Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology 9780816530373, 2013009671

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Knowing the Day, Knowing the World

Knowing the Day, Knowing the World Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology

Lesley Green Recording and Translations by David Green

tucson

For Jordan and Jonathan

The University of Arizona Press © 2013 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Lesley, 1967– Knowing the day, knowing the world : engaging Amerindian thought in public archaeology / Lesley Green ; recording and translations by David R. Green. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-3037-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Palicur Indians—Social life and customs. 2. Palicur Indians—Antiquities. 3. Indian philosophy—Brazil—Amapá (State) 4. Indian cosmology—Brazil—Amapá (State) 5. Archaeology and state—Brazil—Amapá (State) 6. Amapá (Brazil : State)—Social life and customs. 7. Amapá (Brazil : State)—Antiquities. I. Green, David R., 1964– II. Title. F2460.1.P3G74 2013 981'.16—dc23 2013009671 Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

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Contents

List of Illustrations  vi Preface  vii Acknowledgments and a Note on Authorship  ix Introduction. “The Things Left in the Ground”: Introducing Archaeology to Arukwa  1 1. “Are You Here?”: Personhood, Presence, Knowledges, and Knowing  28 2. “So Many Stories on This Day-World”: History as the Retracing of Tracks  51 3. Journeys with the Rain Stars: Making Sense of the Moving Cosmos 79 4. The Curvature of Surfaces: Cartesian Space, the Topology of Palikur Grammar, and Consubjective Space  142 5. “Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors”: Resources for Assembling Times Past  161 6. The Story Trails of Kwap: Archaeology, Provenance, and an Ecology of Predation  177 Epilogue. Beyond Matter Set in Space and Time: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology  241 Notes  265 Bibliography  291 Index  303

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Illustrat i ons

Figure 1.  Aristé-style urn at house  9 Figure 2. Aristé style from the boot-shaped cavern site downriver, in a house in Kumene  25 Figure 3.  Aristé-style zoomorph from the cavern  25 Figure 4.  Eduardo Neves on-site at Kwap  26 Figure 5. Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe Manoel Labonté checking for ceramic samples  26 Figure 6.  Public archaeology in process at Kwap  27 Figure 7.  Kwap Open Day  27 Figure 8. Kiyavwiye João Felício on the Rio Urucauá, August 2001  65 Figure 9.  Kiyavwiye Floriano with a hand axe  76 Figure 10.  Kiyavuno Yuka telling the Kurumsuk story  76 Figure 11.  Kiyavwiye Sarisri Daví Espírito Santo  77 Figure 12.  Kiyavwiye Ishawet at Himeket  77 Figure 13.  The sky at sunrise in the December solstice  93 Figure 14.  The sky at sunrise in the June solstice  94 Figure 15. Kayeb, carved by Uwet Manuel Antônio dos Santos in October 2005  97 Figure 16.  The carving of Tavara  102 Figure 17.  The carving of Uwakti  106 Figure 18.  The carving of Kusuvwi’s boat  110 Figure 19.  Kiyavwiye Uwet with his carving of Awahwi  127 Figure 20.  The carving of Wayam  130 Figure 21.  Arukwa in the cosmos  158 Figure 22.  Kiyavwiye Uwet with two anaconda carvings  158 Figure 23.  A clay whistle found at Aragbus  191 Figure 24.  Siege of an Amerindian village  213

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Prefa ce

What dialogues are possible between different ways of knowing? Is different knowledge necessarily cultural, and is “indigenous knowledge” only translatable as a cultural version of an already established discipline such as “ethnoastronomy” or “ethnophilosophy”? What possibilities are there for different ways of knowing the world to offer the means of analysis? Based on a decade of research in Palikur lands known as Arukwa in the state of Amapá, Brazil, the material presented in this volume rethinks the grounds for a dialogue between scholarship and Amerindian ways of knowing. Beginning and ending with a public archaeology project in the region in 2000–2001 via a round-trip through a decade of further field research, story recording, transcription, and translation, the book traces out different ways of thinking about space, time, and personhood in Amer­indian philosophy, history, geography, astronomy, and geometry. Demonstrating that Palikur knowledges are based on movement and a careful theorization of the consequences of one’s presence in a place, the work makes a sustained case that allowing different ways of knowing to surface can generate rich dialogues about nature, reality, and the ethical production of knowledge. The question to which the book returns throughout the text is, Why was our initial translation of archaeology as “looking at things left in the ground” later translated by Palikur speakers involved in the public archaeology project as “reading the tracks of the ancestors”? The volume offers a narrative of learning as the project developed. The chapters enter into the ethnographic material from the perspective of familiar disciplines—the philosophy of personhood, history and geography, astronomy, geometry—and engage the moments of disconcertment in which their frameworks are inadequate to convey the knowledge of the world that gives form to the stories of Arukwa. The first chapter reflects on questions of personhood, ethics, ethnicity, and ways of knowing. The second chapter rethinks the frameworks offered in history and geography, setting out reasons why chronology and cartography do not have ready equivalents. The third chapter offers an alternative way of thinking about astronomy. The fourth chapter draws on linguistic material to argue that

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the topological concepts embedded in everyday Palikur speech extend to ways of knowing the landscape. The final chapters return to the problem of doing history and archaeology in Arukwa in ways that open the possibilities for thinking with the practice of tracking to explore the confluences of ways of knowing in archaeology and Amerindian thought.

Ack no wle d gments an d a Note on Authorship

This book could not have been written, nor the fieldwork completed, without the strenuous efforts of David Green, who, by the time the volume was ready for press, had recorded, transcribed, and translated over 4,000 minutes of Palikur narrative. My work (LG) has been to conceptualize and assemble the argument in dialogue with a wider body of scholarship that crosses the oceans between Latin America, Southern Africa, Australia, India, North America, and Europe. A debt of thanks is due to the people of Arukwa, the region along the Rio Urucauá, in particular, Mewkayan Ioiô, and Nenélio Batista, Vera Batista, Xoni Batista, Qualeyn Batista, Uwet Manoel Antonio dos Santos, Daví Sarisri Espírito Santo, João Felício, Ivailto Gômes, Edwa Iaparrá, Emiliano Iaparrá, Fernando Iaparrá, Izanilda Ioiô, Parakwayan Idoxi Ioiô, Pupta Paraymeyano, Avelino Labonté, Ixawet Labonté, Lega Labonté, Leny Labonté, Tabenkwe Labonté, Xikoy Norino Martiniano, and Aldiere Orlando. The staff at the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) in Oiapoque assisted in so many ways—thank-you to all of you. Research colleagues in Brazil have been stalwarts. Eduardo Góes Neves offered marvelous hospitality in São Paulo and generosity, skill, and insight in the field. He introduced David and me to Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha, with whom we have continued to dialogue and who are responsible for a setting up a new public archaeology lab in Macapá. At the Museu Goeldi in Belém, Vera Guapindaia and Daniel Froes offered insights and skills when they were needed. The team that Eduardo assembled to assist with archaeological fieldwork included Carlos Augusto da Silva, cartographer Marcos Castro, and University of São Paulo graduate Rafael Bartolomucci—thank-you to each of you. To Lux Vidal, Artionka Capiberibe, and Antonella Tassinari, all of whom have worked in the Uaçá region: thank-you for your friendship and encouragement and the dedication with which you have set up the Museu Kuahi in Oiapoque. Thank-you, too, to Pedro Funari for facilitating introductions where they were needed. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s generosity with comments on chapters 3 and 4 inspired the confidence to pursue those ideas through to the final chapter and conclusion.

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Acknowledgments

David and I have been privileged to have the flexible and generous support of several funders. The Wenner Gren Foundation in New York was a model of kindness. Particular thanks are due to Dick Fox and Pam Smith for their assistance and insights throughout the period of research in 2000–2002, during which the project was supported by an International Collaborative Research Grant. The World Archaeological Congress’s then-president, Martin Hall, offered financial support and intellectual camaraderie at a critical juncture. The South African National Research Foundation supported early research work in 2000 as well as almost five years of translation—from 2006 to 2010—through its Brazil-South Africa grants program. A sabbatical research grant in 2005 from the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship program via the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage enabled the work to begin taking form. Grateful thanks are due to the CFCH, and, in particular, Carla Borden, James Early, Frank Proschan, and Peter Seitel for their generosity, and “fellow fellows” Jane Anderson and Sita Reddy for conversations that have continued. The Nelson Mandela Fellowship for Teaching and Research at Harvard University afforded the privilege of a period of research based at the W. E. B. du Bois Institute for African and African American Research in the fall of 2005, which allowed the beginnings of a dialogue between African and Latin American debates on indigenous knowledge. I am deeply grateful to Henry Louis Gates Jr for his hospitality and to Catherine Elgin and Gary Urton for their collegiality. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program has been a major contributor to the dialogues across the south on indigenous knowledge that appear in this volume. I am grateful to Mellon’s former president Harriet Zuckerman and its Africa representative Stuart Saunders, and to the University of Cape Town (UCT) for expanding the possibilities via the Carnegie-funded Program for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC). The Sawyer and PERC grants offered the opportunity to engage directly with colleagues whose work contributed to the ideas in this volume: I thank them all, and acknowledge in particular long conversations with Mario Blaser, Raewynn Connell, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena, Rene Devisch, Tim Ingold, Ashis Nandy, Laura Rival, Fernando Santos-Granero, David Turnbull, Helen Verran, Hylton White, and Dan Yon. Arturo Escobar was unable to join us himself, but was with us in his many contributions. Within the Sawyer program, Contested Ecologies participants, both graduates and colleagues, gave more of themselves than I could have hoped for. I am deeply grateful to Marisol de la Cadena for making possible my attendance at the Sawyer Seminar in 2013 at the University of California at Davis, and Isabelle Stengers for her commentary on earlier versions of the concluding chapters.

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Thanks are due to Lynne Meskell for her incisive commentary on the early paper on which this book came to be based, published under her editorship in the Journal of Social Archaeology in 2003. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published in the journal Ethnohistory in 2009 and a shorter version of the astronomy chapter was published in Tipití: The Journal of the Anthropology of Lowland South America in 2010. The material on secularism and astronomy that is in chapter 3 formed part of a separate article on anthropology and the secular that was published in Anthropology Southern Africa in 2005. The material on space (in chapter 4) was developed in dialogue with the Contested Ecologies project (2010–2011) and appears in the volume of that name, published by the Human Sciences Research Council Press of South Africa in 2013. The University of Cape Town has been a wonderful base over the fifteen years during which this work has unfolded. Crain Soudien, deputy vice chancellor for transformation, together with deputy vice chancellor of research Danie Visser, dean of humanities Paula Ensor, and research office director Marilet Sienaert, made it possible to focus on this project in 2010 and 2011. Colleagues in Anthropology at UCT have challenged and encouraged: Francis Nyamnjoh, Jess Auerbach, Marcel Faure, Sally Frankental, Divine Fuh, Carolyn Hamilton, Patti Henderson, Susan Levine, Helen Macdonald, Colleen Petersen, Pam Reynolds, Fiona Ross, and Mugsy Spiegel. In the PERC project, Rob Morrell and Brenda Cooper have encouraged and inspired. Colleagues in Computer Science, Gary Marsden, Edwin Blake, and Ilda Ladeira made it possible to try out some of the material in virtual reality form in 2004. Lauren Muller, Steven Robins, Stephen Martin, and the late Ivailto Gomes (who died tragically in 2012)—thank-you for your friendship, intellectual comradeship, and hospitality over many years. Trish Strydom and Jeanette Walker, thank-you for being there through thick and thin. This work would not have happened had it not been for the lepidopterists Ken Beetlestone and Alva Beetlestone of 11 Tulip Avenue, who taught me to love butterflies and the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Natalie Stear, who taught me the power of stories; and Khaba Mkhize, whose journalism sang its own tune. Finally, Harold Green and Diana Green have stood alongside this project from afar for over a decade, and their collection of stories in 1996 inspired the narrative research method. Diana’s commitment to checking the Palikur translations has been far beyond what we could have asked for, and David and I are deeply grateful to her for her generosity with the unpublished material that is cited in the fourth chapter. Kibeyne kiyavwiye, kibeyne kiyavuno. —LG, Cape Town, June 2013

What happens if we deny the anthropologist’s discourse its strategic advantage over the native’s discourse? . . . Translator, traitor, as the Italian saying goes; but what happens if the translator decides to betray her own language? . . . What changes when . . . we apply the Latourian notion of “symmetrical anthropology” to anthropology itself, not to lambaste it as colonialist, exorcize its exoticism, or mine its intellectual field, but to induce it to say something completely different? —Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2003

Introduction

“The Things Left in the Ground” Introducing Archaeology to Arukwa

We found the bomber after a few days of walking, lying quietly in five or six large pieces in the flittering shadows of the trees on the ridge of Wakayri Mountain, attended by a troop of spider monkeys that chased us away with large rotten branches that they aimed with alarming precision from the treetops. Greening over with moss, the silver body lay apart from the two buckled propellers attached to clay ant colonies in what once were engines. The tail gunner’s turret was intact enough for someone to have survived, as local stories had suggested. Fragments of a US Army Air Forces insignia and a number on the tail marked the start of a trail to an archive in Washington, DC, which told us that it was a B-26 bomber that had crashed on January 25, 1945. The stories that we had heard about it from the Palikur elders Kiyavwiye Paulo, Kiyavwiye Afonso, Kiyavwiye Lohai, Kiyavwiye Xele, Kiyavwiye Uwet, and Kiyavwiye Uwakti told of a misty day in which the plane, “she who walked above the day,” had lost its way. Uwakti, who had first found the wreckage with his father when he was a young takweye of sixteen, sang a song of the crash, in which the two mountains, Wakayri and Karumna, called out to one another about the explosion. Much as falling leaves and ant trails continue to fold the airplane’s aluminum and iron into the jungle, the stories themselves of the B-26 bomber that we heard from Uwet and Xele and Lohai and Uwakti in this corner of the Brazilian Amazon were folded into many archives and archaeologies. The archive of yellowing official documents was maintained by the US military in Washington, DC. An archive of family photos and

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Introduction

letters was in the New Orleans homes of the sisters of George Bodin, who had been the radio operator on the B-26, and whose older sister Janet had kept her surname when she married into the Catholic Church as a nun. There was the puzzle of two graves for the five crewmen.1 And there was an archive of Palikur stories about wars of other times: wars of Carib and Arawak over a daughter who had fled here after marrying the enemy, stories of wars in which shamans had blown on bone flutes in order to win, and stories of anacondas and stars and Palikur cosmological wits pitted against the strengths of wave after wave of invaders. Those stories stretched far: some to French Guiana, some to France, some to the Venezuelan Orinoco River in Warao; tales that were invested in landscapes and sounded so similar to those that we were hearing.2 Some stories made trails to the mouth of the Amazon, where relatives had been taken as slaves, and their sons had followed story tracks all the way home, decades later. There were trails from Africa in the stories of runaway slaves who had come to this region at least as early as 1623,3 and others who in the 1790s sought the liberty that they had heard the French Revolution had brought to French Guiana. Some of them had married into local Indian families; some had been killed for stealing crops. Other story trails stretched to China in the arrival of a Chinese trader called Chinua, and to the city of Brasília, whose officials had forced him to leave when the area was declared Indian. Tales of hunting led to the stories of the Gahawkris, the master spirits of different animals, who lived in different parts of the forest, and whom hunters both feared and did not believe in anymore. Those tales, tantalizingly, seemed to have trails all the way to Siberia, where stories of animal master spirits were so similar.4 One of those stories even trailed back, it seemed, to the stories that geographers and climatologists tell of a time when sea levels were higher, and Wakayri Mountain was said to have been out at sea—a tantalizing hint that stories in this area might indeed extend 8,000 years or more, when sea levels were higher and early coastal fisher-gatherers made a shell mound at a place that is now quite far inland. Surprisingly, the paper trail led to England and to Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1595 he had persuaded Elizabeth I to let him out of the Tower of London with his investment proposal titled The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana.5 Yet other trails stretched to Portugal and Spain, and to the tale of Vincente Yañez Pinzon, who on January 1, 1500, had reported dropping anchor in the Mar Dulce—the sweet sea that one could drink, and which is now known as the Amazon—that adjoined the province of the Paricura, or Palikur. Some trails went underwater, along the river paths of underwater spirit creatures, and to a story of a German submarine in the Oiapoque River under the control of Vichy France in

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the 1940s, which had torpedoed a Brazilian cattle ship. Kiyavwiye Paul recalled the cows on the cattle ship, perhaps because later he became a cattle owner—not, he would hasten to add, because he liked the taste of beef (“it tastes like grass, pah!”), but because they could be traded in town to people who were not hunters and had no particular taste for forest meat. It was in the town of Oiapoque, the town that is named in the Brazilian national anthem as the symbol of the farthest reaches of Brazil, that a young Palikur man had been spotted wearing a soldier’s dog tag sometime in 1945. The local prefect of the region sent word to the authorities, and some time later a recovery team from the US military came in search of the remains of their cadres. They had impressed, said some, because of their powerful technologies—a blimp, a searchlight, a helicopter—and because the Palikur who helped them in the arduous journey to Wakayri felt well treated. When American missionaries arrived in the 1950s from Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL (SIL then being the Summer Institute of Linguistics which later became the Sociedade Internacional de Linguística) to ask if they could come to live on the river, the answer from the Palikur leadership was affirmative. David was eight months old when he arrived with one of their teams in January 1965. That background is one to which this volume will return several times.6 The encounter of Amazonians with World War II was fascinating: the Palikur accounts of the crash were rich in their rendering of people and landscape, yet the details that we found so compelling eluded any of the available ways of narrating life in the Amazon. We pursued quite a few avenues to turn it into a short documentary. But the television channel that was interested seemed to want to make of it a kind of The Gods Must Be Crazy movie, which, it is worth adding, was one of the most popular videos in the Palikur village of Kumene7 along the Rio Urucauá. But we didn’t want to copy The Gods Must Be Crazy, nor did David want to sell the footage if it meant that the Kiyavwiyes—“respected sirs”—Paulo, Afonso, Uwet, Xele, Lohai, and Uwakti would be cast as the Natives playing opposite various European Robinson Crusoes of World War II. We slipped away from another director who saw in the material a chance to affirm that New Agers and Amazonians were just the same. We ran from the cameraman who was convinced that here was his chance to shoot jaguars, alligators, snakes, and indigenes in virgin jungle.8 It was a slow process: learning to recognize the available repertoires of writing the Amazon and to extricate ourselves from them. From his upbringing in a mission community, David had brought with him an abiding interest in linguistic uniqueness and cultural wholes. I brought to the tale resources from a critical South African anthropology with its resistance to the culture-based Othering that lay at the core of apartheid.

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Introduction

Where racism had defined some bodies as white and made them more human than Others, the reactionary strategy of progressive South African anthropology, in the 1980s and 1990s, was Saming—you are the same as me. South African anthropology is not alone in following that trajectory. Introducing Time and memory in indigenous Amazonia, Brazilianists Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger comment that if anthropology is to grasp the indigenization of global trends . . . it must come to terms with difference and resist a paralysis born of the fear of exoticising the Other. This results in part from the critique of the Us/Them dichotomy, or “the West and the Rest,” intended to free us from the underlying spell of primitivism. . . . Although the critique of primitivism and exoticism has a number of positive aspects, taken to an extreme it has succeeded in making any evocation of “strangeness” anathema. . . . The risk of taking literally the maxim “Nothing human is strange to me” is to turn our common sense into what we share with (any) others. The danger here lies in performing a reactionary inversion. . . . The anathema of exoticization converts into a rejection of difference, leaving the anthropologists satisfied with the belief that, by projecting the values of the metropolis onto others, they morally upgrade native peoples. While autochthonous peoples were unarguably put in “the savage slot” . . . in the past, the better to be controlled, are we not now requiring them to possess history, identity, and agency of a certain kind to qualify as real people?9

Escaping the paralysis that they describe, we were to learn, involved grappling with the intellectual heritage of modernity. The Enlightenment’s binaries—nature/culture; knowledge/belief; subject/object—are tangled root and branch with the imaginaries that draw Self and Other so vividly, and so easily. The impossibilities of relationality across the Self/ Other divide are as old as the Enlightenment, and as catastrophic as the Holocaust. The choice for the outsider was to know without loving, or to love without knowing, says Marie Roué of the Spanish conquistadors and bishops in the Americas in the 1500s.10 For Emmanuel Levinas, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, much of Western history has involved the annihilation of the Other through injury or murder, or the assimilation of the Other to the Self: “Making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments, but their own substance.”11 “I become like Them” involves the effacement of the Self. “They become like Me” requires the annihilation of the Other. For Levinas, the challenge is to find an alternative ethics, to explore the

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possibilities for hospitality and difference. In a book such as this, the task is to create a space that, in the writing of it, becomes hospitable to different ways of knowing the world. Levinas’s search for a philosophy that escapes Otherness is a mainstay for Latin American decolonial writer Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who sets in dialogue the work of Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel in his explorations of non-Modern thinking. For Maldonado-Torres, Levinas the French-Lithianian-Jew, Fanon the Afro-Caribbean, and Dussel the Christian Latin American share the status of being racialized subjects within dominant Western frameworks of the twentieth century. Their work shares an “acute sense of the problems of Western master morality and . . . ingenious alternatives to its philosophical bases,” he writes.12 We knew when we started this work that to work and write here would involve working against practices and fantasies that were deeply entangled with racism. To write what we wanted to write about that B-26 that lies beneath the trees on Wakayri Mountain, we had a lot to learn before we would escape rehearsing the already-written stories that would make everyday life in Arukwa seem either exotic or just like home—or, in the phrase so common in undergraduate anthropology courses, making strange the familiar, and making the familiar strange. “In order to reflect for oneself and for the world, one must escape the effort that reduces thought to the repression of a fantasy of which one is not the author,” writes Achille Mbembe.13 It would not be enough to “write against” the already-written master narratives of the Amazon. The real task was finding a way to write about difference without naturalizing human difference, since, to use Maldonado Torres’s words again, “the naturalization of human difference is tied to . . . the emergence and unfolding of Western modernity.”14 Naturalized difference effects a denial of “co-humanness,” he comments, calling for scholarly projects of decolonization and liberation that seek to hear people’s strategies for undoing dehumanizing practices and the suffering that ensues from them.15 The challenge, then, is how to hear Amazonian ways of knowing the world in ways that transcend the limitations of ethnohistory, ethnomathematics, ethnoastronomy, or any of the other “ethnos” that assume “native” versions of disciplinary knowledges exist as equivalents of what Euro-American scholarship already knows. Listening to the hundreds of narratives recorded by David along the Rio Urucauá over more than a decade, one hears within them the different assemblages of nature of which Bruno Latour writes, and the different ontologies that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes. One hears within them, too, the “ingenious alternatives to dominant philosophical bases” of which Maldonado Torres writes, and one recognizes the strength of that ingenuity in the ways people assert different ways of

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thinking, without necessarily performing to any preordained “cultural” script. Along the Rio Urucauá, in tales told for the most part in the Palikur language, that ingenious alternative is an ethics for knowing both the day and the world. And knowing the day-world is what it is to hiyak hawkri. * * * The archaeology project that became the focus of this book began amid the dense tangle of story trails that we followed from the airplane wreckage on Wakayri Mountain. One of those stories made a trail to a cave on the eastern side of Palikur lands. There, Kiyavwiye Uwet said, he had once found a basketful of clay hand axes in a rock shelter where an old woman had once sheltered all the Palikur children during the war with the Galibi—the Caribs. David asked if we could go and see it, and Kiyavwiye Uwet agreed. The cave was so rich in potsherds that they crunched underfoot. Their designs and shapes also made a trail: to at least two different levels of an archaeological record that an armadillo had crashed through when burrowing deep into the sandy soils under the rock shelter—sands that were so dry, even in the fifth month of the rainy season, that they powderpuffed when you ran them through your fingers. Among the fragments surfaced by the armadillo were some human leg bones and some anthropomorphic figurines made out of clay that looked as though they may have been either children’s toys or part of a burial urn. From these caves, our own growing archive of stories and conversations and scholarly documents led to other caves. One of these had been explored by German anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú in the 1920s.16 A trail of bibliographical references led to the boot-shaped burial caverns farther south along the Amapá coast, which had been explored by Emílio Goeldi in 1895 and had yielded urns that were among the most famous in the Brazilian state’s archaeological holdings.17 Eventually that conversation led to a boot-shaped burial chamber along the Urucauá River. And one story track took us to a place called Ivegepket, meaning Lookout Point, where millions of ancient seashells formed a deep, long, and wide sambaqui, or shell mound—an archive, if you like, of life here at a time when the water levels were higher. Waramwi giwbi, people called it in Palikur—the garbage of Waramwi, a giant anaconda about whom there were many stories.18 That story, in turn, led to the home of a man in a village upriver, in which he kept a beautifully carved stone reptile that, he said, he had been found in this area and that, in turn, pointed to a very old settlement here, as lithics in these parts are generally associated with some of the very earliest human settlements in the region.

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After a canoe ride back to the village, and twelve hours on a motorboat to the village of Manga, then two hours on a truck to the town of Oiapoque, eighteen hours on a bus to the city of Macapa, twenty-four hours on a ferry to Belém, and sixteen hours on two planes to travel from Belém to São Paulo to Cape Town, we had time to puzzle over the significance and vulnerability of the archaeological record here. A few months later, the Fourth World Archaeological Congress (WAC4) was opened in Cape Town by then-WAC president Martin Hall, who, as a University of Cape Town archaeologist, put us in contact with São Paulo–based archaeologist Pedro Funari, who in turn introduced us to Eduardo Góes Neves, a Brazilian archaeologist with an interest in Amazonian prehistory who had come to Cape Town to give a paper at WAC4. The three of us—Eduardo, David, and I—had long conversations about the archaeological record of Brazil, amid WAC’s deliberations on public archaeology and postcolonial research ethics. A funding proposal to the Wenner Gren Foundation that tried to draw these themes together was generously supported in 2000 and 2001 and gave us the chance to try out a public archaeology project in the Área Indígena do Uaçá in which we hoped to follow the trails of material fragments, written histories, drawings, old maps, and oral histories to try to see if we might be able to narrate a richer tale of the history of this area. Through that project, and later through a grant from the South African National Research Foundation, David and I were able to record hundreds of narratives from about a dozen elderly storytellers between 1997 and 2008. Our requests for stories, initially, were for those that related to archaeological sites, in the hope that we could correlate indigenous history with the archaeological record. In May 2000, Eduardo led a three-week survey of several sites that were prominent in the stories we had heard, and some months later we flew to Manaus with Avelino Labonté, Ivailto Gômes, and Tabenkwe Labonté so that they could attend an archaeological field school in order to be able to advise Palikur leaders on what archaeology was and whether an archaeological excavation in Palikur lands would be a good idea. Flying all the way along the Amazon River to its confluence with the Rio Negro at Manaus seemed like a long way to go to get the all-important “informed consent” for further archaeological research in the area. Yet it was worth the trouble in a place in which people had never yet heard of archaeology. There were, at the time, no museums to point to, nor libraries in which books could demonstrate it, and the nearest university was very far away. One of the first challenges was to find a way to translate the idea of “archaeology” into the Palikur language. Ikiska anavi wayk was the phrase we came up with, after quite a few conversations and discussions: the study of “things left in the ground.” Yet after a mapping project, the

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Introduction

recording of many landscape stories, the three weeks at Eduardo’s archaeological field school in Manaus in July, and a four-week excavation project in November that rotated six teams of four into learning the techniques of formal archaeology,19 the translation of the word “archaeology” had changed. Exactly when or how this had happened was not clear, but after four weeks of augur tests and mapping and reading soil profiles, the translation of the word “archaeology” had become ivegbohene amekenegben gidukwankis, or “reading the tracks of the ancestors.” In this translation were the traces of a way of knowing the world that was about relationships more than it was about what we understood to be things. Over time, we learned that the “things” that were so central to our ways of thinking were very different from the “things” that were significant in local networks. In order to understand the significance of different “things,” we had to understand a different cosmos and grapple with the legacy of the colonial as it takes form in its offspring, “modernity.” This book is the product of that process, tracing a journey in which we have grappled with knowledges and ways of knowing; with the politics of rationality and of the idea of difference; with an intellectual heritage that posits the objective existence of things outside of the networks of relationship that make them significant. We had to grapple, too, with the implications of such debates in diverse contexts: in current political struggles in Latin America over the idea of a pluriverse;20 with the implications of cognitive justice scholarship for fraught debates over indigenous knowledge and HIV in South Africa; and with the provocative dialogue of Latin American anthropologists that problematizes the translation of “indigenous knowledges” into ethnological versions of scholarly disciplines. The balance of this introduction catalogs our early efforts to study ikiska anavi wayk, or “things left in the ground.” The closing chapters describe an archaeology that reads the tracks of the ancestors—ivegbohene amekenegben gidukwankis—across soils and stories. The chapters between set out what we had to learn in order to understand that kind of tracking and its translations, and the epilogue offers a commentary on why it matters. * * * Ceramic styles in the state of Amapá are broadly characterized as Aristé, Aruã, Mazagão, Maracá and Koriabo (see figure 1). The styles have never been neatly tied to contemporary populations, despite several attempts to do so with the Aristé and the Aruã.21 Some scholars have speculated that ceramic styles may instead be associated with craft specializations or other kinds of divisions within a larger-scale sociopolitical organization,22

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Figure 1. Aristé-style urn at house

refusing the assumption that tribes constitute relatively discrete and homogeneous units that can be associated with particular aesthetics. Drawing on this work, the research questions with which we began asked whether the Aristé-style artefacts found on two of the sites were more widespread, whether additional styles could be located at deeper levels on particular sites, and whether archaeological research, supported by oral-historical research, could cast light on questions of the complexity of historical occupations of this part of the coastal Amazon region. In particular, we were interested in the possibility that anthropogenic landscapes might indicate that complex societies had existed some 500 km north of the mound building that Anna Roosevelt had investigated at the mouth of the Amazon.23 We were also especially interested in whether rumors of a shell mound—known in Brazil by the Tupi word sambaqui—were true. And, besides the interest in objects and materials that might be in particular places, we were interested in whether and how the sites were present in local peoples’ memories, and to what extent the archaeological record might constitute a sense of heritage for people living along the Urucauá. Within days of arrival, in May 2000, we had learned the awkward truth that however important and relevant our research questions had seemed from afar, the scholarly debates from which they emerge are worlds apart from everyday life on the Rio Urucauá. Here, dominant concerns are the daily struggle to produce enough food, protect access to Indian lands,

10

Introduction

ensure health, and, at least in the context of the millenialist expectations that predominated in the year 2000 in the biggest Palikur village, keep right with God in preparation for the expected apocalyptic outcomes of Y2K. In that context, our interest in the past and in ceramic shards that we claimed were worthless in monetary terms proved difficult to explain—especially given that we had money for wages, solar panels, and an outboard motor. “Why would you come so far for something that you don’t want to sell?” asked one man. The constant fear that Brazilians were going to come and take Indian lands made some doubly suspicious of our intentions in traveling to remote sites. As for remembering the dead, we learned that the kiysepka ceremony—no longer performed—had been specifically a ceremony for forgetting them, releasing them from social memory, to the point of not even using their names again. So why would we be interested in their lives? The challenge we set ourselves, early on, was to rethink our research questions about the past to find those that had local resonance and interest, while trying to explain archaeological work. What we did not understand, then, was the extent to which every aspect of our project was a product of a modernist vision—of time, of space, of maps, of the purpose of knowledge, of the division of subject and object, and of the categories of animals and people and spirits. A translation of archaeology needed to go two ways, not one: the conceptual structures of the sciences that we had brought with us needed to be located historically, and questioned, as did our technologies for organizing knowledge, whether through chronologies, or in the x and y axes of table formats in maps or calendars, or simply alphabetical order. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has observed from his own experience of anthropological translation in Brazil, translations always involve an act of betrayal. A good translation, he observes, betrays the translator’s tongue, the translator’s certainties.24 One of the ways we set about our translation was with the aid of an exquisite full-color book on Brazilian archaeology25 that we acquired at the exhibition known as the Brasil +500 Mostra de Redescobrimento, which had opened in São Paulo in 2000 as part of Brazilian celebrations of the five-hundredth anniversary of its “discovery,” despite protestation from some of the more vocal indigenous groups that they had been there all along. Part of a celebratory discourse of the state’s capacity to collect, the archaeological exhibition focused on the most prized ceramics in Brazil, most of which were labeled by place of origin, the contemporary collection from which they were sourced, and, for the most part, the culture that they were thought to represent. There was barely any reference, in that particular hall, to contemporary indigenous struggles by the curators. And in the Urucauá, the glossy photographs of urns and ceramics in the book were interpreted as proof that archaeology was a seeking after treasures

Introduction

11

that had meaning in narratives of state, ethnicity, and nationalism. For all its beautiful images, the book established the idea that artefacts were commodities. And despite the critical scholarship that opposed cultural essentialism by not explicitly linking ceramic styles to contemporary assertions of ethnicity, the net effect of the publication was an antipolitics, one that fed into the sanitized state history that contemporary indigenous activists contested. We battled, throughout the project, to undo the ensuing uncertainties as to whether we were there to collect pots for profit or to serve the cause of national patrimony, and we grappled with the larger problem that, if neither of those projects was our aim, how would a public archaeology project show that it was different? The case of the pots found in an underground burial cavern with no attached oral history, near a Galibi-Marworno settlement farther down the Rio Urucauá, brought the issues of commodity and patrimony into sharp relief. In 1997, David had heard about a man who, some years before, had found a small cave in which were lodged about nine beautiful pots. The man had taken them to his home. By 1997, however, only four remained. David visited him, filmed the pots, and went with him to the cavern in which they had been hidden. The urns were very similar to the urns found on the Rio Cunani some 200 km south by the Swiss naturalist Emílio Goeldi in 1895, in one of the more celebrated finds of Brazilian archaeology—so celebrated, in fact, that one of those urns adorned the front cover of the book with which we arrived in April 2000. Circumstances had changed by then, however, and the man had left his village. His brother and father now controlled the site and wanted to limit access to it. After protracted negotiations, they agreed to allow David, Eduardo, and me access to it, along with four Palikur research assistants who will, for reasons that will become evident, remain nameless. After a long canoe ride through a flooded forest, it was a short walk up a hill and across a waterfall and then a climb up to a ledge with an innocuous-looking hole. At the end of a pitch-dark tunnel was a tiny round cavern with unfamiliar acoustics, just big enough for three people to squeeze into, and round enough to have been hollowed out. While we had walked to the site, three of the four field guides engaged us at length on what we—the researchers—would do in the hypothetical situation that whole pots were found. Would we take them away? Would we tell the government? Could anyone still sell them? Some weeks later it emerged that two of those who had gone with us had found four urns on the same island a year before, when lost while hunting. It had been a year with very little rain, and in the darkness, they said, they had crossed the dry creek that separates the islands without realizing it. Under a different rocky outcrop they had discovered four extraordinarily beautiful pots but had never found the place again. To

12

Introduction

prevent anyone else taking the pots, they said, they had hidden them under a tree, where they had remained for a year. When we arrived at the island, they had recognized the area and searched for them. They described beautiful painting and anthropomorphic features on the urns, similar to the Aristé-style urns depicted in the archaeological book we had brought with us. The pots and the manner of their discovery presented a series of dilemmas. The two Palikur hunters wanted to return secretly to collect the pots and preempt their being found by the family of the man who had found the urns at the cavern we were going to. They wanted the right to sell them themselves if they wanted to, and they wanted an assurance from us that we would not tell the authorities—neither of which could we offer. Much of this was discussed without our knowing exactly what artifacts were under discussion, where they were, or who had found them. Two weeks later, they made a decision to go and collect them. Since Eduardo had had to leave by that time, David and I felt it wise that the hunters collect the pots without us: we had no particular expertise to offer, and our presence would in any case be a liability, in terms of relations with the nearest village and since in the forest we were like children who needed constant minding. We offered them gasoline so they could go by motor boat to avoid the longer and more precarious canoe journey, and lent the team—now four people—a video camera for the day so that they could film the journey and the site. The pots were successfully collected. It was clear, though, that people who found artifacts wanted the individual right to dispose of them as they please, and there were competing senses of entitlement to sites. The field guides felt entitled to the pots because they found them and because historically they believed their ancestors had made them—although we were not able to find any oral history teller with any knowledge of them. By contrast, the family who had discovered the urns earlier felt entitled to the site because it was close to their settlement, on an island where they had hunting rights, which to them meant that the people from farther villages had had no right to be there in the first place. At the time, we understood this situation as a series of ethical dilemmas pertaining to archaeology. How might we produce knowledge from the urns without seizing them in the name of science? If public archaeology was to be focused on the mobilization of cultural material for the advancement of indigenous people and the creation of “subaltern publics,”26 how were we to negotiate the state’s definition of archaeological fragments as national patrimony, and the consequent expectation that we ought to dispatch them to an archaeological storage facility? The question was not just a matter of negotiating obligations to public, science, and state, but a matter of practicality: if we seized the urns, all other sites

Introduction

13

would be closed to us forthwith, and artefact commodification—which had probably been going on quietly for a long time anyway—would skyrocket. The beginnings of a community ecomuseum in the region offered the possibility of an acceptable location, but it did not yet exist, and there were no immediate plans to equip it with the humidity control that would stop the urns from drying out and collapsing in on themselves. The only climate-controlled storage environment, then, was the museum at the fort at Macapa, 500 km away—which some here, in the early 2000s, related to as a military site that had housed the forces of slavery in the 1700s.27 One of the team of field guides suggested that the urns be returned to the underground cavern from which they had come. But, if they were to do so, there was little guarantee that others would neither take them nor break them. If, on the other hand, the advancement of indigenous people was our goal, one of them asked us, exactly who did we mean when we said “the community,”28 and what was meant by “advancement”: money, education, what? Clearly, the team of collectors saw advancement as an individual matter. Rightly or wrongly, we felt we had to hold to the principle that we were not there to buy pots. We would also not seize any artifacts, as that would destroy relationships and make impossible any further archaeological work. Recognizing that both ethical practice and commodities are defined by social consensus, our decision was to try to protect the urns by establishing a network of social relationships around them. We discussed the matter—delicately!—with the chefe do posto and the cacique. Both felt that whole urns ought not to leave the Área Indígena, although as per our earlier agreements, shards could be taken away for analysis and returned at some future date. We also sought to build appropriate relationships around the urns beyond the Área Indígena by suggesting that the urn holders consider involvement in the museum, and we secured their permission to discuss the matter in a meeting in the city of Belém with the Brazilian Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional (Institute of National Historical Patrimony and the Arts), which is in charge of archaeological licensing in Brazil, and to whom we also later sent a copy of our formal report about the trip, which included a discussion of this dilemma. The experience unsettled many of my certainties, not least of which was the assumption that a public-minded intentio and the interests of formal science could be thought of as compatible, for in choosing not to take away the urns we were protecting many more sites in the region than this one, yet that course of action risked severe censure from the authorities. In some respects, it was a fairly shocking introduction to the politics of different publics—the public interest constituted by the state, which the latter claimed to serve, and the contending interests of the

14

Introduction

public(s) along the Rio Urucauá. Which of these “publics” was going to be “the public” in our public archaeology? My own belief, at the time, was that we were there to foster a sense of the importance of material heritage that was being destroyed—an alliance with “things” that I had believed a fairly neutral one but that was in fact an alliance with a deeply politicized science, in which the deeply politicized objects were actors. It was a first, and shocking, experience that what I considered an ethical, public anthropology might involve a betrayal of the intellectual heritage in which I had been trained, and to which I felt so deeply committed. Translator, traitor . . . At the time, the sense of responsibility to the ethical and equitable practice of anthropology was an enormous weight to carry for a fairly junior researcher who had quite unexpectedly found such generous support from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. As our funding proposal had outlined, we wanted to question the power relations implicit in everyday fieldwork practices. This had me constantly questioning the certainties that were written into my research grant proposals. What am I doing there? Why am I doing this? What are my motives? Is this justifiable? How are colonial legacies playing out in the bush clothes I am wearing? And so on. They are tough questions to carry through every day when you are pulling water out of a well at 5 a.m., dodging bats in the bathhouse, fending off ill health, and learning a language that has forty different ways to say the word “one.” While there was enough local interest in what we were doing for us to feel that continuing was worth the trouble, there were also plenty of moments of ambivalence to make us agonize about it. Over and over, I had to confront an uncomfortable reality that what seemed appropriate to me was not always appropriate in the villages along the Rio Urucauá; that what David and I took to be carefully considered ethical field research practices were in many moments all but inextricable from colonial practice; that the ideas we brought with us regarding how to do history or geography or astronomy perhaps had more in common with European writing of the 1600s than they did with the Urucauá in the 2000s. With hindsight, it would seem that much of the distress that accompanied the growing sense of being a traitor of scholarly dogma came from the inadequacy of the theoretical tools at our disposal. At the time, the tools of critical postmodernism insisted that the sorts of issues with which the project grappled were a function of the social construction of reality. In this view, one’s identity or social positioning shapes the way one will represent reality. Donna Haraway’s wry comment captured my experience perfectly: “Claims that all knowledge is socially constructed lead to a kind of epistemological electro-shock therapy, which far from ushering us into the high stakes tables of the game of contesting public

Introduction

15

truths, lays us out on the table with self-induced multiple personality disorder.”29 While I sought to extend the world of scholarship and its benefits—research funds, resources—to our Palikur hosts, my efforts to extend participation (with the best of intentions) forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that at the end of the day I was still peddling a particular version of reality: that authorized by “Science” (in the singular and with a capital S, in Bruno Latour’s memorable phrasing),30 with which I wanted people to agree and cooperate. The desire to “get people to cooperate with science” came in large measure from the desire to operate within the frameworks of Brazilian law regarding national patrimony. Yet people’s agreement with Science was only partial, at best. Was this a matter that needed to be addressed by education, followed by policing? I wrestled, agonized, and fought with a growing sense that my benefaction fitted the description by Marie Roué (after Tsvetan Todorov) of the bishop who “loves without knowing,” Levinas’s encounter in which I was effacing difference, and asking my Other to become like Me. The agonizing was not without value. Johannes Fabian writes, “There is an agonistic connotation to ‘confrontation’ that we need to maintain for at least two reasons: (a) to counteract the anodyne, apolitical, conciliatory aura that surrounds ‘communication’ (and for that matter ‘dialogue’) and (b) to indicate that the ‘move toward ethnographic knowledge’ can initiate a process only once it encounters resistance in the form of incomprehension, denial, rejection, or, why not, simply Otherness.”31 Paradoxically, perhaps only because David had such a long history in the village, spoke the language so well, and had deep relationships with people there could incomprehensions and rejections even surface. We found ourselves ensconced in the gossip network—a great place for an anthropologist to be, except when the gossip concerned the anthropologist! “People are saying that you . . .” began many a disconcerting conversation, some of which left me nonplussed; some left me smarting with tears or spluttering with repressed anger when I felt that someone who knew the project better than others was misrepresenting it. Only much later did I begin to problematize theoretically the relationships among science, states, and publics. That discovery took form, again, in South Africa several years later, in response to a discussion on trying to ensure fishers’ compliance with conservation legislation, when a distinguished scientist offered the view, in a workshop on fishers’ knowledge, that the role of the social scientist in the fraught topic of marine conservation would be (a) to educate people in scientific thinking and (b) to research how to improve law enforcement. There, the penny (or perhaps it was the Brazilian real) dropped: the distinguished professor required my graduate students and I to teach South African fishers his Truth and, for those who disagreed, to work out better ways to arrest

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Introduction

them. The moment was key in understanding the ways in which the sciences determine not only truth but also who is criminal and who is not. Latour’s “epistemological policing” indeed!32 In short, public archaeology was tougher than any of us had expected. It wasn’t simply that I had to learn that politically correct intentions would not magic away the colonial histories that we brought with us. It wasn’t just that I had to learn how positions and interests (from local gender/ clan/identity politics to my own disciplinary interests and background as a white South African anthropologist attempting to work in Brazil) would affect constructions of the past. Nor was it a matter of researching how local fault lines of power would affect fieldwork relationships around our project’s resources, such as a boat motor, or solar panels, or a television screen. Nor was it a matter of learning that “things” were not “going to work out” in the way I thought they should. It took a while to realize that public archaeology was not going to be a case of learning local versions of reality and comparing them with those of the sciences and then arbitrating on which versions were more true, or pondering which identities made which truths more true for whom. Urns and sites were not necessarily going to be valued as heritage no matter how much I wanted them to be, not because people were bad or because our team was failing in its commitment to a kind of heritage evangelism, but because the idea of heritage itself was laden with assumptions about time and space and nature and culture that had little local purchase. Slowly, I began to recognize that participatory methods and postcolonial intentions meant little if the idea of knowledge or indeed, heritage, was taken as given, as universal. Eg ka hiyak Uhokri, I thought I heard Kiyavwiye Uwet say about me one day to someone sitting next to him as he made a fire—“she doesn’t know God.” I told Ivailto this and asked him what he thought Kiyavwiye Uwet had meant. “Oh,” he said, slightly taken aback, “I think you didn’t hear him right. He probably said ‘eg ka hiyak hawkri’—she doesn’t know the day.’ ” “Oh,” I said, relieved, “that’s not so bad.” “No,” said Ivailto, “it’s much worse! It means you don’t know anything at all!” It was years before I understood. Kiyavwiye Uwet’s words marked the beginning of my own “disconcertment,” to use Helen Verran’s delicate term for ethnographic insights that make you realize that your way of thinking is, at best, not the only way of knowing.33 I had a great deal of respect for Kiyavwiye Uwet, and his opinion counted for much. Partly out of chagrin and partly out of curiosity, I began to track when people used the idea of hiyak hawkri. The phrase “knowing the day-world” is explored in chapter 1, and its significance undergirds this book, hence the title. As a principle, hiyak hawkri sets out an alternative purpose for having knowledge. Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers speaks of an ecology of practices—the ways in which the goals for knowing shape the ways in

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17

which we come to know, and how we think about an ethics of knowing.34 Both for David Turnbull and for Stengers, a knowledge that is dominated by the goal of being able to calculate and calibrate, to link to dates and sizes and scales and axes, and to predict things in the language of numbers means that alternative reasons for having knowledge of the world will slip out of view. For Stengers, the value of being able to nurture life slips out of view for sciences that are guided by the calculative logics of the knowledge economy. On a parallel track was anthropologist Tim Ingold’s effort to rethink knowledge in ways that elude representation in Cartesian grids and dualisms.35 Though very different, their work resonates with anthropologist Michael Jackson’s call for an ethnography that engages the philosophy that is in the everyday.36 The realization that local ways of knowing history had very little in common with the crafting of chronologies was a first step to recognizing that the enumerative impulse of the sciences had little purchase here. The next step was realizing that not only time but also space had different imaginaries here. This meant that neither history nor geography nor astronomy could be written about here in ways that suggested they could be “found” along the Urucauá as if they were equivalent to the disciplines ethnohistory, cultural geography, or ethnoastronomy. In some ways, that much would be obvious. But discovering how temporalities, spatialities, and relational ethics could effect a different assemblage of the world along the Rio Urucauá was a slow process that required not just “looking” but thinking about how one was looking, being critical of one’s own perspectives, and trying to understand the ways in which colonial histories and intellectual legacies were part of the conversation. Such a degree of reflexivity, at times, left me feeling as if I were in a tangle. The key was finding enough humility to work with misunderstandings as productive moments, when they occurred, instead of trying to make them go away as fast as possible. It would be nice to be able to say that the toughest fieldwork moments produced the best learning curves, but the reality was that moments of difficulty, when they came, were hard work, and in some David and I made the right calls, but in others we didn’t. Not giving up, in the end, came down to quite personal reasons. Had David not had a long history of good relationships in the village and a fluency in Palikur, we would probably have been given up on. He had a wonderful way of settling in to the meandering conversations that people wanted to have, which was much more useful than the more direct and to-the-point style that I had thought would be appropriate. For me, since birth the one who has swum upstream, training in South African critical anthropology had grounded my research practice in attention to the effects of race and coloniality in fieldwork. Attending to these, I could work with difficult moments as productive ones in which to think about the making of

18

Introduction

anthropological knowledge,37 in ways that made it possible to go beyond a naive and unquestioning account of “cultural knowledge” along the Urucauá. A politics of reflexive research also gave me the confidence to pursue both the interdisciplinary and the extradisciplinary: that which exceeded the canons of history, geography, or astronomy. For Eduardo, who was as easygoing in the field as it was possible to be and whose presence was deeply welcomed on the Urucauá for that reason, the understanding of the impact of European colonization on Amerindian precolonial patterns of sociopolitical organization was one of the most important topics of contemporary Amazonian archaeology. His interest in thinking about the size of Amerindian settlements prior to conquest opened many rich conversations about the transformations in native Amazonian societies over the previous five hundred years, due to slavery, diseases, and displacement, and local people were fascinated by the potential for overlaps between archaeology and the oral accounts that they had learned from their parents and grandparents. Perhaps most important, Eduardo’s questioning of the widely believed claim that Amerindian societies had historically been small, vulnerable, shifting bands was welcomed by Palikur elders like the then-cacique Kiyavwiye Emiliano Iaparrá, who had learned accounts from his parents that long ago the Palikur had indeed been many people. For others, in a year when national festivities marked the five hundredth year since “the discovery” of Brazil, it was an opportune moment to strengthen the case that Amerindians had been there long before. For these reasons, it was relatively easy for people along the Rio Urucauá to grasp the value of identifying areas in the Amazon where there appeared to have been a minimum of discontinuity between contemporary societies and precolonial occupations. The idea of combining archaeological information with ethnography and indigenous oral tradition was compelling, as was the idea that the area along the Rio Urucauá might be one of the few areas of the Brazilian Amazon where a task such as this could be accomplished. In pursuing those conversations, however, a significant obstacle turned out to be the magnificent archaeological book that we had brought with us from the exhibitions in São Paulo that marked Brazil’s five-hundredyear anniversary, for it depicted the histories of contemporary indigenous people whose material culture was now a property of the state, housed in glass cases, and unable to speak of the human cost that enabled it to have been assembled in this way. It was not just that Amerindian voices about the past were muted in these exhibitions; it was that the artifacts themselves stood as exemplars of a heritage that was now defined in ways that had almost nothing to do with the philosophies and cosmologies that had produced them. Though the Descobrimento 500 Anos exhibitions in São Paulo were around 2,500 km away from our field site, the politics of

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19

knowledge that its archaeological hall glossed would become central to our project. * * * Some 8,000 km away in South Africa, a related debate on postcoloniality and science unfolded in the first decade of this brave new millennium, where a significant proportion of South Africa’s HIV-related death toll of several million lives38 is the shocking consequence of pursuing a knowledge policy that, under former president Thabo Mbeki, viewed “science” as the opposite of African experience and traditional medicine. Described by some commentators as genocidal, the South African debate on traditional medicine versus antiretrovirals provides the definitive challenge for those who want to pursue postcolonial or decolonial knowledge studies via the routes of “indigenous knowledge systems” and “cognitive justice.”39 The argument set out in this book is an approach that supports to the hilt the goals of the cognitive justice movement but that seeks to rethink the ways in which arguments about knowledges are usefully made. Why? First, the dualism of indigenous knowledge and science privileges a racialized structure of knowledge. Asserting that “ethnophilosophy” or “ethnopsychology” or “ethnoastronomy” or “ethnoveterinary medicine” or “ethnomusicology” exists as a parallel discipline takes for granted the disciplinary apparatus of Europe and searches for equivalents among Europe’s “Others.” Second, the idea of “indigenous knowledge” builds on one of modernity’s enchantments: the idea of a fixed and static culture. Third, the context in which the idea has gained political traction in the past few decades has been primarily in relation to development, aid, conservation, and intellectual property regimes, and a great many of those projects require “IK” to match its frameworks. Fourth, the idea of the indigenous relies on a particularly European model of thinking about ancestry and land. Tim Ingold’s observation is an important one: the indigenous movement presents its case in ways that allow either for complex histories (and therefore weak land claims), or strong land claims and weak histories. His chapter titled “Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land” provokes the question of whether it is possible to think about indigeneity in terms that allow for both history and land.40 All of that noted, however, it is important to note that the outright dismissal of “indigenous knowledge” in the critical humanities as something “invented” and therefore without salience or relevance or importance has been profoundly wrong. In critical postmodern scholarship, particularly in South African postapartheid humanities, the dominant response to culturalist enchantment has been one that I think could fairly be

20

Introduction

characterized as a “diss-enchantment”: a form of scholarship that is enchanted with its own capacity to debunk and to unmask that with which it disagrees as the effect of undeclared interests. In his article “Why has critique run out of steam”41 and in his introduction to the edited volume Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,42 Bruno Latour argues powerfully against the continued use of deconstruction as the primary strategy for critical scholarship. In its place, he argues for an expanded realism in which the process of assembling knowledge itself is grasped as constitutive of things, of facticities. Latour’s work offers the beginnings of a path outside of the current scholarly impasse that is dominated by enchantment/disenchantment, and diss-enchantment. In this context, the Franco-Latin dialogues are provocative. Writers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, and Mario Blaser are shifting the debate about Amerindian ways of knowing the world away from the framework offered by the concepts associated with “indigenous knowledge” and its concomitant interest in proving particular fragments of knowledges. Several of these writers—notably Viveiros de Castro—frame an anthropology that moves beyond a colonial heritage of asymmetrical relationships with its research subjects, toward a symmetrical relationship characterized by an accountability to the concepts of its subjects. Thus, the dialogue is deeply invested in understanding the ways in which different conceptualizations of the world are possible, and different “things” emerge. From Latour’s point of view, what is of interest, is an intellectual heritage in which the founding dualisms of modernity (subject/object, nature/culture, fact/ value, etc.) are rendered differently, such that different assemblages are possible. How might different versions of the world produce different “things”? The dramatic intervention implied by the Franco-Latin dialogues is to offer a space for ontologically different visions and versions of the world in the academy. As such, that work begins to frame the conditions of possibility for what I would call an ontological hospitality in the Academy. A hospitality to different visions and versions of the world, by contrast, does not imply agreement. Hospitality contrasts directly with the “pedagogical wars” of our era, which insist upon a particular version of democracy and of rationality. Hospitality speaks of an approach where one’s own ideas are not effaced—as in the manner of objectivist methodologies—but present, and able to be engaged. As such, the tyrannies of certainty implied in nascent traditionalist movements and idealism are destabilized.43 An expanded realism rather than an antirealism, a hospitable scholarship seeks to understand the assemblages that produce particular regimes of truth, including those of the deconstructionist. Critical of the myths of modernity, yet recognizing the achievements of sciences,

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Latour seeks ways of understanding how the real might be constituted differently—as Making Things Public, edited by Latour and Weibel, so eloquently asserts.44 That project yields a breadth of possibility precisely because its very assemblage resists the myth of modernity that its approaches provide ultimate access to the ultimate reality. Yet it also resists the myths of postmodernity that, cynically, hold to the impossibility of approaching the real, or substitute the idea of multiple realities deriving from multiple positionalities. By contrast, Making Things Public offers a three-pronged strategy: resisting an enchantment with the “diss,” holding open the value of criticism, and expanding the scholarly engagement with the real by an attention to the ways in which facticities themselves are generated. Deeply invested in emerging scholarship from the south on the value of diverse intellectual heritages, this book aims to explore the politics of cosmologies in one particular Amerindian setting. Neither relativist nor deconstructionist, nor bedazzled by exotica, nor crippled by the need to assert an essential sameness, the chapters that follow explore diverse ontologies of nature and culture in relation to the models that give them expression, and the political conditions with which those expressions articulate. Recognizing the responsibility that anthropologists have to work symmetrically—which I understand as the task of engaging diverse intellectual heritages, rather than documenting ethnoknowledge—the work argues that the profession carries an equivalent responsibility to support the emergence of new forms of critique that are emerging in the margins of modernity—including critiques of the idea of being indigenous, or being traditional. To frame these questions in practical terms: How is the world rendered in terms other than those offered by the founding dualisms of modernity—subject-object, nature-culture, space-time? What assemblages do these make possible? What critiques do local people offer of them, in their engagement with modernities of various kinds? If, as Afro-Caribbean scholar Aimé Césaire so pithily formulated it, “colonisation = thingification,”45 then what does it mean to recuperate the “things”—including archaeological artifacts and ikiska anavi wayk— that became the flotsam and jetsam of successive waves of colonialism and its contemporary iteration in modernity? How might one recuperate the “thing” that has become “indigenous knowledge”? * * * Looking back on it now, the “archaeology” in “public archaeology” is a remarkably different beast to the “archaeology” that comes without the confession of its owner. To have translated our project as interested in “things in the ground” was, with hindsight, an odd thing to have done.

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Where was the word “public”? Why did we not see the obvious: that a “thing” requires a public (by which I mean a collective) to name it? Why did we not understand that what we would see as an archaeological object—an “artifact” as opposed to “stone,” “soil,” “charcoal,” or “lemon tree”—depended upon a way of looking at the world that in making them significant, separated things from people, objects from subjects? Throughout the course of fieldwork, I was astonished by the insistence of participants that we identify “which community” we meant when we spoke of “community benefit,” and what interests we were pursuing in our apparently neutral quest. I remember at the time speaking of this to a first-year anthropology class back home and pointing out with some surprise that the people whom we were working with had a great deal of insight into postmodern thought in its criticism of the idea of neutrality and objectivity. I was equally surprised when Kiyavwiye Uwet once jokingly—but pointedly—suggested to me that “anthropologists were ihamwi [shamans].” He implied, I think, that anthropologists had the capacity to change our perspectives, and that an anthropologist is a little different from the kind of researcher that was the classic “disinterested, objective observer.” Over a decade later, I think I finally begin to understand the depth (and wit) of his analogy. Much like the shaman had the capacity to travel across the cosmos and change her or his perspective by transforming her or his bodily form, the fieldworking scholar, too, travels and, in that traveling, begins to adapt her or his body and experiment with different perspectives. But a more disconcerting reading of his words was also possible: taking on a different perspective also meant taking on a different form, and that has the potential for the most dangerous of trickery. Both shaman and scholar could take on the form of a predator. Ba pi ai? is the common greeting between people along the Urucauá that guards against such deception. The phrase asks, “Are you here?” or “Is it really you that is here?” And in a strange sense, it was in the basic skill of learning to greet that lay the seeds of the rethinking of scholarship for a public archaeology in Arukwa. The first chapter explores this. Titled “ ‘Are You Here?’: Personhood, Presence, Knowledges, and Knowing,” it explores what it is to know, offering material that demonstrates that the reason to have knowledge, for an archaeological project, and for local people along the Rio Urucauá, is different. Working with two phrases commonly used in everyday life—hiyak hawkri (knowing the day) as an evaluation of someone’s humanity, and ba pi ai? as a greeting that asks “are you here?,” the chapter makes a case for an ecology of knowledge that finds its rationale for knowing in a concept of relational personhood shared by animals, landforms, stars, and people. “ ‘So Many Stories on This Day-World’: History as the Retracing of Tracks” is the second chapter, which explores ways in which movement

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(rather than stasis) becomes the basis of ordering historical and geographical information. It begins to rethink possibilities for knowing nature via different conceptualizations of time and space. Reading the navigations of modernity evident in texts, the third chapter explores the ways in which storytellers navigate various notions of rationality and reason in accounts of the cosmos. The integration of sky, earth, and underworld is the focus of chapter 3, which explores the ways in which temporalities of the cosmos are understood in a cycle of astronomical narratives associated with the rain stars. Titled “Journeys with the Rain Stars: Making Sense of the Moving Cosmos,” this material makes a case that this astronomy is based on known seasonal movements rather than on known fixed shapes or angular relationships, and it draws on this material to reflect on the ways in which time and space are accounted for in cosmic journeys, and stellar movements. Working with these different notions of temporality, it is argued, the line between “belief ” and “knowledge” might be reworked. It is worth noting that such a detailed account of a cycle of Amerindian astronomical narratives has not been previously published from this region, although regional astronomy receives much mention in Levi-Strauss’s four volume Mythologiques (1964, 1966, 1968, 1971). The importance of knowing the movements of the stars, set out in the astronomical material, initiates a discussion on the problem of conceptualizing space in the fourth chapter, titled “The Curvature of Surfaces: Cartesian Space, the Topology of Palikur Grammar, and Consubjective Space.” Working with linguistic material by Diana Green—shape markers are a very prominent feature in the Palikur language—the chapter explores the significance of the ways in which the linguistic categories of space are conceptualized via surface topology rather than Euclidean flat-plane geometry. The material sets out an argument that the tools of translation in anthropology are never neutral: even geometry, or spatial relationships, needs to be theorized with reference to local rather than universal categories. Chapter 5, “ ‘Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors’: Resources for Assembling Times Past,” returns to the problem posed in this introduction: how might we now explain the shift in translating “archaeology” from “studying things in the ground” to “reading the tracks of the ancestors”? Chapters 1 through 4 focus on presence, movement, rationality, temporality, and space. Working with notions of tracking and translation, and tracking as translation, chapter 5 works toward proposing the terms of a perspectivist approach to working with times past. The final chapter is titled “ ‘The Story Trails of Kwap: Archaeology, Provenance, and an Ecology of Predation.” Focusing on the main site of archaeological investigation at the river bend called Kwap with its record of wars and monsters, the chapter attempts a rereading of the site at

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Kuwap via the multiple stories that intersect there. Tracing the ways in which those narratives constitute the landscape as a matrix of actions by actors human and nonhuman, the chapter reflects on what it means to rethink archaeological and anthropological research in dialogue with the practice of tracking. Amerindian perspectivism, it is argued, has much in common with the radical cross-species empathy required by tracking. Yet, while “tracking the ancestors” offers a possibility for refiguring the colonialities that linger in field research sciences of all kinds, one has to grapple too with tracking as one of the arts of predation. The book closes with an epilogue titled “Beyond Matter Set in Space and Time: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology,” addressing the ways in which notions of space and time inform translations of knowledge. By allowing different ways of thinking about the world— that do not require “space” and “time” to be the basis of reality—it becomes possible to recognize “different natures” not as radically different cultural worlds made of beliefs but as effects of different ways of knowing and thinking and interacting with the world. The challenge of scholarship that attends to “cosmopolitics” is to recognize the problems of conceptual translation, for “different things” are not the effects of “culture” as such, but the effects of practices that, like tracking and like the disciplines in the sciences, bring different imaginaries to bear on reality. Working in these ways, it begins to be possible to shift away from an ethnology fixated on difference or exotica, and away from a postmodern anthropology fixated on representation and its politics, to an anthropology that attends to the ways in which different things and different ontologies are brought into being through practical engagements with the world. * * * A book of this nature would very easily become trapped in dense and abstract debates. In the belief that there is no philosophy that cannot be explained in a good story, the text throughout tries to unfold arguments through anecdote and narrative.

Figure 2. Aristé style from the boot-shaped cavern site downriver, in a house in Kumene

Figure 3. Aristé-style zoomorph from the cavern

Figure 4. Eduardo Neves on-site at Kwap

Figure 5.  Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe Manoel Labonté checking for ceramic samples

Figure 6.  Public archaeology in process at Kwap

Figure 7.  Kwap Open Day

Chapter One

“Are You Here?” Personhood, Presence, Knowledges, and Knowing

“You should teach her to greet,” called Kiyavwiye João Batista to David as we passed his house, some days after we had arrived. Machete in hand, he was standing on the moss-covered slope in the shadow of his house on the main path through Kumene on the Rio Urucauá. “Ba pi ay?” he rehearsed me, grinning as he enunciated the words that asked “Are you here?” “Good, good,” came the response to my effort. “Now you say ‘Ihi, nah ay.’ ” “Ihi, nah ay,” I echoed: “Yes, I am here.” “Kabayhtiwah! Excellent! Now you ask me, ‘Ya pis?’—‘And you?’ ” What does it mean to “be here”? There is the “here” that is about being present in a place: to be “here” in Arukwa, the region along the Rio Urucauá, is to be in homeland and heartland for those who call themselves Palikur, even for those living across the border in French Guiana. This “are you here?” asks, “Do you know where you are?” Then, there is the “here” that is about being present in a time: the present that is the opposite of “the past,” yet also its continuation. With this “here,” “ba pi ay” asks, “Do you see that our paths are crossing?” And then there is the “here” that is about being with, being nearby, and being alongside: a presence that is the opposite of absence. This kind of ba pi ay asks, “Do I have the privilege of your presence? Can you attend to me?” The question is about ethics, attending, tending. It is relevant as much to everyday sociality on the Rio Urucauá as it is to matters of race and racism, objects and subjects, objectivities and subjectivities, and styles of doing ethical field research. In this sense, to respond Ihi, nah ay is to affirm “Yes, I am here with you in this moment, and in this place. We are together here, as equals, face-to-face. You have my full attention.”

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Each of these three readings of what it means to be present, however, are translations that rely on the canons of European philosophy to understand notions of self in space, and time, and ethical relationship. Recognizing this brings the questions: What kinds of “presence” are meant in this greeting that is so much part of everyday life along the Rio Urucauá, and how do these relate to Amerindian philosophical heritages? How might we grasp the question “are you here?” in ways that recognize the different possibilities for what it means to be a person? Over several return trips, after almost a decade of thinking about what happened in our public archaeology project from 2000–2001, after grappling with some 4,000 minutes of stories that David transcribed from video recordings made from 1997 to 2008, and in response to current Amazonian anthropological research, some alternative translations began to present themselves. There is the sense of “being here” that affirms that I am not thinking in the form of another creature—as a tracker might follow prey, or as a shaman might think like a spirit. In this sense, to say “I am here” says, “I am not right now taking the perspective of another creature.” Ihi, nah ay also affirms the converse: “Another has not taken the form of me. It really is I, and not a predator that has assumed my body, my consciousness, my likeness.”1 The inquiry ba pi ay also invites the hearer into a performance of conviviality. It creates an obligation to respond. To ignore a ba pi ay in everyday practice would constitute a negation of the person who is greeting, and a denial of sociality.2 In about a year of fieldwork, I only once observed someone refuse to respond. If the greeting “are you here” has six possible translations that rest on alternative possible understandings of body and consciousness, place, temporality, creatureliness, and obligations, how many more translations might there be of histories: “Who was here? When? What did they do?” * * * Most anthropological volumes begin with histories, and indeed, the first version of this book began with a lengthy chapter on Palikur history that has long since been recycled. Why that should be so is the subject of the rest of the book. The first four chapters—on personhood, space and time, astronomy, and geometry—question the assumptions about reality, and nature, and the nature of reality that would be glossed if this text were to head straight to the idea of “history.” Only then are we ready to go back to the question of history, in chapters 5 and 6. Opening this book with a greeting is in part about an ethics of scholarship that greets the reader in the same terms as she or he would be

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greeted on the main pathway through Kumene. It is also, in part, an invitation to the reader to consider being present to the people whose stories and presence in the world make this text possible. Alongside these concerns, the discussion on the ideas of presence in an everyday greeting also opens a conversation with the ways of knowing the world that are valued along the Rio Urucauá, and that this book hopes to translate. It asks this: what might change in the discussion on public archaeology, and on science and its others, if we allow space in the discussion for different philosophies of time, place, reason, and personhood? This chapter focuses on personhood. It explores contests over what it means to be a person—all of which were ongoing during the public archaeology project in 2000–2001. Then it explores the relevance of locally contested ideas of what it is to be a person, to how a person knows the world. The ideas set out here about personhood are then the foundations of the argument about knowing the world in the chapters that follow. The idea that a particular kind of personhood is vital to what it is to know, is not peculiarly Amerindian. The notion of a knowing subject is central to a range of Euro-American philosophies of knowledge. For example, the language of objective modernist scholarship, as it appears in various forms across the globe, is deeply invested in the idea that in order to know, “one” must be objective rather than subjective. In other words, “one” must absent “one’s person” from what “one” knows. Such a theory of knowing is based on the absence, rather than the presence, of the person-who-knows. Postmodern scholars take the contrary view. Demythologizing objectivity, it asks for scholars to recognize and theorize their presence. Postmodern anthropology asks such questions as, How am I looking? Whose perspective do I occupy? How am I representing reality? What histories allow me to be a researcher? What is the relationship between my anthropological research, and colonial projects? The scholarly approach that could broadly be called the “posthumanities” builds on that theory of the presence of the knower, but it provokes a different view of the world, of nature, and of reality. The writings of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and John Law (among others) break with both the objectivists’ concern with the accuracy of representing things and the social constructionists’ concern with who has the power to represent things in particular ways. For posthumanists, the problem with both modern and postmodern approaches is that they rest on the Enlightenment assumption that there is a single nature, or reality, that can be known either in itself (the objectivist view), or known via a critical view of the social conditions of its representation (the social constructionist view). Instead, for the posthumanities, what is of interest are the relationalities through which objects of study emerge as things. Such an approach takes as given the idea of not a reality that is accessed by experts but a

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reality that is constantly being produced, or enacted: brought into being between actors both human and nonhuman. In this view, the “nature” that scholars know and represent is known via a series of reductions and could be reduced in many different kinds of ways—hence the idea that the object of study is neither “nature” nor “culture” but natures-cultures. Crucially, this approach is not trying to explain “natural” material reality away as a social or ideological construction, but it is looking at an expanded reality: a focus on the relationships through which things come to be seen, defined, and known as “facts.” All three of these examples underscore an argument that philosophies of knowledge and knowing, in Euro-American thought, rest on specific ideas about the relationship between knowledge (or what it is to know) and the presence of the person who claims to know. Where modernist thought suggests that “in order to know that you know, you ought to absent yourself from what it is that you study,” this chapter suggests that in various iterations of Amerindian thought in Arukwa, the kind of presence that is central to what it is to know and to have knowledge of the world is quite particular. In order to understand Amerindian contributions to dialogues on knowledge—whether archaeological, ecological, or historical— a good place to begin is in what it is to be a person here present in Arukwa. It goes (almost) without saying that the range of translations of ihi, nah ay—“yes, it is I here in my body”—that open this chapter do not add up to the “equal opposite” of the objectivist’s concept on absence. What, then, does it mean to be a person who knows, here in Arukwa? Discussions of what it means to be a person easily slip into accounts of moral or ethical ideals, however, and in turn, such accounts readily slip into the archetype of the noble Indian. In order to understand what it is to be a person here, a complex ethnographic account will be more useful than a simple description of an ideal that is in any case contested. For that reason, this chapter’s proposals for understanding the relationship of personhood and presence and knowledge are based on observations of everyday practices, on linguistic and narrative material, and on moments during our field research in which ideals for what it means to be an ethical person became a matter of contest and dissent. The best way to present the kind of material that can set out the wonderfully abstract concepts of personhood and presence is by storytelling, for it is in stories of the everyday that principles become evident. . . . * * * The phrase that most often follows Ihi, nah ay is Bawba ax—“come and eat.” Partly an affirmation of conviviality and partly an affirmation of the shared responsibility for forming one another’s bodies,3 the invitation recognizes that in order to “be” and to “be here,” one must eat.

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One reason that Arukwa has long been such a loved landscape is that the Rio Urucauá makes eating relatively easy. An extraordinary resource for food, the river feeds almost all the families that live along it every day, with fish like umayan (piranha), kunan (tucunare, or peacock bass), and dried kihiwi (pirarucu), as well as tekes (shrimp), fish eggs, turtle, or caiman. If not fish, a day’s catch could be monkey, tapir, capivara, birds, or deer, all of which would be eaten with a bowl of kwak or ground-up bitter manioc. Kwak is the center of the annual cycle of agricultural activity.4 Huge seasonal harvests are processed collectively by groups of families who choose to work together to grate, soak, squeeze, and roast the otherwise poisonous tubers. Eating here, then, is a matter of networks of people and river, fields, and shared resources. Alliances are crucial. They don’t always coincide with clan networks, and bigger or smaller networks of obligation are invoked, depending on the scale of the task at hand. A wide network participates in the bigger tasks like building a house or cutting trees to make a new field. Smaller groups of people generally honor obligations to help each other with smaller seasonal tasks such as canoe making or keeping an eye on each other’s afternoon cooking pots. As is the case elsewhere, friendships and social protocols fluctuate with changing political and economic conditions. Harmonies are neither total nor permanent, and one of the advantages of Arukwa is that, with its dozens of small islands, it has never been too hard for households to move away and settle elsewhere. The environment itself is part of the resolution of intractable conflicts. Change the range of actors in the environment, and the possibilities alter. It is safe to say that the arrival of electricity on the Rio Urucauá in the late 1990s generated some of the biggest challenges to the social relations of food (and its reciprocity) that people here had ever faced. Because electric refrigerators could freeze meat, it delivered those who could afford them from dependence on the timescale of rotting proteins in the tropical heat and began to shift the possibilities for relations of reciprocity. It also meant that instead of hunting two or three monkeys at a time, which is the most that a small network of households could reasonably expect to eat before the meat went bad, people could hunt as many as might fit into a freezer, and keep it within one household, not several. That in turn would free up another day for activities like schooling or making items for sale. And because electricity could light the night and amplify the human voice, it illuminated darkness and projected some voices way out over the watery landscape. In short, because refrigerators, lightbulbs, and microphones change the relationships that human bodies have with time and space, such machines and technologies also change the possibilities for the relationships that people have with other bodies, human and nonhuman. And as the ecology of people and machines

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and environments begins to change, established everyday protocols, too, begin to be contested. The consequences were, at times, quite funny. When David and I arrived in March 1997 after a twelve-hour boat trip, we had navigated the confluences of three rivers in the course of the day, piloted by Kiyavwiye Nilo. Dusk had settled into evening, and most cooking fires were out. Street lights were suspended in the sweet and warm night air by a cobweb of cables that lit up the street and led to a single naked lightbulb in every house. By the time we had ferried our bags and supplies up the hill to the blue and pink Casa da FUNAI, which housed the all-important two-way radio and the hammocks of the three Brazilian teachers, it was close to 10 p.m. Three flickers of the lights provoked much scurrying around for candles and matches, and a minute or two later, the light went out. The throbbing of the generator dropped to a whisper and then a cough, and, in the relative stillness, frogs and crickets redefined silence. That routine would become familiar over the next week or so. The generator would cough into action at dusk, and chug on for about three hours—just enough to light the lamps and chill the chest freezers that had been bought by three or four households. In all of our planning and preparing for this trip, I had never imagined that the thing that I would miss most in the Amazon would be a light switch. Not a single house had one, and the oversight had almost certainly been profitable for the electrical contractor who had installed the village network. The consequence, though, was that the person who had the job of switching the generator on and off acquired an unexpected power over everyone else. He was courted by the church that wanted energia for its meetings—including, on occasion, its early-morning prayer meetings, the annunciation of which was in the glaring lightbulbs over everyone’s beds and the overdrive of a lead guitar whose distortions, in the predawn darkness, scared even the feistiest cockerel. One night, however, the electricity did not go off at all. Our only option for putting the light off was to stand up on a chair, towel in hand, and unscrew the blazing bulb. The village was in a grumpy uproar the next morning, not only because not everyone had had the confidence to take out their lightbulbs, but also because running the generator for an extra seven hours had used up half a week’s diesel. Apparently, the generator operator had asked for a pay increase, and his refusal to switch out the lights was an effort to engineer agreement. But his machinations backfired: the light-up was followed by a blackout later that week when diesel stocks ran dry and the freezers thawed. He was relieved of his duties at the next community meeting. The first community generator had been installed in the late 1990s. Many said it had been part of an election campaign promise of the newly installed prefeito in the town of Oiapoque. Over the years, various political figures promised—and delivered—ever larger generators, which

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were ever thirstier for the diesel that had to be brought upriver from Oiapoque in dozens and dozens of barrels loaded onto a large boat. But the bigger the motor, the more freezers people bought, and the more freezers that there were, the more often would the generator trip from overload. Consequences were many. For a while, a diesel tax was levied on each household, which not everyone could pay. Since hunters with fridges could store food for another day and others couldn’t, networks of obligation around food began to thin. Those who could store food were able to escape the necessity of hunting or fishing every day and could use their time profitably to participate in education or cash-producing activities or to work in health, education, and conservation projects and public archaeology. Over the decade of this research, significant disparities of income emerged, with some families becoming fairly wealthy and competitive for positions of power and others eking by. Central to that process was that refrigeration offered users the ability to control the timescale of the rotting of meat. As any supermarket owner knows, those who can best control the rate at which food rots can accumulate a surplus faster than anyone else. Fridges, once installed on an electrical grid, become actors in the local network. Like any other actor, they change the possibilities for people’s relationships to the environment and to one another. In Kumene, it wasn’t just that there was now light at night and the sound of electric guitars to play the church bell, or that the local church could rock the village with power, light, and sound. It wasn’t just that people could now roar through a microphone to drench the landscape with the names of Jesus and Uhokri (God).5 It was that the capacity to freeze meat and fish changed people’s relationship to time, and that in turn affected sharing, social relationships, political affiliations, architecture, bodies, and animal stocks. In this new landscape, with its newly emerging ecology of space and time and personhood and electricity, people’s attention was focused on a combination of Y2K and the Second Coming, all of which was taking form in all-night ecstatic dancing at the village church that found itself so energized by all things electrical. In the context of all of these changes, what did it mean to be parikwene, or Palikur? While “parikwene” could mean “Palikur” in the ethnic sense, that usage was quite rare.6 Much more frequent was the phrase Ig parikwene ig (“he’s one of us/Indian, he is”), which translates as someone with humanity, someone who is intelligent and generous, someone ethical, someone who has insight. Inadequately translated into the language of ethnic identity as “he is Palikur,” I only ever heard the words said with admiration. The words in themselves suggest the politics of flexible identity that is widely recognized in Amerindian scholarship:7 that while blood ancestry is a significant factor in establishing a person’s identity

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(or belonging), it was by no means the sole arbiter of being parikwene. The description of someone as parikwene, in other words, was less an affirmation of ethnicity and more an approval of someone’s capacity to practice the values of sharing time and resources in order to work, to be present, to eat, and to share in this landscape. It is more about an aspired style of “being together,” to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase8 to translate a way of thinking about identity based on sociality rather than ethnicity. It is a collective noun, rather than a proper noun—so to write it in an English sentence with a capital “P” is to mistranslate the idea of a collective public as a social thing bounded by bloodlines, genealogies, and ancestries. And, at least along the Rio Urucauá, “being together” is more about ethics than ethnicity. Such a usage contrasts with the group-based identity politics that is so powerful an idea in the work of so many nongovernmental organizations, academics, and officials working in the field of “the indigenous.” As David and I returned to Arukwa over the years, we were struck by the constancy of the struggles over what it means to be a good person. On each return, different matters are the subject of contention. Yet almost all of these struggles, I think, can be fairly characterized as struggles over personhood: struggles over what it means to be Parikwené (big P for an ethnic label that is valid in any language) and parikwene (little p for an ethical relationality, in Palikur), struggles over what it means to be part of the Povos Indígenas do Brasil (Indigenous People of Brazil) while being a Brazilian citizen some days and a French Amerindienne other days with concomitant duties and benefits on each side. And, in several of the villages along the Urucauá, it also involved struggles over what it meant to be a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven (or a member of the Assembleia de Deus/Assembly of God). Struggles over appropriate ways of being in the world, and appropriate ways of getting things done, pervaded all these identities and subjectivities whose reference points had so rapidly expanded beyond age, gender, and clan, and now included employment, schools, and telenovelas. The struggles over what it meant to be Palikur in 2001 came to a head over the Jogos Olímpicos Indígenas (Indigenous Olympic Games). The event that year was organized by the state of Amapá and opened by Janete Capiberibe, a feisty anthropologist, activist, and politician who is herself married to the then-governor of this frontier state, João Capiberibé. “The Palikur,” designated as such in the invitation to the villages on the Urucauá, Cassiporé, and Uaçá rivers, were invited to send a team. They declined. As any Brazilian might be, David was puzzled. Why, he asked many, was this so? The reasons offered were multilayered. In part, there was a deeply felt resistance to being positioned as Indians in public events: one

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young man recounted how in a similar public event in a previous year he had felt exhibited as an Indian, having to answer local citizens’ questions such as “do you drink water?” Besides the profound negation of his personhood that was at work in the question, the idea of a person representing the collective was also problematic. Individuality and independence are highly regarded here, and there is a difference between identifying with and being identified as. A second cause for unhappiness, at that moment, was the request that Indians participate in a turé ceremony. At the time, millennial revival was at its height with the expectation that the return of Jesus was imminent in the dramas of Y2K. And, as is the case with pentecostalism elsewhere, traditional dances were effectively outlawed by general agreement because, said most, they required consorting with other spirits. Besides that, the argument went, the inebriation that accompanied dances inevitably led to fights and bad behavior. A third rationale that was offered in support of not sending a team, in 2001, was that it would involve soccer. Soccer had, in the past few decades, become a favored activity of young men on the river. But the arguments and fights that began to break out in the weekend local matches (sometimes decidedly unfriendly!) were deeply frowned upon in a context in which respectfulness is valued, and public displays of anger between adults are extremely rare, even though parents frequently yell at children. The “frown” on soccer was articulated by the church. Palikur head pastor João Felício and his team of five elders outlawed soccer for church members. That attitude was one we were familiar with—in my first visit in 1997, the late Palikur leader and pastor Paulo Orlando had explained with reference to Proverbs 6:16 that among the seven things that the Lord hated were “the foot that kicks”—an assertion that the soccer kick and the aggressor’s kick were one.9 At the time of the dispute, David interviewed Mateus Batista, the leader of the small settlement on the island of Kwikwit. Mateus explains in Portuguese: Em a nossa religião, da Assembléia de Deus, eles não jogam porque tem muita gente que não sabem jogar, né? Não sabem se defender do mal. Eles levam aquelas coisas no sério, sabe, e por isso que a igreja defende deles [á não] jogar agora. É só por isso. In our religion, in [of] the Assembly of God, they don’t play [soccer] because there are many people who don’t know how to play [i.e., be playful]. They don’t know how to defend themselves against evil. They take things too seriously, you know, and because of this the church defends them against playing now. It is only because of this.

