, written through the lives of the persons who live and have lived there, who are or will be buried there. From the hugogo, sitting on the log bench in front of the men’s house (kuakutu), facing east (giti endoho, “sun entrance”), or along the formal path (tangingu) heading due west, (giti ihatigoho, the “exit of the sun”) there is a sensation of omniscience, of seeing all at once. One can look from the village to the northeast, across Itsuva bridge, at the outlet of Ipatse Lake, and out along the trail to the Culuene port (engutaho-imagï). The trail is a long, straight, white line that crosses the broad remnant floodplain of the Culuene River, a scrubby savanna (oti) of xerophytic plants and “hardpan” (gley) soils, a ecological zone relatively unique to this stretch of the Culuene river. Near the end of the trail one passes across the wide, sandy levee and galeria forest of the river bank and, ultimately, at the prominent sandstone outcrop that is the primary Kuikuru port (about four miles from the village). There are two secondary ports, one slightly downstream on the Culuene, and one essentially at the end of the tangingu. There is a “horizon effect” over the 360º of the plaza, as there are few trees left behind houses that rise above the houseline, but along the major roads one has glimpses of the distant horizon, past the house gardens and, sometimes, occasional piquí groves (inka), manioc gardens, and sapé fields. Some villages, like the old ones at Lake Kuhikugu (1860s–1960s) or adjacent to Lake Ipatse in the 1940s, have broad lake vistas,1 along the bathing path (tungakua-imagï). The edges of the high forest (itsuni), “wilderness,” are usually far in the distance, remote from the village margins along the innmerable kwigiimagï (paths to gardens) and hagï-imagï (paths to fishing spots). The Xinguano landscape is an extraordinary artifact of human activities and virtually no part of the upland environment seems untouched, what with the many settlements, roads, gardens, orchards, fields, paths, and secondary forest in long, sometimes very long, “rotational cycles.” Even many wetland areas are the clear marking of human interventions, bridges, such as the one over Itsuva, or Heulugïhitï today, the weirs, that are placed predictably at five major points along the Ipatse stream and one really big, community-owned one across the Angahuku (several hundred meters long and counting dozens of traps). In many cases, such as the weirs, these features overlap with archaeological bridge abutments, raised road bridges, what look, on account of their regularity and placement, like

In the Midst of Others • 225

artificial ponds, including perhaps the large, shallow lakes that nearly dry up today in the dry season. It remains to be shown, but it appears that the reservoirs, while perhaps building upon natural pools in the Ipatse stream, were dammed with the weir embankments and the now dried settlements. The plaza is the centerpiece of the Xinguano landscape and the keystone of their “ethos of settled life,” described above. This includes their heavy and bulky utilitarian ceramics, the seemingly endless repertoire of material culture, well-built and sturdy houses, and the great investment they make in place and in the land, including the places of ancestors, plaza cemeteries, positioned in the hugogo, the axis mundi. As settled people, Xinguanos take great pride in the condition of their villages and expend much effort keeping the men’s house, the plaza, roads and bridges in good repair. The settled, agricultural “mind-set” of Xinguano peoples permeates their life, although both men and women may spend a good portion of each day away from home engaging in brief forays to gardens, forests, and rivers to procure resources. Trips of one to a few days to special activity sites or occasional visits to relatives in other villages, usually during the ritual season (July to August), are not uncommon. When households do move to their dryseason hamlets, they take along most or all of the extended family, one or two ensembles of kitchen utensils, and ultimately build nice houses in which to install these persons and things. Xinguanos seldom leave their villages for long, and even trips to Brazilian cities today are typically “hit-and-run” forays to obtain goods for consumption in the village lasting only a few days or weeks. The southern Amazon, in general, is an ideal place to consider what Leroi-Gourhan (1993) aptly called the “domestication of time and space,” since the people who lived there (since the earliest Arawaks spread across the region) had such elaborated systems of architecture, engineering, mathematics, and astronomy. Here, the centralizing force is the central plaza, the axis mundi (of humanity and divinity), channelled through chiefly persons. These persons and plazas represent containers of power in social networks woven into hierarchical systems of practice that permeate the social and material world. The participation in landscape, while incorporating many alternative readings (heterodoxies) that provide arenas for the expression of power (the status quo according to “tradition”) and resistance (change), and control over place, labor, and symbolic capital. These technologies of power (disciplines) are a critical element of landscape, and discussed again later in Chapter 9. For now it is important to get some idea of the Xinguano landscapes, themselves, or more precisely to understand how the material and symbolic articulate to “inscribe” places and “emplace” persons


in landscape through a dialectic of objectification and embodiment (sensu Bourdieu 1977). Landscapes are made of persons and persons are made of landscapes; whom we live with, sleep with, or eat with is always tied to place, as is whom and what we remember. This is a richly layered world of spirits, sacred ancestor places, of remembered events, and contemporary things and people, gardens, piquí orchards, and the people who own them, destinations, ports, encampments, roadways and riverways, other villages, and other persons: the Xinguano landscape is permeated with “others” including past persons (see Seeger 1976 and 1981 for a detailed discussion of such things among the Suyá, a “Xinguanified” Gê group living slightly north of the Upper Xingu basin). “Stories about ancestors and ancestral places,” Basso (2001) notes, “constitute a narrative bridge leading from actual experiences in recent times to the stories of the very distant past,” integrated through the way places are identified. Places, intimately linked with historical figures and events, not only frame historical consciousness but also constitute a kind of cultural language of history (analogous to the sentences, paragraphs, and passages of written history), topograms as Santos Granero (1998) calls them. History is expressed, produced, and reproduced in a historically defined landscape of greater and lesser places, special settings, spaces, and locales, tied together through time and space by the specifiable actions of discrete humans and other beings. The places of ancient occupations are remembered, not only by physical relationships or the communities who lived there, but particularly by the critical events and individuals who lived there, remembered in chiefly discourse and narratives. The greatest among these places, these passages of Xinguano history, are the plaza villages, remembered by the chiefs who reigned and died there, the chiefs for whom the elaborate mortuary feast—kuarup (egitse in Kuikuru)—are held. Social “others” are diverse; first, there is the fundamental distinction between humans (kuge), “near-others” (other “wild” Indians, or ngikogo) and “far-others” (non-Indians, or kagaiha). Then there is the fundamental division of society into the anetão, the hereditary chiefs, whether they be women or men, young or old, and the rest of society, today called kamaga, likely after the Portuguese camarada, but not needing a name. Although genealogy, in terms of direct reckoning is shallow, three generations, sometimes four, there is a scalar shift that permits it to be pushed farther back in time, back to the dawn time of Xinguano society. The shift is made, after three or four generations, to heroes who are “owned” by chiefs, who automatically claim more direct descent from them and through them to even earlier heroes, chiefs, and ancient ancestors. The rest


of society, in this “heroic mode of lineage formation” (Sahlins 1985), extends their genealogy beyond recent memory through the chiefs. The question is what level of the hierarchy can one engage and it is only the “sitting chiefs,” the anetï, who can invoke the legitimacy of the oldest ancestors. It is through names that the founders of the “House” are identifiable, the ability to speak, publically, the names of the heroes, the founders of the local group. “Otherness,” alterity, is a topic of great interest in Amazonian anthropology. How do Amazonian peoples define “others” and, thus, themselves, particularly their own lives and social relations. We might note the duality of regional systems, encompassing more settled peoples and more mobile “predatory” societies, within pluriethnic regional systems. Within Amazonia, in general, there are many types of alterity, but what interests us here is the alterity of rank, genealogy, hierarchy, such as birth-order and dynasty (the “first” sons). In the Xingu, “first-sons” are really first grandsons in terms of name transmission. They perpetuate the place of their fathers and grandfathers, although third-generation claims, no matter what the social position of the ancestor, are generally weak: the “power” has been lost. A good place to start to consider Kuikuru landscapes is in the origin stories and how these create, animate, and perpetuate relations between people and places, places of the ancestors, ngiholó-ìtupe, ancient places of the dawn times, ingilango (“distant past”).

The Mirror World of Dawn Time The boundaries of the Xinguano nation are defined by three sacred sites, Morená, Ahasukugu, and Kamukuaka, the places of early human ancestors. The latter two define the southern limits of “the people,” and lie well upstream (south) from the Kuikuru and contemporary Xinguano occupations on the Culuene and Batovi rivers, respectively. The former, Morená, the most sacred of all places, where the origins of humanity began, I briefly paraphrase here.2 In the beginning, in the deep past (ingilango) or “dawn-time,” as Basso (1984) calls it, there were no Xinguanos, only “dawn people” and spirit beings (itseke). Into this world was born Quantunga, the protohuman grandfather of the divine twins, Tuangi and Aulukuma (Sun, Giti, and Moon, Ngune, referring to their present form). Kuantunga was born of an unusual coupling, one that startled and annoyed his maternal grandfather, the great, great, great grandfather of the earliest Xinguanos, who was a great forest (tree) chief, an i-oto, as they call tree spirit-persons. A clever little bat had stolen into the chief ’s village and secretly inseminated his daughter, the yucucu tree, while she was in puberty seclusion (masope) in


the special seclusion area (unwa) of the chief ’s house. The fruit of this union was Quantunga. He was the eldest of four protohuman brothers, all i-oto as well, who received their chiefly blood through their mother, the yucucu.3 He was only a half-man really, as his lower half was that of a tree trunk and roots, but when he ventured out he wore the “clothes” of human form. 4 His daughters were fully human, with legs and all the human body parts: we can surmise this anyway, because he made dolls of them, which he brought to life, the “mothers” of Tuangi and Aulukuma. They lived at Morená. One day, while out hunting alone in the forest, far from Morená, Kuantunga was cornered by a great black jaguar, the chief, Netsuengï. His people, the village of animals at Ahasukugu, had formed a great circle to trap their prey and were closing in on the center, where Netsuengï encountered Kuantunga. He pleaded with Netsuengï, who agreed to free him in exchange for his daughters and instructed Kuantunga to step on his bow, at which point the powerful jaguar chief flicked him beyond the encircling hunters. But, Kuantunga was simply too fond of his daughters, however, to honor his agreement, and was forced to drastic measures. Necessity is the mother of invention and he resolved—thinking back to his special heritage, his maternal (at least) line of chiefly trees—to make dolls into new daughters. His solution, having been born himself of trees, was to make new daughters from trees as well, dolls into which he will breath life. He ultimately succeeds in making six, two from eku wood, two from hata, and two from uengïfi. After they have been given hair by a water itseke and seeds for teeth, they are all sent off to the village of tehego (a vine) to complete their vaginas and have intercourse, after which the chief asks for the eldest (eku) as a wife. The five remaining daughters were sent to Ahasukugu, the village of Netsuengï; the next oldest (eku) died drinking poisoned water. The next sister (hata) died by having intercourse with a tapir, and being split apart. The next daughter, because like the light-colored hata wood, she was fair complexioned and beautiful, was tricked into climbing up a palm tree by her (uengïfi) sisters due to their jealousy of her beauty. She fell, was impaled on a palm spine and also died. The two remaining daughters, both made from uengïfi wood (a powerful wood, the chief of the forest), ultimately arrive at the village of Netsuengï. He impregnates the younger of the two, who ultimately bears the divine twins: Tuangi (or Giti, Sun) and Aulukuma (or Ngune, Moon). Unfortunately, the younger of these two sisters was killed by the motherin-law, which prompted a premature birth. The older sister then raised them as her own children. Her surrogacy was soon revealed to the preternaturally


matured twins by a hummingbird from whom they attempted to steal fruit. The twins, infuriated by the story, plotted and eventually killed their grandmother, and in retribution for his complicity, the jaguar was ultimately banished to the Milky Way, where he can be seen in the night skies even today. Before he was banished to the sky, he participated, as chief of his village, in the first kuarup that Giti and Ngune hosted in commemoration of their dead mother (who today presides over the village of Kuikuru ancestors in the sky). On the eve of his banishment, Giti and Ngune made the various lineages of humans that now people the earth: the ‘people,’ kuge, the other Indians, ngikogo, and the white people, kagaifa. Tuangi, the preeminent of two twins, made and distributed the things of the world to his children (and younger brothers). After creating the different human lines, he passed a cup of blood to the Xinguanos, which was offensive and they passed it on to the ngikogo, the “wild” or “fierce” Indians, who tasted lightly of it, hesitant but curious. They in turn passed it to the kagaifa, the whiteman, who freely drank of the gourd. This is why blood, for Xinguanos, is polluting, and why people are the way they are, bloodthirsty or not, warriors or not, meat-eaters or not:. Some blood is unavoidable—menstrual blood, postpartum blood, the blood of a dressed fish—but butchering meat or intentionally killing, which always involves blood, is taboo, and birthing happens under strict food and social taboos. Tuangi then offered the firearm to the Xinguanos. They declined it, being fearful of its destructive power; the ngikogo also declined, concerned with its lethal force as well. However, the white people gladly accepted it, predisposed (like drinking the blood) to its violent force.8 He then offered the war club, which the Xinguanos declined, still worried at the danger it embodied, but the ngikogo accepted and used the club to engage their enemies in warfare. The Xinguanos accepted the bow and arrow, with which to hunt and fish, and rarely used it against their enemies. Village specialization, the economic lynchpin of regional social networks, was also put in place by Tuangi, the creator, father, and older brother of the Xinguanos. Tuangi also fashioned a variety of things that the Xinguanos could use in their daily lives and distributed these to the different groups of the people: to the Waujá he gave ceramics; to the Mehinaku, salt; to the Kuikuru and Matipu, shell belts; to the Kalapalo and Nafuqua, shell necklaces; and to the Kamayura, he gave the black bow. These items form the specialties of the groups in the regional system of exchange that characterizes the Upper Xingu today. The Xinguanos came to occupy Morená and other places throughout the Xingu, after Tuangi had followed Netsuenga, his father, the jaguar chief, to the sky world (the Milky Way). Tuangi and Aulukuma recreated


themselves as the light (sun and moon) in the primordial darkness of the dawn times. After orchestrating the destruction of his father, Netsuengï’s village of jaguars by ngikogo, Tuangi created “the people” (kuge) to inherit his ways and those of his maternal family, Morená and thereabouts, the sacred place of kuge. Tuangi gave to the people (kuge) his most sacred possession, the kuarup with all its vast related knowledge, trappings, and properties, before becoming Giti (sun). He and his brother, Ngune, live on today with all the Kuikuru heroes, ancestors, and all the beings of the Xinguano world, in the mirror-world of dawn time. This is the “master myth of the Upper Xingu,”as Carneiro (1989) calls it, Xinguano genesis. This and numerous other supporting and parallel akiña, are played out in storytelling, chiefly discourse, and ritual, tell of a world cohabited by many “others,” including animals, itseke, and dawnpersons. (Descola 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2001). Xinguano (hi)stories have this dual quality, a complementary temporality: on the one hand, they reflect happenings in ancient times, the dawn time, and, on the other hand, refer to an existing reality, a mirror world that shamans visit in trance and people in their dreams. The former is an ancient mythic time, in the beginning, that provides the foundation for the actual histories of Xinguano chiefs and otomo; the other is a nonlinear “structural” time that collapses past, present and future. The two worlds are interlinked, as the mirror world is inhabited by persons of the dawn time (“dawn persons”), including all the Kuikuru ancestors and affines, the ancient culture heroes, and then itseke. In the dawn time, humans and these other beings walked the earth together, but the two are generally separated and these other beings, itseke, heroes, and ancestors, exist in a mirror-image world in the sky and in dreams. The two do, however, “bleed” into one another. For instance, an old woman who died in 1993 returned in the dream of a kinswoman and told her the cause of her death: she had looked upon Tuangi’s great pot of shell necklaces, and due to his wrath, was made ill and died. Tuangi, whose current form, the sun (giti), is seen each day, or his father, Netsuengï, who is seen (lives) in the Milky Way, live amongst us in the mirror world of dawn time in the sky where they came to reside after a bodily transformation somewhat similar to that made by Kuikuru when they die and go to the village in the sky.

The Skin of the Land There is no right or correct point of entry to consider landscape, no set methodology that can be accepted beforehand. What works at one level of analysis, at one spatiotemporal scale, does not work at another, and this is true of not only your methods and instruments but also the questions we


ask. Further, the transmission of knowledge and “facts” of the world, are socially constructed, engaged, and contested.The historical mood of research is, by necessity, perspectival—“the idea that we all hold different ways of knowing the world and different viewpoints from which to see it” (Strathern 1999: 251). Fortunately, as Strathern (1999: 253) puts it, “what transpires between persons becomes reified, graspable, ‘on their skins’, whether it is the skin of the land or the body or the clan with its universe of names.” The “landscape perspective,” if we can speak of one, focuses on the mutually defining qualities of landscape and persons: how enduring marks on the land orient social life and experience and how, in turn, performance and expression recreate the land. Such a perspective requires some immediate intimacy with a specific context—a “dwelling perspective” (Ingold 1993). Regional specialists widely accept that most lowland communities exist in intricate anthropogenic landscapes formed in the natural environment by the long term, occupation of specific ecological micro-niches (Balée 1989, 1995; Posey and Balée 1989). The Xingu provides an unparalleled example of how Amazonian communities create such landscapes over the long term, which, in turn, are important determinants of settlement patterns and culturally defined group territories. Settlement dynamics conform to these broad ecological conditions, with regard to past modifications of the environment, as they are held in cultural memory. The pattern of Xinguano village locations over the past 150 years documents highly selective patterns of land use and settlement. Certain localized areas have become the location of concentrated occupations over the long term, making the mosaic regional ecology even more “patchy.”5 In other words, naturally good habitation locations, meeting select hydrological, topographic and vegetational criteria, have been “improved” through more or less continuous occupation of certain areas (see Balée 1995). There are very few places in the Xingu that do not have a story, the landscape is literally “saturated” with meaning and knowledge. It is also clear that there are few areas of the landscape that remain untouched by the great chiefdoms of a few centuries ago.

Xinguano Landmarks The primary landmarks that define the Xinguano traditional lands are the three sites of Morená, Ahasukugu, and Kamukuaka. These are situated at the margins of the Upper Xingu basin. At about these places, subtle changes in the land become appparent. To the south or east of Ahasukugu, or to the south or west of Kamukuaka, the land rises up into the scrub forests of the central Brazilian plateau (corrado). To the north, below


Morená, are the broad stretches of the Xingu River proper. The north is particularly critical to Xinguanos, defined by a complex of sacred sites around the ancient settlement of Morená, which in recent times marks the northernmost Xinguano village. In the more remote past, the site was wedged between the Yawalapiti (and later Kamayura and other) ancestors and those of the other Xinguanos, each composed of various otomo in the late 1800s. Tuangi and Aulukuma are responsible for many features of the landscape, but lakes, streams, and other features, such as the ditches made by Fitsi-fitsi (see Chapter 5), are the manufactures of other, lesser heroes. Sagakagagu, the “owner of the water” (tunga òto), made the lakes the Kuikuru have lived near for the past 150 years,6 He made lakes Ehumba, Kuhikugu, and Ipatse for ancestors of the Kuikuru during the dawn time. The making of the eastern lakes, Tafununu, Angahïnga, Aiha, and Magijapei is another story (see below). Sagakagagu was the son of a fish spirit (hugoi kuenga) and although he took human form, he was partially made of water (tunga). Somewhere on the Angahuku River, above what is today Lake Ehumba, after long putting up with the harassments of an evil uncle, he fought with him over a fish trap (utu) they were using when they were out fish-poisoning (halutininha). In anger he stomped the earth and in so doing created a great lake, into which welled up from the river great monsters (itseke), which attacked the bad uncle. Now knowing his power, he again stomped his foot, time and again, to create lakes for his good uncle (Lake Ehumba) and for the ancestors of the people. Sagakagagu continued on to Kuhikugu, where there was still no lake, but here he encountered a group of children playing with a basketry ring that women use to carry pots (tá), and which children try to shoot arrows through still today. They began firing on him—perhaps because he was using the “clothes” of sickness (“pox” blisters) and they knew he was an itseke. He asked them, now full of arrows, to call Yamahutulo, the female chief of the village to come and remove the arrows. He then created the lake to thank her, at which time he removed his “sickness clothes” and transformed into a beautiful man fully painted, and decked out in feathers and a shell collar. Sagakagagu told Yamahutulo to call her people to come and hide with her as he made the lake, since into the waters come itseke, but they didn’t want to as they were dancing. He told Yamahutulo and her brother, Amana, to stay in houses as the water rose up over them. He advised them to keep their doors closed so water monsters (itseke) could not get them. Sure enough, the itseke attacked and ate the dancers; the remainder


became fish. Yamahutulo and Amana stayed in the house until after the water had risen way up and a great lake had formed. When they exited, they saw the immense lake that had consumed their lands and asked Sagakagagu to make it smaller. He reduced it to its present size, which explains why the smaller remnants at Séhu, Séku, Heulugihiti, and Ipatse stayed as much smaller lakes, but are largely dried up. After he made the lakes, Sagakagagu married the daughter of another jaguar chief spirit, Nokugu. In payment for his bride, he made Lake Ipatse and the weirs (ataca) that the Kuikuru still use today, one each for his five fathers-in-law: (1) Tsuva (Nokugu); (2) Kejegepe; (3) Tinhagipe; (4) Suhahugu; and (5) Wagandakagu (Wage, who was a fox [sagoko], and cousin to the jaguar). Yali, a great tapir, created half of Lake Ipatse and half of the Angahuku River, which was finished by a water turtle (Hikutaha), although he drowned a good part of Nokugu village, which is why there is so much ceramics under water there. The creation of Lake Tafununu and the smaller lakes north of it in the dawn time was unintentional. One day a man who lived in the area went to hunt birds, in a small (toucan) hunting stand, high up in a tree. As he waited in his stand at around dawn, he heard the sound of water in itsuni forest. He descended and saw a great tree filled with water, and over a large hole he discovered the rock cap that sealed off the water within. He removed the cap and inside were innumerable fish. He shot several small fish and returned home to his wife, whom he demanded keep the story secret for fear of problems. Everyday he went to fish and then one day, his brother-in-law arrived and inquired about his whereabouts. Where had he caught so many fish? His sister did not tell, but the next day the same thing occurred: the man disappeared and brought back many fish. Finally, the wife told her brother of the fish tree. Although she sworn him to secrecy, the brother-in-law stole off to the tree when the man was in his garden. He removed the stone cap and shot a great fish, which insanely charged the hole, smashed the invisible barrier and out spilled the tree’s water, enough to fill Lake Tafununu, the largest lake in the broad region, as well as Lake Angahïnga, Lake Aiha, and Lake Magijapei. Tafununu still contains the monstrous fish (itseke) from that tree, and to this day the Kuikuru do not pass in canoes or motorboats. Lake Tafununu actually consists of five separate lakes: (1) Anahïtuïepagu; (2) Agahahïtï-epagu; (3) Netunugu; (4) Tehukugu; and (5) Hakapeepagu. The ancient chiefs who presided over the Kuikuru sites there are also remembered: Marika was the chief of Kuguhi (X15); Amatuagu was the chief of Tafununu (X25) and Tamakafi was the chief of Tehukugu (X14).


There are several other critical places at Tafununu, including Makaigikingahugu (where Bakairi peoples apparently killed people of Ipa otomo). There are also numerous named etua (campsites) along the outlet stream (the ipa uhuinagu). There are many, many more “place stories” that I have not heard or do not recount here, but all the living places, the ancestral sites (ingiholo itupe) and abandoned Kuikuru villages (etepe), also have stories and “owners,” spirits who once lived there in body and now live on in the mirror world of dawn time to preside over these places. There are thousands of little places with their own stories, as well, that dot the landscape. For instance, on a recent trip from Kuhikugu, the contemporary village at Lahatua to Asaheïtï, we saw an old trail still incised, only about a foot wide, following the path that had been cut over in the past three years. Both trails followed the ancient roadway, which, like all ancient roads had two parallel curbs some twenty meters apart, the whole length (about 4 km) of the way. Along the way, we stopped at the midpoint, where I was told that women carrying manioc-filled baskets could rest coming back from their garden hamlets. We also passed a tree in which a man, deceased now a generation or so, had built a toucan hunting stand some forty to fifty feet in the tree. “He was a good toucan hunter,” one of our group commented. Virtually every walk is not only a lesson in local ecology, but in history, as well.

Broad Ecological Patterns From a Western point of view, several principal ecological zones can be recognized in the Kuikuru study area, which, by relative order of prominence, are: (1) forests and anthropogenic forest parklands; (2) large rivers and floodplains, including diverse ox-bow and back-channel lakes; (3) secondary streams that emanate in the basin, and are defined by broad wetland marshes and multiple, complex channels (e.g., Angahuku); and (4) tertiary streams, such as Ipatse stream, which lie between forest and the active floodplain of the Culuene River. Conditions vary significantly, particularly in terms of floodplain areas, which are largely confined to the margins of the Culuene River. To date, no detailed studies have been made of local ecology, from either the standpoint of Western natural science or ethnoecology, which impedes precise characterization of variation between and within these “zones.” However, large scale patterning is clearly apparent in aerial photographs, satellite images, and on the ground, as one passes through the zones. Forests come in various types as well, but the two principal types are itsuni (“primary” or “high” tropical forest), although much or most of it in the Kuikuru study area is anthropogenic, and tahuga (old regrown


gardens that are not planted in piquí [inka] or sapé grass) (see Carneiro 1978). Many minor variations of forest character, soil type, and vegetation, which are unnamed in any formal way, are easily perceived by the Kuikuru. Mosaic parklands dominate the countryside, composed not only of gardens, groves, grass fields and tahuga, but also ancient sites (ngiholó-itupe), abandoned villages (etepe), hamlets, and other markers of past land use. These areas would be forest if people abandoned them and, in many cases they have become reforested, due to depopulation, settlement abandonment, and diminished land use. There are also floodplain parklands, scrub and savanna lands between the sandy levees and galeria forests of the major rivers, like the Culuene. These areas are naturally xerophytic, with hardpan (gley) soils and sparse trees. In the Kuikuru area, the oti of the Culuene River is bordered by Ipatse stream and its associated modifications, such as weir embankments, ponds and reservoirs, causeways, and minor raised fields principally near major settlements. Thus, oti—scrubland or savanna— comes in two basic forms, natural and anthropogenic. Xinguano houses are thatched with either sapé grass, which grows exclusively in the anthropogenic “parklands” created around villages, or buriti leaves, which are generally found in abundance near villages. Rivers are also diverse. The largest, the Culuene River, emanates from far away in the Brazilian highlands near the city of Cuiabá. It has a generally muddied, well-defined channel, which the Kuikuru use for transportation, fishing, and to collect turtle eggs in the dry season, and white beaches, among other things. Other large meandering rivers also emanate from the flanks of the Brazilian highlands, such as the Curiseu and Batovi Rivers. Then there are several wide, multichanneled rivers and marshlands with crystal clear water and white sandy bottoms such as the Tuatuari and the Angahuku; these emanate from the basin itself, which together with the Culuene, are the two primary rivers in Kuikuru country. The former two rivers and characterized by swampy stream margins and criss-crossed channels. These serve as primary fishing areas for weir and trap fishing, as well as bow-fishing in open water, during the dry and wet seasons; however, the weirs are most productive in times of high water, from February to May. The wide variations in wetlands guarantees that there is a source for fish. There are places along this river where large itseke dwell, such as the giant frogs, paga paga kuenga, that had apparently tipped the canoe of early whites that had passed that way; another itsekekugu (place of the itseke), in this area is known as the “house of the black jaguar.” Ipatse stream is seasonally dry, in terms of flowage, from about July to September, although the ground under the principal drainage channel—a


low sinuous depression that includes stretches heavily modified by weirs, tied together through seasonal ponds—remains wet throught the year. At the edges of major sites, bathing, watering, and fisheries facilities are recogonizable or still used today. Buriti grows in most well-watered settings and so this generally does not pose a significant problem, but given the highly constructed nature of forests around occupation sites, the possibility that buriti distributions are not entirely fortuitous must be considered. Natural lakes occur in areas that are otherwise forests, along small feeder streams; in virtually all cases they are nodes of habitation. Major settlements are always located at the interface of terra firme forest (flat dry forest land) and wetlands (for water and transportation). These wetlands include “white” (muddied), “clear” (highly transparent), and “black” water rivers; the white water rivers emanate well outside the Upper Xingu basin within the Planalto Central and descend rapidly (from about 500–1000 masl) before leveling out (to about 275–300 masl) in the basin itself. It is truly a basin, a peneplain covered largely with Holocene alluvium, although the terra firme uplands and portions of the floodplains are likely more ancient. Village places are critical nodes in the landscape, not only because of their history as places of ingiholo, but also because of their condensed symbolics: the social, spatial, and cosmological knowledge attached to them. Individuals and families stake a claim to areas they are actively using, such as hamlets, gardens, and weirs, and it would be at least rude to encroach without due license.

Village and Countryside In the Xingu, the plaza villages are the most enduring feature of the built environment that clearly demonstrates continuity through the cultural sequence. In comparing ancient and recent settlements, contemporary villages look just like prehistoric plazas, except that the residential areas are much reduced in size (perhaps as much as ten times or more). What is different is that in contemporary villages, the plaza has moved throughout a restricted area and in the past it stayed put. Xingu villages do not simply have cleared public space, a feature that indeed is nearly ubiquitous in the lowlands, but they are defined by it. The form of the plaza obviously conditions the placement of the domestic activities areas around it, particularly the ring of longhouses, which serve as the primary economic and social units below the village level. Each household or household group forms a discrete unit, but they are more or less identical features of a formal village plan dictated by the plaza. This can be contrasted to a


multicentric pattern, where the village layout is derived from and subordinate to its parts, comprised of the domestic sectors: circular plaza villages gravitate toward a unifying center. The plaza core (hugogo) is the center of public ritual and political life. It is also the location of the village cemetery and the communal men’s house (kuakutu). Ritual performance, including intra- and inter-village ceremonies, physical contests (wrestling and team ball games, including lately soccer) and social and political activities (village meetings, reception of formal visitors and redistribution) are focused in and around the village center. The plaza as a whole can be treated as a single male-centric public domain; women seldom linger in the hugogo, unless there is a public ceremony or redistributive event and even then they tend to remain a good distance from the kuakutu (Basso 1973). Women virtually never enter the kuakutu since it is forbidden for them to see the flutes housed there. In contemporary villages, three settlement changes result from population growth and/or household splitting: (1) settlement relocation, through fission or wholesale movement of the village; (2) reconstruction of houses to broaden the plaza and expand the domestic ring; and (3) construction of houses behind those of close kin. Household compounds form behind the longhouses of principal village chiefs, which are always located in one of the cardinal positions on the house ring (see Chapter 9), and are, in very reduced form, like the domestic precincts or neighborhoods suggested for the late Ipavu Phase villages. As village population continues to grow, there is a point where plaza space is not expanded to accommodate more houses. Either the village splits, or clusters of domestic structures emerge behind the plaza frontage houses. Plaza frontage, in the latter case, becomes a marker of social standing within the household cluster. In late prehistoric villages, which were apparently not abandoned, but instead occupied continuously throughout the Ipavu Phase, plaza size and placement remained more or less fixed, prompting outward expansion corresponding to the pie-shaped divisions created by the permanent paths.7 Beyond the “trash yard” (tsulo), behind houses, one is essentially beyond the “village.” In the village territory inka (piquí groves) and kwigi anda (manioc gardens). Beyond is “nature,” deep forest (itsuni) and deep water, or more precisely supernature, insofar as it is the place of spirit beings. Xinguano communities do not maintain clearly defined or defended territories, but each community has an area or territory to which they have almost exclusive right of usage. Communal “territories” are overlapping, insofar as areas far removed from villages are less contested and used by more than one community. Within a village territory, satellite residential hamlets (hihitsingóho) and special activity


areas also form enduring features of local cultural geography. It is my impression that not all adult men have garden hamlets and it is typically prominent men (household heads) who maintain such areas not only as production centers to provide alimentary support for the major rituals but also as retreats to escape the public eye. In the near-village territory (1–5 km), numerous special activity sites are exploited, including: etua (fishing camps), engutoho (ports), ataca (weir locations), halutinenha (fish-poisoning spots), inka (piquí groves), and kwigi anda (manioc gardens), among others. The primary special activity site is the garden, which is typically created, tended and “owned” by a man and his family for a few years and then transformed into a piquí grove, or “abandoned” for a few to many years. Gardens are not connected to the village with major paths but are often situated along major roads; minor pathways to gardens (current and abandoned) form a complicated network throughout the area around each village. Roads and pathways, including diverse canoe-ways (Figure 7.1), are an important structural component of the cultural landscape, since they provide the means of communication between other villages, access to important natural resources and gardens, and over time give definition to the landscape and the resources in it (Posey and Balée 1989). All villages have several primary paths/roads (generically called amá), including roads to the river port on the Culuene, one to the primary bathing area at Ipatse Lake, and the formal path (tanginga) to Ahanitahagu, just north of Nokugu. Bridges are sometimes constructed over major waterways, such as a 150meter bridge over the Itsuva outlet of Ipatse Lake adjacent to the Kuikuru village in 1993. Minor pathways from each house lead to gardens, special bathing areas, and so on, and converge with one another or with the major paths as one moves out from the village. These paths connect the village with distant areas, including other villages, lakes or deep forest. These paths eventually link up with numerous tertiary paths to form a virtually unbroken web between primary settlement areas in the basin. Garden sites are situated according to specific soil and vegetational characteristics, corresponding roughly to three categories: (1) primary forest (itsuni); (2) secondary regrowth forest or scrub; and (3) areas of egepe, old village sites. Itsuni is usually located some distance from village areas because of recent and ancient deforestation, however, tracts of primary or at least, high forest do occur near villages. Areas in various stages of regrowth (tahuga-pe) are therefore the areas most commonly gardened, but itsuni is also felled for gardens, and particularly garden hamlets. As Denevan (1992) notes, this pattern is greatly facilitated by metal tools introduced into the Upper Xingu during the late nineteenth and early


Fig. 7.1 Canoe launch (from Steinen 1896).

twentieth century. Carneiro (1957, 1983) has provided a definitive description of Kuikuru gardening practices that I was able to consider and corroborate in the field based on my own observations. In garden and hamlets, improvements continue after abandonment and are even heritable: piquí planted in old gardens is “owned” by the planter and can be passed to his sons. Likewise, hamlets, like places on the village ring, are part of a family estate. Symbolically, the village and all the common Kuikuru lands are “owned” by the village chiefs. Historically, Xinguano villages are prone to move from time to time, usually after some significant event, such as house fires. Villages will also occasionally fission, but when a group splits from the mother village to form a new one, they generally remain within the “territory” of the mother village. Sometimes a


village simply “flip-flops” the plaza, sometimes they move it a hundred meters or so away, and other times a little farther, perhaps a kilometer or so away, but seldom far and never do successive plazas overlap.9 Soils in these two areas (primary itsuni forest and successional forest/ scrub) are apparently more or less comparable in terms of soil chemistry and fertility (Carneiro 1983: 66). Egepe soils are higher in pH and some chemical constituents than are natural “red” soils and, therefore, are significantly more fertile (Table 7.1). 10 Black-earth soils are particularly sought after for maize gardens and, in fact, maize fields are called by the same name as black-earth (egepe), as opposed to the generic term for manioc garden areas (anda), meaning simply place of manioc. Other plants demanding high amounts of nutrients, are grown in black-earth as well. Manioc gardens (anda) (following Carneiro 1983) averaging about 0.65 hectares, are cleared and burned during the dry season, planted at the beginning of the wet season, and harvested for about three to four years before abandonment. Many adult men will clear and plant more than one garden at a time (59 plots maintained by 42 men in 1954 and 56 plots maintained by 35 men in 1975)(Carneiro 1983). Women are responsible for harvesting. Women are so involved with harvesting and processing manioc during the dry season that garden hamlets are often constructed when gardens are located some distance (> 5 km) from the village.

TABLE 7.1 Select Soil Chemistry Data from Kuikuru/Ipatse I Village and Nokugu (X6). Site

Context

% Org

pH

Mg

Ca

K

Na

Total P

13.5

7.5

68.7

509.2

38.1

7.2

1312

Kuikuru/Ipatse I Midden House

5.1

5.6

7.9

19.5

15.5

5.2

191

Plaza

5.4

5.2

5.4

14.9

10.8

5.1

117

Plaza

5.4

4.6

0.3

4.1

2.1

4.1

105

Plaza

5.7

4.1

0.1

2.3

1.2

3.5

126

Midden

8.2

5.9

20.1

142.8

54.5

5.5

942

Plaza

5.8

5.6

9.2

52.9

4.1

6.8

350

Domestic

7.5

6.4

18.9

143.8

3.8

5.8

556

Nokugu


Garden hamlets (hihitsigóho), consisting of one or a few houses can indeed be far removed from the village (15 km or more) and families may reside at these hamlet sites for extended periods during the dry season (although this has changed dramatically in the past 15–20 years with the introduction of bicycles, motorboats, and now a few motorcycles). After the dry season, the family returns to the village often with great stores of manioc flour and other resources unique to the area around the hamlet. Garden hamlets can be used for more prolonged stays to avoid tensions in the village and may become the seed of a new settlement. Generally, only prominent men—household heads—have the means to maintain garden houses, even if (like their regular houses) it is their sons and sons-in-laws who make and tend them, particularly in the case of the two really powerful chiefs in the village—the factional rivals. Perhaps the primary “Houses” of the ancient regime villages had more fixed “estates” in past times. There is little to tell one way or the other at present. One thing is certain from the contemporary pattern: new villages always start as a garden house, and then the “house,” its people simply do not return to the mother village, but rather a settlement grows and attracts new people. Eventually a plaza is built, attracts new peoples, and is formalized. The new village grows more and eventually begins burying its chiefly persons, at which point it becomes a mature, rather than a satellite, village. Around Ipa Kuhikugu, associated with the five villages the Kuikuru occupied from circa 1860 to 1961, such hamlets were maintained mostly by prominent men, and included many old villages sites (etepe) at places like Iña, Kuhugupe, Maijeinei, and the old garden estates of the primary household heads at Lahatua (Kuhikugu) in the early to mid-1900s: Lauadoho, Kagetepe, Tungepehugu, Hukekugu, Majaja, Mujuhalu, Djuwahïtï, and Kagaho. Campsites (etua) are short-term (one to a few days) occupation sites used for individual and communal fishing trips (fishing camps), for the procurement of specific resources, or as waystations along rivers and major paths. Campsites with a temporary shelter are often precursors to the construction of more substantial houses and a garden hamlet and, unlike fishing camps, are seldom located in areas unsuitable for yearround habitation. Campsites are usually situated at some distance from a village site, typically along key portions of major rivers related to fishing spots and ports, near fishing areas on the floodplain and unforested savannas, or near areas being developed as garden hamlets. The spatial organization of encampments is primarily determined by hammock placement and the activity areas created around them. Special campsites are also constructed around village sites for visitors during the intertribal festival


season (mid- to late dry season). Other visitation is dependant on kinship ties that would assure residence within the village. Special activity sites (nonovernight) most frequently involve fishing. Special procurement sites are numerous, and diverse materials are harvested far from the village. Buriti palm, inté (“timbo,” fish poison vine), various fruits, medicinal plants, firewood, materials for craftwork, housing materials, honey, clay and turtle eggs are among the varied resources collected away from the village. Unlike fishing sites, which require a longer stay to amass the desired harvest quantity, the resources around these special activity sites can usually be collected at will and typically do not involve an overnight stay. One of the most notable special activity sites is the river port, which sits on a rock outcropping atop the levee of the Culuene River. The port forms an integral and permanent part of the settlement pattern, and lies in an arrow straight line from the village, about 5 km away. River ports are seldom used as overnight camps, because of their proximity to the settlement, but are used on a regular basis (every day or every few days). There were three major ports used by the Kuikuru, two on the Culuene River (one primary port located in the most direct line from the village to the river and another subsidiary port to the north) and one at Ahangitahagu connecting Angahuku with the village via the “formal” entry path/road (tangingï). Although terrestrial roads are more obvious features of the regional communication network, the extensive waterways are also an essential aspect of local transportation and communication, especially during the wet season, including human modified canals for travel by canoe (traditionally made from the bark of the uagï tree).

