A letter of protest: In defense of the rights of indigenous peoples and traditional populations in Amazonia

We, the researchers, professors and technicians in Anthropology and Linguistics at the National Museum/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Goeldi Museum/Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, honoring a tradition of more than a century working with diverse indigenous peoples and traditional populations, hereby declare:

Our repudiation of proposed Complementary Law No. 227 of 2012 in the Brazilian House of Representatives, which aims to make changes to Article 231 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988 defining the public interest in demarcating Indigenous Lands. These changes threaten the rights of indigenous peoples to the exclusive use of their territories, thus allowing the legalization of large private landholdings, hydroelectric dams, highways, and mining and other resource extraction projects on Indigenous Lands;

Our repudiation of the murders of indigenous Terena and Guarani people, killed in the context of defending their territories from invasion by ranchers in the state of Mato Grosso. Elsewhere in Amazonia, many other indigenous people have been murdered over conflicts involving land and access to natural resources, though the press does not always cover these stories nor do the authorities adequately investigate these crimes;

We express our support for the struggles of indigenous peoples and traditional populations in defense of their ancestral territories, and our solidarity with indigenous groups of Pará such as the Munduruku, Arara, Xipaia-Curuaia and Mebêngôkre-Kayapó, who have resorted to lawful protest to publicly express their resistance to government policies that infringe on their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They oppose the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam but they have sought peaceful dialog with the Brazilian authorities; 

Based on the recognition of indigenous rights expressed in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 and Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization as ratified by the Brazilian Congress, we pronounce ourselves against government policies that seek to restrict the demarcation of indigenous and quilombo (traditional Afro-Amazonian community) lands. In this respect we join our voices with popular movements that protest against the hollowing out of agrarian reform and the delays in identifying and demarcating indigenous lands and quilombos. The only solution to the current wave of violence in rural Amazonia is to address the socioeconomic inequalities, socio-environmental injustices, illegal land seizures and political and criminal impunity that reign today in Brazil. 

Finally, based on the principles of socially engaged science, we consider the ethnic and cultural diversity of Brazil and Latin America do be one of its greatest riches. This diversity of life ways and knowledge systems is a collective heritage of the Brazilian nation and the Latin American continent. We recognize native peoples and other traditional populations in Amazonia, including those currently emerging to demand their collective rights, as a fundamental element of this continent. Our ethical role as scientists is also to fight together with them in defense of their territories and other rights, for the preservation of indigenous and traditional peoples’ knowledge, including their full recognition in the educational system and interaction with other knowledge systems. 

August 8, 2013

This text is an English translation of the letter, "Em defesa dos direitos coletivos dos povos indígenas e das populações tradicionais da Amazônia" drafted and circulated by Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and Museu Nacional/UFRJ.

"Why Do They Want to Destroy Us?": Letter from the Munduruku

In the past we, the Munduruku, were feared for our fame in the art of group warfare and we had strategies for attacking our enemies. We did not easily give up the pursuit of our enemies and our trophies were human heads that symbolized power.

With these ominous words the leaders of the Munduruku indigenous people introduce an open letter to the Brazilian government protesting the planned construction of several hydroelectric dams within their traditional territory and adjacent indigenous lands in the Brazilian state of Pará. 

"Why do they want to destroy us?" (Photo source: ARQUEOTROP).

The letter, drafted on June 8, presents an overview of Munduruku social norms and shamanic knowledge:

The shamans take care of the functions of the ecosystem of planetary life so that nothing bad happens, they maintain the balance of the perfect functioning of nature We know how the law of nature works through the teachings of the ancients and how we should respect nature.

These traditional values are compared with the invading European worldview, both by way of contrast and as a dire and urgent warning:

There are no rich or poor within our indigenous society, we do not favor some over others and much less discriminate. In our world such things do not exist, just love, respect, peace, humility, sincerity... We, the Munduruku, this is how we are: we value that which is around us...

