IN SEARCH OF RITUAL: TRADITION,OUTER WORLD AND BAD MANNERS IN

THE AMAZON

Oscar Calavia Sáez

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil

Ritual is currently a central issue in Indian politics in the Amazon. Ritual implies tradi-tion, and thus ethnic legitimacy. But to some groups, such as the Panoan-speaking Yam-inawa, political and social looseness are handicaps to the invention of shared performancesthat are recognizable as rituals. Leadership is based both on an outward policy and aninward search for patterned, collective actions that can designate a gathering of kin andfollowers as an indigenous community.This article focuses on such ritual-making efforts,describing two otherwise informal parties held on a Brazilian Yaminawa reservation wherefieldwork was carried out in 1993.

There is not much to set the Yaminawa apart from other small Nawa groups of the Jurua-Purus and Urubamba-Ucayali rivers in the southwesternAmazon.1 They all belong to the Panoan linguistic family, live in a dense,sparsely populated forest, subsist through hunting and agriculture, and are onlymarginally integrated into their respective Brazilian, Peruvian, and Boliviannational societies. Within this ethnic kaleidoscope, the several groups knownas Yaminawa (also spelled Yaminahua, or Jaminawa) are not differentiated eitherlinguistically or genealogically. The name ‘Yaminawa’ is, however, identifiedwith political instability and a self-destructive bias toward the Western world,in marked contrast to more conservative tribes such as their Kaxinawá neigh-bours.The recent history of the Yaminawa of the Cabeceiras do Rio Acre [Head-waters of the River Acre] Indian Village is therefore commonly understoodas a pre-eminent example of cultural loss.2

This view, which I have discussed in previous works (Calavia Sáez 1995;2001), is predicated on widely shared and enduring ideas about the fate ofindigenous societies, but it seems to me to be defective.3 In reality,Yaminawahave many different and highly flourishing forms of social order. This richdiversity exists without there being any domestic or political authority withthe power to exalt one particular social form over the others.Yaminawa lifethus lacks anything akin to a traditional public arena. There is nothing likethe time-honoured Panoan rituals, such as the Kaxinawá’s Kachanawa, the Sharanahua’s ‘special hunt’, or the Shipibo’s and Kaxinawá’s girls’ initiation ceremonies.4 Nor do the Yaminawa seem to feel the lack of such festivals.Whenever I found memories of past rituals among the Yaminawa, they

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2004.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 10, 157-173

consisted of vague descriptions, suggesting something similar to what the Kaxinawá would call ‘amusements’ (brincadeiras), involving heavy drinking anddancing (McCallum 2001: 130), and lacking the totalizing aspect of the greatPanoan rituals. Even these ‘amusements’ seem to have disappeared some time ago, perhaps when the Yaminawa migrated to the Iaco River.5 Amongthe Yaminawa of the Cabeceiras do Rio Acre Indian Reservation there is nothingthat a conservative lexicographer would call ‘ritual’.This is not surprising, con-sidering the Yaminawa ethos, which is characterized by a lack of formalitywhich might almost seem ‘modern’.Yaminawa have no traditions, complainstheir chief.

This idea of the Yaminawa as a riteless people springs from a somewhatpedantic use of the word ‘ritual’. Of course, the Yaminawa people enjoy gettingtogether to feast, although they do this in a markedly low-key manner. Abroader notion of ‘ritual’ is adopted here to analyse the two largest feasts thatI attended during my fieldwork.The main features of these feasts were impro-visation and contingency, neither of which conforms to most common notionsof ritual.6 The flexibility of the outer shell, however, may conceal some com-paratively stable elements, as will be seen below.

The first feast was held on 31 October 1992, in the home of the Yami-nawa chief, Zé Correia, in the area known as the ‘Indian slum’ (Portuguese,‘Favela dos Indios’) at Assis Brasil, the Brazilian town near the Indian Reser-vation. The feast was occasion for a two-fold celebration: the home-comingof Julio Isodawa, who had been in Norway attending a meeting of indige-nous schoolteachers organized by an NGO, and the birthday of Correia’sdaughter.

The second feast was held on 17 August 1993, on the Indian Reservation,to celebrate the first birthday of Julio’s baby. One could say that the feast wasalso intended to honour the new leader, who had replaced Correia a monthearlier. Both feasts contain very similar elements, so they must be comparedand understood together. As it is useful to name them, I will refer to the firstfeast as ‘Scandinavian Feast’ and the second as ‘Restrained Forró’. In the ethno-graphic description that follows, it will become clear why I regard these asapt rather than whimsical titles for the two rituals.

The ‘Scandinavian Feast’

At the time of the Scandinavian Feast most Yaminawa were present in thevillage of Assis. Some were waiting for Julio’s arrival from Norway. Some werebidding farewell to Correia, who was going to the city with other Yaminawain search of study or medical treatment. Some were waiting for their retire-ment pensions at the post office. Others, as it was near All Souls’ Day, wentto Assis to light candles for deceased Yaminawa buried there. Others were inAssis for more incidental reasons: Chico de Raimundo ( Julio’s elder brother,thus his closest kin) was there on account of a snake-bite. There were, in fact,too many individual causes to account for the general migration that occursregularly every month.

Julio arrived in Assis on 30 October, and was received with mourningchants by female kin. The women’s mourning songs are commonly related

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to kin absence, and are always loaded with bad omens, whether or not anyexplicit danger exists. Julio himself cried the next day during the feast,when he was told that his brother had been bitten by a snake. Such displaysof emotion always seem to be related to distance from loved ones: when thebrothers finally met, they did not go off alone with each other, but ratherjoined a group of Yaminawa who spent all night roaming from bar to bar.

