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Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism. On the inexact lines of Amazonian

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 7
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism
On the inexact lines of Amazonian modernity

o
Aníbal G. Arregui

This chapter investigates the ways in which lower Amazonian Ribeirinho –

mestizo riverine dwellers – articulate the technical aspects of their hunting
activity with their engagement with an animated nature. Amazonian spirit
entities and forces such as panema, the powers of the coiled boa, and the
curupira (discussed below), simultaneously reflect animistic and, implicitly,
technical logics. Despite being regarded as living in ‘traditional communities’,
the Ribeirinho incorporate modern tools – chainsaws, shotguns – and
Western categories such as ‘science’ and ‘intelligence’ into their everyday
activities. It will be argued that the meaning and functionality of some of
these tools and concepts are reinterpreted and embodied in the Ribeirinho
conception of a partially humanized nature.
This chapter reflects, on the one hand, on the local forms in which
apparently distinct dimensions of spiritual life and technology converge and
mutually constitute one another, while on the other hand it engages with the
topic that has motivated the present volume: indigenous modernities. The
Ribeirinho socio-cultural context might be understood as part of the process
of the indigenization of lower Amazonian societies. This would mean that
they have also become ‘natives’ after several generations of dwelling in the
Amazonian rainforest. However, the Ribeirinho, in their capacity as mestizos,
have been made ethnically and historically invisible. The discipline of cultural
anthropology has devoted little attention to what is likely to be the largest
group of people in the Amazon. This is striking as the Ribeirinho are both
an integral part of the Amazonian indigenous populations and the main
social actors in Amazonia’s colonization and industrialization throughout
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 165

the twentieth century. Ribeirinho cultural and historical trajectories are still
blurred or downplayed, and their anthropological description remains fairly
vague. Against the neat distinction between modern and traditional societies,
this chapter shows that in Ribeirinho lifeworld there is no clear separation
between spirits, the invisible forces of a humanized nature and hunting
technology. The following pages approach this relational hybrid, which I will
refer to as ‘techno-animism’, as an analytical tool to outline some of the ways
by which the Ribeirinho relate to other kinds of modernities and indigeneities.

The spirits of (Amazonian) technology

Modern science has always sought to distinguish spirituality from rationality
and technology. In contrast, since the middle of the twentieth century,
anthropology has queried modern science and Western rationality’s complete
independence from spiritual dimensions such as mythical thought and
religion. Structuralist anthropologists, for instance, did not just ascribe
mythical thinking to the sphere of spirituality; rather, they attempted to
disclose its logical functioning and its ability for structuring actual social
practices. Thus, Lévi-Strauss was among the first to notice that

prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between the so-called

‘primitive’ mind and scientific thought have resorted to qualitative
differences between the working processes of the mind in both cases
while assuming that the objects to which they were applying themselves
remained very much the same. If our interpretation is correct, we are led
toward a completely different view, namely, that the kind of logic which is
used by mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that
the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the
nature of the things to which it is applied. This is well in agreement with
the situation known to prevail in the field of technology: what makes a steel
ax superior to a stone one is not that the firestone is better made than the
second. They are equally well made, but steel is a different thing than stone.
In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes
are put to use in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking
equally well.
 (Lévi-Strauss 1955:444)

Nineteenth-century anthropology, however, still championed those

‘modern’ categories that put Western rationalism at the top of an evolutionary
hierarchy. Still embedded within the legacy of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-
century anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer and Edward Tylor struggled
to differentiate between science, magic and religion. The industrial revolution
166 Aníbal G. Arregui

