Review: Reflections of Nature in Vaupés Cultures

Author(s): Irving Goldman

Review by: Irving Goldman
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1981), pp. 383-389
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 review article

reflections of nature in Vaupes cultures

IRVING GOLDMAN-Sarah Lawrence College

From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia.
CHRISTINE HUGH-JONES. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. xx + 302
pp., maps, figures, tables, appendixes, works cited, index. $19.95 (cloth).

The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia.
STEPHEN HUGH-JONES. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. xvi + 332
pp., maps, tables, figures, plates, appendixes, bibliography, indexes. $19.95 (cloth).

Anthropological investigations in the Colombian Vaupes begin appropriately with the

naturalists Alfred Russell Wallace (1870) and Richard Spruce (1908), and with the museum
ethnographer Theodor Koch-Crunberg (1909). All three brought out descriptive portraits of
native peoples in their settings of forest and river as if they, too, belonged with the natural
species. Descriptions of Indian customs, artifacts, and distributions mingle naturally with
accounts of terrain, fauna, and flora. The modern period in Vaupes studies began, I sup-
pose, with my own fieldwork (1939-40, 1968, 1969-70, 1979) and writing about Cubeo, a
Tukanoan tribe, with its focus upon cultural configurations that reflected native concepts
of a natural order (see Goldman 1963, 1976, 1977). In this respect, it was an early form of
structuralism, in the tradition that is now taking shape so strongly in Vaupes studies.
But it was Reichel-Dolmatoff's (1971) pioneering work on the symbolism of Desana
Indians, who are closely related to Cubeo and Barasana (the latter being the subject of the
two books under review), that set the course, perhaps decisively, toward an approach to the
structure of culture through the Vaupes Indians' perceptions of nature. In demonstrating
how Desana drew upon natural models for their own uses, he brought about the transfor-
mation of the naturalist's way of seeing, as though through a camera eye, into an interior in-
strument of vision. Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971:71) wrote:

The central preoccupation of Desana religious thinking is the control of human and animal fertility,
and around this fundamental nucleus revolves the language of their myths and the message of their
ceremonies and dances, their moral norms, their social and economic relationships, in other words,
all of their institutions and cultural patterns.

No wonder that Levi-Strauss said, on the dust jacket of Amazonian Cosmos, "South Ameri-
can ethnography will never be the same again, for you have brought it into a new era." Still,
it is a work clouded by the uncertain quality of its data, acquired mainly from one highly in-
telligent but also highly acculturated Desana informant.
No such qualifications shadow the two brilliant and provocative studies under review

