History and Anthropology

ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20

Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth, History

and Memory in NW Amazonia

Stephen Hugh-Jones

To cite this article: Stephen Hugh-Jones (2016) Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth,
History and Memory in NW Amazonia, History and Anthropology, 27:2, 154-182, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2016.1138291

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2016.1138291

Published online: 25 Feb 2016.

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History and Anthropology, 2016
Vol. 27, No. 2, 154–182, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2016.1138291

Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper:

Myth, History and Memory in NW
Amazonia*
Stephen Hugh-Jones

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music
and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and
also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest
Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal
and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by
indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity
with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with
and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic
systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When
“writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written docu-
ments appear in a new light.

Keywords: NW Amazonia; Myth; History; Memory; Writing; Books

Introduction
In a previous paper (Hugh-Jones 2010), I suggested that, in combination with their
own particular history of contact with outsiders, certain features of the society and
culture of the Tukanoan speakers of the Upper Rio Negro (URN) region predispose
them to write down their stories of origin and more recent history and publish them

*This paper reproduces, in modified form, some material first presented as the Conferencia Magistral to open the
Congreso internacional sobre antropología e historia “Memoria amazónica el los paises andinos”. I would like to
record my thanks to the organizers and sponsors for their generous invitation and to the Rainbird Foundation
for a generous grant that began this current work on Tukanoan chants.
Correspondence to: Dr. Stephen Hugh-Jones, King’s College, Cambridge, CB2 1ST, UK. Email: sh116@cam.ac.uk

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

 History and Anthropology 155
in books. Pursuing this same general theme, here I turn my attention from books to
writing and processes of memory. My aim is to explore how NW Amazonian myth-
history is structured and memorized and how it can also appear in various non-
verbal, material forms. To do this, I examine the relationship between indigenous
speech and music and various forms iconography. The speech and music includes nar-
rative histories, ritual chants, spells, dance songs and instrumental music, all of them
directly or indirectly related to what anthropologists often call “myth”. The iconogra-
phy includes not only obviously graphic forms such as petroglyphs and designs painted
on house walls or woven into basketry but also features of the landscape that are under-
stood in graphic terms as the marks or traces of the bodies of ancestral beings and signs
of their activities as they moved about in the world.
My focus is on the Arawakan- and Tukanoan-speaking peoples of the URN region.
In some contexts, insiders and outsiders both emphasize the differences between the
Arawakans and Tukanoans and stress further differences and sub-divisions internal
to each major linguistic bloc that divide its people on the basis of territory, ecological
specialization, language, rank, status, ancestral origins and so on. However, like their
anthropologist observers, in other contexts URN peoples are also aware that
they share many cultural features in common and make up a single open-ended
socio-cultural system with its own distinct identity. Here I shall concentrate on the
similarities rather than on the differences, one reason why my focus will be more on
form than on content. My concern is not with the details of particular stories or
chants but rather with general features of organization and memory and with the
relation between verbal and non-verbal forms. I am interested in how these forms
inter-relate and work together as a coherent system, in how this might add to an under-
standing of indigenous ideas of time and history, and in how oral and graphic forms
from earlier times filter through into the more recent written documents that are cur-
rently being produced by new, literate generations. The “writing” in my title is thus
both process and product.
My paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, Writing on Stone, I explore some
of the graphic and non-graphic memory systems that support various forms of indigen-
ous history or “myth” in the URN region. These memory systems are what I have in
mind when I refer to as “writing”. I argue that “myth” and “writing” must be under-
stood from an indigenous point of view. I also suggest that, rather than insisting on
hard and fast distinctions between societies with or without writing, or asking
whether petroglyphs, house paintings, basketry designs or other forms of inscription
are or are not “true writing”, it is more interesting and productive to widen the field
of enquiry by examining how obviously graphic and apparently non-graphic, architec-
tural or spatial forms work together with oral traditions. In the Conclusion, I return to
the issue of “peoples without writing” with reference to the debate between Lévi-Strauss
and Derrida.
In the second part of my paper, Writing on Paper, I return briefly to the subject
of books to explore the continuity between older forms of “writing” and the
more recent production of books, maps, diagrams and calendars. These written docu-
ments are being produced in the context of programmes of collaborative research and
156 S. Hugh-Jones
ethno-education allied to the revitalization and reclamation of traditional territory and
culture by indigenous organizations in the URN area. In one sense these documents are
quite new: they first appeared some 30 years ago and they are typically produced by
members of the younger generation many of whom were educated by the Salesian,
Montfortian and Javerian missionaries who once dominated the Brazilian Uaupés
and Colombian Vaupés regions. But in another sense they are also quite old: not
only are they produced in collaboration with older people, the shamans, chanters,
dancers and other knowledgeable elders but, in various ways, they also reproduce
forms of knowledge and inscription that existed long before the arrival of outsiders
and advent of missionary education.

Writing on Stone: Petroglyphs, Writing and Systems of Memory

Petroglyphs
When European explorer-scientists first entered the URN region, one of the things that
impressed them most were the secret Yurupary rituals that took place in malocas, the
huge hall-like ceremonial houses with elaborately painted fronts that are characteristic
of the region. But as they travelled along the rivers these visitors were also struck by
mysterious figures engraved on the rocks that emerged from the waters of the
rapids. Ermanno Stradelli, an Italian explorer who visited the Uaupés in the 1880s,
and Theodor Koch-Grünberg, a German ethnographer who travelled extensively
amongst the Arawakan- and Tukanoan-speaking peoples of the area just after the
turn of the twentieth century, both made accurate records of the many petroglyphs
they came across (Stradelli 1900; Koch-Grünberg 1907/2010). At the same time, they
also began to speculate about the meaning of the enigmatic signs they saw around
them.
When Stradelli asked his indigenous guides what the signs meant, they answered him
in terms of traditional narratives (“myths”); they probably also mentioned writing for,
in the indigenous languages of the region, the words that refer to painted, engraved or
woven designs made by people and to the marks and patterns on the bodies of animals
are also applied to alphabetic writing. But when people from the URN claim, as they
often do, that their history is “written on the stones”, this claim is by no means
simply a translation of indigenous ideas into outsiders’ categories; it also reveals a soph-
isticated understanding of what writing is and does.
Stradelli himself was quite convinced that the petroglyphs were indeed a form of
writing for several earlier travellers had already reported what looked like pictographic
or ideographic forms of writing in other parts of South and Central America. So Stra-
delli came up with the idea that the Uaupés petroglyphs were historical records of
ancient migrations written in a forgotten ideographic alphabet; those who made
these migrations had apparently left messages in strategic places to guide their fol-
lowers. Thus Stradelli claimed that a petroglyph that he took to be a representation
of snakes’ eggs meant “you will find lots of food here” whilst another apparently
 History and Anthropology 157
representing the snakes themselves conveyed the message “watch out, there’s danger
here” (1900, 462).
Koch-Grünberg had read Stradelli’s report but was not convinced by his interpret-
ations. Like Stradelli, he was aware of the local peoples’ claim that there was an intimate
connection between petroglyphs and “myths”. He also made the important observation
that many of the petroglyphs bore a striking resemblance to the figures and designs that
people painted on their houses, engraved on their gourds and other objects, or wove
into their baskets. But, as far as he was concerned, petroglyphs were certainly not
any form of writing. Furthermore, despite what his Indian companions told him, he
emphasized that they were not really related to “myths” either; they were simply
pass-times. Petroglyphs were typically to be found at rapids because that was where
people had to stop and wait while they portaged their loads round the obstacle and
passed their canoes up and down the falls. Having already stopped at the rapids and
with time on their hands, they engraved petroglyphs for their own amusement.

