Vital Diplomacy: The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia

302 Pages·2017·4.093 MB·English

by  Chloe Nahum-Claudel

VITAL DIPLOMACY
Ethnography, Theory, Experiment
Series Editors:
Martin Holbraad, Department of Anthropology, University College London
Morten Axel Pedersen, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Rane Willerslev, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo
In recent years, ethnography has been increasingly recognized as a core method
for generating qualitative data within the social sciences and humanities. This
series explores a more radical, methodological potential of ethnography: its role
as an arena of theoretical experimentation. It includes volumes that call for a
rethinking of the relationship between ethnography and theory in order to ques-
tion, and experimentally transform, existing understandings of the contemporary
world.
Volume 1
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TROMPE L’OEIL FOR A COMMON WORLD
AN ESSAY ON THE ECONOMY OF KNOWLEDGE
By Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Volume 2
FIGURATIONS OF THE FUTURE
FORMS AND TEMPORALITIES OF LEFT RADICAL POLITICS IN NORTHERN
EUROPE
By Stine Krøijer
Volume 3
WATERWORLDS
ANTHROPOLOGY IN FLUID ENVIRONMENTS
Edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup
Volume 4
VIOLENT BECOMINGS
STATE FORMATION, SOCIALITY, AND POWER IN MOZAMBIQUE
By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Volume 5
VITAL DIPLOMACY
THE RITUAL EVERYDAY ON A DAMMED RIVER IN AMAZONIA
By Chloe Nahum-Claudel
VITAL
DIPLOMACY
The Ritual
Everyday on a
Dammed River
in Amazonia
By Chloe Nahum-Claudel
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
Published in 2018 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2018 Chloe Nahum-Claudel
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78533-406-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78533-407-8 (ebook)
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements viii
A Note on Language xi
Map xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Mastery and Subjection at the Fishing Dams 41
Chapter 2. The Fishermen Return ‘Like Yakairiti’ 83
Chapter 3. Routine Ritualism and a Festival of Abundance 113
Chapter 4. Affinal Diplomacy in a United, Egalitarian Society 145
Chapter 5. Cosmic Diplomacy: Cooking, Curing and Crafting
Human Life 183
Chapter 6. Yankwa’s Foreign Diplomacy and Saluma’s Defiance 226
Bibliography 257
Index 271
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 On 18 February 2008 women look on as Yankwa’s fleets
prepare for departure to the fishing dams. 40
1.2 Harvesting fish from the dam’s traps. 46
1.3 Building a fishing dam (wayti) in six archetypal steps. 56–57
1.4 The encampment downstream of Maxikyawina’s dam. 60
1.5 On the day the traps penetrate, men carry their newly
crafted traps to their positions. 66
2.1 Yankwa’s fishermen return from the dams decked out in
palm fronds and mud. 82
2.2 The hosts, known as Halokwayti, re-enter the flute house at
the end of their entertaining afternoon circuit. 88
2.3 The hosts gather in the flute house in readiness to meet the
incoming fishermen in the village arena. 95
2.4 My adoptive younger brother Salika (left) and his nephew
and co-resident playmate Anowlie are happily reunited
after Salika’s absence at the fishing dam. Anowlie looks
‘hostly’ like his father, while Salika’s fringe has grown long
and he is covered in black genipap. 99
3.1 Men’s nightly flute playing winds down after dawn in
February 2009 as Yankwa prepare to depart for the fishing
dams. 114
3.2 Women arrange themselves around the heap of tubers
to grate manioc together. They have straight backs and
straight legs and pivot from the hips. 125
Illustrations vii
3.3 Calabashes piled with yams are put outside the front door
by the wife of a Kairoli clansman for the pet-flute Tawado-
kwase. 136
4.1 Women ‘do the rounds’ of others’ houses to reclaim their
set of calabashes after approximately 4,000 litres of ketera
has circulated on the day of the fishermen’s return. In the
foreground a bunch of women stop to inspect calabashes
carried by others. In the background, another line of
women walk between houses with their own bundles. 144
4.2 The movement of calabashes from the dwelling circle to
the arena and back again. 147
4.3 Inside the flute house the flutes belonging to nine clans
are arrayed around a central pillar. 153
4.4 On 28 June 2009 women enter the arena after cleaning
Kawinyalili clan’s manioc field. They have stopped on
their way for a collective beautification. 171
5.1 A typically laden hearth. 184
5.2 Applying layers of ash and blood-like dye to new
calabashes. 189
