Introduction: The Panoan art of survival

Although the Panoan peoples of Amazonia have a great deal to teach us about
human existence, their experiences of life remain an underutilized resource in Amazonian
ethnology. Counted by number of languages, Panoans are more numerous than betterknown Amazonian language groupings such as the G, Yanomami, or Tukano; but they
are often missing from lists of major Amazonian language families. For example, when
discussing the South American cosmologies that as a set form a vast system of
transformations, Viveiros de Castro (1992:5) mentions G, Tupi, Tukano, Yanomami,
Carib, and Upper Xingu; there is no mention of Panoans. Although he incorporates
Panoan evidence into his model of Amazonian cosmology, for example when discussing
the mythic figure of the Master of Water (1992:83) or Amazonian onomastics
(1992:155), their absence from his list as well as from his index (1992:392407) are
indications of Panoans low visibility in ethnological model-building. This is a pity, for
Panoan experiences of life in the often-violent world system show us how people can
respond to the threat of ethnocide with enormous creativity and both individual and
collective strength. There is hardly an area of theoretical interest in Amazonian
ethnology that would not benefit from listening to Panoan voices; the Amazonian Grand
Unified Theory proposed by Viveiros de Castro (2001) surely requires Panoan
participation.
This is not to say that Panoan studies have been absent in the development of
models for understanding native Amazonian peoples. Panoan studies have been
fundamental for the development of a historical approach to Amazonian ethnology
(Lathrap 1970, Myers 1974, 1981, DeBoer 1981, 1986); of the models known as the
symbolic economy of alterity (Erikson 1986, 1996; Keifenheim 1992) and the moral
economy of intimacy (Lagrou 2000, McCallum 2001); and in the critical examination of
the relationship between history and myth (Lathrap et al. 1985, 1987; DeBoer and
Raymond 1987; Roe 1988; Erikson 1990; Calavia 2000, 2001, 2005; Calavia et al. 2003),
just to name a few areas of contribution. But Panoans are still somewhat marginal in
considerations of anthropological theory in Amazonia. For example, despite the major
contribution of Panoan studies to the symbolic economy of alterity model, the resultant
predation theory (Fausto 1999) is heavily based on Jivaroan and Tupian data, straying
1

from its Panoan roots. I hope this book will contribute to a greater integration of Panoan
studies with Amazonian ethnology, and thus to an improved understanding of Amazonian
peoples.
To introduce some ways in which Panoan studies enhance our understanding of
Amazonian peoples (and indeed, humans in general), I will present a series of narratives
portraying Panoan experiences of crisis, liminality, and reintegration in relation to the
waves of structural violence that have punctuated Panoan participation in the world
system. The selection of these episodes is inspired by Norman Whittens (2003)
description of the ways in which Amazonian symbol systems operate as instruments of
power in contexts of social transformation, as well as by his well-chosen epigram from
Victor Turner (1974 apud Whitten 2003:1): The world over, millenarian and revivalistic
movements ... originate in periods when societies are in liminal transition between major
orderings of social structural relations. The narratives will ground the subsequent
discussion of this books theoretical contributions in Panoan experiences of history,
showing how deployments of shamanic and symbolic power, applied both internally and
externally, mediate disconnections from and reconnections to the world system in times
of intense ethnocidal pressure.
While acknowledging that to see history as a succession of social structures is a
limiting approach (Rubenstein 2002: 64), in this case the framework is useful,
particularly if we understand structure as operating on the regional, national, and global
as well as local and interlocal scales. This is partly because Panoans have participated
actively in the construction of major regional and global macro-structures (for example,
by producing the rubber that facilitated expansion of Western automobile production and
road-building, or by taking leadership roles in the contemporary indigenous movement),
but also because during these major re-orderings of the world system, they have created
new social structures as key components of strategies for coping with intense genocidal
pressures.
The following narratives were related to me early in my fieldwork when my
Marubo language capacity was limited, and as such are filtered through the storytellers
need to use simple language to communicate with me. However, these are oft-told stories
that are the subject of much metadiscourse in contemporary Marubo life. As such I hope

they will represent, albeit in a highly mediated sort of way, Panoan voices in the
polyphony of Amazonian ethnology.
Crisis
The rubber boom affected all Panoan peoples very intensely. During this time
(18501920), Western industries developed important uses for Amazonian rubber,
particularly as the key ingredient in bicycle and automobile tires. Panoan lands, rich in
rubber trees, were invaded by large numbers of rubber extractors. Panoans reacted in
diverse ways including running away, joining the workforce as rubber producers, or
attacking the invaders. Relations between rubber extractors and Panoans were often
violent: some Panoan peoples saw their populations reduced by as much as 90%. This
was the case in the Javari basin, where an attack on at least one village left only three
survivors. The following Marubo narrative portrays this attack, with one version
portraying the use of shamanic power for survival, while another does not:1
Above the Pardo [an affluent of the Curu], there is a rivulet called Kariya, which the
whites called Igarap Setiacho. On the Kariya there were several villages, whose leaders were
Iskopei of the Iskonawavo nation, Tamani Romeya of the Nokoavo nation, and
Tamavanpa of the Ninawavo nation. One day there arrived at this place a boat of
Peruvians with merchandise and cane liquor on board. They called together the longhouses
to receive presents and drink liquor. When the Marubo were very drunk, the Peruvians
explained that they had very little merchandise, but they had a big boat waiting at the mouth
of the Pardo. The Peruvians boat filled with people and descended the river. When they
arrived at the mouth of the Pardo, the Peruvians invited the Marubo onto the big boat to
receive their merchandise. They sat down on a bench to wait. There, the Peruvians tied
everybody up by the ankles and wrists. They became prisoners on the boat. Night arrived
and the Peruvians went to lie down. [Version 1: Tamani Romeyas wife brought him his
bottle of tobacco snuff. She poured the contents of the bottle into his mouth, and he broke
free of his knots and untied his nephew. They fled.] {Version 2: Two people, Tamani
Romeya and his nephew Rane, succeeded in untying their knots and escaping.} The
Peruvians heard and ran shooting with their rifles, but Tamani and Rane disappeared in the
forest. Angry, the Peruvians killed all the adult men right there and threw their bodies
overboard to rot on land. Tamani and Rane returned to their longhouse and told people
what had happened. They thought the Peruvians would not return. There were few people
in the longhouses of the Setiacho. Almost all the men were killed, only a few women and
children remained. The women and children that remained on board the Peruvian boat
were never again seen. We do not know where they were taken. Shortly after the time of the
massacre, Rane went to hunt with his wife and daughter. A short distance from the
longhouse, he stopped because he had forgotten the sugarcane he wanted to chew on the

way. He told his wife and daughter to go back while he waited. A little time passed, and
Rane heard shots from the longhouse. His wife and child came back saying that just as they
were approaching the longhouse, they heard shots. The Peruvians were attacking the village.
Rane and his family fled through the forest. They were found by other Marubo of the
Satanawavo nation and they told them what had happened. Of the Marubo of the Setiacho,
only these three escaped. The others were exterminated.
From crisis to liminality
In response to the rubber boom crisis, some Javari basin Panoans relocated to live
away from the rubber extractors. Previously participants in a system of social relations
extending throughout the Javari basin, these people constructed a new social system
consisting of only five longhouses. The following narrative portrays this movement,
contextualizing it between two deployments of shamanic power, both involving song, one
of which led to the rubber boom while the other ended it.2
First, there were only Indians from the Juru to the Solimes and over to the Ucayali. Then
a shaman sang and the Stranger population increased; the Strangers found the shotgun and
started killing the Indians. The Indians went to the headwaters of the Maronal. There were
only five longhouses: Dionsio, Ernesto, Jlio, Domingos, and Joo Tuxaua. They were few,
but they liked to feast. They held feasts to bring new log drums into the longhouses, but
there were so few people that the women had to help the men to carry the drum. Then Joo
Tuxauas father, Tomas, sang over a bowl of genipap. He went to put this genipap
everywhere white people were, and into all the creeks and rivulets so that it was carried
downstream to the Strangers. Then, the Strangers went away, and for a long time there were
only Indians again, until the loggers came.
Liminality
In contemporary Marubo discourse, the time between their ancestors flight from
the rubber boom violence (c. 18901930) and their bureaucratic incorporation into the
Brazilian state (19701985) is regarded as a sort of golden age, when there were fewer
diseases, cleaner water, and more powerful shamans. This brief liminal phase, between a
disconnection from and a reconnection to the world system, is marked in the oral
histories by the towering presence of their main leader, Joo Tuxaua. Joo Tuxaua is an
overdetermined figure: political leader, shaman, healer, prophet, feast-organizer, expert
orator, singer, performer, father. Narratives concerning Joo Tuxaua emphasize his
mastery of every discourse genre, even attributing to him the re-creation of genres that
had fallen into abeyance. The liminal golden age of near-isolation from encroaching
4

nation-states was infused by this shaman-prophets songs, through which he wove strands
of ethnic unity, consciously creating a new system of social relations firmly grounded in
the old.3
My father, Joo Tuxaua, would lie in a hammock above the log drum and the spirits would
come to him. Thats how he got to know the world of the spirits, they took him and showed
him everything. They taught him the names and origins of all things. When he came back to
his body, he told people what he had seen, or he sang about it. My grandfather was also a
healer, but not as great as my father. My father was the one who gathered together all the
peaceful Marubo in one place. He cured people, he sang all the time, he held feasts. Women
loved him. He had many children. Those leaders who thought like him, like Domingos,
Jlio, and Ernesto, joined him. The others, the angry/ill-tempered Marubo, they kept
fighting each other and the Strangers. They all died out. My father never stopped talking.
He was always telling stories. He drank oni almost every night and he went to all the
longhouses, singing, and everybody listened. Thats how we all learned to sing, my brothers
and I and Domingos children.
Reintegration
When FUNAI (the Brazilian government agency in charge of indigenous affairs)
made contact with the Marubo in the 1970s and established attraction posts, not
everyone was happy with the merchandise, food, and medical care they received from the
government. Several Maruboseveral of whom were culturally hybridargued that
FUNAI policies were disadvantageous to them, and that they needed to make their own
decisions. One of these, Clovis Rufino, discusses his early efforts at political organizing.
His endeavors were not only focused on the Marubo, but also on the formation of an
interethnic alliance linking them to their Kanamari neighbors, to the Matses (their former
enemies) and, later, to the Matis. In an effort to get people to listen to him and his fellow
organizers, he introduced a new social practice and discourse genre, the political meeting,
which subsequently became quite popular. Clovis sought to create a form of social
relationship that was new to the Javari: an indigenous political organization, CIVAJA,
which would later connect the native peoples of the Javari to the worldwide indigenous
movement.
My mother married a logger. I was raised by my aunt in Benjamin Constant. In 1981 I came
back to the indigenous area to live with my kin. I stayed at [The Marubo village of] So
Salvador until 1983. I started to have meetings with the leaders to tell them the reality of
the situation. Before that, the leaders only spoke to each other when they gathered on the
5

longhouse benches at night to inhale tobacco snuff. Darcy and I were the first to have
meetings just to talk about what was happening. At the meetings, we presented ideas to the
elders and made proposals. In 1983 and 1984, I went downriver. I was the first Marubo to
contact the Mayoruna [Matses] to discuss our problems ... In 1991, I went to the Mayoruna
and Kanamari. I spent a week in each place, telling them we were being tricked and
exploited. In 1991, we held the first encounter of the leaders of all the Indians of the Javari.4
Shamanizing the indigenous movement
Just as shamanic power was used as a resistance tactic when the Javari Panoans
were incorporated into the world system against their will during the rubber boom, it was
deployed again when the Javari Panoans sought to impose their own terms for integrating
with the world system in the 1990s. Because of their focus on autonomy and land rights,
Clovis and other members of the Javari indigenous movement received death threats,
allegedly from people connected to the logging business who wanted to maintain access
to indigenous land. Joo Tuxaua intervened, and one of the areas he intervened in was
Clovis speaking ability.
CIVAJA wouldnt exist if it wasnt for Joo Tuxaua. When we first went up the Curu to
organize people, they thought Darcy and I were just children causing trouble. None of the
leaders listened to us. Then, Joo Tuxaua said people should listen to us, that what we were
proposing was the right way. From then on, CIVAJA began to have support in the Curu. - He still helps me. One time, I was about to get on a plane in Manaus when I felt that I
couldnt go on board. I changed my reservation to the next flight. The plane crashed. -Many times, when Im speaking to people, Ill be inspired with just the right words. Then,
once Im finished, I cant even remember what I said or understand how I thought of it. If
people ask me questions, I cant explain what I just said. That inspiration is from Joo
Tuxaua.5
That wasnt my fathers spirit that helped Clovis, it was yove spirits called by my father.
When Clovis started talking, nobody liked him. FUNAI hated him, people wanted to kill
him. Then my father got honey, sang over it, and gave it to Clovis to eat. Thats why the yove
help Clovis. My father called mawa into the honey. Mawa helps people to speak.6
Discourse, power, and social transformation
Whittens (2003) conceptual framework for discussing the transformational and
millenarian aspects of native Amazonian symbol systems can be fruitfully applied to the
Panoan context. Far from reproducing timeless pasts or perfect presents, indigenous
people often use their symbol systems to produce new structures (Hill 1996). In the face

