Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America
352
Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America
352eBook
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Overview
Fluent Selves examines narrative practices throughout lowland South America focusing on indigenous communities in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, illuminating the social and cultural processes that make the past as important as the present for these peoples. This collection brings together leading scholars in the fields of anthropology and linguistics to examine the intersection of these narratives of the past with the construction of personhood. The volume’s exploration of autobiographical and biographical accounts raises questions about fieldwork, ethical practices, and cultural boundaries in the study of anthropology.
Rather than relying on a simple opposition between the “Western individual” and the non-Western rest, contributors to Fluent Selves explore the complex interplay of both individualizing as well as relational personhood in these practices. Transcending classic debates over the categorization of “myth” and “history,” the autobiographical and biographical narratives in Fluent Selves illustrate the very medium in which several modes of engaging with the past meet, are reconciled, and reemerge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803265158 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Suzanne Oakdale is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community (Nebraska, 2005). Magnus Course is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile.
Read an Excerpt
Fluent Selves
Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America
By Suzanne Oakdale, Magnus Course
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6515-8
CHAPTER 1
"Like the Ancient Ones"
The Intercultural Dynamics of Personal Biography in Amazonian Ecuador
CASEY HIGH
I was born on Fish River. Afterwards we lived well on Palm River. We saw the high hills far off clearly. We saw far downriver.
My big brother was Wawae. My father was Tyaento, my mother Akawo. Nampa my brother was a small child. Oba my sister was still younger. My big sister was Onaenga, my other sister, Gimari. My mother's relatives were many. My uncles were Wamoñi and Gikita.
Moipa and Itaeka did not do well. Fleeing and hiding we came, far, far downriver. We went by canoe, then we went back.
When did they spear? They speared at night. My father escaped into the water. They dug a grave for him and he was caused to die. But he didn't die right away. I didn't see it. They spoke and I heard. My relative said, "I buried him."
Moipa and Itaeka speared. Where did they go, did they say? On a small stream upriver we returned. We didn't see them. We drank the water of maeñika fruit. It rained, we got wet. The jaguar growled, the monkeys called. We climbed the trees when the jaguar came.
Then we fled. We came at night in the moonlight. We speared gyaegyae fish.
We were planting peanuts on Palm River. The outsiders came with guns and shot. Their dogs barked. We went in the water, then fled on the other side.
—The Dayuma Story (Wallis 1960:14)
This chapter considers the ways in which autobiographical narratives express indigenous Amazonian understandings of personhood, history, and relations with nonindigenous people. It looks specifically at how, in Waorani communities of Amazonian Ecuador, personal biographies of violence have become part of a broader cultural narrative in the context of changing intergenerational and intercultural relations. Ethnographies of narrative practices in lowland South America have provided examples of how indigenous regimes of myth and history evoke historical continuities and incorporate aspects of colonial history (Hugh-Jones 1988; Hill 1988; Gow 2001; High 2009a). This work, alongside the growing attention to memory in Amazonian anthropology (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007), raises important questions about the relationship between indigenous understandings of personhood and historical consciousness in lowland South America (Taylor 1993; Oakdale 2001; Course 2007). As elsewhere, Amazonian historical narratives express not only a sense of group identity and alterity but also highly individualized experiences that transcend the spatial and cultural boundaries of communities, ethnicities, and even nation-states.
In this chapter I attempt to understand how the autobiographies of certain Waorani elders, which tend to emphasize Waorani people becoming victims of violence, at the same time describe complex and enduring relations across social boundaries. Drawing on the autobiographical narrative of Dayuma, a key figure in both Waorani and missionary history, I describe how Waorani people have come to incorporate kowori (non-Waorani people) into a cultural narrative in which victimhood is a marker of personhood and sociality. I also examine how narratives of victimhood like these are transformed in the context of urban Amazonian Ecuador, where young Waorani men involved in indigenous politics align themselves with the biographies and imagery of famous warriors. I argue that in the case of both Dayuma's autobiography of victimhood and young men's praise for "the ancient ones," a cultural process of forgetting takes place in which personal biographies become part of a broader regime of indigenous history and political representation.