So much research is being done, involving scientists, intellectuals, people gifted with scientific knowledge, but they discover nothing about themselves and they remain in the dark about the precious things that interest us. Every day nature gets farther away and hides itself from us because we are destroying it. Such a precious treasure, and people want to turn it into business. How far will they go with this destruction?...

Mankind is not just destroying nature, but also destroying its very own human nature, but they don't understand this: they are destroying themselves.

The letter includes a detailed presentation of Munduruku history and mythology as inscribed in geographical landmarks both within and beyond current Munduruku territory. The long and fascinating list includes important episodes from Munduruku myth and legend, battles with Portuguese invaders, sacred places that coincide with proposed dam sites, and even the distant Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro:

For us, Munduruku, the city of Belém is Kabia’ip: A meteorological phenomenon that controls the dry season. It is a scepter planted deep in the ocean, and when someone manages to pull it a few centimeters it reacts and causes a change in climate. It should never be pulled beyond its limit, as it would result in grave problems during that season. We recognize this phenomenon when there is intense drought... 

Guanabara Bay [in Rio de Janeiro] is Murekodoybu: The Giant Anaconda, an ancient warrior who taught the arts of war to Karodaybi. His movements are visible in the phenomenon of the tides, when the waves become agitated, and our spiritual leaders, the shamans, are able to hear his voice...

 São Luiz do Tapajós [a proposed dam site] is Joropari kõbie: An ancient locality of Munduruku presence, they lived along those rapids... According to the spiritual leaders, the shamans, they warn that absolutely no kind of alteration can be made to that place or it will destroy this sacred locality, which belongs to the mother of fish, or else disgrace will fall unto people's lives: this is a risk for all societies. But this, a non-Indian will never understand...

 It is just not possible to list here all the sacred places that exist in Munduruku territory. There are various others...

The letter goes on to note the presence of isolated indigenous populations within remote parts of Munduruku territory. 

After this extensive preamble, the letter addresses the Brazilian authorities in the most stringent of terms:

Dear sirs,

Given the facts related above about our situation, we hereby state that we are outraged by the way the Brazilian government has been treating us. We see the disrespect done to our peoples, the Constitution being torn to shreds, becoming invalid, in order for our rights not to be guaranteed by it. Now, our own territory has become a battleground, where we are being exterminated, assassinated at gunpoint by the government's armed forces...

Why do they want to destroy us, are we not Brazilian citizens? Are we so insignificant?...

May our demands be met with urgency:

• That the armed forces leave our lands
• That research studies be halted
• That dam construction be halted
• That they explain everything that is going to happen on our lands, and that they listen to us and respect our decision

A commission of indigenous peoples traveled to Brasilia last week to present their demands to the Brazilian government. A total of 144 Munduruku made the trip, and a group of representatives entered the presidential palace. Though their demand for a face-to-face meeting with president Dilma Roussef was denied, they did meet with one of the president's top advisers, Gilberto Carvalho.

Indigenous peoples in Brasilia protest hydroelectric dams (Photo source: Survival International)

The Munduruku letter was first translated into English for Survival International by archeologist Bruna Rocha. 

Below you will find the full text of my own revised translation as reproduced by Cultural Survival in a recent news story. 

Kaya-Pop: The brave new world of indigenous music in Brazil

The lead singer crooning catchy pop lyrics, the gyrating chorus-line of girls in mini-skirts, the ecstatic crowd of teenagers swaying and snapping photos with their cell phones, the infectious beats pumping out of an electronic keyboard -- it would all be a typical Friday night forró dance party in the Brazilian Amazon if it weren't for one essential detail: practically all the participants, from the singer to the scanitly clad dancers to the raucous audience armed with digital cameras and cell phones -- everyone except the keyboard player, in fact -- are Kayapó Indians living in a vast expanse of protected forest lands in southern Pará.

