Barasana Explained

Barasana (alternate names Barazana, Panenua, Pareroa, or Taiwano[1] is an exonym applied to an Amazonian people, considered distinct from the Taiwano, though the dialect of the latter is almost identical to that of the Barasana, and outside observers can detect only minute differences between the two languages.[2] [3] They are a Tucanoan group located in the eastern part of the Amazon Basin in Vaupés Department in Colombia (Apaporis River) and Amazonas State in Brazil. As of 2000, there were at least 500 Barasanas in Colombia, although some recent estimates place the figure as high as 1,950.[4] [5] [6] A further 40 live on the Brazilian side, in the municipalities of Japurá and São Gabriel da Cachoeira.[7]

The Barasana refers to themselves as the jebá.~baca, or people of the jaguar (Jebá "jaguar" is their mythical ancestor).[8]

Geography, ecology

Barasana territory lies in the central sector of the Colombian Northwest Amazon. The Barasana inhabit the Pirá-piraná river basin of the Comiseria de Vaupés between the two main river systems of the Vaupés River and the Japurá River . The area is a tropical rainforest, interspersed with occasional stands of Mauritia flexuosa or mirití palm and savanna with xerophytic vegetation. Rainfall averages around 3500-1NaN-1 per year.[9] [10]

Its climate is marked by four seasons, a long dry spell from December to March followed by the wet season from March to August, a short dry season between August and September, followed by a rainy season from September until December. The average temperature varies between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (68 and 86 °F).[9] It is notorious for its treacherous rivers that are choked with dangerous rapids and falls. The number of faunal species is not rich, and individual animals not common, though hunting game is prized as the fundamentally male mode of procuring food. Fish also, despite the many rivers, do not abound.[11]

Ethnic group context

The Vaupés area is inhabited by roughly 20 tribes or descent groups.[12] The word tribe is generally disdained by anthropologists, who prefer to define groups by such terms as sib, language group, exogamous group or phratry,[13] [14] [15] living in an unbounded system, that is cosmopolitan and multilingual.[16] Apart from the Maku and the Arawakan, Vaupés Indians belong to Eastern Tukanoan language family, most prominent of them being, other than the Barasana, the Desana, the Bará, the Tukano proper, the Macuna, the Tatuyo, and the Cubeo.[17] Despite the established system of intermarriage, their languages are mutually unintelligible.[18] A Creole-type lingua franca, called locally lingua geral, created by the Jesuit missionaries as a general language for communicating with Indians in the lower reaches of the Amazon,[19] is also spoken among them.

History

The various Tukanoan myths of origin refer to a westward upstream migration from Brazil, and Reichel-Dolmatoff believes that there is a ‘kernel of historical truth’ behind these uniform traditions.[20] Curt Nimuendajú thought that the east Tukanoan tribes invaded from the west, and that the autochthonous population consisted of the Makú, assuming that these smaller hunter-gatherers were older than the agriculturalist newcomers.[21] Desultory Spanish contact with the Vaupés region goes back to the 16th century. But historical records show that the Tukano peoples shifted to the remote headwaters of the Río Negro as a refuge, in flight from the slave trade and diseases, and forced relocations introduced by the Portuguese in the late 18th.century.[22] [23] It was Alfred Russel Wallace, in travelling up the Vaupés river in 1850[24] [25] who first took note of Indians like the Barasana and their dialects.[26] and the rites of their Yurupary cult. According to his account, traders were already active in the area.[27] Catholic and Protestant missionaries entered the area in the last decades of the 19th century. One major reaction to this evangelisation in the Vaupés, initiated by Venancio Aniseto Kamiko,[28] was to create a wave of messianic cults among the tribes.[29] Missionaries were convinced that the central cult of Yurupary, their culture hero,[30] was the work of the Devil, though this was a series of rituals rather than a divinity.[31] The result was widespread damage to the native culture. as ceremonial houses were burnt, ritual ornaments destroyed, and secret masks displayed to the tribe’s women and children, who were previously forbidden to look at them.[32] Messianic shamanism, strongly connected with jaguar shamanism, declined further with the establishment of Catholic missions in the first decades of the 20th century.[33] The German traveller Theodor Koch-Grünberg spent two years at the turn of the century (1903–05) travelling throughout the region and provided a classic account of the Indians’ material culture and languages, which long remained the authoritative source for information of these tribes.[17] [34] Rubber-gatherers from the beginning of the 20th century began to aggressively exploit the area, as they did again the World War II when the urgency of improved rubber supplies led to a rubber boom in the area. Their violent presence caused considerable upheaval and suffering, finally driving the Indians, after fierce resistance, into the less accessible backwaters.[35] Population decline, as a result, has been a marked feature of the past one hundred and fifty years,[36] [37] The earliest professional ethnological fieldwork was done by Irving Goldman in 1939-40 among the Cubeo Indians.[38] Postwar missionary work, colonizing movements, and the activities of the linguists attached to Christian proselytisation still engage, according to Stephen Hugh-Jones, in the ‘criminal folly’ of ethnocide by their programmatic hostility to traditional religion[39]

