Using Film to Explore Continuity and Change Among Bororo People in Central Brazil

GENDERED PROHIBITIONS: USING FILM TO EXPLORE CONTINUITY AND

CHANGE AMONG BORORO PEOPLE IN CENTRAL BRAZIL

By Flávia Kremer

A thesis Submitted to the University of Manchester for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology with Visual Media

In the Faculty of Humanities

2014

School of Social Sciences

Department of Social Anthropology

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

DECLARATION ...... 7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 8

INTRODUCTION ...... 9

GENDERED PROHIBITIONS: CONTINUITY IN CHANGE ...... 17 THE MOIETY ENDOGAMY PROHIBITION: LOVE, MYTH AND SHAME ...... 19 THE AIJE SPIRITS: ‘SEEING’ AS A GENDERED SKILL ...... 21

CHAPTER 1 THE HYBRID ALDEIA: FROM 'CONTACT' TO THE ALDEIA DIGITAL ...... 24

BORORO PEOPLE AND THE BRAZILIAN NATIONAL PROJECT ...... 25 THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER ...... 28 THE OCCIDENTAL BORORO ...... 29 THE ORIENTAL BORORO ...... 30 ALDEIA MERURI: HISTORY OF ‘CONTACT’ ...... 32 THE MISSIONARY COLONY ...... 33 MERURI: FIELDWORK CONTEXT ...... 41 GLOBAL ALDEIA ...... 44 ECONOMICS INSIDE AND OUT: CONFLICT, ‘CULTURE’ AND SUBSISTENCE ...... 55 THE BORORO AND THE SALESIANS: MORALITIES BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH ...... 65 TADARIMANA VILLAGE: HISTORY OF ‘CONTACT’ ...... 70 ALDEIA TADARIMANA: FIELDWORK CONTEXT ...... 74

CHAPTER 2 MULTIVIDUALITY AND PERSONHOOD: NEGOTIATING MARRIAGE BETWEEN ‘LOVE’ AND MYTH ...... 85

IN BETWEEN THE ALDEIA AND THE METROPOLIS: ‘LOVE’, MULTIVIDUALITY AND PERSONHOOD ...... 89 MULTIVIDUALITY AND PERSONHOOD: MORAL EXPERIENCES IN CONTINUITY AND CHANGE ...... 95 THE VILLAGE PLAN: MEDIATING OTHERNESS ‘INSIDE’ AND ‘OUT’ ...... 105 NAMING AND KINSHIP: MOIETY ENDOGAMY AS LIVED EXPERIENCE ...... 118 THE EXCHANGE OF MEN: WOMEN, ‘INSIDE’ OTHERS AND THE PROPER MAKING OF PEOPLE ...... 136

CHAPTER 3 EXPERIMENT WITH FILM: SEEKING TRUE LOVE AND A MR. MYTHICALLY RIGHT ...... 146

FIELDWORK AND THE CAMERA: DIGITAL CULTURE, ANTHROPOLOGY AND SELF-REPRESENTATION . 149 IMPROVISED NARRATIVE STRATEGIES: THE GUIDING STORYLINE ...... 153 CAN WE USE THE CAMERA, PLEASE? ...... 154 PRE-PRODUCTION IN TADARIMANA: FILMMAKING AS GIFT EXCHANGE ...... 159 IMPROVISATION TECHNIQUES: IS IT ‘REALITY’ OR ‘FICTION’? ...... 163 THE ‘FICTIVE’ CHASE: FLIRTATION, MARRIAGE AND DESIRE ...... 166

2 CHAPTER 4 SEEING AS A GENDERED SKILL: ‘OUTSIDE’ OTHERS IN RITUAL AND FILM ...... 171

INTRODUCING THE AIJE ...... 172 THE AIJE AND THE BORORO FUNERAL ...... 173 DISCOVERING THE STRENGTH OF THE AIJE: FILM SCREENINGS AS A TRANSFORMATIVE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE ...... 175 FROM FEEDBACK SCREENINGS TO FILM ELICITATION: THE KNOWLEDGE-MAKING POTENTIAL OF THE FILMIC MEDIUM ...... 182 ON THE FILM SCREENINGS ...... 185 A WARNING ...... 197 SOME FRIENDLY ADVICE ...... 198 FUNERALS AS EXPERIENCED FROM WITHIN THE HOUSE ...... 199 THE AIJE PROHIBITION AT WORK ...... 205 THEORISING MEN’S SECRET CULTS ...... 213 ENCOUNTERING THE AIJE: ‘SEEING’ AS A GENDERED SKILL ...... 220

CONCLUSION ...... 229

3 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1- Facebook selfie by Eloenia Leandro Ararua...... 49 Figure 2 - Bororo feather art accessories...... 50 Figure 3 - My 'sister' Daniela Kietaga on her Facebook profile...... 54 Figure 4 - Edna Arua Bororo's Facebook profile picture...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 5 - Facebook pictures of Daniela and Jordana. Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 6 – Interior of a house in Tadarimana ... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 7. Daniela going to the 'toilet'...... 77 Figure 8. Shower at our 'relatives' house...... 78 Figure 9. Selfie in Leandro Nabure’s Facebook profile...... 79 Figure 10. Raquelaine Itogoga ready to dance in the funeral...... 83 Figure 11. Picture from Jordana's Facebook profile ...... 102 Figure 12. My ‘sisters’ studying Bororo marriage rules in the Encyclopeadia Bororo...... 108 Figure 13 - Funeral dance. Picture taken from Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques...... 115 Figure 14 - i-edaga proclaims the child’s name. Photo by Daniela Kietaga...... 121 Figure 15. Nominação. Kioguaro and feather skirt. Photo by Daniela Kietaga...... 123 Figure 16. Ludimila's nominação. Note her kudukegeu displaying the colors of the Badojeba clan. Photo by Daniela Kietaga...... 124 Figure 17 - Men covering the village plaza to protect women from seeing the aije in Rituais e Festas Bororo (1917)...... 185 Figure 18 - Bororo girls dancing in the Mission. Scene from the film Meruri (1942)...... 188 Figure 19 - The Bororo band. Scene from Meruri (1942)...... 190 Figure 20 - Bororo men cleaning the bones of the deceased. Scene from Funeral Bororo (1953)...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 21. Prohibited images, Fantástico (2003)...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 22 - Women covering their faces to avoid seeing the aije in the film...... 195

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1 – Bororo Territory before Colonisation ...... 29 Map 2 - Bororo Current Territory ...... 31 Map 3 - Meruri (Google Earth 2014)...... 41 Map 4 - Tadarimana (Google Earth, 2014)...... 75

LIST OF DIAGRAMS

Diagram 1 - Bororo village model taken from Crocker (1969:45)...... 110

GENDERED PROHIBITIONS: USING FILM TO EXPLORE CONTINUITY AND CHANGE AMONG BORORO PEOPLE IN CENTRAL BRAZIL

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Manchester Flávia Kremer 2014

ABSTRACT

This thesis is an ethnographic study carried out with the Bororo people in Central Brazil. It focuses on how Bororo people’s moral experiences are transformed through modernisation, evangelisation and globalisation. It will demonstrate that in spite of the cultural and communicational transformations entailed by the villages’ global interconnections, the significance of two cultural prohibitions—moiety endogamy and the aije spirits (men’s secret)—continue to inform the moral actions of contemporary Bororo. Through the use of filmmaking and film elicitation methods, the thesis investigates each of these prohibitions and contends that they are constitutive of the Boe gendered person. The study argues that in the midst of radical cultural and communicational transformation, it is through the construction of the gendered person that continuity is ensured. The thesis describes the radical transformations in two Bororo villages with particular attention to the youths’ participation on social media networking through the Internet. It also stresses the importance of the notion of ‘romantic love’ in contemporary village life whilst also demonstrating how the prohibition on moiety endogamous marriages continues to inform the experience of Bororo multividuals. In order to investigate this issue, I explored the themes of ‘romantic love’ and moiety endogamy through the making of the visual ethnography In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right which accompanies the thesis. Whilst I investigate moiety endogamy through the making of a film, the significance of the aije spirits emerged in a process of feedback screenings, which unexpectedly turned into film elicitation sessions for the film medium, brought to the surface the strength of women’s fear of these beings. Drawing on the analysis of the two prohibitions taken together, I argue that the Boe gendered person is constructed through the mediation of village relations with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others. In this sense, women are responsible for the manipulation of marriage alliances and the inspection of new babies (who are dangerous ‘others’) about whom they have the power over life or death. By the same token, men are primarily responsible for mediating relationships with ‘outside’ others (spirits, animals, non-indigenous peoples). They are in charge of unmaking dead bodies and conducting new souls to the village of the dead. Whilst the Boe gendered person is what ensures continuity in the midst of radical change, the village relations with the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ are in the process of transformation for the presence of the media, and the Internet in the villages is multiplying otherness and the spaces it inhabits.

6 DECLARATION

I declare that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example, graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it that may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, the University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and the University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped me to go through the process of writing this thesis. Firstly, I wish to thank all of my Bororo friends and in particular Kleber Meritororeu, who was the first Boe to believe in my research and who invited me to reside in Meruri village.

This thesis would not have come into existence without the guidance and support of my supervisor Professor Paul Henley. I am very grateful for his patience and our lively discussions during supervision meetings. I also wish to thank my former supervisor Professor Massimo Canevacci who took me to the Bororo village for the first time in 2007 and who continues to encourage my research pursuits.

The department of Social Anthropology at Manchester has been a productive research environment. I wish to thank my PhD colleagues and the lecturers with whom I had the opportunity to discuss my work.

Finally, I am grateful to my family, especially my mother Lucia Kremer, who continuously encouraged me and stressed the intellectual rewards of a PhD. My brother Daniel Kremer provided me with the material and emotional support I needed to be able to finish the dissertation. And last but not least, I wish to give a special thanks to my good friend Ary Brito who cared for me in the busiest moments of the writing-up process.

I dedicate this thesis to my aroe.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine yourself getting off a bus with three big bags you can barely carry in the middle of the BR 070 motorway and in front of an indigenous reserve in Brazil. You are about to live for one year with the Bororo, a people who have inspired one of the most influential schools of thought in the humanities. But you are not exactly thinking about their social organisation or their famous village layout, which served as a recurrent example in Lévi-Strauss’s development of structuralism. Your most private self is thinking about where you will sleep and how you will live away from the middle-class comfort you have always enjoyed, and most importantly, you are thinking about your safety. It is well known that anthropologists’ association with colonial institutions (Clifford 1983; Kuper

1988) is what has guaranteed their physical integrity whilst pursuing their nosy business. When I arrived at the Bororo village, I knew that my link with a British university and my ‘whiteness’ certainly placed me in a position of power within the village. However, I was living in a Bororo house and not at the Salesian Mission, where I initially thought I could be safer.

My Bororo friends told me that I was the first anthropologist who had entered the village through the invitation of members of the community in the first instance and who was living in a Bororo house. But as should be expected, the context of my research was, in spite of my

9 narrative reference, very different from that of Malinowski. I had negotiated my fieldwork with the Bororo through the Internet, and they were careful to emphasise that they would be very attentive to the published results of my investigation. The missionaries also expressed their concerns with my research project; they were wary of my presence in the village for I had not been given their permission. One of the missionaries often enquired about my research aims and told me ‘not to write rubbish’. I had not even started fieldwork and I already had an audience for my future thesis.

My own presence in the Bororo village was the result of the new communicational politics enabled by the Internet—the possibility of building alliances across space and time. I was invited to reside in Meruri because I was seen as a political ally, someone who has had the privilege of education and could thus help the community to improve village life by claiming resources from the ‘outside’.

When I arrived in the village, people confused me with a representative from a German company who had supposedly promised to pay each Bororo person a monthly allowance of £300 in exchange for carbon credit. The excitement of receiving that money was soon over when I said I was not such a company representative and had no means to give them such allowance. Despite the local people’s disappointment, this confusion was an interesting expression of the ‘local’ manifestation of a global environmental politics locating the Bororo as

‘nature keepers’ who sell their ‘rights to pollute’ to large European corporations.

10 Based on these kinds of relationships, my aim was to comprehend how the diffusion of digital cultures and Bororo people’s access to the

Web influences the experiences of Bororo women and men as ‘global’ subjects. I am aware of the problems of applying such a concept in a context such as that of the Bororo, but I also want to distance myself from research approaches which continue to theorise indigenous lives as if they were outside the contemporary processes of globalisation.

This thesis is an ethnographic effort to interpret Bororo villages in

Central Brazil as ‘global’ villages. It asks how Bororo people’s moral experiences are transformed through modernisation, evangelisation and globalisation. My friends in Bororo villages are fond of soap operas, film, pop music, and they also participate in social media networks such as

Facebook and Skype. Young Bororo enjoy walking around the village whilst listening to music, taking pictures with their mobile phones and posting them online. I am currently in contact with many of my Bororo friends on Facebook, where they update me on the latest village news. I have maintained a relationship with Bororo villages through the Internet for seven years now. And as I have already mentioned, it was through the Internet that I negotiated the possibility of doing fieldwork there with the village authorities.

It was my friend and now i-edaga (‘name-giver’) Kleber

Meritororeu, whom I had met in 2007 when I first visited Meruri village, who facilitated my entrance. At the time, Kleber was already friendly with my former supervisor Massimo Canevacci, who had taken myself and ten other students to the village as a pedagogical experiment. Kleber was acting as a mediator in our political relations with the village authorities

11 even then. This gave me the opportunity to talk to him about field research, the requirements of the Bororo community for researchers, as well as my own personal educational aspirations. I told Kleber about my desire to do fieldwork in his village for my future PhD, and he asked my help in applying for a scholarship to study anthropology in Rome. He told me that he had been to Europe a couple of years beforehand. On that occasion, he had visited Lévi-Strauss in Paris, participated in an art exhibition in Genoa with a group of Bororo artists and had visited the

University of Rome for the first time. When I left the village, we agreed to stay in contact through the Internet. Initially, we only communicated intermittently through e-mail, when Kleber could access the Internet from the city. But a couple of years before my fieldwork began, his village acquired its own Internet connection, so we strengthened our relationship by using Skype and speaking to each other more often.

Time passed and Kleber had changed his priorities. He was no longer interested in undertaking anthropological studies. Instead, he decided to focus his career on the implementation of fish farming projects in Bororo villages. During the time that we remained in contact through Skype, Kleber was putting great effort into learning how to write fundraising projects for development aid agencies. I helped him with a couple of applications, and he was very grateful when the Brazilian government decided to fund one of his fish farming projects.

The idea of ‘projects’ is a significant component of Bororo people’s global imagination. Through ‘projects’, they wish to gain government funding to support cultural celebrations, school events, and now, following Kleber’s success, fish farming. One of the reasons I was

12 accepted as a researcher in the village was because I had helped

Kleber to gain funding for this project. Many people wanted my help to write ‘projects’ and most importantly to find available funding for indigenous initiatives through national and international institutions. These people are looking into the economic possibilities of ‘projects’ as a means to gain financial independence from the Salesian Mission and the

FUNAI. They also think of ‘projects’ as a means to address particular problems in the community, including writing a ‘project’ to get a bus to take kids to school and another ‘project’ to create opportunities to sell artefacts and produce income for Bororo families, among others.

Because I had helped Kleber with his successful project, I had become a sort of an interesting researcher, somehow ‘useful’ for the community.

The Bororo interest in ‘projects’, their increasing participation in social media networking and their search for political alliances and economic independence through the Web led me to focus my enquiry on social change. ‘Globalisation’ is a buzzword that permeates the experiences of both academics and ordinary people in the street (Moore

2004). Among the Bororo, it is no different. In an effort to comprehend

Bororo people’s experience of the ‘global’ and their conflicting imaginary projects (Tsing 2005) from a gender perspective, I wished to learn how Bororo women and men experience modernity in relation to their filmic history and their current engagement with the Web.

Building on the methodological strength of anthropological fieldwork, my aim was to explore a space in between the ‘inside’ and the

‘outside’ of ‘the village’ in Bororo people’s experience of globalisation.

My theoretical framework was initially informed by a positivistic

13 conception of gender, an ‘add women and stir’ (Harding 1986) approach, with which I planned to explore gender ethnographically.

Making use of multiple fieldwork methods including the collection of genealogies, interviews, filmmaking and feedback screenings, I proposed to tackle the following questions: building on the theoretical dissolution of the ‘global’/‘local’ dichotomy (cf. Moore 2004; Ong 1999; Tsing 2005) and the presence of the ‘communicational metropolis’ inside the aldeia

(Canevacci 2013), is it possible to comprehend the distinctiveness of

Bororo people’s experience of globalisation and social change? Is there indeed such thing as a distinctive Bororo way to be ‘global’ or ‘modern’?

How can I account for Bororo people’s experience of the ‘global’ and simultaneously seek to comprehend the ‘Bororo point of view’ on the matter? How do the Bororo experience and interpret social change in relation to digital culture and the history of their audiovisual representation?

When I employed immersive fieldwork based on participant- observation as a method, a problem of scale became particularly apparent. Although ‘global’ and ‘local’ cannot be separated, the microscopic scale of anthropological fieldwork opens new paths of enquiry and focuses attention on the importance of issues ‘internal’ to the experience of being Boe (the Bororo term for humans), which are complex in themselves and bear no relation to any idea of the ‘global’ or

‘modern’ world.

In an effort to comprehend the experience of being Boe, I have taken inspiration from the ethnographic literature on lowland South

America with particular focus on the study of ‘Amazonia’ as a theoretical

14 region. My aim was to explore the insights of studying social change from a gender perspective.

The debates focused on gender in Amazonia (Gregor and Tuzin

2001; McCallum 2001) initiated a theoretical path towards examining the applicability of Marilyn Strathern's (1988) feminist-inspired insights to the

Amazonian region. Strathern's work and other Melanesia-based theories have also stimulated contemporary structuralist studies, which theorise social change from an indigenous 'internal’ perspective (Fausto 2007;

Santos-Granero 2009; Vilaça 2006), moving beyond ideas of social change linked to the notion of acculturation. However, despite the fact that gender studies and social change studies in Amazonia are invigorated by the same theoretical source, a dialogue between them is still underexplored.

The influence derived from theoretical debate in Melanesia has promoted a ‘shift from a structural idiom to one of ontology’ in

Amazonian ethnography (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007). By acknowledging the different ontological grounds on which Amerindian philosophies are based, recent studies of social transformation have involved the study of Amerindian concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘agency’

(Carneiro da Cunha 2007). These studies question the essentialisation of the notion of identity and aim to explain social change through

Amerindian ontology and its structural openness to the other (Santos-

Granero 2009, Vilaça 2006). By the same token, studies focused on gender discuss the problems of essentialising 'gender' as an entity defined a priori onto which cultural traits are then imprinted (McCallum

15 2001; Hugh-Jones 2001). Nonetheless, gender continues to be theorised as an ‘internal’ cultural issue and social change continues to be theorised as gender neutral. Would indigenous philosophy organise the relationship between gender and social change in this same way? Are the theoretical developments of these recent studies in Amazonia, strictly defined, also applicable to the peoples of Central Brazil and to the

Bororo in particular?

The Bororo village is circular and divided by an east-west axis into two exogamous moieties with a men’s house in the middle. On each side of the village circle, there are four houses that correspond spatially to a particular clan’s position in the mythical version of this same village. In the

1960s, approaching the Gê and Bororo villages as closed ‘cultures’, the anthropologists of the Harvard Central Brazil Project divided the village into further dualisms: centre/periphery, culture/nature, men/women (see

Maybury-Lewis 1979), which I believe are external and not particularly related to the peoples’ understanding of their own village space.

Through the further development of these theories and especially in relation to the Bororo, there was an explicit association of women with nature (Novaes 1986). Such an association has been widely criticised

(see MacCormack and Strathern 1980; McCallum 2001; Strathern 1988) together with the relegation of women to the realm of the periphery and their presumed exclusion from sacred or cultural affairs (Lea 1995).

In this process, the Bororo categories of Bope/Aroe, which Crocker

(1985) analysed in great detail, were simplified into equivalents of the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, respectively (i.e., Caiuby Novaes

16 1986). The Bope and Aroe categories are fundamental elements in

Bororo life. And although it is possible to simplify their meanings and argue that, following Crocker (1985), the notion of the bope is linked to principles of organic transformation, whilst the aroe are linked to immutable essences, my ethnography will demonstrate that the meanings of bope and aroe are more nuanced and that the meaning of the bope in particular has significantly changed over time.

The Bororo village, as the mythical expression of social organisation, regulates morality and exchange. However, despite the essential character of the mythical village, the spatial design of Bororo villages today is significantly altered. In addition to changes in the spatial layout of contemporary villages, Bororo people also engage in cultural flows of the ‘communicational metropolis’ inside the village (Canevacci

2013). Yet building on my ethnographic investigation of cultural change among the Bororo, I shall argue that in the midst of complex processes of social transformation, it is through the construction of gendered persons that continuity is ensured.

Gendered Prohibitions: Continuity in Change

Through an ethnographic study of the Bororo village in the context of globalisation, this thesis will demonstrate how the resilience of two cultural prohibitions that constitute the Boe gendered person continue to inform Bororo people’s contemporary experience. The two prohibitions I

17 will be analysing relate to fundamental processes of the village’s relations with life and death. Inspired by Cecilia McCallum’s (2001) work, I shall be exploring gender as a key link between these two prohibitions, demonstrating how they relate to the ways in which the Bororo conceive male and female moral agencies.

The first prohibition I will be analysing is moiety endogamy or

‘incest’. In his analysis of the ‘incest taboo’ as a universal institution that is culturally and historically variant, Lévi-Strauss (1969) argued that in all its forms, it should be considered an expression of ‘the principle of reciprocity’, which in turn entails the need for exchange, for, as he put it in the androcentric language of the era, if a man cannot marry his sister, he is obliged to establish an alliance with another man so that he can marry that man’s sister instead. Within this theoretical framework, moiety endogamy would constitute a form of ‘incest’ in Bororo social organisation since it challenges the prescriptive marriage rules that ensure exchange between moieties. However, in my analysis of Bororo moiety endogamy, I shall argue that it is not ethically appropriate to refer to moiety endogamy as ‘incest’. The Bororo never use such term to refer to cases of moiety endogamy, which they call ‘wrong’ marriages instead. Whilst I shall adopt the Bororo terminology to refer to cases of moiety endogamy, and call them ‘wrong’ marriages, I suggest the need to account for Schneider’s (1984) Critique to the Study of Kinship. Instead of taking an a priori concept of ‘incest’, investigating the concept of

‘incest’ ethnographically is necessary in order to properly understand its local meanings.

18 Although I will be analysing moiety endogamy as a prohibition, I will demonstrate how people are increasingly transgressing it and marrying for love. Yet, whilst in the case of moiety endogamy gender difference cannot be dissociated from clan and moiety membership, the second prohibition that proved significant during my fieldwork creates a gendered border between male and female that cross-cuts the moiety division. This is also a much stronger prohibition than moiety endogamy for it is sacred and unquestionable. I am referring here particularly to the aije spirits. Seeing these terrifying spirits is what marks a boy’s ritual transition into manhood. Women are strictly forbidden to see these spirits, for seeing them can cause sickness or even death.

Given the major transformations in Bororo society, I shall be investigating what brings these two prohibitions together as fundamental elements that constitute the Boe person. The strength of these two prohibitions became apparent in fieldwork in distinct ways as I shall now briefly describe, though I shall be returning to this matter at much greater length in the main body of the thesis.

The Moiety Endogamy Prohibition: Love, Myth and Shame

The very first indicator of cultural change that I encountered in the field was that people were no longer marrying according to the traditional moiety exogamy prescriptions. Quite the contrary, I found that many couples were committing what in classical anthropology would have been called ‘incest’ and marrying within the same clan and

19 moiety. Moiety exogamy as a marriage prescription seemed to no longer matter, as people declared themselves modern and able to choose their spouses based on feelings of love. In Chapter 2, I will examine how despite the apparent unimportance of prescriptive exogamy, the singularity of long-term participant observation as a method enabled me to understand that moiety endogamy is still a significant prohibition despite first appearances. In doing so, I shall stress the ubiquity of notions of romantic love in Bororo villages, whilst also emphasising the relevance of the classic studies of social organisation and, particularly, the notion of the person as a means to comprehend the contemporary experiences of the Bororo. Yet my analysis will also contest some key features of classic accounts. Firstly, I shall argue that the notion of dialectics to conceptualise movement in Bororo society is misleading. The concept of dialectics is ingrained with the synthesising logic of identity, a defining feature of Western metaphysics, and it does not account for the

Amerindian ‘openness to the Other’ (cf. Leví -Strauss 1995). Secondly, I shall demonstrate how the Bororo material challenges Lévi-Strauss’s arguments in relation to the exchange of women by demonstrating ethnographically that, among the Bororo, women exchange men.

In order to further explore the relationship between moiety endogamy and love ethnographically, I engaged in a filmmaking project that resulted in the ethnofiction In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right, which accompanies this thesis. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate how the process of making the film guided my analysis towards a more sensorial understanding of kinship. Filmmaking directed my attention to the materiality of bodies and the ambiguities of desire, stressing that kinship

20 and marriage is not just about rules and prohibitions, but can also be about flirtation. The film brings desire to the centre of the investigation of

Bororo people’s intimate lives. In order to preserve the film’s element of surprise, I recommend that the reader watch it before reading Chapter 3.

The Aije Spirits: ‘Seeing’ as a Gendered Skill

In contrast to moiety endogamy, the significance of the aije prohibition was not a topic that I investigated directly through filmmaking; instead, it became apparent indirectly through film screenings. The strength of the aije prohibition was something that I sensed through an experiment with feedback screenings, which were originally motivated by a completely different set of questions. The processes of feedback screenings and filmmaking were related to one another in my original conception of the research project, but the experience of fieldwork led them to become detached, each offering a distinctive insight into the two prohibitions that constitute Bororo personhood.

My project of feedback screenings unexpectedly turned into a film elicitation method, for film elicited alternative forms of knowledge that guided my research practice towards an entirely different path.

Inspired by moral and political concerns around the question of ‘whose story is it?’ (MacDougall 1998), I intended to screen six films that had been made about the Bororo since 1917. I believed that taking these films from museums and libraries in the Brazilian metropolis and bringing

21 them back to the aldeia was a moral duty. My plan was to use feedback screenings as a means to engage in a subsequent practical collaborative filmmaking project, through which, having viewed previous representations of their culture, I would create a film project with interested individuals that could more accurately represent Bororo people’s contemporary lives. As I shall demonstrate in Chapter 4, this project was a failure. But the screenings were successful in another sense because they awakened me to a connection between the two prohibitions that I had not previously considered. Film, although used in two different ways, brought to the surface certain emotional qualities associated with the two prohibitions. In the case of moiety endogamy, the use of film was helpful to stress how feelings of love are disruptive of conventional social relationships. By contrast, the emotional qualities associated with the aije spirits, fear, serves to reinforce those relationships.

After I had learned about the strength of the aije spirits through the film screenings, I began to investigate this prohibition in more detail in the field. Building on Bororo explanations for the fear of the aije, and moving away from representational approaches that seek hidden truths behind the ‘native’s’ claims (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2013), I shall argue that the aije prohibition establishes gender difference through the skill of ‘seeing’.

Through the analysis of a Bororo myth, I shall demonstrate how the Bororo men’s secret, far from being a mechanism of control of women, is a means to protect the humanity of women’s point of view (cf. Viveiros de

Castro 1986).

Both moiety endogamy and the aije spirits have proven to be remarkably important for the Bororo. Taken together, they demonstrate

22 how cultural continuity is ensured through the resilience of the Boe gendered person, which continues to be a significant referent in the moral experiences of contemporary Bororo.

CHAPTER 1 THE HYBRID ALDEIA: FROM 'CONTACT' TO THE ALDEIA

DIGITAL

This ethnographic study draws on twelve months' fieldwork in the aldeias

Meruri and Tadarimana. These aldeias are located in distinct Terras

Indígenas (indigenous reserves), with contrasting colonial histories. The study is primarily based on fieldwork carried out in Meruri where I lived for ten months. In Tadarimana, I did not conduct systematic research into the internal dynamics of the village. I only visited it a few times to attend funerals and to shoot the visual ethnography that accompanies this thesis.

In total, I spent one full month there in addition to my scattered visits that amounted to a second month. However, these visits to Tadarimana were a productive means to further explore insights that emerged in Meruri. In

Tadarimana I lived alone in a 'neutral' house, whilst in Meruri I lived with a family and thus belonged to a clan. These contrasting political positions were particularly informative in relation to the issues that I was researching.

In this chapter, I discuss the incorporation of Bororo people into the

Brazilian national project before continuing with an historical account of

Meruri and Tadarimana. Following each historical account, I provide a picture of the village life in the context of fieldwork. The chapter argues that despite the radical economic transformations in Bororo villages, the traditional ceremonial relations, the bestowing of names and circulation

24 of immaterial property linked to the moral guidance of the village plan continues to inform Bororo people’s contemporary life. In effect, economic transactions do not form the basis of Bororo social organisation; rather, these transactions are guided by mythically informed circuits of exchange. By looking at the dramatic transformations in the economy of Bororo villages, this chapter provides the basis for my overall argument that despite these changes, two cultural prohibitions, linked to the constitution of gender subjectivity, remain powerful elements in the moral experience of the Bororo people.

Bororo People and the Brazilian National Project

The Bororo people live in Central Brazil, in the state of Mato Grosso. In the first half of the 18th century, the population count was of 10,000 nomadic people who wandered freely in approximately 400.000 km² of land

(Coqueiro and Camargo 2001). Currently, they are confined to less than

0.01% of their ancestral lands (Caiuby Novaes 1983). Throughout the 20th century1, the Brazilian government assigned six plots of Terras Indigenas

(TI) to the Bororo: Meruri, Perigara, Sangradouro, Tadarimana, Jarudori and Teresa Cristina. The first four plots are registered and ratified, and are now the locations of Bororo villages. The Jarudori plot was reserved to the

Bororo, but it was continuously invaded and it is now occupied by a city.

The land has been reserved to the Bororo and its legal status is still under revision. The Teresa Cristina allotment is also currently under revision (ISA

1 These pieces of land were reserved to the Bororo by the SPI and later the FUNAI. Teresa Cristina in 1969, Jarudore in 1945, Perigara in 1969, Tadarimana in 1945 and Meruri 1976.

25 2014) 2 . Today, the Bororo population count is estimated at 1677 individuals (ISA 2014). This population count is an index of the horrifying results of the genocide that the Bororo have suffered. Yet it is a reassuring number if we take to account that in the 1980s the Bororo numbered only

626 individuals (Viertler 1990).

In recent years, the Bororo population has grown. They participate actively in the national indigenous movement, and there are a number of young Bororo who attend Brazilian public universities with the aid of the politica de cotas3. There are young Bororo studying psychology, with a view into addressing the problem of alcoholism in their villages. Others are studying law and geography also with the intention to help their community, particularly in relation to the protection of their land. They are also seeking alternatives to their economic dependence on the

Salesian Mission and the Brazilian state. Among these alternatives is the elaboration of cultural projects, such as the Meri Ore village, which was built in the Meruri reserve with funding from the Brazilian Ministry of

Culture. The Meri Ore village is built according to the classic circular architecture and it was supposed to become a ponto de cultura 4 .

Though the village is still there, the Bororo experienced problems with the

NGO in charge of the project and were unable to continue with it.

Through the Internet, the Bororo look for other sources of funding for such projects. My own acceptance as a researcher in the community was linked to their desire to learn more about projects. Since my first visit

2 http://pib.socioambiental.org/pt/povo/bororo/240 (Date accessed : August 2014)

3 This is a governmental policy that reserves places for indigenous people and afro- Brazilians at public universities.

4 The pontos de cultura (cultural posts) is an initiative of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. It funds cultural initiatives managed by members of civil society.

26 to the Meruri indigenous reserve in 2007, I had remained in contact with

Kleber through the Internet. At the beginning of 2010, I sent him a link to a call for projects by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture with funding for cultural initiatives in the region known in Brazil as ‘Amazonia legal’5. Kleber wrote a farm fishing project linked to a traditional fishing ritual, The Kare Paru, and the Brazilian government awarded R$15.000,00 (£5,256) to his associação (an organisation to care for the interests of the community) to fund its implementation. Since then, he has asked for my help with other types of projects. We also wrote a project for the Brazil Foundation in order to build fish farming ponds in the village. During my fieldwork, we were visited by one of the foundation’s representatives, and Kleber’s associação was finally awarded another R$40.000,00 (£10,300) in 2012.

In the course of my fieldwork, the Bororo from Meruri took me to visit some of the local authorities, particularly in the town of General

Carneiro, in order to help them to claim ICMS ecológico funds.6 During these meetings, they emphasised their contacts with the outside who are attentive as to whether or not local authorities are reassigning the funds to indigenous people. We have written an additional fish farming project to be funded through the quota of ICMS ecológico that belongs to the

Bororo. However, I believe the project has not yet been funded. Because of the current focus on women in developmental policies, both the political chiefs of Tadarimana and Meruri expressed interest in creating a

5 The ‘Amazonia legal’ is an administrative concept created by the government of Getulio Vargas as a means to plan and implement policies of economic development in the region. Source: http://www.ipea.gov.br/desafios/index.php?option=com_content&id=2154:catid=28&Ite mid=23

6 The ICMS ecológico is a tributary benefit given to the municipality who contribute to the preservation of the environment. Usually, these municipalities receive these benefits because of the indigenous lands that form part of it.

27 women’s organisation. The problem has been to find a woman who would be willing to be the president of such an organisation. I also tried to help them with this, but I too could not find a woman with the determination to start the project and take the lead.

In the paragraphs that follow, I shall provide a brief account of the history of colonisation of the Bororo. I begin with the first documented contact between the Bororo and the bandeiras (gold mining expeditions) and the separation between the Bororo into two groups: the occidental and the oriental Bororo. Then, I give an account of the colonial history of the people from Meruri, followed by a description of contemporary village life. I then analyse the colonial history of

Tadarimana village, also followed by an account of contemporary life emphasising its differences from Meruri. In conclusion, I suggest that the questions that puzzled early anthropologists of the Gê-Bororo people were mistaken because there is no relationship between technological development and ceremonial complexity among the Bororo. Rather than the economic or technological development influencing the complexity of ceremonial relations, it is the ceremonial circulation of immaterial property that influences the economy and not the other way around.

The Colonial Encounter

The documented history of ‘contact’ between the Bororo and the

'civilised' began in 1718 when private gold mining expeditions, the

28 bandeiras paulistas, invaded their territory (Viertler 1990). The miners defeated the Bororo living around the contemporary city of Cuiaba, who were then forced to leave the region. Eventually, the invaders occupied this resource-rich gold mining area permanently. This divided the Bororo into two groups: the Occidental and the Oriental Bororo (Albisetti and

Venturelli 1962).

Map 1 – Bororo Territory before Colonisation

The Occidental Bororo

The Occidental Bororo occupied the territory around the

Paraguay River. They dwelt in the area towards the north of the mouth of the Cuiabá River, the Bolivian city of San Matías and the region of the present-day cities of Cáceres, Poconé and Barra dos Bugres (Coqueiro and Camargo 2001). Following the violent invasion of their territory, many

Bororo sought refuge around the Jauru and the Cabaçal rivers. But the region around these rivers also presented attractive conditions for cattle

29 pastoralism, with the result that the state distributed large extensions of land to members of the military, who then established farms in the region.

The Occidental Bororo suffered numerous massacres but they battled violently to defend their territory (Langfur 1999). To celebrate their battle victories, they used the whites’7 scalps as body ornaments, worn as a symbol of great honour (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962:32). In response to these actions, the settlers organised expeditions of retaliation and imprisoned Bororo people of both sexes in the central settlement of the captaincy of Mato Grosso. The settlers enslaved the Indians and obliged them to wash gold and construct extensive waterworks.

The land dispute generated recurrent massacres in the region, which resulted in the permanent extinction of the Occidental Bororo.

Although research shows that there are descendants of Occidental

Bororo living around the Bolivian city of San Martín, there is no reference to existing Occidental Bororo villages (Viertler 1990; Coqueiro and

Camargo 2001).

The Oriental Bororo

The Oriental Bororo lived in the area of the contemporary city of

Cuiabá and the region of the São Lourenço, Vermelho, Garças and Das

Mortes rivers from their headwaters to the region around the city of Nova

Xavantina (Coqueiro and Camargo 2001).

7 I shall sometimes use the term ‘white’ to refer to non-Indians because this is the term the Bororo use. Irrespective of skin colour, the Bororo refer to non-Indians as ‘whites’.

30 These Indians remained isolated until the outbreak of the

Paraguayan War (1864–1870) when the invasion of southern Mato Grosso led the Brazilian monarchy to address the vulnerability of the region. The monarchy's strategy was to extend the telegraph lines and occupy the interior of the country. Yet, for this to happen, it was necessary to pacify the Bororo, who were aggressively defending their ancestral lands.

‘Pacification’ was a more economical alternative to seizing Bororo territory. Exterminating them was costly and far outweighed any benefit

(see Caldas 1987:20 in Viertler 1990). Moreover, the government had found that pacification could also be profitable. Instead of exterminating the Bororo as savages, it treated them as a labour resource. Officials took it upon themselves to teach the Bororo 'civilised' notions of work with a view to transforming them into 'citizens' (Viertler 1990).

Map 2 - Bororo Current Territory

31 Aldeia Meruri: History of ‘Contact’

The history of ‘contact’ of the village of Meruri can be traced back to the formation of the Teresa Cristina Colony in 1887, when the government began to recruit Bororo people to inhabit it and put the military in charge of its administration. The strategy of the military was to provide whatever the Bororo asked for, including food, tools and alcohol.