Copyright ? 1981 by the American Ethnological Society

0094-0496/81/020383-8$1.30/1

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here. From the Milk River by Christine Hugh-Jones and the Palm and the Pleiades by her hus-
band, Stephen Hugh-Jones, take off from that premise of Reichel-Dolmatoff, without being
sufficiently aware of the connection. Their theoretical aims are, indeed, more comprehen-
sive and their methodologies are more sophisticated. What is most important, these two
books are the product of 22 months of fieldwork (1968-70), most of it in the native tongue
and mainly with a well-chosen community of traditional Barasana, a Tukanoan-speaking
people of the Pira Parana, a river close to but not part of the Vaupes. They lived within a
native longhouse as participant observers; and, as husband and wife, they occupied both
sides of the gender line. Their field data are the best we now have on this region. Remark-
ably detailed and systematic, these data reflect the intimacies of the relationships shared
with Barasana hosts and informants.
The Hugh-Joneses state their aims rather obliquely: to describe the Barasana cultural
system and to explore theoretical issues; or, as set forth by Stephen Hugh-Jones, to test em-
pirically some of the general observations of Levi-Strauss about mythology. What they
have in fact done, and what gives their work its general importance, is to reveal in a com-
prehensive and original manner how the Barasana have created a conceptual structure that
harmonizes their personal lives with their understanding of how the natural order works. I
would not say that these two books are single-mindedly directed to this particular exegesis,
but it is definitely at the center of their anthropological concern and is what finally
emerges from a spectacular display of symbolic and structural analyses and explanations.
The central theme of both books seems to be neatly summed up by Christine Hugh-Jones:
"Indians conceive of and organize all the processes governing the development and
maintenance of both the physical body and social groups as if they had a fundamental
similarity" (p. 278).
From complementary perspectives, each of the writers undertakes to demonstrate this
seemingly simple proposition and to bring to light the varied and intricate ways in which
Barasana either consciously or unconsciously reflect upon organic analogies. In contrast to
Desana, who have been shown as rather narrowly preoccupied with the generative process
and its sexual correlates, Barasana appear as complete biologists, interested in relating a
broad range of bodily processes to their own cultural life. They are concerned with sexuali-
ty, of course, and with the specifics of conception, but they are also concerned with gesta-
tion, birth, growth, maturation, menstruation, aggression, decay, death, and renewal; with
the nature of the body, its surfaces, its interior, and its orifices; with the significances of
spatial arrangements; and with the flow of time and its periodicities. Their paramount con-
cern is to understand and to deal with the unities and continuities between themselves and
their primal beginnings, between present generations and the founding ancestors. Essen-
tially, Barasana symbols appear to be not quite arbitrary signs, but associative connections
with plants, animals, and natural processes. Insofar as the Hugh-Joneses portray these
Barasana concerns, their studies are, at least to my mind, fully realized and authentic
representations of Vaupes culture as a whole. What is more, their focus on the natural
model redeems ethnology from imposed abstract structures and restores it, at a higher
level, to its ethnographic foundations.
The theoretical perspective of both works is drawn from L6vi-Straussian structuralism,
mainly as it has been subsequently elaborated in the volumes of the Mythologiques. Their
intent is to reveal the distinctive structures of the Barasana mind through a methodology
devised for more general purposes. The question is whether that system of structuralist
mechanics stands the test of ethnographic specificity. By and large it does, because con-
creteness of natural setting is at the heart of the Mythologiques. While the Hugh-Joneses
adeptly employ the full battery of structuralist manipulations, their center is, nevertheless,
the elucidation of meanings that are, or would be, intelligible to Barasana. Their most im-

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portant theoretical contribution to the deeper understanding of Vaupes cultures comes
from their thoroughgoing use of an almost complete collection of Barasana myths (that are
included in The Palm and the Pleiades) for the explanation of ritual and of rituallike actions.
The myths themselves are not put through the structuralist wringer, but are considered in
their integral bearing upon ritual and cultural configurations.
Because myths in their aggregate are a composite of the reflections of many people
about what they perceive to be the fundamental qualities of existence, and because reflec-
tions are not conclusions, their meaningful allusions are inherently diverse, but not
altogether so. There is a core of mythic consistency that is the product of a special culture
and its history, which one can draw upon for synthesizing a coherent ideology. But what
does one do with the variegated and inconsistent meanings that turn up from a sweep of all
mythical associations and allusions? It is a tribute to the methodological rigor of the Hugh-
Joneses that they do not discard misfits. The inconsistencies are there, and they are part of
the Barasana mind. The authors do not quite know what to make of allusions and associa-
tions from which opposing interpretations can be drawn. They recognize that there is no
single interpretation, that Barasana themselves disagree on issues, and that Vaupes culture,
as a whole, consists of variations on common themes. They are driven, nevertheless, by the
understandable necessity to construct coherent conceptual systems. But Vaupes cultures,
including Barasana, are also rooted in a shamanic and hallucinogenic mysticism that in-
troduces the inchoate and unstable as counterparts to organization. The Hugh-Joneses
know this, but I do not see that they have fully taken this factor into account. Nonetheless,
the reader of these Barasana books is drawn deeply, as is the reader of the Mythologiques,
into the special mental world of the Indian.
Christine Hugh-Jones's From the Milk River (an allusion to a legendary stream, a
metaphor of continuities) treats largely of Barasana social and domestic life, presented
from the uncommon (for this region) vantage point of a female anthropologist who sup-
plements masculine perspectives on a strongly male-oriented society. No other work on
native Amazonia does quite so much as hers does, to my knowledge, in elevating the ac-
tivities and concerns of women to the higher ground of religious and cosmological concep-
tualization. She shows decisively that women are not mere secular gardeners and bakers of
cassava bread, but that in these activities they are part of the system of generative sexuali-
ty that, in a broader view, is integral to the ritual structure as a whole. Her book takes up, in
order: social structure as system, the set of specialist roles, kinship and marriage, the life
cycle, and production and consumption. It concludes with a masterful integrative summary
of the culture as seen through concepts of space-time. Because her work is so heavily
analytical, it is gratifying to discover that description and interpretation are clearly
separated and that the analytical theorems themselves are so open that the reader may in-
terpret them differently.
The Palm and the Pleiades by Stephen Hugh-Jones (a reference to the palm fruits and the
constellation that formally open the initiation rites of young men) moves in a different
direction. He relies upon the close study of a major ceremonial complex to convey, as
though it were a central paradigm, some of the principal concepts that regulate Barasana
religious life. This is, broadly speaking, a coming-of-age ceremony in two forms. The
Barasana call the first Fruit House, an association of the ripening of fruits with the matura-
tion of males. The other is a complex form called He House, an ancestral reference that
deals, it would seem, with the fundamental issues of Barasana existence. These two forms
of the rite are also known by Barasana and by other tribes in the Vaupes, and elsewhere in
Amazonia, by the Tupian term Yurupari. Yurupari as a vernacular expression lumps
together indiscriminately a variety of sanctities, but includes the common theme of a ritual
from which women are excluded, and of flutes and trumpets that they may not see. Conse-

