The Human and Non-Human in Lowland South PDF

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Ethnomusicology
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THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN IN LOWLAND

SOUTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS MUSIC
Volume 22
Number 3
December 2013
ISSN 1741-1912
Ethnomusicology
Ethnomusicology Forum
Forum
SPECIAL ISSUE: The Human and Non-human in Lowland South American Indigenous Music
GUEST EDITOR: Bernd Brabec de Mori
Editorial
Trevor Wiggins, Eleni Kallimopoulou & Simone Krüger
Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-humans

Bernd Brabec de Mori & Anthony Seeger
Apùap World Hearing Revisited: Talking with ‘Animals’, ‘Spirits’ and other
Beings, and Listening to the Apparently Inaudible
Rafael José de Menezes Bastos
Flutes, Songs and Dreams: Cycles of Creation and Musical Performance

among the Wauja of the Upper Xingu (Brazil)
Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade
Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America
Volume 22
Jonathan D. Hill
Shipibo Laughing Songs and the Transformative Faculty: Performing or

Becoming the Other
Bernd Brabec de Mori
Focusing Perspectives and Establishing Boundaries and Power: Why the Suyá/
Number 3
Kïsêdjê Sing for the Whites in the Twenty-first Century
Anthony Seeger
December 2013
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ISSN 1741-1912
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2013
Vol. 22, No. 3, 267–268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2013.849136
Editorial
Welcome to the final issue of Ethnomusicology Forum for 2013. This is a special issue,
guest edited by Bernd Brabec de Mori with an intriguing focus on notions of
humanity as opposed to beings occupying another classification. Most of us will have
grown up with John Blacking’s How Musical is Man? (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1973) as a core pillar of our approach to music, appreciating his
deft turn of phrase in mirroring his chapter titles from ‘Humanly Organized Sound’
to ‘Soundly Organized Humanity’. This issue seeks to question what might also now
be perceived as an almost musicological approach by Blacking that effectively defines
music as that organised sound that is made by humans. What this issue now hopes to
insert into that definition is the more ethnographic question about how those
humans conceive the music thus made—is it ‘made’ by them or are they a channel for
musical creation and performance by other beings, and what is the nature of those
entities? We don’t intend to discuss this further here—Bernd Brabec de Mori and
Anthony Seeger expand this area cogently in their Introduction to this issue and the
other articles it contains.
The reviews in this issue engage aspects of musical performance and different
transitions, notably from the global to the local and from the auditory to the visual.
Richard Widdess reviews Matthew Rahaim’s Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in
Hindustani Music, a study of the role of musical gesture in the context of the khyāl
style of North Indian (Hindustani) classical singing. In his balanced appraisal,
Widdess points out that gestures provide an extremely enlightening commentary that
supplements sound rather than challenging its priority. Next, Daniel Avorgbedor
reviews Steven Friedson’s Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land, a
detailed study of Ghanaian Ewe shrine rituals and their music. In his discussion,
Avorgbedor also critically assesses the role of notions such as ‘polymeter’ and
‘ambiguity’ in constructing stereotypical representations of the Other in Africanist
discourse. Moving from the microscopic to the panoramic, Rosalind Duignan-
Pearson reviews Eric Charry’s edited volume Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a
Globalizing World. The book documents hip hop’s spread on the African continent
through an anthology of case-studies that recount stories of indigenisation. In our
final review for this issue, Janet Hoskins discusses Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai
Lam Linh, a documentary film directed and produced by Barley Norton. The film
follows a modern experimental group in its frustrating and creative endeavour to
develop a new Vietnamese style of music vis-à-vis strict state censorship and societal
taboos.
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
268 Editorial
The annual conference of the BFE for 2014 is a joint event with Analytical
Approaches to World Music (AAWM) in association with the Centre for Music and
Science (University of Cambridge) and the Society for Music Analysis. With the title
ANALYSIS, COGNITION AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, it will take place on 1–4
July 2014, at SOAS, University of London. Further details and the CFP will be posted
on the BFE website (www.bfe.org.uk) as soon as possible.
This issue of Ethnomusicology Forum also marks a couple of changes: from the
next issue, we’re putting on some weight—but in a good way. From next year,
Ethnomusicology Forum will have around 15% more pages in each issue so that we
can accommodate more articles and reviews, so please keep the ideas and submissions
coming our way! We have been encouraged to make this move by the number and
quality of submissions so we now need you to justify our leap of faith in the quality
and energy of our readers who are surely the principal contributors. The other change
is that this issue marks the last one that Simone Krüger will be involved in as co-
editor. Many thanks to Simone for all her work over the last three years and best
wishes as she moves onto a new editorial role. Welcome to Jonathan Stock as he now
takes up the responsibility of co-editor with Trevor Wiggins. Best wishes to you and
all of us for 2014.
Trevor Wiggins, Eleni Kallimopoulou and Simone Krüger

Introduction: Considering Music,

Humans, and Non-humans
Bernd Brabec de Mori and Anthony Seeger
Research on music was almost neglected during the history of the anthropology of
Lowland South American indigenous societies. This may be due to their difficult
accessibility and lack of infrastructure in former research, as well as due to the different
focus of researchers. However, the area is now thriving, because many anthropologists
and ethnomusicologists have recognised the central role music performance plays in
ritual, specifically when ritual action involves non-human agency. The role of animals,
plants or spirits in Lowland South American cosmologies has been studied intensely
during the last decades, and laid way for the theories of perspectivism and new
animism. The authors show how music is used in cosmologies where communication
between humans and non-humans is paramount. Further on, they suggest that the
sonic domain can help in explaining many indigenous narratives about transformations
and non-human agency.
Keywords: Music Performance; Lowland South America; Anthropology; Non-human

Agency; Indigenous Societies
Imagine a Shipibo ritual set within a thin-walled house in a rainforest village on a

pitch dark night. A patient, breathing lowly and probably sleeping, is lying before an
indigenous singer and high-level ritual specialist (meráya). The patient’s numerous
family members sit around the scene; children huddled in the corners, whispering or
likewise dozing. The patient is ill; because he or she was bewitched by a human
sorcerer, or maybe by an animal or spirit; this detail does not matter for what follows:
Bernd Brabec de Mori received his PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna, Austria. He specialised in
indigenous music from the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru. He has been working at the Phonogrammarchiv,
Vienna, as a research assistant at the Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, and as a Senior
Scientist at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria. Anthony
Seeger is Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology, Emeritus, at the University of California Los Angeles and
the Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He has undertaken research among the Suyá/
Kïsêdjê intermittently for over 40 years. Correspondence to: Bernd Brabec de Mori, Institute of Ethnomusicol-
ogy, Leonhardstraße 81–83, 8010 Graz, Austria. Email: bernd.brabec@kug.ac.at

270 B. Brabec de Mori and A. Seeger
the singer raises his voice alternately to a high falsetto and repetitive, low staccato
phrases. The song is intended to confront and overthrow the original causer of the
illness. Some phrases from the beginning indicate that ‘It is said that I am singing /
while the bobinsana-meráya is singing / he is singing “I am the yashingo”’. ‘It is
said’—from a third person’s point of view, we can say that the Shipibo meráya is
singing; confirmed by the field researcher and evidenced by his tape-recorder. But the
singer points out that actually a plant-person is singing; and to complete confusion,
the plant-person is singing that it was another plant-person.1 But can a plant be a
person? And how could such a person sing? Can Lowland South American Indians
perceive plants as singing persons? Does the same apply to animals, to spirits, to the
dead? Indigenous references to singing or music-making non-humans not only
abound in Lowland South America but can be found in many places on Earth. Should
we treat these as metaphors; or literally, what could they mean? And what can such
references tell us about the indigenous cosmos, lived worlds and music?
In a recent volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Timothy Rice (2010)
called for a theory of ethnomusicology, or more precisely for an increased focus on
theorising findings from ethnographically grounded music studies. Ethnomusicolo-
gical theories should therefore transcend the local, particular musical culture and
establish frameworks for further, global analysis. The present special issue of
Ethnomusicology Forum takes up the challenge. It builds upon a symposium
convened by Brabec de Mori at the 41st World Conference of the International
Council for Traditional Music in 2011 in Newfoundland. Despite a strong regional
focus on musical ethnographies of a variety of Lowland South American indigenous
societies (see Figure 1), the authors are developing a particular ontology of sound and
music performance. Building upon current cultural and social anthropological
theories, we elaborate on indigenous auditory perception and its interrelation with
what the Indians—and consequently we—know about the world. Further on, we
describe how music performance can contribute to defining humanness and how
music as communication may transcend the permeable boundaries of humanness.
These issues extend well beyond the Amazon and Orinoco rainforests and contribute
to a renewed understanding of sound and music as building blocks for constructing
and reconstructing the world we live in.
Following John Blacking’s (1973: 3) definition of music as ‘Humanly Organized
Sound’ and his argument that leads us to a ‘Soundly Organized Humanity’ (1973:
89), we could stay with the generally accepted opinion that music is something
essentially human. However, Marcello Sorce Keller has proposed an increased study
of ‘zoomusicology’, including his tantalising remark that he ‘would like to suggest
1
The bobinsana (bot. Calliandra angustifolia, Mimosaceae) is a bush predominantly growing on the rocky shores
of small rivers and creeks. The yashingo (unidentified) is another bush that seems likely to grow on the same
sites as the first one. The song mentioned was performed and recorded in 2006, archived at the Vienna
Phonogrammarchiv. See Brabec de Mori (2011: 901–2) for a complete translation, and Brabec de Mori (2012)
for a contextual analysis.
Ethnomusicology Forum 271
Figure 1 Map of northern South America, indicating the main locations of the
indigenous groups mentioned in this issue. Taken from http://www.zonu.com/images/
0X0/2009-11-04-10814/Mapa-de-America-del-Sur-satelital.jpg (accessed 29 September
2012). Indications by the authors.
that musical scholarship excluding non-human animals cannot ultimately describe

“how musical is man”’ (2012: 168).
But rather than focusing on whales’ or birds’ songs, ‘the non-human in music’ in
the current context draws upon an improved understanding of Lowland South
American indigenous societies. Today it is widely accepted in anthropology that these
indigenous people have developed techniques not unlike Keller’s proposal: they listen
to animals (and other non-human beings), study their behaviour and potentials,
translate this knowledge and bring this agency into the realm of their own musical
community life. It is crucial here to notice the difference between listening to the
obviously audible and listening to the apparently inaudible. The first idea coincides
with what Keller proposed and what, for instance, the Papuan Kaluli do (see Feld
1982): the birds Kaluli people listen to and later imitate in their songs sound similar
to those registered by the field researcher. The second idea, on the other hand, refers
to indigenous people listening to the entities or persons (commonly referred to as
‘spirits’) embodied by plants, birds or other animals; that is, listening to the
apparently inaudible and unrecordable (see Menezes Bastos, this issue). Lowland
South American Indians tend to prefer the latter method. Although they can, for
example, hear the call of the bird of prey matataon, when they sing the matataon’s song
they do not imitate the acoustic shape of the call but refer to the bird’s person-entity as
the song’s source. Consequently, by singing, they become the bird (see Brabec de Mori,
this issue).2
A Revision of our Basic Assumptions about Lowland South American Indians and
their Music, Myth and Dance
During the last 20 years, specialists in the indigenous societies of what is referred to
as ‘Lowland South America’ (to distinguish the region from the Andean—or
highlands—region of South America) have been demonstrating how little we actually
knew about the history, narrative and music of the inhabitants of the vast region
extending from the foothills of the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon and from the
Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. During the 1970s we believed the
ecological capacity of most of the Amazon to be too low to support large populations.
We often did our research in very isolated locations without any electronic contact
with the rest of the country and world. We recorded speech and song on heavy reel-
to-reel tape-recorders that quickly consumed expensive batteries and scarce tape. We
often recorded and analysed single pieces of music and single stories because that
seemed sufficient. Dance was extremely expensive to record and rarely documented
because video-recorders for fieldwork were only a dream, moving picture film was
costly and the cameras at the consumer level were still silent. Nearly 500 years of
European contact with Amazonian and Orinoco Indians had resulted in very few
publications on their music and dance, although many brief descriptions of them
filled the pages of explorers’ narratives and some longer reflections gave us glimpses
of a sonorous relationship with the world.
Ironically, the deforestation of parts of the rainforests revealed the presence of large
numbers of interconnected archaeological village sites that had gone undetected on
the forest floor before the removal of the trees (Heckenberger 2005; Roosevelt 1991).
Applying new methods, archaeologists have shown that the pre-Colombian popula-
tion of the region was larger than previously imagined, the resultant population loss
was greater and there is much still to learn from both the archaeological record and
the contemporary indigenous communities. Likewise, anthropologists, linguists and
ethnomusicologists working with contemporary indigenous research associates have
overturned our thinking about oral narrative and music. They have revealed large
narrative and musical structures that incorporate many of the units previously
considered to be separate ‘myths’ and musical pieces (on narratives, see the work of
2
Please note that there are recordings available in order to complement our written analyses with a listening
experience. The books by Menezes Bastos (2013) and Seeger (2004) contain CDs with audio examples. Hill has
his recordings archived and available at AILLA, Texas, and Brabec de Mori at the Phonogrammarchiv,
Vienna.
Basso 1985; Hill 1993, 2009; Werlang 2001, 2008; on music, see Menezes Bastos 2007;
and on ‘verbal art’, see Fausto, Franchetto and Montagnani 2011). The ethnohistory
of the region has also been revealed to be far deeper and richer than we realised
(important sources include Basso 1995; Franchetto and Heckenberger 2000;
Hornborg and Hill 2011; Wright 1998).
If our perspective on the indigenous peoples of the pre-Columbian era was
determined partly by the limitations of our understanding of contemporary
indigenous societies and by the invisibility of the earlier large-scale settlements under
forest canopy and fluvial soils, our perspective on indigenous music was probably
shaped in part by the limitations of our recording devices and our stereotypes about
Amerindian music. Rafael José de Menezes Bastos, along with his students Acácio
Tadeu de Camargo Piedade and Maria Ignez Cruz Mello, have shown that the music
of some of the groups in the Upper Xingu does not consist of short, unrelated,
individual pieces but rather of extended sequences of pieces that resemble suites or
dramatic operas that last for hours, days and perhaps weeks (Menezes Bastos 2007;
Piedade 2004). Menezes Bastos’ (2013) transcription and analysis of the music of an
entire 11-day ceremony of the Kamayurá is the first of its kind. Elsewhere he has
written:
a notable characteristic of the music of Lowland South America […] can be

summarised under the heading of ‘sequentiality’ and typifies the musical
organisation of the rituals on the inter-piece (song or instrumental) plane, or the
articulation among the respective vocal, instrumental, vocal–instrumental compo-
nents. (Menezes Bastos 2006: 8)
He continues that ‘Everything appears to indicate that isolated pieces of music do not
make much sense in the region’ (Menezes Bastos 2006: 8), and yet most of the
previous analyses of South American Indian music have been of isolated pieces,
rather than their inter-piece framework. Careful musical transcriptions and analyses
of extended performances reveal that what is often heard by non-Indians as
repetitious is, in fact, not repetition at all. Rather, it is variation either unperceived
or dismissed as accidental by non-indigenous listeners.3 The apparently small
variations in Upper Xingu flute music and song are perceived by the performers to
be a series of different but related musical ideas.4
In 1974 a book on South American Indians was published with the title Native
South Americans: Ethnology of the Least Known Continent (Lyon 1974). The book
included many ground-breaking articles for the time. Nearly 40 years later we know
3
This recalls Thomas Turino’s observation that he could not always figure out how some of the Andean panpipe
pieces differed from others (1993: 89).
4
Seeger (2004) once suggested that we might consider the almost daily Kïsêdjê rainy season and dry season songs
to be in fact single songs that lasted six months each, but never followed through on the suggestion. Menezes
Bastos (2013) and Piedade (2004) have demonstrated in detail how this happens with suites of flute music pieces
and long ceremonies.
the region a lot better—and we think about it very differently than proposed in many
of those contributions. We certainly know a lot more about its music than we did
then and we have developed new ways to examine and describe musical performance
(for a fine discussion of the study of indigenous music in Brazil, see Menezes Bastos
2007). The changes during the past few years suggest there is a lot more to be learned
with the help of indigenous investigators and the use of new technologies for
recording, preserving and disseminating performances.
New Animism and Perspectivism in Lowland South America

The contributions in this special issue address the role of music specifically in relation
to its origin or destination: much ritual music in Lowland South America is said to be
received from, or directed to animals, plants, spirits or the dead—that is, non-human
beings in general. In biological sciences (and common sense in industrialised
countries), humans are defined as beings pertaining to the species homo sapiens. In
indigenous societies, however, this definition may not apply and the understanding of
who or what can be regarded human (and consequently non-human) may differ
significantly. This implies, among different societies, a varying understanding of what
are culture, society, nature and the environment. Although by no means new to
anthropology, during the 1990s a renewed interest in these issues surfaced (see
especially the volume on Nature and Society edited by Descola and Pálsson 1996). In
an attempt to overcome the duality of nature and culture, French anthropologist
Philippe Descola (1992) explains that in many native communities a vast range of
animals, plants and spirits are regarded as persons not unlike humans in the sense of
homo sapiens. Descola’s proposal is often termed ‘new animism’, because it contrasts
with the classical view on animism, where animals, plants or geographic entities were
thought to be inhabited by a spirit (e.g. nymphs were thought to inhabit streams). In
a more recent book, Descola (2011 [2005]) introduces four ontological models for
any communities on Earth, based on the respective relations between a human agent
and other beings relative to him or her: (new) animism, analogism, totemism and
naturalism. While Descola illustrates naturalism with modern European/western,
totemism with Aboriginal Australian and analogism with African and traditional
European ontological concepts, he explains how animism is conceptualised by
presenting examples from Lowland South American indigenous peoples: animism
implies that across different species, exterior qualities (bodies) are discontinuous but
their interiority (mind, soul) is similar or continuous. More than the other models,
animism enables communication, socialising and transformation across the borders
of these categories of beings or species. Descola’s ontological models allow for a
theoretical framework to be constructed in which non-human agency is evident and
the problematic notion that indigenous people would believe that peccaries were
persons to be rejected: within an animic ontology, they are persons.
Most of the contributions to this issue address the usefulness of a concept called
‘Amerindian perspectivism’ that likewise emerged during the 1990s. Similar to ‘new
animism’, this concept re-interprets the existing term perspectivism5 specifically for
Amerindian contexts. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it was first described by
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996) along with one of his students, Tânia Stoltze Lima
(1996), and has been developed by a number of Viveiros de Castro’s other students.
Viveiros de Castro subsequently published on the phenomenon in English, German,
French and Portuguese (for English, see especially 1998, 2004, 2012); Lima later
published a wonderful ethnographic study of the Yudjá (Lima 2005). Contrary to
Descola’s models, perspectivism does not intend to abolish the nature–culture divide,
but radically reverses the relation between culture and nature relative to a naturalistic
understanding. Viveiros de Castro claims that this set of ideas and practices are found
throughout indigenous America and refers to them (‘for simplicity’s sake’) as though
it was a cosmology:
This cosmology imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective

agencies, human as well as nonhuman, each endowed with the same generic type of
soul, that is, the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of a
similar soul implies possession of similar concepts, which determine that all
subjects see things in the same way. In particular, individuals of the same species
see each other (and each other only) as humans see themselves, that is as being
endowed with the human figures and habits, seeing their bodily and behavioral
aspects in the form of human culture. What changes when passing from one
species of subject to another is the ‘objective correlative,’ the referent of these
concepts: what Jaguars see as ‘manioc beer’ (the proper drink of people, Jaguar-
type or otherwise), humans see as ‘blood.’ Where we [humans] see a muddy salt-
lick on a riverbank, tapirs see their big ceremonial house, and so on. Such
difference of perspective—not a plurality of views of a single world, but a single
view of different worlds—cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the
common original ground of being. Rather, such difference is located in the bodily
differences between species, for the body and its affectations […] is the site and
instrument of ontological differentiation and referential disjunction. (Viveiros de
Castro 2004: 6)
To bring this home to the reader, consider the difference between new animism and
perspectivism and the general Euro-American idea of the differences between human
beings and animals. There is a widespread attitude in Europe and North America that
human beings are exceptional in their use of language, use of tools and their ability to
reflect on themselves. Animals are considered to be unable to do those except in (at
most) a rudimentary fashion. With the exception of certain pet-owners and members
of religious faiths that originated outside Europe and the Middle East, most people
who believe humans have souls do not extend that status to animals or inanimate
objects. While thinking on some of these points is shifting today in the face of animal
5
In the following, ‘Amerindian perspectivism’ will be called ‘perspectivism’. It is to be noted that perspectivism
is a well-known idea in German philosophy: introduced by Leibnitz, it was more prominently formulated by
Nietzsche as a ‘perspectivistic subjectivism’ that generates a plurality of Wirklichkeiten (see Kaulbach 1990).
Amerindian perspectivism is very similar to Nietzsche’s, who, however, limits available perspectives to human
beings (as conceived by him).
behaviour research (tool use and communication are recognised as being more
widespread than earlier declared), a firm distinction is still made between humans
and other animals. Contrast that with the idea that all animals have souls and that
every species sees itself as human, speaks a language, uses tools and engages in
ceremonies in which music and dance are usually a part. Members of a species look
like humans to one another, but other species do not look like humans.6 In Lowland
South American human societies, at least, certain specialists (often referred to as
shamans) can move between the perspectives of different species at will, and other
humans who are not specialists may also have experiences in which they see the
human form of animal species. Viveiros de Castro suggests this is a widespread
understanding of the world in Lowland South American Indian societies and beyond.
Going Beyond: Multiverse and Agency

As Viveiros de Castro has noted, the idea was swiftly applied to other cases and
became the centre of heated debates among specialists in Lowland South America—
among them Brabec de Mori, Hill and Menezes Bastos in this issue. Perspectivism has
been criticised for ignoring the importance of objects, which can also have souls
according to some groups (see the excellent collection of articles in Santos-Granero
2009); for ignoring significant differences among the cosmological ideas of different
South American Indian communities (Menezes Bastos, this issue); for focusing too
much on the visual (Brabec de Mori 2012; Lewy 2012)—perspective is a visual idiom
(e.g. the verb ‘see’ appears eight times in the quote from Viveiros de Castro 2004); for
focusing too much the perspectives of prey and predator (Hill, this issue); and for
ignoring the salience of the sacred. Terence Turner (2009) in a brilliant paper shows
that both ‘new’ animism and perspectivism can neither overcome the duality of
culture and nature or body and mind, nor establish an alternative to what he calls
‘the crisis of late structuralism’. That said, it may be rewarding to understand
specifically Viveiros de Castro’s claim, which is more radical than Descola’s animism,
as a political agenda. Viveiros de Castro declares a certain political intention when he
suggests that the worldview resulting from perspectivism (a concept he calls
‘multinaturalism’) is a ‘bomb’ with considerable social impact when applied to
western society (see Latour 2009). By suggesting an alternative interpretation of
alterity in the world, he challenges the ethnocentric naturalistic understanding of a
multicultural world. He does so by giving a voice to Amazonian Native peoples, who
are among the most marginalised citizens on Earth. With that, ‘subaltern’ people
otherwise unheard (cf. Spivak 2008) are empowered to partake in the global discourse
of the nature and functioning of the world.
6
Descola (2011: 214–18) states that the main difference between his definition of animism and Viveiros de
Castro’s perspectivism lies in the form humans are perceived by non-humans: whereas perspectivism indicates
that for non-humans, humans appear in a form different from a human body, Descola insists that also non-
humans perceive humans in their human bodily appearance.
Regarding definitions of humanness, however, both new animism and perspecti-

vism agree that these are not similar to the notion of homo sapiens, but propose a
concentric, deictic hierarchy of humanness that can be observed in ethnonyms (cf.
Frank 1994; Viveiros de Castro 1998: 472): a person’s own social unit is considered to
pertain to the ‘Real People’, whereas neighbouring indigenous groups as well as non-
Indians are included in ‘People’ but excluded from the ‘Real’ ones. Going further,
many animals, plants, spirits, objects and geographic entities (rivers, lakes,
mountains) may as well be included in ‘People’ and excluded from the ‘Real’ ones.
Relative to naturalistic understanding, the frontier between human and non-human
becomes undefined, shifting and permeable. It may be important to note here that the
ascription of humanness to other than homo sapiens by Lowland South American
Indians is the result of actual experiences of otherness (i.e. transformation) during
accidental transcendence of the porous boundaries of humanness in illness and by
being captured (see e.g., Gow 2001; Illius 1992; Lima 1996; Vilaça 2005), as well as
during ritual performance that is most often experienced by ritual specialists.
Therefore, understanding these specialists’ epistemology by closely analysing their
ritual praxis can shed much light on the relevance and limitations of perspectivism
and animism (see Brabec de Mori 2012). Considering that a great part of ritual and
narration is performed through music, this epistemology can only be really
understood when indigenous music performance can first be comprehended. Ritual
music is the still missing link to understanding Lowland indigenous cosmologies.
Approaches by both Descola and Viveiros de Castro suggest that the traditional
layer-cake cosmic structure often communicated in the literature—that is, a vertical
division in three, four or sometimes more parallel worlds (one or more underworlds,
the world we live in, one or more heavens or worlds in the sky)—is an overt
simplification of how most indigenous people understand the cosmos. In literature,
this cosmos is sometimes described with metaphors from system theory, specifically
fractal self-similarity in different scales (Kelly 2005, among others). Halbmayer goes
beyond such metaphors, because ‘Thereby we will have to keep in mind that such
abstract theoretical considerations always reflect our own models. They are
necessarily radical reductions of lived social and cultural complexity’ (2012: 117).
This author continues that lowland indigenous ‘cosmologies do not create encom-
passing totalities or an integrated universe, but […] a multiverse of co-existing and
multiply connected worlds relying on a specific form of non-totalizing partial
encompassment’ (Halbmayer 2012: 120). The overlapping parts of Halbmayer’s
multiverse may include persons, houses, tools, musical instruments, animals, plants,
villages (of humans or non-humans) and so on. These parts are related to each other
and, through the distribution of agency in various aspects of the multiverse, these
relations as well as the entities themselves are never stable but have to be constantly
negotiated, maintained or transformed (cf. Vilaça 2005). Halbmayer continues that:
From within such an ontology, it is completely clear that communication and

interaction with other-than-human persons may be achieved and how this is done.
The main question inside the ontology is how reasonable exchange and
communication across the borders of unstable and temporary entities and worlds
may be managed without being permanently transformed into the other. Politics of
fragile inter-species and multi-world border management become central in a
world in which the avoidance and limitation of such contact and exchange is at
least as important as its strategic establishment. (Halbmayer 2012: 119)
Such complex relations between humans and non-humans are further illustrated by
the concept of distributed agency (see also Latour 2005) developed by William Sax:
To say that agency is distributed in networks is not a radical claim, it is merely a

truism. A much more radical claim is that the [spirits] have agency too, that they
are part of the agentive network. […] In any case, nonhuman agents are crucial for
the functioning of the system, which would lose its coherence without them. (Sax
2009: 133–4)
The (distributed) agency of nonhumans is also treated by Michael Taussig. In

Mimesis and Alterity (Taussig 1993), he describes how in many different societies and
historical situations, mimesis is used as a tool for defining as well as demolishing
alterity. An indigenous ritual chanter, for example, creates a copy of a tree or a
peccary by ‘singing it into being’. Taussig suggests ‘that the chanter is singing a copy
of the spirit-form, and by virtue of what I call the magic of mimesis, is bringing the
spirit into the physical world’ (1993: 105). This brings us to the function of singing,
and the ontology of music. For Taussig, the song is ‘a verbal, toneful, simulacrum’—
thus, an artefact that works as a copy of the spirit world and simultaneously of the
world people live in. The song as an object is also mentioned by Santos-Granero
(2009), although rather peripherally while analysing The Occult Life of Things in a
much broader sense. A song, however, or any sonic manifestation, may be considered
a ‘thing’ that has an ‘occult life’ in the Amerindian context, enacting agency and
maybe even intentionality in certain conditions or situations. Singers of magical songs
among the Peruvian Shipibo, for example, may ‘summon the songs’ for ritual use, and
the songs may ‘come’ and pass through the singer’s mouth, or may refuse to do so,
thus causing the ritual to fail.
Essays in This Issue

