State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations: A Symmetrical Ethnography

5. Making Kin, Making Society, and Napë Potential Affinity

93 chapter five Making Kin, Making Society, and Napë Potential Affinity This chapter is devoted to putting the arguments I have presented thus far in conversation with Amazonian anthropological theory. In so doing, I provide a theoretical framework for interpretation and a basis for analysis in subsequent chapters. Comparing the napë transformational axis with Gow’s analysis of circumstances for the Piro reveals many similarities but also important differences. What underlies the similarities? Gow’s (1993) own following of Taussig’s (1987) lead offers a first clue. The diverse colonizers of the region deployed a fertile imagery of “wild Indians” echoed in the written history of the area. Gow’s task was to explore how such “imported” imagery was used pervasively by contemporary Indians themselves and played a role in their self-definition. Ocamo use of the term “civilized” is a good example of this phenomenon. The term “waikasi,” in its mocking Ocamo use, is also derived from the criollo use of the Yanomami term “waika.” But while many of the idioms deployed on the napë transformational axis are in this sense imported, their dynamic in everyday circumstances involves a constant interplay between indigenous and criollo forms of action and discourses. Albert (1993:351), in the context of interethnic political discourse, suggests this interaction: “The image that each [interethnic ] actor construes of the other and of the representation that the other has of him/herself is essential to their self-definition” (my translation). I wish to move beyond the sphere of interethnic discourse and consider how such reverberation, not just of images but of motivations and actions, occurs in daily exchanges between criollo doctors and Yanomami as well as in meetings—the more typical sites of political discourse. First, however, 94 • Chapter 5 we must furnish ourselves with a theory that enables us to analyze this network of relations among criollos, Yanomami/napë, and waikasi within a single framework. This is the subject matter of this chapter. The Givens and Human Agency Historical analysis illuminates not only what changes but also what remains constant, and one gets the impression that had this historical encounter in the Upper Orinoco been different, many aspects of today’s relations with doctors would still hold. I propose an argument based on what is constant in the historical outline. We have in the term “napë” a register of change in stability. The term’s semantic field passed from referring exclusively to enmity to including criollo abilities and attributes. Yet its relational nature persists: one cannot be napë on one’s own; one is napë only with respect to another. Napë also retains its outside direction: the prototypical enemy lives far away, beyond the sphere of friendly communities, kinship, and daily interaction. The prototypical criollo also lives beyond the Upper Orinoco. If shapori and interface Yanomami are managing relations with the outside in the same way and for the same reasons, then a constant is apparent in the Yanomami’s relation to exteriority, and if historical relations with national society have not yet changed this, this is because this relation to exteriority is prior to and beyond human agency. Consistent with Wagner’s (1981) and Viveiros de Castro’s (2001:19) descriptions, this relation is (non-intentionally) constructed as given or innate: the outsider will always be a dangerous but necessary Other. Human agency can either domesticate outsiders or keep them at a distance. Domestication involves a movement from alterity to identity. Individual people can travel such a path, like the early missionaries and doctors in their first months, but individual passages neither affect the nature of the outside nor completely remove the trace of their origin—ambiguous creative/destructive power. Also constant are the forms of domestication. Becoming closer to a community or failing to do so has always been predicated on the morality of being human: living with and defending kin, sharing food, speaking the language, using kin terms, marrying affines, participating in funerary ceremonies, and so on. These cultural conventions define the moral path to be laboriously hewed in the domestication of outsiders. The Yanomami moral conditions of humanity, like their relation with exteriority, must be beyond human agency and thus constitute another given experienced as the nature of being human. Kin, Society, and Potential Affinity • 95 ObservingthishistoricalprocessleadsustotwoconclusionsthatViveiros de Castro (1998) has reached by other means: culture is the given nature of being human, and the space between complete (given) difference...