Julio’s arrival provided an added incentive for the drinking festival that wasalready underway.At the beginning of the feast (the afternoon of 31 October),some people were already reeling from one, two, or three days of drunken-ness. Some barely managed to wake up before getting another drink andfalling virtually unconscious. In addition to the Yaminawa, other people gatherat the ‘Indian Slum’: rubber-gatherers, farm-workers, and some Piro Indians.By noon, Zé Correia began to provide meals at his house. For several hourshe dispensed fish (which he had bought from his father in-law), manioc flour,canned meat mixed with flour, and some twenty bottles of cachaça (sugar-canebrandy). It was only to close kin that the food was offered. The serving wascarried out by Correia’s wife, assisted by her children, and was meant for thoseconsidered to be close kin. The drink, however, was more publicly distrib-uted, and acted as the life-blood of the whole feast.

This drinking warrants further attention. The heavy cachaça consumptionindicates a degree of sophistication in the Scandinavian Feast. The commondrink among the Yaminawa (and among all the rural proletariat in the westernAmazon) is 97 per cent alcohol, highly toxic, sold in plastic bottles, andintended for use as a cleaning agent. That is what I mean when I speak of‘alcohol’ – not the array of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol in Assis is a good dealmore expensive than cachaça. It is not a matter of taste; its potency is the onlyserious criterion. Obviously, 194-proof alcohol is much stronger than cachaça,and it is possible to dilute it with water when the drinking-circle grows.Cachaça in no way approaches the strength of even diluted alcohol, and carriessomething of a stigma, being regarded as a ‘lightweight’ drink. Those withweaker stomachs prefer it, however, and glass and plastic bottles sit side byside on market shelves and account for a good deal of the income of localtraders. The cost of beer is much higher and Indians rarely drink it, outsidethe brief prosperous moments when wages and pensions are paid. Some Yam-inawa drink beer-and-cachaça or beer-and-alcohol cocktails, these being muchesteemed for their intoxicating effects.

During the Scandinavian Feast alcohol played a secondary role, appearingmainly at the end of the party. Even so, several hours of ‘weak’ cachaça drink-ing made Correia’s house a scene of diverse and almost surreal activity.By sunset, one group could be observed playing cards. Another group were gathered together strumming country songs on a guitar, while an elderly manran unsteadily around the house, leaning on people’s shoulders and speakingloudly in their faces. A hunter in his 30s made loud pronouncements in unintelligible slurred Portuguese while dancing and calling out hurrahs to the chief ’s daughter. She, with a gang of children in tow, swung across theroom on a fishing-net suspended from the roof. The singing, calling, andspeeches were in Portuguese: alcohol consumption calls for the white man’slanguage. A young Yaminawa man fainted. He was immediately laid in ahammock and covered with blankets, and slept peacefully while the party

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continued around him.When another man collapsed, his friends tried unsuc-cessfully to carry him, but finally lowered him to the ground, and continuedthe feast.

Near nightfall – from the neighbouring house, where I was talking withother Indians – I heard Zé Correia speaking aloud. I went back to the lounge:Julio was close to Correia in the centre of the lounge. Clutching a huge boxof chocolates to his chest, he was holding forth in grand oratorical style. Onthe bright red cardboard, one could see the big golden letters displaying itstrademark: ‘Kong Haakon’ written beneath the Norwegian crown. Julio wasrecounting his trip to Norway, where he met twenty-three other Indianschoolteachers. According to his somewhat rambling account, the box ofchocolates had been presented to him as a memento of his trip, though therecipient was unspecified: the community, himself, the twenty-three school-teachers, South America? In the event, he had decided that the whole Yaminawa community would share the gift. In order to do so, Julio was goingto give it to Zé Correia.When he had finished, Zé Correia responded enthu-siastically, saying that there were certain points requiring further explanation.He spoke about the funds given to the UNI’s (União Nacional do Índio)president to be used in educational programmes. He also boasted that a Yaminawa man, a schoolteacher, was the first South American Indian everinvited to Norway, or to Europe; finally, Correia said something about the fivehundred years of genocide, about South America, and about the South-American Indians themselves. Julio spoke yet again, producing variations onhis previous themes: still clutching the box, he kept apologizing for being lesseloquent than Correia. Correia then took over again, resolutely repeating the same points. Again Julio intervened, then Correia, then Julio again. Thenit was Correia’s turn once again. Increasingly enthusiastic, he called on thosepresent to give three cheers for their hosts and the Yaminawa people.

Throughout this antiphonal performance, everyone in the crowd clusteredround the chief, eagerly awaiting the sharing-out, which could no longer bedelayed. At the climax, Zé Correia called the anthropologist (that is, myself )over to take part in the distribution, organizing his kinfolk into two strag-gling queues, though not without difficulty. Someone held the box, alreadyopen, and the anthropologist was to be the one to offer the chocolates to theparticipants. The problem, however, was that Scandinavian confectionery is not produced with the Amazonian climate in mind.The chocolates had begunto melt, and removing them from the box proved to be a far from simpletask. The chief had to use all the authority at his command to stop peoplefrom queue-jumping; he also had his hands full adjudicating demands for extra chocolates on the grounds that these were to be handed on to absentrelatives.

Once the sharing was complete, but before the crowd had dispersed,Artemira (Correa’s daughter) and some friends ran away with the box, whichwas still full of sweet remains. It was night already, and the feast continued,now given a new lease of life by the arrival of Julio’s brother, the one whohad been bitten by a snake the previous day. Zé Correia headed an expedi-tion to the medical post, where an army physician inspected the wound, andthen went off in search of medicine.