Rafael José de Menezes Bastos opens the essays with a profound treatment of the
constructive and communicative faculty of the sonic. He concentrates on the
perception of sonic events that originate from sources that are rather obviously
known to produce sounds (e.g. birds) but likewise from sources that are commonly
understood as silent (e.g. fish) or even regarded as non-existent by most non-Indians
(i.e. spirits of all forms). In a way loosely related to Feld’s (1996) acoustemology,
Menezes Bastos describes the Brazilian Apùap’s (also known as Kamayurá and
indicated by the numeral 1 in Figure 1) system for classifying such perceptions and its
relatedness to their system of music production. He analyses the musical structures of
performed music in order to show how these are interrelated with the classificatory
system and its categories of sounds from outside the domain of humanly performed
music. Departing from this case study, he suggests the use of three probably pan-
Amazonian musical phenomena—translation, sequentiality and variation—for inter-
ethnic comparison rather than music’s relatedness to vision-based theoretical
concepts like perspectivism.
Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade further expands on the faculty of the sonic to
communicate and interrelate between spirits, men, women and spirits, again. First, he
compares the sacred flute complex between the Tukano (number 4 in Figure 1) and
the Wauja (number 6 in Figure 1). By extrapolating a dual cycle of musical
production, he juxtaposes the supernatural cycle of spirits communicating to human
Wauja ritual specialists with the social cycle of musical communication between men
and women. Thereby he shows in detail that much of the communication necessary
for maintaining the Wauja world in its shape as well as the individual persons’ bodies
in health can be achieved by sonic means, while at the same time these processes are
almost entirely excluded from the visual domain. Piedade shows that sonic mimesis
and music-based deception of enemy others are more prevalent in the Wauja’s
understanding of the world than transforming into the other, or transiting between
different perspectives.
Jonathan D. Hill criticises in his contribution a common attitude of most
perspectivists, who base perspectivism on predation and aggressively transforming
the other. He exemplifies how analysing performances of wind instruments can help
to deconstruct the paradox of ‘living well’ in terms of group-internal relationships
within an environment of seemingly predatory and violent exterior relations. He
bases his analysis on musical ethnographies of the Wakuénai (number 5 in Figure 1)
and Wauja (number 6 in Figure 1), concluding that ‘musicalising the other’ through
ritual aerophone performances provides for a renewed understanding of alterity,
production and reproduction that is grounded in interspecific communication and
sharing of space–time rather than in predation and cannibalism. His essay shows that
collective performances maintain a balance of life-giving and life-taking forces and at
the same time provide stability for the musicians’ and their groups’ identities.
Bernd Brabec de Mori takes up the transformative faculty repeatedly mentioned by
Shipibo (number 3 in Figure 1) ritual specialists. By analysing funny animal songs
called osanti and elaborating on the role of humour and laughter in the construction
and maintenance of the world, he shows that mimesis and transformation are closely
related. Osanti songs can only be performed by ritual specialists, because their
uttering is grounded in the singers’ knowledge of how to transform into animals
while retaining their own humanness. All this is perfectly obvious in song lyrics and
performance styles, although at the same time well hidden from, or eloquently
deceiving, both humans’ and non-humans’ visual capacities. He shows how these
funny songs establish a hierarchy of beings based on their respective competence of
perception and action rather than on an economy of predation or affinity as
suggested by perspectivism. Humorous singing of funny animal songs also
contributes to boundary work between humans and animals, a process fairly similar
to humour in western societies.
Anthony Seeger’s concluding contribution to the present issue takes up the history
of the renewed understanding of Amerindian cosmologies and explains the effect that
his own knowledge of perspectivism had on the interpretation of his prior fieldwork
results. He presents a variety of questions that could be answered in a different and
perhaps more consistent way than he answered them in earlier publications, thereby
nevertheless stressing some limitations of the concept as formulated by Viveiros de
Castro and Lima. Building on these renewed understanding, he adopts another visual
and literally perspectivistic idiom, the ‘gaze’, in order to analyse how Kïsêdjê Indians
(also known as Suyá; number 2 in Figure 1) represent themselves towards others, or
non-humans—namely whites—in order to focus the latter’s gaze on the Kïsêdjê
body. This narrative about indigenous modernity illustrates the role of ritual music
and dance in the Indians’ interaction with non-Kïsêdjê in the broadest sense.
Is Music Human?
Considering the repeated instances of transcending boundaries or broadening the
notion of humanity in these papers, we have to reconsider Blacking’s statement that
music was essentially human in nature. The category ‘human’ is not used everywhere
to mean the same thing. This category is variable both spatially and temporally. We
do not have to look very far back in European history to see times when men were
humans but women were only women, and when the faithful were humans and
infidels were not. In Central Europe, it is often terrifying to note how the ideas of a
time when ‘Aryans’ were humans but others were not are still present and recurring.
In Lowland South America, times are changing too. Shifting attitudes towards non-
Indians, the globalising world and technology influence cosmologies and therefore
categorisations of beings, as is hinted at in various papers in this issue. In the Andes
and western Amazon regions, it is still not clear whether whites are all humans, or if
some—or all—of them pertain to the pishtako demons. They are certainly not ‘really’
humans. We can deduce that humanness as a category is shrouded and permeable,
and consequently it becomes fairly unclear who (or what) one refers to when writing
about non-humans. We will return to this in a moment; but let us first consider that
interestingly, auditory perception and music performance seem to be intrinsically
connected to instances where the frontiers of humanness are explored and crossed
intentionally, in Lowland South America and elsewhere.
The contributions in this issue show that interspecific translation is enabled by
hearing, listening and receiving sonic correlates of meaning (spirits’ or animals’
voices, songs of rushing water, the legendary Inca’s music) that are then translated
into human music by specialists, performed on domesticated ‘living’ instruments or
sung with lyrics in a human language; that is, the respective vernacular indigenous
language. Cases where a linguistic translation of song lyrics is omitted (for
untranslated vocal music, see Brabec de Mori in this issue or Seeger 2004; as well
as for music with imagined lyrics, see Olsen 1996) show that translation is not a
necessary prerequisite of ritual musical performance. Both translation and intentional
omission of translation facilitate the transmission of meaning originating from non-
humans to a human audience via sound and music production. Similarly, messages
designed for summoning, instructing or chasing away non-humans are translated
into the others’ language via sonic performances.
By developing the functions and ontologies of the sonic, long-standing issues in
South American anthropology and ethnomusicology can be revisited (cf. the excellent
collection of articles edited by Hill and Chaumeil 2011). One of the outstanding
qualities of the sonic (along with the olfactory) is its capacity to fill a space, regardless
of where a listener at a given moment is looking.7 Sound production and music
performance can actually create an encompassing atmosphere within a given space
(and there is no easy escape without shutting one’s ears). It is fairly obvious that in
such a sonically filled space, any present being with a functioning auditory sense will
hear something. In Lowland South American ethnographies, many reports confirm
that despite visual barriers—like unilateral or bilateral invisibility—sound and music
can be heard by present entities who (or which) are different from the musicians in
the broadest sense (cf. Piedade in this issue, describing how apapaatai spirits
attentively listen to Wauja flute and vocal music although they cannot be seen by the
musicians; see also Franchetto and Montagnani 2011; Lewy 2012). All papers in this
issue affirm that vocal or instrumental music can be considered a medium for
(mutual) communication, intelligible for neighbouring Indians as well as for non-
Indians, for spirits and sometimes for animals or even plants. These non-humans or
‘not really humans’ are thought to understand music because it is a super-formalised
language and they may react or interfere, for instance by providing their own songs
or musical motifs.
Although one commonly hears nothing special when holding one’s ear close to a
bobinsana plant8 (to recall the example from the very beginning of this introduction),
one can certainly hear the ‘trace left behind by some moving agent’ (Latour 2005:
132); the musical ‘trace’ left by the plant-person in the ritual specialist’s song. For this
difference, Alfred Gell made clear that one should not mistake (applied to our
example) the bobinsana bush with the agent appearing in the song—although they
are synonymous:
7
Auditory perception is not entirely independent of a listener’s directedness. This is well acknowledged in what
music psychologists call Auditory Scene Analysis (Bregman 1990). Of course, a listener usually concentrates on,
and thereby emphasises, a certain set of sound events that are, under most ‘normal’ circumstances, assembled by
memory and other predispositions as well as by the current visual focus (the ‘cocktail party effect’). However, by
imagining how one may listen to an encompassing soundsphere with eyes closed, it is easy to grasp the point we
make here. Although it seems highly rewarding to include auditory scene analysis in rethinking distributed sonic
agency in respect to the relations between people, spirits and animals as treated here, this lies beyond the scope
of this issue.
8
Current findings in plant behaviour sciences (beyond folkloristic interpretations from the 1970s) suggest that
plants actually can emit sounds by themselves. However, these sounds are probably located above audio range
within 20–300 kHz as well as within 10–240 Hz but at very low intensity, still inaudible for human ears
(cf. Gagliano 2013).
[T]he distinction between animacy and inanimacy that we require here cross-cuts
the distinction between the living and non-living […]. The god who, at one
moment is manifested in a non-living thing, such as a stone or a statue [or a bush],
may be manifest in a living thing also, such as a possessed [or singing] shaman. The
worshippers, whose god appears in these contrasted forms, are perfectly cognizant
of the difference between them. (Gell 1998: 122)
Both Gell and Latour suggest that the bush—synonymous with the singing plant-
person—is an agent. This agent can be the origin of a musical rendering (see
Piedade’s kawoká, in this issue) or likewise manifest in the musical structure (e.g. as
microtonal rising, see Hill 1993; Olsen 1996; Seeger 2004). We suggest that this agent
is the instance understood as ‘human’ (although not ‘really human’) by indigenous
people. In a ritual, the indigenous ritual specialist adopts a multiple positionality,
embodying these ‘(not really) human’ agents, and translates their agency to human
agency by performing his or her multiple personality musically. The music used in
such contexts may employ a variety of sounds and timbres, associated with the
embodied non-human entities, or have lyrics with a variety of first-person positions
(see also Severi 2008). Non-humans thus ‘humanised’ may be treated as humans in
discourse, but as Gell indicates: the ‘worshippers’ are perfectly aware that the bush on
the riverbank is not ‘human’ in a strict sense.
Descola and Viveiros de Castro likewise affirm that in both animism and
perspectivism indigenous people are well aware of a difference between a ‘body’
(here, the bush) and a ‘soul’ (here, the singing plant-person). Across species, ‘bodies’
are regarded as different or discontinuous, and ‘souls’ are regarded as similar.
‘Bodies’, therefore, seem to correlate with ‘seeing’ and ‘souls’ with ‘hearing’
(Lewy 2012).
The existence of spirits or singing plant-persons therefore can be validated by the
methods of ethnomusicology. Although in general it is rather assumed that the
bobinsana-person or the kawoká-spirit do not exist in a literal, ‘physical’ sense, they
are evident as musical motifs or music-inspiring agents. They manifest themselves in
sound transmission and execute agency via music performance. It therefore proves
rewarding to understand the music and its details executed in ritual as agents by
themselves, taking on different musical forms and changing in time (cf. Stoichiţă and
Brabec de Mori 2012).
If musical items in ritual are considered agents, it is easier to understand how
music performance can serve as a tool for constructing and transcending perspectives
(see Brabec de Mori 2012), for constructing and transforming bodies (see Piedade in
this issue) as well as for Halbmayer’s ‘fragile inter-species and multi-world border
management’ (Brabec de Mori, Hill, and Seeger, this issue). The large-scale musical
pieces performed by Xingu Indians may also be interpreted in this way (Menezes
Bastos, this issue). While it proves painfully difficult to verify or falsify the existence
of spirits, we can undoubtedly hear that translation, variation and sequentiality occur
in many Lowland indigenous music performances. Spirits, animals and plants can
manifest themselves in their ‘human forms’, so ethnography tells us. But instead of
pondering how this could be understood in a visual, or even physical sense, we

suggest that these ‘human forms’ are those who transmit melodies to people in
dreams, who sing through a transformed healer’s mouth or who cause variations in
musical pieces (which have to be contested and controlled through repetition; see
Hill, this issue). If these musical performances are understood as stemming from
interventions by non-humans in their ‘human form’, and consequently during
performance can be understood by the same (or other) non-humans in their ‘human
form’, it becomes more evident on which ontological level humans may transform
into non-humans, and non-humans likewise can mingle with humans in ritual. By
understanding such ‘non-human’ agency in music, we may finally even come closer
to understanding ‘How Musical is Man’.
Although we recommend acknowledging and integrating new information and
theories from archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology and linguistics, ethnomusicol-
ogists’ most valuable contributions must certainly lie in listening closely and
analytically. In our case, we are listening to the indigenous peoples from Lowland
South America in order to understand how their music is thought to work and who
contributes to such ‘music that works’. Thanks to Timothy Rice, ethnomusicologists
today are encouraged to extend the ideas that emerge from rich ethnographic writing
to ethnomusicology as a whole. Such a procedure may well cause repercussions of its
own in other fields as well. We have shown that analysing the capacities and agencies
of music and the sonic can help to bridge the gap between those who are considered
‘Real People’ and ‘other people’, and between non-humans and ‘non-humans in
their human forms’ among Lowland South American Indians. This serious
engagement with ethnography helps to explain how interspecific interaction may
actually be achieved in this context. Thus a hitherto missing link can be inserted into
current theories, a link that may strengthen aspects of the existing analytic
frameworks, or suggest ways to modify or rethink them.
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Apùap World Hearing Revisited:

Talking with ‘Animals’, ‘Spirits’ and
other Beings, and Listening to the
Apparently Inaudible
Rafael José de Menezes Bastos
The Kamayurá (Apùap) system of classification, identification and nomination of the

acoustic-musical domain is comprehensive, sophisticated and powerful. It involves
communication with ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’ (‘spirits’, ‘animals’ and ‘inanimate
beings’) and is the basis for what I have called ‘world hearing’, a worldview whose
primacy is phono-auditory. For the Kamayurá, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ beings can
be situated at the same ontological level. This paper revisits the Kamayurá system and
compares it with those reported in other areas of lowland South America, suggesting
that it forms the basis for a biopolitics of sensoriality without—or better, against—
modernity. It calls for new research in the region into acoustic-musical perception, the
universe of ritual, and their connections with the worlds of power and politics.
Keywords: Biopolitics of Sensoriality; Acoustic-musical Perception; Kamayurá (Apùap)

Indians; World Hearing; Lowland South American Indigenous Societies
Introduction
We were returning from the swidden, crossing Ipavu Lake by canoe. We talked,
rowing, under a beautiful sunset. Suddenly Eweka stopped speaking and rowing, fell
silent and asked me to be quiet too, gesturing towards the bottom of the lake.
Whispering he told me to listen to what was coming from down below. Despite my
best efforts, I heard nothing from the watery depths. He said to me insistently: ‘Can’t
Rafael José de Menezes Bastos is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa
Catarina (UFSC), author of A Musicológica Kamayurá: Para uma Antropologia da Comunicação no Alto
Xingu ([1976] 1978; second edition 1999), A Festa da Jaguatirica: Uma Partitura Crítico-Interpretativa
(2013) and many articles. He has been studying the Kamayurá since 1969, collaborating with them in their
projects about musical and cultural patrimony. Correspondence to: Rafael José de Menezes Bastos,
Departamento de Antropologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 88.040-900 Florianópolis, SC, Brazil.
Email: rafael.bastos@pq.cnpq.br or rafael@cfh.ufsc.br

288 R. J. de Menezes Bastos
you hear the fish singing? Listen, listen …’. I heard nothing. This went on for several
minutes. Later, back in the village, I concluded that Eweka had experienced some
kind of hallucination, a fit of poetic inspiration or holy ecstasy, the whole event just a
flight of imagination. I recall that some days later he simply told me that I needed to
train my hearing. The episode took place in 1981 while I was conducting field
research among both the Kamayurá1 and the Yawalapití (who I had known since
1969) for around 11 months in preparation for my doctoral thesis (see Menezes
Bastos 1990, 2013).
Some years after these events, I went to an exhibition on the ‘acoustic behaviour’ of
animals, organised by postgraduate students from various areas of biology at the Federal
University of Santa Catarina. There I was able to listen to recordings of bird songs and
various other animals. But what most enchanted me and surprised me were the
recordings of fish songs, with those of the dourados especially catching my attention.2
That was when I learnt that Eweka, in the episode narrated above, appeared more like a
diligent ichthyologist than an inspired poet, a victim of hallucination or holy rapture.
The anthropological and ethnomusicological literature on the indigenous societies
of the South American lowlands eloquently testifies to the fact that the worlds of
sound and music have a special importance among these peoples (Menezes Bastos
2007). These records began as early as the sixteenth century (see Léry [1578] 1941)
and have held a strong interest for my own writings from the outset (Menezes Bastos
[1976] 1978). In 1999 I developed the concept of ‘world hearing’ to distinguish
Amerindian cultures—such as those of the Xinguano—where the acoustic-musical
world is predominant, in contrast to what happens in the West and in some other
lowland cultures (on the latter, see Gow 1989; Lagrou 1995; Viveiros de Castro 2010)
where vision is identified as the primary sense.3
Today I would mark two points of divergence with what I formulated previously
(Menezes Bastos 1999). First: to what am I referring exactly when I speak about the
West? As an anthropologist, I am aware that the term needs to be qualified rather
than obviated. Second: can the South American lowlands, like the West itself, be
comprehended through a single idea, however inclusive this seems to be? Since I
cannot explore these divergences in depth here, I shall simply make a few brief
remarks. In relation to the first point, the West to which I refer is an interpretive key,
its nerve centre being the Enlightenment with its enthronement of reason. This is a
1
The Kamayurá (a word of Arawakan origin signifying ‘cannibals’) recognise themselves to be composed of
various Tupi-Guarani-speaking groups, including the Apùap, taken to be the ‘true Kamayurá’ (see Menezes
Bastos 1995).
2
Scientific names: Salminus maxillosus or Salminus brasiliensis, Characidae family. Little by little I discovered
that the specialised study of this behaviour among aquatic beings—fluvial, marine, lacustrine; fish, mammals and
others—is highly developed, producing an ever-expanding literature (see, for instance, among many others,
Podos, da Silva and Rossi-Santos 2002).
3
Outside the lowlands—or not centrally dedicated to it—and not exclusively having hearing and phonation as its
focus, the work by the Canadian-based group formed by sociologist Anthony Synnott and anthropologists David
Howes and Constance Classen is remarkable. See the landmark about olfaction by these three authors (Classen,
Howes and Synott 1994). For a cross-cultural study of the senses, see Classen (1993).
limited West without a territorial locus (it may be manifested in Tokyo, São Paulo or
Paris) and incongruent with the myriads of different socio-cultural universes included
in its extensive geographic scope, many of these universes even being its inverse or
counter-examples. As for the second divergence, I think certainly not: no worlds as
complex and diverse as those of the lowlands and the West can be comprehended by
a single idea, however globalising it may appear to be. At most this idea amounts to an
interpretive tool, which very often can also be counter-exemplified. On this point and
especially on the question of the predominance of one sense over others in the region
under study, I favour the idea that the senses are at the very least mutually reinforcing,
recalling simultaneously Horace’s maxim, de te fabula narratur (the story is told of
you). The idea that the senses mutually reinforce themselves has provoked much debate
and investigation in several academic areas. See Tilley et al. (2006) for an overview of
the issue in anthropology, and see particularly Howes (2006). The problem of
intersensoriality is part of the agenda of ethnomusicology at least since Merriam (1964).
After exploring systems of acoustic-musical perception and of musical ritual in this
paper, I will finally briefly discuss the concept of ‘amerindian perspectivism’ (Viveiros
de Castro 1998, among others) and its usefulness in an intersensorial approach to
Lowland South America. I believe that perspectivism is an important avenue for
understanding some landscapes in the lowlands, typically those where the visual
channel seems to have predominant importance in relation to other senses. But it
cannot, and should not, be taken as the one exclusive option—others should be
explored as well. Among these is what I seek to develop here, an approach centred in
the investigation of perception and its obvious connections in the region with the world
of power and politics. I suggest that this possibility has a great potential to highlight
links in the lowlands between its celebrated emphasis on the logic of sensible qualities
(in the sense of Lévi-Strauss) and what I call the biopolitics of sensoriality.
As I have explored in various texts (for the most recent, see Menezes Bastos
2011a), the notion of world hearing provides a powerful interpretive tool for
understanding the Kamayurá lifeworld. In their language, the category anup,
originally meaning ‘to hear’, also indicates the nexus of ‘to comprehend’, a nexus
whose position in the scale of values of perceptual–conceptual reliability is
hierarchically superior to tsak, originally ‘to see’ but which also evokes the meaning
‘to understand’, the analytic form of perception and knowledge linked to the field of
intellection and explication.4 Indeed, among the Kamayurá (see Menezes Bastos
[1976] 1978, 1999, 2011a, 2013)—as among the Suyá (Seeger 1975)—exacerbation of
the capacity to ‘see’ is taken as a sign of anti-social behaviour, a case typical of
sorcerers and the mamaé, ferocious ‘spirits’.5 By contrast, ‘to hear’ indicates the
4
I have studied this theme since the 1970s (see Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978). I call axionomy the referred scale of
values (see Menezes Bastos 1999).
5
It is interesting to recall that for Spengler (see [1931] 1941) vision is the predominant sense of the Nordic
predator, while hearing is that of its prey. I thank Carlos Palombini for drawing my attention to this point. See
the text by Jonathan Hill, in this issue’s collection of essays, on the relations between perspectivism and
predation in the view of Viveiros de Castro. On the latter’s position concerning the prevalence of vision among
all the senses in the lowlands, see Viveiros de Castro (2010).
synthetic form of perception and knowledge, linked to the domain of sensibility and
comprehension, with the augmentation of this faculty being taken as a sign of virtuosity
in the musical and verbal arts. The Kamayurá compare the capacity for acoustic-
musical perception of the maraka´ùp (masters of music)—Eweka, now deceased, was a
maraka´ùp virtuoso—to the abilities of audio-recording equipment to capture, store
and reproduce sound. This capacity, for the Kamayurá, results both from innate talent
and from continuous intensive training throughout a person’s lifetime.6 The
ethnographies by Piedade (2004, see also in this issue) and Mello (2005) on the Wauja
(Arawak) allow us to extend this claim to the Xinguano world as a whole.
The present text develops my earlier article (Menezes Bastos 1999). Here I
introduce evidence from the Kamayurá, Xinguano and other peoples of the lowlands
that lends greater support for the most relevant point of the original text: namely that
the senses—in this case, hearing, extended to the universe of phonation and acoustic-
musical production in general—are, like the body in Marcel Mauss’s classic
formulation (see Mauss [1936] 1974), the primary instrument of culture. In 1999 I
asserted that the senses, far from being universally standardised biopsychological
apparatuses, are constructed in their own specific way by each human group, leading
to the development of unique constitutive traits. Hence what we hear is determined
by what we have learnt to hear in our socio-cultural–environmental setting. I would
add what we hear and what we produce in our respective acoustic-musical world.7
Today I would also supplement these considerations further by observing that the
senses are not simply ‘like the body’, but constitute its core. Without them, the body
is illegible and unpronounceable—odourless, invisible, inaudible, insipid, intangible.
The Kamayurá and the Upper Xingu

The Kamayurá numbered around 500 people in 2011. Speakers of a Tupi-Guarani
language, they live in two villages in the region formed by the headwaters of the Xingu
River—a major affluent of the Amazon—within the Xingu Indigenous Park where they
make up part of the Xinguano social system. This system—with its open and fluid
boundaries (Menget 2001)—is composed by local groups of various linguistic affiliations:
the Carib-speaking Kuikúro, Kalapálo and Nahukwá-Matipúhy, and the Arawak-
speaking Waurá (Wauja), Mehináku and Yawalapití are the most ancient groups in
the area. This picture is completed by the more recent inclusion of the Tupian groups
(the Awetí and Kamayurá), and the Trumaí, who speak an isolated language. The Park is
inhabited to the north by other groups: Tupian (Kajabí and Juruna [also known as
Yudjá]), Gê (Suyá [Kïsêdjê], Txukahamãe [Metuktíre], Krenakarore [Panará]) and Carib
(Txicão [Ikpeng]). These latter groups entered the region much more recently.
The Xinguano social system is an elaborate organisation of differences involving the
respective local groups. They speak languages from linguistic families that are mutually
6
I can say very little here in relation to training, merely noting that it basically involves continuous attention and
observation.
7
See Clarke (2005) for current research in ecological listening that is deeply related to mine in the lowlands.
unintelligible, even some languages of the same families (Arawak and Tupi) being
unintelligible mutually. The Trumaí language is unintelligible to all the others. Intertribal
ritual is one of the most important systems constituting and articulating the Xinguano
social system, its lingua franca (Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978). The ritual system
comprises a diverse universe of festivals, comprehended by the natives through a three-
part structure. In this structure, the mytho-cosmology is found in the entry position,
while body-painting, dance and the system of body adornments are located in the exit
position. Music manifests as a pivot between these two points. According to this model,
the mytho-cosmology constitutes the figures from mythic times, while the arts of, or on,
the body actualise them in historical time. Music creates the axiological ambient
responsible for translating myth-cosmology into dance, body-painting and feather art
(on the Kamayurá and the Upper Xingu, see Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978, 1990, 1995).
The realisation of a Xinguano intertribal rite depends on the cooperation between
at least two local groups, who occupy the positions of hosts and guests. It is also based
on the coordination between a -yat (sponsor, owner), two or three ye’ngyaret
(requesters), and a variable number of maraka’ùp (masters of music). The ‘sponsor’
is the nucleus of the ceremony, assuming responsibility for the sustenance (food and
accommodation) given to the invited participants. The ‘requesters’ are responsible for
organising the participants among the hosts. The ‘masters of music’ take care of the
liturgy, which, depending on the ceremony, may be performed as vocal, instrumental
or mixed music (on Xinguano ritual, see Menezes Bastos 1990, 2001, 2004).
The region inhabited by the Xinguano is characterised by an abundance of rivers,
many of them rich in fish, the basis of the local population’s diet. The most
important rivers are the Ronuro, Batovi and Culuene, tributaries of the Xingu.
Vegetation and fauna in the south are typical of the cerrado (savannah) of Central
Brazil, while in the north they belong to transition forest between the former biome
and Amazonian rainforest. The area’s climate has clearly marked dry and rainy
seasons, the latter lasting from October to April. During this period, rainfall levels are
high and the large expanses of floodplain are inundated. In the dry season there is no
rain. This is the season par excellence for the major intertribal Xinguano rituals.
The Kamayurá System of Acoustic-musical Knowledge8

One of the perennial questions of anthropology concerns the commensurability
between worlds. It forms the root of discussions on relativism, which in its most
radical version argues for incommensurability, and on its opposite extreme the claim
to ethnographic objectivity and the idea that complete commensurability can be
achieved through ethnography. I have always remained distant from both extremes,
advocating that the ethnographer’s role is to comprehend the ‘other’, the basis of my
understanding of Weberian Verstehen (see Weber [1922] 1978). This is why ever
since my inaugural publication (Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978) I have insisted on
8
See (Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978, 1986, 1990, 1999, 2001, 2011a).
basing all my work on the study of native categories, classifications and conceptions.
This position has acquired a particular relevance in so far as my main object of
investigation has been the acoustic-musical universe, seen as ‘intangible’ and even
‘immaterial’ in the West, in sharp contrast to the ideas of Amerindian peoples, for
whom sound is as material as stones are for us.
This study of the acoustic-musical perception of the Xinguano looks to contribute
to an anthropology of the body from the viewpoint of its elementary construction in
so far as it centres on audition and phonation, two conditions sine qua non for its
legibility and expression. Moreover it integrates acoustic-musical perception into the
complex of ritual and therefore likewise continues my work on politics and power
among these Indians, typically on the capillary surveillance that through senses like
hearing and also olfaction (Menezes Bastos 2011a)9 is obsessively present in their
culture and indeed forms the basis of the Xinguano version of a biopolitics without—
or better, against—modernity.10 As I have explored in diverse texts, this capillary
surveillance—involving all the senses—constitutes a discipline that encompasses all
domains of social life. In this sense the Xinguano world can be characterised as a
disciplinary society—a notion I use here inspired by Foucault (see Deleuze 1996)—
once more against modernity. As shown in ethnographies ranging from Quain
(Murphy and Quain 1966) and Gregor (1977) to those of Mello (2005) and myself
(Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978, 1990, 1995, 2001, 2011a, 2013), this surveillance rooted
in an elaborate sensoriality is evident throughout the region, where a widely
disseminated logic of sensible qualities—as Lévi-Strauss showed in the Mythologiques
(1964, 1966, 1967, 1971)—combine with an omnipresent biopolitics of sensoriality.
According to the Kamayurá, when two things collide with a minimum of force an
ihu (sound) is emitted that reaches the yapù (ears) via the air. At the same time this
sound is actively sought and captured by the ears of the agent. Here we can note the
fundamental Kamayurá idea of perception as a faculty that is simultaneously active
and passive.11 For these Indians, in other words, to hear implies to receive sounds and
actively to capture them (see Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978, 1986, 1990, 1999, 2001,
2011a).12 For the Kamayurá it is important to have knowledge of both the acoustic
phenomenon in itself and of its generation and capture. The hearing range of the
Xinguano in general is extraordinary, with people of all ages being able to capture
sounds—of planes or boats, for example—much sooner than any outsider.13 The
same can be said of the sounds produced by animals and diverse phenomena, all of
9
In the referenced essay, studying olfaction, I characterised the Xingu ‘flute house’ (or ‘men’s house’) as a ‘pan-
osphresic’ (rather than a ‘pan-optic’ as in Foucault), a nerve centre for the control of sexuality through its
aromas. ‘Osphresic’ comes from the classical Greek word for ‘to smell’.
10
Here I borrow from Clastres (see [1974] 1978) the use of the qualifying term ‘against’; this opposition can be
comprehended as based on the characteristic resistance of the Amerindians, qua traditional people, to the
reproduction of hybrids (in Latour’s sense; Latour [1991] 2006).
11
Piedade (2004) and Mello (2005) report something very similar for the Wauja, another Xinguano people.
12
Gibson’s (1966) work has been one of my bases in my research.
13
Brabec de Mori (personal communication, email, June 2012) tells me that the same occurs among the Indians
of the Ucayali.
them being continuously subject to diligent observation and attention. In terms of

sound generation, for the Kamayurá—especially in the case of humans—considerable
importance is given to knowledge of the phonatory and auditory systems and, in the
case of music, of musical instruments. The world becomes intelligible to the extent
that it emits acoustic messages: someone who moves away, an approaching animal, a
fire in the fields, and so forth. These kinds of events and many others are manifested
through what are for them very distinct acoustic structures. It is notable that when
moving through the forest (where the visual range is very limited) the Kamayurá
demonstrate an impressive capacity for phonic detection, discrimination and
production in relation to the sounds of the environment, communicating with the
‘animals’ and ‘spirits’.14 During one of my longest experiences travelling through the
forest with them, people explained to me that they were continually conversing with
the ‘animals’ and ‘spirits’ all around them, telling them, for example, that they did not
intend them any harm, and simultaneously asking these beings to leave them
unmolested.
The general category ihu splits into the opposition ihu/ye’eng with the phonolo-
gical form ihu here placed at a level of contrast below that of its former occurrence.
Now ihu indicates the nexus of ‘noise’, as opposed to that of ye’eng, ‘language’. This
latter category also subdivides into ye’eng/maraka, meaning ‘spoken language’/‘music’
respectively. As we shall see, ye’eng now also operates at a lower level of contrast.
These classifications can be summarised in a tree diagram (Figure 1).
The Kamayurá classify the sub-domain ihu in the sense of ‘noise’ using a paradigm
constituted by distinctive traces (or dimensions of contrast) that can be compre-
hended as continua formed through oppositions. The distinctive traits are extension,
strength and origin. The latter dimension is composed of three sub-dimensions:
sound-generating processes, consistency and density. Extension is made explicit in
Figure 1 Tree diagram of sonic classifications among the Kamayurá.
14
It should be noted that this does not seem to happen in the savannah.
three-dimensional terms with sounds able to vary in a continuum limited by the

extremes tapiatsa (small)/tuwiap (large). As for strength (intensity), sounds can vary
according to the contrasting pair mewe (weak)/aga´ù (strong). In relation to the
consistency sub-dimension of the origin dimension, the pair is ata (hard)/ipùu (soft).
The density sub-dimension, meanwhile, involves the pairing moyepetewat (concen-
trated)/ayangwat (diffuse). Finally the sub-dimension involving sound generating
processes includes an immense—if not infinite—set of verbs describing the ways in
which sounds are produced: -pang (strike), -tsini (rattle), -tsirik (squeeze), and so
forth.15 In summary, this paradigm includes three distinctive traces or dimensions of
contrast, ihu in the sense of ‘noise’ therefore being defined in terms of its extension,
strength/intensity and origin. Based on this paradigm, the Kamayurá identify, classify
and denominate noises, resulting in a sophisticated auditory spectrum of extreme
eco-environmental and socio-cultural relevance. The contrasting dimensions relating
to the ihu sub-domain are summarised in Table 1.
As shown in Figure 1, the category ye’eng in the sense of ‘language’ is subdivided
into yeéng (spoken language)/maraka (music). This opposition is evinced in so far as
the yeéng of the maraka ‘sings’; that is, changes extension constantly. Duration and
velocity—in the sense of tempo—are also important in terms of distinguishing
sounds. The Kamayurá language is not tonal and duration is not significant in it. In
the case of maraka, the paradigm used in relation to the ihu category is undergoing
profound modifications, which tells us that the respective universes are mutually
discontinuous and continuous simultaneously. On one hand, the maraka paradigm is
expanding, adding three other contrasting dimensions: duration, velocity and
grammatical processing. In addition, consistency is being amplified, conceived in
terms of different ways of singing and playing. On the other hand, the paradigm is
shrinking, density being cancelled and sound generation processes reduced to five. In
terms of extension, the tapiatsa/tuwiap pair has acquired a comparative-relative
Table 1 Dimensions of the ihu (sound) sub-domain of sonic classifications