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The then-chefe do posto, Nilo Martiniano, put it this way: A parte física, para a diversão dos indígenas, é bom. Mas uma parte, enquanto a nós, principalmente os indígenas palikur, enquanto a religião, não seria muito bom. Pois a religião não proibi, mas é que, muitas as vezes pode bater, forte, nos seus próximos. Os caras podem achar ruim. Por isso não é bom. . . . As pessoas que seguem fielmente não devem participar por causa de que ela é uma coisa, assim, de porfia, então porfia não faz parte da palavra de Deus, dos mandamentos de Deus. Por isso, não é bom participar.

In translation, his words approximate these: [On] the physical side, the recreation of indigenous people, [it] is good. But [on the other side], in terms of us, principally for the Palikur indigenous people, regarding our religion, it is not very good. The religion does not prohibit it, but many times they can fight, strongly, with those close by. The guys can take it in a bad way. Because of this, it is not good. . . . The people who are faithful followers [i.e., members of the church] should not participate because [soccer] is a thing like porfia, and porfia is not part of the word of God, of the commandments of God. Because of this, it is not good to participate.

Porfia is a very specific Portuguese word, referring to obstinate contentiousness, being obstreperous, rivalrous, polemical, insistent, or to fight for something in a competitive spirit.10 In the interview, Nilo continued to say that it was all right for children to play soccer, but not adults. In other words, the very style of competition is at issue here. The style of social interaction that characterizes the market and democratic politics, and that is celebrated in competitive sport like soccer, was cause for resistance. The decision was taken, then: “The Palikur” would not send a team to the Jogos Olímpicos Indígenas. For the state of Amapá, however, the Jogos were a major public event in which the state was spending on Indian heritage (in the turé ceremony to open the games), in sport (soccer, tug of war, archery), and in health via the launch of a new water purification system in the village of Manga. These investments were a powerful statement, from government, that the povos Indígenas do estado do Amapá—Indigenous People of the State of Amapá—had a right to public resources. In a frontier state in which political power has over the past decade been as tumultuous as the tides that made the pororoca roar upriver, this commitment to the povos Indígenas was bold and likely to have annoyed several powerful regional stakeholders.

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At stake in the Kumene discussion, however, framed as it was between Jesus and soccer, was a question of citizenship and of styles of public interaction among adults. What did it mean to become a Palikur subject in order to participate in the State? The paradoxical politics of becoming an indigenous subject in order to become a national citizen were complicated by the idea that citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven was a priority at the turn of the millennium. Soccer being what it is, however, the soccer players were keen to go. Surely, it was reasoned, being a Crente (Christian) did not exclude playing soccer. David—a Brazilian citizen for whom soccer is all but a chromosomal property—was prevailed upon for an opinion, in his capacity as the son of the missionaries who had worked here for so long. He saw no harm in going, and said so. A day or so before the games began, the decision was taken: the futebol team would go, without official endorsement.11 They left at dawn, taking many by surprise. David went; I stayed, and in the days that followed I heard a number of cluck-clucks about his decision. Some were whimsical; some were quite offended. The long river journey there, says David, was characterized by the singing of Christian hymns and an iconic moment: the catching of a land turtle (wayam) along the river. Wayam, a creature as clumsy on land as it is elegant in the water, figures as the antihero in the many Palikur trickster tales that speak to Palikur struggles with what it means to be a person in two very different environments: in land and on water. Wayam’s great gift, in the whimsical stories of him, is to teach how to get by in a context where one is at a disadvantage. With whoops of ironic humor, says David, the boat circled around the solitary wayam and Símon (not his real name) caught it as a mascot for the team. (Two days later, at the games, it disappeared. Whether he had been freed or fried, no one was saying.) In David’s footage of the opening of the games, the turé ceremony is performed in broad daylight, by elderly men from different villages who were painted in ochre, wearing red coverings about their loins, blowing booming bamboo bass flutes to the sound of a soccer-style commentary that explained their actions in Portuguese over the public address system. The turé itself, a circular dance, was performed on the center circle of the soccer pitch in broad daylight. As soon as it was over, the soccer began, and when the matches had been lost and won, the dance was Brazilian brega, a style of dancing with Caribbean musical roots that are part reggae and part zydeco, and the drink is factory-made beer and cachaça. The “Palikur” team, thus tribalized, lost its semifinal game. Drunk with defeats in sport, faith, and the contradictions of Amerindian citizenship, the church’s normally ebullient lead singer collared David with a lengthy discourse on being apostate yet not being that bad of a guy. Some seven

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years later, in 2008, Símon was still reveling in his apostasy. His attempts to participate in rituals of citizenship outside of Arukwa had, in many respects, forced him to wrestle with the contradictions of personhood at work in navigations of Palikur and Brazilian citizenship. In some respects, including his newfound fondness for beer, he had become the wayam himself. * * * What was at stake in that struggle? Why did it matter so much? Why did the Kumene Assembly of God prohibit soccer in a country where several national soccer stars made a point of baring their salvation on their Tshirts whenever they scored a goal? What was it about soccer—or, at least, the version of soccer played here—that forced a choice between being a citizen of the (Christian) cosmos or of Brazil? Why was there such an antipathy toward “representing” a Palikur identity in Brazil (by which is meant anywhere outside of the indigenous area)? How might this help us think differently about the kinds of personhood at work in this context, in order to think about personhood and ways of knowing? The struggle, in that moment, seems to have been over two things: a style of relationality that people felt to be fundamentally transformative— a conversion of the body; in relation to a request to perform an ethnicity in a game in which the rules of entry required acceptance of a particular politics of identity. Ashis Nandy’s commentary on cricket in India, titled The Tao of Cricket,12 suggests a number of questions that may also be usefully asked of Palikur reluctance to participate in futebol. Among them: What moral universe does soccer here invoke and sustain? What adversarial principles are at work here, and in what ways does playful collective soccer veer toward warfare? Is there a dialectic between the “killer instinct” required of competitive football, upon which is based the defeat of the opposition, and the principle of predation? What critique is implied by Palikur reluctance to participate in soccer? Is Palikur reluctance to play competitive ethnic football related to an alternative ethics of presence? What was at issue here was precisely what Nelson Maldonado Torres seeks to identify: an opposition to a paradigm of war; a resistance to a politics of culturalist identity.13 “People might disagree on what it is to assemble, or even on the very necessity of assembling,” write Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel in one of the editorial commentaries in Making Things Public. “Our preferred forms of political activity—representing, arguing, dissenting, being citizens—might not offer much of a common ground. . . . So, before we imagine a possible renewal of the conditions

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for democracy, it’s very important to realize the conditions under which some concepts taken to be at the foundation of political assemblies are able to travel and be translated.”14 The material set out in this chapter suggests that the notion of “representation”—to represent—is one that does not have easy purchase in Arukwa. This is not for lack of wanting to engage with the world beyond the Urucauá: no one could dare suggest that people do not want the benefits of education and health care. The issue involves a resistance to the idea of being appointed to represent—to re-present, or make present—others who are absent. In this sense, political representation speaks to the sense in which a representative subsumes others.15 Both the Jogos Indígenas and our efforts to pursue a public archaeology made the assumption that the idea of “a public” and “a community” were concepts that were neutral enough, and universal enough, to travel. What the arguments over the Jogos surface is that these are anything but neutral. More important than compliance with some kind of representative cultural patriotism, people seemed to be saying, was a style of respectful interaction and attentivity; a valuing of the ethics of copresence and responsiveness in an environment that requires watchfulness and that subsists in relation to the cosmos. This has several implications that are important for a project that grapples with knowledge diversity. First, the possibilities that identity (or “belonging”) is something that may be acquired, rather than inborn, are strong in Amerindian literature,16 and the material presented here underscores an argument that ethnic labels and ethnicities that are the products of family trees and genealogies are neither “given” nor universal.17 This problematizes the “indigenous” element of “indigenous knowledge,” suggesting that it is less important to think of indigeneity in terms of ethnic culturalism than it is to think of regional intellectual or conceptual heritages that are transferable in more ways than bloodline. Second, if the intersubjective qualities of an interaction are so important—important enough that they can change someone’s body, personhood, identity—then it becomes possible to understand a conceptual heritage in which a very powerful intersubjective space can transform things, animals, and people. Whether performing as a jaguar or as an aggressive soccer player, one is engaging in transforming one’s body, and therefore also one’s consciousness. The transformation of bodies is a central element in the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,18 Tânia Stolze Lima,19 and Aparecida Vilaça,20 who argue that in Amerindian thought, a creature or person’s perspective on the world depends on their kind of body, and that bodies can change as consciousness or perspective changes. The idea that the body can change in response to an extreme emotion is well evidenced in Palikur

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stories, for example, when a jealous and violently angry brother turns into a wild pig and runs off into the jungle.21 In this sense, the proscription on “the foot that kicks” attends to the ways in which the body itself becomes something different—changes form, changes into a different creature— if perspectives are changed. If you take on the attitude and comportment and perspective of the wild pig, in this sense, you become a pig; in narratives this reflects as an altered state of body rather than an altered state of mind.22 The insight is an important one, for it affects much more than soccer. The principle at work here applies to the wider world. Its claim is that the qualities of interaction make the world. In other words, objects, people, animals, and creatures are not given as objects: they are what they are, to us, in ways that are profoundly tied up with who we are. What determines the way they come to us depends on whether we take on the behaviors—and therefore the body—of a person, or a wild pig, or a jaguar. For Viveiros de Castro, in Amerindian23 conceptual heritage the “body” is “not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus. Between the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms, there is thus an intermediate plane which is occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities and which is the origin of perspectives.”24 What this suggests is that the qualities of “presence” implied in ba pi ay? are not the same as “being” in European philosophical canons, in which one is expected to practice impartial, detached skills that can produce “objective” knowledge. Nor are they the polar opposite of “absence,” as understood in the regimens of objectivist practice. Understanding regional conceptualizations of personhood, then, is a vital place to begin to think about knowledge. Where these ideas come together is in the phrase hiyak hawkri. * * * Hiyak means “to know,” and hawkri means both “day” and “world.” That hawkri translates as both day and world indicates a sense of a day as a place in the cosmos or, to put it another way, the contingency of time and space. Indeed, one might even say that to hiyak hawkri is to know the day-world—that is, to know what day it is in the world, which is to know which stars are rising ahead of the dawn and are invisible in the sky by day. Those stars give their names to the different rainy seasons. To hiyak hawkri is also to know what is going on seasonally in the landscape. In Arukwa, the level of the water in the landscape varies by some three meters annually, and time is marked in relation to seasonal rains of varying intensity and duration. As water levels vary, so do seasonal

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activities—seasons of house building, canoe making, field clearing, and so on—which occur in direct relation to the appearance of successive constellations at dawn. So, to say someone hiyak hawkri is also to say that someone knows what season it is, that someone understands the season in relation to the cosmos and knows what tasks need to be done. As a statement of character, the phrase implies that someone is the equivalent of “street smart” with reference to the seasons: perhaps one could translate it as “season smart.” To say the contrary about someone (ig ka hiyak hawkri) is to say, broadly, that someone is relationally, cosmologically, and environmentally ignorant.25 The translation of any phrase depends upon the dialogics of the moment. In texts recorded or generated by Harold and Diana Green, ka hiyak hawkri implies “not to know how [social] things function.” In their dictionary, which is the product of five decades of collecting Palikur words, ka hiyak hawkri is translated as “inexperienced; without practical know-how” (sem prática). From a bilingual language primer teaching the basics of Palikur and Portuguese comes the line Ig kewa kuhivrabe. Ig ka hiyak hawkri—“He is like a bird. He knows nothing.”26 In Uhokri Gannasan (the Palikur-language Bible, the title of which means “What God caused to be written”), King Saul’s description of himself as “I am like a little child who does not know his way around”27 is translated as ka hiyak hawkri. Over the years, Diana Green has kept a large document in which she has typed up the letters sent by Palikur speakers to herself and Harold Green as a resource for checking everyday usage of the words she puts into the Palikur dictionary. In this file of letters, hiyak hawkri is used frequently to indicate knowing God, or to be a convert, or to know the true cosmos.28 In the stories David and I recorded, there is substantial overlap with these usages, but there are also usages that differ. In a discussion with Kiyavwiye Emiliano Iaparrá as he tapped sap from the tawni tree to treat someone’s skin infection: Heneme igkis . . . igkis . . . nuvewkan igkis ka hiyak hawkri nikwe.29 Igkis kawih nor. Igkis keh ihamwi. Igkis awna: -Nor tawni. Ihamwi eg! Kawa! Eg ka ihamwi bawkata eg iveyti eg.

But they . . . they . . . I think they did not know the day, then. They use [the leaves of that tree] that for . . . They [use it] to become shaman. They said, “That tauni [tree]. She [It] is a shaman!” No! She is not a shaman, but she is medicine.

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Emiliano is a respected senior who has at various times been the cacique of Kumene. The leaves of the tawni tree of which he speaks have hallucinogenic properties that were used by shamans. Here, Emiliano’s distinction between medicine and the shamanic turns on the rational: the shamans of old, he says, did not know the day. Ka hiyak hawkri can also be used to describe someone in a possessed state, or someone who has turned into a malevolent, predatory spirit. Kiyavwiye Daví Espírito Santo (also known as Sarisri) used the phrase in his story about the yadris (pronounced yud-ghis), in which a man becomes a wavitye, a kind of evil monster spirit: Nikwe ig hiyak ginag. Ig sigis atere.30 Ig biyuh. Dawh! Bawh! Ig umehpiye. Awaku ig ka hiyak hawkri. Ig wavitye ig kuwis!

So then, he saw his mother. He ran up [to her] there. He hit her! Thunk! Thud! He started to kill her. Because he did not know the day. [know what he was doing] He was a [bad] spirit, already!

For Kiyavwiye Uwet, wavitye spirits are inherently foolish and able to be outwitted: Gitkan: -Wavitye yuma nah ayamni pit heneme nah axkerevye piban.31 -Mmah hene? -Ihi. Nah wiwhte nuban nikwe! Ig ka hiyak hawkri. Ig wavitye ka hiyak hawkri. Ig wiwhe gitun. Kere! -Ive tah!

He replied, “Wavitye [Devil / Monster], I have no request of you, except that I ask to eat your liver.” “Is that so?” “Yes.” “I will take out my liver, then!” He did not know the day. He, the wavitye, did not know the day. He took out his liver. Rip! “Look at this!”

While these uses above emphasize cosmological and bodily ignorance, there is an equally important sense in which ka hiyak hawkri refers to unfamiliarity with the seasonally flooded grasslands across most of Arukwa. In this sense the phrase refers to an outsider who does not know how to overcome the wateriness of the flooded grasslands (várzea) and its water creatures, like alligators and anacondas. The story of a runaway African slave who was taken by an alligator was told by Kiyavwiye Floriano:

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Kuri padeke. Tivike. Digise ta warikwite nikwen.32 Pahavwi iveg atere. -Henewa! Ig ka iveg akiw. Ig tivik. Yuma ariknawnema giwaku. Ig ka hiyak hawkri ada ig xuwahgi.

Now [the caiman] threw him [into the water] and sank [with him] to the bottom then. The one [man] looked there. “It is true!” He did not search any longer. He went on. With nothing in his hands. He did not know the world [i.e., he know no way to pull himself to the surface] because he sank beneath [i.e., drowned].

Finally, to hiyak hawkri can also mean to have been well-raised, and to know what was socially appropriate. It can be used of people, and of spirit-creatures like Kuwahra the anaconda: Guwn: “Pariye nah awna pit. Ku hiya pahaye danuh wahiwavye kehne giwewvankisneku. Ka ba mwaka mpivuwenekis.”33 “Awaku,” eg awna, “Nah ka ba mwaka ada pis axwikisma.” Eg awna guwnavrik. Eg awna: “Ka mwaka mpivuwinekis.” Henewa ig aymuhka. Ig hiyak hawkri.

She said, “What I say to you is this. On the occasions that you see my descendants coming to do their hunting, do not block them.” “Because,” she said, “I do not want you to eat them.” She spoke in her own language. She said, “Do not block them.” It is true. He [Kwahra] was raised [properly]. He knew the day [what to do].

So, to hiyak hawkri is to know the world, to be able to respond to the season, and as such, to be able to live in an appropriate relationship with cosmos, places, creatures, and people. It is a judgment of the quality of a person’s ability to attend to the interrelations in the world—the cosmos and the social, to animals, spirits, and people—and to know how to participate appropriately. * * * Besides hiyak hawkri, there are several other phrases that speak to the interrelationship of sociality, presence, and personhood with what it is to have knowledge of the world. One is the everyday greeting referred to in this chapter’s title: Ba pi ay? Another is one that is frequently used in stories: ig hiyapni hene, which could be translated as “he looked then”

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or “observing that it was so, he . . .” It is used when a character must observe, consider, and change a course of action. It speaks of seeing, but a quality of seeing beyond what is “in sight” to what is really happening, much as Fernando Santos-Granero speaks of when he describes the Yanesha concept of perceiving things “as they really are. In other words, they can perceive the spiritual dimension of things. In perspectival terms, this is tantamount to saying that they can perceive animals, spirits, and other non-human beings as these beings perceive themselves, that is, as human beings.”34 Ig hiyapni hene occurs in a moment in the story when a protagonist begins to see things in a new way, which is to understand what is really going on. Where hiyapni hene is about figuring out an appropriate perspective on a situation (which includes understanding how others are seeing and thinking about it), hiyak hawkri is about knowing how the world works, and therefore how to act in it. * * * Beyond the discursive, what practices of bodily presence are in evidence, and in what senses might it be said that the value of presence is part of an ecology of knowledge? Throughout fieldwork, I was intrigued by several practices. One of these was the degree of emphasis placed on infant and toddler massage. On the Urucauá, babies enjoy (or endure!) massage that may extend to several hours a day; mothers, friends of mothers, and siblings work on their muscles in every available moment. Massages worked on upper and lower halves of arms and legs, beginning at the ends of each bone (the origin and insertion of the muscles) and vigorously squeezing toward the middle. I asked several times why this was so important. “To make them fat” came the inevitable reply. Frustrated with my inability to elicit more sensible answers, it was only much later that I realized these answers were quite plausible. That realization came through a chance encounter with the work of the Touch Research Institute on infant massage, which claimed that in clinical trials on preterm babies, there was a 45 percent difference in weight gain between massaged babies and those who received no massage.35 Working with our own son Jordan, then a one-year-old, one elderly woman taught me to massage his lower back, across the core postural muscles that he had to learn to control in order to walk. Her movements were deft, precise, and strong, notwithstanding his squawks of protest. Over time, I began to understand infant massage as part of bringing a person into being: physically sculpting them and helping them attain a strong body sense.36 In a review of the Amerindian literature, Suzanne Oakdale explores the ways in which “newborn babies are gradually made into kin through the manipulation and nurturance of their bodies.”37

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Huaorani babies, she notes from Laura Rival’s work,38 are like “guests,” and similarly, Piro babies are, according to Peter Gow,39 only potential “kinspeople.” Elsje Lagrou observes that Cashinahua babies are “held to be the result of a constant modeling of its forms by other people.”40 For example, the woman who picks up the newborn and massages its face transforms the child’s appearance, transmitting some of her features. The effects of these fabrications are not only symbolic. In villages along Arukwa, children as young as three know how to balance and walk on the palm-log waterways that float and roll as you walk on them. Many can walk on the edge of a narrow canoe, and when a little older, young boys in particular learn how to walk with their weight on the back foot so that they are less likely to trip when walking in the forest. The foregrounding of these senses is essential. After I had tripped what seemed like a hundred times a day on a jungle trek, for example, one of my companions took me aside and began to instruct me in the art of sensing the ground with my feet, being able to stop midstride, and keeping my weight on the back foot so that I could hop on the same foot unexpectedly without slowing my pace. After many days, I too began to sense “the eyes in my toes” and could visualize the ground without looking at it. Gradually I learned to lift my eyes from the task of assessing where my next footfall should be, to watching for jaguars and tree snakes farther ahead on the path. And I began to hone the proprioceptive skills of being aware of where my raised foot was in relation to momentum and balance, so that I could at least have a hope of stopping midstride without having to set down a foot to balance. An attention to physical form is significant here in many different ways. In the Palikur language, dimensions and topological forms are an intrinsic part of the verbs, adjectives, adverbs, locatives, interrogatives, and numerals in the language—an argument that is developed more fully in chapter 4. The form itself matters; at least in terms of grammatical rules, a two-dimensional image cannot stand for the animal itself, as when it takes a different dimensionality, it is a different kind of object.41 An example: In pursuing astronomical research described in chapter 3, David and I battled to obtain drawings of the constellations from people. Since drawing itself is not a prominent activity, and the dominant art form is wood carving, at length I asked David, when he visited Arukwa in 2005, to ask for wood carvings of the constellations. The results were astonishing. Not only was there a rich history of carving some of them as benches for specific festivals, but they are beautiful and detailed and part of a world of living forms that transform one another in their interrelationships. Kiyavwiye Uwet describes how sitting on a bench that has been carved like Awahwi the anaconda serves to summon the anaconda.

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Note that making an image, in this account, does not quite translate as making a representation of another world out there: the representation serves to make the master spirit present. As an actor in a space where everything is relational, sitting on Awahwi the bench can make one see as Awahwi does. Uwet: Nah pekne avat awahwi gavan adahan ku kiney ihamwi bat higemne.42 Ihamwigben minikwak pitatye ku pariye keh nor epti Kadahan gavankis. Kuri nah pekne ini avat. Nah kiyene gavankis ku samah minikwak. Igkis kay. Nah pak ini avat ku pis tima: Sahn-goh-go! Sahn-goh-go! Kayhh! Sahn-goh-go! Sahngohgo! Kayhh! Wagahmayhye, Sahngohgo, Ka, Sahngohgo! Warahmayhye, Sahngohgo, Kamayhwahney, Sahngohgo, Yohm. Kuwis kiyavwiye. Nor ner gavanwa. Neg Awahwi ku pariye dakaratyene Kusuvwi. Ihamwi ku lawe ig danuh atere. Danuh tah! Lawe igkis wageswiyes han amadga Kusuvwi Ig hiya neg Kusuvwi egutye. Ig hiya awahwi dakerevwig. Ig hiyavgi. Ig hiya mpana gitew neg Awahwi.

Uwet: I will sing a song. Awahwi’s song. For where the shaman sits and drinks. Long ago, the first shamans who made those benches. They had their own songs. Now I will sing their songs. I am remembering their songs of long ago. They danced. I will sing this song, so that you can hear it. Sahn-goh-go! Sahn-goh-go! Kayhh! Sahn-goh-go! Sahngohgo! Kayhh! Wagahmayhye, Sahngohgo, Ka, Sahngohgo! Warahmayhye, Sahngohgo, Kamayhwahney, Sahngohgo, Yohm. [repeats three times] It is finished, Senhor. That [song] was his [own] song. He, Awahwi, [the constellation] who swallowed Kusuvwi [the older brother]. When the shaman arrived there. Way over there! When they were circling around, this way, on board Kusuvwi [i.e., on his boat] He [the shaman] saw Kusuvwi the Older Brother. He saw Awahwi swallow him [Kusuvwi]. He saw it. He saw Awahwi’s three heads.

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Ayteke kuri. Lawe gitip minehwe. Gitip minahwa. Gitip minehwe nikwene. Atan amadga inin. Ig akumne. Ig awna: -Nah kehte kayka. Ayhte inut nah hiya ayhte inurik. Nah hiya mpana awahwi gitew. Ayhte. Nah kehte gahempak. Ig awahwi ka ba nopsimahad datkad! Nah keh gahempaki. Heneme nah keh gahempak. Nah kawihgi. Ig parak ta garikut. Nah ka mwaka hiyeg mpiya akigsaw ku kiney nevut. Ku kiney nah bat. Ku kiney nah bat higemne. Nah ka mwaka mpiya awke. Ku pis mpiya awke ig axwep! Ig axwep! Awaku nah kawihkis atere. Ig ayge pahapte! Ayge. Pi hiya ah [bakniwad ka katiwad?] Ah bakni adah epti. Heme ig pahapte datka ayge! Nah kehgi. Ada eketni hiyeg. Kahadmakama hiyeg hiyak ku ig awahwi ayhte inurik. Hiyeg hiyaknig. Kahadbe hiyeg hiyak kuri ku Awahwi kadahan mpana gitew.

Ihamwi keh inin. Ihamwi keh ini ka nopsimahad epti ada ig kayne. Ada ig berekevwiy inakni kayka. Usuh kanum kayka ada berekevye inere kaykad. Kiyapyad kaykad.

Afterward then. When his spirit docked. His spirit docked [or arrived or pulled up alongside from out of the river]. His spirit docked then. Here, on this [world]. He smoked. He said, “I will prepare a dance. Way up above. I saw, way up, in Inurik [the upper world]. I saw Awahwi’s three heads. Far away. I will make his image [wooden carving]. He, Awahwi, is such an enormous anaconda! I will summon him. He will enter into [the wood carving]. I do not want people to pass across his nose, which is, in front of him. Where I sit. Where I sit drinking [manioc beer]. I do not want [people] to cross in front of him here. If you pass by, this way, he will eat you! He will eat you! Because I have summoned him [and placed his spirit] there. He is completely [body and spirit] there! There [in the carving]. You see a [piece of] wood that has legs [side supports]. A split [piece of] wood as a bench. But he, is a complete anaconda, there! I will make him. In order, to show the people. So that, the people will know [what] Awahwi [looks like] way up in Inurik [the upper world]. The people will know him. So that the people will know that Awahwi has three heads.” The shaman did this. The shaman made this huge bench, for when he was dancing. For him, to commence that dance. We call the dance, “the breaking forth”43 dance. A huge dance.

“Are You Here?” Embe igi ihamwi kinetihwa gimin Awahwi. Kahawka ig keh gahempak. Kahawka ig kayne gaduhyimadgat inere kuri. Awahwi. Amaksemni kuri.

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So, he, the shaman speaks with Awahwi. So that, he can make his image [wooden carving]. So that, he can dance [while seated] on Awahwi’s back, then. That is the end, now.

* * * So far, the argument is that the notion of personhood on the Rio Urucauá is incorporation—an embodying—of body, consciousness, perspective, and presence. The insight poses several questions for any archaeological project that aims to draw on local ways of knowing. First, what might the emphasis on perspective—“natures” that come to one in the way that they do depending on your bodily form and consciousness—imply for the activity of knowing histories and times past? Second, the knowledge collection strategy that we call “objective” research places great value on the absence of subjective views—which comes with an ethic of working. In one visit I heard several people tell anecdotes of an unhappy encounter with a visiting natural scientist who had come briefly to the region to collect data but had forbidden laughter in the team he was working with. The reason he gave, people said, was that they would be unable to work properly. As one schooled in the research disciplines, I could only guess that the unhappy scientist had felt that laughter would mean that his assistants would not be serious, because being serious is a necessary condition of being objective. The anecdotes spoke of a failed relationship, and indeed, not a few were offended enough to feel it impossible to continue working with him. Why? I asked, perpetually sensitive to my own potential for similar failings, and by then well aware that a story told of another frequently served as a cautionary tale to the listener. The scientist had been proud, explained Ivailto. His anecdotes of their awkward interactions rested on the insight that knowledge without laughter—knowledge that had no insight into the importance of conviviality or of one’s presence—was an absurdity. The scientist might know the world, but hiyak hawkri was clearly not a part of his way of knowing. The disposition of a science based on measurement that depended on the absence of the scholar’s body and relationships fundamentally undermined the possibility that he could know the world in a way worth learning. The notion of “environment” as something that envelopes one, and which a disinterested research assistant might aim to render in numbers generated through silent waged labor, was all but impossible to translate in an ecology of knowledge based on conscious bodily presence.

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chapter one * * *

This chapter has curated material that suggests an ethics of presence that is central to everyday life and ways of knowing in Arukwa. It began with a greeting, and an affirmation of presence. It ends, now, with a sense that bodily presence implies a shared subjective space in which persons, things, and creatures are brought into a mutually transformative relationship. Understanding the possibilities of that transformative space is what makes for “knowing the day-world.”

C h a p t e r Tw o

“So Many Stories on This Day-World” History as the Retracing of Tracks

After we had filmed the remains of the B-26 bomber on Wakayri Mountain in 1997, David and I made our way home to Kumene Village in Kiyavwiye Floriano’s canoe, with Ivailto, Avelino, and Luciano poling and paddling alongside with their hunting dogs perched on the prow of their dugout. Crossing the flooded grasslands with its sawgrass and wild rice and mardi gras of water spiders took about nine hours. As we heaved our way through the dense ten water plants1 and glided through the pools that Ivailto said were alligator houses, Kiyavwiye Floriano told stories nonstop. Every place we passed seemed to cue another story: the war with the Hiye or Galibi; the Imawri spirit creatures on Wakayri Mountain; ihamwi shamans and poisoned potatoes; iveytipti, the inland spring that bubbled up salt water at full moon and had the power to kill or curse an enemy; datka anaconda spirits that saw children splashing in the water as parrots; Waramwi giwbi, the mound of shells that the anaconda Waramwi had left, and so on. Told in Palikur, with David translating as we went, the conversation taught me this: while the physical landscape of Arukwa is sculpted by islands of jungle forest and three small mountains, in the everyday, Arukwa is made and remade by improvisations on autobiography, anecdote, genealogy, and extraordinary histories. The words of Floriano’s stories were part of the canoe’s rhythm, finding point and counterpoint in the dipping and dripping of the storyteller’s pole, and the water grasses strumming David’s paddle. * * *

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Our public archaeology proposal to the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, two years later, aimed to make links between the kinds of stories Floriano had told that day and the archaeological sites that dotted the landscape. When that project got under way in 2000, one of our first tasks was to try to make sense of the canons of stories and to try to organize them and to link them to places. Despite a strenuous effort to workshop the sets of stories into a chronology with a small council of leaders and interested people, it took quite some time for me to realize that a chronology was not something that the stories would settle into easily—and that workshops, like committees, could generate agreements with which no one fully agreed. The initial timeline of the stories that we developed was based on the workshop we had run and the many stories we had recorded in 1997 and 2001. Working backward, the “eras” we arrived at were these: 1. The Christian era (1967 to present): This period centers on Ku­ mene, founded as a settlement of Christian Palikur in the late 1960s. These stories describe a society in crisis, painting a picture of much hunger and feuding between clans, and link both to drinking. Conversion to Christianity, according to the stories people tell now amid the nightly revival meetings, ended feuding and hunger and restored the sociability that is seen as “truly Palikur.”2 2. The era of the shamans and dances: The powerful shamans and the battles between them for control over the spirits of the region form a counterpoint to the stories of the Christian era. Not readily spoken about—magic is considered evil—these stories specifically deal with places in the landscape that have magical properties. 3. The slave raids (c. 1700–1800): Many stories are told of slave raids (such as that at the island of Masika) and also of those who fled from slavery and became Palikur. 4. The war between the Palikur and the Galibi (c. 1400–c. 1760): Readily invoked in conversation are many stories or allusions to the stories of the wars between the Palikur and the Galibi. Specific stories provide detailed references to places. 5. The era of the Amekenegben (literally, the Yesterday Ones, or Ancestors): The Amekenegben are the “old ones” who were strong and had great courage, braved the ocean, buried the dead in pots not boxes, and had no salt, metal, or matches. Their settlements ranged between the Amazon River and into French Guiana. Stories about the Amekenegben are rarely told; historical information is generally in the form of anecdotes. 6. Struggles against axtigs (predatory animals or spirits): Stories of wild and mythical creatures that eat people are readily told, perhaps

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because they are tales of people overcoming a communal threat. All these stories relate to particular landforms, including mountains and sambaquis (shell mounds), and some include named shamans—almost the only tales in which the deceased are named. 7. Originary narratives—the founding of each clan: Most clans have a narrative of origin.3 8. The flood: Some tell this as an originary narrative of the Palikur. In it, landforms feature prominently. The story of Noah is very similar to the Palikur one in which a Palikur hero creates a large clay pot that floats on the water with survivors aboard. Several versions confuse the two stories. 9. Creation stories: Uhokri (creator) walks the land and makes people.4 Even though we had workshopped the story categories in a big workroom in Kiyavwiye Paulo’s old house with almost all the elderly storytellers, it was probably one of the first times that people had been asked to draw lines between groups of stories that were so interrelated in the landscape. And it was tricky indeed to maintain the lines: “Christian era” stories could not possibly be limited to post-1967 when Palikur villages converted en masse to Christianity5 because biblical elements emerged in versions of almost every other “era” of tales. Shamans, too, were present in just about every category and also could not be limited to a specific “era.” Axtigs, or predatory spirits, pervaded almost all of the categories, as did Amekenegben, or ancestors, whose stories were in every one of our “eras.” It was hard to avoid the obvious: that the typology had to be forced quite hard in order to get it to work. Several other matters offered yet more rich problematics. When I heard Kiyavwiye Ishawet tell the same story twice in one fortnight with a completely different meaning, it became clear that the tales served not only as accounts of the past but also as resources to advise on the present and future. One version was about something that happened a long time ago; the other version was an advisory on how to “out” a thief.6 The referents of the stories, in other words, were not fixed. My assumption that histories were representations of the past became less certain. What might it mean to think of the stories not as representational (in the sense of representing events that had happened long ago) but as propositional—as making proposals about how to understand relationalities and how to act? The problematic is crucial, for it reflects a fundamentally different orientation to what it is to think about things that happened long ago. Joanne Rappaport’s book Politics of Memory,7 based on her research with Nasa community groups in Colombia, had taught that histories told about the past reflect the political constraints of the present. But hearing the

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ways in which Ishawet told the same story for different purposes, once as history on request for our video camera, and once as community advice, was a moment that problematized my understanding of the epistemological foundations for making and telling history. It suggested that the “what happened? when?” kind of history was already a translation, something I was making or manufacturing for the purpose of making correlations with archaeological science and approach to producing history. That insight, in turn, provokes the question: What is it to know? Isabelle Stengers’s work on the knowledge economy suggests that ideas we hold to about the purpose of knowledge or knowing are themselves generative of the categories and principles that we rely upon to assure ourselves that we know.8 Her thinking provokes the insight that ontologies—the assumptions and categorizations we make of reality—do not reflect reality itself but are profoundly related to how we understand the purpose of knowing. If the purpose of our knowing is to control nature for the purpose of generating profit, we are interested in causality and causal relationships that we might begin to control, and those become the things that we see, and name, and test. For Bruno Latour, the Gordian knot of the Moderns is made by the three goddess sisters of reason: technical efficiency, economic profitability, and scientific objectivity.9 Stengers’s oftcited injunction to slow down our reasoning asks us to attend to not just the “what” of our reasoning but also the “why”: to ask ourselves why is it that I am seeing what I am seeing? The relationship of knower to known, then, is not just one of neutral surveillance by subject of object (the representational view) but a much more complex relationship that has to do with what is sought. What I see is a reflection of my own capacity for sight, and the knowledges that I bring to a discussion are part of my own continuous fabrication of the world. What we know is not wholly independent of the ways in which we are looking. The shift from a representional idea of knowledge (I, the knower, can represent what happened) to a relational way of knowing (knowledge and the knower are entangled in ways that inluce the limits of human perception) gets us a little closer, I think, to an Amerindian way of knowing the world. In a relational ontology, the “thing” (the object of knowledge; the subject of concern) is formed or brought into being10 in one’s engagement with it, and histories, too, are formed via the way we speak or narrate times that are past. The assumption that one tells histories to recount “what happened” assumes things are there to be grasped regardless of who I am or how I approach them. If one goes to Arukwa’s stories of the past with a different set of questions—such as how different bodies perceive this or that situation—then questions about the past do not seek “the facts” (since different natures come about in interaction with different bodies); they do not presume that stories provide data. More useful

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is inquiry about a story’s transformative moments,11 such as How does the story suggest how others (animals, creatures, people, anthropologists) know the world, and might act in it? With questions like these, one could begin to move away from trying to “data mine” the stories for historical nuggets, and start to comprehend a different set of propositions for making history. A second rich problematic—what Helen Verran would call a generative moment—was in the dialogics of the storytellings that we recorded. There is no neutral microphone and few contexts that permit a person to speak without any restraint at all. Even before they are translated, stories are always already in translation as narrators tell versions that they know (or think) you will understand. In my graduate ethnographic research methodology classes at the University of Cape Town, I regularly taught that, in anthropological fieldwork, people speak to the person that they take you to be. In the professional practice that is anthropology, one always crosses the threshold of the stranger in a role of some kind. It matters whether you take on the role of a customer, a teacher, a community worker, or a drinker, since what people can say to customers, teachers, beer swillers, or community workers is subject to expectations about the limits of the interaction. The difficulty, of course, is that in many situations, the researcher finds her or himself playing a role that takes quite a while to recognize and understand. Methodologically, this is important. Figuring out how you position yourself and how people position you, the researcher, is essential to making sense of any interview material; only then are you able to translate the translations that are being made for you.12 I knew, when we began this work, that it was inevitable that David’s background as the son of a missionary family would be both a difficulty and a benefit. The benefit was that he was known and liked and respected in the village, and he spoke Palikur almost as a first language. The difficulty was that no matter how often we distinguished this project from any missionary endeavors, the missionary mantle was likely to settle upon us and shape the conversations that we could hold, most especially in the early days of fieldwork. For that reason, we worked hard to open up different kinds of conversations. I worked particularly hard at trying to be in the field as a secular anthropologist, seeking not to open up any of my own grapplings with theologies of various kinds.13 It took many months of fieldwork for me to realize that adopting an ethics of professionalism based on absenting much of my person and history was not helpful in the task of research. In its place, I learned a different ethics of anthropological professionalism in Arukwa, which I would call an ethics of presence. Such a way of being in the world is an antidote to the regimes of absence that are so powerful under the star of modernity and are built into

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racisms of every kind. Understanding the personal challenge in shifting from a representational to a relational way of doing research is important, for it is the person of the anthropologist who learns and is in dialogue with experience that one learns. The texts of the stories and histories we collected need to be understood in their contexts along that road. Aware that there were many versions of the stories, and that different storytellers could tell us some parts and not others in the context of the millennialism that dominated the villages in 2000–2001, David and I worked hard to expand the possibilities of our conversations. One of our strategies for translating the translations that were being made for us was to record multiple versions of the same story from storytellers in different places. “Story trekking” was the name we gave to that approach, as we had learned so early that stories are much more richly told in situ, or along a journey. David also intercut the videos of some of the storytellings with different storytellers advancing the same tale. That surfaced vigorous local debate about whose versions were correct and what details were right or wrong. Besides enriching our growing archive over the years, the approach taught us a great deal about the liveliness of critical thinking in everyday life in Arukwa. When, for example, Kiyavwiye Ta­ beh­kwe Manoel Labonté told the story of the Palikur war with the Galibi and included details of the ways in which the Palikur used helicopter gunships in the 1700s, some shook their heads in rather embarrassed sorts of ways; David suggested at the time that perhaps he had mixed up his stories because he had lived outside the village for too long. Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe, however, is a wise and considered speaker—someone to whom I turned for advice on several occasions where careful thought was needed. Given what Fernando Santos-Granero describes as “the occult life of things”14 in many Amerindian societies in which some objects have personas and are transformable,15 Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe’s helicopter gunship could be translated a number of ways. It could be a means of signaling the importance of European technologies in the war that had included, according to many, a weighted catapult to hurl logs. Or it could serve as a reminder to the listener that objects can change their forms. It could be read to index the observation that foreign military technologies had circulated even at that time. More likely, Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe’s rendering of a 1700s tool of warfare in the form of a helicopter gunship in a narrative told to a foreigner can be made sense of in perspectivist terms: that what was a catapult to one party might be a helicopter gunship in the perspective of another. However the gunship is read, the story serves as a comment on the ongoing translations of histories: objects are actors that change their meaning, names, significance, and indeed forms in relation to the perspectives that creatures (including audiences) have of them. Dialogics, here, as the second problematic, began to yield

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important insights that, like the first problematic, shifted the ways we approached the idea of veracity in these stories that we so wanted to match to archaeological accounts. The contestations over Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe’s tale also underscore another important lesson about doing history in Arukwa in 2000–2001: “ways of speaking about reality” and “being rational” are significantly contested. Much dominant discourse in cultural heritage movements seeks to wish away such contestations, most often writing them off as evidence of cultural pollution by a modernity that is out of place. But what might happen if, instead of taking the culturalist’s approach of silencing indigenous critics, heritage activists worked with the critical debates that surfaced the ontological politics that are here at issue? Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe’s helicopters and his local critics problematize the idea of “ethnohistory”—i.e., that there is an “ethno,” and that there is a “history” that can be easily translated into equivalent ideas about the past, about temporality, about objects, actors, knowledge, and agency. To map the “past” using modernity’s binaries such as past/present, subject/ object, nature/culture, and so on, is to inhabit a particular political philosophy of the cosmos, one that Isabelle Stengers condenses with the term “cosmopolitics.” Rather than pursuing an “us-them” analysis that returns us to the domain of ethnology (“Palikur thinking about time is like this, we think of it like that”) the task at hand is to reimagine the tools of anthropological translation. At the time, however, Bruno Latour had not yet published “The Recall of Modernity” or Making Things Public,16 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro had not yet published his reflections on translation and equivocation,17 and Isabelle Stengers had not yet translated Cosmopolitics18 or “The Curse of Tolerance.”19 Baking inside the wooden house along the river that was home-from-home, David and I puzzled over the stories in the hope of resolving the contradictions that beset our story categories. The obvious inconsistencies suggested that there had to be a different way of assembling histories, and perhaps that implied a different way of thinking about temporality. This became the third problematic that, too, was a generative one which provided unexpected insights. Searching through the material on my computer, I struggled through Diana Green’s notes on temporality in the Palikur language and tried to trace different forms of time in the verbs in the interlinear linguistic translations of Palikur stories that she and Harold had made several years before. After several days of working on an overheating laptop in the humidity at 4° north of the equator, I abandoned the effort to make a chronology of the stories and returned to the insight from that long canoe ride with Floriano in 1997: history here was organized in relation more to place than to time.20 Assembling the stories with a map seemed the logical next step.

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Despite careful searches, however, we had been unable to find a detailed map of the Arukwa basin, and at the time, Google Earth was an unimagined future. Harold and Diana Green had worked some years before with Ivailto and Xikoy Nilo Martiniano, son of Paulo Orlando who would later be Chefe do Posto at Kumene, to develop an A4-sized sketch map of the region that included the main islands, waterways, and Palikur place names. At hand were several other maps: German anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú offered a rough map of the Rio Urucauá in 1926.21 There were several maps of Amapá’s archaeological heritage in the work of Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans,22 and a treasure trove of historical cartography was consolidated in the work of Francoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand,23 who had trawled Europe’s archives for references to Palikur and Palikur clan names. In Belém, David had obtained a topographic map of the state of Amapá at a scale of 1:1,000,000, on which the territory of Arukwa took up less than the space of a palm of a hand. That was hardly enough to give any sense of the shape of the hundreds of islands in the grasslands, although it gave a reasonably accurate sense of the flow lines of the bigger rivers. On our next trip into the puddled border town of Oiapoque we splashed through the main road on foot until we found a small stationery store that stocked what we needed: thick tracing paper, drafting pens, permanent ink, a cardboard tube, erasers, and pencils of various kinds. Back home in Kumene, Ivailto Gômes agreed to give the mapmaking a try. A few stretches of masking tape attached the huge sheet of tracing paper onto the wall. He stood at it for four whole days as he drew from memory the twists in the rivers and the turns of island edges in the grasslands. I’ll not forget quite how literally those twists and turns were “remembered”: brought to life in his body as he stood, pencil in hand, eyes closed, making tiny twists and turns of his head and neck and arms and trunk to recall the edges of dozens and dozens of islands in their curves and coils and extensions. When he had finished, I inked in the pencil lines and the names of places and streams and rivers and made a second copy on another sheet of tracing paper in case we lost the first one. A year later the extraordinary accuracy of Ivailto’s map was evident when we returned to find that a visiting biologist had given Ivailto a satellite image of the Arukwa basin. Quite fortuitously, the image was at almost exactly the same scale as the map he had drawn—a piece of luck that probably had a lot to do with standard sizes of paper, and the goal of fitting onto it the length of the Rio Urucauá and the breadth of the Área Indígena do Uaçá. The relationship and scale of the islands were so close that it was as if it had been copied one from the other: an indication of the accuracy of Ivailto’s topographic memory. The only thing that was significantly exaggerated was the curve of the main river and the edges of a few of the larger islands.

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Around that time we began a database of place names in the stories, to try to link them to ones we had on the map so that we could identify sites that might be of interest to our archaeological colleagues. The collection of stories was growing ever larger as day by day David set up visits with storytellers. Our agenda was open-ended: could we, he asked of each one, record the stories of different places that people would tell long ago? Gradually, our collection of places with stories attached to them grew and grew. And just as gradually grew the next disconcertment: that in the same way that historical time here could not be assembled with a chronology, narrative space would not be able to be assembled with cartography. The reasons for that were several. The significance of the body of the storyteller in the performance of cartographies does not fit on a map. It was almost impossible to translate into the language of topography the emphasis on the interactional possibilities of a space—between people, creatures, landforms, and the cosmos. Multiple temporalities—autobiographical, genealogical, seasonal, historical, cosmological—inhered in the stories and their telling, and the interaction between these temporalities in the everyday is much more akin to the “folded time” that Michel Serres describes24 than the linear time of chronology. Space was conceptualized not as a surface but as a cosmological place in interaction with the changing constellations and seasonal weathers and the seasonal activities of animals, plants, people, and creatures in it. Gradually a new realization worked its way into the analysis: contrary to the triumphalism in much of the GIS literature about their marriage of science and indigenous knowledge, maps were not the territory upon which the sciences and local knowledges could meet on equal terms. The logic that “all fire engines are red but not all red trucks are fire engines” applied: the observation that all environmental knowledges might be mapped does not mean that maps are necessarily representative of all environmental knowledges. Visualizations of space and time are not necessarily consonant with cartographic technologies, or with the severances (dualisms) that are necessary in order to imagine Cartesian space apart from time, land from sky, plane and line apart from curve, mind (or perspective) from body, stasis from movement. The work that we needed to do, then, was not to try to map the stories but to try to understand the set of practices that hold together the memory of space and time and the presence of animals, plants, creatures, and people in it. This chapter’s proposals build on the insight of chapter 1 that here in Arukwa the emphasis on presence establishes the importance of an interactional space between actors in which “knowing” is a matter of understanding the possibilities of relationships between actors, rather than “having knowledge” of actors and things in themselves. Such an approach to knowing has a vital interest in the interactions of people, places, creatures, and cosmos. The observer’s perspective is but

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one of several possibilities, and to really think is to be transformed (even translated) by one’s understanding of different possible perspectives of a situation, since how one interacts, or relates, depends on how one sees. Understood in this context, it is significant that verb forms, in the Palikur language, are not defined by whether an action took place in “past,” “present,” or “future” but on the state of completion of the action that is being described: whether it is beginning, in process, or completed.25 To know a place is to know its stories, it is said. In Arukwa, to know the stories of a place is to understand the possible interactions with it and in it. The questions customarily asked in modernist histories of places focus on causality—“who was here? when? what did they do? with what consequences?” Such questions do not necessarily have purchase in Arukwa, where the active interests are more “what kinds of bodies were here? what was happening when a new action began? with what perspective? what does that suggest might be the possibilities for now? what might we expect? how are we to respond?” If what is at issue is grasping actions and interactions and flows of actions, then an interactive vitality replaces the divided space/time that the Enlightenment has bequeathed in the tools of chronology and cartography. Here, a different intellectual heritage finds expression in practices of telling stories about the world’s interactivities. * * * After many months of research, I learned to look forward to the pleasures of the narratives that would be told on board during river journeys. I began to keep notes of storytellings on our long trips into Oiapoque to fetch supplies. One of these was in August 2001, when we made the ten-hour journey downriver, traveling in a small motorized dugout canoe newly made by the then-cacique (elected leader) Kiyavwiye Emiliano and his sons. With us in the boat was Kiyavwiye João Felício; his son Miqueas; our boat pilot Avelino Labonté, his wife, Vera, and their two-year-old son, Ginaldo; her brother-in-law Lega Labonté and their grandfather Kiyavwiye Afonso Ioiô. For most it was a voyage of citizenship: Kiyavwiye João was on the way to collect his pension from the Brazilians; Kiyavwiye Afonso, to return home to the French side; Lega, to visit his wife and child, who had been living on the French side in order to gain citizenship; and ourselves, to report to the local branch of the National Indian Foundation to obtain permission to stay in the Área Indígena do Uaçá for the next three months. Kiyavwiye João had grown up on the river and was at the time the head pastor of the church in the largest of the Palikur villages on its banks. About an hour into the journey, the sight of five large alligators feasting on the seasonal bass run opened a conversation about technologies

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of hunting and warfare, and stories and fragments of history flowed for more than two hours. The conversation,26 held in the Palikur language, afforded insight into storytelling as a kind of tracking. “Indians long ago would shoot with poison arrows, and death would come slowly,” he observed. We rounded the river bend and the large island of Ukupi came into view. “There used to be a church here, long ago,” he says. His father had told him that his grandfather had said so. “Over there, there used to live a Chinese man, called Rafael. His wife was French and his son was called Waxik (a Palikur name), but he left after the Brazilians came in—they made him leave (probably around the time the area was proclaimed Indian territory).” Did other foreigners live here? “North of Kumene on a small island there was a French man who built a church there,” comes the response, his whole body turning to make the customary gesticulation of direction that includes the line of the shoulders all the way to the pointing finger. The gesture recalls archery and is the same one used to tell time with reference to the position of the sun. He names the small islands we pass near to Ukupi. “There is Kaymomni (place of dances) where Parup (the last of the great shamans) used to live. Waravra is over there; over there is Iveytipti.” Iveytipti, place of medicine or poison, was by then known to us from many stories in which it features. A hole in the ground where a spring is reputed to bubble up salty water at full moon, it gives ordinary people the spiritual power of a shaman. “It’s true,” he says, “there is a spring that bubbles up there.” Are people afraid of it? “No, people don’t go there now. There are just a few bats there.” We pass Ukupi, and he gives the date of his birth as 1937 and begins a genealogy of his mother’s brother’s sons who had lived here with him. On the far side of Ukupi a large sawar (saouri nut) tree comes into view, and the vegetation around it differs from the jungle. “That’s where the village used to be,” he says. They had a school in their house and a Brazilian teacher called Gatita, and also one called Clarisa who helped to raise his cousins when he was still a baby. The area surrounding Lake Tuveyni comes into view and, as he had promised, there were more large alligators in the river: they come to the river in the dry season when the lake shrinks and all the fish in the grasslands move to the river. From other days’ journeys we know that across the lake is the island of Masika, remembered by many as “the place where the end of our people began.”27 There, presumably in the late 1700s, almost an entire village was massacred by European slave raiders during a full moon fiesta. Those who escaped into the swamp were taken by alligators. Today, however, Kiyavwiye João does not mention Masika. Pointing to the far side of Tuveyni, he says there is a small island where Kiyavuno Parakwayan was raised, and the island is named after her. He offers to

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take us on a three-day fishing trip to Tuveyni, to get kihiwri (pirarucu, an enormous freshwater fish). “Long ago there were so many turtles here,” he sighs. “Even ten years ago I could catch twenty to thirty in a week. But if we go there now we’ll just find kihiwri.” Aren’t the alligators aggressive? “Tuveyni is not dangerous,” he says, continuing the invitation: “The alligators go after the kihiwri, not after people.” Warumka (Monte Tipoca) is now well in view. Pointing to it, he says that before the French arrived, there was a huge village here: “A huge village, with lots of people. There’s a cemetery on that point—the one closest to the river. The French and the Brazilians, and Blacks and Indians are buried there. Timo, the Black Saramaccan who is Sinval’s father, lived around here.” He begins a brief genealogy of other Black patriarchs who had lived here and had learned to speak Palikur. We pass the island of Msibyumnaw (Bat Land), known also for its caves. “There are big bats there!” he cautions; “if many come out at once they will eat you!” He tells a story about a man who had lived underground in the cave here for a year, concluding with the declarative “inyerwa!”— “it’s true!”28 Long ago, he says, at dusk no one would come to this part of the river as there would be so many big bats flying around. Another story begins, about two men who had gone out to the ocean to catch crabs, and being very tired after their night’s effort, decided to sleep here. He points toward the cave. There, in the early morning, they heard the bats coming. One said he would make a huge fire and stay on land. The other was scared and jumped in the water to hide under his canoe. In the morning light the one who had shivered in the water went to find his friend—but found just bones. He had been sucked dry, he said. When he went home to his people they asked him what happened. And he told them this tale. The 15-horsepower motor takes us into the section of river that narrows as we come closer to the island of Yakotvit (Flecha), and he tells the story of the Maruksi Gahawkri (the Father of Howler Monkeys) who had a hole on both sides of the river and a path running into the underworld (Waympiye) between them. It’s an epic: a struggle that pits Palikur wits and shamanic skills against a spirit-animal’s strength for the right to pass freely through this space. We pass the bamboo grove where the monkey’s hole on the far side of the river is reputed to be. “There it is,” he points. “Have you been there?” David asks. Laughing at himself, the reply is instant: “I’m too afraid!” Conversation turns to the other Gahawkris, and he begins the story of the Father of all Kunan (tucunare, a kind of bass), and then the Kihiwri Gahawkri (Father of all Pirarucu), both of whom were part animal and part spirit. “When the Kihiwri Gahawkri was there there were many kihiwi, because he attracted the others. The Amekenegben (Old Ones) used to say that if there was no Gahawkri there would be no fish. But they

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would say it’s just a story. We know now that it’s really Uhokri (God) who is the Father of all things. If there are no fish it’s because he allowed it. If there are fish it’s because he allowed them to come. Today we don’t call it the Gahawkri [that brings game and fish], we call it Uhokri. It’s God who takes care of everything.” He seems uncomfortable and closes the conversation. Picking up his Bible, he pages through the Old Testament, stopping to read one of King David’s psalms. We pass through several miles without conversation. The confluence of the Arukwa and the Uaçá rivers comes into view: a place of great beauty where intermittent jungle and grassland savanna merge into palm forest, and the dark waters of both rivers have melted into the opacity of the silt water that comes up with the tide that raises the river by two meters or more, depending on the season. Why is this river called Arukwa? David asks. Enthusiastically, the Kiyavwiye begins the tale of a large anaconda that had been named Arukwa by a shaman and was shut inside its hole (i.e., he was closed into the underworld) by the shaman’s smoking of tawari—a leaf much like tobacco. Story and personal anecdote merge; as a small boy, he says, he saw parts of the anaconda’s body in a hole upstream near Kwap—the place where the Arukwa River opens into the grassland basin. The story merges into that of another anaconda in another place upriver, a place—you know that place where there is a big rock almost as high as these palm trees? Suddenly our boat jerks and we lose all forward momentum, spinning around into the reeds on the river’s edge with a motor gasping and flailing wildly in the water behind us. Laughter follows panic: the motor had worked loose from the new boards of the canoe. A thousand dollars had been saved by a fifty cent piece of rope. The story will be told here in time to come. The motor relodged, the journey continues. Kiyavwiye João reads. We watch the parakeets overhead, the alligators diving from mudbanks, and keep an eye out for the telltale movement of a single tree branch that signals not wind but monkeys. When we stop an hour later at the Encruzo—the confluence of the Rio Curipí and the Rio Uaçá and the border post of the área indígena, the stories begin again, told this time by the quiet-humored and elderly Afonso. As a young boy he used to live here, he says; his family had fields on the far side. Autobiography links once more to epics of spiritual and political struggles for the land, to genealogical fragments, to stories of soil quality and food production and contests of will between the Brazilian authorities and the locals. The latter is gossip old enough now to acquire canonical status about the shamanic patriarch called Sansmin who, as one of the few willing to move in the interstices of worlds where frontiersmen plied trades, had made his fortune, they say, by selling items found on

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the US bomber that crashed here in the 1940s. Over freshly cooked fish, stories of lives crisscross the landscape, and epics link this flat world and its seasons to the skyworld and the underworld. Topographic knowledge and survival skills—social and environmental—are written into these narrative geographies. The space that we might label Arukwa on our map was formed not only by its topography, but also by the matrix of relationships in which each person is called into existence. Grasping each yarn, one’s being-in-the-world is anchored as being-in-this-place. An improvisation, the journey narrative draws its lyrics from alreadytold narratives of place and from encounters with multiple temporalities in each place. Kiyavwiye João’s narrative engages the autobiographical time of the narrator; the ecological times of fauna and flora; historical eras that include polities and spiritualities; astronomical seasons of stars, sun, and moon; genealogies; and futures. As in other journey narratives, the unfolding “live” narration relied on skilled perception to evoke temporalities of the present and the future. In the case of the way an alligator’s belly had recently crushed the grass, for example, the cues were clues of presences in that moment, even if the reptile was invisible. In the case of the height of snail eggs on a tree, the future became present, indicating the height of the water level in the seasonal flood to come. In the call of a small bird was an indication that a heavy rain would fall in half an hour. Yet other cues afforded clues as to what was happening in other moments. Together they make for a temporal consciousness of multiple generations and creatures and polities that had and did and would dwell here. Knowledge of place cues the recognition of the interrelated temporalities that transform the simple act of being present in a place into an affirmation of the sources and antecedents of one’s being-in-the-world, ranging from culturally attuned perceptual skill to prior generations, social networks, and current threats. It is this knowledge of the world (hawkri) that enables the responsive self to be an ethical one. To know is to be present. Doing history, here, seems less a matter of following lines through time as having a conversation with places. In Kiyavwiye João’s journey narrative, knowledge of the landscape unfolded as we rounded river bends, as trees came into view, as animals made their presence known in form or in sound. The procession of clues was, in many respects, predictable: after Ukupi comes Tuveyni, after Tuveyni comes Warumka, and so on, all the way down the river. The story track or journey narrative has an improvisational quality: stories that unfold as one goes, via memory, and new experiences. The improvisation that constituted João’s story track that day became, in a way, a performance of the storyteller’s capacity to hiyak hawkri—in that it reflects his or her ability to understand the presences in a place, and to respond to them. Ka aynsima estuwa amadga hawkri, Kiyavwiye Uwet

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Figure 8.  Kiyavwiye João Felício on the Rio Urucauá, August 2001

once said: “There are many stories on this day-world.”29 The preposition he uses for “on” is amadga, which one uses for flat surfaces.30 Stories, in this image, are like tracks on the surface of the earth. What is particular to what I would call the “story track” as a geographical and historical practice is that it constantly reconstellates memory in relation to one’s presence in a place. In such an understanding, multiple presences come to animate the possibilities of a place. Story tracks are more than representational strategies or mnemonics, more than history, and more than a way of consolidating environmental knowledge. Story tracks are a way of being present, a way of knowing how to move through a landscape by responding, remembering, and anticipating all at once. Story tracks recall ways of knowing and enable ways of being. They are about presence in a landscape. They teach you how to move. * * * As our collection of stories grew, it became clear that they tended to cluster around the high points of the landscape—Wakayri, Karumna, Warumka (also known as Tipoca). Moreover, the telling of stories around them was more than a matter of pinning a text on a map—the storytellings themselves were “performance cartographies”:31 moments in which the relationships of landforms were rehearsed in body and in memory.

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For example, Kiyavwiye Sarisri Daví Espírito Santo described the chasing of the Kurumsuk giants from Karumna Mountain along several hundred kilometers of coast. Recorded in July 2000, Kiyavwiye Sarisri’s performance is animated with whole-body gestures of movement up, over, and down hills, with both arms flexing and stretching in the direction of the journey as he describes the direction of the chase: Sarisri: Amekene haraksevgikis. [Igkis] manuvi Uyapkun.32 Ayteke manuvi Uyapkun, manuvu Avuwak. Aytoh ariwntak Avuwak nikwe manuvi Kayan. Ariwntak Kayan nikwe ig tivik Kuwhu. Ayteke Kuwhutak tivik Guadlup juktah danuh ta Afahs. Ayge Kurumsuk usekwe. Henne gitepkemnis.

Sarisri: Our ancestors chased after them. [The Kurumsuk giants] crossed over [fled] to the Oiapoque River. After crossing over to the Oiapoque River, they crossed over to the Avuwak River [Approuague in French Guiana]. From way over at Avuwak River, then they crossed over to Cayenne. From Cayenne then, they went to Kourou. After Kourou, they went to Guadeloupe [Island] until finally they reached France. The Kurumsuk remain there. That was their destination [the end of their journey].

Sylvia Vidal’s work on lists of place names in Arawakan language stories33 demonstrates that the scale of the “story map” can be vast. Listening to Sarisri’s story, one experiences the direction of movement over, among, and between landforms. The story traverses several hundred kilometers of coastline, while earlier sections of the same epic describe in detail the characteristics of particular islands, river bends, and small streams. Quite literally, the story serves to map what landforms follow one another along different trajectories. Other storytellers’ performances of the same stories, told from different places, reiterate similar dramas of orientation toward the places referred to in the stories. Narrative geography, then, is not solely textual but performative. Stories that are performed in relation to place serve as a practice of orientation in which left or right become east or west. The capacity of story maps to guide travel is celebrated in the story of a Palikur man’s son, born into slavery in the city of Belém, who learns this story from his father and, after his escape, follows the story map back to

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Arukwa. The story lists places and landforms from the Amazon through some 450 km across what is now the state of Amapá as far as the Rio Urucauá (Arukwa River), where the scale of the narrative becomes detailed enough to list the islands he passes until he finds the settlement at Ukupi and encounters the solitary grandmother who had not had the strength to flee the arrival of this man who, to locals, appeared with all the terror of a stranger in a time of war.34 Story maps are also present in many renderings of the story of the war between the Galibi and the Palikur, which records running battles that crisscross the Arukwa basin. In every version, storytellers list key features from Wakayri Mountain in the west through to Uraka Lake in the east. Whether told from afar (as story maps) or recounted along the way (as story tracks), what emerges from the tellings is that the texts are performative, integrating the bodies of hearers and tellers with the landscape. The body of the storyteller, then, served to orient people to directions and landforms. The principle extended a few steps further: the body itself could be a map. “How do you find your way to Karumna Mountain?” I once asked Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe Labonté. “It’s like this,” he said, holding out his left fist and tracing over it with his available forefinger, “you cross this hill”—the first knuckle—“then there’s a stream, then another hill, and the next stream you cross is near the base of the mountain.”35 Body parts figure quite frequently as names of natural features. A point of land can be “a nose.” The flat top of Wakayri Mountain is known as its “back,” and some describe its slopes as its “belly.” The word for “upriver”—tiwrik—means “in the head.” With reference to the lay of the Arukwa River, south is elsewhere known as “tiwrik”—meaning “in the same direction as the headwaters of the Rio Urucauá.” Body mnemonics extend to the description of the stars in the Southern Cross is as “the hand” of Kayeb—Kayeb being the name of the shamanic anaconda made of the stars in the region of Scorpius. As a shaman, Kayeb has a hand, and the Southern Cross is it, and he dips it underground annually, as the Southern Cross does when viewed from the equator. Animal bodies give names to landforms as well as stars: an island home of Waramwi, another important anaconda-person, looks like the body of a large coiled snake in the watery savannah. In very tangible ways, then, bodily form comes to animate the landscape. In the Palikur language, places can be described as kiyvi—in a state of remembering36—such that one can hear what they are remembering and that they can sing to each other like sentient individuals, as in the song of the old man Uwakti, in which the two main mountain peaks of the Arukwa region, Karumna and Wakayri, sing questions and answers to each other about the crash of the US Army Air Forces B-26 bomber in 1945.

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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that in Amerindian cosmologies, consciousness is what determines participation in the social realm, not just human form.37 Thus, animals and spirits and humans are part of the same social realm. “Where our modern, anthropological ‘multiculturalist’ ontology is founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures,” he writes, “the Amerindian conception would suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity—or, in other words, one ‘culture,’ multiple ‘natures.’ ” He explains: I use “perspectivism” as a name for a set of ideas and practices found throughout indigenous America and to which I shall refer, for simplicity’s sake, as though it were a “cosmology.” This cosmology imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies, human as well as non-human, each endowed with the same generic type of soul, i.e. the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of a similar soul implies the possession of similar concepts, which determine that all subjects see things in the same way; in particular, individuals of the same species see each other (and each other only) as humans see themselves; that is, as beings endowed with human shape and habits, seeing their bodily and behavioral aspects in the form of human culture. What changes when passing from one species of subject to another is the “objective correlative,” the referent of these concepts: what jaguars see as “manioc beer” (the proper drink of people, jaguar-type or otherwise), humans see as “blood”; where we see a muddy salt-lick on a river bank, tapirs see their big ceremonial house, and so on. Such difference of perspective—not a plurality of views of a single world . . . but a single view of different worlds—cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the common original ground of being; such difference is located in the bodily differences between species, for the body and its . . . capacities to affect and be affected by other bodies . . . is the site and instrument of ontological differentiation and referential disjunction.38

In Arukwa, the insights of perspectivism are relevant to human-animal relationships and also to the relationships between the living and the landforms among which they dwell. Not only are certain elevated landforms potentially animate and bodylike, but the physical perspectives that they afford over the surrounding landscape are a property of their consciousness. As conscious beings, places can be actors. Karumna Mountain is an example. From the point of view of the villages along the Rio Urucauá, Arukwa is dominated by Karumna. An almost bare granite rock, it is an unusually good lookout point from which vision is not occluded by trees, and on a still night, people say, you can hear the jaguars calling from its slopes.

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At least ten historical and mythical epics cluster around Karumna Mountain. In a story about the creation of the Arukwa basin, Kiyavwiye Ishawet describes how Karumna Mountain drew all the other islands and their spirits toward her. To hear this story is to visit Karumna’s relationships with other landmarks and to begin to understand the presence of spirits as masters of places, akin to masters of ships. With each line, Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s body is oriented by gesture toward the landmark of which he speaks, inviting the listener to orient his or her body to key points in the landscape too. His words: Nikwe wakayri yuma. Saramna yuma.39 Warumka yuma. Msibiyumnaw yuma. Ukup yuma. Atan bohka. Ayhte tiwrikut bohka. Bohka igkis msakwa atan. Awaku kakivara. Nerras ku pariye imamna no Mahipoko. Imawi. No Karume. Abes.

Nerras ukivarawi ada no paytwempu. No waxriyad. Igkis msekwe atere.

Igkis hiyemni. Igkis danuh ta gut karumna ay. Danuh atan kenese arimkat karumna. Igkis msekwe. Ku ka heneme guvin[kis] mehwenek. Ayge igkis biyuk. Ka aynsima igkis biyuke.

At that time, Wakayri was not here. Saramna was not here. Warumka was not here. Msibiyumnaw [Bat Island] was not here. Ukup was not here. Here [they were carried along by the current and] collided. Far upstream they came to a halt. [After] colliding, they remained here. Because [Karumna Mountain] had power over them. This was sung about by the Mahipoko [of the underworld], the Imawi [of the underworld], [and] Karume [the great shaman]. [Also by] Abes [dwarves who cause twins]. They were the rulers of those lands [but not the whole]. Those large lands [or mountains]. They stopped there [because Karumna Mountain stopped them]. They saw [Karumna]. They came up to Karumna here. They came up close to Karumna. They stayed [were forced to stop]. If [they had not stopped thus], their houses [islands] would have been destroyed. They [would be] lost/destroyed. Many [islands] were destroyed.

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Keh inin waxri msekwe ay kuri. Minikwak yuma waxri ay. Ganagad yuma. Nornewa! No yanwak ay. Aynenewa nor. Notra hawata. Aynenewa norras. Keh inin ay nikwe. Keh usuh hiyakni. Adukwenewa usuh hiya.

[By the power] that causes this land to stay there now. Long ago, there was no [other] land here. No Mother of All! Only this one! This [mountain called] “Yanwak” here. Only her. Her sister [mountain] also. Only these two [mountains] here. [They] formed this place [Arukwa] here now. [Karumna] has caused us to know. For we still see [Karumna in her place].

The story recalls the islands of the flooded grassland, during the flood of the world, being drawn into place by the sight of Karumna, who attracts them yet stops them from coming any closer. Karumna Mountain is Mother; the islands each have a master who has less power than She. Surveyed from Karumna, the land below is an archive of histories, genealogies, and autobiographies. “Karumna,” in Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s words, “has caused us to know.” It is questions about the animacy of landscape that ground Martin Ball’s critiques40 in American Indian Quarterly, of Keith Basso’s widely cited “Wisdom Sits in Places.”41 While acknowledging Basso’s contribution to scholarship on Native American ways of placemaking, Ball charges that Basso’s grounding in European phenomenology fails to understand the spirit of place. Taking issue with Basso’s assertion that the Apaches with whom he rode were “speaking silently to themselves,”42 Ball comments: Mescalero [Apaches], and most likely Western Apaches as well, do not share Sartre’s conception of the landscape as being comprised of inert objects. For them, the landscape is alive and has agency: their ontology of objects in the landscape is fundamentally different from Sartre’s. . . . Basso may choose to take issue with the Western Apaches (or Mescaleros) and assert the claim that they are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of their religious tradition, but on what grounds? Because Sartre said so? Because Western culture says so? On what authority can such a claim be made? On what grounds should Indigenous cultures be analyzed through ontological and epistemological lenses that are not their own? . . . How can the “meaning” of a culture be adequately pictured if the frame obscures the view?43

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Certainly, Apaches are not Amazonians of the Arawakan language group as are Palikur, yet the challenge to secular phenomenological interpretations of landscape holds for both. Ball’s article is settled strongly within the “sacred ecology” lobby—a language that uses terms such as “spiritual revelation” and “sacred landscapes” unique to “a culture” that is “fundamentally different” to “Western culture.” The language of “sacred ecology” is already an ontological translation which relies on the ways in which “spirit” and “matter” are conceptualized in Euro-American intellectual heritage. In my view, the challenge of translating space is to find words and grammars that do not imply the “supernatural” in the sense of being “beyond nature.” Understanding landforms as beings who have perspectives on the world, and who bring things into being in the world in ways that are meaningful and worth heeding, is part of hiyak hawkri. * * * Gradually, our collection of stories and their interconnections and movements across the landscape developed, and we tried to experiment with a range of ways of mapping and diagramming them.44 And then came the next disconcertment: some of the stories went underworld. That, we thought, could be worked into the representation of space like a set of underworld tunnels, rather like underground urban metros in Washington, DC, or London. But that resolution failed rather spectacularly when, around October 2001, Kiyavwiye João Felício told us a version of the story of the Masitwak in which the hero goes to the underworld and then straight up into the stars before coming home to “this flat earth / land / world / day.” Amazonian anthropology offers plenty of cosmologies in which the levels of the world were multiple—sometimes three, sometimes five, perhaps even seven. In a long discussion with Kiyavwiye Ishawet at the foot of Karumna Mountain in August 2001, he had carefully explained the levels of the sky and underworld, but we had not quite understood the quality of their interconnectedness. Consistently, anthropological accounts had represented these worlds as levels, stacked horizontally like the floors of a building. Kiyavwiye João’s version of the Masitwak story must have been mistaken, I decided; he must surely have misremembered some detail; this was surely a classic case of a story with a missing piece, and more evidence that forgetting was a part of local engagements with modernity. For how could someone travel from a basement to the rooftop without going through the ground level? We would hear in due course, I expected, a more complete version of that story without such an obvious missing detail.

