Carlos Fausto

Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing small independent polities, within a regional peer polity. These patterns constitute a “galactic” form of prehistoric urbanism, sharing features with small-scale urban polities in other areas. Understanding long-term change in coupled human-environment systems relating to these societies has implications for conservation and sustainable development, notably to control ecological degradation and maintain regional biodiversity.

Banquete de gente: comensalidade e canibalismo na Amazonia

Taking the notion of familiarizing predation as a starting point, the article sets out to articulate two forms of consumption in Amazonia: cannibalism and commensality. It begins by analyzing the relationship between war and hunting in ontologies that attribute the condition of persons to animals. The interlocking of the human and animal predatory cycles is made manifest by the analysis of indigenous practices concerning illness, seclusion and food taboos. The article explores then the idea that commensality is a vector of identification for the production of kinship. As such it presupposes the transformation of the animal prey into an object, in order to block the identification of the eater with the thing consumed. The practices for de-subjectifying the prey are analyzed, bringing forth the argument that they are based on a specific conception about the partibility of the person, one which shall not be reduced to a simple and global body and soul dualism. The article offers a different rendering of this partibility, shedding new light on warfare and funerary anthropophagy in Amazonia.

The bones affair: indigenous knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an Amazonian case

This article explores the relation between beliefs and practices manifest in the interaction between indigenous people and outsiders in contact situations. Drawing on oral history, myth, and written documentation, it seeks to reconstruct the experience of the Parakana, a Tupi-speaking people of Southeastern Amazonia, in their early stable contact with national society. It focuses on some apparently implausible events in order to address the question of how certain beliefs about the nature of the whites were put into action during the contact process. The article also employs historical data from South America and comparative ethnography from Melanesia to suggest new perspectives on the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate, making use of the Peircian notion of abduction to account simultaneously for the flexibility and the resilience of magico-religious ideas.

Reconquistando o campo perdido: o que Lévi-Strauss deve aos ameríndios

O artigo retoma as pesquisas de campo de Levi-Strauss no Brasil com base em discussoes etnograficas e debates teoricos que sua obra americanista suscitou. O fio condutor e o problema do dualismo, cujo desenvolvimento aqui se acompanha desde os textos inaugurais sobre os Bororo e os Nambikwara ate Historia de Lince (1991). Neste percurso, chama-se atencao para o lugar central dos materiais sul-americanos na obra do autor bem como para a relevância de sua contribuicao para a etnologia contemporânea.

Socialidade e diversidade de pequis (Caryocar brasiliense, Caryocaraceae) entre os Kuikuro do alto rio Xingu (Brasil)

This article aims to investigate and document socio-cultural aspects of the cultivation, domestication and processing of pequi (Caryocar brasiliense) among the Kuikuro Indians of the Upper Xingu, for whom this fruit has important symbolic and nutritional roles. Pequi cultivation is shared by the nine indigenous peoples who constitute the regional multiethnic system of the Upper Xingu. Despite the species’ importance among these peoples, its morphological diversity has not been the subject of intensive research yet. We intend to correlate social and cultural aspects involved in the management practices of the Kuikuro and the morphological diversity of pequi. Fieldwork was carried out between 2002 – 2003 (Fausto) and 2010 – 2012 (Smith) in the Kuikuro village of Ipatse in the Xingu Indigenous Park. Fieldwork involved interviewing families, participative observations and audiovisual recording. We observed that the knowledge and practices of seed selection and cultivation favor intraspecific diversity of the cultivated pequi groves. Our analysis, thus, supports the inextricable connection between genetic and cultural heritage in Amazonian agricultural systems.