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Banana Diplomacy: "First contact" with isolated tribe in the Amazon

August 16, 2014, 11:16 am
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They were separated only by the narrow course of the Envira river. From a distance of a few meters they tried to speak to each other. As the video clip recently released by Funai shows, Fernando Ashaninka entered the water as two Xatanawa mirrored his motions from the opposite bank. One Xatanawa man remained behind with a shotgun (apparently captured from an unfortunate logger) in case of an attack. After unsuccessful attempts at spoken communication they turned to gestures  and eventually Fernando gave them bananas. The Xatanawa then follow the Ashaninka and FUNAI team to the village and ask for clothing . Watching the video, one only hopes that the used clothes the Xatanawa receive aren’t contaminated with flu virus or other harmful diseases. The speaker on the video announces that this was the "first contact" with the Xatanawa people. But had been in fact several previous interactions between the Xatanawa and the Ashaninka community of Simpatia.




The seven Xatanawa survivors of the recent massacre who reached out to Simpatia included five men and two women, in addition to some 40 to 100 that stayed behind in the forest. They first appeared on June 10, to take iron goods, clothes and food. An Ashaninka man, Raimundinho, initially considered this an act of “thievery,” but the village leader “Carijó” quickly informed FUNAI and organized and informed the village to avoid violent confrontations. Rather than thieves, they were more like diplomats, coming on an urgent peace-making mission.

Members of the same group had already made enigmatic appearances at other Ashaninka and Kulina villages along the Envira River, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI). In March of 2014, Renato Santana from CIMI told journalist Scott Wallace, “Women are afraid to go into the forest to tend their gardens for fear of abduction.” CIMI released additional aerial photographs of the group in April and demanded that FUNAI act to protect their territory. The FUNAI post at Xinane, which had been established as an advanced base to handle this situation, has been closed since it was attacked by drug traffickers in 2011.

After their dramatic, brief appearance at Simpatia on June 10, FUNAI began preparing for an eminent contact, which came on June 27 with an initial peaceful encounter followed by additional visits on June 29 and 30, culminating in a longer meeting on July 4, when the Xatanawa emissaries remained for several hours at Simpatia before returning to the forest.


CONTINUE READING the full article, the second in a three-part series by Felipe Milanez and Glenn Shepard at Indian Country Today:


Part 1: Drug traffickers force isolated group into contact
Part 2: Banana diplomacy
Part 3: Quiet war in the Amazon



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Quiet War in the Amazon: "Uncontacted" tribes vs. drug lords and loggers

August 16, 2014, 11:48 am
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The Xatanawa have never been alone nor "uncontacted" in their century-long history of resistance. Isolation and resistance go hand and hand in this remote borderland region outside the reach of the Peruvian and Brazilian states. The Mashco-Piro have been photographed and even filmed in recent years in Peru. One Mashco-Piro group is believed to be responsible for an attack on FUNAI’s Xinane base in 2004, during which veteran FUNAI agent José Carlos Meirelles was wounded with an arrow. 


Mashco-Piro arrows recovered after people from a settled indigenous community on the Manu river tried to approach: The Mashco-Piro rained arrows on them in self defense.

A Matsigenka man who had been attempting for many years to contact a Mashco-Piro group in Peru was slain by a Mashco-Piro arrow in late 2011. Isolated groups have made incursions on the Xinane base on several other occasions to take food, implements and trade goods, and at times have attacked FUNAI employees, set fire to the base and even killed the guard dogs there, sending a clear message that they intend to protect their territory from invasion. Their hostility must be understood in context, since they are as yet unable to distinguish between the loggers and drug traffickers who have attacked them, and the FUNAI employees who are there to protect them.

Meirelles, who recently retired, was replaced by the young indigenous agent Guilherme Dalto Siviero, who heads the new “Envira Ethno-Environmental Protection Front.” FUNAI has announced it will reopen the Xinane post with about 10 employees, including FUNAI specialists, interpreters and a health team. The plan is to add three additional bases on the D’Ouro, Muru, and Mamoadate rivers to monitor isolated populations. The project would cost about $500,000 dollars initially.

Meirelles was one of the last remaining sertanistas (‘backwoods agents’) in FUNAI, a special category of indigenous agents responsible for carrying out expeditions to attract, contact and pacify isolated indigenous groups along the regions of frontier expansion during the second half of the 20th century. With the employee reforms carried out at FUNAI between 2009 and 2012, and the new policy of “no contact unless necessary,” the category of sertanista was extinguished. In addition to the sertanistas responsible for contacting isolated peoples for the Brazilian state, missionaries of many denominations have taken it upon themselves to contact and study the languages of various Indigenous Peoples, included hitherto isolated ones, in order to carry out evangelization and Bible translation.

Indigenous populations who have refused contact with the state fall into a no-man’s land along this social, political and economic frontier. They are threatened by illegal loggers and gold miners as well as drug traffickers who are active in the lawless border region. Elsewhere in the Brazilian and Peruvian interior, isolated indigenous populations are threatened by ranchers, oil and gas industries, hydroelectric dams, highway-building and other large infrastructure projects.

CONTINUE READING the full article, the final in a three-part series by Felipe Milanez and Glenn Shepard at Indian Country Today:

Part 1: Drug traffickers force isolated group into contact
Part 2: Banana diplomacy
Part 3: Quiet war in the Amazon


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Forget Colonial Myths: Xatanawa contact puts an end to a century of resistance

August 19, 2014, 4:20 pm
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They are young and healthy, with strong bodies and carefully trimmed hair, some bearing delicate designs painted on their faces. They carry fine (and sharp) arrows with impeccably trimmed feather fletching. They wear penis-straps made of tree bark which double as belts to carry machetes, recently acquired. They sing beautiful melodies characteristic of the shared Panoan musical repertoire that is found throughout this region along the Brazil-Peru border, and that has been studied by anthropologists and even recorded on CDs. 

Behind this striking appearance of youthful Xatanawa warriors on the Envira river in Acre, emerging from isolation to seek assistance from indigenous neighbors, lies a terrible history of massacres at the hands of 21st century drug traffickers and loggers and 19th century rubber tappers. 

The "contact" of the Xatanawa is an extraordinary story of resistance. 

Video still of dramatic footage released by FUNAI showing Xatanawa contact.

And yet mainstream reporting has emphasized sensational and exotic details, colonial ideas about a primitive people "emerging from the forest" and entering into "first contact" with civilization. Public comments express surprise at these "Stone Age" people carrying machetes, or even a shotgun. These ethnocentric perspectives ignore the deep and tragic history of this people, and others like them, while also overlooking the negligence of the Peruvian and Brazilian authorities in failing to guarantee their territorial and human rights.

CONTINUE READING the full article (in Portuguese) by Felipe Milanez and Glenn Shepard at Carta Capital

Also read the three-part series (in English) at Indian Country Today:

Part 1: Drug traffickers force isolated group into contact
Part 2: Banana diplomacy
Part 3: Quiet war in the Amazon



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Mashco-Piros on the Verge: Missionaries, human safaris, head-ball and a tale of two contacts

September 19, 2014, 7:19 am
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This is the full text, with additional photos, of a three-part series published concurrently by Indian Country Today

 1. Missionaries and ‘human safaris’ initiate contact in Peru

It feels like a déjà vu: naked youths from an isolated indigenous group step warily through shallow water and approach the strangers. Emboldened by curiosity, or hunger perhaps, they accept colorful clothing and gifts of food, not knowing that they may be carrying an epidemiological bomb back to their people in the forest. And yet the apparent good intentions of these friendly outsiders may be motivated by a hidden agenda: religious prosylization or territorial control. Moreover, initiating contact with isolated indigenous peoples is a violation of Peruvian regulations.

On September 6, tourists and an indigenous woman affiliated with a missionary group were photographed giving clothing and food to Mashco Piro children on a beach in Madre de Dios (Photo: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD)

The scene is strikingly similar to dramatic recent events in a nearby region along Brazil’s border with Peru. On June 27, a group of young Xatanawa warriors, hitherto isolated, established contact with an Ashaninka community on the upper Envira River.

However there are important differences in these two superficially similar episodes: the Xatanawa initiated contact of their own accord, walking for miles to seek aid from the neighboring indigenous population after apparently being attacked by loggers or perhaps (according to preliminary investigations in Brazil) drug traffickers based in Peru. Moreover, the Ashaninka called immediately on an experienced team from Brazil’s Federal Indian Agency, FUNAI, to help mediate the contact, provide medical care for the inevitable flu epidemic that struck the intrepid youths, and develop a long-term strategy to protect the group. The contact with the Mashco-Piro has been carried out informally, irresponsibly, and against official norms, by tourists and local people without the authority or training to handle the potentially genocidal consequences of such a situation.  

The indigenous organization FENAMAD, in conjunction with Survival International, recently published photographs on its FaceBook pagetaken on September 6 showing a group of Mashco-Piro children receiving clothes and gifts from a local indigenous woman from the village of Diamante who is affiliated with an evangelical missionary organization that has been intent on contacting the Mashco-Piro for some time. The people of Diamante on the Madre de Dios River are Piro, and their language is close enough to Mashco-Piro to allow for mutual communication. Some inhabitants of Diamante have been trying to contact the Mashco-Piro for almost 25 years, but only in the past year have the Mashco-Piro responded to such efforts with anything other than hostility: several local people have been wounded by Mashco-Piro arrows, and one man was killed in 2011.

The FENAMAD team was using a boat supplied by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) to patrol the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, which shares a border with Manu National Park. According to their report, in addition to the Piro woman, they also surprised two tourism boats and a group of tourists on the same beach. The tourists and tour boats left immediately leaving only the Piro woman, named Nelly, on the beach with five Mashco-Piro youths wearing their new clothes.


Mashco Piro children taking items from tourism boat (Photo: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD)

When questioned about her activities, Nelly replied that she has been taking bananas to the Mashco-Piro because they ask her to. The Mashco-Piro children were waiting on the beach while their parents hunted in the forest nearby. The clothes, she said, were left by the tourists traveling in a boat operated by Expediciones Vilca. The Mashco-Piro have become a kind of tourist attraction in the region, and some tour operators have even offered clandestine “human safaris” for tourists to view and photograph the Mashco-Piro, much as they would a jaguar or other rare animal. Some tourists have allegedly left soda pop and even beer on the beach as presents to the Mashco-Piro. In one recent photograph, a young Mashco-Piro woman appears with a large wound on her leg, apparently caused by the tropical disease leishmaniasis.
 
In a previous episode highlighting the dangerous consequences of human safaris, a film crew associated with the Discovery Channel trekked to an isolated indigenous community in Manu Park in October of 2007, specifically violating the terms of its authorizations, and was alleged to have contaminated the group with a flu virus that killed four children and left dozens ill.

FENAMAD representative Cesar Augusto Jojajé decried the negligence of the Peruvian authorities in the face of this precarious situation: “The government is absent in this region. We want the authorities to assume their responsibilities and implement the promised operational plan [of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve] which establishes among its clauses the integrity of the Mashco-Piro people’s territory.”

2. From head-ball to hunter-gatherers: the true story of the Mashco-Piro

However the situation becomes more complex once we understand that Nelly, the indigenous woman who initiated contact with the group, is in fact half Mashco-Piro herself: her father was kidnapped in the forest as a young child and taken away from the group by Diamante villagers in the 1970s as part of their attempt to “civilize” the Mashco-Piro, whom the Piro view as wayward brethren. Re-baptized with a Spanish name, Nelly’s father was raised among the Piro and never went back to his people; indeed he has no more memory of his life among them. Nelly has allied herself with a local evangelical missionary group, including a pastor and his wife who now reside in Diamante, in the hopes of helping “her people” overcome the hunger, isolation and fear they supposedly now live in.

