7. Women's Blood, Warriors' Blood,
and the Conquest of Vitality in Amazonia
Beth A. Conklin
Conklin argues that Amazonian and Melanesian personhood tends "to be associated with particular ideas about the human body, especially an emphasis on the mutability and transformability of body substances." Hence the accumulation of an enemy's blood in the abdomen of a Wari' warrior during his seclusion after a killing is "like pregnancy." When transformed through ritual disciplines, the enemy's vitalizing blood essence is passed on to the women, and the enemy spirit becomes the "child" of the warrior.
Killing an enemy and controlling enemy blood and spirit are powerful pseudo-procreative ideas for the Wari', which are ultimately linked to male vitality and potency. Conklin thereby develops a theme that echoes those of other authors, including Hugh-Jones, Biersack, Bonnemère, and Gregor and Tuzin, in this volume. It is also apparent that in the midst of a highly masculine ritual, Wari' culture highlights the mutual dependence and cooperation of men and women and a sense that male and female define gender with a common idiom of ideas and metaphors. This is a theme that is also evident in the articles by Hugh-Jones and Hill.
One of the strongest resonances between the native cultures of Melanesia and lowland South America (especially Brazil) is a shared emphasis on the relational basis of personhood—the idea that the person "knows himself only by the relationships he maintains with others" (Leenhardt 1979 [1947], 153), and that the capacities of the self are activated through interactions with others. As Marilyn Strathern notes (Chapter 10), native peoples in both regions recognize that it is in relation to persons different from oneself that one develops creativity and vitality. Out of a conjunction of differences come generative possibilities.
One context in which native Amazonians have treated a conjoining across boundaries as a source of vitality is in rituals following the killing of an enemy. In a number of native Brazilian societies, one of the most highly valued transformations that a man traditionally could experience occurred when he killed an enemy and then underwent a ritual seclusion in which he lay in a hammock, abstained from sex, and observed stringent alimentary restrictions. In central Brazil, this complex of beliefs and practices has been reported among various Gê-speakers: the Shavante (Maybury-Lewis 1967, 282), Sherente (Nimuendajú 1967 [1942], 78–79), Apinayé (Da Matta 1976, 86–87), Krahó (Carneiro da Cunha 1978, 105), and Suyá (Seeger 1981, 167–168). Elsewhere, it has been
Although enemy-killing and its rites were quintessentially manly activities, a number of ethnographers have noted that the South American warriors' seclusion involves cultural ideas and practices similar to those surrounding menstruation, pregnancy, or childbirth. A key link between the experiences of women and of warriors is the idea that all these processes involve blood flowing across body boundaries, and that the individual must control or deal with this blood properly. When a man kills an enemy, the blood of the slain enemy enters the killer's body. (Some native peoples believe that the victim's spirit enters the killer as well.) In some societies, the ideas surrounding the victim's blood/spirit and the ways that men deal with it parallel how women deal with reproductive blood and bodily processes of growth and development in female puberty or childbearing. Although ethnographers have noted these similarities in individual cases, there has been little recognition or analysis of this as a regional pattern. My goal in this chapter is to call attention to this complex of warriors' rituals and their relation to gender, and to consider how the beliefs and practices associated with the warrior's transformation articulate with cultural notions of fertility, growth, maturation, and human reproduction, as well as their antitheses: antivitality, death, degeneration, and decay.
The act of killing immerses the killer in an intimate encounter with the forces of death. In its "raw"—that is, unregulated, untransformed—state, enemy blood/spirit stands as a prime symbol and agent of antivitality. The Yanomami, Araweté, Krahó, and Apinayé consider the victim's blood in the killer's body to be linked directly to the rotting of the victim's corpse and its putrefying body fluids.[3] Other peoples emphasize the negative effects of an excess quantity of blood or the danger to the killer and his community of this intrusion of "bad" or alien blood.
Except among the Wari', the disciplines of the warrior's seclusion were directed toward expelling the alien blood from his body. Among the Urubú and the Gê peoples, the warrior bled himself with linear incisions that left pronounced scars on the chest, back, arms, or legs. The Suyá warrior also pierced his penis (Seeger 1981, 168). Among the Yanomami, Araweté, and some of the Gê groups, killers vomited profusely, with or without the aid of emetics. What would happen if a killer did not observe the proper ritual actions, or failed to expel the victim's blood from his body? Among the societies for which ethnographers report an answer, there is near-universal agreement: the killer's belly would swell up with blood until he died.[4]
Various Amazonian peoples gave somewhat different inflections to the meaning of the warrior's physio-ritual experience. In one manner or another, however, all saw the killer's mastery of the alien blood in his body as a way to transcend or mute the effects of mundane processes of biological degeneration (weakness, illness, aging, or death). By neutralizing, expelling, or transforming the enemy blood/spirit, a man gained some degree of immunity to decay for his own body, either in this life or after death. Xikrin-Kayapó thought that it brought long life and physical revitalization, making men "hard" (Vidal 1977, 157). Urubú thought that completing the seclusion made killers hard, strong, impervious to pain, and endowed with enhanced sexual potency and male fertility. Wari' think that it promotes physical growth, strength, courage, and health. Yanomami believe that it ensures a man's longevity and prevents cosmic disruption. For Araweté, the killer's transformation is equated not with physical maturation but with a metaphysical maturation that makes the warrior's body immune to decay when he dies and confers upon his soul an immortality that exempts him from being cannibalized by the gods (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 246–247).
These Amazonian rituals revolve around questions of how death is linked to life, how killing may be transmuted into regeneration, and how people can transcend or regulate biological forces of morbidity and mortality. The answer they propose is that men accomplish this through the conquest of enemy outsiders and the ritual transformation of enemy substances. This exemplifies what Bloch (1992) calls the ritual "conquest of external vitality"—the appropriation of elements from beings outside one's own groups to create in oneself a state that transcends (at least temporarily) the constraints of mundane biological degeneration. The notion of enemies as sources of transformative or generative pow-ers—and of predation as a central trope in the construction of identity—is a theme in many lowland South American societies (Viveiros de Castro 1996). Here, I focus on the notions of body, power, and gender invoked by the enemykilling rites in which killers turned their relationship to the slain enemy into a positive enhancement of the self and masculine agency.
The transformation of enemy blood to promote or protect male growth and health was framed in terms of women's physiology and the regulation of reproductive blood in a number of these ritual systems. While I do not claim that this was true in every society, some peoples clearly saw a connection between the experiences of women and those of warriors. Ethnographers have emphasized that specific rites or restrictions that killers observed were similar to those observed by girls during their first menstruation, among the Apinayé (Da Matta 1976, 86), Suyá (Seeger 1981, 167), and Urubú (Huxley 1957, 260). The most detailed ethnographic data on the warrior's seclusion come from Bruce Albert's work among the Yanomami and from studies of the Wari' by Aparecida Vilaça and myself. I compare these two cases, focusing on a few salient dimensions of these rich social and symbolic systems, especially the question of interactions between models of female and male physiology.
"Pseudo-procreative" imagery is, of course, a recurrent theme in initiation rituals worldwide and in men's maturation rituals in particular. The question of why this is so has long intrigued anthropologists and psychologists (especially those working in Melanesia), partly because of the "apparently conflicting idioms of exclusion and appropriation" (Strathern 1988, 103) in many male rites: female reproductive imagery is often most elaborate or explicit in rites that emphasize separating men from females and feminine influences. (See Hiatt 1971; Keesing 1982; Paige and Paige 1981, 4–18; and Roscoe 1995a for reviews of the literature on pseudo-procreation.) My intent in this chapter, however, is not to explain the existence of Amazonian pseudo-procreative imagery by picking a path through the thicket of competing theories of male envy, male anxieties related to mother-son bonds, or political-economic dynamics of male appropriation of female resources. Rather, my aim is to consider what this imagery reveals about how native people think about growth, health, and potency. A number of Amazonian themes are waiting to be rethought, especially concerning the social nature of body substances, the interdependence of female and male physiology, and how complementarity and antagonism are expressed in ritual. Many of these will seem familiar to Melanesianists, and I believe that lowland South Americanists, who generally have paid less attention to gender issues, might learn a great deal from the Melanesian literature along these lines.
My approach draws inspiration from one of the major insights that has emerged from the recent Melanesian literature: the value of looking at male and female rituals in relation to one another (Lutkehaus and Roscoe 1995). Perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than in interpreting "pseudo-procreative" imagery. When men and boys enact transformations of themselves that resemble female bodily processes such as menstruation, pregnancy, or birth, they instantiate M. Strathern's observation that the female body and processes of human reproduction are prime symbols of, and metaphors for, the social body and social reproduction.
There is a methodological point implicit in a focus on how female bodies and reproduction serve as metaphors for social reproduction. This is that men's rituals cannot be analyzed in isolation, as often has been done. Female and male rites often are interrelated, so that "analysis should focus as much on this complex whole as on its constituent parts" (Roscoe 1995a, 224). I would extend this to note that one must look not only at female rituals but at broader cultural concepts of how both sexes grow, mature, and develop their respective forms of agency. From this perspective, the question to ask is not just how men are made, but how persons are generated and how their gendered capacities are enhanced through social action.
