I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community (review)

The canon of a culture provides the desired concepts and categories into which individuals are socialized and that continue to be reestablished through interactions based on particular discourse structures. One such structure is the autobiographical narrative, a cultural practice that serves as the function of reconstructing experience and making it acceptable not only to the listener but also to the narrator. Culturally shared meanings are negotiated and personal identities are established primarily for the benefit of the narrator. In other words, an acceptable sense of the self for presentation not only to others but also to oneself depends to a large degree on how well biographical events fit the cultural canon. This process of recontextualization becomes especially challenging for individuals with unusual or disturbing life experiences that demand at least a partial canonization through a relation to the established categories of the culture. Further complications are introduced when this process involves bicultural individuals, such as Natives of the Americas, who must come to terms with the integrative pressures of competing sets of cultural prescriptions.

The setting for Oakdale’s study of narrative autobiography is the Xingu Indigenous Park, where Native casualties from the ever-encroaching Brazilian frontier have been encouraged to resettle. The data were elicited from Kayabi speakers, who seem somewhat defensive about appearing to outsiders as having “lost their culture” because they dress in modern clothing and have acquired Portuguese as a second language. However, as they quickly point out to the ethnographer, their tribe of 536 individuals still celebrates traditional festivals, at which some of the narrative performances analyzed in Oakdale’s study occur.

The three genres of Oakdale’s recorded texts, which include political oratory, cures, and songs, apparently share the characteristics of travel accounts. For example, political oratory addresses movements in and out of Xingu Park, texts associated with cures describe a shaman’s journey to the land of spirits, and in songs the protagonist finds himself as a warrior in enemy territory. As a device for the presentation of the self, these accounts are interpreted by Oakdale as narrative representations of adult male knowledge. The ideal of male maturity, argues Oakdale, involves the dialogic management of other voices, such as those of ancestors, spirits, and enemies, which emerge through the narrator as a medium. Thus, the self becomes “a figure of the other” and is regarded as the property of relationships rather than a private entity, as in Western cultures.

Although Oakdale’s conclusions seem reasonable enough, at least according to her citations of descriptions of other Amazonian groups, it would be difficult for anyone to replicate her study. Probably the greatest deficiency in her presentation is the lack of Native language data. Since many of her interpretations derive from the meanings of Kayabi grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic markers, it is somewhat mystifying why Oakdale relies only on English versions of the texts and chooses not to include the original Kayabi discourses with interlinear translations. Even her Native translators’ explanations of Kayabi concepts, which she rephrases in English, should have been provided verbatim in Portuguese. Otherwise, it is unclear how another ethno-linguist would be able to add to or amend Oakdale’s findings.

Another weakness in the study is Oakdale’s neglect to embed her analysis in the significant literature on life histories. In reviewing her bibliography, one is struck by the omission of such influential works as Charlotte Linde’s Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (1993). In other words, how does the Kayabi way of structuring autobiographical narratives contribute to our understanding of adult speakers’ universally having life stories that are exchanged with others and that express a culturally acceptable sense of the self? Although the Kayabi stories clearly reconstruct the lives of the narrators as coherent in terms of asserting group membership, Oakdale makes no attempt to connect these narrative preferences to universal processes. For example, it is not clear from...