Rainforest Wraith: Reading David Foster Wallace in the Amazon

David Foster Wallace is probably not the best literary companion for fieldwork in the Amazon. And I’m not just talking about the brick-like girth and serious heft of Infinite Jest. I checked it out of a public library before purchasing and decided I’d be better off, given exotic travel considerations, with the eBook, which I bought and downloaded to my iPod for an expedition among the Kayapó of southern Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. 

Even on the tiny illuminated screen of this wafer-thin device, totaling 7780 bite-sized pages turbocharged for efficiency with searchable text and hyperlinks among wormhole-like footnotes-within-footnotes, Infinite Jest makes for heavy reading. 

It is especially incongruous bedtime fare after a day of tropical heat and colorful festivities in a native village. On the one hand, indigenous societies like the Kayapó, with their powerful sense of group identity and collective purpose reinforced through spectacular public ceremonies, would appear immune to -- even an antidote to -- the kind of mental, electronic and pharmaceutical "cages" that are central to Infinite Jest. And yet as the Kayapó and other indigenous peoples become increasingly connected to global society and dependent on Western technology, one wonders how far off the addictions of modernity really are. 

During several passages of the book I felt physically ill and had to put the device away: the claustrophobic screen and jarring cultural dislocation only intensified my queasy response to the manically unspooling language. But I got hooked on the double binds and dizzying plot spirals, the tragicomic pathos of Wallace’s characters and a tantalizing if mercilessly denied promise of narrative resolution. I just had to find out whether the wheelchair-bound Canadian terrorists succeed in weaponizing a fatally addictive "Entertainment" cartridge, and how bad a DMZ trip Hal is in for. (Spoiler alert: Oh well...)

And so on the last day of March, I dismissed myself from the nocturnal orations of Kayapó chiefs and immersed myself in the tent for an hours-long slog. I finally collapsed in frustrated exhaustion only to be visited, Scrooge-like, by my tormentor’s ghost: 

"Last night certainly less than princess-level sleeping conditions contributed to a spectacular suite of dreams not to mention the fact that I slept nearly 12 hrs. In the first part I ran into some professors, maybe Nancy S. or Beth C. or David A. I saw them talking w/ a shadowy personage they called ‘Dave’ who kept reappearing throughout the dream just out of my reach. I couldn’t figure out whether this was Dave Eggers or whether it was the ghost of David F. Wallace. When the profs told me they had been speaking w/Dave, I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? He’s one of my favorite writers!’

"But I discovered that he had left behind a singular kind of basket or bag, triangular in shape w/ a very narrow opening [and according to the sketch in my journal, a loop-like double handle], at first it didn’t seem to open at all. The womb-like format was not lost on me even in the dream state. Inside were scraps of paper on which Dave had outlined a new novel or rather a revolutionary new novelistic technique which included a chorus-like precocious annunciation of themes that allowed the author to assert an authorial voice without losing himself in mirror-like self-reflection. There were further plot details that now escape. The name for this revolutionary new DFW/DE technique was, of all things, menire, which means ‘girls’ in Kayapó!” 

After jotting down these hasty notes the next morning I realized it was April Fools’: I guess the Jest was on me. 

  ---

In Memoriam:

 February 21st, 2013 would have been David Foster Wallace's 51st birthday.


See also: "Infinite Grace: An interview with Caetano W. Galindo on his translation of 'Infinite Jest' into Brazilian Portuguese"

Previous post, January 27, 2013:
"The Sound of No Salinger" 
Remembering J.D. Salinger three years after his death

The Sound of No Salinger

I looked up from the book, saw the Fat Lady, and found Enlightenment.

I was sitting in a warm café near Lincoln Park over bagels and coffee, bracing myself for the blizzard outside. It was January in Chicago and I was spending the month at the Field Museum to identify a batch of plant specimens from the Peruvian Amazon. No tropical flower could have suffered as much from the contrast in climate as I did. The Museum opened at 9 and closed at 6 and I had plenty of time to kill. For no particular reason, I decided to read all of J.D. Salinger’s books in roughly the order they were written. It doesn’t take long: he published remarkably little.

Isolated, focused, almost monastic, I spent those weeks moving between the luminous vault of the herbarium, the urban tundra of Chicago’s lakefront, and the dense world of Salinger’s fiction. That morning in the café I had just finished Franny and Zooey. In the final pages, Zooey Glass is on the phone with his sister Franny, remembering a conversation with their brilliant deceased brother, Seymour. 