The aim was to subjugate them through this simple though expensive method (Steinen 1940 in Viertler 1990). The Bororo wanted to enjoy their liberty to remain idle, and the military strategy was to allow them to do so for a period of time. Soldiers built all the buildings in the colony, as senior officials were wary about obliging the Bororo to work. They feared that it could ruin the profitable relationships achieved through ‘pacification’

(Mello Rego 1985:20 in Viertler 1990). Yet battles still took place between the Bororo and the settlers of the region. To address these conflicts, the government delegated the colony's administration to Salesian missionaries.

When the Salesians took charge of the colony in 1894, they implemented a rigorous work discipline. They also enforced attendance at Mass and prohibited the consumption of alcohol. On top of these radical measures, the missionary regime greatly challenged the social organisation of the Bororo. It undermined the authority of Bororo chiefs and ignored the customary division of labour (Viertler 1990). It assigned masculine activities, such as weaving, to women, and gave men gardening and other female jobs. Moreover, the priests often 'rented'

Bororo individuals to local farmers. The methods for the enforcement of

32 this work regime were cruel and those who refused to work in the fields were denied food. Exposed to conditions of slave labour and famine, the

Bororo rebelled in 1898. They set fire to their own dwellings and threatened local non-Indian residents, who fled in fear (Langfur 1999). This situation provides evidence of the violent ways in which Bororo people attempted to resist colonisation. It also shows how the Bororo influenced the conditions upon which they would accept submission.

Given its investment in ‘pacification’, the government incurred substantial financial losses as a result of the rebellion. Infuriated, officials expelled the missionaries from the colony and sought cooperation from the few Bororo who had remained (Langfur 1999). The Salesians attributed their expulsion to 'political intrigues, personal interests and calumny' (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962:219). Yet, despite the expulsion of the missionaries, the Bororo continued to rebel. Finally, after two years, the

Salesians were invited to return to Teresa Cristina in 1899, when the government decided to reinforce missionary work in the area. It had concluded that evangelisation was actually an effective and economic pacification strategy.

The Missionary Colony

The Salesians refused to return to Teresa Cristina and proposed to settle instead in the region of the Das Mortes and Garças Rivers. They established a colony in a strategic area called Tachos. Military officials also populated the area so that they could control any eventual

33 rebellions (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962). Nonetheless, the colony later moved to the region of Meruri a few kilometers away.

In 1902, the missionaries founded the Sagrado Coração de Jesus colony in Meruri where they expected the Bororo to present themselves voluntarily (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962). Finally, after seven months, the

Bororo chief Meriri Okwoda approached the colony accompanied by four armed men. The group held bows and arrows, but the chief was

'friendly' to the missionaries (ibid: 221). In due time, the priests baptised

Meriri Okwoda, giving him a Christian name. Meriri Okwoda was still wary of bringing his people to the colony. He visited the settlement a few times before he finally led 147 people from his village to the colony in 1903

(Langfur 1999). Few Bororo individuals settled in the colonies, whilst the majority of the population avoided submission and sought to preserve their nomadic life. Moreover, not every Bororo sympathised with the

Salesians. Many refused to move to Meruri and settled instead in the military colonies, where the pacification regime was relatively tolerant to the Bororo social organisation.

The missionaries confronted the social organisation of Bororo people directly. They changed the topography of their village from its original circular form to a rectangular one (Caiuby Novaes 1999). The priests viewed the village circle as a direct opposition to the rectangular shape of Christian temples. It was thought to be an expression of Satanic beliefs (Vangelista 1996). Through the redesign of the village, they also sought to disrupt the spatial mapping of Bororo clans. The aim was to interfere with traditional marriage rules, which they considered promiscuous. Furthermore, they modified the interior of Bororo houses,

34 building walls in order to separate the rooms. These actions had a deleterious effect on traditional communal dwellings and uxorilocality

(Caiuby Novaes 1999). Through these architectural changes, the priests imposed Christian morality on Bororo space in its entirety. In due time, they also convinced the Bororo to burn the men's house (baito), which was also associated with Satan (Caiuby Novaes 1999; Viertler 1990;

Langfur 1999). Asserting the primacy of Christianity over Bororo social organisation, they replaced the men's house with a large cross (Caiuby

Novaes 1999).

The men's house hosted activities that offended the morality and work ethics of the Salesians. In the baito, Bororo men consorted with the aredu baito. Literally 'women of the men's house', they provided sexual entertainment to single men. The Bororo also performed significant ceremonial duties in the baito. In addition to the supposed association with Satan, these ceremonies took place late at night. Hence, they were particularly disruptive to the work discipline the Salesians were trying to put in place.

The missionaries' work discipline alienated the Bororo from their land and labour since the Mission administered the outcomes of production and even sold to the Bororo the very goods that they had produced (Langfur 1999, Viertler 1990). The priests forced the Bororo to plant manioc, bananas, sugar cane, fruit and vegetables. Bororo workers received vouchers to exchange for overpriced goods in the missionaries' shop. As people who owned large extensions of land, the Bororo faced a colonial regime in which no land was allocated to the subsistence of

Bororo families. They depended on the Mission for their very existence.

35 Hence, deprived of their land and labour, the Bororo had no choice but to accept 'civilisation'.

To 'civilise' the Bororo, the Mission enforced formal education and religious instruction. The Salesians confined children to their boarding school and prohibited communication in the Bororo language. They baptised children and bribed adults into baptism and marriage in

Church. The institution of baptism gradually became a means to develop political alliances. Many Bororo accepted government officials as their godfathers and bestowed Bororo names on their tutors. Father

Colbacchini, a missionary who was in charge of administration and catechesis in the colony, is one example. As a consequence, the translation of Bororo name-giving terms into Portuguese followed

Christian patterns. The Bororo 'name-giver', the i-edaga, is translated as

'godfather' or padrinho. Yet these alliances do not emerge from a fair exchange between autonomous subjects. In a condition of dependence, the Bororo were forced to comply with evangelisation.

The politics of evangelisation was radically transformed in the second half of the 20th century when the government gave new directions to the policies of integration. It replaced state dependence and 'paternalism' with a new politics of 'indigenous autonomy' (Viertler

1990). Moreover, the Xavante had also moved into the missionary colony, and they were far less submissive than the Bororo. These political and local changes, along with the renewal of the Catholic doctrine established in the Second Vatican Council of 1965, required a revision of missionary politics. The Salesians began to incorporate indigenous culture into their efforts to evangelise the Bororo. Bororo culture would no longer

36 be recorded and then eliminated. Rather, it should be preserved. The

Mission refashioned Bororo culture as an example of 'different expressions of human creation' (Caiuby Novaes 1997:111), seeking links between

Bororo and Christian cosmologies, as if these were different manifestations of a relationship with one Christian God. The Mission took up the position of 'guardian' of a cultural tradition that they had once strived to eradicate. Hence, the Salesians no longer stored 'civilised' gifts on their premises. Instead, they used the space to safeguard Bororo artefacts (Caiuby Novaes 1999, Viertler 1990). The Mission's objective was now to preserve Bororo culture and throw light upon a presumed relationship between Bororo and Christian cosmologies.

These connections between Bororo cosmology and Christianity are clearly not neutral. The new missionary politics relies on a sort of theological multiculturalism as a method of governance (Canevacci

2013:13). It accepts Bororo culture as a 'particular', perhaps even mistaken, expression of a relationship with the only true and universal

God, which is of course Christian. Hence, behind the valorisation and promotion of Bororo culture lies its localisation as 'tradition'—cultural elements of a past that should be contemplated in a museum. The

Salesians have recently created a Centro de Cultura Bororo (Centre of

Bororo Culture) in Meruri where they store a number of artefacts which the Bororo use when they celebrate funerals and other rituals. Although it must be recognised that many Bororo are proud of the artefacts that they store in the centre, the idea that Salesians folklorise Bororo culture is not only an insight of a critical anthropologist. The association of

Christianity with modernity in Meruri is unambiguous, even for the most

37 unengaged visitor. During my fieldwork, when missionaries gave public speeches in the aldeia, I often heard the phrase 'Bororo people in 2012 are Christian Bororo!' I also saw it written on the blackboard in a schoolroom where the Bororo had recently attended catechesis. Thus,

Bororo culture is indeed accepted and celebrated as long as it is subordinated to Catholicism, the religion that reveals the real 'truth' that

'modern' Bororo are finally able to learn.

The association of Catholicism with modernity is only one of the elements that compose the 'political double bind of contemporary acculturation', which underpins the communicational ambiguities in

Bororo aldeias today (Canevacci 2013:6). Catholicism in these aldeias is not simple superstructure (ibid.). The Bororo have been historically subjugated into a condition of dependence in which agreement with the Salesian Mission continues to be a condition for survival. In certain aldeias, the Mission provides funding for education, medical assistance and architectural renovations in addition to their crucial intervention in the protection of Bororo territory. The Salesians' involvement in conflicts over Bororo land is indeed noteworthy. Many of my friends manifested their gratitude to the Salesians for their material assistance and in particular for their participation in the land disputes that culminated in the assassination of Father Rodolfo Lunkenbein and the Bororo Simão

Koge Ekudugodu in 1976. This is a memorable event for the Bororo of

Meruri who honoured the missionary with a Bororo funeral (see Novaes

1997). Yet it is important for us to pay careful attention to the ‘continuing practice of evangelisation as a symbolic exchange for protection' of

Bororo territory among other fundamental material advantages

38 (Canevacci 2013:4). The missionaries in Meruri care for the Bororo in the same way that many Bororo are fond of them. But if the missionaries are indeed interested in preserving Bororo culture, they should allow its autonomous transformation (i.e., 'from the native point of view') and encourage Bororo people to experience modernity as Bororo people, becoming Christian Bororo only if they wish to be so. Many Bororo individuals told me they would have liked to attend the seminary.

However, as soon as I enquired about their desire to become priests or nuns, they revealed that what they really desired was to be able to study in order to 'be someone'. None of them said they wanted to lead a religious life. Moreover, I was often told that only those who attend the

Mass and engage in Church activities are given the opportunity to go to university or are offered a job at the Mission. Thus, Bororo people's experience of modernity is necessarily linked to a compulsory loss of identity and the state of dependence in which they remain bound. They either become Christians in exchange for 'protection' or surrender to powerful landowners who will 'civilise' them as cheap labour in their own land. Like many other marginal groups, the Bororo are currently trapped in a colonialist double bind, which links contemporary processes of globalisation to cultural change (Canevacci 2013:6). As Canevacci argues, the preservation of cultural identity necessarily precludes participation in seductive contemporaneity.

Yet the decentralised use of digital technologies can provide an opportunity for the Bororo to cut this double bind and assert their autonomous worldview through self-representation in digital communication (Canevacci 2013). Although digital communication

39 cannot fully resolve the condition of dependence in which the Bororo are bound, the affordability of digital technologies enables the acceleration and decentralisation of communicative processes and thus reconfigures the traditional power play of 'who represents who' (ibid: 55). In doing so, it challenges every 'attempt to flatten and folklorise the Other' along with the representational monopoly held by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, etc. (ibid). Not only are 'native' subjects able to express their worldview and reflect upon their own cultures through online production on blogs and Facebook, but they also have greater possibilities to form transnational political alliances, which can be a crucial means to secure their political autonomy. The Internet enables a communicational visibility to indigenous (among other) issues that can place significant pressure on local and national governments (along with other institutions) so that indigenous rights are properly observed. It remained clear during my fieldwork that alliances with the 'outside' are a powerful means to increase Bororo people's bargaining power to ensure that local authorities recognise and comply with their constitutional rights.

With regard to the Salesian Mission, I agree with my friends who are grateful for their fundamental assistance in health, education and protection of Bororo territory. In fact, given the negative image of the

Mission that inevitably emerges throughout this historical account, it is also important to recollect the only happy memory that the Bororo speak fondly about: the Meruri band. In the 1940s, the Mission trained Bororo musicians who played in their neighbouring town of General Carneiro and also travelled to Rio de Janeiro to perform. Along with many Bororo,

40 inhabitants of General Carneiro also hold affectionate memories of the band. As one of my Catholic Bororo friends said:

'Many Bororo have been invited to study in the seminary. Men studied to become priests and the women to become nuns. But I am not sure about this . . . What I know is: there are no Bororo priests or nuns. Maybe for this reason the priests want to leave us . . . I mean, after more than a hundred years of evangelisation there should be at least four or five Bororo priests, don’t you think? There is none! I think this means that the Bororo do not have a vocation for priesthood. The Xavante have a priest, but he left the priesthood already . . . The fact is there is no Bororo nun; there is no Bororo priest. None. Do indigenous groups in Amazonia have priests? I think the Tukano have priests . . . when they come around to visit, there are two or three priests who are Amazonian Indians . . . but not the Bororo . . . The Bororo were born to be artists!'

Meruri: Fieldwork Context

The Meruri Indigenous Reserve is an area of 82,301 hectares located on the outskirts of the small town of General Carneiro. The nearest city is

Barra do Garças, which can be reached in two hours by bus or car. The

Meruri reserve contains two aldeias: Meruri and Garças.

Map 3 – Contemporary View of Meruri (Google Earth 2014).

Meruri still preserves the rectangular form imposed by the priests at the beginning of the 20th century. The rectangle is formed by Bororo houses and accommodates the mission, the church and the state- funded school and health post. Through this image taken from Google

Earth, we can see that in addition to the rectangular form, the missionaries have also radically altered the cardinal directions that guide the topography of the moral village plan. The mythical village is circular and crossed by a diametric east/west axis that divides the eight clans into two moieties of four clans each, the Tugarege and the Ecerae. In the centre of the circle lies the men's house (baito) that is also crossed by the east/west axis, which inverts the moiety division in the internal space of the men’s house. The baito has two doors, one facing north, the Ecerae side, and the other facing south, the Tugarege side. Through the east/west axis, the internal space in the men's house inverts these directions in such a way that the door facing south belongs to the Ecerae whilst the one facing north belongs to the Tugarege. If we take the North direction of Google Earth as a reference, we are able to make a few observations with regard to the topographic position of the concrete village of contemporary Meruri.

The village is divided by an inaccurate north/south axis with the buildings of the mission lying to the north. The men's house is roughly in its correct position, perhaps because after its destruction in 1914, it was reconstructed in 1996 (according to one of my informants) when the

Bororo were more likely to be able to influence its location. One of its doors faces north and the other faces south. However, instead of facing

42 the Ecerae moiety, its northern door faces the door of the small church incorporated into the mission building. The bororo, the village plaza where ceremonial activity takes place, is also in its correct place, on the western side of the men's house. On its eastern side lies the football pitch, which is arguably Bororo people's favourite space of collective activity.

The pitch was also constructed with Salesian funding, and it illustrates how the Bororo have gradually been able to influence the use of missionary funds towards the realisation of their interests.

The houses in the village are made of concrete and many were recently renovated with Salesian funding. These renovations, the Bororo tell me, are the result of a 'project' managed by the mission museologist,

Aivone Brandão. The renovation of their houses is much appreciated by the Bororo, who are very fond of Aivone. They are grateful for her efforts and often claimed her 'house project' was a contribution that she made in exchange for her research. The Bororo population is growing and so is the desire for neolocality. In contrast to traditional practices of uxorilocality, many couples prefer to acquire a house of their own once they are married. Hence, Aivone's project also constructed new houses on 'streets' that developed on the southern side of the rectangle. Since the houses are no longer positioned in the spaces that belong to particular clans, people in Meruri can inhabit any house in the village. The houses are sometimes inherited or they are bought and sold for astonishingly meagre sums; a house in Meruri may cost as little as £150. I also learned that people acquired their houses by other means, for example, in exchange for a bicycle or a Brazilian name to apply for credit in the city. The men's house is also made of concrete and remains

43 locked most of the time. A few Bororo have access to the keys and they open it for ritual activity (though never for funerals), political meetings and bailes, dances that are much appreciated by the Bororo. When I was in the field, the Bororo painted the inner walls of the men's house fluorescent blue. My friends said it looked like a nightclub, and one of them even exclaimed: '. . . but that is what it actually is!’ With funds gained from the Mission, FUNAI8, local politicians in search of votes, and sometimes 'campaigns' through which they collect money by stopping the cars passing through the road that crosses the reserve, the Bororo from Meruri renovate the spaces of the village according to the new desires of ‘the community’.

Global Aldeia

My first days in Meruri were marked by various unfamiliar experiences: the exhausting heat (stronger than I had expected); the unimaginable intensity with which the mosquitoes had made me into a banquet, and the people I had come to live with, but certainly not their music. My fieldwork was enlivened by competing loudspeakers playing songs such as Adele’s Someone Like You and Coldplay's Paradise along with sertanejo hits from Mato Grosso such as Michel Teló's Ai se eu te pego, a great success in Brazilian and European metropolis. Although the music per se was familiar, its volume, constant presence and regular repetition often made me wish to pack my bags and leave. My sweating

8 The FUNAI (National Indians Foundation) is an administrative branch of the government that cares for the interests of indigenous peoples in Brazil.

44 and lonely self persistently hid in a room, smelling its mosquito repellent, until it could no longer avoid being out and about as a full member of the family.

In this process, TV Globo provided me with a much-needed sense of the passage of time. TV programmes situated me in relation to the days of the week, and I must admit that I often counted them, longing for my return home. They informed my research schedule and created an entertainment routine that brought me closer to my host family. The first soap opera we watched together was Mulheres de Areia (Women of

Sand). It was on in the early afternoons from Monday to Friday at about

3:00 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. as part of a show called Vale a Pena Ver de Novo

(Worth Watching it Again), which reruns successful soap operas. Given my anxieties and loneliness, I consciously looked forward to that time of the day when I would finally be able to watch Mulheres de Areia. This was not motivated solely by the fact that I enjoyed the programme; it also signalled the passage from the first to the second part of the day. I was one day closer to my return home. Whilst I was still a stranger living with strangers, Mulheres de Areia was a sprinkle of much-needed familiarity. My first Saturdays and Sundays were a real nightmare. Anyone who has seen TV Globo's Domingão do Faustão will understand why.

In the first stage of fieldwork, I divided my time according to the times of the soap operas. In the morning, I stayed at home chatting. But I was a 'man' more than a 'woman' in the beginning. I received visits from the village authorities wanting to talk about 'projects' and the men in the house entertained me talking about politics, NGOs and indigenous issues in general. Women also engaged in the conversation, expressed their

45 opinions and concerns whilst paying close attention to the children and the cooking of food. After lunch, I usually organised field notes and planned interviews in my room until it was time for Mulheres de Areia.

Then I would lie on the floor with my 'family' to watch it. By the end of the soap opera, the sun outside was more bearable, which meant I could finally go out and visit other houses to collect genealogies.

When I arrived in other peoples’ houses, I realised that people were usually still watching soap operas. Just like my ‘mother’ and ‘sisters’, they were often watching the soap operas running on another television channel, the SBT. My ‘mother’ and one of my ‘sisters’, the one who went to school at night, usually watched two more soaps in the afternoon, which thankfully, for the sake of my research, I had never had the patience to watch. Even if people were not engaged in soap dramas, the television in the houses was always on. I soon realised that the afternoon was a bad time to do research. The majority of people, if not entertained with television, were usually sleeping. Though many Bororo are waged workers with fixed working schedules, there is no such a thing as sleeping a full eight hours at night to prepare for the following working day. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (1986) had already pointed this out, and I was surprised to realise how true it still is. The Bororo seem to get their rest by instalments. They nap in the afternoon when the sun drives everybody away from the village centre, but they are lively late at night, when there is gossip and noises in other houses that catch the attention of the curious. I did not leave the house late at night, but I often heard loud music, fights or conversations from my bedroom. We also received visitors at around 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. who wanted to sell us their clothes or any

46 other goods. ‘Probably to buy alcohol’, I was told. In my own house, no matter what time we had gone to sleep, my ‘father’ would be preparing coffee, listening to musica sertaneja and slamming doors as late as 4:00 a.m. Then, he would take his motorcycle and ride to Meri Ore village to feed the fish and do other necessary work in the fishponds. The Bororo with informal jobs work in the early morning, way before the sun is up. By the time I woke up at around 8:30 a.m., coffee would already be over and my ‘family’ and visitors would tell me all the things they had already done before I had woken up. Sleeping at night was not easy for I would be constantly awakened by bats (which terrified me in the first days, but I finally began to appreciate them for their service as mosquito eaters), the roosters, the loud drunks and finally the musica sertaneja and door slamming at the house. The situation became worse when I was hired as a teacher at the village night school and worked until late. By the time I arrived home, TV Globo’s 9:00 p.m. soap opera Avenida Brasil would already be over and everybody would be asleep. Not only had I missed the latest developments of the plot, about which my ‘mother’ Dona

Neusa kept me updated in the mornings, but I also took my time before I finally fell asleep at around midnight, four hours before the roosters, the door slamming and the musica sertaneja began to awaken me.

It was through a soap opera experience that I realised when I began to become part of my Bororo family. When I finally had my much- hoped for break in Curitiba, my ‘home’ city, I was sad not to be with

Dona Neusa in Meruri to watch a decisive moment of Mulhers de Areia: when everybody found out that Raquel was actually her twin sister Ruth .

. . To watch it in Curitiba was not nearly as much fun.

47 Upon return from Curitiba I distributed used clothes, which I had collected among my friends and family as well as a couple of new items I had bought as presents. Among these clothes, I reserved a few masculine shirts and shorts for my own use. As a young unmarried woman with no children, I made every attempt not to be seen as a potential sexual partner. In spite of the horrible stories of rape that I had heard,

Bororo men my age were already married and the ones left are potential partners for my ‘sisters’ and friends (though mature Bororo women also enjoy the company of young lovers). By dressing ‘like a man’ and wearing large clothes, I wanted to avoid possible problems with women due to jealousy. I had not yet learned that they even punch those women who attempt to woo their man, so the consequences could actually have been more serious than I had anticipated! All I knew was that I would be working on ‘projects’ with men and I wanted to befriend their wives and not be seen as a potential threat. Yet my dress code strategy was not entirely successful. There were jealous wives, and there were rumours of affairs I had supposedly had with men I have never seen!

The alleged affairs made wives in other villages jealous, and rumours in

Bororo villages travel fast, so I also learned about them. But, to my knowledge, I was never accused of having an affair in Meruri. In the beginning, however, before they had become my friends, some wives in

Meruri were also distrustful. As the women began to befriend me, they also began to feel comfortable advising me on the way I dressed. They told me I should sometimes wear a dress and suggested that I buy new clothes. When I became a teacher at school, the clothing issue became more important. They told me to look at how other women dressed, for as

48 a teacher I should dress properly. Bororo women, especially young women, are very attentive to their appearance. In the same fashion as metropolitan women, blue jeans are important pieces in their wardrobe.

They like to combine their tight jeans, shorts or pants, with small shirts that leave their (sometimes pierced) belly buttons on display. They also like to wear colourful dresses and skirts with nice sandals and even with such high heels that I was surprised that they could even walk across the sandy village ground. Their looks are often enhanced by beautiful pieces of feather art.

They combine the colours matching their Figure 1- Facebook selfie by Eloenia Leandro Ararua. clothes with the earrings, necklaces or bracelets they either make or buy from others in the village. Usually, they wear two small feather earrings or a jazzy single one. The image above is a selfie I copied from my friend Eloenia Leandro

Ararua’s Facebook profile and it shows her earring made of arara

(macaw) feathers. As she is a dedicated artisan, I am sure that she made it herself. Through Facebook, she displays her artwork, which is the focus of the image, both to her friends and to the world. This is only one example of contemporary forms of Bororo feather art. Women wear prestigious accessories made with real feathers, although the majority of

49 their accessories are currently made with artificial feathers. When they use real feathers, clan membership is taken into account in the selection of colours and designs. During fieldwork, the most popular accessory was a hair stick decorated with a long transparent line holding flowers made of feathers. One could leave the line loose with the flowers moving freely or tie them in the hair bun to decorate it. The two little girls in the picture are wearing this popular accessory, which was also very appealing to my friends in aldeia Tadarimana. When I visited the village wearing my own, many women wanted to know whom they could buy it from.

Figure 2 - Bororo feather art accessories.

Along with the accessories that may or may not affirm clan membership, women take great care of their bodies, particularly their fingernails. Alhough I thought I would cultivate gardens and wash clothes in the river with Bororo women, I ended up painting my fingernails with them whilst the clothes were in the washing machine. My ‘sisters’ enjoyed

50 painting each other’s nails to create colourful designs, draw flowers or try new nail design techniques they had learned in specialised magazines.

Although their attention to their fingernails is similar to that of urban

Brazilian women (who are particularly attentive to their fingernails), the way they care for their hair is quite different. Whilst urban Brazilians straighten their hair to deny existing or imagined links to an African identity of cabelo ruim (bad hair)—and the pressure to straighten one’s hair informs experience of the slightest wavy-haired woman—Bororo women straighten their hair and dye it black to affirm their identities as

Indians. Yet contemporary Meruri women are not the only ones to straighten their long hair, wear makeup and tight clothes. There are a few feminine and openly gay men who also gather in the football pitch to play or simply watch the game and socialise at dusk. There was a gay couple that often walked around the village holding hands; one of them was more ‘masculine’, whilst the other dressed ‘like a girl’ with long straight hair and heavy makeup.

Although gay men in Tadarimana stressed that Meruri is more

‘modern’ and thus a better place to be gay, many Bororo in Meruri are not entirely sympathetic towards gays, at least towards the ones that are

‘out’. In my very first days in the village, I was visited by a ‘man’ who called himself a ‘woman’. Her chosen name is Florisbela. She came to the house saying she wanted to be my friend. Saying that I look like Vera

Fisher, a TV Globo actress, she asked me if I knew any soap actors to present to her. Unfortunately for her, I said I do not know any TV actors.

She was drunkenly performing as a prostitute in a contractual agreement and asked me if I was prejudiced against gay people. I said I had no

51 such prejudice, but as soon as she left, the Bororo who remained made comments on the issue. ‘Well, he is gay. You have that in São Paulo, don’t you?’ said one of the men. ‘I find it strange, maybe this has happened because we started to mix up the marriages between clans, maybe it is the food. I don’t know why they are born like this’, he concluded. Women agreed that gay men ‘have no shame’. ‘When they want a man, they insistently go after him’, they argued. A young woman found it upsetting that people in other villages blamed Meruri for the existence of gay Bororo nowadays. Expressing agreement with her point, a man stated that ‘education was harder before, even if there were gay

Bororo in the past, they were not like the gays from today who have rights and things’. For Bororo men there is even a mythical issue, which clashes with Brazilian discriminatory vocabulary to refer to gay men. Gay men in

Brazil are often referred to as viados, which has a pejorative connotation in this context. The word viado is ‘deer’ in English. However, the primeval mother of the Bororo is a deer called pobogo. They often call the gay men in the village pobogo and express concern when the myth is narrated in and out of the village. Interestingly, there are only homosexual men in Meruri. I have not met any openly homosexual women among the Bororo, although I was advised to be wary of a particular woman who is allegedly a lesbian. She was supposedly found in the woods attacking a brareda (non-Indian woman) with a dildo. The people who saved the brareda reported the news and advised women to be cautious of her ‘friendship’, especially when far away from the village centre.

52 In Meruri, both men and women spend most of their time in the houses, perhaps because the men’s house is usually closed. The daily social gatherings are the mass services in the mornings and afternoons, the school break and the popular football match in the late afternoon.

There are sometimes community meetings in the men’s house to discuss collective issues such as land disputes with the Xavante, problems with violence and alcohol abuse in the community, issues with the health post or the school, as well as to meet outsiders who wish to enter the village to work or visit. On normal days, it is common to see small groups of young people walking about once the sun has declined sufficiently to produce some shade. They carry their mobile phones to take pictures and listen to music. Although there is no network coverage for mobile phones in

Meruri, everybody has a mobile phone. Young people, more often than not, walk around the village listening to their favourite tunes. In every group of friends, there was someone playing music on the phone and some people constantly walked about in the sole company of their music. In these daily strolls, the stream situated towards the west of the

Meruri hill, which gave its name to the aldeia, is a popular destination.

Another social space is becoming increasingly popular in Meruri: the Internet area. The router sits in the school coordination office around which people gather with their laptops to connect to the Wi-Fi. I was a well-known member of the Internet community, particularly because of my recurrent complaints about the slowness of the connection and my numerous attempts to fix it. I was astonished when my friends explained to me that the connection was slow because some people were downloading music and watching pornography. Was it even possible to

53 download music, let alone stream videos, when I could barely send an e- mail? I always worked right next to the router and sometimes I was alone in the room, but the connection continued to be slow. It seems like the

Bororo Wi-Fi works in mysterious ways. It did not work in my house, which was close enough to the school area, but apparently it worked better in some houses across the village than right next to the router. If that is correct, more people were accessing the Internet than I could actually observe. Be that as it may, attendance in the Internet area increased in the course of my fieldwork. Although it was mainly a masculine area, women were gradually becoming participants in the joys and frustrations of the Internet area.

Figure 3 - My 'sister' Daniela Kietaga on her Facebook profile.

Popular websites among the Bororo are YouTube and, most particularly, Facebook. In fact, the number of Bororo people that joined

Facebook increased since I left the village. Women and men who did not

54 have a Facebook account whilst I was in the field have recently sent me friend requests. Through Facebook, I continuously receive news about my

Bororo friends. For example, it was through Facebook that I learned that my ‘sister’ Daniela had a baby. We can see her picture on the above screenshot of her Facebook account. I am currently Facebook friends with 26 Bororo people, all of whom I know personally, not to mention the ones who sent me friend requests but whom I have never met. Of these friends, 17 are men and 9 are women. However, the women are much more active on Facebook than their male counterparts. They post newspaper articles related to indigenous issues, music videos, messages to friends and selfies.

Economics Inside and Out: Conflict, ‘Culture’ and Subsistence

Similar to many people in Brazilian and European metropolises, people in Meruri also spend time on Facebook only to later complain about how busy they are. Many of my friends in Meruri talked about their busy schedules and their lack of time, especially the ones who have formal jobs in the village.

Currently, the Meruri economy is entirely dependent on cash. As we have seen, the Bororo have been historically subjugated to economic dependence on the Brazilian state and the Salesian Mission.

Although some people in Meruri still fish and sometimes hunt and cultivate gardens, these activities do not form the basis of the village economy. I was surprised to discover this when I arrived. Thinking I would

55 work in the gardens with women, I brought a number of seeds to the village, which, surprisingly, after 12 months’ fieldwork were never planted.

People told me, 'The problem here is that some people plant, but others harvest!’ So before we could plant, we needed to build a fence in the garden, which required money that was usually allocated for more immediate needs. Another problem was the lack of a tractor to prepare the fields in a larger space in the Meri Ore village. Even if the cacique

(the village chief) lent the tractor to us, we would have no money for fuel. One of the criticisms of the Bororo against FUNAI is that it wants to give them axes, not tractors. 'Who wants to work with an axe if one can do the work with a tractor?' asked the Bororo FUNAI coordinator. The

Salesians still try to implement collective cultivation projects, particularly to provide food for children at school, but these initiatives remain inefficient. Bororo families rely on other sources of income. Some Bororo are waged workers who provide service to the Mission, the state-funded school and health post and FUNAI. A significant source of income is the bolsa familia, a state programme that gives benefits to poor families under the condition that young people attend school. The elderly are also eligible for a 'rural retirement' allowance provided by the state.

Usually, Bororo families rely on the bolsa familia and the income of one or two people, who could be a waged worker or an elder on a pension.

Despite this transformation in the village economy, the classic clan obligations are still observed and the Bororo strive to provide food for those relatives who come to the village for 'visits' that can last more than six months.

56 The state remains the major provider of jobs, followed by the

Salesian Mission in the case of Meruri. The Bororo also created an informal economy in the village. Sometimes, people hire one another to care for children, wash clothes or to assist in the crafting of feather artefacts.

Furthermore, some people created shops in their houses where they sell soft drinks, biscuits, ice cream and sandwiches. Despite being prohibited, however, alcohol, is the most profitable item in the village's economy.

Alcoholism is an open wound of colonisation as there still is a high number of alcoholics among the Bororo (see Viertler 2002). Alcoholism is a serious problem in Meruri, and a few Bororo youths wish to address it through the study of psychology. Before I began fieldwork, I had already witnessed episodes of violence due to alcohol abuse in previous visits.

Although now, as I write, I hold fond memories of the time I spent there and long for my return, when I began fieldwork I was fearful and constantly shocked by the violent stories I heard. The majority of these stories were associated with alcohol, that is, the violent person was always reported to be drunk. As soon as I arrived, I heard that a man I knew, who lives in Garças, had beaten his wife to death because he suspected her of infidelity. This story even influenced the design of my research, for wishing to study difference among the Bororo, I planned to live in Garças village for a period of time as well. But after I heard this story, I thought I would be safer in Meruri under the care of Kleber's family.

I had also learned that these murders usually incite revenge or mori, which is a crucial element in Bororo culture. A number of deaths were reported to be the result of mori. Throughout fieldwork, I heard so many stories of violence that I began to normalise it. I was gradually less and

57 less shocked. I heard about a few cases of rape, people throwing knives at each other, a woman who killed her husband with an axe and another who spanked her children to death, and it was common knowledge that Bororo men beat their wives. Yet it is worth noting that women also engage in physical violence when it is in their interest.

Although extreme cases of violence are reported to be the result of alcohol abuse, there are other occasions in which the fight has no relationship to alcohol. In contrast to stereotypical views about women, there are many cases of women fighting with or without the influence of alcohol. These fights can begin during football matches, or more often, they are related to men. I witnessed a couple of them. In fact, my friends were surprised when I said I had never beaten a woman up because of a man.

My fieldwork exposed me to many experiences that conflicted with the romantic urban idea of the Indians as a collective of 'docile',

'nature-keeping' and 'community-oriented' people. For example, people complained about the previous cacique who had sold all the community's cattle and was involved in the illegal trade of timber. But from the point of view of the ex-cacique, a woman from the Iwagudu clan, it was necessary to sell the timber in order to meet the needs of 'the community'. She criticised FUNAI, arguing they do not help the Bororo and continue to institute prohibitions instead. She claims to have used the money to pay community debts, but also to organise football championships, to buy food and drinks, and prizes for the winners of the competition. Arguing that 'there is no community' in Meruri, she told me

58 about her disappointment when people called her a thief and reported her to the police.

These conflicts are partly enhanced by the transformations in

Bororo economy and the new configurations of hierarchy and exchange that it engenders. I often heard complaints about Bororo people having become selfish and that they are unwilling to share the money that they earn. The village's relation with national society may have generated visible changes to clan hierarchy, but it has certainly not completely eradicated the significance of moiety exchange. Whilst the Badojeba are mythically the chiefs, officially 'the planners of the village', contemporary forms of chiefdom are not directly related to clans.

Moreover, positions of authority no longer depend exclusively on deep knowledge of Bororo philosophy. Instead, current forms of community hierarchy depend heavily on the successful management of the relationship with the 'outside', particularly the state and the Mission.

When the state provides funding for new job positions and the

Bororo manage the recruitment, it is usually through elections and not clan hierarchy, or merit for that matter, that these positions are assigned.

Moreover, there are rumours that, as with local politicians, the Bororo also buy votes. But in the absence of money, it is said, they use alcohol instead. On the other hand, when state bureaucrats manage the recruitment, the appointment of job positions is based on merit. I witnessed a hiring process at the school when a bureaucrat visited the village. In order to hire a security guard and a dinner lady, she was

'counting points' through an analysis of the curriculum of the candidates.

The Bororo were frantic on account of this process, gathering as many

59 certificates as they could from the qualifications they had acquired both inside and outside of the village. The process led to conflicts in the village for the majority of the population is not eligible for recruitment because the minimum requirement for these positions is a high school diploma. This particular event was upsetting because the woman who was appointed as security guard, with a difference of two certificates from other candidates (one of which she had achieved through the completion of a baking workshop), happened to be married to the school director.

Another woman, whose family has no source of income, complained about her appointment, arguing that the family of the director's wife already has a salary. In response, the director's wife insisted on her merit, noting that job positions in Meruri are assigned according to the number of certificates nowadays, so 'it is not needs based, but merit based'. As this example proves, the collapse of subsistence activity and the dependence on market economy profoundly alters the hierarchical organisation of the village with notable impacts on the relationships between the youth and the elder and consequently what is 'new' and

'modern' and what is 'old' and 'useless'.

In the current economic configuration of the village, traditional knowledge of myths, chants and Bororo language is gradually losing its value. When I met the cacique for the first time, he welcomed me, saying he was glad I was in the village to teach people how to develop projects to earn money. 'Only those who have a salary or bolsa familia are able to survive. It is very difficult to work with artefacts nowadays, especially after the government prohibited the use of feathers’. He stressed past difficulties when there was no aposentadoria (pension) or bolsa familia

60 and emphasised the fact that ‘the government never gave money to the cultural chief, but he also needs to survive’. The greatest concern of the cacique is to provide a safe means of transportation to take people to the city of Barra do Garças. The Bororo need to go to the city to buy food in the supermarket, go to the bank to collect their salaries or the money from their aposentadoria and bolsa familia. He wanted me to write a project to buy a bus. I told him it would be difficult to do that, but we could think of alternatives. The problem of transportation is such a concern for the Bororo in Meruri that Kleber told me I should go to the city with the Bororo ‘to understand the situation’. And so I did. We travelled for two hours on the back of a pick-up truck and got into an accident.

The driver braked abruptly and people fell over each other. I was thrown to the very back of the pick-up. People were laughing about it until we saw that a woman was bleeding. They wanted to call a doctor, and they looked at me, expecting that I could do something to help.

Unfortunately, I could do nothing, not even lend them a phone (which I did not have) to call an ambulance. I felt powerless. Luckily, a car with some Xavante arrived and so they took her to the hospital. Experiencing problems with the car, truck, school bus or any means of Bororo transportation is more likely than not. In the end, news about my tumble travelled around the village, and it turned out to be a good way to laugh with the Bororo about my misfortune.

