The infliction of descent: An overview of the Capanahua (Pano) descendants' explanation of the generative process

Description

This thesis traces the ways of explaining the generative process by the eastern Peruvian descendants of the Capanahua. These predominately Spanish-speaking people tend to emphasize the discontinuity with their ancestors, a little known Panoan-speaking indigenous population of the Western Amazon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and transcriptions of recorded conversations, this presentation follows and reconstructs a salient frustrative-generative dynamic in a wide range of representations, wherein alterations of self-containment or perceptibility incept the processes of differentiation and discontinuity. These processes guide a local conception of “descent” as infliction. Implications of this dynamic are examined for the formulations of kinship. The familial relations, explicitly based on notions of consanguinity and filiation – are cast in an ambiguous, if not predominately negative light. Procreation is formulated in predatory, parasitic terms, and shares dynamics with pathogenic causality and aetiology. As such, it does not naturally contribute to reproduction and continuity, but rather frustrates it by introducing difference into the vertical axis. Such results also produce horizontal differences and hierarchies, encoded as the person’s divergent, hidden “descent” in the always “mixed” social life. This image of the generative process is instrumental to understanding the villagers’ explanations of the acculturative processes. Because representations of acculturation focuses on the idiom of procreation and its frustrative results, it appears as the very function of procreative dynamics. This produces a series of associations between the progeny and sociality, focusing on their inherently “third” or external position and perpetual dividuality of belonging/containing. Such ambiguity might be tamed and everted, to produce cleansing or encompassment that counteracts the divisive continuity of time (qua descent, history, or kinship). In a contemporary context, these formulations are seen reflected in the villagers’ construal of the Peruvian state as the urban environment that is hierarchically closer to the ideal originality and beautiful imperishability than the smaller, isolated unities of rural ancestors. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Traces of “the Capanahua” ...................................................................................................................2 2. On the wane: “the Capanahua” of the Tapiche and Buncuya rivers ..................................................4 3. Acculturation and the generative process ...........................................................................................9 4. Fieldwork ............................................................................................................................................ 17 5. Ethnographic theory........................................................................................................................... 21 6. Thesis overview...................................................................................................................................24 Prologue. The drunken speech....................................................................................................................28 1. The drunken speech............................................................................................................................ 31 1.1. Conviviality..................................................................................................................................32 1.2. “Remembering, they cry” ...........................................................................................................34 1.3. The language ...............................................................................................................................37 1.4. Speaking “all that they are” ........................................................................................................39 1.5. Confrontation..............................................................................................................................43 1.6. Violence.......................................................................................................................................44 2. The releasing capacity of drunkenness..............................................................................................46 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................................47 Chapter 1. This side, the outside: The social spaces ..................................................................................49 The city of manioc...................................................................................................................................50 1. Construction and composition of social spaces as clearings ............................................................52 1.1. Sadness of the tropics .................................................................................................................52 1.2. Spatial dimension (opening)......................................................................................................54 1.3. Temporal dimension (maintaining open).................................................................................55 1.4. The qualities of clearings............................................................................................................58 1.5. Su entremedio: Knowing the clearings and knowledge making the clearings ........................64 2. Approximations of ideal sociality ......................................................................................................69 2.1. Alegría: Joy of overcoming obstacles........................................................................................69 2.2. Faces and faeces: clarity betwixt and between .........................................................................74 3. Emerging to know the outside ...........................................................................................................78 3.1. Wild people: “letting themselves be seen” ................................................................................78 3.2. Children: “thrown out into the world” ...................................................................................... 81 3.3. This side is the outside...............................................................................................................83 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................................84 Chapter 2. The other side, the inside: The contained ................................................................................87 Surface and content................................................................................................................................87 Contents xiii 1. Outside of an outside: Behind the worldly surfaces ..........................................................................89 1.1. The cloak of (im)perceptibility ................................................................................................... 91 1.2. Outside in the inside: appearance and truth of social space ....................................................92 1.3. Inside of time: temporal opacity of antiguos’ clearings/times ................................................94 2. Insides in an outside: Behind the faces of participants....................................................................95 2.1. The heart of the problem: Inside of an outside.........................................................................96 2.2. Troublesome insides ................................................................................................................ 101 2.3. Insides in the insides: Internalizing other beings ..................................................................106 3. Inside is the other side ...................................................................................................................... 