This is a pre-publication. Citation: Chernela, Janet (2008) Guesting, Feasting and Raiding: Transformations of Violence in the Northwest Amazon.

In Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America, eds. Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pp 42-59. Guesting, Feasting and Raiding: Transformations of Violence in the Northwest Amazon Janet Chernela, University of Maryland chernela@umd.edu In his classical anthropological work on the Nuer, E.E. Evans-Pritchard defined the boundaries of a group as the imaginary periphery beyond which feud becomes warfare (Evans-Pritchard 1940). The delineation brings into relief an essential fault line -- the limit of moral commitment beyond which there is no recourse to dispute but violence. Within the moral community violence is avoided; outside the moral community it is common currency. This raises questions regarding the constituency of "the moral community." If its parameters shift over time, as our data indicate, what are the forces that push entities toward consolidation and treaty on the one hand, or autonomy, estrangement, and even enmity, on the other? Under what conditions does the language of violence become the common idiom? How are violences begun, ended, rationalized, and recalled? Within this constellation of meanings, as we shall see, lies the possibility of revenge. The notion of revenge cannot be understood apart from the larger body of local meanings in which it is embedded. For the member groups of the Eastern Tukanoan family of languages in the northwest corner of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, these meanings comprise a coherent schema based on generative underlying principles of value and balance. The Wanano have two broadly applied terms that describe debt and repayment -- wahpaiyo for debt, and wahpa'a for repayment. Group relations fall within this schema, and can be summarized as follows: 1) each person belongs to a moral community that is conceptually regarded as bound; 2) group boundaries are reified in daily linguistic interaction, mythic narration, and ritual; 3) relations between communities are governed by norms of reciprocity involving exchanges of several types, including words, goods, spouses, and hostility; 4) a breach of norm between groups initiates a negative form of reciprocity that may be called revenge or retaliation, a transformation that permits violence; and 5) violence may be avoided by compensation according to a system of equivalent values. In discussing rules of interaction, breakage and compensation, this chapter will make suggestions for the historic basis of group configuration and relationship in the northwest Amazon. The essay pays special attention to the custom of obligatory out-marriage in which one must marry a member of a different language group than ones own. Although reported comprehensively in the ethnographic literature (Jackson 1972, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1983), this practice continues to be considered exotic and arbitrary. This essay, instead, considers inlawhood as one

form of alliance-making, whose logic and specifics are accessible through oral histories gathered in the Uaups basin of Brazil. The range between a total insider, such as a consanguineal sib-mate, and an outsider -- "other, enemy, or captor -- is extensive. Mediating these extremes are several categories of "other" with varying degrees of closeness. In the Northwest Amazon, affines are located between the two -- they remain "others" (Wan., paye mahsa), yet the relationship assumes ongoing reciprocities of peoples, goods, and defense. In-law relations, unlike agnatic ones, are subject to the vagrancies of history. In-laws were once enemies; and they may become so again. Identity, Space, and the Moral Community The area referred to as the northwest Amazon consists of the drainage basin of the Uaups River and adjacent areas in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Groups speaking languages of the Eastern Tukanoan family predominate in the region, although nearby inhabitants who speak languages of the Arawakan and Cariban families participate in the social system. The linguist Arthur Sorensen identified 13 languages as members of the Eastern Tukanoan family: Wanano, Tukano, Tuyuka, Yuruti, Paneroa, Eduria, Karapana, Tatuyo, Barasana, Piratapuyo, Desano, Siriano, and Kubeo. He estimated that distances between these languages are greater than those of the Romance and Scandinavian groups of languages (Sorensen 1967, 1973).1 Like Sorensen I use the term Tukano to refer to one of the languages in the Eastern Tukanoan family that is known by that name, as well as members of the group. In contrast, I reserve the term Tukanoan to refer more broadly to a speaker of any one of the languages in the Eastern Tukanoan family. In this system of usage then, a Wanano might be considered a Wanano Tukanoan, a Desano might be referred to as a Desano Tukanoan, and, a member of the Tukano group could be referred to as a Tukano Tukanoan. The names assigned the language groups derive from lingua geral, a lingua franca adapted by Jesuit missionaries and in common usage in official documents dating to the 16th century. Tukano speakers refer to their language as Dahsea; speakers of Wanano refer to their language as Kotiria. The large social field of intermarrying speakers of the many Eastern Tukanoan languages is mahsa, a term which