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Something needs to be said about the fights which took place later, involv-ing the two young men who fainted during the feast. The causes and devel-opment of such fights are never clear to the observer, nor very interesting tothe local actors.There is always some kind of sexual aggression implied (facts,words, or intentions); there is always a frantic coming and going of relatives,who make attempts to prevent such arguments from turning violent, or, ifthey fail to do so, also contribute to the quarrel. Such conflicts show no sim-ilarity to the ‘concentric’ mode of white men’s street-quarrels, where peoplecrowd around a small core of protagonists. The Yaminawa fights are ambula-tory, rarely if ever lead to anything in the way of an immediate and decisivefollow-up. If any violent consequences ensue, this tends to happen much later,in the form of something like a murder on a lone path far from the poten-tially explosive environment of the feast. The chief thus performs his role –roaming agitatedly through the stages of the drama – gathering information,reproaching the fighters and driving them to a place where he then deliversa homily to the entire community. Nobody appears to pay any attention towhat is being said. On the sidelines, those involved unthread their own dis-courses: limping, staggered, uttered in hesitant Portuguese.They do not speakabout the causes of the fight, but about projects and fears. They will studyand live among the white men – they say – they will become cops, army soldiers, or politicians, they will die young …

The ‘Restrained Forró’7

The second feast to be discussed here began on the morning of 17 August.It started with the slaughtering of a pig that Julio had bought from AntonioPedro, a resident of the downriver part of the Indian Reservation. Julio hadbecome chief only one-and-a-half months earlier, and had invited the Yami-nawa and their neighbours to the party. Only the oldest and those most hostileto Julio’s election as chief were absent. Nevertheless, there were representa-tives in attendance from all the political tendencies of the community. Therewere also many foreign guests: rubber-gatherers, farmers, and Julio’s brothers-in-law, who came from the Yaminawa village in Bolivia. When I arrived inthe early morning, the pig had already been slaughtered and was lying by thebonfire near Julio’s house. After a while, it was cleaned and butchered, fol-lowing the same procedures used by the Yaminawa when they butcher game.The liver and the heart, regarded as delicacies, were offered to Julio’s closekinsmen: Clementino ( Julio’s koka, MB) was given the liver and Chico deRaimundo ( Julio’s ochi, eB) received the heart and a good deal of meat –both went home carrying their gifts. The intestines were given to an oldwoman, who cleaned them up and prepared them – usually bowels aredeemed of secondary interest, and given to old women and children. Theyoung men barbecued portions of meat – especially ribs – placing themstraight onto the fire. Most of the meat was taken into Julio’s wife’s kitchen,where it was cooked and afterwards distributed with manioc flour. Severalguests, notably one rubber-tapper (possibly a Piro), spent a lot of time hackingoff the pork fat. This was to be melted down to produce lard, a substance

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even more popular with the Yaminawa than the meat itself. Before the mealwas served, people were offered a mixture (mingau) of sweet manioc andbanana.

At this time, the guests started putting pressure on Julio, asking him to offerthem the alcohol and brandy destined for the party. Julio refused, pointing outthat drinking would be permitted only after 10 p.m. – too late by Yaminawastandards. Before noon the guests dispersed; some went to play soccer andmost of the others went home. Indeed, the real feast only began late at night.It was a very dark night, making it difficult to follow the narrow paths acrossthe village. Even so, the Yaminawa got together in the large classroom of thevillage school.The desks were placed along the walls, and as the guests arrivedthey sat along them in a very quiet and formal way – an unusual behaviour– whilst the hosts went about trying to hang up some oil-lamps. The chief,resting on a desk, performed an eclectic repertoire on the guitar, trying toentertain the guests, but the latter remained motionless in their seats. He per-sisted, and from time to time turned on a huge stereo, playing their only twotapes of chicha music, a blend of salsa and huayno which is very popular inBolivia and Peru. The guests’ expressions held a mixture of astonishment andworry; not even a drop of alcohol had yet been distributed. Meek requestsfor alcohol were constantly addressed to Julio. Between one song and another,he explained patiently that the alcohol should be managed in such a way asto ensure that the feast would not end too early. Otherwise, everybody wouldget drunk and the party would quickly be over.

There was, in fact, a remarkable display of the chief ’s authority. Only shortlybefore drinking was scheduled to begin were alcohol and brandy distributedin tiny glassfuls by the chief and his close subordinates.8 At about this time anew guest arrived – Chaguinhas, a crippled rubber-tapper who started to playthe guitar, producing a rough but effective sound from his instrument.Chaguinhas’s enthusiastic forrós, followed by unskilled percussionists anddancers, continued in a spirited mood until day break. At last the atmospherehad livened up; the mood became uproarious and dancers’ feet stamped evermore loudly on the wooden floor. Of course, such excitement also bred severalconflicts. One of these, which did not come out into the open during thefeast, started out as an item of gossip: Esmeralda, the chief ’s wife, and her closecircle of women friends, were said to be handing out some of the alcoholwhich was in their keeping before the general distribution.This rumour spreadmore widely on the following day, and some men, especially those close toJulio, swore that in the future they would not attend any parties unless theywere assured that the hosts were intending to reserve most of the alcohol forthe machos. Esmeralda, in turn, complained about the heavy work she haddone to prepare all the food. Other conflicts emerged during the Forró itself.The first was so brief and so confusing that it was impossible even to iden-tify its protagonists. At around 2 a.m. Xima, an indigenous teacher, picked afight with his wife – Esmeralda’s sister – and attacked Manuel Bravo, who heclaimed was flirting with her.The fight set everyone running around the hall.It did not last more than a few minutes and left no one hurt. As the first lightof the day – cloudy and cool – began to spread, the feast ended and the Yaminawa returned to their houses. A small group stayed in a circle aroundChaguinhas, singing at the chief ’s house while he slept.