of brutal genocide, racist neglect, or socioeconomic inequality and exclusion, such

symbols become future-oriented and transformational. Millenarian discourses become
vehicles of power, and power becomes an instrument for bringing about a new social
order. This is particularly the case in periods of transition between major orders of social
structural relations, for example, during disconnections from or reconnections to the
world system. The frustration and pain of living within a power system leads to
millenarian visions, to social movements aimed at transforming the system, and
sometimes at social reorderings by means of disconnections from the world system. In
producing millenarian visions, prophets draw on their cultural symbol systems. They do
not always restrict themselves to changing their own social group; they also use
deployments of symbolic power to change other indigenous peoples or even to change
the state itself.
The movement of Javari Panoans away from the rubber extraction front to
isolated rivulet headwaters represents a disconnection from the world system associated
with the conscious, agentive, historically contextual creation of a new social structure
from the symbol system shared by those who joined Joo Tuxaua. This was a transition
from a rubber boom social system perceived as violent and disadvantageous to a new
system created purposely to permit a small number of people not only to survive but to
multiply and thrive. Joo Tuxauas discourses included exegeses on proper social
relations and attitudes, a newly reorganized origin myth incorporating the previously
diverse Javari Panoans into one narrative of creation and travel (Melatti 1986; Cesarino
2008), and a strong emphasis on pragmatic contexts of healing and feasting as loci for
performance. Carrying powerful messages of intimacy and conviviality (Overing and
Passes 2000), his discourse is simultaneously a carrier of power: the power to restructure
social existence.
Half a century later, Clovis similarly used a reordering of discourse genres as part
of a strategy to produce another reordering of social structural relations, this time in
relation to a reconnection to the world system. The reconnection had taken place in
Clovis childhood, but it had resulted in what Clovis perceived to be a disadvantageous
power relationship where decisions were being made for the Marubo when they should
be made by the Marubo. Thus, he introduced a new discourse genre, the political

meeting, to Marubo society. Political meetings were a form of using power to restructure
the social system of the entire Javari in such a way that native peoples could have power
over outsiders. By allying with other indigenous groups, he and his co-organizers
successfully created an indigenous organization capable of exerting pressure at local,
regional, national, and international levels. Marubo, including Clovis, eventually took
leadership roles in the national indigenous movement, linking themselves to national and
international NGOs. They found a way to make themselves heard by a wide audience,
and in a politically effective manner.
Ethnogenesis
Panoan peoples are conscious creators of ethnic identities. Throughout the
approximately 1300 years for which we have evidence of Panoan existence, ethnogenesis
has been a major feature of life in the Panoan area. New Panoan ethnic groups have
emerged from old by fission, by fusion, or a combination of both; Panoans have
developed multiple ecological and economic niches associated with markers of ethnic
identity; and processes of creating ethnic identity have lasted for centuries, during which
groups continually absorb and transform neighbors or alter their cultural markers
according to the demands of survival in changing regional, national, and global systems
of power and exchange. One result of the Panoan passion for identity construction is a
proliferation of ethnonyms that has befuddled ethnologists for a century (Erikson 1992,
1993). The confusion reached its zenith when Loukotka (1968) listed 62 Panoan
languages while Girard (1971) listed 33; perhaps tipping the scale a little too far to the
other side, Kensinger (1985) then listed only 11 Panoan groups. Thus, one of the major
conundrums of Panoan studies has long been, how many Panoan peoples are there, who
are they and where do they live? The basic ethnological task of answering this question
is ongoing (Fleck intra; Krokoszynski and Fleck intra), a task made difficult by the fluid
and transformable qualities of Panoan ethnic identity and the multiplicity of Panoan
groups who refuse formal contact with representatives of the state and world system.
Because it is a veritable laboratory of ethnogenesis, the study of Panoan peoples has the
potential to make significant contributions to our knowledge of this important social
process.

How we define ethnogenesis strongly affects the results of research in this field.
Hill (1996:1) noted that ethnogenesis is not merely a label for the historical emergence
of culturally distinct peoples. Whitten (1976:281) defined ethnogenesis as the processes
of adaptation and intensification, by peoples whose cultures are acknowledged by an
application of ethnocidal policies[,] ... of ways of doing things which underscore their
own implicit, transformable symbolic relationships. Whittens case study well
illustrated that ethnogenesis is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. The Canelos
Quichua emerged from the intermarriage of Jivaroan, Zaparoan, and other peoples of the
Ecuadorian Oriente. Among the primary ethnic markers of this new people was the use
of the Quichua language, which provided an adaptive advantage in trade and in dealings
with state bureaucracy, as well as providing a basis for broad interethnic alliances in
times of external crisis. Despite their distinctly non-primordial ethnicity, Canelos
Quichua culture is well integrated with definable characteristics (Whitten 1976:11)
such as systems of kinship, cosmology, and ritual. But the process of Canelos Quichua
ethnogenesis did not cease once they had come into existence as a distinct people,
perhaps in the seventeenth century: this is a perpetuative formative process (Whitten
1976:8). For example, at the time of Whittens writing Zaparoan speakers were
intermarrying with Achuars and adopting not only the Quichua language but, more
broadly, the Canelos Quichua cultural markers. Thus, Canelos Quichua have been and
still are constantly forming out of Jivaroan-Zaparoan alliances mediated by the Quichua
language. The concept of ethnogenesis as a perpetuative formative process is adopted in
this volume.
The Panoan symbol system
In processes of ethnogenesis, Panoans draw on a rich, shared system of symbols
to construct social orders that are new and yet firmly rooted in past tradition. Whitten
(1976:281) noted that, in processes of ethnogenesis, the symbolic template, so to speak,
provides a manageable cosmogony linking the known and the unknown and provides a
set of ethnic markers in the face of inevitable nation-state expansion. Whitten (1976,
1996, 2003) shows how native Amazonian shared symbol systems are a source of power
with which indigenous peoples transform themselves to survive and thrive in times of

extreme crisis; and, as well as transforming themselves, they draw on symbolic power to
transform the state itself. Myth, as an important part of indigenous symbol systems, thus
becomes a charter for transformation, not stasis, and the symbolic template is used to
make changes, not to prevent them. As Hill (1996:34) notes, ritual and myth did not
act as static cultural molds existing independently of changing historical conditions but as
dynamic building blocks for the historical construction of new cultural identities. Here,
I draw on Whittens notion of shared symbols that are used to (re)construct identity and
sociality and to exert contrastructural power under conditions of extreme crisis. In
Panoan ethnogenetic processes, the shared Panoan symbol system is used, as Whitten
notes, to construct manageable cosmogonies and ethnic markers, but also to develop
systematized forms of social action such as shamanic ritual, ceremonial discourse
performance, and kinship relations.
Panoans draw on their shared symbols not only to create new systems of social
relations, but also in situations of interethnic alliance, trade, or friendship. Symbols that
are shared widely among Panoans can be noted in several symbolic domains, including
categories of identity and alterity (Erikson 1986, 1996; Keifenheim 1990, 1992), mythic
symbols (Roe 1982), linguistic cognates, and kinship terms and categories, just to name a
few that Panoan scholars might broadly agree on. The sharing of kinship categories
across ethnic boundaries is a particularly powerful resource for interethnic alliance and
ethnogenesis, permitting aggregation of and common action by groups of people
speaking differing languages; it can be used to symbolically gloss over ethnic difference
and create a sense of common identity. For example, close cognates of the kin term txai,
corresponding to the category of cross-cousin, are found in Amawaka (Dole 1979: 20),
Kashinawa (Kensinger 1995), Sharanawa (Siskind 1973), Kashibo (Wistrand de
Robinson 1977), Marubo (Melatti 1977), Shipibo (Eakin et al. 1986), and Matses (Fields
and Merrifield 1980) kinship terminologies. When Panoans of disparate ethnicities meet,
the use of this term is a common signal of friendship (cf. Santos Granero 2007),
understood by almost all Panoans, and thus carrying significations of shared social
histories. In Marubo, the term txai is thus slowly becoming a term for friend rather
than cross-cousin or sisters husband.

10

Uniquely among Amazonian peoples, most Panoans have kinship systems that are
either Kariera type (see Lvi-Strauss 1969) or incorporate elements of Kariera-type
kinship (Melatti 1977; Hornborg 1989, 1993; Kensinger 1995). Kariera-type kinship
divides the kin universe into four categories. The four categories are, roughly speaking,
ones own classificatory brothers and sisters; ones mother and her classificatory sisters
and brothers; ones father and his classificatory brothers and sisters; and ones crosscousins. The incest taboo is extended to three out of the four categories, marriage being
generally restricted to classificatory cross-cousins. Furthermore, Kariera systems
terminologically equate alternating generations. For example, fathers fathers and
mothers mothers are generally included in the same category as ego, while mothers
fathers and fathers mothers are generally included in the same category as cross-cousins.
Among the Kashinawa and Marubo, these categories are formally named marriage
sections. Among most other Panoans, the categories are constructed by the application of
kin terms forming four basic categories and equating alternating generations. In
situations where interethnic alliance or fusion are necessary or useful for survival, the
existence of shared categories of kin facilitates negotiation of new kinship arrangements
that draw on the shared Panoan symbol system.
The riverine Panoans of the Ucayali, the Shipibo, do not have Kariera-type
kinship. Unlike all other Panoans, they forbid cross-cousin marriage, requiring marriage
to take place outside the circle of kin. The divergence of Shipibo kinship represents a
major conundrum in Panoan ethnology. Since all other Panoans have Kariera-type
systems, it is logical to suggest that Shipibo kinship reflects their unique adaptation to life
on a major river, their much larger population as compared to interfluvial Panoans, and
perhaps the long-term processes of interethnic fusion that characterize riverine Panoan
history (Ruedas, intra). However, it is difficult to say whether the current difference
between riverine and interfluvial Panoan kinship reflects colonial or postcolonial
processes, or may on the other hand be related to the original occupation of the Ucayali
floodplain by Panoans around 800 C.E.
Panoan categories of identity and alterity are closely related to kinship categories.
Many Panoans have a cognate of the category nawa, which generally means stranger
although it can also mean people (Keifenheim 1990; Erikson 1996). Very often, this

11

category is set up in such a way that the main dualistic opposition in the domain of social
categories is not that between kin and affines, but rather between kin and strangers. The
category of Stranger is often contrasted to a category of real people or people (e.g.,
Kashinawa Huni Kuin, Kashibo Uni), native people or body (e.g., Yaminawa yora;
Townsley 1988), or not-other (e.g., Marubo wetsama; Melatti 1985; see also
Keifenheim 1992).
Aside from kin terms and categories, it is important to note that Panoan mythic
and visual symbols are widely shared and circulated among Panoan groups. Examples of
important shared mythic symbols include the figure of the Inca, used commonly in
Panoan myth to reflect on relations with the state and world system (Roe 1988; Calavia
2000; Cesarino and Colpron intra), and the figure of the living caiman-bridge that
permits some people to pass but not others (Melatti 1986:70; Deshayes and Keifenheim
1994:169; cf. Roe 1982:120). Many Panoan visual designs are shared across ethnic
groups; consider, for example, the similar facial tattoos used to express ethnic identity
among interfluvial Panoans (Krokoszynski and Fleck, intra), or Shipibo designs on
textiles and ceramics, so similar to, for example, Marubo body painting styles.
The Panoan symbol system is not an abstraction extant only in analytic models, it
is a vital resource used to construct social arrangements that are essential to survive and
thrive in conditions of widespread ethnocidal pressure. It is discernible not only in
discourse, performance, art and architecture, but in long-term processes of intermarriage,
coresidence, and social action. It is a basis not only for processes of Panoan
ethnogenesis, but also interethnic alliance, trade, and friendship.
The concept of a Panoan symbol system is presented here explicitly as a
Panoanist alternative to the Arawakanist notion of ethos (Santos-Granero 2002a).
Panoan scholars have long noted the existence of shared symbols among Panoan peoples,
and the examples presented above will not be very controversial. However, the actual
social arrangements and practices developed by Panoan peoples are sufficiently different
as to make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify a coherent Panoan ethos at this time.
Phenomena such as the marking of ethnic differences on the body (Melatti 1992, Erikson
1996) or the constitution of the social self by means of absorbing the other (Erikson 1986,

