Two weeks later I returned to Huascayacu with a mestizo named Julio, hired to help carry my gear. Julio moved effortlessly over the muddy trail even though he was carrying a machete and shotgun in addition to a heavy bag. We arrived before noon and were welcomed by Tomás. After a meal at Tomás’s house, Julio solemnly collected his pay and slipped back into the forest in the direction of Atumplaya.
On that uncommonly sunny day, Huascayacu was a vision of civic order. Women returned from their fields straining against heavy baskets of manioc supported by tumplines that crossed their foreheads. Their husbands were hunting, taking advantage of dry weather. Hens scratched in the dirt. Swallow-tailed kites cruised high overhead. A score of children milled about in front of the one-room school, waiting for Tomás to begin the afternoon class. Although rainforest crowded the village’s perimeter, its sounds were mostly limited to the biting glissando of the screaming piha, a bird whose call would have rattled window glass had there been any.
I was quartered in a palm-thatched house roughly ten feet by twenty, divided into two rooms. The floor was packed dirt. Palm-wood staves, each standing about a half inch from the next, served as walls. Strips of light passed through them and pinwheeled across the floor as the day wore on. For furniture, there were palm-wood benches and a table in the sitting room, a sleeping platform in the bedroom. Sheets of flattened bamboo lent the bed a springy feel that proved surprisingly comfortable. The door consisted of a half dozen stout cylinders of dried bamboo, held loosely by wooden crosspieces, that had to be pushed apart by visitors. The distinctive sound of the hollow bamboo tubes knocking together as people came and went from nearby houses soon became part of the auditory backdrop, as did the barking of Tomás’s pack of gaunt hunting dogs. At night, I was soon to discover, other sounds dominated: the close-in rustle of mice, rats, and immense cockroaches as they carried on a noisy struggle to survive in the palm leaves of the roof. The vampire bats that patrolled for blood meals outside my mosquito net were, in contrast, eerily silent.
Organizing my clothing and equipment in the house took a half hour. Now what? You can study anthropology for years, talking constantly about “the field,” without ever being told what you’re supposed to do when you get there. Of course you expect to learn the language, ask people how they’re related to one another, document their rituals, and, provided that the climate hasn’t yet clotted your camera lenses with fungus or cooked the emulsion on your photographic film, take plenty of pictures. How one does this in the absence of a shared language remains a mystery.
It didn’t help that the late 1970s marked the apogee of French structuralism, a recondite theory focused on the logical operations of the human mind. At my university, several prominent members of the faculty renounced their former materialist approach to anthropology and embraced structuralism with an enthusiasm that approached religious fervor. This hyperintellectual turn made it especially awkward to ask questions on the order of “What the devil am I supposed to do with myself in the months before I can ask a grammatically correct question?”
The answer was not obvious. Of the villagers, only Tomás was truly bilingual. A handful of men and one woman had a limited command of Spanish. They could talk about the weather, food, and how much things cost. When students from Tomás’s school, including a few little boys dressed in nothing but T-shirts, stopped by to peer through the wall slats, I tried to engage them in Spanish or with the few words of Awajún that Tomás had taught me. Mostly there was mutual staring and, on their part, conversations that I imagined were about me and my meager array of stuff. During the day, however, when children were in school and most adults had vacated their houses to hunt or work in their gardens, it was hard to find something useful to do. The voracious biting flies that infested Huascayacu were a constant torment. A vortex of self-pity danced at the edge of my waking hours. The temptation to succumb was powerful.
A different challenge lay in the nature of Awajún society. In common with nearly all indigenous peoples, the Awajún organized their social world around family ties, which give everyone a place in the social order. Where kinship ties didn’t exist, they had to be invented. Nonkinship created a moral vacuum. I knew I would be expected to adopt these conventions, addressing everyone by kinship terms that they would reciprocate. Yet beneath this veneer of familiarity, I would still be an enigmatic visitor adrift from any visible family ties, fated to live in a penumbra of moral ambiguity.
A few things worked in my favor. One was the humdrum reality of village life. The resident alien was a diversion, a social science experiment, and, I soon discovered, an inmate in a petting zoo. During afternoon social calls men and boys showed little hesitation about rubbing the hair on my arms or pulling my beard. Submitting to such frank curiosity was sometimes tiresome but preferable to staring at an empty notebook.
Americans aroused suspicion throughout the Andes, but the Awajún thought differently. Every household owned a copy of Yamajam Chicham Apu Jisukristu pachisa etsegbau, an Awajún translation of the New Testament, published in 1973 by the Wycliffe Bible Translators. This was the fruit of decades of work by American evangelical linguists living in Awajún villages to the north of the Alto Mayo. Although people in Huascayacu remained uncertain about the Christian message, they were impressed that citizens of a powerful foreign nation showed more interest in them than did most Peruvians. Some of my hosts briefly imagined that I was an evangelical pastor. This notion was put to rest by my willingness to drink manioc beer, the staple beverage that Protestant missionaries exhorted them to abandon.
At the time, reliable information about the Awajún was scarce. It was known that they were a numerous people whose population then exceeded 25,000. Most lived in communities located some distance to the northeast of the Alto Río Mayo, along the Alto Río Marañón and several of its tributaries. They were the southernmost members of a loose network of societies that Spanish colonial officials and missionaries called the “great Jívaro nation.” Their ancestors dominated the area between the Andes and the Amazon rainforest on both sides of the frontier that today separates Peru from Ecuador. Recent evidence suggests that proto-Jivaroan culture had a significant Andean presence, although these populations seem to have been transformed or dispersed by the dual impact of Inca expansion and Spanish conquest.1
Surviving Jivaroan peoples thought of themselves as distinct from one another even as they shared closely related languages, a preference for dispersed settlements organized around a prominent male leader, and recognition of the power of shamans to heal or kill. The traditional dress of Jivaroan men was a single piece of cotton that covered them from waist to knee, like a kilt or short sarong. On festive occasions they donned toucan feather headdresses, necklaces of iridescent beetle wings, and bandoliers of beads and bird bones. Jivaroan women, usually described as less flamboyant than their husbands, favored plain homespun dresses tied at one shoulder. For colonial officials, the most important trait of Jivaroans, aside from determined resistance to outside authority, was their practice of turning the heads of murdered enemies into fist-sized, smoke-blackened war trophies called tsántsa as part of a ritual to harness the enemy’s spiritual power. Every North American and European museum of natural history wanted tsántsa for its collection. A single item of material culture was instrumental in turning the Jívaro into icons of primitivism for the West.