Kayapó pop star Bepdjyre

This past 19th of April, the Kayapó village of Turedjam hosted an elaborate festival to celebrate Brazil's National Indian Day. Some 800 people from 15 villages as well as special guests from neighboring Brazilian towns attended the two-day event that included traditional dance presentations, an inter-village sports competition, the 2013 Miss Kayapó and Mister Kayapó beauty contests, and the high point of the evening, a concert by Kayapó pop star Bepdjyre.

The festival included sporting events and the "Miss Kayapó 2013" beauty contest

Bepdjyre, who comes from the village of Kabaú, composes his own lyrics in Kayapó but sets them to popular Brazilian dance rhythms such as forró, brega and sertaneja. He records his CDs in the city of Novo Progresso in southern Pará near the Mato Grosso border. Pykatire, from Las Casas village, has posted a video on YouTube of an acoustic performance in a lovely natural setting. Tewakrã is another young Kayapó singer who, in addition to his own compositions, has covered the Beatles. Mokuká is a 50-year old Kayapó chief from Moikorakô village who composes and performs as avidly as these younger musicians, and has posted a number of lively tunes on YouTube. Live and studio recordings by this handful of emerging Kayapó pop artists circulate virally through villages and Brazilian towns on CDs, cell phones, pen drives, SD cards and portable MP3 players.

One of Bepdjyre's most popular songs, played constantly in Turedjam in the weeks following the concert, is "Waiter bring me another soda" (Pidjo kangô nhoro ondjwy amry ja on dja), borrowing a common refrain from Brazilian drinking songs but adapting it to the Kayapó's tee-totaling prohibition of alcoholic beverages in many villages. 

Bepdjyre onstage with a chorus-line of Kayapó girls

Five girls from Turedjam practiced for several weeks before the show to master the hip-swaying choreography, and they danced in perfect synchrony onstage. They wore matching white mini-skirts bought especially for the show, but underneath the skirts they had on traditional Kayapó ornaments and body paint, adding bright red lipstick to the typical geometric designs in black Genipa and red annatto on their faces.

Teenage fans sing along and snap photos with their phones and cameras

Appearing with Bepdjyre was Mokuká who, unlike Bepdjyre -- in his tight-fitting jeans, white tennis shoes and rhinestone-studded "Tribe" T-shirt -- appeared onstage in traditional Kayapó body paint, bead ornaments and feather headdress. And yet Mokuká swayed and dipped onstage as well as any Brazilian teenager. He sang an extended, encore performance of his contagious Portuguese-language composition, "Tem, tem, tem mulher bonita" ('There are lots of pretty women'). A crowd of teenage boys in the audience sang along with the refrain, "In the village too, in the city too, in the world too: There are lots pretty women!" and pointed out their favorite girls in the crowd or on the stage.

Mokuká sings "Tem mulher bonita"

Alongside Mokuká, a high school student from the remote village of Kuben-Kan-Kren showed off highly erotic, hip-thrusting dance moves wearing ultra-tight, ultra-short-shorts: the Kayapó incarnation of Brazilian dance goddess Carla Peres. As men, both young and old repeated to me, in awe over her performance, "She's the only Kayapó girl who can dance like that. She practiced for months in front of the DVD player." 

"The Kayapó incarnation of Brazilian dance goddess Carla Peres"

The Kayapó cameramen and film makers I have trained over the past three years captured the concert on film and immediately edited a DVD which they distributed in the village and throughout Kayapó territory. On my recent visit to Turedjam, this DVD, as well as MP3 knock-offs of the live audio, was playing constantly. Kayapó men and boys alike are especially enamored of Mokuká's song, "There are lots of pretty women," and the sexy choreography of the girl from Kuben-Kan-Kren.