THE BIOSOCIAL FABRICATION OF PERSONS
One of the strongest resonances between Melanesia and lowland South America (especially Brazil) is the centrality of social concerns with the fabrication of persons through the social fabrication of their bodies. A landmark
In the 1970s, this academic "discovery" of the cultural force of body concepts became a rallying point in Brazilian anthropologists' struggle for what Alcida Ramos (1995, 6) called "their conceptual decolonization by declaring their independence" from Africanist models of descent and corporate groups. (Melanesianists may hear echoes of their own "anti-Africanist" revolt.) In South American ethnology, focusing on the "absence" of lineages, clans, and corporate structures had led to the conceptual dead end of characterizing Brazilian Indian societies simply as "fluid" and "flexible." Anthony Seeger, Roberto Da Matta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in contrast, argued that "the societies of the [South American] continent structure themselves in terms of symbolic languages that—this is the difference from the symbols of Africans, Europeans, etc.—do not concern the definition of groups and the transmission of goods, but rather the construction of persons and the fabrication of bodies." Focusing on notions of corporeality and the social construction of the person promised analytic concepts that would "account for South American material in its own terms" (1979, 9–10).
The human body and the elements that comprise it are a primary matrix of social meanings: in the majority of indigenous societies of Brazil, this matrix occupies a central organizing position. The fabrication, decoration, transformation, and destruction of bodies are themes around which revolve mythologies, ceremonial life, and social organization. A physiology of body fluids—blood, semen—and of processes of the body's communication with the world (food, sexuality, speech, and other senses) appears to underlie the considerable variations that exist among South American societies. (Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979, 11)[5]
The "language of the body" in native Brazilian societies is largely an idiom of relationships. Corporeal elements and their analogs (especially foods, beverages, body paints, and body ornaments) are vocabularies through which individuals not only signify but also actively establish, intensify, transform, attenuate, and sever relations to others. Persons and their capacities are created, nurtured, and maintained through flows of tangible and intangible elements between living persons and between persons and other categories of beings, such as ancestors, animals, spirits, and enemies. Many of these transactions are believed to affect the composition or state of an individual's body, so that the development of new or transformed social relationships and the development of bodily capacities occur in tandem and are inseparable (Conklin 1996; Conklin and Morgan 1996).
The relational construction of bodies and persons and an emphasis on this as an ongoing process that requires repeated and periodic renewal are a major point of commonality between lowland South America and Melanesia. In both regions, notions of relational personhood tend to be associated with particular ideas about the human body, especially an emphasis on the mutability and transformability of body substances (see Biersack [Chapter 4], Hugh-Jones [Chapter 11], and Jolly [Chapter 8]). Where persons are understood to be "made" processually through interactions with other individuals, body elements often are thought of as interactive with each another and with elements that come from outside the body (from other people, ancestors, enemies, or animals, for example). Ideas about the social constitution of corporeal elements provide a conceptual framework and tangible techniques for expressing and enacting the social processes that create, grow, and develop individuals and their capacities.
In native Amazonian societies, social and political relations tend to be organized through the ritual control of symbolic resources centered on the biological and metaphysical components of individuals (Albert 1985, 676–677). In this regard, lowland South Americans resemble the peoples of Papua New Guinea's lowlands and the eastern highlands' "fringe" areas, with their "societies which are constituted and reproduced ritually"; they have less in common with the western highlands of Papua New Guinea, "where social relations are established through the production and circulation of wealth" (Liep 1991, 32). Margaret Jolly's (1991a, 49–50) observation that in the eastern highlands, dynamics of gender and power are based in control over the "procreation, nurture and flow of persons" might describe many Brazilian Indian societies as well.
In Brazil, as in eastern and lowland Papua New Guinea, one of the arenas where concerns with developing persons by ritual regulation of their body substances are most prominent is in rituals aimed at "making men" and enhancing male growth and vitality. In both areas, much of the work of manmaking and man-enhancing rites is done by transfers and modifications of body substances, and these practices are grounded in broader systems of cultural ideas about the human body and the elements that compose it. As Bonnemère (1990, 102) notes for Melanesia, "indigenous conceptions about body fluids form the substratum of representations of the production and constitution of the person."
In her survey of representations of body substances in twenty New Guinea societies, Bonnemère (1990) identified a triad of symbolic relations among sexual/reproductive fluids: semen, menstrual blood, and breast milk. There has been no comparable systematic study of body substances in Amazonian societies, but even a cursory review suggests a number of parallels (and some differences) in how Melanesians and Amazonians think about and act upon specific bodily elements as components of persons and their relationships. The parallels are so striking that when Amazonian ethnographers read the
BLOOD, SEMEN, AND DéJà VU
Among the body concepts that native Amazonians and Melanesians share in common are the idea of blood as the main agent of growth, health, and gendered capacities; the notion of semen as a growth agent; and an emphasis on the transformability of body substances. In both regions, blood is strongly associated with vitality, strength, resistance to disease, and the capacity for hard work. Blood is a key element—for many native groups, the key element—in the regulation of individual growth, health, and productivity. Blood also figures prominently in cultural ideas about reproductivity, especially two developmental processes relevant to the "man-making" rituals: conception/gestation and adolescent maturation.
In Melanesia and Amazonia, blood (especially menstrual blood) commonly is identified as the mother's contribution to conception or gestation. Many peoples in both regions believe that a fetus is formed from the combination of female blood and male semen. Some lowland South American peoples speak of maternal blood as nourishment for the fetus rather than the substance from which the fetus is formed, and a few assert that a mother contributes no substance to the fetus at all but merely provides a womb container. In contrast to Melanesia, lowland South American theories of conception seldom are related to notions of descent in any clear-cut or consistent way, and even within a single community there often is little consensus about precisely what goes into making a baby. Despite the lack of consensus about the precise bodily basis of mother-child kinship, the association between female blood and human reproduction is as salient in Amazonia as it is in Melanesia.
The relation between menstrual blood and female puberty is self-evident; both native Amazonians and Melanesians commonly recognize menarche (first menstruation) as a prime marker of a girl's transition to young womanhood. More specifically, many believe that when a girl develops the capacity to menstruate (and to handle her menses properly), this transforms and enhances other body-based aspects of her self, such as her growth, strength, vitality, and ability to do adult women's work. Menstruation thus is fundamental to womanly agency and female productive and reproductive capacities.
Blood is linked not only to female puberty; many native Amazonians and Melanesians also believe that male pubertal development depends on changes in a boy's blood. The blood changes in pubescent girls generally are assumed to happen more or less naturally, or as a result of experiences (such as sexual intercourse) that are normal events in girls' lives. In contrast, native people who think that male puberty depends on blood changes usually think that this
In Amazonia and Melanesia, there are two major variants of bodily manipulations in man-making or man-enhancing rituals: incorporation and purging. Almost every male transformation ritual uses at least one incorporating or purging technique, and many use several in combination.
Incorporating techniques aim to introduce into the male body positively valued substances that enhance masculinity and alter the composition or quality of blood or other body elements. Such techniques include the oral ingestion of particular foods, beverages, medicines, and other substances, and rubbing or painting substances on the skin. In Amazonia, a killer's appropriation and incorporation of the blood or spirit of a slain enemy might also be considered an incorporating technique.
Incorporating techniques often are associated with ideas about implanting or inscribing "culture"—societal values and normative behaviors—in the physical body. A striking expression of this among the Ilahita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea (Tuzin 1980, 113) is the practice of surreptitiously feeding certain magically treated substances to male initiates in the Tambaran cult. The practice implants in the body's essence a property that will turn against the body if the individual ever violates a cult taboo.
In New Guinea, the ingestion of semen (orally or anally) is another technique for incorporating quintessentially masculine body substance. This is one difference between Melanesia and Amazonia: I know of no Amazonian equivalent to the direct man-to-boy semen transfers of Melanesian ritualized homosexuality. If there are South American parallels, these involve using symbolic substitutes for semen. Hugh-Jones, in Chapter 11, explores the possibility that the secret flute cults of northwest Amazonia "also involve something akin to transactions of semen, albeit in a less overt manner."
Purging techniques, the second type of ritual bodily manipulation, aim to remove substances that impede the development of manly qualities. Common techniques for removing undesirable elements from the male body include inducing bleeding via the penis, nose, mouth, anus, or skin, and purging through vomiting or sweating. The substance to be removed often is blood, which in some cases is associated with mothers, breast milk, or female pollution, so that purging is seen as a mechanism of sexual purification for males (e.g., Tuzin 1982, 338).
Male bleeding practices have been identified as "male menstruation" by native peoples or their ethnographers in a number of well-known cases. In Melanesia, the widespread practices of penile bloodletting and nose bleeding—used in male initiation and afterward as a way to revitalize manliness—have been interpreted as male equivalents to menstruation (Herdt 1981, 245; Hogbin 1970, 88). Lewis (1980) emphasizes, however, that in some other New Guinea societies,
Besides these parallel Melanesian and Amazonian ideas about blood and its role in female and male adolescent development, another shared idea is the notion of semen as a growth-promoting substance. In most societies in both regions, semen is considered closely related to blood or interactive with blood, as in the widespread idea that blood-plus-semen is what babies are made of. Regardless of differences in cultural models of conception, almost everyone considers semen essential to create and/or nourish a fetus. In both regions, a common belief is that a fetus forms when enough semen accumulates in the womb and that conception requires repeated infusions of semen, not just a single act of sexual intercourse. Many people also believe that semen builds or nourishes the fetus as it grows during pregnancy; for example, Tukanoans in the northwest Amazon speak of a father's responsibility to "feed" the fetus in the womb (Hugh-Jones, Chapter 11). In some societies, semen's nurturant qualities are expressed in symbolic equations between breast milk and semen (see Bonnemère 1990, 105; Bonnemère, Chapter 2; and Hugh-Jones, Chapter 11).
