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Lavoisiers method was not to read and pray, but to dream that some long and complicated
chemical process would have a certain effect, to put into practice with dull patience, after
its inevitable failure, to dream that with some modification it would have another result,
and to end by publishing the last dream as a fact (Peirce 1940 [1877]: 6).
I once asked an old man: Are all stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long
while and then replied, No! But some are. (Hallowell 1960: 24).
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social system or a meaningful whole. Once in context, there is always a reasonable reason to believe that witches can fly, that twins are birds or that the
Bororo are parrots, and thus to act according to these beliefs.1 The central
tenet of contextual understanding is that the justification for someone believing in something has to be evaluated according to the epistemic standards of
the community in question (Haack 1993: 190).
For most anthropologists, contextualism is both an epistemological belief
and a methodological instrument. Despite its theoretical aporias, it works well
as an heuristic principle for making sense of fieldwork data, and I will resort
to it in my rendering of the Parakan contact experience. However, a contextualist response to Obeyesekeres challenge would not suffice, since his critique is Janus-faced: on the one hand, he contextualizes European myth-making
and, on the other, he universalizes Hawaiian behaviour on a cognitive basis.
These are not unrelated movements. They are part of a wider effort to
dispose of the category of totality, and related concepts such as culture or
society. If there are no bounded meaningful worlds, only worlds within worlds
connected in various ways, for whom then are twins birds; for whom do
witches fly; for whom is Lono a god? One answer to this question has been:
for anthropologists. If the context to explain beliefs and practices cannot be
the natives, then it must be our own. Cargo cults, cannibalism, deifications
are thus to be dismissed as figments of imperial imagination.
Obeyesekeres second move is of a different order, but it is also a way out of
the concept of culture. Experience has a residual epistemic status in cultural
theory: beliefs are interwoven into the great fabric of culture, they stand by
themselves and imprint themselves on peoples minds as if the mind was a blank
paper.2 Obeyesekere adopts a cognitive universalism and a sort of empirical
foundationalism to counteract this idea. He assumes that there are basic representations that stem from practical engagement, which are strongly constrained
by the objective properties of the world and by the structure of the mind.3
In this article, I will reverse Obeyesekeres first argument and offer a different interpretation of the second. Through the analysis of an empirical case
with no historical or geographical relation to the Hawaiian case, I claim, first,
that the assimilation of conquerors to divinities is not only a pervasive trope
in European narratives but is also a recurrent and lasting interpretation of
the colonial encounter among indigenous peoples. It may thus correspond to
a structural feature of these historical phenomena. Secondly, I argue, as did
both Sahlins (1981) and Obeyesekere (1992), that this assimilation is not
immune to experience or alien to practice. By employing the Peircian notion
of abductive inference I hope to account for both the flexibility and the
resilience of this assimilation. My general question is how to explain a phenomenon which implies at one and the same time the practical engagement
and the stability of certain representations.
Before exploring this argument in full, let us consider the facts.
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671
Local Amerindian people ransack the working camps, obstructing one of the
major national projects of the time: a road traversing the whole of Brazilian
Amazonia. The military government had no time to waste, and sent the
Agency for Indigenous Affairs (Fundao Nacional do ndio, hereafter Funai)
to make contact with the Parakan and draw them into state administration.
This was not the first time that a road had crossed the territory of the
Parakan people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the government
of the state of Par began the construction of a railway to connect the city
of Alcobaa (present-day Tucuru) to Marab, then a centre of rubber and
Brazil nut production. Amerindians, among them Parakan, plundered the
working camps, and the Agency for Indigenous Affairs was called in to resolve
the situation. In 1928, the Agency (then called Servio de Proteo aos ndios,
hereafter SPI) established a base at the 67-kilometre point on the railway,
which came to be known as the Tocantins Pacification Post. The SPIs idea
was to attract the indigenous population through the distribution of goods,
in the hope of bringing them to civilization (and hard, ill-paid work).
From this point onwards, the Western Parakan became regular visitors to
the Post, receiving hundreds of different items, particularly metal implements.