There is a distinctively masculine gaze in productions by the current all-male cadre of Kayapó film makers: even in traditional ceremonies, women strip down to their underwear for the duration of the dancing, while men wear the same shorts they use in daily life. As the inherent machismo of Kayapó culture blends with the sexism implicit in erotic lyrics and choreographies from Brazilian pop music, I get the impression that Kayapó men and teenage boys don’t just watch home-grown films like Miss Kayapó and the Bepdjyre concert documentary: they ogle.

Kayapó cameramen exhibit a distinctively male gaze

At first glance, this indigenous aping of Brazilian pop music genres and sexually charged dance styles seems shocking, disorienting, even degrading: an affront to traditional Kayapó aesthetic values. And yet a closer examination of Kayapó culture reveals the fundamental role of appropriation and re-invention in their relationship with outsiders. Prior to sustained contact with Brazilian society, the Kayapó raided neighboring groups and among themselves, and placed a high value on capturing ornaments, weapons, names, songs and other material or immaterial goods from the enemy, incorporating them into their own cultural repertoire and displaying them as signs of personal and group prestige.[1]

Kayapó body ornamentation is continually evolving to incorporate new materials and aesthetic references

Even after inter-group raiding ceased, the Kayapó continue to value the capture and appropriation of trappings and technologies of the kuben -- Brazilian "white" society -- such as firearms, trade goods, territorial maps[2] and video cameras. The Kayapó made especially powerful use of video cameras in the late 1980s to mobilize an international protest movement[3], blocking international funding for the Belo Monte dam project and paralyzing the project until just a few years ago. The Kayapó continue to use their technological and political savvy and their penchant for spectacle to draw international attention to their cause. 

With funding from the National Science Foundation and approval from Brazil’s National Research Council (CNPq), Middle Tennessee State University anthropologist Richard Pace and I are currently studying how the Kayapó use video cameras and other digital media in their increasingly complex interactions with Brazilian and global society.

A Kayapó film maker at work in his home village

According to Kayapó film maker Tatajyre, having young, sparsely clad Kayapó women strut and dance like Brazilian pop stars does not degrade traditional beauty standards: "We are showing Kayapó beauty to the Brazilians."

Rather than seeing culture as a stark choice between opposing, exclusive categories such as "Kayapó" and "Brazilian" or "traditional" and "modern," the Kayapó today, as always, see culture as an additive process, continually appropriating, incorporating and re-signifying new ornaments, weapons, goods and knowledge from enemies and rivals as a way of highlighting their own strength and perseverance. Does any of this make the Kayapó less "authentic" or "indigenous" or "Kayapó"? Of course not. On the contrary.

Miss Kayapó: "Beautiful as Indians and as Brazilians"

With local village girls dressed both in mini-skirts and traditional body paint, showing off trendy dance moves alongside a native-language pop singer like Bepjdyre, the Kayapó get to have it both ways: they get to be beautiful as Indians and as Brazilians. As Mokuká sings: "In the village too, in the city too, in the world too: There are lots of pretty women."

As I was packing my bags to leave Turedjam, I heard the distant strains of a hauntingly familiar tune: No, my ears were playing tricks on me, it couldn't be. So I followed the sound towards a thatched hut where I found a group of teenage boys listening to a portable MP3 device playing Tewakrã's electronic Kayapó-language cover of, yes: "Hey Jude." 

A brave new world indeed. 

---

First published in "Knowledge Exchange" in the June 2013 issue of Anthropology News (link no longer active, available to AAA members only).
  Special thanks to Amy Goldenberg for editorial input. 

Cite as:

G.H. Shepard Jr. (2013) Kaya-Pop: The brave new world of indigenous music in Brazil. Anthropology News 54(6): 47-48. 

Video stills courtesy of Tatajyre Kayapó, other photos by G.H. Shepard

References:

[1] Lea, V. 2012. Riquezas Intangíveis de Pessoas Partíveis: Os Mebengkokre (Kayapó) do Brasil Central. São Paulo: USP.

