IN SEARCH OF RITUAL: TRADITION,

OUTER WORLD AND BAD MANNERS IN

THE AMAZON
Oscar Calavia Sez
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil
Ritual is currently a central issue in Indian politics in the Amazon. Ritual implies tradition, and thus ethnic legitimacy. But to some groups, such as the Panoan-speaking Yaminawa, political and social looseness are handicaps to the invention of shared performances
that are recognizable as rituals. Leadership is based both on an outward policy and an
inward search for patterned, collective actions that can designate a gathering of kin and
followers as an indigenous community. This article focuses on such ritual-making efforts,
describing two otherwise informal parties held on a Brazilian Yaminawa reservation where
fieldwork was carried out in 1993.

There is not much to set the Yaminawa apart from other small Nawa
groups of the Jurua-Purus and Urubamba-Ucayali rivers in the southwestern
Amazon.1 They all belong to the Panoan linguistic family, live in a dense,
sparsely populated forest, subsist through hunting and agriculture, and are only
marginally integrated into their respective Brazilian, Peruvian, and Bolivian
national societies. Within this ethnic kaleidoscope, the several groups known
as Yaminawa (also spelled Yaminahua, or Jaminawa) are not differentiated either
linguistically or genealogically. The name Yaminawa is, however, identified
with political instability and a self-destructive bias toward the Western world,
in marked contrast to more conservative tribes such as their Kaxinaw neighbours.The recent history of the Yaminawa of the Cabeceiras do Rio Acre [Headwaters of the River Acre] Indian Village is therefore commonly understood
as a pre-eminent example of cultural loss.2
This view, which I have discussed in previous works (Calavia Sez 1995;
2001), is predicated on widely shared and enduring ideas about the fate of
indigenous societies, but it seems to me to be defective.3 In reality,Yaminawa
have many different and highly flourishing forms of social order. This rich
diversity exists without there being any domestic or political authority with
the power to exalt one particular social form over the others. Yaminawa life
thus lacks anything akin to a traditional public arena. There is nothing like
the time-honoured Panoan rituals, such as the Kaxinaws Kachanawa, the
Sharanahuas special hunt, or the Shipibos and Kaxinaws girls initiation
ceremonies.4 Nor do the Yaminawa seem to feel the lack of such festivals.
Whenever I found memories of past rituals among the Yaminawa, they
Royal Anthropological Institute 2004.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 10, 157-173

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consisted of vague descriptions, suggesting something similar to what the

Kaxinaw would call amusements (brincadeiras), involving heavy drinking and
dancing (McCallum 2001: 130), and lacking the totalizing aspect of the great
Panoan rituals. Even these amusements seem to have disappeared some
time ago, perhaps when the Yaminawa migrated to the Iaco River.5 Among
the Yaminawa of the Cabeceiras do Rio Acre Indian Reservation there is nothing
that a conservative lexicographer would call ritual.This is not surprising, considering the Yaminawa ethos, which is characterized by a lack of formality
which might almost seem modern. Yaminawa have no traditions, complains
their chief.
This idea of the Yaminawa as a riteless people springs from a somewhat
pedantic use of the word ritual. Of course, the Yaminawa people enjoy getting
together to feast, although they do this in a markedly low-key manner. A
broader notion of ritual is adopted here to analyse the two largest feasts that
I attended during my fieldwork.The main features of these feasts were improvisation and contingency, neither of which conforms to most common notions
of ritual.6 The flexibility of the outer shell, however, may conceal some comparatively stable elements, as will be seen below.
The first feast was held on 31 October 1992, in the home of the Yaminawa chief, Z Correia, in the area known as the Indian slum (Portuguese,
Favela dos Indios) at Assis Brasil, the Brazilian town near the Indian Reservation. The feast was occasion for a two-fold celebration: the home-coming
of Julio Isodawa, who had been in Norway attending a meeting of indigenous schoolteachers organized by an NGO, and the birthday of Correias
daughter.
The second feast was held on 17 August 1993, on the Indian Reservation,
to celebrate the first birthday of Julios baby. One could say that the feast was
also intended to honour the new leader, who had replaced Correia a month
earlier. Both feasts contain very similar elements, so they must be compared
and understood together. As it is useful to name them, I will refer to the first
feast as Scandinavian Feast and the second as Restrained Forr. In the ethnographic description that follows, it will become clear why I regard these as
apt rather than whimsical titles for the two rituals.

The Scandinavian Feast

At the time of the Scandinavian Feast most Yaminawa were present in the
village of Assis. Some were waiting for Julios arrival from Norway. Some were
bidding farewell to Correia, who was going to the city with other Yaminawa
in search of study or medical treatment. Some were waiting for their retirement pensions at the post office. Others, as it was near All Souls Day, went
to Assis to light candles for deceased Yaminawa buried there. Others were in
Assis for more incidental reasons: Chico de Raimundo ( Julios elder brother,
thus his closest kin) was there on account of a snake-bite. There were, in fact,
too many individual causes to account for the general migration that occurs
regularly every month.
Julio arrived in Assis on 30 October, and was received with mourning
chants by female kin. The womens mourning songs are commonly related