Transportation is not, however, the only material problem faced by the Bororo. They stressed this when enquiring about the material gain they would receive from my research. My friend Angela Kogekureudo, who would later become my Bororo language teacher, criticised my

61 research focus on Bororo culture. ‘There can be no rituals without food,’ she said. ‘President Lula is a blessed person. The bolsa familia is what saves me, I occasionally work for people in the village, I wash clothes, clean the garden. But I have no salary. Plus, the government is very mean to us; now, it has prohibited us from killing animals, using their feathers, teeth or nails to make our ornaments. Now, we have to invent artefacts to sell’. Angela knows the name of every anthropologist who worked with them, and she is very critical of our focus on culture. Once, she brought me a magazine so I could read an article written by an anthropologist. In that same magazine, there was a picture of an Indian wearing a headdress. She pointed to it, saying, ‘I don't like this. If you are Indian, you don't need to wear feathers, unless it is for a ritual'. With this statement, she brings into view a paradoxical feature of Bororo economy. Whilst the value of traditional knowledge in the village has decreased, Bororo culture has become a commodity of interest to the outside world. The majority of work opportunities for the Bororo outside the village are related to culture. They are sometimes invited to talk about culture at universities, museums and there are governmental projects that provide funding for the realisation of cultural activities. A friend once lamented the fact that his father never taught him culture. ‘He never taught me, and now I need it. I am invited to speak at places and I don’t know enough.’

Despite the potential economic rewards generated by the commodification of Bororo culture, there is still little interest in learning the language, chants and names. The bestowing of names is a significant component of Bororo culture, but its process has changed. The choice of

62 a name used to be a very serious process during which the elders gathered in the men’s house to think carefully about each child’s name.

‘Nowadays, people just look at Father Ochoa’s book and choose whatever name they think is beautiful’, Kleber once told me, expressing his disappointment. A Bororo name is currently one’s Brazilian surname printed on the ID card. As Brazilian Indians, the Bororo need to have a

Bororo name to claim benefits, access indigenous health services from the state and live in the reserve. Hence, the Bororo name is also a means to gain material benefits.

Bororo language does not seem to be materially rewarding, and some people say it is undervalued by the youth, who prefer to learn

English instead because it is tested in the vestibular or university entrance examination. Alhough Bororo language is compulsory in the school curriculum, I was told that some Bororo have requested its abolition.

People in Meruri speak Portuguese, and many have no basic notions of

Bororo language. There are also those who can understand the language but are unable to speak it. For some of the Bororo, this is one of the harshest wounds from their history of colonisation. My ‘sisters’ are very critical of those people who ‘only want to learn the white’s stuff’. Both stated their desire to live in another village in the future, so their children can learn to speak Bororo. They regret not having properly learned the language. 9 Because their mother and grandmother spoke it, they are able to understand it, but they are not fluent enough to have the confidence to speak it. Daniela is particularly regretful. She often

9 I also wish that I had learned more of Bororo language. Even though I studied it, I was never able to speak it. It was also very disappointing to try to speak Bororo and realise that the Bororo themselves did not know how to speak it.

63 complained about her peers who ignore the language and who want to move to the city. ‘They don’t realise they will be discriminated against, after all they will always be Indians . . . there are many women here whose goal is to marry a white man’, she lamented.

To marry a white man is desirable because the whites are associated with material wealth. With a dose of resentment, women condemned those who married a braedo (non-Indian man) for showing off the material goods that they had received from their husbands.

Marrying the brae is not common, but there are a few cases. A couple of brareda (non-Indian woman) live in Meruri with their husbands. Men usually bring their non-Bororo spouses to live in the village, but women are not allowed to do the same. My ‘sisters’ think that this is unfair or machismo, but other women told me the men are suspicious of the braedo because they can appropriate the land. Although the brareda can live in the village, Bororo women will not accept jealousy. If the brareda takes issue with a possible affair between her man and a Bororo woman, they will tell her to look for a husband in the city. Bororo men are their husbands.

The incorporation of the brae into marriage and reproduction generates conflict due to contrasting views of the economic management of these relationships. One morning, I had an interesting conversation with Kleber and his father about the issue. Kleber was praising women for taking good care of children because men faz filho

(make the baby) and go away. ‘Bororo women are different from the brareda. If you make her pregnant and later you divorce, she wants nothing from you, not even to see your face. White women are more

64 complicated, they want child support and persistently go after you’ he explained. ‘I am glad Bororo women are different!’ his father exclaimed.

Yet Bororo women are also beginning to claim child support. A couple of women complained that Bororo men learn bad behaviour from the whites but not the good ones such as paying child support. Others threatened their husbands with a possible claim in case of a divorce.

However, it is also true that traditional means to manage a divorce are not entirely eradicated. To mark the end of a relationship, some women burn their man’s clothes, perhaps to signal their ‘death’, since Bororo funerals also include the burning of the belongings of the deceased. Not every man is progressive either. There are cases of women who want to claim child support for their children from previous marriages, but their husbands are jealous and prohibit them from doing so. They want to be the sole provider for the family, even if it means they will have less money to spend. The influence of the Salesians have also altered the configuration of intimate relationships, not so much in economic terms, but significantly in the moral guidance for marriage and funeral choices.

The Bororo and the Salesians: Moralities between Life and Death

This section is inspired by a couple of theatrical performances I witnessed in school events. These could be considered a Bororo

‘metacommentary’ (Geertz 1973) or a commentary they make to themselves about themselves.

It was a pleasant evening and the community gathered at the

65 school area to celebrate the beginning of the academic year. Nearly everybody in the village attended the event to watch the theatre performances and eat the hotdogs and soft drinks offered by the school management. We queued to receive our portion of food and drink, and then we sat on the grass to watch the performances. A master of ceremonies invited village authorities to give introductory speeches between performances. The cacique spoke first. Whilst thanking everyone for their presence and promoting his government, he referred to the village as ‘our parish’ and at some point he declared ‘everybody here is Catholic’. I was truly surprised to hear that, for it was still the beginning of my time in Meruri and I had not yet met the Catholic Bororo.

I later found out that the cacique was also the village’s catechist.

Following his speech, we watched the first performance ‘The Encounter of the Bororo with the Salesians’.

The play started with a couple of nuns playing with children, whilst the Bororo are in the woods, wearing the pariko, playing the cabacinha and singing. The Bororo come to the Salesians, who give them food and clothes. In the end, the nuns join the Bororo and dance with them. They

‘become’ Bororo. The play portrayed what I also heard from some of my friends, that the Bororo also influenced the missionaries and the colonial process was not unidirectional. I enjoyed their performance. Yet it is difficult to fully agree with it. Though it is true that the Salesians have dedicated themselves to meticulous studies of Bororo philosophy and produced fundamental sources of scholarly work about it, their interference in village life through the imposition of religious activity is pervasive. The whole of the village is forced to comply with their religious

66 calendar and associated prescriptions.

This became particularly apparent when these activities began to interfere with my evening classes. It was the first time there was adult schooling in the village for those who had not been able to finish their studies. Many women took their children to class, who would often fall asleep, and they were generally distressed to be out late. My students thought the classes should start earlier and suggested we speak to the school director to arrange a more suitable time. However, when we proposed to start the classes at 6:00 p.m. instead of at 7:00 p.m., the director, who is a Catholic Bororo, said it would not be possible to do so because of the ‘Rosary of Mary’. He argued that May is the month of

Mary, so we should wait until June to be able to switch the class time.

One of the students replied, saying that there were ‘Rosaries of Mary’ three times a day, so people who wanted to pray could do it in the morning or at lunchtime. Everybody agreed. Then the director took votes and it was finally decided we could start the class at 6:00, and whoever wished to pray would do it during the day. Whilst many of my students and my ‘family’ are not too involved with Church—though my ‘sisters’ attended the Mass occasionally and are actively involved in the

Movimento Juvenil Salesiano (Salesian Youth Movement)—some of the

Bororo in Meruri are devout Catholics.

The Catholic Bororo argue that they lived in darkness and were guided by the Devil, the bope, who they claim to be Lucifer, until the arrival of the missionaries. More than one person told me the story about the encounter between the Salesians and the Bororo, when the ‘good’

67 Bororo chief decided to side with the Missionaries, whilst the ‘bad’ one, who wanted to kill them, moved to the villages of Tadarimana and

Córrego Grande. For those who declared themselves God-fearing

Catholics, the moral guidance of their intimate lives is no longer linked to the mythical village plan. Some married endogamously, but had no issue with the morals of Bororo social organisation. A man who chose a spouse in his same clan explained to me that this was not an issue for his family or for hers; the couple faced problems because her family was unhappy that he had been married in Church before. Another man who also married endogamously found no issue with clan endogamy, instead, he claims to have been misfortunate in life because he lusted after his neighbour’s wife.

Not everybody in the village is so clearly convinced about their religious belief, although the majority of people in Meruri are arguably

Catholic. The bope, described by anthropologists as a principle of time and organic transformation, is undoubtedly associated with the devil in

Meruri. It has become the bogeyman of the village. Intrigued by this association of the bope with the devil, I asked Kleber what the bope is.

He replied,

‘The elders tell me that the bope is the spirit who gives power to the bari, our spiritual chief. It is the bope who allows him to work and be a bari in Bororo culture. It has nothing to do with Lucifer. This is something the Mission made up about the bope and I think it is wrong and unfair to distort the work of this being that helps the bari in such a way.’

I also asked Raimundo Itogoga, who is a cultural chief in Tadarimana and is very active in the ceremonial activities of the Bororo funeral, to explain

68 what the bope is. He said,

‘The bope is our spirit. He looks for a person, so he can enter his body and his soul. Now, the bope does not enter the body or the soul of the Bororo because now the Bororo are Christians; God does not allow it. [His son interrupts and says, ‘Some people say that the bope is the God of the Bororo’]. But he is not. He is with us . . . The bope is like this: for example, I am a bari if someone is sick; you have to call me to cure this person. He is not evil; people think he is evil because we cannot see it. Only the bari can see it.’

It is interesting that both of them speak about the bope only through its relation to the bari and do not try to define it outside of this relationship. It is a spirit that guides the bari. However, in contrast to the bope, the bari has a good reputation among the Bororo. Even Dona Neusa, who refers to the bope as the Devil, talks fondly about the bari because she tells me that they see bad things and protect people, and that they used to see the enemies and the brae and warn the community. I also heard about a bari who became famous for curing the brae. Dona Neusa once told me, ‘It is thanks to the bari that the Bororo are alive today, because it saw things and warned the Bororo.’ Interestingly, the bari is also the main character of stories that informed the development of perspectivism

(Viveiros de Castro 1998) in anthropological theory. This was not a focus of my research and I never asked anything with the purpose of generating a conversation about perspectivism. Yet Dona Neusa spontaneously told me two perspectivist stories that are transcribed in the appendix. Given that it is the bope that guides the bari, these narratives illustrate that bope has actually been helpful to the Bororo, in spite of the fact that Christians refer to the bope as the Devil. Bororo youth are usually unsure about their spirituality, and I heard some of them say that the

69 bope is their God.

Yet it is interesting that even those who are wary of the missionaries and examine critically what they say have claimed to prefer a Catholic funeral to a Bororo one. In the 1990s, Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (1999) claimed the majority of the Bororo preferred to have a Bororo funeral to a Christian one. I cannot affirm the same about contemporary Bororo from Meruri. People reject Bororo funerals, claiming that nowadays it is a

'party'. It is an opportunity for ceremonial chiefs and other participants to consume alcohol, which many view as a lack of respect. For this reason people prefer to have a more serious Christian funeral, which further indicates the decreasing prestige of traditional authorities.

Bororo funerals are not held in Meruri village itself. The funerals celebrated in the Meruri reserve are held in Garças. This is a village formed by the Bororo who rebelled against the missionaries. It preserves its original circular form. At Garças, the houses and the baito are made of straw, and people communicate in Bororo. The people who live in

Garças often say that Meruri is not a real aldeia, as do people in

Tadarimana and Córrego Grande villages. But the Bororo from Meruri do not agree. As one of my friends once said, ‘We don’t have the real architecture of an aldeia. But Meruri is an aldeia, although it is not the typical, original one.’

Tadarimana village: History of ‘Contact’

70 The Tadarimana Indigenous Reserve is an area of 9.786 hectares located approximately 50 minutes by bus from the city of Rondonópolis. It takes about four hours to reach Tadarimana from Meruri. There are no direct buses, so it is necessary to take a bus to the small town of Primavera and from there take another bus to Rondonópolis. In Rondonópolis, it is possible to take a taxi to Tadarimana village.

There are striking differences between the colonial histories of the

Meruri and Tadarimana villages. The region of the Vermelho and

Tadarimana Rivers was a refuge for the Bororo who refused to submit to missionary rule (Viertler 1990). It was not until the 1910s that settlers began to populate the area and Tadarimana became an indigenous settlement. Marshall Candido Rondon demarcated three settlements for the Bororo, which military officials administered. Threatened by epidemics and attacks from settlers and other indigenous groups (i.e., Xavante,

Kayapo), the Bororo sought protection in the colonies. Playing the colonial regimes off against one another, the Bororo formed factions that settled either with the missionaries or with Rondon (Viertler 1990, Langfur

1999).

Rondon designed his method of colonial governance based on his positivist philosophical convictions. Positivist doctrine established three stages of human social evolution: the theological, the metaphysical and the positivist. For Rondon, to 'civilise' the natives was to elevate them

'from their current fetishistic stage to the 'scientific-industrial stage of positivism' (Diacon 2002:162). He believed Christian conversion would take the Indians to a rudimentary stage of social evolution. The Indian policy Rondon advocated was based on principles of protection (Viertler

71 1990, Diacom 2002). He viewed indigenous groups as sovereign nations whose lives and land should be preserved, allowing time for the Indians' social evolution and natural acculturation.

The independent Bororo appreciated Rondon's advocacy of protection of indigenous lives and land. Rondon prohibited any form of assault on the Bororo and left gifts in the areas that they frequented

(Magalhães 1943 in Viertler 1990). He soon established friendly contact with the Bororo chief Tusawa. They met in the area of the Garças River during the construction of the Coxim telegraphic line. When epidemics killed many of his workers, Rondon asked Bororo for help in finishing the construction of the line (Viertler 1990). Tusawa, who was a prestigious chief, acted as a cooperative mediator. He would later intercede on behalf of Lévi-Strauss, who praised his credibility amongst his people

(Lévi-Strauss 1936). Tusawa led the faction of Bororo people who strived to preserve their land and nomadic lives. These independent Bororo were unwilling to surrender to the whites, particularly the missionaries.

Rondon's colonial governance was significantly different from that of the missionaries for he adopted a labour regime that was more compatible with Bororo social organisation. Bororo chiefs gave the orders in Bororo language, preserving their traditional modes of authority. In the military colonies, the soldiers often worked for the Bororo, who received free food, tools, clothes and alcohol (Steinen 1940 in Viertler 1990). With their subsistence funded by the state, the Bororo enjoyed a life of drinking. Moreover, women often interpreted offers of food as a request for sexual intercourse. Sex became a common means of exchange between the Bororo and their white contacts. Such exchange was also

72 compatible with the interests of the women's male relatives who benefited from it by demanding alcohol and other gifts. This sexual bartering also encouraged Bororo women to engage in prostitution in nearby cities. These practices marked another point of contrast with the rigid sexual segregation of the missionary regime. Thus, whereas military governance prompted laziness and entertainment, the missionaries used methods of diligence and abstention (Steinen 1940:587 in Viertler 1990).

Given the rigidity of its methods, missionary governance soon became a focus of public discontent. After he visited the Sagrado

Coração Colony in 1911, Rondon publicly attacked missionary management. He declared that Bororo territory had become an agricultural state in which the Bororo were mere workers (Botelho de

Magalhães 1942:118-119 in Viertler 1990:79). By contrast, Rondon's methods of protection and cultural-linguistic preservation were highly rated by public opinion.

Rondon's pro-Indian campaign culminated in the creation of the

SPI (Indian Protection Service). The SPI adopted a protectionist and non- evangelising politics. It was an administrative organisation whose task was to integrate and protect the Indians. Yet SPI had difficulties in implementing its policies, especially with its restricted financial resources

(Ribeiro 1970: 142-143 in Viertler 1990). Moreover, political changes in the government were often hazardous for the SPI, which was virtually abolished for lack of financial endowment in the 1930s. Furthermore, the government was often unwilling to intercede when local settlers invaded indigenous land until the SPI finally abandoned its foundational principles and began to serve military interests more explicitly (Viertler 1990).

73 In the 1960s, the SPI was replaced by FUNAI, which promoted contrasting policies. It advocated rapid incorporation of the Indians into the labour market, with a view to expanding local economies. FUNAI prohibited the commerce of alcohol and free distribution of goods in the villages. These were seen as paternalistic obstacles to the administrative rationalisation of indigenous reserves. The aim was to use Bororo labour to intensify agricultural production and cattle herding in the villages (Caiuby

Novaes 1998; Viertler 1990). It also created a credit system in Tadarimana to compensate the Bororo workers, who had no rights over the outcomes of production. The Bororo worked in exchange for meagre credit to be consumed in FUNAI's canteen. Such work prevented the Bororo from cultivating domestic gardens, increasing their need to use the canteen to obtain subsistence goods (Serpa 1981 in Viertler 1990). Ignoring its obligations outlined in the Brazilian constitution, FUNAI served market interests at the expense of the Bororo. Under these exploitative conditions, the Bororo realised that they no longer owned their land.

‘They were ‘mere Indians’ living on the government's land for the Indian's land had long ago been dismantled' (Viertler 1990: 170).

74 Aldeia Tadarimana: Fieldwork context

Map 4 – Contemporary View of Tadarimana (Google Earth, 2014).

In Tadarimana, the classic village circle is almost complete. The houses and the baito are made of straw, and the only house missing to complete the circle is that of the clan of the Aroroe. There is a circular central plaza, but the village houses are not organised in concentric circles. Instead, straw houses are scattered around towards the southwest of the village. Outside the village circle, there are other spaces of significance for contemporary Bororo as the village expands into secular political spaces. On the street that leads out of the village circle towards the houses on the southwest, there is a health post, a school and a bakery. The bakery is a house built by the Pastoral da Criança (a

Catholic institution focused on children) where they occasionally make food for children. The Bororo from Tadarimana also use the house to host their guests, so anthropologists usually stay there. There was an

75 anthropologist working there when I visited, and though I ate and slept with my Badojeba ‘relatives’ during my first visits, I also stayed in the bakery when I returned to the village for a longer period of time, since the other anthropologist had already left.

In contrast to Meruri, where secular activities take place in the baito, the baito in Tadarimana is exclusively ceremonial. Political meetings, dances and other secular events are held under a straw shelter in front of the football pitch. In Tadarimana, the Bororo communicate in their own language, using Portuguese only occasionally to speak with visitors. Funerals are also taken very seriously there. When a person dies, the whole village mourns. People stop listening to music, take care not to laugh or play and make sure children behave properly for a period of three months. Moreover, funeral prestations are a topic of intense debate and conflict between moieties in Tadarimana.

The village is aesthetically ‘more Bororo’ not only because of the village circle, but also because the majority of the houses are made of straw. The FUNAI coordinator in that village told me a group of missionaries suggested a project to make concrete houses in the village, but he vetoed the suggestion, arguing that straw houses are part of

Bororo cultural aesthetics. He also told me that Meruri is not an aldeia. ‘I am sorry, but it is not. I can’t go there and speak Bororo. It seems like I am not speaking to my people; nobody understands me’. Whilst living in

Tadarimana, I understood my Meruri friends’ resentment. It is in fact true that the Bororo do not think Meruri is an aldeia, and they do refer to the

Bororo from Meruri as brae. On the other hand, the Bororo in Tadarimana are also resentful of people from Meruri and blame them for some of the

76 consequences of colonisation. Once, I was speaking to my second i- edaga Eduardo Koge, who had been to Meruri to participate in my nomination ceremony and had learned I was screening vintage films about the Bororo there. He was complaining that I had not screened the films in Tadarimana, so I explained that I had problems with the films in

Meruri because of the aije and I did not want to show things women could not see. Angrily, he responded, ‘It is all Meruri's fault! Meruri people put all our things on the bapera (paper) and now everybody knows what the men's secret is!’

Tadarimana is not only ‘more Bororo’ on account of the architecture. Some families cook with an open fire, though others have household appliances, such as a gas oven and freezer. The photos are of the room/living room and kitchen in the house of my Badojeba

‘relatives’. They do not live in the village circle; their house is across the football pitch. I initially stayed with them because they are closer to Dona

Neusa and my ‘family’ than the Badojeba who live in the aldeia. I only met the Badojeba who live in the circle when I went to the village to organise the production of the film.

When I visited

Tadarimana with my

‘sisters’, we usually ate Figure 4. Daniela going to the 'toilet'. with our Badojeba relatives but slept in the bakery.

77 My ‘sisters’ preferred to be in the bakery because there they had everything they needed. In our relatives’ house, the bathroom was in the woods and the shower was a spray and a big bowl with no walls to protect the privacy of whoever was showering. We used a small cup to collect water from the spray or bowl and throw it over our head and body. The picture bellow illustrates the shower in our Badojeba relatives’ house. My ‘sisters’ are very attentive to their appearance, so they preferred to be accommodated in the bakery where we had a proper bathroom with walls, a shower and a toilet. There, they could take as long as they wished to shower and wash their hair properly with plenty of shampoo and conditioner. Then, they would dress up and put on makeup before they went out in the village.

As with their

Meruri counterparts, women in

Tadarimana also like to wear nice Western clothing and are keen to make and wear innovative Figure 5. Shower at our 'relatives' house. feather art, especially young women. However, older women display the scars from funeral scarification on their arms, something that is not common in Meruri. In Tadarimana, these scars remain a symbol of honour. Usually women scarify themselves for their daughters, for they do not want their daughters to go through the pain of scarification. The mature female aesthetic is a mix of traditional Bororo scars and haircut

78 (which is also linked to the funeral mourning), with patterned pieces of

Western clothing. Women usually prefer patterned fabric, although much of Bororo clothing comes from donations.

In Tadarimana, there are also women who watch soap operas on television, but I had the impression that the use of television is less intense there. Although they seem to be less interested in soap operas, the

Bororo from Tadarimana love listening to sertanejo music and organising dancing balls. They listen to loud music repeatedly all day every day, as in Meruri.

.Young people in Tadarimana are gradually gaining access to the

Internet. There is Internet connection in the FUNAI post, but the post is far from the village and the Internet rarely works properly. However, there is network coverage for mobile phones in Tadarimana, and people use their phones to access the Internet, take photos and listen to music. From what I could observe, my friends from

Tadarimana are certainly less active on Figure 6. Selfie in Leandro Nabure’s Facebook profile. the Internet than those in Meruri, even though they are closer to the city. The youth who attend secondary education go to a public school in the city of Rondonópolis, so a school bus takes them to school every day. Unfortunately, I did not stay long in Tadarimana, so I met only a few people properly. Some of my

79 friends from Tadarimana are also on Facebook, but interestingly, they are all men. I am not sure if women are using the Internet, though I think some of them might.

In Tadarimana, cultural transformation and colonisation has not eradicated the language or the cultural knowledge of its inhabitants, even among the young. I recently heard from my friend Leandro Nabure, who is pictured in the selfie above. He did not speak to me directly, but he posted a Facebook status update, which is something you say for everybody to see. He wrote, ‘Aff! Our Sunday is coming to an end. It is worth remembering the good time we had today. Now, let’s watch

Fantástico!’ (a national television show on TV Globo). He also recently wrote a message for my birthday because he and my other friends found out about it through Facebook. Leandro is fluent in the Bororo language and lives in a house made of straw. My friend Gilmar Traitowu is also on

Facebook, and I often send him my questions whilst I am writing. He is also fluent in Bororo and acted as a translator whenever I needed. He is one of my best friends in Tadarimana, and he had the patience to teach me many things about funerals.

Although FUNAI and the SPI encouraged cultural preservation, they annihilated traditional subsistence activities. A few people fish and cultivate gardens in Tadarimana, but these are not their main economic activities. As in Meruri, people subsist on salaries from a relative who is a waged worker or on benefits provided by the state. They also receive the bolsa família and rural pension. Alcoholism is a problem that also affects

Tadarimana, as it was also used by the military to ‘tame’ the Bororo, as my friends say. However, they have not changed their sleeping and

80 working habits. In Tadarimana, a friend explained to me why the Bororo do most of their work in the early mornings. His grandmother used to wake him up at around 4:00 a.m. because ‘if the sun rises and sees you lying down, it will make you lie down sick’. So after 10:00 a.m., he could do whatever he wanted, like sleep and play, because then the sun was up, but after 4:00 p.m. he would then have to go back to work. ‘Work in the gardens, clean stuff’. He stressed that the brae will never understand this way of doing things.

In Tadarimana, people are also interested in the economic prospects of projects. The only reason I was accepted in the community was because Kleber told them that I had helped him to write the project for the fishponds and they are very interested in implementing a fish farming initiative in their village as well. Whilst they examine the economic prospects of ‘projects’, they also think strategically about elections, using their votes to guarantee material benefits for the community. Whilst I was in Tadarimana, elections were held for the city mayor and the vereador (city councilman) in Rondonópolis and General

Carneiro (the municipal districts of Tadarimana and Meruri, respectively).

I was impressed by the sense of community that informed the attitude of people in Tadarimana towards elections. One afternoon, the cacique assembled the community in order to think strategically about the votes.

‘If we all vote for one person and then he does not win, the one who wins will give us nothing’, a friend explained. So their strategy was to divide the votes to manage the risk and guarantee that the elected candidate would help their community. This is another difference between Meruri and Tadarimana. Once, I met a politician in General Carneiro who

81 mentioned how people in Meruri are not united politically, noting how that is not beneficial from the community in general. In fact, there was a sense of collectivity in Tadarina, in which people met in order to decide strategically how many people would vote for each candidate. By contrast, the village in Meruri was divided into two factions, each supporting one candidate. As a result, the elections became a source of political conflict in the village.

My own position in Tadarimana was also different. I lived by myself in the bakery and though I often ate with my Badojeba relatives, I also received visitors in my own house, including people who would not have visited me if I were living in a Bororo house. The fact that I was living in a

‘neutral’ area gave me the opportunity to learn more about village politics and understand, through political conflict, the real implications of disrespecting certain traditional rules.

Although I spent most of my time in Meruri, visiting Tadarimana was an important aspect of my field research. I had the opportunity to learn a little more about the language, and it was in Tadarimana that I had the opportunity to participate in funeral celebrations. The strength of the prohibitions I analyse in this thesis are visible in Meruri, and it was by living in Meruri that I sensed their significance. Thus, I was only able to witness the Bororo funeral because of my visits to Tadarimana. Given the significance of funerals in Bororo culture, the fact that funerals are not practiced in Meruri village itself is a question worth examining. I presume the Bororo would not like to have funerals in Meruri because of its village design, but that would be an interesting question to investigate ethnographically. Yet it was certainly beautiful to see a little girl from

82 Tadarimana (Figure 6) painting her face and body and wearing ornaments for the purposes of dancing at the funeral. It is common to see the Bororo dressed in this way as a means to affirm identity in secular political spaces, particularly in Brazilian events, like the Jogos Indígenas

(National Indigenous Football Championship) and the Dia do Indio (the

Indians’ Day). The girl in the picture is wearing ornaments and face paint as symbols, which are linked to the ceremonial realisation of the funeral.

In wearing her clan’s distinctive face paint designs and feather ornaments, she will be performing culture, not Figure 7. Raquelaine Itogoga ready to dance in the funeral. ‘culture’.

Conclusion

Through a historical account of the history of colonisation as well as a description of contemporary relations with the ‘outside’ including the Internet, this chapter has demonstrated how colonial history has led to the collapse of traditional Bororo subsistence activity and their current economic dependence on cash. However, as I shall demonstrate in the following chapters, these economic changes have not undermined the

83 significance of the prohibitions that constitute Bororo subjectivity.

The fact that the Bororo economy has radically changed whilst traditional social and ceremonial relations remain is a significant challenge to the Marxian thesis of an intrinsic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure. This situation is also reminiscent of the question that puzzled the authors of the Handbook of South American

Indians and the Harvard Central Brazil Project (HCBP), namely, the mismatch between the apparent technological simplicity of the subsistence activities and complexity of their social organisation and ceremonial life. As Franklin and McKinnon (2001) point out, much of kinship theory has been informed by capitalist metaphors and a focus on property, and this could perhaps explain this puzzlement. However, the

HCBP researchers also identified a solution to the supposed problem, that is, the centrality of names and immaterial property in the organisation of

Central Brazilian societies. As we shall see, the present circumstances of the Bororo amply confirm this conclusion, for despite the radical transformation of their economic life, names and immaterial wealth continue to be the means through which not only the social organisation of village life is realised but also the gendered subjectivity of individual

Bororo.

CHAPTER 2 MULTIVIDUALITY AND PERSONHOOD: NEGOTIATING

MARRIAGE BETWEEN ‘LOVE’ AND MYTH

'The Bororo now are like the whites, what matters is the heart, not the clan. If the heart wants it, they marry. But it wasn’t like this in the past, when we had to marry whom our mother or our clan commanded. I married my husband because my mother wanted it. She told me to marry him. I married with the right clan, but I don't know if it was right because I didn't like him and he didn't like me. We married in Church and remained married until he went to Heaven. But by living together, we learned to like each other.' (Maria Justina 2011)

After having picked me up at the BR-070 road in front of the Terra

Indígena Meruri, Seu Zé, Kleber’s father, drove me to his house where I would live with his family for the next twelve months. Kleber lives at his wife’s house, but he had arranged for me to live at his mother’s house with both his parents and his sisters. It is a relatively large house with internal divisions that form four bedrooms with beds, mattresses and wardrobes, one living room that has a table with a TV set, a kitchen with a gas oven and an open area facing the woods. Later, this open area would house a washing machine that my ‘sister’ bought on credit once she had reached the minimum age to borrow money.

Dona Neusa, my adopted ‘mother’, shares one of the rooms with her husband Seu Zé and little six-year-old Tarcila. Their other daughters,

Daniela and Jordana, share another room, whilst another room is reserved for their sons who live in Cuiabá, where they attend the Federal

85 University of Mato Grosso, but who often come to visit. The remaining room with a single bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a lock key was given to me. Our house was on the opposite side of its true location.

‘Our house is actually on the other side’, Dona Neusa once explained.

Although our true location, as Badojeba Xebegwiugue people, is next to the aije muga on the west side of the village, we often sat in front of our house to watch the sunset.

However, the location of our house was not the only ‘wrong’ aspect of our household in relation to the village plan. Dona Neusa and

Seu Zé are both Badojeba, so their marriage, according to the moral prescriptions inscribed in the topography of the village, is ‘wrong’. They married not only within the same moiety but also within the same clan.

When I enquired about their ‘wrong’ marriage, they told me it is no longer a problem to marry endogamously. ‘Now, what matters is love’, they argued. Other couples confirmed what they had said, and for the first six months of fieldwork, I remained convinced that ‘wrong’ marriages are not a problem and was a further indication of pervasive cultural change.

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how the colonial history of

Bororo people eradicated traditional subsistence activity and led the economies of Bororo villages to a state of complete dependence on cash. I also argued that my ethnographic account questions the Marxian association between infrastructure and superstructure as well as attests to the fact that the complexity of Bororo ceremonial relations linked to the circulation of names and immaterial property remain fundamental elements in the constitution of Boe subjectivity despite economic and

86 technological transformations. In this sense, my ethnography further demonstrates that the puzzle that was central to the analyses of Lévi-

Strauss and the authors of the HCBP, i.e., the disparity between technological development and ceremonial complexity, was based on a mistaken assumption of an intrinsic association between economic development and ceremonial relations. In this chapter, I argue that despite the radical cultural and economic transformations and notwithstanding the frequent claims of some Bororo to the contrary, moiety endogamy, the moral village plan and the circulation of names and immaterial property continue to inform their experience in relation to the mythical prescriptions for the proper making of people.

I shall also be contesting certain key features of the theoretical framework deployed in classical accounts of the Bororo. Firstly, I stress the need to properly address Bororo people’s globalised individualities and the ethnographic relevance of notions of ‘romantic love’ in Bororo villages. Introducing the concept of multividual (Canevacci 2013) to grapple with Bororo experience of globalisation, I argue that the notion of the ‘person’ is a resilient referent in people’s internal dialogue and lived ambiguities of the tensions between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’.

Secondly, I question the applicability of the concept of dialectics to conceptualise movement in the Bororo system. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s concept of dynamic disequillibrium, I argue that the Bororo is not a

‘dialectical society’ (Maybury-Lewis 1979) for the notion of dialectics is heavily compromised by the Western synthesising logic of identity, which is contradicted by the particularities of Amerindians’ ‘opening to the

Other’ (Leví -Strauss 1995, xviii). Thirdly, I argue that in contrast to the

87 claims made by Lévi-Strauss, the manipulation of marital alliances among the Bororo is a clear case of women exchanging men. This is particularly apparent in the visual ethnography In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right that accompanies this thesis, which I invite the reader to watch after reading this chapter. The theoretical issues raised in the film will be tackled in this chapter, whilst the methodological issues involved in its making will be addressed in Chapter 3.

Finally, whilst continuing to stress the importance of moiety exogamy, I question the use of the term ‘incest’ to describe deviations from this norm. In classical anthropology, the ‘wrong’ marriage between

Dona Neusa and Seu Zé, along with other cases of moiety and clan endogamous marriages would have been referred to as incest. However, the Bororo refer to these marriages merely as ‘wrong’ and do not use the term ‘incestuous’ in this context. Particularly given the horror associated with the term, I therefore find it problematic to refer to these marriages as examples of incest. Instead, I shall follow the Bororo example and refer to cases of moiety endogamy simply as ‘wrong’ marriages. This approach is in line with the ‘ethically conscious methodology’ urged by Fluehr-

Lobban (2003) and with David Schneider's recommendation in Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) that we should look at key kinship terms such as ‘incest’, not through an a priori defined concept, but rather as a cultural category with local definitions and implications.

88 In between the aldeia and the metropolis: ‘love’, multividuality and personhood

Whilst I was living in Meruri, both my ‘sisters’ Daniela and Jordana were young unmarried women in their late teens. According to the latest news

I received on Facebook, Daniela is still not married but she has had a baby with a Xavante man. After I left Meruri, I learned that she received a studentship to study zootechnology in Campo Grande at the Dom

Bosco Catholic University. I also learned that she later got a place at the

Federal University of Mato Grosso. To celebrate her achievement, she posted a Facebook status: ‘Tchau privada, agora sou Federal, tchau pra quem fica!’ (Goodbye private [university], now I am at a federal [public university], goodbye to those who remain there!’). Jordana is currently living in Cuiabá preparing for the vestibular (an exam to gain a place at university). She was wavering between anthropology and medical studies, but she recently told me she had opted for medical studies.

Daniela and Jordana have different views about marriage, religion and ethnicity. They were both actively involved in the Movimento

Juvenil Salesiano, which promotes a series of activities both inside and outside of the village. In 2012, they were committed to a fundraising campaign for their participation in the Catholic World Youth Day, with the exciting prospect of travelling to Rio de Janeiro. Occasionally, they also attended Sunday mass. But they were both uncertain about their religious beliefs although they expressed their ambiguities differently. My

‘sisters’ often argued over issues of religious belief, not in terms of religion itself, but in terms of the implications of being Catholic in relation to being

89 Bororo. Daniela used to say that although she goes to Church, she finds it difficult to be both Bororo and Catholic. She often criticised Jordana for wanting to marry for love and stressed that her sister should marry a

Bororo of the ‘right’ clan. Jordana always defended her point of view, claiming that it is better to marry someone for love rather than follow tradition.

One afternoon, Daniela told her young nephews and nieces that the bope is the God of the Bororo. Dona Neusa heard this and angrily told her to stop. She said Daniela was being ungrateful, ‘just like Kleber!’

Daniela defended her point of view, saying she is Bororo and for this reason the bope is her God, ‘If I believe in the God of the whites, how can I be Bororo? Am I Bororo or am I white?’ Dona Neusa continued what she was doing and ignored Daniela’s philosophical unease. Later,

Daniela described the painful ambiguities of her beliefs in a recorded conversation with me:

‘I go to Church, but sometimes I think, why am I here? This is not my religion. So I feel fractured between Bororo and white. It is sad. Why did this happen to us? Why? Other Bororo don’t have doubts about that, they don’t have a Church in their village . . .’

Both Daniela and Jordana say they feel ‘somehow fake’. They feel sad to have lost their language and expressed a desire to take their children to grow up in other villages. Yet Jordana is less concerned with combining identities. She is more at ease with the Catholic faith. Faith and marriage were themes of recurrent arguments between the two.

The contrasting ways in which Daniela and Jordana express their emotional ambiguities of belonging bring into view important issues in

90 relation to the theorisation of the lives of indigenous peoples. Though my ethnographic experience continues to stress the value of the concept of the person and its significance not only as a means to theorize difference, but also in Bororo experience, I find it difficult to think of Daniela, Jordana or Kleber merely as ‘persons’.

Our experiences - mine, the Bororo’s, and the reader’s - are marked by new forms of belonging, connectivity and citizenship.

As Canevacci (2009) argues digital culture is a fundamental element in contemporary subjectivities. It creates new forms of citizenship and belonging, no longer linked to nation-states, or exclusively to ethnicity, but to e-spaces and ubiquitous connectivity with fragments of the communicational metropolis.

