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Common Knowledge, Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2016, pp. 43-68 (Article)
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S y m p o s i u m : Pe a c e b y O t he r Me a ns, Pa r t 5
CONFLICT, PEACE, AND

SOCIAL REFORM
IN INDIGENOUS AMAZONIA
A Deflationary Account
Carlos Fausto, Caco Xavier, and Elena Welper
Translated by David Rodgers
Past processes of intense sociocultural transformation in Amazonia, led by indig-

enous peoples, have typically been described in the ethnographic literature as
prophetic, millenarist, messianic, or nativist. In other words, they have been
equated with premodern religious movements, in contrast to modern reformism,
which is said to be guided by rational individuals or sparked by organized masses.
The most notorious Amazonian indigenous millenarist movement is probably
Preliminary versions of this text were presented at the nando Santos-Granero and Rupert Stasch, and for its care-
meeting of the Portuguese Anthropological Association, ful and illuminating revision, Jeffrey Perl. Carlos Fausto
the Americanists Seminar in Paris, the University of São conducted fieldwork among the Parakanã from 1988 to
Paulo, and the University of Cambridge. For invitations 1996; Elena Welper, among the Marubo from 2004 to
to speak on these occasions, the authors thank Susana Vie- 2008; and Caco Xavier, among the Koripako from 2007
gas, João de Pina Cabral, Bonnie Chaumeil, Isabelle Dail- to 2011. This research was funded by a number of small
lant, Dominique Gallois, Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, and Sian grants from CNPq, Faperj, Capes, Finep, and the Wenner-
Lazar; for comments on the manuscript, they thank Fer- Gren Foundation.
Common Knowledge 22:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3322870
© 2016 by Duke University Press
43
the 1742 revolt that erupted in the Selva Central of Peru. Led by one Juan Santos
44
Atahuallpa Apuinga Guainacapac and involving various Arawakan and Panoan

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
peoples, the revolt became famous not only because of its size but also its success:
in its wake, the Spanish were expelled and indigenous control was established
over the region for the next one hundred years. Following Alfred Métraux, some
authors have described Juan Santos Atahuallpa — a mestizo with a Spanish name
claiming to be of Inca descent — as a messianic leader.1 Imbued with a remark-
able charisma and employing a hybrid prophetic discourse, he had been able to
catalyze indigenous dissatisfaction, endowing it with a dimension not achieved
in previous uprisings.
In an article titled “Asháninka Messianism: The Production of a ‘Black
Hole’ in Western Amazonian Ethnography,” Hanna Veber contests this messi-
anic reading of the 1742 movement, judging it to be an a posteriori interpretation
of Franciscan missionaries, smuggled into anthropology by Métraux, and later
developed by authors such as Michael Brown and Eduardo Fernández,2 Stefano
Varese,3 and Fernando Santos-Granero.4 The messianic reading, Veber argues,
has led us to translate the expression of “legitimate political claims to the recti-
fication of inequities” into a revolt, in which the subjects were “beyond rational
political communication.”5
While we propose in this essay to apply the expression social reform to
indigenous contexts, it is not our intention to adopt Veber’s position. Her argu-
ment depends on an opposition between rational action (motivated by pragmatic
interests) and irrational action (based on religious beliefs) that we do not take for
granted. Such opposition is founded on a central premise of modern Western
society, namely, that society results from a convention between agents who reflex-
ively recognize the human ability to produce social order itself. In this view, the
capacity for action is understood as an attribute exclusive to (and definitive of) the
human condition. The maximal expression of this capacity is “making history,”
an entirely human endeavor without any recourse to extrahuman forces.6 When
deploying Marx’s dictum that “man makes his own history, but . . . he does not
make it out of conditions chosen by himself,” we should not merely dwell on the
1. Alfred Métraux, “A Quechua Messiah in Eastern Peru,” 17, no. 2 (1988): 1 – 22, www.ifeanet.org/publicaciones
American Anthropologist 44, no. 4 (1942): 721 – 25. /boletines/17%282%29/1.pdf; Opresión colonial y resisten-
cia indígena en la alta Amazonía (Quito: FLACSO Sede
2. Michael F. Brown and Eduardo Fernández, War of
Ecuador, 1992); and Etnohistoria de la Alta Amazonia: Siglo
Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon
XV – X VIII (Quito: Ediciones ABYA-YALA, 1992).
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
5. Hanna Veber, “Asháninka Messianism: The Produc-
3. Stefano Varese, La sal de los cerros: Resistencia y utopía en
tion of a ‘Black Hole’ in Western Amazonian Ethnogra-
la Amazonía peruana (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso
phy,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 2 (2003): 183 – 211, at 201.
del Perú, 2006).
6. Carlos Fausto, “Faire le mythe: Histoire, récit et trans-
4. Fernando Santos-Granero, “Templos y herrerías:
formation en Amazonie,” Journal de la Société des Améri-
Utopía y recreación cultural en la Amazonia Peruana
canistes 88 (2002): 69 – 90.
(siglo 18 – 19),” Bulletin de l’Institut français d’études andines
conjunction between active making and structural inertia but also ask ourselves
45
what precisely is being “made.”7 As Anthony Giddens has observed, “extraordi-
nary complexities underlie the innocent proposition that human beings ‘make
Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

history.’ ”8 Is it such complexity that restrains us from asking under what con-
ditions indigenous peoples make significant amendments to their sociocultural
systems? In concentrating our attention on “revolutionary” changes, cast in mil-
lenaristic terms, do we not lose sight of more finely grained processes?
Our purpose here is to ask and to investigate whether processes of change
among Amazonian indigenous peoples can properly be described as social
reforms. Clearly, that category is not a part of anthropology’s habitual vocabu-
lary, being closer to a particular brand of modernist sociology and its projects of
social intervention. We have chosen the expression as a deliberate provocation, in
•
F a u s t o, X a v i e r, a n d We l p e r
order to destabilize other lexica. Our use of reform here is aimed at deflating the
utopia associated with messianic readings of certain historical events, especially
since such interpretations have overcodified our analyses of Amazonian processes
of change. We propose to think on a lower scale, focusing on more moderate
forms of transformation and the more trivial regime of living well in the here
and now. Not that millenaristic readings are necessarily incorrect: messianic and
millenarist elements are clearly identifiable in various indigenous, mestizo, and
nonindigenous movements, from the sixteenth century onward, throughout the
Americas.9 The model, though, tends to obliterate quieter and less abrupt socio-
cultural changes, which evade the charismatic moment of the great uprisings and
whose imprint cannot be found so readily in the historical sources.
In the movement led by Juan Santos Atahuallpa, for instance, we actually
have very few accounts available of the transformations that unfolded after the
Spanish were expelled. What we do know is that by the time the region was
reopened to nonindigenous people a century later, significant social changes had
occurred. In the Yanesha case, the smithies that had been seized from the mis-
sionaries at the time of the uprising became ceremonial centers, commanded
by priests with supralocal authority.10 It is difficult to ascertain whether similar
ritual centers existed prior to colonial domination, but certainly the smithies —
the locus of the Conquistadors’ technical magic — were appropriated by the Yane-
sha and became pivotal to the authority of the smith-priests, who embodied a
“cosmology of love.”11
7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, de Vienne, “Acting Translation: Ritual and Prophetism
trans. Daniel de Leon (1852; repr., Chicago: Charles H. in Twenty-First-Century Indigenous Amazonia,” Hau 4,
Kerr, 1907), 5. no. 2 (2014): 161 – 91.
8. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of 10. See Santos-G ranero, “Templos y herrerías,” and
the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of Cali- Opresión colonial.
fornia Press, 1984), 201.
11. See Fernando Santos-Granero, The Power of Love: The
9. Most of these movements even appropriated a mark- Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru
edly Christian lexicon. See Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel (London: Athlone, 1991).
How did these less visible transformations following the clamorous revolt
46
unfold? How did new social forms emerge, along with new actors, habitus, and
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
sensibilities? Replying to these questions is tricky, since these slow and nearly
invisible social reforms do not appear in either colonial or national documents.
Neither are they present in the ethnographic literature, where we seldom encoun-
ter descriptions of processes of change negotiated by and among indigenous actors
outside the context of direct contact with the surrounding society. This absence is
intriguing given the small demographic size, especially in the twentieth century,
of Amazonia’s indigenous societies. After all, what prevents a collective of two
hundred, five hundred, or a thousand people from making decisions, negotiating
agreements, and debating alternatives that could lead to significant sociocultural
adjustments? Why did the guiding image of the small Rousseauian community
not inhabit the anthropological imagination in the same way as the image of the
“noble savage” did? Is it because adjustments to the social order result only from
ineluctable structural processes induced by external forces? Or is it because we
have not developed the tools needed to conceptualize the mechanisms through
which reformulations are processed in the indigenous social world?
A deflationary account of social change has the advantage of connecting
us to present-day dilemmas of indigenous collectives without having to adopt
the subaltern-studies vocabulary of resistance, which tends to reduce indigenous
worlds to fit our political rubrics and concepts of power. Veber’s critique of the
millenaristic reading of the 1742 revolt is a case in point. Why should we dis-
cuss the uprising against Spanish domination in the aseptic political discourse
of present-day indigenous movements, a discourse involving “legitimate politi-
cal claims” and “rational political communication”? And if effective indigenous
claims in Amazonia at the time implied drawing on relations with beings not
properly human (so-called spirits)?12 In this context, the indigenous equivalent of
“making history” would be shamanic action, rather than action of a revolutionary
kind, and the uprisings regarded as millenarist or messianic in Amazonia would
not be considered “imperfectly political,” since native politics would necessarily
require the shamanization of practice. In other words, native politics demands the
mobilization of creative capacities that are not “naturally” available to humans as
human. People need to be more than human, or not just human, if they are to be
able to establish relations with extrahuman beings and thereby produce signifi-
cant transformations. If one may suspect that a past religious discourse is merely a
varnish hiding more fundamental motivations of power, one equally may suspect
that our present-day political vocabulary is no more than a varnish hiding more
12. See Fausto, “Faire le mythe”; and Carlos Fausto and Fausto and Heckenberger (Gainesville: University Press
Michael J. Heckenberger, “Introduction: Indigenous His- of Florida, 2007), 1 – 46.
tory and the History of the ‘Indians’,” in Time and Mem-
ory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives, ed.
fundamental conceptions about being and agency (which is to say, an ontology).
47
There is no exit from the hermeneutics of suspicion.13
In the remainder of this text, we examine concrete cases, beginning with