In their youth, Zooey had complained about having to shine his shoes before performing with Seymour for a radio audience of “morons” he couldn’t even see, to which Seymour replied, “Shine them anyway…for the Fat Lady.” Zooey concludes his long, cathartic conversation with Franny, “Don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself,” and Franny goes into a state of ecstasy. 

And, so—when I closed the book and looked up to find myself facing the Fat Lady—did I. 

She was sitting at the next table with manic hair, her bulk magnified by layers of dank clothes and surrounded by shopping bags full, not of purchases, but possessions: in short, a “bag lady.” And yet her sparkling eyes and bright smile gave her the air of a fairy godmother who had fallen on hard times in this disenchanted modern world. She had asked me a question, but absorbed in my reading I hadn’t heard. Surprised by the curious coincidence, and moved by a swell of compassion in the afterglow of Salinger’s art, I went to her table and struck up a long conversation and eventually paid for her coffee, though she didn’t ask me to.

Finally she was gone, and as I walked through the icy streets on my way to the museum, hardly feeling the sting of the wind, I was overcome by an indescribable feeling of grace and warmth and fulfillment that lasted most of the day. It was as if some key had turned in a lock deep in my soul. I felt whole, enveloped in truth and mystery: At One. The saint-like apparition of the Fat Lady had sparked the experience, but it was the intense, cloistered reading of Salinger that had primed me.

In the weeks that followed, I read more about Salinger's life and work searching for clues as to what quality of his art had inspired such a profound reaction in me. His avid involvement with Zen Buddhism and other religions is mentioned by most critics. Gerald Rosen, in Zen in the Art of J.D. Salinger[1], reads Franny and Zooey as a modern Zen tale. But I was disappointed to find that most commentators writing at the time, and even more so since his death, have focused less on his unique literary style and more on his reclusive life, cantankerous privacy lawsuits and a trail of broken relationships. In a culture obsessed with fame, Salinger was a finger in the eye of the literary establishment, and his silence was taken as a snub.

What I find most striking in Salinger’s writing is precisely his use of silence, or 'negative space'. He signals this aesthetic in the epigraph to the Nine Stories, a Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping.[2] In most of these stories and subsequent work, the central events or characters are egregiously absent from the pages: Seymour’s suicide, only alluded to in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”; Seymour himself, always just beyond the frame of the Glass family novellas; the unspeakable wartime experiences left unspoken in the epistolic conclusion to “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor”; Ramona’s invisible friend Jimmy Jimmerino in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” and the parallel phantom of her mother’s lost wartime love; and the scandalously elliptical conclusion to the ninth story, "Teddy," in which a precocious, perhaps divinely gifted child may fall to his death as he himself appears to predict earlier in the story.

   
Much like the unmentioned abortion that lies at the center of Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants” (Salinger admired Hemingway and arranged to meet him while serving in Europe in WWII), Salinger’s characters obsessively skirt around the central facts of their lives, leaving a gaping chasm whose edges are sketched in but whose essence remains elusive, perhaps unknowable, and yet all the more powerful. Salinger’s ultimate application of this art to his own life was his complete withdrawal from the public eye between 1965, when his final published story appeared, and his death in 2010.

A prominent example of negative space in the visual arts is the optical illusion known as Rubin’s vase. The white vase is surrounded by a black background that suddenly morphs into a pair of black faces silhouetted against a white background where the vase used to be. The visual confusion caused by such 'figure-ground reversal' creates a disturbing oscillation as the eye alternately accepts and rejects two contradictory possibilities, forcing the viewer to step outside seeing and consider the paradox of sight itself.

Alan Watts describes a similar cognitive effect of Zen meditation: “The method of Zen is to baffle, excite puzzle and exhaust the intellect.”[3] In Salinger’s writing, a similar method is at work, a constant tension between the narrative 'field' and the unseen, unmentioned 'ground' that nonetheless impinges: the sound of one hand clapping.

I believe that this "baffling, exciting, exhausting" oscillation between seen and unseen, field and ground, presence and absence—which resolved itself in the cathartic finale to Franny and Zooey and in my own chance encounter in Chicago—took me briefly outside the bounded limits of self and opened me to a deeply fulfilling moment of aesthetic rapture.

