Definitions, Aspirations, and Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Definitions, Aspirations, and Acknowledgments

What follows is the annotated translation of the original 1942 publication of the account of three expeditions in Amazonian Guiana conducted by Lode wijk Juliaan Schmidt. This translation of the account, and the editorial com ments by Gerold Stahel, are as much an act of sharing Schmidt’s work with a broader public as it is an invitation to dialogue whose terms and concepts we might more appropriately use. Part 1 begins with an explication on the signifi cance of Schmidt’s accounts to anthropology today, a short biography followed by the politics of authorship and circumstances of Schmidt’s explorations and publication of his account, and a chapter situating Schmidt’s explorations in the broader colonial endeavor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen tury. Part 1 is concluded with notes on the translation, including the definition and explication of terms and concepts. Part 2, as with the original 1942 publica tion, begins with an introduction by Gerold Stahel, the then editor, followed by some notes on Wayana and Trio demographics and settlement names. Part 3 includes the chapter General Comments by Stahel, as well as a novel quantita tive and qualitative analysis of the list of names of inhabitants by Renzo Duin, the translator, editor, and author of the introduction and notes to the present work. Next follow the lists of names per village recorded by Schmidt and origi nally published more than 75 years ago, which are updated and contextualized with prior published genealogical data. Although the original 1942 publication is not widely available, this personal data is nonetheless available in published form prior to the enforcement of the EU gdpr on May 25, 2018, and is there fore kept in the present work. These lists are illustrated with photographs from the unpublished personal photo albums from the Dutch naval officer Claudius H. de Goeje, who between 1903 and 1937 conducted four expeditions among the Trio and Wayana. The photographs taken in 1937 literally provide faces to the names reported a few years later by Schmidt. In the original 1942 publica tion, the chapter List of Names begins with some general history, geography, and anthropological information of the time. It has been decided to include this section in Part 2 as the chapter Notes on Wayana and Trio demographics and settlement names. The present work is concluded with an afterthought on how Schmidt’s account contributes to the advocacy for a reconceptualiza tion of basic social and historical processes in Amazonian Guiana, aiming for an alternative perspective on the socio-political organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Guiana Highlands, their entanglement with

4 Chapter 1 colonial forces, and the Indigenous Peoples’ contribution to the ecologically rich biodiversity of the Guiana Shield today. Lodewijk Schmidt – although his name sounds rather European – was a Saramaka and native of Suriname. The Saramaka are an African Diaspora com munity whose ethnonym is linked to the river Saramacca where this commu nity regrouped after having fled from the plantations located on the banks of the upper Suriname river. Recent spelling of this ethnonym is “Saamaka”, yet as in the Saramaka language the “r” is silent, I maintain in this translation the spelling “Saramaka”, to be pronounced as “Sa’amaka”. From Schmidt’s account, it is clear that the Ndyuka (or Aukan), another African Diaspora community, maintain a trade monopoly on the rivers Maroni and Tapanahoni. Of particu lar interest is that Schmidt in his work distances himself from the Ndyuka boatmen and traders. Not only is this because he himself was a Saramaka, thus belonging to another African Diaspora community, Schmidt above all was a Christianized Saramaka. Also, the humble nature of the Saramaka, and of Lodewijk Schmidt in particular, is in sharp contrast to the rather conceited nature of the Ndyuka. Perchance this distancing may even be a result of Sta hel’s editing of Schmidt’s manuscript. The fact that Lodewijk Schmidt had taken on a Western name and sang the Dutch National Anthem and Christmas songs is indicative of an assimilationist gesture, either forced, voluntary, or complexly both. Several of the terms that up into the late twentieth century were com monly used, have become highly contested in the twenty-first century, albeit some terms continue to be commonly used in Suriname: above all the terms indiaan en bosneger, both of which could have been translated literally, a translation choice that has been avoided for obvious reasons. Several alter native terms, such as Amerindian, Bushinengue and Maroon, have been pos ited by scholars during the last decades, though these terms are contested by the respective Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora Communities. The endeavor to translate the original publication not only demonstrates the rec ognizable colonial demeanor of the time, but also realizes how incompatible present-day academic epistemology is to Indigenous and local Guyanese epistemologies. In the original account, the Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora Com munities are defined as “stam” which could be literally translated as “tribe”. Even today, Dutch popular and popular-scientific literature, describe these communities as “in stamverband levende tribale samenlevingen” (tribal societ ies). Although the Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora Communities in Suriname continue to be defined as “tribe” by a broad range of institutions,