Brazil's Indians and the Onslaught of Civilization: The Yanomami and the Kayapo (review)

During the past thirty years, several hundred indigenous peoples of Brazil have undergone daunting experiences of contact with modern society. Each is a distinct case study, different in every aspect of transition. Surprisingly, most groups have weathered these shocks and suffering. Their lands and health are now secured, their cultures battered but surviving, and their populations recovering from near-extinction.

Linda Rabben has chosen to concentrate on two very different indigenous peoples: the Kayapó of central Brazil, and the Yanomami of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. Both nations are large by Amazonian standards, quite tough and warlike, and they reached the mid-twentieth century with their cultures intact. Otherwise, they have nothing in common—in language, ethnography, terrain, or reactions to contact and social change. But Rabben shows how both had to cope with discoveries of gold on their land, and how both produced remarkably able spokesmen.

The rather Spartan Kayapó adapted to contact with self-assurance. They eagerly learned Brazilian ways, but did so without losing their ethnic pride. Rabben tells about two Kayapó leaders who were born in uncontacted villages but who learned the tricks of politics and public relations. There was the handsome Raoni, whom we first meet as an obstreperous teenager and who remained unscrupulous but decisive when he advanced to chiefdom. The other Kayapó spokesman was Paiakan, less imposing as a warrior but even more charismatic as a spokesman. Both chiefs instinctively knew how to manipulate the media and, when they were taken on promotional world tours, how to charm celebrities—from the pop star Sting to the Pope and heads of state. They gained their objectives by brash stunts or shows of force, using their reputation for fierceness to intimidate politicians, settlers, loggers or mining prospectors.

In the 1980s gold was discovered on Kayapó land. Paiakan negotiated a hefty commission from the miners, and the tribe used its wealth surprisingly sensibly. Paiakan also organized a famous gathering in 1988 to protest against proposed dams on the Xingu river that would have flooded his people's forests. By attracting international media, and by wearing body paint, feather ornaments and lip-discs, the Kayapó won. But Paiakan himself was ruined, by modest wealth, alcohol, and a dubious rape allegation that took a decade to adjudicate.

Rabben tells this remarkable saga clearly and dispassionately, drawing heavily on Terence Turner's studies of Kayapó transition. However, she wrote this book without using or citing what is by far the most important source on twentieth-century Brazilian Indians: the mammoth series Povos Indígenas do Brasil of the São Paulo research institute ISA. Although Rabben knows Brazil and makes good use of her (rather few) sources, she does not appear to have spent much time with the tribes. There is little passion or first-hand experience of these peoples' conflicts and successes.

Rabben tells how the Yanomami were battered by roads into their remote forested hills, decimated by disease, and victims of a massive gold rush in the late 1980s. Thanks to hard work by sympathetic campaigners, massive reserves were finally achieved for the Yanomami in both Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomami's spokesman was the soft-spoken and spiritual shaman Davi Kopenawa. Like his Yanomami counterparts, Davi had no difficulty in explaining his people's terrible problems and his indigenous views of the cosmos on a global stage.

This book was first published in 1998. The main addition in this reprint is the furor that rocked the anthropological world with the publication of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado in 2000. Here again, Rabben does an excellent job in telling this sorry saga. She is fair to Tierney, to his main target the macho anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and to the Association of American Anthropologists that tried to sort out the mess.

This book contains two chapters on other topics. One describes a random selection of commentators on Indians, from sixteenth...