Space and Society in Central Brazil

A Panará Ethnography

Elizabeth Ewart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781472535429
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hailed once as 'giants of the Amazon', Panará people emerged onto a world stage in the early 1970s. What followed is a remarkable story of socio-demographic collapse, loss of territory, and subsequent recovery. Reduced to just 79 survivors in 1976, Panará people have gone on to recover and reclaim a part of their original lands in an extraordinary process of cultural and social revival. Space and Society in Central Brazil is a unique ethnographic account, in which analytical approaches to social organisation are brought into dialogue with Panará social categories and values as told in their own terms. Exploring concepts such as space, material goods, and ideas about enemies, this book examines how social categories transform in time and reveals the ways in which Panará people themselves produce their identities in constant dialogue with the forms of alterity that surround them. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students, scholars and anyone interested in the complex lives and histories of indigenous Amazonian societies.

CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTION

You arrived alone in the village in the Xingú. “Where is she going to sleep?” we asked ourselves. “Here in the school,” they first said, but you said you were afraid to sleep alone. So you came to my house.

I didn’t sleep at all. You were so tall, had such long legs. I slept, then I woke again. I slept, woke again. I wanted to kill you. My brother Ponto was sleeping with me.

“Bring down the mosquito net.”

“No it’s frightening.” Ponto said he was going to sleep in our mother’s house.

“No, don’t leave me behind,” I said to him. We were afraid. Then we slept many nights, and you were no longer frightening. (Pikon, a 25-year-old woman, August 1998)

It was weeks before my departure from the village of Nansepotiti in central Brazil when my sister Pikon, with whom I had been living throughout my fieldwork, and I sat reminiscing outside her house. I had reached the end of my doctoral field research and was preparing to return to the UK after some two years in Brazil. Since then, I have returned to the Panará every three to four years but never again for the length of time I was able to spend during that first field research. As anthropologists trained in the British and Malinowskian tradition of long-term and in-depth fieldwork, we rarely consider the ramifications of this method. For many of us, our first fieldwork is the longest and is not easily repeated once familial and professional constraints take over. This book then is both a reflection of life as I found it among the Panará in the late 1990s as well as a consideration of some of the developments that have occurred since that time. As such, the account I provide here is historical in more than one sense. The analysis draws on material gathered at very specific moments in panará history, while its aim is to account for panará social practice in a temporal framework. Above all though, I wish to provide a panará perspective on how to live as a Panará person amid a plethora and ever-changing cast of non-Panará people. That this perspective has a temporal dimension to it, and that it is therefore subject to change over time, must be taken as given. However, rather than seeing change over time as a series of replacements, one thing replacing and thereby displacing another, I suggest that change over time, or history, is a process that builds on what went before; we can therefore understand history as much by reference to continuities, what some might term cultural logic, as by reference to change and transformation.

The Panará are also known as Kreen Akorore, a name given to them by the Kayapó, their traditional enemies. However, they refer to themselves as Panará and are known as such in the region, and it is this name I use when referring to them as an ethnic group. When I first arrived among the Panará, they were moving their village, a move initiated in 1994. By the time I arrived in the Xingú Indigenous Peoples’ Park, some sixty-seven people had already left for the new village—approximately 250 kilometers away in an area newly identified as Panará Indigenous Territory—while ninety-four still remained at the old site. The move was completed in March 1997 when the entire village was once again reunited in the new location called Nansepotiti.

The recent history of the Panará and the events that led up to this move are described below. First, however, I shall give a brief account of fieldwork conditions.

My first three months were spent in the Xingú Park, where just over half the population (ninety-four individuals) was living, the rest having already moved to the new site on the Iriri River on the borders between the states of Mato Grosso and Pará. I had planned to return once more to the old village, but for various reasons, this turned out not to be possible. However, in the three months that I was there, as well as during a two-week trip through the Xingú in late September 1998, I was able to form a reasonably clear picture of the context in which the Panará had lived for the twenty-odd years prior to their departure from the Xingú. As I spent most of my time in the new village, and since this is the context in which the Panará now live, my descriptions of fieldwork conditions focus on that location rather than on the situation encountered in the Xingú. The latter is discussed in Schwartzman (1988: 325–61), and I found much of what he describes to apply at the time of my own fieldwork there.