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quently, Yurupari has gained attention as a cult that institutionalizes segregation of the
sexes and imposes male dominance. The Hugh-Joneses also see Yurupari rites as a male
control over female sexuality. While such a theme is present in the rites-depending upon
what is meant by "control"-it is but one facet of what Stephen Hugh-Jones reveals as a
many-layered ceremonial structure.
Christine Hugh-Jones's From the Milk River might seem to be the more ambitious and
radical work because it compels us to see the commonplaces of social and domestic life in
a startlingly new light. A case in point is her elaboration in exceptional detail of the com-
mon analogy between gardening and sexual reproduction, as suggested by myth and ritual
usage. Every item of food and each step in its processing and preparation are associated by
the Barasana with the human body. In the words of the author: "The processes of produc-
ing and consuming various substances are analogous to the processes of reproducing both
individuals and social structure" (p. 169). The ubiquitous pepper pot, the spice of every
meal, is shown to represent menstrual fluid and hot female sexuality. The starch liquid
alludes to semen and to vaginal fluids. Stored and hardened starch is analogous to the
menstruant sitting in her initiatory seclusion. Again, on the common analogy between
eating and copulating, all foods appear to have a sexual significance for Barasana. The
elongated manioc press (tipiti), which ingests and disgorges, from which liquids exude and
from which the hardened cassava mass is finally produced, is analogous in one respect to
the intestines. The fiber product is like the "hardened" male initiate.
These analogies are ethnographically significant because they come from Barasana allu-
sions and associations. If they seem bizarre, it is because their proper context may not have
been clearly defined. It seems that we are expected to believe that these are the ways in
which Barasana characteristically think about food and food production. But the mythical
and ritual contexts are special. As in our culture, the bottle of picnic wine is not the wine of
communion. Reading her book from the related perspective of Cubeo, I would say that she
has portrayed not the ordinary world, but the counterpart world of myth and visionary
rituals. Even so, the everyday and the mythical realms intersect; the commonplace enters
the realm of mythical allusions and in both the pepper pot may be contemplated as an
aspect of feminine sexuality.
In essence, the domestic economy is represented as integral with the life cycle. In a
broader sense, the life cycle, the biological continuum from birth to death-and in the
Vaup6s, the constant developmental link with ancestral beginnings-appears in both works
as a focal point for cultural integration. It is, indeed, the conceptual link between From the
Milk River and The Palm and the Pleiades. The former, by bringing out the key analogies be-
tween the social order and the structure and development of the body, allows us to see the
whole of Barasana culture as though it were in important respects one grand life-cycle
ritual. The latter, from the opposite perspective, shows us the same culture as centered in a
tightly organized cult that uses the midpoint of the life cycle as a way of reflecting upon
and controlling that entire biological continuum.
Christine Hugh-Jones also develops a complex thesis that interrelates Barasana social
hierarchy with stages of personal development and, ultimately, with the core of its social
structure of exogamic, patrilineal, and patrilocal sibs, as well as its traditional system of
bilateral cross-cousin marriage with B-Z exchange. That argument is too intricate for brief
summary. It is built around the demonstration that one constituent of the system of rank-
ing-namely, the organization of specialist roles-has an especially close relationship with
the order of age grades, which in turn has its own ramified social and cultural connections.
The argument, which is a structural tour de force, follows from an important ethnographic
discovery. The Hugh-Joneses learned that at some time in the past the Barasana hierar-
chical order included among its other well-known characteristics a formal ranking of