Writing
This now ancient debate between Stradelli and Koch-Grünberg over whether or not
petroglyphs are writing finds a recent echo in Fernando Santos Granero’s paper
Writing history into the landscape: space, myth and ritual in contemporary Amazonia
(1998). Taking as his examples the Yanesha of the Peruvian Montaña and the Arawa-
kan peoples of the URN, Santos Granero is concerned with the Arawakans’ practice of
inscribing their history into the landscape. Sometimes they do this by means of petro-
glyphs but they also do it by constant reference to particular geographical locations in
their stories of creation and by attaching historical memories to old house sites, routes
of migration, sites of battles, and the locations of other important events in their oral
histories. Santos Granero uses the notion of “topographic writing” to refer to these
different ways of inscribing history onto the landscape but also makes clear that topo-
graphic writing cannot be considered to be a form of true writing—and here he follows
Goody’s definition, a “systematic link between sign and sound” that allows for “an
exact transcription of a linguistic statement” (1993, 17). It is with such restricted defi-
nitions of writing and their sociological correlates that Derrida (1966) takes issue.
Santos Granero also goes on to suggest that the topographic writing of Amazonian
peoples might have been derived from their contacts with the more complex societies
of the Andes. The implication would be that the idea of “writing”, in this broader sense,
would have filtered down from sources such as the Inca’s knotted string quipus and
their ceque system that linked lines of sacred sites with calendrical events, both of
them closer approximations to “true writing” than Santos Granero’s Arawakan
examples. But, behind this notion of a possible Andean origin for Amazonian
writing practices, there also an implicit suggestion that Amazonians could not have
invented such schemes for themselves. Below we will see examples of Amazonian
quipus and linear arrangements of sacred sites with calendrical resonances from con-
temporary Amazonian populations. Recent archaeological discoveries of large
densely populated settlements associated with quite complex social organization in
158 S. Hugh-Jones
prehistoric middle Amazonia suggest that previous populations might well have had yet
more sophisticated forms of “writing”.
Rather than making radical distinctions between societies with or without writing or
between writing that is more or less “true”, it might be more useful to widen the field of
enquiry by examining the more general relation between oral traditions and various
forms of iconography. Here I follow Severi who writes: “Word and image articulated
together in a technique of memory, notably in the context of ritual enunciation,
make up an alternative that has prevailed, in many societies, over the use of writing”
(2003, 77; my trans).1 Taking as examples the designs on Yekuana basketry, Kuna
sacred books, NW coast totem poles and Andean quipus, Severi (2009) shows how
Amerindian iconographic systems function as systems of memory associated with
ritual chants, a special form of language whose structure rests on the repetitive
listing of names and various other forms of parallelism. Such memory systems work
by establishing a relation between ordered systems of knowledge and ordered sets of
graphic elements. Severi’s discussion fits well with the URN case and can generate
some interesting insights. In order to show this, I must first outline URN narrative
history in general terms, simplifying what is in fact a more complex picture.

Narrative and Chant

Aside from the difference of language, the URN Arawakans and Tukanoans are also dis-
tinguished by their different origins. The Arawakans all share a common tradition of
origin from the rapids of Hípana on the Rio Aiari whilst most Tukanoans share a tra-
dition of downstream origin from the Milk River or Lake (variously identified with
today’s Manaus or Rio) with a common emergence site from the rapids of Ipanoré
on the Uaupés.2 Despite these different traditions, in other respects the narrative his-
tories of these two populations show striking features in common, so much so that, in
overall terms, one can speak of a shared URN narrative tradition distributed between
different groups with each one producing its own particular version, giving it a particu-
lar slant, and interpreting it in line with its own specific identity. An examination of the
books published by various Tukanoan and Arawakan authors in the Coleção Narradores
Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro series is enough to show that this is so.
Taken as a whole, this common oral tradition is typically ordered chronologically
into three different cycles. The first cycle deals with primordial origins and is set in
the undifferentiated space–time of a universe identified with a single maloca—the
site of Hípana in the case of the Arawakans. The second cycle deals with a divine ances-
tral figure the Arawakans call Kuwai, the Tukanoans call by various different names and
who, in Lingua Geral or Nheengatu, the trade language once used throughout the URN,
is known as Yuruparí. Here I shall use this latter name.
The stories tell of Yuruparí’s conception and birth, how he ate young initiate boys as
a punishment for their disobedience, how he was burned to death on a fire, how the
sacred flutes that bear his name were created from a palm tree that sprang from his
ashes and how Yuruparí’s mother, her sisters and female companions stole these
musical instruments from the men. In a series of events that lead to an expansion
 History and Anthropology 159
and opening up of the cosmos to its present size, the women escape from place to place
with the flutes leaving traces of their passage as petroglyphs on the rocks. The men
chase after them and eventually get back their flutes.
The third cycle then deals with the creation and emergence of true human beings,
with how they divided up into named ethnic units linked by ties of marriage and
exchange, and with the formation and dispersal of these groups’ component clans.
Here stories of migration and inter-group warfare figure prominently alongside the
doings of various clan chiefs and the narratives typically end with the arrival of
slavers, missionaries, rubber gatherers and other agents of white colonial society. In
short, seen overall and from an outsider’s point of view, the passage from the first to
the third cycle might be described as a passage from myth to history.
These narratives, and especially (though not exclusively) those concerning Yuruparí
and the women’s theft of the flutes that bear his name, are associated with ritual chants
that are sung by specialist shaman–chanters in the context of rites of passage. The URN
Arawakans refer to these chants as málikai; different Tukanoan languages employ
different terms—keti oka in Barasana, niromakañe in Tuyuka, etc. Málikai or keti oka
chants function as spells that the shamans use to protect people who are undergoing
the rites: the spells make the foods that they eat and the activities they undertake
safe. These same spells can also be breathed silently into food, drinks, cigars, coca
and other vehicles that are then ingested or applied to the body. In their chants and
spells and in their thoughts, chanters and shamans travel along these rivers, listing
the spirit names and forces associated with named sacred sites strung out along their
lengths and following the routes taken by Yuruparí and by the women who stole his
flutes.
In most instances what is recited in chants and spells can also be recounted in the
form of narrative stories. Narratives and chants or spells are thus transformations of
one another. Narratives employ everyday speech and make obvious semantic sense
as connected stories; chants and spells rely more on poetry, metaphor, metre and
music and typically involve listing of names, places, species, artefacts, etc. rather
than connected speech. Crucially for my argument, chants and spells are associated
with various forms of iconography, not just with petroglyphs and inscription onto
the landscape but also with basketry designs, houses and house painting—just the
kind of thing that Severi has in mind.
In a very interesting work on the subject, Hill shows that Arawakan málikai or ritual
songs and chants lie somewhere between straight verbal narration and pure music that
is sung or played on instruments. Hill uses the terms “mythification” and “musicaliza-
tion” to emphasize the dynamic interplay or tension between the constraining seman-
tic, classificatory, categorical aspects of narrative and the more liberating, poetic,
rhythmical musical aspects of language that are exploited by málikai chants and
songs. The ritually potent process of musicalization uses the dynamic features of
music to transform semantic classifications into an expanding world of named
peoples, places, species and objects; in the less potent process of mythification, the
semantic categories of language are used to constrain the musicality of speech into rela-
tively steady, tonally and rhythmically stable ways of chanting or singing. The
160 S. Hugh-Jones
distinction between “mythification” and “musicalization” corresponds to the Wakué-
nai distinction between “heaping up names in a single place” and “chasing after
names”. If “chasing after names” exploits the potential of the musical, poetic side of
language to expand or cross between bounded semantic categories and identities,
“heaping up names” constrains this fluid, dynamic potential by placing the diversity
of natural objects and species into a relatively stable set of generic categories (Hill
1993, 20–23; 1996, 152–153).
Much the same could be said for the Tukanoans—and here I shall use the example of
the Barasana of the Rio Pirá-paraná who I know best (see Figure 1). The Barasana cat-
egory büküra keti (“old peoples’ stories”) is normally applied to narrated myth but can
also be used to refer to other historical narratives, to genealogies and to stories about
the deeds of previous generations and past clan ancestors. At the other extreme the
word basa covers song, dance and instrumental music. The category keti oka, which
might be translated as “sacred, powerful speech, thought or esoteric knowledge”
applies, in particular, to ritual chants and, in this sense, is roughly equivalent to the
Arawakan málikai. But, in a more extended sense, keti oka applies not only to chants
and shamanic spells but also to dance songs, to the songs latent in the melodies of Yur-
uparí flutes, and also to ritual objects, petroglyphs and sacred sites all of which evoke
extended exegetical commentaries or ancestral pedigrees. Songs, music, objects, designs
and places can all be paired up with relevant sections of oral narrative and can thus
serve as vehicles or manifestations of knowledge or thought.
Tukanoan ritual chants operate along two axes: one axis is structured with reference
to a sequence of named, sacred sites identified with malocas or houses, most of them
located along the courses of rivers (see also Wright 1993, 18). A chant is thus like a
journey that typically follows the linear course of a river, branching off to ascend or
descend side streams and sometimes crossing from one river to another. The other
axis of a chant involves sequences associated with one particular site, an axis

Figure 1. Málikai and Keti Oka: between myth and music.