Around 1982 the Piro captured two more Mashco-Piros, an adult man and a young boy, and held them for most of the day, trying to convince them to “come out of the forest.” However the Mashco-Piro did not converse and refused all food and water, saying only, "Leave us alone".[1]After they were released, they left all the presents they had been showered with by the villagers (clothes, pots and pans, metal tools) strewn along their path back to the forest. In later interactions, the Mashco-Piro fired arrows at Piro who approached them.

Shaco Flores, a Matsigenka man from the village of Diamante who was fluent in Piro, had been attempting to pacify and contact the Mashco-Piro ever since. In the early 1980s he worked alongside anthropologists Kim Hill and Hilliard Kaplan, who carried out preliminary scientific investigations on the group.[2] In ensuing years, Shaco continued observing the Mashco-Piro and developed a certain degree of communication with them, though always at a distance. He even obtained a few objects of their material culture, including a necklace, a rustic arrow-sharpener made from an agouti tooth, a stone axe, and a rubber sphere they use to play the sport of "head-ball." He donated these items to the village school teacher at the time, Alejandro Smith (currently working for the environmental association APECO) and now they are safeguarded at the Goeldi Museum in Brazil.

A withered rubber sphere used by the Mashco-Piro to play “head ball,” originally collected by Shaco Flores (Photo: Fabio Jacob/Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi)

However in December of 2011, Shaco was killed by an arrow fired by a Mashco-Piro bowman in the small garden where he had been letting the Mashco-Piro eat crops, and where he had previously interacted peacefully with them. Spanish ornithologist Diego Cortijo, who was visiting Shaco that December, used a telephoto lens to take striking, now world-famous photographs of the Mashco-Piro near the same locale where Shaco was killed a few days later. 

Mashco Piros photographed on bank of Madre de Dios River in December 2011, days before Shaco Flores was killed by a Mashco-Piro bowman  (Photo: Diego Cortijo/Survival International).
Mashco-Piro arrow-sharpener and necklace, originally collected by Shaco Flores, compared with close-ups of similar objects worn by Mashco-Piro from 2011 photos (Photos:  Diego Cortijo/Surivival International and Fábio Jacob/Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi).

However the Mashco-Piro are no savage, “Stone Age people” living in a pristine state of primitive harmony since time immemorial. In the late 19th century, the Mashco-Piro probably resided in large agricultural villages on the upper Manu River. The Mashco-Piro and other regional groups such as the Piro, Matsigenka and Ashaninka are cultural heirs to the Arawakan-speaking peoples who occupied a vast region in pre-Colombian times from the Caribbean to southern Brazil. 

The Arawaks were known as the “civilizers” of the Amazon since they established sedentary agricultural villages, built vast earthworks in some regions, established networks of inter-ethnic trade, and disseminated a tradition of competitive sports using rubber balls, possibly the ancestor to all subsequent ball sports in the world. Several modern Arawakan peoples continue the tradition, including the Pareci and Enawene-Nawe of Brazil. As unlikely as it may seem among a nomadic hunter-gatherer people, the Mashco-Piro continued to make rubber balls and play the sport even during their century-long isolation.

But rubber bears especially tragic connotations for the Mashco-Piro’s fate. The infamous “King of Rubber,” Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, whose story inspired Werner Herzog’s film, entered the region in the 1890s to establish rubber-tapping camps. In an episode related by Brazilian geographer Euclides da Cunha, Fitzcarraldo tried to intimidate the chief of the “Mashcos”[1] with his weapons. In Cunha’s words:[3]

 “The sole response of the Mashco was to inquire what arrows Fitzcarraldo carried. Smiling the explorer passed him a bullet... The native... tried to wound himself with it, dragging the bullet across his chest. Then he took one of his own arrows and, breaking it, thrust it into his own arm. Smiling and indifferent to the pain he proudly contemplated the flowing blood that covered the point. Without another word he turned his back on the surprised adventurer, returning to his village with the illusion of a superiority that in a short time, would be entirely discounted. In fact, a half hour later, about a hundred Mashcos, including the recalcitrant and naïve chief, lay slaughtered on the river bank whose name, ‘Playmashcos’ (‘Mashco beach”) remembers this bloody episode to this day.”

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo” (Photo: IMBD)
The surviving Mashco-Piro apparently fled to the forest, abandoning their gardens, and took up an entirely nomadic life of hunting and gathering. Given their traumatic experience with rubber tappers and indigenous henchmen, it is no mystery why the Mashco-Piro so vehemently avoided contact, and repelled any attempts at approximation by neighboring groups throughout the 20th century.

In the 1970s, three Mashco-Piro women, apparently exiled by the group, appeared near a guard post in Manu National Park. They had been living for some time without even fire, subsisting on palm nuts and raw turtles. The park guards provided them with matches, clothes and tools, and the three women (referred to by locals as “The Three Marys”) resided in a rustic hut along the banks of the Manu River through the mid-1980s, when they were taken in by Diamante and another nearby Matsigenka native community. The older woman (apparently the mother) has since died, but the two Mashco-Piro sisters now live among the Matsigenka and occasionally even play head-ball in the forest.

The "Three Marys," a Mashco-Piro woman and her two daughters, left the group in the 1970s and lived for several years alone in the forest.
The Mashco-Piro sisters live today in a nearby native community (Photo: Glenn Shepard).

A separate group of Mashco-Piro appeared on the northwest bank of the Manu River in 1996 (the group discussed above lives southeast of the Manu River, along the margins of Manu National Park), and shot warning arrows at an approaching tourism boat. They had apparently been disturbed by petrochemical prospecting activities in their territory along the Rio de las Piedras being carried out at that time by Mobil Oil. 

Anthropologist Glenn Shepard and biologist Douglas Yu had a surprise encounter with a small group of Mashco-Piro in 1999 while carrying out botanical surveys near the native community of Tayakome. They followed the example of their indigenous companions by running away as fast as possible, since, as one man stated in Matsigenka parlance, “arrows hurt.”

Mashco-Piro warriors photographed at “Playamashcos” in 2005 (Photo: Mauro Metaki).

In 2005, a much larger group of some hundred or so Mashco-Piro made a bold trek along the banks of the Manu River, camping out near the well-known biological station of Cocha Cashu on the Manu River for several days (the scientists evacuated the station) before heading further upriver towards the community of Tayakome.

At the very same beach where Cunha described the massacre by Fitzcarraldo over a century prior, a group of Matsigenka fisherman encountered the Mashco-Piro fording the Manu River towards the interior of the park’s protected area. The fisherman tried to approach and show their friendly intentions, but the Mashco-Piro repelled them with a shower of arrows. When they ran out of arrows, they used signs to communicate the fact that, even though they were out of arrows, they could still use rocks to break bones if the Matsigenka tried to approach. Matsigenka school teacher Mauro Metaki took a photograph of the Mashco-Piro warriors at “Playamaschos” and recovered several of their large, distinctive arrows.

Mauro Metaki showing large Mashco-Piro arrows fired at him in 2005 (left), compared with smaller Matsigenka arrows (right)  (Photo: Glenn Shepard)

More recently, people from apparently the same Mashco-Piro group were captured on dramatic video footage asking for food and metal tools from the indigenous community of Monte Salvado on the Piedras River.

3. A Tale of Two Contacts:

The Brazilian Federal Indian agency, FUNAI, has been criticized over its handling of the recent contact with the Xatanawa people in Acre, referred to by FUNAI as the “isolated peoples of the Xinane River.” In an interview with the BBC, American anthropologist Kim Hill dismisses FUNAI agents as “quasi-amateur… with no medical, anthropological or epidemiological training.” Sensational headlines on a Brazilian news site declared that the Xatanawa “could be exterminated due to FUNAI’s lack of competence."

And yet the situation of the Mashco-Piro in Peru is far more grave, since there is no governmental organization like Brazil’s FUNAI with funding (however limited), institutional structures and experienced field agents. José Carlos Meirelles, who was himself wounded by a Mashco-Piro arrow in 2004, spent more than 20 years living in Acre and documenting the situation of isolated peoples. He retired from FUNAI in 2010 but has continued to advise younger employees throughout the tense Xatanawa contact. 

FUNAI's “Department of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indians,” where Meirelles worked, was created in 1987, and within Brazil it is solely responsible for identifying and protecting isolated indigenous peoples. FUNAI only initiates contact in cases of imminent threat, as was case for the Xatanawa earlier this year, and the Korubo eight years prior. In 1990, under the leadership of Sydney Possuelo, FUNAI specifically banned missionary groups from being involved in contacts with isolated peoples.  

FUNAI developed partnerships with NGOs such as Centro de Trablho Indigenista (CTI), Comissão Pró-Índio Acre (CPI/AC) and Kanindé and received funding from agencies like the Moore Foundation and USAid to set aside and monitor vast “Ethno-Environmental Protection Fronts” in Acre, the Javari River basin, Rondonia, and other remote areas that harbor biodiversity as well as isolated indigenous populations.

Yet anthropologist Robert Walker worries that such a 'hands-off' attitude implies risks of its own: “Everywhere you look, there are these pressures from mining, logging, narcotrafficking and other external threats. My worry is that if we have this ‘leave-them-alone’ strategy, at the end of the day the external threats will win. People will just go extinct.”

Predictably, soon after the Xatanawa were contacted, they fell ill with viral respiratory infections, to which they had little immunity. Overcoming budgetary limitations and bureaucratic hurdles, FUNAI quickly developed, in collaboration with a special Indian health division (SESAI) in Brazil’s Health Ministry, an emergency response team consisting of indigenous translators, FUNAI agents including Meirelles and Guilherme Dalto Siviero, and the physician Douglas Rodrigues of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the medical school of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). Rodrigues studied under Robert Baruzzi, a pioneer of preventative health for indigenous peoples who worked with legendary Brazilian indigenist Orlando Villas Boas in implementing health care in the Xingu Indigenous Park in the 1960s.

FUNAI has been trying for over a decade to develop a partnership with the Peruvian government to deal with the precarious situation along the Peru-Brazil border over issues ranging from isolated indigenous groups (who cross unaware back and forth across the porous, forested border) to a growing problem with illegal logging and drug trafficking. Just last week, an Ashaninka indigenous leader in Peru was assassinated near the Brazil border, apparently over his denunciations of illegal logging in his people’s territory.

Only recently, however, has concrete progress been made. In March of this year, FUNAI signed formal terms of cooperation with Peru's Ministry of Culture. Meirelles subsequently visited Peru to carry out reconnaissance flights along the Peru-Brazil border, gather and share other evidence on isolated  populations, and begin developing a joint work plan. Information provided by the recently contacted Xatanawa confirmed the existence of at least four more isolated groups nearby. The two countries are now collaborating on a mapping project.

The indigenous federation FENAMAD is also an important partner in this process, given their  important protagonism in documenting and calling attention to the situation of isolated peoples, especially in the Madre de Dios region.

By Peruvian environmental law, and unlike the situation in Brazil, the national park system specifically recognizes the territorial rights of indigenous peoples within even the most strictly protected “untouchable” natural protected areas like Manu National Park and Purus National Park, where isolated groups like the Mashco-Piro live. Thus Peru’s National Service for Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) would be another logical partner in these ongoing collaborations. However because SERNANP focuses more on biodiversity, with few if any anthropologists on staff, the possibilities for dialog are limited.

On September 9, a large group of Mashco-Piros (a separate group from those observed days prior in Manu Park) approached the indigenous village of Monte Salvado, brandishing their bows and arrows and demanding food and assistance. Peruvian authorities remain largely absent from the scene and FUNAI continues its slow, top-down diplomatic negotiations. But according to FENAMAD, a film crew for Brazil’s TV Globo was on the scene in Monte Salvado even before any health care team was sent: human safaris, it seems, have won the day.

