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

12. An “Inca” Instrument at a “Nawa” Feast: Marubo Flutes and Alterity in Amazonian Context

12. An “Inca” Instrument at a “Nawa” Feast Marubo Flutes and Alterity in Amazonian Context javier ruedas This chapter explores the connections between flute use and concepts of alterity in Amazonia by analyzing a Marubo headman’s comments on flute use. The Marubo, a Panoan society of the Javari River basin in western Brazil, do not have sacred flutes, but their youths play flutes in informal settings such as manioc beer feasts. During one such feast at Maronal, a village on the upper Curuçá River, the headman explained to me that flutes were Inca instruments and what we were attending was not a Marubo event but rather a nawa (distant stranger, white man) feast. I will analyze Marubo concepts of identity and alterity (otherness) to show the importance of nawa and Inca in Marubo thought and, more broadly, in the constitution of Panoan (including Marubo) social forms. I then will use ethnographic observations to point out that the Marubo associate youths with alterity (the nawa) and elders with Marubo identity. Youths incorporate nawa elements into Marubo rituals, while a core set of ritual actions organized by elders remains central to the Marubo self-definition. The Marubo preserve identity by associating youth with alterity. Marubo flutes, used by youths and defined as “Inca,” reproduce the broader Amazonian connection between flute use and concerns with alterity. Although they are not sacred and occupy a marginal place in Marubo ritual, the comparison with sacred flute complexes “may bring us insight into more fundamental Amazonian social themes” (see Brightman, this volume). Throughout Amazonia, the connection between flutes and discourse on alterity reveals the ways in which different Amazonian peoples worry about what they perceive to be the dangerous other and then set about socializing or domesticating the danger or, in the Marubo case, turning it into an object of laughter. Although the ritual and discourse surrounding most Amazonian flute use exhibits a concern with sexual difference or with affinity, Marubo flute use reflects the Panoan concern with the radical otherness of those who represent distant states—the Inca and the white man. The Headman Says Flutes Are Inca Instruments In September 1997, a new shovo (longhouse) was completed at Maronal, and this event occasioned a feast. The longhouse belonged to the headman’s son-in-law, Mayãpa, and was built to house him and his wife and son as well as his three brothers and their wives and children. Because these brothers were all members of the Varináwavo section, the longhouse was called the Varináwavo shovo.1 The occasion for the longhouse’s inaugural feast arose on October 4, 1997, when an ako was heard to sound in Maronal. An ako is a hollowed-out log drum that is found in almost every Marubo longhouse. The ako is used mainly during feasts that involve multiple longhouses. It was once used as a warning that enemies had been sighted. Its main nonceremonial use was to signal that a herd of white-lipped peccaries had been located. As soon as the ako sounded, all the hunters in the village dropped whatever they were doing and gathered to discuss their strategy. They sent spotters out to keep track of the herd, while the bulk of hunters waited for the next day. Early the following morning, twenty-eight hunters surrounded the herd and forced it through a gauntlet of shotgun fire. Forty-three peccaries were killed. The bulk of the meat was given to the Varináwavo brothers so they could host their inaugural feast. On the day after the hunt, young men all over the village rolled 302 ruedas up their hammocks and went to the Varináwavo shovo to eat grilled peccary.2 The older men stayed in their own longhouses. Accompanying a group of elders, I visited the new longhouse on October 7. In addition to grilled peccary, the Varináwavo brothers ’ wives had made a large batch of the slightly fermented corn beer, waka. We ate to our heart’s content and then I returned with the elders to the center of the village, where I lived. On October 8, the remaining inhabitants of the longhouse compound where I lived returned to Mayãpa’s shovo for breakfast . This morning, however, the feast had changed in quality. As we approached, I saw many splotches of a congealed white semiliquid substance all around the edge of...