In Amazonia, ideas about semen and fetal growth are part of a broader notion of what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1992, 187) calls "seminal nurture." Not only does semen "grow" babies; it also "grows" young women and their reproductive capacities. In a number of native Brazilian societies, the transfer of semen into a girl's body through heterosexual intercourse is believed to stimulate the onset of menstruation and female puberty. (As discussed below, this is a belief in several of the Brazilian groups that practiced the ritual seclusion of killers.) In the context of this notion of seminal nurture, menstrual blood cannot be considered the product of exclusively female processes. Rather, there is an explicit recognition that men contribute to the making of menstrual blood, so that female reproductive capacities are a product of cross-sex interactions.
Similar ideas of semen as a stimulant to female bodily development are present in New Guinea, notably among the Sambia, who believe that a husband grows his young wife's body and that his semen creates the breast milk that nourishes their baby (Herdt 1981, 181–182). As a corollary, the Sambia and several other New Guinea groups consider semen a necessary growth agent for boys as well. The belief that boys must take older men's semen into their bodies to mature properly and develop their manly capacities is the key idea behind the well-known complex of semen transfers in male initiation
In native Brazilian rituals and models of the body, in contrast, semen has little potency on its own. Rather, semen functions as a growth agent only when it is combined with a feminine element—usually blood or an analogue of blood. This is most apparent in indigenous models of growth and conception. Moreover, complementary female and male substances are a theme in the many South American rituals in which men and women exchange foods or beverages with gendered connotations, such as meat (masculine) and manioc or maize (feminine), or fermented and unfermented beverages (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 138).
Another difference between Amazonia and Melanesia concerns the question of whether it is possible to replace or replenish body substances that have been lost or depleted. In Melanesia, a near-universal principle is that "life-giving substances are finite in quantity" (Lemonnier 1991, 13). According to Whitehead (1986b, 275–276), the idea that semen loss (in heterosexual intercourse) stunts male growth is nearly universal. New Guinea men use a variety of means to augment and conserve their semen. In Amazonia, however, the idea of a closed economy of finite body substances is less common. Amazonian men do not seem to worry as much about the quantity or adequacy of their semen as Melanesian men do; I have found male fears of semen loss reported only for the Mehinaku (Gregor 1985, 145). Irreversible blood loss also is not a widespread concern. Although a few native Amazonians do think that lost blood is never replaced (cf. C. Crocker 1985, 41ff.; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971), many others (including the Wari') believe that when blood is lost, the body simply produces more.[6]
In both regions, the gendered substances of semen and blood carry ambivalent meanings. Bonnemère's (1990, 108) observation that in New Guinea it is impossible to categorize certain body substances as positive and others as negative applies equally to Amazonia. Semen and breast milk are considered nourishing and growth promoting in certain contexts, but they also are seen as channels for the spread of illness agents and contamination in others. Similarly, menstrual blood is the stuff of which babies are made, but it can be dangerous to men and children and sometimes to women themselves (for example, in Amazonia it is believed that jaguars are attracted to menstruating women).[7] Like semen and breast milk, the blood that circulates in the body is both the foundation of health and a vector for illness agents. A large proportion of lowland South American rules about hygiene and food aim to protect vulnerable individuals from contamination with the harmful blood or blood analogues of certain animals and people.
In native Brazilian societies, healthy blood and a well-functioning circulatory system are the key to health, growth, and vitality for both sexes. The
RITUAL TRANSFORMATION AND SECLUSION IN AMAZONIA
In both Amazonia and Melanesia, the most intense ritual efforts to develop masculine capacities typically are performed during a period of seclusion or semiseclusion in which males separate themselves from contact with females and control the flow of substances into and out of their bodies. As Paul Roscoe notes (Chapter 12), food taboos and sex abstinence are means by which the self constitutes itself as a different kind of self. Transformations of male bodies are transformations of male selves.
In Amazonia, one of the most widespread of all ritual practices for individuals of both sexes is seclusion at a moment of social transition. The two most common times for seclusion are after childbirth and at puberty. In some societies, individuals also go into seclusion in shamanic initiation, after killing an enemy (seclusion of the killer), in mourning (seclusion of the bereaved), and after death (when a newly dead person's spirit and/or body is believed to go through a ritual seclusion that initiates the spirit into the society of the dead).
Indigenous interpretations of Amazonian seclusion rituals—especially the seclusions associated with childbirth, puberty, and enemy-killing—consistently emphasize that their purpose is to achieve the formation or re-formation of the individual's body and of spiritual or psychological capacities linked to bodily states. Some ethnographers have noted that controlling or transforming blood is the focal concern in several forms of seclusion among the Wari', Yanomami (Albert 1985), and in some Gê societies in central Brazil (Carneiro da Cunha 1978, 105; Da Matta 1976, 86).
To understand what ritual bodily transformations mean for native Amazonians, it is essential to recognize that corporeal elements carry meanings that extend far beyond what Westerners think of as the organic/physical. In Amazonian societies, mind, thought, emotion, morality, and character often are seen as linked to (and inseparable from) bodily states. "Body" always exists in a dynamic relation to "spirit" (Pollock 1996). "Knowledge" (broadly conceived and manifest especially in speech, hearing, moral action, and pragmatic efficacy) is often closely related to bodily developments (Kensinger 1992; McCallum 1996) and visionary experiences (Brown 1986;Gow 1991). As Ellen Basso (1995, 97) emphasizes for the Kalapalo of the Upper Xingu, the goal of
Substantive changes in the body achieved through the disciplines of seclusion almost always are related to processes of modifying other aspects of the person as well, such as personality, emotions (especially courage), spiritual powers, knowledge, morality, or capacity for self-restraint (Viveiros de Castro 1979). In all the Amazonian groups that practiced the seclusion of enemykillers, a man's achievement of exerting ritual control to transform the enemy blood or spirit in his body traditionally was (or, where warfare persists, still is) a central element in cultural ideals of masculinity. The killer who accomplished this act of self-discipline always gained prestige and respect, and many groups considered this a prerequisite for the optimal development of masculine powers. In some cases, males could not attain the status of full adult men until they had performed the enemy-killer's seclusion.
Most forms of Amazonian seclusion stress a certain asceticism in which, as Basso (1995, 97) notes for the Kalapalo, secluded individuals must learn to consummate their physical needs (for food, sex, sleep, elimination) within strictly defined limits, hold emotions and impulses in check, and dedicate themselves to activities that promote social well-being. The various forms of ritual seclusion in Brazilian Indian societies vary in their intensity, duration, and the specific disciplines required. What they all share is an emphasis on regulating the flow of substances (such as food, medicines, and bodily substances, especially sexual fluids) into and out of the body. Concerns with regulating what enters and leaves the body are strongest in seclusions for childbirth, puberty, and enemy-killing.
Melanesian ethnologists have emphasized that male initiation rites often draw on cultural images of human reproduction and female bodily processes, especially images of initiation as ritual rebirth (Hiatt 1971; Keesing 1982; Paige and Paige 1981; Roscoe 1995a; Strathern 1988). Some enact analogies to other female bodily processes, such as menstruation, conception, and pregnancy or gestation. In her analysis of twenty New Guinea societies, Bonnemère found that "initiation is not solely a birth but also a pregnancy. Men reproduce at puberty that which occurred in the mother's womb" (1990, 111). The manipulations of blood, semen, and other focal body substances in male transformation rites are one technique men and boys use to assert their symbolic participation in something analogous to female bodily developments.
Amazonian ethnographies have tended to look at men's rituals in isolation, as same-sex transactions conducted in an all-male context, despite the resonances between female and male development recognized in Amazonian models of human physiology. The many parallels between Amazonia and Melanesia in ideas about the embodied basis of relational personhood suggest that Amazonianists might see something new if they looked through Melanesianist
THE WARI'
The Wari' (Pakaas Novas) live in the rain forest of western Brazil, in the state of Rondônia near the Bolivian border. They speak a language in the Chapakuran language family isolate and today number some two thousand or so people. Various Wari' subgroups entered into sustained peaceful contact with Brazilian national society in stages between 1956 and 1969. After the contact, Wari' stopped killing outsiders, stopped building men's houses, and stopped practicing the warrior's ritual seclusion. The following account reconstructs this ritual as it was practiced in the region of the Dois Irmãos River in the decades prior to 1956.[8]
Wari' traditionally are inhabitants of the interior forest (terra firme) who make their living by slash-and-burn farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Post-marital residence patterns are mixed; after a husband has fulfilled his brideservice obligations (which commonly involve a period of uxorilocal residence before and/or after marriage), couples are free to live near either spouse's relatives, and changes of residence are common. Interpersonal relations between wives and husbands are not highly polarized or antagonistic. An emphasis on gender complementarity and cooperative, balanced cross-sex transactions pervades Wari' daily life, productive activities, and rituals. The theme of cross-sex interdependence also pervades traditional Wari' notions of how adolescents mature into adults. Before the contact, both male and female maturation were conceptualized as social processes dependent on inputs from the opposite sex.[9]
FEMALE GROWTH, MATURATION, AND FECUNDITY
A pubescent Wari' girl's sexual maturation and physical growth are held to develop first out of a special relationship to the moon, whose influence is loosely thought of as a stimulus to breast development and menstruation. The second, more direct stimulus (upon which the efficacy of the first depends) is a cross-sex transfer of body fluid: the first time that a girl has sexual intercourse, the infusion of semen (a blood product) is said to transform her blood so that it increases in quantity and strength. This sparks a growth spurt: the girl grows fatter, taller, stronger and—a point that Wari' emphasize—able to do women's work in planting, harvesting, and processing food.
