FACULTAD DE ARQUITECTURA E INGENIERÍAS CIVIL Y DEL AMBIENTE UCSM 3.6 CONCLUSIONES:

The comparative method of structural analysis opens up the possibility of other interpretative approaches to the Angaité narrative of the “Arrival of Paraguayans”. Let us recall briefly their myth of the “Origin of Peoples”, narrated by Dolo Benitez (Fieldnotes 22/4/2005) and referred to by Agapito on other occasions (Fieldnotes 19/1/2005). Dolo tells that “we the Enlhet” came from above by climbing down a “beeswax rope” (Yauham

tamma): “the Koyelhna climbed down, the Konhongnava climbed down, we Koeteves

climbed down; the Kemme Peyem [Ayoreo] as well”. (His list of peoples includes different pre-colonial Angaité groups and one other ethnic group, to which Agapito, in his version, added “five Paraguayans” – see Appendix 1) As they descended, the people looked like bees. 128 Then a parrot climbed down but, unintentionally, he cut the rope with his sharp beak. This caused some people to fall and die and others to stay forever in the sky, without ever again having the possibility of going up or down. The different groups that had already reached the earth dispersed to their respective territories and homelands. 129

A similar version of this myth – which I have presented here in abbreviated form – was recorded in the first quarter of the 20th century by Pittini (1924:77-80). It also figures amongst the myths of the Angaité and Sanapaná recorded by Cordeu (1973, in Biedermann and Zanardini, 2001:143-150).130 There are small differences amongst the versions. For instance, Cordeu, like Agapito, includes the Paraguayans amongst the ethnic groups which descended to earth. He also tells of a group of double-headed people who got trapped in the hole through which they passed on leaving the sky. The introduction or omission of such motifs is a contingent variable – dependent on the particular historical and contextual situation of the narrator – and does not affect the narrative’s basic structure.

In turn, the Angaité “Origin of Peoples” bears a close resemblance to the Kayapo “Descent of Men to Earth”. According to Métraux’s summary of one version of this

128

A similar image appears in a Kayapo version of the myth: “They looked like a line of ants running down the length of a tree trunk” (Wilbert, 1978:105).

129 _{Biedermann and Zanardini (2001:108) record a fragmentary Enlhet variant in which men search for} honey in the upper world, climbing up and down a rope in order to do so. The sky-animals do likewise but, as Parrot cuts the rope, the animals fall. According to the manner in which they hit the ground, they acquire their respective characteristics.

Kayapo myth (in Wilbert 1978:105):

“Long ago all men live in sky as stars. Once, hunter sees hunted armadillo disappear into the ground. Through hole he sees earth below. Many people make long rope and descend to earth where they are still living. Others afraid to follow, cut off rope, and stay in sky as stars”.

In another version of the same Gê myth, it is a small boy who cuts the rope (ibid.108). Despite their differences in terms of idiosyncratic detail – e.g. the motive for the Kayapo’s descent, the diverse peoples listed by the Angaité, the cutter of the rope – the Angaité and Kayapo myths are similar in general terms. Both, moreover, closely resemble yet another myth, told by the Wichí of the Argentine Chaco (who, geographically speaking, are closer to the Angaité). According to the Wichí’s “Arrival of Women”:

At the beginning of time women lived in the sky, amongst the stars. The earth was inhabited by men in the form of birds or animals. The only person of human appearance was “Mischievous Uncle”. The women used to come down to earth by means of a long rope that they lowered from the sky. They always stole the men’s store of meat and climbed back to the sky before the latter returned from hunting. One day Hawk cut the rope, and the women were left stranded on earth, where they became men’s wives. In order to make sexual intercourse possible, Mischievous Uncle copulated with all the women, using a stone penis to destroy their vagina dentata.131

Palmer explains that this myth is complementary with another Wichí myth – the “Origin of the rivers” – and that together they define the cosmos as “a projection of female sexuality” (ibid.91). Without underestimating the specificities of all the myths here referred to – Angaité, Gê and Wichí – and without neglecting the time span over which the different versions we have of those myths were generated and recorded, they share a common element that facilitates their comparison and analysis. All the myths under consideration establish a vertical axis between the earth and the sky and a mediatory element between the two – the rope. How does this relate to the “Arrival of Paraguayans”?