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But the different versions of the Masitwak story did not offer any missing details. On the contrary, the hero consistently did the same thing: going down a hole into the underworld, he met the Masitwak’s child who was the Master of Darkness, slayed him, and followed a trail through the Milky Way to get home. Basement, rooftop, ground. How could that be? Around that time, I was exploring phenomenological anthropologies and was intrigued by Tim Ingold’s work on wayfaring, as well as many works in critical geography which problematize the technology of the map. Ah hah, I thought: the resolution is in embodied perspective on the landscape—in other words, we were dealing with a topographic imagination in which the underworld meets the sky world and this world at the horizon. Such an embodied perspective of the world differed completely from the disembodied view of the world offered by standard cartographies, which offer a view from everywhere and nowhere, outside of time. That insight offered a partial grasp of the cosmos in Arukwa, but it took a while for me to grasp it. What helped was a conversation on the levels of sky, earth, and underworld with Kiyavwiye Ishawet at the base of Karumna Mountain in November 2001. Ishawet: Long ago. The first [peoples] had their own [word for it]. I do not know what it was. But for the later people now, it has come to be called Maywak. Kadahan maywak. Kadahan There is Maywak [earth]. There waympi. Ayhte anaptak. is Waympi [the underworld]. Way Waympiyene hiyeg ayhte waykwi. underneath. The Waympi people [live] under the ground. Udahanwiy amadga inin. Maywak Our [place] is on this [earth]. This inin. Maywak. Kuri ariwntak inin maywak . . . Now above Maywak [earth] is . . . inurik. Inurik. [first sky layer/ heaven] Ariwntak inurik . . . nor . . . inukri. Above Inurik is . . . Inukri. [second sky layer; heaven] Kuri ariwntak inukri . . . mayrap. Now above Inukri is . . . Mayrap. Amaksevwiy. [That is the] end [limit] of the [sky / heaven]. Awaku kiyavwiye keh inin madikte Because Sir [respected one] made udahan. Hiyeg. all of this for us. People. Gikamkayhvuwiy. Ka aynsima His children. There are lots of hiyeg. people. Ishawet: Minikwak. Pitatye gidahankis. Nah ka hiyak ku samah. Sema butyevwiye hiyeg kuri humaw maywak.45

“So Many Stories on This Day-World” Mpuse inere iwetrit. Ku ka henenme wis msakwa amadga pahayku Amadga pahaykunin nikwene ka pisenwa gidahankis! Ba ayesri hiyeg. Ineki ig[kis?] keh mpanabu en ayhte inut Paxkabu avuh ini. avuhpiye ta waykwit. Waympiye. [. . .] Mpanabu ayhte inut. Igwa pahapuwa kamaduke inin hawkri. Yuma ba piyanama! Pahavwiwa Ignewa. [. . .] Minikwak ig aynewa ig. Ineki keh ku amekenegben awna kiyaptunka. Igkis awna kiyavunka. Igkis awna arakembet Igkis kinetihwa akak wavitye. Igkis kinetihwa aka puwikne. Igkis kinetihwa aka made. Igkis kinetihwa aka motye. Ba pis hiyak ku pariye motye? Motye ay. Kadahan parinus. Kadahan nor asuyagi. Kadahan kasuwavutne. Igkis kinetihwa gikak.

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There are many different places [levels of existence]. If it were not so, we would all stay on one [plane of existence / one extensive area / place]. Only on one place, then there were be no end [to the number] of his [children]. A [huge] amount of people. That is why he made three levels in the sky. Way up above. [And] four [levels if you include] underneath this [earth]. Underneath the ground. Waympiye [the underworld]. [. . .] There are three [levels of existence/ skies/ heavens] up above. He [God / the Creator] himself, alone rules this world. [day] There are not two. Only one. He himself. [. . .] Long ago he [God] was here [in Maywak, this earth level]. That is why our ancestors spoke Kiyaptunka [the ceremonial language of respect]. They spoke Kiyavunka [the old, common language of respect]. They spoke all kinds of things. They spoke with spirits. They spoke with animals. They spoke with everything. They spoke with wasps. Do you know what [kind of] wasps [there are]? The wasps here. There is Parinus. There is Asuyagi. There is Kasuwavutne [striped wasp]. They spoke with them.

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Awaku kiyavwiye iki ta gitkis inetit. Ee! Wavitye! Kaybune igkis kinetihwa gikak. Datka. Iyakri. Igkis kinetihwa gikak. Igkis tima giwn. Kawokwine igkis kinetihwa gikak. Yuma arikna hiya gasamanakis Awaku igkis kiyavwiyegben awna kiyaptunka. [. . .] In kiyaptunka inyerwa Uhokri giwn. Inerebaki Kiyavwiye. Inakni nah awna. Kinetihwene pit nek. Nah batek aka inin kiyavunka yuwit. Iveg usuh. Ba Kiyavwiye Eduar Mmahki kiyavwiye? Usuh kinetihwene kiyaptunka aynesa. Kiyavwiye Leon hawata awna aynesa. Yuma akiw. Pitana. Mpana. Yuma akiw. Inme minikwak avanenekwa aka kiyaptunka igkis kinetihwene. Ka aynsima kiyatanikiy. Ka aynsima kiytan bakimnay. Ada bakimnay tinogben. Himanovyo. Kiyavunogben. Takwavye. Bakimnay nopsanyovwiynin. Ka aynsima kiyavunka yuwit igkis awna. Inme usuh butye kuri ka humaw hene. [. . .] Inme kiyavunka barewye in.

Because [God] gave to the people words [matters to talk about]. Oh! Spirits! Snakes! They spoke with them. Anacondas! Iyakri snake! They spoke with them. They understood their language. Jaguars! They spoke with them. No creature had more power [perhaps: knew more?] than they did. Because our ancestors [“the respected old ones”] spoke Kiyaptunka. [. . .] This Kiyaptunka is truly God’s language. This is how it is, sir. This is what I say. What I am saying to you. I love the Kiyavunka words. Look at us. [Including] Senhor Eduar. What is it, sir? We only speak a little Kiyaptunka. Senhor Leon also spoke a little. No one else. Two. [Maybe] three. No more. But long ago, they always spoke with Kiyaptunka. There was lots of respect. Lots of respect for children. For girl children. Young girls. Women. Young boys. Little children. They spoke lots of Kiyavunka words. But we who have come later, have not been raised in this manner. [. . .] Kiyavunka is beautiful.

“So Many Stories on This Day-World” Kibeyne gihiyakemni. Igkis kanum ariknebdi madikte [kewhekwiye?] [. . .] In kiyaptunka. In barewye. Kiyavuno. Kiyavwiye. Wis ta ba avitmin nor . . . Dano.

Ke ba wis danuhpen. Aysaw akebyi wis wagah? Nuvewkan ba takuwanek wis boh usuh aterenek. Iwasgi. Kiyavwiyegben giwn. [. . .] Usuhme kuri: karumna! Uyay atak karumnad! Oo! bakimni yuwit. Bakimni guw gudahan. Kiyavwiye. Ka aynsima kiyavwiyegben giwn. Nah ka makisu in kiyavwiyegben giwn.

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It is a good way of being. [good thinking/wise/pure] They named all things clearly. [purely, individually, specifically] [. . .] This is Kiyaptunka. It is beautiful, Senhora; Senhor. “We are going to the top of . . . Dano.” [A Kiyavunka word for Karumna Mountain; literal meaning: female strength or hardness; rock.] If we can arrive there How [many days before] we climb? I think maybe tomorrow we will go there. And see it. This is our ancestor’s language. [. . .] Now we say, “Karumna!” “Let us go to Karumna!” Oh! Those are children’s words. That is [what] the children call her. Sir. There is a lot of [our ancestor’s] language. I will not finish [with telling about] [our ancestor’s] language.

In this conversation, Kiyavwiye Ishawet set out the elders’ version of the three skies (Mayrap, Inurik, and Inukri), this world (Maywak), and the underworld (Waympiye). For him, the elders’ languages (Kiyaptunka and Kiyavunka) that were spoken on Maywak were the language of respectful relationship. No one had more power than the elders did, in their capacity to speak to animals from wasps to jaguars, and landforms like Karumna were among the creatures (or actors) whose relationships made the world. His account of that time as a time when the creator had walked the world converges with his account of theology, and Jesus, like a shaman, had gone up to the star level. Eight years later at the time of this writing, that conversation remains one that pushes the limits of translatability, for it refuses the divisions of tradition and modernity, knowledge and belief. His words underscore the importance of being able to account for space not as an object or as a set of concepts but as a cosmos: a vision

Figure 9.  Kiyavwiye Floriano with a hand axe

Figure 10.  Kiyavuno Yuka telling the Kurumsuk story

Figure 11.  Kiyavwiye Sarisri Daví Espírito Santo

Figure 12.  Kiyavwiye Ishawet at Himeket

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of place that includes the stars and weathers and the underworld, and their networks with places and creatures and things on this earth. Before moving on to the stars and weathers, however, it is worth pausing to retrace what this chapter has proposed regarding stories and places. Among these: •• The joy of traveling is in seeing the story trails that cross one’s path. •• Places themselves are transformative: some because they are beings; some because of the presence of other beings in them; because you can see things differently in them and from them. •• Stories of travels can be recounted in performances that embody the memory of where cardinal directions like “north” or “south” become “on the left” or “on the right.” •• One’s presence in a place, much like a tracker might follow a trail and interpret what it might portend, serves as a kind of tracking of what has happened here in this place before to ancestors, beasts, spirits, and things. One’s presence in a place and in a time is also a presence to those who have lived and acted and moved and related to this place. To use the words of Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh Minh Ha, one speaks not about, but nearby.46 In sum: to know a place is not to have its information, but to know what it is to be present in it—that is, to allow the possibilities of mutual transformation, of both “it” and yourself; of both knower and known. What Latour distinguishes as the data language of the Moderns from the love language of their relationships, allows for the transformation of the discussion about Amerindian environmental knowledge: when there is presence, as there is in a love relationship, there is the experience of a mutual bringing-into-being. Rendering relational ontologies in the language of knowledge and data and objectivity is to make a category mistake. The belief/knowledge divide is an effect of the concerns that give us the Modernist ontology of nature and culture, science and religion, modernity and tradition. Ways of knowing based on presence call for different kinds of language, like the languages of Kiyaptunka and Kiyavunka, in which one explicitly speaks not about creatures, but nearby them: all the while conscious of the possibility that to name something might be to call such a thing into one’s presence. Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s lament of the passing of the language of respect can, at least in part, be understood as a critique of the shift in everyday thinking in Arukwa from the relational, to the representational.

Chapter Three

Journeys with the Rain Stars Making Sense of the Moving Cosmos

Learning about star knowledge in Arukwa, in the beginning, seemed a relatively straightforward matter: trace the local constellations, draw them into star charts, record the stories, and cross-reference them to the rich literature on Amerindian astronomy in lowland South American anthropology from the 1970s to the 1990s.1 As for Palikur stories, we could take a lead from the work done by Harold Green and Diana Green, who, while working in the city of Belém in the 1990s, had asked Marcelo Iôiô and Mateh Batista, when they visited the city at various times, to write up a story of the relationship of stars to rainy seasons for the growing collection of Palikur literacy materials. The finished text is included in a small collection of stories that they translated. It reads as follows:

The Stars of the Rain-Times by Marcelo Iôiô and Mateus Emilio Batista (Mateh) Long ago our ancestors said that the stars were the “grandfathers” of the rains. They said that the constellation “Kayeb” announced the beginning of the rainy season. Kayeb was an anaconda. The First Rain-Time is called Kayeb. It begins to fall the end of December. It rains all during the month of January, little by little, until it floods the savannah. Then it stops in February for four to seven days. Then the star Tavara (Kingfisher) begins to rain. The Kingfisher appears in the heavens together with his food, all the little ikar fish (the Milky Way).

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After March the “Uwakti” starts to rain. [Uwakti is a man’s name.] We see Uwakti’s house there among the stars. [. . .] At noon the rain stops, so our ancestors said that Uwakti went to eat and take a little nap at noon. While he rests, the rain lets up but then it starts falling again. This is the Second Rain-Time. It ends in early April and there is no rain for a short while. Then a new and different rain begins to fall. It is called “Kusuvwi” (torrents). It begins in the middle of April. It just pours. Really hard. Kusuvwi has two constellations. One is called the Elder Brother. His rain falls first. He is on a boat. In Portuguese his boat is called the “Via Lactea” (Milky Way).This is the Third Rain-Time. During this time we see a big anaconda in the sky. His name is Awawhri. The Third RainTime ends in the middle of May. When it does, we say that Awawhri ate up the elder brother. Then the Fourth Rain-Time begins. We call it the Younger Brother. We say that the younger brother shot Awawhri with arrows. This causes the hardest rain of all. When that rain is over, there will be no more heavy rains for a while. There is only the heat of the sun. Everything is clear. As soon as the Fourth Rain-Time ends, the wide-mouth bass appear everywhere. They have black stripes and a “star” on their tails. We say that the younger brother threw his garbage to Earth. When it landed in the water, it turned into nice big bass. After that [in July] it rains a little more. The constellation we see is called Wayam [land turtle]. It is a lighter rain. It is said that it only rains a little because the turtle can’t hold much water. In the sky, the Wayam appears below his food, the tucumã palm fruit [Milky Way]. That is how people relate the stars to the rain-times.2

Transcribed texts are never uncomplicated by the conversations around them, and this one needs to be read in its context as a collection of texts made for reference purposes in the larger task of generating literacy materials as part of the activities of SIL, the organisation known internationally as the Summer Institute of Linguistics and in Brazil, at one time, as the Sociedade Internacional de Linguistica. In the text, the stars bring the rains without any human intervention, and without the presence of any shamans. Correlated with the twelve months, the constellations are represented here as inert: “The Uwakti starts to rain. Uwakti is a man’s name”; the constellations are seasons (rather than beings, as we later learned) that let loose their showers without expectation of reciprocity. Nevertheless, the text offered a good overview of the major Palikur constellations, and it gave us a lot to work with. Talking with people at

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night in 2001 and again in 2003, we were able to develop a rough idea of where some constellations might be. But without any background in astronomy, it was hard to grasp how or why people could be so certain that, for example, “Kayeb would be visible at 3 a.m.” given that the story explicitly said that Kayeb would appear in December. We had a lot to learn about the turning of the sky each night, and each year. Back in Cape Town in 2003, University of Cape Town astronomer Tony Fairall offered us an afternoon in the city’s planetarium. He set the massive Zeiss star projector for the rough coordinates of Kumene: 3˚27' North and 51˚30' West, and we set about trying to piece together the bits of information we had. As a general guide, Tony suggested, naked-eye astronomies would be quite practical: bright stars would be dominant, and season-based astronomies were likely to be linked to stars that would be visible at times of day when people were waking or settling in for the night. Swinging the enormous Zeiss star projector this way and that to see if any constellations fitted the rough diagrams we had collected a few months before, it took a while before David recognized Tavara, the Kingfisher, in part of the constellation known to astronomers as Aquila the Eagle. But that did not fit any of the dusk skies for February. As for the boats of Kusuvwi, the Hyades in the head of the constellation of Taurus looked very similar to the diagram of the canoe that Ishawet’s son Judah had drawn in my notebook. These stars did not appear in the dusk sky in May, but did show up just before dawn. Kiyavwiye Balaweh had drawn Uwakti’s house as a square with a star in the middle—was it possible that it coincided with what we knew as the Great Square of Pegasus, or perhaps Orion? We weren’t sure, and we found it really difficult trying to imagine how the stars shifted in the course of a year. Their turning in the course of the night around the stellar poles was not that hard to comprehend, but we found it almost impossible to comprehend their nightly rising and setting in relation to annual seasonal changes. After a few hours’ work, Tony suggested that I sit in on Astronomy 101 at the University of Cape Town and that we invest in a software version of the night sky like RedShift or Starry Night Pro. In AST101f, Wednesday afternoon practicals were at the planetarium. When he showed us a model of the solar system that looked rather like a large beach ball with a light in the center (the sun), moving balls for the earth and planets inside it, and a dark transparent dome (the night sky) in which pinpricks made stars, I finally grasped the somewhat elementary principle that in the course of each year, some stars would be behind the sun, and therefore invisible in the day sky. After their annual episode of invisibility in the day sky—behind the sun—those stars would reappear in the dark of the night sky. Even so, it was only on a sabbatical a year later, at the Smithsonian in 2005, that David and I had the chance to play with astronomical

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software for the weeks and weeks that it took to really grasp the principle of Palikur star knowledge: that what we were looking for was the dawn stars, and that when stars have disappeared into the day world for about two months each year, they reappear in the eastern sky at dawn, just ahead of the sunrise. Thereafter, they arrive earlier and earlier and earlier each morning until they are appearing at midnight, and eventually again at dusk in the west, before reappearing in the morning sky after several weeks’ absence in the day sky. The most important principle: the stars that were most significant were those that reappeared along the Milky Way ahead of the point at which the sun would rise. In more formal astronomical language, that was known as a “heliacal rising.” That insight unfolded the next principle: the seasonal constellations followed one another along the ecliptic, or the path of the sun as it crosses the horizon and the Milky Way in the course of the year. It was those constellations that are known in Palikur star knowledge as the ones that bring the season’s rains and dominate the day sky. With all of that pieced together, we could understand Palikur Astronomy 101 (perhaps better named Hiyak Hawkri 101), which goes something like this version of the annual procession of stars and rains, told by Kiyavwiye Sarisri Daví Espirito Santo in late 2003: Sarisri: Barewye estuwa gidahan [Kayeb].3 Aka igi ihamwigben kamax murukti. Kamax marit. Kamax digiki. Igkis akum. Iwi kayeb. Kamax awaka. Inere ihamwigben keh. Kabahte nah ihpin hawata. Inyerwa in. Ku pis hiya marit danuh. Ka aynsima marit. Ihamwi akum. Kamaxe nikwe. Hewke yuma akiw! Ute pahavwiwa hiyeg ariwntak. Mpiyavwiy made. Ke muruktibe. Mpiya. Utev pahavwi awayg ba tino. Nikwe mpiya.

Sarisri: [Kayeb] has a beautiful story. The shaman would capture flu [sickness] with Kayeb. Capture malaria. Capture diarrhea. They would smoke. They would grasp Kayeb’s hand. That is what the shaman would do. I almost believe in this also. It is real [true]. If you saw that malaria has come— lots of malaria. The shaman would smoke [incantations]. Then they would capture it. The next day there would be no more [malaria]! One more person might get sick. But then all [sickness] would pass. Like flu. It would pass. [Maybe] one more man or woman, then it would pass.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Yuma akiw. Awaku ig kawatni kayeb. Mbe ig ka aynsima gannuh. Datka ig. Murok gahawkri. Lesley: Aysaw ig kavusa? Sarisri: Ig kavusa arimkat kayg ‘dezembro’ nutuhbe. Heneme ka ik un. Aynesa un. Ik ada kariwruyan kan. Ik ada iygyan. Eg kan. Aynesa un.

Ariwntak ig maviya kuwis kuri tavara. Tavara ig kiyesrad un. Pikiyeste un kuwis. Tavara wayk. Hawata igwata datka. Kadhan ka nopsimadhad nawiyad. Ada tivikwiye. Ada wageswiye han akiw Nikwe ig tivik. Sarisri: Nikwe estuwa gidahan wakukwa. Ig wakukwa msakwa ayhte ihapka akigbimna parawhokwa. Kuri wakukwa kabiman ig atere. Ig awna git: Ba ayta! Mpiya awke han! Ba ayta iwavun! Nah mwaka pis iwasanun ayhte pahambaka! Nikwe basevwig aka gisuvwan. Baseninwig. Nawiy wagestew. Eg diyuhe. Mpiya ihapkew kenese gimun neg.

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It is all gone. Because [the shaman] summons Kayeb. [Kayeb] has much wisdom [spiritual powers; abilities]. He is an anaconda. The Grandfather of Rains. Lesley: When does he begin? Sarisri: He begins around the month of “December,” I believe. But he doesn’t give [or cause] enough water [to flood the grasslands]. Just a little water. It is enough for the kariwru fish [tamatuatá] to hatch. Enough for the young iyg fish [traira]. The ig fish lay eggs. Just a little water. When he has passed, then it is Tavara [the Kingfisher constellation]. Tavara [brings] much [high] water. More water now. Tavara rains. He is also an anaconda. He has a huge boat. To journey on. To turn around this way again. [points east] Then he leaves. Sarisri: Now then, in the story about the monkey. The monkey was way out on a peninsula at the edge [shore] of the ocean. Now the monkey yelled out to him there. He said, “Come here! Come by here! Come take me!” “I want you to take me to the other side!” Then he waved with his hat. He beckoned him. The boat turned around. It returned. It came up close to [the monkey].

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Then that one said, “What is up? What do you want?” “Oh, earlier I wanted to ask you to [help] me to go. To see me to the other side.” “Oh!” He said, “Sir, you do not have the courage to come on my boat. [My boat is very unstable / can tip easily]” Ka aynsima mayg. Ka aynsima “There is lots of wind. There are paraw nukakuh. many waves with me.” Kwewanek pis avisasewnek. “Later you will become frightened.” Nikwe nah me tivik. Ka ba nah “So I am going to leave, I am almost [stuck] here.” [i.e., I cannot ayhpap. receive you on board]. Waha pahamku nawiy nomnik “Wait for one more boat that will butye. come behind.” Bawa ig uwakti. But it is Uwakti [constellation]. Kuri mpiyase pahavwi kayg. Uwakti Now after one month, Uwakti wayk.[. . .] began to [rain down on the earth]. [. . .] Ka aynsima mayg. Ka aynsima There is a lot of wind. There is a murok. lot of rain. Awahkis im. Pikiyeste un akiw. He sends fish. Higher water [levels] again. Nikwe im pikibite pes. Ka aynsima Then more fish come out [into the im.[. . .] grasslands]. Lots of fish.[. . .] Ayteke ig maviya. Msekwe pahavwi After [Uwakti] passes by, one more kayg akiw. month goes by. Kuri kusuvwi. Kuri kusuvwi wayk. Now it is Kusuvwi [constellation]. Now Kusuvwi rains to earth. Ka aynsima murok hema yuma There is lots of rain, but no wind. mayg. Karisaw. Bowki. [The monkey] was quiet. Sadly pondering Kuri wakukwa hiyapni hene. Ig Now the monkey decided what to awna, “Nah tivik amadga kusuvwi”. do. He said, “I will go on Kusuvwi’s [boat].” Ig awna: “Kiyavwiye, uya amnipen He said, “Sir, can you please help sarayhnuh ta pahambakat.” me and carry me to the other side?” Notra git nikwe: Yaba? Pariye pimawkan. Kaksa nah mwaka ayavagi ada na tivikwiye. Iwasa nahvuw ta pahambaka. Aa! Ig awna: Kiyavwiye pis ka ik ada pibowka amadga nuhmun. [Nuhmun ka bowka adarakan?]

Journeys with the Rain Stars Ig awna, “Ihi. Kabay. Ba ayta katapta amadga nuhmun.” Nikwe ig katapte. Kuri kusuvwi tivikwiye. Awaku kusuvwi mpiyase arakembet im. Puwiknebdi. Ikar. Umayan. Wayabra. Kunan. Bayag. Kuri murok wayk kuwis padak im ka aynsima. Ka aynsima im. Ini avanenekwa kusuvwi hene. Ineki igkis awna: Kusuvwi ka nopsimahad datkad. Murok gahawri ig. Igwa murok gahawri. Uhokri ahegbetgi hene ada ig ewkne mwok. Nikwe kusuvwi gidahan. Nikwe inere nuthu ka estuwama. Heme estuwa in awaku wis ka hiyapni. Heme wis hiyap kusuvwi inut. Igkis awna: Neg awahkis nor un atan uminwiy.

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[Kusuvwi] said, “Yes. It is okay. Come and climb aboard my boat.” Then he boarded. Now Kusuvwi began to leave. Because Kusuvwi brings all kinds of fish and animals. Ikar fish [silver tetra fish]. Piranhas. Silver barracuda-like fish. Peacock bass [tucunaré]. Bayag fish [aruanã]. Now the rains fall. It throws lots of fish. Kusuvwi is always like this. That is why they say, “Kusuvwi is a huge anaconda!” He is the Grandfather of the Rains. God prepared him like this, so that he brings [shows; represents] the rains. So then, [this is] Kusuvwi’s [story] To me, this is not a story. It has become a story because we have not seen [the actual event]. But we see Kusuvwi [constellation] up above. They say, “He sends the [rain] waters here amongst us.”

Kiyavwiye Sarisri here gives a version of the annual star story that, like any beginner’s lesson should, sets out clearly the relationship between the stars and the rains and associated changes in the ecosystem. As fascinating as the story was, there was a sense in which it was incomplete. Why did the narrative jump from a description of the Tavara constellation to a monkey? Why was Kiyavwiye Sarisri so ambivalent in one comment about the shamanic—“I almost believe in this also”—and then so unequivocal a moment later when he said, “All [sickness] would pass”? It was equally unclear what role the monkey was playing. No other story that we had recorded had a monkey in a central role—it was almost as if the monkey in this story was something of a trickster figure. And yet the story itself was not about a trickster, or about anyone being outwitted. Usually stories of this kind mention a relative, but this monkey was

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a loner. Then there was the question of the monkey’s movement. How could he jump from a point of land in the ocean into the sky? Again, it seemed that something was missing. Beyond these details, I was puzzled by the difficulty we encountered in arranging to meet people to record star stories at all. At first we thought it was a problem of memory and forgetting, since people would say “ask soand-so—he knows,” or “so-and-so, who has died, really knew these stories.” But after a while we began to think that our difficulty in collecting astronomical knowledge was not simply that the knowledge keepers were dying—which they have always done—but that the remembering of star stories was subject to a particular politics of forgetting that was related to navigating modernity, citizenship, and church membership. There was a palpable sense in which talking about them was off-limits: that at that time it was not done anymore; that being Palikur, one did not even think about these things. Since the dominant everyday discourse in Kumene, in the early years of fieldwork around the turn of the millennium, was a mix of evangelical Protestantism and the kinds of rationality that framed the nightly news on television, people were reluctant to speak of matters that, many said, no longer had much relevance. Several spoke in cautionary tones about the relationship between the stars and the shamanic arts. Yet talk about the stars was also characterized by commentary on a kind of civic rationality: “We don’t really believe in that anymore,” or, as Kiyavwiye Sarisri put it in the monkey-in-the-stars story, “I almost believe in this.”4 The surprise that people registered when David wanted to know more about the stars seemed to suggest that as the son of missionaries and one who had spent his formative years in the village, he was expected to know that star stories were off-limits. That he did not maintain a silence on matters astronomical puzzled many. Shortly after our arrival in 2003, Kiyavwiye Ixawet and his wife, Kiyavuno Pupta, had arrived at our house by arrangement, to teach us the basics about the stars. The story’s details were bare, as might be expected from any beginner’s lesson. A day after their visit, Kiyavwiye Balaweh arrived. A regal storyteller whose gestures evoke an era of largesse, his words offered fragments of the bigger picture. But still, the details were spare, rendered politely. Some days later, the elderly and ailing Kiyavwiye Uwakti had one of his few good days and was well enough to speak with us. His rambling explanations of star lore were translated, interpreted, and augmented by his daughter and her husband, but our conversations were viewed with suspicion by not a few villagers who were mindful that the Kiyavwiye had left the village many years before, after getting into a fight at a festival had led to him being tied up, urinated upon, and left to be bitten by

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mosquitos (just as in the Uwakti constellation epic). Humiliated, he had moved to the Wahama (Uaçá) river. At that time, he had been a practicing shaman, and had returned only recently. Now returned to Kumene and almost certainly near the end of his days, his conversion was a matter of priority for many in the village. News of his profession of belief in Jesus was communicated with enthusiasm by church members a few days after we had recorded his tellings of astronomical stories. Amid his dying and rebirthing, people seemed to be asking in eyebrows and attitudes, What were we doing speaking to him of constellations that might rekindle his shamanic interests? Several conversations and a few days later, Kiyavwiye João Felício came to visit. He had in 2001 volunteered the Masitwak story that included a section that David recognized as a journey through the rain stars. But when we tried to clarify the names of the worlds and their inhabitants in the version we had carefully transcribed in the intervening months, he was uncomfortable. Parikwene kanum Waympiye henema yuma. Amadga Biblia awna yuma, he said: “The Palikur call it [the underworld] Waympiye but the Bible says nothing about this.” Also, he added, we know now that the world is round. And he carefully pointed out that the ancestors had believed the world to be composed of several flat layers.5 Pressed further on the spirit inhabitants of the underworld, he gave their collective names (the Mahipoko and the Imawri) adding the caveat, “but I think it’s not true.” Then he went on to explain that “there are three skies. The ancestors were right in saying that there are three skies—it says so in the Bible.” The passage to which he referred, he said, is Second Corinthians 12:2–4, in which the apostle Paul describes a transcendent experience: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.6

That said, Kiyavwiye João proceeded to explain that all of the stars are on the first sky; that the next level up also has stars which we cannot see, and the sun and the moon; and that not all the shamans could go up there—only the true ones who had visions when they smoked tawari, a local tobacco. But the conversation tailed out in unease, and he shifted to a sensitive matter pertaining to others who were present. As the conversation was delicate, I excused myself when our one-year-old son Jordan needed attention.

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While that conversation progressed, Kiyavwiye Ishawet arrived to visit unexpectedly. An elderly man—probably then in his seventies—he had spent several hours rowing his canoe downriver to see us. I began talking to him about what I had been learning about the sky since his previous visit a few days before. Did he know, I asked, about the river in the sky which had been described by several? “Yes,” he said, meaningfully, “up there there is a river, and grasslands, and jungle, exactly as there is here.” He said the reason for his visit was that the other day he had spoken about the sky, but that there was another story he wanted to tell David and me. Long ago, he said, he was almost dead for three days. He had, he said, been climbing up a woki tree (bacaba, in Portuguese; one of the taller palm fruit trees) in the rainy season. He raises his eyebrows knowingly and catches my eye, laughing quietly at himself: that is a very stupid thing for an Indian to do, he chuckles. And so, he said, he had slipped and fallen and died and went up to Inurik (the first sky; the word is also used in the Palikur church to indicate heaven). He saw the face of Uhokri (translated as God in Palikur Christian discourse), and Uhokri spoke to him. There were grasslands, a river, otters, palm trees—everything—and a big church that was very beautiful. From there he could look down and see people praying. Then he woke up. After one day he could sit again, and within three days he was better. Since then he has changed to a generous person, he said; now when people visit him he always tries to be generous with his food. The story concluded, he invited us to visit his home upriver, to record it on video. We made the journey there on Tuesday, July 8, 2003, but found him away, making a canoe. His wife, Kiyavuno Pupta, and her son spoke about the constellations and the seasons and began to speak of the things that were generally matters on which people were silent. As per my notes at the time, and mindful of the partial quality of understanding that they demonstrate, she explained that long ago the Ihamwi (shamans) saw Kusuvwi or “Torrents,” which is also the name of the season of heaviest rains. “That was a long time ago when we were with the wavitiye” (malintentioned spirits, which is a way of marking time before the mass conversion to Christianity in the 1970s). “They smoked [incanted] and didn’t eat. When Kusuvwi arrived they smoked.” She began to sing Kusuvwi’s song and then explained: “The boat came to visit the Ihamwi, and then the Ihamwi got on the boat. Only the Ihamwi would see this—he would go up on the boat, and bring all the [seasonal] fish and animals down.” When Kiyavuno Pupta began singing the songs, I had an uncomfortable sense that I was crossing a line out of the apparently neutral space that I had so carefully carved that was neither in the very active church

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nor out of it. I felt uneasy: we were probably overstepping the bounds of what would be acceptable to the church on Kumene island, where we were based. On the way home, David and I wondered how her husband would feel about his wife having sung them for us. I worried that if other villagers had heard of this, they might be unhappy with us both. If not carefully managed, this could have consequences for further fieldwork. On Wednesday, July 9, we returned to the home of Ishawet and Pupta, by invitation, to video Ishawet’s story of his death, his visit to the stars, and his return. That day’s version was very detailed and took about an hour to tell. Completed, we stopped for lunch—generous portions of fresh howler monkey, manioc, and açai to drink. In the course of lunch, David asked if he would be willing to tell us more about the stars. His answer: “Because you have heard my story, and you know Uhokri, I will tell you.” He and Pupta sat down and began to sing all the songs of the dances that they could remember, for much of the afternoon until the sun began to set. It was an extraordinary moment: dances were highest on the list of all the traditions that people here seemed to frown upon at that time, and here they were singing as many as they could remember, in quiet, low voices. Listening to them, seated as they were near the bamboo grove that marked the spot as once having been a space for dances, the “I” that I had put so much effort into producing—the ethical, professional, secular, personally absent, participatory anthropologist—fell into silence. We had been invited to record, as astronomical knowledge, a narrative that was a combination of life story, Amerindian cosmology, and a conversion to the Assembleia de Deus. In Kiyavwiye Ishawet and Kiyavuno Pupta’s singing, what I had thought of as different worlds—evangelical, civic, traditional—were simultaneous presences. Being in the presence of Kiyavwiye Ishawet and Kiyavuno Pupta as they sang provoked all sorts of new disconcertments. The binaries that I had imposed on my conversations in order to make fieldwork ethical and possible, like public and private, sacred and secular, knowing and believing, were being troubled. Clearly, the freedom that they felt to sing the songs for us and speak of matters cosmological came only because the dialogics of the research encounter had shifted: he had requested, and we had acceded, that his life story be heard and be archived along with all the other astronomical stories that he and others had told. In doing so, Kiyavwiye Ishawet established the terms of his own speaking, rather than speaking as a subject of a tradition or an object in a culturalist definition of what it means to be a Palikur Indian. When he had rowed downriver to say that there was a story he had been unable to tell in our earlier discussion of the night sky, he came specifically to say that there was a quality to the sky that our framework of questions had not admitted. Once

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again, I was confronted with a sense of encountering a patient teacher who was provoking the realization that my assumptions about the world were hindering my ability to understand what he had determined that we needed to hear. Learning, here, extended outside of the frame offered by reflexivity (in which the anthropologist learns by looking inward). In that moment, Kiyavwiye Ishawet had taken it upon himself to invite David and me to look at things differently. The paradox: To understand the Palikur cosmos, I had to move outside of the frame of professional disbelief, and the relativist “fix” of suspending disbelief. This did not mean that I had to believe in the sense of taking on a theology: it was not a matter of “crossing the line” from knowledge to belief. It was more that Ishawet was inviting us here to share in the possibility of a world that is not structured by the distinctions of data and spirit. For me, this was a transformative moment—perhaps what Michel Serres would call a “clinamen”: the moment of infinitesimally small declination from the line of flow that causes the turbulence that can become a vortex.7 The implications were both methodological and conceptual. On the matter of ethnographic research methodology, I was confronted with the realization that “professional neutrality” was not neutral at all but deeply embedded in the political cosmos that undergirded my training as a researcher. The silent, absent, interrogative skeptic that I had so painfully crafted and maintained as a professional self was of little use in exploring the implications of his story. Instead of interrogation-like interviewing, there was a need for engagement, for interlocution, for hospitality. To use a Palikur word metaphorically, I had to minahwa: to draw my canoe up alongside the others onto the bank, to be willing to be present alongside, instead of desperately trying to be absent. To minahwa changes the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject of research to a relationship of mutual presence, in at least three ways. First, the relationship was equalized: my wonderings about the cosmos were as open to his questions as his were to mine. I could no longer “write about” local ideas; my own thoughts needed to be drawn up alongside, and be open to reframing. Second, I could begin to see the very idea of secularism as something that, ironically, was part of a legacy of universalizing an approach that saw itself as transcendent. At the time, a literature on secularism was beginning to emerge in anthropology, though I did not yet understand it as part of a broader critique of modernist scholarly heritage. My thinking was that it was appropriate for anthropology to embrace secularism as a field of study: that is, to explore different expressions of secularism, and to pursue the reflexive question of whether ethical and professional anthropological research practice was necessarily secular; was necessarily something that problematized belief.

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In the context of the Brazilian Amazon in which Christian missions have been so deeply contested, stepping out of the idea that a secular position would give me intellectual independence was risky, as was locating Arukwan star knowledge in relation to local Christianity. The version of the world that Kiyavwiye Ishawet was trying to teach was deeply embedded in thinking of the cosmos as a relational whole (that encompassed cosmos, master spirits, Uhokri, God, autobiography, and seasons). Understanding what he was saying required more than learning to join the dots of the constellations and map a cultural version of the sky. Bruno Latour’s effort to rethink the division of knowledge and belief via the languages of information or relationship8 is valuable here, for the orientation to the cosmos that Ishawet was trying to teach us was that the sky is not a set of informational dots, but a relation, and for him, his version of Christianity was as integral to the bigger picture as was the importance of rethinking approaches to physics and geometries of space and time. This chapter and the next unfold an approach that seeks to understand Palikur astronomy, and notions of a world that is not defined as matter set in time and space,9 without resorting either to the informational languages that translate “astronomical” stories as “equivalents of scientific knowledge,” or by relegating them to the terrain of “belief.” Rather, the hope is that the material can set out an approach to knowing the world in which the relationalities that are evident in it can become conceptual resources to work with instead of “proofs of the validity of indigenous knowledge.” As our grasp of the sky stories deepened over several visits between 2003 and 2008, David was able to record increasingly detailed versions of the star stories. Transcription by transcription, the bigger picture emerged in which the rain star cycle is demonstrably reliable. Realizing this was a moment in which to reframe the larger argument of this project: instead of collecting different cultural versions of a nature that some thought only “science” truly “got,” we could demonstrate that here was a way of assembling a world that selected different elements and assembled them into a whole that reliably correlated stars with rains. Yet at the same time as it offered a series of observations that were trusted enough to become principles for assembling a bigger picture that linked stars to rains, it was also an account of how to navigate the cosmos by working politely and respectfully with the master spirits of the stars. The stories speak of five different rains during the rainy season. Each of these rains is identified with a constellation that rises at dawn at the start of that season. The horizon, then, offers a key reference point, consonant with Edmundo Magaña’s studies of Carib astronomy.10 The second principle is that the arrival of the major constellations forms a seasonal cycle that is the backbone of ecosystemic knowledge, many

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narratives, the taskscapes of agriculture, hunting, fishing, and building, as well as, in times past, the calendar of seasonal festivals. Beginning in late December, the arrival of the first rains coincides with the solstice and the rising of Kayeb, the two-headed anaconda in the region of Scorpius. In February Tavara the Kingfisher begins to rain, followed by the rains of Uwakti, a man in a house, in March. In April and May, the torrential rains of Kusuvwi the Older Brother and Kusuvwi the Younger Brother, the Pleiades, flood the grasslands and usher in the fishing season in the context of a titanic battle with Awahwi, the three-headed anaconda in Perseus. The softer rains of Wayam, the land tortoise, follow in July-August. The dry season begins around this time and continues until December. The movement of stars that are directly ahead of the sun in the dawn sky precede it—creating a path for it throughout each day. This principle, known in formal astronomy as “heliacal rising”, is the third principle of knowing the day along the Rio Urucauá. This, too, is familiar in Amerindian astronomy.11 The insight that our work brings to this conversation is that the path of the sun offers a guide as to where the major seasonal constellations will be in the course of the day, allowing one to track the path of the stars that have risen just ahead of dawn. Thus, as Magaña speculates might be the case, the path of the sun provides one aspect of what one might call a pathway in the sky,12 in which the referents of the journey are the horizon, and the zenithal passage of the sun.13 The fourth principle is that the December and June solstices provide key moments in the annual astronomical cycle. These are noted, respectively, in the narratives of the anacondas Kayeb (in the region of Scorpius) and Kusuvwi (in the region of Perseus, the Pleiades, and Orion), which provide the end points of the sun’s seasonal journey to the south and north. The arrival point of the sun on the dawn horizon shifts between east-southeast (azimuth 293 at the 06h40 sunrise on December 21), and east-northeast (azimuth 245 at the 06h30 sunrise on June 21). The June solstice is marked by a particularly complex narrative (see the discussion on Kusuvwi, below) that people associate with the season for demarcating and cutting new fields. The fifth principle is that knowing the constellations is not just knowing their shape (or which dots to join) but knowing the different qualities of their movement at different times of the year. The path of the stars changes through the course of the year in much the same way as the path of the sun will change. Stars closer to the poles move across the sky more slowly than stars in the middle of the sky. And, as the earth travels around the sun each year, our window on the particular arm of our galaxy that we know as the Milky Way will twist around: sometimes lying directly overhead, and sometimes lying low on the horizon. Narratives of the sky and underworld demonstrate an understanding of the movement of the stars as a journey around this world via pathways

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Figure 13.  The sky at sunrise in the December solstice (Source: RedShift 7. Used by permission.)

through the underworld to reappear in the dawn sky. The imaginary framework that undergirds this is not one of two-dimensional flat planes that are unconnected (e.g., a topographical map overlaid by astronomical data) but of a world with multiple levels that are connected via a range of different paths, tunnels, or portals. Like the sun, the stars travel through the underworld from east, to mid-sky (“zenith”), to west, before reappearing in the east.14 Magaña conjectures that observers had failed to grasp the underlying structure of Amerindian astronomy.15 In this chapter, we propose a seventh principle: the logic for tracking stars in the course of the year derives from the path of the Milky Way, well known as the celestial river in Amerindian star lore, in relation to the path of the sun. The importance of the solstices, we suggest, is not simply that the path of the sun changes the direction of its journey along the horizon but that on those two dates the path of the sun crosses the celestial river. The insight has direct relevance to Gary Urton’s insights16 on Andean astronomy and evidences deep historical ties between highland and lowland South America. An eighth principle: the constellations are not flat pictures in the sky, but actual creatures that are readily carved but drawn with difficulty (as discussed in chapters 1 and 4). In what follows, this chapter presents images of woodcarvings of the constellations17 alongside a selection of various texts about them, chosen

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Figure 14.  The sky at sunrise in the June solstice (Source: RedShift 7. Used by permission.)

from over a thousand minutes of video recordings. The variations in the texts underscore the extent to which storytellers’ accounts neither are completely uniform nor are they wholly unique to this river. It does not make sense to offer an ethnography that pretends that there is complete accord. Nor is it possible to assert that this is a uniquely “Palikur” star knowledge as there are so many similarities between these accounts and others told elsewhere in the region. In the villages along the river, a text or a video that intercuts these versions would yield a mix of fascination about particular details and animated discussions and criticism of the differences in the accounts. That interest in critique—what you know and how you know it—is a rejoinder to the assumption that in Arukwa star knowledge is singular and uncontested.

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The Annual Cycle of Stars and Their Stories 1. The First Rain: Kayeb, the Two-Headed Anaconda (December–January) Kayeb is a two-headed anaconda whose body encompasses the stars constellated elsewhere as Scorpius, the Pointer Stars, the Crux or Southern Cross, and the dark matter of the Milky Way.18 During the dry season in August, Kayeb’s hand—the Crux—touches the ground at dusk and goes underground to get the Wayam, or land tortoise, which brings the August rains. Gradually in the course of that month, all of Kayeb disappears at sunset and is not visible for several weeks. The reappearance of Kayeb in the dawn sky marks the December solstice and the beginning of Kayeb’s rains. The season of Kayeb ends in February with the rising of Tavara, the Kingfisher that is at once a bird, and one of the cobras grandes, or anacondas, of the night sky. In the story that follows, recorded in July 2008, former cacique Kiyavwiye Emiliano Iaparrá explains the movement of Kayeb to David: David: What is Kayeb? Is he an anaconda? Emiliano: Aa! Nuvewkan kayeb Emiliano: Oh! I think Kayeb is an datka. anaconda. Madikte [nerras] nutuhbe ku pariye All those, I think, who circle wageswiye aytniye han. Ku pariye around, to arrive over here. Who wayk. Nuvewkan nerras. Uwakti. rain. I think those: Uwakti. Tavara. Tavara. Madikte datkari. All of them are anacondas. Kusuvwi is an anaconda. Uwakti Kusuvwi datka. Uwakti datka. is an anaconda. Kayeb is an Kayeb datka. Tavara datka. Nerras madikte! anaconda. Tavara is an anaconda. All of them! Awaku igkis un anag. Because they are the Sources [i.e., master spirits] of Water. Nuvewkan Uhokri keh igkis hene. I think Uhokri [God] made them, like this. Heme kama madikte nor awayg But not all men in the world know. amadga hawkri hiyak. Ke un ganag. Like, that they are the Source Nerras tavara. Kayeb. Uwakti. of Water. Those: Tavara. Kayeb. Uwakti. No! Kawa! Awaku nah aya ka aynsima nerras Because I have asked many times, nor ku pariye lekkolya amin those who school [study] about hawkri. Igkis awna igkis ka hiyak. the world. They say they do not know.

David: Pariye kayeb? Ba ig datka?19

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Ininewa. Nerrasnewa ku pariye kanivwiye aka warukma. Igkis [unclear: tepew? ikaw?] ku hiyak. Seme igkis kawnata ka hiyak ba kayeb. Ba igkis hiya ba datkam? Igkis ka hiyak.

That’s all. Those who work with stars. They explain what they know [or: they act like they know what they are talking about]. But they also do not know if it is Kayeb. They do not know if they are seeing an anaconda or not. They do not know.

Like the other rain stars, Kayeb is an anaconda and a shaman and can take many forms. Emiliano notes that Kayeb gets his name from the word karewbet, which means coiled up, curved, or twisted—an association also noted by Fabiola Jara in her survey of Arawakan astronomy.20 Across the Rio Urucauá on the island of Mawihgi, Kiyavwiye Uwet explained that Kayeb wears a particular dance headdress, an iyuwti kamewgane, which is a circular crown of small breast-feathers, and not an iyuwti kavanyekhaki which is the larger headdress with macaw tail feathers sticking up from a back plate made of wood or cotton.21 His carving of the constellation (see below) is of a two-headed anaconda with a long hand reaching into the region of the Crux or Southern Cross. The carving demonstrates that the body of the constellation occupies the dark space between the surrounding stars. In the account of Kiyavwiye Sarisri, Kayeb is a healer22 whose long hand can grab the Master of Sickness from far off, and who carries healing servants. The idea to try wood carving was a last-ditch effort, in 2005, after the relative failure of our efforts to encourage people to render the constellations with pencil and paper. While some had drawn forms (e.g., the Hyades) in ways that were recognizable, most attempts to ask people to represent the constellations on paper with stick figures using dots or asterisks for stars were so ambiguous as to be of little use. The success of wood carving in representing the rain stars suggests that our earlier jointhe-dot or stick-figure approach to astronomy was based on the wrong principles, since the constellations are not known along the Urucauá as points of light on a two-dimensional blank canvas, but as living beings whose life (or vitality) would be in the benches depicting them.23 Peter Roe suggests that in Amazonia stars and dark space need to be understood in a figure-ground relationship.24 We would agree but go further—the carvings offer suggest that a different way of worldmaking is at play in the fields of the Amazon: one that is made not by a three dimensional box of empty space, but by interrelating creatures and their movements. The difference between the representational episteme in the stick-figure approach and a relational one implicit in the carvings of the

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Figure 15.  Kayeb, carved by Uwet Manuel Antônio dos Santos in October 2005

stars as beings keys to the difference between “things in the ground” and “reading the tracks of the ancestors” since the constellations are not conceptualized as points in empty space, but as creatures that move and interact. Much as Roe’s research assistants drew his attention to the importance of the dark sky, particularly the dark patches in the brightest parts of the Milky Way, Kiyavwiye Emiliano uses the dark sky to locate Kayeb in the night sky. Here, those dark patches reference a story of two jaguars attacking a deer—in which the jaguars are dark patches of the Milky Way and the stinger of the constellation of Scorpius forms the horns (gituw) of the deer. In the wide range of stories collected about this part of the sky, quite a few stories emerge. The elder Kiyavwiye Ishawet, resident far upstream on Yanawa island which is about two hours’ paddle from the busy villages nearer Kumene, says he does not know the stars that make up the Deer and the Jaguar, though he has heard of them. He sees Scorpius’s stinger as Kayeb’s head and puts Kayeb’s body in the dark parts of the Milky Way. In his version, the pointer stars of the Southern Cross—Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar—are Kayeb’s two hands, not his two heads. Other narrators

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on this river recognize these as the two Poling Stars or Takehpene—two brothers poling alongside Kayeb, searching for a wife who has turned into a turtle.25 Kiyavuno (“Senhora”) Parakwayan, revered grandmother of many on the island of Kwikwit, describes the Takehpene as not the heads of Kayeb but the tracks of a boat that is poling in the water alongside the boat of Kayeb. In our view, this range of stories suggests that there are many stories told about the night sky. Yet across the collection of tales, the narrative of Kayeb is by far the most prominent, almost certainly because of its links to the rain and to travelers to the underworld who need a ride home. David: Is there a story about Kayeb? Parakwayan: There is Kayeb [the Two-Headed Anaconda Constellation]. There is Takehpene [the Poling Stars] Ku unad ig takahpa. When the flood waters are high, he poles [through the flooded grasslands around the sky river] Ay aviku warik ig kadahan gimun. Here in the river [the Milky Way] Ayhte gimun Kayeb. he has his boat.27 [Up] there far away alongside [present with] Kayeb. Heme ku aysaw unad igkis takahpa. But when [seasonal] flood waters Hawata ke wi[x]wiybe. Aybe. are high, they [pole?]. Like we do. Here [on earth]. Takehpene uwarya. Kadahan They went hunting the little uwar estuwa gidahan. [. . .] [cabeçudo] water turtle. There is a story about him. [. . .] Nah ka hiyap kuri. Ke minikwakbe. I cannot see, like long ago. Are Mmah kadahan ayhte inut? they up in the sky now? They are Kadahan kuri aka ini. there, now.

David: Ba kadahan estuwa amin Kayeb?26 Parakwayan: Kadahan Kayeb. Kadahan ta kehpene.

Kiyavwiye Uwet Manoel Antônio dos Santos, storyteller extraordinaire, who lives on the island of Mawihgi across the river from Kumene, links Kayeb’s rains with the jaguars. This interview took place at night, while he pointed at the sky with the laser pointer that David offered him. Neg Kayeb wayk payak aka givig kawokwine.28 Neg kawokwine aka neg kawokwine huwit ayteke gitivut atan.

Kayeb rains together with his pet jaguars. That one jaguar with that [other] jaguar bearing down on [the deer] here.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Ig wade pakwa ayegbiy ay. Ay iyt ay.

Pahavwi kamaxgi ayteke giduhyamadga. Pahavwi kamaxgi [unclear: gihepkatak? giharaptak?] ay. Igkis kanum Kayeb givig. Neg Kayeb kavigyene inere. Embe ineki keh kiyavwiyegben kanum: -Kawokwine Kayeb givig!

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He [the deer] is right in the middle, here. Here, the deer is here. [Uwet points at it with the laser pointer.] One [jaguar] has caught him, on his back side. One [jaguar] has caught him from [his face side? chasing from the other side?], here. They call them, Kayeb’s pets [familiar spirits]. Kayeb has tamed those [jaguars]. Therefore the elders say “The jaguars are Kayeb’s pets.”

On the island village of Kamuywa (“Sun’s Place”), Kiyavwiye Sarisri Davi Espirito Santo’s stories tended to reflect the interests of the farmer, and consistently attended to the correlation of dawn stars, seasonal weather, and the ecosystem: Sarisri: Murok pitatye. Warukma ig pitatye nor Kayeb.29 Kayeb. Kuri ig danuha wot ada ig waykwiye. Nikwe payak aka mayg. Ka aynsima mayg kuwis. Kayeb wayk. Wayk. Wayk. Kuri ku ig wayk. Estuwa gidahankis ku ig tivikwye amadgawa ginawiya. Ka aynsima mayg. Ka aynsima mwok. Nikwe ig tivik.[. . .] Datka ig. Murok gahawkri. Lesley: Aysaw ig kavusa? Sarisri: Ig kavusa arimkat kayg ‘dezembro’ nutuhbe. Heneme ka ik un. Aynesa un. Ik ada kariwruyan kan. Ik ada iygyan er kan. Aynesa un.

Sarisri: The first rains. The first star is Kayeb. Kayeb comes up to us, so that he can start raining [falling to earth]. Together with the wind then. There is already lots of wind. Kayeb rains and rains and rains. Now when he starts raining. Their [the ancestors’] story says that he journeys on his boat. There is lots of wind. There is lots of rain. Then he departs. [. . .] He is an anaconda. The Grandfather of Rains. Lesley: When does he begin? Sarisri: He begins around the month of “December,” I believe. But it is not enough water [to flood the grasslands]. Just a little water. It is enough for the kariwru fish [tamatuatá fish] to spawn. Enough for the young iyg fish [traira fish] to lay eggs. Just a little water.

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Ariwntak ig maviya kuwis kuri tavara.

When he has passed, then it is Tavara [the kingfisher constellation].

The association of a water boa with Scorpius is iconic in Amerindian astronomies.30

2. The Second Rain: Tavara, the Kingfisher (February) After Kayeb, comes Tavara, the Kingfisher, marked by the three stars in a row that resemble a kingfisher in flight with wings outstretched. They form part of the constellation known in formal astronomy as Aquila the Eagle (made up of the stars Tarazed, Altair, and Alshain), and correlate with the stars noted by Peter Roe as the King Vulture stars in Shipibo lore.31 Fabiola Jara notes the significance of Aquila elsewhere in Arawakan lore, but the associations she recounts are not paralleled in our recordings.32 Tavara disappears at dusk in mid-December but reappears at dawn in mid-February. Kiyavuno (Senhora) Parakwayan gives this account of Tavara’s journey: Now Tavara himself also follows [the path of Kayeb, and of the sun] up in the sky. Kuri kabayweke pis hiyavgi ay Now early in the morning, you see kuwis. him already here. Ku pase ig wayk. Kayeb wayk. wayk. Now he begins to rain. Kayeb Ig arewke rains. [He] rains. He dries up. Ig inute. Pase ig inut aytwe han. He [appears] high up. After he is up, he comes this way. [beckons east to west] Kuri tavarame tivik. Inme tavara Now Tavara begins to leave. The tivik. Tavara leaves. Lawe ig wayk hawata ig wayk akiw. When he rains. [He] also rains Pase ig arawka. Inut. Hawata akiw. again. When he has cleared [dried up, or after there has been a short dry spell] he comes up [in the east]. Again. Kuri arewke inutwi. Barewye arivwi Now [he] dries up in the sky akiw. above. After a good while [drying] again. Ig tivik akiw. He leaves again [points to the southwestward]. Parakwayan: Kuri igme tavara hawata makeknene avit inutwi.33

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Tavara appears together with his food, all the little silver ikar (piaba) fish. Kiyavuno Pupta, who is wife to Kiyavwiye Ishawet, explains it in this way: Ig yagahg! Ig kadahan gimana ikar.34 Heneme ayhte gimun. Ayhte inut. Atanme yuma. Nah hiyavgi. Nah aki pit. Ig ayhte. Ig himak ayhte. Tiyegem ig kahayak. Msanbi kahayak.

[Tavara] is stretched out! He has his food, the ikar fish. But way up high on his boat [or, where he is]. Here there is none [ikar fish]. [If] I see him. I will show it to you. He is way over there. He sleeps over there. At night, he is visible. In the dark, he is visible.

Kiyavwiye Sarisri explains what to expect in the season of Tavara’s dawn rising. Lesley: What does Tavara send? Sarisri: Tavara sends [rain]. Now he sends lots more water. Then there are lots of water turtles [tracajá]. Ka aynsima punamna. There are lots of caiman [jacaré-tinga]. Ka aynsima uwar kariymadga. There are lots of uwar turtles [cabeçudo]. Hiyeg takah. Igkis kamax ka People pole [through the flooded aynsima im. grasslands]. They catch lots of fish. Tavara awahkis inere. That is what Tavara sends. Ayteke ku tavara mpiya kuwis. Afterward when Tavara has already Yuma akiw. crossed over. There is no more [rain]. Nikwe kuri uwaktime. Uwakti wayk Then it is the time for Uwakti. hawata akiw. Uwakti also rains again. Lesley: Pariye tavara awahkis?35 Sarisri: Tavara awahkis. Kuri ig awahkis pikiyeste un. Nikwe ka aynsima mewka.

At our request, Kiyavwiye Uwet carved the constellation, and instructed his youngest daughter, Dansa dos Santos, on how to paint it. Note the details of the bright stars on the wings in the finished carving, as the stars in question are very bright and easy to see. Uwet: Neg ku kanumka Tavara. Mwok gahawkri neg.36

Uwet: He is the one who is called Tavara. He is a Grandfather [Master Spirit] of Rains.

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Figure 16.  The carving of Tavara

Neg nopsad . . . ka nopsimahad kuhivrad. Ig kadahan gihanbiy han. Amin inere gihanbi. Inere pahatra gihanbiy inut han.

He is big . . . such a huge bird!

He has his wings, this way. Regarding his wings. That is one of his outstretched wings, up, this way. Sema kote kahayak kabayhtiwatma. But it is not yet clearly visible. Ig kadahan ikar han butak sema He has ikar [fish], this way, behind kote kahayak. him, but they are not yet visible. Awaku hawkri kasayan inut. Pis Because the weather is hazy, up hiyak? above. You understand? He has ikar fish. Ig kadahan ikar. Ig kadahan ikar han pitatak. He has ikar fish, this way, in front [of him]. Ig kadahan ikar ayteke butak. He has ikar fish, on this side, behind him. Neg tavara kiyavwiyegben kanum He, Tavara, the elders called him, mwok gahawkri. “the Grandfather of Rains.” Neg tavara an kuhivra. Ka He, Tavara, is a bird. Such a huge nopsimahad kuhivrad. bird!

Journeys with the Rain Stars Ig neg. Heme gihanbi. Ku pi keh Tavara. Pi keh inin. Pi keh ig. Pi keh ayteke. Ada gihanbi.

Arakat ku pi keh paha warukma amadga gihanbi aytekena. Paha warukma ayteke amadga inin. Ig tavara arakat gidahan ada ig mwok gahawkri. Neg digisese kariy. Neg digise madikte kariy. Muwapuw hiyeg takah kariymadgew. Neg! David: Kiyavwiye, ba kadahan warukma ku pariye igkis kanum Tavara Akivara? Uwet: Ya! [Inereninwa wakuw?] Inerewa Tavara Akivara. Neg! Inme gihanbiy inere. Neg ayteke gihanbi. Igyewa tavara neg. Inme neg gihanbi. Inere arakat . . . ku pi hiya ku kayeb pituke kuwis igme38 ku waykse mwok. Ig waykse mwok. Ig digisase kariy made! Pahakte kariy! Made hiyeg takah muwapuw kariymadgew. Awaku inin . . . neg pi kahwite giwkis made ay. Kiyavwiyebe ig awna: -Ig pi kahwite.

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He is that one. But [those stars are] his wings. If you are making [identifying the constellation of] Tavara. You do this. You make him. You make him, on this side. [These stars are] for his wings. It is a sign [symbol] that you make one star on his wing, on this side. [Another] one star, on this side, on this. He, Tavara, shows his [stars?] for he is a Grandfather of Rain. He floods the grasslands. He floods all the grasslands. People can pole everywhere on the [flooded] grasslands. David: Senhor, is there a star called, “the Master of Tavara”?37 Uwet: Yes! [that one, in the center?] That one is the Master of Tavara. Him! However, that one is his wing. That one is his wing, on the other side. That one, is the real Tavara. However, that one is his wing. That is a sign . . . if you see that Kayeb has already set, it is [now] he [Tavara] who causes rain to fall. He causes rain to fall. He floods all the grasslands. Completely [flooding] the grasslands! All the people pole everywhere through the flooded grasslands. Because of this . . . he pours out more than any of them here. Like the elder [Uwet’s grandfather] would say, “He pours out more.”

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Ig awna: -Ig pi kadahante wohska giwkis made ay. Inakni kuri. [Ihamwi giwn?] Ig kahwi ariw made. Embe ineki keh ku pi hiya Kayeb ka kahwiyneku sema tavarame pi kahwinek Tavara digisase kariy made. Kayeb ka digise sema Tavara digise kariy.

He said, “He has more manioc beer than all of them here!” That is it then. [The shaman’s words?] He pours out more than all of them. So that is why, if you see Kayeb does not pour out [much], Tavara instead will pour it out. Tavara will flood all the grasslands. Kayeb does not flood it, only Tavara floods the grasslands.

Later that evening, Kiyavwiye Uwet sang Tavara’s song: Yes. He is a kingfisher. Now that Maygikwene [Wind being], he lives in Maywaka [this present sky world or atmosphere]. Yuma hiyeg hiyekten. No person sees him. Inin avat kuri. Igkis kanum Now, this song. They call it, Yemaygekwene. Yemaygekwene [The Wind Being Song]. Ig usakwa ariku maygakwa. He lives in the winds [air space]. Ig tavara usakwa sema Maygakwa ig He, the kingfisher, lives only in the winds. usakwa. Inme ini Kwekwene igkis kanum But this Kwekwene [parrot Kwekwene awaku kweravimye ku perch or squawking place], they call it Kwekwene because it is kiney ig bat amadga gevwiy. Kweravimye, where he sits on his bench. Ayhte inurik ig bat amadga gevwiy. Way up in Inurik [the upper world], he sits on his bench. Yuma hiyeg hiyekten sema igwa No person sees him, only the ihamwi hiyavri. shaman himself sees him. Ig ihamwi hiya. He, the shaman sees. Ig wew ku samah tiviga. He walks as he journeys. Ig tivik. Ig akumne. Ig hiya tavara. He goes. He smokes. He sees the kingfisher. Kuri ig usakwa sema arikut Now he lives only in Maywaka Maywaka. [this present sky world]. Ineki keh pakni han: That is why it is sung like this: Ya. Ig tavara ig.39 Inakni kuri Maygikwene ig usakwa sema ariku Maywaka.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Yemayhrey, kwehne, tah-pahy-ra! (x2) Yara, kwehkwehkeyone, tahpahy-ra! (x2) Yemayhrey, kwehne, tah-pahy-ra! (x2) -Ive tavara inut! Ive ku ig ayhte inut! Bawa ig usakwa sema arikut Maywaka. Inme giwetrit ku kiney ig bat. Kweravimye. In Kweravimye usakwa wade akigbimne warik. Ineki keh ig ihamwi batak ini avat. Ka aynsima ihamwi batak inere avat. Ku aysaw ig kayne ig bat akimpu baribwi. Ig iwe givig. Ig keh akisyi baribwi nopsanyo akigsa asugik. Ig batahkiswa atere. Ig batahkis amakut adah ig paksig. Ig paksig gavan.

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Yemayhrey, kwehne, tah-pahy-ra! (x2) Yara, kwehkwehkeyone, tahpahy-ra! (x2) Yemayhrey, kwehne, tah-pahy-ra! (x2) “Look at the kingfisher, up above! Look how he is way up above!” But he lives just in Maywaka. However his place where he sits [is] Kweravimye. This Kweravimye is right at the edge of the river. That is why the shaman performs this song. The shaman performs this song, so much! When he is dancing, he sits at the foot of the dance pole [flag pole]. He takes his pets [animal spirits, helpers, familiars that are inside the Kingfisher bench]. He decorates his dance pole [with] a little flag on top of it. He sits down there on it so that he can sing. He sings the song.

3. Uwakti, the Third Rain (March–April) Uwakti is generally understood as an ancestor who ascended into the skies from a point in the Arukwa landscape called Uwaktewni, or Uwakti’s Spring. He builds his house—four posts with a central post for the roof—around the same time as Pegasus is rising in the eastern sky ahead of the sun, in late March through to early April. When we asked people to draw Uwakti, the constellation was fairly easily recognizable: the four stars with an off-center midpoint looked remarkably like the Great Square of Pegasus, with several smaller stars inside the square that mark the presence of the man called Uwakti.

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Figure 17.  The carving of Uwakti

Lesley: Aysaw kavusa uwakti?40 Sarisri: Uwakti kavusaw aharit no . . . março aharit. Ku pis hiya uwakti wayk kahyewa aharit março ka aynsima unad. Igkis kanum inere Kahambarewka awaku eg kahamabar kew ka aynsima guw. [. . .] Lesley: Uwakti pariye gihivak? Sarisri: Kaba ig ke warukmabe. Ig ke waravyube ig uwakti. Ay ig aka inin kuri. Heneme kabeyweke ig pese. Ke ba quatro horas. Kwewanek uwakti pese. Nikwe ig uwakti. Estuwa gidahan.

Lesley: When does Uwakti begin? Sarisri: Uwakti begins around . . . March. If you see that Uwakti really rains in March, there is a lot of water. [The Palikur] call this the “Taperebá Fruit Season” because the taperebá trees bear lots of fruit. [. . .] Lesley: What does Uwakti look like? Sarisri: He is almost like a large star [warukma]. Uwakti is like a small star [waravyu]. He is here [up in the sky] now. But he will come out in the early morning. Around 4 a.m. Later Uwakti will come out. So then, this is Uwakti’s story.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Ig kavinene ayhte uwaktewni. Waxri kewye uwaktewni. Nah ka hiyak ba pis hiyak Davi? Aynin.

Ayhte kuruvi. Amun iwevravuwnin. Ayge. Ayge pahat mahakwa humaw. Ig awna ini payt adukwen. Minikwak kadahan payt ay. Amekene givin. Uwakti giw. Nikwe ig tivik. Ig wagehe inute. Ku ig ayhte inut kuwis. Ig awna giwn: Kuri me tivik inute. Butyevwi ta nuvin akiw kuri igkis hiyavunek ayhte inute. Nah awahkis mwok yiminek avanenekwa. Nikwe ig ikise neg mahakwa ayge. Payt adukwen. Himekepket adukwen. Uwakti ig. Pitatye yuma uwakti. Yuma warukma inut. Heme ig wagehe nikwe humaw. Ayteke igkis hiyamni hene: Inyerwa humaw. Igkis awna: Kabay! Ig awahkis murok ka aynsima. Ayteke ig maviya. Msekwe pahavwi kayg akiw. Kuri kusuvwi. Kuri kusuvwi wayk.

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He lived way off at Uwaktewni [on Ukupi Island]. There is land called Uwaktewni [an area with a lake and a point of land on Ukupi, called “Uwakti’s Spring”]. I do not know if you know about it, David? It is close by. It is near Kuruvi. Among the iwevra bamboo. There. There a lake was formed. He said, “This is the traces [tracks; ruins; remains] of a house.” “Long ago, there was a house here. Our ancestor’s house.” “His name is Uwakti. Then he left. He climbed up [into the sky].” “Now he [lives] way up above.” [Uwakti] said, “Now I am leaving for up above. [If] my descendants go to my house, now they will only see me way up above. I will always send you rain.” So he left that lake there. The house ruins. The ruins of the sleeping place. He is Uwakti. Before there was no Uwakti [constellation]. There was no warukma star up above. But he climbed up, then he appeared. Afterward they saw this to be true. “He really appeared!” They said, “It is a good [sign]!” “He will send lots of rain.” After [Uwakti] passes by, one more month ends. Now it is Kusuvwi [Constellation]. Now Kusuvwi rains to earth.

Uwakti brings a heavy rain but not the heaviest, perhaps in part explained by his not being directly in the World’s River, but between it and the path of the sun.

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Between the rains of each rain star, there are said to be short, dry spells. Uwakti’s dry spell is the only one given a specific name: it is called kahem (in Creole) and abereswan (in Palikur) which means the clearing of the skies. Ishawet: Ba uwakti? Ku samah ig wayk?41 Ig wayk ada pahay paka. Ig arewke. Hiyeg ka kamax kiyesradma. Ig [ka?] ewk unadma. Pahay paka ig arewke. Kuri ig inut aytene. Ig wayk abusku . . . kawkama pahay paka. Abusku hawkri ig waykwad. Ig arewke.

Ishawet: . . . how Uwakti rains? He rains for one week. He clears up [a dry spell]. People don’t catch much. He [doesn’t] bring high waters. For one week [then?] he clears up. Now when he is coming up. He rains for half . . . not even a full week. Half a day he rains. He clears up.

Uwakti is also associated with heavy winds and storms, as this extract from Kiyavwiye Uwet’s version of the Masitwak tale suggests: Uwet: Embe kuri ahwi uwakti danuh. Ig danuh bute.42 Igkis danuh atere. Igkis ayapkere ada tivik amadgat. Ahwi uwakti awna ta git: -Nukebyi! Ka ik ada ayh awaku numun aka mayg! Mwok! Yuma [ayehpep?] amadga numun. Ku aysaw nah manukwiye han yuma [ayehket?]. Sema mayg. Ndahan ka sama. Hiyawa abet mwok. Heme ig bakibe ka ik. Amawka ig wahamni ahwi. Ahwi nemnik. Me ahwi ayh nek. Neg ahwi kadahan kiyapyad nawiyad. Me gahubwad. Inere gidahan yuma sabapti gimun. Awaku gimun pahowte [pitihvit?]. Mwok ka parak atere. Udahanwa ka [pitihma nor?]. Udahan hennenewa. Usuh ute mwok hawata.

Uwet: So then, Grandfather [Master Spirit] Uwakti arrived. He arrived behind. They arrived there. They asked to go onboard [Uwakti’s canoe]. Grandfather Uwakti said to him, “My relative! It is not possible to be transported because my canoe comes with wind! Rain! There is no [transportation for you?] onboard my canoe. When I cross over, there is no [hiding place?]. Only wind. For me [alone], it does not matter. Even in the rain. But for him, the child, it is not possible. He must wait for grandfather. Grandfather is coming. Soon grandfather will transport you. [This] grandfather [i.e., Kusuvwi] has a huge ship. Quite wide. With him, there is no getting wet. Because his canoe is

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completely sealed. Rain does not enter there. Our [canoe] is not sealed. Our [canoe] goes as it is. We are rained upon, also.” Pegasus is noted by Fabiola Jara as significant in Arawakan lore, but the associations she recounts are unfamiliar along the Urucauá.43

4. Kusuvwi ~ Torrents: The Fourth Rain (April–May) The season of Kusuvwi, or “torrents,” begins in late April, the month in which the water rises and the fish disperse. Food is not plentiful in the early part of the season, but by late June to early July, the little silver ikar or tetra fish begin to move in great schools upstream, looking not unlike stars as they jump the rapids in great waves. The kunan (peacock bass) and umayan (piranha) follow, making for a time of plenty in the river. The Kusuvwi season has many dramatis personae, including the familiar two brothers. Kusuvwi Eggutye—literally, Kusuvwi the Older Brother—is a small star cluster similar to the Pleiades that is barely visible because he has been consumed by Awahwi, the three-headed anaconda (in the region of Perseus) who is big enough to swallow worlds, and who must be fought off. Though Kusuvwi Eggutye is small and in the belly of Awahwi, the boat of his younger brother Kusuvwi Isamwitye (Kusuvwi the Younger Brother) follows several weeks later, piloted by the one-legged man who is so very familiar in Amerindian star lore. His name here is Mahuwkatye (“without a thigh,” or “Thighless”), and he is associated with the region around the three main stars of Orion’s belt plus Orion’s dagger, which is Mahuwkatye’s remaining leg. The other stars of Orion form the stern of the ship, the Transporting Stars (Rigel) and the children of Mahuwkatye and Kusuvwi. On board the boat is the bounty of the June–July season, as well as a constellation known as the Seagull (Wanawna), which is Kusuvwi’s small canoe for going ashore. The part of Kusuvwi Isamwitye is played by the Pleiades. He has to shoot the anaconda Awahwi who is about to eat him too. Awahwi dies, but as a spirit-creature he does not rot and remains visible. The drama is, quite literally, cosmic, involving the sun, the stars, and the Milky Way. The account of it marks the northernmost point of the sun’s annual journey across the sky to the point of the June solstice, which will also be the moment at which the sun’s path meets the center of the World’s River, or the Milky Way, or what astronomers would call the center of the galactic plane. The cosmic drama involves turning back, and not allowing this world to be eaten by the anaconda Awahwi.

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Figure 18.  The carving of Kusuvwi’s boat

The scene opens, as it were, when Awahwi (in Perseus) begins to appear in late May on the northern side of the sun’s path. On the morning of the solstice on June 21, the sun rises east-northeast, at azimuth 246 on a sky map with inverted west and east, at exactly the spot where the arm of the Milky Way crosses the solar ecliptic (see figure 1 in the introduction). The drama, annually played out, integrates the change of direction of the stars, the sun’s turnaround, and the height of the rainy season. It also involves another actor who is very familiar in Amerindian stories: the one-legged man (in Orion) called Mahuwkatye, who plays the role of the pilot of the younger brother’s boat. The elder Kiyavwiye Sarisri (Davi), whose flair for the dramatic makes his stories so absorbing, tells the story like this: Lesley: I hear that there are Kusuvwi the Older Brother and [Kusuvwi] the Younger Brother. Sarisri: Ihi. Henewa! Sarisri: Yes. It is true! At first, they were in two boats. Pitatye igkis mmukna nawiy. Kuri igkis tivikwiyekis mmuknamte. So, they journeyed in two boats together. Lesley: Nah timap kadahan kusuvwi. Eggutye. Isamwitye . . .44

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Pahamku nawiy gegni tivik pitatye. The one boat with the older brother went first. Ku ig tivik pitatye kuwis. When he had gone ahead already. Pahavwi datkad. Ka nopsimahad [There was] one large anaconda. datkad. A huge anaconda. Ig woke gibiy ayesri inin hawkri. [When] he opens his mouth, it is the size of this world. Inin datkad. Awahwad. This huge anaconda. Huge Awahwi. Giw awahwi. Ig datkad. His name is Awahwi. He was a huge anaconda. Kuri igme ka hiyaknima Now [the older brother] did not see him. Ig kuwis tivik. Ka amuwa kuwis. He [the older brother] had already gone [into the anaconda’s belly]. He does not shine brightly. Ig ka wew ig kuwis danuh ayge. He doesn’t go anywhere. He has already arrived there. Ig ka kahawka havisgi. He did not have time to shoot him. Ig taris giyaka. Aa! Kawa! Apa ig He pulled back his arrow. “Oh! kuwis danuh ta gibiyakut. No!” He had already entered [the anaconda’s] mouth! Nikwe datka dakerevgi. So the anaconda swallowed him. Datka dakerevgi nikwe. Gisamwi After the anaconda had swallowed nemnik bute. him, his younger brother came up from behind. Kusuvwi gisamwi nemnikbo Kusuvwi’s younger brother was approaching. Ku ig piyawkad. Ig iveg atere. Ig While he was still far away, [the awna ta git mahuwkatye. younger brother] looked there. The [younger brother] spoke to Mahuwkatye. Ig awna: Axtig ayta! Ig dakere [The younger brother] said, “An negni kuwis. Gimune. Haramnaba axtig Monster [a predator; an eater] is coming! He has swallowed piyako! Havisig! my brother already! Ready your arrows! Shoot him!” Ig mahuwkatye avisasew. Mahuwkatye was terrified. Ig awna: Higihwa. Ba ayta [The younger brother] said, “Get huwitene nawiy. Nahwa! Nahwa out of the way! Come back and atere. steer the boat! Let me try! I will go in front there!”

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So then Kusuvwi passed to the front [of the boat]. Kuri aka inin kuri mahuwkatye Even to this present day, ayhte abuwik kusuvwi ginawiya. Mahuwkatye is way back at the stern of Kusuvwi’s boat. Igme kusuvwi muhuksatak. Kusuvwi [the younger brother] is at the prow. Nikwe nor atere ig haviswig. Pang! So then [Awahwi the anaconda] Aka yakot! was there. Kusuvwi [the younger brother] shot him. Twang! With an arrow! Ta! Arikut giwtyak! Datkad! Ka Thunk! Right in his eye! The big anaconda! The huge Awahwi! nopsimahad awahwad. Nikwe ig haviswig. Made ig miya. So then [kusuvwi] shot him. He completely died. Lesley: Awahwi? Lesley: Awahwi? Sarisri: Ya. Awahwi ig miya. Sarisri: Yes. Awahwi died. Ig miya nikwe kusuvwi mpiya. He died, then Kusuvwi [was able to] pass by. Ineki keh madikte hiyeg hiyak kuri That is why everyone can see Kusuvwi kabayhtiwa. Kusuvwi [the younger brother] clearly now. Igme gegni pis hiya henenwa. Whereas the older brother you can barely see. Awaku ig ayhte gitunik datka. Because he is deep inside the anaconda’s belly. [laughter] Payak igme. ku peke gikamkayh. Together with [Mahuwkatye]. Where [Kusuvwi’s] children are. Kadahan kusuvwi gikamkayh wade Kusuvwi has his children, right giwtak mahuwkatye. near Mahuwkatye. Igi mahuwkatye ig hiyegiwa Long ago, he, Mahuwkatye, was a minikwak ay amadga inin. [real] person [living] here on this [earth]. Aynewa ig. He lived here. Awaku ig kamaxe pahavu tino. Because he married a woman. Gihayo. His wife. Nikwe kusuvwi mpiya.

The season is also the source of the abundance in the months to come, and in it the winds associated with Uwakti have largely subsided. Kiyavuno Parakwayan, of Kwikwit, makes this clear in her version of the story:

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If your canoe is small, you will [still] not sink because he [Kusuvwi] is in the ocean. He is in the ocean waters, he is also passing through. Loaded! His canoe. His large boat is fully loaded with people. He does not want waves. He kills all the wind. David: Which people are on [the boat]? Parakwayan: Made ah gatip. Ah Parakwayan: All the tree spirits. Trees that are mature [ripe]. ivatyo. All fish. Peacock bass [tucunaré]. Made im. Kunan. Kihiwri. Pirarucu fish. Made imbet. Bayag. Ig mpiyasa. All kinds of fish. Bayag fish. [As] he passed by. Pase ku ig inut. Embe kuri im When he is up [in the sky]. wagehe. Now then the fish start to climb [upstream]. Im. Ikar. Ikar. Fish. Ikar fish [silver tetra]. Kiyavwiye, nukamayh awna: Senhor [David], my child said, -Mekavrik ka aynsima ikar kuwis “Downstream there are many ikar kavusa wagah. who have started to climb [swim upstream].” Ig awna: Wagehe im. Hawkri kuwis He said, “The fish are climbing. wagahkis. The season has started.” Kuri ku ig inute kuwis ig padak Now when [Kusuvwi] is up above, im.[. . .] he starts to throw fish. [. . .] Ig ayta aka. Ig wagahkis. He brings them. He causes them to climb [upstream]. Ig amadgatak kuri ig padak im. He is onboard, now then he throws the fish [down]. Igkis wagah awaku ig nawiy ada im. [The fish] climb upstream because [Kusuvwi] is the boat for fish. Ineki keh ig wagahkis. That is why he causes them to climb [upstream]. Parakwayan: Ya ku pimun han nopsehsa pis ka buwisa pase awaku ig parawhokwa.45 Ig ahakwew parawhokwa ig mpiya hawata. Dig! Gimun. Ginawiyad dig aka hiyeg. Ig ka mwaka boboh. Ig umehe kamaygviye made. David: Pariye hiyeg amadga?

