Acting Translation Ritual and Prophetism in Twenty-First- Century Indigenous Amazonia

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 161–191 Acting translation Ritual and prophetism in twenty-first- century indigenous Amazonia Carlos Fausto, Museu Nacional–PPGAS Emmanuel de Vienne, Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense–CNRS; Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative This paper focuses on a prophetic movement led by an Amerindian from Mato Grosso, Brazil, in 2006. This man created a radically new liturgy and cosmology by combining elements borrowed from local shamanism and mythology, Christianity and TV shows, among other sources. He managed to convince entire villages to take part in spectacular healing ceremonies and gathered a huge number of followers. One of these ceremonies was extensively filmed by indigenous filmmakers, making it possible to examine the micromechanisms of this cultural innovation, and thus address with fresh data and a new approach the old issue of Amerindian prophetism. We propose here the concept of translating acts to describe this indigenous practice of transcreation, giving special attention to the multiple semiotic mediums through which it is enacted. Keywords: Amazonia, shamanism, prophetism, messianism, translation, ritual, pragmatics “He said he was an Old Christian, born in the city of Silvis, in the reign of Algarve . and, confessing, he said that about six years ago, a gentile people from the hin- terland emerged with a new sect named Santidade [Sanctity], one of them being called pope and a gentile woman Mary of God” (Furtado de Mendonça [1591–92] 1922: 35). And so confessed Fernão Cabral de Taíde before the Inquisitor Furtado de Mendonça during the First Visitation of the Holy Office in 1591. The slavehold- er Cabral de Taíde had hosted the movement led by a certain Antonio, an Indian raised by Jesuits in the Tinharé mission in Bahia, who, according to other adepts of the movement, proclaimed himself pope—or God: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.008 Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne 162 The principal said he was God and Lord of the world, and there is another gentile among them whom they called Jesus and a gentile woman whom they called Holy Mary. (Confession of Cristovão de Bulhões, Furtado de Mendonça [1591–92] 1922: 137) Known as Santidade do Jaguaripe, the movement brought together Indians, people of mixed blood, and some Whites, combining many different elements into its rites. The movement had a strong political connotation, as many confessions make clear: And they worshiped it [the idol] saying that their God would soon come to free them from the captivity they found themselves in, and would make them the masters of White people and the Whites would become their captives, and those who do not believe in that abomination they called Sanctity would become birds and other beasts of the forest. (Confession of Gonçalo Fernandes, Furtado de Mendonça [1591–92] 1922: 111) Since the beginning of the colonization of the Americas, we find similar references to the emergence of indigenous charismatic leaders announcing a profound socio- cosmic transformation, conceived both as the overcoming of the human condi- tion and as the inversion of asymmetric relations between Amerindians and White people. In Lowland South America, references to such movements appear in the second half of the sixteenth century along the Brazilian Atlantic coast (Monteiro 1999: 1009–15)—as in the case of the Santidade do Jaguaripe (Vainfas 1995)—and accompany the history of indigenous peoples in the region until the present.1 These movements have been interpreted in a variety of ways—as messianic and millenarian, as resistance to colonialism, as political utopias, as syncretic cults re- sulting from the encounter of two cosmologies, or as structural permutations of a mythic world facing new historical situations. Less attention has been given to the actual process of appropriating, translating, and creating a new cultural form, particularly in regard to the pragmatic dimensions and the interactive frames of this process. A more recent approach has come to see these events as providing a privi- leged entry for the investigation of ritual communication and cultural transmis- sion in a broad sense. These studies focus particularly on the propagation of such movements through the analysis of their communicative dynamics, both within and outside the ritual setting. 1. Famous cases discussed in the literature include, among others, the Guarani of Paraguay and Brazil from the late sixteenth to early twentieth centuries (Melià 1987; Nimuendajú 1987); the Arawakan peoples of Selva Central in Peru in the seventeenth century (Métraux 1942; Santos-Granero 1992; Varese 2006); the Upper Negro River Tukanoan and Arawakan peoples in the nineteenth century (Hugh-Jones 1994; Hill and Wright 1988); the Tikuna of the Solimões river in the twentieth century (Nimuendajú 1952; Oliveira Filho 1988; Goulard 2009); and the Ge-speaking Canela of Maranhão in the twentieth century (Melatti 1967; Carneiro da Cunha 1973). For the Guianas, Whitehead refers to an apocalyptic upheaval in Trinidad and the Orino- co region at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but also states that “no millen- nial tradition emerged until the nineteenth century, unlike in Peru or coastal Brazil” (1999: 897). From the mid-nineteenth century on, we witness the proliferation of the Aleluia prophetic movement among the region’s Carib-speaking peoples (Butt Colson 1960, 1971, 1994/1996; Thomas 1976; Andrello 1993). 