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By Glenn Shepard and Felipe Milanez

This is the full text of a three-part series published by Indian Country Today:


More from this blog on isolated groups:



Notes:
[1]: There is some ambiguity as to the precise ethnic group referred to by the term "Mashco," a generic term for "uncivilized" Indians, in documents from the turn of the 20th century; see Peter Gow’s “‘Stop annoying me’: A preliminary report on Mashco voluntary isolation,” presented in 2006 at Núcleo de Transformaçoes Indígenas/Abaeté, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
[2] Kaplan, Hilliard and Kim Hill. 1984. The Mashco-Piro nomads of Peru. AnthroQuest 29 (Summer 1984):1-16.
[3]: Hecht, Susana (2013) The Scramble for the Amazon and the ‘Lost Paradise’ of Euclides da Cunha, University of Chicago Press, p. 435; translated from da Cunha's Um Paraiso Perdido, pg. 164.
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Los mashco-piro al borde: Misioneros, safaris humanos, el juego de pelota y una historia de dos contactos

September 19, 2014, 4:00 am
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1. Misioneros y safaris humanos inician contacto en el Perú

Se siente como un déjà vu: jóvenes desnudos de un grupo indígena aislado se abren paso con cautela a través de aguas poco profundas y se acercan a extraños. Envalentonados por la curiosidad, o el hambre tal vez, aceptan ropa colorida y comida de regalo, sin saber que pueden estar llevando una bomba epidemiológica a su pueblo en el bosque. Y sin embargo, las aparentes buenas intenciones de estos extranjeros amistosos pueden estar motivados por una agenda oculta: proselitismo religioso o el control territorial. Por otra parte, iniciar el contacto con los pueblos indígenas aislados es una violación de las regulaciones peruanas. 

El 6 de setiembre, turistas y una mujer indígena afiliada a un grupo misionero fueron fotografiados entregando ropa y alimento a niños Mashco-Piro en una playa en Madre de Dios (Foto: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD).
La escena es muy similar a los recientes dramáticos acontecimientos en una región cercana a lo largo de la frontera de Brasil con Perú. El 27 de junio, un grupo de jóvenes guerreros Xatanawa, hasta entonces aislados, establecieron contacto con una comunidad Ashaninka en la parte alta del río Envira.

Sin embargo, hay diferencias importantes en estos dos episodios superficialmente similares: el contacto Xatanawa fue iniciado por su propia voluntad, caminando varios kilómetros para pedir ayuda a la población indígena vecina después de aparentemente haber sido atacados por madereros o tal vez (según las primeras investigaciones en Brasil) narcotraficantes con sede en Perú. Por otra parte, los Ashaninka llamaron inmediatamente a un experimentado equipo de la Fundación Nacional del Índio, la FUNAI, para ayudar a mediar en el contacto, proporcionar atención médica para la inevitable gripe que afectó  a los intrépidos jóvenes, y desarrollar una estrategia a largo plazo para proteger al grupo. El contacto con los Mashco-Piro había ocurrido de manera informal, irresponsablemente, y en contra de las normas oficiales, por grupos de turistas y población local sin la autoridad o capacidad para manejar las consecuencias potencialmente genocidas de tal situación.

La organización indígena FENAMAD, junto con Survival International, han publicado recientemente fotografías en su página de FaceBook tomadas el 6 de septiembre donde se muestra un grupo de niños Mashco-Piro recibiendo  ropa y regalos de una mujer indígena local de la Comunidad Nativa de Diamante quien está afiliada a una organización misionera evangélica que ha intentado ponerse en contacto con los Mashco-Piro desde hace algún tiempo. La gente de Diamante en el río Madre de Dios son Piro, y su lengua es muy parecida a la de los Mashco-Piro para permitir una comunicación mutua. Algunos habitantes de Diamante han estado tratando de ponerse en contacto con los Mashco-Piro desde hace casi 25 años, pero sólo en el último año los Mashco-Piro respondió a tales esfuerzos con nada menos que hostilidad: varios pobladores locales han sido heridos por flechas Mashco-Piro, y un hombre fue asesinado en 2011.
CONTINUE READING ------>
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The Kopenawa Galaxy: Review of ‘The Falling Sky’ by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert

October 17, 2014, 10:53 am
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To look across a Yanomami village on a clear night is like seeing the universe in a mirror. Above, the stars glisten like living eyes, their vision unimpeded by smog and incandescence. Below, hearth fires flicker around the rim of the open circular enclosure, each point of light being the sun for a familial solar system orbiting the village galaxy. Beyond the protective ring of the village lies the immense forest whose blackness mingles with the edge of the sky.



A Yanomami man paints his face in preparation for an inter-village feast.

The Falling Sky, by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa and French anthropologist Bruce Albert, takes its title from a creation myth of the Yanomami people who live in the border region between Brazil and Venezuela. The primordial world was crushed by the collapse of the sky, hurling its inhabitants into the underworld. The exposed “back” of the previous sky became the forest where the Yanomami emerged, and where they remain to this day; they still call the forest “the old sky.” A new sky was erected, held in place by metal foundations set deep in the ground by the demiurge Omama. Yet the new sky is under constant assault by the forces of chaos, and Yanomami shamans work tirelessly with their spirit allies, the xapiri, to avert a new apocalypse. A diaphanous third sky already lies waiting, high above, in case the current one collapses and the world once again comes to an end.

...

The Falling Sky is several things. It is the autobiography of one of Brazil’s most prominent and eloquent indigenous leaders. It is the most vivid and authentic account of shamanistic philosophy I have ever read. It is also a passionate appeal for indigenous rights and a scathing condemnation of the damage wrought by missionaries, gold miners and white people’s greed. The footnotes alone harbor monographs on Yanomami botany and zoology, mythology, ritual and history.

Most of all, The Falling Sky is an elegy to oral tradition and the power of the spoken word. As denizens of the “Gutenberg galaxy”[1], we take for granted the superior fidelity and durability of the printed word over speech in transmitting knowledge through time. In his singular voice, Kopenawa, talking of xapiri spirits, turns this notion on its head:

I do not possess old books in which my ancestor’s words have been drawn. The xapiri’s words are set in my thought, in the deepest part of me… They are very old, yet the shamans constantly renew them… They can neither be watered down nor burned. They will not get old like those that stay stuck to image skins made from dead trees. When I am long gone, they will be as new and strong as they are now.

As both narrator and first author, Kopenawa addresses the reader directly: “You don’t know me and you have never seen me. You live on a distant land. This is why I want to let you know what the elders taught me.”

...

A Yanomami shaman's apprentice in yãkoana trance.

Yanomami shamans use a powerful hallucinogenic snuff, yãkoana, made from the resin of the nutmeg relative Virola elongata. By taking it, the shaman “dies” or “becomes other” and experiences the spirit world firsthand. Kopenawa renders these visions with images of haunting beauty:

The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us… Their mirrors arrive from the sky’s chest, slowly preceding them. They suddenly stop in the air and remain suspended… When they arrive, their songs name the distant lands they came from and traveled through. They evoke the places where they drank the waters of a sweet river, the disease-free forests where they ate unknown foods, the edges of the sky where, without night, one never sleeps.
...

Of the “Merchandise Love” that he sees at the root of white people’s greed and destructiveness, he states with prophetic moral clarity: “Merchandise does not die… When a human being dies, his ghost does not carry any of his goods onto the sky’s back, even if he is greedy.” Kopenawa also perceives how the shamanic path has set him apart from ordinary Yanomami: “If you do not become other with the yãkoana you can only live in ignorance. You limit yourself to eating, laughing, copulation, speaking in vain, and sleeping without dreaming much.”
 
The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is mentioned briefly at the end of the book. However, especially in Chapter 21, where Kopenawa contrasts Yanomami traditional revenge killings with the Western phenomenon of total war, Chagnon’s controversial legacy  looms large, as does Albert’s own editorial hand. This chapter seems to recapitulate, in Kopenawa’s voice, the same arguments Albert has leveled against Chagnon in heated scholarly debates.[2] As a cultural anthropologist, Albert sees Yanomami warfare from the native point of view: an integral part of mourning practices that aim at erasing all traces of the dead person (including cremated bones) and quickly sating grief-fueled rage through revenge on the individual killer or sorcerer. Chagnon’s widely cited sociobiological theory reduces Yanomami warfare to a Darwinian contest among males to capture women and procreate.[3] Albert and others[4] have used Chagnon’s own data to refute the central claim that “fiercer,” more homicidal Yanomami men have more offspring.

...

There is little doubt from Kopenawa’s own words that the Yanomami value bravery, revenge and the warrior ethos, though many other things besides. In his frank language, Kopenawa refers often to his kinsmen’s preoccupation with “eating vulvas”; the fact that the verb “to eat” is a euphemism for both intercourse and killing suggests that the Yanomami, like many people, see sex and violence as somehow related, if not in the causal sense suggested by Chagnon's hypotheses.

Kopenawa concludes by reflecting on the profound cultural changes that have turned this warrior ethos outward towards new threats: “The words of warfare have not disappeared from our mind, but today we no longer want to harm ourselves this way.”

The new Yanomami warrior-shaman armed with a hovering laptop (Image: Sergio Macedo).
---

Read the full review in the Nov. 6 issue of 
The New York Review of Books

The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman
by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert
Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 622 pp., $39.95

 


Read more from this blog: An Ax to Grind: Napoleon Chagnon, the Yanomami and the Anthropology Tribe

  
References: 
[1] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962).
[2] B. Albert, “Yanomami ‘Violence’: Inclusive Fitness or Ethnographer’s Representation?” Current Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 5 (1989).
[3] N. Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” Science Vol. 239, No. 4843 (1988).
[4] B. Ferguson, “Materialist, Culturalist, and Biological Theories on Why the Yanomami Make War,” Anthropological Theory Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2001). 

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Infinite Grace: An interview with Caetano W. Galindo on his translation of "Infinite Jest" into Brazilian Portuguese

November 28, 2014, 7:17 am
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David Foster Wallace lives! How else could one explain the long-distance friendship that grew up between myself and a person I have not yet met in person, and would probably never have met at all if it were not for our shared obsession with Wallace’s fiction? As an anthropologist based in Brazil, I got hooked on Wallace while reading Infinite Jest on the tiny screen of my iPod during an expedition to a Kayapó indigenous village. Caetano Waldrigues Galindo is a James Joyce specialist who teaches linguistics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, and who has just finished translating Infinite Jest into Brazilian Portuguese: he kept a blog about the year-long process.

Graça Infinita: Caetano W. Galindo's translation of Infinite Jest into Brazilian Portuguese.

Companhia das Letras, Brazil’s premiere literary publisher, has just released a luxurious hard copy edition of Graça Infinita, Galindo’s Portuguese translation of Infinite Jest. Companhia das Letras first introduced Wallace to Brazilian readers in 2005 with their publication of José Rubens Siqueira’s translation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Galindo has translated more than thirty books in all, including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard and Ali Smith, and is now busy on Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King. 

To celebrate the release of Wallace’s landmark novel in Brazil, I interviewed Galindo—still virtually, via email—for The Millions. Here, I post some highlights; for the full interview, see "Infinite Grace: The Millions Interviews Caetano W. Galindo":

You seem to prefer translating works and authors that are not only essentially "untranslatable," but also notoriously verbose: Joyce, Pynchon, now Wallace. Are you a masochist, or do you just enjoy intense mental activity?

Well, apart from Ulysses, all I've done is translate what my editors give me to do. Ergo, I cannot be considered a masochist: they're the sadists! But yes, this is the kind of literature I like, and thus what I read—and "write"—best. I think my publishers have found this to their liking. And yes, I really do enjoy the acrobatics. It’s kind of like chess: it’s much more fun to play against someone who's better than you are, even though you may end up losing. I like being forced to reach, to face problems I would not have conceived myself. I enjoy trying to recreate puns, acronyms, styles-within-styles, multiple voices: you know, all the hard stuff. What can I say? Back to the masochism hypothesis…


How did you first learn about David Foster Wallace's work? What else of his have you read? Why did you decide to start with Infinite Jest? 