The association of this season with fish was noted by Claude Levi-Strauss who, in From Honey to Ashes, tells us that “in the Guianese area . . . the Pleiades . . . forecast a plentiful supply of fish”46 and adds also that “in the Guianese myths . . . we have seen . . . the connection between the Pleiades and the movement of fish upstream.”47

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Like Parakwayan, Kiyavwiye Uwet describes Kusuvwi as the anag or the gahawkri—the source or the master spirit of the trees that will grow in the coming season, and that produce the hallucinogenic sap of the tawni tree and the tobacco-like bark of the tawari tree, as well as tobacco, and fruit-bearing trees. In this version, Kusuvwi also carries on board the predator spirits or axtigs. Uwet: Nah tiviknene. Nah waxwiy madikte ah gatip. Egu nawiy.48 Kadahan sakeg. No gatip akebi udahan ba inin. Mpiya amadgew.

Kadahan tawni gitip ku mpiya amadgew.

Kadahan kawokwine. Ka aynsima axtig mpiya gimadgew. Umuh ka nopsimahad sema ka aynsima axtig. Kadahan arakembet axtig mpiya amadgew.

Uwet: [Kusuvwi said,] “I’m going on! I’m carrying all the spirits of the forest. The boat herself.” There is sakeg. The spirit of the sakeg tree [that produces a bright red paint] which is like our human spirits [or: like who we are]. [Uwet imitates someone painting his lips.] There was the spirit of the tawni tree on board. [This tree’s bark is a hallucinogen used in shamanic initiations; it is also used for various medicinal purposes.] There were jaguars. There were lots of axtig monsters on board. The boat was huge but there were many monsters. All kinds of axtig monsters were on board.

In another story told by Kiyavwiye João Felício, he emphasizes the healers on board Kusuvwi, a theme that was repeated in several other stories. Of interest is that he, as head pastor of the Palikur Assembleia de Deus in Kumene, speaks here of shamans in the metaphor of medical doctors: João: Ig amekene tivik amadgewa nawiy. Kusuvwi ginawiya. Ka aynsima hiyeg ayge! Ku igkis kanivwiye amadga nawiy. Ka aynsima mekseh gumadga! Ka aynsima hiyeg kanumka mekseh. Ka aynsima gumadga. Awaku eg ihamwi gihmun.

João: Our ancestor went on board the ship. Kusuvwi’s ship. So many people are there! Those who work onboard the ship. So many doctors are onboard her. So many people called doctors. So many onboard her. Because she is a shaman’s ship.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Ihamwi hiyevune ka garanuhsima ada piyih hiyeg. Ka aynsima ig keh iveyti ada hiyeg. Ig makniw hiyeg ka aynsima.

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The shaman seer/one who sees visions [of what has happened aboard Kusuvwi] has great wisdom/ ability/powers to heal people. He makes lots of medicine for people. He heals many people.

Kiyavwiye Uwet’s version (told in 2008) of the same epic, offers this section of the story in great detail, indicating also the kinds of fish and plants on board Kusuvwi’s boat. His narrative contains also a seagull constellation, and emphasizes the way in which Kusuvwi circles around, and with him, many of the master spirits of the resources that will become abundant in the months of June and July. Uwet: Ya kuri ig kusuvwi minehwe atere.49 Ig iwevri nikwene. Ig katapta ayhte giwntak. Ig ka mwaka ada ig usakwa han aburikut. Awaku aburikut ka kabe axtig! Kadahan tawni ku ugesni ovre. Tawni gutip! Ka aynema ah uges. Gutip ugeswiye ovre. Palikar gutip ugeswiye ovre. Waxak gutip ugeswiye ovre. Nor . . . mmahba nor? Wadidga gutip ugeswiye ovre. Irimwi gutip ugeswiye ovre.

Ukum gutip ugeswiye.

Uwet: And then, he, Kusuvwi, docked there. He took him [the boy] then. He [the boy] climbed aboard, way up near him. He did not want him to stay there at the stern. Because at the stern, there were so many axtig [predators]! There is tawni [the hallucinogenic tree spirit] who circles around [there]. Tawni’s spirit. It is not the [actual] tree here, which circles around. Her spirit circles around. Palikar’s spirit circles around. Waxak’s spirit circles around. That . . . what is that [called]? Wadidga’s spirit circles around. Irimwi’s spirit [the spirit of the tawari tree] circles around. [The thin bark of the tawari tree is used to wrap tobacco to form a cigar.] The spirit of the ukum [milk latex, or sorva tree] tree spirit circles around.

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Like the ones which are here in the present. The leaf-bearing trees. All the leaves upon the trees. Do you know that they circle around onboard [Kusuvwi’s ship]? He ties up, such huge trees. He circles them around onboard. So many! All kinds of predatory spirits circle around onboard her. So he observed this, he stayed on the other side, alongside of him [Kusuvwi]. Ig ay. Ig ay gikak. Ig keh ayge hewke He was here. He was here with tiyegim. him. He stayed there, all night long. Ig ayge gimun. He was there with him [in his boat]. Hewke nikwe. Puwivak. The next morning then. In the Hawakanewa ke ininbe. daylight. In the early morning, like this. Ig awna ta git: -Nex! Asa woke He said to him, “Grandson! Go ahead and open that trunk. There udahan nor kiyesrad. Pahow is one large trunk here. I know that kiyesrad ay. Nah hiyak ku pi mativwe. Ka nahme. Nah kote you are hungry. [But] not me. I am [mativwe]. Ik ada nah kamax pina not yet [hungry]. I can go two days hawkri avit nah ax. Heneme nah before I eat [again]. But I can see iveg ku pi mativwe. that you are hungry.” And he opened the large trunk Ya ig woke eg kiyesrad nikwene. then. Ig awna: “Pariye inerewa ay?” He said, “What is [in] there?” Giwn: “Nuhiw! Masara! Piyana He said, “Grandson! Roasted [fish]! Two peacock bass are kunan ayteke. Iwe piyana kunan over there. Take the two roasted masara.” peacock bass!” Ig ewke ta git kusuvwi. He brought them to Kusuvwi. Ig ewke payak aka miyug. He brought them on a plate. Ig ahegbete gidahan gimana. He prepared his food for him. Ig ahegbete. Ig iwe garap nikwene. He prepared it. He took out the fish bones then. Ig ahegbetene gimanakis He prepared their food very well, kabayhtiwa nikwene. then. Ig awna git neg. Ig pituknaw He spoke to him. He gutted the kunan. peacock bass. Ku pariye ku akak inin. Gavanvuwwata ah. Made gavan avewata ah. Pis hiyak egkis ugeswiye amadga nor? Ig waneke ka nopsimahad ahrad. Ig ugeswiye gumadga. Ka aynsima! Arakembet axtig ugeswe gumadga! Embe ig hiyakni ig usekwe ayteke giwntak.

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He said to him, “I brought the fish to here.” Ig ewkne im ayteke. He brought the fish from over there. Ig pitukne garayh. Harayh! Harayh! He took out the entrails. Slice! Harayh! Slice! Slice! Ig pitukavye im made. He gutted all the fish. Wakehte nor gamar usekwe avit nor Only the skin remained on top of the fish bones. garap. Ig ikevri paha. He gave him one. Kuri igkis axne nikwe. Pisenwa Now they ate then. They finished gaxwenkis. their eating. Ig awna git: “Nex! Asa padak wowbi He said to him, “Grandson! ayhte akigbimne nawiy.” Go ahead and throw our leftovers away, over at the prow of the ship!” Nawiyad kanopsimahad han. The ship was so huge, like this. Ig muhuk ayhte waykwit. He descended far below. Avit eg dax ta ahakwat un. Before it touched the water. Ig danuh atere nikwe. Ig padak. He arrived there then. He threw it. Igwata hiya giwbi. Baw! Ig hiya He, himself, saw the leftovers. tuboh! Splash! He saw it splash into the water! Ig hiya kiyapyad kunanad! He saw a huge peacock bass! Ig ivegeyh atere. He was gazing there. He said, “What is it there?” Ig awna giwn: “Pariyeki ayge?” Giwn: “Kawa. Nah padeke wowbi He said, “No. I threw the leftovers atere. Ya kunanad bayhg! Sigis han there. And a peacock bass [just kunanad. Kiyapyad kunanad!” appeared] in plain sight! It [swam away as] a large peacock bass, in this direction. A huge peacock bass!” “And throw [another] one!” “Ya padak paha.” He took it. He threw another Ig iwi. Ig padak paha akiw. one. “Ku pi hiya hawata akiw embe “If you see the same thing again, well, good!” boh”. Ig padak giwbi baw atere. Kabawh! He threw [his leftovers]. Splash! Sigiseyh hawata. There! Ker-splash! It swam away also. “Ya ba?” “And what [happened]?” “Hawata nah hiyavrap. Embe nor “I saw it also. So [it turned into] kunan. that peacock bass.” Ig awna git, “Nah ewkne im aytne.”

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Lawe nah danuh tahan neku. Nah waxrep ta git papay neku. Pome neku julye aharit neku ku pis pes warikmurit ada kadasa atere. Ku pi hiya pahavwi kunanad. Kanopsimahad kunanadmine. Pi havisenek. Pi iwasa. Gumin made wohe! Wohe pahapte aka miget! Pi hiyak wowbi. Nor wowbi. Nikwe pi awna git pig. Pi awna: -Pa! Nah awna pit. Nor kunan ku pariye wis ax gikak ahwi kusuvwi. Nah padeke wowbiy ta unihkwat. Nor ku kunan. Ig awna nut: -Nor ku pariye aharit julye pome kadahan. Nah ka kinetihwa pit amin sema kuri nah kinetihwa pit amin.”

“When I arrive over there. I will take you to your father. At the beginning of July, if you go out onto the river to hunt fish there. If you see one peacock bass. A huge sized peacock bass. You shoot it. You look at it. Its body is all burnt! It is completely burnt [as] with charcoal. You know it is the leftovers. It is the leftovers. Then you say to your father. You say, ‘Dad! I say to you. This is the peacock bass which we were eating with Grandfather Kusuvwi.’ I threw the leftovers into the water. It is this [very same] peacock bass. He said to me that those are the [young, blackened] bass which are [present] at the beginning of July. I did not tell you [before], but now I am telling you about it.” “Is that how it is?” “Yes. Look at its body. It is roasted! Look! Blackened roast.” Then they arrived there then.

“Mmahbe hene?” “Ya. [Pi ive gimin?] Tepkarad! Ive! Tepka masara.” Kuri lawe ku igkis danuh atere nikwene. Kuri igkis sunap umuh ta iwevri Now, they borrowed a canoe to awaku ig ka minahwa ta ihapkat carry him, because he [Kusuvwi] awaku kiyapyad nawiyad! Pis hiyak? could not dock at the shore. Because his ship was huge! You understand? Nor ihapka ka imihadma ada The shoreline was too shallow for minahwa ta ihapkat. him to dock at the shore. Igkis sinap umuh gidahan. They borrowed a canoe for him. [the seagull] Nor ku pariye Tumeh kinetihwa That [person] which Tumeh amin. Wanawna. [Ishawet] spoke about, the wanawna [seagull]. Wanawna ta iwevri. Eg iwevri atere The seagull took him. She took nikwe. him there then. Ig danuh atere nikwene. He arrived there then. Ig kataptase wanawna. Wanawna He climbed aboard the seagull. waxri ta git gig. The seagull took him to his father.

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Now, he took his shaman’s basket. Because he had almost turned into a shaman. Because he had stayed over there, a long time. Ig ugesbaki kabahte ke ihamwi ig He had transformed [into uges. someone] almost like a shaman. Now, he took his shaman’s basket. Kuri ig iwe giyamtig. Ig katapse giyamtig ta amadga He climbed onboard with his wanawna. shaman’s basket onto the wanawna [seagull]. Wanawna waxrevri ta git gig. The seagull carried him to his father. He arrived there. He deposited Ig danuh atere ig sarayhgi ta him on the shore. [. . .] ihapkat.[. . .] Ig awna ta git. Ig awna: “Kibeyne pi He spoke to him. He said, “Thank waxrene nukamayh atere.” you for carrying my child there.” Kuri ig amekene ig awna ta git Then he, our ancestor, spoke to wanawna. Ig awna: “Wanawna! Ka him, the seagull. He said, “Seagull! It is okay, that you brought my sam pi waxre nukamayh atan.” child here.” Nikwe wanawna avim inin hawkri Then, the seagull, at that time, he ig hiyegte ig! was a person! Ka ke kurima. Nikwe ig hiyegte. Not like it is today. Then, he was Gannuh. a person. He had the ability to do works of wonder. Heme kuri aka inin kuri ig ugeswe But now, at the present time, he kuhivra. has turned into a bird. At first, he was actually a person. Pitatye ig hiyegiwa ig. Embe So it is, Senhor. henebaki kiyavwiye. Igwa ihamwi waxri tah amadga He, the shaman himself, was gihmun. Nopsehsa gihmun. Ig carried over there on his canoe. kadahan barewye gihmunisa. His canoe was tiny. He had a beautiful little canoe. Amadga ini ig iwevri. Ig waxri ta Upon this, he carried him. He git gig. brought him to his father. Kuri ig iwe giyamtig. Awaku ig wageste kabahte ke ihamwibe. Awaku ig msekwe ka aynsima ayhte.

The idea of renewal, or rejuvenation, is also familiar in regional astronomical literature. Kiyavwiye Emiliano’s version of the story also emphasizes the movement of Kusuvwi. In this discussion he emphasizes the swirling waters of the celestial river in this part of the sky—a theme that will recur later. Of interest is the idea of a person splashing into the water with Kusuvwi and crossing over to the other side, to find himself young

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again. Significant too is the way in which he speaks about Kusuvwi anchoring his boat when he has crossed to the other side. The crossings in the annual night sky are several, and to be able to speak of them as predictable events, one must have a way of assembling interrelated elements in the sky. Annually, nightly and seasonally, there are multiple crossings to know. The sun crosses the sky, overhead and underneath, as does the moon50 and planets, and the Milky Way /World’s River, which crosses the Sun’s path at the solstices (see figures 13 and 14 in this chapter). The thundering that Kiyavwiye Emiliano mentions as Kusuvwi dragging his anchor is typical of the season, in which very loud thundering occurs quite unpredictably. When the thunder rolls, it is not uncommon for people to look up and comment that “there’s Kusuvwi’s anchor.” For Kiyavwiye Emiliano, there are two kinds of thunderings: the anchor of Kusuvwi’s boat, and also the arrival of the season’s master spirits at their destinations. Emiliano: Igkis kinetihwa amin inin estuwa. Ku wis . . . ke ininbe wixwiy ay kuri. Wixwiy ku payak aka kiyavunki.51 Heneme kahawkanek ku kusuvwi wageswaneku ku aysaw wis . . . ku aysaw neg awna: “Nah wageswiye aka kusuvwi.” Embe ig tivik. Kuri aysaw ig danuh ta anavit egu nor tip ku kiney amiyan. Ka aynsima amiyan wageswa ayge. Kuri kusvuwi awna git: “Tuboh kurin!” Ku aysaw ig tuboh ig iyaka ta pahambakat. Nikwe ig wagah amadga kusuvwi ginawiya. Ig humaw takwaye hiyegad. Ku aysaw tino eg humaw himano. Ku aysaw ig aytwe. Ke negbe. Ke pisbe.

Emiliano: They speak about this story. That we . . . like we who are here now. We who are together with the elders [ken, or knowledge, or wisdom]. But there is a season when Kusuvwi circles around. When we . . . when someone says, “I will circle around with Kusuvwi!” So then, he goes. Now when he arrives under the rock where there are strong currents [or swirling waters]. There are many currents swirling around there. Now Kusuvwi said to him, “Now, splash into the water!” When he splashed into the water, he surfaced on the other side. So then, he climbed up onto Kusuvwi’s boat. He became a young person again. Those who were women, they became young girls. When he arrives. Like him. Like you.

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[If you] come and arrive here, at your house. You depart [and then] stay at your house. Neg tivik hawata msakwa ta He departs also [and then] givinwat. remains at his house. Neg tivik msakwa ta givinwat. Neg Another departs and remains at his house. Another departs. tivik. [points in the cardinal directions] Heneme amekenegben awna But our ancestors spoke these giwnkis: “Ku aysaw kusuvwi words, “When Kusuvwi’s people gihiyega wageswiye gikak. Ku aysaw circle around with him. When he ig tivikwiye ta givinwat. Ku ig goes to his home. When he arrives danuh ta givinwat. Ig tima digihwa at his home. He hears thunder ta givinwate.” coming from his house.” Igkis awna: -Kusuvwi gihiyega They say, Kusuvwi’s people have kuwis danuh ta givinwat[kis]. already arrived at [their] home. From way upstream [south]. Aytohti tiwriktak. Aytohta From way over in the west. From uvitkiyavritak. Ariw wahamatak. the east. From the ocean [north]. Ariw parawhokwatak. Atere ayge There, where they live. igkis usakwa. [I.e., when you hear the thunder coming from those directions you know they have arrived at their homes.] David: Ba inin ku kiney giyokman? David: Are you talking about where his anchor is? Emiliano: Kawa! Igwa kusuvwi ku Emiliano: No! That is Kusuvwi, aysaw ig humaw. himself, when he reappears [in the east]. Igwa kusuvwi ku aysaw ig humaw. Kusuvwi, himself, when he reappears. Ku ig wayk kuwis mataytak. When he has already rained all day [i.e., without stopping]. Takuwa mataytak. Ahewkemni ig Tomorrow, without stopping. humawhe ta pahambakat. The next day, he reappears on Nikwe igwa isahkis giyokman atere. the other side. Then, he, himself, drops his anchor there. Kiyapyad digidgiyad ig keh. He makes huge [loud] thunderings. Madikte hiyeg awna: “Kuwis All the people say, “Already, kusuvwi minahwa.” Kusuvwi has docked.” [Ku pis ] aytwe danuh atan pivinwat. Pis tivik msakwa ta pivinwat.

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Nikwe ku aysaw ig kusuvwi humaw. Ig padak giyokman. Ayteke pisenwa nikwe David: Ba ik ada pis awna amin giyokman akiw? Emiliano: Aa! giyokman. Pahat arikna. Pis hiya madikte hiyeg kadahan akebyi nor. Mmahki wis awna arikut parantunka? David: Ancora? Emiliano: Nor ancora. Nikwe ig kadahan akebyi nor hawata. Ku aysaw ig humaw pahambakat. Ig padakwa ada kahadmakama nawiy msakwa. Kim! Pahambakatak!

So then, when he, Kusuvwi, appears. He throws his anchor. Afterward, it is done then. David: Can you tell me about his anchor again? Emiliano: Oh! His anchor. One thing. You see, all people have those [anchors]. What do we call it in Portuguese? David: Anchor? Emiliano: That anchor. So then, he had one of those also.

When he reappears on the other side. He throws [it down] in order for the boat to remain [stationary]. [Fixed!] On the other side. Nikwe ig kiyokmin ginawiya. So then, he anchors his boat. Kuri ayteke nikwe ig awna gitkis Now afterward then, he speaks to madikte neras hiyeg ku pariye all the people who circled around wageswiye gikak. with him. Kuri igkis tivik. Then they leave. Ig awna gitkis: -Tiviknabay He says to them, “Please go pivinwat! home!” Neg tivik givinwate. Neg tivik This one goes to his house. That givinwate. Ada danuh. one goes to his house. In order to arrive. Ku aysaw igkisme amekenegben ay When our ancestors were here on amadga inin maywak Hawata igkis this maywak [earth]. They also tima digidgiye ayhte tiwrikutak. Nor heard thunder way upstream. That uvitkiyariktak. Han mekavrikut. [thunder] in the west. This way, Han wahamarikut. toward downstream [north]. This way, in the east. Amekenegben awna giwn: Kusuvwi Our ancestors spoke these words, kuwis wageswe kuwis. Kuri “Kusuvwi has already circled hiyegavwu tivikwiyes ada danuh ta around. Now his people are departing in order to arrive at their givinwakis. homes.” Inere kuri igkis ihaw. Now, that is what they believed. Humaw digidgiye ayhtohte. Humaw Thunder sounds way over there. digidgiye ayteke. Humaw digidgiye Thunder sounds on the other aytekempa. side. Thunder sounds over on this side.

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Because they circled around with Kusuvwi. Now [about] those who circled around with Kusuvwi. They said, “They re-appear young again. The women become young girls. The man who yesterday was elderly. Well, today, he is a young man again. Because he has already circled around with Kusuvwi.” David: Why is this, sir? Emiliano: I do not understand this. [laughter] I do not know. But our ancestors’ story speaks about this. At the present time, now, I can not tell you, “It was this way. Or it was that way.” No! I am telling how they spoke Kawa! Nah kinetihwa ku samah about [Kusuvwi]. igkis kinetihwa amin. Heneme ku aysaw wixwiy kinetihwa But if we speak a different nawanewa hiyakemniki amin understanding about this [story]. I inere nutuhbe ka tuguh akak think it will not fall [in line] with amekenegben gidahankis. our ancestors’ [story]. Ininewa estuwa wageska gikak This is all the story [about] circling kusuvwi. Hene amekenegben around with Kusuvwi. This is how kinetihwa amin. our ancestors spoke about it. Awaku igkis wageswiye aka kusuvwi. Neras ku pariye wageswiye aka kusuvwi kuri. Igkis awna giwn: -Igkis humaw takwaye akiw. Tino humaw himano. Awayg kiyaparivwiye. Amakonukwa. Embe ku avim inin ig takwaye akiw. Awaku Ig wageswe aka kusuvwi kuwis. David: Mmahki inin kiyavwiye? Emiliano: Nah ka pukuhpa inin. Nah ka hiyak. Heneme estuwa gidahankis amekenegben igkis awna amin inakni. Ku akak inin kuri ka ik ada nah kinetihwa pit: -Hanaki. Hanaki.

For Kiyavwiye Sarisri, the sound of Kusuvwi’s anchor marks the beginning of the season of field-making: David: Kusuvwi giyokman?52 Sarisri: Giyokman? Ihi. Kusuvwi ku ig tivik kuwis Kuri pis tima digidgiye wahamatak. Kuwis ig iki giyokman. Giyokman kuwis ayteke. Ig kuwis hamah. Pahambakat. Nikwe ig dig ihwa hawata. Ig keh digidgiye gihawh.

David: [And] Kusuvwi’s anchor? Sarisri: His anchor? Yes. When Kusuvwi has already gone. Now you hear thunder coming from the east. He has already put out his anchor. He has anchored / docked on the other side. He has already [come out in the east]. On the other side. So [Kusuvwi] also thunders also. He makes powerful thunder [and lightning].

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Ba seis horas ig iki hawkanewa. Digidgiye. Nikwe made hiyeg awna: Kusuvwi kuwis hamah pahambakat. Kuri yuma murok akiw. Kuri danuh hawkanavrik wasewka. Ya ba ta uwasewka Nikwe ka aynsima hiyeg ku wasawka kuwis. Hene igkis kanum inere kusuvwi.

Around six o’clock in the morning, he thunders. So then, all the people say, “Kusuvwi has already come out on the other side. Now there will be no more rain.” Now arrives the season of wasewka [field making]. “Let us go make our fields.” So then lots of people begin making their fields already. That is what they call that [sound] of Kusuvwi.

In order for Kusuwi to pass and then anchor, however, Awahwi the anaconda has to be killed by the Younger Brother, in the Pleiades. The one-legged boat pilot, Mahuwkatye, steers the boat as it turns around—a significant moment in the narrative, given that between May and June there is a marked turn in the direction of the Milky Way: Pupta: Avanenekwa ig huwitene nawiy!53 Avanenekwa ig wages han. Pes ayteke atan Adukwnewa ig huwitene aburik nawiy. Ayge ig. Lesley: Ke motoristabe? Pupta: Ihi. Kuri pis hiyak. Hene ganivwiy.

Pupta: He is always steering the boat! He always turns around this way. He comes out here, on the other side. He is always steering at the stern of the boat. He is there. Lesley: Like a pilot [Portuguese]? Pupta: Yes. Now you understand. That was his job.

Mahuwkatye’s rather rough life history on the earth is the subject of a detailed narrative that space does not allow for here,54 but which is one of the most widespread narratives in Amazonian anthropology. A short version is told by Ishawet: Ishawet: [. . .] nor Mahuwkatye.55 Negnewa. Awaku igkis pituke gihuw. Awaku ig wagehpiye han. Kuri ig havise yakot tah.

Ishawet: [. . .] about Mahuwkatye [One-Thigh, or the Thighless One, the pilot of Kusuvwi’s boat]. Only him. Because [his in-laws] pulled off his leg at the thigh. Because [Mahuwkatye] began climbing this way [up to the sky] where he had shot an arrow.56

Journeys with the Rain Stars Kuri igkis ganigvig sumuhe gibagwanminat ada putuk inere Neg ku Mahuwkatye biyuke. Kuri ig ay aynte inut giburik Kusuvwi. Giburik Kusuvwi ig msakwa.

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Now his in-laws grabbed on to his leg in order to pull it off. That is [the leg] that Mahuwkatye lost. Now he is way up there at the stern of Kusuvwi’s boat. He stays [there] as the servant/slave of Kusuvwi.

The drama is one of the most familiar in scholarship from the region, even if the actors have different names. Of all the characters in the narratives along the Urucauá, however, it is Awahwi that emerges as a cosmic predator who was overcome, and whose defeat enabled the world to head back to Kayeb as the source of the rain in the December solstice.57 References to the significance of this part of the sky are plentiful in Amerindian literature, though none in lowland South America refer to the crossing of the Sun’s Path and the World’s River—the meeting of the ecliptic and the galactic plane. Gary Urton’s account of this structure of astronomy in the Andes is the closest to this account.58 The battle with Awahwi is hinted at in the account given by LeviStrauss, who notes that “according to the Kalina, there were two successive constellations of the Pleiades. The first was swallowed up by a snake. Another snake pursues the second constellation and rises in the east as the constellation is setting in the west. Time will come to an end when the snake catches up with the constellation.”59 The stories, then, appear to be regional, and the similarity of Kaliña (Carib) and Palikur (Arawak) accounts indicate that this star knowledge is not limited to cultural borderlines. The point is underscored in this interview with Kiyavwiye Uwet, who talks about the dances performed at this time of year in Creole settlements. These he learned from his grandfather, Guillaume or Buyomin was born on the Arukwa River. Kiyavwiye Buyomin was an ihamwi (a shaman) who was living on Mawihgi Island when Curt Nimuendajú conducted his research in the early 1920s. Buyomin did, however, spend some time working in French Guiana. He had strong enough relationships with Creole-speaking people from the other rivers to learn the Creole festival songs and invite their shaman to his house on Mawihgi. Uwet: Neg . . . igkis kanum Awahwi.60 Awaku ig kadahan mpana gitew. Paha gitew. Paha gitew. Paha gitew.

Uwet: They call him Awahwi. Because he has three heads. One head. One head. One head [pointing to heads on carving].

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Igi Awahwi igkis kanumgi . . . awaku neg datka . . . igkis kanumgi Gahawkri Gahawkri. Awahwi. Hawkri Gahawkri. Neku datka igkis kanum Awahwi. Igkis kanumgi hawata Wakayune. Wakayune ig. Wakar Gahawkri.

They call him Awahwi . . . because this anaconda . . . they call him the Grandfather of Grandfathers. Awahwi. The Grandfather of the Day or World. [Or: The Source of the Day World.] This anaconda they call him, Awahwi. They also call him a Wakar [White Egret] person. He is a white egret person. The Grandfather of White Egrets.

Kiyavwiye Uwet’s carving of Awahwi was something that gave him much pleasure as he recounted how Buyomin had carved the same threeheaded anaconda as a bench for the annual turé dance. Like the other star anacondas, Awahwi is an amphibious creature that can ingest whole bodies. The encounter with Awahwi, in times past, was a prominent annual festival. David’s field notes of July 2008 bear this out: Kusuvwi eggutye is swallowed by Awahwi. Both constellations are “avikut warik Avatakni Hawkri,” i.e. in the river [Milky Way] at the joining seam of the world or the end of the world. Awahwi is killed by Kusuvwi Isamwitye, but Awahwi’s body does not rot—one reason it is still visible. Awahwi is a huge anaconda. Amekenegben awna: “Awahwi gayesri mataka hawkri”: The ancestors say, “Awahwi is the size of the world.” A shaman summons Awahwi’s spirit by making his image on a wooden bench, “gahempak epti,” for Awahwi to enter. He says “Batamnika adahan inereka epti.” “I sing the batamnika song [Aramtem or Turé dance] for that bench.”

The minor constellation in the drama of Kusuvwi is that of the Seagull, who plays a small but significant role in several stories. From Kiyavwiye João Felício’s account: David: Ba wanawna ginawiya? Mmah hene?61 João: Ihi. Wanawna eg. Igwa ihamwi kinetihwa gumin ku egu nopsehsa umuhminsa.

David: Is the seagull his boat? Is it true? João: Yes. She, the wanawna [seagull]. The shaman, himself, spoke about her, that she was a tiny, little canoe.

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Figure 19.  Kiyavwiye Uwet with his carving of Awahwi

Ku samah egu tuboh unihkwat. Tapoh! Nor gutew pakiwkig. Guhanbi pakiwkig. Igkis awna: -Nawiy! Kusuvwi gixallopa! Kanumka. Kusuvwi ginawiya nopsehsa inere ada waxrene hiyeg amadgat ta ihapka. Egu wanawna. Kuri ku aka inin nor wanawna ku amaramne ay. Ka aynsima parawhokew aka inin. David: Ba minikwak kadahan kayka amin wanawna? João: Igkis ka kay amin nor. Heme igkis paksig.

Because of how she splashes into the water. Splash! Her head flattens out. Her wings flatten out. [João demonstrates as if the bird is transforming into a canoe.] They say, “A boat! Kusuvwi’s rowboat [skiff]! It is called.” Kusuvwi’s small boat that transports the people onboard to the shore. She, the seagull. Now, at the present time, those seagulls that fly around here. So many, are at the ocean, at this [present time]. David: Long ago, was there a dance about the seagull? João: They did not dance about the [seagull], but they did sing a song about it.

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Igkis paksig ku samah wanawna ku samah eg kusuvwi gimun nopsehsanye ada waxrene hiyeg ta ihapkat. Igkis kanum guw. Igkis paksig. David: Hawata ku aysaw ig danuh pis awna ig ka hiya givin. Ku aysaw ig ‘pisou na terra’ ig hiya ahin. João: Ya. Ig amekene. Ku aysaw ig danuh ihapkat ig ka hiyak givinekut. Ig aya nerras ku giwaxretni atere. Amadga wanawna. Nopsehsa nawiyesa. -Kineyki niguh givin ay? Ig awna giwn: -Pig givin nor ay. -Mmahni nah ka hiya? Ig awna: -Asa subuk amadga wayk! [Eg puwah?] ta ihapkat. Nopsehsa nawiy. Wanawna nopsehsa. [Eg danuh] ayhte ihapka. -Pasa subuh ta waykwit! Ig subuhwa. Pahaye ig hiya ahin tarahad. Ig hiya gig givin kenese.

They sang about how the seagull was Kusuvwi’s little boat that transported people to the shore. They called out her name. They sang it. David: Also when he arrived, you said, he did not see his home. That when he “stepped on the land,” he saw the path. João: Yes. He, our ancestor. When he arrived at the shore, he did not see his way home. He asked those who brought him, there. Onboard the seagull. The tiny, little boat. “Where is my father’s house, here?” He spoke, “Your father’s house is that one, here.” [pointing] “Why can I not see it?” He said, “Go ahead and step onto the land!” [She paddled?] to the shore. A little boat. A little seagull. [She arrived] over at the shore. “Go ahead and step onto the land!” He stepped down. Suddenly, he saw a path stretching out. He saw his father’s house close by.

5. Wayam, the Land Tortoise: The Fifth Rain and the Beginning of the Dry Season (July–August) Wayam, the land tortoise and the trickster, can be seen under his tucumã palm tree in the dry season. Wayam’s rain is light, “because Wayam can only hold a little water,” and tends to be accompanied by low rumbles that sound like a land tortoise slowly dragging himself along a path. Ironically, the trickster was the most difficult to identify. In 2005, two men from Amomni Island identified stars in the region of Cassiopeia as Wayam. These stars are visible at dawn in October, on the horizon at the

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northern end of the Milk Way. However, no one else confirmed this as Wayam. At the time of David’s departure at the beginning of the dry season in July 2008, Wayam was not visible in the dawn sky. With much hesitation, Uwet finally identified Wayam while looking at Starry Night Pro on a laptop computer, as a combination of the constellations Vela and Carina. Yet, Uwet’s eyes are not good, and it is always difficult to translate the flat screen into the turning dome of the night sky. If he is correct, Wayam’s head is in the space around the stars Omicron Velorum and Delta Velorum, and Wayam’s left foot is near Kappa Velorum, and his right foot near the star called Avior. Smaller stars, slightly lower than the two feet, mark the presence of Wayam’s body. Near Wayam, there are two stars which represent waratwi (tucumã palm trees), whose palm fruit the land tortoises love to eat. When rising in the southeast, the star above Wayam’s head is Suhail al Muhlif and the star below Wayam’s body is Miaplacidus. However, this constellation only rises in the southeast in September and October, a month or two later than traditional oral accounts of Wayam’s rising. If indeed Uwet was slightly mistaken in his identifications, it is possible that the bright stars of Sirius and Canopus are the tucumã palms bordering Wayam, thus falling in line with oral tradition and the principles we are proposing for astronomy along the Urucauá. It would appear that, unlike the Bororo tortoise constellations noted by Fabian in the region of Corvus,62 Wayam and his palm tree rise quite far south in the eastern sky. Since they are so far south, they move more slowly than the stars in the center of the sky. The tortoise and his palm tree mark the path of the Milky Way at a place of the galactic arm when it is not too bright, so they play an important part in marking the course of the World’s River at a time when it is turning. They also mark the point in the sky when, in late October, the hand of Kayeb (the Crux or Southern Cross) reappears after going underground to get the tortoise. With the observation of Wayam it becomes clear that all the major constellations are on the World’s River, with the exception of Uwakti (in Pegasus), although it could be argued that Uwakti marks a midpoint between the World’s River and the Sun’s Path. There are dozens of trickster tales about Wayam. Their number is almost certainly bolstered by similar West African tales that have traveled to this region since the earliest African slaves arrived in the region in the early 1600s, and by the few runaway slaves who found a home in Palikur families. Despite the popularity of the Wayam tales—often ribald—there are not many stories about the stellar Wayam. Narrative comments focus mostly on seasonal changes associated with the Wayam, particularly that the Wayam is the last rain of the year.

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Figure 20.  The carving of Wayam

Ishawet: She, Wayam [the tortoise], is behind [last]. Wayam ku wasewkaneku. Wayam is during the field clearing time. Ku was made ihukaki. Kuri wayam When the fields are all cut down metakwa wayk. [cleared]. Now finally Wayam rains. Kuri wayk amadga woharit. Amadga Now it rains while we are getting ini avew. Wayam. the fields ready to burn. During this the Wayam is above. Eg yuma mwok akiw. Amaksevwiten After her there is no more rain. wayam Wayam is the last one. Ishawet: Egme wayam butitye.63

Emiliano: Wayam eg hawata.64 Wayam hawata wayk aharit agosto. Wayam wayk. Heneme ka aritkamnema. Ka kadahan estuwa gudahan kiyesrad. Ininewa ku aysaw eg wayk.

Emiliano: Wayam, she also. Wayam also rains during August. Wayam rains. But it is not a big thing. She does not have a [long] sized story. Just that when she rains.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Amekenegben awna ku aysaw eg wayk eg digihwa. Mmahki eg digihwa ay? Igkis awna: “Bawkata egu wayweyh. Inakni: Dara! Dara! Dara!” Wayam waykno. Wayam digihwa ka aynsima. Ininewa estuwa gudahan wayam inere. David: Nah tima hawata ku aysaw igkis wages wayam. Ku aysaw pis tima digidgiye. Ba ik ada pis awna amin? Emiliano: Amekenegben awna giwnkis: -Ku aysaw wayam wayk. Eg ewk mwok hawata. Wayk pahay hawkri. Heme eg ewk digidgiye ka aynsima. “Mmahki?” Nah aya kiyavwiyegben: “Mmahki eg ewk digidgiye ka aynsima? Mmah eg digidgiye gahawkri?” “Kawa!” Igkis awna: “Kawa.” Ku aysaw eg wew. Wew! Wew! Dara! Dara! Inere kuri digihwa ka aynsima. Bawkata eg wayweyh. Eg tivikwiye ada wageswiye. Inere estuwa gudahan wayam.

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Our ancestors say that when she rains she thunders. “Why does she thunder here?” They say, “Because she is walking along. What we hear is [imitating the sound as ‘dara’]. Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!” The Wayam rains. The Wayam thunders so much! That is all the story there is about the Wayam. David: I also heard that when they turn [over] the Wayam. That is when you hear thunder. Can you talk about this? Emiliano: Our ancestors say, “When Wayam rains, she brings rain also. It rains for one day. But she brings so much thunder!” “Why?” I asked the elders, “Why does she bring so much thunder? Is she the Grandmother of All Thunder?” “No!” They say, “No.” When she walks. Walks! Walks! Rumble! Rumble! That then, it thunders so much! But she is walking along. She goes along in order to circle around. That is the Wayam’s story.

Uwet describes Wayam and her thunder:65 Aharit “julho” kuri aytwe wayam. Wayame. Wayame hiyara. Wayam kadahan hawata. Wayam kadahan pikatna waratwi. Pahat waratwi aytekene. Pahat waratwi butak. Gumana.

Around “July,” then the Wayam [the Land Tortoise] arrives. It is the Wayam’s [season]. Wayam laughs. The Wayam also has [stars]. The Wayam has two waratwi palm trees. One waratwi palm in front. One waratwi palm behind. Her food.

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Kuri lawe eg wayk. Eg waykse mwok. Eg hiyara. Eg hiyara ka aynsima. Eg keh:- Hah. Hah. Hah. -Nah keh mayg. Kaba [aynsima] mayg nah keh! -Nah keh digidgiye! Embe henewa. Lawe, eg wayk. Eg wayk. Eg wayk. Eg keh uguhguh [kariy peh]! Digidgiye. Kiyapyad digidgiyad, Doh! Nahawkri Buyomin awna: “Wayam mabukwiyo.” Ba tima guman? Gumar. Gumar. Ku samah eg wagesne. Gumar ta avit tip. Guman gumar avit tip. Embe nikwe abet inin kayg, eg [kanve?]. Juktah pisenwa was ihukwaki. Eg kaba mbayha was ihukwaki aka mwok. Atere no waykad made ‘setem’. Amadga ‘setem’ neku. Aharit ‘out’ neku Gudahan arawka. Yuma akiw. Atere! Barewye estuwa in.

Now she rains. She brings rain to the earth. She laughs. She laughs a lot. She goes, “Ha. Ha. Ha.” “I make wind. I make lots of wind.” “I make thunder.” It is true. So, she rains. She rains. She rains. She makes lightning [across the grasslands]! Thunder. Huge thunder. Boom! My grandfather Buyomin said, “The Tortoise is [turning over on her back].” Have you heard her sound? Her shell. Her shell. When she turns over. Her shell on a rock. Her sound is her shell on a rock. So during this month, she [lays eggs]. Until the [manioc] fields have been cut down. She almost ruins the field clearing time with rain. She rains all the way until “September.” In “September.” Until “October.” Her drying up season. There is no more. That is the end [of the story]. It is a beautiful story.

Kiyavwiye Sarisri makes a connection between the stellar Wayam and the terrestrial trickster: Lesley: Aysaw Wayam?66 Sarisri: Wayam kwewanek aharit nutuhbe . . . Julho.

Lesley: When is Wayam [the Land Tortoise]? Sarisri: Wayam is later, I believe, around July.

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Wayam rains, rains [some water]. [A fair amount of water], he rains. It is possible . . . that people are almost not able to make [manioc] fields because of Wayam. [. . .] David: [And] lightning? David: Digidgiye? Sarisri: Ya. Inyerwa wayam keh Sarisri: Yes, It is true. Wayam hene. makes it. Ba pis hiyak digidgiye ku akak inin? Have you seen the lightning, at the present time? Wayam ganip. It is Wayam’s [mischievous] doing. Mpuse danuh avim inin kayg julho. Every time the month of July arrives, [there is] lots of lightning. Ka aynsima digidgiye. Ka aynsima Lots of rain [which threatens] but murok heme ka iki un. it does not give up its water. Kuri ada makere un made. Now [begins the time] that all the water dries up. Ka avayvu. [or: ka aravusima] Hene It does not help [flood the wayam gudahan. grasslands] [or, “it gets very dry.”]. That is how the Wayam [rains are]. Wayam wayk, wayk arikna. Arikna ig wayk. Ik ada hiyeg kaba ka ik ada keh was awaku wayam. [. . .]

The long dry season is characterized by a dark sky at dawn, when the World’s River (Milky Way) is not lying in the eastern horizon at dawn, until the rising of Kayeb once again in late December. In that time, Wayam plods across the southern axis of the sky at around the 60° celestial marker, along which the Southern Cross (Crux) will reappear in late October. Uwakti: [Kwewanek] wages ayteke.67 Pis hiyak mmahni wayam tivikwiye? Han manuke eg. Eg keh digidgiye Keh uguhne. Keh tut arikna. Muhuke. Tivik. Eg pes. Eg wages. Kuwis eg ahegbet ayteke. Eg ta imamna digiswaki. Eg kahayak kuwis.

Uwakti: [Later Wayam] comes up on the other side [east]. Do you know how the wayam leaves? She crosses this way [Uwakti points west]. She makes thunder. She makes lightning. She makes all kinds of these. She crosses. She leaves. She comes out. She turns around. She is already on the other side. She chants [to call forth] the flooding. She is visible again.

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Eg keh novena digiswavye Digis kabay. Eg araw. Nikwene eg kahayak.

She makes that flooding [the last rains before dry season begins]. It floods well [or rains well]. She dries up. Then [Wayam] is visible.

Kiyavwiye Uwakti’s account here moves to mention yet another constellation, the Macaw, associated with Kayeb, which suggests that many more constellations play a minor role in these kinds of accounts. This would be consonant with the range of constellations.68 Kiyavwiye Balaweh’s account focuses on the word for “Wayam” in the elder’s language of respect, or Kiyavunka. Speaking of “Tuwatye” in the following account recorded in Kumene in 2003, he was teaching a group of women and men the song of Tuwatye, with his characteristic reverent humor. Note that the reference to the constellation is understood as implicit by his audience, who are clearly unfamiliar with the song and the dance. Balaweh: Ive kuri! Nah pak pahatwowa avat.69 Amadga inin. Gidahan tah minikwak! Neg tuwatye! Ba pis hiyak ku tuwatye yis made ay? Pis hiyak ig tuwatye? Madikte norras hiyak tuwatye Made ba pis hiyak tuwatye? Mmah? Pariye? Asa awna. Pis awna wayam. Pariye tuwatye?! Tino: “Wayam?” Balaweh: Ihi. Egu tuwatyo eg usakwa ahavriku.

Balaweh: Observe now! I will sing a song! On this. [About this.] [Our ancestor’s song] from long ago! That one, Tuwatye [the gentle, humble land tortoise]! Do all of you know who Tuwatye is? Do you know him, Tuwatye? [Questioning the men] All those [women] know Tuwatye. [pointing toward women] All of you, do you know who is Tuwatye? [Questions women again] What? Go ahead and speak. [laughter] You should say, Wayam [the land tortoise]. [gives answer away] What is Tuwatye?! Women: “Wayam?” Balaweh: Yes. She, Tuwatyo, she lives in the deep forest. [He switches to the feminine form.]

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She lives [crawling on the forest floor?]. What is her food? Later, she will Pariye gumana ay? Kwewa egu wagesye. circle around. Ihi. Pikatna akebyi. Kahambar Yes. There are two of them. The akak waratwi. taperebá [fruit] and the tucumã [palm fruit]. Kwewa wageswe. Later, they will come around. She is called, Tuwatyo. Egu kewyo Tuwatyo. She is gentle [humble]. Tuwatavyo eg. Kuri neg ukebyi ayepkepkere gavan Now he, our relative [David], has ku samah eg wageswe. requested the song [that is sung] when she circles around. Pis timamni? Ba hene? You have heard it? Is that true? [points to men] Pis? Ya pis? Yuma pahatnema? You? And you? Not one of you?! Pis tima? Yuma kiyavunogben tima? Have you heard it? Have none of you ladies heard it? Kuri uyay pak payak. Wowhni Now, let us sing all together. payak. [Singing] our words at the same time. -Nahah po iwah. Nah poh iwah. -Nahah po iwah. Nah poh iwah. Mmahyama koh pohnayh. Mmahyama koh pohnayh. Mmahyama koh pohnayh. Mmahyama koh pohnayh. Tah ih poh ayh. Tah ih poh ayh. Tah ih poh ayh. Tah ih poh ayh. [. . .] [. . .] Mmah hiya? Ba hiyak ku samah? Do you see? Do you [now] know Henewa in! how it goes? That is it! Egu [awna]: -Nahwane kapten nah! She [says], “I, myself, am captain!” “Nah ahavrikutyene nah usakwa.” “I am the forest dweller [where] I remain.” Amekenemni nor mmahba giw nor Our ancestor . . . what is his name? That [Alifonsmin?]. He [Alifonsmin]. Ig pak inere. sang that [song]. [. . .] [. . .] Ignes pakne inakni avat. They sang that song. Minikwak igkis pakni inakni avat. Long ago, they sang that song. Ine tinwo awaku amawka wixwiy That is why we are silent . . . kadni ka biyuk. [contemplative?] because we should . . . our sorrow has not been forgotten. Egwa usakwa [huwigi?]

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Kiyavwiye Balaweh’s lesson, given with some sadness, and the great sorrow he expresses at the loss of the dances and the presence of the stars and the elders’ language of respect, are an appropriate moment with which to end this curation of extracts from the cycle of constellation stories. Kiyavunka, the language of respect of the elders, and Kiyaptunka, the ceremonial language of the shamans, are barely spoken now in Arukwa. For elders like Kiyavwiye Balaweh and Kiyavwiye Ishawet, the time in which they were spoken was a time of beautiful words when the interrelations of people, landforms, waves, stars, animals, and spirit creatures were brought into being. Such a language and a way of speaking that approaches what Latour describes in his essay that rethinks the opposition of knowledge and belief: a language not of information, but a language of transformation.70 The difference is that this is a way of thinking about relationships not as nodes in a network, but as inter-animations of mutual presence; the shared generosity and respectfulness that enables people and creatures to survive together in cosmos of predators. That local sky stories are frequent references in everyday talk yet the longer versions were so hard to record, points to the complex navigations people make in regard to the ontologies and rationalities that govern citizenship of the wider networks in which they participate, including the Brazilian federal state, French Guiana, and church-based networks that were so dominant in Arukwa at the turn of the millennium when this research commenced. The unease with this material that we encountered in 2000–2003 has diminished over the years. The reasons for this are, no doubt, multiple. Conversations became easier as our insight into the cosmological stories developed; the opening of the Museu Kuahi, the indigenous-run community museum in the town of Oiapoque, and the national exhibition on cosmology in the region sought to expand the space for Amerindian ways of seeing the world.71 The evangelical millennialism that accompanied the millennium in Arukwa as documented by Artionka Capiberibé72 has diminished somewhat, allowing a little more space for the stars, whose rains are a gift, from one traveler to another, in a journey together through the seasons. * * *

Putting the Stories Together: The World’s River, the Rain Stars, and the Path of the Sun The accounts given here work with four major referents that make up a set of interrelated and moving celestial markers:

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•• The circle of the horizon, the edges of which are water •• The path of the sun (and the stars that precede it in the day sky) through the upper and underworlds—in astronomical language, from east through zenith to west to nadir •• The writhing and turning of the World’s River in the course of the year •• The sequential arrival of the rain star constellations Knowing these interrelated movements, one can predict star positions and rainy seasons fairly accurately. It also begins to explain why the June and December solstices are so significant: it is on these dates that the plane of the ecliptic crosses the galactic plane, giving the appearance of having crossed over. However, that these narratives and their principles can be translated into equivalents in the language of astronomy does not mean that such a translation offers an adequate account of the particular “nature” in this material. In the following conversation, recorded at night in July 2008, Kiyavwiye Uwet explains to David how the World’s River turns in the course of the year. Notice particularly the way in which he uses the word wages (pronounced wuh-GESS), which means to turn, swirl, or circle. The word wages can also mean to change one’s bodily form, as in when a shaman’s body transforms into a different creature such as a jaguar (see chapter 5). Uwet: Nor warik.73 Igkis Kiyavwiyegben kanum nor warik hawkri gidahan giwakun. Hawkri awakun. Nor warik.

Nor warik waxreyene nor Kayeb. Nor warik pitatye usakwa ayteke. Kwewa ugestaw. Ugestaw! Juktah eg kamaxrene Kayeb. Eg kamaxrene Kayeb nikwene. Kayeb tivik payak gikak. Kuri egnewa kamaxrene akiw. Tavara akiw. Tavara avikuw nor warik.

Uwet: That river. They, the elders, called that world river, “the world’s edge” [or, limits; borders; channel; could mean “the contained, passageway of water”]. The world’s border [or edge or limits]. That river. That river conveys Kayeb. At first, the river is over on this side. Later, it circles around. It circles [moves] around! Until it takes hold of Kayeb. It holds on to Kayeb then. Kayeb goes, together, with it. Then it also holds on to more again. Tavara again. Tavara [the Kingfisher] is in the river.

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Awaku nor warik igkis kanum warik nor warik. Ineki keh Kayeb wade gavikuw awaku ig datka! Ig usakwa wade avikuw nor warik. Ig tavara hawata wade avikuwata nor warik Ada ig kamaxne ke ikarbe gimana ku pariye ig kadahan. Amekene kanum nor . . . ka hawkrima avatakni. Igkis kanum nor warik. Warikuwa eg! Heme nor warik ka aynema amadgama inin. Nor warik ku Uhokri keh nor warik. Ayhte inut. Gidahan nerras ku pariye . . . gidahan Kayeb. Gidahan Tavara. Gidahan Uwakti. Gidahan Kusuvwi egutye. Gidahan Kusuvwi isamwitye. Eg waxrene Kayeb han. Ku eg waxrene Kayeb han kuri nikwe. Kuri eg waxrene Tavara. Tavara mekeke bute. Kuri ku Tavara wade amadga inin kuwisa. Uwakti inute ayteke. Eg waxre Uwakti. Lawe Uwakti wade amadga inin igta Kusuvwi kahayak. Lawe Kusuvwi kahayak ayteke kuwisa kuri made hiyeg hiyakri.

Because that river . . . they call that river a “river.” That is why Kayeb is right in the middle [of the river] because he is an anaconda! He remains right in the middle of that river. He, Tavara, also is right in the middle of the same river. So that he can catch ikar fish, which is his food that he has [eats]. Our ancestors called that . . . not the Edge [or seam] of the World [as Emiliano called it]. They call it a river. She is a river. But that river is not here, in this world. That river, Uhokri [God] made that river. Way up above. It belongs to those who . . . it belongs to Kayeb. It belongs to Tavara. It belongs to Uwakti. It belongs to Kusuvwi the Older Brother. It belongs to Kusuvwi the Younger Brother. She [the World’s River] conveys Kayeb, this way. When she conveys Kayeb, this way, now then . . . Then she conveys Tavara. Tavara follows along closely behind. Now when Tavara is right in the middle of this, already. Uwakti comes up, over on that side. She conveys Uwakti. When Uwakti is right in the middle of this, then Kusuvwi is visible. When Kusuvwi is visible, on that side, already, then all the people know it.

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Now, Kusuvwi is high up above, already. Hiyeg awna: “Kuwis Kusuvwi The people say, “Kusuvwi is high inutad. Warik kuwis waxrevye. up above! The river has already Iwevgi ta inere Kusuvwi isamwitye brought him. Bringing him to that inutak?” [Kusuvwi the Younger brother who rises up?]” “Mmah hene?” “Is that so?” “Ya. Ig ay aviku nor warik.” “Yes. He is here, in the river.” Ineki keh igkis ka ikise nor warik. That is why they do not leave the river. Ineki keh Kayeb aviku nor warik. That is why Kayeb is in the river. Tavara akigbimne warik. Avikuwata Tavara is on the edge of the river. Right in the river. warik. Kusuvwi avikuwata warik. Kusuvwi is right in the river. Avikuw pahatenwa warik igkis In [the same] one river, they pass mpiya! by! Lawe igkis ugeswakis igkis When they circle around, they ugeswekis aviku pahatrawa warik. circle around in the one river. Kayeb ugeswe. Ig ugeswe han. Kayeb circles around. He circles, this way. Ig pituke. Ig waykse mwok. He comes forth. He causes rain to fall. Kuri Tavara bute. Gihavu. Then Tavara is behind. With him. Lawe ig ugeswa han. Nor warik When he has circled around, this ugeswe gikak han. way. The river circles around with him, this way. Eg tivik akigbimne. It goes along [with him on] the edge [or bank] of it. Lawe ig pituke ig waykse mwok. When he comes forth he causes rain to fall. Inneki keh igkis kanumni, “Nor That is why they call it, “That warik Tavara giwakunkis. Kayeb river is Tavara’s channel Kayeb’s giwakunkis. Kusuvwi giwakun. channel. Kusuvwi’s channel.” Kusuvwi mpiya avikuwata ig mpiya. Kusuvwi passes by in the same [river], he passes by. Kusuvwi egutye mpiya ouvrewata Kusuvwi the Older Brother passes avikwata. through the same [river]. Kusuvwi isamwitye mpiya Kusuvwi the Younger Brother passes through the same [river]. ouvrewata avikwata. Juk Wayam butitiye uhawkanek Until Wayam, the last [rainy] Wayam mpiya ouvrewata avikwata. season, Wayam passes through the same [river]. Kuri Kusuvwi inutad kuwis.

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Egu pahatenwa warik gidahankis. Gidahankis peheten ahin gidahankis. Ineki keh nor Kayeb giwak . . . Takehpene usakwa wade gavikuw nor warik. Kayeb usakwa aywata gavikuw.

She is the one and only river that they travel on. It is one path that belongs to them.

That is why Kayeb’s hand . . . the Poling Stars remain right in the middle of the river. Kayeb remains, right here, in [the river]. Tavara usakwa aywata gavikuw. Tavara remains, right here, in [the river]. Awaku pahatuwa giwakunkis. Igkis Because there is one channel [for mpiya. them]. They pass by. If this river is not here. Tavara will Ku ini warik yumate. Tavara kote inut. not yet be up. Kayeb kote inute. Kayeb will not yet be up. “Ba yis kote kahayak? Warik ayhte!” “Do you not see it yet? The river over there!” “Eg kote kahayakte.” “She is not yet visible.” Ku aysaw eg ugestaw. Eg iwevun When she circles around, she will nikwe. bring them then. Kuri inute. Kayeb inute avikuhpi. Now rising up. Kayeb rises up moving along the middle of it. Tavara inute avikuhpi. Uwakti Tavara rises up moving along inute avikuhpi. the middle of it. Uwakti rises up moving along the middle of it. Kusuvwi inute avikuhpi. Isamwitye Kusuvwi rises moving along the inute avikuhpi. middle of it. The Younger Brother rises moving along the middle of it. Awaku pahatuwa warik gidahankis! Because there is only one river for them! Pahatuwa warik! One river! Ke usuhbe warikmo. Usuh kadahan Like us, when we are by [our] pahatuwa warik ada usuh ta river. We have one river for us to uyapkunka avikuw pahatuwa go to Oiapoque, through one river. warik. So it is, with theirs, here now. Embe henewa gidahankis ay kuri. Xak gidahankis pase danuh For each one of them, because hawkanavrikis neku. Igkis waykse when their seasons arrive, they mwok. cause rain to fall. Kayeb waykse mwok lawe ig Kayeb causes rain to fall, when he pitukwene. comes forth.

Journeys with the Rain Stars Uhawka Tavara. Lawe Tavara danuh. Danuh gihawkan neku. Ayhte waykwit neku ig waykse mwok. Ka aynsima mwok ig wayksene. Ig pituke. Ig pituke aka mwok.

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[Then] Tavara’s season. When Tavara arrives. His season arrives. Way below, he causes rain to fall. So much rain, he causes to fall. He comes forth. He comes forth with rain.

The Milky Way (or World’s River) lies at 60° to the plane of the ecliptic, which is the movement of the earth around the sun, and it is a combination of the earth’s annual orbit, its annual wobble, and its daily rotation that the Milky Way has the appearance of such irregular movement. Conceptualizing the movement of the Milky Way via the measurement of angles and planes is not easy given its apparently irregular curves in the course of each year. By contrast, Amerindian cosmologies draw instead on familiar kinds of movement to offer an aide-mémoire. The idea of a “celestial river” is widely known in regional ethnography, and is well accounted for in the celestial river diagram drawn by a Barasana shaman in dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones.74 That image depicts the “Star Path” or “Anaconda Path” as having two major twists in it, much as one would see the Milky Way twisting from one side of the sky to the other in the course of the year. Remembering its movements is quite similar to committing to memory the twists and turns of a river as you travel along it. Like Barasana accounts of the night sky, the major constellations in the Palikur accounts offered here are along the river in the sky. Further similarities with Kiyavwiye Uwet’s explanations and Barasana ideas are apparent in the work of Christine Hugh-Jones, particularly with the emphasis on an Earth River and its anacondas.75 Although social life along the Rio Urucauá has little resemblance to longhouses, her comparison of movable axes such as bodies, anacondas, and wombs with referents fixed in everyday life (respectively, house, longhouse, and universe) is valuable because it demonstrates a means of analysis—the tools with which to think, as it were—that are not the static axes and forms of Archimedean and Platonic solids, but bodily movements and interacting surfaces. Pathways, flows, tracks, arcs, writhing, swimming, whirling, falling, and coursing provide the mnemonics that make the coming of the rain stars predicatble. Such forms of body-based abstraction are very different to the kinds of plane-based Cartesian geometries that assume space to be an empty container.76

Chapter Four

The Curvature of Surfaces Cartesian Space, the Topology of Palikur Grammar, and Consubjective Space

A la espada y el compas, Mas y mas y mas y mas was the caption to a frontispiece portrait of Spanish captain Vargas Machuca in his 1599 volume on his journey to the West Indies: “With the Sword and the Compass, More and more and more and more.”1 For Machuca, getting home with the loot from the “large, rich and bewtiful empyres”2 in the tropics was possible for those with the physical and mental agility to navigate the ocean. With every journey made by Machuca’s swashbuckling generation, the scholars in Europe’s centers of calculation could be more certain of the routes across which loots and harvests and the knowledges of them could travel to its emerging empires. Successful journeys affirmed new ways of mapping and, in the same moment, affirmed the usefulness of the era’s experiments in projecting and calculating vast spaces with the tools of measurement, angle, point, and line. Critical geographers have written a great deal about cartography in the colonial imagination. Much of that literature focuses on its codes and conventions, on the selection of objects to map, and on the presentation of spaces as uninhabited terrae incognitae: unknown lands. Their work has inspired many treasured multiculturalist cartographic projects, in which indigenous lands can be overlain on maps of territories to include hunting sites, histories, and creatures of an unknown cosmos. But in these works, critiques of the philosophy of space that renders it in particular geometries warrant barely a mention. The paradox of multiculturalist cartographies is that they assume there is one nature of space

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and, at least in triumphalist accounts of not a few GIS projects in faraway places, one way of mapping and measuring objects in it. More recently, writers have reflected on possibilities of new nonlinear technologies for representing place.3 Google maps that go down to street view offer the possibility of integrating experiential views of space: spatial images arranged in the conical geometries of perspective, rather than the quadrilateral geometries that square the circles of the planet’s surface. Using spherical geometries, the familiar rectangular images from a standard digital camera, shot in a spiral from a particular point, can be assembled in images that stretch the sky into a circle that surrounds one. The confrontation with such images is startling because none of them are “untrue” in the strict sense of the term: they are simply different assemblages, projections of the spaces that encircle us, onto a flat page. To work with them is to encounter the history that delivers particular practices of remembering space and to recognize that the memory of space is not solely a matter of “the nature” of mind in its neurological structures, but it derives from learned practices of putting space together in particular ways. In everyday life, off-screen and off-page, the memory of space is never solely visual. Practices of spatial memory include memories of the sounds of a place, their smells, the ways people move in them, their seasonalities and weathers, their connectedness into other places, among many other sensory cues. Rene Descartes’s fascination with the geometry of quadrilaterals and the ways in which the places of objects could be annotated exactly in x and y axes, elided the need for multisensory, relational memories of spaces-in-times. Space, after Descartes, becomes analytical geometry.4 The cosmos becomes matter extended in space and time.5 The recognition that geometries of space are languages and tools of assemblage provokes the realization that the natures-cultures debate extends to ontologies of space. If space is translatable into a variety of geometries, projects such as ours could productively be asking: What alternative conceptualizations of space are possible? How might anthropological attention to spatiotemporality and its memory, enable us to rethink our reliance on the grids of Descartes?6 How might we grasp geometry as political cosmology? Can archaeologies engage the cosmopolitics of space and time, and critique the intellectual heritage that gives it form in ways that allow places to take form in different terms, and different imaginaries? In this chapter, I pursue two interlinked lines of enquiry: first, to consolidate what the previous chapters have asserted about space as a cosmos of bodies and movement, and second, to pursue some thoughts about form and spatiality in the Palikur language. * * *

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Several proposals about remembering space have been made so far in this volume. The chapter on Palikur story trails suggested that remembering space is quite literally a process of “membering” as performances of stories offer moments to embody the memory of where cardinal directions become left or right, behind or ahead. Hills or mountains are not permanently static forms but, rather, are partners and participants in the movements that make up the hawkri. The landforms of the hawkri are characterized by a capacity for relationships with one another and with people, and some are part of routes in and out of the underworld and the sky. They have the capacity for movement over very long periods of time. Along with seas and rivers, the dark parts of the Milky Way, and even houses, landforms can kiyvi—be in a state of remembering. Chapter 3 on the rain stars concludes with the suggestion that the cosmos in the recorded narratives has an internal logic characterized not by static abstractions based on points and lines but by dynamic abstractions offered by the movement of creatures. The stars, in this imaginary, are emphatically not mere points of light that move across the sky, but boats that move in and out of weeks and through a day, in Maurice Sendak’s lovely phrase:7 boats that bring seasonal bounties and weathers, and that are mastered by spirit-shaman-animal creatures. The figure of the anaconda, for example, is an intriguing choice given the twisting movement of the Milky Way across the sky in the course of a year and at night, as constellations expand and contract between the horizon and the zenith of the night sky.8 The figure of the Wayam, the land tortoise, is well suited to describing the slow movement of the stars near to the south celestial pole and their brief disappearance each year into the watery underworld. The qualities of movement of anacondas, tortoises, and people are part of the conceptual tools for understanding the strange movements of the night sky. The examples suggest that constellations and their movements are not remembered separately—stick figures that traverse the sky—but rather, to know a constellation is to know its story, which is at once a shape, a seasonal propensity (in the sense of what it will bring), and a range of relationships with rains, plants, people, and creatures. The woodcarvings of the constellations attest to a way of thinking about them as creatures that make paths through the sky much the same as boats make paths through the sea: they are bodies in motion whose journey one can share, and to sit on a carving of one during a fiesta might be to allow their hiyakemni— their consciousness, perspective, knowing—to inhabit you, so that your own consciousness and perspective can be transformed, and you might see the world as that spirit-creature would. In sum, in Palikur everyday life and narratives of bodies and bodily movements there is a way of thinking about space and time that derives from understanding the kind of transformations that occur when

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creatures, things, spirits, people, stars, or mountains encounter one another. Those encounters are not locatable in the framework of the Enlightenment’s “matter set in space and time,” because they are an encounter of potentially transformative subjectivities. They are relational spaces, rather than data spaces. With these observations, the challenge becomes to find a way to speak of different conceptualizations of the cosmos without offering “true” Cartesian space as the only “real” referent. How might we begin to translate ideas of space and time in ways that do not offer them as empty boxes in which things occur and action happens?9 What might that offer to the elusive project of conceiving a public archaeology? * * * Throughout fieldwork I battled with the impossibly complicated Palikur language in which spatial referents are ubiquitous, along with number (singular or plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Diana Green’s several papers on the spatial classification system in Palikur numbers, and her account of concepts of space in the language, were an obvious place to begin.10 Surely, I reasoned, there had to be a connection between the linguistics of space and the ways of thinking about space and environments that I was beginning to comprehend. A long conversation began with her. She was at the time grappling with the categorization of shape markers that she had earlier translated with reference to Euclidean forms. Her paper offers a narrative account of her own disconcertments with the assumption that a universal conception of space provided what was needed to translate form and dimensionality: Reference to dimensions and geometric form is pervasive in the [Palikur] language. Physical features are an intrinsic part of the verbs, adjectives, adverbs, locatives, interrogatives, and numerals.11 For instance, there are over forty locative adpositions for the English locative prepositions “on” or “in.” The one you use depends on the geometric form of what the object is resting on. If you want to say “on” a flat object like a book, you would say amadga, but “on” a round object like a rock is avit, and “on” a cylindrical object like a finger is amin.12 For example, “on Earth” is a-madga wayk (it-on earth).

In other words, as one moves through the world, one is making space by naming forms. Yet the naming of those forms is not confined to the forms of objects—round rock, cylindrical finger—but attends also to the interaction of forms: something is not just “on” but “on-round” or “on-flat.” Yet, she argues, the forms themselves are not confined to the

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familiar range of solid shapes. Her argument continues as a narrative of her own disconcertments: [W]hen inanimate units are being counted, the classifier on the numeral indicates the objects’ geometric form. There are seven numeral classifiers that distinguish eleven specific physical forms. For example, the numeral “one” in Palikur is paha. An added shape classifier is obligatory. When I heard Palikur speakers say, pahaw uwas “one orange,” pahaa antiyan “one egg,” pahat ah “one stick,” pahak parak “one board,” pahamku umuh “one canoe,” pahatra warik “one river,” and pahaiku tiket “one fire,” I quickly categorized them as describing shapes I recognized: round, oval, cylindrical, flat, concave, linear. . . . But when I came to [the word] pahaiku, I was stumped. This term was used to count such varied items as a carved ring, a waterfall, a room, a fence, an ocean wave, a fire, a tunnel, a hole, or a wound. I had no easy category in which to fit these things. There was also a problem with my “concave” label for the numeral pahamku, because some types of benches were included in that category. Even stranger, the same term was also used to count a machete, a knife, a saw, a metal ring, a coin, a needle, a ship, or a gun. Why would these objects fit into a category of concave objects? I also wondered why -t is the numeral classifier for both cylindrical objects and intangible items. The term pahat is used to count not only arrows and bananas, but also words and dances and ideas. What possible connection could a cylindrical shape have with abstract nouns? In the small set of only ten numeral classifiers of units, it had to be more than a simple homophone—but what?13

Her conclusion was that it was more helpful to think about surfaces, which she speaks of as boundaries, than the familiar range of geometrical forms. She writes: In the Palikur language, the shape markers are based on three types of specific topological properties that determine the class to which an inanimate object belongs. The first type has to do with the concept of boundary or contour; the second type is a topological dimension that the Palikur call “depth”; and the third property is that of closed or open space. . . . [T]he seven inanimate noun classifiers on Palikur numbers clearly demonstrate this topological understanding. . . . The concept of boundary has to do with the curvature, the circumference, the perimeter, or the periphery of any figure or object, whether that object is flat, spherical, or a mere extension, such as fire. It denotes the whole of that boundary, not the measurements of it.

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. . . The Palikur language classifies inanimate nouns according to whether their boundary is considered to be nonexistent (such as a stream) or partial (such as a hole) or complete (such as an orange). Objects with a complete boundary are differentiated as to whether that boundary is salient (such as a box with its high sides) or not salient (such as a flat piece of paper whose edge is irrelevant). Those with salient boundaries are distinguished as being either symmetrical (such as a round turtle egg) or asymmetrical (such as an oval chicken egg). . . . In the Palikur language the seven numeral classifiers for inanimate units are mainly based on three primary geometrical forms. These forms are described by the Palikur as being tara “extended,” saba- “flat” and huwi- “round.” One could almost classify these terms, respectively, as one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional. Tara “extended” could easily convey the one dimension of length. Saba“flat” conveys two dimensions of length and width. Huwi- “round” describes three-dimensional spheres that have noticeable length, width, and depth; however, it also describes objects like a watch, a coin, or a painted design where depth is not a factor. . . . [T]he . . . basis of these three primary geometrical forms is not dimension but the prominence of their boundaries. . . . Topological features are a fundamental feature of ways of thinking about shape and space in the Palikur language. . . . As a linguist, I shudder to think of how quickly I learned the Palikur dimensional terms for length (ayabwi), width (ahogbi), and depth (amihni), but I never thought to explore the possibility that there would be a term for a geometric boundary. Only after all these years, is ahuwiptiswan (“curvature / closed boundary”) now in the Palikur dictionary, along with aminpig (high sides / open boundary”).14

Her work suggests a way of thinking about space in which the world is not composed of the static geometrical solids of Plato and Archimedes that can be understood via Euclidean angular geometries in Newtonian abstract space and are representable in Cartesian grids. The question arises: In what respects—if at all—are the notions of space that are at work here translatable as geometry? Is it appropriate to use the term? It is important to move slowly here, and it is worth considering that there are several minor geometries that demonstrate that ideas about space and its forms, as consolidated by Euclid, Descartes, and Newton, do not allow for the calculation of all the qualities of space, and that there are alternative ways of conceptualizing movement, curves, and surfaces. The minor geometries offer rich insights into the challenges of thinking about space, and affirm that simple measurement along x, y, and z axes cannot convey the complex properties of all forms. However, even

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across the contending philosophies of geometry and different conceptions of space in physics itself, there is a shared conception of space as a singular “nature of space.” That spatial cosmos derives from an ecology of disciplines, at work in a political cosmos15 that attends to territory and the objects in it.16 This chapter proposes that an understanding of the particular ecologies of knowledge in Arukwa begins with the “re-cognition” that the philosophy of space here is not reducible to planes, nor is it an extensive container, for its conceptual tools include surfaces, skins, bodies, and boundaries; and these are meaningful in interactions, presences, and intensivities. This is a very different approach to “cultural geometry” than that which pervades the cultural geometries literature, which offers ethnologies of symbolic geometries as properties of cultural mind or thought or as visual iterations of ethnomathematics, metrics, and calculation. As rich and important as this line of work is for such fields as reimagining the possibilities for mathematics education, it tends to be quiet on the philosophies of space and geometry that undergird its translations. In almost all of that work, the translatory apparatus of Euclidean geometries forms an unproblematized point of reference. Many of these works move from geometry to cosmology to numbers and patterns, and they reveal a great deal about the ways notions of beauty, truth, and the sacred are linked to shape in different knowledge traditions. But how might the picture change if we see different geometries of space less as properties of culture-as-mind that render “space as science knows it” differently, and allow instead for the possibility that different versions of the nature of space attend not (only) to different objects, but to relationships? That approach, I would suggest, might enable different propositions about space and time to surface in ways that are meaningful, rather than solely as beautiful cultural ensembles. The assumption that space is describable only in the three dimensions of breadth, height, and depth is so automatic that we conflate the x-, y-, and z-box with reality, which is as much of an error as it is to assume that chronology or cartography are universal practices. If instead we problematize the link between the nature/truth/ reality of space and the way of thinking about space that gives us x, y, and z dimensions and forms in them that are definable in theorems of circle, square, and triangle, perhaps we might encounter grounds for a very different philosophy of space, and in turn, different ways of thinking about the natures made known by archaeology. One attempt to rethink the thinking about space, in recent years, has been via cognitive linguistics. The volume Grammars of Space explores the languages of space in a dozen tongues with the goal of understanding the ways in which language structures the human spatial domain.17 Starting

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with the observation that every mobile creature that operates from a home space needs the ability to think about space, editors Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins note that while language is obviously not the condition for animal (or human) spatial understanding, the ways in which languages treat spatiality differently give insights into how people archive information in relation to space. Their central question is, What reference systems do people use in order to understand space, and remember where things are in it? How have people internalized fixed directions so that in unfamiliar terrain they still know where a named direction lies? Levinson and Wilkins’s categorization of possible kinds of spatial referents begins with the pair kinesis/stasis (i.e., movement vs. static space), and they split the category “stasis” into angular space and topological space (which attends to arrangement in space). Angular space, they propose, is governed by frames of reference, including fixed arcs (e.g., sun, zenith, nadir), embodied or somatic directionality such as front/back/left/ right, and topographic and astronomical cues, such as a solar compass, star movements, wind directions, river drainage, and mountain slopes. Based on Levinson’s earlier work,18 they propose that human languages offer three possible kinds of coordinate systems: bodily coordinates (e.g., to the left of the tree), intrinsic coordinates (e.g., in front of x), or fixed bearings, such as absolute (north); and that people use these separately or in combination. Framed with this typology of kinds of space, their project unfolds. In Grammars of Space, twelve linguists present research on how specific languages code topological relations, frames of reference, and descriptions of motion. The study finds an extraordinary diversity of possible kinds of spatial cognition,19 leading the investigators to conclude that while there are some patterns, there is no universal structure for spatial cognition.20 Their work on topological descriptors (or ways of describing spatial arrangements) is based on a series of line drawings showing different relationships between things in order to find equivalent descriptive terms for spatial relationships.21 The cup is on the table, the picture is in the bowl, the ball is under the chair, the fence is around the house, and so on. These locatives, or locational parts of speech in language, occur within different grammatical constructions in languages. This grammar of space, they term the “basic locative construction.”22 The study searches for functional equivalents between languages. The Palikur material, however, points to three shortcomings in that kind of approach. First, the search for equivalent relationships between objects obscures the possibilities for radically different conceptualizations of subjects and objects. For example, in the Palikur language, the terms “left” and “right” can switch, depending on the perspective of the object as well as the subject. Thinking of how the mountain relates to the world

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is a statement about the cosmos. The MPI project’s search for functional equivalents of the “basic locative construction” makes assumptions about what objects are. Second, in the Palikur language, relations in space are primarily about surfaces and bodies in relation, because it is in their interaction that forms come to be what they are. Form is a consequence of interacting surfaces. Stasis is not a given. Levinson and Wilkins’s organization of the range of possible ideas about space, represented in a tree diagram that splits static from kinetic space, and splits static space into angular and topological space, renders very difficult the conceptualization of space as a product of relations and flows, for forms have already been defined as static. In this conceptualization, flows like that of water or flame are very difficult to grasp. Representations of matter set in space and time form the defining frame. Third, the surfaces themselves are salient, not only the edges and angularities that can be shown in lines. The range of seventy-one possible topological relations identified by MPI, drawn in line drawings as a means of eliciting spatial terms in order to understand spatial cognition, has already assumed that a line-drawing representation can stand for the thing itself. The shortcoming of the approach is illustrated in a story that Harold Green and Diana Green tell of a mission that predated their own and that recounted in Palikur the parable of the lost sheep. Since no one in Arukwa had ever seen a sheep, the evangelist had made use of a picture of a sheep to find an appropriate word. It was only years later that Harold and Diana learned that the tale had been told with the word one gives to a picture of a sheep, which is a “one-flat sheep,” as it had been drawn on a piece of paper. Perhaps the Amerindian view was that the deity who came to save the Moderns’ “one-flat sheep” was truly well sent!23 The story makes for a great linguistic comedy of errors—but it is also a moment in which an ontological mistranslation becomes understandable, as it speaks of the misunderstanding that arises when a representational ontology (“the word sheep stands in for a real sheep”) encounters a relational ontology (“a sheep shown on paper is not the same as a sheep in the world”). In the latter, forms and bodies have different interactive possibilities in the world. The representation and the being are not the same. Without detracting from the immense value of the MPI project that breaks with the idea of a universal cognitive template for thinking about space, it is important to recognize that its research methodology on topological relations is limited by the assumption that lines drawn to represent edges can stand in for the things themselves, rather than thinking about the ways in which drawn things are altogether different objects.

