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Guesting, Feasting and Raiding: Transformations of Violence in the Northwest

Amazon

Chapter · January 2008

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Citation: Chernela, Janet (2008) Guesting, Feasting and Raiding: Transformations

of Violence in the Northwest Amazon. In Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland
South America, eds. Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida. Pp 42-59.

Guesting, Feasting and Raiding: Transformations of Violence in the Northwest

Amazon
Janet Chernela, University of Maryland chernela@umd.edu

In his classical anthropological work on the Nuer, E.E. Evans-Pritchard

defined the boundaries of a group as the imaginary periphery beyond which feud
becomes warfare (Evans-Pritchard 1940). The delineation brings into relief an
essential fault line -- the limit of moral commitment beyond which there is no
recourse to dispute but violence. Within the moral community violence is avoided;
outside the moral community it is common currency. This raises questions
regarding the constituency of "the moral community." If its parameters shift over
time, as our data indicate, what are the forces that push entities toward consolidation
and treaty on the one hand, or autonomy, estrangement, and even enmity, on the
other? Under what conditions does the language of violence become the common
idiom? How are violences begun, ended, rationalized, and recalled? Within this
constellation of meanings, as we shall see, lies the possibility of revenge.
The notion of revenge cannot be understood apart from the larger body of
local meanings in which it is embedded. For the member groups of the Eastern
Tukanoan family of languages in the northwest corner of the Amazon rainforest in
Brazil and Colombia, these meanings comprise a coherent schema based on
generative underlying principles of value and balance. The Wanano have two
broadly applied terms that describe debt and repayment -- wahpaiyo for debt, and
wahpa'a for repayment. Group relations fall within this schema, and can be
summarized as follows: 1) each person belongs to a moral community that is
conceptually regarded as bound; 2) group boundaries are reified in daily linguistic
interaction, mythic narration, and ritual; 3) relations between communities are
governed by norms of reciprocity involving exchanges of several types, including
words, goods, spouses, and hostility; 4) a breach of norm between groups initiates a
negative form of reciprocity that may be called revenge or retaliation, a
transformation that permits violence; and 5) violence may be avoided by
compensation according to a system of equivalent values.
In discussing rules of interaction, breakage and compensation, this chapter
will make suggestions for the historic basis of group configuration and relationship
in the northwest Amazon. The essay pays special attention to the custom of
obligatory out-marriage in which one must marry a member of a different language
group than one’s own. Although reported comprehensively in the ethnographic
literature (Jackson 1972, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1983), this practice continues to be
considered exotic and arbitrary. This essay, instead, considers inlawhood as one

1
form of alliance-making, whose logic and specifics are accessible through oral
histories gathered in the Uaupés basin of Brazil.
The range between a total insider, such as a consanguineal sib-mate, and an
outsider -- "other, enemy, or captor -- is extensive. Mediating these extremes are
several categories of "other" with varying degrees of closeness. In the Northwest
Amazon, affines are located between the two -- they remain "others" (Wan., paye
mahsa), yet the relationship assumes ongoing reciprocities of peoples, goods, and
defense. In-law relations, unlike agnatic ones, are subject to the vagrancies of
history. In-laws were once enemies; and they may become so again.
Identity, Space, and the Moral Community
The area referred to as the northwest Amazon consists of the drainage basin
of the Uaupés River and adjacent areas in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Groups
speaking languages of the Eastern Tukanoan family predominate in the region,
although nearby inhabitants who speak languages of the Arawakan and Cariban
families participate in the social system.
The linguist Arthur Sorensen identified 13 languages as members of the
Eastern Tukanoan family: Wanano, Tukano, Tuyuka, Yuruti, Paneroa, Eduria,
Karapana, Tatuyo, Barasana, Piratapuyo, Desano, Siriano, and Kubeo. He estimated
that distances between these languages are greater than those of the Romance and
Scandinavian groups of languages (Sorensen 1967, 1973).1 Like Sorensen I use the
term Tukano to refer to one of the languages in the Eastern Tukanoan family that is
known by that name, as well as members of the group. In contrast, I reserve the term
Tukanoan to refer more broadly to a speaker of any one of the languages in the
Eastern Tukanoan family. In this system of usage then, a Wanano might be
considered a Wanano Tukanoan, a Desano might be referred to as a Desano
Tukanoan, and, a member of the Tukano group could be referred to as a Tukano
Tukanoan. The names assigned the language groups derive from lingua geral, a
lingua franca adapted by Jesuit missionaries and in common usage in official
documents dating to the 16th century. Tukano speakers refer to their language as
Dahsea; speakers of Wanano refer to their language as Kotiria. The large social field
of intermarrying speakers of the many Eastern Tukanoan languages is mahsa, a term
which glosses as "people."
For Eastern Tukanoans rules prohibit marriage among speakers of the same
language, requiring that spouses derive from a language group other than one's own2
(Jackson 1974, 1976, 1993, C. Hugh-Jones 1979, S. Hugh-Jones 1979, Chernela
1993, 2003). The practice of linguistic exogamy results in a coherent and
homogeneous culture complex, with unilineal descent and cross-cousin marriage
integrating some 14,0003 Indians of diverse languages over an area of approximately
150,0004 km.2
The data presented here were derived from fieldwork conducted in Brazil
among the Wanano Tukanoans living along the Uaupés River adjacent to the
Colombian-Brazilian border. I estimate the total Wanano population in Brazil to
number between 500 and 600. When we add the 980 Wanano reported by Waltz and
Waltz (n.d.) for the Colombian portion of the river, the total Wanano population may
be estimated to be between 1500 and 1600 people. Since this measurement is based
on village composition, the calculation includes in-marrying wives who, due to

