Chapter Five explored the way, in Surama, belief is the potential for interacting with otherwise invisible beings. Analysis showed that belief is different from our category of ‘belief’. Belief is not a cognitive outlook, but rather an embodied way of knowing. This final chapter looks at the politics of this embodied way of knowing, and the implications of framing this knowing in “belief”, which seemingly casts doubt on the veracity of these embodied interactions. I suggest that framing these interactions with the word “belief”, rather than treating them as a given, is a part of Surama navigating political interactions with development—the experienced wider world. Part Two
elaborated on interactions with researchers, and I revisit this focus in this chapter, taking myself and my research as an example of Surama’s engagement with the wider world.
Part of my Makushi hosts’ framing these interactions in belief is their recognition that I, a foreign researcher, would interpret belief a certain way. Specifically, Paulette, Daniel, and others in the community, knew that stories associated with belief would be incredible to me. My hosts expect that visiting researchers, the most recent in a history of colonial visitors, cannot accept there to really be an otherwise invisible short man in the forest. At the same time, my hosts’ reference to short man as a “belief” allows us to invoke our cultural relativist sensibilities, and represent this embodied way of knowing as part of Makushi Culture, alongside an array of other ‘mystical’ or ‘unproveable’ ‘superstitions’ in the world. My hosts’ recognition that foreigners would not give full credence to their beliefs is part of their experience in a history of interactions with the wider world, which has continuously marginalised them. Disguising their embodied interactions with beings in the forest as
“beliefs” distances people in Surama from the popular image of timeless or superstitious Amerindians.
Furthermore, framing these interactions, belief, makes it difficult for invisible interactions to be further investigated. Belief was a kind of stop, over which further inquiry was complicated. It is difficult to question other’s beliefs, except to assert or refute them as part of how you see the world. In Chapter Five I pointed out that refuting beliefs could be a negation of one’s own interaction with potentially dangerous beings, or a negation of the existence of these beings all-together.
Finally, framing these interactions in terms of belief protects Surama villagers and foreign
researchers from the potential dangers of these beings in the forest. Knowledge of these potential dangers is knowing how to interact with them, and interactions with these dangerous beings opens
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the knower to accusations of communing with kanaimǐ. Furthermore, framing these potential interactions in belief suggests that they are neutralised in a culturally relative “tradition”. To review, framing embodied ways of knowing in belief…
1). Keeps these ways of knowing from being easily investigated.
2). Is part of the politics of representation through which people in Surama distance themselves from a set of practices associated with the “uncivilized” forest.
3). Ontologically protects my hosts and myself from these potentially dangerous interactions. As this chapter deals with how belief is manifested by people in Surama, and interpreted by non- Amerindians, I take research—specifically my research—to be the main ethnographic focus. I take my relationship with Paulette and Daniel to be the most recent in a history of close interactions with an array of social scientists, other natural science researchers, and development program
coordinators. These range from the coordinators for the Makushi Research Unit, COBRA Projects, and Global Canopy Programme, to high school or undergraduate social science researchers participating in field research schools, as well as PhD students in sustainable development,
sociology, and anthropology. Paulette and Daniel have hosted several of these researchers, and have had close interactions with other visiting groups, inviting them to work in their farm, and learn cassava work. Paulette and Daniel have had more interactions with researchers than others in Surama, and I suggest the way they talk about interactions with potentially dangerous beings as belief with me is informed by this history of interactions with non-Amerindian visitors. As Paulette and Daniel’s interactions with researchers are informed by a specific history (discussed in Chapters Three and Four), I suggest belief also points to “Makushi” representations to, and of the ‘world beyond [their] own’.66
Making the dangerous familiar
Belief is not solely about embodied interactions with potentially dangerous beings, and representing these interactions. As I explored at the end of Part II, belief also contributes to family-friendships in the community. Through relationships of exchange with beings in the forest—not necessarily kanaimǐ, but other forest persons—people in Surama turn potentially dangerous substances into food, which can then be shared with family and friends, contributing to relationships that constitute the community. Thus, relationships with beings in the forest are a part of community kinship
66 Here I draw specifically upon the fact that Paulette and Daniel not only interact with researchers; they are
also Villagers, and leaders in the community, and experienced with an array of outsiders. Informed by this history, they mediate the Makushi world to outsiders in a way they think we can best understand.
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relationships. 67 In other words, this way of knowing allows for a community of similarly bodied
(commensal and consubstantial) kin. Belief relationships with others in the forest, while potentially dangerous, are the same kinds of interactions that Amazonianists have described as leading to family-friend relationships in which the invisible contributes to embodied personhood (for example Guss 1989; Mentore 2005; Overing 2003). Paulette and Daniel neutralise the potential dangers of these forest relationships, and contribute to the bodies of family-friends.
