Xará and I had become friends during his visits to the Pirahã village of Posto Novo, where I worked from 1977 to 1985. We had talked at length about the Pirahãs’ need for a reservation. Xará had renewed his career within the FUNAI and had risen to a place where he had the authority to organize an expedition to identify a reservation for the Pirahãs and Parintintins (the first step in a three-stage process of demarcating Indian land). He sent an inquiry to Waud, who studied Parintintin culture, and me to see if we could go to Brazil to help as interpreters, since we were then the only outsiders known who spoke these languages. The FUNAI, Xará said, could pay for our expenses within Brazil, but we would have to cover our international travel. Waud then called me and suggested that Cultural Survival, an organization founded by the late Harvard anthropologist David Mayberry-Lewis for the preservation of traditional ways of life for endangered groups, might be willing to pay my way down. Mayberry-Lewis responded to my request immediately and assured me that Cultural Survival would be delighted to purchase my ticket to Brazil for such an important mission.
I had been trying since 1979, to no avail, to get the relevant officials interested in protecting the Pirahãs’ land from the growing threat of incursion from the outside. I had appealed to four separate FUNAI directors in Porto Velho (the brothers Delcio and Amaury Vieira, who served in succession; Apoena Meirelles, who actually visited me in the village to discuss the possibility; and a director I only knew by the name of Benamor), practically begging for the establishment of a reservation. Amaury sent a FUNAI employee in for two weeks in the early eighties to get a feel for the place, but then he was replaced. Benamor simply told me, “No one wants to live out there with those Pirahãs and their language. It sounds like they are crying all the time.”
I was excited to have the opportunity to travel the entire length of the Maici River, something I had never done, and to visit all the villages of the Pirahãs. There was so much I wanted to see and learn, including whether all Pirahã villages looked the same as the villages I had already seen and whether all Pirahãs spoke the same dialect and would understand my form of their language. During my first several years among the Pirahãs, I had spent almost all my time at Posto Novo, which lies at the river’s mouth. I had yet to travel to the other Pirahã villages because they were more remote and difficult and expensive to get to.
The FUNAI had invited me to come on this trip to serve as an interpreter. I was to translate their stories and answers for a FUNAI anthropologist who was interested in their traditional patterns and areas of land use. His job in turn was to interview all known Pirahãs along the Maici about the land and to then chart out what lands they used now and what parts they might claim as theirs traditionally.
After hours of travel, I arrived at Humaitá. I had to find a boat to take me to the Maici, so I caught a cab and asked the driver to take me the two miles to the banks of the Madeira. I could have walked there, but by this time the temperature was nearing one hundred degrees and I was hot and tired. Dozens of wooden-hulled, mostly unpainted and rickety-looking boats were at the dock. Not knowing anyone and being uncertain whether the FUNAI would actually reimburse me for the boat rental, I just asked who was available, hoping to get the cheapest ride possible. I approached two brothers who owned a precarious-looking wooden tub about twenty-five feet long. One was under the stern, as boat owners on the Amazon system often are, trying to fix a leak. The other brother was staring lazily from his hammock at me as I approached the banks, clapping my hands in the Brazilian equivalent of knocking where there are no doors.
“Olá” (Hello), I called out above the noise of boat motors, shouting boat mechanics, and children running around the bank playing and yelling.
“Olá,” he replied impassively.
“I wonder if you would be able to rent your boat to take me to the Maici River. The FUNAI will pay you when we arrive at the Maici.”
“But if the FUNAI is not there?” the fellow in the hammock quizzed me skeptically.
“Then I will pay you myself,” I promised him.
I didn’t know this man, but he said, “OK, we’ll take you.”
“Great. Let me have lunch and then we’ll leave.”
“Fine,” he responded.
I ran upstream along the bank and stopped at one of the dozen or so eating houses.