111 4. Containing insides in an outside: Social implications .....................................................................112 4.1. Across surfaces...........................................................................................................................113 4.2. Generative hierarchies: children “inside” the parents ............................................................114 4.3. Beautiful equality ......................................................................................................................115 4.4. Abandonment........................................................................................................................... 118 Conclusion..............................................................................................................................................119 Chapter 3. Introducing the end: The conditioning frustrations.............................................................. 122 1. Giving account................................................................................................................................... 122 Origin of manioc ................................................................................................................................... 125 2. Explaining ejemplos ......................................................................................................................... 126 2.1. Precedent .................................................................................................................................. 127 2.2. Conditioning frustration.......................................................................................................... 129 2.3. Devolution ................................................................................................................................130 3. Inceptions in stories ..........................................................................................................................131 3.1. Basic techniques of exemplifying............................................................................................. 132 3.2. Another technique: insemination ........................................................................................... 134 3.3. Childhood of the Earthworm’s Son: exemplifying divergence .............................................. 135 3.4. Adulthood of the Earthworm’s Son: the potential of foreigner and containing divergence 138 4. Inceptions in daily life ...................................................................................................................... 139 4.1. Inflicting the future ..................................................................................................................140 4.2. Aetiology ................................................................................................................................... 143 5. Some generative-frustrative patterns ..............................................................................................148 5.1. Production of containment ......................................................................................................148 5.2. The implanted elements .......................................................................................................... 150 5.3. Reversal of containment .......................................................................................................... 152 5.4. Diminishment........................................................................................................................... 153 Conclusion............................................................................................................................................. 154 Chapter 4. Between the tree trunks: Articulation and taming of infliction ............................................ 156 1. Procreation and its mortal consequences ........................................................................................ 157 1.1. The “making” mechanism......................................................................................................... 157 xiv Contents 1.2. The results................................................................................................................................. 163 1.3. The trajectories of dilution.......................................................................................................168 2. How not to waste away? ................................................................................................................... 172 2.1. The impregnation of troncos ................................................................................................... 173 2.2. Taming the infliction.................................................................................................................177 3. The second parents...........................................................................................................................184 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................189 Chapter 5. Whose inside is this outside?: Acculturation ..........................................................................191 1. The dying breed: frustrations of the original purity.........................................................................191 1.1. The inseminations..................................................................................................................... 193 1.2. The perishing ............................................................................................................................ 194 1.3. Those that grow: the tender spot of history ............................................................................ 195 Interlude: Carnaval..............................................................................................................................201 2. The remains: frustrations of the present purity............................................................................. 206 2.1. Technical objections .................................................................................................................207 2.2. Moral objections.......................................................................................................................210 3. Rescaling descent..............................................................................................................................210 4. Perú: The co-emerged ...................................................................................................................... 213 4.1. Who have the Capanahua acculturated to?............................................................................. 213 4.2. Is there an owner of this outside? ........................................................................................... 217 Conclusion. The ˀinabu, tamed descent, and acculturation ....................................................................225 1. The ˀinabu trouble.............................................................................................................................227 2. Raza as an origin story.....................................................................................................................233 3. The ˀinabu and anthropology...........................................................................................................234 4. Cholos ................................................................................................................................................238 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 240 Appendix 1. Interlocutors.....................................................................................................................249 Appendix 2. Conversations .................................................................................................................. 271 Appendix 3. Kinship terms...................................................................................................................275 Appendix 4. Orthographic convention ............................................................................................... 285 Appendix 5. Fauna and flora mentioned.............................................................................................283 Appendix 6. List of the stories of the antiguos ...................................................................................286 Appendix 7. Original quotes.................................................................................................................294 xv