Narratives' presentation and analysis
Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (founding
member of ISA) presents and analyzes the twelve narratives
presented here:
History in other terms
The Indigenous narratives published here would not require any
kind of presentation - much less signed by a white - were it not
for the fact that they are addressed precisely to us, whites.
It is only because of this fact that it does not seem improper
for me to introduce them, hoping that they may open our ears and
revive memories. Let us thus hear what have to say the Desana,
the Baré, the Mawé, all those whom we have come
to call, by forgetfulness, 'Indians', as if saying 'the others',
when it was us who have become others.
What
is read here is the history of those 500 years, a history that
we believe to know - but told in other terms. It is not, in the
first place, a history (of the Indians) told by whites, but a
history (of the whites) told by Indians. A history, or more exactly,
several histories. Because these histories are remarkable for
their diversity: diversity of enunciation positions, of contents,
of kinds of speech, of semantic resources, of epistemological
registrations, of textual processes.
Immemorial past is spoken of here, but also yesterday and tomorrow;
some very distant voices, some very close, speak; peoples with
centuries-old experience with whites, others whose 'contact' with
us is just as old as the narrator's lifetime, speak; what we could
call 'myths' are told, personal memories are told, fragments of
conversations are introduced, and formal testimonies, and interviews,
and conferences; what has been said for a long time is said, and
what has never been is said too; much of what we tell is told
as well, but in a very different manner. Summing everything up,
it is told; but also it is explained, criticized, regretted, justified,
demanded, asked. There is much to say.
Such impression of heterogeneity emerges not only from the relationship
between the narratives but from many of them properly, in particular
from those which look for the thread that links the present or
the recent past to the general conditions of possibilities of
the world. The 'historical' personalities (i. e., our historical
myths) co-exist without ontological interruption with mythical
personalities; classic themes of the Pan-American religious tradition
reflect, absorb and transform equally classic motifs of Old World
mythology; deep ethnographic judgements over white society seek
their justification in vast anthropological and cosmological characterizations.
There is, one may say, a little of everything. Just like in the
history we are familiar with, whose heterogeneity is only less
sensitive to our eyes and ears, accustomed to our own narrative
conventions, where non-measurable temporal scales inhabit, and
to our 'natural' leaps between various discursive registers.
It is not difficult to notice, however, the presence of one
main theme that runs across many of the texts. For the apparent
diversity reflects - or, better yet, refracts - a fundamental
conviction: Indians precede whites, in the kinship order and in
the territorial order. Whites did not arrive here, they left from
here; they did not discover the Indians, but covered themselves
up instead, until they came back to what they thought of as being
an encounter with the unknown, but which in reality was a re-encounter
with what had been forgotten. We are, the Desana remind us, their
younger siblings. We abandoned the older ones in the beginnings
of time, and much later (just five hundred years ago) we thought
we had discovered them. Those who came to be called Indians were
that fragment of the original Humanity that decided, for good
or bad, not come along with us. The return of whites was expected
- it was anticipated - but maybe a little more was expected of
it: that they behaved like relatives who return, not like torturers;
that they shared what they had learned wherever they had been
living; that they did not come back to take the little what was
given to the Indians; that their ingenuity had not been obtained
at the expense of wisdom, that their art had not jumbled up their
comprehension, that their writing were not used to silence the
voices of those who had stayed.
Thus what these narratives tell is that the relations with whites
have always existed. There has not been, nor there is, a 'contact'
that was not, or is, a sort of updating - as disastrous as it
might be - of a virtuality traced in the discourse of the origins.
Ailton Krenak observes acutely that "the encounter and the
contact between our cultures and our peoples have not started
yet and sometimes it seems that they are already finished".
But the opposite, and for the same reasons, is also valid: they
never began because they were there from the start. In the beginning
there was disagreement, which, five hundred years later, is not
over yet. But five hundred years is nothing, says Ailton. It is
true. Especially for those who have good memory, for those whose
thoughts are not, as Davi Kopenawa sharply notes, full of vertigo
and forgetfulness. May we at least be capable of remembering from
now on, we who are truly 'very forgetful' ". (Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, October/ 2000)
The terms of the other history
In the face of such diverse texts, the search for recurrences
will necessarily let many things pass unnoticed, and important
things at that. I do not dare, for instance, start a discussion
of the discursive registers used, such as the contrast, sometimes
internal to a given narrative, of a testimonial mode, in which
I myself tell and reflect on what I have seen "with my very
eyes", as Momboré-uaçu
puts it, >, and a traditional mode (in the precise sense of
the term), where I narrate what is narrated, speaking "through
the speech" of another, as Jurusi
uhu says. (1) In
also do not have enough elements to analyze two other significant
differences: the distinction between the narratives (or moments
of the same narrative) which include the appearance of whites
in the absolute origin of things from those who take them as appearing
in a world that already existed; and the differences in the estimation
of the difference between Indians and whites - differences that
should themselves be estimated in accordance to the conditions
in which these narratives were produced or consolidated.
