THE BONES AFFAIR: INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE PRACTICES IN CONTACT SITUATIONS SEEN FROM AN AMAZONIAN CASE ‘Cartos Fausto Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeivo This article explores the relation between belief and practices manifest in the interaction Ibetween indigenous people and outsiders in contact situations. Drawing on oral history, myth, and writen documentation, it seeks to reconstruct the experience of the Parakan3, 2 Tupi-speaking people of Southeastern Amazonia, in their early stable contact with national society It focuses on some apparently implausible events in order to address the question of how certain belief about the nature of the whites were put into action during the contact proces. The article also employs historical data fom South America and comparative ethnography from Melanesia to suggest new perspectives on the Sahlins-Obeyesckere debate, making use of the Peircian notion of abduction to account simultaneously for the flexibil ity and the resilience of magico-religious deus Lavoisier’ method was not to read and pray, but ta dream that some long and complicated chemnical process would have certain effect, co put into practice with dull patience, after its inevitable failure, to dream that with some modification it would have another result, and to end by publishing che last dream as a fact (Peirce 1940 [1877]: 6). | once asked an old man: Ate all stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long while and then replied, ‘No! But some ate? (Hallowell 1960: 24) In this article [ revisit an old theoretical question, the rationality of beliefs, through che analysis of the contact process of an Amazonian people. My initial stimulus was Obeyesekere’s (1992: 124) remark about the possibility of apply- ing his deconstruction of Cook's deification to other famous apotheoses. | intend to take up this challenge here, but in another direction. Drawing on my ethnographic data and on written documentation, I seek to re-construct the experience of the Eastern Parakani, a Tupi-Guarani-speaking people of Southeastern Amazonia, in their early stable contact with national society. T also make use of historical data from South America and comparative ethnog- raphy fom Melanesia so as to analyse the relation between beliefs and prac- tice in contact situations. Ever since Tylor, anthropology has been concerned with the explication of ‘apparently irrational beliefs’, to use Sperber’s expression (1982). Modern anthropology provided a standard answer to the problem, which at the same time derived from, and was directed towards, the fieldwork situation: one must explain natives’ belief in their own context, since they are part of a wider © Royal Anthropological Insitute 2002, J Roy. anthoop. last. (NS) 8, 669-690670 CARLOS FAUSTO, social system or a meaningful whole. Once in context, there is always a rea~ sonable reason to believe chat witches can fly, chat twins are birds or that the Bororo are parrots, and thus to act according to these beliefi.' The central tenet of contextual understanding is that the justification for someone believ- ing in something has to be evaluated according to the epistemic standards of the community in question (Haack 1993: 190). For most anthropologists, contextualism is both an epistemological belief and a methodological instrument. Despite its theoretical aporias, it works well as an heuristic principle for making sense of fieldwork data, and I will resort to it in my rendering of the Parakani contact experience. However, a con- textualist response to Obeyesekere’s challenge would not suffice, since his cri- tique is Janus-faced: on the one hand, he contextualizes European myth-making and, on the other, he universalizes Hawaiian behaviour on a cognitive basis. ‘These are not unrelated movements. They are part of a wider effort to dispose of the category of totality, and related concepts such as culture or society. If there are no bounded meaningful worlds, only worlds within worlds connected in various ways, for whom then are twins birds; for whom do witches fly; for whom is Lono a god? One answer to this question has beer for anthropologists. If the context to explain beliefs and practices cannot be the native’, then it must be our own. Cargo cults, cannibalism, deifications are thus to be dismissed as figments of imperial imagination. Obeyesekere’s second move is of a different order, but it is also a way out of the concept of culture. Experience has a residual epistemic status in culeural theory: beliefs are interwoven into the great fabric of culture, they stand by themselves and imprint themselves on people’s minds as if the mind was a blank paper.’ Obeyesekere adopts a cognitive universalism and a sort of empirical foundationalism to counteract this idea, He assumes that there are basic repre~ sentations that stem from practical engagement, which are strongly constrained by the objective properties of the world and by the structure of the mind. In this article, I will reverse Obeyesekere’s first argument and offer a dif- ferent interpretation of the second. Through the analysis of an empirical case with no historical or geographical relation to the Hawaiian case, I claim, first, that the assimilation of conquerors to ‘divinities’ is not only a pervasive trope in European narratives but is also a recurrent and lasting interpretation of the colonial encounter among indigenous peoples. It may thus correspond to a structural feature of these historical phenomena. Secondly, I argue, as did both Sahlins (1981) and Obeyesekere (1992), that this assimilation is not immune to experience or alien to practice. By employing the Peircian notion of abductive inference I hope to account for both the flexibility and the resilience of this assimilation, My general question is how to explain a phe- nomenon which implies at one and the same time the practical engagement and the stability of certain representations. Before exploring this argument in full, let us consider the facts Setting the plot Para, Brazil, 1970. The ‘Transamaz6nica road cuts through the Eastern Parakana territory, located some kilometres from the left bank of the Tocantins River.‘CARLOS FAUSTO en Local Amerindian people ransack the working camps, obstructing one of the major national projects of the time: a road traversing the whole of Brazilian Amazonia. The military government had no time to waste, and sent the Agency for Indigenous Affairs (Fundacio Nacional do Indio, hereafter Funai) to make contact with the Parakani and draw them into state administration. ‘This was not the first time that a road had crossed the territory of the Parakani people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the government of the state of Par’ began the construction of a railway to connect the city of Alcobaca (present-day Tucuruf) to Marabi, then a centre of rubber and Brazil nut production. Amerindians, among them Parakani, plundered the working camps, and the Agency for Indigenous Affairs was called in to resolve the situation. In 1928, the Agency (then called Servico de Protecio aos Indios, hereafter SPI) established a base at the 67-kilometre point on the railway, which came to be known as the Tocantins Pacification Post. The SPI’s idea was to attract the indigenous population through the distribution of goods, in the hope of bringing them to ‘civilization’ (and hard, ill-paid work). From