 History and Anthropology 161
perpendicular to the linear axis. These sequences consist of lists of named spirits, ances-
tors, natural species and ritual objects, some of which are represented in the petro-
glyphs engraved on the rocks of sacred sites. My two axes would correspond with
the spatial aspects of Hill’s “chasing after names” and “heaping up names” (see
Figure 2).3
Something similar applies to Tukanoan narrative myths: as the narrative unfolds, the
action moves from place to place with each place the setting for one or more different
episodes. In this sense telling a myth also involves travel. The Barasana use the same
term ∼ba4 or “path”, a nominal classifier for anything long, thin and filiform, to
refer to narrative sequences, sequences of places, or trains of thought. Journeys
follow such “paths” and a river can also be referred to as an oko ∼ba or “water
path”. The episodes of myth that unfold in particular places involve beings and
items which also figure in chants and shamanic spells, now as lists of names; the
names of these beings and objects also figure in dance songs and in this way the
songs evoke the episodes of myth to which they refer.
A concrete example of all this can be found in the relation between (a) the story of
the death of ∼Rabe, a cannibal eagle who ∼Waribi, a culture hero, kills with a blowpipe
and poison dart; (b) the lyrics for ∼Rabe basa, “Rame’s Song”, sung and danced during
ritual gatherings in the Pirá-paraná region; (c) shamanic spells relating to curare poison
and (d) chants relating to the Yuruparí instruments and other sacred possessions of the
Tatuyo who are neighbours and affines of the Barasana .
In the story, ∼Waribi shoots ∼Rabe with a poison dart; ∼Rabe then flies deliriously
from place to place above to earth, eventually dying and falling to the ground. As ∼Rabe
flies, drops of his blood fall from his body giving rise to the different plants used to
make curare that are known to occur in different named locations in the region; his
beak then falls off giving rise to the ∼Igeaya or “Beak river”, the Río Tí, an affluent

Figure 2. Places in sequence; sequences in place: the two axes of ritual chants.
162 S. Hugh-Jones
of the Río Vaupés; then his whole body falls to the ground, his bones giving rise to
Tatuyo Yuruparí instruments and his skull becoming their sacred gourds of coca
and tobacco-snuff.
∼Rabe basa is the song that ∼Rabe sang as he died; the few identifiable words of each
verse allude to places, items and stages associated with his slow, painful death. This
sequence of song verses, each one interspersed by a session of chanting, marks the
stages of the ritual gathering at which the song is danced and sung. When reciting a
spell for curare poison, the shaman travels in his mind from place to place, using
river lines as mnemonics and counting off each known source of curare. At each
place, he lists off the names, properties, owning group and other attributes of the rel-
evant plants and utters a series of performative injunctions. These either strengthen or
remove the effects of the poison depending on the purpose of the spell. Finally, Tatuyo
Yuruparí flutes and sacred gourds evoke the story of ∼Rabe just as the spells and chants
uttered when these objects are used also allude to the events and places of the story. In
this way, object, place, name, narrative, spell, song and chant can all be considered as
different manifestations of one and the same entity, in this case ∼Rabe.
Spoken narratives are thus more descriptive; they are also always marked as reported
speech, and are considered less potent. By contrast, chant, spell and song are opaque
and allusive, directly identified with the speaker and considered to be potent, transfor-
mative verbal forms that can act upon the world and transport the enunciator to it. The
direct, transparent quality of spoken narratives means that they can also function as
interpretative keys to the condensed, allusive poetry of chants and spells and provide
clues to understand shamanic taxonomies of the beings in the world and the powers
and dangers with which they are associated. Finally, the places, the sacred sites that
figure in all of these musical and narrative forms have a mnemonic function. Infor-
mation can read into a place by teaching or explaining its significance. This is what
happens when people hear myths, especially when one or more myths are used to
explain the sense and purpose behind a particular chant or spell. At the same time
information can also be read off a place when it serves as a mnemonic device. This
is what happens when story-tellers use their memory of a sequence of places to struc-
ture their story or when chanters move from place to place, verse to verse, as their chant
proceeds.
Much of this also applies to objects. The objects that are found in a maloca, especially
the sacred objects that play a prominent part in ritual, are typically endowed with dense
layers of meaning. These layers of meaning come from the narratives and sections of
chant and spell that are recounted as exegetical commentaries on the objects con-
cerned. In this way increasing amounts of information are read into objects as individ-
uals mature and acquire knowledge and wisdom. In this sense objects can be made to
speak and to recall memories. And the same applies to different forms of iconography.
One conclusion from all this is that, from an indigenous point of view, what anthro-
pologists call “myth” actually comes in a variety of different forms and that our cat-
egory “myth”, with its implications of spoken narrative, fits uneasily with indigenous
understandings. This point emerges very clearly in Romero’s (2003) work on the Ara-
wakan Curipaco. For them, “myth” also appears as chants, songs, music and
 History and Anthropology 163
petroglyphs, the same forms that Barasana would include under their category keti oka.
Romero writes “to limit myth to orality is to only know one of the many forms of the
story” and that the distribution of petroglyphs along the rivers “traces out a geography,
in narrative sequences, in the form of graphic myths, … an alphabet of rapids …
composed of marks and forms on the rocks that revive memories of the passage of Iña-
pirriuli, of Dzuli or of Kuwai” (2003, 20–21).5
To sum up so far: we have seen that sacred sites are also sites of memory and func-
tion as mnemonics, that many of these sites are marked by petroglyphs, and that chants
structured in relation to sacred sites may also make explicit reference to these petro-
glyphs. Thus Barasana chanters know that when their chant arrives at ∼Yedodi, a
rapid and important “house of transformation” (∼basa yuhiri wii) on the Río Pirá-
paraná, they must change the melody of the chant from a repeated rising and falling
tone to a flatter melody that descends at the end of each stanza.
But, in addition to the major linear features of their landscape, the rivers that are cut
every now and then by rapids and falls, the peoples of the URN also make use of various
other mnemonic devices. The standard layout of the maloca, each one with a near iden-
tical structure of parallel rows of supporting posts and a grid of intersecting longitudi-
nal and lateral poles in the roof, provides a ready-made theatre of memory. The designs
painted on the front walls of the maloca, woven into baskets, and repeated in many of
the petroglyphs are another such device. Given pens and paper, people will spon-
taneously reproduce these designs, offering sections of chant or song as an explanatory
commentary as they trace their fingers along rows of dots or repeated zigzags or undu-
lations. Appropriately, ukari, the word for “pattern” or “design” is also used as the word
for “writing”.
What we have here then is a system in which spatially arranged iconographic
elements—petroglyphs along rivers or repeated design elements on house fronts, in
basketry or in petroglyphs—operate in tandem with other non-iconographic elements
that are “out there” in the landscape—un-marked but nonetheless striking rocks,
rapids, hills and other natural features—or in the space of houses—the rows of
posts and the intersections of poles. Severi is of course well aware of the emphasis
on spatial-architectural schemata in European techniques of memory (see Yates
1966) but these theatres of memory figure hardly at all in his discussion of their Amer-
indian counterparts. But it is not simply that iconographic and non-iconographic
architectural or geographic elements operate together as separate, complementary
parts for, in indigenous thought, they are one and the same thing.6
The rapids, boulders, rock outcrops and mountains that figure in chants are them-
selves houses or malocas, the dwelling places of spirits and the places of origin of human
beings; some of them are also archaeological sites and sites of old settlements. Further-
more, given that the maloca is identified with the world and that the world is envisaged
as a house, it follows that mountains are house-posts, that linear rock-outcrops are the
horizontal beams of houses and that rapids on rivers are the doors of those houses. Fol-
lowing this logic, petroglyphs on rocks in the rapids are indeed the designs on the front
walls of the malocas: in some cases they actually repeat these designs and are explicitly
identified as house paintings. ∼Binowü wii or “The Cave the Swifts” in the Pirá-paraná
164 S. Hugh-Jones
region is a good example here: the cave is the house of ∼Robi ∼Kubu and a petroglyph
engraved on the floor of the cave represents the painting on the front of her house.
Finally, baskets, rivers and petroglyphs are directly linked. Ipanoré, the name of the
rapids that are the origin site of most Tukanoans, means “basket” in Geral and are
called thompa duri, “basket rocks” in the Tukano language (Ribeiro 1995, 93). More
generally, the meandering designs on URN basketry are reminiscent of winding
rivers and, as Ribeiro (1995, 93–96) observes, many petroglyphs either represent
whole baskets or repeat basketry designs. Romero’s (2003, 269) caption to a photo-
graph of a petroglyph representing a basket underscores the mnemonic functions of
petroglyphs and basketry designs. Part of the caption reads: “Petroglyph: the malirri’s
paths that are retraced by the malirri to learn parts of the story”.7 Finally there is lin-
guistic evidence for a more generic link between baskets and rapids: in Barasana and
neighbouring Tukanoan languages, the same nominal classifier -bo applies to both.
Thus wühü-bo and biheri-bo are names for large flat baskets used in the processing
of bitter manioc whilst ∼Seda-bo, “Pineapple Rapid” is the name of a large waterfall
near the headwaters of the Pirá-paraná river.

