Amazonian Anthropology Workshop
Friday, 25th June 2010
64 Banbury Road, Oxford
9.30-9.45
9.45-10.30
Welcome
Vanessa Grotti
10.30-11.15 Istvan Praet
11.15-11.30 COFFEE BREAK
11.30-12.15 Audrey Butt Colson
12.15-13.00 Barbara Arisi
13.00-14.15 LUNCH
14.15-15.00 Peter Gow
15.00-15.45 Theresa Miller
15.45-16.00 TEA BREAK
16.00-16.45 Olivier Allard
16.45-17.30 Juan Pablo Sarmiento
Undoing the Other: nurture as an expression
of ownership in Trio-Akuriyo relations,
northeastern Amazonia
An argument against “other people”. The
idea of foreigner as colonial import
"Hidden Structures and Meanings": Naming
and Identity amongst the Carib-speaking
Peoples of the Roraima Region of the Guiana
Highlands.
Matis economy of culture
Three peoples in an ensemble – the Piro, the
Cashinahua and the Yaminahua
The aesthetics of environment: an exploration
of indigenous maize cultivation and
biocultural diversity in Central Brazil
Wailing and Crying: emotion and morality
among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta
(Venezuela)
From Paisano to Diablo: Understanding
Ashaninka Participation in the Peruvian
Internal War
ABSTRACTS
Vanessa Grotti
'Undoing the Other: nurture as an expression of ownership in Trio-Akuriyo
relations, northeastern Amazonia'.
In the late 1960s a handful of North-American Protestant missionaries based in Trio and
Wayana villages of southern Suriname organised a series of expeditions to contact a
group of elusive hunter-gatherers which had been located close to the border with Brazil
and French Guiana. Led by missionaries who mainly relied on the support provided by
the recently sedentarised Trio, these were not the first expeditions of their kind but
rather a continuation of a method developed in southern Guyana in the 1950s among
the among another central Guianese group known as the Waiwai by members of the
Unevangelized Fields Mission (UFM). Based on archival research and ethnographic data
this paper contrasts the accounts and perspectives of the missionaries and the
Amerindian expedition party members, and analyses the ways in which the contacted
peoples were perceived, engaged with and gradually incorporated into a sedentary
existence under the close supervision of their Trio ‘masters’. By focusing on the
implications of processes of contact, sedentarisation and conversion to Christianity, I will
argue that the relationship which emerged between the Trio and the hunter-gatherers is
one of asymmetry which involves control through the idiom of protection. Interestingly
in the case of central Guianese populations such as the Trio and the Waiwai, the
discourse of nurture and care for the Other is resonant from both an Amerindian and a
missionary point of view, and its association with practices denoting hierarchy may be
relevant elsewhere in native Lowland South America.
Istvan Praet
An argument against “other people”. The idea of foreigner as colonial import
This paper examines the curious belief that there exists such a thing as “other people”.
The latter manifest themselves in manifold ways and may be referred to as foreigners,
strangers, outsiders, members of a different society, and so forth. Using ethnographic
material from Amazonia and elsewhere, I show that the anthropological custom of
attributing the notion of “other people” or any of its equivalents to Amerindians or other
so-called indigenous people is questionable. I suggest that it is based on a remarkably
recurrent mistranslation. To be sure, some Amerindians speak of foreigners these days,
but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the Europeans set foot in the
Americas, the prevalent situation was one which anthropologists find difficult to imagine:
a world without “other people”. The paper then investigates in how far this world
persists in the present day and age.
Audrey But Colson
"Hidden Structures and Meanings": Naming and Identity amongst the Caribspeaking Peoples of the Roraima Region of the Guiana Highlands.
This is an examination of the different categories of group names, their meanings and
application, with specific reference to the Pemon and Kapon and their neighbours (in Brazil,
Guyana and Venezuela). Using literary references and field research data, I show how the
different kinds of names reveal levels of structure within a segmentary system of interrelationships, in that they conceptualize and underpin the socio-political, linguistic and
cultural relationships of indigenous peoples within the region and beyond. They also
identify the ownership of ancestral lands and resources.