that of the Parakanã, in order to see how far the notion of “reform” is applicable
to changes that indigenous peoples of Amazonia have produced in their socio-
cultural worlds. In line with the aims of this symposium, the cases that we have
chosen to discuss concern mainly changes that have expanded nonviolent social-
ity or even tended in the direction of pacifism.14
Fabricating Institutions among the Parakanã

The Parakanã are a Tupi- Guarani-speaking people inhabiting the Xingu-
•
Tocantins interfluve in eastern Brazilian Amazonia.15 They number today about
sixteen hundred, living in two separate indigenous lands in the state of Pará. At
the time of their submission to the Brazilian state administration, between 1970
and 1984, they numbered some 350 – 400 individuals. They are divided into two
main branches, western and eastern, the outcome of a split occurring at the end of
the nineteenth century. Some one hundred years later, these branches displayed
very distinct economic, social, and political forms: the western Parakanã were
mobile hunters without agriculture, highly egalitarian, and lacking any form of
headmanship or social segmentation, while the eastern Parakanã were more sed-
entary, practiced a manioc-based horticulture, and possessed exogamic moieties
and three patrilineal segments, as well as a dual-headmanship system.
In the absence of direct ethnographic data, a simple explanation for these
differences might be that the western group lost the more “complex” character-
istics that are still present among the eastern group. If so, that loss would suffice
to identify which negative factor (pressure from powerful enemies, the advancing
colonial frontier) had led the western group to become nomadic, abandon hor-
13. Of course, this journal was itself founded on suspi- Fausto and Heckenberger, “Introduction: Indigenous
cion of the hermeneutics of suspicion; see Jeffrey M. Perl, History and the History of the ‘Indians’ ”; Fausto, War-
“Preface,” in Peace and Mind: Civilian Scholarship from fare and Shamanism in Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge
“Common Knowledge,” ed. Perl (Aurora, CO: Davies, 2011), University Press, 2012); and Fausto, “Too Many Owners:
vii. Mastery and Ownership in Amazonia,” in Animism in For-
est and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants, and Things in
14. Carlos Fausto has proposed a general model for
Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia, ed. Marc Brightman,
understanding the predatory symbolics and practices
V. E. Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva (London: Berghahn,
among Amazonian indigenous peoples, and we have fol-
2012), 85 – 105.
lowed it in writing this article. See Carlos Fausto, “Of
Enemies and Pets: Warfare and Shamanism in Amazo- 15. In this section, we include references to the English
nia,” American Ethnologist 26 (1999): 933 – 56; Fausto, Inimi- version of Carlos Fausto’s ethnography. For a more
gos fiéis: História, guerra e xamanismo na Amazônia (São detailed analysis, see chapters 1 – 3 of the Brazilian edi-
Paulo: EDUSP, 2001); Fausto, “If God Were a Jaguar: tion: Inimigos fiéis.
Cannibalism and Christianity among the Guarani (Six-
teenth to Twentieth Centuries),” in Fausto and Hecken-
berger, Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia, 74 – 105;
ticulture, and rapidly lose their moieties and leaders. Although very commonly
48
found in the literature, this regressionist explanation is nonetheless false in the

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Parakanã case.16 If we turn to oral history to reconstruct what happened to each

of the blocs between 1890 and 1980, it becomes apparent, first, that the western
group had not turned mobile from a lack of choice — mobility was one of the
choices available to them in their sociopolitical context; second, the supposedly
more complex characteristics of the eastern group (social segmentation, moieties,
headmanship) emerged only some decades after the split. We face, therefore, two
diverging processes of transformation, with neither of the resulting sociocultural
forms corresponding to the one that existed before the split.
So what did happen? The major problem faced by the generation of the split
was matrimonial: there was an imbalance in the ratio of men to women, rein-
forced by aspects of Parakanã marriage norms, which together generated a huge
tension between married and single men. Shortly before the split, the Parakanã
had abducted eight women in an attack on another Tupi-Guarani group living
in the region. It was the dispute for possession of one of these women that set off
the split process, giving rise to the eastern and western branches. In the following
decades, each branch would adopt a distinctive strategy to resolve the matrimo-
nial issue and defuse its disruptive potential. One group of Parakanã, immediately
after the separation, headed west and invaded the territory of the Tupi-speaking
Asurini, in the process pushing their enemies northward. The group settled
there, cleared swiddens, and gradually lengthened their periods of trekking.
These expeditions had three complementary objectives: to hunt large terrestrial
mammals, to wage war on other indigenous peoples, and to search for metal
tools from sites of nonindigenous colonization. Thus, the village functioned as a
base of operations: the bands divided and left on lengthy treks, returning some
months later to where they had planted manioc. Between 1880 and 1980, the
western Parakanã were involved in thirty-three armed conflicts, abducted more
than thirty women, and obtained hundreds of metal tools from the Tocantins
Pacification Post, founded in 1928 by the Indian Protection Service.17 A close
connection developed between a subsistence strategy, a strategy for acquiring
women, and a strategy for obtaining material goods. Mutually reinforcing, these
three led to a redefinition of the sociocultural patterns of the western Parakanã:
the group became increasingly atomized, the importance of village life evaporat-
ing in favor of an encampment-based sociality in which differences between men
and women gradually blurred.18 Conflicts between men were assuaged by the
inflow of captured women, which enabled an ideal of generalized polygamy. At
the same time, few distinctions were made on the basis of warfare prowess, and
16. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 84 – 88. 18. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 55 – 57.
17. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 37.

certain practices — such as shooting multiple arrows at an enemy’s corpse — were
49
encouraged to enable all adult men to become killers. In this way, the foundations
of political authority attenuated, and a generalized egalitarianism permeated the

group’s internal relations.
In summary, the western Parakanã responded to their social dilemmas at
the end of the nineteenth century with a centrifugal movement, which led them
to become increasingly atomized and egalitarian. This strategy proved success-
ful for more than half a century: they enjoyed innumerable military victories,
abundant game, copious metal tools, and a constant influx of women. Their ordi-
nary utopia of living well became associated with hunting and warfare, while
village sociality occupied the intermissions between these activities. Rejoicing
in overabundance marked this period of the western group’s history: talking and
•
eating immoderately, capturing women and goods in large quantities, comprised
a viable way of life. This situation, however, would change radically from the
1950s onward, following the “pacification” of regional enemies by the Brazil-
ian state and the incursion of nonindigenous extractivists into western Parakanã
territory.19 This change initiated a phase of more frequent internal conflicts that
would last until the 1980s, when this population finally came under the adminis-
tration of the Brazilian state.
We can now turn to the eastern Parakanã and see how, after the split, they
confronted similar challenges but in a way almost entirely opposite to that taken
by their former kin. In brief, the easterners adopted a defensive posture, closing
in on themselves: they emphasized village sociability, reinforced gender asym-
metry, neutralized conflicts between men, redirected violence to men’s relations
with women, created sociocentric segments regulating matrimonial exchange,
and legitimated hierarchies between men. How did these changes occur? Follow-
ing the departure of those who would form the western bloc, the eastern Para-
kanã were left in a quandary: the group was constituted predominantly by close
patrilateral consanguine kin. There was no alterity within the group. From one
moment to the next, they found themselves confined to a world of consanguinity —
a world of a kind regarded sometimes as ideal among Amazonian peoples but one
that, for the eastern Parakanã, generated in practice a logical and moral dilemma.
The problem was then how to introduce difference into so homogeneous a rela-
tional environment. The solution took some time to emerge, and, when it did,
it came via a captured enemy. Just before the split, the Parakanã had captured
four boys, along with the eight women. Three of the boys were soon killed, but
one of them was saved by the intervention of a man who wished to adopt him.
This boy, called Jarawa, grew up generally distrusted; nevertheless, he was able
to marry and fathered ten children in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Since Jarawa was a Tapi’pya rather than an Apyterewa (the self-designation of the
50
Parakanã), and since group membership was transmitted patrilinearly, Jarawa’s