Digital culture and digital communication multiply body language, values and cultures connecting subjects/bodies beyond the constraints of their respective space-times. In this context, ‘the body language of each person is more differentiated culturally and communicationally than sociologically’ (Canevacci 2009: 15 my translation). Attentive to these contemporary sensibilities,

Canevacci (1999) coined the term ‘multividual’ to account for the interactivity between subjective multividualities, communicational metropolis and digital culture. The multividual is a person, a subject, whose subjectivity is composed by multiple selves, multiple ‘I’s. Self- representation, he argues, is constitutive of the multividual of the communicational metropolis, who narrates and composes

91 him/herself, challenging the representational authority of the journalist or the anthropologist. Kleber, Jordana and Daniela also experience contemporaneity through self-fashioning and self- representation as it remains clear in their body language, fashion styles, their music tastes and their Facebook profiles. But the concept of multividual is not only linked to digital culture. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, Canevacci has developed this concept to express the polyphonic dialogue among internal ‘other’ selves. In this sense, I prefer to refer to the Bororo as multividuals for whom the Bororo notion of the ‘person’ remains a fundamental element of internal dialogue and moral practice. As multividuals, Bororo subjects assess the implications of choosing to conform or transgress, the relations that constitute them as ‘proper’ persons.

The concept of multividual enables an understanding of Bororo experiences of ‘romantic love’ and the significance of moiety endogamy beyond an idea of ‘reception’ or ‘reappropriation’ (cf.

Moore 2011) but as coexisting features of their contemporary experiences. As Moore (2011:5) points out, we need to move away from

‘pre-theoretical commitments’ to modernity versus tradition and to authenticity versus loss when theorising peoples' experiences in our increasingly interconnected world. In doing so, it is important to be wary of idioms of ‘reception’, ‘reappropriation’ or ‘resistance’, for they portray globalisation as if it were ‘exterior’ to these societies and not ‘interior’ to them, part of their lived relation to the world (Moore 2011:71). Along

92 these lines, I shall now consider the relationship between ‘romantic love’ and ‘tradition’ in an attempt to think about these relations beyond notions of influence and ‘reception’ and/or ‘reappropriation’.

The idea of love is not yet fully developed in ethnography, partly because of the methodological difficulties it raises in relation to what anthropologists can properly study (Venkatesan et al. 2011). In addition to the ‘perceived interiority’ of love, the difficulties involved in an anthropological approach to love are also linked to the danger of exporting a particular concept of love to other contexts (ibid). In indigenous Amazonia, there has been an effort to explore ethnographically different idioms of love (Overing and Passes 2000). Thus,

Echeverri (2000, 34) examines among the Uitoto the ‘interplay of desire’ in human relationships, which can produce love, hate as well as life. For them, the regulation of desire becomes an important skill in creating productive relations between people. Kidd (2000) argues that for the

Enxet, love is more than an internal feeling; it is also an important element for proper behaviour and moral action. These authors emphasise the role of emotions in the production of sociality, stressing the language of affect and intimacy in the construction of the moral person. But although they give careful attention to the importance of the autonomous self in indigenous social life (contrasting Western and indigenous notions of autonomy), they make no reference to experiences of romantic love among indigenous peoples. It could be then that among some indigenous groups, the notion of romantic love is not significant, but this is certainly not the case among the Bororo.

Much has been written about the relationship between romantic

93 love and modernity. Anthony Giddens (1992) describes romantic love as a kind of ‘pure relationship’ free from social constraints built upon choice and individual desire. As a characteristic of modernity, romantic love presupposes a sort of democratic contract between individuals; it is a manifestation of a democratisation of intimacy. Viveiros de Castro and

Araujo (1977) argue that the notion of romantic love is linked to the

Western conception of individual as an autonomous entity free from social ties. Analysing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they trace the

Western difference between the individual (asocial) and the person, where romantic love is seen as an individual choice, a relationship between two individuals against the coercive power of the social world.

However, this explicit association between romantic love and modernity is not universally accepted. For example, Lindholm (2006) suggests that anthropologists begin to approach ideas of romantic love more seriously, going beyond the idea that it is merely a modern delusion. More specifically, Maggi (2001) challenges the link between romantic love and modernity arguing that among the Kalasha of Pakistan, romantic love or being ‘heart-stuck’, in her informants’ words, has long been valued and has driven many women to abandon their arranged spouses and elope with the men they love. In the same fashion, Mardsen (2007) looks at practices of elopement among the Khowar-speaking Muslim people in northern Pakistan and shows how notions of romantic love are expressed in local poetic genres with roots in Persian Sufi poetry. However, it is not my aim to discuss here whether or not the notion of romantic love is exclusively Western; rather, I would like to stress its significance in the

Bororo people’s experience. Towards the end of the film that

94 accompanies this thesis, the Bororo man Leandro states that ‘When we love, we focus on the qualities of the person, we see no flaws, we trust that person and it does not matter if she is rich, poor, ‘white’ or Indian . .

.’, which clearly expresses an idea of love that goes beyond social ties, class or racial difference. He stresses the force of the feeling of love between two people who ‘go blind’ and experience love beyond collective constraints. The notion of romantic love is certainly part of

Bororo experience. However, as we shall see, when transgressing collective moral values, the beloved couple can also be subject to a great deal of shame.

Multividuality and Personhood: Moral Experiences in Continuity and Change

In his Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss laments the spatial transformation in Meruri whilst stressing the significance of the circular village layout to the Bororo. Noting that the Salesian Fathers had been responsible for the architectural attempt to ‘disorient’ and convert the

Bororo, he claims that their sin could be absolved by the trouble that they took to understand the complexity of Bororo social organisation. Yet he insists on the urgency to measure the Salesian’s ‘findings against conclusions drawn in regions where the missionaries had not yet penetrated, and where the system was still in force’ (Lévi-Strauss

1974:237). Therefore, he goes to the village of Kejari, where he asked his informants to analyse the structure of their villages.

95 Like Lévi-Strauss, I assumed that the system in Meruri was not still in force. However, in contrast to my illustrious predecessor, I had travelled to

Meruri precisely with the purpose of studying how Bororo multividuals experience cultural change. To my surprise, I was led to the conclusion that despite economic, cultural and communicational transformations in

Meruri (and Tadarimana), the circular village layout remains a significant guide in Bororo moral experience. The lives of Bororo people are profoundly influenced by moiety exogamy and exchange, which predicate the meanings of their spiritual life and everyday existence.

Given the resilience of the moral village plan to contemporary

Bororo, it became crucial that I addressed the nature of this continuity in the midst of radical change. With similar concerns, Elizabeth Ewart (2013) provides an insightful analysis of how the dual logic of indigenous thought incorporates change from within. Looking at the relationship between

Panará (people) and hipe (enemy/others/white people), she demonstrates how the Panará dual logic is not eradicated by historical change but rather, it incorporates and explains it. Ewart criticises previous accounts of the Gê people for their confinement to the realm of the village and their consequent failure to address the relations between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples. By overlooking these relations, she argues, anthropologists took no notice of the indigenous capacity to generate logical solutions to explain change ‘as if contact with Brazilian national society was somehow beyond the domain of indigenous social thought’ (Ewart 2013:19). Taking insight from the Panará dual logic in its contemporary forms, she argues that it encompasses historical change by formulating oppositions in terms of Panará and hipe, self and others. In

96 this sense, whilst the dual logic remains operative, the contents of the categories that order relationships between self and other are transformed. Through an ethnographic approach to the study of dual organisation, Ewart brings change to the centre of the Panará village, introducing dynamism to a mode of analysis that runs the risk of remaining static. This is an important theoretical move both for its accountability to Panará lives and for her contribution to Amazonian anthropology more generally; by opening the Panará Gê-system to incorporate alterity, she approximates it to Tupi-Guarani societies where openness to the other is more apparent.

Although Ewart’s work is useful to my own thinking about issues I observed among the Bororo, we have adopted different approaches to theorise change. Taking into account the communicational connections between the aldeia and the metropolis, some of the classic dualisms are blurred. In my analysis, individuality takes centre stage in the theorisation of social transformation. In my discussion of social change, I shall demonstrate how in the midst of cultural and communicational changes, the social ‘person’ continues to be a significant referent in the moral experiences of Bororo multividuals. Yet, whilst emphasising the resilience of Bororo dual organisation and, most particularly, the exchanges between moieties, I am still trapped by a conceptual model of Bororo society as a closed system’ Thus, unlike Ewart, my theorisation of change is not informed by a Bororo logic and inspired by her work, I wonder how an investigation of change from the perspective of Bororo social thought would look like. Although my account of the Bororo system remains initially ‘closed’, it is useful to draw some comparisons between Ewart’s

97 ethnography of the Panará with my own ethnographic findings.

Ewart (2013:59) theorises change among the Panará by looking at how dual logics expresses itself through rapidly transforming manifestations of binary opposition. In doing so, she associates the centre with social transformation and men and the circle of the houses with continuity and women. Her association of women and the ring of the houses with continuity derives from Panará clan-space affiliation which is essential and given at birth. Similar to the Bororo, Panará clan membership is associated with mother space. A Panará child belongs to the clan of its mother. Because clan membership is immutably related to a particular space in the ring of the houses, where the person is born and will return upon death, Ewart associates it with transformative continuity.

The ring of the houses, she argues, is the realm of women for they constitute these spaces by inhabiting them permanently throughout their lives. Through the principle of uxorilocality, men inhabit different spaces from that into which they are born, and this is one of the reasons why men can be associated with the village centre. In Ewart’s (2013) analysis, the village centre is no longer exclusively the space where culture self- identity culminates; much to the contrary, it is ‘the heart of Otherness’.

Men’s primary relationship with ‘outside’ others, be it through visits to the city, raids, or through the fact that they adopt Brazilian language and clothing before women, is another element that supports Ewart’s association of men with the village centre and processes of social transformation. Although there are some points of comparison with the

Bororo material, there is a fundamental element in Ewart’s theorisation of change that makes it difficult to apply to the Bororo case.

98 Ewart’s (2013:60) ethnography demonstrates how the ‘forms and functions of moieties are transformed’ in time. Moiety membership among the Panará differs from clan membership, people can change moieties throughout life and sometimes by individual preference.

Analysing new forms of moiety organisation and opposition, she argues that white people can be considered an opposite moiety to the Panará.

By bringing the whites into the Panará system as a moiety, she manages to demonstrate how it incorporates ‘outside’ others and change. Among the Bororo, moiety membership is as essential as clan membership, and both are spatially connected to the centre and the ring of the houses in the village. From that perspective, the Bororo system remains ‘closed’, which is contrary to the Panará dual logic that creates new forms of dualism and moieties throughout time. Specifically, the fundamental dualism among the Bororo is that the Tugarege and Ecerae moieties are immutable essences of the Boe person.

In order to theorise change from a Panará perspective, Ewart

(2003) draws on Lévi-Strauss’s notion of concentric dualism focusing in particular on its dynamism and reference to the ‘outside’. In concentric dualism, by opening the village circle into a line, the centre remains outside as a third pole. The system is not self-sufficient, and its frame of reference is always the environment (Lévi-Strauss 1963:156). It is through this conceptual model that Ewart brings otherness to the centre of the village and conceives a temporal relation between the village centre and the circle of the houses. By establishing a temporal relation between the village centre and the circle of the houses, she rejects any parallel association between these spaces with nature and culture. Rather, she

99 argues that these village spaces differ as they express different modes of temporality. Thus, whilst the village centre is ‘future-oriented’ and ‘other- incorporating’, the circle of the houses is characterised by recurrent and

‘replicating transformations inherent in the ‘making of Panará people’

(Ewart 2003:275). Citing Schwartzman (1988: 240), she also argues that the opposition between Panará and hipe is analogous to that of men and women, for both impart the act of piercing and pain: hipe pierce

Panará with their arrows and men pierce women with their penises (Ewart

2003: 271). This is another point of contrast with the Bororo material I shall be discussing. However, it is first necessary to address another element of concentric dualism.

Whilst Ewart takes advantage of the dynamism that the concept of concentric dualism brings to her analyses, Vanessa Lea (2012 [1986]) takes issue with the hierarchical element that is implicit in the concept. In addition to instability, Lévi-Strauss’s (1963:140) concept of concentric dualism posits an asymmetric opposition between the periphery and the centre which he takes as a given, arguing that ‘the two elements are, so to speak, arranged with respect to the same point of reference—the centre’. It was through an analysis of the Bororo village that Lévi-Strauss

(1963:142) argued that the centre/periphery opposition ‘is also an opposition between men (owners of the men’s house) and women

(owners of the encircling family huts)’. His argument goes on to associate centre/men/sacred/culture and periphery/women/profane/nature. By her own account, Vanessa Lea (2012; 1995) has been a sole voice that challenges the connotations of value underpinning this hierarchical relationship—and its application to the Gê-Bororo social organisation—by

100 explicitly focusing her analysis on overcoming this long-standing theoretical bias. In doing so, she questions the connotations of value

(particularly Western), which represent women as ‘natural’ beings in opposition to men, who as ‘cultural’ beings are capable of transcending and controlling nature. Drawing on ethnographic material from the

Kayapó, Lea (1994) refutes the prevalent relegation of the houses and women to a domain of ‘natural activities’ irrelevant for social analysis.

She criticised the explicit undervaluing of the domestic sphere and argued that the houses in the periphery, as the owners of the names and ritual prerogatives that establish group membership, play a central role in the organisation of social dynamics (Lea 1995). A focus on the village centre as ‘culture’ fails to account for the significance of the domestic sphere of the houses, which secure intergenerational continuity (Lea

1995). Building on this insight, Lea (1994) argues that, instead of being in the periphery, the circular ring of the houses encompasses the centre. As the ring of houses is open to the centre, the centre is open to the exterior of the village (Lea 1994:96). In the Kayapó men’s house, she notes, there are representatives of every house, which makes the centre a location for the negotiation of collective interest. By encompassing the centre and its relation to the ‘outside’, the circle of the houses, according to

Lea, expresses a temporal movement of continuity where women are responsible for matters internal to society. Similar to Ewart, Lea observes how the village circle is the site of recurrent transformation, whilst the centre and men look outward and manage relations with the ‘outside.’

The analyses of both authors provide a significant point of departure for my own thinking about cultural continuity among the Bororo.

101 The Bororo material also stresses women’s primary relationship with

‘inside’ matters and men’s connection to the ‘outside’. However, a few differences should be taken into account. In the village of Meruri, the men’s house lies at the centre of the rectangle, and it is the place where

‘outside’ visitors (anthropologists, politicians and their ‘enemies’ the

Xavante) are welcomed and evaluated by the community. It is different in Tadarimana: relations with Brazilian national society are addressed outside of the village circle. The men’s house in Tadarimana is exclusively ceremonial, where men relate to ‘outside’ spiritual others, the aroe. The football pitch is also located outside of the classic circle.

This is an interesting point of contrast both with Meruri village and the Panará, where the football pitch is located in the centre.

Football for the Bororo seems to be as Figure 8. Picture from Jordana's Facebook profile significant as it is for the Panará. However, if there is an ‘outside’ practice in which Bororo women are fully involved, this is certainly football. I was surprised to learn that Panará women do not play and that men discourage them from doing so. Football is a passion among Bororo women, who are often proud to be very good players. My ‘sister’

Jordana is particularly skilled and playing football is one of her favourite activities. Moreover, men find women who play football attractive, and I noticed their admiration towards Jordana’s skilful dribbling. In fact, being

102 a skilled player is also one of the ways in which she chooses to represent herself to the ‘outside’ world, as we can see in the above picture that she uploaded to her Facebook profile. This brings me to another fundamental difference from my own ethnography and those of Ewart and Lea: the presence of the communicational metropolis ‘inside’ the village. Besides the Internet, which is mostly used by young people through their computers and phones, there are televisions and radios in nearly every house in Meruri and, to a lesser extent, in Tadarimana. In this sense, otherness is not only related to the village centre, but multiple virtual, mediatic ‘others’ also populate the houses.

The communicational changes in Bororo villages multiply and decentralise otherness. Yet the association of the village centre with the

‘outside’ is still significant. Physical and ‘spiritual’ others are primarily addressed by men in the men’s house. Moreover, also among the Bororo, men are more versed with the Brazilian ‘outside’ than women, but generation plays an important role in altering these constructions. Lea

(1994) argues that gender tends to dissolve with generation, as older women are more comfortable to speak in the men’s house than younger women, and older men become ‘feminised’ because they constantly inhabit the houses. I also observed that only older women speak in the men’s house (although official discourses are the monopoly of men), whereas young women are quieter. I am not sure if it is possible to argue that generation dissolves gender among the Bororo, but it certainly alters the nature of women’s relationship with the ‘outside’. I met a number of women (even mature ones) who went to university or who speak on behalf of the community outside of the village, and the Internet is also

103 increasing young women’s connection to the ‘outside’. Moreover, it is worth noting that among the Bororo, the village centre is the place where relationships, which were previously discussed in the houses, are formalised. Key ceremonial roles and assignments, although performed in the village centre, are the product of discussion and decisions made in the houses (Caiuby Novaes 1986).

Thus I agree with Ewart’s argument that what marks a fundamental difference between village centre and the ring of houses is not an association of the centre with ‘culture’ and periphery with

‘nature’, but rather they are spatially related by different modes of temporality, where the circle of the houses is associated with continuity.

Building on her insight and following Lea (2012), I wish to stress the importance of reflexively examining the epistemological value we tend to attribute to continuity and change, particularly in relation to the theoretical history of Central Brazilian villages. Although Bororo women, as the owners and transmitters of eternal mythical essences, are closely linked to internal affairs and continuity, this should by no means imply an association of women with ‘nature’ or immutability. By the same token, men’s close relationship to the ‘outside’ and social transformation should not be paralleled to an association of men with ‘culture’. Following this premise, men’s mediation of the village’s relationship with the outside should not be too readily interpreted as a privilege, or as an expression of control over women, as ‘culture’ controls ‘nature’ (i.e., MacCormack and Strathern 1980).

As my ethnography demonstrates, the resilience of the cultural prohibitions that I examine in this thesis express the enduring significance,

104 or the continuity, of the moral agencies that constitute the Boe gendered person. Continuity is thus a concern of both men and women and their respective relation with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others. Continuity is expressed precisely by this gendered relationship with otherness where men are mediators of the villages’ relationships with the ‘outside’

(engaging with spirits, enemies as well as ‘modern’ goods or ‘others’) and women are responsible for relationships with ‘internal’ others (through their active manipulation of marital alliances).

Taking McCallum’s (2001) concept of gender as an embodied capacity for action, I shall be arguing that continuity among the Bororo is linked to the constitution of the Boe gendered person, which guides female and male moral agencies through proper mediation of the unstable transitions between life and death. Whilst women have a major responsibility in the fabrication of bodies and bringing them safely to the village of living, men are in charge of the crucial task of unmaking bodies and guiding the 'souls' to the village of the dead. Whilst in this chapter I focus on the relationship between women, ‘inside’ others and the fabrication of human bodies, men’s relation with ‘outside’ others and the dead will be addressed in Chapter 4. The mediation of the village’s relations with life and death are intimately linked to aroe alliances for which the village plan can be a guiding map.

The Village Plan: Mediating Otherness ‘Inside’ and ‘Out’

105 Even in a rectangular village populated by mediatic, virtual ‘others’, the village plan remains a significant referent in Bororo people’s lives. ‘The morphological structure of the [Bororo] village immediately translates social organisation’ (Lévi-Strauss 1936:240). As with the other Gê-speaking groups, the model of the village plan has been a useful means to comprehend social organisation. However, as Ewart (2013) correctly noted, this understanding of the village as a social map has excluded relations to the ‘outside’, giving an aspect of closure to the social analysis of the Gê. Moreover, she suggests that the aerial view of the village as a social map can be misleading as it can be interpreted as the expression of a total representation of society, which manipulates social actors, whilst instead, the village itself is constituted by the people who inhabit and create its spaces. When analysing the Panará village from the view of the houses, Ewart stressed how the village is in a constant process of reconstruction, with people constructing bigger houses and sometimes moving out of the circle to accommodate new people, which in turn leads other people in the community to move their houses in order to rebuild bigger circles.

In my rare visits to Tadarimana, I also witnessed people from the

Kie clan reconstructing their house in their proper space but a little further from the village centre in order to benefit from the shade of a mango tree in the summer. Such reconstructions are not possible in Meruri because the houses are made of concrete. Nearly everybody in the village lives away from his or her true space and yet, as my ethnography will demonstrate, the moral village plan remains significant, not as an abstract social map, but as lived experience. This became particularly

106 apparent when I was circulating in and out of the houses to collect genealogies with my sisters. As soon as we left each house within the rectangle, they commented on people’s marriages, explaining to me whether they were right or wrong.

One afternoon, I asked for a social map, since I wanted them to give me a general picture of who could marry and who could not. They were having difficulties explaining it to me, so I showed them a map of the village in Crocker’s book Vital Souls, expecting them to be more engaged in the discussion. What happened next is by now a familiar scene in anthropological fieldwork. They said that map was not good enough, so Daniela went inside the house and brought me a copy of the

Encyclopaedia Bororo. They showed me where the rules were; we looked at it for a short whilst and went on doing other things. But they lent me the book, saying I would find what I needed to learn there.

Although the Encyclopaedia provides a very detailed account with prohibited, prescriptive and preferential spouses including the endogamous privileges of certain clans, the most immediate indicator of

‘wrong’ marriages is moiety endogamy. It is important to note that the

Bororo of Meruri refer to the moieties Tugarege and Ecerae as clans and designate as sub-clans those entities which are described in the literature as ‘clans’. Moreover, when I enquired about their sub-clan, trying to locate them into what are called ‘clans’ in the anthropological literature, they never went further than saying their clan. That is, they never told me internal clan divisions such as ‘from above’, ‘from below’, ‘red’ or ‘black’.

Interestingly, it was only through much questioning that I found out that

Dona Neusa and Seu Zé belong to different lineages of the Badojeba

107 clan. Whilst the village plan is not an abstract model for the Bororo, the visual representation of the village is indeed helpful to outsiders who wish to make sense of their lives. Therefore, an analysis of the village map is instructive for our purposes.

Figure 9. My ‘sisters’ studying Bororo marriage rules in the Encyclopeadia Bororo.

As I mentioned previously, the traditional Bororo village is circular and divided by an east-west axis that splits the village into two exogamous moieties, namely, the Tugarege and the Ecerae, which are composed by four clans each. Moiety and clan membership is defined by birth and it locates the child in the same clan-space of its mother. The clan is

‘perceived as based on common substances, but ones of logical identity, not physical stuff’ (J. C. Crocker 1979 : 263). Thus, members of the same clan are not linked through genealogical connections but through

108 their spatial location in the village circle, which will determine their essence, names, ornaments as well as natural and supernatural species that constitute the clans’ property. Therefore, every Bororo individual has relatives and a house positioned in the same space within the circle of any empirical Bororo village. The spatial organisation of the village also expresses prohibited and prescribed spouses through a general rule of moiety exogamy. In spite of a few exceptions, one must marry a member of the opposite moiety.

I shall not examine the particularities of endogamous privileges of certain Bororo clans, nor will I discuss Lévi-Strauss’s speculations on Bororo endogamy as a hidden feature behind the complexity of the prescription for moiety exogamy (i.e. Lévi-Strauss 1963). Rather, I shall focus specifically on ethnographically demonstrating how moiety endogamy is a resilient prohibition and a motif of shame for many of the Bororo in spite of the radical changes that suffuse their contemporary lives. Before I address this issue more concretely, I would like to follow Ewart’s (2013) example and suggest a conceptual interpretation of the Bororo village by making use of Lévi-Strauss’s (1995) notion of dynamic disequilibrium in an attempt to ‘open’ the Bororo system to incorporate change. In doing so, I shall draw upon Viveiros de Castro’s (2013) critique of the epistemological hierarchy that distinguishes the knowledge of the anthropologist from that of the ‘native’, leading the former to seek a hidden ‘truth’ behind the latter’s claims. His argument is that a search for such hidden truth is based on a representational epistemology which assumes that (1) the ‘native’ has a natural, nonreflexive or unconscious relationship with his/her culture and that (2) the ‘native’ and the

109 anthropologist produce different representations of one and the same world. Having stated these premises, I would like to draw attention to the village plan.

Diagram 1 - Bororo village plan taken from Crocker (1969:45).

As Ewart’s (2013) ethnography demonstrates, the notion of concentric dualism can be a productive means to conceptualise change, particularly in the Panará case whose dual logic incorporates the ‘whites’ as an opposite moiety to the Panará. Yet, as Lea (2012) observed, this same concentric dualism presupposes a hierarchical relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, which is parallel to culture/men/sacred and nature/women/profane and the particularly

Western values attributed to these terms (where the first term is always

110 superior to the second). Drawing on Ewart and Lea, I suggest a conceptual interpretation of the Bororo material with which I would like to put into question the characterisation of the Bororo social organisation as a dialectical society (Maybury-Lewis 1979).

As I discussed before, similar to the cases analysed by Lea and

Ewart, I also observed a relationship between village centre and

‘outside’ others (most particularly the dead) among the Bororo. Focusing on this relationship, and the Bororo village in particular, I invite the reader to look at the diagram above and open the village circle so it becomes a line (following Ewart 2003, Lévi-Strauss 1963). The centre becomes a third pole, a reference to the environment, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, and allows us to conceive a continuity between the village centre and the

‘outside’. However, the hierarchy Lévi-Strauss establishes between

‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ does not seem to apply to the Bororo village.

The centre is not an unmarked referent in relation to the ring of the houses. A closer look at the men’s house located in the very centre of the village will show us an inversion of moiety space. From the view of the

Ecerae houses on the northern side of the circle, the centre is Tugarege.

Likewise, from the view of the Tugarege houses in the south side, the centre is Ecerae. As I mentioned, in contrast to the Panará, whose moieties can be continuously redefined even so as to include the

‘whites’, moiety membership among the Bororo is as essential as clan membership and it is determined by birth. Yet the village centre can be interpreted as an expression of alterity itself. It expresses the very principle of difference which mutually constitutes the self and the other. The circle of the houses encompasses this relational otherness (Tugarege and

111 Ecerae), the most significant principle which mediates Bororo relationships with life and death. By locating alterity itself (or perhaps real and potential affinity)10 in its centre, the Bororo incorporate otherness through centralisation of their own idiom of alterity.

However, I would like to stress that the dual relation

Tugarge/Ecerae is not antitethical nor does it evolve towards an encompassing synthesis. As Viveiros de Castro (2011:18) notes, the notion of dynamic disequilibrium developed by Lévi-Strauss through the analysis of twins in mythology moves his conceptual models beyond the stasis of diametric oppositions and away from the synthesising premise of a dialectical approach. Lévi-Strauss (1995:228) writes, ‘Out of myths dealing with an identical conjuncture . . . the Greek myth rejects this disparity and renders the two conditions equal, whilst the American myth accepts them and has no need to change the disparity’. In this sense, ‘two terms will never be equal; there will always be disequilibrium. One may try to solve this disequilibrium by multiplying dualisms whilst trying to approach the real, which always exceeds thought’ (Viveiros de Castro 2011:18-19 my translation).

In an attempt to conceptualise dynamism in dual organisation,

Lévi-Strauss (1944:46) analysed Bororo social organisation and argued that

‘The moiety system can express not only mechanisms of reciprocity but also relations of subordination. But even in these relations of subordination, the principle of reciprocity is at work, for the subordination itself is reciprocal; the priority which is gained by one moiety on one level is lost to the opposite moiety on the other’.

10 Cf. Viveiros de Castro (2006).

112

Instead of thinking in terms of hierarchy and subordination, I prefer to conceptualise Bororo dynamism in terms of reciprocity itself: a dynamics of exchange between creditor and debtor. Crocker (1969) also characterises moiety dynamism through this principle and strives to grapple with the inconsistencies of Bororo material. Crocker notes that

Bororo clans are not comparable. If the members of the Bokodori Ecerae clan are armadillos and those of the Paiwoe are moths, there is no hierarchical relationship between them, as they are different. Lineages

(or name-sets) are expressions of different types of moths or armadillos; there may be an older or younger, a bigger or smaller, a prettier or uglier armadillo (or moth). Thus, Crocker concludes that relations between clans are symmetric and those between lineages are asymmetric. Yet, building on Lévi-Strauss, he tries to prove that the relations between moieties are actually relations between ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’ (instead of brothers-in-law) and establishes a speculative generational hierarchy between moieties. It is surprising that an author who consistently stresses the non-applicability of the genealogical idiom to Bororo material insists on proving ceremonial patrilinearity as an organisational principle.

I do not agree that relations between moieties are hierarchically related through hidden principles of descent. As with clans, moieties are different, and they are indeed the most significant element which informs the dynamics of the Bororo lived experience. This is not merely a theoretical insight; the Bororo explicitly told me that Tugarege and

Ecerae is the way in which their society is organised.

During my final days of fieldwork, I delivered a series of fund-raising

113 workshops on cultural projects in Meruri. When I conducted these workshops, I had recently returned from a trip to Tadarimana, where the cacique had asked my help to create a women’s organisation. This is a response to gender mainstreaming in development policies and the proliferation of grants awarded to women’s organisations. ‘We would like to create a women’s organisation here, but you know, we cannot have a women’s organisation whose president’s name is Carlos’, the cacique told me. So I thought I could help them to create such organisation.

Assuming this would be an exciting idea, I proposed the creation of a women’s organisation in Meruri during one of my workshops. Surprisingly, I was harshly reprimanded by a young man who told me, ‘There is no division between men and women here. Here, the division is Tugarege and Ecerae’. I apologised and reported my conversation with the cacique in Tadarimana to explain my blunder.

Another significant ethnographic indication that leads me to question Crocker’s argument involves an event similar to the marido aroe dance, which takes place during funerals. Like Canevacci (2013), I noted that the Bororo skipped the dance in the funerals that I witnessed. I do not know the specific reasons for the absence of the dance in those funerals. Perhaps, as Kleber explained to me, these dances did not take place because the buriti leafs, with which the cylinder we see in the picture below is made, are available in the rainy season only. This same cylinder is used in the Corrida de Mano (Mano race) when instead of dancing with the cylinder the moieties engage in a running competition in which they carry the mano (the cylinder) on their backs. Kleber also told me the race takes place during the funeral, but I actually witnessed

114 the race during the celebration of Indian week in Meruri.

The Brazilian state instituted the national Indian Day on 19th April. The

Bororo in Meruri celebrate it through a series of activities promoted by the village school. Among these activities is the mano race, which the Bororo enjoy very much and through which the moieties engage in fierce competition.

Figure 10 - Funeral dance. Picture taken from Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques.

On that particular occasion, the Ecerae won the race. When I spoke to

Kleber about it, he told me, ‘The Ecerae wins here, but the Tugarege celebrates the victory in the village of the dead’. Thus, the victory of the

Ecerae is simultaneously a victory of the Tugarege in the village of the

115 dead. In this sense, it is possible to argue that exchanges between moieties involve a synchronic relationship between the empirical and the cosmological village. The Eceare Boe win the race for the Tugarege aroe, and vice versa. This confirms what Lévi-Strauss (1974:205) himself has observed:

‘The two moieties are partners, in short, and all social or religious undertakings involve the participation of an ‘opposite number’, whose role is complementary to one’s own. The element of rivalry is not excluded, however; each moiety takes pride in itself and on occasion is jealous of the other. It’s rather as if two football teams, instead of trying to defeat one another, were to vie with each other in demonstrations of generosity.’

The competition is indeed framed in terms of which moiety performs a superior ‘demonstration of generosity’. There is often conflict between moieties, in which people from one side complain they have done better for the other, who did not properly reciprocate. From

Kleber’s explanation of the mano race, the winner will always be both

Tugarege and Ecerae. By the same token, the Tugarege do not win over and against the Ecerae. The moieties are not opposed and antithetical.

The relation between moieties celebrates co-existence, not an antithetical opposition, which needs to be resolved in a synthesis. In this sense, there is no such thing as a hierarchical positioning between first and second, winner and loser. Thus, to claim that relations between moieties is hierarchically organised in generational terms, where for instance the Tugarege are the ‘fathers’ of the Ecerae, seems to be the expression of a particularly Western concern with origins and political power. Both Lévi-Strauss and Crocker seek these origins to speculate upon relations of subordination between moieties by drawing on a linear

116 conception of time that situates the first and the second, the one and the other. For the Bororo however, what matters is precisely the relation and the co-existence of moieties, for it is through this essential co- existence that the Boe (humans) make people for the village of the living and transform them into aroe for the village of the dead.

Indigenous emphasis on the making of people brought the notion of personhood to the centre of social theory relating to the region, in which the fabrication of the body (through dietary restrictions, theories of conception, ornamentation) as an idiom became a focal subject of analysis (Seeger et al. 1979). For the Boe, the fabrication of the body is intimately related with names. It is through names that the Boe organise prestige and rank lineages (‘name-sets’ according to Crocker 1969) in terms of black/red, big/small, etc., and engage in a series of exchanges that form aroe relations based on reciprocal poguru (shame)(Viertler

1976:232). In terms of aroe relations, the most valuable alliances are those that follow the utawara (paths) of feathers and integrate the village through aroe exchanges in nomination and funerary ceremonies (ibid).

The highly cherished aroe relations, which involve marital alliances and the proper fabrication of people (among the living) and of aroe, are the ones that establish exchanges between moieties. In this sense, the proper

Boe person is a composite of relations between Tugarege and Ecerae, which is actualised in all stages of the life cycle and particularly celebrated through the ornamentation of the body/corpse in name- giving and funeral ceremonies.11

11 To formulate this idea, I took inspiration from Strathern (1988).

117 Naming and Kinship: Moiety Endogamy as Lived Experience

Throughout my fieldwork, I was gradually incorporated as kin by a

Bororo family. By sharing the labour of caring for children with other women in the house, I also became a ‘mother’. In this process, I

‘mothered’ a one-year-old girl called Ludimila, for whom I felt a special desire to be around, to give and receive affection. Given my continuous pampering of Ludimila, her parents soon invited me to be her madrinha

(godmother).

Although I have had a Catholic upbringing and mourned my loved ones in Catholic ceremonies, I do not consider myself Catholic. Yet

I believe in the transformative powers of ritual performances (V. W. Turner

1982; Schechner 1985) and, although the baptism of Ludimila in Church was not ideal, I desired the special relationship that the ritual could create between us. Paradoxically, although I was unsure if I should say yes, I also felt uncomfortable about saying no. I explained to my friends that I do not go to Church in my normal life and I was unwilling to go to

Church in the village either. 'You don't need to go to Church. Everybody here is a godmother, and we never go to Church' said Dona Neusa.

'Bororo people are also Catholic, we baptise in both traditions'. After much insistence of this kind and a persistent de-symbolisation of the ritual,

I was finally convinced and accepted the invitation.

When Kleber learned about it, he asked suspiciously, 'Flavia, are you going to Church?' and laughed at me. This is when I realised the obvious. Religion in Meruri is taken much more seriously than I had imagined, not so much in terms of faith, but in terms of political

118 positioning in relation to the history of colonisation, continuing evangelisation and the eradication of Bororo language in that village.

Kleber reminded me of the wider implications of this baptism as a political act, which went beyond the establishment of a bond between

Ludimila and myself. I had a long conversation with him about the issue and since I had already accepted the invitation, I justified my acceptance with the principle of reciprocity: If wanted a Bororo name and a Bororo 'godfather', how could I refuse being a 'godmother'?

The following morning, Kleber came to visit. Whilst we were discussing Ludimila’s Catholic baptism with Kleiton, I asked him, 'Are you going to baptise Ludimila in Bororo?' He replied, 'No. I am too criticised here in Meruri. Simone and I married 'wrong', so I don't want to transfer all the criticism to my children. Plus, there is too much drinking in Bororo baptism'. Dona Neusa agreed, saying, 'It is true. Sometimes, the i-edaga

('name-giver') can't even hold the child up high because he drank so much during the night'. Kleber, Jordana and I insisted on the significance of the Bororo baptism in Ludimila’s life, and Jordana stressed that she would be angry if her parents had not baptised her in Bororo culture.

As Ludimila's Christian baptism was approaching, Simone and

Kleiton bought her an expensive white dress. On the morning of the baptism, we woke up early, got dressed and headed to the village

Church at 6:30 for the morning Mass. I was half asleep. Whilst sitting in

Church, I was impressed by the knowledgeable participation of the

Bororo in the Mass. Whilst I clumsily consulted the guide, Bororo people had no difficulties in complementing the ritual with formal responses and prayers. Yet the most terrifying moment was when I was ritually obliged to

119 say yes and confirm the following statement: 'I promise to initiate this child in the Christian tradition and the faith of Christ'. There, I saw myself performing a speech act that would transform my relationship with

Ludimila in different terms from what I had desired. That ritual triggered a political and epistemological crisis within my multiple selves, and it strengthened my need to assume a political position in the field. 'I came here to become Bororo, not to become a Christian!' I told Dona Neusa.

She laughed and assured me she would arrange a nomination ritual to bestow me a Bororo name.

There is serious work and money involved in the production of a nomination ceremony (nominação). Therefore, many people prefer to skip it and build ceremonial ties through the Church, which is quick and free of charge. Notwithstanding this, the organisation of the ceremony with which I received a Bororo name happened sooner than I had expected. It is not easy to mobilise people for a nominação, so when rumours about the event spread around Meruri, other people also took the opportunity to 'baptise' their children.

120

Figure 11 - i-edaga proclaims the child’s name. Photo by Daniela Kietaga.

The nominação was an exciting prospect. I was very keen to receive a name and a clan-space in the village. Moreover, the ritual and its preparative processes presented a stimulating opportunity to teach

Jordana and Daniela to operate the camera and an important event to shoot. With my ‘sisters’ shooting the ceremony, we would be inverting traditional communicational roles of self and hetero-representation (cf.

Canevacci 2013). Whilst I, the anthropologist, would be ornamented with feathers and face paint, two Bororo women would produce a visual representation of the event. During the preparations for the nominação, I was teaching them how to shoot, and they were initially excited with the project. Meanwhile, I was also helping to gather the material to make my ornaments.