2
practices of exogamy and patrilocality, are not Wanano. The procedure, however,
assumes a corresponding number of Wanano women residing in the villages of their
non-Wanano husbands. As we will see, the approximation of equivalence in
numbers of women in and numbers of women out is grounded in Tukanoan values
and principles of balanced, reciprocal marriage exchange.
The Wanano practice fishing and gardening, receiving principal inputs of
protein from fishing, and sources of carbohydrates from the root crops manioc and
yams. These activities are carried out extensively on a daily basis, where the unit of
consumption is rarely larger than the members of a single settlement. However,
production intensifies in conjunction with elaborate exchange ceremonies known as
po'oa in which several sib settlements come together.
Brazil's ten Wanano settlements are situated at intervals of 3 to 24 km apart
along the middle course of the Uaupés river and contain from 30 to 170 persons.
Villages are situated on high ground at the river edge. Numerous trails lead from the
residential clearing through the surrounding forest to distant gardens and to
neighboring settlements. Overland paths link Wanano villages on the Uaupés River
to in-law villages on the Aiarí river belonging to Arawakan Baniwa in-laws. (The
Baniwa are also known by the name Curripaco and are discussed in this volume by
Paul Valentine.) Many Wanano and Baniwa sibs have intermarried over generations.
Although the walking time between river basins ranges from four to seven hours,
these paths are used with frequency.
Descent: the korkoa
The Wanano and other Eastern Tukanoans deproblematize group belonging
by subscribing rigidly to principles of descent that determine membership through
patrifiliation. The Wanano term koroa refers to a group of patrilineal kin of any of
several levels of magnitude, from the small patriclan or sib to the large linguistico-
descent group, known as "the language group." Members of a koroa are said to be
children, or descendants, of a founding patrilineal ancestor from whom the sib name
is derived. Membership in koroa is theoretically fixed and ascribed by birth. As
such membership is non-overlapping and boundaries are regarded as impermeable.
The notion of koroa establishes an embedded hierarchy of in-groups based upon the
criterion of common descent and shared language.
That which is referred to as a "language group" in the literature is a maximal
patriclan comprised of a number of local descent groups who consider themselves
kin and may not marry. Shared speech, regarded as an indicator of descent,
manifests the extent of the sociopolitical unit and defines the area within which
sentiments of kinship and moral commitments prevail (Chernela 2001). In ordinary
interaction koroa membership is foregrounded as those within the same koroa
addresss one another through kin terms, with the generic yü korokü/a, my
kinsman/kinswoman, while members of descent groups other than one's own are
referred to and addressed as paye mahsa, meaning Other People. These terms leave
no ambiguity regarding the publicly recognized relatedness of any two interlocutors
and provide an obvious contrast between "own group" and "others." Thus, most
speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages orient identities in terms of the shared
"substance," language, that underlies the basis of groupness. The idea of community
is thereby manifest in linguistic performance and related linguistic qualities that