What I want here is simply to register a resonance that pervades
the texts, and that echoes some important themes of the Indigenous
oral tradition. It has to do with the insertion of the question
of the origin of whites in the Pan-American complex analyzed by
Lévi-Strauss in his tetralogy Introduction to a Science
of Mythology and in the books that followed it, notably The
Story of Lynx.
The original imbalance
The Introduction to a Science of Mythology begins and
ends with the myth of the conquest of cooking fire, which is also
the myth of the origin of human culture. In the last volume of
the series (The naked man), Lévi-Strauss shows how
the theme of the "disnestler of birds" (free translation
from Portuguese), which holds the origin of fire in the bororo
and jê myths discussed in the first volume (The raw and
the cooked), is the semantically attenuated version of a mythical
macro-scheme of continental diffusion. The protagonists of this
'single myth', tied to each other by a relationship of matrimonial
affinity, are the human race, terrestrial, and a celestial people,
the owners of fire. To summarize a long thought: fire, a fundament
of culture, is presented as an equivalent of the matrimonial alliance,
the fundament of society. We cook the meat we eat just as, and
because, we do not eat our own flesh.
The relationship between the South American narratives about
the appearance of whites and the myth of the origin of fire was
initially established by Roberto da Matta, for the case of the
Auké timbira.(2)
Much later, in The Story of Lynx, Lévi-Strauss
demonstrated that the Auké legend is a systematic inversion
of the famous cosmogonic myth collected in Rio de Janeiro by André
Thevet in the mid-16th Century. The texts
sateré-mawé and the
zo’é dialogue presented here show a direct affiliation
of this tupinambá 'arch-narrative', possibly the first
South American myth ever published (in 1575). Five hundred years,
as Ailton Krenak said, is indeed very
little time.
It is remarkable that the presence of the whites was absorbed
so early by a mythical complex evidently older than 1500. Lévi-Strauss
arguments that whites were virtually contained, that is, their
existence was foreseen, formally if not historically, in a constitutive
structure of Indigenous thought: a dichotomal operator which makes
that every position of a term be inseparable from the contraposition,
treated as a presupposition, of an opposing term. In the tupinambá
myth, the creation of the Indians imply the creation of the non-Indians;
or, taking things from the other end, the fact of the existence
of whites is put as constitutive of the fact of the existence
of the Indians, as if participating in the possibility conditions
of the latter (when it defines the Indians, precisely, as 'Indians',
i.e. as non-whites). Seen in such terms, whites came just in order
to occupy a supplementary step on the cascade of dichotomies reiterated
between the positions of 'self' and of 'someone else' that flows
through the myth way before 1500: creators and creatures, humans
and non-humans, relatives and enemies, and so on. The prophecy
mentioned in the baré
narrative, the constant "we already knew that" that
appears in the desana
discourse, the theme, in short, of the announced contact that
Ailton Krenak puts
in evidence, underlining its Pan-American diffusion, are the marks
of this retrospective necessity (in both senses of 'necessity')
of the position of the other in Indigenous thought. Lévi-Strauss
summarizes it in the idea of an "opening towards the other"
(free translation from Portuguese) that would be consubstantial
to this thought and which manifested itself, he says, since the
very first contacts with whites. Unfortunately, as it is known,
the opposite never came to be: the other (us) had a completely
different idea of what the other should be.
The white's virtual reality in the pre-Columbian mythological
corpus does not mean a merely 'distinctive' opposition, static
and self-contained, between Indians and whites. The dichotomal
principle of the tupinambá myth is a recursive principle:
the dualities that it exhibits are seen by Lévi-Strauss
as symptomatic of a "dualism in perpetual imbalance"
(free translation from Portuguese) proper to Amerindian cosmologies.