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is based on sixteen months’ fieldwork in the Enawenê-nawê
village of Halataikwa, concentrated in 2008–2009 while I was a Ph.D.
student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University
of Cambridge. The research was made possible by a grant from the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK. The book was
written during three years spent as Trebilcock-Newton Research Fellow
at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and one year spent as a research fellow
at the EHESS in Paris. I am grateful to all these institutions.
Most of all I thank the Enawenê-nawê. While my stay was just a
blip in time from the perspective of the community, for me it was the
whole world – a break in time, the closure of my previous life, and
an opening to the future. This book is dedicated to them. I hope that
some of their wisdom is faithfully interpreted. In their remarkably
solidary community I learnt from everyone, but various people also
showed me particular love and compassion. In particular, the woman
I called mother, Kawalinero-asero fed and comforted me daily; her
daughters, Atolohe-neto, Kawalinero-neto, Yokwali-neto, Menakalose-
neto, Maxiolo, Mamiro, and their children were constant companions.
Their husbands helped me in many ways. Circling the village I would
like to thank a few others into whose houses I ventured most often to
ask questions or pass the time: Sotailiti and his household; Kawekwa-
atokwe; Kamerose-atokwe and Kamerose-asero, and their daughters and
sons-in-law.
My greatest intellectual and personal debt is to my Ph.D. super-
visor Stephen Hugh-Jones for his clarity of thought as a teacher and
writer, and his kindness and generosity as a person. In Cambridge I
also thank Barbara Bodenhorn, Martin Holbraad, Marilyn Strathern,
Acknowledgements ix
Francoise Barbira-Freedman, Piers Vitebsky and Rupert Stasch for their
mentorship over the years.
I lived for long periods between 2006 and 2010 in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, and the people I met there had a major influence on my life
and my anthropology, and supported me in many practical and emo-
tional ways. My fieldwork would have been impossible without the
support of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In 2006 he welcomed me into
his seminars at the Museu Nacional and introduced me to students
and colleagues who became my friends and interlocutors. My research
authorisation would never have been granted by the National Counsel
for Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) and the Agency
for Indigenous Affairs (FUNAI) if it had not been for his guidance and
tenacity through the process. I also thank Marcio Silva, another ethnog-
rapher of the Enawenê, for his good advice; Aparecida Vilaça for her
ongoing inspiration and support; Marcio Goldman and Tania Stolze-
Lima for conversation and hospitality; and for friendship and anthropo-
logical stimulus I thank Flavio Gordon, Fernanda Chinelli, Jose-Antonio
Kelly, Julia Sauma, Guillerme Orlandini Heurich, Antonia Walford,
Luana Almeida, Laura Lowenkron, Luciana França and Eduardo Dullo.
In Mato Grosso I thank Ivar Busatto, the director of OPAN, for access
to the library in Cuiabá to consult materials on the Enawenê. Antonio
Carlos de Aquino, the head of FUNAI in Juína, was always judicious
in negotiations that arose between myself and the Enawenê. At FUNAI
in Brasilia Giovana Acácia Tempesta helped me to access archives held
there on the Enawenê.
Specific chapters of the book have benefited from comments at various
stages. The Introduction benefited from astute readings by Michael Scott,
Taras Fedirko, Anthony Pickles and Sertaç Sehlikoglu. Chapter 1 has
improved following input from Kenny Calderón-Corredor, the Magic
Circle in Cambridge, and the Seminar of Americanist Anthropology in
Paris. I developed Chapter 3 on the basis of a seminar presentation
at the University of San Diego in 2011, where Joel Robbins provided
important feedback and conversations with Rupert Stasch did much to
further my thinking. Chapter 5 benefited from the engaged reading of
Milena Estorniolo. Chapter 4 profited from comments received at the
Social Anthropology seminar at Durham University and the Kinship and
Relational Logics seminar of Klaus Hamberger at the EHESS. The whole
book is better thanks to Jessica Johnson’s careful reading of an earlier
version of the manuscript. Morten Pedersen, one of the three editors
of this book series, provided sharp editorial feedback, which helped
restructure and orient the manuscript following peer review. I also thank
the two anonymous reviewers for their useful appraisals.