3
come out in the interactional ground, indexing identities and relationships. Thus are
the complexities of community and belonging in the northwest Amazon resolved and
simplified.
The foundation for a sociotopographical order and sacred emplacement of
peoples is found in a pan-Tukanoan narrative recounting the voyage of an ancestral
anaconda-canoe, known as Pamori Busokü. The underwater journey begins in a
primordial location known as Water Door, said to be in the southeast. The ancestral
anaconda canoe is said to proceed upriver toward the headwaters of the Uaupés river.
There, the ancestral canoe turned around, so that its anaconda head faced downriver
and its tail upriver. As the body of the great anaconda rose in the water the founding
ancestors of each of the sib-settlements of the Uaupés river emerged from its body.
The myth constructs and legitimizes the proper “seating” (Wan., duhinia), or
settlement, of each local descent group on the basis of the territorializing genitor.
The myth is recounted with frequency on ceremonial occasions.
The local descent group is theoretically anchored in space through several
ideological mechanisms. A combination of redundant narratives, among them myth,
historicities, and visual imagery, link topography and time with contemporary group
rights. In addition to the narratives of Pamori Busokü and the specific ancestral
narratives of sibs which name the places associated with ancestral events, markings
in the landscape, particularly those on large boulders, are said to be iconic of
ancestral precedence. These inscriptions or traces are regarded as having been left
by the ancestors as indicators of rightful occupation. These are the "evidentiary
signs” of history, written into the landscape -- representations which justify and
define practice.
In spite of redundancy, there is little universal consensus among groups
regarding place. While the morphology of events in the narrative of Pamori Busokü
are shared by all Eastern Tukanoan peoples, the order of group emergence and
emplacement varies substantially from one group to another. The perspectives of the
language groups, or even the sibs of the same language group, do not comprise a
consensual and consistent system. Ancestral emergence, defining the relationship of
groups to one another and their rights to place, are contested. The discrepancies in
narratives that are context-dependent and spatially-situated represent the ongoing
negotiation and contest among localized groupings. The challenge for any sib-
settlement is to maintain intact the continuity of socio-spatial configuration based
upon patrifiliation as the legitimizing function that links spatial demarcation to past
event and, thus, present and future rights.
Across the social and spatial boundaries that separate and define them,
descent groups trade and transact. Types of transactions are differently categorized.
Conversation, for example, is regarded as one form of exchange -- an "exchange of
talk," known as dürüküa. Object exchange is known as po'limina, and woman or
wife exchange is known as koto tarikoro.
Principles of balance govern all transactions and exchanges among groups
are carefully followed and calculated. Transactions are subject to a set of principles
which require that payments be compensated with an item that may be different in
kind but must be equal in value. This is the case, for example, in the repayment of
ceremonial gifts, which are expected to differ in substance but match in value the

4
original gift (Chernela 1993, 2001). The same principles of differing-with-
equivalence applies to the trading of daughters as wives across exogamous language
groups.
The system of value is based on general principles of reciprocity with broad
application across a variety of contexts. As outlined above: 1) both local descent
groups and language groups are regarded as bounded; 2) these boundaries are reified
daily in the act of informal speaking and occasionally in ritual; 3) exchanges between
communities include words, goods, spouses, and hostilities; 4) all exchanges are
governed by norms of reciprocity. A breach of any of the norms or the principles
underlying them may initiate a negative response -- a form of reciprocity that permits
violence. This negative reciprocity is here regarded as "revenge." Although no
longer practiced, Wanano informants still describe the act of kha ma tien, a phrase
that glosses as "to fight to kill." Only compensation, according to the same system
of equivalent values, can halt violence.
Principles of "mortal balance" are modeled in the taxonomy and interactions
in the world of non-human creatures. Groups of animals are systematically classified
into cohorts of ranked brothers. For each cohort an oldest brother or focal ancestor,
guards its kin and avenges those who might prey on them. It is the wrathful sib
guardian, descended from and transformed from the “first ancestor,” who, according
to Tukanoan belief, keeps close watch over his kin and will retaliate if one is taken.
The rule of tit-for-tat prevails: for every individual taken from among own group, a
retaliatory death will be taken from among the predators (cf. Reichel-Dolmatoff
1971, 1979, Chernela 1987; Arhem 1989, 1991). The same system, in principle, is at
play in the social world of humans.
Violence and Revenge
As we have shown, at the basis of an Eastern Tukanoan theory of group
rights is the belief that spatial designations are the result of historic and supernatural
processes. Predation upon a “sitting-place” without historical and supernatural
legitimization is dangerous because it breaches rules of spatial demarcation and
generates retaliatory events. Such predation requires a retaliatory act -- revenge --
necessary to correct a transgression. A loss on one side must be compensated by a
comparable loss on the other. Vengeance, dependent as it is in righting a wrong, is
one means of making good an outstanding debt. Balance must prevail.
In the following pages we will examine how this ideology has been played
out in practice according to ritual discourse and narrative accounts. Past events
perceived as improprieties or usurpation are remembered and kept alive through both
formal and informal discourse.
Ritual Speech
The names of former enemies are not forgotten. Rather, their transgressions
are reified through ritual repetition. In the po’oa, an exchange ceremony between
different sib settlements, ritual participants recount past wrongdoings recalling
former enemies by name while expressing vehement emotions.
In the occasions of the po'oa, when two sib settlements visit one another,
boundaries are created, reified, or broken down, as the identities of sibs and their
relations to one another are defined and redefined. The bueyoaka, a speech act
whose title glosses as "spear talk," is a portion of the po'oa in which past