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The effort to move from representational ontologies to relational ontologies is a central interest in the work of Tim Ingold, whose extensive fieldwork in the Arctic has him grappling with human experience of the environment, time, and space.24 In The Perception of the Environment he explores the notion of wayfaring as a way of world making.25 That project leads to a fascination with the ways in which wandering routes— movements along the way of life—make the world. That work led to his extended reflection on the life of lines within modern technologies of recording information, in Lines: A brief history.26 Sometime after that publication, however, Ingold reflects on that work a little differently: What if the living being is the line of its own movement? Then it cannot be imagined as a bounded totality, surrounded by its environment. We have to rather think of it as a line of growth of concrescence—or, more realistically, as a bundle of such lines—and of the environment as a zone in which these lines become comprehensively entangled with one another. Ecology, I suggested, would then be “the study of the life of lines.” . . . Now I am not so sure. Can such lines really be objects of study? Literally, an object is a thing that has been thrown before the mind, in a form that can be apprehended. Life, however, is in the throwing and in the apprehension. It is the becomings of things perceived and of ourselves as perceivers. Perhaps, then, as an inquiry into the conditions and potentials of life, anthropology is not so much a study of lines as in them.27

Making the world through movement, and thinking about the ways in which anthropological research and writing and drawing make the world through movement, Ingold here moves toward researching lines of movement rather than the lines of representation that they become when they turn into information or data. In Lines, Ingold’s target is the ways in which the conceptual tools of modern scholarship have gradually removed the body and its movements from its representations. Architectural drawing, cartographies, music notation, and others are a project in which, in the name of objectivity, the movements of the body have been erased. Although Ingold does not here refer to archaeology, his observations speak to the comparison between an approach that studies and grids things in the ground and an approach that reads the tracks of the ancestors. Ingold’s is a rich project, yielding many possibilities for critique of techniques of representation that are central to the project of modernist knowledge. Yet the very concept of a “line”—in the sense of a sketched line—assumes that objects in space are related to one another via edges that can be drawn, rather than surfaces that form one another

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in interaction. Where lines demarcate insides and outsides, the Palikur material suggests that representing the world via lines is part of a way of thinking about space that is not readily familiar, not a “mother tongue” in world making. These ideas are difficult to convey. An illustration might help. In the black water landscape that is Arukwa, for example, the surface of the water is much like Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher’s graphic of the water in a pond, titled Three Worlds. In that image, a fish swims under the surface of the water on which leaves float and in which a tree and the sky are reflected. The three levels of upper world, surface world, and underworld are joined. Escher’s drawing resists—deliberately—a conventional geometry of perspective, with a fixed horizon and conventional notions of space. It plays with self-in-world, with plane, and with the illusions of space that lines make possible. Escher, the eschewer of conventional geometries of perspective, reflects in this image the ways in which space can be depicted without edges, without levels. His work offers a route into the “intensivity” of space that is in the Palikur hawkri. Representations of space do not need to assume that space is a container in order to be meaningful. It is this critique that is missing in Ingold’s thinking about lines: the possibility that the very idea of lines themselves come from an ontology of extensive space in which edges and borders and dimensional planes are untheorized. Escher’s works make it possible to visualize some of the ways in which minor geometries and critical arts converge with Amerindian intensive space. Edges and planes and borders are not strongly present in the Palikur narratives that David and I recorded. Consider the story of the Masitwak, in which the hero travels down a hole into the underworld, then out into the upper world of the Milky Way, and then back to this world. The spatial conception at work here is one of spatial flows: a type of geometry in which inside and outside are not clearly defined, and there are no staircases to the top and bottom floor, only pathways to upper and underworlds. In the story of Karumayra dancing along a path for days has people slipping into the underworld. The space of that cosmos is not a matter of stacked-up levels in Euclidean space, but a world of pathways and flows and actions that transform surfaces. Such an attention to effects is less “a way of knowing the world” and more a “knowing the world makings.” (Note the extent to which English grammar finds this tortuous!) To extend the idea, “knowing the body makings” is everyday practice in raising children, in which constant massage, referred to in chapter 1, makes (some authors use the word fabricates) children’s bodies through touch. The crafting of children’s bodies, making or sculpting them with each stroke, expresses the idea that surfaces are transformed through interaction. In much the same way as Escher’s oeuvre offers surprising

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convergences between world makings on the margins of Amsterdam and in Arukwa, the craft of body making has surprising convergences with practices of countermodern infant care in neonatal units, where “kangaroo care” emphasizes the importance of contact and touch. The point is a minor one, but important nonetheless: instead of an anthropology of symmetrical opposites (such as Self and Other, Modern and Non-Modern), emerging here is an approach that, akin to the graphics of M. C. Escher, is neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical: it is an anthropology of tessellations, that is, of forms that form one another as they move in and out of lines and times and through their frames. With compass and sword, the Machucas of European history initiated the process of disembodying space. The history of cartography enacts a geometry of space that minimizes the intersubjective and the relational, replacing these with objects and forms in gridded space. Can there be an archaeology that does not assert Newtonian space in order to know the meaning of objects? Could environments be imagined without compass and ruler? Can space be read in ways that enact different historical subjectivities? Perhaps the impossible thoughts here are easier to think in relation to different forms of music: in much the same way as minor geometries break up space in different ways to those in dominant geometries, different kinds of music break up time in ways that mean very different things to people who hear them. Cameroonian drummer Brice Wassey, the king of 6/8 rhythm, and Johan Sebastian Bach create radically different geometries of time: the former gives voice to what I would call a fractal geometry of point and counterpoint which explodes the rhythmic possibilities; the latter’s baroque cadences reflect the measured austerity of circles and spheres, returns and repetitions that one sees in Europe’s baroque cathedrals. Both inspire very different forms of dance. (Perhaps writing about music is like dancing about architecture!) Any musician can speak of the intimacy that comes with making music together, or the ways in which a really good party can remake the world, like the recordings of really good rock concerts and the roars of the audience mark the emergence of new rhythms as they do new subjectivities: the authorization of different kinds of emotions and ways of singing the self in the political cosmos in which we live. Can we begin to grasp a way of doing geometry that restores it as a world-making practice? David Guss comes close. To Weave and Sing: Art, Symbol and Narrative in the South American Rain Forest28 is an account of the relationship of basketry, architecture, geometry, cosmos, and what it means to be a person. For Guss, the ethos and philosophy of the Yekuana cosmos was evident in architecture and in basketry, in the visual metaphors that organize the cosmos. The mathematics of building and basketry are profoundly

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symbolic and part of an art of living that he describes in the language of encounter, presence, and consciousness to describe the ways in which the weaver weaves baskets and buildings that reflect the spatiotemporal order.29 In several ways, these accounts find unexpected resonance in Europe’s critiques of its own dominant traditions. Edmund Husserl’s effort to retrieve the relationships among geometry, sense, and subject30 was part of his efforts to understand the crisis in the European sciences. He sought to find “a dynamic and living form of reason that releases geometry from its value as an objective, disembodied form of knowledge in modern science”31 of the kind that serves as a source of “irrefutable reason.”32 “For Husserl,” writes Peg Rawes, “reason is inherently connected to hidden notions of existence or life which dominant rational scientific procedures conceal through their production of disembodied knowledge and methods.”33 Geometric thinking, for Husserl, is both an historically specific scientific method and an intuitive activity.34 His interest in the intuited world of geometry begins with the ways in which Galileo generated a divorce between the embodied subjective intuitive reasoning of space and the abstract calculus made possible by rendering geometry as a set of technical procedures.35 He searches, in other words, for ways to relink our active corporeal experience of space and time and sense, to create a living and vital geometry: a geometry that is part of world making, and world sensing.36 Why? In order to recover the purpose of knowing, through engaging actively with the materiality of form; to problem solve without reference to a representative calculus that might have very little to do with the problems at hand. Read in relation to the problem of understanding a different ecology of knowledge, Husserl’s work enables us to see that the measurement of space, form, and spatial relationship are not the only ways of thinking about space, or even space and time. Rather, his work enables us to comprehend that these apparently universal concepts of space are not “Nature” but ways of making the world that has a history that is, in turn, proudly drawn into a political cosmos. For the would-be symmetrical anthropologist (or the tentative tessellator) who is attempting to articulate a decolonial knowledge project in ways that can speak within the halls of scholarship, Husserl’s reflections are evocative. The notion of space, for Husserl, is an expression of subjectivity and world making. * * * Cultural geometry, then, might be not only pattern, nor only cosmological symbols, nor even a different philosophy of space (the very concept already assumes that space is separate), but a different world making

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in which ideas of space, time, philosophy, and knowledge are different. Indeed, the phrase “origin of geometry” appears three times in the work of major philosophers in the past one hundred years: There is Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Then there is Jacques Derrida’s earliest published work, titled Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. And The Origins of Geometry is the title of a major work by Michel Serres that, he declares in his introduction, was the product of thirty-four years’ work from 1958 to 1992 and that informs much of his later thinking.37 For Serres, “The rule of the canon is equilibrium or rest, stability. Hence Euclidean space, the space of the mason and the geometry of statics.”38 Serres’ book The Birth of Physics is a call for a science that attends to flow and movement, turbulence and chaos, rather than stasis and law. For Serres, homeostasis is the exception; the norm is homeorhesis. The world is in constant flux. Working with flow and change, Serres suggests, is the basis of a revised concept of space and, in turn, a revised contract with nature.39 The aim of thinking with these writings is not to arrive at a translation of Amerindian thought into that of Serres, Derrida, or Husserl, but to draw on these “notes on the margins of the canon” to confront the intellectual heritage that brings us the idea that the world is made of matter set in space and time. Neither “Europe” (as a region) nor “physics” (as a discipline) agrees on one “nature” of space and time. In the emphasis in the Palikur stories on bodies and actions and movement and flow in and through the world, there are no uncomplicated equivalents of “space and time.” If “space and time” are not universals, then in what concepts and imaginaries is the world made in Arukwa? Thus far, the hawkri has appeared many times in the preceding chapters, and the translation of it, drawn from texts and everyday practices of greeting, storytelling, astronomies, and linguistics, now approximates “day/world presence/consciousness.” By way of attempting a translation of that cluster of ideas—that ecology of knowing day/world—without resorting to space and time as the definitive reference, I want to go back to the hawkri. Perhaps by exploring the conceptual work that the word hawkri accomplishes, we might get a little closer to imagining the possibilities for dialogue with archaeology in the chapters that follow. What, then, is a hawkri? Nested within the hawkri are multiple temporalities, rather than one. The hawkri contains within it the idea of an earlier era: Igkis avim ini hawkri ka aynsima hiyeg ayge—“During that time, they were many people there,” and Nikwe wanawna avim inin hawkri ig hiyegte ig! “Then, the seagull, at that time, he was a person!” Yet it can also refer to the present: Wake igkis madikwiyebe wixwiy yuma amadga hawkri, “If they had been exterminated, we would not be here on this

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[earth] day.” The word can also refer to a season: Ig awna: Wagehe im. Hawkri kuwis wagahkis. “He said, ‘The fish are climbing. The season has started.’ ” Hawkri also refers to a particular period, such as a day: Abusku hawkri ig waykwad. Ig arewke, “Half a day he rains. He clears up”; a morning: Kuri ariwntak ini igkis ahawkrimineva, “Then, at that time, they woke up the next morning”; or a year: Aa! Kibite. Ka aynsima hawkri akiw, “Oh! Many! Many years later.” Beyond the hawkri lie the en or “sky worlds”: Maywak, Inurik, and Inukri. At the joining seam of the hawkri is the hawkri avatakni, where there is a river [Milky Way] called the hawkri awakun. That world river is “the world’s edge” or border or limits or channel. In this sense, to hiyak hawkri is to know the invisible—as per chapter 3, to know which stars are rising ahead of the dawn and are invisible in the sky by day, but also to know what relationships are possible with the star creatures from other worlds who are crossing the hawkri in the course of the year. Knowing the hawkri is to know the kinds of movement that make it.40 Much as stars are creatures of the hawkri, hills and mountains and rivers are partners and participants in the movements that make up the hawkri. Landforms are characterized by a capacity for relationships with one another and with people, and some are part of routes in and out of the underworld and the sky. Perhaps instead of the day/world one could translate hawkri as “world makings,” “world-season-origination” or “world makery.” That the phrase “knowing the hawkri”—hiyak hawkri—serves as an evaluation of a person or creature’s ethical character was established in the first chapter, where it could mean to have been well raised and to know what was socially appropriate. Hiyak hawkri sets out framing concern for having knowledge, that grasps that the goals for knowing shape the ways in which we come to know. To hiyak hawkri is to understand the ecology of actors in the world, including animals and landforms. A journeying storyteller’s capacity to hiyak hawkri reflects his or her ability to understand the multiple temporalities of generations and creatures and polities in a place, with their multiple presences, and to respond to them. What is established is that we are not dealing with space, or with space-time, but consciousness-space-time. In hiyak hawkri, one attends to the world in motion through one’s own motion. Your relationship with place is transformative, rather than an informational: you are attending to minutiae of transformations that are everywhere about you, and at the same time aware of your own path making and the possible responses to your presence. In short, you are attending to the effects of multiple perspectives in a place, and thinking through how actions and possibilities will be received, as you go. In this sense, ka hiyak hawkri refers to an outsider: like the Kurumsuk giants who did not know how to overcome the

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predatory propensities within the flooding grasslands, in the form of its water creatures such as alligators and anacondas. Ka hiyak hawkri here is “inexperienced, without practical know-how,” or to not know how things function. And since the hawkri is a cosmological and relational context, ignorance—ka hiyak hawkri—is also cosmological, relational, contextual. Time in this view is not purely about history—time past, or actions on a map—but time future: what responses one is about to occasion. To hiyak hawkri is to understand the dynamisms, interactions, potential, and propensity of a situation. Efficacy, in such a situation, is response-ability: the potential for which comes to so many people in the stories in a key evaluative moment as they sit and hiyapni hene—reflect upon a situation, and respond. Perhaps it is in this sense that the master spirit of a season or constellation offers gihiyakemni—which could variously be translated as (his) thoughts, consciousness, perception, perspective. And it would seem that for this reason, the genre of story track telling is so important, as one encounters the perspectives immanent in a place through the presence of the gahawkris of stars and creatures. Perhaps one could draw an analogy: that the journey of the pupil healer through the rain stars is like the coursework of an MBA graduate who learns the ecology and attitudes of capital in various encounters with the three goddess sisters of reason in the knowledge economy: technical efficiency, economic profitability, and scientific objectivity.41 Particular attitudes and affects bring a particular world into being. To attend to the world as hawkri offers what I would like to call an “ethics of world makery”—one that attends to one’s own presence and trail, and the propensities immanent in the places one travels through. Time in this view is not purely about history—time past, or actions on a map—but time future: what responses one is about to occasion. Time future, then, is not so much a “tomorrow” as a set of actions that are likely to flow from today’s actions. Undoing the intellectual heritage that makes hawkri “primitive,” “mythical,” or “cosmological” begins, I want to argue, with rethinking the conceptual apparatus of space and time. Recognizing that the extensive and quantifiable spaces and times bequeathed by Euclid, Descartes, Newton, and Kant are not universal is the beginning of the possibility of generative dialogue between scholarship and the intellectual heritages of everyday life on the margins. We strain, here, against the limits of thinkable thought. That phrase— “the limits of thinkable thought”—is from Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and they use it with reference to the political grammar of news media.42 Like Sky News and CNN, with this material the limits of the thinkable have to do with the global politics of knowledge. Where news media struggle with discourses of subjectivity

Figure 21. Arukwa in the cosmos

Figure 22.  Kiyavwiye Uwet with two anaconda carvings

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and objectivity, this material struggles against the modernist notion that the perspective of an object, that could see facts as they truly are, is what is venerable. By contrast, this argument considers the radical subjectivity of Amerindian intellectual heritage. To name it “subjective” is already a mistranslation, for the translation has already assumed a counterpoint “objective.” What this chapter has sought to argue is that the very idea of “the objective” requires a version of space in which one can stand outside of oneself: a version of space that we call the “representational ontology.” The question, then, is what version of “world” (or space) might accord with a relational ontology? How might we think about “world” without assuming it to be made of “space” in the Newtonian sense? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a rich provocation: Humans are beings that participate in spaces unknown to physics: the formulation of this axiom enabled the development of a modern psychological typology that scattered humans—without regard for their first self-localizations—among radically different places, conscious and unconscious, day-like and nightly, honorable and scandalous, places that belong to the ego and places where inner others have set up camp. What lends modern psychological knowledge its strength and autonomy is that is has shifted the human position beyond the reach of geometry and registration offices. Psychological investigations have responded to the question of where a subject is with answers that belie physical and civil appearances. Only the bodies of the dead can be localized unambiguously. . . . With beings that are alive in a humanly ecstatic manner, the question of place is fundamentally different, as the primary productivity of human beings lies in working on their accommodation in wayward, surreal spatial conditions.43

Sloterdijk’s “consubjective space” of human experience is the “intertwining of several interior spaces [where] the surreal becomes the real.” “Every subject in the real consubjective space is containing, in so far as it absorbs and grasps other subjective elements, and, contained, in so far as it is encompassed and devoured by the circumspections and arrangements of others.”44 Sloterdijk’s commentary is a critique of Enlightenment thought, and his focus is Western metaphysics, not Amerindian thought. But in his reaching for narrative of human experience outside of the constraints of Modernism, his commentary on the provocations of the psychoanalysts is a useful resource for an anthropology that strains against the limits of what it is to know; what it is to have knowledge of the world. Sloterdijk’s “consubjective space” that lies outside of Newtonian conceptions

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of space offers a glimpse of how interactive ways of making sense of the experience of place can come to animate its surfaces. Space, for Sloterdijk and for the narrators whose accounts are woven into this book, is not a universal container, but it finds the forms that it does through the relationships that weave it. Relational spaces are shared, and they can be ecstasy as much as nightmare. The relational cosmos weaves dream, reality, and nightmare together, working with the interactivities of what Moderns call objects, and space. The complex spaces of relationality that psychology speaks of, extend, in such worldmakings, to include objects, people, and creatures, all of whom can become many different beings to one another in the possible range of their interactivities. The beautiful insight that is central to the perspectivist imaginary is that the world is made via interactions, not only by objects in space. The nightmare of many, in Arukwa, is the arrival of an army of bulldozers, dropped by planes and helicopters with the task of flattening the landscape in search of things in the ground: a moment in which cosmological topologies would be flattened by those wanting mas y mas y mas y mas. The struggle of our archaeological project was not to slip into that nightmare.

C h a p t e r Fi v e

“Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors” Resources for Assembling Times Past

“Reading the tracks of the ancestors” is the phrase that, somewhere along the route of the public archaeology project, replaced our initial translation of archaeology as “studying things left in the ground.” The latter phrase seemed to be profoundly significant, although at the time I had no way to explain why it seemed more than merely a different turn of phrase. People immediately responded to “ancestor tracking” as meaningful, while “thing studying” attracted the kind of polite looks that affirmed that the real conversation was elsewhere. Clearly, the phrase “reading the tracks of the ancestors” was connecting to local ways of thinking about the more distant past—but how? It seemed to have something to do with what I was beginning to understand about everyday story tracking, set out in chapter 2, and the ways in which story tracking exceeded the possibility of translation either as geography or as history, or even a combination of them as historical geography. In the years that followed, as David and I worked through the astronomical material and began to understand that it was based on movement rather than fixed points, the journey narratives through the cosmos also began to bolster the sense in which tracking ancestors might be an epistemological practice in itself. Perhaps by working with tracking as more than the ability to follow tracks but as an approach to assembling knowledge more broadly, it might be possible to support a dialogue that could generate interesting and useful approaches to thinking about times past. Bruno Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” refers to the application of ethnographic methods to the sciences, including, for example,

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archaeology.1 Latour’s anthropological research on scientific laboratories, for example, is “symmetrical” because the people who are in “the field” can talk back, to contest accounts of scientific theory and practice, and can ask questions about the ways in which the ethnographer writes. The anthropological account becomes accountable. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro takes this one step further: “What changes when . . . we apply the Latourian notion of ‘symmetrical anthropology’ to anthropology itself, not to lambaste it as colonialist, exorcize its exoticism, or mine its intellectual field, but to induce it to say something completely different?”2 Could anthropology move beyond describing different ways of thinking and begin to draw on them in ways that challenge and transform its own intellectual heritage and conceptual resources? The preceding chapters have argued that formal disciplinary knowledges and practices—chronology, cartography, the philosophy of personhood, ethics, astronomy, geometry—are indeed very different from the ecology of ideas here in Arukwa. In this short chapter, I aim to consolidate what it might mean to track the ancestors, in order to return to the work of the archaeological project in the final chapter. What, then, can be said about “tracking the ancestors” as a historical practice? Answering that question requires us to begin with a prior question: What does it mean to translate such a phrase? This chapter approaches the matter from two directions. First, it considers what it is to translate something, making the case that translation itself does not mean the same in Palikur as it does in English. The argument here is that in Palikur, the word wages that is translated as “translation” reflects the ability to reconceive one’s body—and that that kind of translation is an important skill for a tracker. In English, by contrast, the referential concepts for the idea of translation, deriving from Middle English, involved a change of territory, property, and polity. Second, it proposes that “tracking” as an activity is not only good to think about but also good to think with. Tracking is not a “practice” that can be set in opposition to “theory.” Rather, it is a way of building or assembling knowledge of the world from a range of cues. One might think of it as a practical philosophy, or as a philosophy of the everyday, as a way of world making.

I The Middle English Dictionary, a rich resource for the origins of words, offers six possible meanings for the word “translate”—only one of which refers to changing languages:

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(1) To relocate . . . move . . . transplant . . . ; (b) to transfer . . . reposition oneself;—used figuratively; (c) to . . . disinter (bones or a body from a place burial); (d) to carry away (sb., a nation or group of people) captive or into exile, . . . remove (a people), sweep away, destroy; also, deport (sb., a people); carry (sth.) off as booty . . . (e) to change the site of (the imperial capital, an ecclesiastical see); (f) to transfer one’s allegiance [quot. a1425]; also, cause (sb.) to change (to new laws or customs); also, redirect (worship). (2) To take away (a kingdom, duchy, etc.) from its ruler or people; transfer (rulership, the imperium, etc. from one people or person to another), turn over; cause . . . to be annexed; (b) to relinquish (one’s authority or ownership of property to another); transfer (one’s prerogatives to another); (c) to remove (joy, influence, etc.); (3) (a) To take . . . into the afterlife without death; . . . carry (sb., a soul into paradise or heaven); (b) . . . transformed . . . into a god or constellation. (4) To change the nature, condition, or appearance of . . . ; transform, alter; . . . advance (one’s position). (5) To replace . . . ; turn (sth. into sth. else); also, move (a celebration to a different day). (6) (a) To translate . . . from one language into another; render (a body of knowledge, a calumny, etc.) in another language; also, translate a text by (an author) or in (another language); also, capture in translation (the style or idiom) of the original text; (b) to engage in translation from one language to another, translate.3

The first five meanings of “translate,” in Middle English, concern removing, or relocating to a different place, under a different polity or cosmos. In these senses, the early uses of the word “translation” derive from an understanding of transformations that accompany changes in spatial relationship to a kingdom, a capital, a duchy, the gods, or an ecclesia. Translation, in the senses listed above, is bound to notions of land, territory, property, and realm. It has, one might say, to do with the changes in ideological consciousness that accompany movement through different polities, or cosmo-polities. The Palikur word for translate has a very different set of references. Wages (pronounced wuh-GESS) is the equivalent term, and it has several possible meanings that have little to do with transferring allegiance. An Oxford Dictionary of Palikur could include at least six usages. For example, wages can mean “to turn around,” as in the movement of a constellation-being in the course of a year. Sarisri: Tavara wayk. Hawata igwata datka.4

Sarisri: Tavara [the Kingfisher constellation] rains. He is also an anaconda.

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Kadahan ka nopsimadhad nawiyad. Ada tivikwiye. Ada wageswiye han akiw Nikwe ig tivik. Nikwe estuwa gidahan wakukwa. [. . .] Kuri wakukwa kabiman ig atere. Ig awna git: Ba ayta! Mpiya awke han! Ba ayta iwavun! [. . .] Nawiy wagestew. Eg diyuhe. Mpiya ihapkew kenese gimun neg.

He has a huge boat. To journey on. To turn around this way again [points east]. Then he leaves. Now then, in the story about the monkey. [. . .] Now the monkey yelled out to him there. He said, “Come here! Come by here! Come take me!” [. . .] The boat turned around. It returned. It came up close to [the monkey].

Second, wages can also mean “to circle around,” as in a dance: Uwet: Igkis kay kabubet.5 Igkis wageswa han kabawbet. Aranwa. Aranwa darivwitad

Uwet: They danced all together. [A reference to dancing as if in a swarm during the bee dance.] They circled around all together, this way. Around [and] around the huge clay pot.

Third, wages can also mean “to change one’s body,” as in ig wages kawokwine: he turns into a jaguar. Uwet: Igkis wageswe made.6 Ner wageswe pakig Netra wageswe kavine. Netra wageswe uwan. Netra wageswe bukutru. Igkis wageswe madikte: maruksi, kwat. Madikte igkis wageswe made ayge.

Uwet: [But] they were all transformed. That one turned into a big wild pig [queixada]. That one turned into a small wild pig [caititú]. That one turned into a paca. That one turned into an agouti. They all changed. Howler monkey, spider monkey. They all changed there, all there.

A fourth meaning of wages is “to writhe”: Sarisri: Nikwe ig wagesne ay arikut Sarisri: Then he turn around pudig.7 [writhed] here inside the hammock.

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Fifth, to say ig wages gihiyakemni—he “changes his thoughts, mind, ideas, consciousness, way of thinking”—is something that occurs when a person has sat and thought about a situation long enough to begin to see things differently: ig hiyapni henne. This phrase marks a pivotal moment in many stories we recorded in which the central character takes a new perspective. Sixth, someone can wages when they are entranced by, entered by, or have a sexual encounter with a spirit-creature: Ishawet: She was walking along. He [the spirit creature] climbed up. Pariyeki neg hiyeg? Hawata eg ka “Who is that person?” [she asked]. hiyak. She also did not know. Bawkata mahipoko But it was a Mahipoko [spirit]. Pariyeki neg hiyeg danuh atan kuri? [She wondered] “Who is this Nah ka hiyakti hiyeg. Ka aynsima person who has come here now? hiyeg sema ig ka danuh atan. I have not seen a person like this. Lots of people have come [before] but he has never come here.” Now he came desiring her. Kuri ig ayta guharitne. Hawata ig ay gukak. Ig kahayowene He also stayed with her. He gut. married her [had sex with her]. Ay ig wageswe gihiyakemni gukak. There he changed her way of thinking. Ishawet: Eg wayhweh. Ig wagah.8

Taking all of the above uses together, to wages-translate is to change one’s hiyakemniki—thoughts, ideas, consciousness—to those that a person or creature or body would have after turning around to look at something differently after you have moved your body, or assumed a different body, or taken the consciousness of another creature into your own being. The referent, for translation, then, is not property/polity but the body, specifically, the perspective one has from the direction of your gaze, and the form of consciousness that derives from inhabiting a specific body. Bodies, in other words, are different when they take on different affects, in the sense in which Viveiros de Castro uses the term: “Affects, in the old sense of dispositions or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious or solitary. . . . Bodies are the way in which alterity is apprehended.”9 With this insight comes a first clue to the significance of changing the translation of the Portuguese arqueologia from “reading the things in the ground” to “reading the tracks of the ancestors.” The former reflects a scholarship whose epistemology takes form in relation to the need for

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a knowledge that will identify territory and property. The rationale, or justification, or moral legitimacy of such knowledge is that of sedentary space: ownership, governance, legitimacy, law. In this sense, to read the things left behind in the ground is to find the archive of the ground: the evidence that can be the basis of the findings by an archē or judge, in ancient Greece, who seeks to determine property, ownership, rights, and obligations. The later translation—reading the tracks—focuses on the traces of the bodies of people, as clues to understanding the perspectives or consciousnesses in terms of which their movements were made. Translation of wages is significant for this project at two levels. It calls attention to the act of translation itself as something that is neither neutral nor universal, but is a practice grounded in specific intellectual heritages. Second, translation in the sense used in the Uaçá draws attention to the importance of understanding consciousness as an extension of body and not the other way around. Specific kinds of bodies have specific kinds of consciousness. When one tracks, one is reading a record of the interactions of many different bodies, and it is those interactions that enable one to imagine how the moving party was perceiving the world. To know is to understand movement. For Louis Liebenberg, the author of the book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, there are three kinds of tracking. “Simple tracking” involves following a clear trail, like those left by footprints in snow or sand. “Systematic tracking” involves gathering many more signs of action and reading their temporalities in relation to one another: it involves interpretation and deduction and a more complex account of what happened when. Such a trail could include footprints, bent reeds, or blood, in conditions where a track is not obvious. “Speculative tracking” involves more than deduction or induction: it involves “the creation of a working hypothesis on the basis of the initial interpretation of signs, a knowledge of animal behaviours and a knowledge of the terrain [so that trackers can] look for signs where they expect to find them.”10 Introducing the book, Liebenberg writes: According to a popular misconception, nature is “like an open book” to the expert tracker and such an expert needs only enough skill to “read everything that is written in the sand.” A more appropriate analogy would be that the expert tracker must be able to “read between the lines.” Trackers themselves cannot read everything in the sand. Rather, they must be able to read into the sand. To interpret tracks and signs trackers must project themselves into the position of the animal in order to create a hypothetical explanation of what the animal was doing. Tracking is not strictly empirical, since it also involves the tracker’s imagination. . . . By reconstructing their movements from

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their footprints, you may be able to visualize the animals and in your imagination actually “see” them. In this way, a whole story may unfold, a story of what happened when no-one was looking.11

Rane Willerslev’s study of tracking in Siberia in Soul Hunters: Hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (2007) pursues the arts of imagining oneself into the body of an animal in order to think-feel-know what the creature might do. For Willerslev as for the Yukaghir hunters he describes, hunters are both humans and animals; the art of hunting is to become animal yet also to remain human. Willerslev argues that the kind of perspectivism described by Viveiros de Castro derives not from abstract thinking, but from everyday engagement with the world. “Perspectivist representations,” he writes, “are not just intellectual constructs but . . . inseparably bound up with the hunting activity in which they are engaged. The challenge . . . is therefore to bring perspectivism ‘down to earth,’ as it were, and situate it in its primary context of hunters’ actual perceptual engagement with prey. Taking this condition of engagement as a point of departure, I believe that we can find a way to place Yukaghir conceptions of such matters as human-animal transformations in the lived-in world of experience instead of simply attributing them to some overarching cosmological principle.”12 Willerslev here, in my view, reinstantiates a division between the “practical” and the “cosmological.” Viveiros de Castro’s approach to hunting as thinking does not, in my view, split the intellectual from the practical (as Willerslev suggests he does) but is interested in resolving the distinction. In his 1998 lectures at Cambridge, published in 2012, he writes, “Amerindian perspectivism has an essential relation with shamanism, and with the valorization of hunting as the archetypal mode of practical interaction with the non-human world.”13 The lectures contain an extended discussion on the development of an anthropological approach that moves away from a distinction between the practical and the propositional—questions that are central to any attempt to kindle a generative dialogue between science and its others. “I believe we need to discover the infra-philosophical, i.e., the vital, within the concept,” he observes, “and likewise (perhaps more importantly) the virtual conceptuality within the infra-philosophical. What kind (or ‘form’) of life, in other words, is virtually projected by ideas such as the Cartesian Cogito or the Kantian synthetic a priori? . . . And in like manner, what sort of virtual conceptuality pulsates within Amazonian shamanic narratives . . . ? We need a little less by way of context and much more by way of concept.”14 Contemporary developments in genetics and neuroscience strain against the limits of the mind-body distinction that undergirds the distinction between the practical and the cognitive. In recent years,

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neuroscience has been animated by discussion of the discovery of “mirror neurons” in the brains of humans and monkeys—making the argument that a particular class of neurons in the brain enable one to experience the body state of another.15 Leading neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran argues that this is one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience, for it compels a rethinking of the line between nature and culture, and a rethinking of the idea of the individual self that lives as an independent observer of the world.16 To an anthropologist interested in thinking outside of the dualistic heritage of modernist thought, such work enables discussions to move beyond the belief-knowledge divide. The kind of tracking that Willerslev describes as “becoming animal” has a great deal in common with the way in which neurologist Antonio Damasio describes the experience of empathy, based on Damasio’s description of mirror neurons as the “as-if-body-loop mechanism”: An internal brain simulation that consists of a rapid modification of ongoing body maps. This is achieved when certain brain regions . . . directly signal the body-sensing brain regions. . . . Those neurons can represent, in an individual’s brain, the movements that very brain sees in another individual, and produce signals towards sensorimotor structures so that the corresponding movements are either “previewed,” in simulation mode, or actually executed. . . . The result of direct simulation of body states in body-sensing regions is no different from that of filtering signals hailing from the body. In both cases the brain momentarily creates a set of body maps that does not correspond exactly to the current reality of the body. The brain uses the incoming body signals like clay to sculpt a particular body state in the regions where such a pattern can be constructed, i.e., the body-sensing regions. What one feels then is based on that “false” construction, not on the “real” body state.17

Damasio goes on to describe the part of the brain that is responsible for simulated body states as a “playground where variations on the bodystate theme can be played. . . . [T]he body-sensing areas [of the brain] constitute a sort of theatre where not only ‘actual’ body states can be ‘performed,’ but varied assortments of ‘false’ body states can be enacted as well, for example, as-if-body states, filtered body states [that manage pain], and so on.”18 While his argument might be improved by replacing the language of “false” and “real” with words drawn from performance, imagination, creativity, and the virtual, his overall argument that “bodystate hallucinations . . . are valuable resources for the normal mind”19 is important in this discussion, as it implies that multisensory mimicry of another’s body in order to feel what it might be experiencing is a form

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of embodied intellect that integrates imagination, movement, emotion, and sensations. It would seem to me that there is not necessarily such an enormous gap between the ways in which neuroscientists speak of “hallucinating the body” and the kinds of bodily conceptualities (or habits of thought) that are at work in the discipline of tracking. Taking that approach, it is possible to suggest that at work in the performances of Amerindian shamans—performances of animals that anthropologists have often translated as exemplars of difference or Otherness or even superstition20—is both habitus and a theory of other minds that is grounded in the capacity to hallucinate another body state. Embodied thought, perhaps, is not quite as alien to formal scholarship as it might seem; not quite so Otherworldly. Indeed, Shakespeare speaks to the translation of the body in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when one of the characters is turned into an ass: “Bottom, bless thee, thou art translated!”21 Such a translation is the translation of the body and of conscious experience, and its usage by the Bard offers a tantalizing reminder that while modernist thought might have originated in Europe, not all European thought beat a path to modernism. In sum: to follow an animal, or an ancestor, is to allow oneself to be translated. The similarity to an anthropology based on immersive field experience is uncanny.

II Given the significance of tracking as a practice, what kinds of tracks are there, and what range of meanings attach to the word? A review of the uses of the word gidukwankis (“their tracks or paths”) or adukwen (“its track or footprints”) in the stories we collected yields some surprising results. Kiyavuno Parakwayan uses the word adukwenewa to refer to the pathways of underworld spirit creatures into the everyday surface world. Ihi, ignewa igkis. Ya, igkis ihamwigben igkis keh sabukwigkis ta Wakayrit. Inneki keh igkis ka pes akiw. Ku ka henema igkis adukwenewa pes han. [. . .] Ihamwi awna:- Uyay sabukwig ada igkis ka ayta iwemni tinogben. Ada tivikema tinogben ta anavit Wakayri.22

Yes, they, the shamans, they shut them [the imawri spirit creatures] in at Wakayri [Mountain]. So that they do not come out anymore. If that had not happened, their paths would continue to come out here. [. . .] The shaman would say, “Let us shut them in, so that they do not come and take the women. To take the women [away to their home] underneath Wakayri.”

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For Kiyavwiye Uwet, the ceramic shards at Aragbus are tracks that needed to stay where they were, in order for the stories of them to continue to be told there when people came by. In this sense, adukwenewa are the material remains of a pathway which stands as testimony to the activity of those who have been before in a place: Uwet: Now my thoughts say, “It is better for them [the ceramic shards] to stay there [at Aragbus].” Inin nah kawnate muwaka Also I do not want our relatives ukebyuvwiy ku pariye akiw, ku who come afterward [our ka ignema nah aka, nah kawnate descendants], whom I have not muwaka ada igkis uwi ada igkis keh shown [these things to], I also do piyuka akak. Pis hiyak? not want them to take [things] to make sale of [to sell]. Do you understand? Usuh muwaka eg usekwa aynewa We want [the shards] to stay right ada kahadmakama ku aysaw hiyeg here, so that when people come, danuh, amekene akiw, hiyeg butye our descendants, the people after ku danuh nekuw nikwe igkis aya. us who arrive and ask [about this Igkis hiya adukwenewa ayge. Pis place]. They will see them still hiyak? there. Do you understand? Ka ika adahan usuh wiwh ayteke We can not take [things] away ada usuh keh piyuket akak. Ka ik from here, in order to make a shop with them. We can not do anything adahan wis keh ariknawnema. [with these things]. Uwet: Kuri ndahan nuhiyakemni awna: Pikabayte eg msekwe ayge.23

Like tracks which stay in a place, adukwenewa can also be used to describe the ways in which a person will continue to be present in a place, or will continue to make tracks in a place: Ishawet: Nah kinetihwene pahat Ishawet: [His wife, Tivuw, said,] inetit kiyavwiye. Ba pi iha nunhuh? “I will tell you one thing, sir. Do Ku pis iha nunhuneku. Yuma. you believe [obey; respect] my Adukwenewa ay.24 words? If you respect my words, [there will be] nothing [bad that will happen]. Your path/footsteps will remain here.” It is curious, and perhaps significant, that the noun for “tracks” is the root of a metaphor that means “still” in the sense that something persists, or remains. Diana Green notes that “the word adukwenewa means ‘in

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the very same track’; ‘in the same position,’ or ‘in the same situation.’ It usually fills the adverbial spot that is normally translated ‘still’ or (in Portuguese) ‘ainda’ as in ‘They would still come out here.’ ”25 The sense in which the same adukwenewa refers to “still” is interesting, and at the risk of over-translating its relevance to “tracks,” it is worth exploring the sense in which the term extends to the activity of “making an appearance.” Kiyavwiye Afonso uses the term to refer to the arrival or presence of maggots on a corpse: Hawata adahan pina hawkri, akak amamnam hawkri igkis [awaykemni] danuh akiw.26 Igkis iwasa mmah adukwenewa. Tuwebu humaw ka aynsima. Pi kibite akiw!

Also after two days. On the third day, they [the men] returned again. They were looking to see if [the larvae] were still there. Many larvae had formed. [Even] more numerous again!

In Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s account of Karumna Mountain: Minikwak yuma waxri ay.27 Ganagad yuma. Nornewa! No yanwak ay. Aynenewa nor. Notra hawata. Aynenewa norras. Keh inin ay nikwe. Keh usuh hiyakni. Adukwenewa usuh hiya.

Long ago, there was no [other] land here. No Mother of All! Only this one! This [mountain called] “Yanwak” here. Only her. Her sister [mountain] also. These two are still here. Made here now. It [she] has caused us to know. We still see them.

Adukwenewa as “being in a place” or “being here” by having a trail there forever is the condition of one of the constellations, in this extract from a story told by Kiyavwiye Uwakti: Ig awna:- Aa! Nukamkayh. Pisanaba ayhte . . . piwepka.28 Kama ayta nor waravyuyano. Uwar eg. Nor uwar eg. Iwevgi. Ihi. Adahan pis hiyak pikawnata biyuk. Adukwenewa ay.

He said, “Ah! My child, are you there . . . where you have been taken?” “Did you not come with the little stars [constellation]? She, the cabeçudo turtle?” She, the cabeçudo turtle, took him. “Yes. For you to see, that you are not lost. You are still here.”

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The material suggests that “being still here,” “being in a place,” “making an appearance,” and “making tracks” are conceptually linked.29 In Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s account of Christian teaching, in an interview on Maywak, the Upper World, in July 2001, he brings together the two ideas we are grappling with—translation of consciousness/body and tracking— to explain his version of the theology of Christ’s substitution, in which the atonement is made in others’ tracks/footsteps/place, in order that people no longer change into animals: Nahma ka muwaka inin! Kuwis ka aynsima hiyeg peweke. Kuri nah ka muwaka ada igkis pawaka.30 Nahwa miya gidukwankis.

I [Jesus] do not want this! Already many people have changed [into animals]. Now I do not want them to change anymore. I myself will die in their tracks/ footsteps [in their place].

To read the gidukwankis of the ancestors, then, is to attend to their trails, to enter into their consciousness, to see the evidence of their having been present, to be present, to put oneself in their place, to see from their perspective. “Tracking” and “translating” have very similar conceptual references. What might this “substitutive tracking” mean for the practice of making history? The first draft of this book began with a chapter on the history of Arukwa. It had opened with a natural history: the rising and falling of seawaters over the past several thousand years, followed by an account of the silt deposition of the Amazon that has built up this coast and some musings on the possibility of continuities of memory across thousands of years to a time when sea levels were lower about 7,000 or 8,000 years ago. Then it went on to the debates in Brazilian archaeology about the archaeological record and the dates about the earliest human settlement. After that was an account of Vincente Yañez Pinzon dropping anchor in the Mar Dulce, the Sweet Sea, where the fresh waters of the Amazon reach the coast, and his meeting with “the Pariucura” on January 1, 1500. Some details of the cultural and political history of this region followed, from the rich written archives penned in the past five hundred years by sailors, slave owners, farmers, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, Jesuits, Baptists, government officials, and royal appointees in at least eight languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Palikur, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.31 When it had reached thirty-seven pages and its bibliography ran into several dozen sources, however, it began to sound no different from the already written accounts of the history of the Guianas, which foreground the travelers’ texts and their tales of exploration, trade, battles, and scientific nature.

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The interest of so many European powers in the Guianas has left many traces of the Palikur in the archival records of Europe and Latin America. Yet if we were to take those sources as archives of cultural history, to be organized around “the material record” offered by archaeology as “scientific” or “natural” history, our only option is to graft a putative version of “Palikur culture” on to a scientific account of nature, which, I have argued, is nested in the larger concern to create an archive and an archaeology for governance and for state making. Bruno Latour’s observation is key here: the matters that are of concern, in that approach to the sciences that undergird history, give rise to particular kinds of facts.32 The Palikur stories would inevitably be organized in a modernist ontology and would serve either to confirm the truth of the archive and the archaeological accounts or to stand outside them as exemplars of the radical Otherness of ethnohistory in which we would inevitably relegate to the realm of “belief” whatever did not fit the kinds of facts that are unrecognized, in an archaeology of “the facts” of territory/property/statehood, as expressions of underlying concerns. The best that such a history can hope to effect is a tolerance of multicultural territorial histories. “Who wants to be tolerated?” Isabelle Stengers asks in her essay “The curse of tolerance.”33 Her argument segues with that of Mario Blaser, who argues that when environmental conflicts are explained via the idiom of cultural difference, “a different ontology is reduced to just another cultural perspective on the world within the modern ontology.”34 Recognizing the importance of wider historical concerns in the production of certain kinds of facts has the potential to open up some different possibilities for a generative dialogue within archaeology. Such an approach allows us to recognize the contribution of a broader Amerindian concern with the affective bodies that populated the spaces of Arukwa long ago, and to grasp the relevance of those kinds of concepts for resisting dominant logics. Rethought in these ways, it is possible to move dialogue past the moral relativism in which “belief” is morally upgraded to “knowledge” in order to right the wrongs of colonialism.35 Tracking, I have argued, offers a means of thinking with the body: a set of skills that are passed on through networks of hunters. Perspectivism is a means of imagining the ways in which the world appears differently to different kinds of bodies. Being able to shift one’s experience of the world is part of the skill of interpreting the signs of actions and presences that are going on around one. The phrase that marks this skill in so many of the recorded stories is ig hiyapni hene—“he seeing it [the situation] was so. . . .” Its use signals a transformative moment in a story, as a person sees and thinks about a situation and reorients his or her response. It is the moment in which the character becomes open to different ways of inhabiting a situation, and at that point, he or she can wages gihiyakemni,

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change or translate his or her knowing-consciousness-mind-perspective in order to be able to act to better effect, or respond to the perspectives at work in making the world around him or her. There is no singular nature, in this view. Tracking, this material proposes, is more than practice: it is a way of reading other world makings. It does not assume that the world comes to all as a singular nature, but it does propose that, to understand and live in the world, one needs the capacity to grasp how different creatures respond to their worlds. Understood in these ways, tracks speak of the consciousnesses or perspectives with which ancestors responded to the world and modified it as they went. An alternative account of times past, based on our collection of Palikur narratives of the world, could begin with the hills and landforms and their responses to one another and to the creatures that moved on their surfaces. The tracks of the rain stars were evident in the annual rising and falling of the waters, a rising and falling that brought in seasonal bounties. Different places in the landscape are home to different spirit creatures—master predators, and gradually the shamans closed them into the underworld. Stories of this landscape are not just accounts of what happened where; rather, they are stories of trails in which people learned the skill of surviving the relations of predation, which includes the importance of understanding how predators see, in order to survive them. When the story is told of a son born to a slave who followed the trail he had learned from his father’s epics and found his way back to Arukwa, the story celebrates not only his capacity to memorize landforms but also the ability to understand the ways in which creatures of all kinds were making their worlds. Knowing how to hunt and track meant being able to anticipate what other creatures were likely to do, and to do that, one needs to see how they see the world. Without that skill, one is prey to the master predators, the most iconic of which is the anaconda that takes other creatures whole into its own skin and transforms their bodies into itself. Those who did not survive this landscape did not know how to read the tracks, in this full sense. The boot prints (or were they hooves?) of the marauding Kurumsuk are long gone, but the tales of their habitation of the cave called Kurumsuk-givin, or Home of the Kurumsuk, remain. The chaos of tracks amid alligators and slave traders around the settlement at Masika, which was attacked in a drinking festival when people were drunk and did not hiyak hawkri, marks an ending that is still remembered with tears. The stories of the shamans Karumayra, Uwakti, Wayos, Ugus, Sans, and Parup tell of how they closed off the paths of various predators between this earth and the underworld, including holes in the

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ground, paths, waterfalls, upwellings, and tree trunks. The trails left by Brazilian officials, American soldiers, Chinese traders, French travelers, and various missionaries, conservationists, and anthropologists, too, are in the places along the river, as are people’s fears of what tracks might come next: the army of bulldozers that could level the hills in search of underground riches; the end of the world; the millennium; the takeover of the economy by multinational companies. Stories of conversion and the arrival of various missions, and stories of the raising of the church and schools and a community hall and the end of dancing, pepper tales of the origins of the new villages. Those larger settlements herald the beginning of government jobs and resources in Arukwa, which in turn generate new trails to schools and clinics and the radio rooms, telephone booths, solar arrays, satellite dishes, and trucks on downriver mainland villages where roads mark the beginning of journeys to the cities of Macapa and Belém and São Paulo. Through all of this, a central matter of concern is that people’s bodies and skills are changing and, with that, their way of responding to the world. Ishawet put it well when the discovery of a stone axe in a cave prompted a reflection on the bodies of those who would have used it: They would chop large trees with it. . . . Now we who have come later do not have the stamina for this, no endurance. They were very strong. They didn’t eat salt. They didn’t eat pepper. They ate no seasoning. They would eat meat just as it is. Ah! They were very tough. . . . We who come later have no strength for this. We don’t know how to make this . . . nothing at all. We have lost the knowledge among the days. If we don’t buy metal axes, then we don’t make a field. If we don’t have a machete, we don’t chop. They would even make clay axes. They would chop with them. They had machetes, knives, pans, everything. They had pots. They would cook with pots. The ancestors didn’t buy pots like we do now. You would make ceramic pots, beautiful ceramics. They would make darivwits [manioc-beer pots], tukutgus [doublenecked pots], [and] all kinds of urns to hold a dead person’s body in when they burned the body and put it inside. . . . They had much endurance/knowledge. They had much strength. Giwegamni means strength. Understand?36

A testament to stamina, skill, food, strength, knowledge, and an orientation to life that placed value on the cremation of the dead, a material artifact was, for Kiyavwiye Ishawet, a narrative of a changing perspective on bodies: bodies that do different things, and for that reason, know different things. Bodies that, in a word, are being translated, from one

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ecological economy, to another. The question is: do bodies that do different things, develop different capacities—and, in the logic of perspectivism, see different things, and respond to the world in different ways. The insight is an important one, for it enables us to begin to work with different ways of doing history in ways that escape the clutches of culturalism (that is, the idea that different ways of knowing are related to culture or ethnicity). Ishawet’s comment suggests an insight that the next chapter traces: that differing accounts of the past also reflect a range of engagements with the problem of how to know. Answering that problem in a rendering of all of David’s recordings of narratives of times past would fill several books. Rather than embark on an exhaustive account of them all, it makes sense to try to focus on the narratives of the place that became the focus of our public archaeology project: the wartime village called Kwap. Chapter 6 explores the story trails that pass through Kwap, exploring the ways in which they offer information not only about a place and a time that can be marked on the land and in the soil but about the ways in which the movements of all kinds of bodies, including those that are part of modern knowledge ecologies, make Kwap what it is in the wider cosmos.

C h a p t e r Si x

The Story Trails of Kwap Archaeology, Provenance, and an Ecology of Predation

Having grappled, in the foregoing chapters, with what it means to be a person who knows; with ways of making history through movement; with an understanding of the sky based on the writhing of the Milky Way in relation to the sun’s path; with the world made not by a container made of space but by interactions, we are finally in a place where we can begin to assemble the stories that go through Kwap, in order that they can begin to generate narrative frameworks and research questions that could inform discussion about the prospects for public archaeology here. It is the undisciplining of thought that enables a curation of narratives around what we had thought of as “the site at Kwap” which enables us now to reapproach the question of what it means to think not about Kwap, but at Kwap, and near Kwap, and in doing so, to begin to work with the stories as resources for an interpretive framework for speaking about times past. Like the astronomy chapter, this chapter offers an assemblage of performance art: the stories in which Kwap features. Kwap itself is a point that assembles river, islands, and mainland. Located toward the upper reaches of the Rio Urucauá where the waters are narrow and shallow, the peninsula that is Kwap marks the place where the river widens into a basin and its floodplain turns hills into dozens of islands. Kwap itself is somewhat higher than the immediately surrounding islands: a place of tall, quiet trees where there is an abundance of aquatic foods, a few fresh streams, and the advantages of defense over water. “Kwap,” however, is not well defined on the land: when you were “in Kwap” and when you were “not in Kwap” remained something of a

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mystery to me. The map of ceramic densities from augur tests suggests that some areas had been more densely inhabited than others, but the overall impression is of a spread-out settlement. That very indefiniteness is reflected in the narratives that pass through it, since in them Kwap is less a specific space and more of a meshwork of households, and stories, and temporalities, and contending versions of realities. Translating those realities is a challenge, the more so since the story performances that traverse Kwap come with many caveats about truth and its verities. The multiple realities that the storytellers refer to speak of a landscape that has survived several translations into new polities, languages, and realisms. The challenge of working with them, then, is to grasp the ongoing translations of the real: that is, the way in which Kwap as a place, and a node of many narratives, is continually undergoing a process of retranslation in relation to new modes of the real and the reasonable. That noted, the recorded narratives speak at the same time of Kwap as itself a place that can translate a person’s experience of the world, in its past and present and futures, in different ways. Kwap is at once a landscape of dread; a landscape of heroism and technological skill; a landscape of innovation; and a landscape of predation, dark shamanism, and werewolves. To think about Kwap as a consubjective space is to think about the translation of self in that place, and to begin to know the translations of the world that have histories in the soils and the underworld and the sky at Kwap. The landscape calls forth fear; it simultaneously memorializes devastation and courage and skill. To tell the stories and grapple with their verities is to grapple with what it means to be a person who knows the world here, now. It would border on the fraudulent to curate these accounts in this chapter in a manner that arrives at an authoritative checklist on how to do public archaeology. In the place of an authorial rhetoric of “how to. . .,” the chapter offers resources for ongoing conversation on what it means to know, here, and what it is to be present in the tracks of those who have gone before. More fragile, and tentative, this curation has more in common with the rhetoric of an African dilemma tale in which the speaker’s task is to provoke discussions in the audience. With such an assemblage of stories, further work alongside and nearby might be possible: not only in relation to material provenience—the precise locations of artefacts—gathered by the dedicated and inspiring archaeological colleagues who investigated the soils at Kwap (and those who continue to work alongside community-led museums like the Museu Kuahi in Oiapoque), but also in relation to the provenance of ideas in archaeology: the histories of concepts and technologies that convert and translate items into artefacts, heritage, and patrimony. It might have been appropriate to include, here, the findings from the excavation work at Kwap—the expertly drawn site maps; the ceramic

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densities from the augur tests; the dates of the materials. Those are important, and indeed were included in an earlier draft. Yet it seems preemptive to try to present them here and now, since the prior task is to establish the possibilities for a generative conversation about an interpretive framework. The need is to work slowly toward preparing the ground for a dialogue with these materials, and to proceed as carefully with their assumptions as an archaeologist’s trowel works through centuries of accretions. The issue is not that the material provenience is inconsequential, but that it is embedded in an authority that quickly overpowers the fragile beginnings of a conversation about what it is to hiyak hawkri—to know what is going on in the day and the world—at Kwap. The value of the collection of provenienced things from the ground at Kwap will come in time. For the moment what is more important is the recognition that much as the slow, careful, inclusive excavation work proceeded in the soils at Kwap, the work that has followed with the texts that were intended to match those findings has begun the process of excavating the disciplinary knowledges that had framed our interpretive tools and categories. The task, as I see it, is not to close the argument with a rational and realist account, but to grapple with the stories at Kwap, and to think alongside storytellers as they grapple with creating spaces to speak, and grapple with the politics of reality, truth, nature, space, and personhood. The previous chapters established the possibility of a way of knowing the world that does not depend upon an “I Am” in order to think. The philosophical leap here is huge: from an ontology of Being, in which things and people have a preinstantiated “nature” in a pregiven world, to a way of thinking that centers on presence, and on what presences make of the world. The concept works out across the chapters: personhood and knowledge are not given, but can also be understood relationally. Space is not only meaningful when conceptualized as a container; the interrelations of forms and creatures are rich resources for worldmaking (or worldmakery). History is made by trails that can be walked in, to see as the trailmakers might have seen. The cosmos can be remembered and understood in its movements. The world is not something known in the same way by all creatures, and surviving the predators is much more likely if one can comprehend how they see it. The stories of Kwap make it possible to wonder, think, speculate, and imagine what a public archaeology might look like. Yet they do not speak of a singular, unchanging “cultural” way of making the world. The story­tellers grapple with the cosmological politics of realism in history as much as we did. At the end of the day, it is this grappling with ongoing tasks of worldmaking in a landscape of devastation amid the politics of a universal naturalism, that provide the partial connections that are needed for a generative dialogue.

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Although Kwap was interesting to us because it features as the place of a decisive battle in the stories of the war with the Galibi, the stories of Kwap are part of longer trails through the landscape and the cosmos, and they cannot be contained either into a site or into an era. What is common in those trails is that as they traverse Kwap, they also traverse an historical period in which life itself became precarious. Working with the movement of narratives through Kwap rather than extracting the pieces that speak to Kwap specifically, allows expression of the breadth of that experience. Kwap is at once a place that mourns devastation; a place that fears dark sorcery and werewolves; a place that memorializes the skills and wits necessary for surviving new kinds of predation that took the form of Carib slave raids and new kinds of alliances with the European arrivals; and a larger ongoing struggle with nature, truth, and reason such as that represented by the encounter with an archaeological project. Working in the spaces of ideas where Peter Sloterdijk’s consubjective worlding1 meets Amerindian perspectivism, there is the intriguing possibility of an adventure of ideas—what Isabelle Stengers would call a “free and wild creation of concepts”2 for a research project, in which “our” ideas are as open to study and scrutiny as are “theirs.”3 With these thoughts in mind, this chapter weaves a basket with the story trails that pass through Kwap, preparing the ground for an epilogue that experiments with a perspectivist view of anthropology and archaeology. Finding that space for generative dialogue, the material suggests, is in exploring the partial connections between investigative field science, trail-following, knowing the day-world, and a speculative philosophy that thinks with presence rather than Being. * * * Kiyavwiye Floriano’s account of Kwap is a good place to begin sifting through what the site does, in the making of a past that has meaning in the present. Told at an early moment in the project at a place called Uraka where we had heard we would find traces of the war between the Palikur and the Galibi, Floriano described how the settlement got its name: Kiyavuno [Lesley]. Minikwak paytwempu ay Kwap.4 Inakni paytwempuwad. Igkis avim ini hawkri ka aynsima hiyeg ayge. Ik adahan pahavwiy datka.

Senhora [Lesley]. Long ago, there was a village there at Kwap. That was the name of a large village [points upstream]. During that time, they were many people there. It was possible [to be eaten by] an anaconda.

The Story Trails of Kwap Ka nopsimahad datka ahakwa un. Bakimni awkevye ateren [nikwe]. Igkis bakimni awkevye. Ka aynsima bakimni awkevye ayge. [Ay ahumpiveye?] Ig datka kamax pahavwi bakimni. Ig ax. Kuri bakimnay wagehbete. Sigisbete. Wagehbete waxrite nikwen. Igkis ka kibowka atak. Aa! Kibite. Ka aynsima hawkri akiw. Mpanabuw kamukri. Pohowkubuw kamukri. Bakimni avatra biyukemnek. Igkis awkevye ahakwatak un akiw. Igkis tuboh ahakwatak un akiw. Kuri bakimni tuboh. Ka Kaboh! Kaboh! Ahakwat un Pahaye [gikihbipivivye?] ig datka. Ig datka ax pahavwiy akiw. Avanenekwa. Pahaye ihamwi awna giwn: -Aa! Kadahan paha[vwiy] axtig ay! Neg axtig giw Kwap neg. Neg axtigad. Neg Kwap neg. Ig ka nopsimahad axtigad! Kwap ad neku. Hawata ku samah igkis kinetihwa aka ayhte Kwahra igwata datka Embe neg ay Kwap. Igwata Kwap. Minikwak ka aynsima hiyeg. Kadahan hiyeg ay Kwap.

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A huge anaconda [lived] in the water. The children would bathe there then. The children would bathe. Lots of children bathed there. It was the custom of the anaconda to catch a child. He ate [him]. Now all the children climbed up. [They] ran away. They climbed up onto the land then. They were too afraid [to bathe]. Oh! Many! Many years later. Three years. Five years. The children forgot about this. They swam in the water again. They splashed into the water again. Now the children splashed. Ker Splash! Splash! in the water. Suddenly he, the anaconda [heard them?]. He, the anaconda, ate one more [child]. It was always like this. Until suddenly, a shaman spoke these words, “Oh! There is an axtig [eater; predator; monster] here! This monster is called ‘Kwap.’ This huge predator. He is Kwap.” He was such a huge Eater [Predator]! That Kwap. Also, over there [referring far upriver], they speak about [or speak to] Kwahra. He is also an anaconda. But he [the anaconda] at Kwap, he is called Kwap. Long ago there were so many people. There were people here at Kwap.

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Kadahan paytwembuw ay nor warabdi. Kadahan warumka. Kadahan saramna. Kadahan tivigumnaw. Kadahan uwak [Uraka]. Ka aynsima hiyeg. Ayhte [Uvitkit? Mpitriye?]. Hiyeg ininewa! Ayna danuh hawkanavrik ada kerka. Ay amun igkis madike! Amuni kerka igkis madike. Wake ka kerkama wis hiya mani akiw. Avim inin kuri. Heneme parahnayene umehbete igkis. Heme ka aynema avit arukwama Inin madike ayta arukwatak [awaku] kerka. Igkis kerekis. Igkis madikawnene. Nikwe igkis madike. Yuma hiyeg akiw. Kuri nawatunye parak atan.

There was a village here at that Warabdi. [He lists the villages.] There was Warumka. There was Saramna. There was Tivigumnaw. There was Uraka. So many people! There at [unclear: Uvitkit? Mpitriye?]. It was just people! Then the time of war began here. During the war they were finished off. If there had been not war, we would see so many [people] again. In the present. But the Brazilians killed them. But not here on Arukwa [Urucauá River]. The decimation came to Arukwa because of the war [with the Galibi]. They fought. They were finished off. They ended. There were no more people [i.e., in those downstream villages]. Now foreigners have entered here [Arukwa].

Floriano’s account begins with a place that could be any place. Like any other place, there were predators—in this case, anacondas. When the shaman names Kwap the huge axtig (predator), the act of naming calls him into presence, and begins a process of devastation that extends all the way downstream to the villages in Arukwa: Warabdi, Warumka, Saramna, Tivigumnaw, and Uraka. While Floriano locates the devastations in the long series of battles with Carib (“Galibi”) populations5 (who had sought to displace Arawakan settlements along this coast6), he also notes the role of the Brazilians (Portuguese), probably referring to the genocidal attacks in the area in the 1790s which sought to prevent Brazilian slaves from fleeing to French Guiana (chapter 2). In the conversation that followed, he turned to the problem of the real. Careful to distinguish his father’s

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view from his own, he questioned whether Kwap lives in a cosmological underworld or simply underground: Lesley: Kiney inin datka msakwa? Floriano: Inin datyka msakwa ahakwa un. Heme ariku miyokwiye ig. Kiyavwiye awna amin ku igi datka msakwa ayhte Waympiye. Nuvewkan wasaymka. Nuvewkan ig msakwa anavri waxri. Ku kiney kadahan kanopsimahad miyokwiye aduhyawa waxri. Ayge igi. Ke pareynebe. Akigih! Ig ayge. Ig datka. Embe hene nor: ig ka msakwa Waympiyema. Yuma Waympiye! Kiyavwiye minkwak igkis awna kadahan Waympiye. Yuma! Wasaymka! Nah ka iha inakni. Pasa [ke kibite?] kadahan nor Waympiyebe . . . a biblia kinetihwa amin inere. Nikwe a biblia awna giwn [. . .] Kiyavwiye Jesi awna amin. Ig awna kadahan hiyeg anaptew inere . . . nor waykam. Heme [Waympiye] yuma. Ka hiyak. Nah ka tima arak. Niguh wasayhmkap. Ihamwigben ikehnekis. Giwasamni ineren. Wasayhmka nin Estuwa nin!

Lesley: Where does this anaconda stay? Floriano: This anaconda stays in the water. But he is in a hole. [My father] said that he, the anaconda, stays there in Waympiye [the underworld]. I think that is a lie. I think he stays under the land. Where there is a huge hole on the ridge of the land. He is there. Like a caiman. His nose sticking out! He is there. He, the anaconda. Well this is how it is, [i.e., but actually] he does not stay in Waympiye [the underworld]. There is no Waympiye! Long ago, they [our elders], said that there was Waympiye [the underworld]. There is none! It is a lie! I do not believe in that. Because there are [others] like [or similar to] Waympiye . . . the bible speaks about that. So then [i.e., anyway] the bible says [. . .] Senhor [Lord] Jesus speaks about it. He said, “There are people under that . . . this earth.” But there is no [Waympiye]. I have not seen [it]. I have not heard about it. [It is] my father’s lie. The shamans’ making. Their lies. Only lies. It is just a story!

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Floriano’s closing of the hole to the underworld is an ambivalent one. Where his elders had held that life in this landscape continued to be possible because the shamans had managed to shut underworld predators off from this world, his own account renders the underworld as “a lie.” He considers that perhaps Waympiye is like the biblical underworld, a hell of some sort, in which all the monsters are shut, perhaps like the tales of the devil and the daemons, but does not accept that account either. It is also an ambivalent theology, this. European notions of hell here encounter an Amerindian cosmology of predation and translate the underworld as a demonised “under-earth.”7 Such an argument had framed the earliest encounters of Europe with the Canibales: part of Robert Harcourt’s 1613 report to King James I on the suitability of the Guianas for English settlement, for example, included an account of Indians’ relationship with the devil in adjoining Spanish territories on the continent: “The beginning of the Worke was very difficult, by reason of the unaptnesse of the Indians, so long imbrued in cruell sacrifices of humane blood, and abominable Idolatry, and by the continuall malice of the diuell, rebelling against God.”8 Johannes Wilbert’s commentary on the Warao narratives on the Orinoco River is apposite. There are several similarities between the Warao and Palikur canons that suggest historical connections between the two language groups.9 Both recall traumatic encounters with expansions of various groups: From the Warao we know of fulminating outbreaks [of Old World pestilential disease] that destroyed entire bands and of incidents when two-thirds of the child population of certain local groups fell victim to a single epidemic attack. The awesome power of such hitherto unknown evil so convinced the Indians of the supernatural origin of pestilence that they came to envision the different diseases as pathogenic arrows in the hands of their directional gods. Similarly, the baneful phenomenon of cannibalism was otherworldly to the Warao and associated with were-jaguars and the grim lord of the underworlds. With cannibals and abductors of women, pestilence, and oppressive gods lurking above and about them, the world of the Warao turned into a landscape of dread.10

A landscape of dread pervades Neil Whitehead’s account of shamanic attacks in the greater Guianas region, in the context of historical events in which dark sorcery comes to be mobilized in particular ways. Nevertheless, in a context of wars and unknown diseases, the village at Kwap, on a peninsula at the upper end of the navigable waterway, offered more safety than island-based villages could. Yet such was the devastation in it that Kwap became iconic of dread events.

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For the late Kiyavuno Yuka in a story told in her canoe on the river one afternoon, Kwap is at the upper reaches of a landscape of mourning. It marked the beginning of a sweeping gesture with which she emphasized, with tears, how many settlements there had been here on the middle section of the Arukwa River before the beginning of the era of dread: the coming of the first wave of abductors, in the form of the Kurumsuk, who were very tall people who had horses’ hooves, no knees, and enormous ears,11 who had used giant pans to carry earth to make new islands in order to cross streams, and had tried to capture Palikur by offering clothing so that they came close enough to be grabbed and taken away. Amakewka minikwak hiyeg ka aynsima. Ini Arukwa han. Hiyegninwa! 12 Tiviguwmnaw! Hiyegninwa! Ka aynsima! Warumka! Hiyegninwa!

Ukupi! Hiyegninwa! Ka aynsima hiyeg! Sema inin hiyeg ay kuri madike. Kuri hiyeg madikemet! Kuri amaksemni hiyeg. Kuri hiyeg pahaduhwa atan kuri made. Inere ini estuwa. Hiyeg miyavi madikte. Kuri hiyeg ka keh givinkis atere.

Kukuhwekwa ahwi Yoyomni keh givin atere.

In past times, long ago, there were so many people. This Arukwa River, in this direction. [Yuka points upstream toward Kwap.] It was only [all covered with] people! Tiviguwmnaw [Andiroba Island, pointing toward the north]! It was only people! So many! Warumka [Tipoca Island; she points toward the eastern bank of the lower Urucauá]. It was only people! Ukupi! [an island on the western bank of the lower Urucauá]. It was only people! So many people! But these people here, then, were finished off. Now the people are being finished off! Now, it is the end of the people. Now, the people have all gathered here. [She points toward Kumene, the main contemporary village, close by.] That is this story. The people all died. Then the people did not make their homes there. [She points toward Isuwvinwa, place of the vultures, where she had made her home.] More recently grandfather Yoyomni made his home there.

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Ig keh giwasra. Kuri ig tabirase givin. Kuri usuh usekwe ayge. Gihayo miyovi. Ay avit Kwikwit gihayo miyovi. Kuri igta hawata ig kakahgi Murukti utevgi. Ig miyavi. Kuri usuh usekwe ay. Ig awna git gikamkayhyuvwiy: “Kuri nuvinhu. Msekwe ay arikut ini nuvinhu. Aynewa pis usakwa. Avuhrinaba ini nuvinhu.” Embe hene usuh usekwa ayge Isuwvinwa. Kuri nukamkayh ig kiyavwiye. Ig kahayo. Ig kakamkayhyubdi. Usuh ay uvinwa ay Isuwvinwa. Adukwenewa. Usuh ka wewaki. Kuri usuh kewbetwiy. Made hiyeg kewbetwiy. Usuh aytwe lamisya. Pisenwa lamisya usuh tivik uvinwate.

He made his manioc field. Then he raised up his house. Now, we remain there. His wife died. Here, on Kwikwit [Island, opposite Kumene], his wife died. Then he also became ill. The flu found him. He died. Now we remain here. He said to his children, “Now, this is my home. [You] stay here in my home. You remain right here. Please take care of my home.” It is so. We remain there at Isuwvinwa [Home of the Vultures, so named after many died of illness there long ago]. Now, my child is an adult. He [has] married. He has children. We are at our home, here, at Isuwvinwa. Always. We do not travel around. Now we were baptized. All the people were baptized. We come [to Kumene] to go to church. When church is over, we go [back] to our home.

Like Floriano’s story, her gesture that begins with Kwap concludes with an affirmation of the importance of the church at Kumene in the wake of that devastation. Like Floriano, her account of the number of villages before the arrival of diseases and warfare is suggestive of a larger scale of settlements, along the lines of those referred to by Francoise and Pierre Grenand in their exhaustive search through European archival records for traces of the word “Palikur” and for its clan names.13 Their study evidences the scale of the settlements associated with “Parikwene” in this region. Indeed, the rich archaeological record of Amapá and French Guiana suggests the presence of a complex society that was able to refine its skills. Detailed and careful archaeological studies have included those of Emílio Goeldi, Curt Nimuendajú, Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans, Peter Paul Hilbert, Stéphen Rostain, Vera Guapindaia, Mariana Petry

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Cabral, and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha. Aristé-style ceramics in the region, for example, suggests that the landscape of coastal Amapá and the Guianas had had settlements on them long enough to yield designs so complex that they are considered iconic of Brazilian archaeological patrimony.14 The landscape and anthropogenic soil studies of Anna Roosevelt on Marajoara Island in the adjacent state of Pará have changed the ways in which lowland South America is understood in prehistory and had a significant impact on the work of Eduardo Neves, Jim Petersen, and Michael Heckenberger in the Central Amazon, which argues that the Amerindian past is characterised by several large-scale societies (or federations). That work in turn influences the ongoing studies of Saldanha and Cabral on Amapá’s megaliths and large settlement sites, around which learning must have flourished to acquire the astronomical insights and engineering skills needed to build the stone observatories that, five hundred to eight hundred years later, still hold the 23° angle that has them casting no shadow on the day of the December solstice.15 All of these innovations suggest the likelihood of complex societies in the region. Together, these studies have challenged the narratives of the precolonial Amazon that were told in the wake of the conquistadors: that Amazonia was inhabited by small, shifting bands of Amerindians. In Arukwa itself, human populations here must have had a time of relative plenty in order to hone the skill of making clay so fine that the urn found at Wayadman (see the Introduction) still gives a fine-china “pling” when you tap it. There must have been sufficient ease to give people the time to mourn their dead long enough to hollow out the boot-shaped chamber on the lower reaches of the Urucauá in which funerary urns were placed. (The setting is almost identical to that described by Emilio Goeldi in 1900 in the hills at Cunani, south of the Urucauá along the coast.16) In this context, Kiyavuno Yuka’s account of large-scale settlements on the river is important, and it is one that was echoed many times by other storytellers. A few months after our conversation, Kiyavuno Yuka succumbed to malaria and was mourned in a full night’s wake during which the generator burned until dawn in her honor in Kumene. In a pool of light in the village street, Kiyavwiye Uwet led the group that crafted fresh boards into a coffin for her at the neighboring village of Puwaytiket, weaving anecdotes and stories and chitchat into a conversation as he did so. In the morning she was taken by canoe and buried in the cemetery at Kwap. Once she was at rest in the deep red earth, her pallbearers fled as fast as they could, leaving a bottle of pepper on her grave to fend off the werewolves called uruku. * * *

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The cemetery that received her at Kwap was not something that we wished to disturb. We focused on the size of village settlements and the depth of terra preta (black soils) in a different part of the Kwap peninsula, since our interest was, at the time, in a larger conversation that was ongoing within Amazonian archaeology about the size and complexity of precolonial societies.17 An early augur test in a spot chosen with Kiyavwiye Tabehkwe’s guidance, and with the permission of the wider village after a consultation, disturbed an area of earth about the size of a hand within the limits of the cemetery and suggested that in some places the terra preta might be more than a meter deep. That was significant, but it was not at the same scale as the much deeper terra preta at places like Iranduba near Manaus, in the Central Amazon.18 To the extent that the black soils of Kwap were of interest, we had no desire to work near or with human remains, and from the beginning the archaeological team worked closely with appointed elders to mark off its limits and ensure we worked outside of them. Still, the team was the subject of many jokes about being the uruku werewolves that many feared would dig up the dead. Working so close to the cemetery was, at times, unnerving. The tree under which I was eating my lunch groaned, one calm and sunny afternoon, loudly enough to make Avelino yell at me to “Run Kiyavuno, run, run, run!” I did, and it crashed down on the spot where I’d been sitting. Its leaves, I remember, were green. The landscape of dread entered my world too. The cemetery is sited there, people said, because the final local battle in the war with the Galibi (Caribs) over Arukwa had taken place at Kwap, and there were so many dead that they were buried right there. Kiyavwiye Sarisri Daví Espirito Santo had told a long version of the war story to Harold Green and Diana Green in 1997. His account of the battle at Kwap comes in around the middle of his tale. The Galibi, those people from Cajari [Monte Cajari, also known as Wakayri Mountain], were almost more powerful than the Palikur. Heneme parikwenepwi háwata ka But the Palikur people also [with] aynsima gidatnikis igkis kerye. great power they fought. Igkis hiyapni hene, igkis pitihe ahin Seeing it was so [i.e., they reflected apuheket aynte Kwap. on/realized what was happening], they blocked the trail to the cemetery there at Kwap. Igkis keh bayad aranwa. They made a barrier around.

Igkis hiye neras wakayriyene kabante date giw parikwene aynesa.19

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Amekene keh bayad kahadbekama The ancestors made a barrier so gitimnikis ka wagah aytontima igkis that the enemy couldn’t climb up ka amewpima amin hiyeg atan. at that place to sneak up on the people there. Yuma adahan maviyeket. There was no way to pass through it. Igkis pitihpin madikte. They blocked it all off. Kuri igkis kehe bayad taranad ta Then they made an extended uyakrit gidahankis hiye. barrier facing the port [to stop] the Galibi. Hene hiyeg ahegbet akak yakot. Thus the people were ready with arrows. Ka aynsima igkis wagahkis ah They pulled up many large cedar ka nopsimahad sedgadmin igkis logs [and] pushed them all to the tukuhape ta waxrit. ground. Igkis ikí kabonad waxri. They left [them] lying in rows [on top of the] hill. Pisenwa kuri igkis hiye danuh ta When they were finished, the uyakrit. Galibi arrived at the port. Igkis kabiman, They shouted: “Ba pis ay?” “Are you here?” Giwn: His words [i.e., the response came]: “Nah ay.” “I am here.” “Hiyawa yis wagah.” “You can come up.” “Ahadye.” “Okay.” Igkis wagehe. They came up. Hiye wagah mategbet apigku ahin. The Galibi came up the trail in a disorderly manner. Igkis hiyapni hene ku igkis [When] they [the people of Kwap] kuruwhpad apigku ahin, igkis saw that they [the Galibi] were tukuh pahat ah. swarming on the trail, they pushed a log [down on them]. Aynewa igkis tukuh pahat ah akiw, Immediately they pushed down aynewa igkis tukuh pahat ah akiw, another log, [and] another [and] another. aynewa igkis tukuh pahat ah. Igkis umehe madikte hiye. They killed all the Galibi. Igkis wagah akiw uyakritak akiw. They climbed up again from the port. Igkis umah madikte akiw. They killed all of them, too. Igkis wagah akiw uyakritak. They came up from the port. Igkis umah madikte akak ah. They killed them all with the logs.

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Pisenwa igkis darih pahapri. Pahapri darihka adahan tipikwiye adahan ekene tahan ta gitkis gikebyupwi ku igkis miyá kabá madik. Pisenwa gikeryikis ig tipik.

When they were finished, they kept one [Galibi man]. One man was kept in order to go tell the others over there that they were almost all killed.

When their fighting was finished, he left. Ig tipik ig danuh tahan, ig awna: He left, [and] [when he] arrived over there, he said: “Usuh umehpika kabá madiktehwa. “We were almost all finished off. Nahnewa usekwe.” Only I remained [alive].” Igkis hiye hiyapni hene igkis [When] the Galibi saw that, they awahkis hiyeg akiw. sent more people. Igkis kerye. Igkis kerye adahan They fought. They fought for a pahapri kayg. month. Igkis ka mayak. They didn’t rest. Pisenwa igkis mayak. When they were finished, they rested. Igkis danuh atan gikivarakis awna: [When] they arrived there, their [the Kwap] chiefs/leaders said: Ku aysaw kerka kannikaw akiw “When the fighting begins again, usuh ikí yinetni akiw. we will notify you.” Pisenwa kuri igkis kehe parawkam Then they made ceramic whistles bataka. Igkis keh kanatru. with vibrating reeds. Igkis kadahan adahan ikene hiyeg They had [them] for the purpose of ginetnis muwapu. notifying people everywhere [that the enemy is coming]. Pase danuh ahawkanaparik kerka When the time came for the kannikaw akiw, igkis puh. fighting to start again, they blew [the whistles]. The landscape of mourning is, here, interspersed with accounts of the skills necessary for survival, including the skill of knowing how to use landforms and their resources. The whistles that Kiyavwiye Sarisri spoke of were made of clay, the size that fits into a hand, with a double bulb that resounds with a deep “phwuuughhh” when you blow into the mouth of it. Kiyavwiye Uwet had spoken of having found just such a whistle at Aragbus a long time before. In Kiyavwiye Uwet’s story, the battle at Kwap was influenced by a decisive moment at Aragbus, where the rock formation made it possible to hear whistles being blown far away. Aragbus is a rock shelter with, in all probability, a history of several occupations.20 It is downstream and lies off the eastern banks of the

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Figure 23. A clay whistle found at Aragbus

Arukwa, which from Kwap would be several hours’ paddle downriver and then across the flooded grasslands. Finding it requires the skill to navigate among the many islands. A short walk from a quiet inlet where any sound is magnified between the water and the canopy of trees, two large long rocks in a V-shape point toward the east. From these the site got its current name, derived from the Spanish word for a shotgun with a V-shaped gun sight: the arquebus. Inside the rock shelter itself, potsherds were like gravel underfoot. Around the side of the shelter, an underground passageway is home to tapirs, and an armadillo’s burrowings into the dry, protected sandy soils under the rock face yielded a small line of fragments from burial urns that we had stumbled upon quite by chance in 1997. Here, the war story goes, local villagers had hidden their children from the Galibi during the war, and the use of clay whistles had afforded the strategic advantage that turned the long-running battle in their favor. Uwet: Nikwe inin han Pitatyewivye awna ariwntak inere Aragbus kadahan inin paytwembu waxri gakig.21

Uwet: So then, in that direction [pointing east]. The First Peoples said that there was a village near Aragbus on a point of land [jutting off the mainland].