Memory
Systems of memory rest upon the general psychological principles of order and of sal-
ience: ordered relations between sequences of ritual language and corresponding
graphic elements give the system its logical power whilst the salience of these
graphic elements gives the system its expressive powers (Severi 2007, 26–27; 2009,
478). For such systems to work the elements must be memorable: they must catch
the eye or engage the imagination by their striking, surprising or unexpected appear-
ance. What gives them this quality? Severi suggests that it is the ambiguous, chimerical
quality of the iconographic elements in systems of memory that makes them both visu-
ally salient and memorable. He defines as chimerical “any image that, in designating a
plural being by means of a single representation, calls to mind its invisible parts by
means of purely optical means or by a set of inferences” (2011, 29).8 More simply a
chimera is a special animal whose body combines parts from two or more different
normal animals and a chimerical image is one that represents such a special, plural
and paradoxical being.
Does this work for petroglyphs? A few petroglyphs do represent chimerical or plural
beings but this is certainly not true of most of them; nor does purely visual salience
account for the characteristics of the rocks and rapids on which petroglyphs are
engraved. We must pay attention to other things. In the Amazonian environment
where stone is generally scarce, rocks and rapids in rivers are salient by their very
nature. The presence of petroglyphs makes some rocks yet more salient but unmarked
rocks of striking shape or particular arrangement may be treated as of equal significance
(see also Xavier 2012). Added to this, the sound of the water rushing over rocks makes
them acoustically salient. Like the noise of thunder and the bellowing sound of Yuru-
parí trumpets, the roar of rapids is ∼übüari oka, “the speech of the universe”, another
form of keti oka. Furthermore, stone and rock belong together with other hard, durable
 History and Anthropology 165
substances like bone and hard woods that have ancestral connotations. Thus Yuruparí
instruments, made of hard palm wood, are identified with the bones of immortal
ancestors and the primordial versions of Tukanoan sacred objects are described as
being made of white crystalline stone. As a Tariano man from Yauareté explains, the
first beings were stone people “not because they were made of stone but because the
duration of their lives had no end” (IPHAN 2007, 56).9
Finally, as the seasons pass, the waters of the rivers rise and fall so that petroglyphs
representing spirits and ancestors appear to emerge from the waters just as, in
Tukanoan origin stories, the ancestors emerged from the waters to become human
beings. This seasonal pattern of emergence and submergence also repeats the seasonal
revelation and hiding of the Yuruparí flutes and trumpets. Each year, as the dry season
ends and as the rains increase and the waters rise, the Yuruparí are taken from their
hiding places under the water, displayed in the house, and then hidden away again.
Many of the petroglyphs would appear to represent Yuruparí instruments but in indi-
genous eyes they are not representations; they are the real thing. Petroglyphs are Yur-
uparí in another form (see also Xavier 2012, 7). This is why one should avert one’s eyes
and not look at them. By the same token, for Tukanoans, their anaconda ancestors did
not merely arrive by river; the meandering rivers are those ancestors and were created
as the anacondas moved.
This material leads me to a further conclusion: petroglyphs, rocks and rapids are not
only forms of materialized history; they also synthesize different ways of thinking about
time. Petroglyphs are traces of the ancestors imprinted on the rocks when these rocks
were still soft and new. They are parts of a changeless past that intrudes into the change-
able present making past and present coeval. Strung out in linear sequences along the
courses of rivers like beads on a string, rapids also indicate the linear passage of time in
narratives and chants and in the travels, histories and processes of transformation to
which these narratives and chants refer. In indigenous drawings, these rapids are rep-
resented as a succession of houses, the stopping places of the ancestral anaconda canoe
whose passengers came out onto dry land to dance, then went back under water again
as they travelled upstream from East to West (see Figure 3). The ancestors’ journey also
combines cyclical and linear time: like petroglyphs that emerge from the water then dis-
appear again, the ancestors oscillate between water and land, emerging from the water
to dance in houses then returning to their canoe to continue their journey; yet, taken as
a whole, their journey from East to West is also a linear journey of transformation that
leads from spirit to human and from past to present.

Time and Genealogy

Thus far I have talked mainly about mytho-history but you will recall that, in their
arrangement as chronologically ordered cycles, URN mytho-historical narratives
slide seamlessly from myth to history. Rapids, houses and house sites also provide
the basis for thinking about human time and ordinary history and also for the con-
struction of genealogies. Every anthropologist knows, or they think they know, that
Amazonian Indians do not have genealogies. Gow writes (2002, 148):
166 S. Hugh-Jones

Figure 3. Transformation houses along the Tiquié river—the stopping places of the
Ancestral Anaconda Canoe. From Umusī Pãrõkumu (Firmiano Arantes Lana) &
Tõrãmü Kēhíri (Luiz Gomes Lana) 1995: 79.
 History and Anthropology 167
If we have learned anything about indigenous Amazonian peoples, it is surely that geneal-
ogy and shared descent do not much interest them. Even in the few parts of indigenous
Amazonia where we find descent groups, they have little to do with genealogy as such.

Notwithstanding this received knowledge, as Andrello (2006) has shown for the
Tariano, and van de Hammen (1992) for the Yukuna-Matapí, URN peoples, especially
members of high-ranking clans, can produce quite extensive genealogies.
The long Tukanoan narrations that start with the creation of the first beings and then
move on to the coming of people in the ancestral anaconda canoe, typically end in an
account of the creation and subsequent dispersal of the component clans of the group
to which the narrator belongs—again this can be clearly seen in the books in the
Coleção Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro series. These accounts tell of the found-
ing of different malocas, of how maloca-based kin-groups and communities moved
from place to place, and of how they divided up over the course of time as the popu-
lation increased and the generations passed. For people who live in malocas and
abandon their old houses and build new ones as the years go by, the chronology of
their lives is remembered as a series of houses with periodic moves up or down
river. It is thus quite natural that memories should be tied to the places where
people lived and that their genealogies should be structured as a sequence of houses
for all this reflects their everyday experience.
Writing against the grain of supposedly uniform Amazonian cultural practices
related to death and the afterlife, Chaumeil (2007) emphasizes a diversity of attitudes
and practices amongst different peoples—some take pains to forget their dead but
others do not. Referring to the sacred flutes and interest in ancestorhood of peoples
such as the Yagua and Tukanoans, Chaumeil (2007, 272) writes that we see here:
a shift from a cyclic temporality to a more cumulative conception of time—not truly his-
torical in the sense we commonly understand, but one where the elements layer on top of
each other. An indigenous kind of ‘chronology’ in other words.

I would add two qualifications. Firstly, in oral histories of inter-group warfare and
raiding and of contact with slavers, missionaries, rubber gatherers and other agents
of white society, we do indeed see a conception of history that is quite similar to
non-indigenous understandings (see also Hugh-Jones 1988a). Secondly, in the
mytho-history of URN area, what we see is less a displacement of cyclical time by
cumulative time and more a bringing together or fusion of the two so that the linear
succession of generations is brought into line with the repetitive, circular succession
of the seasons. The linear river with its seasonally or cyclically rising and falling
waters is a potent image of this fusion; the reconciliation of these two modes of time
is also a dominant theme of the myths and rituals relating to Yuruparí.