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 161–191 163 Acting translation Stemming from Boyer’s analysis of the Fang epic genre (1988), which links the asymmetries of knowledge in public declamation with its repetition (and thus with its definition as a tradition), this line of inquiry has also drawn on certain develop- ments in ritual theory (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Houseman and Severi 1998). Severi, in particular, has contributed to the conceptualization of the kind of chi- meric complexity that characterizes ritual enunciation in prophetic movements. Analyzing late-nineteenth-century Western Apache messianism, he shows how a pragmatic counterintuitivity was generated through the condensation of different and contradictory identities in the person of the “prophet” (Severi [2007] forth- coming). His earlier notion of a paradoxical enunciator (Severi 2004), in continu- ity with his analysis of Kuna shamanism, is also meant to explain how prophetic innovations “capture imagination” and rapidly spread beyond their original setting. From a more epidemological point of view, Pierre Déléage (2012, 2013) has investigated the ritual construal of a prophetic authority and the specific mediums employed for the spreading of the prophet’s message. Most anthropologists who have investigated such movements in South America have had to rely on historical data and secondhand accounts, making it difficult to produce a fine-grained analysis. Moreover, only successful movements at a certain stage of their development (when their choreographic, musical, and linguistic elements had more or less stabilized) appear in the written sources. The actual and initial process of invention is mostly absent in these studies. This article aims to fill this gap by peering into the microdynamics of an Amerindian prophetic movement. Here we examine a recent case that erupted in the Upper Xingu region, in Brazil, in 2006, when a man in his forties started curing people through radically new ritual techniques, claiming to have received his powers from a direct encounter with God-Sun. Self-designated “Master,” this man also prophesied the end of witchcraft (i.e., the end of disease and death) and the end of the world. We were not present during the movement’s apogee, but we have at our disposal six hours of video recording of one of its climatic moments, and a number of later interviews.2 This material makes possible a minute description of the ritual actions 2. The filming was made by Takumã, Mahajugi, and Ahukaka, members of the Kuikuro Cinema Collective, who were trained by Fausto in filmmaking and have been close collaborators for the last ten years. The ethnographic data result from approximately two years of fieldwork among the Kuikuro (Fausto), and a year and a half among the Trumai (Vienne), both in the Upper Xingu. The Kalapalo and Kuikuro speak dialects of the same Southern Karib language (Meira and Franchetto 2005). Takumã Kuikuro and Yamaluí Mehinaku Kuikuro worked with us on the transcription and translation of the video recordings in Rio de Janeiro. Ahukaká Kuikuro collaborated on the transcription of the interviews made later with Manuá and his parents in the city of Canarana. Fausto has also interviewed two Kuikuro shamans who were protagonists of these episodes: Lümbu and Samuagü. However, in this text, we avoid using a posteriori discursive ex- planations of the episode in order to focus on actions. More apposite to our aim are the discussions we had with Takumã and Yamaluí on each of the main scenes recorded in the tapes, which gave us a firmer grasp of the actions and the backstage. (Takumã is not only the main filmmaker, but also Samuagü’s first-born son and is half-Kalapalo.) Clearly, there was no stabilized exegesis at the time, and Takumã was also uncertain about some of Manuá’s innovations. Further data were also collected through informal 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 161–191 Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne 164 in all their dimensions: speech, gestures, bodily orientation, the gaze, the manipu- lation of objects, and so forth. It bears witness to the hesitations, uncertainties, misfires, and repetitions that characterize the birth of a new cosmology embedded in a new ritual form. Our case also has the advantage of being closer to failure than to success. The literature on prophetism and related phenomena has had no alter- native other than to privilege the great movements that passed the test of history, and to dismiss the more discreet outbursts that remained unnoticed.

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