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.