was still a recent phenomenon and scientists were still coming to terms
with the immense power of technology. Machines became not only the
means but also the symbols of Western rationality (Hornborg 2001).
However, the philosophical watershed of relativism in the twentieth century
impelled anthropologists to seek a more continuous relation between magic
and technology in so-called ‘primitive’ societies (Jarvie and Agassi 1974).
Structuralism and relativism then partially overlapped in their questioning
of modern Cartesian dualities, which were inadequate for describing the
Other. Exotic cultures were extensively studied and their anthropological
particularities assessed vis-à-vis Western social institutions, yet the rationalist
foundations of our own ‘advanced’ and ‘complex’ society remained exempt
from anthropological critique. The real challenge to Cartesian science and
categories only came a few decades later with the advent of post-structuralism,
when the overcoming of modern dualities (body/soul, subject/object, nature/
culture, practice/theory etc.) was employed in the attempt to decolonize
Western thinking.
The anthropology of the Amazon has not only been influenced by these
philosophical trends; it has also offered ethnographic and theoretical analyses
that have contributed to the destabilization of some Western constructs.
The Amazonian example that I would like to focus on here concerns the
critique of the idea of technology as a purely technical phenomenon. From
the very beginning, the anthropology of the Amazon has demonstrated that
Amazonian mythical thought contains, implicitly, a technological pragmatism.
In a clear functionalist turn, early twentieth-century studies of material
culture show, for instance, that the Omagua planted their crops on the fertile
riverbanks, but the explanation as to why they did so cited the fact that
these lands belonged to their ancestors. Similarly, the Apacocúva used to
bring honeycombs to religious ceremonies, which constituted the base for
the practice of apiculture (Metraux 1928). More recent analyses suggest that
the myths of some indigenous groups contain a detailed ecological map of
the land as well as prescriptions aimed at conserving the ecosystem (Arhem
1996:200; Hill and Moran 1983:131). Furthermore, the influence of spirituality
over technical activities such as the production of tools and weapons has
been broadly analysed in the Amazonian context (e.g. Arhem et al. 2004:81–5;
Carneiro da Cunha and Barbosa de Almeida 2002:312–23; Mader 1999:132, 215;
Rival 1996:145).
Amerindian cosmologies – understood as the ways in which indigenous
peoples engage in and conceive of their environment and their history – can
be regarded as the general framework where the merging of Amazonian
technology and spirituality takes place. The well-known cosmological
categories of ‘animism’ (e.g. Descola 1986, 1996, 2005) and ‘perspectivism’ (e.g.
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 167

Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2002, 2010) stress the relational logic underpinning
Amerindian cosmologies and their analytical opposition to Western naturalism.
Such cosmological opposition leads of course to a basic socio-technical
divergence. For instance, when Viveiros de Castro postulates that in animism
the gap between society and nature is social and in naturalism this gap is itself
natural (Viveiros de Castro 2002:364), the socio-technical transposition can
be seen as the difference between relational versus instrumental modes of
engagement between humans and their environments. Broadly speaking, the
technological consequence of a naturalist cosmology is the domination of a
natural environment that is perceived as an object, and the purest expression
of this is the mechanization of the world (Descola 1996:97). In opposition
to this perspective is the socio-technical schema derived from animism,
according to which the environment itself has social agency. Humans and
natural elements share intentionality and certain subjectivities, thus framing
human–environment relations not terms of the logic of instrumentality but in
terms of social interaction.
The merging of culture and nature or of technology and spirituality is not,
however, a feature exclusive to Amerindian cosmologies. Rather, Amazonian
animism and perspectivism should be regarded as contributions to what
has been called an ‘Amazonian inflection of anthropology’ (Surrallés 2003a).
The influence of Amazonian anthropology beyond the regional context of
Amerindian cosmologies or forest dwellers can be tracked in different areas of
the social sciences and humanities. The idea of multiple natures, for instance,
is to be found both within perspectivist analysis as well as in wider critiques
of Western modernity (Latour 1991; Viveiros the Castro 1998). The relational
logic of human–environment relations appears not only in the anthropology
of the Amazon but also in other analyses concerning non-Amazonian hunter-
gatherer societies (Bird-David 1999; Ingold 2000). The concepts of animism
and fetishism, or the idea of a humanized nature, are being expanded in
order to describe very distant cultures from all around the globe (see Calavia
2003, 2006; Descola 1986, 2005; Hornborg 2006, 2015; Pfaffenberger 1988).
Technology and spirits therefore maintain a co-constitutive dialogue not only
within the Amazonian context, and lower Amazon Ribeirinhos are part of a
general complex in which technology and the other aspects of human culture
stand in close relation and mutually constitute another. Following the animist/
naturalist opposition, one question that emerges from the intertwining of
social dimensions is how different the co-constitution of spirituality and
technology is in distinct places or cultures. Another question – the one to
which this chapter is devoted – concerns internal differences/Otherness
(see Candea 2011) in the ways such co-constitution materializes within the
168 Aníbal G. Arregui

Amazon, which all too often has been presented as a cosmologically coherent
whole.

The Ribeirinho and the modern hybrid

The present chapter uses the category of Ribeirinho – meaning ‘riverine
dweller’ in Portuguese – in an inclusive sense that encompasses the so-called
Caboclos or mestizos as well as riverine Quilombola communities, which
is the Brazilian name for maroon communities.1 Even though both groups
are historically and institutionally differentiated, they are also a product of
mestizisation and accordingly their religious and socio-technical differences
are minor (see Price 1999). This analytical distinction is collapsed in order
to work with a logic of cultural differences that are not tied to ethnic or
historical identities, but which are context-dependent and constantly evolving
anthropological features of the Ribeirinho (see also Arregui 2013).2 At any
rate, the population of riverine dwellers is estimated to be at over 6 million
individuals.3 Despite being the most numerous group on the Brazilian Amazon,
and to some extent ‘indigenous’ regarding their land, anthropological studies
have concentrated their attention to a far greater degree on the officially
recognized Quilombolas and ‘indigenous peoples’, thus adjusting to categories
that are also shared by Brazilian institutions. Amazonian riverine dwellers
as a whole have remained comparatively ‘invisible’ (see Adams et al. 2006;
Nugent 1993; Nugent and Harris 2000). I would nevertheless suggest that
considering the Ribeirinho as an ethnically invisible society sheds light on
some of the processes that have been called the ‘indigenization of modernity’
(Sahlins 1999). The latter is addressed here, particularly in terms of the ways
modernity both reshaping and reshaped by native Amazonian actors such as
the Ribeirinho.
By way of illustration, in the first part of this chapter I will focus on
the ways in which Ribeirinho hunting activities are interpenetrated by
Amerindian animism and myths as well as by Western modernity in the
form of modern tools and concepts. The underlying idea is that Ribeirinho
socio-technical systems are closely integrated with invisible beings and forces.
This articulation of spirits and technology is analytically relevant because