After examining the multiple versions of the tupinambá
myth in the two Americas - all of them having as protagonists
pairs of dissimilar twins -, the French anthropologist concludes
(free translation from Portuguese):
"Which is, in effect, the deep inspiration of these
myths? [...] They represent the progressive organization of the
world and of society in the form of a series of bi-partitions,
but without that, between the resulting parts of each stage, ever
appearing in a true equality: in one way or another, one of them
is always superior to the other. Of such dynamic imbalance depends
the good operation of the system, which, without it, would be
constantly under the threat of falling into a state of inertia.
What these myths implicitly proclaim is that the poles between
which natural phenomena and life in society are ordered - sky
and Earth, fire and water, high and low, close and far, Indians
and non-Indians, fellow citizens and strangers etc. - can never
be twins. The spirit makes an effort to pair them up, but is unable
to establish its parity. For it is those differential dissociations
in cascade, as conceived by mythical thought, that put the universal
machine in movement."(3)
In other words, not only the position of a term presupposes
the contraposition of its contrary, but it causes an indefinite
proliferation of oppositions of decreasing extension, internal
to the term of reference. As for the inevitable 'superiority'
of one of the parts resulting from any bi-partition, it is necessary
to understand it as logical asymmetry (inherent to the multi-dichotomal
functioning of the myth, in which the contraposition is internalized
as presupposition), and not as ontological graduation (inherent
to the substance of the terms); as unstable superiority, dynamic
and ambiguous, that does not freeze in a finalized hierarchy.
Because it should not be forgotten that, if whites took with them,
or acquired, a knowledge and a power that the Indians rejected,
it is because whites were Indians: it was the Indians who produced
whites, by giving them the function of representing a virtuality
contained in the essence of what is human (that is, the Indians).
The Emperor was an Indian, as the Sateré-Mawépoint
out: the superior was interior. Or, as the Kuikuro
recall, it was the Indians who tamed the whites. The action,
even when in the form of laissez-faire, is always Indigenous,
because so is the signification. In other words, whites only constituted
the Indians as non-Indians because they were previously constituted
as non-Indians by them. "We already knew it".
When incarnating, inside out, the conditions that define the
human condition - by being what the Indians could have been, and
that, because they were not, became human, that is, not spirits,
nor animals, nor whites -, whites oscillate between a positiveness
and a negativity equally absolute. Their tremendous cultural superiority
(technical, or objective) is dwarfed by an infinite social inferiority
(ethic, or subjective): they are almost immortal, but they are
brutal; they are ingenuous, but stupid, they are able to write,
but they forget; they produce marvelous objects, but they destroy
the world and life... Super-cultural and infra-social, thus. And
so it is possible to jump from a positive vision of whites, as
expressed in the sateré-mawé
narratives, to a negative and controversial one, such as the
speech of Davi Kopenawa
or of Bráz de Oliveira França.
The narrative of Luiz Gomes
Lana can be placed, in that sense, in the zone of a moment
of transition between those two poles, while the discourse of
Momboré-uaçu brings
a rigorous inductive thought that substantiate the 'experimental'
passage of the first to the second. From mythical possibility
to historical reality, some would say, forgetting with this that
myth is a version of history, and history a transformation of
the myth.
But if the problem of the origin of whites is, so to speak,
solved since before the beginning of the world, the symmetrical
and reverse problem of the fate of the Indians continues, it seems
to me, crucially open. For the challenge or enigma that is posed
to the Indians consists in knowing if it is really possible to
use the technological power of whites, i. e., their mode of objectivizing
- their culture -, without being poisoned by their absurd violence,
their grotesque 'fetish-lization' of merchandise, their intolerable
arrogance, that is, their mode of subjectivizing - their society.
Davi Kopenawa answers
no to this question: whites' culture expresses their society,
so that is a dead end. Ailton
Krenak seems to answer yes: Indigenous society expresses themselves
in their culture, so there must be space for it. History shall
decide; and then the myth will be explained.
