CHAPTER 2
First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship
in North-Eastern Amazonia
Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
The Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo are Carib-speaking Amerindians of the
border regions of Brazil, southern Suriname and southern French Guiana.1
We have carried out field research since 2003 in southern Suriname, in a
predominantly Trio village shared with a number of Wayana and most of
the surviving Akuriyo. A relationship of asymmetry has evolved between
the Trio and Akuriyo since the late 1960s, although arguably from a native point of view these two populations have engaged in a relationship of
mutual avoidance as far back as people can remember. Despite, or perhaps
because of, the memory of prior encounters between them, the Trio and
Akuriyo would probably have maintained their mutual avoidance longer,
had it not been for the intervention of evangelical missionaries.
These missionaries, and in particular a Baptist pastor named Claude
Leavitt, who had established himself and his family among the recently
contacted Trio a decade earlier (Conley 2000), organized a series of contact expeditions to the remote area around the headwaters of the Oeremari River near the border with Brazil in search of an elusive group of
Akuriyo hunter-gatherers then known as wajiarikure, a Trio ethnonym
used to refer to wild, semihuman beings living in the forest (Forth 2008).
Trio people generally consider forest dwellers to be barbaric in everyday practices such as cooking and the treatment of their bodies, but they
also fear them for their fierceness and predatory capacities (these capacities are known as ëire in Trio, a word also used to describe the aggressive,
magically strengthened bodily state of a warrior). The Trio feel ambivalent
towards wild people, considering them individuals of reduced capacity for
socialization who nonetheless enjoy superhuman predatory and transformational aptitudes. This helps to explain the way Trio-Akuriyo relations
unfolded after contact, and particularly how this relationship came to be
considered mutually beneficial and construed in terms of ownership and
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
tutelage. As we shall describe, the Akuriyo became the Trio’s property
through capture and then became the creatures of the Trio, in the sense
that the latter endeavoured to make them into ‘real people’.
In 1968, the first of a series of Trio and Wayana expeditions led by
North American missionaries located a group of Akuriyo. On subsequent
expeditions, some Trio remained with the Akuriyo to gain their confidence
and learn their language. After various sedentarization schemes (including
planting fruit trees and manioc, and starting a Maroon-run manioc ‘farm’
to encourage trade) had failed and progressive contact had led to major
health problems among the Akuriyo, the missionaries decided to cut their
losses and make the Akuriyo settle in Tëpu with the Trio (Crocker n.d.;
Yohner 1970; Schoen 1969, 1971; Conley 2000: 393).
This was not the first time Leavitt had embarked upon a contact expedition; as a member of the Unevangelized Fields Mission, he had gained
some experience in southern Guyana with the three Hawkins brothers,
who had founded the mission of Kanashen among the Waiwai in the early
1950s. It was in southern Guyana that the technique of ‘cumulative evangelism’ (Grotti 2009) was developed, whereby resident missionaries accompanied by converted Amerindians organized expeditions to contact
other groups and encourage them to sedentarize alongside the indigenous
expedition members. This procedure worked well among the populations
of the central Guiana region, which at the time were typically constituted
by relatively mobile extended cognatic groups. The process of cumulative evangelism involving the Waiwai was well documented by Catherine
Howard (2001). Howard describes the Waiwai perspective on these expeditions to contact those whom they referred to as the ‘unseen tribes’. She
stresses in particular that the Waiwai’s willingness to take part in these expeditions reflected an enthusiasm for the capture and assimilation of other
people, and that both capture and assimilation were expressed through the
missionary idiom of evangelization.
The men who embarked on these first contacts were all in the prime
of life. Without exception they were young heads of households, most of
whom had developed a special relationship with the missionaries, making
them their jipawana, their friends or trading partners. All later rose to
become prominent elders as plant and chant healers, village leaders or
pastors. In the Trio case in particular, the initial search for trails or camps
in the forest and the establishment of first contacts were solely a male
enterprise.
During the initial interactions between the Trio and Akuriyo, the hunter-gatherers expressed restraint and a desire to cut bonds by moving on
and trekking back into the forest. The Trio expedition members nevertheless immediately took the initiative to develop a form of ongoing interac-
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First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
65
tion, and some stayed for months with the Akuriyo, following them on
their treks between camps and communicating with the use of a portable
radio.2 Almost immediately after the first contacts, the missionaries stood
back and let the Trio engage in most transactions with the Akuriyo. From
catalysing and organizing the first expeditions, they went on to provide
logistical support. As three main groups of about thirty people each were
contacted between 1968 and 1971 (Jara 1990: 17), Trio men also tracked
down the entirety of the remaining scattered nuclear families.
When diseases started to spread, the Akuriyo were eventually flown in a
light aircraft to Tëpu, where they were settled, each family unit closely supervised by a Trio expedition member. The Akuriyo families were to provide services such as hunting and wood fetching for the families of their
‘captors’, and in return they would be taught how to live as the Trio do.