Map 1.1 Contact, transfer, and return

FIELDWORK CONDITIONS

The new village of the Panará lies within a territory of some 488,000 hectares, which has been identified and demarcated as Area Indígena Panará (Panará Indigenous Territory). It was first identified in 1994, and demarcation began in 1998.¹ By the end of 1998, there were 183 Panará inhabitants living in Nansepotiti, of whom 102 (56%) were aged 12 or younger. Therefore, the village I worked in was a village filled with children. Adults would often comment to me how in years to come the circular village would expand to form a huge circle. In fact, the population has continued to grow at a steady pace; by 2010, there were roughly 400 individuals in Nansepotiti, and a group of some 50 people had split off from the community to form the beginnings of a new village upstream on the Iriri River.

In many ways, it was fortunate that there were so many children in the village, as they were, without a doubt, excellent language teachers. With nothing better to do, they were almost endlessly amused telling me words to imitate and giggling as I did so. Things got more difficult when they found out that it was even more amusing for them to get me to speak words in English, which they then imitated. However, it wasn’t only the children who found entertainment in teaching me panará words. Women busy with beadwork or some other sedentary task were often happy to trade words with me, imitating my English renditions with exaggerated voices and distorting the phonology before erupting into fits of laughter.² In turn, they would tell me the equivalent terms in panará language for me to memorize.

Though I became reasonably proficient both in speech and comprehension of panará language, there are certainly areas in which incomprehension (particularly in the early days of fieldwork) compromised my knowledge of what was taking place. During the times I recorded speech, mainly when people were telling myths, I worked on transcription and translation with young Panará men who are fluent in Portuguese. I was extremely loath to use a tape recorder during ordinary conversations as most of these discussions took place in the midst of other activities, such as preparing food, working in the garden, doing beadwork, eating, bathing, watching or playing football, walking in the forest, or watching the men make baskets or feather ornaments in the central men’s house. It always seemed to me to be rude to expect people to chat about their daily lives with a microphone in front of them.

In general, I was always happier and more at ease when doing fieldwork by participation, gardening, gathering fruits in the forest, preparing food, hunting or fishing with the men, and going on forest treks. I am not suggesting that by joining in on as many activities as possible, I necessarily acquired a better sense of what it meant to be a Panará person at the time, but it is certainly true that conversations flowed more freely while I was engaged in doing things with people rather than rigidly collecting data, requiring people to stop what they were doing in order to talk to me. In any case, Panará people did not give me any choice in this, as it was clear to them that coming to “listen to talk” (pe mpari) meant coming to join in with whatever was going on. Almost from the first day, I was frequently told how beautiful Kaye Heelas³ was because she really knew how to make kiampo, a kind of manioc bread with fish or meat wrapped in wild banana leaves and baked in an earth oven. Particularly in the early days of fieldwork, Kaye was highly praised as someone who really knew how to do panará things and as someone who brought sacks of beads and cloth to give away. It soon became clear to me that this praise of Kaye was a way of showing me what was expected of me. As time passed, people would often express their delight at seeing me making beadwork, grating manioc, or even carrying what were admittedly paltry amounts of manioc in a basket suspended from a strap across my forehead. Praise for other visitors, such as earlier anthropologists, inevitably turned to a description of the kinds of things they brought with them.

In turn, the question of what industrial goods I could bring to the Panará was always an important topic, and from the outset, it was clear that my supply could never meet their demand. Every time I returned to the Panará after a break, I brought with me things they had asked for in the quantities in which I was able to supply them. This included ammunition, fishing equipment, shorts and T-shirts, flip-flops, a football, sewing cotton, needles, cloth, beads, small pots and pans, scissors, knives, combs, and mirrors. Among the women, beads and cloth were the items most demanded, while the men were most interested in ammunition and the consignments of Swiss Army knives I was able to bring along on two occasions. On the advice of other people with experience of doing fieldwork among Amazonian groups, I always gave away everything on the day I arrived, keeping nothing back for occasional presents to informants with whom I worked particularly intensively, such as when recording or transcribing myths. However, I did respond to special requests from such people on my next return from the city. Subsequent to my first visit, I also started taking artifacts made by the Panará for sale in São Paulo. With the proceeds from these sales, I would buy whatever items had been specified by their makers. It was often difficult, however, to balance the monetary value of the object with the items requested in return, and not infrequently, I ended up footing the bill for the discrepancy.

During my stay with the Panará, I lived in the house of the same family throughout and they gradually integrated me into their daily routine, finally including me fully in the processes of garden work and food preparation. This meant that, particularly in later fieldwork, I spent substantial amounts of time engaged in food preparation either for my own family or for others. It gave me great satisfaction to be able to make manioc bread when told to or to sit with Pikon and make bead armbands for her younger brother when a festival was being prepared. Invariably, somebody would come up to me and ask with a smile and a look of pleasant surprise: “You know how to do beadwork?” Being busy and working together are thought to be beautiful behaviors, and it was obvious that Panará people took pleasure in my efforts in that direction. In other activities, such as the carrying of heavy loads of garden produce or the clearing of gardens, Panará people were kind enough to accept what must have seemed more like token efforts than actual contribution.