Economy

The Barasana are slash-and-burn swidden horticulturalists[10] who supplement their food with hunting and fish-gathering, with different roles allocated to men (poisoners) and women (gatherers of the poisoned catch). The economy is inelastic, subsistence-oriented and egalitarian.[40] As both hunter-gatherers, and gardeners, the Barasana exploit the forest in various ways to obtain a wide variety of foodstuffs. Bread made of bitter cassava is their staple food; Barasana culture itself is said to be grounded on cultivation of cassava production. but they also harvest maize, bananas, cooking plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, pineapples, sugarcane and considerable quantities of fruits picked in the forests or from cultivated trees like the Pithecellobium dulce, the "Madras thorn" or mene.[41] Fishing supplies most of the protein in their diet, supplemented by game, rodents and birds mostly, but woolly monkeys and peccaries[42] [43] are also culled, traditionally with blowguns, but most recently also with shotguns.[44] Unlike most South American peoples, the Barasana are not particularly passionate about honey, which they gather occasionally. Beeswax, on the other hand, is highly prized for its use in ceremonial contexts.[45] From cassava leaves they extract a native chicha. Coca and tobacco, the latter prepared either in cigars or as snuff, are also cultivated.[46] They prepare their local entheogenic drink ayahuasca, which they call yagé,[47] from the endemic Banisteriopsis caapi, a liana locally known as "vine of the soul" or "vine of the ancestors".[48] [49]

Social structure

The Tukunoan descent groups are subdivided into ranked and named sibs. The dominant feature of their social organization is language group exogamy, which requires that one must always marry a spouse speaking a language different from one’s own.[50] Among the Barasana themselves, exceptions however do exist to the principle of linguistic exogamy, since they intermarry with Taiwanos whose language is regarded as almost identical to their own.[51] This means that one’s father’s language determines one’s inclusion or exclusion in Barasana identity, which accounts for the custom of virilocality. Women marrying out, though speaking Barasana as their native tongue, are therefore excluded from Barasana identity.[52] Concern for exogamy is obsessive and is considered by Reichel-Dolmstoff to be the most important social rule of all.[53]

The Vaupés social system may be divided in four units in ascending hierarchy, namely (a) the local descent group, (2) the sib, (3) the language-aggregate, and finally (4) the phratry.[54] Kinship is based on a ‘a Dravidian’ type sib system, with bilateral cross-cousin marriage between people from hierarchically order patrilineal sibs.[55] Like most other groups of the Vaupés system, the Barasana are an exogamous patrilineal and patrilocal descent group, with a segmentary social structure. The constitutive groups live in isolated settlements in units of four to eight families dwelling in multifamily longhouses.[18]

The Barasana have seven exogamous phratries,[56] and five sibs, common descendants of the Yebi Meni Anaconda people, traditionally ranked hierarchically in decreasing order of seniority, with each assigned a distinct ritual role as (1) Koamona, ritual chiefs (2) Rasegana, dancers and chanters (3) Meni Masa, warriors (4) Daria, shamans and (5) Wabea, cigar lighters. These ritual functions restricted to distinct sibs, reflect a dying tradition, and survive now mainly as a matter of ideology.[57] Barasana society is rigidly divided along sexual lines. Men and women enter dwellings by different doors, pass most of their lives in separation, a reality reinforced by their ceremonial Yurupari rites.[58] Yet in Vaupés societies women have higher status, and marriages are more stable than in other South Amerindian groups, perhaps since intertribal warfare ended several decades ago, which may explain why women are not ‘pawns in the displays of male brinksmanship.’ [59]