Place and Place-Making: The Sites of Memory Settled life is not a question of human bodies settling into the land, “domesticating it,” making things in it and of it their own, nor of land settling into human bodies, into each and every body as it lives and moves through the landscape, but of “fitting objects and the body together,” as (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Strathern 1996: 38) puts it . Landscape is thus a thing of memory, that reflects history, as well as a thing of land and body, and a critical element of this is the history of places, and how they fit together into cohesive territories. In recent times, Kuikuru “territory” can be described at several levels, a nested hierarchy of social groups (“persons”), including the place rights of individuals, families, and Houses (chiefly kindreds), based largely on usufruct, the community (otomo) territory, and the ancestral lands of larger regional blocks. Otomo maintain territorial boundaries defined by ancestral rights, although these


have changed somewhat through time over the past five centuries. More or less exclusive territorial rights are exercised by the otomo that correspond to an area about five to ten kilometers around the village, which encompasses the major ports, fishing sites, gardens, bridges, and other “improvements” to the lands. In pre-Columbian times, a “buffer zone” apparently existed between clusters of primary settlements (the area that contains the minor Ipatse stream plaza villages, Séku, Séhu, and Maijeinei, for instance). Traditional Arawak and Carib areas can be distinguished within the Xinguano lands.11 The Kuikuru make no distinction between the two as kuge, which suggests the long-standing relationship. However, within these broad “territories,” redefining boundaries is an ongoing process as groups merge and split and individuals and families move about. There are two general tendencies in contemporary settlement patterns: (1) a reluctance to give up an established village locality (by all or part of the group); and (2) within the acceptable range of settlement locations, there is a tendency in historic times for larger villages (250–350 individuals) to fission within or near the “territory” of the parent village and reoccupy abandoned or ancient site locations, remembered by the unique persons who lived there and continue on in the mirror-world of dawn time. When there is a village split, the daughter village does not move far. Fissions usually involve one kin or factional group leaving the main village to set up permanent residence in a previous hamlet location. The new village usually maintains close ties with the parent village (e.g., Kuhikugu/Uagihïtï split, Atï/Kuhikugu split).12 Splitting from a village or merging with a village creates a paradox of ancestors. In the former case, the paradox is resolved by sponsoring mortuary feasts, thus creating founding ancestors, the persons that make the place a traditional living place. The latter involves an engulfment of ancestors. Such budding-off or drawing in typically reflects a significant shift in power. The Kuikuru origin is from a budding-off event from the mother village of Óti (X24). Kinship and political alliances exist between all the villages. Numerous factors contribute to the decision of a village (or some part of it) to move (Table 7.2).13 As Carneiro (1987a: 118) has suggested, generally, these include the filling up of the land around it, increased involvement in warfare, the degree of relatedness within the village, the existence of a strong chief, and the elaboration of social organization. While the Kuikuru seldom give ecological reasons for moving, these factors are carefully considered in deciding on new village locations (e.g., difficulty of access to important resources, such as buriti and sapé, at Lake Tafununu or distance from river and distance from water at Lake Lamakuka).


Fissions are most common among larger villages, 200–300 persons (see Carneiro 1987a for a general discussion), but the general trend since the 1880s (judging from the historical documentation of actual splits) has been mergers due to population loss, rather than fissions. Daughter communities remain socially linked, at least for a generation until they establish their own founders through chiefly ceremonies, especially the egitse or “kuarup” funeral ceremony. A splinter group left the group at Ipatse in 1997 to found a village at Afukuri in 1997, and another has established a “village” at Lahatua, adjacent to the ancient site of Kuhikugu, in 2001. These moves have the effect of both decentralizing local power and expanding the overall position of the community, as both discrete and related groups. These patterns underscore the fact that villages do not move great distances even when they fission, maintaining a strong link with the mother community. Since the Óti split (mid-1800s), because of a dispute over chiefly prerogatives,14 the Kuikuru (Lahatua otomo) occupied five primary village sites at Kuhikugu-Lamakuka and three in the vicinity of Ipatse Lake. The TABLE 7.2 Village Fissions, 1860–2002. Location Date Óti ?–1860

Cause political schism, which founds Kuhikugu

Kuhikugu Locality Atïka

1860–1870

Kuhikugu

1870–1915

Lahatua Lamakuka

1915–1951 1951–1956

Lahatua II

1956–1962

Atï

1910s–1920s

Ipatse Itsuva Ahangitahagu

1920s–1930s 1930s–1940s 1962–1973

Ipatse/Kuikuru I Ipatse/Kuikuru II Afukuri Lahatua

1973–1983 1983– 1997– 2001–

abandoned due to concerns with cemetery abandoned due to concerns with cemetery abandoned (cause unknown) abandoned due to witchcraft-house fires abandoned due to move to inside then PIX boundary

Ipatse Locality political schism from Kuhikugu, due to witchcraft (?) abandoned (cause unknown) amalgamation with Kuhikugu abandoned due to witchcraft-house fires abandoned to expand village current village political schism political schism


tendency toward fissioning of large groups because of factional relations, sorcery, or other factors appears to be a reflection of the ethnographic situation of low population levels and limited threat of violent aggression by other communities. Óti was a long-term village with many satellites, or “houses.” Although the stories that I heard firsthand are equivocal about the exact relations between the various communities (otomo). I agree with Franchetto (1992: 346) that the general impression one gets is that Óti is the most prominent of these villages and the others are secondary or satellite villages. The stories regarding the split originates at the time when white men appear, which according to oral history, place locations, and regional ethnohistory, must be in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The Caribs were attacked by ngikogo at Tafununu at this time and moved west, where they were definitely attacked—likely several times—by whites. The history may be outlined as follows: (1) Carib peoples occupied the southeastern portion of the basin by A.D. 1500 or earlier; (2) the ancestors of the Kuikuru were located at villages around Lake Tafununu ipa otomo—the “lake people”, until forced to flee west due to attacks by ngikogo and, perhaps, whites; (3) they moved to the middle Angahuku, where they were certainly attacked by whites. Based on language and oral history, it seems likely that the Kuikuru and Matipu were closely related communities of ipa otomo, and definitively split after circa 1850–1860. (Franchetto 1986, 1993, 2001). The split, which gave rise to the foundation legend of the Kuikuru as a distinctive community, was precipitated over a chiefly dispute over construction of the chief ’s house (tajïfe). Such moves are not serendipitous, but typically represent a long-brewing social schism, pushing chiefly families to become more permanently linked with garden hamlets and overall improvements of these areas, including garden, house, and trail preparation. The Kuikuru split from the “mother” village, Óti, to establish a village at Kuhikugu (Atika), the garden house of Ihikutaha, one of the chiefly heroes (or founding “great men”) of Kuikuru legend. Three of the eight named chiefs are the founders of Kuhikugu: they are Ihikutaha, who first had a garden house there, Nïtsïmï, and Amatuagu. The latter is a chiefly name associated with the old villages of ipa otomo—the “owner of Tafununu” an ancestral village of Kuikuru (along with Kuguhi). Hikutaha and Amatuagu are chiefly names that still come down to the present; they are “nieces” and “nephews” of the chief and stay in his house when visiting Kuikuru from the Yawalapiti, where they grew up and live, and they are no longer “power” names. The split that gave rise to the Kuikuru, for instance, is well remembered in a variety of stories, some of which pertain to the chiefs recounted in


chiefly discourses; other chiefly names pertain to even older times, when the “Whitemen” were “bad” and attacked various Kuikuru villages (c. 1750 or soon thereafter); other stories go even farther back to the time when the most distantly ancestral villages were occupied, circa 1500–1700 (see Franchetto 2001). These chiefly names are not only recounted in the anetï intagíñu, or special chiefly discourse that is the property of the primary chiefs, but are permanent markers of past settlements, whereby the memory of the settlement is, to some degree, isomorphic with the chief. Actual land ownership beyond the village is primarily based on usufruct, but some continuity in land tenure is maintained between generations, because manioc gardens are commonly planted in piquí and these groves and even individual trees are “owned” and inherited by closely related groups of men. Relations empowering some and excluding others (sources and containers of power) are diverse, but this does not diminish the fact that the greatest concentrations of symbolic and economic capital are concentrated in the hands of hereditary chiefs. It seems reasonable to suggest that, prime lands and resources, as well as labor and the flow of material wealth, were more tightly controlled by elite groups in the past, creating the conditions for a fully political economy, via long-term “ownership” of place and through it, political power. There are also many places that are fondly remembered, even places that the Kuikuru wish to reoccupy. Just as there are good places to live, there are also bad places, “cursed” places, places with many bad memories, where many people die d, such as those in the 1954 epidemic among the Kalapalo of “Jacui,” or the Kuikuru of Ina, of which a mass grave is described, or among groups, “where the witchcraft darts flew” (Basso 1973; Franchetto 1992; Ireland 1988). Villages are generally named by place, something followed with the suffix -hïtï or -ekugu, both meaning “place of.” Also, by attaching otomo, a place becomes a community, but such places are also known by their chiefs, the founding local ancestors that legitimate current persons and their relations. Place names—the place of so and so, the name of the chief who resided over the village (Tafununu), just as they can remember great names of chiefs of Óti, and other related villages (see Franchetto 1993)— the chiefs who are buried there, who had kuarups there, who had tiponhï there, or who received other chiefs there. Hamlets are another critical element of Xinguano settlement pattern, as they provide a retreat from their energy-consuming political duties critical for prominent men and particularly chiefs. These are commonly situated in past village sites, etepe (e.g., Tehukugu, Netunugu, Kuguhi, Nokugu, Hatsikugi, Heulugihïtï, Kagahïtï, Séku, and Séhu are a few old village sites that have been the recent sites of


garden hamlets). These hamlet sites can easily be expanded to more permanent or larger residential areas (i.e., villages) and village schisms often involve the movement of a large portion of a village to a prepared hamlet location (such as was the case of the Kuikuru split from Uagihïtï in the mid-1800s). Another type of being that shares the land is the powerful itseke (Figures 7.2–7.4), some malfareous or ambivalent by nature but only if their specific haunts or homes are happened upon (such as in deep parts of lakes). In fact, many such itseke live in the forests and waters of the Upper Xingu: some are spirits that seldom are apparent, such as the ahasa, the father of the forest, or the atugua (whirlwind spirit) and its aquatic cousin, the whirlpool. However, many do appear and directly attack humans and many of these take the form of giant beasts, such as the aforementioned paga-paga kuengï (great toad) that inhabit one or two bends in the mid- to upper Angahuku River. It was here that this itseke overturned a canoe of white men a long time ago, these kagaifa, in fact, built a canal bisecting the curve to avoid the beast. Another itsekekugu, place of the itseke, is the deep waters of Lake Tafununu, the thin strip separating Netonugu from Tafununu proper; it was here that the monster of the deep attacked an expedition of ngikogo who attacked the old Kuikuru villages on the lake. I once heard a child call an anaconda an itseke, because snakes are considered

Fig. 7.2 Anaconda basking in the sun on the Tafununu outlet stream (1993).


Fig. 7.3 Etching of “father of the forest” spirit (Ahasa) and jaguar (from Steinen 1896).

itseke. A sperm whale tooth, brought to the Kuikuru years ago by a kagaiha, is graphic testimony, in their eyes, of the existence of itseke. Santos-Granero (1998) describes, for instance, how the Yanesha of Peru “have ‘written’ their past history into the landscape,” as Zucchi (2002) also describes the northwest Amazon. Fabian (1998) notes that a Bororo plaza village is “a form of writing on the landscape” (Lévi-Strauss 1961, 1963; Seeger 1976, 1981: Turner 1979, 1996): the Bororo village fits the broadest interpretations of Goody’s definitions of lists (Goody 1977:80) and tables (Goody 1977: 54), and that in fact the Bororo village begins to fulfill the two main functions of writing systems according to Goody: that of


Fig. 7.4 Jakuikatu wooden masks representing water spirits (itseke) (from Steinen 1896).

information storage, and that of shifting language from the aural to the visual domain. (Goody 1977: 78) This also brings to mind, as he notes, the ceque and huaca system of the “sacred valley” of the Inca, described by Zuidema (1990) and Bauer (1998), where kinship and ethnoastronomy, maintain synonymity, each “places” or orders the other. The Xinguanos have a similar system of place-making, which, as described earlier, was carefully gridded out in prehistoric times by settlement “nodes” and interlinking roads positioned according to several basic orientations, most notably the solstitial axes. This raises a question: What are the central symbolic places of Xinguano conceptual landscapes? Rather than anomalous as Gow (1995: 43) implies, a landscape that includes a “bright red road [that] extends to the horizon, while buildings, fences, and isolated trees recede away into the distance,” is exactly the kind one might expect of the ancient regime towns or even the villages of today, looking down the long, straight roads or across the plaza to the lake, the river, the grasslands (oti), or at a wall of high forest far in the distance?


Visualizing Landscape: Memory and Representation “It is hard to see Amazonia as landscape,” Gow (1995:43) remarks, “in the sense the term has for people in temperate climes.” To travel through Amazonia, most of it anyway, he goes on, “is to pass through an endless succession of small enclosed places” and it is only “when an Amazonian landscape has been radically transformed by roads and deforestation is it revealed as visually extended space.” His description eloquently captures critical elements of the symbolic, historical, and political dimensions of a humanist ecology in Amazonia today: Seen from an airplane, uncolonized Amazonia looks like uninhabited wilderness, but it is not. It is people’s land. It is either currently inhabited or, if it is not, it shows constant evidence of recently having been so. Even the naïve viewer can see settlements from the air, while the more knowledgeable voyager can see the network of irregular patches of secondary vegetation that are the mark of slash-and-burn agriculture. The most knowledgeable, such as certain ecologists and Native Amazonian peoples themselves, see even more, and find the marks of human activity in what is apparently virgin forest. For the ecologists, this knowledge is essentially abstract, and produced by their own accumulation of records on paper in their scientific practice. For Native Amazonian people, this knowledge is part of lived experience in the sense of “what is going on.” “What’s going on,” being in the world, is surely the way landscape is experienced by the Kuikuru. There is no copy, only the original, no maps, no charts, but only lived experience, remembered through the body of individual persons. Gow’s observations ring true for much of Amazonia, at least based on my own experience, but there are many places in the broad forested lowlands for which this characterization does not entirely apply, precisely those areas perhaps that most dramatically show the marks of human activity, although no human presence is immediately apparent now. The great mounds of Marajó Island, for instance, some of which are hundreds of meters long and ten meters or more high, the centers of clusters of a few to dozens of smaller mounds, look out over the galeria forests across broad savanna-scrub lands (Roosevelt 1991; Schaan 2004); or the panoramic vistas up and down the Rio Negro from the regional center of Açutuba, perched forty meters above the white sand beaches during the dry season; or nearby in the adjacent lower Solimões, looking out over the


vast seasonally flooded várzea (Heckenberger et al. 1999; Neves 2000; Petersen et al. 2001a). In the Upper Xingu, and throughout the range of the large plaza villages of the southern Arawak, there is no doubt that specialists contained in their persons knowledge of a sophisticated astronomical, mathematical, architectural, and cartographic understanding that formed the basis of the crystalline form of the galactic polity in 1491. Understanding the world, according to Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 325–336), occurs in two modes: “a dynamic [itinerant and specific] one whereby we travel through space to take cognizance of it and a static one [imagined and general] that enables us, while remaining immobile, to reconstitute circles around ourselves extending to the limits of the unknown.” Xinguanos, like the southern Arawak and most big river and/or maritime peoples of the lowlands, in general, do make maps, based on the plaza sun-dial compass and the straight roads leading off the landscape with Cartesian coordinate precision according to cardinal direction and destination points. Incidentally, some Xinguanos are very adept at drawing maps and pictures on the ground and on paper, and they often sit with me as I draw my maps, looking at major features on topographic maps or sate-llite images, plazas, and roads, and rivers, and comparing these with their own knowledge (see Steinen’s definition of a Suyá map in the sand in 1884; see also Seeger 1976, 1981). The Xinguano landscape is a fully “saturated” anthropogenic landscape, with virtually no place that is not touched and molded by human hands. Even the itsuni wilderness shows evidence, when seen from a satellite image, of the massive alterations of this forest, indeed itsuni refers to certain types of vegetation and soil conditions that pertain even in archaeological sites (i.e., not equivalent to natural forest). The importance of landscape, the way sociality or memory are “written” or “inscribed” into landscape, is not unique to the Xingu, as many other Amerindian groups have equally saturated and deeply layered landscapes. Such landscapes are widely known from the Amazon. For the Yanesha, for instance, an Arawak people of the Upper Amazon, origin places are critical landmarks for demarcating lands, particularly as “the solar divinity left important landmarks” (Santos-Granero 1998: 131). Zucchi (2002) and Vidal (2002) in the upper and middle Orinoco, and Neves (1998, 2001) in the Vaupes River area describe similar deeply layered and ancient landscape oriented to sacred “centers.” In short, there is enough available information to suggest that this, too, was an element of the deep temporality of Arawak generally, although significant variation exists in each region, including large, settled riverine peoples. But, before


returning to the question of these cardinal sites of memory, the house and the plaza, it is important to paint a general picture of the landscape, what it looks like, how it came to be that way, and how landscape inscribes itself in human bodies through ritual and daily activities. Many great American civilizations mapped out their sacred and administrative landscapes in such a way, for example, the “four quarters,” the ceque/huaca system of the sacred Inka valley of Cuzco (Bauer 1998; Fabian 1998; Zuidema 1990), and the galactic organization of ancient regime Xinguano peoples, with exemplary centers, radial roads, and settlement nodes. They demand that we explore another extreme: that they overdetermine sectors of the land and economy, oriented to a religious system that is part ancestor cult, part animistic holism, and part “theistic.” Chiefmaking and place-making—and person-making—are inflections of the same cascading system of entailments: history, in one sense, is precisely the process of “pruning” genealogy. It is interesting how indigenous peoples relate to maps and map-making recently, and how readily they take to making and understanding them, according to a slightly different logic, but based on the same foundational materials: where rivers flow, where forests stand, where people live. The monuments the Xinguanos build or have built are quite different than those we might be accustomed to seeing, as a prerequisite for some of “complex societies.” There are no temple mounds, pyramids, stelae, ballcourts or altars, but only plazas, roads, and peripheral moats. In their public works, the Xinguanos do seem to have a “monu-mentalité,” a cultural aesthetic of constructedness and monumentality, with the one caveat that, like the Amazon itself, the monuments are “flat” (lateral), not vertical. The Kuikuru like wide open spaces, they like big open villages, and they build wide, straight roads (up to 50 m wide), and tend to denude “natural” vegetation in wide swaths around these villages— maintaining large areas of manioc gardens, piquí orchards, and sapé fields and lower scrub forests grown up as fallow or lightly managed plots. Staple manioc agriculture is practiced in the terra firme oxisols, and a crop rotational cycle between manioc fields, fruit trees in yards and old gardens, including “owned” piquí groves—all the while observing a cultural aesthetic of “clearing” and land improvement. Xinguano peoples have been in “place” for at least a thousand years; they are so to speak “deeply situated” in the landscape. The primary reasons then that the Xingu contrasts so remarkably with many other general images of Amerindians are found in their geography and ecological orientation, their historical ecology as a settled, regional society, as agriculturalists and riverine fisherpeople, the likes of which had largely been eclipsed in


the early centuries of European colonialism. Too much attention has been focused upon things that are ethnographically obvious, such as reciprocity, generalized exchange, bride-service etc., rather than bride-price, wifegivers/takers, payment, chiefly redistribution, or wealth. What we see here, recapitulated on the pages of southern Amazonian history, is a local version of a very common theme worldwide, that between settled populations in “domesticated” landscapes, such as those of the Upper Xingu, the Pareci, or throughout the Arawak diaspora, for that matter, and the upland peoples, who live a more unsettled and autonomous life and not uncommonly are predatory on the “bottom-landers.” The Xinguano landscape is saturated with meaning. From the point of view of a bird, Lévi-Strauss (1987: 19) remarks, the lived world is “an auditory saturation of space,” among some mammals it is “an olfactory saturation of this same space,” but among humans, “this saturation cedes its physical character and becomes symbolic.” It is this symbolic saturation, this reconstitution of circles around ourselves, that makes the analysis of landscape a critical humanist problem. Thus, how we come to know and view landscape relates to a great degree to “the life of the imagination,” as Taussig (1993: 83) calls it, and its origins “lie in art and politics, ritual and mythology, rather than the survival of an individual organism, as biological entity, adapted and adapting to external material conditions.” Ingold (1996) promotes a “dwelling approach,” that resonates with the phenomenological acuity of Gow’s description (see also Munn 1986; Tilley 1996), but also the exigencies and biases of our (the analyst’s) “being in the world”—dwelling—alongside our “objects” of analysis. Archaeology is also a critical form of dwelling as is “participant observation.”

CHAPTER

8

Houses, Heroes, and History: The Fractal Person In a social formation in which the absence of the symbolicproduct-conserving techniques associated with literacy retards the objectification of symbolic and particularly cultural capital, inhabited space—and above all the house—is the principal locus for the objectification of the generative schemes; and, through the intermediary of the divisions and hierarchies it sets up between things, persons, and practices, this tangible classifying system continuously inculcates and reinforces the taxonomic principles underlying all the arbitrary provisions of this culture. Pierre Bourdieu 1977: 89 … to put it in structuralist terms that have become an argot of the social anthropologist’s craft, the possibility remains that social and cultural phenomena might be collapsed along a number of axes to yield scale-retaining understandings of unsuspected elegance and force, generalising forms of concept and person that are neither singular or plural. Roy Wagner 1991: 159 The interior of the Xinguano house is oval in shape and divided into two parts: the center, a public household area where the occupants of the entire house mingle and receive visitors, and domestic family areas at either end of the house. Like the celebrated Kabyle house, described by Bourdieu (1970),

255


the house, its partitions and spaces, inscribes on the body and in cultural memory, the basic schemas and divisions of culture through a process of objectification and embodiment. The Xinguano house is also conceived and built according to metaphors of the human body (Gregor 1977; Sà 1979). House members enter through the low front (egetilopïgï) or back (gipopïgï) doors, the only openings to the house, visitors by the front alone (Figure 8.1). Entering through the front door, one encounters the most public space, where visitors are received, and the persona of the house is most openly revealed. Behind the central posts, storage racks and manioc silos, which dominate the center of the house in various combinations, is where primary food cooking and preparation activities typically occur (the “kitchen”). Upon entering the house, the visitor has little doubt regarding the principal social divisions: on the right (ot[i]), in the hammock tied parallel to the house’s long axis (right-left), is found the house head, the “owner” (oto), and to the visitor’s left (ehengu[i]), in the same place, is the secondary head. The traditional Xinguano house (üne or ngüne) is an oblong pole and beam longhouse usually about two times as long as it is wide. The construction of a house is a laborious task usually undertaken by two related men, father and son, brothers, or brothers-in-law, the “owner(s)” of the house, with the support of their subordinate relatives. Construction involves: (1) erecting the two to ten large center posts (gahagu) placed

Fig. 8.1 Inside of house under construction (1993).

Houses, Heroes, and History • 257

along the central axis of the house; (2) a center cross-beam (sipo) is attached across the tops of the center posts (ungita center and sata); (3) short closely-spaced posts are positioned in the outline of the outside wall ungita-ngahapïgï; (4) smaller poles (setiso) are placed just outside the short wall posts and bent inward toward the center-beam; (5) thin crossbars are tied to these vertical poles (angao); and (6) sapé grass thatch (or occasionally buriti palm frond) is attached to these horizontal crossbars. When completed, the house looks like an oblong haystack, with a steeply sloping roof that extends to the ground. Other house types, temporary structures or satellites to a primary longhouse, include small round and oval structures, with discrete wall and roof segments, and small- to medium-sized square houses, often with wattle and daub mud walls (reflecting neo-Brazilian influences, cagaihai-ungo). The primary üne form a ring around the plaza, each with a “front-row seat” on the central plaza. The two most powerful families, the two chiefly “Houses,” dominate the cardinal points and have secondary houses beside and behind the main house. Other üne often have work structures behind them. Behind each house is an open cleared area or patio where most outdoor domestic activities are conducted, including manioc processing and other food preparation, and which connects with “backyards” of related houses. Refuse is deposited in large middens ten to twenty meters behind the house, often forming large raised mounds that, in turn, define, the backyard “patio” and the paths leading out from it. These composts (tsulo) are cultivated with diverse plants, including maize, banana, fruit trees, pepper, and bottle gourd, among many others, and constitute the outer periphery of the village proper. Houses range from eleven to thirty-five meters long, six to fourteen meters wide, and three and a half to seven meters high, with variations attributable to household size, prestige and personal preferences.1 The largest house in a village is the “chief ’s house” (tajïfe), although the Kuikuru have not had a chief for over a decade.2 The tajïfe is the only residential structure built by the community at large and at the request of the community. Similarly, the kuakutu (men’s house) is a reflection of the community and not only the individual household. The chief once told me, talking of the tajïfe, that in the past “in-laws passed farther from it, spoke more softly, and respected it with the utmost sanctity,” and that “the laws have changed.” Traditional painting used in the tajïfe and the kuakutu include a front-facing panel on the roof gable and in the front of the house (on interior panels between adjacent the doors, between the two front doors on the kuakutu and on either side of the two uengïfi trunks that frame the front and back doors of the tajïfe). Traditionally, upon entering the traditional tajïfe, the visitor is greeted by three sculptures, made from


the compact red clayish soils, covered with the white clay (enuei), and painted with urucu (red) and charcoal (black) mixed with tree sap. This combination of (white-red-black) is also used to paint both human bodies and the diverse (10–12) masks (other “skins”) they wear in animal/spirit ceremonies. As one enters the tajïfe, on one’s right is the jaguar (ekege), on the left is the anaconda (konto) or “bush-master” viper (ugu kuku), and in the middle is the toad (paga paga), food for the anaconda. Parenthetically, the spirits of ekege, konto, and atugua (whirlwind) are the “spirit guides” of the most powerful shaman in the village.

Xinguano Social Memory: Enchainments The Xinguano house is intermediate between the human being and the plaza community, or otomo. Beyond the level of the individual and family, the house—the primary dwelling—is the skin of social groups, and, like human bodies and plaza villages, is a critical element of cultural memory. Houses are positioned according to a very precise calculus in villages, with primary village leaders occupying cardinal positions (N and S) in the Kuikuru village, perpendicular to the primary east-west axis of village orientation (“sun entrance” and “exit”). From the point of view of the family and the household, the basic structural relations are hierarchically ordered according to principles of gender and seniority: men are senior to women, parents to children, and older siblings outrank younger siblings, according to gender-specific distinctions between older and younger brothers, hinhano and hisü, or sisters, hasü and ikene (cross-sex siblings are simply sisters and brothers, ingãdzu and hisü). Simple as it may seem, this basic distinction between older and younger siblings, iterates across time into high-ranking and cadet descent lines (i.e., those with descent and those without), which enables the whole of society to be ranked against itself, hierarchy in the sense of Dumont (1970). From this general social theorem, the ideology of rank extends outward to structure larger groupings within villages, household clusters or factions. The cardinal houses—the tajïfe (when present) and its oppositional counterpart—are thus the “heads” of the major villages factions, social segments, what amount to the kindreds of the major village chiefs, or “Houses” (sensu Lévi-Strauss 1982, 1987; see also Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000). Minor Houses (high-ranking but subordinate chiefs) are situated at easterly or westerly side of the village. They are also part of larger northern and southern Houses, through kinship and alliance (i.e., their kindreds or “Houses” are nested within those of their older brothers). Thus, there are always several major and minor Houses in each village, and political competition revolves around them.


At the level of the village, within regional arenas, each village resolves into a single kindred, for which the principal “great chief ” (anetï ekugu) is “father”: that is, the ranking man of the ranking house (a dwelling and a kin-group) of the ranking House (a larger, usually multihouse dwelling place and also a kin group) is not only the father of future chiefs, in genealogical terms chief ’s sons (i.e., anetï mugu) and daughters (anetïindiso), but also father to the entire village. Major chiefs refer to community members in informal and formal discourse by the word for child, ngamuke, or “my children,” kangamuke. The chief is thus ancestor or affine to every villager. This pattern had a yet larger supralocal iteration in the galactic clusters of the Xinguano ancient regime. There is evidence that, while not necessarily fixed in place or in literal genealogical terms, there may have been regional chiefs: the highest ranked (first among equals) chief among all the chiefs in this cascading series of “moral personages” that constitute the Xinguano nation (the Kuikuru chief has referred on occasion to another village chief as “our chief ”). To borrow Bourdieu’s (1970: 165) metonym, the “house is an empire within an empire,” or, in perhaps more familiar terms, the household is the “little chiefdom within the chiefdom” (Sahlins 1968: 24).

The Fractal Person This analytical imagery of this “cascading” phenomenon, the “otomo within the otomo,” so to speak, is radically different from that which anthropologists are more familiar: society, culture, tribe, chiefdom. Roy Wagner (1991) coins the term, “fractal person,” to describe such a holographic (self-scaling) effect in cultural systems, recognizing the openendedness, in symbolic and social terms, of both units of analysis and of sociality. Such a metaphor is useful for drawing our attention to the selfsimilar (“fractal-like”) scaling of cultural systems, such as the genealogies of Xinguano social bodies: persons, great persons, families, houses, Houses and “Great Houses” (villages and galactic clusters), and the Xinguano nation. At once singular and plural, the fractal person draws our attention to issues of scale and perspective: the anthropological object or subject changes depending upon the vantage point from which human phenomena is being observed. “However diminished,” into individuals “or magnified,” into communities, societies, even regions, “the fractal person, keeping its scale, reproduces only versions of itself.”3 The concept of the fractal person refers to both the duality of social life, never entirely individual or aggregate, and the multidimensional properties of self-organization, selfsimilarity, and the scaling of cultural schemas, metonymical principles of


self-organization. It most directly implies the symbolic or social self-scaling of human cultural systems. Wagner (1991) notes that “although the idea of fractality may appear abstract, it is in fact no more so than singularity or plurality, or statistical analysis.” The fractal person, by definition, defies narrow, unit-like definitions, and instead draws our attention to polyvalent but self-similar quality of cultural systems: “A genealogy is thus an enchainment of people … [and] person as human being or person as lineage or clan [house, community or nation] are equally arbitrary sectionings or identifications of this enchainment, different projections of its fractality.” (Ibid: 163) The critical point here is that within the concept of the fractal person this idea of selfscaling or holography, fractality, is coupled with that of personhood (the subjectivity of an objective form, the human body, the house, the settlement, the region). It is not simply scaling, saying that regions and locales are both critical and then assuming they can be directly compared—the ecological and historical fallacy, as discussed earlier—but it demands attention to scalar principles, symbolic and social self-similarity. This “tantalizing redundancy” or “seriality,” as Hornborg (1998: 168) notes, “may be a key to finding an epistemologically modest and nonreductionist mode of comparison, which balances formalism and relativism, structure and practice, and continuity and change.” Such regularity and correspondence, a deep, underlying sense or structure of Amerindian thought, should not surprise us, at least since LéviStrauss’s Mythologiques (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 5). As Wagner (1991: 166) notes: “the possibility remains that social and cultural phenomena might be collapsed along a number of axes to yield scale-retaining understandings of unsuspected elegance and force, generalising forms of concept and person that are neither singular or plural.” The plaza, in particular, is the spatiosocial signature as well as mediator of these generalizing forms, particularly in the ritual context of chiefly ceremonies, funerals, initiations, and other public (civil) affairs, which so clearly differentiate the Xinguano high ranking from the hoi polloi, as well as in the natural spirit rituals that highlight or animate these ontological “others” (see Chapter 9). The idea of the fractal person, or sociocultural holography, resonates with Strathern’s (1991, 1992, 1999) concept of the “partible person.” However, whereas the composition and decomposition of subjects, the dividuality or partibility of persons and their perspectives, implies direct traffic, “fractality” makes central the problem of symbolic iteration framed in terms of mimesis and alterity and social “transcorporeality” (corporeal metamorphosis): scale. In particular, issues of self-scaling in ethnotheories of selfhood and otherness


and, particularly, their concrete iterations in the spatial and temporal distributions of persons (their “places” and life histories) are critical. In other words, fractality strikes at issues of topology, rather than immediate relationship; how social substance travels between “persons” that directly and consciously traffic with each other, not how things traffic but how they entail, represent, and transfigure other things of a different nature and scale. From an analytical point of view, this involves most directly questions of visibility, what cultural memories are preserved on “persons,” on “the skin of the land” or in houses and village layouts. One focuses on self-sameness, the inner-fixedness (and mimesis) of fractal persons (in a sense genealogy or consanguinity), not to the exclusion of otherness or cross-ness, alterity, as seen in direct or potential exchange and affinity (traffic) between partible persons, but the reformulation or reiteration of alterity across different social and symbolic domains, of the near-far, up-down, in-out, and us-them variety. Space is a critical means through which to operationalize the concept of the “fractal person,” this symbolic self-organization and “holographic” (self-similar scaling) quality of cultural systems, as it relates to individual human bodies, houses, communities, and world/universe. The plaza, in particular, is such a fractal “operator,” expressing, reproducing and inflecting the valences of self-similarity and difference that cascade throughout cultural systems: a prism-like structure that inflects all types of “persons” into all types of “others.” In other words, the plaza is a symbolic window (Ohnuki-Tierney 1990) that enables us to consider self-scaling between human bodies, houses, neighborhoods, galactic clusters, and regions, each with their unique dimensionality and temporality. Amazonian ethno-theories of the body, the person, and the world, are critical examples of this pattern of cascading (self-scaling), series of sameness/otherness, alterity and mimesis, for theoretical and ethnographic reasons (Vivieros de Castro 2001). Franchetto (1986) describes just such a cascading set of self-scaling relations according to the basic schema of “self ” and “otherness” among Kuikuru (Figure 8.2; see also Basso 1973): Otomo defines both the local group [village community] and the kindred of ego, defined based upon filiation and siblingship; telo simply defines non-relative. Introducing the criterion “sex” into the personal otomo, the categories of affinity are created— mother’s brother, father’s sister, bilateral cross-cousins (1986:110). The Kuikuru system of alterity, whereby “other” (non-relative), the word telo, is juxtaposed at different social levels to: (1) the people (kuge); (2) the


Fig. 8.2 Hierarchically organized conceptions of otherness, including the distinctions between (1) Xinguanos (kuge) and other indigenous peoples (ngikogo) and “Whites” (cagaiha); (2) the otomo/ telo series (following Franchetto 1986: 110); and (3) chiefs and non-chiefs, the former subdivided into great or “true” (ekugu), lesser (nsono), and female (tango) chiefs.

local group (otomo in its most common usage); (3) relatives and nonrelatives; and (4) non-affines and affines (non-affines are then divided into true, ekugu, and classificatory, otóhogo, siblings). It is also combined with that of chiefliness, which, through ranked systems of consanguinity and affinity, positions all members of Xinguano society in an overarching hierarchical structure, that turns family and household members into house heads, house heads into chiefs (the primary village chiefs or anetï, the heads of chiefly kindreds or Houses), and notably the community into one or a few ranking “great chiefs” (anetï ekugu, or in certain contexts, high-ranking female chiefs, tango). The social alterity, or cross-ness, predicated on ranked sibling sets and affines, is played out at the level of individual families, houses, Houses (chiefly kindreds) and Great Houses (maximal otomo). Thus, chiefs and chiefly families or kindreds (Houses) are an intermediate iteration of the social body between individual persons and the Xinguano nation as a whole or, in other words, in certain contexts and particularly in regional interaction, they come to stand for the group. On the ground, these groups can be distinguished as domestic units, houses, neighborhoods, communities, and regions. In addition to kinship, “ethnophysics,” the reservoir of knowledge that includes counting, engineering, starknowledge, and climatology, shows a similar self-scaling geometry. This is no


surprise, considering that one mirrors the other, land and sky, society and cosmos, particularly in light of the cosmo-centrism of Amerindian systems of knowing (Descola 2001). Discussion of sedimentation of personhood in household, community and regional (galactic cluster) spatial patterns must wait for now (see Chapter 9). For now, our interest lies in the divisions between things, persons, and practices, how people divide themselves: the alterities created by systems of consanguinity and affinity, which extend well beyond kin terms and marriage categories to “far-reaching and versatile intellectual templates” that structure every conceivable form of sociality, including “potential” consanguinity and affinity with non-humans, (Descola 1996b, 2001; Strathern 1999, 2001; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2001). So combined, these elements (kindreds, residence, place) can be divided into three units: houses (including all domestic structures in villages), Houses (including minor and major groupings, the kindred of household heads), and Great Houses (in which the village is a House within a regional sociopolitical network). Specifically, chiefs and chiefly families or kindreds (Houses) are an intermediate iteration of this symbolic cascading that extends from the individual person to more encompassing personages: the “One Giant Indian effect” or “heroic I,” as Sahlins called it, or, as Clastres (1987) called it in lowland South America, the “One”—the nascant Leviathan.

Social Bodies There is a large body of ethnographic material written on Xinguano social organization (Coelho 1995). By and large my own experience supports the view that basic residence is uxorilocal, in the wife’s father’s house, at least temporarily as bride-service, and that the underlying kinship logic is cognatic, congruent with what Viveiros de Castro (1993, 1998; Fausto and Viveiros de Castro 1993) calls the “Amazonian Dravidianate.” In this Xinguano case this follows a fairly typical bifurcate-merging “Iroquois” kinship terminology, but varies across time and kingroup. The most striking feature of Kuikuru social organization is the degree to which it is structured not by abstract principles or rules, but by daily contingencies and individual preferences (Basso 1983, 1984). Preferential structural rules do exist, but these are highly diverse and contigent (e.g., finite relations of brother–sister exchange, wife-taker/wife-giver, cross-cousin marriage, local exogamy or endogamy, rank endogamy, bride-service and bride-price) and provide only crude guidelines, followed, manipulated, or ignored due to more immediate concerns such as personal and kingroup social standing, factional affiliation, proximity, preference, and personal safety (from sorcery or accusations of it), among other things. Some of the


flexibility may, in part, relate to “contact.” In other words, depopulation and increased cultural pluralism made it difficult or disadvantageous to practice normative patterns of marriage, residence and affiliation. It is equally likely, however, that some elements of this social flexibility are “traditional,” that is to say inherent as well in the structure of social and power relations in the past, as well. Descent is cognatic and the primary kinship units are ego-centered kindreds, generally patri-uxorilocal households, but larger “Houses” also apparent within the community (otomo), which today represents that “maximal local kingroup” (Dole 1969: 109–110). At first glance, this seems like a simple transformation of a very basic Amerindian pattern (see Coelho 1995; Fausto and Viveiros de Castro 1993; Petesch 1993; Viveiros de Castro 1995). Kinship in the Xingu, including consanguinity, affinity, and residence, differs from many Amazonian contexts or exegeses in the degree to which it is bifurcated and actually forms two systems: a system specific to the high-ranking personages (anetão) and the rest (majority) of persons. The critical difference in Xinguano cognatic kinship is its duality, different top to bottom, although these categories are overlapping and complementary in social and spatial relations and do not form rigidly defined strata, castes, or classes (perhaps less so in the ancient galactic clusters). There is a stated preference for cross-cousin marriages, at least first arranged marriages between chiefs commonly take this form. Polygyny is also common among chiefs. Although there is significant intermarriage across village lines, village endogamy is characteristic of most contemporary villagers. Depopulation resulted in increased village exogamy, but population rebound over the last several decades has reduced the need to look beyond one’s natal village for spouses.4 Intervillage marriages among the Kuikuru are most common with other Carib-speaking groups. Residence and affliation patterns are flexible and based on diffuse kin relations and individuals and families have “far-reaching resettlement privileges with friends or associates living in widely separated communities,” a pattern Sorenson (1976: 133) calls extensive polylocality. Although a wide variety of daily contingencies condition individual decisions regarding residence (Basso 1984), my data confirm that post-marital residence patterns show a tendency toward uxorilocality, as is typical of both Central Brazilian and Amazonian societies (Dole 1969: 107; Maybury-Lewis 1979). Marriage and residence also conform to linguistic proximity, whereby related dialects (distinct local groups) form clusters in regional systems (Basso 1984; Franchetto 1986), but affinity and the “outside,” generally, are moving targets in the Xingu and are redefined situationally according to


several broad social valences: local endogamy, linguistic group endogamy, rank endogamy,5 and Xinguano endogamy, all of which can be followed or not, depending on context. Conversely, consanguinity, the “inside,” is oriented to a relatively precise calculus of seniority, whereby affines, for what ever de facto power they hold, as wives and brothers-in-laws to powerful chiefs, do not hold any legitimate claims to plaza politics and ritual, rooted in descent from local founding ancestors, except through the body of the chief and the chiefly substances associated with it—the immanent de jure power of the chief. In fact, the ability of the powerful to bend tradition to their will, characteristic of chiefdoms, conical clans, and “House societies” in general (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995), cross-cuts all dimensions of social structure. As Viveiros de Castro (1992: 375) suggests: “The Amazonian rule, if it is possible to speak of one, is this: within a general tendency towards uxorilocality, the powerful and their sons do not live according to this residential solution.” Thus two logics exist: one of the high-ranking and one of the hoi-polloi. In some respects, the most interesting aspect of Kuikuru social organization, from a comparative perspective, that is, vis-à-vis the Xinguano past, Amazonia, or other world areas is the distinction between hereditary elite and commoner statuses. Only certain kingroups have primary chiefly rank (anetï), which are distinguished from the majority of society (kamaga). This bifurcation of society, more than any other, colors social relations and provides the basis to distinguish Xinguano sociality from that of many other Amazonian groups, and is a basis for comparison with other world areas. Thus, while Xinguanos may lack lineal descent groups, named moieties or complex age-grade, naming or other special associations, the pan-populational “sodalities” considered characteristic of “tribes,” they do not lack lineality, in the form of “House” groups, ancestrality, genealogy, castelike organization, and social hierarchy. Social hierarchy has been noted by virtually every ethnologist working in the region, but typically it is viewed as a unique twist to an otherwise egalitarian system, much like those often assumed to characterize all of Amazonia, purely symbolic and ritualized with little “real” consequences in terms of political power, that is, economic control and political domination. It is this “structural contradiction,” as Giddens (1984) calls it, that is the most “structural” element of sociality over the long term. Social groups above the family are formed at three basic “institutional” levels: (1) house or household; (2) suprahousehold interest groups, generally conforming to the chiefly kindreds of minor and major Houses; and (3) the village (or galactic cluster), the “Great House” in regional systems. The household forms the primary relational unit above the level of the


nuclear family and below that of the village, and refers to the inhabitants of one house. These cluster around Houses, located in cardinal points of the plaza ring, and correspond to the kindred of the people who occupy the cardinal directions. Thus, the ring of houses forms a continuous link between primary villages heads, corresponding in this case to the heads of chiefly persons, the kindreds of the highest ranking and most powerful chiefs, principally the highest-ranking southern and second-ranking northern Houses. Since the Kuikuru define them through named people, the spaces can be considered as virtual persons, just as a house or settlement can be considered a historical personage. The house usually consists of a pair of related families or otherwise closely related individuals, although a single extended family can occupy a house, with one or two “owners” (in 1993: father-in-law/son-in-law [eight houses]; father/son [six houses]; brothers-in-law [three houses], and brothers [one house]).6 Many economic activities are conducted by nuclear family units, but the extended family and household also forms a primary economic unit. Nuclear families within the household have more or less equal access to essential resources through sharing of labor, materials and foodstuffs. Trade and borrowing between closely related individuals, families and households is common and based on general reciprocity. Redistribution of large community payments by prominent men, under the supervision, at least, of chiefs, is also common, within the context of the cyclical uluki ritual exchange and occasional “windfalls.” The generalized economic pattern, according to the schema laid out by Polanyi (1957), at any rate, would be “householding” rather than reciprocity or redistribution, however (Halperin 1993). Reciprocity, redistribution, householding, and even incipient “market behavior” (in the form of local and intercommunity uluki ceremonial trading) are all important elements of the economy, as are generalized exchange, mobilization, surplus, and equivalencies. The household consists of a fairly cohesive body of individuals who not only share common bonds of kinship and marriage (substance), but who are also bonded by common interests and economic activities, mutually dependent. The household is therefore an important autonomous unit in political action and village activities (Basso 1973; Gregor 1977: 60). Although the families that occupy either side of a longhouse may disagree, the household, via its heads and particularly the principal head, usually forms a voting block. The issues resolved by adult men in formal discussions in the village center are first resolved in household context, where other voices, women, elders, and even children, decide for powerful men what they will decide for themselves. As a general rule, the larger the household, the stronger the male household head is in community affairs.