“Quero um prato feito, por favor” (I want a made plate, please), I announced to the heavyset woman behind the wide plank that served as the bar. A made plate is most commonly a large heaping plate of meat, beans, rice, and spaghetti, covered in yellow, Grape Nuts–consistency manioc meal.
“Você quer carne ou peixe ou frango?” (Do you want meat, fish, or chicken?), the woman asked.
“Todos” (All of them), I answered hungrily.
In less than ten minutes a steaming hot plate of oily food was put in front of me with a plastic bottle at the side full of tucupi, a yellow sauce made from cooked manioc juice with chili peppers. I ate the entire plate in about five minutes, washed it down with a liter of ice-cold Brazilian lager, Brahma, and paid about three U.S. dollars for it all.
“Obrigado,” I said perfunctorily as I headed out the door to the dock.
“Pronto?” (Ready?) the boat owner asked.
His brother was now out of the water and fueling the engine.
“Yes, let’s go,” I answered.
I walked up the narrow plank and tossed my two small bags on board. I took out my hammock and hung it in the main (very small) cabin. Then I went onto the prow.
“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked, uselessly—it would take what it would take and there was no other boat.
“If we go all night, we will be there by noon tomorrow.”
It was now about 3 p.m. The engine cranked over and came to life, putt-putting loudly.
“Embora!” (Away!) came the shout.
As we began to pick up speed, heading down the mighty Madeira, the still, hot air gave way to a refreshing breeze off the water. The effects of my trip, the meal, the beer, and relief to be under way made me suddenly sleepy again. I went to my hammock. The warmth, the breeze, and the comfort of the hammock had a predictable effect on me—I slept most of the voyage, except for a few minutes of lucidity here and there and a breakfast of hard crackers, sweet black coffee, canned butter, and some milk. During one three-hour period coming up the Marmelos River, I watched the beautiful dark waters go lazily beneath us, thinking again of how fortunate I was to be able to experience this dream world. The high banks of the Marmelos, formed of sandy earth, strongly contrasted with the thick mud banks of the Madeira.
We arrived nearly twenty-four hours later, true to the owner’s prediction. I awoke from a final doze to the sounds of animated talk from some Pirahãs on shore. No mistaking the Pirahãs when they were excited—they were loud and full of laughter and exclamations. My hammock was swinging gently as the boat slowed and pulled up next to another boat near the river path to a Pirahã village at the mouth of the Maici River. The other boat, already moored, was larger. I had expected perhaps two FUNAI employees to be waiting for me, but standing on deck staring at me were representatives of two Brazilian government agencies, an anthropologist and a cartographer from the FUNAI, and a specialist in land claims from INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform).
As soon as I appeared on the deck of the small vessel, the Pirahãs started shouting and calling my name. The brothers who had taken me there asked if they would be safe. “As long as you’re with me,” I joked (but they believed me).
“Hey, Dan. Where is Keren?” the Pirahãs asked.
“The boat she was on sank and sat on the bottom of the Maici. She drowned, I’m afraid.”
For about half a second the Pirahãs all gawked at me. Then they broke out in laughter. All the Brazilians watching this exchange stared in amazement.
“At first when we were ordered to wait at the mouth of the Maici for an American linguist, I was upset,” the FU
NAI anthropologist, Levinho, admitted to me. “Why should Brazilians wait for a gringo to interpret for them in Brazil? But now I understand. We have been here for three days and haven’t been able to understand or communicate one thing to them.”
We interviewed Pirahãs at each village about their concept of the land they were on, how they used it, if they thought of individual Pirahãs as owners of the land, and so on. Levinho asked the questions and I interpreted. From there we traveled slowly up the Maici, stopping at each Pirahã settlement we encountered. We took Kóhoibiíihíai as our guide, because his Portuguese was the closest to functional, in order to avoid missing hidden settlements just out of sight from the river. For each of the settlements of Pirahã (ranging from a single nuclear family to several families in size), the boat would pass the village going upriver, then turn with its engine off to approach with the current, and I would stand on the bow, yelling at the village in the Pirahã language, “It is Dan with some non-Pirahã friends. We have come to talk to you.” Then Kóhoi would add that no one meant any harm, that we had fishhooks to give away, and otherwise put people at ease. As Pirahãs I had never met stepped onto the boat, some of the men would speak with me excitedly. The women and children just stared at me from the bank or from their huts as I climbed the bank to the village.
