Book review of, Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonia. Laura M. Rival.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xx + 246 pp., plates, maps,
tables, figures, notes, references, index. ISBN 0-231-11844-9

Whitten, Norman E, Jr

English

Trinity University

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of LowlandSouth AmericaISSN: 2572-3626 (online)Volume 1 | Issue 2 Article 4December 2003Trekking Through History: The Huaorani ofAmazoniaNorman E. Whitten JrUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipitiPart of the Anthropology CommonsThis Reviews is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of theSociety for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contactjcostanz@trinity.edu.Recommended CitationWhitten, Norman E. Jr (2003). "Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonia," Tipití: Journal of the Society for theAnthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 4.Available at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol1/iss2/4223BOOK REVIEWSTipití (2003) 1(2):223–239 © 2003SALSAISSN 1545-4703 Printed in USATrekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonia.  Laura M. Rival.New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.  xx + 246 pp., plates, maps,tables, figures, notes, references, index.  $62.50 (cloth), $31.50 (paper).ISBN 0-231-11844-9, ISBN 0-231-11845-7. [www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/]NORMAN E. WHITTEN, JR.University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignThe themes in this work flow and interweave in multiple and redundantways.  Rival seeks to understand what Gregory Bateson termed ethos andeidos—the overriding emotional tone and the  fundamental cognitiveorientations that motivate and structure a cultural system—as applied here  byRival to the Huaorani native people of Amazonian Ecuador.  The Huaorani(Waorani) separate themselves into huaomoni (us) and huarani (others [likeus, but enemies]) all of whom are differentiated from the cohouri, until recentlyregarded as cannibal others (pp. 10, 212) by whom they are surrounded andwho prey on them.A prominent ethotic theme is that of  pïï, which “constitutes a mixture ofcourage, fearlessness, anger and force—both mental and physical—to kill witha spear” (p. 56).  By broadest contrast with this ethotic quality is huentey,described by the author as a “form of ‘social work’ that helps to restore harmonyin a longhouse” (pp. 100–101).The state of pïï occurs in either men or women, especially when one learnsof the violent death of a close relative.  Only men, however, become pïï inte,which means not only to be stricken by the overriding emotion but to actuallybecome that emotion, to embody it and to enact its externalization.  In thisstate, which the author translates as “homicidal furor” (p. 56) a man may turnfirst to spear his own children, so women run with the small children to theforest while older children escape on their own.  By chanting while undertakingsuch activities as planning a raid, spying on victims, and sharpening spears, aman maintains his state of homicidal rage and communicates it to others whoalso come to embody it and, eventually, if the cultural state persists, go offtogether on a spear-killing raid to reciprocate past death with present death.At this point the men are like jaguars who prey on other Huaorani or cohouri.Huentey is a state brought about by another form of specialized chantingby a man lying in his hammock within the longhouse (nanicaboiri).  Here thevery opposite of jealousy, rage, anger, or schism is absorbed by all people withinthis tightly knit, all-encompassing exogamic social kin group.  The themes ofrage leading to spear killing and of expanding inner harmony leading to peace1Published by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2003224 Tipitíand sustained cooperation permeate this work.  Oddly, they are not representedin the index.A root metaphor, or cultural paradigm (à la Victor Turner), of a providingand nurturing forest is another theme interwoven with cultural rage and socialtranquillity.  In Huaorani eidos the  giving forest has grown from theanthropogenic work of previously unknown but real people, Huaorani andnon-Huaorani, who planted many trees and other edible forest products deepwithin the forest.  The most important of these is the peach palm, which inthis territory, the author tells us, apparently fruits for about six months of theyear.  The peach palm is slow growing, is tended sporadically, and is identifiedwith the contemporary people of a given territory, as well as with the knownand unknown ancestors who have left behind potsherds and stone axe heads.Periodic festivals (eëmë) where manioc food beverage and other beveragesare served together with ample forest food punctuate quotidian life and, througharranged or partially arranged marriages between people in differentlonghouses, tie people in these longhouses together and recreate consanguinealand affinal ties.  Cultivated manioc (and more recently plantain) is the keyelement in the festivals.  Sweet manioc drink is prepared by an interestingprocess similar to Canelos Quichua allu asua (mold brew) except that no moldenters (pp. 132–133).  The Huaorani ethos deprecates manioc as a fast-growing,temporary crop, that only yields its edible roots after one planting, and Rivalargues that they treat it much like any other forest product.  