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They call this “Kariktipti [Inajá] Point” that we poled quite a distance through the flooded forest to reach [at the fork in the path]. Inere igkis kanum ‘Iwavri’. They call it “Iwavri.” Kadahan ka aynsima parikwene avit There were many Indians on that land. inere waxri ayge. Kuri kadahan avit nop Tivigumnaw. Now on Tivigumnaw [Andiroba Parikwene ka aynsima ayge ay. island] there were many Palikur Iveytipti kadahan ka aynsima ayge. Indians. Iveytipti [Poison Island] had many people there. Aynte avit waxri kewiye ‘Wewveket’ There on a land called “Wewveket” kadahan ka aynsima. [Hunting Point], there were many [people]. Kuri hiyeg aytwe tohan ‘Urakat’ ka Now people went to Uraka aynsima hiyeg ta Wakat [Uwakat?]. [electric eel lake, where there had been a settlement]. Many people went to Uraka. Kuri lawe kerka kanikew. So then, the war started. Igkis kannikasa kerka. When they started to fight, Kuri igkis ayemuweh bakimnayh. Now they hid the children. Himaniviyo ba berew gumunkis Young girls about this high. With gikakis takwaviye barewye giminkis young boys, this size. Because they awaku igkis kote kabayte adahan were not ready to fight. kerka. Nikwe avim inin hawkri ignes hiyeg So then, at that time, the people bakimnayh ayhmuwepka ateren hid the children there because awaku igkis kote kabayte adahan they were not yet ready to fight. kerka. Kuri igkis ikise pahavu kiyavuno. Now they left one woman [in charge]. Igkis kanumgu avian awaku eg They called her “Grandmother” kiyavuno. because she was [an older] woman. Kiyapawviyo kuwis. She was already quite elderly. Mugumguviyo kuwis. She was already old. Eg ikiska ay adahan avuriwno She was left there to look after bakimnayh, ba pis hiyak, awaku the children. Do you understand? kerka kuwis kanikew. Because the war had already started. Kuri lawe eg avuriw bakimnayh Now when she was looking after ayge ativutni avim inin hawkri. the children during those days. Igkis kanum ‘Kariktipti akig’ ku wixwiy aytekene ahadruw. [Akatbekuw?]

The Story Trails of Kwap Eg kehne awebgu adahan bakimnayh. Pis hiyak? Adahan bakimnay axes. Igkis kanum wat. Kuri kiyavuno kuwis ayhte kehne gidahankis nikwe ayhte gidahankis wat. Kuri bakimnayh kabiman ta gut: “Avyan pis ka hiyak?” “Aviyan kuwis utimniy pese wotwiy.” “Pariyeva pese?” “Hiye pese atan apa kamaxe piyana tinogben atan kuwis.

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She made manioc bread for the children. You understand? For the children’s food. They call [this type of manioc bread] “wat.” Now while the lady there, was making wat for the children.

Now the children yelled for her, “Grandmother! Do you not know?” “Grandmother, our enemies have come out to [attack] us!” “What has come out?” [The children said] “The Galibi have come out and already captured two girls. Igkis kuwis tivik akak.” They have already left with them.” “Mmah hene?” “Is this so?” “Ihi.” “Yes.” Eg kiyavuno hiyapne hene nikwene. The lady decided what to do. She entered her telephone booth Eg pareke arikut telefone gadug. [calling place or communication post].22 Eg telefonou kibentenwa tohan She telephoned quickly to Waravrit waravrit akak ibug batak. using a molded clay [a sound reflector the size of a person]. Igkis kanum egu “telefone adug.” They called it their “telephone of clay.” Igkis kanum parawtuwe. They called it parawtuwe. Igkis bataku kuri nikwe. They molded them from clay, then. Eg parak tohan arikut. She entered it. Nikwe eg awna arikutak egu Then she called from inside of it. Pes muwapuw. It sounded out everywhere. Kuri igkis hiyak ku kerka kuwis Now they were alerted that the war kanikew. had already started. Now they said, “The war has Kuri igkis awna::Kkerka kuwis begun!” danuhe!. Kadahan mpana tinogben kidiska “Three women have been captured ayhtehan.” over there!” -Mmah hene? “Is that true?” -Ihi. “Yes!” Kuri igkis hiyeg muwapuw dakuhe. Now people everywhere [heard the message].

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Muwapuw Kwaviw. Hiyeg kavusa hiyak ku kerka kanikew kuwis. Kuri igkis hiyapni heneni. Igkis wageswa amadga umuh awaku ig Galibi ig wagehe amadgew. . . . Ig kidise noras bakimnayh. Usuh ka hiyak ku kitak ig kidise noras bakimnayh. Usuh ka hiyak heneme gitkankis aytantak wahamatak. Bon. Kuri, igkis hiyapni heneni. Igkis kataptaw amadgat umuh. Igkis haraksevris. Igkis iwe giyakokis madikte gewkembetkis amadga umuh. Harasekgikis adahan iveviye eg bakibe. Adahan guwepten. Guxuwemtan atere. Igkis ka umahgu. Heneme igkis tivikuye gukak. Lawe igkis tivik gukak. Danuh atereni. Nikwe igkis ibekew han Avikuw Wahama. Igkis puwehe. Puwehe. Juktah igkis danuh atere. Lawe igkis danuh atere. Nikweni igkis ute Galibi ay anavi iguw. Ineku waxri kanum ka Galibi. Awaku minikwak Galibi ayge. Igkis ayem pahavu tino atere. Igkis usekwe akak pahavru tino atere

All around Kwap [village]. People heard that the war had begun. Now they decided what to do. They climbed aboard canoes because the Galibi had also boarded [canoes]. . . . They captured those children. We did not know from which direction they captured those children. We do not know but it is said that they came from the direction of the Uaçá River [to the east]. Well! Now they decided what to do. They climbed aboard [their] canoes. They pursued them. They took their arrows. All their weapons on the canoes. They pursued them, in order to get back the young [girls]. To take them back from there. [The Galibi] had not killed them. But they had taken them. Now they had left with them. [The Palikur] arrived there. Now they [took a short cut], this way, on the Uaçá River. They paddled and paddled. Until they arrived there. Now when they arrived there. So then, they discovered the Galibi there, under the iguw tree [on the flooded river banks]. That [is]land was called “Galibi.” Because long ago, the Galibi lived there. They had hidden one [of] the women there. They stayed with [captured] one woman there.

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along with three young women. Now [the Palikur] docked there at night. Igkis danuh ateren. They arrived there. Igkis menewe mukna umuh. They docked two canoes there. Menewe ateren ihapkat pahamku [The Palikur saw a canoe] docked umuh. at the river’s edge. It was completely filled with Dig akak iyakotnen. arrows. Igkis ahiwe giyakakis madikte. Igkis They gathered all their arrows ahiwe tiyegum. while it was night. Madikte. All [of the arrows]. Nikwe pisenwa igkis kanum guw Afterward they called the name of egkis himaniyo. the young girl. Igkis kanum guwkis atere. They called her name out there. Igkis kabiman: “Bakimnayh! Ba yis They yelled, “Children! Are you here?” ay?” Egkis awna: “Ay usuh!” [The girls] said, “We are here!” “Baytwa!” [The Palikur said,] “Come here!” Egkis hiyapni henne, egkis sigisbet. [The girls], seeing it was so, they ran. Egkis pes kannikaw kibehtenwa. They got up quickly and got out. Egkis sigisbe nikwenewa. Then they ran. Kuri ig hiye hiyapni hene. Now, the Galibi observed this. Hiye kanikew adahan igkis sigise. The Galibi got up, in order to run. Iwe yakot amadga gimuhkis adahan To get their arrows on their canoes igkis keh akak givetuniyakis ku in order to fight with their enemies pariye danuh atere. who had arrived there. Lawe igkis danuh tohan amadga But when they arrived at their umuh. canoes. Nikwen igkis yuma, igkis ka uti They had no [arrows]! They did ariknownema amadga umuh. not find anything on the canoes. Nothing! Yuma. The Palikur had already taken all Madikte igkis Parikwane iwe giyakakis. of their arrows! Now they, the Galibi, considered Kuri igkis [hiye] hiyapni hene. what to do. Igkis kerebet heninwa. They all began to fight regardless. Igkis kadahan parak adahan biwne But they had [wooden clubs] to hit [hiyeg] akak parak. [people] with. Egu parak igkis kanum kabante Those clubs they called them kewye arabe guw. almost the same thing we call our clubs called “arab.” gukakis mpana tinogben. Kuri igkis minewe ateren tiyegim.

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They made them to fight with. Now they [Palikur] decided what to do. Igkis havisave. Igkis haviste. [The Palikur] shot them all [with arrows]. Igkis umahevepka juk madikte, They killed them until there were madikte. no more. Now then, they left two [men] Nikweni kuri igkis ikise piyana aygeni adah pihimkeviye nerras hiye there to roast [cremate] the corpses of the Galibi whom they miyapviye ku pariye igkis umehbe. had killed. Kuri ig[kis] Galibi [igkis iwe Now the Galibi saw this. nikwene. Igkis kavusa iihuk gimasewnti. They began to cut [wood] for their grill [roasting rack]. Igkis keh ah. They made a wooden [grill]. Kanopsad masarad adah kuk tiket They made a huge roasting pit tohan ganavit. so that they could start a fire underneath it. Adahan igkis padak hiyeg gamadgat So that they could throw the kahadbe masereviye neras hiyeg. people on top [of the grill] so that they could roast [cremate] those people. Kahadbe ku igkis maserevye So that when they have roasted madikte kuwis. Ku pirimka made everything. When it is well done kuwis. [reduced to ashes], Kuri igkis iwe nikweni. then they took them. Igkis kadahan mukuw amadga Now they had mukuw [urns] in umuh adahanewa muhuke gitiykis. their canoes as their containers to put [the cremated ashes] in. Egu parawkam bataka. [The urns] were molded from parawkam [gray river clay]. Igkis kanumka guw kanag bataka. They call that clay pot a kanar. Kuri igkis iwe hiyeg gavita. Then they take the people’s bones. Igkis dunihmbata. They break [the bones] into pieces. Igkis kivunsa ta garikut. Dara atere! They fill up the inside [of the pot]. Plunk! There! Igkis iwe gusabot dara ateren. They take the lid. Plunk it down there! Nikwe igkis kivunsa madikte. They fill all [the urns]. Nikwen apa pisenwa nikwe igkis When they have finished diyuhe. everything, they return. Igkis keh adah kereye akak. Kuri igkis hiyap hene.

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They [the Galibi] went bringing the bones from there to where they came from. Their homes. Danuh atere nikwe. [They] arrived there then. Igkis wagahkis gavitakis atere They lifted up their bones there nikwene. then. Igkis awna: “Yaba. Mmahni?” They [those at their home village] said, “And what happened?” “Usuh miya made?” [The two survivors said] “We all Yuma pahavwinama aytwe. Isamtem died. Not one person is returning. We were overcome [defeated] awaku igkis danuh atere tiyegim. because they arrived there at night. Igkis ahiwe made uyaka. They gathered all our arrows. Igkis ahiwavye uyaka. They gathered our arrows.” Usekwe usute dariyhka adahan “[They left] only us, [to guard; pirimkeviye ukebyuvwi ineku. preserve; honor the dead] by [allowing us] to cremate our relatives. In keh usuh ayta atan. That is why we have come back.” “Mmah hene?” “Is this so?” “Ya.” “Yes.” Igkis tivik. Ewke avit tohan. Ku kitak igkis pes givinwatakis.

The landscape here memorializes the determination to protect children, along with the intelligence and chutzpah to outsmart an enemy. (Note that in the above piece, the perspective of the story has shifted, as the narrator follows the two surviving Galibi back home, and then as the story follows their tracks, the point of view is that of the Galibi. When the tale returns to the Palikur, again, the shift in perspective is implicit.) Kiyavwiye Uwet’s story continues, without interruption, to draw in Waramwi, the major cobra grande (anaconda-shaman and master spirit of anacondas in Arukwa) whose assistance was pivotal in securing Palikur victory (though he was himself a predator—but that’s another story). Ayteke nikweni igkis xuwehe bakibe After this then, [the Palikur] removed all the young children ariwntak inere kuw. from there [Aragbus]. Ariwntak inere kuri From that [area] now. Igkis Galibi igkis ku pariye iske [Where] the Galibi had left them. ateren nikweni. Ayteke nikwene parikwene kavusa Afterward then, the [Palikur] haraksevrikis. started to chase [pursue] them.

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Nikwe igkis usakwa ayhte akigsa paha waxri igkis kanum Wanar. Buhiye. Atere igkis harakse. [Atiya tivike tivihi?] Parikwene hiyapni hene. Igkis haraksevrikis atere. Igkis kebetkis ayteke. Igkis ivukevrikis ayteke. Kuri igkis tivik temkatere Kayan. Arimkat Kayan tivigekise. Danuh atere. Igkis tivik nikwene. Kadahan pahavwi awayg. Nah miyehe mmah giw. Igkis kamaxe pahavwi awayg adahan ekene gidahankis. Parikwenewa ig. Igkis kamaxwig adahan ekene. Ada avuriwne. Kuri igkis danuh atere nikwene. Igkis wagah atereni nikwene. Igme amekene muhuke aytakin. Ig tivik akak pumukne umuh. Ig tivik adahan kereye tiviren. Nikwene ku igkis tivik han. Igkis uti pahavwi awayg. Igkis uti pahavwi awayg amadga kahibu. Bawkata ig awayg Waramwi ig. “Nah ayawaptinwa amadga umuh.” “Kitiye yis?” “Wis ta iwasene uvetuniya.” “Nah hawata.”

Then [the Galibi] stayed far away at the foot of that mountain called Wanar. To Buhiye. [The Palikur] chased them there. [Unclear: In full retreat, they went to Tivihi?] The Palikur observed this. They pursued them there. They were beaten [fought; routed] out of there. They retreated [uprooted] from there [also]. Now they went further away to Cayenne. They went [near] to Cayenne. They arrived there. [The Palikur] went [after them] then. There was a man. I forget his name. They captured one man to show [the way to the Galibi’s village]. He was an Indian. They captured him to show the way. As a lookout. Now they arrived there. They climbed up there. He, our ancestor, descended from there. He left with two canoes. He left to fight over there. As they were traveling this way, they found a man. They found a man on a sandbank. But the man was [actually] Waramwi [Father of All Anacondas]. “I request that I can travel [on your] canoe. Where are you going?” [The Palikur said], “We are going to search for our enemies.” [Waramwi said,] “I am also.”

The Story Trails of Kwap “Nah ta iwasene nuvetuniya atere yihapti.” “Ba ik adahan mbiya yimadga?” Igkis kaytwa: “Ihi. Ik adahan.” Ig iwe gimedga. Nikweni ig tabiya muhuksa. Nikwe hewke tiyegum ig ive givawka. Havis tohan ahakwa un. Juktah tivik. Nikwe danuh avit paha waxri kewye Tanawni In kewye Tanawni awaku kuk awaxine. Kuri danuh atereni. Ig Waramwi awna gitkis hene: “Sarayhnay nah atan.” Igkis hiyapni hene igkis sayhgi tohan ihapkat. Kuri Waramwi msekwe ay. Igme Waramwi awna gitkis hene: “Pariye iyamni nuthu.” Ig amekene awna git: “Nah yumawa nayamni pit. Suble amnih iki wotu uvetuniya adahan usuh mateke uvetuniya madikte avim inin hawkri.”

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“I would like to search for my enemies there with you.” “Can I travel aboard [your canoe]?” They replied, “Yes. It is possible.” [Waramwi] picked up his bow. Then he stood at the prow [of the canoe]. All night long, [he stared into the water]. He shot into the water. Until he [they?] left. Until they arrived at a mountain called “Tanawni.” It is called “Tanawni” because it is the place of coconuts. Now [they] arrived there. He, Waramwi, spoke to them, like this, “Leave me here.” Seeing it was so, they left him at the water’s edge. Now Waramwi stayed there. He, Waramwi said this to them, “What would you like to ask of me?” He, our ancestor said to him, “I have nothing I want from you. Just help give us our enemies so that we can beat our enemies today.”

The encounter with Waramwi along the road to victory suggests that the revered anaconda-and-person in local narratives who had his home in the middle reaches of the Arukwa had shared their perspective on who exactly the enemy was. A benevolent and protective creature in this account of him, Waramwi’s habit of eating shellfish had left mounds of shells at a place called Ivegepket (Lookout Point) farther down the Arukwa River.23 His presence here, as a companion to warriors who are finishing a protracted battle far away along the coast, confirms that he is part of a world of creatures in Arukwa who are both predatory and protective, both people and anacondas. Without his intervention, the Palikur would not have retained the ability to live here.24 In the version of the war story told by Kiyavuno Xonkoy, a grandmother on Amomni Island near Kumene, the anaconda constellations Kusuvwi

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and Tavara appear to counsel a wait for the seasons, and Waramwi arrives to help finish the battle: Kuri estuwa gudahan minikwak Kiyavwiye Uhokri ikiskayevwiy ay amadga inin.25 Kuri pahavuw hiyogi eg kehe gubatga gikak nor Mahipoko. Hiyeg ka hiyak ku aysaw eg keh gubatga gikak. Kuri gunag awna -Ba pis ta uwasakat? -Nah ta uwasakat. Mama. Pahaye egkis tima kiyapkaman. Gegni amevwe gumin aka yakot. Ig danuh tahan. Egkis pahapuwat. Mmahbe nor kuri. Kuri ig havisig. Ig havisne neg awayg. Kuri ig huwite ta guvit gihayowa. Kuri ig Mahipoko mehwep!

Embe egme iwasepka. Apa eg miyovi kuwis. Kuwis mutuhpiye amadga . . . ta waykrikut. Ku gukamkayhrivwiy kannikaw nerras ku hiyevwiyene. Bakimany ka aynsima! Kuri hawata ig norte hiye awna git gikukri: Ku avim inin nah ayta ayemni kerka adahan nnaguh. Ku samah pi umehe nnaguh!

Now the story about long ago, when Senhor Uhokri [God] put us here on this [earth]. Now, one woman had an illegitimate child with a Mahipoko [spirit]. The people did not know when she became pregnant by him. Now her mother said, “Are you going to the manioc field?” “I am going to the manioc field. Mama.” At that time, they heard sounds. Her older brother sneaked up to her with an arrow. He arrived over there. They were [standing] apart. That’s how they were, then. Now he [the older brother] shot him [the Mahipoko]. He shot that man. Now he [the Mahipoko] deflected the arrow to his wife. Then he, the Mahipoko, disappeared! [Several accounts say that he turned into an anaconda and swam away.] When [the brother] went to look at her, she was already dead. [When she was] already [buried?] on . . . in the ground. Then her children then, they were [became] those Galibi people. So many children! Now, also, he, the Galibi, said to his uncle, “At the present time, I come to request a war [with you] because of my mother. Because of how you have killed my mother!”

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He, Senhor / Sir Uhokri [God] said this, in the brother’s mind, “Go toward them, so that you can respond to his message.” Ku henewa. Ig hiye awna: “Ku avim When it was so. He, the Galibi, inin. Avim pahavwite [kayg?]nek said, “At the present time. In one month’s time, we will blow norte usuh agiga aka agiganek ada pis ahegbetaw. Usuh ahegbetaw our flutes for you to prepare yourselves. We will prepare hawata. ourselves also.” Igkis kadahan kerka ayhte Kwap. They made war over at Kwap. Ayteke kurin igkis muhuke tahan Afterward then, they crossed over Warabdit. to Warabdi. Ayge igkis keryekis akiw. There, they fought again. So many people were fighting! So Ka aynsima hiyeg ker! Ka aynsima many people died! hiyeg miya! Ku pariye amadgaye inin umah ka Those who were on this [island?], aynsima. so many died! Igkis kabiman mmahbe saruw igkis They screamed like otters! kaba! Awaku ku samah igkis miya. . . . Because of how they were dying. . . . So they finished with [the war]. Embe igkis pisenwa akak. Ka Not right here. aynema. Igkis pisenwa tah parawhokwat. They finished [the war] way out at sea. Ay in igkis pisenwate. There, they ended [the war]. Igkis tivik tah parawhokwete. They went out to the ocean. Ba pis hiyak nor Wanari? Do you know Wanari [Quanary River]? Embe ayge igkis pisenwe aka Well there, they ended with their gikerekis. fighting. Amekenegben. Hiyekis. Pisenwa Our ancestors [and] the Galibi. aka kerekis ayge. They ended their fighting there. Now, they, the Wakayri people Kuri igkisme Wakaygiyene gayta. came. Neg Waramwi awna: “Ku avim He, Waramwi [the anaconda] inin nah pisenwa akak made hiyeg said, “Today, I will finish off all the people’s time/lives. . . .” gihawkan. . . .” Amekenegben estuwa kuri inere. Ya. Now that is our ancestor’s story. Yes. Ig Kiyavwiye Uhokri awna abet gihiyakemni: “Atak gimkanitkis adah pis diyuhkise ginetni.”

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The name of the woman is given in other versions of the story as Kwewka, and she is one of the only women named in the stories we recorded; the other two being shaman Wayos, and Kiyavuno Tivuw (“Frog”), the wife of Wavaman the caiman.26 Kiyavuno Xonkoy’s reference to Kwewka’s children is detailed in other versions of the story, such as Kiyavwiye Uwet’s account of the war told in 2008, in which the origins of the Galibi were said to have been the maggots feeding on Kwewka’s body: Nah kinetihwa aynesa gamin kerka ku samah uhumwan pitatye.27 Git pitatye ig Imawi kahayowa atan. Ig ayevri ta gut pahavu tino. Sema ka ikaka git. Gig ka iki git. Ig hiyakni hene. Eg tino batek gikak. Eg keh bakibe gikak. Kuri lawe eg biyuhkisa kurina gegni aya: “Kakaka pi akamayh? Kakaka pis biyuhkis ay? Pariyeka pikamkayh gig?” Eg awna: “Nah ka biyuhkisa.” “Ya mmah nikwe nah hiya ku pis biyuhkisno?” Eg awna: “Nah ka hiyak.” Giwn: “Kawa. Sema pi gigihwa. Ay pigihri ay!” Gegni hiyakni. Gegni ta kadasevri. Wasamdakat. Ig kadasa awayg ay nikwen. Kuri awayg danuh atere nikwen. Ig ayeke atere: “Mmah pis? -Ya. Ig awna: “Ku avim inin! Nah umehpep avim inin!

I will talk a little bit about the war and how it started in the beginning. It is said, that in the beginning, he, an Imawi, married here. He proposed to one [Palikur] woman. But she was not given to him. Her father did not give her to him. He considered this. She, the woman, loved him. She made a baby with him. Now when she was pregnant then, her older brother asked, “With whom did you have a child? With whom did you become pregnant here? Who is your child’s father?” She said, “I am not pregnant.” “And why then, do I see that you are pregnant?” She said, “I do not know [why].” He said, “No. But you have a husband. Here! Your husband [is somewhere around] here!” Her older brother decided to do the following. Her older brother went to lying in wait. At the manioc field. He laid in wait for the man, here, then. Now the man arrived there then. He asked there, “Is it you?” “Yes.” He said, “On this [day]! I will kill you on this [day]!”

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He, the man, said to him, “Do not shoot! Do not shoot from over there! If you shoot, you will shoot your sister!” Ig awna: “Ka ba natiguhma! Nah He said, “It is not [for] my sister! I havise pis! Pase pis nah aharitye! Ka am shooting you! Because it is you, ba nutiguhma nah havis! that I am [aiming for]! I will not shoot my sister!” Hene gitig ayhte piyawakad. Her sister was far away. Far away Piyawakad giw. from him. Igme bakibe pes ayteke ig pes. He, the young man, came out [into the open]. Now he [the older brother] Kuri ig hiyakni nikwe. Ig awna: decided the following. He said, “I “Nah havise akak yakot! will shoot [him] with an arrow!” Ig havise imawi aka yakot. He shot the Imawi [spirit being] with an arrow. Lawe ku ig havise imawi aka yakot When he shot the Imawi with an arrow, like this. He [the Imawi] han. Ig pasuhme giyakot han deflected the arrow, like this, right arimkat gitig. toward his [the brother’s] sister. Pa! Wade guvitit! Thunk! Right into her! -Aka! Gumun. Baw! Eg tuguhe. “Ouch!” [into] her body. Thud! She fell. She fell then. He took her. He Eg tuguhe nikwe. Ig iwevru. Ig avuhpiyo ta Kwekwemnaw. Aviku buried her at Kwekwemnaw waxri kwekwemnaw. [Parrot Island]. On Parrot Island. Ayge ig umehe gitig. There, he [had] killed his sister. Ig havisne ganig. Kani ig umehe He shot at his brother-in-law, but gatig. he had killed his sister. Now around that time then he Kuri ariwntak inin nikwene. Ig buried her. He came up to his avuhegu. Ig danuh ta git gig. Ig awna: “Aripa nah umehe nor father. He said, “I have killed my sister, over there!” nutigu ayhte. -Mmah guwmhwan pit? “How did you kill her?” Ig awna: “Kawa. Nah haviste He said, “No. I was shooting at her husband. He said, ‘Do not shoot gugihgi. Giw: “Ka ba havis nun! me! You will shoot your sister here!’ Pis havis pitiguh ay! Nahme hiya I saw that my sister was far away. nutig piyawakad. Nah awna: “Nahme havis awayg han. Bawkata I said, ‘I will shoot at the man, in this direction.’ But he [caused my igme [keh nuyakot danuh?] wade guwmkanit. Nutiguh! Nah umehgu! arrow to go?] straight into her. My sister! I killed her!” Ig awayg awna git: “Ka ba havis! Ka ba havis ayteke. Ku pi haviseneku pis havis pitig!

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His father said, “Go to there and look!” Ig tivik iwasa. Ig danuh atereni. He went to look. He arrived there. Ka kabe tuwebru! Ayge kuwis. So many maggots! There, already! Nah kinetihwa ke ininbe aynesa ay. I will tell [the story], like this, just a little bit here. Ka kabe tuwebru ay! So many maggots, here! Nah ka kinetihwa made. Nah I will not tell everything. I will tell kinetihwa ke ininbe pit. it to you, like this.28 Igkisme tuwebru [pugumaw?] igkis They, the maggots, [increased in bakwa hiyeg. number?], they hatched [formed] into people. Ku igkis bakwa hiyeg igkis awna ta When they had formed into git nor. people, they spoke to him, the [brother]. Gig awahkis atere ada sukuhmte His father had sent him to wash made away all [the maggot people]. Pisenwa nikwe igkis awna ta git Afterward then, they spoke to gikukri: “Ka mwaka umah usuh him, their uncle: “Do not kill us, akiw. Kama mwa umah. Usuh anymore. Please do not kill [us]. mwaka ada diyuhkise unaguh We want to repay our mother’s gumig! Ku samah pis umehe unag.” blood! [Because of] how you killed our mother!” Kuri nikwe ig diyuhe. Ig awna ta Now then, he returned. He spoke git gig: “Nah hiya nor bakimnay to his father, “I saw those children, han kuwis. Kadahan payak aka like this, already. [He indicates the yakot ay.” height of his knee.] [They] were together [armed] with arrows, here.” Gig awna: “Suba diyuh tah ada His father said, “Go and return, iwasaavgu igkis akiw!” over there, to look at them again!” Gegni danuh atere. Aripa kadahan The older brother arrived there. paytwempu ayge. Ka kabey hiyeg There was already a village there! kuwis! There were so many [adult] people already! Igkis awna git: “Kukyan! Ahegbetaw They said to him, “Uncle! Prepare kabayhtiwa! Asa keh pimaduk. yourself well! Go ahead and make Usuh aki pit ku pariye pi keh your breastplate! We will show pimaduk. Keh pamaduk. Keh you how to make your breastplate. paraba ada mpitene.” Pase nor Make a breastplate! Make your (igkis kanum nor migaravye) kiyese [short war] club for blocking ayteke. Bawa kayg. Pase kayg [arrows]. When that (they called Gig awna: “Suba ta iwasa!

The Story Trails of Kwap maraha aytekeneku usuh danuh atere.” Inere gakavuska egkis kerebet nikwene Pomé igkis kavusa kerka aka warabdi. Igkis kamaxe warabdi made! Ka aynsima hiyeg bisikwiye hawata. Ayteke nikwe igkis hiyakni hene. Igkis kavusa ada kere aka kiyapyad paytwempu. Asa pisenwa gikebyuvwi awna git hene: “Ka ik ada wis kere aka kiyapyad paytwempu tiwrikute. Pase nor barew ayesri paytwempu. Uyay kere aka nor nopsanyanmin paytwempu. Ig awna giwn: “Kawa. Uya kere atere. Pisenwa wis tivik hanpani. Kuri igkis hiyakni hene. Igkis kanikase kerka. Igkis wagehe gimin. Igkis amekene havis hiye aytohtak Kwap tak. Tah pituri aka yakot. Pis ka hiya ku aysaw [ahikan?]? Pi piyawakte. Henewa uvikan ke nor warik arukwat. Igkis havis atere. Igkis havis atere nikwene. Kuri igi hiye awna ta git: “Nah mwaka nah sumuk pis kite pis nukukri!”

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the full moon ‘migaravye’ ) gets full over on this side . . . [Points toward east.] When the moon is full, we will arrive.” That was the beginning of their war, then. First they began fighting with Warabdi [Island village]. They [the Galibi] captured Warabdi completely! Many people escaped also. Afterward then they decided to do this. They began to battle with the large villages. Afterward, his relatives said this to him, “We are not able to fight the large village upstream. Because that is a fair-sized village. Let us [make] war with the smaller villages.” He said these words, “No. Let us war there. Afterward we will go, in that direction.” Now they decided to do this. They raised up war. They climbed up[stream] to [Kwap village]. They, our ancestors, shot at the Galibi from over at Kwap. Over to Pituri [the point on the opposite side of the river, from Kwap], with arrows. Do you not know the [distance]? A little farther. The same [distance] as the Arukwa River [from here]. They shot there. They shot there then. Now he, the Galibi, said to him, “I want to shoot you first, with a sumuk [arrow], my uncle!”

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“Ku pi miya neku nah mwaka pi samruw kakavusaw. Ku pisamwi miyanek nor ku butye kakavusaw. Ku yi madike made neku kuri nah tivikte sumuh inere hiyeg ku pariye kadahan ka nopsimahad paytwempuw. Nah keh.” “Ahegbetanaba nor pagigni ada telefonar muwapu. Ada telefonar. Awaku usuh kadahan telefone ay.” Igkis keh. “Kehnaba pidahan! Avit kayg marehe!” Ig hiyakni. Ig ahegbetaw made ada inere. Ig ahegbetaw made ku samah nor imawi awna git gikamayh ada igkis keh nor ku telefone. Igkis keh guw. Igkis ahegbete made kuri. Ada ig awnene garikut. Bataka pawkam ka nopsimahad. Ada eg parak ta garikut. Ada eg awna gabiytak ku kerka kwis danuhe.

Embe ig keh made amamnate. Kuri igkis kannikase kerka nikwe. Igkis kannikase kerka aka nor warabdi. Igkis sumuh aka warabdi made. Ka ik ada nopsehsa paytwempu. Ku pariye gidahankis ka aynsima hiyegad. Igkis kerevu. Ka aynsima hiyeg bisikwiye ayteke.

“If you die, then I want your younger brother to start war [with me]. When your younger brother dies, I want the next [brother] to start war [with me]. When you are all finished then I will go to [defeat] the people who have the large villages. I will do it.” “Prepare your [musical instruments, i.e. clay whistles] to telephone everywhere. To telephone. Because we have a telephone here.” They made it. “Please make yours! Before the moon is full!” He considered this. He prepared everything for that [war]. He prepared everything which the Imawi [spirit] had told his child. For them to make a [clay whistle] telephone. They made it. They prepared everything, now. For them to speak into. [They] constructed a huge clay [communications outpost, shaped like a telephone booth] which she could enter [to send and hear messages]. For her to speak with her mouth that war had arrived, already. So then, he made everything three times over. Now they raised up the war, then. They started the war with Warabdi [village]. They overwhelmed [captured] Warabdi completely. It was not possible for a small village. [Only] for those [villages] with lots of people. They fought. Many people escaped from there.

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Some went to Tivigumnaw [Andiroba Island]. To escape from the war. Nawene tivik tehkete urakate. Some went way over to Uraka [Electric Eel Lake]. Neg tivik kariptiptite. Tah aragbuse. That one went to Kariptipti. [Or] Awaku kerka. Ka aynsima kerka. over to Aragbus. Because of war. So much war. Ku igkis hiyakni nikwene. Igkis When they observed this then. danuh atere nikwene. They were approaching there then. Igkis hiya ku igkis kerebet amin They saw that they were fighting at inere those [villages]. Now. However the chief ’s Kuri. Inme kapten gahawkriwa. grandfather. Ahawkriwa. Kwap ku kiney igkis Our grandparents, [here at] Kwap usakwa. where they lived. He said to him, “Our strength is Ig awna git: “Udatni kaba ka almost not able to match their ik gidahankis. Uyay kiyarah ini waxri. Uyaba kiyaranpen! Usuh [strength]. Let us fence in this keh aka yar. Ayteke usuh ihuk ah land. Let us fence it in! We will do ka nopsimahadmin. Uya bukiha it, with a fence. Afterward, we will kiyavwiye ahadmin. Wiswiy chop down huge trees. We will cut wagahkis pohowku akebyi ahadmin down huge, mature trees. We will ta waxrit. Kahadbe ku kuwis move five of those tree [trunks] up wagehe awke aviku ahinneku wis onto the land. So that when [the tukuhe ah arimkatkis. Nah wagesne enemies] are already climbing up, nikwe. Pase paha ah tukuhemet. this way, we will throw down the Paha pakeku bute. Wixwiy umehe tree trunks toward them. I will nerras hiyeg made! circle around then. When one of the logs has been thrown down. One [more trunk] will follow closely behind it. We will kill all those people!” So they made it. They stretched Embe igkis kehe inere. Igkis out huge tree trunks all around tarakuwa ahrad nikwe. them [to roll down] then. Hiye danuh atere. Hiye wagehpiye The Galibi arrived there. The ayta ada kerka. Galibi climbed up, this way, for war. Now they saw [this]. They [rolled] Kuri igkis hiya. Igkis tarakuwa ah. the logs [down the hill]. Igkis umehe. Igkis umehpigkis They killed. They killed them then. nikwene. Nawene tivik tivigumnawte. Bisike avit kerka.

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Two [Galibi men] remained. Those two [Galibi men were allowed] to take [the urns of dead] back [to their villages]. They cremated so many people! Aye nor piyana ta gitkis kavinine ay: Those two [Galibi men] made a “Ba ik ada iki iwedrigit ada usuh request to [the Palikur] who were maserevye nor ukebyuvwiy?” living here. “Is it possible to give a place where we can cremate our relatives?” Giwn: “Ihi. Asa masere.” He said, “Yes. Go ahead and cremate.” Igkis masere nikwe. Kuri igkis They cremated them then. Then diyuhe nikwe. they returned [to their villages]. Now they went again. They went Kuri igkis tivik akiw. Igkis tivik then. nikwe. Igkis kote ihukwet ayteke. They [the Galibi] had not yet left [departed] from here. Igkis kote haraksekam ayteke. They [the Palikur] had not yet chased them away from here. Igkis awahkiskam ay. They sent them here. David: Igkis hiye? David: They, the Galibi? Uwet: Ya. Igkis kote ihukwakam Uwet: Yes. They had not ayteken wakayritak. yet departed from Wakayri [mountain]. Igkis awahkisnin aytak. Wakayritak. They just sent them, this way. From Wakayri. Igkis kerenin. They just fought. Kuri amekenegben kere gikakis Then our ancestors fought with nikwe. them then. Amekenegben matekigkis awaku Our ancestors defeated them inin ahrad. because of those huge [rolling] logs. Igkis umehpete ka aynsima. They killed so many of them. Igkis hiyakni nikwe. Igkis pese. They observed this then. They Hiye pese ayteke. went out [away]. The Galibi went out from here. Usekwe piyana. Igi piyana nikwene iwevrukis. Maserevuwkis hiyeg ka aynsimad!

It is in this account that the landscape at Kwap marks the formation of a new, dangerous alliance between the Caribs and the Dutch, which combined new world weaponry with local knowledge. The narrative focuses again on the skills needed to rout the invaders, including archery, logrolling technology, and poisons.

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The Galibi departed. They went way over there. What is it called? Do you know Buhiye [Mountain]? Ig tivige. Ig pese. He left. He went out Ku hiye pese nikwe igkis awnese When the Galibi went away then nor Hollandé. they invited the Dutch. Igkis awnase: “Uya ta mayuwot. They invited them, “Let us help each other.” Igkis Hollandé ayta gihaptikis They, the Dutch, came together nikwe. with them then. Avim inin hawkri igkis ayta amadga On that day, they came on their gimunkis. canoes. Mmukna gihmunkis. Their two canoes. Hollandé ayta akak arakembet The Dutch with all kinds of arrows yakotye. [weaponry]. Nor . . . mmahba keh nor . . . Those . . . that make that . . . like ke nor bomba. Igkis ayta akak. those bombs. [cannons?] They Amadga eg. came with them. Onboard her [the canoe]. Egu gimuhkis pahamku danuh ta Of their canoes, one reached Pituri Piturit. [a point of land across the river from Kwap]. Ayge pahamkuw gimuhkis buwise. There, one of their canoes sank. Eg buwisevye. Usekwe pahamkuw She sank. One canoe remained. umuh. Kuri nikwe parikwene havise yakot Now then, [the Palikur] Indians aterena. shot arrows there. Aytohtak ig havise pahavwi. From the other side [of the river] Huwitak tah amadga umuh. he shot one [of the Dutch men]. It hit him [while he was] onboard the canoe. Ig kabiman mmahba wakukwa. He screamed much like a capuchin monkey. Ig kabiman kun wakukwabe. He screamed like a capuchin monkey [possibly due to the use of an arrow poison known to cause extreme pain]. Ayge Hollandé awna nikwe: “Nah There then, the Dutch man said, nuvewkankama ig ka ik ada ig “I thought he [the Palikur] did not know how to fight.” kerekam.” Pase ig huwit ta arit. Pa! Aka! Ig Because he hit him directly. miya. Thunk! Ouch! He died. Hiye pesetye. Tivik tehkate. Mmahpa? Ba pi hiya nor Buhiye?

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He [the Dutch man] said, “If it is like this then. I can not manage. It is not possible! Look where they have shot from! [And I have to respond with a lance?] How will I reach him? I can not reach him with a lance.” Ayteke nikwe igkis hiya. Igkis Afterward then, they observed this. They went back [home]. diyuhe. Parikweneyewa! Parikwene They were real Parikwene [Palikur, haraksig. People]! The Parikwene chased after him. Haraksekis. Ka ba danuh ta Buhiye. They chased after them. They almost reached Buhiye [mountain]. Igkis diyuhe gariw. They withdrew from there. Ayteke igkis diyuhe akiw nikwe. Afterward they returned again then. Igkis Hiye haraksevyekis ayteke They, the Galibi, chased after nikwe them, to this side, then. Kuri Hiye wagahkis amin bakimni Then the Galibi climbed ashore on waxri nikwe. the children’s land, then. Igkis ikise bakimni tah Aragbusa. They [the Palikur] had put the Atere. children at Aragbus [rock outcrop]. There. Giwn: “Ku hene ke ininbe nikwe. Embe nah ka ik. Ka ik! Ive kitak igkis havis atan! [Eg nahme awnese aka lans?] Mmah ku nah danuh ta givitit? Nah ka ik ada danuh ta givit. Aka lans.”

In Kiyavwiye Uwet’s story, the tracks of the ancestors mark Kwap as the decisive battlefield where Arawakan alliances (which eventually became the Palikur or Parikwene) fought the Caribs and the Dutch. The screaming of the Dutch on being shot was attributed to the Palikur use of kurumwi, a terrible plant toxin that, people say, will make a person mad with pain as they die. Only a few groves of it grow nearby Kwap, close to Karumna Mountain. People point them out as you walk there, with severe cautions that even a scrape from the growing tip could have terrible consequences. Amid all the devastation, Kwap was also a domestic space at various times. The augur tests done by the archaeological team indicate two areas where ceramic densities are high enough to suggest the presence of dwellings. Near the gravesite area amid the tall jungle trees, a lemon tree grows atop a small mound that was once a household rubbish tip. In recent years, too, the place had been used for manioc fields, amid the debris of very old drinking pots. In an interview at her home in Kumene, Kiyavuno Ida, the widow of the shaman Leon, spoke about having worked in their fields there:

The Story Trails of Kwap David: Minikwak pis kadahan piwasra ayhte kenese Kwap. Mmah hene?29 Ida: Nah kadahan ayge. Kenese Kwap nah kadahan nuwasra. David: Ba yis uti darivwit abekebdi ayge? Ida: Ayge amun inere. Ka ba aynsima! Ka aynsima darivwit heme seme u atike. Pahayowa ay usuh atikavuw. Heme ka nopsimahad darivwitad. Bakadmin. Tukukad arim inere. Inere wayk. Heme ku atike arak. Kadahan.

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David: Long ago, you had your manioc field over near Kwap. Is that so? Ida: I had it there. Near Kwap, I had my manioc field. David: Did you find broken darivwit drinking pots there? Ida: There, on that [land]. So many! Many darivwit pots! But only if you dig for them. At one time [there], we dug one out. But it was such a huge darivwit pot! Broken up. Filled up with earth.

But if you dig around, they are there. David: Ba kadahan payt ayge David: Was there a house there, minikwak? long ago? Ida: Kadahan payt ay. Ida: There was a house there. [Humewne?] nuwasra kadahan [Alongside?] my manioc field, pisaya payt humewne ay. there were two houses alongside there. David: Ba iki ada pis hiyap ku akak David: Can you see them at the in? present time? Ida: Nah ka hiyak kiyavwiye. Nah Ida: I do not know, sir. I am not well. ka maknewa. Ku ka ba henen nah ta waxrap If it were not so, I could take you atere there. Kani wasewvun. It is really overgrown. David: Ba kadahan iwedrit ku David: Is there a place where kiney kadahan terra elevada? Como there is [Portuguese] elevated terra mais alta que talvez tinha uma land? Like higher ground that casa ou uma fortaleza? maybe had a house or a fort? Ida: Ka waxrima. Ayteke Ida: It is not [on higher] land. On this side, [where there is] a wasabugman. level plain. The house was on that side, in this Payt aytohtak han. direction. Nor uwasra aytakihpa. Uwasnin pi Our manioc field was on this side. You could see, only the field. hiya.

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It was a huge size. The house was this way. On the level plain. Barew amun nor asabugman. Amun Right on the plain. Along the nor parewni. stream. Kadahan parewni ku pariye nah There is a stream, which I spoke awna guwmin. about. Ayhte waxri kadahan mahakwa Further inland, there is a lake ayge. there. A fair distance inland. A little lake. Barew avirukan. Mahakwayesewa. Inere ka makara inere. That [lake] does not dry up. Ku samah usuh warivwiy ay. While we remained there. Three Mpanabo kamukri usuh usakwa ay years we stayed there, and the water was always there. hene inere un ay. Avukap ayhte waxriwa ka ba A large body of water far inland, ihapkama. not at the shoreline.

Ka nopsimahad gamunad. Ini payt hanpa. Asabugman.

Safe access to a lake that would not dry up, away from the river that was a route for enemy boats, would have been a good reason to maintain a settlement there during the war years. Yet Kwap, like many other settlements along the river, was higher, offering a defensive advantage: people could roll tree trunks down to defeat an invader: a technology of which New World soldiers were all too aware (see figure 24). One of the war-story trails that leads to Kwap goes through a place of flat open rocks called Uraka, so named after the electric eels that inhabit the lake they enclose. When we travelled there in 2001 after hearing accounts of potsherds on the open rock, it was clear that there were plenty of trails of ancestors. Scrapings on the quartz veins in the rock indicated that people had worked stone and clay tools there, and several places evidenced ceramic debris which our guides said had been drinking vessels. Unlike the fine-grained potsherds of Aragbus or the delicate figurines adorning the burial ware of the boot-shaped cavern, the coarse-grained and thin pottery on the flat rocks here suggested a life of scarce resources in which even clay had had to stretch to the maximum. Curiously, amid some of the rough claywork was a piece of thick ceramic, in an olivebrown glaze, that archaeological colleagues suggested might be of Dutch origin. Like Uwet’s account of the Hollandaises, Floriano’s account of the war trail through Uraka also makes that connection: Inin iwetrit kewye Uraka. Adahan amekenempu gitkis ayemwene’s gavit givetunyakis . . . ku igkis keryekis.30

This place is called Uraka [Electric Eel]. It was where our ancestors hid from their enemies . . . that they were fighting with.

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Figure 24. Siege of an Amerindian village (Source: A. Helman 1982)

Igkis bisik atan. Igkis ayta akak madikte gidavakis atan adahan igkis ka muwakti gitkis girunkis wohska. Igkis ayta akak atan adahan igkis . . . ku aysaw igkis mayak aynesa. Yuma kerka igkis keh girunkis. Igkis kaynekis ay avit nor tip awaku givetunyakis ka hiyavgikis ku kiney igkis ayamwa. Amekenempu kinetihwa amin ku igkis ker muwapu igkis ayamwa.

They took refuge here. They came with all their clay drinking pots here, so that they would not have to lack/be without their manioc beer. They brought [the pots] here, in order for them to . . . for when they were resting a little. [When] there was no fighting they made their drinks. They danced here on top of that rock, because their enemies could not see where they were hiding. Our ancestors spoke about [this]. That [when] they were fighting everywhere, they hid themselves [here].

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[The Palikur] were around here and over on the other side [of Uraka Lake]. What is it called? It is [called] Wewveket [Hunting Point] there. Again. Also. They left their drinking pot there again. Inere nutuhbe igkis nore gidavakis I think that those . . . their ayge. Ku samah kerka pisenwe igkis drinking pots here. When the war was over, they left them here. ikiswig ayge. Hawata nor ay. Nor ay ku samah Those here also. Those are here kerka pisenwe igkis batekyekis. because when the war was over they were celebrating. Pisenwa nikwen . . . , nutuhbe igkis When it was over then . . . I think tivikwiyes, igkis beke nor ay. Igkis they left and they broke those ka ikis pahowtema nor ay. [. . .] [pots] here. They did not leave one whole [pot] here. [. . .] Afterward around that [time] they Ayteke ariwntak ini igkis pes went out [of hiding] then. They nikwen igkis tivik. Igkis tivik left. They went way over to the temkete warikmurite. Igkis tivik river. They went to the river. [. . .] warikmurite. [. . .] Nikweni gitkankis igkis ku samah At that point it is said, that when nor pisenwa kerka nikwen, igkis the war was over, they went out pese aytakin, igkis tivik msekwe ta from here. They left and stayed Piturit. at Pituri [across the river from Kwap]. Atere nikwe kerka pisenwevyewa, There then, the war was ending nikwe, ku samah ig . . . nor . . . hiye then. When he, those Galibi, awnase “walande.” invited the Dutch. Hiye awnase walande nikwe adah The Galibi invited the Dutch to walande mayuye gitkis. help them [fight]. Igkis awkin akak omte pahambakew. nor mmah ariw wewveket ayge. Akiw. Hawata akiw igkis ikis gidavakis ayge akiw.

Continuing his tale, Floriano speaks of the memory of new alliances forged by remnant groups, after the war—as noted by Francoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand31—and he describes the emergence of an everyday common language among many clans who had come together as a federation. By the Grenands’ account of an exhaustive survey of archival resources, a federation of Arawakan “Parikwene” appears to have extended all the way along the Amapá coast, into French Guiana. Floriano comments here on the emergence of “Palikur” as a lingua franca, as distinguished from the richly ceremonial language of the elders and the shamans. David: Hawata, pariye clã (hiyegviyene) estava aqui dos

David: Also, which clan of the Palikur was here? Was it all

The Story Trails of Kwap Palikúr. Era todos os Palikúr ou era só um parte? Uma clã . . . ?32 Floriano: Madikte igkis. Nor parikwene. Ivailto: Seme kadahan parikwene wadahyene, kamuwyene, wakavunyene e paraymeyene e wayveyene. Neras madikte parikwene igkis igkisweke parikwene Palikúr. Floriano: Igkis igkisweke. Yuma nawwotunye. Igkisweke heme seme giwkisnenwa. Kurin, gitkankis, wayveyene giwn mpayew . . . Kuri paraymeyene kadahan giwn mpayewa. Kuri wakavunyenegben kadahan giwnkis mpayewa yuwit igkis awna. Ivailto: Nawenyewa yuwit? Floriano: Ya, nawenyewa yuwit. Heme igkis timavak, timavak igkis. Ivailto: Pahavwi awna pahatwa yuwit? Floriano: Ya. Pahavwi tima giwn pahavwi tima giwn. Hawata igkis kannuyekwiye awna giwn pahavwi. David: Desenho ku pariye igkis tamak ba hempekwiye ba nawenyewa? Floriano: Kawa, hempekwiye. Ivailto: Heneme pahavwi gidahan nawenyewa giw pahavwi aynesa. Gibatkan ibug ku pariye darivwit ig keh nawenyewa giw pahavwi adahan hiyak gidahan.

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the Palikur or just a part? One clan . . . ? Floriano: All of them. Those [Palikur] Indians. Ivailto: But there are Indians who are [lists the Palikur clan names] Wadahyene, Kamuwyene, Wakavunyene, Paraymeyne, and Wayveyene. All those all Palikur Indians. Floriano: They themselves [only]. No foreigners. They themselves but only their own names. Now, it is said [that] the Wayveyene language [was slightly different/apart from]. Now, the Paraymeyene was slightly different. Now, the Wakavunyene language that they spoke was slightly different. Ivailto: Different languages? Floriano: Yes. A different language. But they understood each other. Ivailto: One [clan] spoke one language? Floriano: Yes. One [person] understood the other’s language. Also they knew how to speak the language [of the other] ones. David: The designs that they drew, were they the same or different?

Floriano: No. The same. Ivailto: But each [clan’s designs] are a little bit different from each other. When molding the clay for a pot, he would make it different from the others, so that he would know which one was his. Floriano: Adahan ig hiyak gidahan. Floriano: For him to know his Ku pariye adahan wayveyene, ku own. Which belonged to the pariye adahan wakavunyene, ku Wayveyene. Which belonged

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to the Wakavunyene. Which was the Wadahyene. Which was the Kawakuyene ancestors. Which belonged to the Paraymeyene ancestors. I have mentioned some of them. There is one [design? language?] that comes from the Kamuwyene ancestors. Kadahan kamuwyene akiw. Heneme There was also Kamuwyene avanenekwa kadahan mpusawe. [language]. But there has always Kadahanyekwiye gewkahwankis been many. They had their own igkis kadahanyekwiye gavankis names. They had their own akiw; kadahanyekwiye giwnkis. language. They also had their Igkis ka awna inakni wownwiy ku own songs. They had their own pariye wixwiy awna ay ku akak language. They did not speak inin. the same language as us, that we speak here today. Ivailto: Igkis kadahan mpusewet Ivailto: They had many languages. giwnkis. Floriano: Giwnkis. Floriano: Their language[s]. Ivailto: Heneme igkis igkisweke Ivailto: But they were really Palikúr. Palikur. Floriano: Igkisweke parikwene. Floriano: They were really Pahatrawa warik! . . . [Palikur] Indians. From one river! . . . Ivailto: Kuri ariwntak inin ku Ivailto: Now around when they ended the war, what word samah igkis pisenwe kerka, mmah inin yuwit ku aysaw igkis kaba [language did they speak] when madik madikte kamuwyene. they were almost exterminated Wadahyene madike madikte? . . . the Kamuwyene [Sun Clan]? Were the Wadahyene Gecko Clan finished off completely? Floriano: Now all those who Floriano: Kuri madike madikte remained [survived], they stayed igkis msekwevye pahavwitwa together as one, I think. The nutuhbe. Pariye madikwiwa . . . , kuri yumahwa kiw kamuwyene. [Palikur] who were finished off . . . now there were no more Sun Clan people. Ivailto: Kamuwyene yuma akiw, Ivailto: The Sun Clan people are no more. They were finished igkis madike . . . off. pariye wadahyene, ku pariye kawakuyenegben, ku pariye adahan paraymeyenegben. Nah kinetni gakkis. Kadahan pahavwi gaytakkis kamuwyenegben.

The Story Trails of Kwap Floriano: Madikwiwa igkis. Yumahwa akiw. Pahavwiwa amekene ahwiy Datkamni ignewa kamuwyene heme gikak gikamkayh pahavwi gikamkayh kewye mmak ariw nor a ku pariye igkis kanum Fahswamni ignewa. Kuri ig Fahswamni kamaxe amakanomni Yukamin. Yuma gikamkaywa gukak. Yuma gikamkaysima gukak kurin madike. Ivailto: Kamuwyene madik? Floriano: Kamuwyene madike yuma akiw. Ivailto: Seme inin yuwit ku pariye wixwiy awna ba kamuwyene giwn? Wownwiywa ku pariye . . . Floriano: Wownwiywa yuma akiw. Ivailto: Ininnewa wownwiy kawih kamuwyene giwn? Floriano: Kamuwyenenen giwn kurin. Ivailto: Kuri akak inin ay wadahyene, kawakukyene. Floriano: Wadahyenegbenen yuma giwnkiswa . . . Pahatwowa yuwit kuri wixwiy awna. Madikte biyuke gidahankis. [. . .] Floriano: Pitatyevwi neras wahawkrivwiy neras ka awna inakni wownwiy. Ku samah neras ku pariye kabatkanyevwi inin ka awna wownwiy.

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Floriano: They were finished off. There are no more. There was one of our ancestors, grandfather Datka [Anaconda], he was a Kamuwyene [Sun Clan person]. But with one child called . . . what was his name? That one they call him Fahswamni [Française, Frenchman]. Now he, Fahswamni, married the recently deceased Yuka. He had no children with her. [Since] he had no children with her, then [the Sun Clan] ended. Ivailto: The Sun Clan ended? Floriano: The Sun Clan ended. There are no more. Ivailto: But the words that we speak, are they the Sun Clan language? Our language which . . . Floriano: It is our language [and] no more. Ivailto: Is our language [exactly] the same as the Sun Clan language? Floriano: It is exactly the same as the Sun Clan language now. Ivailto: Now, in the present here, [there are] Wadahyene [Gecko Clan people] [and] Kawakukyene [Pineapple Clan people]. Floriano: There are just people from the Wadahyene Clan [but] none of their language. Now we speak one language. Every [Clan] has lost their own [language]. [. . .] Floriano: The First Ones, our grandparents, did not speak the same as our [current] language. Those who [sat down and greeted people at dances?], they did not speak our language.

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If we spoke to them, with this, our language, they would be very angry with us. Our ancestor, that elder, that my [grandfather]. My grandfather, what was his name? My grandfather Wasad. If he approached you like this. [And] he greeted you there, “Are you here, my grandson?” If you responded, “Yep!” [Ihye: slang for correct response, Ahadye.] Aa! ig dagawne nikwe. Yuma hene Oh! Then he would get angry! akiw. There is no more like that [i.e., angrier than anything.]. Igte awna: “Parisneki mabeyvye He would say, “You are stuck with a bad [ugly] way of thinking!” hiyakemniki!” Ig awna giwn:”Pis aymahwa He would speak these words, “You mabeyvyenen hiyakemniki. Pis have grown up with a bad way of aymahwa. Pinag ka aymwahpi amin thinking only! Your mother did hiyakemniki kibeyne hiyakemniki. not raise you in the good way of Pis awna . . . [pis] kannuhwa amin thinking. You speak . . . [you] have mabeyvyenen hiyakemmi adahan learned only bad ways of thinking mahivwinenen hiyeg.” that are insulting to [disrespecting] people!” Ivailto: Ya ku aysaw ig aytnihwi Ivailto: And if he greeted us, how should we respond? mmahpa wis kaytwa? Floriano: Wis ka kannu kaytwa . . . Floriano: We did not learn [the Ini keh nah hiyavgi nah ayemwe proper] response. That is why gavit. when I saw him, I would hide from him. Ivailto: Pis kannu awna aynesa? Ivailto: Do you know how to speak a little bit? Floriano: Nah ka kannu awna. Floriano: I do not know how to speak it. I do not know even a little Nah ka kannu awna aynisnima. bit. They speak about how my Igkis kinetihwa amin ku samah grandfather . . . pahawkri . . Ivailto: Ba pig? Ivailto: Was he your father? Floriano: Nahawkri. Floriano: My grandfather. Ivailto: Ku pariye ig hiya darivwit Ivailto: Was it he who saw the clay han? drinking pot, in that direction? Floriano: Ay kuri. Floriano: [The pot] is here now. Ku wixwiy awna gikakkis akak inakni wownwiy igkis dagawne ka aynsima wotwiy. Amekene, nor, kiyavwiye ner pahawkri. Pahawkri ner, mmah ariw nor a . . . , pahawkri Wasad. Ku ig danuh pit ke ininbe. Ig aytnihpi ateren: “Aynaba nuhiwhi?” Ku pis kaytwa: “Ihye.”

The Story Trails of Kwap Ivailto: Hanpa.

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Ivailto: In that direction [pointing toward Andiroba Island]?

The urn of which Kiyavwiye Floriano speaks, here, was reputed to be in a cave near Uraka, and it could cause one’s enemies great harm if one knew how to use it, or it could cause oneself great harm if one’s shadow fell into it. A story of just such an urn caused widespread anxiety in 2007 along the adjoining Uaçá River—to the extent that health officials were called in to assist.33 Floriano: But my grandfather, he was a shaman. Did you know that? He was a shaman. Ivailto: Was it your father or your grandfather that saw it? Floriano: My grandfather. He came [here] hunting. [He saw the pot]. He hunted. Afterward then, he went along the shore of the point of this land [terra firma], which [we] passed earlier. Ig minehwe ateren. Ig utevwene. He [docked on the shore] there. Ku ig huwiyavwiynene gitim pahaye He discovered it. While he was adahan hiya arikna ke wotbe lighting his firewood, suddenly dunihkabe giharaptak han. Neptak he saw something like a sherd giw. behind him. Behind [and below?] him. Ig tima ‘tak’, ig tima. Ku ig iveg He heard a “Tak!” Then he looked atere. Ig iveg arimkat hiyeg ahh there. He looked toward it. Oh! [He saw] a person pointing a bow gimedga gimkanit. Ku ig hiya toward him. When he realized hene nikwe igme isahkiswimet. what was happening, he let it go. Ig watiswe. Talowh! Unihkwate! Kuri ig tarise gihmun nikwen. Ig He dropped it. Splash! Into the kataptew amadga gihmun. water! Then he pulled his canoe [away]. He boarded his canoe. Ig awna, giwn “kadahan kuvekti He said, “There is a sorcery ayge,” he’me nor kuvekti here!” [A place where sorcery amekenempu, nor, ikise nor kuvekti is performed]. But that sorcery ayge. [Ig] kehka noren was done by our ancestors. That [ancestor] had put that [sorcery] there. He made that. Ivailto: Mukuw pot sorcery? Ivailto: Mukuwayahvwiy? Floriano: He’me nahawkri awaku ig ihamwi ig, pis hiyak? Ihamwi ig.34 Ivailto: Pig ba pahawkri ku pariye hiya . . . ? Floriano: Nahawkri. Ig ayta kanikne (hiya darivwit), ig kanikne ayteke pisenwa nikwe ig minehwe ta akigsarit inin waxi ku keney kaksa usuh wewnamanen.

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Floriano: Mukuwyahvwi. E Hawata nah kinetni arak ki kibiye hiyeg kinetihwa amin eg ay ku, he’me ay yuma ay.

Floriano: Mukuw pot sorcery! I also have heard about it. Many people speak about it [being] here now. But there is none here.

Kiyavwiye Floriano’s account of his fear of his grandfather the shaman contrasts with the respect that Kiyavwiye Uwet consistently accords his own grandfather Buyomin. The latter’s shamanism, in Kiyavwiye Uwet’s account, has more to do with astronomy, seasonality, and wellbeing or healing. Kiyavwiye Floriano’s description of the urn echoes the fear of a particular kind of sorcery that, by Neil Whitehead’s account elsewhere in the Guianas, is a dark shamanism—assault sorcery.35 Kiyavwiye Uwet spoke of this in a discussion of the scattering of the Palikur after the war as far as the Amazon River, in conversation with David in 2008: Uwet: Minikwak ku samah igkis pisenwa kerka hiyeg miya. Ka aynsima hiyeg miya!36 Awaku Hiye agiga gavita hiyeg. Igkis agiga hiyeg gavita. Igkis agiga nikwe. Hiyeg miya! Hiyeg miya! Hiyeg miya! Ayteke ariwnteke ini, hiyeg miya nikwene. Hiyeg kavusaw higihwe ayteke. Pis hiyak?

Uwet: Long ago, when they ended the war, many people died. So many people died! Because the Galibi blew on the people’s bones. They blew on the people’s bones. They blew then. The people died! The people died! The people died! After this then, the people died then. The people began to flee from here. You understand?

The link between Kwap and dark sorcery, here described by the “blowing on the bones,” is underscored in an epic in which Kwap figures as the site of a major battle between the last two great shamans whom local people remember. In life, the names of Kiyavwiye Sansmin and Kiyavwiye Parupmin had been Sans and Parup; in death, they receive the suffix “-min” to show that they are recently deceased. Ishawet: Gimin amekene Parupmin.37 Ku samah ig aynitye ig Arukwa. Aka kawokwine. Igi Parupmin gikagmada ig Arukwa. Gikagmada! Kamahad ke pisbe nukakuh.

Ishawet: [This story is] about our ancestor Parup. How he greeted Arukwa [his friend] with a jaguar [i.e., took a jaguar to him, who killed him]. Parup and Arukwa were friends. His friend! A friend, like you are to me.

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However, when they were drinking, then the shaman [decided to] send out his powerful servants [to kill Arukwa]. Awaku igkis ihamwigben hiyakis Because the shaman knows the wavitye. wavitye [malign] spirits. Kuri hawkanewa ig gikagmada Now early in the morning, his Arukwa sesamanig. friend Arukwa, joked around with him. Ig awna git hene, “Yanmal! Nah He said this to him, “Yanmal! I mwaka . . . Nah axkere pakir. want . . . I want to eat wild pig. A Kanopsimahad pakigad ada nah huge wild pig. So that I can kill the umehe pakir. Adah’ nah axe pakir. pig. So that I can eat the wild pig. You are a shaman. I saw you at Pis ihamwi pis. Pis nah hiya . . . Warumka.” Warumka mountain.” Giwn, “Nah ahegbete pakir avit nor He [Parup] said, “I will prepare a wild pig on Warumka [Island].” Warumka.” Bawa ka inyema. But it wasn’t really true. Ig kawahahg ig wavitye. [. . .] He sent out the wavitye [malign] spirits [to kill him]. [. . .] Pahay hawkri ig awna git gikebyi One day he [Arukwa] spoke to his amekene Puhiyemni. relative, the former Puhiyemni. Ig awna git hene, “Kamahad. Uya He said to him, “Companion! ta nuhapti tah tiwrikut. Nah kanik Please go with me far upstream. I am fishing so that tomorrow I ada nah uguhne takuwanek. Kuri can go hunting by lights [lantern]. kabeywake usuh tivik.” Early in the morning, we will leave.” Hene igkis aytwe ayhte tiwrikute. So they went far upstream. Lawe tiwrikute. Igkis diyuhe nikwe. They went upstream, and then they returned. Igkis danuhe kabeywake kuwis. They arrived in the early morning already. Pawka mtipka. Tiwrikut. Tah avitit In the middle of the night. [From] nor Iveytipti. upstream to [his home] on Iveytipti [Poison Island]. Ig danuh atere. He [Arukwa] arrived there [with his friend] Kuri ig ka hiyakni ba ig axwikamet. Now he did not know that he was going to be eaten. [. . .] [. . .] Ig ka hiyak ba ig hewke. He did not know that he would [not] see morning [again]. Ig ka hawka! He did not see the morning! Heme lawe ku igkis higemne kuri ihamwi kawahg ku pariye gidatni.

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Bawkata ig ihamwi aripte ahegbete kawokwine ta givit. Avit nor Iveytipti. Lawe ku ig pereke nikwe. Igme amekene Puhiyemni ig givewkan ig ahinapte. Lawe ku ig atak atere, ig ahinap atere. Ku ig pisenwa aka gahinapni ig wagehpiye [. . .] Ig tima. Kabawh! Waxta! Giwaxta! Ig hiyapni. Ig himahwa. Giwn, “Ney! Pariye danuh yit?” Nikwe ig tuboh unihkwat. Nikwe ig takehe. Ig wagehe waxrit. Ig hiya axtigad waywehpad. Kabaywak. Aripa ku ig umehe Arukwamin. Ig kagehpig. Ig kagehe ginag Semin. Ig bekbetemin gutew. Awaku kawokwine kagehpen. Ig danuh ta avit. Ig himehwa atere nikwe. Kawokwine gahinad. Aynewa kawokwine mehwene. Metakwa akiw ig mehwe Ig awna, “Nah hiyak ku pariye neg! Amaka usuh sasemanewa higapkabet. Ig ihamwi. Ig keh inin pikak!” Ig hiyamni hene. Ig iwe neg hiyeg miyavye aka ginag. Egu ta ihapkate. Ig pereke gimun nikwe. Nikwe givin ta Kayomnit. Ig danuhe ta git.

Because the shaman had already prepared a jaguar to [attack] him. On Iveytipti [Poison Island]. When [Arukwa] got under [his mosquito net] Puhiyemni decided to go urinate. He came back from urinating then. When he finished urinating he climbed ashore. [. . .] He heard it. Thud! [It was seen leaving!?] He observed this. He set off from the [flooded grasslands?] He said, “Brother! What has happened to you?” Then he splashed into the water. Then he poled [over in a canoe]. He saw a huge predator walking along. Outside the house. He had already killed Arukwa. He had bitten him. He had bitten his mother, Semin. He had split open her head. Because the jaguar bit her. He [the jaguar] had arrived before. He [Puhiyemni] reached there then. The jaguar’s trail. The jaguar began to fade away. Finally he disappeared completely. He [Puhiyemni] said, “I know who it is! Yesterday, we were fooling around at the drinking festival. He, the shaman! He has done this to you!” He observed this. He took the dead man and his mother. He took her to the shoreline. He entered his [Parup’s] house then. Then his house was at Kayomni [Island]. He arrived up to him.

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He called to him [who was] on the island. Ig awna git, “Ba ayta iwasa He said to him, “Come here and pikagmada! Piwin!” see your friend! Your prey! [the kill of your hunt]” He said to him, “Your prey! What Ig awna git, “Piwin! Pariyeki kind of shaman is friends with a pahavwi ihamwi ke ininbe ku kamahad aka hiyegi pisenwa kuri pi person and then afterward greets aytasig aka kawokwine. Pannivwi!” him with a jaguar?! It is your doing!” Ig awna,”Pannivwi! Pase pisnewa He said, “It is your work! Because ihamwi. Yuma akiw.” you are a shaman! Nothing more!” Ig hiyamni. Ig ka kaytwa. Awaku He [Parup] observed this. He did huwit ta givitit. not reply. Because it struck his soul. Inyerwa! Inyerwa ig arehwane. . . . It was true. It was true that he had fooled around. . . . Ig awna, “Pi ka dahwa! Pi kadahan He [Puhiyemni] said, “You will not hiyeg kannivyevwi. Ke ariknebdi. last long! You have [spirit] people Keh iveyti.” working for you. Doing all kinds of things. Making medicines/ poisons.” Kadahan iveyti gidahan There are medicines that belong to ihamwigben. the shaman. Boh! Hene kuri ig tivik Well! So then he went out ikavaynihne. spreading the news of [Arukwa’s] death. Ig tahan avitit nor Ukup. He went way over to Ukup [island]. Ayteke Ukuptak hiyeg ikavaynih Then, from Ukup, the people arukwa. spread the news of Arukwa’s death. Hiyeg kukehe made. Igkis The people attacked Parupmin. hihimehbete Parupmin. They repeatedly shouted at him. Ka ba i’s biyuhgi, aka’ ah. They almost beat him up, with clubs. Igkis awna, “Ihamwi! Ihamwi! They said, “Shaman! Shaman! You are a bad shaman in this Piskata mbeyvye ihamwi amadga world! Even though at first we hawkri! Ine ku hiya pitatye pis thought you were a beautiful barewye hiyegad? Akumne. Bobo person. You smoked. You chanted pavan. Bawkata pi iwasemne songs. But really you were just patiwni. Ive tah ku pi umehe looking for your payment/reward. nuhiw. Piwin!” Look over there, you have killed our grandson. Your prey!” Ig humahgi ta waxrit.

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Ig awna, “Kurinewa pimine! Pivewkan pi arehwa gikak neg haritmin. Nikwe amawka pi akum. Kamax kawokwine udahan! Pase pivig! Pi kawahg pivig ta umahkis neg. Kamaxnig! Kamaxnig ku kiney usuh usakwa amadga nor tip. Amun nor nuvine. Nor tip ay barew amuni pawka nor tipe. Atere pis padakis.” [. . .] Igkis akumkis ig ihamwi. Akivara. Igkis kamaxwig. Hawkanewa igkis tivik. Igkis iwasa. Igkis ute kawokwine. Kawokwine . . . [kamiyad waduh?] Awaku ig kawine. Igkis amewa avit. Kenese igkis havisig. Igkis umehpig. Lawe igkis umehpg. Igkis bukihe gavita. Igkis bukihe gatewad. Kuri igkis ihuk gatewa. Ihukbete. Igkis ihukbete madikte inere kawokwine. Padekevopti. Atere igkis tivige ta git igi Parup. Igkis wagahkiswig. Igkis awna git, “Parup! Ive tah! Iwi pivig! Iwi pivig kakak pi umah hiyeg!” Eg yuma garaybusima nor kawokwine!

He [Puhiyemni] said, “Right now, it’s all up to you. You thought you would fool around with this one who is stretched out flat. So now you must smoke. Catch the jaguar for us! Because it is your pet! You sent your pet to kill him. Capture it! Capture it [and bring it] to where we are staying on that rock. At my house [on] that rock of a fair height, a little further off. Throw it over there.” [. . .] They made the shaman smoke [to make the jaguar go where he could be caught]. He was its chief. They captured it. Early in the morning, they left. They searched. They found the jaguar. The jaguar . . . [was slowly walking along?] . . . because he had been successful in his hunt. They sneaked up on it. From close by, they shot it. They killed it. When they killed it, they broke its bones. They cut off its big head. Then they chopped up the head. Chopping and chopping. They chopped the jaguar all up. They scattered it around. Then they left and went to Parup. They brought up [the remains of the jaguar]. They said to him, “Parup! Look over there! Take your pet! Your pet with which you kill people!” She, the jaguar had no teeth!

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The jaguar had no teeth! With [her gums only?] she killed people. The jaguar was very old. They brought her up to him. Then they said this to him, “Parup! You are not a good person. Look how you kill people! This person was healthy. He was just playing around with you. Then you killed him. You sent a jaguar to kill him. However, this was not good.” Kuri amekene Sansmin aka Then, our ancestor Sansmin and amekene Wasadmin. Igkis piyana our ancestor Wasadmin. Those two kiyavwiyegben nerras avutneni elders were skilful at handling or gidahan ihamwigben. opposing shamans. Nerras ka umah hiyeg akak Those [elders] did not kill people giwnkisma. with words. Amawka wis wagah gimin marihwa [They didn’t say,] “We should all wis kere gikak. Kawa! overpower him and fight with him.” No! Igkis aytakinewa givinwatakis igkis Right from their homes they are umah ihamwi tahan. able to kill a shaman way over yonder. Kema aka gannuksi! Aka gannuksi It is done with spirit. With the kiyavwiyegben. elders’ spirit knowledge. Nah ay kuri. Kiyavwiye Davi nah I, here, now. Senhor David, I also hawata, ihamwi givuten ay. Heme am skilful at handling shamans. ini ka kahayak. But it is not visible. Pis hiya nahay kuri. Nah givuten You see me here, now. I oppose ihamwi. shamans. Nah suguhne ihamwi. Paxnik I have opposed shamans. Four ihamwigben! shamans! Sema nah ka wew aka nihuma. But I do not operate with my flesh. Nah ka awna, “Uya ta wagah gimin I do not say, “Let’s go attack him iniyegbet gikak.” and argue with him.” Ada nah ta kereten gikak. Nah ka For me to go fight with them. I do not battle with the shaman kere aka ihamwigben. [physically]. Amekenegben gannuksi ay nuvituh. My ancestor’s spirit/spiritual powers are here, within me. Heneme nah ‘bom’ hiyegi. However, I am a “good” person. Maraybu nor kawokwine! Aka [durugbetenin?] eg umah hiyeg. Kiyaparivyo nor kawokwine. Igkis wagahkis ta git. Kuri igkis awna git hene, “Parup! Pis ka kabeynema hiyeg. Ive ku pis umahkisye hiyeg. Makniw neg hiyeg. Ig samenewanin pikak. Kuri pi umehpig. Pis kawahg kawokwine ta umehpen. Bawa ka kabay in.

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If a shaman arrives here. If he is a “good” shaman, I pay no attention to him [do nothing against him]. Heme ku ig umehpew. Ou ku But if he [tries to] kill us. Or [tries yisme. to kill you]. Ku ig danuh atan, kuwewanek ig If he comes here [then] later, if he [marahpen?]. humiliates me. I know how to deal with him. Nah hiyak gikak ig. Kuri nah keh iveyti ayhtohtihan. Then I make medicine from a distance. Kuri nah keh iveyti ayhtohti Then I make medicine from far inutitak. away, from above. After three days, he will already be Ada mpana hawkri apa ig kuwis dead. miya. Kuwis! Pahaye ig kakahgi. Baw! Done! Suddenly he will get sick. Thud! Yuma akiw. Pisenwa gikak. [He] is no more. I have finished him off. So that is how it was with Sansmin Embe hene ig amekene Sansmin and Parupmin. gikak ig Parupmin. Ig awna ta git pahepkatak, patiptak. He went and faced him [with his crime]. Ig awna git, “Parup! Ka He said to him, “Parup! Are you pisnewatma?” not [responsible for the deaths]?” Ig awna, “Kawa.” He said, “No.” “Kuri ka pisnewatma?” “It really wasn’t you?” “Kawa. “No.” “Me ba nah hikekwa nannuh! “Then I shall try to use my spirit knowing/knowledge!” “Aa! Giwn, “Puve pi keh. Puve pi “Oh!” He said, “Go ahead and try. keh. Ka nahnema. It was not me.” “Embe boh. Embe ka pisnema. Pase “Well then. So, it was not you. If we find the man, we will bury him usuh ute ig awayg usuh avuhe ta at Kwap!” Kwavit. Kuri ig tivik ta arimkat gannivwi. Then he went to work [his spiritual powers]. Ig kehni atere. He did it there. Ada mpana hawkri. Parup miya. After three days, Parup died. Tubawh! Makniw ig miya. Thud! While healthy, he died. A dead person. Then he [Parup] Miyavi. Kuri ig dagawne. became angry. Now he became angry then. Kuri dagawnemni kuri! Ku ihamwi ay danuh. Ku ig ‘bom’ ihamwi, nah ka aritnema giw.

