Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica

Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo–Colombian Area

Ernst Halbmayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367808099
• eBook ISBN: 9781000023091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica.

It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region's indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo?Colombian Area.

Part I

The Isthmo–Colombian Area in context

1 Introduction

Toward an anthropological understanding of the area between the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Amazon

Ernst Halbmayer

The book investigates how to conceptualize the area between the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Amazon in anthropological terms.¹ It discusses the Amerindian socio-cosmologies typical and the historicity of regional area conceptions. Since Kirchhoff’s proposal of a “Chibcha Area” (1943) and Steward’s work on the Circum-Caribbean Area (1948a, 1949a; Steward and Faron 1959) the search for a comparative view of the region has been led by archeology and linguistics (Costenla Umaña 1991; Hoopes and Fonseca 2003; see the contributions of Clados and Halbmayer and Paché et al. in this volume). Anthropology, somehow surprisingly and much in contrast to the vivid debates on Amazonia, has hardly contributed to a renewed comparative understanding of this area.² The book offers a first step toward filling this gap and aims to initiate a discussion about a reconceptualization of the Isthmo–Colombian Area in anthropological terms. The contributions search for the region’s prevailing socio-cosmological principles, their relationship to concepts of Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism, and engage with the area’s cultural history.

The volume includes comparative papers as well as specific case studies. The comparative studies focus on a specific Chibchan ontology (Niño Vargas), the wide distribution and historical persistence of the idea of shining or golden persons (Clados), central notions of kinship and clanship (Halb-mayer), the area’s languages and language families (Pache et al.), and the different area conceptualizations and cultural history of the region (Clados and Halbmayer). The case studies include papers on Chibchan- (Iku, Guna, Bribri), Chocoan- (Wounaan, Emberá), Arawakan- (Wayuu), and Cariban- (Yukpa) speaking Amerindian groups. Some contributions focus on the relationship of humans with ancestral or deified beings: Arenas Gómez writes on the creation and renewal of the relations with ancestral parents among the Iku of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; Goletz focuses on Yukpa specialists in transhuman communication and the transmission of knowledge in the Sierra de Perijá, and Peña Ismare and Velásquez Runk et al. deal with the barely known haaihí jëeu nʌm ritual and the role of the sacred prayer/petition canoe k′ugwiu among the Wounaan in the Darien. Martínez Mauri reflects on the ontological status of things, life, and humans and the role of anthropomorphic statuettes (nudsugana) and hand-stitched blouses (molagana) among the Guna, while Kaviany studies the status of plants and the agricultural ontology of the Bribri of the Sierra de Talamanca. Mancuso’s chapter deals with the place of livestock in human – non-human relations among the Wayuu, and Losonczy discusses the emergence of a new category of murderous spirits and the resulting suicide epidemic among the Chocoan Emberá. All contributions demonstrate the vitality of indigenous groups who were characterized seven decades ago in the Handbook of South American Indians as “much acculturated” or “entirely vanished as cultural entities” (Steward 1948b, 1) and consequently perceived as hardly relevant for theoretical and comparative purposes.

The historicity of areas

The engagement with the Isthmo–Colombian Area points toward the obvious need to dynamize and historicize area conceptions and to strengthen our efforts to conceptually connect the archeological and historical record to contemporary anthropology. Areas are fuzzy sets based on empirical evidence that is itself co-constituted by specific forms of observation and historically changing theoretical assumptions. As middle-range concepts areas necessarily imply comparable units that stand for other regions, an internal differentiation and heterogeneity of the proposed units, including the possibility of exclaves (Halbmayer 2017). Areas introduce – conceptually and historically shifting – boundaries to an empirically continuous and gradually changing spectrum of phenomena. The area between Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Amazon was for a long time defined by its very condition of in-betweenness, as “intermediate area” (Haberland 1957; Willey 1971) situated in between the two great cultural centers of Mesoamerica and the Central Andes, and in terms of social complexity in between these civilizations and the Amazon.

Conceptions of the area range from an intermediate land bridge that enabled population movement and culture contact across the subcontinents to an Isthmo–Colombian region defined by endogenous change and a diffuse unity of common genetic, linguistic, and cultural traits derived from the Chibchan and Chocoan linguistic groups (Hoopes and Fonseca 2003; see also Cooke 2005). Defined in this narrow fashion, the Isthmo–Colombian region no longer includes the Caribbean, the languages and cultures of the Cauca region, or the Barbacoan-speaking groups of the Andean-Pacific region extending to the Ecuadorian coast. It also excludes the Arawak- or Carib-speaking groups of northwestern South America as well as the Misumalpan-speakers in the north. In these terms, the region was conceptualized as “a center, characterized by endogenous change in populations of common ancestry who shared elements of cosmology, worldview, and distinctive forms of social organization” (Hoopes and Fonseca 2003, 50), based on a continuous long-term occupation by endogenous populations “but [with] limited evidence for migration or external control” (ibid.).