Whilst thinking about my own ornaments and putting together refreshments for the ceremony, I often asked about the crafting of

121 Ludimila’s ritual paraphernalia. Yet there seemed to be too many problems preventing her participation in the nominação. 'There are no feathers to baptise her, Flávia', Dona Neusa once told me. I replied, 'It’s okay. I will pay for my feathers and for hers'. But despite my attempts to overcome every hurdle to her nominação, it was never clear if she would be ceremonially given a name. There was a time Dona Neusa and I were no longer counting on being able to adorn her. But I continued to enquire, 'Dona Neusa, what about Ludi? Is she not being baptised?' and could not understand why Kleiton and Simone were so unsure about letting her receive a Bororo name. 'I don't know, Flavia’, she told me ‘I spoke to Simone and she said Ludimila will not be baptised’. ‘But why?’.

'She says there are no feathers'. 'But I have feathers. I can give her some of mine!' 'I don't know. Flavia, I also want to give her a name, but what can I do? If they don't want it . . .' Dona Neusa remarked, expressing her disappointment.

One morning, by the time I had already accepted that my little goddaughter would not take part in the ceremony, I woke up to the loud cry of a suffering macaw. When I left the room, Dona Neusa happily informed me that Kleiton had changed his mind whilst plucking feathers to make Ludimila’s ornaments. She was concerned about the amount of time available to properly craft the ornaments. The night before, the

Garças village chiefs visited our house whilst I was teaching, and Kleiton told them Ludimila would be given a name. Dona Neusa could barely sleep thinking about the ornaments, for she had not yet started to convince them that Kleiton would not allow Ludimila’s participation in the nominação. From that day onwards, Dona Neusa was fully committed to

122 the crafting of our ornaments. Day after day she worked on the ornaments: two kioguaro, two kudukegeu and a beautiful feather skirt.

I was showering one evening whilst people gathered outside. Kleiton was complaining about people talking and said that Ludimila should no longer be baptised.

Dona Neusa was furious. Simone sympathised with Dona Neusa’s sentiment and decided to take Figure 12. Nominação. Kioguaro part in the ceremony. 'Even if and feather skirt. Photo by Daniela Kietaga. baptising Ludimila will give me shame, I will do it. I am tired of thinking with Kleiton's head', she argued and joined Dona Neusa in making the ornaments. I do not know what the talk that got under Kleiton’s skin was about; but people had already mentioned that his union with Simone is problematic. Simone herself had already told me, a little ashamed, that in addition to being from the same clan, she and Kleiton are cousins. But I could not understand the nature of the problem. After all, I had learned from people in the village that love was now more important than clans. For a period of time, I was not entirely convinced there was a problem with their marriage. It seemed strange that after so much preaching about love overcoming tradition, there was such a strong concern about a 'wrong' marriage. The nominação itself was not as revelatory as the processes for its preparation. Given my limited knowledge of Bororo language, I can only

123 assume that there were tensions that I missed during the ceremony.

Figure 13. Ludimila's nominação. Note her kudukegeu displaying the colors of the Badojeba clan. Photo by Daniela Kietaga.

The nomination ritual was a decisive moment in the research process for it led my investigation into exploring the issue of moiety endogamy in more detail. My extended visit to Tadarimana was particularly informative of its significance beyond the particular case of

Kleiton and Simone. Living in my own house, I had the opportunity to create a renewed relationship with two women from Meruri who had also recently moved to Tadarimana. Dona Helena and Shirley often visited me to have coffee.

One morning, I was telling them how much I enjoyed having my own house in Tadarimana, especially because it was nice to have friends over for coffee. ‘I love my host family in Meruri very much, but when you live with a family, you may become part of in conflicts that are not yours,

124 so people who might have differences with your host family will never visit you', Dona Helena agreed with me. ‘It’s true. I’ll tell you something,

Flávia—I don't like the family you live with.'

Dona Helena dislikes Dona Neusa because she refused to accept their granddaughter. Dona Helena’s daughter Shirley has a child with

Dona Neusa's son Osmar. 'They have never given her anything. But now, even if they give her something, I will burn it all', said Dona Helena. She is angry with Dona Neusa because she was disrespectful to Shirley when she had just given birth. 'Shirley was still in bed with the baby when Neusa came to our house to confront us claiming the child is not Osmar’s.' With the intention to hurt Dona Neusa, she shouted, 'At least this child is the daughter of a Tugarege with an Ecerae. My daughter is not like you: an

Ecerae married to an Ecerae!' According to Dona Helena, the insult was spot on. It truly hurt Dona Neusa.

Then she went on telling me about her father’s advice: 'You should marry an Ecerae man, you can choose any Ecerae, even if he is not too good. You must marry an Ecerae.' He told her that if she married a

Tugarege like her, it would be ‘very shameful’ to give her child a name.

Moreover, her own funeral and that of her husband would also be shameful. According to Dona Helena, it is always possible to realise if a person’s parents are from the same moiety during rituals, because it is visible through their ornaments. Dona Helena proudly told me that she had all her children with Ecerae men. Shirley was also proud to say the same. This conversation confirmed that the ‘wrong’ marriage between

Kleiton and Simone was indeed the issue preventing Ludimila’s nominação.

125 As I continued to enquire about ‘wrong marriages’, I recorded a conversation with Raimundo Itogoga, an important cultural leader in

Tadarimana, who told me

'Tugarege needs to search for the right partner. It is not like 'Oh, I Iike you, I want to marry you', No. If you marry other people's partner you will be condemned. This is the law in which I was born. Nobody can take other peoples' marriage utawara (path). One has to marry on one’s right path. But nowadays, the Bororo became animals, dogs, bad things . . . they marry nephews, uncles, relatives, I don't know what else . . .'

F: And what does the bakaro (myths) say about marriage matters?

R: Marriage is what I am talking about. There is no bakaro. You need to search for a spouse where your right partner is. If you marry a woman who is not your right partner, another man will take her from you. This is the law. The Bororo need to respect the women . . . but nowadays, it is different. Nowadays, people marry whoever they want.

Jurema interrupted from the other side of the house. 'They marry relatives, they marry uncles and aunts . . .'

R: We Bororo, each one of us has a partner. Tugarege with Ecerae is good, but Tugarege with Tugarege is not good, Ecerae with Ecerae is not good. But nowadays, it all turned into a soup.

Jurema interrupted again. 'Look at Kleiton! He married one of our relatives! 'Osmar married right, he is with a Tugarege. Kleber is also right . . . Only Kleiton is wrong.'

R: Guiguiri (Dona Neusa) married inside her house!'. So . . . you know, red macaws make red macaws, yellow makes yellow, tapir makes tapir . . . they don't mix! Nowadays, it is a shame! I am Kiedo and I will marry a Kiedo. I am Badojeba, I will marry a Badojeba . . .

F: But you are a Kiedo and you are married to a Badojeba!

R: There is the law, there is the law that Kiedo has to marry a Badojeba.

F: But isn't it a marriage between an Ecerae with an Ecerae?

R: No, but this marriage comes from before. It is not new. It comes from a long time ago. Kiedo with Badojeba is allowed because our clan—it is not me—our clan is Kie Bakororo. He can marry anybody, because he made the first things. Kie

126 Bakororo is our mother and our father. So he can marry anybody, Badojeba, Kiedo, Tugaregedo. He comes from the foundation . . .’

Raimundo and Jurema further confirmed the significance of the

‘wrong’ marriage between Kleiton and Simone as the main concern with

Ludimila’s nominação and stressed the significance of moiety exogamy for the Bororo in general. As we have seen, my nominação was particularly informative of the degree to which moiety endogamy, as a moral prohibition, is significantly resilient in the lives of contemporary

Bororo people. It also confirmed the centrality of names, ornaments and the fabrication of the body for the proper making of persons. The ethnographic material also shows that the union between Kleiton and

Simone is particularly problematic; in addition to being members of the same clan, they are parallel cousins. People who commented on their

‘wrong’ marriage consistently brought up the ‘cousin’ issue. Simone herself was more concerned with the ‘cousin’ than the clan issue in her marriage. Her main concern was that, because she had married her cousin, her children could have been born degenerated. But she told me she is glad that it did not happen, and she was not punished for having followed her heart. Her emphasis on degeneration led me to think about the extent to which Christian notions of kinship are also involved in the stigma of marriage, but I have no final answer on the matter.

In relation to the Bororo relationship system, Lévi-Strauss (1936) notes that in this matrilineal society, if a male individual follows marriage prescriptions, he will marry his father’s younger sister or his father’s older sister’s daughter (he addresses both as imarugo). These kinds of marriage,

127 he argues, merge two English kinship terminologies into one and classify

Bororo kinship into the Crow-Omaha type. In the case cited above, if the male individual marries his father’s younger sister, his ‘father’s father is at the same time his father-in-law and his father’s mother is at the same time his mother-in-law’. If he marries his father’s older sister’s daughter, ‘his father’s older sister is his mother-in-law’ (Levi-Strauss 1936:282 my translation).

In the case of a woman, Lévi-Strauss continues, the sister of the same man ‘cannot, symmetrically, marry her mother’s brother, because they belong to the same moiety’. She will use one kinship term to address her uncle and her own (older) brothers (ivuri). Her prescribed spouses are

‘her mother’s brother’s sons, and her older brother’s sons’ (iyagedu). This is because the MB’s sons by virtue of being offspring of the MB’s wife will be members of the opposite moiety. The same applies to sons of the older B.

Building on Lévi-Strauss, Levak (1973:45 original emphasis) argued that ‘some, but not all, of the data would be consistent with a rule of bilateral cross-cousin marriage’. From this point of view, the main problem with the union between Kleiton and Simone would be fully explained, particularly because terms of address between parallel cousins are

‘brother’ and ‘sister’. In this case, if Bororo language were the idiom in

Meruri, Kleiton would call his FBd Simone ituye (which also means Se, MS,

MMS, MSd, FBd, Sd, Fd, Md), and Simone would call her FBs Kleiton ivory

(B, MB, MMB, FBs, MSs, Ss, Fs, Ms). Yet Levak is also careful to note that

‘the Bororo do not say that a person should marry his cross-cousins. They

128 emphasise that a man should marry in an allied lineage’ (ibid.46). In spite of the caveat, he goes on to argue that usually ‘the women of this allied lineage are either his classificatory ‘aunts’ (FS, FSd, etc.) or his classificatory ‘daughters’ (d, MBd, etc.)’ (ibid.). He notes that, even if terms of reference will change upon marriage, terms of address remain the same. So a man will address his wife either as ‘aunt’ (imarugo) and a woman will address her husband as ‘nephew’ (ivagedu) or as ‘father’

(iyogwa)(Levak 1973:47). Taking into account relationship terminologies alone, it would be difficult to justify the problem with the marriage between Kleiton and Simone based solely on the fact that they are classificatory siblings, especially because among the prescribed alliances, those between classificatory ‘fathers’ and ‘daughters’, which are from the same genealogical point of view, are incestuous. Moreover, another ethnographic element questions any easy associations between

English and Bororo kinship terms. The prescribed marriages described by

Levak (1976) and Lévi-Strauss (1936) state that these alliances are formed between the ‘uncles’ and ‘nieces’, as well as ‘fathers’ and ‘daughters’.

As we can see from Jurema’s comments during my conversation with her husband, she condemned the union between Kleiton and Simone along with unions with one’s ‘uncles’ or ‘aunts’. Raimundo was arguing that

‘the Bororo became animals’ because they no longer respect marriage rules, when Jurema said

'They marry relatives, they marry uncles and aunts . . .'

Based on Jurema’s challenge to the terminological model of bilateral cross-cousin marriage among the Boe, I would be interested to

129 learn what ‘marry uncles and aunts’ means for Jurema. Who are these

‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ to whom one should not marry? How are prohibited and prescribed ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ fabricated through the circulation of names and ornaments that form aroe alliances in the village?

Researchers of the Harvard Central Brazil Project were the first to point out the relevance of the naming system to the formation of kin relations among the Gê. These ‘researchers seized on the connection between naming and kinship as an alternative to descent and alliance theories, tying kinship classification to the cultural construction of the person, via the complementary transmission of substance and onomastic identity’ (Coelho de Souza 2012:209). The naming-system creates institutions of para-kinship—ceremonial kinship ties established by the bestowing of names (Fausto and Viveiros de Castro 1993), which adds other layers of prohibitions to the moral rules of marriage. By bringing the name-system into serious consideration, Renate Viertler (1976) emphasises the role of names in creating new forms of ‘descent’ and

‘alliance’ in the relationship system, and demonstrates how the bestowing of names (Ie or names of life and Iebio or names of death) expresses exchange relations narrated in myth.

The name of life (Ie) given to a child in the nominação not only places her in a particular space in the village, but it also shapes much of her future moral exchanges with other Boe. These exchanges are linked to the notion of poguru (feelings of shame), which is a fundamental element in the constitution of harmony and/or conflict in Bororo life.

130 The Boe live under the rules of the bope who enforces proper observation of the moral rules of marriage, exchanges of food and ceremonial life. Under this scheme, human beings are divided into the pogurureuge (those who have feelings of shame and respect) and the pogurubokwareuge (the shameless and disrespectful). Those who have shame are the ones who received a name and were properly ornamented (they are also aroe), whilst the shameless are dangerous beings like the bope and must be eliminated.

Viertler (1976) argues that the attribution of the Ie-mage (plural of

Ie) and the Iebio-mage (plural of Iebio) is always mediated by the council of village leaders, usually from the clan of the Badojeba, the official planners of the village. One does not need to be a Badojeba to become a village leader, however. Leadership is attributed to men with prestigious titles, vast knowledge of chants, ornaments and the deeds of cultural heroes, as well as respectful conduct in relation to the rules of poguru. The names of life (Ie) and death (Iebio) are given to individuals in different circumstances. Because of the prescriptive exchange relations attached to names, Viertler (1976: 101) writes

‘The clan always implies inter-moiety alliances and alliances between certain sub-clans of the same moiety in funeral dances, for this reason we cannot interpret the clan as a simple expression of matrilinearity.’

Therefore, she contends, clans should not be interpreted as social groups, but as ‘modalities of social interaction between members of the two moieties Tugarege and Ecerae’ (Viertler 1976:95 my emphasis, my translation). In this sense, names are not associated with mythical

131 endeavours of members of the same matriline. Rather, they are linked to the i-edagamage (the various name-givers i-edaga). The i-edagamage are ‘principles of moiety ritual cohesion, applied by the village chiefs according to concrete historical contingencies of each village’ (Viertler

1976:124). The i-edagamage ‘constitute a logical principle of agglutination of a variety of names, inspired in mythical stories and ornaments associated with the great cultural heroes and given to concrete individuals’ (Viertler 1976:138).

The Ie (names of life) are the names given to individuals who are related through association with the same i-edaga. They are different from the iebio (names of death and hunting) in relation to both the circumstances for their bestowing along with the composition of the name itself. Whilst the Ie are assigned to children and situate them socially within the community, the iebio are assigned to the aroe maiwu, literally ‘new soul’, a man who will be the ‘substitute’ of a dead person in the village of the living.

After death, the Boe return to being animals because their souls are animals: fish, birds, tapirs. Life and death are linked to the observance or non-observance of the laws of poguru. Those who disrespect the laws of poguru will die as a result of the bope’s revenge. Therefore, the Boe with no poguru die and return to being animals. Yet they never lose their soul. The aroe (soul) is not linked to the ‘transitory and irreversible processes of physiological life, but to the eternal cultural context based on the exchange of food, ornaments and spouses’ (Viertler 1976:58).

Once the bope kills a person from the village, the council of leaders, who represent the aroe, select a hunter from the deceased’s opposite moiety

132 and organise a hunting expedition to kill an animal and avenge the loss of the deceased.

The Bororo call this revenge mori, a repayment of the lost body.

The hunter is the aroe maiwu, the ‘substitute’ of the deceased, who will be him or her among the living and will receive a iebio (a hunt name, or a death name). In contrast to the Ie, which are individual names from a stock associated with the i-edaga and the deeds of cultural heroes, the iebio are inspired by the behaviour of animal prey during the hunt. ‘The hunts are carefully discussed by the men who interpret complex codes of communication between the Boe and the bope strictly demarcated in time and space. These codes of communication inspire the iebio given to the hunter and his new relatives’ (Viertler 1976: 67). According to

Viertler, despite differences between the Ie-mage and the Iebio-mage, both are recruited and distributed as a means to achieve political equilibrium in the village.

The Ie-mage guarantee hospitality and food in every Bororo village, where the given individual will find relatives associated with the same i-edaga. Thus, a baby with no name is a baby with neither relatives

(aroe) nor the right to be given a funeral celebration. The i-edaga, as titles of prestige, also influences the use of relationship terminologies as people address each other as younger/older brother/sister based on the prestige of one’s i-edaga. Therefore, I agree with Viertler (1976) that names and relationship terminologies should be analysed in concrete situations in order to understand the variability of their arrangements and that the same applies to marriage rules.

133 In her analysis of marriage rules, Viertler (1976) stresses the problems of examining Bororo kinship through relationship terminologies alone. Criticising Lévi-Strauss’s theories of Bororo endogamy, she argues that the categories of the higher, lower and middle group sections of the village are not social groups. They are rather ‘indicators of relative prestige and the matrimonial preferences [that] follow the lead of ornaments and feathers (red/black) whose distribution does not coincide with the criteria of localisation in the space of the village model’ (Viertler

1976: 200). In this sense, the most valuable alliances are the ones that take into account the path of feathers, which integrate the village through aroe exchange and funerary ceremonies. The less valuable unions are the ones that follow a utawara (path) with no feathers; these are alliances between the i-edaga of the same moiety, which are stigmatised. Valuable marriage alliances are the ones between people whose i-edaga are spatially distant from each other in the village plan.

As one of Viertler’s informants explains, it is not so important that a man and a woman marry ‘right’, but that men of a particular clan do not marry into a position which places them into ceremonial relations that, depending on his clan, are prohibited by the laws of poguru.

Yet the utawara or ‘paths’ that guide certain marital alliances are the result of solidarity ties generated by the mori. The mori generates ritual sons that the Bororo say are more important than the sons generated by women. The aroe maiwu not only becomes a ritual son, but he will also become a husband, brother and son-in-law. Marital alliances are often related to ‘mystical relations between fathers and sons of aroe initiated by the funeral, which generates new forms of

134 solidarity in the village by transforming the elder in grateful name-givers and father-in-laws to the young hunters’ (Viertler 1976:238).

In this sense, the mori can properly explain marital alliances, which according to the logics of moiety exogamy are ‘wrong marriages’. Yet clans are always exogamous matrimonial units; there are never mori exchanges within the clan. This confirms that although intra-moiety alliances can be motivated by the mori, intra-clan alliances cannot be justified in the same terms. From Viertler’s account, it becomes clear that any interpretation of ‘wrong’ marriages would have to take into account the contextual manipulation of immaterial wealth (names, feathers, etc.) and the existing solidarity ties.

A proper examination of ‘wrong’ marriages would have to take into account the contingencies of the village. This is because the grand leaders bestow names—at times independently of genealogical ties—to provide the necessary equilibrium of ceremonial relations, which can alter marital alliances legitimating a series of exchanges, including moiety endogamous marriages. As Dona Neusa once explained to me:

‘Marigudu (formerly) there was no such talk about love, about liking or not liking someone. Marriage went like this: If my brother dies and Kleber kills a jaguar to give me its skin, he is doing the mori (revenge) of my brother, so then I will give him my daughter in marriage and he becomes like a son to me’ (Dona Neusa 2012).

Note that she says that she will give her daughter in marriage, not her father nor her brother for that matter. The primary role of women in negotiating marriage exchange is the subject of the next section.

135 The Exchange of Men: Women, ‘Inside’ Others and the Proper Making of People

Nearly every author who has studied the Bororo recognised this empirical fact: women are primarily responsible for marriage relations in such a way that it can be argued that among the Bororo ‘women exchange men’.

Let us begin with the Encyclopaedia Bororo for it provides a detailed description of how marriage is lived and formalised among the Bororo.

Albisetti and Venturelli (1962:451) write:

‘Normally and officially, who proposes the marriage is the mother of the bride, or, in her absence, the female relatives closer to the mother’.

Crocker completes the picture:

‘No public ceremony attends Bororo marriages, which are initiated . . . by a woman’s gift of food to a bachelor’ (Crocker 1985:93).

As Albisetti and Venturelli (1962:415) described, if the man eats the food, the union is formalised. After sleeping for the first time in his wife’s house, the man goes on a hunt in the early morning and if successful, he will give the game to his mother so she can take it to his wife. This is how he accomplishes for the first time his obligation towards his wife and future children and confirms the marriage. Following the hunt, he asks his mother to invite his wife to come to their house. There he will spread urucum on her body, paint her face with his clan’s facial designs, decorate her head with plumes and give her earrings and necklaces.

The Encyclopaedia also tells us that during the first days of the wedding, the man will be discreet and hide the relationship from other people. Due

136 to poguru (shame), he will try not to be seen in his wife’s house. In due time, the wife’s mother goes to the husband’s house, packs his belongings and brings them to her own house, where the man will live with her daughter.

From the description of the Encyclopaedia, it becomes clear that women play a fundamental role in the arrangement of marital alliances.

This was also observed by Lévi-Strauss (1974:213):

‘Once in each woman’s life, she must enter the men’s house of her own free will in order to ‘propose’ to her future husband.’

Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (1986:176) made the same observation:

‘As we can see, among the Bororo the valuable gifts to be exchanged are not women (as affirmed in anthropological literature); men are the ones to be literally hunted down by the women’s relatives.’

Whilst Lévi-Strauss is aware that the woman is the one who proposes he leaves this ethnographic fact out of his theory, Caiuby

Novaes (1986) recognises it and questions anthropology’s insistence on affirming the contrary but does not take the issue any further. Crocker

(1969: 51) goes as far as to affirm that

‘Exchange for the Bororo is first and pre-eminently an exchange of women, and hence they must assert women’s natural similarity or substitutability against their social uniqueness. This is all the more difficult since women of different clans have different species of animals as genealogical ancestors, which imply that they are naturally unlike.’

Yet aware of the challenge the Bororo material poses to such affirmation, he adds an explanatory footnote:

‘The problem is the same if men are considered to be the

137 exchanged objects, which I believe is the view of Bororo women. My debt here to Lévi-Strauss’ theories, particularly as set forth in The Savage Mind, should be obvious.’ (Crocker 1969:58.n.14)

Although he recognises that for Bororo women, men are the objects to be exchanged, he justifies his assertion to the contrary by noting that for the application of Lévi-Strauss’s theory, this ethnographic fact is irrelevant. It is in relation to this ‘irrelevance’ that much ink has been spilled to critique and/or justify Lévi-Strauss controversial claim about the universality of the incest taboo and the exchange of women.

As Viveiros de Castro (2012:256) argues, in Levi-Strauss’s work, alliance takes centre stage in the explanation of social cohesion, which opens the possibility of reading his approach to kinship in a non-substantivist relational model. Yet he notes that it can also be read:

‘. . . in a ‘prescriptive’ key—the debt of structuralist model to the traditional view of primitive society as a rule-dominated, no-choice universe, as well as to the ‘Durkheim-Saussure hypothesis’ (as it were), which sees human action as the automatic enactment of a transcendent set of cultural instructions (a cultural genotype of sorts)’

By analysing Lévi-Strauss’s approach to kinship in detail, Fausto and

Coelho de Souza (2004) argue that in The Elementary Structures of Kinship an important distinction emerges in Lévi-Strauss’s theorisation of cross- cousin marriage and dual organisation, which may also explain the marginal place of the Nambikwara and Amerindians in general in that book. It is a distinction between what they call the ‘method of classes’, the immediate constitution of prescribed spouses as a class and the

‘method of relations’, which looks at relations that, in each case, enables one to identify preferential or prohibited spouses. In this sense, refuting

138 critiques of the Lévi-Straussian approach, Coelho de Souza (2009:41) argues that by centralising alliance, Lévi-Strauss’s work actually anticipated the relational approach to kinship, where individuals are not taken to be bounded and exist before kin relations. She writes:

‘The fundamental meaning of the Lévi-Straussian concept of affinity as an exchange relation resides in the priority he attributes to the relation over its terms. The ‘obligation to reciprocate’ is not a socially sanctioned norm, but the expression of an internal relation to which the terms cannot be seen to be pre-existent; created in it, they only subsist while remaining within this relation’.

Yet the feminist critique of the ‘exchange of women’ is not concerned with the exchange of women itself but with the implications of Lévi-

Strauss’s (1963) explicit association of ‘nature/object’ with women and

‘culture/subject’ with men (see Strathern and McComark 1980). The critique of the ‘exchange of women’ and the incest taboo has been debated in and out of anthropology, and it has been often based on a concern with challenging the ‘method of classes’. Thus, Judith Butler

(1990) questions the assumption that there is a ‘before the advent of the law’ of incest (Butler 1990:48 original emphasis) and asserts that Lévi-

Strauss’s theory of exchange is complicit with the naturalisation of

‘heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency’ (ibid 53-58). Although this is a significant contribution, her discursive approach, which informs much of the ‘exchange of women’ debate outside of anthropology, would be difficult to apply to the Bororo. Notwithstanding, it is crucial that we examine the feminist critique of the Western values that travelled with the nature/culture (women/men) dichotomy to indigenous contexts, particularly the Gê-Bororo speaking people, and which have not yet

139 been given proper consideration, as Lea (2012) has also noted. Marilyn

Strathern (1988) has made an important contribution to the investigation of these issues. She argues that the dichotomies public/private and society/individual (culture/nature) as particular expressions of European forms of knowledge are not properly examined before its application into other peoples’ social formations. By the same token, anthropologists formulate gender constructs through which the ‘powerful Western image of control [based on] concepts of ownership and property . . . reinforces the Western antithesis between subjects and objects’ (ibid:103-108).

Through these assumptions and recourse to market analogies, women are seen as a ‘scarce resource’. By means of such commodity thinking, the view that sexual traits give persons value in their capacity for reproduction emerges (Strathern 1988:315) and leads to the premise that

‘what differentiates men and women is their physiology and marriage arrangements across the world have as their purpose the management of female fertility’.

By entitling this section ‘The Exchange of Men’, I do not mean to simply invert these relations and claim that women are subjects, whilst men are objects nor am I drawing on a method of classes and putting men and women together based on a naturally given group membership. As I have already noted, my Bororo friends questioned this division, and Crocker (1969:51) posed the problem percipiently when he theorised ‘the exchange of women’ among the Bororo in the citation I transcribed in the beginning of this section. It is worth re-transcribing here his unease with the Bororo material:

140 ‘[The Bororo] must assert women’s natural similarity or substitutability against their social uniqueness. This is all the more difficult since women of different clans have different species of animals as genealogical ancestors, which imply that they are naturally unlike.’

Thus, Bororo women and men are, for the Bororo, ‘naturally unlike’ since they think differently in terms of logical belonging to clan-space and name-sets, not ‘nature’. In this sense, more than an inversion, my title for this section is an ironic response to the ways in which anthropologists have hitherto chosen to ignore the significance of the fact that Bororo women play a primary role in the manipulation of marital alliances. It is truly remarkable that anthropologists have continuously encountered and ignored this ethnographic fact. In my own ethnography, ‘the exchange of men’ as a means through which women manipulate marital alliances for the proper making of people is not irrelevant. Rather, it is a crucial element for my argument that cultural continuity among the

Bororo is linked to the resilience of the gendered person, where difference is generated in the mediation of the village’s relations with

‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others12.

Crocker (1985) notes that pregnancy is surrounded by cosmological dangers which incur a series of interdictions during pregnancy itself, the child’s birth, and throughout an infant’s early childhood before it ceremonially receives a name (aroe). He stresses that if a child dies before it receives a name, it will be buried with no funeral celebration in the same way as an ordinary household pet. To ensure that the baby is properly formed, both parents (including multiple fathers)

141 are subject to dietary restrictions and are prohibited from engaging in sexual intercourse. The prohibition is to be observed until the child receives a name. Whilst the foetus is not born, infraction of any of these rules is very harmful to the foetus and may include, by repeated intercourse, the formation of twins, which are considered anomalies.

Birth is considered both shameful and dangerous. Although women currently give birth in hospitals, traditionally they sought shelter in the woods and gave birth with the help of a woman of the opposite moiety. This midwife, who was typically the infant’s father’s mother, held the power of decision over the newborn’s life (Crocker 1985: 54). If twins were born, she should suffocate one child and present the other to the village as ‘normal’. Children with physical defects were also suffocated.

In case the child was healthy, the midwife should ask her parents to narrate their dreams for if they had had bad dreams she would kill the child in order to protect the village from evil omens (ibid.).

The newborn baby is not a biological extension of the self. It is a strange ‘other’ that must be inspected both physically and cosmologically through the interpretation of the parent’s dreams.

Dreams can warn parents that the child is a bope pega (evil spirit).

Although the child has an apparently human body, it is not considered

Boe (human) until it receives a name. Viertler (1976:54) argues that the baby is an Iebokwa (no-name) and the process of bestowing an Ie

(name of life) is similar to that of the mori. She argues that by receiving a name, the child dies as an animal and is reborn as Boe. It will receive the name of ancestors who died long ago (aroe marigudu) and whose

142 death has already been avenged through the mori, thereby bringing the name back to the village of the living. The Iebokwa are very dangerous

‘others’, and bad dreams should be taken seriously as a warning. Both

Viertler (1976) and Crocker (1985) report the event of a smallpox epidemic that killed dozens of Bororo living in the region of the Das

Mortes river in the beginning of the 20th century, which led to the suffocation of a number of children. In communicating with the aroe, a shaman of souls found out that a father had dreamt of the epidemic when his child was born but did not report the dream to the i-marugo.

But the aroe did not know whose child had caused the epidemic. They only informed the shaman that it was born six years before the epidemic.

Not knowing which child had caused such an evil omen, the Bororo donned white plumes and suffocated every single child born in that period. I have not heard of this practice among contemporary Bororo, but other precautionary measures continue to be observed during pregnancy and the infant’s early childhood.

From early pregnancy until the child is weaned from its mother, the parents cannot engage in sexual activity. Dona Neusa told me she always observed this rule to protect her children from falling ill. Yet, according to Crocker (1985) and Viertler (1976), transgression of this rule after birth can also affect the mother, the child and the father(s). If parents continue to have sex, they will age sooner. Crocker argues that parents and child share the same raka (life force) linked to the bope, which is associated with organic life and particularly with blood, semen and milk. As parents have dispensed much raka to produce the child, they should abstain from sex in order not to spend more raka and thus

143 age. Moreover, menstruation, childbirth and every object used to assist birth are very dangerous to men. The midwife buries the umbilical cord and placenta along with every object she used in the delivery because men cannot see it; if they do, they will become blind. They are also not supposed to see or touch the belts women use during their menses

(Viertler 1976). Crocker (1985) argues that organic life, rhythms of fertility, sexual activity and women’s menstruation associated with the bope involve the loss of raka and produce jerimaga or the strong smell of corpses, menstruation and semen.

The aroe do not like these smells. Hence, before assuming any ceremonial roles, men and women must avoid sexual activity for several days, for violating this rule may afflict them with the aroe. Crocker and

Viertler also report that a new father is as polluting as a menstruating woman, which means he is unable to join ritual hunts during the first months after his child’s birth because these hunts involve the aroe. ‘As the infant gradually becomes less of a fluid thing, losing its character as a sack of uncongealed pure energy . . . it becomes less and less dangerous’ (Crocker 1985:61). The dangerous process associated with the humanisation of this ‘inside’ other before it becomes Boe (human) and assumes a place in the village is performed by women. It begins with the choice of a proper spouse for their daughters by observing the laws of poguru, which more often than not prescribe moiety exogamy. Once a child is born from this union, the i-marugo has the crucial responsibility to assess if it is safe to accept the child and give her a space in the village. If she allows the child to live, its parents should abstain from sexual activity and any ceremonial relations with the aroe until the child

144 receives a name.

Gender difference is lived through the proper making and unmaking of human bodies and particularly by women and men’s relationship with the unstable limen that separates the village of the living from that of the dead. Through a gendered division of labor that ensures social reproduction, women are primarily responsible for the proper making of human bodies whilst, through the funeral, men ensure that dead bodies are properly transfigured into aroe and make their way to the village of the dead. In this sense, women mediate relations with

‘inside’ others (affines/unnamed babies) and men mediate relations with

‘outside’ others (the dead). Women are responsible for the crucial task of safely fabricating human bodies within the world of the living through careful attention to the laws of poguru and by ensuring that their offspring engages in proper marital alliances and by holding the power to decide over an infant’s life or death.13

***************

The use of visual methods was essential to the formulation of the argument presented in this chapter relating to gender difference and to women and men’s respective mediation of village relations with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others. It is now to a more detailed attention to the use of these visual methods that I will turn my attention in the following chapter.

But before reading the next chapter, I recommend that the reader watch In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right.

13 This insight is inspired by my reading of McCallum (2001).

145 CHAPTER 3 EXPERIMENT WITH FILM: SEEKING TRUE LOVE AND A MR.

MYTHICALLY RIGHT

In this chapter, I discuss the insights generated by the use of filmmaking methods in my ethnographic investigation of the relationship between romantic love, modernity and ‘wrong’ marriages in the lives of contemporary Bororo. In doing so, I challenge the assumption that indigenous practices of self-representation need to be mediated by an anthropological project. Through the analysis of my failed project of

‘handing the camera to women’, I argue that digital culture calls into question any anthropological attempt to continue to mediate the representation of the ‘other’. The ‘natives’ no longer need anthropologists to be given a voice in the metropolis. They have their own means of self-representation through the Web and are not necessarily interested in shooting our films or participating in any project of self-representation mediated by the anthropologist.

In the previous chapter, I showed how despite the many cultural and communicational changes in Bororo villages, the prescription on moiety exogamy continues to be remarkably important in Bororo life. I also argued that women are primarily responsible for the manipulation of marital alliances and stressed how a number of anthropologists simultaneously acknowledged and theoretically dismissed the ethnographic fact that Bororo women exchange men.

As evident in the visual ethnography In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right, women are actively engaged in the manipulation of marriage relations.

Whilst making a film about marriage, I was never told to speak to a man.

146 In fact, men are rather absent from the film and the ones that appear occupy the position of ‘objects’ of exchange. Although these men are actively involved in the shooting process and are clearly subjects in their own right, in the film’s narrative they can only exist in relation to the two women who assess their suitability as a spouse. To put it simply, the film portrays my ‘sisters’ looking for a husband and carefully assessing the candidates who can only exist in relation to their desire. Yet, although I formulated a pre-shooting script—the story of two women who travel to another village in search of a husband—I did not by any means impose a narrative structure that placed men as mere ‘objects’ of women’s desire.

Much to the contrary, it is clear from Bororo women’s explanation of marriage that it is indeed the women (the mothers) who negotiate marital alliances. This is in remarkable contrast to the way they related to the films about the funeral that I screened in the village. Whilst they continuously told me to seek men to help me with that part of the research, no man was invited to participate in the making of In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right, except as ‘objects’ of the heroine’s desire. In this sense, it was through the making of the film that I realised the need to look closer at ‘the exchange of men’ and therefore notice that it is a long-standing ethnographic fact simultaneously acknowledged and ignored in the literature. In my use of film, the Bororo guided me to learn about marriage (and life) with women and about the funeral (and death) with men.

This chapter demonstrates how the film In Search of a Bororo Mr.

Right and the process that generated it made it virtually impossible to ignore the ethnographic significance of the exchange of men along with

147 notions of romantic love for contemporary Bororo. The film guided my research towards a theoretical investigation of ‘the exchange of men’ in the literature, which in turn led me to discover that it is a long acknowledged yet consciously set-aside ethnographic fact. In this sense, the thesis and the film feed each other through distinctive yet complementary forms of knowledge. Whilst the theoretical questions raised in the film were addressed in the previous chapter, this chapter will show how the filmmaking process and the resulting visual ethnography produced alternative insights which participant observation alone would not have generated. Building on these insights, I argue that anthropologists need to pay more careful attention to the significance of infatuation and desire in the constitution of marital alliances.

In order to further investigate the significance of ‘wrong’ marriages, I invited my two ‘sisters’ Daniela and Jordana to make a film. I proposed that we travelled to a different village ‘as if’ we were looking for spouses in their right utawara ‘paths’. Inspired by Jean Rouch’s filmmaking methods, I developed a film plan after a long period of interpersonal engagement. Building on six months’ fieldwork, I created a preliminary storyline for the film, which would function as a guide for improvisation and the exploration of the research question raised during my nominação: Is the moral village plan still guiding Bororo people’s marital alliances or are people currently marrying for ‘love’? This question guided the whole filmmaking process. It was through the use of film for the exploration of the relationship between moiety exogamy and love that I planned to fully integrate the theoretical questions of the thesis to its accompanying visual ethnography.

148 In order to address this question, my ‘sisters’ and I travelled to a different village, where the physical village circle is still present, to research contemporary views on the matters of love and marriage. The film begins with their mother’s explanation of the moral laws of marriage expressed in village plan. We then embark on an exploratory journey of dialogue and interpretation of contrasting perspectives on matters of love, modernity and the cultural prohibition on moiety endogamy.

Fieldwork and the Camera: Digital Culture, Anthropology and Self- Representation

Despite its knowledge-making potential, the use of the camera in anthropological research has been a marginal practice. Most recently, the crisis of representation in written anthropology enabled a wider recognition of filmmaking as a method and a greater appreciation of filmic knowledge (Henley 2000). As a matter of empirical fact, the camera now forms part of the research environment whether the anthropologist appreciates it or not. With the diffusion of digital cultures

(Canevacci 2013) and political indigenous media projects (Ginsburg

1991) even if the anthropologist is not holding a camera, it is very likely that her ‘native’ will be doing so.

Indigenous peoples have increasingly gained access to digital communication technologies and the Web. My Bororo friends use their mobile phones to take photos and share them online in sites like

Facebook and the Meruri Digital blog. In the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil,

149 there are important indigenous filmmakers: my friend Paulinho Ecerae

Kadojeba from Meruri and Divino Teserewahu, a prestigious Xavante filmmaker. Indigenous communities in Brazil have been active in the appropriation of visual technologies for their own purposes (Turner 1992) with special emphasis on the use of video as a tool for representational and institutional politics (Aufderheide and Carelli 1995). A notable example is the Video nas Aldeias project that enabled indigenous peoples to improve their filmmaking skills and use film to represent cultural practice as well as denounce abuses of power in settler society. The crisis of representation in anthropology opened new spaces for positioned subjectivities. Both in writing and film, the ‘natives’ have increasingly been given a voice in the anthropological project.