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Improvised geometries

The first salient feature in these feasts is that both were organized aroundforeign goods. Alcoholic drinks – eclipsed only once by the extraordinaryNorwegian chocolates – were paramount. On a second level, one finds allkinds of Western items cherished by the Yaminawa: the language and themusic of the whites, their food – even when it is cooked by Indian women,it is livestock adopted from the foreigners9 – their jokes and games and theirimages of power (those cops that inhabit the minds of young Yaminawa). Eventhe explicit motives for celebration – children’s birthdays – were borrowedfrom the white man’s custom. The Scandinavian Feast was celebrated on the‘street’, as Yaminawa name the city. The Restrained Forró, celebrated in theIndian village but inside the school, was explicitly conceived as an imitationof white men’s dancing parties, with their spatial display and nimble dancing.10

In short, exotic commodities are inseparable from exotic behaviour. Scandi-navian Feast and Restrained Forró are situations in which the Yaminawa testtheir ability to act like the ‘Whites’.

The role of the chief is central to both situations: he is the one who givesthe feast; moreover, he is the one who regulates it – ‘to regulate’ must betaken here in its strongest sense: to order, to police, to contain. In both casesthere is a central gap – stretched to its limits – in which the chief delays the consumption of the good he is offering, trying to get the highest socialreturns. Greed is, in a sense, the centre of the whole feast. If it goes unchecked,the feast runs the risk of failing even before it begins – as happened whenJulio was unable to hold back the alcohol destined to celebrate the Braziliannational holiday, 7 September. Putting it into concrete terms, the regulationof goods is necessary to place the consumers of such goods in proper order.During the Restrained Forró the chief and his subordinates served the par-ticipants one by one, as they formed a kind of a circle inside the classroom.During the Scandinavian Feast, two queues were organized, and the twoleaders, mediated by a foreigner, divided the Norwegian gift. So, here we arefacing a spatial representation of both principles of organization current inAmazonian social morphologies:11 a diametric axis and a circular limit – formsthat only the energy of the chief is able to enforce, with yelling and gifts.It is worth remembering that while the chocolate splits the community andwhile the alcohol runs around ‘in a circle’, food is distributed through concentric waves, put into motion by kinship links in a way that could bedescribed as not totalizing.

With regard to drink there are still other things to be said: there are no,and apparently never have been any, parties without some kind of inebriation.The Yaminawa are not the only ones to make use of alcohol as an ideal pathfrom everyday life to the alternative social state that the feasts represent. Nonethe less, if alcohol is central to the feast, this is for other reasons. It is theexoticism, not the inebriation, which constitutes the central feature of theScandinavian Feast and Restrained Forró.The Yaminawa could get drunk moreeasily and cheaply on traditional fermented manioc or corn beverages. Theydo not do so. The Yaminawa say that the reason for this is the current ‘lazi-ness’, or as we prefer to say, the current lack of social cohesion and ‘accul-turation’. However seductive, this is too loose a point. In his critique of

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Siskind’s ‘meat for sex’ theory (Gow 1987: 128; Siskind 1973: 117) Peter Gowstates that the correlate of game offered by men is not sex, but fermentedbeverages. Among Yaminawa the women are stingy about their own produc-tion of food because the hunter’s ethos is weakening: there is less and lessgame meat to exchange for.The rising prestige of Western commodities leadsyoung men to undertake wage labour, far from the deep forest. The alcohol,a dawa (foreign) drink, replaces caiçuma (manioc beer), and both men andwomen dispute its consumption.12 The opposition between men and womenis central in the great Panoan rituals – either as an enlargement of the jokingaggressions that permeate everyday life, or in the ludicrous battles commonin the Sharanahua feasts,13 or even in the combining of female clitoridectomyand male nape-wounding during the initiation feasts in the Ucayali. Howeverthe gender opposition is made explicit – as the ethnographers themselves indi-cate – all of the rituals end up by producing a balanced arrangement betweenmen and women who enjoy separate spheres of authority. In the Scandina-vian Feast and, especially, in the Restrained Forró, such a tension manifestsitself at a secondary – and in a sense a furtive – level: women (some women)subtract the essence of the feast to consume it in an anti-social manner; thechief ’s wife complains about her work as a cook. In fact, in both feasts thekind of food consumed did not require men to perform their function fully;therefore it is not something that should be returned. In the ScandinavianFeast this tension was not too strong – a little girl taking away the chocolateremains produced no serious comments – because the food was clearly dawaand, in a word, it reached the Yaminawa already prepared: men and womencould celebrate a gift that had arrived from the outside on equal terms. Theunderpinning of the whole feast was not the co-operation between the sexes,but the good communication with the outside, which, in turn, calls for theability to produce an arrangement between men and women and betweenthe several groups that constitute the Yaminawa collectivity.