1 Fieldwork took place in 2007 and 2009 in several Quilombola communities along
the Rio Erepecurú (Oriximiná, state of Pará) and in Caboclo communities near
Lake Zé Açú (Parintins, state of Amazonas).
2 It is worth noting that the categories Quilombola and Caboclo are largely
mutually exclusive, but the category Ribeirinho may refer to a quality that is shared
by both groups.
3 joshuaproject.net/people_groups/11073 (accessed 4 June 2017).
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 169

it attempts to query the implicit (mono-)logical view of animistic societies

as being exclusively animistic, and naturalistic societies as being exclusively
naturalistic. As critiques of animist and (mostly) perspectivist theories
suggest, both Amerindian cosmologies and modern Western world views
have an internal complexity that should not be downplayed: the reduction of
culture to nature (structuralism, naturalism) and of nature to culture (post-
structuralism, perspectivism) may become hegemonic dogmas that downplay
the heterogeneity of any given society (see Ramos 2012; Turner 2009).
The Amazonian context is indeed marked by a complex set of historical and
cultural circumstances that cannot be reduced to an animistic, perspectivist
nor even to an indigenous-like world view. African slavery, colonial history,
Catholic and Protestant missions, south and north-east Brazilian immigrants,
extractive industries and many other social factors are part of the diverse
cultural landscape of the Amazon. The way that contemporary Amerindians
see the world should not be deduced exclusively from their mythical narratives
or through the invocation of an ontologically ‘animated environment’. Even
if these cosmological traits exist and are useful to understand parts of
Amerindian live, they need to be related to other anthropological dimensions
that offer a less static and homogeneous depiction of their culture: socio-
technical practices, land policies, indigenous rights, flows of Western concepts,
religious conversion and the de facto ‘far-reaching networks’ of some of the
peoples identified as being indigenous and therefore strongly attached to their
land (see Mader, this volume).4 Various historical, political, territorial and even
spiritual factors are ethnographically relevant here, and must not be obscured
by the intense abstraction that often accompanies the notions of ‘animism’ or
‘perspectivism’.
The ethnographic account of the Amazonian Ribeirinho provides a clear
example of the difficulty in ascribing generalizing anthropological categories.
First of all, the Ribeirino have a hybrid socio-technical system which makes it
difficult to define whether they should be regarded as traditional or modern.
The riverine communities in which they are organized are usually identified
as ‘traditional communities’, as their main economic activities are fishing,
hunting, slash-and-burn horticulture, the extraction of natural resources and
a family mode of production (Wagner 2009). As several authors have pointed
out, the Ribeirinho need to draw upon Amerindian traditional knowledge and

4 Mader (this volume) discusses how Shuar shamans incorporate a diversity of

objects, healing knowledge and practices in an analysis of the ‘intercultural’ work
of modern shamans that draws not only on local tradition but also on experience
gathered through far-reaching networks that reach much beyond the geographical
context of their own ‘culture’.
170 Aníbal G. Arregui

