Do spirits resist to exist or exist to resist?
Anthropology and cinema based upon collaborative equivocations with the indigenous Kanamari and Matis peoples from the Javary Valley, Amazon, Brazil
Markus Enk Leiden University
2018
Written component of Master Thesis
Audiovisual triptych of Master Thesis About cameras, spirits and occupations, including: -The Matis’ Ancestral Spirit of Madiwin and the Corn Party
- Healthy politics for who? -Starring a reflexive camera
Do spirits resist to exist or exist to resist? Anthropology and cinema based upon collaborative equivocations with the indigenous Kanamari and Matis peoples from the Javary Valley, Amazon, Brazil
Markus Enk s1921894
Master’s Thesis in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Specialization in Visual Ethnography
Supervisor: Mark Westmoreland
Abstract:
The present thesis is divided into two components: this written paper and the triptych About
cameras, spirits and occupations, consisting of three short-documentaries: The Matis’ Ancestral Spirit of Madiwin and the Corn Party, Healthy politics for who? and Starring a
reflexive camera. The thesis is grounded on collaboration with the indigenous Kanamari and
Matis from the Javary Valley (Amazon, Brasil), based upon a cinematographic workshop, visual ethnography and auto-ethnography. Collaborative approaches are considered to enable the creation of objectifying tools that highlight anthropology’s expertise in familiarizing realities into domesticated categories - that is, controlled equivocations. Influenced by a mélange of the written-essayist style with cinema’s art of montage, the thesis searches for a complementarity between the written and audiovisual component. The documentaries and their inter-relation will turn visible empirical dimensions of the research, critiques and reflections raised during the field, and the relation between aesthetics and politics, while also raising equivocations regarding representation and identities such as activist, anthropologist, artist, ethnographer and friend. This paper will discuss necropolitical practices regarding indigenous peoples in Brazil, the indigenization of research when acknowledging a reverse anthropology, and similarities between shamanism and cinema. To conclude, indigenous is suggested to be also a mode of becoming, if not a state of spirit, in which spirits might be dialectical images that affect the body and its actions.
Resumo:
A presente tese de mestrado é dividida em dois componentes: esta parte escrita e o tríptico
Sobre câmeras, espíritos e ocupações, montado a partir de três curtas-metragens: Madiwin, o Espírito Ancestral dos Matis e a Festa do Milho, Políticas saudáveis para quem? e Em face a uma câmera reflexiva. A colaboração com os indígenas Kanamari e Matis do Vale do Javari
(Amazonas, Brasil) foi baseada em uma oficina de cinema, etnografia visual e auto-etnografia. Abordagens colaborativas são consideradas para possibilitar a criação de ferramentas ‘objetivantes’ que destacam a especialidade antropológica em familiarizar realidades em categorias domesticadas, isto é, equívocos controlados. Influenciado pela escrita ensaísta e pela arte cinematográfica de montagem, esta tese busca a complementaridade entre o escrito e o audiovisual, no qual os documentários e sua interação tornam visíveis dimensões empíricas da pesquisa, críticas e reflexões durante o tempo em Atalaia do Norte e a relação entre estética e política, além de levanter equívocos entre representatividade e identidades como a de amigo, ativista, antropólogo, artista e etnógrafo. O componente escrito traz à discussão as práticas necropoliticas no tocante aos povos indígenas no Brasil, o processo de indigenização da pesquisa quando reconhecida formas de antropologia reversa, e as similaridades entre xamanismo e cinema. Para concluir, indígena é sugerido ser também uma forma de devir, se não um estado de espírito – no qual espíritos poderíam ser imagens dialéticas que afetam corpos e suas ações.
Acknowledgments
Although the impossibility of naming all that have been part of this thesis, I must thank all of those who aided in providing a safe roof or a pleasant hammock to sleep in - before, during and after fieldwork - and also those who provided nourishment - be it food for the body, for thoughts or for the spirit. Especial thanks to: Ioannaki Gkika, who practically co-experienced most of this process. Mark Westmoreland, whose humanity, patience and guidance helped me to be precise with what exceeds. Metje Postma, Peter Snowdon and our audiovisual classmates for constant teaching and learning. Elizabeth, even in distance managing to find a surprisingly way to support me; Martin, with an unexpected, but important, visit during fieldwork; Theresa, for striking comments and sharp critiques. Silene, ACAAMB, the FUNAI [Novo], família Ramos, and our daily dedication that became a motivation. Shapu, his family and friends, especially the darasibo and matxó that came to Atalaia do Norte; Winih and his family; the Kanamari Caciques, especially Arabona, but also urban leaders Kora and Wahü; without them this wouldn’t have been possible. The squatting family that accepted me in Europe. Friends in Brazil, in especial Rodrigo and our philosophical sharing, Lina and the Socioenvironmental reminders of a ‘Latin American’ engaged praxis, Bruno Raposa and Daniel Cefet – who became technological gurus when I overcame the denial over media technology.
My Land – Litefoot Tisket a-tasket, tasket a-tusket, An arrow don't compare with the White man's musket I’ve seen them coming thick as syrup Thousands and thousands they bailed in from Europe So forget what you heard in your school book Forget a treaty, I still call them all crooks A reservation's the apology Anthropology shows the truth, but they still won’t acknowledge me And now they talking this “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” And my people, they went through misery Raped our women and killed our children Replaced all the greenery with concrete buildings And make me feel like I'm less than a man And make me carry ID to prove who I am And now they want to be a friend again Damn, you better run from this Indian This land is our land This land ain't your land From California to the New York islands This land is our land
T
ABLE OF
C
ONTENTS
Abstract: ... 3
Resumo: ... 3
A general introduction ... 6
Aspects of a colonial euphemism, from Brazil to image-producers ... 8
From a cinematographic workshop to an indigenous protest ... 13
An Other’s brief history ... 17
About my white visual anthropologist’s agency ... 21
A possible dialectical image of anthropology ... 26
…what about the Matis’ cinematographic workshop? ... 32
Finally, spirits ... 34
Some conclusions about cameras, spirits and occupations ... 39
Bibliography ... 43
Musicography and filmography ... 49
A general introduction
1
“…style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can’t be separated”
(Jean-Luc Godard)
This Master Thesis is grounded in the gap between its two components, the present written modality and the triptych About cameras, spirits and occupations, consisting of three in(ter)dependent short-documentaries: The Matis’ Ancestral Spirit of Madiwin and the Corn
Party, Healthy Politics for who? and Starring a reflexive camera2. For this thesis, gaps are considered to be a mode of communicating across different perspectives, that is,
equivocations, in which any anthropology would translate these by allowing “alien concepts
to deform and subvert the translator’s conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the original language can be expressed within the new one” (Viveiros de Castro, 2004, p.5).