5
transgressions are publicly broadcast. This ritual act mimics warfare as men from
one village face men from another in postures of violence, brandishing spears and
tossing them into one another's ranks. Each enjoins the other into the mock conflict.
The theme is displacement and abuse by a group different than one's own.
In one of po’oa I recorded among the Wanano, the two participating groups
faced one another in a mock spear battle and shouted these words:
Donor: "The Kubeo are over there; those people are over there, and over
there, they hate us. ...We will make puh of them! This Sirio that took my brother
away; that Bu, he took my son, and this Wamü Po'nairo (Baniwa sib), made us
suffer, raided us, and left us with nothing!"
Donor and Recipient in unison: "They did this to us, to our forefathers!"
Donor: "Long ago, before we became pitiable and frightened as we are today,
in this same place, everyone hated and envied the Wanano. This began long ago,
during the time of our forefathers. Now we do exactly as our forefathers did."
…Raising spears, participants cried out: "Eeeeee! Those Tukano did this!
That Tukano sib captured our grandfathers and forced them out! That blasted
Tukano! And we who were here before...now we are suffering, we, miserable,
people. And the one that took our grandfathers captives and forced them out -- that
cruel one too. That ugly Balero that captured our grandfathers and threw them out.
And those other vicious ones! They took our grandfathers captive and pushed them
out. Curse them! Here we are, bereft and pitiful in this place. While we are here,
pitiably, I do this: 'Puh!' to these despicable creatures!'”
The antagonistic bueyoaka enactment precedes gift exchange and other ritual
steps toward sealing an alliance between two groups. The po'oa in general, and the
bueyoaka in particular, articulate Wanano interpretations of Uaupés historical
relations of guesting, feasting, and raiding. The discourse is a trope of history in
which the adversaries are often neighbors. It is a reflexive model through which the
Wanano locate themselves vis-à-vis their neighbors and other outsiders. The
language and ritual itself brings groups, formerly distanced, into proximity, as the
ritual is a vehicle for re-inventing relations (Chernela 2001).
Speakers use the ritual process, not merely to understand the past, but to
create it (Turner 1968). Each group goes through a ritual transition of being the
enemy only to come out as ally. In the case of two sibs of different language groups,
the ceremony establishes a new, diplomatic proximity or alliance. Through the
vocalizations and enactments of antagonistic hostilities the ceremonial moves
participants toward a finality in which the two sibs are rendered allies. By means of
the litany of naming and enacting a common enemy -- such as the Kubeo, the
Tukano, the Sirio -- the participant sibs, at first on opposing sides, are eventually
brought into alliance. By the end of the bueoyaka the relations of belligerence and
bellicosity shift to those of peace, conviviality, and alliance.
Group identities and relations are forged in the present through a ritual
construction of the past. The po’oa is the site where groups establish what they once
were, what they will be no longer, and what they wish to become. In the course of
the bueyoaka the dangers of the outsider are rendered behind and past.
Through gift and language exchanges an alliance is established, albeit a
conditional one. Insofar as the proximities between groups is constructed and reified

6
through ritual enactment, and based upon the fluctuations of diplomacy, they
constitute a social contract with contingency. In the diplomatic rhetoric of the po'oa,
closeness is created as a difference is underscored. Whatever solidarity is created in
a po'oa may be as easily be broken as it was constructed.
Relations between groups may change both by gradual slippage and by
abrupt rupture. Through ritual, however, relations between groups can change
through "authorized revision." In the language of the po'oa, the past is not restored, it
is rectified and reified. In this sense boundaries, although regarded as essential
givens, are instead a result of the communicative processes that shape them.
Although represented as static, boundaries are conceptualized, subject to context and
to vantage point.]
In recounting histories of displacement the identity of the speaker determines
both the axes of adversarial relations as well as the roles of victor and victim. The
bueyoaka simulation is a pretense in the modality of the vanquished. A speaker never
represents his group as victor. Instead, each group recalls, and perhaps, re-
experiences, the pain of former insult and injury.
The mutual-determination of socially constitutive relations of the present and
the distant past is inherently invisible and insubstantial. Yet these are the forces that
shape that which we call historical events -- births, deaths, wars, alliances, enmities,
nations, clans, and identities. The essential ineffability of social relations is one of
the reasons they require redundant substantiation. It is also the reason why socially
constitutive relations are so frequently represented, described and disputed, in ritual
as well as in ordinary discourse. This is nowhere more the case than in relations
arising from violence.
Oral Histories
Informal conversation and questions I posed among members of the Wanano,
Piratapuyo, and Arapaço Tukanoans5 regarding past events revealed large areas of
agreement regarding population movement, alliances, and displacements. These oral
histories pointed to two types of activities involving violence and conceived as
revenge were prevalent in the river basin: 1) displacement and 2) bride capture.
1. Displacement
Among the important patterns that emerged was the association between
locations of dispute and the attributes of location. Sites regularly reported in dispute
appeared overwhelmingly to be those with greatest strategic and symbolic import.
To illustrate, every confluence of a tributary stream with a main river is a site of
contest. Paku, a settlement located at an important waterfall at the confluence of the
Makuku tributary stream and the Papuri River, is a clear example. Piratapuyo
speakers claim that the site, now occupied by the Tukano, was formerly (and
continues to rightfully) theirs. As one Piratapuyo explained, “Paku is our site. We
were removed by the Tukano sib that lives there today.” The matter is recalled
bitterly by the Piratapuyo, who still occupy villages adjacent to Paku.
Ipanorê is yet another example of a disputed sites with strategic and symbolic
import. Located at the confluence of the Tiquié and Uaupés Rivers, Ipanorê is
important in several senses. The large cataract at Ipanorê is an impediment to heavy-
bodied water craft proceeding upriver into the Uaupés basin. For centuries Ipanorê
was the upriver limit to outsiders of all kinds, including Portuguese merchants,