techniques in order to perform these activities (see Carneiro da Cunha and

Barbosa de Almeida 2002; Wagley 1988). However, labelling the Ribeirinho as
living in ‘traditional communities’ entails some analytical problems, insofar as
cultural and material change is at the core of their identity and is a better way
to understand their dynamic present. By the time my fieldwork took place, the
Ribeirinho of the lower Amazon were far from being ‘traditional’. They had
already incorporated modern machines such as chainsaws, shotguns, outboard
motors, generators and televisions into their socio-technical systems. Their
narratives were impregnated by technical words relating to their machines and
by Western categories such as ‘science’ or ‘intelligence’. Furthermore, for the
great majority, the economy was partially oriented to the market. Leaving aside
those Ribeirinho who worked in the mining industry on the Trombetas River
(Arregui 2015), it was usual for them to sell manioc flour as well as planks,
nuts or some artisanal products such as handmade canoes or ornaments. The
Ribeirinho were not exclusively ‘traditional’, but rather representatives of a
particular Amazonian sort of social hybridity that combines traditional and
modern elements and therefore has ‘no time for essences’ (Harris 2007a:11).
These hybrid socio-technical systems are often classified as extractive
economies or, in Marxist terms, ‘modes of extraction’ (Bunker 1984).5 Besides
industrial forms of extraction – such as mining and oil drilling – this kind of
economic activity, locally called ‘traditional extractivism’, includes practices
like hunting, fishing, slash-and-burn horticulture, logging and the gathering
of fruits, plants and minerals. Ribeirinho systems are based mainly on family
or communal production, and are configured according to local economic
practices, which generally respect the beliefs and cultural values that mediate
the Riberinho human-environment relations (see Fernandes do Rego 1999).
However, extractive economies in the Amazon involve both traditional –
and mainly embodied – indigenous techniques and production methods
and technologies adopted from industrial-capitalist societies.6 The term
‘extractivism’ thus describes in the Amazon an economic system characterized

5 Bunker (1984) alludes to the Marxist concept ‘modes of production’. The

difference, I argue, is that the ‘modes of extraction’ only provide raw materials that
are elsewhere transformed into commodities, and so acquire their exchange value.
The economic history of the colonization of the Amazon can be interpreted as
the exploitation of the ‘mode of extraction’ by the ‘mode of production’, a global
articulation that correlates with the commercial relationship between peripheral
and central economies.
6 Some clear examples of the physical exploitation of the workforce include the gold
mining (Cleary 1990) and rubber industries that expanded exponentially in the
Amazon in the early twentieth century (O’Dwyer 1998).
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 171

by a general sense of the extraction of animal, vegetable and mineral resources

both for immediate consumption and for the market.

‘Animating’ the hunt

The Ribeirinho’s uncertain status with regard to modernity emerges from this
hybrid economic-technological system as well as the way in which this system
is affected by spiritual matters. Ribeirinho spirituality involves at least three
main elements: Christian faith, African religions imported in the course of the
slave trade and an animist social imagination incorporated from relations with
Amerindian societies. While their religious system should be understood as
a hybrid of these three elements, for the purposes of this chapter I will limit
my focus to some mythological narratives that come mostly from the Tupí
tradition (see Galvão 1955). The reasons for this focus are twofold. First, it
would be impossible to consider the whole religious spectrum in the space of
a short essay. Second, Amerindian animism and mythologies are, due to their
historic-ecological placement, more clearly linked to the forest – and hence to
hunting activity – than are African religions or European Christianity.
The imprint of indigenous cultures is firstly visible in the way that
Ribeirinho engage in a partially animated environment. Hunting practices
provide an illustration of how different levels of ‘nature’ – mostly animals and
plants – are endowed with human-like subjectivity. Some Ribeirinho hunters,
for instance, will avoid any kind of sexual contact before entering the forest,
while others prefer to hunt on an empty stomach. Both appetites, alimentary
and sexual, seem to be embedded in the logic of hunting an animal. The point
here is that while the former seems obviously connected to the main goal of
hunting – that is, the acquisition of food – the latter has to be understood as a
specific Amazonian perspective according to which the hunt takes place in the
interstitial space between hunting and ‘seduction’ (Descola 1986).
As a paradigmatic example of this ‘seduction’ logic, a man from the
Rio Erepecurú used to perfume himself and dress in new or freshly washed
clothes before entering the forest. Animism, perspectivism and the endowing
of nature with human-like intentions and desires stand at the centre of
these practices. As has been documented for other Amerindian societies,
in Ribeirinho hunting the hunter and the hunted share a cultural system of
values. The activity of the hunt is clearly technical. However, the attitude
towards nature is not that of domination or predation but rather the intention
to interact with the animal by engaging ‘him’ or ‘her’ in a kind of intimate
relationship. The hunt is rarely a simple search for and pursuit of an animal.
Rather, it involves a set of behaviours that the hunter displays in order to
attract their prey. In the end, Ribeirinho hunting performance consists mostly
of a rich repertoire of animal sound mimicry: whistles, squawks, sounds that
172 Aníbal G. Arregui