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to kin absence, and are always loaded with bad omens, whether or not any
explicit danger exists. Julio himself cried the next day during the feast,
when he was told that his brother had been bitten by a snake. Such displays
of emotion always seem to be related to distance from loved ones: when the
brothers finally met, they did not go off alone with each other, but rather
joined a group of Yaminawa who spent all night roaming from bar to bar.
Julios arrival provided an added incentive for the drinking festival that was
already underway. At the beginning of the feast (the afternoon of 31 October),
some people were already reeling from one, two, or three days of drunkenness. Some barely managed to wake up before getting another drink and
falling virtually unconscious. In addition to the Yaminawa, other people gather
at the Indian Slum: rubber-gatherers, farm-workers, and some Piro Indians.
By noon, Z Correia began to provide meals at his house. For several hours
he dispensed fish (which he had bought from his father in-law), manioc flour,
canned meat mixed with flour, and some twenty bottles of cachaa (sugar-cane
brandy). It was only to close kin that the food was offered. The serving was
carried out by Correias wife, assisted by her children, and was meant for those
considered to be close kin. The drink, however, was more publicly distributed, and acted as the life-blood of the whole feast.
This drinking warrants further attention. The heavy cachaa consumption
indicates a degree of sophistication in the Scandinavian Feast. The common
drink among the Yaminawa (and among all the rural proletariat in the western
Amazon) is 97 per cent alcohol, highly toxic, sold in plastic bottles, and
intended for use as a cleaning agent. That is what I mean when I speak of
alcohol not the array of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol in Assis is a good deal
more expensive than cachaa. It is not a matter of taste; its potency is the only
serious criterion. Obviously, 194-proof alcohol is much stronger than cachaa,
and it is possible to dilute it with water when the drinking-circle grows.
Cachaa in no way approaches the strength of even diluted alcohol, and carries
something of a stigma, being regarded as a lightweight drink. Those with
weaker stomachs prefer it, however, and glass and plastic bottles sit side by
side on market shelves and account for a good deal of the income of local
traders. The cost of beer is much higher and Indians rarely drink it, outside
the brief prosperous moments when wages and pensions are paid. Some Yaminawa drink beer-and-cachaa or beer-and-alcohol cocktails, these being much
esteemed for their intoxicating effects.
During the Scandinavian Feast alcohol played a secondary role, appearing
mainly at the end of the party. Even so, several hours of weak cachaa drinking made Correias house a scene of diverse and almost surreal activity.
By sunset, one group could be observed playing cards. Another group were
gathered together strumming country songs on a guitar, while an elderly man
ran unsteadily around the house, leaning on peoples shoulders and speaking
loudly in their faces. A hunter in his 30s made loud pronouncements in
unintelligible slurred Portuguese while dancing and calling out hurrahs to
the chief s daughter. She, with a gang of children in tow, swung across the
room on a fishing-net suspended from the roof. The singing, calling, and
speeches were in Portuguese: alcohol consumption calls for the white mans
language. A young Yaminawa man fainted. He was immediately laid in a
hammock and covered with blankets, and slept peacefully while the party

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continued around him. When another man collapsed, his friends tried unsuccessfully to carry him, but finally lowered him to the ground, and continued
the feast.
Near nightfall from the neighbouring house, where I was talking with
other Indians I heard Z Correia speaking aloud. I went back to the lounge:
Julio was close to Correia in the centre of the lounge. Clutching a huge box
of chocolates to his chest, he was holding forth in grand oratorical style. On
the bright red cardboard, one could see the big golden letters displaying its
trademark: Kong Haakon written beneath the Norwegian crown. Julio was
recounting his trip to Norway, where he met twenty-three other Indian
schoolteachers. According to his somewhat rambling account, the box of
chocolates had been presented to him as a memento of his trip, though the
recipient was unspecified: the community, himself, the twenty-three schoolteachers, South America? In the event, he had decided that the whole
Yaminawa community would share the gift. In order to do so, Julio was going
to give it to Z Correia. When he had finished, Z Correia responded enthusiastically, saying that there were certain points requiring further explanation.
He spoke about the funds given to the UNIs (Unio Nacional do ndio)
president to be used in educational programmes. He also boasted that a
Yaminawa man, a schoolteacher, was the first South American Indian ever
invited to Norway, or to Europe; finally, Correia said something about the five
hundred years of genocide, about South America, and about the SouthAmerican Indians themselves. Julio spoke yet again, producing variations on
his previous themes: still clutching the box, he kept apologizing for being less
eloquent than Correia. Correia then took over again, resolutely repeating
the same points. Again Julio intervened, then Correia, then Julio again. Then
it was Correias turn once again. Increasingly enthusiastic, he called on those
present to give three cheers for their hosts and the Yaminawa people.
Throughout this antiphonal performance, everyone in the crowd clustered
round the chief, eagerly awaiting the sharing-out, which could no longer be
delayed. At the climax, Z Correia called the anthropologist (that is, myself )
over to take part in the distribution, organizing his kinfolk into two straggling queues, though not without difficulty. Someone held the box, already
open, and the anthropologist was to be the one to offer the chocolates to the
participants. The problem, however, was that Scandinavian confectionery is
not produced with the Amazonian climate in mind.The chocolates had begun
to melt, and removing them from the box proved to be a far from simple
task. The chief had to use all the authority at his command to stop people
from queue-jumping; he also had his hands full adjudicating demands for
extra chocolates on the grounds that these were to be handed on to absent
relatives.
Once the sharing was complete, but before the crowd had dispersed,
Artemira (Correas daughter) and some friends ran away with the box, which
was still full of sweet remains. It was night already, and the feast continued,
now given a new lease of life by the arrival of Julios brother, the one who
had been bitten by a snake the previous day. Z Correia headed an expedition to the medical post, where an army physician inspected the wound, and
then went off in search of medicine.