As captive wild people, the wajiarikure became Akuriyo, after the name
for one of the Akuriyo groups, Akuriekare (or agouti people). In this new,
domesticated guise they were incorporated into village life as children:
they were given the front benches in Church and were encouraged to go
to school, were taught how to make gardens and prepare manioc bread
and manioc beer, and were shown how to cook (and eat) ‘real food’ –
thoroughly cooked meat stew eaten with manioc bread. The Trio held that
all of these activities wrought bodily change upon the Akuriyo, but they
most obviously and visibly changed their bodies by cutting their hair and
plucking their eyebrows the way the Trio do.3
Partial Familiarization
The Akuriyo were domesticated by the Trio but have never been fully
assimilated by them, in contrast to comparable cases in the region.4 The
reasons for this seem to lie in Trio narratives of Akuriyo identity, which
emphasize their barbarity. Primarily because they were nomadic huntergatherers, the Akuriyo were considered particularly wild and inhuman by
their captors – indeed, were it not for the influence of the missionaries, the
Trio and Wayana would not have contacted them at all for the purposes of
trade or alliance. Although the Akuriyo had deliberately and completely
isolated themselves, hoping to exclude themselves from the Janus logic
of war and trade (the one giving way to the other),5 the result was a prolonged Hobbesian war – effectively a ‘cold’ war with a constant (though
rarely realized) threat of violence.
This account of the capture of some Akuriyo, told to us by one of the
Trio expedition members in Tëpu, shows how this threat of violence crystallized into fear:
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
Then we searched for them, they ran and hid, they went this way and that way,
they went running off again. We looked for them on the path, they ran. Sïlawo and
his mother were frightened of us, and they ran on the path. Muloto ran alone, she
got lost in the forest. During the night she ran and also stayed there in the forest
because she was frightened of us. Epoti waited for her, with the others in the little
house: ‘She is coming’, said Epoti. Polowpa waited for her too; Muloto was still
frightened of us. Then Polowpa and Epoti hid to catch her. She came back to look
for fire, it was almost evening, she was all alone, that’s why Polowpa ran towards
her to catch her, but Muloto ran to the river. Then, Polowpa caught her. ‘No, no,
let me go’, said Muloto. ‘No, we won’t do anything, we won’t hurt you’, I said. But
we didn’t know how to speak their language. Their language is different from ours.
… We brought them all back; we had already caught the other two … Sïlawo was
really scared of us; he defecated because he was so afraid of us.
The sudden transformation of the relations between Trio and Wayana on
the one hand and Akuriyo on the other from those of enemy-strangers to
those of coresidents has had far-reaching consequences. The Akuriyo in
Tëpu today are effectively servants of the Trio. Akuriyo nuclear families
live away from each other in different parts of the village, each attached to
the household of a Trio family. Although they are spoken of as children,
Akuriyo men are also often treated in some respects as though they were
sons-in-law, implying as subservient a relationship as is possible between
adults in traditional kinship terms, but also implying indebtedness.6 Despite this, it is rare to find an Akuriyo man actually married to a Trio
woman.7
This situation of partial familiarization, or domestication without assimilation, is extraordinary in a region where coresidence usually leads to
social absorption. Domestication of the Other in Amazonia is of vital importance for the constitution and reproduction of the group, its identity
and its vital energy (Fausto 1999a; Santos-Granero 2009; Vilaça 2002).
Such a state of affairs therefore cannot simply be attributed to missionary activities. It can instead be partially understood through narratives
of identity that have defined certain ‘peoples’ as fierce and cannibalistic.
Since sedentarization, these narratives have come to differentiate ‘superior’, riverine, sedentary, horticulturalist, trading people from ‘inferior’,
forest-dwelling, foraging people. But the narratives also mean that the
domestication of such peoples differs in character from the domestication
of other horticulturalist peoples (Howard 2001).
Akuriyo are in a constant state of becoming, but partly as a result of
this they are also reduced socially. The special advantage of the relationship with the Akuriyo, from the Trio’s point of view, is that the Akuriyo
can still be rendered their agency when they go into the forest, where
they can become powerful hunters who can ‘see’ as no Trio can. With
Akuriyo to hunt for them, the Trio are therefore able to concentrate on
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First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
67
cultivating their familiarity with the more powerful knowledge held by
white people.
The Trio’s aversion to marriage with Akuriyo may be due to the contrived nature of their coresidence, which resulted from outside influence –
as we have mentioned, the Trio would never have shared the same villages
with the Akuriyo had it not been for the intervention of missionaries.8
An ordinary alliance would not have occurred between Trio and Akuriyo
because the Akuriyo lacked the quintessentially humanizing food, bitter
manioc. The Akuriyo may have had gardens and bitter manioc in the past,
and they were, long ago, allies of other jana or historic subgroups who
cannot have considered them fierce, but these facts appear irrelevant to
their current unequal alliance with the Trio. Even though they are now
learning to grow and process manioc, the Trio still portray them as hunter-gatherers whose ignorance of this vital cultivated food is the ultimate
evidence of barbarity, compared to which the inferior knowledge of Christianity is a mild stigma.