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
children were also considered Tapi’pya.20 In the 1920s, Jarawa began to recip-
rocate for the women he had received, giving his daughters in marriage to his
Apyterewa affines.
Until then, all the men of the postsplit generation had married either their
real or close classificatory sisters.21 The new marriage exchanges generated new
tensions: the boy-enemy had become the group’s only fully fledged affine, with
a limited stock of daughters and hence unable to satisfy all his potential sons-
in-law. Obviously, he had choices to make and, after ignoring one man in favor
of the man’s younger brother, Jarawa suddenly died. The death was attributed
to sorcery, which produced a potentially explosive situation. Rather than seek
revenge for their father’s death, however, Jarawa’s sons preferred to avert conflict.
They distributed game to their affines to show their good intentions and thereby
avoid a new split, this time between the Apyterewa and the Tapi’pya.22 From then
on, the exogamic moieties materialized not as a simple adaptation of preexist-
ing structures to singular events but as a creative process that involved various
independent decisions, with unpredictable consequences, at particular moments
of the group’s history. Nor did the eastern Parakanã limit themselves to produc-
ing moieties, they also established a third patrigroup, comprised by descendants
of one of the captured women, who was a Wyrapina. Although identities were
normally transmitted via the paternal line, in this case her outsider status and
the express desire to not let the Wyrapina become extinct led to transmission
occurring maternally.23 It was in this way that the system of exogamic moieties
and three patrigroups, studied ethnographically by Fausto in the 1990s, emerged
at the start of the twentieth century.
The construction of this symmetric alterity between moieties was accom-
panied by the reinforcement of two asymmetries: one same-sex, the other cross-
sex. The eastern Parakanã transformed a space typical of the traditional village —
the tekatawa, used by men to meet on a casual basis — into a political venue, existing
in opposition to the domestic sphere of cross-sex relations.24 There the men met
to talk every evening. In the 1990s, this space was organized around two head-
men (one from each moiety), defined as those “who make talk for us” (oapo moron-
geta oreopé ). These two served as conductors of a multivocal but all-male dialogue.
20. Apytera means “center of the head,” and the desig- 21. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 90 – 93.
nation refers to the group’s traditional haircut. Tapi’pya
means “tapir foot,” and Wyrapina can be glossed as “[the
one with the head] shaven by the birds,” a reference to a 23. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 93.
figure from the myth of the deluge. These designations,
24. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 111 – 13, 124 – 26.
along with others, point to different Tupi-Guarani peo-
ples present in the region since at least the mid-nineteenth
century. See Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 90.
The chiefs sat in the center of a circle, with places allocated to each participant
51
according to moiety affiliation and age, thus enabling the flow of words. The
tekatawa was situated not in the middle of the village but some distance away,

ensuring that the women could not hear what the men said. Auditory secrecy
delineated the boundary of this space, which was no more than a rough clearing
on the edge of the forest. But the boundary was essential, not because of the con-
tent of the secret but because it constituted male solidarity in opposition to the
delights and risks of life between men and women. In the tekatawa, male social-
ity was depicted as perfectly peaceful, and quarrels were invariably attributed to
female gossip.25
The double asymmetry — between men, on the one hand, and between men
and women, on the other — allowed a new village sociality to be constructed and
•
internal conflicts to be avoided without recourse to preying on the exterior: the
eastern Parakanã captured no more women after the split and discontinued the
practice of the warrior band shooting arrows at a dead enemy’s body. The gate-
way to becoming a killer narrowed, reinforcing the possibilities for asymmetry
between men and avoiding the danger that the “alteration” of the killer repre-
sented for the group itself. The institutionalization of the tekatawa as a permanent
political arena led to the development of a public sphere founded on a discursive
modality (morongeta, “conversation”) that was opposite to the violent and intimi-
dating talk (-je’engahya) of warriors.26 The eastern group identified the headman
not with the war leader but with the enabler of conversation and consensus.27
In summary, the two Parakanã branches underwent transformations
unconnected either to revolutionary movements or to charismatic leadership, and
neither of these processes of transformation depended on a mythic or religious
discourse. Both processes were social reforms of a kind, in which changes were
made through the choices of agents, albeit not (to paraphrase Marx) under condi-
tions of their own choosing. The difficulty here is determining what make and
choose imply in each case and what mechanisms and discursive forms are associ-
ated with the actions taken. In the Parakanã case, they are not clearly associated
with a persona-event, that is, an agent condensing a set of transformative actions
(although Jarawa might have had this role); neither are they conceived in terms of
transformations involving extrahuman relations and powers. The entire process,
25. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 117 – 20. men. These interactions are thus decentered in a political
sense — decisions are not “made,” they “emerge” — but also
in an ontological sense, since they are not anchored in any
27. This conversational practice should not be confused individual, subjective foundation (be that reason, free will,
with the democratic-liberal model of interaction between or autonomy). The modality of decentered talk has not
rational agents in the public sphere. It is not founded on the yet been fully described in the Amerindian context. For
exchange of arguments between two or more autonomous the Ge-speaking Shavante, see Laura Graham, “A Public
individuals but, rather, on a decentered sharing of informa- Sphere in Amazonia? The Depersonalized Collaborative
tion, in which meaning emerges from fragmented phrases Construction of Discourse in Xavante,” American Ethnolo-
uttered by numerous voices and orchestrated by the head- gist 20, no. 4 (November 1993): 717 – 41.
in both the eastern and western cases, is easily narrated as a step-by-step change
52
resulting from distinct attempts to solve a chronic internal conflict over mar-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
riageable women. During this process, each of the Parakanã branches ended up
by recreating its own conditions of existence, though not through a new “social
contract” or other foundational act. Rather, it was the intersection of structural
determinants, historical events, and decisions made in particular contexts that led
to the emergence of the new sociocultural forms, still observable one hundred
years after the split.
In contrast to the Parakanã case, our second example involves a charismatic
leader who seems to function as a “revolutionary,” proposing to redefine the very
conditions of his community’s existence. The person in question is João Tuxaua,
“creator of the Marubo people.”
The Creation of the Marubo People

The Marubo are a Pano-speaking population inhabiting the Javari Valley in
the state of Amazonas. Today the population numbers about thirteen hundred,
divided into nine unnamed matrilineal units, each containing two matrimo-
nial sections. These eighteen sections possess names like “peach-palm-people,”
“jaguar-people,” and so on. As these names suggest, the all-inclusive collectivity
known today as the Marubo results from the amalgamation of various autono-
mous groups and “commercial collectives” set up during the rubber era.28 This
is a well-k nown phenomenon (to which both Philippe Erikson and Julio Cezar
Melatti have called attention) in the region as a whole.29 What is particular to the
Marubo is the way in which they recount their own “creation.”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, following the decline of rubber
exploration in the area, a heteroclitic population, which nonetheless shared a
language and a culture, became relatively isolated from the economic frontier.
This period was followed not by one of peace but, on the contrary, by years of
warfare-related violence.30 At the end of the 1930s, when a great war chief called
28. We term commercial collective the temporary aggre- Philippe Erikson, “Une nébuleuse compacte: Le macro-
gates composed of persons of “mixed blood” and individ- ensemble pano,” L’Homme 33, nos. 126 – 28 (1993): 45 – 58.
uals from different indigenous peoples. These aggregates
30. It is not easy to determine with precision the social
materialized in the region to serve the rubber economy;
units involved in these conflicts. The Marubo-to-be were
see Elena Welper, O mundo de João Tuxaua: (Trans)For-
probably in conflict with other small, autonomous Panoan
mação do povo marubo (Rio de Janeiro: PPGAS-Museu
aggregates that fused and split as demanded by the vicis-
Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2009),
situdes of warfare and of unstable alliances. Today the
76. Some of these aggregates were actively promoted by
region is populated mainly by Panoan peoples, speaking
rubber-company bosses, who assembled the workforce in
languages of the two main branches of this family (the
their seringais.
Mayo branch, which includes the Mayoruna, Matis, Mat-
29. See Julio Cezar Melatti, Áreas etnográficas da América sés, and Korubo; and the Mainline branch, which includes
do Sul indígena (Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, 2011), the Marubo and Katukina, among others). In the past,
chap. 17:9 (Juruá-Ucayali), www.juliomelatti.pro.br/; and there was possibly more linguistic and ethnic diversity,
Topãpa died, the cycles of vengeance, abductions of women, and killings reached
53
their peak. Topãpa is considered the last of the “valiant chiefs” (kakaya onikavo),
who, though recognized as true leaders, are today viewed negatively as bearers of