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specialized roles. Thus, among the ranked sibs of each "Exogamic Group," the first was the
province of chiefs, the second of chanters/dancers, the third of warriors, the fourth of
shamans, and the last of servants. I subsequently confirmed that Cubeo had a similar
system which was abandoned, they explained, because of demographic disturbances. What
now remains throughout the Vaupes is a simpler system that ranks by order of emergence,
and by distinctions between older and younger brothers. Since the specialist roles encom-
pass a full range of masculine controls over vital powers, they are indeed important guides
to the general meanings of hierarchy in the Vaupes. These meanings are explicated from
their mythical settings and from their apparent analogies with age grades, life cycle, kin-
ship, cosmology, and other aspects of the culture. While the structuralist demonstrations
are a bit overworked, and the analysis as a whole is insufficiently focused on the central
issue of gradations of powers, the argument as a whole is, nevertheless, powerful. It is an
imaginative foray into a theoretical area long overgrown with unexamined assumptions.

If Stephen Hugh-Jones's The Palm and the Pleiades appears somewhat more conven-
tional, it is because it is in the now classic tradition of close exegesis of microcosmic rituals,
and also because the methodology of Mythologiques adapts more readily to the analysis of
myth and ritual than it does to the events of ordinary life. Without ignoring their real
distinctions, he considers myth and ritual as a conceptual and analytic unit that is lodged
within an ethnographic context. His emphasis, therefore, is on what myths and ritual ac-
tions mean rather than on how they mean. His book, moreover, is an excellent example of
how a holistic representation of ritual can be constructed around a central cultural theme.
In this instance the theme is contained in the name of the major rite, He Wi or He House.
The term He, which he glosses from the Barasana word for fire (hea), seems to me rather
more like the Cubeo be. He, as does be, implies the generative condition. In the same frame
of reference it refers to ancestors, to "Yurupari" instruments, to primal sources, to the myth
world, and to spirits. Thus, to explain He and its house, which is a container of these primal
and generative conditions, is to invoke the cosmological concepts that are incorporated in
these rites. These, in essence, concern the primary issues of birth and death. The rituals give
Barasana the sense that they, too, have the powers to control basic processes of life.
Only the general nature of male initiation in the Vaupes had previously been described.
The author was able to witness the rarely performed full-scale He House initiation rites.
Others, like myself, had seen only the simpler version that corresponds to what Barasana
call Fruit House. By bringing together both versions, Stephen Hugh-Jones has given us, for
the first time, a definitive account of this most important phase in Vaupes life-cycle rituals.
Barasana have given up traditional mourning rituals, but judging from knowledge of Cubeo
it seems that Fruit House and He House synthesize certain themes that Cubeo divide be-
tween their "coming of age" and mourning rites.

With its well-conceived ethnographic summary, the book stands on its own. Successive
chapters deal with Fruit House rites, He House rites, the categories of participants
(especially of shamans), the He trumpets and flutes, the very important gourd of beeswax
(and a variety of other elements integral to the ceremonies), the symbolism of hair, whip-
ping, tobacco, themes of open and closed body orifices, death and rebirth by swallowing
and regurgitation, destruction, creation, growth, aggression, fire and its conceptual com-
plements, and sun and moon. Within this assemblage of related ritual concerns, generative
sexuality is central, as it would be in metaphoric rebirth rites. The shamans' gourd of bees-
wax and the Yurupari instruments are the major ritual symbols, the former an exemplar of
female sexuality (vagina/womb), the latter of masculine forces. My own understanding of
these rites is that they portray a special and exclusive form of masculine and asexual
reproductivity. Here, a convincing case is made for bisexuality. Consistent with this view is

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the concept of initiates and of shamans as menstruants. Stephen Hugh-Jones summarizes
these rites from a somewhat different point of view:

At He House, categories that are normally kept separate are merged and confounded: the house
becomes the universe, the past and the present are merged so that the dead are living and the living
are dead, present time becomes mythic time, a time when human beings, animals, and ancestors are
as yet undifferentiated. The major ritual symbols, the He instruments and the gourd of beeswax,
which combine opposed but complementary attributes are the means by which this merging of
categories is brought about (p. 248).