The Trio see the Akuriyo as fitting into categories that imply transformation and domestication. Carlos Fausto (1999b) has argued that a mode
of social interaction and transformation central to native Amazonia is
‘familiarizing predation’, whereby ‘other’ people are ritually transformed
into kin through a process of domestication following capture in warfare
in the case of humans, or capture during forest expeditions in the case of
pets. Put another way, the dialectic of predation and familiarization allows
the production of persons and the reproduction of society. It provides the
mechanism and the reason for domesticating the Other through nurture.
The object of familiarizing predation is treated as a consanguine and referred to like an adoptive child (rather than a son-in-law, a distinction we
will discuss shortly). Fausto (2008, 2012) has shown that the relationship
also constitutes a form of ownership or ‘mastery’. Today, the Trio refer to
the Akuriyo attached to their households in terms of ownership, or entume: they say that they ‘own’ (entume wae) an Akuriyo. Ownership and
mastery are in fact synonymous: entu signifies ‘leader/owner/master’ as
well as ‘source’ or ‘base of mountain’, and entume wae means ‘I own/control’. Akuriyo call their Trio masters Tamu – a word with a set of meanings
that overlaps with those of entu, for it corresponds closely to the category
of ‘master/owner’ that Fausto has identified across Amazonia. It signifies
consanguineous asymmetry and is most commonly used to address both
paternal and maternal grandfathers. It is also used to address a village
leader or any senior man familiar to the speaker. In the possessive form,
itamu, it is also the term used to refer to the spirit masters of animals.
The significant point here is that the Akuriyo use a term of consanguinity
to address their Trio masters. The latter treat their Akuriyo as servants
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
and do not address them using kinship terms; instead, they address them
by name (which they never do to each other) or as jahko, a neutral term
meaning something like ‘comrade’ whose use appears to be an outcome
of the Trio’s sedentarization in large villages where they frequently come
into contact with affines. They also refer to their Akuriyo servants with an
affinal term, pëito, which we shall now discuss.
Familiarization, Subjugation and Affinity
The Trio appear to see the domestication of the Akuriyo as a form of familiarizing predation and to treat them as a form of ‘pet’, following a pattern
found elsewhere in Amazonia, according to Fausto (2008). The Akuriyo
themselves say that they regard themselves as children in relation to the
Trio, and that the Trio teach them about living in a civilized way, much
as fathers teach sons. Yet the Trio also refer to the Akuriyo as their pëito,
a word associated with affinity. In Wayana (many Wayana living in Tëpu
have intermarried with the Trio), it means ‘son-in-law’. It is also the equivalent of the Carib poito, which was commonly used by both Caribs and
Europeans in the colonial period to refer to ‘red’ or Amerindian slaves, for
which European demand peaked in the eighteenth century (Whitehead
1988: 181). Neil Whitehead (1988: 181) explains the relationship between slavery and affinity in terms of warfare and trade:
Amerindian slaving can be understood as an extension of Carib trading activities, for only by trade and intermarriage would those populations from which the
captives were taken be defined as poitos. Thus the Caribs would have stood in an
affinal relation to the people they raided in virtue of the fact that they married the
women and sold their ‘brothers-in-law’.
The Trio’s use of pëito seems to be a recent adoption from the Wayana.
The corresponding Trio term pito, which has less asymmetrical connotations, is also still used today. Commenting on these words and their cognates among different Carib groups, Peter Rivière (1977: 40) notes that
they ‘ha[ve] variously been translated as slave, servant, client, brotherin-law, son-in-law, and sister’s son’, adding that ‘this range of meanings
covers a continuum from the potentially equal (brother-in-law) to the
totally inferior (slave) … however, slave and servant are concepts that are
out of keeping with the nature of Carib societies as we know them today’.
Whitehead also emphasizes the historical variation in the intensity of the
asymmetry of the relationship with poito, underlining that ‘the “slave” status of the poito became more pronounced under European influence, both
on account of the enhanced exchange value of such captives and because
of the political advantages that accrued to the Caribs through their EuroThis chapter is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY)
First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
69
pean alliances’ (1988: 181) Whitehead further argues that this effect was
especially strong in the Dutch colonies because the Dutch relied more
heavily on trade to maintain ‘access to, and control of, the Amerindian
population’, lacking the ‘manpower and religious infrastructure of the
Spanish’ (184).
The case of the Trio’s subjugation of the Akuriyo shows that since Rivière’s own fieldwork, things have changed in ways he did not anticipate.
More recent scholars of the Trio have struggled to understand the relationship between the terms pito and pëito as used by the Trio in the wake
of these changes. The linguist Sergio Meira (1999: 590) disagrees with
Rivière’s suggestion that pito is a cognate of the widespread Carib term
denoting ‘slave’ or ‘servant’, on the grounds that there is a more convincing
case for arguing that pëito is the Trio equivalent, and thus pëito, not pito,
would derive from the ancient Carib word poito. Meira does not seem to
have been aware that pëito was a recent introduction in Trio. However,
even without this knowledge, he might not have doubted that the two
terms had a common origin had he been aware of the relationship between social subordination and affinity in Guiana Carib societies. Pëito
means ‘son-in-law’ as well as ‘follower/servant’ in Wayana, and the Trio
seem to have adopted the term from them in recent decades (indeed, after Rivière’s fieldwork) during which the two groups have had sustained
close contact including coresidence, mixed villages and intermarriage.