Those who preparethe large amounts of manioc brew for a festival, the hosts, are said to be trees,and those who attend are said to be like birds flocking to the fruiting tree.Rival writes:Marriage forms an integral part of alliance politics . . .  of group formationpolitics.  Marriage, like death, constitutes a moment in social life whenindividuals can affect the course of social reproduction.  Each marriage andeach death affects the boundaries between allied and nonallied house groups,given the negotiable and open character of huaomoni-huarani clustering[endogamous] formations (p. 142).Uxorilocal marriage brings an outsider male into the household controlled byan in-law senior male, if one is still alive, and he must be tamed or domesticatedto soothe the potential explosive rages that living among nonconsanguinealsmay engender.  Eventually, he becomes a pacified consanguine of the embodiedlonghouse.  If he lives long enough, the in-marrying man becomes thehousehold head and endeavors to control the marriage of his grandchildren soas to manage the social body constituted of a few endogamous allied longhousesin a world of danger, rage, and killing.  An ideal marriage begins in an ascendinggeneration with two brothers marrying two sisters, and in ego’s generation, aman from one of these marriages, living in one longhouse, marries a womanfrom the other marriage, living in another longhouse.2Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South Americahttp://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol1/iss2/4Book Reviews 225Failure to reach the integrative level of marriage leads to violence at theeëmë and subsequent organized spearing-to-kill attempts between men of thelonghouses involved in the failure.  The case of the emergence of the nowinfamous Tagaeri into Huaorani, Ecuadorian, and international history is oneof several cases offered.  Basically, a Huaorani Christian group brought a Tagaeriwoman by force to a festival to forge a marriage, but she refused to cooperate.They returned her to her group but they were attacked and one of the initialkidnapping group, called the Babeiri, was speared to death.The author writes that history is constituted of two murderous tendenciesthat are revealed and talked into history during treks.  The first is a long seriesof predatory attacks perpetrated by people represented as cannibal outsidersfrom the Amazon rubber boom to the present, and probably long before, andsecond, from the continuous destruction caused by culturally patternedhomicidal madness (pp. 64–65).  This, she says, is characteristic of an“Amazonian cultural logic” (p. 65) wherein killing inserts memory into sociallife:. . . in the words of one of my Huaorani guides: “a long time ago, there weremany Huaorani people, who defended themselves fiercely against cannibalsand protected their lives from encroachers.  They began to kill each other.Only a few people were left.  They said: ‘we have killed enough, let us stopbeing angry, let us grow children and become many again’” (p. 48).Rival begins her work with the concept of trekking as it relates to history.To situate the people in their own cultural system and possible cultural history,she creates the didactic yet deceptive contrast between Amazonian specialistsas cultural ecologists who construct evolutionary sequences as opposed to thosewho stress functional adaptation.  According to Rival, both ignore history.She takes a position propounded, explicated and demonstrated by WilliamBalée (one of the editors of the historical ecology series in which this book ispublished), that people have, from time immemorial, created their own culturalniches and need not be placed in evolutionary phases wherein they eitherprogress to a higher stage or devolve to a lower one.She relates trekking to war and destruction, as contrasted with localization,which she relates to intensified horticulture.  “Nomadism,” her conceptionand perception of the basic Huaorani cultural ethos and eidos, involves foragingand warfare associated with uxorilocality and endogamy.  It contrasts withsedentism, as potentially signaled by manioc horticulture, which representspacific village life associated with virilocality, exogamy, and new politicalalliances.The ideal region for trekking is the forest, described (p. 80) as a patchworkof successive fallows.  She explicates the cultural nature of the forest in finedetail as conceptualized by the Huaorani and links their viewpoint to westernscientific knowledge.  Her ethnography of people trekking in the forest is3Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of AmazoniaPublished by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2003226 Tipitíimpressive and convincing.  Her interpretations, however, strike me as worthyof discussion.  It would seem from her descriptions that the forest structurereflects long-term horticulture as fundamental to the Huaorani economy, andmanioc production and drinking at festivals as a key to the entire socialorganization that unlocks the possibility of cooperation and fastens bondsthat prevent the Huaorani’s own foreknowledge of possible self-annihilation.Her interpretation of horticulture in Huaorani ecosystems is so radicallydivergent from that of James Yost or Miguel Angel Cabodevilla as to raiseserious issues fundamental to research in greater Amazonia.The author is given to very broad and perhaps unwarranted contrasts andgeneralizations, such as: “There is a staggering tendency in Amazoniananthropology to stress the cultural homogeneity of lowland South Americansocieties” (p. 3).  