Through engaging both the intellect and the senses, this thesis attempts to reflect upon potential realities while ethnographically describe the experienced fieldwork. Artistic inquiry and its theories, similarly to anthropology in its appropriation and representation from the Other (Schneider and Wright, 2006, p. 26), may provide creative and experimental modes to reflect upon knowledge producing, but also upon anthropology and its iconophobia (Tylor, 1996). The equivocation between art and science is, for Schneider and Wright (2006), a difficulty in translating - if not reducing - the form and the experienced reality into a written modality and, therefore, for MacDougall, visual anthropology requires addressing issues intellectually and sensuously, being “[n]either a copy of written anthropology nor a substitute for it” (MacDougall, p.292-3 in Schneider and Wright, 2006, p. 23). As an attempt to translate its content into its form and aesthetics and vice-versa3, this thesis will consider the equivocated complementarity between art and science, in which the written segment is influenced by cinema’s art of montage, while the documentaries by an essayist style.
As an initial attempt of reflection based upon observations, the essay seeks to characterize events and define what would make it a success (Stengers, 2015), considering it to be an
1 The footnotes will not only be a source for extra information, but also an attempt to form different layers of perception over the Master
thesis. By including my subjective comments regarding the objective text, I expect to create gaps as well as complementarity;
2 Although they might be experienced independently, for this thesis the short-documentaries should be addressed as interdependent, as the
goal is to reflect upon gaps and the tensions their boundaries vibrate with each other, i.e. equivocations between the object(ive) and the subject(ive);
endeavor to set something in motion4. Montage, broadly characterized by Willerslev and Suhr as a variety of assemblages and juxtapositions of distinct elements in disparate ways (as repetitions and overlaps), seeks to create perceptions regarding the “relations between artistic expression, scholarly imagination and social life” (2013, p.1)5. In the case of a montage-essay, considering works such of Antick, Vohnsen and Salamon (in Willerselv and Suhr, 2013) and The Possibility of Spirits (Van de Port, 2016), it becomes important to think about the projection of isolated ideas and put them in motion, while also keeping in track what remains in inertia and outlined.
The tension between aesthetics and politics is especially visible in Healthy Politics for who?,
aesthetics described by Rancière (2004) as a previously defined system that determines the
present sense of experience, while politics as an intervention in the distribution of the sensible that the aesthetic consists of. The audiovisual component is, besides expressing ethnographic descriptions, justifying the anthropological labor of the written component which is considered as a practice of philosophizing with peoples6 (Ingold, 1992). The triptych pinpoints representational issues during the field, in the form of indigenous media, through a participative and engaged approach, or even in a reflexive critique with poetic elements, although it also addresses identity conflicts while in the field (and with a camera!).
This written component will, through collaborative methodologies and a cinema workshop, contextualize the fieldwork establishing a critique to Brazil’s post-colonial political practices regarding indigenous peoples and raise reflections upon the relation between cinema and shamanism. It is grounded in two main assumptions: the first, that forms of colonialism exist and the history of micro-fascist desires must be fought through marginal and molecular revolutions (see Guattari, 1984); the second, that anthropologists share a political responsibility in participating in social struggles, especially when aimed against fascist practices. In the conclusion, indigenous is proposed to be a mode of becoming, while anthropology a gap between going native and going academic. Spirits, as dialectical images, may aid us, therefore, to reflect and re-invent ourselves.
4 Etymologically, essay comes from ‘ex’ + ‘agere’, available in Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/essay 5 Etymologically, montage has its origin from men-, cinematographically related to ‘to project’, although the term also conceals meanings
such as ‘to think’, ‘to remain’ and ‘isolated’. ‘Men-‘, available in Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/*men-6 Philosophy considered to be from the Self’s domain, while people from the Other’s domain;
Aspects of a colonial euphemism, from Brazil to image-producers
“Confronted by the ALie Nation, alienation The subjects and the citizens See the material religions through trauma and numb Nothing is related All the things of the earth and in the sky Have energy to be exploited Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold Into nothing is sacred, not even their Self The ALie Nation, alienation”
(R.E.D. – A Tribe Called Red, feat. Black Bear, Yasiin Bey & Narcy)
Brazil’s past of oppression and subjugation of indigenous people is based on colonial praxis, which remains visible in the form Brazil is handling internally with its own habitants - although nowadays in a euphemistic and neoliberal maneuver. According to Carneiro da Cunha et al (2017), the Brazilian government, ruled by the Beef, Bible, Bullet alliance (BBB), is ignoring the protection provided by the Brazilian Citizen Constitution of 1988 and sponsoring a new level of violence that boxes indigenous peoples in by the present political crisis. The Constitution of 19887 defines indigenous lands as the territory required by indigenous people to physically and metaphysically reproduce their society, grounded in
originary rights. Such rights recognize indigenous territories existing prior to the institutional
State, in which the role of the government becomes solely to recognize and demarcate them - instead of granting rights over the land (Carneiro da Cunha et al, 2017).
The new level of violence Carneiro da Cunha et al refers to is related to the “end of new demarcations of indigenous land, the abolition of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), a reduction in the size of areas set aside for environmental conservation, and the loosening of environmental regulations” (2017, p.406). With many decrees to put developmental and progressive projects in action, the government seems to appreciate the accommodation of invaders in indigenous lands, as miners, the agribusiness and even missionaries, mirroring the Brazilian military dictatorship, with examples as Belo Monte hydroelectric project (see Fainguelerent, 2016) and the PEC 2158. Anthropologists, however, are not appreciated by the government, accused of lacking objectivity and of being biased because of their support to the indigenous cause (Carneira da Cunha et al, 2017). At the other hand, indigenous peoples also tend to have their doubts regarding the anthropologists, visible in Starring a reflexive
7 The Constitution of 1988 became an emblem for a ‘new democratic Brazil’ after its military dictatorship;
8 PEC 215, although a project from the year of 2000, would grant the legislation branch, strongly represented by the BBB which share ideals
camera. Ironically enough, anthropologists seem to be in a gap between the lack of
objectivity regarding institutions, and the lack of subjectivity regarding collaborators… In the Javary Valley, violence persists especially in the form of invasions, even after the promulgation of the Constitution of 1988 and the homologation of the land in 2001. The case of the indigenous Kanamari living there, their territorial history reveals a constant oppression by external actors that marginalize their position, these being colonizers, the rubber exploiters, or their baffling situation in the city of Atalaia do Norte (see Costa, 2006; 2016).
…healthy politics for who? represents the Kanamari’s first organized protest against their
marginalized position and the neglecting of indigenous healthcare in the Javary Valley and the municipality of Atalaia do Norte (ATN) by the Special Secretary for Indigenous Health – Special Indigenous Sanitary District of the Javary Valley (Sesai-Dsei/VJ). Although the Matis’ present situation doesn’t differ much when contrasted to the Kanamari’s case - especially regarding health politics, their history of contact has been ethnographically and cinematographically registered. According to Arisi (2011), the Matis contact with globalized society is a history not only filled with unknown diseases for their shamanic practices, but also with anthropologists, photographers and documentary-makers for foreign media.