a “bad talk” (vana ichnaka) that jeopardized the population’s continued existence.
Following Topãpa’s death, his brother Itsãpapa, who would become known as João
Tuxaua, took over the leadership, inaugurating the lineage of chiefs said, today,
to be one of “good talk” (vana roaka). Led by João Tuxaua, the Marubo-to-be
isolated themselves further, transferring their malocas to the headwaters of the
Maronal Stream and the Arrojo River. There they established the territory, called
Kapi vana wai, where this chief famously dwelled. The move was much more than
a spatial relocation of the kind that occurred traditionally after a chief’s death.
In João Tuxaua’s words, the creation of his abode symbolized the abandonment
•
of the “death-place” (vei shava) and a break with the warrior ethos, characterized
by the “death-talk” (vei vana) of the chiefs of the past. He inaugurated a new place-
time where and when the Marubo, instructed by his “good talk,” came together and
lived like the yove (benevolent spirits) as a “thinking people” ( yora chinain).
Kapi vana wai, the name of João Tuxaua’s abode, refers to the plantation
(vana) of mata-pasto (kapi, Senna sp.), a plant known for its curative powers and
used especially by the kechintxo (singer-shamans). It was planted to repel malevo-
lent spirits ( yochinvo), the first step in constructing a spirit-land ( yove mai) in
which people would live better lives — healthier, happier, wiser, better adorned,
more generous — and thrive. With the help of other shamans, João Tuxaua sys-
tematically worked to “spiritize” people as part of the creation of a social world
guided by a nonpredatory ethic.31 In an interview recorded in the 1990s by Del-
vair Melatti, João Tuxaua states that, at the time, “everyone just listened to me. I
would say: ‘Don’t use that talk about killing any more, talk my talk. The valiant
ones, those who killed people, you can’t see any of those chiefs standing any more.
Think about it! That’s how people end up dead. Don’t talk the old talk. Talk
my talk. Talk my young [kani] talk now. Don’t use the talk of the old ones’.”32
João Tuxaua’s message did not place priority on the relation with nonindigenous
people or take the form of an insurgency against the national society. On the
contrary, he spoke from within for those within, looking toward the construction
of new sociopolitical forms for his own people.
These new constructions involved changes to various facets of Marubo
social life. As in the case of the eastern Parakanã, women came to be blamed for
conflicts between men, with a consequent reorganization of gender relations.
especially during the rubber boom, which caused intense 31. See Pedro Cesarino, Oniska: Poética do xamanismo na
migrations across the whole of western Amazonia. See Amazônia (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011).
David W. Fleck, Panoan Languages and Linguistics (New
32. Welper, O mundo de João Tuxaua, 175.
York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum
of Natural History, 2013), 99.
Women, who had previously been seen to possess shamanic knowledge as well
54
as men, were expelled from that universe, their activities limited to the domestic
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
sphere.33 There was a change in diet, as game became relatively less important
than cultivated plants and fruits. There were also changes in body decoration:
the Marubo abandoned the tattoos and facial adornments typical of the region’s
peoples — the shell ear decorations, the peach palm thorns and slivers of snail
shell pierced through the nose, the peach palm sticks inserted through the upper
lip. Graphic designs associated with death and warfare (atima kene and veya kene)
were abolished, and the motifs known as “spirit-design” ( yove kene), also described
as “shaman paintings,” were popularized. The feather and tucum palm straw
decorations were replaced by others made from apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata)
or plastic beads. The adornments that fell into disuse are today associated with
the “peoples of the forest,” characterized by a childlike and predatory disposition.
By contrast, the body decorations made from apple snail — a highly valued raw
material, traditionally associated with rituals — are seen as the expression of an
“advanced” (tavai) and “mature” (tsasia) society, capable of making creative use
of a resistant and long-lasting material to decorate themselves like “benevolent
spirits” ( yovevo). The contemporary adornments are not, therefore, remnants or
mere copies of “traditional” ornamentation. They represent the outcome of a
creative choice regarding the group’s aesthetic representation, a choice made at
the time of this people’s “creation” under João Tuxaua’s leadership.34
The time in which they remained at Kapi vana wai is associated today not
only with peace, prosperity, and demographic growth but above all with the
establishment of a new social and cosmological order; hence João Tuxaua’s desig-
nation as “creator of the people” (Yora shovimaya).35 Strictly speaking, the Marubo
did not exist prior to João Tuxaua’s reformation.36 His “good talk” urged the
abandonment of warfare and the formation of a single moral community. He
exhorted the people to surrender the political autonomy of their isolated groups
and gather into a single village settlement — a village that today figures not only
as the birthplace of the Marubo but also potentially as a posthumous destiny.
“When we die here,” the shaman Arnaldo Mashempapa explained, “our doubles
go to the spirit-land, they go to Kapi vana wai.”37 This eschatological content
33. Welper, O mundo de João Tuxaua, 181 – 82. That the term Marubo became firmly associated with a
certain population was the result of the new political con-
34. Welper, O mundo de João Tuxaua, 39.
text in which formerly permeable frontiers stabilized in
35. Yora means “body” or “person” and is also the self- the form of ethnic boundaries within the nation-state (see
designation of the Marubo collective. Melatti, Áreas etnográficas). In other historical circum-
stances, the Marubo unit could have dissolved again into
36. According to Pedro Cesarino, ed., Quando a Terra
numerous autonomous collectives, articulated through
deixou de falar: Cantos da mitologia marubo (São Paulo: Edi-
exchange and warfare.
tora 34, 2013), 31, this ethnonym is probably a corruption
of the Quechua mayo runa (people of the river), a term 37. Welper, O mundo de João Tuxaua, 178.
used today for another Panoan people of the Javari region.
was already present in João Tuxaua’s utopia: living well in Kapi vana wai implied
55
a state of ritual alertness, an orientation toward becoming (like) a spirit. From
the outset, his activities as chief were connected to shamanism, though veering

toward a nonpredatory shamanism of the kind that Stephen Hugh-Jones desig-
nates as “vertical.”38 Among the Marubo, two types of shaman exist: the kechintxo
(singer-shaman), who cures by means of shõki songs, and the romeya, who has the
capacity for transportation-translation. The body of the latter is a maloca capable
of receiving visits from spirits that speak to the audience through the medium of
iniki songs.39 João Tuxaua was a “spirit child” (yove vake), which is a term applied
to those conceived by benevolent spirits and born as romeya shamans.40 For this
reason, his shamanic capacity manifested itself precociously, and special powers
shared only by renowned shamans were attributed to him.
•
In spite of this power, the Marubo today put little emphasis on the acts
of João Tuxaua as a romeya shaman, acts he performed only when young and
single. After marriage, he ceased to be a romeya and dedicated himself to training
as a singer-shaman and herbalist (raoya). Between the leadership function — that
of the “chief” (kakaya) and “maloca owner” (shovo ivo) — and the singer-shaman
position, there is a congruity that contrasts with the incompatibility obtaining
between the leadership function and the romeya position.41 When the chief is a
romeya, the Marubo say, he is unable to “unite many people,” given the various
restrictions imposed on him. The romeya does not teach wisdom like a singer-
shaman, because the romeya’s talk is spirit talk. His voice is always that of an
other, and his alterity is incompatible with the formation of a consensus-based
collectivity. João Tuxaua’s ceasing his activities as a romeya appears to have been
a precondition for the social changes that he would implement, some years later,
when he became a kakaya after his brother’s death.
In contrast to the Parakanã transformations, then, a central component in
the creation of the Marubo as a people was the shamanization of political prac-
tice. João Tuxaua’s social reform was intended essentially to curb interindigenous
conflicts, and to do so by means of new rules of conduct, the abandonment of
certain warfare practices, and the multiplication of matrilineal units, but also
by means of a new religious discourse. João Tuxaua establishes this link in his
interview: “From up there, he — God, you say — sent me down to observe all the
people’s customs: ‘Don’t do that, don’t fight among yourselves. . . .’ That’s what
38. Stephen Hugh-Jones, “Shamans, Prophets, Priests, spirit” (kana mishon), but his creation involved other spirits
and Pastors,” in Shamanism, History, and the State, ed. as well, generically referred to as “thinking people” ( yora
Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey (Ann Arbor: chinãin).
University of Michigan Press, 1994), 32 – 75.
41. Javier Ruedas, “The Marubo Political System” (PhD
39. See Cesarino, Oniska. diss., Tulane University, 2001), 587.
40. People say that João Tuxaua was the son of a “water
spirit” (vechã vake, the anaconda) and the “forest owner
I told everyone. During that time when I was alone, I created everyone, like an
56
owner. I created people. What you see here are people created by myself.” More
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
than the reference to “God,” which indicates his effort to establish a common
ground with the interlocutor, what interests us here is the affirmation that he was
“like an owner” who created people. João Tuxaua makes use of an extremely pro-
ductive category in Amazonia, linked to the notions of fabricating and engender-
ing.42 João Tuxaua “created” each Marubo person, in an ontological sense, as well
as the Marubo as a collective (which would subsequently become an ethnic unit).
As a magnified person, capable of containing a collectivity in himself, he forged
new practices and a new discourse through a series of traditional re-creations and
creative translations.43
Despite the shamanic components, João Tuxaua’s actions took the form not
of an eschatology but of a mission to reform the here and now. Although defining
himself as an envoy, he took advantage of the predicaments of earlier social forms
to establish a new order based on principles already inherent in the previous
system. Perhaps this was why, unlike most indigenous leaders “sent from heaven
to earth,” he proved so successful: from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Marubo
remained united, the population grew, and the wars and internal conflicts ceased.
A common ethnic identity was shaped from a combination of traditionalism and
modernization, allowing the Marubo to assume a hegemonic position, from the
1990s onward, in the local indigenist political scene.44 The new order thus guar-
anteed not only physical survival but also the political sovereignty of the group
within the context of interethnic relations, both indigenous and nonindigenous.
During a period in which permanent relations were being established with sur-
rounding indigenous peoples and the national society, João Tuxaua’s greatest
achievement was to valorize peaceful sociality and thereby put an end to internal
warfare. In the 1990s, the adoption of his diplomatic and pacifying discourse
placed the younger Marubo generation at the vanguard of the region’s indigenous
movement, culminating in the foundation of the Javari Valley Indigenous Coun-
cil in Atalaia do Norte.
The (Auto)Conversion of the Koripako