7
slaving expeditioners, and others in pursuit of Indian labor or forest resources. Most
significantly, Ipanorê is the recognized site of emergence of the anaconda canoe,
regarded as ancestral to all Eastern Tukanoan language groups. The Arapaço, who
now inhabit neighboring Loiro, claim that Ipanorê, with its weighty symbolic import
for all Eastern Tukanoan groups, is “truly theirs.” The Arapaço claim that they were
forcibly moved downriver by the Arawakan Tariano who now inhabit the site. That
Ipanorê is today occupied by an Arawakan, rather than an Eastern Tukanoan group,
is a bitter fact for Tukanoans in general and the Arapaço in particular (Chernela
1989; Chernela and Leed 2001). The Wanano are unusual in maintaining an
uninterrupted sequence of settlements of one language group along the Uaupés
River. Even so, they claim displacement to the southeast by the Arawakan Tariana
and to the northeast by the Arawakan Baniwa and the Tukanoan Kubeo. They
attribute their integrated string of uninterrupted settlements to a strategy that limited
violation: marriage. For consideration of this we turn to a discussion of wife-taking
and wife-offering.
2. Wife Stealing
A second important form of violence calling for revenge was wife-stealing.
The far-reaching incest regulation that prohibits marriage within the language group
obliges persons to take spouses from alien groups. Marriage was achieved through
two conventional means: violent seizure and negotiation (Jackson 1983:133). A
daughter given in marriage requires that another, a cousin, be returned. Wife-
stealing -- a negative exchange -- and its counterpart, vengeful retaliation, was a
commonplace alternative to negotiation. Indeed, marriage raids were ritualized war
in which the settlement from which a woman was taken would attempt to avenge its
loss. According to Wanano informants, such small-scale raiding for women typified
Wanano history. The Wanano have numerous terms and phrases that refer to wife-
stealing. For example, the act of seizing a wife is described as numisare coro. Those
who seize wives are referred to as numia nãni mahsa.
The tallying of wife-taking was, and still is (see Chernela 1989, 1993),
followed with careful vigilance. Marriages are considered to be exchanges between
sibs and are arranged by the sib seniors. When a simultaneous exchange of women
occurs, the marriage is called koto tarikoro, "woman exchange." When the
negotiation is not immediately reciprocal, it is called pubuhseri manenikoro, "no
woman given in exchange," indicating that the debt is outstanding until a return is
made. A claim is made when a wife is needed; otherwise, a debt may remain
outstanding for many years. During my fieldwork sojourn in a Wanano village a
woman complained because she had given her daughter in marriage four years
earlier and yet no return had been made. Now, her 18-year-old son was wifeless. In
this case the debt was repaid three years after the claim was issued; the return was
made when a female at last became eligible. Once the exchange was reciprocated,
the term implying indebtedness was no longer used. If the giving of a woman in
marriage is not reciprocated it gives rise to counter claim may be the occasion of
enmity and revenge if not fulfilled. This was the case during my 1978 stay in the
Wanano village Yapima when sorcery was reportedly used as revenge against a
debtor sib.