Finally, we must note that there is no feast without fights. Gow (1987:226-7) describes the Piro feast bringing together neighbours from severalcommunities – among whom there are many kinship links – as events inwhich the actors, according to their own accounts, start ‘eating like whites’and end up ‘fighting like Indians’ or ‘like animals’. In the case of the Piro, theboundaries revalidated through such fights are clear.These are the boundariesof the Comunidad Nativa: the adversaries will always be the guests, kinsmenwhose biological proximity is made relative in face of the links built upthrough coresidence within the Comunidad – an entity created by the appli-cation of white men’s law. The Yaminawa case presents a more difficult situ-ation: there is no clear boundary that separates ‘in’ and ‘out’, and the erraticform of the fights – a complex displacement from one house to another,or from one circle of relatives to another – apparently tests these limits.Everyone must estimate what kind of kinship ties are worth stressing in accor-dance with the attitude towards each of the contenders, and what kind ofclassification is to be acted out. We should remember that the breaking linesof the community are carefully isolated from the feast: those who are openlyopposed keep themselves away from it. In the same fashion, people make atremendous effort to prevent the tension that is generated in the context of the feast from becoming an overt and irreversible rupture. It is as if the

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useful ‘order’ that is produced during the feast is an intermediate step betweenpeace and open war – no doubt closer to the latter. The greatest danger for Yaminawa society is not dispute, but the dissolution of social ties. The circle and the double line that were organized for the distribution of goodsduring the feasts illustrate the shift between Yaminawa sociological geometry– as expressed in discourse – and the vague ascription of each individual to its forms: the feasts and the resulting fights are the very moment in which each Yaminawa must occupy, or better still, define his place in the socialplan.

To sum up, the Yaminawa have the rituals they need: not celebrations, butrehearsals of an order that only exists virtually. At the end, the chief congrat-ulates himself for the success of the endeavour: the feast managed to gatherall the Yaminawa and made them interact in a meaningful way; and he, thechief, was endorsed as the main link in the network.

My analysis of the ‘rituals’ is not a joke. The Durkheimian paradigm haspassed away, along with its ordered and ordaining ceremonies. Today’s trendspoint, on the contrary, to ‘disorder’ in rites. From the perspective of struc-turalism, ritual is dispersed, serial, redundant; in comparison to myth, it seemslike a precarious object of study. The postmodernist approach, in turn, doeswell out of the diversity of performances and interpretations that are actedout in the ritual arena; but one can consider that this pluralistic emphasis relieson a certain anti-ritualistic ethos, so esteemed in Western tradition – sinceritual cannot be forgotten, it must, at least, be shattered.14 The concern withorder in ritual is an old one. In his vocabulary of the Indo-European institu-tions, Benveniste (1995) places the Latin concept ritus and the Greek thesmósin the chapter ‘Law’, and not in the chapter ‘Religion’ – as one might perhapsexpect. Both concepts denote order and rules, and evoke a concern withnorms rather than meanings. Throughout history, kings and clergymen havetried to turn unruly acts of dance, drinking, and speech into ritus. Perhaps wecould apply to all ritual Lenin’s statement about revolutions: they are not tobe made, but organized – as far as possible. To understand these tensions asthe central feature of ritual may help us to understand Yaminawa feasts: whileit would be difficult to call them rituals – since they lack any link to deci-pherable symbols and beliefs, and are endowed with no sort of explicit effi-cacy – they still have a ritual function, which is perfectly embodied by thechief. This is not a productive function, but a structuring one: to make up asystem and to extract a collective value from the exorbitant symbolic fertilityof human action, to single out acts, in order to provide grounds for meaning.Interpreters, and priests, are then welcome to grasp meanings and to ascribebeliefs to them, in short, to make out a ‘true’ ritual, and not just a dance ora messy sharing of food and drink. Ritual would not be so ‘true’ – as we alsoknow – if it was thoroughly engineered from a predefined symbolic script:gathered meanings, like pearls, are more prized that cultivated ones. So, thereis a creative imbalance between ritual function and ritual significance, whichcan only be appreciated from an historical perspective.15

My analysis of the Yaminawa feasts is not a joke – I repeat – unless weconsider as a joke the effort of the Yaminawa chief to put sociability withinamusement, regularity within distribution, and order within noise.To deny therelevance of such an effort is to labour under the illusion that there are ‘true-

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born rituals’, with no authorship, which are brought onto the surface of sociallife as an emanation of society’s symbolic inclination.

Core foreignness, outward traditions

The denial of Yaminawa ritual, with which I began this article, is moreover aconsequence of some of the pitfalls of translation. In the Yaminawa language,there are no equivalents for our nouns ‘rite’, ‘ritual’, or ‘feast’: but there areverbs which may be literally translated as ‘to play’, ‘to sing’, and ‘to heal’, andso on. There is also a noun, Mariri, which embraces a set of actions that inthe past were strongly condemned by missionaries and colonial officials. Today,however, they are exalted as valuable Indian traditions by anthropologists, leftistRoman Catholic missionaries and Indian agency officers: they includedancing, singing, drinking of fermented beverages, and so on. We mightimagine that anyone performing Mariri is engaging in ‘old ritual’. But Mariri,an indigenous word disseminated by officers of the Indian agency, is a neol-ogism among Panoan people. The term refers to a plurality of ‘amusements’which have come to be referred to collectively as Mariri.16 Colonial censures,and colonial work regimes, erased or restrained old amusements. But, in doingso, they also unified them as a banned Indian Heritage, ready to be claimedlater as a sign of Indian identity.17 The Yaminawa ‘lack of rituals’ is in themiddle of such a process: they have lost their amusements, and they have notrecovered them as a meaningful whole.

Yet for the sake of consistency with the preceding discussion, some addi-tional qualifications to this statement are called for here.

