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