1. Extension: sounds are comprehended as volumetric, seen as tangible and material. The basic
opposition here is ‘large’/‘small’.
2. Strength: the quantity of energy used when two sound-generating things enter into contact. Basic
opposition: ‘strong’/‘weak’.
3. Origin: the distinctive characteristics of the ‘personality’ of each sound. This dimension supposes
three sub-dimensions:
3.1. Sound-generating processes: e.g., striking, scratching, blowing, etc. The list of
processes is immense, if not infinite.
3.2. Consistency: the ‘resistance’ of sounds. Basic opposition: ‘hard’/‘soft’.
3.3. Density: indicates the quantity of sounds of each acoustic motion. Basic opposition:
‘diffuse’/‘concentrated’.
15
As in linguistics, a hyphen placed before the verb points to the fact that it lacks a morpheme—in the present
case, a pronoun—to be used.
value, the identification of sounds becoming realised through gradations, because

here as already said they ‘sing’. In this way a general series is generated, linked
specifically to the tapiatsa/tuwiap pair. This series is applied to the melodic analysis,
thereby constituting diverse ‘tunings’ (‘scales’), each one of them appropriate to the
different Kamayurá genres. ‘Tunings’ for two, four, five, six, seven, eight and even
more sounds exist. These sounds have verbal labels, which employ syllables like tã, nã
and tĩ. Here we can highlight the fact that the Kamayurá seem to possess some kind
of perfect pitch, as I have discussed since [1976] 1978—their dimension correspond-
ing to western ‘pitch’ being well mapped. The names of these sounds—like those of
colours—are not mutually interchangeable: tã, for example, cannot be called nã, just
as ‘blue’ cannot be labelled ‘green’. This point—as with many others cited here—
requires new investigations. Note that my research about the Kamayurá dates from
the late 1960s up to the present.
The strength dimension is also undergoing increasing elaboration in the maraka
domain with the development of the mewe/aga´ù contrasting pair. The duration
dimension, as I said, is particularly distinctive of the maraka domain. The basic
opposition now is mewe (here in the sense of ‘long’)/tikwaraip (short). Here we can
observe that the pairing of the notion of ‘long’ with those of ‘slow’ and ‘weak’ is
common in the Kamayurá maraka system, involving categorisation and perception
itself. The same occurs with their respective opposites (short, quick and strong).
However this pairing is not an impediment to distinguishing the notions concerned,
as verified by a series of tests that I have conducted in different phases of field work.
In the velocity (tempo) dimension, the contrasting analytic pair is mewe (in the sense
of ‘slow’)/tikwaraip (in the sense of ‘quick’). What is analysed here is the acoustic-
musical flow as a whole, which corresponds to the tempo dimension. As it is related
to the referred flow in terms of its quantity of movement, this dimension is crucial in
the representation of the ethoi of the archetypal figures in the ritual with a strong
importance for dance. The grammatical processing dimension is rooted in the
concept ipù (theme). Etymologically ipù corresponds to ‘foot’ (part of the body),
although in the field covered by the maraka category the notion refers to the themes
of the musical pieces. The ipù of a musical item usually evokes a mythic scene to be
dramatised in the ritual. In this sense the concept is similar to that of leitmotif. In
terms of the awùkù (elaboration) of an ipù, the Kamayurá recognise three processes:
yoyowitewat (repetition), awitewat (imitation) and atùtewat (transformation). The
concept of transformation is of pronounced interest to Kamayurá and Xinguano
cultures, specifically the -rowak (transformation) of one essence into another. As it
points to the identification of the source of sounds—‘human’ or not—the origin
dimension, which can be likened to ‘timbre’, is of special importance to the paradigm
of the maraka category. There are two interrelated basic points to its manifestation:
the ‘sound-generation processes’ and the ‘ways of playing and singing’. The
Kamayurá recognise five musical sound-generation processes: -pù (to blow), maraka
(in the sense of ‘sing’), -tsini (shake), -pang (strike) and -pùrùrù (spin). The second
point involves an analysis of the emotive-affective state of the performer. As for the
diverse ways of playing and singing, the opposition -tsin (sad)/-rùp (happy) is the key
element in terms of marking differences in this field, applicable to the ways of
performing the music adopted by the musician at the moment of execution.
Global Traits of Musical Ritual of the South American Lowlands16

Although ethnographic coverage of global traits of musical ritual in the South
American lowlands is still limited, it is not only already possible but also necessary to
produce a profile of music in the lowlands, a matter of importance for planning
future research. This general profile does not mean that music in the region is
monolithic. Rather it intends to identify its main tendencies, some of which may
include variations, including counter-examples. I am referring to music in terms of its
connections with ritual, in Upper Xingu a privileged space–time—as much as the
universes of sexuality and food—for the manifestation of the capillary surveillance
mentioned earlier, a surveillance that constitutes an ethics and an aesthetics of
interest in terms of exploring what I identify as a biopolitics of sensoriality.
On the other hand the present study looks to explore some seldom-trod paths,
approaching ritual with an emphasis on its striking musicality, an approach often
avoided due to the political system of relationships between the anthropological and
ethnomusicological intellectual fields. Hence authors central to anthropology have
understood rites primarily in terms of their gestures and words, in the case of Lévi-
Strauss—an author who has always been at the heart of my studies—transposing
music beyond the ritual field as a simile for myth. Here we can locate one of the
nexus of Viveiros de Castro’s (2002) description of ritual as the ‘poor cousin’ of myth
within structuralism. In my argument I intend to recover the pioneering spirit of
McAllester’s (1954) classic text in ethnomusicology and anthropology, pioneering in
the sense that the contention imposed by the referred political system is simply not
professed by himself.
The first global trait of music in the region concerns the role it performs in the
intersemiotic chain of ritual. This role points to the general nexus of translation and
is extremely important, originally studied in different sub-regions of the lowlands by
anthropologists conducting independent research: in Peruvian Amazonia among the
Amuesha, speakers of an Arawakan language, by Smith (1977); and in the Upper
Xingu, by myself, among the Kamayurá (Menezes Bastos [1976] 1978). Smith
describes the role of music in ritual as the integrating centre of all the discourses
involved, a centre that produces the unity of ritual expression through the diversity
existing between these discourses. For Smith, music among the Amuesha is thus the
centripetal locus for the convergence of the discourses linked to diverse channels—
visual, olfactory and others. Similarly my study establishes music as a pivotal system
that, in ritual, intermediates the verbal arts (poetry, myth) with the plastic-visual
(graphism, iconography, system of body adornments) and the choreographic arts
16
See Menezes Bastos (2007, 2011b).
(dance, theatre). Integration and intermediation therefore seem to be nexus that after
these sources from the 1970s characterise the role of music in the intersemiotic chain
of ritual in the region. This first trait points to the idea that the various senses are
constituted in an interlinked and mutually reinforcing form, often combining towards
the production of intersensorial perceptual modalities.
Basso’s (1985) research on the Kalapálo, inhabitants of the Upper Xingu but
speakers of a Carib language, is compatible with the works cited above. For her, the
nature of ritual performance among these Indians is musical, where the music is
shown to be the key to this performance, setting it off. Also from the 1980s, research
by Gebhart-Sayer (1987) on the Shipibo-Conibo of Peruvian Amazonia, speakers of a
Panoan language, points to these same nexus. In the shamanic ritual of this people,
Gebhart-Sayer argues, the relation between music and visual designs is one of
translation, the songs being the acoustic, reversible translation, so to speak, of the
design motifs.17 A similar nexus, Guss (1990) tells us, is found among the Yekuana
(Carib) of Venezuela, involving basketry and song. According to Barcelos Neto
(2008), much the same occurs among the Wauja (Arawak) of the Upper Xingu.
The relation of translation to which I refer here is conceived in a tautegorical rather
than allegorical form. It is not manifested, therefore, as sets of synonymous
reproductions of the same meanings by the diverse subsystems of signification
involved, but as universes of differentiated mimeses of meaningful expressions of
meanings from other channels. This meaning of translation is close to the one
originally proposed by Benjamin (1968) as the ‘search for resonances and
reverberations between diverse systems and codes, and of totalizations of partial
viewpoints’ (Cunha 1998: 16; see also Cesarino 2011).
The second global feature of music in the region is its sequentiality. This refers to
the musical organisation of the rituals at an intersong level, constituted by the
connections between the respective component songs (or instrumental or vocal–
instrumental pieces). Sequentiality is manifested in the fact that the region’s musical
repertoires are organised in sequences (or sequences of sequences) of canticles (songs
or vignettes), of instrumental or voco-instrumental pieces. This sequentiality at
intersong level—which evokes the western suite—was first described by myself
among the Kamayurá (see Menezes Bastos 1990, 2013). It was later studied among
other groups of the region, including the Kulina (Arawak) of Acre (Silva 1997), the
Yepamasa (Tukano) of the Upper Rio Negro (Piedade 1997), the Wauja (Piedade
2004; Fausto, Franchetto and Montagnani 2011), the Guarani of the Brazilian south
and mid-west (Montardo 2009), the Javaé (Lourenço 2009), the Arara (Carib) of Pará
(Coelho 2003) and the Kalankó of Alagoas (Herbetta 2006, 2011).
Sequentiality is one of the most important rationales of ritual organisation in the
region. According to Seeger (2013: 15–22), my own research on the subject (Menezes
Bastos 1990, 2013) followed by those conducted by Montardo (2009), Piedade (2004),
17
Brabec de Mori and Mori Silvano de Brabec (2009: 108–10) support the relationships involving graphic art and
music in Shipibo-Conibo cosmology, but do not agree with Gebhart-Sayer in her categorisation of the referred
relationships as translation.
Mello (2005), Lourenço (2009) and others have contributed decisively to the
‘reconfiguration of our ideas concerning indigenous societies of the lowlands as a
whole over the last twenty years’, revealing how groups from the region ‘organise
very small musical units into much larger complex suites at a scale never before
appreciated’. Finally, Seeger claims that these investigations:
convincingly demonstrate that the appropriate unit for musical analysis […] is not
the small piece, which can be easily recorded, circulated on CDs and analyzed in a
few hours. On the contrary, they reveal the coherence of much longer units,
integrated by many small units, difficult to record, transcribe and analyze.
(Seeger 2013: 17)
The corollary of Seeger’s observation is the demand that only transcriptions as

complete as possible of the musical rites in question have the capacity to provide
adequate grounds for significant analyses of the rites concerned.18
Among the Kamayurá, sequentiality assumes an elaborate form, following a pattern
that I have called a sequential structure (Menezes Bastos 1990, 2007, 2013), of great
cognitive interest and which I believe to be widespread in the lowlands, residing at the
base of the region’s musical rituals. These rituals are almost always lengthy in
duration, their preliminary phases sometimes occurring decades before their
performance, their posterity likewise sometimes extending for decades too (Menezes
Bastos 2011c). As I pointed out elsewhere (Menezes Bastos 2007), the sequential
structure can be understood both as an account (a ‘history’) and as a programme
(‘structure’) of composing sequences (of canticles [songs or vignettes] and sequences
of canticles), administrating two processes, repetition and differentiation, through a
fine dialectic with songs and vignettes as their units.
In terms of this second global feature, it would seem to point to music as the art of
constituting and controlling time, producing mechanisms of disciplinary power—
always against modernity (in the sense established by Latour [1991] 2006)—that
could be called chronograms, in particular a variety of timetables, calendars and
chronologies. The above sequences are always related to parts of the day (typically
dusk, night, midnight, early morning, dawn, sunrise and afternoon), the month, year
and other temporal units, each one with its own marked characteristics (e.g., sunrise
is the part of the day when the songs of the curassow are frequently heard).19
18
Complementing what Seeger has written about the topic of the unit of analysis of music in the South American
lowlands, I believe that what Piedade says about the motif in his text in the present issue is fundamental: ‘I can
affirm that these small structural units, the motifs, constitute the macro-structural epicentre of the ritual, and at
the same time the primordial cell at the micro-structural level of the music’. The elegance, parsimony and
economy of this assertion give an idea of the resolution the author provides to the problematic of the divergence
between the micro and the macro.
19
Specifically for the Xinguano, day begins early evening and finishes in the afternoon of ‘our’ next day. Hence it
can be understood as approximately 18 hours behind (or six hours ahead) of ‘ours’ (which I judge to begin at
midnight, zero hours). On time among the Kamayurá, see Ramos (2012) and my own texts (Menezes Bastos
1990, 2013).
The third and last feature of the region’s music that I wish to highlight concerns
the predominant process of musical composition: variation.20 Through variation, the
thematic material—the motifs in particular—performed at the start of the musical
pieces are elaborated through diverse procedures, including repetition, augmentation,
diminution, transposition, retrogradation and many more. This feature is widely
disseminated in the region. My studies among the Kamayurá and those of Piedade
(2004) and Mello (2005) among the Wauja show how variation is at the base of the
musical composition at intra-song and inter-song levels. In addition, Mello (2005)
shows how part of the male and female Wauja repertoires, specifically those of the
‘sacred flutes’ and of the iamurikumã female singing ritual, are variants of each other;
the women singing vocal transpositions of the flute music, the men doing the
opposite and playing the female vocal music on their flutes. This signifies that the
process of variation among the Wauja traverses the musical genres and the ‘sexual’
genders (see also the articles by Piedade and Hill in this issue).
Music and Modes of Relation between ‘Humans’ and Other Beings in the South
American Lowlands: A Brief Note
Thus, from their own viewpoint, the peccaries play flutes, which for humans are
simply coconuts (emptied of the meat, the food of this animal) which the peccaries
nuzzle, causing the emission of a sound reminiscent of whistling to human hearing,
but whose musicality, to peccary ears, is as rich as that of the flutes. (Lima 1996: 31;
original emphasis)
The study of perspectivism is set to contribute decisively towards the advance of

regional ethnology and ethnomusicology. I shall explore this theme briefly here in
line with the original—and lighter, we could say—definition given by Viveiros de
Castro, namely as a ‘conception, common to many peoples of the continent,
according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons,
human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view’ (1998:
469). I also agree with this author’s observation (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 116) about
not seeing the conception in question as the ‘overly symmetric’ inversion of a
supposed western naturalism.21 As I indicated before, I am ever less convinced that
anthropology, philosophy and the human sciences are advanced by an idea of the
West that is, on one hand, obvious—and often stupid in its obviousness—and, on the
20
On the process of variation in the universe of western music, see Sisman (2012), who argues that this process
can be traced back to the sixteenth century. As a project for the future, it would be interesting to compare this
concept of variation in western musicology with the concept of transformation by Lévi-Strauss.
21
It is worth noting, however, that later in the text, despite his initial observation, Viveiros de Castro constructs
precisely an inverse and ‘overly symmetrical’ relation between the modern western thought and Amerindian
thought: while the former is said to presume the ‘unity of nature and the plurality of cultures’, the latter
supposedly inverts these terms, establishing a ‘a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity’ (Viveiros de Castro
1998: 470). This—let us say, radical—acceptation of perspectivism has dominated the recent work of the author
and that of the immense majority of other scholars discussing the topic.
other, decreed as the exact and symmetrical opposite of the savage, nowadays
typically the ‘Amerindian’, or more specifically the peoples of the South American
lowlands, who are represented as kinds of substitutes for the ‘primitives’, often in
conjunction with indigenous Melanesians (see Menezes Bastos 1999). This tendency
of obviation and even ‘stupidification’ of the West is programmatically present when
the construction of the relation ‘we’/‘other’ is in question. The contrary tendency can
also occur, the noble savage (correspondently, the fierce westerner) giving place to the
reverse. The second point I wish to make on perspectivism—and other modes of
relation between ‘humans’ and other beings—concerns the research agenda of
ethnology and ethnomusicology: lest it becomes impoverished, this agenda must not
be monolithic and the lowlands should be approached generously from various
viewpoints or, precisely, perspectives.
Accounts such as Lima’s cited above are numerous in the ethnography of the
lowlands. It is undeniable, therefore, that perspectivism has a place in the regional
ethnography on the acoustic-musical world.22 Saying this does not mean, however,
that it manifests as the only and irrefutable possibility for conceptualising the
relational modes in the region between ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’—here put as
analytical terms—that is, between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’.
Discussing these relational modes in the region under study, Latour (2009) affirms
that there exist two differentiated positions, namely those of Descola (2005) and
Viveiros de Castro. While Descola thinks in terms of types, among them animism,
naturalism, totemism and analogism—perspectivism being included in the discussion
about animism — Viveiros de Castro takes perspectivism to be a radical position,
decolonising and excluding the others, responding to the demand to abandon the
‘nature’/‘culture’ dichotomy. Running opposite to this position, Luciani (2011)
shows that perspectivism can be comprehended as a structural transformation of
totemism and thus maintains a strong relation with Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula
of myth.23 I prefer to conceive perspectivism based on this formulation, seeing it as a
transformation of totemism, and so the two modes of relations as transformations
among themselves.
Approaching the ‘nature’/‘culture’ dichotomy—and its third term, ‘supernature’—
in relation to the Xinguano, I would stress (as I have done since Menezes Bastos [1976]
1978; see also Menezes Bastos 1990, 2013) that this schema makes no sense there,
neither verbatim nor as a mere transformation. In order to approach how these Indians
think of questions that correspond to what is encompassed by the dichotomy in the
West, I make a small incursion into their mythology: the subterranean world of today,
of historical time, is the place of exile of the mama’e (spirits) or totally potent and
transformational beings in constant becoming. In mythic times, these beings inhabited
the surface of the Earth. Then there was no light, only that of the lantern flies and
termites in whose houses the Kamayurá (who were not properly ‘humans’ in the
22
On this theme, see among other texts, Uzendoski, Hertica and Tapuy (2005), Alvarenga (2007) and the article
by Bernd Brabec de Mori in the present issue’s collection of essays.
23
On the canonical formula of myth, see Almeida (2009).
generic sense) lived.24 Also there was no fire. When light and fire, stolen for these
Indians from the vultures by the demiurge, spread across the surface, the mama’e took
refuge, preferentially on the subterranean level but also in some places in the forests,
waters and some other darker locations (for the Wauja version of this myth, see Mello
2005; Barcelos Neto 2008; and Piedade in this issue). It can be observed, on the other
hand, that the world of human sociality, in historical time, is seen by the Kamayurá as
the world of social reproduction, characterised by the productive relation between men
and women. This world is the result of an original renunciation to ‘naturity’, a ‘naturity’
defined in terms of a natura naturans—plenty of agentivity—rather than a natura
naturata, dominated by passivity.25 This is the original world of Amazonian men and
Amazonian women, both strongly present in the Xinguano Yawari ritual (see my texts
Menezes Bastos 1990, 2001, 2004, 2013). This small excerpt from the Xinguano
mythology suggests that there is little commensurability between the western
Enlightenment dichotomy under consideration—always with its third term, ‘super-
nature’—and the concept that could be taken as its closest equivalent in the Kamayurá
and Xinguano world in general.
Coda
Among the priorities that I envisage for a research agenda on the lowlands, I would
highlight the interconnected study of the ritual universes with their respective
intersemiotic chains; acoustic-musical perception, including here the problematic of
intersensoriality, as a basis for what I have called a biopolitics of sensoriality; the
process of variation with its potential intersection with that of transformation
(according to Lévi-Strauss); and the process of acoustic–linguistic–musical commun-
ication, which not only involves ‘humans’ but has a trans-specific scope, including
‘animals’ as well as ‘inanimate beings’ and ‘spirits’. Some immediate questions come
to mind: what exactly is involved in what I identified earlier as ‘a type of perfect
pitch’? What is the auditory range among Amerindian groups of the South American
lowlands? What does it mean that auditory perception not only receives but also
intentionally tracks and captures sounds? Many other questions could certainly
emerge.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Anthony Seeger, Bernd Brabec de Mori and my students Izomar
Lacerda and Kaio Domingues Hoffmann for their comments on an earlier version of
this text. I remain solely responsible for its contents. Thanks also to David Rodgers
for the English version of the original text in Portuguese.
24
The Kamayurá and the Xinguano in general are not exceptional qua Amerindians in conceiving themselves not
as generic ‘humans’ but as unique, a striking trait of their ethnocentrism. In this sense the term ‘human’ for
them seems to be more like an adjective than a substantive.
25
I am following here Spinoza’s Ethics (see Spinoza [1677] 2007) as to the use of natura naturata and naturans.
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Menzes Bastos and C. Rial)]. Ilha 4(2): 113–29.
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Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3–62. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Flutes, Songs and Dreams: Cycles of

Creation and Musical Performance
among the Wauja of the
Upper Xingu (Brazil)
Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade
The Wauja of the Upper Xingu say that their musical ritual is simultaneously of and for
the spirits. I will address some factors of their cosmology and shamanism, and then
investigate men’s kawoká rituals and women’s songs performed in iamurikumã rituals.
I consider these two rituals to be integral parts of a single set, the kawoká–iamurikumã
symbolic–ritual complex, in which there is a deep correlation between men, women and
spirits: the latter transmit their musical creations to humans through dreams. Only the
male master of the kawoká flutes and the female mistress of the iamurikumã songs are
capable of memorising and reproducing this musical material. During ritual perform-
ance, the women transform the music of the flutes into iamurikumã songs and vice versa.
Through ritual performance, the musical creation of the spirits is returned to them in a
humanised and transformed form.
Keywords: Wauja Indians; Upper Xingu; Amerindian Societies; Sacred Flutes; Ritual;
Cosmology
Introduction
This paper will discuss some aspects of the ritual life of the Wauja Indians of the
Upper Xingu region, Central Brazil. My main focus is on two rituals, the men’s
kawoká sacred flute ritual and the women’s iamurikumã ritual, for they are two sides
of a single cultural set, the kawoká–iamurikumã symbolic–ritual complex. This
complex enacts deep correlations between men, women and spirits. My musicological
Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade holds a BA in Music (Composition and Conducting) and a PhD in
Anthropology. Currently he is Associate Professor in the Music Department and the Graduate Program in Music
of the State University of Santa Catarina, Florianopólis, Brazil, where he teaches Music Analysis, Musicology,
Ethnomusicology, and Composition. Correspondence to: Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Centro de
Artes, Rua Madre Benvenuta 1907, Itacorubi, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil. Email: acaciopiedade@gmail.com

study of the sacred flute ritual among the Wauja, which they call kawoká (Piedade
2004), was strongly guided by the Indians who played the flute and revealed quite a
distinctive musical system that is concentrated in the dimension of the musical motifs
that function in it as basic units of meaning.1 I can affirm that these small structural
units, the motifs, constitute the macro-structural epicentre of the ritual, and at the same
time the primordial cell at the micro-structural level of the music: they function as a
base element during the ritual and are manifest in the domain of temporal brevity,
given that they involve sound units of short duration. Through the analysis of this
repertoire, precise techniques of repetition and variation of motifs can be observed,
notable mental operations that constitute the core of a musical thought, which is
certainly a cornerstone of the cosmology. These motifs are recognised and appreciated
by the Wauja, given that they are attentively listened to, memorised and reworked also
by the women who are mistresses of the iamurikumã music and often produce the
songs that are sung during this ritual using the same motifs. Likewise, the masters of the
flute know and listen attentively to the iamurikumã songs. In fact, kawoká and
iamurikumã are part of the kawoká–iamurikumã complex, in which a dual cycle of
musical creation and appreciation is established.
The universe of the kawoká flutes corresponds to what is known in ethnological
literature as ‘the sacred flute complex’, a set of ritual and cosmological phenomena
that is quite widely distributed in the lowlands of South America and other regions,
such as Melanesia, which can be verified in comparative studies between these two
regions (Gregor and Tuzin 2001). The ritual discussed in this article is therefore a
local occurrence of this complex. My research about Tukano music from the north-
western Amazon shows that the ritual known as jurupari also belongs to this genre
(Piedade 1997).
Three characteristics of the sacred flute complex can be highlighted: the existence
of aerophones played exclusively by men; the existence of the origin myth of these
instruments, which establishes that they were originally the property of women and
were stolen by the men; and finally, the visual interdiction to women, who are
prohibited from seeing the instruments and/or the musicians in action. In my
research about the jurupari rituals among the Tukano (Piedade 1997), I found that
this visual interdiction is accompanied by an audio obligation; that is, although they
are not allowed to see the instruments and/or the musicians in action, the women
must not distance themselves from the source of the sound. In fact, the women must
remain in the Tukano village and hear the music, because they are the ritual audience,
along with the spirits. This finding is largely true for the case of the Upper Xingu, and
for other locations (Journet 2011).
It is important to note that in the ethnological literature the sacred flutes are not
always flutes from an organological perspective, as for example the jurupari trumpets
in north-western Amazonia. In the same way, the term ‘sacred’ is inadequate and
1
Musical motif here means the elementary melodic–rhythmic units, mostly very brief. Although it is rather clear
that the Wauja do recognise them, it seems to me that there is no native term for it.
308 A. T. de Camargo Piedade
fairly questionable, but nevertheless I will use the designation ‘sacred flutes’ given that
it has become an accepted or conventional expression in the ethnological literature.2
This being said, I begin with a brief description of the Xinguano ritual system,
followed by a discussion of Wauja cosmology and shamanism, after which I will
briefly describe and comment upon the kawoká flute and the iamurikumã rituals.
The Xinguano Ritual System and Sacred Flutes