Besides a romantic fascination regarding indigenous peoples and their exotic aesthetics, in which contact merely means that we were not there (Sahlins, 1999)9, these foreigner filmmakers were also grounded in an epistemology of registering groups before their extinction with our contact. The juxtaposing of The Matis’ Ancestral Spirit of Madiwin and
the Corn Party10 with Starring a Reflexive Camera is an attempt to diverge such
(mis)conception and seriously consider indigenous agency and invention of culture (Wagner, 1981): first we see the indigenous media produced by Shapu Mëo, who turned out to become a central collaborator and co-producer of the audiovisual outcome, while later his experiences with foreigners media-producers and anthropologists.
The oppressive history of indigenous peoples coincides with a practice of biopower, the power to inflict in the biological organism life or to make it return to death. When designed by biopolitics, it will produce and increase biological force to organize and dominate, instead of blocking or destroying such biopower (Foucault, 2012). In the case of the Matis, the history of their contact with the Brazilian government in 1978 is grounded on an epidemiological crisis (see Coutinho, 2008) based upon the exposure to sexual transmitted
9 Although it also means that recent-contacted bodies will be marked by post-colonial scars;
10 This indigenous media was recorded by Shapu Mëo in 2015, the year we met, and was edited during our cinematographic collaboration
diseases (STD) and hepatitis, for instance. This led to a demographic decline of almost 70% of their population in 1987 (image 1), and, nowadays, they correspond to only 8% of the Vale do Javari, around 390 individuals (Arisi et al, 2011). Marking the biopolitical encounter with indigenous peoples, European expansion and the later contact with post-colonial inhabitants brought “infectious diseases to which native peoples had limited exposure and immunity” (Walker et al, 2015).
Evolution of Matis Population (aldeia - village; pessoas – people); in Arisi, Cesarino, Francisco, 2011 The Javary Valley, as most indigenous lands, is not a place for biopolitics per se11, nor a concentration and/or extermination camp. Indigenous lands are designed to be its opposite, as the legal territory for the physical and metaphysical reproduction of indigenous life. But, in Brazil’s incongruence to the Constitution of 1988 rests a racist politics of warfare that claims having the right to kill the Other (Mbembe, 2003) - or, as witnessed during the Kanamari protest, the right to expose them to death12. In other words, indigenous people are under a threat of necropolitics, the power to dictate life and the ways of death. Necropolitics, originated in colonial occupations, is based upon the “writing of a new spatial relation” that produces “boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves”, subverts “existing property arrangements”, extract the territory’s resources, categorizes its people and manufactures a “large reservoir of cultural imaginaries” (Mbembe, 2003, p.25-26).
The Brazilian BBB’s necropolitical state13 and its fascist forms to apply biopower targets indigenous lands, as they are a spatial location inside demarcated boundaries under constant threat of invasion, extirpation of resources and undermining of indigenous property arrangements - relying also, ironically enough, in the ‘biased’ anthropologists and linguistics
11 The case of the Guarani-Kaiowa in Brazil, lengthily exposed in Carelli’s et al. (2017) documentary Martírio, is one of the best examples and audiovisual way to understand how indigenous peoples and their lands are affected by the Brazilian’s BBB political crisis; 12 The incongruence to the Constitution of 1988 is similar to the situation before its promulgation, unfortunately also during the constant invasions, as well as the potential situation if present-Brazil’s crisis doesn’t change. It might even change for worse if, in the Brazilian 2018 presidential election, for example, the demos decide for a president with fascist tendencies that feels nostalgic about the dictatorship times, defending a state of exception (or even state of siege, see Mbembe, 2003) that shouldn’t provide 1cm of land for indigenous peoples; 13 A situation already presented by MV Bill (1999) in Soldado do Morro, in which he – as an insider of the favela in Rio de Janeiro producing rap and hip hop music, criticizes the situation as a ‘concentration camp’ based upon narcopolitics. To sum up, the recent military intervention in the city of Rio de Janeiro may illustrate how Brazil is dealing with its diverse euphemistic concentration camps, available, for example, in https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazils-military-to-take-over-security-in-violence-scarred-rio-de-janeiro/2018/02/16/5ff9aaea-1341-11e8-a68c-e9374188170e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d4f4f257e41e
categorization of their way of living14. This attempt of the State to ‘trick’ the Other, as expressed by Wahü Kanamari in the final scene of Healthy politics for who?, aims to control, silence and reduce indigenous peoples as a reserve of cultural imaginaries15.
The colony, a place not reigned by human worlds nor fully organized by a state, becomes a zone in which “war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other” (Mbembe, 2003, p.24). In indigenous lands as the Javary Valley, the constant invaders (as illegal hunters, gold-miners or development projects) act as-if superior than the State – that is, when the State itself isn’t an invader and/or a threat to the indigenous peoples’ originary rights. However, when indigenous lands become colonies, they are also spaces were societies against the state (Clastres, 2014; 2015) are resisting against the conspiracy of their death by the imposition of an authoritarian, hierarchical and patriarchal institutionalization of power and its neoliberal network16. As a place that alterity is shaped into an Other, the colony is also a relation and a constitutive force for epistemic moments (Taussig, 1993) and for the translation of equivocations. It is a place where the re-fetischizing of the commodity targeted to act against itself is pro tempore possible. For Taussig, such
space between might allow the representation to temporarily acquire the power of what it is
representing and potentially over the represented, enabling the mimetic faculty to become visible through “the ideological gradient decisive for world history of savagery vis à vis civilization” (1993, p.65).
Though, the mimetic faculty, this “nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other” conceals both a destructive but also a healing force, providing glimpses of opportunities to reconstruct other worlds through the dismantling of that second nature (Taussig, 1993, p. xiii). Besides its creative and curative endeavors, the destructive possibilities, as in necropolitical states, are oppressive organizations in which variations of fascism are its model of domination. Fascism, not only the repression of sexuality and its rebellious act (Reich, 1970) as creativity and the invention of culture, is also the return of the repressed in an attempt of organizing the mimetic faculty so that it becomes controllable as an instrument of domination (Taussig, 1993). 14 Worth noticing that anthropology has been historically involved with colonialism and, although this past doesn’t necessarily have to determine our future as anthropologists, it is a post-colonial scar that anthropologists have to carry; 15 Especially when considering the high concentration of ‘uncontacted’ indigenous peoples in the Javary Valley; 16 I am aware that the State, with its function of producing norms and rules, is entangled (if not submitted) by the globalized Entrepreneur’s cognitive capitalism (see Stengers, 2015, especially chapter 7 and 8), and I do not expect to fall into the trap of using the State as the scapegoat of the necropolitical issues, even if it is, for this essay, being targeted as-if an archetype of the problems raised;.
