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

7. Both Omphalos and Margin: On How the Pa'ikwene (Palikur) See Themselves to Be at the Center and on the Edge at the Same Time

7 Both Omphalos and Margin: On How the Pa’ikwené (Palikur) See Themselves to Be at the Center and on the Edge at the Same Time alan passes Then Ohokri [God] said to the Pa’ikwené king, “You’re the strongest king but I can’t have you staying here for you would take command of all the other [i.e., white] nations.” So Ohokri sent him away, far from all the other kings, to Aúkwa. —From a story told by Kamavi, a Pa’ikwené informant It is now acknowledged that the Conquest meant not only the immediate decline or extinction of some Native South American societies, but the growth, albeit short-term, of others in respect of territory, trade, and political and military power (Dreyfus 1992;Whitehead 1993a,1994;Arvelo-Jiménez and Biord 1994). There also occurred the ethnogenetic formation of new indigenous entities through the aggregation of diverse preexisting and often ethnically and culturally different groups and elements of groups as a result of or, it has been argued, as a strategy of resistance to European expansion (Hill 1996a, 1996c; see also Garcés Dávila 1992, 72–73). This chapter is concerned with one such case, that of the Pa’ikwené or Palikur,1 and the process whereby they turned a remote area of northern Brazil first into a zone of safety for themselves and other Amerindians fleeing the European presence and then into the hub of an important panregional polity.2 The People of the Middle Conventionally labeled a coastal society (Gillin 1963; Lévi-Strauss 1986a),3 the Pa’ikwené or Palikur occupy a wide and environmentally varied territory,4 comprising a far-flung relational network that, they tell you, was even more 07.171-196/H&S 6/4/02, 10:12 AM 171 172 alan passes extensive in the past.It reached north,as now,into French Guiana,where they claim to have had communities since before the Conquest, but also south, into mid- and southern Amapá state (Brazil), and on the Amazon (see map 7.1). As we shall see, there might be reason for believing the Pa’ikwené originated further south than that. Although their present-day habitats range from marshland to periurban,perhaps the Pa’ikwené could best be described as a riverine people in the sense that their existence can be plotted, from a Western historical perspective, in terms of a trajectory between two rivers— the Amazon and Oyapock—and a relationship with a third, the Urucauá, a tributary of the Uaça, which flows into the southernmost reaches of the Bay of Oyapock, at the base of Cape Orange in the northeast corner of Brazil.5 Situated roughly midway between the Oyapock, which forms the frontier between Brazil and French Guiana, and the Cassipore rivers, the Urucauá (Rocawa in French) and the ecologically rich region around it are known in the Pa’ikwené language, Pa’ikwaki, as Aúkwa.6 Whether actually living there or not, today’s Pa’ikwené, no less than those studied by Nimuendajú (1926/ 1971) in 1925, regard the territory as their homeland (settlements are located Map 7.1. Present Location of Pa’ikwené Settlements and Past Routes of Migrations 07.171-196/H&S 6/4/02, 10:12 AM 172 Both Omphalos and Margin 173 mostly on the middle stretch of the Urucauá). It is here that their clans have their two traditional cemeteries (Nimuendajú 1926/1971, 15, 60;Arnaud 1984, 32),where the dead customarily were buried even if they died far from home (Barrère 1743; Fauque 1839).Spatially,materially,and affectively,Aúkwa seems for the Pa’ikwené to embody Augé’s (1997, 42–74) notion of “anthropological place,” as one experienced and valued by its inhabitants as the meaningful locus of relations, identity, and history. However, not only is it possible that the Pa’ikwené have not always inhabited Aúkwa, but, with nearly half the present population dwelling in French Guiana (Passes 1998, 7–8), not all of them do so now. Moreover, because of the intricate wider interethnic framework in which their society is set, they simultaneously live within four cultures and languages: their own, the Brazilian ,the Créole,and the French. The centrality,culturally, emotionally,and in relation to identity and history,of Aúkwa,comprises one pole,or omphalos (i.e.,navel) of the contemporary Pa’ikwené’s stance toward the modern world (see chapters 8 and...