The socio-political system of Upper Xingu, which has unique characteristics for the
Amazonian region, regulates the life of the different Xinguano peoples and is
particularly manifest in intertribal interactions such as rituals, exchange ceremonies,
marriages, kinship relations and shamanic practices. The artistic and aesthetic
dimension is essential in this system, as can be recognised in large rituals such as
the kwarup, the yawari and the iamurikumã, where the system is expressed in the
articulation of cultural differences (Menezes Bastos 1995; Menget 1993). These rituals
integrate and fortify the local societies, causing the alliances to circulate and ritually
absorbing the alterities (Franchetto 2001: 149). Pillars of the social system, the
Xinguano rituals configure a type of lingua franca for the region (Menezes Bastos
1999) and place music at the centre of the social system, because they are essentially
musical rituals (Basso 1985: 243–61). The sacred flute and the iamurikumã rituals are
also inscribed in this context.
All of the Xinguano groups have sacred flutes, which always have an important
position in their cosmologies (they are called kawoká by the Wauja and Mehináku,
yaku’i by the Kamayurá and kagutu by the Kuikúro and Kalapalo). It can be affirmed
that the cosmological centrality of the sacred flutes finds a spatial expression in the
architecture of the Xinguano villages, because at the centre of the courtyards of these
circular villages is a structure where the flutes must be stored: the so-called ‘flute house’
or ‘men’s house’. The Wauja and the Mehináku call it the kuwakuho, the Kamayurá call
it the tapyy and the Kalapalo call it the kwakúto. The men’s house is more than a house,
it is a social institution, a type of club to which all the adult men of the village belong.
This type of institution is present in various cultures around the world and is normally
related to certain practices such as male initiation, the production of warriors, the
revelation of secrets exclusive to men and relations with supernatural entities: I call this
the ‘society of the men’s house’. In these societies, the men’s house reinforces ties of
fraternity and solidarity among the men and the opposition of gender, given that
women are excluded from this community. The existence of this social institution, and
therefore of a society of the men’s house, is revealed by an exclusive physical space for
men; for example, a building like the Xinguano men’s house that houses male meetings
and activities. Note, however, that not every society with a men’s house restricts this
space exclusively to men, as is the case of the Tukano maloca, where women can
2
For example, the idea of ‘sacred’ instruments presupposes the existence of ‘not-sacred’ or ‘profane’ ones, and
in the case of Xinguano musical instruments one may argue that all of them are in some sense sacred.
circulate freely. On the other hand, the Tukano have sacred jurupari flutes that are
stored in secret places, buried under the waters of small streams (Hugh-Jones 1979;
Piedade 1999). This points to the fact that the men’s house and the flute house are not
exactly the same thing. I have argued that the complex of the sacred flutes is a variant of
the institution of the men’s house that is particularly marked by the existence of the
characteristics mentioned above: aerophones exclusive to men, an origin myth in which
the flutes at first pertained to women and a visual prohibition/audio obligation (Piedade
2004). Thus, a society with sacred flutes may not have a specific building for men (as is
the case of the Tukano maloca, which is not an exclusive space for men), or, on the
contrary, a society with the physical structure of the house for men may not have sacred
flutes (the case of the Bororo and of the Kïsêdjê described by Seeger in this volume).
Various ethnographies of the Upper Xingu have provided information about the
precarious situation of the Xinguano houses of flutes, which at times seem
abandoned, and for this reason the instruments are sometimes stored in other
locations, always clandestinely and under the guard of their owners. Nevertheless,
instead of considering this phenomenon to be the result of disuse or cultural
decadence, I prefer to look at this fact as a profound characteristic of this institution;
that the material fragility of the Xinguano men’s house is derived from a
cosmological condition. In Gregor’s view, the extensive proximity between mother
and son in this society has long-lasting psychological consequences; for this reason
boys must undergo intense puberty rituals that serve to ‘pull them out’ of the
feminine world (Gregor 1985). The author believes that this liberation, in reality, is
never completed because adult men suffer from an incomplete identification with the
masculine role. According to this perspective, the men’s house would be a type of
palliative institution, which dramatises the differences and reinforces the masculine
identity. In addition to this idea, von den Steinen (1940 [1894], 1942 [1886])
observed the material precariousness of these buildings at the end of the nineteenth
century, which suggests that this fragile condition is systemic.
The Wauja men’s house is therefore the flute house, although not of all the flutes. In
fact, the Wauja have various aerophones: the watana double flute, the iapojatekana pan
flute, the clarinets talapi and tankwara, the laptawana trumpet, the matapu bullroarer,
the mutukutãi globular gourd flute and the kawoká, kuluta and kawokátãi flutes.3 The
latter three constitute the sacred flute complex: the kawoká flute is the principal one, the
heart of the flute system; the kuluta flutes are shorter and lighter replicas, but easier to
play; and the kawokátãi flute (‘small kawoká’) is a miniature of the kawoká flute, the
size of an alto/treble recorder4 and used for learning the kawoká repertoire and in
certain shamanic rituals (Coelho 1988). The family of sacred aerophones also includes
the matapu bullroarer, used in the pequi festival, the mutukutãi, and an idiophone that
is now rare: the trocano pulupulu.5 The kawoká flutes are therefore usually stored inside
3
For a detailed description of the Wauja instruments, see Mello (1999).
4
An internal duct flute from the recorder family, the alto recorder measures circa 13 inches long.
5
For a description of the kinship relations in the family of the Kamayurá sacred instruments, see Menezes Bastos
(1999: 32).
the flute house and when they are played, whether inside this house or in the patio of
the village, all women enter their houses and close the doors, to respect the visual
prohibition. If a woman sees the instruments, she will be punished by collective rape.6
The ritual of the flutes can be inter-tribal or intra-tribal. In the first case, as part of
the Xinguano ceremony, it includes a large number of participants from other local
groups who are invited by a host group and there is a rigorous etiquette to be
respected. In the case of the intra-tribal ritual, the number of participants in the ritual
is much more restricted and, at least in the case of the Wauja, is related to the process
of curing a sick person, as is the case of many other internal rituals that are related to
the spirits. Like the apapaatai festivals, which involve curing and maintenance of
health, the sacred flute ritual can be seen as a payment of tributes in the Wauja
cosmic economy (Piedade 2004).7 The health of the Wauja is subject to dual taxation:
the fees for the pajés (who are generally called ‘shamans’) are high, the costs of
organising the ritual are added to them and there is still the ritual itself as payment of
taxes to the apapaatai. But there is no other option for an ill person; he must meet
these costs, given that the results are very effective and necessary, not only for him
but for the entire community. With the correct payment of the cosmic fees, the
predator is transformed into a protector, an allied apapaatai who safeguards his
former captive from other dangerous apapaatai who are always around the Wauja. If
the disease is a form of captivity, the cure is a reversal: the captured captures his
persecutor. In short, the rituals of the kawoká–iamurikumã complex are a type of
aesthetic payment whose currency is the beauty created by the apapaatai that is being
returned to its creator. Better to understand these points, it is necessary to take a brief
incursion into Wauja cosmology.
Cosmology
According to Wauja cosmogony, what is now the visible world, this platform of
material phenomena where humans, animals and plants live, was at first the world of
the ierupoho people. The Wauja were poor proto-humans who lived in the darkness
of a termite nest, without fire or water, and for this reason cooked their fish in the
warmth of their armpits and drank their own urine. One day, the demiurge kamo
(‘sun’) came and brought light and thus the Wauja left this dwelling and began to live
like humans. Meanwhile, the ierupoho, who could not be exposed to light, escaped to
the forest and to the deep waters. They were transformed into apapaatai spirits, and
made masks to hide from the light. As the apapaatai live in a world of exile, they
were forced to give up their condition as ierupoho, so their character is associated
6
Although this punishment is largely known in the ethnography of the region, there are very few evidences of
actual occurrences of this kind of rape. One documented case, which took place in 1950, is described in Galvão
(1996: 343).
7
The Apapaatai Festival is a mask ritual in which masked dancers, representing several apapaatai spirits, enter
the village and dance in its central area; see Mello (2005) and Barcelos Neto (2004).
with revenge and they are feared for their capacity to create diseases among the
Wauja.
The apapaatai called kawoká, considered the most powerful and dangerous, was
the only one who, instead of creating his mask, created a flute and took refuge in it, so
it can be said that the sacred flute is the mask of the kawoká and his music is his
epiphany. Fausto (2011) suggested that these sacred flutes are equivalent to the masks
used in other Xinguano festivals, faces that give animals and spirits the capacity to
communicate. In fact, a comparison of flutes and masks in this respect reveals a
parallel between music and iconography in the Amerindian cosmologies as was noted
by Lévi-Strauss (1981) and brings echoes of the question of the inscription of
memory for peoples without writing (Fausto and Severi forthcoming). This theme,
memory, is an essential issue in this article, in terms of understanding the shamanic
dimension of the masters of the music, which I will consider next.
The Wauja cosmos is inhabited by the apapaatai, invisible entities that perform a
crucial role in the life of humans. All of the Xinguano groups have this category of
spirits; for example, among the Kamayurá, where Menezes Bastos (1999) translates
mama’ẽ, the Kamayurá word for apapaatai as ‘that inexhaustible of extreme essence’.
The definition expresses the sense of excess, extreme, similar to Franchetto’s (1996)
description of the itséke spirits among the Carib-speaking Kuikúro. Endowed,
therefore, with this existential excess, in principle essentially dangerous and evil, the
apapaatai also exhibit various beneficial and reliable characteristics in their relations
with the humans, when they are tamed through ritual, thus coming to act as
protectors of the formerly ill against other dangerous apapaatai.
The world of the apapaatai, the place of exile from this visible world of the
humans, is not far: according to the shamanic discourse, the apapaatai only appear
not to be immediately present in this world but in fact their world is right here—their
village is close although it is invisible. It is interesting to note that the question of
being able to see is deeply important in the Wauja cosmology, both in respect of the
invisibility of the apapaatai and in the visual prohibition of the sacred flutes
(Piedade 2004).
The apapaatai masks are not only images or symbols of their creators, they are
existential extensions (Piedade 2004); that is, living copies of the spirit that become
active in the ritual situation. In the case of the kawoká flute mask, music is the strongest
mark of their immediate presence: the Wauja flautists say that the flute music is the
speech of kawoká, so when the flutes are blown, it is his spirit that is given voice.
Therefore, it can be said in semiotic terms that the flute music is an index of the spirit’s
immediate presence.
The centrality of the sacred flutes in the Xinguano socio-cultural system is not only
expressed in the spatial arrangement of the village and the cosmology, but also in the
mythology: an aunaki (‘story’) tells that the sacred flutes originally belonged to the
women and that they were stolen from them by the men through an attack made
with the scary sound of the matapu bullroarer. In the Xinguano realm, this myth,
besides its congruence with the three characteristics of the sacred flute complex,
reveals that gender relations are an essential dimension of the kawoká–iamurikumã

complex.8 The sphere of romantic relations and sex is extremely important, notably
in the iamurikumã, the ritual of women. I agree with Mello (1999, 2005, 2011) that
these two rituals form a complex, constituting two sides of the same coin, so they
should be studied together. The work of Mello and my own observations of the
iamurikumã ritual, which I am planning to carry out in future fieldwork with the
Wauja, will certainly shed additional light on this network of rituals. The musical
connections between these two rituals were initially studied by Mello (1999, 2005,
2011) and, among the Kuikúro, by Montagnani (2011).9 In sum, the dimension of
sexuality and romantic relations is of extreme importance for the Wauja, determining
the entire dynamic of ritual and social life. The universe of the sacred flutes, which is
omnipresent in the Upper Xingu, engages the dangerous world of the spirits with the
Xinguano socio-cultural system, gender relations and ritual practices.
The music of the sacred flutes is very much appreciated by the Xinguano people in
general, including the women who compose the ritual’s audience, together with the
apapaatai. In the iamurikumã ritual the women sing songs that they say are the same
as the music of the flutes. The analysis shows that in fact there are important musical
and symbolic cross-references between these two rituals, and that there is a grammar
that goes beyond music, a fact that appears to be found throughout the Upper Xingu
(Franchetto and Montagnani 2011; Fausto, Franchetto and Montagnani 2011; Mello
2005). To continue this analysis, it is necessary to comment on aspects of Wauja
shamanism.
Shamanism
One of the fundamental distinctions of Wauja shamanism is that it includes three
classes of specialisation of the pajé: iatamá, iakapá and pukaiiekeho. The iatamá is
the smoker pajé, he who can conduct shamanic curing sessions using song, prayer
and smoke. No one can choose to be an iatamá but becomes a pajé by action of an
apapaatai who approaches the person through disease or dream: the spirits ‘make’
the iatamá (apapaatai otumawiu, ‘apapaatai-worked’); that is, a spirit conducted the
construction of a person who is chosen by it to be iatamá. The pajé pukaiiekeho is an
iatamá who learns the songs of the pukai, an important and grave ritual of collective
shamanism. In this ritual, the pukaiiekeho conducts the entire action and is
accompanied by a group, the smoker pajés iatamá. Meanwhile, the pajé iakapá is
basically an iatamá who revealed a special capacity and who chose to go deeper into
the shamanic arts, and only after the entire difficult learning period became a
clairvoyant pajé, who can see the spirit world (see below).
Thus, only one type of highly specialised pajé can enter a trance and see the world
of the apapaatai: the pajé iakapá, who is clairvoyant, can clearly see the cosmos as it
8
Gender relations are particularly important in Amazonian and Melanesian societies, as shown by Gregor and
Tuzin (2001).
9
In addition, the seminal book by Basso (1985) must be mentioned in this context.
is. According to the Wauja ontology, the world of the apapaatai is imminent, it is
present here and now, ‘their village is very close by’, as the Wauja say, pointing
alongside, despite the fact that humans cannot see it. This co-presence in space–time,
however, does not exclude the original condition of exile in which the apapaatai are
found. This apparent contradiction is certainly based on the question of visibility,
given that the entire structure of the world developed from the appearance of light
that allows seeing things. Not being able to see the apapaatai and not being able to
see the flutes are gestures with a common background. The Wauja concept of ‘seeing’
(unupa) implies being co-present to the being that is open and revealed by sight.
Unupa implies not only receiving the image or looking at it but also allows being in
the world together with what is seen. When something cannot be seen, the co-
presence is inhibited by non-vision; what is not seen is not open, although it is there.
It is like saying, ‘If I do not see what is there, I am not there’ or ‘If I cannot see what is
there, what is there is not together with me, it does not belong to the world that
surrounds me’. This cosmological approach to the question of visibility also has
important ethical consequences, suggested by the human condition relative to the
apapaatai according to the Wauja: they frequently say apapaatai unupapai aitsu, ‘The
apapaatai are watching us’. This expression reveals the cosmic inequality, an
uncomfortable position of the Wauja to be constantly seen (and to have their
thoughts heard) by the spirits constituting a foundation for all their ethical and
political behaviour (Piedade 2004).
The intra-tribal version of the ritual of the sacred flutes is related to the issues of
cure and the maintenance of health.10 It all begins when an individual becomes sick.
This process of becoming sick is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic. As shown by
Mello (2005), in order to be well (awojopai) it is important to think well and do good
things, which is beautiful and brings beauty. However, the apapaatai can hear the
thoughts of the Wauja, which brings another dimension to this process. The Wauja
discourse describes a conception of the audible world in which human thoughts have
sound, an audio reality imperceptible for humans but not for the apapaatai: thoughts
can be heard by the spirits. This capacity can be understood as an advantage, a
mechanism at the service of cosmic control, a way for the spirits to exercise vigilance
over humans concerning social and moral rules. This reveals another aspect of the
inequality in the Wauja cosmology: only the apapaatai can see both themselves and
the world of the humans, and in addition they can hear the Wauja’s thoughts.
If, on the one hand, the apapaatai are harmful and dangerous avengers and can be
seen as the watchers of discipline, as controllers of Wauja behaviour, on the other
hand they have various qualities considered beneficial and worth trusting. If the ritual
is pleasing and provides food to these spirits, they become allied to the formerly ill
and protect them against the dangerous actions of other apapaatai. The problem for
the Wauja is that when one thinks what one should not think, this is understood as
10
Both rituals have intra-tribal and inter-tribal versions, which differ in many points. The material presented
here is taken from the analysis of intra-tribal rituals.
desiring what cannot be obtained and the spirits are capable of hearing these thoughts
and taking advantage of the gap that this can cause in the person’s ethical–aesthetic
integrity. They take advantage of a lack of harmony that breaks the protection of the
good and beautiful thinking and introduce an object of bewitchment directly within
the body of this individual. This object is a miniature of the spirit, an existential
extension of the apapaatai remaining encrusted within the individual, causing a
disease. If not cured, the person can die and her soul will belong to the spirit.
The diagnosis of the pajé iakapá is made through a tobacco-induced trance that
allows him to see the world of the apapaatai and to reveal which spirit or set of spirits
is responsible for the disease in question. After this verification, the pajé iakapá
begins the curing process through the removal of the miniature of the apapaatai
encrusted in the body of the diseased person. This is done through ritual singing and
smoking tobacco. There is an interesting remission with the audible world: according
to Beaudet (1997), in shamanic songs, tobacco smoke also has the function of making
the sound visible, of presenting the materiality of the blown sound (see also Menezes
Bastos and Piedade 1999).
The next phase of the treatment is the ritual itself, for which the Wauja make the
masks of the respective spirits that cause the disease in question. If this is kawoká,
flutes will be made instead of masks; the master of the flutes will make a new trio of
flutes to be presented to the patient in treatment. When these new instruments are
ready, there is a ritual performance in which they are played and are officially
delivered to their owner. Thus, each person ill of kawoká becomes a kawokawekeho
(‘owner of kawoká’), and has under his responsibility a trio of instruments.11 He must
care for them and it is his obligation to participate in all of the kawoká flute rituals
for the rest of his life. When he dies, the trio of instruments will be burned.
As outlined at the beginning of this article, there is a strict relationship between the
kawoká flutes and the iamurikumã songs, in such a way that these two rituals
constitute a single symbolic complex with two sides: the kawoká–iamurikumã
complex. A description of this complex is essential for understanding the musical
cycles, so I will now describe the iamurikumã ritual.
Iamurikumã
The iamurikumã ritual, as practised by the Wauja women, is understood as one of the
sides of a musical–ritual complex that involves humans and apapaatai spirits, with its
other face being the world of the kawoká flutes.12 The music, through its
formalisation and the interplay around meanings and proportions, is considered
the central element of this ritual, constituting the ideal form of expression of
emotions.
11
For more about the concept of owners, quite common in the Amazon, see Fausto (2008).
12
This ritual is practised by all of the Xinguano groups, but I will only comment here on the Wauja intra-tribal
version as analysed by Mello (2005), which I was also able to attend.
It can be said that the iamurikumã ritual revises the myth of the transformation of
Wauja women into powerful and dangerous spirits called iamurikumã. In the
narrative, the women are tricked by the men who, instead of returning from a fishing
trip with fish, decide to make masks and kill all the women. Subsequently, the women
decide to eat certain fruits that make them crazy, and begin to sing and dance at the
centre of the village, which normally only the men do.13 The women paint themselves
like men and sing as they leave the village through a hole in the earth, taking a
trajectory to the other side of the sky, to the village of the dead, where they establish
the village of the iamurikumã.
During the entire ritual, the women take the centre of the village and in one group
sing the songs of the iamurikumã in unison. There are two principal musical
repertoires. First, songs that make direct references to the origin myth of the
iamurikumã, constituting the sub-repertoire entitled iamurikumã. This is a type of
script for the ritual, a narrative based on the sequence of events of the myth. Thus,
each song narrates a moment of the history and can be repeated over various days,
thus evoking the non-linearity of the ritual in relation to the narrativity of the myth.
Second, during the entire period of the ritual, some songs deal directly with romantic
relationships, jealousy, envy, romance, sex and facts of daily life. These themes
constitute a musical sub-repertoire entitled kawokakumã. This sub-repertoire is not
related to a myth, but to the passions that circulate in the romantic world of the
Wauja, to the feelings of men and women in the story, and it is precisely here that a
musical bridge is made between the iamurikumã and the kawoká, as I will explain
drawing on Mello (1999, 2005, 2011).
The kawokakumã sub-repertoire has profound connections with the music of the
kawoká flutes. The affirmation of the Wauja women that the ‘music of the
iamurikumã is flute music’ is highly revealing: By saying this, they do not refer to
something generic, as if anything that they sing could be ‘flute music’. In fact, one
series of songs in the iamurikumã ritual is not considered ‘flute music’, the songs of
the sub-repertoire iamurikumã itself. Only the other sub-repertoire, kawokakumã,
has very clear connections with the flutes: these songs present many similar motifs
and are also classified in suites that have the same names as the suites of music for the
kawoká flutes. In this article, with ‘iamurikumã songs’ I refer to this kawokakumã
sub-repertoire.
Analysing this repertoire, Mello concluded that it is anchored in musical
operations that are as complex as the flute music; operations that require a high
degree of knowledge on the part of the women singers, mainly the mistress
iamurikumã singer. Unlike the kawoká flute repertoire, which is always executed in
blocks of named suites, kawokakumã songs are performed alternating in different
styles and interspersed with songs from the other sub-repertoire, iamurikumã, which
refer more to the origin myth.
13
According to the mythic narrative, the women eat unspecified ‘wild fruits’.
The iamurikumã ritual displays much joking and considerable provocation

between men and women: the former leave the centre of the village, which is their
space par excellence, to give place to the iamurikumã singers, who provoke them with
more aggressive behaviour, critical discourses and spicy lyrics to the songs. The sense
of jealousy is simultaneously incited and controlled by means of this ritual. Mello
(2005) shows that jealousy as a passion is essential in the socio-emotional equilibrium
of Wauja society.14 It must be produced so that romantic relationships have interest
in being maintained but at the same time it is a passion, like hate, that must be
controlled. In excess, it causes ruptures, harm and disease. In this way, conflicts in the
sphere of love relationships are worked out and regulated through a poetical–musical
form in the iamurikumã ritual.
The kawoká–iamurikumã complex

From the ritual of the kawoká flutes, however, women are excluded. It is prohibited
for them to see what takes place. They are actually required to remain inside their
houses and listen, given that they know that the entire symbolic–musical universe in
question is originally related to the feminine world. Possession of the sacred
instruments grants powers (for the Tukano, see Piedade 1997) and reveals a special
alliance between men and the kawoká spirit. Meanwhile, in the iamurikumã ritual,
the women take this space of power and also some masculine symbols to remember
the myth about the women’s spirit, which holds the capacity for reproduction and the
option for cosmic transformation in the face of male violence. The masculine and the
feminine are at play in these two rituals that form two facets of one symbolic
complex. This complex is distinguished from other ritual sub-systems like the rites of
homage to the dead (kwarúp and yawari), the seasonal festival of pequi (akãi), the
rites of male initiation (pohoká) and feminine initiation (kaijatapá), the festivals of
apapaatai masks and the curing rites (such as pukai) (see Mello 1999).
The kawoká–iamurikumã complex comprises only two musical and gender rituals
and they constitute musical genres that combine to form a single super-genre (Mello
1999). The iamurikumã ritual is said to be a type of counterpart to that of the flutes, a
type of reply of the women to the performance of the kawoká flutes that excludes the
women. According to Mello (2005: 96), Wauja women say that with the iamurikumã
they are puta o-pete (‘getting back’) at the men, realising an exclusively feminine rite,
emphasising the dialogical and complementary relationship between these two rituals.
This interconnection is musically evident in the exchange of musical material
between men and women, which establishes what I call the horizontal human cycle.
But before this, it is necessary to address a very special quality of the musical masters
and their shamanic potential, which allows the verticality in the cycle of musical
exchanges.
14
More precisely uki, ‘jealousy-envy’ (see Mello 2005).
Musical Masters: ‘Clairaudient’ Pajés

The flute master, kawokatupá, is a super expert: in addition to knowing how to
make the flutes and having profound and detailed knowledge of the entire
kawoká musical repertoire including dozens of pieces, their correct classifica-
tion in suites and ordering in performance, he also has great musical ability
in the execution of the lead flute part in the ritual. During the flute ritual,
the master flautist has a great responsibility because the slightest error can
displease the apapaatai who are present as an audience, making them very
angry to the point of breaking the alliance and causing someone’s death.
Therefore, the kawoká flute performance is something extremely serious for the
flautists, particularly for the flute master who must have a great capacity for
concentration. Before beginning each piece, the master remains stationary for a
few seconds in order to recall the order and structure of the pieces that will
follow, in the knowledge that no error may occur. All of these aspects
are important to show that the structural level of the music is absolutely
central. A sacred flute performance involves an effort to achieve perfection in
execution of the musical motifs and in the development of the form in order to
guarantee the beauty and acuity needed to maintain the cosmic balance. For all
of these reasons the kawokatupá needs extensive preparation, including the
physical and psychological factors required to be able to execute a complete
flute ritual.
Thanks to his exceptional memory, the kawokatupá brings to the human world
audio structures from the supernatural world. The iamurikumã mistress has this
same ability and is able to realise this same trans-creation. Both the masters of the
kawoká–iamurikumã complex use mnemonics during the ritual as an aid to
concentration and the memorisation of the music to be played: the iamurikumã
mistress carefully listens to the kawoká flute melodies at the time of the ritual of
flutes, as does the master of flutes, who carefully listens to the iamurikumã songs
during the ritual of women.
Mello (2005) recounts how an iamurikumã mistress acquired a new piece of
music through a dream: after recalling it when waking up, she recognised that this
new piece had the standard elements of the suite entitled sapalá. Then she created
words for this melody and, with that, this piece was transformed into a new song to
be included in the sapalá suite of the iamurikumã songs, which is also a suite of
flute music. This account is even more significant if we note that it involves one of
the Wauja’s broadly accepted compositional processes: that music comes from
dreams. It is said that anyone can dream of new music but only the musical
masters, the apaiwekeho, have the ability to memorise it. This capacity is extremely
special and places the musical masters close to the pajé iakapá, as I will discuss
below.
According to Mello’s account, it is necessary to add words to the melody that was
dreamed, a fact that complicates the processes of signification in the dialogue
between kawoká pieces and kawokakumã songs. The new semantic material is also
memorised when performing the kawokakumã sub-repertoire songs in the

iamurikumã ritual. The women add another layer of meaning, established by the
words to the song, to the instrumental repertoire of the flutes. This meaning also
becomes part of the respective flute pieces, to the point of emerging when the men
play it again in the kawoká ritual. This process takes place both in the case of a new
flute melody captured by the memory of the musical master in the kawoká ritual as
well as by new songs inserted by the musical mistress directly from a dream in the
iamurikumã repertoire, thus opening the musical production process to both men
and women.
In summary, the careful listening of the iamurikumã mistress during the flute
ritual allows the mistress iamurikumã singer to recognise a new flute piece that
is played and which she will later work with by creating words and adapting the
piece to be transformed into a song that will be incorporated in the repertoire of
the iamurikumã ritual. Thus, both the mistress iamurikumã singer and the flute
master can be considered a type of pajé iakapá, but instead of being clairvoyant
they are ‘clairaudient’ pajés: they have the capacity to hear clearly and their
greatest attribute is memory. The idea of clairaudience (Schafer 1977) refers
here to the extraordinary capacity to perceive clearly the audio world, including
the sound dimension of the apapaatai. The essence is not only to hear, but to
listen, in the sense of understanding what one is hearing, and in this way to be
able to capture and memorise what is heard. Given that it is not possible to
memorise music without a previous understanding of the details of musical
sounds and structures, it follows that the musical masters have a great analytical
ability that allows them to conduct comprehensive listening to the musical
structures of the music, dreamed of and heard obliquely, and they can therefore
memorise and perform them in the ritual of the humans. This ability is a
shamanic power, because its agents are capable of perceiving, understanding,
memorising and transporting music and sonorous structures to the human
reality of the Wauja that are inherent products of the world of the apapaatai.
These musical pajés, through deeper and intelligible contact with the spirits, can
transport musical information from the supernatural world—the immanent and
imperceptible world of the spirits—to ordinary reality. This ‘musical informa-
tion’ is not merely audible, but effectively involves a language: the kawoká music
is understood as the speech of the spirits; a shamanic ability for translation and
elocution of the words of the spirits, which is also at the level of cure, given that
beauty and musical-discursive perfection are essential elements in this process.
In addition, because the alliance between humans and spirits depends on the
accuracy of the ritual, the shamanic role of the musical masters can be extended
beyond the case of an ill person in particular: it involves guaranteeing the health
of all Wauja society. We can now turn to the description of the cycles of
musical creation and exchanges that are not limited to sound but also include
discourse itself.
The Dual Cycle of Musical Exchanges

The Supernatural Vertical Cycle
The creative cycle begins in human dreams, where the spirits frequently play and sing
their music to the dreamer. This can occur with anyone, but most dreamers do not
remember the music when they wake up; this only occurs with people gifted with the
highly specialised memory of the clairaudient pajés. After the musical pajé receives
new music in a dream, he remembers it after waking and is able to perform it. With
that it is transmitted to the other musicians, who perform and incorporate it into the
repertoire of the suite to which it was designated. This new material will be executed in
the next version of the appropriate ritual. According to the native discourse, on this
occasion the spirit is present and listening, thus having the original composition that
he delivered to the humans in a dream returned to him. The piece, however, passed
through a process of transformation and performance. Consequently, when it returns
to its spiritual source, the new composition is a humanised version of the music of the
apapaatai. This constitutes the vertical-supernatural cycle established in the kawoká–
iamurikumã complex.15
The kawoká flute music is comprised of the apapaatai homonym itself. This is why
the Wauja affirm that the music ‘belongs to an apapaatai’: we may say that it comes
from him, it is his creation, his property. But this is not enough; the apapaatai do not
compose for themselves, only to create a music that will remain restricted to their
supernatural world. For some reason, the apapaatai deliver this music to the humans
through dreams. This is certainly a gift but also the transmission of an obligation. The
apapaatai gets back the immaterial object it donated, transformed and enriched by
human experience. This delivery is made as part of a ritual that is completely planned
as a spectacle for the appreciation of the apapaatai, for their enjoyment, pleasure and
satisfaction.
As indicated above, the flute master is capable of memorising and playing on his
own flute the music he received in a dream. His powerful memory is based on his
strong musical knowledge and his ability to concentrate on what is most essential—
and from there to capture its design. Part of this process is the recognition of the
standard motifs of the suite that takes place rapidly for the flautists, who can
normally recognise to which suite a piece belongs after hearing it for a few seconds.
The new melody will be rehearsed and performed in the ritual, contextualised,
animated by human breath in the wooden flutes and danced to. Here, the great
transformation occurs.
In the case of the iamurikumã music the transformation is even more intense. The
iamurikumã spirit does not create the words to the songs. Songs are received in a
dream as melodies sung in an incomprehensible language. Nevertheless, the
iamurikumã mistress is capable of memorising the song entirely and will
15
This vertical cycle can also be present in other Wauja repertoires or other Xinguano music, but treating these
instances exhaustively would exceed the scope of this paper.
subsequently create words for the song. This is another creative poetic work for which
the mistresses of the iamurikumã songs are responsible, and certainly an element that
enriches the supernatural melody with traces of living history and human passions,
an element the apapaatai receive at the time of the ritual. Therefore, this process
likewise pertains to the vertical supernatural cycle that is established between humans
and spirits; on one hand between the kawoká and the men, and on the other hand
between iamurikumã and the women.
The Horizontal Human Cycle

The kawoká–iamurikumã complex reveals another creative musical cycle that takes
place horizontally in the realm of the Wauja gender relations. The cycle is active
when one of the two rituals is underway, always occurring simultaneously with the
supernatural vertical cycle. The process is as follows: the music performed in one of
these rituals will be carefully memorised by the specialist master of the other ritual,
who retains in his or her memory a new composition that has also been performed.
Then he or she can practise this new material in his or her own ritual medium,
transmit it to the others, rehearse and incorporate the material at the next execution
of the ritual. A new iamurikumã song will thus be transformed into a new kawoká
piece and normally will get a title that refers to the content of the lyrics. In the same
way, a new flute piece would be given lyrics and be transformed into an
iamurikumã song.
There are multiple transformations in this material: the instrumental piece receives
lyrics and becomes a song (note that this involves the inclusion of a new semantic
layer); and the material performed by men is transformed into material performed by
women, and vice versa (here it involves the transmission of material that is adapted to
be able to belong to another layer of genre). This is the human horizontal cycle,
between men and women, which is established at the core of the kawoká–
iamurikumã complex.
Conclusion
As shown above, the material captured and recreated by men and performed for the
spirit is recaptured and transformed when recreated and performed by women for the
other spirit and vice versa. All of this takes place as if one spirit was communicating
with another, using the human world as a channel. It seems as if one spirit created a
new musical material primarily aimed at the other spirit, with the result that the dual
cycle consequently functions as a communication between spirits. Therefore, the
division of the communicative sphere of the ritual into two spheres that revolve in
simultaneous cycles results in a proposal for interpreting the rituals in the kawoká–
iamurikumã complex: because what happens in the indigenous reality is a single and
integrated process of co-production between Wauja men, women and apapaatai
spirits. This co-production is precisely the heart of the kawoká–iamurikumã complex.
It is nothing else than a single grand cycle of cosmic communication, transmission
and transformation of immaterial objects. These objects first leave a spiritual source
and then return to the world of the apapaatai enriched by human agency, and
the process of enriching is itself musical. The precious motifs are embellished by the
accompaniment and contextualised by the ritual. The iamurikumã songs are
humanised through the bits of history that are aggregated to the original memories,
and it is perhaps beautiful to postulate that this entire Wauja musical cosmology
explains the desire of the apapaatai to communicate among each other, without the
consent of, and at the mercy of, humans.
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Instruments of Power: Musicalising the