Other suprahousehold social groupings within the village emerge as short-lived task-specific work groups, or “ceremonial teams” (Carneiro 1957: 260), but the major mobilizations are oriented to chiefly ritual, and require the mobilization of labor beyond the household. There are two primary mechanisms through which labor can be mobilized. The firstsimply involves making legitimate demands on one’s network of kin and friends. Clearing gardens, carrying a canoe (ehu and wagi-puhisa, e-akipugu) from the forest to the river, or carrying a house post can all be accomplished with the aid of close relations without incurring direct or immediate costs beyond a bit of food or the certainty of reciprocity (Carneiro 1957: 262). Community-wide task forces can also be organized for communal projects (such as building a kuakutu, tajïfe or an airplane runway) and are organized and administered by the primary village leaders (Figure 8.3). However, individuals can sponsor someone who needs help with a large project. For instance, a leader will often sponsor a community-wide ceremony to promote an activity that he wishes other villagers to participate in (Basso 1973: 110). Ceremonial teams include petitioners (tajope) who “feel the public pulse” of the community to determine if there is a sentiment to hold a particular ceremony and then formally request the ceremony from the “owner” (oto) (Carneiro 1957: 260). This “owner-asker” complex (Dole 1956/58: 131–132), includes chiefly rituals that are asked of the chiefs, the exclusive “owners,” in this case, at appropriate times. Men gain prestige by requesting or sponsoring ceremonies, as well as by specializing in ceremonial songs. (Egiñoto [singers] are a type of inoto [specialists] that are integral, like oto and tajope, to the performance of certain rituals.) There are numerous ceremonies that take place during the year (Carneiro 1994 counted seventeen, but the list is much longer). There are four basic kinds of ritual: (1) intravillage masking or spirit rituals, what Gregor (1977: 311–312) calls “Giving Food and Gifts to the Spirits” rituals, that are concerned with the relations of nonhuman spirits to the village; (2) rituals of sexual antagonism, including the women’s chiefly rituals (yamuricuma and tolo), and the ant-eater (agigi) spirit ritual with its distinctive character of sexual antagonism; (3) intraand inter-otomo exchange rituals (uluki) overseen by chiefs; and (4) the most sacred and intense rituals, the primary chiefly rites of passage, including the tipoñhï (ear-piercing) boy’s puberty initiation, or the women’s uluri, held for anetï indiso, and the most important of all, the egitse mortuary feasts.7 Like other rituals, chiefly rites of passage are requested by village spokesmen (tajope), representing the community at


Fig. 8.3 Kuakutu (1995).

large, of chiefs (oto), only both tijope and oto are, by necessity, anetão. The diverse inducements for ceremonial sponsorship, beyond building prestige and public interest, involve the accomplishment of a variety of tasks.8 One objective of mobilizing such a work group is to amass the food and wealth to support larger communal undertakings (i.e., ceremonial payments), the second mechanism of labor mobilization. The latter depends on the network of kin, particularly subordinate kin (e.g., younger siblings, sonsand daughters-in-law, and offspring), that can be relied on for support. Obviously, the larger the network one can draw on, the larger the tasks that can be performed. Among men, it is these certain individuals who are regularly able to muster the support necessary to sponsor major village ceremonies, and as a result are the more prominent men in public ritual activity. Minimally, an individual needs to have the ability to provide the required ceremonial food payments (primarily fish and beiju) that are distributed in the hugogo. As Basso (1973:108) notes: As a result of inegalitarian kinship and affinal relations, certain men and women find themselves surrounded by satellites, relatives who … feel constrained to lend assistance when called upon. In contrast, these same men and women find they have few relatives who can make demands upon them.


As we have seen, the unusual influence of these individuals depends on a large local group of close subordinate kin upon whom they can depend for support. As Basso (1973: 107) notes for the Kalapalo, “leaders are persons who are continually expanding and reinforcing social ties, and in so doing, are actively demonstrating their ability to influence a large number of individuals.” As with other prominent men, these individuals have demonstrated their willingness and capacity (because of the large local kingroup) to sponsor numerous village ceremonies and projects and thus achieve the prestige associated with these activities. From birth, anetï are raised above the rest of society as an elite group, at least symbolically. At this level, however, the idea of “House,” as a personage, a moral body, becomes more apparent: the heads of Houses are anetï, and the House is isomorphic with the kindred of the chief. Thus, social hierarchy is always relatively clear about the relations standing behind the sitting chiefs and their political legitimacy (since to a large degree the hierarchies are constructed or at least centered around them). It is that second tier that stands, poised to step in that is diverse and numerous enough, and often ready, if not hungry for power, that depends not only on individual abilities and status, but to a large degree on the ability of a man to surround himself with close subordinate relatives (i.e., staunch political supporters), including in-laws, sons, and brothers. There are two strategies: one is local solidarity, the other is foreign alliances.

Chiefs and Others At the level of the community, whereby the village operates as a more or less cohesive body in external affairs, a more formal political structure is evident. Whoever becomes a village spokesperson in external affairs is strongly conditioned by hierarchical social categories, namely the difference between chiefly (anetï) and nonchiefly (kamaga) individuals. While any man can achieve considerable influence in the village arena, only hereditary anetï, as copies of their parents and grandparents (through name transmission) and more remote founding ancestors (local culture heroes) recited in chiefly discourse, can ascend to high office, as sitting chiefs, with the full complement of chiefly properties, substances, and practices. Only chiefly sons and daughters (anetï mugu and anetï indiso) are constructed, through plaza ritual, in such a way as to attain the position of “true chief ” (anetï ekugu or tango, for women), (see Chapter 9). For the present purposes, it is important to note that political process in villages is multiscalar, operating within and between households, between adult men, and particularly household heads in the village plaza, and between prominent village leaders in a supravillage arena. These levels are hierarchical in


that important decisions are resolved at one level, before a mandate is given to an individual to act as a representative at a higher level. All individuals may speak their minds within their houses and domestic affairs and informal information exchange and gossip are common between houses, but the plaza forum is dominated by prominent adult men and the supra-village political arena is dominated by the most influential men, the weightiest social actors in the village arena, the village chiefs.

Chiefly Status: The Anetão Village chiefs throughout the Upper Xingu share one thing in common: they are members of a bilaterally inherited elite status group, called anetï by the Kuikuru. Many people are anetï and as such have a claim to chiefly position. In fact, all Kuikuru have anetï ancestors, given the small size of community, the bilateral transmission of anetï status (from either parent to all offspring) and the flexible (nonexclusive) marriage patterns. Anetï is not a uniform status, since the anetão are living human beings, as reproductions of ancestors, that make up the “social class” or “caste,” that, while tied to material things, objects, like houses, benches, perhaps as subtly as one or two feathers, are made and remade by people using things. All individuals can be ranked according to the strength of their claim to anetï status with respect to sitting chiefs and recent ancestors, primarily on the strength of their anetï parent and their position relative to that parent. Younger siblings have progressively weaker claims to anetï status. As the genealogical ties to individuals with high chiefly rank (i.e., those individuals who are or could be accepted as village leaders, and through them, founding ancestors), becomes increasingly attenuated, claims to chiefly rank or office become more irregular and unacceptable. Some individuals are recognized as anetï by everyone, first sons and daughters of first sons and daughters (primogeniture and cross-generational name transmission). Other people’s claims are more contested, they are irregular nearing the vanishing point of the anetão aristocracy (third, fourth, or fifth sons, of third, fourth, and fifth sons), or are related to foreign chiefly lines, affines to the principal House(s). Hierarchy is defined based on birth order (primogeniture), such that over time, certain bloodlines are exalted above others (e.g., first-sons of first-sons opposed to fifth-sons of fifth-sons), a type of social structure elsewhere commonly referred to as a “conical clan” (Sahlins 1968: 24). High-ranking families, the anetão, which seem to make up about 20 percent of village population, are not, as a group, socially distinctive from the rest of Xinguano society, but depopulation may have blurred the lines.9 The pyramidal structure, an extension over time and space of the


separation of elder (superior) and younger (inferior) siblings and the principle of primogeniture, is thus characterized by an upper tier of highranking individuals, men and women who are unquestionably strong in chiefly blood. Principal among chiefs are the titled, or “sitting,” chiefs (anetï ekugu; meaning “true” or “great” chief; women are called “tango”) of whom two, in particular, reign supreme: the hugogó òto (the “owner of the middle,” or hugogo) and the eté oto (“owner of the village,” or eté). These men have mastery of the full complement of chiefly knowledge and demeanor, and they determine who can conduct the principal chiefly rituals, and who learn and use the chiefly dialect (anetï intaríñu). A second-tier is composed of weaker and ascendant chiefly individuals (anetï insoño, or “small” chief) who, while having special rights and prerogatives (sponsoring rituals, labor projects, oration), are subordinate to primary chiefs. A rank of common people (kamaga) is subordinate to chiefly ranks. A similar, but slightly subordinate, hierarchy among women interpenetrates that of men. Primogeniture and internal hierarchy within kingroups not only creates legitimacy for chief ’s sons, but also provides greater access in chiefly places, such as the chief ’s house, real (the tajïfe) or de facto, to the things that chiefs (their fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, affines) use to convert their legitimacy into real power: for example, wealth, specialized (“esoteric”) knowledge, demeanor: these elements comprise the symbolic capital to finance their power, crystallized in chiefly rites of passage, but established in the productive and political climate of local rulers. Sons also can depend on the father’s large kindreds. Perhaps most importantly, the offspring of powerful anetï are recognized in ritual by other chiefs, not only locally recognized chiefly attributes (genealogy and “personality”) but through ritual presentation in the natal and other villages. The title anetï ékugu is specifically used for adult men who actually occupy chiefly office, having received visitors for the community, represented the community as a kuarup “owner,” or host, and as participant. Chiefs are anetï who can and have performed all of the duties of chief, or are poised to do so, although there are always many strongly anetï (i.e., having high chiefly rank) individuals. Ascension to chiefly office requires that an individual not only be strongly anetï, but high chiefly rank does not, in and of itself, ensure political authority. Xinguano hierarchy is tied to native conceptions of ihuse, which in practice equates to being in a state of humility, deference, or respect, being “ihuse-ndagu,” to a social superior (elders and chiefs) or in-law. It crystalizes over the long term in the definition of a hereditary elite status (anetï), based itself on primogeniture; ideally, strong anetï are the firstborn sons


and daughters of a firstborn parent, traced cognatically. The historical results are chiefly lines that on the ground create distinctive social strata composed of individuals of greater and lesser substance (class-like organizations), metaphorically, at least, assumed to be related to the depth of one’s genealogy within the group (a founder principle) For example, an older sibling preserves more genealogical substance from his forebears than does a junior, and a senior line (first-borns) more than a junior line, leading back to the founders of the village, the local group, and broader population clusters. Anetï ekugu are particularly influential, having (by definition) a community mandate to receive outsiders, to represent the Kuikuru in external affairs, to choose others for wrestling line-ups, trips, or other activities, and to nominate or appoint assistants of various kinds, and to generally direct village affairs. In 1993, two Kuikuru men were considered anetï ekugu: the eté òto (“owner of the village”) and the hugogó òto (“owner of the middle/ plaza”). The difference between the hugogó òto and the eté òto was pronounced, although both were considered anetï ekugu. The eté òto was a village elder who acted primarily as a figurehead, although he was consulted about important decisions and his voice could add considerable weight to the position of one or another political coalition. The hugogó òto directed village public and political life. As the name suggests, he is a man of the plaza, the center of public political activity and ritual performance. The hugogó òto also mediated all supravillage contacts. Today, the then hugogó òto has changed to eté òto, since the previous one had left the village,10 although his actual status and role have changed gradually in cadence with the incremental phases of his specific life history. Like names, chiefs cycle through titles in the course of their lives and as “symbolic property,” or “inalienable possessions,” the names take on a history, which represents both a genealogical past and a potential future as an ancestor. Village chiefs gain their mandate in the context of the village, but it is they and they alone who mediate contacts beyond the village that affect the community. As the village grows and the number of voices multiplies, individuals are less capable of directly affecting political process except insofar as they represent larger social groups. In other words, access to political process—access to the plaza—is critical to the operation of political power, even though this is usually in ritualized form. It is thus a container of power, like the city or nodes in a galactic polity, at a larger scale (an embryonic “theater state”). This space (read political power) is increasingly restricted to and controlled by powerful men, household and factional leaders, and it is the most prominent among them who compete for the authority to represent the village as a whole


(person) to the outside. The ability to form and maintain a following in village politics depends on the inherent characteristics of that individual, including their legitimacy (i.e., claim to “chiefly” anetï status) and their efficacy in meeting the desires and expectations of their fellow villagers. To engage in external politics, however, an individual must be a chief, which in most cases means being strongly anetï.

Major Houses The village can be divided into two major Houses and several secondary houses, headed by chiefly persons, as well as various nonchiefly houses (dwelling owned by non-aneti). There are no households that are not directly related to all others and no village, in the regional system, that is not also tied to some members of the community: the primary chief is a brother-in-law to several chiefs, including his primary political rival (to which he is a wife-giver) and the older brother of the two other principal chiefs today as well as first cousin to several others, and “cousin” to all through past and present chiefly marriages. Over the past fifty years, at least, two primary kin-groups have been central: the highest-ranking family (House A) and the ascendent and opposing kin group (House B), the brother-in-law of the ranking House A (Figure 8.4). For the past three decades (and two villages) the two Houses have sat directly across the plaza from one another, at the south (A) and north (B) poles of the village ring. The primary legitimacy of both House A and B, in terms of descent from founding Kuikuru ancestors, is through the now deceased matriarch of House A (Auna, the elder) (Figure 8.5). She was the mother of the current eté òto and two of the three ranking female chiefs (tango) in the village. She was the conduit through which the three primary contemporary lines come down to the present: through her first-born son, the eté òto, her first-born daughter, who carries the name of her mother’s mother, Ngohugu, and is from the line of Ipatse chiefs, into which Auna the elder she married upon the death of her first husband. After her death, in 1993, three women were considered tango: her only daughter (sister of the eté òto), her granddaughter (daughter of the eté òto), and one other woman. The largest concentration of closely related and strongly anetï individuals is by far in House A, and it largely mandates at the village level, typically in collaboration with the northern house, but not without significant rivalry even so. The present eté òto, the middle-aged chief Afukaká (the name of his grandfather, also a powerful chief of Lahatua, in the 1930s and 1940s) is the head of household cluster A, following rules of primogeniture and name transmission. As noted earlier, the ability to maintain subordinate kin close at hand is important for the maintenance of political power,


house 2

house 1

anetï ekugu strongly anetï anetï kamaga tango . aneti kamaga

house 23

house 24

1994

1995

24

1

23

2

Fig. 8.4 Kinship diagram of southern House (1993). house 13

. aneti . irregular aneti kamaga tango . aneti kamaga

house 14

house 15

15

13 14

Fig. 8.5 Kinship diagram of northern House (1993).

particularly if these kin are also influential, and the southern House is quite large—called “a cidade” (the city) jokingly by Kuikuru, with three large plaza-front houses, two small rear houses, bracketed by two plaza


houses of very near kin. Invariably, he is presented as the village chief to outsiders, although he has “shame” to say so directly. Today, House B is composed of one large and one small plaza house and two smaller rear houses, with one house and its two rear houses closely aligned. In the Kuikuru village, a generation was skipped when a powerful anetï ekugu, grandfather of the current eté òto died without sons. The latter was confident that his oldest son would “fill his place,” but the son tragically died in 1993, although the line remains strong with the oldest daughter, who bears the name Auna and her oldest son, Afukaká. Whether there is something deeper or not conditioning the oscillation between gender, Afukaká to Auna, to Afukaká, to Auna, to Afukaká, the grandson of the eté òto (currently too young to be elevated to chief). Only time will tell, if he carries the name forward or if the House passes into the hands of diverse claimants to the same apical ancestors, Afukaká/Auna. In the Yawalapiti village, the office of principal chief passed from father to oldest son for at least three generations (and the oldest son of the current chief is the presumptive heir). Similar patrilineal transmission is known from other villages, including the Waujá and Mehinaku (Ireland 1996). Rights and obligations are transferred bilaterally, cognatically, including the genealogical substance of chiefs. The Kuikuru say that parents must dream of powerful spirits, like the jaguar, for their children to be strong and likewise, through bad dreams the child can be weak. This is one of several reasons the Kuikuru give for there being weak anetï, just as there are reasons, both mythical and historical, for strong kamaga to ascend to positions of power, particularly through strategic marriage. This is essentially the situation of the House B leader. The proof is in the exploits and actions of the chief, and in his physical form, courage, and prowess. When there are irregularities related to birth, such as when a chief is born weak or a commoner made strong, there are always measures and explanations (e.g., the “mandate of heaven”). Houses, on the other hand, are more enduring as composite persons than individual chiefs, and shifts in power, like the ascendence of House B, transpire over generations. In part,major Houses are fixed in place and it is this physical immobility that cements their continuity. When a new village is opened, its “owner” (eté òto) is named, and, once named, stands in this position throughout the life of that village, or until he dies or leaves the village. The hugogó òto (“owner of the village center”) is also a named position that constitutes a more or less permanent position of political authority. The two positions form a diarchy, whereby either chief can be dominant, related to the person holding the office. In 1993, the then hugogó òto (now eté òto) was the most powerful and legitimate chief,


corresponding to the center of political gravity, House A. Anetï ekugu do not gain public support merely on the strength of their anetï status, but also must be efficacious leaders and model citizens. Clearly, those individuals who have widely recognized status as anetï at birth, have greater ease in promoting themselves as village leaders later in life. Not everyone who has legitimate anetï status has political aspirations, however, and emergence as a village leader is not a direct outgrowth of powerful parents or grandparents. The sons of powerful chiefs, in particular the oldest son, has a privileged position for leadership; from an early age the oldest sons are groomed to follow in the place of their father, they are recognized as legitimate by virtue of their father, and they are privy to position. Thus, the eté òto has power because he is legitimate (he is the first son of a powerful tango who was the first daughter of a powerful anetï ekugu), but also because he is efficacious in that he can influence other people, has a large kingroup, and is politically minded. They are also, traditionally, supposed to be champion wrestlers and powerful orators. Village chiefs are expected to be knowledgeable about the external world and advise the community in these matters. For example, the nocturnal public orations given by the eté òto, for instance, often describe the dangers of going to the city, the FUNAI Indian Post, or even other villages (see Gregor 1977: 83). The leader of House B is an affine, a brother-in-law, being married to the elder sister of the House A brothers. His strategy is that of the “bigman,” as was his father before him. Together they orchestrated several key marriages, positioning House B squarely within the central families of the otomo, as well as aligning it with the chiefly families of Aiha (Kalapalo) and the Mehinaku. In the case of House B, the skill of both father and son at political strategy was critical to maintain a large and powerful local kin group. This House also benefited by a privileged position in village external relationships (considering that the House B founder was among the first Portuguese speakers in the village in the 1950, and his daughters married men from other villages). The influence of this factional group is extended by the marriage of the founder’s son to two women closely associated with House A. The older wife, a village tango, is the sister of the eté òto, which creates the conditions for greater legitimacy for their offspring.11

House as Faction The primary political rivalry is that between House A (south) and House B (north), as in the previous village (Franchetto 1986). The core of the former is the principal village chief (the eté òto) and his immediate


kindred, the primary adult support group (political base), which in 1993 included his mother, the matriarch of the southern House, the ranking woman, and mother of the primary chiefly persons in both the southern and northern Houses. The northern House derives legitimacy within the Kuikuru from the southern line, the mother of the hugogó òto and her second husband, the heir to the recent Ipatse line (1920s to 1950s). The leaders of the two Houses are the primary village leaders, and the household heads of eastern and western houses are likewise prominent, which either stabilize as a secondary line or represent alternative lines. The ascendence of House B in Kuikuru politics was recently crystallized (2001) in the chiefly initiation (tiponhï) of an heir to the chiefly lines, instilling in a male heir the legitimate connections to Kuikuru founding ancestors. The eté óto in 1993 seldom received outside visitors in his house or formally in the plaza, except in those occasions when the hugogó òto was indisposed (such as when he was in mourning) and, as the only other individual versed in the chief ’s language, the responsibility fell on him. Disputes between political rivals often focus on each individual’s hereditary claim to anetï status, (Franchetto 1986: 18; see Basso 1973: 119). Descriptions of those who were anetï ekugu varied within the village. The House B leader, when discussing the matter in 1993, liked to refer to individuals as chief one, two and three, whereby the then eté òto was first, the then hugogó òto (now eté òto) was second, and he was third (faction B leader and the eté òto formed a loose coalition at the time). When I asked the oldest living Kuikuru man who the anetï ekugu were he simply said, “for us your friend [the then hugogó òto] is our chief.” The then eté òto moved to the new village at Afukuri when it was opened in 1997, where he was the ranking person among the closely related founders of Afukuri. His grandson now has the name, among other names, that the former eté òto used as a presiding chief at Ipatse. Powerful persons and particularly, the ranking chiefs, collect names as well as titles, both sequentially and opportunistically. The House A leader, upon becoming the eté òto, has held all the titles in the course of his life. By taking on the title eté òto, he has made the split of the other village complete and, through the fact that the former eté òto’s son, the rightful heir of the newly formed village, died and was buried in the original village (Ipatse), ensured his social dominance over all three Kuikuru villages (Ipatse, Afukuri, and Lahatua). The newly formed power does not, however, operate autonomously from the “mother” village at Ipatse. The line is subsumed by the ancestors of the Ipatse elite, interred in their midst. Following the death of the principal anetï ekugu of the 1940s and early 1950s, Afukaká the elder, no powerful anetï apparently emerged for


some time. At this time the village chief (eté òto) was a “quiet individual who played a very small role in his village politics … [and] another more vigorous individual, though not anetï, took over the de facto role of the chief,” (referring to the father of his brother-in-law, the founder of House B) (Carneiro 1994: 208; Dole 1966, 1969). This man, the patriarch of House B, held power for several decades, before gradually passing the reins of authority to his son. He inserted himself into a prominent position because of his mastery of Portuguese at a time when few anetï spoke it (c. 1960–1980), co-opting a traditional prerogative of chiefs, formally receiving “outsiders,” specifically the new and powerful cagaiha. He was also, an extremely astute and savvy politician as is his son. His marriage and those of his children insured broadly spread alliances and diffuse claims to legitimacy, including to the Mehinaku and Kalapalo elite. His children, although only weakly legitimate themselves, parented more legitimate heirs, creating the conditions to improve and perpepuate the new line of power. The son, in particular, married the senior daughter of House A and thus ensured the local legitimacy of his children. The position of patriarch was passed onto his son gradually over the past 15–20 years. His ascendancy as patriarch of House B has expanded the group of subordinate relatives surrounding his father, particularly by his marriage to first the younger sister of the hugogo óto and, later, the daughter. House A leader is a model chief, as it is he who defines chiefliness, but also because he has mastered all the chiefly ways. They are almost secondnature for him and he applies or bends them with ease. The House B leader is the model of his rival, a big-man, depending on wit, skill, and cunning over legitimacy. Both he and his father are studies in how historical factors and personal ambition can bend tradition, but they are the exception to the rule of factional anetï (elite) rivalry. Throughout the time I have lived in the village, the chief and his younger brother, and their brother-in-law, essentially run politics in the Kuikuru community. In Kuikuru politics, like everywhere, not everybody is political. Some individuals are unable to maintain a sustained voice in village politics, and some are genuinely disinterested in directing public activities. The sons of powerful anetï, although rich in the blood, may amount to very little because their parents “dreamed bad.” Most adult men are active political players, each with their own genealogy and track-record (legitimacy) and their own ability to put things into motion (efficacy). The people who need to try the least to gain support are strong in both legitimacy and efficacy. Their rivals, who must often compete harder for public sympathy, are oftentimes individuals strongly colored in one or the other area: legitimate


but ineffectual or effectual but irregular. These are the climbers on the social power ladder and, not surprisingly, are often the most inventive, critical, or energetic participants in village politics. Thus, not everyone has equal access to political process and public ritual. In fact, some individuals receive highly preferential treatment in learning the ground rules and benefitting from inheritance. Considered historically, and in terms of indigenous social models, it is the sitting chief’s sons, daughters, and grandsons that tend to, or ought to, ascend to office by replacing their parents in one of the enduring Houses, particularly the major Houses, north and south, through the inheritance over time, of “sacred” things. While everybody knows very clearly how relations stack up in each house or factional core group, “House,” because they are predicated on a hierarchical kinship structure, competition and rivalry are present at all levels, particularly between Houses in the village and within the supravillage political arena. Nevertheless, it is well known who does or does not have the authority and that the spatial arrangement of the village is physically and symbolically a reflection of this hierarchy. The hugogó òto “owns” the village plaza, the political heart of the village, while the “owner of the village” (eté òto) is more a senior statesman or figurehead for the village. The latter has real power in influencing people in village councils and more discreetly through private commentary, criticism (complaint) and gossip, but he does not receive visitors or otherwise mediate relations with the outside world. The latent ability of powerful chiefs to muster support for intervillage ceremonies (feasts), expeditions or other supralocal enterprises far outstrips that of the average person in the community. The chief provides certain services, including notably the sponsorship or orchestration of important ceremonies, upholding and publicly promoting community social values (e.g., diligence in work, ceremonial participation, harmony and beauty), and representing the community in external affairs. The chief maintains a social contact with villagers, such that in return for their support, he will achieve certain things for them and generally promote Kuikuru ideals. The chief is expected to redistribute these benefits throughout the village and is constantly evaluated on the basis of his generosity and productivity (efficacy at “getting the goods”), which today includes things like solar-powered artesian wells, large in-board riverboats, motorboats, a tractor, and, perhaps, this year their first pickup truck. Redistribution is most visible with respect to ceremonial food payments made in relation to some stage of the ritual process, and goods coming in from the outside (like things from FUNAI or payments by researchers, journalists, filmmakers and the like) (Basso 1973: 132).


Since direct coercion and hostility are avoided at all costs and leaders must use other mechanisms, notably persuasion, subtle prodding, and personal example, to control the actions of others, opposition is manifest through subtle verbal attacks (e.g., through allusion to myth or traditional practice), thinly veiled innuendo, subterfuge and physical avoidance, as well as disagreement over the course of village affairs in public debate (Ireland 1987). In the Kuikuru case, avoidance and lack of overt antagonism between the two factional groups is accentuated by the fact that the two leaders are brothers-in-law (a role that demands very formal respect). Political rivals attempt to undermine the mandate of chiefs by criticizing them as self-serving or bad managers, and chiefs must justify that they are not. There are numerous ways chiefs are criticized or otherwise have their power curtailed, most notably by lack of support or mandate from the otomo, just as there are diverse ways that nonchiefs can attain prominence and achieve power within a “dialectic of control” (Giddens 1984). Dole suggests alternate social controls to political power, including gossip and complaining, as well as shamanistic divination (Dole 1966: 75–77). But gossip is not “the only socially permissible context for discussing particularly sensitive political issues, such as sorcery accusations” (Ireland 1986), but it is a critical means by which almost any individual can question or undermine the position or authority of political leaders. Many rumors that were started with respect to my activities, for instance, were obviously thinly veiled attempts to undermine the political authority of the then hugogó (now eté òto), my sponsor. The fact that numerous individuals have legitimate claim to hold office also limits the power of individual chiefs, since there is always a pool of legitimate chiefs and there are many rivals hungry for power in any village. But, as widely noted of chiefdoms, the pyramidal structure may come to a point, a head, but within the social body there are diverse alternatives, the next tier below the titled chiefs can be quite large (cf. Comaroff 1985). Furthermore, the alternative pathways, including shamanism, special statuses and industry, through which individuals can gain prominence regardless of their hereditary status has made it increasing possible for non-anetï to assume positions of authority. Despite a general decrease in legitimate and efficacious anetï in villages due to depopulation, village amalgamation has resulted in having several powerful chiefly lines in the same village. Recent splits largely in the 1990s have happened precisely along these lines, between rival lines (Kamayura, Kalapalo, and later Kuikuru). In the Kuikuru village, one of the important chiefs from Uagïhïtï lived in the village, but remained distant from village political affairs, seldom appearing in the plaza.


Dole (1973) points to the obvious political power of the shamans, as holders of unique supernatural power, based in the esoteric knowledge and corporeal discipline that enables them to channel supernatural power, and traffic, or at least “see” other beings, including itseke and kugife-oto. Depending upon their ability to persuade others, their ability to divine sorcerers and malevolent spirits, shamans can wield substantial political power, including witchcraft executions or other social sanctions. The shaman Metsé, prominent in discussions of the Kuikuru of this time, was recognized as one of the most powerful individuals in the village in the 1950s. Metsé was the only shaman at the time who could enter a trance and divine witchcraft and misfortune and strongly anetï, and his singular power was only weakly counterbalanced by the reigning anetï ekugu. Metsé had a large kingroup for support, because at the time he had multiple wives. Thus, his decisions were less debated and his power more supreme than among shamans today, where there are several powerful secular leaders, including a very efficacious anetï ekugu (the eté òto), together with eight shamans. The “sorcery complex” is almost certainly not a postcontact creation, given its widespread presence in southern Amazonia, but a correspondence between actual morbidity and mortality (as discussed in Chapter 5) is expected as a consequence (i.e., an increase in illness or death will result in an increase in local anxiety related to sorcery). The acute morbidity and mortality related to epidemics of contagious disease such as were common through the twentieth century resulted in an equally acute anxiety related to sorcery and an attendant increase in the influence of the shaman. The Kuikuru had two shamans in 1993–1995 who could enter a trance state and thus identify malevolent spirits and sorcerers through divination; six other Kuikuru shamans could not induce trance and acted strictly as healers. Thus, as chiefly power was on the decline in the mid-1900s, the power of the shaman was accentuated. In 1953, Metsé’s political influence was greater as the only shaman who could induce trance and divine the cause of illness or death—perhaps even greater than that of the chiefs, but this is a singular case of overarching shamanic authority. The threat of witchcraft also curtails openly hostile or coercive behavior or stinginess, particularly in times of high mortality. The belief in sorcery as an invisible form of cosmic power, channeled or contained in humanform witches, the owners of charms (kugífe oto), and this power, like that of shamans, other chiefs, and other prominent persons limits the power of the chiefs (Gregor 1990: 123). Ireland (1996) reports that, historically (c. mid-1800s to 1980s among the Waujá), the heirs of ranking chiefs either ascended to office, were forced into exile, or were executed due to


sorcery accusations. Numerous families and entire households move as a result of threats of sorcery and/or accusations, always significantly reorganizing the balance of power between prominent families and factions (Basso 1984; Dole 1984b; Gregor 1977).12 Indeed, chiefs firmly believe that they are under a virtually perpetual threat. In the early 1990s, the two sons of the hugogó òto died suddenly, his mother died after a prolonged illness and he himself was suffering from debilitating health problems, all on account of sorcery carried out by his jealous political rivals. Because anyone can “contract” a witch, even the weakest community members can directly attack the most powerful (see Heckenberger 2004a).

The Duality of Control: Balancing Legitimacy and Efficacy The anetï bloodlines (lines of “substance”) are always contested. Chiefs who could not claim some significant lineal anetï connections, is unheard of, unless champions, bowmasters, powerful hïati (shamans), and other prominent people can elevate their status and that of their offspring through marriage. In pre-Columbian villages I surmise that there were many more anetï individuals in the large prehistoric villages who could take office, and generally no need to look outside their ranks for chiefs. Upward social mobility, through hypergamy, creates greater legitimacy for future generations with strategic marriages. In other words, the contemporary relations between House A and B reflect a type of structural relation that was typically between strongly anetï kindred that dominated north and south tied to more subordinate Houses in secondary and tertiary plaza villages. Ireland (1987) suggests that, among Waujá people, politically sensitive issues are generally not publically contested, and informal mechanisms such as gossip, subtle innuendo, and dissimulation are the means through which delicate intravillage political concerns are often resolved (see Franchetto 1996). In fact, Ireland adds (1987: 4), that “gossip is by far the most important channel among the Waujá for transmitting information vital to the political process, far more important than the convivial banter which goes on in the men’s house or even the formal public speeches made in the plaza.” Informal political process provides a vehicle through which persons underrepresented in public forums, women and young adults, can directly influence decision making. But, if the resolution of the most politically charged, and in many cases most critical, issues is conducted through informal means, why is the central plaza so conspicuous in political process, even in villager’s eyes? The answer lies, in part, in the distinctions made between internal and external politics. For instance, politically sensitive topics relating to affairs beyond the confines of the village are a


common topic in men’s house discussions and chiefly oratories (Ireland 1987: 4; see also Gregor 1985). Plaza meetings are the typical forum to deal directly with external affairs of relevance to the village, such as hosting or participating in intervillage ceremonies, rebuilding the men’s house, constructing the tajïfe (chief ’s house), preparing for large expeditions, or accepting visitors (such as myself ) into the village. Debate is dominated by household heads and moderated, to some degree, by factional leaders, the village’s “weighty actors,” and it is these individuals who dominate the external dimension of the political process to become “men of renown.” Factional disputes usually involve the proper course of action for the village in external matters and success in external relations distinguishes a factional leader. In prehistoric times, like today, factionalism undoubtedly characterized village politics, because of the same oppositional partitioning of village space, discrete neighborhoods created by the village plazas and roads, and the physical barriers they represent. Because of the variable impact of external affairs on the community, the importance of centralized decision making and differential “weights” of social actors fluctuates considerably from day-to-day, year-to-year, and generation-to-generation. During the demographic nadir, when both village populations and supralocal interaction were at a low point, such centralized political process was less pronounced. As external factors come to impinge more directly on the lives of villagers, particularly in situations of high risk and uncertainty (i.e., crises, like war), then the concentration of political power in the hands of those individuals most suited or best situated to deal with the outside world also increases. In a situation where the well-being of the community depends on quick and effective response to external forces (e.g., warfare), we can expect that those individuals who most directly mediate outside contacts (chiefs) will have more authoritative power in the community (Spencer 1993). Kracke (1979), in his aptly titled book, Force and Persuasion, about the Tupi Kagwahiv, for instance, has demonstrated how changing external conditions, war and peace, lead to variations in the expression of chiefly power. In times of war, a more forceful and authoritative posture emerges or is preferred, while in the absence of external conflict leaders are more apt to rely on persuasion and consensus (cf. Carneiro 1995). Warfare is a particularly dramatic aspect of external affairs, the increasing intensity or importance of external relations, in general, stimulates stronger patterns of centralized leadership. Spencer (1993), following Sahlins (1963), points to the difference between internal (intrafactional) and external (extrafactional) dimensions of chiefly power as critical to understanding the


emergence of “permanently institutionalized chiefly authority.” He suggests that the “lack of articulation” between external and internal dimensions of power inhibits the perpetuation of central leadership (Spencer 1993: 43). Not only do internal and external dimensions of power exist as somewhat exclusive domains, in a synchronic sense, but the relative importance of one dimension vis à vis the other varies dynamically over time, since they are the strategies deployed by politicos. Even in times of relative calm or predictable external relations, it is the chiefs who mediate external contacts and control supra-village information and alliance networks and thus, are poised to respond most directly to changing external conditions, dominate village politics, and initiate action. However, their rivals or potential rivals can parlay precisely the same external relations toward capturing prestige and power through efficacy and innate capacities, as well as historical contingencies. As a chief becomes widely accepted by the community as a legitimate holder of authority, he becomes the vehicle through which the community engages the outside world. Leaders must maintain their community mandate, however, and whatever achievements are made in the regional arena must be transformed into tangible results for the community. As chiefs become increasingly knowledgeable and skillful in their conduct in external arenas, they not only galvanize support within the community, but are in a more advantageous position to pass these skills and knowledge (as well as material benefits) directly to their offspring (i.e., hereditary bias) (cf. Werner 1982: 370–371). In the supra-village arena, chiefs are privileged above others to represent the community to outsiders and particularly to other Xinguano chiefs. The emphasis shifts from actors interacting with other actors in the context of an egalitarian and consensual forum, the plaza forum of household heads, that is, interactions between in individuals and Houses, to ritualized engagements between the weighty social actors in highly restricted social situations, principally the major chiefly rituals, contexts where the entire village operates as a House, a “Great House.”

