The Xavante in Transition: Health, Ecology, and Bioanthropology in Central Brazil

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Sometimes fortuitous encounters in our lives may start us along paths that take us a great distance, involve relationships that last for years, and, if we are fortunate, give us great personal and intellectual pleasure. This book is the result of such a meeting. The idea for a multidisciplinary research project among the Etéñitépa Xavánte bringing together perspectives from biological anthropology, human ecology, and public health was born in 1988 from a casual conversation between Carlos Coimbra Jr. and Nancy Flowers during a break between sessions of a seminar on biological anthropology in Belém, Pará. Soon after, the idea was discussed with Ricardo Santos and Francisco Salzano, who immediately joined the project . Authors’ names in this book appear in alphabetical order. For some twenty-five years Flowers has been doing research, especially in human ecology and anthropological demography, among the Xavánte. In 1976 and 1977, Flowers lived at Etéñitépa for fourteen months. Flowers’s research was part of a project, Human Ecology in Central Brazil, planned and coordinated by Daniel Gross. According to the design of the project, Flowers, with two other graduate students from the City University of New York, spent a year in different Indian villages of Central Brazil, Dennis Werner with the Kayapó-Menkrangnotı́ and Madeline Ritter with the Canela (Ramkókamekra), collecting data for the comparative project as well as their dissertations. Throughout the 1980s, Coimbra and Santos were involved in research in medical-biological anthropology and epidemiology among indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon. Both based their doctoral dissertations, defended at Indiana University, Bloomington, on research carried out among the Gavião, Surui, and Zoró, Tupı́-Mondé-speaking groups who live on reservations near the boundary between the states of Mato Grosso and Rondônia. Both Coimbra and Santos are interested in understanding how the health and biology of Amazonian indigenous peoples are affected by contact and increasing interaction with the Brazilian national society. xxii Preface and Acknowledgments Francisco Salzano has been working since the 1950s with indigenous peoples in Brazil and other South American countries. He initially worked with the Kaingáng in southern Brazil and shortly after, in the early 1960s, did research among the Xavánte. In the following years this research was extended to a number of different groups, chiefly from the Amazon region, in collaboration with a large number of colleagues from both Brazil and abroad. Particularly noteworthy was a joint project that involved the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine, University of Michigan, and the Departamento de Genética, Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul. These studies were conducted over a period of four decades, contributing in a significant way to knowledge of the genetics of Amerindian tribal populations. In our early discussions of our Xavánte project it became clear that we all had a particular interest in studying the ways through which socioeconomic and environmental changes affect the health, biology, and ecology of indigenous peoples. Aspects of the Xavánte experience, including their history and patterns of interaction with non-Indians, offered a unique opportunity for this kind of research. An unusual and interesting aspect of the Xavánte is the considerable time depth of historical references to them. Based on these documents we can draw a reasonably detailed picture of interaction between the Xavánte and the Brazilian national society over the past two and a half centuries. Another advantage was that some members of the team had already done fieldwork among the Xavánte. Both Flowers and Salzano did research with the group that now lives on the Pimentel Barbosa reservation . Work could be done in the same community where previous research was carried out, making it possible to compare data collected at different times in the recent history of the group. Moreover, two anthropologists , David Maybury-Lewis and Laura Graham, had made ethnographic studies of the group at different periods. The first fieldwork of Coimbra and Santos among the Xavánte was in May and June of 1990, when they made a field trip to Etéñitépa with Flowers. At that time they collected many of the data that we present here. But they and Flowers returned to Etéñitépa many other times, and over the period of their research they developed very warm relations with the Xavánte. During the years of the project it attracted a growing number of people. At the beginning of...