12

Ruedas intra), though common to most Panoans, are also widespread in Amazonia and
thus not unique to a hypothetical Panoan ethos.
Panoan history and the contexts of ethnogenesis
Because Ucayali riverine Panoans engaged in endowarfarepreferential warfare
against other Panoansfor centuries, if not millennia, Panoan histories present us with
potential case studies in which resistance to the state is not the proximate cause of
ethnogenesis. The Shipibo and Konibo, and later the macro-ethnicity resulting from the
fusion of these and other groups, raided neighboring Panoans such as the Amawaka,
Kashibo, and Kapanawa from at least the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century.
Captives taken in these raids were incorporated into Ucayali Panoan society or traded to
missionaries or rubber bosses for metal tools. By this means, Ucayali Panoans
maintained autonomy from Spanish and Peruvian domination for 250 years, and at the
same time established dominance over all Panoan neighbors. Although this raiding was
directly connected to global systems of power and exchangein the sense that it
generated a flow of manufactured goods to indigenous peoples and a reverse flow of
indigenous laborers for mission economies or for the production of raw materials
essential to Western industrial productionit is important to recognize that in the Panoan
historical experience, ethnogenesis occurred not only in situations where native peoples
were suffering directly at the hands of representatives of the state, but also in situations
where native peoples suffered at the hands of other native peoples whose raiding was a
form of resistance or adaptation to the state.
The importance of inter-indigenous conflict in ethnogenetic processes has been
explored by Hill (1996: 2), who noted that ethnogenesis is [often] grounded in the
conflicts within and among indigenous and Afro-American peoples ... Factionalism can
lead to ethnogenesis through a process of resisting not only a dominant social order but
also other factions ways of relating to that dominant order. Similarly, interethnic
rivalries among indigenous and Afro-American peoples often formed part of
ethnogenesis and ethnocide. However, inter-indigenous conflict as a context for
ethnogenesis remains understudied compared to state oppression. Periods of retraction
were particularly rich in terms of the reorganization and re-creation of native societies,

13

prompting historical processes whose rationale was only partiallyor even marginally
colonial (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007:17). Panoan histories present us with a wide
variety of situations encompassing the full range of possible ethnogenetic contexts.
Among the most important conundrums in contemporary Panoan studies is the
origin of Panoan peoples (Carneiro, intra). Panoans appear somewhat suddenly in the
archaeological record, reflected in the Cumancaya phase of occupation on the Ucayali
River (c. 8001200 C.E.). Cumancaya ceramics are very similar in decorative style and
vessel shape to contemporary Shipibo ceramics. The Cumancaya peoples also made
large numbers of shebenanti, the ceramic bandages used historically by Shipibo during
rituals of female puberty. These rituals, the ani sheati, have been described as a Shipibo
Naven (Bateson 1958), the major focus for the network of intercommunity interaction
involving issues from trade through alliance on up to the planning and perpetration of
warfare (Lathrap et al. 1985:78). Roe (1973, 1988) argued that since this ritual
expressed and commented on a set of integrated, institutionalized social practices, it must
have been brought by the Cumancaya peoples to the Ucayali from their previous location.
However, application of contemporary ethnogenesis theory to archaeological data
compels us to problematize the role of migration in language family origins (Hornborg
2005).
The issue of Panoan origins is inseparable from that of Arawakan origins and
migration because the Cumancaya peoples of the Ucayali appear to have replaced a prior
people identified as Arawakan (the Hupa-Iya archaeological culture). Heckenberger
(2002, 2008) argues that Arawakans migrated throughout Amazonia from an origin point
in the middle Orinoco, bringing with them intensive manioc agriculture, hierarchical
social organization, and the practice of long-distance trade, thus integrating Amazonia
into a nearly continent-wide web of exchange. Known as the Arawakan diaspora (c. 500
B.C.E.500 C.E.), this great migration is portrayed as creating Arawakan wedges
between other language families. Heckenberger (2008: 946) shows Panoans originating
in the Juru-Purs headwater area. Hornborg (2005) has critiqued the migrationist
emphasis in the concept of an Arawakan diaspora, arguing that major Amazonian
language families originated in regional ethnogenetic processes rather than migrations.

14

Hornborg argues that, rather than originating in primordial pasts and spreading through
migration, ethnic identity is a product of placement in regional exchange systems.
Panoan origins offer a suitable testing ground for Hornborgs hypothesis because
the Panoan appearance on the Ucayali, unlike the instances of Arawakan diaspora, has no
indisputable precursor elsewhere on the continent, thus opening up the possibility of in
situ ethnogenesis (Hornborg, intra), as well as the long-running debate over the origin
point for a hypothetical migration of Panoans to the Ucayali (Carneiro, intra). The
argument that it is impossible for such a complex social feature as the ani sheati to have
been created on the Ucayali, rather than inherited from a deep primordium, seems
insufficient evidence to resolve the issue, since it contradicts what we know about the
extraordinary creativity of Panoan ritual actors (Ruedas, Cesarino and Colpron, and
Dlage, intra). It is at least worthwhile to explore the possibility that the emergent
Panoan culture of the Ucayali resulted from an ethnogenetic process fusing Panoan
elements with the Arawakan adaptation of long-distance trade and intensive agriculture;
this would explain some of the divergences between Ucayali Panoans and their fellow
language-family members. In this volume, Carneiro and Hornborg examine issues of
ethnogenesis and migration in Panoan origins, in efforts to resolve a major problem in
Panoan studies that has repercussions for broader issues in South American ethnology,
including language-family origins and their relations to economic processes (e.g.,
Renfrew 2000; Bellwood 2001).
Following the establishment of Spanish and Portuguese imperial power in the
Americas, the riverine Panoans created a system of regional warfare and exchange that
lasted from the mid 17th to early 20th centuries. Panoans made extraordinary efforts to
establish political and military predominance over the Spanish, and succeeded. Panoans
creation or joining of interethnic alliances was a major means of resistance. In the 1660s,
Shipibo and Shetebo joined with the Tupian Kokama and Kokamiyatheir former
enemiesin a rebellion that displaced both Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries, as well as
their military support, from the Ucayali. This alliance attacked Spanish missions as far
north as the Pastaza and maintained indigenous autonomy in the Ucayali area for 25
years. Missionaries returned to the upper Ucayali in 1686; this time the Konibo allied
with the Piro, killing Jesuit missionary Heinrich Richter and defeating a Spanish-led

15

force of over 300 soldiers in 1695. Shipibo, Shetebo, and Konibo joined with Juan
Santos Atahualpas millenarian movement in the 1740s and 1750s, allying with
Arawakan peoples as well as highland Quechua and African-Americans (Brown and
Fernandez 1991) to repeatedly defeat Spanish incursions.
The Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion is often portrayed as expelling the Spanish
from the area for a century, but this is the case only if we consider the Arawakans Gran
Pajonal area independently of the broader Ucayali basin context. From 1760 to 1766,
Franciscans established new missions among the Shipibo, Shetebo, and Konibo. Shetebo
leader Runcato created another interethnic alliance among Ucayali Panoans, who yet
again defeated and expelled the Spanish. Thus, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries,
Panoans established a series of interethnic alliances, often including non-Panoans, as a
means of resisting Spanish presence and establishing Panoan autonomy and
predominance on the Ucayali.
From at least the late 1680s to the early twentieth century, Ucayali Panoans raided
neighboring Panoan and Arawakan groups, took captives, and either enculturated these or
traded them for metal goods at Spanish missions or, later, at rubber depots (Myers 1974,
DeBoer 1986, Santos-Granero 2009). Neighboring Panoans took varying approaches to
resisting Shipibo-Konibo aggression. The Amawaka developed their famously dispersed
settlement pattern, thus making it difficult for the Ucayali Panoans to find them (Dole
1998). Mayoruna and Kashibo resisted aggressively (Erikson 1996, 1998; Frank 1998).
Thus, interfluvial Panoan patterns of settlement and social action to some extent reflected
the need to fend off raids from their more numerous and powerful Panoan neighbors.
Markers of ethnic identity and cultural continuity were developed in a context where the
main ongoing threat to survival was raiding by other native peoples, not by Spanish or
Peruvian nationals.
Frank (1998) has argued that the development of a distinct Kashibo ethnic identity
is a result of their exclusion from the Ucayali Panoan system for procuring and
distributing manufactured goods. He argues that the Kashibo-Shipibo ethnic boundary
was fluid until the late 18th century; indeed, the term Kashibo does not appear in the
historical literature until 1765, although it is clear that the Kashibo homelandthe
Pampa del Sacramento, an upland that bridges the headwaters of the Pisqui and Aguayta

16

rivers betwen the Ucayali and Huallaga, along with parts of the Pachitea headwaters
was inhabited by Panoans since well before the late 1700s. Shipibo, Shetebo, and
Konibo took control of the flow of manufactured trade goods throughout the late 17th and
18th centuries, excluding other peoples and enforcing their monopoly by military means.
Franks hypothesis is that Kashibo ethnic identity developed as a result of their exclusion
from the trade system, in combination with the need to resist Konibo and Shipibo raids.
Fleck (personal communication) argues, on linguistic grounds, that the notion of a fluid
Shipibo-Kashibo ethnic boundary as late as the 1790s is problematic; however, the
general concept of Kashibo ethnogenesis in relation to Shipibo-Konibo raiding bears
close study and possible generalization.
On the periphery of the Ucayali Panoan politico-economic sphere of dominance,
phenomena of Panoan ethnogenesis call for closer examination. For example, Fleck has
shown that the Kapanawa language is 90% similar to Shipibo; and yet, his ethnohistorical
research has shown that the Kapanawa have existed as a distinct group since earliest
missionary contacts in the early 1600s. Furthermore, Kapanawa were victims of Ucayali
Panoan raids for centuries. We thus have a significant historical and ethnographic
conundrum: how is it that an interfluvial Panoan group has a nearly identical language to
a riverine Panoan group, despite three centuries of enmity and separate identity?
Kapanawa ethnogenesis should be a primary objective for future research.
After South American nation-states established their independence from Spain
and Portugal, a new global macroeconomic process engulfed Panoan peoples, signaling
the end of Panoan military predominance on the Ucayali and the beginning of a new
period of profuse ethnogenesis. This process was the rubber boom. The rubber boom
affected all Panoan peoples, bringing tens of thousands of new migrants to Panoan lands,
threatening Panoan physical and cultural survival, and forcing Panoans to develop new
strategies of social organization.
Rubber boom denotes a period of time when demand for rubber was very high,
most of the planetary supply came from the Amazon rainforest, and prices accordingly
rose (Weinstein 1983). Rubber is made from a sap produced by Hevea or Castilloa trees,
both of which grow naturally throughout much of the Amazon basin. The value of rubber
rose steadily throughout the nineteenth century as new applications for the material were