Village as “House” Histories are good to hear and everyone has some, at least anecdotal, knowledge of the past, but knowing the details of history is the business of the chiefs. Hierarchical conceptions of social relations, dependent as they are on legitimate ties with ancestral chiefly lines, are inevitably tied to issues of history—the inheritance of the past—as locally construed. Xinguano historicity does not, however, linguistically mark time relative to


precise divisions or periods. History is marked, punctuated, according to the life histories of specific places, people, and events: it is inscribed in bodies, spatial organization, and landscape. This does not mean it is not linear, however. In fact, Xinguano time is keenly divided into the dawn times, when stories of all varieties are recounted and lead from one to the next, such as the story of the first proto-human, the first human, the first Xinguano, and the founders of the local groups. The major narratives (akiña) of Kuikuru heritage legitimize the positions of rank in the contemporary village by linking living chiefs to (1) the origin of kuge (“the people”) and the transmission of the egitse chiefly mortuary feast from Tuangi to the original Xinguanos (chiefs); (2) the great ancestral Kuikuru chiefs at Óti in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; (3) the origin (circa mid-1800s) of the Lahatua otomo, tied to living memories of specific names and places; and (4) the founders of the Ipatse otomo over the past few decades. The central concern of Xinguano history is the identity of individuals: it is a history of chiefly persons and lines, of chiefly plazas, and the events and commemorations that took place there, the initiations and funerals of chiefs. History is made isomorphic with the hierarchy of chiefly persons, starting with the sitting chiefs (Sahlins 1985; see Basso 1995). It is only these certain heroic individuals who are selectively remembered or ignored to legitimate living social actors in public and formal (highly visible) arenas. Thus, rather than seeking only to understand how society at large conceives of history as a collective pool of memory and experience, we must also ask: “Who is history about?” “Who is interested in it and why?” and “Who controls history and how?” As in other hierarchical societies, where rank distinctions (elite status) are recognized as legitimate and formally defined, actual genealogy (descent) becomes a primary dimension in the definition of social identities and boundaries. The links are lost, but one need only to reconstruct their relationships with immediate predecessors to establish linkages with deeper genealogies that over time are “pruned” down to a few critical individuals. Indeed, among preliterate societies, generally, Adams and Kasakoff (1986: 61) note, “rarely could [researchers] record reasonably full genealogies back more than three generations due to a lack of written records [and] those that went back further were invariably of the descendants of a tribal hero or demigod, pruned of any links that were not necessary to tie the living into a web of nameable relationships.” Social rank, although framed in an idiom of descent, requires little depth of actual genealogical knowledge: legitimacy is tied to specific recent ancestors, grandparents and parents. Very clearly, however, individuals


reckon descent differently based on their position in the existing chiefly hierarchies: high-ranking individuals place far greater emphasis on issues of blood, birth-order and genealogy, and sometimes are able to recount genealogical relations to specific chiefly figures back over one hundred years. In contrast, lower-rank individuals often place so little emphasis on genealogy as to be described by a “genealogical amnesia” (Gregor 1977). In this sense, history is not only chronologically marked, according to a relational sequencing of events, places, and personages, but is also prismatic: tightly linked to the personal genealogies of actual chiefs in one context; transformed, through the prism of ritualized chiefly discourses into a discrete chain of specified ancestral chiefs in another; and, in others, transformed again, through the prism of ritualized chiefly performances, to link it with the foundational mythic events and people also created Xinguano society: chiefly rites of passage. In other words, chiefs represent earthly manifestations of lines of power linking contemporary individuals with the past, particularly the history of the local group, and ultimately the origin of Xinguano society itself. This interplay creates historical links between current and ancient chiefs, the symbolic rebirth of Xinguano society, which not only mythologically legitimizes, or “naturalizes,” the hierarchical social relations, but also places the historical process under direct scrutiny. Beyond the chief ’s language, chiefs make it their business to know their chiefly history and genealogy. They are both authorized and encouraged to learn the chiefly discourse style (anetï itaríñu) and give regular public orations using the customary language. But what “stories” (akiña) do they learn? They describe the first kuarup, the great ancestral chiefs and culture heroes, special places and ancient villages, and the singular events that make up their history. These legendary tales and sacred lore punctuate and authorize their public discourses, including orations regarding the mundane activities of the community or affairs of the day. The Xinguano past is peopled with such heroic figures and signal events: it is heroic history. The eight great chiefs, the ability to speak of them in public, and to recount their names and deeds, is the exclusive property of the anetão, and only the one or two highest ranking chiefs have full command of it. The Waujá genealogies likewise remember eight chiefs, and nine generations worth of esoteric knowledge, such as the anetï itaríñu, is guarded by chiefs and passed from elder to younger anetï (preferrably parent to child). Ireland (1996) describes the primary chiefly genealogy of the Waujá from the mid-1800s to the 1980s, including those that ascended to office and those who did not and were typically killed or fled,


or who otherwise retreated from the tumultuous and dangerous games of the powerful. Among the highest-ranking chiefly individuals, there is likewise an internal hierarchy, topped by the hugogó òto: space and society both come to a point, at the center of a concentric circle and the tip of a pyramid, respectively, and that point is embodied in the hugogó òto. At one level, the chief is primus inter pares, among chiefly “Houses.” Houses, in general, represent both “unity and various kinds of hierarchy and division,” which operate (are visible) at multiple scales (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). At the highest level, however, where the chief is symbolically situated at the apex of the pyramid, the entire village, even the region, is a “House,” a conical clan with apical ancestors (founders), including totemlike nonhuman or semihuman beings in the dawn time, the first chiefly family. But while the local group may be equivalent to the chief ’s “house” and society, and at one level, isomorphic with the chief, we must remember the highly factionalized and multicentric nature of the political structure: what at one level (historical or practical) or one perspective, seems fairly crystalline, pyramidal, and centric, evaporates into a more amorphous, multicentric, and “flat” arena of competing interests and interest groups as scale and perspective change. Kingroups are organized around the core groups of high-ranking men and women, linked through genealogical substance, common descent. Hierarchical relations are based on the bilateral (cognatic) transmission of genealogical substance and the unilateral (lineal) transmission of names, titles, and ritual prerogatives, following a pattern commonly referred to as a House society, following Lévi-Strauss (1982, 1987; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). In the Xinguano case, titles and prerogatives are not controlled by individual families but instead pass between high-ranking families, depending on who actually holds power and authority at any time. Thus, there is no singular dominant lineage but instead competing Houses that at any moment in time represent the kindreds of the primary chiefs, within which secondary hierarchies are manifest. Such hierarchical structures, represent a moment when social relations, although ordered and conceptualized in terms of kinship, are increasingly determined and motivated by economic and political interests (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). The clan ancestors are local founders, commemorated in mortuary feasts administered by their children, the ones who are their direct descendants and the recipients of these lines of power extending back to more remote ancestors, cultural heroes and the dawn time. The operative economic principles are generalized reciprocity and exchange, between social pairs of all kinds, including chiefs and commoners, as manifest in chiefly redistribution


and mobilization, and householding. One might say, in fact, that village political economics are built upon the premises of householding at the level of house, House, and Great House, only the size of the house changes. Returning to the question of how the past is inscribed in bodies, narratives, material culture, monuments, and other “sites of memory,” the nature of the house, the schema it engenders and the divisions it displays are critical elements of cultural memory, the self-same schemas and divisions that partition villages and regions: right and left, public and domestic, family and world. The houses are also spaced along the domestic ring, strictly according to the hierarchical structure of village social relations. The highest ranking, or at least most prominent, houses are to be found at the cardinal points of the village circle. At a still higher level, the village operates as a single house, a Great House. Before moving on to the house of the Great House, the plaza village, this reminds us that “however diminished or magnified, the fractal person, keeping its scale, reproduces only versions of itself (Wagner 1991: 159), or, in the case of the house, as Lévi-Strauss (1987: 156) notes with respect to Indonesia: the wealth of decoration, the complicated architecture, the symbolism attaching to each element in the total construction, the arrangement of furniture and the distribution of its inhabitants make of the house a veritable microcosm reflecting in its smallest details an image of the universe and the whole system of social relations. We might again note, in purely sociological terms, the dialectical and holographic, or self-same, qualities of plazas and the “Houses” making up plaza (local) groups, pointed out by Lévi-Strauss on numerous occasions (e.g., 1961, 1963, 1987): Patrilineal descent and matrilineal descent, filiation and residence, hypergamy and hypogamy, close marriage and distant marriage, heredity and election; all these notions, which usually allow anthropologists to distinguish the various known types of societies, are reunited in the house, as if, in the last analysis, the spirit (in the eighteenth century sense) of this institution expressed an effort to transcend, in all spheres of collective life, theoretically incompatible principles (1982: 185). This “dialectic of filiation and residence,” or that of self-and-other, in general. The houses of major factional leaders, typically chiefs who sit atop large hierarchically organized kindreds. The powerful “used exogamous


marriage to capture titles and endogamous marriage ‘to prevent their leaving the house once they have been acquired’.” (Boon 1990: 97). In this sense, the Xinguano Great Houses, which in 1492, in their full-blown galactic form were fairly great indeed vis-à-vis contemporary social forms in the twelfth- through fifteenth-century worlds. It is interesting to note that in all his discussions on the “House society” in Northwest Coast societies, in Indonesia, Oceania, and Africa, as well as feudal Europe and Japan, Lévi-Strauss really never mentions the Amazonian and central Brazilian peoples that he knew so well. The critical issues of hierarchy and genealogy, political economy, names and ancestors, perhaps were seen not to apply. In his earlier writings, we can see the nascent qualities of the “société à maison” among the Bororo (replacing clan with House, each with its own totems, ancestors, etc.): Wealth and status, as between one clan and another, is quite another matter. Each clan has a capital of myths, traditions, dances, and functions, either social or religious. The myths are, in their turn, at the bottom of technical privileges which are one of the most curious features of Bororo culture. Almost all Bororo objects are emblazoned in such a way that the one’s clan and subclan may be identified. The privilege lies in the use of certain feathers, or colours of feathers; in the way in which an object is carved or cut; in the disposition of feathers differing in colour, of species; in the execution of certain decorative work; fibre-plaiting, for instance, or feather mosaics; in the use of particular patterns, and so on. (1961: 208) The chief was always chosen from a particular Cera clan, and: … received tokens of homage from all the clans, in the form of food and manufactures. But as each entailed a subsequent obligation, he was in the situation of a banker: wealth passed through his hands, but he would never call it his own. My collections of religious objects were built up in return for presents which the chief would at once redistribute among the clans, thus conserving his ‘balance of payments’ intact (Ibid: 208). Of several examples compellingly discussed as “House societies,” for instance, among the Northern Kayapó (Lea 1993, 1995, 2001) and northwest Amazon (Hugh-Jones 1995, 1996; see also Chernela 1993; Hill 1993, 1996; C. Hugh-Jones 1979), the Xinguanos among southern Amazonian and central Brazilian ethnographic cases, perhaps best fit the model of House society: hierarchical, flexible, cognatic.13 All that is lacking here is


not a descent reckoning system or lineal inheritance, which is not only present but omnipresent, but that descent (ambilineal) is important mainly with respect to things having to do with chiefs. The powerful are therefore highly preoccupied with issues of genealogy and history, and others much less so, whereas nonchiefs generally are not. The position of each person is a reflection of distance from common chiefly ancestors, relating to chiefly “lines” that extend back to the middle 1800s. In the most sacred, secret lore, anetï ekugu remember these chiefs through a specialized chief ’s language (anetï itaríñu) (Franchetto 1993). Powerful past chiefs are invoked legitimizing both the chiefly lines (recognizing that through name transmission, chiefly lines equate to chiefly individuals) and the orator, metaphorically linking them with the powerful human and divine ancestors (chiefs). Ancient plazas were cemeteries, the places of ancestors, which constitute a kind of founder’s property or capital, the first-in-lines of ancestral estate, as is further explored in Chapter 9, in which we focus on plazas as major historical personages, and the likely descendant of the great galactic clusters, what I might call the otomo kuenga, following Kuikuru logic: the Great House.

CHAPTER

9

The Symbolic Economy of Power: Plazas as Persons So vital to the social and religious life of the tribes is this circular lay-out that the Salesian missionaries soon realized that the surest way of converting the Bororo was to make them abandon their villages and move to one in which the huts were laid out in parallel rows. They would then be, in every sense, dis-oriented. All feelings for their traditions would desert them, as if their social and religious systems (these were inseparable, as we shall see) were so complex that they could not exist without the schema made visible in their ground-plans and reaffirmed to them in the daily rhythm of their lives. Claude Lévi-Strauss 1961: 204 The plaza in itself, considered limited in space by its four sides, is the most exquisite expression of social life ever achieved by Man’s city planning and architectural genius. The pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Babylon, the temples of Greece, managed to convey a limited aspect of human life, but in so doing they sacrificed the wholeness of life. … They are closed circuits, frozen and gruesome perfections, because man was never able to fully inhabit them, in spite of all their rich and complex existential temporality and eternity. … In contrast, the plaza affirms and resolves all things that are

291


incompatible to pure reason; it preserves them, and gives them a voice and a future Fernando Guillén Martínez 1958 (cited in Low 2000: 30) Clifford Geertz (1979: 123) wrote that “characterizing whole civilizations in terms of one or another of their leading institutions is a dubious procedure, but if one is going to indulge in it for the Middle East or North Africa, the bazaar is surely a prime candidate.” Throughout much of the Americas, no doubt, the plaza would be the spatiosocial master symbol or institution, as Lévi-Strauss (1963) hinted at fifty years ago. Considering the central plazas of Poverty Point, the Mississipian centers, the almost ubiquitous plazas of Mesoamerican and those of most Andean cities and towns, the Caribbean, the Amazon, the Great Lakes, it is clear that the plaza is a very common element of Native American sociopolitical landscapes, particularly in those areas where political economy is a critical dimension of social life. There are other grammars of space, other disciplines, that create an equally potent exclusivity, for example, the sacred inner chambers of early Peruvian temple centers, the palaces of the Chimor kings, Southwestern U.S. kivas, the great houses of the Northwest Coast, but, in general terms, the most rudimentary architecture of power in Native America was the central plaza. The appearance of plazas heralds not only the emergence of an architectural feature but also reformulated notions of social difference, spatial exclusivity, and bodily discipline. In terms of political economy, the critical feature of central plazas is the exclusivity that they create, concentrating power in the hands of those individuals that can dominate public action and ceremony. The techniques of power that it embodies lay at the root of many of the major political regimes of Native American civilizations: the plaza is not only a social metaphor, a cosmogram, but also a political discourse that molds human bodies and their movements. Big or small, round or square, the ancient architecture varies immensely in size, shape and elaboration. For instance, one is reminded of the great plaza at Cahokia, with mountainous Monk’s Mound at one end, and stubbed all around with smaller platform mounds, which all define a central precinct enclosed originally by an imposing palisade wall (not at the edge of the settlement but in the middle). Or we might recall the square central plaza at Tikal, the sacred inner sanctum that seems small, like a sunken courtyard, amidst the towering pyramids and acropoli. The inconspicuous square in the center of Cuzco seems not nearly up to the task of containing the divine force of one of the largest empires of the ancient world. The actual size of these structures often belies the immense power embodied in them. In any case, there is little doubt that the armature of

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state power was tied closely to the rituals of state, succession, divine ordination, and an exclusive control over these public symbols and rituals, the “theater state.” The central plaza may not be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering ancient Amerindian systems of disciplinary or structural power, but it is commonly the cornerstone of a genuinely American language of political power. The idea of the “theater state” and related ideas, the “galactic polity” (Tambiah 1985), the “political economy of grandeur” (Sahlins 1991), or what Southall (1999) calls simply “the ritual phase of political economy,” are discussed in Chapter 10. Here the plaza itself, its contours and meanings, are what interest us, as a point of discussion to explore how persons are made by plazas and how plazas are “persons.” Where does such a structure ultimately come from, when does it appear, and how exactly does it inflect preexisting, more fully “egalitarian” patterns of social and spatial organization? For now, these questions must await resolution. The Xinguanos appear to have arrived in the area already culturally predisposed to a settled, regional, and hierarchical way of life prior to A.D. 800–900, and already based on the complicated plaza and road systems that we see across the southern Arawak. The questions here are how history is written on the human body in domestic activities, ritual performance , and through the landscape; how it is read through diverse types of individual and collective memory; and, how it is inscribed in “domesticated” space (Lefebvre 1991). How does corporeal, tangible, although often subtle, manipulation of the body through partitioned space reproduce the basic cultural schema, and vice versa? Spatial design and ritual form are primary forms of remembering that enable persons to decipher and translate certain things about other persons and, notably, yesterday persons.

The Xinguano Plaza Living in a plaza village, there is a unique sense of “being there,” of being everywhere at once. If the house opens out on to the community, the plaza opens out on the world; it is a gateway that mediates between categories of social opposites—men:women, chiefs:commoners—but also acts like a prism and inflects the persons and powers of one world into another: men become animals and animals become men, chiefs become ancestors and ancestors become heroes. The plaza, as Guillén Martínez suggests (1958; cited in Low 2000), “affirms and resolves all things that are incompatible to pure reason; it preserves them, and gives them a voice and a future.” Following the seminal descriptions by Lévi-Strauss (1961, 1963), the configuration of circular plaza or “ring” villages in lowland South America, like those of the Upper Xingu, has received considerable attention (e.g., Fabian 1992, 1998; Hornborg 1990; Lathrap et al. 1975, 1985;


Roe 1987; Seeger 1976; Turner 1996; Zeidler 1984, 1998, among others). The plaza is a topic of considerable scholarship in the ethnology and archaeology of South America, but few have specifically taken up the question of this structural inflection of power: the birth, development or collapse of this commanding and affective disciplinary force. Many scholars have pondered the unifying, equally weighted, egalitarian elements of circular plazas, “everybody has a front row seat,” elements that Lévi-Strauss called “dialectic,” easily divided into halves or quarters. Less attention has been paid to the “concentric” (hierarchical) relations; or how these are inflected through or by the equally weighted (dialectic) parts. The largest Amazonian polities that we currently know also had impressive plazas: Santarem, Açutuba, Gavan and Yarinacocha, among others (Heckenberger et al. 1999; Lathrap et al. 1985; Spencer and Redmond 1992; Roosevelt 1999). Indeed, the missionaries along the Amazon, zealous to dismantle the idolatry of these heathen peoples, clearly saw what Lévi-Strauss (1961: 204) noted, the surest way of converting them was “to make them abandon their villages and move to one in which the huts were laid out in parallel rows” (see Betendorf [1695] 1910). In some areas, such as the central Amazon, western Orinoco and Greater Antilles, circular plaza villages were transformed into great rectangular plazas or embellished with other central, exclusive structures, such as the ballcourts that came to dominate in some parts of the Greater Antilles. In the southern Amazon, circular plaza villages were part and parcel of the architecture of power throughout the cultural sequence (here I refer to the large Arawak regional social formations, Pareci, Bauré, and Xinguano). In the Upper Xingu and across the southern Amazon, the traditional circular pattern seems to have been maintained and involved no transformation of the basic pattern, just a remarkable amplification and elaboration, into the galactic clusters of prehistory. The “model” village consists of several components; (1) the circular plaza; (2) the more or less continuous ring of domestic sections (houses or house clusters) situated around the plaza; and (3) the undulating and discontinuous peripheral “ring” of trash middens (“trash yard”), house gardens, and domestic activity areas (Gregor 1977). These enduring features of village layout are each characterized by the distinctive, albeit overlapping, range of activities conducted there. The domestic areas that ring the plaza are bisected by primary roads at several points. These patterns leave a marked signature on the archaeological landscape and plaza, house ring and peripheral trash midden areas clearly recognizable in abandoned villages. Artifact distributions conform predictably to these areas. Likewise, soil samples collected from an abandoned Kuikuru village


(occupied between 1973 and 1983), demonstrate that alterations in soil chemistry, color, and texture clearly reflect these activity zones, an obvious observation in contemporary villages. This concentric village plan is widespread in the lowlands, but ethnographic villages of this type are concentrated in Central Brazil and surrounding areas. More common are the acentric single or multiple family hamlet or the multicentric many-family agglutinated villages, usually linear or irregular in plan view. What is most important from an archaeological point of view is that we can find plazas, dependably and fairly comprehensively: this structure provides an archaeological entre into all the different domains of the ancient world, economy, society, cosmology, politics, and so on: it is a particularly clear symbolic window. Archaeologists can see them for what they are, compare them in size, form, and content, and, see how they connect and correspond to other things, other plazas, other parts of settlements, or other areas outside of the range of Xinguano plazas (which historically have ended more or less at the edge of the Upper Xingu basin itself). Through plazas we can consider yesterday persons, ancestors, the bodies of history (in this case that body that corresponds with plazas as persons) and through them the history of the social body: the plaza encodes and is steeped in all of the primary cultural schemas. The plaza is the stage for public political activity and ritual performance, and the political man is a frequent actor on this stage. Within the village, access to public areas, whether for social or spatial reasons, is essential to the exercise of political power. Because the landscape is so precisely mapped by the Xinguanos, the job of reading these landscapes is greatly improved: the partitioning of space into plazas, causeways/roads, houses, patio groups, neighborhoods, and the galactic cluster is itself a mapping. The circular pattern of the village also allows the spatial expression of separation and opposition; it is the fundamental representation of “otherness”—plaza people and “others,”—which here means having plazas that are sacred ritualized centers, as the primary font of cosmological authentication, naturalization, and legitimization, in ritualized acts. Through the differential treatment of the body in public ritual, chiefs are constructed and symbolically separated from (i.e., set above, in hierarchical terms) the rest of society (see Agostinho 1974a; Basso 1973: 65–70, 140–147; Carneiro 1993). Likewise, chiefly bodies are treated differently in death.1 Hereditary chiefs (anetão) are marked in public ritual through body ornamentation (e.g., special body painting designs and ritual regalia, such as jaguar skin headdresses) and spatial arrangements (i.e., where people sit or stand), emphasizing their privileged social position and


their legitimate claim to chiefly status. These distinctions not only express social hierarchy, but also legitimize it by linking them to the sacred (J. Turner 1992).

Making Chiefs In his classic text Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres suggests that “the purpose of the initiation, in its torturing phase, is to mark the body: in the initiatory rite, society imprints its mark on the body of the young people” (Clastres 1987: 184). Unlike the violent coercive power of the State, of the written word, the law inscribed on the body, the “mark on the body, on all bodies alike, declares: You will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission” (Ibid: 188). Upon the initiate, the secret imparted is: “You are one of us. Each one of you is like us; each one of you is like the others” (Ibid.: 186, author’s emphasis). “Societies of the mark,” those without writing, are therefore societies without the State, because: writing points to the existence of a separate, distant, despotic law of the State … [and] it is precisely in order to exorcise the possibility of that kind of law—the law that establishes and guarantees inequality—that primitive law functions as it does. (Ibid.) Xinguano society, past and present, passes a different message to its youth through initiation rituals: the message inscribed on the body is inequality, not sameness. The law written on the body is precisely that law that establishes and guarantees difference, social hierarchy. There can be no doubt of the essence of this hierarchy, it is marked at birth: all people, men and women, are born either high ranking (anetï) or not. But, although chiefliness (to be anetï) is a matter of heredity, to be a chief is not: chiefs are not born but made, constructed through a series of lifecrisis rituals that distinguish individuals as chiefs and, in turn, further legitimize their lines. The entire ritual cycle of Xinguano social life is tied to these rites-of-passage, as it is here that persons and Houses are publicly legitimized, reproducing the basic schematic divisions and spatial partitions of social bodies, that is, social and symbolic reproduction. Chiefly rites of passage recreate the world, as in the first egitse, when Tuangi and Aulukuma brought their mother back to life in the form of a kuarup trunk, at a time when the dead were not buried but hung in the rafters of the house; she was released afterward to go to the sky village, where all Kuikuru who have a proper burial also go after death (Carneiro 1989). As is true today, when deceased anetï are invoked to occupy uengïfi trunks in the egitse ritual and participate with the living one last time. The


Xinguanos remained on, the first chiefs, who inherited the kuarup festival, and their children. These lines of power are actualized and the spirits of deceased chiefs are called back, one last time, to animate the living, not only reenacting the primary elements of Xinguano cosmogeny but resedimenting in place the linkage with the ancestors, all of whom are laid to rest side by side in the heart of the village. Chiefs must also be strong, and athletics, including traditionally wrestling, ball-games, and foot races, are critical arenas of status rivalry. Champion wrestlers, in particular, are the only other men (aside from legitimate chiefs) permitted to wear jaguar skin (as belts) and the oilape (necklace), worn only by champions and primary chiefly initiates (future anetï ekugu, by all rights) (Figure 9.1). The recently deceased chiefs that have returned the finale of the kuarup cycle to occupy the wooden idols, decked out as they are with oilape, sun diadems, the egitse designs, which come to stand for the ancestors and the chieftaincy, the anetão. Specialists of various kinds are present in Xinguano society. In the past, specialist bowmasters were not only exceptional bow hunters but warriors in time of need (Basso 1995). As previously discussed, there are other specialists that make certain baskets, bows, arrows. Some specialize in certain utensils, like wooden grater boards, and still others make flutes, masks, combs (a special gift for mothers-in-law), wooden benches, and adornments. A pathway to becoming a “great-man” is to be alogi, the master of all

Fig. 9.1 Oilape and other ornaments draped over painted kuarup (egitse) trunks, topped with sun diadem headdresses (1994).


the arts, and the four principal active chiefs, three brothers and their brother-in-law, are alogi, and several chiefly helpers (anetï insoño) are as well. Commonly, some adult men do not own or know how to make all the necessary paraphernalia to participate. In these cases, prominent men lend needed items to other adult men (those who are past puberty seclusion) who are participating in ritual commemorations; likewise, the chief “guards” the sacred objects—the black bow and egitse maracas. The central cemetery is not the exclusive burial ground of anetï, all community members are buried there, but the anetï for whom the egitse is called is buried exactly in the village center—the ancestral core—of the community, and those who control it also directly control the history of those ancestors. Nobody recites formal discourse from their house; rather, they do so from the plaza, which is broken into two parts, the plaza generically, hugombo, and the plaza core, the most sacred and public of all places on earth, the axis mundi to a world not only of spirit “others,” the dead, but to the specific heroes that have defined Xinguano life—the ancient chiefs, and wrestlers, and archers, and shamans, that make up collective histories—and the hugogo is the singular monument to this collective past. The most profound expression of difference is not when boys are initiated as men and future chiefs, but when deceased chiefs are commemorated in the elaborate funeral ceremony (egitse, more commonly known as kuarup). The kuarup cycle is the core ritual in Xinguano society. It can take well over a year for one village to prepare for this ritual, and on the regional stage it is ongoing, since not a year goes by without one or several across the villages. It simultaneously recreates the birth of ancestral chiefs through metaphorical allusion in words, body disciplines, and objects, and, through the proxy of the kuarup trunk and idol made of uengïfi, the first kuarup given for the earthly (uengïfi) mother of the twins who passed it on to her children, through his mother’s younger sister, the Xinguanos. Through performances, the egitse not only expresses but affirms existing hierarchical social relations, since through the veneration of past chiefs, living chiefly persons are positioned within sociohistorical trajectories that concretely link them with ancestral chiefs and, metaphorically, with divine culture heroes. The anetï are thus the worldly heirs of these sacred, divinely ordained lines of power, created at the dawn of (human) time—of Xinguano society—when the initial kuarup was held between the fish and animals to commemorate the divine mother, the mother not just of chiefs, but of gods—of the divine twins Sun (the older) and Moon. They too were the sons of chiefs, their jaguar father being a chief, and their mother carved from the wood of the uengïfi tree (the chief of the forest).


When they die, anetï ekugu and tango are buried with special ceremonies and the general lament of community. All anetï are given special burial treatment and, in theory, merit commemoration in a kuarup ceremony, but only the death of “great chiefs” or their principal heirs, be they men or women, prompts a community to request a kuarup from their next-of-kin. The kuarup cycle begins with the principals of the ceremony (the next-of-kin) lined up in a row of benches in the village plaza—again with higher-ranking individuals in the center, graphically representing the hierarchy of living family members. A tafite (“house of the dead”) is built over the anetï grave, using short uengïfi trunks, to mark the initiation of the kuarup (Figure 9.2). First-fruits (piquí) and manioc flour are collected for storage by the chief (Figure 9.3). For months leading up to the final phase of the ceremony, atanga flute dances are held regularly. Formal messengers (tinhü) are sent out just prior to the invocation ceremony, when the spirits of the dead ancestors are invoked to occupy the large uengïfi trunks sunken over the uprooted tafite. On the day of the ceremony, anetï family members are painted in the village plaza with special body designs marking their chiefly status, later to be augmented by jaguar skin and claw ornaments by the principal male anetï. Perhaps the most blatant representation of hierarchy is that moment when the principal anetï call out their champions into the plaza (those who will wrestle the strongest of the other

Fig. 9.2 Kuarup elders singing facing the tafite of the recently deceased anetï heir, and men of all ages perform on the “dancing ground” (1993).


Fig. 9.3 Chiefly redistributive payment for services rendered by the community at large (1993).

participant villages). These young men come and kneel before the anetï sponsors with head to ground, in a graphic gesture of supplication (see Agostinho 1974a; Basso 1973; and Carneiro 1993 for more detailed discussions). Using the chiefly discourse style, the primary village chief often gives oratories in the village plaza late at night or in the early morning. These oratories describe the appropriate conduct of Kuikuru, as perceived by the chief in the context of recent situations, and are justified through allusion to myth or the personal experiences of the chief (Basso 1973; Gregor 1977; Ireland 1987). During my residence in the village, only the hugogó òto gave such speeches, and he did so frequently prior to the death of his oldest and youngest son; no other individual filled this role in the intervening period of mourning (lasting nearly a year and a half ). Other prominent men would make brief speeches to muster support for communal projects they sponsored. Chiefly nocturnal speeches are unique from other speeches, since only the highest ranking chief can so express himself in the community without ridicule, which affirms his position as chief and is seen as a basic duty of the highest office. In the Kuikuru village in 1993, the eté òto and the hugogó òto (now eté òto) were fully conversant in the “chiefly” discourse. After a village split in 1997, the then eté òto left, leaving only one person fully fluent in the anetï intagiñu today. Today there is only one chief, the principal eté òto, who speaks the anetï intaginu properly, although his


daughter and one or two other lower-ranking chiefs have gleaned some small amount, but no one has been formally trained by the eté òto. The reception of formal visitors, tinhï (commonly called pariat), is seen as a critical mark of chiefly action, which also requires formal chiefly discourse. Although it is the province of the anetï ekugu to instruct younger chiefs in this discourse, to avoid disgruntlement, ill-will, or outright criticism by other community members, the decision to instruct a younger man in the “chief ’s language” requires a mandate from the community. It is not an individual but a community decision. A village chief receives formal visitors from closely related (sister) communities, also using the special discourse that affirms elements of local genealogy, his place in it, and the relations among the groups—for instance, the “chief list” of hereditary chiefly heroes: Kujaitsi, Amatuagu, Akusá, Ongosugu, Nïtsïmï, Hikutaha, Tuhaí, Tihangakú. The great Angahuku chiefs, three of whom founded Kuhikugu (Amatuagu, Nïtsïmï, Hikutaha). Amatuagu was also the principle of Tafununu (X25), along with Marika of Kuguhi (X14), communities of the ipa otomo. The chiefly discourse also lays out major dimensions of the interregional exchange: … I have brought my true sons, it is still as always…, you look for the chiefs still as always…, I brought my things here, still as always…, I sat beside to receive the true messengers, still as always…, after I conducted my people as always, I affirm…, the necklaces of Aikakú, I affirm, as always…, the black bow, I affirm, as always…, the metal knives of Kudjaitsi, I affirm, as always…, the necklaces of Inasá, I affirm, as always…, grandson of chiefs [addressing invited chiefly messengers]…, you that receive messengers [chiefly person]. (Franchetto 2003; translation author’s) The “word,” as Clastres (1987) calls the unique ability to speak, publicly, of chiefs. These discourses reflect different conceptions of time, including what are considered “real” (akiña ekugu) histories of historical figures and “dawn time” myths and legends—ancient histories—of the emergence of the humans, Xinguano society, the constituent language and local groups, and specific features of landscape, nonhumans, and social and ritual life (Franchetto 1993, 2001; see Basso 1995, 2001). But, what is important to keep in mind is not only that history runs very deep, but that control of it is a critical element of social power among the living. The chief represents on the ground symbolic lines of power and substance, graded according to chronological order (linked to eight great chiefs systematically recounted in Kuikuru chiefly discourses): the chief is entailed


in this historical group of “great chiefs,” as the heir to these lines of power. It is in a like manner that these legitimate lines are the heirs of original chiefly power and substance through the exclusive use of ritual knowledge and objects, handed down to Xinguanos from the creators Sun and Moon. The chiefly rituals and histories reenact origin events in the emergence of Xinguano society. They legitimize the genealogy of the chiefly families, and in so doing, pave the way for their future generations. That chiefs are like fathers, in the sense they refer to others as “children” and they are afforded the respect that is due for a father, an ancestor, or an affine. Chiefs are chiefs precisely because they are ancestors or affines to all community members; their influence extends across dimensions and “traffic.”

Socio-Ethnophysics The Kuikuru reigning chiefly line has oscillated from father (Afukaká) to daughter (Auna) to grandson (Afukaká) to great-granddaughter (Auna), whose adolescent son—Afukaká—has yet to develop as a chief. The House can perpetuate its names through both genders and, in fact, the now deceased matriarch of House A (Auna, the elder) is the apical ancestor to the three primary chiefly lines, House A (through her son the eté òto) and the other two through her daughter (wife of House B leader) and son through another chiefly husband. House A shows clearly the interrelation between continuity of places and personages—in this case, through the enduring relation of the south and north houses. Burying the dead of closely related villages often involves sharing of ancestors, a point of contestation and unity. It is primarily men who parade the power and wealth of the House and compete with other men for prestige. However, the social and political continuity of the House is nongender specific: a powerful anetï mugu or anetï indiso, son or daughter, can assume authority as a true chief, anetï ekugu or tango, and pass names and status to offspring. However, the continuity of status also depends on continuity of place through “presence” and “properities” that are “owned” by primary (typically male) chiefs, which are organized in villages according to very precise spatial and social calculus, which is situated in a landscape that is gridded out according to a complex mapping of ecological, cosmological, and political factors. The chief ’s house (tajïfe), the only residential structure in the village constructed communally, is another emblem of chiefly office.2 The chief ’s house is generally larger and better built than other houses. It is constructed from special woods (notably uengïfi) and unlike other houses, it is decorated with paintings on the interior. A tajïfe was being constructed for the then hugogó òto in 1993 just prior to the death of his son, at which time


the chief cancelled the project. The then eté òto had never “owned” a tajïfe. The community builds a chief ’s house because they support the claim of that individual as anetï ekugu and, once built, the house stands as a tangible symbol of—a monument to—the office. A man learns the chief ’s language because the community supports his claims as a chief, but once he has learned it he is one of a few (two in the Kuikuru) individuals privileged to formally receive visitors from other villages. During formal visits, the visitors are led first to the hugogo or the house of the chief, whether an official tajife or not. In addition to the tajife, other village structures such as the formal path for visitors, fish weir, bridges, and the kuakutu, are “owned” by anetï. Ownership of monuments, including the tajïfe, hugogo, tafite, kuakutu, and sacred flutes, all of which contain ancestral spirit force, and the plaza ritual, particularly chiefly rites-of-passage and exchange rituals, communication arteries (roads and intravillage causeways) and major public works (weirs and bridges). No major public ritual is not “owned” by a chief and “asked-for” by a commoner, the question is one of relative rank. In payment for the construction of a tajïfe, a kuakutu, a tafite, or community works such as a primary bridge, the formal path, or community fish weirs, the chiefs who will “own” the works and their sons, brothers, and other close kin and affines must would go fishing each day while other men worked on the project. Ethnophysics here refers to indigenous systems of knowledge that incorporate elements of what, in Western societies, are called mathematics, engineering, astronomy, and calendrics. This body of knowledge can only artificially be distinguished from indigenous knowledge and theories about natural (animal, plant, soils, hydrology, climate) and social (other living persons) distributions in the present and recent past: the holism of nonWestern societies (Descola 1996). These areas of knowledge—kinship, genealogy, and history, ethnoecology, and ethnophysics, although interrelated, are separable enough to make it worth discussing in these terms (i.e., about parts and how they get put together). This is not meant to emphasize a difference between the human and the nonhuman world, a distinction blurred in most Amazonian settings (Descola 1996; Slater 2002), but instead to point to the radical transformations of space, particularly common as we look backward in time, but which seem extraordinary given what is typically portrayed as typical for Amazonia. The way people count, measure, design, and build the world around them is knowable and of great interest, but while there is a burgeoning body of material on indigenous ecological knowledge, land use, and subsistence, there has been much less available research on basic astronomy,


mathematics, engineering, architecture, and so on, in part because these “sciences” were not present in any developed form. This is, of course, because of the privileged relationship between nature, culture, and anthropology and particularly the view that Amazonians are more “natural” and science and physics are more part of “civilized” society. In some respects, Xinguanos share our passion for quantification, as evident in a perception of the world that is readily mapped out according to a precise system of arcs, nodes and circles (Ascher 1991; Seeger 1976, 1981). While space and time are thus divided, some things simply cannot be “seen” except in a certain light, or only when they are animated. For instance, shamans engage in psychic travel, activating their individual perceptions to enter an altered state of perception. Chiefs, too, induce an ecstatic sensation, but they themselves do not travel out of body, but instead draw ancestral forces upon themselves, creating an altered social state. As living ancestors, glowing in the full light of ancestral power, they activate an “otherworldly” experience attained through communitas and the ritualized and corporeal disciplines (well described in Agostinho 1974). The air is alive with social energy, the thoughts of ancestors mixed with those of future descendants is activated, or instantiated, and linked with other things in dynamic, changing conceptual landscapes. The rhythmic orientations of the feast, the movements of bodies, and the spatial layouts are sedimented in place and also are imbued with a temporality (Bourdieu 1990). When villagers attend the egitse ritual in other villages, for instance, three village anetï sit on stools at the front of their village group. These include one anetï ekugu and several lesser anetï of his choosing. The pie shaped segments created by the visiting communities that encircle the hugogo from one side of the kuakutu to the other (about 180°). These wedges appear like the residential precincts of the individual houses, a pyramid laid on its side, with the head always pointing toward the hugogo in the center. These are maps of chiefly hierarchy and social rank: three “heads,” usually men but also women and youths, one higher ranking and the other two “assisting,” with the community fans out behind them. Measurement, distance, angle, and time are familiar concepts to the Kuikuru, and they reproduce these in art, domestic and public architecture, and spatial organization, although not as codified systems but in terms of human bodies (arm length and span, hand measurements, body height, left/right) and the reproduction of angles and lengths (measured by reeds, cane, or any number of natural “measuring sticks”). 3 The Xinguanos have never explained to me all the actions that go into making a settlement just so, they have no sundials either, except the village


itself, run out across the landscape by straight, uniform road networks. In the galactic clusters, one angle dominated all others in native mathematics: the more or less east–west passage from sun entrance and sun exit in villages, the alignment of human bodies in graves, and the alignment of the primary chiefly residences in the Kuikuru village. The line from House A and, across the plaza, House B, is more or less north–south and the midpoint is the hugogo at center. At the western edge of the hugogo is the kuakutu, its southern and northern doors likewise facing due south and north. Just as Xinguanos carefully measure house parts, not with some abstract units—as the units are the pieces themselves—the ability to reproduce distance and multiply or subtract from it using a fixed measure is well established in crafts, houses, road ways, and village spatial patterns. Although surely we must avoid imposing any Euclidean rigidity upon this system, there is something almost like a Cartesian coordinate grid inscribed in each village and, inverted outward into landscapes that are gridded off by the primary roads. Kuikuru counting, like spatial measurements, is tied to concepts of the body, is based on a system of fives according to one hand, two hands, two hands and a foot, and two feet: aetsi (one, “finger”), takeko (two), tlilako (three), tatakegeni (four), and nhatui (five or one hand), and aetsi inkugetoho (six, or “one on other hand”), takeko inkugetoho (seven), tilako inkugetoho (eight), tatakegeni inkugetoho (nine), and timuho (ten or two hands), and then aetsi hugape (eleven, first “toe”), takeko hugape, etc., and then heine hugape (fifteen), and then aetsi heine hugape (sixteen), takeko heine hugape (seventeen), and then, finally, one whole person, represented by katute hugape. The system could conceivably go onward to at least four hundred, that is, the twenty digits of twenty persons (since they count over 20 by simply moving on to another person, another body), and it is not too vast an overstep of logic that one person could come to stand for four hundred instead of twenty. Although I never heard Kuikuru speak of numbers in these terms, they have adapted surprisingly well to the concept of money. The Kuikuru also use a rudimentary system of tokens, for instance, carved sticks used in the manioc festival that mark participation in rituals, or in other words, come to stand for “persons.”4 Building a house also involves many such measurements. A house must be oriented in a particular place in accordance with the plaza, its neighbors, and then there are height and floor area concerns of the household. First, the central posts are installed, usually two, sometimes three or more, and then the side posts are laid, equidistant from the center posts. Next, the front and rear walls are laid out, parallel and equal in length to the center posts, and then the side curves are laid in. Distancing


is always facilitated by using arrow cane and other measuring devices, including the human body, at virtually every point along the way. The traditional house (ngüne) lasts about ten years, before it is rebuilt and repositioned on the plaza, increased or decreased in size, and such change signals critical personnel changes. The skill with which Kuikuru determine angles through astronomical observations and an intimacy with their “lands” is perhaps most clearly expressed in how they lay out the village, the northern and southern houses, the east-west roads, and the crystalline or gridlike patterns of the pre-Columbian galactic polity. Ethnomathematics is space, geometry, and segmentation, but does not employ autonomous, classifiable dimensions according to which mutually exclusive units are defined and measured, “disciplines.” Rather, ethnomathematics is part and parcel of a holistic worldview, social calculus, astronomy, and ethno-theories on the body, person, and universe (Ascher 1994: 124–125; 2002). Imagine my surprise to find a Cartesian coordinate grid, hidden in the Xinguano perspectives on spatial partitions that corresponded to my compass!

Plazas as Persons There are many vantage points in a Xinguano plaza. It is not only a settlement pattern or spatial organization but also an observatory, providing a panoramic overview of town, world, and universe (Figures 9.4–9.7). There are many viewpoints entailed in it, but there is no getting lost in the plaza; the persons it entails are sitting before your eyes, across the plaza, in the center, on the roads, in front of the houses, and above your head, across the skys, which in the cold, cloudless skies of the deep winter, here just beyond the illumination of our mechanized civilization, no artificial light occludes the star filled plaza dark at night. It is the kuarup, the chiefs, and the plaza that make the Xinguanos who they are. They are kuge because they have chiefs, ancestors, the kuarup, and the plaza, which is the place of the chiefs, who “own” the plaza, and through it they control history and eventually become ancestors themselves (Figure 9.8). The village is highly differentiated. As noted above, the most sacred of all village space is the plaza core (hugogo) and insofar as it is “owned” by a single chief, can be seen as an incarnation of that individual—the hugogó òto—and more importantly, of the office he represents. In other words, the plaza, men’s house, and cemetery are institutions, insofar as they represent central and established practices, relationships, or organizations of society. They are also monuments to chiefs, both to the living chiefs who own them and to the chiefly rank itself.


Fig. 9.4 Map of first Ipatse village (1972–1982; Franchetto’s 1986 map included in inset).

The plaza is the primary arena for public ritual and political action in these villages and is invariably male dominated space. Within the village access to public areas, whether for social or spatial reasons, is essential for the exercise of political power. The plaza is the stage for all public political activity and ritual performance and the political man is a frequent actor on this stage. The circular pattern of the village also allows the spatial expression of separation and opposition. This topic has been widely discussed in relation to concentric village patterns and social opposition (e.g., Lathrap et al. 1975; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Zeidler 1984). Although the Upper Xingu lacks moieties, the opposition of social groups is still quite clear (such as the placement of House A and B). Influential families (or individuals) are positioned in specific places or in opposition to other powerful factional leaders or families (Gregor 1977, 1985; Ireland, personal communication, 1995). Lévi-Strauss (1963) noted that, the circular plaza (concentric) spatial organization invariably represents concepts of hierarchy. Although it sometimes has dialectic connotations, plazas always have concentric, hierarchical, meaning, they are “encompassing” in Dumontian terms. The plaza is a spatial metaphor for human society, a key symbol of


Fig. 9.5 Map of second Ipatse village (1982–present) in 1993.

sociality among Xinguano peoples. First and foremost, plazas are metaphors of distinctions between women and men, young and old, and chiefs and others (ancestors, other chiefs, non-chiefs). Nowhere in an Amazonian context is this more clear than in Xinguano villages, where prominent chiefs live in houses positioned at cardinal points of the house ring and control major roadways and the central plaza. To paraphrase what one chief once told me, when I asked about the time he spends (or not) in his gardens: “the plaza is my garden, my work is there.” For our purposes here, it is important to recognize the symbolic “weight” of the central plaza: virtually all public ritual and political action is focused in the plaza. It is a “container of power.” Like all public structures it is symbolically “owned,” not surprisingly by the principal village chief. He is one of two primary sitting (named) chiefs: the “owner of the village” (eté òto) and the “owner of the center” (hugogó òto). Both are anetï ekugu and can speak in the chiefly discourse style and both can formally receive visitors from other villages, but the hugogó òto is clearly the ritual and political leader of the village. He is accordingly afforded considerable


Fig. 9.6 Map of Ipatse village in 2002.

