Creating Dialogues: Indigenous Perceptions and Changing Forms of Leadership in Amazonia - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607325594 ISBN 13: 9781607325598

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2017

Synopsis

Creating Dialogues discusses contemporary forms of leadership in a variety of Amazonian indigenous groups. Examining the creation of indigenous leaders as political subjects in the context of contemporary state policies of democratization and exploitation of natural resources, the book addresses issues of resilience and adaptation at the level of local community politics in lowland South America.

Contributors investigate how indigenous peoples perceive themselves as incorporated into the structures of states and how they tend to see the states as accomplices of the private companies and non-indigenous settlers who colonize or devastate indigenous lands. Adapting to the impacts of changing political and economic environments, leaders adopt new organizational forms, participate in electoral processes, become adept in the use of social media, experiment with cultural revitalization and new forms of performance designed to reach non-indigenous publics, and find allies in support of indigenous and human rights claims to secure indigenous territories and conditions for survival. Through these multiple transformations, the new styles and manners of leadership are embedded in indigenous notions of power and authority whose shifting trajectories predate contemporary political conjunctures.

Despite the democratization of many Latin American countries and international attention to human rights efforts, indigenous participation in political arenas is still peripheral. Creating Dialogues sheds light on dramatic, ongoing social and political changes within Amazonian indigenous groups. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, ethnology, Latin American studies, and indigenous studies, as well as governmental and nongovernmental organizations working with Amazonian groups.

Contributors: Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, Gérard Collomb, Luiz Costa, Oscar Espinosa, Esther López, Valéria Macedo, José Pimenta, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Terence Turner, Hanne Veber, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen

About this title

About the Author

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen is assistant professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is also affiliated with the Centre EREA, Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre La Défense. Her publications include Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia, as well as several edited books and articles on mobility, shamanism, adolescence, indigenous politics, ethnohistory, and indigenous ontologies and epistemologies and various indigenous school materials.

Hanne Veber is an independent senior researcher affiliated with the University of Copenhagen Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, specializing in indigenous cultures and the history of colonization of North America and the Upper Amazon. She has worked with the Ashéninka of Peru’s Selva and published on Ashéninka social and political organization, intercultural relations, material culture, gender relations, indigeneity, and ethnography. She worked intensively with autobiographical stories for her edited volume Historias para nuestro futuro/Yotantsi ashí otsipaniki‘: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes asháninkas e ashéninkas and co-authored a monograph on the Ashéninka of the Gran Pajonal for the Guía Etnográfica de la Alta Amazonía volume 5. Her other publications include special issues of academic journals, book chapters, and articles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creating Dialogues

Indigenous Perceptions and Changing Forms of Leadership in Amazonia

By Hanne Veber, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-559-8

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments, 
Introduction Hanne Veber and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, 
Part I. Indigenous Perceptions of Leadership, 
1. "Becoming Funai": A Kanamari Transformation Luiz Costa, 
2. Variabilities of Indigenous Leadership: Asháninka Notions of Headship in Peru's Selva Central Hanne Veber, 
3. The Rise of the Egalityrant (Egalitarian Tyrant) in Peruvian Amazonia: Headpeople in the Time of the Comunidad Nativa Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, 
4. Guarani Cosmopolitics in the World of Paper Valéria Macedo, 
Part II. Changing Styles of Leadership in Lowland South America, 
5. The Young Kayapó Movement (Movimento Mebengokre Nyre) among the Mentuktire Kayapó Terence Turner, 
6. "All Together": Leadership and Community among the Asháninka (Brazilian Amazon) José Pimenta, 
7. Leadership in Movement: Indigenous Political Participation in the Peruvian Amazon Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, 
8. Gender and Political Leadership: Indigenous Women Organizations in the Peruvian Amazon Region Oscar Espinosa, 
Part III. Amazonian Indigenous Actors in State Politics, 
9. "The Colonos Come in Like Termites to Take Our Land": A Study of Indigenous Leadership, Women Representatives, and Conflict in the Bolivian Amazon Esther López, 
10. "All This Is Part of My Movement": Amazonian Indigenous Ways of Incorporating Knowledge in Urban Politics Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, 
11. Shifting Leadership Legitimation: From Heredity to Election among the Kali'na (French Guiana) Gérard Collomb, 
List of Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Becoming Funai"