I can’t claim to have attained lasting Enlightenment, but the singular experience of grace that pulsed through my being on that day remains precious in my memory fifteen years later.

In his last published novella, Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger writes, "All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." Today, on the third anniversary of Jerome David Salinger’s death, I reflect on his unique body of work and express my gratitude for one little piece of Holy Ground that he and the Fat Lady gave me. 

---

[1] Rosen, Gerald (1977) Zen in the Art of J.D. Salinger. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co.
[2] One of the more ridiculous interpretations of this koan is related by Ron Rosenbaum, who in his jilted, indignant 1997 profile for Esquire claims to have stood at Salinger's driveway in New Hampshire waving one hand in front of his face—like Muriel drying her nails in the story "...Bananafish"—as the elusive author drove past.
[3] Watts, Alan (1960) The Spirit of Zen. New York: Grove Press, p. 19.

Photos sources:  Esquire, The New Yorker, Wikipedia.

Shipwrecked: The sorry state of development in the lower Urubamba

The shipwrecked hospital boat at the mouth of the Camisea River is an apt metaphor for the sorry state of social development in indigenous communities of the lower Urubamba impacted by the Camisea Gas project in southern Peru.  

A $150,000 hospital boat shipwrecked at the mouth of the Camisea River.

Donated at a  cost of $150,000 by PetroBras as part of its negotiations with native communities, the boat was supposed to serve as a fully equipped aquatic hospital and ambulance.  Instead, due to poor coordination between the company, the Peruvian Health Ministry and the community, the boat lies on its side filled with silt like a beached whale: an expensive eyesore, a dangerous jungle-gym for native children playing by the river, and a reminder of where good intentions can lead.

The Camisea region is home to a great diversity of indigenous peoples including the Matsigenka, Piro, Ashaninka, Nahua, Nanti and perhaps others, some of whom remain in isolation to this day.  With 25 years of experience working among the Matsigenka and other native groups in the region, I was called on to take part in an independent advisory panel set up by the Import-Export Bank of the United States as a condition of their loan to Hunt Oil for building a pipeline that brings Camisea gas to the Pacific coast of Peru for export. My preliminary analysis of the situation of social development in the Lower Urubamba has now been published in the most recent report of the South Peru Panel.  The report also includes analysis by other panel members of Peru's energy matrix, environmental impact assessments and community-based monitoring of mining and hydrocarbon projects. 

In this posting I summarize the results of my contribution to the report based on field research in ten indigenous communities in the lower Urubamba.  During the two-week visit, carried out in November-December of 2011, I interviewed community members and leaders about their perceptions of the changes brought about Camisea Gas development.  One indigenous federation leader summed up the situation in this way:

What is happening in the lower Urubamba isn’t development.  It’s confusion.  Everyone has their chain saw, their boat motor, their zinc roof… The rivers are contaminated, the young people who have jobs don’t plant crops… People have money but malnutrition and illiteracy are on the rise.  There is no food, just cans of tuna.  When there’s no tuna, there’s always beer.

Between the Cross and the Pleiades: Missionaries, museums and a Baniwa shaman's heritage

"Right there in that deep pool," she pointed a weathered brown hand across the sand towards a bend in the river.  "That's where she told him to dump it."  She counted the items out on her fingers, "Virola snuff, a snake's head, a jaguar tooth, an earth-spirit crystal, yopo snuff.  All of his shaman's instruments.  Sophie made him do it."

Baniwa shamans use crystals and other magical materials to enter the spirit world and transform into various beings.

Ana, a septuagenarian Cubeo woman from Colombia now living among the Baniwa people in Brazil, describes how an American Protestant missionary named Sophie Muller convinced her uncle (now long deceased) to throw his shamanistic paraphernalia into the river and convert to Christianity in the 1950s.  Shamans of the northwest Amazon use hallucinogenic snuffs and other psychoactive plants to enter the spirit world, employing various minerals, animal parts and other magical materials during trance to transform into different animals and spirit beings[1].

"And he regretted it, too.  Says he wished he had thrown his instruments in the woods, so he could go back and get them later.  But at the bottom of the river!  He was finished.  He was the last one."

"All of his shaman's instruments. Sophie made him do it...  At the bottom of the river! He was finished."

I met Ana on a recent trip to the Içana and Ayari Rivers, tributaries of the Upper Rio Negro in the northwest Brazilian Amazon.  Concluding a three-year long project of exchange between the Goeldi Museum and several indigenous peoples, I traveled to the Upper Rio Negro carrying digital photographs of ethnographic objects collected in the region over a hundred years ago and deposited in museums in Brazil and Europe by German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg[2].
  