Our final example, the Koripako of the Upper Rio Negro basin, contrasts strongly
with the previous two, which concern peoples with a strong egalitarian and pred-
atory ethos. In the Upper Rio Negro, we find a hierarchical, clan-based system
articulated mostly through exchange. The Koripako are an Arawak-speaking
42. See Carlos Fausto, “Donos demais: Maestria e pro- 44. See Maria Helena Ortolan Matos, “Rumos do movi-
priedade na Amazônia,” Mana 14, no. 2 (October 2008): mento indígena no Brasil contemporâneo: Experiências
329 – 66, and “Too Many Owners,” 85 – 105. exemplares no Vale do Javari” (PhD diss., Universidade
Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo, 2006).
43. Fausto, “Donos demais,” 334 – 35.
people, numbering about fifteen thousand, inhabiting the valleys of the Guainia
57
and Içana Rivers, on the border of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. They are
part of a broad, interethnic regional system composed of Arawak-, Tukano-, and

Hupda-speaking peoples. Traditionally, the Koripako differentiated themselves
from their close Arawak relatives, the Baniwa and Wakuenai, with reference
to the distinct territories occupied by their ancestors, their linguistic particu-
larities, and the names of the exogamic clans. More recently, a fourth criterion
came into use, based on the way in which the Baniwa and Koripako converted to
Evangelical Protestantism at the end of the 1940s, as well as the forms of social
organization that emerged from their doing so.
This latest distinction relates to the history, frequently narrated in the tone
of myth, of the arrival of a lone American missionary, Sophie Muller, after World
•
War II. As one of the first representatives in Colombia (and a pioneer in Brazil)
of the recently created New Tribes Mission, Muller’s incursion was not preceded
by any substantial training, work strategy, or logistical support, which appears to
suggest that the rapid conversion of the region’s indigenous population resulted
from a single person’s efforts. What was the secret of her success — the working
of the Holy Spirit, Muller’s own charisma, or a propensity of the indigenous
people themselves to embrace prophetic messages? In the case of the Koripako
of the Upper Içana, Muller’s success involved no simple continuity with some
preexisting eschatological disposition among Rio Negro Arawak populations, but
a movement of “autoconversion” focused on the here and now.45 If indeed the
Koripako dealt with Sophie Muller as a cultural hero of a sort, the actual agents of
transformation were the young indigenous people, who took her as the exogenous
element through which they promoted an internal social reform.
Movements involving an active search for Christianity are not unknown in
the history of conversions. Although they present a wide range of motivations,
they tend to reduce the role played by outside missionary activities and increase
the decision-making role of the converted groups. In such cases, Christianity is
not imposed on the converts — whether by the mission apparatus or by colonialist
intervention — but rather evaluated and adopted by them as their “own” tradition.
At the start of the 1950s, Sophie Muller made a number of incursions into the
Brazilian stretch of the Içana River in order to evangelize the Baniwa living on
its middle and lower courses. At some point on the Lower Içana, during her sec-
ond trip to the region, Koripako traveling from the Upper Içana (at least a three
weeks’ journey away) reached her, carrying letters that said: “Come! We have
heard God’s Word and relinquished evil. We have relinquished drink too. We
45. Robin Wright, For Those Unborn: Cosmos, Self, and His-
tory in Baniwa Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1998), and História indígena e do indigenismo no Alto Rio
Negro (Campinas, Brazil: Mercado das Letras, 2005).
think of our Chief Jesus. We read His Word every day. We have already built a
58
house for you.”46 The missionary writes of how surprised she was: she had not yet
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
stayed among the Koripako of the Upper Içana, much less taught them to read
or preached the Gospel to them. She decided to journey upriver in a campaign
involving eighteen villages, and in each she encountered a house already built for
her arrival.
Muller had come from a three-year experience working among the Koripako
of the Guainia River, in Colombia. She knew the indigenous language as well as
Spanish, had taught reading and writing, and had evangelized more than a dozen
villages, having translated a considerable portion of the New Testament into
Koripako.47 Undoubtedly, it was the Koripako of the Guiania who introduced
their relatives from the Upper Içana to the Gospel, although we do not know
who wrote the letters that were sent to Sophie Muller. In any case, traveling to
meet the missionary had not been the isolated act of a few who had accepted a
religious message and interiorized a faith, but rather a community decision made
within a system of hierarchical clans. In (auto)converting to the new religion, the
Koripako threw away their ritual and shamanic objects, smashed the large con-
tainers for fermenting manioc beer, and replaced their festivals and dances with
literacy classes and solemn nocturnal church services. In a short time, no more
shamans existed on the Upper Içana, and all the communities were participat-
ing in Evangelical practices — holding semiannual Bible conferences (large-scale
events involving as many as a dozen villages) and monthly holy supper meetings.
During the first few years, the success of (auto)conversion stemmed from
the combination of at least three elements: Muller’s presence in the region, a
salient and counterintuitive figure whose discourse echoed Koripako concerns;
the collective and coordinated work of the first indigenous pastors, in general
young people eager to learn to write; and, finally, the “sense of community”
itself,48 at the time threatened by the cycles of retribution and vengeance that
prevailed after a century of enormous instability in the region.49 Although today
the Koripako do not attribute a millenarist meaning to this first phase of con-
version or identify prophetic traits in Sophie Muller, to some extent these may
have been present at the time. Such has been the case, at least, during the con-
version of their neighbors, the Baniwa. According to Robin Wright, they estab-
lished a clear congruence between Muller’s evangelization and the native mil-
lenarist movements of the nineteenth century, when indigenous leaders reacted
46. Sophie Muller, Sua voz ecoa nas selvas (1988; repr., Aná- 48. See Joanna Overing, “The Aesthetics of Production:
polis: Transcultural Editora e Livraria, 2003), 173. The Sense of Community among the Cubeo and Piaroa,”
Dialectical Anthropology 14 (1989): 159 – 75.
47. Muller had also translated hymn books and question-
and-answer booklets on Christian doctrine. 49. See Nicolas Journet, La paix des jardins: Structures soci-
ales des Indiens curripaco du haut Rio Negro, Colombie (Paris:
Institut d’Ethnologie, Musée de l’Homme, 1995).
against white domination, uniting a substantial following around eschatological
59
and hybrid discourses and practices.50 It is difficult to determine to what extent
the Koripako, protected by a series of impassable waterfalls, were affected by

