ANTHROPOLOGY Chapter Showcase

LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS

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FROM THE EDITOR

Lexington Books is committed to publishing the highest quality anthropology scholarship. Our books engage with research from around the globe and feature the latest research in cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. Our scholarly and applied works are united by a cross-cultural understanding of the human experience and critical social awareness. We publish a wide range of works that draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and examine topical and traditional areas of study, including immigration, tourism, education, health and well-being, gender and social identities, religion, and kinship. Lexington Books offers the most current and premium academic thought in the field for scholars, researchers, and students. The chapters in this showcase look at the role of manliness and money in suburban drug dealing, gender issues in an indigenous medical system in Nepal, the resettlement of Guatemalan Mayan refugees in the American Midwest, the relationship between capoeira mestres and students in an age of global mobility, and popular media representations of the culture and heritage of Native peoples. These chapters provide a sense of the depth of critical thought and engagement found in our publications and the breadth of our anthropology list. I invite you to publish your next scholarly book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, revised dissertations, and ethnographies by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around key subjects, such as Crossing Borders in a Global World: Applying Anthropology to Migration, Displacement, and Social Change; Anthropology of Well-Being: Individual, Community, and Society; and Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published expediently. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers and we market our new titles aggressively around the world. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you.

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contents

4 – 18 David Crawford, “Gendered Ambivalence: Cocaine, Money, and Manliness,” in Dealing with Privilege: Cannabis, Cocaine, and the Economic Foundations of Suburban Drug Culture

19 – 45 Mary M. Cameron, “Gender, Culture, Science, and Ayurvedic Medicine: Five Women Ayurvedic Doctors,” in Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change

46 – 72 Martin Renzo Rosales and Juana Domingo Andrés, with commentary by Claire Herzog, “Guatemalan Mayas in the American Midwest: Creative Intercultural Networking,” in The Crux of Refugee Resettlement: Rebuilding Social Networks

73 – 93 Sergio González Varela, “The Mestre-Student Relationship in the Age of Tourism,” in Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World

94 – 113 J. Brett Hill, “Popular Media,” in From Huhugam to Hohokam: Heritage and Archaeology in the American Southwest

The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. David Crawford, “Gendered Ambivalence: Cocaine, Money, and Manliness,” in Dealing with Privilege: Cannabis, Cocaine, and the Economic Foundations of Suburban Drug Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 61–75. All Rights Reserved.

FIVE Gendered Ambivalence

Cocaine, Money, and Manliness

The previous chapter explored the cultural confusion inherent to conducting business with friends. In suburban drug dealing profit is derived from people you know, sometimes people you know well, and calculation of interests is entangled with camaraderie. Given that friendship involves an implicit interest in the person—and not what you can get out of them—extracting material benefits from friendship is a vexing endeav- or. In a typical drug deal the roles and motives of buyer and seller, user and provider, gift-giver and recipient mix and contradict in the space of a single transaction. This gets no easier in the context of romance and sex. Most of us would agree that sexuality is complicated, and by many accounts, cocaine is associated with sex. Cannabis and LSD might have been culturally linked to “free love” and the hippie movement, but the rise of cocaine brought with it a different sexual ethic. Some make the argument that the chemical substance of cocaine lends itself to this. Some report that arousal is a feature of the drug, arguing that it lowers inhibi- tions for women and increases stamina for men. Note, however, that this assessment of how the drug impacts sex depends on a specific understanding of how sex works in humans, with women requiring induce- ment and men needing, or at least appreciating, help with what is called, without irony, “performance.” This is a very culturally specific way of understanding sexuality. This model has little to do with the iconic orgies of Imperial Rome or 1960s Connecticut key-swapping parties, never mind other understandings of pleasure, for instance societies that treat male/male sex as a desirable norm (like parts of ancient Greece or Papua New Guinea), or those that consider the female libido to be stronger than the male.1 The “coke is

4 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 62 Chapter 5 good for sex” assertion envisions sexuality in conventional American terms, in other words. It seems a retreat from the more androgynous sexual identity of the 1960s, where men and women wore similar clothes and had similar hairstyles. This suggests that in the 1980s the role of cocaine in courtship and mating represents a return to a more traditional American understanding of sexuality, with an emphasis on sexual dimor- phism rather than an extension of the sexual revolution begun in the 1960s. The cocaine-sex nexus operates two main ways. First, the use of a drug to facilitate sexual connection fits squarely with our mechanical understanding of ourselves. Americans tend to view their bodies as so- phisticated machines that can be directed to behave one way or another with calculated instructions in the form of chemicals. We are perhaps only an extreme example of Western, mechanistic understanding of the mind/body relationship, but from this vantage it makes perfect sense that a thing external to us (in this example, cocaine) can change fundamental things about us. It “makes us” do things or want things, or makes us capable of things that we would not otherwise desire or achieve. However, a second way that cocaine relates to sex is through money and power. Male sexuality in our culture is augmented by power, and power is connected to money. We expect rich men to have beautiful wives, which demonstrates that female sexuality emerges from what we consider physical attractiveness while male sexuality relies on at least an element of status. This is not true everywhere for everyone, but in the American context wealth is often believed to serve as an aphrodisiac for women. If it does not conjure genuine desire, it at least inspires women to accommodate powerful men. In the 1980s context, where women were considered to have naturally less powerful sex drives, men used money and its crystalline avatar, cocaine, to attract mates. This is all relative, of course. In the context of middle class lives, where most young men make minimum wage or something close to it, having any cocaine at all was a form of conspicuous consumption. Whoever had it was claiming disposable wealth, and was thus com- manding attention, including sexual attention. If someone was giving coke away for free, that was notable. Yet not everyone connected sex to cocaine in this way. Doug had a long-term girlfriend, we recall, though even he noted that he “missed his chance” to use cocaine for sexual advantage. He understood that cocaine was connected to sex, but he personally did not use it that way. Art, by contrast, never mentioned the opposite sex or sexuality at all. For him the bonds formed by cocaine were entirely homosocial—powerful, but pla- tonic. By the time Brad was a dealer cocaine had come down in price and had lost its exotic allure, including its sexual allure. As he made clear, people even denied taking it. Cocaine had become less expensive and unglamorous, even shameful. But in its heyday men like Wayne saw

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cocaine as a prime way to build masculine attractiveness. We will begin with what Wayne had to say about this, then we meet Woody and Pete. Wayne represents a pretty typical story, I think, a common way men attempted to provide cocaine to women as part of the process of wooing them. Woody explains this further. Pete connects cocaine to sex (and money) in a different way than the other two, but he is insightful about the connection between sex, drugs, money, and masculinity.

WAYNE’S COCAINE SELF

Recall that Wayne’s initial response to my question of why he sold drugs was that “It was about fucking fun! Financing the fun!” And his answer to why he gave away coke was that “no one wants to party alone. So if your friends couldn’t afford it, they got it anyway.” Here he means “friends” as men, which for him are not sex partners. Wayne’s main motivation is to hang out with his buddies. But in the interview, he also insisted that cocaine dealing was “lots and lots about sex.” I think it is fair to say that in his twenties Wayne was enthusiastic about meeting women, the more, and the hornier, the better. Cocaine was “lots about sex” because, at that moment in Wayne’s life, everything was. In Wayne’s world, cocaine needed to be provided to “the girl you wanted to be with, and/or the girl she had brought with her,” as he told me. This was not trading cocaine for sex, however. The girl’s friend (who was not an immediate target of sexual conquest) was as deserving of free drugs as the desired girl herself, for example. The coke was not quid pro quo any more than a dinner date might be, or even a barbeque, where you invited multiple people. The idea for Wayne was to establish himself as a particular type of person, a generous guy, a fun guy, and in this sense the barbeque is perhaps the best analogy. This ultimately would be the kind of man an attractive woman would of her own free will choose to sleep with. It was a broader identity Wayne sought, the construction of a self that was sexually desirable. The gifting and consumption of cocaine, like food, was part of building a social world in which this identity made sense. Cocaine, like alcohol and marijuana, was fundamentally a way to pass the time in company, to “spend time” with people, including women. Note that for Americans “time” is a thing (like money) we “spend.” So “spending time” is another variety of expenditure, though it is unclear what type exactly. Is this spent-time a gift (as when we congratulate fathers who “spend time” with their kids) or is it a calculated return (as when you “spend time with a client” playing golf or sitting in special box seats at a game)? Time is not universally understood to be like a “thing” one would “spend,” but for Americans it is. Spending time is our way of grasping one of our most basic existential coordinates. We are allotted a

6 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 64 Chapter 5 certain amount of time; we spend it doing some combination of what we have to do and what we want. Wayne wanted to spend his time doing cocaine with women. This could amount to a kind of foreplay, at least in that cocaine facilitated lots of talking and getting to know people. There is no denying that people on coke cannot shut up, and while this could be annoying, it also accelerated the rate at which you might come to know a person (for better and for worse). Having a pile of cocaine in front of him meant that at least some women were willing to share—conversation and cocaine, of course, but perhaps more. Wayne recognized that at least some women explicitly liked to combine sex and cocaine, which was one source of its power. But more generally women liked to be around men who had the drug, especially those who gave it away. Such men were “fun,” the kind of guys who not only provided drugs, but went out to bars and concerts, picked up the tab for dinners, men who performed a broad array of behaviors commonly associated with the masculine side of heteronormative American mating rituals. The cocaine was added to an existing cultural mix, in other words, the money and social visibility already associated with desirable manliness. Few women paid for cocaine, according to Wayne. In his view women who bought it “were not that bright. Or else they weren’t interested in sex. Because I’d give it to them just out of the prospect.” He discussed going through his phone book methodically from one end to the other inviting women over to do coke (people had actual phone books in those days, made of paper). If one woman declined, he went on to the next. Wayne didn’t see this as manipulative or sleazy. He did not see it as disrespectful or as an attempt to buy sex. Wayne liked cocaine. He liked sex. And he was searching for women who had the same interests. This seemed to him obvious and commonplace. It also meant that cocaine was a masculine thing, a substance men used to perform masculinity, because, at least in part, women wanted it. If you sought to be a desirable male, and particularly if you wanted to be an alpha male, having cocaine was important. It follows, then, that if you were not rich, selling cocaine was essential to full manhood. So cocaine sales—not just cocaine use— were deeply bound up with masculinity and sex in the suburbs.2 At least for a while.

WOODY

It is February 2014 in small-town Colorado, cold and brilliant, and Woody finally agrees to be interviewed. He is not excited about this, and he has made that clear. I have followed him around for days, chatting with him and his friends, and he has been willing to say lots of things informally in bars and restaurants, or on ski lifts, but he does not want to

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face the recorder. He never says this. He just finds a way to do something else whenever I think we might have time to do a “real” interview. Woody is tall, tan, scruffy, and fit—as stylishly casual as the premier ski resorts he has lived in for decades. On my last day in the state, in his truck on the way to the airport, he agrees to be taped. I turn on the machine and ask him simply to tell me about his career in dope. “Well,” he begins carefully, “I guess, it would start . . . I grew and sold pot. I was sixteen years old, or something like that. It was pretty small time. I had a few plants in my parents’ backyard. Never really made too much money off of it. . . . ” There is a pause here before Woody moves on to the real story. “But I moved out here to Colorado. I guess the only time I really made money was selling cocaine while I was bartending. My roommate would go buy kilos of blow. Then he bartended and another roommate bartended and I bartended all at different times of the day. So you could pretty much buy cocaine at any time of the day, from 2 p.m to 2 a.m.” I had spent hours already talking with Woody, but none of this had come up. I had not known about the roommates, I had not known about the cocaine. I had just interviewed Art in California and Woody’s situation made me think of Art’s “cocaine collective” in college, so I asked whether Woody and the roommates worked as a unit. “No,” was the answer. “I would buy a small amount, like an ounce. Or maybe that’s not a small amount. In any case I would get twenty-eight grams, sell them for one hundred bucks a piece, and probably triple my money, or something like that.” Few people gave me specific information about prices, but this suggests that Woody was getting ounces of high quality cocaine for about $900, twice what Doug had paid (who gave so much away), but still remarkably cheap. Woody continued, “I sold almost exclusively, pretty much, while I was working . . . I would bring like three grams of cocaine to work with me.” He explained that his entire customer base was about twenty people, all friends, people from town. “It would always be friends.” They would come into the bar and “usually order a drink and then pay me $103 for their drink.” Woody called it getting a B&B, a “Budweiser and a bindle,” the “bindle” meaning a small paper envelope of cocaine. Like this, he said, he would “make $300 bartending and $300 selling in a night . . . tax free.” That seemed like a lot of money for a young person, but it also seemed to lack the “hanging out” and “partying” that were so common in the other interviews, so I asked about this, whether there were other ways he sold cocaine. “Well, you’d throw a couple in your pocket whenever you’d go out, you know, two or three grams. Generally I would work nights, Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights when people were out. But no, I didn’t have people coming to my house.” I thought that this was interestingly differ-

8 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 66 Chapter 5 ent from most of the earlier interviews, so I asked Woody specifically about the pricing, about discounts for friends, and he replied emphatically that it was “pretty standard a hundred [dollars per gram].” There was no “bro price,” as he put it, as there had been for others, and no ritual gifting. Woody explained, “The only people I was dealing with were bros. There was no one else. It was just a set deal.” I remembered Doug giving “everyone” the bro price, and Art using a sliding scale, where the price would reflect your level of friendship with him or members of the collective. Woody is decidedly more businesslike, in attitude more like Wayne, yet he seemed defensive when explaining his decision, as when he continued, “I wasn’t getting a great price, I wasn’t buying tons of it. I was doubling my money, but it wasn’t like I was getting it for nothing. I got it for forty or fifty bucks a gram, sold it for one hundred. Each transaction I made like $50, or something like that.” Initially Woody estimated that he tripled his money, but in response to my questions about friendship and drug transactions he recalls “only” doubling it. There seemed to be some tension around the practice of profiting from friends. Partly this is because Woody has already explained to me that he didn’t really consider himself a dealer. His roommate was a “real” dealer, the one who came face to face with what he called the “cartels.” Woody himself was, in his mind, helping people out. “My roommate, he was a little more big time. He was the one who would go and meet the cartel fellas and brought it home. He would not deal with people at night. He only worked in the daytime. It was all prearranged, he wouldn’t take any calls. You had to tell him a week ahead of time if you wanted something. That was the wholesale. The other roommate and I were just kind of retail. More, like . . . friends. Friends would get it for a friend. So that was my career arc. I did that for about ten years or so.” Listening to Woody, I thought back on my interview with José, who sold something like a tenth of a gram at a time (the twelve packages that sent him to jail equaled about one of Woody’s minimum units), and was in business less than a year. Clearly Woody had a much better business model, one predicated on having a great supplier, wealthy friends to sell to, and a context—the bar—where he could sell without having to use his own drugs to “party” with customers. Like many of the suburban dealers we met so far Woody stumbles on to a high level connection early in his career. Wayne’s initial cocaine connections were bringing it across the border themselves, Art met two guys in his freshman dorm who could get lots of coke cheaply, while Doug and Woody both were living with roommates who, it turned out, had access to kilos of very pure cocaine. All of them were within a person or two of connections who were bringing drugs into the country. Woody even showed me the parking lot about an hour from where he lives where his roommate used to meet the “cartel fellas” (suggesting that he, too, had more to do with that end of the business than he’s telling me).

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Whether or not the “fellas” were really in a “cartel,” they were Spanish- speakers ready to unload as much cocaine as they could, and the roommate who dealt with them used extreme caution. It seems that blind luck—meeting someone with a wholesale supply of cocaine—was a large part of what drew suburban dealers into the business, at least the ones I happened to find. The dealers in this book did not usually start small and “move up” the chain. They began their cocaine careers high up the lad- der, with familiar contacts who gave them great, wholesale prices, more or less from the day they started selling. It was, it seems, a deal that was too good to pass up. What is different with Woody is how the transactions are organized. He does not sell out of his house (none of his roommates did either) and so we do not see the style of socializing, ritualized drug sharing, and gifting that we saw in the home sales context. Woody is very clear that everyone he sells to is a “friend,” and on this basis he considers himself “small time,” yet none of the “friends” get special deals, gifts, or even lagniappes. The friends pay $100 for the cocaine and $3 for the beer. There is no ambiguity about it. We do not see the blended partying-with/ supplying-the-party dynamic that we had when the deals happened in a living room, or even when Wayne or Doug sold as customers in bars. The difference seems to be the side of the bar they were on. Doug and Wayne were among friends drinking in a bar—not a bartender among customers, like Woody. Woody used his position as bartender—only selling while he was “working”—to minimize the contradictions of conducting business among friends. By removing himself socially (selling “exclusively, pretty much, while working”) he was exempt from the normal social requirements of drug sales, and their high transaction costs in time and drugs used or given away. It was a hybrid model, with efficient elements of urban sales (a set price, no gifts or discounts, no time spent “partying”) but the safety of suburban drug dealing (only selling to known people in relatively safe contexts). Since Woody did not present himself as involved in the social use of cocaine, I was interested in his view of how that worked, and more specifically about the link between cocaine and sex that others discussed, so I asked him about this. He thought and said, “There were some girls, but primarily it was men.” From Woody’s perspective cocaine was “something you would bring on a date kind of thing. You know, you’re going to go see a concert. . . . Alcohol, drugs, it’s all kind of part of the package. . . . It’s like. ‘hey I have a concert ticket, I’ll buy you a drink, we’ll do this’ . . . it’s like anything you can do to add on to the package of how desirable you are. Depending on the girl. Whether it’s dinner or blow. It depends on what she’s into, what she considers a good time.” I asked whether this was tantamount to trading sex for cocaine, whether it was a kind of economic transaction. He replied, “In itself it wouldn’t be a way to get women. If they were not into you then having

10 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 68 Chapter 5 some coke wouldn’t do it. It’s like taking a woman out to dinner, whatever you do to impress them, or not really impress them but . . . it’s a courting ritual.” Woody pondered more and added, “Plus, no, there were definitely groups of girls who’d get their own, it’s pretty common,” and I quipped, “They didn’t want to wait to go on a date?” Woody continued, un- amused, “They knew what they were doing. They had money. Usually in groups, I would say. Men, almost never. It was like four . . . women would go in on it together. Men would have their own.”3 Here I wondered if that gives women independence from men. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” Woody decides. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about his own lack of socializing with coke, so I ask Woody about this again. The answer, again, was that for him there simply wasn’t time. “They’d walk up and say who’s holding. I’d say, ‘I am.’ And that’s that. . . . We could transfer money because I was already in that business, it wasn’t raising eyebrows. If someone is handing you a stack of cash they can’t tell if it’s three dollars or three hundred. We all knew each other, but they would go hang out and talk. I didn’t really like it. I don’t like hanging out late night with a bunch of guys. It wasn’t my social scene . . . it didn’t interest me. Which a lot of people were into. They would like to sit around and listen to music and talk. It just didn’t interest me.” I pondered whether this made Woody a better dealer, and here he laughs. “Yeah, don’t get high on your own supply! Definitely. I was working. You could do a little toot or something, but I was not off socializing. I was busy. There were 300 people yelling at you for drinks. You don’t have a minute to yourself, really, until it’s over. I guess that . . . the exception to selling to people we didn’t know was the bands. The bands all want drugs when they traveled around. Different guys in the band. And you just kind of figured, I guess they weren’t cops. Since you’ve seen their tour schedule and you’re writing them checks and you know they’re from out of state and all these other things. It would be a pretty elaborate sting if it was the police. They’d have a band that would go around to every bar.” We both thought this was pretty funny, and I joked “So it turned out the members of the band Sublime were FBI agents? They would have wanted more than a gram.” “Yeah, but most bands don’t make a lot of money, either. Most guys aren’t rock stars. They get gas money and a per diem. They’d crash ten of them in a condo. So, sure, they wanted stuff. . . . The more popular bands, people would buy them stuff, to hang out with them, but if you’re just some dudes, nobody knows who you are, you’re paying for it. People think you’re a rock star and they want to be around you, whether it’s guys buying them drugs or girls sleeping with them or whatever. It’s

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basically like entertaining . . . to make yourself popular . . . whether you have a bunch of nice wine or whatever it is . . . you can have people over to drink this Bordeaux I have or you can snort this eight ball I have. I guess in a way you’re paying, but it’s like entertaining . . . providing.” From here Woody and I move to discussing gifts, what makes a gift. To his assertion that some people would buy cocaine for the bands and this is “providing” or “entertaining,” I suggested “You don’t go to dinner at someone’s house and leave somebody $25, you bring a bottle of wine.” His response is that “Yeah, it’s more of a social thing than just handing them money. Maybe down at the base of it, that’s true. But that’s based on gratitude, for hosting or whatever, having people over or whatever that might be. I guess that goes back to if you’re a caveman and you kill a buffalo or whatever and share it. The tribe likes you. You helped them out. Same deal.” It seems to me that we have arrived at the sort of ambivalence that we found with Art and Wayne. Dealers—or Americans in general, if they stop to think about it—struggle with the idea of gifts, whether they are “real,” generous and altruistic, or instead intentional, self-interested, and therefore false. I suggest to Woody that in his buffalo example it would seem important to “share.” It cannot be a quid pro quo, I’ll give you this meat but you give me your spear. The tribe won’t like you if you’re selling it to them. Woody says “Yeah, that’s a butcher. He sells meat just like you sell blow. The next person who shares that thing, after he bought it, that changes from a straight up transaction to a social thing.” Woody sells the cocaine to people who are then going to share it. So for Woody there is a stark difference between a “straight up transaction” (which is what he was involved in) and “a social thing,” but cocaine can easily cross that boundary, transform from one kind of thing into the other. It is not the substance itself that defines its status, nor even the apparent actions of people, what they physically do with it.4 Cocaine changes hands, but what does it mean? It depends on the situation and intentions are key, what people mean by what they do. Cocaine says something in every context, but it readily changes contexts, and it can say different things at the same time.

PETE’S PROBLEM

Wayne represents a relatively happy outcome. He never became ad- dicted, in the sense of degrading his reputation or his health to get cocaine, and he never suffered any big social or legal problems from what was a long and occasionally large cocaine dealing operation. Wayne is astonishing in his ability to walk away from drugs, from alcohol, from pretty much anything that he decided was no longer of interest. He has a

12 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 70 Chapter 5 rare personal biochemistry that can withstand absurd quantities of drugs and alcohol, quantities that would kill an ordinary person, and he can stop using just about anything any time he wants. Woody maintained control a different way. By separating his dealing and his socializing, he was able to keep cocaine under control. None of this was true for Pete. Pete grew up in Southern California in an ocean view house with two brothers, two parents, and a dog. An all American boy—surfer, athlete, lifeguard, star student—Pete retained his swagger (and all of his hair) into his fifties, when he sat down with me for a set of interviews. Still lean and garrulous, Pete was kind enough to show me around his world in Hawaii, where he has lived and worked since the early 1990s. He introduced me to his friends in bars, and his buddies from work and the beach. Pete received a small inheritance, and he built his own house; he does not struggle financially. He has a college education, but works in construction, and augments this with earnings from growing cannabis. Pete’s cannabis farm is the topic of the next chapter. Here we focus on his earlier cocaine business. Pete is deeply negative about cocaine, and the business of transacting it. He has avoided it for many years. Pete first smoked marijuana in 1978, “but it didn’t do anything for me,” he says. His dad was “OK with drugs,” but told Pete not to smoke pot until he was sixteen “because of the brain,” presumably meaning a concern for Pete’s brain development. Pete claims that he was initially attracted to the money to be made from drugs rather than the drugs themselves and to make this point he told me a story of buying candy in third grade, breaking it into smaller units, and selling them to friends at school for a profit. It sounded something like my early hashish endeavor, but the point was the opposite: Pete wanted to make money. He was very concerned to show me that making money was the point of dealing, and that making money—in this or any other way—was fundamental to proper masculinity. The precocious candy dealing set the stage for selling drugs later. “It was all about the economics,” he said emphatically. “The way I got started was to make . . . money. I didn’t even do drugs.” Pete’s family was from Texas and his values tend towards the right end of the American political spectrum, especially on economic issues. He deeply believes in the American dream, even if his version of it is not quite what they teach at the American Enterprise Institute. Making money is a moral good, an American thing to do. Drugs were perhaps not the ideal way to do it, but the positives of making money mattered more than the nega- tives of making it from drugs. Real men made money. In high school the one clique Pete was not part of was “the stoners,” but he set out to change this. He sold marijuana early in high school, then hallucinogenic mushrooms, and finally, by senior year, cocaine. Since he claimed this was all about profit, but he was from a prosperous family, I wondered why he needed cash so badly. At first he said “there was

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nothing I lacked in any way,” which seemed to me to be agreeing with the premise that he had everything he needed, that there was no reason to go out and make money. But he shocked me by saying that drug money was different, it was “like driving a Porsche,” and that his goal was not just to have money, but to be “nigger rich.” What I take this to mean in this context is that drug money had cachet in his white, wealthy community, an audacious visibility that was cool in itself. 5 Pete wanted to be flagrantly profitable. Dealing involved conspicuous consumption (of drugs) and an equally conspicuous production (of money, identity, masculinity).6 When I pushed him further on this, asking why in his upscale community being conspicuously wealthy would matter, he was clear. It was about sex. “Getting pussy,” as Pete phrased it, was the point of life as a young adult. In this he sounded very much like Wayne: “you want to be the man,” Pete said repeatedly, using exactly the same words as Wayne. In those days the man with cocaine was the man (though, oddly, the police were also “the Man”). Still, I found Pete difficult to understand. He was very definite—totally sure—that his dealing was only about money, but it was equally clear that dealing was linked to sex and masculinity. Otherwise, what did “being the man” mean? It wasn’t just money that was important, but money from high-risk behavior consolidated into a hard to get, sexy substance that people wanted. I suppose that in an environment where having money was common, having money in the form of cocaine was symbolically significant, more than mere cash. (Arthur had said this, too.) Cocaine represented a hip way to have money, a dangerous way, or a fashionable way to expend it. Another factor is probably that while Pete’s family was very wealthy compared to the average American, they did not have the level of income of others in this exclusive beach community. So while Pete did not have to sell drugs to meet his financial needs, selling did provide the flashy cash necessary for a particular sort of masculinity. Drugs were involved in building the identity of a money-making man, one that Pete wanted to cultivate, at least for a while. Pete’s cocaine career was short and tumultuous. As he said, “in 1977 coke wasn’t bad . . . everybody did it . . . as far as anybody could tell.” I protested that he himself was not doing it in 1977, and he responded “no, but that is what you aspired to do.” So he began dealing late in high school, as he says, to make money, but his involvement took off in the mid-1980s when he met a Venezuelan woman who was, in his words, “super-hot.” Pete was smitten. Almost immediately the super-hot Vene- zuelan told Pete that her “father has diplomatic immunity” and that she regularly “flies into LAX with a suitcase full of cocaine and three pairs of underwear.” Pete really wanted to get in those diplomatically trafficked, coca-scented panties.