Although for many decades Parakan people had made peaceful visits to the
Post, they remained outside the control of the Brazilian authorities until the
1980s. The Eastern Parakan, for their part, never discovered this wonderland
of desirable objects. Apart from occasionally attacking and plundering the few
whites who ventured into their territory, the group had little access to commodities until the Transamaznica road crossed their lands.
In 1970, the Funai abandoned the static posture that had characterized
SPI activity in the region and mounted four Penetration Fronts (Frentes de
Penetrao) to contact the Amerindians who were jeopardizing the advancement of the road. Their orders were to track them and find their villages. But
the Parakan made the first move. On 12 November they ransacked one of
the Funai campsites with displays of fierceness. Tracking them, the agents
penetrated deep into Eastern Parakan land, finding and entering numerous
campsites and gardens. The sertanista Joo Carvalho headed the Funai team
and had some knowledge of the Parakan language since he spoke a related
Tupi-Guarani tongue.5 On 30 November he wrote in his diary:
we arrived at a camp where the fire was still lit. We were so euphoric that we didnt
examine everything; we wanted to meet the Indians soon and see their reaction. At 3.00
p.m., we arrived at a place where they had gathered honey We came along cautiously
[When] we were at 100 metres [from them], we dropped our stuff, leaving the rifles and
keeping the revolvers, since our shirts covered them. I opened my backpack and got out
the gifts When we were at some 50 metres, we stood in a row to shout altogether. As
soon as we did so, the Indians stopped speaking We shouted a second time; they answered
with anger, uttering a war-cry and running in our direction with the arrows in their bows,
telling us to go away, otherwise they would kill us. The Assurini Indian [the interpreter]
wanted to run away, but we didnt consent to it. They stood at 20 metres from us, shouting, while we spoke We spoke for five minutes until they put their arrows down and
came out to meet us. We distributed the gifts and they gave us three land-turtles and the
young of an agouti. Then we noticed that we were surrounded because more Indians
appeared from all sides. Our encounter lasted twenty-five minutes. In the end the interpreters had calmed down and were talking. So we asked to stay with them. But they revolted
once more, ordering us to leave (Carvalho 1971: 30 Nov. [1970]).
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Three weeks later, Parakan men and women started visiting the Funai
camp. They received gifts and paid (-wepy) for them with land-turtles. This
was a pattern followed by both Parakan branches since the end of the nineteenth century. Parakan say that they learned how to pay for metal instruments from Moakara, who is considered to be the first master of the whites
(Torijarypya). Moakara was the leader of a tiny Tupi-Guarani community living
near the Parakan territory which maintained sporadic contact with Brazil nut
collectors down river, at a time when the Parakan were completely isolated
from the whites.6
During the first months of 1971, the interaction between the Parakan
and the agents intensified, and some trust pervaded their relationship. Men,
women, and children visited the camp, where they obtained axes, knives, glass
beads, dogs, and food.The agents worked intensively for the Parakan, hunting
for them with guns, cooking for them in aluminium pots, and sharpening
their metal tools. In all encounters the natives asked the agents to sing and
dance with them, but refused to allow them to visit their village. In April,
they finally agreed to a visit.
Another visit followed, and the contact process advanced at a steady pace.
On 6 May, Parakan men and women came to the Funai camp.
I saw a woman carrying our bottle of Especfico Pessoa [a regional phytotherapeutic against
snake venom]. I said it would have no use for her, since it was a medicine against surucucu
[Lachesis sp.]. Then Picaua asked me to put some of it on his wounded foot. I cut the skin
with a Gillette blade and pressed a piece of cotton wool soaked with Especfico against the
wound. When I finished, Jauarauaqua said: Let us raise him/her who is interred. At first,
I didnt understand. Then the captain [the headman] invited me to go When we arrived
at the grave, he ordered Gerson [a Funai agent] to remove the stuff placed on it and dig.
He began digging with his hands, but they told him to use a stick My curiosity was
roused. I told [another agent] to fetch a hoe When we uncoverd the patellae (it was
buried with the knees upward), and Gerson held the bones, and then the shins, I asked what
they were going to do, and the captain said it was for me to murrem, which means to take
out. It was to make the body raise up. I understood the goal. I was to revivify the dead
(Carvalho 1971: 6 May).