Among the Trio, pito can refer to brothers-in-law as well as sons-in-law,
and even to fathers-in-law. This is related to the traditional ideal of marriage with one’s sister’s daughter (Rivière 1969), which blurs the distinction between symmetrical (brother-in-law) and asymmetrical (son-in-law)
relations. In other words, the differences between traditional Wayana and
Trio marriage practices and political relations correspond to the differences
between pëito and pito. The two terms in Trio and Wayana play equivalent
roles, taking into account the greater emphasis on endogamy and individual autonomy among the Trio.9
Pëito was thus adopted from the Wayana to enable Trio people to express – and reproduce – new, more asymmetrical kinds of relationships.
It is interesting that Rivière believed that the more extremely asymmetric
forms of meaning for pito/pëito cognates on the continuum he described
were more likely to be ‘postcontact adaptations of indigenous ideas modified by European influence’ than reflections of ‘an earlier, more complex,
and more hierarchical form of society that has now disappeared’, although
he recognized that these two explanations were not necessarily mutually
exclusive (Rivière 1977: 40). This belief may seem to be supported by the
fact that the capture and subordination of the Akuriyo (which resulted in
the clearest example of asymmetrical relationships in Trio society today)
would almost certainly not have happened without the missionaries’ interThis chapter is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY)
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
vention. On the other hand, Santos-Granero’s recent study of indigenous
Amazonian forms of slavery (2009 and this volume) shows that the precontact thesis should not be dismissed too lightly.
One might expect that carrying out fieldwork among the Trio would
make Rivière more alert to the more ‘equal’ end of the continuum of meanings of pito/pëito. Yet he recognized that ‘in all Carib societies the relationship between affines – and specifically between parents-in-law and their
children-in-law – is always asymmetrical in nature, and this being the case,
affinal relationships offer the best idiom for expression of political relationships that involve domination and subordination’ (1977: 41). Here,
then, we have the social category which allows the domestication of the
wajiarikure, the wild people, and in the Trio’s case pëito seems to have been
adopted to refer to the new and exceptionally asymmetrical relationship
with the Akuriyo.
It is worth noting that this shows that familiarizing predation among
the Trio seems to be constituted affinally as well as consanguineally, rather
than in unequivocally consanguineal terms. This difference may be partially explicable in light of the symbolic importance of the father-in-law
among the Trio. In many myths a Trio man meets a jaguar or another forest person who entices him to marry his daughter, and only by avoiding
eating the food of his host does he escape turning into a jaguar himself.
Of course such myths express affinity, but they also express the dangers of
marrying distant Others – one risks losing one’s human perspective and in
some cases may even have to attack and kill one’s own former kin. They
also express the ideal of marrying close, in which consanguinity and affinity shade into each other. And the risk of losing one’s own perspective, as
attested in numerous cases from all over Amazonia, derives from the fact
that commensality and conviviality can lead to becoming kin: as Fausto
(2007) has pointed out, by eating with each other (rather than eating each
other), we come to share the same perspective. Indeed, as Lévi-Strauss argued in his article on the Nambiquara brother-in-law relationship (1943),
the term (equivalent to pito) for the brother of a potential wife serves to
create kinship relations between previously unrelated groups.
What is occurring in the case of the Akuriyo is precisely the opposite:
they have been domesticated and made into servants, but neither marriage
nor kinship relations have been created. That they are referred to as pëito,
but never as pito, seems significant for understanding this. Santos-Granero
(2009: 174) notes that slaves eventually tend to intermarry with their
masters: ‘captive slaves, servant groups and tributary populations were
integrated, and eventually assimilated, into their masters’ societies’, yet
‘[e]nemies are equated to affines and game meat, whereas captive children
are associated with consanguines and pets’. On one hand, the Akuriyo
engage in a constant attempt to assert themselves as consanguines, deThis chapter is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY)
First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
71
scribing themselves as being like the children of the Trio and thus implicitly bidding for their eventual integration into Trio society. On the other
hand, the Trio maintain them as affines, placing them in a category, pëito,
which demands service, and meanwhile withholding the only means by
which Akuriyo may be familiarized as kin: intermarriage. They never call
Akuriyo pito because this term would imply the potential, if not the realization, of marriage. In the Akuriyo case, intermarriage has not occurred
in the forty years since their capture, except in certain rare cases. When
such marriages have occurred, the relationship has always favoured the
Trio. Trio ‘ownership’ of Akuriyo always trumps the usual behaviour expected of wife-givers and wife-takers, and if an Akuriyo should become a
father-in-law to a Trio then it is the Akuriyo who performs services for his
son-in-law, in a reversal of the traditional practice of bride service. Even
when intermarriage occurs and affinity in this sense is thus realized, the
relationship of mastery persists.