nineteenth-century indigenous prophetism. Certainly the news reached them
through the extensive and intensive networks of social connections existing in
the region, but no evidence exists that the Koripako became directly involved
in these movements, any more than they were exposed, in the first half of the
twentieth century, to Salesian attempts to convert the indigenous peoples of the
area.51 The profoundest impact on the Koripako probably came from the civil war
in Colombia, known as “the Violence,” given its dramatic effects on the peoples
of the Guainia, Vichada, and Guaviare Rivers.
It was this tumultuous setting that awaited Muller when she arrived, soli-
•
tary, on her mission, but equipped with a multitude of voices, as well as signs,
practices, and technologies (especially writing, which was a central tool of domi-
nation in the regime of debt-peonage). The historical and sociological context
makes comprehensible her success and the rapid (auto)conversion — even before
she visited their villages — of the Koripako of the Içana. What is more difficult to
explain is the stability of this conversion. Muller’s evangelical work was prolific.
In addition to her work with the Koripako of the Guainia River, she evangelized
the Piapoco, Puinave, Guayabero, and other peoples of the Colombian savannah,
as well as the Baniwa and the Nyengatu (Baniwa groups speaking the Amazonian
Língua Geral ) located in Brazil. For this purpose, she used the same methods,
with a few variations, based around literacy classes in the native language, the
reading and repeating of the New Testament, and a series of precise instructions,
inscribed in small booklets, that even today provide the framework for the ser-
vices, conferences, and rituals among the Koripako of the Içana.52 Many of the
groups that Muller evangelized were only briefly “in the Gospel.” Some returned
to their traditional life; others saw deep divisions emerge between Christians
and non-Christians. In some cases, the rejection of Christianity was explicit and
violent; in others, no more than a matter of disregard and resignation. Today, the
50. These processes date back to the mid-seventeenth Salesians occurred some years after native prophetism had
century but intensified, as Wright has shown (História receded.
indígena, 27 – 81), in the eighteenth century, following an
51. The Salesians finally settled on the Içana River in
increase in slave raiding and missionary activity in the
1951, in order to contain the advance of Evangelism.
region. It was only during the rubber boom and the bru-
During this period, they constructed a mission in Assun-
tal alteration of the indigenous social world, however, that
ção, which had little or no influence on the communi-
the region finally yielded to the missionaries, in particu-
ties upriver but did produce a division (principally on the
lar those of the Salesians, who arrived (with their strict
Middle Içana and Aiari Rivers) between Evangelicals and
methods and boarding schools) in the mid-1910s. The
Catholics that persists to this day.
Salesians established themselves in an indigenous world
already profoundly transformed not only by the rubber 52. Sophie Muller, Jungle Methods (Woodworth, WI:
economy and by epidemics but also by an indigenous wave Brown Gold, 1960).
of messianism in the nineteenth century. The entry of the
Evangelical populations in the areas where Muller worked are reduced and mixed
60
with Catholic or “traditional” populations. Among the Koripako of the Içana,

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
however, some sixty years later all the communities remain Christian, organizing
their life around Evangelical practices, without any trace of hybridism or syncre-
tism.53 There was no violence or resistance; there were no backlashes or forms of
dissidence, not even a period when they ceased to hold the holy supper and Bible
conferences, the main events of the Koripako calendar.
How do the Koripako today explain this perseverance? When asked about
their conversion, the oldest — some of whom knew Sophie Muller personally —
invariably tell us of a time when they lived in terror of the cycle of poisonings
and sorcery, as well as of the festivals with “dancing and drunken binges,” in
which fights were frequent and “brothers stabbed each other to death.” Dur-
ing this era, the elders often say, “nobody died naturally.” When someone was
stricken with illness or had suffered a fatal accident, their kin would visit a sha-
man, who would identify who had poisoned them or attacked them with sorcery.
The kin of the deceased would then hire another shaman to carry out the koada
(retribution) — or, if the occasion demanded, they would mount an ambush to
kill the killer of their relative directly. According to the elder Koripako today,
this cycle of revenge would often lead to the destruction of entire families and
the dissolution of villages, as well as to migrations in search of refuge. The cycle
also occasioned a state of constant distrust, fed by the profusion of intrigues over
poisonings and suspected attacks of sorcery.54
When asked about Sophie Muller, many Koripako respond with a virtu-
ally mythic narrative, in which she occupies the place of a cultural hero, a figure
who offers new resources and introduces new processes by which to modify the
everyday life and practices of those “who are yet to be born.”55 Many of the
“civilizing arts” of the whites (how to dress, eat at a table, and build houses for
nuclear families) are understood by the Koripako to derive from the Gospel —
and, by extension, from God — through Muller’s intermediation. The missionary
appears, therefore, as the figure responsible for providing the conditions for “liv-
ing well” (paowhaakao matsia) in the present.56 The Koripako often refer to their
53. See Journet, Paix des jardins. mid-t wentieth century the Upper Rio Negro peoples had
barely recovered from the rubber boom, the messianic
54. It is difficult to say how much this image of the past
movements, the work of the missionaries, the epidemics,
corresponds to actual experience. Though the Upper Rio
and the Violencía.
Negro system is generically associated with a pacific ethos,
there is evidence that warfare also structured aspects 55. See Wright, For Those Unborn.
of the system in the past. In regard to the Koripako of
56. The root -owhakao signifies, in a strict sense, “con-
Colombia, Journet (Paix des jardins) provides information
viviality, way of living, conduct.” The verb paowahaakao
on cannibalism, trophy taking, and the abduction of chil-
(where pa- indicates indeterminacy, as in our infinitive
dren. As for the fear of poisoning, see Wright, For Those
forms) means “to sit down” and “to live with.” There is
Unborn, 175: “It would be difficult to find an element more
an interesting play of meanings among the closely related
charged with significance in Baniwa culture than man-
Baniwa and Koripako peoples. To convey the idea of
hene [poison].” As for the historical circumstances, by the
ways of life before and after conversion, in Portuguese, as the “antiga tradição”
61
(ancient tradition) and the “nova tradição” (new tradition) — in their language,
walidali iowhakao and oopi iowhakao, respectively. Another Portuguese word that

the Koripako associate with these notions is cultura; they speak, for example, of
a new Evangelical culture. The use of the expressions “new tradition” and “old
tradition” suggests that the Evangelical religion has, for the Koripako, the same
status as the practices of their ancestors. The current Christian practices, along
with their mythological corpus and ethical precepts, are now the basis of collec-
tive life and identity, just as the practices of shamans, along with the formidable
local corpus of myths, had been so in the past. In accepting Christianity, the
Koripako passed from a traditional (shamanic) society to a traditional (Christian
Evangelical) society: they altered the elements of sociality but without changing
•
their constitutive base.
In contrast to the millenarist utopia of the nineteenth-century prophetic
movements in the Upper Rio Negro region, the Koripako opted for a more
routine sort of religion. Although charismatic elements may have existed at the
beginning of the conversion process, the believers ended up privileging a reli-
giosity based on order and on a tranquil sociality. Doing so meant overcom-
ing decades of tumult to reestablish the minimal conditions for “living well”
( paowhakao matsia). Christianity was the lever enabling this reform, given the
compatibility (equivocal, undoubtedly) between its message and traditional forms
of living together (koameka iowhaakao) among the Koripako. Christianity did not
exert the same influence over them as usually is observed, and to some extent
expected, in the conversion of indigenous peoples.57 The new religion did not
make them modern or white, nor did it make them wish to be one or the other.58
On the contrary, by means of a self-initiated conversion, the Koripako’s Evangeli-
calism helped maintain a traditional sociality, making explicit and indeed con-
firming the (desire for) distance from what they understood and still understand
as the nonindigenous world. The Koripako collective today has merged with the
“Koripako church,” thus enabling the expansion of a kind of sociality — a “holisme
“living well,” the Baniwa use an expression employ- 57. See Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and
ing the verb peemaka, which strictly means “to be in an Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley:
upright position,” but also “to live in.” For their part, the University of California Press, 2004), and Webb Keane,
Koripako use an expression that contains the root for “to Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission
be seated.” In the Baniwa language, to “live well” is to be Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
stuck upright — l ike a vertical support or pillar — a nd in
58. Until recently, new economic forms and processes
Koripako, it is to be firmly seated, grounded on a partic-
of individuation, usually associated with Christian con-
ular base. These languages share the notion that living
version, had a marginal effect among the Koripako. In
well is to be firmly attached to one place. See Zenilson
contrast, schooling, urban life, and projects of cultural
Bezerra, Dicionário Kuripako-Português (Manaus: Missão
revitalization appear to them, today, as threats to the per-
Novas Tribos, 1998), and Henri Ramirez, Dicionário
manence of their “new tradition.”
Baniwa-Português (Manaus: Editora da Universidade do
Amazonas, 2001).
villageois” as Nicholas Journet describes it — that has always been a structural vec-
62
tor alongside their clan-based organization.59 Here, continuity implied change.