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However, while Pete was fixated on “getting pussy” (his words), he was also sleeping with men. He explained that he would make his way to Laguna Beach, in those days a gay mecca, and spend the afternoon in beachside bars. Young, fit, attractive, and horny: nobody in the bars asked Pete for ID, and generally he didn’t spend a dime. Even back in college, when I first met Pete, he wondered aloud why others weren’t doing what he was. I didn’t record those conversations, but it went something like “you go into a bar, you sit down and guys buy you drinks. If you want, they give you great drugs in the bathroom, and then suck your cock. Why would anyone not do that?” At the time I didn’t have an answer. It had simply not occurred to me to have sex with men, and I was fairly sure that the sex of a person in front of me would influence my level of arousal. Pete found this absurd. The sex of his partners matters to Pete in ways that are complicated. When Pete says “why I was doing what I was doing as a teenager . . . the whole thing was basically to get laid,” he means “getting laid” specifically by women. From his perspective, it is difficult to have sex with women, but men are easy. All he had to do was show up where men congre- gated and present himself as available. But women were different. They were hard work. They do not readily agree to sex, especially anonymous sex, and they certainly do not provide you with alcohol and drugs before having sex with you. That’s what men do. So, to be a man, you have to have the money (and the drugs) to perform proper masculinity, to woo or seduce people (women or men) in culturally sensible ways. To Pete, proper masculinity is more or less the same whether the sex is homosexu- al or straight. If you want to get laid by someone you consider desirable, you must be prepared to attract them—chemically and financially, in addition to everything else. The traditional masculine role is to pursue, and drugs are for pursuit. If you are the object of desire, the one being sought, people use drugs to pursue you. It was pretty straightforward from his perspective.7 At the point that the Venezuelan came on the scene Pete had developed a serious relationship with a man. Fortunately for Pete, this fit the Venezuelan’s tastes. She admitted that she liked to watch men have sex, and Pete readily agreed to this. “We got together because she watched me and my boyfriend have sex,” he said. And while not exactly a Holly- wood romance, these initial drug-fueled sex events evolved into a deeper passion. The Venezuelan eventually left her boyfriend for Pete and Pete left his boyfriend for the Venezuelan. Now when she flew in to LAX with a suitcase full of cocaine it was Pete who met her at the gate. You could still greet passengers at the boarding gates in those halcyon days. The Venezuelan girlfriend made the case that cocaine in itself was never a problem. Problems, according to her, came from money. This concerned Pete because, as we noted, money is fundamentally positive for him. But the Venezuelan asserted to Pete that cocaine is “only bad if

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you buy it” and Pete agrees that she has a point, that “technically it worked pretty well for me for a time. I did it, I didn’t buy it, and it wasn’t bad.” Really, though, it wasn’t bad yet. Pete had so much cocaine at such reduced prices that he made far more money off the drug than he and his partner could ever spend on it. And he ingested more of it than any reasonable person should ever consider. But the girlfriend intends more than this with her statement. According to Pete, she “used the term ‘buy it’ but also meant that you didn’t want it enough to buy it.” Unfortunately, Pete did “want it enough to buy it.” For him, at least, cocaine seized control. It became bad because he wanted it very, very much. Gradually, I came to understand that Pete’s ambivalence was not limited to the material substance of cocaine. It extends to the economics. Pete explained at agonizing length, and in a number of different ways, that he was a lousy businessman, bad at the clear-sighted calculation necessary to make real money, incapable of effectively focusing on his self-interest. For instance, he “passed on” his Venezuelan contact rather than jealously guarding it. Pete put his main customer in touch with his Venezuelan girlfriend, in other words, thus depriving himself of the ability to make a profit by buying from the one and selling to the other. He lost his source of revenue, and eventually he lost the girlfriend this way, too. He says, “I introduced the two of them and that was it for me. I was out of the loop.” While money was the main point of dealing (“the way I got started in it was to make fucking money”) looking back Pete says bitterly that “I don’t think I have leveraged . . . my da kine, da kine,” or in other words, he has not leveraged his advantages as he should have. He “failed” (his word, repeatedly used) at “capitalizing” (also his word). Primarily this is because “You gotta have the ability to fuck somebody over to make money in this business.” He pauses here, which is rare for Pete. Of all of the emotionally difficult things we discussed, this was the moment he seemed saddest. “I destroyed my business by giving it away.” Why? I ask, and he does not hesitate: “Because I’m dumb.” He dwelt on this for some time. To Pete’s way of thinking a smart dealer—a real man—would have taken better advantage of his opportunities. Ultimately Pete says “my cool gene just doesn’t fucking exist.” No matter how hard he tried to do the cool thing, the right thing business-wise, the manly thing, it was never going to work. For him, then, growing marijuana makes more sense than dealing because the demands—the practice of it—better suits his character. We explore this in the next chapter.

CONCLUSION

Drugs and sex go together—with rock and roll, as the saying goes. But the cultural context of sex has as much to do with how this works as the chemical composition of the drugs. It also seems strikingly personal.

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Some people find cannabis to be an aphrodisiac, for instance, while others are left with only a dry mouth (and other mucous membranes) and a lust for ice cream. Cocaine has been the main topic of this chapter since, in the era that concerns us, it was by far the most sought after drug and the one most closely associated with sex. Cocaine is a stimulant. One thing it was thought to stimulate was passion. It is also connected to masculinity, partly because of its association with money (and money with power) and the way that male sexuality in particular is dependent on money and power. Whatever cocaine does physically to the body, its cultural meaning was closely tied to desire. However, the relationship between sex and cocaine has varied over time. It seems more correct to say that cocaine had a reputation for being sexy, a reputation that has dwindled over the years. Indeed, it dwindles in the space of one song—“Life in the Fast Lane,” by the Eagles, but it also changed over decades. Younger dealers do not associate cocaine with money, power, and sex the way older ones did. It is also quite variable from person to person. Doug was monogamous despite his dealing business. Arthur never mentioned it. But Wayne, Woody, and Pete explained in clear terms how they saw cocaine, and cocaine sales, as connected to manhood. It is important to note that while the cocaine-sex linkage might have been the dominant view of things at the time, a wide variety of experiences and attitudes existed. However young men conceptualized cocaine in its prime cultural moment, this was fading fast by the late 1980s. Some moved on—out of college, in Art’s case, on to legitimate business in Wayne’s, into sobriety for Doug. Others, like Pete, moved on to different sorts of illegal business—like growing cannabis. For Pete the money was clearly “the super easy thing that got me really hooked . . . hooked on the lifestyle.” But the “lifestyle” had all sorts of elements that Pete struggles to sort out, even thirty years beyond his coke dealing years. This is the focus of the next chapter and it serves as a way to investigate how production of an illegal substance is different than distribution.

NOTES

1. Hugo Scwyzer, “Turns Out Women Have Really, Really Strong Sex Drives: and Men Handle It,” The Atlantic, published June 6, 2013, accessed on June 6, 2018, https:// www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/turns-out-women-have-really-really- strong-sex-drives-can-men-handle-it/276598/. 2. Often framed as “toxic masculinity” today, this notion of masculinity as essen- tially “cynical, self-serving marauders ceaselessly exploiting” others is longstanding, and hardly confined to the suburbs (Liebow 1967:89). 3. Woody is careful not to succumb to easy gender stereotypes, which is important, see Morningstar and Chitwood (1987). 4. See Pyyhtinen (2014) for a rebuttal to this conceptual linkage of relationships to gifts, and its inattention to the materiality of the gift-object.

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5. This is almost certainly what Mohamed and Fritzvold call “warding off the emasculating force of privilege,” which is one of the motivations of middle class drug dealers (2010:58). 6. The notion of “conspicuous consumption” comes from Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class (republished in 2016). 7. Some reviewers wanted more on the sexual politics of cocaine, especially in the gay context, but I do not feel qualified to say much more than I have. I am not a researcher in sexuality, and I asked few questions about it. I took what Pete had to say at face value, and repeat it here.

18 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase Mary M. Cameron, “Gender, Culture, Science, and Ayurvedic Medicine: Five Women Ayurvedic Doctors,” in Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 179–205. Series: Anthropology of Well-Being: Individual, Community, Society. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 6

Gender, Culture, Science, and Ayurvedic Medicine Five Women Ayurvedic Doctors

Today you can see that women’s health and safe motherhood have got the highest priority everywhere in the world.1 But in our country, many women are losing their lives while giving birth to infants and [from] other health problems. Today, if one or two people die due to accident, they get more importance than 14, 16, or even more women who die during labor every day. We are not even aware of the death of women. (Dr. Laxmi Bista, remarks at United States Edu- cational Foundation, Kathmandu, Nepal, March 2000.2)

NEPALI WOMEN’S HEALTH

Dr. Laxmi Bista (a pseudonym) issued the dire warning above shortly after a 1998 Nepal maternal mortality study found between 596 and 683 deaths of mothers per 100,000 live births. I myself had witnessed several newborn deaths, one maternal death, and many pregnancy complications while living in far western Bajhang District over the years, where early marriage, low female education, high fertility rates, lack of roads, and poor medical facilities all contributed to maternal mortality risk, and led to Bajhangi women’s stated fear of giving birth despite pregnancy happiness. Two years following Dr. Bista’s concern about maternal mortality, HMG established the fifteen- year National Safe Motherhood Plan 2002–2017, its most integrated and comprehensive program to date. At the time, approximately 90 percent of births occurred at home, attended by local midwives and/or family relatives, with few women attended before, during, or after delivery by trained birth atten- dants or medical providers. Antenatal, delivery, and postnatal monitoring of pregnancy and birth had proved key in reducing maternal and infant mortality in other countries; the Nepali government, in concert with nongovernmental

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organizations and international donors, commenced a step-wise program to reduce some of the highest birth-related mortality rates in the world. By 2016, at the time of Nepal’s most regular and comprehensive national health survey, the NDHS, Nepal’s national fertility rate was reduced by half, 84 percent of reproductive age women received antenatal care sometimes multiple times, and nearly 60 percent of births occurred in a health facility (Ministry of Health 2017). Biomedical interventions like iron pills, blood pressure monitoring, tetanus vaccination, public service health campaigns, and care by trained medical providers contributed to these landmark improve- ments in which the maternal mortality rate dropped to between 134 and 345 deaths per 100,000 live births (Ministry of Health 2017). What the NDHS did not measure, though, is how many of the doctors and trained medical providers were from Ayurveda, how many were female providers, or whether the health facility was allopathic, Ayurvedic, or something else. In the absence of clear survey questions on the NDHS about traditional medicine and its role in reducing infant and maternal mortality (and in public health in general), what is noteworthy is that fully two-thirds of women surveyed expressed concern about the absence of female health providers, a concern widely recognized as a barrier to health seeking behavior. This chapter focuses on the period just before these important public health initiatives were launched, and, by focusing on specific gendered dimensions of health care, it provides insight into women Ayurvedic doctors’ role in women’s health care overall, and the doctors’ experiences in becoming and being practitioners at a time of increasing medical modernization.

CULTURE, GENDER AND HEALTH

The diversity of indigenous medical systems around the world suggests that gender issues, well understood for Western science, may differ in significant ways for non-Western science practices. As such, they are an important dimen- sion of understanding how women’s health care is transformed, directly and indirectly, by broader social transformation and, in particular, by medical modernization itself. Health care for the women of Nepal, like for women around the world, is complex, is often difficult to access, and can be different from men’s. Some differences that I have observed during field research and within extensive conversations with women Ayurvedic physicians include fewer family resources dedicated to women’s health care; women patients’ reproductive health issues, some of which, like uterine prolapse, are Nepal- specific to labor, ethnicity, and caste factors; doctor-patient interactions and female-centered diagnosis and therapy; doctors’ re-appropriation and medical neutralization of gendered symbolism like impurity; and women’s preference

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for female physicians. The most important of these for understanding medical modernization’s effect on non-Western human health knowledge systems, like Ayurvedic medicine, is how much—and why—women patients value having women doctors. In the context of plural medical choices familiar to women and their families in many parts of the world, we might ask if biomedical modernity’s power overshadows and compresses indigenous medical plurality in a manner that bears on people’s gendered experiences of medicine. Indeed, women’s health care, as Dr. Bista warned above, may significantly depend on critical reforms in addressing women’s health concerns. While welcoming such lifesaving medical strides described in the chapter’s opening paragraph, we can also ask, in preserving other forms of public health care, how medical modernization might transform women patients’ relationships with their female Ayurvedic doctors, and vice versa. Understanding the nature and complexities of gender and indigenous medical relationships is one step toward minimizing negative outcomes of sociomedical change for women. This chapter addresses issues around gender, culture, health, and sociomedical transformation in Nepal through the experiences and perspectives of Nepali women Ayurvedic doctors. For women living in a patriarchal society, the physicians have achieved high professional status, they practiced important female-centered medicine, and they increasingly encountered and interacted with biomedicine there. Thus, this chapter diverges from the previous ones in focusing on a social class—women—and not individual and male Ayurvedic practitioners, in bringing attention to bear on an important global health concern: women’s health and well-being. Several themes from prior chapters converge on the discussion here, but observations specifically associated with being female in Ayurvedic medicine demonstrate the unique cultural and social forces at play in becoming a woman doctor. Over the nearly two decades I have been conducting field research on Ayurveda in Nepal, I have worked with both men and women doctors of all knowledge traditions. Here I explore the issue of traditional medical transformation and gender within three main contexts: medical education and women training to become doctors, their unique capability to heal women patients, and the ways they enculturate (make meaning of and interact with) medico- science practices. I identify gendered features of medical knowledge and practice that can potentially change from biomedical influences, as feminist scholars of science and technology have identified the latter. The women’s experiences and perceptions about being professional healers in a moderniz- ing health care context allow us to think more broadly about the connections between social (gender) and medical transformation, and how they affect gender-specific health care policy and delivery in those societies with strong traditional healing systems.

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There are four main points I wish to develop here regarding medical transformation and gender. First, in addition to the inherent paradigm differences between Ayurveda and biomedicine discussed in the previous chapters, the social and cultural features of women’s professional practice indicate contradictory paradigms in which medical authority belies women’s social subser- vience. Women patients’ strong preference for female healers of all kinds is the most evident example of a gender order that stratifies, on the one hand, and empowers, on the other, as the women doctors enjoy high social status and patient demand for their medical services in an otherwise male-dominant society. Still, while their professional status may minimize their gender-based social inferiority, it also creates a new kind of social marginalization found in some women’s unorthodox marriages and other family arrangements. This gender-based social paradox is further complicated by how the status of Ayurveda itself is being changed—and devalued—by biomedical health care development. That brings us to the second point. The field of feminist studies has long called us to look closely at the connection between the secondary status of women and the kinds of work that women perform in society today and in the past. In Nepal, more young women are choosing Ayurvedic medical education from among an array of possible careers in medicine. This trend is growing in spite of the government’s view that Ayurveda is secondary to biomedicine, a view belied by Ayurveda’s enormous popularity in rural areas and urban communities. We are led to ask, then, if women’s participation is contributing to Ayurveda’s practical marginalization, or, vice versa, if Ayurveda’s lesser official status somehow makes it preferable or easier—more socially acceptable—for women to apply to Ayurvedic medical colleges than to biomedical programs. Put another way, does a growing feminization of Ayurveda lead to its diminished status or does its diminished status—for example, it receives far fewer resources from the Nepali government and international donors—lead to its feminization? Both sides of this formulation may play a part in explaining the Nepali case of gender and sociomedical change, but the ethnographic data nonetheless provide persuasive other reasons for women’s enhanced role in Ayurveda on the one hand, and Ayurveda’s official marginalization, on the other. For example, the personal satisfaction and social power women doctors derive from caring for the health care needs of women, and their experience in Ayurveda’s efficacy, are important incentives for women’s professional choice. Additionally, higher education for women is more acceptable and encouraged now in Nepal than it was fifty years ago, and women’s presence is growing in all fields, including Ayurvedic medicine. Finally, Ayurveda’s official decline is very much the ideological product of the political economy of contemporary health care development: simply put, international donors favor biomedicine’s development. And yet, gendered

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features of another kind may, indeed, contribute to Ayurveda’s quasi-official decline, bringing us to the third point. The very qualities that comparatively render Ayurveda inferior to biomedicine in certain official and public discourses are precisely those that bring women healers and women patients together. These include noninvasive and low technology diagnostic techniques, minimal cost, and clinical interactions that encourage culturally relevant knowledge exchange. Other diagnostic techniques like pulse reading, doṣa evaluation, and the use of plants as medicines are considered essential characteristics of Ayurveda that are not inherently gendered. Women embrace these clinical techniques and cultural relevance; however, biomedical hegemony can potentially disrupt and alter them to the point of negatively impacting women’s health care. Many of the same reasons why Ayurveda is popular among Nepali female doctors and patients also lead to biomedicine’s general rejection of Ayurveda there, with health care administrators and officials declaring Ayurvedic medicine insuf- ficiently objective and not scientific. Although such conclusions are debated by both sides of these Nepali medical communities, as previous chapters described, it is important to consider women’s and men’s different relationships to health care regimes. This brings us to the fourth and final point. Potential sites of medical and social transformation related to the gendered dimensions of health care suggest areas that should receive attention by those advocating integrative plural medical systems that benefit women’s health. To that end, the analysis to follow on women becoming doctors, the healing of women patients, and the enculturation of medico-science practice can provide insights for those in policy positions. I observed and interviewed female practitioners, health administrators, and patients and their families in a variety of medical and nonmedical contexts, including Ayurvedic hospitals, clinics, health posts, classrooms, and pharma- cies, primarily in the three cities of Kathmandu Valley (Kathmandu, Bhak- tapur, and Patan), in Dang District and in rural communities in far western Bajhang District. The main features of women’s medical practice that make them unique as healers within the Ayurvedic tradition have been distilled here from my work with seven women, five of whom are presented in this chapter.

FEMINIST INSIGHTS ON GENDER, SCIENCE, AND MEDICINE: CROSS-CULTURAL APPLICATIONS

To understand the gendered features of Ayurvedic practice and how they potentially change with medical modernization, I look to insights from feminist theory and feminist medical anthropology that address the relationship between scientific ideology and gender, and the ways gendered symbolism

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and gender stratification are embodied in medicine and medical practice. In the area of science, culture, and social change, medical anthropologists have shown the variability with which modern science and globalized biomedicine’s power in non-European contexts can affect indigenous healing systems (Connor and Samuel 2001). To evaluate how biomedical development might transform women’s access to plural health care in the developing country of Nepal, I draw from feminist critiques of science to frame and analyze the women doctors’ work, lives, and words: their paths to becoming physicians, what they are uniquely able to offer women patients, and the ways they enculturate medical practice to deal with modern pressures. Feminist scholars of globalized Western science have greatly advanced our understanding of gender and modern scientific ideology, in particular how the historically braided nexus of politics, culture, and science have affected women’s health lives. From the philosophically grounded work of Evelyn Fox-Keller and Helen Longino (1996) on the gendered ontology of scientific language, to the well-known work of Emily Martin (1987) on gendered language embedded in medical school textbooks, the abundant findings of feminist scholars of Western science provide ample evidence of science as a gendered social practice with real consequences for women. The social study of science questions certain assumptions at the heart of Western scientific research and practice, and persuasively argues for fundamental reformulations of accepted knowledge around human-science issues. The analysis provided here is informed by Donna Haraway’s (1989) and Sandra Harding’s (1993) early calls for an expanded objectivity that is situ- ated and embodied, thus giving multiple perspectives from specialists and non-specialists alike. Here we understand that inclusion of women’s perspectives, and other minorities and marginalized groups, too, produces more representational—and thus more accurate—knowledge. Anthropology’s feminist-informed theoretical reformulations are multiple, from gender-equal images of labor and socialization in biological evolution to richly argued causal theories of (universal) gender stratification. South Asian society that is gender, caste, ethnic, and class stratified has typically marginalized knowledge from the lower social strata. Nepal’s largely exclusionary Ayurvedic education history, in which no groups except high-caste men formally and even informally studied, parallels Harding and Haraway’s (and many others) critique of Euro-Western science practice and knowledge production that intentionally, subconsciously, and unintentionally excludes many groups. Women are almost always an excluded or marginalized group. In the wake of modern allopathic medicine’s rising institutional and discursive power, and its concomitant devaluing of Ayurveda and other traditional medical systems, it is possible that Ayurveda’s feminization may contribute to this devaluation in the minds of primarily high-caste male

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medical authorities. Furthermore, as official support for Ayurveda wanes in comparison to biomedicine, lost are the benefits to Nepali society from plural medicine’s strong objectivity of the kind that Harding describes. Put another way, plural medicine that is authentically multiple in type (Ayurveda, biomedicine, shamanism, etc.) and diverse in participants (women, lower castes, lower classes, janajāti) enhances medical knowledge production and practice. All of the Ayurvedic doctors I’ve worked with in Nepal, including the women, support a robust plural medical system in which traditional and Western medicine co-equally exist. Finally, feminist theory also informed my methodology. In analyzing the apparent contradictions in the lives of women Ayurvedic doctors—for example, when they advance naturalizing explanations of female impurity over culturally stigmatizing ones, yet follow most cultural prescriptions for properly subservient female behavior—I recognized that multiple subjectivities are complexly formed across a range of sites in which women’s agency is centrally important (Skeggs 1994). Multiple subjectivities, rather than discreet monolithic subjects, emerge when we consider women’s lived experience as professionals, within families, and in their communities. Feminist methodology directs questions to how opportunity, agency, experience, and response come from being female, and when not. Each woman’s story was unique, yet they shared a struggle to overcome social barriers. Scholars from anthropology, philosophy, and history have identified elitist, sexist, and objectifying practices of Euro-American science and biomedical institutions.3 Still, critiques of modern medicine provide only a partial context in which to understand gender, health, and Ayurveda in Nepal. Medical anthropologists confronted with questions of rational knowledge accumula- tion and efficacy are called to describe and explain ethnomedical theoretical diversity, particularly in the case of Ayurveda, on the one hand, and are challenged to provide evidence of efficacy that may not fit the highly valued and uniquely powerful biomedical model, on the other. This challenge parallels that for those whose livelihood depends on how competently they address questions of evidence, proof, and efficacy. The women Ayurvedic doctors discussed here confronted tests to their professional legitimacy, all the while supported by the large numbers of women patients who seek them out. Like professional women around the world, women Ayurvedic physicians experienced gender-based discrimination in their professional lives, thus add- ing a level of stress to their already challenging lives in a patriarchal culture like Nepal’s. While attempting to identify women physicians to talk with about their professional experiences, for example, I noticed that some of their male colleagues (excluding those in this book) seemed to reserve a level of personalized gossip and criticism of them not used on their male colleagues. My fieldnotes on the first day of July in 2005 summarized these observations.

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Two prominent women Ayurvedic physicians were criticized on personal and professional accounts, including claims that they are unpopular, that they are unethical, and that they are not good teachers. Indeed, male doctors talk about each other also, though not at the personal level. One male doctor claimed that his female colleague’s reputation, otherwise good, deteriorated while she was on leave to study in India at BHU and a colleague signed her attendance with HMG (the government at the time), allowing her to continue receiving a salary. The male colleague was not cited for misconduct nor did he apparently suffer reputational damage like she did. In another example, an Ayurvedic obstetrician was accused by a colleague in a hushed conspiratorial tone of performing abortions for payment, even though abortion is legal in Nepal. A third woman doctor was denounced in the newspapers for clinical misconduct that was later found to be untrue. Fortunately, her reputation was quickly repaired through her excellent clinical skills and classroom teaching. This kind of gender discrimination was not new to her. When she had entered medical school, another student publicly proclaimed his refusal to attend classes with her, a Newar, and he dropped out. All of these incidents were disconcerting to the women and they themselves readily volunteered raising them when asked if they had ever experienced professional discrimination, suggesting they were still troubled by such treatment.

Health Production by Women In her excellent review of women’s health ethnographies over the last two decades, anthropologist Marcia Inhorn (2006) notes particular gaps in our understanding of gender, culture, and health care. She points out the dis- proportionate amount of research that anthropologists have conducted on women’s reproductive roles (constituting between 75% and 90% of the ethnographies she reviewed), suggesting that, although this is a unique and important aspect of women’s health care, research could be encouraged on other health care issues of concern to women. Regarding practitioners, midwives and other informal providers of health care have been at the center of research attention by anthropologists and others. Here I take her observation to partly explain the lack of information on women professional providers, noting in particular the seeming paucity of research on women professional practitioners of non-Western medico-science; one way to expand our understanding of women’s health globally is with the specific case of women professionals of Ayurvedic medicine. Their position importantly compares with women allopathic practitioners and traditional midwives, two groups that have received considerable research attention. Ayurvedic women doctors, too, are highly educated and skilled in a field that is medically and

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socially desirable for women, and yet, little researched, they remain poorly understood. What Inhorn calls the “production of health by women” (Inhorn 2006, 358) is quantitatively and qualitatively significant, occurring in the home, in the midwives’ quarters, and in the sacred spaces of spiritual healers. The record, though, leaves the impression that women are not significant players in professional medicine, including traditions that have histories and lineages of knowledge transmission found in formal and nonformal institutions.4 How- ever, women have been part of Ayurvedic medicine’s evolution and practice for at least three decades in Nepal, and the number of women formally trained in both Ayurveda and biomedicine has steadily increased with the acceptance of women’s higher education. The production of health by women clearly also occurs in clinics and hospitals by professional practitioners of human health knowledge systems like Ayurveda, who provide for women’s health while finding themselves at the crossroads of modern medical change. The near invisibility in medical anthropology of women professional healers has limited our understanding of the gender dimensions of professional non- Western medicine and science, and has confined our models of the relationship among social change, gender, and health to informal female healers in a variety of communities (Huber and Sandstrom 2001; Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Lyon 1989; Jordan 1983; Kaufert and O’Neill 1993; Laderman 1983, 2001; Martinez-Cruz 2011; McClain 1995), and to male professional and informal healers in South Asian medical anthropology (Burghart 1984; Desjarlais 1992; Durkin 1988; Kakar 1982; Leslie and Young 1992; Macdonald 1975; Maskarinec 1995; Nichter 1980, 1981, 2001; Nordstrom 1989; Obeyesekere 1992, 1988; Stone 1976, 1986; Trawick 1992; Zysk 1991). In Nepal, traditional medical practitioners such as shamans and midwives have been identified as bridges between the people and the state’s modern messages of health care, as Pigg (1992) notes, and we might also ask about Ayurveda’s parallel role and, in particular, its female practitioners. Women providers from such traditions stand in a unique position not only to their patients but also to the state (Cameron 2009a). Professionals are understood here to be medical practitioners who skillfully apply an organized body of knowledge that is transmitted in formal educational contexts.5 They are sought by community members for their expertise in diagnosing and curing a broad range of illnesses, and some of the women in this chapter have specialized in obstetrics-gynecology when pursuing the MD (Ayurveda) degree. All of the women in this chapter received formal higher education in Ayurvedic medical colleges and hold the MD (Ayurveda) degree. Today in Nepal, approximately 15 percent of the Ayurvedic doctors holding the BAMS or MD (Ayurveda) and registered with the Nepal Ayurvedic Medical Council (NAMC) are women. The number of women

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Ayurvedic medical students is rising, and that a majority selected Ayurveda over biomedicine as their first choice in higher education is itself a trend reversal. Here a look at the Nepali women’s professional paths can help explain Ayurveda’s appeal to prospective women doctors. What these examples importantly illustrate is how difficult it was for women to study medicine in Nepal, and the real effects of such a career choice on women’s marriage and family life are evident for all of the doctors portrayed here.

BECOMING DOCTORS

Dr. Sarita Shrestha: Teacher, Healer, and Innovator When Dr. Sarita Shrestha first applied to the new Ayurveda certificate program at Naradevi College in 1978, the college principal told her she should quit because the curriculum contained science, mathematics, English, and Sanskrit, all subjects and languages that women did not understand suffi- ciently or were unable to learn. As she conveyed to me about the incident, “It made me feel, now I must show that this woman can do it!” (Dr. Sarita Shrestha, in an email to the author on September 23, 2018). She completed the three-year program in the top of the class, along with Dr. Risha Ram Koirala, her classmate. As the first woman to graduate from the program, others soon followed, including Dr. Dev Kala Bhandari who is discussed below. Dr. Shrestha received a Colombo Plan scholarship to study in the BAMS program at the Government Ayurveda College, Jiwaji University, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India, where she graduated in 1988. She returned to Nepal and taught in Naradevi’s Ayurveda certificate program—the very one she had been told to quit because she was a woman. Dr. Shrestha then earned her MD (Ayurveda) with an obstetrics-gynecology specialization from BHU’s Institute of Medical Science, Banaras, India, in 1996, and, again, returned to Nepal to teach in Naradevi’s BAMS program for several years. She eventually left government service in 2004, one year after she started the NGO Devi Ma Kunja and opened Devi Ma Hospital in Bhaktapur in 2003.