animals make while chewing and so on. Almost every kind of animal invites
the sonic mimesis of the hunter, who reproduces the specific call of a bird
like the red-billed curassow (Crax blumenbachii), the sound of the agouti
(Dasyprocta leporina) scratching its teeth on a nutshell, the grunting of a
tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in heat and a large variety of other sounds. The hunt
might thus be regarded as a technical or bio-mechanical matter: the hunter
needs to be skilled in reproducing all these sounds with their own body. He
uses his mouth, his hands or his feet in order to produce a specific sound. The
body techniques involved in animal imitation must be learned, a process that
takes place mostly in the context of collective hunting. And there are further
technical factors that influence the success of the activity: the proper placing
of a trap, the choice of an ambush site, the measured movements required in
order to pass silently through the forest, the skill needed to wield the weapon
of choice.
Despite the technical contingencies of the hunt, explanations of it often
concern ‘non-technical’ issues. A typical explanation for an unsuccessful
hunt, for instance, is that the hunter has suffered from panema, a specific
sort of bad luck or misfortune that affects mostly hunters and fishermen
(see DaMatta 1973). This misfortune has nothing to do with mere chance,
however. The causes of having or of ‘being’ panema are varied and always
have a social logic. Panema might be the result of a curse: someone in the
community or from a neighbouring community may have cursed the hunter
and thus kept him from catching his prey. Social conflicts from the past might
be invoked for explaining the panema that a hunter is suffering in the present.
If a Ribeirinho with whom one has problems does not have the magical power
to induce panema in others, they can always ‘delegate’ the casting of the spell
to a shaman.
Sometimes a hunter cannot be sure whether someone is looking to curse
them with panama, but the very possibility or suspicion pushes them to take
preventive measures. Panema is related to smell. The curse may materialize
in an odour that follows the hunter and that obviously affects the seduction
element of the hunt. Since animals can easily detect the unpleasant smell –
that is, the perverse intentions – of the hunter, all their imitative performances
will fail to attract their prey. In order to avoid animals fleeing from their body
odour, the hunter must observe strict hygiene – at least – before hunting.
Having a long bath in the river the night before or at dawn is almost an
obligatory measure. Scrubbing the whole body with a hard brush and an
intense, smelly soap might similarly aid in ‘washing‘ panema away.
The case of the hunter mentioned above who uses perfume and clean
clothes in order to appear clean and attractive to his prey is one instance of
a local perspective of the relation between hunter and hunted that is defined
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 173

by rules similar to those that regulate relations between men and women (see
Sautchuk 2007:129). Moreover, the vocabulary that Ribeirinho use to describe
the actions and intentions of some animals is evocative of language used with
regard to women. If a snake bites a hunter, he may declare ‘she offended the
hunter’ (ela ofendeu o caçador). The ‘expertise’ of the animal is another mode
for describing its human-like subjectivity. Ribeirinhos may complain, while
pursuing an evasive animal, that it ‘is very expert’ (e muito experto) or suggest
that this animal is arisco, that is ‘crabby’, ‘sour’ or ‘unfriendly’ in a rather
human sense.
Animals have a human-like subjectivity and therefore hunters must
interact with rather than hunt them. Panema introduces a ‘magical’ logic to
the activity. Intense washing can therefore be regarded as a body ritual to avoid
the odorous effect of panema on the hunter’s body. Focusing on the presence
of the ‘magical’ panema logic in hunting activities, it would seem that, as
Charles Wagley has suggested, Ribeirinhos ‘do not distinguish between the
tangible natural and the supernatural world’ (Wagley 1953:76). Nevertheless,
body rituals can neither be understood as mere means for the production of
magical effects nor as totalizing traits of a given culture (Douglas 1966). In the
Ribeirinho context, panema and its associated body rituals express a specific
social constitution of the environment wherein the body mediates in symbolic
as well as in technical issues.
Even if the animation of the Ribeirinho forest is interpenetrated by
magical elements such as panema, other cultural notions referring to an
animated nature and the body invite us to look at it from a more technical
perspective. The use of the words ‘intelligence’ or ‘science’ are illustrative.
Hunters and animals share a ‘forest-oriented intelligence’ (uma inteligencia
para o mato) that is materialized in specific body skills. This intelligence plays
an important role in hunting, and encounters with prey can be expressed as
an intellectual confrontation. Thus, while the hunter may evoke their own
intelligence when they are successful, the ‘intelligence’ of the animal may be
referred to when it escapes.
Broadly speaking, the idea of ‘intelligence’ can be placed within an
extended notion of ‘science’. Sassá, a sixty-year-old Ribeirinho, described ‘his’
science as follows:

I never get lost in the forest. I have a science for that. I am ‘very’ expert. I
know how to watch […] When I see prey, I can follow it through the whole
forest until I catch it. I kill it right there. The prey cannot hide because I
find it. I don’t need to make picadas [marks on the branches or trunks of
trees that indicate the path for the return journey]. I find the direction by
looking at the sun. It is a gift. […] Once I had to sleep in the forest. I don’t
174 Aníbal G. Arregui

even know how far from the community I was. But I woke up early in the
morning and I looked to one side and then I knew the community was over
there. I knew the way even if I had walked it. I have this science.