[2] de Robert, P. 2004. Terre coupée: Recompositions des territorialités indigènes dans une reserve d'Amazonie. Ethnologie Française 34(1): 79-88.

[3] Turner, T. 1990. The Kayapó Video Project. Revue de la Commission d'Anthropologie Visuelle, Univ. Montreal.

Remembering Francis Bossuyt

The evening before his 31st birthday, biologist Francis Bossuyt went for his daily swim in the lake at Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Manu Park, Peru, and was never seen again. After weeks of fruitless searching by scientist colleagues, park guards, the Peruvian authorities and his Belgian family, he was presumed to be the victim of some mishap on the lake. This loss represented a double tragedy for his family, since his own father had died four years earlier in the mysterious explosion of a TWA flight off Long Island in July of 1996, which had interrupted Francis's very first month of fieldwork at Cocha Cashu. 

Francis with a titi monkey
(Photo source: Myriam Bossuyt)

Just a few days before Francis disappeared on April 27, 2000, I received a letter from him that was written from Cocha Cashu before Christmas and postmarked from Miami on April 13. 

In the letter, Francis describes his preliminary observations about the use of apparent medicinal plants by a group of dusky titi monkeys he was studying for a doctoral thesis at U.C. Davis. He was interested in comparing this information with my own work on plants used by the nearby Matsigenka indigenous people. We had begun to correspond about beginning a comparative study.

Today, on what would have been Francis's 44th birthday and the 13th anniversary of his disappearance, I reproduce this letter with its novel observations about the use of aromatic plant species by dusky titi monkeys:

In the days and weeks following his disappearance, I was reminded of Matsigenka stories about special individuals -- shamans, herbalists, orphaned children -- who use their knowledge of esoteric plants to join the immortal beings residing in the Milky Way: they vanish without leaving a physical trace in the world below.

As his mother Myriam wrote in a memorial posting last January, celebrating renovations at Cocha Cashu being carried out by the San Diego Zoo, "For us, [Cocha Cashu] will always be a special place where Francis’s spirit roams, and we hope it will remain a sanctuary for the many creatures who live and work there, who love and die there." 

----

An Ax to Grind: Napoleon Chagnon, the Yanomami and the anthropology tribe

I felt like I had walked right into one of the Napoleon Chagnon/Timothy Asch Yanomami films. At one end of the circular village enclosure, a shouting match had erupted between two Yanomami women. As the argument continued, a crowd began to gather divided among two opposing groups, one around each woman: a sketch-picture, like one of Chagnon's genealogy diagrams, of the social tensions and kinship alliances in the village. Towards the other end of the village enclosure (known as shabono in Yanomami) more people watched from a distance, whether waiting to take sides or just spectating, I couldn't tell. There was an electric crackle of tension in the air, so different from the calm rhythm of village life that had reigned up to that moment.

I am admittedly no Yanomami expert; on the contrary, this was my first, and so far only visit to the group. But having read Chagnon's once-popular textbook ethnography, The Yanomamö (originally subtitled, "The Fierce People") and having seen and taught his film, "The Ax Fight," several times, I was struck with a remarkable sense of déja-vu: that film also involves a verbal duel between women that escalates into full-fledged physical combat between two men. As I watched the unfolding drama in the shabono, the shouting continued and a few men towards the back of the opposing groups peeled away from the crowd and returned to stand at attention, gripping long, sturdy tree saplings: the same style of dueling clubs seen in the film made 30 years prior.

It was April of 2004 and I was taking part in a large Brazilian scientific expedition to the Yanomami village at Marari, inside the vast binational Yanomami indigenous reserve just across the Venezuelan border from the region where Napoleon Chagnon had worked decades earlier. In fact, Venezuelan Yanomami from the group "Shaki" (Chagnon's Yanomami name) once studied had recently visited Marari. The controversy surrounding Patrick Tierney's book, Darkness in El Dorado, published in 2000, accusing Chagnon and other scientists of misconduct and even genocide, was still roiling the anthropological and indigenous rights communities in the U.S. and South America, although the Yanomami at Marari had no idea about the international scandal that was unfolding in their name.