Driven by these theoretical debates and an interest in using filmmaking as a method, my initial project involved handing the camera to Bororo women, particularly to Daniela and Jordana, and having them participate actively in the shooting and editing processes. I taught them to operate the camera during the preparation for my nominação when they had the opportunity to film their mother making ornaments, looking for feathers around the village, etc. Daniela was not too excited about shooting a film; she was more interested in taking photographs. Hence, I focused on training Jordana to shoot the ritual and asked Daniela to photograph it.

When the ritual finally took place, Jordana filmed and Daniela took photographs. Other Bororo were also recording the event with small photo cameras and mobile phones. But Jordana had the biggest and most sophisticated camera. Given the extravagance of her

150 technological apparatus, she was somehow the ‘official' filmmaker.

Perhaps this explains the hostility of some men towards her. After the ritual, she angrily reported that a man she referred to as sexist (machista) told her to stop filming and go to the kitchen. I wonder if this incident had affected in any way her relationship with filmmaking because my project to hand the camera to my 'sisters' turned out to be a complete failure.

After teaching Jordana to film and inviting Daniela for the same project during the ritual process of my nominação, they showed very little interest in participating in my subsequent filmmaking project: the production of In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right. Neither of them wanted to operate the camera or think about possible ideas for the film. Perhaps

Jordana was discouraged by the hostility of Bororo men towards her role as a filmmaker in the nominação, or perhaps these events are completely disconnected and the nominação was an opportunity for them to experience filmmaking, only to realise later that they were not interested. Yet the reasons for their disenchantment with filmmaking are not as important as the questions it raises. Kamala Visweswaran (1994) argues that the ‘failure’ of a method brings into view fundamental issues of epistemology and it should hence be used as an epistemological construct. In this sense, she suggests we use failure as a means to address

‘the difficulties in our own epistemological assumptions and representational strategies’ (Visweswaran 1994:98). Daniela and

Jordana’s indifference towards my film project sheds light on the flawed anthropological assumption that indigenous peoples are necessarily interested in being ‘allowed to speak’ or sharing authorship in a given anthropological project. Before fieldwork, I considered it inconceivable

151 to formulate a film project with indigenous people without handing the camera to them. There seems to be a general perception that the anthropological unease with representation can be addressed through the palliative measure of ‘giving the camera to them’. By this means, the politically correct anthropologist ‘shares authorship’ and is also more likely to capture their ‘real’ point of view. As it will remain clear throughout this chapter, Daniela and Jordana had no interest whatsoever in being ‘given a voice’ and much less the camera in my film project. The fact of the matter is that they do not need me to represent them. Rather than participate in my film project, Daniela and Jordana preferred to be involved with their own projects of self-representation, i.e., taking selfies or other photographs to post on Facebook.

As Visweswaran (1994:100) notes, ‘Failure signals a project that may no longer be attempted or at least not on the same terms.’ The failure of my proposed method determined that I assume authorship and investigate further the questions that the renewed project would raise. In its new version, my point of departure was precisely the puzzle of Daniela and Jordana’s lack of interest towards the making of our film. It was this lack of interest that first led me to enquire about what would later become a fundamental component in the whole film project: desire, infatuation and a ‘wish to’…

Unfortunately, desire was not something I explored as a Bororo cultural category in linguistic or ethnographic terms. This is a question to which I was led after fieldwork and significantly through the use of film.

The focus on desire became relevant through my thinking over the course of the shooting process and the interaction between the many

152 subjectivities involved in the making of the film. Desire moved the entire project. The subjects committed to making the film and the

‘gatekeepers’ with whom negotiation would be essential to make it happen, were moved by multiple ‘desires’ that can be related to political interests, love, marriage and exchange.

Improvised Narrative Strategies: The Guiding Storyline

Having learned about the significance of moiety endogamy as a prohibition in the lives of contemporary Bororo, I set out to explore this issue ethnographically through the making of a film. Inspired by Jean

Rouch’s filmmaking methods and particularly his ethnofictions 14 , I created a storyline based on the narrative chronology of the journey. As such, I invited my two ‘sisters’ to travel to another Bororo village ‘as if’ they were looking for a husband who belonged to the ‘right’ clan according to their proper marriage path (utawara). I told them we would travel to another village to meet new people, most particularly men from the Tugarege moiety with whom, according to Bororo lore, they would be advised to marry. I did not have a script; my rough idea was to ask them to visit Tugarege houses in order to meet the ipare (single men) who lived there. Since they had shown little interest in operating the camera, I would follow them with the camera as we visited the houses whilst trying to catch the spontaneity of these encounters.

14 According to Henley (2009:75) Rouch referred to his fictional mode of filmmaking as ‘science fiction’ because it involved ethnographic, historical and statistical research. The term ‘ethnofiction’ would later become a common way to refer to Rouch’s ‘science fictions’ in the literature.

153 When they asked me what the film story would be like, my responses were usually vague because I also did not know exactly what we would do. The only guidance for their improvised performance was to visit

Tugarege houses in order to meet available men. But this was not a defined script. My aim was to engage with people in order to learn more about marriage practices among the Bororo, and I was open to suggestions of alternative cues for improvisation. In case the story developed according to my initial idea, I imagined that my heroines’ pursuit would be motivated by the mere fact that they were not interested in the available candidates in Meruri. Yet I was blessed with that helpful sprinkle of luck that can considerably improve a film. Whilst shooting the first scenes, I found out that there were no men of a marriageable age in Meruri who belong to their optimum marriage path

(utawara).

Narratively speaking, this turned out to be an excellent reason to justify the heroines’ journey in search of their Mr. Mythically Right.

Notwithstanding, throughout the process, instead of my ‘fictional’ heroines, I was the one faced with countless obstacles to achieving my goal of finally making the film project a tangible reality.

Can we use the camera, please?

Introducing the camera in my field research was a stressful enterprise filled with emergent gatekeepers and unstable political boundaries. The initial plan was to film in aldeia Tadarimana. I organised

154 the trip and saved money to take Dona Neusa and her two daughters to shoot in the circular village plaza. I also had to bring Kleber along. He is an essential mediator who negotiated permission for us to film in any village, especially because women do not have a say in such matters.

Because Kleber was coming, I also had to welcome one of his wives,

Margarete, and his two young children. Kleber helped me with part of the expenses, but I covered the majority of the costs, which included everybody’s ride to the village and everybody’s food. Because there was a funeral in Tadarimana, the central plaza was fully committed to the funeral celebration. So we went to aldeia Córrego Grande to try and make the film there.

We spent ten days in Córrego Grande and attended countless political meetings whilst seeking official permission to film in the village plaza. By the tenth day, we still had not managed to officially take the camera to the village centre. Dona Neusa began to complain because she wanted to return to Meruri soon and Daniela and Jordana were also impatient with the whole business of getting permission. The girls preferred to be in Meruri at that time because they were involved in activities with the missionaries. Jordana was particularly sad about missing Sunday mass, and I was surprised that she would rather be in church in Meruri instead of making a film in a different village. Indeed, there was a general lack of motivation to stay in Córrego Grande. Children began to cry, wanting to go home.

Finally, we were invited to yet another of the many meetings that we had to attend to negotiate permission. This one was held in front of the men’s house, so I thought it was more serious and believed we would

155 finally gain permission to film. Kleber spoke first. The group of men who gathered to negotiate the issue were speaking in Bororo, so I could hardly understand what they were saying. I just understood the word

‘love’, so I asked Dona Neusa to translate the outcomes of the meeting.

In previous meetings, I had already explained the purposes of my research and the story of the film to a couple of cultural chiefs. One of these leaders said, ‘It is nothing new that people marry who they love.’

He continued telling us that his father, who is Ecerae, also married an

Ecerae woman because they loved each other. Surprised by his statements, Jordana exclaimed, ‘Flavia! What did you tell them?! I am not getting married!!’ ‘I didn’t tell them you are getting married, I just said we are making a fiction film, a kind of a soap opera, in which two girls look for the ‘right’ husband according to Bororo law.’ It was important that I continuously emphasised that the film was fiction, like theatre.

Dona Neusa had warned me, ‘Flavia! Don’t go about saying my daughters want to get married. People will start talking! They will say

Neusa is around looking for husbands for her daughters.’ I understood her concern and told her I would always emphasise that the film would be fiction, like a soap opera. During that meeting, the men were thinking of ideas as to how we could simulate a Bororo marriage. They wanted to have a party with rice and meat ‘since we are braedoge (non-Indians) anyway’ instead of the are kuru, a typical drink a wife gives the husband’s family when they marry. The project seemed to have been accepted until I was told there were not enough people to decide whether or not I could film. The decision was once more postponed. Later that night, there was a school celebration where we would be able to

156 speak to the whole community. It turned out that the event finished late at night, and we were not given the chance to negotiate permission once again.

Overall, this last meeting and the party had improved the mood of the film crew. Jordana seemed more excited, saying she would ‘become a real actress’. Our host in Córrego Grande was also happy to show us a beautiful macaw feather skirt that she meant to lend to the ‘artists’ when they would pretend to be ‘getting married’. Dona Neusa was also celebrating. ‘In this village, I won the game! The Tugarege keep talking about me, but here, everybody recognises that the Ecerae like the

Ecerae!!’ It all seemed to be going well, but we could not start shooting because we had no permission. The days passed without us obtaining permission. My friends told me the FUNAI and the liderança (the group of village chiefs) in Córrego Grande village were ‘making fools out of us’. So we decided to return home. On the way home, we stopped in the city of

Rondonópolis and went to Tadarimana to re-negotiate filming there once the funeral was over.

Once I was back in Meruri, I continued filming and kept inviting

Jordana and Daniela to learn how to shoot or just help me with ideas for the film. Having read about indigenous groups and technological appropriation (Canevacci 2013; Henley 2000; Ginsburg 1996; Turner

1992), I truly believed my project would be meaningful and fun for them.

Instead, they were clearly not interested. In Meruri, they were unwilling to shoot and gave no input whatsoever to collaborate with the film. At least they allowed me to film them going about their lives and to ask them to engage in certain activities (washing clothes, doing manicures, cooking)

157 for the purposes of the story. Negotiating a second film trip, this time to

Tadarimana village, was a little more complicated.

The political closure in Córrego Grande had been stressful for all of us, so the idea of travelling again with the purpose of making a film was not particularly appealing. Dona Neusa never came to Tadarimana with us. Daniela persistently affirmed that I would not be given permission to film in Tadarimana either; it even seemed like she did not want it to happen. I was the only hopeful soul who kept the idea of the film alive.

Whilst we were still in Córrego Grande, I could see in their faces that they were unhappy to be there and annoyed with the film project. Their malaise was so evident that I felt the need to apologise and ask them to please understand that it was not my fault that we were taking so long to start shooting.

When it was time to travel to Tadarimana in another attempt to make the film, they were not very excited with the idea and it was not easy to convince them to accompany me. My strategies varied from countless discursive elaboration on the excitement of the project to direct material persuasion. I gave them a few presents and I even offered to pay them R$100, 00 each to participate in the film as my research assistants. Even so, they were still unsure about going to

Tadarimana. The amount of work I had to put into making my film appealing to them was truly surprising. Unfortunately, my project was incompatible with their wishes at the time.

In Meruri, they were participating in a series of activities promoted by the Salesian Mission. They were fundraising to participate in the

Catholic World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in July 2012. Speaking to

158 Kleber about the issue, we were both wondering why ‘our’ sisters were so committed to the activities promoted by the Mission. He said his sisters were silly to be always around the missionaries, but he acknowledged that ‘they have no other options for their social life in Meruri’. In fact, it is true. The majority of social activities in Meruri involve the Mission. From there, I began to understand that for Daniela and Jordana, the desired

‘outside’ was definitely not related to a project self-representation mediated by an anthropologist.

Hence, convincing them to travel to Tadarimana was not easy, particularly because their desired ‘outside’ was right there in Meruri at the

Salesian Mission. But my intention was to use film to pursue a theoretical question, which emerged in the field, and which would tie film and thesis together in an interesting way. My intent was to use film to provoke situations that could enlighten my theoretical pursuit and not so much to film/observe their day-to-day life. So despite my sisters’ lack of interest in the project, I continued to insist that they travelled with me to

Tadarimana.

Pre-production in Tadarimana: Filmmaking as Gift Exchange

Having learned from my experience in Córrego Grande, I decided to invest more time in Tadarimana in order to properly negotiate entrance for the camera in addition to my own. Upon return from

Córrego Grande, I had already spoken to Tadarimana chiefs to get permission to film there once the funeral was over. Interestingly, they kept telling me to speak to the family of the deceased in order to get

159 permission. In spite of my persistent explaining that my film was about marriage, they continued to instruct me to get permission to shoot the funeral. It seemed inconceivable to them that someone was interested in filming something else, especially when the funeral cycle had already begun.

When I returned to that village two months later, I was glad that I had no intentions to make a film about the funeral. I arrived in

Tadarimana a week before the final three days of the funeral cycle when its most crucial phases are performed. Guided by Dona Neusa’s advice, as soon as I arrived in the village I went to the house of the deceased with my ‘cousin’ Gilmar to offer coffee and tobacco. Upon seeing me, a woman angrily asked Gilmar if I was there ‘to take pictures of the funeral’ to which he said ‘no.’ It was actually a relief that I did not make a film about the funeral because if a film about marriage (that appeared to be so irrelevant as to seem inconceivable to some Bororo) was already problematic, a film about the funeral would have been a real nightmare!

When the funeral was over, I began to negotiate filming in

Tadarimana. The Bororo in Tadarimana allowed me to do research there because they had learned from Kleber that I helped him with the fish farming projects. The cacique was also interested in implementing a similar project in Tadarimana, so he was happy to welcome me. Aware of the conditions upon which I would be accepted in the village, I also presented myself at the meeting with the application form for a project focused on artefacts and offered to help them to write it and submit it.

He liked the idea and began to look for someone who would write it with me.

160 News about the purposes of my visit travelled fast, so I soon received a visitor, Dona Jucila, who wanted to participate in the

‘artefact project’. I would later have a meeting with some people to think about the proposal, but unfortunately, there were too many unrealistic ideas and no one properly took charge of the process, as

Kleber had done in Meruri, so we never submitted the project.

Meanwhile, I was also negotiating the making of the film with the Bororo who live in the village plaza. A fundamental location for the film was, of course, the Badojeba house, so I approached my ‘relatives’ living there to explain the project. Dona Maria and her husband were amused with the story and agreed that we could make the film in their house. We agreed that Daniela, Jordana (who were still in Meruri) and I would sleep in the bakery but eat in the Badojeba house and that I would buy some good food for us to share.

In a visit to the Badojeba house, I met Dona Jucila again; she was visiting her daughter who lives there with her Badojeba husband. We spoke a little about the ‘artefact project’, and then she asked more details about my film. ‘I was going to offer my son to participate in your film, because I hear you are bringing two Badojeba girls to pretend they are getting married, like in the soap opera, so I would like to offer my son who is a Tugarege to participate in it . . . but I heard that Bariga said he is the one who will make the film and he is going to do it with Vilma a Kiedo girl’. When I said it was not true that Bariga and Vilma would marry in the film and that I was actually hoping that people would help me with ideas, she was relieved. ‘Ah! Now I understand. I found it strange and was wondering about it . . . I thought how can Flávia make a film about

161 Bororo marriage and have an Ecerae marrying an Ecerae? I thought she wanted to portray a traditional marriage.’ I laughed in amusement because I had never appointed any such ‘actors’, but I was pleased to know that people were already involved in the film despite the absence of its main ‘actresses’.

Once I had already gained permission to film and negotiated access to the shooting locations, I returned to Meruri for the sole purpose of bringing Daniela and Jordana to Tadarimana. Although they were tired of travelling and not particularly excited about making the film, they agreed to travel to Tadarimana to help me. I think they felt they had no choice but to help me. Dona Neusa always expressed how grateful she was for my economic help in the household, and I think she might have told her daughters to help me in return. Throughout the fieldwork, I used all the money I earned as a teacher at the village school to buy food for the family, and I also managed to buy them a big freezer by installments.

A freezer would allow them to store the fish that they breed, so I thought it would be a useful gift. Dona Neusa and her husband very much appreciated the value of that gift to their fish farming enterprise and often expressed their gratitude. I gave them the freezer because I thought I should leave something meaningful to them and especially because by working as a teacher in the village I was taking one of their jobs. Nobody ever said the girls should accompany me to Tadarimana because of the freezer or anything else, but I think their parents asked them to help me; they were worried about my studies.

Upon my return from Tadarimana, I explained to Daniela and

Jordana that we already had permission to film, so we needed to stay in

162 Tadarimana for only a week. Despite being tired of travelling, they agreed to accompany me and I guaranteed it would be fun. Daniela was more easygoing than Jordana, but neither was particularly excited with the film project. There was a time that I even considered inviting other girls to make the film, but I thought that doing so would create more problems than if I just continued trying to show my ‘sisters’ that a filmmaking project could be amusing.

Improvisation Techniques: Is it ‘Reality’ or ‘Fiction’?

As we arrived in Tadarimana, we settled in the bakery and headed to the Badojeba house and take the food that I had bought. We had lunch there and, after a nap in the bakery, we returned to the plaza to start shooting. In the late afternoon, the Bororo like to sit in front of their houses looking at the movement in the village and chatting. So they all sat in front of the Badojeba house and I began to film. Nobody said anything; nobody knew what to do in front of the camera. Dona Maria broke the silence, saying that we were making a ‘silent movie’ and we laughed out loud. Since the idea was not to make a ‘silent movie’, I suggested that Dona Maria explain to the girls where they could look for a husband. She tried a couple of times, but she would be embarrassed and start laughing in the process, so she told her daughter Raquel to give it a try. Raquel was also shy, and our film was on the verge of becoming a ‘silent movie’ until Dona Jucila arrived.

Jucila had very clear ideas about how the film should be made.

163 She insisted that her son Arlindelson participate in it, arguing that he is a

Tugarege man and therefore belongs to the right moiety to marry a

Badojeba woman. According to her, the film should imitate a Bororo marriage as it happened ‘before’, i.e., in the old days. We improvised on her guidelines, asking questions about the candidate in order to assess if he was right for the girls. I filmed them, pretending to be evaluating

Arlindelson as a potential marriage candidate and everybody, except

Jucila and I, was very shy. However, the girls were not romantically interested in Arlindelson. Not only was he clearly too old for them, but he was also typical of the kind of Bororo man that they would not want as a husband. Rumour has it that he has no profession and sleeps too much.

The girls also suspect that he drinks. As they told me, they are looking for a nice guy who wants to have a future, who plans to go to university, who studies and who wants to have a good life. In spite of that, we did as Jucila suggested and played ‘as if’ (Turner 1982; Schechner 1985) the girls were interested in marrying Arlindelson.

On our way back to our house, Jordana said she was confused.

‘Flavia, I do not understand anything about the film anymore,’ she said.

‘Why?’ ‘I thought the film was fiction, but what I’m seeing is that we are making a film about reality.’ I thought about Jordana’s question and decided to explain to her my own ethical concerns in relation to the making of the film. ‘When I said that the film was ‘real’, or when I said it was about ‘marriage’, you were alarmed, saying that you would not get married. Your mother was nervous about people talking. So I started to say it was fiction.’ ‘But a fiction film would be like Jucila suggested,’ she responded. ‘To enact a ‘real’ marriage between people as it would

164 have happened before.’ I explained to Jordana that the film we were making would be different from what Jucila suggested. I was actually terrified with the idea of taking Jucila’s idea further and recreating marriage as it used to happen before. As I began to visualise the necessary processes for the production of such a film, I immediately ruled it out in alarm. Aside from my concerns with the degree to which such an enactment would come across as ‘true’ in a performative sense, I saw myself in the midst of inconclusive arguments about ‘how marriage actually was like before’ and (even worse) trying to accommodate everybody’s demands and establish the necessary synchronicity that allows for a rehearsal to take place. So I explained to Jordana that our film was a mixture of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’. She and Daniela would pretend they were looking for a husband, and I would film them visiting the Tugarege houses and asking to meet the ipare (single men).

Filming in Tadarimana was very difficult at the beginning. It was extremely hot, and we were often dragging ourselves to film. Given that until then, I was the only person excited with the idea of making a film serious motivation was needed on my part to make it happen. Slowly,

Daniela and Jordana started to act. I was surprised to see Jordana (who is much shyer than Daniela) easily engaged in the proposed improvisation and asking to meet the ipare (single men) in Tugarege houses. Unsurprisingly, the fact that three women with a camera were visiting Tugarege houses and chasing single men generated gossip. We were soon warned that people were talking.

Before I tackle our problem with gossip and the ethical implications of the film project, I wish to emphasise that the film crew was

165 deeply transformed by the time we finally came to know about it. The turning point of our filmmaking process was our encounter with the

Aroroe man Leandro. He was just what Daniela and Jordana were looking for. In addition to being their optimum mythical husband, he is a handsome, hard-working, serious and studious young man. The three of us were thrilled to have met him. Leandro was the missing element that sparked the narrative and moved the film forward. The film suddenly became an excellent excuse to chase him, and the whole idea of making the film transformed after we met him. The girls began to become far more excited about filming. They were collaborating more with ideas and less with ‘problems’ such as tiredness, laziness or sickness.

Maybe it was a thrill of infatuation . . .

The ‘Fictive’ Chase: Flirtation, Marriage and Desire

Meeting Leandro was a turning point in the filmmaking process and in our film. The final film expresses the corporeal flirtation in the performative evaluation of the ‘potential husband’. An unexpected element had suddenly made the film project move forward: infatuation or perhaps

‘love at first sight’? Swept Away by True Love was the title suggestion of a viewer of the first cut.

Daniela and Jordana’s flirtation, interview and evaluation of that potential spouse performatively challenge Lévi-Strauss portrayal of women as objects of exchange. ‘Rather than exchange of women, what

I see here are men being fished!’ commented a senior member of our

166 department. The film took us into an exploration of marriage alliances in which women make choices, sometimes according to their own feelings of romantic love, at other times in relation to the moral laws established in myth, and sometimes both, as it was the case with Leandro. Because we were making a film, the three of us had an excuse to walk around the village in search of a Mr. Right. Mythical truth led us to the most appropriate place in the moral village to look for a husband: the Aroroe house, where we met Leandro.

As Badojeba women, we were asking the Tugarege moiety for a suitable husband. But a man of the right clan was not enough. The girls had a series of other criteria to select their Mr. Right, including love. But

Leandro ticked all the boxes: he was handsome, shy and intelligent. He worked in the health post in the village and studied in the city. He was also keen to meet the two Badojeba women I had brought to make a fiction film where they act as if they were looking for a husband. He congratulated them, saying his mother also thinks it is important that he marries in the right path (utawara). We also met his mother, who proudly announced that all her sons were married to Badojeba women. Jordana and Daniela were in the Aroroe house with all legitimacy of mythical being to claim their husband. The handsome Aroroe was the optimum husband or brother-in-law. Arlindelson, whom the girls had met before but were not too excited about, balanced the tension. He accompanied

Leandro in the filming activities. Through this fiction film, the ‘artists’ had the opportunity to engage in mythical truth to find a path in between continuity and change. Mythical truth was not all that mattered to the film heroines; the importance of love in marriage is very present in the

167 characters’ narratives and bodily performances. A shy desire for mutual exploration surrounded relations in and out of the film narrative.

Film has a remarkable capacity to represent the spontaneity of the concrete ethnographic encounter. It brings the materiality of being into presence. The corporeal engagement between filmmaker and subjects crystalise that encounter in its spontaneity (MacDougall 2006). In

Search of a Bororo Mr. Right brings into presence the corporeal aspects of the production of kinship, the flirtatious performance that may lead to a sexual encounter and/or marriage. It also expresses the characters’ dreams in relation to notions of romantic love and marriage. Whilst it manifests the performance of seduction between the film subjects, it also communicates the rational evaluation of the potential spouse. What In

Search of a Bororo Mr. Right brings into view is a particular kind of excitement, a shy desire to explore each other’s boundaries. It demonstrates how a particular project, in this case, a filmmaking one, becomes more exciting for two women after having met a man. The flirtation, the negotiation of potential marriage exchange and the legitimacy of myth were driving multiple desires in the filmmaking process.

In a corporeal account, Daniela and Jordana navigate mythical truth, modern desires and a sensorial experience that draws attention to desire and flirtation as significant elements for marital alliances and kinship.

Whilst it is difficult to define the magic spell that was cast in our film experience, those who were not involved in the film project were less enthusiastic about our process of discovery. As Dona Neusa and my

‘sisters’ had already warned me, our fictive ‘chasing of a man to marry’ could generate gossip.

168 This is what eventually happened during our stay in Tadarimana.

Gossip seemed to be a general concern for the film participants, and I was worried that it could be harmful for the girls. Luckily, we only learned about the badmouthing after we had already met Leandro, who was in fact the person who told us about it. We were walking around the village looking for him when he approached us, reporting rumours that made us worry. He said that some people, for lack of information, were thinking the marriage for the film was real.

The girls were upset by the rumours, and I also worried that making the film or the film itself could be harmful to them. I began to think about the ethical implications of making that film and about what it could potentially do to the reputation of the girls. In order to properly discuss the issue with the film crew, I invited them for a formal meeting.

In contrast to the usual playfulness with which we interacted, I began the meeting in a very serious tone and explained to Leandro and

Arlindelson that the film we were making was a research method. I said that Daniela and Jordana were not looking for husbands, but were actually participating in a personal research about Bororo culture and modernity. The research was about love as a feeling that has driven people to overcome traditional laws and that Jordana and Daniela were my assistants. My ‘sisters’ were proud to be formally presented as research assistants to Arlindelson and Leandro, and after some conversation, we decided the film would be an exploratory journey where young Bororo people reflect upon love, marriage and cultural traditions.

Although the research process was clear among film participants,

169 we were always emphasising the film’s fictional character to other people in the village. If in the beginning of the filmmaking process the creation of an ethnofiction was solely a methodological device, it gradually became a significant ethical device (Henley 2009). Through the playful ‘protection’ of fiction we could act in ways that would have been morally condemned otherwise. Through the ‘protection’ of fiction the girls were able to use this cinematic event to take further their real desire to approach Leandro and evaluate his potential as an affine.

The transformation of the filmmaking process after we met

Leandro and the performative flirtation that followed confirms Rouch’s statement that ‘fiction is the only way to penetrate reality’ (Rouch

2003a:6). Through the particularity of the film medium and its capacity to convey body language and emotions, the visual ethnography In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right drew attention to women’s flirtatious negotiation of marriage alliances. In doing so, it signalled the need for an exploration of flirtation and desire as important components in the negotiation of marriage and the production of kinship. The contrasting performative engagement that each ‘potential spouse’ provoked in the film’s heroines also brings into view the unstable relation between reality and fiction that suffused the making of the film. From beginning to end, we were not sure which aspects of the film were reality or fiction. The heroines’ feelings of infatuation played an interesting role in disturbing any fixed boundaries between reality and fiction as well as transforming relationships throughout the filmmaking process. When the project began, Daniela and Jordana were making the film for me, but after we met Leandro, our chase of a husband was certainly no longer exclusively diegetic.

170

CHAPTER 4 SEEING AS A GENDERED SKILL: ‘OUTSIDE’ OTHERS IN RITUAL AND FILM

In this chapter, I discuss the significance of another cultural prohibition: the aije spirits. In contrast to the prohibition on moiety endogamy, which regulates men and women’s lives, seeing the aije spirits is a prohibition that affects women and children exclusively. The chapter is divided in two parts. Firstly, I provide a brief introduction to the aije spirits and demonstrate how an experiment with film elicitation was a powerful means to indicate the contemporary significance of the prohibition. In the second part, I draw on my participant observation in Bororo funerals in order to examine the prohibition of the aije in more detail.

In the previous chapters, I argued that cultural continuity among the Bororo is expressed through the resilience of the Boe gendered person as a significant referent in contemporary experience. More specifically, I contended that the gendered person is constituted through a division of labour that organises relationships between ‘inside’ and

‘outside’ others. In this sense, women are primarily responsible for the manipulation of marriage relations and the inspection of suspicious

‘internal’ others who seem so ‘human’ that come into the village through the womb of a woman. This chapter looks at the aije as ‘outside’ others and investigates how the men’s secret marks difference of a gendered kind among Bororo people. In doing so, I argue that the aije prohibition is a means to cope with the different ways men and women see things.

171 Drawing on theories of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998) and analysing a Bororo myth, I demonstrate how seeing is a gendered skill, most particularly when it comes to seeing ‘outside’ others (spirits and animals). Hence, instead of expressing an idiom of control, the aije prohibition is explained through an idiom of protection of women’s

‘human’ point of view. They cannot see the aije because they do not develop the skill of properly seeing the aroe and the aije (animals and souls) throughout their lives, whilst at the same time, animals and spirits are keen to take advantage of their inability to see and distinguish humans and non-humans in order to marry them.

Introducing the Aije

The aije are terrifying spirits. They are animals that live in the rivers and in mud. The term also refers to men who represent these spirits at funerals and to the wooden bullroarers they use during funeral ceremonies (Albisetti &Venturelli 1962). The origin of the aije is narrated in myth. It is a ‘fabulous animal’ (ibid:17) and it was encountered by a member of the Paiowe clan when it was very small. The man took the animal home and put him in a bowl with water. As the animal grew, the man placed it in bigger bowls until it achieved terrifying proportions.

When that happened, Baitogogo, a cultural hero from the Aroroe clan, took possession of the animal, claiming that the Paiwoe did not have chants and ornaments to the standards of the spirits. The aije then taught their new owner to craft the wooden bullroarer: the aije-doge.

172 The aije spirits, the men who represent them and the bullroarers are all very dangerous to women, and if women see any of them, they can die. These spirits usually visit Bororo villages at the time of funerals. The

Bororo funeral has been extensively described (see Albisetti & Venturelli

1962) and analysed (Canevacci 2013; Novaes 1986,1993; Viertler 1991), so it is not my intention to provide yet another comprehensive examination of this ritual process. Rather, I shall focus specifically on the aije spirits as a prohibition for women and children. When the aije are present at a funeral, women and children must hide in their houses, where they can hear the sounds of the bullroarers. In the house, women continuously seal the straw walls with cloth to prevent any woman or a child from accidentally seeing the aije. It is said that the stomach of any woman who sees them will swell with mud; they can fall ill and eventually die.

The Aije and the Bororo Funeral

The funeral lasts about thirty days, but its length varies according to the political circumstances of the village (Albisetti & Venturelli

1962:647). During this time, men engage in hunts and mythic performances in tribute to cultural heroes and the ancestors’ souls. The number of performances and the kinds of ritual representations will depend on the boe eimejera, the cultural leader who assesses the number of ceremonies to be held and the cultural heroes to be celebrated in accordance with the status of the deceased. Although the

173 general number of representations over the course of the funeral cycle may vary, the ceremonial performances of the final three days are obligatory (ibid:654)15.

During these final three days, the ceremonial duties are greatly intensified and, due to the visit of the aije, women remain inside the houses for about three days. Yet they do not have to stay inside for the whole of every day. Men are careful to advise them about the right times to go out and to stay in. When the aije are about to enter the village, every woman is made aware of that fact and goes home to avoid being taken by surprise. On the second day of the triad, men begin to engage with the aije, a group of men of the Tugarege moiety, collect wood and begin constructing the aije-doge, the bullroarers. These are made by tying a length of string to a flat, oval-shaped piece of wood which is then whirled around in the air at the end of the string in order to create the distinctive aije noise. The men also collect palm leaves to seal the men’s house properly and prepare it for the ceremonial acts that women and children cannot see (ibid:655). The arrival of the aije in the village, represented in the form of men who whirl the bullroarers, is one of the main events of the final days of the funeral cycle.

It is also during these final stages that, without disrupting the funeral ceremonies, the men initiate a group of boys into sexual maturity through physical tests of bravery and the revelation of the ceremonial secrets of men. The boys go through a series of physical trials away from the village where the aije run after them. Since they have learned to fear

15 I have not personally witnessed men’s relationship with the aije, so my account will be based on the descriptions in the Encyclopeadia Bororo.

174 these beings from an early age, they are forced to run for great distances. This is also when the initiates engage with the productive work of men for the first time; they hunt, fish and learn traditional laws expressed in myth (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962:642).

Discovering the Strength of the Aije: Film Screenings as a Transformative Cinematic Experience

Although I encountered the aije at the time of funerals, it was through a process of feedback screenings that I discovered its significance. In my first encounter with the aije, I was not yet aware of its strength nor did I have a proper sense of its importance in the constitution of gender difference among the Bororo. It was during the time between my participation in the first and the second funerals that I carried out my experiment with feedback screenings and began to understand the magnitude of the aije. It was only through this process that I discovered the need to examine the aije in its singularity carefully. By the time I attended the second funeral, the aije spirits had already become a focus of my enquiry. It is important to stress that my experiment with feedback screenings was not initially supposed to form the basis for an interpretation of the aije spirits. The initial methodological proposal was to engage in a collaborative filmmaking project, which included a chronologically organised series of film screenings about the Bororo, as its first methodological step.

Inspired by Jean Rouch's (2003b) shared anthropology, my aim with this experiment was to encourage the Bororo to act as a thesis

175 committee and judge the films that had been made about them. My plan was to use these screenings as a basis for a follow-up collaborative filmmaking project with Bororo people's active participation in all stages of the process: from the conception of a basic film idea to shooting, sound recording and providing editorial advice. My aim was to edit the final film upon my return to Manchester, but I wanted Bororo people to be as active as possible in the whole process whilst I was in field. Thus, my intentions with the feedback screening sessions were twofold: it would be both the initial phase of a filmmaking project and also a means to elicit further responses to the relationships between gender difference and social change that I had set out to investigate. But it turned out that film brought a twist to the research that led me to an entirely different path of enquiry, namely, an investigation of the aije prohibition. If the relationship between love and moiety endogamy was an aspect of gender relations that I chose to explore through the making of an ethnofiction, the feedback screening sessions were dissociated from the filmmaking process itself and led me to enquire about the intense presence of the aije as the marker of a gender border in the constitution of Boe personhood.

According to Jean Rouch (2003b), the practice of feedback screenings was initiated by Robert Flaherty in the 1920s.

'When Flaherty set up a developing room in a cabin on Hudson Bay and projected his brand new pictures on a screen for his first spectator, the Eskimo Nanook, he did not know that, with absurdly inadequate means, he had just invented both "participant observation", which would be used some thirty years later by sociologists and anthropologists, and "feedback", with which we are still clumsily experimenting.' (Rouch 2003b:82).

176

Although inspired by Flaherty, Rouch's methods of shared anthropology differed greatly from Flaherty's initial invention. Both were explorers in filmmaking and participant observation, but as Paul Henley

(2010) points out, it is in relation to their aims and the involvement of subjects in the filmmaking process that there is a fundamental difference between Flaherty's approach to feedback screenings and Rouch's shared anthropology. Whilst Flaherty screened footage to his subjects motivated merely by requirement of the next day's shooting, Rouch strove for their active collaboration in all various stages of the filmmaking process (Henley 2010: 85).

My aim was to follow Rouch's example. Firstly, I would screen a number of films as fragments of Bororo people's visual history. Then, I wished to work with interested individuals in the making of a new film.

Convinced by the potential of audiovisual media as a means of intensifying the communication between researcher and researched (de

Maaker 2000), I believed the screenings would form a productive basis for our collaborative project. Although I was aware of the limitations of visual research in its attempt to reduce the hierarchical gap between researcher and researched (Packard 2008), I still wished to explore the potential of collaborative methodologies and the epistemological outcomes of the ethical shift they produce (Pink 2001). What would be the ethical and epistemological outcomes of sharing these films with the

Bororo? How would they interpret the visual representations made about them? How would community debates influence the production of our final collaborative film?

177 Informed by these initial questions, I wished to use our filmmaking process as a means to investigate the cultural elements the Bororo would choose to emphasise when representing their contemporary lives.

Perhaps, as in the case analysed by Alex Vailati (2013), Bororo people would also choose to focus the film exclusively on their 'marketable'

'traditional culture' and thus reaffirm a close connection between image making and neoliberal power. Or, as Dobbin (2013) pointed out, this process of visual repatriation could enable Bororo people to produce counter narratives to their 'official' history, giving us the opportunity to carefully examine the outcomes of the community's reappropriation of meanings and histories expressed in the films (Peterson 2005; Pack 2013).

Whatever Bororo people's response to the films might be, the motivation behind my collaborative project was not only related to my research interests. It was also strongly motivated by a sense of moral duty: taking these films back to the Bororo village was, I thought, fundamentally a good thing. Having heard so many of my friends complain that researchers 'give nothing in return' and 'don't even come back to bring the book they wrote', I was sure that taking these films to the village was an ethical responsibility.

Notwithstanding the moral dimension of my project, it was more than a response to my friends' complaints; it was also informed by contemporary trends of what Paul Henley (forthcoming) calls ‘modes of authorship denial’, which developed both as a consequence of technological advancement and as a response to intellectual debates around ethics and epistemology in the history of ethnographic film.

Through an analysis of these modes of authorship denial, Henley

178 demonstrates how the history of ethnographic film is marked by a constant effort to mask inevitable traces of authorship, for authorship has been historically interpreted as a threat to ethnographic integrity (Henley forthcoming). If these modes of authorship denial were initially developed as attempts to produce 'objective' ethnographic accounts through film, contemporary approaches to ethnographic filmmaking no longer strive for objectivity and focus instead on developing reflexive and participatory approaches to filmmaking as a response to the ethical and political climate of our times. In these senses, and particularly in relation to indigenous peoples, these contemporary modes of authorship denial emphasise shared authorship through increased participation of indigenous people in the filmmaking process. As Henley points out, the development of cheap and lightweight technology in conjunction with participatory approaches to filmmaking enabled the development of what Faye Ginsburg has dubbed 'indigenous media'. These projects intend to go beyond an idea of shared authorship by training indigenous peoples as filmmakers and thus displacing authorship from the position of the anthropologist to that of the 'native'.