This little episode, narrated by a Brazilian civil servant, resonates with some
long-standing anthropological questions concerning irrational beliefs. What
were the bones really for? Were the Parakan seriously considering the possibility that the whites could bring the dead to life? And why the whites?
Myths of immortality
In Parakan mythology, whites are associated with shamanism and superhuman creative powers. Their very origin manifests special transformative
capacities. The myths narrate how the whites-to-be differentiated themselves
from a common humanity through a process of self-transformation and body
renewal, a process which is often associated with immortality and the capacity to bring the dead back to life. In a well-known myth, the white-to-be
dances around his mothers grave, while blowing the smoke of his cigar. He
raises the skeleton and dances with it. The boys grandmother, however, disturbs him and the revivified dead escapes to the forest as a big rodent. Later
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673
Figure 1. Two Parakan men and a Funai agent (left foreground) during the distribution of
knives. Photo: Y. Billon.
on, having become a full white, he brings his mother back and takes his new
kin out of the earth.
The image of the boy-shaman dancing with the skeleton is a compelling
one. The same motif appears in almost all Tupi-Guarani versions of the myth
of the twins, who are children of the same mother but have different fathers:
one is the son of Mara, the great primordial shaman, the other is the son
of Opossum, the sign of death and decay. Maras son tries to resuscitate their
mother, but his brother disturbs him, preventing the revivification. The
Parakan narrative is a transformation of this myth, in which the white-to-be
plays the role of Maras son, conveying his association with shamanic power.7
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For the Parakan, the main icon of the whites creativity is the objects
they make. Axes and machetes are not only useful and desirable, but are also
signs of their producers powerful agency. The objects stand as evidence of
shamanic capacity.8 Another narrative illustrates this point well. It was originally told by a woman captured during the attack on Moakaras group, at the
end of the nineteenth century. It goes like this. Two of Moakaras sons died
of fever and their kin decided to take their bones to a Brazil nut collector
who was on friendly terms with them. Upon arrival, they shouted to him
from the opposite river bank, and he came to their meeting in a canoe full
of goods.
Moakara enquired of the white man:
Is it you who makes the axes?
Yes, it is me. We do it, he answered.
Well then, revive my sons for me! I brought my sons so that you can resuscitate them for
me, replied Moakara.
(Akaria Parakan, recorded in 1995, tape 9)
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675
Figure 2. An Eastern Parakan woman holds an axe given by the Funai servants during the
contact process (1971). Photo: Y. Billon.
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theme in the colonial process, whose conformity to the natives point of view
was challenged by Obeyesekere (1992) in his critique of Sahlins (1981; 1985).
Obeyesekere claims that the equation between gods and whites is a selfaggrandizing European myth, which must be dispelled in the name of a practical rationality, defined as the process whereby human beings reflectively
assess the implications of a problem in terms of practical criteria (1992: 19).
Let me rephrase Obeyesekeres problem with our case in mind: how can
we reconcile the Parakans supposedly irrational belief in the whites capacity to resurrect the dead with their rational behaviour in their practical daily
affairs with the same whites? Is this belief a phantasmagoria of an imperial
imagination or does it also correspond to deep-rooted cultural assumptions
about life, power, and death among these Amerindians? Before answering these
questions through an analysis of the empirical evidence, some theoretical
observations are required.
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677
world. And here is my second point: I claim that propositions like the whites
are superhuman or the whites are capable of reviving the dead are not the
mere projection of native cosmologies onto facts, but are based on empirical
inferences. As Boyer (1994: 142-8, 211-18) suggests for all magico-religious
representations, the main modality of inferencing here is neither deductive
nor inductive, but abductive.12 From new data that demand explanation a
proposition is postulated, which, if confirmed empirically, accounts for the
observable data. Of course, what counts as evidence (and as experience) is
also culturally modulated.13
The well-documented first contact with New Guinea highlanders shows
how empirically orientated the process can be. When Michael Leahys team
traversed the highlands valleys in the early 1930s, the highlanders variously
assumed that they were dead relatives, mythological beings, sky-people, and so
on. They scrutinized the gold-miners, both to identify their deceased clansmen and to determine whether their assumptions were correct. Any body
detail could be relevant: the colour of the skin, the size of the penis, the smell
of the faeces:
Leahy and Dwyer found it necessary to choose a secluded spot and post a guard when they
wanted to relieve themselves A screened latrine-pit was dug within the roped-off area.
