Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia

4. Rethinking the Arawakan Diaspora: Hierarchy, Regionality, and the Amazonian Formative

4 Rethinking the Arawakan Diaspora: Hierarchy, Regionality, and the Amazonian Formative michael j. heckenberger The Arawak, or Maipuran,languages were the most widely distributed language family in South America—perhaps in all of the Americas—in 1492.1 Arawakan peoples were spread from southern Brazil to as far north as Florida and from the sub-Andean Montaña of Peru and Bolivia to the mouth of the Amazon. It was one of the great diasporas of the ancient world. Not surprisingly ,their distribution and cultural history have long interested lowland specialists.2 Broad cultural comparisons within the family have languished in recent decades, however, and questions of origins, cultural and linguistic relationships within the family, and the processes that lie behind the Arawakan diaspora remain poorly resolved. This chapter considers these broad questions—history writ large—with the aim to agitate debate about the deep historical roots, the deep temporality, of Amazonian peoples. Recent broad comparative studies along linguistic lines in Amazonia (Basso 1977; ButtColson and Heinen 1984; Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999; Maybury-Lewis 1979; Viveiros de Castro 1984–85, 1992) and “phylogenetic” modeling of dispersal and divergence within large prehistoric diasporas elsewhere in the world,such as Europe (Indo-European), Africa (Bantu), and the Pacific (Austronesian) (Anthony 1990; Kirch 1984; Kirch and Green 1987; Renfrew 1987; Rouse 1986; Vansina 1990), gives us reason to feel optimistic about the results. The specific themes in this chapter are as follows. First, I explore Arawak origins, which I take to be somewhere in northwestern Amazonia, and primary dispersal routes, c. 500 b.c. to a.d. 500, largely along rivers and littoral areas of northern South America, as reconstructed from linguistic, archaeological , and ethnological information. Second, I explore the general cultural schemas or deeply “sedimented” practices that characterize peoples within 04.97-122/H&S 6/4/02, 10:11 AM 99 100 michael j. heckenberger the diaspora, including ancestral peoples; Arawakan peoples, though enmeshed in unique pluriethnic, multilingual regional social systems, generally share three features: settled agricultural village life, social hierarchy, and regional social organization (regionality). Third, the appearance of these structural features or cultural schemas among the progenitors of Arawakan peoples (Proto-Arawak) represents one of the earliest,if not the earliest chiefdom society in Amazonia; it represents a “rank revolution” (Flannery 1994) after c.1000 b.c. and heralds what we might call an Amazonian “Formative,” following convention for similar instances of early sedentary (generally agricultural ), hierarchical, and regional societies (i.e., early chiefdoms) elsewhere in tropical America (Ford 1969).3 The Root of the Matter The 1970 publication of Donald Lathrap’s The Upper Amazon and Robert Carneiro’s “A Theory of the Origin of the State” marked a major turning point in regional anthropology: The standard model,the long-held view that Amazonia was uniformly “the habitat of small,dispersed,isolated groups that were autonomous and self-contained, egalitarian, and technologically austere ,” was on the wane (Viveiros de Castro 1996, 180–82). Just the year before , almost no mention was made of Amazonia among the ranks of early chiefdoms,the Formative cultures,identified elsewhere throughout the neotropics (Ford 1969). Most Americanists denied that the early state—even in its most initial stirrings,that fitful transition from autonomy to earliest statehood , the chiefdom—ever arose there. The areas where complexity seemed undeniable, where the chiefs, temples, priests, idols, and the like were simply too big or too numerous to ignore, were seen as the decadent progeny of Andean chiefdoms that could not sustain their past size or grandeur in the tropical forests of Amazonia; they devolved into the ubiquitous “tropical forest tribes” (see Roosevelt 1980, 1–30, for a fuller discussion). By 1970 such a view could no longer stand unquestioned: “Only by comparing the flourishing sixteenth-century inhabitants of the Circum-Caribbean area with the marginal and shattered tribes now surviving in the Amazon Basin does this contrast [circum-Caribbean chiefdoms versus tropical forest tribes] become evident” (Lathrap 1970b, 47). Cultural variance was more continuous. Far from being a cultural backwater—peopled with tradition-bound, “primitive” tribes for whom change was an imported commodity—the Amazon floodplain was increasingly seen as a locus of major cultural developments , including early agriculture, sedentism, and complex social formations .A new várzea model took shape that envisioned not one (the “tropical 04.97-122/H&S 6/4/02, 10:11 AM 100 Rethinking the Arawakan Diaspora 101 forest tribe”) but two social...