Not only does semen enhance a girl's capacity for productivity; it also is essential to her capacity for reproduction. Both Wari' women and men assert that semen stimulates the production of menstrual blood. Both women and
This Wari' idea that heterosexual intercourse is a prerequisite for menstruation means that a woman's fecundity depends on her relationship with a man. Menstrual blood is a social product. For Wari', the oft-repeated idea that men are "made" but women mature naturally does not apply. Prior to the contact, girls ideally (and often in practice) married and began to have sexual intercourse before they began to menstruate. The ideal that a husband should "grow" his young wife's body is analogous to a father's responsibility to contribute semen to the growth of the fetus in his wife's womb and to contribute meat, fish, and vegetable foods to feed his children.
Wari' do not mark female puberty and menarche with any ritual, and they do not consider menstrual blood to be very dangerous or polluting to men or anyone else. Menstruating women engage in most of their normal activities, except that (because the blood attracts jaguars) they are not supposed to go to the forest or have sex (which would make the male partner attractive to jaguars). Wari' say that mature women's blood is "strong" (hwara opa', connoting positive vitality and health). Men and children have weaker blood, and if they accidentally ingest menstrual blood, the more powerful blood can make them slightly sick. This risk affects only a menstruating woman's own husband and her prepubescent children, the individuals who share intimate body substance with her. Before the contact, when Wari' used body paint more than they do now, when a woman's period began, she, her husband, and their young children all painted themselves with fresh red annatto (urucú). The other visible markers of menstruation were small mats called hujam. When her period began, a woman wove several hujam, which she used to cover bloodstains on spots where she sat for a long time. Another context in which Wari' used hujam was in the enemy-killer's seclusion, as explained below.
Blood and blood-semen interactions are salient themes in Wari' ideas about pregnancy. Conception depends on a union of semen (which builds the fetus's flesh/body) and maternal blood (which is a source of fetal blood or its nourishment). The verb to describe the swelling of a pregnant woman's stomach is munu, which specifically means swelling with blood or serum in the abdomen. Fetuses are said to have a growth spurt (from an infusion of maternal blood) every month at the time when the mother's menstrual period would have come. The bloods of mother and infant merge during gestation, which transforms the mother's blood (Conklin and Morgan
MASCULINITY AND WARFARE
In the decades before contact in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wari' experienced frequent attacks and a number of massacres at the hands of non-Indian Brazilians and Bolivians, as well as Indians from other tribes whom businessmen in the Guajará-Mirim rubber trade hired to kill Wari'. In the more distant past, their main enemies had been Indians from neighboring tribes. It was in this context of threat and interethnic hostilities that the killing of an enemy outsider was valued so highly. The ritual seclusion following an enemy-killing was the most ritually elaborated event in an individual man's life. Vilaça (1996) emphasizes that the image of the warrior is central to Wari' notions of male identity: without it, "masculinity would be unimaginable." While this is true, it is also true that Wari' masculinity would be unimaginable without fatherhood, hunting, or shamanism. Wari' masculinity is a dynamic bundle of roles, competencies, and responsibilities to others. Without essentializing the warrior's role, one may recognize that among these masculine responsibilities, protecting one's people by killing enemy outsiders when necessary was a highly valued dimension of manhood.
Participation in the warriors' ritual seclusion was a pinnacle of male experience and achievement. Wari' from the Dois Irmãos region describe this as a requirement for full manhood status: an adolescent became napiri, a full adult man, when he had participated in killing an enemy and had experienced the abdominal swelling that marked his physio-ritual transformation. For adolescent boys, this constituted a rite of maturation that both marked and effected their becoming napiri.
Manhood and growth are conceptually fused, and the enemy blood that the boys who accompanied war parties incorporated was believed to stimulate the boys' growth and maturation in a manner identical to the effect of semen on girls' blood. The infusion of enemy blood made boys grow taller, fatter, stronger, more courageous, and capable of productive work—that is, able to actualize their masculine potential. Seasoned warriors also went into seclusion each time they killed an enemy. For an older man, each new killing brought
This was not a rite of gender formation per se—men were not "made"—but a rite of what Strathern has called "internal efficacy," aimed at actualizing capacities for masculine agency.[11] This is not to say that Wari' believe that boys do not become men at all now that there no longer are enemies to kill. Rather, they emphasize that males do not grow as much or mature as well. Santo André elders complain that today, men are smaller, weaker, and sicker than the tall, strong, fat warriors of the past in comparison to whom, they claim, the present generation (literally) comes up short.
Organized Wari' war parties typically traveled on foot for several days to attack enemies at sites far enough away that the attack would not draw retaliation against Wari' villages. As I have emphasized elsewhere (Conklin 1989, 386–388), during this journey, the warriors were thought to be engaged in a delicate and dangerous relationship with spirit forces that would determine the success of the attack. These spirits are associated with fire and the powers of predation, and they come from the underwater realm that is the abode of Wari' ancestors and the nonhuman forces that control human death. When angered by misbehavior in a war party, the spirits send topo—fierce storms that blacken the sky, inundate the earth, topple trees with raging winds, and bring illness and evil. If such a storm developed during the journey to attack an enemy, the warriors turned around and went home.
To maintain a positive relationship to these spiritual-cosmological forces, the war party observed certain behavioral restrictions, which were most stringent for the man who was the bearer of a ritual bundle of firebrands. This special fire bundle (which later would be used to light the fire to roast enemy body parts) was treated as sacred, and it was decorated and tied with the type of liana that Wari' used in funerals to tie the decorated firewood bundle over which they roasted corpses of their dead in preparation for cannibalizing them.
The multiple forms of death-related imagery in the warriors' journey suggest a symbolic interpretation of this as an encounter with the forces of death, although Wari' themselves do not speak of it in these terms. When the victorious warriors returned home from their encounter with death in the alien realm of the enemy outsider, the ritual acts with which women welcomed them and the ideas that surrounded the warrior's transformation in seclusion were replete with birth-related symbolism.
Wari' believe that when an enemy is killed, the victim's blood enters the bodies of everyone who witnessed the killing, regardless of whether or not they actually shot an arrow. Women did not shoot arrows, but if a woman witnessed a killing, she also incorporated the victim's blood and experienced effects similar to the male warriors. I heard of one girl and one woman to whom this happened.
Cannibalism of a slain enemy's body parts was a routine aspect of Wari' warfare, and Wari' ideas about incorporating enemy blood/spirit should be
A key point is that the physiologically active element acquired from the vic-tim—the part of the enemy that affected the person who incorporated it—was the blood/spirit, not the flesh. Unlike many Melanesians and a few other native Amazonians, Wari' did not believe that eating roasted human flesh transferred any vital biosocial energies, personality characteristics, or other qualities from the person who was eaten to the person who ate them.
The fact that Wari' warriors did not eat their victims' flesh is consistent with a basic principle of Wari' cannibalism: that one does not consume the flesh of one's own consanguines. When the victim's blood/spirit entered the killer's body and (as discussed below) the Wari' warrior tamed and fed this alien spirit, this created a relationship between them analogous to consanguinity. Wari' say that the enemy spirit became the "child" of the killer in whose body it resided, and the spirit child was said to call the warrior "father." Just as a father does not eat his own offspring, warriors did not eat their victims' flesh.
The ones who did eat enemy body parts were people who had not participated in or witnessed the killing. Until recently, Wari' consistently have said the eaters of enemy flesh were men, especially old men. Recently, however, Vilaça (1996) reported statements from one or more elderly men in the Rio Negro-Ocaia community who told her that their women ate enemy flesh and that women's expressions of desire to eat it motivated men to go out and kill enemies. Although the individual women said to have eaten enemies deny having done so, Vilaça finds the male statement credible. On this basis, she asserts that a principle of Wari' gender relations was that enemy flesh was a male "offering to the women" parallel to the meat of animals that men hunt and give to women: "They [the women] desired enemy flesh, which represented a present, making it clear that [the women's] participation in war was fundamental, because it was through them and for them that the enemies were killed." While this interpretation of exocannibalism is uncertain,[12] the central point about warfare and women is valid: that enemy-killing was a service that Wari' women valued and desired from their men.
WARI' WARRIORS' SECLUSION
The immediate rewards for a man's success in warfare came from the women of his community. When victorious warriors returned home, the women greeted them with cries of joy and a ritual welcome replete with symbols of rebirth. As each man entered the village, women picked him up in their arms
After these festivities, the members of the war party secluded themselves together in the men's house behind palm-frond screens. Here, they reclined together in giant hammocks, in which they spent the entire period of seclusion. (This is the only context in which Wari' used hammocks before the contact.) When a man killed an enemy on his own, he lay alone in a hammock in a screened-off section of the men's house.