Unconventional Marriages Dr. Maya Devi Gautam was also one of the first women Ayurvedic doctors educated in Nepal. She began studying when she was seventeen years old, received the Āchārya degree from Naradevi Ayurvedic College in 1970, and

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completed clinical rotations throughout much of 1971. When I first met Dr. Gautam, she was working as the head doctor in two clinics and as a government administrator. For the first of our interviews in 2000, I took a taxi to the Department of Ayurveda on a rainy monsoon morning and dashed inside the dark entry to her office, a branch of the MoH located in a converted Rana pal- ace. I shook out my umbrella as she put aside papers that detailed Ayurvedic medical supply distribution to the then nearly 300 Ayurvedic hospitals, clinics, and health posts in Nepal. She then gestured for me to sit down on one of two small red couches facing a wood and glass coffee table, on which an assistant soon placed a tray of sugar cookies and sweet spiced milk tea. Dr. Gautam was educated during a period when King Mahendra began radically transforming Nepal’s educational system, called the New Education Plan, a process that continued for several decades by the eldest of his three sons and his heir, King Birendra. The traditional Sanskrit-based curriculum of Ayurvedic medical education was converted into an English- and Nepali- based curriculum that integrated biomedicine, and its administration was moved from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Education. This move split the regulation of clinical Ayurveda from the formal educational system, a division that continues today. The Madhyama and Shastri degrees of the Sanskrit system were replaced with the intermediate degree in Ayurvedic Science and the bachelor’s degree in Ayurveda; the Āchārya degree was eliminated, later replaced by the BAMS.6 In balancing domestic and professional life, Dr. Gautam found the conventional patrilocal marital arrangement unsuited to her educational goals. Nepali daughters-in-law are expected to work harder in the home than other family members, and they do the majority of household work. In spite of being in college when she married, Dr. Gautam was expected to perform the demanding role of daughter-in-law in her husband’s extended family. Dur- ing a July 2000 interview, she divulged to me that it had caused her many hardships.

I finished a two-year course on Ayurvedic medicine at Naradevi and then when I was in my first year of the Shastriya course, I got married. I married at a young age and struggled hard to continue my studies. My husband was a teacher. I wasn’t treated well in my husband’s home. I had to cook for all the family members but I wasn’t given much to eat myself. Often I had to rush to campus without taking any food. My husband is a simple gentleman who does not like to say anything on these matters. When he found out that I wasn’t eating, we decided to live separately from my in-laws. He even took care of the cooking so that I could study. (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kath- mandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000)

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In Nepali families, formal education is often discontinued or devalued once a daughter marries. Yet with a supportive husband, change is possible for a couple. The Gautams quietly moved to a separate flat and Dr. Gautam continued her medical studies. Still, family life for a woman can hinder professional progress. As part of King Birendra’s reforms, educated Nepalis were required to provide service to rural communities in what was called National Devel- opment Service (Hayes 1981, 677). Promotions and raises for Ayurvedic professionals required a doctor to spend several months to years working in remote districts of Nepal serving the rural poor. Dr. Gautam, however, had been unable to relocate away from Kathmandu because of family obligations. She noted that men received merit-based raises much more often than women because they could provide such national service, and she resented the sex- ism in the system. Dr. Gautam felt discouraged that she had been overlooked for promotions, and she compensated by being actively involved in many professional organizations and mentoring new doctors in establishing their own private clinics. The marital histories of women Ayurvedic doctors rarely fit Nepal’s general marriage patterns. Now in her late fifties, Dr. Sarita Shrestha married a widower ten years ago. Dr. Kadambari Acharya married a man of higher caste status in a love marriage (as opposed to the far more conventional arranged marriage). Her husband’s family never accepted her, and the couple and their three children lived with her parents who, along with a sister, provided child- care while Dr. Acharya studied medicine. Finally, Dr. Dev Kala Bhandari’s impending arranged marriage while she was a teenager compelled her to run away from home long enough to convince her family she was serious about her future education and her desire not to marry young. She tried a few different medical programs and finally discovered her passion in Ayurveda. Eventually, Dr. Bhandari married a fellow student in an unconventional love marriage.

Journeys to Professional Ayurveda Dr. Laxmi Bista was born in India thirty-seven years ago. She studied in a pure Ayurveda program in Bangalore, India, that was not integrated with modern medicine, although she was one of the only doctors with whom I worked who occasionally and unapologetically prescribed biomedical drugs. Dr. Bista began studying Ayurvedic medicine when she was nineteen after securing a scholarship from the Indian government and graduated at age twenty-four. Her brother, whose opinion she greatly trusted, advised her to study Ayurveda, even though there were family allopathic doctors, including her own father. In fact, Dr. Bista had not heard about Ayurveda until she went to study it and was most surprised to learn that much of the coursework was in

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Sanskrit, a language she did not know. In a July 2000 interview, she described the winding journey that took her to Ayurveda.

My father is an allopathic doctor. In fact there are six or seven allopathic doctors in my family. In [her Indian state of birth] we did not have a university or an Ayurvedic college. So in order to produce doctors, the Ayurvedic colleges in India established scholarship quotas for the people of [her Indian state of birth]. The year I passed the I. Sc. there were two seats for Ayurveda for the first time in [her Indian state of birth]. My brother is a lawyer and he tried to get me a medical seat. I even got an MBBS seat in Bīhar. On that same day the health director told me that there was also an Ayurveda seat . . . and I could try for that. My brother thought that Bīhar was not a good place, so I applied for the Ayurveda seat and on the first attempt I got it. It was in Delhi but there was no women’s hostel. Again I applied for any college that had a hostel. And the next seat was from Bangalore. That is where I went. Until then . . . I had no idea what Ayurveda was. I knew I wanted to become a doctor. I had scored 89 percent in I. Sc. and I was sure that I would get a medical seat. So this was how I came to Ayurveda. When I went to the college the very first class was in Sanskrit. I thought to myself, “What is all this?” My classmates told me . . . that everything would be in Sanskrit. After that I started taking Sanskrit tuition classes . . . and I committed to finish it. (Dr. Laxmi Bista, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 3, 2000)

Many of the doctors with whom I worked, including the informally trained village healers, chose their vocation because of an inspirational family member in Ayurveda. Still other Ayurvedic doctors have children who go on to practice biomedicine. Dr. Bista’s path was unique, coming as she did from a family of biomedical doctors. With funding from the Nepali government and the WHO, she studied Ayurvedic obstetrics in India and returned to fill the obstetrician’s position at Naradevi Teaching Hospital that had been vacated by Dr. Sarita Shrestha. All of the women performed multiple medical functions in their communities. They worked in clinics, hospitals, government service, and as medical school educators. Dr. Shrestha was the cofounder and supervising physician at the Devi Ma Rural Ayurvedic Hospital for Women, established in 2003 on the outskirts of Bhaktapur, a city in Kathmandu Valley (see figure 6.1). She was also the supervising physician and board chair at Dhanwantari Ayurvedic Hospital, a private hospital in a Kathmandu neighborhood. Finally, her private clinic was a collection of third-floor rooms on a busy Patan street. In addition to her work in Nepal, Dr. Shrestha annually traveled to the United States to serve as a resident Ayurvedic practitioner in a number of health facilities. The money she earned from international work helped support the Devi Ma Hospital for Women.

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Figure 6.1 Dr. Sarita Shrestha (in shawl) and female staff at Devi Ma Ayurvedic Hospital for Women, Bhaktapur, Nepal, 2005. Source: Photograph by Mary Cameron.

WOMEN HEALING WOMEN

[The female patients] covered themselves and refused to let the [male] doctor see them. Being a physician intern, I did not feel shy or ashamed, nor do I feel it now. (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000)

Although a heterogeneous group, the women Ayurvedic doctors agreed that being female allowed them to provide medical care to women differently than male physicians. Although it would be misleading to present women Ayurvedic doctors as a definitive case study of female empowerment, their claims to being uniquely positioned to understand the social contexts of gendered morbidity are persuasive and widely shared. As practicing scientists, such women can be seen from the perspective of feminist standpoint theory as occupying heterogeneous and potentially more objective subject positions (Harding 1993), thus suggesting an important contribution women Ayurvedic doctors make to science and medicine. Nepali women practitioners are able to strengthen medical objectivity by enlarging the discourse of science’s role in society and by extending notions of medical truth to include subjective and marginalized states. Nepali women

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doctors are particularly concerned about how women’s health is affected by everyday economic arrangements, gender role expectations, and family neglect of women’s health needs. Dr. Gautam poignantly described how the gender organization of labor and kinship in the subsistence farming economy exposes women to greater health risks.

The women from the villages and remote hills hesitate to tell us about their gynecological problems. They carry heavy loads during pregnancy and immediately after delivery, and as a consequence, they develop a prolapsed uterus. But they do not know exactly what it is, and when they finally tell their mothers-in-law, they are told to keep quiet and that such a condition is not unusual. But the condition worsens and becomes chronic, yet they are still not taken to the hospital. The in-laws need the daughter-in-law at home to do the chores, and so they claim they do not have money for treatment. (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000)

The too-common condition in Nepal of uterine prolapse resulting from hard physical labor during and after pregnancy is worsened by family decisions that place economic needs over medical ones, delaying medical treatment for suffering women. Dr. Gautam’s knowledge of the cultural basis of this painful condition helps to inform the compassionate medical care she provided to them. Women patients share a number of reasons for preferring women doctors, beginning with Ayurveda’s cultural salience. As discussed in previous chapters, concepts of the body and person in Ayurvedic thought differ fundamentally from the mechanistic and compartmentalized biomedical model of the body. As it is widely practiced in South Asia, Ayurveda regards the patient’s daily practices, social relationships, and environmental surround- ings to be integral to diagnosis and treatment.7 A doṣa-based, integrated theory of the human body, non-medicalization of the human life cycle, and noninvasive techniques of diagnosis all potentially make Ayurvedic practice less detrimental to female bodies than what feminist scholars have shown for biomedical science. Within this broader framework of practice, specific characteristics of clinical interactions that appeal to women include the following: (1) an experience-based and reflexive understanding of the complex social, cultural, and gender factors of health; (2) doctors’ willingness to convey medical knowledge that involves appropriate explanation of the cause and cure for a condition; (3) skillful diagnosing of medical conditions utilizing noninvasive techniques that are familiar to women, such as pulse examination, evaluating foods regularly eaten, and identifying recent abrupt changes in living and other conditions that may disrupt humoral balance; (4) expressing an empathic rather than a detached objectivity toward the patient; (5) reading certain cultural practices as biological, natural, or health related in

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ways that reinterpret the symbolism of female impurity; and (6) encouraging culturally relevant and feasible preventive medicine. Examples of these are described below. Women physicians employed an empathic and engaged objectivity by focusing on patients’ subjective states and family and community values even while diagnosing physical signs of aggravated doṣa. Some of the women I have observed in clinical settings spent considerable time with patients and their accompanying family members, understanding their emotional states and family situations. At other times they were stern with patients, as I show below. Although they did not disregard the patient’s feelings, they exhorted them, for example, to stop eating foods that cause doṣa imbalance. Power and agency in the patient-doctor relationship were influenced by the doctors’ authority to competently adjust patients’ unique doṣa imbalance and Nepali cultural acceptance of socio-professional rank.8 Women Ayurvedic doctors clearly practice female-centered medicine by the sheer numbers of women patients they see. Male doctors, aware of this preference, are hesitant to treat female patients if female doctors are conve- niently available. At the hospital that Dr. Shrestha supervised, for example, women’s and men’s wards and massage-therapy facilities were separate. As she and I talked one morning in March 2005, a male colleague interrupted our conversation by seeking advice on the “difficult” application of heat to a woman’s hip. Understanding the male clinician’s hesitation to touch the woman’s abdominal and pelvic areas, I offered to end our conversation so that Dr. Shrestha could attend to the patient. In July 2000, Dr. Acharya succinctly summarized how gender norms help shape medical experiences: “Female patients expect to have female doctors. They feel they can be more open to talk about their problems with female doctors than with male doctors.” A health facility for women on the outskirts of Bhaktapur specializes in Ayurvedic medical approaches that appeal to women patients. Devi Ma Hos- pital for Women is a three-story building on a footpath branching from a road that eventually leads to Bhaktapur. The brainchild of Dr. Sarita Shrestha, the hospital was inaugurated in 2003 by a group of women that invested supplies and money to launch a rural hospital specializing in women’s reproductive health care. The staff successfully delivered eight babies during the hospital’s first year. A large photograph of the eight mothers and their infants hung in the overnight patients’ room; the woman doctor, Dr. Sumana Thasineku, a new graduate of Naradevi Ayurvedic Hospital and College and one of Dr. Shrestha’s protégés, stood tall and proud behind the seated mothers holding their plump babies, each infant’s face shining with mustard oil and gajal- lined eyes. Dr. Thasineku herself had shown an interest in medical botany from an early age and expanded that interest in earning an I.Sc. in Biology from Kerala, India, and later enrolled in Naradevi after finally deciding

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Figure 6.2 Devi Ma Ayurvedic Hospital for Women medicinal plant garden, Bhaktapur, Nepal, 2005. Source: Photograph by Mary Cameron.

between law and medicine as her professional career.9 She also assisted Dr. Tiwari (chapter 2) in a two-day herb identification workshop at Devi Ma Hospital for the local community (see figure 6.2). On a normal day, the modest hospital received 10–15 patients. In its first year it received nearly one thousand patients. The staff is paid and the build- ings are rented, but Dr. Shrestha takes no salary. She used the money earned while lecturing in the United States a few months each year to finance the private hospital, which had an annual budget of $8,000–$10,000 in 2005. The all-female staff consisted of one full-time Ayurvedic doctor, two Ayurveda CHW, two midwives with training in Ayurveda, and a cook and cleaner. At least two staff members stayed at the facility overnight, while the others roomed in a house next door; the doctor stayed over some nights (see figure 6.3). The midwives trained for eighteen months, and the CHWs trained for six months. Dr. Shrestha was on call for emergencies, advising treatment over the phone or summoning an ambulance if the situation required. There was also an Ayurvedic pharmacy on-site. During the two hours of my first clinic observations with Dr. Shrestha, she examined six patients using an ear scope and stethoscope, and she felt patients’ pulses to assess doṣa and nerve functions. A pregnant woman was

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Figure 6.3 Patient beds at Devi Ma Ayurvedic Hospital for Women, Bhaktapur, Nepal, 2005. Source: Photograph by Mary Cameron.

further examined in a private room where her blood pressure was measured and laboratory tests were prescribed. Dr. Shrestha gave her home phone number to a male patient with an ear infection so he could contact her about his condition a day later. She spoke to each patient with authority and reas- surance, explaining the source of doṣa imbalance, listing foods to avoid, and insisting they follow her instructions to recover quickly. At the reception counter, patients were given their medicine and bill. The minimal sliding fees were adjusted in the case of one woman who expressed an inability to pay; Dr. Shrestha told her not to worry, that payment could wait until her next visit. The patients at Devi Ma Ayurvedic Hospital told me they were very pleased when the hospital opened in their community to provide prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care within a medical tradition that their experiences told them was efficacious and less harsh than allopathic medicine. “We believe in Ayurvedic medicine,” one middle-aged woman commented. Twenty-four-hour medical assistance was particularly reassuring to them. Flexible fees, short waiting periods, culturally relevant advice on health and illness, and a respectful staff all contributed to a satisfying clinical experience for patients. The female providers treated most of women’s non-birthing health problems, too, such as infections, indigestion, headaches, and painful menstruation; interestingly, they regarded birth as an ordinary event compared to other health problems. As I show below, some of the women doctors

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embraced essentialist ideas, such as the belief that a woman’s quintessential role is child bearing, a natural and biological function that empowers women and, in contrast to modern medicine, is not overly medicalized in Ayurveda.

Empathy and Authority The quality and character of patient consultations reflected the doctors’ authority and the patients’ acceptance of it. In Nepal’s clinical settings one often hears a parentalistic tone in provider-patient dialogue, a culturally acceptable assertion and acceptance of professional authority. Dr. Shrestha consulted with her patients as an active listener and a wise advisor, gaining the trust of her patients by examining them gently and by inquiring about family and farm. Indeed, patients agreed with Dr. Acharya’s explanation that women doctors are “softer in nature and talk to the patient like an older sister or a mother.” But when giving medical instructions that included admonishing unhealthy behavior, some doctors adopted a stern tone like a parent correcting a child or an educated authority figure firmly advising an elderly patient. I observed this approach in Ayurvedic clinics many times, finding somewhat surprising both the doctors’ abrupt switching from active listener to strict lecturer, and the patients’ willingness to accept the doctors’ unyielding warnings. Patients rarely directly challenged doctors’ advice, although they always sought clarification and sometimes complained about food restrictions. Importantly, cultural scripts like these allowed professional women to exert authority regardless of their gender, and to have that authority respected. In turn, patients recognized their own power in health care. For example, they kept their own medical records, they were free to select among a variety of professional healers, and they could even damage a doctor’s reputation through negative gossip.

ENCULTURATING MEDICO-SCIENCE PRACTICE

As we critically examine the expanding national dependence on expensive technologies and therapies that can drain national health budgets in developing countries, understanding the gender issues when non-Western human health knowledge systems modernize and encounter modern medicine’s influence can prevent the introduction of ideologies and practices associated with biomedicine that are potentially detrimental to women. The biomedical framing of women’s bodies in a manner that alters cultural ideas about pregnancy and birth, for example, and that introduces forms of diagnostic objecti- fication and unfamiliar medical language, can impede patient knowledge and

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input in health care decisions. Certainly, traditional and indigenous models of illness and healing are not easily translated into biomedical paradigms, and vice versa. Yet as traditional systems modernize and increasingly confront and coexist with modern medicine, the impact on women and women’s health care must be understood to best guide the process in positive directions for women. All of the women providers interviewed believed that as women they are in a unique position to care for women patients because they can recognize the social factors of health and are able to educate their patients on health mainte- nance and illness prevention relevant to their social and economic situations. In so doing, they are staunch advocates of the Ayurvedic scientist’s identity, which often means critiquing biomedicine as misused in a poor country. Still, the doctors differed in their perceptions of other aspects of gender, such as the impurity associated with female bodies and the authority of men over women. Some continued to work within a medical establishment that hinders their professional advancement, while others worked independent of direct male authority. Such realities engage with broader feminist concerns that the female subject be understood as contextualized historically and culturally, rather than as possessing a fixed subjectivity (Skeggs 1994). Educated, high-caste professional Nepali women living in a male-dominant society are only partially shielded from bias by their elite status, for they continue to confront other sociocultural and political barriers to professional advancement,10 including powerful institutions of biomedicine that continue to challenge the legitimacy of their practice. Following are examples of how women Ayurvedic physicians adjusted to sociomedical modernization in culturally appropriate ways. When she began her medical practice as a young doctor, Dr. Gautam charged patients very little for her medical expertise. She explained this arrangement as a suitable compromise between her professional expectations as a physician and Nepali cultural constraints discouraging married high- caste women from earning outside income. The decision she initially implemented was in line with Ayurvedic professional ethics, too, that encourages doctors to be motivated by compassion for the suffering of others, rather than by payment one might receive.

I don’t ask for a fee. I hesitate to take money even when patients want to give me some. But my children tell me that I should take a fee from those who can afford to pay, saying that the money can be useful to buy daily goods like vegetables, etc. So these days I take money from those who can and are willing to pay. But for old people with little money, I don’t accept anything. I give them medicines free of charge. (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000)

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I remarked to her how different her practice was from that of biomedical doctors, whose fees may be beyond the means of average Nepalis. She agreed, suggesting that payment expectations might impede valuable social factors in the patient-doctor relationship, like patients utilizing kin terms for her. “That’s correct. People say that you don’t have to pay for Ayurvedic medicine. Besides, most of the people were born here and we all know each other in the neighborhood well. Some call me their sister, and others call me their daughter. Due to these relationships, they don’t expect me to take money from them” (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000). When I returned to Nepal in the summer of 2005, Dr. Gautam’s medical practice had changed. Dissatisfied that the Department of Ayurveda had denied her merit-based raises in the past several years, Dr. Gautam moved one part of her practice from a room in her home to a family-operated Ayurvedic pharmacy where she had a clinic and saw patients in the late after- noons. At the entrance to her office was a sign that read“ Consultation Fee Rs. 60” or just under one US dollar. She still did not require the poor to pay, but the stated fee helped compensate for what she felt the Nepali government owed her after 30 years of service.

Expanding Science, Limiting Biomedicine There must be a scientific understanding. Without that we cannot fully understand Ayurveda. With science, Ayurveda can understand allopathic medicine, and allopathic medicine can understand Ayurvedic medicine. (Dr. Dev Kala Bhandari, interview by the author, Dang, Nepal, March 29, 2005)

In considering the rise of biomedicine in their country, women doctors distinguished between science and biomedicine by considering Ayurveda as an example of the former but fundamentally different from the latter. For them, science should be thought of in a broad way, as an approach to accumulat- ing knowledge that is both systematic and replicable. Guided by the theories of panchmahābhūta, tridoṣa, and dravyaguṇa (explained in prior chapters), Ayurvedic practitioners have over the centuries sought to transmit and expand knowledge of human illness and health, notwithstanding the sometimes secretive sequestering of accumulated knowledge in family lineages. Biomedicine, however, is problematic for many Ayurvedic doctors. They are particularly concerned about biomedicine overwhelming Nepal’s other medical practices, not because biomedicine is necessarily more efficacious but because it is a powerful political and economic force. The women doctors rejected narrow standards of medical management that are borrowed from biomedicine and applied to Ayurveda, for example, in the

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form of licensing regulations and other strategies used by the MoH to manage Ayurveda. In critiquing biomedicine, the doctors point out certain ironies. Dr. Shrestha observed that nearly half the allopathic doctors she knew prescribed Ayurvedic drugs while at the same time criticizing Ayurvedic doctors for prescribing allopathic drugs. Many biomedical doctors do, indeed, use and prescribe Ayurvedic medicine for their families and their patients, including high-level administrators in the MoHP that I have interviewed. The muted friction between Ayurveda and biomedicine is repeated in educational venues. Dr. Shrestha described a time when a group of Ayurvedic practitioners wanted to learn more about biomedicine so they could properly refer their patients, but the biomedical community declined. Dr. Acharya, a member of the Naradevi teaching staff, explained to me that when the Ayurveda graduate curriculum became increasingly integrated with biomedical information, students protested; the college administrators, concerned that graduates were opting for biomedical positions over Ayurvedic ones, removed some of the biomedical curricular content. Still, the doctors differed in the degree to which they integrated biomedicine into their Ayurvedic practice. Dr. Bista, with several relatives who are allopathic doctors, regularly recommended and prescribed allopathic medicine. Dr. Gautam never prescribed biomedical drugs and instead referred her patients to allopathic colleagues if necessary. Dr. Bhandari, former director of the Dang Regional Hospital, combined the two medical systems in ways she found most beneficial to her patients. Dr. Shrestha followed yet a different strategy. She did not prescribe biomedical drugs but she did employ biomedi- cally trained technicians at Dhanwantari Hospital because, as she explained, “they better understand how to sterilize instruments.” Like many of her colleagues, Dr. Shrestha referred patients to biomedical providers if necessary.

Constructing Scientist Identity Feminist scholars note that the process of symbolically naturalizing what are otherwise cultural and social phenomena has been common in the history of women’s health, a process that slips past critical social factors of health and effectively depoliticizes gender issues by casting them as immutable biological facts. For example, Nancy Theriot’s (1993) work on the history of locating mental illness in women’s reproductive organs illustrates how this notion affected their treatment and became embedded in the development of specializations in Western medicine. When naturalizing constructs draw from science and medicine discourses, they become powerful tools to obfus- cate social inequalities, blocking understanding of the social determinants of health. Women Ayurvedic doctors, too, assert natural reasons behind cultural and religious beliefs about women’s menstrual and other bodily impurity

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found in the ancient texts and in Nepal’s Hindu communities.11 However, in this case, the natural rationalization potentially empowers women by subver- sively implicating gender inequality. Two of the doctors claimed, for example, that menstrual seclusion is beneficial to women because it temporarily averts overtaxing the body’s doṣa balance otherwise caused by the (unpaid) heavy female labor demanded by patriarchy, caste, and class. Still, it is not unusual to find some doctors professionally extolling natural explanations while personally following Hindu precepts that at least partly assert women’s lower status than men. An example of this occurred one late morning in July 2000 when interviewing Dr. Bista after her busy morning of seeing several pediatric patients and meeting with three Ayurvedic drug representatives. That day, Dr. Bista was addressing my broader questions about how Ayurveda perceived women and whether it ascribed to women a status different from men, corresponding to broader cultural ideas. To explain the impurity of women from an Ayurvedic perspective in the contemporary period, Dr. Bista drew from a naturalizing language of medicine, describing the hard life of rural farming women and its toll on the physical body.

In Ayurveda there are specific ideas about menstruation. As you might have noticed, during menstruation women do not take part in any kind of work. For example, I will not touch my husband and I do not enter or go near places of worship and religious ceremonies. The classical texts in Ayurveda say that women should rest for at least three to five days when menstruating because they are weak during those times. It is also mentioned that we should not have sexual intercourse with our husbands and so we avoid them during that time. Both Suśruta and Caraka say this. It was likely carried out in earlier times since it was mentioned in such texts, but as we come to think about it now, we realize that women do need some rest during those times, and that the need to rest is more important than refraining from work because we are impure. Because we live in an urban place like Kathmandu, we work less and maybe our body might not need so much rest. But in the villages women have to wake up at four in the morning and do so much work—collect firewood and fodder, farm, etc. The pressure of the household chores is all on the women. So I think these restrictions are put on women to give them rest because their health requires it. (Dr. Laxmi Bista, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 3, 2000)

I had also found that rural women sometimes welcomed the rest that accompanied menstrual seclusion, called chhaupadi, as told to me over the years by the farming and artisan women of Bajhang. Recent Western reports of chhaupadi health hazards, including deaths of women and accompanying infants in menstrual huts, and menstrual stigma have spurred new Nepali national policy. Still, Dr. Bista, who may have been unaware of extreme menstrual seclusion practices in Nepal, as she was not a native (and the international

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attention is recent), emphasized the health benefits of menstrual seclusion and minimized the ideology of female impurity. And, she herself followed menstrual behavior restrictions. Although she explained that menstrual seclusion and rest had health benefits for rural women farmers, Dr. Bista also complied with gender-based religious and social norms by avoiding family members and sacred spaces; perhaps she had decided there were other battles to fight and didn’t mind culturally conforming, or perhaps she feared social exclusion if she spoke out against the arguably harmful practice of menstrual seclusion. Still, her empathic understanding of the female body—that it needs rest from constant physical labor—minimized the impurity stigma and made following social norms tolerable for her. Dr. Gautam, too, presented herself as an objective professional healer in her response to my question about difficulties she experienced while studying medicine. By the time we had met, she had practiced for several decades. Dr. Gautam described that during her internship she realized how effective she could be with female patients who, with little choice or preparation, feared and experienced shame and even dishonor with male physicians. Treating the human body objectively, she believed, without regard to gender or status, allowed her as an intern to administer care to all patients. As a woman Ayurvedic doctor, Dr. Gautam helped remove for women patients a barrier long endured—an overwhelming dependence on largely male healers.