This displacement of authorship signals the centrality of self- representation within anthropology and beyond, for self-representation is a ubiquitous experience of contemporaneity. As Canevacci (2013) argues, the diffusion of digital cultures challenges 'the communicational division of labour between those who narrate and those who are narrated . . . between self- and hetero-representation' (Canevacci

2013:55 emphasis in original). Hence, indigenous peoples, who were once mere subject matter for the TV presenter, journalist or

179 anthropologist, are filming, photographing and narrating themselves on the Web. And they are doing so regardless of ethical or epistemological developments in the discipline of anthropology. In fact, as my account in

Chapter 3 demonstrates, my attempts to hand the camera to research subjects came to nothing: all the film subjects were actively engaged on the Web, particularly on Facebook where they have their own projects of self-representation, so the prospect of participating in my project did not even have novelty value.

However, still burdened by a moral sense of the obligation to produce self-consciously collaborative films, I initially sought through the screening of past films about the Bororo to explore the tensions between conventional hetero-representation and the practices of self- representation made possible by digital technologies. At the same time, I felt that these screenings would also fulfil a moral duty to engage in visual repatriation (Lydon 2010). With this aim in mind, I collected as many films as I could possibly digitally reproduce in the Museu do Indio, Rio de

Janeiro. I also contacted TV Globo, the largest television channel in Brazil, who kindly gave me access to two journalistic reportages they made about Bororo funerals in 2003 and 2005. In the Granada Centre for Visual

Anthropology film library, I also found the latest visual ethnography of the

Bororo funeral, which was released in 2005.

I initiated the feedback screenings during the second part of my fieldwork, from August 2011 to January 2012, when I screened six films to my Bororo friends in Meruri village. These films were Rituais e Festas Bororo

(Luiz Thomaz Reis 1917), Meruri (Nilo Oliveira Veloso 1942), Funeral Bororo

(Heinz Forthman 1953), two reports from TV Globo's Fantastico (2003,

180 2005) and Edgar Teodoro da Cunha's Rituais da Vida (2005), which was filmed in Tadarimana village. Although I was convinced that the community would have a positive reaction to my initiative to bring these films back to the village, this proved not to be the case.

Out of the six films that I screened, five were about the Bororo funeral, and all these films portray images of the aije and other elements of the 'men's secret' that are prohibited to women. To my surprise, many members of the community, and particularly women, were not happy with the screenings. Perhaps because photographs and films share 'a continuity . . . with the physical and sensory life of their referents'

(MacDougall 1998:152), many of the Bororo were unhappy with the possibility of encountering the aije in film. These screenings strongly underlined for me the importance of the aije and challenged me to further investigate their singularity. Although I was aware that community insider perspectives can be conflictive (Henley forthcoming), the screenings strongly challenged my easy assumption that taking these films back to the community is always an ethically and politically appropriate research methodology.

The screenings also signalled the profound limitations of the very conception of my research project. Through the screenings, I came to realise that the use of film in feedback sessions could play a much greater part in generating knowledge than I had imagined since they could be much more than merely a methodological stage in collaborative filmmaking project, as conceived by Flaherty and further developed by Rouch.

181 In my project design, I had imagined the feedback screenings as a dialogic encounter, and I assumed that this would be an entirely verbal and intellectual affair. Bororo individuals would assess the films as a thesis committee and together we would analyse or rationalise an appropriate visual response to the films, taking into account issues of ethics and representation. But contrary to these assumptions, the screenings elicited an intense emotional response from my Bororo friends, which reconfigured my entire project and shed light on the aije prohibition as a powerful element in Bororo people's experience. For them, the films were not merely ‘texts’ that could be dispassionately evaluated through a collective verbal dialogue. Though I might consider them mere representations that could be analysed for their ethical, ideological or perhaps ethnographic shortcomings, for the Bororo audience, they were enactments of a ritual that retains a powerful agency, even though they were being presented through the medium of film and at a considerable distance in time. It was this reaction to the presence of the aije in film that first made me aware of its profound and continuing significance. Thus, my feedback screening sessions turned out to be film elicitation sessions, although they differed greatly from what has been conceived as classic film elicitation methods in visual anthropology.

From feedback screenings to film elicitation: The knowledge- making potential of the filmic medium

Photo elicitation has been a key method in the history of visual anthropology and often leads research problems towards unexpected paths. By contrast, film elicitation studies have been relatively few,

182 although Douglas Harper has argued that there has not been so much an absence of film elicitation studies as a lack of both formal acknowledgement of the use of these methods and careful assessment of their epistemological implications (Harper 2002:14). Marcus Banks

(2001) also notes an imbalance between the number of film elicitation studies and the significance of the practice in the history of visual anthropology. He offers a more pragmatic reason for the lack of film elicitation studies, given that due to the nature of the medium, it is much harder to conduct such studies in the field and more 'difficult for the researcher to control' (Banks 2001:99).

It is often the case that researchers are surprised by the outcomes of their experiments in film and photo elicitation (Banks 2001), and this was also my own experience. Banks stresses the productive outcomes of thinking carefully about the selection of material to be screened and the circumstances of the screenings. Moreover, he argues that the analysis of the screening event as a cinematic experience can create knowledge of different kinds. My insight into the significance of the aije was generated through the whole series of screenings as a cinematic experience, which turned out to be more informative than the planned post-screening filmed interviews. As in Banks's experience, in my use of film elicitation methods, I also encountered 'issues of viewing practice, engagement with and experience of events depicted, and the politics and ethics of social research [which] served to complicate the straightforward task of asking questions and receiving responses' (Banks

2001:99).

183 Bororo people's engagement with the depicted events raised ethical and political issues in relation to my own position in the field.

Contrary to my expectations, the Bororo people's response to the films was not communicated through formal interviews. Rather, it was people's reaction to my overall project of screening these films (many people in the village were scrutinising my project, including those who did not participate in the screenings) and the often non-verbalised emotional responses to the films that signalled the strength and significance of the aije as a cultural prohibition.

Bororo women’s concern with the prohibition of the aije influenced the development of my research from a very early stage. For example, the separation between women and men for the film screenings was initially a methodological device that I had planned in advance. Nevertheless, from the very first time, I excitedly mentioned that I was going to screen 'a film about the funeral from 1917' to a friend, the separation became mandatory. The first thing my friend asked was,

'Are there aije in this film?' 'I don't know,' I replied. So she advised me to screen it to the men first so they could check if there were any secrets that women cannot see. My friend was particularly scared of the aije from 1917 whose medicines (aijeorubo) she thought would be more powerful than those of today. Following her advice, I first screened the film to the men in order to learn more about the secret images I was not supposed to reveal to women.

184 On the Film Screenings

When I first started to screen films in the village, there was much excitement with the project. People were very curious about these old films I had been talking about. In order to recruit people to my screenings

I announced the event through the Mission's loudspeaker. Some of my friends also told me that the village chief publicised the screening during the Sunday Mass. In my announcement, I let it be known that men should see the film first and after they had seen it, women would be invited to join.

Many of the cultural leaders presented themselves for the screening of the first film Rituais e Festas

Bororo (1917) by Luiz

Thomaz Reis. When they Figure 14 - Men covering the village plaza arrived, I explained that I to protect women from seeing the aije in Rituais e Festas Bororo (1917). was interested in studying cultural transformation and that the separation between men and women was not only motivated by the secret of the aije, but it was also part of my research. Then, I asked permission to film them and with their consent I placed the camera on a tripod directed at the audience whilst I managed the computer and the boom microphone. The men stressed once again the importance of screening the films to them first, underscoring the fact that women are not allowed to see the aije.

185 There was a great sense of joy during the screening with much talk in Bororo language. In the follow-up interview, the men criticised the chronology of the funeral presented in the film and stressed the need to re-edit it according to its proper chronological organisation. Kleber recommended that I speak to Paulinho, the filmmaker in the village, because he would know how to re-edit the film according to the correct chronology. Members of the audience were also discussing the vegetation of the village in the film, trying to guess where the film had been shot. They explained that there are regional differences in language and ritual herbal medicines (including the ones they use to meet the aije) among the Bororo. Kleber was sitting beside Father

Ochoa, a Salesian priest, and they were both guessing that the subjects were the Bororo of Rondon. Kleber recounted that the Bororo liked

Rondon very much, so he thought they had planned a beautiful celebration for Reis to film. He also reported that the Bororo chief Cadete told Rondon, 'You should come die with us, because we, the Boe, are the only ones who know how to celebrate a funeral properly.’

After the interviews, many of the men thanked me for bringing the film to the village and recommended that I screen it to young people.

On the matters of the aije, the men suggested, Rituais e Festas Bororo was not a problematic film. Reis announces the appearance of the aije in writing before he actually shows it, so it was particularly easy for me to skip the images of the aije and allow women to amuse themselves with the rest.

Immediately, after I screened the film to men, women were invited into the room. Many of them brought their children, who were

186 excited with the new event and curious about my equipment. During the film, some of the children were crying and becoming impatient with the silence. I presume that it was strange for them to be watching a silent film. When Reis announced the arrival of the aije through an intertitle, I asked women what I should do. They told me that I should just skip the images of the aije and let them enjoy the rest of the film. Whilst I was managing the computer to skip the images of the aije, women were looking away from the screen and covering their children's eyes with cloth or paper. After I skipped the prohibited images, they were amused with the film and particularly impressed by the beauty of the ornaments.

At the end of the film, I had planned to hold open-ended interviews without any particular agenda, so I simply asked, 'What do you think of it?' Whilst we discussed the film, Jordana was filming our conversation.

Many of the women said that they would have liked to be able to hear the sounds and stressed the difficulties of distinguishing people's clans because the film is black and white. They wondered about the colours of the ornaments on screen from which they would have been able to know the clans of the performers. In a humorous tone, one woman said the men in the film were 'tall and white', whilst today’s men in the village 'are black and fat'. There was an explosion of laughter after this remark. They guessed that the men in the film were good hunters and fishers, and therefore they had such beautiful bodies compared with the women’s contemporaries. One of the women asked me if their ancestors were really dancing that fast or if it was an effect of the film. I had screened a digital reproduction of the 35 mm film, which reproduces motion very quickly, so they were relieved to know that the rhythm was

187 an effect of the film and not actually the way the Bororo used to dance in the past. 'It’s very fast!' They exclaimed. Women also thanked me for bringing the film to the village and, as the men had done before, they stressed the importance of screening it to young people. They were so excited with the screening that they asked if I had brought more films.

Since I had a number of films to show, I told them that we could watch another one that evening. But although they were excited with the idea, one of them reminded the others to ask, ‘Have the men seen it?’ The men had not seen the second film that I was planning to show them, but there should have been no problem because the film was not about the funeral.

The film is called Meruri and it was directed by

Nilo Oliveira

Veloso and released in

1942. It is a Figure 15 - Bororo girls dancing in the Mission. Scene from the film Meruri (1942). seven-minute film about the work of the missionaries and military personnel in the processes of 'civilisation' of the Bororo. It also features Father Colbacchini, one of the authors of the Encyclopaedia Bororo. After the screening of

Meruri, the group of women to whom I first screened it were already tired and did not comment too much on it.

188 I screened these first films a number of times to different groups of people. Perhaps I relied too much on Bororo people's patience when I screened the same film a number of times, so gradually there were fewer people interested in attending the public screenings. After a couple of occasions in which only one or two people attended the screening, I decided to project the films to my students during our history class. When

I screened films in class, I could no longer separate men and women for each screening. Nevertheless, the post-screening interviews continued to be productive.

When I screened Meruri in class, the first person to comment on it was Matias, who is also a teacher at the school. He said, 'This film is a celebration of the cultural encounter between the Bororo and the

Salesians, but I find the choreographies very militarised . . . It shows the process of 'civilisation' of the Bororo, and the wounds of this process have remained with us to our days.' Another student remarked, 'I think the film was humiliating. It seems that the Bororo at that time didn't act according to what they felt right. They only did what the priests told them to do. I think that is the reason why there is no copy of this film stored here'. But according to some of my students, the film was too partial. 'The film only shows the priests' and the military side of cultural transformation.

It does not show how the Bororo have also influenced the Salesians.'

Another student added

'The people who made this film have good news. They managed to do what they wanted to the Bororo. They made us become 'almost white'. We already speak the language of the whites and don't speak our own language anymore. They took it away from us. Now, it is difficult to start speaking it again. When Bororo people from Corrego Grande or Tadarimana villages come to Meruri, they stop speaking Bororo because

189 they have no one to speak to in Bororo.'

Dona Helena, who had joined our class to watch the film, was delighted to see the people she knew on screen. The film also inspired her to tell us about the kinds of punishment she received for speaking at that time. In the conversations inspired by the film, the pain and suffering felt by the Bororo from Meruri as a result of having lost the ability to speak their language became even clearer. Nonetheless, there was one thing introduced by the missionaries that everybody enjoyed: the band. Many people expressed a wish for the creation of a new band.

Figure 16 - The Bororo band. Scene from Meruri (1942).

These first screenings were amusing and light hearted, so I became rather relaxed regarding the issue of the aije. To be perfectly honest, I did not imagine the aije prohibition to still be so strong. I had met so many people who had converted to Christianity. I had seen so many families prefer to give their loved ones a Catholic funeral, and I had interviewed many people who claimed to prefer having a Catholic celebration rather than a Bororo funeral when they die. From both formal

190 and informal interviews, I learned that Bororo people's traditional authorities were considered less reliable than the Church. On many occasions people complained that Bororo funerals are now 'parties' or

'an excuse to drink' and condemned contemporary men for being too drunk to be able to properly perform their ceremonial duties. The people who claimed to prefer a Catholic funeral justified their choice with the argument that there is no respect for the deceased in Bororo funerals nowadays. Although I had been advised about the aije prohibition, I did not properly listen to the Bororo, or in other words, I did not actually believe in the strength of the aije.

The first time I actually realised the strength of the prohibition was when I screened Heinz Forthman's Funeral Bororo (1953) in class. At that time, Jordana and Daniela were already tired of helping me to shoot the interviews, and I had been managing the screenings alone. I imagine that my research activities were too time consuming for the girls who slowly detached themselves from their posts as research assistants. By the time I screened Funeral Bororo to my students, I also had already disconnected the film screenings from my filmmaking project since, contrary to my expectations, the screenings did not help to create a group of people with an interest in filmmaking with whom I could make a new film.

One evening, I took Funeral Bororo to screen in class. I confess I was slightly irresponsible and did not show the film to men, as I had been advised, before screening it to a mixed group in my history class. After I had heard so many times that the Bororo funeral was ‘no longer serious’,

‘just a party’, I assumed the prohibition on the aije was not too important,

191 so I assumed there should be no problem to screen the film to a mixed group and ask men to help me skip the prohibited images, if there were any, as we went along. Little did I know that Funeral Bororo would present a series of close-up shots precisely of what women are not supposed to see.

In that film, there were too many prohibited images and I lost control because I was not able to distinguish the prohibited images well enough. A number of women left the room in the middle of the film.

When it was finished, one man explained to me once more that there are parts of the funeral that women cannot see. I invited the women who had left to come back to the room and apologised for my mistake. They accepted my apology, but warned me, ‘You should show these films to someone who knows first. You have to screen it to an older man who participates in 'culture' and he will tell you what women can and cannot see. There were images there that we cannot see and we almost saw everything. If we hadn't left the room, we would have seen everything.'

When a man began to explain to me that 'women go to the funeral but they stay hidden', I complained that neither he nor the other men in the room had helped me to skip the prohibited images, to which he replied, 'I knew there were images they cannot see, but I thought maybe they wanted to watch it so I thought, let it play . . .' This is an important comment that challenges the argument that male secrets are a means to control women. It illustrates how the observance of the prohibition is not something men try to impose on women, but rather that women are free to choose to ignore or respect it. In fact, the majority of my friends choose to respect it.

192 After this screening, I realised the extent to which I had underestimated the power of the aije, and I began to learn which images in the films were prohibited so I could give women the joy of watching the films without causing distress. Since my female friends had enjoyed watching the non-prohibited parts of the films, I invited the men to watch Funeral Bororo with me in order to decide what I could show women. I organised a screening event with this purpose and announced it on the community's loudspeaker. I invited the knowledgeable men to attend the screening and decide what I could show to my female friends. Many men attended this screening, and it was decided that this film should not be projected to women in its entirety. Men told me there are very few images that are safe for women in Funeral Bororo and since

I am not knowledgeable enough to properly distinguish safe from unsafe images, I thought that thereafter I should not risk showing it to my women friends.

Because there was such great concern about the images of the aije and other prohibited images of the funeral (for example, the cleaning of the bones) among women, I asked them, 'Is it the same thing to see the aije live and see them in film?' 'Yes, because we cannot see them, so it is the same thing', Vitalina argued. Fortunately, although they prefer not to see the aije, overall, they were interested in watching the films, even if they occasionally made them sad.

Recent films such as the Fantástico featured people that they knew, and my friends were sad after watching the funeral of someone dear to them.

193 This screening was particularly moving. For the first time, I thought about the emotional implications of screening a film about the funeral. When some of my students told me the film had made them sad, I imagined myself in their position, watching a film about the funeral of someone I loved. That screening stressed the value of

Renato Rosaldo's (1989) critique of anthropological approaches to the study of funerals that underplay the emotional experience of the subjects involved in the process. Nonetheless, because my friends had also enjoyed watching it and told me they would also like to see the other recent reportage of the Bororo funeral, which was shot in

Tadarimana in 2005, we agreed to watch it on our next class.

As soon as I entered the classroom and announced that we would watch a film, one of the women asked, 'Have you separated the prohibited parts?' 'Yes, I watched it before class and marked the points where I have to pause and tell you to close your eyes'. Before this screening, I had done my homework, so we had no problems with images of the aije. This time, the discussion centred on their critique of

TV Globo; they criticised the broadcaster for diffusing their secret images. One of the students reported that the Bororo who understand about ‘culture’ were offended when they saw those images on television. Paulinho Ecerae Kadojeba, who is the filmmaker in the village, also complained about the diffusion of these images. He was unhappy because he helped the TV crew during the shooting and said that the elders still blame him for the broadcasting of the men’s secret.

The screening of Edgar Teodoro da Cunha's Rituais da Vida (2005) took place at my house in the village when I projected the film to my

194 closest friends. I took the opportunity to separate men and women so I could discuss the issue of the aije with men in more detail. When it was the women's turn to watch the film, they insisted that I be careful not to skip anything other than the aije. They were excited to see as much as they possibly could. However, I stressed that it would be a dangerous business to attempt to see every possible image because they could encounter the aije by accident. It was a playful event. Daniela was saying that when she decides to die, she will see the aije. Jordana added that if she catches a terminal disease, she will finally be able to see the aije. Everyone was laughing at their jokes and people played around saying I had planned the screening with the intention to kill them. We laughed out loud about what was supposedly my attempt at serial killing!

Figure 17 - Women covering their faces to avoid seeing the aije in the film.

The screening with the men had a much more serious tone. In the filmed interview, Kleber said, 'The men's secret should not be filmed.

195 Women are also going to university and they may end up seeing it. The women who saw the aije paid with their lives. This is the most sacred part of our culture.' Moved by my astonishment at the importance of this prohibition, I said, 'Everything changes in Bororo culture, but the power of the aije appears to remain the same. Why? I don't understand'. 'There are certain things that you do not have to understand', Kleber replied. 'My mother always says that I should not deal too much with the aije . . . everything we do here impacts upon the world of the dead as well, and they also take care of us. When we do not perform rituals properly, we pay for it, not only the women, us men also have things that we need to respect.'

Perhaps Kleber was right and I should accept that ‘there are certain things that we do not have to understand’. Although I do not think I ever understood the secret of the aije, I sought means to interpret the significance of this prohibition. The aije turned out to be so powerful that it seemed impossible for me not to study it. The intensity of the aije prohibition was the most significant insight generated by the film screenings. The 'presence' of the aije on film touched the immediate audience in each screening and a wider audience of indirect spectators who commented, evaluated and judged my facilitation of this presence through the film screenings. It was through a combination of the use of film in research and immersed participant observation beyond the context of the film screenings that the insight into the significance of the aije was generated. Through participant observation I was exposed to the informative village talk that surrounded my facilitation of the

196 screenings. The vignettes below illustrate the impact of ideas about the aije outside the specific context of the screenings.

A warning

On another hot afternoon, I walked to a friend's house to buy ice cream. There I met one of the missionaries, Jeremias, who asked my friend to remove an embedded insect from his foot. During the dry season, we had many such insects (bicho de pé, or cuiege as they say in

Bororo) and it is common practice to exchange the favour of removing them. I told Jeremias that I needed to use the church's microphone to announce that I was going to screen a film that evening and that I would be waiting for him to open the church for me. I also wanted to use the loudspeaker to remind women to bring pieces of cloth (as suggested by a male friend) in case the aije appeared onscreen. As I was explaining to

Jeremias what I wanted to do, Laurinda, a woman from the Bokodori

Ecerae clan, interrupted the conversation and said, 'There are people who are not happy with your film screenings. This is what I heard. You should screen films about the funeral somewhere else. Here, we know how the funeral works. People are unhappy with these screenings.' By that time, maybe because I had been in the village for quite a while, I was getting a little impatient with the Bororo and the many demands that I never seemed to be able to fulfil. So I replied, 'I put a lot of effort into finding these films and bringing them to the village. Plus, you always complain that people do their work here and never bring it back for you

197 to see and I am bringing these works back to you. So really, it is very difficult to make you happy.' And I left. Despite my angry outburst, I became worried about the ethical implications of the screenings and went to speak to one of my good friends.

Some friendly advice

Simone was working at the school canteen preparing snacks for the pupils' afternoon break. I was worried about what Laurinda had said and I explained to Simone what had happened. Having heard the story,

Simone advised me to stop the screenings. She explained that if something happened to one of the women who attended my screenings, people would blame me, 'just as they did with Aivone'.

Aivone Carvalho Brandão, the missionary anthropologist who is very dear to many Bororo, asked some people to craft an ornament to be displayed at the Centre of Bororo Culture that she was creating in collaboration with the missionaries. Some elders were rumoured to be unhappy about the crafting of the ornament without the ritual prescriptions required by the spirit who owns it. Sometime after the ornament had been put on display, a truck full of Bororo people crashed and about six people died. The driver was rumoured to be drunk, but many people blamed Aivone. In one of my visits to the village prior to my doctoral fieldwork, I had heard people explicitly saying that 'Aivone killed

Bororo people'. Some people even told me they intended to sue her. At the time, I found it interesting how they were mixing two different cultural

198 logics to account for the event: Aivone was accused of having killed the

Bororo by not observing traditional ritual prescriptions, so they wanted to take her to a brareda court!

These events posed the question of whether I should stop the screenings, but fortunately I managed to finish the experiment without any problems. Film elicitation was a remarkably productive method for, through the potential of the film medium, it generated a powerful emotional response among the Bororo that asserted the continuity of the significance of the aije in contemporary life. In what follows, I draw on my participant observation in Bororo funerals to examine the prohibition of the aije in more detail.

Funerals As Experienced from Within the House

The first time I attended a funeral, I was not yet aware of the strength of the aije as a prohibition to women. ‘Be careful with the aije’ was the most important recommendation that Dona Neusa made to

Jordana and Daniela before we left the house to travel to Tadarimana.

She was worried because we would arrive in that village on Friday afternoon, the second day of the final three days of the funeral cycle.

‘You two are too curious! You know how Bororo people are. You will arrive there and the aije-doge will already be around. Be careful!’ Dona

Neusa strongly advised her daughters to respect the family of the deceased as well as the aije prohibitions: ‘You have to take food and

199 coffee’, ‘Make sure that when you arrive, you take coffee and tobacco to the house of the deceased. You have to show respect!’

Tadarimana is about a four-hour drive from Meruri. We travelled during the night and at around 3:00 a.m., we had an accident. Kleiton was driving when halfway there I started to smell petrol. I told Kleber and

Kleiton that I was concerned about the smell, but they did not think there was any need to worry. But a few kilometers further on, the engine gave up and Kleiton pulled over to the side of the road. As soon as the car stopped, the engine caught fire whilst we were still inside the car. Kleiton got out quickly and Kleber, although he was stuck by the seatbelt, also managed to get out, followed by Jordana and Daniela who jumped through the front seats. I got stuck. I was trying to get out of the car through the back, but I could not push the front seat so I could exit the car. I was very alarmed. Thinking that the car could explode at any minute, I cried, ‘I’m stuck! I’m stuck!’ Kleber looked at me from far in the high grass and ran to pull me out of the car. Kleiton came from the other side and took me out through the driver’s door. I ran away from the car and gave Kleiton my water canteen so he could extinguish the fire. We were all relieved to be safe and I can affirm that the experience brought us closer together.

After that, Kleiton had to ride back to Meruri and find a way to take the car for repair. Kleber, Jordana, Daniela and I had to decide what to do. I was particularly scared after that event. I was not sure that we should continue travelling and I thought about going back to Meruri with Kleiton. But Jordana said, ‘Let’s go. I didn’t go through all of this not to arrive in Tadarimana for the funeral!’. Kleber also wanted to go, so

200 Daniela and I accompanied them. We got a ride in a truck that was going to Primavera town where we took a bus to Rondonópolis, followed by a taxi to the village.

When we arrived, we made for a Badojeba clan house in order to meet our relatives. It was not situated in the village circle to the west, in the direction of the sunset, as it should have been according to traditional Bororo lore. Rather, it was one of the houses scattered around the village and outside of the classic circle. Starting in front of the Ecerae door in the men’s house in the centre of the village, the Badojeba house was reached via the street leading out of village plaza on the Tugarege side towards the south of the village. On that street is a medical post and a primary school on the right side, and a house of the Pastoral da

Criança (a Catholic institution dedicated to children) on the left side that people referred to as ‘the bakery’. Beside the bakery, there is a straw marquee where people hold parties and political meetings. The

Badojeba house for which we were searching was round behind this marquee.

In the house, we were welcomed by Jurema, who told Kleber to lodge us in the bakery. The bakery building is made of concrete, unlike our relatives’ house, which is made of straw. It also has a bathroom, whereas the ‘bathroom’ at the Badojeba house is in the woods. Dona

Neusa had been right. The aije would indeed come to the village that day. Jurema warned us to leave our stuff in the bakery as quickly as possible so that we could come back to the house before the aije appeared. Women say they should not see even the aije’s shadow because if they do, they will fall ill.

201 Jurema also implored Kleber to take good care of the young

Badojeba boys who were going to see the aije for the first time. Exactly as described in the Enciclopedia, Badojeba boys would see the aije before other boys because the Badojeba are the village chiefs. The ceremony of the aije not only marks a boy’s sexual maturation, but is also a means through which a boy is prepared to perform men’s work for both subsistence and ceremonial activities. The boys are challenged to prove their courage as they are threatened by the aije. Therefore, it is the duty of clan relatives to protect them. Aware of such duties, Jurema asked

Kleber not to allow men to go too far when initiating their boys.

We women went to the bakery, whilst Kleber went to the village centre to greet the cultural leaders. Whilst getting dressed before heading back to the Badojeba house, Jordana and Daniela started quarrelling. Daniela complained that Jordana had taken too long to shower. ‘Now we have to stay here with no food because the aije are already around.’ We rushed to Jurema’s house and Jordana told me that she was ‘too curious’. ‘My eyes seek the aije even though I know it’s not good to see them.’ Jordana told me that Kleber was advising her and her sister to wear a cloth over their heads to avoid seeing the aije.

But she was reluctant to leave the bakery with a cloth over her head. ‘I’m not wearing that cloth. They will laugh at me. They think that they can make fools out of us.’

Whilst we were talking inside the bakery, Kleber went outside and saw that there were no aije around, so we ran to Jurema’s house. We stayed there all afternoon whilst the aije were making a commotion outside. I wanted to go outside, so I asked my ‘cousin’ Gilmar to go with

202 me, but he was reluctant: ‘It’s too messy.’ Gilmar is an interesting character: he is a man, but he has assumed all the work performed by women. He cooks every day and takes care of children, and he has no interest whatsoever in going outside to participate in the aije business even though he has already been initiated. He said that he was afraid of the agitation and committed instead to helping his mother to cover the house doors, windows and every single hole in the straw walls that might allow women to see the aije.

Because I am a brareda, I could go to the village centre with

Kleber to watch the early stages of chanting. The girls stayed at home watching soap operas. When I came back to the house, I also watched

TV with them and listened to the sounds of the aije outside. When I heard many aije passing in front of the house, I went to watch them. I saw men and boys yelling, imitating animals and swinging the bullroarers. Gilmar called me from inside and asked me to come to the kitchen. ‘Please, do not say anything to other women. It is a sacred secret that women shouldn’t know about.’ I assured Gilmar that he did not need to worry. ‘I already read about it in the books, and I’m not going to say anything’. A woman can never say that she has seen an aije and many Bororo women were commenting on the fact that I, the brareda, had seen them. The aije were in the village from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening. Towards the end of the day, the aije went away and we could only see men and boys covered in mud.

People continued to perform chants and ceremonial duties leading up to the final burial of the deceased. We women could then join the ceremony in the men’s house. Women joined men in chanting,

203 but they were not involved in the painting and ornamentation of the bones, and they should not see it either. Men used straw mats to cover the bones and also gathered around the deceased’s bones in such a way that women are protected from seeing this process. The final tears over the deceased’s ornamented skull is enabled by a straw artefact that covers it from the view of women, who can then embrace it and say goodbye. After the painting of the bones in the baito (men’s house), they closed the bakité (a straw basket into which they put the decorated bones) and carried it around the village plaza one last time before taking it to the dead man’s house. Whilst we were still at the baito, the chants were coming to an end, and some people were already saying, ‘Okay, it’s over, it’s over.’ The village had been mourning the dead man for three months. During that time, they could not listen to music nor hold parties. They did not celebrate Christmas and the New Year, which they usually do, on account of the funeral. Some people were therefore impatient for it to end. The chants continued for a while at the dead man’s house. The bones stayed there for the rest of the day, and in the early morning, the bakité was buried definitively. The next day, the whole village was listening to music and preparing to throw a party whilst we were preparing to head back to Meruri.

Rides in Bororo transportation are not usually safe, as I had learned on our outbound journey. During our return, we travelled for about four hours in the pickup of a truck under the rain. The rain was heavy and the wind sharp, and many of us shared various things to cover ourselves. Daniela, Jordana and I were hiding under our tent. Later, when

I was back in Meruri, I became sick. I woke up feeling unwell. I had a

204 headache, sore throat and a very strong cough. Dona Neusa was worried and angry at Kleber for allowing me to get exposed in such a way. She urged him to ask the missionaries to lend us a car in order to take me to the hospital. I went to the hospital, where I was given medicine, and I got better. Nevertheless, the women were convinced that it was all caused by the aije. Dona Neusa reasoned, ‘Why were

Daniela and Jordana fine and only you got sick?’ Obviously, only I got sick because only I had seen the aije.

The Aije Prohibition at Work

Other friends of mine were also convinced that I had become sick because I saw the aije. At that time, I respected their belief but found it amusing to think that it was the aije and not the heavy rain that made me sick. Despite my scepticism about the power of the aije, every woman to whom I told the story assured me that I had fallen ill because I had seen the aije. However, I was still unaware of the strength of this prohibition. I knew women were not allowed to see the aije, but I did not know just how afraid of the aije women actually are. It was only through my experiment with feedback screenings that I fully came to realise the power of this prohibition. Before that, however, I had an interesting encounter with the aije on my second experience of attending the funeral.

On this second occasion, I arrived in Tadariama a week before the final three days. The day after I arrived, I saw that some men were going

205 fishing. I thought they were the aroe because one of them was wearing a pariko (the Bororo headdress) and they were playing pana (a wind instrument made of three big cabaça gourds) as well as the ika, a flute, as described in the Encyclopeadia. The next day, when they returned from the fishing expedition, women were already scared of them. One of my friends came to visit me in the bakery in the morning and she said she was already scared because the aroe-doge (the many aroe) were about to arrive. Women were telling each other that it was time to stay inside.

Immediately after lunch, I was at Jurema’s house when we heard the noises that announced the arrival of the aije. Gilmar closed all the doors and windows and began to cover the little holes in the straw house with cloth. The aim was to prevent any woman from seeing the aije by accident. All the women in the house went inside and when a little girl of about four years old was stubborn and stayed outside, people told her to get in immediately. We heard the noise of the aije again and Gilmar said

‘Can’t you hear Janielle, come inside, right now!’ She was being taught to fear the aije from a very early age. The aije passed in front of our house playing ika and pana and then headed to the baito, the men’s house. After around twenty minutes, Gilmar opened the house again and announced that the aije had gone away.

When it was possible for women to walk around the village, I went to the bakery to speak to Leila Souza, another researcher who was staying in Tadarimana. We spent the afternoon talking about bakaro, the

Bororo word for myths and legends. My conversations with Leila were very inspiring. We were caught up in conversation so when I wanted to

206 head home to Jurema’s house after dinner, I could no longer do so because we heard the noise of the aije. Leila and I had talked about trying to see and research the aije together. We thought maybe as two people, we would be able to protect one another. However, when I heard the aije, I decided to stay in the bakery with her. I was too scared to challenge the prohibition to walk home. We closed the door and stayed inside looking at the aije through the keyhole.

When the first group passed in front of our ‘house’, I saw the aije bullroarer. I had seen pictures of it in the Enciclopedia Bororo but I was impressed by its size. It is much, much bigger than in the pictures. After the first group of aije had passed, it was already dark. When silence fell, we decided to go outside to brush our teeth. I also thought that I could already run home. When I left the bathroom, we heard chants again and

Leila saw a big group of men in front of my ‘house’ who were coming towards us, so we entered the room again. I thought out loud, ‘I think I won’t be able to go home’ and Leila added, ‘If you have the courage . .

. I wouldn’t . . .’

I was faced with the decision as to whether or not to walk across the street to go home. As women, Leila and I shared a concern with the transgression of that male cultural boundary. We both felt vulnerable enough to be a woman in that situation. Nevertheless, the fear that held us was not only based on our womanhood, on our sexed body. Gilmar, a man who performs the daily work of a woman, also preferred not to join the ceremony of the aije. What united us with him in our choice not to participate in the ceremony was a feminised position regardless of our biological sex.

207 Based on his fieldwork among Brazilian travestis, Don Kulick (1998) has argued that sexual identities are not defined according to people’s anatomical sex but rather by a person’s activity or passivity during the sexual act. He demonstrates how amongst the travestis, if a man is the active partner in a sexual relationship with another man, he is not considered a homosexual. Rather, it is the passive man who is viewed as a homosexual or as a woman. I heard many stories of heterosexual men who had had sexual encounters with other men among the Bororo.

Similar to Kulick’s case, these men, as long as they were active in the sexual act, were not considered homosexuals. Similarly, the boundary that stopped Leila, Gilmar and I from encountering the aije was not fundamentally an anatomical boundary.

Despite any possible speculation about the reasons that stopped

Gilmar from seeing the aije, it is still problematic to claim that Leila and I remained inside the house simply because we are women. Such claim would lead us to the trap of believing that women always speak from the position of ‘woman’ (Strathern 1988). Leila and I are very different women with contrasting power positions in the field. Although we are both

Brazilians, we are different in terms of race and class, and we also occupied different positions in relation to Bororo politics. We were both aware of our differences, and we often talked about how they influenced our field experience.

In spite of our differences, we felt close as fellow ‘outsiders’ and as women, and we were both frightened. Our fear of the aije could be partially explained by the fact that we were occupying a feminine position in the field at that particular time. Other women anthropologists,

208 such as Sylvia Caiuby Novaes and Renate Viertler, have attended the aije ceremonies and were given access to the prohibited events. In their case, their ‘whiteness’ was more significant than their gender. Both anthropologists accessed the village through the missionaries and the

FUNAI, and their official links to these powerful institutions placed them above Bororo law. But Leila and I were different. We were accepted as researchers through an invitation of Bororo cultural leaders and we were therefore ‘less official’. This made us more vulnerable, more ‘woman’ because we were not above Bororo law; our position in the field was not officially legitimised by a powerful colonial institution. Although we were aware of our middle class privileges in relation to the Bororo, we felt that our power position was not strong enough to take us to the village plaza in the midst of the aije ceremony.

Sitting inside with Leila, I recalled how my first days in Bororo villages were marked by fear and anxiety derived from numerous accounts of violent behaviour, sexual or otherwise, which were reported to be the result of alcohol abuse. By the time I was participating in this funeral, I was already comfortable with the Bororo in Meruri and was less shocked when I heard rumours of violent behaviour. Even though people in Tadarimana were less familiar with my presence, I was beginning to feel safe in Tadarimana given the great care that I was receiving from my Badojeba relatives. Even so, I was afraid to leave the bakery and go home alone facing the chance to meet a large group of men, possibly drunk, whilst embodying the aroe or the aije. I was scared to challenge the aije prohibition, and I wondered if my act of leaving the house would

209 be interpreted as an offence, a transgression that could require punishment.

However, my fear was not much related to the fear that Bororo women have of encountering the aije. I was mostly afraid of sexual violence. I wondered if Bororo women felt this same fear in relation to the aije and if the fear of sexual violence was the real ‘truth’ hidden behind the secrets of the aije. My association of the secrets of the aije with sexual violence was not entirely unfounded. Studies of male secret cults in

Amazonia and elsewhere stress the possibility of gang rape as a disciplinary measure against women who attempt to access ceremonial male secrets (Gregor 1987).