I got to know about IJ when I was deep in my Ph.D. thesis on Ulysses. It was a time in my life when I thought nothing post-Ulysses was worth the effort: I was a real bore back then! “Badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways,” as good ol' Jim J. would have it. Then I heard about this huge book, and many people I respect said I should check out. And so I did. That was 2005. I got hooked. After that I read pretty much everything Wallace wrote, and everything people were writing about him. When I sat down to translate IJ, I had read the whole book twice, and was deeply familiar with Wallace's voice and “tricks.” As a matter of fact, my fascination with the book was probably what landed me the job as a translator for Companhia das Letras. André Conti, the editor at Companhia das Letras who kinda headhunted me for them, is a big Wallace fan. From the moment I was hired in 2008 we had this dream of publishing IJ in Brazil.

...

What did it feel like to spend so much time, so deep inside such a complicated plot, and such a complicated mind?

It was a fascinating process. And in this book in particular, the sensation of being "inside" someone's head (pun intended) is really overwhelming. I love the book even more today, after having unraveled and re-raveled its inner workings. I could feel the plot: I could almost touch it. But you have to remember I was not working on a regular daily schedule. When I could, I clocked 10 hours. But then, the next day, I wouldn’t have time to translate at all, since I would have papers to grade, or other things to write, or students needing help, classes to teach. I think that helped keep me safe. Wallace's (or Incandenza's) mind seems to be exactly what the book is: a beautiful labyrinth. Enchanting. But dangerous...

"Enchanting. But dangerous..."
Infinite Jest IV: A short film (with J.L. Matney), inspired by the fatally addictive "Entertainment" at the heart of the novel, created as part of a multimedia exhibit series in New York and Virginia.

What do you make of IJ’s notoriously indeterminate plot? Did your interpretations or understandings affect your translation?

As for the plot: well, I'm a translator. The guy designs a labyrinth. I reproduce the design with my own bricks and mortar. It's not my job to point any ways out, if there are any! As a reader, I do have my interpretation, but that's not what matters. As I tell students all the time, the translator's job is not to find an interpretation, but to try and find all interpretations, and keep these possibilities open for this new reader who's going to have only the translation as a guide. But, back to plot, you basically follow the original steps. No biggie. There's one thing I regret, though. A student of mine, Ana Carolina Werner, pointed it out to me. The final two words of the book, referring to the tide being "way out," also suggest the possibility of exit, escape. But there was no way to keep this double entendre in the Portuguese.

...

In the European Portuguese translation, the title is rendered as Piada Infinita, while you translate it as Graça Infinita. Explain. Doesn’t graça have mystical overtones, in the sense of religious grace?

Well, that's the one I was afraid of… So here goes. First, there is the question of Brazilian vs. European usage. Both piada and graça refer to jokes, or anything that is funny. But graça also has an extended meaning cognate with English “grace,” both in the sense of religious grace and physical gracefulness. In Brazil we have an expression, ‘não tem graça’, which means both “that’s not funny” but also, “that’s not nice”; there’s also ‘sem graça’ which means “awkward,” or literally “without grace.” Europeans use piada in almost exactly the same expression, não tem piada, “that’s no joke, that’s not nice.” So in Portugal, piada has a more extended range of meanings, somewhat like graça in Brazil, whereas piada in Brazil means only "joke." So we couldn't go there. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the expression "graça infinita" was used by Millôr Fernandes in his Brazilian translation of Hamlet. We were toying with the title Infinda Graça, which uses an older, more archaic word for "infinite," and which sounded good to my ears. But the Hamlet factor was a good argument, and we ended up with Graça Infinita. Finally, you are right, graça does sound religious-y. We didn't have that many choices to begin with, and I don't think this "mystical" undertone is wrong. Is it? There may be no “God” figure central to the novel’s narrative. But, sorry! I really do like this idea that the ineffable, the mystical (as good old Ludwig W. would have it) is always there, always lurking, always tempting. So I stand by our choice!


What about Infinite Jest do you think will appeal to Brazilian readers? Is there any Brazilian author who could be considered a "soul-mate" to Wallace, in some sense? Has Wallace exerted a notable influence on Brazilian literature? What Brazilian authors, contemporary or otherwise, would you recommend to Wallace fans?

I think Graça Infinita (let me use my title, now that I’ve justified myself!) is of immense interest to anyone who is thinking about or wants to think about what it means to be a human inhabitant of this particular nook of world history. I hope readers in Brazil can see that, and can find in the book all it wants to communicate to us at this deep, human, level. As for a Brazilian “soul-mate”... well, here in Brazil we have yet to arrive at such gargantuan hubris! Our best writers, right now, seem to be more concerned with short-ish studies. But we do have a new generation of very promising prose writers. Among them we find lots of readers of Wallace. People like Daniel Galera, Daniel Pellizzari. Wallace’s influence is felt in a number of ways. Wallace is probably the best prose stylist since Pynchon or DeLillo. But like both of them, he is also a deep thinker. And what he said, through his fiction and in his essays, is already a big influence on a whole generation of writers, even here. Brazilian authors I’d recommend? Hmm.... There’s always the great Machado de Assis (I suggest Epitaph of a Small Winner)... João Guimarães Rosa, most definitely. The João Ubaldo Ribeiro of Viva o povo brasileiro. Someone more contemporary? The André Sant'Anna of O paraíso é bem bacana. Me... :-)


Have you read translations of IJ into other languages?

No. I'm only human!
...

Read the complete interview at The Millions.

Special thanks to Matt Bucher, C. Max McGee, and Nick Maniatis of The Howling Fantods.



Graça Infinita by David Foster Wallace, translated by Caetano W. Galindo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2014, 1144 pp..

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See also from this blog: 
Rainforest Wraith: Reading David Foster Wallace in the Amazon







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Indigenous Engagement with Digital and Electronic Media: InDigital Conference at Vanderbilt University, March 26-28

January 21, 2015, 6:49 am
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A cartoon by Gary Larson from 1984 shows natives in grass skirts rushing to hide TV, VCR and telephone before the anthropologists arrive. As these devices have become smaller, cheaper, and more widely available, the penetration of electronic media into indigenous cultures has only grown.


Native peoples of the Amazon and elsewhere in Latin America have become engaged consumers of electronic media, while also making use of video cameras, cell phones and laptops to create and transmit their own artistic and cultural productions and political views. The results can be complex and surprising, ranging from videos about traditional ceremonies to catchy electronic music and even a native-language cover of the Beatles. Among the works made by Kayapó film makers I trained as part of an indigenous media project at the Goeldi Museum in Brazil are films documenting tug-of-war at an interethnic sports competition; a professional soccer game in Rio de Janeiro; the “Miss Kayapó” beauty contest at a local fairground; and a concert by the indigenous pop star Bepdjyre, who composes his own lyrics in Kayapó but sets them to popular Brazilian dance rhythms.


Bepdjyre's stage show includes Kayapó girls showing off sensual dance moves gleaned from watching TV and DVDs.

This conference, sponsored by Vanderbilt and Middle Tennessee University, brings together anthropologists, media scholars and indigenous filmmakers to reflect on the appropriations and interpretations of digital media by indigenous peoples, and to discuss the transformations this use of technology is bringing about.

The "Miss Kayapó" beauty contest captured by film maker Tatajere.

Faye Ginsberg of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University will give the keynote address at the event. Indigenous filmmaker Takumã Kuikuru and Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto present their documentary “The Hyper-Women,” which follows a village on the Upper Xingu River as it strives to rescue, rehearse and host a traditional song festival before the last woman who knows the repertoire dies. The film has won several international awards including the Jury Prize at Brazil’s prestigious Gramado Festival, Best Film at the Curitiba International Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival. Kayapó film makers Bepunu and Krakrax will show works produced on their own village-based laptop editing suites as part of the Goeldi Museum media project, and Richard Pace of Middle Tennessee University will present results of a study financed by the National Science Foundation on the uses and impacts of satellite TV, DVD players and cell phones in a Kayapó village.
 
Conference registration is open through February 16. For more information, visit vanderbilt.edu.

Updated from the original posting by The New York Review of Books.


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A Welcome of Tears, and Farewell to Chief Mro’ô

May 29, 2015, 9:35 pm
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When you cry for someone you’ve lost, you cry for everything you’ve ever lost.

Although it is perhaps the most universal human emotion, grief weighs uniquely upon each of us, and we each must find our own way through the wastelands of loss and bereavement, shadowed by the patterns and compulsions of our distinctive personalities, families and societies. Modern American society seems bent on classifying, five-stepping and pressing on through grief; other societies across the globe give witness to a wide diversity of strategies, from strong repression[1] to cathartic indulgence.[2]

The Kayapó people of Brazil enact the lingering toll of grief through the ritual “welcome of tears,”[3] in which friends or family members who haven’t seen each other for some time cry, wail, embrace and wipe tears away as they remember loved ones they have lost since their last meeting. This custom attracted international attention in 2011, when a photograph of Kayapó chief Raoni in tears was circulated widely with a caption stating (incorrectly) that he was crying over the approval of the Belo Monte dam project. In fact, he was enacting the tearful ritual of greeting with a relative.

Kayapó chief Raoni greets a relative in the traditional "welcome of tears"

When a young Kayapó filmmaker called me at 2 AM on the second of January this year to tell me that the chief of Turedjam village, Mro’ô, had died, I thought I must have misunderstood. This just couldn’t be: Mro’ô is younger than I am. I had seen him a little more than a month before, if ever preoccupied with the burdens of leadership on a violent frontier, still alive, healthy and happy, surrounded by his grandchildren at an idyllic small village where one of his daughters had moved. 

Mro'ô Kayapo, 1969-2015

When I had last seen him, Mro’ô was proud to learn that yet another of his many ambitious dreams would soon come true: three Kayapó film makers, including one novice cameraman from his own village, had been invited to travel in March of 2015 to represent his people’s concerns and show images from Kayapó culture at an international event on digital media in the United States. I had come to Turedjam in late November of 2014 with anthropologist/journalist Felipe Milanez to convey the good news to the people of Turedjam, and to begin the complex and time-consuming arrangements for obtaining passports and U.S. visas for the Kayapó film makers who would be traveling.

A soft-spoken yet determined leader, Mro’ô had first approached me at the Goeldi Museum in Belem during my first month curating the ethnographic collections there in 2009. He was visiting the museum with French anthropologist Pascale de Robert, and asked me for help to obtain ongoing support for this exchange with the Goeldi Museum. He was especially eager to equip and train a cohort of Kayapó youth to use video cameras and digital editing equipment to record Kayapó culture, both material objects preserved in the Goeldi Museum collections, and the living culture of traditional dances, songs, orations and ceremonies that still take place regularly in modern Kayapó villages : “The old people are all dying,” he had said. “We need to register our culture so that our children and grandchildren will not forget.” 

CONTINUE READING ------>
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Agony and Ecstasy in the Amazon: Excerpt from 'Broad Street'

June 30, 2015, 10:57 am
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Never tell a Matsigenka shaman his tobacco snuff is anything but katsi, “extremely painful.”

I learned this lesson the way I learned most of my lessons during fieldwork and in life generally—the hard way. Many years ago, in a village at the headwaters of the Manu River in the Peruvian Amazon, my friend Shumarapage initiated me into the pungent delights of seri[1], a fine green powder of tobacco and ash that Matsigenka men blast up one another’s nostrils to dispel fatigue, treat colds, build bonds of friendship, share shamanic powers, or just get plain smashed.

"Tobacco is the shaman’s soul. The more 'painful' or 'pungent' (katsi) the tobacco, the more powerful the shaman."

That first time, Shumarapage punished me with an intentional overdose. “Just one more puff,” he kept saying, until ten hits later I was lying in a puddle of green snot and vomit while a crowd of men, raucous on manioc beer, laughed all around me (the Matsigenka have a rather harsh sense of humor). Among the Matsigenka, such an episode is nothing to be ashamed of: on the contrary, guests are expected to overindulge as a sign of appreciation. And so despite this traumatic initiation, I soon came to savor the sharp sting of tobacco, crave the euphoric rush of nicotine, even appreciate the purifying bouts of retching that sometimes follow an overindulgence. 