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
The emphasis on certain extant values implied the erosion of other fundamental
values and institutions. In contrast with developments among the eastern Para-
kanã and the Marubo, the expansion of village sociality following the adoption
of Evangelical Christianity involved a decline in the importance of the clans,
especially in relation to their hierarchical structure. A generic brotherhood was
affirmed to the detriment of another model of living well based on difference
and hierarchy.
The word best expressing this change is kitsindata. The root kitsin desig-
nates the solidarity, cooperation, and sociability inherent to kinship. The verb
kitsindata literally means “to help” and the Holy Spirit (and, in some contexts,
Jesus Christ) is called Ikitsindatakaita, the “one who helps,” the “helper.” In a strict
sense, a kitsini is a consanguine relative of the same generation, a brother, but the
derivative term kitsinda ended up designating a friend or companion more widely,
including individuals from other clans and even from other peoples, thus eclips-
ing affinity and alterity. The resignification of the term, based on a Christian
grammar, which took place during extensive negotiations of meaning between
the missionary and the first believers, opened the way for kitsindata to become
foundational to the construction and reproduction of the Koripako as a singular
people. This notion became the center point for the emergence of what we might
call a “social religion.”60 Evangelical Christianity to an extent conditioned the
indigenous ideas of kitsin and kitsindata, just as these ideas conditioned Koripako
Evangelical Christianity. From a variety of angles, then, we end up encountering
the same concepts that had replaced the hierarchical, clan-based system.
Although the missionary Sophie Muller today appears in the discourse
of Koripako religious leaders as the agent of this ample process of transforma-
tion, it seems to us reasonable to conclude instead that the Koripako instituted a
true social reform through her mythicized figure. They (auto)converted collec-
tively to produce changes to the social logic and organization in which they until
then had lived. At that moment of deep crisis, the traditional forms of dealing
with disease, factionalism, and conflict, as well as those for producing persons
and groups through rituals, proved incapable of counteracting forces that, over
decades, had profoundly altered the social environment in which these tradi-
tional forms had flourished. When Muller appeared, she represented a unique
opportunity to establish a new lived world, to form (or reform) a Koripako unity
that today they value as their authentic tradition and see as under threat from the
59. Journet, Paix des jardins, 37–42. 60. See Caco Xavier, “Os Koripako do Alto Içana: Etno-
grafia de um grupo indígena evangélico” (PhD diss., Rio
de Janeiro: PPGAS-Museu Nacional, Universidade Fed-
eral do Rio de Janeiro, 2013).
forces of modernity and from projects of cultural revival under way in the Rio
63
Negro region.

In Conclusion
The category of “social reform” encapsulates a number of elements that seem to
us central for comprehending the empirical cases that we have treated in this text.
The first of these elements is the indigenous appropriation of particular historical
events to promote internal social changes. For the eastern Parakanã, the event
was the capture and raising of a foreign child; for the Marubo, the death of a war
leader and the emergence of a new form of leadership; and for the Koripako, the
arrival of a missionary bearing a new discourse and a new technology. “New,”
•
however, is in this context a manner of speaking. In all three cases, we are faced
with a situation that becomes effectively new only after the fact, since in each
case the new is already present in the past formation as an objective possibility.61
The institutions fabricated by the eastern Parakanã objectively existed in
potentia within their social system; for example, the transformation of the teka-
tawa into a permanent agora, founded on a discursive form intended to achieve
consensus, was built on elements that had defined the tekatawa previously, includ-
ing the opposition between “hard and effective talk” ( je’engahya) and “human(e)
conversation” (morongeta).62 Similarly, among the Marubo, João Tuxaua made
use of elements inherent to the preceding social form in order to construct an
alternative to predatory sociality: he interiorized, in the form of clans, a social dif-
ference that until then had been expressed as a difference between peoples. In the
process, João Tuxaua added exogenous elements, predominantly Christian, to his
“good talk” — elements that resonated with a local ideal of living well. Among the
Marubo, at least during the period when they were living together in Kapi vana
wai, this guiding ideal acquired eschatological overtones, calling up the utopia of
a life without shortage, illness, or death that is characteristic of some indigenous
prophetic movements in Amazonia. This tendency, however, did not prevent the
“creation of the Marubo people” from being stabilized in a new social form. The
Koripako, for their part, seem to have been uninterested in the more eschatologi-
61. The expression objective possibility points toward the existing as an objective (but not necessary) possibility. As
notion of “objective modality,” an offshoot of the distinc- Carlos Fausto has written elsewhere, this conceptual for-
tion, in modern dialectic, between positing (Setzung) and mulation implies “a dialectic of constitution, which differs
presupposition (Voraussetzung). This distinction is heir to both from the teleological conception of political evolu-
the one between act and potency employed by Aristotle. tion, and from the radical particularism dominant in cul-
We use objective possibility here to convey the idea that a tural anthropology” (Warfare and Shamanism, 126).
presupposed object “is not an object of pure actualities. . . .
62. In Tupi-Guarani languages, the root moro- indexes
The world also contains the non-existent existent” (Ruy
a human condition. Thus, moropiara means “killer of a
Fausto, Marx: Lógica e Política II [São Paulo: Brasiliense,
human person,” whereas jawaropiara means “killer of a
1987], 155). In other words, that which is not posited exists
jaguar.”
as a possibility inscribed in the object — it is presupposed,
cal and utopian elements potentially extractable from the Christianity taught by
64
Sophie Muller. Rather, they focused on order and routine, as though they wanted
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
to establish a world without abrupt movements and surprises. An idea of order

had been a defining trait of Koripako sociality, although in the past it had been
connected mainly with the hierarchical clan-based system.
In links between old and new, external and internal, a common dynamic
is identifiable in these processes. A brief detour to New Guinea — more specifi-
cally, to Irian Jaya, where Rupert Stasch has described a recent process of change
among the Korowai — may help us to clarify and generalize this dynamic. Famous
for their tree houses dispersed in the forest, the Korowai since the 1980s have
been building ground villages composed of diverse clans. The change is so sig-
nificant that, in their discourse, they often speak of “before villages” and “after
villages” as contrasting eras.63 The villages answer to how the Korowai think
that nonindigenous people want them to live, and indeed government agents
and missionaries view concentration of the people as a prerequisite for effec-
tive administration. The Korowai, moreover, associate this new form of dwelling
with the expansive sociality and spatial model of the city, which they understand
as resulting from the capacity of nonindigenous people to produce consensus
among different sorts of people. The establishment of the villages, however, is
far from being an imposition from outside upon the Korowai: “Most Korowai
who have ever created villages and lived in them have done so mainly through
processes of consensus formation among themselves, rather than under the direct
influence of outsiders.”64 The villages are thus an objective possibility that the
Korowai exploit to experiment with principles contrasting with those governing
their usual dispersal. They amount to a social reform based on a complex inter-
action with the outside world: from the Korowai perspective, villages are what
nonindigenous people expect them to construct and, at the same time, the social
form indexing a nonindigenous capacity that the Korowai wish to emulate. If
there is an emulation of the other here (including of the other’s perception), the
village form is not radically new to the Korowai: they were already familiar with
moments of village aggregation during ritual assemblies, meaning that today’s
villages can be seen as the permanent form of previously temporary “traditional”
ritual gatherings.65
The Marubo and the Koripako explored external compatibilities as means
of promoting internal changes, thus making the component of “equivocation”
(as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro terms it) equivocal in itself, since the concepts
63. Rupert Stasch, “The Poetics of Village Space When 65. Note that, from the viewpoint of the Korowai fami-
Villages Are New: Settlement Form as History Making in lies, the villages continue to be temporary dwelling places,
West Papua,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 3 (2013): 555 – 70. since the tree houses have not been abandoned. See Stasch,
“Poetics of Village Space,” 556.
64. Stasch, “Poetics of Village Space,” 560.
and practices of outsiders were incorporated over time as their own.66 The “new”
65
tradition became “our” tradition, and practical misunderstandings became the
trigger for a transformative dynamic that was autochthonous, if not autono-

