The Archaeological Encounter

Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by
Paolo Fortis & Istvan Praet

Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and

Caribbean Studies
University of St Andrews
Occasional Publication No 33

CAS
Centre for Amerindian,
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of St Andrews
Occasional Publication No 33
ISBN-10: 1-873617-01-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-873617-01-4
Copyright Paolo Fortis and Istvan Praet 2011.

Contents
-

Foreword
Michael Heckenberger

Introduction
Paolo Fortis and Istvan Praet

35

Part I. Objects, Alterity and Memory

1. Is the Past another Time? Ancient Objects in
Tsachila Cosmology
Montserrat Ventura i Oller

56

2. The Memory of Objects and the Zpara

Production of Knowledge
Anne-Gal Bilhaut

80

3. The Chachi and their Uneasy Relationship with

Archaeology
Istvan Praet

101

Part II. History and Ancestrality

4. Guarding, Feeding and Transforming: Palm
Trees in the Amazonian Past and Present
Pirjo K. Virtanen

125

5. Rethinking Cities in Peruvian Amazonia:

History, Archaeology and Myth
Peter Gow

174

6. Nuchu and Kwarp: Images of the Past in Central

and South America
Paolo Fortis

204

Part III. Extended relationships

7. Like Scars on the Bodys Skin: the Display of
Ancient Things in Trio Houses (Northeastern
Amazonia)
Vanessa E. Grotti

236

8. Spirits, Genes and Walt Disney: Creativity in

Identity and Archaeology Disputes (Altai,
Siberia)
Ludek Broz

263

List of Figures
Figure 1 Salun Numi

64

Figure 2 Archaeological remains

65

Figure 3 The Fazenda Paran earthwork

134

Figure 4 Manchineri house made of paxiba wood and

ivory nut palm leaves

139

Figure 5 Heads of Manchineri arrows made of peach

palm wood

140

Figure 6 Ripe assai

141

Figure 7 Kuna wooden figures

210

Figure 8 Leopoldo Smith carving a wooden figure 212

Figure 9 Functional replica of Pazyryk chariot in
Ulagans museum made by Oleg Chelchushev and
several helpers

270

Figure 10 Souvenir model of Pazyryk chariot displayed

in one of Ulagans households

271

Figure 11 Oleg Chelchushev in the process of making

the chariot

281

List of Contributors
Anne-Gal Bilhaut is a researcher affiliated to the
University of Paris Ouest (Nanterre, La Dfense) and the
EREA

Centre

(Enseignement

et

Recherche

en

Ethnologie Amrindienne). In 2006-2007 she was a

fellow at the Quai Branly museum in Paris and in 20082009 she was a visiting researcher at the University of
Western Australia in Perth. Her research is focussed on
the Zpara Indians of Eastern Ecuador. She is
particularly interested in indigenous ways of dreaming,
the anthropology of food, and newly emerging forms of
politics in Amerindian societies.
Ludek Broz is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the
Siberian Studies Centre of the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology. His main geographical areas of
interest are Siberia and Inner Asia, especially the Altai
Republic where he conducted his doctoral research in
2004-5. His theoretical interests include the interface

between current science studies and the anthropology of

religion, as well as contemporary kinship theory.
Paolo Fortis teaches Social Anthropology at the
University of Roehampton (London, UK). He conducted
fieldwork with Kuna people (Panama) and is interested
in art, cosmology, sociality, and bodies. He has written
articles on designs, personhood and death. His
monograph on Kuna woodcarving and shamanism will
be published by the University of Texas Press in 2012.
Peter Gow is Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of St. Andrews, and the author of two books
and numerous articles based on fieldwork among the
indigenous peoples of the Bajo Urubamba river in
Peruvian Amazonia. He is currently engaged in a project
on the concept of acculturation in Amazonia, on the
transformational relations between neighboring peoples
in the region, and a long term comparative project on
social transformation in the Highlands of Scotland since
the eighteenth century.
Vanessa

Grotti

is

currently

British

Academy

Postdoctoral Fellow at ISCA (Oxford), studying the

6

relations between Trio and Wayana Amerindians and the

health care systems in Suriname and French Guiana. She
is the author of several articles analyzing conversion to
Christianity, corporeality, human non-human relations
and beer production and consumption among Caribspeaking populations of northern Amazonia.
Istvan Praet is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at
University of Roehampton (London, UK). His principal
areas of expertise are Latin America (Ecuador),
Amerindian forms of animism, and anthropologys
relationship with the life sciences.
Montserrat Ventura i Oller carried out fieldwork with
the Tsachila of Western Ecuador (1991-1997, 2000,
2005) focusing on cosmology, shamanism, ritual,
identity and notions of personhood. She is professor of
Social Anthropology at the Universitat Autnoma de
Barcelona and has published widely in edited volumes
and journals in Europe and America. Her monograph
Identit, cosmologie et chamanisme des Tsachila de
lquateur. la croise des chemins was published in
2009 in Paris by LHarmattan.
7

Pirjo Virtanen is a researcher in Latin American

Studies in the Department of World Cultures at the
University of Helsinki. Her research interests are
Arawakan speaking peoples, Amazonian indigenous
ontologies, migration, urbanization processes, cultural
change, indigenous youth, and indigenous politics.

Foreword
Michael Heckenberger
University of Florida

Recent archaeology in Amazonia radically alters

how regional specialists and outsiders, in general, view
the worlds largest forest. Until recently, issues of
biodiversity, ecological integrity, and climate change, all
of pressing global concern, were framed through idioms
of natural science and, in recent decades, within broader
neoliberal discourse of conservation and development of
the natural environment. Archaeology and indigenous
history suggest that the natural environment and its
history are not so strictly natural after all. They are
equally or, in some cases, more a reflection of sociocultural, economic, and political factors and flows.
Hidden beneath the forest canopy, complex and diverse
9

vestiges of past human influence are preserved in and on

the ground and in the composition of the forest and its
biodiversity. Many spectacular finds have been
exposed recently by the very denuding of forest cover
widely decried as a threat to local ecological integrity
and global climate. Geoglyphs in western Acre, Brazil
(Virtanen, this volume) and monuments that have
been discovered across the southern Amazon
graphically reveal what is buried beneath the forest.
Black earth, terra preta do ndio, in many areas, which is
widely known and used by indigenous people for its
unique properties, indicates a more illustrious past,
including sophisticated systems of semi-intensive land
management, and is seen by many scientists as a key to
sustainable tropical forest agriculture and carbon
sequestration.

Archaeology

provokes

wholesale

reconsideration of tropical nature and, by extension, not

only what is being saved, or not, but also why and for
whom.
Far from virgin forest and simple societies
marginal bands or tropical forest tribes research from
10

across the Amazon suggests a deep and rich history,

which is as diverse and dynamic as other world areas.
Within the contemporary world of interdisciplinary and
multi-cultural research, research questions multiply and
are reformulated as one changes scale and perspective.
Likewise, the diverse voices of other interested parties,
including indigenous peoples, challenge us to consider
not only what but who is Amazonia. Some voices,
notably those of indigenous peoples, are muted and, as
emphasized in The Archaeological Encounter, require
careful consideration in that small corner of the
knowledge production industry Western ruminations
on non-Western histories dominated by archaeologists
and historians.
Archaeology at the turn of the century, at the
point the Golden Spike that global climate indicators
prompt scientists to define a new geological epoch, the
Anthropocene, reveals a deep history, extending back to
earliest (human) times in the Americas in the late
Pleistocene. It is no less dynamic than other proportional
world areas in the pre-modern world or, in other words,
11

no less filled with people and their (hi)stories. Human

interactions that transformed the natural environment,
the domestication of nature and landscape, are as old and
varied here as elsewhere in the New World. Indeed,
biodiversity is pronounced in the region, in both natural
and socio-cultural terms. By the late Holocene, some
socio-political formations had become quite agential,
including powerful polities that radically transformed the
landscapes of the region. Amazonia adds novel variety to
the world sample of small- to medium-sized complex
societies, which have yet to make an impact in general
coverage of world history. Regardless of the fact that
bureaucratic states, large cities, or centralized empires
did not flourish here, diverse pathways and forms of
socio-political complexity did develop, including vast
political economies based on prestige goods and ritual
grandeur, which are no less impressive than other major
world regions.
In terms of world socio-cultural, political and
ecological history, the Amazon has burst onto the
scene recently, shattering some of the most popular
12

images of the tropics as pristine and primitive. Long

gone are the days of the one size fits all tropical forest
tribe, but recent commentators are reticent to frame
change in the terms of Western historical experience, the
origins

of

things

that

dominated

Enlightenment

sensibility as harbingers of progress: private property,

stone citadels, writing, draft animals, and, ultimately, the
bureaucracies, standing armies, full-time police, guilds,
factories,

barracks,

and

asylums

of

the

urban

revolution. Our words impel or even betray us, perhaps

even more in Amazonia than most other parts of the
world, but the region boasted what in common Western
parlance would be called kings, queens, nobles,
aristocracies, realms, estates, and properties, as well as
political power.
Archaeologies provide alternative narratives to
Western histories. Knowing these other histories, writing
the Amazon into our texts of world historical
development, is an important achievement in and of
itself. Discovering the domestication of nature in the
Amazon also has important implications for indigenous
13

pride of place, heritage preservation, and cultural rights.

It reveals a history of colonialism no less dire than
elsewhere in the Americas, the most recent chapter of
which, neoliberal conservation and development and
globalization, is no less dangerous to indigenous persons
than former forms. But, the past is contentious, as the
essays compiled here underscore. Indeed, while writing
this foreword I received word from Cultural Survival
that President Barack Obama announced that the US has
finally resolved to support the U. N. Declaration of
Indigenous Rights an e-mail that the Kuikuro, the
Amerindian community with whom Ive worked for the
past two decades, may well have seen before I did.
Cultural rights include the simple right to receive such
words and engage with them, to be part of the dialogue.
It also includes rights of first occupancy, intellectual
property rights, and the recognition of the dire historical
consequences of over five centuries of colonialism and
the rise of the political and economic fortunes of the
West.

14

Anthropological
ethnographic

archaeology,

perspectives

on

the

as

well

as

archaeological

encounter, add precision to this history but also present

new challenges. This timely volume explores one
important dimension of this new panorama: the
dialogues between archaeologists, and others interested
in the ancient past, and the authors and inheritors of this
past:

indigenous

peoples.

Critically

important,

indigenous peoples have views of the past and

knowledge of it, of diverse forms, and stand to gain
much from dialogues and partnership about their
heritage. However, as often as not, indigenous peoples
are limited partners in research, the source or subject of
archaeological,
reconstructions

historical,
and

local

and
labour

ethnographic
in

knowledge

production. This is the principal challenge for 21st

century

anthropology:

the

development

of

such

dialogues and partnerships, which, in the present case,

situate indigenous peoples in a history, and a future.
Forty years ago, David Clarkes influential paper,
Archaeology: Loss of Innocence (1973), pointed to the
15

transition from disciplinary consciousness to selfconsciousness

and,

ultimately,

to

critical

self-

consciousness: The loss of disciplinary innocence is the

price of expanding consciousness; certainly the price is
high but the loss is irreversible and the prize substantial.
The forward progress of archaeological science, the
phases

or

eras

of

knowledge

production

professionalism, specialization, and integration in a

discipline are as clearly marked in Amazonia as
elsewhere in the mid- to late-20th century. The regions
past, although still only probed by a very small group,
has netted some real gems, archaeological and historical
narratives
colonialism,

of

past
and

Native

American

globalization.

What

civilization,
archaeology

reveals, in a nutshell, is that, while uniquely Amazonian,

people here share much in common with other world
regions, notably other regions of the Global South.
Until recently, archaeological voices were fairly
mono-vocal, personalized narratives by pioneering
fieldworkers. Indeed, in 1989, when I first went to
Brazil, Anna Roosevelt was the only professional
16

archaeologist conducting in-depth fieldwork. By the

mid-1990s, there were still only a handful of researchers.
The landscape has changed dramatically over the past
decade. The first (2008) and second (2010) International
Congress of Amazonian Archaeology, held in Belm and
Manaus, included hundreds of participants. Various new
studies further confirmed the rising consensus that
Amazonia was not, exactly, what mid-20th century
anthropologists had assumed: sparsely populated. Some
areas teemed with people. More importantly, numerous
new professional voices have emerged. Archaeology, it
would seem, has come of age in the 21st century.
At the turn of the century, Christopher Tilley
(1998), one of Clarkes last students, pointed to the
isolation, or navet, of archaeology to social theory: it
failed to achieve the heralded critical self-consciousness.
The third archaeological Enlightenment, if I may be so
bold, refers to this reflexivity, and, particularly, the
critical

engagement

with

other

perspectives

in

interdisciplinary and multi-cultural dialogues, which are

unavoidably politically and ideologically charged and
17

always a work in progress. Archaeologists are experts in

the past, but it is not the only past nor the only way of
knowing it. They are specialized, skilled technicians, like
ethnographers,

linguistics,

historians,

and

natural

scientists, who hold certain perspectives, themselves

quite varied, in knowledge production networks that
today are as likely as not to bridge disciplines as fit
neatly within them. Furthermore, the current generation
of archaeologists, historical ecologists, and other
students of indigenous history, are increasingly aware of
this politics of nature, including the general shift from a
world of science, where certainty, solutions, and
quantitative results prevail, to a world of research, which
confounds certainty, truth, as perspectives and voices
multiply (Latour 1998). Amazonia is not alone in
reformulating

the

place

of

archaeologies,

and

archaeologists, in engaged research and dialogue with

diverse publics, notably indigenous peoples (e.g.,
Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007; Schmidt
2008),

but

it

does

offer

18

privileged

site

of

interdisciplinary

and

collaborative

research

and

articulation with broader dialogic communities.

The 2009 conference of the Association of Social
Anthropologists

in

Bristol,

Anthropological

and

Archaeological Imaginations: Past, Present, and Future,

heralded an important shift in emphasis in the field.
Several prominent archaeologists headlined the program,
like Ian Hodder, Julian Thomas, and Chris Gosden,
leading figures of the British wave that challenged the
hegemony of positivist cultural materialism of North
American anthropological archaeology. Fairly suddenly,
a place had been cleared for archaeology at the table of
European social anthropology and the Bristol conference
certainly marks this watershed moment. As a US
anthropologist, trained in the four-field approach, the
view that archaeology and social anthropology were
separate things has always seemed foreign. An even
deeper change was afoot: the shift to interdisciplinary
and multi-cultural knowledge production. This provokes
the question addressed by the chapters of this volume:

19

who

has

place,

legitimate

viewpoint,

in

archaeological research.
In Bristol, I participated in three sessions, which
all underscored this hybrid knowledge production. One,
Emergent Novelty, was organized by Stephanie
Koerner (Manchester), who specializes in the history of
science, particularly archaeology, and Tim Ingold
(Aberdeen) who, among British social anthropologists,
personifies a multi-field approach. It included, among
other things, human evolution, cultural heritage, and the
archaeology or persons, viewed from varied spatial and
temporal scales, from the microscopic to the global,
earliest times to the present, and representing a wide
array of specializations and perspectives. A second,
Historical Ecologies of Tropical Landscapes, was
organized by two social anthropologists, James Fairhead
(Sussex) and Pauline von Hellerman (York), whose work
in Africa parallels what historical ecologists have come
to accept in Amazonia: tropical forests are artefacts
and, more importantly, must be understood in the context
of cultural, social, and political histories, as well as
20

through natural science, within the contemporary world

of conservation, development, and globalization, the
politics of nature.
The session that resulted in this volume, The
Danger and Virtue of Ancient Things, brought together
ethnographers and archaeologists interested in how
indigenous peoples, mainly in Amazonia, conceived and
interacted with the past. As widely accepted in 2010,
Amazonian peoples have dynamic histories and diverse
forms

of

historicity

and

cultural

memory.

The

contributions here further challenge traditional views of

indigenous peoples as without interest in history, if not
outside of it altogether. Weve come a long way from
Steward and Farons (1959) assessment that Indians
lacked a sense of history and took no interest in
genealogies [and] there is no group whose oral history
extended more than one hundred years [or that] even
societies whose principal religious activities centered
in a cult of the dead concerned with ancestors in a
general sense and not identifiable individuals.

21

The Archaeological Encounter is unique in taking

as its problem how ancient artefacts and other
residues of past human agencies are seen from an
indigenous point of view. The perspectives of these
peoples, within broad socio-political and symbolic
economies, are broadly shared, in some respects,
although often diverse and distinctive from one place or
time to another. In other words, communities of practice
and imagined communities, multiply into strategies and
negotiations, social and political choices, and include
diverse ideologies in vast political economic landscapes.
Putting boundaries on these groups, like defining scale,
in any exact sense, reifies or confines what are, in fact,
continuous phenomena. Archaeological research in
Amazonia, like knowing the past itself, ancient or recent,
is multi-vocal and contentious. It is interdisciplinary and
multi-cultural, and shot through, so to speak, with
questions of scale and point of view: it is, in a word,
perspectivist.
In a paper called Sacred, Polluted, and Hybrid
Pasts, I discussed the dangers and virtues of ancient
22

things among the Xinguano peoples, as I have come to

know them over the past two decades. Interactions with
the past, and notably archaeological attempts to
understand it, include dangerous agencies and pollution.
It also involves opportunities for local collaboration,
including paid assistants and specialists in archaeological
knowledge production. Engaged research reveals and
maps aspects of the archaeological record, which
expands local and global views on the ancient past of the
Xinguano

peoples.

In

the

Upper

Xingu,

this

understanding emerges from archaeological research,

but, more critically, the relevance of these to my
understanding of the past owes as much to dialogues
with my colleagues Bruna Franchetto (ethno-linguist)
and Carlos Fausto (ethnographer). Dwelling together,
collaborating, in the field with other specialists, in the
Xingu and elsewhere in the region, has been both
inspirational and unsettling. Above all, the Kuikuro
changed

my

worldview,

and,

to

some

degree,

archaeology changed theirs. Working with indigenous

peoples reveals different ways of knowing and dwelling
23

in landscapes, sometimes quite different but commonly

complementary, as well.
Viewpoints invade and infect one another; they
provoke and, occasionally, convince one another.
Reading Gows paper on the Piro, I fondly recalled our
conversation in Rio de Janeiro in 1997, which included,
among many other things, talking about cities in ancient
Amazonia

and

in

the

minds

of

contemporary

descendants, as well as ample servings of cerveja and

carne seco. While not unique, Amazonian archaeology
benefits immensely from the interdisciplinary and socioculturally diverse interests and engagements of other
anthropologists and interested parties. This dialogue not
only inflects anthropological questions but addresses
issues of engagement itself: why do these questions
matter, how and to whom exactly. Social networks of
knowledge production, kin, affines, and others, in this
case

the

kindred

orbited

around

the

heady

anthropological atmosphere of the Museu Nacional,

create distinctive contexts of research and dialogues that
colour our anthropological findings.
24

What began as a caricature, something of a joke,

lost cities of the Amazon, now, to almost everyones
surprise, seems plausible if not probable in many areas,
with the caveat that urbanism, like domestication, needs
to be redefined to accept novel forms, often quite
different than classic examples from Western historical
experience. How we define and describe things,
construct comparative categories, creates the basis for
conversations about things like bodies and persons, kin
and affines, communities, landscapes and whole regions,
and relations between them. It is becoming increasingly
clear from across neo-tropical South America that this
dialogue includes historical examples of polity and its
twin pillars, statehood and urbanism, and familiar
themes of colonialism and globalization. Thus, no simple
definition is possible or desirable for any of these things:
ethnographers, archaeologists, and the people with
whom they work see different things, which by being
partially at odds inflect one another. It is the journey, the
conversation, rather than the destination (agreement on

25

things, about terms like urban, for example) that is

important.
The partial connections between archaeology and
indigenous peoples are also described by Virtanen from
the adjacent regions, in this case between nature and
culture, notably through palms, which alongside tubers
are the primary managed plant species. Palms are critical
in native cosmologies and socialities throughout
Amazonia and, in some cases (e.g., Maraj Island), may
have provided important staple crops for settled
societies. They were critical elements in late preColumbian urbanized landscapes in southern Amazonia,
which, as she notes, are concentrated in old settlements.
The distribution of these monumental built environments
partially coincides with Arawak speaking peoples in the
southern Amazon and elsewhere in the region, but, as
Gow notes in his chapter on the nearby Piro, social
relations and identities are reinvented, time and again,
and many of the boundaries or classes of artefacts we
see as critical are not even recognized or recognized as
important by the people themselves.
26

Front and centre, the diverse contributions

emphasize, as Fortis and Praet note in their introduction,
that artefacts are alive, and have their own agency.
Indeed, Grotti suggests that wealth can be understood as
the embodiment of personal histories of social relations,
as is true of what, in English terms, might be called
estates, Houses, cities and landscape. The Trio have a
fondness for ancient things and objects are part of the
body in the sense that they extend it and, as she goes on
to note, citing van Velthem (2001), the display of
objects confers attributes of visibility on [] objects
that go beyond the concrete action of seeing. The body
and adornment, the social skin, and embodied
personhood, often written on the skin of the land,
includes the agency of objects, the sociality that orbits
around them and their movements, including what
Santos Granero (2009) aptly calls the occult life of
things. It is these bodies, material cultures, and
landscapes that are what both archaeologists, and, often
enough, indigenous people, are most interested in.

27

The Xinguanos also have a fondness of the past.

Fortis briefly describes the celebrated Kwarp of the
Xingu, which he compares to his own studies of the
Kuna nuchu. The mortuary feasts instantiate persons,
which, as Barcelos Neto (2008) describes, are not only
constructed through material goods, but interact with
other beings, ancestors and other spirits, which have
their own agency over the living. Archaeological
examples expand what are described as properties,
heritability, ancestrality, and distributed personhood.
Burial urns, whose wide-mouths were purposely exposed
at the ground surface, represent specific ancestors on
Marajoara elite mounds. The late pre-Columbian cavern
cemeteries of Marac and tombs of the eastern Guianas
are other examples. Indeed, the whole Amazonian
Polychrome and related traditions is evidence of a vast
political economy that extended across the Amazon
River bottomlands, no doubt integrated through such
ritual enactments, parts of which are preserved in the
symbolic language of ceramic iconography. The scale of
these vast social landscapes is preserved in sacred
28

knowledge, such as that described in the Northwest

Amazon, or the urbanized built environments of southern
Amazon peer polities.
Brozs chapter on the Altai (Siberia), the only
non-Amazonian

contribution,

provides

fitting

conclusion to the volume. It underscores that indigenous

peoples in other parts of the world have diverse, often
political relations with ancient things and the people who
interact with them. Indeed, the past, its traces and the
narratives outsiders build from them, is not only linked
to broader discourses on the present but is potentially
dangerous, buried and linked to the other world, rather
than products in circulation that pertain to the safe
world of the living. In Amazonia, Bilhauts discusses
Zpara knowledge production, noting their penchant to
collect and store ancient things to control the past.
Through their own urgent ethnography, they engage
artefact teachers. Archaeology and the residues of the
past are important sources of cultural affirmation, pride
of place, and cultural rights within traditional knowledge
systems. The Chachi, as Praet notes, may have an uneasy
29

relationship with archaeology, but they are a good

example of the fact that relations with archaeologists are
more personal, varied, and their work not only provide
important clues to the past, as well as conversations on
it. In this sense, ethno-archaeology is no more seriously
flawed from the start than any other way of knowing the
present or the past, but should, to the degree possible,
involve an ethno-ethno-archaeology.
The nature of this dialogue, which unsettles and
shifts traditional divisions between outsiders and
insiders, specialists and laypersons, objects and subjects
of study, was suggested by Claude Lvi-Strauss (1978:
42):
by studying carefully this history, in
the general sense of the word, which
contemporary Indian authors try to give us of
their own past, by not considering this history
as a fanciful account, but by trying extremely
carefully, with the help of a type of salvage
archaeology excavating village sites referred
to in the histories and by trying to establish
correspondences, inasmuch as this is possible,
between different accounts, and by trying to
30

find what really corresponds and what does not

correspond, we may in the end reach a better
understanding of what historical science really
is.
The interest in the ancient as an arena of
scientific inquiry is indeed recent, a product, like
anthropology, of colonialism. Like science itself,
archaeology today needs to go well beyond the analytical
and develop a critical self-consciousness, one that
embraces the multi-vocal, contested, and hybrid nature
of dialogue. However, as Ventura i Oller notes, while
the indigenous past is not the same as our own, the
remains, respectively, of divine beings and remains of
other settlers whom historians call the ancestors of the
Tsachila, there is no reason to assume that both are not
legitimate

ways

of

addressing,

visualizing,

and

publicizing the past. The conceptualisation of history by

indigenous people is more an ethnographic piece of data
than a documented source, but so too are the ways
archaeologists and others dwell in the places of Others
pasts. In Amazonia, in dialogue with indigenous peoples

31

and their interlocutors, research is political. Most

practicing archaeologists realize that research is political,
as well as historical. They work within contexts of
application

that

represent

contested

frontiers

of

knowledge, as skilled labourers, like surgeons, slicing

and sewing up bits of the landscape, parts of even larger
geo-political bodies, and bodies of knowledge about
them.
At first glance, many practicing archaeologists
might feel that this is not a book for them, not relevant.
Aside from a brief overview in the introduction, there is
little

engagement

with

the

actual

archaeological

research. This compilation of studies is critical, however,

for archaeologists and others working in and around
indigenous peoples. It is among the first to interrogate
how indigenous peoples view ancient things, and the
persons that orbit around them, including the dead and
their

corporeal

historians

in

Western

societies,

archaeologists. In Amazonia, the on-going dialogue

between anthropologists and archaeologists interested in
challenging received conceptions of the worlds ancient
32

past erodes the familiar images of cultural and

ecological uniformity. This shatters the view that the
Amazon was sparsely settled by fairly primitive peoples,
not interesting and not pertinent to world historical
schemes or politicized neoliberal discourse that, as such,
they have little history nor rights to it, as authors and
participants in history-making. The Archaeological
Encounter, and other anthropological perspectives on it,
changes

the

meaning,

scope,

and

relevance

of

archaeology to address not only the mission of

anthropology to understand human diversity in all times
and places, but its commitment to revealing, as expert
witnesses, the entrenched inequalities of cultural
production, including the construction of history.

References
Barcelos Neto, A. 2008. Apapatai: Rituais de Mscaras no
Alto Xingu. So Paulo: EdUSP.

33

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, J. and T. J. Ferguson (eds.) 2007.

Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Working with
Descendant Communities. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press.
Clarke, D. 1973. Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence.
Antiquity 47, 6-18.
Latour, B. 1998. From the world of science to the world of
research? Science 280, 208-209.
Lvi-Strauss, C. 1978. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code
of Culture. Toronto: University Press.
Santos Granero, F. (ed.) 2009. The Occult Life of Things:
Native

Amazonian

Theories

of

Materiality

and

Personhood. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Schmidt, P. (ed.) 2008. Post-Colonial Archaeologies. Santa
Fe: SAR Press.
Steward, J. and L. Faron (eds.) 1959. Native Peoples of South
America. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Tilley, C. 1998. Archaeology: The Loss of Isolation.
Antiquity 72, 691-693.
Velthem, L. H. 2003. O belo e a fera: a esttica da produo
e da predao entre os Wayana. Lisboa: Museu Nacional
de Etnologia.

