Reviewed in Ethos 35.3 by: Grant J. Rich, Assistant Professor, University of Alaska Southeast

Comparative Arawakan Histories is a collection of eleven chapters focusing on the study of the Arawak-speaking peoples of South America and the Caribbean basin. It was speakers of these languages who were the first indigenous peoples contacted in 1492 by Columbus. As Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, the volume editors, note in their insightful introduction, “evidence of the influence of Arawak-speaking peoples on European understandings of the “new” world they had “discovered” can be found in the persistence of such common words as canoe, cacique, hammock, hurricane, barbecue, maize, cassava, and tobacco” (p. 1). In addition, the Arawak word caniba is famously the source of the word cannibalism.

The chapters in the present volume originated as presentations at a conference held in 2000 in Panama sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Smithsonian. The contributors include ethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists, all of whom focus on the complex and dynamic diaspora of these societies along the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and beyond. The editors note that the diaspora results in part from demographic, ecological, social, and political factors. Though their numbers have been drastically reduced, such peoples continue to live in parts of Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere. The present volume offers a number of extremely helpful maps indicating such important issues as the location of major Arawak groupings at the time of European contact, the location of Caribbean and Northeastern South American Arawakan peoples and their neighbors in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the location of contemporary Arawak-Speaking peoples. A major task of the volume is to unpack the concept Arawak from ethnological, archaeological, linguistic, and historical perspectives. The editors argue that there is a “discernable set of cultural practices that could be called distinctively Arawakan,” (p. 15) yet note that they aim to avoid the errors of previous generations of scholars who simplistically reduced these peoples into “exotic images of “friendly” and “peaceful” Indians in opposition to “hostile” and “bellicose” native peoples such as the Carib” (p. 15).

The present volume is sensibly organized into three major sections. The first section, entitled “Languages, Cultures, and Local Histories,” utilizes a long range historical perspective. Fernando Santos-Granero focuses on Arawakan clusters in Peru, northwestern Amazonia, and northeastern South America in colonial and post-colonial eras. In another chapter in this section, Sidney da Silva Facundes utilizes historical linguistics to analyze three languages that are subgroups within Arawakan, and explores their protolanguage. Neil L. Whitehead’s interesting chapter tackles the complex history of the word Arawak. In particular, reporting on accounts mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he discusses the significance of the terms caribe/caniba and aruaca/guatiao, wisely noting that the “cultural positioning of the reporter had a fundamental influence on the nature of linguistic representation.” For instance, one Jesuit missionary to Dominica wrote that the Caraibe had no words for soul or related religious terms, while in contrast a lay Protestant traveler wrote that their word for rainbow is “God’s plume of feathers” (p. 60).Whitehead justly notes that the story of the Belizean Garifuna is relevant in that this group traces its ethnogenesis, in part, to St. Vincent Arawaks. Unfortunately, the author describes the Garifuna as the “descendents of African slaves” rather than as the intermarriage of Arawaks with shipwrecked slaves to be. Indeed today’s Garifuna proudly declare that they have never been slaves and the perspectives of Garifuna and Garifuna anthropologists such as Joseph Palacio (2005) would greatly add to Whitehead’s otherwise excellent chapter. The linguistic relationships between the Garifuna language and language spoken by Arawakan peoples elsewhere is also an area worthy of investigation. As the author notes, Garifuna still speak Garifuna, unlike the “Amerindian” or “Red” Caribs of St. Vincent and Dominica.

The next section of the book focuses on political organization and is entitled “Hierarchy, Diaspora, and New Identities.” Michael J. Heckenberger explores commonalities among Arawakan peoples in political hierarchy, sedentism, and regionality. He also notes aspects of material culture that appear to be shared among Arawak groups, including bull-roarers, ball games, and sacred flutes. France-Marie Renard-Casevitz explores various forms of political organizations among Campa and Mojos peoples. The author notes the similarities between seventeenth century missionary accounts of political organization in warfare and recent techniques utilized in the late 1980s against the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The wide dispersion of settlements and lack of political leaders to capture are viewed as assets to survival both historically and in recent times. Peter Gow’s chapter focuses on assimilation and dissimilation among the Campa, Piro, and Apurina. Concluding this section, in an excellent chapter, Alan Passes investigates spatial metaphors, scared space, and political territory among the Pa’ikwene in Brazil.

The third and final section of the book is entitled “Power, Cultism, and Scared Landscapes.” Here, Alberta Zucchi examines the expansion of the northern Maipuran branch of Arawakan peoples in the Upper Negro and Orinoco rivers. Next, Jonathan D. Hill’s clever chapter “Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Woman” explores myth, ritual, and landscape among the Wakuenai (Curripaco). Then, Silvia M. Vidal offers a chapter focusing on eighteenth century multiethnic confederacies along the Rio Negro and Upper Orinoco entitled “Secret Religious Cults and Political Leadership.” Robin M. Wright explores prophetic traditions among the Baniwa and other Arawakan peoples in the northwest Amazon, with special emphasis on millenarian movements and shaman leaders. Wright contrasts traditional spiritual life with its focus on mythology of the earliest ancestors, Kuwai instruments, and shamans, with the mass conversion to evangelical Protestantism in the twentieth century. The author sensitively discusses how notions of purity and contamination inform understanding of Baniwa millenarian consciousness.

While some edited books are disappointing and uneven in quality, the caliber of the present volume’s contributions is consistently high, and though the discussions are tailored to specialists, the writing offers enough background and context that interested non-specialists may find a window into the lives of these intriguing and rapidly transforming peoples. The volume relies more upon linguistic, historical, and to some degree, archaeological, than psychological evidence. Readers will find none of the experiments, ANOVAs, and Q-sorts utilized by the conventional psychologists of modernity in academe. Nonetheless, or perhaps because the contributors are well-aware of the shortcomings of such paper-and-pencil and quantitative methods for the project at hand, taken as a whole, the volume’s contributors and methods successfully illuminate the worlds of Arawakan-speaking peoples and their ethos.

REFERENCE CITED

Palacio, Joseph, (Ed.).

2005   The Garifuna: A Nation Across Borders. Benque Viejo,

Belize:Cubola Productions