17

invented. These included rubber boots for New England fishermen, raincoats for British
consumers, pencil erasers (rubbers) for schoolboys, and condoms (also rubbers) for
anyone who could afford them (Stanfield 1998). However, the importance of rubber as
an industrial product was greatly enhanced by the development of bicycle and automobile
tires in the 1890s and 1900s. This development made large quantities of rubber essential
to Western industrial production and to the transformation of the Western transportation
infrastructure. Until the British were able to grow rubber trees in Malaysian plantations,
the Amazon rainforest was the primary source for rubber, and rubber production in
Amazonia intensified as people scrambled to meet the growing demand and make
fortunes in the process.
During the rubber boom, entrepreneurs obtained manufactured goods on credit
from importers, then loaned these goods to laborers against future rubber production.
Rubber laborers spread throughout the Amazon basin, extracting rubber from the trees
and bringing it to the middlemen to whom they were indebted. The only people who
obtained large sums of cash were owners of major firms that collected rubber from
middlemen and sold it to exporters, as well as the exporters who shipped the rubber to the
U.S. or England and sold it to manufacturers (Weinstein 1983). The rest of the rubber
economy operated on credit. Panoan lands, rich in Hevea and Castilloa trees, were
invaded by veritable armies of rubber collectors and middlemen working to supply the
Wests insatiable demand.
Panoan responses to the rubber boom ranged from violent resistance to active
participation. Some Panoans became small-scale rubber bosses, obtaining goods on
credit from middlemen and distributing them to indigenous crews in exchange for their
labor. Other Panoans attacked manufactured goods depots or invading rubber laborers,
while yet others fled; and this merely scratches the surface of Panoan strategies for
coping with the rubber boom. Panoans who resistedand many who participated or
fledwere attacked by rubber merchants anxious for new rubber estates, for slave labor,
or for captive women and children. The Ucayali was settled by large numbers of
outsiders for the first time, and Panoans in remoter interfluvial areas also saw their lands
colonized. Disease and violence took their toll on Panoan populations. Panoans

18

responded by developing new social arrangements and practices perceived as

advantageous for survival and expansion.
In the Javari basin, multiple ethnic groups with distinct identities and languages
moved to a remote location where they consciously negotiated a new language, kinship
system, ritual practices, and social ethics. Here, ethnogenesis consisted of interethnic
alliance and fusion. In the Juru-Purs headwaters area, the Kashinawa took a different
approach, setting up a relatively rigid ethnic boundary with an endogamous ethos and
facilitating cultural survival via the reproduction of a complex four-section kinship
system. In contrast, speakers of what is now called Yaminawa split into numerous small
groups, developing multiple ethnic identities while retaining enough commonalities to
permit future reintegration into a broader social network (see Ruedas, intra, for fuller
discussion). This should not be construed as implying that ethnicity is an extrahuman
causal force generating monolithic behavior among its human containers; quite the
contrary, it is collective and individual agency that creates ethnicity, so that identity
results from common choices by groups of people.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new global process is
providing yet another context for Panoan ethnogenesis: globalization and the
incorporation of Panoan peoples into the international indigenous movement. In Brazil,
this process is intimately related to the expansion of state bureaucratic power into Panoan
land and to efforts on the part of state-supported business interests to exploit the natural
resources of the Amazon basin. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian state-owned oil
corporation, Petrobras, looked for fossil fuels in the Javari basin. This led to armed
conflicts between Matses and Brazilian nationals, which in turn led to the introduction of
FUNAI administration in the 1970s. As the state established a bureaucratic presence in
the interior of the Javari, native peoples became concerned with land rights, health care,
economic development, education, and other problems. Clovis and others followed in the
footsteps of ancient Panoans, establishing interethnic alliances as means of reversing the
power relations between Panoans and the state. Furthermore, growing bureaucratization,
the propensity of nation-states to neatly categorize tribes (Anderson 1991), and the
granting of land rights to indigenous peoples in the 1988 constitution, created new
opportunities for the production of Panoan ethnic identities. As the twenty-first century

19

proceeds, Panoan peoples are working for physical, cultural, and symbolic survival using
numerous strategies, including international media activism and alliance with NGOs,
negotiation with and participation in state agencies, participation in indigenous
organizations, exploitation of the Western exotic imaginary, active participation in
national education and health systems, the use of shamanic and ritual power, the creation
of new forms of social organization, and, in many cases, the steadfast refusal to have
anything whatsoever to do with the state and its representatives (e.g., the Korubo (Arisi
2007)).
Panoan historicities
In August 2009, Marubo elders gathered to sing a swine flu vaccine into
existence. When I had left the U.S. in April, no one was talking about swine flu. By late
April, a global panic was developing as swine flu killed hundreds of people in Mexico
and quickly spread across the planet. By the time I arrived at my field site, native
peoples of the Javari feared that if the swine flu arrived in their villages, it could
exterminate them. One day my host asked me to find out about the origins and symptoms
of swine flu so that he and his fellow singers could identify the diseases origin and
correct place in creation, and send it back. I used precious minutes on my satellite phone
to ask my family to investigate the matter and report back to me. With this information
available, the Marubo healers decided that swine flu was caused by ko, the smoke
produced by the Strangers, which leaves disease wherever it falls. Now they used song to
infuse corn beer with the power to send the swine flu back to its proper place. This corn
beer, they explained to me, would act as a swine flu vaccine for the Marubo. The sing
lasted for weeks and was ongoing when I left in mid-August. Just a few months later,
global discourse on swine flu changed radically; from panic the general consensus
changed to one of confidence, as many people argued that the threat had been overblown
by governments, media, and NGOs. The swine flu returned to its proper place as a
dangerous but relatively minor disease.
As this episode and the historical narratives presented above make clear,
contemporary Marubo singers follow an old tradition of using shamanic power to act on a
global scale. Shamanic song increased the Stranger population, bringing the Strangers

20

and their shotguns into Panoan lands. Shamanic power was used to resist the Strangers,
to end the rubber boom, and to support the indigenous movement. Now, shamanic power
was used to send the swine flu packing. Thus, Marubo people see history as a product of
their own making.
This mode of conceptualizing history is widespread in Amazonia; for example,
Hill (1996:17) has pointed out that native Amazonians often resist systems of domination
by constructing a shared understanding of their historical past that enables them to
understand their present conditions as a result of their own ways of making history. A
similar approach is taken by the Piro, Arawakans who, as neighbors of the Konibo, have
adopted some Panoan modes of action in a process Santos-Granero (2002a:32) has called
Panoization. Gow (2001:303) argues that the colonial situations Piro people have found
themselves involved in have been shaped by the Piro in ways intrinsically meaningful to
them. Fausto and Heckenberger (2007:16; emphasis in original), citing Gow, also look
to understand the ways in which the indigenous societies of Amazonia set about
constituting the specific historical situations in which they find themselves embroiled.
Hill (1988, 1996) and Gow (2001) thus draw attention to the ways in which
Amazonian peoples experience, reflect on, and act in, history. Whitehead (2003a: xi)
uses the term historicities to refer to varying cultural proclivities that give rise to
differing ways of making and understanding, or finding meaning in, history. The concept
of historicity is valuable in that it focuses attention on the need to explore how different
peoples remember events, how they express their knowledge of the past, how they derive
meaning from their knowledge (Basso 1985:40), and ultimately how people draw on their
knowledge of the past to make important choices in the present. Such choices allow
people to make their own fates (Basso 1995:23), often in contexts of social
transformation related to the need to survive and thrive in the face of ethnocide.
Historicity thus involves ideas about how to take actions that are effective in
transforming the world and creating history, that is, ideas about historical agency.
Native Amazonian concepts of historical agency are the subject of current debate
among ethnologists. Fausto and Heckenberger (2007:13) have proposed that the native
Amazonian equivalent to our concept of historical agency is shamanic action on the
world. In this conception of agency, history is made not only by human action, but also

21

by the actions of nonhuman beings, as well as by humans with special shamanic powers.
Creative human activity depends on mobilizing capacities that are not just human ... The
equivalent of our making history is, then, a mythopraxis that is narrated as a past and a
future in a shamanic key (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007:14). The narratives of Panoan
historical action presented above illustrate this concept of history, showing the
importance of shamanic action in shaping history.
Fausto and Heckenberger present their concept of Amazonian historical agency as
a counterpoint to Hills (1988). Hill criticized the consequences of focusing on mythic
consciousness as the primary characteristic of native Amazonian concepts of time and
change. At the time of Hills writing, Amazonian peoples were still frequently thought of
as having a relatively homogeneous, small-scale tropical forest culture that had been
stable for centuries. Following Rosaldo (1980) and Fabian (1983), Hill argued that the
concept of timeless and changeless native peoples was related to ideas about the role of
myth in social action. Native Amazonians, Hill pointed out, were often seen as
struggling to replicate a timeless and changeless mythic past-time in their contemporary
social arrangements. Thus, Amazonian peoples were thought to struggle against the
effects of time, working to maintain a changeless social order portrayed in their myths.
Hill exploded this stereotype by focusing attention on native Amazonian historical
consciousness, showing that Amazonian peoples concepts of history were concerned
with historical agency in processes of social transformation, particularly under conditions
of radical change related to contact with European colonial empires and Latin American
nation-states.
While Hill (1988) and Fausto and Heckenberger (2007) appear to present
opposing perspectives on Amazonian historicity, they are similar in that both seek to
redress imbalances in anthropological thinking about native Amazonian concepts of
history. Fausto and Heckenberger note that the distinction between a concept of history
involving the actions of nonhuman beings, and a concept of history involving persons
exercising only ordinary human abilities, has roots in the ancient Greek contrast between
logos and mythos. In Homeric narratives, for example, history is driven by the actions of
nonhuman entities; in contrast, in Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War, history
is driven by human actions in the absence of divine intervention. Fausto and

22

Heckenberger argue that Hills emphasis is on logos, whereas native Amazonians have a
distinct otherness to their concepts of historical agency, which they encapsulate in the
notions of shamanic action on the world and mythopraxis in shamanic key.
However, Hill did not argue for an exclusively logical, ordinary human, Amazonian
concept of historical agency, but rather sought to balance an overemphasis on mythos by
demonstrating the existence of a complementary mode of historical consciousness in
which ordinary human actions could shape history and transform social reality. What we
need is a balance between logos and mythos, not an overemphasis on either side.
Panoan voices clearly tell us that shamanic action on the world is a vital and
salient mode of Panoan historicity; but it would be a mistake to simply characterize
Panoan concepts of historical agency as shamanic or mythic in nature. Dlage
(2007, intra), for example, explores Sharanawa modes of constructing narratives about
the past that are not readily explained in terms of ideas about shamanic transformational
action. Panoans do not have an exclusive type of historicity; multiple modes of
historicity are at their disposal in constructing, expressing, and interpreting knowledge of
the past. Even as we point out that the deployment of shamanic power is a major means
whereby indigenous Amazonians shape history, we should not impose a categorial
restriction on Amazonians that they do not, in fact have. Ordinary, non-shamanic
Amazonians are fully capable of transforming the world through means such as media
campaigns, protests, and participation in state institutions, which are not necessarily
linked to mythopraxis or shamanism. Amazonian historicity shows full awareness of
these possibilities as a complementary (Hill 1988) mode of historicity.
The temporal dimension in Amazonian anthropology
The recent emphasis on histories and historicities of Amazonian peoples is partly
a reaction to the perception that Amazonian anthropology was ahistorical until the late
twentieth century. Thus, Whitehead (2003a: vii) states that external historiography saw
Amazonia as a place with no history, while Fausto and Heckenberger (2007:1) state
that indigenous peoples of lowland South America have often been depicted as being
out of time ... contemporary ancestors, representatives of a distant past and a mode of
living once common in human history. This ahistorical anthropology, they argue

23

(2007:2), reflected the Stewardian consensus: the idea that the tropical forest
environment limited native peoples population density and social complexity, so that
native Amazonians must have always lived in small, simple, isolated villages without
developing complex or hierarchical polities. Fausto and Heckenberger (2007:10) credit
Overing (1977) and Hill (1988) for providing an important impulse toward research into
indigenous temporality and memory. Since then, a wealth of historically contextualized
research has changed our view of native Amazonians, showing that they underwent
intense transformations throughout precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times.
Among the most influential scholars in the process of historicizing Amazonian
anthropology was Donald Lathrap (Heckenberger 2002:100). Much of Lathraps work
concerned Panoan archaeology, history, and ethnography (e.g., Lathrap 1962, 1976,
1983), thus adding time depth and historical context to anthropologists understanding of
Panoans. His work on large-scale cultural transformations firmly embedded Panoans in a
broader Amazonian context (e.g., Lathrap 1970, 1973a). Lathraps disagreements with
Meggers on issues of diffusion and culture change in Amazonia (e.g., Lathrap 1968,
1973b) contributed to the decline of the Stewardian model upheld by Meggers (1954,
1971). Lathraps archaeological investigations in the Ucayali basin uncovered early
evidence of Panoan occupations and interrelations with other groups such as Arawakans
and Tupians, offering a view of Panoan peoples as participants in processes of social
transformation and large-scale networks of exchange.
The process of historically contextualizing Panoans, and the upper Amazon in
general, was furthered also by Lathraps students (e.g., Myers 1970; DeBoer 1972;
Raymond 1972; Roe 1973; Raymond et al. 1975) and students students (e.g., Golob
1982), deepening our understanding of Panoan histories. Lathraps book The Upper
Amazon (1970) was widely read by archaeology students, inspiring some to work in
Amazonia and thus contributing to what Fausto and Heckenberger (2007:3) have called
the new archaeology in Amazonia (e.g., Heckenberger 2005). Thus, decades before it
was common practice in Amazonian anthropology, Panoan studies were historically
sensitive. The tradition of historicized Panoan studies has continued through the present
day (e.g., Melatti 1981; Erikson 1992, 1993; Coutinho 1993; Ruedas 2004; Fleck 2007;
Krokoszynski and Fleck, Hornborg, DeBoer, and Carneiro, intra).

