The Amazonian Puzzle: Ethnic Positionings and Social Mobilizations 9781805390916

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The Amazonian Puzzle

THE AMAZONIAN PUZZLE Ethnic Positionings and Social Mobilizations   

Véronique Boyer Translated by Precious Brown

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Véronique Boyer All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boyer-Araújo, Véronique, 1960- author. | Brown, Precious, translator. Title: The Amazonian puzzle: ethnic positionings and social mobilizations / Véronique Boyer; translated by Precious Brown. Other titles: Puzzle amazonien. English | Ethnic positionings and social mobilizations Description: New York: Berghahn, 2024. | Original title: Le puzzle amazonien: positionnements ethniques et mobilisations sociales. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023018548 (print) | LCCN 2023018549 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390909 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390916 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Caboclos (Brazilian people)—Brazil—Amazonas—Ethnic identity. | Amazonas (Brazil)—Ethnic relations. | Race—Social aspects— Brazil—Amazonas. | Race—Political aspects—Brazil—Amazonas. | Group identity—Brazil—Amazonas. | Spirit possession—Brazil—Amazonas. Classification: LCC F2659.C32 B6813 2024 (print) | LCC F2659.C32 (ebook) | DDC 305.800981/13—dc23/eng/20230524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018548 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018549 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80539-090-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-374-0 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-091-6 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390909

Contents   

Foreword by Peter Wade Acknowledgments Introduction

vi xiii 1

Chapter 1. Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”

13

Chapter 2. Personal Experiences in the Service of Collective Projects

31

Chapter 3. Local Populations as Caboclos: The Difficult Naming of a Social Formation

45

Chapter 4. The Caboclo, a Protean Notion: “Traditional Populations” versus Invisible Beings

61

Chapter 5. The Implicit Nature of the Caboclo: Or How to Conceive the “Mixture”

79

Chapter 6. The “Mixture” and Its “Matrices”: Race through the Prism of Culture

96

Conclusion

112

References

122

Index

131

Foreword   

Peter Wade

This book is many things—an ethnographic account of a locality in northern Brazil, an examination of the relationship between religion and politics, a critique of multiculturalist and identity politics, an account of social mobilization. Given my own interests, I take it as also being an intriguing and insightful exploration of ideas about (race) mixture—commonly called mestizaje in Spanish and mestiçagem or miscigenação in Portuguese. To achieve this, Véronique Boyer has used material drawn from her extensive ethnographic experience with Brazilian people often labeled by others as caboclos, who live around the lower reaches of the Amazon river. A caboclo is, in simplified terms, a person who has mixed European and native American Indigenous ancestry—with perhaps a substantial element of African ancestry to boot. Right at the end of her book, in a search for possible comparative frames of reference for her exploration—Amazonianist anthropology? Afro-Latin American studies? Peasant studies?—Boyer asks whether the literature on mestizaje/mestiçagem could form such a frame, looking briefly at the work of Marisol de la Cadena on “Indigenous mestizos” in Peru and at an article I wrote in 2005. She highlights the difference and particularity of the Brazilian caboclos in relation to these two contributions and, as far as I can tell, she remains agnostic about the value of this specific comparative framing. However, I think that her book works to brilliantly enrich existing approaches to conceptualizing mixture in Latin America, mostly, as she says, by “focusing on the identification of local categories of thought concerning what produces identity but also otherness, and the processes that they underlie.” In my experience, studies of Latin American racial formations have generally dealt with mixture in two ways. First, it is described as ongoing processes of biological and cultural interaction between people of European, African, and Indigenous origins, which began five hundred years ago and gave rise to new generations of people seen as different from those original categories and generically known as mestizos in Spanish or mestiços in Portuguese. Second, it is analyzed as a nation-building ideology, driven by elites, which proposes that

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the emergence of a distinctive nation is grounded on those processes of interaction. In this ideological version, mixture is hierarchized into a process of social evolutionary progress in which African and Indigenous ancestries and heritages, deemed inferior, are incorporated into a modernizing and homogenizing mestizo body that is predominantly shaped by—and ideally moving ever closer to—European whiteness, deemed superior. However, historians and social scientists have noted that traces of African Blackness and Indigeneity remain in these nation-building narratives, despite their apparent drive toward homogeneity. Elite nationalism has often made room for these traces in ideologies and policies of indigenismo and, to a lesser extent, negrismo, which recognize and even venerate Black and Indigenous heritages, but almost always in the past tense or in highly patronizing and limited ways that confine such heritages and their human bearers—actual Black and Indigenous peoples—to stereotyped and stagnant spaces, often portrayed as destined to disappear with the march of progressive mixture. Ideologies of mixture are thus generally seen in these analyses as masks or veneers that ostensibly include everyone as a potential mestizo, but in practice exclude Black and Indigenous peoples and histories, while also demeaning and discriminating against those mestizos whose bodies or behaviors show too clearly the proximity of their Black and Indigenous origins. The turn toward multiculturalist policies that swept Latin America from the late 1980s onward, recognizing and entitling Black and Indigenous communities in varied and uneven ways, was heralded by some people—spanning a range of political and class positions—as a radical break with homogenizing ideologies of mixture. With time, and as material conditions remained the same or became (often violently) worse for these communities, such optimism seemed unwise and analyses began to highlight the evident continuities that linked multiculturalism and ideologies of mixture in terms of the limited spaces afforded to Blackness and Indigeneity. Meanwhile, also from the 1980s, other analyses began to propose different approaches to mixture, rearticulating it as a process that could challenge homogenization based on racist hierarchies. The proposal started from the fact that some nationalist versions of mixture, albeit themselves racist, were pitted against the global hierarchies of race of the early twentieth century that depicted mixture as degenerative and Latin America as therefore destined to inferiority. This starting point was now aligned with postmodern concepts of hybridity as a positive resource for challenging fixed hierarchies and categories, giving rise to the idea of mixture “from below”—that is, framed by Indigenous, Black, and dark-skinned mestizo people—as disruptive of hegemonic narratives of mixture. Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza” is an early (and largely autobiographical) example of a mestizo figure who embraces their Indigenous origins,

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alongside Western elements (Anzaldúa 1987). Later, De la Cadena (2000) described “indigenous mestizos” as people who identify as mestizos but do not see themselves as non-Indigenous, thus disrupting hegemonic versions of mestizaje that define mestizo and Indigenous as mutually exclusive categories. It is worth noting that in both cases—and also in relation to “hybridity” in general—there were ongoing debates about the extent to which ideas of mixture could escape the confines of the original categories that gave rise to the mixture, and thus, at least implicitly, the racial hierarchies in which those origins were still located. In the article that Boyer cites at the end of this book (Wade 2005), I took up this theme and tried to explore mixture in terms of everyday experience and categories: how did mixed people see their own mixture? On the basis of ethnographic evidence, I proposed a mosaic model of the mestizo person, in which racialized elements coexisted, rather than being fused or melted together and thus losing their particularity. Mestizo people identified specific organs of their body (real, such as the heart, or abstract, such as the soul) and specific tastes and predilections as being negro (Black). I drew in part on the religious practices surrounding the figure of María Lionza in Venezuela, as reported by Barbara Placido. Like the religious practices Boyer documents in this book, ritual specialists of this “cult” are possessed by spirit entities, some of which are racially coded as Black or Indigenous. According to Placido (1998: 35–36), “‘Black’, ‘Indian’ and ‘White’ are composite parts of the person; however in the cult of María Lionza these different elements should not merge, people should keep them distinct.” The people Placido talked to recognized the possibility of a fused mestizo person, in whom the original roots had melded together, but they saw this homogenized mestizo as grey, colorless, and lifeless. In contrast, true Venezuelans had a composite, mosaic-like character that retained the racialized roots as distinct components, lending color, potency, and vitality to the person and allowing them to interact fruitfully with the spirit world. Boyer takes this approach and develops it powerfully and in great and compelling ethnographic detail into an account of a native ontology. She produces a fully rounded account of non-fusional mixture, based in part on characteristically Indigenous Amazonian concepts of transformation in which people can alter their bodies, acquiring new aspects (through embodied work) and moving between them at will. From a Durkheimian point of view, it is to be expected that local concepts of the spirit world reflect and inform such views of the caboclo person of the visible world: the caboclo spirits that inhabit the invisible world and possess human mediums are also able to move between different forms and embody diverse aspects. There has been a lot of anthropological literature on these kinds of possession religions in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America; Placido aside, I think Boyer is one of the first to show how an anthropological

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approach to such religious concepts and practices can help us understand local ideas about mixture in people. Some of the literature on possession religions inquires into the political dimensions of these practices. Lindsay Hale, for example, explores the figure of the preto-velho (the old Black person, male or female, who represents enslavement) whom mediums embody in Umbanda ritual centers in Rio de Janeiro. He finds that the political meanings attached to this figure are not univocal— individual pretos-velhos have personal histories that bespeak resistance but also passivity (Hale 1997). Boyer also gives us an account of the relationship between religion and politics, but in a very different way. Rather than inquiring into the political dimensions of spirit caboclos, she shows us how the whole spirit world provides clues to the way people think about themselves as the products of mixture. And this in itself has political aspects. A starting point for grasping these aspects is the ethnographic fact that acts as the key spur for Boyer’s approach. The people she talked to spoke of themselves as being able to choose to be “Indigenous” or “Quilombola” (strictly speaking, the descendants of a quilombo or maroon settlement, but in effect, “Black”), or even both at the same time, and to be able to switch between these “identities” by choice (although they knew that it took substantial work to be recognized as one or the other by the powers that be). This, as she recognizes, had been noted by previous anthropologists, such as José Mauricio Andion Arruti and Jan Hoffman French—and, I would add, a former Ph.D. student of mine, Joceny Pinheiro. But Boyer takes this ethnographic fact and develops it into an integrated account of a local theory of ontology. And on the basis of this, she is able to generate insights that have very important political dimensions. To grasp these dimensions, we need to first understand the way that Blackness and Indigeneity have figured first in colonial social orders, then in postcolonial nationalist narratives of mixture, and finally in history and social science (for a full account, see Wade 2018). Briefly, in colonial regimes, Black and Indigenous peoples were placed in different classificatory positions in terms of governance: for example, the conceptual starting point for the former was “slave,” while for the latter it was often “vassal” or “tribute-paying subject.” Quite often, Black and Indigenous peoples were set against each other in a strategy of divide and rule. In the postcolonial republics, the conceptual and political division between Black and Indigenous remained, with the latter being seen as culturally more Other than the former, and ideologies and policies of indigenismo carrying much more institutional weight than was the case for negrismo. Academic research in the twentieth century more or less followed these lines of fracture, with, for example, anthropology focusing on Indigenous peoples, while Black people fell within the purview of sociology. Multiculturalist reforms from the 1990s on-

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ward tended to reinforce such differences, creating separate policies and legislative channels for Indigenous and Black (or Afrodescendant) communities. Recent research has tried to supersede these divides of colonial origin. Historiography has shown that, in practice, colonial governors could not keep Indigenous and Black communities as fully apart as they would have liked: Indigenous and Black people interacted and mixed, sometimes giving rise to whole regions where the population was predominantly zambo (to use the colonial term for the Indigenous-Black mestizo whose presence was deemed particularly undesirable). Significantly, the area of Brazil where Boyer did her research seems to have been one such region, despite the fact that the term caboclo does not nominally refer to African ancestry. In general, Brazil figures as a country where, in particular regions, the Black–Indigenous divide was less clearly demarcated than in other areas of Latin America, especially those where there was a large, sedentary Indigenous population (see Chapter 3 of this book). For example, although Indigenous slavery was outlawed in Brazil in 1570, the law allowed captives of a “just war” to be enslaved, such that Indigenous people were enslaved in large numbers in some areas, continuing into the nineteenth century. In the social sciences, the impulse to bring Black and Indigenous peoples into the same analytic frame—as I, following scholars such as Norman Whitten, tried to do in my book Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997; published in a second edition in 2010)—was especially relevant in the light of the multiculturalist reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. These policies reinforced existing—and created powerful new—avenues for the institutionalization of lived experience into political identities, with all the bureaucratic weight and boundaries that follow from attaching rights and material resources to identities. As a result, social scientists found themselves obliged to explore the ways that these processes were playing out and whether they were happening differently for Black and Indigenous peoples. This was given a sharp edge by the fact that anthropologists were often called upon by the state (especially in Brazil) to testify as to the authenticity of identity claims. One finding that emerged was that, in some areas, people with a common history and heritage were choosing whether to pursue an Indigenous or a Black route to land rights. They were thus also choosing to identify as one or the other in a legislative context that assumed “Black” and “Indigenous” were mutually exclusive identities and were both historical givens. In Brazil, at least, policy did adapt to recognize that such identities could be emergent rather than pre-given, but emergence was still tied in some way to ideas of the recovery of a “real” identity, which had been forgotten or covered over. The effect of this was that communities that chose to pursue a land rights claim on the basis on being Indigenous or Quilombola, when they had not self-identified or been identified as such until land rights

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became possible, were often accused by third parties, who had a vested interest in denying them land rights, of “fraud” and of cynically constructing an identity for the purpose of gaining rights. The non-fusional and transformational conception of mixture provides a convincing riposte to accusations of this kind. People in the north of Brazil who are labeled caboclo and see themselves as mixed were always already both Black and Indigenous, because these elements coexisted within their bodies and in their histories and memories, as well as in the spirit world they communicate with. This also helps to explain the seemingly contingent events that provoke a move by a given community down the route toward Quilombola rather than Indigenous status or vice versa. Boyer (and French) show that this is often the result of the intervention of a specific person—a priest, a teacher, an activist—who uses some local memories or historical facts as a basis that mobilizes the community to move in one direction rather than another. For an observer thinking in terms of “fraud,” this is grist to the mill. For local people, it is simply one transformational facet of their existence, which can metamorphose into a different facet. In short, while Boyer seems uncertain about locating her book in the existing field of studies of mixture, mestizaje/mestiçagem, and so on, in Latin America, I am convinced that it has a great deal to offer to scholars of these matters. The question of what mixed people—mestizos, mestiços, caboclos— think about themselves is a rich vein of inquiry to which this book is a marvelous contribution. Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism and Race in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2017) and Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America (edited with Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Pittsburgh University Press, 2022). He has codirected a project on “Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age” (2017–19), is directing a project on “Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America” (2020–23), and is coinvestigator on a project titled “Comics and Race in Latin America” (2021–24). References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hale, Lindsay L. 1997. “Preto Velho: Resistance, Redemption, and Engendered Representations of Slavery in a Brazilian Possession-Trance Religion.” American Ethnologist 24(2): 392–414.

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Placido, Barbara. 1998. “Spirits of the Nation: Identity and Legitimacy in the Cults of María Lionza and Simón Bolívar.” Ph.D. thesis. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Wade, Peter. 2005. “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37: 239–57. ———. 2010. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edn. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2018. “Afro-Indigenous Interactions, Relations, and Comparisons.” In Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, ed. George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente, 92– 129. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgments   

This work received funding from the Tepsis Laboratory of Excellence (ANR11-LABX-0067) and the Program Investissements d’Avenir. It also received support from the Center of Research on Colonial and Contemporary Brazil (CRBC/EHESS). Finally, I warmly thank Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet for her careful and extremely attentive revision of the translation. Her work was indispensable for the published version of this book.

Introduction   

In 1997, I was talking to a dirigente (local religious leader) of the Assembly of God in a hamlet a few hours by boat from the small town of Tefé, in the state of Amazonas. Seated on the large sacks of cassava flour with which his congregation paid their tithes, Isac told me about the circumstances in which his father had decided to settle on this side of the Solimões River some twenty years earlier. After first giving an ecological explanation (annual flooding that had driven many farmers to take refuge on dry land—terra firma), and then a religious motive (it may not have been easy for an evangelical to live his faith in a place that was essentially Catholic), the religious leader dwelt on what he considered to be the main reason for his father’s departure: his refusal to “pretend to be something he was not.” At the time, according to Isac, the inhabitants of the hamlet where his father lived had been persuaded by the parish priest to request the demarcation of their lands as Indigenous. His father, however, did not want to be “Indigenous.”1 First of all, as he had arrived as a very young man from the neighboring state of Pará, he did not see himself as a “native.” Moreover, having taken a wife from the kin of the “legitimate” owners of the place, he was integrated as a dependent but one whose presence was merely tolerated. Lastly, he apparently spoke only Portuguese. Bundling his meagre personal effects into a pirogue, he signaled his disagreement by leaving the area with his wife and children. He did not, however, stray too far from his allies, as his new house was almost opposite his former place of residence. This decision was not without consequences for his descendants, however: while Isac’s cousins who remained on the other bank benefited from public policies aimed at Indigenous populations, the religious leader and his relatives found themselves excluded at the time of our conversation. At the time that Isac recollected his father’s movements, many rural populations in the region were taking the exact opposite route. Instead of trying to avoid being referred to as Indian or as Black, names that were both previously considered derogatory, they took advantage of a provision in the new Constitution of 1988 that allowed them to request recognition from the state as culturally differentiated social groups, able as such to enjoy specific territorial rights: either as “Traditional populations,”2 or as “Indigenous peoples”3 or even “Quilombola communities,”4 that is, descendants of Brazilian Maroons.5 This change in the reading of family histories as well as in the form of ethnic naming was also observable in Amazonian cities, where a growing number of people

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The Amazonian Puzzle

belonging to the middle classes no longer hesitated to assert their Black or Indian origin, which was unimaginable only a decade earlier. After a long period in which Indianness and Blackness were kept at a distance—even completely denied—a time had come in which they were valued. Several ethnographic studies have nevertheless revealed that these signs of belonging were sometimes articulated in unexpected configurations. In a locality in the state of Amapá, which the authorities had made the symbol of a Black “identity,” it turned out that the inhabitants were equally strongly attached to a Portuguese past represented by the feast of Saint George, and that they did not rule out acknowledging an Indian “root” (raiz) by reviving the Sairé dance.6 The observation of another situation in the neighboring state of Pará7 highlighted that what was conceivable on a collective level was also conceivable for individuals. In a group of neighboring hamlets that had not opted for the same “ethnic self-definition” (some declaring themselves Quilombolas, others Indians), it was accepted that the villagers could change their category when they changed residence, for instance by moving to a locality associated with another label.8 There is a vast literature on the new social mobilizations in the name of ethnicity within the framework of different populations’ fight to defend their territory or obtain inclusion in targeted public policies.9 From this perspective, authors rightly underline the territorial attacks, threats to ownership, and multiple, even sometimes physical, intimidations that these populations face. The fact remains that although we have extensive knowledge of the often violent sociological contexts in which ethnic claims emerged, little has been written about the categories of thought and the local concepts that made it conceivable to convert sociopolitical problems into identity particularisms. Even if we adhere to the concept of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988), which assumes that in order to access rights, one has to present an “identity,” it remains unclear in what terms and under what conditions a public declaration of Indianness or Quilombolity (if you will pardon the neologism), and a fortiori the transition from one to the other, is envisaged. These questions are sensitive and, as we will see, they involve concealing certain filiations for the sake of bringing others to light, but also negotiating with friends and relatives in order to define a common position. In this context, “identity,” “choice,” and “mixture,” at the very least, are recurring notions that need defining.

Repositionings That Often Go Unnoticed While ethnic positionings always clearly manifest themselves in the public space, the possibility of envisaging classificatory repositionings is most often concealed from external actors—be they institutional representatives, members of non-

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3

governmental organizations, or visiting anthropologists. In the Brazilian Amazon, very few inhabitants openly express their doubts as to the current ethnic profile of the hamlet where they live, and few mention the fact of being able to change or of having already changed their “self-definition.” At best, people sometimes mention that before the “mobilizations” they did not consider themselves Indians or Quilombolas. In this case, their remarks aim to underline their state of “ignorance” of their true nature in which they were unfortunately immersed, and in doing so, to allow their interlocutor to measure the road traveled to recover their culture and memory. And if, for various reasons, an identity requalification were to be considered, it would again be formulated under cover of this same argument of the rediscovery of their true “identity”—as if the register of certainty and clarity was the only one acceptable to foreign ears. On the other hand, more divided opinions, even questionings, often surface when the moment of political and collective expression of ethnic demands has passed and more personal subjects are broached in the privacy of the home. It is there that comments are made about ancestors whose origins do not fit the label adopted by the village. These comments are always followed by the obvious point that: “There’s a mixture [mistura] in the family. After all, I could have been this or that.” In the local language, it would thus seem sufficient to privilege such or such a forbear to present another self-image to the world. In other conversations, the claim of a territorial right conferred by kinship in the surrounding villages may also be reinterpreted in the sense of a right to change one’s official status: “I inherited a plot of land there. I could be like them.” These few examples show that it is not the register of ethnicity and the perception of differences that make identity differences intelligible. Understanding these situations requires referring to shared rules whose application is urgently demanded, or conversely, vigorously contested. Depending on the circumstances, a kinship relation will either be concealed, or attributed to a neighbor to smooth over disputes or to forge alliances. Despite the appearance of new terms, disagreements arise from relationships embedded in the local social fabric. Two elements largely explain the discretion about the possibility of these shifts in identity affiliation. The first is directly linked to a political context that favors the development of agribusiness and livestock farming through legal and illegal seizure of land. To prevent the application of the territorial rights guaranteed by the Constitution of 1988 to groups recognized as Black, Indian, and Traditional, the defenders of this predatory model, who, as we know, have powerful allies in Congress and in the government, do not hesitate to use the services of private companies responsible for gathering evidence of so-called “ethnic fraud” and “lies.” The objective of such offensives is, of course, to disqualify the territorial demands made on behalf of ethnic minorities in order to promote the expulsion of populations.

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The second element concerns governmental tactics and the administrative organization of the Brazilian state. Declared “ethnic identities” correspond to ethno-legal categories that distinct institutional agencies are responsible for: the National Foundation of the Indigenous People (Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas, FUNAI) handles Indigenous people; the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, INCRA) handles Quilombolas; and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (Instituto Chico Mendes da Conversação da Biodiversidade, ICMBio) handles so-called Traditional populations. The fact that these administrations specialize in the management of a particular type of population imposes a certain stability not only in their classification, but also in the lists of beneficiaries that are then constituted. The effectiveness of the deployment of targeted public policies depends on these two operations. In this context, it is clear that any fuzziness in the projected “identities,” any hesitation in the statement of “what one is,” but also any performance that is out of step with the images associated with Blacks and Indians or even any violation of the virtuous environmental behavior expected of Traditional populations, risks delaying or, worse, totally compromising the already very slim chances in the normal course of bureaucracy of obtaining official recognition of the ethnic “identity” of a given group and therefore envisaging the demarcation of its territory.10

Identity as a Given versus Identification as “Choice” In a landmark article, Rogers Brubaker lists the uses that the social sciences have made of the term “identity” by showing that both the “strong conceptions,” which insist “on similarity across time or between people” and assume homogeneity and persistence, and the “weak conceptions [emphasizing malleability and multiplicity, that] might be ‘too’ weak to fulfill any useful theoretical function,” result in an impasse (Brubaker 2001: 74). This criticism is particularly relevant to the study of complex Amazonian situations, where ethnic movements sometimes occur. It is indeed difficult to think of these situations in terms of stable prior “identities” without immediately having to grapple with assumptions of fickleness, loss of bearings, or, worse, dishonesty. As for the “weak” conception of identity, which undoubtedly accounts for identity better, it does not constitute a sufficient basis to favor a systematic comparison between the processes at work in collectives that are labeled differently. There will therefore be no question, in these pages, of “identity” as an analytical concept likely to shed light on the classificatory transformations of the Amazonian scene examined, whether from the angle of resurgences of a vanished past, or even that of contemporary cultural inventions.

Introduction

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This term, as well as that of “ethnic group,” will instead be used here as “categories of social and political practice” (Brubaker 2001: 69, original italics), that is to say, as notions that can guide and support action. Although the different actors involved have integrated these terms into their respective lexicons as quasi-synonyms, they do not give them exactly the same meaning or the same interest. For activists and members of NGOs, identity is what gives substance to social mobilizations. It makes it possible to restore the idea of unanimity in principle concerning the battles to be waged and the way to conduct them, whereas ethnicity clarifies vis-à-vis the outside the nature of the “political subjects” that are constituted. Institutional representatives apprehend them above all as administrative categories that mark the boundaries of their interventions. While they recognize that an ethnic group presupposes an identity, institutional representatives endeavor above all to give these terms a certain density so that they can serve as guides for the implementation of targeted redistribution programs. Lastly, for the populations concerned, it is essentially a matter of notions that must be constructed in order to establish a dialogue with all parties concerned. Their approach is twofold. They must first obtain information from various external sources about what the proposed terms signify, imply, and are likely to afford them as possible “identities,” that is to say, as official labels giving them a social existence in the eyes of the institutions. They must also try their hand at reflexivity in order to discern the elements in their daily actions and gestures, even in their phenotypes, that can support the declaration of their difference. Far from “inventing” “identities” ex nihilo for themselves, populations draw on family histories and lived social experiences for material to develop motifs that support their current struggles. Ultimately, local people must reconcile two distinct perspectives about what confers rights: their own perspective (which holds that the right to use a plot of land derives, first and foremost, from descent and from alliance) and that of external actors (for whom the recognition of territorial rights is also conditioned on a kind of categorial determination). In other words, the search for a local consensus occurs at a frontier. It must be respectful of village principles while remaining audible to Others, so that what is usually held to be legitimate can converge with what is considered legal. As far as form is concerned, ethnographic observation reveals the very voluntarist and convinced nature of ethnic claims, as well as the recurrence of declarations always made in the name of a collective of people. Far from the intimate feeling usually associated with “identity,” the systematic use of action verbs is indicative of the importance of the political dimension: “we have decided [resolvemos] to be Quilombolas,” “we have chosen [escolhemos] to be Indians,” “we have opted [optamos] to be Traditional” (my emphasis). This preeminence of “choice” and “decision” in the representa-

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The Amazonian Puzzle

tions of social trajectories punctuated by positionings and repositionings seems to me to be rendered by the notion of identification, which makes do with successive temporary arrangements, and hence with plurality.

“Mixture” versus “Miscegenation” In a fascinating article published in 2013, the Brazilian anthropologist Mariana Pantoja analyzed the profound destabilization that she suffered after the “ethnic transfiguration” of a group in the state of Acre (in the Upper Juruá) with which she had worked for quite a time. She gives an enlightening example of these processual constructions. During an investigation that she conducted as part of her doctorate, she followed the process of political organization of a group of rubber collectors (seringueiros) as they managed to become recognized as a “Traditional population.” In 1990, after a hard fight, they won the creation of an Extractivist Reserve (RESEX), a type of territory associated with this category (Pantoja 2008). However, in the mid-2000s, the ethnologist noted that some members of the group vigorously rejected this designation, and declared themselves to be Kuntanawa Indians.11 The break therefore seemed clear and sudden and had very concrete consequences: not only did the supporters of Indianness demand the application of other rights and support from FUNAI—and no longer from ICMBio—but the demarcation of the Indian land requested was superimposed on the space of the RESEX, thus threatening its integrity. What captures our attention in this example is the comments made by the young Kuntanawa on their “identity.” Pantoja (2013: 41) reports that they “challenged the idea of an ethnic ‘emergence’ . . . They objected that they were not ‘seeds’ that had been dormant underground and [had] suddenly surfaced . . . They were indeed ‘existing, non-emerging Indians’; in other words, they had always been Indians.” Mindful of rendering their current point of view without obliterating their recent past as seringueiros, the anthropologist argued that the Kuntanawa “operated in duality. They claimed to have existed forever, and had put mixture on the back burner” (ibid.: 42, my emphasis). The term “mixture” (mistura) that Pantoja employs is extremely common among these populations. In the literature, it is generally held to be a popular version of the scholarly term “miscegenation” (mesticagem or miscigenação), and similarly implies crossings, mergings, and recompositions that are both biological and cultural. In this proposal of equivalence between these two notions, “mixture” is endowed with the same properties as “miscegenation,” and in particular it refers to the “degeneration” that has long been an obsession of Brazilian intellectuals.12 The affirmation of a “pure” Indianness can then only be done

Introduction

7

by denying any possibility of mixed blood. Indians can only claim to have been Indian for all eternity by excluding all contacts and other contributions. Most Amazonian populations seem to subscribe to a similar exclusivist postulate: “We are either one thing or another,” it is frequently said. They also often mention a problem of “confusion” that has had to be cleared up. But they also articulate, and without great difficulty, the claim to an intrinsic quality of the political principle of identification as “choice.” To avoid a seeming contradiction, it must be admitted that even if the two terms designate analogous phenomena, “mixture” is not exactly “miscegenation.” The zoological or botanical metaphor (the production of something new by crossbreeding or hybridization) that is commonly associated with the latter term seems to me to poorly account for the specificity of “mixture,” which is better perceived if one adopts a physical or chemical approach, according to which the “constituents of the mixture are without any profound reciprocal physical or chemical action” (Encyclopædia Universalis). In this sense, the concept indicates, first of all, that different elements, possibly held to be of a different nature or origin, have been placed in the same container. This conception opens the way to a duality that contents itself with coexistence, but not to dualism, which implies antagonism. Being truly Indian or Black does not depend on a pure and simple denial of “mixture,” or even on relegating it to the background. It means exploring the possibilities it carries, letting matrices reemerge, or expressing “existing ones” as the Kuntanawa— who in fact never disappeared—do. In a certain sense, the aptitude for “purity” is constitutive here of “mixture.” Therefore, the relationship between the local categories of “decision” and “mixing” can be understood as a way of highlighting certain attributes while others remain latent, nevertheless persisting as virtualities in the collective imagination.

The Power of Metamorphosis: The Echoes of a Religious System? By positing the resolutely open, constantly negotiated, and possibly divergent features of current identifications, the Amazonian ethnographic situation presented here is a perfect illustration of the analyses of Anthony P. Cohen: “The ethnic group is an aggregate of selves each of whom produces ethnicity for itself ” (Cohen 1994: 76). In a rural locality, three brothers consider their ethnic inscription in distinct ways in genealogies that from an administrative point of view are assumed to be mutually exclusive. While they recognize that they come from the same family “mixture,” born of a Black great-grandfather and an Indian great-grandmother, one brother declared himself Black, the other Indian, and the third to be “both one and the other.” These differences never-

8

The Amazonian Puzzle

theless in no way affect their agreement to declare themselves all Quilombolas at this precise moment in their trajectory, confirming the political nature of “choice” and the importance of the territorial context and land issues (Chapter 1).13 Still taking this ethnographic example as a point of departure, I argue that the formulation of collective projects under the seal of ethnicity is nourished by the personal experiences that each individual has experienced and shared with the others. Rather than sticking to the version of primordial unanimity and demands that are claimed to manifest the resurgence of a forgotten past, this political reading of social demands seeks to stress the importance of creativity stemming from secondary socializations, capable of reinjecting hope in contexts marked by the failures and uncertainties of everyday life (Chapter 2). A brief reminder of regional history places this precise situation in a more general context, marked by the density of exchanges between rural and urban areas as people, objects, and ideas circulate. However, despite its dynamism, the social formation established over the centuries arouses the mistrust of the authorities and elites, who consider that those whom they designate as caboclos are marked by negative characteristics: idleness, ignorance, superstition, resignation, and undifferentiated origins (Chapter 3). This pejorative exogenous designation is rejected by many local populations, who then sink into a kind of nominal invisibility despite the evidence of their presence. In the 1980s, the success of cultural promotion did little to change the way in which these caboclos, as in-between and “mixed,” did not seem able to embody a “pure” type like the Indians or the Quilombolas. The creation of the institutional expression “Traditional populations” aimed to break with the negative stereotype of the caboclo, but its success was only partial because the adjective chosen tended to maintain the local populations in a premodern but also timeless limbo. On the other hand, another interpretation of the caboclo around the same period has enjoyed an undisputed fortune until today: as a figure of the invisible world, the caboclo-spirit embodies a transgressive omnipotence and relieves human beings of the weight of the traits associated with the caboclo-man by concentrating them on him. In other words, it is less a question of affirming an identity between the medium and the spirit than of the existence of certain affinities.14 The caboclo of possession cults not only confirms the importance of this reference in the Amazonian imagination. By embodying the possibility of transgressing established rules, it also succeeds in symbolizing openness to the world, to multiplicity and the freedom to be what one wants, that is to say, openness to “choice.” Such a representation is a kind of inverted mirror of the social order imposed on the caboclos-men, who seem to suffer their “mixture” and their dominated status (Chapter 4).

Introduction

9

The establishment of the new constitutional framework and the attribution of specific rights to ethno-legal categories indicated a way to break with this inferiorizing association. Without, of course, guaranteeing inclusion in preferential programs, and sometimes even unleashing the anger of the ruling classes, the decision to attach oneself to a single “root” nevertheless changes the way in which outsiders consider these populations who now claim “authenticity.” Yet even though the ways in which the components of “mixture” are disentangled are a recent phenomenon, the ethnic transfigurations that it entails are not new. I will therefore propose two comparisons: on the one hand, with the conceptions of metamorphosis documented by anthropology for the Amerindian universes and, on the other hand, with the transformation device called virada that the Amazonian spirit possession cults admit for the caboclo. Of particular interest are the counterpoints that these models provide that allow us to better understand how the repositioning of local populations on the ethno-legal scene mobilizes the representation of an “unstable mixture” where “confusion” gives way to articulation (Chapter 5). As a final point, the comparison with the field of possession is likely to shed light on current concerns about the “ethnic” origins of social groups. Indeed, the great divide, which is now a matter of broad consensus, between rural religious practices of Amerindian origin and urban spirit possession cults of African origin was largely constructed according to the interest of intellectuals concerned with the “mixed-race problem.” Convinced that religion revealed race (Figueiredo 2009: 85), by separating cultic elements, they sought a way of avoiding contamination by preserving the purity of origins. However, chronologically, the injunction to authenticity, which led cult leaders to embrace a proposal of de-syncretism (they undertook nevertheless the necessary ritual adjustments to show the extent of their skills), predates the impetus for the un-mixing of real populations by some ten years. These populations reposition themselves with respect to ethno-legal categories in order to avoid being qualified as caboclos, while creating new escape routes by way of their “mixture” (Chapter 6). While remaining as close as possible to the conceptions of local actors, this book thus seeks to reconstitute the way in which they anchor their current political positions in a specific cosmovision that authorizes alterations and transformations. Ethnography reveals a very clear gap between a multivocal reading of contact phenomena, which accepts several registers in the treatment of otherness, and the scholarly interpretations organized around “miscegenation,” which suggest convergence and homogenization. Therefore, while this book is concerned with the processes of miscegenation through the material it contributes to the local elaboration of mistura, it is also an invitation to put this concept into perspective.

10

The Amazonian Puzzle

This remark also spurs us to resist the temptation of a decontextualized definition of ontology: as Africanists such as Jean-Paul Colleyn (2006: 309) have already pointed out, the renewal of the question of the variability of the conception of reality15 cannot operate to the detriment of taking contexts and diachrony into account. From this perspective, the fluidities and circulations between ethno-legal categorizations, which can be observed in the situation in question and in many others in the Brazilian Amazon, and which are inconceivable from a legal point of view, owe as much to the historical processes of which the modes of classification and interaction with beings and things are a product as to the way in which these modes in turn support social transformations. When we question both longue durée history and political sociology today, but also the relationship between individual experiences and the enrichment of collective repertoires or the different local and regional scales, it appears that rather than being sealed off from each other, the ontological and sociological dimensions are in constant communication. This book thus contributes to the reflection on the historical and social conditions of the situated production of “ways of acting, thinking, [and] feeling,” to borrow Durkheim’s (1998: 97) words. Notes I warmly thank Odile Hoffmann for having encouraged me to explore a barely sketched idea that I had submitted to her, as well as Roberto Araújo, Anath Ariel de Vidas, Agnès Clerc-Renaud, Nicolas Ellison, Peter Fry, David Lehmann, Anne-Marie Losonczy, Philippe Léna, Deborah Lima, and Cédric Yvinec, who, through their critical reading, enabled me to refine the analyses proposed here. I remain solely responsible for any errors and omissions and for the views expressed here. 1. From the strict point of view of usage, índio should be translated as “native” and indígena as “Indian,” since the first Portuguese term has pejorative connotations that bring it closer to the English notion of “native.” The local populations who most often call themselves indígenas nevertheless refer in certain circumstances to the word índio to better underline their difference. Because of these contextual usages, I adopt the convention of a literal translation for ease of reading. 2. “Populações tradicionais”: https://www.gov.br/icmbio/pt-br/assuntos/populacoes-tradicio nais. 3. “Quem São”: https://www.gov.br/funai/pt-br/atuacao/povos-indigenas/quem-sao. 4. “Informações Quilombolas”: http://www.palmares.gov.br/?page_id=52126. 5. I have chosen to respect English typographical conventions by capitalizing White, Black, and Indian, but adding quotation marks on the first occurrence to emphasize that these are social categories. Except when referring to the literature, I have adopted the same convention for Quilombolas, Indigenous peoples, and Traditional populations to indicate that these are administrative categories with the potential for distinction vis-à-vis the state, but I have used lowercase for caboclo because it does not exist as an administrative category.