I also thought about the aredu baito, the women of the men’s house, an institution that has officially been eradicated as a Bororo cultural practice (cf. Viertler 1990), but which I believe still exists in Bororo villages today, although it takes a different form. The aredu baito were women who provided sexual services to single men in the baito (men’s house). These women rarely chose to become aredu baito, and they were required to have sex with many of the single men. These sexual relationships were not violent, and the aredu baito enjoyed a series of privileges among the men, who were obliged to give them a variety of presents (Crocker 1969). Anthropological accounts of Bororo social organisation also make clear the threats of approaching the men’s house uninvited. Lévi-Strauss writes

‘Women are prohibited . . . to enter the men’s house. Married women, that is to say, for unmarried girls take good care not to go near it; they know too well that if they stray too near, either from inadvertence or from the wish to provoke, the men may dart out and rape them.’ (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 213)

210

Narratives of rape abounded in my fieldwork. This is a problematic statement, and I am aware that I am not in a position to properly analyse the theoretical and ethical implications of such statement. However, without getting caught in precipitate moral judgements of the practice, I would like to address these narratives as a means to illustrate their impact on my own experience of fear and my subjective association of the fear of the aije with a fear of sexual violence. A common theme of gossip in the village involved a sort of ‘collective rape’ where multiple men allegedly had sex with one drunk woman. The woman in question was different each time the rumours circulated. But the story always revolved around similar events: after a night of heavy drinking, a woman was found naked in the woods where the men had ‘lined up to have sex with her’ (fizeram fila nela). So the notion of collective rape, although perhaps theoretically inappropriate, was not distant from my personal engagement in the field. Hence, my fear of sexual violence was not merely a product of my imagination and whatever prejudices I had taken with me to the field.

However, my Bororo friends never speak about sexual violence as a possible threat of the aije. So was I merely exporting a Western conception of sexual violence as a means to discipline women to Bororo villages? I was not willing to put this to the test. As a brareda, I thought that by leaving the house and confronting the men, I might place myself in a liminal space outside of Bororo law that would give them licence to abuse me. So I decided to stay in with Leila. When we heard loud noises, voices and men screaming, we began to spy through the keyhole again.

211 It seemed as if they had thrown a stone at our door. Suddenly, they threw another one, and a bigger one was thrown a little while later.

The noise of that one was really loud, strong and scary. I was impressed with the efficiency of their acts as a means to discipline us. We were definitely scared. We wondered if they had seen us leaving the house to brush our teeth and had purposely decided to scare us. Confronting my anxieties, I started to wonder why the aije prohibition is so effective, whilst intra-moiety marriage prohibitions seem to be broken without too much fear. I continued to wonder if the fear of sexual violence has anything to do with the strength of the aije to discipline women. I concluded that the threat of sexual violence, real or imaginary, was definitely a means to discipline me.

After a scary and thoughtful night, I headed to Jurema’s house the next morning. I told the women that I was not able to come home to sleep because the aije were out and I was scared. All the women were laughing at my ordeal. I entertained them by telling them that the aije had thrown things at the door to scare Leila and me (we found out in the morning that the ‘stones’ were actually lemons!). Women were laughing out loud at my experience. It was actually an experience that helped me to bond with them. Jurema then said, ‘You could not have left the house.

They would have certainly taken you! I am glad you stayed inside!’

Whatever the threats of the aije, women agreed with me that my best choice was to stay inside.

212 Theorising Men’s Secret Cults

In spite of the contrast between my own subjective association of the fear of the aije with sexual violence and Bororo women’s views on the matter, the fact that they cannot see the aije was inevitably an invitation for my investigation of this curious ethnographic fact. ‘Why can women not see the aije?’ was a question that haunted me during my fieldwork and which continues to fascinate me. I am not alone in the interpretive quest for the meanings of men’s secrets. Men’s secret cults have long been a subject of debate among anthropologists who sought to explain this puzzling exclusion of women.

The view that men’s secret cults exclude women from crucial phases of ceremonial life is charged with assumptions that continue to inform the discussion of gender in Amazonia and elsewhere. The idiom of exclusion recalls the early debates of the anthropology of gender and the investigation of whether relations between men and women in

Amazonian societies are hierarchical or egalitarian. In examining this debate, Joana Overing (1986) takes issue with the gender hierarchy embedded in Western epistemological constructs stressing its inapplicability to Amazonian contexts. She discusses the gender imagery and hierarchical values associated with the categories of ‘nature’ and

‘culture’, noting how they underpin a series of other assumptions that inform the analysis of female subordination. Two of these assumptions will be useful for our purposes: (1) that ‘the political’ is universally the most valued sphere of human activity and (2) that the ‘private/public’ and the

213 ‘domestic/political’ dichotomies are universal contrasts and hold the same value as in the West (Overing 1986:139-41).

Overing goes on to argue that the assumption that centralises the political as a superior sphere of activity informs conceptions of inequality and hierarchy and emphasises the idiom of coercion and control. By the same token, McCallum (1994) notes that the analysis of secret cults in the

Alto Xingu has been heavily compromised with such notion of control. In this sense, men’s secret cults are theorised as a strategy to manage and control female fertility through the coercive threat of collective rape.

These modes of analysis manifest a particular Western preoccupation with the association of gender with a structure of power (McCallum 2001,

Strathern 1988). Such a view derives from a concept of gender identity which presumes a social construction of gender over a previously existent

‘sexed’ body. The notion of gender identity has been strongly debated to the point of collapsing the sex/gender distinction (see Bulter 1990).

Marilyn Strathern criticises the very concept of gender identity by looking at the naturalistic ways in which group membership is assigned to women and men. For Strathern, the Melanesian person (which is itself also a theoretical construct) is ‘partible’ and contains both male and female elements, which are emphasised differently within relations. Strathern’s theory of gender generated a productive comparative debate between secret cults in the Amazonian and Melanesian region, which sought to explain men’s secret cults beyond the idiom of control and domination

(Gregor and Tuzin 2001).

In a comparative analysis between men’s cults in these two

214 regions, Hill (2001) challenges the symbolic association between what he calls ritual hierarchy and the domination of men over women. Analysing the ways in which different groups manage the contradiction between male controlled ritual hierarchy and the relative gender equality in secular social relations, he notes that the interdependence of men and women in ordinary life disputes any easy assumption of male separateness. Although Hill’s analysis focuses on relations and interdependency instead of control and exclusion, the notion of ritual hierarchy remains problematic. The very notion of ritual hierarchy assumes that men’s ritual work is superior to that of women. Deriving insight from what I observed among the Bororo and building on Lea

(1994), I argue that Bororo women are not excluded from the ceremony of the aije. They are fundamental actors in the ceremony as they cook the food of the aije, who in fact pause for a midday meal. This is a safe time to cross the village when the aije are visiting. The notion of ritual hierarchy is questionable precisely because of the analytical hierarchy that is placed between men and women’s ritual work. Implicit in the notion of ritual hierarchy is the assumption that cooking the food for the aroe (including the aije) is unimportant.

Other analytical approaches to the study of secret cults question the notion of exclusion by stressing the significance of women’s reproductive capacity in ritual symbolism. Comparing men’s secret cults in Amazonia and Melanesia, Pascale Bonnemère (2001:31) argues that these rituals and the initiation of the boys draw on a symbolism of rebirth, where the reproductive capacity of women is taken as a ‘model for making the boys grow’. In both regions, she identifies analogies between

215 men’s rituals and the processes of human gestation. The difference in these rituals, she argues, are linked to the contrasting ideas that each society elaborates to account for the origin of the world and the place of humanity in relation to other living species.

Experimenting with Strathern’s relational approach to gender,

Hugh-Jones reviews his own previous work and analyses a myth told by the Barasana of Northwest Amazonia in a different light. This myth narrates that men owned certain flutes, which were stolen by women and subsequently recaptured by men. A shaman woman, ‘as a palm- tree womb, gives asexual birth, first to two manioc-tuber daughters and then to flute sons who menstruate like women’ (Hugh-Jones 2001:252).

The shaman woman offers her sons a ‘gourd of beeswax and powdered coca that she keeps between her legs’. Her sons refuse to eat it, because they believe it belongs to her, just like her genitals. In refusing to eat what is offered, these men lose the capacity to menstruate, so the shaman woman gives them a ‘lesser gourd’ that is used in initiation rites ‘along with the flutes and which underwrites their claim to be “menstruating”’

(Hugh-Jones 2001:252). In comparison with other myths involving theft,

Hugh-Jones proposes an understanding of theft as one form of exchange among others. In doing so, he challenges the idea that the theft of the flutes signals a theft of instruments of domination and any theorisation of

‘culture’ and ‘society’ as exclusively male domains. He compares the transactions in Barsana initiation rituals with those of the Sambia people, as analysed by Strathern, and stresses the androgynous nature of musical instruments and the entities that generate them.

216 In contrast to the cases analysed by Bonnemère (2001) and Hugh-

Jones (2001), the myth of the origin of the aije has no relationship with the origin of the world or the establishment of ‘culture’. It also has no trace of gender imagery. Yet, through an analysis of the myth, Sylvia Caiuby

Novaes (1994:186) argues that the aije can be read as a ‘metaphoric expression of Bororo sexuality’. Below I translate the version of the myth collected by the author during her fieldwork in 1972. As her informant

Kewai explained:

Jokurugua [member of the Paiowe clan] was walking around waterlogged places when he found a beautiful small frog. He found it funny and put him into a small shell – atu. He put water into the shell and placed the frog there. He looked at it every day. The frog grew and grew until it didn’t fit in the shell anymore, then Jokurugua put it in a bowl – ruwobo. The frog grew even more and was put in a pot – aria. And the pot soon became full of it.

So Jokurugua took the frog out of the pot and left it outside. He took care of the animal and it was soon very big and round. Jokurugua’s siblings and relatives were invited to see the animal.

‘This is a water animal, black, full of spots!’ some would say.

‘No, it is not. This is an aroe, a spirit!’ others would reply.

But the animal didn’t want to stay with his owner because Jokurugua wasn’t rich. He didn’t have a pariko [the Bororo headdress] because Jokurugua’s clan, the Paiwoe, didn’t have ornaments and chants that were up to his standards.

Therefore, Mano Kurireu, the great chief of the Aroroe clan, took the aije from the Paiwoe. Mano Kurireu told everybody to paint and ornament themselves, to wear their parikos and go to the place where the animal was living.

They made cigarettes with leafs, they made a fruit juice (cajá). They took sweet water and a pot full of acuri wine.

Then, Mano Kurireu started to speak and play instruments, and the animal started to move his body, he moved here and there. They played and played and took the animal to the Bororo [the village’s central plaza]. Then the animal screamed, while everybody sang in the men’s house.

They thought about what they should do with the animal. So Mano Kurireu said, ‘Let’s make the aroe souls visit this aije.’

217 And the animal told his owner Mano Kurireu, ‘When any of you die, you can call me and I will come.’

The aije [Kewai continues to explain] doesn’t belong to the dry, to the wind. He only lives in the deep waters, this is his place. That is where one has to call him, offering him cigarettes, fruit juice and wine. When he arrives, the water moves and then it stops.’

The aije also said that women and children could not see him. The woman that sees him will have her belly grow, her legs will be loose and she will be creeping on the ground.’

The narrative does not make any reference to gender imagery or to a possible antagonistic relationship between women and men. The aije, even in myth, are the affair of men and only men. The exchange relations that are expressed in this myth are not those between men and women. There is no explicit reference to theft or exchanges around fertility and human reproduction. However, through a compelling interpretative exercise, Caiuby Novaes (1994) argues that the aije represent Bororo society through a regularisation of sexuality.

In her analysis, she takes into account the three meanings of the term aije for the Bororo: the bullroarer, the terrifying spirits that live in the mud and the men who ritually represent this entity. Drawing on her field notes and interviews, she demonstrates how prescriptive forms of exchange between moieties are enacted in the ritual representation of the aije. As she recounts, it is always a man from the Aroroe clan of the

Tugarege moiety who asks a man from the Bokodori clan of the Ecerae moiety to go to the swamp to collect the bullroarers. These will then be given to another man of the Aroroe clan, who will then give them to a man of the Badojeba Bakorokudu clan of the Ecerae moiety. According to the author, this reenacts the mythical event in which Bakorokudu, the cultural hero of the Badojeba clan, received the aije bullroarer from

218 Baitogogo, the cultural hero of the Aroroe clan. The Bakorokudu man then gives the bullroarers to his potential brother-in-laws, i.e., the men who will marry Badojeba women. These men will ornament the bullroarers and ritually represent the aije (Novaes 1994:189).

Building on her first-hand observation of initiation rituals in the field, she also identifies aspects of the performance that resonate with sexual imagery. For instance, she argues that the performance of the aroe- maiwu (the deceased’s representative) includes sticking the bullroarers into the ground of the aije-muga (the place of the aije), and such act can be interpreted as a sexual metaphor. The author also examines the names of the heroes of the origin myth of the aije comparing the version of the Salesian’s Enciclopedia Bororo with that of her informant. In her informant’s version, the hero is called Jokurugua; in the Enciclopedia’s version, his name is Robugu. Translating these names from Bororo to

Portuguese, respectively, she understands the former to mean ‘turtle’ and the latter to be ‘the one who found the frog’. She then points out that both the frog and the turtle expel liquids and stresses that in the myth’s narrative the aije grew incessantly. In both senses, she detects an

‘allegoric reference to sexual life’ and further supports her argument by citing Crocker, who affirms that ‘the bullroarers . . . imitate the cries of these monsters and which the Bororo explicitly compare to giant phalluses (Crocker, 1985:106 in Caiuby Novaes 1994:192).

Caiuby Novaes also looks at the spatial representation of femininity and masculinity in the village. The aije-muga is a strictly masculine place, she argues, and is opposed to the mano-pá where the

Bororo make the cylinders with buriti palm leafs for the mano races in

219 which women also participate. She also stresses that the Bororo make both male and female versions of both the mano wheel and the bullroarer. Thus, ‘if on one hand there is a clear opposition between men and women in Bororo society, each of these terms actually contain, in itself, its opposite’ (Novaes 1994:193, my translation).

Although this metaphoric interpretation also stresses androgyny and sexual imagery, we also note in Caiuby Novaes’s account that what is ritually emphasised is the exchange between moieties and not between men and women as such. Yet, although mythically and ritually the Bororo emphasise moiety exchange rather than male/female exchanges, the secrets of the aije do create difference of a gendered kind. It separates men and women according to their embodied capacity for social reproduction (cf. McCallum 2001). In analysing the aije as a marker of gender difference, I would like to move away from a representational approach that seeks an explanation of the aije in a metaphorical level. Instead of interpreting the aije through a metaphorical framework, I shall attempt to ‘think native thought’

(Viveiros de Castro 2013:489) and take Bororo women’s explanation for their fear of the aije seriously.

Encountering the Aije: ‘Seeing’ as a Gendered Skill

My own motivation to fear the aije was based on the assumption that sexual violence was the real punishment that enforced the observance of the prohibition. Regardless of my theoretical position and

220 my wish to move away from theorizing hidden ‘truths’ the Bororo are unaware of, or consciously or unconsciously hiding, I experienced fear of the aije as a fear of sexual violence. Yet my friends never spoke about their fear as such. They are actually afraid that they might become sick or die as they claim to have been the fate of a number of stubborn women. Not only am I a brareda, I was also a stubborn woman and left the house with the specific purpose of seeing the aije when they were running in front of it. Three days later, I caught bronchitis. My friends were convinced the bronchitis was caused by the aije, whilst in my view I was sick because I had travelled for four hours in the back of a pick-up truck under heavy rain. Although I continue to think that I became sick because of the heavy rain, I would like to adopt a symmetric approach to my interpretation of the aije. In advocating a symmetric relationship between the ‘native’s and the anthropologist’s discourse, whilst also acknowledging their fundamental differences, Viveiros de Castro

(2013:487) writes

‘The question then becomes whether to disqualify [the ‘native’s] conceptions as errors, dreams or, illusions, in order then scientifically to explain how and why the “others” cannot explain them(selves) scientifically, or to promote native conceptions as more or less continuous with science, fruit of the same desire to know, which unites all humans.’

As applied to my own ethnographic case, I should take their explanation for my sickness seriously and also move my analysis away from any assumption that sexual violence is the hidden truth behind the fear of the aije, in spite of how I have experienced such fear. In doing so,

I would like to explore

‘. . . what would happen if we refuse the epistemological advantage of the anthropologist’s discourse over that of the

221 native: what if we took knowledge relations as modifying, reciprocally, the terms they relate or, rather, actualize? This is the same as asking: what happens when the anthropologist’s objective ceases to be that of explaining, interpreting, contextualizing, or rationalizing native thought, but instead begins to deploy it, drawing out its consequences, and verifying the effects that it can produce on our own thinking? What is it to think native thought? I say “think”, here, without worrying whether what we think (namely, other’s thoughts) is “apparently irrational”, or even worse, rational by nature’ (Viveiros de Castro 2013: 489).

So how can I ‘deploy’ and ‘draw out the consequences’ of Bororo ideas about the aije? A good starting point is to listen to what they have to say. I transcribe two women’s explanations of why they fear seeing the aije.

‘. . . the men use medicines from the woods, and you don’t know these medicines, you don’t know how to make an antidote for these medicines. They are different in every village. For example, the aije from Perigara come to Meruri, the Bororo from Meruri don’t know how to make an antidote for the medicines from Perigara. This is because the roots in Perigara are very different from the ones of our savannah. You wouldn’t know . . . and then what? You see the aije. You see a man and you think, ‘Ah, that is so and so’, but then you die. Because you saw him. But he is using medicines. And then you start to feel sick, your relatives run around trying to find an antidote, but nothing works . . . and then a relative will ask you, ‘Who did you see?’ and then you say who you saw and your relatives speak to the man imploring him to give you an antidote. If he accepts, you live. If he doesn’t, you die. Because he will say, ‘Didn’t you tell her? Didn’t you teach her? She wanted to see me, she saw me.’ (Neusa, Meruri 2012)

‘A very long time ago, people say that the aije existed, and they used to come to the village. But then, it was too difficult to bring them every time, so the aije left the material to bathe with that we can’t see. I heard it like this, I can’t explain it correctly, because I don’t know I can’t see . . . but there are the materials that they left. When the men leave to take this material, they use medicines, but we can’t see and if we see even a shadow, we can feel very sick. Then you have to know who you saw in order to ask that person for the antidote. We have to find the specific person, otherwise there is no way, there is no doctor, there is no nurse, there is nothing to cure us. The only thing that cures us is the medicine that the man whom you saw (who was representing the aije) was using.’ (Vitalina,

222 Meruri 2012)

These quotes demonstrate that women are not afraid of the aije because of a threat of sexual violence; they are afraid of the power of the medicines that men use to protect themselves whilst encountering the aije. Taking these explanations for the fear of the aije as valid knowledge claims, the task then is to investigate how Bororo people’s understanding of the aije transforms the knowledge claims that I can make. Building on Bororo ideas concerning the aije, I would like to explore the consequences of these ideas for an interpretation of the aije as a marker of gender difference among the Bororo. As I discussed in previous chapters, the manifestation of continuity among the Boe is expressed through the resilience of the gendered person as a significant referent in the lives of contemporary Bororo. I argued that gender difference is constituted through a division of labour which organises the mediation of the village’s relations with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others.

Whilst women inspect dangerous and apparently ‘human’ babies before they can be fully incorporated to the village plan, men mediate the village’s relations with the aije and the aroe when unmaking dead bodies and guiding their souls to the village of the dead. Part of men’s learned life skill then is to make these essential medicines that enable them to properly ‘see’ and engage with these entities.

When they visit during funeral times, the aije spirits assist Bororo men in the ritual celebration of death and the proper ceremonial transfiguration of the deceased’s body into a macaw (arara) and thus an ancestor (aroe). Throughout ritual hunts and fishing trips, Bororo men

223 and the aije also guide the dead soul in its journey towards the village of the dead. This ceremonial duty—the unmaking of dead bodies (through the cleansing of the bones from the remaining flesh, disassembling the skeleton) and the transfiguration of the corpse into an ornamented aroe—is one of the fundamental responsibilities of being a man and it is perhaps for this reason that the boys are initiated into adult life during funeral times. Being a male Boe involves the capacity to handle the threats of the unstable limen between life and death. To become sexually mature is to become aware of the ceremonial duties involved in relations with the dead. Bororo women claimed to be scared of discovering the men’s secret given their lack of preparation to produce the medicines that protect men in their relations with the dead. A man explained to me that once ‘men used to manipulate the corpse with sacred medicines. But the new generations don’t know how to keep secrets, so the Bororo are no longer teaching the young how to make medicines. They want to teach them, but they are afraid to ruin the medicine by teaching it’.

The men’s secret is powerful precisely because it is a secret. When

I asked if secrecy was what guaranteed the potential of the medicine he replied, ‘Yes, and this is important because you can’t deal with the corpse without these medicines. Women cannot see the aije because they are too sacred and too strong. A man can handle seeing the most powerful sacred matters, but women can’t, they may faint’, he explained. ‘But why are women unable to see the aroe?’ I insisted.

‘Because it is a spirit, it is like the wind. For example, if we have a corpse here, there is the spirit, but we can’t see it. Only the pajé (shaman) can

224 see it. Then, he warns the men, the ones who understand his warnings.

When everything is prepared; they call the men to give them medicines.

Then it is all right’. ‘So then the men can see the aroe?’ ‘No, only the pajé sees it, but in order to protect themselves, the men use the medicines.’

Here my informant and I were not speaking about the same thing. Whilst he was speaking of the aroe as the spirit of the deceased, when I asked the question I actually wanted to know why they cannot see the men when they impersonate the aroe, which is the case with the aije and with the cultural heroes men become at funeral times. As my women friends also stressed, ‘The men who manipulate the body in the funeral are chosen men. It is not everybody who can do it.’

Hence, the idiom with which the Bororo explains the prohibition of the aije is not an idiom of exclusion, punishment or sexual violence. It is an idiom of protection against threats of contacting death. Women cannot handle the strength and ambiguity of the ceremonial transition between life and death. They cannot ‘see’ the aije because they ‘are not strong enough to face the sacred’. For the initiates, seeing the aije is to experience the ambiguity of the transition between life and death in its fullest sexual expression. It is when they see they aije, and when it threatens them playing the bullroarers and conducting the new soul to the village of the dead, that the boys discover the secrets of sexual maturation.

The encounter with the aije is also an encounter with the souls of the ancestors: the other aroe. Once a Bororo person dies, she travels to the aldeia dos mortos (the village of the dead). The village of the dead is divided in two realms, the Itubore towards the East and the Bakororo

225 towards the West. The soul can choose to live on either side of the village, and it visits both sides going through frightening encounters with the aije and other souls (Albisetti & Venturelli 1962:101). During this terrifying transition, the dead relatives comfort the new soul and advise her that the threats of the aije are actually made by the men who are tricking her.

As recounted in the Enciclopedia, the soul then identifies these men calling them by name. When they hear their names, the aije/men are unmasked, and their tricks are no longer effective (Albisetti & Venturelli

1962:101). Upon arrival at the village of the dead, the soul receives the ornaments with which living people have decorated their bones.

Bororo men have the distinctive responsibility of performing the ritual transition of the deceased’s body and soul from the village of the living to that of the dead. This is certainly no simple task. It requires care and skill, and it is certainly not an activity that can be performed by any person whatever. The relation of Bororo men with the dead is far more immediate than the hygienic outsourcing that characterises funerals in the so-called ‘West’. I am sure that many non-Bororo men would not be strong enough to confront Bororo people’s sacred matters and properly manipulate a corpse according to the moral requirements of Bororo souls. The activities of such transition involve the exhumation of the body, the cleaning of the bones of the flesh that the waters did not wash away during the three months that it remained in the river, the painting and ornamenting of these bones in the men’s house, not to mention the knowledge of the medicinal roots and the mythical knowledge required to accomplish funeral ceremonies.

226 Whilst men become the aije and the aroe in funeral times, they are simultaneously involved in the process of celebrating life through the reproductive initiation of the boys and through liberating the deceased from its putrefied body, turning it into a living macaw, an ancestor (aroe).

In this process of such close contact with death, men use medicines that they learn to make throughout their process of maturation and their many powerful encounters with the dead, who constitute, at least under traditional circumstances, quintessential ‘outside’ others. This obligation on men to deal with ‘outside’ others, contrasts with the obligation on women to be primarily responsible for the articulation of marital alliances and the encounter with powerful ‘inside’ others who reach the village through a woman’s womb. As I argued in Chapter 2, babies are not a biological extension of the self. Rather, they are rather dangerous ‘others’ who need to be properly examined before their incorporation in the village as full humans through the name-giving ceremony. The processes involved in the production of new people, particularly in its early stages

(pregnancy and birth) are very dangerous to men, who cannot see women’s menstruation, the birth itself, or any object used to assist delivery. If men see any of these polluting processes and objects, they can become blind (Viertler 1976). By the same token, the mediation of the village’s relations with ‘outside’ others such as the dead, are dangerous to women. Whilst it is primarily the work of women to make human bodies and to ensure their health, it is the work of men to

‘unmake’ human bodies/corpses, to clean the bones removing any trace of flesh, disassemble the skeleton, paint the bones and ornament the skull so it is transfigured into an ancestor, a macaw.

227 In short, at the two extreme points of the human life cycle, the Boe person is gendered through a division of reproductive labour that mediates the village’s relations with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ others. This then finally provides me with an answer to the question that haunted me throughout my fieldwork, that is, why can women not see the aije? On the basis of the materials that I have presented in this chapter, I would argue that it certainly cannot be explained as a consequence of the political domination of women by men, but rather should be understood as a means of maintaining the crucial division of reproductive labour that forms the basis of all Bororo life and which continues to play this constitutive role despite the many radical transformations of more superficial features of Bororo society and culture that have taken place in recent years.

228

CONCLUSION

In the context of the diffusion of digital cultures in indigenous villages

(Canevacci 2013) and the increasing participation of indigenous people on the Internet, this ethnographic study has sought to explore the relationship between gender difference and cultural change among

Bororo people, focusing in particular on their relationship to digital culture and the history of their audio-visual representation. It has demonstrated how Bororo people's experience of change is marked by the enduring significance of two cultural prohibitions, which have proved to be fundamental elements in the constitution of the Boe gendered person.

Making use of audio-visual research methods, this study has also sought to address the issue of cultural change from a gender perspective. As such, it seeks to build upon studies that take gender as a central theoretical concern in the region (notably, McCallum 2001;

Gregor and Tuzin 2001) and the few research approaches that have addressed the issue of gender difference when analysing indigenous engagement with translocal cultural processes (i.e., High 2010; Walker

2013). In addition, this study noted that the majority of studies dedicated to examining the elaboration of gender difference in Amazonian contexts have remained focused at the village level.

If studies centred on gender have been scarce in the so-called

Amazonian region as a whole, there has been even less attention to

229 gender issues in relation to the Gê-Bororo speaking groups of Central

Brazil. In this regard, the work of Vanessa Lea (1992, 2012) is a notable example of the few studies among the Gê that benefit from a gender perspective. Lea's work questioned the long-standing devaluation of women's contribution to ceremonial affairs and the relegation of women to a value-laden periphery of the village associated with 'nature'.

Notwithstanding the significance of this contribution, Lea's analysis remains confined to the village level in the same fashion as those of the

Harvard Central Brazil Project that she so competently criticised. In a recent ethnographic study conducted among the Panará, Elizabeth

Ewart (2013) provides an innovative approach on this regard. Focusing particularly on the classical Gê theme of dual organisation, the author investigates social transformation from an 'internal' perspective. Rather than discussing change as acculturation with its implied sense of cultural loss, Ewart examines how the Panará logic of dualism remains a fundamental principle with which they interpret the world. Thus, historical change becomes apparent in the transformations of content of the categories, but it does not eradicate the logic of dualism itself. Although gender difference is not a central concern in her analysis, Ewart's ethnography offers interesting findings that resonate with my own.

Moving beyond previous theorisations of Gê dualism, which paralleled centre/periphery, men/women and culture/nature dichotomies in indigenous villages, she demonstrates how the village centre is mostly associated with transformative processes and change, whilst the ring of the houses signals continuity. Similar to other ethnographic accounts

(McCallum 2001, Walker 2013), Ewart's work confirms men's primacy in

230 building relationships with the 'outside'. Like Lea, she argues that, given the association of clan membership with village space and the houses in the village circle, women can be associated with cultural continuity.

Although I have been specifically concerned with analysing change in my own ethnography, my fieldwork also strongly signalled continuity. In this sense, I have also found that among the Bororo, men are mediators of the villages' relationships with the 'outside' (engaging with spirits and traditional enemies as well as with 'modern' goods or 'others'). However, although my insight into the resilience of the gendered prohibitions became apparent mostly through my relationships with women, I argue that continuity is not associated with women exclusively, but rather with the constitution of the Boe gendered person.

Taking McCallum's (2001) concept of gender as an embodied capacity for action, the resilience of these prohibitions can be attributed to their fundamental role in guiding the moral agencies of male and female persons. Thus, I agree with Ewart's arguments that what marks a fundamental difference between village ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ is not an association of the centre with 'culture' and periphery with 'nature', but rather they are spatially related by different modes of temporality, where the ring of the houses and women are associated with continuity.

Building on her insight, I wish to stress the importance of examining the epistemological value we tend to attribute to continuity and change, particularly in relation to the theoretical history of Central Brazilian villages. Although Bororo women, as the owners and transmitters of eternal mythical essences, are closely linked to the village ‘periphery’ and continuity, this should by no means imply an association of women

231 with 'nature'. By the same token, men's close relationship to the 'outside' and social transformation should not be paralleled to an association of men with 'culture'. Moreover, men's mediation of the village's relationship with the 'outside' should not be too readily interpreted as a privilege or as an expression of control over women, as 'culture' controls 'nature'. As my ethnography demonstrates, the resilience of the gendered prohibitions expresses the enduring significance, or the continuity, of the moral agencies that constitute the Boe gendered person, in both male and female forms. Furthermore, as I have noted, the strong presence of the media in Bororo houses, particularly the Internet, has brought multiple

‘others’ to the interior of the houses. As a consequence, women and men’s relations with the outside are increasingly transformed.

In conducting fieldwork, I extensively used audio-visual research methods, and these have fundamentally shaped the conclusions that I have reached. This study provides further evidence of the knowledge- generating potential of film in ethnographic research, which goes beyond the task of gathering ‘data’ or illustrating conclusions previously arrived at by other means (Henley 1998). Through different processes, it was the use of film that provoked my insight into the significance of moiety endogamy and the secret of the aije as constitutive elements of

Bororo subjectivity. Although the resilience of moiety endogamy as a meaningful prohibition initially became apparent through participant observation, it was through the filmmaking process and the resulting visual ethnography that I was able to properly assess its impact on contemporary village life, along with the moral dilemmas of Bororo youth.

232 In the case of the aije spirits, the impact of the use of the medium of film was even more explicit. The emotional responses elicited by the representation of men’s secret ceremonies on film were so powerful as to redirect my enquiry entirely. Indeed, my accidental use of film elicitation methods in connection with films about Bororo funerals was much more informative of the significance of the prohibition than my participant observation during the funerals themselves. In effect, the strength of the fear of the aije became most apparent through the use of film. By facilitating the presence of the aije outside the context of an actual funeral, the use of film also unexpectedly united the prohibitions. It led me to think more explicitly about the relationship between the aije secret and moiety endogamy as constitutive elements of Boe subjectivity and therefore to seek connections between them, and to reflect upon the insights that I could draw from using film in approaching each one of them.

In the case of moiety endogamy, I used film to further explore an insight I had gained through participant observation. Following my failed attempt to involve my principal women research subjects in a collaborative project of self-representation by directly handing the camera over to them, it seemed reasonable to engage in an alternative form of collaboration by exploring the theme through the making of an ethnofiction. Whilst the women concerned had shown little interest in operating the camera, they were a little more inclined to become

‘actresses’ in a film. Both the film subjects and I were unsure about whether the film was reality or fiction, but despite this uncertainty, the filmmaking process itself was a useful heuristic device which brought to

233 light key insights into the reality of Bororo people. In conjunction with participant observation, it also enabled me to participate in various village debates about the filmmaking process, in which people would further examine and comment upon the moiety endogamy issue.

Throughout the filmmaking process, it became apparent that instead of being an example of 'exchange of women', marriage among the Bororo could well be interpreted instead as an 'exchange of men'.

Whilst in relation to the aije, women always advised me to speak to older men who would have the necessary knowledge to teach me, the moiety endogamy prohibition was something that they themselves were very keen to explain to me. In the film In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right, the major involvement of women in the issue is very clear both because the majority of the characters are women and through some of their explanations. As narrated by one of the characters in the film, mothers used to choose a spouse for their daughters, even if nowadays there is greater acceptance of the idea that women may choose their own partners. In this sense, the film emphasises women's major responsibility in managing relationship with 'inside' others in relation to the moral rules of reproduction. It also demonstrates how the transgression of the moiety endogamy prohibition is more widely accepted than the revelation of the secrets of the aije, perhaps as a result of the diffusion of discourses on romantic love, both through the media and evangelisation. Nonetheless, despite the association of 'wrong' marriages with ideas of modernity and cultural change, we can learn from women's narratives and performances in the film that the failure to combine Tugarege and

234 Ecerae elements in the production of people is still a source of great shame.

Through the corporeal account enabled by the medium, the film evokes women's primary role in the management of marriage and reproduction as well as their advocacy for the proper combination of

Tugarege and Ecerae elements in the production of kinship. It also brings into view the tensions between generations of women and the moral dilemmas attached to the transgression of the prohibition. This corporeal account takes moiety exogamy beyond the abstractions of the conventional study of kinship and approaches more closely the ways in which it is lived out in the field. The film is particularly useful in evoking the role of flirtation as a feature of Bororo marriage. It is not possible to affirm that this has always been the case, but through the film it is certainly possible to affirm that nowadays, flirtation and desire are major components in the seeking of a spouse. In fact, it is often the case that desire and flirtation, or what the Bororo now refer to as 'love' in

Portuguese, is a major driving force for the transgression of the moiety endogamy prohibition.

In relation to the aije prohibition, the medium of film also played a major role, albeit in a very different way. The experiment with film elicitation sessions further challenged the thesis that men’s secret cults are a means to control women and that the threat of sexual violence is a means to discipline them (a point already made by McCallum 1994).

Bororo women are very fond of watching television and films. This was certainly not the first time that they had watched a film, so they were very much aware that images on the screen were mere images.

235 However, even if the possibility of rape was ruled out during the screenings, women were still very scared of the images of the men's secret. They did not see the aije on the screen as a mere representation of these beings. Rather, they attributed agency to the images. For them, the images were the aije and not a mere representation of them. Thus, even though men were not greatly concerned with the behaviour of women during the screenings, women themselves were careful not to allow themselves see the images of the aije and other elements of the men's secret, since they believed that seeing these things could be very harmful to them.

Moving beyond the thesis of ‘exclusion’ and ‘control’, I sought to interpret the aije by taking seriously what the Bororo have to say about them. ‘Control’ was never an issue in Bororo people's narratives about the aije. In discussing the avoidance of any encounter of women with the aije, neither men nor women have spoken about men controlling women. On the contrary, whilst in women's discourse the main issue was the fear of the potentially harmful consequences of seeing the aije, in men's explanations, the main reason for hiding the aije from women was that they were 'too sacred and too strong' for the women to bear.

Hence, the men needed to protect the women from seeing the aije and were in charge of postmortem manipulation of bodies during the funeral.

By taking Bororo people's explanation seriously and without trying to uncover an underlying logic that they themselves are not able to perceive, I interpreted this prohibition as a means of protecting women from seeing the aije, thereby avoiding the possibility of them developing

236 kinship relations with animals and spirits and thus move to the village of the dead.

Building on theories of perspectivism, I also argued that men are trained throughout their lives to see the aije and properly distinguish humans from non-humans. By contrast, women, being mostly responsible for the generation of life in the village of the living, are not skilled enough to be able to see the aije. Not having learned the lifelong skill of distinguishing humans from non-humans, women who encounter the aije spirits might not be able to properly assess who is really human. Men on the other hand, from the moment of their initiation and throughout their participation in numerous funeral celebrations, learn how to properly distinguish humans and non-humans through a deep understanding of traditional knowledge as well as of the sounds and beings who inhabit the forest.

The two prohibitions that I have analysed in this thesis are constitutive of the Boe gendered subjectivity and both guide male and female moral agencies in the proper management of the unstable transitions between life and death. Male and female persons observe the prescriptions of moiety exchange through a gendered division of labour that ensures the reproduction of social life. Whilst women have a major responsibility in the making of bodies and inspecting babies as dangerous ‘internal’ others, men are in charge of the crucial task of unmaking dead bodies and guiding the 'souls' to the village of the dead.

As such, the Boe gendered person is a fundamental moral referent that informs Bororo multividual experience. Although I agree with

McCallum (2001) that the notions of discourse and gender performativity

237 are difficult to apply to gender relations at the village level, the presence of the communicational metropolis inside the village enables alternative ways of thinking and constituting male and female subjectivity. Even though this presence does not eradicate the fundamental elements that constitute Boe subjectivity, new ideas of gender are also part of Bororo people's village life. Many of my women friends claimed to be feminists and complained about certain things that they considered male privilege (i.e., holding driving licenses and being able to bring their non-

Indian wives to live in the village). Another interesting phenomenon that would require further research is the emergence of a number of feminine homosexual men who live in Meruri. Perhaps this is another indication of men's primary relationship to the 'outside'. By contrast, there are no openly homosexual women in Bororo villages. Homosexuality is clearly associated with modernity by many of my friends, who often claimed that Meruri, as a more ‘modern’ village, is a more welcoming place for the homosexuals to expose their sexuality freely.

Therefore, although the prohibitions I have analysed indicate the resilience of the Boe gendered subjectivity, the endurance of these prohibitions signal a moral referent with which Bororo multividuals negotiate with 'outside' discourses of gender, modernity and cultural change.

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