For instance, the Nazism’s propaganda movie, Triumph des Willens (Riefenstahl, 1935) is, through the mimesis of mimesis, seeking to dominate using the “rebellion of suppressed nature against domination” (Taussig, 1993, p.68). Howbeit, a curative mimesis is mimicking resistance and its forms of oppression in the name of resistance itself, as in The Nation Erupts (Poole, 1992) - or even in La Hora de los Hornos (Getino and Solanas, 1968). In these cinematographic examples lies a mimetic power defined by Gaines (1999) as political
mimesis, which connects the audience’s body with the bodies at the screen and, transferring
violent mirroring effects, propels the audience to act accordingly. Beyond cinematographic realms, political mimesis is a reflecting image that effects the body to produce affection – a non-conscious experience of intensity that prepares the body for action in given circumstances (Shouse, 2005). Affection, however, might be destructive, as well as curative. For instance, the imagetic usage of ‘uncontacted’ indigenous peoples is a mimetic labor in which the threat of extinction and the excitement of ‘exoticism’ and ‘authenticity’ might affect the receiver of such images. Employing the mimetic faculty in a romanticized way to perpetuate the resistance of the Yanomami towards globalized societies, Ramos exemplifies their success in “exploiting their exoticism”, when the Yanomami became an international symbol for attracting global attention and the Amazon protection (2000, p.180). Yet, Conklin (1997) reminds us of how such ‘authentic’ images might fall into an essentialist trap that denies agency and history to indigenous peoples and open to accusations of ‘acculturation’ -that allow the imposition of development projects. But, when considering globalized technologies and their products17, “exogenous elements are culturally indigenized” and there shouldn’t be any concern or discomfort regarding inauthenticity (Sahlins, 1999, p. xi). The documentary Martírio (Carelli et al, 2017) demonstrates how the Guarani-Kaiowa, considered by agribusiness lobby as acculturated and inauthentic, are suffering with the denial of their originary rights and the imposition of a death politics, enabled by and in order to perpetuate neoliberal projects. Therefore, representation issues may also rise in the case of
Piripkura (Terra et al, 2017), documentary that stars (probably unwillingly) two ‘isolated’
men, Pakyî and Tamandua, wanting to light their torch with FUNAI’s aid; or, regarding the Javary Valley, the to-be released ‘impact film & campaign’ that will ‘tell the universal story of our human tribe’: Tribes on the Edge (Cousteau, estimated for 2019)18, and also Survival
International’s campaign19 for the protection of ‘uncontacted’ indigenous peoples.
17 ‘Modern’ technology, as wearing cloths, living in urban environments, or media instruments as cellphone or the camera; 18 Tribes on the Edge official teaser and website: http://www.tribesontheedge.com/about/the-teaser/
19 Survival International’s Vale do Javari official website https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/amazonuncontactedfronti
by S hap u M ëo, 2 01 8 by Ma rk us E nk , 2 01 8
From a cinematographic workshop to an indigenous protest
“Hold tight, the swing is coming This swing is the swing of the Jibóia, The Jibóia from the enchanted forest is coming, Snake in this force to come and enchant us”
(Balanço da Floresta/ The swing of the Forest – Tuim Nova Era)
My interest in getting involved with the indigenous peoples from the Upper Solimões region in 2015, pursuing the conclusion of a project that relied in photography, incited common friends to introduce me to Shapu, at the time an indigenous photographer interested in improving his media knowledge. The camera, not only a mimetic machinery, is also a magical technology of embodied knowledge (Moore, 1997) that enabled our friendship and my interest in Shapu’s interest over my filmmaking interest. In other words, the camera became our main instrument of inquiry and the source of equivocations, allowing the intersection of our projects of becoming (see Tsing, 2015) and which propelled us to conduct a cinematographic workshop with the Matis’ youth.
Through the camera came my interest in indigenous media, considered by Ginsburg as a tool for cultural activism based on counter-hegemonic cultural productions (1999, in Deger, 2006). As a form of expression and production of “contemporary indigenous subjectivities” (Deger, 2006, p.45), indigenous media became the main concept of this project, and collaboration an imperative for this research. In ATN, the closest city to the Javary Valley, the expectation for indigenous peoples to occupy the space of images’ production and circulation (see embedded aesthetics and media sovereignty in Ginsburg, 1994, 2016; Ginsburg and Myers, 2006; and visual sovereignty, Peterson, 2013), cameras and the editing computer passed through many hands, while files circulated through many pen drives – acknowledging that they produce recordings, although not always aware of how the next step, i.e. editing, would be.
The camera, as an equivocated technology between art and scientific work, aims to affect through taking advantage of and refetishizing the “marketed reality” (Taussig, 1993, p.23), while cinema combines its capacity to copy with its visceral quality for perception in order to possibly merge the “object of perception with the body of the perceiver” (1993, p.25). The co-created context of a cinematographic workshop with Shapu’s collaboration aimed a
process through drawing (see Hastrup, 2004; Hendrickson, 2008; Taylor, 1996), photography (see Botticello, 2016; Sutherland, 2016) and cinematographic recording, editing and exhibition (see Gubrium and Harper, 2013; Larcher and Oxley, 2015; Lunch and Lunch, 2006; Møhl, 2011; Nichols, 1994, 2010) with the Matis youth in ATN. This Amazonian city, a cosmopolitan post-colonial space of frontiers20, is among national perimeters and connecting the triple frontier of Brazil, Colombia and Peru; and among ethnic margins, including the Pano linguistic trunk (Korubo, Marubo, Matis and Mayoruna, and the resurgent Kulina Pano), the Katukina linguistic trunk (Kanamari and probably Tschon-Djapah), other indigenous peoples from the Upper Solimões region (as Tikuna and Cocama) and globalized society (its technologies, its commodities and its peoples). Such peripheral places, where the State fails in its function to shelter those under its jurisdiction, reveal elements of sovereignty and movements of resistance that fight to install other frontiers to protect themselves from external aggression (Cataia, 2008). Such places that projects of becoming cross (Tsing, 2015) are also spaces of equivocations, in which cultural translations are prompted to communicate through difference and founded by a diversity of perspectives and disparate modes of symbolization (Viveiros de Castro, 2015)21.
When corresponding with Others (Ingold, 2014), moments of equivocations and of inventing second natures, as any differentiating mode of symbolization, became the “only ideological regime capable of managing change” and condition for anthropological research (Wagner, 1981, p.7). Regarding the Other, i.e. the ‘primitive’, co-related to the projections of our fears (Moore, 1997), it seems required the acknowledgment that They (and the imaginaries they represent) won’t magically disappear in failed attempts of extermination or silencing. As an expression of possible worlds (Deleuze, 1969a:335, in Viveiros de Castro, 2002), the Other might enable conditions to alter from and resist fascism and its racist politics, be it biopolitics or necropolitics. Instead of merely explaining Other worlds, the process of multiplying Our worlds (Viveiros de Castro, 2002) might drawn anthropologists – Schneider and Wright (2006) probably including artists - to emancipate themselves from their culture through the “threatened, criticized and counterexemplified” perspectives from Others (Wagner, 1981, p.17-18). Electronic indigenous societies, which have appropriated the usage of media technology to communicate their difference and express their imaginations (Gallois and Carelli) and have “survived by harnessing industrial technologies to paleolithic purposes” (Sahlins, 1999, p.vi), become also an Other’s mirror to reflect about the Self when
20 Considered to have one of Brazil’s worst Municipal Human Development Indicator (see IBGE, 2018). 21 That is, when the Other isn’t silenced or completely devoured by the Self;
corresponding with societies that, using and/or imagining the usage of globalized objects, as the camera and other mimetic machineries, are since 1492 communicating difference while resisting institutions’ impositions.