this point onwards, the Western Parakana became regular visitors to the Post, receiving hundreds of different items, particularly metal implements. Although for many decades Parakani people had made peaceful visits to the Post, they remained outside the control of the Brazilian authorities until the 1980s, The Eastern Parakana, for their part, never discovered this wonderland of desirable objects. Apart from occasionally attacking and plundering the few whites who ventured into their territory, the group had lite access to com- modities until the Transamazénica road crossed their lands. In 1970, the Funai abandoned the static posture that had characterized SPI activity in the region and mounted four ‘Penetration Fronts’ (Frentes de Penetragée) to contact the Amerindians who were jeopardizing the advance ment of the road. Their orders were to track them and find their villages. But the Parakana made the first move. On 12 November they ransacked one of the Funai campsites with displays of fierceness. Tracking them, the agents penetrated deep into Eastern Parakana land, finding and entering numerous campsites and gardens. The sertanista Joio Carvalho headed the Funai team and had some knowledge of the Parakani language since he spoke a related Tupi-Guarani tongue.’ On 30 November he wrote in his diary: we arrived at a camp where the fire was stil lit... We were so euphoric that we didn't examine everything; we wanted to meet the Indians soon and see their reaction. At 3,00 pim,, we arrived ata place where they had gathered honey ... We came along cautiously [When] we were at 100 metres [ftom them], we dzopped our stufl, leaving the rifles and keeping the revolvers, since our shirts covered them. I opened my backpack and got out the gills ... When we were at some 50 metres, we stood in a row to shout altogether. As soon as we did so, the Indians topped speaking \... We shouted a second time; they answered ‘with anger, uttering a war-cry and running in our direction with the arrows in their bows, telling us to go away, otherwise they would kill us. The Assurini Indian [the interpreter] wanted to run away, but we didn't consent to it. They stood at 20 metres from us, shout ing, while we spoke ... We spoke for five minutes until they put their arrows down and came out to meet us. We distributed the gifs and they gave us three land-tuetles and the young of an agouti. Then we noticed that we were surrounded because more Indians appeared from all sides. Our encounter lasted twenty-five minutes. In the end the inter- preters had calmed down and were talking. So we asked to stay with them. Bue they revolted fonce more, ordering us t0 leave .. (Carvalho 1971: 30 Nov. [1970),672 CARLOS FAUSTO Three weeks later, Parakand men and women started visiting the Funai camp. They received gifts and ‘paid’ (-wepy) for them with land-turtles. This was a pattern followed by both Parakani branches since the end of the nine- teenth century. Parakani say that they learned how to pay for metal instru- ments from Moakara, who is considered to be ‘the first master of the whites’ (Torijarypya). Moakara was the leader of a tiny Tupi-Guarani community living near the Parakana territory which maintained sporadic contact with Brazil nut collectors down river, at a time when the Parakani were completely isolated from the whites.° During the first months of 1971, the interaction between the Parakani and the agents intensified, and some trust pervaded their relationship. Men, ‘women, and children visited the camp, where they obtained axes, knives, glass beads, dogs, and food. The agents worked intensively for the Parakana, hunting for them with guns, cooking for them in aluminium pots, and sharpening their metal tools. In all encounters the natives asked the agents to sing and dance with them, but refused to allow them to visit their village. In April, they finally agreed to a visit. Another visit followed, and the contact process advanced at a steady pace. On 6 May, Parakani men and women came to the Funai camp. | saw a woman carrying our bottle of Fspedfco Pesca [2 regional phytotherapeucic against snak= venom}. I said it would have no use for her, since it was a medicine against sun [Lachesissp."Then Picaua asked me co put some of it on his wounded foot. I eut the skin ‘with a Gillete blade and pressed a piece of cotton wool soaked with Espefco against the ‘wound, When I finished, Jauarauagual said: ‘Let us raise him/her who is interted’. At first, I didn’t understand. Then the captain [the headman} invited me to go ... When we arrived at the grave, he ordered Gerson [a Funai agent) to remove the stuff placed on it and dig, He began digging with his hands, but they told him to use a stick ... My curiosity was roused, I told [another agent] co fetch hoe ... When we uncoverd the patellue (it was bburied with the knees upward), and Gerson held the bones, and then the shins, I asked what they were going to do, and the captain said it was for me to murrem, which means to take out. It was to make the body raise up. [ understood the goal. I was to revivily the dead (Carvalho 1971: 6 May). This little episode, narrated by a Brazilian civil servant, resonates with some long-standing anthropological questions concerning ‘irrational beliefs’. What were che bones really for? Were the Parakani seriously considering the pos- sibility that the whites could bring the dead to life? And why the whiees? Myths of immortality In Parakand mythology, whites are associated with shamanism and super- human creative powers. Their very origin manifests special transformative capacities, The myths narrate how the whites-to-be differentiated themselves from a common humanity through a process of self-transformation and body renewal, a process which is often associated with immortality and the capac- ity to bring the dead back to life. In a well-known myth, the white-to-be dances around his mother’ grave, while blowing the smoke of his cigar. He raises the skeleton and dances with it. The boy’s grandmother, however, dis turbs him and the revivified dead escapes to the forest as a big rodent. LaterCARLOS FAUSTO on Ficunr 1. Two Parakand men and a Funai agent (eft foreground) during the distribution of knives. Photo:¥. Billon on, having become a full white, he brings his mother back and takes his new kin out of the earth. ‘The image of the boy-shaman dancing with the skeleton is a compelling one. The same motif appears in almost all Tupi-Guarani versions of the myth of the twins, who are children of the same mother but have different fathers: ‘one is the son of Mara, the great primordial shaman, the other is the son of Opossum, the sign of death and decay. Maira’s son tries to resuscitate their mother, but his brother disturbs him, preventing the revivification. The Parakand narrative is a transformation of this myth, in which the white-to-be plays the role of Mafra’s son, conveying his association with shamanic power.”674 CARLOS FAUSTO For the Parakani, the main icon of the whites’ creativity is the objects they make. Axes and machetes are not only useful and desirable, but are also signs of their producers’ powerfull agency. The objects stand as evidence of shamanic capacity. Another narrative illustrates this point well. It was origi- nally told by a woman captured during the attack on Moakara’s group, at the end of the nineteenth century. It goes like this. Two of Moakara’s sons died of