This is a curious summation of key themes of He House rites. It is curious because it

seems at odds with two of the most admirable features of the author's approach to his sub-
ject. One is that it concludes with an abstract structuralist axiom, whereas his clear intent is
to render structures concretely. The significance of He instruments, and of the gourd of
beeswax, is not that they are "opposed but complementary attributes," but that they repre-
sent, among other things, male and female sexuality. The He state from the author's data is
ritually significant not because of "merging of categories," but because it consists of
specific rearrangements that recreate a mythic state. Second, Stephen Hugh-Jones's state-
ment ignores the element of ambiguity in ritual and myth. In one sense, the He instruments
and the shaman's gourd of beeswax are directly representative of the He state itself, as at-
tributes of shamans, of spirit beings, and of the ancestors. As such, they do indeed draw the
initiates out of the temporal world into mythical existence. In another sense, and as major
symbols of sexual reproduction and of metaphoric rebirth, they are, contrariwise, the
means of passage out of He into the social world.
Ambiguity is an important issue because it is an inherent element in rituals that are
shamanistic and visionary, as those of He House are. The ritual participants draw upon a
repertoire of mythological allusions, with all their differing meanings, to recreate a per-
sonal vision of ancestral and primal states. At the same time, ritual also has an ideological
coherence that the author has so carefully reconstructed for us. I can readily agree with
him, on grounds of intellectual coherence, that the all-important gourd of beeswax can be
understood as vagina/womb and can therefore serve as the essential female element in the
rites. But all the other meanings of this symbolic element that he has culled from myth
must also be incorporated within an overall structure of connotations. The mythical
associations of the gourd of beeswax include the sun, shamans, ancestors, the liver and
tongue of a mythical being, the pleiades, the opossum, fire and light, and others. Its genital
character seems primary because it fits easily into an ideological structure of generative
forces. The other meanings, however, are ambiguous. Perhaps they can be accommodated
within a ritual structure that is, as Stephen Hugh-Jones suggests, multidimensional and sub-
ject to differing interpretations. Or, as I would suggest from a Cubeo perspective, there is in
ritual much that is intrinsically not coherent. Cubeo regard ritual with all its general mean-
ings as a setting for shamanic visions aided by hallucinogens and other drugs. The vision
which brings the ancestors to life in the mind of the participant is the true power of ritual:
coherence is background, while symbolic diversity and ambiguity are the stuff that
recreative visions are made of.

Considering the magnitude of the contribution both books make to Vaupes and Amazo-
nian ethnography, it is perhaps anticlimactic to conclude a review with questions of struc-
turalist methodology. It is important only to observe that the methodologies of Mytholo-
giques in such capable hands provoke insights and interpretations that otherwise go un-
noticed. In turn, the substantial ethnographic base resurrects disembodied structures.
Above all, what gives permanent value to both of these books is that they bring to life a
small community of tropical forest Indians, who now appear vividly before us as naturalists
and as philosophers of nature.

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 references cited

Goldman, Irving
1963 The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
1976 Perceptions of Nature and the Structure of Society: The Question of Cubeo Descent. Dia-
lectical Anthropology 1:287-292.
1977 Time, Space, and Descent: The Cubeo Example: Actes du XLIIe Congres International des
Americanistes 2:175-183. Paris.
Koch-Grunberg, Theodor
1909 Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern. 2 vols. Berlin: Strecher and Schroeder.
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo
1971 Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Spruce, Richard
1908 Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, 2 vols. London: MacMillan and Company.
Wallace, Alfred Russell
1870 A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. London: MacMillan and Company.

Submitted 15 October 1980

Accepted 20 October 1980

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