Matsigenka men usually share tobacco at dusk, as the cooking fires begin to flicker against the black wall of the surrounding forest and crickets, frogs, and nocturnal birds tune up for an all-night symphony. A pair of men, usually brothers-in-law or other close kinsmen, sit facing one another on a dingy cane mat in the sandy plaza between thatched houses where women cook, gossip, nurture and laugh while children sleep or play.

The men are often grimy and tired, having just arrived from their slash-and-burn gardens or a hunting foray. They may chat softly for a few minutes about the day’s toils and revelations—peccaries plundering the manioc crop, tapir tracks along the stream—or they may be too tired, and so remain silent. One of them reaches into a coarsely woven net bag slung across his chest and removes the shell of a giant snail (Megalobulimus sp.), known as pompori in Matsigenka, which can be as white and polished as porcelain from years of use. He extracts a cloth wad from the shell’s orifice, careful not to spill any of the precious green powder stored inside. He raps the shell with his knuckles, tilting it slightly downward so the powder sifts down from the coiled innards towards the mouth.

"Green tobacco powder is mixed with the ash obtained from burning the bark of an exceedingly rare tree species known simply as seritaki, 'tobacco bark'.[2]"

The tobacco’s owner brandishes his seritonki, or “tobacco bone,” an L-shaped tube made from two leg bones of the curassow, a pheasant-sized game bird with silky black feathers and a hooked, bright red beak. The bones are secured with sticky brown resin and twists of handspun cotton. Then follows a brief but animated conversation as the two men decide who will go first—which is to say, who will start out on the receiving end of the seritonki. 

“You first!” says the tobacco’s owner. 

“No, you first!” says the other man. “Your tobacco is very painful! I’ll never get used to it.”

“You first!” insists the tobacco’s owner. It’s like watching two gentlemen bicker over who will hold the door.

“All right, I’ll go ahead, but just two nostrils’ full,” the second man acquiesces. He rubs his nose and scratches his head in anticipation.  
CONTINUE READING ------>
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Surreal Specters: Martin Gusinde and The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuego, reviewed in the New York Review of Books

August 11, 2015, 1:02 pm
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The surrealists’ 1929 Map of the World depicts Tierra del Fuego as larger than Australia: Martin Gusinde's photographs show us why.

When Martin Gusinde was ordained as a priest in Germany in 1911, he hoped to travel to New Guinea to work as a missionary among exotic tribes. Instead, his superiors sent him to Chile to teach at the German school in Santiago. Within a few years, however, he found his calling at Chile’s Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, carrying out expeditions to Tierra del Fuego in the far south of Chile and Argentina…

Photography was an important aspect of Gusinde’s scientific and humanistic endeavor, and The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuegois the first book to address this work in its own right… His portraits especially reveal a tension between Gusinde’s ethnographic training and his humanistic (and artistic) instincts.
…
 
Ulen is a clown­like male spirit, whose role is to entertain the audience of the Selk’nam Hain ceremony (1923) © Martin Gusinde/Anthropos Institute/Editions Xavier Barral

Gusinde’s expeditions predate the surrealist movement and the irreverent 1929 map showing Tierra del Fuego as disproportionately large; but his first monograph, including 250 images, was not published until 1931. And yet even if only by coincidence, there is something bewitchingly surreal about Gusinde's photographs of the Hain initiation ceremony, in which young Selk’nam men are hazed by a pantheon of spirits that are revealed, in the final moments (forbidden to women), to be kinsmen in elaborate masks. Several photos show naked male figures standing barefoot in the snow, their bodies painted in bold white stripes on dark ochre and wearing eerie, phallic headdresses
…

In 1923 Gusinde photographed the last Hain ritual before the Selk’nam were decimated by a final wave of measles and forced to assimilate. 

The last fluent Selk’nam speakers died in the 1980s,[1] and Herminia Vera, who spoke the language as a child, lived until 2014: at ninety-one, she was born the same year Gusinde photographed the final Hain ceremony documented in this book. But Joubert Yanten, a linguistically talented mestizo man (he goes by the tribal name Keyuk) has sought to encourage a cultural revival…

In a recent interview with the New Yorker[2]  Keyuk explains the etymology of the group’s name: “The word ‘Selk’nam’ can mean ‘We are equal,’… though it can also mean ‘we are separate.’” Gusinde’s camera captures the essence of this fundamental enigma of the ethnographic encounter.

Read the full review at The New York Review of Books

  

by Martin Gusinde, edited by Christine Barthe and Xavier Barral
with text by Marisol Palma Behnke, Anne Chapman and Dominique Legoupil
English edition: Thames & Hudson; French and Spanish editions: Editions Xavier Barral
Photographs © Martin Gusinde/Anthropos Institute/Editions Xavier Barral

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     References:
     [1] Rojas-Berscia, Luis Miguel (2014) A Heritage Reference Grammar of Selk'nam. MA Thesis, Dept. Linguistics, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.
     [2] Thurman, Judith (2015) “A loss for words: Can a dying language be saved?,”The New Yorker, March 30, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/a-loss-for-words
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The Vampire Pipeline: Unhealth and undevelopment in the lower Urubamba

September 30, 2015, 9:20 am
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The Vilcabamba mountain range, last holdout of the Inca empire in the 16th century, looms in the distance as a man in a cotton tunic and baseball cap scrolls through the photographs on his laptop: dozens of people, adults and children, gravely ill from what was ultimately attributed to a rabies outbreak, but which many Matsigenka people of Camaná in southeastern Peru blame on a leak in the gas pipeline which passes near their village.

“Lots of people died. Children! Fourteen years and below,” he said. “They took them to Lima and they died there. The doctors came and said ‘It’s not gas, it’s not gas, it’s the bat-illness that bit them.’ I said, ‘What if you’re lying?’”

Young girl from the community of Camana who died, presumably of rabies, in May 2012. Photo taken by a community member and used with permission.

 “In 2012 the pipeline broke. They said it didn’t break, but it just leaked a little. In the month of March, at the beginning. They said ‘Don’t worry, the water is safe, the contamination isn’t coming downstream.’ But then it started raining and the floods bought all that contamination down here close to the community. 

“Ohohoh!," he shook his head and then continued in the staccato cadences of the Matsigenka language, “It messed up the river… At first I didn’t notice it, I was eating armored catfish and they had a strange smell. And then I thought, ‘It has come down here after all. People are going to get sick. We might die.’ And then my wife got sick. And the doctors came and said it was rabies. The bat-illness that bit her. I said ‘No way! It was gas!’ Has a bat bitten my wife? She was never bitten by a bat. I built my house carefully. You don’t get rabies so easily.”

A 600 km pipeline carries natural gas from the Camisea gas fields—among the largest natural gas deposits in all of South America—from the Urubamba region in the upper Amazon, across the Andes to refineries near Paracas Marine Reserve on the Peruvian coast. The pipeline supplies over 40% of Peru's natural gas, representing a contribution to the Peruvian economy of about 28% of GDP.1 The Camisea gas fields are located in the heart of the territory of the Matsigenka, an indigenous Amazonian people of about 12,000 who live in the lower Urubamba, Manu and upper Madre de Dios rivers; some Matsigenka in the Camisea region maintain little or no contact with the outside world. And yet because of Peru's subsoil mineral laws, the Matsigenka people have no direct ownership stake in the gas deposits, which are leased by the government to private companies.

In March 12, 2012, the pipeline administered by Transportadora de Gas del Perú (TGP) near the Matsigenka Native Community of Camana on the Rio Picha (an affluent of the Lower Urubamba) leaked into a small stream known locally as Tsirompia. According to the people of Camana, not only did fish die and become contaminated with a strange odor, but also large animals such as tapir and peccaries that drank contaminated water also died and were found lying in the forest or along the river.

Water samples collected on March 13 by a team sent by the Cusco Health Directorate showed unsafe levels of petrochemicals at two of eight collection points, namely, the points closest to the site where the leak was detected. Unsafe levels continued at these two points through March 18, and a final collection on March 22 showed a return to safe levels at one of these points, although no data is given for the second point.1 The health team concluded that, by the date of its return on March 23, the water in the region was now safe.

Yet a number of people fell ill beginning late March through mid-April, and by May 10 five children had died. According to media reports at the time, the people of Camana blamed these illnesses and deaths on contamination from the gas leak.

A health team sent by the Cusco Health Directorate in May concluded that the deaths did not result from water contamination but rather were probably due to rabies transmitted by vampire bats.2 In all, eight suspected cases of rabies were documented of which seven (all children or adolescents 14 years old or less) proved fatal. The only survivor was an adult woman, the wife of the man interviewed above. One of the fatal cases was confirmed as rabies by autopsy, and two additional cases showed indications of rabies by indirect laboratory results. The exact cause of the initial five deaths could not be confirmed due to lack of blood or tissue samples, however the report classified them as “probable” rabies cases.

However during my visit to the community in April of 2014 as part of an independent evaluation of social, economic and environmental impacts of gas development in southern Peru, many community members suspected that some or perhaps all of these illnesses and deaths were not a result of rabies, but rather consequences of the gas leak in March.

“We stopped eating fish for months. There were even cases of children who became malnourished because their parents were afraid to feed them fish.”

As one man said, “There has not been one case of rabies for years and years. There’s a gas spill, and suddenly people start dying. It’s not rabies: it’s the gas. It’s been another two years since then and not a single case of rabies: it was the gas!”
CONTINUE READING ------>
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Water in Yomibato: Guest post by National Geographic writer Emma Marris

May 12, 2016, 7:59 pm
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I traveled last November to Manu Park in the Peruvian Amazon with writer Emma Marris to guide her among the Matsigenka people for a story she published this week in National Geographic. In this post from the science blog The Last Word on Nothing (reproduced with permission), Emma describes her visit to the water purification system recently inaugurated in this remote village by the charity organization Rainforest Flow.

Text: Emma Marris
Photography: Glenn Shepard

Durable, hygienicdrinking taps, sinks andbathrooms were installed near the Yomibato village school by Rainforest Flow.
Last November, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic.  I focused on a group of indigenous people, the Matsigenka, living inside Manu National Park.

One of these people is Alejo Machipango[1], a hunter, farmer, and member of the water committee for the village of Yomibato. Alejo is about 32, but I would have guessed his age at 22. He is married and has several kids. He is a jokester. He likes chewing coca, drinking manioc beer. He takes his arrows with him most places, just in case. I saw him shoot at some birds, but never hit one. And he always laughs when he misses.
 
Alejo with his arrows, just in case.

One day, Alejo takes me to see the spring where Yomibato gets its water. The water system in the village was installed by a charity called Rainforest Flow between 2012 and 2015.

A few generations ago, the Matsigenka used to be more dispersed on the landscape. Each family lived apart, and households moved often. The whole community would gather together once a month, on the full moon, and have a big party with manioc beer. But many families decided to move to Yomibato to be near the school and clinic. As the community grew to several hundred, the local river and streams became contaminated with bacteria and waterborne illness became a chronic problem.

The slow sand filtration treatment tanks, with water committee members.

The newly-installed water system itself is a very simple slow sand filtration setup. Water is piped from a spring away from the main village to a series of three portable geomembrane tanks[2] filled with sand and rocks. Microbes living on the sand gobble up bacteria, viruses, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and parasites. The water is stored in a 30,000 liter bladder tank that is essentially a big tough geomembrane pillow, then is distributed throughout the village through pipes. The whole system is gravity fed, so there are no pumps, no electricity required, no moving parts. It is also light and easy to transport by canoe. It was designed by hydrological engineer Humphrey Blackburn. The water committee clean the filters every couple of months and repair pipe breaks, and that’s about it.

We cross the river by canoe, stop to look at the filters and reservoir, and then start climbing the foothills of the Andes towards the spring. When we get there, the spring itself looks like nothing. A wet spot in the ground. A pipe with holes in it is buried below the surface, I am told.

