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Brazil

Page 6

by Heloisa Maria Murgel Starling


  With so many conflicting aims, the enmity between the Jesuits and the settlers soon came to the surface. Whereas the latter were ever ready to enslave the Indians as a part of their ‘righteous war’ against them, the former tried to protect their newly converted Catholics, appealing to the Crown for more effective measures to do this. This pressure resulted in the Royal Charter of 1570, which forbade the enslavement of Indians, except when motivated by a ‘righteous war’. The king had to constantly arbitrate in conflicts, with the Jesuits accusing the settlers of greed, and the settlers accusing the Jesuits of wanting to control the country.

  The Society of Jesus was, over time, to transform itself into a veritable economic powerhouse. Although initially it depended on the generosity of the Crown, the Jesuits gradually grew rich, renting out houses, leasing land, and controlling the lucrative trade in spices that were cultivated in the villages they controlled. Their hegemony was such that in the eighteenth century the Crowns of Spain and Portugal banned the Order. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and its colonies in 1759, from France in 1762, from Spain and the Kingdom of Naples in 1767, until finally in 1773 Pope Clement XIV abolished the Order. It was only to be restored in 1814 in the wake of the sweeping changes created by Napoleon Bonaparte. But that is another story. At the time of colonial expansion the history of the Jesuits was inextricably linked to the Indian peoples.

  LONG BEFORE CABRAL

  The colonial metropoles soon understood the strategic potential of the rivalries between indigenous groups, whether longstanding or recently provoked. For this reason, in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese made an alliance with the Tupiniquim while the French allied themselves to the Tamoios and the Tupinambá. Later, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch were to join forces with the Tapuia against the Portuguese. The Tamoio, the Tapuia, the Tupiniquim – whatever name the Portuguese had given the groups they encountered – had their own reasons for making these alliances, which they interpreted within the context of their customs. In the words of the Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade,86 ‘Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.’ Indeed, the native peoples already had their own societies, values, languages, customs and rituals.

  When Christopher Columbus landed in the Antilles in 1492, the islands were densely populated by the Arawak-speaking Taino people, who were soon to be almost annihilated by epidemics and inhuman treatment. These indigenous groups, known as kasiks in Arawak (corrupted to cacicazgos in Spanish), were subordinated to a tribal chief or cacique. In America a centralized political system existed where the caciques were the supreme leaders with powers over the villages and districts, which were also hierarchically structured. Unlike European countries, however, there was no body of administrators and no permanent army. All disputes were resolved by the chief, who summoned his warriors in cases of conflict.87

  As this model began to expand across the colony, it was given the name cacicado. The term referred to settlements that had a regional centre, public works, collective and agricultural labour, dwellings of varying sizes, a commercial network for the exchange of produce, and technical procedures for burial. There were many regions with differing hierarchical structures, but all these societies did have a faith and the rule of law, despite their values being very different from those of the Europeans. The geographical divisions of the modern era, which led to the creation of distinct nation states, were also based on the logic of colonization and ‘discovery’, with no respect for pre-existing borders. Thus today these people are generically known as Amerindians, because, despite their linguistic differences, they were united by cultural ties and by the continent that was later to be called America.

  The continent was named as a tribute to Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian merchant, navigator, geographer and cartographer who wrote about the ‘new lands’ to the west of Europe, and considered himself to be the first person to set foot in a land that had in fact been inhabited for approximately 35,000 years. Of this very distant past very little is known. It is known, however, that about 12,000 years ago milder temperatures led to the gradual separation of the two continents and to the ocean coming between them. For this reason the hypothesis most generally accepted is of a terrestrial migration from the northeast of Asia via the Bering Straits, from where the migrants gradually spread across the entire length of the American continent. A more recent, highly controversial hypothesis suggests that the first migrants arrived by sea and landed on the northeastern coast of Brazil. It is certain, however, that on the eve of the European conquest the differing social indigenous systems did not exist in a state of isolation, but were linked at both local and regional levels. There were also commercial networks connecting groups that lived in regions wide distances apart.

  The first of these immense areas was formed by the Amazon basin. Aside from the more florid reports fantasizing about a lost Eldorado and a land inhabited by the Amazons, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chroniclers provide us with some valuable information. By all indications there were intermittent occupations along the banks of the Amazon river, villages interspersed between uninhabited stretches of land. The villages varied in size and in the number of inhabitants. It is known that the largest of these extended along the river for as much as seven kilometres, and had a hierarchical system as well as political and ceremonial activities. The records also mention a wealth of natural resources, including an abundant supply of fish and agricultural products such as corn and manioc. In many of these villages the art of pottery was already developed, as in the Marajoara culture. Based on the island of Marajó, located off the coast of the present-day state of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon river, it prospered from 400 to 1400 CE. Its political systems varied widely. Records show the prevalence of cacicados, or chiefdoms, and groups of descendants formed by matrimonial alliances. Contradicting the official version of Brazilian history, violence was very much present from the beginning of the ‘encounter’, with the colonizers seizing ports and sacking villages, where they were received by warriors armed to the teeth, with fleets of canoes and poisoned arrows.

