Latin American Racial Transformations

NAPO RUNA: MODERNITY, ETHNOGENESIS, AND TRANSCULTURATION

BLACKNESS, ZAMBAJE, AND COMPLICATIONS WITH INDIGENOUS CULTURES

ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES AND EMERGENT CULTURES

The term ethnogenesis refers to the emergence of a people within recorded or oral history. Throughout the Americas, people have surged into history as independent nationalities or ethnicities, sometimes as allies in wars between colonial powers or, later, wars of independence. In the late twentieth century, waves of previously unrecognized people—in cultural alliance with others—appeared in Latin America in protest movements and in performances that celebrated a new, alternative modernity, as historical peoples in new contemporary places. People have also been placed in various categories historically, whether or not they wanted to be in such categories or deserved to be there. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, cultural systems have emerged to confront nationalist ideologies of “racial hybridity” that signify the oneness of the mestizo body of the nation, and to reject or transform stereotypic categories such as the Spanish indio (Indian) and negro (black). In such rejections, aggregates of people with multicultural or intercultural orientations often come to the forefront of ethnic resurgence. During such resurgence, emphasis is placed on culture as interethnic, and on ethnicity as intercultural.

In his edited book History, Power, and Identity: Ethno-genesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (1996), Jonathan D. Hill writes: “ethnogenesis can be understood as a creative adaptation to a general history of violent changes—including demographic collapse, forced relocations, enslavement, ethnic soldiering, ethnocide, and genocide—imposed during the historical expansion of colonial and national states in the Americas” (p. 1).

In a 2000 article in the journal Current Anthropology, the archaeologist Alf Hornborg argues that ethnogenesis was prevalent throughout prehistoric America, but as destruction and devastation occurred during the European conquest and the subsequent extended colonial period, ethnogenetic processes became increasingly important in response to the catastrophic disruptions that occurred in the varied lifeways of the vanquished. Transculturation is part of the process of ethnogenesis. It refers to the appropriation of cultural features by people in one system from those in another for specific purposes. Such purposes include trade, alliance against enemies, and religious conversion.

NAPO RUNA: MODERNITY, ETHNOGENESIS, AND TRANSCULTURATION

In the Quichua language, a variant of Incaic Quechua, runa means “people,” or “fully human beings.” Napo is a province in Ecuador named for the Napo River, which has its headwaters in the Andes mountains and runs down through Ecuador and part of Peru into the Amazon River. While Quechua is an Andean language, the Napo Runa are Amazonian people in an Andean nation. The origins of their language, spoken by perhaps 100,000 Amazonian people in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, remains obscure, but “conservative” features in it negate migration theories from the Ecuadorian Andes to Amazonia. In his book The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (2004), Michael Uzendoski offers a dramatic illustration of historical cultural emergence (in the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth century) that manifests a twenty-first century cultural resurgence oriented to the establishment of self-determination in a known territory (the Napo river region of Ecuador) and general recognition in the Ecuadorian nation-state.

The drama of transculturation is documented in the sixteenth-century revolt of shamans (called pendes) led by the indigenous leader Jumandy. In his chapter “The Return of Jumandy,” Uzendoski writes about the indigenous uprising of 2001, during which Quichua concepts of transformation of space-time and power generated a collective sense of ancient resistance to conquest and colonialism, thereby strengthening an affirmation of oneness by a people in intercultural interaction with other Andean and Amazonian people. During the 2001 indigenous uprising, Napo Runa people blocked the airport and bridge in Tena, in northern Ecuador. Even after one person was shot and killed, waves of indigenous people came to replace one another, and in the face of death proclaimed a victory modeled on the historical revolt led by Jumandy.

The sixteenth-century uprisings in the Quijos territory of what is now Napo Runa cultural territory was nearly coterminous with another great uprising, that of the Shuar people to the south. Both rebellions spread to the Andes, where they were viciously crushed by the Spanish, but the former is commemorated in the early twenty-first century in north Andean Ecuador in a major festival of the Otavalan people, who still celebrate the “revolt of the shamans” in their annual ritual of the Pendoneros.

On the southern fringe of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, there are indigenous people who have thus far not participated in the sporadic indigenous uprisings that well up in the countryside and flow into the capital. These people celebrate cultural diversity and interculturality in two extended annual festivals, the Day of the Dead, celebrated throughout Latin America, and the local festival that is dedicated to Saint Bartolomé. Although as yet unpublished, important research by the anthropologist Julie Williams demonstrates that the people of Lumbisí, who speak Spanish and work as lower- and middle-class people in Quito, regard themselves as multicultural and indigenous, separate from all processes of mestizaje. In their celebrations they build ties to other indigenous communities as they celebrate “the future’s past,” itself a metaphor for the emerging identity referent of the Ecuadorian people.

To understand the early underpinnings of ethnogenesis and transculturation more fully, it helps to look at the Caribbean region, the area that took the first brunt of the conquest and suffered the brutal changes of the colonial era. This is the region where the miracle of interculturality, often known as creólité, uniting indigenous people with African and African-descended people, first emerged in the Americas.

