Flora y fauna

Sacred Flutes as the Medium for an

Avowed Secret in Curripaco Masculine Ritual

nicolas journet

“The most useful science is the art of dissimulation,” wrote a Jesuit philosopher in 1647 (and he added that “passions are an open door to a man’s mind”) (B. Gracian, maxime 98). He in-sisted that concealment and secrecy can be necessary in ordinary life and even more so in court life. Religions, too, use dissimula-tion, often mixed with mystery and ambiguity.

Because religions deal with death, destiny, and morals, they are accepted as containing mysteries even more than secrets. Initia-tion rituals, especially when participaInitia-tion is restricted, are often treated as if they were triggering mysterious forces and transmit-ting esoteric knowledge. They are frequently analyzed as a collec-tion of symbols, and the ethnographer or the religious specialist undertakes to decode these symbols even more completely than any of the actors of the rite.

This essay begins by distinguishing among mystery, lies, and se-crecy. A quick review of the topic (G. Simmel 1996, H. Bonello 1998, A. Petitat 1996) shows that religions may comprise all three cate-gories. Mystery refers to an unrevealed truth supposedly unknow-able or deemed so by some authority. Thus the difference between lies and secrets has little to do with intentionality. For example, within Christianity the Holy Trinity is a mystery that has been con-sciously instituted by the Church. Nevertheless, mystery always im-plies that truth is beyond the reach of ordinary human intellectual

capacity, and its effectiveness relies on the belief that obstacles to revelation are either natural or supernatural, but not human. So dissimulation may use the mystery as a tool to enforce some se-cret; mystery relies on the belief that truth is out of range of the human mind. Secrecy is different; it is maintained by ignorance, threat, or even convention. Ignorance is fueled by lying, whereas threat is a public manifestation. Hence secrets are of different kinds. Some are like lies; others are publicly acknowledged as se-crets and maintained as such, whether by threat or convention.

These distinctions are useful for understanding the numerous prohibitions that exist around sacred musical instruments in Am-azonia. The particular example considered here is that of the Cur-ripaco people of the Guainía River in Colombia. Sacred flutes and trumpets called Kuai—named for a mythic hero—are still some-times exhibited in their villages for ceremonial purposes. In 1985, a male initiation ritual (kapetiapan) was performed in the village of Neeripan. Most of the ethnography in this essay comes from direct observation of that event. We will first describe the different kinds of precautionary measures that are required for both initi-ated and uninitiiniti-ated persons when using the sacred flutes. Some of these measures are like the Polynesian taboo, and as such are imbued with supernatural beliefs. Others involve a deliberate re-strictive arrangement toward women and children that requires dissimulation. Then we will turn our attention to analyzing the cognitively ambiguous kind of secret that is enacted in the flutes’

prohibition.

Symbols and Food Avoidance

Scholars have frequently considered the symbolic dimensions of the prohibition of women from seeing Jurupari sacred flutes in the northwestern Amazon. In his analysis of the He concept among the Barasana, which is very close to the Curripaco Kuai seman-tic field, Stephen Hugh-Jones (1979) identifies the second most

important ritual paraphernalia within the He ceremony as a wax gourd that men activate in the middle of the night. This gourd embodies a very strong and obvious female symbolism. Although this object is not formally forbidden to women, the wax gourd is exhibited along with a pair of sacred trumpets, and the moment when the wax is burned is considered to be a dangerous one, since it is associated with the idea of male menstruation. For obvious reasons, women are not welcome to witness such an event. It ap-pears then that He ceremonies activate cosmic and sexual sym-bols, which acknowledge the strong gender separation that keeps at least half of the community out of the sight of the sacred flutes.

If such a point a view were to be applied to the Curripaco Kuai ritual, it would inevitably consider a word that Curripaco cur-rently use to distinguish Kuai ceremonies from all other kinds of feasts. When speaking Spanish, Curripaco men use such words as dangerous and mysterious when trying to explain the specific climate in which kapetiapan is to be held. But the proper local word that applies is kanupadaritsa, an idiom that hardly can be translated better than “full of nupa.” This last word is better de-scribed than translated.

Nupa, when associated with Kuai, designates all the substances whose contact or ingestion may be dangerous at any moment of the ritual period. The prototype of these nupa is prohibited food, particularly meat and capsicum pepper, but many other el-ements like the river water or the sound of sacred flutes may be labeled this way.