The fall of the Inca Empire in 1533 and subsequent incursions by Spanish settlers and missionaries unleashed changes whose repercussions continued for centuries. The northern corner of Awajún territory contained gold deposits that attracted settlers until the early 1600s. Although colonists were subject to royal laws defining how indigenous populations could be treated, circumstances favored what the anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor calls a “piratical life-style” that included de facto enslavement of Indians. A major native uprising in Logroño led to a dramatic decline in colonization efforts. The Jesuits tried a different approach, establishing a network of missions that encompassed an enormous area stretching from Borja, on the Alto Río Marañón, to a point east of present-day Iquitos. Among the tens of thousands of Indians brought into the Jesuit mission system, often unwillingly, were doubtless some Awajún, although mission records generally tend to portray Jivaroans as a nearly hopeless case for priests whose energies were already taxed to the limit. As was true elsewhere in the New World, clustering indigenous peoples in densely settled “reductions” made them more vulnerable to the epidemics that regularly swept through the region. The Jesuit system was stretched too thin to be fully integrated, and it proved incapable of protecting missions from Portuguese slavers in its eastern extreme. The network largely collapsed when the Jesuit order was expelled from Peru in 1768.2
The earliest known reference to the Awajún dates to the mid-1700s, in a Jesuit account that mentions “Ahuarunes, natives of the Río Santiago.” The origin of the name Aguaruna remains the subject of speculation to this day. The most obvious etymological theory—that it represents a combination of the Spanish word for “water” and the Quechua word for “people”—has few adherents among experts, but alternative etymologies are no less contested.3
Specific information about the Awajún remains scarce until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. There are intriguing glimpses here and there. One is found in the diary of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1802 traveled on the Ríos Chinchipe and Marañón. He describes an encounter with “Jíbaros”—most likely Awajún—who were “the happiest savage Indians I have seen.” He continues: “They have lively faces that advertise the great vivacity of their character.… How different the free, savage man is from those of the missions, slaves of opinion and priestly oppression! What vivacity, what curiosity, what good memories, what drive to want to learn the Spanish language and to make himself understood in his own!” His opinion was echoed nearly seventy years later by the American naturalist James Orton. Orton refers to the Jívaro as the “ ‘Red Indians’ par excellence … the most numerous and the most spirited of the oriental tribes. They are brave and resentful, yet hospitable and industrious.”4
Awajún family, Río Apaga, 1929.
From Rafael Karsten, The Head-Hunters of Western Amazonas, 1935. Image VKK 721:219, National Board of Antiquities, Finland.
Descriptions of the Awajún—referred to by such terms as Antipa, Ahuaruna, Ahuarone, or Aguaruna—became more numerous when the Amazonian rubber boom (roughly 1880–1912) increased the number of travelers and government officials moving along the Río Marañón and its tributaries. Courtenay De Kalb, an American mining engineer who wrote occasional articles for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times, describes his first encounter with an Awajún couple in 1891:
But at Barranca and westward, I met a tribe called Ahuarunas, which departs in many characteristics from those around them. The first whom I saw were the chieftain and his wife. He was tall and heavy, and had a pleasant face, with well-chiseled features, the forehead high, the nose long and perfectly straight. His hair, in addition to hanging down his back, had been made into two little braids which hung like horns from his temples. His only garment was a brown striped waist-cloth. In manner he was as simple and naïve as a child. His wife, who followed along behind, stopping when he stopped, advancing when he moved, like a faithful dog, was a mere girl, of slight form and delicate features, with a small chin, and an almost Grecian nose. Her arms and hands were of an absolutely perfect mould. Later in my journey I met others of the Ahuarunas, and these exceptional characteristics seemed to be a persistent quality of the tribe.5
Traveling in the same region only a few years after De Kalb, the American engineer and explorer Fritz Up de Graff portrayed the Awajún in a less favorable light: “Contrary to what is generally supposed, these untamed sons of the forest are a compendium of all that is cunning, knavish, and diabolical.” Up de Graff’s distaste for the Awajún was matched by that of a Passionist priest, Silvio de San Bernardo, who in 1922 characterized them as devoted to “laziness, drunkenness, polygamy, hatred of other peoples [and] aversion to the white man,” qualities that the priest judged to be “powerful obstacles that make civilizing them morally impossible by human means.”6
De Kalb and Up de Graff explored Awajún country during a period considered the most violent in the Amazon’s modern history, at least until the rise of the cocaine industry in the 1980s. Downriver from the Awajún, rubber barons based in Iquitos and Manaus bankrolled armies of barefoot mercenaries to defend tapping territories and prevent heavily indebted mestizo and indigenous workers from fleeing. The Alto Marañón, a river less endowed with rubber-producing species than areas to the east and south, attracted minor-league but equally vicious patróns—men such as Amadeo Burga, Miguel Hurtado, and Fabriciano Yajamanco. Some Awajún worked as part-time tappers; others served as occasional oarsmen. They were drawn into the orbit of patróns by a desire for steel tools, firearms, trade cloth, and sometimes aguardiente. Nevertheless, there is little evidence that they were as deeply involved in the rubber trade as the Bora and Witoto, indigenous groups enslaved by rubber barons farther east.7
Accounts portray the Alto Marañón of this period as an intractably violent place, with parties of Awajún men, armed with steel-tipped lances and later muzzle-loading guns and Winchester rifles, cruising the rivers or patrolling the trails in search of Wampis (Huambisa), Shawi (Chayahuita), and mestizo settlers to kill. Some of the attacks were proxy conflicts instigated by local patróns vying for influence. Among the most notorious was the coordinated mass killing at several rubber stations, including Huabico, by large parties of Awajún in 1904, which some accounts imply had its origin in a long-simmering rivalry between two patróns. The precise number of fatalities in the 1904 attack is hard to piece together, although it appears to have been at least twenty, including women and children. Among these were two visiting missionaries, Father Bernardo Calle and Brother Miguel Villajolí, who may have been unlucky bystanders rather than intended targets. Another large-scale Awajún assault in 1914 led to the immediate abandonment of the Marruecos rubber station. “Uprising of Aguaruna Indians,” clamors the headline of an account of the attack published in a Lima newspaper. “They mete out a horrible death to fifty people.” Later accounts suggest that long-standing hostility between local Awajún and Wampis leaders may have been exploited by the manager of the Marruecos rubber post.8
Awajún belligerence cannot be attributed solely to the rubber boom. José María Guallart (1915–2002), a Spanish Jesuit who worked among the Awajún for nearly fifty years, collected documents and oral histories that shed light on attacks reaching back as far as the 1830s. The administrative chaos unleashed by Peru’s struggle for independence in the early nineteenth century created a power vacuum in the Alto Marañón that the Awajún were happy to fill. They wiped out mestizo settlements in Puyaya, Copallín, Borja, Santa Teresa, and Barranca, among others, and mounted serious attacks as far west as Bagua Chica. Guallart insists that most of these assaults were provoked by mestizo abuses, although the scale of the response often exceeded that of the alleged provocation.