No, I didn’t [have any difficulties]. In the practical lessons, in surgical and maternity works, we had to face everything. There were male doctors at Bir Hospital. The women patients from villages really had difficulty as they didn’t know that the male doctors would lay them on the table and they would see everything. They used to cry, “Oh god, do not let a man touch me!” They would scream and shout, saying they would prefer to die. They covered themselves and refused to let the doctor see them. Being a physician, I would step in. I did not feel shy or ashamed, nor do I feel it now. (Dr. Maya Devi Gautam, interview by the author, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 7, 2000)

Students of formal Ayurvedic medicine are trained to treat the ill regardless of gender, caste, ethnicity, or class. Furthermore, as the women doctors often asserted, the human body is best approached from the objective perspective of a practicing scientist. The women saw themselves as objective medical scientists. Yet because they were women they also understood the cultural factors that effected women’s health and well-being; female patients in turn felt comfortable seeking treatment from them. This sets off an interesting paradox, that objectivity empowered the women physicians professionally, while women patients sought out their empathy and non-Western clinical approaches, as described earlier, and their social status as female. Thus, both

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medical and nonmedical reasons can influence health outcomes for women patients, and the women doctors described here understood them both.12

The Future of Ayurveda and Women’s Health Care As Nepal’s medical modernization and social transformation continue, questions about how these changes will affect Ayurveda and other traditional medical systems naturally arise. This chapter examined sociocultural factors that both limited (lack of support for women’s higher education; family obligations) and enhanced (women patients preference for female doctors) one group of professional practitioners’ – women – opportunities and experiences as they learned and practiced Ayurvedic medicine during one period in Nepal. Transformational modernization of indigenous and traditional medicines can exhibit distinct gendered patterns that help us better understand the relationship among social change, gender, and health care, and hence better predict and prevent negative outcomes for women. For example, one set of compet- ing ideas that can be evaluated is whether biomedical practice and ideology introduce new or different gendered ideas into traditional medicine that may be detrimental to women, or if certain characteristics of science and medicine ultimately transcend cultural distinctions—as modern science would have us believe. Alternatively, we can ask if gender issues in traditional medicine, such as ideas about nature or diagnostic approaches, differ so significantly from Western science and biomedicine that what have been identified by feminist scholars as important gender problems for Western science and medicine do not hold true for traditional medicine. The discussion here of Nepali women Ayurvedic doctors finds some answers to these questions and uncovers certain paradoxes in health care modernization concerning women doctors and their patients. Indigenous practices beneficial to women are potentially changing under the influence of modern medical regulatory standards that marginalize lineage and other non-formally trained healers who work under the rubric of Ayurveda. Finally, there is the government and donors’ position that Ayurveda is not a modern medical science and is therefore less deserving of developmental funding. Countering this are the requests for more Ayurvedic facilities from politi- cians that recognize its benefits and its rising global popularity, the expanding focus on biodiversity conservation and medicinal plants, and the new demo- cratic government’s support for increased biotechnology research on medicinal plants (Guo 2008). Thus, the present indirect link between Ayurveda’s feminization and its marginalization in relation to modern biomedicine may evolve to become more direct and consequential for women’s health in the country.

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In countries heavily dependent on foreign donors to develop and sustain health care, the state becomes one of the most powerful instruments of modernity. Ayurvedic medicine highlights an important problem in how the Nepali state advances modernity in health care development. As an organized body of knowledge about illness and health that is culturally embedded and that utilizes medicinal plants as its materia medica, Ayurveda is a medical science accessible to the people. Although firmly rooted locally, Ayurveda is also caught up in broader conversations: narrow claims of what constitutes modern science (by which Ayurveda is found wanting), the popularity of traditional medicine as an alternative to allopathic medicine (by which Ayurveda is a well-lobbied alternative), and, as this chapter demonstrates, the role that social transformation like higher education for women plays in creating internal change and support for women’s health. The marginalization arising from state supported health care policy that reduces support to medical traditions like Ayurveda has potentially far-reaching consequences. Broadly thinking, the gradual attrition of any locally based health knowledge also risks diminishing specific features of cultural identity. The coevolution of traditional and Western medicine in Nepal provides an important site for asking how women Ayurvedic doctors negotiate these medical and cultural transformations, and continue providing low-cost, culturally empathic, and healthful medicine to their patients. In Nepal, gender issues in professional indigenous medicine exist in a region that is home to one of the world’s oldest medical traditions, and where some of the world’s highest rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality and child morbidity lead to significantly shortened lives—importantly, a trend that has now been reversed. Strengthening Ayurvedic medicine would encourage talented women wanting to practice this living, ancient medical science, particularly at a time when the value of dialogue across plural medical systems is increasingly recognized. As we advocate for women’s health improvement globally, understanding and supporting the work of women providers of traditional, learned medicines like Ayurveda that are efficacious, locally available, low cost, popular, and of cultural value is critical. The findings presented here further suggest that women’s health is positively affected when more women are practicing scholarly Asian medicines like Ayurveda. We now turn in the conclusion to the ways Ayurvedic doctors represent their practice as forms of medical expertise.

NOTES

1. Portions of this chapter were previously published in Cameron (2010a) and are published here with permission.

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2. Dr. Laxmi Bista is a pseudonym for a research participant who could not be located for permission to reproduce her interview words. All identifying information, including her place of birth in India, has been removed. 3. Other feminist scholars of gender, nature, and science that inform this study include Longino (1990, 2002), Keller (1985), and MacCormack and Strathern (1980). 4. An exception here is Hong’s (2009) analysis of Korean women doctors beginning in the Chosun Dynasty at the turn of the fifth century and continuing for 500 years. 5. See Hsu (1999) on professional Chinese medicine. 6. Some people believed the reforms weakened Ayurveda by integrating it with biomedicine. Ayurvedic education in Nepal reached a low point one year after Dr. Gautam graduated, in 1972, when the new educational system was enacted. 7. For India, see Langford (2002), Nichter (1981, 2001), Sharma and Dash (1998), and Zimmermann (1987). 8. On social hierarchies in Nepal, see Cameron (1998) and the contributions in Pach et al. (1998). 9. Dr. Sumana Thasineku, interview by the author, May 2005, Bhaktapur, Nepal. 10. Patriarchy is evident in many forms in Nepal, such as son preference; patri- lineal inheritance; comparatively low literacy levels for girls and women; low social status of daughters-in-law, wives, and widows; tolerance of domestic violence; and girl trafficking. 11. Not all ethnic groups in Nepal adhere to menstrual prohibitions, and this tends to be a set of prohibitions found among Hindus and those who have adopted dominant Hindu practices. 12. For a comparison of patient outcomes in biomedical interventions when treated by male and female doctors, see Tsugawa et al. (2017).

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Cameron_9781498594233.indb 205 4/15/2019 7:57:55 PM Martin Renzo Rosales and Juana Domingo Andrés, with commentary by Claire Herzog, “Guatemalan Mayas in the American Midwest: Creative Intercultural Networking,” in The Crux of Refugee Resettlement: Rebuilding Social Networks, ed. Andrew Nelson, Alexander Rödlach, and Roos Willems (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 29–55. Series: Crossing Borders in a Global World: Applying Anthropology to Migration, Displacement, and Social Change. All rights reserved.

Chapter 2

Guatemalan Mayas in the American Midwest Creative Intercultural Networking Martin Renzo Rosales and Juana Domingo Andrés, with commentary by Claire Herzog

Juana Domingo Andrés, a Q’anjob’al1 woman born in the town of Santa Eulalia,2 in the Department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, arrived in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1995. With the support of one of her brothers, she moved to this city after several months in Los Angeles, where she arrived from Guatemala in 1994. In Omaha, Domingo Andrés started working as a regular employee at a meat processing plant, a far cry from her days in Guatemala where she founded and was the director of a Catholic school. She said that, by the time of her arrival in Omaha, she met other immigrants who, like her brother, had arrived in the city during the mid-1980s. These people had fled the military regime that was violently ruling their country through the repression of individuals and communities, to the extent being accused of committing acts of genocide3 (Falla 1992; Amnesty International 2014; Spanish Federal Court 2008). Domingo Andrés also noticed that, after the end of the civil war in Guatemala in 1996, immigrants from that country kept coming to Omaha looking for better economic conditions. Since the moment she settled in Omaha, Domingo Andrés started a new life with opportunities and challenges that were simultaneously old and new for almost any immigrant (learning the law of the land, adjusting to the cultural idiosyncrasies of the US Midwest, looking for a job, and dealing with her status as resident). By 2007, after observing the diverse problems and needs of their fellow migrants, Domingo Andrés, her husband Luis, and others pondered what could be done to help other Q’anjob’al to navigate their new place of residence and, as a result, founded the community organization Pixan Ixim (Spirit of Corn). Since then, this organization has been engaged

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in a series of networking initiatives of active collaboration with diverse individuals and organizations that support fellow Q’anjob’al immigrants in their process of understanding and assuming the implications of living in Omaha,4 regardless of their status as refugee seekers or economic migrants. With the slogan Reinforcing Our Roots, Living Our Maya Heritage, Pixan Ixim has been facilitating the connection not only among the Q’anjob’al residing in Omaha, but also between them and other organizations and institutions in the United States, and between the Q’anjob’al in Omaha and those remaining in their original town of Santa Eulalia in Guatemala. Furthermore, Pixan Ixim has fostered relationships with other indigenous groups in the United States, more specifically the Omaha Nation. By analyzing the actions of immigrants like Domingo Andrés and organizations like Pixan Ixim, this chapter will present a case in which we will revisit some conceptual categories, such as migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker/asylee,5 and appreciate the practical dynamics of networking that a group of Q’anjob’al have developed to build, restore, sustain, and increase their social capital. The Q’anjob’als’ experience in Omaha, represented by Pixan Ixim, shows several commonalities with the experiences of refugees, as well as other documented and undocumented immigrants. It also exposes the politicization in the United States of the blurred boundaries between the categories of refugees and immigrants when applied to people coming specifically from certain conflict Latin American countries. In addition, this case reveals a singular insight for the discussion of distinctive migration rights for Native Ameri- cans that goes beyond the contemporary legal framework of modern states. Considering all these aspects, the Mayas in Omaha have been developing creative strategies of social adaptation in the United States by simultaneously bonding, bridging, and linking social capital through networking within and outside their ethnic or sociocultural context (Morrice 2007).

CONTEXT: IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES FROM LATIN AMERICA IN THE UNITED STATES

The growing presence of Latin American immigrants in the United States has been serving as an opportunity to reshape the misleading and simplistic perception held by the common population and popularized by the media, of who these immigrants are beyond the image of the stereotypical Spanish-speaking mestizo almost exclusively identified as Mexican. This presence is also helping to spread awareness of the demographic and cultural diversity within each country of that region and the different backgrounds and dynamics of the migration experience of many of the people coming from there (Sanabria 2007; Portes 2011; Rumbart 2011; Le Baron 2012).

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Latin America is a demographically diverse region: by 2012, it was estimated that 126.21 million of people of African descent lived in Latin America and the Caribbean, versus 39.16 million in North America (World Bank 2012). It is also home to more than 45 million of Native Americans (United Nations 2010) who possess cultures, traditions, and languages totally different from that of the dominant Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking societies of Central and South America (Winn 2006, 3). The Economic Comission for Latin America (CEPAL) has recognized 826 indigenous groups in this region, and has estimated that more than 200 groups are living in voluntary isolation (United Nations 2010). The percentages of indigenous people listed by CEPAL in countries like Bolivia (62.2 percent), Guatemala (41 percent), Peru (24 percent), Mexico (15.1 percent), and Panama (12.3 percent) are indicators of the demographic relevance of these groups. In Guatemala alone, twenty-two different Maya groups add up to a population of more than four million people of Native American origin (Brown and Odem 2011). It is important to remember that the political violence that has affected Guatemala since 1960 has been a crucial catalyst in the increase of forced migration from there to the United States. Other migratory waves have been triggered by critical economic conditions, natural disasters, or widespread post-civil war criminality (Tienda and Sanchez 2013; Jonas 2013; Ribaldo 2016; Hiskey, et al. 2016). Among those who have emigrated from Guate- mala, the Maya population deserves special attention. It has been estimated that about 500,000 Maya have migrated to the United States (Brown and Odem 2011). To give perspective to the magnitude of this migration of Native Americans from Guatemala, Alan Le Baron noticed that, according to the US 2010 census, the Native American population was estimated at 5.2 million, but, when compared with other Native American groups, if considered as a single group, “Maya in the U.S. could possibly be larger than the combined two largest groups of currently recognized Native Americans, the Navajo and the Cherokee” (2015).6

MAYAS AND THEIR CULTURE OF MIGRATION

Research about a “culture of migration,” in which migration is considered a part of a series of embedded values of a community and among several socially accepted and encouraged behaviors, has been referred to in several sources (Timmerman, Hemmerechts, and De Clerck 2014; Brettell 2015, 155). Lutz and Lovell (2000) have pointed out that, throughout the centuries, migration has been and still is part of the historical life experience of the Maya people, who have been moving across the borders of many contemporary national political units. More explicitly, they said that “migration is a

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crucial element in the story of Maya survival . . . a rational, multidimentional reaction to the daily challenge of survival, whether the challenge arose last year, a decade ago, or in the wake of the Spanish conquest almost five hundred years ago” (Lutz and Lovell 2000, 11–12). This aspect of the perception of migration as embedded in the culture of the Maya people has been presented by Luis Marcos, one of the leaders of Pixan Ixim. He argues that this practice should be considered an ancestral characteristic of the Maya groups that sets them apart from other types of immigrants coming to the United States (Marcos and Domingo Andrés 2015).

MAYA MIGRATION TO OMAHA SINCE THE 1960s

Several sources have documented different aspects of the migration of people from Maya communities from Mexico and Guatemala to locations in North America as diverse and widespread as Los Angeles, Florida, Hous- ton, Georgia, and Vancouver (Falla 1992; Burns 1993; Foxen 2007; Goldin 2011, Loucky and Moors 2000; Nolin 2002). All of these references relate the Guatemalan migrations to the political, social, and economic factors which, since the 1960s have forced many of the migrants to move out of their homeland looking for a safer home, better socioeconomic conditions, and additional supporting resources for their fellows back home. The zenith of this migration was reached between the mid-1970s and 1980s during the military governments of Generals Romeo Lucas García (1978–1982) and Efraín Rios Montt (1982–1983) (Falla 2000; Burns 1993; Loucky and Moors 2000). By that time, inspired by the challenges of a devastating earthquake that affected Guatemala in 1976, Maya communities had developed self-help networks7 and a stronger sense of identity that in different ways contested the military repression. It is argued that this network of solidarity was interpreted by the Guate- malan army as a sign of the subversive nature of the Maya population, which led the military to suspect them of supporting the leftist guerrilla groups that were operating in the mountainous Maya regions (Jonas 2013). To intensify its fight against the guerrillas, the Guatemalan government implemented a policy of scorched earth (tierra arrazada) (Amnesty International 2014). Between 1960 and 1996, over 200,000 people were killed in the country’s internal armed conflict, including an estimated 40,000 who were subjected to forced disappearance. Countless others suffered torture including sexual violence. The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification concluded in its 1999 final report that State forces, and groups allied to the state, were responsible for 93 percent of documented human rights violations and

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an estimated 83 percent of victims of the internal armed conflict were Indig- enous Mayan people. The 1999 report also stated that a culture of racism had led to Indigenous peoples being viewed as “the enemy within.” As a result of this military action, it was estimated that, during the 1980s alone, about half a million Guatemalan people were internally or externally displaced (Fabri 2000). Some 150,000 fled to Mexico, but, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, only a third of them settled in refugee camps and were identified there as refugees (UNHCR 2011). In 1996, a peace agreement was signed between the Guatemalan government and the Marxist rebel army, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit. This peace agreement put an official end to the armed conflict in that country, but led to a set of contradictory consequences that pushed another wave of Maya migrants to the United States. On the one hand, the agreement signified positive achievements in terms of demilitarization, the creation of a civilian police force, the establishment of a human rights commission, and the discussion of the rights of indigenous people (Brown and Odem 2011). On the other hand, the postwar governments failed to address properly the issue of land distribution, and they were negligent in the implementation of effective policies that would relieve the lives of exclusion and poverty lived by the majority of the Maya population. The Free Trade Agreements between Guatemala, other Central American countries, and the United States, and the implementation of neoliberal policies, created additional vulnerabilities for small rural producers and workers in cities. In addition, the presence of mining and hydroelectric projects in traditional Maya territories produced collateral tensions. In fact, since the year 2000, Mayas have been forced to migrate because of the expansion of mines and hydroelectric projects that are expelling the population from their ancestral lands (Amnesty International 2014). There is a persistent dynamic of governmental repression against people protesting not only because of the pollution, exploitation, and deprivation of their lands and rivers, but also against the increasing poverty and illness among the population. The Guatemalan legal system seems to be ineffective in protecting the lives and rights of Mayas and in prosecuting the perpetrators of acts of violence against Maya environmental activists. This has forced more Mayas to look for other spaces of social and economic freedom where they could thrive without being repressed (Ibid.). When people are forced from their homeland not because of the pressure of a blatant and violent political persecution, but because of economic policies that exclude them from the basic elements of a life lived with dignity, the formal concepts of either “refugee” or “migrant” are insufficient to capture the need to flee from the conditions that undermine their rights.

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MIGRANT, ECONOMIC MIGRANT, REFUGEE, OR ASYLEE?

Considering this panorama, what is the best term to describe the status of the Maya diaspora in the United States? At first, their status should be determined according to the conditions that motivated their migration, either forced or voluntary; however, not all the known terms seem to be appropriate to describe the complexity of their condition. Terms widely used, like migrants, economic migrants, refugee, asylum seeker, and asylee, have different con- notations depending on the historical and sociopolitical contexts in which they have been defined or their association with different juridical areas: immigration law, refugee law, and citizenship. In addition, there are differences between how the US government and international organizations define these basic terms. In its Glossary on Migration, the International Organization for Migration (IOM 2004),8 argues that some definitions in the field of migration are frequently vague, controversial, or even contradictory. According to this document, as migration is a phenomenon that traditionally has been addressed nationally, the usage of certain terms tends to vary from country to country or even among the officers of sending and receiving countries, border authorities, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and even migrants themselves (IOM 2004, 3). Despite this observation, they see a common element present in the definitions of the term migrant used by different organizations, which is the freedom that the person has when deciding to migrate (IOM 2004, 40; UNHCR 2011). In addition, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines a migrant and economic migrant as: “a person who . . . voluntarily leaves his country in order to take up residence elsewhere. . . . If he is moved exclusively by economic considerations, he is an economic migrant and not a refugee” (UNHCR 2011). However, the IOM goes beyond the UNHCR definition of economic migrant, and uses the following:

A person leaving his/her habitual place of residence to settle outside his/her country of origin in order to improve his/her quality of life. This term may be used to distinguish from refugees fleeing persecution, and is also used to refer to persons attempting to enter a country without legal permission and/or by using asylum procedures without bona fide cause. It also applies to persons settling outside their country of origin for the duration of an agricultural season, appro- priately called seasonal workers. (IOM 2004, 21)

A refugee, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, is a person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,

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is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (UNHCR 2016). In Latin America, this definition has been extended to include “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order” (Cartagena Declaration 1984). The US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) of the Department of Homeland Security summarizes as follows the criteria that, according to US law, describe a refugee:

• Is located outside of the United States. • Is of special humanitarian concern to the United States. • Demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. • Is not firmly resettled in another country. • Is admissible to the United States. (USCIS 2016)

The difference between the two definitions is obvious: while the UN Convention of 1951 focuses on the situation of a person fleeing from persecution in their home country, regardless of where the person is settled, US law emphasizes that the physical location of the person should be outside the United States. In addition, US law stipulates that the situation of the person looking for refuge should be of special humanitarian concern to the United States. This concept is of course subject to different interpretations given that the humanitarian criteria agreed upon internationally are not always shared by US authorities, or may be overruled by certain national political interests. When addressing the different legal frames of reference regarding the concepts associated with migration in general and refugees in particular, Julian Lim (2013) distinguishes between historically contested areas: immigration law, refugee law, and citizenship. According to Lim, “in the last century, exclusion has been a defining criteria in the development of U.S. immigration law, while refugee law has effectively become an alternative pathway to admission for certain immigrants who would otherwise be excluded” (Lim 2013, 1014). Lim argues for a complementarity of these different legal areas in ways that could cover certain legal vacuums. The process of covering legal voids has not been exempt from conceptual or practical tensions. While US refugee law has adopted the 1951 Conven- tion’s definition of refugee and the related concept of non-refoulement, which protects individuals from being sent back to their place of persecution, US immigration law on the other hand is based on “the right of a sovereign state

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and its political community to make decisions about inclusions” which “are often advanced through self-interested claims of ethnic, cultural, political and economic preferences” (Lim 2013, 1040). This could partially explain why, even though the majority of immigrants who left Guatemala between the mid- 1970s and 1990s were fleeing political violence or ethnic persecution, they were not granted political asylum by the US government who categorized them as economic migrants (Brown and Odem 2011). According to the American Migration Council, an asylum seeker is the person who is requesting asylum, while an asylee is the person granted asylum (American Migration Council 2016). The USCIS on the other hand, uses the terms asylee and asylum seeker interchangeably to describe:

an alien in the United States or at a port of entry who is found to be unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality, or to seek the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution. Persecution or the fear thereof must be based on the alien’s race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2018)

While we acknowledge the semantic distinction between the terms asylum seeker and asylee stated by the American Migration Council, for the analysis of the case presented in this chapter, we will use the definition officially applied by the USCIS, considering its official authoritative role in granting legal status to the different categories of immigrants in the United States. The USCIS defines asylum status as “a form of protection available to people who: a) meet the definition of refugee, b) are already in the United States, and c) are seeking admission at a port of entry” (USCIS 2015). In other words, in the United States, the location of the individual is what deter- mines the distinction between refugees and asylum seekers. So, refugees are outside the United States at the moment of their assessment for relocation, and asylum seekers or asylees are already in US territory or at a port of entry when they raise their request for that special status. Having a legal migration status is not a requirement for asylum seekers to apply for protection. Another difference in the United States between those people who have been granted the status of refugee and asylum seekers/asylees is that refugees must apply for a permanent resident status (green card) after one year in the United States, while asylees/asylum seekers have the option to do so. Starting in 1965, US immigration policy toward Latin America has been inconsistent in terms of either limiting or supporting immigration from certain countries. During the 1980s, the ideological affinities between the right-wing military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador and the Reagan administration that supported them influenced US policy toward refugees

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moving from these countries. This affinity became even more controversial because, during this period, the Reagan administration denied 98 and 97 percent of asylum petitions from Guatemalans and Salvadorans, respectively (Hipsman and Meissner 2013; Jonas 2013). In contrast, people who fled countries like Nicaragua or Cuba, whose governments were opposed by the US administration, were granted asylum status easily.9 Despite the setbacks in the process of being accepted by US government officials as refugees or asylum seekers/asylees, some Mayas and other Central Americans fleeing from persecution did receive the support of different agencies, organizations, and institutions that challenged attempts to undermine the accounts of those fleeing violence and oppression in their countries of origin. Religious activists for instance had an important role by declaring their communities, or congregations, sanctuaries for refugees coming from Guatemala and El Salvador and forcing the invocation and reinterpretation of laws in meaningful ways. Their actions in favor of those migrants fulfilled US and international regulations that were, in fact violated by the US government itself (Bibler Coutin 2011, 577). Most of the Mayas in Omaha as well have never been granted the official status of refugees or asylum seekers despite escaping from political, economic, or ecological violence, and they also did not receive the special types of government assistance for relocation that other refugees in Omaha did receive (as reported by Laura Heinemann et al. in this volume). Hence, the Mayas in Omaha necessarily have had to rely more heavily on the use and building of social capital needed to fill that gap by developing solidarity networks very similar to those they had in Guatemala.

TRANSNATIONAL MAYA IMMIGRANTS IN OMAHA, NEBRASKA: RUPTURES, SUTURES, AND THE BUILDING OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

In spite of the challenges encountered in their process of relocation, Mayas in Omaha developed a set of strategies that are helping them to adapt, negotiate with, and survive in the US sociocultural context, while at the same time preserving their connections with Guatemala, as such complementing the existing research in the field of transnational migration. In her study about Guatemalan refugees and immigrants in Ontario, Canada, Catherine Nolin (2002) commented on the dynamics of what she calls “refugee transnationalism,” which is defined as “the process by which immigrants and refugees forge or maintain multi-stranded social relations that link together their places of origin and places of settlement” (Nolin 2002: 61). According to Nolin, this transnationalism implies also a shift from an exclusive focus on “connections” to the study of “ruptures and sutures” of identity and sense

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of belonging. This approach is useful because it captures the realities of migrant lives not as static events frozen in time, but as dynamic and evolving processes. Nolin relates rupture to the “discourses of exile, migration, place- making, and identity.” By contrast, sutures in immigrant lives are created in the processes of identity renegotiation that are established through “points of attachment, temporary identification, and place-making strategies” in the new context (Nolin 2002, 62). As Nolin rightly says, “the ruptures of refugee lives, emerged as the spaces of loss through death, disappearance, and departure of leaders, teachers, and activists.” As such, a rupture could mean the end of relations, interactions, shared experiences, or memories built with others in the homeland (Nolin 2002, 60). The rupture also implies the geographical distancing from the familiar, the homeland, and starting anew in a different context. Among the members of the community, rupture also triggers initiatives of ensuring their adaptation to the social, cultural, legal, and economic context of the host place. One clear rupture experienced by the Mayas who left their homes was triggered by the extensive repression they suffered in Guatemala (Falla 1992; Burns 1993; Goldin 2011; Lutz and Lowell 2000).10 In many cases, the trauma associated with that experience became difficult to communicate ver- bally, even years after the events had occurred. The political violence or the memories of direct repression affected people’s reluctance to return to their homeland or speak about the brutal events that led to their departure. Nolin points out that after a time of settling in their new homeland, these refugees proceed to suture, which is the process of growing new affective and effective roots and forging new alliances and connections in the new setting. These connections and alliances, which will be explored later when analyzing the topic of social capital, foster the refugees’ sociocultural adjustment and integration into the new context, while at the same time providing ways to preserve their connections with symbolic or real spaces for cultural identity (Nolin H. and Lovell 2000). Although several voids created during the episode of rupture could not be recovered, new points of connection between the new and old homeland and the past and present were created instead. In the case of the Maya immigrants in the United States, these points of suture have taken the forms of practical and connective symbolic actions. Practical skills, such as learning English, strategies for finding a job, getting a house, becoming familiar with the US legal system and sociocultural norms, and becoming engaged in local community and religious organizations, coexist with symbolic actions of identity affirmation, such as the use of traditional Maya costumes in special occasions, communication in the native language, and the ritual expression of their ancestral spirituality.11 The learning of new practical skills also has been useful for the preservation and communication of the symbols of their ancestral identity, as it can be seen in the use by the

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Q’anjob’als in Omaha of electronic communication and social media to keep in touch with fellows in Santa Eulalia or in other parts of Guatemala either in Spanish or in the Q’anjob’al language. In fact, Pixan Ixim has its own web page and a Facebook account where information and updates about its activities are posted and where people can contact its leadership. The process of what Nolin calls suture also leads to a flexible identity that moves across a spectrum of multiple sociocultural definitions, independent of the simple identification with the homeland or a specific ethnic group. We find, for instance, many of these individuals who, when living within the borders of Guatemala, were self-identified as member of a specific Maya group like Mam, Q’anjob’al, Kekchi, Chuj, Quiché, and so on. However, when in the United States, as they share with others several forms of discrimination as well as the need for affirmation or recognition of specific common rights, they become Maya, or Guatemalan, or even Hispanic. As Domingo Andrés and Marcos stated: “if the condition of speaking Spanish is seen as a convenient tool to prevent discrimination, many fellows could assume in many instances, sometimes reluctantly but other times without internal conflict, the Mexican, Hispanic or Latino identity” (2015). However, there are instances in which the sense of indigenous identity supersedes any other ethnic identity not directly associated with their cultural heritage, and the individuals “actively resist a public miscategorization of being part of the Hispanic community” and position themselves mainly as indigenous people seeking refuge in the United Sates (Hiller, Linstroth and Ayala Vela 2009). From the process of suture described by Nolin, we can observe some outlines of what we call the building of social capital.