Ricardo, a Brazilian Protestant missionary who was assisting the scientific team and who has worked with the Yanomami for over 25 years -- apparently becoming in the process more Yanomami than the Yanomami have become Christian -- told me to run and get my camera.

"There's going to be a fight," he said. Then he turned to leave.

"Aren't you going to stay?" I asked.

"Nah, happens all the time. You stay, you're an anthropologist, should be interesting. Call me if anyone gets hurt."

But no one got hurt. Instead, the shouting subsided, the momentary tension dissipated together with the crowd, the men discreetly put away their clubs and the village returned to normal: the public spectacle of a Yanomami duel is as much about containing violence as engaging in it.

Weapon and art: Decorating an arrow point, Marari, 2004

What no one remembers about "The Ax Fight" is that there is no ax fight in "The Ax Fight." The sharp edge of the ax, though raised in the climax of the film, is quickly turned around to the blunt side and never deployed, defusing what could have been a lethal turn to the explosive but highly ritualized stick-duel that Timothy Asch captured on film. I guess "The Stick Fight" doesn't have quite the same ring.

Another thing to remember about "The Ax Fight" is that exactly one month after it was filmed on the last day of February in 1971, Second Lieutenant William Calley of the U.S. Army was found guilty for his participation in the massacre of some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai three years prior. U.S. casualties in Vietnam up to 1971 surpassed 45,000 (one and a half times the current Yanomami population) and total Vietnamese casualties of that war will never be known, though the number is likely over 5 million.

So much for "The Fierce People."

Preemptive Anthropology: FAQs

Remembering the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, here is a bit of dark humor written as the bombs rained over Baghdad:

Anthropological ethics must evolve in response to undeniable world realities.  Recent events have unmasked the fallacy of cultural relativism while reliable intelligence has demonstrated its connection to a global Praxis of Evil.  The current Code of Ethics entangles us in fruitless obligations toward foreign nationals to the detriment of American interests and security.  With resolve, we, members of the Guild of Outmoded Phrenology, have drawn up a Code of Anthropological Ethics for the New American Century, reviving cultural evolutionism and its foreign policy imperative, imperial expansion, while restoring the comfort and moral clarity of ignoring history.  The full document, “Ethics, Freedom, Democracy, American Interests and the New World Order, not Necessarily in that Order” is available at www.notinthatorder.ord.   Here are responses to some frequently asked questions:

1.  What should I do in the event that the clan, tribe, religious sect or rogue state where I am conducting research is attacked by United States Armed Forces?

Because the American Anthropological Association does not issue a uniform, anthropologists dress in local costume and may be considered unlawful enemy combatants, subject to indefinite detainment, interrogation, and sentencing without legal council (note: “gone native” defense strategies are not admissible).  We urge anthropologists to maintain frequent contact with their Embassy while engaged in fieldwork, and suggest changing regions every few years to avoid perilous linguistic competence and cultural identification.  In the event of a sudden U.S. attack, we advise field anthropologists to demonstrate their peaceful intentions by removing all clothing and, if time permits, shaving head and facial hair before strapping themselves with duct tape to a gurney.

2.  Are there provisions in the new defense budget for anthropological research?

We are excited about new funding modalities emerging from the Doctrine of Preemptive Anthropology.  Security and intelligence agencies will fund studies of local conditions, social networks and military targets in strategic regions before they become a security threat.  Because of the broad definition of the preemptive doctrine, grants will be open for all geographic regions, but research is subject to certain restrictions and conditions. 