Ribeirinhos do indeed have their own ‘science’, a concept that mostly

concerns the physical skills involved in hunting, fishing and healing activities
(see Arregui 2014). For instance, a man who has caught a pirarucú (Arapaima
sp.), a big fish that requires great dexterity to land, will be likewise regarded as
having the specific ‘science’ for catching it. But having ‘science’ is not a feature
exclusive to humans. That animals have their own ‘science’ is taken as a fact
in Amazonia (see Carneiro da Cunha and Barbosa de Almeida 2002:312–8).
For both humans and animals, the idea of science encompasses a wide range
of behaviour, bio-mechanical capacities and embodied knowledge that are
enacted in living in and dealing with the forest.
The ideas of ‘intelligence’ and ‘science’ – or at least the Portuguese words
ciência and inteligencia – were imported with colonization. Since then, they
have been reinterpreted and replaced in a semantic field where the body – not
the brain or the mind – is perceived to be the ‘locus of conscience’ (Karadimas
2005:2). For many Amerindian groups and for the Ribeirinho as well, the body
plays a central cosmological role (see e.g. Surrallés 2003b; Taylor 1996; Viveiros
de Castro 1998, 2002). In the Ribeirinho context, the animation of nature is
in part mediated by the embodied cultural qualities that animals and humans
share, as exemplified by the mutual possession of ‘science’ and ‘intelligence’.
However, these extended notions of science and intelligence reflect not only
the animistic heritage of the Ribeirinho but also the entering of ‘modern’
concepts into their culture. Ribeirinho hunters use concepts linked to Western
rationality and incorporate them into an animistic schema that encompasses
the animals they hunt. Whether they belong to the naturalistic or the animistic
side of the cosmological dichotomy, hence, remains a difficult question.
Myths, techniques, technologies
Amazonian myths or mythical legends provide a more classical example
of the animation of nature. Ribeirinhos not only take them seriously but use
them as a guide for practice. That mythological narratives are intimately
connected to the logic of daily practical activities is nothing new, neither is
it something limited to Amazonian contexts (see e.g. Eliade 1963). However,
this connection is not always explicit and it must be explored from a local
perspective and using the methodological tools of anthropological fieldwork.
By way of illustration, in conversations with and among Ribeirinho, a
mythical narrative sometimes appears to fill the gap of what might elsewhere
have been a technical explanation. Mythology is often evoked when an
anthropologist expects technological reflections, which tend to be implicit
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 175

or expressed in a laconic fashion. The practice of ‘learning by watching’

(aprender olhando), for instance, is a typical Ribeirinho response to the
anthropologist’s technical inquiries. Mythical explanations may contextualize
central socio-technical practices such as hunting, fishing and gathering. An
initial ethnographic conclusion might be that Ribeirinho technical practice is
too embedded in other social dimensions to be considered ‘technology’, that
is, an ‘externalization’ – conceptualization, mechanization, institutionalization
– of the technical phenomenon that is characteristic of modern societies
(Ingold 2000:290). Conceding that Ribeirinho technical practice is embedded
in society, I would rather argue that it is no more embedded than in modern
contexts and that the difference remains in the habit of making technical
reflections explicit.
According to Maurice Bloch (1998:7), implicit knowledge becomes
explicit under certain circumstances. Implicit Ribeirinho knowledge is not
immanent. Rather, it is a social or cultural contingency that can be modified if
the circumstances require it to be externalized. In this regard the insistence of
the ethnographer plays an important role: technical explanations only emerge
when the ethnographer persists in demanding verbal descriptions of what the
Ribeirinho themselves do not always consider necessary to understanding
a certain activity. At first sight, a traditional technique might seem simple
and its logic completely embedded in other discursive dimensions, such as
mythological narratives. But this apparent simplicity could also be considered
the tip of an iceberg, beneath which remains important technological
knowledge, spatio-visual thought and analogical reasoning (Pfaffenberger
1992:508). In the Ribeirinho case, a central ethnographic question is, therefore,
to what extent their mythology contains an implicit technical logic.
As argued above, hunting is undertaken in a partially animated forest.
Local myths contribute in a significant way to this animation of nature. One
of the mythological narratives that the Ribeirinho relate to the forest is that
of the coiled boa (jiboia enrolada, Boa constrictor). The Ribeirinho explain
that the coiled boa hunts by waiting. They call it the ‘waiting hunt’ (caça
de espera), a method that Ribeirinho hunters themselves employ. Both the
Ribeirinho and the boa hide somewhere in the forest and remain there until
their prey approaches. Their silent bodies function like traps. Often, hunters
use the body strategies described above in order to seduce and attract animals,
bringing them towards their location. So too does the boa. The difference is
that the snake does not imitate animal sounds. She – the mythological boa is
female – coils up her body and hides among the fallen leaves. She then emits
a sort of hypnotic aura that spreads through the forest. Affected by the boa’s
spell, animals suddenly feel dizzy and disoriented and fail to notice that they
176 Aníbal G. Arregui