RESETTLEMENT AND AGENCY: BONDING, BRIDGING, AND LINKING SOCIAL CAPITAL IN OMAHA

According to Robert Putnam, the definition of social capital is as follows: “features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, which facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefits” (1995, 67). The concept has been adopted for analytical purposes by a wide array of disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, public health, and disaster studies (Hawkins and Maurer 2010). In the field of migration studies, social capital has been understood as an encompassing concept that describes the endowment of personal and sociocultural resources that immigrants have and put into action in diverse ways and circumstances in order to be effectively engaged into to the sociocultural context of their new place of residence (Palloni, Massey, and Ceballos 2001; Erel 200l; Lamba and Krahm 2003;

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Morrice 2007). Cheung and Phillmore (2013) describe the concept of social capital simply as “the concrete help and resources garnered from networks.” Social capital has been considered as a theory useful to explain the factors affecting the decision to migrate (Portes 1997; Palloni, Massey, and Cebal- los 2001). An understanding of social capital also elucidates interpersonal networks developed in the course of the movement of people across national borders; such movement generates a “self-perpetuating dynamic that progres- sively reduces the costs and risks of future migration” (Massey and Riosmena 2010, 298). More specifically, social capital theory would say that, despite the usual high cost and risk associated with migration for the first member of the community that successfully migrates abroad, a social connection with him or her becomes an important source of social capital (i.e., access to information, assistance, and material support) that other members of the community take advantage of for future migrations at reduced costs and risks (Lamba and Krahm 2003). In another chapter of this book, Heinemann et al. address in more detail the discussion about social capital, and like them, we have assumed the use of the term as a conventional, but somewhat limited, way to address a complex set of resources related to the network of relationships that refugees build when circumstances force them to relocate. The “push/pull” factors that influenced the migration to Omaha expose the relevance of social capital as a factor that simultaneously promotes migration and gathers the members of a diasporic community who have been threatened or discriminated against elsewhere. Linda Morrice (2007) has addressed the distinction between bonding, bridging, and linking forms of social capital. She refers to bonding capital as the ties that connect individuals with those of similar demographic characteristics or affective closeness (friends, close relatives, neighbors, and work colleagues). Bridging capital refers to the ties that connect them with other groups more distant in terms of sociocultural or economic background. Linking social capital refers to the individuals’ connections with “contacts outside of their own social milieu, who have relative power over them and from whom they draw upon resources, ideas, and information” (Morrice 2007, 162; Hawkins and Maurer 2010, 1780). In the study that is the focus of this chapter, bonding, bridging, and linking are categories that represent, sometimes partially, different types of connections within and between groups that either could be mutually excluding or overlapping. According to Domingo Andrés, many of her fellow Q’anjob’als, on the one hand, felt pushed from locations in the United States where they experienced unemployment and racial discrimination from US citizens and other immigrants from Latin America. On the other hand, they felt pulled to Omaha because of their contacts with relatives or compatriots from Santa Eulalia who had arrived previously to this city and who were able to endure the demanding conditions of working in meat-packing companies. After having

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adapted to a type of job quite different from what they were used to in Gua- temala and other parts of the United States, those who first arrived in Omaha encouraged other relatives and friends to move to this city by ensuring them mentorship and connections to be inserted in the job market. After, and even while, finding job stability, many of the newcomers start to participate in social groups and religious and other community organizations in which they become connected with other fellow immigrants with whom they engage in the process of building more social capital.

BONDING CAPITAL AMONG THE Q’ANJOB’ALS

The majority of the Q’anjob’al Mayas in Omaha are people who already have an original sociocultural and geographical base for bonding capital: Santa Eulalia, the community from which where they come. They also share a common ethnic identity that becomes apparent through symbolic expressions and active actions of solidarity. Some symbolic expressions are shown in community events and celebrations by, for example, the use of traditional dresses in public places and the common practice of Maya spirituality, even with some blending with colonial Catholicism. In this regard, one example that unifies several symbolic elements of the Q’anjob’al identity is the celebration of the feast of Santa Eulalia12, the Catholic patron saint of the namesake town from where almost all the Q’anjob’als in Omaha came. In fact, the feast of Santa Eulalia is the main social event of the Q’anjob’al community in Omaha. It is prepared and organized with anticipation and pride and requires extensive coordination and collaboration among many members of the community. This celebration is where the dynamics associated with bonding, bridging, and linking capital are on full display and the sense of belonging to a unique community takes front seat. This celebration also shows how a Catholic devotion introduced by Spanish missionaries in the highlands of Guatemala some centuries ago has been appropriated by many of the Q’anjob’als to such a level that it has become a symbol of their ethnic identity. Celebrated every year in the second week of February, this is the event at which many Q’anjob’als coming from different parts of Omaha and other surrounding towns gather and socialize by performing several activities: common prayer, meal sharing, and listening and dancing to traditional music played with the marimba. Coordination of the actions of different people is crucial for the success of the celebration: fundraising; finding and reserving the location of the celebration; advertising the event; preparing the food; organizing the program of activities during the event; assigning of the different performing roles; rehearsing and performing the traditional dances; contacting, rehearsing, and performing of the marimba players; or, even transportation of the

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marimba from Guatemala. These are some of the apparently simple actions that require an important investment of time and coordination of people, not to mention financial resources. Language is a symbolic aspect of the event and serves as a metaphor of the simultaneous experience of bonding and bridging capital. As other non-Q’anjob’al guests13 are invited, the organizers of the event are careful to guarantee that the non-Q’anjob’al speakers can understand prayers and other statements that are expressed in that language; therefore, those parts of the activities that require it are interpreted or spoken in English or Spanish. Even though language is an important element of ethnic identity, it yields precedence to the sense of connection with the ancestral place of origin or with other traditional symbols. These other symbols are used to create a trans- generational bonding between first and second generations of Q’anjob’als. I was able to witness an example of this during a Santa Eulalia celebration held in 2013, when noticing the behavior of young Q’anjob’al girls born in the United States. Like any second-generation kid, they tended to speak English instead of Q’anjob’al to communicate with peers and even with their parents. However, I noticed that they felt equally comfortable wearing the corte, the traditional skirt worn by Maya women. They also joined other young Q’anjob’al boys, now native English speakers, when dancing with the rest of the community to the rhythm of the marimba, a traditional instrument played by Maya musicians. Later in life, these second-generation Q’anjob’als probably will be more assimilated to the mainstream Anglo culture, and even the current appreciation and acceptance of these ancestral symbolic elements will be diminished; however, at the moment, part of that sense of a distinctive identity has been passed down to them thanks to this collective effort to reproduce a celebration associated with the traditions and values forged in a remote homeland. The bonding capital of the Q’anjob’als also could be seen from a transnational perspective in the two-way exchange and transfer of resources and expertise between Mayas in Omaha and those in Guatemala. The easy communication between these communities by air transportation, telephone, and social media has facilitated these connections. Here are some recent examples: in 2013, Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri, bishop of Huehutenango, came to Omaha to participate in the second conference of the International Day of the Indigenous People and celebrated a mass for the Q’anjob’al community. Since 2014 until the time of writing, Fr. Mat Xun, a Catholic Q’anjob’al priest, has been coming to Omaha to preside over the mass for the feast of Santa Eulalia in Q’anjob’al with the community. During their visits, both religious leaders not only preside over liturgical activities for the community, they also hold conversations with families and individuals, participate in community gatherings, and share first-hand information about the situation in

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Santa Eulalia. In response, the Q’anjob’al community in Omaha has been able to organize fundraising activities to provide substantial financial support for the construction of a new Catholic church in Santa Eulalia and other projects. The bonding capital built in Pixan Ixim has been crucial to providing moral support to the members of the community who face health issues or problems with the US legal system. For instance, home or hospital visits to other Q’anjob’als who are sick is a common practice. This practice of moral solidarity also is evident when members of the community who are able to visit Santa Eulalia pay a visit to the relatives of other Q’anjob’als living in Omaha. The same could be said about visits to those members of the community who are in prison or facing legal issues in Guatemala. In 2014, in reaction to a judicial case in Santa Eulalia against a group of Q’anjob’al leaders, the leadership of Pixan Ixim was able to serve as liaison between Q’anjob’al lawyers and the office of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in Washington, D.C., to coordinate advisory and advocacy support. The solidarity of the immigrants in the United States is also coming from Guatemala. In December 2016, a Maya scholar residing in Guatemala, who had a PhD in social psychology, was invited to collaborate on research about health assessments in the Maya community in Omaha. She interviewed more than fifty members of the community and was able to provide some counsel- ing to women in need. During the month she stayed in Omaha, her room and board were covered by Pixan Ixim in exchange for her expertise in interviewing, transcription, data coding and analysis.

WORKING ON BONDING AND LINKING CAPITAL FOR MIGRATION PURPOSES: THE CASE OF ROLANDO LORENZO-NICOLAS

In addition to the collaboration deployed for the successful organization of a community celebration, the concrete impact of bonding capital has also been seen through long-lasting actions of solidarity in which the dynamics of bonding and linking social capital seemed to converge. In 2015, Lorenzo- Nicolas, a Q’anjob’al activist who was part of the leadership of Pixan Ixim in Omaha was informed that he was going to be deported to Guatemala for the second time.14 However, this process was halted thanks to the active support of Pixan Ixim and the use of the legal resources available in the US court system. Lorenzo-Nicolas arrived in Omaha as an undocumented immigrant in 1998 and was initially deported to Guatemala near the end of 2005. In April 2006, Lorenzo-Nicolas came back to the United States, again without documents, after spending about five months in his native Santa Eulalia, where he observed the repression suffered by his fellows. In 2007, he became involved

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with Pixan Ixim and joined its leadership team. By that time, Pixan Ixim was opposing a mining project that was affecting Santa Eulalia and surrounding communities. Operating in Guatemala as part of the Gobierno Ancestral Plur- inacional (Ancestral Plurinational Government) or GAP, Pixan Ixim unsuc- cessfully demanded that the Guatemalan government stop the mining project. The refusal of the government to proceed accordingly triggered a series of demonstrations by the locals in Santa Eulalia, which were violently repressed by military and police personnel. Detentions, harassment, and threatening of other Maya leaders, and even the kidnapping and then killing in April 2013 of activist Daniel Pedro, a local leader of Pixan Ixim in Santa Eulalia, were the evidence of an escalating conflict in which the indigenous leaders were bearing the brunt of the repressive tactics. On January 6, 2015, Lorenzo-Nicolas received a removal order, an official notice informing him of his imminent deportation, from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Fearing for his security because his public activism with Pixan Ixim in Omaha was well known in Guatemala; Lorenzo- Nicolas filed an application for withholding of removal15 and protection under the Convention against Torture. After providing arguments supporting his claim, and with the support of the leadership of Pixan Ixim, the Migration Court blocked his removal from the United States. This case is considered by the leadership of Pixan Ixim a huge step in the direction of US recognition of the persistent danger that members of the Maya community could experience in Guatemala even after the civil war. The bonding capital accumulated through the relationship between Lorenzo- Nicolas and other members of Pixan Ixim provided him the law services and community support he needed to successfully complete a migration procedure; he would have not been able to afford it individually. The linking capital accumulated by Pixan Ixim through the understanding of and access to the US legal system, and the bridging capital resulting from their connection with legal advisers, provided the institutional support that reversed Rolando’s vulnerable position and has set a legal precedent for other possible claims against the deportation of other Maya activists. In addition, it helped give some visibility to the struggles of the people of Santa Eulalia in order to defend their rights in Guatemala.

BRIDGING CAPITAL: Q’ANJOB’AL NETWORKS IN THE MIDWEST

In the United States, the bridging capital that connects the members of the Maya community with other groups, agencies, and institutions is a resource that has facilitated access to services provided by extra-ethnic networks with

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which Pixan Ixim has established relationships at different levels. As of 2015, Pixan Ixim has built a growing network of evolving alliances with diverse organizations and institutions in the United States, Omaha, and Guatemala (Marcos and Marcos 2015), including:

a. The Catholic Church: At the national level, Pixan Ixim was originally associated with the National Office of Pastoral Maya, which was under the umbrella of the Office of Migration and Refugee Services of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). After lobbying to acquire a status that was more in line with their allegiances with other Native American communities, the role of this office was assumed by the office of Native American Affairs. At the city level, the connection has been with the archdiocese of Omaha, the Ixim Group (Spirit of Solidar- ity),16 and the Jesuit Community of Creighton University. The parish of Saint Francis of Assisi has become the main center of activities for the Maya community. Its facilities have served as space for organizing meet- ings, training sessions, and prayer services. It also offered provisionally a space for housing Q’anjob’al youth. b. Universities: Through diverse partnerships, Pixan Ixim has been able to coordinate recurring training programs (e.g., English as a second language, migration issues), youth mentoring, and health issues (e.g., formation of health promoters and courses on mental health and first aid). The main partners are The Center for Reduction of Health Disparities of the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and the Center for Promoting Health and Health Equity and the Department of Cultural and Social Studies at Creighton University. c. Other Local Organizations: Pixan Ixim was able to get the assistance of Justice for Our Neighbors, which provided advice for migration issues, the Seventh-Generation Fund and the Omaha Community Foundation, which provided financial support. d. The Omaha Nation: This group provided support and affinity for the reaf- firmation of the Maya identity as a Native American group by promoting sociocultural exchanges. e. The Plurinational Ancestral Government of the Akateko, Chuj, Popti’, and Q’anjob’al Maya Nation: Composed of different Maya groups that historically have been autonomous, this is a movement of political affirmation within Guatemala formed to gain a public voice and demonstrate unity in a country where, despite being a majority, Mayas are treated as second-class citizens and perceived as fragmented ethnic units.

Even after acknowledging some difficulties,17 these different alliances have been instrumental in providing the Q’anjob’als in Omaha with diverse spaces

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for bonding and bridging social capital, which have helped them to adapt and thrive in this city with different levels of success.

BEYOND SOCIAL CAPITAL CATEGORIES AND CONTEMPORARY MIGRATION STATUS OF NATIVE PEOPLE IN THE AMERICAS

Ongoing interactions between Q’anjob’als, other Maya groups from Guate- mala, and Native Americans in the United States have created supporting networks that combine elements of bonding and bridging social capital. These spaces of social capital have also provided the leadership of Pixan Ixim with new insights about the migration rights of Native people from different parts of the Americas. Pointing out, correctly, some particularities of the cultural and ethnic backgrounds that distinguish Mayas from US Native Americans could be an appropriate argument to consider the result of their interactions as another example of bridging capital, exemplified by the appointment of formal ambassadors between the Omaha Nation and the Maya Ancestral Govern- ment.18 However, there are some overarching characteristics that could place these groups, at least theoretically, within a common category: the shared ancestral identity of being the direct descendants of the original inhabitants of the continent, with religious and cultural expressions, and links of communication that predate those introduced by the Europeans. These native groups also share a common history of dispossession, oppression, and marginalization by the European colonizers and their descendants. More recently, all over the continent, these native groups are in danger of losing their ancestral identity due to the overwhelming influence of the non-indigenous majority. These common experiences have set into motion between the Mayas and members of the Omaha Nation dynamics of interactions akin to bonding social capital. One result of this interaction in the United States is the elaboration of the argument defending the migration rights of native peoples coming from other parts of the Americas. In this regard, the claim made by the Pixan Ixim leadership in Omaha is that Mayas, and therefore Q’anjob’als, should be recognized by the US legal system as members of a Native American nation has become part of the Maya arguments in favor of their right to migrate to the United States. The argument says that this right is a prerogative granted by their status as indigenous people, as established by their traditions and the history of interethnic interactions that predate the existence of the modern states in the Americas. Taking advantage of the linking capital built with international organizations that have framed the legal criteria for indigenous rights, Luis Marcos emphasizes in his argument in favor of migration regulations that consider the special conditions of indigenous people and the relevance

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of the United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people (UN- DRIPS). Article 36 of this declaration states:

1. Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation, including activities for spiritual, cultural, political, economic and social purposes, with their own members as well as other peoples across borders. 2. States, in consultation and cooperation with indigenous peoples, shall take effective measures to facilitate the exercise and ensure the implementation of this right. (The United Nations General Assembly 2007)

These two parts of this article are references for the new input that the leadership of Pixan Ixim is giving to the discussion about the migratory status of Mayas in the United States. Luis Marcos argues that the US government should acknowledge in its national legislation these rights that have been acknowledged internationally. This is a position supported by Alan Le Baron, who asserted:

for all people in the United States, considering the Maya as Native Americans gives opportunities to re-imagine the debate over immigration and the immigration conflict between Anglos and Hispanics (Latinos) in the United States by remembering that all the Americas have experienced the “original sin” of the conquest and the subsequent oppression of the Amerindians, which continues unresolved in most all areas of the Americas. (LeBaron 2015)

Article 36 is the basis of the dialogue and cooperation between the Maya leadership and the Omaha Nation. However, the expectation of the leverage that could be built with the combination of bonding and bridging capital coming from this relationship could face some hurdles from the long history of the groups’ rights being ignored or dismissed. Despite some advances in the acknowledgment of indigenous rights, the evidence promotes skepticism. For example, by 1995, Robert Fairbanks wondered how realistic it was to expect a respectful recognition by the state of Native American sovereignty (Fairbanks 1995/1996). Twenty years later, the question about how modern states effectively address the issue of sovereignty or autonomy of indigenous groups is still a work in progress, and the political context in the United States at the beginning of 2018 could make this endeavor more challenging. The installation in February 2017 of a new US government that has prom- ised a more restrictive migration policy increases the sense of uncertainty about the effectiveness of the alliances between indigenous groups for the purpose of migration rights. In this context, the Maya strategy of bridging social capital with different agents could provide alternative spaces for agency and maneuvering in a potentially more hostile context. However, there is no room for naiveties. Pixan Ixim also would face the natural

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challenges of the dynamics that are common in many organizations: internal divisions, changes in the intensity and relevance of the relationship with other stakeholders, and the changes in vision and mission associated with the aging and replacement of the leadership of the organization and the first generation of Maya immigrants. In general terms, and in addition to the challenges mentioned above, the Mayas’ experience and arguments have introduced another element to the discourse about migration: how to catalog the migration rights of a group whose heritage, despite having as a traditional place of geographic location a Latin American country, is not mainly Hispanic and whose existence predates the colonial settlements, but, as has happened with the Native Americans in the United States, has been victim of the abuse and oppression of European colonizers. Alan Le Baron (2015) has summarized the challenges of this particular area of inquiry in the following terms:

Inside the United States, the Maya become part of the larger questions concerning immigration policy and immigration justice. As a new ethnic group in the United States, questions emerge on how they affect previous social and race relations. For the children of the Maya, it becomes a question of education and how to overcome the limitations of the home life and successfully compete with children of non-immigrant and non-indigenous parents. In addition, indigenous immigration from Latin America should inspire questions about who belongs to the Latino family in the United States; while reminding us about Latino and Hispanic inter-ethnic and class divisions.

The complexity of this case ultimately encompasses something that is, on the one hand, common among migrants and refugees, such as the emotional and practical spaces of ruptures and sutures triggered by migration and the different ways to exercise their agency in the new setting. On the other hand, in the case of the Q’anjob’als in Omaha, their concerns about and struggles for justice and prosperity in their ancestral homeland (Santa Eulalia, Hue- huetenango) are as appreciated and passionately pursued as their claims and actions to protect their rights to migrate and live with dignity, freedom, and preservation of their ethnic identity either in Omaha, Nebraska, or elsewhere in the United States.

COMMENTARY

Claire Herzog Rosales and Domingo Andrés examine in their chapter the complexities surrounding the migration of Mayas to the United States, specifically the Q’anjob’al community in Omaha, Nebraska. As they point out, whether

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migrants are deemed immigrants, refugees, asylees/asylum seekers, or economic migrants is highly influenced by politics and ideological affinities toward particular governments. Regardless of terminology, many of the observations about networking, social capital, ruptures and sutures, and a community’s efforts to retain their culture in a new country are applicable to other immigrant and refugee groups. The situation faced by the Maya in Guatemala parallels that of some refugees in Omaha, especially those from Burma (Myanmar) who also resided in rural areas in the homeland and were considered inferior, experienced internal and external displacement, and were subjected to development projects such as dams that damage their ability to sustain themselves. These minority ethnic groups, which in Omaha primarily include the Karen, Karenni, Chin, and Kachin, have also heavily relied on creative networking and social capital to make the transition to the United States. Each of the aforementioned ethnic groups has formed its own community organization to support activities similar to that of Pixan Ixim. As the authors also mentioned, those formally resettled as refugees have a distinct advantage of being connected with a resettlement agency for a short time upon arrival and often continue to rely on that agency for occasional needs for years to come. However, the language barrier is also significant, as many refugees speak uncommon ethnic languages and may be forced to communicate in a second language in which they are not completely fluent, which puts them in a similar situation as Q’anjob’al who may need to use Spanish to access interpreters. This can make it difficult to create bridging or linking social capital and forces families to rely more heavily on bonding with their own communities, although those community members trying to assist newcomers often have many gaps in the knowledge needed to navigate various situations in a new country. Another interesting similarity can be found in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Karenni community. As the authors mention, they found the Q’anjob’al follow the “common practice of Maya spirituality even with some blending with colonial Catholicism.” The same can be said for the Karenni who encountered Catholic missionaries in the refugee camp and have formed a connection with a Catholic church in their neighborhood, though they can also be found practicing animist beliefs. The authors equally point out the push/pull factors influencing migration of Q’anjob’al to Omaha. The pull factors are very similar to those that have led to Omaha being home to the largest Sudanese community in the United States, as well as one of the largest populations of ethnic minorities from Burma. Both of these refugee groups experienced high “secondary migration,” in which they were initially resettled in another city, then migrated to Omaha to join family and friends from the same refugee camp, and pursued the job opportunities in meatpacking that were not as readily available in the first city of placement.

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The account of the experiences of the Q’anjob’al in Omaha is an important contribution to the understanding of migrant acculturation. The section about their rights as indigenous people provides a unique addition to the discussion. It is important to understand the various factors that impact a community’s ability to thrive to support and strengthen that effort.

NOTES

1. The Q’anjob’al is one of the thirty distinctive groups that belong to the Maya family who populate most of Guatemala and part of the south of Mexico, Belize, and part of Honduras. Just in Guatemala, there are twenty-two Maya groups. 2. Santa Eulalia is the name used by the colonizers for the Maya town of Jolom Konob’ (Head of the People), a center where the Maya leaders and elders used to meet to discuss community and administrative affairs. 3. According to Amnesty International, between 1960 and 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed in the country’s internal armed conflict, including an estimated 40,000 who were subjected to forced disappearance. Countless others suffered torture, including sexual violence. The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification concluded in its 1999 final report that state forces, and groups allied to the state, were responsible for 93 percent of documented human rights violations, and that an estimated 83 percent of victims of the internal armed conflict were Indigenous Mayan people. The 1999 report also stated that a culture of racism had led to Indig- enous peoples being viewed as “the enemy within.” 4. In 2013, Pixan Ixim was granted tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization. 5. Definitions of each of these terms will be provided later on in the text. 6. According to the US 2010 Census, the populations of Navajo and Cherokee people reported were 286,731 and 284,247, respectively. See: https ://ww w.cen sus.g ov/hi story /pdf/ c2010 br-10 .pdf. 7. This practice of communal solidarity in Guatemala was the base of the building of social capital among Mayas when they migrated to the United States. 8. By June 2017, this publication was under revision and being updated. 9. Susan Bibler Coutin witnessed cases whose development supports her argument on the political influence in the interpretation of refugees’ experiences. She comments how on asylum hearings, “US government representatives depicted Central Americans’ accounts of persecution as something other than the threat of violence, or as a type of violence that could not be linked to race, religion, nationality, social group membership, or political opinion” (Bibler Coutin 2011, 576–577). 10. As mentioned previously, by the early 1980s alone, about 150,000 individuals—mostly Mayas from the highlands—were killed or disappeared during the civil war, and the Guatemalan army has reported the destruction of 440 villages from the highlands at that time (Jonas 2013). 11. In several homes where their ancestral spirituality is still appreciated, the elders are used to praying using candles, burning resin, copal resin, and incense. 12. This is the name of a Catalonian Catholic saint whose devotion was introduced in Guatemala by the Spaniards colonizers in the seventeenth century.

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13. These guests are Hispanic and Anglo members of the Omaha community, organizations, or representatives of agencies that have been supporting Pixan Ixim and with which this organization has been building bridging capital. 14. This is a summary collected from file # A078-357-132 on the case of the withholding of removal of Rolando Lorezo-Nicolas, raised to the Immigration Court of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, US Department of Justice. October 1, 2015. 15. A withholding of removal is a legal procedure that a person requests for the prohibition of his removal to the country where he “would feel that his life or freedom would be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” (Assylum and Withholding of Removal Relief Convention Against Torture Protections 2009). 16. Not to be confused with Pixan Ixim, the Ixim: Spirit of Solidarity is a local group of American missionaries who organize mission trips to rural parishes in Gua- temala and coordinate the connections between the diocese of Huehuetenango and the archdiocese of Omaha. 17. Not all the alliances have been able to stand the test of time and, in certain cases, the connections have been based on circumstantial needs and have been short- lived or reassumed according to specific situations. 18. Since 2017, the Mayan embassy to the Omaha Nation has been located in the building that Pixan Ixim has been renting in Omaha.

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Guatemalan Roots New American Lives, edited by James Loucky and Marilyn Moors, 35–55. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Nolin, Catherine. 2002. “Transnational Ruptures and Sutures: Questions of Identity and Social Relations among Guatemalans in Canada.” Geography and Refugees 56 (1): 59–67. OSEA. 2004-2016. “Maya or Mayan? Comment on Correct Terminology and Spell- ing,” The Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology. Retrieved from http:// www .osea -cite .org/ progr am/ma ya_or_maya ns.ph p. Palloni, Alberto, Douglas Massey, and Miguel Ceballos. 2001. “Social Capital and International Migration: A Test Using Information on Family Networks.” Ameri- can Journal of Sociology 106 (5): 1262–1298. Papademetriou, Demetrios. 2004. “The Shifting Expectations of Free Trade and Migration.” In NAFTA’s Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere, edited by John Audley, Demetrios Papadimitriou, Sandra Palaski, and Scott Vaughan, 39–60. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Passel, Jeffrey and D’Vera Cohn. 2016. Overall Number of U.S. Unauthorized Immi- grants Holds Steady Since 2009. Washington DC: Pew Research Center. Portes, Alejandro. 2011. “America and Its Immigrants: A Game of Mirrors.” Pro- ceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155 (4): 418–432. ———. (1997). “Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities.” The International Migration Review 31 (4): 799–825. ———. (2012). “Tensions that Make a Difference: Institutions, Interests, and the Immigrant Drive.” Sociological Forum 27 (3): 563–578. Putnam, Robert. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Jour- nal of Democracy 6 (1): 65–78. Ribaldo, Clare. 2016. Gangs in Central America, CRS Report Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress. Washington DC: Congressional Research Service. Rostow, Walt. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Economic Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridege University Press. Rumbart, Rubèn. 2011. “Pigments of Our Imagination: The Racialization of the Hispanic-Latino Category.” Migration Information Source, April 27. Retrieved from http: //www .migr ation polic y.org /arti cle/p igmen ts-ou r-ima ginat ion-r acial izati on-hi spani c-lat ino-c atego ry. Sanabria, Harry. 2007. “Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean.” In Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Harry Sanabria. New York: Routledge. Spanish Federal Court. 2008. “Summary of Genocide Proceedings before the Spanish Federal Court Round One February 4-8, 2008.” Retrieved from https ://ns archi ve2. g wu.ed u/gua temal a/gen ocide /roun d1/su mmary 1.pdf . The United Nations General Assembly. 2007. Declaration on the Rights of Indig- enous People. Tienda, Marta and Susana Sanchez. 2013. “Latin American Immigration to the United States.” Daedalus 142 (3): 48–64.