My analysis draws in part on ethnographic fieldwork in Waorani communities along the Curaray River and the surrounding areas since the late 1990s, Christian missionary texts published since the 1960s, as well as a short excerpt from Dayuma's autobiography as she told it to me in her home in 2009. My hope is that the combination of these sources, alongside the practices and commentary of young men who recently migrated to the frontier cities of Amazonian Ecuador, will illustrate the ways in which autobiographical narratives become cultural narratives and how these narratives change from one generation to another, evoking indigenous engagement with broader intercultural and political relations in Amazonia today.
Dayuma's Story
In 1960 a Christian-inspired book, The Dayuma Story: Life under Auca Spears, was published and distributed widely among evangelical communities in North America. Much as its author Ethel Emily Wallace anticipated, the book and the story it told became a source of inspiration for evangelical missions and Christian audiences across the world. It tells the story of Dayuma, a young Waorani woman who fled her native community in the 1940s in the wake of a series of intergroup revenge killings. She later befriended U.S. missionary Rachel Saint while living and working at a hacienda on the frontier of Amazonian Ecuador. The book's front cover claims to tell "the breathtaking story of the Ecuadorian Indian girl who escaped from—and returned to—the world's most murderous tribe." It tells how the Waorani, then referred to in Ecuador as aucas ("wild" Amazonian Indians), became the target of one of the most widely publicized mission campaigns of the twentieth century.
As the opening lines of Dayuma's narrative quoted at the beginning of the chapter suggest, The Dayuma Story tells how Dayuma's family became victims of spear-killing raids carried out by rival families and the incursions of nonindigenous people who came into contact with Waorani groups at a time when they were relatively isolated from the national society. It also describes an event in 1956 in which Rachel Saint's brother, Nathan Saint, and four other North American missionaries were killed by Waorani in a failed attempt to establish peaceful contact with Waorani people—some of whom were close relatives of Dayuma. This event, which came to be known in missionary literature and international media as the "Palm Beach" killings, became an important narrative of Christian self-sacrifice in the name of evangelism.
At the time of the killings Rachel Saint, who was affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) missionary organization, was conducting interviews and linguistic research with Dayuma, who later joined Saint in her return to Dayuma's family. Their relationship became a key platform for establishing the first Christian mission in Waorani territory. Dayuma and Saint would eventually become central figures in the mission in the 1960s, facilitating relations between Waorani groups, other indigenous communities, the Ecuadorian authorities, and petroleum companies that sought to develop oil resources on Waorani lands. Dayuma's autobiography is thus not only one of personal tragedy but also a narrative that maps the ways in which Waorani people came to establish enduring relations with kowori—non-Waorani people. Like Dayuma herself, by the 1970s most Waorani at the mission had converted to Christianity, and there were an increasing number of marriages between Waorani and Kichwa-speaking people (Yost 1981). Most importantly however, at least in The Dayuma Story and numerous other missionary books published subsequently, the mission coincided with a significant decrease in spear-killings between Waorani groups. The enduring presence of Dayuma's story in popular imagination, and that of the missionary "martyrs" killed in 1956, became evident in 2006 when a Hollywood film about Waorani history, End of the Spear (Hanon 2006), was released and viewed by millions of cinemagoers in the United States.
