Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia

4. Cannibal Tourists and Savvy Savages: Understanding Amazonian Modernities

4. CannibalTouristsandSavvySavages UnderstandingAmazonianModernities NeilL.Whitehead The ideological construction of indigenous peoples as obstacles to “progress” in public discourse, the media, and anthropological writings has served to enable and encourage violence against them. From the initial charges of cannibalism made against Amazonian peoples in the sixteenth century, there has been a continuous external discourse on native Amazonian savagery and wildness, particularly as evidenced in their supposed Satanic proclivities (shamanism) and demonic customs (cannibalism). This discursive production of “natives” continues to create a broad cultural framework in which violence against indigenous persons can be more easily obscured or justified. In the region of my own ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean and northeastern Amazonia, kanaimà, a form of native assault sorcery, has become widespread in the cultural imagination of both national and indigenous populations as a violent marker of both tradition and indigeneity. In turn kanaimà practice itself has become closely attuned to the violence of the development frontier and thus symbolically, as well as materially, directly engages with this external discourse on savagery and development (Whitehead 2002a). In a similar way the 107 cannibal tourists and sav v y savages notion of cannibalism, a term whose linguistic and historical origins are the same as those for “Caribbean,” is an important historical part of this discursive construction of “savages” and likewise has been used to separate out the “good Amerindians” from the “bad,” or the cooperative from the resistant to colonial development. The idea of development in Western discourse alludes to forms of both material and spiritual redemption and advancement and should be understood as part of the colonial and national conquest and incorporation of indigenous communities under the power of the state and government. Amazonia is thus seen as the end point of exploration, the counterpoint of modernity, and so the necessary context for development. Accordingly the language of conquest and occupation still suffuses the national imagining of this region, and kanaimà comes to stand for that alterity, just as cannibalism did in earlier times. Such ideological constructions thus were part of the program of conquest, and the fact that such ideologies are still sometimes part of the way national states and international agencies construe their indigenous policies and aid programs makes contemporary Amazonia and the Caribbean a significant region for analyzing how such constructions are rooted in regional histories and actively deployed today. One particularly fertile field for such analysis is tourism, which has grown significantly in the Amazon in the past couple of decades and is a critical part of the economy for certain Caribbean islands, such as Dominica, where Carib populations are still living. Tourism is a relatively new and burgeoning topic in anthropology because of the vast growth in leisure travel and continuing education in the past twenty years or so. Given the millions of people who vacation each year in distant, if not exotic locations, the cultural phenomena of holiday travel and tourism is, for this reason alone, worthy of serious anthropological analyses (for example, see Brennan 2004; Desmond 2001; Smith 1989; Vivanco and Gordon 2006). 108 neil l. whitehead In other societies we do see patterns of movement that seem to reflect similar urges. In Amazonia a couple might well decide to take off on a hunting or fishing trip that will last one or two weeks, not just because more food is needed or because it is the season for a particular fish or game animal, although this may also be the case. Instead they may leave because of tensions in the home village or household, boredom with the dull grind of everyday routine, or simply to seek some intimacy and privacy. In other words the “tourist” urge is to a degree universal, and the value of exotic knowledge more generally seems to undergird this social proclivity, although the nature of Western tourism has of course specific origins that give it special characteristics and consequences. Some have suggested that the holiday, or holy day, should be considered in the light of its religious origins, whereby an explicit withdrawal from the things of this world was the aim of the saints’ days and feast days that made up the bulk of the these holy days. Indeed the medieval world of Europe was, perhaps as it is today, very much in love with its holy days such that they occupied some forty to fifty days per year and put a real limit on the productivity...