White death
The problem of the origin of whites was 'processed' by the machine
of the myth of the fire, as we have seen. But some of the narratives
presented here show a specific dimension of this process that
has not been the object of special attention neither of Da Matta
nor of Lévi-Strauss. I refer to the presence, in the desana
and sateré-mawétexts,
as well as what can be perceived in the zo’édialogue,
of the widespread myth of the 'brief life', whose place in the
complex about the origin of fire and of culture was demonstrated
in "The raw and the cooked".(4)
The myths that tell how we humans lost our original immortality,
or came to live less time than trees, or became unable to rejuvenate
like certain animals, revolve around a central motif: a 'bad choice'
we made in the face of a test or an opportunity offered by a demiurge
(or equivalent character). In general, this bad choice is the
result of a mistake or neglect expressed in terms of the five
senses: we did not hear, see, touch - in short, respond to a stimulus
-; or, alternatively, we saw, heard, talked with, tried, what
we should not have. Those who behaved appropriately, such as the
trees, the reptiles and the anthropoids, which periodically change
their skin and thus rejuvenate, conquered a long life.
The desana narrative
enchains the themes of the brief life and of the origin of whites.
After describing how the white, the last one to disembark from
the Canoe-of-Transformation, was sent away by the demiurge, the
text moves directly (and, for a listener who is unfamiliar with
the larger mythical contexts, somewhat mysteriously) to the motif
of the short life of humans. The poisonous animals managed to
get close to the recipient that held the drug for changing skins;
Humanity did not. No reference is made here to whites; but it
is tempting to imagine that, among the poisonous animals, maybe
the white man was included... Because in the following paragraph
he reappears, in the figure of the ancestral who was able to become
white by bathing in the demiurge's wash-bowl of magic water. It
is known that, in other versions of the myth (and for other Amazon
peoples), the theme of immortality or resurrection is associated
with a bath in a wash-bowl of magic water that changes one's skin.
In this desana narrative, the theme seems to be split: immortality
or perpetual rejuvenation by changing of the skin is restricted
to animals, but the typical means of reaching it is displaced
to explain the difference - expressed precisely in terms of change
of the skin color - between Indians and whites.
The desana narrative
transforms other tukano myths in which the relationship between
the creation of whites and the origin of death is much more evident.
In a barasana story registered by S. Hugh-Jones, the origin of
the power of whites - the guns - is explained as the result of
a fateful choice. The demiurge offered human ancestors the option
between the bow and the shotgun: those who would be white chose
the latter, those who would be (or would continue to be) Indians,
the former. (5) It
was because of such choice, one can suppose, that whites were
sent far away from the demiurge, as Luiz Lana tells here. The
theme of choosing weapons appears in the same way among the Tupinambá
of 17th Century Maranhão (it was registered by Abbeville
with the Tupinambá of Momboré-uaçu), in contemporary
Upper Xingu River mythology and in many others. As for Hugh-Jones'
barasana myth, it is, in fact, a very close variety of Thevet's
tupinambá myth. Just like it, it establishes a direct link
between the origin of the brief life (of the Indians) and the
origin of whites, because they are described as similar to spiders,
snakes and women in their ability to live long. Contrary to the
changing of natural skin of snakes, spiders and women, whites
would change a cultural skin, their clothes; thus technical ingenuity
and relative immortality are connected. (6)
The same theme of the clothes appear in the
zo'é dialogue published here. Jipohan, the demiurge capable
of resuscitating the dead from their bones, left with the whites,
and, like them, goes about dressed up and owns many clothes.(7)
The tupinambá mythical fragment reported by Abbeville
and Hugh-Jones' barasana myth suggests an inversion of the seniority
between brothers in consequence of the choice of weapons. (One
should keep in mind that the Tukano patrilineal system places
the hierarchy on the masculine offspring and their descendants
in order of birth.) Lévi-Strauss treated the myths of the
brief life in terms of a "code of the five senses" (free
translation from Portuguese), which, as can be seen, is present
in the desana myth. It would be possible to see, in the motif
of the choice of weapons, a modulation of such code. Instead of
mistakes related to sensitivity, what we would have would be a
fault associated to good sense, that is, to comprehension: a 'miscalculation',
so to speak. In Thevet's 16th Century myth, the rupture of the
demiurge (of whom whites would be the "successors and true
descendants", says the French friar) with Indian humanity,
caused by its ingratitude or aggressiveness, may equally be taken
as a case of 'bad choice', of absence of discernment on the part
of humans (the Indians).(8)
In the desana myth
published here nothing is said in that regard: the younger brother
continues to be so, and making choices are not mentioned, but
rather the allocation of objects and techniques appropriate to
the respective 'vocation' of whites and Indians - shotgun and
Bible versus bow and memory. Thus Luiz Lana's narrative seems
to avoid or resist a conclusion which would have been present
in previous versions of the myth, a resistance that would indicate
a political change in the estimation of the difference between
Indians and whites. Now whites are not what the Indians could
have been, but rather what the Indians did not want to be. Thus,
I believe, the partial split between the motifs of the origin
of whites and the loss of immortality.