8
 The in-law relationship is fraught with ambivalence. The dangerous enemy
in-law is a recurring theme in narratives of all kinds. An origin myth, specific to the
Wanano, tells of an occasion when ancestral Wanano brothers discovered Kubeo
women harvesting manioc in a forest clearing. This was the first time these earliest
Wanano men, the legend tells, had seen either women or gardens. Delighted, the men
arranged a po'oa ceremony in which the Kubeo women were to provide manioc beer,
a cultivated and cooked product, in exchange for uruku, an uncooked fruit that
produces a blood-red pulp now used in ornamenting the bodies of pubescent girls.
The fruit would be given by the Wanano men to the Kubeo women. Following the
po'oa the Kubeo men, now referred to as brothers-in-law in the narration, became
aware of their sisters' absence -- and their loss. They took immediate revenge against
the Wanano, attacking them with fire. From this violent interaction the first "real"
Wanano sib emerged. The newly-formed, "real" Wanano descended the flames as
drops of water, quenching the fires. This, according to the tale, accounts for the
name, Kotiria, meaning drops of water.
Numerous narratives recount the dangers encountered by a Wanano culture
hero when he attempts to visit his wife's family. These tales recount the hazards
presented to the Wanano hero by his in-laws and his narrow escapes from their
attempts on his life.
Violent retaliation is not the only form of response to breach, however. Other
responses may be used strategically, including alliance -- the complementary
opposite of revenge. We have discussed how marriage can initiate violence.
Marriage can also end enmity. It is this we consider now.
Pre-emption: Marriage as Treaty
While marriage in which a wife was taken could initiate revenge, and thereby
"war" (Wan., kha ma chien, see above), marriage in which a wife was given could
bring about peace. In this system of meanings and equivalences, a violent situation
could be reversed by bequeathing a woman. Oral histories in which informants
recount wife-giving as one means of ending disputes strongly support this position
(Chernela 1989, 1993). Several reported instances represent the in-law relationship
as tantamount to treaty between the sibs exchanging spouses. Warring between
Desano and Wanano, for example, is said to have ceased when the Desano "gave a
woman" to the Wanano. Speaking of a Baniwa in-law sib, the Wamü Makama Koro,
one informant said this: "The people of the Wamü Makama Koro sib were the
brothers-in-law of our ancestors; for this reason they did not eat Wanano flesh."
From the Wanano point of view, in-law status exempted them from Wamü Makama
aggression. The Wanano still use an intimate nickname to refer to the ancestor who
first married a woman of that sib and thus brought about peace. Marriages between
groups over generations create alliances, reified through ceremonial discourse, ritual
gift-giving, and the co-production of future generations.
Co-raiding with In-laws: Alliance Formation
Oral histories also made frequent mention of raiding under the leadership of
Arawakan paramount chiefs who would consolidate Baniwa sibs and enlist Wanano
in-law sibs as allies. Informants attributed the Wanano participation to in-law
obligation. One informant expressed it this way: "Since our grandfathers were
brothers-in-law of the Baniwa, they dragged them off to wars at the headwaters of

9
the Papurí, Cuiubí, and Querarí rivers. In these rivers, the Baniwa went together
with our ancestors killing people." As in-laws of the Baniwa sibs, according to these
reports, the Wanano participated in campaigns against the Kubeo, the Tukano, and
other Baniwa groups. Each of these former enemies is today an in-law group to the
Wanano -- a point which reflects the changeable status of in-law relations through
time. While Wanano informants vividly recall Arawakan war chiefs and campaigns,
they have no such recollection of their own campaigns. On the other hand, it is
evident that the Wanano provided warriors to the Baniwa in what the Wanano
consider to be "Baniwa Wars." Keeping in mind that it is the narrator that
determines adversaries and allies, as well as the morality of all involved, these data
suggest several important conclusions.
For one thing, we must now consider the Wanano as possible constituents of
a regionally-based chiefdom in which Arawakan leadership predominated. By
providing warriors and wives to the Baniwa, the Wanano succeeded in maintaining
the integrity of their own settlement sites on the heavily contested Uaupés River.
This is supported by the fact that the Tariana and Baniwa who displaced numerous
Arawakan and Eastern Tukanoan settlements left intact a substantial block of
Wanano settlements along the principal river. This is especially noteworthy since
the Wanano are located between the Baniwa, moving south, and the Tariana, moving
north.
These data support conjectures that Arawakan sibs may have mobilized under
paramount chiefs for military campaigns, as well as related hypotheses that
Arawakan populations were migrating throughout the Uaupés region. A scholar of
Baniwa ethnohistory, Silvia Vidal, reproduces the sacred/secular routes of a Baniwa
culture hero that "conform to the sociopolitical and religious basis for the regional
leadership of powerful Arawakan chiefs and groups within multiethnic
confederacies" (2003:44; and See Robin Wright 1981). Vidal represents the territory
of the Arawakan Baniwa to include the Içana, Uaupés and its affluents the Papurí
and Tiquié, showing movements both up and down the Uaupés, up the Papurí, and
down the Tiquié (2003:45).
Numerous sibs of the Arawakan Tariana and the Baniwa are now linked by
marriage to the Wanano. Of the eight in-marrying wives in the Wanano village of
Yapima, three were either Tariana or Baniwa. 6
Relational Shift: Affinity and the Moral Community
The strategy of marriage as treaty is not uncommon. The North American
legend of Pocahontas represents her as marrying the man whose life she saved and
thereby created peace. The facts have been transformed into a tale of connubial
peacemaking. The use of marriage as a treaty formation is a well-known strategy
among heads of European states, the Hapsburg monarchs most notably.
For the Wanano, in-laws are the very groups named as enemies in oral
histories and in ceremonial litanies. If we take this to be evidentiary, it strongly
suggests that linguistic exogamy is one means of making peace when the alternative
is violence, displacement, and revenge.
For the northwest Amazon, we may construct a spectrum recognizing three
primary categories of relationship: 1)fraternal, in which no wives are exchanged; 2)