Lines, Circles and Numbers

The metaphors of line and circle that Western peoples use to characterize different
kinds of time lead me to an examination of the objects that Tukanoans use to give
form to abstract notions of time and space and also to a discussion of why we
168 S. Hugh-Jones
should include a consideration of numbers and counting when examining chanting,
memory and writing. Here I can only offer some brief observations designed to add
further dimensions to the material discussed earlier. Let me begin with the Andean
quipus that were one of Severi’s (2009) examples. We have already seen that rapids
on rivers are used as mnemonic devices or “topographical quipus” in the URN; but
we also find real quipus in Amazonia. These Amazonian quipus, made of knotted
strings and sometimes incorporating figurines, feathers, bones and other objects, are
used to represent sequences of time, points on journeys or sequential operations, or
to indicate ordered series of chants or songs, ritual sequences or a succession of past
events. The Yagua use such knotted strings for memorizing ritual sequences, songs
and chants, the latter detailing clan histories, genealogies and war stories (Chaumeil
2005).
Although I have never seen knotted string quipus in use amongst Tukanoan peoples,
I have been told of them and of specialist dancers (baya) using strings of beads of alter-
nating colours to teach others sequences of dance songs. In NW Amazonian myths
about the origins of night, and thus of time itself, there are also several references to
people untying knots in strings of beads to set time in motion, counting off sequences
of beads in order to remember sequences of song that measure time, and putting on
and taking off body ornaments as a mnemonic for temporal sequences (see Hugh-
Jones 2015). These Amazonian quipus of knotted string or coloured beads should
therefore take their place alongside the rapids, petroglyphs, houses and baskets dis-
cussed above. As Chaumeil (2007, 272 and passim) observes, such apparatuses imply
a particular idea of chronology, one of cumulative time and of links between the
living and their ancestors. As might be expected, the use of these Amazonian quipus
is frequently (though not exclusively) associated with societies in which genealogical
awareness and some form of “unilinear” reckoning is present—as in the URN.
Now for some words on baskets. If linear string and bead quipus are used to record
and memorize various kinds of temporal sequences, baskets would seem to provide
ready-made images of both linear and cyclical time. URN basketry comes in both
the circular form of the flat tray or balay and the elongated, linear form of the
tipití.10 Circular balays also integrate linear elements both in the form of the strips
of aruma11 cane from which they are made and in the designs that are built up from
these strips; and we have already seen that the repeated, linear elements of these
designs may be used as mnemonics. In Barasana, the tipití is called ∼hido-bü, a term
made up of ∼hido, “anaconda”, plus -bü, a classifier that applies to all closed tubes.
For the Barasana, the tipití is identified with the shed skin of an anaconda, with the
ancestral Anaconda-canoe, and with its transformation as the ancestor deity called
∼Kii Rükü ∼Hido, “Manioc-Stick Anaconda”. Round cakes of manioc bread placed
in round shallow baskets are the coiled body of Manioc-Stick Anaconda. Coiled and
round or laid out straight, anacondas and basketry therefore provide other readily at
hand models for thinking about lines and circles.
More generally, we have seen that Tukanoan languages group apparently dissimilar
objects into generic classes according to their shape, marking each class by a dis-
tinguishing nominal suffix. These nominal classifiers predispose the speakers of such
 History and Anthropology 169
languages to use everyday objects as protoforms for thinking about more abstract prin-
ciples of time, space and social organization. Much of Hugh-Jones (1979a) monograph
is taken up with an extended discussion of the lines and circles evident in the organiz-
ation of the body, the maloca and the cosmos that also function as organizational prin-
ciples in Tukanoan society. We have already seen how the classifier ∼ba, “line or
filliform object”, brings together linear rivers and the linear basketry of the tipití
with the temporal sequences of narratives, chants and songs; below and in a more
modern context we will see circular diagrams and baskets representing seasonal
cycles and cultural-ecological calendars.
Citing Guss (1990), Severi explains that Yekuana myth is more often evoked as finite
lists of named spirits and places in ritual chants than told as connected narrative and
that these ritual chants are evoked by the designs worked in flat basketry trays. This
is also true of the Arawakans and Tukanoans of the URN and it sheds further light
on why basket making is such an important part of the education given to young
men during the period of seclusion that follows their initiation rituals (see Hugh-
Jones 2009). In learning to make basketry, the initiates are learning the skills that
define a competent husband, one who can make the equipment that allows his wife
to produce food. At the same time, as the initiates learn to make baskets, they are
also learning narratives and chants. This is one reason why there are strong links
between knowledge of basketry and shamanic knowledge more generally (Ribeiro
1995, 90–92).
Quipus and baskets also lead me to the subject of counting. One cannot make bask-
etry or basketry patterns without counting the threads and the chanting that baskets
evoke also involves counting off lists of places and their associated spirit powers. In
Portuguese and Spanish, the verb contar, “to count or recount”, applies equally to
the enumeration of objects and to the narration of stories. In the same way the Barasana
verb ∼koiare, literally “to see or examine quantity”, applies equally to counting objects,
to counting off days, generations, places or lists, and to chanting, divination and spells,
where the chanter or shaman must ensure that he enumerates all the relevant places,
spirits, species, objects, etc. and in their correct order.12 All this suggests that indigen-
ous ideas about number and order must be included as an integral part of the oral tra-
ditions, iconography and techniques of memory we have been considering, something
that is already hinted at by tripartite cycles of NW Amazonian mytho-history that were
noted earlier.
Let us begin with hands. Tukanoan counting works on a base of five with a constant
play between imbalance and balance: one finger, a pair, a pair plus one, two pairs, then
one hand, a complete higher-level unit that is again unpaired and unbalanced; then one
hand plus one through to two hands—another more balanced pair; then two hands
plus one toe through to twenty—two hands, two feet, two pairs but one person,
another higher-level unit. Like Quechua numbers, Tukanoan numbers are also concep-
tualized in terms of social relations. In the Quechua case, five is a mother with her four
children, the thumb and four fingers (Urton ibid: 75 ff.); this would also apply to the
Tukanoan deity ∼Romi ~Kubu's four Ayawa sons (see Hugh-Jones 1979b, 267). In
other contexts one, as a single hand, encompasses five just as the body of one anaconda
170 S. Hugh-Jones
ancestor becomes his five clan-ancestor sons ranked by their order of birth with their
five specialist roles of chief, chanter, warrior, shaman and servant. The number five also
appears in the maloca’s two rows of five central posts—five pairs that represent the
ancestors of different groups—and in the four legs and seat of the shaman’s stool,
the five primordial Thunders in their five houses, the four cardinal points plus
zenith (see Hugh-Jones 1995). As for the Quechua case (Urton 1997, 80), for Tukano-
ans the number five, paradigmatically as five ranked sons, also has connotations of hier-
archy and succession and serves as a model for the organization of ordinal sequences in
general.
A hand with its five outstretched fingers or the diverging veins on a leaf of coca are
two images used to indicate kin relations between a father and his sons or ancestors and
their descendants. These images relate to two indigenous ways of thinking about gen-
ealogy and descent, either as rivers converging, backwards in time, as they flow from
West to East—part of the logic behind the story of the upstream journey of the Ana-
conda-Canoe; or as vines diverging, forwards in time, as they grow upwards from a
common stock—the vines of yagé (Banisteriopsis sps.) and ∼kada (Sabicea amazonen-
sis) that provide images of umbilical connections between mother and children, ances-
tor and descendants, source and outcome.13
To date anthropologists studying Amazonian societies have paid relatively little
attention to the issue of numeracy—by implication people who “lack writing” also
“lack” numbers and counting. These remarks on Tukanoan numbers are intentionally
speculative and incomplete. I mention them to suggest an avenue for research into
notions of time, myth, history, genealogy and memory that might shed new light on
URN cultures and also point towards their links with the civilizations of pre-historic
Amazonia. In this context we should note Brotherston’s (2000, 11) observation that
Stradelli’s (1890) Yuruparí story “offers numerical and technical data that, considered
together, suggest an order of knowledge comparable in some respects with the math-
ematics and astronomy present in Mesoamerican and Andean texts, and which even
shed light on them”.14
To summarize thus far: following a discussion of the writing of myth and indigenous
historical memory into the landscape of NW Amazonia, I have argued that instead of
asking whether petroglyphs and other forms of inscription are or are not “true writing”
it is more profitable to ask how graphic and non-graphic but architectural or spatial
forms work together with oral traditions. Radical contrasts between people with or
without writing are not helpful because they obscure the fact that oral, visual,
graphic, material, architectural and geographic modes work together in integrated
systems of memory and enumeration.

Writing on Paper: Books, Maps and Calendars

Ethno-education
I now want to turn briefly to the indigenous schools and programmes of ethno-edu-
cation that have grown up over past decades on both sides of the frontier between
 History and Anthropology 171
Colombia and Brazil. I cannot give a full account; my aim here is simply to explore
some of the continuities between the old and the new, between writing on stone and
writing on paper. From what I have said so far, it might be deduced that the people
of the URN have a predisposition to write their own history and to record various
kinds of knowledge on paper. An extraordinary indigenous publishing boom that is
unique to the URN area and linked with these programmes of ethno-education
would be one indication that this is indeed the case and elsewhere I have argued
that a submerged URN literate tradition stretches back to pre-historic times (see
Hugh-Jones 2010).
Despite national (Colombia, Brazil) and linguistic (Arawakan, Tukanoan) diversity,
the ethno-education projects of the URN region15 share many characteristics in
common. The projects involve participation by all members of the community—
parents, teachers, students, ritual experts and elders; in them school and community
affairs are linked by mutual feedback between classroom knowledge and collective pro-
blems; and education is combined with programmes dealing with health and environ-
mental management in a holistic and unified project of “world management” (manejo
del mundo). There is also a strong emphasis on ensuring the continuity of traditional
knowledge and local languages with younger teacher-leaders engaging in active pro-
grammes of collaborative research with both community experts—shamans, chanters,
dancers, craft specialists, and with outside experts—anthropologists, educationalists,
ecologists, health workers, etc.
Emphasis on traditional knowledge and the intervention of elders and ritual experts
as teachers, healers, community protectors and ecological resource managers means
that such projects represent a transformation of the chants and spells discussed
above, with the outputs of research going both directly into classroom teaching and
into the preparation of books recording mythology and history, of school books for
teaching mathematics and other subjects, of maps of territory and resource distri-
bution, and of cultural-ecological calendars that show correlations between astronom-
ical events, ecological changes, plant and animal breeding cycles, subsistence activities,
the ritual calendar and various other cycles (see also Hugh-Jones 2015). In what follows
I shall be concerned only with these written documents and the continuities between
them and the oral-iconographic systems discussed earlier.