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Something needs to be said about the fights which took place later, involving the two young men who fainted during the feast. The causes and development of such fights are never clear to the observer, nor very interesting to
the local actors. There is always some kind of sexual aggression implied (facts,
words, or intentions); there is always a frantic coming and going of relatives,
who make attempts to prevent such arguments from turning violent, or, if
they fail to do so, also contribute to the quarrel. Such conflicts show no similarity to the concentric mode of white mens street-quarrels, where people
crowd around a small core of protagonists. The Yaminawa fights are ambulatory, rarely if ever lead to anything in the way of an immediate and decisive
follow-up. If any violent consequences ensue, this tends to happen much later,
in the form of something like a murder on a lone path far from the potentially explosive environment of the feast. The chief thus performs his role
roaming agitatedly through the stages of the drama gathering information,
reproaching the fighters and driving them to a place where he then delivers
a homily to the entire community. Nobody appears to pay any attention to
what is being said. On the sidelines, those involved unthread their own discourses: limping, staggered, uttered in hesitant Portuguese. They do not speak
about the causes of the fight, but about projects and fears. They will study
and live among the white men they say they will become cops, army
soldiers, or politicians, they will die young

The Restrained Forr7

The second feast to be discussed here began on the morning of 17 August.
It started with the slaughtering of a pig that Julio had bought from Antonio
Pedro, a resident of the downriver part of the Indian Reservation. Julio had
become chief only one-and-a-half months earlier, and had invited the Yaminawa and their neighbours to the party. Only the oldest and those most hostile
to Julios election as chief were absent. Nevertheless, there were representatives in attendance from all the political tendencies of the community. There
were also many foreign guests: rubber-gatherers, farmers, and Julios brothersin-law, who came from the Yaminawa village in Bolivia. When I arrived in
the early morning, the pig had already been slaughtered and was lying by the
bonfire near Julios house. After a while, it was cleaned and butchered, following the same procedures used by the Yaminawa when they butcher game.
The liver and the heart, regarded as delicacies, were offered to Julios close
kinsmen: Clementino ( Julios koka, MB) was given the liver and Chico de
Raimundo ( Julios ochi, eB) received the heart and a good deal of meat
both went home carrying their gifts. The intestines were given to an old
woman, who cleaned them up and prepared them usually bowels are
deemed of secondary interest, and given to old women and children. The
young men barbecued portions of meat especially ribs placing them
straight onto the fire. Most of the meat was taken into Julios wifes kitchen,
where it was cooked and afterwards distributed with manioc flour. Several
guests, notably one rubber-tapper (possibly a Piro), spent a lot of time hacking
off the pork fat. This was to be melted down to produce lard, a substance

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even more popular with the Yaminawa than the meat itself. Before the meal
was served, people were offered a mixture (mingau) of sweet manioc and
banana.
At this time, the guests started putting pressure on Julio, asking him to offer
them the alcohol and brandy destined for the party. Julio refused, pointing out
that drinking would be permitted only after 10 p.m. too late by Yaminawa
standards. Before noon the guests dispersed; some went to play soccer and
most of the others went home. Indeed, the real feast only began late at night.
It was a very dark night, making it difficult to follow the narrow paths across
the village. Even so, the Yaminawa got together in the large classroom of the
village school.The desks were placed along the walls, and as the guests arrived
they sat along them in a very quiet and formal way an unusual behaviour
whilst the hosts went about trying to hang up some oil-lamps. The chief,
resting on a desk, performed an eclectic repertoire on the guitar, trying to
entertain the guests, but the latter remained motionless in their seats. He persisted, and from time to time turned on a huge stereo, playing their only two
tapes of chicha music, a blend of salsa and huayno which is very popular in
Bolivia and Peru. The guests expressions held a mixture of astonishment and
worry; not even a drop of alcohol had yet been distributed. Meek requests
for alcohol were constantly addressed to Julio. Between one song and another,
he explained patiently that the alcohol should be managed in such a way as
to ensure that the feast would not end too early. Otherwise, everybody would
get drunk and the party would quickly be over.
There was, in fact, a remarkable display of the chief s authority. Only shortly
before drinking was scheduled to begin were alcohol and brandy distributed
in tiny glassfuls by the chief and his close subordinates.8 At about this time a
new guest arrived Chaguinhas, a crippled rubber-tapper who started to play
the guitar, producing a rough but effective sound from his instrument.
Chaguinhass enthusiastic forrs, followed by unskilled percussionists and
dancers, continued in a spirited mood until day break. At last the atmosphere
had livened up; the mood became uproarious and dancers feet stamped ever
more loudly on the wooden floor. Of course, such excitement also bred several
conflicts. One of these, which did not come out into the open during the
feast, started out as an item of gossip: Esmeralda, the chief s wife, and her close
circle of women friends, were said to be handing out some of the alcohol
which was in their keeping before the general distribution.This rumour spread
more widely on the following day, and some men, especially those close to
Julio, swore that in the future they would not attend any parties unless they
were assured that the hosts were intending to reserve most of the alcohol for
the machos. Esmeralda, in turn, complained about the heavy work she had
done to prepare all the food. Other conflicts emerged during the Forr itself.
The first was so brief and so confusing that it was impossible even to identify its protagonists. At around 2 a.m. Xima, an indigenous teacher, picked a
fight with his wife Esmeraldas sister and attacked Manuel Bravo, who he
claimed was flirting with her. The fight set everyone running around the hall.
It did not last more than a few minutes and left no one hurt. As the first light
of the day cloudy and cool began to spread, the feast ended and the
Yaminawa returned to their houses. A small group stayed in a circle around
Chaguinhas, singing at the chief s house while he slept.