10
adversarial (war), in which a woman or other life (ancestral site) is taken; and 3)
treaty, in which a woman is given:
Fraternal= No exchange of women.
War=Woman (or other lives) taken
Treaty= Woman given
For Eastern-Tukanoan speakers of the northwest Amazon, such as the
Wanano, the concept of common descent is the only truly solidary relationship.
Unlike the artifice of marriage, bonds of siblinghood are deemed "natural," not
intended to be the subject of pragmatic consideration. The boundary of moral
obligation within which participants accept certain values and conventions extends to
groups deemed “brother.”7
At the other end of the spectrum are those furthest from own group with
whom one has negative reciprocities: taking, not giving. Revenge is the necessary
action taken by the victimized Other. The in-law relationship originates in conflict as
de facto in-lawhood emerges from bride seizure. Yet marriage itself is
transformative, capable of creating alliance or retaliation. When inlawhood is
regarded as balanced it confers upon an alien group a non-alien status, conferred
ritually and maintained over generations of wife-giving and wife-receiving.
Attached to this status is the assumption of treaty, assistance of several kinds,
including military, and ongoing ceremonial gift exchange of food and craft items. In
the spectrum of relationships, the approved and recognized in-law stands between
kin and enemy.
Tukanoan myth and history both affirm in-lawhood as a dubious, ambivalent
category (Chernela 1997). Compared to relations among the members of a common
descent group, in-law relations are fragile. Structurally limited by the closure of
restricted exchange, and historically limited by the exigencies of circumstance, the
non-alien identity is fraught with contradiction. In-laws are thought to be
treacherous, their treachery although expected, all the more offensive for its breach
of contract.
Even so, marriage shifts the moral boundaries that signify where and when –
and with whom – violence is or is not an appropriate means of conflict-resolution.
If conflict, albeit rule-governed, is the relationship between those who are unrelated,
transforming Others – i.e., non-kin, aliens -- into in-laws renders them closer to self
and thus less menacing.
If an alien woman in marriage is adequate compensation for the death of a
brother, it suggests the transformation of past lives for future ones. Following the
prescription of cross-cousin marriage, an in-marrying wife from one language group
will produce offspring belonging to her husband’s language group. If this
prescription is followed in the subsequent generation, her own daughters will marry
into her own language group, thereby peopling future generations for both groups.
Thus marriage consolidates investment in future generations for both marrying
entities. It brings intermarrying descent groups within the imaginary boundaries of
the moral community by sharing stakes in future generations.
Alliances formed through marriage may be used to avoid imminent violence
as well as to prevent future, potential violence. In the latter sense, linguistic out-
marriage constitutes a preemptive strategy – a form of group insurance. Eastern

11
Tukanoans, such as the Wanano, lack supralocal military organizations with which to
defend their borders. Instead, they pay for peace with women. Marriage -- loose,
egalitarian affinities -- rather than internal consolidation -- is their overriding
strategy.
From this proposition, we may generalize a relationship between social
distance, marriage, violence, and revenge, constructing the following heuristic:
ceremony and marriage may be used to close a significant expanse of social distance
and pacify an avenger. This creates an intermediate zone of “conditional morality”
in which a conditional balance is achieved. If that balance is breached, relations
return to violence, and retaliation is the appropriate, morally prescribed response.
Insofar as persons stand for political entities in this exogamous context, and
marriages carry the potential for political linkage, marriage constitutes a strategy for
intergroup alliance. This, in turn, is related to both land and persons, since the two
are inextricable.
Both ritual speech and informal accounts reference the displacement of one
local descent group by another. The accounts I gathered point to violent
displacement and continuing contest at sites of greatest strategic or symbolic
relevance. These include locations at impassable waterfalls, confluences of rivers,
and sites packed with supernatural power and signification. These reports also
suggest raiding by confederacies of Baniwa sibs and allies throughout the Uaupés
River and its affluents the Querarí, Papurí, and Tiquié. If Arawakan expansion has
been acompanied by full integration into the Tukanoan social universe, as would
appear to be the case today, this came about, we argue in this paper, through
intermarriage, one alternative to vengeance.
Discussion and Conclusion
The argument presented here is that two types of predation -- one involving
territory, the other involving women – are transformations of one another. This
works in two ways: the first negative, in which a woman is taken and the victimized
group takes revenge; here, only future lives can compensate past deaths. In the
second, given a positive value, a war in progress is halted by the giving of a woman.
The second illustrates the transformative and complementary nature of the
territory/marriage dyad in which compensation for one of the two can be made with
the other. Predation on territory can presumably be avoided by alliance formation
through the giving of a wife. This appears to be the Wanano strategy.
Through several mechanisms discussed in this essay – wife exchange and
gift-giving among them – enemies are transformed into allies. These mediations
illustrate several important phenomena: 1) that violence is but one form of social
exchange; 2) that the principles of balance and reciprocity govern all exchanges; and
3) that ceremonial reification and exchange of women may bring new groups within
the moral boundaries, shifting them from full outsiders to partial insiders. In
considering the set of equivalences that determine whether balances are met, the
paper addresses the necessary criteria of retaliation and the determinants of revenge.
At the basis of a Tukanoan social economy is the notion of an eternal
scoreboard marking life and death, birth and mortality. Victim and avenger are
parties in a single mode of exchange, a retaliatory dialogue between families who
trade in lives. Principles of reciprocity link predator and prey, as killing is justified