mous. João Tuxaua and Sophie Muller came to occupy the position of persona-
events, transformers of the social world and inaugurators of a new era. What they
reformed was the domain of human relations, the sphere of living well — what we
would call “social conventions” — but in order to do so they effectively became
more than human. They condensed in themselves the action of multiple agents,
appearing as authors of “a particular kind of decision,” as Caroline Humphrey
argues, that “can itself be a kind of event: this sort of decision is one that retains
the key features of a break with a previous regime of intelligibility and the con-
stitution of a new time (‘after the decision’).”67 It is difficult to decide whether this
•
temporal rupture, the institution of a “before and after Sophie” or a “before and
after João Tuxaua,” is a feature taken from Christianity, which precisely “places
at the centre of its messages, its kerygma, the reality of time, the radical novelty
of its history.”68 We merely suggest that another equivocal compatibility may be
involved here, given the recurrence, especially in western Amazonian mythology
and oral history, of persona-events that redefine the social world and establish a
new era.69
The Parakanã case diverges, in this aspect, from the others, since it does
not postulate a persona who condenses a complex agency and organizes a new
temporal frame. Neither the western nor the eastern Parakanã describe their
respective processes of change as a rupture. These are rather to be understood as
resulting from a cumulative effect of positive feedbacks, one change leading into
another. The Parakanã case is actually two cases, each exploring different poten-
tial aspects of the social system before the split: the centrifugal movement of the
western bloc succeeded in dissolving the possibilities for internal differentiation,
while the centripetal movement of the eastern block prompted their construction.
Expansion and contraction, homogeneity and segmentation, absence and pres-
ence of headmanship, external warfare and internal peace are among the alterna-
tives leading to distinctive forms of sociality constructed during the twentieth
century. The Parakanã example presents us not with an entirely different sort
66. On the concept of equivocal compatibilities, see João 68. Marcel Detienne, A escrita de orfeu, trans. Mário da
de Pina-Cabral, Between China and Europe: Person, Culture, Gama Kury (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1991), 116.
and Emotion in Macao (London: Continuum, 2002), and
69. Luiz Costa, “As faces do jaguar: Parentesco, história
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology
e mitologia entre os Kanamari da Amazônia ocidental”
and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití 2, no.
(PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2007).
1 (2004): 3 – 22.
67. Caroline Humphrey, “Reassembling Individual Sub-

jects: Events and Decisions in Troubled Times,” Anthro-
pological Theory 8, no. 4 (2008): 357 – 80. See also Margareth
Jolly, “Specters of Inauthenticity,” Contemporary Pacific 4,
no. 1 (1992): 49 – 72.
of case, but with a similar one transpiring at a lower intensity. Actually, it was
66
this lower intensity (or, perhaps better put, this microscopic scale) that inspired
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
us to explore the Marubo and Koripako examples in a different way, seeking to

recuperate the multiple decisions and agents condensed in the magnified figure
of the reformer. The disparity in scale may be related to the Parakanã operating
within a system of mostly indigenous alterities, rather than on the frontier with
nonindigenous society. It may be the case, therefore, that for each of the manifest
examples of shamanic political action in Amazonia, there are dozens of more
subtle movements that preceded and succeeded them, without coming to the
attention of anthropologists or historians.
We still know little about processes of social change of the kind described
here, but we can learn more by adopting appropriate conceptual tools. In doing
so, we need to avoid the Eurocentric illusion that history and social change
befall indigenous peoples only when they are subjected to the encroachments
of nonindigenous society — an illusion that derives from both an ideology and
a practical consideration: we have historical records only when nonindigenous
people (including anthropologists) are present. The importance of the relation
with outsiders varies from case to case: marginal in the Parakanã case, relevant
in the Marubo case, and central to that of the Koripako. While relations with the
other play a key role in these movements of reform, the other is not necessarily
nonindigenous — though the latter is commonly the most immediately visible fig-
ure, because of the radicality of the cultural difference involved and the presence
of written records.
It remains to determine the connection between indigenous social reforms
and peace, since our examples mostly concern changes tending toward paci-
fism or the expansion of nonviolent sociality. Clearly, the growing presence and
impact of national society in the twentieth century, after four hundred years of
mostly violent interaction, were essential factors in predisposing the Marubo and
the Koripako toward a new (and at the same time old) form of sociality, in which
predation became less and less central to their cosmopolitics. This movement
resulted from a previous one, in which warfare and violence came to occupy the
entire social field, threatening the very existence of collective life.70 Amazonian
indigenous processes of social reform also occurred in colonial times to cope with
invasion, slavery, and ethnic soldiering.71 No simple equation of social reform and
peace offers itself here, since many peoples have also reorganized themselves to
70. Such may also have been the case, in the 1930s, among Pereira, Um povo sábio, um povo aconselhado: Ritual e política
the Bora and the Huitoto of the Putumayo-Caquetá inter- entre os Uitoto-murui (Brasília: Paralelo 15, 2012).
fluve. After the rubber boom, they rebuilt their collectivi-
71. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the
ties around the space of the mambeaderos, a mostly male
Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa
arena, in which a peaceful conversational practice conveys
Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992).
the “cool” wisdom of tobacco and coca. See Edmundo
exert violence and participate in the colonial circuits in persons and goods. More-
67
over, the idea of “living well” cannot be equated with ordinary peaceful sociality.
As we have shown, the centrifugal dynamic of the western Parakanã took excess as

its utopian ideal. For many decades, living well required war, murder, the abduc-
tion of women, dreaming about enemies, prodigious consumption of meat, and
nearly constant motion. Such a state of affairs is perhaps doomed to collapse, but
the same may be so also of more ordinary utopias.
Despite the paucity of ethnographic descriptions, processes of this kind
must have occurred in other indigenous societies of Amazonia, not only after but
also before the European conquest. While recovering some of these processes
through oral history may still be possible, above all a new ethnographic approach
is needed. Researchers should focus now on processes by which an internal
•
reform of the indigenous social world has occurred. Most of us, too involved per-
haps with mythic and shamanic discourse, have paid inadequate attention to the
decision-making mechanisms, political practices, and forms of social mediation
underlying such processes. There is, furthermore, a relative scarcity of descrip-
tions of how indigenous people produce the collective that today they generally
refer to as their “community.” Behind this nonindigenous category, there is a set
of practices to be described — not only those that, as Joanna Overing has shown,
confer the “sense of community,” but also those that enable people to reform the
bases of their community and create or renew their forms of “living well.”72
Each of the indigenous “communities” that we have had the privilege to
know in Amazonia asks questions of itself about its own mode of existence. Is
this how we wish to live? Is this how we ought to live? Can we live in some other
way? How can conflicts be avoided? How can we counter human and nonhuman
predators? How can we put an end to sorcery? How can our rituals be made
more effective? What should we do about money, schools, the whites? This rest-
less questioning is usually considered a simple consequence of the compulsory
absorption of these groups as minorities into national society. But these ques-
tions antedate our time and the colonial situation as well: they have been posed
in various ways throughout the history of Amazonia and have been answered
in the form of particular choices that, determined by the sociocultural struc-
tures and historical processes into which they were inserted, became determinant
over time.
It is worth recalling, at this juncture, the dilemma that the sons of Jarawa
faced, in the 1920s, when their father’s death was attributed to sorcery. Jarawa had
been the “boy-enemy” of the eastern Parakanã, but a creative choice, his adoption
72. Joanna Overing, “The Aesthetics of Production: The

Sense of Community among the Cubeo and Piaroa,” Dia-
lectical Anthropology 14 (1989): 159 – 75.
and later his marriage into the group, allowed men of the postsplit generation to
68
marry women, Jarawa’s daughters, who were not their own sisters. Yet another
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
choice, that of Jarawa’s sons to distribute game to their affines as a peace offer-
ing, rather than seek revenge for their father’s death, saved the Parakanã from yet
another violent fissure. There is a magic to making peace: it takes imagination
and conversation. But the social forms and values on which peace is based are
contained as objective possibilities in the present. Making it actual requires cre-
ative choices. As Hanna Arendt so eloquently put it: “[The faculty to act] enables
him [man] to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for
goals and enterprises which would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of
his heart, had he not been given this gift — to embark upon something new.”73
73. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” New York

Review of Books, February 27, 1969.

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CONFLICT, PEACE, AND

Carlos Fausto, Caco Xavier, and Elena Welper

Translated by David Rodgers

Past processes of intense sociocultural transformation in Amazonia, led by indig-

Common Knowledge 22:1

Atahuallpa Apuinga Guainacapac and involving various Arawakan and Panoan

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

Fabricating Institutions among the Parakanã

found in the literature, this regressionist explanation is nonetheless false in the

Parakanã case.16 If we turn to oral history to reconstruct what happened to each

17. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 37.

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

19. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 44.

Parakanã), and since group membership was transmitted patrilinearly, Jarawa’s

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

The Creation of the Marubo People

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

The (Auto)Conversion of the Koripako

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

with Catholic or “traditional” populations. Among the Koripako of the Içana,

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

tor alongside their clan-­based organization.59 Here, continuity implied change.

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

to establish a world without abrupt movements and surprises. An idea of order

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

67. Caroline Humphrey, “Reassembling Individual Sub-

us to explore the Marubo and Koripako examples in a different way, seeking to

Peace by Other Means: Par t 5

72. Joanna Overing, “The Aesthetics of Production: The

73. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” New York

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&RQIOLFW3HDFHDQG6RFLDO5HIRUPLQ,QGLJHQRXV$PD]RQLD

tor alongside their clan-based organization.59 Here, continuity implied change.