Fig. 9.7 Flyover of Kuikuru village (2002) showing plaza village at edge of anthropogenic forest and relict low-lying floodplains of Culuene River (seen in top center); the two primary radial roads lead off to the Culuene River and Angahuku River (exiting to left). Note another primary road leading off to Lake Ipatse in the east (to right) and another to the south (bottom).


Fig. 9.8 Flutists with sunlike diadems playing atanga flutes commemorating deceased anetï (1993).

respect by the vast majority of villagers, to the degree that many people, particularly younger adults, will not speak or only speak softly in his presence, and will not sit too close to him—an extension of the basic ihuse deferences one pays a social superior. Thus, in chiefly initiation rites, the learning and use of esoteric ritual knowledge, and in the trappings of office bestowed upon chiefs the body of the chief is not only symbolically transformed but amplified as the chief accumulates a surplus of symbolic resources and which are often truly inalienable—written on the body. To address the processes of maintenance or transformation of village patterns over time requires that the expression of basic cultural categories (public/domestic, male/female) be placed in the context of other social factors (related to, for instance, public ritual performance and village politics). Of particular interest in the present case is the centralization and exclusivity of public ritual and decision making embodied in the central plaza. In ring villages, the plaza depicts unity and egalitarianism, while simultaneously restricting access to select social actors. “Equal” access to public activities and ritual performance is spatially represented by the distribution of houses equidistant to the central area; essentially everyone has a front-row seat (Gregor 1977). However, in practice the ubiquitous “male-centricity” represents a transformation of this egalitarian ethos based on gender and


age. Plazas spatially represent community unity, but at the same time create the conditions for inequality and opposition within communities. Xinguano village patterns were not always like they are today, however; prehistoric plaza villages were much larger in size. Village fortification and population nucleation had a profound effect on village spatial organization, since there was a necessary segmentation of the village into distinct precincts (or neighborhoods). The positioning of neighborhoods was somewhat immutable due to the placement of the earthworks (ditches and linear mounds). Thus, the configuration of domestic space around the plaza was radically different than today, since domestic precincts (neighborhoods) closer to the plaza had privileged access to the plaza. Such village segmentation would break the pattern of equal access provided by a ring of houses equidistant from the plaza, and leads to increasingly restricted access (“privatization”) of the central plaza and, hence, public ritual and political action. Given the scale of these villages, we can assume that patterns of village leadership were stronger in the past. Even today, hereditary Xinguano leaders (anetï) dominate factional politics and public intervillage interaction. Prehistorically, these “chiefly” lineages dominated public ritual and political activity, like today, but more restricted access to ritualized public space tended to embed or institutionalize the nascent social inequality embodied in the plaza and the “chiefly” status. The Upper Xingu case provides insight into the process by which incipient patterns of hierarchy, based on principles of gender and seniority and embodied in the plaza, could be transformed into actual control of public ritual and political action/process by certain segments of society. This pattern effectively truncated the egalitarian principle of equal access creating more enduring patterns of social inequality based on more institutionalized ranking of different kingroups in the community. This was based, at least in part, on increasingly restricted access or privatization of central public space. Upper Xingu plaza villages not only concentrate and restrict public ritual and political action in the context of the community, but, as evidenced by the formal paths leading outward from the plaza, they also have an inherently external dimension. The village presents itself to the outside world from the plaza; goods brought for the community from the outside are redistributed there; and chiefs directly receive their mandate to represent and do represent the community in the village plaza. The plaza not only symbolizes community unity but also represents this community unity to outsiders, as well. However, it is not an unranked, symmetrical unity, as commonly suggested, but a deeply hierarchical one that contextually


represents and to a degree mediates between the egalitarian and the hierarchical tendencies, formulas, or impulses of Xinguano culture.

The Symbolic Economy of Power The plaza is a monument, insofar as it represents persons, past personages, in a fixed and enduring way. It is a monument to the otomo, the living group, itself ranked from top to bottom, from the newest or most marginal citizens to the most ancient, potent and central ancestors, founders, and chiefs (living ancestors). The plaza is more than a bounded physical space, it is also a social mnemonic, which brings together all the social identities in the world, and mediates among them. It is also a container of power, the primary site of a symbolic economy of power: the theater state or political economy in its ritual phase. In addition to the three moods of regional ethnology, described by Viveiros de Castro (1996): the “moral economy of intimacy,” the “political economy of control,” and the “symbolic economy of alterity” (predation), must be added a fourth “economy,” one particularly well suited to describing Xinguano peoples over time. This refers to a form or modality of power not based on political coercion or economic exploitation, first and foremost, but instead in what could be called structural or disciplinary power, the control over the construction and operation of human bodies. The plaza thus lends itself to a different reading than has been customary to describe, as sociological model or cosmogram. This alternative reading situates front and center the issues of exclusivity and political power inherent in plaza ritual and “ownership.” This is particularly true if one looks back to the polities of pre-Columbian times, where plazas and ancestors were ranked in supralocal galactic clusters, and within settlements often more like towns than villages. If we wish to perpetuate the Western connotations, the central, sacred precincts of ritual and public affairs were physically enclosed by great earthen barriers, with few if any people actually living inside. We might also note, the panoptic qualities of the plaza as panoramic observatory, enclosure, and container of power (and powerholders), only rather than the faceless gaze of State power, the plaza is imbued with precisely that personified power that Foucault (1977, 1980), following a long list of others, calls kingly power, the power immanent in the kingly body. Kingly power was contained in “[t]he body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others.” This is “the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region of irregular


bodies.” For Foucault, who discusses the birth of discipline in Discipline and Punish (1977) and locates it in the “swarming of institutions,” the partitioning of space, and the control of the human body inherent in the panopticon and related structures of power in prisons, factories, barracks, hospitals, asylums, and the like. This panoptic effect is thus an inversion, in a sense, from what interested Foucault, from marginal back to exemplary bodies, about the body as understood in its collective, politicized sense. It is also an inversion of how history is written (from masses back to heroes and great persons). It is also an inversion back to spectacle in contextually (ritually) “illuminated” spaces from Foucault’s concrete hyper-secularism of the Benthamite panopticon and other techniques of power in the new physics of panopticism. What is placed for all to see in circular plazas is itself an exclusionary tactic, all the more so in the great plaza villages of the Xinguano galactic clusters, as the privileged locales of public mediations, political, economic, and symbolic (with ontological “others”). This is, of course, written in an idiom of ancestrality, of specific persons, not in the despotic law of the States of which Clastres (1987: 186) spoke. The point is not to import Foucault into the realm of Amazonian anthropology taken far out of its original context, but to emphasize the degree to which the plaza, which orients the movements of social bodies through structured space in a very precise way, represents an equally dramatic variation or transformation of spatiality, a “swarming of institutions.” It does not compare in scale with what comes after kingly power, the production of (full-time) docile bodies in the cold institutional space of prisons, factories, and hospitals. Nonetheless, it is a radical departure from what came before or exists alongside: the undifferentiated (nonplaza) space of the typical tropical forest village. The plaza is a socially hot center of public life, the place of spectacle which hosts the making and unmaking of chiefs. It does represent, through its exclusivity, a container of power, as discipline, which “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space” and “requires enclosure,” that is, “the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself ” (Ibid.: 141). What changes is the fact that it is a dynamic, situationally defined enclosure. At times it is a political apparatus. Since as a naturalized power (from within) it is not easily resisted, if perceived at all. It represents and reproduces social hierarchy and, through it, the exercise of social control, in terms of the distribution or deployment of persons and things, social labor and symbolic capital. At other times, it is a playground, an observatory, and a common theater, always hierarchical and tied to divisions of age and gender: its social identity is pluralistic,


polyvalent, and polysemic, it contextually translates and mediates (i.e., creates a dialogue) between opposites, all the divisions that make up Xinguano ontologies. This brings us back to the problem of bodies and persons. Fausto (1999: 934), summarizing a consensus among many regional specialists, notes that “Amazonian societies are primarily oriented toward the production of persons, not material goods; that is, their focus is not on the fabrication of objects through labor, but of persons through ritual and symbolic work.” However, what is different in the Upper Xingu than most Amazonian cases described ethnographically, is that bodies are publicly produced in such a way as to rank and separate individuals into chiefly and commoner rank and according to an internal ranking in the chiefly lines, in degrees of chiefliness. In other words, what is particularly notable about the Upper Xingu, is the degree to which the primary ritual and everyday mechanisms of social and symbolic reproduction are tied specifically to the production and operation of chiefly bodies. Chiefly persons are constructed in a way that privileges their access to symbolic capital through a distinction between the owners of these principal chiefly rituals and symbols, which directly impinges on their ability to control labor and economic valuables. This distinction is fundamental, because it marks a division between those kin groups that are responsible for the production of chiefly individuals (i.e., the reproduction of the social body) and those who are not. The reverse is also true, amassing labor or wealth by whatever means does capture symbolic capital, and some individuals act as “big” or “great” men, entrepreneurs, and capture prestige through competitive localized exchange, transforming their houses and Houses into entrepôts. The economic and the symbolic are inextricably linked in most political transactions, particularly those of the powerful, but the most exclusive thing of value is the symbolic capital accumulated, in an inalienable way, in the person of the chief. It is possible to move, sometimes quickly, through the social ranks, but chiefliness is a matter of birth and without the legitimate claim to acknowledged bloodlines, it is impossible to have access to the full range of symbolic or economic resources. In pre-Columbian clusters, there were small plaza centers, logically with “smaller” ancestors, and larger plazas, with larger and weightier ancestors. Thus the lords of Nokugu were more powerful (i.e., their power emerged from) because they could activate or engage the ancestors at a higher level (cf. Leach 1954). Like contemporary villages, social actors were linked from their house into the pool of local ancestors whose names they carried forward, and they could link into a kinship structure that connected all the communities of the region and defined people as affines and consanguines. The great


regional initiations, marriages, and mortuary feasts are collective and they instantiate ancestors as well as chiefs in plaza ritual. As noted above, the body of the chief is the embodiment of that power, and his person is a reflection of this channeling of ancestral power; when the channeling is no longer obvious, through deeds as well as genealogy, the body of the chief withers, or loses power. The social tendency inverts the biological, however, and substance is passed from fathers and mothers, through grandparents, to offspring. Chief-making is an excellent example of what Foster (1995), among far-off Austronesians, calls “replacing the ancestors”: a process of making chiefs. Likewise, the Kuikuru speak of taking the place of their fathers and grandfathers. Another interesting aspect of Xinguano cultural life, even paradoxical according to some anthropological schemata, is the coexistence of different modalities of exchange, contextually operative relative to bodies of different scale. Xinguanos maintain extensive reciprocity between men and women, between families and friends, between trading partners, and between chiefs, who have reciprocal relations with other chiefs and with community members. They also have chiefly redistribution, and in some respects, given its basis in village specialization, systems of equivalencies, and immediate payoff, the Xinguano “trading game” (uluki) has certain features that seem almost market like. Uluki is a centralized form of economic exchange insofar as chiefs control the “gaming,” which is conducted in “centers” of houses and villages. It reveals many things about Kuikuro social dynamics: a look at where people sit, how they act, and, of course, what, how much, and with whom they bid tells much about sociality, wealth, and power. In the “trading game” wealth is exchanged, specifically, prestige goods—objects that mark social position, such as benches and special body ornaments. Although these are portable and are traded as “goods,” they ritually operate—become visible—only as extensions of persons (fetishes) that are “inalienable.” Whether such items are (or ever were) commonly given as prestations is unclear, but the primary element of the political economy is not transportable wealth—which is amassed through “householding”—but symbolic and social capital. Shell belts and necklaces, ceramics, and salt are traded as commodities, not as fetish items that embody (i.e., objectify) persons. As noted earlier, the overarching economic principle in Xinguano society, if we can speak of it in such terms, must be “householding,” and not reciprocity or redistribution (see Halperin 1994). According to Polanyi’s (1944: 53) original definition, the householding “pattern is the closed group, whether the very different entities of the family or the


settlement or the manor formed the self-sufficient unit, the principle was invariably the same, namely, that of producing and storing for the satisfaction of the wants of the members of the group.” And what more fitting economic principle for a society so well described as a “House Society” (“société à maison”). Village chiefs sponsor intervillage trading ceremonies (uluki), which they arrange informally beforehand with the principal chiefs from another village. Anetï ekugu preside over the intercommunity uluki and any anetï can call and mediate in intravillage ceremonies, as participants pass from house to house and individuals from the house produce items they wish or feel obligated to trade, and one or another participant usually takes up the offer and pays the price asked by the owner. The intervillage uluki between two villages takes place in the village plaza and involves more or less the same process of laying an object on the ground that someone from the invited village can choose to trade for. These trade rituals, arranged and directed by village chiefs, are in part based in village specializations, of which unique items produced by one village are widely sought by the other villages. Virtually anything of value is traded, but there are recognized mediums of payment, most notable among which are ceramics and glass bead and shell ornaments (belts and necklaces), the latter having a somewhat unique exchange value as they are highly storable, displayable, and transportable wealth items: shell money. Shell necklaces are made with water snails, oïke, and shell belts are made from land snails, iñu. Village specializations were tied in part to the natural distributions, like speciality black wood bows or stone axes, in the past. Ceramics, made almost exclusively by the Waujá, and many other products are specialities of one or another village but do not relate to resource distributions nor to specialized technology. There are no full-time craft specializations, but there are part-time specialists in the village who are considered “owners” of certain craft items (e.g., fishing traps). We might note that glass-bead and shell necklaces/belts are not only qualitatively and quantitatively measured, as fine adornments, and prestige markers, but also as serve “money in the bank”: they can be used to purchase virtually anything, a song, a cure, a favor, labor, and even food and constitute a rudimentary “currency.” Kuikuru ritualized exchange thus follows a principle essentially opposite to that which Malinowski (1922: 95) suggested was the basis for primitive economy (based on his work in the Trobriads), wherein gifts (or countergifts) “can never be exchanged hand to hand, with the equivalence between the two objects discussed, bargained about and computed”. As noted above, barter and trade between individuals within villages and with


outsiders is common and based on direct and delayed reciprocal payments. However, formalized exchange is under the direct influence of the village chiefs. Chiefs also have an inordinate ability to acquire and amass wealth for ceremonial payments; in part as a result of far greater access to long-distance trade items, such as red macaw feathers (from the Kayapó) and quality bamboo for flutes (from the Juruna), as well as Western goods, because of their numerous external contacts. It appears that the economy has changed significantly and there has been significant deterioration of traditional patterns, not because they naturally declined in the face of Western contact, but because in light of the impact of that contact—massive depopulation and foreign opportunity—it was hard to consolidate chiefly power, either spatially or genealogically. As the chief said, “the laws have changed.” In recent times, in fact, interaction with the Western world has been essential in terms of insuring medical assistance, obtaining Western goods, and otherwise maintaining the well being of communities. There has been a marked increase in the influence of individual chiefs’ depending on their abilities to operate in the supraregional networks linked to Western market society. Villagers recognize the importance of having well-known chiefs who can influence outsiders, and while opportunities for gaining prominence through nontraditional means has also increased, powerful chiefs command the respect necessary to truly manipulate the external world for the benefit of the community (e.g., gaining audience with high-ranking government or nongovernmental organization [NGO] officials). Thus, the control of external relations, notably involving the flow of goods and information, has a strong influence on chiefly power. As external relations become more important, so does chiefly power, in both regional and local contexts. Although in recent decades it has been the control of Western goods which has strengthened the influence of chiefs, the complicated pattern of regional exchange suggests that such forces are not strictly restricted to the introduction of European goods. Prehistorically, we can assume that the external dimension of political process was quite pronounced given the obvious importance of regional interaction, particularly warfare (marked by defensive works) and intervillage interaction (marked by roads). We also can assume that chiefs were considerably more exalted in prehistoric times. There is some indication of a tribute economy in the recent past (c. late 1800s to early 1900s). This is provided by a Waujá historical reference to a chief, living not in the too distant past, who was not required to produce for his family but instead was maintained by tributes from other community members (E. Ireland, personal communication, 1995; see also Neto, n.d.). In contemporary villages, there is still a tendency for goods to circulate


through the hands of village chiefs, such as in public redistributions in the plaza or in private in the chief ’s house, but there are no chiefs whose families are not responsible for self-maintenance. Chiefs are often assisted by other kin-members to enable them to attend to chiefly activities, notably ceremonial sponsorship and today excursions to government agencies. Ceremonial payments are also made to chiefs by the community in support of the primary anetï ceremonies. Chiefly redistribution is tied to sponsorship of primary chiefly rituals, and mobilization is the critical feature. Surplus is maintained through ritual sponsorship, for instance the large silos of manioc flour, both individual and community owned, or the piquí tubes, collected in first-fruit rituals by the sponsors of the rituals. This symbolic capital, as discussed above, is a direct reflection of a person’s ability to legitimately appropriate the power or influences of ancestors. It also relates to the ability to amass economic goods and labor, through social obligation, highlighting the critical interplay of legitimacy and efficacy in Xinguano political economies.

CHAPTER

10

Conclusion: The Pedigree of a Contradiction … in eastern Bolivia [southern Amazon], a men’s ceremonial house, based upon the Amazonian pattern, was magnified to state significance. Julian Steward and Louis Faron 1959: 2 In short, a bird’s eye view of classical Bali’s political organization … [reveals] an extended field of highly dissimilar political ties, thickening into nodes of varying size and strength at strategic points on the landscape and then thinning out again to connect, in a marvelously convolute way, virtually everything with everything else. Clifford Geertz 1980: 24 Amazonian “high culture,” as Max Schmidt (1917) called the ancient Arawak peoples, fell short of what Western society considered civil society (civitas) in the early 1900s. Most ethnologists, in fact, had already fully come to expect that Amazonia was one of those world areas, like the Pacific Islands or the sub-Saharan Africa, dominated wholly by primitive peoples, what Karl von den Steinen (1894) called “naturvölkern.” The greater and lesser American civilizations, the states, kingdoms, and chiefdoms so prominent in the archaeological and early historical records, had been reduced to obscurity through, as Lévi-Strauss (1961: 42) put it, “the cannibal instincts of the historical process.” Even the giants of pre-Columbian world systems, great Native American empires like the Inka and

319


Azteca seen firsthand by the interlopers, were forgotten, casualties of a nineteenth-century evolutionary rhetoric bent on measuring the progress and major limens of human history according to the yardstick of Western historical experience (Chang 1989). Many of the great temple centers of Mesoamerica, Peru, and the southeastern United States were only discovered between the mid-1800s and early 1900s. There is more to it, however, than just scholarly ignorance, since the Western intellectual tradition has tended to neglect, if not degenerate, ancient Amerindian societies that cannot be described as “primitive,” “simple,” or “uncivilized” by any stretch of the imagination, civilizations, as Alice Kehoe (1998) so aptly puts it, that remain “hidden in plain sight.” In Amazonia, ancient polities are truly hidden from view. There are few early chronicles that describe the native peoples of the sixteenth century and rarely have these been studied in detail (see Porro 1996; Whitehead 1988, 1993, 1994). Most of the major riverine societies, which by most estimations were the largest and most complicated political formations, were largely destroyed by the time eyewitnesses arrived, and Europeans did not venture far into the forests. Archaeology, which might provide clues of their presence, has also lagged behind most other world areas (Roosevelt 1991). And, of course, the hallmarks of the state—pyramids, draft animals, writing, and cities—are so conspicusouly absent here. Nonetheless, there have always been writers promoting the idea that “lost civilizations” exist in the Amazon, just as there have always been those who see in the Amazon, or places like it, glimpses of our own primitive past. Colonel Percy Fawcett was among those who sought lost cities, based on “the truth of Indian stories,” tales of ancient ruins among peoples, he thought, that had no relation to the architects of them. He died searching for the lost civilizations of ancient European legends, Atlantis in the Amazon. The idea of at least “minor civilizations,” as Kroeber (1947) called them in North America, was a subtext in regional anthropology throughout the twentieth century. In the southern Amazon, the idea was championed not only by Max Schmidt, but also by Alfred Métraux (1942), whose seminal book on the southern Amazonian peoples described in detail the structures of chieftainship so widely distributed in the region. Julian Steward and Louis Faron (1959), in the first synthetic volume of the South American continent, turned them into the “tropical forest chiefdoms” or “theocratic chiefdoms of eastern Bolivia,” based on Métraux’s work, as well as that of Kalervo Oberg (1949: 52; 1955), who coined the term “chiefdom” to refer to these peoples. Steward and Faron noted that the “chiefdoms of Venezuela, the Greater Antilles, and eastern Bolivia consisted of a number

Conclusion: The Pedigree of a Contradiction • 321

of villages bound together through common religious worship” (Steward and Faron (1959: 2). Clastres (1987: 28) likewise notes: the authority of the chieftaincy is explicitly documented only in the case of a few groups … almost all of whom are Arawak, are located in the northern-western part of South America and that their social organization presents a marked social stratification into castes: this latter feature is found again only among the Guaycuru and Arawak (Guana) tribes of the Chaco. Decades of ethnohistoric and archaeological research show that the distribution of chiefly societies is far greater than various authors had imagined, but concrete examples of what a genuinely Amazonian complex society might actually look like, “in the flesh,” are few and far between. Discussions revolve around assumptions that are derived from other places according to the expectations of a general stepwise evolutionary typology or, conversely, a century of ethnography among the demonstrably depopulated and often radically transformed remnants of ancient Amazonian cultural variation. In the end, Amazonia must be understood on its own terms. What exactly is it about some Amazonian societies that might lead us to invoke images of chiefdoms and states? The Amazon shows us different pathways to complexity, not dissimilar to other areas, but unique and requiring inquiry into local sequences of change, particularly those that can bridge the quincentennial divide of 1492. Should we expect surplus, literacy, and urbanism, for instance? Unfortunately, the paucity of well studied regions prohibits detailed internal comparisons and cross-cultural comparison, is therefore critical at this stage anyway. Students of Amazonian culture history are faced with the recalcitrant question of how to breathe some life back into yesterday persons, to give them voice, after being mute for centuries if not millennia. As Menget (1999) puts it, “How do we write histories of the vanquished?” In the Upper Xingu, the lack of written materials prior to 1884 requires that archaeology be our guide. It provides the only pathway to probe the deep past, because the indigenous narratives, although providing critical insights, become more fragmented as one moves back though time (Basso 1995), and must be aligned or “rewritten,” to the degree possible, with an alternative historiography. In a place like the Upper Xingu, we need a special kind of archaeology, one that links living human bodies to their ancestors, the personae of the past. It is one of those rare and precious examples of cultural continuity, so amenable to “direct historical” and “contextual” analysis. Ingold’s (1993) “dwelling perspective” to address “the temporality of landcape,” is


particularly appropriate to the archaeology of a place like the Upper Xingu, where “dwelling,” the movements and techniques of the body, and the multivocality of landscape, are omnipresent in the archaeological experience. There are many perspectives on landscape, anthropological and local, and a resonance between diverse researchers and varied indigenous voices immersed in the same context of study, working together in place, highlights the scalar, multi-dimensional quality of human bodies and cultural systems, social enchainments of a self-similar nature, the fractal person (Wagner 1991). It is persons that are made and remade through social and political ties and that “thicken” into nodes of varying size and strength and at strategic points on the landscape. The question is, what persons do we see, and how? If memory and landscape are, in large part, questions of “being there,” of lived experience, then watching human bodies moving through time and space, creating and recreating sites of memory, is the history we need to write. In other words, we must learn about actual human bodies, their practices and disciplines, and the ways they are cojoined into “communities of practice,” social bodies. This looks to a deeper cultural memory, a deep temporality, which is activated through lived space, place, ritual, and the memory of the human body as it moves through in structured space.

Persons Large and Small The largest “historical personage,” a step down, in a world historical sense, from “Amazonia” or Amerindians,” is the Arawak diaspora. It can be viewed in two ways: (1) as a history, distinguished from those of other such Amazonian personages, that is, the other linguistic diasporas, TupiGuarani, Carib, and Gê; and (2) and as a geography and identity, that is, how the descendants reflect these histories and local circumstances in dynamic regional systems. Within the Arawak diaspora, smaller historical personages, often of hybrid parentage, are apparent. The Southern Amazon Periphery, the Upper Paraguay, or the lowland savannas of Bolivia, in the south, or the Greater Antilles, the lower Negro, and various stretches of the Amazon and other major rivers to the north are a few examples. Within this regional stage, the Xinguano tradition is also a type of historical personage in this nested, concentric imagery of personhood, with its own subgroups. Arawak, Carib, Tupi, are others, as are each of the individual villages, persons. At local levels, persons resolve themselves as houses, “Houses” (the kindreds of chiefs), and “Great Houses” (otomo), and they are objectified by objects, dispositions, monuments, and the social bodies of individual human actors.


In a nutshell, some three thousand to four thousand years ago, a fairly small group of related peoples, the “proto-Arawak,” began to move out of their homeland (which I would situate on the Negro-Orinoco rivers). From colonized areas they continued to move out across the South American continent and the Caribbean, and by A . D. 500 had virtually attained their maximal geographic extent. During this period, each region entered into a process of ethnogenesis and settling-in, as diaspora encroached and transformed local systems, sometimes through interaction between the members of the different primary diasporas. By A . D. 500–1500, many of these regional centers had developed into complex, hierarchical social formations, including, perhaps, Marajoara, Santarem, many other large settled societies all up and down the Amazon, up the full length of the Negro, down the full length of the Orinoco, and throughout the Antilles. By A.D. 500, it is implausible that change in many of these regional systems was guided by purely endogenous process of internal differentiation. Instead, processes of interaction and hybridization, where languages, material cultures, spatial calculi, among many other things were “traded around,” were increasingly common. Social hierarchy marks a transition, one that is primarily symbolic and social. In other words, it reflects changes in relations of production and the way difference and value are created in society, rather than changes in the economic, technological, or demographic mode of production. This “symbolic Rubicon” was crossed in Amazonia, as is true throughout much of the Americas, more than three thousand years ago. The initial inflection was subtle, a minor change in: (a) social structure that made the division between older and younger siblings into marked categories of superiority and inferiority (this is the very initial stage of a conical clan type organization, as discussed later); and (b) a transformation of space, the emergence of central plazas and the exclusion they embody. The institutional separation of senior and junior siblings, status rivalry, and the techno-economic conditions of the settled, riverine, root-crop agriculturalists propelled Arawak speaking peoples quickly across tropical America, slightly later circa three thousand to two thousand years ago.1 These groups became situated in regions along the routes of expansion, and over time showed a tendency to absorb or amalgamate with other cultural groups. The Xingu is one of those regions. The Upper Xingu provides a particularly clear example, but there are obvious correlates throughout the lowlands among primarily Arawak peoples in the southern and northwest Amazon, the northern lowlands, and even the Caribbean. These include plazas, ceremonial structures, chiefly initiations and mortuary feasts, and the body of chiefs and the spaces they


occupy. In a way they personify or “embody” place and history, which in turn is objectified or “materialized” by them; they are living ancestors. Perhaps, in this sense, collective ontogeny does recapitulate cultural phylogeny. At least we can historically map out this process of colonization, domestication, and inscription of/in the land in the Xingu, and see it as an extension and development of a process that occurred in many parts of Amazonia, unique to each case but nonetheless comparable in terms of certain conditions and transformations within cultural structures. The Arawak diaspora extended into the Upper Xingu by A.D. 500–1000, if not slightly before. It establishes the basic Xinguano cultural pattern, in terms of economy, technology, spatial organization, and regional distributions. The presence of Carib peoples is firmly dated to A.D. 1400–1600 in eastern parts of the basin, although they may have been present throughout parts of the Upper Xingu basin long before. These Carib and Arawak ancestors engaged in social relations to the point that the former largely adopted the ways of the later, the Xinguano cultural tradition, by circa A.D. 1750, if not before. The period from circa A.D. 1650–1750 was characterized by the three primary groups: the western Xinguano (Arawak Western Complex), the eastern Xinguano (Eastern Complex or Carib), and the northern Xinguano (a Western Complex variant or a distinctive third cultural complex), becoming compressed into nuclear portions of the basin, which was largely western Xinguano territory prior to A.D. 1650. About 1750, Tupian (ancestors of Aueti and, Kamayura among others) people became incorporated into the system, circa A.D. 1750–1800, at the latest. Other groups, such as the Eastern Bakairi, Trumai, Suya, and other Tupi and Carib groups more recently have been partially integrated into the system over time, although none fully adopted the plaza ritual complex of the Xinguanos. The height of this was the “galactic,” from circa A.D. 1250 to 1600, when not only was the system at its largest, most elaborated, and integrated, but it was already a hybrid social formation. It was also defined by the plazacentric ritual complex, but also concentric with an undulating social landscape composed of core groups, peripheral groups, and complete “others.” Such long-term histories do not appear to be uncommon in the region, as many of the authors of Comparative Arawakan Histories suggest for the Arawaks more generally (Hill and Santos-Granero 2002). Particularly important is the continuity central places (Zucchi 2002). In the Upper Xingu, these places are plaza villages, leading back to the origin place of the human line, the home of the maternal grandfather of “the people,” Kuantunga. The people were created by divine conception, but at the hand of Kuantunga’s grandson, Tuangi, who impregnated his mother’s sister,


and was/is both brother (parallel cousin) and father to “the people.” He is a consanguine, most directly, through the chiefly lines whose greatness or weight is a result of their perceived genealogical “height” (depth). This consanguinity, the “divinity” of the chiefs, although not conceived exactly in these terms by Kuikuru is paraded for all to see in the exclusive use (ownership) of jaguar ornaments, certain painted designs, and objects uengïfi wood. It is difficult perhaps for many anthropologists to entirely embrace such a history that appears so hermetically sealed, closed and “traditionbound,” wherein even newcomer groups, with distinctive histories, seem to “bud-off ” relatively unproblematically from a common group of ancestors. This is harder still to believe considering that the Xinguanos are one of Amazonia’s most celebrated cases of “hybridity.” Gow (1995) notes this tendency to make what we know of the present into what is traditional for “others,” without attention to the specific histories that would make it so. Obviously, one way to improve the situation is to make history better and deeper.

Chiefdoms, or What? The southern Amazonian chiefdoms were stratified, regionally integrated, and based upon a settled and highly productive agricultural economy, supplemented by rich aquatic resources. In many places where Arawak peoples still survive, even when populations are quite small, they have social hierarchy, they are regionally integrated, and they are settled. This is often seen as anomalous by many commentators. But if Arawak peoples were predisposed, ecologically, economically, technologically, socially, and symbolically to reside in large, fixed, and regionally integrated villages, with fairly intensive agriculture and focused exploitation of the rich aquatic resources in areas of major rivers, it only makes sense that these peoples were particularly hard hit by contact. This creates a blind spot in regional ethnology, as it is so focused on the past 100–150 years. What happens if we expand our perspectives on native Amazonian points of view to include the majority of these Arawak peoples in 1492, or probably to include the majority of Amazonians at this time? In Amazonia, the problem of the “chiefdom” has become central to ethnology. It poses a big problem for political theorists, generally since it spells out a radical moment in human history, what Flannery (1994) calls the “rank revolution.” Chiefdoms are about power, and it is the organization and flow of power in such chiefly societies that interests us here. The transition from institutional equality (in which differences are based on gender, age, and personal characteristics) to inequality (that class-like form of difference that must, in large part, be tied to birth) is continuous


as well as discontinuous. Hierarchy is about how people define the status and role (identity) of other people within their social formations, but it refers to two related but separate things, an ordered segmentation of society, that may be purely symbolic, and a structure of power. Hierarchy refers specifically to an ideology that divides society into lower and upper social strata, in terms of rights and access to certain material and symbolic things, based in large part on genealogical “substance.” This is not to suggest that there is anything natural or given about it, that is, that such a cultural solution is inevitable given certain conditions, nor is it meant to deny the multidimensional nature of power relations within and across genders and ages in all societies. And, wherever such a hierarchy that divides society into higher and lower ranks exists, it plays a singular role in the definitions of cultural identity and categories, as well as forming a primary dimension of power struggles. As a heuristic device, the concept of chiefdoms draws our attention to certain things, most notably the emergence and nature of the political institution of the chieftaincy (cf. Kopytoff 1999), wherein elite are more directly descended from local ancestors (grandparents and dead chiefs), more closely related to older culture heroes, and ultimately, the divine figures. Divine chiefdoms and kingdoms are at two ends of a continuum of disciplinary power aimed at the “construction” of chiefly or kingly persons as living ancestors or “mortal gods” (Sahlins 1985). Within this loosely defined group there is significant variation in the nature of property and ownership, economic inequality and “tribute,” but all are founded upon the same cultural principle. Chiefdoms, according to Service (1962: 143), who brought greatest currency to the term as an evolutionary category, “are not always demarked by a particular technological innovation which would set them off from tribes and states, but are characterized by their form of organization.” In a similar vein, Descola (1996a: 330) notes that “counter to the over-hasty technical determinism with which evolutionist theories are often imbued, one might postulate that, when society transforms its material base, this is conditioned by a prior mutation of the forms of social organization that serve as the conceptual framework of the material mode of producing.” In other words, what is at issue is political organization and it is therefore critical to consider not only the techno-economic changes—the changes in mode or forces of production—but the changes that occurred in the structure of relations of production, that is, in social and political organization and the practices and ideologies that produce and reproduce them.


“It is the presence of the office of chief that makes a chiefdom,” Service (1962: 150) goes on to say. Feinman (1991: 230) also suggests that: “chiefly formations should be associated with a suprahousehold decision-making structure or relatively permanent positions of leadership [office of the chief],” but not, as he notes, “with the marked internal differentiation of such structures.” The chieftaincy, as used here, refers to a structure, a political ideology, that distinguishes between chiefly and nonchiefly individuals based on an idiom of social hierarchy and organized into ranked social groups. Such polities are structured by “overlapping, layered and linked authority patterns with different factions and institutions competing for power” (Earle 1991: 9; 1997), or as Crumley (1987, 1991, 1995) defines this in terms of the increasingly popular idea of “heterarchy,” which is “a system in which the elements are unranked relative to one another or ranked in a variety of ways depending on conditions.” The Xinguano system certainly had plazas as their centers, and they were hierarchically oriented, but the ability or power of one village to consistently demand or coerce support or action on the part of another is unknown. It is equally plausible that villages engaged in situational alliances and confederated into a larger cohesive political body only under certain conditions, notable among which is warfare. The pertinent question is thus not whether an institutional hierarchy exists wherein persons are ranked according to chiefly genealogies that “collapse” living persons with ancestors of greater and more ancient portent—it does—but how and under what circumstances are existing (embedded/embodied) hierarchical structures put into action? How do names, spaces, objects, and lands get activated and participate in the making of persons, and how do persons, as they move through time, remake names, spaces, objects, and landscape? We might ask what contexts promote the transformation of symbolic representations of power, embodied in chiefly persons, spaces, and properties and reified by title and office (anetï ekugu, tango, hugogó òto, etc.) or rank (anetï), into overt “coercive” power: the ability to forcefully control the actions of others. What are the structural conditions (i.e., what techniques of the body, what institutions, and landscapes) that promote such a discipline? In Amazonia, most discussions of chiefdoms emphasize regional organization, most notably “paramountcy” (Carneiro 1981, 1987, 1998), and the ability of paramount chiefs and villages (“centers”) to extract resources from secondary villages in the form of political coercion and economic exploitation, features of regional polities that seem to emerge relatively late, if at all, in Amazonian trajectories (Roosevelt 1999). This does, however, address the emergence and nature of the sociopolitical structures and


ideologies that, as Descola (1996: 330) notes, must precede such a pronounced consolidation of regional power. Chiefly structures are often seen to emerge directly from shamanism, as specialists in techniques of the supernatural are able to contain cosmic power and position themselves above the rest of society in social and political terms. Warriors, who are able to expand their situational power beyond the period of conflict, are also seen as the root (Carneiro 1995). But whether a shaman, or a warrior stood at this turning point, at this crossroads of political destiny, we will likely never know, but what regional ethnology shows clearly is that shamanism, war leadership, and chiefly leadership are different, although overlapping domains, as is commonly pointed out among Pacific island peoples (e.g., Kirch 1991; Thomas 1994). What particularly interests us here is the structure of the institution, the regulation of the human body that is embodied in the plaza and the general use of space, a discipline rooted in chiefly power, which, in turn, is forged and reproduced in ritual and public affairs. The plaza signifies a remarkable break, a bifurcation, in ancient Amazonia, whereby the riverine peoples somewhere in the areas of the central Amazon, Negro, or Orinoco rivers diverged from the archaic pattern. In other words, this transition is marked by a remarkable technological invention: the plaza village. It radically reoriented bodily discipline, the construction of the body, and the partitioning of space: a “swarming” of new institutions tied to the creation of a new corporeal a discipline, to put it in bold Foucauldian terms. Lathrap (1985) was the only author to directly address this question of plazas and political power in his seminal paper “Jaws” (1985). He concluded that plazas represent a source of power that concentrates cosmic force and diverts it into human hands, and this was the political driving force in early American civilizations. Lathrap and his students understood the circular plaza (i.e., the Bororo plaza village of Lévi-Strauss) as the primitive form that represented more or less pure egalitarianism, which was then elaborated upon and transformed in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere as it was stretched, bent and otherwise deformed to concentrate symbolic or cosmic power. However, the plaza itself, is rather dimly conceived in Lathrap’s discussions, for instance about the power over social labor through public ritual and its basis in genealogy, i.e., control of founding ancestors and ancestor places (tombs). Work in the source area of central Brazil has also expanded upon Lévi-Strauss’s observations in various ways, but it largely focuses on the internal dialectical divisions that the plaza creates (Da Matta 1982; Turner 1979, 1996). A notable shared characteristic of all these groups is the existence of a hereditary elite status and the passage of chiefly office from father to son.


Members of the chiefly elite are marked in ritual by special symbols of office and their exalted status affirmed in chiefly rites of passage, as well as other communal activities and political actions. The chiefly elite are not only marked by special symbols of rank, but have special privilege within the village, including special burial, community built houses, polygyny, and freedom from some labor tasks. In the Upper Xingu, there is evidence of an embryonic tributary system (first fruits and large stores of manioc flour to sponsor chiefly rituals) in historic times insofar as chiefs are able to amass significantly more than others through obligation enabling them to dominate village ceremonial and political life centered on the plaza. What is clear is that the Xinguanos represent exactly one of those societies that Steward and Faron called “theocratic chiefdoms” of the lowland tropics. In Amazonia, according to some authors, it is not protein or calories, but women that are the scarce commodity, as reproducers of genes and alliances and as producers of surplus kin. They are also the conduit for older men to control younger men directly (as sons-in-law) and as producers of local surplus to finance the politically-minded activities of powerful men—the “politics of persons” (see Rival and Whitehead 2001; Rivière 1984; Turner 1979, 1984). Labor is rarely not a scarce commodity, but focusing narrowly on the recent past makes it a more generally important thing in terms of ritual and public works—social labor—beyond the domestic sphere. Political economy always involves control of some kind of labor, but it also involves social and symbolic capital. However, power is not limited to ritual contexts. As noted above, weighty actors, who can accumulate of surplus of symbolic and social resources, can transform these into economic capital, wealth, and control over human labor in the context of a regional network of elite ritual exchange and ceremonial interdependence. Xinguano chiefs not only have greater privilege, but wield considerable authority in community affairs, including the right to sanction sorcery executions, which depending on the social and political size of the person executed could conceivably escalate into aggression between otomo. Chiefs are treated with deference by other community members; in fact some people are “embarrassed” to even come near major chiefs. They are consulted in all aspects related to external affairs and preside over, or “own,” major community rituals, including exclusive rights to receive visitors and send messengers to other villages. They control external communication and commercial relations and have considerable control over the flow of information into the village, as demonstrated by the control over two-way radios in recent years (see Roscoe 1993). In short, chiefs represent the village in all external actions and orchestrate (control) all communal endeavors within their villages. Like the chieftaincy in other southern


Arawak groups, village leadership was hereditary (Block 1980: 78–80; Métraux 1942: 69, 128–129, 165), and the heads of families formed a “kind of aristocracy” who “controlled a class of dependents, whose status was that of serfs.” Following most ethnographic descriptions of village leadership, however, Xinguano leaders, although enshrined in an elaborate ritual system that marks social difference, would seem to be actually quite powerless. For the Kuikuru, specifically, Dole suggests that a chief “exerts no control whatever in political, economic, or ceremonial behavior” and as a result, “formal leadership and authority are so weak among the Kuikuru as scarcely to exist” (Dole 1966: 73; see also 1956/58: 131, 1969: 53). Carneiro (1957) notes that, “[a]s an agency for providing initiative and direction … [,] chieftainship is very weakly developed.” Nonetheless, even chiefs with limited actual power in day-to-day affairs have “a substantial expressive role in rituals, in making public speeches, and in organizing trade sessions” (Basso 1973: 153). The authority of chiefs, in fact, does extend well beyond symbolic functions even when populations are at their lowest, but as Carneiro (1957: 272) suggests that, “the role of the chief is … that of conciliator and advisor rather than aggressive leader or law enforcer.” While it is true that aggressive or “pushy” behavior of any kind is considered distasteful of every adult and particularly chiefs, powerful chiefs very definitely influence and control the actions of others. Coercion involves more than simply physical or economic force. Sometimes this entails taking a very hard stand on issues, although in so doing chiefs exemplify a “rigid protocol of public restraint in handling disputes” (Ireland 1987: 1). In fact, as Ireland (ibid.) points out: important dispute cases are rarely even mentioned in public by the village leader and legal authority. His decision is made known indirectly, through allusion to myths, in gossip coming from his household, and even his silence of critical moments. Although chiefs express their opinions and wishes subtly, chiefs are at the heart of all major decisions in the community, including the emotionally charged and politically weighty issue of sorcery executions. In the Waujá, for instance, every sorcery execution occurring during the tenure of the past village chief (now deceased) was carried out at his express command, even though he vehemently protested against them publicly (Ireland 1986: 1). The overt affability and reserve of leaders in public situations also masks their actual influence. As Carneiro (1957) and Dole (1973) recognized, the power of Kuikuru chiefs in the mid-1900s was


probably artificially low due to depopulation. Carneiro (1994: 208) recounts that “the Kuikuru tell of past chiefs, like Afukaká [the grandfather of the present eté òto], who, because of the strength of his personality, exercised considerably more control of village life than did later chiefs.” We can assume that the “practice of the structure” became less hierarchical over time as nested hierarchies of settlements, integrated by smaller and larger nodes across the region, the galactic clusters, became single villages. Carneiro (1957, 1993) and Dole (1966) note the diminished role of political leaders related to the reduced warfare (i.e., external crises) and depopulation, in the context of the demographic nadir of 1940–1970 (see also Gregor 1990) and the appearance of innumerable nontraditional avenues for prestige and wealth. Depopulation was critical to change, for instance: (1) a reduction in overall population size and organizational scale; (2) an attendant reduction in the political power of anetï Houses and individual anetï ekugu; (3) a greater convergence of the anetão and nonanetï houses, and an occasional lack of appropriate persons, as power changed hands across generations; and (4) a perceived increase in sorcery, influencing the expression and balance of power, notably that between chiefs and shaman, because of threats and accusations of witchcraft. Today, we are in a better position to bracket this artificially low population, reduced by centuries of epidemic disease, including the large scale of past settlements and the remarkable rebound in numbers in recent decades. As external influences within a national political economy have become increasingly important, village leaders have greatly enhanced their influence in recent decades.