Books
Over the past two decades indigenous authors from the URN have produced more than
twenty books devoted to sacred narratives, history and traditional knowledge. Several
of the Tukanoan volumes published in the series Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio
Negro (NIRN),16 are organized so as to reproduce the tripartite structure of NW Ama-
zonian mythology mentioned above. They begin with a version of the Tukanoan origin
narrative particular to the group to which the authors belong, a narrative that ends with
an account of the dispersion and successive house moves of the component clans of the
group in question that is effectively a genealogy in the sense mentioned above. The
second section of the books is devoted to a compendium of narrative stories or
172 S. Hugh-Jones
“myths”, other versions of which are well known from elsewhere in Amazonia, and the
final section is devoted to oral histories of slavery and inter-group warfare, messianic
movements, the depredations of rubber gatherers and the arrival of missionaries.
Alongside the continuity between oral mytho-history and its published counterpart
in terms of overall tripartite structure and general content, a version of the Tukanoan
origin narrative published in a Desana book reproduces, in written form, the paralle-
lism that is characteristic of NW Amazonian ritual chants and mnemonic systems.
Over some 170 pages (pp. 73–248) the book by Tõramü Bayaru (Wenceslau
Sampaio Galvão) & Guahari Ye Ñi (Raimundo Castro Galvão) (2004) repeats an
more or less identical text, verse by verse, as part of an account of four repeated ances-
tral origin voyages. The text as a whole, in effect a chant or spell transposed into
writing, reads as a list of ancestral transformation houses, the rapids along the Rio
Negro and its affluents, with each paragraph reproducing a standard frame: place
name (here in bold to make it more visible), chant/spell; or place name, chant/spell,
acquisition of ritual knowledge/ritual object. This can be readily seen in the following
two brief extracts.
Extract 1. (pp. 215–218): They continued their voyage as far as Dia Waña Wi’í (“River
Waña House”) where they landed. Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü began to recite blessings17:
Dia Waña Wi’í masá suri wereri wi’í masá ehari wi’í masá suri wereri seka masá ehari seka
masá suri wereri yuhiro masá ehari yuhiro masá suri wereri muruyukü masá ehari muruyukü
masásuri wereri poga kua masá ehari poga kua masá suri wereri waigõã masá ehari waigõã.
The ancestors of humanity took up their stools and entered the house. They sat on their
stools, chewing coca, smoking the cigar and gradually removing their clothing of invisi-
bility. When they re-embarked, Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü once again began to bless the
Transformation Canoe: Pumüri Yuküsiro masá suri wereri yuküsiro masá ehari yuküsiro
masá gamesüri metapuri doahayuma.

They continued their voyage to Dia Nima Üta Wi’í (“River Poison Stone House”) where
they landed. Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü began to recite spells: Dia Nima Üta etc..

They continued their voyage to Dia Doe Wi’í Miriá Pora Wi’í (“River Taraira Fish Yur-
uparí House”), etc.

They continued their voyage to Dia Gãma Imikaya Wi’í (“River Gãma Imikaya House”),
etc.18

Extract 2. (pp. 271–272):

They re-embarked and continued their voyage to Dia Wera Paga Wi’í (“River Tapioca
Starch Paga House”). The ancestors of the people of the Rio Negro took up their
stools, went into the house, sat chewing coca and smoking the cigar and began to
think. As they did so, Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü began to bless: Dia Wera Paga Wi’í,
kumuari wi’í, bayari wi’í weri wi’í kumuari seka bayari seka weri seka kumuari yuhiro
bayari yuhiro weri yuhiro kumuari koasoro bayari koasoro wei koasoro kumuari muruyukü
byari muruyukü weri muruyukü kuuari poga kua bayari poga kua wei poga kua kumuari wai
waigõã.

Through their blessing, Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü caused a cake of manioc starch bread
to appear for the ancestors of the people of the Rio Negro who, having already taken yagé
and the plant of wisdom called bayapika, now ate for the first time. Until they got to this
 History and Anthropology 173
house they had lived entirely from tobacco smoke and coca powder. It was in this house
that they ate manioc starch bread for the first time. They were like initiates.19

They re-embarked and continued their voyage to Dia Mome Wi’í Bayiriko Wi’í (“River
Honey Dance-Apron House”) where they landed. The ancestors of the people of the Rio
Negro took up their stools, went into the house, sat chewing coca and smoking the cigar
and began to think. As they did so, Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü began to bless to transform
the house into a house of honey: Dia Mome Wi’í Bayiriko Wi’í mome seka yuhiro mome
koasaroparu mome muruyukü mome poga kua mome waigõã.

All their singing of songs and playing the sacred flutes had left the ancestors of the people
of the Rio Negro with no more strength. Through the medium of a blessing, Kisibi and
Deyubari Gõãmü strengthened their hearts with honey. They also used the honey to
bless the dance aprons20 to kill the microbes and alleviate the itching caused by the
bark of the tururi tree so that, when they used them, they would not suffer from the
illness called wasuru (itching) in Desana. They also taught them these two blessings.

They re-embarked and continued their voyage to Dia Umu Wi’í (“River Japú21 House”)
where they landed. The ancestors of the people of the Rio Negro took up their stools, went
into the house, sat chewing coca and smoking the cigar and began to think. As they did so,
Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü began to bless: Dia Umu Wi’í wi’í, bayari wi’í weri wi’í
kumuari seka bayari seka weri seka kumuari yuhiro bayari yuhiro weri yuhiro kumuari
koasoro bayari koasoro weri koasoro kumuari muruyukü byari muruyukü weri muruyukü
kuuari poga kua bayari poga kua wei poga kua kumuari wai waigõã.

In this house they dressed themselves with the feather crown called umu pisi that is made
from japú tail feathers. Kisibi and Deyubari Gõãmü taught them the umu pigõri bayari
blessing that gets rid of the smell of japú tail feathers. They also taught them the umu
bayari blessing that stops domesticated japú chicks from fleeing the house when they
begin to grow big.22

In this very literal and uniquely indigenous transposition of oral chant to written text,
the conventions of oral transmission and memory take clear precedence over the econ-
omies usually associated with printing and publishing.
The six books in the NIRN series that relate to Tukanoan groups are each published
in the names of two individual authors, an elder shaman (∼kubu) as informant and a
younger teacher–leader acting as his amanuensis; each book also includes a preface
giving brief biographical information on the two authors. However, the books’ titles
and other features make clear that each is to be understood more as a collective auto-
biography in the form of the origin history of the clan in whose name the book is
published.
URN mytho-history is political history in a double sense. On the one hand and with
reference to outsiders, the histories of all the groups of the region reflect a long history
of resistance to external domination and serve to legitimate indigenous claims to ter-
ritory. On the other hand, particular histories also serve to legitimate the claims to ter-
ritory and status of one particular group vis-à-vis the others. This is why, when one
group publishes their history, this tends to provoke other groups to do the same. An
example would be the four books in the NIRN series published in the names of differ-
ent Desana clans. This run of publications began, in part, as an answer to Reichel-Dol-
matoff’s Desana (1968) written in collaboration with the Antonio Guzman. Implicit in
174 S. Hugh-Jones
this collaboration was a claim to authoritative knowledge on the part of an individual
from a specific Desana clan. The successive Desana volumes in the NIRN series can be
understood as setting out a sequence of counter-claims culminating in the unusual
length of Livro dos Antigos Desana—Guahari Diputiro Porã—it’s phyical size, thickness
and weight is part of its political message.23
Finally, with reference to school-books, and in relation to the links between baskets,
chanting and numeracy discussed above, I would here simply draw attention to the
widespread use of basketry and basket making in the teaching of mathematics in indi-
genous schools.

Maps
Given what has been said above, it should come as no surprise that the people of the
URN have remarkable cartographic abilities. One manifestation of this is the spon-
taneous production of maps and diagrams in the sand, and now on paper, in the
context of explanation and teaching. I have recorded maps of constellations (Hugh-
Jones 2015) and seen an expert Barasana chanter (∼yoabü) using a sand map to
explain the relation of chants to sequences of rapids (Figure 4); illustrations on the
covers of Correa (1996) and L’Homme 33, 126–128, 1993 provide two earlier published
examples of indigenous maps produced in relation to anthropological enquiries. The
NGOs made extensive use of social cartography in the participatory initiatives that
led to the current programmes of ethno-education and maps continue play a very pro-
minent role in the current activities of these programmes with indigenous groups in
alliance with NGOs harnessing satellite imagery and digital technology to produce
maps of territory, resource distribution, sacred sites and ancestral migrations. Many
of these maps represent transformations of the mnemonic systems discussed above,

Figure 4. Rufino Marín, Barasana ritual chanter (∼yoabü) using a sand map of rapids
along the Pirá-paraná river to explain the structure of ritual chants (Photo: Stephen
Hugh-Jones).
 History and Anthropology 175
with graphic and oral modes still working in combination so that, for an indigenous
viewer, these apparently new indigenous maps can be read not just as representations
of space and territory but also as sequences of chants and spells.
By relating indigenous histories to spatial representation through borrowed technol-
ogy and in a manner that is readily understood by outsiders, these maps and the pro-
grammes of self-demarcation with which they are associated, play a key role in
reinforcing territorial claims. The maps also have an explicitly political agenda.
Using the same technology and format, this new indigenous cartography answers the
official cartography produced by state agencies in Brazil and Colombia and on its
own terms. Official Brazilian and Colombian maps divide the continuous territory
that URN peoples consider to be the centre of the world into two disconnected
pieces, each one placed right at the very edge of the nation-state as a remote and mar-
ginal frontier zone. By contrast, indigenous maps put indigenous society and territory
centre stage with the metropolitan centres at the edge (see also Arvelo-Jimenez 2000;
Medina 2003; Vidal 2003).