Other Catholic missionaries and, beginning in the 1920s, their Protestant counterparts offer accounts of relentless conflicts involving the Awajún. Reporting on a visit to the nominally Christianized Shawi people in 1926, the Passionist priest Martín Corera describes the Indians as having abandoned their mission village out of “fear of an uprising of the infidel Ahuarunas because these savages, who are close by, were wont to hurl themselves unexpectedly on the Christians, kill them, and then loot and burn their houses.” An Awajún raid in Cahuapanas in 1925 resulted in fifteen dead and nineteen people taken captive. A rescue party from Cahuapanas managed to locate and kill five of the attackers, but the rest escaped.9
Elsewhere Padre Corera provides a detailed account of a large party of Awajún fighters planning vengeance on Wampis enemies who murdered one of their kinsmen, a man named Nantipa. Corera presents their declaration of intent as it was conveyed to him in broken Spanish: “Aguaruna, going to kill, taking oath to kill. Doing nothing else before killing. Not eating, not doing anything else first; only killing. Likewise, others taking oath, all going to kill.”10
Awajún family, Río Cenepa, 1946. Two men on the left are holding blowguns.
From Leonard F. Clark, The Rivers Ran East, 1953. Used with kind permission of Melinda (Clark) B. Price, David L. Clark, and Gregory G. Clark. Copyright © 1946 by Leonard F. Clark.
Probably the most widely read description of Awajún life is found in a book published in 1953, The Rivers Ran East, written by a flamboyant adventurer and former American military officer named Leonard Clark. In 1946 Clark traveled through Awajún country searching for ancient gold deposits, a quest that years later cost him his life in Venezuela. Like Up de Graff before him, Clark’s characterization of the Awajún emphasizes their cruelty. Although elements of his account seem overwrought, his observation that the Awajún were enmeshed in bitter reciprocal warfare with the Wampis is accurate enough.11
Conflict was by no means limited to intertribal raiding. The murder of alleged sorcerers also figures prominently in missionary reports. “In September [1947] a young man named Cuyu, a student in the Protestant school at Yamayacat, died in the house of Sijapa in Chinimpi,” wrote the Jesuit José Martín Cuesta. “They say that before dying, Cuyu did nothing more than repeat that he had been bewitched by a túnchi named Ichiás from Chimutás. Four fellow students were by his side: Shuc, Pate, Chimbucát, and Pitón.… The four students, along with a group of Awajún from Chinimpi, left with their guns and lances in search of the sorcerer Ichiás.… After spying on him for several days, they surprised him alone and cruelly victimized him with bullet and lance in late September or early October, days after my visit to Guayampiác.” Countless stories of this kind, strikingly similar in their plot lines, can be found in the accounts of missionaries working among the Awajún from the 1940s until the 1970s.12
Routine exploitation of the Awajún by patróns and merchants continued through the 1950s. Immediately after completing his university degree, the future writer Mario Vargas Llosa accompanied a research team on a trip down the Marañón in 1958. Merchants, “barefoot and semi-literate … savagely punished any attempt by the Indians to escape from their control,” writes Vargas Llosa. He continues: “When we reached the settlement of Urakusa, the chieftain, an Aguaruna called Jum, came out to meet us and it was terrible to see him and hear his story because here was a man who had been recently tortured for having attempted to create a cooperative. In the lost villages of the Upper Marañón, I saw and touched the violence that the struggle for existence in my country could cause.”13
By the time of Vargas Llosa’s visit, the Awajún had begun to cluster in villages. They were drawn by the gravitational pull of schools, health posts, and secure land titles. Missionaries played a part in this shift. The Kansas-based Church of the Nazarene established a foothold among the Awajún in the early 1920s. This provided a setting for American evangelical linguists whose skillful work produced the Awajún translation of the New Testament, as well as bilingual teaching materials for use in schools. They trained a cohort of young Awajún men, most of whom eventually worked as elementary school teachers in Awajún communities. The educational efforts of American evangelicals were complemented by those of the Catholic Church, which intensified missionary activities among the Awajún beginning in the early 1950s.
In 1977 few maps showed Awajún populations reaching as far south as the Alto Río Mayo. This suggested that Awajún families were relatively recent arrivals who had come in search of game or a place of refuge. Elementary schools had been founded only a few years before I settled in Huascayacu. The teachers, all from the Alto Marañón, were inclined to see their Alto Mayo cousins as uncouth rustics. This didn’t stop many of them from marrying local women and settling in the region permanently.