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Improvised geometries
The first salient feature in these feasts is that both were organized around
foreign goods. Alcoholic drinks eclipsed only once by the extraordinary
Norwegian chocolates were paramount. On a second level, one finds all
kinds of Western items cherished by the Yaminawa: the language and the
music of the whites, their food even when it is cooked by Indian women,
it is livestock adopted from the foreigners9 their jokes and games and their
images of power (those cops that inhabit the minds of young Yaminawa). Even
the explicit motives for celebration childrens birthdays were borrowed
from the white mans custom. The Scandinavian Feast was celebrated on the
street, as Yaminawa name the city. The Restrained Forr, celebrated in the
Indian village but inside the school, was explicitly conceived as an imitation
of white mens dancing parties, with their spatial display and nimble dancing.10
In short, exotic commodities are inseparable from exotic behaviour. Scandinavian Feast and Restrained Forr are situations in which the Yaminawa test
their ability to act like the Whites.
The role of the chief is central to both situations: he is the one who gives
the feast; moreover, he is the one who regulates it to regulate must be
taken here in its strongest sense: to order, to police, to contain. In both cases
there is a central gap stretched to its limits in which the chief delays
the consumption of the good he is offering, trying to get the highest social
returns. Greed is, in a sense, the centre of the whole feast. If it goes unchecked,
the feast runs the risk of failing even before it begins as happened when
Julio was unable to hold back the alcohol destined to celebrate the Brazilian
national holiday, 7 September. Putting it into concrete terms, the regulation
of goods is necessary to place the consumers of such goods in proper order.
During the Restrained Forr the chief and his subordinates served the participants one by one, as they formed a kind of a circle inside the classroom.
During the Scandinavian Feast, two queues were organized, and the two
leaders, mediated by a foreigner, divided the Norwegian gift. So, here we are
facing a spatial representation of both principles of organization current in
Amazonian social morphologies:11 a diametric axis and a circular limit forms
that only the energy of the chief is able to enforce, with yelling and gifts.
It is worth remembering that while the chocolate splits the community and
while the alcohol runs around in a circle, food is distributed through
concentric waves, put into motion by kinship links in a way that could be
described as not totalizing.
With regard to drink there are still other things to be said: there are no,
and apparently never have been any, parties without some kind of inebriation.
The Yaminawa are not the only ones to make use of alcohol as an ideal path
from everyday life to the alternative social state that the feasts represent. None
the less, if alcohol is central to the feast, this is for other reasons. It is the
exoticism, not the inebriation, which constitutes the central feature of the
Scandinavian Feast and Restrained Forr.The Yaminawa could get drunk more
easily and cheaply on traditional fermented manioc or corn beverages. They
do not do so. The Yaminawa say that the reason for this is the current laziness, or as we prefer to say, the current lack of social cohesion and acculturation. However seductive, this is too loose a point. In his critique of

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Siskinds meat for sex theory (Gow 1987: 128; Siskind 1973: 117) Peter Gow
states that the correlate of game offered by men is not sex, but fermented
beverages. Among Yaminawa the women are stingy about their own production of food because the hunters ethos is weakening: there is less and less
game meat to exchange for. The rising prestige of Western commodities leads
young men to undertake wage labour, far from the deep forest. The alcohol,
a dawa (foreign) drink, replaces caiuma (manioc beer), and both men and
women dispute its consumption.12 The opposition between men and women
is central in the great Panoan rituals either as an enlargement of the joking
aggressions that permeate everyday life, or in the ludicrous battles common
in the Sharanahua feasts,13 or even in the combining of female clitoridectomy
and male nape-wounding during the initiation feasts in the Ucayali. However
the gender opposition is made explicit as the ethnographers themselves indicate all of the rituals end up by producing a balanced arrangement between
men and women who enjoy separate spheres of authority. In the Scandinavian Feast and, especially, in the Restrained Forr, such a tension manifests
itself at a secondary and in a sense a furtive level: women (some women)
subtract the essence of the feast to consume it in an anti-social manner; the
chief s wife complains about her work as a cook. In fact, in both feasts the
kind of food consumed did not require men to perform their function fully;
therefore it is not something that should be returned. In the Scandinavian
Feast this tension was not too strong a little girl taking away the chocolate
remains produced no serious comments because the food was clearly dawa
and, in a word, it reached the Yaminawa already prepared: men and women
could celebrate a gift that had arrived from the outside on equal terms. The
underpinning of the whole feast was not the co-operation between the sexes,
but the good communication with the outside, which, in turn, calls for the
ability to produce an arrangement between men and women and between
the several groups that constitute the Yaminawa collectivity.
Finally, we must note that there is no feast without fights. Gow (1987:
226-7) describes the Piro feast bringing together neighbours from several
communities among whom there are many kinship links as events in
which the actors, according to their own accounts, start eating like whites
and end up fighting like Indians or like animals. In the case of the Piro, the
boundaries revalidated through such fights are clear. These are the boundaries
of the Comunidad Nativa: the adversaries will always be the guests, kinsmen
whose biological proximity is made relative in face of the links built up
through coresidence within the Comunidad an entity created by the application of white mens law. The Yaminawa case presents a more difficult situation: there is no clear boundary that separates in and out, and the erratic
form of the fights a complex displacement from one house to another,
or from one circle of relatives to another apparently tests these limits.
Everyone must estimate what kind of kinship ties are worth stressing in accordance with the attitude towards each of the contenders, and what kind of
classification is to be acted out. We should remember that the breaking lines
of the community are carefully isolated from the feast: those who are openly
opposed keep themselves away from it. In the same fashion, people make a
tremendous effort to prevent the tension that is generated in the context
of the feast from becoming an overt and irreversible rupture. It is as if the

