Masked observers and mask collectors: entangled visions from the eighteenth-century Amazon

Abstract

This essay explores the culture of mask use and mask collection in eighteenth-century Amazonia as a way of bringing together the reciprocal observations undertaken by indigenous, European, and peoples of mixed race and identity in South America during the colonial period. By focusing on masks as physical objects containing attributes that can be studied with reference to historical and contemporary indigenous Amazonian groups, it attempts to disrupt the binary opposition between observers and observed and argues for a more connected set of epistemologies in the study of the colonial world. One central proposition is that European naturalists and those who accompanied them in the tropics may have been implicated in the fluid ontologies that were proposed by the objects worn and wielded by indigenous groups. It thus becomes necessary to reinterpret European ethnographical description to account for the agency of indigenous objects and individuals, leading to a more imbricated vision of engagement and encounter than an earlier generation of scholarship has tended to portray.

Notes on contributor

Neil Safier is Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, with a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (2008), which was awarded the 2009 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français d’Amérique. He has held numerous research fellowships at libraries and archives, including the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, and has a wide collection of published books and articles, including essays in Isis, Book History, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. His current research relates to the environmental and ethnographic history of the Amazon River basin, and the circulation of ideas in the Atlantic world during the age of revolutions.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank members of the Seminar at The Johns Hopkins University and the Early Modern Empires Workshop at Yale University for incisive comments that helped me to refine arguments in this essay, as well as the three reviewers for CLAR whose generous assistance strengthened this piece immeasurably. Finally, my thanks to Dana Leibsohn, Marcy Norton, and Ralph Bauer for their support and encouragement. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Neil L. Whitehead, a pioneering scholar in the theory of entanglements, who first invited me to present on these questions nearly a decade ago.

Notes

1. For an especially illuminating account of the relationship between ontological, formal, and pragmatic analyses of masks in the Amerindian tradition, see Fausto 2011.

2. Unsurprisingly, in the English language, the definition of a mask as a ‘representation (usually carved or sculpted) of a human face or animal head, originally made for religious or ceremonial purposes but later often produced simply as a decorative artefact,’ dates from a collection of works related to circumnavigations published in the 1790s but referring to voyages in the 1760s. See ‘Mask’ in Oxford English Dictionary 2000.

3. The late Brazilian ethnohistorian, Monteiro, effectively historicizes the changes that have taken place in indigenous history and anthropology over the course of the last half-century, with particular reference to the contributions of Florestan Fernandes, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among others. Pointing toward the present moment when ethnohistorical materials are brought into contact with anthropological fieldwork related to present-day indigenous communities, Monteiro insists that indigenous groups did not have to reject the foreign in order to maintain their own identity, fleeing to neutral spaces away from the colonial presence, but rather had to adapt—‘capture and domesticate’—the symbols, objects, and discourses of their enemies to maintain and advance their own identities. For an incisive article discussing representation and ontology in the context of indigenous artifacts and art, see Dean 2014.

4. For a broad introduction to this burgeoning scholarship, see Heckenberger et al. 2008, and Erickson 2008.

5. This Amazonian literature is vast, but important recent works that take part in these debates include Viveiros de Castro 2013, Descola 2013, and Kohn 2013.

6. Fortunately, two recent ethnohistorical works related to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Amazon demonstrate innovative strategies for bringing new kinds of creative source materials to bear on that history. See Harris 2010, and Roller 2015.

7. This literature is vast, but for representative examples see Greenblatt 1992, and Pratt 1992, which are still routinely cited.

8. Whitehead’s work in the South American context on questions of materiality and entanglement remains essential reading. See Whitehead 1996 and 2002.

9. See, most recently, Matt Crawford’s exemplary study of cinchona bark as a case of the ‘entanglement of science and empire’ where the dynamics between naturalists and bureaucrats is in no way straightforward or derivative (2016). See also Safier 2008, introduction.

10. This is not to deny the idea that cultural practices might have changed over time, which they certainly did, but rather to give credence and credibility to perspectives that have been brought forward by native communities who have passed along crucial cultural knowledge through oral and embodied practices. See Monteiro (2012) for one scholar’s explanation of why this is so necessary.

11. This literature is broad and growing, but a good starting point is Cummins and Rappaport 2011. Other recent work pushing the boundary on how to define indigenous intellectual engagement includes Ramos and Yannakakis 2014. On the ontological turn in contemporary anthropology, see Venkatesen 2010.

12. Marcy Norton's recent essay in the American Historical Review (2015) is a salutary example of such recent efforts by historians to revisit fundamental structural categories through which anthropologists have sought to define and organize many of their actors’—and their discipline's—conceptual categories. See also Descola 2013, Kohn 2013, and Viveiros de Castro 2014.

13. For a recent discussion of borders in the Iberian context, see Herzog 2015. The classic work on the eighteenth-century border conflicts between Spain and Portugal is Cortesão 1952.

14. All translations from Portuguese into English are mine unless otherwise noted.

15. On the importance of the scientific intermediary, see Schaffer et al. 2009.

16. On the history of the dispersal and loss of Ferreira's Brazilian collection, see Daget and Saldanha 1989; Brigola 2003.

17. The exhibition, Memória da Amazónia, at the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico in Coimbra presented a wide array of these masks from its own collection and that of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (Memória da Amazónia, 1991). Another exhibition, Os índios, nós at the Museu Nacional de Etnologica, took place in the year 2000.