Introduction

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

11

Finally, I capitalize the territorial designations to indicate that they correspond to different land statuses. Boyer (2009). Boyer (2015, 2017). In addition to the ethnography that will be presented in the first chapter, and the two situations briefly mentioned in this paragraph, this research is based on three other surveys. The first was carried out in the suburbs of the capital of the state of Amapá, Macapá: the analysis of an internal conflict in a Quilombola community allowed me to suggest that this refers to struggles of influence between dominant kin groups to maintain control over their poorer kin (Boyer 2014). The other two were carried out in the neighboring state of Pará: the study of another internal conflict, in a hamlet about 20 kilometers as the crow flies from the city of Óbidos, led me to suggest that the fears raised by the political Quilombola project promoted by the local authorities were expressed using a new religious language, that is, Pentecostal language (Boyer 2002); the second study, conducted in a small town about 30 kilometers from the city of Santarém, allowed me to understand the heritage dimension of these labeled identities (Boyer 2018). This literature is too abundant to be quoted in extenso. The reference list therefore only includes the sources used in this book to analyze the situation studied. The pace of land approvals was particularly fast during the two mandates of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–99, 1999–2003), but slowed down as the ruralist bloc favorable to agribusiness and the mining industry rose in Congress. According to the anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (2017), Cardoso’s successor, Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–7, 2007–11), favored the creation of conservation units intended for “Traditional populations” rather than the regularization of Indian and Quilombola lands, which aroused great frustration very early on (Lima 2015: 445), while Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011–14, 2015–May 2016), then adopted a very wait-and-see position. The climate worsened even further under the presidency of Michel Temer and of course under that of Jair Bolsonaro, who fully supported the ruralist bloc advocating economic development at all costs. Social mobilizations therefore took place in a context of very real threats of infringement of the constitutional rights of the Indian, Quilombola, and Traditional populations, which was reflected in the endless delays of the administration in carrying out land demarcations, and thus in validating the legal transformations of the territorial landscape. In 2020, 1,914 lands had been identified as Quilombola by state institutions, including 170 in the northern region, but only 134 Quilombola Territories (67 in the Amazon) had been titularized (“Quilombolas no Brasil”: https://cpisp.org.br/direitosquilombolas/observato rio-terras-quilombolas/quilombolas-brasil/). Also in 2020, the FUNAI counted 749 registers of Indigenous Lands (369 in the Amazon) but only 473 regularized, including 259 in the northern region (“Terras indígenas”: https://www.gov.br/funai/pt-br/atuacao/ter ras-indigenas). Lastly, concerning the Conservation Units for Sustainable Use, the former site of the Ministry of the Environment indicated that 134 had been created in the country, including 91 in the Amazon (“Populações tradicionais”: https://www.gov.br/icmbio/ pt-br/assuntos/populacoes-tradicionais). Pantoja points to sociological explanations for this repositioning: the return of clientelism in the association managing the Extractivist Reserve, the development of predatory practices (commercial hunting and creation of pastures), the marginalization of historical leaders, and lastly a territorial dispute (Pantoja 2013: 38–39). Between 1870 and 1930, the Brazilian intellectuals—including Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who will feature again below—who held that interbreeding condemned the Bra-

12

The Amazonian Puzzle

zilian population to “degeneration” (Rodrigues 2008) constituted the dominant current of thought in the country. In the name of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and in the wake of Italian criminologists such as Lombroso, they claimed that Blacks and mestizos were physically and morally inferior and advocated implementing eugenic practices as a protective measure. For an analysis of the hegemony of these discourses in academic institutions of the period, see Schwarcz (1993). 13. I decided to focus the ethnography on the case of these three brothers because of its exemplarity. Their voices are therefore the only ones that will be heard directly in this book. For other examples, I will refer to the analyses that I have developed elsewhere and that are listed in the References. 14. The role attributed to their caboclo by mediums, mostly poor women living in the outskirts of cities, attests to the prevalence of affinity over identity. The construction of this character is in fact carried out in accordance with the sexual division of labor opposing male production and female management within domestic groups. All the stories attempt to describe the process of transformation of an authoritarian relationship into a harmonious relationship, a process at the end of which the spirit is established in the role of companion of the possessed woman. By placing themselves under the symbolic protection of the caboclo, the mediums become autonomous in relation to their real spouses and consolidate their position within the networks of the neighborhood and the religious community (Boyer 1993a). 15. See Erwan Dianteill’s (2015) article for an excellent analysis of the heated debates sparked by this notion after the publication of Philippe Descola’s (2005) book Par-delà nature et culture.

CHAPTER 1

Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”   

The ethnographic situation presented in this chapter seeks to introduce the reader to the fluidity of ethnic identifications in the Brazilian Amazon. In a relatively isolated locality, I met three brothers who positioned themselves differently on the identity chessboard: one declared himself “Black,” the other “rather Indigenous,” and the third “both one and the other.” These siblings nevertheless claim to be born from the same parental couple, they refer to the same family history, they live in the same village and have similar phenotypic characteristics. It being impossible, in this specific case, to relate the divergences to specific origins or to distinct cultural universes, the example prompts us to consider instead the importance of the notion of personal “choice” in the interpretation of a “mixture” that is thought of as a set of attributes shared by a certain number of relatives. The locality where these men live, which I will call Lagoa Bonita,1 is in the Amazonian state of Pará, some 180 kilometers as the crow flies from Santa Clara, the nearest medium-sized city, with two hundred thousand inhabitants. From this large urban center, one must travel by boat for around ten hours to reach the capital of Vila Araçatuba, a town of about four thousand inhabitants that was in the past a district headquarters (the lowest rank in the administrative system). In addition to the few civil and religious services still serving the area, the notarial archives, and a health station, Vila Araçatuba hosts the general coordination of the many primary schools opened in the sixty-eight villages of the rural zone, including Lagoa Bonita. This is therefore where the director (whom I spoke to on arriving) works. One early evening in November 2013, the man I will call Pedro received me very cordially in his office where he was still busy planning visits to the schools that he was responsible for and which gave him a very detailed knowledge of the PAE (see below). He willingly agreed to interrupt his work and talk to me about the forty or so families established in Lagoa Bonita—families to whom he was very close, having himself been born in a nearby hamlet. At the end of our discussion, the director offered to make a radio announcement to inform the villagers of my arrival the following day. Lagoa Bonita is only about

14

The Amazonian Puzzle

15 kilometers from the main town, but the track leading there is in very poor condition. No doubt thanks to the attentions of Pedro, the three brothers, who were in their early forties and shared the leadership of the hamlet, gave me a warm welcome. From our very first exchanges, they confirmed that they did not adopt the same identity positioning, but that they all agreed in seeking official recognition from the state as Quilombolas. They then invited me to meet with each of them in private to explain their ways of thinking in more detail. It immediately became apparent that what for Pedro was an extremely perplexing paradox was not one for these men. The surprising serenity with which the brothers explained their points of view contrasted sharply with other situations where differences have generated numerous internal conflicts, sometimes even causing the break-up of family ties. This example suggests a certain disconnection between the identity claim of the public image supported by collective action and that of the representations of oneself developed in the privacy of the home that support plurality. It makes it possible to specify the terms in which the possible readings of the “mixture” are carried out and common positions are negotiated between close relatives. Before I examine the different ethnic arguments, Lagoa Bonita must be situated in its socio-territorial environment. Along with other hamlets, it is located within the perimeter of a vast geographical area falling within the institutional category of “Agro-Extractivist Settlement Project” (Projeto de Assentamento Agroextrativista, PAE). In principle, this confers a number of advantages on so-called “Traditional populations” established in the area, but also subjects them to a number of limitations. Understanding the unanimity with which the three brothers demand political visibility as Quilombolas at this point in their trajectory implies taking into account the frustrations aroused by this situation.

An Agro-Extractivist Settlement Project: Promises and Disappointments Since the 1990s, a new “socioenvironmental” development model has arisen, forming an alternative to “predatory development.” As the anthropologist Roberto Araújo notes, from the outset, [t]his model is linked to a sort of discursive recomposition of the identity of certain populations . . . based on the idea that the key to alternative development in Amazonia can be found in a virtual state in [their] knowledge or [their] practices. (Araújo 2009: 7)

It is thus as holders of “traditional” knowledge and know-how of the collection of forest products that local populations emerged as legal subjects. Araújo

Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”

15

insists on the originality of the public policies implemented by the state at the time compared to other programs. With the creation of Agro-Extractivist Settlement Projects (PAEs) and Extractivist Reserves (RESEXs): rather than sharing plots between farming families who, as a result, would have individual access to property, it is a question of establishing a lease for a group of families, each exploiting a different placement [colocação] of public and inalienable land, respecting customary limits as much as possible. (ibid.)

In fact, the spirit in which the Sustainable Protection Units are established breaks with the National Colonization Institute and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) policy in areas of agrarian colonization where a plot is allocated to a named family. Instead, in PAEs, zones that are often vast are delimited by establishing environmental specifications and rules that have to be respected by the inhabitants, but leaving the internal management to the local association that represents them. Today, the Amazon includes a very significant number of such territorial units2 managed collectively by groups of Traditional populations, proving that these policies were meant to be far-reaching. In addition to guaranteeing their right to remain on the demarcated lands, the texts concerning PAEs provide for the setting up of various lines of credit (support for installation and production) and the construction of basic infrastructure (roads, access to water and electricity).3 In exchange, the populations agree to make eco-responsible use of the natural environment (for instance, controlled slash-and-burn farming and the migration of livestock, absence of agro-toxic substances [pesticides and chemical fertilizers], open fields set back from roads, respect for vegetation, no overfishing or hunting for commercial purposes, etc.). Nevertheless, various authors, based on studies conducted in several states in the region, have shown that the results of these policies are not always conclusive. In 2002, Araújo, mentioned above, traveled to Sena Madureira, a small town in Acre, to meet rubber collectors whom the state government encouraged to return to live on the seringais as part of a pilot project. However, he writes, “the experiment was short-lived, and seemed to have failed before it even began, as it were” (Araújo 2009: 14). Only one man inhabited the seringal, the association was in sharp decline, and everyone wanted to know who would keep the goods and equipment obtained from the state. As Araújo argues, it is possible that the highly diverse social trajectories of the people approached made it difficult to form a cohesive collective: domestic groups who had lived in relative isolation and heads of families who belonged to the association of collectors after having exercised various professions had to agree on the forms of exploitation of the natural environment and face attempts at co-option by loggers or large landowners.

16

The Amazonian Puzzle

Yet things are no easier in other, presumably more favorable situations. This is the case in the Mamirauá, a vast geographical area located in the middle Solimões River in the state of Amazonas. It was first created as an Ecological Station in 1990 and then became a Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS) in 1996. The requalification of an Integral Protection Conservation Unit (that is to say, without human presence) as a Sustainable Use Conservation Unit (where human presence is tolerated) was the crowning victory of the local populations in their negotiations with institutions operating at different levels of territorial administration. However, the recognition of the essential role of the inhabitants, as executors of a “new rationality in the use of natural resources” (Mendes 2009: 226), was not sufficient for them to be convinced that “a public policy that has been designed for them” (ibid.: 218) brought them a real improvement in living conditions. Even if the implementation of the RDS “contributed significantly to reducing the uncertainties, insecurities and lack of guarantees” (ibid.: 59) that weighed on the local populations’ way of life, the ensuing imposition of restrictive rules was interpreted by the latter as a “restriction on [their] freedom.” Under these conditions, old claims of Indianness resurfaced, demanding the expansion of Indigenous Lands (TIs) that existed prior to the creation of the reserve and on which it was superimposed, while there were new demands for Indian recognition, with demands for a new demarcation of TIs to boot, thus posing a direct threat to the territorial integrity of the Mamirauá (ibid.: 293). Ana Beatriz Vianna Mendes (ibid.: 218) argues that these ethnic repositionings must be considered in relation to attempts to avoid the “social sacrifice” demanded of Traditional populations and with the search for more protective rights, such as those guaranteed in principle to Indians and Quilombolas. A final case, meticulously documented by Ricardo Folhes, Ana Paula Dutra de Aguiar, and Roberto Araújo (2012), suggests that the idea of an AgroExtractivist Settlement very often arises as a last resort, after all the administrative or legal means of appeal have been exhausted. In the Lago Grande area, around the city of Santarém, it was after the INCRA had failed to finalize the regularization of individual occupations4 and the increase in illegal land appropriations by dominators (loggers, mining companies, politicians) had provoked many conflicts that social movements demanded, and in 2005 obtained, the implementation of an Agro-Extractivist Settlement Project. However, as the authors point out, many problems persist, or have even increased: once again, not only did the delimitation of the perimeter of the PAE not take the presence of Indigenous Land into account, but other inhabitants declared themselves Indians in turn, and land disputes continued.5 Sustainable Conservation Units, which appeared to be the solution for ensuring territorial protection and the social reproduction of so-called Tradi-

Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”

17

tional populations, are thus traversed by innumerable tensions and processes of fragmentation of representation: This can result in the creation of competing associations within the same “Extractivist Reserve” which—each claiming a representativeness by virtue of the autochthony of its affiliates—defend different proposals on land status, economic destination and the area of the reserves, some clearly targeting the sole benefit of local entrepreneurs and politicians. (Araújo 2009: 15)

To preserve the anonymity of the ethnographic situation in question, I will not dwell on the conditions for the creation of the Aminacamba AgroExtractivist Settlement Project, where the hamlet of Lagoa Bonita is located. Suffice it to say that it extends over a vast geographical area of 250,000 hectares, barely less than Luxembourg, and that its creation in the early 2000s, after intense social mobilizations, aroused immense enthusiasm among the approximately 4,600 beneficiary families registered on the official lists. Nevertheless, many of them today seem to consider it a trap that finally closed in on them. The PAE was indeed a fine project on paper, and fifteen years later, it is still just that: the Concession of Real Right of Use (Concessão de Direito Real de Uso, CDRU)—a document that officializes the administration’s transfer of the use of public property to an association (Folhes, Aguiar, and Araújo 2012: 30)—has not been published and the area has not been physically demarcated, which prevents any definitive land regularization. Moreover, the living conditions of the inhabitants have not markedly improved: only a few of the promised lines of credit have seen the light of day, not everyone has taken advantage of them, and no technical assistance has been provided. Things are no better as far as infrastructure is concerned: a dirt road was indeed opened but, due to lack of maintenance, it is in a deplorable state, and the planned bridges have not been built, to say nothing of the fact that the multiplication of climatic disorders has caused more intense floods, making travel very difficult during the rainy season. Lastly, the local populations have to deal with INCRA’s ambiguities. In fact, the organization responsible for setting up collective management of the territory is now pressuring them to agree to receive individual use concessions (CCUs). However, not only does the issuance of such titles subtract the land concerned from the perimeter of the PAE, thus reducing it in size, but some claim that it promotes the subsequent purchase of lots by agribusiness, thus also subverting the social purpose of the PAE. In other words, enthusiasm and hope for better days have undoubtedly given way to discouragement and bitterness, including among the leaders of the federation created in the early 2000s to meet an institutional demand for

18

The Amazonian Puzzle

representation of the PAE’s populations. Thus, when I went to discuss the difficulties encountered by the federation with its president, Dona Ana, her body tense and her face closed, she emphasized her remarks by opening her arms wide: “We have a right, but to obtain it, we must perform [cumprir] a task of this size.” The Traditional populations’ right that the authorities confer is constitutionally recognized, but it seems almost derisory, crushed by the weight of the demands and obligations that they have to fulfill in order to assert it. The situation is no different in Lagoa Bonita, where the forty or so families in the hamlet all receive the Family Grant (bolsa família) established under the Lula administration,6 and have no documents attesting ownership of the land, apart from loose sheets of paper recording informal agreements made with neighbors. At INCRA’s request, they founded an association of inhabitants (Associação de moradores), registered in a notarial office in 2004 and attached to the PAE federation, which two of the three brothers successively chaired. The only notable improvement resulting from the implementation of the AgroExtractivist Settlement Project was the installation of a micro-system for drinking water supply in 2008. Impasses in state planning encourage local populations to find other ways, including attempting to obtain visibility through identification with an ethnolegal category.7 For this reason, the villagers of Lagoa Bonita are turning to public policies in favor of the Quilombolas that, they hope, will give their land a status distinct from that of the PAE and perhaps easier access to new resources in terms of health and education. In Aminacamba, they are not alone in thinking this. As I returned to the city of Santa Clara, I learned from the captain of the boat, who was familiar with the area and its inhabitants, that Dona Ana herself planned to “become Quilombola.” In addition to the harsh living conditions they and all other inhabitants of the area faced, the families of Lagoa Bonita experienced specific problems. For some years, they had been at odds with a woman from a nearby locality who, contravening regulations and customs, cleared the banks of the river (which had become a stream), built an enclosure to bar them access, and let her cattle roam, contaminating the water and trampling their cassava fields. It is in this specific context, where the land institutions’ failure to keep their promises has combined with a disinterest on behalf of the powers that be in enforcing environmental legislation, that we must understand the three brothers’ remarks. The names given to the three brothers are fictitious and, in order to facilitate reading, they were chosen in alphabetical order, which is also the order of birth: Alex is therefore the oldest, Bernardo the middle son, and Carlos the youngest. I will nevertheless start with the latter because his opinion in favor of the Quilombola option prevails in the village.

Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”

19

A Black-Dominated “Mixture” The youngest brother, Carlos, is 40 years old. He is a teacher and works in close collaboration with Pedro, the director who is responsible for his school. He invited me to take a seat in the school’s only classroom, a semi-open circular building with a roof of straw, to explain to me how he came to emphasize his family history’s Black genealogy: [My brothers and I] always debated, discussed, exchanged ideas, dialogued and I see that our root [raiz] . . . We know that the people, the Brazilian people come from three different races which are, in this case, Blacks, Indians, and Whites. And as incredible as it seems, we are the descendants of our great-grandparents: our grandmother, great-grandmother was Indigenous [indígena], but our great-grandfather was Black [negro].8 So it got a bit confusing [confuso]. But also because of the characteristics, the way of life here, the people [and] there are our customs [costumes] . . . The opinions of our [sic] brothers are different. So one is in favor of the Indigenous, the other of the Quilombolas. For my part, I see that our root is more . . . that it has a more black-oriented characteristic, Quilombolas. [Question: Is it a question of culture?] I see it because of the culture, the way of life . . . Here, the question of living together [convivência], of our own, which is very similar [muito voltada para] to that of Blacks. Because Blacks have always liked being like that, together, always united, the way of expressing themselves too. That’s how I see things.

Starting from a representation that is widely held in the school institution to which he belongs, namely the history of Brazil as a country of the encounter between three races,9 Carlos very quickly focuses on his own family and, more particularly, on two direct ascendants: the union between an Indigenous great-grandmother and a Black great-grandfather is a local illustration of these more general contact phenomena. Like his brothers, he recognizes that he and his siblings come from a “mixture” and, as he points out, the subject is a source of endless discussion. For all that, Carlos does not grant this notion a positive value—perhaps because he apprehends it from the angle of the miscegenation (mestiçagem) taught at school. On the contrary, “mixture” is for him synonymous with “confusion,” that is to say, a loss of clarity about what one really is, and therefore a constant questioning about the “roots” one is connected to today. The mixture here carries an identity disorder, and, from his point of view, it is this property that the divergent interpretations among the siblings illustrate. Carlos then refers to the register of culture—a particular type of sociability and linguistic practices whose expressions however remain very vague in his words—to justify his reading of a Black dominance in their origins.

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The Amazonian Puzzle

When discussing the reasons for his own “choice” in favor of the Quilombolas, Carlos centers his narrative on the geographical displacements that have taken him to places that are farther and farther away from Lagoa Bonita and more and more urbanized. Continuing his education and then professional training forced him to go first to a nearby hamlet for middle school, then to the capital of Vila Araçatuba for high school, and finally to the big city of Santa Clara for university. Although he insists that he has “always considered himself Black,” we surmise that the painful realization of the color of his skin occurred as he entered spaces where he was less protected. His use of the adverb “always” signifies less that he had been aware of discrimination since his childhood than it aims to indicate to the listener that, now, with the political conscience that he has forged, he knows that some of the attitudes he faced were part of it: [Question: Have you always considered yourself Quilombola?] I have always considered myself [this way]. When I started to understand things [A partir do momento que eu passei a me entender], I was always proud to be Black [Negro], I always declared myself Black. And even that, lately [ultimamente], we have been suffering from racism, from the prejudices of other communities [comunidades].10 You would always hear people saying: “Hey, [you, the] black [preto], from Lagoa Bonita.” You know, uninformed people sometimes don’t even know that it’s racism. Today, by law, it is a very big thing, but I have always [denounced] it. When they said to me: “Shit [puta], you are very black [preto], my man,” I said: “I am proud of it.” I am proud to be Black [Negro] because the roots of my grandparents, of my great-grandparents are Black [negras]. They are still alive today. [Question: Was it here in the community?] No, outside, when I was studying, about 12 years old. When I started to understand things, we discussed with classmates [in middle school, in high school, then at university], why I was treated like this, you see. Today, after having these ideas [conhecimentos], we started to discuss. Now, we see that people view us in a different way because we have more knowledge [sabedoria] and we show them the reality. It’s not because we’re Black [negro], because we’re a different color . . . different, right . . . Because we’re Christians, we’re human beings . . . Until I was 12, I studied here, in the community . . . Because there was only a primary school at the time . . . we had to change communities . . . That was a community where there was a lot of suffering in the classroom: “Look, the blacks [pretos] have arrived.” That’s when we started to wake up a bit. We started to discuss and see the situation . . . Afterwards we went to middle school in Vila Araçatuba . . . and in Santa Clara at the university [for three years]. Then things started to change because our knowledge was greater. I see things like this: discrimination, which existed before, started to be perceived [a sair um pouco], because we started to fight, to talk about reality, you understand?

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The only sibling to have stayed at length in a big city, Carlos has directly experienced the looks, remarks, and contemptuous attitudes of city dwellers toward the inhabitants of rural areas. It also gave him the opportunity to meet and discuss with other young people from hamlets similar to his who found themselves in the same difficult situation. In the course of their discussions and his integration into urban activist networks, he forged a political culture that enabled him to counter the insults that he kept receiving with the expression of the “pride” (orgulho) of being Black. In a way, he found in “race” a language to neutralize the effects of a degrading social otherness as a dark-skinned rural dweller. According to him, the acquisition of various types of knowledge (of the urban universe, of academic knowledge, of political discourse), the denunciation of racism, and his own definition as Black went hand in hand. The construction of this positioning led him to privilege identification with his Black greatgrandfather’s lineage rather than with that of his Indian great-grandmother. Back in Lagoa Bonita as a teacher, logically, he seeks to make his close relatives benefit from the knowledge that he amassed with such difficulty. What is specific to his narration is that it makes heard a voice that seeks to be individual and singular, whereas, as we will now see, his brothers evoke the sharing of bodily substances or of cultural traits common to all villagers.

A “Mixture” That Seeks a Balance The second brother, who is one or two years older than Carlos and whom I call Bernardo, is the former president of the community and represented the village in this capacity within the PAE federation, the two functions going hand in hand. However, he continues to fulfill a representative function in the Union of Rural Workers, which more broadly coordinates all the villages of the region. Inviting me to join him, Bernardo gestured to the chair he had placed for me facing the bench running along the outside wall of his mud-brick house, in the shade of a mango tree. As his brother had done before him, Bernardo began by recalling the components of the family “mixture” (“Blacks with Indians”) before opposing school knowledge and official history. However, denouncing the racism suffered by Blacks or the “fable” of Brazil as a country of three races was not the issue for him. Rather, Bernardo attacked the idea of a Portuguese “discovery” of America, asserting the anteriority of a native presence. His story refers to two events that did not feature in his brother’s version. The first is implicit, but from the terms “revolution” and “war” it is easy to see that he is referring to a popular regional uprising (1835–38) that was harshly quelled by the sending of troops (Harris 2010) and that is engraved in the pop-

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ulations’ memory. The second is a new geographical scale of reference, the Aminacamba flood basin where several hamlets are located, including Lagoa Bonita and the town of Vila Araçatuba. While Carlos concentrated on the processes of awareness of difference and of the constitution of political collectives based on personal experiences, Bernardo sought to describe the formation of the village by inscribing it in a regional history and a particular space. Lagoa Bonita thus appears as an example of the social dynamics that presided over the foundation of the sixty-eight communities of Aminacamba: Our community of Lagoa Bonita is the result of a mixture of Blacks and Indians. In fact, our [great-]grandfather was one of the [Indigenous] Lukkunu . . . I learned of this descent [sic] [from my grandmother], and because we know that the revolution of the “remnants” [remanescentes] [the Cabanagem uprising], it comes from the Blacks. Blacks with this mixture with Indians. . . . We went to get this information and our grandmother said that our greatgrandfather—it was her father—was one of the Indians, of the Lukkunu. [Question: Where was he from?] From this region, from Aminacamba. I mean [that] this region of Aminacamba . . . it’s Brazil! For us, Whites and Blacks, it’s Brazil. Because they say Brazil was discovered by men. This what’s-his-name, Pedro Alves Cabral. Because we think that, but in fact, it was not discovered, the Indians were already there. The Indians were the inhabitants, they were the masters [donos] of the land. Isn’t that true? We are the masters of the land, right? . . . So this land belongs to the Indians. The Indians were nomadic people, they did not stop in a particular place. . . . So, they were rational [from the point of view of the use of resources, but which may appear to sedentary city dwellers as] irrational [sic], and they explored. They arrived in a locality, they exploited what they wanted. And when [the resources] ran out, they would go somewhere else. And so they came up here, to our community—well, it was just a place [lugar]—and to the community further up, and they extended from that one to here. With this revolution, this war [the Cabanagem], they began to hide and that is when they founded this community . . . It is from this place, because the people, the Indians before, they lived on the banks of the river. From then on, they survived by fishing and gathering fruit. None of this forest was exploited . . . So families arrived . . . So there were other communities which are also of this descent from the Indians . . . So you see that Aminacamba is big. There are sixty-eight communities up and down the lake. So from then on, there was mixed blood [cruzamento] between people.

Bernardo rejects the notion that Pedro Alves Cabral arrived on a virgin continent. Instead, he claims that it was previously and indisputably occupied by Indigenous populations. The argument is essential in that it bases their legitimacy on the true mastery of the land. After having established this general principle of original territorial rights, which are legally recognized, Bernardo strove to show that it could well apply, in the present situation, to his relatives.

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By engaging discursively in a sort of compression of the different strata of populations that succeeded each other in the place now called Lagoa Bonita, he considers its current inhabitants to be the direct descendants of the first Indians: “The Indians were . . . the masters of the land. . . . We are the masters of the land.”11 In his version, the modalities of local settlement (isolated families who ended up settling close to one another) follow from Indian characteristics (“nomadism” and the practice of gathering). The mention of an ethnonym—information that he claims to have learned from his still-living grandmother and that he is the only one to assert—ensures this inscription in the Amerindian lineage. He thus claims to have authority by heritage over the land where the village is located. The whole of his argument is consolidated by the reference to shared bodily substances: the “blood” that flows in the “veins” of a set of relatives is in fact a powerful symbol of what is common to all. Although he is inclined toward the theme of Indianness for most of the interview, Bernardo does not neglect Black genealogy and, for this reason, it can be argued that he defends the position of a “mixture” that tends toward a balance. First, he associates the “revolution” of the Cabanagem with the “remnants” (remanescentes), a modern term designating the descendants of fugitive African slaves, before correcting himself to also mention the participation of “Indians.” It should be noted that the Cabanagem is generally remembered, as Bernardo did during our discussion, as a time of extreme and lethal violence when it was necessary to be wary of both soldiers and insurgents.12 However, it is within this context that he situates the connection of the Lukkunu with other Indian groups, but also with Black families, suggesting that the “crossing” (cruzamento) between these different populations that he evokes seems to result from their fragility. In Bernardo’s narrative, however, Indian and Black genealogies do not receive the same treatment. The former is lost in time immemorial whereas the latter only takes shape in a really positive way with the introduction of the figure of the Black grandfather, whom Bernardo believes to have come from a small town built in the 1930s as part of an American project to produce latex, where he is said to have met the Lukkunu woman. Probably following the closure of the exploitation in the early 1940s, the man who seems to have had no relatives followed his companion when she returned to settle in Lagoa Bonita near her sister. This difference in the inclusion of the two tutelary figures in kinship networks perhaps explains why Bernardo expands further on the Amerindian genealogy. Because of the regional history, Bernardo is certain that, like all the other hamlets in the area, Lagoa Bonita sprung from a “mixture” between Indians and Blacks. That’s why we are sure that our roots come from there, from the Indians with the Blacks. Well I know, we identify as Quilombola; it is our identity. [So you are a Black Lukkunu?]

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Yes, Lukkunu. Because the truth is this: the people of Aminacamba, whether they like it or not, they are Indians or Quilombolas. [Can’t you be both?] [Laughing] No, no. It depends on what you mean, whether you want to opt for Quilombola or for Indian. Because we all have a vein [veia], because we know that it is the blood, that part there, of the Indians. We have this mixture [mistura]. [So you can’t be Quilombola Lukkunu?] No. Either Quilombola, or Lukkunu. [And what did you choose?] We here opted for Quilombolas. It is the decision of the community. It means that it is the community that decides what it will really be, its descendants.

Bernardo clearly perceives proof of a dual genealogy in his family history, but the institutional reading implies that the populations can only opt for one of them. It is to this limitation, of which he is fully aware, that he implicitly refers when he insists on being “either Quilombola, or Lukkunu.” It thus appears that the terms of the “choice” to be what one wants, a right given by the Constitution of 1988 and that everyone intends to exercise, are those of a binding alternative. Although Bernardo is very attached to his Indian ancestors, he fully agrees with his brothers in asking for Lagoa Bonita to be recognized as Quilombola, that is to say as Black. But his agreement stems less from a deep conviction forged by family memories than from the certainty that political action must be taken to improve living conditions. And, for this to be the case, “the community”—a set of relatives with convergent interests—gathered in assembly publicly and collectively approved the Quilombola mobilization. As Bernardo very rightly remarks, this “decision” has very concrete effects. Favoring one ancestral figure while excluding the other means officially determining the “quality” of the inhabitants as well as that of their “descendants” vis-à-vis the administration. It then becomes clear that the restitution of the hamlet’s past and the future that opens up to its inhabitants are linked: both are a function of present positionings that are negotiated between relatives and, as we will see further, in the interaction with external interlocutors.

A “Mixture” Leaning toward Indianness The oldest brother, whom I call Alex, is 45 and now represents the village in the PAE federation, as he is the current president of the community. He welcomed me under a papaya tree near his adobe house with a straw roof. His

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narrative, like that of his brothers, opens with the characters of his Black greatgrandfather and his Indian great-grandmother. He associates the former with tragic periods in history (the Cabanagem, slavery13) and harsh bodily treatment, and the latter with the universe of the forest where she was supposedly born. He also gives them distinct temperaments, archetypal images relating to Blacks and Indians: the man’s taste for novelty and his desire to increase opportunities for socialization; the mistrust of the woman who prefers to move away when newcomers settle in the vicinity: Listen, my [great-]grandparents, my great-grandfather himself, he was from the time of slavery, from the time when there was this war, the Cabanagem. He ran away. He belonged to the masters [senhores]. He told us, he was black. He had all these marks on his back . . . He fled, they left him on a beach [of the river]. So, this great-grandfather, he is of this descent. So he met my great-grandmother who belonged to [que era] the heart of the forest. Even when he was drawn to some activity [quando foi pró movimento], she stayed more in the forest. These two got closer and they started to form a family. This is why there is this descent; only relatives. Because the two [Indian] sisters came to this community.

However, more than Bernardo, for whom the “mixture” seems to tend to a balance, and unlike Carlos, who supports the Quilombola position, Alex seems to anchor his version of family genealogy more in the Indian woman than in the Black man. Even though he says he does not know the ethnonym of his ancestors, he is not satisfied with “blood.” From the beginning of our discussion, he searched for proof of the villagers’ Indianness in the field of culture. An example is the case of matrimonial practices between cousins: Because before [the quilombola claim], there was already a mobilization. We were already aware that we are the descendants of Indians. Like it or not, even the structure [of the houses] and the rest [are like theirs]. And even [até] because I don’t even know what kind of Indians we are! There are those who marry relatives, right? And really, our community has that, [unions of ] cousins with [a] cousin. I am the only one to have [taken a wife] in another family. And my uncle. Very few of us have [done that].

His reference to a social mobilization prior to the Quilombola demands— which aimed at the creation of a territorial unit intended for the so-called Traditional populations and to which I will return in the last chapter—is an invitation to put current political action into perspective. It is as if its current expression constituted the new trappings of older struggles. This fact is of course not without significance. Later in the discussion, Alex returned to the theme of “resemblance” with the Indians, taking one of my questions as an opportunity to express his perplexity

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The Amazonian Puzzle

at the community’s “choice” to be Quilombolas. Shortly after, he maintained that everything in the village—from the adobe structure of the houses with straw roofs to the farming and portage techniques—evoked Amerindian origins. His opinion was reinforced after watching a documentary on Globo, the main national television channel, where the Indians’ gestures reminded him of their own: [Question: If you have this double ancestry, why did you choose to be Quilombolas?] Exactly! That’s why it’s pounding in here [tapping his temple]. For me, who loves my genealogy, I don’t understand a lot of things, but, in my opinion, we should be . . . not Quilombola! We should be of our true descendants [descendência mesmo] [sic]. [Question: Are you both at the same time?] Yes, you can also be both things. So, either we are for one thing, or we are for the other. [Question: For the moment, the community seems to be on the side of the Quilombolas?] Yes, [it is] more for the Quilombolas. Me, I remain doubtful. Because you know, it’s not that I have more knowledge than the others here. You who know a lot more than we do, you could explain to us if we are right or if we are wrong. But for my part, I am doubtful. [Question: You said you were different from other communities . . .] A difference in attitude, you see. Because there are people who are a little more civilized. Ours [our community] is a bit different. The civilization is more Indian, even our structure, our little houses in the maloca style. Are these not the malocas of the Indians, who make little huts? I make this comparison because once there was a report in which the Indians make [cassava] flour, go to the fields, carry things on their heads. So I compared with my community: [it’s] almost identical, you know! So I spent my time thinking [fiquei só matutando]: “Look, my community is more or less like that.” We are often in no position to say things [suspeito de falar], aren’t we? But I speak all the same; not well, but I speak.

Like Bernardo, Alex stresses that the village recognizes two genealogies, and he does not dispute any more than his brother did the fact that the populations have to comply with the principle of the identity alternative. These two propositions are clearly based on very different principles (the first admits the possibility of accumulating genealogies, the second is based on binarity). However, they each refer in their own way to the notion of “choice.” The feeling of contradiction that seems to emerge from Bernardo’s second answer (in bold in the extract above) dissipates when the frames of reference are taken into account: what he means is that, from the point of view of the family narrative, “one can be both things,” but from the point of view of the norms of the national legal framework, one is obligated to be “for one thing or for the other.”