While I searched to enter in contact with the Matis youth to organize the cinematographic workshop, Shapu arranged a meeting with Pixi, at the time president of the Matis Association (AIMA). Shapu, training his filmmaking skills by recording the meeting, Pixi and I, discussed the elaboration of the workshop, the goals of the research-project and some specific topics of the research - as the relation between photography and spirits. After it, Shapu and I returned to Benjamin Constant, the only Brazilian nearby city to ATN connected by the federal highway BR-30722. As-if rumors of a white person with a high-tec camera existed, Pixi called some days after asking me to return to ATN and record an indigenous protest that would happen. One day before the protest, I returned to ATN and overnighted at Shapu’s cousin Tëpi’s house - as Shapu had to stay in Benjamin Constant to finish nursery school. The next morning, 4 a.m., at the square where the protest would start, some indigenous people started appearing. Wahū Kanamari23 was helping to organize the protest with his brother Analimar Kanamari, an indigenous anthropologist24 who I knew from previous projects. When he recognized me, in a surprise, he started introducing me to the Kanamari Caciques [Chiefs] present and to Winih Kanamari. With media sovereignty in mind, I handed in one of the two recording-cameras I had to Winih and briefly explained him how to use it - Winih turning out to become an important collaborator25. The third camera I had with me, mainly for photography, was handed in to Dambá, a young Matis that participated in the movement and had previously joined another audiovisual workshop in the region. Besides the Matis (Pixi, Dambá and his brother Tumi), those engaged in the protest were Kanamari. At that time, recording a Kanamari street-protest appeared to radically diverge from the initial research project - as it was not a cinematographic workshop nor with the Matis. Attempting to form an image of the Kanamari26, I asked other indigenous people, governmental employers and locals from ATN about them, but the ‘definitions’ I encountered
22 The federal highway BR-307 is a failed project from the military dictatorship time in Brazil that has been consumed by neglect since its
construction (a couple of decades ago), in which, besides the impossibility of driving through when it rains, my main concern with the motorcycle was to follow the thin asphalt and avoid the excessive holes;
23 Wahü, his indigenous name; Igson, his registered name; and Gago, the nickname he is regionally known, became the president of the
Kanamari Indigenous Association (Coordenação Indígena Kanamari / Kanamari Indigenous Coordination - COIKA) during the protest;
24 Analimar became a friend in 2013 while I studied at UFAM-INC/BC, federal university located in Benjamin Constant, through a student
exchange program. He studies indigenous peoples, but, son of a Kanamari woman with a white father, he is also an indigenous Kanamari;
25 Winih Kanamari or Lucinho Tavares (his registered name) is a 24 years old Kanamari with 4 children (that appear at the credits in About
cameras, spirits and occupations) and became the vice-president of the Kanamari Indigenous Association. Before the protest I instructed him how to use the camera, with which he helped me to cover the protest cinematographically;
were similar to the rumors Costa (2006) identified in 2002: that the Kanamari are drunk acculturated lazy indians that didn’t plant their food anymore; the difference I heard was that, in addition, it was claimed that the cause of death of their children was the Kanamari’s lack of knowledge in feeding their children properly, who would starve to death because of malnutrition. That image was not in accordance to the experience that followed, especially when the main argument of those opposed to the occupation became relying to an ‘anthropological discourse’ about the Kanamari’s ‘cultural specificity’ – or better put, because of a lack of ‘Culture’. Such stereotypical equivocation became comprehensible – for me - when a FUNAI’s employee commented that “the Kanamari are the anarchopunks of the Javary Valley”27 – noticing that, even if acting as ‘punks’, they were the ones leading a molecular revolution (Guattari, 1984). This incongruent image, besides the fact that during the occupation – full of children - the Caciques had prohibited the temporary consumption of alcohol, is historically linked with biopolitics and necropolitics, the Kanamari’s occupation becoming moments to resist against its imposition and its power of affection.
27 I have met many so-called ‘anarcho-punks’, and even if they do seem to carry the burden of a ‘trashy’ or ‘junkie’ image, many also have
great hearts, raise families and might even – ironically enough for some – be straight edge, meaning they probably are vegan, do not consume alcohol nor any substances we ‘expect’ a punk would be ingesting;
by Ma rk us E nk , 2 01 8
An Other’s brief history
“I carry in my mind conflicts of the past, People and more people being massacred. Trying to protect their lands, They have lost their lives and their rights as well. Where’s our respect?”
(Conflitos do Passado/Conflicts of the Past – OZ Guarani)
Without properly knowing yet the reasons for the street protest throughout the city, Analimar said: “Run to that building, we are arriving where we have to go, record the Chiefs arriving
at the building”. As shown in Healthy politics for who?, when the Kanamari Chiefs arrived at
Sesai-Dsei/VJ, they began to swing the gates until its opening and, in a flash, we were all inside the building as if self-organization was orchestrated: the Chiefs got the keys of the building with the guard and took care of the organization of the movement; some Kanamari were chanting and dancing while circulating the building; the women were chanting and facing the male Kanamari that were aligned with their spears inside the building; the urban Kanamari leaders, as Wahü and Analimar, had started to gather signatures of the indigenous participants in order to release an official letter in the name of the Kanamari movement; Winih and I recording these moments.
The Kanamari occupation was the highest moment of equivocations during the stay in ATN and, even the occupation lasting 19 days, the whole research context radically changed. The occupation and its consequences required moments for solitude, i.e. to make practical decisions. In these reflexive moments, gaps between the Kanamari occupation and the Matis, lead me to realize the engagement of my participation, but also that I would have to constantly ‘update’ epistemologies in order to take seriously the native’s thought (Viveiros de Castro, 2002). As Shapu criticized anthropologists, revealing also his own and his father’s anthropological interest in anthropologists, the doubts about my role in the field entangled our forms of anthropologies:
S: “… my father taught [anthropologist] a lot of things – there never lacked anything. My father taught [anthropologist] to hunt, to build a blowpipe, build bow and arrow, to fish and hunt, to drink tatxik, to tell stories, he used to dance [with anthropologist]. My people used to like [anthropologist], to play with [anthropologist], to dance with
[anthropologist] – [anthropologist] even used to stay naked, without anything, in the time that we used to live that.
So, a friend of my father… for me, as an indigenous person, just as my father had his own interest in [anthropologist], but, until now, my feeling is that it didn’t help to have anything.”