Areas are historically changing in several respects: first, in terms of their empirical cultural expressions, their internal relations, and external contacts (see Clados and Halbmayer, this volume) and second, with regard to the specific forms of observation and theoretical axioms that generate distinct conceptions. Different disciplines refer to different empirical expressions such as language, archeological artifacts, or forms of socio-economic integration and a resulting cultural core. Within the disciplines, theoretical assumptions change and compete with each other. Changing area conceptions therefore reflect not only changing empirical expressions and changing territorial boundaries through time but are co-constituted by socio-historical, political, and scientific contexts in which specific theoretical assumptions gain popularity and direct the attention toward particular empirical phenomena and conceptualizations of sameness and difference. In other words, area conceptions are historically contingent expressions. While the classical anthropological culture area concept based on environmental conditions, economic forms, and political ways of integration was typically first half of the 20th century, contemporary reflections for the Americas build on schemata of social practice and forms of perception and focus on distinct ontological principles of conceptualizing persons, human and non-human beings, the cosmos, and the relations between these elements.

Going beyond Steward’s Circum-Caribbean Area

In Steward’s (1948a) cultural-ecological vision, the so-called Circum-Caribbean Area was historically distinct from neighboring areas such as Mesoamerica,³ the Andean Civilizations, and Tropical Forest Amazonia and defined especially by the existence of chiefdoms. Steward assumed that an Andean Formative culture had spread northward to the Caribbean where it formed the Circum-Caribbean type of culture. While in the Central Andes the Formative cultures developed into civilizations, in the Circum-Caribbean Area they remained on the Formative level.⁴

Steward had obvious difficulties in making the culture area concept fit this region. In his environmental-determinist conception, culture areas reflected the combination of a relatively homogenous ecological environment and associated socio-economic formations. The Isthmo–Columbian Area’s extreme geographical and ecological heterogeneity thus posed a challenge to the classical anthropological culture area concept. In this region the northern Andes meet the Caribbean Sea, the semi-desert of the Guajira Peninsula encounters the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and the dense rain forests of the Darien and the Pacific Coast stand in sharp contrast to the sandy Caribbean Islands of Guna Yala or the Talamanca mountains of Costa Rica.

Chiefdoms and tropical forest cultures co-existed in the area and at its borders even so-called marginal groups⁵ could be found (Steward and Faron 1959, 203). The notion of the Circum-Caribbean apparently referred less to a culture area rather than to a specific socio-cultural type that found its expression in chiefdoms (Steward 1949b; Steward and Faron 1959). However, these historical chiefdoms had vanished and contemporary groups “had suffered drastic changes” and “resemble the Tropical Forest tribes rather than their own ancestors” (Steward 1948a, 2). Many former complex and hierarchical social formations had become extinct and contemporary groups seemed comparatively simple in terms of their social organization. The contemporary, transformed, and reduced groups thus resembled Amazonian Tropical Forest Cultures and for this reason the theoretical framework for their study was now provided by the anthropology of Amazonia.⁶

Since the 16th century, the Circum-Caribbean Area was heavily affected by European colonization that imposed new economic structures like the plantation economy, slavery – soon based on African slaves –, resource extraction, animal husbandry, and new forms of governance and power relations within a transatlantic and finally global system. In the so-called “Colombian exchange”, new plants, animals, viruses, and bacteria were introduced, leading to the extinction of indigenous groups from epidemics, the radical transformation of environmental conditions, and new kinds of hierarchy, mestizaje, and creolization. More ethnohistorical research would be needed to gain a better understanding of these processes and the concomitant formation of transformed and new indigeneities. These processes finally created the contemporary small and discontinuous areas of indigenous retreat, many of which were never completely conquered and brought under continuous state control. Today many, though by no means all, of these areas are officially recognized as indigenous territories.

Such processes went along with the radical loss of complexity of indigenous socio-cultural formations and led to the disappearance of raised fields, irrigation system, streets, cities, markets, exchange media, and monu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Isthmo–Colombian Area in context
• Part II Conceptualizing the Isthmo–Colombian Area from a regional comparative perspective
• Part III Case studies: change and continuity in shamanic and priestly practices and the conception of things, humans, plants, and animals
• Index