glosses as "people." For Eastern Tukanoans rules prohibit marriage among speakers of the same language, requiring that spouses derive from a language group other than one's own2 (Jackson 1974, 1976, 1993, C. Hugh-Jones 1979, S. Hugh-Jones 1979, Chernela 1993, 2003). The practice of linguistic exogamy results in a coherent and homogeneous culture complex, with unilineal descent and cross-cousin marriage integrating some 14,0003 Indians of diverse languages over an area of approximately 150,0004 km.2 The data presented here were derived from fieldwork conducted in Brazil among the Wanano Tukanoans living along the Uaups River adjacent to the Colombian-Brazilian border. I estimate the total Wanano population in Brazil to number between 500 and 600. When we add the 980 Wanano reported by Waltz and Waltz (n.d.) for the Colombian portion of the river, the total Wanano population may be estimated to be between 1500 and 1600 people. Since this measurement is based on village composition, the calculation includes in-marrying wives who, due to

practices of exogamy and patrilocality, are not Wanano. The procedure, however, assumes a corresponding number of Wanano women residing in the villages of their non-Wanano husbands. As we will see, the approximation of equivalence in numbers of women in and numbers of women out is grounded in Tukanoan values and principles of balanced, reciprocal marriage exchange. The Wanano practice fishing and gardening, receiving principal inputs of protein from fishing, and sources of carbohydrates from the root crops manioc and yams. These activities are carried out extensively on a daily basis, where the unit of consumption is rarely larger than the members of a single settlement. However, production intensifies in conjunction with elaborate exchange ceremonies known as po'oa in which several sib settlements come together. Brazil's ten Wanano settlements are situated at intervals of 3 to 24 km apart along the middle course of the Uaups river and contain from 30 to 170 persons. Villages are situated on high ground at the river edge. Numerous trails lead from the residential clearing through the surrounding forest to distant gardens and to neighboring settlements. Overland paths link Wanano villages on the Uaups River to in-law villages on the Aiar river belonging to Arawakan Baniwa in-laws. (The Baniwa are also known by the name Curripaco and are discussed in this volume by Paul Valentine.) Many Wanano and Baniwa sibs have intermarried over generations. Although the walking time between river basins ranges from four to seven hours, these paths are used with frequency. Descent: the korkoa The Wanano and other Eastern Tukanoans deproblematize group belonging by subscribing rigidly to principles of descent that determine membership through patrifiliation. The Wanano term koroa refers to a group of patrilineal kin of any of several levels of magnitude, from the small patriclan or sib to the large linguisticodescent group, known as "the language group." Members of a koroa are said to be children, or descendants, of a founding patrilineal ancestor from whom the sib name is derived. Membership in koroa is theoretically fixed and ascribed by birth. As such membership is non-overlapping and boundaries are regarded as impermeable. The notion of koroa establishes an embedded hierarchy of in-groups based upon the criterion of common descent and shared language. That which is referred to as a "language group" in the literature is a maximal patriclan comprised of a number of local descent groups who consider themselves kin and may not marry. Shared speech, regarded as an indicator of descent, manifests the extent of the sociopolitical unit and defines the area within which sentiments of kinship and moral commitments prevail (Chernela 2001). In ordinary interaction koroa membership is foregrounded as those within the same koroa addresss one another through kin terms, with the generic y korok/a, my kinsman/kinswoman, while members of descent groups other than one's own are referred to and addressed as paye mahsa, meaning Other People. These terms leave no ambiguity regarding the publicly recognized relatedness of any two interlocutors and provide an obvious contrast between "own group" and "others." Thus, most speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages orient identities in terms of the shared "substance," language, that underlies the basis of groupness. The idea of community is thereby manifest in linguistic performance and related linguistic qualities that

come out in the interactional ground, indexing identities and relationships. Thus are the complexities of community and belonging in the northwest Amazon resolved and simplified. The foundation for a sociotopographical order and sacred emplacement of peoples is found in a pan-Tukanoan narrative recounting the voyage of an ancestral anaconda-canoe, known as Pamori Busok. The underwater journey begins in a primordial location known as Water Door, said to be in the southeast. The ancestral anaconda canoe is said to proceed upriver toward the headwaters of the Uaups river. There, the ancestral canoe turned around, so that its anaconda head faced downriver and its tail upriver. As the body of the great anaconda rose in the water the founding ancestors of each of the sib-settlements of the Uaups river emerged from its body. The myth constructs and legitimizes the proper seating (Wan., duhinia), or