This seclusion was a time of relaxation and, when the killing had been a group affair, a time of conviviality and conversation. Much of the talk seems to have revolved around warfare and stories about warriors of the past. The men and boys did little except chat among themselves, play small reed flutes, and gorge themselves on pot after pot of sweet (unfermented) maize beverage, which their female kin made and passed to them through the palm screen. In contrast to the ascetic seclusions practiced in other Amazonian societies, this Wari' ritual brought intensified consumption of highly "social" elements: mass quantities of sweet maize beverage; assiduous attention to hygiene, with frequent warm baths and fresh applications of body oil and paint; and adornments and accoutrements (body paint, flutes, scarlet macaw feathers) that express Wari' notions of beauty.
For male adolescents, this was a time of intimacy with older men, a time of forging a shared masculine identity that transcended the kinship distinctions that divide Wari' men in certain other ritual contexts.[13] It also was a period of orientation during which older men instructed boys about masculine roles and ideals of manhood. Elders at Santo André told me that fathers used this time to lecture their sons about their new roles and responsibilities, as napiri, to direct their energies to socially beneficial activities: to hunt to feed their families and to control their sexuality by respecting other men's wives.
Warriors in seclusion neither spoke to nor touched women or children. When Wari' men talked about this, they emphasized that this avoidance of women and children was not because the men feared female pollution, but because of the need to protect others from the danger of the killer's touch. If a warrior touched a child, the enemy spirit could pass into and harm the child. If he touched a woman, she would be impassioned with uncontrollable sexual desire. Sexual intercourse was prohibited during seclusion because the enemy blood and fat would flow out in the ejaculation of semen. Unlike killers in other Amazonian societies, Wari' men did not want to get rid of the enemy
To acquire the benefits of the enemy elements that had entered their bodies, Wari' warriors drank copious amounts of sweet (unfermented) maize chicha. Maize chicha is a quintessentially "Wari'" food, and—in its "sweet" (unfermented or lightly fermented) form—it is a quintessentially feminine product that is symbolically identified with blood and the building of blood and breast milk and with consanguinity, amity, nurturance, and the reconstitution of a fragmented self.
Drinking chicha was said to affect the warrior in two related ways, one spiritual and one physiological. First, it fed the enemy spirit, satisfying its hunger and thereby taming and civilizing it. Not only did this establish kinship between the killer and his victim, it also transformed the former enemy's spirit into a Wari' spirit, with all the trappings and predispositions of Wari' ethnic-ity.[14] This Wari'-ized spirit would then remain in its killer's body as his companion for life and even after death. The "possession" of enemy spirits brought prestige to the killer. There are vague suggestions that it also brought enhanced spiritual power, but Wari' offer no clear statement on this.
The tangible manifestation of this spiritual transaction between the warrior and his victim was that the killer grew fat and his belly swelled. The disciplines of the ritual seclusion explicitly aimed to promote this abdominal swelling: to protect their newly acquired blood, men walked carefully to avoid stubbing a toe or cutting their feet and avoided unecessary contact with the earth or any dirty or polluting substance. They also did not touch food with their hands but ate using thin splinters like cocktail toothpicks.[15]
By all accounts, the chicha-gorged men really did grow quite fat. There was an aesthetic and erotic dimension to this, for the warriors emerging from seclusion with their plump, carefully oiled and painted physiques were considered very beautiful and were highly desired as sexual partners. The idea that everyone emphasizes is that the first time that a warrior has sex, the enemy fat passes out in his semen and into the body of his female partner, who then absorbs some of its vitality. Wari' say that as the men lost their newly acquired body fat, their wives grew fatter, stronger, and more vibrant. Thus, enemy-killings revitalized not only male bodies but also a wider collective body that included the sexually active women as well.
REPRODUCTIVE PARALLELS
For Wari' females and males, respectively, childbirth and enemy-killing/seclusion constituted the two biggest changes in social status, the experiences that made narima (full adult women) and napiri (full adult men). Wari' conceive of these in parallel terms. The ritual management of the warrior's transformation encapsulated images, ideas, metaphors, and practices related to several dimensions of
Female Puberty/Maturation
According to the oldest men at Santo André, enemy blood/spirit enters the Wari' warrior's body through his genitals. In his genitals, layers of the enemy's blood alternate with layers of the killer's semen. Blood-plus-semen is, of course, the generative combination that Wari' believe produces female pubertal maturation, menstruation, and pregnancy. Enemy blood stimulates the growth of boys in a manner identical to how semen stimulates the growth of girls. Thus, for both sexes, maturation traditionally was conceived as a blood transformation stimulated by the genital incorporation of another individual's body fluid.
Menstruation
According to Santo André elders, the warriors' seclusion ideally was supposed to last through a full lunar month, so that it would end at the second new moon after the killing. Wari' traditionally believe that women menstruate at the new moon. Menstruating women and warriors in seclusion marked their special blood states with two of the same visual markers: annatto (red body paint) and hujam (the small mats that women used to cover their menstrual bloodstains). Warriors in seclusion smeared their bodies heavily with annatto, just as a woman smeared herself, her husband, and her young children with annatto when her period began. When a warrior in seclusion left the men's house (to urinate or defecate) or stood playing a flute, he tucked a hujam under his arm. His mat was adorned with a long scarlet macaw feather, which swayed gracefully above his head.
Pregnancy and Childbirth
Male elders commonly describe the appearance of warriors' fattening bellies as "like pregnancy" (ak ka nam wa). Munu ("to swell with fluid") is a verb that describes the fattening of both a warrior's belly and, as noted, a pregnant woman's abdomen. Nourishing the blood is a focal concern in both processes, and maize chicha is considered the most important blood-building food during both pregnancy and the warriors' seclusion.
Wari' also compare to childbirth the loss of the warrior's fat belly after he has sex. As one male elder described it: "The enemy blood enters the war-rior's body. The warrior gets fat. His belly swells. He gets really fat, like pregnancy. When the man has sex with a woman, the enemy blood goes out in the man's semen. It is like when a baby is born. The man gets thin. The enemy blood is gone, his fat is gone. The man gets thin, like a woman gets thin when a child is born."
Wari' thus projected a scenario of physiological changes in males similar to, but distinct from, female reproductive processes. (They say that it is like pregnancy, not that it is pregnancy.) This male transformation was procreative in its own way, for it produced the enemy spirit "children" who inhabit their Wari' "fathers." To call this parthogenesis (as Vilaça 1996 does) is to miss the point—which Wari' men make explicit—that this was not something that men accomplished on their own but a transformation that depended on a series of cross-sex transactions.
MASCULINITY AND INTERDEPENDENCE
Although the period of seclusion after an enemy-killing was the time in a Wari' man's life when he separated himself most from contact with women, this was not a rigid exclusivity. The warriors had intimate tactile contact with women as soon as they arrived home, when the women carried the killers into the village, bathed them, and oiled and painted their bodies. Even during the men's seclusion, some women (in their role as mothers) apparently entered the men's house enclosure: when adolescent boys were secluded after their first warfare experience, their proud mothers would visit them to pull on the boys' legs and arms, stretching them to encourage their growth.
When Wari' men talk about the warriors' seclusion, they openly acknowledge that its success depended on women's labor. An infusion of enemy blood/spirit alone does nothing for the warrior; only if the killer drinks quantities of chicha can he transform and retain this enemy substance in order to derive its positive effects. Seclusion, Wari' men say, would have been impossible without the chicha that women made.
Wari' consider sweet maize chicha the single most important food for building both healthy blood and nourishing breast milk. Sweet maize chicha is symbolically associated with femininity, consanguinity, social integration, and the formation and maintenance of nurturant relationships within the domestic sphere. The sweet maize chicha that Wari' warriors drank during their ritual seclusion was a thoroughly feminine substance. It was literally full of female fluid—saliva—since women sweetened it by chewing the maize (which breaks down complex starches into simple sugars) and spitting this masticated mixture into the pot.
Wari' see chicha as the quintessential product of female labor. During the warriors' seclusion, each warrior's sisters, wife, mother, and other female relatives worked long hours grinding, masticating, and cooking the maize to make the copious amounts of chicha the men required. When I ask older Wari' women why they were willing to do all this extra onerous work, and why it was so important for men to go through the ritual seclusion, they say that they considered the young men's growth, strength, health, and vitality essential to the well-being of the whole community. Napiri, they point out, were the
The women's burden was compounded by the fact that with so many hunters temporarily out of action, there was little game to eat. Old people say that while the men grew fat, their wives grew thin from overwork and lack of meat. Some commented on how relieved women were when the seclusion ended and the men got back to work. One gathers that it sometimes ended earlier than the warriors would have liked because their female kin lost patience with the situation.
Understanding how Wari' see the warriors' seclusion as a cross-sex transaction brings us back to Strathern's point at the beginning of this chapter: that native Amazonians and Melanesians recognize that it is through transactions with persons different from oneself that one develops creative capacities in the self. For Wari', maturation to full adulthood for both girls and boys traditionally was thought to be stimulated by interactions with two categories of "others": first with a being external to Wari' society (the moon for girls, an enemy for boys) and second with members of the opposite sex in one's own group—with men who produced the semen or women who produced the chicha that helped transform an adolescent's blood.