Big-Men, Great-Men, Chiefs, and Others The question of whether Xinguano society is a chiefdom or state is the wrong question to ask, as it assumes we already know, a priori, exactly what it is that we need to find out: why “some people weigh a great deal more or less than we would expect, given their height” (Drennan 1995). In one sense, the idea of the “chiefdom” was originally coined to describe the southern Amazon (Carneiro 1981; Oberg 1949: 53, 1955; Steward and Faron 1959); the question is not if chiefdoms existed here, but do we find them (societies of similar form) anywhere else. Similarly, there is no doubt that, in anthropological terms, big-men are “historical facts,” a term applied to specific kind of political leader found in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. Big-men in New Guinea achieve their status during the course of their lives through exemplary achievement in the renowned incremental exchange ceremonies of the region: moka, tee, and others. They have little privilege accorded them in public arenas solely on account


of birth and their system is virtually devoid of ranked “bloodlines.” In other words, this system is the quintessential meritocracy. But, the question is, are there big-men anywhere else? The Baruya of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea and their characteristic political form (presided over by great-men) provide an interesting counterpoint to that of the big-men (Godelier 1986; Strathern and Godelier 1991). The comparison may seem odd, given that big-men and great-men are so “Melanesian,” and the Xinguanos, as I’ve portrayed them here, seem so “Polynesian.” Xinguanos have hereditary chiefs (anetï) and a whole social strata of chiefly individuals orbiting around them (anetão), an episteme that, considered over the long run, is often glossed as “divine” authority, kingly or chiefly power, and is elemental to the Austronesians that dominate the Pacific islands. It is what prompted Oberg (1955), Steward and Faron (1959), and others (see Oliveira 1968) to label this form of governmentality “theocratic chiefdoms” in the southern Amazon, before that concept found its widest currency in Polynesia (Sahlins 1963). Some authors have suggested that a Xinguano leader is somewhat similar to a big-man, as they are “aggrandizers,” who achieve status through their personal skill and charisma, and assume greater cultural continuity not with the southern Amazonian chiefdoms to the west (Pareci, Bauré, Terena/Guana) but to the Gê (Menget 1993). But, if this is so, were preColumbian leaders, simply “bigger-men?” Big-men achieve their status through “a series of acts which elevate a person above the common herd and attract about him a coterie of loyal, lesser men” (Sahlins 1963: 289) and they do this in the context of major competitive exchange ceremonies, the likes of which are unknown in Amazonia. Big-men create and participate in an “elite network of exchanges,” but these networks are not “hardened into hereditary chiefship, aristocratic lineages, or any rigid social stratification” (Strathern 1987: 259). And, herein lies the difference, since, like the Austronesian world of eastern Melanesia and Polynesia, there is hereditary hierarchy, as seen in the aristocratic kin groups, and a stratification of society into chiefs and nonchiefs; in other words the political institution of the chieftaincy is visible. The Baruya great-man societies and the Xinguano peoples share certain features that make the comparison interesting, at least vis-à-vis big-man models in Oceania and head-man models in Amazonia. First, we see the presence of diverse institutionalized sources of prestige and political power. Second, both men and women achieve power, with the caveat, following Godelier (1986: x) that:


women who are widely regarded as “greater” than others, and, the men confidently admit, greater even than many of themselves. What is unthinkable is the idea that any woman could be as great as the great men … However, what I find most fascinating and what I think resonates most strongly with the Xinguano case (and, I should add, the Austronesian world) is the degree to which there is exclusive control over critical elements of social and symbolic reproduction held by a hereditary “elite” group, the “kwaimatnie-owners.” In speaking of “hereditary status and interlineage hierarchies,” opposed to the status of warriors, shaman, and hunters that is “there for the taking, Godelier (1986: 81–99), describes just such exclusivity: “although celebrated by all, the initiate ceremony is not performed by all, for only the men belonging to certain lineages owning a kwaimatnie, a sacred object, have the right to celebrate these rites” (lbid.: 81). Whether it is objects, places, names, or other valuables that are controlled, it is this exclusive control over “sacred” things and ancestors, that, in my opinion, lies at the root of Xinguano political power. The “owners” of exclusive valuables control structures and places and names, esoteric knowledge, and the ritual apparatus of their transmission. The ear-piercing ceremony, tiponhï, is enacted when the son of a “true” chief (anetï ekugu) reaches the appropriate age. The adolescent anetï is positioned in the center of a line of stools in front of the men’s house (kuakutu), and he is painted with special facial markings and wears special adornments (e.g., the sun diadem feather headdress and oilape): he stands out very obviously from his peers. Like his fellow initiates (mostly younger and graded in rank from center outward), he is subjected to the same piercing that marks him as a member of society. But, unlike his cohorts (pierced with wooden spikes), his ears are pierced with jaguar bone, the unmistakable emblem of chiefs. At this moment, the anetï initiate is publicly exalted before all, including those guest chiefs and their sons invited from other villages; he is recognized not only as anetï, which was already taken for granted, but as a potential anetï ekugu. In other words, he is marked by society to rise above it. In the Xinguano case the ritual expression of this transmission is dramatic and monumental. It fits most descriptions of the inchoate state where cosmology and genealogy (and not control over means of production or economic administration) create the basic divisions (Flannery 1994). In the Xingu, the “coronations” and funerals of state, the puberty initiations and mortuary feasts of chiefly persons are the most obvious institutional context for activating this authority, although public works and affairs and even the daily disciplines of social bodies that are tied to


these persons are political. The mere presence of a powerful anetï ekugu, the person of the chief—commonly makes a social setting take on a ritualized character. Jaguar skin tiaras and claw necklaces, sun diadems, oilape necklaces, uengïfi wood, and the kuarup designs come to stand for or are substituted for chiefliness and ancestors—these are the exclusive things of chiefly persons. Chiefly stools (e.g., such as the one bearing the image of a two-headed vulture) are also activated activated in specific contexts to stand for chiefs. Xinguano chiefs must maintain a public following, which they do through progressively singular acts of efficacy and legitimacy. Over time, as local support is galvanized chiefs increasingly command elite networks of communication, exchange, and interaction with other chiefs and outsiders in general. In the Upper Xingu, however, the attainment of leadership positions and political power is conditioned by hereditary chieftaincy (anetï ekugu) and membership in socially exclusive (aristocratic or elite) chiefly lines, the anetão. In contemporary villages, there are other means of achieving prestige and political power, including shamanism and entrepreneurialism among non-anetï individuals, but these individuals rarely emerge as true village chiefs (anetï ekugu). Furthermore, while named chiefs such as the eté òto and the hugogó òto are typically distributed between two or more strong anetï lineages, ascension to positions of anetï ekugu or tango is dependent on direct lineal relatedness (son/daughter or grandson/daughter) to previous anetï ekugu or tango. Chiefly office exists regardless of situational context (in the named positions eté òto and hugogó òto), as does the hereditary rank of chiefs (anetï). What varies is the degree to which anetï can (a) control the actions of other individuals and (b) pass their eminence or influence on to their anetï offspring and establish an anetï lineage that dominates others (as classic hereditary power). The Xinguano system like that of the Baruya is the paradigmatic opposite of the “big-man” model of production and accumulation of wealth (pigs, shells, and other things) as the basis of primary political power, wherein persons are crystallized, defended, and perpetuated in the major competitive exchanges. Are Xinguano leaders then “great-persons,” persons who make themselves and are simultaneously made, within a complex hierarchical system of roles? The Baruya, in fact, represent one of the smallest of a series of “rank conscious” societies in Oceania like those of Amazonia, where rank and achievement are critical to political power (Chernela 1993; Hill 1993; C. Hugh-Jones 1979). The point is that these structures of power need not be treated categorically, tied directly to demographic history or techno-economic conditions. Instead, they afford social alternatives that are inherent in many social formations, and


separate not only great-men and chiefs, as opposed to big-men, but hereditary hierarchy as opposed to more purely “heterarchical” forms of power (i.e., unranked or situationally reordered categories), patrimonialism and populism, and monarchy and meritocracy. The political structures that employ both centralized decision-making (central plazas) and a formal ranking of kin groups (anetï chiefly lines vs. kamaga nonchiefly lines) have existed throughout much, if not all, of the known Upper Xingu cultural sequence. However, the expression of this formal hierarchy in terms of the actual ability of certain individuals to control the actions or efforts of others (i.e., greater centralization of political power) has fluctuated considerably from time to time, depending on external conditions. This flexible and dynamic pattern is reminiscent of what Anderson (1994) calls “cycling,” insofar as he relates cycling to the situationally variable enactment of political structures as seen, for instance, in Leach’s (1954) now classic recognition of the cyclical movement between states of relative equality (gumlao) and hierarchy (gumsa) among the highland Burmese Kachin. The Baruya case, which is virtually as small and “simple” as any in the world today, is important as an example of a structure that is common in societies slightly larger in the Austronesian world, for example, or even much larger in the theater states, galactic polities, and divine monarchies spread widely across the globe in 1492 (Mann 1986). It relates to a type of social structure considered typical of “middle-range” societies, the heroic mode of lineage formation. In many respects, the conical clan in canonical form, as a nonexogamous corporate cognatic descent group, well defines the Xinguano otomo, particularly with respect to the galactic cluster of the pre-Columbian past. The characteristics of the conical clan, following Knight (1990: 4; paraphrasing Kirchhoff 1959), are: (1) orientation of the clan to a core group of noble lineage, the aristoi, (2) elaborated genealogies [vis. commoners] as the means of validating rank within the structure, (3) an overall “cone shape” linking the entire society to a single legendary ancestor, (4) the principle of genealogical nearness to the common ancestor of the group [founder] as the basis for the different standing of every member of the society, (5) absence of exogamy, (6) a tendency for close endogamy among the aristoi, and (7) a tendency for ambilineal descent reckoning, particularly among the nobility as a means of enhancing personal status. In terms of basic structure, however, there is every reason to assume continuity in the basic form or structure of power and in the techniques


and disciplines of the body. In other words, the basic political organization of contemporary Xinguano villages, based on an institutional hierarchy of elite lines of chiefly rank (“Houses”) and factional rivalry between them over the support (labor, tribute, alliance) of nonchiefly houses, was similar to that of prehistoric villages. The variable expression of an underlying hierarchical political structure in the Upper Xingu has been related not only to societal scale, but fluctuated dramatically in response to specific external forces. Today we might say that the house is the little otomo in the otomo, or community, and, in the past the community was but a part of the larger polity, the galactic cluster and regional Xinguano nation. In the village, space corresponds to these divisions, where the major Houses are located at the north and south and the two or three minor Houses at other prominent points (at east, west, adjacent to road entries). Throughout Xinguano culture history, as with other southern Amazon Arawaks, social hierarchy, regionality, and settled farmer-fisher economies were established by initial Arawak populations. The Xinguano galactic sociopolitical organization was tied together by a unifying hierarchical concept of centricity. Centers became interscalar or interdimensional “others” in this cascading sequence familiar in many “heroic societies:” god:ancestor : ancestor:chief : head:house : man:woman : father:child : and chief:children. The lines of ancestral power of departed chiefs and culture heroes, the founders of the local group, are linked to more ancient ancestors, and ultimately to the creator beings, Sun and Moon. Thus, while equality and hierarchy exist in all social formations, the Upper Xingu is one of those cases where hierarchical social ranking is the dominant dimension in the structural distribution of power and authority. It is the birth of difference, the type of internal differentiation that Giddens (1984) alludes to with his idea of a “structural contradiction,” the classlike division of society, but it is also the birth of a discipline of power, tied to the human body, space, and landscape, ultimately leading up to the development of the fullblown “theater state” and broad regional “prestige-goods” economies.

The Structural Contradiction and the Theater State Thinking about Xinguano history from the perspective of the past brings certain aspects of culture into greater relief. Ethnographers have long recognized that Xinguano groups are better viewed as a regional social formation rather than as discrete communities, that they are rather settled, with fairly fixed economies, and that they have a rather hierarchical social organization—a “chiefly” status (e.g., Carneiro 1961; Galvão 1953; LéviStrauss 1948). What archaeologists and other culture historians might


therefore “see,” better at least than authorities whose point of view is too narrowly focused on the present (“sociological photography,” as Braudel (1980: 36) called this tendency), are these large historical personages, diaspora, region, and the longue durée. Only through serious violence to Xinguano history can models suggesting strong internal (structural or ideological) or external (ecological) mechanisms against social hierarchy, regionality, or sedentism be sustained. In other words, Xinguano social hierarchy and its objectification in symbolic and economic capital do not merely represent a slightly complex variation on a generalized (“traditional”) “tropical forest” model, which as described over the past one hundred years or so (the demographic nadir) is characterized by small-scale, egalitarian, and autonomous villages. Considered historically, it is clear that Xinguano society as we see it today is an egalitarian “twist” of a fundamentally hierarchical model, the historical low (in demographic and political economic terms) of a genuinely Amazonian complex society. Inequality and techniques of power exist in all social formations, but a critical transition, the “rank revolution,” or “leap to a stage where lineages are ‘ranked’ with regard to each other, and men from birth are of ‘chiefly’ or ‘commoner’ descent regardless of their own individual capabilities,” is widely recognized (Flannery 1972: 409, 1994). This threshold, which is marked by the emergence of institutional inequality, or the birth of disciplinary power. It is not only a moment in world historical and regional development, but also a condition of local systems of knowledge creating an alterity played out within the context of regional political economies: the long noted upland/riverine dichotomy. Settled, hierarchical, and regional populations are juxtaposed against predatory, often more mobile, autonomous, and heterarchical groups. The problem in Amazonia is not the evolutionary problem of origins, but the structural problem of presences and correspondences: why are some of the many features considered typical of the state—economic surplus, literacy, and cities—absent from Amazonia? The alter-egos of such a large historical personage as the Arawak diaspora would be other major diaspora, such as the Tupi-Guarani, as Viveiros de Castro (1992) describes. This suggests that this alterity is not only the outcome of regional social dynamics, but of deep cultural dispositions, particular cultural histories. Actually, the alterity breaks into a tripartite schema Tupi-Gê-Arawak in a theater of second millennium regional social interaction (cf. Petesch 1993). Parenthetically, we might describe this as a continuum from a condition of existential to structural contradiction, following Giddens’s (1984) terms (see below): the Tupians,


and “predatory” societies, in general, represent the former; the Arawaks represent the latter (strongly influenced by the structural division of society); and the Gê fall between the two. To further complicate this history, in the regional context of the Upper Xingu, diverse groups were drawn into the orbit of Xinguano pluralism, the confluence of a cultural aesthetic of accommodation and the historical realities (specific geopolitical contingencies) of colonialism. In more the more local terms of the Upper Xingu, social dynamics must be understood with regard to distinctive, although interpenetrating, scales within Native American world systems: (1) relations within galactic clusters or communities (otomo); (2) between clusters or otomo of Xinguano peoples (kuge, or putaka in Arawak); and (3) between Xinguano peoples and outsiders, “wild indians” (ngikogo, or in Arawak meteitsi) and whitemen (kajaipa, the Waujá say, kagaiha in Kuikuru, or, in Tupi, from which the word originates, caraiba) after about the 1750s. Interestingly, Yale Ferguson (1991) recognizes similar domains of ancient Greek “peer-polity, center-periphery, and non-Greek interaction.” Interaction occured in terms of the broad theater of power of the southern Amazonian peripheries, bounded by the crossroads of Amazonia, the highlands of central Brazil and southeastern Bolivia, and the seasonally inundated plains of the Gran Chaco, Pantanal, and Llanos de Mojos. Since circa 1400, at least, there have always been groups living on the margins of the Xingu who are both enemies and affines and trade partners of Xinguanos, “others.” The tendency is for these groups to either (a) adopt the Xinguano ways, established by Arawak peoples but adopted and transformed by Carib, Kamayura, and Aueti; (b) “glance” off the Xinguano regional society, never being drawn into its primary social orbit, the Upper Xingu basin (Suya); or (3) enter and exit, which has happened in most cases in recent years as populations and general cultural well-being rebounds (Trumai, Bakairi). In this sense, we might say that Xinguano society has always been in a state-of-becoming, but it is important to remember the remarkable condition of internal self-organization, the inner-fixity of Xinguano culture even in the face of radical changes in the social composition and scale of the system. In this context, it is important to note that issues of alterity and mimesis, in Amazonia at least, have another critical facet, which Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2001) calls “potential affinity” or more generally described by the non-Cartesian “animistic” views of nature described by Descola (1996a, 1996b), an Amerindian perspectivism: the presence in the world/universe of diverse biologically nonhuman others that are conceived as persons and enter into social relations with humans through myth, ritual, dreaming, and shamanic action, among other things.


Like actual social alterity, potential others come in three forms: affines, consanguines, and other nonsocial others (witches, ambivalent or malevolent spirits). All these relations are mediated in one way or another by the plaza, which represents all the social, economic, political, cartographic, cosmological principles that go into making of the social person of the “community.” This is not to say that consanguinity necessary must precede affinity, but that both are characteristic of dawn time peoples, even if the divine grandmother was a gift: through the mother’s line there is consanguinity to the forest, the forest chiefs, to the uengïfi and yucucu lines; and through marriage, arboreal ancestors were wedded with animal affines to produce the divine twins, who through a logic of consanguinity of Xinguanos is the creator (father), as well as half-brother (parallel cousin), to humans. Descola (2001: 108) notes that “Amazonian cultures are cosmocentric rather than sociocentric.” “They grant less centrality,” he goes on, “to the ritual and political reproduction of the human social order—including the domination of men over women than to the continuous efficiency of their relations with the multiple actors of the universe.” Here we see that Xinguano peoples also differ from the average Amazonian society in having characteristics that are seen as uncommon if not implausible in Amazonia: settled, regional social formations, social hierarchy, bride-price (alongside bride-service), and “representationalism,” things that stand for persons. Ornaments, body painting, housing, spatial orientations, and persons can stand for other persons, which largely underpins the holographic quality of the Xinguano chieftaincy and chiefs as persons. Chiefs do accumulate objects and substances, as well as knowledge, that stand for relationships with other humans. A pattern of equivalence in purely economic transactions and reciprocity and of conversion or fungibility between distinctive valuables, economic support, social labor, and symbolic “trappings,” all directed according to the form of the chieftaincy: what is often crudely glossed as chiefly redistribution. In the Xinguano example, like the general model of Amazonian cosmo-vision, humans live in parity with nature, but what is important is the recognition that both cosmos and world are divided into side-to-side into male centers and female peripheries, into moieties and age-grades but also vertically into two basic worlds: chiefs and nonchiefs. Ecology is important, but the fact that there are similar complexes, which include social hierarchy, ceremonial elaboration, and regional integration, found in societies of small scale (e.g., the Arawak/Tucano system of the northwest Amazon)(Chernela 1993; C.Hugh-Jones 1979), as well as big, dense settled regions without them (Fausto 1992). This suggests that other factors, conveniently glossed as cultural, social, and ritual, are at work. The Xinguanos represent an important


variant of sociality and “potentiality” within an Amerindian perspectivism in the degree to which sociological factors color cultural life, and the collapsing of heaven and earth, divinitas and societas. The variant was widespread, I believe, in 1492 and has become increasingly rarer, just as many aspects of the conviviality, predatory ontology, and small and “simple-ness” of Amazonian “minimalist” societies, recognized over the past fifty to one hundred years, erodes way to the inexorable draw of “globalization”: it is both social condition and anthropological mood (Strathern 1999). Here we might extend our Oceanian analogy one step further, to expand upon the idea that genealogy, objectification, spatiality (partitioning), and fungibility operate differently in Xinguano political economies than in those of many other parts of Amazonia, and thus Polynesia (i.e., the Austronesian diaspora) or the humid tropics of Africa might be more apropos comparators, rather than Melanesia. The Xinguano chiefly rites of passage recreate the world, the first egitse or kuarup, the chiefs of old, when these lines of power are actualized and the ancestors, the spirits of recently deceased chiefs are called back, one last time. It is precisely one of those types of social formations, where things and persons come to stand, symbolically, for something else and are thus the basis of the cosmological justification or “authentication” of sociopolitical relations. in the kuarup idols, the oilape and sun diadems, the jaguar body, the wood of the divine mother, objects that stand for the chief, who stands for the otomo, who stands for the people, who stand for all of earth and the cosmos. “Replacing the ancestors,” is how Foster (1995) describes a similar case in New Ireland of this uniquely Austronesian feature of “Near Oceania” (“Melanesia”). Following Wagner’s (1991: 173) description of the Usen Barok (New Ireland): Arutam feasts, held in the space defined by the convergence of feasting and burial functions, are restricted to salup, men formally defined as already deceased by having undergone their mortuary feasts while still alive. They are already ancestors. In “remote” Oceania this ritual took on a larger historical capacity, and “living ancestors” were amplified to the level of gods (more ancient ancestors) (Sahlins 1985). Such a complex is uniquely Arawak in Amazonia, largely shared by Arawaks and those who have been strongly influenced or “acculturated” by them: plaza-centric rituals and other initiations, the ceremonial structures, the sacred flute ceremonies, the myriad symbols of chiefliness, painted on the


body, encoded in onamastics and chiefly diglossia and discourse, and objectified or embodied—depending upon the scale of the persons at issue—in houses, space, geography (a topic that screams for comparative ethnology in Amazonia). This pattern in Amazonia and Oceania can be framed in relation to Giddens’s (1984: 193) general distinction of what he calls the existential and structural contradictions. Historically one does seem to often lead to the other, but the two can also be viewed as two elements, or strategies, in all social systems, as well as two distinctive logics. In this sense, the former refers to “an elemental aspect of human existence in relation to nature or the material world” and the latter to “the constitutive features of human societies.” Within the context of existential contradiction, there is: “antagonism of opposites at the very heart of the human condition … in such decentered systems structural contradiction is nonexistent. Existential contradiction traces out the contours of the natural world,” or in the terminology of Amazonian ethnology, the alterity of ontological “others” (Ibid.: 195). For Giddens, the structural contradiction is “signaled by the rise of the state, which in turn is associated above all with the formation of cities” (Ibid.: 195–196), taking most notably feudal Europe as his model, the city (urban-folk distinction) becomes centrally important: “The city, which only ever develops in conjunction with the elaboration of new forms of information storage, above all writing, is the container or ‘crucible of power’ upon which the formation of class-divided societies depends.” The city, as container of power, refers to the creation and maintenance of difference through partitioning, segregration, centralization, exclusion, although there is great variation in what is being partitioned, centralized, and controlled. In the Upper Xingu a good to great portion of the resources being trafficked are surely symbolic or, in other words, they have some affinity to Geertz’s imagery of the theater state. Ritual action provides the foundation of political power and from it stems what little exploitation, first fruits, fish, manioc, almost always collected for ritual or at least ritualized actions, usually in homage to ancestors or in sociocosmic communitas with diverse mirror world spirits and other varieties of ancestors. Otherwise, power is concentrated only to the degree that it is seen as congruent with public opinion, for works projects, prestige building, and community property, but this too is couched in idioms of kinship with diverse “others” in this “ritual phase of political economy.” In a similar way, Xinguanos, like most native American civilizations, lacked writing, but did not lack the literary effect, the evolution of symbolic simplicity that is part and parcel of statehood (Yoffee 2001).


They, too, had the means for complicated information storage, centralization, and exclusion, a partitioning of knowledge that was critical in the type of time-space distanciation needed to order large, networked communities (cf. Roscoe 1993). The Upper Xingu provides a particularly clear example of how human bodies domesticate the landscape and space in an Amazonian complex society and, in so doing, how space is transformed into a technology of power. Class-divided society is marked by some “disembedding” of traditions of kinship, politics, and economics, all being subsumed in the discourse of the state, while “traditional practices and kinship relations, even tribal identifications, remain very prominent.” Parenthetically, Ferguson’s [1991] discussion of ancient Greece, Chang’s (1986) of early China, or recent treatments of the Maya (Gillespie 2000) are revealing here. When we expand our discussions to non-Western peoples, Giddens’s (1984) weak spot, like that of Marx, Foucault and many others, is that the idea of what constitutes “class-like” changes is based on the European feudal model of political coercion and economic exploitation, particularly in terms of the relevance of cities, or what Giddens calls the “city-countryside” dichotomy. This is why the viewpoint of historical anthropology is critical to understand the political theory of classical human civilization, and its transformations—within core and marginal areas—during the past five hundred years. Nonetheless, while more diffuse than a feudal “central place” model might suggest, in terms of economic centralization and outright political coercion, there still are centers. Political power, although couched in ritual, is no less centralized. First and foremost this represents a fundamental transition in the nature of structural power, pace (Wolf 1999), that is, in how it is constructed, legitimized, and expressed. Among contemporary social theorists, Anthony Giddens has had much to say about this transition, notably his discussion of “Structure, System, and Social Reproduction,” chapter four in The Constitution of Society (1984). He has, as noted earlier, set his sights rather high, and late, missing the mark of this transformation, both in terms of society and history. Leaving aside, for now, the issues of cities, writing, economic surplus, among other things that he, following Western philosophical orthodoxy, considers as harbingers of the State: classdivided societies. He has provided us with a useful terminology that pinpoints important elements of the transition. The theater state need not be, or not only be, couched in evolutionary terms, but also in terms of the sociosymbolic alternatives in and between interacting collectivities within regional political economies: it is a fractal person, which defines bodies of diverse size, even, as in the case of the Inka


or Romans, ones virtually as large as whole continents. Geertz (1980: 24) notes that the theater state is an extended field of highly dissimilar political ties, thickening into nodes of varying size and strength at strategic points on the landscape and then thinning out again to connect, in a marvelously convolute way, virtually everything with everything else. The theater state is based upon these same basic principles, perhaps slightly more elaborated, because of historical circumstances, cultural predispositions, and scalar differences, as the Xinguano symbolic economy of power, which focuses also on ritual, or the spectacle, as the primary site through which social difference is publically created and reproduced. Like the theater state, “political power inhered less in property than in people,” that is, in the accumulation of symbolic valuables (including objects like gold, cloth, or shell), not on subsistence surplus. The critical imagery Geertz (1980: 13) develops for the theater state suggests that: Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. … Behind this, to us, strangely reversed relationship between the substance and the trappings of rule lies a general conception of the nature and basis of sovereignty that, merely for simplicity, we may call the doctrine of the exemplary center. This is the theory that the court-and-capital is at once a microcosm of the supernatural order—“an image of … the universe on a smaller scale”—and the material embodiment of the state. In sum, this “political economy of grandeur,” as described above for the Xingu, is an Amazonian variant of a very general variety of historical transformations that we might call the “symbolic economy of power,” within the midst of other cultural “economies” in the region (Viveiros de Castro 1996), or simply, following Steward and others (Ford 1969), the “theocratic chiefdom.” This imagery resonates strongly with Tambiah’s (1985: 252) notion of the galactic polity, wherein the design of polity codes “in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features,” particularly, according to a cascading series of relationships generally composed by two elements: a “core” and a “container,” made up of “both simple and complex satellites arranged around a center.” Geertz (1980: 21) continues: The “international” politics of between region combat were directly superimposed upon even fused with, the ‘domestic’ politics of


within region rivalry [or between otomo and within otomo]; they were acted out … through a broken network of alliance and opposition spreading out irregularly over the entire landscape. Politics differed in scale from the base of the system to its apex, but not in nature. There is a social logic that underlies Upper Xingu polity that in many respects conforms to what Sahlins (1985) calls the “heroic mode of lineage production,” based on genealogical “pruning.” The genealogy of the group becomes isomorphic with that of the chiefs, the descendants of “heroes.” In Xinguano society, like most chiefly societies, these heroes are ancestors, specifically the immediate ancestors of living chiefs. The living chiefs are thus a pivot or prism between the living world of the people and the mirror world of all the human ancestors. In other words, historical kinship or genealogy extends through them to the rest of society: “commoners” trace their ancestry through the living chiefs, who also serve as “living ancestors,” who in turn are connected to chiefly histories extending back to the dawn time. If these large, centralized polities seem strikingly familiar to what we might expect to find in Bali, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific, to “Asian societies,” generally only further turns Marx and others on their heads, insofar as the “Asiatic mode of production,” once seen as an aberrant social form because of its often massive size juxtaposed against an apparent “traditionalism,” a cultural pattern that “carries so much of its past forward,” is no longer the anomalous but typical: continuity as much as rupture defines the transition from societas to statehood (Chang 1989). The objective or archaeological methodology, although historical, is, in a very crude sense, Foucauldian, in that it does not aim, or not primarily, at least, to illuminate the “distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin” (1972: 140), in this case what caused the origin of a structure that might be called the “structural contradiction.” Instead, it attempts to describe the history of a discourse object, the nature of a certain type of discipline. Discipline “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space,” so that “each individual has his own place.” In other words, discipline—the bodily expression of a discourse—is created through “partitioning,” the construction and maintenance of enclosures. What I have attempted to do here is trace out the major dimensions of a very early form of discipline, an early form of panopticism, that goes deep into the roots of lowland history, perhaps back four thousand years or more and shares many of the same problems and features that we might gloss as minor civilizations, chiefdoms or kingdoms, theater states, the ritual phase of political economy, political economies of grandeur, or galactic polities,


as well as as kingly bodies. It is empires or chiefs all the way down, or up as the case may be, and this entirely symbolic or cultural dimension of persons, as they press and contort themselves against the world, as they reproduce and refit themselves, is what I mean by the ecology of power. In the specific local context, Xinguanos are people committed to settled village life, guided by bodily disciplines that are part and parcel of a fully agricultural economy. They are in a constant oscillation between domesticating “nature” and being domesticated by it. This is also an ecology of power, which also involves a complicated process of domination and resistance of different types of persons. Not only are the people tied to a very long history of plant domestication, in this case bitter manioc, as is true of Amazonians, in general, but as manioc people, banking over 80 percent of their subsistence output in it (Carneiro 983). They are continuously and actively at work managing their lands and rebuilding their houses and settlements, and how could it be otherwise in a tropical forest environment that creeps back into gardens, paths, and even villages if not carefully tended. They do not chip away at the high forest for the short-term satisfaction of a new garden, but instead to open areas for long-term management, areas that are “owned” as gardens and orchards, or simply recorporated in the extraordinarily complex mosaic of the Xinguano countryside. It is an impossibility, however, to conceive of a Xinguano landscape without forest mixed with the highly “domesticated” fields, gardens, orchards and the diverse constructions associated with roads, settlements and wetlands: “the people” could not survive socially, symbolically or economically without forest. The point is that Xinguanos are uniquely situated in and adapted to their landscapes, as well as carriers of deep Amazonian histories, the descendants of very ancient persons, ancestors. Historical anthropology in the tropical lowlands over the past several decades suggests that diverse Amazonian peoples were linked across the entire region into vast social networks, as is now well known in North America, Africa, Oceania, and across the non-Western world, at least before European colonialism truncated native world systems and strictly indigenous histories. These multicentric regional systems can be, in turn, “ranked” according to overall size and politico-economic scale, with Cahokia, the North American city, for instance, or consolidated Hawai’i or the “empire” of Tonga, as “peaks” in these broad social landscapes. These centers, particularly Cahokia, articulated with other contemporary theaters of power in the northern borderlands of an Early Postclassic Mesoamerica world system; Chaco, with a remarkably similar history, was on its northwestern border.


The ancient capital of the Tapajós, at Santarem, may have been equally as large as Cahokia (in the tens of thousands), or at least large enough to qualify as an American city, which following Flannery (1994) would be five thousand or more (see Roosevelt 1999). The mound complexes on Marajó certainly rival those of many Mississippian centers (e.g., Moundville, Etowah); and the vast extent of the Polychrome horizon, spreading wealth goods and symbolic language, are ample evidence of a broad “prestige goods” economy in late prehistoric lowland South America. For instance, the dense populations along the Amazon, in northern South America and the Caribbean, and in the southern Amazon and adjacent areas are fruitfully seen in this manner, as theater states and galactic polities. Most of the river between circa 1540 and 1650, the language through which potentates of neighboring polities communicated in rivalrous exchanges, which included, undoubtedly food stuffs, “medicinal” plants, wooden benches, feathers, ornaments, people also circulated, as did substance, but perhaps most importantly were the knowledge and identities represented in the exchanges, representing existing relations, reproducing them, and creating others. At present we can only speculate on the larger theaters of power and world systems that linked societies in the southern Amazon in late prehistoric times, as we await more detailed studies of the early colonial history and archaeology of indigenous groups across this area. Amazonia was not insulated from

Fig. 10.1 Afukaká Kuikuru on stool with author (1994).


the ebb and flow of these regimes of power, these macroscopic theaters of power neither before or after 1492. The central concern of a properly human ecology is therefore historical, equally symbolic, social, and political, as well as techno-economic and demographic. In the Upper Xingu, this involves, and always has, operation of power in local contexts of chiefly rivalry, in regional contexts of social alterity and warfare, and supraregional contexts of imperialiam, nationalism, and globalization: it is the confluence of these diverse factors, only visible through situated historical analysis, that constitutes the subject matter of an ecology of power. The (overly) anthropological view presented here of a very complicated indigenous history is merely a start, a perspective on an ecology of power over the past one thousand years emerging from long-term, in-depth engagement with indigenous Xinguano people, the Kuikuru (Figure 10.1), and the archaeology of their ancestors. In closing, I reiterate that my aim is as much to provoke questions as provide conclusive answers, to incite dialogue about the deep history of a place history that has for too long gone little noticed: Amazonia.

Notes Chapter 1 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

The Upper Xingu is the common name for the region, which corresponds to the southern half, more or less, of the present-day indigenous reserve, Parque Indígena do Xingu (PIX); I refer to the region as the Upper Xingu or Xingu (following convention in Brazil and among Xinguanos to refer to the area as Alto Xingu or Xingu) to describe the geological basin formed by the Xingu River headwaters (a basin of erosion and sedimentation along the northern flanks of the central Brazil plateau as it descends northward into the Amazon basin). The people who have always traditionally occupied it are called Xinguanos here. Goldman (1963, 1970) defines a gradient of “rank consciousness” in minimally to moderately hierarchical societies based on his analysis of Eastern Tukano (Cubeo) and Arawak groups in the northwest Amazon as well as the hierarchical societies of Polynesia and the Northwest Coast of North America, where he calls this organization the “status lineage.” In the NW Amazon, hierarchy is most developed (and likely original) in Arawak group (see Chernela 1993). Although the term “chiefdom” achieved its greatest popularity and generality vis-à-vis its application to Polynesia by Service (1962) and Sahlins (1958), the terms was borrowed from their teacher Julian Steward (Steward and Faron 1959), who had in turn taken it from Oberg (1955) to refer to minimal to moderately hierarchical societies in lowland South America. Oberg had introduced the term in his translation of Sanchez Labrador (1910–1917: 255) regarding the Mbayá/Guaná (Oberg 1949: 52). Thus, the term chiefdom is a specific characterization of the hierarchical societies of the southern Amazon and adjacent areas. See, for example, Carneiro 1970, 1979; Clastres 1987; Erickson 1999, 2000, 2001; Denevan 1966, 1976; Lathrap 1970; Lathrap et al. 1985; Meggers 1996; Roosevelt 1980. Here we might note Dumont’s (1970) recognition that in India and elsewhere, equality and hierarchy exist in all social formations. This point is also made by Lévi-Strauss’s (1961, 1963) recognition of dialectic and hierarchical features in plaza villages. Morená is a cosmological center, a regional axis mundi for Xinguano peoples. As discussed in Chapter 7, the site was the home of the protohuman grandfather of the creator twins, Sun and Moon, who returned there from their natal village, the home of their father, the jaguar chief, after sending him to the sky world. The Sun gave not only his substance to his children, the people (kuge) or Xinguanos, but also the unique chiefly rites of passage, before he and his brother transformed themselves into their present-day form of the sun and moon. Along the Xingu River proper, below Morená, Xinguano occupations extended at least as far north as Diauarum (50 km north of the confluence), although this area has been dominated by other peoples from the late twentieth century forward, including Tupian peoples, including diverse Tupi-Guarani (Kajabi, Manitsaua, Kamayura), Juruna, and Mundurucu peoples, as well as other peoples, including Trumai, Carib (Ikpeng, formerly Txicão), and Gê (Suyá) peoples. Historically diverse Carib (Yaruma, Ikpeng, Bakairi, and proto-historic

349

350 • Notes

8.

9.

10.

Xinguano Caribs), and Gê (Suyá and Kayapó) groups have lived at the margins of the Upper Xingu basin to the east, south, and west. The northern margins of the Brazilian highlands (see Figure 1.2, lower right) are generally composed of sandstone, argillite, various metamorphic rocks (associated with the Paraguai fold), including quarzite/silicified sandstone, and magmatic rocks (e.g., rhyolite), crystal deposits (quartz and precious gems), and placer deposits of gold. The idea of divine kingly power is quite old and widely discussed in anthropology. Early discussions include Frazer (1922), and Hocart (1936), among others, Heusch (1979), Sahlins (1985), Geertz (1980), and Earle (1997) provide important recent discussions and, from a more general point of view, Foucault (1977), Giddens (1984), and Poggi (2001). After the German ethnologists, including major works not only by Steinen (1886, 1894) but also Meyer (1897), Schmidt (190–204), and Hintermann (1925), sporadic ethnographic reports by Naronha (1924), Petrullo (1932), and Quain (Murphy and Quain 1955) appeared, culminating in a major ethnographic initiative under the auspices of the Museu Nacional. The latter included fieldwork by Carneiro, Dole, Galvao, and Lima, among others. Since the 1960s, various ethnographic monographs on the Xingu have appeared, for example, Basso (1973), Bastos (1979), Gregor (1977), Agostinho (1972, 1974) and Viveiros de Castro (1977), as well as numerous articles, graduate theses, and unpublished papers and reports. Two recent edited volumes Karl von den Steinen: Um Século de Antropologia no Alto Xingu (Coelho 1993) and Os Povos Indígenas do Alto Xingu: História e Cultura (Franchetto and Heckenberger 2001) provide a more complete history of research in the area.

Chapter 2 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Agostinho 1993; Becquelin 1993; Carneiro 1957; Dole 1961/62. At a recent conference on Arawak peoples (Hill and Santos-Granero 2001), the idea of “diaspora” was hotly debated—whether the distribution should simply be called movements, dispersal, radiation, or something else, but my reason for coining the term, in part influenced by discussions of Austronesian peoples (Bellwood 1995; Kirch and Green 2001), is that diaspora has a uniquely cultural and historical connotation. This differs somewhat from some definitions of diaspora, that is, the Greek, Jewish or African diaspora, in that there is no necessary attachment to a conscious or recognized identity. Indeed, it is surprising, given Lathrap’s widely recognized command of South American prehistory and ethnology, that he made no mention of Schmidt’s doctoral thesis “The Arawak” and his depiction of the diaspora and its cultural specificity. Hastorf 2002. To be part of the Arawak diaspora does not simply mean to be an Arawak speaker, as in the case of the Upper Xingu, where groups of diverse languages have been incorporated into the regional cultural system adopting basic Xinguano ways. The system was, however, culturally founded by the Arawak immigrants. For example, the Kuikuru, the Xinguano community with whom I worked are Carib speakers but virtually identical to the Arawaks. Other examples include: Mbya-Guana, Chiriguano, Mojos, Pareci-Kabischi. Likewise in other areas, some groups gave up their language but seem to have retained much of their basic cultural pattern (e.g., Kokama/Omagua). Here we might note that many, if not most, Arawak regional social formations included other “ethnic” groups, that is, they were pluralistic, including other languages. By diaspora I refer not to an essence or “spirit” carried across the lowlands, but instead a historical process that involves the transmission of cultural memory, including a variety of discrete but linked domains, such as material culture, bodily dispositions, spoken language, spatial patterns, and landscape (but direct and sustained interaction throughout the diaspora, nor self-identification with, or even recognition of it is necessary). It is important to emphasize here, at least for non-Amazonianist readers, that the vast majority of Amazonian languages do not pertain the principal diasporas: Arawak, Tupi-Guarani, Carib, and Gê, although even the most “isolated” languages were socially entangled. Lathrap did not emphasize the connection between plazas and Arawaks, but more generally with proto-Arawak, thus including the Guajiro and others (now considered correlated),

Notes • 351

7. 8.

and emphasized a link to the northern South American coast (the shell middens of the “formative”), and thus overlooked the “Arawak” specificity in important junctures of his argument. The critical influence on Lathrap’s thinking was Lévi-Strauss, particularly with respect to a tropical forest cosmology and the orientation and meaning of central plaza villages, elaborated upon in Chapter 9. An alternative model sees the western or southwestern Amazon as the point of origin, see Noble 1965, Lathrap 1970, and, notably, Schmidt’s (1917) suggestion of a link between Tiwanaku and Arawaks. Many of those that do not live in such villages, still have an idea of them (in myth), such as in parts of western Amazonia (Gow, personal communication), or tell of a time when they did live in plaza villages, such as parts of the northwest Amazon (Hugh-Jones, personal communication).