Other in Lowland South America
Jonathan D. Hill
Indigenous peoples across Amazonia make and play a rich variety of flutes and other
wind instruments in their collective rituals and ceremonies. These instruments are
cultural tools for enacting semiotic transformations that are central to indigenous
understandings of human and non-human powers to control social reproduction and
natural fertility. This essay will explore collective performances of flutes and other
aerophones as ways of harnessing powers of predation and reproduction in two
Amazonian communities, the Wauja of the Upper Xingu and the Wakuénai/Curripaco
of the Upper Rio Negro. My theoretical approach to musicalising the other is offered as a
critique of perspectivism. I will demonstrate how musicalising the other, embodying
intrinsic linkages between life-giving and life-taking forces, is a more nuanced process of
making history through engaging others, sharing the space–time of others (rather than
violently consuming them) and always returning to one’s own identity.
Keywords: Flute Music; Transformations; Sacred Rituals; Ceremonial Exchanges;

Amazonia
Introduction
In this essay, I aim to broaden and deepen a comparative theoretical approach to the
study of indigenous Amazonian musical performances (see Hill and Chaumeil 2011b)
that has begun to demonstrate the central importance of collective male performances
of flutes, trumpets and other wind instruments in mediating relations between men
and women, kin and affine, living and dead, and human and non-human beings. A
great diversity of aerophones, and especially flutes, are made and played in
Jonathan Hill is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University and has done extensive fieldwork with
the Wakuénai (also known as Curripaco) of Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s. He is the author of Keepers of the
Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society (University of Arizona Press, 1993), Made-
from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History in an Amazonian Community (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
and numerous articles and chapters on music, myth and history in Lowland South America. He is co-editor with
Jean-Pierre Chaumeil of Burst of Breath: Indigenous Ritual Wind Instruments in Lowland South America
(University of Nebraska Press, 2011). Correspondence to: Jonathan Hill, Department of Anthropology, Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA. Email: jhill@siu.edu

324 J. D. Hill
Amazonian communities, and this proliferation of wind instruments is to some

extent a reflection of the diverse range of natural sounds, plant and animal species,
and non-human spirit beings with which (or whom) indigenous people are
interacting through their music (Hill and Chaumeil 2011a). The immense geographic
distribution of flutes and other wind instruments across Lowland South America is
also undoubtedly related to the pathways of ancient migrations and trade relations
within and across the region’s complex network of rivers, streams and interfluvial
trails (Heckenberger 2002; Hill and Santos-Granero 2002; Hornborg 2005; Hornborg
and Hill 2011). But the question of why so many Amazonian communities have
developed such a diversity of wind instruments and made this special class of
artefacts into the centrepiece of their ritual and ceremonial practices requires an
explanation that goes beyond natural diversity and intercultural histories. Instead, it
is necessary to explore the importance of indigenous understandings of breath and
breathing as expressions of life-force and the associated meanings of wind
instruments as cultural tools for channelling this life-force into activities designed
to collectivise shamanic abilities to return to life from death and to ensure the
continued fertility of animal nature as well as the regeneration of human social
worlds.
Collective performances of wind instruments are closely related to shamanic
powers of killing, dying and returning to life, which invoke natural processes that are
simultaneously concerned with the reproductive behaviours of ‘animal’ species—fish,
birds, game animals and various spirits—and images of predatory violence. In some
cases, such as the Waiwai of Guyana and Brazil (Fock 1963), the musical sounds,
melodies and rhythms produced with wind instruments are considered to be
augmentations or amplified forms of shamanic breath. When groups of men play
flutes or other wind instruments in exchange ceremonies, their actions can be
understood as the musical creation of a collective shamanic space of relations
between living and dead humans. Shamanic breathing, blowing of tobacco smoke and
the playing of aerophones are ways of producing sounds to make the invisible into
the visible, at least for the initiated adult men who make and play these instruments.
In effect, the men’s seeing, making and playing of sacred flutes and trumpets
transports them into a shamanic realm of power that allows them to participate
directly in processes of mythic creation, destruction and transformation.1
Collective performances of wind instruments in Lowland South America must be
understood in relation to shamanic powers of journeying among the various
categories of human and non-human, living and dead spirit-beings. In some cases,
the integration of shamanic powers and sacred instrumental music is so complete
1
A similar process of collectively experiencing shamanic visualisations occurs entirely through vocal musical
performances among the Kayabi, a Tupi-speaking community living in Central Brazil. In shamanic healing
rituals, maraca songs require groups of young male kin of the patient to repeat the shaman’s sung narratives line
by line in a dialogical, or call and response, style. This collective singing is said to allow shamans and male
chorus members to perceive powerful spirits, events and places from the distant, mythic past. Listening to and
participating in maraca singing allows participants ‘to feel as though they “have been where the shaman has
been”’ (Oakdale 2005: 89).
that we can refer to them as shamanic musical configurations or analytical units in

which shamanic and musical spheres are systematically linked together.2 Although
the integration of shamanic power and instrumental music is most clearly and
vividly demonstrated in contexts where the playing of sacred wind instruments is
understood to participate directly in mythic processes of bodily, social and cosmic
creation and destruction, similar processes of musicalising the other3—or singing-
into-being, dancing-into-being and playing-into-being the powerful beings of myth
(Basso 1985)—are also centrally important in the instrumental music performed in
contexts of exchange relations between communities of kin and affines.
The two case studies chosen for detailed comparative study in this essay include
examples of both kinds of shamanic musical configuration. The Wauja of central
Brazil provide an unusually vivid illustration of how shamanic breath and the playing
of sacred flutes are two manifestations of the same ritual powers. Each set of sacred
kawoká flutes is made to commemorate the recovery of an individual man or woman
from life-threatening illness, and the playing of the flutes transforms these shamanic
recoveries into collective ritual power to regenerate nature and society. The music of
kawoká flutes is not an isolated genre but overlaps in multiple ways with women’s
ritual singing, and it is only through exploring these complex interweavings of
intertextual linkages between men’s flute music and women’s singing that the deeper
connections between sickness, death, sexuality and fertility can be understood (Mello
2011; Piedade 2011, this issue). The Wakuénai, or Curripaco, of southernmost
Venezuela play a variety of ceremonial flutes and trumpets during intercommunal
ceremonial exchanges between kin and affines, performances that derive from the
actions of a powerful mythic trickster who created these wind instruments and
associated genres of singing so that people would know how to ask actual or potential
affines for food and drink (Hill 2009a).4 These ceremonial wind instruments are
closely related with natural processes of regeneration, such as the migratory and
spawning behaviours of fish and other aquatic animal species, and my analysis will
demonstrate how musical theme and variation is used in musicalising the social space
between kin and affines so that both are included within a single ‘naturalised’ mythic
space–time that allows people to acknowledge the other’s otherness.
My theoretical approach to musicalising the other is offered as a critique of
perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1996), not to replace it with another ‘-ism’ but to
2
The concept of ‘shamanic musical configuration’ is a specific kind of ‘musical configuration’ (Beaudet 1997),
which is defined as an analytical unit ‘through which the musical and social spheres are systematically (because
not mechanically) linked together’ (Menezes Bastos and Piedade 2000: 150). In Burst of Breath, we developed
the concept of ‘shamanic musical configuration,’ or analytical units in which ‘shamanic and musical spheres are
systematically linked together’ (Hill and Chaumeil 2011a: 23).
3
Musicalising the other refers to indigenous ways of producing musical sounds as a way of socialising relations
with affines, non-human beings and various categories of ‘others’. This concept of musicalising the other is
explored in detail below.
4
The Wakuénai also have a highly elaborate repertoire of ritual music played on sacred wind instruments that
are regarded as parts of the body of the primordial human being of myth and that participate directly in
shamanic powers of mythic creation and destruction (see Hill 1993, 2009b).
326 J. D. Hill
broaden its overly narrow focus on predation, killing powers and aggressive
transformations (e.g., cannibalistic devouring) of others. My approach agrees with
predation models in so far as both musicalisation and perspectivism start from a
recognition of the fundamental importance of the ambiguous category of affines as a
source of potential conflict in Lowland South America. There is overwhelming
evidence that processes of exchange between affines often take on predatory or other
violent characteristics (e.g., cannibalism or consuming the other). That said, my focus
on musicalisation also calls attention to the limitations of such predation models and
seeks to constructively critique them in two general ways.
First, musicalisation diverges from perspectivism by privileging sound and hearing
over sight and vision. Given the central importance of speech and sound, listening
and hearing, in Amazonian communities (Basso 1985; Beaudet 1993, 1997; Brabec de
Mori 2012; Hill 1993; Hill and Chaumeil 2011b; Menezes Bastos 1978, 1995, 1999;
Seeger 1979, 1991), it is appropriate to develop theoretical models of sociality that are
grounded in specifically Amazonian semiotic ideologies that privilege sound over
vision and other senses for managing the transformative relations between humans
and various kinds of ‘others’ (non-human species and objects, affines, spirit-beings,
etc.). In previous publications (Hill 1993, 1994, 2004), I have used the term
‘musicalisation’ to refer to this process of using non-verbal or semi-verbal patterns
of sound to enact various kinds of social transformation: lifecycle transitions,
shamanic journeys, affinal exchanges, revitalisation movements, political-economic
resistance, and so forth. Musicalisation, or the production of musical sounds as a way
of socialising relations with affines, non-human beings and various categories of
‘others’, is perhaps best understood as a process of creating a naturalised social space
in which human interactions are densely interwoven with the sounds and behaviours
of fish and other non-human animal species. By paying close attention to the details
of musical sounds and their organisation in ritual and ceremonial performances, we
can better understand how indigenous Amazonian peoples enact these transforma-
tions between self and other, human and non-human, living and dead, kin and affine.
Special attention will be given to the use of theme and variation practices and the
associated contrast between, on the one hand, unique melodic phrases that give
expression to heightened powers of creation and transformation, and on the other
standard melodic phrases that anchor such hyperanimacy in repetition, stability and
continuity.
Second, the somewhat narrow emphasis on predatory relations between kin and
affines (and ‘others’ in general) tends to overlook many linguistic and cultural
practices that engage otherness in a more nuanced manner. My approach to
musicalisation builds on a number of recent studies (for example, Hill and Santos-
Granero 2002; Overing and Passes 2000) that have demonstrated how ritual and
ceremonial practices in Amazonia can contribute to harmonious conviviality and
even transform, or ‘domesticate’ (Wright 2011), potentially violent relations into
more peaceful forms of social reproduction and history. The argument developed
here is perhaps most similar to Santos-Granero’s (2007) demonstration that both
predation and conviviality models are required to understand the complexity of social
and religious practices even at the level of internal relations within a single
indigenous community.5 By demonstrating the intrinsic linkages between life-giving
and life-taking forces embodied in collective musical performances, I will demon-
strate how musicalising the other is a more nuanced process of making history
through engaging others, acknowledging the otherness of the other (Basso 2009),
sharing the space–time of others (rather than violently consuming them) and always
returning to one’s own identity.
By giving primary attention to musical sounds, I do not intend to deny that similar
transformations can unfold in other, more visible and tangible dimensions of ritual
performance, such as body ornamentation, masks, petroglyphs, geoglyphs and
consuming or exchanging of foods, but to assert that the musical and auditory
dimensions of ritual and ceremonial performance are regarded as primary by
indigenous Amazonian peoples and should therefore be given similar priority in the
theoretical models developed by anthropologists for interpreting such performances.
Theoretical models based on visual–spatial metaphors run the risk of mistranslating
indigenous linguistic and cultural practices by implicitly placing them into modern
academic epistemologies that privilege visual–spatial representation (e.g., distanced
observation) as a basis for objectivity (Fabian 1983). I propose that the concept of
musicalisation is valid and useful for cross-cultural comparison among indigenous
Amazonian communities precisely because it is a process with deep roots in
indigenous cosmologies and at the same time builds on the insights of both predation
and conviviality models that anthropologists have advanced in recent years.
Men’s Flute-playing and Women’s Singing: A Wauja Poetics of Social Life

The Wauja are an Arawak-speaking community, which forms part of the unique
cultural–historical synthesis of Arawak-speaking, Tupi-speaking and Carib-speaking
communities residing at the headwaters of the Xingu River in central Brazil. As
mentioned earlier, the Wauja complex of sacred flutes are understood as direct
expressions of powerful, disease-causing spirits (apapaatai), and especially the most
powerful of these dangerous spirits, known as kawoká (see Piedade, this issue).
A set of three kawoká flutes is made to commemorate the ritual healing of an
individual man or woman by a shaman, or ‘seer’ (iakapá), who is capable of seeing
the apapaatai and other spirit-beings that remain invisible to non-specialists. The
music of kawoká flutes is called kawokagatakoja, or the ‘speech of the kawoká’
(Piedade 2011: 250). The myriad of dangerous apapaatai spirit-beings are given
material, visual substance in ritual performances in the form of large circular masks
worn by men as they dance on the village plaza. The relationship between kawoká,
the most powerful and dangerous of all the apapaatai spirit-beings, and the sacred
5
See Fausto (2012) for a nuanced argument about the meanings of friendship among the Tupian Parakanã of
Brazil.
328 J. D. Hill
flutes bearing the same name is so direct that no masks are even necessary: ‘The mask
of the kawoká is the flute, and the music is their epiphany’ (Piedade 2011: 244).
Although the kawoká and other apapaatai spirit-beings are regarded in generally
negative terms as sources of disease or even death, they are also considered to be
guardians watching over humanity who can act as protectors of the man or woman
whose recovery from life-threatening illness is commemorated by the set of flutes. So
the flute rituals can be understood as a collective shamanising or purifying of the
Wauja village in which potentially harmful spirit-beings are transformed into sources
of bodily recovery and moral order.
The kawoká flutes are always made and played in sets of three instruments. These
flutes have ducts and four stops, or finger-holes, and they are known as plug flutes
because a deflector (or plug) blocks nearly the entire proximal end of the flute’s bore
except for the airduct (see Piedade 2011). The music of kawoká flutes consists of two
voices, a set of long notes played by the two accompanists, or apprentices, and
melodic variations played by the master-flutist, or kawokatupá, who must have
perfect memory of the kawoká melodies and be able to perform them in exactly the
correct order, ‘because any mistake can disturb the apapaatai, who may thus become
angry, break the alliance, and cause illness and death’ (Piedade 2011: 246). The
prolonged notes played by the two apprentices are highly repetitive and stable not
only within each performance but across several related performances that together
constitute a ‘suite’ of flute pieces. These repetitive phrases have the effect of doubling
or echoing some of the master-flutist’s melodic phrases, thereby creating a dynamic
contrast within each piece between louder passages played by all three flutists and
softer ones played only by the master-flutist.
Contrasting with the apprentices’ repetitive phrases, the master-flutist’s melodic
phrases are unique and highly varied motifs that are based on principles of motific
variation such as ‘augmentation, diminution, transposition, inversion, inclusion,
exclusion, and duplication’ or, even more uniquely, ‘fusion, elipse, commentary,
reiteration, and compression’ (Piedade 2011: 248). The salience of this distinction
between highly repetitive, stabilising notes in the two accompanists’ voices and the
much more dynamic, variable and unique melodic phrasing in the master-flutist’s
voice is given clear recognition in Wauja musical thought: ‘As the flutists say, these
phrases constitute the heart of the kawoká music. It is where the apapaatai “sing,”
while the standard phrases are not sung but “blown”’ (Piedade 2011: 247).6
Wauja men’s sacred kawoká flute music is in itself a powerful example of the
domestication of violent, predatory spirit-beings into sources of health, protection
from evil and renewal of life. However, the genre of men’s sacred flute music is not
performed or understood in isolation; rather, it forms part of a ‘supergenre’ with a
genre of women’s ritual singing called kawokakumã that is performed in rituals
named after a kind of dangerous feminine apapaatai spirit, called iamurikumã (Mello
6
In a related version of this distinction, the Carib-speaking Kuikuru of the Upper Xingu region in Brazil perform
melodic passages on their kaguto flutes that are said to be non-verbal ways of saying, or ‘pronouncing’, the
names of powerful spirit-beings (see Franchetto and Montagnani 2011, 2012).
2011: 270). Iamurikumã is a collective female ritual held annually but in no particular
season of the year, and it can be either intercommunal or intracommunal. Maria
Ignez Cruz Mello recorded more than 200 distinct songs during the intracommunal
iamurikumã ritual held by the Wauja in August through November 2001. The ritual
commemorates the transformation of women into dangerous apapaatai spirit-beings,
called iamurikumã, as part of a mythic struggle to fight back against the men, who
had transformed themselves into apapaatai spirit-beings by making and dancing with
ritual masks (Mello 2011: 261). Some of the women’s songs refer to this mythic
struggle between iamurikumã women and male apapaatai, whereas other songs are
about love relations, envy, jealousy, romance and sex. The latter include gossip-like
commentaries on current and recent sexual affairs among Wauja men and women as
well as with people (i.e., affines) in other communities of the Upper Xingu region.
Within the overall corpus of women’s songs performed in iamurikumã rituals, the
sub-genre called iamurikumã is mostly concerned with mythic themes of competition
between male and female spirit-beings, and the sub-genre known as kawokakumã is
more focused on current sexual relations and associated emotions (Mello 2011: 263).
Wauja women refer to this latter sub-genre of their songs as ‘flute music’ because of
the different ways in which their songs are influenced by, and in turn shape the
meanings of, men’s kawoká flute music. Women may learn the men’s flute melodies
by studying with a master-flutist and then ‘create poems, or verbal texts, to sing to the
originally instrumental pieces’ (Mello 2011: 264), or they can compose new songs that
will be taught to and performed by groups of women before men learn the melodies
and play them as instrumental music. Significantly, even the melodies that originated
as men’s flute pieces take on new meanings as ‘the words of the song aggregate
another layer of meaning to the instrumental repertoire of the flutes’ (2011: 264).
During the women’s collective performances of their kawokakumã songs, the men
will either leave the village to go fishing or provoke the women by yelling somewhat
derogatory comments at them (e.g., ‘iamurikumã is crazy, mean’). The women will
then retaliate by attacking the men with moderate amounts of hitting, scratching and
sexual provocation; ‘there is no clear demarcation between the play, the bluff, and the
threat’ (Mello 2011: 265). However, both the men and the women fully understand
that their actions and emotions are expected to remain within modest proportionality
or intensity.
In terms of musical form, the women’s songs make use of many of the same
principles of motific variation as the master-flutist’s kawoká flute melodies. These
principles include ‘thetic variation, suffixal variation, fusion, neighboring tone type,
interplay alternating major and minor thirds, juxtaposed motif of quotation, addition,
exclusion, rhythmic prolongment, motif of dissolution, and motif of return’ (Mello
2011: 270). It is scarcely surprising and indeed even predictable that women’s singing
and men’s flute-playing would make use of similar compositional principles, since
women are learning men’s flute melodies and vice versa. But in the dimension of
formality versus informality, women’s singing could hardly be more different from
men’s flute-playing. Whereas the latter must be performed only in a strict, unvarying
330 J. D. Hill
order, women’s singing in iamurikumã rituals is entirely non-linear and related only
to the passions associated with men’s and women’s sexual relations.
Wauja men’s sacred kawoká flute music and women’s kawokakumã songs are two
sides of a single, complex set of ritual performances that can be understood as a social
poetics of death, life and love. The musical techniques of motific variation and the
passing back and forth of dreamed, memorised melodies across the gender divide
between men and women integrates these two sides of Wauja social poetics. Men’s
flute-playing is a purely instrumental, non-verbal transformation of dangerous, life-
threatening spirit beings into a source of health and renewal of life. But even the
motific variations of the master-flutist must be rigidly organised into exact sequences
of melodies, and his performances are always surrounded by constant threats of
illness or death (or sexual violence against women who violate the taboo against
seeing the sacred flutes). Women’s kawokakumã songs are related only to the
passions associated with men’s and women’s sexual relations. They are a lexicalised
transformation of the men’s solemn, strictly ordered flute ritual into a playful, non-
linear dramatisation and musicalisation of sexuality and all its emotional dimensions
of attachment, envy, jealousy and aggression. But these affects and their enactments
in male provocations and female counter-provocations are always kept in a
proportionality of intensity, allowing men and women to show that their knowledge
of ‘how to deal with these feelings is in the right degree of provoking and accepting
provocations […] and in not provoking beyond an acceptable limit’ (Mello
2011: 271).
Wauja men’s kawoká flute rituals give direct expression to the violent, predatory
relations between humans and apapaatai spirit-beings, whose ‘strongest character is
related to a desire for revenge, the impetus to cause harm to humans’ (Piedade 2011:
243). It is only appropriate that male ritual performances aimed at controlling such
potentially deadly, exiled, revengeful, disease-causing spirits should be hierarchical,
precise and tightly controlled. Wauja women’s kawokakumã songs respond to the
men’s formality by bringing instrumental spirit-voices into the realm of human
speech, including both mythic discourses about the eternal cosmic competition
between men and women as well as experience-near discourses about current and
recent sexual relations. In doing so, the women’s songs socialise the men’s flute music
through adding new meanings to the same melodies. By means of this two-stage,
dialogical process of men’s flute-playing and women’s singing, a Wauja poetics of
social life transforms the predatory violence of apapaatai spirit-beings into the
harmonious, yet provocative, sexual relations between men and women.
Fish, Flutes and Affines: Musicalising the Other Among the Wakuénai
The Wakuénai, or ‘People of Our Language’, are an Arawak-speaking indigenous
group living in the headwaters of the Rio Negro and its tributaries in Venezuela,
Colombia and Brazil. In male initiation rituals and ceremonial exchanges, called
kwépani, groups of men enact the world-creating powers of the prototypic human
being of myth. Women and children are forbidden to see the men and their sacred
aerophones, and there are lively interactions between women who remain in
seclusion but whose singing forms a dialogue with men playing special flutes called
molítu outside on the village plaza (Hill 1983, 1993, 2009b). Wakuénai sacred wind
instruments are another very clear example of a shamanic musical configuration in
which complex genres of shamanic singing and chanting form the basis for collective
ritual performances of wind instruments; both vocal and instrumental genres are
understood as parts of a mythic process of creating natural and social worlds through
musical sounds.
In addition to this variety of sacred wind instruments associated with shamanic
rituals and mythic narratives about the creation of the world, the Wakuénai make
and play ceremonial flutes and trumpets that are not taboo to women and uninitiated
children.7 In the past, these ceremonial wind instruments formed the main focus of
collective dancing in pudáli, or ceremonial cycles in which a local group transported a
large gift of food and presented it to another group who were affines or potential
affines. The cycle began with a male-owned ceremony in which the guests played
trumpets (kulirrína) named after a species of large catfish and pairs of máwi (or
yapurutú, in Lingua Geral) flutes as they entered their hosts’ village with a gift of
smoked fish and game meat. In the opening performances, hosts remained at a
respectful distance watching and listening as long lines of guest men and women
danced in counter-clockwise circles around the gift of food. At sunset, the guest and
host headmen made long ceremonial speeches of offering and receiving the food,
which was then put inside the hosts’ house for the night. Guest men and women were
then invited inside to drink copious amounts of manioc beer during the night, and
hosts and guests sang drinking songs (pakamarántakan) to each other until dawn. In
the morning, the gift of food was redistributed to guests and hosts, starting a day-long
celebration of feasting, music-making and dancing in which guest men were allowed
to dance with host women (and vice versa). Throughout the ceremony, the dancing of
men and women to the sounds of flutes and trumpets was closely associated with the
spawning behaviours of migrating schools of Leporinus and other fish species.8 At the
end of the ceremony, guest men presented their hosts with their kulirrína trumpets as
tokens of the latter’s obligation to sponsor a female-owned pudáli ceremony several
weeks later (Hill 1983, 1987, 2011).
Although the tradition of pudáli exchange ceremonies was no longer practiced by
the last decades of the twentieth century, the Wakuénai continued to perform the
music of máwi flutes as expressions of their ethnicity (Hill 1994) and as forms of
entertainment when people from different villages gathered to drink and socialise
7
There are numerous differences between the ceremonial wind instruments and the flutes and trumpets played
in male initiation rituals and other highly sacred contexts. I have documented and interpreted these differences
in several earlier publications (Hill 1983, 1993, 2004, 2011).
8
As I have explained in greater detail elsewhere (Hill 1987), the celebration of pudáli was ideally timed to
coincide with the period of massive spawning migrations of Leporinus fish during the first weeks of the long wet
season. The same verb, -irrapaka, is used to describe the spawning and mating behaviours of fish ‘dancing’ in the
rivers and human men and women dancing in pudáli.
332 J. D. Hill
Figure 1 Transcription of máwi flute duet opening a pudáli ceremony.

Source: Original hand-written transcription in ink based on an earlier transcription
written in pencil while still in the field in 1981.
together. There is a standardised duet played on pairs of long máwi flutes during the
opening dances of pudáli, and this duet is always the first one to be played at any
social gathering. Máwi flutes are made in ‘male’ and ‘female’ pairs. The longer, ‘male’
flutes are the height of a man, whereas the ‘female’ flutes are four finger widths
shorter (up to a man’s eyebrows). These máwi flutes must be made from separate
máwi tree trunks that have been hollowed out. The flutes have no finger holes and so
can only produce a series of overtone intervals rather than smaller, melodic intervals.
However, when played in a hocket style, pairs of ‘male’ and ‘female’ flutes tuned
approximately one whole tone apart can be made to produce a great variety of
melodic patterns (see Figure 1), each based on the interweaving of ‘male’ and ‘female’
notes. Through the constant interweaving of ‘male’ and ‘female’ notes (i.e., notes
produced on the longer male and shorter female flutes), the theme of gender
complementarity is replicated at the level of musical composition as well as in the
physical contact between male flute-players and their female dance partners.
In traditional pudáli ceremonies, the day of feasting was a setting for young men to
demonstrate their creative and improvisatory skills as máwi flute-players. Among the
many improvisatory duets with animal names played in the final stage of pudáli, the
one called dzawírra after a species of small fish (viejita, Span.; cicholasoma species),
was the most popular in Wakuénai villages along the lower Guainía River in
Venezuela at the time of my fieldwork in the 1980s. The following description of
dzawírra dances is based on three separate performances of the same duet in the
village where I carried out six months of fieldwork in 1981.
The dzawírra duet begins with a pair of male flute-players dancing in a circle. The
men support their instruments with the outside arms and embrace one another
around the shoulders with the inside arms. After completing one full circle, two
women join on the right side of each of the two male flute-players. Suddenly, the pair
of male and female dancers on the inside of the circle stands still, and the other
couple continues on for a few more paces, turns around to face the motionless couple,
and then approaches them from the front-right side. They approach until the flute in
front of them crosses underneath that of the couple who stands still. Then they back
off and approach again. On the third approach, the flute-player who is standing still
raises his instrument up high to allow the other couple to pass underneath. He
continues to play the flute in this raised position while the other couple dances in
small, counter-clockwise circles around him and his partner. Immediately following
this sequence, the roles are reversed and the couple that had been moving around the
other couple in small circles stands still. The couple that had been standing still then
goes through the series of approaching and backing-off motions before being allowed
to pass several times under the raised flute of the other couple. After the role reversal
has been completely acted out, the two couples rejoin and dance in a clockwise
direction to the place where the dance had begun on one side of the dancing area.
The end of the duet comes with the usual high-pitched, screeching sounds of the two
flutes when overblown with maximum force.
According to the Wakuénai, the dzawírra duet portrays a female dzawírra fish
protecting a nest of eggs against an enemy. They point out that the dzawírra fish stays
with its nest until the eggs are ready to hatch, whereas most other fish species simply
lay eggs and abandon them. The approaching and backing-off motions of dancers in
the dzawírra duet are said to represent a process of asking the mother fish’s
permission to ‘dance’ in a circle over her nest. Similarly, the raising of the máwi flute
is said to be the mother fish’s sign of giving her approval to the outside intruder to
enter the nest (Hill, unpublished field notes, Río Guainía, Venezuela, 1981). Although
the indigenous explanation centres around the theme of protection against predators,
it also evokes a sexual theme of male fish asking permission to ‘dance’ in the female’s
nest. The spawning runs of fish are generally referred to with the word meaning ‘to
dance’ (-irrápaka), and the emphasis on fish nests and eggs in the dzawírra duet
expresses a concern for natural processes of reproduction and their relevance as
models for social behaviour in the ceremonial context of pudáli.
Like other máwi flute duets that have animal names and that were traditionally
played after the redistribution of a ceremonial food-gift in pudáli ceremonies, the
dzawírra duet makes use of theme and variation that allows for individual creativity
(see Figure 2). The tonal sequences of the two máwi flutes that I transcribed in 1981
are A-E-A-C#-E-G-A-(B) for the longer (1.59 m) male flute and B-F#-B-D#-F#-A-B-
(C) for the shorter (1.44 m) female flute. The main theme, played at the very beginning
of the piece, is a six-note melody plus the ‘tail’, a four-beat sustained note (C#) played
on the male flute that comes at the end of each phrase in the piece. The tonal structure
of this melodic theme is changed to produce 10 other variants of the same six notes’
duration in the course of the piece. The main theme is also lengthened by two beats to
make eight-note melodic phrases and shortened by two beats to make four-note
phrases. Both the lengthened (eight-note) and shortened (four-note) phrases are
altered to produce seven tonal variants each, bringing the total number of variants up
to 27, all based on the main theme (‘2a’ in Table 1).
334 J. D. Hill
Figure 2 Transcription of dzawírra flute duet.