This notion that one depends on others to realize capacities in the self is salient not just in Wari' thought but also in other Amazonian societies, like the Kayapó described by William Fisher (Chapter 6), who emphasize social interactivity as the basis for self-actualization. This resonates with Aletta Bier-sack's insight (summarized in Strathern 1988, 130–131) that the Paiela of New Guinea "locate the sources of their internal efficacy beyond themselves. The sources do not constitute some other realm or domain but another type of ‘person.’ For ‘men’ they lie in the acts of ‘women.’ These sources are not to be controlled or overcome but sustained in order to give perpetual evidence of this very efficacy." Like the Paiela, Wari' look beyond themselves for agency-enhancing resources. In the past, one place they found it was in enemy outsiders, whom Wari' treated as a kind of natural resource, a source of growth-promoting, revitalizing substance that one could journey out beyond the boundaries of their society to acquire and bring back home.
SWOLLEN BELLIES, DEGENERATION, AND DEATH
Wari' emphasize the individual's responsibility to maintain his or her own health and strength, especially by guarding the purity and strength of one's blood. For napiri, this means practicing proper hygiene (bathing and avoiding dirty substances such as charred meat) and not eating a long list of proscribed game and fish (most of which are excessively bloody or are thought to have slow blood circulation). The same foods are prohibited for anyone in a state of growth, and for pregnant women in particular.[17]
What happens if someone does not follow these rules? Wari' say that the individual's blood will slow and degenerate, leading to weakness, lethargy, and illness. This can end in a fatal, much-feared disease syndrome called kup, in which the abdomen swells up huge with serum, often accompanied by vomiting of blood and uncontrolled nasal bleeding.[18] Pregnant women and napiri are the two categories of people most vulnerable to this disease.
Wari' thus posit two contrasting images of abdominal swelling for both sexes: a positive process of growth and enhanced vitality experienced by women in pregnancy and by men in the warrior's ritual seclusion, and a negative syndrome of deadly degeneration that results from failure to take care of one's blood. A third image of abdominal swelling appears in Wari' thinking about death, in which the decay and bloating of a corpse is equated with the ritual swelling of a warrior's belly. Before contact, when Wari' practiced mortuary cannibalism, they did not roast most adult corpses until about the third day after death. Wari' say that during this period when the unroasted corpse lay rotting and swelling on earth, in the underworld the spirit body of the dead person (of either sex and all ages) was lying in itam, a ritual state of unconsciousness during which, some elders say, the spirit goes off to kill birds or enemies. The swelling of the corpse was a manifestation of the swelling of the belly of the dead person's spirit, now become napiri. When revived by the master of the underworld, the dead person's spirit is restored to complete health, beauty, and perfect maturity; children are grown to young adulthood and old people become young and vigorous again. Wari' see the bloating of the rotting corpse as the visible marker of a positive spiritual transformation. This inverts the negative symbolism of the disease kup, in which abdominal swelling signals deadly degeneration of the blood. It also inverts the connection that Yanomami and other native Amazonians make between the swelling of a killer's belly and the decay of his victim's corpse.
THE YANOMAMI
The Yanomami of northern Brazil studied by Albert are one of four subgroups of the larger population generally referred to as Yanomami, which is one of the largest and least acculturated native populations in South America. Like Wari', Yanomami make their living by slash-and-burn gardening, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Postmarital residence is normatively uxorilocal. In contrast to the Wari', warfare continues to be part of life in some Yanomami communities today, as violence by outsiders (especially in the recent invasion by Brazilian gold miners; see Ramos 1995) and hostilities among Yanomami themselves keep dynamics of attack and retribution in play. Thus, following Albert (1985), I write of the Yanomami killer's ritual in the present tense.
Yanomami directly equate the state of a killer who has incorporated enemy blood with the condition of a girl during her first menstruation. Menstruating
For Yanomami, blood is the fundamental vector of biological becoming, a key element in processes of growth and decay, health and illness, maturation and aging (Albert 1985, 607–608). Blood also is a privileged symbolic element in the Yanomami philosophy of time: human biological rhythms are closely linked to cosmo-meteorological rhythms. Displaced outside the body, blood becomes a factor and a sign of disregulated biological, social, and cosmo-meteorological periodicity. Uncontained, it plunges people, society, and the universe into an irreversible process of entropy that is analogous to organic degradation. The two major contexts in which this danger is manifest are menarche and homicide.
Albert argues that in physiological terms, both the body of the warrior and the body of the pubescent girl are affected by excessive biological "naturalness," in the form of excessive blood in their bodies (Albert 1985, 587). Yanomami are concerned to control this blood and to circumscribe and contain the threats posed by its flow outside the body. They accomplish this through the ritual seclusion of the blood-contaminated individual, which Albert interprets as a form of control and containment, a symbolic "cooking" of the "raw" naturalness of the blood.
Menstrual blood is considered to be dangerous, imbued with a harmful odor, and polluting to others, especially men (Albert 1985, 574). The blood of menarche is most dangerous. When a girl's first period begins, she must immediately retire to a hammock behind a screen in her home and observe a solitary seclusion involving semi-isolation, immobility, silence, fasting, and nudity. If she failed to seclude herself properly, or if she did not complete the full seclusion, she would quickly experience premature aging and become an old woman (Albert 1985, 583). In addition, if her blood were to flow uncontrolled (that is, if it were not ritually contained in the seclusion), the world would be subject to constant darkness, rain, and storms.
The second extremely dangerous form of blood is that of a homicide victim. Yanomami believe that the victim's blood enters the killer through his nose and mouth (Albert 1985, 361). As long as this blood is present in his body, the killer is considered to be unokai. Like menstrual blood, the victim's blood is associated with decay, degeneration, and the disruption of biocosmic rhythms. To control its deleterious effects, the Yanomami warrior observes a strict seclusion whose details of proscribed and prescribed behaviors are virtually identical to those practiced by girls during their first menstruation. The consequences of not following the ritual restrictions are identical disorderings of biological and cosmo-meteorological rhythms: the killer would age very rapidly into an old man, and the world would be inundated with constant rain, storms, and darkness in the daytime.
The Yanomami killer's incorporation of his victim's blood is symbolically conceived as blood cannibalism: inside the killer's body are spirits of cannibal animals and insects that devour the victim's vital image/blood. The blood processes in the killer's body are closely associated with the rotting of the vic-tim's corpse (Albert 1985, 351). This blood gives off a putrid, nauseating odor in the killer's body. Like the Wari', Yanomami connect enemy blood to fat; they believe that it exudes out of the killer's body as grease sweated out on his forehead. The killer's seclusion lasts until the victim's corpse has rotted, the corpse fluids are gone, and the bones have become dry (Albert 1985, 362–363, 374). The killer then expels the remnant of putrid enemy elements from his body by vomiting (provoked by emetics) into running water and bathes to cleanse himself of the fat on his face.[19] If he failed to purge himself of this rotten blood, his abdomen would swell, bringing violent pain and death (Albert 1985, 375).
This equation between menstruation and the "state of homicide" recurs in two other contexts that Yanomami also call unokai: male puberty and conjugal seclusion at menarche. In the male puberty rite (which seems to be infrequent and not much elaborated), young men say that they defecate blood, which is literally conceived as male menarche (Albert 1985, 599–601). Boys defecating blood are unokai and are supposed to observe an attenuated version of the seclusions practiced for menarche and homicide.
Conjugal seclusion (with husband and wife lying side by side in a hammock) occurs when menstruation begins for a young girl who married before she had begun to menstruate. When a husband has "fed" and "raised" his young wife for some time, he participates in the bodily experience of her menarche: the husband is said to experience a fever, which Albert (1985, 592) views as a symbolic transfusion of heat and blood from the girl's body. Like his wife, the husband is unokai and must lie in seclusion with her. The odor of his wife's menses enters his nose and causes grease to exude from his forehead, just as the victim's blood did in the killer (1985, 593).
Here, menstrual blood and its dangers do not appear to be attached exclusively to femaleness but also may be associated with men. The emphasis is not on the polluting nature of women alone but on the responsibility of the individual (of either sex) to take proper action to control dangerous blood. Menstruating women, the husbands of menarcheal girls, pubescent boys, and killers all use the same ritual techniques to circumscribe, control, and neutralize their blood and channel it for purposes of promoting health, growth, and societal well-being.
DISCUSSION
One of the points that emerges from a regional comparison of the Amazonian warriors' seclusion rites is that while these share certain themes and construct manhood out of similar processes (killing an outsider, seclusion and its
In many ways, the Wari' warriors' ritual complex appears anomalous in comparison to the Yanomami and other native Brazilian peoples. Wari' treated enemy blood as a revitalizing resource, whereas Yanomami and others associate it with decay and degeneration. Wari' warriors tried to keep the victim's blood in their bodies so they could absorb its beneficial properties, whereas Yanomami and others seek to neutralize and expel it. Wari' men actively cultivated the swelling of their bellies during seclusion, but Yanomami and others see such abdominal swelling as life-threatening. Wari' symbolism emphasized growth-related metaphors of pregnancy and birth; for Yanomami, the dominant metaphor is menarche—an ambivalent state encompassing powers of both human fecundity and cosmic destruction.