Papeeku rinupa is a formula that designates several ritual ges-tures consisting of spitting out food in determinate moments, flag-ellating a partner, jumping backward to avoid an invisible danger, slapping the river water with the hands, and waving a basket over a heap of fruits. It can be translated as “to throw out the nupa,”

and this operation is meant to diminish the dangerous attributes of the substance. When applied to a dish, papeeku rinupa authorizes

its ingestion by the person who performs the gesture: thus it is an individual ritual of purification.

Pakanupaka is a verbal formula that designates the conse-quences of transgressing a prohibition. It is frequently described as a deadly bleeding, but it does not imply a real hemorrhage;

rather, it designates the phenomenon of losing one’s normal skin color when fainting.

Finally, nupa can also designate a personal allergy to or dis-gust for a specific substance without any reference to ritual con-text. A person who eats a specific food for the first time and gets sick will suspect that this food is probably a nupa to him or her.

He or she will normally abstain from eating it in the future. In its ordinary sense, a nupa is merely something that one consid-ers pconsid-ersonally harmful.

In the ritual context of kapetiapan, rinupa is the general word used to refer to the food and behavior restrictions that young ini-tiates and men follow when they are in the presence of the sa-cred flutes. These restrictions are not personal but collectively in-stituted by the presence of Kuai, and there are many reasons to think that the original model for these “allergies” is the mythic character himself. That is why Curripaco men refer to “his nupa”

and never to “our nupa”: food and behavior prohibitions are en-forced as a way to be like Kuai, who is said to be extremely ab-stemious, eating nothing but “wind” and drinking nothing but manioc beer. By taking up his “allergies,” participants in the rit-ual identify themselves with the mythic hero. By achieving com-mensality, they create a common humanity between Kuai and the ritual community, following a model that E. Viveiros de Castro (1996) has shown to be widespread in the Amazon area.

Comparatively, the concept of nupa appears to be very close to the more famous Polynesian taboo or tapu. It combines sa-credness and danger; it is the specific attribute of a mythic hero;

its causes exist in nature, but its use by men is largely symbolic

(the adult men are not really afraid of transgressing food restric-tions), and its consequences are specific and do not merge with human sorcery.

Taboo and Secrecy

All records of Jurupari feasts in the northwest Amazon nowadays agree that women and children are to be considered as active par-ticipants of the ritual. As we will see, they do interact in differ-ent ways with the men as they dance and play the sacred flutes.

Women and children may not see the flutes or touch them, but they are required to listen to their sound. Such close involvement implies that women also are affected by the taboo dimension of the ritual, that is, the nupa dangers. Although they are not sup-posed to follow the same food restrictions as the men, they do not cook as usual and do not make a fire all night long.

During the ceremony, women live mainly on manioc tuber and leftover smoked fish. At determinate moments they may be directly affected by the nupa. For example, when preparing for kapetia-pan, men perform several piamaka rituals. These ceremonies con-sist of collecting large amounts of forest fruits or leaves or palm boards. Then men pile these offerings in the middle of the village plaza and play the Kuai flutes over the heap. As soon as they stop playing the flutes and dancing, they bring the instruments back to the river, protecting them from women’s sight. Then, the women and children come close to the heap and make some comments.

However, they abstain from touching the fruits or leaves until one of the women has performed a specific ritual gesture: she waves a large, flat basket over the heap, so as to “throw away the nupa.”

Touching or picking up the fruits before this operation is said to bring sickness and death. Immediately thereafter, fruits are col-lected, prepared with water and manioc gruel, and collectively drunk before dark. Leaves and palm boards are stored and used for fixing the ceremonial house. Thus we see that women and

children may be affected by the taboo dimension of the sacred flutes’ presence in the village.