  Another area that is much studied today lies along the Xingu river, one of the main southern tributaries of the Amazon. In this region a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic but culturally homogeneous society emerged. It was non-migratory, based on fishing and the cultivation of manioc. Abundant natural resources meant that a large population existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which enjoyed regular interaction with other cultures, very different from the traditional image of these peoples as isolated groups who only made sporadic contact with outsiders. The political system of the Xingu people included a chief and different social groups with a remarkable degree of political autonomy.

  There was also a third area, bordering the Amazon Forest to the south and east: the grasslands of the cerrado.88 This was a vast area of scrubland dotted with bush, home to the Macro-Jê people. On that population fell a certain cultural myopia, distorted by the Andean viewpoint – with its great civilizations – but also by a lens of the Tupinambá, the Tupi-Guarani and the Portuguese who degraded these groups. Hence, for many years the Macro-Jê were described as ‘barbaric people’, who possessed neither villages, agriculture, transport nor ceramics.

  Actually, it was the coastal Tupi-Guarani who named the people of the sertão Tapuias, thus obliterating their individuality. However, the supposed marginalization of the Jê of the scrublands has been revisited in studies by major anthropologists such as Curt Nimuendajú, Claude Lévi-Strauss and more recently Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among many others. The Jê are no longer seen only as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but have become studied and acknowledged as a people who possessed a sophisticated economy and cosmology. There are records of horticultural practice in the region going back millennia, as well as of the art of ceramics, known as una, present in the entire region from prehistoric times until the ninth century, when it was replaced by other traditional forms of ceramics, such a
s aratu and uru.89 Villages laid out in circular form, characteristic of the central plateau, date from approximately 800 to 1500 CE. There the Indians cultivated corn and sweet potatoes. These villages consisted of between one and three circles of houses, sometimes called ocas,90 with a circular communal area at the centre91 where ceremonies and rituals were conducted. The population of these villages was larger than those of the present day, with between eight hundred and two thousand inhabitants. The structure of Jê society in Brazil was very different from that of the peoples of the tropical rainforest. They were travellers; they lived in large villages; their subsistence technology was simple and their body adornments elaborate. There were no supreme chiefs, although a certain hierarchical order existed alongside community institutions and imposing ceremonies.

  Although the Jê, like the Amazonian peoples and Amerindians in general, did not leave the kinds of monumental constructions associated with those of the Andes that have become the benchmark for evaluating the indigenous people of the Americas, their cosmology was truly sophisticated. Anthropologists like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola borrowed a term from philosophy – ‘perspectivism’, employed by Leibniz and Nietzsche – to describe certain aspects of the Amerindian peoples’ cosmology. The concept is based on the idea that perception and thought result from a ‘perspective’ which alters according to the context and situation. This is a very complex cosmology, but can be simplified by examining two of its major premises: first, that the world is populated by many species, both human and nonhuman, all of whom possess consciousness and culture, and second, these species perceive themselves and each other in a very particular way. Each group sees itself as human and all the others as non-human, in other words, as animals or spirits. According to Amerindian myths, at the ‘beginning’ all beings that were human became the animals of today. Whereas according to Western science, humans were animals who became humans, for the Amerindians all animals were previously humans. The consequence of this was a different interpretation of the interaction between humans and animals, all of whom are ‘citizens’ with social relations. This model also questions basic Western parameters such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. For Westerners, there is Nature (which is a given and universal) and different cultures (which are constructed). For the Amerindians, on the other hand, there was one culture but different ‘natures’: men, animals and spirits.

  In this interaction between ‘natures’ the shaman plays a vital role; he was the equivalent of a political, social and spiritual leader. An appreciation of this role is essential for understanding societies that do not discriminate between humans and nonhumans. He was the only one who could ‘transport bodies’ and had the powers to perceive these different states of being (human, animal or spirit). These Amerindian theories question our widely held prejudices which suppose that the Indians had ‘myths’, whereas we have ‘philosophies’; that they had ‘rituals’, whereas we have ‘sciences’. These are the vestiges of the legacy of the writings of sixteenth-century travellers, who saw as inferior what was in fact different. Taking seriously these groups that lived in America before the arrival of the Portuguese implies not only thinking of their history in our own terms, but also understanding that there existed and continue to exist other ways of comprehending the land we now call Brazil.92

  In order to give a complete overview of these indigenous people, we need to mention the group that inhabited Brazil all along the coast at the time when the Portuguese arrived: from north to south, the coastline was occupied by a people widely considered homogeneous, the Tupi-Guarani. The group can be divided into two subgroups, based on linguistic and cultural differences. In the south, the Guarani lived in the basins of the Paraná, Paraguay and Uruguay rivers, and along the coast from the Lagoa dos Patos93 to Cananeia, in the present-day state of São Paulo. The north coastline, from Iguape to what is today the state of Ceará, was mostly inhabited by the Tupinambá, some of whom also lived inland, in the area between the Tietê94 and Paranapanema95 rivers.96