3.  Will urban anthropology also receive support? 

Yes.  The new Department of Homeland Anthropology will promote studies of patriotic moral values illustrated in popular culture.  An analysis of the epic film Star Wars, for example, reveals an archetypal story of the battle between good and evil that is instructive during this moment of crisis.  A mighty, technologically advanced Empire amasses a vast war apparatus that it plans to test, thereby cowing galactic resistance, by destroying a remote planet harboring a primitively-armed rebel group believed to maintain ties with a robed, bearded religious guru who lives on a war-ravaged desert planet in a cave, has an unusual six-syllable name beginning with “O,” yet who is connected by disquieting family and pedagogic ties to the Empire’s cowboy-booted usurper...

4.  I am carrying out ethnomycological research with South Korean matsutake mushroom gatherers, and my informants are concerned about U.S. military contingency plans that include nuclear strikes against North Korea.  Would such an attack constitute the use of “weapons of mass destruction?”
 
No.  By definition, all weapons used in the defense of freedom, liberty, and American interests constitute constructive purposes, and hence are not weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  The correct term for such arms deployment is “Wherewithal to Motivate Democracy,” also WMD, but the similarity is merely coincidental. 

5.  Could the same logic apply to other nations’ use of military force against enemies or in the name of national interests?

Yes and no.  It all depends on which nations, whose enemies, and in what national interest.  This is called strategic relativism.  Note the advantages over cultural relativism, where all people are valued equally.

6.  Could anthropologists contribute to the search for Iraqi WMDs?

Certainly.  Anthropologists have pioneered studies of mythology, folklore and urban legend, and are unrivaled except by certain National Security advisers at maintaining unwavering ideological stances in the complete absence of empirical evidence. 

7.  Given the broad surveillance powers ceded by the U.S. Patriot Act, are there any anthropology textbooks or courses that should best be avoided?

Avoid  books, articles and courses whose titles include the words hegemony, history, Islam, Sumer, domination, resistance, gender, colonialism, or post-anything, as well as those having colons, hyphens, quotation marks, parentheses, and other unpatriotic punctuation.  Anything published after 1968 might be considered suspect, especially titles by French authors, those with Arabic last names, and works by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, …//doha. bbrother.aphage/cdua.exe//line 81 match detect//Content-type: multipart; boundary=S_31568_12728 <<Anthrophage software is connecting to Central Database on Unpatriotic Academics>>…

---

First published in the "To Wit" back-page humor column of Anthropology News 45(2): 56 (Feb. 2004)

Three Cheers for Periwinkle: Ethnobotany, histiocytosis and Rare Disease Day

Just over seven years ago, my youngest son, then eighteen months old, woke up one morning with a lump exactly the size and shape of an olive behind his ear. An X-ray revealed a quarter-sized hole in his skull and a mass of dense tissue. The initial diagnosis -- malignant tumor of the cranium -- left everyone in the family reeling, incredulous and praying for a miracle. Within a few days and thanks to the incredible staff at the Boldrini Children's Hospital in Campinas, Brazil (if I ever become a millionaire I will leave my fortune to them), this diagnosis was rejected in lieu of something far stranger: Langerhans cell histiocytosis, also known as eosinophilic granuloma or histiocytosis-X (due its mysterious etiology), a childhood disease that is a hundred times rarer than leukemia and thus often misdiagnosed.

You know you are desperate when a doctor tells you your child has an extremely rare immune system condition of unknown origin that punches Swiss-cheese-like holes in the bones and especially the skull, fatal in about 15% of the cases and usually treated through experimental drug protocols, and you feel relieved.

Periwinkle: Our little miracle

His initial treatment included small doses of vinblastine, a drug derived from the caustic sap of the rosy periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus (or Vinca rosea), native to Madagascar. In a matter of days, the olive-sized lump looked more like a caper, and within six weeks the tumor was no longer visible to the eye. The treatment regime continued for another two years with a cocktail of drugs similar to those used for leukemia but in far smaller doses. 

I am very relieved to say that he is now fully recovered and suffered no side-effects from more than two years of low-dose chemotherapy. Miracles really do happen.

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.