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Timmerman, Christiane, Kenneth Hemmerechts, and Helene Marie-Lou De Clerck. 2014. “The Relevance of a ‘Culture of Migration’ in Understanding Migration Aspirations in Contemporary Turkey.” Turkish Studies 15 (3): 496–518. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 2018. “Asylee.” Retrieved from https:// ww w.usc is.go v/too ls/gl ossar y/asy lee. U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review. 2009. “Asy- lum and Withholding of Removal Relief Convention Against Torture Protections.” Fact Sheet, January 15. Retrieved from https://ww w.usc is.go v/ili nk/do cView /SLB/ HTML/ SLB/0 -0-0- 1/0-0 -0-11 261/0 -0-0- 14927 /0-0- 0-152 42.ht ml. UNHCR, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. 2011. “Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Con- vention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.” Retrieved from http: //www .refw orld. org/d ocid/ 4f33c 8d92. html. United Nations, Comisión Económica para América Latine y el Caribe (CEPAL). 2010. Los pueblos indígenas en América Latina. Retrieved from Https://ww w.cep al.or g/inf ografi as/l os-pe ublos -indi genas -en-a merica-lat ina. ———. (2016). “UNHCR Viewpoint: ‘Refugee” or ‘Migrant”-Which is Right?,” July 11. Retrieved from http: //www .unhc r.org /en-u s/new s/lat est/2 016/7 /55df 0e556 /unhc r-vie wpoin t-ref ugee- migra nt-right.h tml. USCIS, US Citizenship and Immigration Services. 2015. “Refugee & Asylum.” Retrieved from https://ww w.usc is.go v/hum anita rian/ refug ees-a sylum . ———. (2016). “Refugees.” Retrieved from https ://ww w.usc is.go v/hum anita rian/ refug ees-a sylum /refu gees. ———. n.d. “Service Law Books Menu/Immigration and Nationality Act.” Retrieved from https ://ww w.usc is.go v/ili nk/do cView /SLB/ HTML/ SLB/0 -0-0- 1/0-0 -0-29 /0-0- 0-101 /0-0- 0-195 .html . Velasco, Andres. 2002. “Dependency Theory.” Foreign Policy (133): 44-45. Winn, Peter. 2006. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Carib- bean. Los Angeles: University of California Press. World Bank. 2012. African Diaspora. Retrieved from https://si teres ource s.wor ldban k.org /INTD IASPO RA/Re sourc es/AFR_Dia spora _FAQ. pdf. Zong, Jie and Jeanne Batalova. 2016. Migration Policy Institute. April 14. Retrieved from http: //www .migr ation polic y.org /arti cle/f reque ntly- reque sted- stati stics -immi grant s-and -immi grati on-un ited- state s.

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Nelson_9781498588898.indb 55 2/18/19 10:01 AM Sergio González Varela, “The Mestre-Student Relationship in the Age of Tourism,” in Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 63–83. Series: The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter Three

The Mestre-Student Relationship in the Age of Tourism

In the world of capoeira Angola the relationship between mestres and students is vital for the transmission of knowledge. It does not matter if an Angola academy is in Brazil, the United States, Japan, or Russia, members have to build a relationship with a known mestre, so it is common for famous leaders to lend their names to international groups—and the same is true with academies in Brazil. Of course, many Angola groups in the world exist without a direct association with a single mestre. There are cases where international members prefer to stay independent, working with many leaders at the same time without committing to one. In other instances, infighting between leaders and students can lead to separations and disappointments. Although the relationships between mestres and their groups vary, what is constant is the requirement that any student who aspires to become a true angoleiro work with an influential figure at some point. The mestre-student pair is, in this sense, indissoluble. It is a dialogic and almost symbiotic relationship. Sometimes it is full of friction, enmity, and mistrust; other times it is sustained through mutual admiration, loyalty, fraternity, and guidance. The connection is complicated, involving contradictions and moral dilemmas. What I analyze here is how this relationship has changed as a consequence of the global mobility of capoeira leaders described in the previous chapter. My interest centers on the characteriza- tion of tourism that happens among capoeira Angola academies in Bahia, Brazil, and groups in other cities abroad. The objective is to portray the perception that mestres have about tourism and mobile citizens, and the way these leaders negotiate the dictates of belonging to a tradition and making money at the same time by showing capoeira internationally. The chapter also addresses the point of view of those whom capoeira mestres consider to be “apprenticeship pilgrims,” to borrow Griffith’s concept, and how

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international practitioners represent a particular form of tourism mobility. The tension between tourism and tradition becomes visible in the dialogue between the perspectives of mestres and of students.

TOURISM AS AN INSTANCE OF THE INVENTION OF CULTURE

Anthropology and tourism have had a strained relationship. I have not titled this section “anthropology of tourism” because what interests me here are the challenges that tourism poses for anthropology, not just tourism as a topic of anthropological research. In recent decades, the anthropology and history of tourism have increased in the most unexpected ways (see, for instance, Guichard-An- guis and Moon 2009, Jolliffe 2007, Richards and Wilson 2004, Staples 2002, and Smith 1989). Tourist guides have become professional scholars, bringing a view of their industry from the inside (Picard and Di Giovine 2014). They have confronted the maligned interpretation of tourism held by many anthropologists and have contested the prejudiced perception of tourism as a banal, superficial cultural expression. At the same time, tourism has become more important economically and culturally for many people and for the development of cities and countries (Scranton and Davidson 2007, Souther 2006). The effects of tourism on societies all over the world is unmissable; we cannot ignore it. Condemnation has not led to a better understanding of how people relate to a mobile life imposed by tourism. The experts in the field, following the pioneering work of Dean MacCannell (1999), have deepened our understanding of what apparently would be the banality of culture, the simulacra of the real as Jean Baudrillard (1983) would say, the process of endless simulation. But there is no banality in tourism: it affects people, its impact is real, and its consequences could be a matter of life and death. In sum, tourism is a symptom of capitalism (Merrill 2009). My objective in this section is to think through tourism anthropologically by reflecting on alterity and the power of otherness (Picard and Di Giovine 2014). Today, everybody is a tourist; if you have the fortune to take holidays and travel, you qualify as a member of this category. Roy Wagner (1981: 36) mentions in The Invention of Culture that all human beings are potential anthropologists, inventors of culture. In the same vein, all humans are or have been at least once in their lives “tourists” in the sense of seeing or visiting something not restricted to working activities. You may work in the tourist industry, but you can still become a tourist when you travel or when you take someone for a tour of your hometown.

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The anthropological category “tourist” is an ambivalent and empty sign, either full of meanings or devoid of any significance. It is like the concept of “culture”; we do not know what it is, but we all have it. We speculate about the limits of the concept “tourist,” but it is a category into which we can all potentially fit. Tourism is another instance of the invention of culture. It is a way of describing particular cultural experiences presented to people willing to engage with human creativity. Tourism can be problematic: in some cases it can transform the landscape of a whole city; it can reproduce stereotypes and economic inequalities; it can destabilize relations between local and global forces. However, tourism is essential for the construction of intercultural understanding (see Di Giovine 2009, Guichard-Anguis and Moon 2009, Kringelbach and Skinner 2014, Timothy and Nyaupane 2009). Tourism operates on a set of conventions, collective forms of meaning that makes it credible. In this way tourism works like culture. For Wagner (1981: xiv–xv), the dialectics of anthropology oscillate between the realms of collective conventions and individual inventions. By this he intends to address the artificiality of these two combined dialectic forms by refusing to display a world “out there” and independent of human agency—what we would today call “nature.” “Nature,” for Wagner, would be another name given to the collective conventions about the meaning of human life. In this sense, there is never an “out there” purified of human agency (Wagner 1981: 145–51). Nature and humans are always related; they form an indissoluble pair, or, as Bruno Latour would say, they constitute a fundamental relation of “natures-cultures” (Latour 1993). Humans make culture by inventing the way they relate to alien or unfamiliar collective conventions. Experience and perception control the act of invention, which is an effort to give meaning to a particular context. Wagner (1981: 37) mentions that the power of invention lies in the human capacity to move between contexts of collective conventions. Therefore, anthropology is the paradoxical art of “imagining a culture for people who do not imagine it for themselves” (Wagner 1981: 27). Tourism works in the same fashion. It displays a set of collective conventions about places, mobility, and people that could be and are most of the time artificially presented. Tourism leaves the power of making sense of that experience to individuals who cannot or do not possess an in-depth understanding of the creation of those collective conventions. The convention-invention relationship produces the culture of tourism, and it is the source of social imaginaries about people and places. As I mentioned in chapter 1, “social imaginaries” should not be equated with falsehoods. They do not emerge from fantasy but from the combination of conventions and inventions, of collective meanings and individual

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creations. Like anthropology, which strives to describe objectively the experience of alterity, tourism tries to deploy conventions related to the world the conventions intend to describe. In both cases, the process is one of trying to gain a “relative objectivity,” as Wagner says (1981: 2). When using their own culture to understand another, anthropologists thereby make objectivity possible, but objectivity relative to their perspective as possessors of an already-shaped point of view. Pure objectivity would be only possible by a nonhuman anthropologist devoid of culture. In the same fashion, the invention of the culture of tourism rests on a set of collective conventions relative to a set of objective materials, ideas, individuals, places, monu- ments, music, and so on. In this sense, the “social imaginaries” of tourism are an analogue to the inventions that anthropology creates through the uses of “culture.” The problem with some of these tourism imaginaries has to do with the unmasking of the process of constructing the collective conventions it portrays. The artificiality of these imaginaries seems too obvious to nontourists, or to anthropologists of tourism. So, their inventive process seems false and exaggerated. The “falseness” of the process of invention has led some authors to argue in favor of invention as a form of unreal projection, as in the case of the “invention of tradition” developed by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (2000). For them, the invention of traditions has the purpose of unmasking the artificial uses of the past in the construction of recent myths. Although the approach of these authors is revealing, they fall into the trap of thinking that the concept of invention is devoid of any objective inten- tionality and is purely politically motivated. Marshall Sahlins (1999: 403–4) argues in his critique of the uses of “invention of tradition” that all traditions are invented, but people put enormous effort into keeping their tradition an- chored in a set of legitimate conventions that use the core symbols of a culture in innovative ways and not solely for political purposes. In the same way, the invention of the culture of tourism should not be portrayed as a fantasy but as the creative effort of people who want to ascribe new meanings to a set of cultural conventions. The anthropological analysis of tourism is far too complicated to tackle here. Rather, I want to show here only how the concept of “tourism” is analogous to the concept of “culture.” In the next sections I describe how the inventive process of tourism has affected the “traditional” relation of knowledge that exists in capoeira between mestres and students. Due to their global itineraries and missionary work, mestres of capoeira are beginning to transform their relationship with their global students, projecting a set of social imaginaries and intense feelings analogous to those found in tourism. It is to these emotional traits and imaginaries that I now turn.

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THE TRADITIONAL MESTRE/STUDENT RELATIONSHIP IN CAPOEIRA ANGOLA

When Mestre Pastinha codified the Angola style in the 1940s, he put the value of Afro-Brazilian tradition on the figure of the mestre. For him, mestres symbolized the real knowledge of capoeira; they embodied all the desirable attributes that a player had to cultivate to become a genuine practitioner. Pastinha made the mestre the pivot on which all teaching, rules, and decision-making turned. By placing everything necessary on the will of a single person, Pastinha transformed the mestre into more than just an educator. For him, a mestre had to be a leader, a moral guide, capable of managing the positive and negative sides of capoeira, willing to sacrifice his life for the well-being of his students. He had to be a paternal figure for his disciples. The hopes that Pastinha pinned on mestres set the bar too high for other practitioners. Some mestres criticized Pastinha’s view as too demanding and overbearing. They negotiated and did what they could to assume their new role as moral figures of authority. Their main complaint had to do with the deceptive nature of capoeira Angola itself; How could one become an ethical guide when the core practices of the Afro-Brazilian martial art prioritized feigning, cheating, and taking advantage of others by simulating attacks, friendship, and solidarity and by using underhand tricks? To become a moral authority contradicted the essence of being a capoeira player, a rogue-like figure and a deceptive being capable of misleading an opponent; it also went against the background of most Angola mestres at the time. Some of these individuals played between the limits of legality and illegality, either forming criminal gangs or being troublemakers. They liked fighting the police, as Mestre Cobrinha Verde mentions in his memoir: “When I turned seventeen I went to fight the police. To the point that with seventeen years old I got into a huge brawl with it. Police hated me because I always resisted arrest” (Santos 1991: 12). Because of his problems with police, Co- brinha Verde had to flee from his hometown of Santo Amaro after injuring a couple of officers in a brawl. Mestre Caiçara, another infamous capoeira player, was also involved in illegal activities and was known among practitioners for having troubles with the police in Salvador. Many mestres did not have formal jobs and had to deal with a hostile and violent environment where being streetwise was not only a virtue but also a strategy for survival. It is understandable, then, that many mestres had difficulty adjusting to the new vision implemented by Pastinha. However, some of his fellow mestres saw in Pastinha’s teaching an opportunity to break with the notorious reputation that capoeira had in society at the time, and most of his students, over the years, would accept their role as moral guides in their academies. The idea of

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the mestre as the possessor of knowledge and embodiment of tradition was no longer questioned in Angola academies; the mestre’s authority went unchal- lenged unless other powerful mestres objected to it. As I have shown elsewhere, mestres constituted lineages of power through which they transmitted their knowledge to younger generations (González Varela 2017). Tracing an ascending line to a famous mestre became a prerequisite for belonging to a community of participants; it was a process of legitimization. Respect toward older mestres created social relations based on vertical authority. This verticality explains the admiration and deference that exist from disciples (who are themselves sometimes younger mestres) to their mentors. A case that comes to my mind is the admiration that Mestre Renê Bittencourt, a famous Angola leader, professed for his Mestre Paulo dos Anjos. Renê, in his public Facebook posts, has mentioned how vital Paulo dos Anjos’s presence was. When traveling all over the world, he considered it his duty to honor the memory of his deceased mestre by telling stories in the classroom about him. He says, referring to his mestre: “Sometimes I feel tired, but I find my strength in the legacy from the person who taught me [capoeira], it is my mission and it is with love. I am going to share what I learned from him: being a capoeirista, a better human being, a better father, and a more understanding citizen and son” (Bittencourt 2018). For Renê, his missionary duty has been to keep the memory of his mestre alive. The respect Mestre Renê felt for his mestre mirrored the reverence, and even fear, that his mestre felt for his older mentor, Mestre Canjiquinha. This unbroken chain of power and strong feelings also exists with other mestres I have met in Brazil and abroad. The project implemented by Pastinha, his idea of turning everything in capoeira Angola around the figure of the mestre, has become the norm among capoeira practitioners all over the world. Naturally, not all students become mestres or ascend in the hierarchical structure of academies. Many, most of them, are casual practitioners, and just a few assume responsibilities or become deeply engaged with their groups. In Bahia, it is difficult to get a title within the capoeira Angola community because there is a lot of competition and mestres are careful about giving a title and responsibility to somebody in their hometown. In some instances, it is easier and faster to become part of the hierarchy abroad because being outside Brazil makes it more difficult to challenge the bestowal of a title and because giving a title to a person in charge of a group abroad is a way to create strong connections with international students. I have seen many cases where a person who in Brazil would be considered just an ordinary player takes a title and the responsibility for leading a group abroad. Mestres and students have a relationship of interdependence. Students expect a lot from their mestres, and so too the other way around. Mestres ex-

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pect a lot from their disciples. However, as in any ritual activity, hierarchies determine how mestres classify their students. Advanced students with titles or with a long commitment to the Angola cause get the sympathy and relative trust of mestres who value the time they have invested and the experience gained through practicing capoeira. This situation applies not only to groups in Brazil but also abroad. Mestres expect that international students could make it to Brazil one day to practice capoeira there, and, most importantly, they want individuals to move from being casual students to become real adepts of the Angola style. When Pastinha codified capoeira Angola, he envisioned the mestre-student relationship as a close and daily interaction between individuals. This relationship between students and mestres was stable throughout the revival of capoeira Angola. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, it was still possible to follow the ideal of Mestre Pastinha. Students and mestres interacted closely; they reinvented the notion of tradition, explored new movements, revised sequences of attacks and counterattacks, and studied more deeply the meaning of songs. More important, young students learned the politics of capoeira in a general social environment where local authorities excluded them and discriminated against them openly. For mestres, being at home regularly developed ideas about the meaning of capoeira as an Afro-Brazilian practice. This traditional and idealized image of the mestre-student relationship remained relatively unchanged until leaders began their international missionary work in the late 1990s. Before that global exposure, the dictates of tradition stipulated that students should follow without question the lessons taught by their mestres. Mestres were also responsible for students in a roda, giving advice and protection if something went wrong or out of control in the performances. During the 1980s and 1990s, mestres and students worked more closely together, and hierarchies in the groups remained established with relatively few changes. The global expansion of capoeira has shattered this image. Today, the mestre-student relationship is very different; leaders and students travel more than ever before, and there are new social relations. From the late 1990s onward, the interactions between mestres and students took on a new meaning.

TOURISM SUBVERSIONS

Mestres took their role as missionaries of Afro-Brazilian culture in the 2000s seriously. If in the previous decades we saw interest in creating, sustaining, and consolidating Angola academies in the local scenes of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other Brazilian cities, in the late 1990s and the first

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decade of the twenty-first century, the movement of capoeira Angola tar- geted the “outside world.” The mestre-student relationship experienced many changes. Leaders, who were supposed to be with their students all the time, suddenly had to be absent for many months. Some mestres migrated to other countries and left their groups in the charge of a minor mestre or a professor. The demands of an international market signaled a change in mestres’ responsibilities. They could no longer spend time with local students on a daily basis. Some disciples were now advanced students or mestres themselves. Mestres began to delegate duties and started exploring the world. Although the increase in mobility of capoeira Angola practitioners happened at the beginning of the new millennium, tourism in capoeira settings existed well before the intensification of movement and travel. Ethnographer Waldeloir Rego, for instance, pointed out in 1968 that the tourism industry in Bahia had affected the local practices of Afro-Brazilian culture, although capoeira practitioners used the industry to their advantage:

Concerning capoeira, if things did not go like in a dream, it was not completely disastrous. It is clear that there were groups of capoeiristas and academies that yield to pressures and economic temptations, devaluating themselves completely. But in reality, the majority remained away from those influences and more importantly, capoeira took out from tourism what it was more convenient of it, which was the international and national promotion and diffusion [of capoeira]. Seen as an exotic thing, the capoeira from Bahia, together with can- domblé, was sought after by all kind of tourists, ethnographers, artists, writers and filmmakers. (Rego 1968: 318–19)

Rego mentions that the tourism industry raised capoeira’s visibility in other sectors of society and in other areas such as painting, performing arts, poetry, cinema, and music. However, tourism also made capoeira more mainstream and detached it from its Afro-Brazilian roots. Rego (1968: 43) notes, for instance, that the changes in academy dress codes in the 1960s were a consequence of the tourism industry, which had devalued local customs. For him, tourism was the opposite of tradition. Tourism was a subversion of the patterns of cultural stability that existed among different ritual and religious practices in Bahia. The economy of tourism focused on the display of art as spectacle. For Rego, the advent of tourism “cheapened” the essence of capoeira. This conflict is similar to the one mentioned by Dean MacCannell (1999: 91–198) about the staging of authenticity and the opposition between “true” and “false” representation of local cultures. He explains, “The current structural development of society is marked by the appearance everywhere of touristic space. This space can be called a stage set, a tourist setting, or simply, a set depending on how purposefully worked up for tourists the display

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is” (MacCannell 1999: 100). The creation of a tourist setting related to ritual or traditional practices creates an artificial stage designed for purposes other than those dictated by the members who perform on that stage. In the late 1960s, famous capoeira Angola mestres such as Pastinha and Canjiquinha used to their advantage the interest that local authorities had in showing capoeira for tourists. Rego cites a variety of places where Mestre Canjiquinha presented capoeira as a spectacle in Brazil; Rego (1968: 276–78) divides the exhibitions into categories: “official,” “In the State of Bahia,” “Outside Bahia,” “During Carnival,” “In Cinema,” “Social Clubs,” “Public Squares,” and “Various.” For Rego (1968: 276), Canjiquinha used the tourism industry to his advantage more effectively than other mestres: “From all Bahian capoeiristas, he [Canjiquinha] was the one who was invited most to exhibitions, traveling around Bahia and outside the state, he was also the one who acted most in cinema, short and long productions.” Since the 1960s the use of Afro-Brazilian culture for economic development and tourism has marked the local policies concerning many Afro- Brazilian practices. This continues today, and it is impossible to dismiss the power that the tourism industry has in shaping the perception that Angola mestres have about their art. Although Rego’s opinion of the use of tourism by local mestres could look outdated, it serves as a reminder today of how leaders deal with contextual circumstances when tradition and the preservation of Afro-Brazilian values are at stake. Another important (although short) narrative about tourism and mobility appears in a footnote of Greg Downey’s Learning Capoeira, where we find a casual but revealing description of capoeira tourism in the 1990s:

Black North Americans once traveled to Brazil to experience what they saw as a society free of prejudice. . . . [N]ow many make a pilgrimage to Salva- dor to experience the city’s Afro-Brazilian heritage. While I was in GCAP, a constant complement of foreign capoeiristas was in residence, some for months at a time. This intimate, long-term contact between Bahian and foreign capoeiristas, especially African Americans, left a deep imprint on everyone involved. (Downey 2005: 214)

This note, made during Downey’s intense fieldwork between 1993 and 1995, offers a view of the situation within GCAP (Mestre Moraes’s group) and of the intentions and motives of American capoeira practitioners who had traveled to Bahia. These players did not come for just a few days but for months, in a pattern that will become the norm in subsequent years. Unfortunately, Downey does not offer more information about who these African Americans are and why they consider their visits to Bahia a sort of pilgrimage. We can speculate that if this interaction between local and foreign practitioners was

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already taking place in the 1990s, then it is possible that the influx was a consequence of the early impact that mestres such as João Grande, Cobra Mansa, and Jelon Vieira already had in the United States. The beginning of new relations and the emergence of new actors in the capoeira scene in Salvador led mestres to ponder their heritage and their role as caretakers of Afro-Brazilian culture. From the broad scope of influences that the tourism industry brought to Salvador in the new millennium, what interests me here are the destabilizing forces that tourism brought and how they affected the traditional mestre-student relationship in the practice of capoeira Angola. With the promotion of capoeira as a tourist attraction and its insertion in the general context of Bahian society since the 1970s, practitioners began their global itineraries searching for new economic and social opportunities. By making travel their primary focus, mestres transformed their local relations with their students at the same time that they created new connections with practitioners abroad. Traveling fractured forever the traditional relationship between mestres and students. Pastinha’s idea of mestres’ daily interaction with and commitment to students changed; students had to adapt to a new set of relations that included the prolonged absence of their mentors. At the same time, mestres gained new paths of apprenticeship with international students. The mestre- student connection adapted to a mobile reality where both mestres and students had to build a new meaning of tradition and knowledge transmission. Tourism and mobility also changed the role that women play today in the development of capoeira. As part of the transnationality of the Afro-Bra- zilian art, women have sought equal treatment within the hierarchies of the groups, both within Brazil and in other countries. The #MeToo movement, for example, has brought a reckoning about the violence and abuse against women in capoeira, where men dominate the structures of power. In Sal- vador, a courageous group of women has taken up the task of denouncing on social media acts of violence and harassment against them by prominent figures of the capoeira scene. The initial act of condemning violence and abuse has mutated into a new and exciting social movement of feminist capoeira practitioners, whose members, among them researchers Christine Zonzón and Adriana Albert Dias, condemn any act of misogyny and fight for gender equality and the visibility of women in Bahian capoeira. The initial movement has gained national and international attention, expanding in 2018 to other regions in Brazil and gaining support from international practitioners in other cities across the globe. In an environment marked by male-centric power and authority, the influence of female students and the achievement of women recognized as group leaders have contributed to a more balanced relation between leaders and

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students. One of the biggest struggles in capoeira circles today is opposing a particular male-centric form of power as the only way of transmitting knowledge and preserving a tradition. The global itineraries of mestres were and are not all equal. Some famous leaders travel all the time, others travel less often, and some mestres do not like to travel at all. However, the general condition is one of mobility as a form of preserving the capoeira Angola tradition. The subversion produced by tourism has also increased the diversity of practitioners of capoeira An- gola. Today, there are all kinds of people practicing capoeira Angola not only in Bahia but also all over the world: children, adults, adolescents, women, and senior citizens all take part in an Afro-Brazilian art that tries to transcend the barriers of language and cultural adscription. The popularity and accessibility of the Angola style, although it has never achieved the same level of success as Regional and Contemporary variants, has to do with its semantic bodily expression and the nature of dance itself (Robitaille 2014). Through its imme- diateness, capoeira Angola has attracted practitioners interested not only in physical activities but also in the culture that supports it. As Kringelbach and Skinner (2014) mention, dance brings a unique possibility of integration and inclusion of people with different backgrounds because it does not entirely depend on language. Despite the openness and inclusion that capoeira foments, mestres and advanced students struggle to control the collateral effects of the movement’s global mobility. Sometimes the malleability and open interpretation of capoeira Angola abroad clashes with the perspective of mestres about what is allowed and forbidden in practice. Questions about the limits of innovation are not limited to capoeira but also are raised in other dances and ritual performances where dependence on the body makes them “vulnerable” to modifications, improvisations, and extreme variation. Due to this potential risk, mestres emphasize that part of their global mission is to bring the right message and the correct way of learning capoeira to international groups. A brief ethnographic example from my field notes in Bahia exemplifies the subversion of tourism in capoeira Angola’s practice. While I was training with Mestre Valmir, the leader of FICA Salvador, one of his students invited me to a capoeira exhibition for tourists coming from a transatlantic cruise. We rehearsed at FICA the day before a series of sequences and practiced a choreography to entertain the tourists with some acrobatic movements. The performance took place the next day, and Valmir acted like a showman, skillfully motivating people to participate. Dressed all in white, we performed our choreographed sequences during a performance that lasted no more than twenty minutes. After we concluded the show, we were invited to talk to the tourists and explain a little bit about the meaning of capoeira.

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Days later I talked to Valmir about the exhibition. He told me that he did not do such shows very often; in this case he did it as a favor for a friend and because of the money and opportunity to show capoeira Angola to travelers. He said that many mestres were conflicted about using capoeira Angola as a show because it did not have the same acrobatic and spectacular appeal as capoeira Regional or Contemporânea. He also mentioned that using capoeira as a performance for tourists gave a false impression about Afro- Brazilian traditions. In the end, Valmir had to negotiate his commitment to tradition within an environment of increasing tourism. He was more open to engaging with shows than other mestres because he was an avid traveler. He understood the curiosity that tourists had about capoeira and how different people around the world interpreted capoeira in their own terms. Although Valmir acknowledged this conflict between tradition and spectacle, he had learned how to separate both contexts and use his capoeira skills to negotiate its diverse expressions. The mestre-student relationship in all its variability fluctuates based on the mobility of leaders and advanced students and the subversion that tourism and global exposure generates. An increasing number of avid participants want to learn the “true” meaning of capoeira from a great mestre. In the next section, we explore what happens when mestres and students meet in concrete situations and “controlled equivocations,” to use Eduardo Viveiros de Cas- tro’s (2004) expression, to establish apprenticeships.