24

In describing the transformation of the standard (Stewardian) model of

Amazonian pasts, Heckenberger (2002:100) cites the influence of Carneiro (1970) as well
as Lathrap. Indeed, Carneiros work exhibits a shift from careful ethnographic
investigation to the construction of large-scale models of social change. Carneiros
development of a theory to explain the evolution of social complexity (1970a, 1987) was
informed by his ethnographic research among the Panoan Amawaka (Carneiro 1964,
1970b, 1974). In conjunction with his research on Kuikuru agriculture (Carneiro 1961),
Carneiros experience of Amawaka agriculture and settlement patterns supported the
conclusion that when abundant space is available for people to expand into, the evolution
of social complexity is inhibitedone of the foundational principles of the
circumscription theory of state origins (Carneiro 1970a).
History, myth, and landscape in the shadow of the Inca
Jonathan Hill (1988:9) has pointed out that consciousness of the past is given
expressive form by its articulation into diverse performance genres. Through careful
study of the full range of genres that give expression to mythic and historical (or mythichistorical) consciousness, researchers can begin to study how indigenous peoples have
constructed shared interpretive frameworks for understanding the social situations of
contact (Hill 1988:9). Hill also pointed out that by studying the full range of genres in
any given society, it would be possible to find historical consciousness expressed in a
wider variety of cultural practices than we might expect. Indeed, indigenous historicity is
expressed in practices including oral-historical and mythic narratives, but also ritual
performance, visual art and design, music and dance, ecological practices, and
relationships to landscape.
Careful attention to the full diversity of loci for expression of past-times
knowledge has been characteristic of Panoan studies since Lathraps multidisciplinary
efforts (e.g., Lathrap 1970, 1976, 1983; Lathrap et al. 1985, 1987; see also DeBoer intra).
Scholarship on Panoan past-times narrative genres is fairly old; for example, famous
Brazilian historian Joo Capistrano de Abreu (1914) met two Kashinawa in Rio de
Janeiro, a collaboration resulting in a volume of Kashinawa language and narrative.
However, during the mid-twentieth century little was done on this subject, leading to

25

Panoans under-representation in the Mythologiques (Lvi-Strauss 1964, 1966). By the

1970s, however, SIL linguists began publishing significant numbers of Panoan narratives
(e.g., Wistrand de Robinson 1969, 1972, 1976; Eakin and Dvila 1976). Anthropological
scholarship on Panoan past-times narratives grew in the 1980s (e.g., Melatti 1985, 1986)
and 1990s (e.g., Frank et al. 1993), and has seen a tremendous increase in recent years
(Cesarino and Colpron intra, Dlage intra).
Considerable recent scholarship has focused on construction of and relationship to
landscapes as integral aspects of Amazonian peoples historicities (Bale 1998; Hill
1989; Medina 2003; Santos-Granero 1998; Vidal 2000, 2003; Whitehead 2003b). As
Whitehead (2003a: xiii) points out, landscape emerges as a highly significant category
for the sense of history and the construction of those histories. Tracing the theoretical
implications of an approach to historicity through historical ecology, Whitehead (2003b)
explores links between ethnic identity and ecological practice; interconnects identity,
landscape, and engagement with the past as presented in oral performances of historical
and ecological knowledge; and shows how human consciousness of change is directly
linked to their consciousness of the landscape.
DeBoer (intra) draws on his exceptional depth of knowledge concerning Panoan
pasts to present a nuanced view of Konibo cultural knowledge of the changing Ucayali
landscape. Integrating data on geologically recent changes in the Ucayali basin
landscape with research on change through time in Konibo place-names and on narratives
about past floods, DeBoer blends scholarship on landscape and memory with an
understanding of regional geomorphology. Additionally integrating archaeological,
historical-linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnohistorical data into his analysis, DeBoer
exemplifies the multidisciplinary approach to Panoan knowledge of past-times, proposing
new hypotheses on the origins and dispersal of Panoan and Arawakan groups, and sheds
new light on the ways in which Panoan awareness of changing landscapes is expressed in
oral narratives and related to changes in settlement patterns and ceramic design.
One expression of Panoan historicity has exerted a continuing fascination over
Panoanist scholars in recent decades: the widespread production of narratives about
Panoan relationships with Incas (Bardales Rodriguez 1979; Calavia 2000; Cesarino and
Colpron intra; DeBoer and Raymond 1987; Erikson 1990; Harner 1993; Lathrap et al.

26

1985, 1987; McCallum 2000; Melatti 1985, 1986; Ruedas in press). This is little wonder.
Consider, for example, the discovery of Andean copper axes in Panoan levels at
Cumancaya (Roe 1973). How did these axes find their way from the highlands to the
Ucayali? Did native Amazonians travel to the highlands, perhaps to trade brilliant
feathers and psychoactive drugs for ground stone and metal implements? Did the Inca
establish lowland agricultural colonies where Panoans, or perhaps Arawakan
intermediaries, worked for tools (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1986:100)? Such images stir the
imagination, suggesting direct encounters between people from the Andes and the
Amazon, worlds that seem far apart despite their geographic adjacency (Santos-Granero
2002b). But did Panoans really interact with Incas in pre-Columbian times? If not,
how is it that Panoan narratives so frequently describe interactions with people called
Inca? The meaning of the Inca figure in Panoan oral narratives is one of the major
conundrums of Panoan studies.
Given the enduring fascination exerted by Inca narratives on Panoanist scholars, it
is unsurprising that the issue of how to interpret Panoan Inca motifs has been marked by
strong debate. Lathrap et al. (1985) advocated a somewhat literal interpretation of Inca
tales, arguing that a Quechua-speaking elite colonized the Ucayali and established a
stratified society with a Panoan underclass. Melatti (1985:8084) noted the possibility of
direct Inca-Panoan contacts, but also proposed other sources for the Inca figure, such as
the thousands of Quechua-speaking highlanders that migrated to Panoan lands during the
rubber boom. DeBoer and Raymond (1987:130) critiqued Lathrap et al. (1985), arguing
that references to Incas ... probably originate from long-term historic and prehistoric
contact with the highlands and an association of exotic valuables such as copper and
bronze implements with the people of the highlands. The use of the term Inca as
short-hand for highland peoples would have been spread by the Spanish, with whom
Panoans had abundant documented contact. Roe (1988) argued that Shipibo Inca tales
are a means of conceptualizing the figure of the Whiteman indirectly. Roe also reported
on a millenarian movement advocating a return of the Inca among the Shipibo in the
1950s. Harner (1993) further traced the relationship between Konibo narratives of the
Inca, millenarian expectations, and resistance to colonial oppression. With the
development of scholarship on Panoan alterity (e.g., Erikson 1986, 1996), Roes idea that

27

the Inca figure is a way of conceptualizing the Whiteman has gained some traction (cf.
Calavia 2000), though it has become clear that Panoan Inca narratives are related to
general concepts of dangerous others, and the dangerous others thus considered are not
necessarily Whitemen (Ruedas in press).
Cesarino and Colpron (intra) apply the new Panoan scholarship, involving
carefully transcribed and translated texts, improved knowledge of Panoan cosmology and
shamanism, and recent scholarship on Panoan alterity, to the problem of interpreting the
Inca figure in Panoan narratives. Drawing on their research among Shipibo and Marubo
(e.g., Colpron 2004, 2006; Cesarino 2008), the authors connect Inca figures to Panoan
symbolic representations of cultural others, comparing these figures to other characters
and motifs in Panoan and, more broadly, Amerindian myths. Developing analogies
between the Marubo myth of trading with the Inca and Panoan myths of afterlife travel
and of interactions with strangers and dead people (cf. Dlage, intra), Cesarino and
Colpron show how Inca myths constitute a variant of Panoan ways of dealing with
cultural others. Analysis of Inca narratives thus provides a Panoan perspective on the
longstanding problem in Amazonian ethnology of evaluating the relationship between
history and myth.
Recontextualized discourses and constructed identities
Marubo historical narratives show the central role played by discourse in
mediating historical transitions between indigenous social arrangements, in relation to
dramatic changes in global political and economic conditions. The Javari Panoans who
aggregated between the Itu and Curu rivers during the rubber boom adopted a new set
of discourse performance practices suggested primarily by Joo Tuxaua. These practices
included healing rituals employing powerful songs called shki; rituals during which
shamans sing songs called iniki; the performance at feasts of sung myths called saiti; a
sort of lecture on proper social behavior called ese vana (words of wisdom; cf. the
Suy sarn, Seeger 1987:26); and the performance of a discourse genre called tsaki,
which is sometimes a ceremonial dialogue (Urban 1986) exchanged by elders from
different villages meeting before or during a feast, and at other times a monologic
harangue delivered by an elder to a longhouse (for more information on Marubo

28

discourse genres, see Montagner 1985; Ruedas 2002, 2003; Cesarino 2008). Joo
Tuxaua and his crew (Portuguese turma) had learned some of these discourses directly
from their own elders; but many were re-created from social memories, often with
assistance from incorporeal Othersfor example, yove spirits or dead shamans.
Although they were new, these discourses thus carried a certain metadiscursive ideology
of continuity, for a song learned from a dead shaman is as authentically traditional as a
song learned from a living one.
Joo Tuxaua did not just create new discourses; he created an entire new set of
performance contexts and practices, many of them quite elaborate and involving large
participatory audiences. For example, saiti are typically sung at feasts, which may last
for days or weeks; involve the meeting of several villages in an exchange of food, crafts,
and words; and require intensive hunting and food preparation involving collaboration
between multiple longhouses to feed the guests, who may number in the hundreds. Shki
healing rituals are often daily events in Marubo villages; they are powerful expressions of
solidarity between the ill and their kin, and are sites of extraordinary poetic expression
(Montagner 1985, Cesarino 2008). They are also, effectively, informal decision-making
councils of elders (Ruedas 2002).
Joo Tuxaua and his crew thus created a new configuration of performance
contexts for discourse genres. Although some were previously performed discourses, and
most were presented as such through the metadiscursive ideology of continuity, all were
performed in a new social context. This provided the opportunity for ritual participants
to make connections between newly juxtaposed discourses, thus allowing for the
emergence of new meanings and interpretations. Among these meanings was one that
Joo Tuxaua surely planned, though he would not have expressed it in this way:
participation in this system of ritual performance and communication is a powerful
marker of the ethnic identity known today as Marubo.
The Marubo ritual performance system points to the significance of discourse
recontextualization in processes of ethnogenesis and identity construction in Amazonia.
Graham (1995) describes how the Xavante elder Warodi enacted his dreams as ritual
performances. By incorporating pre-existing myth narratives into these performances, he
gave the audience the opportunity to generate new interpretations by making associations

29

between the narratives that that he had placed together in one performance for just such a
purpose. Warodi thus created new meanings by recontextualizing old narrativestaking
extant narratives and fitting them to a new context (Graham 1995:8). Joo Tuxaua, like
Warodi, placed discourse that was presented as old into new contexts and, like Warodi,
he did so explicitly to orient action in the present. In both Xavante and Marubo contexts,
recontextualization is part of ethnogenesisthe ongoing production of an identity that, in
the Xavante case, is felt to be continuous, and in the Marubo case (somewhat
paradoxically since there is a metadiscursive ideology of continuity), is felt to be new.
The concept of recontextualization, as applied by Graham (1995; cf. Bauman
1996), Senft and Basso (2009), and Oakdale (2009), is closely linked to the discoursecentered approach to culture (Urban 1991). Urban (1991) stated that the discoursecentered approach to culture is founded on a single proposition: that culture is localized
in concrete, publicly accessible signs, the most important of which are actually occurring
instances of discourse (Urban 1991:1). Urban thus set the discourse-centered approach
to culture (Sherzer and Urban 1985) apart from structuralism (Lvi-Strauss 1964, 1966),
the theretofore dominant mode of interpreting native South American narrative
productions, on the grounds that for structuralism, culture exists in peoples minds and
must be analytically constructed, whereas in the discourse-centered approach, culture
exists in socially circulating signs and must be empirically recorded.
Adopting a semiotic approach, Urban noted that listeners interpret discourse
events by comparing them to other discourse events that they have previously heard.
Every instance of discourse is compared with previous instances of discourse, and the
similarities and differences are meaningful; for example, when performers choose to
modify a well-known song (as opposed to simply making a mistake), it can be a notable
event that eventuates much discussion as to the performers intended meaning. A
communitys discourse history is thus a key matter of investigation; insofar as people
have experienced similar histories of discourse events, they may share interpretations and
meanings with others, and this sharing of meanings, discernible in publicly accessible,
socially circulating metadiscursive reflections, is culture (Urban 1991:18). Graham
(1995:7) adopted a similar approach to culture as the history of past expressive
performances.