Chapter 3 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

Notably, Wüst and colleagues (Prous 1992; Wüst 1990; Wüst and Barreto 1999) have recognized numerous rockshelter sites loosely affiliated with the Itaparica tradition, as well as open air and rockshelter sites associated with the Una and Uru ceramic traditions, in areas to the south of to the Upper Xingu. This assertion must be made with the caveat that nowhere in Amazonia is the archaeology particularly well known, vis-à-vis many world areas, such as temperate Europe, North America, or Mesoamerica. See Prous 1992 and Kipnis 1998 for an overview of central Brazil. Kamukuaka is an important sacred site in Xinguano oral history and, together with sacred sites located on the middle Culuene (more or less parallel, in latitude, with Kamukuaka), represents the southern limits of Xinguano territory, as defined by contemporary communities. This also has been related to the “Incised-Punctate Tradition,” as defined by Meggers and Evans (see Prous 1992), but this is erroneous. Simóes (1967) defined two phases; the Ipavu phase for sites in the Upper Xingu (headwater) basin and the Diauarum Phase for sites on the Xingu River proper. The two “phases” are apparently points within a geographic and temporal continuum and not two distinctive “phases,” but may represent slightly divergent complexes of the same basic cultural pattern, Arawak in origin. They may correspond to prehistoric ancestors of the Waujá/Mehinaku/ Kustena and those of the Yawalapiti, a southern and northern branch of the Western Complex, respectively. At the site of Diauarum (MT-AX-01), a ditch similar to ones encountered at sites in the Upper Xingu basin (south of the confluence) was reported. The size and configuration of this ditch is not known. It is probable that this ditch also represents a humanmade earthwork like those investigated in the present study and not a natural feature as Simões (1967) suggested for all such features in the broad region. Sites downstream from the confluence tend to be situated adjacent to the actual floodplain of the Xingu River, whereas those upstream from the confluence are generally located some distance from the major river channels. In terms of basic settlement pattern, that is the tendency for village sites to be situated within terra firme forest adjacent to large permanent watersources, there is also similarity between the two areas. This pattern relates to local geography; upland terra firme is separated from the river channel by wide relict floodplains throughout much of the Upper Xingu basin, while below the confluence high ground (terra firme) are directly adjacent to the main river. Where the terra firme lies adjacent to the locations of the major stream courses, village sites are common, both above and below the confluence (note FX-08, FX-07, FX-17, and the contemporary Tanguro, Morená and Afukuri villages). Recently there was debate about whether a chief should be buried in a river bank village on the culuene. Fieldwork in the Upper Xingu was conducted between January and December 1993, August 1994, October 1995, August 1996, July 1999, August 2000, July through September 2002, June through August of 2003, and June through August of 2004. As of this writing, the author has spent some twenty months in residence in the Kuikuru community. A full archaeological monograph on these investigations is in progress.

352 • Notes 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

“Tradition” as used here refers to a temporal and spatial entity—a discrete continuity—that can be broken into separate periods, “phases” based on changes in the “ethnic” composition, settlement patterns, technology, and discrete historical (oral and written) events. Phase, as used here, is not meant to imply a community or “tribe,” as sometimes used in an ethnographic context (cf. Meggers 1992a: 198) but, instead, implies a generalized spatiotemporal entity corresponding more or less to a regional archaeological culture. Ethnological evidence clearly indicates that, while sharing certain cultural traits with adjacent groups, for example, circular plaza villages and “men’s houses,” such as those of the northern Gê, Bororo, Mundurucu, and Tapirapé, the Xinguano pattern overall correlates most clearly with other Arawak groups in the southern peripheries of Amazonia. These complexes more closely approximate “archaeological cultures,” sharing essentially identical features of material culture. Kuikuru terms are used throughout the text. As discussed in text the root of the system is Arawak, but the Kuikuru and other groups (Carib and Tupian speakers) retain their distinctive languages. All indigenous Xinguano terms are italicized. The basic procedure used at Nokugu and Kuhikugu was to establish a coordinate (X/Y) grid encompassing the entire site, after the rough size and configuration of the site was assessed through extensive walkover. At Nokugu and Kuhikugu this involved clearing five-meterswide parallel transect lines every fifty meters; at Kuhikugu, perpendicular lines were also cleared. These transects were the basis of most mapping, excavation, and surface collection at the two sites. Along each transect, 2.0 m² surface collection units were established, from which all surface remains were collected according to four 1.0 m² subunits. Soil/vegetation data was collected on most units. Itseke means a monstrous and magical spirit—a dawn time being. Whales, whirlwinds, and giant anacondas are itseke, as are spirits that only appear in their true forms in shamanistic and masking rituals (see Viveiros de Castro 1996, 1998, for a general discussion). Nokugu (called “Kuikuru Village” by Simões 1972 and “Lahatua” by Becquelin 1993) is designated MT-FX-06 in the Brazilian site recording system. Terra firme refers to non-inundated areas that, aside from anthropogenic impacts, are always medium to high forest. Significantly more in-depth excavations and GPS mapping in 2002, using a Trimble XRS with Omnistar satellite real-time service, largely confirm these earlier results (Heckenberger et al. 2003). Strata descriptions are as follows: stratum I: preoccupation (sterile) deposit tentatively dated to pre-A.D. 900 or before; stratum II: intact occupation layers, c. AD 900—A.D. 1400 ± 50, consisting of dark earth, with discrete charcoal rich lenses and one or more thin layers of soil distinctive in color and texture and recognized in horizontal excavation; stratum III: reddish overburden sediment from ditch construction c. A.D. 14001–450 ± 50; stratum IV: postditch construction cultural fill of variable color and texture, with clear micro-stratigraphic layers within two macro-stratigraphic units recognized in the profile; the middle of stratum IVA is dated to A.D. 1590; the top of stratum IVB is dated to AD 1770; stratum V: upper humic layer intermixed with cultural remains likely attributable to stratum IVB. In seven of these, excavations extended into sterile sediments (non-terra preta/natural reddish soil) representing the base of the cultural deposits; five units were left unfinished. All eleven units were excavated in 10 cm artificial levels within discernable natural or cultural stratigraphy. Excavated sediments were screened through 6.4 mm mesh screens from all levels of each unit, except in the case of two deep units (units 9 and 10) where the lower eight levels (levels 21–29) were not screened (because of time constraints and a lack of assistants during the final stages when the excavation levels were too deep to permit easy soil removal or exit from the excavation trench). Excavation of the eleven meter trench yielded 2,548 ceramic fragments and the fragments of 43 lithic artifacts. Excavation of trenches 2–10 in 2002-2003, involved unscreened excavations of 1x10m trench and controlled and screened excavation of 0.5x1.0m control units abutting the trench wall in one or more places. From these, a total of 3,139 ceramics and 34 lithics were recovered. Eighty-three ceramics and 4 metal artifacts were recovered in association with the three Kuikuru villages that lie outside of the ditches (Lahatua I and II and Lamakuka).

Notes • 353 20.

21.

The cultural stratigraphy of the unit can be divided into two broad units: (1) the over burden from road/mound contruction (stratum III), and (2) underlying intact occupation surfaces (stratum II). Within the intact portions of the profile, several distinct layers were apparent corresponding to one or more thin layers of reddish-brown compact sediment within the otherwise homogenous brown-dark brown terra preta sediment. The one clear microstratigraphic unit, horizontally apparent across the unit, was used to sub-divide the intact terra preta macro-stratum into an upper (IIA) and lower (IIB) sections. Artifacts (931 ceramic fragments and 7 lithic fragments) were recovered from throughout the test unit, but artifacts were concentrated in intact stratum II.

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

I use Basso’s apt term “dawn time,” which she uses to describe the Kalapalo; see particularly 1985, 1995; also Franchetto 2001. There are five etepe at this locale: Atïka (c. 1870–1880), Kuhikugu (1880–1920), Lahatua (1920–1950), Lamakuka (1950–1956) and Lahatua II (1956–1961). The Kuikuru oral history and written accounts disagree on this point: the Kuikuru say Kalusi visited them, whereas Hermann Meyer (1897) is the first to record the village. Their name, Kuikuru (first written Guikutl), began to appear in written documents, government records, and inscribed itself in the collective memory of the Kuikuru themselves. Whites, or “branco” in Portuguese, is a gloss for all non-Indians; the Kuikuru term is kagaiha. Parenthetically, the Upper Xingu is somewhat unique in the southern Amazon (in Amazonia, generally) in its diversity of large bodies of water, including: deep river pools, such as Ahanitahagu; natural lakes, like Kuhikugu/Lamakuka; and the shallow lakes, ponds, and dammed reservoirs adjacent to the Ipatse stream sites, from Healugihïtï to Séhu, which become little more than huge mud-flats in the height of the dry season, the burning season (late July to early October). I listen most attentively for historical “hints” in the lengthly narratives told to me in Portuguese, for specific persons and places. The complex correlations between narratives, landscape, and varied “persons” defy simple topology: myth/history. I leave as more comprehensive analysis to listeners far more skilled than I (e.g., Basso 1985, 1988, 1995; Franchetto 1986, 1992, 1993). The Kuikuru village of Ipatse, with about 300–350 persons in between 1993–2002, is the largest historical known village; the Yawalapiti in the late 1940s had been reduced to about a dozen primary members (Lima 1951). When a village or road is opened, debris is pushed and piled up at the margins forming low curbs. Significantly, the Xinguanos do not distinguish between these two groups as original inhabitants, although the Tupian Kamayura and Aueti are considered “newcomers.” Most ritual terms and songs are in Arawak still today, even though linguistic pluralism is a hallmark of contemporary Xinguano society (Aihkenvald 1999; Franchetto 2001). Numerous Carib, Tupi, and even Gê groups have more open or metamorphic settlement patterns, particularly when considered over the long term. Intact site stratigraphy is capped in each case with disturbed deposits that represent the construction fill (“overburden”) deposited over intact stratigraphy. The internal consistency of the radiocarbon dates within each of these excavations demonstrate that dark earth, in general, are accretional deposits built up over centuries of continuous (or near-continuous) occupations. making the final plaza/road configuration. Particularly, as Tambiah notes, Geertz’s (1980) idea of the “theater state.” The roads do not correspond to true N, S, E, and W, but the precise angles and cruciform pattern demonstrate that the patterns are based in conceptions of cardinality. Comparing the clearly residential areas of a site like Nokugu, over 20-25 ha, to those of the modern village, about 2 ha, for 300 persons; some Gê villages are also quite large, at least 1,000-1,500 persons (Nimuendajú 1967; Wüst 1994). The maximum size of the late prehistoric villages, about 40 to 50 ha, was estimated based on the distribution of domestic ceramic remains at Nokugu and Kuhikugu, restricted to areas within but not outside the outermost ditches. Domestic remains in these villages are

354 • Notes

17. 18.

19.

interspersed with areas without anthropogenic soils or artifacts, thus the actual extent of residential activities in larger sites is estimated at about 20-25 ha. Two radiocarbon dates from ditch 2 and 10 suggest the earthworks involved reworking older structures, perhaps dating to two thousand to fifteen hundred years ago; ditch 1, the outermost ditch, is clearly a single, late construction episode related to village expansion. The exact extent of the Xinguano ancient regime is not well known in terms of the number and distribution of contemporary villages of “the people,” minimally including the Western Complex and their distinctive cultural “cousins,” the Eastern Complex. It is possible to make an educated guess, based on the presumed correlation between these peoples and material culture and spatial organization. The northern limits of Xinguano territory, as known through Xinguano oral history, relates to early Yawalapiti occupations (pre-1750) along the Xingu River between Diauarum and Morená. Diagnostic ceramics of the Xinguano tradition [Ipavu Phase] have been identified at Diauarum and other nearby sites, as have earthworks, also diagnostic of late prehistoric (c. 1400) Western Complex villages in the basin itself. Diagnostic ceramics of the Xinguano tradition [Ipavu Phase] have been identified at Diauarum and other nearby sites, as have earthworks, also diagnostic of late prehistoric (c. 1400) Western Complex villages in the basin itself. Although distinctive, the linquistic proximity of the two Upper Xingu Arawak languages, vis à vis other Arawak languages (Medeiros 1993; Payne 1991), suggests a fairly recent divergence, perhaps not long after initial Arawakan occupation of the Upper Xingu. Circular earthworks, including ditch/mounds 80-100 meters in diameter and 8-10 meters wide, are reported for the upper Purus drainage in eastern Acré, Brazil (Dias and Carvalho 1988; Prous 1991: 464). These works may represent defended houses because, in one instance, two large circular earthworks were encountered side by side. Circular “ring” mounds have also been reported from the upper Madeira River region; these earthworks, which range up to 100 meters in diameter, 1.5 meters in height, and 1.0 meter wide, are similar to Eastern Complex circular mounds in the Upper Xingu insofar as they apparently lack associated ditches (Prous 1991:463). Small circular palisades surrounding two adjacent houses are known ethnographically from Rondônia/northwestern Mato Grosso, Brazil (Lévi-Strauss 1948b: 301). A complex of earthworks, including a circular ditch (2.75 km long, roughly 10–12 meters in width and over a meter deep) enclosing an occupation area some 500 meters across and small mound, were investigated at Tumi Chucua on the lower Beni River (Arnold and Pretoll 1988). Based on cross-dated ceramics, occupation of the site is roughly attributed to the period from circa AD 780–1500, although the ditches themselves remain undated (Ibid.: 462). On the middle to upper Guaporé River, extensive ditches enclosing late prehistoric to early historic occupation sites have been identified archaeologically, including one to three concentric semi-circular ditches, which extend from several hundred meters to over one kilometer and enclose occupation areas of less than five to over 20 ha. and the ditches extend from several hundred meters to over one kilometer (Miller 1983:127–128, 193, 247). Two radiocarbon dates suggest a late occupation of these sites, circa A.D. 1350–1600 (Miller 1983: 189, 254–255). Nordenskiöld (1919: 230–232) also mentions ditch/palisade defenses around villages on the middle Guaporé River at Matucare (Matequá). In the intervening area between the upper-middle Guaporé and lower Beni sites, in the northern peripheries of the Llanos de Mojos, village defensive works including moats and palisades are well known ethnohistorically. Only recently has systematic archaeological study of these earthworks been undertaken. Although unreported, preliminary investigations have revealed extensive circular earthworks in the northwestern Llanos de Mojos (C. Erickson, personal communication, 1994). In the adjacent central Llanos de Mojos, a complex of pre-Hispanic earthworks, including “raised fields, canals, causeways, reservoirs, oriented lakes, surface alignments features, and mounded occupation sites,” are known archaeologically (Erickson 1995: 71; 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b; see Denevan 1966; Dougherty and Callandra 1981). The substantial body of archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from the central Llanos de Mojos indicates that defensive features (e.g., ditch/mound constructions, palisades, etc.) are not widely distributed in this area (Métraux 1942; Denevan 1966). There is, however, considerable ethnohistoric evidence of warfare. Along the upper Mamoré River, for instance, there were pronounced buffer zones between distinctive Mojos groups. Within

Notes • 355

20.

a discrete linguistic group, five or six settlements were frequently clustered within a few kilometers (a league), whereas “between one nation and another … there are six, ten, five, or ten [sic] leagues [25–50 km]” (Block 1980: 57–58; citing early Jesuit explorers [c. 1592]). Warfare thoughout much of the area apparently did not take place between villages of the same language group (Block 1980: 83). The prevalence of “Tupi-Guarani” ceramics and the domination of the area by Tupian groups in historic times (Brochado 1984; Hilbert 1958; Magalhães 1994; Miller 1992b; Peroto 1992; Simões et al. 1973; Susnik 1975:83).

Chapter 5 1. 2.

Parts of this original text are translated in Steinen 1966: 517 [1894: 425]. An imagery borrowed from Schleiser 1976.

1.

As noted above, I distinguish between regional societies, which require formalized supralocal interaction to socially and symbolically reproduce the local group, like the Xingu with its core intercommunity rituals, the chiefly rites-of-passages, and regional social systems, which are typically engaged in supralocal social relations, but can reproduce the group without them. See Carneiro 1995 for a fuller discussion. Other “sweets” include the paste, or “butter,” of piquí processing (tuma), and diverse fruits, such as goiaba (tahoti kuenga), mangaba (catuba), caju (cagutaha-hugahigu), palm fruits, including tucum (caiha), used for fruit, rind, and as blunt arrow point; a smaller tucum (asataha), also for fruit, rind, and arrow points; macauba (cuhugu) for fruit; inaba (nauga) for fruit; anaja (acua) for thatch; as well as buriti (ekingi, tati, haka), used for fruit and as perhaps the most important industrial plant. Piquí (imbe) also comes in several varieties (imbecay, cagamukugu, tagiki, suokogu, tungui), and is used also for nuts (minga). Other delicacies include special fish, harvested in season, such as huke (armored catfish) and other fish, hugoi, agapiso, ogupulu, which are collected in fairly large quantities using the kundu trap in shallow (dry-season) ponds (a trap also shared by other southern Arawak peoples, like fish weirs and other apparatus). Carneiro (1978) felt that they developed in situ from earlier hunting populations. Miararrei is an underwater (lake) site where many ritual ceramics have been found, including a variety of pieces with affinities to the “Incised-Punctate” tradition, namely the Konduri sub-tradition. Heckenberger and Toney (n.d.), describe the contemporary manufacturing process, as witnessed among the Waujá by the author in 1993 (see Figure 6.12). Two possible varieties of cauíxi were apparent: one a tiny, translucent brown/smokycolored and sickle-shaped variety and the other more clear and straight, although also miniscule. This distinction was not incorporated into the analysis awaiting confirmation that they are, in fact, different species and not within the range of variability of one. Two different species of sponge were observed by the author in the Upper Xingu, but only one is used by contemporary potters. Cauíxi, in either of the two varieties, cannot be seen with the naked eye and temper was analyzed with a 10–25 power binocular microscope. The two varieties correspond roughly to caraipé A, which is a tiny whitish sickleshaped variety, and caraipé B, a grey to whitish, fibrous variety that is larger than caraipé A, as defined elsewhere in Central Brazil (Wüst 1990, personal communication, 1994). Although the Kuikuru have never produced pottery in recent times and contemporary Waujá potters do not apparently use caraipé anymore, one Kuikuru chief was able to show me two varieties of trees from which potters in his “grandfather’s” day produced temper (whether these correspond to the two varieties used prehistorically is not known). Other tempering materials, including carbonized organic material, grog (crushed pottery), and possibly some grit (crushed rock and/or sand) were also used. Small voids or “pock-marks,” apparent on the surface of some sherds, represent the decomposition of an organic tempering material. Some of these voids preserve evidence of organic fibers and

Chapter 6

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

356 • Notes

8.

may also represent tree bark, either incompletely burned fragments of caraipé B, or some other tree species. Grog was rarely used in small quantities in some of the larger pot forms and pot supports. Grit is also present in virtually all the sherds analyzed and varies in density from very little to about 20 percent or more of the paste. Most grit fragments are heavily worn, or rounded, indicating that much or all of the grit inclusions are unintentional or natural inclusions in the clay or tempering material. A total of 8,935 ceramic sherds, pertaining to all chronological periods, were recovered and processed (washed, numbered, and catalogued) in 1994 at the Museu Antropológico (Universidade Federal de Goiás, in Goiânia). Of this total artifact assemblage, 1,135 sherds (primarily rims and bases) securely attributable to the Ipavu Phase were brought to the Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh) where the author conducted a more thorough attribute analysis from 1994 to 1995. Attribute analysis included analysis of rim and base form and thickness, vessel diameter (including oral, mid-body and basal diameters, as available), temper, surface treatment and decoration and, when possible, indicators of method of manufacturing and/or firing were recorded. Based primarily on this analysis and a more cursory analysis of additional wall, base and appendage fragments, several primary Ipavu Phase forms have been defined.

Chapter 7 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Today the Kamayura at Lake Ipavu, the Kalapalo at Aiha, Matipu at Angahïnga, and Nafuqua at Magiapei, look over large (5–10 km) lakes, one of the rarest physiographic features of the entire Amazon. There is much variation in this and other stories: see Basso 1973: 10–12, 1984; Carneiro 1989; and Villas Boas 1973: 69–83 for more detailed versions. This story reflects the diversity of others, including spirits, which in addition to tree people (i-oto) also include personages or “spirit people” of water, rock, and, of course, the numerous fish and animals that are “activated” in ritual performances. The form of Quantunga’s mother is uncertain, but I have heard that she may be a tree also. Quantunga uses “clothes” of humans and is i-oto, whereas tunga-oto has the form of a person, yet uses the clothes of a jaguar; in the dawn time when humans could still interact directly with itseke. Viveiros de Castro (1998: 482) notes that “it is not so much that the body is clothing, but rather that the clothing is a body,” to “activate the powers of another body.” The close correspondence between the location of archaeological sites of the late prehistoric or early protohistoric periods and known historic Xinguano settlements attests to this fact. Since at least A.D. 1000, local populations have situated their villages in the same select areas across the landscape. After moving to Kuhikugu, where they first occupied the village of Atïka (c. 1860–1870), the Kuikuru settled in the village of Kuhikugu (1870–1915), positioned directly over the plaza of the ancient village site Note: After 1910–1920, the Kuikuru occupied three villages just north of the ancient village site, actually abutting the northern ditches: Lahatua I (1915–1951); Lamakuka (1951–1955/56); and Lahatua II (1956–1961). After 1961 and the establishment of the PIX boundaries, north of Kuhikugu, the Kuikuru moved about 25 km north to Ipatse Lake. Here they first occupied the site of Ahanitahagu, adjacent to Nokugu and just slightly north of a nineteenth century Waujá village. They occupied the place for roughly ten years (1962–1973), then moved east (3 km) adjacent to an old splinter village at Lake Ipatse, where they live today. In the Kuikuru case, for example, the village was moved to expand the plaza and accommodate the larger population that had grown from about 140 in 1974 (Kuikuru I) to over 200 in 1983 (Kuikuru II). In the current Yawalapiti village, houses in disrepair were reconstructed outside of the current house ring in anticipation of a larger plaza in the future. I know of absolutely no cases (out of over 25 village sites occupied between 1850–present observed on the ground) in which a modern village plaza is placed through the middle of another (older but still recent) village plaza, although it is common for the domestic areas of subsequent villages to overlap (i.e., several houses on one side of the village move to the opposite side of their preexisting trash middens/house gardens).

Notes • 357 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

The pattern of village movement every 10–50 years in recent times within a restricted area (about 5–10 km²) creates a patchy distribution of black-earth insofar as only domestic areas and trash middens become black earth, whereas plaza areas do not. This pattern contrasts with ancient villages, where plaza(s) were fixed over many generations, at least, from circa A.D. 1250–1300 until they were abandoned circa A.D. 1600 or later. Differential distributions of egepe appear in late prehistoric sites, generally characterized by concentric zones of increasingly less pronounced alteration as one moves from the plaza to the village margins. Such dark earth formation and distribution is not different in kind from that of the contemporary ring villages, but simply an amplification of the pattern. Egepe develop in association with domestic activities within villages and are, invariably, associated with domestic archaeological remains (most notably ceramics, egeho). Black earth formation across villages is quite variable. Disposal areas, most notably backyard trash middens, are the most obvious location of soil alteration (note). Open plaza areas are the areas of least soil alteration and, even in the case of the immense long-term sites of Nokugu and Kuhikugu, plaza and road areas are more or less “clear” of both artifacts and egepe. The circular house at Kuguhi also shows this pattern well. A “clean” (red earth) house and traffic areas are evident and a major black earth trash dump is adjacent to the house, also with a high absolute phosphate value (sum of phosphate fractions = 389 ppm). Two Tupian groups and other peripheral Xinguano groups are considered somewhat foreign, nikogo insono, which they relate to their more recently “becoming people” (Coelho 2001). Atï lies just south of Nokugu, and here they lived with several Matipu families. This group, later living at Ipatse/Itsuva, moved back with the Kuikuru at Lahatua in 1948 when their population declined to 16 individuals living in one house (Lima 1950: 163). Fissions are common in all Xinguano groups. A splinter chiefly group of Kamayura moved away from the mother village in the early 1990s, because of a rivalry with the principal chief and his eldest son. A splinter group of Kalapalo split from the mother village, intiated by a young chief. The Matipu split from their village, which after the early 1960s was mixed with remaining Nafuqua. While I was in the Kuikuru village in 1993, the primary Kuikuru chief considered moving his “family” because of several deaths in his family (attributed to sorcery). Had this happened, it would have amounted to a village split, since at least six full households and likely half or more of the village population, if not the majority, would have likely followed him. The possible sites considered and discussed were Lahatua and Tafununu.

Chapter 8 1.

2.

3. 4.

The mean house size is about twenty-two by eleven meters (242 m²). Over the past fifty years, the mean number of house occupants ranges from twelve to sixteen (Carneiro 1957; Heckenberger 1996). A simple regression analysis of the floor-size of houses (m²) and the number of occupants, conducted on the 23 “true” houses in the Kuikuru village in 1994, produced a significant (p = 0.032) but weak (r² = 0.202) relationship between house floor size and number of occupants. Based on this analysis, we can say that about 20% of the variability in house floor size is explained by the number of occupants. When six houses burned down in September 1995, for instance, several temporary houses were constructed and houses throughout the village became more cramped as a result. The loss also created a shortage of materials and labor for house construction in the following dry season, which directly affect the types and sizes of houses that were built in 1996. The largest house I measured in the Upper Xingu was the nearly fifty-meter-long chief ’s house in the Kalapalo village of Aifa (the tajïfe initiated in the Kuikuru was to be exactly fifty meters in length, although this project was cancelled due to the deaths of two of the chief ’s sons in 1993). Editorial comment by Strathern and Godelier (1991) on Wagner’s (1991) article. Depopulation is an important factor (Basso 1973: 100–102, 1984; Dole 1969: 110; see Dole 1964, 1983/84, 1984; Gregor 1977: 316). Dole (1957, 1969, 1984) and Carneiro (1994: 207) suggest that categories in egos and descending generations have been collapsed, perhaps related to demographic disruption, a “bifurcate generational” system, that is an Iroquoian

358 • Notes

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

system with generational (Hawaiian) kin terms in egos and descending generations (see Gregor 1977: 277). In the Kuikuru village, there was one such marriage—first cross-cousin marriage within chiefly families—and another planned in 1993, both linking the family of the primary chief with his most powerful rival, his brother-in-law. Households 5 and 6, for example, are closely linked since the household heads are brothers; likewise, the elder heads of households 21 and 22 are brothers (both are quite old and not actively involved in political activity, but their sons, sons-in-law, and grandsons are). The ritual playing of sacred flutes was used to inaugurate a newly built or refurbished weir among the Enauene Naue (Saluma-Pareci). Yãkwa (1995), Video nas Aldeias, Sao Paulo, Brazil. A young man who had recently built a large house needed help to place a support beam. A group of some 15 men helped him retrieve and install the beam. The following day he sponsored a ceremonial dance of the unduhe, the festival of a fish spirit of which he was oto (“owner”). As with all such intravillage ceremonies, he was required to distribute ala (fish gruel) and imbene, a mixture of thin beijú, piquí fruit and water, to all the men in the village plaza. In another example, falling ill was believed to have been affected by a particular spirit, a spirit associated with the spear-throwing ceremony. The family of the woman asked the ifagaka oto to perform this ceremony in attenuated form because it is normally an intervillage ceremony. The following day one of her sons (the tijope) organized a large fishing trip to provide fish for payment. At least ten individuals were considered prominent anetï by the then hugogó òto in 1993, insofar as these individuals “assist” in external affairs (intertribal rituals and non-Indian relations), including the two younger brothers of the hugogó òto, his brother-in-law, and his nephew. At a recent gathering, when the charter of the Associação Índigena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu (AIKAX) was made, the second younger brother of the present eté òto, (the eldest son of the primary chiefly line of the old secondary Kuikuru village) nominated his oldest halfbrother, the current eté òto, as honorary president, his younger half-brother as president, he nominated his brother in law (House B leader) as vice president, his younger full brother as secretary, and his nephew as treasurer (son of his next older half-brother, the president of AIKAX). The village hierarchy is thus perfectly reproduced. The recognition of her eldest son in the tiponhï ear-piercing ritual was one of the first occasions that his father, who inherits his chiefliness principally through his Mehinaku mother and his father’s weak claims to Kalapalo chiefly lines, was established as an “owner” of a chiefly ritual. The kuarup, when the chiefs come to pay their respects to other deceased chiefs (affines), is a replication, once again spread over two-dimensional space, of cosmogeny, the originators, their mourners (consanguines), and their affines. In 1974, over 50 individuals, constituting several households, moved from the Kuikuru to the Yawalapiti due to sorcery accusations (Carneiro 1994). Several other families have moved out of the village since that time, two of whom have returned. The Karajá also might be analyzed this way, but here it is interesting to note that the Karajá and Bororo are among the most historically divergent of the macro-Gê (culturally intermediate between Arawak and Gê). The Bororo add other historical question (considering the eastern and western Bororo) the eastern Bororo only historically amalgamated into the clans described ethnographically, in an ethnogenetic event at Arigao Bororo, circa 1720, in the context of Luso-Brazilian expansion and the Brazilian “gold rush” (Wüst 1994). This bespeaks a regional system that is “condensed” into a single village or social system, as we also see in the Xinguano case. The Xinguano case is more clear, however.

Chapter 9 1.

During the period that I first lived with the Kuikuru, seven burials took place, including that of a primary chief (tango) and that of the heir of the primary village chief. Primary chiefs are buried by linking two deep shafts with a tunnel and placing the body in a hammock hung from trunks placed in each. Anetï mugu, heirs to primary chiefs, are placed in a single shaft sitting on a stool with full sun-like diadem and ornamentation. Commoners are wrapped in a hammock and placed in a single bell-shaped shaft.

Notes • 359 2.

3.

The tajïfe include many special features and decorations, tajïfe-ingatïhïgi, include the extended roots of the center roof trunk, called tuinha (orelho) or sehandangago, general designs on the gable, ingno, ïneigu, and the designs painted on panels inside the front doors: hototoiatagu (divided), ngnehutagu (ngne = animal; divided); adjuetupongu (adjuey = tortoise carapace; not divided). Also, as noted in Chapter 8, the clay sculptures (snake, toad, jaguar) are singular expressions of tajïfe distinctiveness.) Although there is no established system of measurement, Kuikuru constructions generally involve the reproduction of measurement. This is respresented in net-making, when a reed or buriti fiber is also bent or broken to create an expedient measuring device. Painted hatched chevrons, painted on the body, artwork and inscribed on the rims of ceramic pots, notably the fish-cooking pot atange, is called atangetamingugu, literally “design on pot”, likewise show consistency, including numbers in repeated and systematic denominations of 5, 10, and 20. Here we might note that oto is the first finger of the right hand, it is the right generally, and it is used to refer to the human “owner” or “master” of things, another symbolic iteration of the fractal person.

Chapter 10 1.

These ideas, I reiterate, are inspired by diverse authors, most notably the ideas of Max Schmidt (1914, 1917) about the Arawak, Donald Lathrap (1970, 1977) about the dynamics of settled riverine peoples in Amazonia, and the robust discussions of precisely these same issues within other tropical diaspora, for example, among Niger-Congo (Bantu) languages in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Vansina 1990), and particularly, Oceanic Austronesian in the Pacific (e.g., Bellwood 1995; Kirch 1984). My optimism that deep culture histories— temporalities—are present is buttressed by the ongoing dialogue emerging from FrancoBrazilian structuralism, notably including the nonriverine diaspora in Amazonia. This is represented in the present case by the Southern Amazonian Tupi-Guarani (Viveiros de Castro 1984, 1992) and Gê (Maybury-Lewis).

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Orthography and Glossary of Indigenous Terms Kuikuru Orthography1 Vowels i = high, front unrounded e = middle, front unrounded a = low, central unrounded ï = high, back-central unrounded (written as ü in Franchetto 2003a) u = high, back o = middle, back Consonants stops p = bilabial devoiced [b] t = alveolar devoiced [d] ts = affricate alveolar devoiced k = velar devoiced j = palatal voiced fricatives s = apicoalveolar h = glottal fricative (in free variation with f) liquid l = lateral g = uvular tap (sometimes perceived as a velar voiced fricative or velar voiced stop) 1

generally following Franchetto 1986, 2003a

385

386 • Orthography and Glossary of Indigenous Terms

nasals m = bilabial n = apicoalveolar ñ = palatal ng = dorsovelar

Kuikuru Words Used in Text2 Basic Words ahukugu = large manioc cooking and processing, storage, and water carrying pot ahukugu-gugu = small ahukugu akiña = a narrative or legend alato = manioc griddle alogi = a master of all trades ama = road aminga = day after tomorrow (aminga lapene refers to the next day) ana = corn ande = today anetão = the entire class of anetï persons, in each community or in general. anetï = chiefly person anetï ekugu = true chief, including all people who have achieved all the primary symbols of chiefly office including knowledge of the anetï intagíñu and have a general mandate of the community as one of the primary sitting chiefs, either the eté òto or the hugogó òto. anetï indisï = daughter of an anetï ekugu anetï insoño = chiefly assistant or weakly legitimate anetï anetï intagíñu = chief ’s formal language, known and used by the one or two anetï ekugu in each village in public ritualized discourses. anetï mugu = son of an anetï ekugu angãu = thin crossbars used to attach sapé grass thatch to house asã = deer ataka = 1. fish weir; 2. conical traps that are placed in them that are made of; 3. saplings also called ataca. atanga = long double-tubed bamboo flutes (note: the Kuikuru have five major flutes, including two sacred flutes, the wooden kagutu and bamboo kuluta, both of which cannot be seen by women and are stored in the kuakutu (flute or men’s house); several other varieties of flutes are made of bamboo (sangakagi). 2

for a more complete list, see Franchetto n.d.

Orthography and Glossary of Indigenous Terms • 387

atange = round or oval fish cooking pot atange-kusïgï = small atangi (kusego is common to denote smaller form of, living things commonly use nsoño) cagaiha = whiteperson (adapted from Tupi-Guarani caraíba) egiho = archaeological ceramics or just broken pottery sherds egepe = dark earth soils or the general environment where it is found, notably marked by certain trees, other plants, and some animals; also used to refer to localized corn gardens, which only grows well on such soils. egiñoto = singer egitilopïgï = house front door egitsï = the major annual intercommunity ceremony conducted to commemorate recently deceased chiefs (also known as kuarup); the major chiefly life-crisis ritual, along with boys puberty initiation (tiponhï). ehu = canoe (also uagi-puhisï to describe tree bark canoe or i-akipïgï to describe a wooden dugout canoe) ekege = jaguar eku = type of wood that was used to make two of the proto-human dolls by Quantunga as proxies for his real daughter ekugu = place of ekugu = the “real” or “true” version engutoho = port engutaho-imagï = port road etepe = abandoned village ete = village etige = hammock etua = fishing camp eunge = white clay gepïgï = excavated hole or ditch gigopïgï = house back door giti = sun giti endoho = sun entrance (east) giti ihatigoho = sun exit (west) hagï-imagï = road to river (also engutaho-imagï) halutiniña = place of fish-poisoning hata = type of whitish wood that was used to make two of the protohuman dolls by Quantunga as proxies for his real daughter heshe = Waujá (Arawak) word for manioc griddle heshe-ti = Waujá for small manioc griddle hihano = older brother (hisu = younger brother); hasu (older) and ikene (younger) sisters (note: the older/younger distinction is only applied to same sex siblings, including parallel cousins).


hihitsingóho = residential hamlet hïati = shaman (hïatâo = plural) hïtï = place of (from Arawak “piti”?) hugogo = plaza center, including kuakutu, cemetery and dancing ground hugoi kuengï = fish spirit hugombo = the plaza as a whole (in the plaza, hugogo + locative) i = firewood or simply wood, i-oto are wood spirits ï = axe igitilopo = house center ihagaka = spear-thrower (atlatl) ritual iheigï = left (ihengï) ihïsu = shame or deference (ihïsu ndagï) imbe = piquí fruit imbene = piquí mixed with thin manioc porridge (lisiña) iñagi = wooden manioc grater, made with buriti palm wooden spines iñepe = sapé fields (sapé is called iñe) ïngatahukugu = front door ïngita = center posts of outside wall of house (ïngita-ngahapogu) located on either side of door; posts regularly spaced along the circumference of the house are called sata ingila = past ingilango = dawn times inka = piquí groves (also imbepe) inte = timbo iñu = terrestrial land snail used traditional for disk beads for belts and necklaces and today used to make the distinctive rectangular plate bead necklaces, unique to Xinguanos, that were formerly made for aquatic snails, oïke) ipa = lake (hagï is used to refer to small lakes) ipa ugingagï = outlet stream itseke = powerful spirit, often a dawn time personage, or monstrous being itsekekugu = place of an itseke itsuni = deep or high “true” forest, although much is actually ancient secondary forests kamaga = non-anetï or common person, likely borrowed from Portuguese word camarada, companion (Franchetto, personal communication, 1992). kamalupa = Waujá (Arawak) word for manioc cooking, storage, carrying pot


kamalupa-ti = small kamalupa kanga = fish kine = manioc flat cake (beiju) kingo = net kogetsi = tomorrow konto = anaconda kuakutu = ceremonial plaza central house, the “flute house” or “men’s house,” as it is commonly called kuarup = Kamayura word for the egitse mortuary feast kuengï = larger or more powerful version of something (kuêgï) kuge = humans or the people (Xinguanos) kugífe = a witchcraft charm; a witch is referred to as a master of charms (kugífe òto) kuhi = small silver fish kuigi = manioc kuigi-anda = manioc garden kuigi-imagï = paths to manioc gardens kuigi-ingï = manioc storage silo kuigiku = processed and cooked manioc porridge kuigiñu = manioc flour kundu = conical dunk-trap for fishing kune = anti-witchcraft pot or the ritual around it lisiñï = thin manioc flat bread dissolved in water, the primary Kuikuru beverage makula = Waujá word for fish cooking or small storage pot makula-ti = small makula masope = young girl in puberty seclusion minga = roasted and storage piquí nuts motegoho = ahukugu pot that has been used for cooking kuigiko and is therefore covered in soot. nduhi = mask, of which there are diverse forms used to represent animal, fish and other natural spirits (such as atugua [whirlwind], kuambï [fish], jacuikatu [fish], agigi [anteater], ahasa [father of the forest], piju [monkey], aulati [sloth], and others) ngamuke = child; sometimes used in chiefly discourse in referring to “my children” (kangamuke; see Franchetto n.d.) ngiholo = ancestor ngiholò-ítupe = place of ancestors ngikogo = wild Indians (non-kuge) oho = basket net


oilape (oinlape) = special bow-shaped necklace used by anetï mugu in the tiponhï initiation ritual and placed on the trunks used in the egitse as the embodiment of recently deceased chiefs; also a mark of champion wrestlers oti = open savanna or parklands oto = 1. owner or master; 2. right otomo = community (like person/close relation; see Chapter 8) sagoko = fox sata = house wall and wall posts satagu = hour-glass shaped storage basket, often large and used to store manioc flour sipo = house center post sitisu = type of tree sapling used exclusively for small poles used to make house lattice frame; larger versions of same species are commonly used for house center posts (gahagu). tá = basketry ring used on women’s head to rest water or manioc pots and carrying baskets for transport; also used for sport by children tafite = hourglass-shaped structure made of short uengïfi posts that is placed over the grave of recently deceased chiefs prior to the culmination of the egitse rituals (the “house of the deceased chief ”) tahaku (bow) = tehaku oto—“bow master” tahuga = low secondary forest, tahugape is slightly taller tajïfe = chief ’s house tajope = persons who petition or are responsible for (caretakers) ritual actions tangiñu = formal path (usually exiting to the west) tatohongo = large manioc carrying or storage basket telo = “other” (them) or affine (teloko) teniñï = tobacco timbuku = low-grade (rough) manioc flour tinhü = formal messangers sent by anetï ekugu to invite other villages to chiefly rites of passage (commonly called pariat, following Kamayura language) tiponhï = boy’s initiation ear-piercing ritual, called in commemoration of anetï mugu tsulo = backyard trash midden tuafi = mat tunga = water tungakua imagï = bathing road tunguhi = wooden digging stick


uagi = large tree associated with egepe (anthropogenic soils), the bark was used in the past to make canoes. uengïfi = type of wood that was used to make two of the protohuman dolls by Quantunga as proxies for his real daughter, the only two to make it to their destination—the village of Netsuenga—from which the divine twins were born. This wood is exclusively used by chiefs. ugukuku = “bush-master” viper uluki = ritualized formal exchange in both local and intercommunity (annual) contexts uluri = triangular female pubic cover unique to Xinguano peoples üne = true house; small temporary rectangular structures, used during house reconstruction or as behind house work structures, sometimes made of wattle-and-daub are called kagaihai-ïngï, reflecting the neo-Brazilian (kagaiha) origin unwa = puberty seclusion house divider (uwâ) utu = fish trap yali = tapir (jali) yamugikumala = women’s ritual (jamugikumala) yanapï = Waujá word for a special pot used in the ear-piercing boy’s initiation ritual; it is a slightly castilated form and the bigger the pot the more important the person in the ritual (all initiates have one); the Kuikuru do not use. yukuku = type of tree that was the mother of Quantunga, the protohuman grandfather of the divine twins, Tuangi and Aulukuma (jukuku)

Place Names (non-Kuikuru names; -ekugu and -hïtï common place suffixes) Afukuri = second Kuikuru village established by splinter factional group in 1997. Agahahïtï = mouth of the feeder stream leading to Magakange Agahangugu = Xinguano Carib (Kalapalo language) village occupied in 1880s to early 1900s on middle Culuene River south of the PIX. Agikuangaku = ancient village site Aguhakugu = ancient village site Ahasukugu = village of the jaguar chief Netsuenga, home of the egitse mortuary feast. Ahangitahagï = name of large pool or lake (hagu) along the Angahuku River; also name of village site first occupied by Matipu (1960–1961) and later Kuikuru (1961–1972). Akagahïtï = place of the stork (akaga), ancient village site; also known as Itsagahïtï


Anahïtï-ipagï = one of five separate lakes that make up Ipa Tafununu, also including (continuing from west to east), Agahahïtï-ipagï, Netunugu, Tahukugu, and Hakape-ipagï. Angahuku = the “buriti river” which runs through Kuikuru territory Angahïnga = major lake adjacent to contemporary Matipu village, just north of Kuikuru traditional territory Apalási = ancient occupation site located across Lake Lamakuka from Kuhikugu (X11) Asahïtï = place of the deer; ancient village site, paired with Ugotahïtï to the immediate south. Atïka = old (first) Kuikuru village adjacent to Lake Lamakuka (c. mid1800s) Culuene = primary river Curisevo = primary river defining the extreme western boundary of Kuikuru territory Ehumba = large lake in the traditional territory of the Nafuqua. Hatsikugi = ancient village site Heulugihïtï = place of the jaguar spirit (heulugi); ancient village site Hukekugu = dry season hamlet of Afukaká I along the forest margin near Lahatua, one of various “owned” estates along the forest margins, extending in a broad arc from Asahïtï to the mouth of Lamakuka stream. These were associated with the prominent families of Lahatua before they moved (1961) to the area of Ahanitahagu and Ipatse lakes to the north and also includes: Lauadoho, Kagetepe, Tungepehugu, Majaja, Mujuhalu, Djuwahïtï, and Kagaho. Intagï = ancient village site along the Aahuku River Ipatse = Ipatse refers to the lake adjacent to the contemporary Kuikuru village, and is also used to refer to the community itself; in text used to refer to the cluster in integrated sites and also the stream that runs adjacent to several of them (X12, 13, 18–21). Ipavu = large lake adjacent to the Kamayura village Itsagahïtï = small site on Tafununu stream (also another name for Akagahïtï, see above) Kejegepe = one of five primary weir locations along Ipatse stream Kuguhi = ancient village site; occupied by Kuikuru ancestors (epa otomo) on Lake Tafununu. Kuhikugu = place of the small fish (kuhi); second Kuikuru village adjacent Lake Lamakuka (c. 1870–1920) and also site of major ancient village (center of Kuhikugu cluster of villages as described in text) Kuhugupe = place of the kuhuga (date palm, macauba); ancient village site located across Lake Lamakuka from Kuhikugu (X11)


Lahatua = ancestral Kuikuru villages (c. 1920–1960) Lamakuka = northern of two major lobes Lake Lamakuka/Kuhikugu and also used to described a village (in Lahatua locality) occupied from early to mid-1950s. Maijeinei = ancient village site Magakange = ancient village site Makaigikingahugu = place along Tafununu stream where Bakairi people killed Kuikuru ancestors, members of Ipa otomo, the people of the lake. Morená = ancient village site; considered as the home of Quantunga and ancestral center of world of Xinguano peoples (kuge). Netunugu = ancient village site on Lake Tafununu Nokugu = place of the jaguar Noviari = archaeological site identified by Simões (1967) in 1960s. Séhu = ancient village site Séku = ancient village site Sékuhai = ancient village site Tafununu = the largest lake in the Upper Xingu basin, where Kuikuru ancestors—the people of the lake or ipa otomo, lived until the 1700s. The Kuikuru continue to use and occasionally reside in this area today. Tehukugu = ancient village site; ancestral Kuikuru (epa otomo) site Tsuha = outlet of Lake Ipatse, one of five major weir locations along the Ipatse stream, also including Kedgegepe, Tinhagipe, Suhahugu, Wagandakagu, made by Sagakagaga for his fathers-in-law, Nokugu and his brothers. Tuatuari = primary clearwater river Ugotahïtï = ancient village site Yakare = ancient village site; occupied historically by Kamayura and Trumai; location of base of the Brazilian Air Force from 1960s-1990s.