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This is the perspective that leads Alex to adopt a different position from his brothers. For, with the help of snippets of family history, personal observations, and pieces of information that come to him from the outside via national media, he seems to go farther than Bernardo in developing Amerindian genealogy as another legitimate option for Lagoa Bonita. And if he asked the visiting anthropologist to confirm the relevance of his reasoning, it is perhaps less because he considers that her opinion would be more authoritative than his, than because he expects to gain new arguments. Be that as it may, he concludes by affirming that his lack of formal education does not prevent him from expressing his doubts to his brothers, one of whom, being a teacher and defender of the Quilombola cause, is also the main repository of knowledge. It also seems that Alex’s opinion was echoed by Bernardo, who, in answer to my last question, said: [Question: Since you consider yourself a Lukkunu Indian, have you not thought of assuming an identity as Indigenous?] In truth, not yet [laughing], in truth not yet.

These words, and above all the burst of laughter that accompanied them, suggest that the former president of the community has not totally ruled out the idea of joining the current president in the search for a new consensus, which would bring the Indian genealogy into the light but would then relegate the Black lineage to the background. Of course, the youngest brother, Carlos, would have to adhere to this reading for the siblings’ unity to remain unbroken. While Carlos does not seem convinced for the moment, he nevertheless concedes that he will not oppose the “community” if it wishes to “assert itself ” as Indigenous: Since I was little, my decision has been to be Quilombola. But if most people want to define themselves as Indigenous . . . I will not be in the front row [não vou balançar], but I’ll accompany them.

Thus, we guess that Carlos will not dissociate himself if by chance his brothers envisage another destiny for the hamlet.

Conclusion: Personal Identifications, Political Watchwords As in many other Amazonian villages, the three brothers of Lagoa Bonita all admit to being the product of a mistura whose original components and the individuals who embody them in the family history are clearly identified.14 Considering their three narratives together is interesting in several respects. First of all, it highlights that what is not only perceived but also affirmed as a common

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base and shared memory is likely to receive contrasting interpretations, some of which would be inadmissible from a legal point of view. Each sibling sheds a singular light on the fabric of their “mixture,” bringing out a specific representation of the hamlet: the youngest brother, Carlos, favors Black lineage, the middle brother, Bernardo, dual ethnic filiation, whereas the oldest brother, Alex, attaches great importance to Indian genealogy. The ethnographic situation also invites us to heed Fredrik Barth’s (1994: 21–22) recommendation to distinguish between processes that occur at the micro-level (“persons and interpersonal interactions”) and those that concern the median level (the creation of collectivities and the mobilization of groups) and the macro-level (“the legal creations of bureaucracy”). Insofar as they are developed in the family sphere and are expressed in terms of affect and intimacy, personal identifications are of little import for a group of relatives. They are processes of singularization within a group of people who know each other: “my grandmother was already a healer” and “he hunts like his grandfather” are formulations that aim to explain why I/she or he has a specific skill, but I/she or he may have to assert others during his/her existence. In this sense, the notable absence of tensions produced by the divergent positions taken by the two older brothers—one at odds with the official position of the “community,” the other claiming a dual affiliation—can be understood as the affirmation and recognition of personal singularities. In principle, it is quite a different matter for the collective watchwords that are intended to give substance, and a concrete outcome, to social mobilizations and political demands. The constancy and unanimity that a group of relatives show in the display of an “identity,” in the sense of a label, are therefore essential for its determination to be taken seriously during interactions with external actors. They are also essential so that the representatives of the administrations agree to proceed with the effective implementation of specific measures intended for the beneficiaries of an ethno-legal category (land status, type of rights). In these circumstances, the passage from Quilombola to Indian would imply a significant change in the village’s public image as well as a repositioning with respect to the institutions and the associative world. The National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) would take the place of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and the Palmares Cultural Foundation,15 and the Regional Indigenous Council that of the Quilombola Federation. Any change in political watchwords thus has a direct impact on access to administrative programs and funding. Seen through the prism of the constitutional principle of self-definition, the notions of “choice” and “decision” appear as elements favoring a resumption of initiative on the part of local populations who no longer hesitate to “declare” themselves Traditional, Indian, or Black populations. These notions can there-

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fore be seen as attesting to their political awareness. However, once we take into account the binarity and exclusivism of identifications authorized by the state, which is reflected in the simple alternative between Indian and Quilombola, they also seem to create an effect of closure, even of alienation, against which the populations must fight. Keeping possible new configurations on the horizon could be a visible sign of this, showing that the “choices” made are never definitively sealed. Notes 1. In order to preserve anonymity, the names of places, organizations, and people have all been changed. 2. The NGO Instituto Socioambiental mentions seventy-seven RESEXs in the Brazilian Amazon, some under the federal administration and others under that of the various states of the Union (https://uc.socioambiental.org/unidadesdeconservacao#resex). A complete list of PAEs for each state can be found on the website of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (https://www.gov.br/incra/pt-br/assuntos/reforma-agraria/ assentamentos-relacao-de-projetos). The RESEXs are managed by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), which comes under the Ministry of the Environment, and the PAEs by INCRA, which comes under the Ministry of Agriculture. 3. https://www.gov.br/incra/pt-br/assuntos/reforma-agraria/assentamentos. 4. The Union of Rural Workers of Santarém (STTR), supported by the Catholic Church, obtained INCRA intervention in the 1980s. However, the work of demarcation was not concluded. 5. Other criticisms could be made of the action of state institutions and in particular of INCRA. In his thesis, Ricardo Folhes (2016) shows that they did not take into account the complementary use of resources from the rich and fertile floodplains (várzea), nor did they perceive the power relations and social practices stemming from the mastery of these differentiated spaces (ibid.: 26). 6. “Bolsa família” (https://www.gov.br/cidadania/pt-br/bolsa-familia) 7. This situation is related to the attempts to access citizenship through ethnicization analyzed in the Brazilian Amazon in Boyer (2016). 8. The word Negro, as well as preto, which is found later on in Carlos’s story, are translated into English with the same word, “black.” However, they have very different connotations. Negro is today above all a political identity and, for this reason, activists consider that its use should prevail over a qualification like preto, which refers to color and is considered offensive. I capitalize Black as Negro and use lowercase in the sense of preto. 9. Given their age, the three brothers must have been educated in the 1980s, that is to say at the time of the redemocratization of the country. However, according to Fabiano Dias Monteiro, this period was also a period of revision of the school programs concerning the reading of the past. The version of Brazil as a country of harmonious encounter and fusion between three races—the Portuguese adventurer, the African slave, and the native Indian (Monteiro 2015: 131)—was denounced as a fiction and challenged by discourse that pays more attention to conflict and exploitation. The process of valuing differences, which according to the author has been observed since the 1980s at the municipal and state levels of the Union, became the official narrative from 1995 on under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (ibid.: 149). Even if, as Monteiro points out (ibid.:151), teachers may

30

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

The Amazonian Puzzle

not use all the new textbooks, it is certain that ethnic certainties are more present in the younger brother, that is to say, the last to have been in contact with the educational institution and also the one who stayed there the longest. “Community” is a term commonly used to designate all the inhabitants of a place, forming a political and administrative unit. A soil formation called “black earth” (terras pretas), which archaeologists think results from human activities in pre-Columbian times, is sometimes adduced by the populations as a comparable element of proof of their Indianness. The presence of this quality of soil in their areas of residence attests to an initial Amerindian occupation that they consider themselves, as the current inhabitants, to have inherited. In other interpretations, the Cabanagem appears as a struggle for freedom. According to the historian José Maia Neto Bezerra, however, it is a question of historical memory that was constituted in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth. century, this uprising was associated “with disorder and debauchery” (Bezerra 2009: 27). According to Bezerra, the abolitionists and emancipators did not see themselves as the heirs of the cabanos and the cabano leaders did not question the institution of slavery (ibid.: 30–31). If we count between twenty-five and thirty years per generation, the great-grandfather would in fact have been born before the abolition of slavery. It might seem surprising that the brothers mention only two of their ancestors when their great-grandparents are theoretically eight in number. Several factors explain this disappearance of stories. First of all, the fact is that it is extremely rare for family memoirs to retain the memory of so many ancestors without the support of written sources, in Brazil as elsewhere. Then, in the context of ethnic claims, the ancestors brought to light must be able to be linked to genealogies that have suffered from the history of colonization. However, if “becoming White” for deprived populations does not constitute a possible “choice,” then all the Dutch, Portuguese, and other ancestors can possibly be mentioned in private (and they sometimes are), but not publicly. The aim of the Palmares Cultural Foundation, created in 1997, is to promote African culture and its diverse forms of expression in Brazil, among which are the Quilombolas and their territories. However, since 2003, the demarcation of their lands has been the responsibility of INCRA.

CHAPTER 2

Personal Experiences in the Service of Collective Projects   

The previous chapter showed that dissonant interpretations of a family history may lead close relatives to make different ethnic “choices,” and that the state and many militants find this disconcerting, as they expect these populations, which they consider similar, to all think alike. The present chapter focuses on the impact of individual initiatives in the reformulations of the public expression of a territorially situated project. This perspective prompts us to distinguish between two facets of experience.1 The first corresponds to the shared daily experience of a subordinate social position by a group of people: from this point of view, the commitment to common action within a given territory in order to transform problematic living conditions seems to constitute the most remarkable expression of collective agency. The second refers to the experiences encountered by only some of the members of a group of relatives: these individual agencies are nourished by secondary socializations along specific geographical paths that may eventually lead to other places where new “causes” are discovered, and sometimes embraced, and new skills acquired. Taking Lagoa Bonita as an example of this, I suggest that the understanding that each of the three brothers shows toward the opinion of the others attests to their unfailing attachment to family solidarity as well as their awareness of belonging to a dominated social group. The diagnosis they make is therefore a shared one, and its accuracy is tested on a daily basis. The solutions that each person advocates in order to fight against precariousness and for the well-being of all are, however, different, and these differences are indicative of their specific involvements in networks of local and regional militant relations. As already pointed out, despite the difficulty of accessing the hamlet, it is nonetheless open to the world. Alex mentions the information he gets from television that sustains his reflection, and Bernardo evokes a regional uprising, using the term “remnant,” which is not part of the local vocabulary. As for Carlos, he dwells on the formative years he spent in the city of Santa Clara. The knowledge and know-how brought by each of them undoubtedly constitute privileged vectors for the enrichment of the collective imagination. By

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adding to the knowledge already available to a group of relatives, they broaden the latter’s understanding of social situations and diversify their repertoires of action on the socio-institutional environment. A villager whose singular trajectory leads him to think that a political proposal is the best option for his relatives will talk to them about it. Depending on how convincing he is, on his capacity to form local and supra-local alliances as well as to provide “proof ” of the relevance of the project he advocates and the promises it holds (for example, by bringing in outside visitors), an initially minority or even marginal perspective may manage to win over the majority. Personal experiences, during which everyone forges their own relationships and their own certainties, thus give us a glimpse of hitherto unheard-of possibilities and shift lines that seemed entrenched. In this chapter, I will first examine the answers of each of the three brothers to an open question on the history of the hamlet, showing how this highlights what they retain as relevant markers of very different events. The particular turn they give to their stories and how they understand the “struggle” (luta) can then be linked with the initiatives they envisage taking to work for the common good, but also, ultimately, with their positions vis-à-vis the family “mixture.” Despite these variations in the narrative of a family chronicle, the notions of “decision” and “choice” emerge as constants to designate the moment when social mobilizations take shape. However, these two notions are not exactly equivalent, and I will therefore try to specify how the meaning conferred on each of them reflects the advent of a political posture of protest in a daily life that is marked by uncertainty and difficulties.

Siblings: Three Accounts of the History of Lagoa Bonita When asked about Lagoa Bonita’s past, Alex, Bernardo, and Carlos all organized their narratives around the idea of a common “struggle” waged tirelessly by the inhabitants of an Amazonian village to gain visibility in the eyes of the authorities. Beyond their use of this generic term, they do not, however, refer to exactly the same situations, neither with regard to the period considered nor to the collective project and the means mobilized to achieve it. This plurality of voices contributes to the construction of a complex and multifaceted narrative of the development of a hamlet and the links it maintains with others. By considering the three narratives together, the question of “choice” can be sociologically inscribed, placing current Quilombola watchwords and the introduction of an ethnic register in a broader chronology of social mobilizations.

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The Founding of a “Community” The account given by Alex, the eldest of the siblings and the current president of the community, who, as we have seen, is tempted by the Amerindian genealogy, illustrates well the usual descriptions of the occupation of a given geographical space by men and women. With the arrival of families and isolated people, unions are formed, children are born, sociability is established, and previously dispersed habitats are brought closer together. The villagers then join forces to install and then improve equipment, without outside help: together they clear an area to turn it into a football field, they sometimes build a small wooden chapel, they make contributions so that the villager who is considered a bit better educated can teach the children what he knows. Daily life in Lagoa Bonita seems to hinge on the consolidation of family networks into which newcomers are integrated: At the time [the hamlet was formed], there were few inhabitants. There were four families. One here, the other there. Afterwards, they got closer, the families. There were children, so they formed this little nucleus [of the settlement], and they started to play football there, in Boa Esperança [another locality] . . . . Near the [football] field, a school was founded, which was paid for by the parents, and after that another one that was built by the government. Then it stopped. A new one was again paid for by the parents. So we fought, fought and it is catechesis [priests and militants of the Catholic Church]. So, after catechesis, came a school [financed by the municipality], which is the one we have. So we started to organize. That’s what brought this business [negócio] of community president . . . So they [the Catholic priests] spoke with people who had a little more knowledge, to call, to make this community visible to other people [from outside]. Because it was not visible; even today it still isn’t. We have recognition [from the municipality] but [the community] is still not very visible. When it’s election time, there is movement [of candidates for the elections who come], but as soon as it’s over it stops.

Due to the distance and the precariousness of the means of transport, the inhabitants at the time had limited contact with the urban world. They go there, however, to ask the “government” (probably the municipality) for help with their school: they obtain materials to build a classroom, but not money to pay the teacher’s salary. The progressive Catholic clergy, who were very active in the 1960s, were more receptive and the priests visited them, encouraging them to adopt the organizational model of the “community” united under the aegis of its president. It is likely that, as in other Amazonian villages, the grouping together of dwellings increased at the time when the Basic Education Movement (MEB), created in 1961 by the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), developed an ambitious adult literacy program in rural areas:2

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in order to be able to follow the radio broadcasts, domestic groups established themselves for the duration of the lessons near the place where the antenna was located. Having thus gained in “visibility,” the inhabitants of Lagoa Bonita were visited during election periods by politicians who were anxious to obtain their vote and who, in order to do so, made them many promises that they did not necessarily keep. As Alex says, while the community endowed Lagoa Bonita with a social existence in the eyes of the outside world, it did not iron out the difficulties of sustainably retaining the attention of the authorities. The Creation of a PAE Bernardo, the middle brother, was the first president of the community and supports the position of a “mixture that seeks a balance.” On the topic of the founding of the village, he does not speak at any length on the micro-history of the hamlet and the visitors it may have received. It is not that he neglects the “community”—he also emphasizes having played an active role in its foundation—but what really interests him is any mention of larger-scale social mobilizations, in particular, during the 2000s, the one that led to the creation of the Aminacamba Agro-Extractivist Settlement Project. He remembers having left the village on countless occasions to join his companions in the struggle, traveling all over the area to “mobilize.” During these trips, he had the opportunity to meet and talk at length with people facing the same difficulties as the inhabitants of Lagoa Bonita. And if he does not mention phenotypic or cultural differences, it is because such differences were not significant at the time. Insisting on shared experiences is what rallied all of the hamlets to the PAE project. These expeditions also had a very specific objective: the collection of data made it possible to draw up a map showing the salient points of the Aminacamba area and thus make the different population centers “visible.” Today, this map is not displayed in the villages, nor even in the capital of Vila Araçatuba, but in the city of Santa Clara, on a wall of the federation’s modest headquarters: When I was younger, I was always someone who was involved in the community. I participated in a lot of these meetings, encounters, of discovery. We also made a map of Aminacamba, we made a workshop [oficina]. If you go [to the federation’s headquarters, in Santa Clara], you will see a map there and that map is the result of the workshop, of our work. We know the whole area . . . It was a three-step process to get it approved. So we had to know our history, and in order to identify our origins [dar a nossa raiz: give our root], we had to find out by having this discussion, this dialogue with our grandparents. It was our ancestors who gave us this information.

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From his discussions with the administrative representatives, Bernardo retains their marked interest in the history of human occupation of the area they proposed to designate a PAE and in the economic activities that the inhabitants developed there. Indeed, the official creation of such a territorial unit is conditional on the qualification of the occupants of the area as Traditional populations, based on two main criteria: how long they have been there and the environmental sustainability of their practices. Being aware that their answers constituted powerful arguments vis-à-vis the state, Bernardo recounts that he was keenly interested in conversations with the elders that allowed him to get a precise idea of the dates when the various localities were founded, as well as the extent of knowledge and know-how. He and his fellow campaigners accumulated proof of the “traditionality” of the inhabitants of Aminacamba. Unlike his older brother Alex, who tells an almost intimistic story centered on the hamlet, Bernardo is part of militant sociability and the epic time of emerging and converging social conflicts. His interest in the community is manifested in his incessant efforts to connect it to others, and although he is no longer directly involved in the management of the PAE federation, he still represents Lagoa Bonita within the union of rural workers. The Constitution of a Quilombola Community As for Carlos, his preference is for a period that is more recent than the foundation of the community or even than the creation of the PAE, as if what counts in the history of the hamlet is its recent adherence to the Quilombola cause. He also introduces a register absent from his brothers’ accounts: ethnicity. Carlos claims to be behind the introduction of this word into the village vocabulary. He presents this initiative as a “will” to allow his close relatives to benefit from knowledge that is inaccessible to them, since it was in town that he himself acquired it, during the few years he spent in Santa Clara. However, he admits that the word would perhaps not have taken hold without the intervention of various actors outside Lagoa Bonita whose presence and official status attested to the validity of the “explanations” he had previously given the villagers. He dwells above all on the essential role that his superior, the director of rural schools, played in this awareness, insisting on his “friendship” with the inhabitants: It is Pedro who connected us . . . We have a good knowledge [of the policies and directives] because he has a very strong attachment [to our community] . . . . When he left [the Aminacamba region], he went directly to Santa Clara [to study] and we stayed in Vila Araçatuba [to go to middle school] to go later [to university in Santa Clara] too. He is older. That’s why we have a solid friendship with him. He knows our reality, that’s why he tried to help us.

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If we need something, we go and see him. He comes here . . . Recently, they [the municipal civil servants in education] came to have a meeting, so that we could decide, explain what are the advantages, the disadvantages, look for roots, if we are really, if we have Indian or Black blood, if we want to declare ourselves Quilombolas or Indians . . . The word Quilombola, I took a certain course, in Santa Clara. From there [the city], I brought it here, discussing with them, explaining to them [the villagers]. We were supported by Professor Pedro, the director, he came to help us. He explained to the people and then it started to work.

During my stay at Vila Araçatuba, Pedro explained to me how he came to imagine such a Quilombola destiny for Lagoa Bonita. While declaring himself to be a “son from there” and “identifying” with the geographical space where the hamlet is located, he stressed that he had always felt a “difference in behavior and way of life [convivência] of his neighbors,” which, he said, evoked a “Black” sociability to him. Proof of this is that the women breastfeed their children in front of everyone, and the villagers sometimes bathe “naked” in the river. So when, after his studies in the city of Santa Clara, Pedro took up his duties in the capital of Vila Araçatuba in June 2012, he advised the inhabitants of Lagoa Bonita to ask the authorities for recognition as Quilombolas: this would ratify the difference he sensed and could also serve the interests of the families in question. Pedro then did not hesitate to take advantage of the contacts that, by virtue of his position, he has in Santa Clara to organize a visit from the Municipal Education Secretariat team in charge of the implementation of “differentiated education” for the Quilombolas and for the Indians, who was also accompanied by an activist of the Quilombola movement. According to the director, the event was a great success: more than ninety adults and many children met at the appointed time in the community hall. They “recognized themselves” in the portrait that was presented to them and enthusiastically accepted “the proposal made to them to request” their inclusion in this ethno-legal category. Pedro observed that their commitment then turned out to be somewhat inconsistent when some people allowed themselves to be “contaminated by negative comments” insinuating that the villagers were going to lose their retirement pension and family allowances. Fortunately, the families got involved in the mobilization again after being reassured by fresh “explanations.” Carlos is grateful to the director for having spared no effort in helping them understand the texts, the rights, and the advantages of declaring themselves Quilombolas. He relied all the more on the actors he had brought to the village as their trajectories were similar. Often coming from rural localities with which they still maintained ties, they pursued their education in Santa Clara where they encountered new ideas and learned about activism. Some, like Pedro and the members of the municipal team, even became civil servants. The idea of a

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community of interests based on elements other than kinship relations in a territory thus emerged from this sociability established in an urban environment. The stories of the three brothers all relate to a process of social formation, and then of political organization of a village, but they refer to distinct spatiotemporal scales, political alliances, and modes of development. The oldest brother, Alex, builds his narrative around a localized, autonomous social institution (the community) that brings together domestic groups linked by family solidarity and receives the occasional attention of certain politicians. His younger brother, Bernardo, focuses on the constitution of bodies with a broader scope targeting categorical representations in a given geographical area (the federation of Traditional populations, the union of “small rural producers”) vis-à-vis the administration of the state. As for the youngest brother, Carlos, he focuses his account on the interest that a particular village aroused among certain municipal officials promoting a public policy (the “differentiated” school), which distinguishes his village from its nearest neighbors, but brings it closer to more distant localities.

From “Decision-Making” to “Choice” or How to Revive the Hope of Better Days These narratives evidence the diverse points of view in the reading of the same family chronicle. When linked together, they reveal a shift that can be identified in other ethnographic situations: the description of the arrival and gradual convergence of people and families in a given space (Alex), then the growing political coordination between the hamlet they have formed and other villages perceived as equals (Bernardo), give way to the story of their gradual awareness of a particularity that spurs them to distance themselves anew from their immediate neighbors (Carlos). This evolution shows how iconoclastic the latter position is. It asserts the importance of the local level of “community” and recognizes the need for supralocal mobilizations, but these are no longer based on the intermediate scale of socio-territorial unity. The breeding ground for alliances is formed less by analogous living conditions and the need for solidarity than by the postulate of an identity in nature between domestic groups found in various parts of the national territory, that is, disconnected in terms of spatial proximity. In this way, the term “root” is completely redefined: from being based on family networks or a territorial project, it shifts to “ethnicity,” a notion that attempts to problematize the relationship between localized but scattered islets and the abstract matrix from which they proceed.

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By distinguishing between locality conceived as a “phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feelings that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity and that yields particular sorts of material effects” (Appadurai 1996: 182) and locality as “neighborhood,” that is “the actually existing social forms in which locality . . . is variably realized” (ibid.: 179), Arjun Appadurai invites us to focus on the “techniques for the production of locality” (ibid.: 182). In doing so, he draws attention to the fact that neighborhoods “both are contexts and at the same time require and produce context” (ibid.: 194), but also to the fact that “the production of the locality [is carried out] in a world that has become deterritorialized, diasporic and transnational” (ibid.: 188). The accounts of the three brothers suggest this phenomenon of the amplification and mutation of arenas as forms of the realization of neighborhood structures. The projects and forms of organization that the three brothers envisage are thus clearly distinct in the institutional spaces to which they provide access, involving increasingly complex negotiations. The constitution of a hamlet as a community really only concerns its inhabitants, encouraged by their Catholic allies. As a result, the name of the village is entered in the parish registers where the visits of the priests and the number of inhabitants are recorded. By comparison, the creation of a federation of Traditional populations presupposes bringing together a much larger number of partners. It involves discussions with all of the community’s presidents and the leaders of small farmers’ unions in the area, not only to convince them to join the movement, but also to know how to respond to administrative requirements in terms of documentation (cards, lists of beneficiaries, statutes). In terms of the diversity of parties involved, the founding of an ethnic association is not very different. Depending on its “declaration,” a community joins the confederation that, in the region, defends the interests of the ethno-legal category in which the community asks to be registered, it discusses with the administration officially responsible for its management, and it seeks support from certain nongovernmental organizations. The last two modalities, nevertheless, differ both in the number of people concerned (unlike a federation, an ethnic association only includes the members of a community) and in the quality of their relationships, as most of them are relatives. The dominant theme running through all these narrative frameworks is that of “decision-making” and “choice.” In general, these local notions are conceived as a driving and unifying force that allows the production of political subjects (a recurrent expression in the Brazilian literature), in an action carried out first of all on oneself: after having agreed on the need to modify the image presented to the outside world, the members of a collective gathered in assembly decide in favor of an organizational change that evidences this.

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It is nonetheless important to emphasize that the main aim of this self-transformation is to produce effects on one or more Others. By claiming to have adopted such and such a form of government—designated by new words that must be appropriated (community, federation, or association)—by “decision” or “choice,” a village or a group of villages ceases to be an informal and conjunctural collection of individuals. It now appears to outsiders as a stable group aware of its rights, and endowed, moreover, with a formal structure and legitimate representatives whom politicians seeking votes, civil servants in charge of implementing programs, or activists with a mission can address. “Decision” and “choice” must therefore be understood as discursive resources that indicate to the listener a process that endorses a combative posture, making it possible to break with an unfavorable status quo, to “make demands” in the face of those who are more powerful, and to have the “strength” to be heard by them. In other words, they denote the desire to enter political arenas on an equal footing. In reality, the determination with which the local populations maintain their intention to exercise what they consider to be the freedom of self-determination is often hampered by their weak capacity to master the situations they are confronted with, as is shown in the following extract from an interview with Alex: We are waiting for them [the representatives of the Municipal Education Secretariat and the school director] to give us the positive or negative points . . . My granddaughter, Nete, saw on the internet: “Ah, you have been selected [contemplados] to be Quilombolas” . . . We are waiting, still waiting to know: will it work or not? . . . They say: “You are the ones who are going to choose” . . . From 2008 until now [2013], we started to organize to see if we would make a decision, so that we could have the right to make demands on them, and they on us, as a citizen . . . But before, we didn’t have the strength to speak. We didn’t know what was within our rights. From there, we started making decisions . . . Who am I to say no? Or what you are going to be? I will not force any of my children. It’s like [sports] fans. One is for Vasco, the other for Flamengo [football clubs]. It exists in families. Now it is good that you make a decision, that you see what is best for you . . . They told us that they were going to see how many families there were, so the federal [administration—the INCRA] came and marked this area as if it were Quilombola. [Question: And how is it going for the Indigenous populations?] I’m not sure. But I have a friend who works there [at FUNAI]. Basically, it’s almost identical. The Indian has the right to delimit [marcar] where he thinks it should be . . . We will try this [Quilombola] route [caminho] because we see that they [the PAE federation] do not want to help us [with the problem with the neighbor who blocks the access to water] . . . That’s why we are going to make this decision . . . almost forced . . . Because I know that if we go to the Quilombolas, we will have a right . . . I spoke to them: if they [the federation] don’t make a decision, then we will make ours!

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What is particularly striking in this quotation is the contrast between the voluntary, and even voluntarist, attitude that the use of the expression “decisionmaking” is intended to signify, and the uncertain and changing character of the social situations in which it must be implemented. The unreliable or contradictory information that reaches the local populations, the arbitrations that are not communicated to them (in the above extract, their “selection” as Quilombolas), the slowness of administrative procedures, and competing attachments limit in particular their capacity to evaluate themselves with precision, and above all to effectively oppose spoliation. The villagers then find themselves placed in a wait-and-see attitude where their “decision” turns out to be closely correlated with that of other actors. It is in this sense that an action usually understood as the manifestation of political maturity and the autonomy of the inhabitants of a hamlet can also be thought of as being “forced” by a third party. According to the president of Lagoa Bonita, the inhabitants distance themselves from the PAE federation because it does nothing to solve their problem of access to water caused by the actions of an unscrupulous neighbor. It is this “disinterest” that pushes them “to try the Quilombola route,” that is to say, to seek the protection of institutions that they hope are more diligent. The change of register in self-affirmation is then above all a weapon to provoke a reaction, sometimes as is the case here among historical allies. In any case, this register nevertheless remains relational and political rather than existential and personal. The comparison that Alex sketches in the extract above between the affinities that are forged in Lagoa Bonita around divergent ethnic proposals and football fans places the discussion on the terrain of collective games and not on that of inner truths. In this way, he also prevents simple intra-family differences from turning into open conflict between factions that accuse each other of dissociating themselves from social struggle, as is sometimes the case elsewhere. Recognizing the cohesive value of “decision-making” and “choice” does not mean assuming that agreement is sudden or permanent: it can happen after a relatively long period of time and fade away as quickly as it appeared. And as Alex’s metaphor shows, this does not imply that in principle there is unanimity as to the way in which it should concretely manifest itself. Up to now, I have used “decision” and “choice” as synonyms, which is what local populations do most of the time. However, it seems to me that the two concepts do not have exactly the same meaning. “Choice” is in fact a “decision” of a particular kind, which forces one to decide between competing projects such as inclusion in a territorial modality intended for Traditional populations, requesting the demarcation of land as Quilombola, or claiming Indigenous land. It is significant in this respect that Alex, who leans toward Indianness, does not use the term “choice.” Although he is convinced of the need to act in order

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to make the daily life of the villagers of Lagoa Bonita less difficult, he is not convinced that the Quilombola option is the best for the village. He therefore agrees with “decision” but not “choice.” Although the two words are associated semantically and sequentially (something must be “decided” to be “chosen”), they differ in that the latter presupposes that one renounces other possibilities, and the advantages they might confer. Identity claims are usually regarded in the public space as the almost natural reflection of collective subjects who already preexist on the basis of a common ethnic or racial origin. However, the case in question shows that “choice” cannot be conflated with the simple expression of any prior “identity”—unless one depoliticizes it. Amazonian villages mobilize in the name of ethnicity in order to gain access to rights, that is to say, to try, in particularly difficult situations, to regain control by establishing a new and more favorable balance of power. Their participation in regional mobilizations having resulted in disappointment, claiming a difference from one’s neighbors and associating it with a lesser territorial demand is likely to be perceived as a means of exerting pressure to attract the attention of the authorities and obtain subsidies. From this point of view, the political consciousness of local populations is based not so much on a more or less abstract conception of law and the common good as on their ability to explore various possibilities to improve their living conditions by seizing new legal instruments. Even if the divergence of identity positionings within a village is probably a handicap in the face of external actors concerned with ethnic clarity, it shows that the political dimension, strictly speaking, lies in the situational and contextual construction of new consensuses. This explains why Bernardo, who was closely involved in the creation of the PAE, sides with his brother Carlos’s Quilombola cause, and why Carlos does not exclude going along with Alex if the Indian option were to be considered afterward. More than defending an ethnic identity, what matters here is to preserve cohesion between the siblings, and more broadly between all their relatives. Configurations such as that of Lagoa Bonita are particularly enlightening in understanding how collective reflection is nourished by the multiplicity of sources of information (real people such as members of institutions or activists, but also virtual communication channels such as government or NGO websites) to which everyone has access depending on their technological skills and their contacts. However, these sources of information potentially open the way to unforeseen developments as to the form that a social demand should take in order to be effective. Carlos thus thought that the arrival of the educational team would convince his brothers of the merits of the Quilombola option. Yet, as he says, the presence of representatives from the two main sectors of “differentiated education” allowed the community not only to learn more about

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Quilombola rights, but also to take stock of the difference between “Blacks” and “Indigenous.” It is thus possible that while the younger brother found something to sharpen and assert his Quilombola conviction in the village, his older brother Alex discovered, for his part, how to strengthen his arguments in favor of Indianness. Transformed into ideas that can be compared, these different resources are mobilized to encourage close relatives to enter into the movement of history by “making a decision,” and sometimes by adjusting their “choice” when necessary. In fact, the mere explanations of administrative representatives or urban activists are not enough to win the votes of a village during the establishment of a new project. For the project to appear as an opportunity in everyone’s eyes, local actors have to give it meaning intellectually, by making it intelligible to the inhabitants of a hamlet, and practically, by indicating what it can bring them. These actors are not only the relays of an action coming from outside, nor are they just mediators—unless they are defined as partial mediators, that is to say that their role of translation is deployed, above all, to serve the defense of local interests. The evidence they provide in support of the ideal future proposed to the group (evidence contributed essentially by outside visitors) is here assumed to acquire a special status because they belong to the family in question.

Conclusion: Social Change and Political Transformation The Amazonian ethnography presented here leads us to distinguish between the various narrative registers that are often grouped under the same generic term, “transformation.” The first register concerns concrete facts to which everyone refers in order to mark the milestones of their story and that of their family. The arrival of electricity, a road, the establishment of a school, the construction of a health post, and so forth constitute references and temporal markers. These arrangements, often called mudanças, are not always associated with the setting up of state services; they can also be more or less coordinated local initiatives aimed precisely at making up for their absence. This story is a rather intimist one, reproducing the daily battles that, on a small scale and with modest means, improve the infrastructures of a village. The second register pertains more openly to politics. It is no longer simply a question of organizing (organizar) as much as possible a living environment, but of mobilizing (mobilizar) all the inhabitants to form a visible community and to get the various representatives of authority (politicians, civil servants, religious leaders) to acknowledge them as the privileged recipients of their action. Unlike the previous register, it therefore underlines the position of protest

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taken up by a group of people vis-à-vis the outside world. Common demands and claims take the place of sometimes personal adaptations and requests. In this context, the naming and the qualification of the collective being become important stakes, as they attest to its very existence. Whatever the names or qualities, the notion of “identity,” which implies a certain stability, is here an essential motif in the rhetoric of social groups engaged in conflict. Nevertheless, certain experiences, alliances, or impasses can, as we have seen, lead to a village substituting one watchword for another and thereby altering its public image. However, during these changes of labels (and this distinguishes the intimate from the political register), the processual dimension tends to be ignored. While the narratives trace the effervescence of the mobilizations, it is above all in order to highlight the culminating moment when a “decision” was collectively taken and a “choice” was unanimously made. The transformation is thus related to an episode of radical change, which, even if it presupposes a rereading of the past, seems to project immediately toward possible futures. This difference could be understood as a simple echo of what is stated as public or private discourse but, beyond that, it seems to me to draw attention to the presence of specific categories of thought thanks to which populations conceive possible identity conversions.3 Among these categories of thought, the couple formed by the notions of “mixture” and “choice” emerged with particular acuity. It has in fact become apparent that the local populations link the ability to make a “choice” with the presence of a family “mixture.” Without anticipating too much the analysis of the properties they attribute to these notions, we can already say that their definition of “mixture” admits the principle of the coexistence of original matrices and a regression toward them of various heterogeneous elements. Social groups therefore consider themselves the bearers of ethnic potentialities with which it would be perfectly legitimate to identify. Such a conception provides the possibility of considering political transformations from the angle of identity metamorphoses. These metamorphoses do not necessarily correspond to current social mobilizations, but they are all—both those that preceded and those that followed—considered authentic. In addition to counteracting the accusations of fraud that weigh on rural populations, as well as avoiding a sterile search for origins, this approach to recent mobilizations and ethnic repositionings encourages us to take seriously into account the way in which the theme of metamorphosis radiates throughout the universe of Amazonian references. To do this, we must first place localities like Lagoa Bonita in the context of regional geography and history, and then examine the pejorative notion of caboclo that has long been used to qualify the populations that inhabit the region.