The myth of origin of the
Baré people told by Bráz de Oliveira França
, in this sense - but this is pure speculation on my part
- could be read as an inversion of the tukano myths, or at least
as an ulterior state of the movement of ideological adjustment
suggested in Luiz Lana's text. The man who traveled alone, on
the outside of the big ship that entered the Negro River and became
the ancestral of the Baré, seemed to me to correspond to
the younger brother of the desana narrative, the last one to disembark
from the Canoe-of-Transformation and the one who became white.
Let us remember that the Canoe-of-Transformation is, in tukano
mythology, a large anaconda which brings inside the different
exogamous groups, and that the baré hero is called Cobra
(snake in Portuguese) - a water 'snake' that comes from the river.
In the case of the desana, we have a younger brother who is sent
away by his male relatives because of his aggressiveness; in the
case of the baré we have a stranger who is incorporated
after appeasing, due to his sexual potency, a group of aggressive
women. Everything happens, in other words, as if the ancestral
of whites in the desana myth became the ancestral of the Indians
in the baré myth. So in the latter the origin of the Indians
is definitely disconnected to the origin of whites (who come from
the outside, and arrive in the middle of a story), while in Luiz
Lana's narrative they still have a connection.(9)
Another manifestation of the theme of bad choice, with the consequent
loss of something whites obtained or maintained, is found in the
mawé myths published here, in which it is associated with
Christian motifs. The humans who stayed are those who did not
respond to the Emperor's (or God's) call, because, in Vidal
Sateré-Mawé's delightful expression >, "they
were distracted with the fruit " along the way. This suggests
an appropriation of the biblical episode of the apple (Adam and
Eve are among the protagonists of the narrative), but also evokes
a famous theme in native mythology, the 'call of the rotten wood',
to which humans responded instead of the call from the rock and
the hardwood, missing thus the opportunity of living for as long
as them.(10)
In the case of the sateré-mawé
narratives, it should be noted, those who left with the Emperor
were able to "hide themselves from death"; those who,
on the contrary - and literally - missed the boat stayed in the
forest and are, from now on, subjected to what cannot be avoided.(11)
In short: whites have the same origin as death. On one hand,
such equation derives from a 'transcendental deduction' that aims
at a universal human condition - thus, if humans in general die,
it is necessary to exist a particular kind of human who does not,
or a non-human who lives more than humans. On the other hand,
however, it expresses an empirical deduction, that that the Indians
lived, or better (or worse) yet, died in their own flesh. Whites
were able to hide themselves from death because it was them who
revealed it to the Indians, that is, they caused it. The diseases
that decimate them come from very far away, says the Mawé
narrative: they come from the same place where whites went to.
The kuikuro story
is even more direct: even after they were tamed, even after they
had been convinced to stop killing the Indians, the caraíba
(whites) continued to bring death, in the form of disease and
magic spell. When they do not kill with their own hands they do
it by proxy, through the objects - cutting objects, coincidentally
-that signify them: "They gave knives, scissors, axes. The
cough came." Davi
Kopenawa describes in details the same sinister enchaining:
white culture is lethal. There is no one better than us, then,
to illustrate death as a condition.
Eve's nephews
Let us return to the double fundament of the human condition
described in the myths of origin: fire and matrimonial alliance,
i. e., culture and society. The myths of the origin of the brief
life express the third fundament, a natural one: the mortality
of the human species.
To that triple title, whites outline the limits of humanity,
by lack or excess. In what refers to 'fire', i. e., to technology,
we are super-cultural. In what refers to the natural mortality
of the species we are supernaturally immortal (innumerable and
indestructible). But in what refers to a life of relationships,
to the forms socially instituted of subjectivity, we whites are
unquestionably sub-human. It is about this last limit that I would
like to say something, by way of a conclusion.
If matrimonial alliance is put, in Amerindian mythology, as
a fundament of society, where are the whites in that respect?