Underlying the marked differences between the Wari' and the Yanomami and others, however, is a shared conception of the warrior's ritual transformation as a means for enhancing masculine vitality and conferring long life with some protection against illness, degeneration, or death. If the central concern of these warriors' rites is male transcendence over biological forces of death and degeneration, it is no surprise to find that men enact this by embodying female reproductive processes. Cross-culturally, rituals (especially men's rituals) that are concerned with creating a transcendent order commonly project imageries of power that posit "a contrast between mortal bodies and Enduring Ones" (Shapiro 1989, 76). "Mortal" bodies are prototypically female bodies. Bloch and Parry's (1982) well-known argument suggests that women and their sexual functions tend to be symbolically identified with biological degeneration because women give birth and birth leads inevitably to death, decomposition, and decay. Thus, in rituals concerned with creating a transcendent order, "this world of biology is elaborately constructed as something to be got rid of " (Bloch and Parry 1982, 18–27). Warren Shapiro (1989, 74–75) has extended this insight with a provocative argument that the "immense denigration of procreation by pseudo-procreative theorists … [and] their often barely disguised misogyny" reflect men's "desperate attempts to control and denigrate" the biological forces that women control. "Pseudoprocreation, then, has to do with the magical conquest of the mortal implications of procreation, and, like certain other forms of such conquest known to psychoanalytic theory, it partakes of its supposed antithesis." In Amazonia, this interpretation applies most directly to pseudo-procreative (especially menstrual) imagery in the classic men's cults such as those of the Mehinaku
In the native Brazilian warriors' seclusion rituals, however, neither secrecy nor the denigration of women and female physiology are mentioned in any of the ethnographic accounts. Rather than assume that misogyny must lurk beneath the surface, it seems more fruitful to probe the implications of what the Yanomami and Wari' systems explicitly assert: that female and male growth and physiology are parallel processes.
One dimension of this is an emphasis on relational interdependence, the idea that for both sexes, sources of vitality and potency that create gendered capacities (growth, health, fertility, productivity, efficacy in fulfilling adult roles) lie outside the individual in interactions with others (cf. Lindenbaum 1984, 356; Strathern 1988). For females, this is expressed most directly in the notion of seminal nurture, the idea that menstruation results from or is stimulated by sexual intercourse with a man. This idea is shared by the Araweté, Wari', and, among the Gê, at least the Xikrin-Kayapó (see Fisher, Chapter 6) and the Krahó (Carneiro da Cunha 1978, 106). The Yanomami and some Gê peoples also think that the blood processes of menarche affect men's bodies as well. This militates against a simplistic model of male and female substances as antithetical in these specific cultures. It also implies that notions of procreation are not associated exclusively with women; rather, there is a broader concept of nurturance as a component of masculinity as well, expressed in the nurture of fetuses and wives and (for the Wari') in the production of spirit "children" through warfare.
Just as female fecundity depends on a cross-sex transaction, the Yanomami and the Wari' traditionally saw men's bodily potency as derived from the incorporation and self-disciplined transformation of an enemy's blood/spirit. (The Wari' also considered women essential participants in the men's transformation.) It is worth considering whether conceptual parallels between male and female relational fecundity underlie the warriors' ritual complex in other Brazilian societies as well. Unfortunately, this is difficult to assess with the sketchy data now available.
The idea that procreativity, growth, and capacities in the self develop out of relationships between unlike individuals is something that Amazonia and Melanesia share in common. As Marilyn Strathern notes (Chapter 10), these are two world areas in which people actively seek to create social differences among categories of persons, to produce outsiders from whom one gains one's own identity. The rites surrounding the killing of an enemy are one of the most direct expressions of this. As the Melanesian literature has demonstrated, focusing on relationality opens possibilities to explore, compare, and find the common threads underlying seemingly disparate phenomena. It allows us to ask, for instance, whether native people see similar dynamics in the
A first step for Amazonianists is to begin to think about the regional patterning of male rituals and their variations on the themes of blood, semen, seclusion, and bodily disciplines of abstinence and consumption as technologies for enhancing agency in one or both sexes. The diverse cultural meanings associated with the enemy-killers' rites suggest that the argument developed by Jonathan Hill (Chapter 3)—that Whitehead's models of fertility cults offer illuminating perspectives on Amazonian men's rituals—might be extended considerably further. When Hill asserts that in "cults of manhood" in what he calls Amazonian "hunter-warrior" societies (which would include the Yanomami and Wari'), "substances and symbols of fertility are entirely male-controlled," this describes only one pole of a continuum. As Keesing (1982, 11), Whitehead (1986b), and others have noted, Melanesian rites of male initiation and manmaking vary considerably in the degree of male exclusivity they involve. Whitehead (1986b) emphasizes that women participate in many male ritual activities; indeed, she suggests that some "cults of manhood" might more accurately be described as "man-woman" cults. Like their Melanesian counterparts, Amazonian man-making rituals run a gamut from antagonism to complementarity, from emphases on inimical physiological differences to notions of interdependence and the productivity of cross-sex transactions. The Wari' case, in particular, demonstrates that there is no single pattern of gender relations or male dominance associated with the social valuation of men as hunter-warriors and of enemy-killing as a source of masculine vitality. Men may assert their control over life-giving, procreative powers by acts resonant with feminine symbolism without necessarily diminishing or denying their women's own distinct powers and intrinsic sources of procreative agency.
If native Amazonians sometimes see male and female development as parallel, they obviously do not see them as identical. It is the distinctiveness of the male transformation that native Amazonians emphasize when contrasting femininity and masculinity. For Wari' women, the stimulus for fecundity is located within their own society, in members of the opposite sex, and women access this relational potency through sexual intercourse. The stimulus to male fecundity/potency, in contrast, is located outside society in the alien world of the enemy, and it is accessed by the violent act of killing. This contrast—between centripetal (female) and centrifugal (male) dynamics in the process of coming of age and coming into adult agency—is a cross-cultural pattern in initiation rites and cultural ideas about the transition from childhood to adulthood.
In the Brazilian warriors' rituals, another glaring difference between images of male and female development is that the male transformation is based on violence, on participation in an aggressive, often life-risking act that may entail intense physical exertion, anger, and fear. This reflects a more general
In locating the source of a young man's transformation in his interactions with an enemy outsider whom he kills and from whom he appropriates something that he may transform and thereby enhance his own masculine powers, the Brazilian enemy-killer's rituals resemble certain Melanesian societies noted by Whitehead (1986b, 278), in which male fertility develops through violence that garners elements of the enemy which become an ingredient in human fertility and the enhancement of human health and vitality. In both regions, this is expressed in beliefs about acquiring and incorporating (into individual or social bodies) elements taken from enemies, such as captive children (Murphy 1958), trophy heads, flesh, genitals, souls, or blood. In ways specific to each culture, these convey vitality, strength, long life, and sometimes even immunity to death or the rotting of one's corpse.
In both regions, some men have looked outward to enemy humans located beyond the bounds of the local group as a resource for self-transformation. In Strathern's terms, they have gone out searching to find what is hidden and must be brought into relation with the self. This theme is particularly elaborated in Amazonia, where the world outside human society—the domain of forest animals and human enemies—plays a larger role in self-conceptions and self-identity than it does in Melanesia.
The regeneration of Amazonian males' vitality via enemy-killing and its disciplines asserts masculine influence over the interlinked forces of body, cosmos, and time. This is a supremely cultural act, for as Lawrence Sullivan (1988) observed in his masterful synthesis of themes in South American religions, the idea of intercalating cosmic periodicity into human life is at the center of native Amazonian conceptions of culture: "The capacity to relate to things in a proper, periodic way is fundamental to the possibilities of culture" (Sullivan 1988, 262).[21] The Wari' warrior's journey in search of an enemy to kill was both an extension of self across space and an assertion of influence over temporal periodicity. An attack on an enemy inevitably provoked counterattacks that fed ongoing cycles of interethnic violence. In Wari' memories, attacks and counterattacks—the killings and massacres their people suffered and the moves they made in response—are rhythms of their historical consciousness.
Recognizing how warriors' acts of killing are implicated in temporal periodicity suggests another, prototypically Amazonian, reason why female physiology is a template for the warrior's seclusion rituals. Attuning the self to cosmic
This contrast between intrinsic female powers and intentionally constructed male powers suggests that male feelings of inadequacy may be a component of pseudo-procreative imagery. Tuzin (1995) identifies male inadequacy as a core dynamic in men's cult activities in Papua New Guinea, and Sullivan's survey of the literature on male initiation in South America reaches a similar conclusion. "Men's relationship to life processes, the regenerative processes of culture, is an uneasy one in comparison to women's," he writes (Sullivan 1988, 345). "Whereas women's relationship is part of the primordial condition of the mythic world, men's involvement in reproductive processes threatens to remain borrowed, instrumental, and ideological rather than material." Sullivan suggests that both the terms in which men perceive their inadequacy and the ritual mechanisms they use to overcome it are framed by quintessentially Amazonian concerns with the links among space, time, and body. Men's claims to powers of reproduction are tenuous, Sullivan asserts (p. 329), for there is "an apparent lack of relation in space between objects (e.g., men and the instruments of regeneration; the male body and the bodies of offspring from the female) and an apparent separation in time between distinct events (e.g., intercourse and parturition)." In the face of the resulting sense of male inadequacy and insecurity, the ritual appropriation of feminine symbolism in male initiation and rites of transformation "aims at providing men a fundamental and corporeal relationship to powers of regeneration, growth, and transformation" (p. 345).