Ancestral or Spirit Figures Afukaká = chiefly name; the grandfather of the principal village chief, who has passed name on to his first grandson. Ahasa = “father of the forest” spirit Ahiguata = chief of Agahahïtï or other village Akusa = a chief invoked in anetï intagíñu Amana = brother of Yamahutulo (se below) Amatuagï = chief of Tafununu and, in later generation, one of cofounders of Kuhikugu otomo; invoked in anetï intagíñu Aritana = middle-aged chief of the Yawalapiti village, sometimes called “our chief ” by other Xinguano chiefs.


Atugua = whirlwind spirit Auna = daughter of Afukaká and mother of current chief (Afukaká); passed name on to first daughter of her first son (the current chief Afukaká) Fitsi-fitsi = protohuman spirit considered responsible for construction of earthen ditches in and around ancient village Giti = first-born divine ancestral twin, creator being of humans, who today has the form (body) of the sun (giti); proper name = Tuangi Hikutaha = one of the founders of Kuhikugu otomo; invoked in anetï intagíñu Ipa otomo = lake community; ancestral to Kuikuru and Matipu who lived around Lake Tafununu prior to circa 1750 Kalusi = Kuikuru word for Karl von den Steinen Kuantungï = also know as Mavutsini, by Kamayura: one of first protohumans and grandfather of divine twins Kujaitsi = major chief of the Oti cluster of villages; also invoked in anetï intagíñu Marika = presiding chief of Kuikuru community at Kuguhi, ipa otomo Netsuengï = chiefly jaguar father of divine twins, Tuangi and Aulukuma, who was baished by them to the Milky Way, where he resides today. Ngune = divine ancestral twin who today has the form (body) of the moon (ngune); proper name = Aulukuma Nïtsïmï = one of the founders of Kuhikugu otomo; invoked in anetï intagíñu Ongosugu = a chief invoked in anetï intagíñu Paga-paga kuenga = giant frog spirit (puga-puga is a type of frog) Sagakagagï = “tunga-oto” (owner of the water) who made the Ehumba, Lamakuka, Ipatse, and smaller lakes in Kuikuru area by stamping his feet (Tafununu, Aga’aga, and Magiapei lakes were made differently) Tïhangakú = a female chief invoked in anetï intagíñu Tuhaí = a chief invoked in anetï intagíñu Yamahutulo = the female chief that presided over the dawn time village at what became Lake Lamakuka.

Numbers aetsi = one (first finger) takeko = two tilako = three tatakegeni = four nhatui = five (one hand) aetsi inkugetoho = six (one hand and first finger)


takeko inkugetoho = seven tilako inkugetoho = eight tatakegeni inkugetoho = nine timïho = ten (two hands) aetsi hïgape = eleven takeko hïgape = twelve tilako hïgape = thirteen tatakegeni hïgape = fourteen heine hïgape = fifteen (two hands and one foot) aetsi heine hïgape = sixteen takeko heine hïgape = seventeen tilako heine hïgape = eighteen tatakegeni heine hïgape = nineteen katute hïgape = twenty (two hands and two feet) > 20 = the Kuikuru count above twenty by referring to another person (body)

Names of Cultural Groups in Upper Xingu Agahïtï = Kuikuru name for Yawalapiti Agahïtï kuengï = another group related to the Agahïtï, who have disappeared but are on occasion said to be seen in the wilderness areas Aueti = Tupian Xinguano group Bakairi = Carib group that approximated Xinguanos in 1800s Ikpeng = Carib group; former enemy of Xinguanos but drawn into the orbit of Xinguano peoples by the Villas-Boas brothers in 1960s (formerly called Txicão by many; see Menget 2001) Kalapalo = Carib Xinguano Kamayura = Tupiguarani Xinguano Kuikuru = Carib Xinguano Matipu = Carib Xinguano (also Uagihïtï) Manitsaua = Tupian Xinguano distant neighbor Mehinaku = Arawak Xinguano Nafuqua = Carib Xinguano (also Djagamï) Trumai = isolated language near-Xinguano neighbor Yaruma = Carib near-Xinguano neighbor (now extinct) Yawalapiti = Arawak Xinguano Waujá = Arawak Xinguano (sometimes spelled Waurá)

Index A

anetï mugu (son), 259, 269, 302, 358 anetï nsono (junior chief), 271, 298 (anetï) tango (female chief), 269, 302, 327, 334 Anthropogenic landscape, 23, 191, 210, 231, 251 Arawak diaspora, xv, 2, 31, 42, 43, 44, 46–48, 50, 72, 120, 189, 195, 252, 321, 324, 350 Aristocracy, 20, 145, 270, 330 ethos of aristocracy, 20 Austronesian (Oceanic) languages, 6, 25, 45, 119, 189, 315, 331, 332, 334, 340, 351, 359 Axis mundi, 225, 298, 349

Acculturation, 38, 60, 61, 74, 121,136, 147, 155–157 Achagua, 19, 43, 52 Acuña, P. C. de, 149 Açutuba, 53, 54, 132, 250, 294, 355 Afukaká, xvii, xxiii, 83, 114, 116, 126, 175, 273, 275, 277, 302, 331, 347, 351, 392–394 Agency, 32, 33, 184, 185, 330 Agostinho da Silva, P., 30, 39, 68, 79, 97, 103, 126, 152, 164, 165, 168, 169, 295, 304 Agricultural/Horticultural mind-set, 47, 196 Agriculture, 45–47, 50, 78, 81, 119, 138, 143, 192–193, 195–196, 200, 203, 216–217, 250, 252, 325 Alterity, 57, 65, 120, 140, 187, 189, 227, 261, 262, 337, 338, 339, 341, 346, see also otherness Amazonian Barrancoid, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53–55, 60, 68, 209 Amazonian Polychrome, 54, 209, 346 Analogy, 34, 186, 340 Ancient (Xinguano) regime, 72, 73, 117, 121, 122, 124–126, 128, 132, 133, 241, 249, 354 Anetï (chief), xxiii, 131, 227, 246, 262, 265, 269–271, 273–275, 277, 278, 280–282, 286, 296, 298–300, 303, 304, 310–311, 316, 318, 327, 331–335, 358 anetão (plural), 131, 226, 264, 268, 270, 286, 295, 297, 331–332, 334 anetï ekugu (“true” or senior chief), 259, 262, 269, 271–272, 274–277, 281, 290, 297, 299, 301–304, 308, 316, 327, 331, 333, 334 anetï indisu (daughter), 259, 267, 369, 302 anetï intaginu (chief ’s talk), 271, 286, 290, 300–301

B Bakairi, xxi, 44, 59, 61, 71, 103, 105, 120, 135, 140, 146, 149, 153–157, 164–165, 222, 234, 324, 339, 350 Balée, W., xvi, 10, 19, 23, 64, 140, 195, 199, 231, 238 Ball-games, 297 Bandeira/bandeirantes, 30, 74, 149, 149–151, 154, 163, 180 Bantu languages, 7, 45, 120, 358 Baruya, 332, 334, 335 Basso, E. B., 45, 57, 74, 107, 116–117, 137–139, 151, 154, 156, 159, 172, 174, 176, 180, 198, 200–201, 222, 226–227, 237, 246, 261–269, 277, 279, 282, 285, 295, 297, 300–301, 321, 330 Bastos, R. J. d. M., 39, 152, 154–156, 168 Baure, 19, 42, 119–120, 146, 164, 195–196, 332 Big-man, 278, 332, 334 Birth-order, 21, 286

397

398 • Index Bloodline, 21, 61, 175–176, 180, 270, 282, 314, 332 Body/Bodies, xxiii, xiv, xv, 3–6, 12, 17, 20, 25–29, 28, 31, 33, 37, 50, 58, 63–64, 77, 112, 116, 122, 124, 128, 131–132, 163, 178, 181–195, 200, 203, 242–264, 252, 258–259, 261, 282, 285, 288, 292, 294–296, 298–309, 312–323, 333, 336–340, 342, 345, 353 bodily decoration, 27 bodily discipline, 26, 291, 327, 345 bodily dispositions, 2, 190, 350 bodily idioms, 26, 184 body of the king, 311 social bodies, xv, 5, 185–186, 259, 263, 296, 313, 322, 333 Bourdieu, P., 26, 28, 61, 179, 188, 226, 255, 259 Bow-master, 137 Braudel, F., 3, 32, 37, 117, 186, 337 Built environment, 27, 33, 39, 117, 123, 181, 183, 236

C Cahokia, xiii, 291, 345–346 Caquetio, 19, 42, 52 Caribbean, 6, 7, 9, 42, 51–55, 292, 323, 346 Carneiro, R. L., xvi, 16, 19, 22, 30, 47, 62, 68, 103, 114, 117, 135, 165, 169, 173–176, 181–182, 184, 191–196, 198–199, 201–217, 219, 221, 231, 235, 239–240, 243–244, 267, 278, 283, 295, 300, 327, 238, 330–331, 336, 345 Carvajal, 8, 148 Cascade/cascading, 125, 131–132, 183, 186, 188, 251, 259, 261, 263, 336, 343 Central Amazon, 46, 53–55, 294 Central Arawak, 58, 60 Central place, 21, 26, 51, 124–125, 128–130, 132, 324 Central plazas, 50, 53, 106, 129, 292, 323, 335 Cerrado, 22, 58, 150 Chaco, 4, 58, 134, 141, 321, 338, 345 Chané, 59, 119 Chernela, J., 12, 289, 334, 349 Chiefdom, xiv, xv, 4, 5, 12, 14–16, 20, 25, 27, 42, 52, 60, 62, 124, 133, 180, 181, 183, 190, 195, 230, 259, 265, 280, 319, 320, 321, 325–331, 344 chieftaincy, 4, 14, 19, 61, 296, 320 chieftainship, 119, 320, 329

Chiefs, 4, 20, 26, 30, 53, 63, 65, 66, 96, 112, 114, 130, 131, 143, 174–177, 190, 191, 203, 208, 218, 223, 226, 227, 230, 233, 237, 239, 241, 245, 246, 258, 259, 262, 346 chiefly authority, 4, 284 chiefly discourse, 226, 231, 246, 269, 286, 300–301, 307 chiefly hierarchy, 62–64, 304 chiefly kindred, 131, 242, 262, 265 chiefly office, 63, 271, 302, 328, 334, 386 chiefly persons, 26, 124, 224, 266, 273, 277, 285, 298, 314, 327, 333–334 chiefly power, 4, 177, 281, 283, 302, 317, 328, 332 chiefly redistribution, 198, 287, 315, 318, 339 chiefly rituals, 26, 30, 56, 130, 161–162, 175, 199, 267, 271, 284–286, 297, 302, 314, 318, 329, 340 chiefly societies, 26, 181, 321, 324, 343 chiefly status, 63–64, 161, 175, 270, 296, 299 chief-making, 131, 252, 315 chief ’s house, 199, 273, 336 Circum-Caribbean, 43 City/Cities, xii, 10, 66, 130–133, 171, 179–180, 198, 225, 235, 272, 274, 276, 291–292, 320, 337, 341–346 Clan ancestors, 64, 287 Class-like, 272, 325, 342 class-divided society 342 Clastres, P., 4, 9, 17, 21, 163, 176, 296, 301, 321 Coercion, 5, 18, 21, 130, 280, 312, 327, 330, 342 coercive power, xiii, 18, 281, 296, 327 Colonel Percy Fawcett, 71, 179, 180, 320 Colonialism, xii, xvi, 1, 9–10, 14–15, 19, 30–31, 44–45, 143–144, 151, 162, 193, 253, 338, 345 Commodities, 18, 315, 329 Communitas, 302, 341 Complex society, xiii, xiv, 4, 5, 21, 190, 337 Complexity, xii, 13, 18, 19, 21, 22, 125, 126, 181–183, 321, 342 Concentricity, 60, 62, 64, 65, 89, 93, 119, 133, 159, 287, 294, 295, 322, 324, 354, 357 Conical clan, 27, 64, 120, 196, 200, 265, 271, 287, 323, 335, 307 Contact, 1, 18, 27, 31, 39, 44, 49, 51, 53, 58, 61, 71, 74, 136 contact period, 1, 2, 31, 83, 173, 215

Index • 399 Containers of power, 22, 53, 131, 225, 246 Context(s), 4, 42, 64, 124, 171, 175, 186, 210, 215, 262, 264, 284, 317, 327, 329, 334, 346 contextual, 6, 41, 184, 311, 314, 321 contextual approach, 34, 42 Counting, 305 Cultural ecology, 34, 48, 181, 182 Cultural evolution, 16 Cultural Schema, 7, 12, 41, 45, 50, 60, 188, 256, 259, 288, 293, 295 Cultural structures, 42, 324 Cycling, 335

D Deep history, xii, xv, 41, 204, 346 Deep temporality, xiv, 5, 29, 31–33, 251, 322 Demographic nadir, 15, 39, 283, 331, 337 Demographic shocks, 163, 172 Denevan, W. M., 16, 23, 42, 145, 192, 193, 195, 196, 217, 238 Depopulation, 1, 15, 30–31, 39, 42–43, 63, 71, 74, 144, 149, 157, 162–166, 169, 172–173, 214, 220, 235, 264, 270, 280, 317, 331, 357 Descola, P., 15, 17, 19, 50, 124, 176, 182–183, 192–193, 202, 217, 231, 263, 303, 326, 328, 339 Dialectic (duality) of control, 21, 280–282 Diauarum, 70, 73, 102, 153, 154, 349, 351, 354 Dietary restrictions, 200, 201 Disarticulated urbanism, 132 Discipline, 26, 28, 53, 125, 225, 281, 292, 298, 304, 306, 313, 322, 327–328, 333, 336, 344–345 Disciplinary power, xv, 5, 190, 312, 326, 336 Disease, 1, 11, 31, 144, 150–151, 163–165, 170–174, 281, 331 Divine authority, 22, 332 religious authority, 50 sacred authority, 27 Divine twins, 227, 228, 298, 339, 391, 394 Docile bodies, 313 Dole, G. E., 39, 55, 63, 68, 79, 97, 102, 103, 106, 114, 117, 151, 152, 168, 172, 174, 175, 199, 213, 215, 264, 267, 278, 280, 282, 330, 331 Dwelling, 31, 35, 105, 106, 108, 253, 258, 259, 273, 321 dwelling perspective, 35, 230

E Earthworks, 23, 39, 70, 75–78, 83, 88–90, 95, 97, 98, 100–103, 107–108, 118, 121–123, 129, 211, 311, 354 Eastern Complex, 70, 72, 74, 77, 103–107, 111–112, 137, 153, 161, 211, 324, 354 Eco-functional, xv, 12, 48, 125 ecological determinism, 15–16 Economic capital, 64, 131, 246, 329, 337 Edenic narrative, 11 Egalitarian ethos, 14, 18, 310 Egalitarianism, 310, 328 Egitse, 26, 30, 161, 204, 208, 218, 220, 226, 229–30, 244, 246, 267, 271, 285–286, 296–299, 304, 306, 334, 340, 358, 389, 390 Elite, 20–21, 27, 53–57, 65, 176, 246, 265, 269–271, 277–278, 285, 326, 328–329, 332–334, 336 Embodiment, 3, 28, 53, 64, 183–184, 187, 226, 229, 256, 287, 293, 310–311, 315, 327–328, 341, 343 Enchainment (social), 43, 190, 258, 260, 322 Epidemics, 71, 144–145, 151, 158, 163–165, 168–169, 172, 174, 281 Epidemics of witchcraft, 174 Ethnogenesis, xxi, 71, 120, 124, 143, 156–157, 162, 323 Ethnographic present, 15, 38–39 Ethnophysics, ix, 183, 262, 302–303 Ethos of accommodation, 135, 162 Exclusivity, 131, 292, 310, 312–313, 333 Existential contradiction, 57, 184, 291, 337, 341, see also structural contradiction

F Factionalism, 63, 120, 128, 131, 174, 176, 241, 245, 258, 263, 272, 276–279, 283, 288, 307, 311, 327, 336 Fausto, C., xvi, 17, 57, 138, 161, 184, 190, 263–264, 314, 339 Fawcett, see Colonel Perry Fawcett Feasts, 26, 30, 243, 267, 279, 287, 315, 323, 333, 340 Ferguson, R. B., 47, 134, 338, 342 Fetish, 315 First contact, 44 Fishing, 14, 23, 46–47, 50, 52, 62, 90, 118–119, 137–139, 145, 193, 196–197, 200, 208, 217–219, 224, 235, 238, 241–242, 303, 316, 358

400 • Index Formative cultures, 50 Foucault, M., 21, 25, 184, 312, 313, 342, 344 Founders/founding ancestors, 5, 26, 53, 227, 243–246, 265, 269, 272–273, 277, 285, 287, 312, 328, 336, 393 founder’s ideology, 45, 49 Fractal Person, xv, 6, 186, 190, 255, 259–261, 288, 322, 359 fractality, 190, 260–261 Franchetto, B., xiv, xvi, 74, 103, 144, 151, 153–154, 159, 164, 168, 174, 223, 245–246, 261–262, 264, 276–277, 282, 291, 301, 306 FUNAI, xvi, 102, 276, 279

G Galactic clusters, 78, 130, 133, 136, 259, 261, 264, 290, 294, 305, 312, 331, 338 Galactic period, 129 Galactic polity, 79, 124–125, 130–131, 251, 272, 293, 306, 343 Galvão, E., 39, 103, 147, 155–156, 164–165, 168, 336 Gavan, 52, 132, 294 Geertz, C., 26, 64, 130, 132, 183, 292, 319, 341–343 Gift economy, 18 Gow, P., xvi, 250, 253, 325 Great House, 259, 262, 265, 284, 288–292, 323 Greater Antilles, 123, 294, 320, 322 Great-man/men, 297, 331–333, 335, Gregor, T. A., 5, 14, 126, 135, 137, 139, 156–157, 159, 161, 168, 172, 174, 176, 198, 222, 256, 266–267, 276, 281–282, 286, 294, 300, 307, 310, 331 Guaná, 55, 59, 63, 119–120, 145, 321, 332, 349, 350 Guaporé, 42, 58, 145, 180, 354 Gumlao/gumsa, 335

H Habitus, 26, 61, 186, 190 Hamlets, 93, 107, 132, 202, 225, 234–241, 245–247 Handbook of South American Indians, 11 Hereditary chiefs, 174, 176, 226, 246, 295, 332 hereditary chiefship, 332 hereditary or institutional inequality, 17 hereditary succession, 20, 63

Heroic, xiii, 4, 27, 30, 64, 75, 120, 130, 227, 263, 285, 286, 335, 336, 343 heroic ancestors, 30 heroic mode of lineage production, 4, 227, 343 heroic societies, xiii, 27, 130, 336 Heterarchical, 21, 130, 335, 337 Heterarchy, 25, 176, 327 Hierarchy, xv, 6, 9, 13, 20–22, 25–27, 42, 45, 50, 60–65, 119–120, 123, 126, 128, 130–132, 135, 145, 176, 183, 227, 242, 258, 265, 269–271, 279, 285, 287, 289, 296, 299, 304, 307, 311, 313, 323, 325–327, 333, 335–339, 349, 358 hierarchical modes of sociality, 17 hierarchical social structures, 16 Hill, J. D., 45, 289, 324, 334 Historical anthropology, 44, 186, 342, 345 direct historical approach, xiv, 34, 41, 221, 321 historical ecology, 19, 252 historical ethnography, xiv, 6, 34 Historical fallacy, 9, 13, 260 Historical personage, xiv, 3, 28, 32, 42, 49, 117, 188, 266, 290, 322, 337 Historicity, 20, 21, 33, 185, 284 Holistic, xiv, 19, 42, 190, 306 Holography, xv, 259–261, 288, 339 Hornborg, A., 50, 133, 183, 260, 293 House (capital H), 65, 120, 128, 190, 227, 241–242, 255, 257–259, 262–265, 269–270, 275, 284, 288–289, 296, 302, 322, 336 House A/B, 273, 276–278, 282, 302, 305, 307 House garden, 224, 356 House society, 64, 287, 289, 290, 316 Société à maison, 289, 316 Householding, 198, 266, 288, 315 Hugh-Jones, C., 289, 334 Hugh-Jones, S., 12, 18, 64, 258, 265, 287 Human ecology, 12, 19, 193, 346 Hybridity, 48, 323, 325

I Idea of the State, xiii Identity, 20, 21, 26, 27, 30, 60, 65, 138, 152, 155, 160, 161, 184, 188, 223, 285, 313, 322, 326, 350 Inalienable possessions, 188, 272, 310, 314, 315 Inka, 249 Incised-modeled, 52, 53, 68

Index • 401 Incised-rim, 68, 209 Ingold, T., 19, 35, 88, 230, 253, 321 Initiation, 26, 71, 184, 190, 260, 268, 277, 285, 296, 299, 310, 315, 323, 333, 340 Intensification, 16, 46, 216 Ireland, E. M., 63, 68, 94, 117, 159, 163, 164, 168, 172, 174, 176, 190, 246, 275, 280–283, 286, 300, 307, 217, 330, 340 Itaparica tradition, 68, 351

Legitimacy, 27, 63, 227, 269, 271, 273, 276–278, 282, 285, 318, 334 Lesser Antilles, 52 Lévi-Strauss, C., xii, 1, 6, 9, 12, 18, 56, 64, 67, 132–133, 136, 160, 182, 203, 248, 253, 258, 260, 287–294, 307, 319, 328, 336 Literacy, 255, 321, 337 Living ancestors, xi, 131, 304, 312, 324, 326, 340 Llanos de Mojos, 58, 179, 338, 354 Longue durée, 31–33, 37, 337 Lowland Bolivia, 23, 58, 59, 13

J Jaguar, 79, 82–83, 90, 192, 203, 208, 228–229, 233, 235, 248, 258, 275, 295, 297–299, 325, 333–334, 340, 349, 356 Jivaro, 57 Juruna, 140, 141, 151, 169, 317, 349

K Kaiabi, 72 Kalusi, 114, 159, 353 Kamakuaka, 76 Kayapó, 22, 150–151, 350 Kehoe, A., xiii, 8, 18, 133–134, 320 Key symbols, 41 Kingdoms, 20, 27, 53, 133, 183, 264, 320, 326, 244 Kingly body, 312 kingly persons, 326 kingly power, 27, 312, 313, 350 Kirch, P., 27, 45, 64, 120, 328, 335 Kokama-Omagua, 54 Kuarup chiefly mortuary feasts, see egitse Kwaimatnie-owners, 333

L Labor, 10, 14, 20, 50, 64, 131, 172, 176, 191, 218, 220, 225, 246, 266–271, 313–318, 328–329, 357 Landscape, xiv, xv, 3, 5, 23, 28, 31, 35, 40, 50, 58, 61–62, 66, 68, 73, 75, 78–79, 82, 92, 114, 119, 123, 129, 133–134, 139, 145, 183, 188–211, 225–231, 242, 248–253, 294–295, 301–302, 304, 319, 324, 327, 336, 342, 345, 350, 353, 356 Lathrap, D. W., 16, 43, 46–56, 133, 193, 195–197, 294, 307, 328 Lea, V., 289

M Manioc, 46–47, 52, 60, 62, 116, 119, 138, 143, 160, 189–253, 257, 299, 305, 318, 341, 345 Marajó Island, 23, 250, 346 Marajoara, 132, 323 Measles, 163–164, 169, 171 Measurements, 304, 305 Meggers, B. J., 19, 23, 192–193, 209 Melanesia, 14, 15, 26, 332, 340 Memory, 5–6, 26, 28, 50, 53, 75, 114, 123, 132, 137, 179–191, 214, 223, 231, 242, 246, 251–252, 256, 258, 285, 288, 293, 322, 350, 353 cultural memory, 5, 28, 114, 123, 132, 183, 185, 188, 231, 256, 258, 288, 322, 350 social memory, 258 Menget, P., xvi, 17, 65, 140, 155, 321, 332 Mesoamerican, xiii, 10–11, 179, 292, 320, 345 Métraux, A., 53, 141, 145–146, 149, 163, 175, 320, 330 Middle-range societies, 4 Mimesis, 183, 187, 189, 260–261, 338 Mirror world, 113, 205, 227, 230–231, 341, 344 Monumentalism, 123 Morená, 22, 70, 79, 102, 129, 133, 153–154, 227–232, 349, 351, 354 Murphy, R. F., 139, 140, 141, 169, 171 Museu Nacional, xvi, 72 Mythologiques, 56, 260

N Naturvölkern, 7, 29, 180, 319 Neolithic revolution, 46, 196 Neves, E. G., xvi, 54, 251 New Ireland, 190, 340

402 • Index Niger-Congo languages, 120, 359 Nimuendaju, C., 149, 164 Nordenskiold, E., 44, 141, 163 Northwest Coast, 64, 289, 292, 349

O Oberg, K., 20, 63, 103, 121, 150, 165, 168, 169, 181, 196, 320, 331, 332 Objectification, 28, 64, 177, 183, 226, 255–256, 337, 340 Oceania, 10, 15, 26, 64, 125, 289, 334, 340–341, 345 Oliveira, A. E. d., 63, 149, 151, 169, 332 Oliver, J. R., 50, 52–53 Ontological others, 57 Orientalism, 7, 18 Orinoco, 48, 51–55, 132, 181, 251, 294, 323, 328 Otherness, 227, 260–262, 295, see also alterity Otomo, xxiii, 95, 103, 115, 120, 131, 223, 224, 230, 232, 234, 242–247, 258, 259, 261, 262, 267, 276, 280, 285, 290, 301, 312, 322, 329, 335, 338, 340, 343

P Panopticism, 312–313, 344 panopticon, 313 Pantanal, 58, 338 Papua New Guinea, 331–332 Paramountcy, 327 Pareci, 19, 42, 43, 44, 55, 59, 61, 119–120, 140, 143–150, 181, 195–196, 208, 253, 294, 332, 350, 358 Parque Indígena do Alto Xingu (PIX), xvi, 24, 30, 72, 87, 87, 102, 158, 169–171, 220, 221, 244, 349, 356 Pax xinguana, 72, 136 Person, xv, 3–5 personhood, 3, 18, 20, 28, 181, 183, 184, 260, 322 person-making, 252 social persons, 3, 27, see also fractal person, yesterday persons, historical personages Peruvian temple centers, 292 Petersen, J. B., xvi, xvii, 52, 54, 204, 251 Phylogenetic, 45, 49, 221 Pires de Campos, A., 42, 71, 144–146, 149–150 Place-making, 242, 249, 252 Planalto Central, 22, 180, 236

Plaza village, 23, 42, 51–61, 68, 70, 72, 104, 125, 126, 146, 155, 160, 223, 226, 230, 243, 251, 258, 282, 288, 293, 294, 310–313, 324, 328, 349, 351, 352 Polanyi, K., 198, 266, 315 Politics, 16, 18, 26, 72, 130, 173, 175, 180, 185, 253, 265, 273, 277–279, 282–284, 295, 310–311, 329, 342–343 political discourse, 292 political economy, 4, 13, 27, 55, 64, 128, 130–133, 220, 246, 289, 292–293, 312, 329, 331, 341, 343–344 political evolution, 193 political power, 2, 5, 12, 16, 21, 26, 31, 45, 57, 64, 124–125, 129, 174–176, 183, 246, 265, 272–273, 281, 283, 293, 295, 307, 328, 331, 333–334, 341–342 politics of persuasion, 18 polity, xiii, xv, 4, 9, 16, 79, 124–125, 130–131, 183, 190, 251, 272, 293, 306, 336, 338, 343 Polynesia, 15, 64, 130, 196, 264, 332, 340, 349 Pombal Directorate, 150 Postmodernism, 32 Potential affines/consanguines, 137, 223 Poverty Point, 50, 292 Predatory, 65, 120, 137, 139, 140, 227, 253, 337 Presentism, 32, 39 Prestige, 55, 64, 131, 137, 199, 257, 267–269, 284, 302, 314, 316, 331–332, 334, 336, 341, 346 Prestige goods, 55, 314–315 Primitive other, 6, 10 Primitive society, 8 Pristine nature, xii, 8, 11, 23 Productivity, 12, 17, 37, 192–193, 216, 219–220, 279 Property, 18, 20, 49, 64, 183, 246, 272, 286, 290, 326, 341–342 Puerto Rico, 52–53

Q Quipu, 133

R Radial mapping, 124, 126 Ramages, 64 Rank conscious, 3, 334, 349 rank endogamy, 63, 263, 265 rank revolution, 325, 337

Index • 403 Redistribution, 132, 198, 237, 253, 266, 279, 287, 315, 318, 339 Regional societies, 19, 124, 137, 162, 193, 355 Regionality, 42, 60–61, 65–66, 119, 145, 162, 180, 336–337 Replacing ancestors, 26, 131, 190, 315, 340 Resistance, 21, 22, 125, 135, 176, 225, 345 Reticulate, 25, 45, 49 Ritual phase of political economy, 4, 27, 130, 341 Rondon Commission, 30, 71 Roosevelt, A. C., xvi, 4, 12, 14, 16, 47, 48, 50, 51, 132, 144, 193, 195, 220, 250, 294, 320, 327, 346

S Sahlins, M., xiii, 4, 27, 64, 120, 128, 131, 152, 227, 259, 263, 270, 283, 285, 293, 326, 332, 340, 343 Saladoid-Barrancoid, 50–55 Salumã (Enawenê Nawê), 59, 145, 196, 358 Santarem, 132, 209, 294, 323, 346 Santos-Granero, F., 45, 248, 251, 324 Saturated anthropogenic landscape, 62, 192, 231, 251, 253 Scapes, 33, 185 Schmidt, M., 20, 29, 43–46, 60, 65, 71, 97, 121, 136, 147, 150, 162, 165, 193, 319, 320 Sedentism, 46, 60–61, 119, 138, 337 settled village life, 17, 61, 62, 190–192, 196, 201, 220 Seeger, A., 27, 50, 64, 155, 183, 226, 248, 251, 294, 304 Self-scaling, xv, 33, 182–183, 186, 259–262 Seriality, 183, 260 Shaman, 12, 15, 18, 27, 82, 113, 115, 131, 172, 174–177, 204, 208, 230, 258, 280, 281, 298, 304, 328, 331–334, 339, 352, 361 Shell belts, 203, 230, 315, 316 shell necklaces, 203, 229, 231, 316 shell ornaments, 316 Simões, M. F., 39, 68, 79, 152, 155, 164–166 Simón, P. d., 149 Sites of memory, 242, 252, 288, 322 Skin of the land, 33, 137, 182, 188, 230 Slaving, 74, 155, 180 Social hierarchy, xv, 6, 9, 20, 22, 25–27, 42, 45, 57, 60–63, 119, 123, 130, 135, 145, 265, 269, 296, 313, 323, 325, 327, 336–337, 339 social ranking, 26, 61, 336 social stratification, 321, 332

Social power, 4, 26, 279, 301 Sociality, xv, 4–6, 16–18, 65, 120, 125, 137, 175, 181–185, 223, 251, 259, 263, 265 308, 340 Sociopolitical landscapes, 292 Southern Amazon Periphery, 31, 55–56, 119–120, 124, 134, 137, 140, 144, 189, 257, 322 Spatial scales, 33 Special places, 118, 202, 286 State, xiii, 9, 11, 13, 183, 296, 312, 336, 344 statehood, xiv, 341, 344 State of nature, xi, 8 Status rivalry, 120, 121, 297, 323 Steinen, K. v. d., xix, 29, 38, 40, 44, 71, 74, 83, 97, 106, 114, 146, 148, 150, 155–160, 164–165, 168–169, 180, 204, 207, 218, 239, 248–249, 251, 319, see also Kalusi Steward, J., 12, 42, 52, 180, 182, 190, 319–321, 329, 331–332, 343, 349 Strathern, A., 5, 28, 184, 187–188, 242, 332 Strathern, M., 3, 6, 28, 182, 186, 230, 260, 263, 332, 340 Structural contradiction, 3, 57, 63, 265, 336, 341, see also existential contradiction Structuralism, 12, 17, 255 Structure of power, 20, 326, 335 Subsistence, xv, 14, 16, 42, 57, 61, 138, 140, 147, 169, 170, 189, 200, 212, 216, 220, 304, 343, 345 Surplus, 64, 199, 216, 266, 310, 318, 321, 329, 337, 343–344 Suyá, 71–72, 103, 324, 338 Symbolic capital, 131, 175, 225, 313–314, 318, 329 Symbolic economy of power, 131, 312, 343 Symbolic property, 272

T Taino, 19, 43, 52–53, 292 Tambiah, S. J., 124–125, 131, 293, 343 Techniques of the body, 113, 322, 327 Technique of power, 27 Technology, xv, 18, 42, 47, 50–51, 55, 69, 72, 103, 189, 193, 196, 200, 202, 205, 211, 216–218, 317, 324, 342, 352 Temporality of landscape, 35 Terêna, 19, 63, 120, 145–146, 164, 332 Terra firme, 10, 14, 22–23, 34, 47, 54, 62, 79, 81, 84, 93, 95, 116, 202, 215, 219–220, 236, 252, 351

404 • Index Terra firme/vàrzea dichotomy, 47 Terra preta, 86, 88, 90, 100, 101, 109, 115, 209, 352 Theater state, 26, 64, 130–131, 183, 190, 272, 293, 312, 335–336, 341–345, 353 Theocratic chiefdoms, 27, 42, 62, 180, 181, 329, 332 Thick description, 34, 62 Tiwanaku, 45, 133, 351 Topograms, 226 Topology, xv, 5, 33, 41, 53, 261 Towns, xii, 23, 40, 75, 117, 124, 128–129, 132, 148–149, 171, 249, 292, 312 Trading game, 315 Translation, 6, 17, 32, 44, 144, 187, 301, 349 Trash yard, 237, 294 Tropical forest, xi, 2, 3, 7, 10, 14, 17, 22–23, 28, 38, 46–48, 58, 60, 134, 220, 234, 313, 320, 337, 345, 351 Tropical forest agriculture, 46 Tropical forest culture, 12, 42 Tropicality, 7, 18 Tupi-Guarani, 3, 7, 28, 45, 49, 57, 72, 140–141, 168, 337, 349, 350, 358 Turner, T., xvi, 30, 50, 64, 133, 139, 151, 165, 184, 248, 294, 328–329 Turner, V. W., 173–174, 187–188 Twins, 227–229, 298, 339, 349

W

U

Y

Uniformitarianism, 15, 32, 34

Yanesha, 19, 248, 251 Yanomamo, 57 Yarinacocha, 294 Yarumã, 71, 153, 157, 169, 221, 350 Yesterday persons, 28, 182, 186, 293, 321

V Várzea, 12–14, 18, 22, 47, 124, 195, 209, 251 várzea model, 13, 48 Villas Boas, O., 113, 139, 168 Viveiros de Castro, E. B., 5, 12, 15, 27–28, 45, 56–59, 138–141, 161, 176, 182–184, 202, 231, 260, 263–265, 312, 337

Wagner, R., xvi, 3, 6, 28, 125, 186, 190, 255, 259–260, 288, 322, 340 Wealth, 50, 62, 64, 121, 130, 181, 246, 253, 268, 271, 288–289, 302, 314–316, 346 Western Complex, 15, 70, 73–75, 77, 89, 102–104, 106–109, 112, 135, 153, 209, 211–214, 324, 351, 354 Western society, 31, 319 “Whitemen,” 31, 61, 159, 201, 245, 247 Whitehead, N. L., xvi, 12, 17, 27, 45, 134, 320, 329 “Wild Indians,” 8, 31, 106, 161, 163, 169, 201, 338 Witchcraft, 62, 136, 173–177, 244, 246, 281, 331 witches, 131, 173–177, 281, 339 Wrestling, 237, 272, 297 champion wrestler, 276 Writing, xiii, 28, 187, 248, 289, 296, 320, 341, 344, 351 Wüst, 58, 68, 74, 355, 358

X Xavante, 141, 150, 164 Xinguano cultural tradition, 32, 69, 72–73, 117, 231, 322, 324, 354

Z Zucchi, A., 50–52, 248, 251, 324 Zuidema, R. T., 133, 249, 252

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