fever and their kin decided to take their bones to a Brazil nut collector who was on friendly terms with them. Upon arrival, they shouted to him from the opposite river bank, and he came to their meeting in a canoe full of goods, Moskara enguited of the white man: Is it you who makes the axes? Yes, i is me. We do it, he answered, ‘Well then, revive my sons for me! I brought my sons so that you can resuscitate them for , replied Moakara (Akeria Parakani, recorded in 1995, tape 9) The connection between technical knowledge and the resurrection of dead persons may escape us, because our notion of creativity is different from that of the Parakan’. For us, an invention is che result of a cummulative historical process and a brilliant insight. For them, it results from eventful interaction with ‘others’ (enemies, animals, and other entities) in their condition as persons. This interaction is realized by ‘those who truly dream’, and the dream- ing experience is an integral part of the Parakani lived world. The profusion of objects is thus a sign of a rich oneiric life and the promise of immortal- ity: ‘Ts it you who makes the axes? Well then, revive my sons’ ‘The identification of whites with powerful shamans and immortality has a long history of its own. It is a theme that pervades the very first information about Brazilian Indians, written by missionaries and other colonial agents in the sixteenth century.’ The term ‘Caraiba’, by which the Europeans became known among the coastal Tupi-Guarani, expresses this identification: the Caraiba were shamans who circulated among villages, curing, foretelling the fature, and talking about a life with no death, no labour, no incest taboos, and many enemies to eat.” Brazilian historiography channeled this identification into a classic inter~ pretation of the Conquest, according to which the European expansion was seen, from the western side of the Adantic, as the coming of god-like people Frei Vicente do Salvador, who was the first to write a history of Brazil, thus narrates the arrival of Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500: ‘The said captain disembarked there with his soldiers armed for combat, because fist he sent a boat with some men to discover the lie of the land and they brought news of the numer fous gentiles they had seen. However, the weapons were not necessary, because just from seeing clothed men with shoes, white, and with beards (all of which they lick), they took them as divine and more than men, and in this way, calling them ‘antily’, which means divine thing in their idiom, they came peacefully to our men (Salvador (1627] 1982: 56) This interpretation of the first encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans is not unique to Brazil, nor even to the New World. It is a classicCARLOS FAUSTO 675 Ficuns 2. An Eastern Parakani woman holds an axe given by the Funai servants duing the contact process (1971). Photo. Billon,676 ‘CARLOS FAUSTO. theme in the colonial process, whose conformity to the natives’ point of view was challenged by Obeyesekere (1992) in his critique of Sablins (1981; 1985). Obeyesekere claims that the equation between gods and whites is a self aggrandizing European myth, which must be dispelled in the name of a ‘prac- tical rationality’, defined as ‘the process whereby human beings reflectively assess the implications of a problem in terms of practical criteria’ (1992: 19). Let me rephrase Obeyesekere's problem with our case in mind: how can we reconcile the Parakan’’s supposedly “irrational belief” in the whites’ capac- ity to resurrect the dead with their ‘rational’ behaviour in their practical daily affairs with the same whites? Is this “belief” a phantasmagoria of an imperial imagination or does it also correspond to deep-rooted cultural assumptions about life, power, and death among these Amerindians? Before answering these questions through an analysis of the empirical evidence, some theoretical observations are required Ontological assumptions and abductive inferences 1 will follow here some propositions advanced by Boyer in his book, The naturalness of religious ideas, to address three problems: first, the conflation of epistemic and cognitive phenomena; secondly, the over-simplified character of the opposition between representations and practical action; thirdly, the truth- value of apparently irrational propositions. I begin with the first. Boyer (1994: 49-52) points to the necessity of distinguishing between two levels of analysis, one epistemic, the other cognitive. According to him, anthro- pology has tended mistakenly to conflate them. The fruitful anthropological procedure of understanding natives’ belief and practices in their own terms led some to presuppose, or even postulate, different cognitive principles in operation. Passing from cultural representations to thought processes or mental states did not seem to pose a problem. Ever since Durkheim's social con- structivist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, the dominant notion of the mind in anthropology is that of a poorly structured structure upon which culture freely inscribes its meanings. We have hardly ever assessed the implication of the distinction between being ‘culturally reasonable’ and ‘conforming to reason’, Rationality has come to mean both of these in anthro- pological discourse. ‘When Obeyesekere talks of ‘an area of cognitive life’,‘a mode of thought’ which he calls ‘practical rationality’, he is reversing anthropological common sense by postulating a cognitive device in order to deny a cultural inter- pretation, But if we cannot pass directly from culture to cognition, neither can we do the reverse. Moreover, as Boyer (1994) suggests, what may char- acterize a representation as religious is precisely its counter-intuitiveness; that is, the fact that it violates intuitive expectations." No anthropologist would deny that religious representations have a special resilience which demands explication, not dismissal. My intention here is not to explain cultural beliefs in terms of cognitive causes. I am concerned with knowledge practices and aim to understand how a group of people, in a specific historical situation, puts certain beliefs in motion in order to meet the needs of comprehending and acting upon theCARLOS FAUSTO, 67 world. And here is my second point: I claim that propositions like ‘the whites are supethuman’ or ‘the whites are capable of reviving the dead’ are not the mere projection of native cosmologies onto facts, but are based on empirical inferences. As Boyer (1994: 142-8, 211-18) suggests for all magico-religious representations, the main modality of inferencing here is neither deductive nor inductive, but abductive.”? From new data that demand explanation a proposition is postulated, which, if confirmed empirically, accounts for the observable data. Of course, what counts as evidence (and as experience) is also culturally modulated.” ‘The well-documented first contact with New Guinea highlanders shows how empirically orientated the process can be. When Michael Leahy’s team traversed the highlands valleys in the early 1930s, the highlanders variously assumed that they were dead relatives, mythological beings, sky-people, and so on. They scrutinized the gold-miners, both to identify their deceased clans- men and to determine whether their assumptions were correct. Any body detail could be relevant: the colour of the skin, the size of the penis, the smell of the faeces Leahy and Dwyer found it necessary to choose 2 secluded spot and post a guard when they wanted to relieve themselves... A screened latrine-pit was dug within the roped-off area, But the highlanders’ curiosity could not be left unsatisfied for long. One of the people hid recalls Kirupano, ‘and watched them going to excrete. He came back and ssid,""Those men fiom heaven went to excrete over there." Once they had left, many men went to take a look, When they saw that it smele bad, they said, “Their skin might be different, but their shie smells bad like ours."’ (Connolly & Anderson 1987: 44) The investigation could lead to disproof of the initial hypothesis, as hap- pened with the people of the Asaro valley who believed that the dead could take human form by day and become skeletons by night. A witness recounts how two warriors managed to find out if the whites turned into bones: ‘There were guard dogs in the camp during the night, but these two men were very careful, They crept very quiedy ... They spent the whole might trying to peep inside the tent They watched and watched, and they expected to see bones in there, but they could see none. They saw no changes taking place. The strangers stayed the same. So they said we should stop this belief that they were dead people (Connolly & Anderson 1967: 43), What was at issue here was what kind of being the newcomers were. New facts generated new hypotheses, which put into motion a process of con- tinual inferencing and debate. This leads to my third point. If propositions like ‘the whites are sky- or dead people’ proceed by abduction, and are not divorced from experience, then their truth-value is necessarily conditional. 1 refer here to the degree to which a belief is held to be true by a person, and ot to its truth-indicativeness or orientation. As Boyer (1994: 217-18) points out, abductive explanations are conjectural, and the process of inferencing is triggered by the explanatory needs of particular situations Conditionality thus implies flexibility, but also resilience. Conditional truth value accounts for behavioural flexibility and practical engagement, and at the same time for the stability of magico-religious assumptions. No single piece678 CARLOS FAUSTO of evidence is sufficient. No particular situation can disprove a general assump- tion, When a proposition is subjected to close scrutiny, the network of onto- ogical assumptions that sustains it is not thoroughly affected." The proposition is tested in context. Thus to say that Leahy and his team are not dead people does not mean that the dead cannot assume human form and interact with the living during the day. It may just mean that Leahy and his team are not dead people (see also Sablins, 1995: 185) Even the belief that whites are ancestors or have a privileged relation- ship with them can be re-actualized in new situations. Commenting on Salisbury’s observation that the Papuans finally realized that the visitors were men and not spirits, A. Strathern writes that ‘one may wonder a little about this, since in both Hagen and Pangia the idea that Europeans may be spirits continues to be entertained along with the normal working assump- tion that they are probably people’ (1984: 108). Tuzin suggests that as interactions with whites become more intense and diversified, practical affairs make the balance lean definitively towards this working assumption. However, this was not yet the case for the Mahita who took Tuzin himself to be a returnee from the dead well into the 1980s (1997: 135-6; see also Leavite 2000) The trickiest question is how and when a network of representations changes to such an extent that it no longer motivates certain actions. How and when are the main ontological assumptions discarded or held as margin- ally true? In epistemic terms, it may help us to think of this network as a more-or-less coherent and integrated set of representations, some more basic than others, which configures a world-view. The degree of supportiveness within this set is called into question in practical situations, being either reinforced or weakened. This process is continuous, and transformation is necessarily part of it. Change, however, requires not only stopping the flow of supportiveness among previous representations, but creating new connec- tions and new flows among new ideas. It is the cumulative effect of this process that may account for change Let me return now to our story and consider whether the notion of abduc- tion illuminates the bones affair. Crossing the Great Divide Among the Tupi-Guarani-speaking peoples the assumption that some indi- viduals, especially great shamans, can come back to life has been well docu- mented since the sixteenth century. This belief is rooted in pre-contact indigenous representations, but cannot now easily be distinguished from the influence of missionary Christianity and its discourse on immortality. Two known examples manifest the equivocality of the encounter between Catholic and shamanic imaginaries. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit priest Ruiz de Montoya found a house where the Guarani of Paraguay preserved the bones of powerful shamans, who were believed to be capable of coming back to life, ‘recovering their former flesh, now beautified by juvenile freshness’ (Montoya [1639] 1985: 108). In the same period, the Tobajata, a Tupi-GuaraniCARLOS FAUSTO, 679 people of northeastern Brazil, conserved the bones of the Jesuit Francisco Pinto, whom they considered to be a ‘master of the rain’ (Carneito da Cunha 1996; Castelneau-L’Estoile 2000). According to the Asurini of Para, a contemporary Tupi-Guarani group, dead shamans should not be buried, but rather put into a basket. After the cor- ruption of the flesh, the bones should be collected and preserved. The women will then make sweet porridge for the soul, night after night, until the soul gets used to the living again and comes back to life (Andrade 1992: 220-2). Thave never heard Parakani people refer to such a funerary practice, despite their geographical and cultural proximity to the Asurini. They say instead that a great dreamer can resurrect a person by dancing on his or her grave while intoning songs of revivification (ywy-je’engara, or ‘songs of the Earth’). In the dreaming, he learns from an enemy how to ‘make [the dead] leave’ (-mo hem, precisely the term that Carvalho transcribes in his diary as murrem)."