Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
visited homes in the other two villages in Kuluene on a weekly basis before I started
teaching. To know my way around I drew maps of the three villages in Kuluene, the
paths and shortcuts that led to them, the houses and their inhabitants. Altogether, at the
time, the total population of Kuluene was approximately 1,500 people.
Aside from hearing, the other life-saving faculty the Xavante rely on is a sharp
sense of smell. Early one morning in July 1978
Apitó
(chief) Tomás, the headman
of the Ri'tubre village, came into my newly built thatched-roof house with adobe
walls and packed dirt floors. As I grabbed a piece of firewood to liven up the fire and
prepare coffee for the old man, he shouted: “
Apapa
!
Apapa
!” Next thing I knew he
had killed the
apapa
, as this giant scorpion is called in the Xavante language. The
creature was hidden under a pile of firewood next to the woodstove in my room. I
asked him how he spotted the critter, and he answered: “The smell is strong.” I had
not smelled a thing. Known in Portuguese as “escorpião-vinagre,” and in English as
“vinegaroon,” the critter emits a vinegarish liquid when frightened. The acetic acid
the animal sprays can cause several reactions, including blindness. And according to
the Xavante, “the apapa can kill people and even tapirs.” The tapir (
Tapirus terrestris
)
is the largest mammal in South America. It is the size of a cow, but with a prehensile
nose and short legs. The scorpion
apapa
, instead, belongs to the
Arachnida
family.
I suspect the ones I saw in Kuluene were giant vinegaroons, known scientifically as
Mastigoproctus giganteus.
In Brazil there are 103 species of the
Uropygi
order to
which the
apapa
belongs. Their 4-plus inch size and bright color red indicated to me
they were of the giant kind.
Compass and maps ready at hand, I was still at a loss in the Brazilian
cerrado
. In the
1970s and 80s there were still no GPS instruments available for the public. My senses
of hearing and smell were largely underdeveloped. My mother Ilsa taught me to scrub
my hands with lime juice whenever I came back from fishing trips in Ubatuba with
my cousins. “lt's the only way to get the stench off your hands,” she used to say. Body
odors were supposed to be scrubbed off really good with coconut soap or whatever else
it took. “Good smells” meant perfume or the smell of sweet baking goods. Neither was
my hearing developed enough to identify the wide variety of sounds of the
cerrado.
So at 19 years of age, I was like a toddler unable to orient myself in what seemed to
me like a brand new world. Contrary to the official maps I consulted, the maps I drew,
with the help of the Xavante community, included not only rivers, fences, and other
landmarks, but mostly
people
. However, how could these two-dimensional maps I
relied on truthfully represent three-dimensional realities depicting human interactions?
How about the layers of rocks and the roots under the soil, where the Xavante store
their knowledge? And how to represent sounds and smells on a map so that it can
provide us with the information we need for a certain purpose, like getting from one
village to the other without getting killed by a jaguar? I agree with Denis Wood in
The Power of Maps
(1992), and with Peter Turchi in
Maps of the Imagination
(2004)
,
who argue that if sounds and smells are difficult to map it is because we readily accept
“the conventions of maps - among them that maps are fixed in time and include only
features considered relatively permanent” (Turchi 2004:37).