Source: Original transcription by the author.
In theory, the number of possible combinations and permutations for complete

melodic passages is extremely high (27!), but in practice the amount of variation is kept
in bounds by the greater number of times that the main theme is played (see numbers in
parentheses after listing of each variant in Table 1) and by playing two of the shortened,
four-note melodic phrases to form a sort of cadence. Table 2 indicates the sequence of
theme and variation in a complete performance of the dzawírra duet combined with
the symbolic contents of the dance segments and shows how the use of two consecutive
four-note phrases (shown as ‘C-C’ in the top line of each row) divides the piece into
sections that roughly parallel the major divisions of the dancing. No cadence, or
repetition of the two C-C phrases, is played in the middle of the piece when the reversal
Figure 2 (Continued)
336 J. D. Hill
Table 1 Musical analysis of dzawírra flute duet showing frequency of

each phrase and its variants in parentheses
(1) Shortened, four-note phrases
a A-F-g-f (15)
b A-F-a-f (2)
c C-B-g-f (1)
d A-F-C-B (1)
e A-F-e-g# (1)
f A-F-g-f (1) (differs slightly from 1a)
g A-F-e-f (1)
h E-F-g-f (1)
(2) Main theme and variants (six-note phrases)
a A-f-A-F-a-f (19)
b G-f-A-F-a-f (3)
c B-f-E-F-a-f (1)
d A-f-E-F-g-f (2)
e a-f-A-F-g#-a (1)
f a-f-E-F-a-D# (1)
g a-f-A-F-g-f (2)
h a-f-E-F-a-f (2)
i a-f-E-F-g-f (1)
j g-f-A-F-g-f (1)
k a-f-A-F-g-a (1)
(3) Lengthened, eight-note phrases
a b-f-a-f-A-F-a-f (2)
b a-f-a-f-A-F-g-f (2)
c a-f-a-f-A-F-a-f (2)
d b-f-g-f-A-F-a-f (1)
e g-f-g-f-E-F-g-f (1)
f b-f-a-f-E-F-a-f (1)
g a-f-a-f-E-F-g-f (1)
h a-f-a-f-E-F-a-f (1)
Note: Small letters indicate notes in the higher register, capital letters are lower notes. All C
and F notes are sharp; other notes are natural unless indicated (#).
Source: Analytical transcription based on an original type-written version in Hill (1983).
of aggressor and protector roles is happening in the dance movements. Instead, there is
a rather symmetrical use of single cadences in alternation with single six-note or eight-
note melodic phrases (e.g., ‘C-1-C-1’) before and after a central passage of three six-
note melodic phrases. This passage marks a turning point in which the female protector
begins to assume the role of the male aggressor and vice versa.
The theme of predatory violence between kin and affines emerges in the
indigenous ways of explaining the music and dancing that make up the dzawírra
duet but in more general terms plays a role that is less prominent than the symbolism
of natural fertility and reproduction in pudáli ceremonies. Nevertheless, the potential
for violent conflict between kin and affines is highly salient in narrative discourses
about the mythic times in which ceremonial music and dancing originated. In the
Table 2 Alternative transcription of dzawírra flute duet in terms of phrase lengths

(middle lines) and tonal variants
Note: Numbered and lettered according to Table 1. The top line of each row uses the abbreviation ‘C’ for four-
note phrases and shows the number of each six-note and eight-note phrase in between each pair of four-note
phrases (e.g., C–2–C).
Source: Analytical transcription based on original type-written versions in Hill (1983).
earliest space–time of myth, ‘The Primordial Times’, narratives describe the origins of
a powerful trickster-creator (Iñapirríkuli, or Made-From-Bone), sickness and death
(Hill 2009a: 25–56). This grouping of narratives centres around the figure of the
trickster-creator, whose struggles against various adversaries resulted in the creation
of natural and social worlds. Overall, ‘The Primordial Times’ was a period of
unceasing violence between Made-From-Bone and his animal-affines in which the
trickster anticipated the treachery and deceit of other beings and skilfully
manipulated words and other signs as tools for deceiving and defeating these
adversaries. The trickster always managed to find ways to cope with difficult, even
life-threatening situations, not by directly confronting adversaries but through self-
concealment and use of secret knowledge to imagine a future way to break out of
present dangers.
A second cycle of narratives, called ‘The World Begins’ (Hill 2009a: 75–91),
encompasses six narratives that explain the origins of night and sleep, cooking fire,
manioc gardens, peach-palm fruits and the musical dancing of pudáli ceremonial
338 J. D. Hill
exchanges. These narratives took place in a more recent space–time in which the
trickster gets new things by solving riddles and deceiving their mythic owners rather
than through violent struggles. The beginning of ceremonial music (mádzerukái)
marks a major turning point in Wakuénai mythic history, for Made-From-Bone and
his younger brother, Káali, created mádzerukái as a way to teach their children how
to give and receive food and other things from their affines in a non-violent,
respectful manner.
Musical sounds and performances occupy a special place in Wakuénai mythic
narratives, since it was through the invention of ceremonial dance-music (mádzer-
ukái) that Káali transformed the unceasing cycles of violence, fear and hostility of
‘The Primordial Times’ into relations based on respect and reciprocity between
communities of people. An indigenous theory of music, or musicology, thus arises in
the first place from the principle that collective musical performances and associated
dances provide the primary means for socialising the relations between communities
of people who are in the process of creating, or celebrating, affinal alliances through
exchanges of male and female labour, food and drink, and other material goods. This
musicalisation, or musical socialisation, of affinal relations between communities of
people is a process of creating a naturalised social space in which human interactions
are densely interwoven with the sounds and behaviours of fish and other non-human
animal species.
Collective musical performances often form a central part of indigenous ways of
expressing and recovering cultural identities in situations where these have been
ignored, suppressed or denigrated by outsiders.9 Shamanic musical configurations of
Lowland South America—with their concern for coupling transformation, impro-
visation and creativity to continuity, community and persistence—are ready-made
cultural tools for coordinating internal political economies as a constant interaction
between more hierarchical (or centripetal) versus more egalitarian (or centrifugal)
forces, as well as these communities’ ongoing struggles to navigate treacherous
histories of interethnic relations with expanding colonial, national and global states. It
was no coincidence that the millenarian movement led by Venancio Camico on Saint
John’s Day of 1858 employed a genre of highly sacred collective singing and dancing,
called kapetiápani (‘whip-dance’), a singing-into-being and dancing-into-being of the
fiery transformation of the world when the primordial human being of myth was
pushed into a bonfire and the world turned inside-out and upside-down. Venancio
and his followers carried Christian crosses in their hands instead of whips (kapéti) as
they sang to invert the cosmos in their messianic movement against the debt
fetishism of western political-economies of predatory extraction in Brazil and
Venezuela (Hill and Wright 1988; Wright and Hill 1986). Nor was it mere
coincidence that a powerful shaman led a group of Curripaco and Yeral (Lingua
Geral) men and women in the singing and dancing of máwi flute duets and the
9
See Graham (2002) for a discussion of the importance of collective singing and dancing by the Xavante, Kayapó
and other Gê-speaking and Tupí-speaking peoples of Central Brazil as they formed a multiethnic alliance in
opposition to the proposed building of a hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River at Altamira in 1989.
kapetiápani song on the banks of the Upper Rio Negro in July 1981 to protest the
doubly exploitative actions of local merchants (Hill 1994, 2002). In both historical
moments, collective performances of instrumental and vocal dance music were
central to the way indigenous communities organised themselves in opposition to
non-indigenous outsiders. In these cases, collective singing, flute-playing and dancing
is a reflexive process of social reproduction that aims to create a social space for
dialogue with invasive white ‘others’.
Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America

Across Lowland South America, collective ritual performances of wind instruments
serve as cultural tools for enacting semiotic transformations that are centrally
important in the ways that indigenous communities understand their ability to
control social reproduction and natural fertility. Predatory violence and conflict are
always present as potential outcomes when relations between kin and affines, humans
and non-human animal species and/or spirit-beings, or the living and the dead are
put to the test. Even in cases where predatory violence is the main theme of ritual
celebrations, such as Jawosi rituals among the Tupian Kayabi of central Brazil that
allow warriors to see their encounters with others ‘from the enemy’s point of view’,
ritual performances place limits on ‘Other-becoming’, or identification with ‘Others’.
Jawosi songs are performed as dialogues in which groups of young, mostly unmarried
women repeat each of the male warrior-soloist’s lines. According to Suzanne Oakdale,
the female chorus in Jawosi rituals ‘may in fact work as a tether, keeping the narrators
tied to the living Kayabi community and guarding against too much identification
with these others’ (2005: 158). Such an over-identification with others leads only to
individual death rather than collective empowerment.
The comparative approach developed in this essay has called attention to the
importance of theme and variation practices and the contrast between, on the one
hand, unique melodic phrases that give expression to heightened powers of creation
and transformation, and on the other standard melodic phrases that anchor such
hyperanimacy in repetition, stability and continuity. In Wauja men’s sacred flute
music, this contrast is clearly audible in the difference between the master-flutist’s
more powerful and highly varied production of the kawoká spirit’s voice and the
more repetitive, prolonged notes played by the two apprentices. Wauja flutists’
awareness of this difference is fully evident in their verbal distinction between the
master-flutist’s melodies as ‘sung voices’ and the apprentices’ notes as merely ‘blown
air’. It is in the master-flutist’s melodic variations that human actors can most
powerfully musicalise the other, or sing-into-being and play-into-being the powerful
spirit-beings of myth (Basso 1985: 70). Yet the less powerful sostenuto played by the
two apprentices is just as important to the success of the Wauja flute ritual as a
process of transforming dangerous, evil spirit-beings into a protective moral force,
since it is only through the grounding or insulating effects of the apprentices’ notes
that the master-flutist’s powerful voice—the singing of kawoká, the most dangerous
340 J. D. Hill
of apapaatai spirit-beings—can be harnessed or ‘domesticated’ (Wright 2011) to

create communal harmony. Likewise, the use of theme and variation in Wakuénai
ceremonial flute music, such as the dzawírra duet discussed above, shows a clear
distinction between a large number of tonal and/or rhythmic variants that are played
only once or twice and a few variants that are played repeatedly (as many as 19 times)
in the course of a single performance. Again, it is the rapid movement across many
melodic variants that embodies the principle of transformation, of musicalising the
other, or of creating a naturalised mythic social space that includes both kin and
affines. And again it is the musical production of stability through frequent
repetitions of a small number of standardised phrases that the dynamic energy of
the highly variant phrases is pressed into the service of harmonious conviviality
between guests and hosts, kin and affines, and humans and non-humans. While
sharing the same point of departure with perspectivism and predation theory, the
concept of musicalising the other developed in this essay offers a more nuanced
process that acknowledges the otherness of the other even as it seeks to transform or
‘domesticate’ otherness, not to eliminate or consume it but to create a social space in
which communities of people can interact with otherness in ways that promote
harmonious conviviality, proportionality of emotional intensity and the collaborative
making of history through engaging others.
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Shipibo Laughing Songs and the

Transformative Faculty: Performing or
Becoming the Other
Bernd Brabec de Mori
Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres,

including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain
non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-
humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous
medicine and sorcery (médicos), because it is crucial that the performer owns the
faculty of transforming into the animal in question, although in osanti the singers do
not transform. Songs involving actual transformation are not meant for laughing: these
are magical songs including interaction with and transformation into animals or spirits
that possess a more ample radius of perception and action than ‘Real Human’ beings.
Osanti songs, with their position between secular and magical songs, allow for an
analysis of humour and laughing in the construction of the indigenous ontology, thereby
questioning some generalisations made in theories of animism and perspectivism.
Keywords: Shipibo-Konibo; Humour; Vocal Music; Magic; Perspectivism
Introduction
Relations between humans and non-humans are the subject of many indigenous
rituals and are usually considered very serious by researchers, but they can also be
funny. This paper is about a specific song genre called osanti (‘to laugh’), performed
among Shipibo-Konibo indigenous people (henceforth Shipibo). Osanti songs express
differences between people and certain non-humans, mostly animals, in a way that
Bernd Brabec de Mori received his PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna, Austria. He specialised in
indigenous music from the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, where he spent some years among the indigenous
group Shipibo-Konibo. He is currently Senior Scientist at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Music
and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria. His publications contribute to the research areas of western Amazonian
indigenous music, arts and history as well as the complex of music, ritual and altered states. Correspondence to:
Bernd Brabec de Mori, Institute of Ethnomusicology, Leonhardstraße 81-83, 8010 Graz, Austria. Email:
bernd.brabec@kug.ac.at

344 B. Brabec de Mori
provokes laughter among singers and listeners of this indigenous group. Although
humour appears to be a highly cultural category, laughing and making fun seem to
bridge borders and social gaps. Likewise, sung words, in Shipibo context, are thought
to be comprehended also by non-Shipibo Others. Therefore it is rewarding to analyse
the role of humour and song—specifically of humorous singing—in the complex
negotiations of the boundaries between humans and non-humans.1 The aim of this
contribution lies in investigating the functions of laughing and singing in the
construction and maintenance of boundaries between the Shipibo people and their
environment.
The Shipibo, who number as many as 50,000, live mainly along the Ucayali river
and its tributaries in the lowland rainforests of Eastern Peru. They are well known
among both researchers and tourists for their spectacular artwork in embroidered and
painted patterns (see Figure 1; cf. Tessmann 1928: 40, 49 and 62), as well as for their
sophisticated use of the hallucinogenic plant brew ayawaska in their indigenous
medicine.2
Shipibo as well as Konibo are not autodenominations in the strict sense.
Although today, most of them will say that they consider themselves ‘Shipibo’, the
Figure 1 A textile sheet with kené patterns during the process of embroidering.
1
For a definition of how I use human versus non-human see the introductory essay in this volume.
2
For a comprehensive compendium on preparation, uses and contexts of ayawaska see the volume edited by
Labate and Araujo (2004); for its history in the Peruvian lowlands, see Brabec de Mori (2011c). For the relations
between music, artwork and indigenous medicine, see Brabec de Mori (2011b) and Brabec de Mori and Mori
Silvano de Brabec (2009).
vernacular autodenomination is noa jonikon, ‘We the Real People’. Throughout this
paper, I will use Real People (with upper-case initials) in order to refer to people
from the same group, depending on perspective: from a Shipibo’s point of view,
other Shipibo are Real People; from a jaguar’s point of view, other jaguars are Real
People. This terminology is in tune with Amerindian perspectivism, following the
concept of cosmological deixis established by Viveiros de Castro (1998: 476), who
points out that the ‘people’ category, besides embracing other human beings like
neighbouring indigenous populations, Peruvian mestizos or whites, further extends
among animals and even plants or rivers and mountains, for example. It is the
respective point of view, the perspective, that defines ‘we’; that is, who pertains to
the Real People. The validity of perspectivism is not unchallenged, and debating
perspectivism and animism (Descola 2005) is a central issue in the present volume
(see also the dossier edited by Halbmayer 2012b). In the introduction to this issue
it was considered that the theories of Descola and Viveiros de Castro, among
others, cannot be applied without confronting inconsistencies (see also Hill and
Bastos, this issue). In general, both authors are too quick in assuming an
encompassing cosmology for Amerindian societies. I prefer the interpretation by
Halbmayer (2012a, quoted in detail in the introduction to this issue) who proposes
a multiverse with multiple overlapping and non-encompassing layers of reality,
specific not only for humans, animals and spirits but also for things and social
entities (e.g., villages). Interactions of humans and non-humans therefore are
constituted by complex and contingent relations that have to be permanently
negotiated, processes Halbmayer calls ‘politics of fragile inter-species and multi-
world border management’ (2012a: 119). Therefore I will later turn to the
sociological concept of boundary work as a tool for analysing these negotiations.
The material presented in this contribution was recorded and evaluated during my
own fieldwork among the Shipibo and neighbouring groups from 2001 to 2006 (see
Brabec de Mori 2011a). Selection, translation and interpretation has been undertaken
in close cooperation with the singers themselves, bilingual native teachers and other
native experts who commented on the work in progress. The short and funny animal
songs osanti were hitherto only mentioned by Illius (1999: 227–30) and Brabec de
Mori (2011a: 417–30 and 881–92, where the examples in this text are taken from). In
order to comprehend osanti and their performance contexts, in the following section
I will first outline Shipibo vocal music and its functions, then the form and function
of humour, and the concept of boundary work. Thereafter, osanti songs and related
genres will be presented, analysed and juxtaposed to magical songs dealing with
animals in different ways. Finally I will propose answers to some questions: What is
funny about these short animal songs? Why is their performance restricted to
specialists? How do laughter and singing contribute to boundary work that
establishes and maintains the singers’ and their communities’ position in their
environment? And how can humour and song help in criticising and developing
existing theories on personhood and indigenous cosmology?
Songs, Humour and Boundary Work

Shipibo people employ a rich and developed music theory, especially regarding vocal
music (see Brabec de Mori 2011a: 284–309). They distinguish mainly three categories
of songs, which are defined by their melodic-rhythmic form. The first, mashá,
denotes both a round dance and its accompanying song, commonly performed at
atsa xeati (manioc [cassava] beer) drinking festivals. This form is defined by a
successively accelerating four-beat rhythm with sequences of repeated phrases, which
are usually preceded by a higher pitched introductory phrase. The shiro bewá is a line
dance with its accompanying song, likewise performed mostly at festivals. Its phrase
structure moves in four-beat or five-beat rhythms along a generally descending
melodic line, lacking the mashá’s repeated phrases. Finally, the bewá is generally
performed at a slower tempo, with more fermata and often exhibits a symmetric
phrase structure. It is performed at festivals, but also in private and is not
accompanied by dance.3 On the other hand, Shipibo people name and distinguish
many song topics (e.g., nokon chaibetan xeaitian iká, ‘sung when drinking together
with my brother-in-law’), which can be grouped in what I call genres, for example:
drinking songs, love songs, songs for welcome or departure (which I categorise as
non-magical songs), as well as curing, protection or sorcery songs (i.e., magical songs)
and also the osanti laughing songs. These genres are usually performed applying
either mashá, shiro bewá or bewá musical forms. A distinction between magical and
non-magical songs is not named by Shipibo but they precisely distinguish them by
context, intention and performer: a magical song can only be performed by trained
specialists (i.e., by healers and sorcerers, who I am going to call médicos in this
paper),4 it should change circumstances or states of persons (e.g., in order to cure
illness), and it is performed in rituals or in situations when asked for by a client.
Magical songs likewise make use of the formal categories mashá, shiro bewá or bewá,
and additionally ikaro, a vocal form limited to magical songs.5
The attentive reader may have noticed that I have not yet defined a magical or
non-magical status for osanti songs. This is not obvious because osanti can only be
performed by médicos but, at the same time, they are not thought to change
circumstances. Maybe they are neither magical nor non-magical, or both; but anyway,
osanti songs are funny, so let us turn to the topic of humour for the moment.
Humour and laughing in general rank among the less studied phenomena,
especially in the anthropology of Lowland South American societies (but see Beaudet
1996; Lagrou 2006; Overing 2000). A seminal work about humour and power was
3
Certain ritual songs (nawarin, ai iká, ishori and ikaro) represent their own formal category. A detailed
treatment of these songs and their formal characteristics is given by Brabec de Mori (2011a: 395–444).
4
In Shipibo language, the corresponding terms are yobé (dart warfare specialist) and meráya (specialist in
transformation). However, in Ucayali indigenous discourse, the reinterpreted Spanish term médico is most often
applied also by the specialists themselves. Throughout this paper I will use male forms with this term, because
most practitioners are males (93% in my survey).
5
Ikaro is a form of vocal music known and applied among most populations in the Peruvian lowlands. It is
associated with, although not restricted to, the use of ayawaska in curing or sorcery rituals. Among the Shipibo it
was introduced together with ayawaska from the north, probably around 1800 (cf. Brabec de Mori 2011c).
published by Radcliffe-Brown, who proposes that among many societies on earth,

people make fun of each other in more or less formal, symmetrically or
asymmetrically constructed relationships ‘of mutual disrespect and licence. Any
serious hostility is prevented by the playful antagonism of teasing’ (1940: 197–8). In
the western Amazon, such ‘joking relationships’ are very common among in-laws, or
between grandparents and grandchildren. Joking in such relationships, but also in
general, is called shiroi among Shipibo and is highly esteemed. For example, one man
told me that he managed to stay unnoticed while knotting a short rope to both a
pillar and to his brother-in-law’s belt while they were sitting on a platform and
chatting. He teased the victim that for sure he could not jump to the other platform,
about two metres away and separated by water. The victim tried, with the predictable
result. People who excel in (sometimes fairly dolorous or bawdy) joking are called
shiromis by peers and many say, in a sense of ethnic identification, that Shipibo in
general are kikin shiromis, ‘real jokers’.6 Similarly, joking towards outsiders is
important and often takes the form of tall tales or ridiculous events that the victim is
made to believe. After the poor person’s departure, the jokers would often literally roll
on the floor laughing. Even worse if this happened publicly: a white woman who
worked in a non-governmental organisation project was taught by malicious Shipibo
that, in their language, ‘gentlemen’ was expressed with boshirashki,7 and she should
use this term to address the village’s authorities when presenting her project. She did,
and the rest is history, as the reader might imagine. Likewise I was told on my first
days among Shipibo that being very nice to a young woman was expressed with xebi
noe. I suspected something, and asked a female Shipibo friend what this meant. She
was earnestly upset about her peers’ unmannerliness.
These anecdotes illustrate that in many instances laughter explicitly deals with
alterity and humour is used in order to work on boundaries. ‘Foreigners are funny’,
states Critchley (2002: 67), because ‘Humour is a form of cultural insider-knowledge
[…]. Its ostensive untranslatability endows native speakers with a palpable sense of
their cultural distinctiveness or even superiority’. In jokes about foreigners, these are
commonly either stupid or canny, and both can be understood as a sort of prejudicial
categorising them as inferior to the ones who laugh (The Superiority Theory of
Humour, see Carroll 2003: 345). On the other hand, humour can be an effective tool
in bridging boundaries, for instance when a foreign field researcher starts out among
a community still alien to him or her (Driessen 1997; Illius 2003). In such cases,
humour and laughing allow an Alien entity to be changed to an Other, an Other that
can be understood and dealt with (one cannot deal with an Alien). We will see that
6
The verb shiroi is also used in the musical form shiro bewá. Shiroi can be translated as ‘to joke’ but its meaning
extends much further: courting is subsumed in shiroi, as well as formalised speech for expressing jealousy or loss
of relationships, or formalised invitations for fighting and drinking together at a festival. Therefore, shiroi
circumscribes fairly exactly the scope of ‘good life’ or ‘living well’ (cf. Gow 2000). Accordingly, the predominant
topics performed in the shiro bewá vocal form are drinking, courtship, loss of relationships, welcome and
departure.
7
This term and also the following are so obscene that I refrain from translating here. For obscenities in names
see also Driessen (1997).
much—although not all—of the laughing about animals in osanti songs may be
understood as pertaining to one of these two boundary processes: superiority and
othering.
Boundary work as an analytical concept was introduced in the early 1980s by
Thomas Gieryn (1995: 441) as a tool for studying the margins of science and
technology. This concept has since then been used in sociological analysis of border
processes in general terms (see Pachucki, Pendergrass and Lamont 2007). Tanja
Paulitz (2012: 47–58) implements in boundary work what Foucault had to say about
knowledge and power, adds Bourdieu’s actors and habitus, and therefore provides a
powerful tool for analysing processes of othering. When Gieryn mentions ‘four types
of boundary-work: monopolization, expansion, expulsion, and protection’ (1995:
424), one may be reminded of methods used by Shipibo médicos for underlining their
distinction among Shipibo laypeople, as well as for their negotiations with non-
humans or non-Real People, aiming for their own group’s effective positioning in the
cosmos. Here, Halbmayer’s ‘fragile inter-species and multi-world border manage-
ment’ comes into play as the main occupation of indigenous healers and sorcerers. If
dealing with non-humans—including spirits, animals and in the present case non-
Shipibo indigenous, mestizo or white people—mainly consists of imminently
performed boundary work, I will in the following pages elucidate where and how
singing and laughter enter into these dealings and what their functions or effects
may be.
Osanti Songs: Performing the Other

Osanti are short funny songs. Their melodic and rhythmic structure is borrowed from
the aforementioned mashá and shiro bewá forms but, unlike those, they are not
performed at festivals or accompanied by dance. When analysing them as isolated
pieces, the most obvious difference from other categories of song is their short
duration, a few seconds up to a maximum of about one minute. Further on, in their
adaptation of a mashá or shiro bewá form, there is most often an error included, as if
the singer would not know how to sing correctly according to emic aesthetic criteria:
the tempo may be too fast, for example, or melodic lines not well developed. Quite
contrarily, festival songs as well as magical songs are always intended to exploit the
singer’s aesthetic knowledge and singing abilities to the maximum. It is very
important for Shipibo singers to perform as perfectly as possible.
Osanti are sung from the perspective of animals or, more seldom, of plants or
demons. Animals and other non-humans play a prominent role in almost all songs
performed by Shipibo (and throughout the indigenous western Amazon). However,
these roles are multiple: in non-magical songs, people who are mentioned in the lyrics
are in general substituted by animal names (cf. Brabec de Mori 2011b). These
metaphors or codes are shared, so any culturally educated Shipibo understands them.
In a festive shiro bewá, the singer may also use a metaphorical code for himself or
herself, but this is never meant literally. In magical song lyrics, on the other hand,
Figure 2 Transcription of the beginning of the land tortoise’s song.
non-human names are never used to substitute present people (patients or family
members). These are addressed from a ‘safe distance’ while the non-humans’
positionalities remain unclear; the lyrics are often coded and twisted (Townsley
1993). The singer may disguise as a non-human, masking his voice or hinting at his
transformation in the lyrics, but this is not made obvious although it is meant
literally. But in osanti songs, the role of animals is explicit: they are the singers.
Osanti songs are usually performed before or during, but most often after healing
sessions, and only by the specialists. For instance, a highly renowned Shipibo médico,
who left us in 2008, used to sing the tortoise’s osanti (see Figure 2) after treating
severely ill people. In the dark of night, he shifted his body posture in order to appear
like a tortoise and sang its mashá, imitating the tortoise by his movements. He told
me that if the patient then laughed, his healing would be successful; if not, the patient
would be doomed. Here, the osanti song serves as a tool for post-treatment diagnosis,
a test if the patient was again brought back to ‘correct’ human life.
Illius, contrarily, describes osanti songs as entertainment provided by the specialists
in order to educate children:
The meráya, mighty priest-shamans of old, besides their function as healers, also had
the duty to educate and entertain children. Every night, these medicinal-religious
functionaries provided show performances of their ‘art of transformation’ which not
only contributed to strengthen their reputation as equally powerful enemies of
the yoshinbo [demons], but also simply served as entertainment. […S]pirits were
depicted as ridiculous by any means and sometimes one could even interpret some
self-irony of the meráya. (Illius 1999: 227; my translation)
Illius is certainly correct in interpreting osanti song performances as ridiculous

renderings of the meráya’s transformative faculty. They are entertainment, although
I doubt that they would be specifically dedicated to children. In my own experience,
osanti were more often performed in the absence of children. There are also Shipibo
children’s songs but these always apply third-person addressing for animals. Children
make fun, for example, of three small pigs who go bathing to the beach despite their
mother’s warning and are eaten by a jaguar (cf. Brabec de Mori 2011a: 473–7).
Children, along with Shipibo laypeople, would never dare to sing osanti. For instance,
before I grasped this and believed that osanti were children’s songs, one day I sang
some osanti I had heard beforehand to a few boys in a Shipibo village, just for fun.
Figure 3 Transcription of the beginning of the howler monkey’s song.
Well, they had their fun, laughed and commented on my performance with ojojoi,
kikin yobé (‘Wow, a true médico!’).
This anecdote illustrates Illius’ suggestion that the rendering of osanti songs is a
display of the singer’s own transformative faculty, of his training as a médico: the core
ability of médicos is their acquired power intentionally to transform into an animal or
spirit while retaining the ability to return again from this endeavour as a Real
Human. This transformative faculty is also a prerequisite for singing osanti. Only a
person who has the knowledge of transformation is believed by his peers to be able
convincingly to perform osanti—although these songs do nothing magical and they
are not thought to produce any effect besides laughter. Let us analyse the first
example, a song performed by the howler monkey roo.
The song’s musical structure (Figure 3) exhibits a typical form of the shiro bewá:
verses are grouped in musical phrases of mostly five beats in length (separated by
ticks in the transcription). The first phrase is relatively high pitched and repeated (A),
followed by one descending and one ascending phrase (B) and concluded with a
relatively low pitched sequence of phrases (C), starting an octave lower than (A). But
there are two minor ‘singing errors’: the phrases marked with (C) are, compared with
a ‘correctly performed’ shiro bewá, too low and monotonous, they imitate the
howler’s prolonged roar (also in the lyrics: jo oraraira jo are not Shipibo, nor ‘human’
words). Furthermore, in a human shiro bewá, the final syllable of each phrase has to
be je. This is an onomatopoeic particle with high significance; it means affirmation
and can also be glossed as ‘melody’ in music theory. Je is an essentially human
syllable in Shipibo understanding. Here, the howler is almost perfect in singing like
Real People, but fails in these two musical details, he roars at the end and falsely
pronounces the syllable jo, hinting at his impressive call. With this, he reveals that
although he may be a Real Human in his own experience, he is different from the
Shipibo. In the lyrics, the howlers appear very human, too. The song is sung by the
male leader of a polygamous group:8
8
Excerpts, performed by Rafael Rodriguez Yui in 2004 and Pascual Mahua Ochavano in 2005. Phonogram-
marchiv (Vienna) archive numbers D 5293 and D 5544.
Lyrics 1: Osanti by the Howler Monkey Roo.