Putting the Reich back in Reichel-Dolmatoff: Nazi past of legendary Colombian anthropologist revealed

While delving into Colombia's rich indigenous heritage, the acclaimed Austrian-born anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff may also have been hiding his own Nazi past. 
 

A tireless fieldworker and scholar, Reichel-Dolmatoff carried out research throughout Colombia's diverse geographical and cultural regions. He founded Colombia's first department of anthropology and made contributions in all fields of the discipline, including archeology.  His ground-breaking research and prolific writings spanning nearly six decades inspired multiple generations of anthropologists in Colombia and throughout the world, including myself.

In the Spring of 1986, archeologist Anna Roosevelt, then at the Bronx Museum of the American Indian, lent me her copy of Reichel-Dolmatoff's Amazonian Cosmos[1] and changed my life.  At the time I was a a pre-med student at college but found myself increasingly drawn to foreign languages, folk medicine and ethnobotany.  After reading Reichel-Dolmatoff's brilliant study of mythology and shamanism among the Tukano people of the Vaupes river I became set on working in the Amazon.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, born Erasmus Gerhard Reichel in Austria in 1912, emigrated in 1939 to Colombia where he pursued anthropological research on diverse indigenous groups including the Guahibo, Kogi, Kuna and Tukano.  His work in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta resulted in the classic ethnography on the Kogi people[2] as well as important archeological discoveries[3].  He was best known for his work on Tukano shamanism, pointing out the role of ecological concepts in indigenous cosmology[4] and highlighting the significance of the hallucinogenic vine yagé (ayahuasca)[5].  He also made pioneering contributions to the archeology of the Amazonian lowlands[6].

Considered the "father of Colombian anthroplogy," Reichel-Dolmatoff published 33 books and hundreds of scientific articles, crowning his career with prestigious visiting positions at Cambridge and UCLA beginning in the 1970s.  In 1975, he received the Thomas H. Huxley medal from the British Royal Anthropological Institute.

He was admired by students and colleagues as much for his erudition and meticulous scholarship as for his generosity and humanism.  He died in 1994 at the age of 82.  In 2012, the Colombian anthropological community was prepared to celebrate his centennial with accolades.

At an anthropological conference in Vienna this July, however, Colombian anthropologist Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo presented disturbing evidence concerning Reichel-Dolmatoff's Nazi past.  According to documents he uncovered in German federal archives, Erasmus Gerhard Reichel was a member of the SS, participated in Hitler's murderous "Night of Long Knives" in 1934 and served as a guard in the notorious Dachau concentration camp in 1935.

A Nazi party notice seeking Erasmus Gerhard Reichel in 1937 after he had left Germany. 
(Image source: Bogotá Blog)

Rainforest Crunch: Origins of the Brazil nut in ancient Amazonia (Bertholletia excelsa)

If you still miss "Rainforest Crunch" ice cream, you can finally rest assured that Amazonian Indians really were behind all those Brazil nuts in the recipe, only not in quite the way that Ben & Jerry's had advertised.

The stately Brazil nut tree appears to have been managed
and perhaps cultivated by ancient Amazonian peoples.

Recent scientific studies show that Brazil nut groves have been managed, facilitated and probably spread throughout the Amazon by indigenous peoples since before European conquest. As highlighted in this month's issue of the Brazilian science news magazine, Revista FAPESP, "the human factor" has played an important role in shaping this emblematic rainforest landscape.

Brazil's Original Sin: New film declares war on Belo Monte dam

Brazilian film maker André D'Elia has declared war on the controversial hydroelectric dam along the Xingu river in the new film "Belo Monte: Anúncio de uma Guerra."

The 104 minute film premiered at a free public showing in São Paulo on June 17 -- timed to coincide with the "Rio +20" Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro -- and was immediately released for free viewing on Vimeo. An English translation was posted on YouTube last week.

The production team took advantage of the new landscape of online social media, funding the project entirely through web-based contributions by 3429 donors totaling over 140,000 Brazilian reais (about $78,000) and distributing the film freely on the internet.