A Kanamari Transformation

Luiz Costa

The Kanamari, a Katukina-speaking people from the western edge of Brazilian Amazonia, say that they are becoming Funai. Funai is the acronym of the Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indian Foundation), the Brazilian government agency responsible for the tutelage of indigenous people in the country. "We are becoming Funai" (Funai-pa adik [anin] tyo; Port: estamos virando Funai) is a statement that the Kanamari make in a variety of settings: when explaining to the anthropologist the historical events that brought them to their present predicament, when contrasting the past to the present in discussions among themselves, or when speaking to government agents about their current projects and hopes for the future. "Becoming Funai" marks a quality of the "present" (bati in Kanamari) or "recent times" (bati nahan ti). But becoming Funai is not restricted to discourse. Some Kanamari have effectively sought and obtained employment in the agency, others have tattooed the word "Funai," or some word or insignia associated with the agency or the federal government, on their arms or chests (see figure 1.1).

Quite a few Kanamari wear clothing or caps displaying Funai crests, regardless of whether or not they have worked for the agency. One village had a large sign by the riverfront with the words "Funai Community" written in capital letters for all who approached the village to see. In most Kanamari villages, people have stopped working in their gardens or procuring food on Sunday because (as they say) "Funai does not work on Sundays." Many Kanamari are named after employees of the agency who have passed through their villages, and a few are named after a rankthat they associate with the agency's hierarchy (e.g., "General" or "Capita," a shortened form for capitão, "captain") or after one of the acronyms of agencies that the Kanamari associate with Funai (e.g., "SUCAM," the "Superintendence for Public Health Campaigns").

"We are becoming Funai" is a common utterance, but it is not equally common for all Kanamari. It is more usually stated by men than by women, by young and mature men than by children or the elderly, and by those who have effectively obtained employment in government agencies or who intend to do so than by those who do not seek out such employment. In the Kanamari language, the phrase is constructed through the verbalizer suffix -pa, which indicates a present continuous aspect, a process of becoming and not the result or conclusion of the becoming (see Costa 2012:102). Becoming Funai by no means implies thatthe person who says it considers the Kanamari to have become Funai, only that they are on a trajectory that has that result as a desired outcome. Although the Kanamari may say of individuals that they "are Funai" (Funai anin) by virtue of their employment in the agency, I have never heard a Kanamari use a grammatical construct that implies that all of them are already Funai, and that they are no longer a part of an ongoing transformation.

The Kanamari also say that Funai is their chief. When speaking in Portuguese they often call Funai "our chief" (nosso chefe), but also nosso cacique or nosso tuxaua. Cacique and tuxaua are, respectively, words of Arawakan and Tupian origin that have been in circulation since colonial times and were adopted by both federal agencies and Amerindian peoples as part of the language of interethnic contact in Brazil. The same words — chefe, tuxaua, and cacique — are used by the Kanamari to refer to contemporary village chiefs, who are usually men who are the heads of localized kindred groups. Contemporary village chiefs seem to blend certain features of traditional styles of chieftainship, based on genealogy and coresidence, and more modern intermediary spokesperson positions that involve dealings with government and nongovernmental institutions (see Calavia Sáez 2010; Virtanen 2009). If we restrict analysis to how the Kanamari speak of chiefs when they use the Portuguese language, then Funai appears to be a more encompassing analogue of local chiefs, a sort of intervillage cacique of the Kanamari who, instead of being a native chief acting as a spokesperson in relations with non-native state agents, is a government agency that has been rendered a native chief.

While this analysis would be accurate, to a point, when we turn our attention to how Funai is discussed in the Kanamari language we can see a clear distinction between Funai, on the one hand, and village chefes, caciques, and tuxauas, on the other. In their own idiom, the Kanamari always refer to Funai as -warah, a term that has multiple meanings, one of which is to designate the traditional native chiefs of villages and multivillage agglomerations that I call subgroups. Hence both village and subgroup chiefs were traditionally called -warah, while today village chiefs are always called by foreign loan words, regardless of which language is spoken. In the hierarchy of chieftaincy, then, the term -warah is used exclusively to refer to Funai, which, as chief to all of the Kanamari, is equivalent to an inflated subgroup chief rather than a versatile village chief. Funai is the only contemporary analogue of the ancient subgroup chiefs, since there are no other figures that are approximated to subgroup chiefs as these existed prior to Kanamari submission to state tutelage. It is as if the presence of Funai among the Kanamari has fissioned a native concept that formerly referred to two varieties of chiefs, resulting in a situation in which there are many chefes, tuxauas, or caciques of villages, but a single -warah of all the Kanamari in Funai.