What several narratives published above suggest is that we are
beings who do not know what human social relations are: we are
bad allies par excellence. People who do not exchange people for
marriage, but kill, rob and enslave people instead.
In the desana myth ,
the ancestral of whites is a younger brother, not an ally by marriage.
But a brother who, when he returns, behaves like a stranger and
an enemy, coming back to rob and kill. Among the 'things' that
whites robbed, as Davi
Kopenawa and Momboré-uaçurecall,
were children: thus instead of becoming allies of the Indians,
whites take from them the fruits of their alliances. The tupinambá
chief from Maranhão reveals how that particular betrayal
worked: the Indians were honored when the whites started to cohabit
with their women, thinking that they wanted to become their brothers-in-law
and form with them one single nation; but the whites soon transformed
the alliance into submission, enslaving those who had given them
their wives. And if, in the initial stages of the 'contact' described
by Momboré-uaçu, the alliance serves as pretext
and antecedent for servitude, Bráz
de Oliveira França's narrative shows the culmination
of this process, when it is servitude that precedes a disgusting
anti-alliance in which the bosses of the Negro River take by force
Indian women in 'payment' for the 'debts' contracted by their
fathers and husbands.(12)
In the sateré-mawé
and wapishana one
can find a more idealized vision of this exchange relationship
between Indians and whites. In the case of the mawé texts,
in particular, is established a labor division seen as relatively
'natural' - or at least it is desired that, based as it is on
the discourse of the origins, such exchange system may come to
be equitable in reality. Note that the mawé myths reduce
the relations with whites to an economic exchange with whites,
not to a matrimonial exchange of people; but it must be registered
the subtext present in the identification of whites with the cairara
monkey, seen as 'shameless', that is, licentious and sexually
voracious.
But it is also in the mawé narratives that the most interesting
suggestion can be observed: that whites were, indeed, predestined
to become allies of the Indians. Eve had a brother; thus Adam
had a brother-in-law. Vidal
Sateré-Mawé's text does not make very clear
how this original triad 'works'. The narrative's first lines mention
the death of a "sister of his", but it is not clear
who "he" refers to; the impression I have is that it
is Tupana, or God. There are no elements here to affirm that this
sister was Eve. Further on Adam and Eve are described as the ancestors
of those who stayed, those who did not follow God and the whites.
Next, the reason for the permanence of the Indians in the forest,
close to death and to diseases, is explained by the fact that
Adam ignored God's invitation; but further on it is Eve who, in
reaction to her brother's call, convinces Adam to go back and
stay. This brother, on the other hand, is the person who would
have given them axes, machetes, in short, objects from whites
(or from Tupana), which could suggest that it was Eve's brother
who had left, while Adam and Eve stayed in the forest. The texts
are very ambiguous. Would Tupana be Eve's brother? Would the whites
be Adam's brothers-in-law - the whites that the old tupi-guarani
mythology consider the demiurge's descendants? Or would the Indians
be the children of this brother of Eve, since it was he who called
her back to the forest?(13)
Be as it may, Eve had a brother. Which conforms to the Indigenous
vision of the fundaments of social life: behind every couple there
is the woman's brother, the man who ceded his sister to the other
man. This 'kinship atom' (free translation from Portuguese), to
recall a famous notion set forth by Lévi-Strauss, is made
up of a child, the father, the mother and the maternal uncle.
The mawé texts suggest, then (or at least I would like
them to be suggesting...) that whites and Indians would not be
simply and equally descendants of Adam and Eve. We would not be,
thus, 'all brothers' - a formula that never kept some of these
'brothers' from plundering, enslaving and murdering other brothers.
We would not all be 'Adam's sons', then - some of us would be,
maybe, children of Eve's brother, her collateral descendant, but
not Adam's. Who Eve's nephews are, the whites or the Indians,
is a question the myth does not give the answer. But that does
not change the moral of the story: we are crossed cousins, that
is, potential brothers-in-law. We are not naturally identical
like brothers are; we will always be different, because it is
that difference that make us socially necessary to one another,
and equally necessary to one another. The re-encounter of Indians
and whites can only be made on the terms of a necessary alliance
between equally different partners, in such a way that we will
be able to, together, move the world's perpetual imbalance a little
further ahead, thus postponing its end. (Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro,
October/ 2000).