But the highlanders curiosity could not be left unsatisfied for long. One of the people hid,
recalls Kirupano, and watched them going to excrete. He came back and said, Those men
from heaven went to excrete over there. Once they had left, many men went to take a
look. When they saw that it smelt bad, they said, Their skin might be different, but their
shit smells bad like ours. (Connolly & Anderson 1987: 44).
The investigation could lead to disproof of the initial hypothesis, as happened with the people of the Asaro valley who believed that the dead could
take human form by day and become skeletons by night. A witness recounts
how two warriors managed to find out if the whites turned into bones:
There were guard dogs in the camp during the night, but these two men were very careful.
They crept very quietly They spent the whole night trying to peep inside the tent
They watched and watched, and they expected to see bones in there, but they could see
none. They saw no changes taking place. The strangers stayed the same. So they said we
should stop this belief that they were dead people (Connolly & Anderson 1967: 43).
What was at issue here was what kind of being the newcomers were. New
facts generated new hypotheses, which put into motion a process of continual inferencing and debate. This leads to my third point. If propositions
like the whites are sky- or dead people proceed by abduction, and are not
divorced from experience, then their truth-value is necessarily conditional. I
refer here to the degree to which a belief is held to be true by a person, and
not to its truth-indicativeness or orientation. As Boyer (1994: 217-18) points
out, abductive explanations are conjectural, and the process of inferencing is
triggered by the explanatory needs of particular situations.
Conditionality thus implies flexibility, but also resilience. Conditional truthvalue accounts for behavioural flexibility and practical engagement, and at the
same time for the stability of magico-religious assumptions. No single piece
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of evidence is sufficient. No particular situation can disprove a general assumption. When a proposition is subjected to close scrutiny, the network of ontological assumptions that sustains it is not thoroughly affected.14 The proposition
is tested in context. Thus to say that Leahy and his team are not dead people
does not mean that the dead cannot assume human form and interact with
the living during the day. It may just mean that Leahy and his team are not
dead people (see also Sahlins, 1995: 185).
Even the belief that whites are ancestors or have a privileged relationship with them can be re-actualized in new situations. Commenting on
Salisburys observation that the Papuans finally realized that the visitors were
men and not spirits, A. Strathern writes that one may wonder a little about
this, since in both Hagen and Pangia the idea that Europeans may be
spirits continues to be entertained along with the normal working assumption that they are probably people (1984: 108). Tuzin suggests that as
interactions with whites become more intense and diversified, practical affairs
make the balance lean definitively towards this working assumption. However,
this was not yet the case for the Ilahita who took Tuzin himself to be a
returnee from the dead well into the 1980s (1997: 135-6; see also Leavitt
2000).
The trickiest question is how and when a network of representations
changes to such an extent that it no longer motivates certain actions. How
and when are the main ontological assumptions discarded or held as marginally true? In epistemic terms, it may help us to think of this network as a
more-or-less coherent and integrated set of representations, some more basic
than others, which configures a world-view. The degree of supportiveness
within this set is called into question in practical situations, being either
reinforced or weakened. This process is continuous, and transformation is
necessarily part of it. Change, however, requires not only stopping the flow
of supportiveness among previous representations, but creating new connections and new flows among new ideas. It is the cumulative effect of this
process that may account for change.
Let me return now to our story and consider whether the notion of abduction illuminates the bones affair.
CARLOS FAUSTO
679
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believe them (1972: 67). This is true in so far as one has an internalist theory
of dreaming. If not, the question of belief is posed differently. First, one can
lie about having dreamt, and it is for others to decide if the dream has taken
place. Parakan people have a simple method for judging these matters. If
someone knows a new song it means he or she has really dreamt, since songs
always result from interaction with enemies in dreams.