Although the Huaorani live in the Upper Amazonian-AndeanPiedmont region, she characterizes their system as “societies” of the “Amazon-Orinoco drainage” and as “Northwest Amazon.” She goes on to write thatculture-area specialists “typically assume that variation in technology, systemsof production, or social organization is not significant” (p. 3).  I find thisstatement astounding.  Just reading relevant literature on this small westerncorner of Amazonia, I cannot believe that such homogeneity has been or isstressed by those who have written significant ethnographies on the Shuar,Achuar, Shiwiar, Canelos Quichua, Naporuna, Cofán, Secoya or Siona, noneof whom live so very far from Huaorani territory.  Pursuant to the same theme,her radical dichotomy between settled, horticultural systems and trekkingsystems is undercut by the ethnographies of the people mentioned above, amongmany others.She next deals with the known ethnohistory of Tupian, Tucanoan andZaparoan people of what is now Amazonian Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, tomake the point that the Huaorani cultural niche creation seems to be ofindependent longhouse systems on high hills away from the expandinghorticultural systems of the rivers.  This brings the more recent Huaoranihistory into this system.  Then comes a chapter on “Huaorani NomadicIsolationism” within which the rage and anger are explicated and placed incultural contexts.  The fourth chapter on cultural ecology is strong and shouldbe required reading for all interested in forest ecology and horticulture.  Thesubsection on chanting is especially informative and shows how peopleconstitute and transmit cultural knowledge in nondiscursive manners.  Afterdiscussion of the eëmë festivals, that again make us think more of thecomplementarity of horticulture and trekking, quite contra to her central thesis,she writes of  “Schools in the Rain Forest,” where the international and nationalhistory of the Huaorani is revealed in its regional modernity.In 1956 the Huaorani (then derogatorily known as “Auca”) spearedthemselves into international history by killing five Summer Institute of4Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South Americahttp://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol1/iss2/4Book Reviews 227Linguistics (SIL) personnel who attempted to “contact” them by landing on abeach of the Curaray River.  Subsequently, two women missionaries, relatedby marriage and consanguinity to the victims, accompanied by a famousHuaorani woman, Dayuma, trekked into the area from Arajuno and settled atTihueno where Dayuma’s native group (the Guiquetairi) lived.  There, theybefriended, inter alia, one of the Huaorani killers and “pacified” the people,and subsequently others, who came in for the abundance of goods and modernresources distributed by the missionaries (pp. 156–161).Thus began the new Huaorani historical epoch that featured the spearingof the five SIL representatives and the alleged shooting by one of them of aHuaorani attacker, Dayuma’s brother Nampa, who subsequently died (p. 158).From these reciprocal deaths and the contact by missionary women with newrules and great external abundance came the indigenous adaptation of takingfrom the others, but not following (necessarily) their dictates.  By 2002 theHuaorani were taking from oil camps, ecotours, missionaries, scientists, andothers, using the schools to enter global modernity, essentially on their ownterms as they continued to trek toward the future with decreasing forestresources but increasing exogenous resources.On May 26, 2003, the breach between Huaorani living near the Coca-Tigüino road, called the  “vía Aucas,” and other Huaorani from the far southeasterupted in yet another historical incident.  Huaorani from the Tigüino regionspeared eight women, five children, and an uncertain (if any) number of menof a Taromenane longhouse.  This incident produced and is producing ahistorical marker in Ecuadorian legal and constitutional “plural culturalism.”On the one hand, the Huaorani who took part in the raid gave interviews tothe effect that they were enacting intracultural justice, reciprocating presentdeaths for a past death (the Tagaeri incident mentioned above).  On the otherhand, and in perhaps a complementary relationship to this exegeticalinterpretation, is the position, backed by evidence, that the illegal Colombianlumber extractors working in Tagaeri territory induced the Huaorani to makethis raid to create an atmosphere of intimidation to drive the Tagaeri and/orTaromenane away from the illegal operations.  The Huaorani indigenousorganization and regional indigenous organizations all exonerated the Huaoranispearmen from the killing of multiple women and children, and condemnedthe madereros for inducing the incident and creating a mood of fear and unrestin the region.Rival’s Trekking Through History is an excellent ethnography of threeinterrelated sectors of Huaorani society: the forest, the longhouse, and themodern village.  When the author veers from her own ethnography, however,to cite second-hand information about other peoples, she sometimes errs.Attention to the rich ethnographies available for the broader region of Ecuador’sOriente would have forestalled many interpretative glitches.5Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of AmazoniaPublished by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2003

Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonia

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Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonia

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