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Notes 1. This distinction is freely inspired by the analyses of Mancur Olson in his book The Logic of Collective Action (1978), where he explores the articulation between individual choices and common interest. 2. The history of the MEB went through two phases, analyzed by Vitor Machado and Antonio Francisco Marques (2015). During the first, from 1961 to 1964, its action contributed significantly to the emancipation of rural populations, by giving them access to education based on the theories of the pedagogue Paulo Freire and by encouraging them to organize trade unions and politically in “a Christian vision” (ibid.: 157) of change. During the second period, from 1964 to 1988, the MEB redefined its educational project so that it was in line with the objectives of the military governments in power: it was no longer a question of mobilizing, but of teaching literacy and catechizing. 3. René D. Flores and David Sulmont note that in Mexico and Peru, the implementation of preferential policies has little impact on ethnic self-declarations. They interpret this to mean that the fear of being perceived as “assisted” discourages the populations for whom these programs have been developed. According to the authors, this contradicts certain analyses made in Brazil of an “artificial” increase in ethnic identifications (Flores and Sulmont 2021). It seems to me that this counterexample argues above all for considering categories of thought that make ethnic requalifications by populations possible or not.

CHAPTER 3

Local Populations as Caboclos The Difficult Naming of a Social Formation   

As clichés die hard, it is often expected of today’s Quilombolas and Indians that they continue to be as they were in the past and that they remain so forevermore. Stereotypically, the former have rather dark skin and are said to be descended from African slaves who fled the plantations, whereas the latter belong to the direct line of Amerindian groups skilled in the art of featherwork and body painting. In other words, these populations are claimed to be easily identifiable both by their cultural practices and by their phenotypes. Moreover, these populations are all thought to share the fact of having protected themselves by staying away from colonial society, allegedly because these groups never really lost the awareness of being the repositories of ancestral pasts that they now seek to reconnect with. However, the literature has amply documented that recent Black or Indian demands, in the Amazon as elsewhere in Brazil, are the result of more sinuous and complex trajectories. For instance, research has shown that groups that present themselves today as Quilombolas were not always founded by escaped slaves; these groups also include free men whose lands may have been inherited from a former master, or even purchased (Almeida 2002: 57). Other studies have pointed out that poor Whites and Indians joined the quilombos (Schwartz and Langfur 2005) and that these pockets of resistance were sometimes found in the very heart of the city (Gomes and Reis 1996). As for the groups that mobilize as Indigenous people, some of them have long been perceived as “devoid of strong cultural contrast” (Oliveira 1998: 52) with other regional populations. In the Northeast Region (Nordeste) of the country, as a consensual marker of Indianness, the institution of the Toré,1 a ritual dance, allowed them to widen the gap with their neighbors. It also allowed them to move away from the notion of “remnants,” which acknowledged their link with an Indian past but reduced it to a distant echo. The people who present themselves as Blacks or Indians are therefore traversed by a mistura that is all the more uncomfortable in that it sometimes makes it difficult for outside actors to perceive a clear difference between them and the rest of the population, and sometimes even a clear distinction between

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the two groups. Based on the examination of several cases of ethnic resurgence in the Nordeste, José Mauricio Arruti (1997: 16) underlines “the arbitrariness of the Black/Indian dichotomy” both from the point of view of ethnographies and from that of history, prompting us to take into account the political nature of classificatory rearrangements. Along the same lines and regarding the divergent trajectories of the Xocó Indians and the neighboring Black community of Mocambo, also studied by Arruti (2006), Jan Hoffman French (2009) highlights that the family accounts of foundation and the proofs of authenticity called upon are likely to be reworked according to the positions taken in favor of one or the other category. The Amazon is no exception in terms of bifurcations of identity and the appearance of unexpected ethnic claims among populations that were simply thought of as “peasants.” Cases of requests for ethnic requalification as Quilombolas or Indians have been recorded by various authors (notably Pantoja 2008, already cited, in Acre; Cárdenas 2008 and Vaz 2010 in the lower Tapajós; Santos and Souza 2012 for the mid-Solimões). Generally speaking, such dynamics are fully recognized as a legitimate object for anthropological reflection. On the other hand, the historical perspective advocated by Arruti does not seem to have gained acceptance, even concerning the short term. Although the effects of the intervention of Indigenous agents (Oliveira 1998), the action of the Catholic Church (French 2007), and the role of anthropologists (Costa 2012 and Pantoja 2013) have been the subject of various publications, they are used less as a solid base for analysis than as theoretical references that are cited out of convention. Mobilizations in the name of ethnicity are therefore still too often understood as the result of a collective and autonomous awareness, taking place in a vacuum. Contact between local groups formulated as unanimist “communities” and representatives of institutions then seem a happy coincidence between ethnic nature and administrative division. However, placing the emergence of these demands in the broader context of the social integration of local populations makes it possible to better understand how what my Amazonian interlocutors call “decision” and “choice” are defined. One has only to listen to the villagers recalling the arrival of representatives of state institutions, researchers, and urban activists keenly interested in their beliefs and their daily activities to realize the importance of their interactions with a certain number of actors—or to pay attention to what they say when they mention information meetings held in the hamlets about the land ownership status they could obtain, or about the practical workshops (essentially on “traditional remedies”) that it would be possible to organize. The arrival of these actors is mentioned as the first sign of interest in them for a long time by the outside world, and it restored their “confidence” and “dignity.” As for the many conversations about their trips into town to defend their cause to the

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administrations, consolidate alliances with Black or Indian organizations, or participate in various seminars set up by the authorities, they also call for due consideration to be given to these links between rural and urban areas.

The Amazonia of the Ruling Classes: From a Reservoir of Slaves to Territorial Integration Archaeological and historical studies have established that the different populations occupying the vast geographical space that is now Amazonia developed relations long before the arrival of colonial powers. According to Camila Dias (2014: 66), ethno-historians agree that there is a distinction between the dynamic of exchanges unfolding at a regional level, between the two main ecological landscapes (floodplains and dry lands), where subsistence products circulated, and the dynamic that is sustained by interregional connections where prestigious goods such as gold or prisoners transited. In order to establish themselves in the region, Europeans tried to become part of these far-reaching trade networks that existed prior to their arrival, and which were fueled as much by war as by alliance, exchanges, and rituals (Espelt-Bombin 2018). The amplitude of the networks supplied by Amerindian groups specialized in the transport of goods along the waterways was such that Indian populations had access to manufactured goods coming from Europe, notably from Holland, without having been in direct contact with the colonists (Dias 2014: 81–82). In a recent book on the history of the Indian populations of the northwest Amazon from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century, Décio Guzmán (2021) confirmed the importance of movement in this world “traversed by large-scale circulations, criss-crossed by trade routes and shaken by incessant wars” (ibid.: 134). According to Camila Dias (2014: 26), until the middle of the eighteenth century, the occupation of the Amazon by the Portuguese did not follow a single pattern, as it did in the rest of the colony. Around coastal towns that were set up in what was called the Estado do Maranhão,2 they tried to establish “a colonial production zone” based on forced agricultural labor that was comparable to the one they established in the southern part of Portuguese America then called Estado do Brasil. They do not seem to have had any intention, however, of establishing settlement in the interior of the northern region.3 These lands were considered “a slave breeding area,” that is to say an immense reservoir of cheap labor that was not intended to be occupied on a long-term basis. Transposing a system that they had already implemented in their trading posts in Africa to Amazonia, the Portuguese exchanged prisoners of war taken by Indian groups for manufactured goods, thus encouraging the development of

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intertribal hostilities and the constitution of an organized slave trade on the frontier of the empire (ibid.: 92–110). As the labor force obtained from their commercial partners was never sufficient due to the very high mortality rate, two other methods of supply were put in place, “reduction” and capture. “Reduction” concerned the Indians qualified as “friends,” who were grouped together in villages (aldeias) administered by Catholic missionaries4 near the colonial enclaves, in order to contribute regularly to the expeditions to collect spices. In principle, capture was reserved for the Indians considered “enemies” who could, for this reason, be reduced to slavery and then be attributed to the colonists.5 This policy of extracting Amerindian populations further and further inland, and their forced displacement (descimento) over very long distances—sometimes as much as 2,000 kilometers—drastically reduced their numbers and contributed to destructuring their societies. However, as Camila Dias (2014: 110) again points out, these deleterious effects were only assessed by the Portuguese in the light of the interests of the crown. For instance, for the Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608–97), the depopulation of the region was dangerous above all because it risked weakening the Portuguese claim to domination of the territory. To avoid the labor shortage, the authorities encouraged the creation of a trading company in 1682 that was to transport African slaves (Dias 2014: 155). It was a very costly affair. Not only were the prices higher than those of the Indian captives, but the colonists preferred the latter for their knowledge of the natural environment. In addition, the diseases brought by the slave ships from Africa decimated the Indigenous populations of the plantations, thus reviving the infernal chain of capture expeditions in the forest. In Amazonia, the work of Africans therefore did not replace that of Indians (ibid.: 156). It was not until the enactment of the directory of the Indians in 1757, which established their status as a minority and entrusted their government to a civil administrator, as well as the introduction of new crops that were less reliant on local knowledge (Paiva 2010: 412), that the second trading company significantly developed the slave trade from Africa to the Amazon.6 It was perhaps at this time—when the slavery of Amerindians was officially prohibited even if it persisted in practice—that the distinction between Africans and Indians became clearer. Until then, the missionaries believed that both had been affected by the curse of Ham, that they had the same features and the same skin color, and that they shared the same customs (Dias 2014: 122–23). This relative lack of distinction was further reflected in their common designation as negros, that is to say as Blacks (Chambouleyron and Arenz 2016: 16).7 Although the Portuguese did not seek to physically occupy the interior, they nevertheless tried to put the native populations to work for their benefit. In his study of the Amazonian Northwest—the region that still has the highest re-

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corded number of Indigenous peoples today—Márcio Meira (2018) detected the first signs of what would become the dominant regional economic model: a generalized system of barter on credit known as aviamento in which manufactured products circulated in one direction and various raw materials in the other. This socioeconomic configuration reached its peak during the rubber period (1879–1912). International companies financed trading houses based in large urban centers (Rio, Belém, Manaus). These houses, in turn, catered to the White merchants or “bosses,” providing them with goods that were then sold to the small Indigenous producers or “customers” (fregueses) (Santos 1980). Growing labor needs, particularly for the extraction of latex in the Amazonas and Acre areas, gave rise to significant migratory flows from the Nordeste,8 diversifying the profile of the populations involved in aviamento. Although this system was based in principle on free and voluntary work, physical violence was often used to remind the seringueiros that their social condition was comparable to that of serfs; they were slaves owing a fictitious debt that they could never repay and that bound them forever to a boss (Martinello 1988; Geffray 1995). When the aviamento finally went bankrupt in the 1970s due to the fall in the price of raw materials, the families of the collectors left the estates, settling along the river banks or in urban centers. After it had undergone the combination of free and slave labor, forest gathering, and agricultural production, the region was finally perceived as a territory to be “integrated” into the national space through settlement, without, however, ceasing the old practices of draining its natural resources and servile exploitation. The military governments in power between 1964 and 1985 sought to pursue this policy of “integration” of the Amazon by opening land routes (the Trans-Amazonian Highway from east to west and the Belém–Brasília road from north to south). These routes aimed to facilitate both the arrival of new migrants from the Nordeste and south of the country that the implementation of colonization programs had attracted, as well as the transport of raw materials extracted from the region and goods coming from the south. This forced march of “development” encouraged illegal land appropriation, land concentration, and the development of livestock farming and agribusiness that only stalled in the 1990s–2000s with the creation of conservation units for Traditional populations and the demarcation of Indian and Quilombola lands. Generally speaking, the local populations have therefore continued to be exposed to increasingly strong pressures, either confining them to a particular place during the period of the aviamento, or nowadays expelling them so as not to disturb the implementation of “big projects,” whether public—Tucuruí (1982) and Belo Monte (2016) dams, the military project of Calha Norte (1985), and in the near future the bridge over the Amazon—or private: Carajás iron mine

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(1982), Jurutí bauxite mine (2009), the port of soybeans in Santarém (2003), and now the opening of other mines and monocultures).9

The Amazon of Populations: Intense Circulation and Multiple Contacts A considerable number of historical studies on the colonial period have documented the circulation of men and women of the most diverse origins, statuses, and destinies throughout the dense river network. In a review article, the anthropologist Mark Harris lists the following groups of actors, emphasizing that their specific insertion into colonial society did not prevent them from being in contact: [T]hese newer studies are developing frameworks to contain the various kinds of people of Portuguese Amazonia. These folk may have experienced colonial life from different subject positions, but they still were living under the same conditions and communicating with each other . . . Who were these people? Indians with highly varied experiences of colonial life; Africans sent as slaves from various nations in southern and western Africa; colonists, mostly poor soldiers, artisans and peasants seeking fortunes, or criminals sent to Brazil as punishment . . . This mobility gave people the confidence to function in a range of contexts and to pursue their own interests rather than those expected of them. In this way, there were no stable or fixed frontiers between the variously identified ethnic groups in colonial Amazonia. (Harris 2013: 88–89)

Even within their constrained framework, he notes, people were not content to simply obey the Portuguese authorities by carrying out the tasks or functions attributed to them. To achieve their own goals, they exploited the interstices that escaped the control of the authorities, which sometimes involved metamorphoses by changing “names, language and clothes” (Harris 2013: 97) or by making choices that in retrospect seem somewhat surprising. Concerning the Indians, the historian Heather Flynn Roller (2010) has shown that some of them sought to fulfill colonial service by participating in expeditions intended to collect drugs from the sertão or to capture slaves. According to Roller, in addition to the fact that these expeditions allowed them to escape the obligation of agricultural work, people considered that they offered the opportunity to travel, form new contacts, and trade on their own account. This preference was so marked that even the village authorities, although their status exempted them from any responsibility of this type, sometimes asked to join in the expeditions (ibid.: 444). Furthermore, we know that people of African descent may have seen their enrollment in tropas de resgate as a way of

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consolidating a recently acquired free status that was still very fragile (Chambouleyron, Bonifácio, and Melo 2010; Viana 2013), and they were even able to find a certain source of profit in the captive trade when they themselves were slaves (Chambouleyron and Arenz 2016: 17). Colonial society was undoubtedly very hierarchical, social relations were structurally unequal, violence was rife, and the majority of displacements were imposed on the populations. Yet when the intensity of these other forms of mobility, of the fluidity they introduced, and of the exchanges they fostered is taken into account, a more nuanced picture emerges than the binary representations opposing isolated and dispersed Indian or Black groups to the inexorable advance of colonial society as a homogeneous front. Barbara Sommer therefore underscores the need to resituate complex social realities in the context of their time: In contrast to the old tribal versus accultured dichotomy, historians now interpret the adoption, exchange, layering, and convergence of native and Western concepts and the creation of new meanings and identities in colonial context as a selective, innovative process without a predetermined outcome. (Sommer 2014: 110, my emphasis)

In any event, the practices and representations that emerge over the course of these encounters and confrontations do not reflect any planning whatsoever, and they did not even necessarily serve the purposes of the dominant elites. Quite the opposite, they were adjusted and negotiated in the converging or negotiated meanings that various actors of the time attributed to them. These forms and social arrangements experienced varying fortunes, traces of which can still be discerned today. In previous articles, Sommer (2005, 2006) examined one of these intellectual creations in more detail, that of the cunhamenas (brothers-in-law in the Tupi language). Cunhamenas were traders who took wives from several Indian groups to gain allies, and thereby gain access to sought-after commodities, namely spices or slaves.10 However, Sommer points out that the condemnation of this practice by the Portuguese crown did not lead to its total disappearance. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Pombaline reforms admittedly ratified the prohibition of Indigenous marriage customs and polygamy, but marriage between colonists or soldiers and Indian women, which the authorities encouraged by granting economic and social benefits, “imitated certain methods of the cunhamenas” (Sommer 2006: 790). In a way, these figures reflected the penetration of state politics by informal uses. Reviled by those in power, they served as a model for reinforcing a kind of “cultural integration” (ibid.) deemed essential to the consolidation of the Portuguese colony. Living at a distance from the urban centres where the official authorities resided, the cun-

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hamenas still continued to operate in a “classical” way, by marrying the women they had taken advantage of, and sometimes using the sons they had from them to establish political and economic influence over Indian communities.11 Meira (2018), cited above, shows clearly how, in the Amazonian Northwest, their actions contributed to establishing, and then maintaining for their benefit, the system of aviamento. Above all, he indicates that this system still manages to persist today by assuming new forms of deferred exchange, as in the case of merchants who supply goods to beneficiaries of the “family grant” and then take payment, totally illegally, by keeping the beneficiaries’ cards (ibid.: 115). His study also suggests other reconfigurations in which ritual kinship seems to replace marriage. For instance, Meira (2018: 172) underlines that, in the 1990s, when he conducted his investigation, the power of small bosses was built on an extensive network of religious ties. Interestingly, a similar observation was made at the same time by Roberto Araújo (1993) about a completely different sociohistorical context: that of the colonization zones on the Trans-Amazonian Highway that drained flows of migrants from other regions of the country. Araújo gives a very fine-grained analysis of the strategies adopted by important local figures such as merchants and politicians who became the godfathers of many children of small Catholic farmers in order to increase their prestige and strengthen their position. In both situations, the fabrication of kinship and the control of economic exchanges went hand in hand. According to Araújo, these merchants organized “both the marketing of all the surpluses of the households [of the farmers] . . . , and the bulk of the purchases of goods in the town” (ibid.: 173) that they provided the farmers with. While the parents hoped for special protection and easier or more regular access (Clerc-Renaud 2022) to goods and services through the person to whom they ritually entrusted their children, the merchant or godfather expected the exclusivity of the commercial transactions of all his compadres to be reserved for him. Because this device links the production of co-parenting with the search for commercial advantages like that of the cunhamenas, the question then arises whether this is not a new duplication of this colonial creation. The possibility of multiplying godfather relationships in order to enlist numerous compadres, who then become dependent, may perpetuate a domination that can no longer be exercised by the accumulation of matrimonial alliances.12 The extent of the diffusion and reformulation of the modes of subjection also concerns the modes of resistance. Historians have pointed out that, from the eighteenth century, other relationships between populations with a very different integration in the region, and different trajectories and social statuses, were formed in common opposition to the advance of colonization. Thus, certain principais, Indigenous authorities appointed by the colonial power, took the lead or joined quilombos, called mocambos at the time, in the state of Mara-

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nhão ( J. J. A. de Souza 2011: 380), which welcomed runaway Black or Indian slaves, free people, deserters from the army or militias, and poor Whites (ibid.: 384). Souza estimates that between 1752 and 1809, thirty-five mocambos of fugitive Indians were formed in the Amazon, both in the captaincy of Pará and that of Rio Negro (ibid.: 385), that is to say, from the east to the west of the Amazon. Some twenty-five years later, the most diverse populations still rubbed shoulders in the Cabanagem movement studied by Harris (2010) and mentioned by two of the three brothers from Lagoa Bonita. By creating contact between the occupants of the sources of the rivers, those who had settled along the rivers, and the inhabitants of the colonial towns, circulation in the dense river network favored the development of new sociabilities as well as the borrowing and reinterpretation of various practices and notions. A framework of shared references was gradually forged from the beginning of the seventeenth century, that is to say a “unique regional culture,” to use Sommer’s terms (2003: 416, cited in Harris 2013: 88). Among the characteristics that we could possibly associate with it is a pronounced taste for travel, which undoubtedly continues to inhabit the Amazonian populations even today. An invitation to go “visit” the neighboring village or to go to a much more distant one is systematically seized as an opportunity to passear, that is to say, to go on a trip. Traveling is perceived as both a distraction and an opportunity to see new things and to potentially learn something for oneself, or not. Such a proposal, insofar as it holds the promise of new experiences, is therefore rarely declined. On innumerable occasions, I have been fascinated by the enthusiasm of young and old people discussing what they had discovered, were discovering, or were about to discover, never showing signs of fatigue although the level of comfort was very basic. By way of example, let us take the cases of the women who, in the early 1990s, took the bus from Belém to Paraguay (almost three days one way) to bring back duty-free goods, or in the 2000s, the villagers going from Santarém, or localities even further upstream, to Belém by boat (nearly three days) to take part in seminars organized by various institutions about Quilombola rights. One can also mention the excursions from Belém organized by the mediums of possession cults to go by bus to Lençóis beach, in Maranhão (nearly a day), or to go by boat to the island of Marajó (four hours crossing) to pay offerings to their “spirits” and take the last ferry to return to the capital the same day. It is also not uncommon for people to go on tours lasting several days,13 or even entire weeks, to deliver their message either for religious reasons, such as itinerant evangelical missionaries, or political reasons, such as militants devoted to the Indian or Black cause. The examples are endless. If we also take into account travel in search of work—women going into town to find work as domestic help, men to gold mines or fazendas—comings and goings to visit relatives, to see a doctor, to study, to take part in various “partic-

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ipatory” meetings, and so forth, it is obvious that dense networks connect the villages not only to one another but also to the medium-sized towns and to the urban universe. Despite the difficulty of accessing the hamlets, they are not isolated or landlocked aggregates. The representation of rural populations firmly anchored in an atemporal hinterland (interior), with centuries-old habits and intangible traditions, must therefore be rejected in favor of the view that the region remains traversed in all directions by its occupants, and that in the course of their peregrinations, ideas, practices, objects, and representations also circulate.

Caboclo: An Ambivalent Exo-Designation The contacts formed in the confrontation or collaboration between people and social groups with diverse trajectories, who came together either to oppose Portuguese expansion or to take advantage of the new opportunities it seemed to open up, gave rise to multiple local groups that are referred to in archives and in the current literature as caboclos.14 Since its appearance in the second half of the seventeenth century, the term caboclo has had several meanings and very diverse uses. It seems that the Tupis on the coast first used it to designate their inland enemies (Grenand, Grenand, and Guillaume 1990: 27). In this sense, it may have been a synonym of tapuia, a category constructed in the colonial context from a set of geographical (coast for the Tupi/forest for the Tapuia) and cultural and linguistic (homogeneity for the former/heterogeneity for the latter) oppositions (Pompa 2001: 33). However, in a letter written by a missionary in 1747, caboclo is not used as an equivalent of this term, but as a very distinct notion: in this source, the inhabitants of a Jesuit mission are described as caboclos in contrast to the socalled tapuia, who were associated with the barbarism believed to rage in the interior regions (Chambouleyron and Arenz 2016: 27). These authors therefore suggest that the term could have had a positive connotation for the Portuguese by designating the Indians integrated into colonial society as Christians and workers. Lastly, still at this time, caboclo assumed a much more offensive connotation that seems to have caused the authorities concern. Thus, the two historians cited above note that a law of 1755 denounced the word “as a discriminatory denomination with regard to ‘mestiços’” (Chambouleyron and Arenz 2016: 27). Referring to the same law, the folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1984: 165) also affirms that the word was considered “an offensive term and that King D. José of Portugal, by a decree of April 4, 1755, ordered the expulsion from the towns of those who called the sons of Indians caboclos.” The term caboclo is therefore highly ambiguous, suggesting the progress that certain Indians had

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made toward what the Portuguese considered civilization just as much it could, on the contrary, underline the insurmountable gap that separated them from it. The multiple meanings of the term are reflected in the vagueness of its etymology and in the controversies surrounding it (Grenand, Grenand, and Guillaume 1990: 26). Admittedly, lexicographers all agree that it is of Nheengatu origin—a vehicular language of Tupi origin spoken in Amazonia until the middle of the nineteenth century—but they are divided concerning the expressions that gave it shape. Some, like Câmara Cascudo (1984: 165), believe that caboclo comes from caa-boc, literally “coming from the forest,” while others, like the philologist Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira (1971), maintain that the term derives from kari’boca, meaning “who comes from the white man.”15 The representation of the caboclos thus oscillated between the image of men coming from the hinterland, that is to say, “savages” who would hopefully become civilized, and that of descendants of the Portuguese who were no longer exactly like their forefathers because of their union with Amerindian women, in other words, “mestiços” whose adherence to colonial values remained unclear. Be that as it may, the caboclos inspired little confidence as to their potential to “develop” the region. During the first rubber cycle, part of the regional elite considered them a “people enfeebled by Amazonian nature and, therefore, unprepared for civilization” (Castro 2013: 443). Even though they recognized that their forestry know-how qualified them to harvest latex, they felt that their “temperament” needed to be boosted by the injection of the supposedly “stronger” blood of migrants from the Nordeste (ibid.: 445) that they brought in droves. The term caboclo has thus a highly pejorative connotation that persists over the centuries even if the reasons have changed. In the eighteenth century, it was disliked by the colonial authorities because it revealed the durable perception of differences between Indians and colonists within the free population. In contrast, by encouraging intermarriage, the authorities maintained that they were increasing the number of “whites” by including their children, the mamelucos, in this category (Guzmán 2006: 66), to justify their establishment in the Amazon vis-à-vis their European rivals. As Décio Guzmán points out, the decree of 1755 mentioned above had the important consequence of erasing the processes of interbreeding from the sources, “[only] letting the white, native and African populations appear, [as] isolated from each other” (ibid.: 71). During the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, the caboclo was disparaged for hindering the modernizing ambitions of the elite. The character projected an image mired in a past that if not savage, was at least backward; it was an unpleasant reminder of a history that the elite wanted to reread from a positivist perspective. The few initiatives taken to make it a term with a positive connotation, most often in association with a supposed feminine sensuality (cabocla bonita), did not manage to change the situation.

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Neither did the efforts of the bishop of Pará, Antônio de Macedo Costa, in the nineteenth century to promote a “cabocla identity as a basic Amazonian family unit” (Castro 2013: 441), nor the attempts of regional intellectuals to rehabilitate this word in the 1930s and make it the quintessence of an Amazonian “identity” that was not subjected to the domination of the intellectual, political, and economic elites of southern Brazil (Boyer 1999). It was not until the 1950s and the development of community studies that the caboclo was regarded as the characterization of an Amazonian, and specifically tropical, social type, with the publication of Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics by Charles Wagley (1953) and Santos e visagens: Um estudo da vida religiosa de itá, Amazonas by Eduardo Galvão (1955). These two monographs based on surveys carried out in the same place and at the same time, which are still essential references today for anyone wishing to work on rural Amazonia, endeavored to highlight the specific social organization and culture of the caboclos, paying particular homage to their religious creativity. As Thierry Valentin (2001: 23) notes, the effect of these studies has been positive because the caboclos “appear for the first time in their own light,” but it has also been negative in “sustainably introducing the idea of a group with tangible borders.” It is difficult to reproach the authors, caught up in the preoccupations of their time, for having carried out ahistorical modeling, as they were more interested in the phenomena of acculturation than in the conditions of social reproduction. Yet the adoption of this perspective has had implications for later “assessments” of the caboclos’ skills by the scientific community since, from the moment that they appeared as “a stable and homogeneous object of study” (Valentin 2001: 23), the question of their relationship to the Amerindians, from whom they are at once distinct and close to, arose. However, the comparison has always been made to their disadvantage: The Caboclos’ knowledge of the local fauna and flora is not original and owes everything to the culture of the Amerindians. Moreover, what clearly emerges from our comparative observations [is] that this knowledge is very far behind compared to that from which it is derived: all that remains is a heavily shrunken fabric which is essentially confined to practical knowledge from which the “superfluous” elements in terms of survival and “unproductive” in terms of immediate profitability are discarded; it is the end of the subtle and refined knowledge of the Amerindians, based, of course, on pragmatic need, but also, and above all, attached to cultures where wisdom is defined, among other things, by the aspiration to know and therefore to name the universe. (Grenand, Grenand, and Guillaume 1990: 31)

In the 1990s, this social reality still seemed elusive and its characteristics evanescent. Researchers did not fail to emphasize its originality, in particular the

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“great spatial mobility and the flexibility of the Caboclos in the face of salaried work” (ibid.: 34–35). But the recognition of these particular traits was also accompanied by the observation of a certain difficulty in deciphering the way in which caboclos form a society and in stating its singularity. As Grenand and coauthors observe, the hypothesis of the existence of a kind of “deviance in the face of a Brazilian society taken as a culture,” or more radically of “culturally excluded people,” is “not sufficient to account for the dynamism of the caboclo fact” (ibid.: 36). In fact, while the comparison with the Indigenous societies leads to underlining the lesser symbolic richness of the caboclo world, and while the comparison with the national society dwells on the weakness of its economic development, neither of them, with their value judgments, really shed light on the dynamics that are specific to it. Forty years passed after the publication of the books by Galvão and Wagley before the caboclos were no longer considered simply as a disjointed sum of individuals but as historically constituted collectives. The idea of a “cabocla society” was pitched by Stephen Nugent in the title of his book published in 1993 (Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay on Invisibility and Peasant Economy). And it was taken up ten years later by Cristina Adams, Rui Murrieta, and Walter Alves Neves in their collective work entitled Sociedades caboclas amazônicas: Modernidade e invisibilidade, published in 2006. From one title to the other, the passage from the singular to the plural in the qualification of this social formation clearly reflects the hesitations of anthropology: can we refer to a single cabocla society that extends over the entire Amazon region, or should we think of it in terms of different aggregates presenting analogous traits that one may find in various points of the territory? The persistence of the term “invisibility” attached to it raises an equally haunting question: why does this (or these) social form(s) remain in the shadows, reduced to a chronic “invisibility,” instead of appearing in the public space as representative(s) of a particular symbolic and material culture that everyone nevertheless easily perceives? The local populations, whatever their social condition, like researchers, whatever their discipline, indeed know that the Amazon is populated by caboclos, which at first sight makes the question surprising.

Conclusion: An Elusive Object Circulations and exchanges, recompositions and innovations, conflicts and collaborations have woven a fine web in the history of this American space. Since colonial times, Indigenous Amazonia has received significant influxes of populations (Portuguese and Africans, then Nordestians and Moroccan Jews

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during the nineteenth century, Japanese at the beginning of the twentieth century, migrants from both the Nordeste and the southern states in the 1960s, and so forth) and has shown a remarkable ability to absorb these exogenous elements. As Deborah Lima (1999: 19) points out, apart from in a few rare places where not only was the number of migrants very high, but where they also remained grouped together, the distinction between the descendants of populations formerly implanted in the region and the generations descended from the newcomers quickly became “vague,” attesting to the power of a process that Eugene Parker (1985: 1) called “caboclization.” The term caboclo then grew to designate, almost indiscriminately, all of the rural populations in the region and to be sometimes applied to the poor inhabitants of the cities. However, the generalization of the name often appears as an obstacle when it comes to specifying the dynamics specific to the “historical Amazonian peasantry” (Nugent 1993) who had long inhabited the region and were perceived as not Indian. It is true that the villages that were formed very often resemble each other from the point of view of production methods, religious beliefs and rites, matrimonial and political practices, and so forth. But these common traits do not erase the diversity of economic activities (rubber extraction, subsistence farming, extensive husbandry, charcoal production, hunting, crafts, and so forth), nor that of spatial inscriptions (on the banks of rivers, in floodplains, along roads), nor of religious plurality (Catholicism, Evangelicalism, possession cults, shamanism) and phenotypic variability. The multiplicity of self-designations (collectors of rubber, or seringueiros, inhabitants of the banks, or ribeirinhos, “small,” or pequenos, communitarians, or comunitários, small-scale producers, or pequenos produtores, and so forth) of those who are perceived as caboclos reflects this. Because the general social principles that organize cabocla society have difficulty emerging, this figure most often appears in the singular, condemned to embody a generic human type tinged with exoticism. The golden-skinned cabocla is dressed in a long skirt, she wears a colorful flower in her long hair, steps lightly, and prepares cassava flour; the caboclo wears trousers rolled up to the knees or Bermuda shorts, protects himself from the sun with a hat while smoking rolled cigarettes, and is a skilled fisherman; they live together in stilt houses, enjoy the liveliness of festivals where people dance the carimbó, and frequent the Catholic chapel as well as healers (pajés). A little like Macunaíma, the eponymous hero of a novel published in 1928 by the poet and novelist Mário de Andrade, the caboclo seems to be a hero without any character, to the point that it sometimes seems impossible to decide between his association with the “degeneration” of the colonist or with the “domestication” of the Indian. Nevertheless, by referring to a mistura between the Indians and the Portuguese, then with the slaves deported from Africa, which

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took place in contexts of great violence—the levying of forced labor, revolts such as the Cabanagem—this character ended up being generally considered from the perspective of the bastardization of races and the degradation of cultures. The unflattering portraits given by travelers and folklorists, which continue today, evoke an ordinary, mixed-race rural dweller, cut off from his roots, whatever they may have been, rather lazy, uneducated, and with unrefined manners, sometimes cunning, always poor and destitute, often content with his lot. As Nicolas Tiphagne (2005: 15) points out, the descriptions only discern in the “coppery” skins an Amerindian origin that is “more and more diluted.” By dint of being “mixed,” the local populations no longer seem to be attached to anything and, insofar as one can refer to a single cabocla society, it suffers from an obvious deficit of “identity,” not even having a term for self-definition, or, more precisely, not wanting the one that it has been offered. Tirelessly, anthropologists have reexamined the notion of caboclo in order to understand the reasons for its distancing from the populations it is supposed to designate.

Notes 1. The recognition in 1928 by the Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI), an administration that was replaced in 1967 by FUNAI, of the only Indian group in the Northeast to have retained its language—the Fulni-ô—contributed to establishing Toré as a “diacritical sign of Indianness and an external legitimator [of the fact] of being Indian” (Reesink 2000: 361). In the later context of a “dispute over being named ‘Indian’” (ibid.: 370), groups seeking official state recognition embraced this ritual as it symbolizes an “Indian regime” (ibid.) in the face of the authorities. A video on the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) website covers one of these versions: see https://mirim.org/node/17217 (accessed 17 March 2023). 2. The Estado do Maranhão, which in 1751 became the Estado do Grão-Pará, chose in 1823 to join the newly independent Brazil. 3. As the historian Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has shown, the political choices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were largely determined by navigational constraints. The winds and tides forced travelers wishing to go from Rio de Janeiro or Salvador de Bahia to São Luiz in Maranhão or Belém in Pará to go through Lisbon. The trade winds and currents similarly constituted “a considerable hindrance to the Indian slave trade along the South Atlantic” (Alencastro 2000: 61), from the Amazon to the south of the colony, whereas they favored “Brazil-Angola crossings” operating south of the equator, and therefore the import of African slaves. 4. Space is lacking here to deal with the question of evangelization strategies and the many conflicts between the different orders and between them and the imperial power. I therefore refer to the book by Décio Guzmán (2021), which offers a meticulous analysis of the political geography of the missions in the Amazon basin. 5. Created in the seventeenth century by Roman Catholic missionaries and heavily used by colonists until the mid-eighteenth century, these often mercenary soldiers were called tropas de guerra e de resgate—“war” in reference to their determination, and “rescue” on the pretext of their acts, that is, rescuing the Indians from a state of savagery.

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6. Between 1755 and 1815, approximately fifty thousand African slaves were landed in Amazonian ports (Souza 2009: 206, cited in Dias 2014: 334). After 1850 and the prohibition of international traffic, slaves came from other regions of Brazil. By way of comparison, approximately sixteen thousand natives were displaced in less than ten years (1722–32) from the Rio Negro (ibid.: 246), the number of those who were grouped within the Jesuit missions in the eighteenth century seems to have reached thirty thousand (ibid.: 287), and a single epidemic in 1720 around the city of Belém caused more than fifteen thousand deaths (ibid.: 205). 7. These authors specify, however, that the second Portuguese word meaning black (preto) was applied exclusively to Africans (Chambouleyron and Arenz 2016: 16), who were also qualified as tapahunos, a term that was never associated with other categories of populations. 8. According to Samuel Benchimol (1992: 117), the contingent of Nordestins who joined the Amazonian domains amounted to five hundred thousand for the period from 1850 to 1945. Other researchers (Santos 1980: 99) estimate that it was between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. 9. On President Bolsonaro’s plans for the Amazon, see: https://theintercept.com/2019/09/ 19/plano-bolsonaro-paranoia-amazonia/. 10. In the early 1940s, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a study on the Nambikuara, drew attention to the fact that the relationship between brothers-in-law constitutes “an indigenous aboriginal institution based on a native cultural model,” but also to the convergence “between native and Latino-Mediterranean institutions” (Lévi-Strauss 1943: 398), notably godsiblingship. 11. According to Peter Fry (personal communication), this technique was also adopted in Mozambique by settlers, called prazos, who married the daughters of powerful chiefs. 12. The rapprochement between alliance and godfatherhood is in line with the remark of Agnès Clerc-Renaud that ritual co-paternity converges with the consanguinization of affines: “If alliance is a preeminent organizing principle in the Amerindian societies of the lowlands and if the salient feature of the dynamics of kinship and locality consists in consanguinating potential affines, the compadrazgo system fits perfectly into a dynamic of this type. The register of filiation to which godfatherhood belongs makes compadrazgo a relationship of affinity ‘consanguinized’ by co-paternity” (Clerc-Renaud 2022: 267). 13. This attraction to “traveling” is shared by the urban middle classes, such as the inhabitants of Belém who make day return trips as far as Salinas, 400 kilometers away, to spend a few hours by the sea. 14. I borrow the expression “exo-designation” used in the subtitle from Nicolas Tiphagne (2005: 25). 15. For other examples, see Lima (1999), Boyer (1999), and Valentin (2001).