I will argue that a study of naming systems should be a prime consideration in any attempt
to classify the indigenous peoples of Guiana and in order to understand the basic structures
underlying daily life and to explain group relationships, past and present.
Barbara Arisi
Matis economy of culture
Os Matis são muito conhecidos na academia graças ao trabalho do antropólogo Phillippe
Erikson e no mundo todo por causa dos diversos documentários e reportagens feitos a
seu respeito como, por exemplo, a série Tribe, de Bruce Parry para a BBC, ou matérias
de capa para a revista National Geographic. Contatados em 1978, os Matis rapidamente
aprenderam a negociar sua “cultura”. Esse artigo é um “work in progress”, pois estou
preparando minha tese após pesquisa de campo empreendida em 2006 e 2009 no Vale
do Javari (AM). Meu objetivo é estudar a rede de relações dos Matis com
documentaristas, turistas, indigenistas, pesquisadores, ONGs e indígenas para quem os
Matis exibem suas festas ou como sopram suas zarabatanas em troca de dinheiro ou
outros itens e bens. Pretendo apresentar dados de minha pesquisa e alguns de seus
momentos-chave: a) visita de jornalistas da TV MBC da Coréia do Sul nas duas aldeias,
b) gravação de piloto para a Discovery Channel/Animal Planet, dos Estados Unidos e c)
acampamento com quatro turistas alemães. Descreverei e mostrarei também dados
sobre: a) festas dos bichos (“nëix tanek”, imitar, ser como animais...), quando a
comunidade de uma das duas aldeias se reuniu para que os mais jovens aprendessem a
fazer a festa da tatuagem, com seus cantos e mímica de sons e movimentos de animais
ao encenar/vivenciar mitos, b) construção do corpo das meninas e c) transmissão de
conhecimentos sobre plantas e medicina tradicional. Meu artigo irá relacionar esses dois
lados da “cultura” e cultura Matis: o que se mostra para os de fora e o que se ensina
para os de dentro. Meu objetivo é estudar como se dá a transmissão desses
conhecimentos dentro dos limites da aldeia e o que se deve esconder, evitar transmitir,
quais são os conhecimentos que devem ser preservados longe daqueles que são
considerados de fora
Peter Gow
Three peoples in an ensemble – the Piro, the Cashinahua and the Yaminahua
To Follow
Theresa Miller
The aesthetics of environment: an exploration of indigenous maize cultivation
and biocultural diversity in Central Brazil
This talk will highlight the importance of maize and its varietal diversity to central
Brazilian indigenous communities. It will be shown how this crop is central to indigenous
cosmology, ecology, and society, and how some communities continue to maintain
maize varietal diversity. I will argue that these issues can be best explored within an
aesthetics of environment framework, in which multi-sensory perceptual environmental
experiences are given value and made meaningful.
Olivier Allard
"Wailing and Crying: emotion and morality among the Warao of the Orinoco
Delta (Venezuela)"
The Warao perform upon death a powerful form of funerary lament, whose most salient
feature, I argue, is not that it is a conventional expression of grief, but rather that it
moves others to tears: men cry silently and women join in the lament. I relate this ritual
to ordinary and drunken crying, and to moments when people refer to crying in order to
manipulate interactions, and try to show that grief can be intentionally sought after
because of its moral value.
Juan Pablo Sarmiento
From Paisano to Diablo: Understanding Ashaninka Participation in the
Peruvian Internal War".
This is an attempt to understand the transformation from human being to daemon that
Ashaninka people believe those Ashaninka who followed Sendero Luminoso were forced
through in their captive years. It is believed that this transformation, and the
perspective that came with it, allowed them to act with cruel violence to their former
countrymen and kin. Following there ideas of the transformative nature of the Ashaninka
body and the changes in perspective caused by it, I try to find what reconciliation after a
process of extreme violence looks like in a society that upholds emotional restraint and
has no successful 'traditional' means of conflict resolution.