® He then repeats the act in a wakefil state, singing the songs he received from the enemy of whom he dreamt. Pi'awa, an old Western Parakan man, narrated one of these dreams to me. In the dream, he went to see his father’s brother's grave and met a white man who showed him how to resurrect the dead. By dancing and singing, Pi'awa made his father’s brother come out of the earth. He stank, and demanded that Pi'awa fetch some water. Pi'awa washed him and said, ‘Very well, I made a human leave [the grave’. Other resurrections followed suit. When Pi'awa finished recounting the dream, he asked me: ‘How do you make the dead leave (-mohen)?" Thad no answer." The ability to resurrect the dead is not attributed exclusively to the whites Other ‘enemies’ (akwawa) are capable of bringing the dead to life because they are held to be the real owners of shamanic knowledge.” Western Parakani assert that they are ignorant of the technique for extracting the pathogenic agents that cause diseases. For this reason, all true healings must be performed by enemies, who are summoned to cure by the dreamers. There is a type of dream called ‘bringing in the enemy" (akwawa-rera’awa), which is composed of two parts: in the first, the dreamer’s double (-a’owa) meets an enemy and asks him to come and cure. Then the dreamer wakes, prompting the second part of the dream, which the Parakani conceive of as a wakeful state, In this part, dreamer and enemy meet in their ‘real skin’ (ipireté), a8 they put it, and the actions have the same existential status as those which occur in waking reality. This is a limit-case of a more general issue concerning the status of dream- ing as a kind of experience." I am convinced that Parakani people are being literal when they say that the second part of the dream of ‘bringing in the enemy’ is waking reality (see Fausto 20014: 355-84). In any case, even when the dreaming is held to be an experience of a component of the person (the ‘double’, the ‘soul’, and so on), it is not something that happens internally to him or her. It is conceived as an experience of an exterior dimension of the world, where the dreamer actually interacts with other people.” Facing a similar question, Needham wrote that ‘dreams are real when we are in them — only then they are not “dreams”. They do not become dreams until we wake, and it is then that we are faced with the question whether we680 ‘CARLOS FAUSTO. believe them’ (1972: 67). This is true in so far as one has an internalist theory of dreaming, If not, the question of belief is posed differently. First, one can lie about having dreamt, and it is for others to decide if the dream has taken place. Parakani people have a simple method for judging these matters. If someone knows a new song it means he or she has really dreamt, since songs always result from interaction with enemies in dreams. Secondly, a dream may be interpreted as forecasting coming events. In this case, to believe it means to act according to its message. An extreme example is the Iroquois practice of publicly acting out their dreams, even when this involved acts of violence or sexual promiscuity. A dreamer who had a night- mare about being captured by enemies would ask his fellows to torture him, “believing that after this imaginary captivity he would never actually be a pris- coner’ (Wallace 1958: 240). Performing dreams by transforming them into ritual action is a recurrent feature of ceremonial life in Amazonia and elsewhere. As a guide for action, dreams may inflect vital political and economic decisions, Iks importance tends to accrue during periods of rapid social change, because it provides, along with mythical fabulation (Gow 2001), a creative device to interpret new situations and act in new contexts (Stephen 1982). Hence its centrality in indigenous ‘millenarian’ movements observed throughout Amazonia and Melanesia What I suggest here is that the dreaming provides an experiential basis to support and motivate beliefs and practices. This is not only because it is so lively and vivid an experience for the dreamer, but because its experi- ential density can be communicated to others by means of narratives and rituals (Graham 1995). It is thus turned into powerful embodied and shared experiences, which constitute a significant dimension of the lived world Moments of intense excitement or affliction, of great intellectual or practi- cal bewilderment, tend to activate the memory of these experiences. Death is one such moment, contact is another; both are part of our context here The bones affair Let us accept, then, that there is a network of beliefs, contextually motivated by the necessity of acting and understanding, which supports the association of the whites with shamanic power, and with the possibility of resurrecting the dead. The question I wish to address now is: how was this nexus of beliefs motivated in 1971 so as to result in some Parakand men asking the Funai team to ressurect the dead? To answer this question, I will return to some events that happened before 6 May, when the bones affair first came into question, The first visit of Funai agents to the village was on 17 April. Hitherto they had not allowed the agents to visit their settlement. On that day some Parakeni arrived early at the Funai camp. They received bunches of bananas and some machetes, Carvalho offered them a quarter of a large rodent. They were puzzled by the smallness of the bullet hole in the animal’s flesh, and they asked how he had killed it. For the first time Carvalho displayed his rifle and showed them how it worked. Then the Parakana invited the whitesCARLOS FAUSTO 681 to dance. The women cut the agents’ hair in the native style and painted them. When they were about to leave, Carvalho asked if he could go with them: They asked me, ‘What for. 1 said that I wanted to stay with them, But before they allowed me [to do so], they asked if | smoked tauary {the Parakan’ cigar), if Isang and danced. 1 answered, yes, so they decided co ake me with them. Nekon, Josias and Piaui were forced to go, and the others, they puished them back, telling them (0 stay (Carvalho. 1971: 17 Apr). The party arrived at the village at 3.30 p.m. and started to dance and sing, ‘Then they asked Carvalho to sharpen the blades of their axes. The women brought food to him, At dusk, some men came to him carrying a metre-long cigar, and the dancing began again, Eventually they went to sleep, but before dawn he was called again: ‘Before getting up, I spoke and my voice was hoarse, ‘The same happened to the Indians and I pulled at the throats of eight of them, rubbing my hands and then blowing to throw off the disease” (Carvalho 1971: 17 Apr). Carvalho thus acted as if he were es ricting the pathogenic agent from their bodies. After this fake shamanistic performance, he and Nelson started to sing again, the former chanting songs of the Urubu-Ka'apor people (among whom he had served for many years) and the latter singing those of the Tembé people. Since both are Tupi-Guarani groups, the Parakani were probably able to grasp some of the words After this visit, the headman Arakyti became Carvalho’s ritual friend, a special relationship that one has with cross-cousins and enemies, During the Ficumr 3. Joio Carvalho (painted all over with genipa) shows a Parakand man a shot-gun (1971). Photo:¥. Billo,682 CARLOS FAUSTO next months, Arakyti insistently asked Carvalho to sing: ‘Before dawn’, writes the Funai agent, ‘the captain always comes to my hammock and asks me to sing’ As I have said, songs are the sensory evidence of a special relationship between a person and the akwawa. Songs can only be obtained through inter- action with chese alien persons in dreams, and are therefore a sign of shamanic power, Names are obtained in the same way, and young parents usually ask dreamers to name their child, as did Arakyté’s son co Carvalho: Piciaté... arrived with hhis wife and his new-born son, [asked him what his name was. He told me to give the name. I thought and gave the name of an Urubu-Ka'apor warrior: Tameré. They found it so beautiful that they asked me to name a gitl of the same age (Carvalho 1971; 13 July), One week after the visit, the Parakand took chem again to the village, to the all-too-familiar routine of dancing and sharpening, But something new happened, Around 9.00 pm., we were dancing and suddenly Miarin [another