12
as a means of rectifying an imbalance, inherited and requiring correction. Imbalance
may result in death, with ample evidence of misfortune interpreted as retribution.
Only equity is capable of producing and maintaining peace. Equity, as we have said,
is created through two means: retaliation and treaty.
Thus relations of enmity, of hatred and hostility, presume and tell of their
opposite – the positive in-law relation made through the agency of women
exchanged by men and the future generations produced by the alliance. The case of
the Northwest Amazon suggests that at least one political formation may be
associated with linguistic exogamy: diffuse organization, weak leadership, and
incorporation through expanded affinity. Reciprocities of violence are ritualized.
Forms of war “contain” -- in two senses -- peace.
This mirroring of relationships generates and regulates violence between
human groups, creating rules of negative reciprocity that become the forms of
positive interactions, peaceful associations. The key to this transformation of
negative into positive reciprocities is the idea of an equivalence between different
species of actions – the giving of a wife, the taking of a life. The idea of an
equivalence between disparate actions crosses the law of mimesis according to which
one treats as friends those who treat one as friends, as enemies those who treat one as
enemies, and life can be paid for only in life. The notion of equivalence between
different actions and of mimesis together provide the rules for connecting events,
enacting, remembering, and recording history.
The notion of violence as asymmetry, involving the disruption of a symmetry
or balance, is explicit in our examples. In them we find that anti-social relations of
violence, of kill and/or be killed, are governed and justified by rules of reciprocity
that presume peace in an image of balance or equality. The fundamental opposition
between a wife freely given and a wife forcibly taken is the balance between social
contract and war. Marriage is both the product of war and the management of
conflict. A woman taken is war; a woman given is treaty. War and marriage are
transformations of one another, part of a continuum of cultural practices that are
touched off situationally as in-laws are feasted, guested, and raided; raided, guested,
and feasted.

Endnotes
1
Despite ongoing contact and a deliberate maintenance of distinct linguistic
varieties characterized by separations that exceed those of the Romance group,
models of ethnic pluralism do not accurately describe the Eastern Tukanoan case. A
number of factors, including a correspondence between linguistic performance and
group membership, loyalty to the language of one's descent group, and marriage
across language groups, serve to establish a single speech community in which
numerous codes interact according to shared norms and beliefs.
2
The Kubeo (Cubeo) (Goldman 1963), Makuna (?rhem 1981, 1998), and
Arapaço (Chernela 1988, 1989) are exceptions to the pattern of linguistic exogamy.
3
The figure of 14,000 is based upon the 1987 reported census figure of
14,164, compiled by the Centro Ecumenico de Documentação e Informação (CEDI),
Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. It exceeds by 5,000, the estimates of Sorensen
(1967) and Jackson (1976).

13
 4
The figure of 150,000 square kilometers is the sum of 90,000 km2 reported
by Jackson (1976) for the Colombian Vaupés, and 60,070 km2 reported by the
Centro Ecumenico de Documentação e Informação (CEDI), Museu Nacional, Rio de
Janeiro, for the Brazilian Uaupés.
5
Oral histories were collected among members of the Wanano, Piratapuyo,
and Arapaço Tukanoans between 1978 and 1980.
6
The degree of assimilation by these intermarrying sibs is perhaps best
illustrated by the fact that Tukano has replaced Tariana as a language in all but one
Tariana sib.
7
Marriage is not permitted within the phratry, an extended brotherhood of
several language groups. It is interesting to note that Wanano oral histories do not
recount conflicts among language groups of the same phratry nor do they report
aiding another group on the basis of socially-constructed brotherhood ties.

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