Calendars
The curriculum of the education programmes being developed on both sides of the
Colombian-Brazilian frontier typically centres on the elaboration of what are known
as “cultural-ecological calendars” (calendarios ecologico-culturales). These calendars,
typically presented synoptically on a circular piece of paper (e.g. see Cabalzar org.
2010, 21, 27), condense and integrate information relating to what outsiders would
identify as discrete fields—astronomy, ecology, subsistence and production, health
and diet, social life, ritual activities and the school year. This unified educational
scheme is explicitly intended reflect the holistic quality of indigenous thought and
experience and is based on information that is also encoded orally in the chants and
spells discussed above. In its most elaborate form, this knowledge is usually only
known to a few elders and ritual experts. Working together with these individuals,
younger literate teacher–leaders write down this knowledge in notebooks and
present it in calendars that combine text and images.
One model for these calendars comes from the circular diagrams relating seasonal
ecological and productive cycles made familiar to URN peoples through the field
research and publications of anthropologists. But if books, maps and calendars all
make use of technologies and formats that are borrowed from the outside world,
this does not make these apparently new forms inauthentic. As I have already
suggested, they all build upon and extend pre-existing indigenous graphic and verbal
forms and ways of thinking. This is very clear in the various spoken metaphors of
lines, circles and segments that URN peoples use to talk about time. These same
lines, circles and segments reappear in visible, material form in the familiar domestic
world where manioc tubers are processed into flat, round cakes of manioc bread.
Here the tipiti manioc press and shallow balay basket suggest line and circle whilst
woven designs divide balays into segments just as each cake of manioc bread is cut
into four neat segments and stored in a balay. The cultural-ecological calendars of
176 S. Hugh-Jones
the URN also draw upon these indigenous models. It is therefore especially appropriate
that round baskets are often used as supporting frames for these calendars.
In this context it is also interesting to note the contrast between two phases in the
development of ethno-education programmes that brought together indigenous
people from the Brazilian and Colombian URN. The first phase, characterized by a
seminar on the theme of “the management of the world” (o manejo do mundo),24
was much taken up with cultural-ecological calendars and circular metaphors. As if
to redress the balance, the succeeding seminar25 was devoted to the recording and
mapping of the routes of origin under the theme of Narratives of Origin, Routes of
Transformation (Narrativas de origem, rotas de transformação, Instituto Socioambiental
2010). These routes of origin are the subjects of the chants discussed above. Again the
continuities between “writing on stone” and its more recent transformations as
“writing on paper” are evident.