Native Amazonians and Melanesians see the human body as a prime site for constructing relationships. Modifications of bodily processes—manipula-tions of blood and semen, seclusion and abstinence, control of what passes between the internal body and the external world—are technologies through which men activate their self-potential and construct their claims to generativity and cosmic attunement. The Brazilian enemy-killers' rituals are one example of how men have used the symbolic and substantive resources of women and enemies to express and enact masculine control over powers of life, death, and biological regeneration. These rituals embody the insight common to both Melanesia and Amazonia: that it is in relation to persons different from oneself that one develops creativity and draws capacities out of the self. The new perspectives generated by bringing a focus on relationality and
NOTES
1. The Kayapó (a Gê group) also believed that enemy blood enters the killer's body and must be ritually expelled (by scarification and exposure to the sun), but they did not enter seclusion to accomplish this (Vidal 1977, 156–157; Verswijver 1996, 24). Huxley (1957) and Viveiros de Castro (1992) have suggested that in the sixteenth century, a ritual seclusion may have been practiced by the Tupinambá, Tupians who inhabited coastal northeastern Brazil at the time of the European invasion. The Aché of Paraguay believed that only the victim's soul entered the killer's body (through the anus), where it ate his entrails and had to be vomited out (Clastres 1972, 259).
2. Among Upper Xingu peoples who have renounced warfare and do not valorize the image of the warrior, there is a similar belief that when a man kills a witch (a fellow tribesmember), the killer's belly will swell with the victim's blood unless this is purged through seclusion disciplines similar to those for puberty seclusion (Gregor 1985; Viveiros de Castro 1979). The nearby Suyá fear that the witch's blood that swells the killer's belly will make the killer into a witch, and witch-killers observe a semiseclusion similar to enemykillers, but without any bleeding, scarring, or ceremony (Seeger 1981, 168). In contrast to enemy-killing, witch-killing does not enhance (and may even diminish) status and masculinity in these societies.
3. The Araweté killer with his belly full of enemy blood "dies" and is in "a state in which he actually becomes a corpse. … He feels ‘as if he is rotting … and his bones become soft’ in tandem with the rotting of his victim's corpse" (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 240, 247). Apinayé warriors consumed quantities of hot pepper because the heat drives away the spirit (which likes cool places) and consumes the dead person's cadaver more quickly, thereby liquidating the contaminating fluids (Da Matta 1976, 87). The Krahó sometimes burned the corpses of enemies and witches, thereby eliminating the blood so that the killer could shorten considerably the duration of his seclusion (Carneiro da Cunha 1978, 105).
4. Fatal male abdominal swelling is reminiscent of the "male pregnancy" illnesses reported among the Awa and Hua of highland New Guinea (Newman and Boyd 1982, 267; Meigs 1984, 52–55). I find no evidence, however, that native Amazonians think of the swelling of the killer's belly as negative pregnancy. On the other hand, a theme in several societies is the idea that fatal abdominal swelling (for women as well as men) results from transgressions of societal norms, especially improper cross-sex interactions. In view of widespread native ideas about blood as a key factor in pregnancy, perhaps it is worth considering whether Amazonian fears of warriors' bellies swelling and bursting might evoke negative pregnancy images.
5. All translations of texts with foreign titles are my own.
6. Some scholars have proposed that concerns with blood loss motivated warfare in certain Amazonian societies. The idea is that a motive for vengeance was a desire to recapture
7. In most societies in both regions, native people consider menstrual blood and the blood of childbirth at least somewhat polluting or dangerous to adult men. In much of Melanesia, there are stringent taboos and prohibitions on contact between men and menstruating women. Some Amazonian groups also see menstrual blood as quite dangerous, while others treat its risks as minimal.
8. This account is based primarily on data collected in the village of Santo André in June 1985–June 1987 and May–June 1991, with supplementary data collected in the villages of Ribeirão, Lage, Tanajura, and Rio Negro-Ocaia. Fieldwork was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the Inter-American Foundation, authorized by the CNPq and FUNAI, and sponsored by Júlio Cesar Melatti of the Universidade de Brasília.
9. Throughout the life cycle, Wari' conceive of individuals as developing and maturing through their engagement in flows of elements (tangible and intangible) between persons in contrasting social categories. Transformative interactions involve transfers of substance (usually blood or its analogs) between different types of Wari' persons (female/male, mother/fetus) or between Wari' persons and nonpersons (animal spirits, enemies). These latter nonpersons, however, ultimately are conceived as persons: jami karawa,"animal spirits," have human-form (Wari') spirits; and an enemy spirit becomes Wari' in the killer's body.
10. This applied only to the killing of outsider (non-Wari') enemies (wijam). The killing of a fellow Wari' tribesmember did not involve transfers of substance, nor does it appear to have been ritualized in any manner analogous to enemy-killing. Readers desiring a fuller understanding of Wari' warfare and the category of wijam should consult Vilaça (1992).
11. Biersack (Chapter 4) emphasizes how men's rites of passage reproduce gender hierarchies. In the Wari' case, gender hierarchies were not pronounced, but it is worth noting that any claims that Wari' men might make to superiority over women—such as physical strength, self-control, or the knowledge of how to handle the dangerous blood of animals or corpses—were buttressed by their claims to enhanced blood acquired through the disciplines of the warrior's seclusion.
12. I hesitate to read these scanty data as evidence of a fundamental dynamic of Wari' gender relations, especially since so many Wari' interviewed independently by five different ethnographers have represented exocannibalism as a male activity. The denial by the women who allegedly ate enemies is troubling, especially in view of the relative openness with which Wari' speak about their cannibalism practices. Vilaça's argument that it makes sense that women would have eaten enemy flesh because the men had taken part in the war party and thus were precluded from eating is unconvincing. This assumes that Wari'
13. Viveiros de Castro (1992, 281–282) suggests that there is a broad Tupian (and perhaps pan-Brazilian) pattern of equating enemies with feminine symbolism and equating relations to enemies with relations to affines. Vilaça (1992) develops a complicated argument to assert that Wari' project images of affinity onto their enemies. From this perspective, oppositions between consanguines and affines are not absent from the warrior's ritual but are displaced onto Wari'/enemy oppositions.
14. The enemy spirit acquires the markers of Wari' ethnicity: it comes to speak the Wari' language, enjoy Wari' foods, and sleep on a bed (as Wari' normally do) instead of a hammock (as Brazilians and most neighboring Indians do). Vilaça emphasizes that the Wari' system does not fit Viveiros de Castro's (1992) model of the Araweté (Tupian) killer, in which the killer takes on characteristics of the enemy Other. On the contrary, the spirit of the slain enemy becomes Wari'. "The society of the [Wari'] killer does not appropriate any symbolic goods of the dead enemy: there are no songs, names, insignias. Neither does it appropriate [the enemy's] ‘negative’ attributes: his anger, thirst for vengeance, in sum, his position as enemy. Everything [in the Wari' system] appears to reduce to a transference of substances, to an operation restricted to the level of individual physiology, which culminates with the enemy spirit transformed into the offspring (parthenogenetic) of the killer" (Vilaça 1996).
15. Wari' use such "toothpicks" to eat meat and pamonha (a sort of dense, unleavened corn bread) in certain festivals and, in the past, in funerary cannibalism.
16. Vilaça suggests that some Wari' directly equate menarche and the male transformation via enemy-killing. In the Rio Negro-Ocaia community, she reports hearing the term napiri used to describe a girl after her first menstruation. Wari' with whom I worked, however, disavowed knowledge of such a usage.
17. Until old age, napiri were supposed to safeguard the enhanced blood in their bodies by strict attention to hygiene; they were supposed to bathe and apply body oil and annatto paint frequently and avoid contact with dirt and the soot on charred meat. They also were supposed to avoid eating a long list of animals and fish species that are thought to be excessively bloody or to have slow blood circulation. The same species are prohibited for consumption by anyone in a state of growth—pregnant women, young adolescents, and small children and their parents (who share intimate connections of body substance). Eating these foods is said to cause stunted growth and physical disfigurement in children and adolescents. For adults (especially pregnant women and napiri), eating proscribed animals or failing to observe the hygienic prescriptions is said to lead to weakness, lethargy, and eventually death.
18. These symptoms resemble the (biomedical) disease ascites, in which disorders of the liver, pancreas, or other organs lead to the presence of free fluid in the peritoneal cavity, gross abdominal swelling, and sometimes hematemesis and nasal bleeding as the result of ruptures of gastro-esophageal varices associated with portal hypertension.
19. A similar practice of men vomiting to rid themselves of blood after a violent encounter occurs among the Mehinaku of the Upper Xingu in central Brazil. In the Jawarí ritual of contests between members of different, ethnically distinct villages, a man who is struck by a spear thrown by an opponent from another group vomits and uses medicines
20. See Sullivan (1988, 328–329) for an extended discussion of the role of violence in men's cults and strategies of initiation.
21. Sullivan offers an evocative image of this nexus of cosmic, bodily, and social rhythms: "Throughout their lives men continue to embody the periodic rhythms to which they were first initiated in the womb: in the blood pulsing through the body or spurting from wounds in war or rite, in the tempos of the hunter's life (the periodic fasts, avoidances, and sexual abstentions), in the steady ‘thump’ of one's lineage as it matures and falls as the ripe fruit of a new generation or age-set during the periodic performance of initiation" (Sullivan 1988, 265).