settlement, of each local descent group on the basis of the territorializing genitor. The myth is recounted with frequency on ceremonial occasions. The local descent group is theoretically anchored in space through several ideological mechanisms. A combination of redundant narratives, among them myth, historicities, and visual imagery, link topography and time with contemporary group rights. In addition to the narratives of Pamori Busok and the specific ancestral narratives of sibs which name the places associated with ancestral events, markings in the landscape, particularly those on large boulders, are said to be iconic of ancestral precedence. These inscriptions or traces are regarded as having been left by the ancestors as indicators of rightful occupation. These are the "evidentiary signs of history, written into the landscape -- representations which justify and define practice. In spite of redundancy, there is little universal consensus among groups regarding place. While the morphology of events in the narrative of Pamori Busok are shared by all Eastern Tukanoan peoples, the order of group emergence and emplacement varies substantially from one group to another. The perspectives of the language groups, or even the sibs of the same language group, do not comprise a consensual and consistent system. Ancestral emergence, defining the relationship of groups to one another and their rights to place, are contested. The discrepancies in narratives that are context-dependent and spatially-situated represent the ongoing negotiation and contest among localized groupings. The challenge for any sibsettlement is to maintain intact the continuity of socio-spatial configuration based upon patrifiliation as the legitimizing function that links spatial demarcation to past event and, thus, present and future rights. Across the social and spatial boundaries that separate and define them, descent groups trade and transact. Types of transactions are differently categorized. Conversation, for example, is regarded as one form of exchange -- an "exchange of talk," known as drka. Object exchange is known as po'limina, and woman or wife exchange is known as koto tarikoro. Principles of balance govern all transactions and exchanges among groups are carefully followed and calculated. Transactions are subject to a set of principles which require that payments be compensated with an item that may be different in kind but must be equal in value. This is the case, for example, in the repayment of ceremonial gifts, which are expected to differ in substance but match in value the

original gift (Chernela 1993, 2001). The same principles of differing-withequivalence applies to the trading of daughters as wives across exogamous language groups. The system of value is based on general principles of reciprocity with broad application across a variety of contexts. As outlined above: 1) both local descent groups and language groups are regarded as bounded; 2) these boundaries are reified daily in the act of informal speaking and occasionally in ritual; 3) exchanges between communities include words, goods, spouses, and hostilities; 4) all exchanges are governed by norms of reciprocity. A breach of any of the norms or the principles underlying them may initiate a negative response -- a form of reciprocity that permits violence. This negative reciprocity is here regarded as "revenge." Although no longer practiced, Wanano informants still describe the act of kha ma tien, a phrase that glosses as "to fight to kill." Only compensation, according to the same system of equivalent values, can halt violence. Principles of "mortal balance" are modeled in the taxonomy and interactions in the world of non-human creatures. Groups of animals are systematically classified into cohorts of ranked brothers. For each cohort an oldest brother or focal ancestor, guards its kin and avenges those who might prey on them. It is the wrathful sib guardian, descended from and transformed from the first ancestor, who, according to Tukanoan belief, keeps close watch over his kin and will retaliate if one is taken. The rule of tit-for-tat prevails: for every individual taken from among own group, a retaliatory death will be taken from among the predators (cf. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1979, Chernela 1987; Arhem 1989, 1991). The same system, in principle, is at play in the social world of humans. Violence and Revenge As we have shown, at the basis of an Eastern Tukanoan theory of group rights is the belief that spatial designations are the result of historic and supernatural processes. Predation upon a sitting-place without historical and supernatural legitimization is dangerous because it breaches rules of spatial demarcation and generates retaliatory events. Such predation requires a retaliatory act -- revenge -necessary to correct a transgression. A loss on one side must be compensated by a comparable loss on the other. Vengeance, dependent as it is in righting a wrong, is one means of making good an outstanding debt. Balance must prevail. In the following pages we will examine how this ideology has been played out in practice according to ritual discourse and narrative accounts. Past events perceived as improprieties or usurpation are remembered and kept alive through both formal and informal discourse. Ritual Speech The names of former enemies are not forgotten. Rather, their transgressions are reified through ritual repetition. In the pooa, an exchange ceremony between different sib settlements, ritual participants recount past wrongdoings recalling former enemies by name while expressing vehement emotions. In the occasions of the po'oa, when two sib settlements visit one another, boundaries are created, reified, or broken down, as the identities of sibs and their relations to one another are defined and redefined. The bueyoaka, a speech act whose title glosses as "spear talk," is a portion of the po'oa in which past