However, evidence strongly suggests that the main and by far most critical prohibition that women have to follow, that of being barred from seeing the flutes, has no relation to this taboo dimension. Curripaco informants always have denied that wom-en’s exclusion has any relation to the sacred flutes’ nature or sig-nificance. One of them clearly stated that women were barred only by men’s will and for no other reason. There was no sense to speculate on Kuai’s avoidance by women in terms of sacred-ness, nor any kind of allergy (nupa), be it natural or supernatu-ral between the mythic figure and femininity. On the contrary, some men insisted that women were fully capable of handling the flutes, that they had done so in the past (this is an episode in all Jurupari legends), and that it was only because of men’s meanness that they were kept away from the flutes. This kind of statement, although sporadically documented, has often been ne-glected because of such impressive prophecies as those that pre-dict that, in case of sacrilege, men would immediately menstruate or that women would mysteriously be killed or die or, alterna-tively, that the sacred objects would lose their power and have to be replaced. Curripaco informants admitted that an inquisitive or clumsy woman would expose herself to the danger of getting sick or being assaulted. But they insisted that the cause would be human sorcery motivated by human jealousy; the figure of Kuai would not be involved in this sanction.

All this evidence leads to the conclusion that the prohibition against women and youngsters seeing the sacred flutes has nei-ther natural nor supernatural significance: it is not even as sym-bolically grounded in the social division of labor. Curripaco men often state that women are unable to kill animals, but they have never suggested that women were unable to handle the sacred flutes. Thus the prohibition is not a taboo. It is a secret enforced

by men, which has no fundamental symbolic relation to gender difference and has to be considered in its pragmatic and cogni-tive dimensions.

Lies, Secrets, and Dissimulation

Dissimulation is the common term encompassing different kinds of noncommunication (Bonello 1998: 35). Profound differences have been noted by social scientists as early as Georg Simmel, who in 1906 qualified common dissimulation as “passive,” as opposed to “active” secrecy. Such dissimulation he considered necessary to social life. He noted that proper or essential secrecy “appears whenever the intention of dissimulating is confronted with the intention of unveiling.” Although he does not theorize it, Simmel highlights the fact that secrecy exists also for those who do not share it and that it has a specific power to fascinate: it places the secret’s owner “in the middle of a bright cloud that encompasses the surrounding persons” (Simmel 1996: 12).

As shown by Pascal Boyer, most ritual secrets are “active” se-crets, in the sense that they must be known to exist by the people who are not admitted to share in the ritual. More recently, Mi-chael Houseman (1993) has distinguished two kinds of secrecy policy used in initiation rituals:

“Concealed secrecy” designates any situation in which not only spe-cific information but its very existence is collectively concealed. For the outsider, the secret does not exist before it is disclosed. We may call it “true secrecy.”

“Exhibited secrecy” involves secrets whose existence is widely known, but whose precise content is not. As a consequence, this declared se-crecy has two faces—one public, the other private—and both must be looked after so as to maintain the effectiveness of the secret. There ex-ists a medium through which the secret is kept from the outer world.

Houseman has shown how among the Beti (Cameroon), mas-culine initiation uses both kinds of secrets in a progressive manner

to give access to ritual details for the initiates. I will not try to ap-ply such a sophisticated model to the Curripaco ritual. True se-crecy exists in Kuai rituals, but it is clearly secondary to the ex-tensive use of declared secrecy directed toward women.

One of the most interesting aspects of declared secrecy is its public face: what should those who do not have access believe about the sacred flutes? How are they kept ignorant about their true nature? Sacred Kuai flutes and trumpets are loud, melodi-ous, and far-reaching instruments. They can be heard several hun-dred meters from their playing ground, and their tunes are very specific. One who has heard them once will recognize them apart from any other musical performance like social dancing and play-ing. Identification is certain and easy. The only restricted access to the flutes for women, children, and unrelated visiting persons is their sight. Hearing, smelling, and touching are not restricted, although evidence suggests that touching usually implies seeing.

Thus the sacred flutes’ secrecy has to be considered in its specific visual perspective.

Sensory Modes and Truth: A Look at Tatuyo Language

The Tatuyo are Tukano speakers who live on the Vaupés River in Colombia and share with the Curripaco the same ritual com-plex. Although Curripaco linguistics has not been fully studied, most of the classifier systems and worldviews are close to those of the Tatuyo. In a seminal article, Elsa Gómez-Imbert has shown how in Tatuyo language, the expression of truth is supported by verbal classifiers. Gómez-Imbert states that these semantic- syntactic forms are required when a speaker refers to past or pres-ent evpres-ents that he thinks are real. The expression of a desire or a hypothesis is different. Without entering into linguistic details, according to Gómez-Imbert, there exist two classes and five cat-egories of expression.

One class of verbal markers refers to indirect knowledge and comprises two categories: