Upriver: The Turbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian People

Many accounts of anthropological journeys begin with a false start. The ethnographer sets sail in one direction, heading for a predetermined site to do fieldwork. But he meets adverse winds and is not able to access the field. He is obliged to change course and to look for another research topic. This leads him to uncharted waters where he stumbles upon a treasure island: a welcoming community that lends itself to ethnological study, a felicitous encounter with a key informant, the witnessing of an important symbolical event. He collects enough material to write his monograph, goes back to his country to publish and get tenure, and regularly revisits a site that provides fodder for the whole of his academic career. This is, more or less, what happened to Michael Brown. His original plan, for which a private foundation had awarded a modest research grant, was to study the use of medicinal plants by the Lamistas, a native people of Peru who had abandoned its Amazonian language in favor of Quechua. After having been wrongly taken as an agent of the CIA, the ethnographer settled in a Lamista community, only to discover that Quechua-speakers had mostly died off and that traditional Andean customs were in decline. Mestizos dominated Lamista's economic life, and Lamistas themselves were reluctant to talk to strangers.So the anthropologist began the quest for another research site. He was told that Indians belonging to the Aguaruna--or Awajún--tribe, who lived in frontier settlements, had kept most of their traditions alive and were fiercely independent. After a long and difficult journey, he reached an Awajún community in the Amazon highlands and began his work as a participant observer. Even once he decided to pitch tent among the Awajún, it took him some time to find a proper research topic. He first made efforts to acquire the rudiments of the local language, which was not easy considering the fact that the only written source on Awajún language was the Bible translated by protestant missionaries. He tried to document local customs: kinship (a long-standing obsession among anthropologists, which doesn't involve an extended vocabulary,) public rituals (which involved an inordinate amount of manioc beer drinking,) healing techniques (his original plan, which had granted him his research funding.) But his ambitions were soon thwarted. Family relations proved to be very different in practice from their ideal type, and the Awajún were mostly noticeable for their philandering. They seemed uninterested in religious rituals of the public sort, except the recent ones spread by evangelical spirituality. And they had discarded their traditional cures against ailments in favor of an exaggerated faith in the healing power of injections. As the anthropologist concludes, "my only choice was to continue seeking a framework that would bind these disparate stories and curious facts into a coherent pattern, assuming that one existed."After a while, he thought he had found such a coherent design: the Awajún, otherwise brave and fearless, had an inordinate fear of sorcery. They identified cases of infant deaths or adult illnesses as incontrovertible evidence that homicidal sorcerers lived among them. Shamans or iwishin were both respected for their healing powers and feared for their ability to raise the dead and cast spells upon the living. Having mastered the rudiments of the language, Michael Brown felt confident enough to approach the local shaman, a man of formidable spiritual power. He asked him whether he could ask a few questions about his trade and maybe record his story. The answer was a flat no. The anthropologist was disappointed: he had hoped to learn more about magic rituals and healing ceremonies, and perhaps even to become the shaman's student and learn his secrets. Becoming the apprentice of a local sage or sorcerer has always been the dream of anthropologists, who identify participation in rites of initiation as the golden standard of participant observation. This profession's fantasy was heightened at the time of the author's fieldwork by the success of the books written by Carlos Castaneda which, it is noted in passing, were based more on fiction than on facts.But in the end, the shaman's refusal to become the main informant or even the teacher of the ethnographer was fortunate. By being seen as too close to the shaman and suspected of having shared his power, the young fieldworker would have risked his life, and would most certainly have faced a violent death. The Awajún, remember, are a fierce and fearsome lot. They were the southernmost members of a loose network of societies that Spanish colonial officials and missionaries called the "great Jivaro nation". The Jivaros are best remembered for their talent as hunters using curare dart poison for their blowguns, and for their custom of turning the head of murdered enemies into fist-sized, smoke-blackened war trophies called tsantsa. Original descriptions by the soldiers and explorers who first came in contact with them describe them as "cunning, knavish and diabolical," prone to "laziness, drunkenness, polygamy, hatred of other peoples and aversion to the white man." They resisted evangelization by the Jesuits, and only recently converted to Protestant evangelicalism, while keeping some of their traditions--including polygamy. Unlike the Lamistas the ethnographer first came in contact with, the Awajún considered themselves as at least equal if not superior to the mestizos and other components of Peruvian society.The violence of Awajún's society was not just turned toward outsiders. As the fieldworker recalls, "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." Violent death was not a remote prospect but a familiar reality manifested in suicide and murder as well as more ambiguous but equally feared attacks by sorcerers. A close association with a shaman could prove lethal: anybody could be suspected of being a sorcerer and having cast spells, for which the revenge was usually murder. The first community where the anthropologist had set tent was in the thrall of such rumors and accusations, which indeed led to the escape of the anthropologist's main informant and only Spanish speaker, who complained that the locality was a breeding ground for sorcery, lechery, and drunkenness. Warriors from neighboring communities would visit during a wedding with their shotgun on their shoulders as if ready to avenge the murder of relatives, participating in a tense ritual where all questions and answers had to be shout in the face of your opponent.Anthropologists usually bemoan the process of acculturation, by which they mean the abandonment of ancestral lifestyle and customs in favor of the cultural traits of the dominant milieu. The result for indigenous peoples is usually marginalization and alienation, as individuals both reject their culture of origin and are relegated to a marginal place in the wider society. Acculturation is often associated with alcohol and substance abuse, social maladaptation, and moral vacuousness. Christian missionaries are often said to heighten this process by having converts renounce their traditional ways. Michael Brown disagrees with this view. First, social change seems to improve the lot of the Awajún, both individually and collectively. Due to their sense of superiority, the Awajún maintained their traditions, while adapting to modern society's new challenges and opportunities. Stalwart and enterprising, that do not oppose modernity. In the recent period, ambitious, educated leaders have thrown themselves into campaigns of political mobilization, fund-raising among international organizations, and public denunciations of violations of Awajún's civil and territorial rights. Clashes with the police over extraction of petroleum have confirmed the reputation of the Awajún as the nation's toughest and most intransigent indigenous peoples. They remain committed to defending their land and their right to govern themselves,still driven by a steely determination to live on terms of their own choosing.Second, Christian Churches are found to have played a positive role in this process. As the author notes, "I had to admit that decades of work by missionary-linguists had incalculably improved the Awajún's prospects for survival." His work alongside a catholic NGO also convinced him that "not all work supported by Christian denominations was intolerant or injurious." Protestant missionary schools and their Roman Catholic counterparts trained a cadre of young, bilingual, literate Awajúns, who became important leaders at the local level and later in the emerging national and international movement for indigenous rights. Even alcohol is found to play a somewhat positive role in Awajún's society. It has been part of Awajún's culture from times immemorial, and communities has developed ways to control and limit its consumption so that it does not degenerate into conflict. As the ethnographer records, the essential element of any party was manioc beer, the dietary and social pillar of Awajún's life, and its preparation was an unchanging part of a woman's working day. It also helped him support the diet of monkey meat, armadillo grease, wasp larvae, and other treats of the Amazonian food diet.The author also came to measure the great distance between what he was taught in graduate school and actually doing fieldwork. As he notes, "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." At first, the language barrier proves insurmountable. How are you able to ask people how they're related to one another, document their rituals, and participate in their daily occupations in the absence of a shared language? "For me, dealing with a new language was the hardest part," the author confesses. But even when the fieldworker is able to communicate, it is hard to find something useful to do during the day when children are in schools, women work in their gardens or in the home, and men are away hunting in the forest or working in the fields. Michael Brown remembers moments of utter boredom and desperation: "A vortex of self-pity danced at the edge of my waking hours. The temptation to succumb was powerful." He finds himself incompetent in most skills practiced by the Awajún, except, it turned out, giving the exact time or showing pictures from old copies of National Geographic. The Awajún were particularly shocked by the picture of Amazonian Indians wearing only penis sheath or G-strings.As Michael Brown notes, an unavoidable reality of ethnographic work is that it entails uncertainties rarely encountered in other approaches to the study of human social life. "Borders close; wars are declared; visas are denied for unknown reasons; populations relocate; new social movements change a community's attitude toward outsiders from one day to the next." Despite the modern facilities offered by cellphones, notebooks, and the Internet, modernity has erected new barriers to fieldwork among indigenous people. "Anyone attempting to do similar work would face ethical vetting by the institutional review board of his or her home institution. This would be followed by months of negotiation with host-nation authorities, and their indigenous community's own gatekeeping organization." On the other hand, a similar enterprise today would certainly be multi-sited and possibly trans-national. "Anyone studying the Awajún today might feel obliged to follow them into the cities where some of their young people are pursuing advanced education and their leaders have established offices close to the ministries and NGOs whose activities influence life in the hinterlands. If research funds sufficed, it would be useful to accompany Awajún leaders to global forums in Lima and occasionally as far afield as Geneva, Paris, or Washington." If older ethnographies were often characterized by false starts, new departures, and hundreds of hours of tedium as a participant observer, new anthropological writing is exposed to the temptation of sampling, browsing, and not setting tent anywhere.

Upriver had a very positive review in New Scientist and, as usual their reviews are reliable indicators. My therefore high expectations of Upriver were met. Michael F. Brown is very much aware of the limitations of his own research among a Peruvian tribe, and not afraid to share this, as any academic researcher would be expected to do. Brown is also very critical of some of his fellow anthropologists in their distinction between civilised societies and savage tribal life. His analysis suggests that this arbitrary distinction is an oversimplification of reality, given the many injustices occurring in so called civilised societies. And then there are those ironies of induced cultural change by the Churches: he locals being bemused by the infighting between the Catholic missionaries and the US Evangelicals, and western enlightenment seekers wanting shamans to introduce them to their hallucinogenic beverages much to the irk of indigenous Christian converts unhappy with such devilish practices.

WISE AND WITTYThis is an excellent book and I have no hesitation in recommending it to general readers, as well as to experienced and novice anthropologists. Framed by Brown's visits to the fiercely independent Awajún people of Peru (who had not long previously been headhunters!), first as a postgraduate anthropologist in the 1970s and then again more recently, the bulk of the book is a readable, sympathetic, and fascinating account of Awajún life and practices, both then - and now, as the pace of change and westernization accelerates. Brown cleverly focuses his account on a number of Awajún individuals that he met and interviewed, so that we see their practices as much as possible through their own eyes. The reader ends up hoping that the Awajún can preserve at least the most important elements of their traditional way of life - even, if they cannot otherwise be tamed, their propensities for violence and female suicide. Much of the pleasure of the book is afforded also by Brown's reflections on the discipline of anthropology - on how well its tried-and-tested precepts stood up to his practical experiences in the field, and on the bewilderment of a young anthropologist in the field facing an as-yet unknown language and alien conditions.

Easy to read and fascinating view of a very different society.

great

Fine

It's easy to see why this book has received accolades. It's a great story, authentic, mature, complex, sincere, imaginative. I loved getting a chance to understand the gift that anthropology can bring to us.