transgressions are publicly broadcast. This ritual act mimics warfare as men from one village face men from another in postures of violence, brandishing spears and tossing them into one another's ranks. Each enjoins the other into the mock conflict. The theme is displacement and abuse by a group different than one's own. In one of pooa I recorded among the Wanano, the two participating groups faced one another in a mock spear battle and shouted these words: Donor: "The Kubeo are over there; those people are over there, and over there, they hate us. ...We will make puh of them! This Sirio that took my brother away; that Bu, he took my son, and this Wam Po'nairo (Baniwa sib), made us suffer, raided us, and left us with nothing!" Donor and Recipient in unison: "They did this to us, to our forefathers!" Donor: "Long ago, before we became pitiable and frightened as we are today, in this same place, everyone hated and envied the Wanano. This began long ago, during the time of our forefathers. Now we do exactly as our forefathers did." Raising spears, participants cried out: "Eeeeee! Those Tukano did this! That Tukano sib captured our grandfathers and forced them out! That blasted Tukano! And we who were here before...now we are suffering, we, miserable, people. And the one that took our grandfathers captives and forced them out -- that cruel one too. That ugly Balero that captured our grandfathers and threw them out. And those other vicious ones! They took our grandfathers captive and pushed them out. Curse them! Here we are, bereft and pitiful in this place. While we are here, pitiably, I do this: 'Puh!' to these despicable creatures!' The antagonistic bueyoaka enactment precedes gift exchange and other ritual steps toward sealing an alliance between two groups. The po'oa in general, and the bueyoaka in particular, articulate Wanano interpretations of Uaups historical relations of guesting, feasting, and raiding. The discourse is a trope of history in which the adversaries are often neighbors. It is a reflexive model through which the Wanano locate themselves vis--vis their neighbors and other outsiders. The language and ritual itself brings groups, formerly distanced, into proximity, as the ritual is a vehicle for re-inventing relations (Chernela 2001). Speakers use the ritual process, not merely to understand the past, but to create it (Turner 1968). Each group goes through a ritual transition of being the enemy only to come out as ally. In the case of two sibs of different language groups, the ceremony establishes a new, diplomatic proximity or alliance. Through the vocalizations and enactments of antagonistic hostilities the ceremonial moves participants toward a finality in which the two sibs are rendered allies. By means of the litany of naming and enacting a common enemy -- such as the Kubeo, the Tukano, the Sirio -- the participant sibs, at first on opposing sides, are eventually brought into alliance. By the end of the bueoyaka the relations of belligerence and bellicosity shift to those of peace, conviviality, and alliance. Group identities and relations are forged in the present through a ritual construction of the past. The pooa is the site where groups establish what they once were, what they will be no longer, and what they wish to become. In the course of the bueyoaka the dangers of the outsider are rendered behind and past. Through gift and language exchanges an alliance is established, albeit a conditional one. Insofar as the proximities between groups is constructed and reified

through ritual enactment, and based upon the fluctuations of diplomacy, they constitute a social contract with contingency. In the diplomatic rhetoric of the po'oa, closeness is created as a difference is underscored. Whatever solidarity is created in a po'oa may be as easily be broken as it was constructed. Relations between groups may change both by gradual slippage and by abrupt rupture. Through ritual, however, relations between groups can change through "authorized revision." In the language of the po'oa, the past is not restored, it is rectified and reified. In this sense boundaries, although regarded as essential givens, are instead a result of the communicative processes that shape them. Although represented as static, boundaries are conceptualized, subject to context and to vantage point.] In recounting histories of displacement the identity of the speaker determines both the axes of adversarial relations as well as the roles of victor and victim. The bueyoaka simulation is a pretense in the modality of the vanquished. A speaker never represents his group as victor. Instead, each group recalls, and perhaps, reexperiences, the pain of former insult and injury. The mutual-determination of socially constitutive relations of the present and the distant past is inherently invisible and insubstantial. Yet these are the forces that shape