Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and redistributing resources within broad territories, in the generous spirit of a true
gift economy. Their cosmology and everyday practices show local and extended
families supporting one another in an economy of gift exchange in which the goal
is to circulate, rather than accumulate resources. The discourse of land ownership
according to Brazilian jurisprudence relies heavily, instead, on the basic tenet of
capitalism: the expropriation and accumulation of wealth. Multiple Brazilian map
topics produced since the early 1980s convey very clearly Amerindian perspectives
of land occupancy, which differ greatly from the complicated and convoluted process
of “demarcation” of Indigenous territories by the federal government.
The discourse of “white jurisprudence” relies heavily on a distinction between
fact and fiction. Facts would report us to what really happened, whereas fiction
would refer us to the imaginary and the unreal. The history of the occupation of
central Brazil by settlers and colonizers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s was constructed
under the banner of “development and progress” - the saying printed across the
country's green and yellow flag. But development for whom? An arbitrary grid was
placed upon a cartographic map of the Mato Grosso region, and the resulting lots
opened to homesteading - without any consideration for the possession of ancestral
lands, guaranteed to Brazilian “Indians” by the country's 1934 Constitution. The
arbitrary division of Indigenous lands by the federal government is considered a
fact
that farmers who filed the lawsuit against the Suyá people refer to throughout court
documents, despite the counterfeit and artifactual construction of the “discovery”
of Central Brazil as an empty, no man's land that can be chopped into pieces, its
original inhabitants ignored and cast aside as “obstacles to the development of the
country.” Imaginary lines and fictional boundaries have since defined the diminutive
Indigenous lands (once called reservations) in Brazil.
What becomes clear in the court cases here considered is that the etymology of
facts and the etymology of fiction inevitably refer us to human action, performance,
that is, to
human feats
. The various versions of the world created in the judiciary
reports by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples alike are inextricably interwoven
of fact and fiction. Fiction is also about human action and so, too, are the narratives
of science - fiction and fact - about human action (Haraway 1989: 3-4).
Cosmic Voyagers
Amerindian shamans are cosmic voyagers par excellence. Whether in dream,
trance, or other altered states of consciousness, shamans are able to dwell in various
cosmological domains, where they may interact with other beings, human or not. The
word shaman itself, which derives from the Siberian language Tungue, indicates an
individual, or being, who mediates between the human world and the spirit world
(Langdon 1996:12). In their cosmic voyages, ceremonial and religious Amazonian
leaders, including those from Araweté (Viveiros de Castro 1998), Asuriní (Müller
1996), Baniwa (Wright 1999), and Waiãpi (Gallois 1996) peoples, interpret the bizarre
and the unusual, conferring on the fantastic an intelligible locale in the social order.