are moving in a spiral direction that will end with them in the fatal coils of
the boa.
Like animals, hunters may fall victim to the boa’s spell as well. Although
they know the forest as though it were an extended garden, they sometimes
get lost. Orientation in the forest is one of the most important skills a
Ribeirinho hunter must develop. As mentioned, those who have the ability
to find the right way in the jungle intuitively are regarded as having special
‘theories’ or even a particular ‘science’, thus stressing the complexity of the
embodied knowledge involved in it (see Arregui 2014). Concrete techniques
for finding one’s way home in the forest include following footprints, scenting
the smell left behind by dogs – whenever they escort a hunter – and observing
the sun’s position. In the case of a collective hunt, hunters communicate with
their comrades spread across the forest by whistles or by beating on the trunk
or the roots of the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra).
Beside these spontaneous modes of orientation, there is a technique that
Ribeirinho use to ensure that they will find their way back to the community:
they use a machete to make cuts and scratches on trees. These subtle marks
are called picadas. Experienced hunters recommend that novices always make
picadas when moving through the forest. But young hunters like to think
of themselves as having the ‘gift’ of orientation. As mentioned above, the
embodied ability to orient oneself is deemed to be a ‘science’, or an embodied
‘intelligence’. Every hunter wants to be regarded as so skilled that they never
gets lost and always return home in time for dinner with freshly killed prey to
share with other members of the community.
When they possess this ‘science’ of orientation, hunters sometimes feel
so self-confident that they do not feel the need to make picadas. But this
Ribeirinho ‘science’ does not always work properly and hunters occasionally
have to spend the night in the forest, having lost their way. In such cases,
however, the enquiries of other Ribeirinho upon the return of the disoriented
hunter are not reduced to the fact of having or not having made picadas.
They may refer at the same time to the boa, who, coiled up in the leaves, may
have been attracting the hunter towards her, thus making him walk in circles,
unable to orient himself – something that would otherwise have been an easy
task for him. The lost hunter may then refer to two parallel logics. The first
– if he has sufficient humility to admit it – addresses the technical fact of not
having made picadas. The second addresses the boa and the procedure that
freed him form her spell, that is, cutting a piece of a liana and rolling it up as
if it were a coiled snake, then throwing it back over one’s head. Rather than
implying a contradiction, the magical solution of throwing a rolled piece of
liana and the technical practice of making picadas have to be seen as two sides
of the same coin. This complementarity of logics is an old anthropological
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 177

issue. Malinowski long ago pointed out how Trobriand islanders deemed the
‘efficiency of magic’ in the construction of canoes to be insufficiently strong to
overcome the technical mistakes of bad craftsmanship (Malinowski 1963:175).
The coiled boa is not the only animated being to disorientate hunters in
the forest. An often evoked mythological being is the curupira. The curupira
is mostly thought of as being male, but some Ribeirinho see it as being
female. Either way, the curupira is the size of a child, sometimes has red hair,
sometimes has hairy skin and always has feet that are turned backwards.
The latter trait is frequently cited as being responsible for making Ribeirinho
hunters lose their way. They fall into a sort of sick, confused mental state as
they try to follow the illogical footprints they find on the ground.
The curupira is regarded as the protector of the forest. It can be either
benevolent or evil, depending on the Ribeirinho’s behaviour. It observes in
particular what hunters and woodcutters do. It forbids hunters from killing for
mere pleasure or from killing pregnant animals or those that are accompanied
by young offspring. Likewise, the curupira gets angry if a woodcutter fells too
many trees or sells the wood of certain rare species of tree. The curupira can
make such men lose their way in the forest just by leaving their footprints on
the ground or by projecting false images of the forest to Ribeirinho. Sometimes
the curupira expresses their anger by making thunderous noises that boom
across the forest or by beating on tree trunks at night, close to communities.
An old Ribeirinho offered me a detailed description of how the curupira
– regarded on this occasion as female – is conceived by them: ‘The curupira
is very sensitive. We are perturbed by her gestures and she is perturbed by
our gestures. She sees us like animals’. The curupira has human attributes
such as sensitivity, a sense of love and respect towards the offspring of every
species; it tries to protect the forest from the excesses of humans and, from a
perspectivist point of view, it perceives ‘inferior’ beings – that is, Ribeirinhos
– as animals. A hunter told me once that he repeatedly heard the curupira’s
voice demanding of him: ‘Where are the wild pigs?’ (Cadê os porcos?). The man
had for years regretted the day he killed several wild pigs from the same herd.
It was difficult to discern whether the voice he heard was his own conscience
or the human-like voice of this mythological being. What seems to be clear is
that the curupira functioned in his experience not only as a myth capable of
causing fear or admiration, but also as a way of setting socio-technical limits
on Ribeirinho hunting activities.