CHAPTER 4

The Caboclo, a Protean Notion “Traditional Populations” versus Invisible Beings   

Caboclo is a highly evocative word, conjuring up images of the immensity of a region, the nonchalance of its inhabitants, a shimmering nature, the slow rhythm of the river, and abundant resources. But this idealized view that, at the same time, nourishes and feeds the Amazonian imaginary imbued with exoticism, turns out to be dark and ambivalent, and it struggles to be embodied by concrete groups of people. Local uses of this term, which are akin to affectionate mockery or the recognition of singularity, most often concern a given person1 and require the speaker to accept the person he is talking about as a close equal, on pain of offense slipping into the term. It is, however, true that in certain situations, caboclo can be understood as a collective self-denomination. In Acre and the middle Solimões region, Indians occasionally called themselves this during conflicts with non-Indians (Lima 1999: 10–11). According to Eduardo Ferreira (2020: 19), this equivalence between caboclo and Indian is also reinforced through the consolidation of recent claims of Indianness. In quite other contexts, groups of people also appropriate this word to assert an ecological label allowing them to better sell their products on the international market. This is shown by Eduardo Brondizio (2008: Chapter 1) in his study on the island of Marajó (in the state of Pará). Lastly, in the poor neighborhoods of Manaus, an association called Nação Mestiça asserts its cabocla culture (Véran 2010: 21). These, however, are exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking, anthropologists agree that most people so qualified have long refused and most often still refuse to recognize themselves in this term. Instead, to situate themselves socially, they mention the precise geographical location of their place of birth (a village, an arm of the river, and so forth), their membership of a family, a trade union organization, or a religious congregation (a parish or church), or even their economic activity. In this sense, the “invisibilization of cabocla society” to which Nugent and his followers refer stems more from the rejection of this term by those concerned than from a desire of the dominant group to erase a social reality by not naming it. On the contrary, they do everything to maintain the idea of its existence:

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naming people as caboclos pushes those who find themselves in a subordinate position into an infra-modernity and this justifies the exercise of domination in the name of “development,” “civilization,” and “evolution.” Because of local resistance to this denomination, the word appears as a kind of floating signifier, which can therefore be the subject of various interpretations. We can distinguish two main ones that, each in their own way, have tried to break the association between the caboclo and concrete populations. The first one, which appeared in the 1980s and was promoted by international mobilizations, resulted in proposing a new expression, “Traditional populations,” that was free from any negative value judgment, to designate groups of people in rural areas. In addition to Indigenous people, the expression Traditional populations claimed to federate a diversity of terms, some of which were old and local (seringueiros, fishermen, and nut shellers, for instance), others much more recent and exogenous (ribeirinhos and Quilombolas2 in particular), to which was added that of caboclo.3 It was somehow expected that this renomination would dissolve the stigmatizing character attached to the term caboclo. But the concept has also been the subject of a completely different process, almost symmetrically opposed to the previous one on three points. First of all, this time it starts from the populations themselves that are usually qualified as caboclos. Further, it does not seek to discard the term, but rather to retain it and give it a distinctly different meaning. Above all, it does so by turning away from social realities. In urban possession cults, the term refers to powerful spirits whose company is much sought after by men and women when they make themselves present through mediums. The caboclos here are exclusively the beings that inhabit an invisible world, and no one would dream, in this precise context, of designating those who consult them or those they inhabit by this term. The persistence of the figure of the caboclo in the Amazonian imaginary is therefore as remarkable as its way of constantly evading sociological analysis. Generally speaking, the multiplicity and porosity of the uses of this notion, whose meaning can only be understood in specific enunciative contexts, confuse researchers. Some, like Florent Kohler, choose to keep it insofar as it seems to them “productive in the discourse of those concerned” (Kohler 2009: 42);4 others, like Deborah Lima, prefer to discard it because it “freezes the subjects in a social immobility” (Lima 1999: 21) and ahistoricity. Personally, it seems impossible to me to retain it as an analytical concept designating a precise set of people unless one remains implicitly within the conceptual framework of colonization that gave birth to it. However, the word is an essential local category and a guideline for deciphering Amazonian society. From Traditional populations to the invisible beings of possession cults, the caboclo continues to haunt people’s minds by operating in different ways, at different levels, and in several spheres.

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Caboclo: The Rejection of a Stigmatizing Categorization The studies carried out during the 1990s and 2000s show that the ambivalences of the notion of caboclo and the problems that these pose for anthropological analysis are constitutive of the multiple modalities of its deployment in the social field. Beyond the fact that the term almost always refers to negative stereotypes, the discomfort it arouses derives from its polysemic use. One never knows whether it designates a specific social group or whether it simply indicates greater or lesser variations with respect to other populations (settlers or Indians, for instance). In a landmark article, Deborah Lima (1999) delivered fascinating analyses of how caboclo functions both as a category of social classification and as a relational category. In the first sense, the word appeals to different objective criteria that make it possible to define a regional “type”: a geographical location (the inhabitants of rural Amazonia), a racial descent (the descendants of Indians and Whites), historical depth (a former occupation), economic activities (smallscale producers), and social class (the very poor). This has the effect of suggesting that there are individuals and collectives who display these traits and who can be “immediately identified” (ibid.: 7) as caboclos. However, ethnographic descriptions systematically introduce nuances that challenge this evidence. As Thierry Valentin points out, they draw a: permanent triple liminality—[of ] identity, spatial and temporal—[that] can arguably be found systematically at all levels of their concrete life: the caboclos’ habitat oscillates between forest and rivers—on the riverbank . . . ; productive activities: between direct harvesting (animal and plant extractivism) and small-scale agriculture; market relations: between autarky and clientele dependency; the relationship to space: between a sedentary lifestyle and repeated migrations; the social relationship: between community holism and the particularity of individual trajectories; the relationship to the sacred: between Catholicism (cult of saints) and paganism (shamanic practices); the relationship to time: between the linearity of a historical consciousness and the circularity of a mythical consciousness, and so forth. (Valentin 2001: 25)

As the author’s use of ‘arguably’ suggests, this liminality is nothing more than a projection that makes the analysis of Amazonian populations, which combine various territorial, religious, and economic inscriptions in an original way, difficult. As for their denomination, it poses an insoluble problem. Researchers clearly perceive that local populations present a certain number of recurring characteristics, but they have no native term allowing them to be grouped together and thus to situate them easily in relation to the national or even regional whole. In other words, they lack an abstract tool that saves them

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from having to always specify who exactly they are talking about, and this difficulty favors the continuing use of the word caboclo. Lima (1999: 20) argues that “the caboclo is a historical construction of what is native at a given moment in history.” From this point of view, it is less an “intermediate being . . . supposed to be merely [the manifestation of ] a transitory phase” (Valentin 2001: 24, my emphasis) than an “intermediate category of the social classification system” (Lima 1999: 20, my emphasis). This category is defined through a series of constantly updated contrasts regarding recent migrants as well as Indigenous peoples and those who perceive themselves as White, urban, and wealthy (ibid.). In this sense, caboclo does not name an objective social reality, but rather legitimizes the processes of differentiation that are at work. It nourishes the perception of differences, attributing values to them and organizing positions between different actors present in the regional space. The operations of social classification that the concept of caboclo would allow are thus eclipsed by its relational dimension, which reduces its descriptive effectiveness. Lima describes a cascading operation in which this figure, placed ever further away, remains constantly elusive: For the urban population of the large cities of Amazonia, such as Belém and Manaus, the population of the hinterland—including residents of smaller towns like Tefé [a small town in the middle Solimões region, state of Amazonas]—can be considered cabocla . . . Among the urban population of Tefé, as in comparable cities, it is primarily members of the upper classes who frequently refer to people in the rural area as caboclos. The urban upper class may sometimes also refer to the urban poor as caboclos. The rural population rejects this caboclo label and considers that it does not refer to them, but to the Indians. (Lima 1999: 10)5

In everyday situations, the use of caboclo makes it possible to assign, implicitly and indirectly, people or a group of people to a social position different from that which the speaker attributes to themselves (like bosses to their employees). This relational category, which establishes an asymmetry and inequality in social relations,6 is also a liminal category whose limits and objects are continuously negotiated (the caboclo is by turns the least educated, the furthest from city centers, or the poorest). It should be specified that caboclo is a term used to name a third party rather than a term of address. It is seldom used to call someone in this way in their presence—unless the aim is to deliberately insult the person. On the other hand, it is readily applied to those who are not present and who cannot therefore protest. The anecdote cited by Lima about the adoption of this term by the anthropologists Charles Wagley and Eduardo Galvão in the 1950s is highly

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revealing about the strength of the representation of the caboclo as Other. Each time they presented the research program they intended to conduct in a small town in the state of Pará to their Brazilian colleagues, to government authorities, and to the people in the capital city of Belém, they were systematically told: “So you are going to study the caboclos” (Wagley 1985: vii, cited in Lima 1999: 25). Faced with such comments, which can still be heard today, the researchers ended up adopting the term despite their initial reservations. Basically, this category only really takes shape in the eyes and words of those who above all do not want to be described as such. By designating someone as caboclo, I affirm that a social distance separates me from them and without having to say so openly, I raise my personal status. It does not matter who we claim to name because we are talking first and foremost about ourselves. This is why caboclo can accommodate imprecision, and even requires it in order to be effective in a large number of social situations. Its use therefore provides more information about the way in which those who use it claim to fit into social realities than it says something proven and observable about the social realities in question. The originality of the caboclo is that it constructs an ethnic reading of social inequality. Like other anthropologists, Nicolas Tiphagne (2005: 24) argues that “[before] being [a marker of ] self-awareness, the ‘caboclo’ is an awareness of the Other.” He is nevertheless alone, to my knowledge, in having considered this notion as a “performative ethnonym” (ibid.) that gives the caboclos existence through the act of more powerful people naming them, and by denying them the opportunity to define themselves. Caboclo therefore appears as the key element of a discursive form loaded with “symbolic violence,” in the words of the Brazilian sociologist Fábio Fonseca de Castro (2013: 435–37), in which rejection of others and self-affirmation are linked. Castro concludes that “the ideal type of caboclos [is not] a subject without identity, but a subject of accepted counter-identity” (ibid.: 462). This formulation deserves clarification. Insofar as the idea of caboclo is associated with definite characteristics—even if they are negative stereotypes—it is possible to argue that it has a content of its own that, if one subscribes to this reading, is likely to pass for an “identity.” Moreover, while its pejorative connotations dissuade people from using it for themselves, this concept has received some attention as a counterpoint intervening in the social positionings aimed at distinguishing oneself. Self-valorization depends less on claiming positive qualities for oneself and on their exclusive enjoyment than on the reference to an indefinite other claimed to have fewer of them—in other words, on summoning up a stooge that Castro calls “counter-identity.” The relational efficiency of the caboclo, and its astonishing persistence in view of the prejudices it conveys, can be grasped even better if, following Carmen Izabel Rodrigues (2006: 128), we take into account the fact that it slips

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into the interstices and gaps of Amazonian society where the following discourse is expressed and reproduced: [a] double discourse of exclusion: for those who look and speak from the outside, the caboclo is the one that is outside of modernity. For those who look from the inside, and see the other [the dominator] like a mirror—at the same time he sees himself through the eyes of the other—the caboclo is he who wants to be someone other than himself. (ibid.: 126)

In his study on the Tukúna (Ticuna) on the middle Solimões, Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1972: 83) had already noted that the caboclo is the Indian who sees himself as an inferior being through the eyes of the master. Rodrigues pursues his analysis by emphasizing the force of attraction of the term on those who are its primary victims. Not content with seeing themselves belittled as caboclos by a constellation of disparaging traits, the most fragile populations internalize this representation, consider themselves through this prism, and seek to escape their condition by identifying with those who marginalize them. It seems to me then that the device of exclusion built around this discursive form rests more precisely on the abolishment of the barriers between an “interior” and an “exterior” so that only the dominators’ point of view prevails. The caboclo allows no political counter-speech, and rarely an amiable folklorization; it is just a negative stereotype to be resisted. The mobilization of this figure thus promotes mises en abyme where everyone can distance the other but also distance themselves. Given that caboclo is based on self-affirmation by disqualifying the person who is designated by this term, and on assignment to a state of permanent premodernity, it is understandably difficult for it to take hold as a collective term of self-definition.

Traditional Populations as a Positivation of Caboclo Deborah Lima (1999: 22) argues that caboclo has not shed its negative connotation because it has “never been associated with a political movement.” In support of her argument, she cites the case of the categorization as “Indian” (and, one could add, that of Quilombola), which despite being just as pejorative, was accepted by the populations on which it was imposed once it had acquired the value of collective political representation. In other words, the stigma that it aroused and possibly still arouses in interpersonal relationships tends to be neutralized by its ability to make a group of people visible in the public space, that is to say, to include them in social mobilizations for the fight for rights and to promote the formation of alliances with other social sectors (NGOs in particular). While Amerindian groups can henceforth be perceived as localized

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minorities struggling to preserve their territory against the advance of modern capitalist society, the vast swathes of rural populations designated as caboclos, who can be found in almost identical forms throughout the region, appear to show little determination to resist the expansion of livestock farming and agribusiness, which nevertheless threatens them as well. Among the more or less distant heirs of native peoples, it is argued, resignation in the face of an unjust social order and inertia in the face of a subordinate condition reign. Considered to be closer to civilization, the caboclo is also viewed as being resistant to the canons of political commitment. Lima evokes another element, however, that is just as important in her eyes: “Among the politicized Indigenous Peoples, the names attributed to them [by the Whites] have been abolished and, alongside their process of self-determination, the insistence on self-denomination also features prominently” (Lima 1999: 27). There thus appears to be a two-tier system: a general level where the term “Indian” has become a unifying political signifier and a lower level where the chosen ethnonyms reflect the diversity of the groups it brings together. However, in the case of non-Indian rural populations, the demands for self-denomination are not articulated via the political re-semanticization of the notion of caboclo: quite simply, they discard the notion. In doing so, a rupture is created that Lima welcomes because: Words do not only create things, but preserve what they create, like social structures and representations. Because it carries a colonial history of subordination, the word caboclo compromises the destiny of a population. (Lima 1999: 28)

Against this exogenous designation, “small-scale producers of historical occupation” (ibid.: 5) seek to make themselves known under other terms that suit them more. Thus, a host of denominations aiming to replace it arose during the 1980s: Traditional populations, peoples of the forest, artisanal fishermen, riverside residents (ribeirinhos), Brazil nut collectors (castanheiros), babassu nut shellers (quebradeiras de coco de babaçu), rubber collectors (seringueiros), and so forth.7 In the context of the time, it was a question of opposing an ecological discourse dominated by biological concerns that advocated the creation of vast socalled “integral environmental protection reserves” where no human occupation would be tolerated—not even that of the populations already present in the areas concerned. Faced with these proponents of hard biodiversity, a socioenvironmental alliance formed that promoted the constitution of “conservation units for sustainable use” and considered that long-time inhabitants could participate in the aim of preserving the environment. This coalition of associative actors, which strongly supported social mobilizations and was backed by the

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development of international cooperation programs, contributed to the gradual erasure of the term caboclo from public (but not private) discourse in favor of one of the new expressions—that of Traditional populations—which eventually became the emblem of a large part of the rural struggles. The objective of social inclusion is clear, the political line followed resolutely progressive, and the argument sophisticated. Lima sums it up as follows: Naming the inhabitants of the reserves traditional populations is a way of excluding them from the condition of modern [people] and thus of placing them in closer proximity to nature, so as to justify their presence in the protected areas. (Lima 2008)

The image of those who were reflected only in the degraded mirror of the caboclo was transformed: once they are perceived as “the essential and useful repositories of the various native knowledge of the Amazon . . . they deserve a possible ‘protection’ and the ‘recognition’ of their identity” (Castro 2013: 451) by the state. The concept of Traditional populations therefore seeks to translate and consolidate the socioenvironmental pact to which social collectives adhere, which was, until then, kept in obscurity and without any rights. In 2000, the institution of the National System of Conservation Units (SNUC),8 which oversees the creation of these territorial units, consecrated the official use of the expression. The 2007 publication of a presidential decree made it a category of rights holders under the National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities (PNPCT),9 which the Ministry of the Environment is responsible for.10 However, the choice of the adjective “traditional” has given rise to many criticisms. Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha argue that it does not take into account the processual dimension of identifications and their relationship with the implementation of new territorial public policies: The groups thus called are not traditional—they become “Traditional Populations” by embarking on the category bus which gives them access to territorial and other rights at a cost, the fulfilment of certain obligations. (Cunha and Almeida 1999, cited in Araújo 2009: 16, their emphasis)

The official recognition of the inhabitants of rural areas as Traditional populations in fact implies that they respect a certain number of environmental rules laid down by the administration. The Traditional populations are therefore not traditional for all eternity, but only if they subscribe to political discourses and practices, and with the aim of asserting specific rights. In a similar perspective, Roberto Araújo (2009: 7) underlines that this voluntary, even voluntarist adherence is accompanied by a “kind of discursive re-

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composition of identity.” To give substance to the idea of the occupation and use of “territories and natural resources as a condition of their cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic reproduction, using knowledge, innovations and practices generated and transmitted by tradition” (point I art. 3º decree 6.040/2007),11 populations must be “traditional” not only in the eyes of third parties but also in their own. It is through the construction of a quality that therefore presents itself as intrinsic that categorization acquires consistency and is given a capacity to describe social realities. The expressions “Traditional populations” and caboclos, which, it should be remembered, apply to the same people and the same social groups, are thus very different in the echoes they arouse. The institutional character acquired by the former makes its use acceptable, even valued. This fact contrasts with the informality of qualifications by the second term, which are extremely rarely, and only in very specific contexts, welcome. In addition, the relational dimension also present in the use of Traditional populations does not have the negative effects that can be identified in the case of caboclo. City dwellers certainly believe that they are less “traditional” (or more “modern”) than they think villagers are. But the rural collectives concerned do not dispute this assessment because they have exploited this situation by turning it into a weapon serving the social conflicts they engage in. The fact remains that, on two points, these categorizations converge. First of all, several authors note that the category of Traditional populations is just as generic and imprecise (Araújo 2009: 11; Castro and Oliveira 2016: 50, 56) as caboclo. The list sketched out above attests to the fact that it bears innumerable variations referring to economic activities or to distinct modes of exploitation of natural resources. Moreover, the legal definition that has been given shows little sociological rigor. As Pedro Silveira (2007: 5) notes, it refers to “an identity component (‘those who recognize themselves as such’), to a vague essentialist component (‘proper forms of social organization’), a territorial relationship, a relationship to natural resources and a link with a concept of tradition that has not been defined,” in other words to elements that can be applied to many populations in rural areas. Finally, even if the expression Traditional populations claims to distinguish those whose noble role is to preserve biodiversity, it retains a certain ambivalence as to the position reserved for them in contemporary society. In an unpublished text, Deborah Lima, who was initially very favorable to this designation, indeed suggests that it operates to distance various social collectives from what is considered to be the temporal norm for the majority: Instead of looking forward and calling them post-modern or neo-traditional . . . we use a historical reference and call them only traditional, as if they were at

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an earlier stage of social development. In this way, we are simply re-editing the label of “primitive populations” specific to the evolutionary paradigm of the beginnings of anthropology. (Lima 2008)12

Traditional populations are thus implicitly perceived as a sort of persistent testimony to a bygone past, and they are not supposed to be present in an urban universe that projects itself into the future and modernity. However, this representation is reminiscent of that suggested by the qualification as a caboclo, as someone who is apart from and lagging behind “civilization.” The new formulation then often appears more as a synonym, at best as a less offensive expression, than as a semantic construction that makes a radical break with the old prejudices. To ordinary ears, they both resonate in the same way. It is with difficulty that folklore gives way to “culture,” dependency to autonomy, and subsistence to innovation. It is for this reason that the following statement by Lima about the caboclo seems to me to also apply to Traditional populations: “While the Indian is not considered poor, the theme of poverty is directly associated with the caboclo” (Lima 1999: 15). In fact, while the maximum otherness evoked by the term Indian and their rejection in an ahumanity that justifies exploitation means that they do not even need to be qualified as “poor,” the relative otherness of the caboclos and Traditional populations relegates them to the most distant but known margins of national society, thereby exposing them to incessant comparisons. By asking to be registered in the administrative category of Traditional populations, a village undoubtedly adopts a combative posture that allows it to acquire social visibility. However, as this category is weakened by the links it still maintains with the regional stereotype of the caboclo, the price is implicitly agreeing to occupy a subordinate position analogous to that allotted to the caboclo. The evocative force of this figure for any occupant of the Amazonian space makes the attempts at emancipation of the Traditional populations in relation to it somewhat laborious.

The Transgressive Power of the Caboclo-Spirit The term caboclo is, however, recurrently used by those who refuse to have this term applied to them. Both in metropoles and in Amazonian villages, it does not designate human collectives or people perceived as relatively “wilder” than oneself, but rather a set of Others whose nature is radically different, since they are figures of the invisible world.13 When, in places of worship or terreiros,14 these caboclos15 manifest themselves through mediums to provide advice and care to men and women, they adopt behaviors that break with the social conventions usually in force at two

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levels of society: those of the middle and upper classes, who affirm their status by exhibiting consumer goods and claim to be “modern,” and those of the working classes, to which the sons and daughters of saints (the mediums) belong, who declare themselves attached to the values of humility, reserve, and submission. Indeed, the possessed mediums do not respect the ordinary rules of propriety (they drink, flirt, make fun, threaten, demand, and so forth); they use slang or coarse words and expressions that are rarely used outside the terreiros (marafa for alcohol and “foam” for beer, babugem for food, “trouser leg” for men and “dress tail” for women, “white caps” for doctors, “spunk” [porra] to announce a possession, and so forth); and they show a lack of knowledge of objects symbolizing modernity (the telephone, airplanes, cars, and so forth)—even if they do not hesitate to use them if necessary in their consultations. These ritual interpretations, which nourish what could be called an aesthetics of the vulgar, are not only possible; they are prescribed. In this specific system of possession, the character represented and the personality of the person possessed in the “pure” state are under no circumstances confused in the eyes of the public: their facial expressions, gait, temperament, clothes—everything must change. The postulate according to which a son or daughter of a saint momentarily lends their body to an Other is thus performed anew with each incarnation. The criteria for evaluating the competence of mediums reflect this requirement. The best of them are believed to abandon themselves completely to their “guides,” without being able to restrain them in their actions, and they are considered “unconscious,” in contrast to their less gifted co-religionists, called “conscious” because they keep the memory of the actions carried out under the influence of the caboclos. The prestige that a son or daughter of a saint will be able to derive from this exercise ultimately depends on their ability to show that they are capable of stepping aside, of being a docile instrument, the “horse,” “mount,” or “device” of their spirits. Submission becomes the sign of an alliance that allows the medium to be recognized as an experienced healer and, thanks to the donations of the clients it brings, to gain a certain financial autonomy. Not only is it assumed that the same term caboclo cannot designate both powerful spirits and their modest mounts, it is also assumed that only nonhumans can free themselves from having to respect the norm, by adopting socially condemned behaviors. This religious dimension, based on the contrast between mediums and the “entities” (entidades) that inhabit them, contributes in this way to neutralizing the negative charge carried by the term caboclo by diverting it from human. As we have seen, the compositions of the caboclos-spirits draw heavily on a set of traits that are held to be stigmatizing when associated with human beings. It is precisely their exclusive assignment to the ritual sphere that allows their value to be reversed. The stereotypes do not disappear,

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but everything that was held to be a sign of backwardness or a lack of good manners becomes the mark of an extreme transgressive force and an ability to cure the most diverse disorders. Also, in the world of cults, the caboclo is no longer a personal offense from which one must protect oneself, but a double to which one actively lays claim. But the caboclos of the terreiros are not content with allowing the social order to be disrupted; they also suggest, and enable one to think about, the world’s diversity. As an echo of the multiplicity of Amazonian human collectives qualified as caboclos, the invisible beings do not melt into an indistinct whole. On the contrary, the description of their universe by mediums involves the principle of a grouping of “spirits” according to common characteristics resulting from their presumed origin or history. Traditionally seven, the number of these groups, or “lines” (linhas), nevertheless varies according to the interpretations of the people questioned. The following list therefore does not claim to be exhaustive or exact; rather it attempts to indicate in a few words what the organization of the caboclos-spirits is like according to the mediums. A first major principle of classification makes a distinction between the caboclos of the forest (mata) and those of the sea (mar). These two blocks are in turn subdivided into several subgroups. That of the forest includes first of all the “Indians” (índios), also called juremeiros,16 who live in dense and deep woods, work most often for “charity,” and are known for their seriousness, brightly colored feather headdresses, and the spears with which the possessed dance. This area is also said to be populated by surrupiras, warriors with a jumping gait who live in the trunks of trees and are fond of making fun of people, sometimes spitefully, and also by cowherds (boiadeiros) who guide cattle in wide open spaces and ask for their characteristic leather hat when they possess the mediums. Finally, the miners (mineiros) are often attached to the forest: the sons of saints consider these “old-blacks” (pretos-velhos) to be powerful, dark-skinned magicians, calm and aged.17 As can be seen, this universe is thus assumed to stretch over a very large territory that, despite its name, includes non-wooded areas: the mines in the southeast of the country and the sertão of the Nordeste. The domain of the sea is in no way inferior to the previous one, whether from the point of view of its extension—it would be better to refer to a watery domain since it also includes the rivers—or the diversity of its invisible inhabitants. In golden cities located in the depths of the rivers, the “enchanted ones of the depths” (encantados do fundo) are said to reside in animal form, such as the mermaid, the coral snake, and the freshwater dolphin (boto). On the coast, famous warriors, known by the name of Codó and comprising several families including that of the Legua, are alleged to have taken up residence on the wellknown Lençóis beach, in the state of Maranhão. They are said to be well versed in magic, and no one would risk jesting with them. At some distance from the

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coast, glorious navigators called mariners (marinheiros) who are sensitive to the misfortune of men and women ceaselessly criss-cross the seas. One last group surpasses almost all of them in notoriety: that of the lightskinned Turks (turcos).18 Their kingdom is located on the other side of the ocean, and they are renowned for their refined manners and their knowledge of the magical arts. The description of these different linhas thus evokes a vast gallery of colorful characters, grouped by type and characterized by their place of residence and their activities. In this respect, the invisible caboclo of the Amazonian cults is specific. While in urban centers of the other regions of the country, this figure is closely associated with the representation of a generic Indianness (sometimes imported, as for those who, in São Paulo, seem to assume Apache attributes), in Amazonia it can encompass a very broad spectrum of population groups. In northern Brazil, the portrait painted of the invisible universe is that of a complex organization, an immense world, powerful entities, interested in having dealings with men and women but also very demanding. Although the spirit possession cults adopt some of the stereotypes associated with the cabocloman, they offer an interpretation that is a complete break with the latter and that transforms defects into qualities and weaknesses into strengths: lack of instruction becomes confidential knowledge, indolence becomes tenacity, dance becomes performance, and promiscuity becomes a prerogative. This projection onto imaginary Others of features that the ruling elites seize upon in order to disqualify human beings whom they hold to be inferior could lead one to believe that there was a representation of a self freed from a subordinate condition. The presence of some of them—“Whites” (brancos) who are called “lords” (Senhores) (Leacock and Leacock 1975: 163)—would then be an indication of this. However, the performances concerning the latter caboclos show no more respect than the others for the standards of good manners and they are not even among the most sought after by the public. But above all, the symbolic efficiency of such characters depends on the staging of differences and not of similarities. Their interpretations always aim to reaffirm a contrast between a transgressive capacity, which belongs to them, and the fragility of their human supports, essentially poor women at the head of single-parent families. In a way, alterization is the condition of protection. In this sense, transforming the stigmatization of so-called crude ways into attributes of power depends on a perfect separation of the roles assumed. The mediums therefore seek to consolidate in many ways (by possession, consultation, and so forth) partial affinities with a caboclo-spirit, so that the public never forgets that these are strong and singular, avoiding full identification with a figure that must remain a distinct double.

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Conclusion: Distancing through Inverted Disjunctions According to Thierry Valentin (2001: 27), “the Caboclo became visible to anthropology [in the 1950s] once it was necessary to think of a ‘prototype’ of what the Indian could become when he ‘acculturates.’” Even if the term is less used today in the social sciences, particularly in Brazil, it continues to haunt people’s minds in that, by its Tupi etymology, it suggests an obvious difference that is nevertheless difficult to grasp. For anthropologists, the main problem posed by this concept is that it splits into multiple “sub-identities” (Castro 2013: 458) instead of forming a single broad term of self-identification—which would correspond better to their perception of an overall coherence of sociability and social organization, way of life and production, beliefs and religious practices. The example of the three brothers presented in the first chapter is significant of these diverse self-designations. Although none of them mentioned the term caboclo, each of their positions aimed to avoid this qualification: Carlos by calling himself Quilombola, Alex by seeing himself as Indian, and Bernardo by identifying with the Traditional populations, that is, the acceptable face of the caboclo. Valentin (2001: 29–30) gives a fine description of the felt unity of the caboclo, emphasizing the feeling of “an obvious community of existence, a lifestyle that seems to link each little hamlet or village encountered, as if in a singular repetition of an invisible but agreed disposition . . . , narrative activity of every moment . . . , permanent travel stories, undertaken and maintaining each other.” These remarks aim to answer a question that he formulates in the following terms: There must be, in a form yet to be researched, a minimal set of creations original to this population, that would at least express their liminal restraint—the weak assumption—or even their construction of a set of referents around which their existence can pass from the status of shameful imposition to that of positive internal elaboration—the strong assumption. (ibid.: 28)

It seems to me that the invisible-caboclo can be apprehended as one of these creations. It is true that, in the specialized literature, this figure is associated with possession cults in an urban environment. This might suggest that it is a question of urban religious production linked to a more or less recent history of migrations from the countryside to the cities: the populations descending from men and women born in the hinterland allegedly find in the elaboration of this powerful character an element that enables them to counter a persistent discourse of disqualification propagated by the middle classes and the elites. The substitution of the spirit-caboclo for the representation of the humancaboclo thus completes the break with the rural environment that can be perceived in family trajectories.

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However, during a survey on the island of Marajó in 2019, I was struck by the fact that relatively isolated villages, even sometimes mere hamlets, had spacious terreiros with imposing statues of caboclos. The presence of these places of worship, which were on a par with those found in the outskirts of large Amazonian cities, attests to the circulation of people (in this case ritual specialists) and the dissemination of ideas (here of a religious model), as mentioned above and as stressed by Valentin. It also indicates that distancing the stereotype of the caboclo by its projection into the invisible world could make sense in rural areas, including among people who in principle have a more rewarding self-designation. One of these terreiros on Marajó was indeed located in an extractivist reserve, that is to say, within a territorial unit reserved for Traditional populations. These observations lead us to suggest that the invisible-caboclo cannot be reduced to the evocation of the urban experience of migrant populations or only their reaction to marginalization, but rather that it is part of a feedback process between cities and countryside. As we will see, the description of the universe of spirits echoes the vastness and the diversity of the social world and its inhabitants, which is also likely to speak to those who are supposedly closest to places said to be populated by caboclos. It is obviously not a question of claiming that all the inhabitants of the rural environment are followers of spirit possession cults; the high number of evangelicals demonstrates that this is not the case. However, it seems to me that the religious practices articulated by the spiritcaboclo say things about Amazonian society that must be taken into account in the analysis of the recent politico-identity positions of the populations. More generally, the importance of this figure in the regional imaginary is reflected in the very different nature and origin of its manifestations. The first, promoted by progressive and militant sectors, has been developed on a political and legal level since the 1980s and has resulted in the creation of the legal category of Traditional populations. The second, which is more difficult to date but comes from people likely to suffer from the prejudice of being characterized as caboclo, took place on the religious level through the elaboration of an invisible being whose alterity is ritually and repeatedly asserted. Although these two initiatives are similar in their attempts to break with the negative definitions of the caboclo, they diverge as to the means mobilized to achieve this. It can even be said that they act in a symmetrically inverse fashion. Religious work has endeavored to change the meaning of caboclo by replacing human with strongwilled spirits; legal work has attacked the signifier itself by coining the expression Traditional populations to designate the human collectives perceived, in Amazonia, as caboclos. Perhaps it is necessary to underline the specificity of the Amazonian representations of the two facets of this character compared to those in the rest of the

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country. In its human version, the portrait of the caboclo as a poor relative of the Indians, forgetful of his roots and culture, neglected by history and assigned to indistinct margins, indeed contrasts sharply with other Brazilian regions where he represents a heroic figure. In Salvador de Bahia, he is celebrated, along with the other “liberators” who freed the country from the Portuguese yoke and won independence, with a huge column in a square in the city center. By comparison, the monument erected in honor of the populations closest to what, in the northern region, we imagine to be caboclos avoids naming them by dedicating itself to the “cabano people,” named after the popular nineteenth-century revolt previously mentioned in connection with the three brothers of Lagoa Bonita. This sort of self-effacing temperament attributed to the human-caboclos contrasts with the capacity attributed to the invisible-caboclos to occupy the entire ritual scene. If, in the urban centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, these spirits only evoke a generic Indianness sometimes largely based on popular Apache iconography, in the Amazon (as well as in Bahia, according to Santos 1992: 93), they are never restrained as to the forms they wish to assume.19 In the north of the country, the caboclo is thus likely to symbolize both relegation and freedom.

Notes 1. Agnès Clerc-Renaud (2022) observes that, in the northeastern lands she investigated, women may speak of young men as caboclos. In rural Amazonia, I myself have heard a man’s hunting skills recognized by reference to this word. 2. While the Quilombolas and the Indigenous peoples are formally included in the category of Traditional populations, they enjoy specific rights and are not administered by the same organization as them. Quilombolas, who are granted collective property rights, are under the aegis of the Secretariat for the Promotion of Policies of Racial Equality (SEPPIR), which delegated the demarcation of their territories to the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). Indigenous peoples are managed by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and obtain a concession for permanent and exclusive use of the territory (but not of the subsoil). The other Traditional populations are granted a usage concession limited in time and subject to compliance with strict specifications by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio). 3. On the diversity of the groups included in the Traditional populations category, see the examples given by Roberta Rowsy Amorim de Castro and Myriam Cyntia Cesar de Oliveira, based on a bibliographical study (Castro and Oliveira 2016: 55). 4. Kohler refers to the use of this word as a mark of affection, mentioned by a few authors from the 1930s (Boyer 1999: 38) and which he was able to observe himself in his field. The few occurrences that I observed always occurred in contexts of derision or self-derision when faced with urban foreigners such as myself. 5. For another description, see the quotation of Roberto Décio de Las Casas (1964: 16–17) by Nicholas Tiphagne (2005: 19).

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6. According to Emília Pietrafesa de Godoi, this representation is also present in other regions: “what is common to the meanings of the category ‘caboclo’ in the Zona da Mata in Pernambuco state and in eastern Amazonia is the fact that in both contexts, they refer to subjects who are devoid of any rights and that the term is very seldom used to define oneself ” (Godoi 2014: 157). 7. Different designations are noted in other regions: growers of mate and pig breeders (faxinenses) in the north of Minas Gerais, communities known as fundo de pasto and inhabitants of the sertão (geraizeiros) in the semi-arid northeast, etc. See the government decree for the complete list: https://www.gov.br/mma/pt-br/noticias/decreto-presidencial-reconheceexistencia-formal-das-populacoes-tradicionais 8. https://www.gov.br/mdh/pt-br/navegue-por-temas/igualdade-etnico-racial/acoes-eprogramas/politica-nacional-de-desenvolvimento-sustentavel-dos-povos-e-comuni dades-tradicionais 9. https://www.gov.br/mma/pt-br/noticias/mma-lanca-politica-nacional-para-povos-e-co munidades-tradicionais. 10. While “traditional” is never problematized by the administrations, it should be noted that they name the social collectives using various terms that the human sciences attempt, albeit with some difficulty, to distinguish: “populations,” “communities,” and “peoples” are all likely to be given very different definitions. For an in-depth discussion of the debates around these terms, see Castro and Oliveira (2016). 11. https://presrepublica.jusbrasil.com.br/legislacao/94949/decreto-6040-07. 12. This criticism by Lima seems to me to echo the analyses of Adam Kuper (2003) when he emphasizes that the terms “native” and “indigenous”—and “traditional” for Lima—are “often euphemisms for what used to be termed ‘primitive’” (Kuper 2003: 389). 13. In this part, I draw on the results of a field survey carried out in Belém at the end of the 1980s (Boyer 1993a) and of a mission carried out in 2019 on the island of Marajó. I checked the relevance of my observations by reading various recent studies. A thesis on possession practices in the Bragança region (Silva 2014) and, for the lower Tapajós region, a doctoral thesis (Romcy-Pereira 2018) as well as a master’s thesis and two articles by Costa Pereira (2017a, 2017b, 2018), complete the information on Pará. The situation in the other Amazonian states is approached from various readings: for Roraima, a collective work portraying several specialists in possession cults working in Boa Vista (Fé e resistência 2020); for Acre, a master’s thesis (Silva 2009); for the state of Amazonas, two doctoral theses (Vieira 2012; J. J. A. Souza 2011), and for Rondônia an article by Britto and Souza (2018). As the data of these various studies is consistent, I have refrained from quoting the authors each time so as not to overburden the text. 14. Most of the terreiros are located in the outlying districts of cities, and each of them is organized into a family of saints: a cult leader, assisted by their caboclo, gathers mediums around themselves called sons and daughters of a saint. Even if the majority of the leaders of worship are men, religious participation is mainly female. For these women, the caboclo is an invisible companion who takes on the role of provider usually expected of men. 15. I do not consider in this chapter the divinities called orixás because if these are always evoked at the beginning of the ceremonies they are not, or are very rarely, represented in the possession. It is the caboclos that occupy the entire ceremonial space here. As we will see in the next chapter, they are, however, much more present as the cults experience a process of Africanization. 16. From the name of a thorny tree (Pithecolobium tortum) that is very widespread in the caatingas, a semi-arid vegetation of the Nordeste (Dicionário Aurélio da Língua Portuguesa,

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2010). In possession cults, Jurema sometimes designates a group of enchanted people, sometimes a cabocla. 17. Unlike Umbanda in the south of the country, the “old-blacks” in Amazonia belong to the category of caboclos. 18. The history of this group, whose presence is thought to have been felt in the terreiros since the end of the nineteenth century, is the subject of various accounts. According to Mundicarmo Ferretti (1992: 60), some cult leaders from São Luíz de Maranhão refer to enchanted “Mauritanian Turks,” which is interpreted by researchers as the manifestation of an Islamized nagô. Other clues suggest, however, that the “Turks” could also be a reworking of the characters from the novel Carlos Magno e os doze pares de França attributed to Nicolás de Piamonte, which seems to have been very popular with the rural populations, who organized collective readings aloud (ibid.: 63). Finally, still according to Ferretti, the American anthropologists Seth and Ruth Leacock, who carried out a survey in Belém in the early 1960s, associated the presence of these caboclos with the influence of the dance of the Moors and Christians that was very popular in Portugal and in Brazil (ibid.: 64). 19. I thank Peter Fry (personal communication) for drawing my attention to these contrasts.

CHAPTER 5

The Implicit Nature of the Caboclo Or How to Conceive the “Mixture”   

A few preliminary remarks on the central position of the notion of caboclo in understanding the hierarchies and the definition of social positions are essential to the discussion. Generally speaking, in both rural and urban Brazilian Amazonia, the social structure is comprehended in terms of a major division between the “poor” and the “rich” that seems to everyone almost unshakable. On the one hand, it is said, there is the vast majority of vulnerable populations who, in the cities, live in often precarious housing in unhealthy peripheral neighborhoods and work in the informal sector. In the countryside, they live in small isolated houses or in “communities” established on the banks of the river or on the mainland, scraping a living with difficulty thanks to the sale of products collected in the forest or their agricultural production. On the other hand, there are the elites and middle classes who reside in the city center, in spacious villas, or in comfortable buildings policed by security guards, who meet at weekends in clubs and whose comfort is ensured by domestic help. The transition from one group to the other can only take place through upward mobility that is as desired as it is curbed. In principle such mobility is accessible to all, but, in fact, it is reserved for a few people. All of these descriptive elements seem to be summed up in the opposition between caboclos and “barons” (barões);1 these are mocking reciprocal exodesignations, but which nevertheless introduce a new dimension to the differences already mentioned. While the origins of the mass of the “people” (povo, or povão in an even more disqualifying formulation) are by definition held to be dubious, if not most of the time indefinable, as evidenced by the diversity of phenotypic traits that they present, those of the members of the small privileged group are claimed to be easily classifiable in racial terms. In the 1980s, they were commonly referred to as brancos, in an unquestioned, and always implicit, association between social status and whiteness.2 Since then, the introduction of positive discrimination measures has facilitated access to university for children from certain underprivileged families, and a slight declarative “colorization” of the middle classes has, it is true, undoubtedly taken place, some families now asserting themselves as Black and

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very rarely as Indian. While this change has modified the previous representation of a necessarily White ruling class, we note that the same perspective of supposed racial legibility is presumed to apply to the newcomers. Integration into quota policies is in fact conditional on the registration of people in a single ethno-legal category: Black, White, or Indian, to name only the main ones. In other words, the current rebalancing of chances between all is envisaged by considering a kind of zero point in the past when clearly defined groups were brought into contact in an unequal way. The success of the equity enterprise, and the possibilities of upward social mobility for its beneficiaries, then seem to depend on a sort of cancellation, by those concerned, of the “mixture” that might have taken place in the meantime. This question is proving to be a particularly thorny problem for the vulnerable populations of the Amazon who, more than ever, have to choose between suffering the “mixture” and resolving to occupy a subordinate social position or scrutinizing it to determine what the dominant tone might be in the hope of improving their living conditions. The first option is actually not an option, and we have seen that the majority of populations do not want to be associated with the categorization of caboclo, the memory of whose ancestries is lost in the mists of time.3 However, their room for maneuver is limited. Since they continue to be held firmly at arm’s length from any personal or collective identification with the term “White” because of its primary understanding as a synonym of “rich” and dominant, they have to refer to categorizations that the promulgation of the Constitution of 1988 transformed into socially feasible alternatives, that is to say, Black or Indian. Yet if the Indian peoples are the descendants of the pre-Columbian populations, if the Quilombola communities are in the lineage of former African slaves, what about those who are “mixed”? What of the intertwinings that are produced, and which ancestors should be favored in the presentation of oneself? I proposed in the previous chapter that the elaboration of the figure of the caboclo-spirit loosens the stranglehold imposed by the categorization as caboclo as the centerpiece of the reading of the social order. In projecting the caboclo into an invisible world, he is transformed into an alter ego, which is by definition an Other related to but also distinct from the self. I would now like to argue that, insofar as the spirit world is associated with a principle of ordered multiplicity (the “lines”), it may constitute a counterpoint illuminating the way in which local populations attempt to grasp what is perceived as a sort of constitutive inconsistency of the caboclo-man, that is to say the illegibility of his “mixture.” This perspective leads me to consider the notions of “self-definition” and “choice” from the angle of “metamorphoses” between various states related to “roots,” and deemed modifiable and even reversible.

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Amerindian Transformations: A Non-Fusional Mixture This theme of metamorphosis is well known for the Amerindian populations, where it concerns a “becoming other,” notably “White.” The contrast established by José Antonio Kelly Luciani between theories of the hybridization of mixed Latin American elites, in particular Venezuelan, and those of the Yanomami Indians will help clarify the specificity of the latter. With regard to the former, to which I return below, it suffices for the moment to say that “Criollo culture is in an in-between position and its relations to metropolitan and dominated cultures—indigenous and Afro-American—are articulated by a neither-nor logical operator” (Luciani 2016: 28). In comparison with this ideology of a mixture that produces original novelty, the case of the Indigenous peoples refers to a completely different theory: that of a “non-fusional mixture” (ibid.: 42) that is rendered in the title of Luciani’s book: About Anti-Mestizaje. Thus, for the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco in Venezuela, learning to speak Spanish, exchanging with Criollo traders, or possessing manufactured goods, for example, nurtures a new “context of relations where a criolla sociability can be enacted” (ibid.: 45), whereas the “‘Yanomami conventional space’ . . . continues to determine relations between Yanomami communities” (ibid.). Yanomami and Criolla sociability mark the poles of what Luciani calls the “napë transformational axis” (ibid.) (a term designating potential enemies, that is, nonYanomami, but also Criollos), which unfolds in a space extending from forest communities to city dwellers. In a relational reading of different geographical locations, the same group can be considered more napë than Indigenous communities situated upstream and can assert a Yanomami position vis-à-vis city dwellers and state institutions (ibid.: 56). Therefore, Yanomami hybridization does not imply a “consumptive fusion of difference, but rather the adding of a different (napë) sociality which allows Orinoco Yanomami to differentiate from the upriver Yanomami and down river napë to different political effect” (ibid.: 49). As all positions are interesting depending on the context—some to weave alliances, others to have access to goods—it is best to know how to alternate them. In this play between poles, the “incorporation of a difference that seeks to transform the self into the Other” (ibid.) does not aim at the permanent modification of a previous state (going from Yanomami to napë). It is rather a question of renewing the pleasure of the emotion procured by the transformation4 itself (ibid.: 50). The logical operator that articulates the relational positions of Yanomami and napë is therefore not the Criollo “neither one, nor the other,” but that of “and,” which underlines the oscillation and the alternation of states. After reviewing other analogous situations in the lowlands (the Piro in the Peruvian Amazon, the Wari’ in the state of Rondônia, the Karajá in Goiás),

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Luciani addresses a complex case in which the “becoming other” is developed, as the author says, in “a two-pronged white-and-Kisêdjê becoming” (Luciani 2016: 67). In the renowned Xingu Indigenous Park, the Kisêdjê (formerly known as the Suyá) are the only Jê-speaking populations, and, in a process evoking “acculturation,” or more precisely, “Xinguinization,” over time, they have adopted many of the features that made the dominant Indigenous groups famous: intertribal rituals, musical repertoire, body paintings, and so forth. However, according to Luciani, the ethnography carried out by Marcela Coelho de Souza (2010) shows that it was as their participation in the White world intensified that the Kisêdjê engaged in a movement of revivalism to rediscover the “authenticity” of their own culture, which they considered lost. By appropriating the idea of “cultural promotion policies” and by summoning a third party (state institutions) into the interplay of local political relations, they have given themselves the means to destabilize the conventional representation of Indianness in the park. The mastery of knowledge associated with the “Whites” thus enabled the Kisêdjê to become autonomous from the cultural norm prevailing in the Xingu in order “to differentiate from themselves” (Souza 2010: 106, cited in Luciani 2016: 71), that is, from what they had become in the context of the park. In this specific situation, becoming White and becoming Kisêdjê “are part of the same movement of self-transformation” (ibid.). The historical trajectory of the Gamela, who live in the Amazonian part of the state of Maranhão, suggests still other configurations relating to transformation. According to István van Deursen Varga (2019), Indian groups that the Portuguese called Gamela took in runaway Black slaves and allied with Quilombola communities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The expansion of colonization then separated them into two subgroups, one of them disappearing as an Indigenous people following the military expeditions carried out against them, whereas, in 1759, the other was granted territory by the crown in the form of a sesmaria in their name.5 Urged by the authorities to integrate into society and the regional economy, these Gamela de Codó “mixed” with their populations and ended up being considered caboclos rather than Indians. In 1936, Curt Nimuendaju noted their high degree of miscegenation with “Afro-Brazilians” and the absence of traces of Indian heritage, whether in terms of physiognomies, material culture, or language (Varga 2019: 9). Nevertheless, in 1982, attempts at fraudulent spoliation of their territory led Gamela leaders to present themselves as “descendants of Indians” to organizations of the Catholic Church. They seem to have received the hoped-for support from them, but as “peasants” (camponeses) and not as Indians, which linked their specific struggle to others that were developing at the same time. While in 2013, this group decided to break more radically with the “process of ethnic invisibilization and loss of collective memory” (ibid.: 25) by engaging in a demand for recognition

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of their Gamela identity by the state and in a process of reconquest (retomada) of their territory, certain neighboring localities opted to organize themselves as Quilombolas. According to Varga, the negligence of the public authorities in enforcing the rights associated with the latter categorization, however, spurred these hamlets to seek to “activate their indigenous identities” in turn. However, the author notes that the regions historically occupied by the Gamela and where the Quilombolas also settled are also those that today have the greatest concentration of “houses of saints” or terreiros (Varga 2019: 26). This presence is long-standing, as certain mentions date back to the second half of the nineteenth century (ibid.: 22), and according to Varga, it attests to “the vitality and depth of alliances and cultural products” (ibid.) between Blacks and Indians. Beyond the observation of a certain religious bricolage of elements of Indigenous, African, and Catholic origin in original compositions, and even that of a reflection in religious practices and representations of solid and lasting cooperation between different groups, the observation raises a fundamental question. Is it possible to relate, and, if so, in what terms, the circulations of the Gamela between various categorizations with their religious practices based on possession, that is, on transformation into an Other? The link between the religious dimension and the perception of the Other has already been underlined by various specialists in Amerindian societies. In particular, Aparecida Vilaça (1999: 240) showed that the Wari’ think the process of contact with White people “through the very prism of shamanism.” Elaborating on this idea, she argues that for these Indians, “the Western image is not another facade that covers a truer or more authentic interior . . . It is also true and exists simultaneously with the nude Wari body” (ibid.: 243). Drawing on the perspectivism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996), Vilaça suggests that the use of animal skins by shamans, Indigenous body ornaments, and even the manufactured clothing that the Wari’ may use “are all forms of differentiation and transformation of the body” (Vilaça 1999: 246): In a certain sense, we could even say that the Western clothes worn by the Indians are more traditional or authentic than the feather ornaments that they put on at the same time, as they are the indigenous way of being White. Feather adornments, on the other hand, are the White way of being Indian. (ibid.)

This suggests that body coverings are therefore not conceived as objects (or disguises) favoring the staging of representations of the Other, but as instruments inducing “real metabolic processes” and real transformations “of the body, identical to those resulting from food practices and the exchange of substances through physical proximity” (Vilaça 1999: 246). From this point of view, continues Vilaça, “clothing, paintings and masks can be seen more as a means of

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naturalizing undifferentiated cultural substrates (Castro 1996: 130) than as a means of culturalizing an excessively natural body” (ibid.: 247). Also, she concludes, the idea of an “encounter between entities defined a priori in terms of Western ontology,” with circulating cultural traits or actors mediatizing social relations (ibid.: 252), is foreign to Indians who think in terms of transubstantiation or metamorphoses (ibid.: 253) of their own bodies. This analysis seems to me to converge at least in part with the treatment given to the theme of difference in possession cults. For if the mediums differ in any case from the Wari’ shamans who have an animal form and a human form (Vilaça 1999: 243), the “entities” who possess them are for their part supposed to have several forms and even present themselves to men and women as they please under one of these forms. The question that will occupy us now is therefore the following: to what extent, and how, do the representations of the invisible world give meaning to the notion of transformation?

Transformation According to the Cults of Possession: The Virada I said in the previous chapter that the vast world of the caboclos was assumed to be organized in a system of lines in which the caboclos are mainly grouped according to the place of residence attributed to them. This representation has a ritual consequence, as the mediums often affirm that in order to manifest themselves to the public in the terreiro, each of these caboclos must take a specific “path” (caminho) corresponding to their linha, that is to say that he must wait for the moment of the call sung by the sons of the saint in question.6 At the same time, the latter consider that this is an ideal principle and that, in fact, no sequencing is genuinely capable of constraining the caboclos at the time of possession. These “spirits,” held to be as powerful and free as they are transgressive, are said to respect an order recalled by human beings only if it corresponds to their goodwill. Thus, it is accepted that a caboclo belonging, for example, to the Jurema may burst into the ritual enclosure when the group of cowherds (vaqueiros) is called, but also that the gap can be even greater, especially when an “entity” attached to the domain of the “forest” (mata) is manifested when a “line of the sea” is called. These infringements of the ritual, which are very rarely disputed, are justified in various ways. To better understand them, let us briefly recall what the mediums tell us about the human and nonhuman nature of the caboclos. When they are qualified as “spirits,” it is the first aspect that is evoked: the invisible characters are considered to have an earthly existence during which they experienced the passions, joys, and difficulties of the human sort. Yet, as they are not exactly “dead,” they are also clearly distinguished from the “spirits of

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light” who manifest themselves in spiritism, as well as from the eguns who have not accepted their death and “disturb” the living. The process of producing new caboclos does not, in fact, involve a disjunction between the soul that survives death and a body doomed to decomposition, but the total “disappearance” of a person’s carnal envelope. This transformation, called “enchantment of body and soul” (encantamento de corpo e alma) takes place when a spirit that is already caboclo takes a “liking” (simpatia) to one who is still a human being, and captivates him, leading him into an underground realm (encante or encantaria). The notion of “liking” here signifies less benevolence or recognition of affinities than the imposition of a connection and control: the choice of person is also a predatory act. This change of state is marked by a change of name, the preceding one being kept secret and sometimes revealed only to the medium as a pledge of trust. Living henceforth in the opulence of golden cities with their new “relatives,” the “enchanted” (encantados) are thought to be able to still access the terreiros thanks to the great gates that surround their rich residences and open during ceremonies that allow them to “incorporate” the body of mediums.7 The representation of the geography of the encante—comprising many crossing points between the invisible world and the society of men—and the dual characterization of the caboclos—sensitive to the problems of human beings as a result of their past as mortals and skilled in solving them thanks to their new powers—nurture the idea of great proximity between them as well as that of shared interests. While bringing the two into contact is not without danger (human beings should avoid all commensality, which would lead to an unwanted transformation into a caboclo, as well as sexual relations, which would cause fatal disorders),8 these two universes echo each other in a parallel construction that creates multiple bridges between them. The manifestation of a caboclo of the forest when those of the sea are called could then be explained by the point of entry, in the encante, which he took to enter the terreiro—because the “spirits,” like men, are held to be lovers of travel and new experiences. The mediums admit that during his lifetime, a caboclo could have been born in one place, “raised” (criado) in a second, then have gone “walking” (passear) to another, have been somewhere else again when he was “enchanted” (encantado), and finally transformed into a “spirit.” From their point of view, this mobile trajectory continues logically in the invisible world and this justifies the same caboclo being interpreted differently by the possessed, depending on the “customs” (costumes) of the “spirits” among whom it resides. Therefore, whether an “old-black” comes as a “Turk,” or an “Indian” presents himself as an “enchanted of the sea,” whether a “white lord” manifests himself as a juremeiro, whether he drinks beer, cachaça (sugar cane alcohol), or prefers sodas, whether he is playful or taciturn, whether he speaks clear or strange (enrolado) Portuguese, is after all not surprising—provided, however,

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that the performance of the medium convinces the public of the credibility of the interpretation. But the caboclos may also challenge the human classifications in “lines” because of their ability to forge their own kinship ties. In the Amazon, the case of the most famous kin of the invisible world is exemplary in this respect. Mariana, Erundina, and Jarina were the three adopted daughters of the illustrious King Sebastião,9 who supposedly reigned over the kingdom of Turkey beyond the seas. Their common Turkish filiation does not, however, mean that they are given analogous moral characteristics or physical traits, nor that they belong to the same ritual group. Thus, the mediums assert that during her lifetime, Mariana, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and with long blond hair, was an inveterate seductress who loved to reduce men to despair. Banished by her father, but still considered Turkish, she now returns among humans to help them, “for good or for evil” (para o bem or para o mal), in their love affairs. Of her earthly existence, she retains a great coquetry, as well as a shrewd and exuberant temperament. For some, her dark-skinned sister, Erundina, was a Spaniard who drowned in the Bay of Bahia, and, for others, an Italian who lived in the shallows and died under a hail of police bullets. Very serious, she has a strong character, does not tolerate hypocrisy, and says things bluntly, but she is also very faithful. This daughter of the Turkish king is said to have approached the juremeiros by “transforming” into an “Indian” (Castro 2016: 60), carrying a bow and arrows like them, and is expected to come in the linha of the forest. As for Jarina, a princess like the previous two daughters, her statues represent her as a brunette with long hair and a rather fair complexion. Presumed to be very cheerful, she enjoys receiving gifts from her admirers and her reputation for solving difficult cases is well established. Like Erundina, she turned away from the group of “Turks” by joining the warriors of Codó on the beach of Lençóis in the state of Maranhão, with whom she shares a taste for treachery and gossip.10 Like all the other caboclos, the “princesses” are said not to be constrained by their “origins.” Their preferences and their “will” may lead them to other linhas—apart from the fact that a visit to their father would give them the possibility of coming through Turkey. The multiplicity of points of contact between the encantaria and the world of human beings, adherence to the “customs” of encantados that a caboclo is alleged to have chosen to rub shoulders with, and personal whims all make it impossible for men and women to issue a clear judgment on the interpretations of these characters by mediums. This flexibility may also explain why the sons of saints do not always agree on the membership of the caboclos, nor on the number of linhas: some merge different families, or omit some of them, whereas others insist on distinguishing them.

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A ritual principle nevertheless seems a priori to firmly delimit the space of transformation acceptable to the caboclos. Indeed, the moment of the virada (literally “reversal”), which begins around midnight, marks the start of possessions by a category of aggressive entities (entidades) that seem radically different from the previous ones. Unlike the caboclos, who defend a vision of a world of solidarity and understanding and are concerned with reparation, the exus associated with the individualistic and ruthless world of the street grant even the worst wishes of men and women on condition that they pay the price, and woe betide them if they do not meet their commitments. However, according to the mediums, this distinction is entirely relative: an exu may ultimately be nothing other than a caboclo whose manifestation in linha virada changes their behavior and name (only a select few are believed to know this secret). The distinction is even less clear when the mediums affirm that, to be effective, an exu should submit to a second virada, which would bring its behavior closer to that of the caboclo. This is said to be essential in order for him to stop growling while crawling and to be able to interact with his clients. The contrast between the brute force of the exu and the benevolence of the caboclo, intended to suggest a difference in nature between the two categories, rapidly crumbles in the face of these many nuances. The virada must then be understood less as a tool for classifying and separating spirits into uniform groups than as a fundamental instrument that promotes passage and articulates transformation. Mediums also use this term to warn those attending that the next songs will be addressed to another group of caboclos: “we are going to change the line” (vamos virar de linha). This notion gives full scope to the power that the mediums attribute to the caboclos to present themselves to men and women in animal form, in the guise of a child or an old man, as an “Indian,” a fair-skinned “Turk,” or an “old-black”: they “return,” “change,” “reorient themselves,” “rebel” from the pivot of the virada. The polysemy of the term is thus particularly suitable to the representation of entities that have a multiplicity of avatars. Whatever appearance a caboclo dons, it will not be evaluated by the yardstick of any conformity to an intrinsic nature, that is to say, of authenticity, but will be perceived as the legitimate exploration of a range of possibilities.

An Unstable “Mixture”: An Original Theory Taking the religious model of the virada into account seems to me to offer a fresh perspective on the ethno-legal repositionings of local populations. It is not a question, of course, of affirming that these are a direct transposition of

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the metamorphoses of spirits in the social world, but of showing the interest of approaching them from the angle of transformation. The discursive reconfigurations, and the sometimes material work to stage the “identity” that local groups claim as theirs,11 are sometimes confusing because they do not always correspond to what one would expect of Blacks or Indians, other than that elements (for example the use of tipitís, presses of woven straw used to extract the juice from cassava) can be claimed by one or the other. The anthropologist Marcio Goldman mentions such interferences in his commentary on ethnographic situations outside the Amazon region: [In Caravelas, south of Bahia] a group of people traditionally classified as “Afro” establishes a relationship with “indigenous” virtualities that cross their existence . . . [In São João das Missões, in the north of Minas Gerais,] a group classified and even self-classified, as Indigenous traces a connection and incorporates in a particular way a series of very real practices generally held to be “Afro,” re-articulating in a certain way the boundaries between “Afro” and “Indigenous.” (Goldman 2014: 218)12

According to Goldman, who relies on the work of one of his students, these examples do not simply report encounters, reciprocal influences, or juxtapositions, but manifest the presence of a “third form, with specific characteristics” (Mello, cited in Goldman 2014: 213) that he proposes to call an “Afroindigenous relationship.” A quotation of Cecília Mello by Goldman clarifies their understanding of the concept: [It does not concern] something of the order of identity or even of belonging, but of the order of becoming [devir], of what is in the process of becoming [se torna], of that which is transformed [se transforma] into something different from what it was and which, in a way, retains a memory of what it was. (Mello 2003: 95, cited in Goldman 2014: 214)

The repetition of the same idea using different verbs (devir, tornar-se, transformar-se) to show its various dimensions (timeline, modification in progress, transfiguration) attests to the importance of the ceaseless movement and its resistance to nominative reduction: Variations should not be seen either as varieties irreducible to one another or as the emanations of any one universal connecting homogeneous entities: connections are made [se dão] between heterogeneous [entities] as heterogeneous. (ibid.: 218)

Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marylin Strathern, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, Goldman suggests approaching this relationship based on a theoretical model that he describes as “transformational” (ibid.: 217):

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It is therefore a question of carrying out a confrontation [confronto] between cosmopolitics and collectives that are in principle heterogeneous [, which] could make it possible to mutually enlighten them, avoiding evolutionism at the historical level, dualism at the ontological level and manichaeism on the ethical level. (ibid.: 218)

Such precautions are in fact indispensable if we do not want to freeze social realities that are constantly being recomposed. Taking this cautious approach, it can be added that the “concrete mixtures” that Goldman advocates “distinguish[ing] analytically” from the “effective alliances and arrangements that produce [them]” (ibid.: 218) also deserve to be distinguished from the mistura as a native theory. To clarify the specificity of mistura, let us begin by resuming the discussion outlined in the introduction on the equivalences that often appear in Brazilian literature between mistura and miscigenação. Since its first uses, the latter term has frequently been associated with an assessment of the consequences of “crossing” (cruzamento) between different groups of physically similar individuals, that is, in the terms of the time, between “races.” After leaning, throughout the nineteenth century, on the side of degeneration and the explanation of the inferiority of the Brazilian “people,” the term was transformed by Gilberto Freyre into a factor favorable to the formation of a stable and harmonious Brazilian civilization. Miscigenação as a process of merging and overcoming multiple origins was then perceived as the way to produce the novelty to which the Brazilian elites and middle classes aspired, an outcome that, like their Venezuelan equivalents to which Luciani (2016) refers, they intended to embody. Over the course of the past forty years, this national narrative has been denounced by activists and many intellectuals as a racist ideology in the service of the ruling classes supporting a state project to whiten the population, Indians and Blacks being reduced to ornaments in a society dreaming that its framework was Western. The new ethnic mobilizations have since been understood in terms of a return, sometimes a difficult one, to the authenticity of cultures, the recovery of collective memory, and the recuperation (resgate) of traditions. From their perspective, the necessary decolonization of minds and bodies was a two-step process. First of all, the progressive awareness of localized groups that they were the bearers of a different history and culture led them to decide to break with the invisibility into which they had been plunged when they believed themselves to have “become,” or had been convinced that they were, caboclos. These collectives then engaged in a labor of tearing away the veil of alienation and thus bringing out a kind of preexisting, even primordial identity. Although such an approach to social mobilizations lays the foundations for collectively thinking about the development of more rewarding self-images

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and the deployment of effective political action, it ultimately still rests, even if indirectly and sometimes unconsciously, upon the idea of an initial contact between human groups that were themselves homogeneous and different from each other. Insofar as it reveals a preoccupation with “origins,” this perspective then seems open to the criticism that Goldman (2014: 217), in the article quoted above, formulated about the classical analyses of syncretism. Noting that the classical analytical framework for interpreting such phenomena seeks to identify the source of the traits that make up the new religious system, and therefore to fix them, Goldman considers that it is of no help in restoring the uninterrupted movement of the “Afroindigenous” relationship. Although I agree with him on this point, it seems to me that his refusal to respect the hyphenated spelling convention (“Afroindigenous” and not “Afro-Indigenous”), in order to emphasize “that it is a continuously variable process, oscillating between the purely theoretical limits of opposition and identification” (ibid.: 220), is not very appropriate to the notion of mistura as I have encountered it in my Amazonian terrains. Indeed, while the local conception of mistura is just as distant from the miscigenação that engulfs differences as from the recovery or the repair of a history having suffered from it, it does not exactly refer to process and movement. Signifying neither triumph of the new, nor an unequivocal return to the old, it is not directed toward a specific objective and does not involve any moral judgment. Moreover, it is not even reserved for human beings alone, since the term is commonly used in connection with associations of the most diverse elements: plants in a medicinal preparation, colors in a landscape, and animal species in an enclosure. In the terreiros where it is also used, the mistura helps explain how a caboclo usually held to be an encantado, that is to say, having joined “by body and soul” an underground world where the customs of men do not prevail, can nevertheless show, through the medium he possesses, a certain mastery of human tastes and habits. This nature justifies in a certain way possible transgressions in the representation of certain spirits. To refer to a village as a mixture is to account in a word for the diversity of tastes, phenotypes, geographical origins, and temperaments of the inhabitants, without any concern for order and hierarchy or even articulation. It is a question of evoking accumulation and coexistence, as well as the fact that things have been put in common rather than their miscibility or what they become. In a way, the notion makes it possible to evoke the extent of the constellation of traits and attributes of a localized group: “we are mixed” (somos misturados); “it’s all a mixture” (é tudo uma mistura); “we have this mixture” (temos essa mistura). The “mixture” thus seems to be expressed at first sight as an observation of heterogeneity that results from the examination of family histories.

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While the “mixture” is not meant to create anything in itself, its recognition by all undoubtedly opens up a field of possibilities. Indeed, as an abundant and malleable material, this common good and shared heritage that continues to grow richer can give rise to several interpretations. Depending on the elements selected, the construction of the narratives can offer very different readings, but they are not necessarily deemed contradictory and rarely contest the relevance of the components underlined by others; they will just momentarily be backgrounded in their own stories. The example of the three brothers of Lagoa Bonita attests to the mutual acceptance of the right to disagree. Discussions about the association of the various elements identified with distinct “roots” (raizes) reflect the classificatory interest of the local populations. The representations of these operations do not imply, however, that human action is placed at the center of the game. This can only be exercised because of the prior power of a process of spontaneous regression of various elements to original matrices. If we had to choose a metaphor to account for it, it would be that of a composite and heterogeneous emulsion, which ends up sedimenting in distinct layers when left to rest. The main characteristic of the mistura is thus its instability, and it is this that drives the movement that Goldman mentions. The richness of the “mixture” of a village and the properties attributed to it then make it a privileged resource for symbolically producing “homogeneous” collectives that were thought to have disappeared. The configurations that appear, and that attentive men and women perceive, can be grasped by the latter through “choice.” In what is only a slight exaggeration, it can be argued that local populations consider themselves justified in claiming with equal sincerity, that is to say with equal legitimacy, a “true” (de verdade) Indianness or Quilombolity, by virtue of “their” mistura. In a way, it is a weapon that makes it possible to fight the figure of the “mixed race person” (mestiço):13 insofar as this device admits that the characteristics of some can be the attributes of all, it justifies that one can then virar Indian or Quilombola. Obviously, this representation is not without echoing the figure of the spirit-caboclo in possession cults that, while remaining itself, is supposed to be able, almost instantaneously and at will, to “commutate” lines, change behavior, and alter its appearance. This open combinatorial thinking is however strongly challenged when the versions of local history that are elaborated aim to be political discourses ruling, apparently once and for all, on what the fundamental nature of a group is, most often in the eyes of external actors. In this context, the theory of mixture seems to yield to the ideology of miscegenation and the notion is negatively defined, becoming a source of “confusion” (confusão). The mistura then appears as an obstacle that prevents the expression of a clearly dominant strand in the village “culture,” and an obstacle to removing the classificatory indefiniteness

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that threatens individual bodies and that the category of pardo14 evokes. In such cases, it is imperative to master rather than submit to it,15 in order to ward off the innumerable accusations in the press against “caboclos disguised as Indians or blacks” (caboclos metidos a indios or Quilombolas) that seek to disqualify their demands for access to territorial rights. While well-meaning listeners (researchers or representatives of certain institutions) are obviously anxious to support social conflicts, some find it difficult to hide that the “mixture” can be a problem in the era of expressions of ethnicity. As shown by the case of the Gamela, who are alternately peasants, caboclos, Indians, or Quilombolas, and as I have seen in my own Amazonian terrains, the mistura is nonetheless a powerful resource against closure.

Conclusion: The Quest for Markers The last forty years have seen a significant change in the way that vulnerable populations perceive themselves and are perceived by others. After having been socially marginalized for a long time as caboclos carrying an illegible “mixture,” they were encouraged to probe this mixture in order to discern a Black or Indian origin that they could highlight to support their social struggle in the eyes of the state. The extent of these processes of redefining the public image of oneself is certainly to be understood in connection with the establishment of a legal framework that favors the access of minority groups to rights, and this is what I have done elsewhere. But the analysis of these processes cannot avoid questioning the categories of thought that make the recent repositionings on the ethnic chessboard conceivable and acceptable by the local populations. In fact, deciding to distinguish oneself from the mass of the “people” (povo) by affirming oneself as belonging to a Traditional population, and even considering that this designation could later be substituted by declaring a Black or Indian “identity,” is in no case a trivial process, devoid of subjective cost. This implies a reorientation of the narratives on family history and an investment in work on bodies and spaces so that they correspond to the declared label. These metamorphoses are therefore no more a pure and simple return to a prior existence than they are within everyone’s reach. Placed at the heart of the deployment of different narrative arcs, the category of “mixture”—a mixture whose instability makes it legible—stands out in particular in that it justifies being able to assert a “choice,” that is, a right, in principle, to virar what one wants (but, nevertheless, not when one wants). This right is anchored on the one hand in the narratives of the specific histories of the villages, by indicating how what is considered to be a set of shared attributes was constituted. On the other hand, it is based on the idea of the

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exchange of bodily or spiritual substances, which can ensure social cohesion by creating “relatives,” and above all allow everyone to call themselves bearers of everything. The dialectical relationship established by the “mixture” between localized social unity and the diverse trajectories of a group of people not only authorizes certain attributes to be established as markers of distinction, but also allows others to take their place afterward. These metamorphoses, by being accompanied by an often active search for contrast with close neighbors while keeping new ones on the horizon of possibilities, enter into a kind of resonance with the “becoming other” in historic Amerindian societies, which is characterized by the alternation between states and the adoption of a relational perspective. Analyses such as Vilaça’s of the Wari’ are also very stimulating in their emphasis of the fact that the representation of the transubstantiation of bodies draws on that of shamanic transformation—that is, that its conception and understanding borrow from the religious model. In an analogous fashion, I have argued that the metamorphoses of those who were previously qualified as caboclos are reflected, at least indirectly and partially, in the capacity given to the caboclos of the invisible world to present themselves in various forms. What is always at stake is the articulation of the fact of being able to change one’s appearance with that of always remaining oneself. One thing, nonetheless, is specific to the metamorphoses of these human collectives: “becoming other” never means “becoming White,” neither temporarily nor permanently. Admittedly, as an emblematic figure of the dominator, the Whites occupy the furthest place in the gradient of otherness and are associated with powerful technologies and knowledge, but experimenting with their affects and sociabilities during the process of transformation is never envisaged. While “mixing” allows present-day rural Amazonian populations to reinvent themselves in unexpected metamorphoses, it only seems to allow them access to positions perceived as subordinate, that is to say, positions of social minority, historically minoritized and now legally recognized. Moreover, it is perhaps in the constraints of the legal framework that we must seek the explanation of the invisibility in Brazilianist literature of the native principle of circulation between ethno-legal categories. Faced with state administrations and more generally with external actors, populations have to attach themselves in fact to a single “root,” and this root must also correspond to one of the institutional categories in force: the idea of an alternative between claimed qualities then seems to prevail over that of alternation between states. Yet the increasingly pronounced taste for the exercise of dissociation finds here again its equivalent in the universe of Amazonian possession cults. Thus, while in the mid-1980s, a majority of mediums explained to me that their religious practices were part of a “syncretism,” by the end of the decade a growing

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proportion of them tended to qualify them by their attachment to “matrices.” I therefore propose, in the next chapter, to chart what is at stake in these discussions as recorded by the religious actors, by relating them to the successive rereadings of the “mixture” of human beings. Notes 1. In the figurative sense, this expression refers to those who live ostentatiously, such as the seringalistas of the rubber era. 2. See the analyses of Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães (2004) for the Brazilian Northeast. 3. This does not mean that the vulnerable Amazonian populations are insensitive to phenotypic differences, and they sometimes share prejudices attesting to diffuse racism: the light color of a child is still praised, while the term Black (but more often the euphemism moreno) is used to refer to people with dark skin, and Indigenous extraction is rarely mentioned, except allusively. In the 1980s, only the term preto was used; negro was associated with black magic. That is why the latter term is used nowadays to designate Black people. 4. In the Portuguese version, the author uses the polysemous term virar, which means to alter, to turn around. We return to it in the next subsection. 5. Sesmarias are grants of land made by the Portuguese government to Brazil for settlement and production purposes. 6. The occasions of possession by caboclos are numerous in the world of cults. I will stick to the main ones here. A chef de terreiro first convenes so-called weekly “consultation” sessions during which the mediums dressed in white abandon themselves to their spirits to relieve the ills of human beings. He also organizes, at the request of a particular client presenting a case that he considers more serious, nocturnal “work” sessions that give rise to beautiful dance movements to the rhythm of the drum. Finally, the anniversary date of the first possession of a medium by their caboclo is fittingly celebrated each year until late at night, and a copious banquet is offered to the attendees and the numerous guests. In all cases, songs in honor of the orixás, the deities from Africa, precede the moment of possession proper, when the caboclos of the sea are called, then those of the forest. 7. They can also appear to them, in dreams or during visions, in places that men and women recognize as points of entry for the encante into their territory. 8. The mediums systematically claim a privileged intimacy with “their” caboclos and they very often claim to have been taken to the encantaria at the “bottom” of the waters to be “prepared” there (preparados: initiates). They then make a point of stressing that they refused to taste the appetizing food that they claim was presented to them and to sleep with the young and beautiful caboclos or caboclas. These themes also appear indirectly in their descriptions of possession. Thus, the sons and daughters of saints maintain that they never return to themselves drunk even when the caboclo who inhabits them has consumed alcohol, thus marking a hermeticity of the two states. Furthermore, although the possessive trance is supposed to involve a necessary abandonment of oneself to the caboclo and sensory alterations that can reach a state of unconsciousness, it is never associated with a desire to return to this state, and even less to the pleasure; the dominant register is that of constraint, even violence when the facts evoked concern the early stages of the relationship with the caboclo. 9. The disappearance of the Portuguese king Dom Sebastião in the sixteenth century generated the messianic expectation of his return to “save” the kingdom from a political crisis. In Brazil, Sebastianism left its mark on several religious movements in the nineteenth century,

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

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notably that of Antônio Conselheiro in the Northeast, who hoped for the restoration of the monarchy against the new Republic. In the cults, Dom Sebastião is the undisputed head of the “Turkish” family, but he is never represented by the possessed. Versions may vary. Those presented above are the ones that prevail in Belém. The Quilombolas distinguish themselves by referring to a set of practices (capoeira, AfroBrazilian cults, braids, etc.) that they imagine to be the generic attributes of Blacks; the Indians choose to emphasize their resemblance to famous, more or less geographically distant Amerindian groups (via use of body paint, necklaces, designation of a healer (pajé), etc.); the Traditional populations seek to assert their skills in the management of natural resources and their role as defenders of the environment in the continuity of the seringueiros movement born in the 1980s in Acre. Still other examples can be found in the literature. Thus, in the Northeast, the Fulni-ô Indians organize their annual festival “on a beach south of Recife which pays homage to the statue of a washerwoman [linked] to Iemanjá, a divinity of the Afro-Brazilian cult of Candomblé” (Martig 2012:73). An echo of this representation of the mistura without miscibility and without the ability to produce anything new can be found in the countless stories of freshwater dolphins (botos) who have come from the encante to mingle at balls and seduce women. As Deborah Lima writes, “The union of an encantado and a woman does not produce a human son; it does not give rise to a new human condition. The hybrid is not fertile” (2014: 193, emphasis mine). These two formulations are, however, the opposites of each other. While, as Lima points out, pessimism seems to dominate the narratives concerning the boto (the children of these encounters all die before they are born), the discourses on the mistura of men have an optimistic tone, emphasizing its power to favor the reconstitution of the “roots,” which legitimize the demands for repositioning. Pardo is a census category chosen by all those who do not consider themselves Black (preto), White (branco), Indian (indígena), or yellow (amarelo). The following comment by João Pacheco de Oliveira shows that this question also arises for the administrations in charge of the Indian peoples: “In the case of the Northeast, the challenge of indigenist action is to restore indigenous territories, promoting the withdrawal of non-Indians from indigenous lands, denaturalizing the ‘mixture’ as the only way of survival and citizenship” (1998: 53, my emphasis). The “mixture,” which is particularly problematic in the context of territorial administration, is so to speak “undone” by the displacement of populations.

CHAPTER 6

The “Mixture” and Its “Matrices” Race through the Prism of Culture   

As elsewhere in Latin America, the theme of contact between populations of different origins has long plagued Brazilian intellectual elites. In the nineteenth century, the proclamation of independence in 1822 gave rise to fiery debates on “Brazilian identity.” As the former colonizer could not be selected to represent the newly constituted nation, any more than the Black because of his status as a slave, it fell to the Indian to embody the moral and spiritual values of the country. The Indian in question was, however, a mythologized figure—the noble and proud Indian of romanticism—totally disconnected from the situation of the real populations decimated by the advance of colonization. Sixty-six years later, the abolition of slavery revived passionate discussions on the future of the “Brazilian race,” at a time, however, when the “cult of the conventional Indian, a pure fantasy” (Rodrigues 1977: 4) was no longer popular and when the place that the Black could occupy in society was still problematic. The only remaining hope was that whitening the population by immigration would “regenerate the people.” It was in this context that the question of the “mestizo” and his “social value” for the future of the nation arose, and many intellectuals undertook a “scientific” evaluation of the different racial components that it gave rise to. The Indians were expected to remain in the remote forests whereas the Blacks, so the argument went, would continue to live in the vicinity of their former masters and would be exposed to “dilution” by the White population. Moreover, in this program they were given priority by privileging the regions reputed to have received large numbers of African slaves. The precursor of these studies, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, a forensic scientist, psychiatrist, and anthropologist, thus carried out in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia in the Nordeste region, an investigation whose results were published posthumously in 1932 under the title Os Africanos no Brasil. Beginning in the 1930s, such studies became legion concerning all of Brazil, except Amazonia.1 This neglect was due to the fact that there was an entrenched consensus that in this region, the African presence was very limited, even almost absent. Amazonia was imagined as comprising only a few urban centers (Belém and

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Manaus) held to be places of power and “civilization” and, by contrast, vast forests populated by various Amerindian groups. This social and spatial divide was also temporal. As Aldrin Moura de Figueiredo (2009: 24) remarks, the didactic books of the nineteenth century show “the Indian as a being distant from reality, a prisoner of the ‘past’, a figure of the ‘pre-Columbian era.’” Historians were less and less interested, he continues, and turned at the beginning of the twentieth century to themes more related to “the history of rubber and what is conventionally called a project of modernization and Europeanization of the Amazon” (ibid.). At the same time, other intellectuals of the Belle Époque,2 who often had several strings to their bow (journalists, poets, judges, and so forth), developed a passion for rural populations, that is to say, the so-called caboclos, whom they saw as the mixed-race descendants of the primordial Indians. The contours of this new Amazonian field of study called folklore were the product of the classifications and representations that underlay the regionalist discourse. Yet its method and presuppositions were shared with research carried out elsewhere in Brazil. In the Nordeste, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues inaugurated an approach that flourished: this doctor and anthropologist considered that the discussion of the inferiority of Blacks in Bahia necessarily involved an analysis of their cultural productions, which is why he endeavored to identify the origins of the captives and to document their insurrections, their languages, and their customs. In the northern region, the intellectuals who studied the “Amazonian racial type” likewise considered it essential to collect the tales and legends, the beliefs and religious practices of the “people” insofar as one could discern in them an Amerindian origin. In these ideological constructions, scrutinizing culture was consistently seen as the best way to reach the hidden truth of race in order to determine its degree of evolution and its capacity to contribute to “civilization.” For the Amazon, intellectuals believed, as Figueiredo again emphasizes, that while one could see racial heritage on people’s faces, their cultural heritage was even more visible. The religion of the “inferior populations” of the Amazon was steeped in indigenous beliefs—this was the most visible. One thought of the two traditions that came into contact—Catholicism, white, civilized, and fetishism, indigenous, savage. For a degenerate race, a degenerate creed . . . Religion was thus the great paradigm of race. (2009: 84–85, my emphasis)

In the following century, from the 1930s, the notion of “race” was eclipsed by that of culture, and the growing importance of a valuation of African continuity relegated concerns about Amerindian influences to the background. Nevertheless, the classification of religious practices continued to operate on the basis of the idea of original matrices: the numerous terreiros of urban centers had

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Afro-Brazilian forms, whereas the rituals carried out in rural areas, designated as pajelança, allegedly drew on an Indigenous background. It must be clearly stated that the practices of spirit possession cult mediums do not obey this logic of classification, but that of the accumulation of skills. Drawing heavily on the work of Figueiredo and the data he gathered, I will first chart the constitution of this opposition. I will then discuss the way in which, in the 1980s, urban religious actors, confronted with this culturalist reading favoring African authenticity, negotiated their image and adapted their religious practices. Finally, I will draw a parallel between the discourse on the “de-syncretism” of religious practices and that of the “de-mixing” of family histories.

Indigenous Pajelança and Afro-Brazilian Cults: A Scholarly Construction Against a Background of the “Métis Problem” In his master’s thesis (defended in 1996 and published in 2009), Figueiredo states that he was extremely surprised to find that the terms pajés and mestres (masters), now strictly reserved for healers in rural areas, were widely used during the Belle Époque, in press articles denouncing the actions in urban centers of individuals described as unscrupulous. Another subject of astonishment was that they were also characterized as Cearenses (inhabitants of the northeastern state of Ceará) and “Blacks” or “Portuguese.” At the end of the nineteenth century, the term pajé therefore designated all those who engaged in religious activities linked to possession in the Amazonian space, without associating them with a religiosity specific to the regional populations, with a geographical environment, or even with a specific human type. These people could come from elsewhere and have very diverse phenotypes. In the middle of the following century, however, the panorama seemed to have radically changed and the pajé to have completely disappeared from the urban scene. For most researchers, the publication in 1955 of the previously mentioned work by Eduardo Galvão, Santos e visagens: Um estudo da vida religiosa de itá, Amazonas, was a marker in the history of Amazonian religious anthropology, as from then on the character of the pajé was presented only as a rural healer. Galvão (1955: 3) offers a meticulous ethnography of the “religious life” of the caboclo, whose Catholicism is “impregnated with ideas and beliefs that derive from the ancestral Amerindian,” as evidenced by the importance of the pajelança. Without of course disputing the importance and the quality of this work, Figueiredo (2005: 26) stresses that it follows the “classical model of understanding the ethnic and social formation of the Brazilian people,” which was already at the heart of the reflections of folklorists of the previous century.

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Accordingly, he sought to highlight the intellectual genealogies that, between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1950s, favored the progressive constitution of the pajelança as an object of study by detaching it from a larger set of possession practices. Among the regional intellectuals, the name of José Veríssimo stands out because of the influence he had on his generation. Born in 1857 in the small town of Óbidos (in the state of Pará), this essayist, historian, and sociologist admittedly considered the “indigenous race as determining in the northern context” (Figueiredo 2005: 33), but he was more interested in the thorny question of the mixing of races. As for many of his contemporaries, the “métis” posed a problem for him: while this figure was considered superior to the “savage races,” it also crystallized “the most terrible characteristics of all” of the “races” (ibid.: 117). The solution, these intellectuals claimed, lay in the avoidance of all sexuality between people of different “races,” in order to protect those who were said to be “civilized” from contamination by those who were considered savage or primitive. Maintaining “purity” was thus a principle that should be applied to all. However, according to Figueiredo, the Maranhense doctor Nina Rodrigues, who considered the Paraense jurist Veríssimo to be an absolute authority on matters concerning Amazonia, painted a catastrophic portrait of the state of the northern region: Amazonia had become the center of Brazilian miscegenation, the symbolic territory of racial degradation . . . The “mameluco or caboclo”3 or even “curiboca or cafuzo” were the cause of the imminent extermination of the pure races, because miscegenation accelerated, while the Indian fled far away when he did not die, Africans were no longer imported and European immigration practically did not exist. It was a difficult situation . . . the worst was that the “pure” races existing in the Amazon were suspect. Nina Rodrigues said that, in the far north, “African blood, already received in métis dilution,” was doomed to disappear completely “in the face of crossbreeding with the white” [Rodrigues 1938: 125]; in turn, the mixed race interbred with the Indians, contaminating the purity of this race. (2009: 117)

When Veríssimo published Estudos amazônicos he therefore denounced the “repugnant mixture [mistura]” (ibid.: 125) of the populations of the interior and the “degeneration” of the métis. But, Figueiredo (2009: 166) points out, it was also the time of the discovery of the “people” (povo), and “different readings, all intertwined” were given at the same time. Some, who claimed to be attached to “science” like Veríssimo, believed that the study of the religious practices of the caboclos would make it possible to determine “their level of cultural development, their instincts and

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their social pathologies” (ibid.: 167). Others, who declared themselves more affected by “the poetry of the traditions of the people” (ibid.: 166), sought to define through folklore what a regional identity might be. All aimed to record and write down tales, legends, and customs, in order to make known everything that the inevitable march of modernity and civilization would eradicate, according to them. Many of them sought out the caboclos where they were closest to their origins—necessarily Amerindian—that is to say in villages of the interior, paying particular attention to the pajelança, perceived as the quintessence of popular religiosity, and the pajés, considered living witnesses of a bygone Indian past. As Figueiredo meticulously demonstrated, based in particular on the analysis of the publications of the journalist and folklorist Pádua Carvalho, little by little “an epic discourse on Amazonian nature, from a legendary and mysterious time” and “a romantic image of the people of the hinterland” (ibid.: 60–64) was constructed. As this representation of a rural localization of the authentic religion of the “people” developed, the image of the pajés exercising their talents in the city, who appear as such in the nineteenth-century archives consulted by Figueiredo, was degraded. They were said to be charlatans who “infest Belém” (2009: 128), exploit the credulity of their victims, practice witchcraft, and practice medicine illegally, activities that all distort the beliefs and practices of the “real” pajelança. It is interesting to note, Figueiredo emphasizes, that the urban pajés did not remain simple victims: they defended themselves by arguing that the composition of their baths and potions came from natural medicine, giving rise to debates in the press in which they were not always repudiated by readers. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the pajés seemed to have disappeared from the cities, or, rather, folklorists no longer recognized the model of the “primitive” religion of the Indians described by their predecessors in the ritual practices of religious specialists, some of whom were migrants from other regions of the country, probably bringing new ideas. “The strategy of men of letters,” Figueiredo (2009: 182) stresses, “was to decree the death of the pajelança.” By denying religious specialists the name of pajé and their rites that of pajelança, intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century symbolically erased the urban version of this Amazonian religious form. This choice seems in a certain way the logical conclusion of the harsh criticisms that had been formulated by their predecessors since the 1870s. It also tried in fact to answer the same question: how to explain why religious practices that are supposed to truly reflect the soul of a “people,” no doubt ingenuous but dignified, can pose a problem for the maintenance of public order. The answer is irrefutable: quite simply because they are “bastardized,” “corrupted,” or “contaminated” because of the “crossing” (cruzamento) of races (2009: 207) and then yield to black (negra) magic and witchcraft.

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From the 1920s on, connections based on racist discourse between “nigromancy” and the phenotype of healers nourished the image of a black pajelança. According to Figueiredo, the descriptions given by the press were very different from those of the previous century. For instance, among the ritual transformations, possession was no longer reserved for the pajé alone, the drum was heard and the mediums danced (2009: 211). The association of possession practices with Africa took a more positive turn after the arrival of the Folklore research mission (organized in 1938 by Mário de Andrade, the Paulista poet and founder of the modernism movement) in Belém. During the first trip in 1927,4 Andrade thought he discerned African references in a pajelança that he thought was dominated by Indigenous influences. He therefore returned with a music student, Oneyda Alvarenga, so that she could document this little-known dimension by recording “African” songs. In 1950, the results of this investigation, based on two interviews with a single religious specialist—one at the researchers’ hotel, the other in the specialist’s place of worship—were published under the title babassuê, a name that established the existence of an Afro-Brazilian mode of worship in the Amazon. Already partly discredited by Alvarenga’s work, the representation of an Amazon with purely Amerindian echoes was permanently called into question with the publication in 1971 of Vincente Salles’s book O negro no Pará sob o regime da escravidão. Academic research then crystallized around the contribution of Blacks to popular culture, and more specifically to religious forms in cities—notably the work by Napoleão Figueiredo (1976) and Anaíza Vergolino e Silva (2015). Enthusiasm for this new perspective was such that urban possession cults no longer appeared in the literature except under the “Afro-Brazilian” label, then more recently under that of “African matrix,” which seemed to confirm the pajelança’s confinement to rural areas, of which Heraldo Maués (1995)5 was long the only specialist. Thus, after these representations had been constituted in a series of oppositions between the rural world and the urban universe, between Indian influences and African heritage, between healing magic and attack sorcery, between past and present, the division of anthropological labor came to accredit the idea of distinct religious modalities.

To “Cross” or Not? Daily Bricolage versus African Legitimacy The classification of religious specialists based on this interpretative framework is, however, far from being an exact science, and the case of the healer Satiro interviewed by Alvarenga is a perfect example. Indeed, while in accordance with the terminology adopted by anthropologists with regard to Afro-Brazilian cults, this musicologist in 1938 described Satiro as the father of a saint or the

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father of the terreiro (place of worship), he had appeared eleven years earlier as pajé in police records (Figueiredo 2009: 281). It is possible that the man modified some of his practices during this period of time, but the substitution of the term pajé with that of “father of saint” is more likely to reflect the changes that took place in academics’ understanding of the religious field. Figueiredo (ibid.: 228–40) points out that the portrait drawn by Alvarenga of the cults of Belém was based on very limited data, since it came from a single person and was moreover truncated. Among the information generously offered by the healer, the folklorist was only interested in the orixás and other elements that she associated with Africa, in other words with what echoed her readings of other regional situations, in particular the northeast region. The words of the healer, however, suggest a much less fixed universe, as he declares that he does not know “the true name” of his religion, calling it both batuque and babassuê. Satiro also points out that according to the “lines,” Saint Barbara, the patroness of his place of worship, can be given other names and, in addition to the orixás, he mentions other categories of entities: caboclos, voduns, saints, and masters. However, Satiro did not take offense at this selective listening. Much like the religious actors I later accompanied in the same city, he doubtless discussed and reinterpreted scholarly classifications with his colleagues in order to apply them to his art in a very competitive arena. In Belém at the end of the 1980s, the field of possession was very dynamic and the wide range of designations available to qualify religious practices gave an impression of extreme diversity: to mention only the main terms, from the most “Indigenous” to the most “African,” there were Pena e Maracá, Jurema, Umbanda, Umbanda Omolocô, Mina, Mina Nagô, Candomblé Angola, Candomblé Ketu, and so forth.6 These designations were conceived in terms of “lines” (linhas), a word we encountered earlier in connection with the groupings of caboclos-spirits, and it was not unusual for the same terreiro to propose rituals that different people would have classified at distinct points in the universe of possession.7 Sessions of Pena e Maracá or Jurema, located at the Indigenous pole, were for example held in the afternoon: the mediums, dressed in white tops and long colored skirts, sat on low stools waving a rattle (maracá) and clapping their hands (corimba) to call their caboclos and give “consultations” to members of the audience who were patiently waiting their turn. Some cult leaders also convened so-called “medium development” sessions, often associated with Umbanda, to improve spirit contact with the daughters and sons of saints, who donned simple white coats for the occasion. The characteristic ceremonies of the Umbanda Omolocô, the Mina, and the Mina Nagô, which were intended to solve the problems of particular clients, took place in the evening and until late at night. The mediums wore voluminous dresses with starched petticoats, drummers were contracted to punctuate their dance movements, and the show

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often attracted a large audience. Rituals marking an initiation stage (coroação in Umbanda, bori in the Mina, feitura in Candomblé) and caboclo anniversaries (from Umbanda to Mina Nagô) enriched the festive calendar. Specialists also offered clairvoyance, cartomancy, or even divination by cowries throughout the day on request. A priori, this accumulation was surprising because it laid those taking part open to very offensive criticism of indulging in an inopportune “mixture” (mistura) and unduly “crossing lines” (cruzar as linhas). In fact, no one escaped criticism, and specialists engaged constantly in mutual accusations. Some reproached their colleagues “for beating the drum although they were registered as umbandists,” for “practicing the Mina while they call themselves Umbanda Omolocô,” or “that their caboclos [from the Mina] speak the African dialect” of Candomblé. Those initiated in Candomblé, which appears in the literature as the “purest” form of worship from Africa, were not spared: the fact that they were not satisfied with the only authorized boiadeiro and that they adjusted the ritual to keep the polymorphic caboclos of the Mina in their central place was frowned upon. The Indigenous and African poles did not mark the boundaries of this continuum in the same way. The Indigenous pole was not expressed as such; it did not appeal to any protest discourse but rather to the implicit “force” of autochthony. The Pena e Maracá and the Jurema were thus recognized by all religious actors as particularly effective ritual expressions for the “cure” and as stemming “from the land” of Pará, that is to say, truly Amazonian. The figure of its specialist—the pajé—seemed however to have definitively deserted the urban universe. No cult leader presented himself using this term, nor did he use it to refer to his coreligionists. The few times it was used, it was always for acquaintances residing inland or passing through town. This was therefore a “line” that was fairly well represented in local practices, but with very low institutional visibility. The African pole, by contrast, was consolidated more and more explicitly around reference to an imaginary Africa, almost completely saturating the space of possession cults. This amplification was reflected in changes in vocabulary: terreiro and no longer tenda; centro or casa for places of worship; ialorixá instead of mother of saint and iaô for daughter of saint; ekedi instead of cambono or servant (servant) of mediums. It was also reflected in new ritual preferences: in particular, a growing number of mediums wished to add to their “gift” (dom) of receiving the caboclos an initiation (feitura) devoting them to African orixás, at the end of which they would be issued a “diploma” called a deká. This hegemony was also indicated by transformations affecting the image of worship in the public space. Thus, the Federation of “Spiritist and Umbandist and Afro-Brazilian cults,” created in 1964 to, according to its leaders, unite the terreiros but also control their “morality,” in a way disavowed the title it had ini-

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tially chosen because it discouraged new religious leaders from applying for a license to operate as an umbandist—a trend considered too “syncretistic”—and encouraged them to register as “Afro-Brazilian cults.” Lastly, the officialization of this African reference involved the annual organization of a big ceremony, subsidized by the municipality and the state of Pará, in honor of the orixá of saltwater, the goddess Iemanjá. On this occasion, the mediums, usually confined to the outlying districts, came into the limelight, provided they reduced the role of their familiar caboclos-spirits to a bare minimum in the possessions. Claiming inscription in the African genealogy undoubtedly conferred additional legitimacy and prestige vis-à-vis cultural institutions and intellectuals, who considered Candomblé to be a religion in its own right, relegated Umbanda to magic, were hesitant about the Mina, and did not even mention the Pena e Maracá. Claiming an African origin, however, was not enough to neutralize the accusations of “mixing” and “confusion.” Not only was this African pole not monolithic, since several “lines” claimed it, but the mobilization of a language of orthodoxy continually introduced new differentiations (between Mina and Candomblé, and between the Angola and Ketu versions of the latter, for example) and new evaluation criteria (notably, valuation of formal initiation). Basically, this work of distinguishing and classifying the various ritual elements, in which the cult leaders were experienced, was essential to the construction of a diversified religious offer essential to their reputation since, vis-à-vis their clients, it attested to the extent of their skills, from the “cure” punctuated by the maracá to the batuque to the sound of the drum. The justification for the exercise of an art of combination that they practiced at will—an art of “mixture”8—was based on a reasoning rather similar to that explaining the virada, with, however, one fundamental difference. Human beings were indeed subject to obedience, but this was not supposed to weigh on the spirits: a caboclo could assume several forms “at will”; a medium “who has [was born with gifts in] two or three lines, must work with them,” as it was frequently asserted. An additional argument—irrefutable given the authority attributed to the spirits—was that the latter wanted to participate in different forms of worship. This is why certain religious specialists argued that their mission led them to “cross lines” by arranging, in the same terreiro, ceremonies relating in principle to different religious currents, even by passing from one to the other during the same ritual. To put it another way, the “mixture,” which was firmly condemned verbally, imposed itself in daily practice when it was defined in terms of religious obligation. Moreover, it seemed that, ultimately, the reputation of specialists hardly suffered, as evidenced by the remarks of a mother of a saint about a famous cult leader in the city: “He mixes. He ‘shaves’ [the heads of his sons of saints, that is to say, he uses elements of the initiation that everyone associates with Candomblé, whereas he claims to be of the Mina], but with

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his trickery [marmotagem], people are doing well.” (woman, forty years old). In other words, while denouncing the transgressions that she claimed to identify easily, this woman recognized the benefits that clients derived from them. The scope taken by the reference to Africa has not fundamentally changed the practices of accumulation of cult leaders,9 and the categorizations on which everyone formally agrees establish a framework that performance during possession can still contradict. It has nevertheless contributed to introducing an additional register to assess skills (“authenticity”) and to modifying the perception of the relationship to origins and the past.

From Culturalism to the Ethno-Legal Framework and from De-Syncretism to De-Mixing Studies on the Afro-Brazilian religious field in Belém rightly insist on the link between the migrations of men and women and the establishment of new forms of worship. In particular, Marilu Márcia Campelo and Taissa Tavernard de Luca (2007) mention the periods when the Mina arrived (from São Luis in the middle of the nineteenth century), then the Umbanda (perhaps from Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s) and Candomblé (from Bahia in the 1970s), following the circulation of religious specialists. My purpose here, however, is less to contribute to the reconstruction of this history than to provide some benchmarks for understanding how the concretization of the African reference has resulted in the gradual entrenchment of a culturalist reading of ritual forms. From this perspective, it can be argued that the first signs of what often appears in the literature as a process of the Africanization of cults occurred in Belém in the 1950s during the arrival of the Folklore research mission, already mentioned in this chapter. On this occasion, a religious specialist designated as a pajé by the police was requalified by a musicologist as the father of a saint—a term associated with a generic Africanity. We also know, thanks to the research of Anaíza Vergolino e Silva (2015: 89), that around the same time, a cult leader from the Amazonian city left for Bahia and Rio where he frequented Candomblé terreiros, then accompanied a journalist he knew to Africa. This direct contact with the land of the orixás earned him the attention of the photographer and ethnologist Pierre Verger and, upon his return to Belém at the end of the 1960s, he tried, with difficulty, to establish a house in Angola Candomblé. Finally, according to the information I was able to gather, the Ketu version of Candomblé was introduced to Belém in the early 1980s by a saint’s mother from Bahia. Her presence is said to have aroused immense curiosity among the sons and daughters of saints, who asked to be initiated by the feitura do santo, and then initiated others in turn.

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These few examples suggest that innovations have had growing, and perhaps increasingly profound, repercussions on religious dynamics. The first modification is formal and seems to generate a kind of collective impetus, since all the religious specialists adopt the terms father and mother of saint (the pajés then “disappear” from the urban religious scene). With the second change, a ritual singularity is related to a different “root,” but it remains accessible to all: no possessed hesitate to seize the caboclos called boiadeiros, who are in principle specific to the Angola Candomblé modality, to be part of their usual invisible companions. The third poses the “difference” as being absolute and impenetrable. By affirming that its secrets, which come from the African continent and are passed down from generation to generation, are known only to its initiates, Candomblé seems to break with possession conceived as a “gift” linked to the “election” by the caboclos. On this religious scene, the African pole is therefore structured around the keywords “purity,” “root,” and “fidelity.” As the success encountered by Candomblé seems to be explained by the strength of its link with Africa via Salvador de Bahia, Mina has also been worked on by the desire to “recover” (resgatar) an African genealogy via another road, coming from São Luis of Maranhão. The decisive intervention was, once again, due to an intellectual. In 2004, during a public ritual, the anthropologist Anaíza Vergolino e Silva offered a father of a famous mineiro saint in the city a large laminated poster “on which the entire line of ancestry that linked him to the African continent was inscribed” (Campelo and Luca 2007: 9). The African roots of Mina, then established and visible to all, made it an equal of Candomblé. The new register of the exception reserved for a small number, of the immutable reproduction of ancestral gestures and the preservation of memory, contributed to anchoring a normative approach in the universe of cults, encouraging people to turn away from “syncretism” and therefore from the “mixture” polluted by borrowings. However, this process, which was initiated in the religious field, seems to me to echo the current scrutiny of their origins by men and women. The previous section also shows that the questions at the heart of the cult leaders’ concerns are only slightly removed from those that the three brothers of the first chapter attempt to resolve. How is one to understand the result of the “crossing” of people with different practices, experiences, and diverse stories? How can intellectual and practical order be brought to the disorder of the “mixture”? How can one avoid the “mixture” being reduced to the alienation caused by “confusion”? Their objects and objectives are admittedly different. In the first case, classificatory knowledge is exercised on others, who are competitors, and its demonstration is used to improve individual position and reputation within a local network.

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In the other case, it is a question of going beyond the sometimes perplexed observation of a “mixture” in a personal family history, by identifying the elements likely to be embedded in a narrative that will support collective social claims. However, several clues suggest that the two situations are similar. The first is of course their permeability to aspirations for greater clarity and legibility of the structuring lines of the universe of possession, as well as those that separate ethno-racial matrices. The analogy is further reinforced if we consider the method adopted to do this, which consists, in both cases, in engaging in operations of decomposition to seek, beyond the appearances of things and beings, their original nature. Lastly, an apparent paradox argues in favor of considering the two situations as comparable: insisting on the need for exclusivist classifications never succeeds in entirely imposing that the result of cult leaders’ reflection on ritual orthodoxy be accompanied by their renunciation of practical accommodations and bricolage. In this way, cult leaders have come to terms with increasingly pressing incitements to “de-syncretism” by interpreting them in an original way. From their point of view, this implied an obligation on their part to show mastery of a formal knowledge of the “differences” between the various modalities of worship present in Belém, and not to purely and simply refrain from “crossing” the ritual “lines.” On the contrary, they considered that by giving discursive proof of such knowledge, they provided their clients with proof that any risky contacts they then made were perfectly under control. This is still the case today. For their part, the populations currently mobilized under various ethno-legal labels consider that, because their “mixture” is unstable, its various components can regress without great difficulty to their original matrices. In any event, this representation provides for the possibility of metamorphoses, that is to say of repositionings: a group of relatives may virtually have several identifications, each as legitimate as the others, which materialize through “choice.” The example of the three brothers attests ethnographically to this agility in conceiving alternative discourses to the “identity” that one recognizes at a given moment, a gift that is similar to cult leaders’ art of combining. Retracing the broad outlines of the profound changes in the perception, processing, and arrangement of the markers of difference over the past forty years seems to me to gain in density if we consider the following two processes together, one process that I call “de-syncretism” when the object is ritual practices, and the other “de-mixing” when it affects human beings. However, once we accept the idea that these constitute two facets of the establishment of a new, more general model of comprehending the order of the world, the question arises of the time lag between the two. In the Amazon, and more particularly in Belém, the capital of Pará, “de-syncretism” preceded “de-mixing”: while, from the mid-1980s, discussions were going well between religious specialists

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on the “African” roots of the cults,10 it took some fifteen years more for them to bear with the same vigor on the ancestry of the people themselves. The dynamics that have favored the convergence of “culture” with “race” are due as much to social mobilizations as to public policies, to actions developed at the national level as to local initiatives. For Brazil as a whole, this theme of “race” and “racial inequalities,” which emerged with the revelation of the numerous and persistent discriminations against Black populations, is represented by the United Black Movement (MNU) founded in São Paulo in 1978.11 If we follow the periodization established for Pará state by Domingos Conceição (2017: 17–20), the repercussions in Amazonia were almost immediate, since the Center for Studies and Defense of the Black of Pará (CEDENPA)12 was created in 1980. Yet, the author observes, for nearly ten years the latter constituted the only reference structure and its main watchword was antiracism. It was not until 1990–95 that several Black associations on the most diverse subjects appeared: organizations of students (GEUN—Black College Student Group), of seminarians (GRENI—Black and Indigenous Religious Group), of hip-hop (NRP—Peripheral Resistance Nation), of Afrodescendants (MOCAMBO—Pará Afro-descendant Movement) and Quilombolas (MALUNGU—Coordination of Associations of Remnant Communities of Para Quilombo), for example (Conceição 2017: 17). The third phase began with the accession of the Workers’ Party (PT) to various levels of the political structure.13 Considering themselves the natural ally of social movements, the PT leaders implemented a strong policy in favor of associations by granting them various financial aids and offices. Above all, the party has created privileged official spaces for the expression of Black demands— such as, in the city of Belém, the Municipal Council of the Black (CMN) in 1997, and, in the country as a whole, the Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR). The participation of the various associative structures in these institutional spaces was certainly important for the joint reflection to produce a definition of the victims of racism that removed them from random arbitrariness in order to insert them into a group that could be named and characterized: the Black people, that is to say, a race endowed with its own culture. This shows clearly that through its representative the Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults, the world of the terreiros, where the problem of distinction and combination had been discussed for at least two decades, was a source of inspiration. After having been in some way “constructed” by scholarly discourses that the religious leaders then applied to their own objectives, this religious universe in turn made a significant contribution to the systematization of a model ready to circulate and ready to be interpreted by other people and groups.

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Conclusion: An Early Example of the Fight Against “Mixture” After having shown in the previous chapters how the elaboration of the caboclo of possession cults partly relieves men and women of the weight of the stereotype of the caboclo, then underlined that “decision” is a transversal notion, applying both to the explanation of the metamorphoses of the spirits and to that of the ethno-legal repositionings of the local populations, I sought to show that the terreiros discussed the problem of the fight against “mixture” long before human collectives came up against it. These echoes are not very surprising when we consider that a religious system is a human production, which offers both a metaphorical interpretation of the social world and categories of thought for action. In this dialectical relationship, men and women, in their diverse habitats, customs, and phenotypes, feed the imagination of possession cults: the lines of caboclos appear as a sort of cartography of the population drawn up according to different criteria (geographical, physical, and so forth). This formalist order is not, however, totalitarian, because, by integrating the notions of mobility, encounters, friendships, but also individual desires, it accommodates a central ritual principle of metamorphosis. Conversely, one could suggest that this universe of possession, which manages to articulate opposites (the multiplicity of possibilities with the legibility of origins, the faculty of “crossing” with knowledge of the “matrices”), is likely to represent, if only indirectly and metaphorically, a model for human beings who, in order to escape from a mistura that has become confusion, embark on a quest to determine ancestries, that is to say “roots,” and to establish what prevails—as if the identity vacuum had given way to a kind of ethnic overflow. The “matrix” that first appeared the most distinctly in the public space is unquestionably African. Whether they live in rural or urban areas and whether or not they regularly frequent the terreiros, the Amazonian populations know from television and radio that a major festival devoted to orixá Iemanjá has been held every year since the 1970s in presence of the authorities in most Amazonian capitals. This spectacle, which has become grandiose, and very different from the ordinary possession ceremonies inhabited by the caboclos, has contributed to the popularization of the name of the divinity, who everyone knows is “African,” and to the legitimization of this reference. After focusing on the identification of the cultural elements of the African matrix, concerns turned to the recognition of the racially defined men who produced them. If, at first, the presence of the latter was mainly associated with the urban universe that had produced an image of Africa in Brazil through the cults of possession, it did not take long for the Quilombola claims in rural areas to enrich the register of Africanity, attesting to the familiarity of all the inhabitants of the region with the new interpretative framework.

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It is a quite different matter for the Indigenous “matrix.” Remember that if the “African root” has been at the center of both religious and political attention, it is because it is not possible to imagine any “Indigenous” trace in the urban environment, since, as Stephen Baines (2001) points out, the idea that an “Indian in the city ceases to be an Indian” is long-standing.14 This representation extends to the villages of the hinterland, which are said to be populated only by caboclos, and has a corollary in the religious world with the erasure of the pajés from the ritual scene. There is no doubt, however, that if the interest of researchers had focused on “Indian survivals,” they would have endeavored to identify, and would obviously have finally found, “evidence” of Indianness in urban settings. The regular arrival of rural healers in the terreiros and of clients referred to them by urban cult leaders could undoubtedly have been interpreted in this way, as could the persistence of linhas such as the Pena e Maracá and the Jurema in urban places of worship. In reality, as Figueiredo has shown, it is less a question of an absence than of the persistence of a gradient in otherness: the “Indian” is far away in the depths of the forests, whereas the “Black” can be found in domestic quarters near the masters. Various signs, echoed by the new Amerindian demands, however, indicate that Indianness is in turn imposing itself as an option that can be envisaged by vulnerable populations. Since the mid-1990s, this movement has been gaining momentum through an analogous modality of showcasing the public self with, here, lots of body paintings, straw and bead ornaments, feather headdresses, and dances of pajés. Unlike the previous case, it does not extend from large urban centers to rural areas, but starts from small towns (1995, Jurutí, state of Pará; 1996, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, state of Amazonas) and even from villages (1997, Alter do Chão, state of Pará).15 Although the in-depth study of the historical processes that presided over its constitution and the representations of a somewhat generic Indianness that are emerging still remains to be carried out, there is no doubt that “becoming Indian” is increasingly appearing as an alternative to “becoming Black”. Notes 1. For a critical review of this Afro-Brazilian literature, see Boyer (1993b). 2. This period, which began in 1871 and ended in 1920, is linked in Amazonia to the exploitation of the rubber cycle and gave rise to numerous architectural embellishments including, in particular, the construction of the opera houses of Belém and Manaus. 3. These terms were intended to distinguish types of miscegenation: mamelucos and mamelucos and caboclos would come from the unions between Indians and Europeans while the cafusos or curibocas would descend from the unions between Indians and Blacks and the mulatos from those between blacks and Europeans. 4. According to Figueiredo (2009: 191), Mário de Andrade found local intellectuals “uninteresting and boring” because they were not curious about folklore. The only reflections that

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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found grace in Andrade’s eyes were those of people born outside the Amazon who reflected on the “differences and specificities” that fascinated Andrade. In 1977, at the Federal University of Brasilia, Heraldo Maués defended a thesis entitled “A Ilha Encantada: Medicina e xamanismo em uma comunidade de Pescadores,” which he published in 1990. He subsequently published several works including Padres, Pajés, Santos and Festas: Popular Catholicism and Ecclesiastical Control (1995). The spiritism that draws on the book by Allan Kardec, the French founder of a spiritist doctrine that was very popular in Brazil, could be added to this list in that it represents a vague Europeanness. However, it has characteristics that are different from the other designations mentioned: its centers are located outside the outlying districts and its recruitment is less popular. From the previous decade, see the doctoral thesis by Anaíza Vergolino e Silva, defended in 1976 and published in 2015. Reading it shows that the play on the names of forms of worship and the accumulation of skills already structured the field of possession in the early 1970s. On the other hand, it seems that gossip, analyzed in great detail by Vergolino, questioned the authenticity of the possessions, the morality of the cult leaders, and their knowledge of the rituals without any reference to the “mixture” (see the next paragraph). Vergolino only mentions this notion once. Since “mixture” was a category of accusation, religious specialists referred instead to the learned term “syncretism,” which according to them explained that things had been put together, something that some uninformed people might mistakenly interpret as “confusion.” This is still the case today, as I was able to observe during recent discussions with the mediums with whom I have become friends over the years. The periodization is not the same for Brazil as a whole. The Africanization movement radiated from the Northeast of the country after the organization of two congresses by prominent intellectuals during the 1930s opened the way to a promotion of African contributions to national culture, which was to go far beyond the borders of the scientific community, and an institutional organization of the terreiros into federations (Boyer 1996: 12–13). See Prandi (1991) for São Paulo, Maggie (1977) and Birman (1980) for Rio de Janeiro, and Dantas (1988) for the northeastern state of Sergipe. We could go back further in time, but that would take us too far from the main theme of this book. Suffice it to say that, in a book where he analyzes the processes of inclusion and exclusion throughout Brazilian history, Andreas Hofbauer (2006) shows that from the 1950s, under the aegis of UNESCO, “culture” then “ethnic group” replaced “race” in an attempt to escape biological determinism. http://www.cedenpa.org.br/sobre/(accessed 19 April 2023). The President of Brazil from 2003 to 2016, the Governor of the State of Pará from 2007 to 2011, and the Mayor of Belém from 1997 to 2004 were members of the PT. After the pioneering work of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira on the Terena in towns in Mato Grosso, anthropology took no interest in this theme, with very few exceptions, before the 2000s (Nunes 2010). Respectively see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB2OWtt7Z_Y; https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=Et59qTFj2TY___; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3t3hME A_CY.

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Through this book, I wished to suggest new avenues for trying to understand recent ethnic claims other than in terms of the alternative between instrumentalist constructivism and resurgent primordialism. Indeed, while there is no doubt that the watchwords of these social mobilizations aim above all to provide the respective groups with better living conditions and more protection from the state, it is also undeniable that the history of the region, with its violence and its intermingling of populations, has led the latter to assume various identity repositionings over time. What can therefore be perceived as new can also be seen as just a return to the old. For this binarity to become fruitful, it was necessary to take into account the highly political dimension of social demands while questioning the categories of thought that support flexibilities and recompositions. The approach in this respect follows in the footsteps of the work of Jean-Loup Amselle (2001) when he analyzes the phenomenon of “connections” from one culture to another as narrative frameworks accessible in a globalized context. It differs from it, however, in focusing not on intellectual creations based on the production of writings and images that transform Africa into a floating signifier (ibid.: 15) but on the local, diffuse, and ordinary elaborations of devices making it conceivable to connect with different “matrices.” The specific conception of the idea of “mixture” (mistura), which differs from miscegenation in that it suggests accumulation without implying miscibility, is the cornerstone here. By signifying that a group of relatives consider themselves the bearers of a diversity of moral and physical characteristics that have been preserved in their integrity and in their singularity, this conception is at the foundation of the exercise of a right to choose (escolher), for oneself and for close relatives, between the characteristics that are considered relevant at a given moment in a collective social trajectory, and to make this moment public by declaring a specific ethnicity. Moreover, as the discarded elements are not considered to disappear but rather to fade into the background, the reference to the mistura contains in itself the possibility, on the one hand, that the present choice may be different from others previously or subsequently made, and, on the other hand, that individuals belonging to the same family may not all position themselves in the same way. In other words, it makes intelligible the fact that collective and individual identifications do not always coincide.

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Historicity of the Mistura The study of this Amazonian ethnography has made it possible to establish the centrality of the notion of mistura in the understanding of family histories and in the justification of current political actions. It should be remembered, however, that, like all local concepts, the notion must be considered in its own historicity and in the contingent interpenetration of distinct domains of social life to which it attests in its own way. Concerning the first point, let us recall that mistura has long been embedded in the idea of miscegenation, which, depending on the period and the social category, has been the subject of very distinct interpretations, often opposed in the consequences associated with the term. Thus, miscegenation has sometimes been praised for the beauty of the physical types and the originality of the cultural elaborations that it promotes, and, at other times, denounced for tarnishing the purity of religious traditions and for blurring racial classifications. These evaluations have not only varied over time, they have also been part of cycles: criticisms of the degeneration of races at the end of the nineteenth century were succeeded by celebrations of the creativity of popular genius until, during the 1980s, miscegenation was once again seen as a source of disorder, that is, of “confusion.” One important thing nevertheless changed from one century to the next, which allowed mistura to constitute itself as an autonomous native theory: a sort of democratization in the production of registers for understanding history. While the political dimension has always been constitutive of discourses that serve as grand narratives about the nation, it has long been in the hands of the middle classes and elites who plunged the masses into the indistinction of their origins in order to better claim to be the sole representatives of modernity and civilization. However, the promulgation of the Constitution of 1988, at the end of the military dictatorship, clearly changed the situation by establishing the principle of the coexistence of several ethnic communities and by recognizing the intrinsic value of their specific histories and cultures. Intellectual innovation aimed to include, as subjects of law, categories of populations that had previously been excluded, and it in fact forced the masters to loosen their ideological hold on the representations of the nation. Its concrete realization in terms of public policies is, however, based on a condition that has had an impact on the vulnerable populations invited to enter the arena: they are expected to speak with a unanimous voice regarding their collective “identity.” In this unprecedented context where access to crucial rights is linked to legibility or clarification of origins (or both), the question of the interpretation and assessment of “miscegenation” arises as a very serious issue and needs to be rethought according to local methods. In the popular terms of mistura, the variability of talents and individual qualities is often perceived by the

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fact of having “leaned” or “pulled” (puxar) toward such and such an ascendant. It is thus a personal and domestic matter, evoked in the privacy of the home by the recollection of the elders and possibly related to the behavior or physique of their descendants. In the new post-Constitution situation, this register was gradually linked to another one, more oriented toward the classification of the elements identified in matrices that were, so to speak, objectified and more abstract, in order to correspond to its public and political dimensions. In this situation, discussion takes place within the community assembly and must result in a joint statement that can be communicated to an outside third party. It is likely that the imperative to create a language common to populations and the state, that is to say, understandable by the former and audible to the services of the latter, encouraged the constitution of the theory underlying the unstable “mixture” as well as its political activation to justify demands for social redistribution.

A Portable and Transposable Message This native theory is neither historically nor sociologically decontextualized. Clearly, the way in which the urban universe of possession considered the historical processes of contact from the angle of “syncretism,” while subsequently attempting to curb it by a relatively elaborate effort to classify ritual forms, presents similarities with an understanding of family trajectories in terms of “mixture,” a “mixture” whose instability means that it can be canceled by valuing one of the identified “roots” over the others. It is not a question of arguing that the native theory of mistura is actualized in rural areas according to the rites of urban possession cults or even that it embodies all of their principles. If we consider, for example, the status conferred on the invisible figures who incorporate the mediums, we observe significant differences. The caboclos-spirits of the urban terreiros never assume the role of topographical marker that belongs to the entities at the center of village worship practices (Stoll 2014).1 Moreover, in the hamlets, disputes over legitimacy still rarely appeal to the notions of “syncretism” or “authenticity” instead of the “gift.” Beyond these differences, which are no doubt important for analyses of the religious systems themselves, what is striking is the crossed destinies of the caboclos-spirits, who appeared in the poor suburbs of cities, and the caboclos-men, who have to be sought ever deeper in the forest. From this point of view, it appears that the perception of the caboclo is always based on an association with margins (margins of civilization, margins of the urban universe), and this cannot be taken for a mere coincidence.

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The concepts forged by Thomas J. Csordas to assess the capacities of religions to spread can help us to specify the modalities of this convergence. According to this anthropologist, we can propose two aspects of religions that must be attended to in determining whether or not they travel well, what I will call portable practice and transposable message. (Csordas 2007: 261)

Thinking in terms of “portable practices,” defined as rites that can be easily learned, and of “transposable messages,” that is, messages that can easily be anchored in different contexts, is in fact very stimulating for understanding the circulation of religious practices through temporary or permanent migratory flows. In the case we are dealing with, however, the propagation does not exactly concern the dissemination of particular rites within a geographical space, specifically between cities and countryside, but rather the passage of a motif from one sphere of social life to another, or from the religious domain to political mobilizations. Csordas’s proposal to distinguish practices from messages is essential here to account for this second displacement. Indeed, considering the figure of the caboclo-spirit as a message makes it possible to underline its qualities of transposability and portability. The former quality seems to me to be confirmed by the fact that the same word is used for human beings and for invisible beings. However, by converting negative attributes into signs of power, the caboclos-spirits reverse the stigma, which also benefits men and women. As for portability, their paradoxical power of representing the great diversity of human groups (expressed as distinct “lines”) and of negating their formal limits (since a caboclo can pass from one to the other) undoubtedly contributes to the fact that the universe they depict seems familiar to a large number of people. If we had to formulate the message conveyed by the caboclo-spirit, it would be that of a metaphorical and open definition of the self capable of informing very diverse and sometimes very new situations. Despite this character’s original link with an urban religious imagination, which made him a symbol of the rural world, his power of symbolizing social experiences enables a projection, even an unconscious one, outside places of worship stricto sensu.2

Sociopolitical Transformations and Metamorphic Thought Without wishing to apply the religious model to the expression of recent ethno-territorial claims, one cannot ignore their cross-cutting themes, in particular the principle of the possible coexistence of various “identities” held to

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be equally legitimate and that of the notion of “choice” as the driving force of action. Concerning the first point, it is thus remarkable that the system of possession cults holds that it is possible to have several forms, even several names, without this multiplicity implying any kind of renunciation or disintegration of the self (the caboclo-spirit is always assumed to be itself, even when it is recognized only by the relatives of the person it possesses). Village populations say something similar when they declare that after having tried one ethnic “path” they could eventually take another. The “mixture” here is a resource for identifications that will be asserted in the “decision” mode, in relation to personal circumstances and histories, but whatever the labels, they designate the same cohesive set of relatives. It is as if the caboclo-spirit and the native theory of mistura both justify a universe of possible transformations and temper the demands for classification imposed on men by placing the political dimension of “decision” at the center of the game. There is a slight time lag between the parallel processes of de-syncretism and de-miscegenation to which the caboclo-spirit and the native theory of mistura respectively refer, nor do these processes relate to the same materials (it is a question of examining ritual practices in the first case, and of examining the nature of a human collective in the second). However, by establishing that claiming a difference can constitute an advantage, they share, if not a common cause, at least the same social dynamic. In the same way that the proliferation of religious designations reconfigures the competitive market in which religious leaders evolve, the promotion of distinct ethnic labels induced by public policies of socioenvironmental development contributes to restructuring the political arenas in the search for responses to threats and disinheritance. The actors who take it upon themselves to contest the result of this intellectual and practical work in order to produce formal criteria of distinction are however very different in the two cases. In the universe of the terreiros, human efforts to neutralize syncretism are hindered by nonhuman actors, the caboclos-spirits who violate classifications at will during possession. In situations of ethno-territorial affirmation, on the other hand, the possible questioning of the ordering of the social world by separating the various components of mistura comes from human beings. They may be members of the ruling class who want to seize land, but they may also be neighbors from the same social class who seek to discredit their equals for claiming rights in the name of a particularity. They accuse them of pretending to be what they are not or what they are no longer, in other words they try to bring them back to their liminal, subjugated position of caboclos-men. We touch here on a fundamental difference in the meaning of caboclo in the religious sphere and in sociopolitical mobilizations: praised as a transgressive double who undermines established

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categorizations in possession cults, he is denigrated when the term refers to someone who has irremediably foundered in the “confusion” of miscegenation. Although the value associated with this figure changes completely, it remains perceived as a source of disorder and contrast. And it is in this respect that when the caboclos-men also prove capable of undertaking emancipatory action to metamorphose themselves into what they want, we can say that something of the caboclo-spirit remains. The transformation in the virada is then not only the ritual projection of a hoped-for freedom, but a political fact experienced in the demands for recognition. Ultimately, historical trajectories, including in their prosaic aspects, are made up of sociopolitical transformations articulated by metamorphic thought.

Reading Mistura: Source of Benefit or Corruption? This book is more an attempt at interpretation nourished by the familiarity acquired during thirty years of research in the Brazilian Amazon than a classic study based on a long-term ethnographic survey, which I have also carried out on several occasions. While acknowledging that there may be local variants of the native theory of “mixture” described in these pages, it aims to put forward for further discussion a general proposition on the structuring recurrence of an ideal scheme in which the unity of being is never opposed to the plurality of its forms. This approach posits that just as the caboclo-spirit’s will allows it to metamorphose in the religious space, the mistura of men and women authorizes them to reposition themselves on the ethnic chessboard according to the requirements of their sociopolitical claims. Peter Gow’s work entitled Of Mixed Blood (1991) deals with a fairly similar theme insofar as the gente nativa, as the populations of the Peruvian Amazon with whom he worked call themselves, is said to be of “mixed blood” (sangre mezclada). Los nativos are also subject to numerous prejudices similar to those from which the populations of the Brazilian Amazon suffer, qualified not so long ago as caboclos: they are not held, including by anthropologists, to be true Indigenous people, endowed with a true culture, because they are considered to have been “acculturated” by the colonial history of which they are the “victims.” Lastly, the way in which the reference to modern institutions (the school and the comunidad nativa—a legally recognized community—for los nativos in Peru; the school and ethnic associations for minority populations in Brazil) seeks to distance a past of oppression and slavery suffered by their ancestors (Gow 1991: 197–98), and to avert it for the new generations, addresses similar concerns.

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On some points, however, the two situations are not exactly similar, starting with the representations of what gives strength and coherence to a collective. Although local populations in Brazil also subscribe to the idea that kinship constitutes a cardinal value (Gow 1991: 2), those who are engaged in ethnic claims recognize two distinct types: kinship woven on the basis of affective relations produced and managed on a daily basis, and kinship that we will qualify as political in the context of social mobilizations. However, not only do these two registers not always overlap (political kinship does not require matrimonial union; affective kinship can do without political agreement), they can be contradictory when relatives or neighbors assume different ethno-legal identities. In such cases, the kinship of everyday life must sometimes be silenced so as not to blur the ethnic message and weaken the political kinship. The legal provisions that differentiate the rights and statutes of Indigenous people from those of Quilombolas and Traditional populations are not unrelated to the importance assumed by political kinship, and this has a key consequence. While at the start of the survey, the frequent mention of their mistura by these populations might suggest that, as in Peru, “boundary maintenance hardly seems to be the most important feature of these communities filled with ‘mixed people’” (Gow 1991: 13), the imperative demand for territorial delimitation on the part of the state ultimately imposes boundaries as a fundamental issue. This is the reason that when los nativos suppress tribal differences in order to insist on the opposition between themselves and the Whites (ibid.: 7), the villagers of the Brazilian Amazon construct a double system: Whites against Blacks, Indians, and Traditional populations from the general point of view of access to differentiated rights, but also Blacks separate from both Indians and Traditional populations from the point of view of the specific rights granted to each category. In addition to the classic question of the link between subordinates and rulers, the question of the relationship between different types of subordinates arises here. The legal framework thus generates constraints concerning the acceptability of the political representation of vulnerable populations in Brazil, and perhaps this should be taken into account to explain in what way their conception of “mixture” differs from that of los nativos from lower Urubamba. Like the latter, the Brazilians believe that “mixed people” are the fruit of matrimonial alliances contracted between “types of people” belonging to distinct “races” (Gow 1991: 276). The union between the Black great-grandfather and the Indian woman is thus the event that gives rise to the mistura in relation to which the three brothers of Lagoa Bonita position themselves. However, unlike their Peruvian counterparts, these villagers do not want to experience “the prolonged and complex process of a proper mixing of difference” (ibid.) in order to become civilized. Adopting a very different attitude, they maintain, against the civilization that colonizes minds and bodies, that the initial “pure types” continue to coexist in

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misturadas persons, and that they can again come to the fore. Depending on the particular situations it is part of, the same notion can therefore give rise to systems that appear similar but are fundamentally very different. In Peru, los nativos identify differences in the past to create mistura today; in Brazil, the recognition of the mistura that occurred in the past aims to affirm that difference is possible in the present. The processes are, so to speak, reversed.

Hybrids, Métis, and Other Intermediaries According to Gow (1991: 279), rather than trying to seek the “‘basic’ structure, of which other systems are elaborations,” anthropology must place itself on the ground of history, and its “comparative project must follow the clues suggested by the system of topological transformations between existing Native Amazonian social organizations.” This perspective leads him, through various comparisons between these and the comunidad nativa of lower Urubamba, to finally affirm that this “community organization . . . is an unusual transformation of other Native Amazonian systems, but it is not the only one” (ibid.: 280). Insofar as the notion of mistura also occupies a central place in the situations of Brazilian Amazonia such as the ones examined here, should they not be considered as another example of the same phenomenon? This is undoubtedly tempting, but it confronts the analyst with a significant and perhaps insoluble problem. Indeed, the system at work proves to be very effective in producing “pure” Indian collectives, but it is also capable of producing “authentic” Black groups, not to mention the naturally harmonious Traditional populations. What, then, are the social organizations of these rural populations the topological transformation of? Of a native Amerindian system, a system with African roots, or a colonial system based on aviamento and dispossession that assigned them to the category of caboclo? Beyond this problem of the reference criterion, there is another equally important issue, which concerns the historical moment to be taken into account in scrutinizing apparently different social organizations. Should we assess them in terms of the origins claimed today (which would involve assessing them according to the political watchwords proclaimed)? This is the position that Brazilianist anthropology seems to have adopted when it compartmentalizes the discussion, restricting it to a strict bibliographic framework relative to a label. With very few exceptions (Arruti and French in particular), there is thus relatively little comparison between the processes that lead to the so-called Amerindian resurgences, African Quilombola, and the highlighting of the ecological virtues of Traditional populations. In this way, everything that brought concrete populations together rather than opposed them is backgrounded.

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One could then be tempted to associate the native theory of unstable mixture, which seeks to problematize all the gray areas that scholarly categorical approaches often ignore, with miscegenation, since, as Peter Wade (2005: 243) reminds us, interpretations of the latter oscillate between an ideology of oppression and a subversive hybridity capable of creating “a ‘third space’ outside binary oppositions.” The comparison is interesting, all the more so since Marisol de la Cadena (2005: 262) has shown the great complexity of the figure of the mestizo, which cannot be reduced to an “empirical hybridity” but is rather a “conceptual hybridity [that] houses social taxonomies embedded in different forms of consciousness and regimes of knowledge,” which, before the Enlightenment, linked it to mixtures of “faith,” and, in the nineteenth century, to mixtures of “races.” The caboclo, considered in turn through the prism of “acculturation” then of “miscegenation,” could here be taken as one of its variants. Yet what the theory of mistura achieves in the Brazilian Amazon is quite specific. It is true that, as in Peru, “Indigenous hybridities . . . ignore purified categories . . . including those demanded by political activism” (Cadena 2005: 281). But the example of a redefinition of miscegenation that Cadena gives in an earlier article—the “Cuzqueño commoners who claim indigenous cultural heritage, yet refuse to be labelled Indians” (Cadena 2001: 23), which implies being poor and uneducated—is incomprehensible in the Brazilian context, where semantic disjunctions are replaced by the centrality of metamorphosis. Without it being possible, in the current state of thinking and knowledge, to put forward a completely satisfactory alternative analytical proposal, we must at least concede that the sociopolitical mobilizations in the Brazilian Amazon, during which populations who considered themselves—and were considered—alike experienced diverging ethnic destinies, pose a stimulating intellectual challenge to researchers. Understanding this phenomenon certainly implies carrying out a historical study (while taking care to avoid being trapped in the search for a zero degree of “contact” or of original form); in particular, it presupposes focusing on the identification of local categories of thought concerning what produces identity, but also otherness, and the processes that they underlie. From this point of view, it appears that the greatest strength of the theory of mistura, as it has been described in these pages and without excluding the possibility that other strengths could come to light, is to reverse the terms of the nationalist ideology of miscegenation, which, as summarized by Wade (2005: 240), maintains that “everyone is eligible to become a mestizo,”3 by affirming on the contrary that everyone is eligible to become an Indian, a Black, or a member of a Traditional population. In this sense, it goes beyond “the idea [that] a mestizo person [is] as a mosaic of racialized elements” evoked by Wade (ibid.:

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257) by postulating the coexistence, in their completeness, of roots that can be actualized. Examining the conditions of this actualization is an invitation not only to engage in further reflection about intermediary figures, human and nonhuman, but also to continue the analysis of the action of mediators such as civil servants, activists, and sometimes anthropologists, who nourish the reciprocal articulations between symbolic constructions and social experiences. Notes 1. Unlike encantados in rural areas, caboclos never indicate the position of nearby natural places such as a grove, a beach, or a lake placed under the protection of their respective “mothers” (they can nevertheless be associated with more distant sites), only the position of places of human socialization such as the terreiros, and sometimes centers of power such as the Sé cathedral in Belém. One could then wonder if the constitution in the villages of terreiros on the urban model leads to the replacement of rural encantados by caboclos-spirits (which I doubt) or whether they are confined to different roles. 2. It would of course be an overstatement to say that the religious model finds its immediate expression in the theory of mistura. The relationship between the two seems to me rather to be of the order of “elective affinities” that Max Weber declared he was seeking in his program for L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme: “We have no intention whatever of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism . . . could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation. In itself, the fact that certain important forms of capitalistic business organization are known to be considerably older than the Reformation is a sufficient refutation of such a claim. On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world. Furthermore, what concrete aspects of our capitalistic culture can be traced to them. In view of the tremendous confusion of interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out” (2005: 49). In the same way, the form of current identity claims does not result from a transposition of the representation of the caboclo-spirit in rural areas. On the other hand, it is obvious that both are anchored in a common, preexisting model that irrigates them, a kind of “conceptual bridge between the different actors” buttressed on “a complex of images relative to humans as transformational beings,” in the words of Mark Harris (2008: 52–53). 3. Peter Wade, in the same article, rightly adds that this inclusive discourse is accompanied by a reality of exclusion, since Blackness and Indianness are marginalized in favor of Whiteness, but that does not enter into my argument.

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Index   

Accusations of ethnic fraud, xi, 3, 43, 92 of mixing ritual “lines,” 103–4 administrative ethnic classification, x, 4–5, 24, 28, 38, 46 administrative territorial units Agro-extractivist Settlement Project (PAE), 13–8, 21, 24, 34–5 39–41 Extractivist Reserve (RESEX), 6, 15, 17, 75, Indigenous Land, 6, 16 Intégral Protection Unit, 16 National System of Conservation Units (SNUC), 68 Quilombola Territory, 11n, 18 Sustainable Conservation Unit, 15–6, 67 Amazonian States Acre, 6, 15, 49, 61 Amapá, 2 Amazonas, 1, 16, 49, 56, 64, 98, 110 Pará, 1–2, 13, 53, 56, 61, 65, 99, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 110 Amazon history Aviamento, 49, 52, 119 African slaves, 23, 45, 48, 80, 96 Belle Époque, 97–98 Cabanagem, 22–3, 25, 53, 59 colonial regional mobilities and new sociabilities, 50–1, 53 colonization and forced displacements, 48, 96 cunhamenas, 51–2 “development” and recent colonization, 49, 52 reservoir of slaves, 47 Appadurai, Arjun, 38 Araújo, Roberto, 14–7, 52, 68–9 Arruti, José Mauricio, ix, 46

Blackness, vii, 2 Center for Studies and Defense of the Black People of Pará (CEDENPA), 108 National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), 4, 15–8, 28, 39 Negro and preto, 29n Mocambo, 52–3, 108 Palmares Cultural Foundation, 28 racism and discrimination, 20–21, 94n, 108 Quilombola, 18, 20, 23–9, 32, 35–6, 39, 40–2, 49, 53, 109, 119 Quilombola community, 1, 35, 80, 82 United Black Movement (MNU), 108 bolsa familia, 18, 52 Brazilian comparisons Nordeste, 45–6, 49, 55, 58, 72 Rio de Janeiro, ix, 76, 105 Salvador, 76, 96–7, 106 São Paulo, 73, 76,108 See also Amazonian states Brubaker, Rogers, 4–5 caboclo/caboclos as human population anthropological perspectives, 56–9, 67, 98 category of relative social classification, 64–6 “invisibilized” social formation, 57, 62, 74, 89, 93 negative stereotype, 8, 43, 55, 63, 68 See also “mixture,” transformations caboclo/caboclos as polysemic notion, viii, 8, 54–5, 62, 76, 87 caboclo/caboclos as spirits encantados, 72, 85–6, 90 invisible word, viii, 8, 62, 72–6, 84–6, 93, 106, 104, 115

132

Index

ritual construction of otherness, 72–3, 86 transgressive spirit, 71, 84, 91, 104 Cadena, Marisol de la, vi, viii, 120 Cascudo, Luís da Câmara, 54–5 Castro, Fábio Fonseca de, 55–6, 65, 68, 74 “choice” and “decision,” ix, 2, 5, 7–8, 13, 20, 24, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 38–3, 46, 50, 80, 91–2, 107, 116 Chambouleyron, Rafael and Arenz, Karl Hein, 48, 51, 55 community as ethnic group, xi, 20–1, 26, 35–6, 38, 41 as part of supra-local mobilizations, 22, 34–5, 38, 42 as social organization of parents and relatives, 24–5, 33, 37–8, 42 Constitution of 1988, 1, 3, 24, 80, 113 Csordas, Thomas J., 115

Galvão, Eduardo and Charles Wagley, 56–7, 64, 98 genealogies, 7, 19, 23–4, 25–8, 33, 104, 106 “blood,” 23–5, 36, 55, 99, 117 culture, 19, 21, 25, 53, 56–7, 59, 61, 70, 76, 81–2, 89, 91, 97, 101, 108 race, vii, 9, 19, 21, 59, 89, 96–7, 99–100, 108 “root,” viii, 2, 9, 19–20, 23, 34, 36–7, 59, 76, 80, 91, 93, 106, 114, 119, 121 See also Blackness, Indianness Goldman, Marcio, 88–91 Gow, Peter, 117–9 Grenand, Françoise, Grenand, Pierre. and Guillaume, Henri, 54–5, 57 Guzmán, Décio, 47, 55

Dias, Camila, 47–48

Indianness, 2, 6, 16, 23, 25, 45, 62, 73, 76, 82, 110 índio and indígena, 10n Indigenous people, x, 4, 45, 62, 67, 81–2, 117–8 masters of the land, 22–3 National Foundation of the Indigenous People (FUNAI), 4, 6, 28, 39 Romantic image, 100

Elites, xvi, 8, 51, 56, 73–4, 79, 81, 89, 96, 113 ethnic positionings collective project, 5, 8, 24, 28, 32, 38, 41, 43, 46 de-miscegenation 116 divergent internal interpretations, 27–28, 91–2 ethnic matrices, 7, 91, 94, 107 sources of information, 5, 22–3, 27, 31, 34, 41, 46, 65 See also accusations of ethnic fraud, “choice” and “decision” external actors, activists, 5, 21, 36, 39, 41–2, 46, 89, 121 Catholic church, 33, 46, 82 Non-Governmental Organizations, 5, 38, 41, 66 politicians, 17, 34, 37, 39, 52 Figueiredo, Aldrin Moura de, 9, 97–102, 110 Folklore research mission Andrade, Mario de, 58, 101, 110n Alvarenga, Oneyda, 101–2 Freyre, Gilberto, 89

Harris, Mark, 21, 50, 53

Lima, Deborah, 58, 61–70 Luciani, José Antonio Kelly, 81–2, 89 Meira, Márcio, 49, 52 “mixture,” vi–ix,xi, 3 Black-dominated “mixture,” 19 balanced “mixture,” 21, 23 “confusion” and “degeneration,” 80, 99, 103–4, 106–7 distinct from miscegenation, 6–7, 112 Indian-dominated “mixture,” 25 mestizo, vii–viii, 97, 99, 120 native theory, 43, 81, 89, 90–2, 107, 114, 118 See also ethnic positionings, genealogies Nina Rodrigues, Raimundo, 96–7, 99 Nugent, Stephen, 57–8, 61

Index

Oliveira, Joao Pacheco de, 45–6 possession cults, 8–9, 53, 62, 73 Africanization of, 105–6. batuque, 102, 104 Candomblé, 104–6 Jurema, 84, 102–3, 110 Mina, 102–6 orixás, 102–3, 105 pajelança, 98–102, 105, 110 Pena e Maracá, 102–4, 110 pretos-velhos, ix, 72 syncretism and de–syncretism, 93, 107, 116 Umbanda, ix, 102–5 See Folklore research mission, terreiro racial, racism, viii, 20–1, 80, 96–97, 99, 107–8, 113 religion, ix, 9, 52, 97, 115 catholic Basic Education Movement (MEB), 33, 44n Evangelicals, 1, 53, 75 shamanism, 83 spiritism, 85 Rodrigues, Carmen Izabel, 65–6 Silva, Anaíza Vergolino e, 101, 105–6 social mobilizations, 2, 17, 28 for land security, 1–3, 16, 92 for political visibility, 34, 37 socio-environmental movement, 14, 67–8, 116. See also Traditional populations Sommer, Barbara,51, 53 Spirits, 75–76, 84–5, 88, 104, 114–6. See caboclo as spirits, possession cults

133

targeted public policies, 1–2, 4, 15, 18, 68, 118 terreiro, 70, 75, 83, 85, 97, 102–5, 109–10. See also virada Tiphagne, Nicolas, 59, 65 Traditional populations, 38,46, 75 administrative category, 4, 6, 14–6, 18, 35 criticisms of the concept, 68–70 Instituto Chico Mendes da Conversação da Biodiversidade-ICMBio, 4, 6 positive notion for the so-called caboclo, 8, 62, 66–7, 74 ribeirinhos, 58, 67 seringueiros, 6, 49, 58, 67 See also caboclo as human population transformation, 4, 39, 42–3, 103, 116–7 Amerindian theory, viii, 81–4, 93, 119 ethnic metamorphoses, 6, 43, 50, 80–1, 88, 92–3, 107, 120 Gamela, 82–3, 92 Kisêdjê, 82 virada, 9, 87, 104, 117 Valentin, Thierry, 56, 63–4, 74–5 Varga, István van Deursen, 82–3 Veríssimo, Jsoé, 99 Vilaca, Aparecida, 83–4, 93 Wade, Peter, 120 Whiteness, vii, 80 barões, 80 becoming White, 82–3, 93 urban ruling classes, 64, 80