Secondly, a dream may be interpreted as forecasting coming events. In this
case, to believe it means to act according to its message. An extreme example
is the Iroquois practice of publicly acting out their dreams, even when this
involved acts of violence or sexual promiscuity. A dreamer who had a nightmare about being captured by enemies would ask his fellows to torture him,
believing that after this imaginary captivity he would never actually be a prisoner (Wallace 1958: 240). Performing dreams by transforming them into ritual
action is a recurrent feature of ceremonial life in Amazonia and elsewhere. As
a guide for action, dreams may inflect vital political and economic decisions.
Its importance tends to accrue during periods of rapid social change, because
it provides, along with mythical fabulation (Gow 2001), a creative device to
interpret new situations and act in new contexts (Stephen 1982). Hence its
centrality in indigenous millenarian movements observed throughout
Amazonia and Melanesia.
What I suggest here is that the dreaming provides an experiential basis
to support and motivate beliefs and practices. This is not only because it
is so lively and vivid an experience for the dreamer, but because its experiential density can be communicated to others by means of narratives and
rituals (Graham 1995). It is thus turned into powerful embodied and shared
experiences, which constitute a significant dimension of the lived world.
Moments of intense excitement or affliction, of great intellectual or practical bewilderment, tend to activate the memory of these experiences. Death
is one such moment, contact is another; both are part of our context
here.
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681
to dance. The women cut the agents hair in the native style and painted
them. When they were about to leave, Carvalho asked if he could go with
them:
They asked me, What for?. I said that I wanted to stay with them. But before they
allowed me [to do so], they asked if I smoked tauary [the Parakan cigar], if I sang and
danced. I answered, yes, so they decided to take me with them. Nelson, Josias and Piau
were forced to go, and the others, they pushed them back, telling them to stay (Carvalho
1971: 17 Apr.).
The party arrived at the village at 3.30 p.m. and started to dance and sing.
Then they asked Carvalho to sharpen the blades of their axes. The women
brought food to him. At dusk, some men came to him carrying a metre-long
cigar, and the dancing began again. Eventually they went to sleep, but before
dawn he was called again:Before getting up, I spoke and my voice was hoarse.
The same happened to the Indians and I pulled at the throats of eight of
them, rubbing my hands and then blowing to throw off the disease (Carvalho
1971: 17 Apr.).
Carvalho thus acted as if he were extracting the pathogenic agent from
their bodies. After this fake shamanistic performance, he and Nelson started
to sing again, the former chanting songs of the Urubu-Kaapor people (among
whom he had served for many years) and the latter singing those of the Temb
people. Since both are Tupi-Guarani groups, the Parakan were probably able
to grasp some of the words.
After this visit, the headman Arakyt became Carvalhos ritual friend, a
special relationship that one has with cross-cousins and enemies. During the
Figure 3. Joo Carvalho (painted all over with genipa) shows a Parakan man a shot-gun
(1971). Photo: Y. Billon.
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next months, Arakyt insistently asked Carvalho to sing: Before dawn, writes
the Funai agent, the captain always comes to my hammock and asks me to
sing. As I have said, songs are the sensory evidence of a special relationship
between a person and the akwawa. Songs can only be obtained through interaction with these alien persons in dreams, and are therefore a sign of shamanic
power. Names are obtained in the same way, and young parents usually ask
dreamers to name their child, as did Arakyts son to Carvalho:
Piriar arrived with his wife and his new-born son. I asked him what his name was. He
told me to give the name. I thought and gave the name of an Urubu-Kaapor warrior:
Tamer. They found it so beautiful that they asked me to name a girl of the same age
(Carvalho 1971: 13 July).
One week after the visit, the Parakan took them again to the village, to
the all-too-familiar routine of dancing and sharpening. But something new
happened.
Around 9.00 p.m., we were dancing and suddenly Miarin [another Funai agent] fell down
This was like a bath of cold water. Every young Indian got a machete and asked if he
had caruara (if he was a shaman). We said, No They ordered everyone to go to sleep and
they kept their machetes under their hammocks (Carvalho 1971: 25 Apr.)