As in much of Amazonia, Kanamari chieftaincy is framed in an idiom of asymmetrical consanguinity, as a parent-child relationship which posits chiefs as metaparents to the community (McCallum 1990;Santos-Granero 1991). Fausto (2008) has shown that the idiom of asymmetrical consanguinity has great scope in Amazonian sociocosmologies, delineating a scheme of "metafiliation" that determines relations between unequal terms in a variety of contexts, often being conceptualized as the tie between an owner-master and his children-pets. Indeed, "owner" or "master" are possible translations of the Kanamari term warah, which, I will show, has a much wider semantic range than its gloss as "chief" first suggests. From this angle, both "parent" and "chief" are figures of the "owner-master," a fact that the Kanamari convey by, on occasion, calling Funai either by the Portuguese expression nosso pai or the Kanamari ityowa pama, both meaning "our father," a designation never used to refer to the village chiefs.

My aim in this chapter is to investigate the process of becoming Funai, which necessarily requires that I investigate how the subgroup chiefs of the past have been transformed into Funai in the present. Although more could be said about how contemporary chefes, caciques, and tuxauas are at the same time similar to and different from village chiefs, my concern is exclusively with how the transformation of subgroup chiefs into Funai affects the Kanamari population more generally. This analysis will allow us to understand the apparently paradoxical nature of becoming Funai as a process common to the whole Kanamari population, a state of affairs that seems to fly in the face of an anthropological literature that stresses that, in Amazonia, chieftaincy is the prerogative (or burden) of a few (Lévi-Strauss 1944; Clastres 1974).

Before proceeding, I should state that my fieldwork was carried out between 2002 and 2006 among the roughly 430 Kanamari who inhabited the Itaquaí River, in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Area. The Itaquaí is a tributary of the Javari River, and its upper reaches are accessible, over the watershed, from the affluents of the middle Juruá, where most of the over 3,100 Kanamari live at present. What I discuss below concerns the history of the Itaquaí River and may not apply to the other river basins in which the Kanamari live. Although, for the sake of economy, I refer to "the Kanamari," my ethnography thus has a more restricted remit.

FUNAI AS POLITICS

The first thing to note about Funai is that although it is a word borrowed from the lexicon of the Brazilian government, in Kanamari usage it is not simply a term with the eponymous agency as a referent. Instead, Funai is an indigenous concept that includes, but is not reducible to, the agency of the same name. This is because Funai is also a blanket term for all government institutions or orders, including any institution that is ranked hierarchically and that is perceived to be linked to the government. This includes, among others, the National Health Foundation (FUNASA), the Brazilian army, the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), as well as (non-indigenous) NGOs that operate in the region, such as the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista, which evidently need to work with the government to put their projects into effect. All of these institutions and organizations are Funai, which is their horizon and synthesis. Although less common, some Kanamari use the words the Federal or the Federal Government as synonyms for Funai. In Kanamari talk about the Brazilian government and in their interactions with government agents, Funai thus designates both the National Foundation for Indian Affairs and other government or nongovernmental agencies, as well as, more generally, the hierarchical structure of the Brazilian government and its summit.

Even this broad definition fails to exhaust the meaning of Funai for the Kanamari, since Funai is also linked to a project in which interactions with the state are relatively marginal, as will become evident below. At the moment, I want to investigate why Funai is so preponderant in Kanamari conceptions of the state, coming to encapsulate the bureaucracy and hierarchy of the Brazilian government to such an extent that it is synonymous with it. By highlighting the salience of Funai for the Kanamari, I do not mean that they fail to recognize various government agencies or programs as being somehow distinct. Recent events in Brazilian indigenous politics make it unlikely for such a confusion to emerge. In 1999, a government decree transferred the administration of healthcare to the indigenous population from Funai to FUNASA. The decree required FUNASA to establish agreements with local entities that could oversee the logistical side of healthcare in Indigenous Areas. In the municipality of Atalaia do Norte, within which much of the Vale do Javari Indigenous Area lies, this agreement was signed with the indigenous NGO Conselho Indígena do Vale do Javari (Vale do Javari Indigenous Council), a partnership that lasted until 2004, after which a new agreement was signed with the municipal government.

Until 1999, then, Funai was directly involved in tutelary care, land administration, healthcare, and consequently pretty much every situation in which a Kanamari would have to deal with the Brazilian government. After 1999 this changed, and the Kanamari saw two sorts of government agents visiting their villages regularly: Funai employees and FUNASA doctors and nurses. This furthermore furnished two routes for Kanamari who sought government employment: permanent or part-time jobs in Funai and technical training as nurses with FUNASA. In 2004 the Kanamari also witnessed FUNASA's regional partner change from an indigenous NGO to the local municipality, which was reflected in a change in the personnel who administer health facilities in town. The Kanamari know that these people respond to different hierarchies and that they are concerned with different aspects of Kanamari involvement with the state.