Language

See main article: Barasana language. Barasana is classified as one of the eastern Tucanoan languages. It is mutually intelligible with Taiwano, and both are considered dialect variations of each other, though it is reported that Taiwano speakers are assimilating to the Barasana with whom they have very close relations of exchange, leading them to adopt the Barasana tongue.[60]

Popular culture

The Barasana were the subject of Disappearing World (TV series), episode 4, The War of the Gods, aired on 22 June 1971 for British Granada Television. The episode shows four young anthropologists travelling into the jungle to show how to live as a Barasana, before getting into a deeper debate about what it means to be a marginalised tribe in a changing world and documenting Barasana magical rituals and traditions.

References

Notes and References

  1. Book: Hugh-Jones, Stephen. The palm and the Pleiades : initiation and cosmology in northwest Amazonia. 1988. 1979. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 978-0521358903. 1st pbk.
  2. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.23
  3. Christine Jones,From the Milk River.p.12.
  4. Determining their exact number is difficult, because inclusion in the group is determined by one’s father’s language. The figure of 500 refers to this Vaupés group, and excludes people whose mother language is Barasana.
  5. See Gomez-Imbert. Elsa. Michael Kenstowicz. Barasana Tone and Accent. International Journal of American Linguistics. October 2000. 66. 4. 461. 10.1086/466437. 1265845.
  6. For the figure of 1950 see Book: Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. 2010. Routledge. London. 978-0415563314. 115. 1. publ. in pbk.. Christopher Moseley., and News: Bignell. Paul. The beckoning silence: Why half of the world's languages are in serious danger of dying out. The Independent. 13 December 2009.
  7. Web site: Conselho Indigenista Missionário . CIMI . 2015-09-28 . 2015-11-04.
  8. Gomez-Imbert. Elsa. Michael Kenstowicz. Barasana Tone and Accent. International Journal of American Linguistics. October 2000. 66. 4. 461. 10.1086/466437. 1265845.
  9. pp.18-19
  10. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.50
  11. Book: Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. Amazonian cosmos; the sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians.. registration. 1971. University of Chicago Press. Chicago. 978-0226707310. 13. 4. Aufl.. For a list of edible foods and animals in the Vaupés area see pp. 11-14, and Appendix 3, pp. 274-5
  12. Irving Goldman, writing in 1948, identified 18 sub-tribes of the Eastern Tukunoan group Irving Goldman, ‘The Tribes of the Uapes-Caqueta Region,’ p.764: The Taiwano taxonomy has 22 groups: Bará, Barasana, Cabinyari, Carijona, Cubeo, Curripaco, Desana, Letuama, Macú, Macuna, Pirá-Tapuya, Siriano, Taiwano, Tanimuka, Tatuyo, Tariana, Tucano, Tuyuca, Uanano, Yauna, and Yurutí. See François Correa Rubio, Por el Camino de la Anaconda Remedio, Univ. Nacional de Colombia, 1996 p.375
  13. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.50,
  14. Elsa Gomez Imbert, ‘Conceptual categories and linguistic classification’, in John Joseph Gumperz, Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) Rethinking linguistic relativity, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Cambridge University Press, 1996 pp.438-469 .p.442
  15. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.22-23
  16. ’i.e. ‘a large geographical area in which people are basically similar and distance and differentiation are seen in terms of degrees rather than absolutes’ Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia, p.7: Reichel-Dolmatoff, following Goldman, called this system ‘cosmopolitan’ . See Irving Goldman 1963 p.15; Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff ‘Review of The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon by Irving Goldman,’ p.1378. For multilingualism see Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.56: Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.21.
  17. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1
  18. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.53
  19. Michael Shermer, In Darwin's shadow: the life and science of Alfred Russel Wallace : a biographical study on the psychology of history, Oxford University Press US, 2002 p.67
  20. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people, p.21.
  21. [Alexandra Aikhenvald|Aleksandra Yurievna Aĭkhenvald]
  22. Jonathan David Hill, Made-from-bone: trickster myths, music, and history from the Amazon, University of Illinois Press, 2008 p.66
  23. Alcionilio Brüzzi Alves da Silva, A civilização indígena do Uaupés: observações antropológicas etnográficas e sociológicas, São Paulo, 1962 p.22, cited Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.21
  24. Stephen Hugh-Jones,The Palm and the Pleiades, p.4.
  25. Irving Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, University of Illinois Press, 1963 p.12 puts the date as 1853. The difference may reflect the fact that Wallace’s book, Palm Trees of the Amazon and their uses, was published in 1853.