Miarin had fainted. His faintness could be interpreted in two related ways:
he could have been attacked by pathogenic agents called karowara, or he could
have been dreaming as a result of the dancing and tobacco intoxication. Both
interpretations invited the same conclusion: for better or for worse, powerful
shamanism was on the scene. So the dancing stopped for a while, only to start
again before the break of the day:
By dawn, almost every single Indian was singing and dancing. They performed the song of
the howler monkey, the rail, the tayra, the anteater, the peccary and others, and in the end
the white-man song. This one, they requested me to sing with them until I learnt it fully
(Carvalho 1971: 25 Apr.).
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683
This was not the case, however. The Parakan do not practise secondary
burial. Carvalho was judging what he saw by what he knew about other
Amerindian peoples. For the Parakan, the deaths and the radio once again
raised the issue of the powers of whites and motivated them to act. This time,
however, Carvalho did not deny that he was a shaman. He was uncertain of
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Arakyts purpose, and said that it was not yet the right time (implying that
there is a right time). If we assume that it is possible to cross the Great Divide
between us (the living) and them (the dead), the crucial question is: Who can
do this, and when?
From July to August, Carvalho was absent from the field, and the diary is
written by other Funai agents. During his absence, there was an outbreak of
influenza.This time Parakan men and women came immediately to the Funai
camp, asking for medicines. It was the peak season for anti-flu, anti-catarrh,
and antibiotics injections. On 13 August, for instance, twenty-two people
(among them children) received injections, and an agent writes that all of
them accepted the medication well (Carvalho 1971: 13 Aug.). By the time
Carvalho had returned, the outbreak was already under control. More confident, Parakan men begin to ransack a nearby town that had grown up along
the Transamaznica road. The government instructed the agents to put an end
to the contact process, moving the Parakan to a new village near the Funai
camp.
Meanwhile singing continued to be a daily activity. Now the Parakan
invited Carvalho to participate in the all-male nocturnal reunions in the
tekatawa, the plaza.When they finished smoking the 20-centimetre-long cigar,
they asked me to sing I sang songs they didnt know, in other words, I
invented them. Then it was Nelsons turn, he imitated me, and in this way
we sang many pieces without repetition (Carvalho 1971: 23 Sept.). The
Parakan were about to perform the opetymo ritual. The stage witnessed by
Carvalho is known as the nurture of the jaguars ( jawara-pyrotawa). It consists
of the dreamers giving the songs (called jaguars), which they had received
from the dream enemies, to those who were to dance in the festival. By asking
Carvalho to sing in the plaza, Parakan people condensed these two figures
into one, treating him again as the dreamer and the dream enemy.
The ritual was aborted by an outbreak of conjunctivitis. The Eastern
Parakan had already suffered from many diseases in the previous months.
They now eagerly took medicines, particularly penicillin injections whose
rapid effect had a great impact on them. On 30 September, Arakyt called
Carvalho to come to the village and give his sick little daughter an injection.
Finally, by 2 October, they abandoned their village, moving to a new one built
by the Funai agents near their campsite. During the trip, the bones affair came
to the fore for the last time:
When we passed alongside the grave of an old shaman, which has a beautiful shelter over
it, we sat to rest and talk. I asked the captain [Arakyt] who was there. He said it was
my grandfather and asked if I were going to take him out. I said it was not the right
time yet, since he would still stink. He agreed, but asked me to give him [the dead shaman]
an injection. I said that it was impossible to inject into the bones, and besides one who
dies never lives again, and the medicines only cure when there is still life. They agreed, but
even so wanted me to take the bones out. I questioned them as to why they wanted the
bones, but obtained no satisfactory answer, and I still remain in doubt (Carvalho 1971: 2
Oct.).
Arakyt asked Carvalho to open the grave and inject medicines into the
bones. They were both uncertain. Carvalho questioned his first assumption
that he was to murrem the dead. Arakyt wanted to know if the injections
CARLOS FAUSTO
685
were the whites well-guarded secret of immortality. This time Carvalho was
peremptory: death is irreversible, one who dies never lives again.