Belo Monte: A Declaration of War
Photo source: Belo Monte film FaceBook page

The film is built around a series of interviews with indigenous leaders, non-indigenous Xingu inhabitants, NGO representatives, writers and representatives of the Brazilian government including ombudsmen, politicians and FUNAI Indian Agency employees.  

If Raoni -- a charismatic Kayapó leader who has led the protest movement against Belo Monte since the 1980s -- is the film's hero, its villain is Nicias Ribeiro, the smooth-talking Special Secretary for Mines and Energy of Pará state.

What the film lacks in subtlety and depth, it makes up for in breadth and urgency.

One of the most intriguing interviews in the film is with anthropologist Marcio Meira, who was president of Brazil's Indian Agency, FUNAI, from 2007-2012. Portrayed in the film as a Faustian figure, Meira provides a surprisingly candid assessment of the historical context surrounding Belo Monte.

He characterizes the colonization of the Amazon, and the concomitant conquest of its indigenous inhabitants, as Brazil's "original sin." And he appears to acknowledge -- whether in irony or resignation -- the role of FUNAI and its predecessor, the Indian Protection Service (SPI), in facilitating this conquest over the past century.

Other prominent voices in the film include Marcelo Salazar of Instituto Socioambiental, Renata Pinheiro of Xingu Vivo, journalist Luis Flavio Pinto and federal prosecutor Felicio Pontes Jr.

In one especially powerful scene a Xinguano chief berates the camera as if it were some captured enemy, and then his formidable wife swings a war club directly at it, entreating the film-makers to take their war-cry against the dam across the globe, but especially to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Video still: Xinguano warrior woman swings a club at the camera

The interviews are mingled, not altogether successfully, with breathtaking but sometimes gratuitous vistas of rivers and forests, vignettes of indigenous life and historical footage showing the international protest movement that successfully halted the original Belo Monte dam project in the late 1980s.

Shunned by international banks ever since, the Belo Monte dam was shelved for two decades until it was finally approved in 2010 by the Brazilian government and heavily funded by Brazil's development bank, BNDES, despite protest by local indigenous groups, repeated national legal challenges and concerns raised by international bodies including the Organization of American States.  

"Stop Belo Monte": Protestors occupy the causeway
Photo source: Atossa Soltani / AmazonWatch

Celebrities like Sting, James Cameron and Bianca Jagger have supported a renewed protest movement that gained traction and visibility in recent weeks during the Rio +20 Summit with street protests in Rio de Janeiro and an ongoing occupation of the construction site on the Xingu River.  

D'Elia's film, with its crowd-sourced funding, viral marketing and audacious "declaration of war" makes for a timely and innovative documentary about this movement, as well as a provocative contribution to it.  

---

• For a useful overview of the history of the Belo Monte dam project and more recent developments, see the July 23 report by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs -- shared by Janet Chernela of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Monkey-Frog at the Racetrack: Horse dope from the Amazon (Phyllomedusa frog venom)

More than thirty racehorses in Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas have tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug derived from South American frog venom.  As reported in today’s issue of the New York Times, racing regulators have long suspected that trainers were doping horses with dermorphin, a painkiller forty times more powerful than morphine that is found in skin secretions of the Waxy Monkey Leaf Frog, Phyllomedusa sauvagii, traded internationally as an exotic pet.  Dermorphin belongs to a novel class of compounds first identified in skin secretions of the related frog species Phyllomedusa bicolor, used as a stimulant by indigenous hunters of the Amazon.  Frog venom had so far evaded detection in racehorse drug screening until Denver-based Industrial Laboratories tweaked its tests.

Several Phyllomedusa species have toxic skin secretions

The Spiritain missionary Constantin Tastevin[i] was the first outsider to document the use of frog toxins known locally as kampo by Cashinahua (Kaxinawa) Indians of the upper Juruá River in Brazil.  The Cashinahua collect secretions from the Giant Waxy Monkey Frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) and administer the substance directly into the bloodstream through small wounds burned with smoldering twigs on the skin.  The treatment produces short-lived bouts of nausea, sweating, vomiting, diarrhea and sometimes unconsciousness, but leaves the user with a lasting sense of strength, well-being and heightened sense perception.  The treatment is especially valued by indigenous hunters for improving their stamina, skill and luck at hunting.  "Hunting magic," as it is sometimes (and perhaps erroneously) called, proves to be an important category of traditional medicine in Amazonia. 