Fausto (1999a: 949) writes that ‘to be powerful, shamans and warriors
must ensure that the subjectivity of their wild pets is preserved, which
means that they can never become entirely tamed’. This ambivalence is
at the heart of mastery. But it seems that a similar ambivalence lies at the
heart of asymmetric relations of control – an ambivalence that can itself
take the form of chronic slippage between the two forms of asymmetry,
consanguineal and affinal, in native Amazonian social relations.
Nurture
The Trio mastery over the Akuriyo can also be read in terms of feeding
and nurture. The image of the prestation of manioc – the quintessential
humanizing food, associated with maternal nurture – constantly recurs in
the contact narratives of missionaries and Amerindians alike, and is the
key image in the idiom of ‘care for the Other’ as constituting the driving
force behind contact (Crocker n.d.; Schoen 1969, 1971). Certainly Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this idea of ‘care’, the word used
by missionaries in their accounts, differ in a way that reflects diverging
views about the nature of these other people and the underlying reason
for their need for care. The missionary notion of care found resonance in
a set of Trio processual kinship practices that we can understand in terms
of nurture. Nurture in this sense implies a relation that engenders regressive control because it places contacted peoples in the social position of
children who need to be fed and educated.
The ‘domestication’ or ‘taming’ of other groups occurs throughout
the Guianas. The Waiwai, following their contact expeditions to sedentarize and ‘domesticate’ neighbouring groups (Howard 2001), maintain
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their relationship with these groups through various prestations clearly
expressed in the institution of the alliance feast, at which the exchange
of manioc beer or bread plays a key role. These alliance feasts today differ significantly from those recalled in oral narratives of the more distant
past. For example, when the Apalai, having had enough of war, decided
to accept the equivalence of the Wayana’s culture, they exchanged both
beer and women with them (Barbosa 2002: 180–82).10 In contrast, the
Waiwai and the Surinamese Trio and Wayana, as Christian converts, were
convinced of the superiority of their newly modified way of life; therefore
their prestation of manioc was not to be reciprocated. Their expeditions
to contact other groups were not for the purpose of alliance in the conventional sense. Their purpose was evangelical, and as such it was to give
culture, not to receive it; correspondingly, they were to give manioc,11
not receive it. The result was integration, or in the case of the Akuriyo,
incorporation and subjection: an unequal alliance. This should be seen
in conjunction with the fact that in such cases knowledge, in the form of
evangelization, is also primarily passed from manioc-giving hosts to manioc-receiving guests, reversing the usual direction.12
Although they were not ‘tamed’ by the Trio or Wayana in the same sense
in which other Amerindian groups were, it is useful to compare the case
of the Maroons – the descendants of slaves who escaped Dutch plantations
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were, for over a hundred
years, the Trio’s privileged trading partners. The Trio say that Maroons, like
the Akuriyo, do not ‘know about’ manioc (although in fact they do grow
it); also like the Akuriyo, Maroons are not considered suitable marriage
partners. The modalities of the relationship between categories of people
are thus expressed in the reciprocal or nonreciprocal prestation of beer and
women: ‘real’ people gave manioc to Akuriyo and Maroons, who are classified as ‘lacking’ manioc; this marks them out as unsuitable wife-takers.
During our field research Trio people often contrasted their past life
in the forest, characterized by warfare and spirit attacks, with their present living conditions in large, sedentary villages near rivers, where former
enemies intermarry and live in peace with one another. In this new way
of life they attach great importance to a capacity for extended socialization, the quintessential symbol of which is manioc production and processing. But additionally, in the eyes of our Trio interlocutors, wildness
implied greater exposure to the spirit world and to body-strengthening
techniques that the Trio gradually gave up as a compromise to live in
larger sedentary settlements. So the Akuriyo did not represent an Amerindian version of the intellectually inferior Aristotelian natural slave who
could be captured with ease, but rather an ambivalent, highly transformative Other whose wildness had to be carefully controlled. In accounts of
first encounters, whereas the missionaries emphasize the Trios’ willingness
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First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
73
to tell the recently contacted hunter-gatherers about the Bible and God,
the Trio remember the importance of handing over manioc bread and
teaching the rudiments of garden clearing and manioc planting – manioc
being the substance from which the bodies of ‘real people’ are made. In
short, whereas the missionaries wanted to humanize the Akuriyo by inculcating Christian knowledge, the Trio wanted to socialize the Akuriyo by
inculcating moral convention through action on their bodies rather than
on their minds. Both cases, however, entailed an insistence on caring for
these wild people as a motivating force.
Securing the Akuriyo well-being implied both healing and educating
them. Upon being sedentarized, the Akuriyo were exposed to many infectious diseases for the first time. Adding to the trauma of their radical
change of lifestyle, health problems had a major impact: about a quarter of
those contacted died within the first year of their sedentarization (Kloos
1977a, 1977b). The wives of Trio expedition members got involved in
caring for the Akuriyo, especially by treating them for their illnesses. This
was very much encouraged by the missionaries, who considered this form
of dedication a true demonstration of the altruistic potential of the Trio,
revealed by their conversion to Christianity (Schoen 1969; Yohner 1970).