  As in the Amazonian cultures, the Tupi-Guarani lived from fishing and hunting. They also practised the traditional agricultural technique known as coivara, cutting down native brush, then burning the vegetation to clear the land for planting rotating crops. The staple food of the Guarani was corn, whereas the Tupinambá grew bitter manioc from which they made flour. Both groups benefited from the fluvial and maritime resources of the region, and were expert canoeists, a fact duly noted by sixteenth-century chroniclers. The wealth of natural resources provided sustenance for a large population. It is thought that the total population in the area inhabited by the Tupinambá was one million, or nine inhabitants per square kilometre. In the southern regions occupied by the Guarani the total population was one and a half million, or four inhabitants per square kilometre. In this region a particularly large number of Indians lived in villages established by Jesuit missionaries. They were often mobilized for war (especially in the case of the Tupinambá), or enslaved by the so-called bandeirantes (adventurous settlers, who ventured into unmapped regions in the pursuit of fortunes from slave-hunting and precious metals), for use on expeditions into the interior, during which large numbers of Guarani were captured from the sixteenth century on. As explained before, the term sertão was first employed by Vaz de Caminha to refer to the vast unknown interior of the colony, far from the sea. From the fifteenth century on, as the colony expanded, the word (originally used to designate regions in Portugal that were distant from Lisbon) was used to refer to areas about which little or nothing was known.

  With time, however, the name came to indicate a symbolic space rather than a geographical one. Whereas ‘settlement’ referred to a location where order was imposed by the Catholic Church, sertão referred to vast areas where no such order existed – areas that were soon to be explored for the exploitation of their resources (wood, minerals and Indians). It was thanks to the alliances that the Portuguese made with Indian groups that they were able to conquer the interior of the continent. Piratininga97 is a particularly significant example.98 The introduction of sugar production from the middle of the sixteenth century – the subject of the next chapter of this book – led to a significant increase in the demand for labour to sustain the emerging economy, a situation that was exacerbated by the wars between rival groups of Indians.

  In 1548, when São Vicente was founded, there were three thousand Indian slaves working along the coast of the captaincy, all available for work at the six local sugar mills. The conflict between the local sugar planters and the Jesuit missionaries, who arrived in the region in 1553, began during this period. The Jesuits demanded that the Indians from the interior should be settled in the missionary villages. The immediate outcome of this was the Freedom of Indians Act, passed in 1570, which forbade the enslavement of indigenous people except for in cases of a ‘righteous war’. Thus, between 1580 and 1590, the expeditions that brought back large numbers of captured Indians from the interior were all conducted under the guise of ‘righteous wars’.

  Between 1600 and 1641 the Carijó Indians, part of the Guarani linguistic group living in areas to the south and southwest of São Paulo, became the main target. These ‘hunting expeditions’ reached a peak in the 1620s and 1630s, when, in flagrant disrespect of the law and in spite of the Jesuits’ protests, they began to resemble paramilitary groups such was their size and the scale of resources at their disposal. Bandeiras – expeditions to the interior of the land – under the command of Manuel Preto, Antônio Raposo Tavares and Fernão Dias Paes, to mention only a few, decimated the local populations, creating considerable tension between the explorers, the Jesuits and the Crown.

  The Bandeirantes were so heroically depicted in Brazilian history that their image was used by the state of São Paulo, as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, to symbolize the ‘adventurous and intrepid spirit of the region’. Whereas the benefits of their exploits were exalted – the fearless explorers of the ‘dangerous sertão
’ and its wealth of mineral resources – the violence that characterized these expeditions, with the capture and enslavement of the Indians, was conveniently forgotten. The truth is that the vicious circle, set in motion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was brutally perverse. The lack of native labour on the coast led to more and more expeditions that penetrated further and further into the interior, resulting in the decimation of the Indian population from both epidemics and attacks by the explorers.

  However, while many of these groups suffered a drastic reduction in numbers, during the sixteenth century the Tupi-Guarani sustained a remarkable political and economic system. Organized in villages each with a population of between about five hundred and two thousand, they maintained close links with other groups with whom they had ties of kinship. Great Tupi-Guarani shamans, known as karaí or karaíba, travelled around the land healing and prophesying. It was within this context that the millenarist movements of the Tupi emerged, which foresaw the coming of a time without evil. After the arrival of the Europeans the movement would adopt a distinctively anti-Portuguese bias.

  Besides this, some of the villages were allied with each other and formed multi-community groups. They had no regional centres or chiefs whose powers went beyond their village. Power was not hereditary; it had to be earned in battle. There were chiefs who became famous for their leadership in war, when they mobilized large military forces by bringing together a number of local groups. Jean de Léry, for example, cites a confrontation between the Maracajá and the Tupinambá, in which the forces of the latter totalled four thousand men. The aims of these wars were not, however, the customary ones: sacking villages and conquering their lands. They were motivated by ‘vengeance’ and intended to capture prisoners, whose destiny was not slavery but death. They were to be eaten in the ocara, the circular communal meeting place at the centre of the village.99 All the reports from the time agree. No writer of the period fails to mention the wars and cannibalism practised by the Tupinambá. We now know these practices were central to the beliefs of these groups, which created lively systems of trade and cultural exchange but abhorred centralization and any form of overarching state.100

 

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