131 _{Cf. Palmer, 2005:88-89, who mentions that a more complete version of the myth, narrated by Yilis of} Hoktek T’oi, is published in Pérez-Diez (1983).

I suggest that, in merging that narrative with the “Origin of Peoples”, Agapito transformed the vertical, cosmological axis (earth-sky) and its mediatory means (the rope) into a horizontal, sociogeographic axis (near-far) with its corresponding means of mediation – the canoe/steamboat.

Lévi-Strauss (1978), in Volume III of his Mythologiques, analyses two parallel series of myths related to the origin of cooking fire, on the one hand, and man’s mortality, on the other. He reaches the conclusion that the myths:

“conceive of the relationship between the sky and the earth in two ways: either in the form of a vertical and spatial conjunction, terminated by the discovery of cooking, which interposes domestic fire between sky and earth; or... in the form of a horizontal and temporal conjunction, which is brought to an end by the introduction of the regular alternation between life and death, and between day and night”. [ibid.181]

He also postulates “the equivalence between the canoe and domestic fire as respective mediators between the near and the far on the horizontal level, or between the low and the high on the vertical level” (ibid.185). However, the series of myths which concern us here deal with the origin of (differentiated) peoples – in the case of the Angaité and Kayapo myths – and of (differentiated) reproductive sexes in the case of the Wichí myth. In addition, the mediator of the vertical axis (earth/sky, low/high) is, in most of the versions, a rope, not domestic fire. It is transformed into the canoe/steamboat on the horizontal axis only when Agapito merges two different myths into one. Nonetheless, it is possible, despite the differences, to extrapolate from the myths common principles by which we can interpret several opposed terms. Thus, the sky/earth opposition on the cosmic level can be correlated with other opposed categories on other levels, such as the geographical (near/far), the biological (male/female) and the sociological (kin/foreign). The procedure leads to a “more complex opposition affecting two [or more] modes in which the first opposition can be expressed” (ibid.190). The mediator – be it the hearth/rope or the canoe/steamboat “serves in the myths as vector of a medium solution between the two extreme forms of an opposition which, for lack of an intermediary term, would be abolished by the conjunction or disjunction of its poles” (ibid.189-190). For instance, in the journey of the Sun and the Moon – analysed by Lévi-Strauss in the series of myths related to man’s mortality – the canoe serves to keep them “at the right distance in

relation to each other, together and separate at one and the same time, as the sun and the moon must be in order to avoid excessive daylight or excessive darkness which would scorch or rot the earth” (ibid.189; original italics).

Let us start with the rope. In the beginning, it allowed the conjunction of earth and sky, and later – on being cut – disjoined them. The rope connected a sky-world populated, according to the case, with undifferentiated (endogamous) or unreproductive (female- only) people to an uninhabited or unreproductive earth (populated only with men). By climbing down the rope, people started to differentiate themselves – in exogamous or ethnic groups, on the one hand, and according to gender, on the other. With the cutting of the rope, sky-people and earth-people became distinct, dissociated beings: the former, stars; the latter, humans. Without the initial conjunction of sky and earth by means of the rope, the earth would not be populated with differentiated (or reproductive) people. Without their subsequent disjunction, the worlds of undifferentiated and differentiated peoples (or of unreproductive and reproductive people) would be confused.