34

Introduction
Paolo Fortis and Istvan Praet

At least since the 18th century, archaeology is a

burgeoning academic endeavour. The efforts of its
practitioners have resulted in an understanding of the
human past that is infinitely richer, more acute and often
more surprising than what was imaginable prior to its
incipience. But what is sometimes forgotten is that
archaeological research rarely, if ever, takes place in a
vacuum. When ancient artefacts and the archaeologists
that excavate them appear on the scene this always
happens in specific places inhabited by specific people.
Even though the latter are usually not professional
archaeologists, they often have their own views of
dealing with the distant past and its material remains.

35

This volume gives pride of place to such non-expert

engagements with the ancient. More specifically, we
focus on how Amerindian people in South and Central
America conceive of the archaeological encounter. As
will become clear in what follows, the past often appears
as a dangerous territory in indigenous narratives; it is
inhabited by powerful agencies that may influence the
present. Such agencies can be hosted in ancient artefacts
that people find in unexplored corners of their land.
These artefacts are often envisaged as the product of the
creativity of enemies or, more generally, of outsiders.
The skilful handling of such extraneous things enables
people to cure, kill or foresee the future, among other
things. Archaeological artefacts are thus alive in
indigenous life-worlds. Even though conceived of as
pertaining to an alien world, they can activate
relationships with different forms of alterity, which
affect contemporary human beings. By investigating this
living quality of ancient things, this volume aims to
enrich current debates at the interface between
anthropology and archaeology.
36

On the basis of first-hand ethnographic research,

the contributors to the volume not only investigate how
Amerindians engage with historical artefacts but also
how they envisage those exotic people who go through
such great pains to study those old things, i.e.
archaeologists. It will emerge that archaeologists are
often regarded with suspicion, or even fear; indigenous
people frequently have misgivings concerning their
peculiar curiosity for the chthonic realm and their
physical interaction with potsherds and other remains
found in the undergrounds of their land. Yet, such doubts
are usually brushed under the carpet as irrational. A
common thread running through all the investigations is
the question why such indigenous conceptions of the
ancient tend to be taken less seriously than the official
accounts promoted by academic archaeology. Why is it,
for example, that Amerindians always seem to end up at
the wrong (or at least less exact) side of illustrious
dualisms such as History/Myth or Science/Culture? Why
is it, on the other hand, that professional archaeologists
have ended up as the only ones that are qualified to
37

speak of a past that is supposed to be pictured ever more

truthfully as the accumulation of historical/scientific data
continues? In short, a central aim of this volume is to
question the perhaps all too comfortable a priori division
between the archaeological knowledge of academic
experts and that of purported non-experts.
Archaeology is literally the science of the
ancient. Etymologically, the term derives from the
classical Greek notions arkhaios, ancient, and logos,
reason. As a scientific field, its position in the current
academic landscape is somewhat variable. In the socalled four-fields framework, prevalent in NorthAmerica, archaeology is subsumed under anthropology,
while European universities tend to envisage it as a
separate field altogether. Yet, there is a broad consensus
that the archaeological discipline is built on a couple of
fairly specific ideas and practices. Perhaps one of its
most recognizable features is that it involves the
excavation of artefacts and material remains from the
past. The underlying aim is to elucidate the origins and
historical trajectories of ancient human cultures and
38

societies. The focus of attention is especially (but not

exclusively) early human history or prehistory, that is,
the period for which no written sources exist. This
remarkable curiosity about the deep past goes back some
time, at least to the medieval epoch; moreover, it was by
no means limited to the European continent. For
example, Muslim scholars at the Al-Azhar university of
Cairo

already

attempted

to

decipher

Egyptian

hieroglyphs and studied pre-Islamic antiquities and

monuments in the 13th century. Flavio Biondo, an Italian
renaissance scholar fascinated by the ruins of ancient
Rome, is often hailed as one of Europes first
archaeologists. Another commonly cited precursor is
the Spanish Jesuit Jos de Acosta, who travelled in the
Americas during the 16th century and wrote in exquisite
detail about the traces left by the Inca, Aztec and other
Amerindian civilizations in his famous treatise Historia
natural

moral

de

las

Indias.

However,

the

institutionalization of archaeology as an academic

discipline only dates from the 18th century, that is, from
the period known as the Enlightenment. People such as
39

Heinrich Schliemann - the excavator of Troy - and John

Lloyd Stephens - who discovered various important
Maya sites - were instrumental for archaeologys
consolidation as a veritable science.
Archaeologys elevation to the status of a
proper science has had important consequences with
regards to the way in which the past is viewed and dealt
with at present. In a quite literal sense, the ancient past
has become the privileged domain of a fairly limited
group of professionals: only trained archaeologists and
their scientific proxies are properly accredited to make
pronouncements about it, only those who possess the
appropriate digging and documenting skills are allowed
to engage with it physically. Arguably, professional
archaeologists have successfully delimited the distant
past as a field of enquiry that falls under their sole
authority. Or, to put this less strongly: it is widely
accepted that only archaeologists can expertly deal with
all that pertains to ancient human cultures. That is not to
say that non-archaeologists are so easily kept in line.
Amateurs, hobbyists, local enthusiasts but also so-called
40

indigenous people have their own conceptions of the

past; this has been documented amply by contemporary
anthropology (e.g. Gow 2001, Hill & Santos-Granero
2002, Whitehead 2003, Heckenberger 2005, Fausto &
Heckenberger 2007).
One could say that the whole framework is
premised on the great divide between Us and Them,
between those in the know (archaeologists and all those
sensible enough to recognize their authority) and those
who are out of the loop (amateurs, animists and all those
stubborn enough to cling to their supposedly archaic
cosmologies). In other words, it is based on an a priori
separation between our history (singular) and their
myths (plural). Arguably, this separation is just one
instantiation of a wider dualistic framework often
referred to, albeit in unsatisfactory general terms, as
modernism or the Western cosmology. As various
contemporary authors have pointed out (e.g. Descola
2005, Viveiros de Castro 2009), this framework is based
on a seemingly ineluctable bifurcation between nature
and culture, as well as between their concomitant 41

isms: universalism and relativism, or naturalism and

multiculturalism. In this scheme, archaeological truth
and History with a capital H overlap with the pole of
nature,

while

the

various

supposedly

distorted

approximations of non-archaeologists and the myths of

alleged non-moderns are isomorphic with the pole of
multiple cultures. Alternatively, the bifurcation can be
expressed by means of familiar dichotomies such as
trustworthy/dodgy, rational/primitive, Western/native,
modern/traditional, professionalism/amateurism or more specifically - academic archaeology/treasure
seeking, scientific digging/grave plundering. Note that
the activities of indigenous people and other purported
non-experts tend to be seen as disturbing by default.
A principal purpose of this volume is to question
this prevalent idea of the non-expert as an unavoidable
nuisance. In line with recent anthropological and
archaeological research, it aims to probe in how far
people without formal training in archaeology can
constructively contribute to academic debates about
bygone epochs. This contribution is not necessarily
42

limited to what one can learn from myths, oral traditions

and local accounts of the past; it also includes
contemporary usages of ancient artefacts. The present
volume intends to illustrate that such usages cannot be
reduced to mere treasure hunting and/or illegal
trafficking; in other words, they should not necessarily
be seen as disturbances of a supposedly intact past,
waiting to be excavated and expertly described. A key
premise of this book is that studying the ways in which
ancient things are incorporated in present-day spheres of
life is by no means superfluous but interesting in itself
and may even add something of value to the
archaeological endeavour as a whole.
Consider the use of archaeological artefacts by
shamans and all kinds of ritual experts. Anthropologists
have documented this remarkably consistent predilection
for ancient things all over the world, albeit often only in
passing (see, for example, Claude Lvi-Strauss classic
work on the mythical and ritual connotations of pottery,
La Potire Jalouse). In the Americas, the toolkit of
shamans may consist of obsidian projectile points, flint
43

axes, pre-Columbian figurines and pottery but also of

fossil remains and bones of Pleistocene animals. Such
artefacts are often conceived of as endowed with a
specific potency or power, just like those who
manipulate them. The idea appears to be extremely
widespread and is not necessarily restricted to what is
conventionally classified as archaeological: living
entities and specific features of the environment can also
be imbued with such ancestral powers. For example,
Chachi shamans of the Pacific coast of Esmeraldas
(Ecuador) maintain that their paraphernalia of old
potsherds, statuettes, aromatic herbs and polished rocks
were originally made by uyala, powerful cannibals,
while they themselves are often perceived as latently
dangerous and are indeed sometimes referred to as maneaters. What is more, those who purposefully search for
that kind of things are often envisaged in strikingly
similar terms; Chachi people sometimes suspect latterday archaeologists to be sorcerers keen on human flesh
(Praet, this volume).

44

In scientific accounts such apprehensions of the

ancient tend to be dismissed as irrational or, at least, not
entirely trustworthy. Yet, the widespread character of
such at first sight frivolous conceptions and their
associated practices suggest that the shamanic usage of
ancient things forms part of a longstanding tradition
which may itself reveal something about the distant past.
To be sure, the issue is tricky: let it be clear that this
book is not a surreptitious attempt to revive the now
defunct idea that indigenous peoples, because of their
presupposed

inherent

primitiveness,

offer

the

investigator a privileged window on the past. In recent

years, archaeologists and anthropologists have rightfully
insisted that the argument that there exist people
without or outside history is ethno-centric and,
ultimately, unfounded. Our aim here is not to challenge
this crucial insight. However, we do wonder in how far
the appropriate worry of avoiding that intellectual trap
has

prevented

contemporary

researchers

from

developing an eye for age-old continuities in so-called

indigenous societies. More generally, we wonder by
45

which kind of intractable magic the Western cosmology,

with its inbuilt bifurcation between nature and culture,
between a singular history and multiple myths, between
the archaeological truth of experts and the distorted
approximations of non-experts, appears so self-evident.
Ultimately, this volume is not so much about
documenting

cultural

constructions

of

the

archaeological encounter as about questioning the very

notion of such constructions and the more fundamental
reality it presupposes.
While most chapters focus on peoples of Greater
Amazonia (including the tropical lowlands of Central
America), one chapter deals with the Altaian people of
Siberia. Ludek Brozs account of the Altaians provides
an interesting counterpoint to the Amerindian papers,
as it shows how a desired ancestral link is expressed
through the contemporary creation of artefacts that
stylistically emulate objects found in archaeological
sites. Broz shows that excavated remains are considered
highly dangerous and therefore avoided by local people.
The creation of replicas of ancient objects activates the
46

relationship with contemporary people and their

ancestors vis--vis the nation state. In the Amazonian
context, the relationship with ancestors is often denied,
or is projected onto the level of alterity; among Altaians
it appears to materialize through a process of
externalization of the creative agency of contemporary
individuals. The chapters focusing on Amerindian
peoples explore two paths. On the one hand they focus
on present day practices through which people interact
with objects that they conceive of as imbued with the
power of immortal beings. This implies an adjustment of
common

understandings

of

what

counts

as

archaeological, for it may also include such things as

recently carved wooden statues and living trees, which
some Amerindians envisage as ancient and/or ancestral.
This is evidenced by the case of the Kuna people from
Panama, who mediate their relationship with dangerous
alterity by creating wooden artefacts imbued with similar
powers to those once possessed by their ancestors
(Fortis, this volume). In addition, it will emerge that
objects acquired from foreigners and outsiders are
47

considered powerful in a similar way as those made by

ancient people. Spatial and temporal distance is a source
of alterity and power (Helms 1979, Ventura i Oller, this
volume). Objects and food kept in the houses of Trio
people from Suriname bespeak of the network of
relations that their owners have managed to establish
with past and present allies and are related to
contemporary notions of personhood (Grotti, this
volume). In a similar vein, the authenticity of objects
found in the forest, or in museums, by the Ecuadorian
Zpara, can be ascertained through dreams, which reveal
them as people (Bilhaut, this volume). On the other
hand, the chapters examine the narratives and the myths
through which people account both for their own past
and for that of those others who created the objects
they use in their everyday lives, often for protective and
curative purposes. We are particularly interested in how
such ideas and their usages inform the social values
involved in the on-going creation of peoples lived world
(Munn 1986). Put simply, the rationale is that what
people do in the present says something about how they
48

conceive of the past. When this ethnographic perspective

is augmented with archaeological research, as Pirjo
Virtanens chapter demonstrates, new light may be cast
on the link between cosmology and history. Similarly,
myths narrated by contemporary Piro people from
Peruvian

Amazonia

reveal

information

about

disappeared cities in the forest, which can be brought

into alignment with archaeological material (Gow, this
volume).
Given that most contributors are Amazonia
specialists, we are particularly intrigued by the recurring
observation that indigenous people in South America
associate ancient artefacts with the outside that is, with
strangers,

enemies

or

the

dead.

In

Amazonian

anthropology, it has become commonplace to say that

Amerindians deliberately distance themselves from their
ancestors; kinship is rarely if ever conceived of in terms
of lineages. A widely supported conclusion is that
genealogical continuity between contemporary people
and those who lived in their territories in the past is
downplayed if not denied altogether (cf. Overing 1977,
49

Taylor 1993). In fact, the dead are often considered as

strangers and enemies (Carneiro da Cunha 1978).
However, recent research has partly questioned this lack
of generational continuity and the idea of the active
distancing of the living from the dead (Chaumeil 2007,
Heckenberger 2007). Furthermore, the appearance of
new

archaeological

evidence

suggests

higher

complexity of ancient settlements in Amazonia than

previously imagined (Heckenberger 2005). In line with
these recent contributions we suggest that refining our
understanding

of

the

specific

relationships

that

contemporary Amerindians entertain with those who

used to dwell in their territories in the past may be very
rewarding.
The present volume, which provides ethnographic
perspectives on these various issues, is only a first step
towards this goal. The papers that constitute it were
presented at the 2009 ASA Conference held in Bristol
(Anthropological and Archaeological Imaginations:
Past, Present and Future). No doubt, much still remains
to be done, but we hope that the ensuing chapters
50

provide a good starting point to further the on-going

dialogue between anthropologists and archaeologists
interested in challenging received conceptions of the
worlds ancient past.

References
Carneiro da Cunha, M. 1978. Os Mortos e os Outros: uma
Anlise do Sistema Funerrio e da Noo de Pessoa entre
os Indios Krah. So Paulo: Hucitec.
Chaumeil, J.-P. 2007. Bones, flutes, and the dead: Memory
and funerary treatments in Amazonia. In Times and
Memory

in

Indigenous

Amazonia.

Anthropological

Perspectives (eds.) C. Fausto and M. Heckenberger, 13368. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Descola, P. 2005. Par-del nature et culture. Paris: Editions
Gallimard.
Fausto, C. & Heckenberger, M. (eds.) 2007. Time and
Memory

in

Indigenous

Amazonia.

Anthropological

Perspectives. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.

Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian Myth and its History. Oxford:
University Press.

51

Heckenberger, M. 2005. The Ecology of Power: Culture,

Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, AD 10002000. London & New York: Routledge.
2007. Xinguano Heroes, Ancestors, and Others:
Materializing the Past in Chiefly Bodies, Ritual Space, and
Landscape. In Times and Memory in Indigenous
Amazonia. Anthropological Perspectives (eds.) C. Fausto
and M. Heckenberger. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida.
Helms, M. 1979. Ancient Panama. Chiefs in Search of Power.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hill, J. & Santos-Granero, F. (eds.) 2002. Comparative
Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and
Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana & Chicago: University
of Illinois Press.
Munn, N. 1986. The Fame of Gawa. A Symbolic Study of
Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea)
Society. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Overing, J. 1977. Orientation for Paper Topics, in J.Overing
(ed.) Social Time and Social Space in Lowland South
American Societies. Paris: Actes du XLII Congrs
International des Amricanistes.

52

Taylor, A.-C. 1993. Remembering to Forget: Identit,

Mourning and Memory among the Jivaro. Man, (N.S.) 28:
653-678.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2009. Mtaphysiques cannibales. Paris:
PUF.
Whitehead, N. 2003. Histories and Historicities in Amazonia.
Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

53

54

Part I
Objects, Alterity and Memory

55

Is the Past another Time?

Ancient Objects in Tsachila Cosmology
Montserrat Ventura i Oller
University of Barcelona

In a recent article in the journal Les Temps

Modernes, Claude Lvi-Strauss recalls how poorly his
idea of considering indigenous societies as cold was
understood. According to Lvi-Strauss, [the distinction
between hot and cold societies] does not suggest a
difference in nature between societies nor does it place
them in separate categories; rather it refers to the
subjective attitudes that societies adopt regarding history
and the different ways in which they understand it. Some
nurture the dream of enduring forever, as they believe

56

they were created at the beginning of time. Clearly, they

are mistaken: these societies do not evade history any
more than those like our own who do not deny that
they are historical and who find the driving force of their
development in the idea they are made from history. No
society can therefore be termed completely hot or
cold. These are theoretical concepts: certain societies
move through time, in one sense or another, on an axis,
whose poles are never occupied by any of them. (LviStrauss 1998: 67) He later added: societies that were
previously cold heat up when history ensnares and pulls
them in (as observed in the Americas, where American
Indian peoples, accepting their past, discover that they
have common interests and unite as nations to defend
themselves). I have asked myself whether, at the end of
this century, our own societies are not sending out
noticeable signs of cooling (Lvi-Strauss, 1998: 68).
Although this ad hoc reflection is from 1998, the
recently deceased author had first explored it 50 years
before, at a time when anthropology, especially the
anthropology focused on indigenous societies, was often
57

considered to be incompatible with history as a method

of investigation. At present, however, indigenous
history, ethno-history, cultural history and historical
anthropology have established that the indigenous past
is not equivalent to our own. Elsewhere, I have
attempted to analyse the correlations between ways of
representing the past, language, myths, cosmologies and
the meaning behind the shamanic objects of an
indigenous group, the Tsachila of the western lowlands
of Ecuador (Ventura 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2009,
Dickinson & Ventura forthcoming). The present chapter
continues this investigation by taking one particular
myth as its starting point.

Pieces of Salun
Walking along the banks of the Naranjos stream
with Alejandrino Aguavil in July 1995, we found pieces
of what appeared to be ancient pottery. These pieces,
Alejandrino explained, were the remains of salun numi,
the penis of Salun. In the community of Congoma such
58

pieces are also called suyun numi, the penis of the

rainbow. These two associations are not contradictory.
Suyun is a mythical being that can take the form of a
rainbow or a so-called rainbow snake (suyun pini). It
often appears to humans in the form of an extremely
handsome man who is always coveted by Tsachila
women; but when women touch or embrace him, they
get burned and die. Salun is a mythical being with a long
tail, which prevents him from sitting down. He uses it
to trick, penetrate and - eventually - kill women.
Basically, there are two similarities between these
beings: a prominent sexual organ and the faculty of
killing humans. But while Suyun is avoided but not
immediately dismissed (his beauty initially attracts
women), Salun is avoided straight away, and his acts are
always considered the result of harmful powers. While
for some Tsachila in Congoma both figures are distinct,
for others the distinction is not so clear-cut. Alejandrino,
for example, referred to numis remains in the following
terms:

59

In ancient times, there was a Tsachi

[matu mate jein tsachi manka churan
chulamantie] whose daughter was learning to
be a shaman. But one shaman was annoyed, as
he believed that women should not be shamans.
He called for Salun, who lived in a waterfall.
He [Salun] arrived at the grandparents house
in the form of a grandchild asking to sleep in
the same bed with the young woman who was
learning to be a shaman, because his parents
had gone fishing that night. The grandparents
offered to let him sleep with them in their bed,
but he cried and shouted until they let him
sleep in the bed of the young woman. When
she didnt get up in the morning, her parents
went to check and found Salun on top of her
having sex - his penis came out of her mouth
full of semen. Salun fled leaving a trail of
semen and the womans parents followed him.
They found him sleeping, so they got an axe
and cut off his penis. Salun went into the
waterfall of the lagoon and shouted that he
could regenerate himself. Indeed, his genitals
grew back and he continued to rape and kill
Tsachi men and women. Salun carried his penis
rolled around his body like a necklace. He was
like a boy, but very strong.
On one occasion, a Tsachi who was
hunting met a boy who encouraged him to join
a party. The hunter went to the party; he
60

climbed up a hill where there was a house full

of all types of Tsachila people: in the form of
deer, agouti, jaguar [mana tsankiranla, kuru
tsankiranla, kela tsankiranla (tsan = as;
kiranla: see/plural: see as = form), kono
tsankiranla (form of a rabbit)]. They were
dancing. Then the sloth [mantsa, lazy] decided
to stretch in order to straighten out his back.
The party came to an end and everyone left,
running down the hill. The hunter was sitting
on a balsa wood bench, until he suddenly
realized that he was sitting high up a tree.
Scared and alone, he could not get down. He
started to shout. Salun came by and offered to
help him get down; he coiled his penis around
the tree branch, and lay down face up. The
hunter descended using the penis like a vine,
but jumped off to avoid Salun's clutches. Salun
followed him. The hunter asked an iguana for
help to cross the river. The iguana hesitated
until he made sure, by looking at his teeth, that
the Tsachi couldnt eat iguana. They then
crossed the river. Afterwards Salun arrived and
he also asked the iguana to help him cross the
river. The iguana hesitated again because he
feared that Salun would eat his family. They
began to cross after the iguana had inspected
his teeth, but in the middle of the river the
iguana sank and Salun disappeared. It is said
that his penis got caught in a bed of guadua
bamboo and smashed into pieces. That is why
61

there are pieces of Saluns penis littered in the

river today. This is the story [jaatsanke
kuwenta joe], just like the story from ancient
times [matuto kuwenta, tsankeri joe].1
Many elements in this myth deserve further
analysis. However, another paper would be necessary to
compare it not only with other versions of the same myth
and with other tales from the same series within the
Tsachila mythical corpus, but also with related myths of
neighbouring groups such as the Chachi, with whom
they share many linguistic, social, cultural and historical
features. Here, I will limit myself to assessing the
material evidence of this mythical time in the present
day and age. Of all the spirits (oko) from this other time,
only luban oko - the red spirit who sucks the blood of
humans and animals and appears in human form remains active. That is why potsherds and other
archaeological pieces are sometimes also referred to as

1 Extract from two versions of the Salun myth, both narrated to

Montserrat Ventura by Alejandrino Aguavil in Naranjos, on 26
August 1994 and 16 July 1995. Both translated by Alfonso Aguavil.

62

bits of luban oko numi, the penis of the red spirit. Direct
contact with such pieces does not cause immediate harm
but one must avoid taking them home, for they can cause
illnesses as the spirit tends to follow whoever takes
them. Something similar happens with the stones of the
pone (shaman), black stones that are often found along
riverbanks. These black stones are incarnations of seiton
oko, bad spirits. Only shamans can tame these spirits; if
they manage to do this, the stones can be used for
healing purposes; just as the pieces of Saluns penis, they
are endowed with shamanic power. While Saluns penis
pieces are not explicitly presented as healing objects,
hard black stones and ancient pottery remains especially anthropomorphic archaeological artefacts that
are also found along the river banks - are among the
usual paraphernalia of Tsachila shamans (ponela). At
their healing table2 they prominently figure alongside

2 I use the expression healing table to refer to a kind of ritual place

used by Tsachila shamans to gather all the ritual objects, most of the
time in the form of a table, but this table has different connotations
than those usually attributed to the Andean mesa as defined by D.

63

other ritual objects of a different ethnical (i. e. nonTsachi) origin. And because of their shamanic power,
they also circulate in the shamans exchange network.3

Figure 1 Salun Numi

Sharon (1988). That is why I avoid this term here (cf. Ventura
2009).
3 When these remains were anthropomorphic, Alejandrino used to
sell them to tourist shops in Santo Domingo. But like other old
Tsachila, he also sold them to a trader in ritual objects, thus
participating in an ancient, country-wide shamanic exchange
network (see Ventura 2003 and 2009).

64

Figure 2 Archaeological remains

What do the remains of Salun, the shamans black
stones and the other objects that comprise the shamans
healing tables, such as Shuar tsantsas (shrunken heads)
and Quichuas del Napo spears, have in common? Some
are from the mythical past; others from a far-off people
or a distant land. Distance through time and space

65

endows symbolic material with alterity, a source of

power for the Tsachila, as I have shown elsewhere.4 It is
important to note that Tsachila people acknowledge that
such powers do not affect whites (fetola), for whom such
artefacts are prized tourist objects. Shamanic powers do
not reach Quito, Ecuadors capital; they only concern the
Tsachila. This is why Alejandrino assured me that there
was no reason to worry about my safety if I stored them
carefully in Quito: Luban oko is not used to take the
bus. Neither the Tsachila nor their spirits are
universalists. We are dealing with local and locallycentred powers.

Myth and history

Tsachila people of the past had different customs
from those of the present. Just as in Lowenthals foreign
4 Alterity as a source of power is revealed in the shamanic exchange
networks for both objects and knowledge, involving different ethnic
groups in the Andes, the Amazon and the Pacific coast; the alterity
of shamanic knowledge and objects are explicitly valued (Ventura
2009; cf. Chaumeil 1994 and Tylor 1996).

66

country (1985), they do things differently there [in the

past]. They speak differently, with suffixes unthinkable
in

everyday

speech

(Dickinson

and

Ventura

forthcoming); shamans can have two wives, humans can

breed with animals or spiritual beings; or change
appearance during a story. Yet that time is not perceived
as strange by contemporary Tsachila, contrary to what
Lowenthal (1985, 1996) suggests regarding the historical
past. Stephen Hugh-Jones asserts that nothing happens
in the historical narrative that could not happen today,
while myths are full of impossible events that come from
a level of reality that is only accessible through dreams,
shamanism and ritual (1989:56). This could be nuanced
when regarding the Tsachila case. In mythical times
things happened that followed moral rules and norms
that are compatible with those of today. It is not a time
that has ended, like historical time; it is a time that
always remains present through myth. We are not
dealing with a time that is disconnected from the here
and now. That is why one encounters its remains when
passing by a river, remains that remind us that Salun was
67

really there. They are instances of the mythical time that

establish bridgeheads with the contemporary world. One
may add that this is characteristic of Amerindian
cosmology more generally: worlds are not separate but
connected. One always finds paths, vines, rivers,
channels of communication between different spheres of
the universe (cf. Ventura, 2005). This exemplifies that
there are no impassable borders between the everyday
world and that of myth. Obviously, all this differs from
received meanings of the archaeological. It is said that
when archaeological remains are set up as collective
heritage objects, they can activate all the mechanisms of
memory,5 but they do not allow us to travel to this other
past world with any more than the imagination. But
pieces of Salun can really harm, as they did in mythical
times. And shamans do travel to this mythical world. In
his journey, the shaman reaches other time/spaces
backgrounds. Again, what matters here is the meaningful
5 The relationship between history and memory has been discussed
by historians especially since the 1980s (cf. Connerton 1989) but
has also awakened the interest of anthropologists (cf Ingold 1996).

68

difference between a key notion of Western ontology,

i.e., chronological /spatial linearity, and Amerindian
ontologies
One aspect which makes Tsachila myths stand
out from what has been reported for other Amerindian
mythologies is that the individual does not disappear
from the narrative. According to Hugh-Jones (1989:56),
individuals in Barasana myths disappear to the benefit of
unitary categories, beings with stereotypical and
generalised attributes that are in conflict with historical
and everyday narratives where the focus is on the details
and complexities of individuals and events. Through the
evidentiality that characterises the Tsafiki language
(Dickinson 2000), the explicit relationship between the
narrator and the event narrated is expressed, while any
direct connection with impersonal past events is
prevented. All the tales that go further back than the
grandparents generation should be accompanied with
so-and-so has said that so-and-so said or ultimately it
is said that. It will never be ascertained, however, that
all Tsachila dressed this way or in the past we lived in
69

such-and-such a place. Through its suffixes Tsafiki

differentiates between degrees of connection with the
information narrated, whether through direct sensorial
experience (the speaker is witness to the events), direct
physical evidence or deduction based on general
knowledge of the world. This means that in this manner
Tsafiki clearly delineates the speakers relationship to
the event in terms of participation; this participation can
be physical (they were there), psychological (it fits in
with their worldview) or social (they are part of the
group).6 To these three distinctions we should add an
indirect discourse marker, ti, also classified as evidential,
that can be repeated to indicate up to three sources of
information between the speaker and the original event
(Dickinson 2000:407-408). Dickinson shows that the
indirect style presents a different function from that in
English, Spanish or other European languages, where the
speakers suggestion is associated easily with the
certainty of the statement. In Tsafiki, the indirect style
6 C.S.Dickinson, personal communication

70

seems simply used to locate the source of the

information outside of the speaker, without implying
other connotations. However, Tsafiki is not the only
language that expresses evidentiality through such a
marked indirect discourse system. This system seems to
fulfil the same function in other Amerindian languages
where it is present. Consider, for example, the use of
quotations by the Arawet of Brazilian Amazon.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out the overriding
importance of individual tradition over the impersonal
for Arawet people. This system gives authority to the
words of shamans and specific ancestors quoted during
the discourse, beyond the idea of a generic ancestrality
(Viveiros de Castro 1992: 17-18). In Tsafiki, the use of
the direct form is not only the direct, conscious
experience of the event, but also includes the degree with
which information is integrated into general knowledge
(Dickinson 2000:409). This does not mean that there is
no historical awareness among the Tsachila. Yet, this
form of relating to events establishes a distinction
between lived history (i.e. the succession of events in the
71

personal life cycle: childhood, marriage, constitution of

the commune, arrival of electricity, the road and the
Evangelist pastor, etc.) and a generic History. Generic
past,

necessarily

recounted

by

others

than

the

protagonists, is invariably concluded by so they say or

sometimes by the rhetorical question is that true? This
does not hamper a clear distinction between the
historical and mythical stories, which always refer to this
other time of the Tsachila world.
The Tsachila are the product of an ethnogenesis
of colonial origin among various groups which were
decimated as a result of external pressure (Salomon
1997, Ventura 2009). However, unlike other groups that
have emerged under similar conditions on the Amazon
border, such as the Napo Quichuas analysed by Bianca
Muratorio (1987), the Canelos-Quichua analysed by
Norman Whitten (1987), and the people of the Bajo
Urubamba analysed by Peter Gow (1991), it is necessary
to mention that the Tsachila have not constructed their

72

mythical past in a chronological way.7 Whether this is

because their historical experience of colonial contact
has not been as traumatic as in the Amazonian region
and history is consequently not experienced as a
traumatic transformation process, remains an open
question. In any case, Tsachila myths contain many
elements of general history; past events form the setting
of mythical stories, e.g. when the Tsachila went to Quito
to sell chilli peppers and their shamans fought against
evil beings, or when their women were pursued by a
priest who emerged from the groundwater and ended up
turning into stone. The stories of their battles against the
Dobe, wild enemies (Indios bravos) who also appear in
the stories of their Chachi neighbours (Ventura 1999 and
Praet, this volume) also contain many historical
elements. Following Gows analysis (1991:9-20), I
suggest that the conceptualisation of history by
indigenous people, with regards to their way of
7 A.C. Taylor (1996) has revealed this common feature in her
review of those three monographs in a paper devoted to the Jivaros
notion of history.

73

summarising and explaining it, is more an ethnographic

piece of data than a documented source. In the case of
the Tsachila, it enables us to see which essential
elements from their experience of colonial contact with
the West have been retained. These stories exist in
parallel with mythical stories, such as that of Suyun, in
which there is no evidence of the white world or lineal
time as they are known in the West. Given this
background, the Tsachila do not doubt that the remains
of Salun are the remains of another reality, a
simultaneous world of old settlers that they do not know
and on which archaeologists can shed light. Perhaps I am
stretching things too far, but the fluidity of Amerindian
cosmology makes it possible, as Gutirrez Estvez
already noted for the Mayas (2006), to be A and B at
the same time without contradiction. The remains of the
past may be the remains of Salun and the remains of
other settlers whom historians call the ancestors of the
Tsachila.

74

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J.-P.

1994.

Las

Redes

Chamnicas

Contemporneas y las Relaciones Intertnicas en el

Alto Amazonas. Revista de Antropologa, UNMSM
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P.

1989.

How

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Remember.

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Descola, Ph. 1996. Constructing Natures. Symbolic
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Dickinson, C. S. 2000. Mirativity in Tsafiki. Studies in
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Dickinson, C. & M. Ventura i Oller (forthcoming). La
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Gow, P. 1991. Of Mixed Blood. Kinship and History in
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Gutirrez Estvez, M. 2006. Dualismo y Mestizaje en la

Identidad de los Mayas de Yucatn. In La frontera,
entre Lmits i Ponts (eds.) M. Ventura, A. Lluis, & G.
Dalla Corte, 161-173. Barcelona: ICCI-Casa Amrica
Catalunya.
Hugh-Jones, S. 1989. Wribi and the White Men:
History and Myth in Northwest Amazonia. In
History and Ethnicity, ASA Monographs 27 (eds.) M.
Tonkin McDonald and M. Chapman, 53-70. London
& New York: Routledge.
Ingold, T. 1996. 1992 Debate: The Past is a Foreign
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Lvi-Strauss, C. 1998. Retour en arrire. Les Temps
Modernes 598, 66-77.
Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country.
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Sharon, D.1988 [1978]. El Chamn de los Cuatro
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Transformations des Rapports Interethniques depuis

la Priode Coloniale. In Las Races de Amrica.
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1999.

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(ed.) J. Bestard Camps, 115-128. Barcelona: Dept.
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79

The memory of objects and the Zpara

production of knowledge
Anne-Gal Bilhaut
Universit Paris Ouest (Nanterre, La Dfense) & Centre
EREA

In their search for recognition as a living and

original people, the Zpara of the Ecuadorian Amazon
are carrying out what could be described as urgent
ethnography, that is, they preserve and record artefacts
which they actively search and collect themselves. This
material, which is considered kikin Zpara or properly
Zpara (Bilhaut 2007), is usually stored and filed. The
Zpara thus build assorted collections, which are
conserved both in the office of the indigenous
organization in the little provincial town of Puyo
80

(Pastaza province) and by private members of the

community. Other collections of Zpara items are also
conserved in European museums. In the 1970s two
Ecuadorian anthropologists (Costales & Costales 1975)
declared the Zpara Indians of the Upper Amazon to be
extinct. Yet, in the late 1990s the first Zpara
organization emerged in Ecuador. It was established by
the sons and daughter of the last shmano (shaman) both
to revitalise three primary aspects of Zpara culture language,

shamanism

and

history-

and

to

gain

recognition of land rights and titles for the territory they

inhabit. The Zpara belong to the Zparoan linguistic
group, composed of the Iquito, the Andoa and the
Arabela in Peru, and the Zpara in Peru and Ecuador.
With a population of about 200,000 a century ago, the
Zpara of Ecuador are estimated to comprise just five
hundred people at present. This rapid decrease is
considered to be the result of diseases, forced migrations
and enslavement. Many members of the community
were also absorbed and acculturated by neighbouring
indigenous groups. The Kichwa language was used as a
81

mediating lingua franca, and is the language that most

Zpara now use; less than five still speak the vernacular
language.
This paper will explore how ancient objects kept
either locally or in Europe, are viewed as artefact
teachers by the Zpara. I will explain their idea that the
memory of these objects may have a role to play in the
Zpara production of knowledge. More precisely, I will
investigate how this indigenous group, in need and in
search of its patrimony, produces its knowledge through
ancient artefacts found both within and outside its
territory. These objects, which have been possessed or
fabricated by the ancestors, are considered to be
endowed with relevant qualities and capacities for the
production and handing down of knowledge.
In order to examine the modes of collection,
conservation and use of these objects, I will draw upon
the

notions

of

embodiment,

aesthetics

and

patrimonialisation. By embodiment, I refer to the way

the Zpara Indians incorporate knowledge (usually
through diets) and keep it in their body, a common
82

theme in the Amazon basin. By aesthetics, I consider the

effect produced on the viewers after looking at some
specific items; this effect was described by Gell through
the concept of social agency and the relation between the
maker (or agent) and the receptor (or patient) of the item
(the secondary agent). Lastly, the patrimonialisation, or
the process of making heritage, is increasingly
important. The promotion and recognition of el
patrimonio are a means for being heard at the regional,
national and international level. It also provides the
Zpara with a label or a mark offered by UNESCO.
I - Collecting ancient things
The strength of the Zparas will to reconstitute
their knowledge of the past is linked to its peoples selfperception as weak: the Zpara do not consider anyone
in the group, including the elders, to be able to
reconstitute their history. They believe that they are
unable to transmit knowledge adequately because of a
previous deficiency in the human resources. Some of
83

them have developed a strong ability to dream further

into the past: through visual retrogressions, or visual
journeys into the past, they can observe the objects
produced by their ancestors, receive their advice and
learn lessons from them. In addition, in their daily life,
they gather ancient things, such as ceramic stamps and
shards, and magic stones, which they occasionally find
on their land. These things first need to be identified.
This is where dreams play a crucial role. In some
instances, the object has been the subject of a dream
before it was discovered. This is usually the case for
magic stones, and sometimes also for certain artefacts. In
other instances, the items are dreamt about after having
been discovered. This is especially the case when the
person who found it wants to check its origin. In this
ethnically

diverse

region,

the

identification

of

archaeological pieces is not an easy task. That is why the

Zpara prefer to refer to their dreams in order to acquire
the correct information concerning the object: if it can be
dreamed about, it is considered to belong to the Zpara
society.
84

Archaeological objects
Upon their discovery, ceramic shards and
ceramic stamps are brought to the community where the
Zpara then try to identify them and establish who used
them and what for, and who made them. Given the
ambiguity of their provenance, it is sometimes necessary
to request a dream. Blowing tobacco smoke can help
identify the object and make it the subject of a dream.
During the dream experience, auxiliary spirits or
ancestors contribute to the understanding of what these
objects are. Some of them can potentially encourage the
Zpara to dream and then they appear as a person in the
dream. If this happens it means that the thing is a person,
and a sinchi (or powerful) one. Thus, they appear with an
anthropomorphic silhouette. This is the sign that the
ancient thing is runa (a person, in Kichwa), endowed
with subjectivity and with intentionality. In this case, the
artefact can be vivified by using tobacco. The
conservation of the magic stones requires this same
85

injection of life provided by tobacco. The smoke

revitalizes the potency of the magic stone, which can
then be used therapeutically if it was found by a shaman.
In this case, the object is conserved in the shamans
house, usually on a shelf along with photographs,
perfumes, audio tapes and books. This collection is not
intended to be seen and admired: the private and
personal space does not function as place of display.
Rather, it induces knowledge transmitted by the objects
themselves or by the ancestors who made them.
If the object is not sinchi in the dream, it is not
considered to be powerful and there is no need to start a
process of conservation. They are nevertheless kept in
their homes, as things that have their own history and
survived over time. The purpose of this collection is not
explicitly articulated. And I would add that it is not made
visible. We cannot speak of its conservation, since
nothing is done to take care of it. These things of the past
are marks left by the ancestors on the territory, which
can in fact help them to determine just how sizeable their
land is. By finding them, the Zpara are able to
86

determine and prove to their Kichwa and Achuar

neighbours that they were there before and that this is
their land. While providing evidence of their earlier
presence on the territory, these objects are both used in
their arguments to claim land rights and crucial elements
of their heritage. The Zpara try to gather information on
the Zparas past way of life in order to demonstrate
their originality. The ceramic shards, ceramic stamps and
their design, and the stones axes permit the Indians to
affirm it.
Magic stones
Magic stones are transmitted from one generation
to the next, since the task of shaman usually goes from
the father to his sons or daughters in Zpara society.
Sometimes when a shaman dies, he has not had enough
time to pass on his secret yachay, or knowledge, to one
of his or her children. Alternatively, it can happen that
they are unable to find the minerals. The islambu net
bag, where they are usually kept is either empty or lost.
87

However, a dream may guide the sleeper to the location

of the stone. Thus, when found, these stones already
have a history. They usually have had several masters as
some of them have circulated for decades. In other
words, these stones, which are yachay, and endowed
with subjectivity and intentionality, bear witness to the
Zpara history. As runa or persons, they have their own
memory, but also their proper moods. The body of this
runa must be questioned. A Zpara woman, Kiawka,
told me a very interesting tale about her grandfathers
stone (Bilhaut 2006). The stone was round, with
markings and gouges on its top, which are supposed to
result from ancient battles with other stones owned by
the grandfather. Kiawka described the stone, which had a
personal name, as follows. It was two-coloured: red with
green lines. The red represented its penchant for
aggression, its need for blood, whereas the green showed
its ability to cure. Following a dream she had weeks after
her fathers death, she found the stone and recognized it
as being the stone that her father had obtained from his
own father.
88

In 2003, two thieves who took her backpack had

attacked her in Quito. That day, she had put all her
shamanic paraphernalia in her bag with the intention of
treating and curing a friend. She thus lost all of it. A
couple of months afterwards, she decided to take
ayahuasca in Quito. She dreamt of what had happened to
her stone: broken by the thieves, its spirit had to flee.
This spirit had gone to the forest of the suburbs of Quito
and was calling Kiawka. When she took the ayahuasca
brew, the spirit was wandering without a body but
decided during the session to enter Kiawkas body. It is
not surprising that this decision modified her relation
with the spirit of the stone. Actually, Kiawka had
embodied another spirit a couple of months before,
during another ayahuasca session: her fathers father, the
very first master of the stone. In sum, she had
incorporated an ancestors figure, seen as the most
powerful shaman during his time, and also his most
powerful stone. However, she could no longer make use
of that stone in the same dyadic way. The stone, which
had belonged to the grandfather and the father, could not
89

breathe any more on Kiawkas face to cure her. She

could no longer handle it in a therapeutic way in order to
cure others. She could no longer feed it with the usual
tobacco smoke. On the contrary, she could sometimes
feel the stones anger and she was more likely to react in
an aggressive manner, being influenced by the stones
mood.
For the Zpara, as for most of the Amazonian
groups, acquired knowledge is located in the body where
it can prosper thanks to the care given to it through
tobacco and a plant-based diet. Some magic stones
spirits, which carry with them a social history, can be
embodied by shamans or other spiritually trained Zpara.
This operation is uncommon and not very desirable. It is
difficult to maintain a good relation with that kind of
spirits for, as persons, these spirits have their own
agency. They can make Kiawka dream or act in a
dangerous

way.

Through

this

example,

have

empirically identified one of the Zpara regimes of

historicity (Hartog 2003). I have shown how the Zpara
articulate their present and their past through visual
90

retrogressions. These retrogressions allow them to face

the future collectively, because they draw from their
dream interlocutors the means required to realize the
present and prepare for the future. I have shown that for
Zpara people, the dream is a formidable engine: it
promotes,

creates,

and

preserves

system

of

representations. Its realm is porous and its boundaries

are penetrable, allowing living people and objects to
introduce themselves. Furthermore, some objects or
concepts are appropriated and identified as belonging to
the Zpara after having been dreamed of. The
penetration of material or immaterial objects into Zpara
dream space marks their relational subjectivity (Santos
Granero 2009) with the living people and induces their
identification. In other words, the dream process is a
mode of identification for Zpara objects. The
relationship between regimes of memory and the system
of powerful objects is above all a state of vision. Dreams
and material supports of cognition stimulate each other's
properties. The object - through its agent - can cause the
dream or make the dream, while the dream reveals the
91

objects true nature so as to identify it.

II - Constructing the knowledge of the past
In 2006, Manari, one of the young Zpara
leaders, came to the Muse du Quai Branly in Paris to
discover the museums Zpara collection (Bilhaut 2009).
During his visit he was provided with an original
example of the reacquisition of knowledge through
conserved artefacts, a case linked to aesthetic agency,
as described by Gell (1998). The museums collection is
composed of thirteen items which were donated in 1880
by the French diplomat Charles Wiener. It includes four
painted shields, two spears, one net bag, five necklaces,
one blowgun, and the hard palate of a fish. Just as for the
Asmat shields from Sepik described by Gell in Art and
Agency (1998), the agency of the Zpara painted shields
on Manari was easy to perceive. Manari described his
accelerated breath as he faced three of the four artefacts
of defence. He expressed his impression with utter
conviction. He could identify the shields as Zpara, and
92

among them, he felt that three of them were sinchi,

powerful and full of knowledge. He could feel this by
watching them and observing the designs painted on the
shields.
Gell has described how the Asmat shield
terrifies the opposing warrior (1998: 31), as its design
has been painted with the core intention of frightening
the enemy. For Gell (1998: 16) agency is attributable to
those persons (and things) who/which are seen as
initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is
events caused by acts of mind or will or intention, rather
than the mere concatenation of physical events. In the
Zpara case, the objects from the past which are kept in
the Muse du Quai Branly and are linked with ancestors
reminded Manari of conversations he had with his father
about how such shields are made. Some designs painted
on the shields could be mnemonic means to think out the
notion of runa, or person. The day prior to his visit,
Manari had drawn for me its representation: the Zpara
describe the Zpara person as a human being fastened to
auxiliary spirits by threads a description quite common
93

in the Western Amazon. As a result, when he saw the

shields and the triangles with two or three lines on their
tips drawn on them, he declared that these geometrical
figures symbolized the strength of its owner and
especially the number of his auxiliary spirits. Contrary to
the Asmat shields, the figures drawn on the front of the
Zapar shields are not only intended to frighten the
enemy, but seek to make him defective. For example, the
design of the paws of a kinkajou (Potos caudivolvulus), a
nocturnal monkey well known for its permanent motion
of knees and paws, will help deviate the enemys spear.
Similarly the drawing of an anaconda, which is known
for its smooth skin, is to cause the spear to split as it hits
the shield. For Manari, the presence of these artefacts
and their conservation in a foreign museum so distant
from the Zpara territory is not troubling in itself,
provided that the items do not remain in the storehouse.
Given that they are displayed to the public during
exhibitions and that the museum has been taking care of
them for more than a century, he feels the Zpara
collection must remain in Paris.
94

In brief, Manari identified these objects by

handling, smelling, and touching them that is by his
physical contact with the object, and also by being the
receptor of the ancestors agency after more than one
century. Once identified, Manari told me stories, myths
or other parts of the tradition linked with each of the
items, as if the objects could generate narratives. He also
declared his desire of dreaming about the shields in order
to understand what they really are, what their social
biography is (Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986) and what
they can teach him. Manaris visit to the museum in
Paris tells us a lot on how the Zpara are able to extend
beyond the categories of space and time in spite of the
great geographical distance and many years passed.
Manari was most moved by three specific items; he felt
an instant connection between himself and the shield
makers. When the ancestors made them, they intended to
produce effects on the viewers senses. Gell has
emphasised the effect that artefacts can generate and
named this process social agency. He focused his
analysis on the social relations between art makers and
95

their receptors through the magical efficacy of things

this magical effect being linked to what he defined as the
technology of enchantment (Gell 1992: 44), an
expression which characterizes art. The agency of the
Zpara shields thus extends beyond time and space and
still works in the consultation room of the storage
facility in the basement of the Muse du Quai Branly.
Artefact teachers and patrimonialisation
The examples I have presented, including the use
of ceramic shards, magic stones, and the impact of the
shields, are all relevant for understanding what artefact
teachers are for the Zpara. The expression is not theirs.
Inspired by Eduardo Lunas concept of plant teachers
(1984), I use it to stress the way in which things induce
knowledge for the Zpara. Some of these objects are able
to make the Zpara dream while others reveal
information on the past. Of course, they all provide new
knowledge on the patrimony. The Zpara usually
describe themselves as dreamers. Dreaming is their
96

specific mode of construction and production of

knowledge. Through the dreams they are able to access
the knowledge of the past provided by their ancestors.
Dreams are used as vehicles to access their collective
memory and to represent their tradition.
Zpara dreamers envisage things from the past as
artefact teachers which should be cherished because
they increase one's knowledge, such as the stones and
artefacts which make them dream. In this paper I have
focused on ancient objects. Nevertheless, other things,
including contemporary ones are also considered to be
artefact teachers, which can also teach and make people
dream about the past. For instance, some books are
described as things which are dreamt rather than as
objects to be read. Not all the books have this ability to
make people dream, but some of them, exactly like some
contemporary artefacts, do. What is specific about these
things is that they are agents or secondary agents that can
teach. To receive their knowledge, one must be a good
dreamer who is familiar with the techniques of
dreaming. His or her ability to capture the knowledge
97

provided by the artefact is linked to the willingness of

knowing what the object found on the territory is and
what it reveals about the society and its past. Through
these agents it is conceivable to reach the knowledge of
the past and to gain shamanic knowledge by the magic
stones and dream processes.
Acknowledgements
I thank Istvan Praet for his comments and France
Bourgouin for her corrections.
References
Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the
politics of value. In The social life of things.
Commodities in cultural perspective. A. Appadurai
(ed.), 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bilhaut A-G. 2006. Biographie dun esprit au corps
bris. Les pierres magiques des anctres zpara
dAmazonie: des sujets du pass. Journal de la
Socit des Amricanistes 92 (1-2): 237-254.

98

 2007. Le Rveil de limmatriel. La production

onirique du patrimoine des Indiens Zpara (Haute
Amazonie). Thse de doctorat, Universit Paris X
Nanterre.
2009. When Museums are Dreamed. Subjective
Relationships with the Past in an Amazonian
Community. In Subjectivity, Creativity, and the
Institution. C. Crouch (ed.), 87-96. Boca Raton
(Florida): BrownWalker Press.
Costales P. y Costales A. 1975. La familia etnolingstica zpara. Ethos 1: 3-30.
Gell, A. 1992. The technology of enchantment and the
enchantment of technology. In Anthropology, Art,
and Aesthetics. J. Coote & A. Shelton (Eds.), 40-63.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1998. Art and agency: an anthropological
theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hartog Fr. 2003. Rgimes dhistoricit. Prsentisme et
expriences du temps. Paris: Seuil.
Kopytoff I. 1986. The cultural biography of things:
commoditization as process. In The social life of
99

things.

Commodities

in

cultural

perspective.

Appadurai A. (ed.), 64-94. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Luna E. 1984, The Concept of Plants as Teachers
among four Mestizo Shamans of Iquitos, Northeastern
Per. The Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 11: 135156.
Santos Granero, F. 2009. Introduction: Amerindian
constructional views of the world. In The occult life
of things. Native amazonian theories of materiality
and personhood. Santos-Granero F. (ed.), 4-37.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

100

The Chachi and their Uneasy

Relationship with Archaeology
Istvan Praet
Roehampton University, London

Monstrous artefacts
The central question of this chapter is: to what
extent is the notion of ancient itself relatively new? Let
me put my cards on the table straight away. I will
suggest that a distinction such as that between old and
new is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. To be sure,
it has been spread with considerable success all over the
world,

also

among

so-called

indigenous

people.

Archaeologists, scientists of the ancient, have played a

crucial role in this. Arguably, they are among the prime

101

disseminators of the idea of the old or the ancient

since at least two centuries. That specific role of
archaeologists is often overlooked, for it is commonly
assumed that conceptions of what is bygone are similar
(if only roughly) all over the world. We could say that
so-called indigenous people are taken to be ethnoarchaeologists, which in this context simply means that
they are supposed to make a basic distinction between
what is old and what is not. This chapter considers the
(at first sight) improbable possibility that such a
distinction does not or, at least, did not exist. It takes an
Amerindian example as its starting point: I will draw on
my research among the Chachi Indians of Esmeraldas,
Ecuador.
The province of Esmeraldas in NW Ecuador is a
bit of an archaeological wonderland (cf. Alcina Franch
1979, Bouchard 1995, DeBoer 1995, 1996). It is a
tropical area cross-cut by various rivers, stretching
between the western Andean foothills and the Pacific
coast. The site of La Tolita, on an island near the
confluence of the Cayapas and Santiago rivers, is
102

particularly renown, even internationally. The island is

dotted with pre-Columbian burial-mounds that contain a
wealth of archaeological artefacts, especially ceramics
and jewellery. Over the years, much of it has been
destroyed and looted but a great deal is still preserved in
museums and private collections. The famous golden sun
mask that is nowadays the emblem of Ecuadors central
bank is kept in a museum in Quito but was unearthed in
La Tolita. Moreover, the coast of Esmeraldas has many
tricky coral reefs and because of that shipwrecks used to
be quite common. Treasure seekers of all plumages are
frequently diving at spots where Spanish galleons are
said to have sunk, in the hope of retrieving silver and
golden coins. In the provincial capital, there is a
flourishing underground market for such valuable things.
The suppliers are Black and Hispanic peasants who live
near archaeological sites. The Amerindian inhabitants of
Esmeraldas, the Chachi, are much less involved in this
kind of trafficking, at least as far as I could establish. It
is true, the Chachi tend to live away from the coast
(where the most spectacular sites are located) and
103

usually reside near the headwaters of rivers. Chachi

people often insist that life is more tranquil over there
(urachunu) and as passionate hunters and canoe crafters
they appreciate the abundance of forest resources one
encounters upriver. But even such hinterland locations
are generously littered with all sorts of pre-Columbian
remains. Why, then, are Chachi so reluctant to engage in
what is clearly a very lucrative business?
Whatever the reason, it is definitely not the case
that Chachi are uninterested in archaeological artefacts.
In fact, these are eagerly sought after and even though
they are as good as invisible in everyday life they come
prominently to the foreground in certain very specific
circumstances. When somebody is ill, for example: to
cure the sick, Chachi shamans (miruku) use wooden and
ceramic figurines and a whole range of very old artefacts
such as potsherds, polished stone axes and obsidian
mirrors. In addition, they rely on antique Spanish
swords, ornamented wands of dark hardwood, necklaces
made from ancient silver coins and animal body parts
such as the teeth of felines and the claws of raptor birds.
104

Both among the Chachi and the neighbouring Tsachila

these instruments are referred to as artes (cf. Ventura
2000: 386). Strikingly, most of them depict or at least
allude to all kinds of fearsome outsiders, especially
policemen and soldiers and, more specifically, white
policemen and soldiers from the colonial era. Figurines
representing exotic, non-Chachi Indians and Blacks are
also reported (DeBoer 1998: 125). The same pattern is
also found in Tsachila shamanism. According to Ventura
(2000: 416), the curers equipment consists of figurines
representing the following outsiders: soldiers, doctors,
lawyers, gentlemen with ties, hacienda bosses, priests,
nuns, blonde gringas, Indians from the highlands,
Indians from Amazonia, Chachi (!), Hispanics from
Manabi and Blacks from Esmeraldas. A remarkable
element that my informants emphasized time and again
is that such outsiders have, or at least used to have, one
rather terrible characteristic in common: they crave
human flesh - they are man-eaters. In the vernacular they
are referred to as uyala, a term that designates both
wild non-Chachi Indians and Whites as well as man105

eaters. Moreover, the specific animals invoked during

shamanic sessions have similar inclinations: they are
always notorious predators such as the puma or the
condor.
There is no doubt that many of the paraphernalia
of Chachi shamans are indeed very ancient. According to
the archaeologist Warren DeBoer (1998), the stone axes
and ceramic figurines are from local archaeological
deposits and are of types characteristic of the Rio
Cayapas region during the La Tolita period, ca. 200 BC
to AD 350. Yet, each time I attempted to find out more
about the age or history of this or that shamanic
instrument, the curers I interviewed reacted perplexed
and sometimes amused. They were too polite to tell me
directly, but I quickly became aware that my question
was impertinent. It emerged that what matters to them is
not so much their artefacts oldness but, rather, their
non-Chachiness. That many happen to be ancient is
merely circumstantial. What is emphasized endlessly is
their monstrous quality; one shaman described his
instruments to me as little man-eaters. What is more,
106

those who cure are often referred to as man-eaters

themselves too. At this point, it is worth to underline the
importance of saying man-eaters and not cannibals.
My Chachi friends and acquaintances rarely failed to
mention that those who eat humans are certainly not
humans themselves; in fact, the very act immediately
disqualifies one as such - as they see it, eating Chachi is
the supreme proof that one does not belong to humanity
(even though one may look deceivingly human). In
short, the crucial point is that we are dealing with nonhumans eating humans; to speak of cannibalism would
therefore be confusing not to say mistaken. For people
such as the Chachi, humans eating humans are a logical
impossibility. As I have explained elsewhere (Praet
2006, 2009a), shamans help their patients by means of
shape-shifting; they temporarily assume the position of
monsters. Why this is so and how it precisely happens is
not relevant for our present purposes. All one needs to
remember is that the instruments of Chachi curers are
primarily monstrous devices.

107

The Polished Village: neither myth of origin nor

ethno-history
To claim that the epithet ancient does not
adequately capture the way in which Chachi shamans
envisage their paraphernalia is one thing, but to state that
Chachi people do not have (or at least did not use to
have) any notion of the ancient is still quite another.
Surely, there must be something that they conceive of as
old? Surely, they must sometimes wonder about their
origins? When I asked about the past, my Chachi
interlocutors rarely failed to mention the name of Tuts,
or, as it is known in local Spanish, Pueblo Viejo - the
Ancient Village. According to oral tradition that is the
place where the ancestral Chachi used to live before they
settled in the coastal flatlands. Nearly all stories are
congruent on the point that the Chachi originate from the
Andean highlands and that they are relatively recent
inhabitants of the tropical lowlands. At one point, life in
the mountains became difficult. Some link this to the
historical invasion of the Inca, others to the Spanish
108

conquest. All versions correspond to the extent that they

explicitly mention that the Chachis peaceful existence
was disturbed and that the good life (urachunu, la vida
tranquilla) had become impossible. There is no uniform
account of how the Chachi eventually reached Tuts, the
Ancient Village. Most widespread is the story that they
were led there by a jaguar who was in fact a powerful
shaman (cf. Barrett 1925:31-9, Carrasco 1988:138-43
and Vittadello 1988:5-6). Some storytellers, however,
insist that it was the Virgin Mary who acted as their
guide. Descriptions of Tuts itself vary according to the
source. What is agreed upon is that it is a very isolated
place, situated somewhere in the thickly forested and
hardly accessible western Andean foothills.
At first sight, these findings are devastating for
my argument. Contrary to my claim that the Chachi did
not use to have the ancient, here we have something
old, something which is even explicitly referred to as
old, at least in local Spanish - Pueblo Viejo, the Ancient
Village. Contrary to my intuition that for people like the
Chachi there was no such thing as a remote past that is
109

forever bygone, here we have a relatively coherent body

of accounts that go back to the Spanish conquest and
perhaps even further. Even though my claims now
appear increasingly improbable, I stand by them. In
order to make the case plausible, it is necessary to tell a
bit more about Pueblo Viejo. The etymology of the
vernacular term, Tuts, is revealing. Tu means land,
while ts is derived from the verb tsanu, which means
to polish or to finish off. A greatly crafted canoe, for
instance, is referred to as tsantsa: impeccably finished
in the sense that it cannot be made more perfect. In other
words, a literal translation of Tuts would be the
Polished Land or the Perfect Land (not the Ancient
Land).

Storytellers

always

underscore

that

the

inhabitants of Tuts were more perfect, stronger and

more

powerful

than

ordinary

mortals,

just

as

contemporary shamans are more perfect and more

powerful than non-shamans. Actually, it is often
repeated that those of Tuts were all shamans.
The few elderly who were still alive at the time
of my fieldwork and who claim to have visited Tuts in
110

their youth say it contains enormous grindstones, which

were used to ground maize. It is told that those in Tuts
did not know plantains, the contemporary Chachis
staple food. The last visitors8 are able to provide very
specific details about what can be found there: they
speak about huge ceramic barrels, which were used to
make maize beer during fiestas, spears of peach palm
hardwood and a variety of axes and knives, but all in
stone and not in metal as those used by Chachi at
present. Furthermore, they claim it is littered with big
stones such as the ones Ferocious Indians (jeenuyala or
man-eaters of the forest) habitually use as projectiles.
In fact, all these foodstuffs and artefacts are completely
atypical for the Chachi; rather, they are closely
associated with those quintessential anti-Chachi, the
man-eating Ferocious Indians. What is more, the
inhabitants of Tuts are explicitly described as wild
8

According to Aapa Cimarron (2003: 35), the ultimate person to

leave Tutsa was a man known as Ambu Ruku; allegedly, this was in
1935. Laura Rival (2001, unpublished field notes) recorded that
until 70 to 80 years ago people used to undertake a three to four day
walk to go there at Easter. The pilgrims used to burn candles in the
church (cf. infra).

111

and warlike (salvaje, bravo). Unlike latter-day Chachi

(who pride themselves on their peaceful, tranquil
conduct, as we have seen), they frequently engaged in
wars.
In one account, the inhabitants of Tuts confront
the Spaniards who had arrived in a galleon that was so
enormous that it had a complete hacienda on board,
comprising cows, horses, coconut palms and even a
chapel. Thanks to their exceptional Warrior-Shamans
they fairly easily dodged the invaders. When Spanish
soldiers took their swords from their sheaths they broke.
When they threw spears these missed their aim and
returned to those who had launched them. All their
bullets and cannonballs inexplicably bounced back.
Then, the Warrior-Shamans counter-attacked. To sink
the ship they called upon their animal allies, the turtles
(in some accounts they transformed into turtles
themselves). First, they sent a whole range of tiny
varieties, but the wood of the hull proved too solid for
them. Only the giant lamaa aveyu, the sea turtle,
managed to sink it. In the lagoon where the galleon is
112

thought to have perished coconut palms grow in the

middle of the water nowadays. These are supposed to
have originated from those that the Spaniards had on
board.
In some accounts, however, the inhabitants of
Tuts appear as Spaniards or Whites themselves. In fact,
Tuts is very often described as a typical Spanish
colonial town. Some specify that it has a plaza and a
stone church with a bell that sounds incomparably
beautiful. The inhabitants often go to Mass and light lots
of candles to ask God-the-Father (diusapa) for
compassion or, as they express it, miseecuya (from the
Spanish misericordia). Many storytellers mention that
the church contained a miraculous image of the Virgin
Mary. When somebody who had made a mistake,
(somebody who was not perfect or polished)
approached the image, it started crying, blushing and
turned the other way. An eighty year old man,
interviewed by Ramiro Cabrera (1999:39), recounted:

113

One day I went to Tuts. I was a young

man and had just married my first wife. There
was a fiesta in San Miguel and one man, now
long deceased, asked me to join him to Pueblo
Viejo. Several people bought candles and I put
in 10 sucres, which was a lot of money at the
time. In total we had about twenty packets of
candles. We would lighten them in honour of
God-the-Father. Over there the Saints are alive!
The Virgin Mary was beautiful and smiled It
was as if she looked at me - she was alive my
friend! Christ was also better there, everything
was better in Tuts. We were away for eight
days - from San Miguel it took us three days to
get in Pueblo Viejo.
A striking element that always recurs is that the church
and the houses of Tuts are full of gold and silver, just
like the baroque Catholic churches of highland towns
such as Quito and Ibarra. My Chachi informants always
described this little obsession with precious metals as a
typically Spanish trait; unlike the inhabitants of Tuts,
most contemporary Chachi are not at all interested in
gold (in any case, gold-mining in the Cayapas area is an
almost exclusively Black/Hispanic affair). Tuts, the
Perfect Land, is also incredibly dangerous because the
114

slightest imperfection is harshly punished. Those who

cheated on their spouse or committed incest would be
whipped or burnt. As such, the punishers acted in exactly
the same way as cruel hacienda bosses in the sierra or as
colonial policemen and soldiers, but certainly not as
Chachi (who always stress their peaceful disposition and
abhor any kind of torture).
The idea of ancient as colonial import
These differing and at first sight somewhat
contradictory accounts have one thing in common:
whether they foreground Ferocious Indians, WarriorShamans or Spaniards and Whites, they are always about
non-Chachi. The conduct of the inhabitants of Tuts is
always conspicuously unlike the tranquil lifestyle that
the Chachi persistently champion: they are aggressive
and cruel. In addition, they are often referred to as uyala,
man-eaters (as mentioned before, the same term also
designates Spaniards and Whites). This leads us to a
crucial insight: stories about Pueblo Viejo are not about
115

ancient Chachi. In fact, they are not about Chachi at all

but about warlike monsters and man-eaters. These are
not accounts of how the ancient Chachi came to be as
they currently are; the point is not to explain how old
Chachi became new Chachi; I would even suggest that
there was no such thing as ancient Chachi and that this
idea only emerged with the advent of archaeology. In
that sense, the Tuts epics can neither be understood as
an origin myth nor as some kind of ethno-history.
What matters is not so much the Tuts-inhabitants
ancient-ness as their monstrosity. Just as during the
curing sessions I discussed at the beginning, the ancient
is irrelevant here; strictly speaking, all that really counts
is non-Chachi-ness. Instead of the Ancient Village,
one should speak of the Monstrous Village.
What is crucial to grasp is that this monstrosity
does not refer to some remote and irretrievable past that
is forever bygone. Monstrosity is neither old nor new;
while its specific properties do change over time, it is
first and foremost a continuous phenomenon. Indeed,
monstrosity always re-emerges. In the Chachi case, this
116

happens most prominently at Easter, when people gather

in ceremonial centres to celebrate weddings. I have no
space to go into the intricacies here (see Praet 2009b for
a more detailed account), but let me just mention that
these ceremonial centres are only ever used for such
specific rituals and are very different from ordinary
Chachi settlements. For one thing, they have a church
where people celebrate Mass and burn candles (it is
customary to invite a Catholic priest for the occasion).
These centres are also graveyards (reason why they are
avoided in normal circumstances), which means that
they are particularly rich in pre-Columbian pottery and
other archaeological artefacts. Just like Tuts, these
places are thought to be full of buried silver and gold.
Some artefacts are openly displayed: antique images of
Saints and the Virgin Mary, hardwood spears of a kind
that Chachi no longer use and, in one centre, a bronze
bell that is said to be retrieved from the Spanish galleon
that Warrior-Shamans sunk with the help of the turtles
(cf. supra). What is more, those who participate in rituals
appear and behave in an obviously non-Chachi way:
117

many of them dress in white mans clothes, some of

them wear helmets and accessories dating from the
epoch of the Spanish conquistadors. Elders are addressed
with colonial titles such as capitn or polica and
castigate all those who committed mistakes (polygamy,
incest ) by whipping them or clenching them in the
stocks. The food is also strikingly non-Chachi: just as in
Tuts, the fiesta-goers eat ground maize instead of
plantains. In sum, ceremonial centres are Monstrous
Villages too.
What archaeologists and their proxies envisage as
old things are for people such as the Chachi not so
much ancient as attributes of the monstrous. For the
latter, the age of such artefacts is irrelevant; what really
matters is their monstrosity. Therefore, they should only
be used on very specific, ritual occasions and are
generally banned from everyday life. Archaeological
artefacts are quintessentially non-Chachi. They are the
business of monsters: of their own shamans (who are
referred to as man-eaters, as we have seen), but also of
Whites.

The

notorious

hacienda
118

owner

Donato

Yannuzzelli, who possessed the island of La Tolita and

systematically looted and destroyed most of the burialmounds, was feared as a particularly voracious maneater. The more honourable archaeologist Warren
DeBoer, who worked in Esmeraldas during the 1990s
was also rumoured to crave human flesh. When I myself
expressed an interest in the ceramic remains that litter
the area (locally known as ollas de indios bravos or pots
of the Ferocious Indians), my Chachi host was not at all
surprised. After all, he remarked, they belong to your
family dont they? While all this does not provide a
definitive answer, it does offer some insight into my
initial question as to why the Chachi, unlike their Black
and Hispanic neighbours, are so reluctant to engage in
the trafficking of archaeological treasures.
The key point of this chapter is that the idea of
the ancient is (or at least was) not as widespread as one
may be inclined to think. The idea appears so basic and
so self-evident to us, children of the age of archaeology,
that we can hardly imagine that it might actually be a
relatively recent phenomenon. I have shown that the
119

Chachi do not distinguish between old and new; an

undertaking such as ethno-archaeology, by definition
based on the erroneous presupposition that all people
make such a distinction, is therefore seriously flawed
from the start. Of course, I have exaggerated a bit for
effect; at present, many Chachi undeniably do use
Hispanic expressions such as viejo and nuevo and some
of them (especially schoolteachers) have even developed
a keen interest in the archaeological discipline. After all,
they are children of the age of archaeology too and, as
anybody else, they are not immune to outside influences
and all sorts of novelties. In any case, the ancient used
to be inconceivable for the Chachi and it arguably still is
for some of them today. Whether it is/was similarly
inconceivable for other so-called indigenous peoples
remains an open question, but I would not be surprised if
it was. When and how the ancient exactly emerged is a
fascinating problem that goes beyond the scope of this
chapter, but my hunch is that it is a product of the
colonial age, a bit like horses or shotguns.

120

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Ramiro Cabrera, R. 1999. Cuentos Chachis. Quito:
Proyecto de Manejo Forestal Sostenible.
Ventura, M. 2000. A la croise des chemins. Identit,
rapports autrui et chamanisme chez les Tsachila de
lEquateur. Paris: EHESS, doctoral thesis.
122

Vittadello, A. 1988. Chapalaachi. El Idioma Cayapa.

Guayaquil. Pontificia Universidad Catlica del
Ecuador/ Museos del Banco Central del Ecuador.

123

Part II
History and Ancestrality

124

Guarding, Feeding & Transforming

Palm Trees in the Amazonian Past
and Present

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen

University of Helsinki & Universit de Paris Ouest
(Nanterre - la Dfense)

This chapter looks at the use of palm trees in the

Manchineri Indians past and present, as well as the
meaning of certain palm trees in their communal life and

125

sociocosmology.9 The Manchineri envisage a close

relationship between certain palm trees, their past, and
the non-human (spirit) world. For this Arawakanspeaking native group the non-human being that guards
the forest is identified with three different palm trees. It
is a powerful and dangerous entity, which enables
hunting, curing and the communitys well-being in
general. Moreover, palm trees have served and continue
to serve as a source of alimentation and construction
material. The palm spirit people are associated with large
plain areas and ancestors, and therefore I will also
discuss their connection to large earthwork formations
nearby the Manchineri land.
I wish to suggest that palms have been
personified and associated with danger because they are
powerful transformers, enabling human beings to
produce human bodies and human ways of living. I base
myself on my own ethnographical data on the
9 I am thankful to Paolo Fortis, Istvan Praet, Jrmy Deturche, and
Luiz Costa for their comments on the earlier version of this article.
The research was funded by the Academy of Finland.

126

Manchineri, but also draw on recent studies of

Northwestern and Western Amazonian native groups
relations to palm trees, as well as on studies on Western
Amazonian earthworks. Although it is acknowledged
that the historical times and the sources of this article are
diverse and there are limitations in their comparison, my
attempt is to show the continuity and consistency of
similar phenomena in the past and present of the same
Amazonian region (see Virtanen 2008; 2011).
In the next section, Manchineri people will be
presented. This is followed by a short presentation of the
recent research findings on the earthworks in the Upper
Purus. Then I will address the usages and the
significance of palms in the Manchineris everyday life
and among some other native communities. This leads to
a discussion on the role of palm tree spirits in
Manchineri sociocosmology and their relationship to
forest resources. Eventually, I will analyse the relation
between ancestors and the non-human palm entities, as
well as explore the ritual practices related to palms in
Northwestern and Western Amazonia. It will be shown
127

that palms belong to a special category in Amazonian

indigenous thinking.
The Manchineri
At present, the Manchineri reside by the Yaco
river in Western Brazil; they inhabit the Mamoadate
reserve, the largest expanse of demarcated indigenous
land of the Acre state. The population living in the
various villages by the Yaco river number some 800
persons. The Manchineri are closely related to the Yine
(Piro), one of the most numerous indigenous people of
Peruvian Amazonia, who live by the Madre de Dios and
Urubamba Rivers and occupy a vast territory in
Southwestern Amazonia (Steward and Mtraux 1948:
539-40). The Manchineri probably migrated to the Upper
Purus at the latest during the arrival of Europeans.
The Manchineri are also known by the names
Manxineru, Manitineri, Manetenery, Maneteneri and
Maniteneri. The Handbook of South American Indians
(1948) includes the Maniteneri among the Arawakan
128

groups of the Jurua-Purus basin and reports that they

lived between the mouths of the Yaco and Arac Rivers,
as far as the mouth of the Curinah river, as well as
living along the Caspah River and on the Rio de
Maloca, a tributary of the upper Acre River (Mtraux
1948: 662). The first historical documents on the
Manchineri recorded that they were good hunters and
canoe builders, and made beautiful cotton clothes which
they used for trading. They were river-dwellers and
travelled long distances up and down river, although
they also had fixed settlements. They had well cultivated
plantations of fruits, staple food crops and cotton
(Castelo Branco 1958; Chandless 1866). The Manchineri
and the Yine of Peru are closely related and possess
many cultural similarities, such as their mutually
intelligible languages. They originate partly from the
same ancestral groups, Manxineru being one of them
(Gow 1991; Virtanen 2007; 2008). Current opinion
identifies the Manchineri as members of the pre-Andean
Arawakan group composed by the Piro (Yine), Apurin,
Ashaninka, Mantsiguenga and Yanesha, a classification
129

based on their linguistic affiliations, which differ from

other Andean Arawakan groups (Hill and Santos
Granero 2002).
When

exploitation

of

rubber

(Hevea

brasiliensis) began in Western Amazonia in the end of

the 19th century, massacres of Indians ensued and many
were enslaved to work in the rubber tapping. Some
Indians fled deeper into the forest, while those who
were captured, or decided to cooperate with the rubber
bosses, worked as guides, canoe paddlers or rubber
tappers (seringueiros). For the Manchineri it was a
period of encounters between the regions indigenous
peoples and Peruvian, Bolivian and Brazilian rubber
bosses

looking

for

rubber

areas

to

exploit.

Consequently, the Manchineri were forced to work as

rubber tappers and many families lived on the lands
owned by the farmers and rubber bosses. Besides rubber
extraction, the work undertaken by the Manchineri
included cultivating swidden crops, clearing jungle
paths and transporting rubber by foot or river. Castelo
Branco (1947: 145) states that in 1898 exploitation of
130

rubber was made difficult in the Guanabara area of the

Yaco River following resistance from the Catiana,
Canamari, Capixia, Inamare and Manetenery, some of
which are now extinct.
After FUNAI opened its regional office in Acre,
it subsequently reported Manchineri and Yaminawa
working as seringueiros and clearing the forest for their
bosses on the Guanabara and Petrpolis plantations. In
1976 FUNAI opened a post (posto indgena) in the
location called Extrema, to which the Manchineri and
Yaminawa of the Yaco River area were transferred. The
Manchineri-Yaminawa

reserve,

Mamoadate,

was

demarcated in 1985 and officially legalized in 1991. The

FUNAI post in Extrema was closed. The Manchineri and
Yaminawa continued to pursue small-scale agricultural
activities. Later they started breeding cattle and selling
their agricultural produce, mainly rice and beans, in the
nearby municipalities.
The past for the Manchineri is the time of their
ancestors, [comma] who lived in another type of time.
This period is described as a time of powerful shamans
131

and traditions, yet the ancestors were also living in a

state of deprivation since they lacked the education and
the commodities of today. When today the Manchineri
hunt or go deep in the forest upriver they regularly
discover old banana plantations and numerous shards of
pottery, which are supposed to have been made by their
ancestors. Once I undertook a two hour walk with a few
young men to one of the sites nearby a tributary of the
Yaco where they presumed that their ancestors had lived.
When we arrived at this site near the Extrema village,
everyone fell silent in reverence. It was as though we
had entered a sacred place. One of the young men, who
wanted to show me the place, whispered that the site was
a place where the Manchineri had lived at an earlier
time. The other young Manchineri said it was a mystical
place where one often finds pottery, which some people
keep in their houses. Similarly to the way they perceive
ancient areas of anthropogenic forest, I noted a mixture
of respect and fear in the Manchineris reactions to the
non-human palm peoples. The anthropogenic forest and
palm trees are both closely associated to ancestors. For
132

the Manchineri these palm peoples are markers of the

continuity of their history.
The earthworks in Western Amazonia
The earthworks in Western Amazonia are
circular, hexagonal, and rectangular earth structures;
they are also called geoglyphs (earth marks). These
geometric constructions have ditches, walls, banks and
their diameters vary between 20 and nearly 400 meters.
The depth of the ditches is between one and four meters.
The biggest enclosures can be found in Acre, southern
Amazonas, and Rondnia states. Straight causeways
connecting and traversing neighbouring constructions
link some enclosures. (Prssinen et al. 2009; Schaan et
al. 2008.) Such large pre-Colombian settlements and
road systems connecting the earthworks have changed
our understanding of Lowland South Americas past (see
also Heckenberger et al. 2008).

133

Figure 3 The Fazenda Paran earthwork (photo by

Diego Gurgel)
The project PRONAPABA (Programa Nacional
de Pesquisas Arqueolgicas na Bacia Amaznica) was
the first initiative to study these geometrically patterned
earthworks in 1977 (Dias and Carvalho 1988). That was
continued by a research project of Brazilian-Finnish
research team in 2002, the same year when I started my
doctoral research on Manchineri youth (Virtanen 2007).
My role in the multidisciplinary research project has

134

been to see if the ethnography of contemporary

indigenous peoples could help to explain and understand
better some aspects of the construction of these sites and
the prehistory of the region (Virtanen 2008; 2011.).
The earthworks are situated mostly on terra firme
(upland), but also in the varzea (floodplain) close to the
affluents of the Upper Purus River and the current BR317 highway. More than 200 geoglyphs in the region
have been identified, but that may represent only some
10% of the all earthworks (Prssinen et al. 2009; Schaan
et al. 2008.). Many more are still being discovered as
deforestation makes pre-historical settlements visible.
The archaeological datings have already shown that the
sites were constructed between 700 and 2500 years ago,
the older ones being in the south (Dias 2006; Ncoli
2000; Prssinen et al. 2003; 2009).
The earthworks in the Upper Purus show that a
relatively dense population combined with a wellorganized societal system, existed in the area before the
14th century. This was followed by a decline of the
population density due to climatic deterioration and a
135

marked demographic and economic collapse due to new

diseases (Prssinen et al. 2003). The earthworks in
Western Amazonia may have been ceremonial sites,
fortifications, or meeting places, or all of these. Their
functions remain unknown. In addition to being
ceremonial sites and defensive structures as assumed by
Prssinen et al. (2009), they could have been a way to
show the unity and power of some groups (Virtanen
2011).
According to Dias (2006), in the earthwork areas
of Acre palm trees are common. He especially mentions
assai (Euterpe oleracea), ucuuba (Virola spp.), babassu
(Orbignya sp.), and moriche or buriti (Mauritia
flexuosa) palms. Therefore, as other archaeologists have
also suggested, they may have been an important source
of alimentation and construction material for the prehistoric population at the time when these marks on the
earthworks were made. Domesticated palm trees are
usually marks of human settlements even if other traces
of human life cannot be seen (Bale 1988; Brondzio
2008).
136

Feeding and Guarding

It has already been pointed out that palms have
been domesticated and managed in pre-Columbian
Amazonia (Bale 1988; Balick 1988; Clement 2006a;
2006b; Kann 1997). In fact, it has been shown that
Northwest and Western Amazonia have the richest
genetic resources in palm trees and for many indigenous
groups of the region palm trees have offered subsistence
before agriculture (Clement 2006a).
While nowadays the Manchineri use paxiba
wood (Socratea exorrhiza) for the construction of
houses, their roofs are made of the leaves of the jarina or
ivory nut palm (Phytelephas macrocarpa) or ouricuri
(Attalea excelsa). The Manchineri bows and the head of
their arrows are prepared from peach palm wood, which
is very hard. Furthermore, palm fruits were the previous
Manchineri generations key source of food. According
to Manchineri elders, the main source of alimentation
used to be the three previously mentioned palms: ouricri
137

 ksami, peach palm kiru or chonta, and ivory nut palm

kyawe. When cooked, peach palm fruits are edible. The
Manchineris ancestors also prepared a nutritive soup
from fresh, soft ouricri leaves. Palms are rich in protein
and oils. Although Dias (2006) does not mention these
three palms (ouricuri, peach palm, and ivory nut palm)
in reference to the earthwork sites he studied, the
Manchineri

themselves

identified

them

in

the

photographs of those earthwork structures they have

seen, ouricuris especially. The Manchineri still prepare
nutritive drinks from other palms: assai speri, buriti
sinre, batau shitshitshi (Onecarpus bataua), tucuma
(Astrocaryum vulgare), as well as from the jatoba tree
peji (Hymenaea courbaril).

138

Figure 4 Manchineri house made of paxiba wood and

ivory nut palm leaves
139

Figure 5 Heads of Manchineri arrows made of peach

palm wood

140

Figure 6 Ripe assai

141

The multiple usages of palm trees among

Amazonian communities are reasonably well-known.
For instance, the Apurinas ancestors used moriche,
tucuma, assai and batau palms for their nutrition
(Schiel 2004). The fruits of batau and assai supported
the Bar population (inhabitants of the border area of
Venezuela and Colombia) and brought variety to their
fish and game diet (Beckerman 1977). In addition to
food, palm trees are used for construction, baskets, nets,
and medicine by both Indians and non-Indians in
Amazonia (Balick 1988; Brondzio 2008; Campos and
Ehringhaus 2003; Clement 2006a; Lvi-Strauss 1987).
Moreover, indigenous peoples use various palms for
making bows, arrows, blowguns, darts, masks, as well as
musical instruments (such as from Bactris gasipaes,
Socratea exorrhiza, Lucuma bifera). Palm fruits are also
an important source of alimentation for various edible
birds and other animals, and thus for the native
communities ecosystem (Hill 1993: 114; 2009b: 100).
Recently, the uses of palm trees and sustainable
development have been studied extensively. For
142

instance, assai and babassu offer income for non-Indians

and Indians involved in the extractive economy, as well
as those exporting them to global markets in the South
America and beyond the continent for cosmetics and
food industry in which palm oils and protein is
benefitted (e.g. Brondzio 2008; Campos and Ehringhaus
2003).
The Manchineri skilfully manage their palm trees
and, according to discussions with people working with
other indigenous groups in the area, their techniques are
highly sustainable even in comparison to those of other
indigenous groups. For instance, they rarely cut a palm
in order to enjoy its fruits. In the Manchineri
sociocosmology trees are personified and also associated
to powerful non-human beings. The term Manchineri
means people of the inhar tree. Thus, they say that
We are the inhar tree.

143

Palm Tree Spirits and the Forest Resources

The most feared non-human beings in the
Manchineri cosmos are the forest spirits identified with
three particular palm trees. These non-human beings are
called kajpomyolutu and may be either female or male,
although they are mostly male. They differ by their size,
knowledge and activities. This divides them in three
different groups associated with specific palm trees: kiru
(peach palm), ksami (ouricri), and kyawe (ivory nut
palm). They are referred to as Kiruneru (the peach palm
people), Ksamineru (the ouricri people) and Kyaweneru
(the ivory nut palm people). Size-wise, they are all taken
to be relatively small people. They correspond to those
entities that are considered to be master, owner,
mother, or father beings in many Amerindian
sociocosmologies (e.g. Viveiros de Castro 1992; Costa
2007).
Elsewhere in the Amazon region, beings similar
to the kajpomyolutus are known as a father or mother
of the forest, caboclinho da mata, curupira, or hand144

whistler (Gow 1991; Opas 2008; Regan 1983; Virtanen

2007). Their appearance is human, but they have great
physical

powers

and

other

non-human

qualities.

Sometimes they have been depicted as small men with

one leg turned backwards; this is exemplified by their
Quechua name, chullachaki. This kind of nondifferentiation between human beings, animals and
plants is typical of Amazonian indigenous peoples
(Viveiros de Castro 2004). As one Manchineri man once
told me: I have heard the caboclinho da mata many
times. He blows in his hands. He is the size of a boy. He
is like a person, like a boy. This type of kajpomyolutu is
associated with ouricuri palm. The other two ones are
father of the wind the father of the storm
corresponding to peach palm and ivory nut palm.
These kajpomyolutus can be encountered in the
jungle and they may appear in ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis
caapi) visions. They are supposed to teach the secrets of
the forests and of non-humans, which are needed to
become a good hunter or healer. The kajpomyolutus help
hunters, leading them to the places with an abundance of
145

game, especially tapirs, which are difficult to catch.

Moreover, many people told met that one of the
contemporary shamans of the reserve on one occasion
disappeared in the forest for months. It is believed that
he was taken care of by the mother of the forest, one of
the kajpomyolutus. During his absence the people
thought he had already died, but one day he suddenly
came back. He was in pretty good condition, although all
his clothes had rotted away and he had acquired some
kind of mental disorder. Since then he has preferred to
live by himself. According to the Manchineri, he had
learnt many things from this non-human being,
especially healing skills. Now he is the person who all
villagers seek out if they need curing.
Various youths explained to me how they had
escaped the father of the forest by running desperately
after hearing him or after he had slapped them on their
backs. The kajpomyolutus are immensely strong and can
even kill people if someone does something they do not
like. They are the guardians and protectors of the forest
and its animals. They punish those who over-hunt or
146

damage the forest otherwise. Nevertheless, some men

enter into contact with kajpomyolutus voluntarily. For
instance, a hunter must agree to avoid the company of
females, including his wife, and make offers of tobacco.
People told me that one knows when the father of the
forest is nearby since he blows in his hands to make a
sound like a whistle or the cry of a tinamou. Those who
have made a deal with the father of the forest are now
excellent hunters. However, only few men have done
that, since it is required that one follows strict rules. If
one breaches those rules there is the risk of being killed
by this powerful non-human being. According to
Manchineri people, it is difficult to negotiate with the
father of the forest, since he can take a person to his
world permanently. An encounter with the father or
mother of the forest may lead to mental disorders and
sickness, as well as contacts with other forest spirits. A
person may even die if he fails to follow these rules. A
young Manchineri man told me: When I hunt alone too
much, sometimes the father of forest wants to kill me.
[] When someone does bad things, he kills the
147

person. Usually the person becomes sick first, although

this may also happen to one of the family members,
usually the child of the hunter. If the cause is not
discovered and the correct shamanic treatment not given
to the patient, he or she will die.
Narratives about the master spirits of the forest
that capture people in the forest and harm them or their
family members are common in Amazonia. They can be
markers of proper human behaviour: people should
establish proper relationships to their community
members, avoid overhunting, and acquire appropriate
physical powers and habits that make their bodies human
(see Conklin and Morgan 1996; Gow 1991; Opas 2008;
Virtanen 2007). Such entities represent the dangers of
the forest, as it has been also pointed out in relation to
the chullachaki (Regan 1983: 203). Furthermore, in my
view, the kajpomyolutu stories narrated by Manchineris
in which children were abducted are indicative of the
risks that children and young people run when they
wander alone in the forest and may get lost. Adolescent
boys already at hunting age are more independent and
148

can at least decide whether or not to make a deal with

this forest being. They are almost full persons who know
the moral values of the community. Furthermore, palm
trees manifest values and symbolic limits of the
Manchineri sociocultural system. Even today the
Manchineri say that the spirits of the palms do not live
close to urban areas or in the vicinity of villages
adjoining farms and deforested areas. As for the
contemporary Yine in Madre de Dios the non-human
guardians of the forest are known as a protector of the
valuable tropical trees (Opas 2008). They protect the
environment that many non-Indians are willing to
destroy.
For the Manchineri certain plants and animals are
very dangerous because of their transforming powers.
When Manchineri shamans communicate with the nonhuman world, they deal with such transformations.
Additionally, participants in shamanic rituals, when
taking the hallucinogenic concoction called ayahuasca,
may

interact

with

non-human

agents.

In

their

hallucinogenic visions, they can see the kajpomyolutu,

149

who usually appears as a small man smoking a pipe. He

can show people how and where certain animals live and
what certain plants serve for. Like shamans these palm
beings can see the world from the viewpoint of animals
and plants (Viveiros de Castro 1996: 117-8), but the
difference is that shamans are able to control their
encounters with other non-human beings thus remaining
human (Langdon 1992). Overall, since palm beings are
related to important knowledge, they contribute to the
health and strength of the community.
Palm Trees and Ancestors
When palm spirit people are seen in ayahuasca
rituals hallucinogenic visions they may appear alone or
together with other forest or ancestor spirits that are
important in the Manchineri sociocosmology and
history.

In

general,

for

the

Manchineri

these

hallucinogenic visions are geometric designs (yonha) or

150

image-like visions.10 The kajpomyolutus can appear

with both types of visions. The geometric designs are
themselves non-human entities, such as forest and
ancestor spirits. Even young people can identify different
ayahuasca designs/visions, but elders may help in
interpreting them. The designs appear to the person who
takes ayahuasca bringing knowledge, but they only
appear to those they want to appear to (Virtanen 2007;
2009).
One of the geometric designs that is associated
with non-human palm people in ayahuasca visions is a
design that, according to the Manchineri, is closely
related to one of their ancestors, Pwernokatu. The nonhuman palm being arrives with the design as its vehicle.
The design is associated with this particular ancestor
because when his figure has been drawn to illustrate the
story of Pwernokatu or after ayahuasca visions that I
asked people to describe after ayahuasca rituals, his long
cotton dress was decorated with this particular design.
10 Cf. Gow (1999; 2001) and Reichel-Dolmatof (1978).

151

Pwernokatu is considered to be very beautiful in this

kind of colourful koshma. However, this design never
appears on the body of palm spirits as these non-human
beings remain dissimilar to humans. Palm spirits differ
from ancestor spirits, but at the same time they have a
close relationship with ancestors: palm spirit people
offer resources that ensure well-being and transformation
of cultural places. Likewise Erikson (2001: 109)
observes that for the Matis (a Panoan group of Western
Amazonia) the forest spirits have no ornaments or
piercing, whereas their ancestor spirits have them, as
contemporary Matis do. Moreover, the Matis ancestor
spirits, who lived as real humans, live close to
domesticated palms. In contrast, their forest spirits do
not live in these kinds of cultural human spaces.
It is worth noting that the geometric design that
appears with the ancestor Pwernokatu and is the vehicle
of the palm spirit is similar to the form of the earthwork
site called Cruzeiro in the Upper Purus, Amazonas state
(Virtanen 2011). Its rectangular form has entrances in
four sides (Prssinen et al. 2009). The Manchineri also
152

use the same ancestor design occasionally on their

ceramics and cotton fabrics creating new relations with
different beings in their sociocosmology. However,
different painted designs are usually applied to the
Manchineri body, such as those imitating the skin of
certain animals. These designs can be received from
different animals or ancestors that master the designs
(see Gow 2001 on the anaconda spirit).
Moreover, the landscapes where most of the
upper land earthworks of Western Amazonia are situated
are very similar to those that the Manchineri relate to the
palm spirits. According to the Manchineri, two of the
three types of palm spirit peoples live on terra firme.
This upland makes the palms stand out from the forested
lowlands - such plateaux can be observed from afar.
They are high plain areas that have slopes on some of
their sides and where many palm trees grow. There,
these non-human palm beings are supposed to inhabit
samauma (family: Bombacaceae) or other big trees. The
plain areas, mounds and mountains are features that are
indeed often associated with palm spirits (Daillant 2003:
153

330-4), as well as other spirits (Erikson 2001: 109;

Mtraux 1943: 9). In general, their difference from the
natural environment can have served as points of
reference and orientation.
Palm trees have also been associated with forest
spirits and ancestors in Northwest, Southwest, and
Western Amazonia. This is the case among the Desana
(Hugh-Jones 1979), the Yagua (Chaumeil 2001), the
Matis (Erikson 2001), the Kanamari (Costa 2007), the
Ashaninka (E. Rojas Zolezzi 1994), the Wakunai (Hill
2009a; 2009b), the Apurina (Schiel 2004), and the
Mantsiguenga (M. Rojas Zolezzi 2009). It is not a
surprise, then, that different palms play a central role in
origin myths and cosmologies in this area. The peach
palm, especially, appears in the myths of origin of
Arawaks and Tukanos (Chaumeil 2001; Hill 2009a: 8791; Hugh-Jones 1979). For the Ashaninka kiri (peach
palm) was previously a person, a hero of the myth about
the origin of humanity (E. Rojas Zolezzi 1994). In
Mantsiguenga cosmology peach palm (also called kiri) is
related to the origin of weaving and spinning, skills that
154

were inherited from the moon. Kiris are also envisaged

as beautiful white-skinned women of the forest who have
long black hair and who are complementary parts of the
moon (M. Rojas Zolezzi 2009). According to the
Wakunai myths, the seeds of peach palm were received
from an anaconda spirit (Hill 2009a: 87-91). This may
also link the anaconda designs to palm spirits. The
symmetry between the anaconda and the paxiba palms
especially is seen among in the Vaups. For the Tukano
the paxiba palm originates from a wasp (ReichelDolmatoff 1996), which in the analysis of Karadimas
(2008) has the same personality of the anaconda in
mythology. In the Desana origin myth the anacondacanoe was the carrier of the ancestor clans that
correspond to the wasps larva carried in a parasitic
body. The transformation of the parasite wasp from a
larva is comparable to human life and becoming an
adult. For the Huaorani, as for many other Amazonian
groups, the palm fruit crops represent continuity and
fertility (Rival 1997). Moreover, in the origin myths of
the

Katukinan-speaking

Kanamaris,
155

jac

(Attalea

butyracea) has a fundamental role in the explanation of

the origin of humanity (Costa 2007). Such origin myths
are closely related to the natural environment of these
peoples and explain their relations to non-human beings.
Consequently, in Northwestern and Western
Amazonia palms trees are central in many ritual
practices. The rituals involve chanting, dancing, and
drinking. Festivities mostly take place in the rainy
season. Between November and March, when palm
fruits are ripe and abundant, in Northwestern Amazonia
important rituals are organised that transform energies
and social relations in the community. Then the
ceremonial flutes made of paxiba are made visible
(Chaumeil 2001; Fraysse 1975; Hill 2009b; Hugh-Jones
1979).
In Western Amazonia many other rituals are
related to the peach, moriche and assai palm, and their
ritual objects, such as masks made of palm materials, are
associated with power. The Apurina still organize
festivities for the kamatxi ancestor spirits, who live in
moriche palms. In earlier times, the women had to be
156

hidden during this festivity as the kamatxi came to the

festivity with the help of the flutes and the shamans
work (Schiel 2004). Today the male members reach the
village with moriche palm leaves, and meet the women
in the village plaza before the dancing begins. Male
members of the community look for the palm materials
in the forest. For example, they use moriche leaves for
masks and costumes. Among the Katukina and the
Kanamari, the men also look for palm fruits for
ceremonial drinks, which are later prepared by women.
The adult female members of the community prepare
ritual beverages from palms: batau, peach palm and
assai (Costa 2007; Deturche 2009). Consequently palms
also set gender roles, since men and women relate
differently to palms and personify them in different
ways. Drinks prepared from palm fruits are considered to
be sacred beverages in these contexts and thus, for
instance, are given to young people who participate in
the initiation ritual (Hill 1993: 135-136).
Among the Maipure, the Yagua, the Wakunai
and the Desana these festivities are about the
157

construction of ritual hierarchy between men (ancestors

and new generations), who can see and employ the
sacred instruments made of palm material, recreating
ritual power relations between men and the sacred world.
The sacred instruments are objects of the shamans that
mediate between sky and earth, humans and nonhumans, the living and the dead. (Chaumeil 2001; Hill
1993; 2009b; Hugh-Jones 1979; Zucchi 2006, Schiel
2004). The use of instruments, costumes, masks, foods
and drinks made of palms in rituals show how palm
materials offer a means to communicate with the nonhuman world. Only men are allowed to see the
ceremonial flutes, which are usually shown to young
men for the first time during their initiation ritual.
The men also prepare hunters weapons made of palms:
blowguns and blowpipes, which are prepared from thin
woods and may extend to four meters, and are very
difficult to fabricate (Chaumeil 2001; Erikson 2001).
These objects have usually great symbolic significance.
Chaumeil (2001) suggests, the Yagua blowpipes, which
158

are made of peach palm, pucuna capsi (Lucuma bifera),

or paxiba, transform invisible energies similarly to the
work of shamans. Erikson (2001) points out that the
Matis have continued to use their blowguns, because
they are closely related to their ancestors. The blowguns
are seen to act as ancestors and the hunters choosing
them as a weapon maintain to carry ornaments. The use
of blowguns differs greatly from bows and they are used
for different kinds of game, because the use of one of the
weapons alters the hunters status temporarily and
determine what to hunt. They relate the Matis to animals
as well as to themselves. What seems to link the palms
and ancestors as seen in hunting, ritual acts, and designs
is that palm are seen as transformers similar to ancestors
spirits, who have contributed to the current life form of
many indigenous peoples.
Transformability of Palms
Vegetal materials are often the symbol of novelty
and fertility, and thus they are used for making
159

ceremonial costumes and masks. For instance, the

Manchineri use fresh leaves to prepare the ceremonial
costume of Paho, the protector of the ceremonies and
festivities. However, he is more a maintainer than a
transformer, which would explain why his costume is
not made from palm materials. Palms are powerful
entities that connect human and non-human perspectives.
For the Manchineri palms are powerful transformers:
they allow the communitys exchange, creation and
production.
Palm trees provide transformable materials that
feed and protect humans, serve for construction, and thus
enable community members to recreate their humanity.
For the Manchineri palms constitute an ancient source of
subsistence. They also relate certain palms with forest
beings that guard the necessary immaterial and material
forest resources. In their cosmology these palm trees
have been subjectified: they are separated from the web
of relations in the sociocosmoloy and regarded as
persons. Therefore, they are seen as people and a special
meaning is given to them. However, too close interaction
160

with these non-humans would harm a human perspective

(Viveiros de Castro 2004: 468, 476). I would like to
suggest that one of the reasons why a non-human agency
has been attached to palms and they have been
personified

has

been

the

uncertainty

about

the

availability of necessary resources and the continuity of

generations. Uncertainty is common feature for nonhuman agencies (Teubner 2006). For the Manchineri, the
same three palms species, which are associated with the
powerful non-human being, are the ones that have
offered them a source of alimentation and housing in the
past and at present. These palms carry knowledge about
how the ancestors who lived in the past and survived at
times of difficulty. The palms have influenced the way in
which Manchineriness has been and still is produced:
Manchineri bodies, houses and objects have been made
of certain types of palm resources. As these palms have
been one of the important contributors to their human
forms, they are special markers of Manchineri history
and closely related to ancestors. Today the palm spirits
are also guardians of forest resources, such as game, that
161

the community need in order to produce their agency.

That explains why palm trees are also important for
other Arawaks, as well as Katukinas, Panoans and
Tukanos. The ways they use palm materials in order to
prepare ceremonial objects contribute to the continuation
of the relationship between humans and non-humans, the
living and the dead (see also Hill 2009b; Hugh-Jones
1979). Palm trees are personified as entities that are
considered to be partly human and partly non-human.
Thus, they allow transformation and interaction between
the human and non-human worlds, which is also seen in
the ritual life of other Amazonian native communities.
As markers of humans relation to both their
environment and their communities, palm trees continue
to belong to a special category in Amazonian thinking.
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173

Bogot:

Rethinking Cities in Peruvian

Amazonia
History, Archaeology and Myth
Peter Gow
University of St Andrews

This essay seeks to show how the potential links

between myth, as a body of ethnographic data and as an
object of analysis, can be brought into alignment with
archaeological materials in the elucidation of the past of
Peruvian Amazonia. I look at a curious feature of a set of
myths about a kind of wild pig, and suggest that this
feature once had a material referent, namely, cities.
These cities have disappeared, but have left their imprint
on the mythic system.

174

My reason for addressing this topic is to restate

the position of Lvi-Strausss work in anthropology. I
think that Lvi-Strauss is, despite popular opinion, one
of the most consistent materialist thinkers in recent
anthropology. Further, I think that Lvi-Strauss is also,
and again despite popular opinion, one of the most
consistently historical thinkers in recent anthropology.
The four-volume Mythologiques, his major work
([1970][1973][1978][1981]), records a surprising fact:
the myths of indigenous American peoples are internally
structured as a system of great scale and remarkable
consistency. Importantly, and virtually unremarked on,
Lvi-Strauss is clear that this system is an event. It is the
on-going product of human thought occurring in, and
about, the processes of the human settlement of the
Americas.
More importantly still, Lvi-Strauss shows how
myths are material. On the face of it, myths would seem
to be the least material of objects since, unconstrained by
any objective reality tests, they could be expected to vary
virtually freely. They do not. Despite their extreme
175

variety, myths show very consistent transformational

structures. Lvi-Strauss argues that the only explanation
of that structure is that it is revealing the internal
structure of human thought. But as I noted, for LviStrauss, this structure of human thought is not abstract or
timeless, but rather historical: human thought necessarily
occurs in history, understood as a set of irreducible
contingencies. The core analysis of the Mythologiques
ends with a remarkable geological metaphor, to
underscore the materialist nature of the project.
Indigenous settlement in Amazonia
Over the past few years, there has been a
revolution in the way in which scholars of indigenous
Amazonia have thought about how indigenous people
inhabit and think about settled space. Before this change,
indigenous settlements in the region were usually
imagined to be both small and highly mobile, due to low
population densities, the ecological constraints attendant
on shifting cultivation and fishing and hunting as a
176

subsistence base, and sociological deficiencies and/or

limitations. Ethnographic studies showed that houses and
settlement layout often have dense symbolic meanings,
but variation in scale was not imagined to be an
important issue.
This attitude was held despite the fact that
anthropologist knew that this had not always been the
case. The earliest European chroniclers of Amazonia
described very large settlements. Carvajal wrote,
there was one settlement that
stretched for five leagues without there
intervening any space from house to house,
which was a marvellous thing to behold.
(Toribio Medina [1988:198])
Later accounts, describing conditions after the first major
post-Colombian epidemics, described much smaller
settlements, and some later commentators doubted the
earliest testimony (see discussion in Myers [1992]).
Certainly, the ethnographers of the region have not felt it
necessary to think of cities as a former or potential state

177

of indigenous Amazonian social forms. That, however,

has now changed in the past few years, as archaeologists
have started to find large pre-Colombian settlements in
Amazonia.
This change is important, but I do not think that it
changes much about my own data as an ethnographer
among the Piro and Ashninca people of the Bajo
Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia. Those data still
stand, for they are rooted in their own materiality as
products of my personal engagement as an ethnographer
of those people since 1980. However, the recent change
in our understanding of the deep past of Amazonia
allows me to rethink my own data.
Further, it has been argued by the archaeologist
Roosevelt that what ethnographers of indigenous
Amazonian peoples have observed in the twentieth
century does not matter because such ethnographers
have arrived far too late in the processes of colonial
destruction [1993]. I believe that this is false, and is
based on a false idea of evidentiality. Here I want to
tentatively suggest the relevance of ethnographic data
178

from the late twentieth century in order to understand the

past of the region.
Starting with ethnography
I begin with a piece of ethnography, which is
what ethnographers know best (see Gow [2001]). In
1982, I told a Piro man, Artemio Fasabi, headman of the
little village of Santa Clara on the Bajo Urubamba, with
a population of about 80 people, of an ayahuasca vision
I had had four years before in Alto Shim, a much
smaller Ashninka community in the Gran Pajonal to the
west of the Bajo Urubamba, with a population of five
people. My vision was of flying under the earth and
seeing a large city below me. I asked him if there were
people living under the earth. Artemio told me that the
old people, like Old Shantako and his own father, say
that this is so, that the cajunchis, shamans, visit the
underworld and see people down there. These, they say,
are the white-lipped peccaries, who are people in the
underworld. He then went on to tell me a myth (Piro:
179

tsrunnini ginkakle, ancient peoples story) about a man

who visited this subterranean world.
Several versions of this myth are known, and one
contains an elaborated description of the white-lipped
peccaries settlement. This is a version collected by the
Dominican missionary Alvarez in the 1950s, which
contains the following passage,
This shaman went down under the earth,
following the tracks of the white-lipped
peccaries, walking for five days and nights. At
the end of this period, he found the great city of
the white-lipped peccaries, set out in lots
separated by wide streets. Each lot was fenced
in with pona (palm bark) to the height of two
metres. In the centre of the city was the palace
of the Mother of the White-Lipped Peccaries.
The shaman went to talk to the mother
of the white-lipped peccaries, who received
him with solicitude and courtesy. Afterwards,
she took him around all the corrals, explaining
to him the distinct characteristics of the whitelipped peccaries. There were peccaries of the
Koshichinari family, black and small, which
went up to the earth; others of the Payoneri,
round and fat; of the Manchineri, with white
feet; of the Kakoaleneri, fat and reddish; of the
180

Gimekaneri, which are the biggest; and of the

Hahamlineri, which are very wild, and jump at
their fence to escape to the earth. [1960]
The family names of the white-lipped peccaries refer to
the nerune, the endogamous groups into which the Piro
say their ancestors were divided.
This myth segment seems to be a very succinct
but rich description of a type of urban settlement: a
central area with a large house (the palace) of the ruler
of the place, surrounded by enclosed fenced areas
inhabited by endogamous groups, which are separated by
wide streets. Piro people do not live, and, as long as
written records exist, never have lived in communities
like these. Contemporary Piro settlements are, in the
main, long lines of houses strung along the banks of the
Bajo Urubamba river. Illustrations from the midnineteenth century (when the Piro population was much
lower) show a similar pattern of short lines of larger
communal houses also oriented to the mainstream
(Marcoy [1875]). Piro villages show little or no internal
181

segmentation and certainly do not contain fenced

neighbourhoods.
There are many strange details in Piro myths, but
this image of a city struck me as especially enigmatic.
When I thought about this detail, which occurs less
strongly in other versions of this myth, I was not sure of
what to make of it. The image reminded me of the small
Franciscan mission of Puerto Ocopa on the Peren river,
to the west of the Bajo Urubamba, but a settlement
known to some Piro people. In 1978, Puerto Ocopa was
laid out rather like the mythic description, with the
church and mission buildings in the centre, and the
inhabitants houses laid out in streets and surrounded by
high pona fences. The image bore a lesser, but still real,
similarity to the centre and suburbs of the large city of
Pucallpa to the north down along the Ucayali river. This
city is familiar to many Piro people, and some are longterm residents in it. Pucallpa thus functions as a model of
a real city (Ucayali Spanish: ciudad legtima, Piro:
tsro poko potu). At best, I thought that the image of such
settlements characterized by their relative or absolute
182

size and internal social complexity had migrated, for

whatever reason, into this Piro myth. Perhaps, the
subterranean world of the white-lipped peccaries had
been subject to a recent urbanization to stress its
difference to the everyday Piro lived world.
Thinking further on the problem, it seemed odd
that this mythic account of a city should be so different
to Cuzco, to the south in the headwaters of the
Urubamba in the southern Peruvian Andes, the one city
with which the Piro people had long been familiar. The
Piro version specifies local, Amazonian, materials for
the construction of the city of the white-lipped peccaries.
It does not mention stone, even though Piro people are
well aware of the nature of Andean architecture, and
indeed regularly talk of cities of stone located in the
forests of the Alto Urubamba, which they identify with
the Gigkane, the Incas.
Further pause for thought occurred because this
myth is not unique to the Piro, but is known in different
versions throughout Southern Amazonia, at least as far
away as Maranho in Eastern Brazil. Some of these
183

eastern Amazonian versions were studied by LviStrauss in The Raw and the Cooked [1970]. LviStrauss analysis reveals two interesting features.
Firstly, indigenous Amazonian mythic thought
uses peccaries as images of human society/collectivity,
and it uses the difference between the two local species
of peccaries to differentiate two aspects of that
collectivity based on difference in the ecology and social
behaviour of the two species. Collared peccaries, with
small and stable home ranges and living in small groups,
stand in these myths for human collectivity as a
synchronic phenomenon, while white-lipped peccaries,
with very large territories and living in herds of several
hundred, stand for human collectivity as a diachronic
phenomenon. That white-lipped peccaries image human
collectivity as a diachrony is amply confirmed by later
ethnographic research: the multiplicity of this species
can either be viewed as the past of humans or their
future.
The second point that Lvi-Strauss makes about
these myths is that they are so specific and so
184

stereotyped in their description of the residences of the

white-lipped peccaries, and the manner by which the
animals enter and leave them, that they might refer to a
former mode of semi-domestication of these animals that
has since disappeared and left no trace other than in the
variants of this myth [1970:87]. The enigmatic nature of
the city of the white-lipped peccaries is also confirmed
by other ethnographic fragments. In the Piro language,
there is a root yomle-, which in substantive form is
yomlechi, tomb, grave, and in verbal aspect is yomleta,
to jump up against an enclosure, an activity specified
for the white-lipped peccaries in the myth. Similarly, the
Arawet (speakers of an entirely unrelated language in
Eastern Amazonia) say that humans and white-lipped
peccaries are both dwellers in enclosed places, villages
in the case of the former, swamps full of palm groves in
the case of the latter (Viveiros de Castro [1992]). As
with Lvi-Strausss analysis, these little fragments
suggest a material referent that is currently absent, or at
least just recently and secondarily instantiated by
contemporary urban settlements.
185

While Lvi-Strauss is committed to seeing myths

as historical objects in the Mythologiques, he very
seldom appeals to such evidence-free speculations. This
suggests to me that these myths about white-lipped
peccaries actually are especially enigmatic. In short, they
constitute what Stephen Jay Gould called odd features
in his analysis of geological thought [1987]: odd features
are the unexpected traces of an older order in what
should be seamless systems, which reveal a hidden
history of that system. Lvi-Strauss has used this kind of
argument often, most notably in his critique of the
supposed archaism of people like the Nambikwara. The
simple culture of the Nambikwara turns out to contain
elements that are not at all simple, which suggests that
Nambikwara

simplicity

development

from

is
former

relatively

recent

complexity

[1963].

Obviously, Lvi-Strausss argument here is against

social evolutionism, but it also contains the essence of
his theory of human history. It is anti-evolutionist, but
not anti-historical.

186

I suspect that Lvi-Strauss speculations about a

former state of semi-domestication of white-lipped
peccaries are mistaken. Many indigenous Amazonian
peoples have long been familiar with Old World
domestic pigs and their modes of raising, and the
analogies between the Tayasuidae and the Suidae have
not been lost on them. Artemios own story shifted from
huangana,

white-lipped

peccary

to

chancho,

domestic pig as his hero entered the underworld. It

seems very likely to me, therefore, that the raising of
domestic pigs provided indigenous Amazonian peoples
with an concrete image of how the white-lipped
peccaries interacted with their supernatural owners, an
image unavailable from Old World sources of their
understandings of, say, the relationships between
supernatural owners and spider monkeys or piranha fish.

187

Finding the city of the white-lipped peccaries

The problems of the city of the white-lipped
peccaries, and the wider enigmas of the myths about the
white-lipped peccaries, were certainly working away in
my mind, but they might have simply gone totally
unanswered had I not, one day in Rio de Janeiro, read
the thesis of the American archaeologist Michael
Heckenberger on his research in the Upper Xing in
Central Brazil. I was in the midst of writing a book on
Piro myths about white-lipped peccaries, and it was with
a sensation akin to vertigo that I read his account of the
site Kugikugu.
Following

his

archaeological

research

in

Kugikugu and similar sites, Heckenberger argues that the

period between 1300 to 1700 in the Upper Xing was
characterized by the emergence of a small number of
very large settlements, surrounded by defensive ditch
and palisade structures, with a central circular plaza, and
a series of large roads leading out of the central plaza
towards the outer defensive ditches and beyond. The
188

orange-segment shaped areas bounded by the plaza,

roads and outer defences were also palisaded, so
producing a complex set of defensive possibilities.
Judging from the density of ceramic remains throughout
the area inside the outer defensive ditches, the entire
settlement seems to have been densely populated.
It was with a kind of amazed fascination that I
read Heckenbergers account of these Upper Xing
fortified settlements. They were like nothing I was
familiar with in the ethnography of the Piro, living so far
to the west, except to the mythic description of the
subterranean city of the white-lipped peccaries. As the
myth states,
This shaman went down under the earth,
following the tracks of the white-lipped
peccaries, walking for five days and nights. At
the end of this period, he found the great city of
the white-lipped peccaries, set out in lots
separated by wide streets. Each lot was fenced
in with pona (palm bark) to the height of two
metres. In the centre of the city was the palace
of the Mother of the White-Lipped Peccaries.

189

Now what is a very concise description of a form of

settlement found from 1300 to 1700 in the Upper Xing
doing in a Piro myth told almost three centuries after
their abandonment and some 2000 Km away? There are
a number of connections.
Firstly, Heckenberger is clear that a site like
Kugikugu is not historically continuous with its current
inhabitants,

the

Carib-speaking

Kuikuru.

He

convincingly demonstrates that the current residents of

the site are recent, post-1700, migrants to the site. The
people who built Kugikugu were the ancestors of the
contemporary Mehinaku and Wauj peoples, currently
resident slightly to the west but still in the Upper Xing
basin. The Mehinaku and Wauj peoples are speakers of
a single language of the Maipuran family. Heckenberger
argues that speakers of Southern/Central Maipuran
languages radiated out of Northern Bolivia into Central
Brazil as intensified modes of agriculture led to rapid
population expansion.

The Mehinaku and Wauj

language is closely related to Piro, and it seems likely

that the Piro were the product of a slightly later radiation
190

out of the Northern Bolivia but in the opposite direction

not east into Central Brazil, but west into Western
Brazil and Southeast Peru.
Heckenberger told me once that the Piro were a
problem for his analysis: they were in the wrong place
and they confirmed none of his theories, as the linguist
Dale Kauffman had pointed out to him. I offered my
little myth fragment as a bit of hope, which he took with
an archaeologists proper scepticism about such stories.
Not long after, however, Heckenberger very proudly
showed me an aerial photograph of a large structure
recently discovered in Acre State, Western Brazil, with
many of the features of the Upper Xing sites. This
structure is located in what was, historically, the territory
of the easternmost population of Piro-speakers (the
Manchineri (see Virtanen (this volume)), and in the area
through which the ancestors of the Peruvian Piro almost
certainly migrated to their current location (see Gow
[2002]).
These sites in Acre are now much better known
than was true at that time, and that their makers were
191

ancestors of modern Piro-speaking peoples is almost

certain. These archaeological sites suggest a solution to
the enigma of the cities of the white-lipped peccaries:
this mythic image refers to a model of settlement present
until relatively recently in Piro history. This is possibly
also true of the other versions of the myth about the
white-lipped peccaries, which would then record, not an
abandoned mode of rearing white-lipped peccaries, but
an abandoned mode of settlement.
Implications for settlements
I want now to draw out a few of the implications
of my argument and the recent archaeological findings.
Firstly, large complex settlements are clearly old in
Amazonia. This allows us to think that the original
accounts of people like Carvajal were correct, but also
requires ethnographers of the region to include that fact
in their analyses. That no later European observers saw
such settlements is undoubtedly due to the first and
devastating wave of epidemics.
192

Secondly, settlement patterns are complex in the

region. Heckenberger has convincingly argued that the
ancestral Carib-speakers in the Upper Xing lived in
small settlements reminiscent of those found among
contemporary Carib-speakers in the Guianas. It was only
later, and under the influence of Arawak-speakers, that
they began to live in larger, round, multi-house villages
[2005]. This suggests a lability in indigenous Amazonian
conceptualizations of settlement pattern, and an ease in
moving from one to the other. For example, Townsley
[1994] has recorded a dramatic transformation in
Yaminahua social organization and settlement pattern
over the twentieth century from socially isolated villages
based on longhouses identified with exogamous moieties
to modern villages centred on relations with Peruvian
nationals.

However,

instead

of

viewing

this

transformation as a simple case of acculturation,

Townsley has argued cogently that the modern village
is simply an intensification of an older pattern of dryseason trekking camps, which have now become
permanent

settlements.

As
193

they

abandoned

the

longhouse villages, the Yaminahua also abandoned the

complex moiety rituals performed there, adopting new
modes of organization.
The lability in settlement forms also goes some
way to explaining how many indigenous Amazonian
peoples survived the early and later epidemics. They
were able to quickly shift from large-scale to small-scale
settlements because both models were available to them.
The Upper Xing is a good example of this process.
From the 1880s until the 1960s, this area was
characterized by dramatic demographic collapse due to
waves of epidemics. The traumatic human cost of that
demographic collapse cannot be underestimated, not can
the profound implication of that process for local social
life. But crucially, the Upper Xing social system did not
disintegrate

completely

as

population

numbers

constantly fell. Instead, it contracted in scale while

retaining its overall form. Some component communities
were abandoned, permanently or temporarily, but most
survived (Heckenberger [2005]), in a remarkable

194

testament to the lability of indigenous Amazonian

settlement forms.
Thirdly, my account here goes some way to
rethinking the modern cities of Peruvian Amazonia, and
perhaps elsewhere in the region. The past century and a
half has seen a dramatic rise in urban settlements in
Peruvian Amazonia. Especially since WWII, the region
has seen a dramatic shift in population into urban centres
like Iquitos and Pucallpa. While many of the inhabitants
of these cities are immigrants from outside the region,
the vast majority originate in the Peruvian Amazonia.
While seldom seen as indigenous people, they are
certainly autochthonous and descended from indigenous
people. Indeed, the beginning of my own fieldwork in
Peruvian Amazonia, in 1980, coincided with an
important statistical event: the population of the region
became predominantly urban (Santos-Granero and
Barclay [2000: 347]).
Such literature as is available on modern cities in
Peruvian Amazonia attributes their social forms to nonlocal sources, although there is very little evidence that
195

any of these cities was ever consciously planned, except

in their central and most economically valuable areas.
Instead they seem to simply have accreted. Chevalier
[1982] gives a fascinating portrait of the formation of
Puerto Inca, admittedly a very small town on the
Pachitea river. As people moved, over time, into Puerto
Inca from other areas, primarily in the nearby Ucayali
valley, they spontaneously formed a system of
neighbourhoods of considerable spatial and symbolic
complexity. This suggests strongly that such migrants
already had a model of what cities could be and how
they should be internally ordered. Where would such a
model come from?
The only candidate for such a model that has
been posited in the admittedly very scanty literature on
the topic is the overt and formal planning of Jesuit and
Franciscan missions (San Roman [1975]). These two
mission organizations controlled large areas of Peruvian
Amazonia from the seventeenth century onwards, and
even until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the
Franciscans were among the very few non-indigenous
196

people resident in the region. The Jesuits and

Franciscans had very definite ideas about what a mission
should look like, and they undoubtedly imposed the
basic form that the centres of cities in Peruvian
Amazonia currently take. There is however a significant
problem in the literature on the foundation of these
missions that has never, to my knowledge, been
addressed: how were the fairly powerless missionaries
able to impose the mission model on so many different
indigenous peoples. Why did the latter so readily, in
many cases, accept the alien mission model? As many
cases historically proved, indigenous people in the
region

were

perfectly

capable

of

resisting

the

missionaries when they saw fit.

One possibility, raised by the present analysis, is
that many indigenous people in the region accepted the
mission model because it fitted with a model of large,
internally-complex

settlements

that

they

already

possessed, and hence that missions were an immanent

structural potentiality of indigenous societies. It is also
probable that both the Jesuits and the Franciscans
197

developed their plans for missions in dialogue with

indigenous people, a dialogue that, along with so much
else, is silenced in the mission histories.
Obviously, my account here is tentative in the
extreme, and only further research will confirm or
challenge it. However, I hope I have shown how taking a
mythic image that is an odd feature can be profitable in
opening up new kinds of questions about the past of
Amazonia, and presumably elsewhere.
Implications for the study of myth
To conclude, I want to point out a key
implication for the relationship between myth and
history. In their content myths provide no reliable
evidence of past conditions, but in their structure they
do. In the Overture to the Mythologiques, Lvi-Strauss
argued that myths, like music, are instruments for the
obliteration of time [1970]. It is in the very effort that
myths make to obliterate time that we have historical
evidence. Certain myths have a sticky or resistant quality
198

that leaves a residue, an unresolved thought, a problem

to ponder on. Here the myth has not completed its work,
and has not fully obliterated time. The myth has, in
short, left an odd feature.
Such odd features are all the more impressive
given the general weirdness of myths. One of the most
important Piro myths begins with an account of how a
woman took an anaconda as a lover. This outlandish
scenario should be no less resistant to critical scrutiny
than the city of the white-lipped peccaries, but I have
never felt obliged to think about it, for it is simply how
the story goes: it is not, therefore, an odd feature within
the structure of the myth. However, in one version, a
man told me,
The grandmother was holding the baby
in her skirt, swinging in her hammock, and she
fell asleep, and the baby slept too. Then she
awoke and saw the snake curled up on her skirt.
In her fright, she let the baby fall, into the fire...

199

His wife noted an odd feature of this scene. Hammocks

are little used by Piro people other than for small babies.
A Piro grandmother might, at a stretch, fall asleep in her
grandchilds hammock with it on her lap, but that
hammock would never be near a fire. Assuming
(wrongly) that I had noticed this improbability too, she
said, referring to a neighbouring people,
Long ago, my fellow tribespeople slept
in hammocks with their fires underneath, just
like the Amahuaca people.
So, Piro people also notice odd features in their myths,
but very different ones to those I have noticed. I doubt
that any contemporary Piro person would consider the
city of the white-lipped peccaries an odd feature, for Piro
people know that cities exist out there somewhere, and
they also know that these cities are full of people like
me. Here the myth has done its work of obliterating time,
for contemporary Piro people do not hold that cities are
part of their past. Now, for them, cities belong to others,

200

kajitu and giyalu, white people and white-lipped

peccaries.

References
Alvarez, R. 1960. Los Piros. Lima: Litografa Universo.
Chevalier, J. M. 1982 Civilization and the Stolen Gift:
Capital, Kin and Cult in Eastern Peru. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Gould, S. J. 1987. Times Arrow, Times Cycle: Myth
and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time.
Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press.
Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian Myth and its History.
Oxford: University Press.
2002. Piro, Apurin and Campa: Social
Dissimilation and Assimilation in Southwestern
Amazonia. In

Comparative Arawakan Histories:

Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in

201

Amazonia (eds.) J.D. Hill and F. Santos-Granero.

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Heckenberger, M.J. 2005. The Ecology of Power:
Culture,

Place

and

Personhood

in

Southern

Amazonia, A.D. 1000-2000. New York and London:

Routledge.
Lvi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New
York and London: Basic Books, Inc.
1970. The Raw and the Cooked. London:
Jonathan Cape.
1973. From Honey to Ashes. London: Jonathan
Cape.
1978. The Origin of Table Manners. London:
Jonathan Cape.
1981. The Naked Man. London: Jonathan Cape.
Marcoy, P. 1875. Travels in South America from the
Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, 2 vols. London:
Blackie.
Myers, T.P. 1992. Agricultural Limitations of the
Amazon in Theory and Practice. World Archaeology
Vol. 24: 82-97.
202

Roosevelt, A.C. 1993. The Rise and Fall of the Amazon

Chiefdoms. LHomme, 126-128:255-283.
San Roman, J.V. 1975. Perfiles histricos de la
Amazona peruana. Iquitos: CETA.
Santos-Granero, F. and F. Barclay 2000. Tamed
Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in
Upper Amazonia. Boulder: Westview Press.
Toribio Media, J. (ed.) 1988. The Discovery of the
Amazon. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Townsley, G. 1994. Los Yaminahua. In Guia
Etnogfica de la Alto Amazona, Volumen 2:
Mayoruna, Uni, Yaminahua (eds.) F. Santos-Granero
and F. Barclay.

Panama and Quito: Smithsonian

Tropical Research Institute/Ediciones Abya-Yala.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992. From the enemys point of
view: humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society.
Chicago: University Press.

203

Nuchu and Kwarp

Images of the past in Central and South
America
Paolo Fortis
University of Roehampton

My aim here is to address some issues

concerning the relationship that Kuna people from
Panama entertain with their past. Specifically, I will look
at how this relationship informs the carving of wooden
sculptures called nuchukana or ukkurwalakana which
are central in Kuna healing rituals. Kuna people entertain
a particular relation with their own past and with the
people and entities that populate it; this relation unfolds
when we look closely at contemporary daily practices,
such as woodcarving. I will argue that figures of

204

ancestors and primordial beings are conflated in Kuna

practices and discourses involving their wooden figures
and in the perception of the forest as their ancestral land.
This poses an interesting problem: although Kuna
wooden figures are associated with death and the
primordial past, they are not, strictly speaking,
representations of ancestors. How do Kuna people think
about their forefathers? What ideas inform present day
ritual practices in a Kuna lived world?
In order to address these questions I will point at
remarkable similarities between Kuna woodcarving and
mortuary rituals carried out by the people from the
Upper Xingu in Central Brasil. I will focus on common
traits, as well as on differences, between Kuna and
Xinguano ritual usages of wooden logs, and will
highlight shared motifs in their mythologies and ritual
life. Eventually, I will suggest that a similar logic
underlies Kuna and Xinguano woodcarving, pointing at
the relationship between the living and different forms of
otherness, such as the dead, ancestors, or primordial
beings.
205

Although I restrict my focus to the comparison

between

these

ethnographic

two

ethnographic

evidence

suggests

areas,
that

the

further
same

comparison can be extended to other Amerindian

societies. Little attention has been paid to threedimensional, sculptural forms in Lowland Central and
South America. Ethnographic studies of Amerindian
sculptural forms are very limited mainly because of the
difficulty in finding what we normally define as
sculpture from a Western point of view, namely the
representation

of

the

human

body.

Nonetheless,

ethnographic examples illustrate the use of sculptural

forms in healing and mortuary rituals across a variety of
groups in Central and South America suggesting a link
between sculptural representations of the person and
death (Fejos 1943; Nimuendaj 1952; Nordenskild
1929; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1960; Ypez 1982). I shall
address here one aspect of this issue, which regards
Kuna ideas of ancestral pasts and the ways these pasts
can be instantiated in wooden sculptural forms.
The majority of Kuna people live on more than
206

thirty

small

islands,

scattered

throughout

the

Archipelago of San Blas, off the Atlantic coast of

Panama, also known as Kuna Yala (Kuna land). A few
communities are situated in the Darin forest and on the
Urab gulf of Colombia. Almost half of the entire Kuna
population (around 60,000) lives, more or less
permanently, in Panama City, and other smaller towns
such as Coln. The ancestors of Kuna people came in
contact with Spanish invaders early in the sixteenth
century (Lothrop 1948; Howe 1998) and by the mid
seventeenth century they were living in the Darin
forest, interacting with colonists and missionaries with
alternating bellicose and cooperative attitudes (Salcedo
Requejo 1908[1640]). What we know about Kuna ritual
practices and cosmology from the early chronicles is
scant, with the notable exception of the description of
shamanic rituals given by the English surgeon and
explorer Lionel Wafer (1888[1699]).
Kuna wooden figures are first mentioned by
ethnographers and missionaries in the early twentieth
century (Nordenskild 1929; 1938; Santa Teresa 1924).
207

We know little about the origin of their carving.

However, I shall argue that it is not through looking at
archival sources that we are likely to find an answer to
our initial questions, but rather by focusing on
contemporary Kuna daily practices and discourses. By
comparing Kuna practices with those of other Lowland
Central and South American societies we can shed some
light on their understanding of the relationship between
past and present, the living and the dead.
Nuchu
Kuna people carve different types of wooden
figures, almost all with anthropomorphic features. Small
figures, maximally 10 cm long, are used by men as
amulets to protect them from evil spirits when they walk
alone in the mainland forest. They are also tied up at one
extremity of hammocks where small babies sleep, to
protect them against predatory spirits, and are put in
water drunk by pregnant women, to help them have a
smooth delivery. Medium size figures, between 20 and
208

30 cm, are the most common type and are called

nuchukana (little ones), or, sometimes, suarmala
(wooden poles/sticks). They are kept in wooden or
plastic boxes at the feet of one of the two house posts.
Their task is that of protecting Kuna households from
incursions of evil entities (ponikana), demons (niakana)
and ghosts (kirmala). Moreover, nuchukana are personal
auxiliary spirits of Kuna ritual specialists, especially of
the nele, the seer, and of the apsoketi, the knower of the
healing chants. They are key in helping the former to
diagnose illnesses and the latter to cure them. The third
type of wooden statues is called ukkurwalakana. Those
are taller figures, of around 1,5 m, carved out of balsa
wood during collective healing rituals conducted by the
apsoketi and the nele.

209

Figure 7 Kuna wooden figures

Ukkurwalakana are so called after balsa tree,
ukkurwala (Ochroma pyramidale), from which wood
they are made. They are carved during the preparation of
the eight-day long ceremony, nek apsoket, carried out to

210

rid the village from pathogenic animal spirits, who cause

epidemics, or from the soul of a deceased person, which
terrorizes people and affects the tranquillity of everyday
life. In Okopsukkun, a village in middle-Eastern San
Blas where I conducted fieldwork, the most skilled
carvers are asked to carve figures for the nek apsoket.
Balsa figures are placed against the cane walls in the
interior of the communal gathering house (onmakket
neka). I have unfortunately never witnessed an actual
ceremony of this kind. However, Kuna people described
the rows of balsa figures of different size, lining against
the walls in the dark interior of the gathering house, as a
somewhat uncanny spectacle. I was told that they are
ordered in a row from the tallest to the shortest, como
una escalera, like a stair, a Spanish expression often
used by Kuna people to refer to a set of siblings one near
the other in age.
Powerful co-residents
Besides indicating the wooden figures, the term
211

nuchu is also used to address children and youngsters in

an affective way. A certain degree of affectivity and
intimacy is also evinced in the way wooden figures are
treated by household members. Although people
seemingly pay no attention to their nuchukana during
daytime (they would stand almost unnoticed at the feet
of one of the two house poles), I noticed that members of
the household are fully aware of their presence and
interact with them during daily life.

Figure 8 Leopoldo Smith carving a wooden figure

212

Young, pre-pubescent girls regularly wash

nuchukana with fresh water perfumed with sweet basil
(pisep). This is meant to wash their cloths (mola). Elder
women, normally the grandmother (muu), blow tobacco
smoke from a pipe on their nuchukana, and burn cacao
seeds in clay braziers near them in order to nurture and
strengthen them. Tobacco smoke is the unfermented
maize drink (inna) of nuchukana, while cacao smoke is a
medicine that strengthens their capacity to see (kurkin
okannoket) and to interact with human and non-human
beings. Adult men, and especially the oldest member of
the household, the grandfather (tata), entertain personal
relationships with nuchukana. A man who knows
healing songs would rehearse them, lying in his
hammock, before sleeping. These are long chants,
incomprehensible to most people, which are sung in the
language of nuchukana. For this reason, nuchukana are
delighted to hearing elder Kuna people singing at night
because, I was told, they like to converse (apsoket) with
them. Many times village elders told me that it is
important that young people keep learning healing songs
213

because these songs make nuchukana feel alive and

happy, thereby encouraging them to protect Kuna people
against illnesses and misfortune. However, if men do not
sing at night, women do not smoke, and young girls do
not bathe them, nuchukana feel sad, weak and lonely,
they do not feel loved, and may decide to abandon their
human co-residents to move permanently to their village
in the underworld, called Kaluypakki.
By the same token, nuchukana are acknowledged
by household members as powerful ancient beings
(serretkana) and are treated with deference and respect. I
was intrigued each time I asked someone to show me
their nuchukana under the sunlight by the care with
which their boxes were moved and brought in the
courtyard. People told me that if someone causes a
nuchu to fall on the floor this might upset it. Even worse,
if any one breaks specific restrictions during the
performance of a healing ritual, nuchukana will retaliate
against the performing singer and might even kill him.
This is particularly serious during the nek apsoket,
during which adult men and elder women sit for many
214

hours in the gathering house smoking pipes and

cigarettes, while the apsoketi sings and the nele observes
what happens in the invisible domains of the cosmos. All
men have to abstain from sex, lest they would upset the
ukkurwalakana participating in the ritual, who would kill
the apsoketi.
Such apparently different feelings towards their
ancient co-residents are also represented by the use of
different terms to refer to them. On the one hand, the
term nuchu (little, young, small one), used in
current daily language, implies familiarity. On the other
hand, when a singer addresses his nuchukana during
curing sessions, he refers to them in general as nelekana,
seers. More specifically, he addresses each one with
the mythic name of the owner of the tree species from
which is has been carved. Kuna people agree in saying
that the spirits inhabiting the wooden statues are
powerful shamans. They move through the different
layers (pillikana) of the cosmos, where animal entities
and spirits live. When summoned by singers, they
directly and personally confront evil spirits in order to
215

retrieve abducted human souls. All these were once

skills possessed by Kuna shamans, which have now
disappeared. In brief, it seems that nowadays nuchukana
embody the powers and skills once possessed by ancient
Kuna shamans.
The past in the forest
People in Okopsukkun narrate stories about
powerful shamans (nelekana tummakana) who lived in
the past. These stories are divided between mythic and
historical narratives. The former refer to eight powerful
shamans who - corrupted by their own powers - brought
tyranny and disruption among ancient Kuna people. The
latter refer to the time when Kuna people lived in the
Darin forest and mention figures of shamans who were
also political chiefs. From a first analysis of Kuna ethnohistory it emerges that Kuna people gradually abandoned
forms of strong shamanism when they reached the
Atlantic coast and then moved to the islands of the San
Blas archipelago, around 100 years ago.
216

People in Okopsukkun told me that Kuna

ancestors (tatkana) came from the river Tuile (Tuira)
near the border with Colombia. There, tatkana, male
ancestors, were skilled hunters, powerful shamans and
warriors, and muukana, female ancestors, were skilled
hammock weavers, clay potters and experts in plant
medicine. These forefathers used to live in kin-based
groups in the Darin forest. Each group was seminomadic, settling near a river for only a relatively short
period of time, before moving somewhere else. The
reason for moving was the confrontation with other
indigenous groups, such as the Ember (cf. Wassn
1963) and the war against white people, waymar (cf.
Salcedo Requejo 1908[1640]: 128-30). After a series of
relocations, each group reached the Atlantic coast on a
different spot. One of these groups arrived near the
mouth of the river Puturkanti, close to the island of
Ustupu, where they moved at the beginning of 1900 and
still reside.
When narrating the story of the arrival of the
ancestors of Okopsukkun people on the coast, Reynaldo
217

Tuny, one of my hosts and informants, mentioned the

name of each river whereby they stopped. As Reynaldo
explained to me, rivers in the Darin forest are named
after the Kuna chief (sayla) who died in the settlement
established there, or after the tree species which was
more abundant on its banks. Trees and ancestors
intermingle in the perception of the forest of people in
Okopsukkun. The forest is a map of their history, where
rivers are associated with historical events that fade into
the mythic past. By the same token, I suggest that
present day Kuna people think of ancient peoples social
life and relationships with different types of enemies
(Ember and Spaniards) in the form of the life of trees in
the forest.
It is important to note that what is now a sociality
based on condensed residential patterns with highly
populated island villages (see Margiotti 2010), has been
achieved, among other things, through the abandonment
of strong forms of shamanism, especially those entailing
violence. People in Okopsukkun told me that their
ancestors were able to provoke lightning to fall on a
218

person, to transform into jaguars and snakes, and to

listen to distant conversions using different objects as
mediators (cf. Chapin 1983: 141). These powers were
used when people still lived in the forest and were
constantly threatened by Europeans and other indigenous
groups. Today, acquiring the capacity to harm other
people is highly disregarded. It is also said that people
cannot achieve such powers any more. Moreover, while
ancestors were fierce warriors, using bows and arrows
and spears, contemporary Kuna people have a strong
peaceful ethos, condemning any form of violence, both
physical and shamanic (cf. Praet, this volume).
As I have suggested above, nuchukana embody
shamanic skills once possessed by the ancestors of Kuna
people who lived in the Darin forest. Moreover, as I
argued elsewhere (Fortis 2008), wild emergent forest
trees, growing deep inland, are considered by the Kuna
as the visible manifestation of primordial beings. When
Kuna elders talk about trees, they always refer to a
mythic past during which fights between culture heroes
and owners of animals took place. Present day trees
219

represent the same source of power through which

culture heroes overcame animal beings in the mythic
past and established Kuna life as it is today.
Nuchukana seem not to be reducible to one single
thing. Rather, they seem to embody multiple layers of
meaning and history and evoke a distinctively complex
regime of historicity, to borrow an expression used by
Anne-Christine Taylor (2007). Myth and history merge
in the Kuna practice of carving wooden ritual statues.
Although the separation between mythic and historical
pasts is maintained in Kuna discourses, it seems that an
interesting problem comes to the surface when we try to
understand what a nuchu is for Kuna people. Why are
nuchukana associated to primordial immortal beings,
even though they seem to have all the characteristics of
ancient Kuna people?
Let us turn briefly to another ethnographic
example from the South American tropics that might
provide helpful insight to address this problem.

220

Kwarp
In the myths of the people from the Upper Xingu
in Central Brasil it is narrated, as Ellen Basso reports for
the Kalapalo, that the creator Kwatng, in order not to
give his own daughters in marriage to the jaguar, decided
to carve substitute daughters with the wood of a tree and
send them to the jaguars village. After many adventures,
two of the made ones (the wooden daughters) reached
the house of the jaguar and married him. After some
time the jaguars mother had an argument with one of
her daughters-in-law who was pregnant with the twins
Sun and Moon and killed her (Basso 1987: 57-8). Born
after their mothers death, the twins grew up thinking
that their mothers sister was their mother. But one day
they discovered the body of their real mother on the roof
of the house. When they started crying for her she
responded to them, but when they lowered her body they
realized that it was half rotten and she eventually died.
This mythic episode, which in its many variants is
narrated throughout Lowland South America, addresses
221

the crucial problem of death from the perspective of

indigenous people. In the Kamaiur version of the same
myth, collected by the Villas Boas brothers, it is made
clear that this episode represents the first socially
acknowledged death. Lowering the body [of their
mother] into the grave, they [the twins] said, Now it
will always be this way; people die and never come
back. They will die only once (Villas Boas and Villas
Boas 1970: 64).
Xinguano people celebrate a ritual called kwarp
by

the

Kamayur,

neighbouring

villages

during
are

which
invited

visitors
to

from

participate.

According to Pedro Agostinhos ethnography (1974), the

ritual is hosted by the kinspeople of a deceased person of
high status and the ceremony is often held to
commemorate more than one dead at the same time.
During the ceremony sections of tree trunks, themselves
called kwarp, are planted vertically in the centre of the
village plaza and decorated with body paintings, feather
headdresses and cotton strings. Each kwarp log stands
for an individual dead. At the climax of the ceremony
222

the kinspeople of each deceased person gather around

the decorated log representing their dead relative and
weep. The day after all the villagers come out of their
houses and run to the centre of the village in a state of
euphoria. At this point the kwarp logs are taken from
their holes, carried outside the village and thrown in the
nearby lake. This indicates the end of the ceremony.
The

festive

mood

of

Xinguano

mortuary

ceremonies is thus opposed to the sadness of the mythic

explanation of the irreversibility of human death
(Viveiros de Castro 1977: 120). The dead are celebrated
through collective, inter-group ceremonies. After the
ceremony they are expulsed permanently from the
village, so that the social life of the living can continue.
Kwarp logs are the real core of the ceremony. They are
figures of person, instantiating the original act of
fabrication carried out by the demiurge Kwatng, who
carved his substitute daughters in wood (ibid: 122-3). By
the same token, they represent the impossibility of
replicating what they stand for: dead people. In the same
way as the made ones were different from Kwatngs
223

original daughters, each kwarp log is different from

the deceased person it represents. They concretely
represent the impossibility of bringing the bodies of the
dead back to life.
Interestingly, Xinguano dead are thought of as a
category which stands in the middle between archetypal
mythic beings and the living. The former are conceived
as the prototypical model of actual living beings, the
latter as imperfect replicas of the former. Therefore, in
Xinguano philosophy the living and original mythic
beings are separated by an incommensurable qualitative
difference rather than by a chronological distance. The
dead, as Viveiros de Castro puts it with respect to the
Yawalapti, live like the ancestors, although they are
thought to be closer to mythic beings than the living
(ibid: 111-9).
Conclusions
By bringing to a conclusion this brief exploration
of some aspects of the Kuna and Xinguano relation to
224

alterity and death I wish to make a couple of points. On

the one hand, Lowland Central and South American
people generally associate trees with primordial beings,
immortality and ancestral people (cf. Basso 1987;
Chaumeil 2001; Erikson 2001; Virtanen this volume;
Wassn 1933). On the other hand, the Kuna and people
from Upper Xingu both use wooden logs as figures of
person to represent either primordial beings or the dead.
My point is that through the comparison of these two
cases, which I believe are not isolated in the lowlands of
Central and South America, a particular aspect of the
way the Kuna and the Xinguano think of the relationship
between their lived worlds and their ontological
preconditions emerges.
Kuna and Xinguano people use wooden figures
of person to mediate their relationship with the dead and
primordial beings and therefore to securely recreate their
lived world. By reproducing the original act of
fabrication of human bodies using the wood of those
trees which are themselves considered immortal beings,
they concretely reflect upon the human condition.
225

Looking at the mythology and ritual life of Xinguano

people we can observe a double switch. Firstly, through
carving substitute daughters out of wood the creator
Kwatng establishes a difference and a discontinuity
between himself, a mythic being, and humanity. In
contemporary Xinguano life this difference is projected
onto the ontological level and is conceived of as an
incommensurable gap that separates original mythic
beings and the living. This is also translated to the
difference that has to be ritually created between the
living and the dead. This difference is instantiated during
the kwarp ritual through the presence of the wooden
logs representing the dead. Secondly, by means of
indicating a relation of figurative resemblance between
an image and its referent (Chaumeil 2007: 261) i.e.
the kwarp log and the celebrated dead person Xinguano people indicate by the same token a relation of
ontological difference between the living and the dead
(cf. Carneiro da Cunha 1978). This ontological
difference is recreated constantly in the on-going
construction of Xinguano social life.
226

Following this line of reasoning we can thus say

that the living are clearly different from mythic beings
and they are also different from the dead, while the
relation between the dead and mythic beings constitutes
a more blurred territory. It is perhaps by starting from
these considerations that we should begin to look at the
concept of ancestry among Amerindians, so often
characterized by a sense of distance and alterity towards
the past, its inhabitants and their remains in the present
(cf. Gow; Montserrat Ventura; Praet; Virtanen this
volume)
Kuna people today differentiate themselves from
their ancestors who lived in the Darin forest and to their
eyes represent a past of violence and shamanic bravery
that is no longer acceptable in todays social life. Kuna
people see their ancestors as Others and are aware that to
be Kuna today means to be different from those Others.
Therefore they have to avoid violence and forms of
strong shamanism. Nuchukana remind the Kuna of their
ancestors, while trees remind them of the primordial
past. Nuchukana are therefore ancestral Others, insofar
227

as they are the instantiation of ancestral forms of life

which have become conflated with those of immortal
original Others.
References
Agostinho, P. 1974. Kwarp. Mito e ritual no Alto Xingu.
So

Paulo:

Editora

Pedaggica

Universitaria/EDUSP.
Basso, E. 1987. In favor of deceit. A study of tricksters in
an Amazonian Society. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Carneiro da Cunha, M. 1978. Os mortos e os outros.
Uma anlise do sistema funerrio e da noo de
pessoa antre od ndios Krah. So Paulo: Hucitec.
Chapin, M. 1983. Curing among the San Blas Kuna of
Panama. University of Arizona, PhD thesis.
Chaumeil, J.-P. 2001. The blowpipe Indians: variations
on the theme of blowpipe and tube among the Yagua
Indians of the Peruvian Amazon. In Beyond the
visible and the material. The Amerindianization of
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society in the work of Peter Rivire (eds.) L.Rival and

N.Whitehead, 243-283. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
2007. Bones, flutes, and the dead: Memory and
funerary treatments in Amazonia. In Times and
Memory in Indigenous Amazonia. Anthropological
Perspectives (eds.) C. Fausto and M. Heckenberger,
133-68. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Erikson, P. 2001. Myth and material culture: Matis
blowguns, palm trees, and ancestor spirits. In Beyond
the visible and the material. The Amerindianization of
society in the work of Peter Rivire (eds.) L.Rival and
N.Whitehead, 101-22.Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fejos, P. 1943. Ethnography of the Yagua. Viking Fund
Publications in Anthropology, No.1.
Fortis, P. 2008. Carving wood and creating shamans. An
ethnographic account of visual capacity among the
Kuna of Panam. University of St Andrews, PhD
thesis.

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 2010. The birth of design. A Kuna theory of

body and personhood. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, (N.S.) 16:480-495.
Forthcoming. Images of person in Central and
South

America.

Journal

de

la

Socit

des

Amricanistes.
Gow, P. 1987. La vida monstruosa de las plantas.
Amazona Peruana, 14: 115-22.
Helms, M. 1979. Ancient Panama: chiefs in search of
power. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Howe, J. 1976. Smoking out the spirits: a Cuna
exorcism. In Ritual and Symbol in Native Central
America (eds.) P.Young and J.Howe, 67-76. Eugene:
University of Oregon Anthropological Papers, No. 9.
1998. A People who would not kneel. Panama,
the United States and the San Blas Kuna. Washington
and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lothrop, S.K. 1948. The archaeology of Panama. In
Handbook of South American Indians. Vol. 4. The
Circum-Caribbean Tribes (ed.) J.H. Steward, 143-67.
Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology.
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Margiotti, M. 2010. Kinship and the saturation of life

among the Kuna of Panam. University of St
Andrews, PhD thesis.
Nimuendaj, C. 1952. The Tukuna. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Nordenskild, E. 1929. Les Rapports entre lart, la
religion et la magie ches les Indiens Cuna et Choc.
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1938. An historical and ethnological survey of
the Cuna Indians. Gteborg: Etnografiska Museet.
Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 1960. Notas etnograficas sobre
los Indios del Choco. Revista Colombiana de
Antropologia, 9:75-158.
Rival, L. 2006. Amazonian historical ecologies.
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S79-S94.
Salcedo Requejo, J. 1908[1640]. Relacin histrica y
geogrfica de a Provincia de Panam. In Relaciones
histricas y geogrficas de Amrica Central. Madrid:
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Santa Teresa, S. 1924. Creencias, ritos, usos y

costumbres de los indios Catos-indios Cunas de la
prefectura apostlica de Urab, Colombia. Bogot.
Taylor, A.-C. 2007. Sick of history. Contrasting regimes
of historicity in the Upper Amazon. In Times and
Memory in Indigenous Amazonia. Anthropological
Perspectives (eds.) C. Fausto and M. Heckenberger,
133-68. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Villas Boas, O. and Villas Boas, C. 1970. Xingu. The
Indians, their myths. London: Souvenir Press.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1977. Individuo e sociedade no
Alto

Xingu:

os

Yawalapti.

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thesis.
Wafer, L. 1888[1699] (ed. V. Restrepo) Viajes de Lionel
Wafer al Istmo del Darin. Bogot: Imprenta de
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Wassn, H. 1933. Cuentos de los Indios Chocs
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103-37.
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waunana apuntados en 1955. Etnologiska Studier,
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Ypez,

B.

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233

234

Part III
Extended relationships

235

Like Scars on the Bodys Skin:

The Display of Ancient Things in Trio
Houses (Northeast Amazonia)11
Vanessa Elisa Grotti
Oxford University

This paper is an analysis of the ways in which the

Trio, a central Guianese Carib people who live in the
border area of Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil,
relate to the eclectic collection of objects they
accumulate in their houses. The study of the house in
Amazonia has previously been characterized by a
11 This article is based on my doctoral fieldwork among the Trio,
Wayana and Akuriyo of Southern Suriname and French Guiana,
funded by the ESRC, Trinity College (Cambridge), the Gates
Cambridge Trust, the Smuts Memorial Fund and the Wyse Fund. I
am indebted to the editors of this volume and to Marc Brightman for
comments on earlier drafts.

236

particular attention to traditional dwelling places, their

decorative value and symbolic powers (Hugh-Jones C.
1979; Hugh-Jones S. 1979, 1995), and the intricate
relationship between kinship, community and settlement
(Rivire 1995). In recent years, some authors interested
in the integration of recent historical change to native
Amazonia

have

addressed

issues

raised

by

the

remapping of settlements (rhem 2001; Freire 2002;

Kelly 2003), sedentarization (Brightman 2007) and
indigenous conversion to Christianity (Bonilla 2008;
Vilaa 2002, 2008). My approach in this paper lies
somewhere in between, as it offers an analysis of
relational permanence in new indigenous architectural
forms. I am looking at the novelty of old houses and
their use as display cases of personal histories as an
illustration of a series of transformations experienced by
the Trio in recent decades, some of which they claim to
have actively sought. Ultimately I wish to demonstrate
that the house and its artefacts on display constitute
literal extensions of their owners body (a perfect
example of the notion of artifactual anatomies
237

described by Santos Granero 2009: 6-7), and that this is

particularly true in a native Amazonian cosmology
which considers persons as composites of affects and
capacities fabricated by careful engagement with distant
alterity (Viveiros de Castro 1998).
My discussion will mostly focus on data
collected in the village of Tpu, which, like the other two
most important Trio villages of southern Suriname, was
founded as a mission-station in the late 1960s by two
North-American Protestant missionary organizations
which had been delegated by the Surinamese authorities
a decade earlier to open up and develop the interior
(Conley 2000).12 This process of sedentarization was
part of an attempt to concentrate and aggregate the

12 Namely the Door-to-Life Mission which in the late 1960s was

taken over by the umbrella group the West Indies Mission, today
known as World Team. Despite the regular changes occurring at the
management level of these organisations, the staff on-site remained
the same until the Surinamese civil war of the mid-1980s which
signaled the departure of the foreign missionaries. Additionally, the
North-American missionaries worked in conjunction with the Dutch
Reformed Church which recruited missionary nurses and
schoolteachers.

238

dispersed Amerindian and Maroon13 populations of the

interior, and to allow for an increased governmental
involvement with the countrys interior and unchartered
borders by the clearing of airstrips in what were regarded
as strategic locations. Although there are no resident
missionaries as such anymore, the villages they founded
retain some of their original layout and architecture,
something which I will discuss by looking at the social
role of some of the oldest houses.
The Trio today: sedentarization and pacification
The Trio or Tarno14 (meaning the people
here) are a population of about 2,500 and live on either
side of the Surinamese Brazilian border (Gallois &

13 The Maroons are descendants of runaway African slaves who

established communities in the Guianese interior, and who have a
long history of relations marked by trade, warfare and alliance with
their Amerindian neighbours.
14 All words in italic are in Trio unless stated otherwise.

239

Grupioni 2003).15 Whereas a significant proportion of

the Trio live in some large settlements on either side of
the international border, in recent years younger heads of
household have taken the initiative to found their own
nuclear settlements away from the larger settlements in
order to secure better access to natural resources.16
Some Trio also live in Wayana and Apalai villages in
French Guiana. Additionally, whilst most Trio villages
in Suriname in particular remain fairly remote insofar as
they can only be reached by plane and river travel,
15 The term Trio is an exonym used in both English and Dutch; it
corresponds to Tirio in French and Tiriy in Portuguese, and is used
to refer to a population which speaks a common Carib language
(tarno ijomi). The Trio refer to themselves as such when dealing
with non-Amerindians or other Amerindian groups; at a local level,
they do however use a system of reference which is based on
residence (the differences between villages are quite noticeable)
together with their individual belonging to historic sub-groups
which sometimes come to play a role in everyday relations (this in
terms of filiation, and not descent).
16 This recent phenomenon involves the usual practice of young
men who, at the birth of their second child, decide to leave the house
of their father-in-law to build their own home, but who instead of
doing so in another section of the same village as in common
practice in todays large sedentary settlements (Grotti 2007), decide
to establish themselves further away, as they would have done in the
pre-sedentary past (Mans n.d.; Rivire 1969, 1984).

240

contact with urban dwellers and city life is steadily

increasing and Trio families now live in urban centres
across the region, such as Paramaribo, Cayenne or
Macap. Consequently, although a good majority of the
villagers never travel very far, the relative intensity of
movement of a significant minority allows connections
with other villagers and more remote locations to thrive,
and social relations are nurtured along kinship lines by
the use of modern communication technology and travel.
In Suriname, the villages in which the Trio live
have been shaped by a missionary policy of population
concentration and sedentarization through the provision
of health care, trade and education. They are larger in
size than the more traditional settlements described by
Rivire in the 1960s (1969, 1984) but kinship networks
equally define the pattern of settlement. Although their
total population varies from about 300 for a village like
Tpu to over 1,000 for the biggest village of
Kwamalasamutu,

the

way

extended

families

are

organised spatially as clusters that gravitate like satellites

around the public buildings (the school, church and
241

clinic) replicates the shape of traditional settlements

numbering thirty to forty people. This in turn expresses
the same aspiration to endogamy and uxorilocality.
Cognatic clusters co-exist side by side and are
themselves referred to by the Trio as villages (pata).
They are named after their original founder, some of
whom are still alive today and represent elders of
authority (tamu), who have roles either in the Church or
as governmental employees. In addition, the Trio see
these clusters as qualitatively different from the village
as a whole which they refer to as pananakiri ipata
(which means white peoples village in Trio).
The primary difference between traditional Trio
settlements and larger villages like Tpu lies in their
longevity and therefore in the relationship their
inhabitants have to alterity: the villages and many of the
houses are still the same, defying the tendency to
dissolution which is characteristic of affinal relations
among Carib populations (Rivire 1984). This introduces
a new relationship towards the dead: in the past, villages
would relocate following the death of their founder.
242

Today, it is not uncommon to see former enemies solve

disputes through ceremonial drinking of manioc beer and
a widow, her daughters and in-laws live in the house
built

by

her

deceased

husband.

This

different

relationship towards alterity is described in positive

terms by the Trio who live in these villages as a process
of pacification which they have undergone willingly and
which is contrasted to their past life marked by warfare
(Grotti 2008).17 There is a persistent use in Trio
discourse (especially used in public speeches) of this

17 This process of social pacification as described in contemporary

Trio discourse (for further discussion on social pacification as
human transformation, see Grotti 2007) can also be found among
the neighbouring Waiwai (Howard 2001) and Wayana (Chapuis &
Rivire 2003). The impact of conversion to Christianity has
definitely played a role in the recurrent theme of pacification and the
need to be at peace with resident affines (this influence is quite
common throughout Amazonia, as among the Paumari (Bonilla
2008) and the War (2008)); this does not mean however that
accusations of sorcery attacks do not exist in large sedentary
settlements, quite the opposite. However, conversion does not play
an exclusive role, as my Wayana informants who were never
exposed intensively to evangelical proselytism held a similar
discourse. Reference in myth to wars of the past and their end sealed
by inter-group alliance is something clearly found in Trio
(Koelewijn & Rivire 1987) and Wayana myths (Chapuis & Rivire
2003).

243

opposition between their present state of communal

peace and a past in which the Trios subgroups lived in
the forest, along creeks in relative isolation from one
another and constantly fighting attacks from either
unrelated people or spirits. The past is also described as
a time in which their bodies were less stable, more
transformable, and exuding something described as
fierceness, or desire for warring (ire). Todays Trio
bodies are seen as more stable and content (sasame). The
recurrence of this discourse can also be attributed to two
additional causes: the recent infiltration on their lands of
illegal placer mining for gold, with devastating
environmental and social consequences, leading young
men to revive a call for the need to train their bodies for
warfare, and the raw memories of the civil war of the
1980s whose violence spread to the interior.
Since the civil war, no foreign missionaries
reside in Tpu, but the Trio elders who assisted the
American missionaries when they originally founded the
villages, and who accompanied them on contact
expeditions to the Akuriyo hunter-gatherers, have taken
244

on the role of managers of affinal relations. The first

generation of Christian converts each head a household
unit and they regard it as their role both in everyday life
and through ritual celebrations to perpetuate this
communal state of social pacification, known in Trio as
sasame wehto.18 Keeping this in mind I would like to
focus my discussion on the role of the long-lasting
houses of Trio elders as strategic displays of personhood.
Old houses and accumulated things
My host in Tpu was an elderly man in his 60s
who lived with his wife surrounded by his daughters and
in-laws reaching to four generations, in the centre of the
18 The conventional morality implied by the phrase sasame wehto
(being happy, a state of happiness) has many ramifications,
which all delve into the realm of potential affinity. Whereas there
are other words in Trio for describing the feeling of happiness or
contentment (such as onken), sasame wehto is used to describe a
feeling of contentment felt with affines, for instance during a beer
festival or when singing in church. It can also be used as a noun to
refer to a gift. Even though there is also another word in Trio for
gift, (ekaramato), sasame wehto is used on a regular basis. In this
usage it emphasizes the feeling of happiness and mutual affection
the gift promotes between two un-related persons (Grotti 2007).

245

village. His house, as he would proudly remind me, had

been built by his Wayana son-in law and was one of the
oldest in the village. With its characteristic walls made
of planks and corrugated iron, it was typical of the first
generation of houses in the village built in a style that
suited both the missionaries aspirations to cut through
kinship ties and emphasise the nuclear family, and the
Trios own new use of walls to create an effective barrier
protecting them from sorcery attacks from co-resident
affines. Next to the main building in which the
household members slept, stood two smaller structures:
the cookhouse, and the manioc processing house beneath
which members of the household would work and chat
during the day. The arrangement of these houses formed
a small courtyard, and all of the houses except the
sleeping house lacked walls; they were open structures
covered with a roof, beneath which all was visible to
passers-by. Visitors would always announce their
presence before walking through the courtyard. These
buildings were therefore both accessible and somewhat
sheltered.
246

At first sight, the house appeared very untidy, a

feature which it shared with the other older houses, with
heaps of rotting foodstuffs brought back from the
gardens and orchards that surround the village, and
which were lying around the place. For certain urban
visitors such as missionaries, such untidiness seemed
further evidence of the Amerindians persistent laziness
and lack of discipline. Initially, I thought that this
accumulation of rotting foods only represented waste
which my Trio hosts regarded as less palatable, or less
significant than game, fish or processed bitter manioc.
However, I soon noticed that in the cookhouse, leftover
cooked rice in pots and leftover bitter manioc juice and
manioc bread could be found, as well as the odd smoked
fish or piece of cooked meat. Similarly, the last morsels
in a pot were rarely eaten, there was always enough to
leave to rot. These rotten foods were not considered as
rubbish; if they were, they would have been discarded in
the liminal section of forest surrounding Tpu referred to
as wrptao (meaning the place of spirits) where some
forms of unprocessed rubbish would be thrown, in
247

particular forest products, animal bones and skins, or

bees nests.
On the contrary, my adoptive grandmother would
lift pots and point at the leftovers expressing her pleasure
at the sight of so much food, some ready to be
consumed, and some left behind. By doing so, she was
signifying her contentment at having so many relatives
who could provide for her. What she conveyed was the
fact that these foods, left to rot in visible communal parts
of the house, represented in her eyes and those of other
people, the extensive network of relationships she
enjoyed. The latter allowed her and her husband, as
heads of household, to behave appropriately towards
food. It demonstrated the capacity for self-control in the
ingestion of foodstuffs, as well as the extensive social
relations that the head of household enjoyed and which
provided him with so much to eat. In contrast, there was
little evidence of accumulated abundance19 of this sort

19 I use the notion of abundance following Munn (1986); on

accumulated abundance, see (Grotti 2007).

248

in the more recent households built by young men at the

birth of their second child.
In this context, like the rotten manioc bread that
is used for the making of new manioc beer, rotten
garden products, fish and game in the home express the
abundance of foods remaining outside peoples bodies.
Accumulation and excess constitute a display of
moderation in ones own consumption, as well as of the
capacity to redistribute a form of social wealth
encapsulated in the display of foods.
Display and abundance of social relations
I would like to suggest that the visual significance
of rotting foods can be understood as one form of
strategic display in Trio houses, and that it shows how
visible things can embody invisible relations. I have
pointed out that this is a specific feature of the oldest
houses built in the sedentary settlements and it therefore
seems likely to be a phenomenon which, if not
necessarily new to the Trio, has attained greater salience
249

than in their semi-nomadic past because of long-term

sedentarization. I will now turn to the display of specific
objects in the house in order to argue that the narratives
surrounding and embodied in certain objects have come
to play as significant a role today as scars from battles
would have in the past in the expression of their owners
capacity to deal with distant spheres of alterity.
To the Trio, the most valued objects are objects
which are hard and durable. The word for hard, karime,
is often associated with beauty and strength. Certain
invisible things, particularly secret names and the image
of the heart (which contains the very essence of the
person) are considered to be hard and are highly prized.
Some hard visible things are valued because they
contribute to the beauty and strength of their owner.
(Rivire 1994). And some of the hardest things coveted
by the Trio can only be obtained through trade. Glass
beads, ink for tattooing, cooking plates and iron tools are
preferred to their locally produced equivalents made
from forest or garden products because they are hard and
long-lasting, but the obsession with these features is far
250

from being strictly of a practical nature. Some hard

objects seem to be given a place of choice in the
household because of the social relations they visibly
manifest. This is particularly true of objects which were
made by real people (wtoto), such as the Wayana sonin-law or the Akuriyo helper.20
In the house in which I was staying, there was an
old threadbare fibre hammock hanging under the
cooking house, it used to hang near the daytime
hammocks, in clear sight of everyone, but its sorry state
meant that it could not have been of much use to anyone
apart from the children who used it as a swing. I soon
discovered it had been made by my hosts Akuriyo
helper. This helpers social position may be understood
as a form of captive slave (peito), of whom my host
acquired

ownership

after

he

returned

from

the

missionary-led contact expeditions of the early 1970s to

contact a forager group, the surviving members of which
20 The Trio define all Amerindians as real people (wtoto).
Maroons are known as mekoro, city-dwellers as pananakiri and
Brazilians as karaiwa.

251

were brought back to the village of Tpu.21 A handwoven hammock is considered to be a personal item,
intimately linked to the makers body. In the case of this
hammock that had belonged to the deceased Akuriyo
helper, a prized personal possession normally buried
with its maker, it had ended up on display in the house of
the Trio who had claimed the right to his services. The
hammock on display was a marker of my hosts personal
exploit as a predator of former enemies and his
continuing authority in the face of the deceased and the
latters family. Similarly, my host would use the
manufactured goods given by his life-long tradingpartner and fictional kinsman who was a Maroon and
with whom he went on his first trips to the city and to
Maroon villages. Because of his age, his standing in the
21 The case of Trio-Akuriyo relations can arguably be considered as
a contemporary example of a relation between an owner and his
captive slave, following Santos-Graneros definition of Lowland
South American slavery as the incorporation by predation of the
productive agency of a distant Other (2009a: 168). In their
reminiscences of their participation in the missionary-led contact
expeditions of the late 1960s, my Trio informants described the
contact and sedentarization of the Akuriyo as a hunting expedition
(Grotti 2008).

252

village and various experiences throughout his life, my

host had accumulated objects which were evidence of
some of the great moments of the history of the village.
These visual markers testified to his life of travels to
distant spheres of alterity and his own extended capacity
as head of a large network of relatives.
These examples lead me to the following
observations. The objects displayed have become visible
representations of specific social relations with distant
others which have been nurtured by their owner over the
course of his lifetime. These things were ancient insofar
as to describe them a Trio would say they were old and
useless yet, these things were precious, because they
had each been obtained by dealing with distant others
through trade and travel to remote places in the forest
and the city alike. In the pre-sedentary past, such objects
were scarcer, and those which could be obtained would
be less likely to survive the more frequent migrations.
Objects obtained through trade with Maroons and
White people represent bundles of relations acquired by
engaging with people with whom there is no exchange of
253

spouses, pertaining to the category of real affinity

(Viveiros de Castro 2002: 157).22 Reliance upon the
accumulation of objects is deeply ingrained in sedentary
life since this new lifestyle has facilitated the Trios
access to a vast number of new objects. It has also meant
that objects which are considered by the Trio as old and
useless (in practical terms), or as dangerous because
belonging to dead people, are now kept in the house,
running the risk of attracting the spirit of their owner.
The sedentary house becomes an outer skin of the
owners extended body, and a display of his diffused
influence along the network of social relations. The
house therefore represents a visual reminder of a senior
mans extensive wealth of kin (providers of goods and
services because of the obligations of kinship ties),
trading partners (suppliers of objects and knowledge of
extraneous origin because of the duties of commensality
of such partnerships), and finally helpers (subordinates
22 I am referring in particular to the following passage: The real
affine is that with which one does not exchange wives but only other
things: the dead and rituals, names and goods, souls and heads
(Viveiros de Castro 2002: 157, my translation).

254

who must offer services in return for their nurture into

the Trio way of life). Finally the last two categories
provide items with connections with distant spheres of
alterity over which the Trio, as a result of their sedentary
lifestyle, do not possess sufficient direct influence: the
forest and the city.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have offered an explanation for
the Trios particular fondness for the accumulation of
ancient things in their houses, which seems to be
particularly salient among senior, elderly men. Their
houses thus become displays of their past achievements
and give visual significance to their relations with distant
alterity. They manifest their reliance on, and influence
over, an extensive network of productive relatives. These
visual markers in the form of old things put on display
were given regular support by the narratives that they
elicited, in a similar vein to scars on mens bodies would
inspire tales of past warfare. The body and things are
255

therefore intimately connected: [f]rom an Amerindian

point of view, the boundaries of a person are not
coterminous with his ... body, not only in the sense that
bodies are relational and subjectivity communal but also
because a series of personal objects become part of the
body (Santos-Granero 2009b: 14). In the case of the
Trio of southern Suriname, objects are part of the body
in the sense that they extend it, they issue forth
(Wagner 1986) connections with powerful Others.
The Trio word for being poor is apkma,
which

literally

means

short-armed,

and

when

remembering their life of the past along creeks deep in

the forest, the Trio say they used to be apkma kutu-uu-ma: so very very poor. When remembering their
poverty and isolation, they tend to list the objects they
did not have then, but can enjoy now. By doing so, they
equate wealth in objects with a wealth of social relations
which can provide for these objects. Abundance of
things whether of foods or objects - means an
abundance of people. Abundance is not simply
accumulation for the sake of saving up for better days
256

on the contrary, objects displayed as an expression of

abundance tend to lose all utilitarian value as they
become old. They are instead the immediate and visible
expression of a state of being. As Lcia Van Velthem
has pointed out, the display of objects confers attributes
of visibility on [...] objects that go beyond the concrete
action of seeing (2001: 207). Even rotting foods and
discarded, dismembered objects participate in this highly
social aesthetic. In this context, the strategic use of
material culture displayed in Trio houses today may
reflect an Amerindian notion of wealth which can be
understood as the embodiment of personal histories of
social relations with both kin and affines.
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262

Spirits, Genes and Walt Disneys Deer:

Creativity in Identity and Archaeology
Disputes (Altai, Siberia)23
Ludek Broz
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

This paper concerns the perception by Altaians of

ancient artefacts found in the Altai Republic in the
Siberian part of the Russian Federation. While 60% of
23 I am grateful to Roxane Gudeman for editorial help with this
paper and Joachim Otto Habeck for fruitful comments. My doctoral
fieldwork (2004/5), from which most data used in this paper
originates, was kindly supported by the Cambridge Committee for
Central and Inner Asia, the Anthony Wilkin Studentship, Corpus
Christi College Cambridge, the Richards Fund and the Chadwick
Fund. In Altai I was a research associate of Gorno-Altaisk State
University.

263

the population of the Altai Republic is Russian, the

native Altaians form the majority of the population in the
region where I conducted fieldwork and where the most
spectacular archaeological finds have been made.
Generally

speaking,

Altaians

is

complex

national/ethnic label given to diverse groups of Turkicspeaking inhabitants of Altai, excluding the Kazakhs
(Halemba 2008). Since the late 1980s an intensive ethnocultural revival is taking place among Altaians as among
many other peoples of the former USSR. However, this
contemporary process is not simply enabled by the
decomposition of the Soviet Union. Rather, it is
predicated on the past project of building the USSR as a
conglomerate

of

quasi-national

states

and

other

connected nation-building policies (see Slezkine 1999;

Hirsch 2005). As the present chapter will show, this ongoing revival is also important with regard to the
perception of ancient artefacts in Altai (see also Broz
2009).
Ulagan region of the Altai Republic, where I
conducted my doctoral fieldwork, is home of the
264

Pazyryk burial mounds, a world-famous archaeological

excavation site, where 2500 year old frozen bodies and
artefacts of former inhabitants of the Altai mountains
were unearthed in the late 1940s (see Rudenko 1970).
Preservation of organic materials such as wood, felt, fur
or human and animal bodies for such a long time is of
course very rare. At the moment the most spectacular
finds from this site (e.g. the oldest surviving carpet in the
world) are exhibited in Ermitazh. However, almost no
archaeological excavations are taking place in the
republic at present.
The head of the Department of Archaeology and
Ethnography of the Gorno-Altaisk State University, V.
N. Elin, explained to me in 2005 that when he takes
foreign colleagues to the well-known site of Pazyryk he
cannot stay more than approximately two hours. If the
visit takes longer, there is a good chance that local
people will threaten the visitors with violence. He told
me that the university stopped almost all field activities
in

the

mid-1990s

researchers

were

when

students

bullied

by

265

and
local

principal
dwellers.

Archeological excavations have also been impeded by

other means. In 1996 the parliament of the Altai
Republic imposed a moratorium on any archaeological
excavations on its territory by requiring that anyone who
wanted to pursue archaeological research must obtain
special permission from the Altaian agency for
protection of cultural heritage. The effectiveness of the
moratorium was undermined by a 2002 federal law about
objects of cultural heritage, which reserves all regulatory
practices for federal authorities (see for example
Kubarev 2002).24 The legality of any attempt to conduct
archaeological research nevertheless continues to be
challenged by anti-archaeology activists.
For the sake of this papers argument I want to
suggest that the current anti-archaeology mood in Altai
24 I refer here to the 2002 Russian Federal Law 73-FZ About
objects of cultural heritage (memorials of history and culture) of
peoples of Russian Federation (Ob obektakh kulturnogo
naslediia (pamiatnikakh istorii i kultury) narodov Rossiiskoi
Federatsii).

266

has two main aspects. On the one hand, archaeological

work is deemed responsible for misfortunes such as the
2003 earthquake (Broz 2008; Halemba 2008). On the
other hand, archaeology disputes are infused with
identity claims and heritage talk (Halemba 2008;
Halemba 2006; Broz 2009). In the popular press as well
as in anthropological work most attention is paid to the
case of the Altaian princess or Ice maiden, a wellpreserved body of a Pazyryk woman with rich tattoos,
which

was

excavated

in

1993

by

Novosibirsk

archaeologists and is now kept in the Novosibirsk

Institute of Archaeology. Was she a direct ancestor of
present day Altaians, or, if not, is she not an Altaian in
some other fundamental way? Why do many Altaians
insist on returning the body to the Altaian soil or even on
its reburial? The topic is widely discussed in local media,
and the disputes are heated (Halemba 2006; Halemba
2008; Broz 2009). While this example illustrates some of
the themes to be discussed, in this chapter I will focus on
the ancient objects found in the burial sites - Pazyryk
artefacts - rather than on human remains.
267

Over the last two decades social anthropologists

have shown greater interest in artefacts, materiality or, as
some prefer to call it, material culture. Appadurai
(1986), Gell (1998), Miller (2005) and, most recently,
Henare et al. (2007), to name just a few, have placed
things/artefacts

at

the

cutting

edge

of

current

anthropological theory. An approach vaguely called

Actor-Network Theory and after (Law and Hassard
1999) even more successfully advocates for the
importance of things/artefacts/non-humans in social
scientific enquiry (see for example Latour 2005). Even
though the way I treat artefacts in this paper is
influenced by the body of literature mentioned above, I
cannot engage it in an explicit way because lack of
space. Rather, in line with the orientation of the volume,
I aim at a theoretically informed ethnographic account.
Dangerous and popular
For most villagers in the Ulagan region it is
obvious that graves should not be dug up nor should
268

things be taken away from them. This conviction is often

voiced in descriptions of clashes with the Soviet
worldview. I was told stories by/about people who,
following Soviet rationalism, used to treat the local
perception of graves as superstitious until they
themselves had had a personal experience with them.
One man from Iazula village said to me that once, back
in the 1980s, he decided to take some artefacts, which
included the remains of a drum, from the disintegrating
grave of a kam (shaman) to the museum. It was August;
people were haymaking in the Chulishman valley when
it suddenly started to snow heavily. As the man
approached the haymaking camp to find shelter, he was
shouted at hysterically by people who spotted the drum
and other equipment from the burial: Go away! Take
the stuff back. The guy rode back to the grave, returned
the items and said: I am sorry, old people. I did not
mean to offend you. This story shows that wrong
conduct with regard to graves is potentially dangerous,
not only for the offender himself/herself but for the
entire community everyone was affected by the sudden
269

snowfall and the reaction of the people leaves no doubt

about the threat they perceived. Furthermore this story
elucidates what the head of the department of
archaeology said to me it partly explains why
archaeologists are driven away by local people.

Figure 9 Functional replica of Pazyryk chariot in

Ulagans museum made by Oleg Chelchushev and
several helpers

270

At the same time, copies/replicas of Pazyryk

artefacts are extremely popular among the people of the
Ulagan region as well as elsewhere in the Altai Republic.
In an Ulagan village one can see them in miniature form
in souvenirs (circulating much more among local
dwellers than among incoming tourists, who are still
quite rare in the region). Various people in Ulagan
produce such things; sometimes the producers are
children who are taking arts classes.

Figure 10 Souvenir model of Pazyryk chariot displayed

in one of Ulagans households

271

When visiting the regional museum in Ulagan

one can see a room divided by a wooden partition into
three sections the first one is dedicated to the Great
Patriotic War (a term used in Russia for WWII), the last
one to local arts and crafts and the middle one to
Pazyryk. It includes photos from Ermitazh, where
artefacts excavated in the Pazyryk tombs are kept and
several replicas of Pazyryk artefacts among which one
cannot miss the largest exhibit of the museum a 1:1
replica of a chariot excavated from the Pazyryk tombs.
In 2000 the wagon-replica was used in the Kosh-Agach
regional centre to carry people dressed up in replicas of
Pazyryk costumes during the El Oiyn (national games)
festival.
Here, I am convinced, we move to the set of
meanings which is structured by identity politics and the
complex of values connected to it. Spectacularly
preserved, rich Pazyryk artefacts and bodies are
compelling elements of the Altaian national and cultural

272

revival, much more so than archaeological cultures25

consisting of bones and stones only, let alone than
those that are almost unknown because not sufficiently
popularised.
V.

Molodin,

prominent

Novosibirsk

archaeologist has noticed the Catch 22 of the situation.

He points out that those opposing archaeological work
for the sake of peace of their great ancestors only know
about those very ancestors thanks to the results of
archaeological work (Molodin 2000). Molodin might be
misunderstanding the causation of misfortune idiom
(i.e. the link that many people make between digging up
graves and disasters of various kinds), he seems to be
treating it in a patronising way, as a superstition that
should be ignored or ridiculed or as fake superstition
utilised by activists of cultural revival. However, he is
right in recognising a certain paradox vis--vis the local
perception of archaeology. This paradox is well
manifested

in

contradictory

values

which

many

25 I mean here the concept of archaeological culture as used in

archaeology, which is often called techno-complexes.

273

inhabitants of the Altai Republic associate with Pazyryk

artefacts. These artefacts are dangerous and they should
be left alone where they are. Simultaneously, however,
their existence is taken as the evidence of the great past
of the former inhabitants of Altai, who are routinely
treated as ancestors by contemporary Altaians, evidence
which

resulted

from

archaeological

excavations.

Therefore Pazyryk artefacts should be displayed to

nurture national pride and contribute to the survival of
the Altaian nation.
It seems that while excavated artefacts play a role
in both discourses (that of misfortune causation as well
as of identity claims), thus being simultaneously a source
of strength and a source of danger for Altaians, their
copies possibly dissolve this uneasy tension or
contradiction. I have heard no reports of copies/replicas
bringing about any misfortunes. To the contrary, people
proudly display them to reference their great past. Thus
copies/replicas of Pazyryk artefacts appear to bear only
positive meaning. In that sense there seems to be a sharp
distinction between an original and its copy/replica. It is
274

important to add that images of Pazyryk artefacts are

equally popular as replicas and also are viewed as
harmless. In other words, representations of Pazyryk
artefacts - whether a most schematic drawing or a
realistic 1:1 copy - seem to feature only in the realm of
identity politics, not in that of the causation of
misfortune.
The phenomenon of artefacts that are dangerous
and at the same time instrumental for ethno-cultural
revival is certainly not limited to Altai. I found similar
dilemmas in neighbouring Tyva. Elena Liarskaya
described them in Iamal peninsula (Liarskaya 2010),
Czech moviemaker and writer Martin Ryav made a
documentary about similar issues in Iakutia (Sakha).
Indeed, it seems probable that the situation is analogous
in

many

other

parts

of

Siberia.

In

addition,

representations (copies/replicas/images) of such artefacts

seem to bear only positive meanings in other places as
well. Evgenii Saryg, a Tyvan throat singer from Kyzyl
said to me that he would never go to the Tyvan national
museum to see spectacular golden artefacts excavated
275

from Arzhaan 2 (an excavation site in Tyva where

burials contemporary to Pazyryk were found see
ugunov et al. 2003). Rather, he would see all that
beauty safely in books, as he expressed it. Here Saryg
referred to the causation of misfortune discourse. Many
people I spoke to asserted that those who participated in
excavations of Arzhaan 2, especially young male
students of history who did it as part of their professional
training, are dying one by one. Suicides and other
unfortunate

events,

was

told,

also

increased

considerably in nearby villages.

The western rationalistic view certainly does
not account for any misfortune caused by Pazyryk or
other artefacts. Nevertheless, if we set aside this basic
difference

the

assumption

that

representation

(image/copy/replica) lacks the harmful as well as

harmless features of its model/original is still perfectly
acceptable. It seems to be beyond discussion that a
picture of a tiger is not likely to eat anyone. The question
of Pazyryk or Arzhaan 2 artefacts and their difference
from their representations seems to be similar. However,
276

when we examine the Altaian case further we can see

that the sharp distinction between original and
copy/replica does not seem to hold. In the following
section I am going to examine why this is so.
Copy?
In the autumn 2004 I was sitting in the office of a
gymnasium teacher in Gorno-Altaisk, capital of the Altai
Republic. With the enormous pride of a dedicated
professional he was showing the works of his students to
me. Among these he paid special attention to what
looked to me to be replicas of the so-called Scythian
animal style which is typical of Pazyryk archaeological
culture. However, I soon realized how mistaken I was.
The students works, I was told, were not replicas.
Rather these were manifestations of a specific creativity.
As the teacher put it: you just give them instruments and
they produce Pazyryk animal style. It is genetically
given. Such genetically grounded ability is nevertheless
not found among all children. The so-called national
277

gymnasium is generally perceived as the institution

which educates the future elite of the Altaian nation;
students who produce the Pazyryk animal style in their
art lessons are explicitly envisaged as Altaians, native
inhabitants of the Altai Republic.
This case provides a specific contribution to the
debate about Pazyryk people and their connection to
present day Altaians. While the genetic link is doubted
by archaeologists and physical anthropologists (see Broz
2009), the teacher has drawn his own conclusion. Since
his pupils carve naturally in Pazyryk style, their
creativity must be given genetically and they must be
genetically linked to the Pazyryk people. In other words,
the ability to create the same artefacts means that the
students have the same genes as their producers, which
implies the existence of a desired ancestral link between
present day Altaians and the historical Pazyryk people.
Obviously, such understanding makes the copy
original distinction rather meaningless.
Another example of the uncertain differentiation
between a copy and the original is the above mentioned
278

chariot replica in the Ulagan museum. The person who

made the chariot is a local craftsman named Oleg. This
man in his late forties is one of the few people in the
Ulagan village who makes crafts for a living without
being subsidised by the local House of Culture or
similar institutions.26 In fact he is so successful with the
furniture he produces that he barely succeeds in
satisfying the demand. In 2005 Oleg said to me that he
has a specific calling to make Pazyryk artefacts (apart
from the chariot, he has made, for example, a replica of
an excavated musical instrument referred to as a Pazyryk
harp). When he decided to make the chariot he was
struggling to make wheels and was unable to figure out
how to make them. As a result he became obsessed with
the technical riddle and this obsession provoked some
supernatural help, or possession. They, or, as Oleg
sometimes says, she came and guided him through the
process of building. However, when the work was done
26 For more information on the peculiar Soviet and post-Soviet
institution of House of Culture see Donahoe and Habeck
(forthcoming).

279

something happened that changed Olegs life they did

not leave. Repeatedly, Oleg has experienced a certain
restlessness,

not

dissimilar

to

the

shamanic

calling/illness, which passes only when Oleg makes yet

another Pazyryk artefact. When it is done he is able to
relax. About one year later, the restlessness returns and
he creates a replica of another artefact. In 2005 Oleg
reckoned that one day he will make an entire set of the
wooden burial equipment of Pazyryk burial mounds.
In Olegs case the distinction between original
and replica is also problematic, though in a different
way. Oleg does not envisage his craft as a copy-making
process; rather, he speaks about hidden forces. Since
Oleg is not able or willing to identify those spiritual
entities that make him produce Pazyryk artefacts, it is
impossible to confirm, in contrast to the interpretation of
the gymnasium teacher, that he is (in his view) driven by
the same forces that Pazyryk craftsmen were. It seems
even possible that the souls-spirits of those ancient
craftsmen themselves are inspiring Oleg. Both options

280

imply an essential similarity rather than difference

between Pazyryk artefacts and those produced by Oleg.

Figure 11 Oleg Chelchushev in the process of making

the chariot
The foregoing leads me to the conclusion that the
distinction between harmful and harmless artefacts only
incidentally correlates with what is, in some contexts, the
sharp distinction between original and copy. Rather, the

281

difference between harmless and harmful is, in the

Altaian context, equivalent solely to the difference
between what was buried and what was not. In other
words, we are referring back to what was said earlier,
namely that most people in Ulagan consider digging
graves and taking any burial equipment to be a business
that is dangerous for the person who takes it and his
family, for the descendants of those whose graves are
being disturbed and for the entire local community.
Replicas, copies or other representations were not part of
genuine burial equipment. Therefore they can represent
the cultural and technological advancement of people
who lived in Altai 2500 years ago, whom contemporary
Altaians proudly think of as their ancestors, without
irritating the occult forces.
Ryav suggests that artefacts in Jakutian
museums are neither alive enough to serve their original
purpose, nor dead enough to be safely touched and
studied (Ryav 2008: 201). Replicas of ancient
artefacts in the Altaian context live almost antithetical
life to that gloomy fate of originals. They are harmless
282

when touched, traded or studied and in that sense they

are safely dead, i.e. inanimate, as proper things should
be, at least in our western understanding (cf. Leach
2007: 167). Simultaneously, they are alive enough to
serve the purpose they were made for the Scythian
harp made by Oleg was used by the Altaian musician
Emil Terkishev, the chariot was used during the El-Oiyn
festival to carry people around. On both those occasions
the artefacts bore witness to the great past of Altai and
singled out present day Altaians as rightful heirs. The
same goes for the things produced by the students of the
national gymnasium.
Externalised creativity
In the preceding section I introduced the concept
of creation/creativity that seems to undermine the
distinction between original and copy since Altaians can
see both to be a result of an identical creative
momentum. In this section I want to briefly point out
another feature of this concept of creativity, namely that
283

it consistently situates the source of creativity outside the

creating human subject. This feature is of course well
known in anthropology.27 Alfred Gell suggested that
any artefact, by virtue of being a manufactured thing
indexes the identity of the agent who made or originated
it (1998: 23).28 Importantly for our purposes here, he
adds that anthropology of art cannot be exclusively
concerned with objects whose existence is attributed to
the agency of artists, especially human artists
(1998: 23). This is so because many artefacts are locally
attributed to other (often supernatural) agencies that are
external to the creating human subject presupposed by
many anthropologists.
27 Most social scientists seem to suppose that in European past
human creativity was understood as the humble human counterpart
to Gods creation (Arieti 1976: 4; quoted in Leach 2004: 161) or in
some specific cases as divine creativity channelled by the human
subject. James Leach has recently argued that such idea of
creativity as a transcendent force accords with a notion of the
intellect as separate and organising. With the removal of God, the
notion of transcendence is replaced by notions of contingency
(Leach 2004: 161).
28 In fact Gell identifies this logical inference as abduction.
Nevertheless, there is no need to introduce his use of this concept
taken from logic/semiotics in this brief paper (see Gell 1998: 14-16).

284

It can be argued that such an idiom of

externalizing creativity is well established in the Altaian
context. The most vivid example is that of a kaichy, a
storyteller who uses throat singing techniques (kai) to
tell heroic epics. The most respected eel kaichy is
understood as performing under inspiration of a master
spirit (ee) (cf. Funk 2005). A similar relationship
between art and its producer may be observed in the
Orthodox Church. There is a strong authoritative
discourse

on

icons

that

are

not

manmade

(nerukotvornye) but appear (or, alternatively, are

repaired) in miraculous ways, which is an extreme
example of what I would call externalized creativity - the
medium (the artist) is skipped altogether. In such an
interpretation the statement of the teacher used above
could be seen as a combination of the externalization of
creativity idiom and the language of genes that is for
many reasons important in identity politics and the
connected archaeology dispute (see Broz 2009). By
placing the source of creativity in genes (not in the way
we are used to in the language of predisposition or talent,
285

but in an extreme sense of seeing particular styles as

genetically determined), he simultaneously externalised
and internalised creativity. This is so because genes are
seen as internal and external. They are part of ones body
and identity, but they are also external for they are not
limited to a single individual. Rather, they are imagined
as being passed from one generation to another (see also
Ingold 2000: 134-9). Such creativity is therefore external
because it is potentially distributed among many
individuals, linking them across time and space.
In the cases I have reported artefacts work as
manifestations/indices of some hidden realm: of genes,
of spirits which are the source of creativity. This source
is other because it is distant (in time and space),
because it is a notion associated with some microscopic
structure (genes), or because it is of the other world
(occult, invisible).
Many, notably in popular western views, see the
creating subject as the principal source of creativity
(even though there may be a notional slot for external

286

inputs/inspirations).29 The valuable core of the creative

process, in such a view, resides in some sort of
originality nested in the individual subject. In contrast, in
the above mentioned Altaian cases we saw that the
emphasis is clearly on external sources of creation. What
is more, the value of the creation resides exactly in the
creative momentum coming from outside the creating
human subject. The highest valued kaichy is the one who
mediates the story from the spiritual realm his eezi.
The value of the carvings shown to me in the National
Gymnasium

springs

from

their

alleged

genetic

determination rather than from the individual creativity

of each student.

29 This applies equally to most of anthropological theory and, as

James Leach has argued, Alfred Gells Art and Agency is not an
exception (Leach 2007: 169).

287

Authorship
What are the implications of the above invoked
externalised

creativity

model

for

the

local

understanding of authorship? Or, in Leachs words, in

what way are people connected to what they produce
and what are the terms of their claims upon those
productions (Leach 2007: 167)? I shall touch upon this
question by continuing with Olegs story. When I met
him again in 2009 Oleg had breaking news for me. After
some serious quarrels with regional authorities his
enemies managed to take away all references to him as
the maker of the chariot and other Pazyryk artefacts in
the museum. Indeed, his name is not mentioned a single
time in Ulagans museum. His artefacts were even taken
to an exhibition in the republics capital and their
authorship was attributed in captions to one of Olegs
former helpers. Oleg was, of course, angry and
triumphantly showed me an old negative he had found
recently that proved that he was the principal craftsman
leading the work on the chariot. At the same time he
288

admitted that those quarrels and lies about the chariot

and other artefacts had an unexpected effect they left.
Oleg was free from the cyclical possessions urging him
to produce Pazyryk artefacts.
Oleg speculated that perhaps they were also
confused by all those quarrels and accusations. If that
was the case, he suggested, perhaps the guy falsely
attributed with the authorship is suffering now instead of
him. Given their bitter history the two men do not speak
to each other. Oleg added that he would not wish for
even his worst enemies to suffer from possessions such
as he had experienced. Alternatively, Oleg suggested
that they left independently of those quarrels, simply
because they had achieved what they wanted.
The continuation of Olegs story illustrates well
that even though Oleg himself saw his work on Pazyryk
artefacts as inspired and led by some external forces, he
still fought for being credited with their authorship. If we
take the person of eel kaichy (inspired storyteller) as a
model, we can perhaps even say that Oleg was fighting
to

be

credited

not

with
289

authorship

but

rather

mediumship, as some kind of eel craftsman. Each

understanding constructs Oleg as a certain kind of person
(cf. Gell 1998: 222-3) and the latter one, as the example
of kaichy suggests, is locally highly valued.
The character of the process by which Oleg
created Pazyryk artefacts is especially visible when
compared with the way Oleg describes the making of
other products. I shall use the example of a sunduk a
coffer that is given as a wedding present. While in the
neighbouring Kosh-Agach region a sunduk is covered
with metalwork, people in Ulagan are proud of their
truly Altaian (without alleged Kazakh influence) style of
sunduk which is only decorated with relief-carvings of
fine pine wood. The most prevalent motif on Olegs
sunduks is that of a deer. Oleg would place it into
geometrical frames, first by drawing with a pencil and
then by carving the line, creating some sort of a relief.
Once Oleg showed to me what he regarded as his
greatest help an old book with pictures from Walt
Disneys 1942 classic Bambi. He said: I saw many
drawings of deer, but I found these the most helpful.
290

When Oleg is overtly copying from Disney he

feels much more in charge of his creation than when he
worked under inspiration. As he said to me, he would
continue producing Pazyryk artefacts, but now the
process will be similar to that used when he produces
sunduk with the motif of Bambi. He will use his skills
and ideas and the entire creative process will be under
his control. As I have suggested above, we can perhaps
see the difference pinpointed by Oleg as a distinction
between authorship and mediumship. Expressed in
Gells terms the former posits Oleg as an artist-agent i.e.
source of creative act while the latter posits him as an
artist-patient i.e. witness to act of creation (Gell 1998:
28-9). Needless to say, the difference is therefore one of
will and self-acknowledged agency rather than, say,
originality,

innovation,

authenticity

or

intellectual

property. Anyone interested in originality would see

Oleg as simply making copies in the case of his Pazyryk
artefacts (regardless of the claimed presence or absence
of supernatural inspiration) and as utilizing Disney
motifs in the case of his furniture.
291

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that the world-famous
Pazyryk artefacts are ascribed with contradictory values
by the inhabitants of the Ulagan region of the Altai
Republic, where they were excavated. In the context of
an ethno-cultural revival Pazyryk artefacts are used as an
example of the great past of Altai and Altaians even
though the very process of their excavation is
condemned as disrespectful to both present-day Altaians
as well as their alleged ancestors. In what I called the
causation of misfortune idiom Pazyryk artefacts are
feared as bringing disasters, bad luck. Such related yet
contradictory

values

seem

to

dissolve

when

copies/replicas of Pazryk artefacts are concerned. Yet, as

it was argued above, the reason does not seem to reside
in a distinction between original and copy. Such a
distinction is actually problematic. In several above
mentioned contexts original Pazyryk artefacts as well
as their copies are seen as indices of an identical source
292

of creativity that is external to the human creator.

Therefore locally the most meaningful distinction
between Pazyryk artefacts and their replicas seems to be
based on the fact that the former are/were buried and
linked to the other world while the latter pertain to the
safe world of the living.
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