30

Today, Panoan metadiscursive commentary on recontextualization often involves

the concept of culture, incorporated from anthropology with the mediation of the
indigenous movement, in which indigenous culture is something to be valued,
defended, and encouraged. A new feast may be criticized as not being our culture or
even destroying our culture, or on the contrary may be a cultural feast or cultural
festival. Potentially subjected to national and international regimes of intellectual
property law (Baptista and Valle 2004), recontextualized indigenous discourse genres
may be performed for profit. But for Javari Panoans, recontextualization has been a
strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of a menacing world system. Joo Tuxaua
assembled portions of various Javari Panoans origin myths into a massive epic that
provided all participants in his ritual communication system with a sense of shared social
history and, we might say, ethnic identity, while Clovis and Darcys introduction of the
political meeting to the communication systemexplicitly approved by Joo Tuxaua
provided an important new context for initiating politically engaged actions. Both
recontextualizations were brilliant and effective in their own ways.
New approaches to Panoan discourse
As is the case throughout native Amazonia, among Panoans there are gifted poets,
singers, and performers, crafting complex and beautiful assemblages of words. Both
Panoans and anthropological fieldworkers are often fascinated by the task of interpreting
the meaning of formally performed discourses. Several of the contributors to this volume
have chosen to investigate Panoans through their discourse performances; but the
approach to discourse that is emerging in contemporary Panoan studies is different in
significant ways from the discourse-centered approach to culture (Sherzer and Urban
1985; Urban 1991).
In Amazonian ethnology, the discourse-centered approach to culture has, since the
1980s, steadily enhanced our understanding of Amazonian cosmology, personhood, and
culture by focusing on carefully transcribed and translated texts (e.g., Basso 1985, 1987,
1995; Seeger 1987; Hill 1993, 2009; Graham 1995; Oakdale 2005), as well as on rich
ethnographic description of their performance contexts. Panoan studies are just now
catching up, as a new generation of scholars produces similarly rich analyses of texts and

31

their dynamic social contexts. Although Panoan discourse has been the subject of
scholarly attention for at least a century, transcription and translation of recorded texts by
anthropologists trained in both linguistic and sociocultural anthropology is a recent
phenomenon in Panoan studies.
The past two decades have seen accelerating research in Panoan linguistics,
yielding a host of new grammars and dictionaries (see Fleck, intra, for details on the
history of Panoan linguistics), which greatly facilitate communication for new
fieldworkers (though some must still carry out in situ basic linguistic fieldworke.g.,
Cesarino 2008). Scholars such as Colpron, Cesarino, and Dlage are producing a new
style of Panoan scholarship involving the careful transcription and translation of texts,
intimate knowledge of Panoan languages, ethnographic attention to the dynamic social
contexts of performance, and the influence of a quarter-century of scholarship on Panoan
alterity (vide infra). These scholars are greatly expanding our understanding of Panoan
cosmology and shamanism, transforming our view of Panoans and their relation to other
Amazonians.
The new Panoan scholarship shares the discourse-centered approachs
methodological emphasis on discourse analysis, but not its Boasian ancestry. Urban
(1991:17) traced the intellectual lineage of the discourse-centered approach directly to
Boas, who emphasized the collection of texts in the native language. Boasian
Americanists (e.g., Radin 1949) collected native texts as a vehicle for reading back in
time to an older culture of which the present was a vestige (Urban 1991:16). The
Americanist tradition of text collection and translation was transformed by Dell Hymes
(1974), who proposed a framework for the analysis of communicative events, beginning
with the fine-grained analysis of discourse and leading out to the role of communicative
events in the ongoing adaptation of the culture (Urban 1991:16). Text collection was no
longer oriented towards understanding a reconstructed past but rather towards
understanding indigenous action in the present. Inspired by Hymes, Americanist scholars
carried out further research on native American discourse, performance contexts, and
problems of translation (e.g., Silverstein 1976; Tedlock 1983; Bauman 1986). Joel
Sherzer (1983) brought these methods to bear in his ethnography of Kuna speech, and
formulated the discourse-centered approach to the problematics of language, culture,

32

and society (Urban 1991:16; see also Sherzer 1987). Sherzer and Urban (1985)
generalized the approach as a method for investigating native South American culture.
An alternative Boasian intellectual heritage in Amazonian ethnology is found in
Rubenstein (2002). Rubenstein presents the life history of a Shuar healer through
translations of autobiographical narratives. Life history is presented as a means of
understanding the struggle of an individual within and against his own culture and that
of a dominant society, in the pursuit of economic security, social prestige, political
power, and some sense that life has meaning and value (Rubenstein 2002:59).
Rubenstein traces the lineage of this method to Boas (1940) call for investigating the
relationship between individual and society, a task taken up by Boasian Americanists
using the life history method (e.g., Radin 1963). The problem, Rubenstein notes, is to
apply this method in a way that sees culture as a dynamically changing product of human
agency (Rubenstein 2002:61) rather than as a static entity to which humans must adapt.
Rubenstein, like Graham, resolves this problem by paying attention not only to human
agency in creating culture and historic change, but also to the colonial contexts of
anthropological research and the global changes in which native Amazonians actively
participate.
A major difference between the discourse-centered approach to culture and the
new Panoan scholarship is the centrality of the concept of culture in the former and its
marginality in the latter. For Dlage (2005), for example, culture is not a major category
for investigation. Dlage uses the transcription and translation of Sharanawa discourse
as a means of making Sharanawa shamans words comprehensible to an outside
audience, to describe Sharanawa shamanic knowledge, and to elucidate Sharanawa
epistemology, without endeavoring to construct a total Sharanawa culture. In
discussing issues of culture and fieldwork, Cesarino (2008) cites Wagner (1981), for
whom culture is a co-construction of fieldworker and hosts, not an independently extant
object that the fieldworker can discover. Cesarino uses transcription and translation of
Marubo discourse to understand the poetics of Marubo shamanism; again, culture is not
a major category for investigation. These alternative approaches to discourse analysis in
Amazonia reflect the Franco-Brazilian rather than Boasian-Americanist intellectual
lineage of many contemporary Panoanists.

33

Hybrid persons and circulating experiences

Marubo bodies and subjectivities do not have simple one-to-one relationships. As
Cesarino (2008) has described in rich detail, Marubo personhood is hybrid and multiple.
All Marubo are considered to have multiple parts to their persons, which Cesarino calls
doubles (Portuguese duplos; Marubo vak). In some Marubo, particularly shamans and
others who have mastered valued forms of knowledge and social action, these parts are
fully developed subjects with their own names and distinctive characters. A persons
everyday self may thus be replaced by another one of their subjectivities at any moment,
and these alternate subjectivities are recognizable by their distinctive manners of speech
and action. Such shifts in subject position are not seen as possessions (Cesarino
2008:150). Instead, the major metaphor is that the Marubo body is a longhouse inhabited
by several people at once, and any of these may speak at a given moment (Cesarino 2008;
Montagner 1985). In addition, Marubo subjectivities may depart the body-longhouse,
and the body-longhouse may receive visits from subjectivities who may then speak
through the body. Marubo doubles (subjectivities) are commonly associated with
specific bodies, but may express themselves from different bodies under certain
circumstances. Examples drawn from Cesarinos research illustrate this point.
The Marubo shaman Venpa has a double named Isko Osho, who is his chin
nato (thought-double). Isko Osho is older and wiser than Venpa is, has greater acquired
shamanic knowledge than Venpa, and is the son of a dead shamans chin nato. When
Venpas body utters words, it is usually Venpa speaking, but under certain
circumstances such as shamanic rituals and feasts, it may be Isko Osho speaking. Other
subjectivities are also linked to Venpas longhouse-body, such as the middle brother
Pan, who is more playful and intrepid than Isko Osho (Cesarino 2008:59). Although
Isko Osho is typically associated with and speaks through Venpas body, he may also
visit others longhouse-bodies, and thus speak through others. These subjectivities may
also visit the abodes of incorporeal entities such as yove spirits, or visit distant txai such
as Kapanawa shamans (Cesarino 2008:140141). Such Others as yove spirits, dead
shamans, and distant non-Marubo shamans may in turn visit Marubo bodies and speak
through them.

34

The complex identity shifts discernible in Marubo shamanic performances are

classically Amazonian. For example, Arawet shamans may sing in the voice of dead
people or gods, while Arawet warriors sing in the voice of dead enemies (Viveiros de
Castro 1992; Cesarino 2008:142). Examining analogous phenomena in Amazonian
biographical and autobiographical narratives, Oakdale (2009:153) notes that there is a
kind of circulation of experiences and perspectives between subjects from different time
periods, distinct communities, or both. Panoans frequently engage in such circulation
of experiences, but the process works variously in differing social contexts and
performance genres. Cesarinos analysis of Marubo shamanic poetics exemplifies one
modality of Panoan circulating experience. Dlage (2007, intra) presents a second
modality of Panoan circulating experience in his analysis of Sharanawa yama yama
autobiographical songs.
To illustrate the circulation of experiences in Amazonian ritual communication,
Oakdale (2009:18) draws on the example of Sharanawa yama yama as well as on her own
research with the Kayabi and cases from Xokleng (Urban 1989), Xavante (Graham
1995), and Jivaroan (Taylor 1993) ethnography. Dlage (intra) examines performed
Sharanawa discourses that are said to be autobiographical, that is, to describe experiences
that the narrator has had in the past. However, these discourses are also said to be
learned verbatim from other people. Thus, ones own experiences are expressed in the
same words used by others to express their experiences. Experiences circulate among
Sharanawa; one person can in a sense adopt anothers experience of life as their own.
Urban (1989) explored forms of narrative I in Amazonian ritual discourse,
pointing out diverse ways in which narrators can speak as other subjects. Oakdale (2009)
takes up this project, noting the various forms in which Amazonian ritual narration
involves identification of participants with the subjectivities of Others, including
incorporeal, dead, or distant subject positions. Dlage (2007) has suggested the term
traditional I for the subject position taken up in Sharanawa yama yama songs,
expressing the way these constitute, as it were, a pool of experiences shared in common
by Sharanawa, which yama yama performers may draw upon to express their own
experiences of life.