Why, then, is Funai both equivalent to the government's chain of command and ranked above all other agencies and offices? I suggest that this is at least in part due to the concentric spatial organization of Funai's hierarchy. The lower rungs of the Foundation's chain of command are physically based in Kanamari villages, while medium-level instances are at the limits of the Indigenous Area and the nearest town, and its all-encompassing power is situated in the federal capital, an unknown land and the seat of power of the Brazilian state. The Foundation traverses every instance in which the Kanamari need to interact with the Brazilian government and these interactions point toward a power that exists beyond its local ramifications. By following these local-to-national nodes, the Kanamari extrapolate global characteristics of Funai from concrete experiences and inferences. It is worth detailing Funai's structure further.

During the period of my fieldwork, Kanamari interaction with or knowledge of Funai passed through four instances of the agency: the "outpost chief," the regional administration, the Ethno-Environmental Protection Front, and Funai's headquarters in Brasília. Each level implies a wider sphere of activity and increasing power. Living in Massapê, the largest of Kanamari villages, for long periods of time was the Funai outpost chief (chefe de posto), whose job it was to help organize and put into practice development projects, sell Kanamari produce in the nearby towns, and help during emergencies. The outpost chief was subordinated to the regional administration of Funai, based in the nearby town of Atalaia do Norte, which was directly responsible for all of the Amerindian population of the Vale do Javari Area and which acted as an intermediary between the outpost chief and Funai's headquarters in Brasília.

Due to the presence of a large number of Amerindians who do not maintain regular contact with the surrounding nonAmerindian population, the Vale do Javari is an area in which Funai's Department of Isolated Indians maintains a physical presence, and the Kanamari are regularly involved in their activities. Many obtain temporary employment in the Vale do Javari Ethno-Environmental Front (FPEVJ), which is a massive structure, composed of three large and interlinked houses, equipped with high-tech surveillance technology and intermittently inhabited by up to 30 employees. It sits at the confluence of the Itaquaí and Ituí Rivers, the main point of entrance into the upper Itaquaí from the town of Atalaia do Norte. The employees of the Front (which include a rotation of Kanamari men) carry out fiscal activities to ensure that the area is not being invaded by unauthorized poachers or timber men.

Finally, there is the incredibly powerful, but more amorphous and mysterious Funai based in the distant and exotic city of Brasília, which controls all local branches of the agency. None of the Kanamari had been to Brasília at the time of my fieldwork, although they were well aware that bureaucrats in Brasília gave orders to the Funai employees who interacted with them. When the Kanamari say that Funai is equivalent to "the Federal Government," and when they speak of it as the horizon of the hierarchies of the Brazilian state, it is this Funai, physically based in a far-away land yet powerful enough to coordinate its regional manifestations, to which they refer. They sometimes call this Funai "true" or "prototypical" Funai (Funai tam), to distinguish it from the local refractions with limited power that they are more familiar with in regular interactions. During my fieldwork I often heard that the "true Funai" was then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, chief not only of all the Indians but also of all the Brazilians.

This type of hierarchical organization is not the exclusive privilege of Funai. Other government agencies, such as the National Health Foundation (FUNASA), are structured in a similar way. However, it is only Funai that makes this hierarchy visible to the Kanamari, as can be inferred in two local contingencies that, from the perspective of the Kanamari, make Funai the guarantor of all state institutions at a national level. The first is that everyone who works with Amerindians must go through Funai and needs to abide by their rules. For instance, all boats that pass through the FPEVJ are checked by its employees to ensure that nothing that is legally barred from entering the area (such as alcoholic beverages), or from leaving it (such as game meat), passes through. This includes the FUNASA boats, which are therefore dependent on Funai for access to the Amerindian population. This is not only true for FUNASA, but also for researchers and civil servants who visit Kanamari villages, as well as local councilmen and census missions. In this way, Funai does in fact arbitrate over who can see the Amerindians, and it enforces legislation concerning the administration of Amerindian territories even in what pertains to the activities of other government agencies. Their laws seem to the Kanamari to be more binding than other laws.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Creating Dialogues by Hanne Veber, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen. Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607325594
• ISBN 13: 9781607325598
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322
• Editor: Veber Hanne, Virtanen Pirjo