Let us reconsider a constant feature of the Yaminawa feasts: their outwardorientation. Anthropology has long emphasized the adoption of Westernobjects, symbols, and behaviour by ‘primitive’ groups as an indicator of accul-turation, or of entrance into a world system. As long as this adoption couldbe included under the heading of ritual, it was generally possible to recog-nize it as a form of native agency (for instance, resistance); and the actualmeaning of the borrowing thus became uncertain and ambiguous as far asanthropologists were concerned. Consider the many kinds of religious move-ments described by anthropologists: for example, both older and newer formsof African millenarianism (Balandier 1962: 417-520; Behrend 1997); and themany so-called cargo cults of Oceania (Lattas 1992; Worsley 1957) or ‘every-where’ (Lindstrom 1993).18 Or consider the performances de moros y cristianos,de Santiago, or de la Conquista, from the Meso-American Indian world, para-doxical celebrations of defeat or reinventions of history which focus on themenacing characters of the Spaniards or their saints (Gutiérrez Estévez 1993).At the other end of the spectrum, consider parody, whether it be in the Haukarituals filmed by Jean Rouch in Les maîtres fous (cf. also Rouch 1960: 73-7),and more recently described by Stoller (1995), the clowning of the Agbegijoat the Egungun festival, the ironic mimicry of the Bawle statues or the Igbombari houses (Stoller 1995), or in the Chewa ritual described by Kaspin (1993).In each case the whites/Christians, their power and their wealth, are vestedwith grotesque or monstrous traits. The ritual exorcises them or, as Stollersuggests, allows for their power to be captured and used at some point in the

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internal political game. As suggested by the sequence of cargo cults analysedin the pioneering work of Lawrence (1967), the white man oscillates betweenthe position of a paternal and generous relative and that of a terrible enemywho must be defeated, and this extreme duality perpetuates the movement ofthe cults. In all these instances, the white man’s symbols

come to be potent precisely because of the historical circumstances in which they acquiretheir meanings … they tend to become the currency of ritual that seeks both to preserveendangered values and to give birth to new possibilities … And so, over time, the exoge-nous becomes indigenous, the strange is synthesized into the ‘established’ order (Comaroff& Comaroff 1993: xxii).

Correlate cases abound in the South American Lowlands. Parodies of whitesare inscribed within the rituals of the Bororo (Novaes 1997), Kaxinawá(Deshayes 2000: 144-7; Lagrou 1998), and Piro (Alvarez 1972).19 Regardingthe engraved Kuna figures from the region’s outer periphery, Severi’s (2000)analysis and his critique of Taussig’s (1993: 251) interpretation provide anexcellent overview of this issue. Since the Kuna figures are not mere repre-sentations of white men but are instead portrayals of powerful white men’sspirits, their comically exaggerated features can not be reduced to a simplestatement of contempt or hostility, which is otherwise explicit (Severi 2000:125-7). There is an extensive literature on millenarianism in South America(Carneiro da Cunha 1973; Clastres 1978; Crocker 1967; Schaden 1969: 241;for comparison with Melanesian cargo cults, cf. Brown 2001). Such move-ments have many superficial similarities to the various kinds of comparablebeliefs and practices in other former colonial societies. There is also muchcommon ground in analyses of all these expressive forms; indeed, in almostevery case we see debate in much the same terms. Those involved focus onthe issue of origins – whether indigenous or external – and also on whetherthe experience for those involved is one of trauma or creative imagining, resis-tance or syncretism, subversive mimicry or submissive imitation.Yet this long-running game of mirrors might be replaced with something altogetherdifferent. In place of binary oppositions we might employ a third term, onespecific to the South American Lowlands or at least to certain analytic fea-tures of the region. The great Panoan rituals cited at the beginning of thisarticle have been analysed as episodes of assimilation of otherness, or moreprecisely as the constitution of the social self through this assimilation (cf.McCallum 2001; McCallum 1994 for analysis of a Xingu celebration in a verysimilar manner). The ‘visit’ or performance of the ‘others’, not only here butin many other examples from the Lowlands, defines a society whose nexus isnot provided by corporate groups or explicit rules of belonging or exchange(Howard 1993); society is produced by the consumption of otherness, in formsthat range from actual or symbolic cannibalism to the capture of prisoners,names, songs, or virtual pets (Fausto 2001;Vilaça 1992). Importantly, none ofthese cases can be reduced to a dialectical deduction of the self based on theother. Instead, what characterizes them is the notion that, in one way oranother, the enemy is immanent to the self (Viveiros de Castro 2002: chap.4), and that the ritual institutes or updates this immanence.This issue becomesclearer when we compare an African ritual such as the aforementioned Chewa

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(Kaspin 1993) with MacCallum’s (2001) descriptions of the Nishi Pae. In bothcases, which are otherwise surprisingly similar in numerous aspects, there existsa tense encounter between the community and an external contingent (ofspirits or foreigners). In the African case, however, the celebration ends withthe re-establishment of the previous limits (a battle must take place againstthe spirits so that they do not seize the wives of the living); while in theAmerindian cases these limits only begin to exist with the celebration andwith the incorporation of the other.

Should it be surprising to anyone that in a new ritual the white man cantake on the old roles of enemies, spirits or the dead? Something like thishappens at the Yaminawa feasts.These are, again, both somewhat parodic (withtheir affected mimicry of exotic behaviour) and somewhat millenarian or cargoist, with their hopes of transformation and external gifts, and with theaspirations of the Amazonian chief to become a type of super-bigman sup-ported by the management of development projects. Furthermore, these feastsperform a society, bringing together the Yaminawa as a whole, with the crucialassistance of external elements.They are following a tradition common in theLowlands, the same that reveals itself in the great rituals of the Pano group.The Yaminawa, who were always a marginal and unstable part of this group(cf. Calavia Sáez, forthcoming), carry out this tradition in a most casual orimprovised way, and even this is in itself a tradition.