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He made [caused] lightning! He, Parup, made lightning. He made rain! Wind! He thought he would finish off [destroy] this land, but Uhokri [God] did not give it to him. Uhokri [God] did not allow him. Pase ka ignema ku kehne waxri. Because he was not the one who made the land. Ig mpiyase nawiy Wakaygitak han. He crossed over in his ship, coming from Wakayri [mountain], in this direction. A ship. Onboard it. He, Parup! Nawiy. Amadga nor. Igi Parup! Ig mpiyase nawiyad. Ka nopsimahad He crossed over in a large ship. Such a huge ship! nawiyad! Dik! Aka hiyeg wavitye! Completely filled! With wavitye [malevolent creatures]! Igkis hiya humah wahamarit. They saw it reach the east [eastern horizon]. Made hiyeg hiya. Amekenegben. All the people saw it. Our Bakimayh. ancestors. The children. Wake ihamwi. Inyerwa ihamwi Ig Because if a shaman is a real detye ihamwi. Kuri lawe ig miya. shaman . . . a strong shaman, then Lawe kuri haritminew. when he dies . . . now then when he is laid flat . . . he causes strong winds. Ig keh kamayvwi. Ig keh mayg. Ig He causes wind. He makes keh digidgiye. lightning. Ig mpiyase ginawiya amadga He passes by in his ship through inin. . . . this [world]. . . . Igme Parup. Ignema pahavwi keh However Parup, he was the one ini hawkri. who caused this weather. All shamans die. Lots of shamans Made ihamwigben miya. Ka have died here. aynsima ihamwigeben miya ay. Optih. Wahamarit. Kwivit. All around here. On the Uaçá Parahmnaya. River. On the Curupí River. In Brazil. Heneme ig ka kannu mpiya ay. But they did not pass away like Ignewa pahavwi Parup. that. Parup was the only one. Nah ka hiyak ku pariye. Embe I do not know how it is. [However] hene in. it is so. Heneme kuri ig miyavi. But now he is dead. Ig kehne digidgiye! Ig Parup keh digidgiye. Ig keh muwok! Mayg! Igme givewkan ig pisenwa ini waxri sema Uhokri ka ik git. Uhokri ka isaksig.

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Wake ka heneme ig ayta kuwiskam, seye gitew. Kiyapayvwiye. Ey! Ig ka kibeynema ihamwi. Keh igkis umehpig. Keh kuri ig yuma. Gahempaknin pis hiya. Kiyuvuwanen gahempak. Kiyavwiy, inakni nah kinetihwa gamin awaku kiyavwiyegben keh inere. Igkis kaba igkis biptevgi. Kibeyne kiyavwiye Uhokri ka ik gitkis. Akak inere igkis umehpig. Aka gannuksi igkis umehpig. Ineki ig Parupmin umahkis ig Arukwamin aka kawokwine. [. . .] Heneme kadahan pahavwi ihamwi hawata sema ig ka makniw hiyeg. Ku pariye ig kadahan ada inin. Umahkisnig ninewa. Heme ig ayavaw aynesa. [. . .] Igme pahavwi ig humaw kabahte ke mekseh. Ig kannu piyihaki. Ig kannu makniwa hiyeg. Ig kannu makniw bakimnayh. Ig kannu makniw kiyavwiyegben. Kiyavunogben. Ku pariye kakahgavye. Ig kannu inuhe hiyeg gikahri Ig. Neg ku kavinine tah.

If it were not so, he would still be here with a white head. Very elderly. Oh! He was not a good shaman. It caused them to kill him. Now, it caused him to be no more. You can only see his picture!38 [laughter] Wearing a feather headdress in his picture. Sir, I am talking about this because the elders did this. They almost beat him up. Thankfully Senhor Uhokri [God] did not allow them to do that. That’s how they killed him. With their spiritual powers, they killed him. That is what happened, Parup killed Arukwa with a jaguar. [. . .] However, there is another shaman also, but he did not heal people. What he had, was for killing only. Although, he did help a little. [. . .] However the other shaman, he became almost like a doctor. He knew the arts of healing. He knew how to heal people. He knew how to heal children. He knew how to heal the men. The women. Whoever was ill. He knew how to lift out people’s illness. Him. He who lived over there.

In this story, the two shamans had battled over the use of power for wellness or death, and Parup, who had used dark sorcery to kill a man called Arukwa, had been killed. (This story refers to a time in the 1950s or 1960s, since Sansmin had been involved in helping to find the B-26 bomber in the late 1940s [see Introduction].) Many recounted that Parup

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had called up such a floodstorm during his own burial at Kwap that his canoe took him all the way from Kwap at the upper reaches of the Rio Urucauá, to Wakayri, the mountain that marks the lower end of the river. It is the relationality of the space that is important here: that while Kwap marks a space of the decisive encounter between the Palikur and invaders, it also marks a decisive encounter in recent memory between those who would use shamanic powers in the interests of healing, and those who wanted to work with dark sorcery. Whether or not Parup himself caused the storm is a less useful or important argument; what is important is that in living memory, the arts of dark sorcery had been driven out. Kwap is a space of encounter between the living and the dead. In a story about the old kiysepka ceremony—the dance of forgetting the dead, a year after their cremation in an urn—Kiyavwiye Uwet speaks of a widow lamenting the loss of her husband. She is taken to Inurik (the upper world) by the kakuw hawk. After a perilous journey through the Had or Kirikri (the jagged entrance to the upper world), the widow discovers her deceased husband is already with another woman. Upon her return, the widow angrily smashes her husband’s urn. Her entry to the world of the dead, in Inurik, is via Kwap. Kiyavwiye Ishawet39 had told the same story, and in his account, too, Kwap figured as a point of access to the community of the dead. Kiyavwiye Uwet’s version was told as part of a long conversation in 2008, when David spent a few days with him to record stories about Inurik and the stars: Kuri [amin] inere ku igkis kanum Kwap.40 Eg amakano [waxre] ta kwavit. Eg hiye paytwempu. Barewye paytwembu! Aytekenewa. Ariwntak inere. Ariwntak inereku ahin ku tivikwiye han arimkat gugihgi givin. Kuri kadahan pahat ahin han nevut. Ku pariye ig awna ta gut: “Kaba atak aviku inere ahin! Inere ahin [sandam] awna ta gut: “Inere gahin inere kawih pidahan ku pase pis miyovineku pis ayta atan. Wade ta arimkat kiyavwiye Uhokri.

Now [about] that [place] which they call Kwap. She, the [Palikur] widow, was taken to Kwap. She saw a realm. A beautiful realm! On this side. Near that. Near that path which went, in this direction, by her [deceased] husband’s house. Now there was [another] path, in this direction, up beyond. Which he [the guardian angel?] told her, “Do not go onto that path!” [Regarding] that path, [a guardian? A guardian angel?] spoke to her, “That path is for you to use when you have died. You come here. [It leads] straight to Senhor Uhokri.”

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-Kiyavwiye Uhokri givin. Aywe gimun! -Aywe gimun heneme ku pis kote miyote ka ik ada parak. -Pigihgi kuwis mpiye awke gimun kiyavwiye uhokri kuwis. Heneme pisme ka ik ada mpiya awke. Kote miyote. Ku kuwise pis miyovineku. Pis mpiya had nikwe pis aytwempe. Wade arikut nor. Mmahba? Pis danuh ta git uhokri!”

-Ayteke ariwntak uhokri nikwe. Kuri pis juhe nikwen. Pis danuh ta arimkat pigihgi givin. Atere pis danuh. Atere amaksemni.

“The Senhor Uhokri’s house. He dwells here!” “He dwells here, but if you have not yet died, you can not enter in.” “Your husband has already passed through to Senhor Uhokri’s dwelling. But you can not pass through here. [If you] are not dead. If you have already died. If you have passed through the Had [passageway between worlds with interlocking teeth] then, you can come. Straight into that . . . What is it called? . . . You arrive up to Uhokri.” “Afterward, being with Uhokri then. Now then, you return. You arrive up to your husband’s house. There, you arrive. That is the end.”

Kiyavwiye Uwet speaks of the path to Inurik, the place of the dead, as he concludes the story of the woman who had gone there with the Kakuw hawk to find her husband. However, she finds that the Kakuw had not taken her to Inurik, but to Kwap. Asked why it was to Kwap that she had been taken, he offered this response: David: Kiyavwiye mmahki ayhte Kwap? Pariye pivewkan? Mmahki? 41 Uwet: Nah iki inere hene. Ke ininbe. Pase pis miyarap. Pis miya. Pis miyavi. Estuwa adahan usuh miyavi minikwak. Ku pariye miyavi minikwak. Estuwa gidahankis miyavi. [Puwasa?] aranwap adukwenewa Kwap. Pivin aranwap adukwenewa Kwap. Made pimewkan aranwa. Made Kwap. Kuri nahawkri Buyomin awna ke inbe:

David: Sir, why way over at Kwap. What do you think? Why? Uwet: I put it like so. Like this. When you die. You die. You are dead. The stories about our dead, long ago. Those that died long ago. The stories about their dead. [Their spirits are seen?] always around Kwap. Their homes are always around Kwap. All their funeral things are around. All at Kwap. Now my grandfather Buyomin spoke, like this:

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I say, “Yes. It is so. He [the Kakuw hawk that takes the dead] takes you there. He does not take you up to Inurik [the upper world].” Kuri nuhawkri awna giwn, “Ba Now my grandfather said, “Do pis hiyak nor had ku pariye nah you know that Had [passageway kinetihwa amin. Nor ay amadga between the world of the living and inin!” the dead] that I was talking about? It is here [in this world]!” “Pariye?” “What?” “Amadgewa inin. Ineki ku lawe “It is on this [world]. That is why pis miya. Ku yuma pahina. Pis ka if you die. And if there is no path mpiya. Ku yuma. Pahaynema. Pis for you. You will not pass through. ka mpiyig. Ku pis kahina embe pis [There is] no [path]. Not a one. mpiya eg? [. . .] You will not pass through it. If you have a path, then you can pass through it [the Had].” [. . .] Nawane [hiyeg] awna, “Aa! Nah ka Another person might say [after a mpiyasaki awaku nahina pudukwad near-death experience], “Oh! I did not pass through because my path aviku nahinad. was full of large thorns.” Bawa kawa! Bawa nor had! Nor pis But no! But it was [the teeth of] ka mpiya nor. Awaku pahakti ini that Had! You cannot pass through that [Had] because it goes from hawkri! one end to the other, of this world! Embe ku pis hiyak pis kahina. So then, if you know your way, you Embe pis mpiye. Pis tivik. pass through. You journey on. Nah awna, “Ihi. Henewa in. Atere ig waxrep. Ig ka waxrep ta inurikut.”

* * * Kiyavwiye Ishawet tells another tale of Kwap: one that brings us back to the account with which this collection of Kwap stories began—the story of the anacondas living at or near Kwap. For Kiyavwiye Ishawet, however, the river at the place called Kwap is also the home of the Master of the Sawfish who had been closed in to the underworld by a shaman.42 So too had been the anaconda Kwahra, who had also been closed in to the underworld by a shaman.43 Closing off the irruptions of predation into the world was described by several as also the task of Kiyavwiye Jesus; Floriano once described Jesus as having done so with the use of huge metal grates like the ones used in urban settings to close off stormwater pipes. Even with all the closings of predator pathways that have happened in recent years, Kwap remains a place where humans encounter creatures

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that affirm the precariousness of life. Kiyavwiye Sarisri recounted a 1940s sighting of a Masitwak-like creature near Kwap—the predator in one of the major epics that houses the cycle of star stories44 (chapter 3). But the creature that most people associate with Kwap is the uruku, the werewolves that eat the dead. Urukus are reported to appear as a bright light, and Uwet tells of an encounter with one while he was hunting alligators. The man with whom he was hunting alligators, he said, turned into a giant wood stork [jabiru]. Then, while flying through the sky, he turned into two pulsating bright lights that twisted and turned up above Warumka [Tipoca] Island.45 * * * In the mound near the lemon tree, atop the hill at Kwap, was a small ceramic two-headed king vulture, which was one of the rare moments when a material item indexed a familiar story. Given the extent to which Kwap memorializes the ability to survive predations of all kinds, the discovery of a fragment was evocative. David asked Kiyavwiye Uwet to explain, and the epic that followed was the tale of the two-headed vulture that is familiar in Amerindian literature. In brief, a hunter kills a two-headed king vulture. The relatives of the dead king vulture take the hunter to the upper world where, he dons the cloak of the deceased king vulture and transforms into a two-headed king vulture. However, he has trouble convincing the two wives that he is their husband. He is set a number of tasks which are impossible for a human. With the upperworld helpers, such as the Mun (termites), the Uwiwi (a cicada-like wood beetle), the Karuw (a giant, red-glowing firefly), the Karew (a giant, blue forest dragonfly), and the Wagaygi (a blue-nosed lizard with white stripes), he is able to accomplish the epic tasks. David: Mmahki pisaya gitew?46 Uwet: Gihumwan henne, kiyavwiye. Neg igkis kanumgi: “Huwe” neg. Kiyavavye kanum: “Isuw-Gikivara” neg. Neg hawwata kewa nawwotunyebe kadahan . . . Nawwotunye kadahan “presidah” [presidente] embe henne neg. Neg hiyak gikakkis made ayge. Neg gikiravakis. Yuma akiw. Yuma

David: Why does he have two heads? Uwet: That is the way he was formed, Sir. They called him “King.” The old ones called him “The Ruler of the Vultures.” [Just] like other peoples [nations] have a “presidents.” So he was like that. He was the one who took care of all those [vultures] there. He was

The Story Trails of Kwap kuhivra kadahan pisaya gitew. Negnewa makawem kadahan pisaya gitew. Makawem ganig. Anigti neg. Anigti. Ig kadahan pisaya gitew. Ignesme ganigkis kadahan pahawowa gitew. Pis hiyak?

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their leader. No other bird has two heads, only the Makawem [King Vulture] has two heads. The King Vulture, [the] brother-inlaw. He was the brother-in-law. He had two heads. Those other brothers-in-law only had one head. You understand?

Finding tangible evidence that a story much like this was once told at Kwap helps to situate it as a place to learn how to survive the encounters of different worldmakings by forming alliances with helpful creatures around one, and by changing one’s body-consciousness: putting on the coat (the body form) of another creature in order to perceive and act in the world in the same manner that it would do. The story is widely told in the Amazon and is, quite literally, of vital importance. It sets out a conceptual approach to the navigation of a world made via simultaneous multiplicities: in contrast to a philosophy in which the world can be categorized into a single, universal nature of things, independent of the kinds of bodies we have with which to perceive it. The story is one to which we return in the epilogue. Where the clay Makawem at Kwap had led to Kiyavwiye Uwet’s carving the bird in wood and telling the story, it led to Kiyavwiye Ishawet’s singing of a Makawem song.47 He continued with a range of songs about the other birds, and the opposite of predation: generosity and respect. Nah pekne nor amin isuw seynevad. I will sing the [song] about the Pis hiyak? Pis ka hiyak? large, white vulture. You know it? You do not know it? Neg pes ayhte inuriktak. Isuw He comes out from way up in Makawem. Makawem igi. [. . .] Inurik [the upper world]. He, the Makawem, the king vulture. [. . .] Makawem! Kuri nah paknite. The Makawem [king vulture song]—now I will sing it. [sings] Isuw Makawem! Ig awna: “Nah The Makawem vulture! He says, ayhte maywak! Ayhte inurik! Ayteke “I am way up in Maywak [the nah muhuk. upper atmosphere]! Way up in Inurik [the upper world]! I have descended from there.” Givanbi sabugman. [The Makawem’s] drum song. Heneme amekenegben ka pakni. But our ancestors did not sing it. Nah pakni. I sing it.

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Amekenegben ka kannu pak inakni. Nah pak awaku narisun! Nah pak inakni sabugman. Ka ba ayteke yis utimni. Nah isun. Nah hiya inakni. Ig pak inakni. Ig tesne sabug. Ig awna nut: “Nuhiw! Ba ayta nutuh! Timahnaba ku nah pakni. Ku samah nah pak.” Ig kuhivra inurikyene. Ayhte Inurik ig. Ig pak inakni.

Our ancestors did not know how to sing this [song]. I sing it because I dreamt it! I sing this drum song. [laughter] You will not find it anywhere else. I had a dream. I saw this. [The Makawem] sang this. He hit the drum. [The Makawem] said to me, “Relative! Come to me! Listen to what I sing. How I sing.” He was an upper world bird. He was [from] way up in Inurik [the upper world]. He sang this [song].

Ishawet sings the Makawem song again. Then: Now when you leave. This [song] will go with you, far away [i.e., on video]! [. . .] Ka aynsima igkis batek! Nawatunye They like them a lot! The igkis batek akak inakni. Wotwiy foreigners, they like these things. barew aynesa. To us, they are only a little bit pretty. Kiyavwiye kuri nah wageswad Senhor, now I will be remembered, darihwad ke isuwbe. with a [like a?] vulture. [laughter] . . . [He sings again.] . . . Kuwis Kiyavwiye! Kuri pi tivikwiye It is finished, sir! Now you are aka nunetni teyhkete. going with my message, far away. Ine nah miyavi pis ayhte Even if I die, you will be over there, continually singing. . . . adukwenewa pekne. . . . Kiyavwiye! Ku wohska ay nah kuwis Sir! If there was manioc beer here, urukya. I would already be drunk. Bobohnewa uvanme. Rising and falling with the song. [laughter] . . . Nah ka urukyama. Ku nah . . . I am not drunk. If I was drunk, urukyabe nah woke nubiytene I would open my mouth [with [maygad?]. more force of breath?]. [coughs] Avyan ewk un ayta! . . . Grandmother! Bring water here! . . . Nah pakte nor kuyuw. Egwata I will sing the Kuyu. She is also a bird. kuhivra. Kuri ku pi tivik. In tivik pihapti powkate! [. . .]

The Story Trails of Kwap Kuyuwey, Kuyuwey, Darahbehyohna, Kuyuwey Darahbehyohpehna, Aawey. Pak kuyuwey! Darahbehyohnawa kuyuwey, Aa, Kuyuwey Marayhpiyo nawey, Nahri pak kuyuwey Yanigra kona, kuyuwey Oo! Kuyuwey! Arahpehyoniko nahwey pak kuyuwey Darahbehyohpehna kuyuwey, ka kuyuweyo. Kuyuwey, Kuyuwey, Darah, Kuyuwey Darahbehyohna, Kuyuwey Marayhpiyo nahah, Nahwey pak kuyuwey Marayhpiyo nahah, kuyuwey Darahbehyohpehna, Nahwey pak kuyuwey Darahbehyohna kuyuwey. Gawhmmmm. Inakni kuyuwepka.

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Kuyuwey, Kuyuwey, Bend down [Bow down?] Kuyuwey Bowing down, Calling, Sing Kuyuwey! I, myself, am bowing down, Kuyuwey, Oh, Kuyuwey I am humbled, I sing to the Kuyuwey Yanigra kona, kuyuwey Oh! Kuyuwey! Arahpehyoniko, I sing to the Kuyuwey! I am bowing down, Kuyuwey, such a Kuyuweyo. [first verse ends]; [second verse begins] Kuyuwey, Kuyuwey, Bow, Kuyuwey Bowing down, Kuyuwey I am humbled, I sing to the Kuyuwey I am humbled, Kuyuwey I am bowing down, I sing to the Kuyuwey. Bow down, Kuyuwey. Gawhmmm.

That is the Kuyuwepka [dance song]. Ada kuyuw. Egnes higemnes. For the Kuyuw [bird]. They drink. Kuyuw kabahte ke marasbe guhivak The kuyuw [bird] almost has the same appearance as the Maras [bird]. Kameki kuyuw eg. Seyo gutew ke [But] she is a kuyuw. Her head is nahbe. white, like mine. [laughter] That is it, sir. . . . Nor baki inere. Kiyavwiye. . . . Nor baki kuri kiyavwiye. Eg kuhivra That is it now, sir. She, the bird, amaramna. flies. Igkis kiyavwiyegben ku mmahpa That is what the elders would sing. igkis pekne Awaku kusuvwi inute kuwis. Because Kusuvwi is up already. Awaku kusuvwi inute igkis batek. Because Kusuvwi is up, they rejoice. Ka aynsima igkis batek awaku They are very happy because the uhawkri uniyehwe gukakis. season has arrived among them.

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Ku aysaw kusuvwi inut kuhivra batek ka aynsima! Ku samah wixwiy. Ku wis hiya kusuvwi. “Ive! Kusuvwi inut!” Made hiyeg! “Ka barew! Uya kannivwi! Uya tigah uwasarwiy!” Embe kuhivra novinawa. Aya ta git kusuvwi.Uhokri Egkis awna, “Kibeyne neg! Ku kuwis inute. Udahan ay inute.” Igkis batek ka aynsima! Madikte kuhivra batek! Made wokari batek! Madikte ariknebdi batek ukakwi! Awaku kusuvwi kuwis inute. Igkis bateke. Mmahba wixwiy? Usuh ay kuri. Kusuvwi kuwis inut. “Ey! Ba yi hiya ku ig kusuvwi kuwis inute?” Made kuhivra awna notra. Kibeyne. Bateka inakni. Kibeyne.

When Kusuvwi is up, the birds rejoice, so much! Just like us. When we see Kusuvwi. “Look! Kusuvwi is up! All the people [say], “So beautiful! Let us work! Let us clear our fields!” So then, the birds do the same. [They] asked God for Kusuvwi. They say, “It is good that he is already coming up. He is up there for us.” They rejoice, so much! All the birds rejoice! All the bacaba trees rejoice! All things rejoice with us! Because Kusuvwi is already up. They rejoice. Is it not like us? We are here, now. Kusuvwi is already up. “Hey! Do you see that he, Kusuvwi, is already up?” All the birds say this [too]. Good! It is rejoicing. Good!

The songs that Kiyavwiye Ishawet sang that day were much like the songs he had sung at Himeket, near Karumna, when we had walked there with him on a trek of several days. It was a rare treat to hear his joy in birds and trees, stars and fields. The conversation of music and laughter and his quips about traveling via video material and being remembered as a vulture reflected many years of friendship between himself and David. That friendship had begun one day in the town of Oiapoque when we saw him pass by our table at the local por quilo, and David had guessed he had arrived that morning to collect his pension and was probably hungry. Over lunch, many conversations began which continued over the years. In the course of writing this chapter, the news reached us that Kiyavwiye Ishawet, too, had passed on and had been settled in the hill at Kwap, on the path once again to Inurik. * * * From story trails around anacondas and children swimming in the river, to trails of the war and the possibilities for imagining the experience of

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another’s body, or experiencing place as transformative of how you see and think, the archive of Kwap’s narratives and anecdotes opens into the cosmos. As stories that follow the trails of the ancestors through a curious point of land that has marked battles over many different encounters, they offer much more than an understanding of what it might mean to know what happened here, a long time ago, and speak to ongoing struggles with the real and the rational; with what it means to be a public both alongside and entangled with the apparently rational knowledge of “the Moderns.” Kwap, as a place, speaks for the encounter of the living and the dead; the traumatic encounter of historical worlds, and the ongoing challenge of scientific realism to the kinds of stories spoken around it that disqualify their presence in regimes of truth. Ironic that our research project stumbled into the place of encounter that is Kwap in order to study material heritage but found itself drawn into a process of thought that decomposes its own assumptions about space, time, and personhood. The simultaneous process is that of recomposition: a recomposing of its perspectives. Into whose publics ought patrimony to be patriated? is the question that is most often asked in struggles over archaeology. Important as it is, it is also the question from which we need to step back in order to be able to think outside the spaces of property, and ownership, as given in the translatory apparatus of the knowledge economy. It slips too quickly into a space of mutual denunciation about reality and belief. The problem is that the question of ownership has already surrendered to a translation (in the sense of the word “translation” that is offered in chapter 5: the translation to a different polity) and having done so, it is unable to change the terms of the discussion. This does not suggest that there is no discussion to be had about rights to archaeological provenance or sites; to do so would be to surrender to injustice without changing the debate—and thus hand victory to those who claim universalist truths to be ascendant. The challenge is broader, and more subtle: to work with the technical practices of translating materials into the world of archaeological provenance. The shift is at once a move from an analytical to a speculative anthropology which countenances an unimagined possibility: that perhaps an activist archaeology is not about the saving of provenienced heritage but about the possibilities for dialogues about the reconstitution of worlds (to use the phrase of Marisol de la Cadena48): that is, to work in ways that might bring into presence different things and relations altogether. In other words, what is at issue is the possibility of a wider set of techniques for knowing the past. The memorialization at Kwap is not only about the dead—and their tracks here through so many encounters with different worlds—but about their relationalities, perspectives, reciprocities, and predations, and

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about dread, threat, skill, and at times exultant relationships with stars as with birds and fields. To know the day, and know the world, is to hold all of these together, amid the wreckage of villages and the memory of wits and determination in the face of decimation. Having heard these stories, the questions might begin to change for any future archaeological project in the area. Among these: What might it mean to try to reconstruct the material remains of past activity with reference to hiyak hawkri ways of knowing? In a place like Kwap, the density of story trails suggests that it is possible to work generatively with the partial connections between excavating (with reference to technologies like cartography), and trailreading (with reference to the movements and activities of bodies). That generativity is possible if researchers are willing to recognize space and time and personhood not as givens, but as received through mediations of histories, and the multiple interconnected technologies that render the world an empty space populated by subjects and objects. Having worked through these stories, it becomes possible to name as travesty the encounter with a rationality that renders knowledge practices like hiyak hawkri incomprehensible, or as a quaint expression of animist thought. For Harry Garuba, animism as a concept arises alongside the colonial project and occupies the space of all that is left over once you have taken the science away.49 The insight that knowledge and animism are like yin and yang in the history of modernist thought demands that we ask this: instead of consigning the Kwap stories a provenience that archives them as culture alongside the truth of the material record (“nature”), could we allow their provocations to gather us—archaeologists, storytellers, anthropologists—around different technologies for assembling the world? The stories of Kwap evidence the shifting terrain of ideas in a place that testifies to terrifying encounters of many kinds. From wanting a simple site at which to explore the possibilities for matching stories of a war to the material record in the ground, Kwap now appears to us as a place which, like the anaconda for which it is named, has absorbed many bodies, with their many consciousnesses to itself. Dread; war; death; sorcery; predation here meet heroism; survival; wits; intelligence; domesticity; and exultation. It is a place where entering into the imaginaries of predators (Kwap, the uruku, the Makawem vultures) and animal partners makes it possible for song, story, and laughter to have survived. Their stories are premised on the questions, How does the other see? How do I imagine the world in the view of the other? Who am I to the other? What does the other need to do in order to survive? All of these are questions that arise from the experience of surviving an ecology of predation; one that includes its necessary opposite, which encompasses raucous joy in the recognition of cosmic generosity, and a daily quiet

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pleasure in the intelligence that can work out strategies for survival in a predatory world. For Peter Sloterdijk, the history of Modernism is of the making and unmaking of relational spaces. Sloterdijk’s notion of the consubjective (chapter 4) is one in which collective spheres of shared animation emerge. Such spheres, as fragile as bubbles, can be spaces for shared life and breath. They can be divided, torn open, joined, and sometimes re-formed.50 The idea speaks to the ongoing making and unmaking of enlivened spaces, in which worlds, and natures, are constituted in a relational space. The idea of consubjectivity offers a way of thinking about the ways in which the Kwap stories speak of a history of unmakings of relationalities.51 Yet at the same time, the stories at Kwap testify to the struggle to hold on to a relational worldmakery. While grappling with the non-relational cosmos of modernism, the stories speak simultaneously to relationships with bird, animal, and plant allies in the context of ongoing strategies for avoiding predation, albeit with bodies that are changing in a new ecology and economy of life and work, and which perceive the world differently. In that approach “the real” emerges as a property of the interactions in a terrain: relationships of humans and nonhumans; species, machines, spirits, people, and substances. It is not that the world is composed of “I Am” beings—whether humans or animals—but that the real emerges as a consubjectivity that attends to presence, and seeks to understand the arts of becoming aware of presences, and bringing their presence into consciousness. Yet, like Sloterdijk’s concept of bubbles—the interanimations of collective life—that understanding of the world is itself transforming, and historically contingent. The choice given to protagonists, in so many stories, is for a protagonist to “hiyapni hene”—to think about what things are to others, and to consider the range of interactive possibilities in any situation before acting, mindful of the ever-present prospect of predation and the importance of maintaining reciprocities. In it, creatures and things are not defined by their “Being” but by their interactivities; their propensities; the kinds of mutual “presence-to” that they generate together. This chapter and the previous one make a case that thinking like a tracker is a practice that enables one to understand the interactions that animate the world, and might be useful for public archaeology. At the same time, it is fitting to note that tracking is also one of the arts of predation. “Anthropologists are like ihamwi (shamans),” Kiyavwiye Uwet told me early in the project, chuckling with pleasure at my instant intrigue and simultaneous discomfit. As with so many of his other comments, it was a triple-decker: in it he read and critiqued my early-project fascination

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with the spirit world; he commented on anthropology as an activity that sought to inhabit a different perspective, and he cautioned that there was an edge in ethnographic story collecting that, like shamanism, like tracking, and like colonial sciences that have gone before it, could become predatory. Can one read the tracks of the ancestors without becoming their predators?

Epi l o g u e

Beyond Matter Set in Space and Time Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology

“Archaeology is about pinning down objects in space and time in order to say something about a culture in a territory and at a time,” declared an archaeologist at a seminar I attended. Though unconnected with this project, his words reflect an approach to archaeology that privileges laboratory work, with little reflection on either the nouns in the statement: archaeology, objects, space, time, culture, territory, history; or the verbs “to pin down”; “to say.” That the field experience at Kwap allowed for the possibility that a retranslation of the word “archaeology”could emerge—“reading the tracks of the ancestors” instead of “things in the ground”—reflects the richness of the conversations between the intensely engaged Eduardo Góes Neves and his team, and the many from Arukwa who were willing to be trained in excavation methods at Kwap. It also reflects the vital presence of David Green who made it possible for the field research and associated conversations to proceed not only in Portuguese but in Palikur. Field experience—the activity of digging; the experience of relationships on site; the histories of words; the justifiability of archaeological excavations; the detective work required for piecing together the clues; the caveats regarding the limitations of technologies: such discussions are for my colleague cited above, off-stage—though they are center-stage for many critical archaeologists in Latin America1 and South Africa2 who have led research on these questions. The retranslation in the course of

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the participatory excavation work reflects, to an extent, the recognition in field archaeology of the more familiar activity of tracking, in Arukwa. Yet even though field science and laboratory sciences are quite different, they both depend on trails that can be followed through the world. Consider the journey of samples and artefacts: in the activity of excavation, every item (or collection) is bagged and tagged with a provenience number. In the moment it is put into the plastic bag’s bubble, it has become something new because it has entered the conscious world of another. Via its provenience number, it has become an object that has been gridded in the x, y, and z axes of Cartesian space; archived in a precise layer of the earth. In due course, perhaps carbon dating, or another dating technology, laboratory technicians will add the fourth dimension of time to its coordinates, in order to try to locate it precisely in chronological time. The plastic bag, and eventually the trunks full of plastic bags, seal them off from other kinds of relationships. In a way, they become zombie objects, stripped of all relationships; ghosts of a past that will travel in the hope of reconnection with bodies from times past, in the future. It was a bitterly ironic moment when we learned that the box of carefully provenienced ceramic and charcoal samples that travelled to the United States for laboratory tests and carbon dates was destroyed, at the border, by a zealous US Customs official who confused “archaeological samples” with “agricultural samples”, with the result that they were duly incinerated; cremated before analysis might have rejoined them with the ancestors. While our colleagues in Macapá, thankfully, had a backup set of samples to send (along with a formal complaint to US Customs), the moment spoke volumes of the fragility of our nascent dialogues to the retranslations and accidental predations of the global political economy. The Customs official who (for reasons that perhaps included poor eyesight, fear, and a dollop of dutiful zealousness) confused “agricultural” and “archaeological” had made of our precious samples a small pile of ash because his or her perceptual range was limited by the disinterested absence that becomes embodied in the ungrounded, depersonalized figure of the bureaucrat making a decision about a box of things to which she or he imagines no relation. Provenance—the journey of an artefact into the material record, here crashed into provenience, the record of the location in space and time when it was unearthed. It was a poignant encounter with the idea that information is always on a trail, and always subject to predation, accidental or otherwise. The partial connection between tracking and field research is an important one. The beginnings of a fragile dialogue between archaeological researchers and Arukwa’s hunters, farmers, fishers, schoolteachers, and new class of bureaucrats emerges in the very familiar activity of piecing together a picture from the smallest of traces evident in a place. There

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was also a familiarity in understanding the risks and limitations of interpreting trails. In the moment of recognizing this connection, partial as it is, is the possibility of moving away from the inevitabilities that are built in to the categories of “indigenous knowledge” and “science,” which research must either show them as “Other,” or match them as “Same.” The challenge, as Helen Verran so aptly puts it, is to “work difference together.”3 The previous chapters have sought to work the sorts of differences whose nuances require a first language to be articulated, and which were invested in the phrase “reading the tracks of the ancestors.” Along the way, the material presented here has encompassed a rethinking of many key words. The idea of “the public” in public archaeology is questioned: by whom is it gathered and named, and for what purpose does it take a name, and what does “representation” mean in that political assembly? The idea of Being has been destabilized, as the material presented brings into view instead a set of conceptual processes in which creatures and things take form in interactive presence and mutual animation. The ordering and categorizing technologies of history (chronology, biography) and geography (cartography) have emerged as partial and incomplete assemblages. The worlding of the cosmos as matter set in space and time, in the disciplines of astronomy and geometry, has been argued here (chapters 3 and 4) to be but one way of thinking about space. Interacting, interanimating forms make the world a relational cosmos, not a planebased one that sets apart objects from subjects. In each of these themes it is not the case that there is a singular “Western” perspective that can be set in opposition to “an Amerindian” one, for minor geometries, the arts of Escher, speculative philosophy, and the post-humanities provide many spaces of tentative connection, understanding, and insight. The idea of knowledge translation in the Palikur language (chapter 5) as to see from a different body rather than from a different polity (of language and territory), is vitally important: returning us to the centrality of tracking and tracing tiny clues in the everyday,4 using sensory capacities and an intuitive assessment of their combinations in ways that recognize that perception and interpretation are both effects of bodies with particular kinds of consciousnesses and perceptual skills that have grown and been nurtured via different ecologies of practice. The writing of this book began with the challenge that neither the projects of Othering nor Saming are useful for anthropology, and with the uncomfortable realization that people in Arukwa who were not willing to believe in the innocent goodwill that I myself believed in in bearing the message of a postcolonial anthropology. Over many years of writing and wrestling, the preceding chapters have surfaced what Stengers would call an ecology of knowledge practices that

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establishes the grounds for a way of knowing the world that stands outside of the truth regime established in the Moderns’ constitution: that of matter set in space and time. At the end of all of that research, the proposal is a simple one. Hiyak hawkri—knowing the day and knowing the world—is a theory of presence in which consubjectivity, interactivity, and interanimation of creatures, things, and people comprise the activity of worldmaking. Knowing the many different kinds of worldmakings (or worldmakeries) going on around you, enables you to survive predation; participating in the generosity of allies allows you to thrive. The previous chapter made a case for archaeologists to explore the provenance of provenience, and consider alternatives. Is it possible to think with the conceptual tools of perspectivism? By way of closing, I want to return to the Makawem story with the intention of exploring the relevance of it to a project like ours: an anthropological and archaeological project. * * * The story of the Makawem, the two-headed king vulture encountered in the previous chapter, offers several insights about what it is to travel, and to learn, and to survive: activities familiar to archaeologists and anthropologists. Neg minikwak amekene. Ig tivikte kaniknes . . . masayakis ta tiwrikut. Kuri ig danuh atereni. Ig ute ka aynsima makawem te kanikne aviku warik. Igkis tivik kanikne tiwrikut nikweni. Ig ute makawem ka aynsima makawem kanikne. Kuri ig hiye pahavwi pisaya gitew. Ig awna. Giwn:- Nah ta haviste nuvigvi. Pewru akevga. [. . .] Ig danuh atere. Tah!!! Ig haviswig akak yakot akak imedrit. Ig kah. Seeee!!! Ig haviswig Dawh!!! Gadukmadgat! Wiwh!!! Bawh!!! Tuguhe waykwite.

Long ago, one of our ancestors, he went hunting. They were roasting fish upstream. When he arrived there, he found lots of Makawem [vultures] fishing in the river. So they had gone fishing upstream. He found lots of Makawem fishing. Now he saw one with two heads. He said, “I will shoot [him] for my [pet’s food; medicine]. To make my dog a good hunter.” [. . .] He arrived there. Thunk! He shot [the Makawem] with a bow and arrow. He pulled back [the bow string]. Whish! He shot him. Thunk! [Right] into his chest! Crash! Thud! He fell to the ground.

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After he had fallen to the ground, he pulled out the machete. He took his machete to cut off the beak. Pase [ku aysaw] ig danuh atere When he [was on his way] there adahan ig bukihpiye akig nikweni to cut off the beak, then he saw all henewa ig hiya akebyuvwi madikte [the Makawem’s] relatives take off pakiswe ta inute. to [the sky or world] above. Kuri ig danuh atere adahan Now he arrived there to retrieve. ig akidisepten . . . adahan ig To cut off the beak then. Now the bukihpiye akig nikweni. Kuri relatives all landed together on the akebyuvwi batebdi ta waykwit ground. They walked toward him. nikwen. Igkis wew gimin. Danuh [When they] arrived there, [one atere awna git henne, ig awna: of them] said, “My grandson, why “Nuhiwhi, mmahki arewhe git, no’, were you mean to our brotherwanigku?” in-law?” Ig awna: “Mmahpe yanig neg?” He said, “Is he your brother-inlaw?” Giwn: “Waniguh neg. Usamu He said, “He is our brother-in-law. gugihgi. Eg kigihgunye neg. Our little sister is his wife. She married him. Why did you kill him Mmahkap pis umehpig henne?” like that?” Giwn: “Kawa nah aharitne He spoke, “No, I was just wanting nuvewka nah aritne noti . . . , adah to find that . . . medicine for dogs aminne adah pewru akevga.” [to make them hunt better].” Igkis awna: “Henneme kuri usuh ka They said, “Now we are not going ikispi ay. Amawka pis tivik uhapti, to leave you here! You must go with us and take the place of our giwenyanpiye waniguh.” brother-in-law!” Ig awna: “Ihi. Ik adah nah tivik He said, “Yes. I am able to go with yihapti.” you.” Tuguhe waykwite nikweni. Kuri ig taris. Ig iwe gikaswaga adah ig bukihne akig.

To work playfully with the story thus far, the visitor is one who wants an artefact that will enable his dog to follow a trail. But the locals—the king vultures who are from the world of the dead—are none too happy that one of their brothers with two heads was killed for his beak. The nolonger innocent traveller has no choice but to follow the prey species and become, apparently, one of them, by putting on the cloak (the kin) of the dead vulture. The participant observer goes through many tests to prove he is truly one of the vultures, and ought not to be killed. From this point on, the survival of the collector of beaks turns on the art of performing and imagining himself into the body of the vulture, since two other vultures—now his wives—are suspicious of him. The story continues:

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“Ah,” eg awna: “Ka ignema.

“Oh!” She said, “It is not him!”

Thus begins the first of a series of enormous tasks that he has to undertake, in order to prove himself. Now she considered this . . . his mother-in-law. The girl’s mother. She said to her [daughter]. She said this, “If you [believe] that he is another [person] and not your husband. Then maybe you can discover that he is not [your husband]. Let us give him the tasks that your husband did here. If you see that he can not do them, then you know he is not your husband. If he can do the tasks, then you will know he is your husband.” Egkis hiyapni henne nikwe, egkis [The wives] considered this, awna ta git. Eg awna ta git gugihgi, then they talked to him. She spoke git gig. Gig ayta awna ta gut her husband regarding her father. gikamkayk. Awna gut: “Nah mwaka The father had come to speak adahan pis iwasa ndahan . . . , with his child. He said to her, “I would like you to do something pisamwi kehkisne giwewten pit. for me . . . your brother has asked (Kiyaptunka umuh kanumka you to make him a traveling “uwewten.”) instrument.” (In the ancients’ language, a canoe was called a “traveling instrument.”5) Danuh atere nikwe iwasa ah ka So then he arrived there and saw aynsimahad ah. Ahbonavad umuh. lots of tree trunks. For making Ka aynsima umuhad. Kote kehka broad canoes. Lots of canoes. nopsanyu ahadmin. Huge tree trunks that were not finished. Danuh atere adahan kahadbekama He arrived there so that he could takuwanek ig atak iwase umuh. Avit see to finishing the canoes, the puwipka adahan ig pisenwa gukak, next day. Before noon, he was madikte yayge made. Hawkanawa supposed to be done with [the ig danuh atere. canoes]. [With the hulls] dug out and stretched wide. Early in the morning he arrived there. Kuri eg hiyapni nikweni . . . Gumatru. Gunag tino gunag. Awna ta gut gise. Awna gut henne: “Ku pis hiya ku nawenetke ka ignewa pigihgi. Nawene pis hiyavgi ka ignema. Uya kehkis git annivwit ku pariye pigihgi keh ay. Ku pis hiya ig ka hiya akehka neku embe pis hiyak ku ig ka pigihgima. Ku pis hiya ig keh embe pis hiyak ku ig pigihgi.

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Now when he arrived there then, his wife took him there. She said, “Here is the work for tomorrow, you make my little brother’s canoe, tomorrow.” So he said, “Okay.” Early in the morning, he left. He arrived there. [He said to himself,] “How will you manage to make all these [canoes.] You cannot manage. One person cannot make even one canoe [this size]. How will you do it?” Ig hiyapni nikwe ig danuh He considered this. He arrived atere nikwe. Ig danuh atere. Ig there then. He arrived there. He batahkiswe. Ig batahkiswe ig sat down sadly pondering. He barukiswe, barukih he ig tih. pondered until he cried. Now when he was crying, people Ku aysaw ig tihene nikweni hiyeg appeared before him. The people pes git. Hiyeg awna git: “Nuhiwhi, said, “My grandson, are you here?” mmah aynabap?” He said, “Yes.” Giwn: “Ihi.” “Piswa ba pibetki umah makawem “Was it not your idea [desire] to kill your brother-in-law the ganig! Pit iveg ku kiney pis kuri. Kuri pis axwika kuri! Mmahka pis Makawem? Look where you are umahgi?” now. Now you will be eaten. Why did you kill him?” Ig awna: “Ka nuhawkanavrikma. He said, “It was not my fault. I Nuvewkan nah han akiw nah thought I was doing something kehne, nuvewka nah aharitne [right]. I believed I was getting nuvig, givey adah gakig, ini keh nah medicine [treatment] for my dog, umehpig.” that is why I killed him.” Ig awna: “Kuri pis axwika. He said, “Now you will be eaten. Iveg arimkat kamuw me puwip Look the sun is up, near high paw. Pakeku akak puwipkaneku noon. At noon your wife will come and bring manioc beer here. And pihayo danuh atan ewkno wohska you have not yet finished all your atan. Pisme pi’ kote pisenwava work.” pannivwi.” Kuri nikwe ig hiyapni henne... Now then they decided what to do. Ig awna, giwn, hiyeg awna ta git: The people said to him, “We will “Usuh amnihpite.” help you.” Bawkata neras hiyeg ku pariye ayge Actually the people who were there became his partners, to work for bawkata givevwimni, no’ gihiyega ignes hiyeg. Igkis kannivwiye gikak. him. They worked with him.

Kuri law [ku aysaw] ig tivik danuh atere nikwen, gihayo ta waxwevgi atereni awna: “Noba’ annivwit adahan takuwanek pis kehne nusamwi gihmun, takuwanek.” Nikwe ig awna: “Ka sam.” Takuwa pasa hiyavawkanek ig tivik. Danuh atere. “Kitki pis hiya asamanak inin ka aynsimahad. Pis ka hiya asamanak. Pahavwi ka hiyeg ka keh umuh pahamku umuh. Mmahpa akehka pit?”

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Kuri, ku aysaw ig danuh atere nikwe igkis awna ta git: “Asa higihwa aytaki ayinesa.” Bawa ignes hiyeg munyene hiyeg. (Pis hiyak mun ku pariye ka nopsinima gavinad ariku, amin ah, abetki keh ariku payt, mun?) Embe danuh atere nikweni. Igkis danuh atere nikweni ig higihwe ayteke, nop munviyene kannivwi kibenten. Ine kuri lawe ig tivik nikweni. Hiyeg munviyene danuh atere nikweni igkis kannivwi ayge. Igkis kannivwi ayge nikwen pase danuh, mpiye neve [9h] kwis danuhe arimkat me puwipkamet igkis pisenwa akak madikte. Igkis yayge made umuh. Igkis wanakavuse made usekwe pahamku kote wanaki. Kuri ig awna ta git: “Hiyawa pis wanakis nor umuh. Pis wanakis nog umuhneku . . . Wanakinaba pase pihayo nomnik eg. Ku pis hiya eg danuh atan nikwe. Eg ayta ewk wohskaneku pis higa pahamku tumowrinek, pis higap makepte. Kuri eg ewk avemku nikweni pis higa abusku pis darih abusku udahan ay adah usuh higa. Usuh me tivik.” “Ye!” Igkis tivik nikwe. Ku aysaw igkis tivik han nikweni gihayo pes. Gihayo danuh atere ig ay wanakisane umuh akak akuywa. Wanakisane umuh. Gihayo awna: “Mmah pis kwis pisenwe?” Giwn: “Nah kwis pisenwe nannivwi.”

Now, when he arrived, they said to him, “Just stand back a little bit.” But they were termite6 people. (You know the little termites that build their nests up in the trees and in houses?) So they arrived there. When they had arrived, he stood back a bit. Those termites worked quickly. So when he left then. The Termite People arrived there and began to work there. They [started] working there just past 9 a.m., by around noon they had finished everything. They had finished hollowing out all the canoes. They tied them all up [at the port]. There was one canoe which was not yet tied up. Now he said to him, “It is better for you to tie up this canoe. You should tie up this canoe . . . tie it up quickly, because your wife is approaching! When you see she has arrived then. She will bring manioc beer. You should drink one gourd bowl full. You should drink until it is dry. Now when she brings the second bowl, you [only] drink half of it. Pour out half of it, for us to drink. We are getting ready to leave.” “Good bye!” They left then. When [the termites] left, then his wife appeared. [When] his wife arrived there, he was tying up the canoe with akuywa vine. Tying up the canoe. His wife said, “Are you finished already?” He said, “I have already finished my work.”

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“Are you thirsty for water?” “I am very thirsty!” “Oh really!” “Yes.” “Thank you.” Now he arrived there then. He had finished his work, so then he sat down. He said, “I will rest a little bit.” He sat down there. Plop! He rested a while. Later he [stood up]. His wife gave him manioc beer. He drank [it]. He drank one [bowl] until it was dry, because he was very thirsty for water. He said, “I am thirsty. I am very thirsty!” Kuri eg ike pahamku akiw nikweni Now she gave one more [bowl] to ta git akiwa. Ig hige pabuskak him. He drank half of it then. He nikweni, ikise abusku ayge. left half of it [on the side] there. Now he said to his wife, “Leave Kuri ig awna ta gut gihayo: that gourd bowl sitting there.” “Batahkis nor tumowri ayge.” Hennewa pitatye ku pariye gugihgi He acted just like the first one, pitatye ku pariye miyatine henne ig the first husband, the one who keh ininbe. Lawe [ku aysaw] ig kwis had been murdered. When he had pisenwe gihigvan usekwe abusku finished his drinking, there was tumowri ig ikise ayge, gidah negas half a bowl left. He put it there, gihiyegavu ku pariye kannivwiyevwi for his companions who worked, igkisme higa. for them to drink. “Boh.” Gihayo tivik. “Good!” His wife left. Gihayo awna: “Nah me tivik.” His wife said, “I am leaving now.” Ig awna: “Pigakwa nah butte.” He said, “I will come later [behind].” Pase eg tivik han nikweni When she left this way, then his gihiyegavu pes. helpers came out. When they arrived there, he gave Danuh atere ig ike gitkis igkis [manioc beer] to them. They each higa nikwe pahabyut, pahabyut. drank one mouth full. Now they Kuri igkis awna: “Usuh me tivik.” said, “We are going to leave!” Igkis tivik. Ig pese butte. They left. He left behind [his wife].

“Ba pis arabyu un?” “Ka kabay nah arabyu un!” “Mmah henne.” “Ya.” “Kibeyne.” Kuri ig danuh atere nikweni... Pisenwa gawankasni nikweni kuri ig bate. Ig awna: “Nah mayakte aynesa.” Batahkiswe. Barah! Ayge. Ig mayekne aynesa. Kuri ig tabir. Gihayo ikevgi akak wohska nikwe ig hige. Hige pahamku makepte. Awaku ig arabyuvye un. Giwn: “Nah arabyu. Nah aynsima arabyu.

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The termites make the canoes for him, much to the surprise of the family. His wife remains suspicious, however, and another test is set for him: to cut down a huge swathe of trees for a manioc field. When he saw them: [He said to himself,] “How are you going to cut all this down? The trees were huge! When will you ever be done with this field?” The size of the field was . . . from here to Wakayri Mountain. A huge sized field. “In order for you to finish . . . early in the morning you [start] chopping and before noon, you finish with it? You can not manage [all] the chopping!” Danuh atere akiw, kawnata. Ig He arrived there again. [He was ihuknen [ig] mabi . . . ig tihep. Ig not managing] again. He chopped batahkiswe. Ig awna: “Kurikata nah a little. He was exhausted. He pisenwa nuhawkan ay. cried. He sat down. He said, “Soon my days here will be over!” Embe, lawe ku ig awnepiye ke But while he was talking like this, ininbe hiyeg danuh git atere. a person approached him there. Hiyeg danuh atere awna git: The person arrived there and said “Nuhiwhi, ba pis ay?” to him, “My grandson, are you Giwn: “Ihi, ay nah.” here?” “Pariye pikehni pis umah no He said, “Yes. I am here.” Makawem ganing?” Kurikata “What have you done? You have killed your [brother-in-law] the pis axwika kuri! Mmah pis atak Makawem! Soon you will be eaten umahgi? Kuri pis axwika kuri! now. Why did you go and kill him? Now you will be eaten!” Kuri ig tivik. Ig batankiswa aygen, Now he left. He was sitting there. hiyeg danuh git. Bawkata nerras People approached him. But those awaygemni ku pariye danuh git young men who approached him atere, bawkata nerras pitatye there, were the first one [the ku pariye makawem ig umehe, vultures he met] after he killed gihiyegavu ignes awaykemni danuh the Makawem. The young male atere . . . iwasavri atere. companions of the Makawem arrived there and looked at him there. Igkis danuh atere igkis awna git ke They arrived there. They spoke to inaknibe. Ig awna git: “Mmahka him like this. He said to him, “Mmah avuka pit? Kanopsimahad ahadmin. Kitki pis pisenwa akak no was? Was avugbad aytakin . . . Tah! . . . arimkat Wakayri. Was avugbanad. Adahan pis pisenwa . . . hawkanawa pis ihuk, avit puwipka pis pisenwa aka inere? Pis ka hiya ahuka!”

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“Why did you kill your brotherin-law, the Makawem? You will be eaten now!” Aynewa awaykemni awna ta git: A few minutes later, the young “Usuh amnihpite. Ka mwaka men said to him, “We will help avis usuh amnihpi. Higihwa you. Do not be afraid. We will aytekene. Usuh ihukemni pidahan rescue you. Stand back over here! We will quickly chop [down the kibentenwa. Su tivik akak inin akati.” trees] for you. Go with this rope.” [Ignes kadahan pahat akati. They had a rope. A large and long rope. For him to run with [and Kanopsima akatad ayabuwad.] Adahan ig sigis aka han. “Kitki encircle the demarcated area]. pivewkan sigis adah pis manuk inin “How do you think [one person] han? Ka ik adahan pis patiptak can run, in order to surround all akak inin akati.” this [forest area]? It is not possible for you to meet up with [the other end of] this rope!”7 Kuri ig hiyapni hene, ig awahkise Now he [one of the Makawem] pahavwi gaytakis. “Su atak ewk . . . observed the situation. He sent Sigis udahan akak inin akati one of his companions. kibentenwa, kahadbe wixwiy ihuke “Go and bring it back. Quickly! nop was kibentenwa!” Run for us with the rope, so that we can cut down the field quickly.” “Ye!” Igs tivik. “Yes!” He left. Kibentenwa igkis keh han. Aynewa Quickly, they went around this igkis danuh akiw. Akak ini akati way. Immediately they returned. With this rope they arrived there. igkis danuh atere. Kamax pawtak han. Aytak akigsatak pahavwi . . . They held on together. One person Dara! Pahavwi kamax aytaki. at the beginning point [of the rope]. Pull! One person grabbed the other end. Kuri [ig] awna ta git amekene. Now he said to our ancestor. Ig awna:”Higihwanaba ayteke! He said, “Stand back from here! Higihwanaba aytaki kibentenwa. Quickly, stand back from here! Iwawhaw.” Pasebe ig higihwa igkiste Hurry.” When he had stepped kahbuke ini akati. Igkis kahbuke back, they pulled tight the rope. akati nikwe. Ah hah pawenkeke They tightened the rope then. The ah amadga was. Igkis kahbuka, trees fell one after the other in the kahbuka, kahbuka was. Akati ihuk field. They cleared and cleared the ah, juktah ta danuhe arit nikwe. field. The cord cut down the trees up to the point [where they were standing]. pis umah makawem ganig? Kurikata pis axwika kuri!

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Danuh atere nikwe . . . Dara! . . . Patiptak atere, yuma akiw. Was madavwi. Bawkata nerras awaykemni, igkis kanum giw Wagayriyene hiyeg, ku pariye guguh ah atawna ayte inut. Nawene pis hiya ah huwewatip. Ah gatawni tuguh ayta inutak kigiswiye, bawa ignes Wagayriyene hiyeg. Kuri pisenwa nikweni, ig awna:” Usuh me higihwa aytakin met, pase pihayo nomnik ewkno wohska ta pit. Igkis higihwe ayteke nikwe, kote arivwiwa gihayo danuh atere. Ig higep pahamku tumawri. Pisenwa gihigvan ig higep pahamku abusku akiw. Abusku ig batahkise ayge. [. . .] Ine kuri, ig kwis ihuke inere was. Kuri ig awna ta gut gihayo,: “Ignewa neg awayg ku pariye gugihgi pitatye. Eg gimin ka ignema, bawkata ignewa, pit iveg ku samah ig keh inin was.”

Kuri egme [amekene] gihayome awna: “Ka ignema.” Gunag awna:”Ku ka ignema nikwe embe uya kehkis annut made. Ku pis hiya ig muwamnehe inin gannu madikte ku pariye pitatye ku samah ig keh inin annut. Ku pis hiya ig danuh avigkuwe inere annut akiw embe igenwa pigihgi.

They arrived there then. Pull! [The two ends of the rope] met there. It was all done. The field was cleared. But those young men, they were called Wagayriyene [blue lizard people]?8 They were the ones who saw tree branches way up above. Sometimes you see a flourishing tree. A branch falls from above, [for no apparent reason]. But it is those blue lizard people [who do it]. Now when they had finished, he said, “We are going stand back over here, because your wife is approaching. [She] is bringing manioc beer to you.” So they stood back then. Not long later, his wife arrived there. He drank one gourd bowl. After his drinking, he drank half a bowl again. [The other] half, he placed down there. [. . .] So now, he had already cut down [the trees in] the manioc field. Now [the father-in-law] said to his wife, “It is the same man who was her husband, in the beginning.” She did not really believe it was him, but it must have been him. “You look at how he made this field!” Now our ancestor’s wife said, “It is not him!” Her mother said, “If it is not him, then let us give him all the tasks. If you see that he is able to do the work, from beginning to end, like he [the King Vulture] did before. If you see that he can meet and rise above those tasks again, then he is really your husband.”

Epilogue Kuri eg [gunag] awna ta gut: “Wani, no’, pigihgi ta amnih ariyeve ndahan pisamwi gibiwhwavan. Nopsehsa was.” Eg awna: “Ihkata nikwe.” Kuri eg awna git: “Nnaguh awna nutuh adahan pis atak amnih ariyava ndahan panig gibiwhwavan nopsesniye ku pariye amaka pis dunihave gidahan.” Giwn: “Ihi.” Takuwa hakanaw ig tivik. Amaka pisenwa ahukak embe takuwa adahan ig ta abukepten, ku avim inin. Hawkanawa nikwe ig tivika. Ig danuh atere nikweni... ig iwasa was... kote huguhguwa avan. Kuri ig hiyapni henne, ig hamah tiket. Tiketyewa ig hamah, teketwa. Kadawempadi ig kuk ta ganivit, ka hamahwa. Kuri ig msekwe ayge. Ig hiya ig batahkiswe [i] kamuw[me] tiviknene wagehnene adahan kahadbekama inere was pisenwaneku pakeku akak neve [9h], adahan ig pisenwa ini was kahadbekama dize [10h] ig paytrik. Kuri nikwe ig tivik. Ig danuh atere nikweni. Ig bukah ka hamahwa ig hiyapni ig biyuk gikan ig tihene. Kuri ig tihene ayge betnene nikweni, mmapana akeb awaykemni danuh git atere. Igkis awna ta git: “Nihiwhi, ba pis ay.” Ig awna: “Ihi.” “Mmeneki pis umah Makawem ganig? Pit iveg kuri pis ka hiya asamanak inin was. Mmahpa kuri

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Now [the mother] said to [her daughter], “Ask your husband to help to burn off your brother’s field. It is a small field.” She said, “As you wish.” Now [the ancestor’s wife] said to him, “My mother asked me to tell you to go burn off your father-inlaw’s little field that you cut down for him yesterday.’ He said, “Yes.” Early the next morning, he went to work. He had finished cutting down [the trees] the day before. Now the next day, this day, he went to burn the field. So then early in the morning, he went. He arrived there then. He looked at the field. The leaves were not dry out yet. Now he considered this. He lit a fire. He started a real [big] fire. He put the flame underneath [the trees]. It did not light! Now he stayed there. He decided to sit down, but the sun was already rising high. [He] was supposed to complete the field around 9 a.m., so that he could finish the field and be at his house by 10 a.m. Now then he went. He arrived there then. He burned [the leaves], they did not light. He considered this. He lost his composure. He cried. Now while he was crying, three men approached him there. They said to him, “My grandson, are you here?” He said, “Yes.” “Why [on earth] did you kill the King Vulture’s son-in-law? [Just] you look! You were not able [to cut

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down the trees in] this field. How are you [possibly] going to burn this field? It will not burn for you. Now you will be eaten! You just see something, and then you shoot it!” Ig awna: “Ka nuhawkanuma . . . He said, “It was not my fault. It was because of this and that han akiw, han akiw . . . again.” Ig awna: “Mmah henne?” He said, “Is that true?” “Ya!” “Yes.” “Embe ka sam.” “It is okay, then.” Ig awna: “Usuh amnih bukehe He said, “We will help burn the pidahan inin was. Usuh amnihpi. field for you. We will rescue you. Please stand back here.” Asa higihwa ayteke.” “Bye!” He stood back then. Now “Ye!” Ig higihwe ayteke nikwni. Kuri igkis taris nikwe tiket gameyad they pulled out the coals from ku pariye ayge hamewempad. Ig the fire that was burning there. tari nikweni ig uguguh ta amadgat He picked them up then, he lit was. Ig padak tah! amadgat was. the field with them. He threw In tuguh ta amadgat was bawh! them there on the field! The coals ta amadgata was nikwe hamehwe, fell onto the field. Whoosh! The pahakte was wohe. Was wohe. field caught fire. The field burned Wohe madikte. Kehe kimankarad!!! completely. The field burned. All Pakeku akak kamuw ka ba puwip of it burned. It made a huge noise! in madavwi. When the sun was almost reaching midday, the field was done. Ig awna ta git awayg: “Usuh me He said to the man, “We are tivik aytaki pihayo nomnik. Ku going to leave here. Your wife is eg danuh atan kehnaba hawwata approaching. When she arrives, please do what you did yesterday. ku samah amaka pis keh. Pis keh You do it again.” novinawa.” He said, “As you wish.” Ig awna: “Ihkata.” Gihayo danuh atere awna: “Ba pis His wife arrived there and said, ay. “Are you here?” He said, “Yes. I am here.” Giwn: “Ihi. Ay nah.” “Mmani nusamwi gibiwhwavan?” “How is my little brother’s [manioc Giwn: “Nah hiya hamahwanad in. field]?” Henneme kuri nah kote iwasamni. He said, “I see it has caught fire. Nah hiya in hamahwa.” But I have not yet looked at it. I saw it caught fire.” “Mmah henne?” “Oh really?” “Ya!” “Yes!” pis bukah inin was? In ka woh pit. Kurikata pis axwika kuri. Pis hiya arikna pis atak umah.

Epilogue Eg awna: “Ba pis arabyu?” Giwn: “Nah arabyu un.” Eg ewke pahamku tumawri wohskarad git. Ig higep makepte ini wohska, ig higep makepte. Kuri eg ewke pahamkunad akiw nikweni ig higap pabuskaknad, ig iki abusku ayge gidahan neras hiyeg ku pariye bukehne ini was. Kuri nikwe . . . Lawe gihayo tivik nikweni neras awaykemni pes atere adahan higevye ini wohska asemne. Kuri bawkata neras awaykemni ku pariye ayge bawkata gihiyega neg gugihgi ku pariye miyatinen gihiyega, ku pariye amekene umehe. Gihiyega ignes. Ignes hiyeg ku pariye bukehne ini was neras hiyeg Karuwyene hiyeg. Ignes bukehne was gidahan. Kuri nikwe, pisenwe nikweni . . . igkis pisenwa gihigvanikis nikweni igkis pese. Ig [amekene] danuh tahan ig awna ta gut gihayo. Ig awna: “Nobaki naniguh gibiwhwavan. Ba pis atak iwasamni?” Eg awna: “Nah ka atak iwasamni. Nah ka atak iwasamni. Seme nah hiya hamahwa. Gihayo nikwe ekkemni ta gut gunag. Gunag awna: “Kuwewa usuh atak iwasamninek gikak papay. Kuri danuh daraka kamuw nikweni gunag tivik iwasano. Danuh atere iwasa, wohe barewap was wohe. Yuma. Pis ka uti ah gamadga. Wohe barewap was wohe.

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She said, “Are you thirsty?” He said, “I am thirsty for water.” She brought him a large bowl of manioc beer.9 He drank until [the bowl was] dry. Now she brought one more large [bowl], he drank half of it. He gave half to those people who burnt the field. Now then . . . when his wife had left, those men came out there to drink the rest of the manioc beer. But those young men who were there, they were the companions of her husband [makawem] who had been murdered. Who our ancestor had killed. They were the ones who used to help him. Those people who burnt the field were the Firefly People.10 They burnt the field for him. Now then, when this was done, when they had finished their drinking, they went away. Our ancestor arrived there [at the house], he spoke to his wife. He said, “Here is [my brother-in-law’s] field. Are you going to come and look?” She said, “I will not go look. I just saw that it caught fire.” His wife told her mother. Her mother said, “Later, we will go and look with your dad.” Now when the sun started to go back down, then her mother went to look. She arrived there and looked. The field was completely burned. You could not find one branch that had not burned!

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The field had burnt beautifully. [The girl and her mother then plant two baskets of manioc stalks and they grew waist-high by morning.] Now [her mother] said to her girl, Kuri nikwe gunag awna ta gut gise: “Kuri avim inin pahete annut “Now, today, [this will be] the gidahan pigihgi. Ku pis hiya ig final task for your husband. If you see that he is able to finish this mpiye inin annut kurineku embe nah hiyak ku ig pigihgi. Kuri yuma task, soon you will know if it is [really] your husband. Now, never akiw pis awna: ‘Ka nugihgima, ka nugihgima.’ Ku pis awna ka again, will you say, ‘He is not my pigihgima pig kahawkan pikak.” husband!’ If you say he is not your husband [then] your father will deal with you.” Eg awna ta gut gise. Eg awna: She said to her girl. She said, “Wani nuwaygi amnih keh ndahan “Request my son-in-law to make nuvagapa. Amawka ig keh nuvagap me a tanga [loincloth]. He should hawwata ahumwan, ku samah nah make the tanga with exactly the akka pit.” pattern that I show you.” Eg awna: “Ihkata nikwe.” [The daughter] said, “As you wish.” Kuri eg danuh taha, awna git So [the daughter] went over there gugihgi han akiw, “Nnaguh and spoke to her husband, like this kehkisno guvagap pit.” again. “My mother has requested that you make her a tanga.” Kuri gugihgi awna: “Mmah akehka Her husband said, “How can nut, no’?” Ganaktin ig ka awna ta I [possibly] make that?” He said gut. “Mmahpa akehka ta nut kuri this to himself, not to her. “How tino guvagapa?” can I make a woman’s tanga?” Now he was there. He sat down. Kurin ig ay. Ig batahkiswe. Barah! Ig batahkiswe. Ig wew ta aranwata Plop! [in plain sight]. He sat down. He walked around the house. payt. Ig batahkiswe aranwat payt. Kweknewa Wagaygi danuh git awna He sat down in back of the house. Soon a blue lizard came up to him. git: “Nuhiwhi, mmah pis ay?” It said, “My grandson, are you Giwn: “Nah ay.” here?” He said, “Yes, I am here.” Giwn: “Mmah humkiska pit, no’, [The blue lizard] asked, “Are you pimatru humkis guvagap pit?” supposed to weave your mother-inGiwn [amekene]: “Ya!” law’s tanga?” He [our ancestor] said, “Yes.”

Epilogue Ig awna: “Wahapnan. Uya atak atere. Ta bete guhumwat. Ka ba miniwbetaw guw. Nah parakekuhte gukawihni . . . Nah ka dax ariknawnema. Nah pareke abetiw gukawihni, abetiw gusimsa, kameki nah dax ariknawnema. Lawe ku nah kwis danuhe ta arikut gutunneku, eg hiya ariknaneku, eg inuh gukawihninek. Piste hiya tino guvagapa, pimatru guvagapa.” Ye, hennewa ig danuh atere ig batahkiswe. Ig ka aminama . . . Bahg! Ke wotbe ig ka hiyaknibe. Bawa ig [wagaygi] pareke, tivige. Wagaygi wagehe gusimsa garikuw, Ig ka dax gubagwan, he garikumpi.

Lawe ig danuhe ta arit gutunmar. Atan arimkanit inin gutunmar, guvatakni. Kuri, lawe, ig danuh atere nikwe. Kuri ig Batan! atere nikwe. Eg hiyapni hene, eg kabiman: “Aaa! Pariye parakekuhe nukawihni ay?” Eg inuhptaw. Parang! Baw! Siwm! Wagaygi tivik. Kuri ig tivik nikwe, ig wewkiswe ta aranwat payt. Wagaygi, Siwm!, tivik, pareke ta abetite nop adahan ku ig wageswa han ig pawak hiyeg. Ig [wagaygi] awna git: “Ba pis hiyap?”

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[The blue lizard] said, “Wait for me here. Let us go over there. Sit alongside her [the mother]. I will sneak up into her dress. I will not touch a thing. I will climb into her clothes, into her dress, but I will not touch a thing. Now when I have reached her stomach, she will realize something is there. She will lift up her dress. You will see her female tanga. Your mother-in-law’s tanga.” So then, he arrived there and sat down. He did not let on a thing. Just sitting there! Like he did not know anything. [The blue lizard] entered and went up. The blue lizard climbed up the inside of her dress, without touching her leg. Just along the inside of her clothing. Now he arrived at the lower part of her stomach. [Uwet explains] Around here. At her pubic area, her vulva.11 Now, [the blue lizard] arrived there then. He went . . . Chomp! there then. She saw this. She yelled, “Agh! What has entered my clothing here?” She lifted up [her dress]. [The lizard] jumped out! Thud! [he hit the ground] Zip! The blue lizard ran away. Now he left then. He went around to the back of the house. The blue lizard went . . . zip! He was gone. [The blue lizard] went into the [grass] so that he could go around, this way, and turn into a person. [The blue lizard] said to him, “Did you see [her tanga]?”

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Ig [amekene] awna: “Ihi.” [Wagaygi awna:] “Embe hene pis hum.” Embo amekene tari nikwe. Kuri lawe ig wagaygi awna ta git, awna git: “Ba pis hiyapni kabayhtiwa?” Giwn: “Ihi, nah hiyapni kabayhtiwa.” “Pis hiyak ku samah nihumwan kabayhtiwa?” Giwn: “Nah hiya nihumwan kabayhtiwa.” “Ku samah pis hiya nihumwan embe [nikwe] pis kehni hawwata.”

[Our ancestor] said, “Yes.” [The blue lizard] said, “Well then, that is how you will weave it.” So then our ancestor left then. Now the blue lizard had said to him, “Did you take a good look at it?” He said, “Yes, I saw it well.” [The blue lizard said,] “Did you see well, how it was woven? He said, “I saw its pattern clearly.”

[The blue lizard said,] “You should make it in the exact same pattern as you have seen.” Awaku egu Makawem guvagap, egu Because her, the [female King tino guvagap. Guvagap ka kema Vulture] Makawem’s tanga. She wisma hiyegma udahan. In humaw had a woman’s tanga. [But] her kumbe anhakibe, pis hiyak? Kumbe tanga was not like a human being’s tanga. It had designs. You anhaki... kawokwine asubanap. Muwapte inin tino ku pariye understand? Like the jaguar track guhumwan ay. Pahatte nikak! Kum design. It covered all the woman’s kawokwine asubanap. [. . .] area there. It covered everything! Like jaguar tracks. [. . .] Now our ancestor observed this. Kuri ig amekene hiyapni henneni. The blue lizard said to him, “Did Wagaygi awna ta git: “Ba pis you see?” hiyap?” He said, “Yes. I saw.” Giwn: “Ihi, nah hiyap.” [The blue lizard said], “Can you “Pis hiyak akehka?” make one?” Giwn: “Nah hiya akehka.” [The ancestor] said, “I can make one.” Ig ivegve gihuvaga. Nikwe ig He went looking for arumà bekbetepni. Nikwe ig keh. Ig keh weaving reed. He split it. Then he ku samah ahumwan, ig kehni made [a tanga]. He made it exactly hennewa ku samah ahumwan. in the same pattern. When it was Pisenwa akak made nikweni kuri all finished then, he took it to his ig ewkwin ta gut gihayo. Ig awna wife. He said to his wife, “Here is ta gut gihayo: “Noba’ [ki] akya aunty’s tanga.” guvagap.” She said, “Where is it?” Eg awna: “Kineykin?” He said, “Here it is.” Ig awna: “Nop ay.”

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His wife looked and said, “It is exactly the same!” She said, “He really is my husband!” She said [to herself], “He is really my husband!” But she did not tell him. Now she observed this. The daughter went to take it to her mother. She said to her, “Mom, here is your tanga. Your son-in-law has [woven] a poorly-made [tanga] for you.” Eg iwasa. Eg iwasa . . . Eg ivegvitaw [The mother] looked it over . . . Ayteke pisenwa eg iwasa ini carefully. Afterwards, she looked humka, tuguh hawwata ahumwan. at how it was woven. It was Eg awna ta gut, gunag awna ta gut: exactly the same design. Her mother said to her, “He is your “Pigihgiwa ig. Yuma akiw. Yuma annut adahan ig keh akiw. Ig keh husband! There is no other muwamnete annut. Iveg inin ku person! There is no other task for pariye pi mahikonene ig keh. Pis him to do. He has completed all hiyak ku ignewa. Mmahki ku pis the tasks. Look at this, which was ikiygi ku ig ka pigihgima? Kuri ka the most difficult [task]. He did ba ikiygi . . . ! Ku pis hiya ku pis it. [Now] you know that it is [your ka ikiygi kema pigihgimanek, pap husband]. Why did you think kahawkan pikak.” that he was not your husband? Now, do not think that any more! If you think that he is not your husband, [then] your father will deal with you!” Pase gig axtigi. Eg awna. Guwn: “Ig Because her father was an axtig kahawkan pikak.” [predator] monster. [Her mother] said, “He will deal with [eat] you.” So after that, the woman accepted Embe ayge nikwe amun inere her husband. She looked after him nikweni eg tino ameve gugihgi. well, like her first husband. Amevevgi kabayhtiwa kewa pitatyewatbe gugihgibe. Eg [gunag] awna: “Ignewa. Yuma [Her mother] said, “It is him. akiw.” There is no other.” Amevevgi. [His wife] accepted him [back]. Awaku made annut ig kwis keh. Ig Because of all the tasks he had keh ku samah akavuska annut completed. He performed the Gihayo iwasapni eg awna: “Ihwatama.” Eg awna: “Ignewa nugihgi.” Henneme eg ka awna git. Seme eg awna: “Ignewa nugihgi.” Kuri eg hiyapni henne nikwen eg, gukamkayh, ta ewkwin ta gut gunag. [Eg] awna gut: “Mamayh, nobaki pivagap. Pihigi gikehni pidahan he mbeyviyednen.”

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tasks like he did in the beginning. Like the first husband, he also did [it]. In the same manner, he passed through [completed] the all [the tasks]. Boh! Kuri. Kuri, kiyavwiye. Kuri Well! Now, Sir, there was one task usekwe pahete annut ay. remaining there. Kuri eg awna gut: “Usekwe pahete Now [the mother] said to annut adahan wis akki git ku avim [the daughter], “There is one inin. remaining task we will show him, today. Wani ig atak amnih iwasa papay That he should go and look at giteyni. Ig iwasa pavay giteyni. Dad’s [hunting or fishing traps]. Nawenetke in kiyake ku akak inin He should look at Dad’s traps. ku.” It could be that the traps have caught something, at present.” [The man has to catch a huge quantity of fish and does so with the help of a large dragonfly who sucks up all the water in the lake.] Gimatru awna ta gut gise. Eg awna: His mother-in-law said to her girl. She said, “He is your husband. No “Ignewa pigihgi. Yuma akiw.” more [doubting].” Eg awna: “Mamayh, hennewa. She said, “Mom, it is true, like you Piwnepnewa.” have said.” Eg [gunag] awna: “Ignewa.” [Her mother] said, “It is him.” Gig danuh atere. [Ig awna:] Her father arrived there. “Ignewa. Yuma akiw. Yuma akiw. [He said], “It is him. No more Pit eveg made annut ig keh. Pit [doubting]. Look at all the tasks he has completed. Look at my iveg nteyni. Pit iveg gayesri unad [fishing] traps. Look at the depth gahakwa. Pit iveg ku samah igkis [amount] of water in [the river]. ewk im atan. Pis hiyak ku ig Look at how they brought fish pigihgiwa ig.” here. You know that he is your husband!” Embe nikwe. Eg tino nikwe So then she, the woman, finally metakwa kuri eg pasamrak gikak igi got along [reconciled] with that awayg. man. Egme pahavu isamutyo . . . The younger sister always got on adukwenewa ihuhekwiye gikak ke well with him because she did not wotbe . . . awaku eg ka ayh gihri. smell his [bad; human] odor. ig keh. Ku samah pitatye gugihgi keh embe ig keh . . . awvrewata ig mpiyasa. Awvrewata ig mpiyasa madikte. Ig mpiyase madikte.

Epilogue Egme egu gegni eg kadahan mabeye hiyakemniki. Eg humaw kabahte ke axtigibe, ku eg ayh gihri miyekeriki givititak egma guvewkan axevgi. Henneme gusamume awnino ta gut.

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But she, the older sister, had a bad attitude. She was almost like an axtig monster. [When] she smelled his human [mortal] odor, she wanted to eat him. But her younger sister [would talk her out of it].

The story is humorous—but also serious, and it is about experiencing other worlds under conditions in which one has caused offense by having imposed a singular nature—his nature and desires—on the vultures.12 He wanted a beak for his dog, to sharpen its sense of smell. Oblivious to the implications of his desire for the vulture world, he lands up in a situation comedy where he must participate and observe and take on the body-consciousness of the vultures—and survive many tests in order to prove himself to be real, not duplicitous. Surviving among predator inlaws with grudges and suspicions about his smelly human body in the coat (skin or form) of the vulture he had killed, he alternately despairs for the impossible tasks and tests, and learns to work with a network of allies, from termites to lizards to fireflies and dragonflies in a system of reciprocal generosity. I want to try to think with this story. In part, my attention to it is playful, since at one level it offers some witty parallels with the condition of the hapless anthropologist or archaeologist who has collected an artefact without realizing the implications for others of what has been done and then seeks to make amends. At another level, I want to pay quite serious attention to the ways in which test after test—chapter after chapter—the protagonist learns to see and act in the world differently. Constantly at risk of becoming prey to the predators he had preyed upon, he has to learn to form alliances with creatures around him who can move between worlds: termites between ground, trees, and sky; lizards who live in trees; fireflies who pass between worlds. It is in learning to work with the many other creatures who pass between worlds, that the man passes the tests and survives, albeit barely. His is a tale of a reluctant diplomat, constantly under suspicion. Is his story one of transformation or duplicity? Betrayal or ethical encounter? What will be its outcome? We do not know, other than to know that the story is told of his misadventures; the ethnography of an encounter of worlds in which the condition of predation is permanently unstable, and mitigated only by learning how not to impose one’s own version of nature and objects on the world, and to work with the multiple worldmakings in it.