M: “…I didn’t understand” [obviously I didn’t understand, as I
wasn’t expecting nor prepared for such critique]
S: “My feeling is that, just like [anthropologist] learned my knowledge, [anthropologist] didn’t show [anthropologist’s] knowledge, how the nawa [white people] live, how the nawa study… (Shapu Mëo Matis, 06th February 2018)
Besides caressing a reverse anthropology (see Wagner, 1981), the engagement in taking seriously the indigenous thought prompted the factual deconstruction of the Kanamari’s stereotype. The Kanamari are newcomers at the Javary Valley, a region where the Panoan groups maintained their singularity, their territorial cohesion and cultural homogeneity, such singularity marking their cultural distinction (Erikson, 1992). The relation between the Pano groups and the Kanamari, at the time living in the Juruá river region, used to be solely for warfare (Costa, 2006). In the Javary Valley, the Kanamari could be considered as a ‘Panoan Other’, as alterity is what determines the Other’s place, in which the Other of the Other is also an Other (Viveiros de Castro’s, 2015).
A brief history of biopower applied to the Kanamari is registered in the Javary Valley since 1930, as when, according to Costa (2006), engaged with the rubber exploitation28 they started migrating to the Itaquaí River. Characterized as living in the middle of white people, they were not recognized as indigenous people, the situation only changing in 1972-3 with the inauguration of FUNAI’s subpost Massapê in the Itaquaí river. Launching a project to remove non-indigenous peoples from the region, FUNAI aided in the payment of the Kanamari’s debt to rubber exploiters and in the installation of a commercial trade with FUNAI - the Kanamari being instructed to avoid the commercialization of rubber and wood with white people. With a 5-days route by motor-boat to arrive in ATN and the deactivation
28 The engagement of any indigenous peoples with the rubber exploitation requires a recognition that ‘exploitation’ is reflexively related to
of the Massapê subpost’s in 1975, the difficulty to access globalized commodities lead them to migrate into the Javary Valley, nearby the Marubo subpost, but FUNAI enforced their return to the upper parts of the Itaquaí river, concentrating the Kanamari in that area. This created internal tensions for the Kanamari, only alleviated when the Front of Ethno-environmental Protection of the Javary Valley (FPEVJ) was inaugurated in 1996 and their sub-groups were able to disperse into villages that communicate through distance, mimicking the social configuration from the Juruá river. In 2001, with the homologation of the Javary Valley as an official indigenous land, the removal of the remaining non-indigenous peoples was completed (Costa, 2006; 2012).
New to ATN’s different institutions, as the municipality and its departments, the hospital and its nurses, science and its anthropologists, the Kanamari lately learned about the existence of CIVAJA – the Indigenous Council of Javary Valley, historically presided by the indigenous Marubo. After constant migration and marginalization, the Kanamari’s stereotypical image was, according to Costa (2006), reinforced by local newspapers and organization that worked with them (governmental and non-governmental), but also by other indigenous groups involved in the local and national indigenous politics.
The Kanamari’s occupation, a breakthrough of this stereotype, was grounded in the ongoing deaths of their children and started to change their image in the region29. They protested for an indigenization of the medical institution, in order to reaffirm their right for a differentiated health practice that takes seriously their physical and metaphysical existence - as promulgated by the Constitution of 1988. Instead of incapables, by proving their difference they were protesting against the instauration of a late-colonial necropolitical state30; against the definition of who is disposable and who is not (Mbembe, 2003); against local hospital doctors who deny authorization to remove high-risk patients from their villages; against indigenous peoples being neglected when SESAI’s travel expenses, i.e. gasoline, had been reached. They were protesting as a society against the present form of State and its institutions (Clastres, 2014, 2015). Yet, the indigenous healthcare problems were, as shown in the Matis’ epidemiological history, ironically put into operation by the same institution that they claimed for improvements - a process wisely summarized in Reassemblage (Min-ha, 1982): “first create needs, then offer help”. In the case of the Javary Valley, and when the
29 Change their image by the way they managed to organize themselves, to contact lawyers and the Public Ministry, to document every step
of their actions and juridical process – something acculturated drunk Indians probably wouldn’t have the agency to do…
30 In which Mbembe (2003) states the most accomplished form of combination among disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical power,
with its technologies of destruction and war machines ready to ambush any attempt of people leaving their in-between state of living dead, is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.
biopolitical strategy is transformed into a politics of death, the institution’s neglect creates the need to occupy a space to resist such transformation.
by Ma rk us E nk , 2 01 8
About my white visual anthropologist’s agency
“After all, we are what we do to change what we are”
(El Libro de los Abrazos/The Book of Embraces - Eduardo Galeano)
While at the main-table from the occupied building together with the Kanamari leaders, relying on spontaneous translations or on a language that I could caress only the Portuguese mixed in it, my opinion seemed to be continuously valorized and asked for, bringing inspections through their silence before my answers. Frightened by the sudden authority given to my voice while painted Kanamari Chiefs looked at me, led to a thoughtful hurricane about what it was that the Kanamari expected to hear - or, differently put, what sort of reverse anthropology (Wagner, 1981) was in process.
As if I was simultaneously being researched, the answers provided by this external white actor might have acted as a sample for their survey, or used in order to mimic it into their speeches or other metaphysical cannibalism. Without an answer to such reflections, the Caciques kept requesting my opinion, as when a disavowal letter was released by SESAI’s Coordinator at the third day of occupation, moment in which their movement started to be taken seriously. I told them, as a pseudo-revolutionary, that their political protest was against the neglecting of indigenous healthcare for the whole Javary Valley and, if managing to include the claims of other indigenous peoples into their own ethnic claims, they shouldn’t be worried with accusations or threats done by any institution - required support would come, as with the local NGOs (the Indigenous Missionary Council – CIMI - and the Indigenist Work Center – CTI) and also by the mimetic machineries me and Winih were using.
Where did mimesis begin or ended in this alteric relation?31 The reflection upon the question “who is mimicking whom?” (Taussig, 1993, p.76) lead me to conclude that the Kanamari were engaged in imitating an anthropological posture and its embodied mimetic skills (as participative-observation methodologies), amid my attempt of mimicking ‘Kanamariness’ to improve communication and comprehension. Following such thought, the Kanamari were reversely attempting to acquire the mimetic power of a researcher to caress the perspective of
31 To emphasize, there is no claim of any power of influence over their choices, nor maneuver for the benefit of my research – after the
above said opinion, the echoed vacuum of the room was occupied by that unique language, in which I had to rely on observing faces between approval and discontent, as no direct response to what was said happened.
an Other32, so that the mimetic power of the camera could make their Others relate better to their cause – their Other potentially our Self.