They are thus traditional, even too traditional to be traditionalists. Perhapsthere is only one genuine traditionalist: the leader of the group, eager to intro-duce it to the symbolic market of Amazonian indigenousness. If the ancientrituals performed indigenous societies out of external substances and spirits,traditionalist rituals perform indigenous societies for ‘the other’. Native lead-ership must seek to promote and to control these symbolic foreign affairs inboth ways. Different political performances might reduce a people to a sad,‘riteless’ condition, or reinforce attempts to build up a great ‘ancient ritual’,or even assimilate the ceremonial culture of the white settlers and mission-aries. External recognition and support will be different in each case.

In Brazil there is recent and extensive literature about the recovery or rein-vention of rituals: important examples include the Toré, a dance of the spiritswhich represents the Indian identity of several emerging ethnic groups fromnortheastern Brazil (Oliveira 1998: 60; 1999), and the funeral Kiki ceremony,this being the main symbol of a group, the Kaingang, which used to be itselfan icon of Indian acculturation in Brazil (Almeida 1998; Fernandes 1998).20

Although fertile enough in details to satisfy the ethnographer’s romantic taste,the great rituals of several Amazonian groups could be included among theseexamples. The recovery or reinvention of rituals – unless we merely want todelight in demystifying narratives – must be understood in a broader context.This context should include ritual innovations, processes of ‘de-ritualization’(which, like rituals, have been diverse),21 and, last but not least, the not-so-natural ritual continuities within those groups which for some reason presenta more ‘vigorous’ culture.

Globalization softens exotic barriers and reveals the ritual virtuality of anyobject or action22 – while annulling the old ritual, it can provide the elementsfor the new one. The commodity is turned into a ritual object (as in the Yaminawa case); the old ritual is converted into an exchange value (as in thecase of the Toré and the Kiki), or even converted into a near-commodity (as

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in the case of the traditional ceremonies so valued by the white man’scamera).23 I tend to believe that indigenous rituals are rapidly being groupedat one or another end of this polarity.24

Even if anthropology becomes increasingly prone to admitting a concep-tual approximation between the traditional rituals and the improvised ones, itis harder to accept their temporal proximity, that is, the idea that in a shortperiod of time the improvised becomes traditional.The distance between theYaminawa feasts and true rituals can remain unbridged, or might be crossed,but in any case it is much smaller and more contingent than it seems. Part ofthe prestige of ritual issues in anthropological studies arises from the sup-posedly long-standing character of ritual. Studies of rituals from an historicalperspective are comparatively rare, but they could show that these complexstructures are ephemeral and easily created and lost. Although Western ideology used to see Indians as a reserve of authenticity rather than as ‘inventors of traditions’, we must acknowledge that in an illiterate society it is much easier to process these inventions and that they leave few traces;moreover, such aptitude for invention is the best guarantee for the historicalcontinuity of these peoples.

NOTES

1 This article is based on my fieldwork among the Yaminawa of the Acre River in 1992-3,and secondarily among Yawanawa from Rio Gregorio in 1998. Research among the Yaminawawas funded by São Paulo State public research endowment (FAPESP).

2 The acculturated and disintegrated image of the Yaminawa arises from regional stereotypes– common among Indians, Indian agency officers, and anthropologists – and plays an impor-tant role in Graham Townsley’s (1988) pioneering study. Reports of Yaminawa families wan-dering as beggars in the streets of Acre towns frequently appear in local newspapers.

3 In studies on the South American Lowlands, historical pessimism goes hand in hand witha culturalist emphasis. Historical pessimism is, also, a sub-product of nation-building ideologies,confronted by very small-scale Indian societies.

4 There is extensive literature on Panoan rituals. For a general overview, see Erikson,Kensinger, Illius & Aguiar (1994). McCallum (2001) and Lagrou (1998) offer detailed descrip-tions of girls’ initiation rites. For the Shipibo case, see Roe (1982: 93-112). Siskind (1973: 96-101) has much to say about the Sharanahua ‘special hunt’. Yaminawa shamanic sessionsperformed with chants and shori – an hallucinogenic beverage – are private practices, moreunderstandable as esoteric techniques than as ritual (Townsley 1993).

5 Reports from recent visitors to Iaco villages suggest that such ‘traditional’ rituals are stillenacted there.

6 Of course, a less common notion of ritual is to be found in many studies focused in ritualcontingency and improvisation, especially in urban places: Howe (1998), Blehr (1999), andBaumann (1992) are some examples.

7 Forró is a Brazilian country dance, most popular in the northeast and thus in the Amazonregion. It refers as well to the dance-hall, and is a synonym for both strife and spree.

8 This control over the drinkers was a remarkable success.Two weeks later, the chief broughtan ample supply of bottles from the town for the Brazilian national feast, but this was all con-sumed en route and on the next day; the expected feast did not take place at all.

9 Other Yaminawa feasts called for the sacrifice of an ox from the community’s herd – as arule this meat is considered to be of little value.

10 Álvarez (1972) and Gow (1987) reported a similar mimesis of the white man’s behaviourin the Piro feasts.Yet they offer opposing interpretations of this. Álvarez understands mimesisas a satire against foreign customs. For Gow, see below.

11 Cf.Viveiros de Castro (1993: 171-7). The diametric/concentric binomy, of course, comesfrom Lévi-Strauss (1958). The choice of different modes of distribution by the two chiefs was

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not quite casual. Zé Correia is a politician, interested in the inner rapport between Yaminawasub-groups – it is the diametric oppositions which he must control. Júlio Isodawa is a teacher,whose rise to leadership was linked to educational projects, and therefore to discourse onindigenous identity and external boundaries.