Conclusion: Writing and Hierarchy; Lévi-Strauss and Derrida

In this paper, I have been concerned with how and why the Tukanoan- and Arawakan-
speaking peoples of the URN inscribe their knowledge, history and traditions on fea-
tures of the landscape, a propensity that they share with Arawakan-speaking peoples
living elsewhere in Amazonia. Although inscription sometimes takes the form of pet-
roglyphs, these must be set in the wider context of both the more general use of land-
scape, understood in iconographic and architectural terms, and of other forms of
iconography such as basketry or house-front designs. In treating these mnemonic
devices as forms of “writing”, I have argued that instead of narrow dichotomies
between “true” and less “true” forms of writing or between oral and literate societies,
it is more useful to open up the field and explore of how graphic and apparently non-
graphic forms work together with oral traditions.
In arguing for an extended understanding of “writing” and against a dichotomy
between peoples with and without writing, I might appear to align myself with
Jacques Derrida in his well-known disagreement with Lévi-Strauss. In Lévi-Strauss’
Leçon d’écriture (1955, 337–349) he recounts how a Nambikwara chief had imitated
the author’s own use of writing in an attempt to appropriate to himself this non-
Indian technology of power. From this cue, Lévi-Strauss goes on to expound a pessi-
mistic view of writing in general, arguing that its sole true correlate was hierarchization
in castes or classes and that it favours more people’s exploitation than their illumina-
tion (1955, 343).
Derrida took issue, not with the association between writing, hierarchy and violence,
but rather with what he sees as Lévi-Strauss’ nostalgic, Rousseauesque stance in arguing
that the egalitarian, free-and-easy Nambikuara—and by extension all peoples without
writing—are innocent of the ills with which writing is inexorably linked. For Derrida
“true” writing is merely a special case of an “arche-writing” that is characteristic of all
peoples. The Nambikuara already scratch designs on gourds. More importantly, their
personal names bear all the hallmarks of writing. Instead of a term-to-term correspon-
dence that would make each unique, proper name a part of its bearer’s person, names
 History and Anthropology 177
are stripped of their referents and become components of one system of differences, a
special sub-set of words that are aligned with another set of differences, this time
between persons. In this extended form of “violence”, the “proper” connection
between name and person has been effaced, just as in language the connection
between signifier and signified is effaced. This effacement is also a property of
writing where there is no intrinsic connection between written symbol and its referent.
As writing is merely a sub-species of language and as all peoples possess language, it
follows that they must also already have “writing” in this extended sense.
The complex philosophical underpinnings of Derrida’s argument need not detain us
here. What is relevant is the ethnography. Philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis
aside, Derrida is surely right to see hints of writing in Nambikwara gourd designs.
With reference to the Mamaindê-Nambikwara, Joanna Miller reports that “body orna-
ments, particularly black bead bands (are) what defines a subject (as) capable of having
consciousness, memory and intentionality” (2009, 67) and observes more generally
that a rich cosmology is hidden behind their apparently simple objects (2009, 76). In
the light the analysis presented above, one suspects that the Nambikwara may have
many more tangible manifestations of “writing” than even Derrida imagined and are
much less of “a society reduced to its most simple expression” than Lévi-Strauss
(1955, 365) had supposed.
In the Amazonian context, as semi-nomadic hunters with few possessions who prac-
tice limited agriculture, the egalitarian Nambikwara are right at the one end of a spec-
trum. At the other end are peoples such as those of the URN with their sophisticated
agriculture and highly developed fishing technology, their hierarchical socio-political
organization and regional integration, their elaborate ritual possessions and ceremonial
architecture, their complex ritual performances and systems of priestly esoteric knowl-
edge in the hands of savant, priest-like ~kubus and, today, their books, maps and
calendars.
It is no coincidence that the more elaborated forms of “writing” examined above
should be associated with the peoples of the URN for here hierarchy, as both differ-
ences in status and as differential access to resources, goes hand-in-hand with
“writing” as two sides of the same coin. This is especially so for the Tukanoan speakers.
The exogamous, patrilineal groups that make up their open-ended society, each one
with its own language and set of ranked clans, are defined less by blood or filiation
than by the transmission of names, genealogies, histories, chants, songs and other
verbal property that also animates sets of ritual wealth objects identified with clan
ancestors. The legitimacy of claims, made by individuals and their clans, to territory,
rank, status and to objects of wealth and power depends on both knowledge and per-
formance. On the one hand they must have an accurate knowledge of the origin stories
and genealogies of their clan and its possessions and, on the other, they must display
this knowledge and validate its claims through the public, ritual performance of
chants, songs and spells and the display of wealth.
The oral traditions are long and complex and many are cast in an esoteric language
that can only be understood through further lengthy exegesis. Chants and ritual
speeches are also performed in a special style and at a rapid pace that is difficult to
178 S. Hugh-Jones
master, as are the complex cycles of dance songs with their accompanying movements
and elaborated singing style. Training and learning takes many years and is
accompanied by strict regimes of dieting and bodily discipline. Furthermore, because
performance has all the elements of a tournament where reputations are at stake,
chanting, singing and dancing must be constantly practiced and refined. The mainten-
ance and successful transmission of these politically loaded traditions depends on the
mnemonic systems described above. In a context where knowledge, politics and per-
formance go hand in hand we should expect “writing” to develop.
These same characteristics also predisposed the Tukanoans to see their own learned
~kubus as the precursors and rivals of the missionary priests (Hugh-Jones 1994) and, at
the same time, to welcome the education and literacy these priests brought with them
as a defence against exploitation and enslavement by outsider merchants and soldiers.
Finally, these factors also underlie the Tukanoans’ propensity to write down their tra-
ditions and publish them as books. These books are at once a recent transformation of
an ancient learned “literary” tradition and part of an ongoing effort to undo the cultural
holocaust that came as the price of mission education (Hugh-Jones 2010).
Levi-Strauss was correct in linking writing with hierarchy. His mistake was rather in
linking its evolution with what he calls “civilization”—something that began with
Egypt and China (1955, 343) and from which Amazonian Indians were apparently
excluded—and in his undue pessimism. Like “civilization”, “writing” comes in differ-
ent guises and can be used to resist as well as to oppress.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
[1] “La parole et l’image articulées ensemble en une technique de la mémoire, notamment dans le
contexte de l’énonciation rituelle, constituent l’alternative qui a prévalu, dans bien des soci-
étés, sur l’exercice de l’écriture”.
[2] For some Tukanoan groups, the rapids of Yuisi or La Libertad on the Rio Apaporis is their
emergence site.
[3] The “places” in “heaping up names in a single place” are not simply geographical places. They
can also be “places” in the cosmos, human society and the individual life cycle and musical
“places” such as tones, tempos, timbres, rhythms and volumes (Hill 1993, 23; 1996, 153).
[4] The ∼ indicates nazalization so ∼ba reads as “ma”, ∼Rabe as “Rame”, etc.
[5] “Limitar el mito a la oralidad, es sólo conocer una de las múltiples formas del relato”
… “deslinda una geografía en secuencias narrativas en forma de mitos graficos” … “un alpha-
beto de raudales” … “compuesto por marcas y formas que sobre las rocas rememoran la
marcha de Iñapirriuli, de Dzuli o de Kuwai”.
[6] Referring to the Yekuana, Guss (1990, 168) writes, “The basket derives much of its metapho-
ric power from its structural relation to the house”.
[7] “Petroglifo: Caminos del malirri, recorrido del malirri para aprender partes de la historia”.
[8] “Toute image qui, désignant à travers une seule représentation un être pluriel, mobilise, par
des moyens purement optiques ou par en ensemble d’inférences, ses parties invisibles”.
[9] “Não porque fossem feitos da pedra, mas porque a duração de sua vida é indeterminada”.
 History and Anthropology 179
[10] A tubular basketry press used to dry manioc pulp; popularly (but erroneously) believed to be
used to extract poison from bitter manioc.
[11] Ichnosiphon sps.
[12] Compare the Quechua yupay—see Urton (1997), 96 ff.
[13] It is possible that the kin terms hakü/hako and ~bakü/~bako, “father/mother” and “son/
daughter” derive from this lway of thinking: hasa- is “to converge”, -sa is a classifier for
“river” and ∼ba the classifier for ’line”.
[14] “Oferece dados numéricos e técnicos que, considerados em conjunto, sugerem uma ordem de
conhecimento comparável em certos aspetos com a matemática e a astronomia presentes nos
textos mesoamericanos e andinos, e que até as iluminam, reciprocamente”.
[15] These include Proyecto Educativo Indígena de ACAIPI and Proyecto Educativo Indígena
Majîrike de ASATRIZY in Colombia and Escola Indígena Pamáali; Escola Indígena Kotiria
Khumuno Wu’u; Escola Indígena Tuyuca I̵tapinopona; and Escola Indígena Tukano
Yupuri in Brazil.
[16] For extended discussions of these texts see Hugh-Jones (2010); Andrello (2010); Chernela
(2011).
[17] Brazilian Tukanoans translate the verb base- as benzer (“to bless”); Colombian Tukanoans use
curar (“to cure”). Here I refer to blessings/curings as “spells”.
[18] Eles prosseguiram a viagem até Dia Waña Wi’í, onde encostaram. Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü
começaram a benzer: Dia Waña Wi’í masá suri wereri wi’í masá ehari wi’í masá suri wereri
seka masá ehari seka masá suri wereri yuhiro masá ehari yuhiro masá suri wereri muruyukü
masá ehari muruyukü masásuri wereri poga kua masá ehari poga kua masá suri wereri waigõã
masá ehari waigõã. Os ancestrais da humanidade pegaram os seus bancos e entraram na casa.
Sentaram no seu banco, mascando ipadu e fumando o cigarro, desmanchando um poco a sua
ropa de invisibilidade. Enquanto eles embarcavam de novo, Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü reco-
meçaram a benzer a Canoa de Transformaçãõ: Pumüri Yuküsiro masá suri wereri yuküsiro
masá ehari yuküsiro masá gamesüri metapuri doahayuma.Eles prosseguiram a viagem até
Dia Nima Üta Wi’í, onde encostaram. Kisibi e
Deyubari Gõãmü começaram a benzer: Dia Nima Üta etc.
Eles prosseguiram a viagem até Dia Doe Wi’í Miriá Pora Wi’í, etc.
Eles prosseguiram a viagem até Dia Gãma Imikaya Wi’í, etc.
[19] Following initiation, initiates eat a restricted diet of ants and thin cakes of pure tapioca starch.
[20] Painted bark-cloths hanging between the knees and suspended from the waist.
[21] Oropendola; birds of the genus Psarocolius.
[22] Eles embarcaram de novo e prosseguiram a viagem até Dia Wera Paga Wi’í. Os ancestrais dos
povos do rio Negro pegaram os seus bancos, entraram na casa, sentaram, mascando ipadu e
fumando o cigarro, e ficam pensando. Enquanto isso Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü começaram a
benzer Dia Wera Paga Wi’í, kumuari wi’í, bayari wi’í weri wi’í kumuari seka bayari seka weri
sek kumuari yuhiro bayari yuhiro weri yuhiro kumuari koasoro bayari koasoro wei koasoro
kumuari muruyukü byari muruyukü weri muruyukü kuuari poga kua bayari poga kua wei
poga kua kumuari wai waigõã. Por meio de um benzimento, Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü
fizeram aparecer um beiju de tapioca para os ancestrais dos povos do rio Negro, que ya
tinham tomado a planta de sabedoria bayapika e caapi, comeram por primeira vez. Até
nesta casa, eles viviam somenta de fumo e pó de ipadu. Foi nesta casa que eles comeram
beiju de tapioca pela primeira vez. Eram como iniciantes.Eles embarcaram de novo e prosse-
guiram a viagem até Dia Mome Wi’í Bayiriko Wi’í onde encostaram. Os ancestrais dos povos
do rio Negro pegaram os seus bancos, entraram na casa, sentaram, mascando ipadu e
fumando o cigarro, e ficam pensando. Enquanto isso Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü começaram
a benzer para transformer a casa em casa de mel: Dia Mome Wi’í Bayiriko Wi’í mome seka
yuhiro mome koasaroparu mome muruyukü mome poga kua mome waigõã.De tanto cantar e
tocar as flautas sagradas os ancestrais dos povos do rio Negro não tinham mas força. Por
180 S. Hugh-Jones
meio de um benzimento, Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü fortaleceram o coração deles com mel.
Benzeram também com mel as tangas de dança para matar os microbios e aliviar a coceira
de entrecasca de planta tururi e para eles não pegarem a doença chamada en desana
wasuru (cobeira) quando eles fossem usá-los. Ensinaram-lhes também esses dois benzimen-
tos.Eles embarcaram de novo e prosseguiram a viagem até Dia Umu Wi’í onde encostaram.
Os ancestrais dos povos do rio Negro pegaram os seus bancos, entraram na casa, sentaram,
mascando ipadu e fumando o cigarro, e ficam pensando. Enquanto isso Kisibi e Deyubari
Gõãmü começaram a benzer Dia Umu Wi’í wi’í, bayari wi’í weri wi’í kumuari seka bayari
seka weri seka kumuari yuhiro bayari yuhiro weri yuhiro kumuari koasoro bayari koasoro weri
koasoro kumuari muruyukü byari muruyukü weri muruyukü kuuari poga kua bayari poga
kua wei poga kua kumuari wai waigõã. Nesta casa, eles enfeitaram com o cocar umu pisi
feito com o rabo de japu. Kisibi e Deyubari Gõãmü ensinaram-lhes o benzimento umu
pigõri bayari para tirar o pitiú das penas do rabo de japu. Ensinaram também o benzimento
umu bayari para impeder o japu de fugir da casa quando ele cresce.
[23] Samir de Angelo, pers. comm.
[24] FOIRN/ISA, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, 11–15 April 2010. See Cabalzar org. (2010).
[25] FOIRN/ISA, São Gabriel da Cachoeira 24 November 2010. See Andrello org. (2012).

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