Since Tastevin’s early record, kampo use has been documented by anthropologists among other indigenous groups of the Brazil-Peru border region including the Amahuaca, Yaminahua, Matis, Matses (Mayoruna), Marubo, Katukina and Yawanawa.[ii]  Writer Peter Gorman’s 1993 article in Omni magazine[iii] on Matses "magic" in Peru -- echoing Gordon Wasson's famous 1957 story[iv] on the magic mushrooms of Mexico -- generated  widespread popular interest in the substance.  More recently, indigenous healers from the state of Acre have brought the “frog vaccine” to urban centers throughout Brazil as part of an expansion and popularization of indigenous shamanistic practices.[v]

 

Indigenous healers administer frog secretions directly into the bloodstream by means of small burns to the skin.

 (Photo source: Théo Brandão Festival of Ethnographic Film and Photography).

Berkeley anthropologist Katharine Milton first collected scientific samples of Phyllomedusa bicolor secretions among the Mayoruna of Brazil[vi] (the same group known as Matses on the Peruvian side of the border), and ensuing studies have revealed novel chemical compounds with a wide range of physiological and neurological activities.[vii]  Over 20 patents have since been registered on various compounds derived from Phyllomedusa venom, including dermorphin which is now synthesized and sold on-line.

Racehorse trainers have been known to use other exotic substances including cobra venom to improve horse performance and cheat at the tracks.  In addition to its analgesic effects, masking the pains of overexertion by horse or man, dermorphin appears to produce physiological excitement and euphoria.  Two of the horses testing positive for the substance in Louisiana had earned substantial purses.  As Louisiana's Racing Commission director Charles A. Gardiner III told the Times, “A lot of money’s got to be given back.” 

If only such ill-gotten winnings could be returned to the Matses…

---

References:

[i]  Tastevin, C. Le fleuve Muru. La Geographie 43: 14-35.
[ii] Carneiro, R. 1970. Hunting and Hunting Magic among the Amahuaca of the Peruvian Montaña. Ethnology 9(4): 331-341; 

     Erikson, P. 1996. La griffe des aïeux: Marquage du corps et démarquages ethniques chez les Matis d’Amazonie. Paris: CNRS/Peeters; 

     Lima, E.C. 2005. Kampu, kampo, kambô: O uso do sapo-verde entre os Katukina. Revista do IPHAN 32: 254-267; 

     Carneiro da Cunha, M. Des grenouilles et des hommes. Télérama hors série, Les Indiens du Brésil. March, 2005: 80-83.
[iii] Gorman, P. 1993. Making magic: A Westerner glimpses one of the secrets of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon. Omni Magazine 15(9): 64. July, 1993.

[iv] Wasson, G. 1957. Seeking the magic mushroom. Life Magazine, May 13, 1957.
[v] Lima E.C. & B.C. Labate. 2012. Kambo: From the forests of Acre to the urban centers. Erowid.org. May 31, 2012.
[vi] Milton, K. 1994. No pain, no game. Natural History 9: 44-51.
[vii] Daly, J.W., J. Caceres, R.W. Moni, F. Gusovsky, M. Moos, K.B. Seamon, K. Milton, and C.W. Meyers. 1992. Frog secretions and hunting magic in the upper Amazon: Identification of a peptide that interacts with an adenose receptor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89(22): 10960-10963.

Camisea Hostage Crisis: Matsigenka natives locate Peruvian commandos ambushed by Sendero Luminoso

It took a pair of Matsigenka natives, armed only with machetes and jungle savvy, to retrieve the fallen commando after the Peruvian military, using helicopter gunships and hundreds of troops, failed after searching for nearly three weeks.

On April 9, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas stormed Kepashiato town square in the Peruvian rainforest north of Cusco and took hostage 36 workers on the Camisea gas pipeline, demanding $10 million in ransom.  Peruvian police and military commandos were helicoptered in three days later but the rescue mission ended in disaster:  one soldier, Landert Tamani, was killed, while two others, badly wounded, were abandoned in the retreat.  For the next seventeen days, the Peruvian press followed the dramatic search for the missing men, José Astuquilca and Cesar Vilca.

(Photo source: LaMula.pe)

The hostages were freed suddenly on April 14, and although the Peruvian government and the Camisea pipeline consortium have denied any such negotiations, it is widely presumed that a substantial ransom was paid.  Military operations continued as some 1500 police and soldiers combed the jungle to hunt out Sendero fighters and rescue the missing men.  Matsigenka villagers abandoned their homes and fled from the heavy bombardment.  But by the end of April, six more Peruvian troops were dead and the two wounded men were still missing.