1. nokon chiní bakebo jo My younger children
2. shiní tapon joyoxon jo form a row on top of a palm tree
3. mochakinpariban jo and are going to worship the sun
4. jo oraraira jo while crying hooh (onomatopoeic word.)
5. noara nawan anake jo The foreigners (nawa) could kill us,
6. iki itaibi jo this may happen, because
7. inkan yami kanakan jo the flash from the Inca’s iron [a gun]
8. ratéresibawanke jo already gave us a fright before
9. xomi nishi ponyaman jo On the branches of a big tree
10. nokon awinbobetan jo together with my wives
11. bewashaman noikanwe jo we sing to each other in love
12. oken chixbabekoni jo while their buttocks wobble
The lyrics illustrate the monkeys’ presumed humanness, their dealing with foreigners
and a pun. The pun is delivered rather directly at the end (lines 9–12), where the male
singer sings love songs together with his many wives and while they sing the wives’
buttocks wobble. This is fun for Shipibo listeners who imagine the monkeys behaving
in this way. Although wobbling buttocks are not a sole property of howlers, they are a
typical feature of the female howlers’ physiognomy that is highlighted and exploited
in this phrase. This is one of the very few instances of obscenity in osanti lyrics. In
both the examples presented later and in other details of the howler’s song text, the
humour is not bawdy but very subtle.
In lines 1–4, the singer describes his children worshipping the sun (mochakin). The
mochai ritual complex is no longer performed among Shipibo but in former times it
was staged for collectively transcending the borders of humanness in order to worship
the sun, heal the sun or the moon in times of eclipse, and also for summoning and
transforming into celestial or demonic non-human persons (Brabec de Mori 2011a:
447–64). This essential ritual for negotiating the ontological status of Real People in the
complex and partially overlapping multiverse is here also performed by the howlers,
confirming that they are Real People in their own perspective.
Lines 5–8 demonstrate their relation to Shipibo people. The singing leader warns
his fellow monkeys to take care of the foreigners (nawa), because they may shoot
them with guns (the Inca’s flashing iron). This feature is similarly astonishing
because—theoretically—it could be sung in exactly the same terms by a Shipibo
singer frightened of approaching whites (or, for example, guerrilla fighting groups
during the Peruvian civil war). Historically speaking, Shipibo people know very well
what life is like when in the howlers’ position (except for the generic wobbly
buttocks, of course).
From the analysis of both musical form and lyrics it can be deduced that this song
is thought to originate from a singing howler monkey, although it is performed by a
Shipibo male singer who is a specialist médico. The monkeys behave humanly in a
convincing way, despite the small instances where they reveal their non-human
identity. They also engage actively (here, evading) in their relationship with ‘cannibal’
enemies who appreciate monkey soup.
Let us pause for a moment to analyse what is considered funny here by Shipibo
listeners. First, the not-exactly-correct singing of the emically well-known shiro bewá
form. This resembles humour in music in a way equally well known in western
society. One may, for example, have heard recordings by Florence Foster Jenkins
singing opera arias and appearing ridiculous to people who know how these arias are
supposed to be sung ‘correctly’. The monkeys think that they sing ‘beautifully’ or
‘correctly’ (it is said that also Foster Jenkins thought she could sing brilliantly).9 From
the monkeys’ perspective the concluding syllable they sing is je, they feel the same
quality of ‘correctness’ that Shipibo people sense when hearing je. Therefore the
monkeys consider their song a beautiful shiro bewá. However, the Shipibo (and fellow
humans, even tape-recorders) hear the same sound as jo. From the Shipibos’
perspective, the monkeys fail to sing ‘correctly’, so they appear ridiculous. Second, the
pun with the wobbly buttocks is considered funny. But there are more humorous
facets hidden in the performance context. Imagining how the howlers’ song is
performed subsequently after a very serious healing session, the audience may sense a
release from anxiety towards laughter and lightness. Furthermore, it is considered
funny that the médico sings as if he was transformed into a howler monkey. Applying
the (dangerous, serious and powerful) transformative faculty on the magically
powerless monkey would be an incongruent act (the Incongruity Theory of Humour,
Carroll 2003: 347). Finally, and most delicately, Shipibo people laugh about
perspectivism. That is, they are amused by the fact that the howlers think they are
Real People. Simply imagining howlers doing mochai when ‘singing’ in the early
morning, worshipping the sun, makes Shipibo listeners cheer up. What is understood
in a very serious way connected to predation and cannibalism by most perspectivist
anthropologists is ridiculed by the indigenous people themselves (a pun completely
unintended but nevertheless cheerful).
The next example shows another sort of subtle humour and illustrates a slightly
different form of relationship to Shipibo from the perspective of the (zoologically
unidentified) aquatic bird jenenponpo. The jenenponpo similarly performs a shiro
bewá in a musical form very closely related to the one performed by the howler. Here,
the revealing detail is again coded in the syllables concluding the phrases: the bird
cannot pronounce it correctly and utters on on ri (onomatopoeic syllables):10
Lyrics 2: Osanti by the Aquatic Bird Jenenponpo.
1. nokon tae kenéya on on ri My feet show design patterns
2. tae kenéyaninbi on on ri With those patterned feet
3. winawinaboai on on ri I continue paddling and paddling
4. en chaikonintsi on on ri My poor chaikoni
5. nonti toron axona on on ri makes his canoe sound so noisily
6. oniskain ninike on on ri that I have sadly to retire
9
See Brittan (2010) for more details on (deliberate) musical failure and an alternative interpretation of Foster
Jenkins’ ineptitude.
10
Performed by Francisco ‘Pancho’ Mahua Ahuanari, 2005 (D 5350).
Much like the howler monkey, the bird seems to be a Real Human at the first glance
but reveals its otherness with the on on ri syllables, as well as with hints hidden in the
lyrics: First, it mentions its designed feet (tae kenéya). The kené designs (see Figure 1)
are genuinely Shipibo and are used in general to confirm their humanness and social
status. For festivities, Shipibo may paint their faces, hands, and feet with kené.
However, the bird sings that it is paddling with these designed feet; a Shipibo would,
of course, paddle with a paddle (winti) that he manoeuvres with his hands (note that
also this detail is subtly constructed: winti paddles, at least in former times, were often
decorated with carved kené patterns, see Tessmann 1928: 118).
For lines 4–6 it is first necessary to explain what a chaikoni is. In former times, all
Shipibo lived in an intraculturally determined ‘correct’ way of living but many did not
behave well before the Inca, so this culture hero separated them into two groups;
those we commonly know and meet, and the chaikoni. The latter did not commit the
sins of the former and so the Inca sent them to live in the deep woods, hidden from
view for ordinary people. Only well-trained specialists may contact these chaikoni
people, who maintain the ‘correct’ way of living, wearing perfumed clothes, singing
instead of talking, commanding all sorts of rainforest magic and being the masters of
all the animals, including the mighty anacondas and jaguars.
In the jenenponpo’s osanti song, the bird mentions a chaikoni. From the bird’s
point of view, a Shipibo fisherman in his canoe is as strange and powerful as a
chaikoni is from a Shipibo’s point of view (note here the historical implication: once,
Shipibo and chaikoni were equals; now they are different). Therefore, the ‘human’
bird sees the Shipibo as ‘its chaikoni’. This ‘chaikoni’ beats his canoe with the paddle,
thus scaring fish into a net he prepared beforehand (which is not made explicit in the
song but is a common fishing technique among Shipibo). Because of the noise the
bird has to retire. The bird itself was fishing, too, but all its potential catch is scared
away by the chaikoni (who, therefore, commands these animals by sound, as the
chaikoni are thought to do). The detail lies in the suffix -tsi applied to the chaikoni in
line 4. This suffix indicates compassion. The bird knows very well that it is actually
the better fisherman, working quickly and precisely with its beak without scaring
away the other fish. Therefore, the joke goes against the Shipibo’s clumsy fishing
technique, which is funny, because Shipibo generally regard themselves formidable
fishermen. This osanti is about superiority, but not a linear one. Shipibo are more
powerful than jenenponpo birds in the way chaikoni are superior to Shipibo; however,
the bird is the superior fisherman and, remarkably, the pun is at the expense of the
Shipibo.
The conflict of appearing human but not being one, or, from the animal’s
perspective, being human but not appearing thus, is perfectly illustrated by the
tortoise’s mashá:11
11
Performed by Herminia Sanancino Mozombite, 2005 (D 5467).
Lyrics 3: Osanti by the Tortoise Mananxawe.

1. jawe rao kaarinx All herbs I passed by on my way-‘nssh’ (onomatopoeic)
2. bero wiso sanakon I have seen with my black eye
3. ibaikanai Again and again they say that
4. chanketitanina I was unable to walk upright,
5. ninaren akerix but I stand very well-‘issh’ (onomatopoeic)
Here, fun is made directly about the tortoise lacking the ability to stand and walk
upright. In lines 1–2 the tortoise affirms that it eyed all the (low-growing) herbs while
walking. ‘They say’ in line 3 refers to Shipibo who (ignorant to reality!) do not see
that the tortoise is ‘really’ walking upright, as Real People do. Again the hints in the
lyrics are accompanied by musical ones: the mashá is truncated to a monotonous line
of tones with slight microtonal fluctuation (Figure 2), as if performed by somebody
who has only the dimmest idea how a mashá should be sung. The tortoise also reveals
itself by repeatedly interjecting the sound ‘inssh’, onomatopoeic for what Shipibo hear
from tortoises.
The Transformative Faculty: Becoming the Other

The following, final, example text shows what sounds like an osanti but is none. The
musical form is again shiro bewá, but note here the correct human pronunciation in
‘je je je’:12
Lyrics 4: Love Magic Song, by the Bird of Prey Matataon.
1. eara jain joai je je je From there I am coming,
2. nokon xoarantibi je je je with my vest
3. xoarameyontaanan je je je Having dressed up with my vest
4. bari jiwi ponyaman je je on a branch on a sunsplashed tree
5. yaka akekawanax je je je I sat down when passing this way,
6. taen oten taentan je je je putting one foot above the other
7. nokon bero kereshin je My eyes are red
8. maxen bero kereshin je je je red like the Bixa orellana fruit juice
These lyrics seem perfect for an osanti: The bird has stripes on its breast, so it appears
that it put on a vest, like Real People might do. It sits down on a tree branch, putting
one foot above the other—hinting at its non-humanness, which is finally made evident
by the red eyes. But there is neither an error in singing or pronunciation, nor a pun.
Therefore this song is not funny. On the contrary, Shipibo listeners are scared
when hearing this. The matataon is a (zoologically unidentified) bird of prey, and its
appearance is an omen of love magic. The specific matataon who sings that song is
not an animal in the strict sense, but a very Real Human Shipibo: it is the
manifestation of a médico who put on the bird’s vest in order to dispose of the bird’s
ability to initiate love relationships. The médico uses the bird’s agency in order to
actively manipulate the world. This is not a laughing song but a serious magical song.
One method of transformation is the use of mask-clothing, as Viveiros de Castro
12
Performed by Misael Torres Garcia, 2004 (D 5423).
(1998: 482) puts it. In the matataon case, however, the médico does not put on a
mask in the literal sense but indicates that a matataon which can be seen by people in
reality is actually himself in a transformed state. In Shipibo understanding, anybody
can transform unwillingly (many illnesses are interpreted as incidental or incomplete
transformations), but only trained specialists harness the musical power of
transforming and returning without harming their original human identity. There
are three main techniques used to obtain such transformed states (see Brabec de Mori
2012, 2013): with or without ingesting the hallucinogenic ayawaska brew, Shipibo
médicos can transform hidden from view or in absolute darkness, expressed with
intransitive verbs directly derived from names (e.g., inoti, to transform into a jaguar
ino). Another technique is to infiltrate the ‘nature’ (niwe) of non-humans by adapting
their appearance, a process called naikiti. With both techniques, the médico obtains
full access to these beings’ competences of perception and action. Finally, the médico
can use deception by appearing similar to the target beings, mimicking their
appearance and behaviour but without owning their competences, a process called
paranti (to betray, to trick) in Shipibo.
During a healing ritual, the boundaries of humanness become veiled and extremely
opaque. While the patient becomes an Other by being drawn beyond these borders by
malign forces, the médico consciously plays with his own indifferent positionality; the
ritual’s main phase is highly liminal and deconstructive, the médico becomes an
enigmatic entity. But his aim (when healing) lies in the reconstruction of the world
with its boundaries again securely embracing the patient within the Real People’s
domain. Therefore he ends a session by singing protective songs and ‘returning’,
putting off voice masks and again appearing and sounding human. Magical songs for
curing and sorcery do not use metaphors of animals or spirits aiming at describing
certain features of human sociality, but rather they are emanations of (prior or
current) full-blown experiences of what it is like to be an animal or a spirit (cf. Brabec
de Mori 2012).
Overing (2000: 77) declares her opposition to Sir James Frazer’s claim that magic
words were ‘false words’ because of his claim that: ‘You cannot control natural forces
with words’. Overing argues that ‘the magical words of Piaroa myths have a good
deal of efficacy because they have first and foremost to do with human forces’
(original emphasis). This is true for Piaroa myths, and for narratives with translated
metaphors. However, forces that we—in a naturalistic understanding—declare as
‘natural’ are located within the realm of humanness (although not of Real Humans)
within an animic ontology. Agency is distributed among them and interaction with
them is crucial. The key for communication is song. For the Shipibo, Illius writes that
‘Music is the spirit’s language, and singing is the adequate mode of communicating
with them’ (1997: 216; my translation). When music performance kicks in, the
human voice is super-formalised to an inter-specifically intelligible medium and may
exert the power of its words on human forces in agents such as howler monkeys,
birds of omen, anacondas or spirits. This is underlined by the behaviour of the super-
human chaikoni, who constantly sing instead of talking and therefore are able to
command even the most powerful rainforest agents, including spirit-animals like the
jenen ino (‘water-dwelling jaguar’). The power that chaikoni wield towards any other
beings by producing sounds and song stands paradigmatic for the paramount role of
the sonic in Shipibo cosmology and cosmological boundary work.
It is therefore interesting to differentiate between those non-human instances that
produce funny osanti songs when singing through the mouth of a médico and those
associated with magical songs, like the chaikoni or the matataon bird. The matataon
song differs from osanti more than anything else in the respect that the singer uses
the bird’s superior agency for changing circumstances. He does not use the howler’s
or tortoise’s agency in osanti singing. Here are the animals that appear in osanti songs
I recorded: the howler monkey (roo), the red monkey (joshin shino), the spider
monkey (iso), the dog (ochiti), a vulture (xete), a baby parrot (bawa), two more birds
(jenenponpo and abokoma), the land tortoise (mananxawe) and three fish (ipo,
amákiri and koyaparo). Further on appear one plant (the bush anta) and one lesser
demon. These entities have in common that they possess lower competence of action
or perception than Shipibo people. Therefore osanti songs, by the means of
performance, reconstruct the hierarchy of beings. As long as one can laugh about
somebody else, the hierarchical positioning is in favour of those who laugh. Dealing
with instances of higher competence, on the other hand, is the sole domain of magical
songs, where also trickery (paranti) may play a role, but this is not funny and
therefore beyond the limited scope of this paper.
These borders are never set in stone and have to be maintained and negotiated.
The boundaries, at least in Shipibo ontology, are neither based on a hierarchy of
predators and prey as commonly suggested by perspectivism, nor do they replicate a
symbolic economy of affinity. The hierarchy is based upon the agents’ competences
of perception and action, and the scaling is very fine-tuned and flexible. Many birds
own a higher competence of perception than Shipibo and therefore may foretell the
future—a competence that can be useful for a médico, as can the competences of
action owned by the legendary chaikoni, or the magical and physical power of
anacondas and jaguars. All these instances are addressed in magical songs. Because
the medicos know and perform magical songs for summoning or transforming into
these beings, they can establish social relationships with them. But with that, also the
borders between médicos and Shipibo laypeople are strengthened: Médicos told me
that in some cases they would make fun, together with powerful entities like the
chaikoni, of others including Shipibo laypeople. However, I have not yet discovered
whether chaikoni sing osanti songs from the Shipibo’s perspective.
If osanti contribute to boundary work by demonstrating the médicos’ superiority
compared with those who are thought to sing them, a question remains: where are
whites and mestizo people localised in this hierarchy of competences? I recorded an
osanti song by a lesser demon who expresses how its bones bend and arch and its feet
feel like iron from repeated stamping. This demon is actually a white or mestizo
young adult dancing in a discotheque or at a party as viewed by conservative Shipibo
people: instead of dancing in a civilised way in a mashá round dance, this person
stamps on the ground and bends bones like a ridiculous demon. Fun can also be
made of such people and boundary work can be done: by performing an osanti, the
singer relegates the dancer to the realm of the non-human, specifically to the realm of
non-humans with lower competences than the singer.
In most instances involving whites, mestizos or other indians, however, a different
musical genre is performed that is not exclusively Shipibo: mocking songs. One
médico sang such mocking songs after a healing session I recorded (D 5255–65),
respectively imitating an Asháninka healer, a mestizo from downriver who is thought
to cheat white visitors, and a ‘gringo shaman apprentice’ (Brabec de Mori
forthcoming). Here, the singer imitates (mawai) the Other and, notably, neither is
the musical form ‘shipibicised’ into mashá or shiro bewá nor are the lyrics translated.
Both the mocking songs’ localisation after the ritual and their function in boundary
work is similar to the osanti’s. But in osanti, the animals’ different ‘musicality’ is
translated (although with deliberate errors), as is their ‘language’. In mocking songs
these stay foreign and are directly imitated, although likewise with errors and
ridiculous additions. Translation is not considered necessary in mocking as anybody
can understand it. Likewise, any Shipibo may musically mock whites, mestizos or
other indians, this is not restricted to médicos.
Conclusions
Mary Douglas, in her analysis of ritual jokes, extrapolates the ambiguous role of
jokers in society: A joker ‘has a firm hold on his own position in the [social]
structure’, but at the same time ‘he lightens for everyone the oppressiveness of social
reality’ and ‘[h]is jokes expose the inadequacy of realist structurings of experience’
(Douglas [1970] 1999: 159). This refers rather to professional jokers, who, for the
Amazon, are most often mentioned as trickster characters (cf. Basso 1996; Hill 2009).
A tricksterish attitude can be ascribed to médicos in their ritual dealings with all
forms of non-humans, many of these involving trickery (paranti), but osanti songs
themselves lack any such tricks. The animal or demon protagonists in osanti songs
are far from being tricksters, although some of them may be tricksters in other
contexts: the tortoise mananxawe, for example, archetypically wins a race against the
stag chaxo or resists the mighty jaguar ino as a protagonist in trickster stories.
However, as a protagonist in osanti songs, mananxawe is simply itself and does not
trick anyone (see Lyrics 3).
Although tricksters in narrative have been studied among Lowland indigenous
people, humour by itself is hardly mentioned or analysed. An important contribution
is Overing’s (2000) paper about ‘The Ludic Side of Magic’. Overing highlights the
repeated surfacing of obscene and hilarious hints throughout situations commonly
regarded as serious, like myth-telling or ritual curing, for example. As a result, she
asserts ‘generative power [to] bawdy words’ (2000: 77), concluding that humour in
ritual and myth-telling is a tool for achieving positive conviviality and finally fertility
(this idea is further developed in Lagrou 2006).
Recalling that osanti are most often performed after very serious healing sessions
and, as one médico put it, as a test of whether the patient was again brought back to
‘correct’ human life, Overing’s proposition can be questioned. Here, life is in perfect
order if a person is able to laugh. The joke and its laughter are not tools for achieving
well-being (which is achieved with magical songs), they are what is to be achieved.
Among the Shipibo, humour and laughing (shiroi) are ultimate goals of techniques
for constructing a world in which conviviality can be achieved. Shiroi does not lead to
a good community life but results from it.
Osanti songs, however, may also serve as tools apart of post-treatment diagnosis.
They demonstrate that laughing works for maintaining borders. They establish a
specific joking relationship between more and less powerful entities (the médicos and
the osanti singing animals). While the médicos as tricksters (cf. Basso 1996, 2009;
Douglas [1970] 1999) deconstruct the world in ritual, they reconstruct it afterwards,
also by singing an osanti or two after the session. As tools for ordering the world,
osanti pertain to Radcliffe-Brown’s proposal that the comic helps to establish order.
Notably, joking (shiroi) among in-laws, towards visitors and in mocking outsiders,
can be done in words, or without music and translation. Anybody can imagine (and
mock) the Others’ position. Osanti songs, on the other hand, can only be sung by
médicos, because these are the only ones who own the transformative faculty that
enables them to convincingly communicate—by translating ‘from the original’—how
animals, plants or demons perceive their world.
Viveiros de Castro also talks about humour but he makes a premature general-
isation when he asks, based on an analogy borrowed from Clastres:
What do Indians laugh about? By analogy, I wish to ask: what are Indians afraid of?
The response is, in principle (and only ever in principle …), simple: they laugh at
and fear the same things, […] such as jaguars, shamans, whites and spirits—that is,
beings defined by their radical alterity. (Viveiros de Castro 2012: 29)
Osanti songs show that this is an overt simplification. Shipibo people laugh, in principle
(and only ever in principle), about Others that are clearly distinguished from those they
fear. They would not laugh about, and definitely never ‘at’, the jaguar, shamans or
spirits lest they would reveal suicidal tendencies (but they do laugh about whites,
including perspectivists, who they usually do not fear). Osanti songs, furthermore, show
a very interesting attitude towards animals: in humour, European perspectives can be
surprisingly coherent with Amerindian ideas. Critchley (2002), with considerable
scrutiny, explores whether animals can laugh, basing his argument on European
history, literature and ethological studies, and concludes that only humans can laugh or
sense humour. Consequently, ‘[i]f humour is human, then it also […] explores what it
means to be human by moving back and forth across the frontier that separates
humanity from animality, thereby making it unstable’ (2002). Critchley goes on that
‘[w]e might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of
identifications and misidentifications with animality’ (2002: 29; original emphasis) in
humour and beyond. That said, in European or naturalistic terms, humour contributes
to boundary work marking a difference between humans and animals. For Critchley,
and for the naturalistic world, animals are funny in jokes when they become (or behave
like) humans, but humans appear disgusting when becoming (or behaving like)
animals. Among Lowland South American societies, the picture does not appear very
different. Osanti singing animals, as indicated by perspectivism, are persons, they
believe that they are ‘Real People’ and therefore behave like humans, which finally
results in them being funny when trying (and failing) to sing like humans. But with that,
the osanti case also questions some of the animic or perspectivistic claims that the
frontiers between animal persons and human persons are very differently treated in the
Amazon when compared with naturalism. If one bears in mind that in naturalism, all
animals are considered inferior to humans, the laughter about them behaving like
humans seems very similar to the Shipibo’s laughter about osanti-singing animals.
Acknowledgements
I express my deep gratitude to my wife Laida Mori Silvano de Brabec, to Bruno Illius,
Jean Langdon, Beverley Diamond, Laure Carbonnel, Anthony Seeger and all authors
in this special issue, who significantly helped me sculpting this paper out of a mess of
crazy ideas.
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Focusing Perspectives and Establishing

Boundaries and Power: Why the Suyá/
Kïsêdjê Sing for the Whites in the
Twenty-first Century
Anthony Seeger
Looking at Lowland South America as a whole, it appears that instrumental and vocal
music are essential components of the relationships between kinds of beings and realms.
This is one reason why music in the region is important and so often at the heart, rather
than the periphery, of social experience. New music is produced and learned at the
interface between kinds of beings, and music is used to transition from one realm to
another or one kind of being to another. But how does one move from the apparently
sacred sphere intrinsic to these societies to the conflicted struggle of these Indigenous
communities to survive the assaults on their lands, their health and their livelihood
brought by agroindustry, large dam projects and oil drilling? What is the place of music
at this interface, and what does that use tell us about music as a whole for the region?
Keywords: Brazilian Indians; Music; Kïsêdjê; Perspectivism; Identity
Introduction
This paper considers the questions of why a group of Brazilian Indians that feels
threatened by the encroachment of potentially violent Brazilians with their mechanised
soy-bean plantations, poaching of fish and game, and pollution of rivers sing and dance
for them? And why have they done so for over 50 years? What is the relationship of
music and dance to outsiderness? What is the purpose of singing and dancing for past
or potential enemies? I will first examine the usefulness of a concept called
Anthony Seeger is Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology, Emeritus, at the University of California Los
Angeles and the Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He holds a BA from Harvard
University and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has undertaken research
among the Suyá/Kïsêdjê intermittently for over 40 years and is the author of several books and over 120 articles
and book chapters on them, on ethnomusicology and on audiovisual archives as well as intellectual property.
Correspondence to: Anthony Seeger, 2 Kimber Ridge CT, Annapolis, MD 21403, USA. Email: aseeger@arts.
ucla.edu

‘perspectivism’, widely applied and debated during the past 20 years in Amazonian
research on Indigenous societies, and then will reflect on some of the implications of
focusing the White’s gaze on one facet of themselves through performance.1
Before examining the particular case of the Suyá/Kïsêdjê2 referred to in the title, I
begin with some reflections on the recent and remarkable transformations of our
understanding of Amazonian Indian history and music and a discussion of the
significance of perspectivism and its applicability or not to the Gê-speaking Kïsêdjê.
One of the pleasures of aging is to see earlier certainties challenged and to watch
one’s own students devise better ways to address the ethnographic representations of
the Amazon region, including one’s own earlier work. The presentation of the Kïsêdjê
case follows the discussion of perspectivism (Lima 1996, 2005; Viveiros de Castro
1996, 1998, 2004, 2012), which has been presented in the introduction to this volume.
Perspectivism and What Suyá/Kïsêdjê Sing