that which we call historical events -- births, deaths, wars, alliances, enmities, nations, clans, and identities. The essential ineffability of social relations is one of the reasons they require redundant substantiation. It is also the reason why socially constitutive relations are so frequently represented, described and disputed, in ritual as well as in ordinary discourse. This is nowhere more the case than in relations arising from violence. Oral Histories Informal conversation and questions I posed among members of the Wanano, Piratapuyo, and Arapao Tukanoans5 regarding past events revealed large areas of agreement regarding population movement, alliances, and displacements. These oral histories pointed to two types of activities involving violence and conceived as revenge were prevalent in the river basin: 1) displacement and 2) bride capture. 1. Displacement Among the important patterns that emerged was the association between locations of dispute and the attributes of location. Sites regularly reported in dispute appeared overwhelmingly to be those with greatest strategic and symbolic import. To illustrate, every confluence of a tributary stream with a main river is a site of contest. Paku, a settlement located at an important waterfall at the confluence of the Makuku tributary stream and the Papuri River, is a clear example. Piratapuyo speakers claim that the site, now occupied by the Tukano, was formerly (and continues to rightfully) theirs. As one Piratapuyo explained, Paku is our site. We were removed by the Tukano sib that lives there today. The matter is recalled bitterly by the Piratapuyo, who still occupy villages adjacent to Paku. Ipanor is yet another example of a disputed sites with strategic and symbolic import. Located at the confluence of the Tiqui and Uaups Rivers, Ipanor is important in several senses. The large cataract at Ipanor is an impediment to heavybodied water craft proceeding upriver into the Uaups basin. For centuries Ipanor was the upriver limit to outsiders of all kinds, including Portuguese merchants,

slaving expeditioners, and others in pursuit of Indian labor or forest resources. Most significantly, Ipanor is the recognized site of emergence of the anaconda canoe, regarded as ancestral to all Eastern Tukanoan language groups. The Arapao, who now inhabit neighboring Loiro, claim that Ipanor, with its weighty symbolic import for all Eastern Tukanoan groups, is truly theirs. The Arapao claim that they were forcibly moved downriver by the Arawakan Tariano who now inhabit the site. That Ipanor is today occupied by an Arawakan, rather than an Eastern Tukanoan group, is a bitter fact for Tukanoans in general and the Arapao in particular (Chernela 1989; Chernela and Leed 2001). The Wanano are unusual in maintaining an uninterrupted sequence of settlements of one language group along the Uaups River. Even so, they claim displacement to the southeast by the Arawakan Tariana and to the northeast by the Arawakan Baniwa and the Tukanoan Kubeo. They attribute their integrated string of uninterrupted settlements to a strategy that limited violation: marriage. For consideration of this we turn to a discussion of wife-taking and wife-offering. 2. Wife Stealing A second important form of violence calling for revenge was wife-stealing. The far-reaching incest regulation that prohibits marriage within the language group obliges persons to take spouses from alien groups. Marriage was achieved through two conventional means: violent seizure and negotiation (Jackson 1983:133). A daughter given in marriage requires that another, a cousin, be returned. Wifestealing -- a negative exchange -- and its counterpart, vengeful retaliation, was a commonplace alternative to negotiation. Indeed, marriage raids were ritualized war in which the settlement from which a woman was taken would attempt to avenge its loss. According to Wanano informants, such small-scale raiding for women typified Wanano history. The Wanano have numerous terms and phrases that refer to wifestealing. For example, the act of seizing a wife is described as numisare coro. Those who seize wives are referred to as numia nni mahsa. The tallying of wife-taking was, and still is (see Chernela 1989, 1993), followed with careful vigilance. Marriages are considered to be exchanges between sibs and are arranged by the sib seniors. When a simultaneous exchange of women occurs, the marriage is called koto tarikoro, "woman exchange." When the negotiation is not immediately reciprocal, it is called pubuhseri manenikoro, "no woman given in exchange," indicating that the debt is outstanding until a return is made. A claim is made when a wife is needed; otherwise, a debt may remain outstanding for many years. During my fieldwork sojourn in a Wanano village a woman complained because she had given her daughter in marriage four years earlier and yet no return had been made. Now, her 18-year-old son was wifeless. In this case the debt was repaid three years after the claim was issued; the return was made when a female at last became eligible. Once the exchange was reciprocated, the term implying indebtedness was no longer used. If the giving of a woman in marriage is not reciprocated it gives rise to counter claim may be the occasion of enmity and revenge if not fulfilled. This was the case during my 1978 stay in the Wanano village Yapima when sorcery was reportedly used as revenge against a debtor sib.