In Chapter Four I described the way “culture” and “tradition” are marked with ideas of the past through which the bodies of family-friends were made. “Traditional” items are formed in the community, but the materials to make them cotton, cassava, and prey are from the forest, and associated with belief. These materials are not produced, but rather acquired through belief relationships with the spirits of the plants and animals. These plants have been described as having their own personhood. Exchanging with them brings their ‘products’ (food, cotton, etc) into the community. In this way, belief in the forest allows for “tradition” and family-friend contributions inside the community. Once made safe through Paulette and Daniel’s knowledge, they contribute to the bodies of family-friends.
By participating in farming, cassava work, and weaving hammocks researchers too are the subjects of Paulette and Daniel’s bodily creation. While belief relationships seem to resist investigation, researchers and visitors are encouraged to learn and participate in their safe correlates “tradition”
and “culture”. Though my hosts recognised that researchers were expected to produce for academia, the best researchers are those willing to integrate in the community; our academic requirements were secondary. I was often asked if I would return, if I would do the things I learned in Surama, if I had made friends, if I liked farine, parakari, and fish; meanwhile only one person expressed interest in the academic product of my work.68 Less interested in the academic products
of our research, my hosts were more interested in the exchange between us.
67 Relationships with plants and animals have been described by Amazonian anthropologists as kinship
relations. While it may be safe to suggest that in Surama these are also kinship relations, (relations of potential affinity), plants’ most evident contribution to kinship is in the way people in the community turn relationships with the spirits of plants into food for family-friends. This may in turn suggest that potential affinity is essential for the continual process of consanguineal kinship relations, however, as belief hides these ‘potential affinal’ relations, I am pushed to suggest instead that amongst my hosts, potential affinity is masked by family-friend relations. In other words, affinity, or potential affinity, is obviated by consanguineal relations. This is consistent with the way people in Surama treat each other as kin, not only at the level of sharing (or the preferred model of sharing), but the way they consider everyone in the community to be consanguineal kin.
68 When I asked Grandfather Fred in an interview if there was anything he felt we should know about people
living in Surama, he reminded me to send my report back. He said researchers came and did their work, but they didn’t all send their reports, and he was interested in these being available in Surama.
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Paulette’s culture, tradition, and belief were meant to guide my research interests into her way of life. “Cultural” or “traditional” items, while seemingly detached from daily life, point to the historic ways that people made kin. When shared with researchers, hammocks, cassava, and thatch roofs appear to be representative of Amerindian authenticity, but they are also demonstrations that Makushi people make Makushi bodies. While my hosts wear ‘Western’ clothes, sleep in beds, and make their houses’ roofs out of corrugated zinc they teach researchers to weave and sleep in hammocks, go fishing or farming, and do cassava work. I do not deny that this is part of an avenue for asserting political claims, but it also shows that we too have the possibility to contribute to the bodies of others, and know in other ways. By teaching us “tradition”, they change our bodies into bodies more like theirs, and show us that we both have the ability to contribute to each other’s bodies.
Daniel describes foreign research as a becoming “doctors of [his] knowledge.” I would add that as we research, we also become “bodies of their knowledge.” Through working with community members, we are made into family friends. As we do this work, our bodies are changed. While we create knowledge out of their bodies, their bodies know us into creation.69 Thus work and belief are
two sides to becoming family. Where work is highlighted and made visible, belief is hidden.
I conclude the chapter by returning to an analysis of not-believing alongside recent anthropological scholarship of social transformations in Amazonia. Amazonian Amerindians have been described as able to occupy different bodies, taking the perspectives of the bodies they inhabit and create. This multi-natural embodiment has enabled us to rethink Amazonian acculturation or enculturation not as a change in culture, but as a change in natures; maintaining ontological fluidity (and mono- culturalism) as a key characteristic. In Surama, multi-natural perspectives are described through belief, and it is through belief that the bodies of kin are made. Considering current literature alongside my ethnography, I ask what not-believing means. Gow (2007) has described that ontological changes also assert changing kinship obligations and ways of being social. Birthlan’s statement about not-believing is similar to those made by ‘ex-Cocama’ who deny kinship obligations by asserting themselves as Peruvians, not indigenous. Taking Gow’s analysis onboard, Birthlan’s assertions seem to claim that he can be kin to an array of other non-believers in current
“development time”. Looking at his statement diachronically, however, Birthlan’s denial of his parents’ way of knowing suggests that his children will similarly not participate in these embodied belief relationships. If Amazonians are characterised as spirits loosely attached to bodies—
69 The implicit next step in this analysis is to suggest that we, researchers, and other foreigners, are the ‘new’
belief relationships. We are the potentially dangerous beings, not from the forest, but from a similar place of differing sociality and corporality. This will remain only an implicit suggestion.
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attachments made stronger by family-friends—what happens when this attachment is stabilised through different ways of knowing? Talking about embodied ways of knowing the forest suggests that by returning to the forest, Amazonian people could again know as their ancestors did, through the same kind of embodied interactions. This hypothetical will mark the end of my analysis into Amazonian ways of knowing.