In Nansepotiti, fifteen people, including myself, slept in a single-roomed house. There were three beds: one for Suakjê and her husband, Sokriti, their youngest daughter, and one grandchild; another for Suakjê’s daughter, Pikon, Pikon’s husband, Krentoma, and their two daughters; and finally, at the other end of the house, a bed for Suakjê’s other married daughter, Satun, and her husband, Mikre, and the younger of their two children. The rest of us slept in hammocks, many of which were tied up to a beam of the house during the day to permit people to walk around in the house relatively unhindered. At various times, pet monkeys, parrots, macaws, ducks, chickens, a coatimundi, and a baby white-lipped peccary also shared the space.⁴ During the day, panará houses are virtually unoccupied, with people either away from the village, outside in the open-sided cooking shelters attached to every house, or inside the central men’s house. When people do use the interior of the house during the day, they will sit in the doorway from where they can get a good view of what is going on in the village.

As is probably true for most ethnographers, fieldwork for me included both the most exhilarating as well as the most lonely of times. My mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness and died during this period, and for many months of fieldwork in 1997, I mourned her death. Coincidentally, perhaps, my inclination to lie in my hammock for hours on end and to drastically reduce social interactions corresponded very closely to what Panará people expect and do when hit by the death of someone close to them. Thus, they left me to be quiet during this time, while still keeping a watchful eye over me. I count myself lucky to have found myself among a people who, through their own experiences, have come to know so much about death and grief.

GETTING THERE

At the time of my fieldwork in Nansepotiti, the only means of access to the village was by small, single engine plane; although, since about 2007, there has been overland access by rough road. The flight takes about thirty minutes from the nearest town, Guarantã do Norte, which is one of many small towns that sprang up along highway BR-163 in the 1980s. Following the opening of the road between Santarém and Cuiabá, thousands of settlers were attracted to the area to find work in the open-cast goldmines around the Peixoto de Azevedo basin. Subsequently, the area was opened up to cattle farms, and more settlers followed, many coming from the southern states of Santa Catarina, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul. A large number were migrants who were being relocated after losing plots of land in other areas; others were so-called brasiguaios: Brazilians who had been living in Paraguay and had lost rights to land there.5 More recently, the area has been at the forefront of the timber logging frontier, which in turn has been followed by soybean cultivation. By 2005, the industrial scale cultivation of soy had reached Guarantã do Norte.

All along the road starting from around Peixoto de Azevedo, several grid-shaped towns have sprung up, of which Guarantã, Colíder, and Ma-tupá are the most significant to the Panará insofar as these are the towns the Panará are most likely to visit or pass through when leaving their village. The population of Guarantã is 32,216,6 and this is the town closest to Nansepotiti, which in recent years has come to be the main place where Panará people go in order to buy goods or deal with financial and bureaucratic matters. The regional administration of FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, has its headquarters in Colíder (pop. 30,7667), which is also the site of the regional hospital as well as a Casa do Indio, where Panará people go to get medical care. Now that most of the gold mines are no longer commercially viable, these towns have an air of slight decay about them; although, the trade in mahogany and the surrounding ranches still mean that employment can be found. This area is located on the northern edge of the soya belt, and the rapid expansion in soybean cultivation has had dramatic environmental and social effects. Providing infrastructure for soy farmers is also the driving force behind long-standing plans to pave the road all the way from Cuiabá to Santarém, making it passable all year. These plans are accompanied by well-founded fears on the part of indigenous groups living in the area, and these groups have campaigned for a proper environmental impact assessment as well as compensatory measures for themselves. Thus in 2006, a coalition of Kayapó and Panará people blocked the highway and demanded formal agreements to open roads off the main highway leading to their respective villages so that emergency health cases could be evacuated without having to wait for an aircraft to become available.

In the late 1990s, the towns along the BR-163 were quiet backwaters that had seen the excitement of the gold frontier pass, when fortunes could be made in a day and ended by a bullet. The main source of economic income came from timber logging and cattle farming, and local commerce was based on supplying everyday necessities to the surrounding ranches and smallholdings. Within this context, the FUNAI regional administration—and the Kayapó Indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Orthography
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Villages—The View from the House
• 3. Villages—The View from the Center
• 4. Soti—Things
• 5. Hipe—Enemies and Others
• 6. Hipe Within—Witches and Witchcraft
• 7. The Making of People
• 8. Peanuts
• 9. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index