Burst of Breath: Indigenous Ritual Wind Instruments in Lowland South America

15. Mystery Instruments

15. Mystery Instruments jean-michel beaudet Translated by Marc Brightman 1 The following essay takes the form of commentaries upon the chapters of this volume. Grounded in the rich ethnography and the high quality analysis in these texts, I permit myself a degree of temerity in my interpretations. The commentaries that follow are written from the point of view afforded by my experience of Wayãpi villages: from the visual and auditory perspective of a male ethnomusicologist who works closely with the Wayãpi women and men of the upper Oyapock, on the frontier between Brazil and (still) French Guiana. I will also suggest several points of comparison based on my brief ethnographic exchanges with the A’uwe-Shavante, Kali’na, Chacobo, and Mashakali. This perspective is distant from central Amazonia. It is true that the Wayãpi are a people of Tupi language and culture, who migrated from south of the Amazon toward the Guianese plateau in the eighteenth century. This was a migration of both survival and conquest during the course of which they acquired cultural features of Guianese peoples, notably Caribs. Moreover, the Guianas do not seem to be the region of secret musical instruments .1 The perspective of these commentaries is therefore a distant one inasmuch as the Wayãpi do not have sound instruments that the members of certain social categories (women, the 372 beaudet uninitiated) do not see. However, the paradigm of “secret wind instruments” is not alien to them. Indeed, Wayãpi women can see all of the aerophones, but they do not play any of them. As elsewhere , the Wayãpi have a story of an ancient time when women occasionally played certain aerophones. On another note, Hill and Chaumeil as well as Menezes Bastos rightly draw attention in this volume to the problems of classification of the instruments in question: they are not always flutes, and can be other types of aerophones, or even idiophones, as among the Kamayurá or the Wauja. The question of relations between different types of instruments and what they produce, in terms of signification or agency, during the course of rituals, remains unresolved , and it seems to me that it is up to those ethnomusicologists fortunate enough to work among peoples using several types of secret musical instrument to develop this theme. Of course this is not just a question of formal typology: playing techniques as well as acoustic parameters can turn out to be significant. Through this subjective introduction, I simply wish to say one thing to begin with: “secret flutes” should be included in the wider ensembles of secret aerophones and of aerophones in general : the fact that, among certain Amazonian peoples, women do not see certain aerophones should be understood in the context of the overwhelmingly widespread fact that, among the Amerindian peoples of the three Americas, women do not play any aerophones , apart from the exceptions that prove the rule, such as the Jalq’a of the southern Andes (R. Martínez 1992, 1994; Beaudet 1997). The geographical extent of this mystery that is also found on other continents, notably in Oceania, suggests that it occupies a fundamental place in these acts or processes through which the women and men of these different cultures define themselves as civilized people. In any case, if in order to understand secret aerophones it is necessary to extend the analysis to all wind instruments, including those that are not of a ritual nature, it is also important to as- Mystery Instruments—373 sociate them, in the framework of a comparative analysis, with the presence or absence of a men’s house. The civilizations of lowland South America can combine these features as follows: presence of a men’s house with secret aerophones (Wauja) (see essays by Cruz Mello and Piedade, this volume), secret aerophones without a men’s house (Barasana),2 a men’s house without secret aerophones (Akwê Shavante) (Maybury-Lewis 1967), absence of secret instruments and absence of a men’s house (Wayãpi) (Beaudet 1997). In all cases, the polarization “men-women” through musical instruments remains. The second characteristic that colors these commentaries is that I am a man, one among the eleven male authors and the four female authors of this volume. Does this disproportion signify that women carry three times as much weight as men? Is it representative of the “sex ratio” among ethnomusicologists or...