The point of this chapter is not to recount or debate the "history" told in missionary texts, movies, and more recent ethical critiques of missionary activities among the Waorani. My interest is instead to consider "Dayuma's story" as an autobiographical narrative that both exemplifies Waorani expressions of the self as victim (Rival 2002; High 2006) and points to the ways in which missionaries and other nonindigenous people have come to be part of Waorani understandings of history and sociality. Although the SIL was banned from Ecuador in the early 1980s and Rachel Saint died in 1994 after living with the Waorani for decades, Dayuma continued to live in the Waorani village of Toñampari—not far from the locations where her relatives and the missionaries were killed in past times—until her death in 2014. To outsiders who read misleading accounts of Dayuma as the "chief" or "matriarch" of her "tribe," she might have appeared to be a seemingly unremarkable elderly woman when I first met her in the mid-1990s. While few status distinctions are recognized in Waorani communities—even among elders—Dayuma was an avid and capable storyteller. On several occasions she shared with me pieces of her autobiography, sometimes at my request and sometimes on her own initiative. It wasn't until recently, however, that I began making video recordings of her narrative as part of a project to document the Waorani language. The following are short excerpts from a narrative she told to me in her home in June 2009:
Dayuma: Long ago they speared my father dead, you understand? They really speared my father dead long ago, but I did not see it myself. We went to the other side and hid; then we heard that they speared my father. I ran away, all the way to the outsiders' house, but nobody was there. We went far away, but we found no outsiders. Since we were worried we returned, and when we got back Wamoñe had been speared in the leg. Despite so much killing they survived; only my father died.
Casey: What about your mother?
Dayuma: Yes, my mother, Akawo, only recently died in Tiweno; she died of sickness. My father was speared dead, and so was my brother Wawe. Other Waorani people killed Wamoñe for no reason at all; that's how he died. They speared him all over, and then [after he was dead] they speared him in the head and in the eyes, again and again. My mother told me that he was lying there dead; she said they speared him in the head.
Not long ago my mother, Akawo, died in Tiweno. My brothers and Nemo died; they cut her with a machete. My sister Onenka ... at night the wind was blowing so much that branches were breaking from the trees ... one went right through my sister's eye, like this [demonstrating with her hand]. She died ... two of my sisters died, but two survived and are still alive today. I came to Tiweno, and we lived very well until Guimare's child had a painful birth. She died while giving birth, but her child Tomas and her other child survived. My sister Oba became sick and died of measles, so now I am alone, an old woman. I live all alone, but there are many children of Oba and Guimare. Her [Guimare's] husband already died but Oba's husband Yowe still lives.
Casey: Was Nemo [missionary Rachel Saint] like your sister?
Dayuma: Nemo was like my sister, and I lived loving her very much. She used to go to Quito and bring me food; she brought rice, noodles, and oatmeal for me to eat. Now Nemo is gone, and there is nobody to bring me food. She was very good. She also brought medicine for everyone to take when they were sick. When they found out that Nemo died they no longer listened to God's words since Nemo was gone; she was a great preacher. They live very badly; they get drunk and fight.
Don Pedro, Eduardo, Captain Nathan [missionaries] ... five of them died. They died because Nenkiwi was angry and speared them. When they buried Guimare, they became angry among themselves and wanted to kill. They grabbed his [Nenkiwi's] spear and broke it, and then went and killed the outsiders. I am angry because they secretly speared and killed them while I was away in Quito. If I hadn't gone to Quito, I would have heard them calling and would have returned. If the outsiders had lived, they would have made a big runway and we would have lived very well. I am very angry because they did this very bad thing. Babe [missionary Steve Saint], Nathan's son, used to live here, but he doesn't come anymore. Felipe never comes anymore; I wonder who the other one was, his brother? I don't remember who it was; he used to come a lot, but he doesn't come anymore.