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So similar is the condition of field researchers, whether anthropologists or botanists or conservationists or archaeologists, who move between worlds. Like him, the disconcertment, disappointment, at times desperation leads to a rethinking of relations with things and creatures and approaches around him. In my case, as the anthropologist who was trying to work out what postcolonial South African whiteness might mean in the wider world, the project I proposed could be framed in terms that advanced, in compelling terms, the goals of postcolonial ethnography. Yet the tale of what Stengers calls “the goodwill scientist” is “a ‘non innocent’ tale where the only truly dangerous being . . . is the one who feels at home everywhere, serving some universal cause, thus not knowing ‘where he is.’ ”13 After all, the rupture that the prefix “post” asserts, has not happened; the most one can hope for is to participate together in an ongoing process of decolonization, through all the moments of trust, misunderstanding, confusion, shared delight, and the risk that senses of betrayals and disconcertments alike can become generative events. And though my tests did not involve new alliances with lizards and termites, making sense of the ethnographic material forced me to form new alliances with “critters” of a different kind (to use Donna Haraway’s term): the critters that are the ideas of space and time and personhood; the provenance of ideas that locates objects in space and time and creates knowing subjects. Learning that not everyone populates the world with these critters makes it possible to think alongside, and nearby, about a philosophy premised in presence-to, rather than Being. * * * The chapters in this volume have sought to “capitulate”—simultaneously, to explore in chapters and to trouble—the central ideas in the disciplinary regimes that framed our understanding of what “evidence” in our project might be.14 Around and through those capitulations, the idea of hiyak hawkri began to open up as theory, and in that moment, it opened up the possibilities for a generative dialogue. That dialogue was not “between indigenous knowledge and science,” for such an approach would have set them up as different before we began, and it would have taken us back into the dualisms of culture and nature, belief, and knowledge; back to Stengers’ “curse of tolerance.”15 Nor was the conversation only about the categories of “IK and science,” for that would have situated the work between actors in a way that prevents the tracing of partial connections, and which is unable to work with the historical production of those categories. Rather, with an interest in the concerns that animate them, the work is nearby all the actors who are trying to work together, for all sorts of different reasons, all the while changing as they do.

Epilogue

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Letting go of the idea that there is only one scientific version of “Nature” that can exist as uncontested universal truth is not a capitulation to the perils of “relativism,” of “not believing in reality,” and so on. When we recognize that what we have always grasped as “Nature” with a capital N is an effect of an ecology of knowledge practices that we have inherited from other times and other places, the implication is no longer that we can only “disagree with Science at our peril,” but rather that what Helen Verran calls “a vulnerable dialogue” becomes possible.16 The risk, as the Makawem story wryly suggests, is of insincerity, instability, betrayal, tolerance. One is not Same, even after many years of field research and textual dialogue. But one is transformed, learning the arts of seeing and knowing co-presences and consubjectivities. And perhaps it is that partial connection, with the honesty to look at its very precariousness, that is valuable. Slowly, carefully, this work has come to welcome the presence of a different way of knowing the day, and knowing the world: a nature that has taken fifteen years of learning the arts of hiyapni hene—thinking and reflecting on what has passed—to begin to be able to think via different perspectives. David’s painstaking transcription and translation of about 4,000 minutes of narratives over several years—a project that still continues—begins to suggest ways to grasp the discontinuities of disciplines sufficiently to begin to see different possible confluences between archaeological interests and a public like that in Arukwa. This volume has sought to set them out. Being here—ba pi ai; thinking in a space—hiyapni hene; knowing the day world—hiyak hawkri: together these offer an ecology of predation that explores multiple ways of world making or “world makery,” to allow for a grammar to render its active quality, always mindful of the possibility that in any interaction, generosity is the hope, but predation is a possibility. Inhabiting different kinds of consciousness in different kinds of bodies is what it takes to grasp the world makings around one. To hiyapni hene—think there—is the moment of slowing down one’s own doings in order that a different version of the real can come to comprehension. That capacity to think in multiple ways, in relation to the trails that precede one through a place, and via an understanding of what different moving bodies need, is the art of understanding what has gone before. In this sense, part of a reimagined public archaeology involves not only the study of what has gone before; it becomes also an exercise in transforming modernist practices of knowledge production. Working in this way, a reading of the tracks of the ancestors in Arukwa finds unexpected confluences with the work of scientists and philosophers who are trying to learn different kinds of world making amid the predatory relations that frame the global knowledge economy.

N otes

Introduction 1. The B-26 was crewed by Theodore Handley, Raymond J. Carson, James E. Johnson, George W. Bodin, and Wesley W. Fulton. The first four were buried in Louisville, Kentucky. Fulton, the rear gunner who may have survived the actual crash but died later in the forest, was buried separately. 2. Johannes Wilbert’s account of the story of the origins of the Cariña (Caribs) has many resemblances to the version told along the Rio Urucauá about the origins of the Galibi (Caribs). See Wilbert, Mindful of famine: Religious climatology of the Warão Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Centre for the Study of World Religions, 1996), 37. Lux Vidal has published on various versions of the same story told in the region of the Rio Uaçá, of which the Rio Urucauá forms part. See Vidal, Mito, história e cosmologia: As diferentes versões da guerra dos Palikur contra os Galibi entre os povos indígenas da Bacia do Uaçá, Oiapoque, Amapá, Revista de Antropologia 44, no. 1 (2001):117–147. 3. According to James Williamson, a Franco-Dutch party arrived at the Rio Oiapoque in 1623 and found “a solitary Englishman with three negro slaves.” Williamson, English colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon 1604–68 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 65. 4. See Rane Willerslev, Soul hunters: Hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 5. See Neil L. Whitehead, The discoverie of the large, rich, and bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). 6. The diary of David’s mother, Diana M. Green, is the focus of a chapter by Brazilian anthropologist Artionka Capiberibe in her book on Palikur Christianity, Batismo de Fogo: Os Palikur e o Cristianismo (São Paulo: Annablume Editora, 2007), 159–164. 7. Kumene is written as Kumenê in Portuguese but Kumene in Palikur, and pronounced KuMEne. 8. For an account of different versions of the Amazon, see Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 9. Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger, Time and memory in indigenous Amazonia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 7.

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10. Roué’s comments are based in large measure on Tsvetan Todorov’s analysis of Spanish debates about the brutality of the conquest of Mexico. See Roué, US environmental NGOs and the Cree: An unnatural alliance for the preservation of nature?, International Journal of Social Science Research 178 (2003): 622; see also Tzvetan Todorov, The conquest of America: The question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 12. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against war: Views from the underside of modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. 13. Achille Mbembe, Subject and experience, in Nadia Tazi (ed.), Keywords: Experience (New York: Other Press, 2004), 12. 14. Maldonado Torres, Against war, xii. 15. Ibid., xiii. 16. Curt Nimuendajú, Die Palikur Indianer und ihre Nachbarn (Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1926). 17. Emílio A. Goeldi, Excavações archeologicas em 1895. Executadas pelo Museu Paraense no Littoral da Guyana Brazileira entre Oyapock e Amazonas. 1ª Parte: As cavernas funerárias artificiaes de Índios hoje extinctos no Rio Cunany (Goanany) e sua ceramica. Belém: Museu Paraense de História Natural e Ethnographia, 1900. 43 p. il. (Memórias do Museu Goeldi, I). 18. See Uwet Manuel Antônio dos Santos, David Green and Lesley Green, Waramwi: A Cobra Grande. (São Paulo: Iepé, 2013). 19. For a detailed account of this archaeologica project, see Lesley Green, David Green, and Eduardo Góes Neves, Indigenous knowledge and archeological science: The challenges of public archeology in the Reserva Uaçá, Journal of Social Archeology 3, no. 2 (2003):366–397. 20. See Arturo Escobar, Postconstructivist political ecologies, in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate (eds.), International handbook of environmental sociology, 2nd ed. (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2010); Mario Blaser, Political ontology: Cultural studies without “cultures”?, Cultural Studies 23, no. 5–6 (2009):873–896; and Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010):334–370. 21. See Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans, Archaeological investigations at the mouth of the Amazon, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 167 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1957), 606; Peter Hilbert, Contribuição à arqueologia do Amapá, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi Antropologia 1 (Belém, Brasil: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, 1957); Stéphen Rostain, L’occupation Amerindienne Ancienne du Littoral de Guyane, Ph.D. dissertation (Centre de Recherche en Archaeologie Precolombienne, Université de Paris I, 1994); and Stéphen Rostain, The French Guiana coast: A key area in prehistory between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers, in A. Versteeg (ed.), Between St

Notes to Pages 9–19

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Eustatius and the Guianas: Contributions to Caribbean archaeology (St. Eustatius: St Eustatius Historical Foundation, 1994), 53–99. 22. Neil Whitehead, Ethnic transformation and historical discontinuity in native Amazonia and Guyana, 1500–1900, L’Homme 33, no. 2 (1993):285–305. 23. Anna Roosevelt, Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical archaeology on Marajó Island, Brazil (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991). 24. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): article 1. 25. M. C. M Scatamacchia, Arqueologia. Mostra do descobrimento (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo/Associação Brasil 500 anos, 2000). 26. Martin Hall (2005) ‘Situational ethics and engaged practice: the case of archaeology in Africa’, in: Embedding ethics: Shifting boundaries of the anthropological profession, edited by Lynne Meskell and Peter Pels. Oxford: Berg, pp. 169–196. 27. Five years later, the state of Amapá set up its archaeological research institute there, and by 2010, archaeologists João Darcy de Moura Saldanaha and Mariana Petry Cabral had established a facility that established the principles of public archaeology as foundational to further work in the region. 28. The Palikur language has two words for “we”: a “we” that includes “you the hearer” and a “we” that excludes the hearer. The convention in writing a letter is that before “we” can be declared, those in the “we” are named, as in “I, Lesley, and David, we send greetings.” 29. Donna Haraway, Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 186. 30. Bruno Latour, The recall of modernity: Anthropological approaches, Cultural Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2007):13. 31. Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an attitude (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 25. 32. Latour, Recall of modernity, 13. 33. Helen Verran, Science and an African logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 34. Isabelle Stengers, Experimenting with refrains: Subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism, Subjectivity 22 (2008):38–59. 35. Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history (London: Routledge, 2007). 36. Michael Jackson, Where thought belongs: An anthropological critique of the project of philosophy, Anthropological Theory 9, no. 3 (200):235–251. 37. In this, I acknowledge the work and day-to-day thinking of my senior colleague Andrew Mugsy Spiegel, whose approach to anthropological research, over decades, has insisted on the primacy of reflexivity. 38. See Nicoli Nattrass, Mortal combat: AIDS denialism and the struggle for antiretrovirals in South Africa (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007).

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Notes to Pages 19–34

39. For further discussion see Lesley. J. F. Green, Beyond South Africa’s “indigenous knowledge”—science wars, South African Journal of Science 108, no. 7/8 (2012): article 631. 40. Tim Ingold, Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land, in The Perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 132–151. 41. Bruno Latour, Why has critique run out of steam?: From matters of fact to matters of concern, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004):225–248. 42. Bruno Latour, Which cosmos for which cosmopolitics?, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005), 98–155. 43. Ashis Nandy, Traditions, tyranny, and utopias: Essays in the politics of awareness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 44. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 45. Aimé Cesaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 21. Chapter 1 1. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro comments that in Amerindian thought, “Appearances deceive not because they differ from the essences presumed (by us) to be concealed behind them, but because they are, precisely, appearances, i.e., apparitions. Every apparition demands a recipient, a subject to whom it appears. And where there is a subject, there is a point of view. . . . Every appearance is a perspective, and every perspective deceives.” Viveiros de Castro, Immanence and fear: Stranger events and subjects in Amazonia, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012):27–43. 2. For an overview of current anthropological debates on everyday philosophy of personhood in the Amazon, see Annica Djupp, Personhood and human-spirit relations among the Yurucaré of the Bolivian Amazon (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2007), esp. 4–13. 3. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro speaks of the “intentional processes of fabrication” of the human body. See Viveiros de Castro, A fabricação do corpo na sociedade Xinguana, in J. Pacheco de Oliveira Filho (ed.), Sociedades indígenas e indigenismo no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: UfRJ/Editora Marco Zero, 1987), esp. pp. 31–32; also see also Djupp, Personhood and human-spirit relations, 11. 4. Lux Vidal, A roça e o kahbe. Produção e comercialização da farinha de mandioca (São Paulo: Iepé, 2011). 5. “Some people are saying God can only hear you if you pray through a microphone, but I don’t think so,” commented Kiyavwiye Uwet. 6. See Anthony Seeger, Roberto da Matta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígneas brasileiras, Boletim do Museu Nacional 32 (1979):2–19.

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7. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, GUT feeling about Amazonia: Potential affinity and the construction of sociality, in Laura M. Rival and Neil L. Whitehead (eds.), Beyond the visible and the material: The Amerindianization of society in the work of Peter Rivìere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19–43; also Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital enemies: Slavery, predation and the Amerindian political economy of life (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009). 8. Jean-Luc Nancy, The inoperative community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 9. Most translations refer to “the foot that races to do evil.” 10. According to the authoritative Dicionário Houaiss da Lingua Portuguesa, “porfia” means (1) contenda obstinada de palavras; discussão, disputa, polêmica; (2) qualidade do que é persistente, insistência; perseverança, tenacidade; (3) insistencia insensata ou importuna; teimosia, obstinação; (4) luta por alguma coisa desejada tb. por outros; competição, rivalidade, disputa. 11. A leading local Indian official based in Oiapoque, explained that “I spoke with them and I put it to them: that they ought not to impede those who were going to participate in those Games. So because of this, they were able to go. If I hadn’t have done that, they would not have been able to go.” 12. Ashis Nandy, The Tao of cricket: On games of destiny and the destiny of games (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against war: Views from the underside of modernity (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5, 7, 18. 14. In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 46–47. 15. In what ways does this segue with the language of predation? It would not be appropriate to offer a one-size-fits-all response to this issue, as the Kumene futebol saga itself indicates the range of opinions along the river. But it is interesting to hear one regional official in the area talking about his own participation in state structures: “Brazil is so corrupt that I—even I!—am corrupt!” he once said. Though not a first-language Palikur speaker, his words offer a sense that participation in representative structures easily translates into one becoming part of an elite that has, at times, a predatory relationship with those they served. 16. See Seeger, Matta, and Viveiros de Castro, A construção da pessoa; see also Santos-Granero, Vital enemies, on Amerindian practices of slavery. 17. See Tim Ingold’s work on genealogies in Lines: A brief history (London: Routledge, 2007). 18. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies, Common Knowledge 10 (2004):463–484. 19. Tânia Stolze Lima, Um peixe olhou papra mim: O povo Yudjá e a perspectiva (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005). 20. Aparecida Vilaça, Chronically unstable bodies: Reflections on Amazonian corporalities, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 11 (2005):445–464.

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Notes to Pages 41–45

21. Harold Green and Diana Green, Folk tale texts: Palikur language (unpublished manuscript; Belém: Sociedade Internacional de Linguistica, 1996), 271–286. 22. See Michael Lambek, How to make up one’s mind: Reason, passion, and ethics in spirit possession, University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2010): 720–741. 23. This body of work is drawn on extensively in this volume. It is worth noting that the heuristic device that contrasts mononaturalism/multiculturalism of Modernist thought in opposition to the multinaturalism/monoculturalism of Amerindian thought, is central to Viveiros de Castro’s work. While he specifically names this as an heuristic device that surfaces (makes evident) the differences in play, it needs to be noted that the limitations of explaining in terms of oppositions, is that the difference one seeks to describe are overly defined by the opposition itself. The task of an ethnography such as this is to surface differences in a way that they exceed those limitations. 24. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere, four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February–March 1998, Hau Masterclass Series 1 (Manchester: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, 2012), 113–114. 25. See Vocabulário Português—Palikúr—Kheuol (Belém: Sociedade Internacionale de Linguistica, 1996). 26. See Communique se bem na lingua palikur e na lingua Portuguesa (Belém: Sociedade Internacional de Linguistica, 2000). 27. 1 Kings 3:7, Holy Bible New Living Translation (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1996). 28. Diana Green has collected letters and texts over the years in a searchable file of over three hundred pages, used primarily as a reference for checking colloquial word usage. 29. Extracts from stories in our archive are referenced here by their filenames, which follow the format-year-month-tape number-storyteller-subject-revision number. Here the file is 2003-July-t13x-Emiliano-tauni. 30. File 2001-17c-Davi-yadris. 31. File 2003-July-Ishawet-wavitiye. 32. File 2001-July-20-Floriano-creole-slavery. 33. File 2008-July-t12b-jorge-kwah. 34. See Fernando Santos-Granero, Sensual vitalities: Non-corporeal modes of sensing and knowing in native Amazonia, in Fernando Santos-Granero and George Mentore (eds.), In the world and about the world: Amerindian modes of knowledge, special issue in honor of professor Joanna Overing, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 4, no. 1–2 (2006): 57–80, at 61. 35. The Touch Research Institute offers evidence for the physical benefits of massage. See the study by T. Field, M. Diego, M. Hernandez-Reif, O. Deeds, B. Figueiredo, and A. Ascencio, Moderate versus light pressure massage therapy

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leads to greater weight gain in preterm infants, Infant Behavior and Development 29 (2006):574–578. The results are abstracted as follows: Sixty-eight preterm infants were randomly assigned to a moderate or to a light pressure massage therapy group to receive 15 massages three times per day for 5 days. Behavior state, stress behaviors and heart rate were recorded for 15 min before and during the first 15-min therapy session. Weight gain was recorded over the 5-day therapy period. The moderate versus light pressure massage group gained significantly more weight per day. During the behavior observations the moderate versus light pressure massage group showed significantly lower increases from the pre-session to the session recording on: (1) active sleep; (2) fussing; (3) crying; (4) movement; and (5) stress behavior (hiccupping). They also showed a smaller decrease in deep sleep, a greater decrease in heart rate and a greater increase in vagal tone. Thus, the moderate pressure massage therapy group appeared to be more relaxed and less aroused than the light pressure massage group which may have contributed to the greater weight gain of the moderate pressure massage therapy group. 36. In the film Kayapo, based largely on Terence Turner’s work, when a Kayapo woman wanted to gravely insult the character of a Brazilian official, she waved her machete under his nose and yelled at him, “Your mother didn’t hold you enough!” While Kayapo territories are far from Arukwa, it was of interest, though, that she referred to a lack of touch to insult his character, and certainly in Arukwa there is an equivalent sense in which infant massage and maternal touch are closely tied to the forming of both physical form and the quality of one’s personhood, which here is assessed via the ability to see and to know the world and respond appropriately. 37. See Suzanne Oakdale, Anchoring “the symbolic economy of alterity” with Autobiography USA, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 5, no. 1 (2007):59–78, esp. 67. 38. Laura Rival, Androgynous parents and guest children: The Huaorani couvade, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 4 (1998):619–642. 39. Peter Gow, Helpless—the affective preconditions of Piro social life, in Joanna Overing and Alan Passes (eds.), The Anthropology of love and anger (London: Routledge, 2000), 46–63. 40. Elsje Lagrou, Homesickness and the Cashinahua self: A reflection on the embodied condition of relatedness, in Overing and Passes, 160. 41. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and Diana Green, Palikur and the typology of classifiers, Anthropological Linguistics 40, no. 3 (1998):429–480; Diana Green, O sistema numérico da língua Palikúr [The Palikúr number system], Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi-CNPq 10, no. 2 (1994):261–303. 42. Uwet Manuel Antonio dos Santos, file 2008-JUL-t10-uwet-shaman-songs .doc.

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Notes to Pages 48–57

43. Berekevye, meaning “uncertain”; the commencing dance, the beginning dance, the initial dance, the “breaking forth” dance. Chapter 2 1. The plant known as ten in Palikur is known in Portuguese as the aninga, botanical name Montrichardia arborescens, also known as arum. 2. For an account of Palikur conversion to Christianity, see Artionka Capiberibe, Batismo de Fogo: Os Palikur e o Cristianismo (São Paulo: Annablume Editora, 2007). 3. Francoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand, La cote d’Amapá, de la bouche de l’Amazone a la baie d’Oyapock, a travers la tradition orale Palikur, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi 3, no. 1 (1987):1–77. 4. This material is an extract from a working paper presented to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in 2001. 5. See Capiberibe, Batismo de Fogo. 6. The story focuses on the shaman called Parup, who lived in the first half of the 1900s. See chapter 6 for a version. 7. Joanne Rappaport, The politics of memory: Native historical interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 8. Isabelle Stengers, Experimenting with refrains: Subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism, Subjectivity 22 (2008):38–59. 9. Bruno Latour, The recall of modernity, Cultural Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2007):11–30. 10. The words “fabrication” and “forge” are used here in the sense proposed by Latour in which they are products of activity, not in the sense that they are “false.” 11. See Bruno Latour, Thou shalt not freeze-frame, or How not to misunderstand the science and religion debate, in On the modern cult of the factish gods (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2010), 99–123. 12. See Bruce Albert and Alcida Ramos, Pacificando o Branco: Cosmologias do contato no Norte-Amazônico (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002). 13. For further discussion, see chapter 3. 14. Fernando Santos-Granero (ed.), The occult life of things: Native Amazonian theories of materiality and personhood (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009). 15. For example, according to Karumna Mountain in Kiyavwiye Uwakti’s song, the B-26 bomber that crashed in 1945 was “the thing that walks above the day.” 16. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 17. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, (anthropology) AND (science) (E. Viveiros de Castro) AND, afterdinner speech at “Anthropology and Science,” the 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain and Commonwealth, July 14, 2003, Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology

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7 (2003), available at http://nansi.abaetenet.net/abaetextos/anthropology-and-sci ence-e-viveiros-de-castro, accessed July 1, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, Introdução ao método do perspectivismo—perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): article 1; Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian perspectives, Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004):463–484. 18. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bonnono (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010). 19. Isabelle Stengers, Book VII: The curse of tolerance, in Cosmopolitics II, trans. Robert Bonnono (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011), pp. 303–416. 20. See Lesley Green and David Green, From chronological to spatio-temporal histories: Mapping heritage in Arukwa, Área Indígena do Uaçá, Brazil, History and Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2003):283–295. 21. Curt Nimuendajú, Die Palikur Indianer und ihre Nachbarn (Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1926). 22. Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans, Archaeological investigations at the mouth of the Amazon, Bulletin 167 (Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1957). 23. Grenand and Grenand, La cote d’Amapá. 24. See Michel Serres on folded time in his conversation with Bruno Latour in Serres, Conversations on science, culture and time, with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 25. Linguists speak of “aspect” to describe such verb forms. In the Palikur, for example, ig umehe kaybone means “he is killing the snake” (continuous action), but it could be said of an action in the past or the future. 26. The conversation cited here is reconstructed from notes made by LFG from DG’s live translations from Palikur as the journey progressed. Speech marks are used to delineate Kiyavwiye João’s words from our comments and explanatory notes. 27. See Moises Iaparrá 1997, ‘The raiders’ in Harold and Diana Green, Historical Narrative Texts in the Palikur Language. Unpublished manuscript, p. 116ff. Belem: SIL. 28. It was a habit among many storytellers to declare a story to be true (inyerwa) or not true (ka inyerwa) on conclusion of a tale. 29. File 2001-JUL-20c-uwet-creation.doc. 30. For a discussion of spatial grammar, see chapter 4. 31. See Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Pleiades and Scorpius in Barasana cosmology, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385 (1982):198–199; Neil L. Whitehead, Indigenous cartography in lowland South America and the Caribbean, in David Woodward and G Malcolm Lewis (eds.), The history of cartography, Vol. 3, Book 2: Cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic,

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Australian and Pacific societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 301–326. 32. File 2000-JUL-t00-sarisri-kurumsuk.doc. 33. See Silvia Vidal, The Arawak-speaking groups of northwestern Amazonia: Amerindian cartography as a way of preserving and interpreting the past, in Neil Whitehead (ed.), Histories and historicities in Amazonia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 33–57. 34. The story was told to us three times, by Paulo Orlando in 1997, by his son Nilo Martiniano in 2001, and by Tabenkwe Labonté in 2001. 35. The referentiality of the body in story map performances is echoed in the Palikur language, in which many of the spatial forms built into the language derive from body parts. Linguists Alexandra Aikhenvald and Diana Green note that “different body parts are grammaticalized as different kinds of classifiers. ‘Mouth’ and ‘hand’ become numeral classifiers . . . presumably due to the functional use of mouth and hand in measuring operations. ‘Head’ and ‘nose’ are grammaticalized as verbal and locative classifiers . . . ‘[b]one marrow’ became a specific locative classifier for roads and rivers.” Aikhenvald and Green, Palikur and the typology of classifiers, Anthropological Linguistics, 40, no. 3 (1998):429–480. 36. Diana M. Green, personal communication, August 2007. 37. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998):469– 488; Viveiros de Castro, Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): article 1; Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian perspectives, Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004):463–484. 38. Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging perspectives, 4. 39. File 2001-12b-Ishawet-flood.doc. 40. Martin Ball, “People speaking silently to themselves”: An examination of Keith Basso’s philosophical speculations on “sense of place” in Apache cultures, American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2002):460–478. 41. See Keith Basso, Wisdom sits in places: Notes on a Western Apache landscape, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds.), Senses of place (Santa Fe, NM: School of America Research Press, 1996). 42. Ibid., 109. 43. Ball, “People speaking silently to themselves,” 473. 44. One of these efforts was to explore virtual reality technologies for archiving the stories; see Lesley Green, Cultural heritage, archives and citizenship: Reflections on using Virtual reality for presenting different knowledge traditions in the public sphere, Critical Arts 21, no. 2 (2007):101–122. 45. File 2001-Jul-t13b-Ishawet-Karumna-Maywak.doc. 46. See Nancy N. Chen, Speaking nearby: A conversation with Trinh T. MinhHa, Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (1992):82–91.

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Chapter 3 1. A rich literature on Amerindian astronomy supported Claude Levi-Strauss’s four-volume Introduction to a Science of Mythology (New York: Harper and Row): Vol. 1, The Raw and the Cooked (1969); Vol. 2, From Honey to Ashes (1973); Vol. 3, The Origin of Table Manners (1978); and Vol. 4, The Naked Man (1981). Partly in consequence, astronomy occupies a central place in ethnographic research that was pursued in the lowlands and highlands of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, including Christine Hugh-Jones, From the Milk River: Spatial and temporal processes in northwest Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Pleiades and Scorpius in Barasana cosmology, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385 (1982):183–202; Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian cosmos: The sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); S. Hugh-Jones, Rainforest shamans: Essays on the Tukano Indians of the northwest Amazon (Devon: Themis Books, 1997); Marc de Civrieux, Watunna: An Orinoco creation cycle, ed. and trans. David M. Guss (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980 [1970]); Jean-Paul Dumont, Under the Rainbow: Nature and supernature among the Panare Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972); Gary Urton, At the crossroads of the earth and sky: An Andean cosmology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Anthony Aveni and Gary Urton (eds.), Ethnoastronomy and archaeoastronomy in the American tropics, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385 (1982):183–202; Stephen Michael Fabian, Space-time of the Bororo of Brazil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992); Fernando Santos-Granero, The dry and the wet: Astronomy, agriculture and ceremonial life in Western Amazonia, Journal de la Societé des Americanistes 78 (1992):107– 132; Wilbert, Johannes, and Karen Simoneau. 1992. Folk Literature of South American Indians: General Index. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, pp. 23–33; Edmundo Magaña, South American Ethno-astronomy. In Myth and the Imaginary in the New World (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Centro de Estudios e Documentación Latinoamericanos.1986), 399–426; Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy: Ethnohistorical and ethnographic notes, in Von Del Chamberlain, John B. Carlson, and M. Jane Young (eds.), Songs from the Sky: Indigenous astronomical and cosmological traditions of the world (Bognor Regis, UK: Ocarina Books, 2005 [1996]), 244–263; Fabiola Jara, Arawak constellations: A bibliographic survey, in Del Chamberlain, Carlson, and Young (2005 [1996]), 264–280; Peter Roe, Mythic substitution and the stars: Aspects of Shipibo and Quechua ethnoastronomy compared, in Del Chamberlain, Carlson, and Jane (2005 [1996]), 193–227; Philippe Descola (1996) In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Trans. Nora Scott. New York: Cambridge University Press; Browman and Schwarz (eds.), Spirits, shamans, and stars: Perspectives from South America (The Hague: Mouton, 1979); and Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu’s drum: An orientation to meaning in South American religions (New York:

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Macmillan, 1988). Surprisingly, given its centrality to Amerindian knowledges, astronomical research waned in lowland anthropology after the early 1990s. 2. Harold Green and Diana Green, personal communication, 2001. 3. File 2003-JUL-t22-davi-rainstars2.doc. 4. The kind of modernity in its place is well described by Artionka Capiberibe in her book on Palikur Christianity, Batismo de Fogo: Os Palikur e o Cristianismo (São Paulo: Annablume Editora, 2007). 5. His representation of the Old Ones as “flat earthers” is intriguing (and multilayered!). In modernist discourse, “flat earthers” has the obvious connotation of ignorance: pre-Enlightenment. Yet neither are the the layers of the cosmos necessarily concentric. See chapter 4, figure 21, for a description of interconnected layers with portals. 6. 2 Corinthians 12:1–4. Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. 7. Michel Serres, The birth of physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000 [1977]). 8. See Bruno Latour, Thou shalt not freeze-frame, or How not to misunderstand the science and religion debate, in On the modern cult of the factish gods (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2010), 99–123. 9. Michel Serres Los orígenes de la geometría [The origins of geometry], trans. Ana María Palos (Coyoacán, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1996 [1993]). 10. Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy, 257. 11. See, for example, Fabian, Space-time of the Bororo of Brazil; Roe, Mythic substitution and the stars; Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked; and LéviStrauss, From honey to ashes, among many others. 12. Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy, 256. 13. Kayeb and Kusuvwi are the most precise, in terms of heliacal risings. Uwet’s identification of Wayam is the least accurate (see the Wayam section later in this chapter) as Wayam rises farther toward the south. However, if Sirius and Canopus are seen as the Waratwi [Tucumã] Palms beside Wayam, then Wayam would be much closer to a heliacal rising, and Wayam would be rising in late July as per oral tradition. 14. See diagram of the path of the sun around the world in Roe, Mythic substitution and the stars, 197. 15. Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy. Elsewhere he references Gary Urton’s masterful At the crossroads of the earth and sky: An Andean cosmology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); it is not clear why he did not engage Urton’s work in this particular comment. 16. Urton, At the crossroads of the earth and sky. 17. Lux Vidal’s exhibition on Amerindian cosmologies in the Uaçá titled A presença do invisível opened at the Museu do Índio in 2007, to which we were honored to contribute. See Vidal, Povos Indígenas do Baixo Oiapoque: O encontro das águas, o encruzo dos saberes e a arte de viver (São Paulo: Iepé, 2007); Vidal, A

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presença do invisível na vida cotidiana e ritual dos povos indígenas do Oiapoque: O contexto de uma exposição, Ciência e Cultura 60, no. 4 (2008):45–47. 18. See Lesley Green and David Green, Kayeb: A constelação Anaconda bicéfala dos Palikur. Trans. Aurélio Simango. Unpublished paper prepared for the exhibition A presença do invisível: Vida cotidianae ritual entre os povos indígenas do Oiapoque (2006); Lux Vidal, Povos Indígenas do Baixo Oiapoque: O encontro das águas, o encruzo dos saberes e a arte de viver (São Paulo: Iepé, 2007). 19. File 2008-JUL-t03b-emiliano-spirits3.doc. 20. See Jara, Arawak constellations, 271. 21. See ibid., 271. The words describe the way the feathers are assembled: kamewgane would mean “clinging”; kavanyekhaki could mean “sprouting.” 22. File 2008-JUL-t13-sarisri-rainstars.doc. 23. See Colin McEwan, Seats of power: Axiality and access to invisible worlds, in Colin McEwan, Cristiana Barreto, and Eduardo Góes Neves (eds.), Unknown Amazon: Culture and nature in ancient Brazil (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 176–197. 24. Roe, Mythic substitution and the stars. 25. Curt Nimuendajú lists the same stars by their alternative names of Alpha and Beta Centauri as the poling stars (Nimuendajú, Die Palikur Indianer und ihre Nachbarn (Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1926), 128. 26. File 2003-JUL-t09-parakwayan-star-stories.doc 27. Diana Green observes that “the word ‘gimun’ can mean his (‘gi’) boat/ canoe, or his body, or his dwelling, or staying with someone e.g. staying with him in his house. There are two similar words in Palikur: gihmun means ‘his boat,’ gimun is a preposition ‘with him’ or ‘in his presence.” Diana M. Green, personal communication, August 2007. 28. File 2008-JUL-t07-uwet-night-stars.doc. 29. File 2003-JUL-t22-davi-rainstars2.doc. 30. See, for example, Jara, Arawak constellations, 271; Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked and From honey to ashes; C. Hugh-Jones From the Milk River; S. Hugh-Jones, The Pleiades and Scorpius; Magaña, South American ethnoastronomy; and Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy, among many others. 31. Roe, Mythic substitution and the stars, 213–214. 32. Jara 2005 [1996]. 33. File 2003-JUL-t09-Parakwayan-star-stories.doc. 34. File 2003-JUL-t16x-Ishawet-star-songs2.doc. 35. File 2003-JUL-t22-Davi-rainstars2.doc. 36. File 2008-JUL-t07-Uwet-night-stars.doc. 37. The question arose as Kiyavwiye Emiliano had identified the stars in the Delphinus constellation as the Master of Tavara (Tavara Akivara). 38. “Ig” means “he”; “igme” means “the other he,” indicating a change of the person about whom one is speaking. 39. Source file: 2008-JUL-t09-uwet-tavara.doc. 40. File 2003-JUL-t22-Davi-rainstars2.doc.

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41. File 2003_JUL-xx_Ishawet-stars.doc. 42. File 2008-JUL-t10-Uwet-masitwak.doc. 43. Jara, ibid. 44. File 2003-JUL-t22-Davi-rainstars2.doc. 45. File 2003-JUL-t09-parakwayan-star-stories.doc. 46. Levi-Strauss, From honey to ashes, 263–264. 47. Ibid., 266. 48. File 2000-MAY-xx-uwet-masitwak.doc. 49. File 2008-JUL-t10-uwet-masitwak.doc. 50. An understanding of the moon’s movements allowed people to predict coastal tides accurately when setting out downriver for the long river journey to Oiapoque, down the Rio Uaçá and out to sea, and then up into the Rio Oiapoque at its mouth. 51. File 2008-JUL-t03b-emiliano-spirits3.doc. 52. File 2003-JUL-t22-davi-rainstars2.doc. 53. File 2003-JUL-t16x-ishawet-star-songs2.doc. 54. File 2003-JUL-t22-davi-rainstars2.doc. 55. File 2003-JUL-xx-ishawet-stars.doc. 56. Longer versions speak of Mahuwkatye as the ancestor who killed his wife and tricked her family into eating her, and then escaped into the sky by shooting one arrow into the back of another to make a ladder into the sky. 57. Note that although this drama occurs midyear in the center of the sky, Awahwi rises in late March, in the middle of the rainy season. Kusuvwi Isamwitye is seen as the hero of the epic. 58. Urton, At the crossroads of the earth and sky. 59. Levi-Strauss, From honey to ashes, 269. Levi-Strauss also explores narratives of the origin of the Pleiades in The raw and the cooked, 241–245, but these narratives have little resonance to the stories along the Urucauá. 60. File 2005-dec-txx-Uwet-awahwi.doc. 61. File 2008-JUL- t06b-joao-wanawna.doc. 62. Fabian, Space-time of the Bororo of Brazil, 135. 63. File 2003-JUL-xx-Ishawet-stars.doc. 64. File 2008-JUL-t03b-Emiliano-spirits3.doc. 65. File 2003-Jul-t12b-Uwet-seasons-stars2-revised.doc. 66. File 2003-JUL- t22-Davi-rainstars2.doc. 67. File 2003-JUL-01x-Uwakti-stars.doc. 68. Noted by Jara, Arawak constellations; Magaña, Tropical tribal astronomy; S. Hugh-Jones, The Pleiades and Scorpius. 69. 2003-JUL-t03-balaweh-kwakhut.doc. 70. Latour, Thou shalt not freeze-frame. 71. Vidal, Povos Indígenas do Baixo Oiapoque; Vidal, A presença do invisível. 72. Capiberibe, Batismo de Fogo. 73. File 2008-JUL-t07-uwet-night-stars.doc.

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74. S. Hugh-Jones, The Pleiades and Scorpius, 187. 75. C. Hugh-Jones, From the Milk River, 238. 76. Helen Verran offers a critique of the idea that three dimensional space as a universal, in Science and an African Logic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), pp. 123–155 Chapter 4 1. Source: Vargas Machuca, Bernardo de, 1599. ‘A la espada y el compas, Mas y mas y mas y mas’ in Milicia y descripcion de las Indias. Madrid: En casa de Pedro Madrigal. 2. Note that the conquests of the era pushed the Caribs out of the West Indies, contributing to the Carib expansion and their wars with the Arawak, including the Palikur. See Neil L. Whitehead, Carib ethnic soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492–1820, Ethnohistory 37, no. 4 (1990):357–385. See also C. O. Frake, Cognitive maps of time and tide among medieval seafarers, Man 20 (1985):254–270. 3. The phrase comes from the title of Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of his voyage to the Guianas of South America. See Neil L. Whitehead, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Walter Ralegh (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). 4. See John Pickles, A history of spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world (London: Routledge, 2004); David Turnbull, Maps are territories; science is an atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); David Turnbull, Maps, narratives and trails: Performativity, hodology and distributed knowledges in complex adaptive systems—an approach to emergent mapping, Geographical Research 45 (2007):140–149. 5. See René Descartes, Discourse on method, optics, geometry and meteorology, rev. ed., trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2001 [1637]). 6. See Rene Descartes, Principle X: What space or internal place is, in Principles of Philosophy [1628], reprinted in The philosophical works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 1. 7. Maurice Sendak, Where the wild things are. (New York: Harper Collins, 1963). 8. Much as the moon appears large on rising or setting but small in the middle of the sky, the constellations, too, appear magnified near the horizon and contracted when overhead. 9. I am not arguing that Cartesian space does not have validity, nor am I seeking to offer “an insult to generations of geographers,” as the editor of one geographical journal described our already-accepted paper (now chapter 2) on indigenous geographies. (He removed the paper from the journal, notwithstanding the formal letter of acceptance.) The question that emerges here is how to grasp

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a perspectivist conceptualization of the cosmos, and then to ask how it might be possible to bring that into dialogue with modernist approaches to space and time. See David Rapport Lachterman, The ethics of geometry: A genealogy of modernity. (London: Routledge, 1989). 10. Diana M. Green has been a wonderful dialogue partner in linking these explorations with the linguistics of space in the Palikur language. I gratefully acknowledge her decades of thinking about the linguistics of Palikur numbers. about which she has written or published many papers on Palikur numerals. See the bibliography for details. 11. The semantic typology of the numeral classifiers has also been addressed in more detail in Aikhenvald and Green, Palikur and the typology of classifiers. Elsewhere Aikhenvald asserts that “Palikur has the world’s richest system of noun classification devices.” See Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Classifiers: A typology of noun classification devices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 535. 12. See Aikhenvald and Green, Palikur and the typology of classifiers. 13. Diana Green, The topological basis for shape classification in the Palikur language: Rethinking Euclidean dimensions as a reference for the classification of shape (unpublished manuscript, 2010). Quoted with permission. 14. Diana Green, Geometrical forms in the Palikur language: The importance of topology (unpublished manuscript, 2011). Quoted with permission. 15. See Isabelle Stengers, The cosmopolitical proposal, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making things public (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005); Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, trans. Robert Bononno (University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Bruno Latour, Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics: Comments on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck, Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004.):450–462. 16. The literature on this point is extensive. See James C. Scott, Seeing like a state (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Turnbull, Maps are territories; Turnbull, Maps, narratives and trails; J. B. Harley, Deconstructing the map, Cartographica 26 (1989):1–20; Pickles, History of spaces; Neil L. Whitehead, Indigenous cartography in lowland South America and the Caribbean, in D. Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (eds.), The history of cartography, Vol. 2, Book 3: Cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific societies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 301–326. 17. Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins, Grammars of space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 18. Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 19. Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of space, 550. 20. Ibid., 551. 21. Ibid., 570–575. 22. Ibid., 15.

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23. I use the term “Moderns” here in the sense that Bruno Latour uses it, in which “moderns” have never been modern. A summary of the arguments is in Latour, The recall of modernity, Cultural Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2007):11–30. 24. Tim Ingold’s account of his the development of his ideas is set out in Drawing together: Materials, gestures, lines, in Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds.), Experiments in ethnographic holism (2010). 25. Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (London: Routledge, 2000). 26. Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history (London: Routledge, 2007). 27. Ingold, Drawing together, 300–301. 28. David Guss, To weave and sing: art, symbol and narrative in the South American rain forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 29. Movement, color, and design are also intimately linked in Gerardo ReichelDolmatoff ’s account of Tukano shamans’ thought. See Reichel-Dolmatoff, Rainforest shamans: Essays on the Tukano Indians of the northwest Amazon (Devon, UK: Themis Books, 1997). 30. Husserl’s full text, plus Derrida’s introduction to it, is in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s origin of geometry: An introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1989). See also Peg Rawes, Space, geometry and aesthetics: Through Kant and towards Deleuze (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 154. 31. Rawes, Space, geometry and aesthetics, 157. 32. Ibid., 154. 33. Ibid., 157. 34. Ibid., 159. 35. Ibid., 163. 36. Even geometers call for this: David Hilbert and Stephan Cohn-Vossen introduce Geometry and the Imagination (trans. P. Nemenyi [New York: Chelsea, 1952]) with an attempt to step aside from the geometry of abstraction that focuses on logical relations, to a geometry based on a more “intuitive understanding [that] fosters a more immediate grasp of the objects one studies, a live rapport with them, so to speak, which stresses the concrete meaning of their relations.” Their text emphasizes the range of possibilities of mathematical understanding that can be gained from the visual—demonstrating complex geometrical thought with reference to visual images of structures, lattices and curves. 37. See Michel Serres, Los orígenes de la geometría, trans. Anna Maria Palos (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1996 [1993]). Serres comments on several of the ideas in that book in a dialogue with Bruno Latour, which has been translated into English. See Serres, Conversations on science, culture, and time, with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). His critique of the philosophy of geometry permeates The birth of physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000 [1977]) and The natural

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Notes to Pages 155–167

contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1995 [1990]). 38. Serres, Birth of physics, 46. 39. Serres, Natural contract. 40. In this regard, see Johannes Wilbert, The house of the swallow-tailed kite: Warao myth and the art of thinking in images, in Gary Urton (ed.), Animal myths and metaphors in South America (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 145–182. 41. The phrase “the three goddess sisters of reason in the knowledge economy” is from Bruno Latour, The recall of modernity, p.14. 42. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 43. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Vol. 1: Bubbles—microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 83–84. 44. Ibid., 87–88. Chapter 5 1. Bruno Latour, The recall of modernity, Cultural Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2007):11–30. 2. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. (anthropology) AND (science) (E. Viveiros de Castro) AND. Afterdinner speech at “Anthropology and Science, the 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain and Commonwealth, July 14, 2003. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Accessed July 1, 2013. http://nansi.abaetenet.net/abaetextos/anthropology-andscience-e-viveiros-de-castro. Accessed July 1, 2013. 3. Middle English Dictionary, available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/ mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED46784 (accessed October 20, 2011), emphases mine. 4. File 2003-Jul-t22-Davi-Rainstars2.doc. 5. File 2005-nov-txx-uwet-wanese-bees.doc. 6. File 2001-JAN-t14-uwet-flood.doc. 7. File 2001-JUL-t08c-Davi-Maye.doc. 8. File 2001-JUL-t05-ishawet-campfire.doc. 9. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere, Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February–March 1998, Hau Masterclass Series 1 (Manchester: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory), 113–114. 10. Louis Liebenberg, The art of tracking: The origin of science (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 29. 11. Ibid., v–vi. The interest in imagination and storytelling that illuminates Liebenberg’s introductory comments are subsumed by the language of data later in the book. As his argument gathers, tracking is translated into the language of

Notes to Pages 167–172

283

hypotheses, induction, and deduction, and the ways of knowing that are imagination, story, song, ritual, trance, becoming-animal, and dream-traveling in spaces other than those one’s body occupies, disappear. It is this relational sense of “tracking” that falls out of discussions where knowing must match science in order to be meaningful. 12. Rane Willerslev, Soul hunters: Hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 95. 13. Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological perspectivism, 59. 14. Ibid. 15. This theme is addressed in several popular science books by leading neuroscientists. See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions, emotions, and experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring people: The science of empathy and how we connect with others (New York: Picador, 2009); V. S. Ramachandran, The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human (New York: Norton, 2012). 16. Ramachandran makes this argument in a TED Talk titled “The neurons that shaped civilization” (available at http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran _the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html). Accessed July 1, 2012. See also Ramachandran, Mirror neurons and imitation as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution, EDGE: The third culture, http://www .edge.org /3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html. Accessed July 1, 2012. 17. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow and the feeling brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), 115–116. 18. Ibid., 117–118. 19. Ibid., 119. 20. Damasio’s discussion of drug-induced auditory and visual hallucination is worthy of further study in regards to shamanic use of hallucinogenics. 21. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, act III, scene I. 22. File 2001-JAN-t22-eduard-mahipoko.doc. 23. File 1997-May-txx-Uwet-Aragbus.doc. 24. File 2008-Jul-t09b-Ishawet-Wavaman.doc. 25. Diana Green, personal communication, March 2012. 26. Filename 2001-Sept-t02b-Afonso-War.doc. 27. File 2001-Jul-t12b-Ishawet karumna calls the lands.doc 28. File: 2003-Jul-01x-Uwakti-Stars.doc. 29. The conceptual significance of movement in Amerindian thought is apparent in Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff ’s observation that in the Tukano language in the Central Amazon, types of locomotion form the basis for the classification of animals. See Reichel-Dolmatoff, Desana animal categories: Food restrictions, and the concept of colour energies, in Rainforest shamans: Essays on the Tukano Indians of the northwest Amazon (Devon: Themis, 1997), 35.

284

Notes to Pages 172–182

30. File 2001-Jul-t13b-Ishawet-Karumna-Maywak.doc. 31. That conditions of historical truth have varied considerably in European archives over time is central to contemporary archive studies. See Neil White­ head, The discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful empyre of Guiana by Walter Ralegh (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); see also Francoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand, La cote d’Amapá, de la bouche de l’Amazone a la baie d’Oyapock, a travers la tradition orale Palikur, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi 3, no. 1 (1987):1–77; and M. Vandenbel and M. Cabral, The journal of Lourens Lourenszoon (1618–1625) and his stay among the Arocouros on the lower Cassiporé River, Amapá (Brazil). Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências humanas 4, no. 2 (May/Aug. 2009):1–26. 32. See Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 33. Isabelle Stengers, Book VII: The curse of tolerance, in Cosmopolitics II (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011), pp. 303–416. 34. Mario Blaser, Notes toward a political ontology of environmental conflicts, in Lesley Green (ed.), Contested ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2013). 35. Meera Nanda scathingly terms such an approach “epistemic charity,” though the sources for her critique are wholly different from those offered here. See Nanda, Prophets facing backwards (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 36. This extract was published in an earlier article in English translation only. It was translated from a video recording that, at the time of writing, was untraceable. See Lesley Green, David Green, and Eduardo Góes Neves, Indigenous knowledge and archaeological science: The challenges of public archaeology in the Reserva Uaçá, Journal of Social Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2003):366–397. Chapter 6 1. Peter Sloterdijk, 2011. Mario Blaser offers a comparable argument in Storytelling globalization from the Chaco and beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 2. Isabelle Stengers, 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 3. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2003. 4. File 2001-JUL-t23c-floriano-kwap.doc. 5. See Neil L. Whitehead, Carib ethnic soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492–1820, Ethnohistory 37, no. 4 (1990):357–385. 6. See Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha, Ocupações pré-coloniais no Setor Costeiro Atlântico do Amapá. In Edithe Pereira; Vera Guapindaia (eds.), Arqueologia Amazônica (Belem, 2010) vol. 1, p. 50–60.

Notes to Pages 182–185

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7. Neil Whitehead’s work on dark shamanism—assault sorcery—in these parts locates it at least in part as an assertion of native autonomy and describes some Amerindian forms of Christianity as potent ways to ward off its threats. His work is an important corrective to accounts of shamans and witches that focus only on their work in relation to wellbeing. Whitehead, Dark shamans: Kanaima and the poetics of violent death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 128. 8. See Charles Alexander Harris (ed.), A relation of a voyage to Guiana by Robert Harcourt 1613 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1926), pp. 58–59. For commentary on the Catholic encounter with Amerindians, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The inconstancy of the Indian soul: The encounter of Catholics and cannibals in 16th-century Brazil. Trans. Gregory Duff Morton. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2011. 9. These include a similarity in the name attached to the anaconda (in Warao, Mawari; in Palikur, Waramwi); and a similarity in the tales of the Kurumsuk as people with red faces who abducted locals, among others. See Johannes Wilbert, The house of the swallow-tailed kite: Warao myth and the art of thinking in images, in Gary Urton (ed.), Animal myths and metaphors in South America (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 145. 10. Ibid., 146. 11. Robert Harcourt’s account of the English attempt at settlement in Guiana in the year 1609 makes mention of narratives of people with enormous ears: “Certain daies iourney [aboue the firft falles of the Wiapoco (Oiapoque)] . . . there is a Natio¯ of Chaibes hauing great eares of an extraordinary bignes, hard to bee beleeued” (ibid., 109), and adds that “it feemeth there bee many Nations of thofe great eared people: for in the Riuer of Marrawini I heard also of the like, who dwell farre vp towards the high land” (110). 12. File 2000-JUL-t09-yuka-kurumsuk. 13. Francoise Grenand, and Grenand, Pierre (1987). La cote d’Amapá, de la bouche de l’Amazone a la baie d’Oyapock, a travers la tradition orale Palikur. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi 3, no. 1:1–77. 14. It is interesting to note that fisher-gatherers’ sites elsewhere in the Guianas range from 7000 BP to 1000 BP. Stéphen Rostain, The archaeology of the Guianas: An overview. In Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell (eds.), Handbook of South American archaeology (New York: Springer, 2008), 280. At a sambaqui near Santarém in the Amazon basin, Anna Roosevelt and colleagues obtained dates ranging from 7700 BP to 4300 BP. A. C. Roosevelt, R. A. Housley, M. Imazio da Silveira, S. Maranca, and R. Johnson, Eighth millennium pottery from a prehistoric shell midden in the Brazilian Amazon, Science 254, no. 5038 (1991):1621–1624; see also Maria Dulce Gaspar and Maura Imazio, Os pescadores-coletores-caçadores do litoral norte Brasileiro, in Maria Cristina Tenório (ed.), Pré-história da terra Brasilis (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio

286

Notes to Pages 185–188

de Janeiro, 2000) and David Hammond, Tropical Forests of the Guiana Shield (Oxfordshire: CABI, 2005, p. 388). While sea levels changed in this time due to the end of the ice age, there is an additional factor at play in these coastal lowlands, and that is that they are constantly being formed by silt depositions from the Amazon River, borne by the Guiana Current that runs northwest along the Atlantic Coast. Hammond describes the landform along the Guiana Coast as “Recent Coastal Plains” lying from 10 m below to 10 m above sea level: Along the Atlantic coast between the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers, a narrow plain of flat, low-lying sediments extends up to 80km inland from the present day coastline. . . . These areas are subject to daily tidal oscillations extending many kilometres upstream. . . . the Recent Coastal Plains rarely rise higher than 10 m asl [above sea level] and the vast majority of this landform . . . is subject to tidal submersion. The coastal belt consists of a series of unconsolidated clay and silt layers deposited over the past 10 000 years. . . . These represent the current land-building front between the built-up coastal backlands and open marine environment of the coastal shelf. . . . The ejection of sediment from the many rivers draining the shield interior and spilling their sediment load directly into the Atlantic has compounded deposition, creating localized sediment “bulges” on the seaward side of the major rivers (Hammond, Tropical forests of the Guiana Shield, pp. 44–45). Hammond’s account of the effect of silt depositions on regional landscape suggests a possibility that there is a long cultural memory in play in the Palikur account of Wakayri Mountain having been out at sea a long time ago, and the insistence that the higher landforms have “floated in from the sea and collided” with terra firma over time (chapter 2). 15. Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha, Paisagens megalíticas na costa norte do Amapá, Revista de Arqueologia 21 (2008):9–26. 16. Emílio A. Goeldi, Excavações archeologicas em 1895. Executadas pelo Museu Paraense no Littoral da Guyana Brazileira entre Oyapock e Amazonas. 1ª Parte: As cavernas funerárias artificiaes de Índios hoje extinctos no Rio Cunany (Goanany) e sua ceramica. Belém: Museu Paraense de História Natural e Ethnographia, 1900. (Memórias do Museu Goeldi, I). 17. See Colin McEwan, Cristiana Barreto, and Eduardo Góes Neves (eds.), Unknown Amazon: Culture and nature in ancient Brazil (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 176–197. 18. See Eduardo goes Neves, Arqueologia da Amazonia. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2006; Eduardo Goes Neves, The relevance of Curt Nimuendajui’s archaeological work, in Per Stenborg and Stig Ryden (eds) In Pursuit of a Past Amazon. Goteborg, Sweden: Museum of World culture, 2004, v45, p. 2–8. 19. Harold Green and Diana Green, Historical narrative texts—Palikur. Unpublished collection. Belém: Sociedade Internacional de Linguistica, 1996.

Notes to Pages 190–232

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20. See Cabral and Saldanha, Ocupações pré-coloniais. 21. File 1997-May-txx-uwet-aragbus.doc. 22. The reference is to a place at Aragbus where clay or stone structures act like a sound-capture dish, so you can hear sounds far away. Uwet says people made them of batak (clay). 23. Some of the complexities of exploring this site, defined in archaeological narratives as a sambaqui, are detailed in Lesley Green, David Green, and Eduardo Góes Neves, Indigenous knowledge and archaeological science: The challenges of public archaeology in the Reserva Uaçá, Journal of Social Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2003):366–397. 24. See Lesley Green, Archaeologies of intellectual heritage, in Post Colonialism, Ethics and Archaeology, ed. Cristobal Gnecco and Larry Zimmerman. Springer. Forthcoming. 25. File 2001-JUL-t13c-xonkwoy-stories.doc. 26. Kiyavuno Tivuw appears in several stories. Among them, she raised Kwahra, the guardian of the Arukwa River and the portal to the Painted Catfish Lake. 27. File 2008-JUL-t00b-uwet-war.doc. 28. In several versions, the brother returns to his sister’s body several times, seeing more and more larvae (maggots), which mature into the Galibi people. 29. File 2000-JUL-t00-ida-kurumsuk.doc. 30. File 2001-JUL-t00x-floriano-uraka-hiye. 31. Francoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand, La Côte d’Amapá, de la Bouche de l’Amazone a la Baie d’Oyapock, a travers la tradition orale Palikur, Boletim do Museu Emílio Goeldi 3, no. 1 (1987):1–77. 32. File 2001-JUL-t00x-floriano-uraka-hiye.doc. 33. Mariana Cabral, personal communication, 2008. 34. File 2001-JUL-t00x-floriano-uraka-hiye.doc. 35. Whitehead, Dark shamans. 36. File 2008-JUL-t04b-uwet-war.doc. 37. File 2001-JUL-t14c-ishawet-parup.doc. 38. A reference to the photograph of Parup in Curt Nimuendajú’s 1926 volume on the Palikur, which we had brought with us. 39. File 2008-JUL-t11-ishawet-kakuw.doc. 40. File 2008-JUL-t03-uwet-kwap.doc. 41. File 2008-JUL-t03-uwet-kwap.doc. 42. File 2008-JUL-t08b-ishawet-arukwa.doc. 43. In another day’s storytellings, Ishawet explained that the shaman who closed his access to the world had led Kuwahra to Tinukrimnaw, the Lake of the Painted Catfish. File 2008-JUL-t13b-tabehkwe-kwahra2 44. File 2008-JUL-t21-sarisri-masitwak.doc. 45. File 2008-JUL-t00b-uwet-uruku.doc. 46. File 2001-JAN-txx-uwet-makawem.doc. 47. 2008_JUL-t11x-ishawet-makawem.doc.

288

Notes to Pages 233–257

48. See Marisol de la Cadena, 2012. Dialogues on the Reconstitution of Worlds, Sawyer Seminar Proposal, University of California at Davis. http://sawyer seminar.ucdavis.edu/files/2012/01/Sawyer_Seminar_Proposal.pdf, accessed May 1, 2013. 49. Harry Garuba, On animism, modernity/colonialism and the African order of knowledge: Privisional reflections. In Lesley Green (ed) contested Ecologies: Dialouges in the south on nature and knowledge. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2013. 50. Peter Sloterdijk, 2011. 51. Thanks to Artwell Nhemachena for discussions on this theme. Epilogue 1. See Cristobal Gnecco and Patricia Ayala, Indigenous peoples and archaeology in Latin America (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011). 2. See Shepherd, N., N. Lahiri, J. Watkins and L. Zimmerman (2007) Virtual Forum: Archaeology and Decolonization. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(3): 390–412; and Shepherd, N. (2003). ““When the hand that holds the trowel is black”; disciplinary practices of self-representation and the issue of “native” labour in archaeology,” Journal of Social Archaeology 3(3): 334–352. 3. See Helen Verran, Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward doing difference generatively and in good faith in L. Green (ed.), Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press). 4. See Carlo Ginzburg and Anna Davin, 2013. Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method. History Workshop 9 (Spring, 1980), pp. 5–36. 5. “Uwewten” means the thing that one travels on, in Kiyaptunka, the old language of respect and ceremony which does not name things directly but names its action, one’s usage of it, or its intention. 6. Diana Green notes (pers. comm.): “Termites and wasps feature often in stories. The choice of insects is noteworthy: termites are tree-based creatures that can go to the upper world. Wasps can fly, and for this reason also serve as creatures between worlds.” 7. The rope referred to here is possibly kuriwru: a strong copper-like cord which can bind forever. It features in several Palikur stories. 8. The wagayri lizards live on both ground and in trees. In English they are called whiptail lizards or racerunners because of the great speed at which they run (especially when courting) and because they have long tails that they whip about. Hunters here rub the lizards on the noses of their dogs to make them better hunters, similar to the Makawem nose treatment earlier in the story. 9. Note that he asks for water but is given manioc beer, as manioc beer is water to the creatures he is with.

Notes to Pages 261–263

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10. The karuw firefly emits a reddish light, like fire. 11. The word “avatakni” means a seam or a meeting place. From the word patiptak “to meet” and hawkri avatakni “the meeting of the worlds, or the seam of the world.” 12. Thanks to Isabelle Stengers for pointing out the possibilities for thinking with this story. (pers.com). 13. The cited phrases here are from a personal communication (July 2013), and reflect a recurring theme in Stengers, The Curse of Tolerance, p. 371. 14. Isabelle Stengers, (2011c). Another science is possible! A plea for slow science. Inaugural lecture of the Willy Calewaert Chair 2011–2012; Vrije Universiteit Brussel, December 13, 2011. 15. See p. 351, Isabelle Stengers, 2011. The curse of tolerance. Book VII in Cosmopolitics II. Trans. Robert Bonon. Milwaukee: Minnesota University Press. 16. Helen Verran, 2013.

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In d ex

Page references in italics refer to photographs. ba pi ay (are you here?), 22, 28, 29, 41, 44, 263 Bach, Johan Sebastian, 153 Balaweh Tumeh Labonté, 81, 86, 134–136 Ball, Martin, 70 Basso, Keith, 70 bawbaax, 31 Being, 179, 180, 239, 243, 262 belief/knowledge dualism, 78, 91, 168 binaries in modernist thought. See dualisms Blaser, Mario, 20, 173 bodies, transformation of, 40–41, 142–160, 165–166, 173–176 bodily presence, 45, 50 body consciousness, 233–237, 244. See also perspectivism bomber US B-26, 1, 3, 5, 163–64, 67, 265n1 Brasil + 500 Mostra de Redescobrimento, 10, 18 Buyomin (Guillaume), 125, 220

adukwenewa (in the tracks of), 169, 170–172 Afonso Iôiô, 1, 3, 60, 170 Amekenegben era of, 52 Amerindian: cosmology, 75–78, 89, 158, 184. See also rain star cycle; geography, 66; history, 29, 51–59, 124–125; perspective, 243 anaconda (Awahwi, Kayeb), 6, 44, 46, 51, 63, 67, 74, 79, 80, 83, 85, 92, 95–100, 109, 111, 112, 126, 138, 141, 144, 157, 158, 163, 174, 180, 181–182, 183, 197, 198, 199–200, 217, 231; woodcarvings, 97, 158 ancestor tracking, 161, 174–176 anthropological research, 24 archaeological artefacts, 6–7, 8–9, 11–13, 242 archaeological research, rethinking, 24 archaeology, 6–14; public, 7, 13–14, 16, 21–22, 30, 40, 52, 177, 179, 241, 263; translation of concept, 7–8, 10, 23, 161 Aristé ceramics, 187 artefacts, 6–7, 8–9, 11–13, 242. See also urns astronomical narratives, 79–141 astronomy, 14, 17, 18, 23, 29, 162, 243; Amerindian, 79–141 autobiography, 51, 63 Avelino Labonté, 7, 51 Awahwi (three-headed anaconda), 109, 125, 126, 127. See also anaconda axtigs (predators), 52–53, 181–182

Cabral, Mariana, 187 Capiberibe, Artionka, xiii, 136, 265, 272n4, 276n4 Capiberibe, Janete, 35 Capiberibe, João, 35 Caribs (Galibi), war with, 52, 56, 180, 188–214 Cartography, xi, 58–60, 142, 148, 153, 162, 238, 243 ceramic style, Aristé, 8–9, 9, 25, Césaire, Aimé, 21

303

304

Index

Chomsky, Noam, 157 Christianity, 35, 37–40, 53, 91, 86–87, 91, 172, 285. See also Kumene Assembly of God church chronology, xi, 52, 57, 59, 60, 148, 162, 243 citizenship, 38 colonialism, impact of, 18, 175 community, 22, 40 consciousness, 67–68 consubjectivity, 142, 159, 178, 180, 239, 244, 263 cosmology, 21, 23, 68, 143, 148; Amerinidian, 75–78, 89, 158, 184. See also rain star cycle cosmopolitics, 21, 24, 57, 143 crossings, night sky, 120, 125 Damasio, Antonio, 168 de la Cadena, Marisol, 20, 237 Derrida, Jacques, 155 Descartes, René, 143, 147, 157, 167 dualism in modernist thought: belief/ knowledge, 78, 91, 168; nature/ culture, 4, 16, 20, 21, 31, 57, 79, 143, 168, 262; past/present, 57; space/time, 21, 237, 241; subject/ object, 4, 21, 57 Dussel, Enrique, 5 Dutch, war with, 208–214, 213 eggutye constellation (older brother), 109, 110, 126, 138–140 electricity, impact, of 32–34 embodied intellect, 169 Emiliano Iaparrá, 18, 60, 95, 97, 119–123, 130–132 Enlightenment, 4, 30, 145, 159 enthoastronomy, xi, 5, 17, 19 Escher, M. C., 152, 153, 243 Escobar, Arturo, 20 ethnicity, 11, 35, 39, 176 ethnohistory, xv, 5, 17, 57, 173 Euclid, 143, 147, 157 Evans, Clifford, 58, 186 excavation, 178–179, 241–242

Fabian, Johannes, 15 Fairall, Tony, 81 Fanon, Franz, 5 Fausto, Carlos, 4 field research, 14, 16, 17, 22, 224, 28, 31, 55, 89, 241, 242, 262 Flood, 53, 64, 70, 92. See also Tavara Floriano Iôiô, 43–44, 51, 57, 76, 180–183, 212–214, 215–220 Funari, Pedro, 7 Gabral, Mariana Petry, 186–7 Galibi, war with, 52, 56, 180, 188–214 Galileo Galilei, 154 Garuba, Harry, 238 geography, xi, 14, 17, 18, 66, 72, 161, 243; Amerindian, 66 geometry, xi, 148, 154–155, 162, 243; cultural, 148, 154–155; Euclidean, 23, 29, 147, 148; of space, 23, 143, 148, 153 gidukwankis (their tracks), 169, 172 Goeldi, Emilio, 6, 186, 187 Gow, Peter, 46 Green, David, xiii, 5–7, 11, 12, 14, 17, 21, 29, 33, 35, 38, 46, 51, 55, 56–59, 62, 63, 81, 86–91, 98, 126, 152, 161, 176, 229, 232, 241, 236, 263 Green, Diana, 23, 42, 57, 58, 79, 145–147, 150, 170–171, 188 Green, Harold, 42, 58, 79, 150, 188, greeting, 22, 28, 50 Grenand, Francoise, 58, 186, 214 Grenand, Pierre, 58, 186, 214 Guapindaia, Vera, 186 Guss, David, 153–154 Haraway, Donna, 14, 262 Harcourt, Robert, 184 hawkri (day, world, situation), 64–65, 152, 155, 157. See also hiyak hawkri Heckenberger, Michael, 4, 187 heliacal rising, 82, 92 Herman, Edward S., 157 Hilbert, Peter Paul, 186

Index history, xi, 11, 4, 7, 11, 12, 14–10, 154, 157, 161, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 238, 239, 241, 243; Amerindian, 29, 51–59, 124–125; ethno-, xv, 5, 17, 57, 173 HIV debate, South Africa, 19 hiyak hawkri (knowing the day/world), 16, 22, 41–45, 49, 64, 71, 156–157, 179, 238, 233 hiyapni hene (to see and decide), 44, 45, 157, 173, 239, 263 hospitality, ontological, 5, 20–21, 90 Hugh-Jones, Christine, 141 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 141 Husserl, Edmund, 154, 155 Ida Iôiô, 210–212 identity, 34–35, 39, 40 indigenous knowledge, 15, 19, 40, 243, 262 Ingold, Tim, 19, 72, 151 interactions, 243 intersubjectivity, 40, 153 isamwitye constellation (younger brother), 109, 110, 126, 138–140, 278 Ishawet Tumeh Labonté, 69–70, 72–75, 76, 86, 88, 90, 124–125, 139, 165, 170, 172, 176, 220–235 Ivailto Gomes, xiv, xv, 7, 49, 51, 58, 215–220 Jackson, Michael, 17 jaguar, 68, 74, 97–99, 114, 164, 220, 222–225 Jesus, 36, 75, 87, 231 João Batista, 29 João Felicio, 60, 63, 64, 64, 71, 87, 114–115, 126–128 Judah Labonté, 81, 88, 97 Kant, Immanuel, 157, 167 Karumayra dancing, 152 Karumna Mountain, 68–75 Kayeb (constellation, two-headed anaconda), 67, 79, 81–82, 92,

305

95–100, 97, 104, 125, 129, 133, 134, 137–140. See also anaconda Kiyaptunka language, 73–75, 78, 136, 246, 288 Kiyavunka language, 73–75, 78, 134, 136, 214 knowing, 17, 22, 54, 178 knowledge, 22, 31, 45. See also Archaeology, Astronomy, Cartography, Geography, Geometry, History; cultural, 18; Euro-American philosophies of, 30; relational vs representational, 54–55, 56; translation, 243 knowledge/belief dualism, 78, 91, 168 Kumene Assembly of God church, 35, 37–39, 186. See also Christianity Kusuvwi (torrents), 92, 109–128, 110, 199–201 Kwahra (anaconda), 181, 231. See also anaconda kwak (manioc meal), 32 Kwap, 23–24, 27; as link with dead, 229–231; as place of dread, 185, 238; as place of survival, 233, 238; songs at, 233–236; sorcery in, 220–228; stories, 180–236 landscape, remembering, 67 language, ceremonial (Kiyavunka), 73–75, 78, 134, 136, 214 language, spatiality in, 148–153 Latour, Bruno, 5, 20, 21, 30, 39, 54, 57, 78, 91, 161, 173 Law, John, 30 Lega Labonté, 51, 60 Leon Orlando, 210 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 5, 15 Levinson, Stephen C., 149, 150 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 113, 125 Liebenberg, Louis, 166–167 Lima, Tania Stolze, 40 linguistics, 145, 148–149, 155. See also Palikur language Lohai Labonté, 1, 3 Luciano Batista, 51

306

Index

Machuca, Vargas, 142, 153 Magaña, Edmundo, 91, 93 Mahuwkatye (legless man constellation), 109–112, 124, 125, 278 Makawem, 233, 244–261, 263 maps, 58–59, 142, 153, 243; story, 66–67 Marcelo Ioiô, 79–80 Masitwak, 71–72, 87, 108, 152, 232 massage, 45–46, 152–153, 275–276n35 Mateus (Mateh) Emilio Batista, 36, 79–80 Meggers, Betty, 58, 186 Milky Way (World’s River), 92, 95, 97, 107, 109, 120, 125, 129, 133, 137–141, 144, 156, 177 Miqueas Felicio, 60 modernist thought (Modernity), 4, 21, 30, 31, 54, 55, 78, 159, 160, 168, 238, 243. See also dualisms movement, 23; ordering spatial information, 23, 51–78; of constellations, 79–14 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 35 narratives. See stories and storytelling nature, 5, 23, 29, 30, 31, 54, 68, 71, 91, 137, 143, 148, 154, 155, 166, 173, 179, 180, 238, 261, 263 nature/culture dualism, 4, 16, 20, 21, 31, 57, 79, 143, 168, 262 networks, importance of, 32, 34 neuroscience, 167–168 Neves, Eduardo Góes, 7, 11, 18, 26, 187, 241, 266 Newton, Isaac, 147, 157 Nimuendajú, Curt, 6, 58, 186 nurik, 48, 72, 75, 88, 104, 137, 152, 156, 172, 229, 231, 232, 233–234 Oakdale Suzanne, 45 objectivity, 22, 49, 90, 159 originary narrative, 53 Othering, 3–4, 5, 19, 173, 243 Palikur language: adukwenewa, 169, 170–172; form and spatiality in, 23,

143, 144, 145, 149–150, 152–153; gidukwankis, 169, 172; hiyak hawkri, 16, 22, 41–45, 49, 64, 71, 156–157, 179, 238, 233; hiyapni hene, 44, 45, 157, 173, 239, 263 ; Kiyaptunka, 73–75, 78, 136, 246, 288; Kiyavunka, 73–75, 78, 134, 136, 214; kwak, 32; origin of, 214–218; wages, 163–165, 173–174 Palikur stories. See stories Parakwayan Eudoxia Iôiô, 61–63, 98, 100–101, 112–113, 169 parikwene (Amerindians), 34–35, 186, 210, 214 Parup, Parupmin (shaman), 61, 174, 220, 224–229 partial connections, 179, 180, 238, 262, 283n11 past/present duality, 57 patrimony, 11, 12, 15, 178, 187, 237 Paulo Orlando, 1, 51 personhood, 22, 30, 35, 41, 49 perspectivism, 23, 68, 173–174, 176 Peterson, Jim, 187 Pinzon, Vincente Yañez, 172 postcoloniality, 16, 19, 262 posthumanities, 30 postmodernism, 14, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30 predation, 231–233, 238, 239 presence, 22, 23, 28–29, 30, 31, 41 45, 50, 55–56, 64–65, 78, 178, 262, 243 public archaeology, 7, 13–14, 16, 21– 22, 30, 40, 52, 177, 179, 241, 263 Pupta Paraymeyano, 86, 88–89, 124 rain star cycle, 79–141 Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., 168 Rappaport, Joanne, 53 rationality, 23, 57, 238 Rawes, Peg, 154 reality, 54, 263 reciprocities, 239 relational: cosmos, 243; knowing, 54–55; ontology, 159, 160 relationalities, 30, 90 relationships, importance of, 32, 34 relativism, 173, 263

Index remembering, 65, 67, 86, 141, 143– 144, 179 representation, 40, 159 Rival, Laura, 45 Roe, Peter, 96, 97 Roosevelt, Anna, 9, 187 Rostain, Stéphen, 186 Roué Marie, 15 Saldana, João de Moura, 187, 267 Saming, 4, 243, 263 Sans, Sansmin, 63, 174, 220, 224–229 Santos-Granero, Fernando, 45, 56 Sarisri Davi Espirito Santo, 43, 66, 76, 82–85, 86, 96, 99–100, 101, 106– 108, 110–112, 123–124, 132–133, 163–164, 188–190, 232 Sawfish, Master of, 231 science, 12, 15, 19, 49, 243, 262, 263 Second Coming, 34, 36 Serres, Michel, 90, 155 shamans, 2, 22, 42, 43, 47, 48, 52, 53, 62, 82, 87, 88, 104, 105, 11, 115, 119, 126, 167, 169, 174, 183, 184, 202, 210, 220–229, 239; anthropologists as, 22, 239; battle of Parupmin and Sansmin, 220–229; era of, 52, 53 shape markers in Palikur language, 23, 145–146, 280nn11–14 sky, earth and underworld, integration of, 23, 79–141 slave raids, era of, stories, 52 Sloterdijk, Peter, 159–160, 180, 239 soccer, 35–40 social constructionism, 30 solstices, 92, 93, 94, 137 songs, 233–236 space: as movement in, 143, 149, 151– 152, 155; Cartesian, 23, 143, 147, 242; concept of, 23; consubjective, 159, 178; geometry of, 23, 143, 148, 153; in Palikur language, 143, 144, 145, 149–150, 152–153; interactional, 59; linguistics of, 145–147; remembering, 143–144 space/time dualisms, 21, 237, 241

307

spatiality in language, 148–153 spatiotemporality, 23, 59, 64, 143, 155–156, stars, annual cycle of, 95–136; First Rain Kayeb (anaconda), 92, 95–100; Second Rain Tavara (kingfisher), 100–105, 102; Third Rain Uwakti, 105–109, 106; Fourth Rain (Brothers), 109–128, 110, 127; Fifth Rain Wayam (land tortoise), 128–136, 130; interpretation of, 136–137 Stengers, Isabelle, 16, 17, 30, 54, 57, 173, 180, 243, 262 stories: actions and interactions in, 2–3, 59–60; advisory role of, 53; anaconda, 181–183; as performance, 65–67, 78, 177; axtig, 181–182; Kwap, 180–236; Makawem, 244–261, 263; navigation in, 23; personhood and presence in, 31; propositional aspect of, 53; spatiotemporality in, 59, 64; timeline in, 52; tracking, 51–78, 161; transformative nature of, 78; versions of, 56; war with the Dutch, 208–214, 213; war with Galibi, 180–183, 188–214 story maps, 66–67 story trekking, 56 storytelling: as tracking, 61–65; dialogics of, 55 subject/object dualisms, 4, 21, 57 subjectivity, 28, 30, 35, 40, 41, 49, 50, 68, 145–153, 154, 157, 159 Summer Institute of Linguistics (Sociedade Internacional de Linguística, SIL), 3, 80 symmetrical anthropology, 161–162 Tabehkwe Manoel Labonté, 7, 26, 57, 67, 188 Tavara (kingfisher constellation), 79, 81, 83, 85, 92, 95, 100–105, 102, 137–141, 163, 199–201 three skies, 75, 87 thunder, 120, 123

308

Index

time: concept of, 10, 16, 17, 23–24, 28–30, 32, 34, 41, 57, 59–60, 64, 72, 78, 91, 143–145, 148, 150–157, 241–243, 262–263; past, 177–240; telling, 61 topology, 23, 142–160 Torres, Nelson Maldonado, 5, 39 tracking, 23, 166–1679 172–174, 239–240, 242–243, 263 tracks, interpretation of, 243–243, 263 translation, 162–166, 169, 178, 237–238 turé (bamboo flute) ceremony, 36, 37, 38 Turnbull, David, 17 underworld (Waympiye), 23, 62, 63, 64, 71–75, 78, 87, 92–93, 98, 137, 144, 156, 169, 174–175, 178, 183–184, 231 upperworld (Inurik), 48, 72, 75, 88, 104, 137, 152, 156, 172, 229, 231, 232, 233–234 urns, 6, 10–14, 16, 125, 187, 191, 196, 208, 219–220 Urton, Gary, 93, 125 uruku (werewolf), 187, 188, 232 Uwakti, constellation, 86, 92, 105–109, 106, 133–134, 171 Uwakti Labonté, 13, 67, 86, 134, 272n15 Uwet Manoel Antônio dos Santos, 1, 3, 6, 16, 22, 43, 46–49, 98–99, 101–105, 108–109, 114, 115–119, 125–126, 137–141, 158, 164, 170, 187, 191–199, 202–210, 220, 229, 230–231, 232–233 Vera Labonté, 51 Verran, Helen, 16, 55, 243 Vidal, Lux, 265n4, 276n16, 277n17

Vidal, Sylvia, 66 Vilaça, Aparecida, 40 Viveiros de Castro Eduardo, 52, 40, 41, 57, 68, 162, 165, 167 vulture two-headed (Makawem), 100, 232–236, 238, 244–261 wages (to turn around or into), 163–165, 173–174 Waramwi (anaconda), 197–201 Warão narratives, 184 Wassey, Brice, 153 Wayam (land tortoise), 92, 126–137, 130, 144 Waympiye, 23, 62, 63, 64, 71–75, 78, 87, 92–93, 98, 137, 144, 156, 169, 174–175, 178, 183–184, 231 Wayos, 202 Weibel, Peter, 21, 39 Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 7, 14, 52 Western perspective, 243 Whitehead, Neil, 184 whistles, clay, 190, 191–197, 191 Wilbert, Johannes, 184, Wilkins, David, 149, 150 Willerslev, Rane, 167, 168 words, rethinking of, 241, 243 World’s River (Milky Way), 92, 95, 97, 107, 109, 120, 125, 129, 133, 137–141, 144, 156, 177 woodcarvings, 93–94, 96, 97, 102, 106, 110, 127, 130, 158 Xele Martim, 1, 3 Xikoi Norino (Nilo Martiniano), 33, 37, 58 Xonkoy, 199–201, 202 Y2K, 34, 36 Yuka Iôiô, 76, 185–186, 187