After a week with the FUNAI team delineating the Pirahãs’ reservation, my job as interpreter was done. We had reached the Transamazon Highway, which I saw now for the first time. Since there were no Pirahã villages above the highway, FUNAI gave me a choice: remain with the boat for another two weeks while they descended the Maici slowly and then the Madeira to Manaus, or hitchhike back to Porto Velho on the Transamazon. I chose to hitchhike, so the boat let me off at the bridge over the Maici, a small wooden structure that looked totally inadequate to support the weight of the heavy trucks that regularly rolled over it full of logs or minerals, from the mining company Mineração Taboca, some two hundred miles to the east.
We had learned many things during this trip. The FUNAI cartographer learned on our fifth day that the Brazilian government’s map of the area, produced by aerial photography, was wrong. Over coffee one morning he said that we would not make the next village for two or more days at our current speed. This worried us because we were running low on food and fuel. I turned and asked Kóhoi if the next village was close or far. He said that the next village was Toitoi’s and that we would be there by noon. I relayed this to the FUNAI cartographer. He said, “Well, I’m not going to argue with a Pirahã about his own river, but if he’s right, the army’s map is wrong.” About noon we pulled up to Toitoi’s village. The cartographer looked at the map carefully. Then he realized that the central section of his map, representing the Maici between Kóhoi’s village and Toitoi’s village, had been inadvertently duplicated by the person who made the map for the army. This was a very important lesson for the Brazilian government.
For the Pirahãs and for me the results were even better. The Pirahãs now had an officially identified reservation. The long bureaucratic process of getting a reservation approved for them could now begin. Levinho and I talked for hours and hours about Pirahã culture. He was fascinated by the absence of creation myths. He tried very hard to get some from the Pirahãs, but could not. He was also fascinated by the absence of oral history and oral literature. Levinho was probably the first person ever to get me to think about how unusual this is. His enthusiasm was contagious. Eventually a friend of his, Marco Antonio Gonçalves, a Ph.D. student in anthropology from Rio, came to study Pirahã culture.
I met, and got to know the name of, nearly every living Pirahã. They were fascinated by me. They had heard of the white man who spoke their language, but most of them had never seen me. The children and women in particular stood openmouthed as I addressed them in Pirahã. At every village, I was invited to come back with my family and live among them. This was an attractive possibility, because I noticed that the Pirahãs farther upriver that I was now meeting made virtually no effort to throw pidgin Portuguese into their conversations. The Pirahãs downriver often knew Portuguese verbs, and when they spoke Pirahã with me, they tried to use these verbs, in an effort to help, no doubt. But their use of even a little Portuguese adversely affected my ability to learn natural Pirahã. I could see that by moving to a village upriver I would encounter much less Portuguese “static.”
So this trip seemed to be positive for everyone involved: the Pirahãs, the Brazilian government, science, and me.
10 Caboclos: Vignettes of Amazonian
Brazilian Life
Caboclos are by and large descendants of Amazonian indigenous peoples who now speak only Portuguese, are integrated into the regional economy, and consider themselves Brazilians rather than members of a tribe. The Pirahãs call caboclos xaoói-gíi (authentic foreigners; the suffix -gíi means “authentic” or “real”). Americans and other foreigners, including Brazilians from the city, are simply xaoóì.The Pirahãs relate better to the caboclos because they see them more often and because they and the caboclos share the same environment and many of the same skills of hunting, fishing, canoeing, and knowledge of the jungle.