In this instance, Dayuma began speaking to me about how her father was killed after I asked her to tell me a story about her life. As with several other autobiographical narratives she shared with me in the past, this story focuses on the violent deaths of her close relatives and how the apparent chaos of past killings led to the suffering that comes with the absence of kin—both then and still today. The lines quoted here are part of a longer narrative she told that details the pain experienced by her relatives after they were speared. While Dayuma's experiences and personal biography are no doubt extraordinary, her emphasis on victimhood is part of a broader Waorani cultural narrative that firmly situates the self and the group as victims of aggression, be it from enemy spears or kowori outsiders. Ethnographies of the Waorani have given considerable weight to the idea that Waorani see themselves as "prey" to powerful outsiders, who they assumed until recently were cannibals (Rival 2002; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). The word kowori, applied to all non-Waorani people, appears also to have referred to "spirits" of the dead who were contrasted to "people" (Waorani) on the basis of their assumed cannibalism. A common theme in many Waorani oral histories is the violence of kowori who entered their lands in the past. Still today Waorani often position themselves explicitly as victims of kowori, whether in reference to other Ecuadorians who colonize their lands or oil companies operating on the Waorani territorial reserve.
Killings like those narrated by Dayuma are commonly described in morally charged terms, such as ononki, which refers to deceptive or unjustified actions. Ononki can refer lightheartedly to a mistake, perhaps simply going the wrong way on a path, but it is also used to describe intentional behavior that aimed at tricking someone or lying or in reference to unjustified or unprovoked killing. In the text here Dayuma describes the killing of her uncle Wamoñe, saying, "Warani ononki ononkiponi tenonani" (others speared him for no reason at all), emphasizing his victimhood in the face of seemingly unprovoked violence. Dayuma gives particular emphasis to the word ononki in this phrase by repeating it and adding the intensifier suffix, poni. Similarly, the word for spearing, tenonani (they spear), is often repeated for emphasis.
Fig. 1. Dayuma in her home in 2010. (Photo by Casey High)
Narratives like these also describe past killings as wene (bad, evil) or wiwa (bad, ugly). Like ononki, the term wene can also be highly morally charged, to the extent that Waorani people translate it as the Spanish word diablo, meaning "devil." They generally use this term not to talk about a specific supernatural entity (such as the Christian devil) but rather as a general concept of actions that they find to be unacceptable. In the transcription Dayuma repeats the word wene in describing her anger after the killing of the missionaries (wene wene kegaranimpa / "they did this very bad thing"). Although The Dayuma Story and similar missionary texts do not provide transcriptions, it is likely that translated phrases we find in them, such as "Moipa and Itaeka did not do well," would have indicated similar usages of ononki or wiwa given the tone and content of the narrative.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fluent Selves by Suzanne Oakdale, Magnus Course. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction SUZANNE OAKDALE and MAGNUS COURSE,
Part 1. Neither Myth nor History,
1. "Like the Ancient Ones": The Intercultural Dynamics of Personal Biography in Amazonian Ecuador CASEY HIGH,
2. "This Happened to Me": Exemplary Personal Experience Narratives among the Piro (Yine) People of Peruvian Amazonia PETER GOW,
3. Memories of the Ucayali: The Asháninka Story Line HANNE VEBER,
Part 2. Persons within Persons,
4. Multiple Biographies: Shamanism and Personhood among the Marubo of Western Amazonia PEDRO DE NIEMEYER CESARINO,
5. The End of Me: The Role of Destiny in Mapuche Narratives of the Person MAGNUS COURSE,
Part 3. Creating Sociality across Divides,
6. Relieving Apprehension and Limiting Risk: The Rituals of Extraordinary Communicative Contacts ELLEN B. BASSO,
7. The Lascivious Life of Gabriel Gentil OSCAR CALAVIA SÁEZ,
Part 4. Hybridity, Dissonance, and Reflection,
8. An Indigenous Capitão's Reflections on a Mid-Twentieth-Century Brazilian "Middle Ground" SUZANNE OAKDALE,
9. Fluid Subjectivity: Reflections on Self and Alternative Futures in the Autobiographical Narrative of Hiparidi Top'tiro, a Xavante Transcultural Leader LAURA R. GRAHAM,
10. Autobiographies of a Memorable Man and Other Memorable Persons (Southern Amazonia, Brazil) BRUNA FRANCHETTO,
Contributors,
Index,