Funai agent) fell down ‘This was like a bath of cold wacer. Every young Indian got a machete and asked if he had caruan (if he was 2 shaman). We said'No’ ... They ordered everyone to go to sleep and they kepe their machetes under their hammocks (Carvalho 1971: 23 Apr) Miarin had fainted, His faintness could be interpreted in two related ways: he could have been attacked by pathogenic agents called karowsra, or he could have been dreaming as a result of the dancing and tobacco intoxication. Both interpretations invited the same conclusion: for better or for worse, powerful shamanism was on the scene. So the dancing stopped for a while, only to start again before the break of the day: By dawn, almost every single Indian was singing and dancing, They performed the song of the howler monkey, the rail, the tayra, che anteater, the peceary and others, and in the end the white-man song. This one, they requested me to sing with them unal I learnt it filly (Carvalho 1971: 25 Apr. Carvalho had to learn a song given by a white man in a dream. He was representing the dream enemy in his ‘real skin’. This confation between dreaming experience and wakeful interaction was fuelled by the positive responses of Carvalho and his team.” Finally, on 6 May, the Parkana asked Carvalho to murrem the dead; that is, to mio-hem, ‘to make leave’. More precisely, they asked him to make a specific person alive again. As far as I know, it was a young woman who was recently deceased and much mourned by the Parakani people, This is Carvalho’s response, which I omitted from the first quotation: the captain suid it was for me to murem, which means to take out. It was to make the body raise up. I understood the goal. 1 was to revive the dead. I informed them that I was no shaman. They told us to arrange the grave as it was before, and ordered Gerson to wash his Inands (Carvalho 1971: 6 May),CARLOS FAUSTO 683 Were these Parakand men convinced by Carvalho’s answer? Apparently, since they told him to close the grave. But it might have been that he was merely unwilling to display his powers. Perhaps it was just too early to ask him to do this. In any case, Carvalho seemed to know that a great shaman could revive the dead, otherwise he would not have said that he was no shaman, One who dies never tives again May 1971 was a sad month. The epidemics that would kill 30 per cent of the Eastern Parakand population began to ravage the country. At least nine out of some one hundred and forty people died within a couple of weeks. The Parakana stopped visiting the whites. By the end of the month, the agents had decided to track them. They found abandoned camp-sites full of squeezed pieces of Brazil nut tree bark, a native treatment for fever. They also found graves and a corpse, covered only with cloth In the first days of June, some Parakana people reappeared at the Funai camp, and Carvalho noted in his diary that ‘the captain fheadman} said something about taking the bones out. I didn't fullly understand what he meant. So many deaths in so short a time had probably motivated this new comment, since the losses were difficult to bear. But the contact process went on. The agents resumed their visits to the village, and even began to stay there for more than one night at a time. Whenever they passed near a grave, Parakana men ordered Carvalho to sing, ‘probably not to ask questions’, he writes. By 18 June, a new gadget was introduced to the Parakani: a radio con- necting the camp to the Funai network. Carvalho made them listen to it and speak into it. they were happy, everyone wanted to listen to it, even the children, Every man said his hhame to hear the radio responding, Whenever a word imitating their names came out, it was sheer bliss. I turned on the radio at 8.10 am., and at 11.30 the captain [the headman Arakytil told the women to leave. As soon as they lef, he invited me to remove some bones fom a grave. When we arrived there, he asked me t0 dig and the other Indians encitcled the grave. The captain started co blow the smoke of his cigar .. I asked him why he wanted the bones, He told me he was going to take them and brought a basket to putt the bones inside, all the while blowing smoke. When I had alzeady lad the arm and leg bones [inside]. T noticed that they were sell clammy... [told the captain it was not good to take them out yet, since they were stinking, He said [I was] to return the bones to the grave and asked ‘me to come back later, remove the bones and bring them to him. I think they ate going to perform a symbolic burial into those large pots I've seen in the village (Carvalho 1971: 21 June) ‘This was not the case, however. The Parakani do not practise secondary burial. Carvalho was judging what he saw by what he knew about other Amerindian peoples. For the Parakani, the deaths and the radio once again raised the issue of the powers of whites and motivated them to act. This time, however, Carvalho did not deny that he was a shaman, He was uncertain of684 CARLOS FAUSTO Arakyta’s purpose, and said that it was not yet the right time (implying that there is a right time). If we assume that it is possible to cross the Great Divide between us (the living) and them (the dead), the crucial question is:Who can do this, and when?” From July to August, Carvalho was absent from the field, and the diary is written by other Funai agents. During his absence, there was an outbreak of influenza, This time Parakani men and women came immediately to the Funai camp, asking for medicines, It was the peak season for anti-flu, anti-catarth, and antibiotics injections. On 13 August, for instance, twenty-two people (among them children) received injections, and an agent writes that ‘all of them accepted the medication well’ (Carvalho 1971: 13 Aug). By the time Carvalho had returned, the outbreak was already under control. More confi- dent, Parakand men begin to ransack a nearby town that had grown up along the Transamazénica road. The government instructed the agents to put an end to the contact process, moving the Parakani to a new village near the Funai camp. Meanwhile singing continued to be a daily activity. Now the Parakang invited Carvalho to participate in the all-male nocturnal reunions in the tekatawa, the plaza. ‘When they finished smoking the 20-centimetre-long cigar, they asked me to sing ... 