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useful order that is produced during the feast is an intermediate step between
peace and open war no doubt closer to the latter. The greatest danger
for Yaminawa society is not dispute, but the dissolution of social ties. The
circle and the double line that were organized for the distribution of goods
during the feasts illustrate the shift between Yaminawa sociological geometry
as expressed in discourse and the vague ascription of each individual
to its forms: the feasts and the resulting fights are the very moment in
which each Yaminawa must occupy, or better still, define his place in the social
plan.
To sum up, the Yaminawa have the rituals they need: not celebrations, but
rehearsals of an order that only exists virtually. At the end, the chief congratulates himself for the success of the endeavour: the feast managed to gather
all the Yaminawa and made them interact in a meaningful way; and he, the
chief, was endorsed as the main link in the network.
My analysis of the rituals is not a joke. The Durkheimian paradigm has
passed away, along with its ordered and ordaining ceremonies. Todays trends
point, on the contrary, to disorder in rites. From the perspective of structuralism, ritual is dispersed, serial, redundant; in comparison to myth, it seems
like a precarious object of study. The postmodernist approach, in turn, does
well out of the diversity of performances and interpretations that are acted
out in the ritual arena; but one can consider that this pluralistic emphasis relies
on a certain anti-ritualistic ethos, so esteemed in Western tradition since
ritual cannot be forgotten, it must, at least, be shattered.14 The concern with
order in ritual is an old one. In his vocabulary of the Indo-European institutions, Benveniste (1995) places the Latin concept ritus and the Greek thesms
in the chapter Law, and not in the chapter Religion as one might perhaps
expect. Both concepts denote order and rules, and evoke a concern with
norms rather than meanings. Throughout history, kings and clergymen have
tried to turn unruly acts of dance, drinking, and speech into ritus. Perhaps we
could apply to all ritual Lenins statement about revolutions: they are not to
be made, but organized as far as possible. To understand these tensions as
the central feature of ritual may help us to understand Yaminawa feasts: while
it would be difficult to call them rituals since they lack any link to decipherable symbols and beliefs, and are endowed with no sort of explicit efficacy they still have a ritual function, which is perfectly embodied by the
chief. This is not a productive function, but a structuring one: to make up a
system and to extract a collective value from the exorbitant symbolic fertility
of human action, to single out acts, in order to provide grounds for meaning.
Interpreters, and priests, are then welcome to grasp meanings and to ascribe
beliefs to them, in short, to make out a true ritual, and not just a dance or
a messy sharing of food and drink. Ritual would not be so true as we also
know if it was thoroughly engineered from a predefined symbolic script:
gathered meanings, like pearls, are more prized that cultivated ones. So, there
is a creative imbalance between ritual function and ritual significance, which
can only be appreciated from an historical perspective.15
My analysis of the Yaminawa feasts is not a joke I repeat unless we
consider as a joke the effort of the Yaminawa chief to put sociability within
amusement, regularity within distribution, and order within noise.To deny the
relevance of such an effort is to labour under the illusion that there are true-

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born rituals, with no authorship, which are brought onto the surface of social
life as an emanation of societys symbolic inclination.

Core foreignness, outward traditions

The denial of Yaminawa ritual, with which I began this article, is moreover a
consequence of some of the pitfalls of translation. In the Yaminawa language,
there are no equivalents for our nouns rite, ritual, or feast: but there are
verbs which may be literally translated as to play, to sing, and to heal, and
so on. There is also a noun, Mariri, which embraces a set of actions that in
the past were strongly condemned by missionaries and colonial officials. Today,
however, they are exalted as valuable Indian traditions by anthropologists, leftist
Roman Catholic missionaries and Indian agency officers: they include
dancing, singing, drinking of fermented beverages, and so on. We might
imagine that anyone performing Mariri is engaging in old ritual. But Mariri,
an indigenous word disseminated by officers of the Indian agency, is a neologism among Panoan people. The term refers to a plurality of amusements
which have come to be referred to collectively as Mariri.16 Colonial censures,
and colonial work regimes, erased or restrained old amusements. But, in doing
so, they also unified them as a banned Indian Heritage, ready to be claimed
later as a sign of Indian identity.17 The Yaminawa lack of rituals is in the
middle of such a process: they have lost their amusements, and they have not
recovered them as a meaningful whole.
Yet for the sake of consistency with the preceding discussion, some additional qualifications to this statement are called for here.
Let us reconsider a constant feature of the Yaminawa feasts: their outward
orientation. Anthropology has long emphasized the adoption of Western
objects, symbols, and behaviour by primitive groups as an indicator of acculturation, or of entrance into a world system. As long as this adoption could
be included under the heading of ritual, it was generally possible to recognize it as a form of native agency (for instance, resistance); and the actual
meaning of the borrowing thus became uncertain and ambiguous as far as
anthropologists were concerned. Consider the many kinds of religious movements described by anthropologists: for example, both older and newer forms
of African millenarianism (Balandier 1962: 417-520; Behrend 1997); and the
many so-called cargo cults of Oceania (Lattas 1992; Worsley 1957) or everywhere (Lindstrom 1993).18 Or consider the performances de moros y cristianos,
de Santiago, or de la Conquista, from the Meso-American Indian world, paradoxical celebrations of defeat or reinventions of history which focus on the
menacing characters of the Spaniards or their saints (Gutirrez Estvez 1993).
At the other end of the spectrum, consider parody, whether it be in the Hauka
rituals filmed by Jean Rouch in Les matres fous (cf. also Rouch 1960: 73-7),
and more recently described by Stoller (1995), the clowning of the Agbegijo
at the Egungun festival, the ironic mimicry of the Bawle statues or the Igbo
mbari houses (Stoller 1995), or in the Chewa ritual described by Kaspin (1993).
In each case the whites/Christians, their power and their wealth, are vested
with grotesque or monstrous traits. The ritual exorcises them or, as Stoller
suggests, allows for their power to be captured and used at some point in the