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them to bury him, and Poenakatu laments, The Whites, they didnt know that
he dreamt (Andrade 1992: 220).
NOTES
This article is a version of a paper presented at The Ethnohistory of the So-Called
Peripheries Wenner-Gren Conference, held in London, Ontario in 2000: my thanks to
Marshall Sahlins, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Neil Whitehead for the invitation and comments. The present version has greatly benefited from the criticisms I received when presenting it at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes, the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences
Sociales, the cole Normale Suprieure, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Oxford, and the London School of Economics. I am grateful to those who invited
me: Patrick Menget, Philippe Descola, Benot de lEstoile, Laura Rival and Roger Goodman,
Peter Gow and Stephen Feuchtwang. I have also benefited from the suggestions made by
Aparecida Vilaa, Christina Toren, Carlo Severi, Adam Kuper, Luiz Antonio da Costa, and the
anonymous JRAI reviewers. I would also like to thank Yves Billon for granting me the right
to publish his photographs and the Instituto Socioambiental for making them available.
Research among the Parakan was financed by Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP),
Associao Nacional de Ps-Graduao em Cincias Sociais (ANPOCS), the Ford Foundation,
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I completed this article during my stay at the Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale (CNRS/Collge de France) in 2001 my thanks to P. Descola for the invitation
and to the Coordenao de Aperfeioamento de Pessoal de Ensino Superior (CAPES) for providing the means for my stay.
1
The structuralist answer was different, for it focused on the mind, not on the sociocultural system. Lvi-Strauss (1962a; 1962b) universalized analytical reasoning and reread
ethnographic data through the lenses of classificatory and categorical thought.These two answers
together were so successful that the issue of rationality became a meta-anthropological question
rather than an anthropological one. See, for instance, the contributions to Wilson (1970) or to
Hollis and Lukes (1982).
2
Here I employ Lockes famous metaphor about the mind, which allowed him to affirm the
pre-eminence of experience as the source of human knowledge. Culturalism espoused a classic
empiricist theory of the mind without embracing its corresponding experience-dependent
theory of concept formation. Acquisition was thus seen as a simple process of inscribing readymade contents in the individuals mind.
3
In response to one of his critics, Obeyesekere defines practical rationality as a term that
helps me to see Hawaiians and others engaged in certain activities that show a rational meansgoal nexus and links them up with others engaged in the commonplace tasks of planning and
making do as they struggle with want and scarcity. I cannot imagine humans living without
such a mentality, call it universal if you will (1995: 272).
4
The Parakan split into two groups, East and West, at the end of the nineteenth century
(see Fausto 2001a). In 1999, the Western branch totalled more than 400 people, and the Eastern
branch just under 300 people.
5
Sertanista is the most senior position in the career of a Funai agent. The term comes from
the word serto, which during the colonial period denoted the Brazilian hinterlands and was
applied to a person who accompanied expeditions into the woods, in search of gold and native
slaves.
6
The Parakan are probably remnants of a large Tupi-Guarani population reported to have
lived in the region since the seventeenth century.The intensity of relations with colonial agents
in the remote past is impossible to determine. The forebears of the Parakan may have been
drawn into contact with missionaries and merchants. They may have suffered from the numerous epidemics that ravaged the Tocantins valley during the first centuries of colonization.
However, the Parakan have no memory of such events. Their view is that they had discovered the whites by the end of the nineteenth century; they think of themselves as completely isolated until that time.
7
For an analysis of this myth and its transformation, see Fausto (2001a: 470-82). For
the other Parakan myth on the origin of whites, see Fausto (forthcoming). For this same
CARLOS FAUSTO
687
theme among the sixteenth-century Tupinamb, see Thevet (1575 [1953]: 39; 1576 [1978]:
100).