WONDERMENT

The mestre-student relationship is in principle asymmetrical. The obligation of learning from a qualified mestre makes those in the category of “student” always at a disadvantage. The power and authority in the transmission of knowledge imposed by tradition are expected to flow in one direction only, from leaders to disciples. This directionality constitutes a power relation. In theory, students are supposed to learn without questioning much the status or quality of the source of knowledge—that is, they are expected to defer to the mestre. Deference plays a vital role in the way capoeira should be practiced among students, but it does not explain the mestre-student relation entirely. The mestre-student relationship is more than just an association based on power and authority. Students influence mestres’ perspectives and are active participants in the transmission of knowledge. Students owe mestres deference and respect, but, because of the global expansion of capoeira, students, particularly international ones, are more willing to question some of the Afro- Brazilian principles concerning concepts such as “tradition,” “religion,” or

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“belonging.” The mestre-student relationship is not only one of obedience; rather, we need to see this vertical relation as tending all the time toward becoming partially horizontal as students try to establish a dialogue with their mentors and to create possibilities of mutual understanding. In the development of the mestre-student relationship, I identify three moments that shape the effects of tourism mobilities: wonderment, expectations, and disappointments. These three moments shape the relationship between mestres and students. They unfold through time, they represent the duration of apprenticeship, and they indicate the emotional engagement between leaders and students in local and global scales. The feeling of wonderment appears in the initial contact between a mestre and a student. A student feels a sense of complete admiration when she sees the leader perform, talk, and sing for the first time. The mestre, on the other hand, transmits his knowledge to beginners. He wishes to capture the attention of the new disciples as they, possibly, have never trained capoeira before. Of course, the context where this interaction takes place for the first time is crucial. People in Brazil who want to try out capoeira for the first time sup- posedly have more knowledge about the Afro-Brazilian art, although this is not always the case, so the mestre may take for granted some elements such as music and the African origins of capoeira. When the initial contact happens abroad, the mestre changes his attitude because the new students may not know much about capoeira or may have only a vague notion about it. The mestre may talk more than perform, spending time explaining the meaning of songs, music, and the history of capoeira. Nevertheless, the mestre will also try to express bodily the art of deception by playing with some of the advanced students in the classroom or the roda. A student’s experience of wonderment appears as an initial moment where the world stops, where she has the strong feeling of being in the presence of a unique and charismatic person. It is an aesthetic effect the mestre produces with his body. On the other end of the relationship, a mestre knows that his missionary role has been intensified by a multiplicity of travels all over the world. The seductive effect of capoeira is essential for transmitting the mestre’s message immediately to students he does not know very well or whom he encounters for the first time. The feeling of wonderment is very similar to the rapture of an aesthetic semiotic experience of art (Greimas 1997), occurring in unexpected circumstances and places, such as in a museum exhibition, as Stephen Greenblatt (1991) has aptly described. In this initial stage, mestres know that they have to transcend as quickly as possible the commercial side of their craft. By this I mean they try to show the “true” essence of capoeira and make curious observers into students. This deliberate move happens in the academies or workshops abroad. On the stage,

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when Angola members perform for tourists, as in the case described with Valmir, mestres do not have time to go beyond the tourist setting. So, instill- ing the feeling of wonderment in beginners is the initial step that mestres take as a strategy to move beyond the constraints of tourism. These casual students who came for a diversity of reasons to take a lesson with a mestre in an Angola academy need to feel an initial wonderment about capoeira even if they never return or never see capoeira again. Sometimes, the feeling of wonderment occurs also with advanced students who meet a famous mestre for the first time. I remember a couple of occasions when I had the fortune to meet mestres such as João Grande, Moraes, Cobra Mansa, Bigodinho, and Virgilio da Fazenda Grande for the first time. Although I was not a neophyte when I met these mestres, my feeling of wonderment was strong enough that I chose to dedicate part of my life to train capoeira and also convinced myself that the intricacy of the Angola style would be worth studying anthropologically. Personal power appears seductively. As Luke Freeman (2007: 286) notes, “Power is about gathering followers by communicating an aura of unusual efficacy as a person and of natural authority as a ruler.” This unique aura is what I consider the feeling of wonderment experienced by students who meet a mestre for the first time. I remember how I felt when I got to know Mestre Moraes during his first trip to Stockholm in 2002. I had met other famous leaders before, yet seeing Moraes was a life-changing experience. He was in Stockholm just for a couple of days, but during that time participants understood his greatness as a capoeira leader. The way he played music, how he moved in the roda, and his singing and personal engagement with students were things I had never seen before in capoeira. Moraes was different, and his body irradiated the aura that Freeman describes. People who attended that workshop with Moraes knew he was powerful. He represented the charismatic figure Max Weber refers to (1947: 358–63). His personality showed his power in practice. The feeling of wonderment is part of the charisma that radiates from a mestres’s inner spiritual force. Through wonderment, a leader builds a different sort of connection with people, especially when he knows he will not be stay- ing in one place for long. This seductive first encounter aims to create an intense and durable experience for students, one that lasts long enough to keep students motivated to continue practicing capoeira. It is irrelevant whether mestres are successful in their missionary path to overcome the superficiality of casual and ephemeral experiences of capoeira. What remains important is that mestres act with their bodies to transcend the barriers imposed by tourism mobilities in order to show an “authentic” form of tradition.

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EXPECTATIONS

The second moment that surrounds the mestre-student relationship has to do with the expectations that students build around a leader. Expectations are a by-product of mestres’ charm and their initial effect of wonderment. They are a consequence of the fluctuating presence and absence of a leader in a group. Mobility makes mestres into itinerant beings who cannot stay for too long in one place. Expectations grow when a leader is absent. Students wait for the day of a mestre’s return to continue their learning from the vital source of capoeira. This waiting happens in Brazil, the United States, Europe—in any place where an Angola academy is depending on a mestre to exist. Expecta- tions also lead to imaginary projections. Just as tourism mobility often portrays an unreal experience of local settings, people who want to know more about capoeira Angola sometimes have expectations that do not correspond to the reality of mestres’ intentions. Let me return here for a moment to the concept of tourism imaginaries discussed by Noel Salazar and Nelson Graburn. One of the main arguments in the introduction of their edited volume is that social imaginaries emerge from the relationship between tourists and the places they visit. Defining these imaginaries is complicated, and it is even more difficult to locate or make them tangible: “By their very nature, imaginaries remain intangible, so the only way to study them is by focusing on the multiple conduits through which they pass and become visible in the form of images and discourses” (Salazar and Graburn 2014: 2). So, images and discourses shape the social imaginaries of tourism, and these images and discourses are the ways the social imaginaries become anthropologically relevant. The mestre-student relationship, if not entirely characterized as a touristic one, has many of the elements needed to create a set of imaginaries very similar to those found in tourism. The expectations that are a product of mestres’ mobility set up imaginary projections in students. These expectations are about specific images of Afro-Brazilian culture. In their missionary quest, mestres reveal, step by step, what they consider to be their Afro-Brazilian values and traditions, such as the importance of slavery in the history of capoeira, the primacy of deception as a compelling game strategy, their musical knowledge, and the social memory of some dead mestres. Through intermittent face-to-face interactions, disciples learn gradually about all these issues and complement the experience they gain with the help of the Internet and the contact they make with their mentors through social media. As mestres are constantly moving, imaginary projections are not only an experience of international students but also affect practitioners in Brazil. The

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imaginaries that capoeira Angola creates vary widely. These imaginaries are a by-product of the expectations built around a leader. Mestres are aware that something is expected from them, that students, as they become more and more involved in capoeira, want to learn the fundaments of tradition. At the same time, mestres expect a lot from students; they demand loyalty, deference, and respect for the right way of performing capoeira. Disciples then create a set of “tourism imaginaries” about their mentors that focus on the role of mestres as caretakers of Afro-Brazilian tradition. Students, in many cases, follow what their leaders say without question. Mestres, on the other hand, use the expectations of students to maintain student interest in the fundaments of capoeira Angola without revealing too much. They try to keep the image they are presenting within that realm of deference and relative sacredness while maintaining secrecy. One example of the tourism imaginaries that mestres inadvertently project has to do with how they speak about their places of origin. The importance leaders give to their home cities and how they talk about them always sur- prises me. I remember, for instance, how Mestre Pedrinho, leader of Terreiro Mandinga de Angola (TMA), spoke with his students in Mexico City about Figure 3.1. Capoeira music orchestra minutes before the beginning of a roda at Ter- his hometown of Duque de Caxias in Rio de Janeiro. The way he described reiro Mandinga de Angola academy, Mexico City. different aspects of Caxias, its violence, its “dangerousness,” the people who Photo: José Luis Pérez Flores. Date: November 19, 2011. inhabit it, and the stories of his childhood and teenage years there gave students a sense of the meaning of capoeira in that social context. His capoeira stories about the famous Roda de Caxias transported disciples on an imaginary journey about Caxias, Rio, and Brazil. It made students hopeful about one day visiting Caxias to see capoeira there and meet the people Pedrinho mentioned. Unintentionally, Pedrinho was building a connection between his Mexican students and Brazil. Years later, that relationship brought Mexican students to Caxias; they had the opportunity to know firsthand the capoeira scene there, and, in turn, capoeira people in Caxias were able to meet the disciples Pedrinho talked so much about when he visited his old neighborhood. Through this dialogical exchange, imaginaries in capoeira operated in the same fashion as imaginaries in tourism. In this way, seductive and fantastic projections of otherness surrounded places, people, narratives, and images. Globalization and the mobile nature of tourism make possible exchanges between leaders of capoeira Angola and academies all over the world. In the example cited above, imaginaries also operate with capoeira players from Caxias, who understand and represent the presence of international practitioners, who visit the Roda de Caxias all year-round, in their own imaginative ways. They, the people from Caxias, built imaginary projections about the otherness of tourism, and they also fall “prey” to the images that itinerant

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19_0234-Varela.indb 78 4/30/19 2:03 PM The Mestre-Student Relationship in the Age of Tourism 79 imaginaries that capoeira Angola creates vary widely. These imaginaries are a by-product of the expectations built around a leader. Mestres are aware that something is expected from them, that students, as they become more and more involved in capoeira, want to learn the fundaments of tradition. At the same time, mestres expect a lot from students; they demand loyalty, deference, and respect for the right way of performing capoeira. Disciples then create a set of “tourism imaginaries” about their mentors that focus on the role of mestres as caretakers of Afro-Brazilian tradition. Students, in many cases, follow what their leaders say without question. Mestres, on the other hand, use the expectations of students to maintain student interest in the fundaments of capoeira Angola without revealing too much. They try to keep the image they are presenting within that realm of deference and relative sacredness while maintaining secrecy. One example of the tourism imaginaries that mestres inadvertently project has to do with how they speak about their places of origin. The importance leaders give to their home cities and how they talk about them always sur- prises me. I remember, for instance, how Mestre Pedrinho, leader of Terreiro Mandinga de Angola (TMA), spoke with his students in Mexico City about Figure 3.1. Capoeira music orchestra minutes before the beginning of a roda at Ter- his hometown of Duque de Caxias in Rio de Janeiro. The way he described reiro Mandinga de Angola academy, Mexico City. different aspects of Caxias, its violence, its “dangerousness,” the people who Photo: José Luis Pérez Flores. Date: November 19, 2011. inhabit it, and the stories of his childhood and teenage years there gave students a sense of the meaning of capoeira in that social context. His capoeira mestres display about other Brazilian cities with strong capoeira traditions stories about the famous Roda de Caxias transported disciples on an imagi- like Bahia. nary journey about Caxias, Rio, and Brazil. It made students hopeful about The social imaginaries produced by the mestre-student relationship could one day visiting Caxias to see capoeira there and meet the people Pedrinho multiply ad nauseam. They appear as moments of expectation with students mentioned. Unintentionally, Pedrinho was building a connection between his who are neither beginners nor exclusively casual practitioners. In this sense, Mexican students and Brazil. Years later, that relationship brought Mexican imaginaries extend to other disciples who have trained capoeira for many students to Caxias; they had the opportunity to know firsthand the capoeira years. Relevant to the discussion here is the content of the imaginaries about scene there, and, in turn, capoeira people in Caxias were able to meet the dis- capoeira that students create, and, recursively, the meaning that mestres give ciples Pedrinho talked so much about when he visited his old neighborhood. to their contact and interactions with people in capoeira settings. In other Through this dialogical exchange, imaginaries in capoeira operated in the words, what is at stake here is how mestres imagine students, how they lo- same fashion as imaginaries in tourism. In this way, seductive and fantastic cate them in a hierarchy of power and knowledge that extends globally. This projections of otherness surrounded places, people, narratives, and images. inquiry leads us to the third moment of the mestre-student relationship. Globalization and the mobile nature of tourism make possible exchanges between leaders of capoeira Angola and academies all over the world. In the example cited above, imaginaries also operate with capoeira players from DISAPPOINTMENT Caxias, who understand and represent the presence of international practitioners, who visit the Roda de Caxias all year-round, in their own imaginative Both leaders and disciples experience a widespread feeling of disappoint- ways. They, the people from Caxias, built imaginary projections about the ment at some stage in their relationship. Some students have negative otherness of tourism, and they also fall “prey” to the images that itinerant feelings about their mentors after the initial moments of wonderment have

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passed, and mestres are often disappointed when their disciples do not con- form to their high expectations. It takes time for some students to feel disappointed about their mentors. The initial fascination with all things associated with capoeira Angola can last many years; practitioners adapt to the nomadic life of their leaders and get used to seeing them sporadically. Sometimes, however, disciples’ perception of their mestres undergoes an abrupt change. It is common, particularly outside Brazil, to wrap the figure of the mestre in a semisacred aura. Inter- national students of capoeira Angola—whether beginners, advanced players, or those positions of authority and responsibility within an academy—tend to take their leaders too seriously. Students often forget that these leaders live a missionary life and cannot pay attention to everyone they meet. More importantly, they change their views about the meaning of capoeira with time; they must embody the art of deception as a game strategy and a form of establishing power relations too. International students get caught in a web of misunderstandings when they give high moral value to interactions with their mestres. Just because mestres hold power does not mean that they will act automatically according to particular values. Students sometimes demand that mestres behave morally, and more often than not such demands contradict the dictates of deception as the primary strategy of capoeira. Mestres use the new moral status they have gained for missionary purposes. They play along with students’ demands, but they cannot always be seen as moral beings—they must also embody deception and trickery. They know that it is part of their lives to be malandros (rogues), fluctuating between order and disorder, disruption and continuity, legality and illegality, and “good” and “evil” (Downey 2005: 153–68). So, at some stage in their lives, mestres face the same dilemma that Pastinha confronted when he realized that becoming a moral guide and quasi-religious leader often contradicted the essence of capoeira. Deception is one of the lessons that capoeira gives students, and leaders must demonstrate that lesson at some point in their lives to their disciples. As I have shown (González Varela 2017), stories of “betrayal” by mestres who take economic advantage of students are common, as are stories of students betraying mestres. The relationship between leaders and disciples is a risky one. If capoeira’s practice is about simulation and feigning attacks to catch your opponent off guard and win, the same situation may happen out in the world, in the roda of life. Students must be prepared to confront their leaders’ deception when the time comes and must decide what to do about it. International students have to face the reality that the moral status they have given to their mentors is not the ideal behavior they should expect. Instead, they should embrace the art

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of deception and recognize its value when embodied and performed by the leaders of capoeira. However, many mestres could change their attitudes and become moral guides for their disciples around the world. As far as I know, leaders are assuming more and more their role as moral guides, even if this attitude contradicts the art of deception as a virtue. Of course, these new patterns may be part of innovative deceptive strategies employed to hide and protect mestres’ power and knowledge. I am not sure how widespread the status of mestres as moral figures is among capoeira academies worldwide, but the tension between what students imagine about their leaders and what leaders do is a cause of conflict and disappointment. If students feel disillusioned with their mentors, the reverse is also true. Mestres have high expectations of students, and when they think that students’ commitment is not strong, they may feel extremely disappointed and annoyed. Leaders expects blind deference from advanced students, who should, in theory, be committed to capoeira full-time. As students struggle to keep these high standards, mestres could consider them not to be true “capoeiristas.” I remember how a leader in Mexico mocked a student because of his lack of commitment to capoeira. The mestre said that the student had not embraced the Afro-Brazilian art because he would train intensively for two months and then stop completely for another four months; the student in question would come to many rodas and then suddenly disappear for extended periods. This inconstancy made the mestre furious; he berated the student and often told him that he was a “capoeira tourist,” someone who did not believe in discipline or responsibility. Another Bahian mestre also felt annoyed with international students who focused only on physical movements. He said that these students did not want to listen to a mestre; they did not want to learn the Portuguese language, music, or lyrics; and, worse, they did not want to know anything about capoeira’s history or the tales of his ancestors. The mestre said that these were not capoeira practitioners but lame players, capengas, incomplete persons. These are just two examples of the disappointment in their students that mestres sometimes experience. There are other situations when leaders feel that their disciples do not understand capoeira as they should, including the choice of international practitioners to become independent, rejecting an association with a single mestre, switching loyalties from mestre to mestre, challenging the authority of a leader, banning people because of race, and failing to make the visit of a mestre profitable. Mestres try to keep control of their groups and the people they meet during their trips, but they face a changing landscape that seems to create constant tensions related to tradition and what is allowed or not allowed in capoeira Angola performances. Paradoxically, the more a mestre’s missionary work intensifies, the more the

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mestre loses control as the message gets lost in translation or is interpreted in diverse and unexpected ways.

THE LIMITS OF INNOVATION

The current, accelerating changes in capoeira Angola academies in Brazil and abroad do not pass unnoticed by mestres, who blame globalization, tourism, mobility, and cultural differences. However, many have realized that they own part of the blame too. Many mestres use social media to express their concerns about tradition, innovation, and the preservation of Afro-Brazilian culture. They know they are facing a complex environment. On the one hand, they want to “correct” and give proper direction to the development of capoeira Angola throughout the world, so they continue moving around the globe to deliver their message. On the other hand, the more they travel, the more they lose control of how capoeira is interpreted and assimilated in different cultural settings, as they are not there all the time to correct or supervise in the flesh. This loss of control, naturally, does not happen everywhere, and there are academies and well-organized franchises, such as, for instance, FICA and Filhos de Angola, that institutionalize the transmission of knowledge from mestre to students. However, as I show in chapter 5, in countries such as Mexico, mestres are losing their grasp on how tradition should work, and more independent groups, led by local long-term practitioners, even contest the power of mestres. The proliferation of groups abroad and the idealized image that students create about traditional capoeira cities in Brazil and the mestres who embody Afro-Brazilian religions bring into question the limits of innovation in capoeira Angola. How far can a group depart from the mentorship of a mestre? How do leaders present themselves abroad so that they can keep control of their tradition? These are difficult questions to answer. What I can say is that one of the critical problems in the transmission of knowledge between a mestre and his students today is that it is more permissible, allowing students to innovate in modes that do not always follow the “right way” of performing capoeira. Mestres know they have to adapt to this uncontrolled environment and thus innovate in the way they teach students, both in Brazil or abroad. They compete with other Angola mestres too, so they need to transmit their message in the most innovative way. Nevertheless, there are limits to what mestres will allow within capoeira groups they lead. For example, they do not permit recorded music in a roda, and they require members to learn how to play musical instruments. They condemn singing in languages other than Portuguese, and they

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warn students of the consequences that will occur if the students start calling themselves “mestre” or “professor” without their mestre’s consent. Mobility, globalization, and the effects of tourism are changing the structure and emotional tenor of the mestre-student relationship in capoeira Angola today. Transformations in the way practitioners define concepts such as “tradition,” “power,” and “Afro-Brazilian” are visible more than ever, and leaders face the challenge of controlling innovation and change in capoeira Angola and the commodification of Blackness for consumption by tourists (Hedegard 2013). In the next chapter, I describe how mestres set up limits to innovation in the face of these challenges. The process of innovation depends on religious and spiritual principles that need to remain relatively untouched in order for leaders to preserve and transmit the “true” meaning of capoeira Angola.

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19_0234-Varela.indb 83 4/30/19 2:03 PM J. Brett Hill, “Popular Media,” in From Huhugam to Hohokam: Heritage and Archaeology in the American Southwest (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 23–42. Series: Issues in Southwest Archaeology. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 2

Popular Media

Dynamic senses of O’odham culture and history abound today in forms that communicate identity and the relationships among people. Both earthly and digital media create a vibrant landscape of expressions people have about who they are and are not. We are limited to a focus on the O’odham, but many Native people in the Southwest claim an ancestral connection to the ancient sites in southern Arizona. Consultation about cultural affiliation rou- tinely involves multiple tribes who also have a traditional connection to the Sonoran Desert, and want a role in the care of its places and objects. Focus here is limited to the O’odham for two related reasons: 1) as a people, they have the longest recorded history in the region where Hohokam archaeological culture is found, and 2) the term Huhugam is from the O’odham language. The continuity debate has traditionally focused primarily on the O’odham for these reasons. At once, both sameness and difference of identity are found among the O’odham. Individuals of all tribal membership may live at all of the reservations but a fundamental distinction appears in organization that permeates their history and culture. The Four Southern Tribes are divided into Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham, translated, respectively, as River People and Desert People. The Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC) and the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) are predominantly Akimel O’odham, while the Tohono O’odham Nation (TON) and the Ak-Chin Indian Community (ACIC) are predominately Tohono O’odham (figure 2.1). These are often referred to more simply as Gila River, Salt River, Ak-Chin, and Tohono O’odham. At the same time that the O’odham are distinguished from one another, the Akimel O’odham are merged with the Pee Posh, or Piipaash tribe at Gila River and Salt River. In 1857, the Pee Posh fled their home in the Colorado

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Figure 2.1 Southern Arizona Showing Reservations and Museum Locations. Source: Created by J. Brett Hill.

River Valley to the west due to conflict with tribes with whom they shared a language and history, but their history and interaction with the Akimel O’odham precedes that merger by centuries. In the past, Euro-Americans often referred to the Akimel O’odham as Pima and the Tohono O’odham as Papago. Likewise the Pee Posh were referred to as Maricopa. These terms are still used occasionally, mostly as part of formal names of institutions that began at the time those names were common. They were never natural to the O’odham and have become less common in recent years. Akimel O’odham are concentrated primarily to the northeast along the Gila and Salt Rivers. The Gila River, Salt River, and Ak-Chin communities are contiguous areas oriented around major water sources. The most densely populated reservation is at Salt River near Phoenix with seventy-six persons

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per square mile. Tohono O’odham are more dispersed in the Sonoran Desert to the south, living in four separate areas. Though most of their lands are spread across the desert, some districts, such as San Xavier and San Lucy, are beside rivers. These associations among the Desert People and the river undermine a simple dualism that superficially characterizes the O’odham. While the Tohono O’odham have by far the largest area, it is also the least densely populated with only two persons per square mile in the southern-most deserts.1 In addition, Tohono O’odham strongly identify with O’odham living in Mexico. The fluidity of identity through time is reflected in recent political negotia- tions. In 2013 the Hia-Ced O’odham were officially recognized as the 12th district of the TON. After decades in which the US government deemed them “extinct,” approximately 1,100 Hia-Ced O’odham were enrolled in the TON, and thus were found to be “Extinct No More.”2 The Tohono O’odham sub- sequently overturned this formal recognition and the Hia-Ced O’odham are currently seeking independent status as a federally recognized tribe. Archaeological remains have been found on all four reservations. Those characterized as Hohokam are concentrated in the northern part of the O’odham ancestral region. Several of the largest and best known sites are near the Gila River and Salt River Valley bottoms, which have attracted the largest populations for millennia. However, large sites are found in tributary valleys and desert areas as well, and their oversight and care is an important concern to all of the tribes. The relationship between present peoples and particular places is a central theme throughout this discussion. The control over land, its resources, and the rights of self-determination are in turn connected to another important issue to all of the tribes, sovereignty. For Native Americans, however, sovereignty goes beyond the legal authority of a state to govern itself. Sovereignty is an obligation to live according to the laws of their Creator and to pass that way of life to future generations.3

TYPES OF MEDIA

O’odham today describe their heritage in a multitude of popular media, including tribal websites, museums, art, food, and events. One thing that distinguishes these media is their intended audience; they draw a public audience but target especially members of their own community. The purpose of many public institutions is to communicate authoritative views of tribal heritage. The most easily accessible media where these views are expressed is on official tribal websites. Each of The Four Southern Tribes maintains a website for the community, and these offer information on a

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broad range of topics including current events, government, tribal indus- tries, culture, and history.4 Each of the tribes also supports a museum where similar topics are under- scored. All four serve as repositories for cultural objects, in part to satisfy legal requirements for a proper facility to house objects repatriated from non- Native museums but also, and perhaps more importantly, to educate. All four tribal museums are at the forefront of evolving theory about the social role of the museum, serving local communities rather than academic narratives. In addition to collection and display, each of the tribal museums serves important functions as a location for community gathering and ritual. They are used as settings for sharing O’odham traditions including oral histories, music, dances, food, and crafts. In some cases these activities are open to the non-Native public, but they are intended for Native participation and thus the museum serves as a venue for the production and reproduction of O’odham culture for O’odham interests. Native institutions are conceived and designed subjectively as expressions of O’odham identity. They acknowledge a non-Native public, but are oriented to convey understanding of their own culture and history within their own community. The importance of traditional foods is seen through museum depictions of hunting, harvesting, and preparation. The Salt River museum describes how their ancestors obtained nutritious foods from the desert before the arrival of the Spanish, and offers tips on contemporary harvest and preparation.5 Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) describes the collection and preparation of desert foods such as tepary beans, cholla buds, and saguaro seeds and syrup.6 All are introduced as foods that have long sustained the Tohono O’odham. TOCA also publishes a more substantial guide and cookbook titled From I’itoi’s Garden, which illustrates gardening and preparation techniques for plants collected and cultivated in the Sonoran Desert.7 It describes the traditional food system as part of their culture for countless generations, and credits the importance of community, drawing knowledge from scores of members, shared over many generations. It details the process by which their traditional food system was degraded by interference from the US government during the twentieth century. Renewed interest in traditional foods is evident in gardens and restaurants where foods that have sustained the O’odham for centuries are revi- talized in a contemporary culinary movement. Healthy foods have been difficult to obtain for many O’odham due to the loss of water and isolation in remote areas. Since the greatest loss of water and land around the turn of the twentieth century, O’odham have come increasingly to rely on pro- cessed, introduced foods, with catastrophic results for health. Today, health problems related to diet are epidemic and efforts to return to foods grown

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in the local environment aspire to offer better nutrition and more sustain- able land use. Interest in traditional foods is not limited to dietary considerations though. It is also a critical component of O’odham identity, linked to the concept of sovereignty and central to cultural revitalization. From I’itoi’s Garden describes O’odham culture as “truly an agri/culture,” emphasizing that the loss of traditional foods is a loss of “O’odham Himdag—Desert Peoples Way.”8 Traditional foods are used in school meals and in job training. Along with crafts, storytelling, music, and games, traditional foods are a way of using the past to reach goals of empowerment and self-sufficiency. Museums, casinos, and schools host events such as pow-wows, pageants, rodeos, musical performances, and storytelling. Popular Waila music com- bines electric instruments with polkas and Latin American styles in uniquely O’odham ways that inspire partner dances. Traditional songs focusing on themes of land and heritage, are often accompanied by rattles and inspire patterned group dances. Many song titles refer to sacred mountains, shrines, and desert life. The program for the 77th All-Indian Rodeo and Fair at Tohono O’odham Nation describes the O’odham as “community minded people who reach out in kindness to friends and strangers alike” and who “hold true to the cherished traditions and values that guide us as we move forward.”9 Pageants integrate traditional song and dance with popular music and choreographed competition to select tribal “royalty.” The contestants compete in categories including both evening gowns and traditional Native dress. At pow-wows, traditional costume and craft themes from tribes across America come together in a common expression of Native identity. At all of these events, participants typically introduce themselves by reference to their families, parents, and grandparents. No event seems to pass without the exchange of small gifts, even among hundreds of spectators. O’odham also use contemporary art to express connection to ancestors and to challenge their representation. Traditional arts such as basketry are still common, and some, like pottery, jewelry, and painting combine traditional techniques with contemporary styles. Photography is one of the most common media used by contemporary O’odham artists. Images of traditional landscapes and people combining traditional and contemporary themes are found in museums and galleries.