Caboclo culture has impinged on the Pirahãs almost daily for more than two hundred years. It is a macho culture, not unlike the cowboy culture I was raised in. But it has another side, an aspect of stoicism, almost fatalism, that is hard to find in most U.S. subcultures.
The Pirahãs’ knowledge of the outside world is almost exclusively gained from their contact with caboclos. Americans and caboclos have very different values. And the Pirahãs see these differences, usually favoring the caboclo view because it is more like their own.
For example, Americans and caboclos see the human body differently. Caboclos are more uniformly judgmental about laziness and being overweight than Americans. In general, caboclos believe that working hard is a sign of health, good character, and stewardship of God’s blessings. If you are healthy enough to work, God must be watching out for you. Fat means corruption to most caboclos. Overweight people are lazy idlers who take more than they need for themselves. Hence, even among fairly well-off caboclos (and there are a few), there is a strong work ethic. It is common to find caboclos who never need to work again clearing their own fields, swinging a machete, or going into the jungle to search for products with their employees. These values are to some degree shared by the Pirahãs—leanness, toughness, knowledge of the jungle, hunting, fishing, and self-reliance.
To understand the Pirahãs’ view of outsiders and where I fit in, I realized that I would need to understand caboclos. But since I was not going to build a house and live among caboclos, my knowledge of them would have to come from occasional personal contact. And the most common contact with caboclo culture occurred during river travel.
One trip in particular stands out. I was taking a dentist and my cousin, who was trained to check vision and fit glasses, to visit the Pirahãs, to offer dental assistance and (free) eyeglasses. At the dock in Porto Velho, I saw a boat that I hadn’t noticed before. It was a large, newish-looking vessel with a sign that announced trips to Manaus and Manicoré, the latter a small town near the mouth of the Madeira. These boats were nearly the only means of long-distance transport known by the caboclo population of the Amazon River system.
I descended the riverbank, steep during this dry-season month of July, and walked the narrow plank onto the boat. I asked for the dono (owner).
A bare-chested, bald man about forty-five years old, five feet ten, approached and declared, “Eu sou o dono” (I am the owner).
Like all men working the Amazonian system, he was strong, and his skin was weather-hardened and tan. Like most donos, his body showed that he enjoyed easy access to food and drink. He was wearing white but soiled bermuda shorts and flip-flops—the ubiquitous footware of the Amazon.
“When are you leaving for Manaus?” I queried.
“A gente vai sair lá pelas cinco horas da tarde” (We are going to leave about 5 p.m
.), he answered politely and confidently.
On our way to town, I highlighted the pleasures of traveling by recreio on the Madeira River for my traveling companions.
“You guys are gonna love this! The breeze from the movement of the boat, the birds and wildlife, the jungle, one of the biggest rivers in the world, and Brazilian cooking!”
About 3:30 p.m., thanks to my prodding, we got to the boat and all of us crossed the plank, enthusiastic and joking. We did notice that several trucks were still being unloaded into “our” boat, but assumed that this work would be done soon and that we’d be under way as promised by five o’clock. After hanging our hammocks, we bought some ice-cold fresh coconuts, with straws in openings in their tops to drink their sweet liquid. Refreshed and relaxed, we talked about the upcoming trip, watching the stevedores toil in the waning sun, under their burdens of boxes, butane bottles, and bananas (tons of them) on their way to market in Manaus. We expected them to finish soon, because it was now after five. There did seem to be a lot of trucks, though—too many I thought to be unloaded in an hour, but that was OK. Being an hour or so late is common in the Amazon. Six o’clock came and went. I went to the dono and asked when he expected to leave.
“Daqui a pouco” (Shortly), came the jovial reply.
I informed my traveling companions. The dono said he would supply a free dinner to all of us. That was a good deal, I thought, because on these trips there was generally no dinner served the first night. Then I noticed something curious: no more passengers had come on the boat in all of this time, except for one lean, muscular, and quite drunk fellow, wearing a cowboy hat over his face as he snored in his hammock.
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