Huascayacu’s imposing houses, some more than sixty feet long and thirty feet from floor to roof peak, scarcely differed from those visible in grainy photos from the early twentieth century. People still depended on foods they could grow, gather, or hunt. But homespun cloth was now rare. Clothing followed rural Peruvian fashion: men wore trousers and loose shirts, while women favored one-piece dresses of trade cotton. Around cooking fires, ceramic pots competed with aluminum pans and plastic tubs. The ubiquitous steel machetes, axes, and shotguns were all imported. For school, children needed pens and notebooks. None of these things could be acquired without money, which families obtained by selling commercially valuable trees, game meat, and rice that they had recently begun to cultivate as a cash crop.
A few days after my arrival, the villagers began a series of parties to mark the New Year. Before the foundation of the elementary school, calendars and clocks had meant little to them. It was sufficient to divide the year into rainy and dry seasons and the day into periods defined by the sun’s movement. But contact with government agencies and the schedule followed by the village school forced them to reckon time in more precise units. Thus began an interest in time that bordered on obsession. Tomás and I owned the only two functional wristwatches in the village. While he was teaching or away, I became the village timekeeper, constantly answering passersby, eventually including every ambulatory child, who wished to inquire about the hour. It soon became clear that my answers meant nothing in themselves, and people left perfectly content when, at nine in the morning, I replied that it was eleven or three.
Eladio, the Huascayacu headman, promoted the New Year’s celebration with a zeal that reflected this collective fascination with clocks and calendars. Eladio’s leadership role coincided with his standing as father, elder brother, or father-in-law of most of Huascayacu’s adult male residents. In pursuit of his official duties, Eladio wore a battered blue sport coat that seemed particularly incongruous with his callused bare feet. His age was impossible to determine with precision, although he was probably in his fifties. Like most men in Huascayacu, his hair was short on the back and sides, with straight bangs in front. His weather-beaten face was often creased by a sly smile. Eladio spoke a rough-and-ready Spanish based exclusively on the present participle. His invitation to the party can be rendered literally as, “You coming to the fiesta tonight. We drinking lots of beer.” Compared to my command of Awajún, then limited to the equivalent of “hello,” Eladio was as eloquent as Cervantes.
The essential element of any party was manioc beer, the dietary and social pillar of Awajún life. Its preparation was an unchanging part of a woman’s working day. Most afternoons, women returned from their gardens bearing heavy baskets of tubers. These were peeled, split into smaller pieces, and boiled in large aluminum pots. The cooked manioc was then tumbled into concave wooden platters. While smashing the tubers with a heavy, clublike pestle, women chewed bits of the mash and spat them back into the mix to hasten fermentation. Removed to brewing pots, the mash was later mixed with water, strained, and served. Unfermented manioc beer was often an infant’s first food after mother’s milk. Warmed over the fire by an attentive wife in the hours before dawn, beer was a man’s first meal of the day. For parties, beer was allowed to ferment for a few more days to raise its alcohol content.
There was no shortage of well-fermented beer at Huascayacu’s New Year party. The community’s official registry showed a population of 110, and more than half were present at the house where the celebration commenced. Mature men sat on benches near the door. Women and children clustered near the cooking fire and around the beer pots. A few of the men wore feather coronas or bandoliers of bright seeds across their chests. Women circulated with bowls of beer, serving each man individually. Eventually people began to dance. Tomás had warned me that the Awajún lacked collective dances, that each person danced as he or she pleased. This proved accurate in a general way. Men circled the room, sometimes hopping and turning, each singing his own song and punctuating it with shouts, whistles, or loud guffaws. One or two wore anklets of dried nuts that served as rattles. Sometimes men bunched together, dancing in twos or threes with arms around one another’s shoulders. Knots of men broke apart and regrouped. Two circled the house with bamboo flutes that were neither played in unison nor coordinated with the rest of the revelers. Women danced and sang more demurely in the center of the men’s circle. The noise was deafening, the sense of cheerful anarchy overpowering. After an hour, someone broke out a battery-powered record player and a handful of 45 rpm records. The music was Andean huaynos and tropical cumbias to which only the younger people danced, self-conscious and awkward.
During the party I focused on learning people’s names. Local custom made that difficult. In Huascayacu, most people had Spanish names as well as traditional Awajún ones. Many had nicknames as well. In the jungle areas of eastern Peru, mestizos favored flamboyant handles, as if to counter the stark simplicity of daily life. One was more likely to meet a Winston, Nixon, Sofocles, Neli, Salomé, or even the occasional Hitler than the conventional Juan or María. This custom had been embraced by the Awajún, among whom were people with names as exotic as Napoleón, Comisario, Hilbertina, Nelson, and Fredesvinda. Because speakers of Awajún had trouble pronouncing certain Spanish consonants and vowels, names were transmogrified almost beyond recognition. Osvaldo became Uspartu; Napoleón became Napurín; Rosinda became Urucínta. Surnames, which were unknown prior to regular contact with Hispanic society, had been imposed by the government. When officials visited native communities to enter families into the land-titling records, they issued surnames based on the names of the parents of the oldest members of a household. If a senior man named Wajajái had a father named Ampám and a mother named Tumús, then his identity document showed his name as Wajajái Ampám Tumús. An additional layer of complexity, about which I was to learn later, was that men might change their name two or three times over the course of a lifetime after participating in murders. An occasional name change made it harder for enemies to target them for reprisal. The tactic of camouflage through renaming was becoming harder to use as names became fixed in official documents.14
I returned to my house at around 10:00 P.M., exhausted by the effort to remain sociable amid the din and my limited ability to converse. One of the side effects of consuming quantities of manioc beer, aside from an acid stomach, was the necessity of frequent “undrinking,” to use the Peruvian slang of the time. Getting up to empty my aching bladder at 3:00 A.M., I could hear men singing in a house on the other side of the village. All was quiet at dawn, but by 8:00 A.M. festivities had resumed at another house. It continued throughout the day, moving from house to house based on the availability of beer. A couple of colonists from Atumplaya joined the celebration, but they were unable to keep up with the pace of drinking and staggered down the trail toward home by early afternoon. By late that evening, supplies of beer had dwindled, and the 1977 New Year’s party faded to black.
Tomás later explained that this was a short celebration by local standards. He had asked women to make only a little beer so that the festivities wouldn’t last too long. In his view, several days of nonstop drinking would surely lead to a brawl, a case of wife beating, or some other disturbance. Tomás was a teetotaler but had resigned himself to the prospect that others were going to drink. His goal was to limit the damage.
Tomás, in whose house I took meals and who provided me with daily language lessons, proved to be a mass of contradictions. A trim, fastidious man in his forties, he was old by the standards of other bilingual teachers in the region. His biography seemed like a story from the nineteenth-century American frontier. He had been widowed twice already, and his current wife, Celestina, was at least fifteen years his junior. He had fathered twelve children. Raised in a traditional household in the Awajún heartland to the north, Tomás had been among the first generation of Awajún trained as bilingual teachers by American missionaries. He strongly identified with evangelical Christianity, which he saw as redemptive and modern. Like other bilingual teachers from the Alto Marañón, he thought of his Alto Mayo students as primitives desperately in need of his civilizing influence.
Tomás’s image of starchy rectitude became tarnished in my mind when I learned that he had seduced one of Eladio’s daughters, Isabel, a young woman in her teens, during a period when his wife, Celestina, had returned to the Alto Marañón for an extended visit with relatives. The liaison, which continued after Celestina’s return, eventually produced two children. Although no one referred to Isabel as Tomás’s wife, there was an understanding that he had laid claim to her in some way. The ambiguous marital situation posed no particular problem for Isabel’s children. Their grandfather’s large household afforded an abundance of caregivers and agemates. As I gained some fluency in the language and came to know people better, I heard amusing stories about Tomás’s romantic peccadillos, including one from a man who, while stealthily entering a house one dark night intent on seducing a particular woman, found himself trailing Tomás, who was on an amorous mission of his own.
For all of Tomás’s pretensions of sophistication, he was one of the villagers most fearful of sorcery. His wife’s persistent abdominal pain led him to shuttle her from doctor to shaman and back during the first months of my residence in the village. Tomás’s increasing anxiety about her illness reflected what turned out to be a slow-growing crisis in Huascayacu over a rash of infant deaths and adult illnesses that residents came to see as incontrovertible evidence that homicidal sorcerers lived among them.
Tomás emphasized that in the interest of avoiding gossip I had to be circumspect with village women. That meant, among other things, that accompanying them to their gardens was out of the question. This left me with only a limited range of ways to spend my time. I participated in villagewide events—parties, formal meetings, communal work, and group fishing expeditions—whenever they took place. I could hunt with the men, assuming that they let me tag along. I soon learned, however, that for an astigmatic suburbanite with limited experience as a tracker and marksman, the Amazonian rainforest was little more than a heavily vegetated theater of humiliation. Even skills in which I had thought of myself as competent, such as axemanship, were of limited use in this new setting. The Awajún made their own axe handles, which were half again as long as their North American counterparts. When attacking a tree, they swung the axe in an elegant overhead arc—nearly a full circle, in fact—that was a wonder to watch but difficult to emulate. I had more success helping out in the fields of maize and rice that Tomás had convinced most of the men to cultivate for sale in town. There, at least, the necessary skills were within reach.
On one occasion I stayed at a temporary camp that Eladio and others had built close to their maize and rice fields, an hour’s easy walk from Huascayacu. The group included Eladio’s younger brother Kíjik, a widower, as well as Eladio’s daughter Lucila and her husband, Lauriano, plus a half dozen children. I set up my mosquito net in Kíjik’s shelter. Eladio woke everyone before dawn. Lucila and the other women began to roast green plantains in the coals while Eladio stripped bark from a vine that he would use to make a carrying basket.
At about seven we ate the plantains and boiled howler monkey meat. After a few weeks it had become clear that Awajún cuisine was uncomplicated, to put it charitably. Meat, tubers, and plantains were served roasted or boiled. Gardens attracted agoutis, a species of rodent that could weigh ten pounds or more, as well as a small species of armadillo. Cooked carefully, armadillo meat could be tasty, although I never became fully accustomed to having it cold for breakfast or savoring the layer of fat under the shell, which my hosts eagerly sucked off as if they were eating artichokes. Rustic salt was the only regularly used condiment, although a creative cook might occasionally offer a bowl of crushed chili peppers or ginger into which boiled manioc could be dipped. Now and then there would be a culinary surprise, usually resulting from a discovery on the hunt: edible mushrooms, palm fruits, or polliwogs steamed in banana leaves.
At certain times of year, large red ants were collected by children and roasted in the fire after being spitted on splinters of wood. This delicacy was appreciated by local mestizos, too, who called it “jungle popcorn.” A physician in Tarapoto told me that once or twice a year he treated overenthusiastic gourmands who suffered fecal impactions after eating too many of the ants, whose hard exoskeletons were difficult to excrete.
A favorite delicacy—the Awajún equivalent of caviar—was a two-inch-long, tan-colored grub collected from the trunks of rotting palm trees. Served raw and wiggling or cooked and thoroughly dead, grubs were consumed with an avidness I never came to share. In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic account of his travels in Brazil in the 1930s, similar grubs are described as having “the smoothness and the consistency of butter and the flavor of coconut-milk.” He neglects to mention the grub’s crunchy head.15
The Awajún had their own culinary limits, as I learned after serving pieces of canned Dutch cheese to a group of women and children who stopped at my house for a social call. Almost simultaneously, every bit of the precious cheese was spit onto the floor by my guests, whose expressions suggested that they thought themselves the victims of a disgusting practical joke.
Much of the morning was spent cutting and burning dried maize stalks. Eladio, Kíjik, and the other men worked in a desultory way. Agricultural work clearly was not something embraced with gusto. Their talk was mostly about hunting. At one point Eladio gazed intently at the edge of the field. “Peccary!” he said. “They want to eat the maize but are scared by the smoke.” When asked where he saw the wild pigs, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t see them. I smell them.”