18. For a broad overview of the multi-faceted development of scientific observation, see Daston and Lunbeck 2011. For a more detailed view of Portuguese natural history during this period, see Brigola 2003.

19. For an understanding of Portugal's earlier global scientific empire, see Breen 2015. On Vandelli's natural historical contacts and connections, see Cardoso 2003.

20. On the Arco do Cego, and more specifically its visual elements, see Figueira de Faria 2001a.

21. Several classic works, including Schnapper (1988) and Findlen (1996), trace the museum's role in this broader transformation, and have given rise in recent years to studies that emphasize the material and mercantile nature of collecting and museology. See, among others, Cook 2007, and Schiebinger and Swan 2008.

22. Vandelli, D., “Viagens filosóficas, ou dissertação sobre as importantes regres que o filósofo naturalista, nas suas peregrinações, deve principalmente observar,” reproduced in O Gabinete de curiosidades (2008, 93).

23. On the notebooks and note-taking practices of eighteenth-century travelers, see Bourguet 2010.

24. The origins of this division have been explored more fully in the recent work of Philippe Descola 2013. In writing about schemas, Descola has discussed ‘the role played by abstract structures that organize understanding and practical action without mobilizing mental images or any knowledge conveyed in declarative statements’ (102), emphasizing that in Europe, since the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this can be most effectively connected to an ‘analogical ontology’ that has been described by Arthur Lovejoy as a ‘great chain of being.’ In this schema, the world is composed of ‘distinct things’ each of which was different from that which preceded and followed it. See Descola 2013, 202–6.

25. For a broad description of the population map (mapa de população) in the context of the mapping of the Amazon River region and its indigenous groups, see Safier 2009.

26. For more on Amazonian hunting and the symbolism behind it, see Conklin 2001.

27. An impressive collection of Jurupixuna masks collected by Ferreira is today held by the Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa; they are reproduced in Ferreira 2003, 60–74.

28. According to Monteiro, Ferreira was ‘frustrated by [Indian] women's refusal to hand over an object of great ethnographic interest’ for him, which in this case was a set of cuias and muiraquitãs. Monteiro insists that ‘the persistence of distinctive cultural practices’ that were seemingly unaffected by Europeans’ insistence that they adapt to different ways made clear that ‘the Indians had something to say about the terms of their own transformation.’ See Monteiro 2012, 25–26.

29. Emphasizing their construction, Barcelos Neto provides a typology of these masks based on their relationship with specific animals and vegetables (from monkeys and frogs to feather-bearing monsters), including their material (cotton and palms) and their basic geometrical forms. Describing in particular the visual patterns and symbolic formulas reflected in these masks, he concludes by granting a high degree of agency to the decorative objects of the Wauja in the cosmic processes that appear at the center of their communal festivities: at times they turn into animals and travel independently into the forest, at times they merely serve the Wauja as reflections of their own ‘aesthetic efficacy.’ These present-day interpretations should not be grafted onto the historical interpretations of Ferreira tout court, but may be used to guide our assessments of reported interactions as well as the many-layered constructions of the masks themselves.

30. Descola has argued that the dominant way of apprehending the relationship between ‘human nature and nature alien to man,’ regnant during the Middle Ages and Renaissance when these dichotomous perspectives were elaborated fully for European artistic practice, was controlled by a sense of the material continuity between beings, an analogism that ‘predominated’ in early modern Europe and created order in a world that was otherwise quite chaotic. For more on his ontological schemas, and analogism in particular, see Descola 2013.

31. Viveiros de Castro (1998, 470–71). Some recent critical perspectives on Viveiros de Castro and his work can be seen in Turner (2009), where Turner makes the observation that although Viveiros de Castro successfully animates a dialogue between equals by placing an ‘integral, homogenous system of […] Western Modernist ideas’ against an ‘equally homogenous system’ of Amazonian ideas, ‘the result is the misrepresentation and mistranslation of the form, content and meaning of the ideal categories and social meanings of many Amazonian cultural systems, not to mention some of the Western ideas drawn upon for comparison.’

32. Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, as cited in Mello Moraes (1858, 2:270). I thank Heather Roller for pointing this passage out to me.

33. Ferreira's prime authority here was Thibault de Chanvalon, author of the Voyage à la Martinique, who wrote in reference to the Carib populations he had known during his childhood that ‘their stupid eyes are the true mirror of their soul; [their soul] appears to have no function’ (Thibault de Chanvalon 1763, 51). Ferreira also relied upon Antonio de Ulloa, who wrote regarding the Indians of Quito that the ‘limits of their intelligence appear incompatible with the excellence of their soul,’ even if they do not see or observe as expertly as other members of the human race (Ulloa 1748).

34. In a short but magisterial introduction to Lévi-Strauss's Longe do Brasil, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro tells about Lévi-Strauss's failed return journey to the Bororo communities he first visited in 1935, and his inadvertent participation in the Bororo myth in Mythologies that he himself did so much to popularize: the Bird-Nester's Aria. In this retelling, Lévi-Strauss was confined to hover in an airplane without landing, due to a rainstorm, and was therefore unable to visit the first community that received him and made his anthropological career. See Viveiros de Castro 2011.