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Constitutive alterity
Panoan social contexts are critical for understanding patterns of inter-human
predation among native Amazonians. Fausto (1999) has proposed a model of Amazonian
social reproduction in which the predatory seizure of bodies and body parts from other
peoples is a critical aspect of individual and group self-constitution. Relations between
captor-killers and captured bodies, body parts, or subjectivities are often described in the
idiom of the relation between a pet and its owner. This pattern appears among Panoans:
the Konibo called their captives hin, domesticated animal (Santos Granero 2009:179)
and the Matses called their male child captives iwa, pet animal (Fleck n.d.a.). Cases of
Panoan warfare aimed at taking captives are thus of considerable significance for
understanding patterns of Amazonian predation in general.
The most salient manifestations of Panoan capture-warfare have been Konibo
17th20th century raiding and Matses 20th century raiding. During the lengthy period
when they dominated the Ucayali, Konibo raiders favored targets were other Panoans,
especially the Remo and Amawaka (DeBoer 1986, 2008). Multi-canoe expeditions set
out for the interfluves every year. War parties attempted to take the target villages by
surprise. When successful, Konibo raiders destroyed and pillaged the village, taking the
women and children as captives and generally killing the men and elders. Captives were
put to work on onerous tasks such as making dugout canoes, rowing canoes during longdistance travel, weaving, or making large quantities of manioc beer; the women became
concubines for Konibo men (DeBoer 1986; Santos Granero 2009). Santos Granero
(2009:57) has estimated that ten percent of Konibo society consisted of captives, and
their labor was considered very valuable. Nevertheless, the Konibo had to give up some
of their captives in order to get metal tools. Downriver, the Jesuit missions of the Ucayali
and Huallaga were perpetually short of labor and converts. Konibo multi-canoe trading
expeditions regularly ventured to the Jesuit missions to exchange captives for
manufactured goods. Konibo raiding thus secured both labor and valuable material
wealth objects.
Matses raiding patterns reflected their smaller population and interfluvial location
relative to the Konibo. Information on Matses raiding comes from Romanoff (1984) and
Fleck (n.d.a.). The period of most intense Matses raiding was between 1920 and 1960.
36

Matses raiding parties consisted of six to twelve males who traveled overland up to 300
kilometers, although most raids were in the 150 km range. Matses raiding, like Konibo,
focused on the capture of women and children. However, unlike the Konibo, mid-20th
century Matses never traded captives for goods. This is correlated to another contrast
with Konibo raiding, to wit, Matses frequently raided Peruvian and Brazilian
nonindigenous settlements, killing men, capturing women and children, and taking away
metal tools and other manufactured goods. During the decades of Matses raiding, the
proportion of captive to Matses women was very high. Fields and Merrifield (1980)
reported that 71 out of 146 married Matses women were captives, while Romanoff (1984)
reported that as late as 1975, over twenty percent of all inhabitants of Matses villages
were captives. Thus, Matses capturing of women and children provided them with an
important demographic boost just after the chaos of the rubber boom. Matses raiding
came at the expense of other Panoans, mostly of the Mayoruna branch; Matses raids were
a major factor in the demographic decline of the Kulina-Pano.
Erikson (1986:189, 1996:81) has argued that Panoans are characterized by
constitutive alterity: for Panoans, identity is not merely defined vis--vis alterity, it is
constituted symbolicallyand sometimes physicallythrough the principle that the
Other is a key ingredient of the Self. Panoans typically place the Other in a category
denoted by a cognate of nawa; for Panoans, the typical nawa are not affines (though they
are potential affinescf. Viveiros de Castro 1993, 2001), but rather the representatives
of the state such as nonindigenous city-dwellers, anthropologists, or the Inca of Panoan
myth. However, despite its primary meaning of Stranger, nawa or nawavo connotes
internal social divisions such as lineages (sometimes regulating marriage, sometimes not)
in several Panoan groups; in other cases the morpheme nawa is a component of personal
names. This is one example of Panoans symbolic incorporation of alterity to constitute
the collective self (Erikson 1986:188190, 1996:7782; for other Panoan modes of
incorporating the see Ruedas intra). Matses and Konibo raiding are among the clearest
examples of this phenomenon. Among the Matses, in particular, the Other was literally
the sine qua non of social reproduction (Erikson 1996:78), since half of all reproducing
women were captives. The Other constituted the collective Self.

37

Panoans thus participate in a symbolic economy of alterity (Viveiros de Castro

1996:190). Like the Arawet, Panoans have a passion for exteriority (Viveiros de
Castro 1992:3). Arawet identities are produced through interactions with enemy others:
after an enemy is killed, for example, the enemys spirit teaches his Arawet killer songs
that contain enemy names. After an Arawet killed a Parakan in the 1980s, 15 people
were assigned names that the killer had learned from his enemy song teacher and had
then performed in dance festivals (Viveiros de Castro 1992:148). For Panoans as for
Arawet, alterity constitutes identity.
In his explanatory model of predatory social reproduction in Amazoniaknown
informally as predation theoryFausto (1999) argues that native Amazonian peoples
are concerned with the ritual production of persons, but social reproduction is dependent
on relations with alterity because the identities, qualities, and energies linked to proper
personhood must be acquired from the outside. He proposes that wealth and prestige
goods have very limited involvement in the production of persons and social relations in
Amazonia as compared to persons, parts of persons, and non-material subjective
qualities such as names, souls, and songs. Finally ... the primary mode of interaction with
the ... alterity necessary for social reproduction, is not peaceful exchange, but predation
(Fausto 1999:934).
In constructing his model, Fausto drew on cases of exocannibalism, seizure of
trophies, and incorporation of non-material subjectivities, but did not address cases of
captive-taking in lowland South America (see, e.g., Santos Granero 2009). However,
although such practices as Tupinamb exocannibalism (Viveiros de Castro 1992),
Jivaroan headhunting (Taylor 1985, Descola 1993), Yagua tooth-capture (Chaumeil
1985), or Parakan enemy-song familiarization and predation (Fausto 1999) display
remarkable symbolic analogies with Panoan captive-taking, the differences are
substantial enough that predation theory would require some modification if it were to be
applied to the constitution of Konibo and Matses societies through incorporation of
captive bodies.
If native Amazonians social reproduction depends primarily (Fausto 1999:934),
or often (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007:6) on predatory incorporation of alterity, then
most Panoans fall into the cracks of predation theory. Historical contexts in which

38

Panoans captured living bodies, or body parts (Erikson 1986:197; Santos Granero
2009:61), are salient in Panoan histories. But predation is only of many Panoan patterns
of constitutive alterity. Descola (1993:186) has argued that although predation appears to
characterize Jivaroan (and perhaps Tupian) self-constitution, patterns of peaceful
exchange are equally salient in such multiethnic regional systems as the Eastern
Tukanoan zone; Fausto (1999:935) also acknowledged that peaceful exchange integrated
regional systems in the upper Rio Negro and upper Xingu. Among Panoans, processes of
interethnic alliance (vide supra), interethnic fusion (Ruedas intra), exchange of shamanic
services, or interethnic friendship (cf. Santos Granero 2007), among others, provide
alternatives to predation as modes of relating to and symbolically incorporating alterity.
Panoans do not seem to lend themselves to straightforward characterization. They
participate actively in a symbolic economy of alterity, but this participation is only
sometimes predatory.
Fausto distinguishes the taking of bodies and body parts from the taking of wealth
and prestige goods, arguing that the latter are relatively unimportant in comparison with
the former as vehicles for the construction of persons and social relations. In Faustos
model, the cause of predation is thus squarely cosmological-ideological, not economic.
Santos Granero (2009) comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that the primary purpose of
taking captives in tropical America was to secure a major portion of limited energies and
vitalities, and to deny these energies and vitalities to the enemy; any trading of captives
for goods was strictly a secondary practice. Panoan raiding, however, raises questions
about such dichotomies. Metal appears prominently in Panoan cosmologies as an object
of desire with mythic origins and owners. It is not clear that the desire to obtain metal is
material or economic rather than ideological or cosmological. Konibo
undertook canoe journeys taking months to trade captives for metal tools, and went to a
great deal of trouble to ensure that they held a monopoly on metal in the Ucayali. Santos
Granero (2009) argues that most captives were kept, not traded; but even so, the taking of
a captive was simultaneously economic, for not only could it be traded for metal but it
was also used in heavy labor. Matses raiding presents a similar unity of opposites.
Matses reasons for raiding included the desire to tsid (=join up with/incorporate into the
group/civilize) the others, but also the desire to obtain metal tools and manufactured

39

goods (Fleck n.d.a.). To distinguish these motives, calling one primary and the other
secondary, seems impossible. Raiding fulfilled both ideological needs and the desire for
prestige objects. The complete Panoan male person possesses many subjective qualities,
but also a metal axe.
Panoan idioms of relation to alterity hint at the distinctive Panoan approach to
common Amazonian problems. Viveiros de Castro (1992, 1993, 2001) has pointed out
that affinity and potential affinity are major idioms for thinking about and relating to
alterity in Amazonia. Konibo and Matses captives would appear to be a straightforward
fit here, since they were often female captives and therefore destined to be affines. But
Jivaroan trophy heads and Tupinamb captives, if they were affines, were ideal affines
(Descola 1993:183) or anti-affines (Viveiros de Castro 1992:294), because they were
affines that did not bring with them bunches of pesky in-laws demanding respectful
treatment and onerous prestations. However, Fleck (n.d.a.) has noted that upon being
married to a Matses, female captives became simultaneously affines to the captors
consanguines and consanguines to the captors affines, who had very real obligations to
look after the womans welfare and especially that of any children she may have. Far
from ensuring the dream of affinity without affines, Matses wife-capture thus generated
affinal links and obligations.
The pattern whereby an outsider, upon establishing a relation with a single
Matses, ipso facto establishes kinship relations with all Matses, is classically Panoan.
The sociocentric Kariera kinship characteristic of most Panoans permits members of a
local group to deduce their relation to an outsider provided the outsiders relation to any
one local group member is known, a phenomenon that facilitates relations with distant
members of the same ethnic group as well as with anthropologists. Furthermore, Matses
captive male children refer to their captors as adoptive fathers. The Matses system of
categorizing captives thus incorporates at once idioms of affinity, consanguinity, adoptive
filiation, and pet-keeping. It is both classically Amazonian and distinctively Panoan.
Erasing affinity
Kariera kinship differs in important ways from Dravidian kinship. In Dravidian
systems, affinity is often a logical operator for thinking about relations to the exterior

40

(Descola 1993:175). Dravidian systems divide the kinship world into two broad
categoriesconsanguines and affineslinked by cross-cousin marriage. Rivire (1969,
1984) noted a tendency for such systems in the Guianas to foster a dualistic conception in
which affinity represents dangerous otherness. Rivire noted a strong tendency on the
part of village leaders to encourage real cross-cousin marriage because this often
involved two people from within the village, thus obviating the need to incorporate a
dangerous affine from the outside. Affinity as a symbol and idiom of dangerous
otherness is easily extended to broader categories of outsiders who are potential affines
(Viveiros de Castro 1993). Because affines are considered threatening and undesirable,
Amazonians have developed creative techniques for avoiding its perceived pitfalls, such
as Guianan village endogamy or Arawet sexual friendships, the antidote to affinity
(Viveiros de Castro 1992:170). The Kariera system offers a range of alternative
possibilities for handling the problem of affinity as a potential threat and for thinking
about self and other.
In a Kariera system, there are not just two categoriesus and them, self and
otherthere are four. The consequences are profound. The Dravidian category of
affines is, in a Kariera system, divided in two: ones affines/potential affines, and their
parents. One of these two categories is not considered affinal at all. In a matrilineal
system such as the Marubo or Katukina, for example, the category consisting of real and
classificatory fathers, fathers brothers, and fathers sistersall of whom would be
affines in a matrilineal Dravidian systemare in fact considered close kin, although of
course the precise connotations of this third category are culturally malleable. The
result, however, is that only one of the four categories is affinal. The world is not
simply divided into symmetrical categories of consanguinity and affinity; instead, affinity
is reduced to one fourth and consanguinity is expanded to three fourths. But the
consequences of Kariera kinship do not end there.
One could imagine that a Kariera-type system could trend towards Dravidian
attitudes if the non-affinal half of the other moiety were considered dangerously
unpleasant strangers. In such a case, the affinity of the cross-cousin category would
infect the consanguinity of the fathers brother category. But in the Marubo case, the
opposite is true. The consanguinity of the F/FB/FZ category is extended to the cross-

