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Kim — U of N Press / Page ix / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE [-9], (9) Lines: 239 to 259 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-9], (9) PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In March 1992 I disembarked from a small plane at one of the posts in the Xingu Indigenous Park, a Brazilian Indian reservation located in the state of Mato Grosso. I had hired the plane and pilot to drop me off in the park, since during the wet season travel by bus to the park over unpaved roads is extremely timely and difficult. I was a student conducting research for my doctoral dissertation in sociocultural anthropology and had arranged by letter and radio contact from the capital city of Brasília to live in a Kayabi village in the Xingu Park, where I would study Kayabi rituals. The post where we landed, called Diauarum, is the park’s northern administrative headquarters. It consists of a small group of wood-and-thatch houses with a few more permanent structures made from cement, all ringed by grass. A group of people—men dressed in shorts and t-shirts, women dressed in homemade dresses, and children each wearing an article of clothing or two— stood in a ring around the plane as we stopped. As I jumped from the plane, a light rain began to fall. While I looked around, wondering who these people were, a tall man, Marcos, accompanied by a smiling woman, his wife, Vera, and a few small children came up and greeted me in Portuguese. “Suzanne, You’ve come. We’ve been waiting for you.” They quickly ushered me to one of the houses and fed me a meal of roast fish and farinha, a manioc cereal ubiquitous in Brazil. Resting in one of the hammocks as chickens pecked the dirt floor beneath me, I could not take my eyes off of a bright neon blue and purple clock with a silhouette of a palm tree on its face that was hanging on one of the stick walls. Try as I might to focus on my hosts, the clock drew my eyes like a magnet. It so sharply contrasted with its earth-tone surroundings. I followed its black cord down the wall as it disappeared between two of the sticks. Was it plugged in? I watched the hands. Were they moving? “Are you finished eating?” Marco’s voice broke my meditation on the electric cord. “Oh yes, yes,” I snapped back to attention. “Let’s go then. It’s getting late. I don’t want to spend one more night here,” he said as he packed up with lightening speed, leaving the house in practically a sprint. I and his family ran to catch up. I took one last furtive look at the clock. No, I decided, the hands were most definitely not moving. As we all boarded the small motorboat for the village, I learned that the family had been waiting for me at the post for several days. I had had to delay my trip and had radioed the Xingu that I would be arriving a few days Kim — U of N Press / Page x / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE preface and acknowledgments [-10], (10) Lines: 259 to 267 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-10], (10) late. Marcos and Vera had, however, not received the message until after they arrived at Diauarum and were therefore stuck there until I finally appeared, growing ever more uncomfortable as the days passed. After several more hours of travel on the river, we finally arrived at their village, here called Kapinu’a, the locale where I was going to reside. From the water, the rooftops and semicircular plaza were just barely visible behind the palm and cashew trees standing near the shore. A group of people, turkeys, and dogs was standing on the gentle dirt slope leading into the water in front of the trees. Marcos and Vera informed me, as we traveled on the water, that the village chief, João, would approach the boat and say, “ere ko ra’e” (you have arrived), when we pulled to shore. I was to respond, “jere ko wei” (I have arrived), before disembarking. After I repeated my lines to Chief João, as I had practiced them, the group on shore responded with a few giggles. As I stepped out of the boat, Chief João shook my hand and greeted me in Portuguese a second time. Because...

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