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internal political game. As suggested by the sequence of cargo cults analysed

in the pioneering work of Lawrence (1967), the white man oscillates between
the position of a paternal and generous relative and that of a terrible enemy
who must be defeated, and this extreme duality perpetuates the movement of
the cults. In all these instances, the white mans symbols
come to be potent precisely because of the historical circumstances in which they acquire
their meanings they tend to become the currency of ritual that seeks both to preserve
endangered values and to give birth to new possibilities And so, over time, the exogenous becomes indigenous, the strange is synthesized into the established order (Comaroff
& Comaroff 1993: xxii).

Correlate cases abound in the South American Lowlands. Parodies of whites

are inscribed within the rituals of the Bororo (Novaes 1997), Kaxinaw
(Deshayes 2000: 144-7; Lagrou 1998), and Piro (Alvarez 1972).19 Regarding
the engraved Kuna figures from the regions outer periphery, Severis (2000)
analysis and his critique of Taussigs (1993: 251) interpretation provide an
excellent overview of this issue. Since the Kuna figures are not mere representations of white men but are instead portrayals of powerful white mens
spirits, their comically exaggerated features can not be reduced to a simple
statement of contempt or hostility, which is otherwise explicit (Severi 2000:
125-7). There is an extensive literature on millenarianism in South America
(Carneiro da Cunha 1973; Clastres 1978; Crocker 1967; Schaden 1969: 241;
for comparison with Melanesian cargo cults, cf. Brown 2001). Such movements have many superficial similarities to the various kinds of comparable
beliefs and practices in other former colonial societies. There is also much
common ground in analyses of all these expressive forms; indeed, in almost
every case we see debate in much the same terms. Those involved focus on
the issue of origins whether indigenous or external and also on whether
the experience for those involved is one of trauma or creative imagining, resistance or syncretism, subversive mimicry or submissive imitation.Yet this longrunning game of mirrors might be replaced with something altogether
different. In place of binary oppositions we might employ a third term, one
specific to the South American Lowlands or at least to certain analytic features of the region. The great Panoan rituals cited at the beginning of this
article have been analysed as episodes of assimilation of otherness, or more
precisely as the constitution of the social self through this assimilation (cf.
McCallum 2001; McCallum 1994 for analysis of a Xingu celebration in a very
similar manner). The visit or performance of the others, not only here but
in many other examples from the Lowlands, defines a society whose nexus is
not provided by corporate groups or explicit rules of belonging or exchange
(Howard 1993); society is produced by the consumption of otherness, in forms
that range from actual or symbolic cannibalism to the capture of prisoners,
names, songs, or virtual pets (Fausto 2001; Vilaa 1992). Importantly, none of
these cases can be reduced to a dialectical deduction of the self based on the
other. Instead, what characterizes them is the notion that, in one way or
another, the enemy is immanent to the self (Viveiros de Castro 2002: chap.
4), and that the ritual institutes or updates this immanence.This issue becomes
clearer when we compare an African ritual such as the aforementioned Chewa