41

cousin category. All kin are consanguineal kin; the only real affinity results from
interethnic marriage. One category encompasses all Marubowetsama, not other
and it is opposed therefore, not to a category of affines since such a category does not
exist, but rather to the category of stangers, nawa.7 The basic internal division of society
into us and them is replaced with an ontological unity, and an opposition is instead
formulated between wetsama and nawa. No matter how hard I tried to get a category of
affine out of Marubo consultants, even with carefully framed leading questions, I
couldnt: they kept repeating, over and over again, we are all kin. Thus, to the variety
of Amazonian strategies for achieving utopian societies without affines, we may add the
erasure of affinity in Kariera systems.
Beautiful structures
Panoans are enormously creative in constructing arrangements of kin terms, group
names, onomastic systems, ideals of marriage, and philosophies of social ethics; the
varying Panoan approaches to enacting Kariera kinship (Erikson 1996:112133)
exemplify but do not exhaust this creativity. Fleck (n.d.b.) is currently assembling an
annotated list of named Panoan social groups, past and present. The creativity is
extraordinary: just to name a few examples, the Kasharari have either six or eighteen
exogamous clans; the Kashinawa have four marriage sections; the Marubo have nine
exogamous lineages divided into eighteen marriage sections; the people broadly known
as Yaminawa are divided into at least three ethnic denominations; the Yaminawa
themselves have moieties, the Sharanawa have multiple non-exogamous denominations,
and the Yawanawa have between five and seven clans, apparently not exogamous either;
the Matses have moieties the names of which appear to change across time and space.
This proliferation of shifting identities appears to constitute an extreme atomization
coexisting with mechanisms of interethnic identification and cultural homogeneity
(Erikson 1993:45). Indeed, Panoans often recognize interethnic kinship in situations
where homophonous hereditary identities exist in differing ethnic groups Fleck (n.d.b.)
has noted, for example, that the denomination inonawabojaguar peopleand its
multiple cognates is/has been found among the Kashibo, Marubo, Shetebo, Shipibo,
Kapanawa, Sensi, Iskonawa, Nukini, Amawaka, and Kashinawa, while barinawabo

42

(sun people) is found among Kashibo, Katukina, Marubo, and Iskonawa. Thus, in
interethnic encounters with other Panoans, Marubo may ask mi awe nawavo ra? (what
people are you?) and apply terms for sibling, parent, or uncle if the other happens to carry
an identity that relates thus to the askers identity. However, just the fact of having a
nawavo identity is grounds for application of the term txai, straddling the connotations of
cross-cousin and interethnic friend.
As Erikson has noted, however, if we examine only the proliferation of internal
subdivisions, we are missing the point of Panoan social-structural creativity. Panoans do
not just create identities, they create systems of relations among identities. In some cases
(Kashinawa, Marubo, Katukina, Kasharari), Panoan identities are socially performed as
exogamous marriage sections; in others, they are hereditary and convey identity but do
not regulate marriage. Either way, identities carry connotations of expected behavior
towards other identities, and the expected behavior is often considered beautiful. For
example, Marubo ideals of marital exchange among exogamous sections have led to the
construction of social arrangements that are extraordinarily beautiful from both analytic
(see figure 1) and emic perspectives.
Panoan social structures derive from processes of conscious and agentive
creation, negotiation, and performance engaged in by historically situated actors,
individual and collective. The creation by Domingos, Joo Tuxaua, and other Javari
Panoans of a new social system in the early twentieth century exemplifies this creative
process. The new system was created by people with differing though related
ethnolinguistic identities, who negotiated their differences and agreed on a shared
concept of kin relations. They proposed the ideal of multigenerational exchanges
between marriage sections (figure 1) as the best way to secure demographic expansion
while retaining cultural vitality. They gave life to their thoughts (chini), enacting a
complex new interpretation of the Panoan symbol system. Recognizably Panoan yet
absolutely unique, the resulting pattern of social action grew the participant population
from 50 to 1000 in four generations. Furthermore, with the sole exception of the ill-fated
Kananawavo section, the patterns of matrimonial exchange among exogamous groups
have distributed growth evenly, resulting in ongoing, cross-cutting alliances among eight

43

growing lineages divided into sixteen sections, thus fostering social cohesion as well as
demographic growth.
Cases of conscious negotiation of structural norms are known elsewhere among
Panoans. Coffaci (1994:4751) reports Katukina discussions concerning inheritance of
group membership. Coffaci found six exogamous Katukina clans. She found that the
predominant form of group membership transmission was matrilineal inheritance; it was
also considered traditional. However, a vocal minority, influenced by an
anthropologists reports on Kashinawa kinship, openly argued for a shift to patrilineal
inheritance. Another individual argued for adopting the Marubo alternating-generation
scheme in which group membership is transmitted from the mothers mother. Similar
discussions extended to the realm of onomastics, leading to repeated arguments over
whether the father or mother should name children (Coffaci 1994:58). Clearly, these
aspects of social structure are not unconscious mental abstractions, nor extrahuman
causes of behavior. Descent and naming rules are subject to open debate and the
possibility of change through the exertion of human agency.
Based on the Marubo and Katukina cases, I argue for a generalized Panoan
agentive capactiy for creativity in domains we may refer to as socio-structural: the
formation of named subgroups, patterns of inherited recruitment to social groups, ideals
of matrimonial exchange between exogamous units, expectations of behavior linked to
kinship relations. Social structure may be lacking or unimportant in some areas of
Amazonia, but among Panoans it is not only present but highly valued. The production
of named subgroups, matrimonial exchange patterns, and discourses on proper social
relations among kin are creative endeavors that have attracted the attention of brilliant
Panoan minds over the centuries, particularly during extended periods of ethnocidal
brutality linked to regional and global circulations of power and commodities.
The concept of social structure can be problematic in the Amazonian context
(Overing and Passes 2000). Rubenstein (2002), for instance, presents the life history of a
Shuar healer as an alternative to ethnographies that portray culture as an invariant
background to human lives. Such ethnographies, he argues, conceive of social structure
as an abstraction in peoples minds, and as a model of how people behave. A
consequence of these abstractions is that human activity is portrayed in a timeless

44

ethnographic present and that culture is seen as an external determinant of human

behavior (Rubenstein 2002:60). Rubenstein argues for a different approach to culture, as
the product of human agency. Panoan voices suggest a similar approach to social
structure: as a product of human agency.
In making the argument that social structure, at least in the Panoan area, is real
and is cherished by people who consciously create it, I incorporate critiques of the
concept. Overing and Passes (2000) have summarized some of the many problems with
conceptualizing social structure in Amazonia. In modernist social theory, the social
has been equated to the formal, public, jural, corporate-hierarchical, and male-dominated
areas of social action, excluding all that is domestic and related to love, caring, and
everyday life. But, in Amazonia, the domestic arena and relations of mutual support and
caring are of central importance for native peoples. The modernist concept of social
structure portrays human collectivities in the language of roles, statuses, and juridical
rules, a language that is not suitable for the purposes of translating most of the social
practices and persectives of indigenous Amazonia (Overing and Passes 2000:14). If we
portray indigenous Amazonian society in terms of status and role, we ignore the rich
aesthetics of affective and everyday life that are so well developed in indigenous
Amazonia. And yet, it is common for Panoans both male and female to expound at
length on status and role, named social groups, and the proper structural relations
between them. Matters of descent group recruitment via lineality, symbolic associations
of descent group membership, and proper application of complex onomastic rules are
topics of much discussion throughout the Panoan zone. How should we interpret these
apparent bursts of passion for structure?
Panoan creations of social structure are very much infused with some of the
tendencies suggested by Overing and Passes. The Marubo ideal of a thriving system of
matrimonial exchanges involves a vision of thriving longhouses filled with healthy
children laughing and playing, well-fed and happy women, fathers who care for and heal
their children, brothers and cousins who support one another in producing lots of good
food. Longhouse owners are meant to, and often do, remind their coresidents of proper
behavior, often expressed specifically in terms of status and role. But such roles involve
construction of bodies and persons through the application of loving care, healing, mutual

45

aid, and solidarity (cf. McCallum 2001). Furthermore, social structure is not here a
matter of rigid insistence on fulfillment of traditional rules. Far from it, it is a creative
endeavor, and successful manifestations of the ideals are explicitly referred to as
beautiful.
Panoan discourse on social relations thus focuses less on the awful consequences
that may ensue from violating social norms, and more on the fine advantages of
following them. The most important such advantage is survival in the face of ethnocide.
The program of matrimonial exchanges among Javari Panoan social groups instituted at
the end of the rubber boom was explicitly portrayed as a strategy for demographic and
cultural survival. If the plan were followed properly, everyone would have spouses and
lots of children and all the subgroups would expand jointly. The result was envisioned
not so much as a single thriving society but rather as a thriving set of interrelated
identities each consisting of healthy persons involved in relations of mutual support with
others of both same and differing identities.
It is equally critical to note such visions of thriving groups of longhouses are
conveyed in a performative key. Joo Tuxaua did not merely explain to people how they
should behave. He went on visits to other longhouses, singing about the origins of
Panoan peoples and identities at festivals lasting days and involving consumption of corn
beer, game, turtle eggs, and other delicacies. In ceremonial discourses he reminded
people that in the past they had fought each other and killed each other and stolen one
anothers wives, but now they exchanged food and feasts and spouses and they had large
families and healthy children with full bellies. He sang of his visits with the spirits and
the healing techniques that he learned from them. By conservative estimates he had six
wives and twenty children. And people were captivated by his visions.
Basso (1985:4) has pointed out that performed cultural events actually achieve a
nonordinary reality as a consequence of the ability of humans to create illusory
apparitions that seem to exist for themselves without any necessary practical relation to
the world ... Hence if an illusion is intriguing and vital, we can even forget we are
watching a performance and become drawn into it to the extent that it achieves a
palpable reality by means of our own active imagining or self-enchantment. Joo
Tuxauas performance art was so vital and intriguing that people became totally involved

46

in its reality. For example, his use of song to heal people inspired a generation of young
men to become healers in his footsteps. But equally significant, as an artist playing with
the symbols of culture (Basso 1985:5) he played also with the symbols of social structure:
the kin terms, relations among kin exemplified in the myths and other discourses he
performed, passionate portrayals of the benefits of believing in the system. And because
this, too, was captivating, involvement in this reality took the form of social action
sharing his passionate belief in the emerging Marubo kinship system. He didnt invent
the kinship system alone, he negotiated, discussed, and co-created it with his companions,
synthesizing from their shared symbol system. But in this particular case, the emergent
symbolic creation was espoused by a brilliant and charismatic performer.
Basso (1985:9) noted also that Lvi-Strauss, in his masterful analysis of
Amazonian myth, missed a key point: that myth in Amazonia is performative action. The
new social system proposed by Joo Tuxaua involved lots of discourse performance
contexts: healing rituals, shamanic rituals, encounters between different local groups
during preparation for feasts, multi-settlement feasts with lots of food, drink, drumming,
and singing, and spontaneous lectures on social relations emitted to longhouses in
rhythmic and musical language. These are not one-person performances, they are
participative. They involve choreography, the movement of bodies in patterns considered
good and beautiful.
Indeed, Lvi-Strauss was on the right path when he called myth-making, and by
extension structure-making in general, bricolage. As Basso has pointed out, it is a
creative and often playful rearrangement of cultural symbols. When the symbols in
question are kin terms, ideas about relations between social statuses, and visions of longterm patterns of intermarriage and demographic growth resulting from multigenerational
prescriptive alliance, this, too is a creative rearrangement of cultural symbols. Social
structure is not merely bricolage, it is art, and it is not a static artnot a painting, not a
discourse, abstract idea, or sculpturebut a dance guided by a long-term macrochoreography. This macro-choreography guides bodies in relationships of caring, mutual
support, exchange of spouses and production and rearing of persons. Social structures
created by conscious actors in concrete historical conditions are expressed in elaborate

47

social choreographies lasting centuries and expressed in the idiom of survival: the Panoan
art of survival.
Notes
1. Version 1, marked with normal brackets, is the usual version, first narrated to me by
Jos Barbosa on 18 August 1997. Version 2 was compiled by Alfredo Barbosa filho
from information provided by five elders on 31 May 1998. It was intended to document
traditional indigenous occupation of the Javari basin, in support of efforts to demarcate
the Javari indigenous area.
2. Jos Barbosa, 13 May 1998.
3. Jos Barbosa, 9 January 1998.
4. Clovis Rufino, 21 July 1997.
5. Clovis Rufino, 6 to 13 March 1998.
6. Jos Barbosa, 4 May 1998.
7. The precise overlap of the categories wetsama and yura remains to be examined in
detail.

48

Figure 1. Marubo multigenerational matrimonial exchange.

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