COLONIAL ARAWAK AND CARIB PEOPLE

Probably nothing captured the interest of Europeans in the Americas like the image of the “savage cannibal.” This image of man-eating people, long existent in European thought, became codified into a Spanish religious and secular canon in a royal proclamation, signed by Queen Isabella in 1502, that created what Michael Palencia-Roth calls “The Cannibal Law of 1503.” This extraordinary law established the people who became known as the “Carib” as veritable cannibals. These people were also called indios (Indians), and because of their alleged cannibalism they became legal victims of “Just Wars.” Anyone named as “Carib” could be legally enslaved and sold at a profit—no proof was needed of anthropophagy. To “be Carib” was to be fair game for legal servitude or annihilation. In many cases, indigenous people with long hair were taken to be Carib and treated as subhuman eaters of other humans.

The idea of Caribs apparently came to Columbus from people he encountered in his first voyage. They called themselves Taíno (meaning talented people, crafts people) and spoke an Arawak language of the greater Antilles. On his second voyage in 1493 Columbus, at the suggestion of his Arawak peons and slaves, took a more southerly route across the Atlantic and the flotilla made landfall in islands in the lesser Antilles. There, in an island household, human bones were found. At this point the living legend of the savage cannibals, dangerous to “peaceful” Arawaks and Europeans, was born, and it has been maintained right up into the present century.

Arawaks, or those said to be Arawaks, were recruited by European powers such as the Spanish, who regarded them as malleable to European needs, but those who resisted the Spanish were called Caribs. These latter people, whatever language they may have spoken, were recruited by the enemies of the Spanish, such as the Dutch and the English, in a system known as “ethnic soldiering.” In the early twenty-first century, learned scholars still debate relationships, historical and contemporary, among the Caribs and the Arawaks. The languages still exist in the mainland of South America, and a mixture of Carib and Arawak is spoken on the Caribbean Island of Dominica. But the actual ethnic affiliations and cultural characteristics of this great dichotomy in history, as well as the present lifeways of these peoples” descendents, remain very controversial.

BLACKNESS, ZAMBAJE, AND COMPLICATIONS WITH INDIGENOUS CULTURES

The characterization of Caribs and Arawaks—as fierce and friendly, respectively—became complicated in the Americas almost from the outset due to the presence of African-descended peoples in the same region, and due to the phenomenon of cimarronaje, self-liberation by African-descended and indigenous-descended people who mixed, merged, and defended their traditional and new territories on the fringes of the growing capitalist enterprise. Two people who became known (and feared) in early colonial times are the Garífuna and the Miskitu. Each is the

representative of a segment of the population of Central America in the early twenty-first century, and each has been studied from a variety of scholarly perspectives. The Garífuna are usually regarded as African American, and the Miskitu as indigenous American, but both share a deep history of cimarronaje, ethnogenesis, transculturation, and emergent cultural orientations. Many of these features speak against the facile, racialized Western contrast of African and Indian.

The Garífuna of Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, and Guatemala have large local populations with specific cultural organizations in Los Angeles and Chicago. They were first known in the seventeenth century as the “Black Carib” because they came into historical view on St. Vincent Island in the Lesser Antilles through interbreeding between native people (known as “Island Carib’) and black Maroons (and perhaps enslaved Africans). The name Garífuna (plural Garinagu), which these Central American people call themselves, derives from “Kalinago,” the name Christopher Columbus learned as the plural of the “Carib” of Eastern Venezuela and the Guianas. All Carib speakers, and other native peoples who resisted Columbus’s profitable advances, were called “Cannibals” (from whence came the name “Caribbean’).

The Miskitu people of Honduras and Nicaragua became famous during the U.S. sponsored Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. They got their name through their colonial alliance with the British, from whom they obtained muskets that they used against the Spanish. The name for the weapons they used (muskets) was applied to the weapon bearers in the form “mosquitoes” (like “musketeers’), which then became “Miskitu.” Missing the major point of zambaje—the mixture of African-descended and indigenous-descended peoples without European “admixture’—many anthropologists and historians have debated whether the Garífuna and Miskitu, among many other similar people, should be studied “as Africans” or “as Indians.” Once such a debate is engendered, the tendency is to see what is “retained” from African heritage and what is “retained” from indigenous heritage. When this happens, a colonial mentality prevails, and people living their ways of life are stifled in expressing their existence, presence, and emergent cultural systems to a global audience. To use the Spanish vernacular, they become negreado—darkened, blackened, diminished, and silenced by a spurious hegemonic, racialized, diffusionist debate.

ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES AND EMERGENT CULTURES

Two concepts that relate specifically to ethnogenesis are alternative modernity and emergent culture. A third idea, which has become prevalent throughout Latin American nation-states, is that of interculturality, which contributes to the process of transculturation. Emergent culture confronts racial categories of the conquest and colonial era of Latin America, drawing upon previous moments of ethnogenesis for strength and self-assertion. This idea of emergent culture refers to how people present themselves in various settings, ranging from everyday greetings to stylized ritual performances for varied audiences. In the 1980s, for example, indigenous people in many nations organized themselves into nationalities to reflect their individual cultures grounded in specific localities, as well as their common identity through specific histories of oppression. By 2001, more than twenty different nationalities had emerged in Ecuador, and they have coalesced into regional organizations located in the coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions of that country. With such emergence, regional commonalities are stressed that may clash with other commonalities in different regions. Nonetheless, with all this diversity, coastal, Andean, and Amazonian people have arisen as one group to confront national leaders in Ecuador, even contributing to the ousting of several national presidents.

Alternative modernity is the idea that one can live in the contemporary world but adhere to cultural values and social practices at odds with the dictums of dominant modernity, where racial stratification, profit seeking, and forced conformity define an ideal way of life. Indigenous nationalities reflect the notion of alternatives in modern life, as do celebrations of Kwanzaa by North American African Americans near the time of the winter solstice. Indigenous nationality is an alternative to standardized, Western nationalist life, and Kwanzaa is an alternative to Christmas and Hanukah.

In Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, many Andean indigenous peoples present themselves as Inca (or Inka), not as remnants of a conquered people, but as people transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first century as self-determined peoples in control of their own lives. In Andean Ecuador, for example, indigenous festivals of Corpus Christi, once a blending of Catholic and local indigenous (not Incaic) traditions, have been reconfigured into a celebration of Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun. This festival has come to be promoted in Ecuador, the United States, Canada, and European nations as “authentic” Ecuadorian indigenous performance, and it is being adopted outside of Ecuador as essential Ecuadorian culture by people identifying as nonindigenous.

In the Amazonian region of Ecuador, however, indigenous Quichua-speakers generally reject any Incaic heritage, lumping the conquering Inca with the conquering Spanish and identifying “Andean” with a clear hierarchy, in contradistinction to individualistic and egalitarian Amazonian values. However, Andean and Amazonian people, together with various peoples of the coast, have allied repeatedly since the indigenous uprising of 1990 to proclaim themselves as united, intercultural, indigenous people opposed to the national ideology of “blending” and “hybridity.” These peoples are opposed to a national, hierarchical socioeconomic system that places them together with Afro-Ecuadorians at the bottom of the social ladder of power, privilege, and life chances. In such movements, the twin phenomena of interculturality and transculturation stand in strong relief.

INTERCULTURALITY AND TRANSCULTURATION

As a vibrant ideological and educational motif in many Latin American nations, interculturality lies just beneath the surface of public publications, radio broadcasts, and television presentations of the oneness of the people of a nation-state and on the vestiges of indigenous and African-descended cultures. Emerging in the 1980s and early 1990s, interculturality represents an indefatigable social movement called interculturalidad, which is conjoined with its seemingly paradoxical complement of reinforced cultural and ethnic boundaries. Interculturality is very different from an ethos of hybridity or social or cultural pluralism. It is multicultural, but it is also intercultural. Interculturality stresses a movement from one cultural system to another—the phenomenon of transculturation— with the explicit purpose of understanding other ways of thought and action. Social and cultural pluralism, by contrast, stress the institutional separation forced by the blanco (white) elite in Latin American nations on its varied and diverse peoples. The ideologies of hybridity and pluralism are national, regional, and static, while a formal consciousness of interculturality and transculturation is local, regional, diasporic, global, and dynamic.

The transformations of ethnicity and cultural systems in the twenty-first century in the Americas have roots in the European conquest and colonization of the New World. Now, as then, people throw off their stereotypical otherness to affirm and reaffirm their own dynamic life-ways. In their assertions one finds revolt and rebellion as well as celebration and festivity. The significance of ethnogenesis and interculturality must be sought in the symbolic and pragmatic systems of people themselves, and not in the oppressive categories that continue to reflect conquest and colonial mentality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bilby, Kenneth. 2006. True-Born Maroons. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida.

Hill, Jonathan D, and Fernando Santos-Granero, eds. 2002. Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hornborg, Alf. 2005. “Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia: Toward a System Perspective.” Current Anthropology 46 (4): 589–620.

Hulme, Peter, and Neil Whitehead, eds. 1992. Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day. New York: Oxford University Press.

Palencia-Roth, Michael, 1993. “The Cannibal Law of 1503.” In Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention, edited by Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Redstall, Mathew, ed. 2005. Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Silverblatt, Irene. 2004. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Uzendoski, Michael. 2004. The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Witten, Norman E., Jr., Dorothea Scott Whitten, and Alfonso Chango. 1997. “Return of the Yumbo: The Caminata from Amazonia to Quito.” American Ethnologist 24 (2): 355–391.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr., and Rachel Corr. 2001. “Contesting the Images of Oppression:” North American Congress of Latin America (NACLA) 34 (6). Special Issue: The Social Origins of Race: Race and Racism in the Americas, Part I, pp. 24–28, 45–46.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr., ed. 2003. Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Norman E. Whitten Jr.

Latin American Racial Transformations

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