1 sang songs they didn’t know, in other words, I invented them. Then it was Nelson's turn, he imitated me, and in this way we sang many pieces without repetition’ (Carvalho 1971: 23 Sept.). The Parakand were about to perform the opetymo ritual, The stage witnessed by Carvalho is known as the ‘nurture of the jaguars’ (jawara-pyrotawa). It consists of the dreamers giving the songs (called “jaguars’), which they had received from the dream enemies, to those who were to dance in the festival. By asking Carvalho to sing in the plaza, Parakan’ people condensed these two figures into one, treating him again as the dreamer and the dream enemy. The ritual was aborted by an outbreak of conjunctivitis. The Eastern Parakand had already suffered from many diseases in the previous months. ‘They now eagerly took medicines, particularly penicillin injections whose rapid effect had a great impact on them. On 30 September, Arakyté called Carvalho to come to the village and give his sick litde daughter an injection. Finally, by 2 October, they abandoned their village, moving to a new one built by the Funai agents near their campsite. During the trip, the bones affair came to the fore for the last time: ‘When we passed alongside the grave of an old shaman, which has a beautiful shelter over it, we sat to rest and talk. 1 asked the captain [Arakyts] who was there. He said it was my grandfather and asked if T were going to take him out, I said it was not the right time yet, since he would still stink. He agreed, but asked me to give him {the dead shaman] an injection. [ said that ic was impossible to inject into the bones, and besides one who dies never lives again, and the medicines only cure when there is sil lif. They agreed, but ever so Wanted me fo take the bones out, I questioned them as to why they wanted the bones, but obtained no satisfictory answer, and I still remain in doube (Carvalho 1971; 2 ee} Arakyti asked Carvalho to open the grave and inject medicines into the bones. They were both uncertain. Carvalho questioned his first assumption that he was co “murtem’ the dead. Arakyt’ wanted to know if the injections‘CARLOS FAUSTO 685 were the whites’ well-guarded secret of immortality. This time Carvalho was peremptory: death is irreversible, ‘one who dies never lives again’ What Poenakatu said ‘We can now understand the status of the proposition ‘the whites can revive the dead! entertained by the Eastern Parakani during the contact process. The proposition was based on deep-rooted ontological assumptions and on his- torical and dreaming experiences, crystallized in narratives and represented in rituals. Many other propositions were implicated in this one, such as ‘one who dies can live again’, ‘some shamans can resurrect the dead’, ‘shamans interact with powerfull enemies’, ‘the whites are powerfull enemies’, ‘the whites may be powerful shamans’, ‘Carvalho may be a shaman’, and, finally, ‘Carvalho may know how to resurrect the dead’. As one comes from the general to the spe- cific, there is increasing conditionality on the truth value of these proposi- tions, which sets into motion an inferential process based on empirical evidences. During the first months of contact, the veracity of the latter propositions was reinforced by some facts. Carvalho mastered songs and names as only dreamers do. The question then for the Parakana was: how powerful is this man? If he cures with injections, controls the flow of goods, operates the radio, and is the head of the whites, he may be very powerful indeed. In 1999, commenting upon these events, the headman Arakyti confirmed to me that they envisaged this possibility: “We asked ourselves: do the whites resur- rect people?” (oporowa’a pa rimio Tria, omja rakokwehe). This reasoning was grounded in a series of assumptions about the nature of whites and enemies in general, which were knit together into a shamanistic ontology. The final test was to ask Carvalho to resurrect the dead, but unfortunately he failed three times. What did this failure mean for the Eastern Parakana? They concluded that either Carvalho himself or the whites in general did not know the shaman- istic art of resurrection, But they remained impressed by the whites’ power to cure, and even more by their power to cause diseases. For many years, the Eastern Parakani suffered from acute epidemics, and many of them died. They never asked the whites to resurrect their kin again, In 1998, however, the death of a teenager caused a tremendous commo- tion among them. They buried him and built a shack over the grave. For many days his father and other elders danced on the grave, smoking their long cigars, and singing the Songs of the Earth. The whites remained in the Indian Post at a respectful distance. The elders danced again and again. In vain, No dreamer succeeded in bringing the young man back to life. Despite so many failures, there is no definitive disclaimer of the plausibil- ity of crossing the Great Divide. So long as there are dreams and shamans, there is hope. Poenakatu, an Asurini Indian, once explained to an anthropol- ogist why his father who was 2 great shaman did not return to life:‘Our father always told us not to bury him, but to make a basket and leave him in there until all the flesh was gone ... That is why our mother did not want to have him buried. He was going to live again for us’. The whites, however, urged686, CARLOS FAUSTO them to bury him, and Poenakatu laments, “The Whites, they didn’t know that he dreamt’ (Andrade 1992: 220). NOTES This article is a version of a paper presented at The Ethnohistory of the So-Called Peripheries Wennet-Gren Conference, held in London, Ontario. in. 2000: my thanks to Marshall Sahlins, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Neil Whitchead forthe invitation and com- ments. The present version has greatly benefited from the ertcians T received when present- ing it at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Institute of Social and. Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and the London School of Economic. Yam grate to chose who invited sme: Patrick Menget, Philippe Descola, Benoit de l Exile, Laura Rival and Roger Goodman, Peter Gow and Stephen Feuchowang. I have ako benefited from the suggestions made by ‘Apatecida Vilaga, Christina Toren, Carlo Severi, Adam Kuper, Luiz Antonio da Costa, and the atonymous JRAT reviewers. ! would ako like to thank Yves Billon for granting me the right to publish his photographs and the Instivuto Socioambiental for making them avaiable. Research among the Parakani was financed by Financladora de Estudos © Projtos (FINED), Associo Nacional de Pés-Graduagio em Cigncss Socials (ANPOCS), the Ford Foundation, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFR), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro” pological Research. I completed chs article during my stay at the Laboratoie d’Anthropolo- Bie Sociale (CNRS/Collige de France) in 2001 ~ my thanks to P. Descola forthe invitation and to the Coondenagio de Aperfigoamento de Pesoal de Ensino Superior (CAPES) for pro- ding che means for my say. 'The structuralist answer was different, for it focused on the mind, not on the socio- cultural system. Lévi-Strass (1962s; 19626) wniveralized analytical reasoning and reread exhnographic data through the lenses ofclasiicatory and categorical thought. These two answers together were so successfil thatthe ixue of rationality became a meta-anthropological question rather than an anthropological one. See, for instance, the contributions to Wilson (1970) or to Hollis and Lukes (1982). ?Here I employ Locke's famous metaphor about the mind, which allowed him to affirm che pre-eminence of experience a the source of human knowledge. Culturlsm espoused a case empiricist theory of the mind without embracing its corresponding experience-dependent theory of concept formation. Acquistion was thus seen ata simple proces of inscrbing ready sade contents in the individuals mind, “In response to one of his critics, Obeyesckere defines ‘practical rationality’ asa term that helps me to see Hawaiians and others engaged in certain activities that show rational means goal nexus and links them up with others engaged in the commonplace tasks of planning and raking do as they strugele with want and sears. T cannot imagine humans living without such a mental, ell it “universal” if you will (1995: 272), “The Paakand split into two groups, Eat and West at the end of the nineteenth century {sce Fanso 20014). In 1999, the Western