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(Kaspin 1993) with MacCallums (2001) descriptions of the Nishi Pae. In both
cases, which are otherwise surprisingly similar in numerous aspects, there exists
a tense encounter between the community and an external contingent (of
spirits or foreigners). In the African case, however, the celebration ends with
the re-establishment of the previous limits (a battle must take place against
the spirits so that they do not seize the wives of the living); while in the
Amerindian cases these limits only begin to exist with the celebration and
with the incorporation of the other.
Should it be surprising to anyone that in a new ritual the white man can
take on the old roles of enemies, spirits or the dead? Something like this
happens at the Yaminawa feasts.These are, again, both somewhat parodic (with
their affected mimicry of exotic behaviour) and somewhat millenarian or
cargoist, with their hopes of transformation and external gifts, and with the
aspirations of the Amazonian chief to become a type of super-bigman supported by the management of development projects. Furthermore, these feasts
perform a society, bringing together the Yaminawa as a whole, with the crucial
assistance of external elements. They are following a tradition common in the
Lowlands, the same that reveals itself in the great rituals of the Pano group.
The Yaminawa, who were always a marginal and unstable part of this group
(cf. Calavia Sez, forthcoming), carry out this tradition in a most casual or
improvised way, and even this is in itself a tradition.
They are thus traditional, even too traditional to be traditionalists. Perhaps
there is only one genuine traditionalist: the leader of the group, eager to introduce it to the symbolic market of Amazonian indigenousness. If the ancient
rituals performed indigenous societies out of external substances and spirits,
traditionalist rituals perform indigenous societies for the other. Native leadership must seek to promote and to control these symbolic foreign affairs in
both ways. Different political performances might reduce a people to a sad,
riteless condition, or reinforce attempts to build up a great ancient ritual,
or even assimilate the ceremonial culture of the white settlers and missionaries. External recognition and support will be different in each case.
In Brazil there is recent and extensive literature about the recovery or reinvention of rituals: important examples include the Tor, a dance of the spirits
which represents the Indian identity of several emerging ethnic groups from
northeastern Brazil (Oliveira 1998: 60; 1999), and the funeral Kiki ceremony,
this being the main symbol of a group, the Kaingang, which used to be itself
an icon of Indian acculturation in Brazil (Almeida 1998; Fernandes 1998).20
Although fertile enough in details to satisfy the ethnographers romantic taste,
the great rituals of several Amazonian groups could be included among these
examples. The recovery or reinvention of rituals unless we merely want to
delight in demystifying narratives must be understood in a broader context.
This context should include ritual innovations, processes of de-ritualization
(which, like rituals, have been diverse),21 and, last but not least, the not-sonatural ritual continuities within those groups which for some reason present
a more vigorous culture.
Globalization softens exotic barriers and reveals the ritual virtuality of any
object or action22 while annulling the old ritual, it can provide the elements
for the new one. The commodity is turned into a ritual object (as in the
Yaminawa case); the old ritual is converted into an exchange value (as in the
case of the Tor and the Kiki), or even converted into a near-commodity (as

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169

in the case of the traditional ceremonies so valued by the white mans

camera).23 I tend to believe that indigenous rituals are rapidly being grouped
at one or another end of this polarity.24
Even if anthropology becomes increasingly prone to admitting a conceptual approximation between the traditional rituals and the improvised ones, it
is harder to accept their temporal proximity, that is, the idea that in a short
period of time the improvised becomes traditional. The distance between the
Yaminawa feasts and true rituals can remain unbridged, or might be crossed,
but in any case it is much smaller and more contingent than it seems. Part of
the prestige of ritual issues in anthropological studies arises from the supposedly long-standing character of ritual. Studies of rituals from an historical
perspective are comparatively rare, but they could show that these complex
structures are ephemeral and easily created and lost. Although Western
ideology used to see Indians as a reserve of authenticity rather than as
inventors of traditions, we must acknowledge that in an illiterate society
it is much easier to process these inventions and that they leave few traces;
moreover, such aptitude for invention is the best guarantee for the historical
continuity of these peoples.

NOTES
1

This article is based on my fieldwork among the Yaminawa of the Acre River in 1992-3,
and secondarily among Yawanawa from Rio Gregorio in 1998. Research among the Yaminawa
was funded by So Paulo State public research endowment (FAPESP).
2
The acculturated and disintegrated image of the Yaminawa arises from regional stereotypes
common among Indians, Indian agency officers, and anthropologists and plays an important role in Graham Townsleys (1988) pioneering study. Reports of Yaminawa families wandering as beggars in the streets of Acre towns frequently appear in local newspapers.
3
In studies on the South American Lowlands, historical pessimism goes hand in hand with
a culturalist emphasis. Historical pessimism is, also, a sub-product of nation-building ideologies,
confronted by very small-scale Indian societies.
4
There is extensive literature on Panoan rituals. For a general overview, see Erikson,
Kensinger, Illius & Aguiar (1994). McCallum (2001) and Lagrou (1998) offer detailed descriptions of girls initiation rites. For the Shipibo case, see Roe (1982: 93-112). Siskind (1973: 96101) has much to say about the Sharanahua special hunt. Yaminawa shamanic sessions
performed with chants and shori an hallucinogenic beverage are private practices, more
understandable as esoteric techniques than as ritual (Townsley 1993).
5
Reports from recent visitors to Iaco villages suggest that such traditional rituals are still
enacted there.
6
Of course, a less common notion of ritual is to be found in many studies focused in ritual
contingency and improvisation, especially in urban places: Howe (1998), Blehr (1999), and
Baumann (1992) are some examples.
7
Forr is a Brazilian country dance, most popular in the northeast and thus in the Amazon
region. It refers as well to the dance-hall, and is a synonym for both strife and spree.
8
This control over the drinkers was a remarkable success. Two weeks later, the chief brought
an ample supply of bottles from the town for the Brazilian national feast, but this was all consumed en route and on the next day; the expected feast did not take place at all.
9
Other Yaminawa feasts called for the sacrifice of an ox from the communitys herd as a
rule this meat is considered to be of little value.
10
lvarez (1972) and Gow (1987) reported a similar mimesis of the white mans behaviour
in the Piro feasts. Yet they offer opposing interpretations of this. lvarez understands mimesis
as a satire against foreign customs. For Gow, see below.
11
Cf. Viveiros de Castro (1993: 171-7). The diametric/concentric binomy, of course, comes
from Lvi-Strauss (1958). The choice of different modes of distribution by the two chiefs was

