First Contacts, Slavery and Kinship in North-Eastern Amazonia

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20047587
AutoresVanessa Grotti (0000-0002-2041-2788), Marc Brightman (0000-0002-6360-8449)
Año2016
Páginas63-80
Fecha de publicación2016-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaOwnership and Nurture (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/j.ctvpj7h8p.9
OpenAlexW2573297729
ISBN9781785330841
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas7

The Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo are Carib-speaking Amerindians of the border regions of Brazil, southern Suriname and southern French Guiana. 1 We have carried out fi eld research since 2003 in southern Suriname, in a predominantly Trio village shared with a number of Wayana and most of the surviving Akuriyo.A relationship of asymmetry has evolved between the Trio and Akuriyo since the late 1960s, although arguably from a native point of view these two populations have engaged in a relationship of mutual avoidance as far back as people can remember.Despite, or perhaps because of, the memory of prior encounters between them, the Trio and Akuriyo would probably have maintained their mutual avoidance longer, had it not been for the intervention of evangelical missionaries.These missionaries, and in particular a Baptist pastor named Claude Leavitt, who had established himself and his family among the recently contacted Trio a decade earlier (Conley 2000), organized a series of contact expeditions to the remote area around the headwaters of the Oeremari River near the border with Brazil in search of an elusive group of Akuriyo hunter-gatherers then known as wajiarikure, a Trio ethnonym used to refer to wild, semihuman beings living in the forest (Forth 2008).Trio people generally consider forest dwellers to be barbaric in everyday practices such as cooking and the treatment of their bodies, but they also fear them for their fi erceness and predatory capacities (these capacities are known as ëire in Trio, a word also used to describe the aggressive, magically strengthened bodily state of a warrior).The Trio feel ambivalent towards wild people, considering them individuals of reduced capacity for socialization who nonetheless enjoy superhuman predatory and transformational aptitudes.This helps to explain the way Trio-Akuriyo relations unfolded after contact, and particularly how this relationship came to be considered mutually benefi cial and construed in terms of ownership and

Amazon rainforest · Biology · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Kinship · Sociology · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Indigenous Health and Education · Ecology