We sit down to rest in the hollows made by the huge buttressed roots of massive fig trees. Alejo says he knows a tree nearby that is fruiting, and he and his friend Alex disappear, then reappear with their T-shirts filled with brown seed pods, about five inches long. They are called azucar huayo in Spanish; koveni in Matsigenka[3]. The water committee hack them open with machetes and begin eating the sweet brown fluffy stuff inside. It is almost too sweet.

Alex with azucar huayo.

I ask Alejo about laying the 16 kilometers of pipe the project required. “Everybody came to work,” he says. “The women came. We all suffered a lot.”
 
I ask him if it was worth it. Sometimes, I think, development projects are more about what rich people think a community ought to want, rather than what they actually do want. “If we had to do it again, we would.” Alejo says. “One of my children died of diarrhea, and I had it many times.”

He says this so matter of factly that I don’t say the kinds of things I would say if someone back home told me their child had died. I suppose that in a place where people have a dozen kids and where childhood mortality is relatively common, it is possible that the etiquette is a bit different. But in truth, I am stunned that this happy-go-lucky guy who looks like a teenager has lost a child. And as a mother, I feel that vaguely sick feeling you get whenever you hear about any child dying.

I wonder if he is on the water committee because his child died, or if he just thought he’d make a little money without having to leave the village—which is the way most people make money in Yomibato, if they need some for soap or cooking pots or gasoline. But I don’t know how to ask him any more about this dead child.

Nancy Santullo, founder and director of Rainforest Flow.

The American woman who runs Rainforest Flow, Nancy Santullo, sees clean water as a basic step on the road towards empowering indigenous communities that have historically been victimized by outsiders: paid less than non-natives for their work, denied benefits owed to them as citizens, abused by those sent to help them. 

She is on a spiritual quest to make the Matisgenka strong and confident. Alejo already seems strong and confident, but I don’t know. His smiles may cover a shell thicker than the koveni. 

We walk back along the pipe, and it is a hot day, like every day. When we get to the first house of the village, I stop and take a long cool drink from the tap.


Access to clean, safe water has transformed health and sanitary conditions in the project communities, benefiting children especially.
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Find out about Rainforest Flow's water projects in indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon atrainforestflow.org


Read more about the Matsigenka people and Manu Park in the June 2016 issue ofNational Geographic:

by Emma Marris
photography by Charlie Hamilton James

by Susan Goldberg
photography by Glenn Shepard

 

Notes: 
1.  As a young boy, Alejo appeared in the Discovery channel documentaries Spirits of the Rainforest(winner of two Emmys) andThe Spirit Hunters, both filmed in Yomibato in 1992. Alejo's grandfather, Mariano Vicente, a storyteller, shaman, and "star" of the films, passed away in 2012. The Spirit Hunters , narrated by James Earl Jones, streams free online at Culture Unplugged.
2.  Slow sand filtration is a centuries-old technology used by many small towns as well as by the U.S. military on extended combat missionsand the U.N. in disaster relief efforts. Read more at slowsandfilter.com/.
3.  Azucar huayo (or jatobá in Brazil) is a legume seed pod from the tree Hymenaea courbaril L.

 
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Ceci N’est Pas un Contacte: the Fetishization of Isolated Indigenous People Along the Peru-Brazil Border [Excerpt]

May 27, 2016, 8:29 am
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Words matter. Peruvian legislation recognizes two categories of indigenous peoples with little or no interaction with outsiders and the state: “peoples in voluntary isolation” and “peoples in initial contact.” And yet there is no term, process or protocol to describe that moment of transition from one category to another: the process we refer to, for lack of a better term as “contact,” which evokes cinematic images of encounters with alien civilizations.1

Throughout 2014, groups of "uncontacted"(?!) Mashco-Piro regularly approached tourism and transport boats along the banks of the upper Madre de Dios river asking for food, clothing and metal implements.

I visited Peru in March of 2015 in the company of retired FUNAI agent José Carlos Meirelles and Brazilian physician Douglas Rodrigues, both with decades of experience among such peoples. My visit was an attempt to help the Peruvian Culture Ministry better address the precarious situation of isolated indigenous peoples along the Peru-Brazil border. It took years for the Peruvian government to even recognize the fact that isolated indigenous groups still exist in some parts of the Peruvian Amazon. Once such peoples were officially recognized in Peru about a decade ago, the official state policy, promoted by indigenous federations such as the Federacion Nativa de Madre de Dios (FENAMAD), has been “no contact.” Whereas in past years, religious and other organizations have sought to initiate contact with such isolated indigenous peoples, typically resulting in their decimation and cultural assimilation, this more enlightened, recent policy has recognized isolation as a form of cultural self-determination that should be respected and enforced.

Mashco-Piro women on the banks of the Madre Dios river. Photo: Charlie Hamilton James, National Geographic, June 2016.

I first coined the term “voluntary isolation” in an open letter to Mobil Prospecting Peru protesting this company’s seismic exploration in the Rio Piedras known to be inhabited by Mashco-Piro and perhaps other poorly known indigenous groups, referred to at that time with inaccurate and pejorative terms such as “uncontacted,” “Stone Age,” “primitive,” “uncivilized,” or “naked.” The point of the term “voluntary isolation” is to recognize this situation, not as an accident of nature or history — a human group lost in the backwaters of human evolution — but rather as a conscious choice of these indigenous peoples to isolate themselves from outsiders, often due to disastrous prior experiences, as a mode of survival and self-determination.2 The term seemed to catch on, initially through the activism of FENAMAD and the International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs in Peru, and ultimately spread to neighboring Amazonian countries like Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay.

What do we do when a group of isolated people, such as the Mashco-Piro along the upper Madre de Dios River, who had previously rejected all attempts at “contact” by missionaries, scientists, government agents and nearby indigenous brethren, have suddenly emerged along river banks, calling to tourist boats and loggers asking for food, clothes, and metal implements? Mashco-Piro bowmen have raided legally recognized native communities to take food and trade goods, sometimes wounding and even killing apparently inoffensive indigenous “brethren” with their arrows.

Faced with such difficult challenges, one Peruvian Culture Ministry representative asked the Brazilian specialists, “Don’t we need a new category to refer to these people? ‘People in sporadic contact’ perhaps?” This person, and others we met during this visit of exchange between Peru and Brazil, seemed to be contorting the language to find ways of respecting the inviolable principle of “no contact.” Meirelles responded in his characteristically sardonic manner: “Can a person be considered ‘sporadically pregnant’? No. Either they are, or they aren’t.” 

Piro interpreters working for FENAMAD's isolated peoples protection project communicate with a group of Mashco-Piro, 2014.

Viewing numerous photographs of Mashco-Piro individuals approaching boats, receiving clothes, metal implements, food, even a Coca Cola bottle, Meirelles commented: “Contact has already happened. You people are in denial.”

…

The official Peruvian policy of “no-contact” is reinforced by vehement, idealistic media campaigns by indigenous rights organizations and concerned individuals who post on social media networks —“leave them alone!” While there intentions are of course noble, such a simplistic view of the complex and quickly changing situation tends to romanticize and fetishize the condition of “isolation” as a pristine, natural, unadulterated state of the last autonomous, free peoples of the planet beyond the clutches of capitalism, organized religion and the state. People forget that the very state of “isolation” is most often a historical product, a conscious choice by certain groups of people, in certain moments, to defend themselves from moments of violence and territorial invasion, notably during the Rubber Boom at the turn of the 20th century. For this very reason I have resisted the idea that such peoples should be referred to as “uncontacted.” 

Mashco-Piro children remove clothing and food from a tourism boat. Photo: Jaime Corisepa/FENAMAD
…

As Felipe Milanez has written, “Contact is a myth: it is a colonial myth.” It is a myth that fetishizes as a primordial condition —“uncontacted,” autonomous, free, beyond the state — what is in fact a historically contingent response.  The response of isolated peoples is evolving, in some cases rapidly, in a rapidly changing world impacted not only by roads, mining, logging, gas pipelines, and colonization, but also by global warming, environmental change, and changing social relationships with neighboring peoples.3 It is only by looking beyond these myths and the idealistic, sometimes naïve notions they evoke, that scholars and supporters of indigenous rights and the relevant government institutions can develop policies that defend the long-term rights of survival, territory and self-determination of indigenous peoples, rather than blindly defending their own fantasies about them.


.....

Excerpt: Full text at Tipiti 14(1): 135-137 (article 8)

Read more from the special forum on isolated peoples at Tipiti 14(1), with articles by Felipe Milanez & yrs truly, Lucas Bessire, John Hemming, Minna Opas, and Warren Thompson & Obed Garcia

References:

1. Shepard, G.H. 2002. “Prólogo.” In: Huertas, B., Los Pueblos Indígenas en Aislamiento: Su lucha por la sobrevivencia y la libertad. Lima: IWGIA, 11-14.

2. Shepard, G.H. et al. 2010. “Trouble in Paradise: Indigenous populations, anthropological policies, and     biodiversity conservation in Manu National Park, Peru.” Journal of Sustainable Forestry    29(2): 252-301.

3. Walker, R. S., and Hill, K. 2015. “Protecting isolated tribes,” Science 5 June 2015: 1061.
 


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This is your brain on Li-Lo: Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century

September 3, 2016, 12:42 pm
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The genie is out of the bottle, tweeting about the next shamanic bodywork leadership seminar, and the bottle; well, check and see if it isn’t in the back of your fridge by the vegan TV dinner. 

"The genie is out of the bottle" [Photo: Pinterest]

Who would have ever imagined that ayahuasca, the enigmatic jungle potion William S. Burroughs once referred to as “the secret”[1] and whose very botanical identity was a matter of debate through the mid-twentieth century[2] would, within a matter decades, become a household (or at least, yoga-mat) word; the subject of hundreds of scientific, anthropological, and medical studies; a magnet for international tourism; the motor behind a global religious diaspora, and the victorious plaintiff in absentia of an historic Supreme Court case?


The rhyme “herbal brew”/“bamboo” in Paul Simon’s 1990 ayahuasca-inspired song “Spirit Voices” already rings of kitsch, but there is still something, if not fresh, then at least compelling about Sting in his biography Broken Music,[3] revealing that “ayahuasca has brought me close to something, something fearful and profound and deadly serious.” But by the time Lindsay Lohan confides to a reality TV host in April of 2015 that ayahuasca helped her “let go of past things…it was intense,”[4] Burroughs’s “final fix” has finally entered the realm of cliché.

How did this happen? What is the special appeal of this bitter Amazonian brew in the post-post-modern global village toolbox of self-realization? How has it fared in the bustling marketplace of New Age spiritual entrepreneurism and on the battleground of the War on Drugs? And what does it all mean for the multiple, religiously and socially diverse communities and individuals who consume ayahuasca, as well as various ayahuasca-like analogs, around the world?

We can think of the global ayahuasca expansion of the past two decades as a kind of second wave to the psychedelic revolution, following upon that other, “fantastic universal… inevitable… high and beautiful wave,” Hunter S. Thompson describes as cresting in the mid-1960s only to crash so quickly, and so disappointingly:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back[5]…

"Wave of the Future"


…Will the “re-traditionalization” of global neo-ayahuasca ceremonies provide adequate social controls and ideological coherence to ensure that this “second wave” psychedelic revolution doesn’t crash and dissipate somewhere between the headwaters of the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef? Will the contradictions of the modern self and the temptations of capitalism undercut the radical vision of individual and planetary healing that some neo-ayahuasca enthusiasts prophecy? Will ayahuasca become another battlefield casualty in the global War on Drugs, or will legislation evolve to protect ayahuasca as a religious sacrament, as a medicine, as a tool of experiential freedom? We don’t yet have all the answers to these questions, but the authors of this book are on the crest of the wave, and if anyone can see ahead to the far shore, it is they. 