NOTES
(1) Such distinction corresponds only very
partially and imperfectly to the one we would make between 'historical'
and 'mythical' narratives.
(2) R. DaMatta, “Mito e
antimito entre os Timbira.” In: Vários autores, Mito e linguagem
social (ensaios de antropologia estrutural). Rio de Janeiro:
Tempo Brasileiro, 1970 (pp. 77-106).
(3) C. Lévi-Strauss, Histoire
de Lynx. Paris: Plon, 1991 (pp. 90-91).
(4) C. Lévi-Strauss, Le
cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon, 1964 (troisième partie).
(5) S. Hugh-Jones, “The
gun and the bow: myths of white men and Indians.” L'Homme
106-107, 1988, pp. 138-155.
(6) The Barasana conceive
menstruation as a periodical 'change of skin', i. e., a rejuvenation
of the woman. Such rejuvenation, in the case of males, can only
be made ritually and collectively, through the He ('Jurupari')
ceremonies, conceived as a male menstruation - and/or, as Lana's
myth indicates, through the ingestion of coca, an indispensable
substance in such ceremonies. As for the relationship between
clothes and long life, it is obviously a symbolic equivalence,
motivated by the theme of change of skin in animals. Besides,
the notion of an 'immortality' of whites, in the case of the barasana
myth, refers to the fact that whites are innumerable, and are
constantly reproducing: they are immortal, thus, in the sense
that it is useless to kill them for there will always be others
to replace them. And there is nothing symbolic to this thought.
(7) The theme of changing
of skin as a technique for immortality is central in the cosmology
of several contemporary tupi groups; among the Araweté,
for instance, it is associated with the Maï (i.e. Maíra),
whom, after devouring the dead who arrive in the sky, remake them
from their bones - like Jipohan - and bathe them in a magic water
wash-bowl to revive and rejuvenate them.
(8) To this scheme that
makes whites the descendants of those who did not make the mistake
made by the Indians the yanomami mythology presents an interesting
alternative. Whites were created from the blood of Indians who
died due to the violation of a sexual interdiction. Here whites
are not the ones who made the good choice but the direct product,
the "successors and true descendants", of a bad choice
made by the Indians (see also note 7
by B. Albert to Davi Kopenawa's text).
(9) If we take into account
that the word Baré may be a derivative of bári,
'branco' (white in Portuguese) as chromatically non-black - non-slave?
-, as D. Buchillet mentions, the question becomes even more complex.
Compare, by the way, with the desana myth, in which the Indians
see themselves as non-white in this very chromatic sense.
(10) See the apinayé
myth (M9) analyzed in The raw and the cooked.
(11) The Indigenous and
biblical themes of the deluge are merged here. It is interesting
to note also the animals to which whites are associated with by
the Mawé, according to Alba Figueroa. Of the two 'whitish'
toads, one at least is poisonous (the cunauaru) - it produces
a white secretion that destroys the skin when touched. The cairara
monkey, as the Indians say, is "white and shameless";
and the oriole is gregarious and noisy - Ihering observed also
that this bird has a very unpleasant smell. Poisonous (a poison
that 'changes the skin'), lascivious and noisy-stinking, whites
are thus not so unambiguously positive...
(12) And in this sense
the myth of Mira-Boia and the amazon women told by Bráz
de Oliveira França may be read as inverting the figure
of the boss.
(13) In the short narrative
"Uruhe'i e Mari-pyaipok" figures only Eve (Uruhe'i)
and her brother Mari-pyaipok, a name that is probably connected
to the Maíra of the tupi mythology. Both siblings stay
in, or come back to, the forest, and the Sateré-Mawé
are described as descendants of Eve; Adam is not mentioned in
the story. Other versions of the myth of Uruhe'i and Mari-pyaipok
make of those characters brothers, with Mari being the one who
has gone away and Uruhe'i the one who stayed. (Such variations,
registered by Nunes Pereira and others, are mentioned in Alba
Figueroa's works.) It is not impossible that the oldest versions
of this myth were centered around a pair of brothers, maybe even
twins, like in the tupinambá mythology, which seems to
have strongly influenced mawé culture. The feminization
of one of the brothers could be attributed, in this case, to an
interference of the biblical couple, or to a fusion with myths
of non-tupi origin. But it could also be expressing a mythological
fundament properly mawé, a people who speak a language
of the tupi branch but that do not belong to the tupi-guarani
family.