8
In Amazonian mythology there is a recurrent motif that explains the technological asymmetry between natives and whites. In primordial times, they had to choose between two technical items offered by the culture hero. The ancestor of the Indians made the wrong decision
(choosing, for instance, the bow instead of the rifle), condemning future generations to technological inferiority. This myth was first recorded in the seventeenth century among the
Tupinamb (Abbeville 1614: 60) and appears today among other native peoples. Its structure is
identical to that of the myths which explain how death entered into the human world (see
Lvi-Strauss 1964). We have thus only one motif that accounts for both mortality and technological inferiority. On this topic, see Hugh-Jones (1988: 143-4); Viveiros de Castro (1992:
30-1); Giraldo-Figueroa (1997: 280-1); Goulard (1998: 464-515); Gow (2001: 205-18); Fausto
(2001a: 469-531).
9
For a splendid analysis of the Tupi-Guarani assimilation of Europeans to great shamans and
the cultural hero Mara, see Viveiros de Castro (1992).
10
This designation was generally applied to the Europeans, whereas Pero was used for
the Portuguese and Mara for the French. Some of the shamans known as Caraba
headed messianic movements during the first centuries of colonization. There is much controversy concerning the status of these movements, especially in what concerns the impact of
the colonial process upon them: see inter alia Clastres (1975); Vainfas (1995); Fausto (1992;
2001c).
11
Boyer claims that religious ideas are at the same time natural (because they depend on
universal properties of the human mind) and perceived as unnatural by human subjects (because
they violate intuitive expectations). The cultural transmission of religious representations would
depend on a certain combination of intutitiveness and counter-intuitiveness, that is, on a cognitive optimum, in which a concept is both learnable and nonnatural (1994: 121).
12
Abductive inferencing is not peculiar to magico-religious explanations. For Peirce, who
introduced this notion into epistemology as a third term, to be situated between induction and
deduction, it was a perfectly rational procedure. Today it is recognized as a step in the construction of knowledge, although some hard empiricists contest its legitimacy (see Boyd 1995:
212). See also Peirces distinction between strong induction and abductory induction (1940
[1901]).
13
I am aware of the implications of this statement, and would like to avoid an ultrarelativistic reading of it. I am cautious about the idea that standards of evidence depend only
on the epistemic community to which one belongs. I do not want to dwell on this problem
here and will merely quote from Haack: There is a relevant ambiguity in what counts as evidence. In one sense, there is much divergence in what counts as evidence; in what one
counts as relevant evidence, which depends on ones other beliefs. In another sense, perhaps,
after all, there is not much divergence in what counts as evidence; in appraising the security
of a belief, pre-scientific as well as scientific peoples may be assessing its fit to their experience and to their other beliefs If we think of criteria of justification at the appropriate
level of generality, of framework principals rather than material content, of the constraints of
experiential anchoring and explanatory integration rather than of specific judgements of relevance, there may, after all, be commonality rather than divergence (1993: 207).
14
The expression ontological assumptions should not be confused with the cognitive notion
of intuitive ontology. The former refers to a set of cultural categories about the beings existing in the cosmos, while the latter refers to a natural set of ontological categories built into
every human mind.
15
Among the Parakan, the default gender of a dreamer is male. Old women, however, do
dream and give songs for the festivals, although not to the same extent as men: see Fausto
(1999; 2001b).
16
Compare Piawas question and my reaction with Leavitts (2000) analysis of similar situations involving anthropologists in Melanesia.
17
Akwawa is the general category for all entities, in their condition as persons, who do not
belong to Egos community. I translate it as enemy. Animals are akwawa when considered as
subjects endowed with intention and verbal communication (as happens in dreams and mythical narratives). As game, they are classified in the general category for objects, maejiroa. For
details, see Fausto (2001a; 2001b).
688
CARLOS FAUSTO
18
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690
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question de savoir comment certaines croyances au sujet de la nature des blancs entrrent
en action lors du contact. Cet article utilise aussi des donnes tires de lhistoire de
lAmrique du Sud et de lethnographie compare de la Mlansie afin de suggrer de
nouvelles perspectives sur le dbat entre Sahlins et Obeyesekere. La notion Peircienne
dabduction sert rendre compte de la flexibilit et de la rsilience simultanes des ides
magico-religieuses.
Museu Nacional-PPGAS, Quinta da Boa Vista s/n, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 20.940-040 Brazil.
cfausto@alternex.com.br