In this part of Peru the period from January to April is the rainy season, which makes hunting difficult. Meatless days promoted endless talk about game. Because of the difficulty of hunting in wet weather, men fell back on a risky hunting technique: a length of iron pipe with a spring-loaded hammer set to fire a shotgun cartridge when released by a trip wire. These were usually set up a few inches above the ground on an animal trail, often on the edge of a garden, in the hope of bagging an armadillo, peccary, or paca, the last a tropical rodent that often weighs fifteen pounds or more. A distracted walker might fail to notice one of these sinister devices, and cases of accidental shootings were not unknown. It was a good idea to keep one’s eye on the path when walking near gardens.
Another way to break the tedium of the rainy season was to organize a fishing expedition, which usually turned into a festive outing. Fishing was done in small streams relatively close to the village or in temporary lakes created when the Río Mayo flooded, then retreated, leaving countless fish imprisoned in forest pools. Although it may be hard to reconcile with today’s image of Amazonian Indians as pious protectors of rainforest wildlife, the people of Huascayacu preferred to fish with poison, especially if they couldn’t winkle a stick or two of dynamite out of a mestizo colonist in Atumplaya. The fish poison of choice was a tall herb in the aster family called wasú, commonly cultivated in house gardens.16
Eladio and several of his sons and sons-in-law prepared for a fish-poisoning expedition by piling stacks of wasú that had been cut down with machetes. They then stripped the plants of their leaves, mashed them to a green pulp, wrapped the mash in banana leaves, and loaded it into baskets. Five households of men, women, and children walked a half hour to a stretch of stream with the right qualities. Several boys walked to midstream and dipped the baskets of poisonous mash into the water. Wide fingers of green worked their way downstream through the turbid stream’s café au lait. The rest of us waited below holding machetes, nets, fishing spears, and small baskets. Like other fish poisons used in Amazonia, wasú stuns fish when they take it in through their gills. Within a minute, small fish splashed to the surface, their gills flapping spasmodically. Adults and children scrambled through the creek, netting the fish that appeared around them. The few large fish were smacked with machetes or bitten behind the neck to prevent them from escaping. Fish continued to rise for about a half hour, after which we gathered our baskets to walk home. The adventure netted about eight pounds of fish, the largest of which were perhaps ten inches long and the smallest still aspiring to minnowhood. Eating them was an exercise in oral mortification: countless spines, scanty flesh. But they offered dietary novelty at a time of year when meals were mostly limited to manioc, green plantains, and sweet potatoes.
The scarcity of game also led men to kill animals that at other times of year they might ignore. A curious feature of Awajún food preferences was that two of the largest rainforest mammals, the deer and the tapir, were customarily considered taboo. Deer were said to be one of the forms taken by human souls after death. The objection to tapir remained vague, however. These taboos were losing force as access to game-rich territory declined.
One day, my next-door neighbor Kayáp returned from the forest to report that he had killed a tapir at a place an hour away. The animal was far too heavy for him to carry without help, so he had left it where it fell and returned to the village. The next morning, I accompanied Kayáp, his wife, Marleni, Kayáp’s brother Tiwijám, and three boys to the kill site. On the way, we experienced the full spectrum of the rainforest’s powerful odors, from the smell of rank vegetation in wet places to the pungent, cinnamonlike aroma given off by certain trees.
When we reached the dead tapir, everyone examined it with interest. With a sharp blade, Kayáp carefully punctured the animal’s abdomen. There was a sudden rush of gas, and parts of the animal’s digestive system ballooned out. The effect was unsettling, and even Kayáp, whose approach to butchering was businesslike, looked momentarily queasy. He and one of the boys cut the hide above the animal’s hooves, then sliced up and along the limbs. The hide was peeled back and used as a ground cover to protect the meat from dirt. When Kayáp finally began to remove the entrails, the stink was overpowering. By this time, the entire butchering site was alive with insects. Biting flies, mosquitoes, and sweat bees swarmed over everyone. Marleni built a smoky fire to discourage the insects, but it did little good. Periodically Kayáp’s hunting dogs fought among themselves, deranged by the insects and the smell of blood. Kayáp carefully divided the meat into manageable portions, bundled them in palm leaves, and loaded the packets into carrying baskets. Left behind were the hide, the long bones, and all internal organs except heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver.
The arrival of such a quantity of meat was an occasion for dinner invitations to go out from the hunter to other households. The atmosphere was often jovial, especially after a meatless spell. But tapir aroused little enthusiasm. Kayáp invited me to eat the next day, and we were joined by a young man from an outlying household. He politely declined the tapir meat, opting instead for a paltry portion of fish, which prompted a debate about whether the traditional taboo made sense. Kayáp argued that the taboo was misguided, that only deer should be treated as inedible. The visitor stubbornly insisted that traditions were traditions and that in any case he didn’t like tapir meat. In the end, Kayáp sold much of the smoked meat to mestizo colonists in violation of a widely flouted law that prohibited traffic in game meat.
All-day rain was favorable for interviewing because it inclined people to sociability. Men stayed at home to make baskets or repair tools, and they were usually willing to chat. If there were ample supplies of beer in the house, invitations went out to other households. My tape recorder became a source of entertainment on these occasions, to the peril of my limited supply of batteries. But I succeeded in recording stories, songs, and instrumental music, which in turn prompted discussions about everything from romance to sorcery.
A friend in Lima had given me old copies of National Geographic that I hoped to use as a tool for prompting discussion that would improve my conversation skills. The results were unexpected. When shown pictures of European people in urban settings, the schoolchildren and postadolescent men who were my main conversation partners inevitably asked me their names. The prospect of moving through a world of strangers was still something they struggled to comprehend. A magnified, full-page photo of a mosquito prompted cries of wonder and dismay as my hosts leapt to the conclusion that in my country biting insects grew as big as songbirds.