Educating was as important as healing. When we asked our host why
he went to the Akuriyo, he answered that it was because they did not
know how to live properly and needed to be taught. When telling us this,
he used the words enpa, which the Trio use to describe the kind of education that a father gives to his son (see also Kloos 1977a), and arimika,
which describes the nurture of children by mothers. While the notion that
the Akuriyo needed to be taught how to live might well owe something
to missionary influence, its expression in the idiom of consanguinity is at
least consistent with the principle of familiarizing predation. Bringing up
a child among the Trio is associated less with doing than with undoing:
arimika, the word for a mother’s upbringing of her child, means ‘to undo
the spider monkey’, as at birth the ontological status of an infant is still
indeterminate; consequently, any traces of wildness have to be gradually
undone to secure it as a human and a relative.
After their incorporation into Trio social networks, the surviving
Akuriyo appeared more than ever to have this need to be cared for. In
both Amerindian and non-Amerindian discourse, the predator gradually
becomes a carer who secures the well-being of his prey. This change evokes
the relationship between control and protection underlined by Fausto,
who observes that ‘the owners control and protect their creatures, being
responsible for their well-being, reproduction and mobility. This asymmetry implies not only control but care’. He goes on to comment that ‘from
the perspective of whoever is adopted-captured, being or placing oneself
in the position of an orphan or a wild pet is more than just a negative
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
injunction: it may also be a positive way of eliciting attention and generosity’ (2012: 32). As if to confirm this view, an Akuriyo hunter described
to us that he considered himself to be like a child, and that when he and
his kin lived in the forest they were ignorant of the things they were now
being taught in Tëpu. However, this version of Trio-Akuriyo relations
exemplifies only one dimension of a complex web of relations; one may
see it as the ‘official line’ given in discourses in which Trio or missionaries
are present. When alone, our host’s Akuriyo helper abandoned the discourse of the child benefiting from education to complain bitterly about
the rough treatment inflicted upon him daily and tell about intimidation,
beating and theft.
From the missionaries’ point of view, the mere fact that these discourses of nurture were still repeated to non-Amerindians like ourselves
thirty years after the Akuriyo were brought to Tëpu shows that something has gone amiss and the process of assimilation has in effect stalled
into mere incorporation. These peculiar ‘children’ never became civilized
but remained servants undergoing a perpetual nurturing and humanizing process, neither processual kin nor attractive marriageable partners.
Trio themselves consider the Akuriyo effort to adopt Trio social conventions as a failure in many regards. Today they still see Akuriyo gardens
as primitive and unproductive, their cooking and manioc processing as
dangerously incompetent, and their treatment of their bodies as far from
sufficient to make them ‘proper’. But whereas their socialization has
failed, their wildness has allowed them to maintain a certain supremacy
in the world of the forest. Hunting and gathering remain their domains
of excellence, something the Trio candidly admit they cannot be as good
at simply because their bodies are not as strong and fierce anymore. They
associate this ‘softening’ with their sedentarization and their conversion
to Christianity.
Predators of unerring strength and skill, the Akuriyo are a unique
source of services and goods for their Trio guardians, who enjoy increased
influence and status through them by enlisting their services. At times of
large-scale celebrations in particular, they rely on Akuriyo hunting skills
to provide game for the participants. Trio men with trading partners in
the city enlist Akuriyo hunters to obtain game, which the former can send
to the market by air for a considerable profit. Yet the Akuriyo remain
marginal and subject to the Trio’s surveillance and control, although their
mistreatment at the hands of the Trio is somewhat restrained by fears that
they may put powerful curses on their tormentors. In short, from this
perspective the Akuriyo typify a form of servitude that presents aspects of
a situationally reversable asymmetry – a form of reciprocal hierarchy that
depends upon the social surroundings, with the village at one end of the
spectrum and the forest at the other.
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First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
75
Conclusion
The modes and effects of the nurturing relationships that were sealed at
the time of contact and have evolved up to the present day between expedition members and contacted ‘wild people’ – that is, the relations between
captors and captives, between carers and cared for – can shed light on the
expression of a peculiar form of Amerindian ownership that may have resonance elsewhere in native lowland South America. This is especially clear
from Santos-Granero’s work on captive slavery, which is based on a study
of multiple early sources that was undertaken in such a way as to exclude
the possibility of European influence on the practices described (2009;
also see Santos-Granero this volume). In his analysis of the ‘process in
which slaves shifted from a marginal condition as recent war prisoners to
their integration as subordinates and, eventually, to their (or their descendants’) assimilation into their masters’ kinship networks’, Santos-Granero
(2009: 200) equates wildness with lack of humanity, arguing that wild or
enslavable Others are treated like game that can be preyed upon – they are
‘total strangers uncontaminated by links of consanguinity, with whom …
one does not marry but rather makes war’. Captives were treated much
like pets, except that they were to be turned into people and ultimately
into kin. Their role was not merely material but more importantly allowed
the reproduction of society. It was ultimately more concerned with the
creation of sameness rather than the maintenance of otherness – slavery
was about the conquest and acquisition of symbolic vitality (207).