CONNECTION

Unity among O’odham is a common theme throughout popular media. It refers not only to unity among the tribes but also to their common connection

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to place and to generations of descent. Both the Gila River and Tohono O’odham websites note that the current divisions into distinct tribes do not represent their understanding of themselves as a people. The Gila River website describes the other three as their “sister tribes” and “cherished relatives.”10 Likewise, the Tohono O’odham website notes that the current reservation system is an artificial division of society imposed by the US government.11 A sense of inclusion pervades the texts, for example, in the concept of “our people.” It presents people, and the communities they represent, as they appear to themselves. “Our” suggests meaning in which “we” are defined in relation to an “other.” “Our people” are defined in contrast to those who are not our people. Throughout the tribal webpages, categories reflecting this subjective orientation are by far the most common. In addition to general ideas of “our people,” specific references to a noble race, a peaceful people, and a people who were generous with their crops are commonly presented subjectively. Basket makers, farmers, students, veterans, dance and drum groups are all described as “ours.” Most of all though, we see “our people” distinguished by subjective kinship categories. Kinship references to family and future generations appear frequently, as do more specific categories such as elders, children, and grand- children. Expressions of subjective kinship appear in terms like “our elders,” “our spouses,” “our children,” and “our relatives,” signifying relationships of inclusion and origin through procreation. Kinship reflects the importance of reproduction in Native concepts of self. These categories of kinship identity are not static in time, but account for the continually changing membership that results from the process of living and reproducing. Their concepts must therefore meet the challenge of simultaneously distinguishing meaningful categories of “our people” and acknowledging the fluidity of this concept as generations come and go. At a more general level, the concept of “our people” is often found in reference to Indian or Native American. The word “Indian” remains in use by three of the Four Southern Tribes in their formal names as “Indian Communities.” On the Salt River website, Diane Enos uses Indian throughout her account, Life For Indians Changed As White Men Moved In.12 Usually, though, the phrase “Native American” seems more common in contemporary use. In either case, the terms reflect a fundamental distinction between Native and White, or non-Native. The phrase “our people” is found in the context of environmental health, water rights, crops, and general quality of life that is associated with place.

Desert and River O’odham emphasize connection not only with each other, but also with places in the desert. References to place are among the most prevalent

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themes identified on tribal websites. The most obvious relationship between place and identity is seen in the names of the current tribes, each of which is named for a part of the environment: the Tohono O’odham for the desert and the Akimel O’odham for association with the Gila and Salt, the two largest rivers in the region. Ak-Chin is an O’odham word meaning “mouth of the wash” and refers to a location in the lower Santa Cruz River Valley where conditions are beneficial for a particular type of floodwater farming used in the desert. Likewise, the words “native” and “indigenous” are used frequently and reflect the importance of place in tribal identity. Both words mean someone born in a particular place. They connect the concepts of life and birth with the concept of place. The association between O’odham and place is further reflected in the conflation of tribal names with reservation names. A phrase such as Gila River Indian Community is used to describe both the lands included in the reservation and the community of people who live there. It is sometimes unclear whether the reference is to a place or a people, or both. What is clear, though, is the strong sense of connection between O’odham people and the landscapes of southern Arizona. On tribal websites, this idea appears as, “First there was the river and the land” in the opening description of Gila River community history, and “Our origins are linked to our homeland” in the opening description of Tohono O’odham history.13 In addition to the frequently invoked rivers and desert, there are references to subjective forms of place, “our lands,” “our reservation,” “our environment,” and “our water rights.” The tribal museums share a theme of connection to the surrounding landscape. All use architecture to integrate interior space with natural outdoor space, employing a ramada, or traditional shaded outdoor space, for conducting community activities. Native vegetation, traditional gardens, nature trails, and local terrain are incorporated at all four museums to emphasize their connection to their Sonoran Desert environment. The Tohono O’odham museum is designed to accentuate views of nearby Waw Giwulk, or Baboquivari Peak, a sacred landmark, and the Salt River museum shows pride in its construction from native materials. The Gila River museum most clearly expresses a sense of ancestral connection between ancient and contemporary people. It employs a combination of design influences from traditional art and architecture, together with modern materials to integrate the past and the present. Its form depicts a pot emerging from the earth holding an ancient style great house and ballcourt, from which pours stylized water onto the desert (figure 2.2). A sign at the entrance says “Welcome to our land.” On nearly every panel in the main hall are references to the desert and the Gila River, defined as sacred and “the center of our way of life.” The theme of life permeates the

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Figure 2.2 Aerial View of Huhugam Heritage Center. Source: Google Earth Image 2017.

exhibit with references to crops, grasslands, and special emphasis on plants and animals from the banks of the flowing Gila River. It is all described in the context of loss, as the life-giving waters of the Gila, which had supported their ancestors for millennia, ceased to flow. The tribal museums display O’odham heritage through contemporary art as well. For example, in an exhibit by community member Amy Davila at the Gila River museum, photographs depict a young woman with traditional clothing and baskets in a desert foreground setting, juxtaposed against the background of urban Phoenix (figure 2.3). She describes her exhibit, titled

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Figure 2.3 “Cityscape.” Source: Photograph by Amy Davila, for Exhibit She Who Searches for the River at Huhugam Heritage Center.

She Who Searches for the River, as “a short fictional journey of an O’otham spirit who is faced with the contrasting realities of the modern world and the lack of water in the river she once relied so heavily upon.”

Ancestors Another kind of unity is found in a sense of connection to ancestors. The word Huhugam is described linguistically as a “reduplicated plural, from huk (end) and kam (person or persons who).”14 This description suggests little more than a reference to people who lived in the past, but much more is indicated. The mission statements of all the museums prioritize sustaining connections among ancient and present people. The Gila River museum preserves culture shared with ancestors so that it may “survive and flourish for present and future generations.” The Ak-Chin Museum promotes “the sharing of the past, the present and the future.” The Salt River museum is dedicated to preserving traditional lifestyles so that the community may “carry on the knowledge of their ancestors.” The Tohono O’odham museum works with

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elders to instill pride preserving and protecting O’odham jewed c himdag or land way of life. One interesting aspect of the tribal websites is the diversity of spellings. In addition to Huhugam, ten other spellings appear, including HuHuGam, HuHugam, Hoohoogam, Hoo-hoogam, Huhukam, Huhu-kam, huhu-kam, Hu Hu Kam, Ho-Hokam, and Hohokam. In one case, three different forms are found on the same page.15 This variability perhaps derives from the problem of transcribing an O’odham word into English. However, the diversity of forms suggests more than errors of transcription. It hints at a desire to reclaim linguistic authority on the correct usage of a term of identity. Variation may also reflect the fluidity of the Web, subject to diverse expression and rapid modification by multiple authors, and/or a disregard for conventions of West- ern scholarship, where consistency glosses differences in meaning. Frequently, Hohokam is used parenthetically with one of the other spellings, as a sort of correction, suggesting that the authors find something is not fully expressed by Western forms. O’odham today commonly speak English more than their native language, and tribal webpages are mostly written in English, with only a few examples of O’odham language. The loss of native languages, especially among the young, is a grave concern to Native Ameri- can leaders and an important focal point for cultural revitalization efforts.16 At the Tohono O’odham museum, text is offered in English, Spanish, and O’odham, and several panels are only presented in O’odham, keeping language central to heritage. A special interactive display with recordings from seven dialect groups among the Tohono O’odham notes that language is part of Himdag—the “way of life”—and inseparable from identity. The concept Huhugam reinforces connection when used subjectively, as in “Our Huhugam,” found on an introductory panel at the Salt River museum. Likewise, the title of an introductory panel at the Gila River museum says, “We are descended from our Huhugam.” It goes on to say, “This land is our home” and “We are the descendants of an ancient way of life deeply rooted in the land.” Furthermore, it claims the Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Onk Akimel O’odham, Hia’ced O’odham, and O’odham of Mexico are relatives through shared ancestors, the Huhugam. The flexibility of the Huhugam concept is reflected at the Salt River museum, dedicated to those who have served their country both past and present. At its founding, it was given the name Huhugam Ki, meaning “House of the Ancestors,” and the mission to “share our unique heritage.” In an interview celebrating Veterans Day, museum manager Gary Owens noted “It would not have been complete, in our opening program, if we did not salute those who had gone before us and those who are serving,” honoring Huhu- gam and US military veterans with the same concept of heritage.17

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The Tohono O’odham museum is described as an institution to “instill pride” and to “protect and preserve” the O’odham way of life.18 The Ak-Chin museum is described as an Eco-Museum and a place where “objects of our past are conserved and shared.”19 In all of these names and descriptions, the central theme is connection between the past and the present through generations of O’odham. Words like “heritage,” “conserve,” and “preserve” all reflect the importance of maintaining this connection. Words like “ancestors,” “way of life,” and “Eco-Museum” reflect the importance of O’odham as a living extension of their environment and history.

Objects Unlike most ethnographic and archaeological museums, which emphasize exotic objects, the tribal museums show relatively little interest in archaeology. None of the museums display the large collections of artifacts that are seen at most museums in the Southwest. The Ak-Chin museum exhibited no artifacts at all in the summer of 2014. The Tohono O’odham museum only displays a handful of modest artifacts in two small display cases near the rear of the exhibit, despite the fact that their collections hold many more impressive objects. Likewise the exhibits at the Salt River museum include only a few ancient artifacts. These are displayed with no indication of the usual chronological or cultural affiliation. Instead, they are in an exhibit describing the tribe’s official archaeology program and their sovereign authority to manage their own past in a respectful manner. The museums do not hold any human remains or funerary objects, which have instead been “laid to rest” following the wishes of the community. Many of the spectacular items that typically dazzle non-Native audiences are sacred or funerary objects that are highly sensitive for Native Ameri- cans. Valuable objects were not usually left behind carelessly. When they are found, they are most often in burials or ritual sites. Thus, they were not abandoned, to be freely claimed by whoever happened upon them, but were carefully placed for religious or spiritual purposes. This is why archaeo- logically prized objects are often requested for repatriation, and sometimes reburial by tribes. Wherever ancient artifacts are displayed in tribal museums, they are com- plemented by displays of more recent artifacts, and little distinction is suggested between them. For example, at the Gila River museum, twelve cases of archaeological artifacts are side by side with five cases holding more recent examples of Native crafts. Four are devoted to a collection of early twentieth century O’odham basketry and the fifth holds examples of contemporary pottery and shell crafts inspired by ancient designs.

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Likewise, at the Tohono O’odham and Salt River museums, a transition from ancient to recent history is depicted through Native crafts and activities such as farming, ranching, and traditional food preparation. At the Ak-Chin museum, only a small number of O’odham baskets were on display. Instead, the main exhibit hall was given to a display on the development of Harrah’s Ak-Chin casino in the 1990s, and its many benefits to the community. The tribal museums make no clear distinction between “prehistoric” and “historic” periods that is so prevalent in non-Native discourse. Instead, the concepts of ancestry are employed in a seamless display of past and present O’odham lives. In addition to objects of O’odham history, each of the museums emphasizes descriptive panels recounting the lives of ancestors through text, photographs, and art. They do not present the objects as exotic but use them to recount a personal, living history. The museums are models of a new ethos in museum design, in which objects take a supporting role in order to convey history and meaning. Displaying the objects divorced from their context objectifies the experience and distances the viewer. In contrast, O’odham museums use the objects on display to tell a story that connects the present- day people to their past. With the emergence of a more diverse heritage, museums everywhere are undergoing a shift away from massive displays of objects reflecting European colonialism, which often fails to communicate the richness of local meaning. An exhibit at the Tohono O’odham museum includes photographs by several young Native artists from the Ha:san Leadership and Preparatory School in Tucson, whose mission statement is to infuse education with “Tohono O’odham language and Native history.” The photos respond to the famous early twentieth-century photos by Edward Curtis in which he attempted to document “the vanishing race.” Artists responding to his photos acknowledge their beauty, but also are suspicious of them as contrived and untrue to the actual lives of their subjects. They strive to overcome a narrowly constructed image of vanishing Native American identity imposed by non-Native artists. They juxtapose the mythologizing images of Indians with their views of themselves, connecting themselves to ancestors with dreams of their future (figure 2.4). Though the artists are predominately Tohono O’odham, many identify with more than one tribe including the Hopi, Navaho, Oglala, Quechan, and Yaqui. Likewise, in their work reimagining the Curtis photos, the artists include subjects from other tribes of the American Southwest. They identify broadly with Native Americans, easily crossing others’ perception of their ancestors. In contrast to the relative lack of ancient artifacts on display, all four museums prominently display materials associated with Native US military veterans. Each one has exhibits dedicated to uniforms, weapons, photographs,

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Figure 2.4 Virginia Palimo and Wendel Ortiz, Photographs for Exhibit “Photo ID: Portraits by Native Youth.” Source: Project led by Lisa Falk, Arizona State Museum.

and other materials illustrating the role of O’odham and Pee Posh soldiers and sailors in every major US military engagement since the late nineteenth century. That O’odham never engaged in hostility against the people of the United States is a point of pride in tribal history. Instead, O’odham were recognized early on as reliable allies of the United States in conflicts against diverse enemies. The first O’odham soldiers to participate in the US military were known as the Pima Scouts, who fought with the US Cavalry against Apache and Yavapai in Arizona beginning in the 1860s. Since that time,

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Figure 2.5 Man in the Maze Window, Looking Toward Waw Giwulk, or Baboquivari Peak. Source: Created by J. Brett Hill.

O’odham men and women have fought in all branches of the US military in the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among others. During World War II, General McArthur said of the 158th Regimental Combat Team of O’odham soldiers, “No greater fighting combat team has ever been deployed for battle.” One of the most famous O’odham veterans depicted at the Gila River museum was US Marine Ira H. Hayes who par- ticipated in the invasion of Iwo Jima and is shown raising the American flag in the iconic Rosenthal photograph of that event. In a poignant note on the display, he is said to have confided in a friend that he joined the Marines so that his people could get back the water that was lost when the Gila River was dammed. The strongest theme to pass through all of these media is connectivity. This is nowhere more clearly symbolized than in the ubiquitous representation of the Man in the Maze design (figure 2.5). This symbol dates back to the early twentieth century at least and likely has connections to similar symbols dating back even further. Today, though, it is seen on official seals, signs, baskets, and art, used by all Four Southern Tribes. Most recently it was incorporated into a style of Nike shoes designed by Salt River artist Dwayne Manuel. The Man in the Maze is said by Salt River elder Dorothy Lewis to represent the house of the god Elder Brother and is meant to teach children the meaning of life.20 At the

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same time it represents the individual’s twisting and turning path of happiness and sadness, toward a dream and the Sun God’s blessing at death. This symbolic line connects the ancient god with the future through an individual’s life.

DISTINCTION

Though a sense of connection to the land and their ancestors is pervasive among the O’odham, distinctions are also found. These reflect the evolving relationships between O’odham and people recognized as belonging to an “other.” Others are likewise defined by place and origin, but in terms relative to the O’odham. Others are often identified with conflicts, and both personal and structural violence. Apache, Yuman, and Yavapai peoples, who shared the desert, are Native but are described in terms of shifting historical conflict and alliance with the O’odham. Contemporary differences between Native groups, however, are down- played in public narratives, and O’odham interactions typically reflect a peaceful and accommodating etiquette. Despite inevitable conflicts of interest among diverse peoples, a sense of solidarity permeates discourse and corre- sponds with the subjectivity of Native classification. The emphasis on “our people,” “our ancestors,” and “our lands” more often distinguishes between Native and non-Native peoples. The history of colonization and resulting centuries of oppression has minimized the differences among Native people, making the highest organizing division that between Native and non-Native. In the Tohono O’odham museum, the main exhibit focuses on the recent history of the Tohono O’odham and interaction with Euro-American colonizers since the late 1600s. It illustrates the importance of the Sonoran Desert environment as the home of O’odham people. On the Gila River to the north the greatest impacts of colonization did not arrive until the nineteenth century when Anglo settlers diverted the Gila River, which led to the “years of fam- ine,” in which many O’odham suffered and died. Even in those years of hardship, though, there is no mention of collapse or failure. Instead, they speak of survival, using terms like continuity, resilience, strength, adapt, and regenerate. O’odham also use place to identify non-Natives, with origins outside Arizona, in Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Europe. In most cases, these references are in the context of the hardship O’odham endured with the arrival of non-Natives in their homeland. Descriptions of O’odham interaction with Euro-Americans illustrate the contrast between O’odham hospital- ity and the catastrophic consequences for their lives that resulted from land and water theft and the imposition of Western education and politics. At the Tohono O’odham museum descriptions of traditional plants and animals are contrasted with more recent developments, such as ranching

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and mining, which have changed the natural environment and way of life for Native people. A prominent theme throughout the exhibit, though, is the injustice brought to O’odham by non-Natives in the form of violence, broken promises, and forced displacement and containment of O’odham on reservations. One display carries this theme into the present with a panel about the proposed Rosemont copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains east of the reservation. O’odham objections to its development include concerns about ecology, as well as disturbances to sacred places. There are also interesting differences in the ways tribes interact with non- Natives. Just on the outskirts of Phoenix, the Gila River’s Sheraton Wild Horse Pass resort and spa was “designed to be an authentic representation of the Gila River Indian Community’s heritage and culture” and its Kai Restau- rant is recognized as one of the finest dining experiences in the Phoenix area. It is designed to “incorporate the essence of the Pima and Maricopa tribes and locally farmed ingredients from the Gila River Indian Community.”21 The resort interior is lushly illustrated by artists from the community on a large circular ceiling mural, designed to depict the O’odham creation story accompanied by nine paintings of various aspects of traditional life. Com- munity elders are followed in a circular path through a range of crafts and activities, concluding with a depiction of youth listening to tales of the elders, “Learning the Creation Story and Himday—the ‘way of life.’” The lobby displays O’odham calendar sticks, which record events an individual “felt were important or life changing, and include the birth of a child, death of a loved one, world event, etc.” Calendar sticks teach that “our past affects our future” and strengthen “the common bonds we share through our knowledge of our heritage.”22 The resort is both an economic enterprise for the tribe and a venue to express distinctive O’odham identity to a largely non-Native audience. In contrast, remote desert Tohono O’odham communities emphasize self- sufficiency. For more than a thousand years, until the mid-twentieth century, O’odham used traditional Sonoran Desert agriculture to provide food. This culinary movement is strongly oriented toward engaging O’odham in Native food traditions. The Desert Rain Café, for example, serves traditional foods, created using produce from TOCA farms, and offers a model of healthy diet, bringing local foods to local people. While the Akimel O’odham today benefit from economic interactions with Non-Natives in the Phoenix area, Tohono O’odham inclusion in the United States presents challenges. The biggest of those is the fact that the US/Mexico border divides ancestral lands, separating people into citizens of the United States and Mexico. Tohono O’odham describe the many difficulties imposed by this “artificial barrier” to freedom in terms of connections to relatives and cultural traditions. The construction of a larger set of national categories, and the conflicts of interest reflected on the border between the two countries

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make it difficult to maintain the traditional category of “our people” united by common origin. Recognition of their contributions as citizens of the United States is also a problem for Tohono O’odham. Despite more than a century of unwavering service to the United States, O’odham do not always experience the benefits of classification as citizens. As early scouts for the cavalry, they were often indistinguishable by Euro-Americans from enemy tribes, and were frequently treated as enemies when their service was no longer needed. The mistreat- ment of Native American service members is not only historical prejudice though. One of the strongest statements of frustration at the TON museum is in the veterans display and concerns the inability of O’odham veterans to qualify for benefits following their service. Some members of the tribe who were born in remote areas of the reservation lack documents to prove they were born in the United States. They find their definition as Americans adequate to serve their country, but not to benefit from just compensation for service. They are both inside and outside the category.

DIFFERENT YET THE SAME

The Huhugam present a special case of connectivity and distinction that appears variable among the tribes. On a conceptual level, definitions of Huhu- gam such as “Those who have gone before” used at the Gila River museum, suggest a contradictory relationship in place and time. The Huhugam are of this place but not this time. Yet, literal translations fail to convey the full range of meaning contained in the term Huhugam. The English word “gone” is temporal—the people who were once here are not here anymore—and does not communicate the sense of connection that is important in the term. In virtually every case where Huhugam is defined, it is accompanied by discussion of either O’odham ancestry or the engagement of Huhugam with the local ecology. Through the subjective form it signifies a connection between living people and those in the past in which the Huhugam are a subset of “our people.” The ancestral tense, however, presents a paradox. “Our people” will eventually become the Huhugam, and thus a subset of them. Such paradoxes illustrate the challenges and misunderstandings that arise from applying categories through time. There is broad agreement among the tribes that Huhugam lived at ancient ruins in the area, and that O’odham in general are descended from them, but different tribes emphasize Huhugam in different ways. The Akimel O’odham emphasize Huhugam ancestry by the name of their museums; the Huhugam Heritage Center is found at Gila River and Huhugam Ki Museum at Salt River. In contrast, the Tohono O’odham emphasize “way of life” in the

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names of their museums. The Tohono O’odham have a Cultural Center and Museum, called Himdag-Ki, and the Ak-Chin community has a Him-Dak Eco-Museum. The concepts overlap in their emphasis on the connections between present people, their land, and ancestors. For example, the Gila River museum defines Himthag as a way of life that teaches respect for nature and all people. It uses ancestral ceremonies to carry these traditions to future generations. The different names, however, suggest a different kind of interest in the Huhugam. The relationships between them and the Huhugam help define them, but they also create variability among the tribes. The two Akimel O’odham tribes most closely associated with the Salt and Gila Rivers, where Hohokam archaeological sites are most common, are those that have the biggest displays of ancient artifacts and use the word Huhugam in their displays. The Gila River museum exhibits the largest number of artifacts with twelve display cases devoted to archaeological materials from the famous Snaketown excavations near the Gila River. These cases display impressive examples of prehistoric pottery, shell jewelry, and flaked stone projectile points. The Salt River museum displays artifacts primarily to illustrate the tribe’s development as a contemporary community. In contrast, the Tohono O’odham explicitly claim Hohokam ancestry, but display very few archaeological artifacts at all. The Akimel O’odham are also the only tribes to say much about either the origin or the fate of the Huhugam, and both express ambivalence. The Gila River website defines the Huhugam as an ancient merger between immigrants from Mexico and local populations.23 This suggests Huhugam changed through time, two different categories becoming one, overcoming the temporality of “gone” by a combination of people. According to the Gila River website, the Ho-Hokam are said to have dispersed for uncertain reasons, possibly including environmental and social factors. In contrast, The Salt River website notes that the Akimel Au- Authm believe their ancestors were the Hoo-hoogam, but also that the Hoo-hoogam mysteriously vanished.24 For both the current Gila River and the Salt River communities, “our people” are composed of a merger of once distinct peoples into a common category. Both are formally composed of O’odham and Pee Posh. Historical accounts of their merger in the nineteenth century are important parts of tribal statements on contemporary identity. For both communities, the term Huhu- gam is applied in ways that describe a shared past and no effort is apparent to distinguish between the O’odham word Huhugam and Pee Posh ancestors. Both quietly accept that they are contemporary, ethnically distinct people sharing the Huhugam concept.

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Throughout contemporary media, O’odham express a sense of unity among themselves, and with their land and ancestors. They also express concern about their sovereign authority to tell their own story, as well an obligation to pass it on to future generations. General categories of people are subdivided into hierarchies of inclusion. Distinctions among categories often appear dualistic, but not usually in the classical sense of discrete attribute lists. Instead of objective distinctions, categories of people often are shaped by subjective elements of common and opposing interest. They are further characterized in many cases by shared or distinctive origin. The contradictory aspects of classification through time that appear paradoxical from an objective standpoint seem unproblematic from the O’odham point of view.

NOTES

1. “Demographic Profiles for Arizona Indian Reservations 2010 Decennial U.S. Census and 2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates/” Note Tribal websites may offer higher estimates than those provided by the U.S. Census. 2. Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan, “Extinct No More: Hia-Ced O’odham Officially Join Tohono O’odham Nation,” Indian Country Media Network, June 30, 2013, https:// in dianc ountr ymedi anetw ork.c om/ne ws/po litic s/ext inct- no-mo re-hi a-ced -oodh am-of ficia lly-j oin-t ohono -oodh am-na tion/ . 3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). 4. “Ak-Chin Indian Community – About,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://ak- chin.nsn.us/about.html; “Gila River Indian Community – Tribal History,” accessed January 28, 2015, http: //www .gila river .org/ index .php/ about -trib e/pro file/ histo ry/11 5-tri bal-h istor y; “Gila River Indian Community – Tribal Culture,” accessed Febru- ary 24, 2015, http: //www .gila river .org/ index .php/ about -trib e/pro file/ cultu re; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: History and Culture,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Akimel Au-Authm (Pima) People,” accessed February 24, 2015, http: //www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/pim a.asp ; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: A Pima Past,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/pim apast .asp; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa) People,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/mar icopa .asp; “Tohono O’odham Nation – History & Culture,” accessed February 24, 2015, http: //www .tona tion- nsn.g ov/hi story _cult ure.a spx; “Tohono O’odham Nation – History,” accessed February 24, 2015, http: // www .tona tion- nsn.g ov/to n_his tory. aspx. 5. Huhugam Ki Museum Staff, “Foods from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: “O’odham Haicu Huki Piipaash Chmash” (Huhugam Ki Museum, 2012).

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6. “Tohono O’odham Trading Company: Healthy, Traditional, Native American Foods” (Tohono O’odham Community Action, n.d.). 7. Tohono O’odham Community Action, Mary Paganelli Votto, and Frances Manuel, From I’itoi’s Garden: Tohono O’odham Food Traditions (Tohono O’odham Nation: Tohono Community Action, 2010). 8. TOCA, I’itoi’s Garden, 11. 9. Dr. Ned Norris Jr. and Wavalene M. Romero, “O’odham Wapkial Ha:tas 77th Annual All-Indian Rodeo and Fair” (Tohono O’odham Nation, 2015). 10. “Gila River Indian Community – 2015 Inauguration Ceremony: ‘Year of Our Water Rights,’” accessed February 24, 2015, http: //www .gila river .org/ index .php/ janua ry-20 15-gr in/52 88-20 15-in augur ation -cere mony- year- of-ou r-wat er-ri ghts. 11. “Tohono O’odham Nation – History & Culture.” 12. “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Life For Indians Changed As White Men Moved In,” accessed February 24, 2015, http: //www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/lif efori ndian s.asp . 13. “Gila River Indian Community – Tribal History”; “Tohono O’odham Nation – History.” 14. Ruth M. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1969). 15. “Gila River Indian Community – Tribal History”; “Tohono O’odham Nation – History”; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: History and Culture”; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: A Pima Past”; “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Huhugam Ki Museum,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /hist ory_c ultur e/mus eum.a sp. 16. Leanne Hinton and Kenneth Locke Hale, The Green Book of Language Revi- talization in Practice (Academic Press, 2001). 17. “Au-Authm Action News Online,” accessed January 8, 2017, http: //www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /comm unity /auau thm/a rchiv es/20 12/de c-06- 2012/ news/ news- 04.ht m. 18. “Tohono O’odham Nation – Cultural Center & Museum,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://www .tona tion- nsn.g ov/cu ltura l_cen ter_m useum .aspx . 19. “Ak-Chin Indian Community – About.” 20. “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Great Seal,” accessed Febru- ary 24, 2015, http://www .srpm ic-ns n.gov /comm unity /grea tseal .asp. 21. “Kai Restaurant,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://gil arive r.org /inde x.php /ente rpris es/10 0-com munit y-ent erpri ses/1 01-ka i-res taura nt; “Sheraton Wildhorse Pass Resort & Spa,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://gil arive r.org /inde x.php /ente rpris es/10 0-com munit y-ent erpri ses/10-she raton -wild horse -pass -reso rt-a- spa. 22. Print documentation of the ceiling murals and calendar sticks is available at the Hotel reception desk. 23. “Gila River Indian Community – Tribal History.” 24. “Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community: Akimel Au-Authm (Pima) People.”

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