The most talked-about pictures from National Geographic had been taken among another Amazonian people living in Brazil’s Xingú region. In common with many indigenous groups of the lower Amazon, men and women of this tribe customarily wore only penis sheaths or G-strings. The Awajún are prudish by comparison: although little boys might shun clothing until puberty, girls were dressed from infancy and as toddlers were sharply rebuked if they revealed their genitals when urinating or bathing. The concept of people living virtually naked scandalized all who examined the magazine, which soon included everyone in Huascayacu. For days afterward, clusters of adolescent boys would slink up to my door after dark and whisper conspiratorially in Awajún, “Brother, let’s see the naked women!” I confess to amusement that National Geographic, a revered source of images of scantily dressed women for American males of a certain age, was now serving that same purpose in Peru’s Upper Amazon. The conversations inspired by the revealing photographs improved my anatomical vocabulary in Awajún, but after a few weeks I tired of serving as village pornographer and concocted a story to account for the magazine’s disappearance.
Moyobamba, capital of the Department of San Martín, was founded in 1540, making it one of the oldest colonial settlements in Peru. Its climate was springlike, its views of surrounding mountains enchanting, and its streets well paved and clean—largely, it must be said, because the town had been completely rebuilt after an earthquake leveled it in 1968. There was even electricity now and then. Every few weeks I hiked three hours from Huascayacu, crossed the Río Mayo, walked another hour to San Fernando, then waited for the first of a series of precariously loaded pickup trucks that took paying passengers to Rioja, where I had a post office box. From Rioja it was another hour to Moyobamba. I usually stayed at a small hotel whose owner, Moisés López, a retired police sergeant, let me store a suitcase of clean clothes and personal effects in the back room.
Aside from his hotel business, Don Moisés trafficked in orchids. He had a small garden behind the hotel and took evident pleasure in talking about each plant in his collection. He was a compact, solidly built man with wavy hair and dark skin. He spoke with the lilting cadences of eastern Peru. Consistent with the universal stereotype of police sergeants, Don Moisés’s thinking was rarely subtle, and he preferred to follow well-traveled paths in his interpretation of events. He clearly believed my study of Awajún culture to be a cover for something more practical—secret mineral prospecting, perhaps, or the pursuit of sexual conquests based on what he assumed to be the natural ascendancy of white men over native women. His view was shared by many other longtime residents of Moyobamba, who never tired of inquiring about how many blue-eyed “disciples” I had fathered in Huascayacu. Some were convinced that the Awajún carried me around on a litter like a latter-day Inca.
The more recently arrived Andean colonists shared some of these ideas but more often seemed lost in otherworldly dreams inspired by the region’s proliferating evangelical sects. A colonist town whose name translates as Second Jerusalem, lying just off the main road to Rioja, was reputed to be organized around a group of “apostles” ruled by a pastor whose word was law. Life in Second Jerusalem was disrupted on several occasions by the intervention of Peruvian police sent to enforce the Ministry of Education’s requirement that schools include soccer in their roster of playtime activities. The town’s pastor considered games to be sinful and actively prevented government teachers from promoting the national sport.
Once I walked into a colonist settlement to find a group of men standing outside one of the village’s cane shacks. They invited me inside to share a glass of aguardiente. Sitting where directed, I found that my bench stood only inches away from a wooden box in which a dead colonist was laid out. The corpse was dressed in a cassock of coarse blue cloth. On both feet were white socks with holes over each mud-encrusted big toe, perhaps for some ritual reason beyond my ken. Candles burned at each end of the coffin. No one said much about the dead man, whose name went unspoken. They mostly stared, stunned and glassy-eyed from the cane liquor, at the gringo who had just emerged from the jungle. The arrival of a truck full of Seventh-day Adventists provided me with an excuse to flee the drunken wake. The visitors, members of a choir from one of the region’s towns, disembarked at the nearby chapel. The choir sang hymns vigorously, if not with great accuracy. In his sermon, a young pastor wearing an immaculate guayabera shirt reminded us that the world was destined to end soon and that Jesus would come with His angels to collect the saved. Amid the muck and squalor, apocalypse was not hard to conjure up.
Compared to life in colonist settlements, Huascayacu came to feel like paradise despite its endemic biting flies and the enervating boredom of most afternoons. The more I dealt with settlers, the more I worried that awareness of my presence might snowball into one of the heavily embroidered stories that circulated constantly in eastern Peru. It was not unusual to walk into a decrepit shop in Atumplaya and be regaled with reports of recent sightings of the vaca huilca, a supernatural cow that breathed fire, or the depredations of a giant feline called caballo puma, whose magical howling had the effect of putting entire villages to sleep so that the beast could feast at leisure on the brains of its human victims. Rumors about battalions of gringo engineers, said to helicopter into remote jungle locations for mysterious, sinister “projects,” were equally common. Given the possibility that one such story might lead someone to denounce me to the authorities, I endeavored to leave Huascayacu rarely and keep a low profile on my trips to town.
Just when the boredom of those first months became unendurable, something unexpected would happen. One day Kayáp told me that visitors were expected from a community called Kaupán, located far to the north. His wife, Marleni, had already swept the floor, and extra stools were carried in from nearby houses. Eventually four strangers passed my house in single file, each carrying a shotgun. Their cheekbones were painted with red achiote, and one wore a corona of toucan feathers. The straps of small woven bags crossed their chests. Their arrival prompted shouting from the adults gathered in Kayáp’s house: “It’s you?” “Yes, it is I!” “You come?” “Yes, I come!” “Enter!” “I’m entering!” The peculiar call-and-response of Awajún greetings was elaborated and amplified far beyond anything I had previously witnessed. The visitors stood straight, their shoulders thrown back and firearms assertively displayed. After everyone moved into Kayáp’s house, the four visitors sat next to each other on a bench. Within minutes, Kayáp, two of his brothers, and their brother-in-law settled on wooden stools positioned directly opposite the guests. Each visitor began shouting rhythmically. Speakers cupped a hand above their mouths or moved an arm out stiffly for emphasis. Conspicuous spitting punctuated long phrases. Each man’s opposite number listened intently, sometimes responding with shouted interjections: “Yes!” “That’s true!” Then the four men on the host side picked up the chant as the visitors fell silent. The noisy, dramatic back-and-forth continued for perhaps forty-five minutes, then slowed to more normal talk as women bustled about carrying bowls of beer.