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not quite casual. Z Correia is a politician, interested in the inner rapport between Yaminawa
sub-groups it is the diametric oppositions which he must control. Jlio Isodawa is a teacher,
whose rise to leadership was linked to educational projects, and therefore to discourse on
indigenous identity and external boundaries.
12
Katukina women (Lima [1994: 86]) also give up their caiuma-making. In this case, however,
it was explicit avoidance of reputedly dangerous drinking-feasts. Katukina forrs, furthermore,
are very similar to Yaminawa ones (Lima [1994: 111-15]).
13
The traditional Yaminawa feasts performed nowadays in Rio Iaco village share this
pattern: verbal aggression on the part of women, and feigned attack by men, alongside such
dances.
14
It is worth pointing out that, traditionally, most studies of ritual are not concerned with
ritual as such, but focus on its contents, its values be they aesthetic, political, musical,
ludicrous, therapeutic, and so on or else reduce ritual to them.
15
This division between ritual meaning and ritual function is borrowed from Giobellina
Brumana (1990: 149), who in fact describes ritual function as a consequence, or as a subproduct, of the symbolic order. My point is that, by performing this ritual function, choices
are made out of the vast virtualities of the symbolic order, and that these choices may require
further elaboration, eventually leading to a new, and more concrete and explicit version of such
order. So, meaning can be, in turn, a hyper-product of ritual function.
16
Generally speaking, anthropologists are inclined either to consider amusement (brincadeira)
as a contemptuous colonialist term borrowed by the Indians, or, alternatively, as an object of
study less relevant than the great rituals. It is important to note that the Indians are less worried
about authenticity, and tend to give their feasts names such as forr or fandango Portuguese
expressions that are used to designate dance and parties in general. The ethnographic material
about these brincadeiras is abundant, and is now becoming the object of closer attention: the
events described by Labiack (1997) about the Kanamari, and those by Carid Naveira (1999)
about the Yawanawa, are relevant examples.
17
This phenomenon is, of course, a constant in colonial processes. Blochs observation about
the Merina case It is not too much to say that it was Christianity that created Merina
Religion as an entity in itself (1986: 20-2) could extend to numerous other cases. Or it
could also ascend to a more general theoretical level, if we concede that colonial experience
has redefined the metropolitan notions of ritual or religion.
18
Cargo-cult is, of course, a long debated and finally deconstructed term. Recent
analysis (Hermann [1992]; Lindstrom [1993]; Kaplan [1995]) tends to deny any validity to it
outside the colonial representations of other, or to accord to the white man a far less central
role in its growth and structure as expressions of Melanesian religious imagination.
19
Cf. also the several Pano cases I have analysed elsewhere (Calavia Sez 1999).
20
However, this literature has not focused on the diversity of the internal developments
regarding these new old rituals. This could lead us to think of them as folklore festivals, which
is not necessarily the case. Fernandes, for example (pers. comm. [1999]) mentioned to me
the awful consequences diseases, perhaps deaths according to some Kaingang, of the
performance of Kiki (a ritual that deals with the dead persons of the group) by improvised
specialists.
21
Analyses such as Gows (2001) warn us against an unduly facile reckoning of the end of
ritual life. Perhaps they also warn us against an over-interpretation in discourses on indigenous
ritual transformation.
22
The simultaneous debilitation of the West/rest and the sacred/profane boundaries also allow
for the agency of the indigenous peoples to be recognized outside ritual. The native can carry
out his parodies, his cultural enhancements, or his antagonistic acculturations in the most
quotidian domains (cf. Sahlins 1997).
23
However, the proportion of indigenous population and the political role reserved for it
within Brazilian society introduces a perceptible difference between its ritual commoditization process and what can be observed in Melanesia (cf. Gewertz & Errington [1991]). In
Brazil, the pecuniary reward is, for the time being, a complement or an indirect consequence
of the main external objective of ritual performance, that is, the affirmation of cultural authenticity: the roll of clients is formed by institutions and large communication companies, and not
by private consumers of exoticism, which is coherent with the perception of indigenous identity as a highly scarce resource, at times an object of a strategic reserve.

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24

In the Xingu, the true ritual paradise of Lowland South America, between the traditional
rituals performed repeatedly for the video cameras and the distribution of Western goods
(strongly ritualized since the first years of contact) (Franchetto [1992]) there is a rich series of
ceremonials which organize the linguistically and ethnically diverse context (Bastos [1990]). It
is important, however, to question to what extent this intersemiotic role may survive in the
face of the political and linguistic mediation of the white man.

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la recherche dun rituel : tradition, au-del et mauvaises

manires en Amazonie
Rsum
La question du rituel est aujourdhui centrale dans les affaires indiennes en Amazonie. Qui
dit rituel dit tradition, donc lgitimit ethnique. Pourtant, chez certains groupes comme les
Yaminawa de langue panoan, labsence dun cadre politique et social strict empche linvention dactions collectives pouvant tre reconnues comme des rituels. Le commandement
se base la fois sur une politique extrieure et une recherche interne dactions collectives
structures, susceptibles de donner un assemblage de parents et de proches le statut de communaut indigne. Lauteur sintresse ici ces efforts dlaboration de rituels et dcrit deux
ftes, informelles par ailleurs, qui ont eu lieu dans une rserve Yaminawa au Brsil, terrain
o il a effectu ses recherches en 1993.
Departamento de Antropologia, CFH Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 88040-970
Florianopolis SC, Brazil. occs@terra.com.br