Then on April 29, two native Matsigenka women from the community of Inkaari found José Astuquilca alive and helped him get to the small town of Kiteni on the lower Urubamba River.  Dionisio Vilca went to the remote region by himself and hired two Matsigenka guides to help search for his own missing son.  On May 2, they located Cesar Vilca's body less than 300 yards from where the ambush had first taken place.   

Cesar Vilca
(Photo source: LaMula.pe)

The Peruvian press has lambasted the military and police for abandoning the wounded soldiers, and for the travesty of the botched rescue mission.  With a growing public outcry, the Ministers of Defense and the Interior recently resigned.

Yet the episode also highlights the bravery and dire predicament of the anonymous heroes of the story, the Matsigenka, an indigenous people caught up in the rapid and sometimes chaotic transformations ushered in by the Camisea gas pipeline.

Camisea pipeline during construction
(Photo source: Panoramio)

The Camisea gas project has brought in over 4 billion dollars in foreign investment to Peru's booming economy, and the regional government of Cusco has received roughly $1 billion in direct royalty payments.  The municipality of Echarate, where these events unfolded, is now among the richest in Peru, awash in royalty payments from the Camisea gas fields.

Camisea pumping station at Malvinas
(Photo source: Panoramio)

And yet the Matsigenka and other native communities within Echarate have seen minimal long-term benefits:  large amounts of development money have been wasted on failed projects, fish and game populations have dwindled, social problems like alcoholism and prostitution have multiplied while health care remains precarious.  Yet another gas spill (the 7th in the 8-year history of the pipeline) was reported in March, contaminating streams near the Matsigenka community of Camaná.  A wave of illnesses and several recent deaths in Camaná have been blamed on the spill, though these claims are still being investigated.

The recent hostage-taking incident and dramatic resurgence of Sendero Luminoso reveal further dark consequences of gas development in this region.  One can only hope that the Peruvian government will emerge from this tragedy with a renewed covenant not only with its armed forces, but also with its unsung native heroes.

-----

Media sources:

• CNN
• El Comercio
• Lima Times
• La Mula
• Peru This Week
• La Republica
• Salon
• Servindi

Miss Kayapó: Filming through Mebengokre Cameras

In a make-shift editing room in Belém, Brazil, seven aspiring Kayapó filmmakers hunch over laptops viewing footage shot during the prior year. These young men, representing three Mebengokre-Kayapó villages, are part of a Goeldi Museum project funded by Brazil’s National Research Council (CNPq) that is providing indigenous communities with equipment and training in digital film production. After three days of editing, the novice cinematographers are ready to screen their first films.

Some, such as the Woman’s Festival and Belo Monte Dam Protest are examples of what Terence Turner calls “cultural performance,” a staple element in indigenous-made films.[i] Others focus on less usual topics: a professional soccer game in Rio de Janeiro and a local health worker’s explicit presentation on STDs.

The most intriguing work, however, is Miss Kayapó, a forty-minute documentary about a beauty contest held yearly in a Brazilian town near Kayapó territory.

A video still from "Miss Kayapó"

With a backdrop of São João carnival fairgrounds, neon-lit Ferris wheels, and a country band warming up, adolescent Kayapó girls saunter one-by-one around a makeshift runway painted in chalk on the dusty ground. As during traditional Kayapó dance festivals, the girls wear long bead necklaces, wide bracelets, and brightly colored bikini underwear. Their bare torsos are decorated with elaborate geometric patterns in black Genipa. 

Far from traditional, however, is the girls' deliberately swaying gait, punctuated by a dramatic pause at each corner of the chalk runway, hands on cocked hips, with pouting lips and a sultry tilt of the head. This erotic body language, which they have learned from watching fashion models on Brazilian TV, is a far cry from the collective feminine stomping of traditional Kayapó dance performance.

Before the beauty contest, villagers perform a traditional dance on the fairground

The clash of cultural traditions captured in Miss Kayapó raises a troublesome question: is the film self-degrading, subverting native self-understandings and aping Western paradigms in the worst possible way?[ii] 

The Menire Biok festival celebrates traditional notions of feminine power and beauty

Not if you ask Tatajere and Pymare, the film’s creators:  “We are showing Kayapó beauty to all Brazilians.”