Such questions will remain unanswered, as similarly to cinema and magic, they are rated by their effect, “repetition, arbitrariness, movement and tacticle apperception”, instead of their descriptive contemplation (Moore, 1997, p.2). Feelings of responsibility rose by being a researcher, being a Kanamari’s interiorized Other, being the one holding such powerful magical technology that produces mimetic images - globalized culture’s most “effective fetish” (Moore, 1997, p.1) as a transporting device to other times and spaces. Basically, a situation of equivocation, willing to hand in the agency of image-producing to the collaborators in order to their autonomous production and circulation of representation, while expected to behold my agency as a white visual anthropologist to record their occupation. Although the recordings happened in moments of collective construction based upon self-organization in which the Kanamari proved to be professors in an extremely practical way regarding how to participate with a camera in a situation of resistance from inside… they were also probably expecting to enter “the world ‘stage’ and thus benefit from its perceived resources” (Westmoreland, 2005, p. 59). The expectation of the effects of my recordings were always present, as if political mimesis and its power to affect was the goal of internalizing their Other’s white image-producer.33 In the day we occupied SESAI, two videos were collectively edited through the white walls with the institution’s projector that, when finished exporting the file, they were handed to Kora Kanamari, an urban Kanamari leader who had participated in international conferences to bring awareness about the situation in the Javary Valley. He also affirmed that even the United States of America would see what was happening in ATN, being aware of the power of the image and with a:
“shifting desire by ethnographic subjects for an intentional and motivated relationship with the documentary film genre. Unlike indigenous self-representation, ethnographic film in the hands of Western anthropologist may actually be desired by subjects who wish to deliver their inscribed message to a place they may not be able to access otherwise” (Westmoreland, 2005, p.61)
32 In the specific case, my Self potentially as a representation of our collective Self
33 As I was insecure with the usage of the camera and, reversely, the Kanamari were asking me if what they were doing was good enough
and searching for my cinematographic approval, the moments of recording that didn’t follow a spontaneous approach, slightly observational, could be characterized as having short practical talks before turning the camera on, englobing topics such as the best angles to record, the effect of the light in the environment, and if all the elders were appearing in the shots.
Although the Kanamari Caciques assured me that the videos were helping their movement and that my presence and work was of great aid to them, I am not aware where to the files have been sent. I felt as the only non-indigenous authorized to freely enter, participate in the meetings and to speak out my opinion, a feeling ensured by Wahü’s response when I asked him about the value of the camera and if “it made something happen that wouldn’t be possible to happen without it”:
“Yes, the media, the camera, to record things, to register things, everything that happened, was of great quality and helped us. It made things flow. It recorded and made the propagation, and this gave us more power – in the media level, in the level of television, of radio. Brasilia started to communicate with us through radio. We had even interviews with a radio from Brasilia. So, when it was recorded and thrown to national level, we got much more power. The whole Brazil, the whole world saw that what was happening was real. It was of great usage the image. The television.” (Wahü Kanamari, 13/03/2018)
While participating in the occupation, I continued to share my photography, recording and editing knowledge with Winih, and we even made a temporary photography exhibition about the occupation’s daily meals34. In moments of solitude, the over-balance of participation over observation and the co-creation of my research context35 lead me to reflect about some differences in anthropological methodology. Equivocations among participant-observation [or observant-participation?], ethnography and anthropology lead me to agree with Ingold (2014; 2017) when affirming that participant-observation and ethnography aren’t equivalent nor are automatically bounded.
For Ingold (2014), participant-observation would be characterized by an educational process and transformational learning that merges the activities lived alongside with people and things (to participate) with the watching, listening and feeling about and around the context (to observe). Distinctively, Ingold (2017) argues that ethnography would be the art of writing – equivalent to editing in the cinematographic realm - about how people used to live, dedicated to document empirical particularities and converting the learnings, remembering
34 Unfortunately, its (audio)visual register was lost because of the local epidemic amount of virus in SD cards and computers; 35 Including the expectations to the Matis cinematographic workshop that hadn’t happened yet…
and note-taking into a judgment. The fundamental difference, therefore, is that ethnography is not a method per si (Ingold, 2014; 2017).
The becoming of ethnography to anthropology - just as inert images that moving become a film - is similar to the appearance of dialectical images, in Moore’s words, the “use of the power of the commodity fetish (which he [Walter Benjamin] considered inexhaustible), to create immediate […], archaic […], transformative […] images….” (1997, p.248). Dialectical images, with the possibility to bypass the audience’s conscious cognition by providing a mirror to the Other’s “primitiveness”, provide a moment of radical encounter that implies a lack, and projects “one’s own fears onto unknown cultures” in order to use the power of commodity fetish against itself (Moore, 1997, p.11). Ethnography (as commodities) might become anthropology (the fetish with a potential of refetishizing itself) in order to create such dialectical images; but ethnography isn’t a synonym to anthropology. Cinema (as well as anthropology) might enable the curative potential of film images, in contraposition to the descriptive and objectified image that does not entail such potential (as well as ethnography). The objectified images that compose cinema into a ‘ritual cure’ through the mimetic faculty (see Moore, 1997) aren’t, however, any gathering and/or agglomeration of images, nor are they equivalent to any specific form of cinema; their curative potentials are evaluated by their political mimesis’ (Gaines, 1999) power to occupy bodies with the images’ presence in order to produce actions. In other words, one of the goals of making cinema politically - as well as making anthropology politically – would be to produce affections, instead of mere contemplation of the mimetic power of description.
Although ethnographies aren’t necessarily a prelude for anthropology (Ingold, 2014), their sum might produce a mimetic excess that we may name as anthropology. When not in the form of a colonial imposition of ‘wildness’ into the Primitive-Other, nor functioning to domesticate and/or repress and/or silence, the mimetic faculty and the ethnographies, with their self-awareness potentiated by the mimetic machinery, enable the power to “become any Other and engage the image with the reality thus imagined”, where the “Self is no longer as clearly separable from its Alter” (1993, p. 254). The mimetic excess provides opportunities to “live subjunctively as neither subject nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time”, in opposition to fascist organizations of the mimesis of mimesis - destructive forces of the mimetic faculty (Taussig, 1993, p.255). It is such excess that anthropology could aim in attempting to make appear dialectical images, in which, participative-observation, this art of living life with others in which the past is “attuned to the conditions of the present and
speculatively open to the possibilities of the future” (Ingold, 2014, p.390), becomes a methodological condition for anthropology.
The way how indigenous societies are organized against the instauration of the State (Clastres, 2014; 2015), with their political control over economy36 and their social control over the political37 to neutralize political authority and constrains tendencies of converting “power, wealth and prestige into coercion, inequality and exploitation”, is similar to an immunological system (Vivieros de Castro, afterwords, in Clastres, 2014, p.306). Indigenous societies could be, therefore, immunological systems that act against the repressed organization of the mimetic faculty - that is, against emotional plague (see Reich, 1972). Against any attempt of destroying power itself, Clastres (2014; 2015) explains how such societies imprison power in a web of powerless relations, instigating the usage of nature’s power to create a second nature.