  26. He composed ten syllabaries and synonymies, published in the first edition of his account, but dropped from subsequent editions. See Michael Shermer, In Darwin's shadow: the life and science of Alfred Russel Wallace, p.67
  27. Camilo Domínguez, Augusto Gómez, La economía extractiva en la Amazonia colombiana, 1850-1930, Corporación Colombiana Para la Amazonia Araracuara, 1990 p.124
  28. Robin M.Wright & Jonathan D.Hill, ‘Venancio Kamiko: Wakuenai Shaman and Messiah,’ in E. Jean Langdon and. Gerhard Baer, (eds.) Portals of Power: : Shamanism in South America, University of New Mexico Press, 1992 1992 pp. 257-286.
  29. Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘Shamans, Prophets, Priests and Pastors,’ pp.47ff.
  30. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.6.
  31. Goldman wrote that the "great spirit"called Yuruparí believed to be worshipped through the Vaupés was a fiction. ‘In simple fact there is no Yuruparí. The term is jargon from the trade language of the Amazon based heavily upon Tupían and is used indiscriminately by the Indians to refer to anything that is sacred and taboo.’ Irving Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, p.255.
  32. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.4.5
  33. Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘Shamans, Prophets, Priests and Pastors,’ p.57
  34. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘Review of The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon by Irving Goldman,’ in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 6 (Dec., 1963), pp. 1377-1379, p.1377.
  35. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, 1979 preface
  36. Stephen p.25
  37. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people, p.21
  38. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1
  39. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades:Initiation and Cosmology ion Northwest Amazonia, p.5
  40. Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, p.85
  41. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.65
  42. There are two varieties of peccary (kii jece) hunted, the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu tajacu: kii jece) and the collared peccary. R.A. Donkin, ‘The Peccary’, in Transactions, American Philosophical Society, (vol. 75), Part 5, 1985 pp.1-152, p.61)
  43. Gomez-Imbert, Elsa, & Kenstowicz, Michael, ‘Barasana Tone and Accent, p.434
  44. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.29-30
  45. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.163.
  46. Book: Hugh-Jones, Christine. From the Milk River : spatial and temporal processes in northwest Amazonia. 1988. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 978-0521358897. 176–9, 206. 1st pbk..
  47. The English botanist Richard Spruce made the first report of this drink in his journey among the Tukuano Indians in 1852, roughly contemporaneously with Wallace’s visit. For details see Andrei A. Znamenski, The beauty of the primitive: shamanism and Western imagination, pp.148ff.
  48. Book: Znamenski, Andrei A.. The beauty of the primitive : shamanism and Western imagination. 2007. Oxford University Press. New York. 978-0195172317. 148.
  49. Book: Hofmann, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert. Plants of the gods : origins of hallucinogenic use. 1987. A. van der Marck Editions. New York. 978-0912383378. 120–7. registration.
    this text contains a photo of a Barasana tracing religious patterns while under the influence of the yagé decoction on p. 124
  50. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1. However, the Cubeo do not practice language group exogamy, since they marry among same language phratries, that is they practice linguistic endogamy, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, pp.42ff.: Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.23-24. For failing to observe this principle, their status as ‘real people’ becomes a matter of doubt among the Eastern Tukunoans, of which the Barasana are one. See Jonathan David Hill, History, power, and identity: ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992, University of Iowa Press, 1996 p.144.
  51. Jean Elizabeth Jackson The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia, p.20, p.246 n.11.
  52. Gomez-Imbert, Elsa, & Kenstowicz, Michael, ‘Barasana Tone and Accent,’, p.420
  53. Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1
  54. Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.53.
  55. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.22
  56. Jean Elizabeth Jackson The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia, p.246 n.11. Hugh-Jones lists only 5 neighbouring groups with whom the Barasana intermarry: the Bará, Tatuyo, Taiwano, Kabiyeri and Makuna. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.27.
  57. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.25-26.
  58. Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, preface
  59. Jean Elizabeth Jackson The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia, p.194
  60. Elsa Gomez-Imbert, 'Conceptual categories and linguistic classification,' in John J. Gumperz, Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, Cambridge University Press, 1996 p.443.

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