Lévi-Strauss argues that “poles of the vertical axis can be plotted on the reduced scale of the human body, limbs and organs of which are then divided between the high and the low” (ibid.186). I suggest that a further analogy can be established between the cosmic and biological levels. The rope symbolizes the umbilical cord, which conjoins the mother and the foetus until it is cut in order to allow the differentiation of its poles, mother and child.132 From a temporal perspective, there is an original stage – equivalent to the pregnancy period – followed by a process of individuation and differentiation after birth (and the cutting of the umbilical cord). This analogy between the broader cosmic process of the origin of peoples (and sexes) and the biological micro-process of the origin of sexually differentiated persons is consolidated by various elements found in the mythology of diverse ethnic groups. The idea that the sky is a symbolic female womb derives both from its image as a self-contained world (in the Kayapo myth: Wilbert, 1978:107) and from its implicitly being likened to a beehive or ant-hill (Kayapo and

132

The rope is made of a variety of materials, such as beeswax (Angaité), plant fibres (Kayapo, Wichí), “anklets, belts, bracelets, and bowstrings” (Kayapo), cotton (Kayapo, Sanapaná), cobwebs (Wichí) or arrows (Wichí): Wilbert, 1978:105, 106, 108; Neueswander and Hiter et al., 1999:62-65; Palmer 2005: 80, 80n., 283-284. The evocation of the umbilical cord – an idea which I owe to my colleague Margherita Margiotti – is often inverted, as the rope serves as a means both of descent and of escalation. Such is the case in a Sanapaná myth in which the hero climbs to the upper world by means of a cotton rope in order to go and see his mother and take revenge on his wizard father (Neueswander and Hiter et al., loc.cit.).

Angaité). The people descend from the sky-world through a hole, i.e. the vagina (Kayapo and Angaité), by means of a rope, i.e. the umbilical cord (Kayapo, Angaité and Wichí). The rope is later cut and the different peoples start to wander on the earth – walking like toddlers, as it is expressively stated in one Angaité version (Biedermann and Zanardini, 2001:144).133

With regard to the canoe/steamboat, they are mediators of the horizontal axis and the opposition between near and far, an opposition which is “determined by social, instead of cosmic [or physiological] coordinates” (Lévi-Strauss, 1978:190). The sociological frame of reference “gives rise in its turn to the opposition within a group/outside a group, from which, by means of further bifurcations, we arrive at endogamy, exogamy or war” (ibid.187). Together, the steamboat and the canoe allowed the Paraguayans to come from the furthest extreme on the horizontal axis – the Paraguayan capital, Asunción (Yelhvasa

Yetemema) – to the closest extreme, the Angaité village of Yelhvasa Lhepop. The

mediatory canoe/steamboat thus operates a conjunction, the confluence of distant ethnic groups at a common geographical point. At the same time, however, it is a relative conjunction, for the exchange between the Angaité and the Paraguayans failed to unite them. The two terms therefore remain disjoined, thus unequal and socially separated. Time also operates along the horizontal axis – the time of the boat journey and its associated transition from an initial state of mutual anonymity (as between the two social and geographical poles) to one of distant coexistence.

It should be borne in mind that it is an analytical abstraction to consider the horizontal and vertical axes in isolation. As we have seen, their inseparable complementarity is made clear by Agapito’s merging of the “Arrival of Paraguayans” and the “Origin of Peoples”, whereby the mediatory functions of the canoe/steamboat and the rope, respectively, are conflated. Nevertheless, I propose that, as we move from the vertical to the horizontal axis

133

In Enlhet and Sanapaná mythology, the sky is replaced by the underworld as the place of origin from which differentiated peoples appeared on earth. In the Sanapaná myth, undifferentiated primordial people dug themselves into the underworld in order to nurture themselves. They covered up the entrance holes and later reappeared on earth as different peoples (cf. Biedermann and Zanardini 2001:106, 130-132). Here the cosmic origin of peoples is linked to insemination and procreation. Similarly, in the Wichí’s “Origin of ethnic groups”, a demiurge makes a wooden trough out of a yuchan tree (Chorisia Sarmientoi) into which he pours the blood of different animals. He then covers the trough and, after a while, the different ethnic groups appear (Palmer, 2005:296-297). The connexion with procreation is supported by the Wichi theory that the foetus is created by the accumulation of the father’s semen, who during couvade also transfers his blood to the foetus (ibid.190-191). Cf. Grant (2006:43), who reports that, for the Nivacle, “The foetus is formed from semen, which gradually transforms into blood”.

– from the “Origin of Peoples” to the “Arrival of Paraguayans” – we also move from the theme of socially differentiated reproduction to that of socially differentiated production.