But, besides the image of the commodity’s fetish turning against the commodity and its alienating process; or of the image’s fetish against fetish itself as a suicidal martyr; another image is that of when institutions and their colonial powers - as the authority of academia and anthropology - are used against colonialism itself or their actualized necropolitics. Dialectical images, the collective expression of an object/subject mélange represented to awaken the optic unconscious in a shocking flash (see Walter Benjamin in Taussig, 1993 and Moore, 1997; Pensky, 2004), are probably similar to the sensation of coming to do an anthropological research, but receiving from the collaborators mainly critiques about anthropology. Or even, similar to the expectation of elaborating an indigenous media sovereignty project, juxtaposed to the acknowledgment that, possibly, the Kanamari knew that the “camera in the hand of a Westerner had the power to deliver the […] message farther than their indigenous media […] accompanied by the hope of having the final product broadcast in Discovery or a channel like that” (Westmoreland, 2005, p.61). Requesting a white visual anthropologist through a phone call, expecting his cinema’s to generate political mimesis (Gaines, 1999), is, at least, trusting in the anthropologist’s engagement with the mimetic process of copying reality, transforming it and, therefore, affecting it to disturb the organization of the sensible. Becoming a political actor, to sum up, is related to the image of the artist as the role-model for engaged anthropologists (Schneider and Wright, 2006), art possibly being anthropology’s connection to aesthetics and with disturbing the sensible.
36 A regime of sufficient subproduction, a blockage of accumulation through forced redistribution or ritual dilapidation (Vivieros de Castro, afterwords, in Clastres, 2014, p.306);
37
The separation between leadership and power, the warrior’s submission to glory’s suicidal imperative (Vivieros de Castro, afterwords, in Clastres, 2014, p.306); by Ma rk us E nk , 2 01 8
A possible dialectical image of anthropology
“Fed lies from the school system Misinterpret Thanksgiving, teach history like it's fiction What's written ain't fact We take down these flags, raise an eagle staff”
(Warrior – Nataani Means)
During the Kanamari occupation, gossip about the reason of the occupation spread around the city, specially after the disavowal letter of SESAI’s Coordinator, an indigenous Marubo that was probably also concerned with his image in the local political arena38. In this letter, he claimed that the Kanamari were being politically manipulated39 and that the other ethnic groups (from the Pano languages) were not favorable to the movement. He also listed problems he had to face during his mandate, as the burning of water boxes - but the majority didn’t have direct relation to the Kanamari nor their occupation.
The occupation, an equivocated situation, brought other ethnic groups to descend from their villages to ATN40 in order to comprehend the reasons of SESAI’s occupation and the paralysis of its administrative activities, even if emergency situations hadn’t stopped41. The occupation brought the Matis’ darasibo (elder wise men) and matxó (elder wise women) involved in the local political scene and created an opportunity to negotiate the cinematographic workshop with them, although it also made visible equivocations between their image on professional filmmakers against my own anthropological filmmaking identity. Why would someone offer a cinema workshop as a research project?
The Matis, following a temporal conceptualization in which films are eternal in opposition to the intermittent payments for their image (Erikson, 2011), enhanced the equivocation among the fact that I wouldn’t offer money transactions nor donations42. The ethnic difference between the Panoan group and the Kanamari also played a role for the disparity of my image
38 Although, for the purpose of this paper and to avoid discussions about inter-ethnic conflicts in the Javary Valley, his role is analyzed as a
State’s representative, instead of his ethnic group;
39 The accusation was that participants of the movement, as Analimar Kanamari, were protesting only to get a job (or recover their jobs) in
the institution. According to some nurses I had spoken to and Analimar himself, Analimar had been hired by the institution to make an anthropological report in order to understand better the situation of malnutrition among the Kanamari, but he had had malaria during his visit in the villages and had to return to Atalaia do Norte. Malaria is a common disease at the region, but they decided to fire him, and he wouldn’t receive a salary while in treatment;
40 Bringing to resurgence the Kulina Pano in a Javary Valley’s political movement, by the presence and participation of Pedro Kulina -
another ‘forgotten’ indigenous group that has been practically wiped out by the Mayoruna (see Anonby and Holbrook, 2010);
41 Emergency situations, such of the removal of high-risk patients and the delivery of medication to the villages in the Javary Valley, hadn’t
stopped during the occupation, i.e. SESAI’s nurse Leonardo was authorized to enter the building for these affairs.
42 Nor equipment or night stays in hotels. For instance, translating the darasibo, the younger Matis informed me that the previous
filmmakers were able to provide them with boats, equipment or even enough money to buy the building hosting AIMA, material returns I was not even able to take in consideration.
as an (amateur) filmmaker, effecting me, the Kanamari and the Matis, as my body had been painted, had participated, and I was involved with the Kanamari’s movement. When asked by another anthropologist “are you an anthropologist of the Matis or the Kanamari? If you are here for the Matis, why are you painted as a Kanamari?”, made the trust conflict evident43. Disappointing the imagetic expectations of the Matis’ image for professional filmmakers lead me to conclude that the magical effects of my image-producing processes would also not be achieved (Taussig, 1993), and that I represented something else: or a doubtful awkwardness containing possible beneficial, neutral or harmful effects; or an image that produces only minor magical effects.
Not only my filmmaking project brought discussions among the darasibo and the matxó, but also the incorporated ethnographic posture when observing, taking notes, attempting to draw, and checking the Matis-Portuguese dictionary. The Matis were affirming by their posture, as Erikson pointed out, their anger towards the nawa, not only because of their epidemiological history, but also because of their attraction with projects at the cost of infections with diseases, an existential debt towards their dead that not even “thousands of machetes” would pay (2011, p. 108). My image embodying their oppressive history prompted critiques towards anthropology, visible in Starring a reflexive camera, as when they requested me to read articles and books about them, affirming that part of the information contained was wrong and that anthropologists aren’t trustworthy people, because they do not become friends and always leave. At the same time, the Matis were enthusiastic for watching documentaries through my computer, although they disliked most of the nawa movies and always asked for more indigenous documentaries, specially from the Xingu region. Our documentary afternoons became based upon Videos nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages)44, but also other audiovisual project with Amerindians, as Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922) and Belo
Monte: Announcements of War (D’Elia, 2012).
With the critiques intensifying doubts concerning how to represent the Matis in an adequate way that captured our lived experiences (see representational crisis, in Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2007), or simply to correspond, respect and take seriously their thought; these equivocations, at the other hand, also enabled the realization of an intersubjective process, founded of objectivity and language and considered to be the medium
43 Questioning with who my commitment was even raised a doubt if I should be ‘bodily’ supporting the Kanamari occupation as I
previously was. Finally, I decided not to be further painted, which, inversely, made some Kanamari leaders doubt of my loyalty and trust within their movement. But, I do believe this trust issue was partly solved after the magical effects the produced images brought, and I hope to become fully regenerated with the completion of this Master Thesis, both the documentary and this paper.