Inexact modernity
A large number of works have shown that Amazonian modernity differs
explicitly from what Latour (1991) called the ‘modern constitution’ that
separates humans (culture, technology) from nature (natural objects, animals),
178 Aníbal G. Arregui

and both humans and nature from the divine entities. At the same time, until
recently, only a small number of studies have focused on the interstitial spaces
between Western and non-Western dogmas (see e.g. Halbmayer, Kapfhammer
and Garnelo, Mader, Meiser, Rosengren, this volume). But if globalization has
a longer history than is often supposed (see e.g. Wolf 1982), one may wonder
to what extent the modern cosmological and geographical divide between
Western and non-Western will remain useful (Halbmayer and Mader 2004).
Indeed, there coexist in the West diverse conceptions of nature (see Eder
2002) and also specific modes of animation, such as technological fetishism
(Harvey 2003; Hornborg 2006, 2015). In a similar way, indigenous peoples,
hunter-gatherers and animist societies are surely not the same ‘animists’ that
they were before colonial expansion. There is a tendency among scholars to
refer to cosmological principles such as animism or naturalism as though
they were exact manifestations of how people experience their environment.
Cosmological accounts of one’s world are of course shaped by the discourses of
science in the West or of relational cosmologies in the Amazon. But one may
wonder if the explicit way that cosmologies are ‘explained’ to anthropologists
by their counterparts makes them the best source from which to analyse a
given socio-cultural system (see Bird-David 1999:S81, S87).
I have drawn here upon the example of the lower Amazonian Ribeirinho
in order to show how different perspectives on the environment converge
in the narratives and practices of one single social group. In a sense, the
hybrid Ribeirinho socio-technical system illustrates how Amerindian and
Western world views transcend their own ethnic, epistemological and
geographical frontiers, thus generating ‘a new complex’ (Harris 2007b:311).
This new complexity can be addressed in many ways. Here I have stressed
the articulation between the animation of nature and technological reflection.
Both dimensions share a socio-technical space where technical practices and
spirits provide one another with a structure (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols
2008:99), a social network that is constituted by this local yet efficient
relational hybrid that I have called ‘techno-animism’.
But this is not simply a question of knowledge. All myths and values
related to the animation of nature stand in potential tension with new material
conditions such as the incorporation of new technologies into day-to-day life.
The panema, for instance, coexists with the growing presence of shotguns,
whose noisy discharges provide hunters with additional firepower, but also –
like the panema – may frighten away other possible prey. Similarly, chainsaws
are opening up a new market for the Ribeirinho, who are increasingly trading
in timber. Many of them, however, recognize the pernicious consequences of
chainsaws on the variety of flora and fauna. The curupira is of course aware
of chainsaws, and sometimes manifests itself against them. The effect of
Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism 179

shotguns and chainsaws on the dispersal of animals is also recognized by the

Ribeirinho, who see this explanation of food scarcity as on an equal footing
with the likewise powerful effects of the panema or the curupira in scaring
off game animals. In this regard, explanatory or relational ambivalence can be
seen as a core feature of the Ribeirinho: neither animistic nor technological
rationales can be regarded as independent, hegemonic discourses that provide
us with a homogeneous depiction of Ribeirinho lifeworlds.
I have described how the ‘foreign’ ideas of ‘science’ and ‘intelligence’
have been adopted into Ribeirinho socio-technical systems. But there,
once again, they acquire a different quality. The meaning of ‘science’ to the
Ribeirinho seems to be less cerebral and more an aspect of people’s bodily
skills (see Aregui 2014). Moreover, the idea of ‘science’ in this context is an
attribute of some animals as well. Nature is animated or humanized with
Amerindian spirit entities and forces, but also with categories based on
modernist relational principles, such as those related to ideas of technical
efficiency. As I have argued, the Ribeirinho’s relational hybridity, detached
from historically congealed ethnic categories, allows approaching them as
living in a space that is neither modern nor traditional. Accordingly, this space
cannot be represented as existing along an evolutionary line. It is rather a
cosmo-political space, of which Ribeirinho are just a fraction – maybe a fractal
part – that is changing constantly and everywhere, and that at the present is
being profoundly transformed by global flows of concepts and materials and
the technological infiltrations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Of course, the universal
scale of such changes should not blur the anthropological accounts of cultural
differences; on the contrary, it should challenge and urge anthropologists to
account for the ways in which social boundaries and differences are being
reshaped in current times. In a sense, the anthropology of the Ribeirinho can
then also contribute to overcoming Latour’s modern constitution (1991), as the
ethnography of their hunting activity discloses a particular hybrid: a natural-
cultural/object-subject forest. Such questioning of modern thought has been
addressed in this chapter by showing the ways in which the Ribeirinho merge
technology and spirits in a local history whose core feature is precisely the
blurriness of its outline.

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