Why do I find perspectivism important enough to discuss it in the context of Kïsêdjê
songs and stories? Because it allows me to make better sense of three things that have
puzzled me for decades in my own ethnographic work and writing. These are: the
relationship between humans and the ‘natural world’ as defined by them; why all
music is said to be obtained from animals, enemies and monsters rather than from
human creativity; and why the Kïsêdjê have sung for strangers on so many occasions
over the decades I have known them, even though they had ambivalent or negative
opinions of them. These are old questions of mine for which I have provided answers
in a number of publications (Seeger 1981, [1987] 2004, 2010 respectively). But
perspectivism suggests somewhat different new responses to these old questions.
For the past 40 years, I have been endeavouring to understand the relationship
between Kïsêdjê definitions of human beings and the ‘natural world’ (aspects of
certain humans, animals, plants and things) in order to learn how they organise their
cosmos, themselves and their music. My first ethnographic description of the Kïsêdjê
was entitled Nature and Society in Central Brazil (Seeger 1981). I was particularly
puzzled by the way all music was said to come from natural species (animals and
plants that have their own ceremonies and songs), enemies, monsters or Kïsêdjê in
transformation to other states of being but was performed by the Kïsêdjê in the least
transformed and most ‘humanised’ events and places: during ceremonies held in the
1
I use the word ‘White’ throughout this paper to mean ‘all non-Indians’. In Brazil, many of these are not
Caucasian, but the word is a gloss on the commonly used Portuguese term brancos and has the advantage of
including both Brazilians and foreigners.
2
Members of the group known for over a century in the literature as the Suyá now prefer to be called by one of
their own names for themselves, Kïsêdjê. I use both names in titles and this paragraph in order to be clear that I
am discussing the group formerly known as Suyá and to help with bibliographic searches. I had written
extensively on them before they wished to have their name changed (Seeger 1980, 1981, [1987] 2004, and many
articles). The Brazilian anthropologist Marcela Coelho de Souza, who currently works with the Suyá/Kïsêdjê,
uses the name Kïsêdjê in the titles of her publications. From this paragraph on, I refer to the group by the name
Kïsêdjê, in accordance with their request.
364 A. Seeger
cleared-off plaza within the circle of residential houses. I initially suggested that the
Kïsêdjê cosmos could be organised along a continuum between ‘nature’ as defined by
them and ‘society’—I purposefully did not contrast nature with culture (Seeger 1981).
But in a subsequent book on Kïsêdjê music, Why Suyá Sing (Seeger [1987] 2004), I
suggested that instead of being ends of a continuum, the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’
seemed to be in constant interaction in space and time.
To a certain degree, perspectivism addresses my puzzlement. According to the
Kïsêdjê, animals have ceremonies like Kïsêdjê because they see themselves as such. If
all species had similar ‘souls’ and saw themselves as Kïsêdjê, then they would sing
that way. The two ends of the spectrum of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are in some ways
the same, if asymmetrical.
Some other things began to make sense from a perspectival perspective as well. The
Kïsêdjê always maintained that the animals I could see and hear, and the sounds they
made, were not their real language and song. Kïsêdjê songs did not imitate the actual
sounds of animals I heard in the forest, the way Steven Feld has described for the Kaluli
whose songs follow the contours of the muni bird (Feld 1982). I was told by a number
of Kïsêdjê that animals live in villages like the Kïsêdjê and look a lot like them when
they are in those villages. Some described them as taking off their animal appearances
like removing their ‘skins’ to reveal a human body. Even generally solitary animals, such
as jaguars and tapirs, were said to have villages. They look like humans to one another
(and to human visitors to their village) but have a different perspective on certain things
—just as Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Lima (1996) describe. One man recounted how
he turned into a vulture, flew up into the sky, learned some of the vultures’ songs and
joined them around a rotten carcass to eat. The vultures exclaimed ‘Yum! This is good
ceremonial food!’ (Seeger 2004: 56, from a description of Bentugarara). His report was a
classic example of perspectivism: both humans and vultures have ceremonies, and both
of them have ceremonial food, but the ceremonial food of vultures looks like carrion to
humans. Every time the man told the story of being invited by the vultures to share
their ceremonial food, the listening Kïsêdjê reacted with disgust and laughter—
resembling reactions to animal behaviour songs described by Brabec de Mori in this
volume. But full Kïsêdjê songs were not considered to be funny. A few children’s
shout songs (akia) were purposefully funny, but they were taught to them by their
Kïsêdjê relatives, not learned from animals. They were thus not ‘real’ songs.
There are some impediments to wholeheartedly fitting perspectivism into an analysis
of Kïsêdjê music. One of the most important is that the Kïsêdjê are one of the Gê-
speaking societies that once occupied a broad swath of Brazil inland from the coasts,
extending from near the Amazon River to Rio Grande do Sul.3 In South America, the
language family to which any given group pertains is to a degree an indication that
certain characteristic social institutions and cosmological beliefs will be present. This is
certainly not always the case, as there have been fruitful and creative interactions
3
Terence Turner has written a very detailed and thoughtful review of perspectivism in the journal Tipití (Turner
2009), and also observes that the descriptions of perspectivism do not translate completely to his own
ethnographic area, the Gê-speaking Kayapó.
among groups speaking languages of different families for a long time—the Upper
Xingu region is an example. But there are often striking differences across language
families. The cosmologies and social institutions of the Gê speakers are very different
from those of most of the Tupí, Arawak and other language groups whose speakers are
the objects of the other papers in this volume. The Gê-speaking societies do not
typically have the same focus on predation and the incorporation of affines (although
they do hunt and marry) as the other groups reported on here. Most of them do not
have any sacred flute traditions such as those reported in Acácio Piedade’s and
Jonathan Hill’s papers in this issue (see also Piedade 2004), and their myth-chants are
quite different from those described by Guilherme Werlang da Fonseca Costa do Couto
(2001). Some Gê-speaking groups use non-melodic whistles to intensify the sound
at their ceremonies, but very few even use melody-producing flutes, even though
they may know of their existence from contact with other groups. Most of the Gê do
not have an important institution of shamanism, and most of them do not use
hallucinogens or tobacco as important parts of ritual life. That is what they do not have.
On the positive side, what the Gê-speaking groups characteristically do have is
large circular villages and a cosmological vision that I would characterise as being
(in Weber’s terms) more ‘this world oriented’ than that of most of the other language
groups in Lowland South America. Their cosmos is laid out on the earth’s surface
through village design and attitudes about space and time. Many of the Gê-speaking
groups have one or more pairs of ceremonial moieties and a complex social
organisation famously discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) in three essays in
Structural Anthropology, in which complex relationships of naming were the
organising features of ceremonial groups rather than kinship or affinity. Many of
the Gê speakers were very hostile to the invasion of their lands and mobilised strong
opposition to Brazilian incursions; today they continue to be at the forefront of such
conflicts as the Belo Monte dam (where some Kayapó groups have been especially
active). The Central and Northern Gê were the subjects of a collaborative study by the
Harvard-Central Brazil project under the leadership of David Maybury-Lewis and
Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (described in Maybury-Lewis 1979). During the ensuing
decades, studies and restudies have been done in most of the rest of the Gê-speaking
groups in Brazil, as well as in groups characterised as macro-Gê. Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro and many of his students studied Tupí-speaking groups, and their work was to
a degree a response to studies of the Gê.4
Gê music is virtually all vocal music rather than instrumental. Most singing is
accompanied by some kind of rattle and rhythmic stamping or dancing. Music and
dance are often inseparable in language and in performance. Many groups have
4
I can vividly recall a long discussion with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro when he was still a graduate student
beginning his research among the Araweté, the Tupí-speaking group described in his ethnography (Viveiros de
Castro 1992). I kept asking about the spatial layout of the villages, to which he responded that there was not
much apparent system to it. He described a shaman’s cure and said it happened ‘in his back yard’, to which I
responded with disbelief. The complexity of Tupí cosmology is in other realms, not laid out on the ground and
enacted within that layout. We then began to come to grips with how a Gê-centric view of Lowland South
America was not going to answer all of the questions either.
366 A. Seeger
several genres of heightened speech and song, and they are often restricted to people
of a certain age and gender.
In spite of this, the Gê speakers are not from another planet—their cosmological
thought bears strong relationships with that of the other Indigenous peoples of
Lowland South America. They, too, make strong contrasts between human beings
and natural species, but without as much emphasis on spirits. Humans, most animals
and some things have ‘shadows’ (sometimes glossed as ‘souls’) that can be separated
from their physical bodies. The separation can have an important impact on the
person or thing that has lost its shadow.
The Kïsêdjê are an unusual Gê-speaking group. While many aspects of their cosmo-
logy and ritual life have parallels among other groups of the Northern Gê branch (the
Timbira and Kayapó groups), for much of the past 150 years or so they have interacted
and intermarried with members of groups from other language families in the Upper
Xingu (described by Rafael Bastos and Acácio Piedade in this issue). A great deal of their
material culture was adapted from the Upper Xingu, as well as some of the ceremonies
they perform. I am not certain whether perspectivism resonates so well among the
Kïsêdjê because of what they have incorporated (in somewhat changed forms) from
the Upper Xingu, or if the ideas can be applied to other Gê-speaking societies.
Crucial to most discussions of perspectivism is some human personage (or spiritual
being) who can make a connection between the perspectives of different entities—
someone who can actually see or experience multiple perspectives. In many cases this
figure is glossed as the ‘shaman’ or, as among the Shipibo described by Bernd Brabec
de Mori, using the Spanish terminology, médico. Shamans are widespread in Lowland
South America, but not as often found among the speakers of the Gê family of
languages in Brazil. The Kïsêdjê do not have them, although they may have had them
before about 1900, and they consult shamans of other tribes when their own
medications fail them. But a different kind of person does have at least two
perspectives. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that two linked personages can
have two perspectives: a person and his or her spirit.
Kïsêdjê say they have one spirit/soul (garon), which in most people resides in the
chest and leaves the body only when a person dies. But certain Kïsêdjê have
permanently lost their spirits. Their spirits have been taken from them and ‘thrown’
to live with some class of animal, insect or plant species. In this case, the ‘person’ (the
physical body) lives in the Kïsêdjê village; the spirit lives in the village of the bees, the
birds, game animals, trees and other natural species. The person is said to be ‘without
a spirit’ (katon kidi) because he or she lacks a spirit. The spirit, living with another
species, learns the language, music and perspective of the natural world to which it
has been sent. The Kïsêdjê ‘people without spirits’ who introduced new music to the
village share certain features with the shamans found in communities like the Upper
Xingu and the Shipibo described in this volume. The difference is that the Kïsêdjê
spirits taken to live with animals never return to their human bodies—they are
permanent residents in the villages of the natural species. This is very different from
most ideas of shamanism in Lowland South America.
Here is how the separation of person from spirit occurs. A person and his or her
spirit get separated through the action of an angry and jealous ‘witch’ (wayangá),
who is angry when he or she does not receive something others have in abundance.
Many examples were given to me about how this happens, but they all have the same
basic structure as the following example using a male subject (women could lose their
spirits and teach songs as well): a man robs a bees’ nest and takes the honey to his
family, observed by a ‘witch’ who does not receive any of the highly valued food.
Angry at not being given any honey, the witch comes at night and takes the man’s
spirit from his chest and ‘throws it’ to the bees.5 Once there, the spirit cannot usually
return. The man who has lost his spirit gets very thin and weak. After wasting away
for some time, the person ‘sees himself’ among the bees and can suddenly understand
their language. He thus knows that his spirit is living with the natural species he can
understand. At that point the man starts to get better. His spirit, meanwhile, has
learned the speech and songs of the bees, and the man can understand the speech of
the bees and can hear them singing, too. When he walks outside the village he can
hear, and sometimes see, the bees singing and dancing. Upon learning that the man’s
spirit is with the bees, people start to ask him for songs, which he teaches them. He
can only teach bee songs, because he only knows the bee language. If they like the
songs he teaches, more and more people ask him to teach them new ones. The person
in the village does not create the songs the way a composition student in a music
department creates a piece, according to what I was told. Other people-without-spirits
in the village would understand the language and singing of another class of species
and would teach people the songs of those species. In this way the songs of many
different species were part of the Kïsêdjê repertory. Both men and women could
become teachers of songs, even though women did not perform all of the song genres
they taught. The Kïsêdjê also said that children could lose their spirits quite young,
and then when they were older they would begin to teach songs.
The critical feature for the Kïsêdjê perspective is that a human being can have
different perspectives because his body and his spirit each have one. Importantly, in
the Kïsêdjê case the dual perspective relationship revolves around ceremonies and
songs rather than curing diseases or finding lost souls. Kïsêdjê remedies for the body
are either herbal or quietly uttered ‘invocations’ performed by a knowledgeable—but
not necessarily dual-perspective—man or woman (Seeger 1981: 100–5 and 212–19)
and transmitted from one generation to the next by the Kïsêdjê themselves.
The relationship between a person and his or her absent spirit is complex, however.
The actions of the spirit seem to have a direct impact on the person long after they
have been separated. When I recently listened to my 1970s interview tapes again,
I ‘discovered’ (in the sense of hearing something I had not paid much attention to
before) that the person and the spirit are not completely separated. Instead, the
actions of the species with which his or her spirit lives and shares experiences affect
5
The Kïsêdjê do not specify the species of each group in which spirits reside. They refer to larger categories—all
bees (mben), all birds, all game animals, all fish and so forth. The spirit learns the language the group shares. For
example, all bees and wasps were said to live together in a single huge village to the East.
368 A. Seeger
the person-without-a-spirit in the village. When the bees swarm and go to perform a
ceremony in the sky, a person whose spirit is with them may faint or act ‘like a bee’
and tie his hair in front of his face and stand rocking in the doorway of his house for
hours. When fish or birds move quickly in a school or flock, a man or woman may
faint. I never heard of anything that a person did affecting his or her absent spirit,
however. When the Kïsêdjê sing or take a long trip, their spirits seem to be
unperturbed. Losing one’s spirit was a frightening experience, and having one that
was living with a natural species was also. Several of my research associates told me
that in the old days, when the villages were big and there were many witches, life was
very frightening (Seeger 1982). Today, they said, there are many fewer Kïsêdjê and it
is less frightening. There are also fewer people without spirits—perhaps only one.
It is possible to extend the principle of perspectivism from animals to other kinds
of beings, among them other humans. Like most people, the Kïsêdjê think of
themselves as true people (me) and other kinds of people (referred to by the term
kupen) as substantially different. In her discussion of Yudjá perspectives, Lima
describes a similar delineation of other Indians as less-than-truly human by the Yudjá
(Lima 2005: 47ff). For the Kïsêdjê, other Indians have their own languages,
ceremonies, foods, customs and their perspectives. Under some circumstances—in
armed conflicts—other Indians are referred to as ‘our game’ because they are hunted
and killed (but not eaten). The Kïsêdjê also learn songs from other Indians, whom
they classify as kupen. According to the origin stories of several ceremonies, some
Kïsêdjê have visited animal or enemy villages and brought back ceremonies or
captives who teach them (see Seeger 1984: myth numbers 60, 82 and 158). But they
have not lost their spirits because their physical bodies (with spirit inside) travelled to
the non-human village. In some cases, a lone hunter is out in the forest when he is
invited to join a given animal species in a ceremony. By carefully watching and
listening, and by avoiding being permanently trapped there, he learns new ceremonies
and is able to return to his villages where he teaches them to his fellow Kïsêdjê.6
The Kïsêdjê like to learn and perform songs from other Indians the same way as they
learn those of animals: they learn by watching and listening, or they learn them
from captives or affines from other villages that live with them. Or, today, they may
purchase a tape from a member of another community and learn from that.7 Following
a perspectivist approach, it would be possible to imagine that, for the Kïsêdjê, enemy
Indians, monsters and Whites are all ‘others’ with their own perspectives.
6
Several Kïsêdjê ceremonies have an origin story of this kind. Much to my surprise this turns out to be true of
the Mouse Ceremony, described in Why Suyá Sing.
7
Late one night in 2008, I heard flute-playing in the men’s house (a rarity among the Kïsêdjê), but with strangely
long pauses between the pieces. In the men’s house, an older man with a cassette tape recorder was listening to a
tape and reproducing the melodies on a small bamboo duct flute. He gleefully told me how he had managed to
get the tape from a member of another tribe for very little money. The point was less the money than the
subterfuge of getting the music he could play to the whole village from another community (an Upper Xingu
society that has an extensive wind instrument tradition). The process of obtaining music from strangers persists,
but the methods have changed.
The symmetry between humans and animals is not perfect, however. I never heard
of an animal species learning songs or ceremonies from human beings. As far as
I know, animals have never asked a human to sing them songs in order to learn
them, or captured a human for that purpose. I have also never heard that any of the
Kïsêdjê’s contemporary neighbours have performed any of their songs, even though
the Kïsêdjê frequently perform songs learned from many of their neighbours. Why
that is, and how it might be explained by perspective, is still not clear to me.
When the Kïsêdjê sing in their villages, virtually all of their music is part of long
ceremonies. The social life of ceremonies is very different from the social life of
everyday domestic living. Domestic groups are made up of people who have specific
kinship relations to one another—parents, children, in-laws and the like. The
differences between kin and non-kin, and between birth family and affinal family, are
very important. But in ceremonies, relationships are very different. Membership in a
particular ceremonial group is determined by a person’s names, which are received at
birth from some real or classificatory maternal uncle. Brothers are often in different
ceremonial groups, and in-laws that are separated most of the time may be in the same
groups. The name groups themselves are self-perpetuating through time. As men and
women pass their names to their young nephews and nieces, the young children join
the groups of their name-givers. They paint themselves the same way, ornament their
ceremonial regalia the same way, sing the same ceremonial group songs together and
eventually pass their name set to young nieces and nephews of their own. During
ceremonies, a man or woman is a name-giver and/or name-receiver, and the everyday
kinship relationships are far less relevant. The one important kinship relationship that
remains is that between brother and sister; sisters play important roles in a number of
ceremonies. The recruitment to groups through name sets makes singing, dancing and
doing ceremonies a way of overcoming time and transforming human relationships. By
displaying the paint, paraphernalia and sounding the appropriate songs, Kïsêdjê are
also abandoning some of the individuality of their relationships to each other, and also
to Brazilians. When men (for whom moiety membership is especially important) sing,
they are to a certain degree channelling all of the men who have had the same names
and done the ceremony before them. This is a little like the ‘cosmic flow’ Piedade refers
to in his paper on Wauja sacred flutes and women’s songs—but it is done ‘in this
world’ by human actors. When the Kïsêdjê sing for Whites, they usually do one of the
songs sung in the morning and evening of most ceremonies. These have important
significance, but are not associated with the final transformational night characteristic
of most of the major ceremonies.
One of the ways humans and animals interact through singing is that on the
final night of several ceremonies the participants ‘become’ animals—or they
become beings that combine aspects of the animals about which they are singing
and human beings. I have described this for the Mouse Ceremony (Seeger 2004:
104–27), but it is also true of the Savannah Deer ceremony, and some others. For
a short time—usually between dusk and dawn—the singers experience the
ambiguity described for shamans in some of the other papers. Their songs are
370 A. Seeger
ambivalent references. Who is singing ‘I leap and sing the ceremony of the
mouse?’ Is it the human, or is it the animal? Or is it, at some point in the evening,
both combined? Although the Kïsêdjê do not have shamans, they do have
transformative experiences—temporarily as singers and more permanently as
‘people without spirits’ who teach new songs to the rest. None of this, however, is
shown to the Brazilians for whom they perform. They are shown the body paint,
the dancing and the unison singing.
Focusing the Gaze of the Enemies

Perspectivism posits that each species (and perhaps by extension every group of
humans) regards the others from its own perspective. What would be the Brazilian
perspective on Indians? I present the following observations with some diffidence—
they are mostly taken from my experience between 1970 and 1982, and are stereo-
types. Some of this has certainly changed following the subsequent Indigenist
political activity, debates during the elaboration of a new Brazilian constitution and
the education of the world’s population. On the other hand, stereotypes die hard and
popular sentiment seems not to have changed that much in the rural areas of the
country. With those cautions, I would say that for many Brazilians in the interior the
stereotypical Indigenous peoples of Brazil are thought to be very different from non-
Indians—they are ‘others’, not ‘us’. Those living close to Indigenous people often
fear them and characterise them as animal-like. By those more distant from them,
they are exoticised and fantasised about in everything from literature, cartoons and
television shows to journalistic reporting. In the popular imagination, ‘real’ or
‘authentic’ Indians are ‘forest people’ (Portuguese silvícolas), an idea with roots in
the German Naturvölker and Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage. Their ‘purity’ and
Indianness is expressed by nudity, feathers, body painting, bows and arrows, and—
very important for this article—collective singing and dancing (it is no accident
that this is how Carnival dancers in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere represent
themselves as Indians).
If ‘pure’ Indians are represented by nudity, feathers and unison singing, then
‘degraded’ or vice-ridden (viciados) or ‘acculturated’ Indians wear clothes, speak
Portuguese, have driver’s licenses and university degrees, are reported to commit
criminal acts familiar to Brazilians, play Brazilian (rather than Indigenous) music and
ask for things individually such as money, employment or land. Alternatively,
clothed, educated and Christian Indians may be called ‘civilised,’ since they have
become ‘like us Europeans’. For Brazilians, ‘pure’ Indians strip down, paint up, put on
feathers and dance and sing and are watched by them; civilised Indians join them in
church and other activities, albeit in subordinate roles.
The Kïsêdjê perspective on Whites begins with their designation for them. When
they met their first Whites, probably in the nineteenth century (but possibly much
earlier, before they arrived where they currently live on the Xingu river), they called
them ‘big skinned people’ (kupen kawti) referring to the clothing that they thought
was a large, baggy skin.8 Whites characteristically are considered to be powerful,

armed and have a lot of wealth and goods. Since their first recorded meeting with
Whites—with the German explorer Karl von den Steinen in 1884—they have worked
hard to obtain the material goods that Whites possess. Part of the Brazilian peace-
making process with isolated Indigenous peoples has been to seduce them into
permanent contact through giving gifts of steel tools, clothing and other desired
goods, which reinforced the Kïsêdjê idea that Whites were essentially a good source of
goods. This relationship continues today in the form of a Kïsêdjê foundation
(Associação Indígena Kïsêdjê) that has been quite successful at applying for grants and
other kinds of support and at establishing relations with a variety of non-
governmental organisations and government agencies.
The Kïsêdjê sang and danced for the team of Brazilians that came to make peace
with them and give them presents in 1959 (discussed in Seeger 2010). They sang and
danced at events organised by Claudio Villas Boas at the northern administrative post
of the Parque Indígena do Xingu between 1960 and 1980. Later, when the Brazilian
frontier advanced toward them and large agricultural endeavours as well as towns
came close enough to visit, the Kïsêdjê also sang there for inaugurations and other
political events. Kuiusi, the strategic-thinking leader of the Kïsêdjê, once commented
on why the Kïsêdjê sing for strangers. He said:
some other groups don’t want to sing for the Whites; they are ashamed to take off
their clothes and sing. We [Kïsêdjê] are not ashamed to take off our clothes and
paint ourselves. We will do it and sing for the Whites. (Seeger field journal)
They continued to sing and dance at the visit of government ministers in the 1990s,
at the inauguration of the mayor of the town of Querência, in the village for a major
television advertisement for sandals,9 and for many years on 19 April, the national
‘Day of the Indian’.
The Kïsêdjê, who today wear clothes most of the time, frequently speak Portuguese
quite well, have had open conflicts with local landowners, are knowledgeable about
(but do not play) Brazilian country music (música sertaneja; Seeger 2003), and are
known to the people in the region as individuals, focus the White’s gaze on them as
pure Indians by taking off their clothes, painting and ornamenting their bodies, and
8
Note how important the skin is for both Brazilians and Kïsêdjê—for the Whites, real Indians wear no clothes
but have painted skins; for the Kïsêdjê, Whites have distinctively baggy, non-Kïsêdjê, skins. In many parts of
Amazonia, the skin defines the person. Animals can take off their animal skins and become like humans, and
many Indigenous body paint designs define specific people and statuses. While some of these tendencies were
visible during the period of my research (1971–2005), they are the object of much greater self-conscious
community reflection today than they were in the past.
9
The complex negotiations around the preparation of an advertisement for a line of sandals launched by the
super-model Gisele Bundchen is described by Marcela Coelho de Souza in her fascinating article on the subject
(Coelho de Souza 2012). The video advertisement itself, which I played during my presentation at the
International Council for Traditional Music, features the Kïsêdjê singing in unison and may still be visible on
YouTube. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk9PPYLLShs (accessed 12 April 2013).
372 A. Seeger
singing/dancing collectively. They present themselves as the truly Indigenous other in

terms the Brazilians can understand.
When their ornamented, singing, dancing bodies ‘capture’ the White’s gaze and
focus the White’s perception of them as Indians, the Kïsêdjê are focusing the
foreigner’s attention on their collective identity and on their peaceful but potentially
aggressive Indianness. This emphasises their rights as Indians, and their role in the
region as ‘original inhabitants’. It diminishes attention to them as individuals who
may owe money to local merchants, fail to give neighbours a ride in their trucks, or
be known for courting local women. It also downplays their presence in the region as
warriors acting to increase their lands and reduce the pollution of their rivers. A
negative view of their singing and dancing would note that it increases their exoticism
in the eyes of their neighbours—which it may do. But it also reminds their
neighbours and the officials of the towns of the Kïsêdjê’s important otherness and
their special origins, their special rights as Indigenous peoples and their role in the
history of the region and the country. They focus the gaze away from their daily and
conflicted interactions with their White neighbours and to one that supports a
collective political and cultural stance.
To a certain extent, it is possible to argue that the Kïsêdjê played to the White
stereotype of them. By performing as ‘pure Indians’ they improved their chances of
obtaining certain concrete benefits for their community. These included material
objects, favourable local policies regarding land claims and environmental concerns, the
improvement of the road to their village, and the recognition of their collective status by
townspeople who otherwise know them as workers, clients and debtors who look much
like non-Indians. By singing and dancing collectively, wearing little besides feathers,
they focused the White’s gaze on certain aspects of themselves for their benefit.10 But I
would argue that the Kïsêdjê performances are not simply a strategic presentation of an
essential ‘ethnicity’ of the kind richly described by John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
(2009) in Ethnicity, Inc. I am arguing instead that their performances are rooted in a
perspectival understanding of the world, in which species of animals and humans are
expected to look somewhat similar, but to have species-specific perspectives and
actions. The Kïsêdjê treatment of Whites may be part of a widespread perception of
essential similarity and difference found in Lowland South America.
Looking back at Viveiros de Castro’s observation that ‘multi-naturalism’ (where
every species and some classes of objects see themselves as human but are not so
regarded by other species) replaces ‘multi-culturalism’, it is worth considering that a
similar process may occur strictly within human communities. With the exception of
suggestive remarks by Lima (2005), I do not think this has been sufficiently discussed.
Where one community sees delicious food, another may see an inedible mess; where
10
After I gave this paper at the 41st International Council for Traditional Music World Conference in
Newfoundland, Canada, Jean Ngoya Kidula sat down next to me and said: ‘I heard your paper, and you have
given away our secret!’ Whose secret, I wondered. The ‘our’ in this case referred to communities in Africa who
are similarly aware of the stereotypes about them and similarly purposely focus the foreigners’ gaze on certain
aspects of themselves through performance.
one hears beautiful music, another hears noise; and where one sees the fulfilment of
its expectations of another group, the other group sees a clever manipulation of those
expectations for their own purposes. This is indeed a scenario of a multitude of
mirrors, and leaves room for conscious agents and innovative action.
I do not recall any examples of the conscious focusing of attention on certain
aspects of their perspectives by animals or other Indians, but they may occur. When
the Kïsêdjê travellers are invited to visit animal villages they see the animals in human
form, but they also have moments in which the human-looking animals reveal their
distinctive perspectives. Yet when the Kïsêdjê perform for Whites, they present
themselves wearing their Kïsêdjê ‘skins’—painted and feathered—and singing
Indigenous songs in unison. It made me wonder about the other cases of perspective
in the literature—do the vultures make the carrion visible to their human guest to
focus the gaze on their difference? It would seem that establishing a certain kind of
difference is part of the effect of language, food and music. The purpose is to focus
the gaze of the other—and also back on the viewers in a particular way.
There may be more than just the possibility of obtaining pragmatic benefits from
performing for Whites. The Kïsêdjê and the Brazilians also may be enacting a shared
cosmological perspective that they are both applying to a new and difficult situation
through body ornamentation, song and dance: discovering how to live with peoples
with imagined different perspectives—the Kïsêdjê using their Amazonian perspecti-
vism, and the Whites influenced by a European past of theories of polygenesis, racial
difference and ethnic essentialism of its own. And the Kïsêdjê intend to come away
with the spoils again, as they always have in their presentation of their history.
2013—In the Age of YouTube

The Kïsêdjê may be changing their minds on how they present themselves, and this
may be partly because of the way they are using video production to represent
themselves and their ideas. Building on early efforts of mine to provide them with
equipment and training to make videos in 1994, a number of Kïsêdjê are today excellent
camera operators and editors. This is a result of their interest, talent and perseverance,
and also of the very impressive programme of a non-governmental organisation called
Video nas Aldeias (‘Video in the Villages’) that since 1987 has devoted its efforts to
training Indigenous filmmakers (for a preview of their work visit their website).11
Some of these are available for sale, and many shorter productions are available on
YouTube (search ‘Kisedje’ without diacritics for those currently available). Almost
every Kïsêdjê production uses music (several use recordings from the 1970s I have
provided to them), and many depict dancing. But the Kïsêdjê are apparently no longer
dancing on some public occasions.
11
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM6t-E9pp50 (accessed 12 April 2013). They have also recently
published a wonderful 34-minute video on the 2010 performance of the Mouse Ceremony, which those familiar
with my book on the ceremony (Seeger 2004) would probably enjoy (Video nas Aldeias 2011).
374 A. Seeger
One of their recent video projects posted to YouTube was a report on the ‘Day of
the Indian April 19, 2012 Canarana Mato Grosso’ in the city of Canarana, Mato
Grosso.12 Using extensive narration in Portuguese, it describes the events of the
annual national ‘Indian Day’ that is commemorated in many parts of Brazil. In
Canarana that year it featured the sale of Indigenous handicrafts and an evening of
musical presentations that ranged from the municipal band to a number of
Indigenous groups presenting their own music. The evening events began with the
mayor giving a speech, with an important Kïsêdjê leader standing to his left—who
later also gave a speech. After presentations of several non-Indigenous municipal
groups, members of several Indigenous communities that use Canarana as a place to
shop and to catch a bus to other parts of the country briefly performed dances and
sang. The Kïsêdjê did not present any of their own music that day, however.13
Instead, some Kïsêdjê participated in a pan-Indigenous dance/song they learned from
the Kayapó Indians. A number of their leaders were present wearing shorts but no
shirts and sporting feather headdresses. I suspect their non-participation in the
musical part of the evening was carefully discussed, tactical and creative, as Coelho de
Souza (2010, 2012) has suggested about other decision-making. They are facing many
pressures on their lands, on their livelihood and on many aspects of their individual,
family and community lives. They may well decide it will be their words that they will
contribute to non-Kïsêdjê events in the future, not their music.
Another recent example of Kïsêdjê public presentation is a really interesting video
prepared for the Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development:
‘Amne Adji Kapẽrẽ Mba—Carta Kĩsêdjê para a Rio + 20’ (Come Listen to Our
Words—a Kïsêdjê Letter for Rio + 20)’.14 The video denounces the environmental
and lifestyle changes caused by intensive agribusiness in Mato Grosso and includes
dramatically presented angry speeches by a number of Kïsêdjê women, music from
my 1970 tapes, and also videos of singing and dancing.15 Whether this means they
will stop singing for the Whites is still to be seen—but it is clear they are adding a
powerful technological tool for communicating their ideas on current events to their
earlier repertory. Video, even more than live performance, can focus the foreigner’s
gaze exactly where they choose.
Final Observations
Humans everywhere construct their own cosmological views about the origin and
nature of the world and its many inhabitants, and there is an impressive variety of
these around the world. In Lowland South America, however, careful examination of
12
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2TTZGVDZdY (accessed 12 April 2013).
13
The filmmaker confirmed that there was no Kïsêdjê music at the event, but mentioned their presence in the
speeches and in the Kayapó dance.
14
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU2O9RNNTx8 (accessed 12 April 2013).
15
The video is interesting in that it presents visuals of Upper Xingu Indians dancing, but overlays a Kïsêdjê song
on top of the visuals. This may have been because of concerns about intellectual property, or it may be because
they wanted their own music in the video.
those relationships reveals some striking commonalities, even across language

families. The relationships established among humans, and between humans and
not-quite-so-human others, are complex and filled with music. The music represents
and enables the cosmic flow (Piedade in this issue), or exchange relationships that are
central to many Lowland South American cosmologies. Perhaps this is why
Indigenous musical forms in this region are restricted to ceremonial music. While
they may be funny, and they often are exhilarating and transforming to perform and
experience, they are ultimately central parts of very important cosmic relationships.
Indigenous music is not usually casual entertainment—for that, the groups usually
turn to national popular music forms (although sometimes those popular genres are
repurposed into evangelical Protestant church music in Christian Indigenous
communities today). While other authors have discussed how meaning is created
through song in South America (see Taussig 1993), new and careful ethnographic
investigation of music across the region appears to be revealing a general pattern of
musical creation and use for a large, historically interconnected, geographic area.
Why the Kïsêdjê sing and how they focus the gaze of the ‘others’ is deeply embedded
in cosmological ideas, and loudly proclaimed in their villages, in their encounters
with others in conflicted situations, and today in their YouTube postings. The
location changes and the strategies are carefully thought out and applied, but the
music continues to move, to organise and to have impacts that are simultaneously
carefully directed and also unseen, but felt.
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Ethnomusicology Forum

THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN IN LOWLAND

Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-humans

Flutes, Songs and Dreams: Cycles of Creation and Musical Performance

Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America

Shipibo Laughing Songs and the Transformative Faculty: Performing or

Trevor Wiggins, Eleni Kallimopoulou and Simone Krüger

Introduction: Considering Music,

Keywords: Music Performance; Lowland South America; Anthropology; Non-human

Imagine a Shipibo ritual set within a thin-walled house in a rainforest village on a

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

that musical scholarship excluding non-human animals cannot ultimately describe

a notable characteristic of the music of Lowland South America […] can be

New Animism and Perspectivism in Lowland South America

This cosmology imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective

Going Beyond: Multiverse and Agency

Regarding definitions of humanness, however, both new animism and perspecti-

From within such an ontology, it is completely clear that communication and

To say that agency is distributed in networks is not a radical claim, it is merely a

The (distributed) agency of nonhumans is also treated by Michael Taussig. In

Essays in This Issue

pondering how this could be understood in a visual, or even physical sense, we

—— ——. 2009. ‘Perspectivism: “Type” or “Bomb”?’Anthropology Today 25(2): 1–2. doi:10.1111/

Apùap World Hearing Revisited:

The Kamayurá (Apùap) system of classification, identification and nomination of the

Keywords: Biopolitics of Sensoriality; Acoustic-musical Perception; Kamayurá (Apùap)

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The Kamayurá and the Upper Xingu

The Kamayurá System of Acoustic-musical Knowledge8

them being continuously subject to diligent observation and attention. In terms of

Figure 1 Tree diagram of sonic classiﬁcations among the Kamayurá.

three-dimensional terms with sounds able to vary in a continuum limited by the

Table 1 Dimensions of the ihu (sound) sub-domain of sonic classifications

value, the identification of sounds becoming realised through gradations, because

Global Traits of Musical Ritual of the South American Lowlands16

The corollary of Seeger’s observation is the demand that only transcriptions as

The study of perspectivism is set to contribute decisively towards the advance of

Flutes, Songs and Dreams: Cycles of

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The Xinguano Ritual System and Sacred Flutes

reveals that gender relations are an essential dimension of the kawoká–iamurikumã

The iamurikumã ritual displays much joking and considerable provocation

The kawoká–iamurikumã complex

Musical Masters: ‘Clairaudient’ Pajés

memorised when performing the kawokakumã sub-repertoire songs in the

The Dual Cycle of Musical Exchanges

The Horizontal Human Cycle

Instruments of Power: Musicalising the

Keywords: Flute Music; Transformations; Sacred Rituals; Ceremonial Exchanges;

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

Amazonian communities, and this proliferation of wind instruments is to some

that we can refer to them as shamanic musical configurations or analytical units in

Men’s Flute-playing and Women’s Singing: A Wauja Poetics of Social Life

Figure 1 Transcription of máwi ﬂute duet opening a pudáli ceremony.

Figure 2 Transcription of dzawírra ﬂute duet.

In theory, the number of possible combinations and permutations for complete

Table 1 Musical analysis of dzawírra flute duet showing frequency of

Table 2 Alternative transcription of dzawírra flute duet in terms of phrase lengths

Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America

of apapaatai spirit-beings—can be harnessed or ‘domesticated’ (Wright 2011) to

Shipibo Laughing Songs and the

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres,

Keywords: Shipibo-Konibo; Humour; Vocal Music; Magic; Perspectivism