Santos-Granero understands the capture and appropriation of persons
in native Amazonian societies in terms of the renewal and reproduction
of society, accomplished by making enemies into real people. It involves
the creation of relations of ownership through the capture of wild Others.
These relations of ownership are an effect of social reproduction, which is
a process of transformation from Other into kin. But the case presented
here suggests something more complicated. Before contact was established between Trio and Akuriyo, the Trio did indeed regard the wajarikure, as they called them, as wild enemies rather than potential affines.
After contact was established, Trio and Akuriyo each sought to fit the
other into relationship categories that best suited their interests. The Trio
adopted a Wayana term to affirm the Akuriyo as affines, placing them
in a role that would require the Akuriyo to serve them. The Akuriyo,
meanwhile, responded to the Trio’s nurturing actions by reaffirming the
consanguineous relationship they implied, calling the Trio tamu. These
distinct Trio and the Akuriyo points of view can explain why the relationship terms each uses for the other are not terms that one would ordinarily
expect to be mutually reciprocated. Here, words are not exchanged for
words, but for actions. The Trio address their Akuriyo captives as pëito,
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Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
and the Akuriyo respond with work. The Akuriyo call their Trio captors
tamu, and are rewarded with care.
This divergence between the Trio and Akuriyo understandings of the
relationship between them is precisely what allows the relationship to be
perpetuated. But it also illustrates something more general about native
Amazonian societies. Historical accounts of Guiana Carib slavery have
emphasized the affinal relationship expressed in the term poito. Meanwhile,
accounts of war captives from elsewhere – such as, most famously, those
of the Tupinambá – have emphasized the ‘familiarizing predation’ that
functions in the idiom of consanguinity. Both cases involve an openness
towards alterity, which Viveiros de Castro contends does not concern ‘the
creation of sameness rather than the maintenance of otherness’. He argues
instead that the Tupinambá and other Amerindian societies are founded
on ‘the relationship to others, and not self-identity’. He then goes on to
quote James Clifford:
Stories of cultural contact and change have been structured by a pervasive dichotomy: absorption by the other or resistance to the other. … Yet what if identity is
conceived not as a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject? The story or stories of interaction must then
be more complex, less linear and theological. What changes when the subject of
‘history’ is no longer Western? How do stories of contact, resistance, and assimilation appear from the standpoint of groups in which exchange rather than identity
is the fundamental value to be sustained? (Clifford 1988: 344, cited in Viveiros de
Castro 2011: 17–18)
In the 1970s, the missionaries – and the anthropologist Peter Kloos
– predicted that the Akuriyo would quickly become Trio, that the Trio
would impose their identity upon them. This did not happen, and we
might hope to find that acts of resistance performed by Akuriyo people
are the reason. It is indeed gratifying to watch Akuriyo hunters as they
enter the forest: they stand taller, their eyes brightening as they begin to
enjoy some short-lived autonomy. Similarly, when an Akuriyo complains
to an anthropologist about being mistreated by his Trio owner, we may or
may not interpret this as some sort of act of resistance. However, we suspect that such resistance plays little or no role in the actual relationship between Trio and Akuriyo. When Akuriyo complain to an outsider of petty
acts of violence that Trio perpetrate on them, they call for pity, appealing
to the anthropologist, in this case, to engage or continue to engage in
another paternalistic and nurturing relationship. Meanwhile the violence
itself no doubt reiterates and helps maintain the Akuriyo’s lowly status.
The relationship between the Trio and Akuriyo is fundamentally ambivalent. From the Trio point of view, the Akuriyo are servants and bride
servants without brides. They are objects of property that are to be nurtured but never allowed to become full and proper Trio persons. The
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Akuriyo meanwhile cling to the potential of the Trio’s nurturing role to
transform them into Trio and dissolve the affinal difference between the
two groups. They address their Trio masters as tamu and emphasize that
they are to become civilized. The emphasis is on becoming: the Akuriyo are
continually becoming kin. Trio and Akuriyo have found a way of maintaining a relationship of exchange and continual transformation that is
premised upon, and perpetuates, their divergent points of view.
Coda
During field research in 2011 we discovered that a group of Trio men
from Suriname had visited a remote group of Zo’é, a Tupi-speaking group
living in isolation in a remote part of the Brazilian state of Parã, under the
protection of FUNAI, the Brazilian Indian agency. The Trio delegation
took trade objects – fishhooks, metal tools, clothes. They brought a young
Zo’é boy to visit their home villages in Suriname and took video footage
of his adventure with their mobile phones. Stories circulate about other
isolated groups and further plans for contact expeditions. According to
the missionaries still active in Suriname, the Trio, of their own initiative,
are carrying out their own evangelical missions to reach uncontacted peoples with the goal of converting them to Christianity. While this may be
true, we hope that we have shown that this missionary zeal is founded
upon a more ingrained desire to embrace alterity – that is, to help Others
to become Trio and thus to become white themselves – for the Trio relationship with the Akuriyo, and perhaps in turn the Zo’é, reproduces that
of the missionaries with the Trio themselves, in which nurture and alterity
are perpetuated together.