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Excerpted from: "Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century: Having it Both Ways"[6],in:


edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar & Alex. K. Gearin



 Related links from this blog:
Agony and ecstasy in the Amazon
Return of the secret shaman
Dream tobacco
The cheerful pessimist
 Chronicle of a death foreclosed 
Between the cross and the Pleiades
  

References:
[1] Burroughs, W. S., & Ginsberg, A. (2006 [1963]). The yage letters: Redux. San Francisco: City Lights Books
[2] Schultes, R. E. (1957). The identity of the malphigaceous narcotics of South America. Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 18, 1–56.
[3] Sting. (2005). Broken Music: A Memoir. New York, NY: Dell, p. 18.
[4] Morris, B. (2014) Ayahuasca: A strong cup of tea.The New York Times, June 13, p.  ST1.
[5] Thompson, H. S. (1998 [1971]). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York, NY: Random House/Vintage Books, p.  68.
[6] Shepard, G.H. Jr. (2017). Ayahuasca in the Twenty-First Century: Having it both ways. In: B.C. Labate, C. Cavnar & A.K. Gearin (eds.), The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies. New York: Routledge.


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Lessons from the Catwoman: Extinction and resliience of Amazonian fauna [exerpt from SAPIENS]

February 15, 2017, 10:48 am
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Francisco Evangelista, a Paumari Indian who grew up along the Piranha River within the Purus River basin in the Brazilian Amazon, tells a tale from his boyhood about a pelt hunter who went mad from his own excess. Speaking in backwoods Portuguese, Evangelista—who was raised by a rubber tapper whom he called patrão (“boss”)—recalls the day he and the patrão came upon this commercial hunter in distress.

“My boss found [the pelt hunter] on the river bank by a whole herd he had just killed, must have been 12 or 15 peccaries skinned and left to rot,” Evangelista recounts. “We had seen two more herds he had slaughtered a little farther up the river. He was crazy, scared, shaking, screaming about how the jaguars and peccaries were coming to get him because he had killed so many. We took him in our boat but he kept screaming and going crazier and crazier till finally he died, right in front of my eyes,” Evangelista says. “Our people know you can’t just go killing animals like that. It’s perverse. And the forest has its guardians.”

Hunting by local forest-dwelling people in the Amazon for subsistence and commercial purposes has long been considered by many conservationists to be a major threat to biodiversity conservation. In the 1990s, conservationists warned that unbridled hunting could result in “empty forests”—places where trees remain but large animals are eerily absent, hunted out by local people... But a recent study published in Science Advances analyzing historical data on commercial hunting throughout the 20th century tells a different story, showing that many terrestrial Amazonian species have proven more resilient than most experts expected... 

"The suit worn by Catwoman in the 1966 film Batman: The Movie helped drive the trend..."
The international trade in Amazonian animal hides gradually increased after the collapse of the "Rubber Boom" in 1912, then experienced its first peak during World War II when the U.S. again sought wild rubber from the Brazilian Amazon after the capture of Malaysian rubber plantations by the Japanese. The influx of tens of thousands of rubber tappers meant more hunters in the forest taking advantage of a secondary income stream. The 1960s saw a second peak of Amazonian animal hide exports as exotic furs came into fashion in Europe and the United States. The suit worn by Catwoman in the 1966 film Batman: The Movie helped drive the trend...

At least 23 million wild animals were killed for their pelts and skins in the Amazon during the heydey of commercial hunting in the 20th century.

But apart from the white-lipped peccary, terrestrial animal populations were surprisingly resilient in the face of all that hunting. In contrast, aquatic species like the giant river otter, black caiman, and manatee showed rapidly dwindling export numbers during the age of commercial hunting, despite steadily rising prices—proof that their population had collapsed under hunting pressure. The result was local extinction in aquatic and semiaquatic habitats—an “empty river” scenario… [but not] the “empty forest” scenario that some experts predicted.
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Continue reading the full article in SAPIENS by Glenn Shepard and Emma Marris

Based on the paper "Empty forest or empty rivers? A century of commercial hunting in the Amazon," published in Science Advances 2(10). 
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The hummingbird shamans of Peru: Excerpt from "Agony and Ecstasy in the Amazon"

September 19, 2017, 5:20 pm
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Abanti blew the tobacco with fast furious puffs. The snuff entered my nostrils as a sequence of chartreuse explosions that expanded in chain reaction and spread backwards and upwards, illuminating my brain as if from the inside. I gasped at the roaring wildfire that penetrated my sinuses and seared the trigeminal nerves throughout my face. It was more than pain: it was suffering. He was punishing me, there was no doubt, but the pain he inflicted, though intentional, was not cruel or gratuitous. It was an initiation, a right of passage: he was teaching me a lesson.  


"It was more than pain. It was suffering."

The first dose was done and Abanti was already scraping up another. There was no question of refusal. As he rang the bone against the shell, it occurred to me that he was summoning someone, or something. The jets of powdery tobacco entered me once again.  A bright green cloud of excruciating vapor expanded inside my mind’s eye and then turned in on itself, swirling both outward and inward into iridescent fractals that filled me with their luminescence while folding both us within an evolving pattern. There was no way to look at it, since it was everywhere: a million unblinking eyes, a peacock’s fanning tail, a rainbow of undulating woven patterns, the shimmering plumage of a hummingbird. 


"As he rang the bone against the shell, it occurred to me that he was summoning someone, or something"

"A bright green cloud of excruciating vapor expanded inside my mind's eye and then turned in on itself, swirling both outward and inward into iridescent fractals" 
(art: Titia van Beugen)
The two of us were in some secret and enveloping holy place: a cave, a sacred grove. What he was transmitting to me through that bone tube was no longer a physical substance, it was knowledge, a living power: a sacrament. Some part of Abanti was entering me. Not Abanti exactly, but rather a silent twin, a shamanic dopplegänger that had been transmitted to him by some other master. It was both part of him and yet also more than him. It was ancient and eternal, but needed a human host. It could confer practical insights and mystical powers, but was also capricious and probably had its own agenda. This invasive alien force was melding with my spirit through a portal opened up by tobacco. The sensation was both euphoric and frightening.


"A capricious hummingbird seemed to be playing hide and seek with me"
(art: Clancy Cavnar)

I don’t know how many doses he gave me. At some point I whimpered, “Intaga,” and Abanti stopped. Tears streamed down my face. My breath came in sobs. My hands trembled, my face went slack and numb. Thick, dark mucus began to flow out of swollen sinuses onto my lips, neck and chest.  

An eerie buzzing sound surrounded me, sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes in front or behind, on one side or the other. I could never locate it, much less identify its source. A capricious hummingbird seemed to be playing hide-and-seek with me. There was something unbearable about that sound, not so much menacing as utterly incomprehensible and disorienting. I was confused, with no sense of space or time, and the euphoria had drained out of me and in its place came the nausea, rising like a sickening tide that rolled and spun me to that dizzy, unsettling hum. There are times when one can hold firm and fight off ayahuasca nausea through force of will. This was not one of those times.

“Jiromanka,” I called out: ‘The pot.’


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Read the full article at Medium.


Read another excerpt from "Agony and Ecstasy" on this blog.







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The Decade of Contact: Isolated indigneous people in the 21st century [excerpt]

October 11, 2017, 10:07 am
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José Carlos Meirelles, a retired field agent from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, FUNAI, refers to the current moment for isolated indigenous people of the Amazon as “The Decade of Contact." After numerous tragic experiences in initiating contact with isolated indigenous peoples in the second half of the twentieth century, almost always resulting in their decimation, the official policy of FUNAI’s Department of Isolated Indians since 1989 has been to identify, protect and patrol the territories of isolated indigenous peoples without unnecessarily initiating the process of "contact." In extraordinary cases, as was the case of Korubo people on the Javari in 1996 and the Txapanawa of the Río Envira in 2014, FUNAI has initiated contact with isolated groups, taking special medical, logistical and cultural precautions in order to avoid imminent threats. Indigenous organizations and government agencies in neighboring countries have been inspired by FUNAI's example, incorporating the principle of "no-contact" into their policies for isolated peoples.

But the paving of the Inter-Oceanic Highway (formerly known as the ”Trans-Amazon Highway”) between Peru and Brazil, the continued expansion of the agricultural frontier, the growing demand for oil and gas exploration, and the activities of loggers, gold miners, drug traffickers and other outside agents are increasingly penetrating remote regions of the Amazon that once served as refuges for isolated peoples. Because of these external pressures, but perhaps also owing to their own internal dynamics, isolated indigenous peoples from the border region between Peru and Brazil — almost never seen in previous decades — have become increasingly visible and even aggressive in their interactions with neighboring populations.

One group of Mashco-Piro on the upper Madre de Dios maintains regular contact with a team from the Department of Isolated and Recently Contacted Peoples of Peru's Culture Ministry. In this photo, several Mashco-Piro have climbed aboard the Culture Ministry's boat (November, 2015).

In 2011, a Mashco-Piro archer in the Madre de Dios region of Peru killed Nicolas "Shaco" Flores, a Matsigenka indigenous man from a neighboring community who had engaged in tenuous exchanges and dialogue with the group for many years. In 2014, the isolated Txapanawa or “Xinane” people from the Envira river in Brazil took it upon themselves to approach FUNAI agents and neighboring indigenous communities and initiate contact, apparently out of desperation after being attacked by loggers and drug traffickers. In 2015, the settled Matis people of the Javari region in Brazil began a process of violent and uncontrolled contact with isolated Korubo people, leading to deaths on both sides, contagion of diseases to the Korubo, and a crisis in the Department of Isolated Indians in FUNAI. [More recently, another isolated people of the Javari was attacked by illegal gold miners].

And so began the Decade of Contact…

Roads, oil and gas concessions, logging and mining interests are edging in on the territory of isolated indigenous peoples (Image: Science Magazine).

… A growing wave of international media outlets have published sensational texts and photos about isolated indigenous peoples "emerging from the forest." In this context American anthropologists Robert Walker and Kim Hill suggested that contact was inevitable, and that the remaining isolated peoples should be subject to "controlled contact" for their own protection. The article generated tremendous controversy in the media and in academic circles, polarizing debates around policies for protecting isolated indigenous peoples and reducing the complexity of the subject to a false dichotomy between "forced contact" and the principle of no-contact: the so-called “Leave them alone" policy…

… National governments play a key role in guaranteeing the territories, rights, health and cultural integrity of isolated indigenous peoples. But the current scenario of road-building, major infrastructure projects and expansion of the agricultural, logging and mining frontier takes outside agents ever closer to isolated peoples while contributing to an increased curiosity among isolated peoples themselves. This situation demands new policies, concepts and protocols to deal with situations of imminent contact. The Decade of Contact has arrived. A naive "no contact" policy — "Leave them alone!"— has become not only a contradiction, but an act of neglect.

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 Excerpted and translated from “A década do contato," in: B. Ricardo & F. Ricardo (Eds.)Povos Indígenas no Brasil 2011/2016. São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 556-559 (2017).

Read the full article (in Portuguese) at Academia.edu

 
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The Awakening of the Waters: Clean water, health and village sanitation in the Peruvian Amazon

January 31, 2018, 2:08 pm
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So it was, long ago, people had no clean water to drink.Instead, they drank from muddy swamps and stagnant puddles of algae and slime.One day, Shigentiri, the Dragonfly, watched a man hauling gourds of filthy water.  

"Wouldn't you prefer to have clean water to drink?" asked Dragonfly.
 
"Yes!" answered the man."All we have to drink is this muck."  

"So be it," said Dragonfly,"I will awaken the waters. Follow me."

The man followed Dragonfly through the forest and soon they came upon a new spring, gurgling and splashing on the rocks. 

"Don't fill your gourds yet," said Dragonfly."Wait 'til tomorrow, and never again will you have to drink swamp water."

The man obeyed Dragonfly's words, and when he awoke he saw that the spring had filled the stream basin.People have had fresh, clear water to drink ever since.And so it was. 



This myth was told to me by a Matsigenka elder named Tito in the mixed Matsigenka/Huachipaericommunity of Santa Rosa de Huacaria on the fringes of Manu Biosphere Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon.In the first place, the story makes a specific association between dragonflies and clean water sources. As is the case for other Matsigenka tales, such mythical referencesoften emerge from accurate ecologicalobservations. Dragonflies, aquatic species that spend much of their life cycle underwater, are indeed considered by scientists to be important indicator species of environmental health, especially water quality. 

The story also highlights a number of important traditional concepts about water use and purity. Water that is stagnant or muddy is unpleasant and unhealthy to drink, while spring water that is clear, running and free of sediment (sanaari in Matsigenka) is considered pure, safeand drinkable.The story also makes clear the importance of restraint and respect in peoples’ relationship with natural resources: by obeying Dragonfly’s warning and resisting greedy thirst through the night, the man allows clean water to flow eternally. Indigenous mythology is replete with such lessons in restraint and balance in the use of natural resources. 

I gathered this story during anthropological fieldwork in Huacaria as a consultant for the non-profit organization Rainforest Flow, in preparation for a water and sanitation project that was implemented initially inHuacaria, and expanded more recentlytoremote native communities in the heart of Manu Biosphere Reserve.

Despite appearances, even limpid tributary streams in the Amazon can have significant levels of bacterial contamination
 
You might ask, "But what do anthropologists know about sanitation engineering?" And to be honest, I'd have to answer, "Not much." But anthropologists can apply their cultural insights, observational habits and research skills in order to help community development projectsunderstand the local social context, translate complex concepts between languages and cultures, andavoid (or at least minimize) gaffes, misunderstandings and generalgringo cluelessness.

You might also ask, "But I thought the Amazon was the largest body of fresh water in the world. Why do indigenous people livingin a huge, pristine rainforest park at the headwaters of the Amazon need tap water?"

 That, in fact, was the first question I posed to Rainforest Flow director Nancy Santullo when she first called on me to be part of the project: "Isn't their stream water good enough? Prove to me they actually need a new water system!"

Conducting fieldwork in Huacaria

So on my first trip to Huacaria with Rainforest Flow, among mytop priorities was carrying out laboratory testing of the drinking water sources availableto the village. The results were shocking even to me.

All drinking water sources in the community had moderate to extreme levels of contamination with fecal bacteria. Some households in the community already had a government-installed tap water system, which fed raw stream water to cement tap stands near the houses. However analysis revealed that the tap water in Huacaria was actually more contaminated, on average, than water from fresh streams that some households used(!). Furthermore, the existing tap stands had no drainage system, depositing waste water directly onto the ground around houses, generating even more contamination. House-to-house health interviews revealed that 83% of children under five in Huacaria had experienced at least one episode of diarrhea during the prior month.Frequent diarrhea episodes in the early years of life can have a lasting impact on a child's health, and hence it was no wonder that 39% percent of children in Huacaria showed some degree of malnutrition according to World Health Organizationstandards.

The previous tap water system in Huacaria brought contaminated water to households and had no drainage system
 
In addition to measuring water quality and observing water use patterns, I also analyzed health data being gathered by the project team and conducted interviews with community members abouttheirviewson water, health and sanitation.

The Matsigenka concept of well-being is summarized in the verb shinetagantsi, which means to be happy, productive, and well-fed as well as free of illness.  Concepts antithetical to well-being include illness (mantsigarentsi), suffering (tsipereagantsi), "skinniness" or weight loss (matsatagantsi), sorrow or worry (kenkisureagantsi), anger (kisatsi), and soul loss (gasuretagantsi). Health and well-being and, conversely, illness and malaise, embrace physical, emotional, and spiritual states as well as harmony (or lack thereof) in productive, social, and environmental interactions. Their classification of illness categories and their theories about illness etiology and treatment reflect these complex notions. In the Matsigenka cosmos-as-ecosystem, illness, misfortune, and death are often interpreted through the ecological metaphor of predation: just as humans hunt for sustenance, so do demons, illnesses, dangerous animal spirits—and more recently, human sorcerers—look on human beings as game animals to be killed and eaten.

A Matsigenka healer giving me a very effective treatment for an excruciating caterpillar sting: The pain stopped instantly

The Matsigenka are respected by neighboring indigenous groups for their detailed knowledge of medicinal plants addressing a wide range of ailments. In the past, and in some communities through the present, shamans have practiced a special variety of spiritual and cosmological healing that depends on esoteric connections with forest spirits and the celestial realm. Through today in many communities, traditional medicine is still practiced in various forms and by various specialists and non-specialists. Matsigenka theories of illness are highly cosmopolitan and dynamic, often combining empirical, social and spiritual understandings of illness, and treatments likewise can combine herbal, shamanistic, Andean and biomedical treatment methods.

Amazon rainforest peoples such as the Matsigenka and Huachipaeri lived traditionally in widely dispersed, semi-nomadic settlements composed of a few related families. However throughout the 20th century,attracted by missionary outposts and government schools and health clinics, many indigenous families now live in permanent, centralized communities.Increasing population density and more sedentary lifestyles have generated a number of problems including decreasing stocks of fish and game near communities, social conflicts between families, fecal contamination of the water supply and high incidence of intestinal parasites and other gastrointestinal disorders. Although the Matsigenka maintain their rich knowledge of medicinal plants for treating a wide range of traditionally recognized conditions, their pharmacopeia is insufficient for addressingthe full range ofhealth conditions they face today, especially gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses.

As I observed throughout the course of my field study, families in Huacaria who had tap stands used water much more frequently, whether for washing themselves, their clothes and utensils, or for cooking and drinking. Families without taps had to carry water from nearby streams, and thus used it much moresparingly. In order save water, these families would re-use waste water for hand-washing and cleaning utensils, increasing the chances of contamination. Despite the contaminated tap water, sanitary conditions were better in houses with taps than those without them because of the ease of access. Based on these observations, an overhaul and expansion of the existing tap water system seemed warranted.


Slow sand filters use locally available rock and sand loaded into portable geomembrane tanks to purify water in remote communities

Rainforest Flow carried out a complete renovation of Huacaria’s tap water system, using a technology known as "slow sand filtration" to purify the water. This simple but effective technology, used worldwide in remote communities and disaster relief situations, harnesses natural processes, both mechanical and biological, to remove 99.99% of disease-causing microorganisms. Locally-occurring rock and sand are loaded into portable geomembrane filtration tanks that purify water and make it safe for consumption. Wateris distributed to households from a portable, geomembrane storage tank through hygienic plastic tubing to durable, practical tap stands that incorporate local materials and design concepts. By taking advantage of the hilly terrain in the Andean foothills, the water system in Huacaria is entirely gravity-fed, requiring no external power sources (pumps, engines, solar panels) to distribute or treat the water. Portable geomembrane filtration and storage tanks greatly reduce the need for cement, rebar and other construction materials that are difficult to transport to remote communities. 


Community members participate in all stages of construction and maintenance of the water system to guarantee sustainability. A special stand-alone tap design using local river stones was developed after studying community needs and use patterns.


Afterthisbaseline research, I carried out afive-year follow-up study of the project impacts in Huacaria (2002-2007). More recently, I haveevaluated the initial phase of theproject's expansion (2007-2014) to the communities of Tayakome and Yomibato in Manu National Park.

Ongoing biomedical monitoring in collaboration with the Peruvian health ministry suggests a significant impact of the water purification system on child and overall community health. The prevalence of diarrhea among children saw a 45% reduction over a three year period after the water system was renovated (see report for complete health data). Prior to the water system renovation, over half (54%) of Huacaria’s children and youths suffered from multiple parasite infections (two or more parasite species simultaneously). After three years of access to purified water, only 20% had multiple infestations, while 23% of children were parasite-free, up from only 9% parasite-free prior to the water system renovation, a nearly threefold improvement. 

Height and weight measurements suggest a trend in improving nutritional status for Huacaria's children during just the three initial years of the project. The percentage of children considered of "normal" weight (according to WHO standards) increased from 83% to 90%, while the percentage of children considered to have normal stature doubled from 35% to 70%. A concomitant trend is noted in decreasing numbers of children considered malnourished because of being underweight (from 17% to 10%) and undersized (from 39% to 30%) for their age. Though it is difficult to assign causality for such a small population, the drastic reduction in episodes of infant and child diarrhea, and the notable reduction in intestinal parasites certainly appear to be relevant in reducing malnutritionrates.


Microbiological analysis shows the progressive reduction of bacteria levels from the stream source water (left), to the output of the gravel pre-filter (top), to the safe drinking water emerging from the slow sand filter (right). No chlorine or other treatments were added.


After witnessing the health improvements in Huacaria, observing the community empowerment generated by Rainforest Flow's programs and attesting to the organization's socially and environmentally sustainable practices, I suggested to Nancy Santullo that she expand the project to include the much more remote communities of Tayakome and Yomibato within the core zone of Manu National Park, where I have worked for almost thirty years. She accepted the challenge and now, after arduous years of even more difficult work, both communities have sturdy tap stands delivering clean, safe water to every household where it is technically possible. The schools in Tayakome and Yomibato also have utility sinks and hygienic, well-ventilated bathrooms with a sealed, composting septic system. 



Getting to Yomibato is an extreme sport: the narrow stream is an obstacle course of fallen trees, submerged trunks, shallow rapids and sandbars.

Spacious, well-ventilated, eco-friendly bathrooms at the community schools in Tayakome and Yomibato

The water systems and sanitary installations brought by Rainforest Flow have delivered far superior results to those found in communities of the adjacent Camisea region, outside Manu Biosphere Reserve, where a gas pipeline has caused serious social and environmental impacts, while generating over one billion dollars in royalties that have been invested in mostly failed community development projects, with particularly dismal results in the areas of health and community sanitation, at least so far. Rainforest Flow's project design and results have been shared with indigenous associations and government representatives in the Camisea region in the hope that better use will be made with gas royalties and other community investments in the future.




To learn more about Rainforest Flow's projects, programs, and mission, visit rainforestflow.org


Proceeds from the sale of selected artworks at Linda Matney Gallery in Williamsburg, Virginia, support Rainforest Flow and other community projects in the Amazon

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The following reports and publications on water projects, health status and ethnomedical practices in native communities of Manu Biosphere Reserve and the Camisea region are available for download:

Matsigenka: Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology (2003)

Huacaria Hygienic Center: Summary of goals and results of field research carried out in June, 2003 (2003).

Rainforest Flow/House of the Children’s “Project Huacaria”: Five-Year Evaluation (2002-2007) of Social and Health Impacts of an Integrated Water Purification/Health Education Project (2008)

Revenge, Envy and Sorcery in an Amazonian Society: Revenge in the Cultures of South America (2008). 

Rainforest Flow’s “Manu Expansion Project”: Preliminary Evaluation of Social and Health Impacts of an Integrated Water Purification/Health Education Project in the Native Communities of Tayakome and Yomibato in Manu National Park, Peru (2014).


The Vampire Pipeline: Unhealth and undevelopment in the lower Urubamba (2014).


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The Fish Trap: Winning poem featured by Sapiens.org for World Poetry Day

March 20, 2020, 2:56 pm
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The fish trap

The fish trap is sun bleached dry half
buried in squeaking white
sand under an equatorial
moon that wants to walk across the black
mirror but instead is twice
swallowed by river and 
clouds

It is both an elegant and obsolete
thing this hybrid carcass of palm
staves lashed with sinewy vines an incongruous
coil of copper wire binding some
ancient fracture burnished
golden by the 
sand

He dismembers it like some beast on a
skewer its ribs and sinews yielding to dark
vegetable hands function
not lost but transformed as he starts
a fire and the flattened
helix glows among the 
ashes

The fish lie on the bank by the haul
net sucking at the futile night
air through pumping gills still
they watch him stunned through
glazing water as red
halos ebb behind open
eyes

And he feeds the last
of the trap to the
flames under a gnarled
pot on the beach flickering between
an empty village and the black
river under the smothered 
moon



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Poem chosen as a winner in the 2020 anthropological poetry prize by Sapiens.org

Read my introduction to the poem for #WorldPoetryDay

Hear me read "The Fish Trap" on SoundCloud
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