This performance was a variation of enémamu, a greeting ritual documented by visitors to Jivaroan communities for more than a century. The Finnish ethnographer Rafael Karsten observed enémamu many times during his extensive travels among the Shuar and Awajún between 1919 and 1929. “The most curious thing in this greeting ceremony,” Karsten writes, “is the tone in which the men speak and the way in which the whole conversation is carried on.” He continues: “It is not the ordinary conversational tone; the Indian who is speaking for the moment shouts loudly.… During the conversation the host and the guest regard each other with stern looks just as if they were angry or excited, while they speak they hold the hand to the mouth, and after every fourth or fifth word they spit on the ground, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. A listener unacquainted with the customs of the Indians might believe that two madmen are conversing. It may be more to the point however to liken them to two lions, doing their best to arouse mutual respect.”17
Four visitors from distant community, holding firearms, engage in formal speech with hosts in Huascayacu, 1977.
Photograph courtesy of Michael F. Brown.
Karsten’s account conveys the event’s intensity, its odd intertwining of the everyday and the novel to heighten experience. There is danger in visitors. Under the guise of sociability, they may be sizing up the village’s vulnerability to attack, perhaps on behalf of some ally harboring an ancient grudge. One might be a hidden sorcerer, bent on finding new victims. More prosaically, the younger men among them might be prowling for attractive girls to seduce. Yet both visitors and hosts are drawn to the encounter: for novelty, for the chance to renew family ties, and for news about alliances or feuds that could affect their well-being. The enémamu gives senior men, Karsten’s “lions,” a way to show their power. They present themselves as formidable, prepared for combat, unafraid of consequences. Missing from Karsten’s description are the treble notes sounded on the edges of the men’s bombastic fugue. Clusters of adolescent girls, some with their arms around each other, taking in the performance, whispering and giggling. Boys doing the same but also attentive to a speaking style they would have to master soon enough. Married women moving briskly to keep men supplied with beer, whose quality and quantity measured their value as wives. And the anthropologist, promoted to the status of nonpresence amid so much excitement, at last able to document something important.
The Huascayacu resident who embodied the traditional male virtues displayed in enémamu was Arturo. Arturo, a name that when spoken in Awajún sounded something like “Ásturu,” was Eladio’s nephew. In his late thirties, Arturo wore his hair long in the traditional style and carried himself with a studied formality already becoming anachronistic among his people. He seemed such an imposing figure that I’m now struck with wonder when I look at photographs of him. They show a serious, solid-looking man whose short stature contrasts with the outsized impression that he managed to project. He inherited some of his toughness from his widowed mother, Inchít, the oldest person in the village. Barely five feet tall, Inchít was creased like a piece of ancient leather and just as tough. I often saw her muscling enormous bundles of firewood or baskets of manioc tubers down one of the village paths.
Arturo’s house, which he shared with two wives, a half dozen children, and a son-in-law, was some distance from the school, and he was rarely seen in the center of the village. At first I assumed he was standoffish. But his reserve went deeper, to a growing rift in the community whose full dimensions only became clear after several months. One day as Tomás and I walked to Arturo’s house to pay a social visit, Tomás abruptly declared that Eladio, the ápu, and some of his close kin were ruthless killers despite their friendly demeanor. Eladio had murdered in the past, he said, and had moved to Huascayacu to flee the police after one such killing. Eladio and his sons wished others ill—here Tomás spoke in hushed tones—and there was reason to fear that sorcery was behind much of the sickness that afflicted people in the village. One of Arturo’s wives suffered from persistent stomach pains. Arturo had already consulted a shaman in another Awajún community, and although Tomás was closemouthed about the diagnosis, it was not hard to infer that the shaman had fingered someone in Huascayacu as a hidden sorcerer. I had not yet witnessed shamans at work, but it was well known that they were pressured by relatives of the patient to identify the source of illness brought about by sorcery. Arturo had confided to Tomás that he planned to move his family elsewhere.
Tomás called a village meeting the next day. He reminded parents that it was again time to register children for school and to purchase the notebooks and pencils they would need in the coming semester. He lectured them on the importance of agricultural work, which was preferable, he said, to selling game meat to colonists. Finally, he announced his intention to seek a transfer to another community immediately. This sparked an explosive response from Eladio and several other men and women, who began shouting in protest. “We don’t want another teacher,” they said. In a loud voice, Eladio threatened to burn down the school if Tomás left. “We’ll go back to living the way we did before,” he said. As the discussion became more heated, Arturo stood and announced that he was leaving Huascayacu because it was a “place of sickness.” The unstated implication was that a sorcerer hidden somewhere in the community was threatening the lives of Arturo’s family members. The meeting ended with mutual recriminations that I was largely unable to follow because of my still limited command of the language.
That night I was awakened by roosters calling to a false dawn just past midnight. There were clear skies under a full moon, a rare event in those parts. The moonlight cast icy shadows in the house. Lying under my mosquito net, I pondered the animosity and fear simmering beneath the surface of life in Huascayacu. Death was a remorseless enemy here: one out of three infants failed to survive to age five, and many older children and adults were lost to dysentery or snakebite, suicide or murder. Why they would want to compound this heartache by accusing their closest relatives of sorcery was a mystery for which my training had failed to prepare me.
I combed the shortwave bands for news or music, anything to take my mind off this troubling puzzle. A German station was deep into jazz: John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Even the static from distant equatorial lightning couldn’t mask the power of Coltrane’s tenor as it pushed ever higher, propelled by the rhythm section, the massive, blocky chords of McCoy Tyner’s piano, and Coltrane’s own spiritual hunger. It was music from another world, one infinitely far from the scene of my troubled sleep.