Vanessa Grotti is Part-Time-Professor at the European University Institute in Florence. She is the co-editor, with Marc Brightman and Olga
Ulturgasheva, of Shamanism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood in the
Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (2012) and Rethinking the “Frontier” in Amazonia and Siberia: Extractive Economies, Indigenous Politics and Social Transformations (2007). Her monograph Living
with the Enemy: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia is due to be published by Berghahn Books.
Marc Brightman is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and author of The Imbalance of Power: Leadership, Masculinity and Wealth in Amazonia (in press). He co-edited (with
V. Grotti and O. Ulturgasheva) Shamanism in Rainforest and Tundra: PerThis chapter is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY)
78
Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman
sonhood in the Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia
(2012) and Rethinking the “Frontier” in Amazonia and Siberia: Extractive
Economies, Indigenous Politics and Social Transformations (2007).
Notes
This chapter is a synthesis of the authors’ separate contributions to the workshop,
‘Relações (Im)próprias’, which we co-organized with Carlos Fausto at the Museu
Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2010. An early version was presented at the
Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory at the London School of Economics in
March 2013, convened by Matthew Engelke. We are grateful for the comments and
suggestions of participants on both occasions. We are immensely indebted to our Trio,
Akuriyo and Wayana friends and hosts. We also wish to express our gratitude towards
Peter Rivière for sharing with us unpublished documents from his personal collection.
1. There are just over 2,000 Trio and just under 2,000 Wayana. The Akuriyo number less than 40.
2. Radios were clearly an important tool for the contact expedition. Unfortunately
the missionary accounts offer no indication of how the Akuriyo thought of these
objects, although one may easily imagine that they perceived them as powerful
and mysterious. What we can say is that today, Akuriyo people, in contrast to
their Trio neighbours, do not use the radio, for two reasons. First, there are few
Akuriyo in other villages, and Akuriyo travel little except in the forest – they
therefore have virtually no kin, trading partners or friends to speak to on the
radio. Secondly, speaking on the radio requires adoption of a ‘strong talking’
idiom and confident deployment of protocol such as the English term ‘over’, or
the Trio ‘meta’ (‘you hear’ [i.e. ‘do you copy?’ in radio protocol]). The Akuriyo
are extremely reserved and timid; to adopt this mode of speech would be almost
unthinkable for them.
3. At the time, the characteristic Trio hairstyle was long at the back and sides with a
short, straight fringe. Today this remains the hairstyle of choice for older Trio men
who wish to affect a traditional appearance. Then as now, the most respected Trio
men pluck all of their body hair, including not only eyebrows but also eyelashes.
4. Particularly the Waiwai, see Howard (2001).
5. Prior to missionization, the Trio were by their own account engaged in more or
less constant war with their neighbours in cycles of vengeance alternating between shamanic spirit attacks and warrior raids. They thus maintained a form
of negative reciprocity with their enemies. The wajarikure, in contrast, isolated
themselves, remaining mysterious and frightening to the Trio, who in turn
avoided making contact with them.
6. A key institution in Trio kinship (though ideally cancelled out by marrying ego’s
sister’s daughter) is the practice of bride service: marriage tends to be uxorilocal,
at least for an initial period during which the new husband carries out services
such as building canoes and houses, clearing gardens, hunting and fishing for his
parents-in-law (see Brightman 2007 and Rivière 1969 for further discussion).
7. In one or two instances Akuriyo men have married old Trio women, and Trio
men have married Akuriyo women, but otherwise no intermarriage has occurred.
In practical terms, it is favourable for a Trio man to be married to an Akuriyo
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First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
79
woman because he can hardly be obliged to carry out bride service for an Akuriyo father-in-law. In exactly the same way, the Makú, whom the Tukanoans treat
as servants, only intermarry with Tukanoan men: ‘Whilst Tukanoans sometimes
take Makú wives, Makú men do not marry Tukanoan women’ (Silverwood-Cope
1972: 200).
See Keifenheim (1997) on ‘wild’ Mashiku Indians ‘pacified’ by the Kashinawa:
their status is ambiguously poised between ‘brother-in-law’ and ‘slave’.
We are grateful to Luiz Costa (pers. comm. 14 July 2010) for his detailed comments
and notes on this point. For further discussion see Brightman (forthcoming).
The exchange of women and food to end conflict is a recurrent theme in Wayana
mytho-historical narratives (Chapuis and Rivière 2003: passim).
Protestant missionaries, unlike the Catholics in Missão, have attempted to eliminate the production of beer wherever they have had influence (among the Wayana,
Trio, Waiwai and Wapishana). They have completely succeeded only in the case
of the Waiwai, who replaced it with a non-alcoholic alternative also made from
manioc that is called pënkuhpë by the Trio, who therefore also call the Waiwai
pënkuhpësawa, ‘drinkers of pënkuhpë’ (C. Koelewijn, pers. comm. 2004).
Knowledge of the forest, hunting skills and shamanic knowledge are passed
from guest to host under such circumstances. We observed this in the case of the
Trio-Akuriyo relationship, as did Howard (2001) in the case of the Waiwai and
the ‘unseen tribes’.
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