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75 4 Musicality and Environmentalism in the Rediscovery of Eldorado: An Anthropology of the Raoni-Sting Encounter Rafael José de Menezes Bastos In 1989 Raoni,1 the chief of the Txukahamãe Indians in Brazil, and Sting, the British rock superstar, traveled to Europe, where they were hosted by government officials, as an initiative to raise funds for the protection of the tropical rainforest and support the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Following this effort, Raoni participated in concerts and related events in Brazil and overseas, not only with Sting but also with other figures of the international popular music scene.2 In 1991 Raoni participated in a show with Elton John, Tom Jobim, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Red Crow (a North American Sioux leader), an encounter witnessed by excited fans who believed in the music as much as in the concert’s cause (Carvalho 1991), which mirrored that of Raoni and Sting’s trip to Europe and was supported by the Brazilian branch of the Rainforest Foundation.3 This kind of encounter between artists and activists was not unique, as others had occurred in the region, such as that between Milton Nascimento—the consecrated Brazilian singer-songwriter—and the indigenous leaders Ailton Krenák and Sian Kaxinawá, from the Krenák and Kaxinawá groups, respectively. In this case the Aliança dos Povos da Floresta (Rainforest Peoples Alliance) provided an institutional framework for the event. The Alliance supports ongoing relationships between indigenous peoples and the seringueiros (workers who extract rubber from 76 | Rafael José de Menezes Bastos the seringa tree), unified by their commitment to protect the environment. As part of the same initiative, Milton Nascimento’s concert Txai—which had the same name as the album (Nascimento 1990)—took place in São Paulo in April 1991 before an audience of more than thirty thousand. This concert was also performed overseas and became the centerpiece of Nascimento and Krenák’s excursion to the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. According to one source, this series of events “sowed fruitful seeds that effectively aided the cause of indigenous peoples and seringueiros in the Amazon” (Aquino 1991; my translation). In encounters of this type, music is the supreme universe of signifiers, with environmentalism as its world of meanings.4 The music itself denounces the burning down of the “green,” then seen by many as the end of millennium Eldorado and the new pathway for indigenous peoples’ position in relation to the caraíbas.5 These concerts occurred in a context where the entertainment industry was increasingly important in Brazil, with that nation ranking sixth worldwide in musical production . At the same time, to underline the magnitude and delicacy of this kind of encounter, it is important to remark upon the relationship between these megaconcerts and the question of national sovereignty in the Amazon, especially as the various personalities involved were politically ambiguous. One may observe how these concerts had assumed the identity of political acts, necessarily situated in a global geopolitical context. State representatives, such as the then French prime minister François Mitterrand, who formally hosted Raoni and Sting in 1989, had defended only partial sovereignty in the Brazilian Amazon, a position they also held for other countries in the region. To particular branches of the Brazilian government and in some sectors of Brazilian society, this would signal new efforts at “internationalizing” the region (Passarinho 1991). Backbiting and innuendos inevitably occurred among the different actors, partly because of the mercantilist appearance of the event. In this context the encounters displayed onscreen seemed like commercials, which led to a great deal of suspicion, especially for an event that, from its participants’ viewpoint, claimed to be free of political sin. This chapter aims to contribute to the study of music and contact between artists as well as to the study of the connections between local, regional, and global levels of analysis, especially in the realm of popular music. One may well ask: What do Raoni, the Amerindian “eminent man,” and Sting, the Western pop music icon, have to do with these different levels of meaning and practice? The concept of popular music with which I have worked (Menezes Bastos 2000, 2005, 2008b) departs from that proposed by Vega (1966). Briefly put, I contend that popular music (Western in this case) is a musical tradition as old and widespread as Western art music, because phonographic recording is a global process capturing all kinds of music (popular, art, folk...

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