branch totalled mote than 400 people, and the Eastern branch just under 300 people. Sertanista is the most senior position in the career of a Funai agent. The term comes from the word ‘endo, which during the colonial petiod denoted the Braclin hintelands and was applied to a person who accompanied expeditions into the wood, im search of gold and native aves “The Parskand are probably remnants of a large Tupi-Guarani population reported to have lived in dhe region since the seventeenth century The intensity of relations with colonial agent in the remote past is impossible to determine. The forebears ofthe Purakand may have been drawn into contact with missionaries and merchants. They may have suffered fom the rum fous epidemics that ravaged che Tocantins valley during the first centuries of colonization, However, the Purakani have no memory of such events, Their view is that they had ‘dis coveree” the whites by the end of the nincteenth century; they think of themselves as com- pletely isolated until chat time, For an analysis of this myth and its transformation, see Fausto (2001a: 470-82). For the other Parakin myth on the origin of whites, see Fausto (orthcoming). For this sameCARLOS FAUSTO 687 theme among the sixteenth-century Tupinambi, see Thever (1575 {1953}: 39; 1576 {1978} 100) In Amazonian mythology there isa recurrent motif that explains the technological asym- retry between natives and whites In primordial times, they had to choose between two tech nical items offered by the culture here. The ancestor of the Indians made the wrong decision (Choosing, for instance, the bow instead of the rie), condemning future generations to tch- nological infviorigy. This myth was fist recorded in the seventeenth century among the ‘Tupinambi (Abbevile 1614: 60) and appears today among other native peoples. ts stuctuce is identical to that of che myths which explain how death entered into the human world (see LLévi-Steauss 1964). We have thus only one motif that accounts for both mortality and tech- nological inferiority. On this topic, see Hugh-Jones (1988: 143-4); Vivetos de Castro (1992: 30-1); Giraldo-Figucroa (1997: 280-1); Goulard (1998: 464-515); Gow (2001: 205-18); Fausto (20040: 469-531) For a splendid analysis ofthe Tupi-Guarani asimiltion of Europeans to great shamans and the cultural hero Mair, see Viveiros de Cato (1992). "This designation was generally applied to the Europeans, whereas ‘Pero’ was used for the Portuguese and “Mafra’ fer the French. Some of the shamans known as ‘Carafba’ headed 'mesianic’ movements during the frst centuries of colonization. There is much com troversy concerning the status ofthese movements, especially in what concetns the impact of the colonial process upon them: see iner alia Castes (1973); Vainfse (1998); Fausto (1992; 20010. “Boyer claims that religious ideas are atthe same time natural (because they depend on Universi properties ofthe human mind) and perceived as unnatural by human subjects (because they violate intuitive expectation). The cultural tansmission of religious representations would depend on a certain combination of intuttiveness and counter-ineuitivenest, that is, on 8 “cog nitive optimum, in which a concept is both learnable and nonnatural’ (1994: 121), "Abductive inferencing is not peculiar to magico-religiows explanations. For Peitce, who introduced this notion into epistemology as third term, to be situated between induction snd deduction, it was a perfectly rational procedure. Today it is recognized as « step in the con- struction of knowiedge, although some hard empiricits contest its legitimacy (sce Boyd 1995 212), See ako Peirce’ distinction between ‘strong induction’ and sbductory induction’ (1940 1901p. °1 am aware of the implications of this statement, and would like to avoid an ultra- relativistic reading of it. 1am cautious about the idea that standards of evidence depend only fon the epistemic community to which one belongs. {do not want to dvell on this problem here and will merely quote from Haack: There is relevant ambiguity in "what counts as evi- dence” In one sense, there is much divergence in “what counts as evidence”: in what one counts a5 elewunt evidence, which depends on one’ other belie. In another sense, perhaps, after all, there is not much divergence in “what counts at evidence"; in appraising the security of a belief pre-scientifc as well a5 scientific peoples .. may be assessing its fit to their ex- perience and to their other belie .. If we thnk of exteria of justification a the appropriate level of generality, of framework principals rather than material content, of the constraints of| experiential anchoring and explanatory integration rather than of specific judgements of rel vance, there may, after al, be commonality rather than divergence” (1993: 207) “The expression ‘ontological assumptions should not be confused with the cognitive notion of intuitive ontology". The former refers to set of cultural catagories about the beings exist- ing in the cosmos, while the later refer to 4 natural set of ontological categories built into covery human mind. "Among the Parakan3, the defwult gender of a dreamer is male. Old women, however, do dream and give songs for the festivals although not to the same extent 3¢ ment see Fausto (1999; 20018) ‘Compare Piawa's question and my reaction with Leavit’s (2000) analysis of similar sit tions involving anthropologist in Melanesia ° Akuawa is the general category for all entities, in their condition a persons, who do not belong to Ego's community. I translate it as ‘enemy. Animals are alwmwa when considered 28 subjects endowed with intention and verbal communication (a happens in dreams and mythi- cal nar-atives). As game, they are chsified in the general category for objects, ma’gitos. For denis, see Fausto (20014 20018)688 ‘CARLOS FAUSTO, "ST thank P. Menget for calling my attention to this question. "When narrating a dream Parakani people employ the same epistemic marks, indicating direct witnesses and not hearsay, which they use to communicate events on a day-to-day basis, Another Tupi-Guarani people, the Parintintin, employ a specific epistemic mark to differen tiate dreaming experiences from wakefal ones: ra'w (Kracke 1987), which is 2 cognate of the Parakand term for ‘double’ (-a'owa). 1 do not interpret it as a mark of ‘irrelity’ or inter= nality’, but rather as an indication that the events narrated were experienced by the person's ‘double’ The Parakand seem to have entertained the idea that the whites were ‘like people you see in.a dream’ long before stable contact. The dreamers generally address the dreamt enemies with a formal vocative for father and father’s brothers, miangé. The Parakani originally employed this very same term co address the whites. 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Lexamen de certains événements apparemment implausibles permet d'aborder ka690, CARLOS FAUSTO. question de savoir comment certaines croyances au sujet de Ia nature des blancs entrérent ‘ies données tirées de Mhistoire de Amérique du Sud et de Pethnographie comparée de la Mélanésie afin de suggteer de nouvelles perspectives sur le débat entre Sablins et Obeyesckere. La notion Peircienne abduction sert 4 rendre compte de la flexbilité et de la réslience simultanées des idées magico-religieuses, Museu Nacional-PPGAS, Quinta da Boa Vista s/n®, Rio de Jancir, RJ, 20.940-040 Brasil. fausto@alterex.combr