12 Katukina women (Lima [1994: 86]) also give up their caiçuma-making. In this case, however,it was explicit avoidance of reputedly dangerous drinking-feasts. Katukina forrós, furthermore,are very similar to Yaminawa ones (Lima [1994: 111-15]).

13 The traditional Yaminawa feasts performed nowadays in Rio Iaco village share this pattern: verbal aggression on the part of women, and feigned attack by men, alongside suchdances.

14 It is worth pointing out that, traditionally, most studies of ritual are not concerned with‘ritual’ as such, but focus on its contents, its values – be they aesthetic, political, musical,ludicrous, therapeutic, and so on – or else reduce ritual to them.

15 This division between ritual meaning and ritual function is borrowed from GiobellinaBrumana (1990: 149), who in fact describes ritual function as a consequence, or as a sub-product, of the symbolic order. My point is that, by performing this ritual function, choicesare made out of the vast virtualities of the symbolic order, and that these choices may requirefurther elaboration, eventually leading to a new, and more concrete and explicit version of suchorder. So, meaning can be, in turn, a hyper-product of ritual function.

16 Generally speaking, anthropologists are inclined either to consider amusement (brincadeira)as a contemptuous colonialist term borrowed by the Indians, or, alternatively, as an object ofstudy less relevant than the ‘great rituals’. It is important to note that the Indians are less worriedabout authenticity, and tend to give their feasts names such as ‘forró’ or ‘fandango’ – Portugueseexpressions that are used to designate dance and parties in general. The ethnographic materialabout these brincadeiras is abundant, and is now becoming the object of closer attention: theevents described by Labiack (1997) about the Kanamari, and those by Carid Naveira (1999)about the Yawanawa, are relevant examples.

17 This phenomenon is, of course, a constant in colonial processes. Bloch’s observation aboutthe Merina case – ‘It is not too much to say that it was Christianity that created “Merina Religion” as an entity in itself ’ (1986: 20-2) – could extend to numerous other cases. Or itcould also ascend to a more general theoretical level, if we concede that colonial experiencehas redefined the metropolitan notions of ritual or religion.

18 ‘Cargo-cult’ is, of course, a long debated – and finally deconstructed – term. Recent analysis (Hermann [1992]; Lindstrom [1993]; Kaplan [1995]) tends to deny any validity to itoutside the colonial representations of ‘other’, or to accord to the white man a far less centralrole in its growth and structure as expressions of Melanesian religious imagination.

19 Cf. also the several Pano cases I have analysed elsewhere (Calavia Sáez 1999).20 However, this literature has not focused on the diversity of the internal developments

regarding these new ‘old rituals’.This could lead us to think of them as folklore festivals, whichis not necessarily the case. Fernandes, for example (pers. comm. [1999]) mentioned to me the awful consequences – diseases, perhaps deaths – according to some Kaingang, of the performance of Kiki (a ritual that deals with the dead persons of the group) by improvisedspecialists.

21 Analyses such as Gow’s (2001) warn us against an unduly facile reckoning of the end ofritual life. Perhaps they also warn us against an over-interpretation in discourses on indigenousritual transformation.

22 The simultaneous debilitation of the West/rest and the sacred/profane boundaries also allowfor the agency of the indigenous peoples to be recognized outside ritual.The native can carryout his ‘parodies’, his ‘cultural enhancements’, or his ‘antagonistic acculturations’ in the mostquotidian domains (cf. Sahlins 1997).

23 However, the proportion of indigenous population – and the political role reserved for it– within Brazilian society introduces a perceptible difference between its ritual commoditiza-tion process and what can be observed in Melanesia (cf. Gewertz & Errington [1991]). InBrazil, the pecuniary reward is, for the time being, a complement or an indirect consequenceof the main external objective of ritual performance, that is, the affirmation of cultural authen-ticity: the roll of clients is formed by institutions and large communication companies, and notby private consumers of exoticism, which is coherent with the perception of indigenous iden-tity as a highly scarce resource, at times an object of a strategic reserve.

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24 In the Xingu, the true ‘ritual paradise’ of Lowland South America, between the traditionalrituals performed repeatedly for the video cameras and the distribution of Western goods(strongly ritualized since the first years of contact) (Franchetto [1992]) there is a rich series ofceremonials which organize the linguistically and ethnically diverse context (Bastos [1990]). Itis important, however, to question to what extent this intersemiotic role may survive in theface of the political and linguistic mediation of the white man.

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À la recherche d’un rituel : tradition, au-delà et mauvaisesmanières en Amazonie

Résumé

La question du rituel est aujourd’hui centrale dans les affaires indiennes en Amazonie. Quidit rituel dit tradition, donc légitimité ethnique. Pourtant, chez certains groupes comme lesYaminawa de langue panoan, l’absence d’un cadre politique et social strict empêche l’in-vention d’actions collectives pouvant être reconnues comme des rituels. Le commandementse base à la fois sur une politique extérieure et une recherche interne d’actions collectivesstructurées, susceptibles de donner à un assemblage de parents et de proches le statut de com-munauté indigène. L’auteur s’intéresse ici à ces efforts d’élaboration de rituels et décrit deuxfêtes, informelles par ailleurs, qui ont eu lieu dans une réserve Yaminawa au Brésil, terrainoù il a effectué ses recherches en 1993.

Departamento de Antropologia, CFH Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 88040-970 Florianopolis SC, Brazil. occs@terra.com.br

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