The in-law relationship is fraught with ambivalence. The dangerous enemy in-law is a recurring theme in narratives of all kinds. An origin myth, specific to the Wanano, tells of an occasion when ancestral Wanano brothers discovered Kubeo women harvesting manioc in a forest clearing. This was the first time these earliest Wanano men, the legend tells, had seen either women or gardens. Delighted, the men arranged a po'oa ceremony in which the Kubeo women were to provide manioc beer, a cultivated and cooked product, in exchange for uruku, an uncooked fruit that produces a blood-red pulp now used in ornamenting the bodies of pubescent girls. The fruit would be given by the Wanano men to the Kubeo women. Following the po'oa the Kubeo men, now referred to as brothers-in-law in the narration, became aware of their sisters' absence -- and their loss. They took immediate revenge against the Wanano, attacking them with fire. From this violent interaction the first "real" Wanano sib emerged. The newly-formed, "real" Wanano descended the flames as drops of water, quenching the fires. This, according to the tale, accounts for the name, Kotiria, meaning drops of water. Numerous narratives recount the dangers encountered by a Wanano culture hero when he attempts to visit his wife's family. These tales recount the hazards presented to the Wanano hero by his in-laws and his narrow escapes from their attempts on his life. Violent retaliation is not the only form of response to breach, however. Other responses may be used strategically, including alliance -- the complementary opposite of revenge. We have discussed how marriage can initiate violence. Marriage can also end enmity. It is this we consider now. Pre-emption: Marriage as Treaty While marriage in which a wife was taken could initiate revenge, and thereby "war" (Wan., kha ma chien, see above), marriage in which a wife was given could bring about peace. In this system of meanings and equivalences, a violent situation could be reversed by bequeathing a woman. Oral histories in which informants recount wife-giving as one means of ending disputes strongly support this position (Chernela 1989, 1993). Several reported instances represent the in-law relationship as tantamount to treaty between the sibs exchanging spouses. Warring between Desano and Wanano, for example, is said to have ceased when the Desano "gave a woman" to the Wanano. Speaking of a Baniwa in-law sib, the Wam Makama Koro, one informant said this: "The people of the Wam Makama Koro sib were the brothers-in-law of our ancestors; for this reason they did not eat Wanano flesh." From the Wanano point of view, in-law status exempted them from Wam Makama aggression. The Wanano still use an intimate nickname to refer to the ancestor who first married a woman of that sib and thus brought about peace. Marriages between groups over generations create alliances, reified through ceremonial discourse, ritual gift-giving, and the co-production of future generations. Co-raiding with In-laws: Alliance Formation Oral histories also made frequent mention of raiding under the leadership of Arawakan paramount chiefs who would consolidate Baniwa sibs and enlist Wanano in-law sibs as allies. Informants attributed the Wanano participation to in-law obligation. One informant expressed it this way: "Since our grandfathers were brothers-in-law of the Baniwa, they dragged them off to wars at the headwaters of

the Papur, Cuiub, and Querar rivers. In these rivers, the Baniwa went together with our ancestors killing people." As in-laws of the Baniwa sibs, according to these reports, the Wanano participated in campaigns against the Kubeo, the Tukano, and other Baniwa groups. Each of these former enemies is today an in-law group to the Wanano -- a point which reflects the changeable status of in-law relations through time. While Wanano informants vividly recall Arawakan war chiefs and campaigns, they have no such recollection of their own campaigns. On the other hand, it is evident that the Wanano provided warriors to the Baniwa in what the Wanano consider to be "Baniwa Wars." Keeping in mind that it is the narrator that determines adversaries and allies, as well as the morality of all involved, these data suggest several important conclusions. For one thing, we must now consider the Wanano as possible constituents of a regionally-based chiefdom in which Arawakan leadership predominated. By providing warriors and wives to the Baniwa, the Wanano succeeded in maintaining the integrity of their own settlement sites on the heavily contested Uaups River. This is supported by the fact that the Tariana and Baniwa who displaced numerous Arawakan and Eastern Tukanoan settlements left intact a substantial block of Wanano settlements along the principal river. This is especially noteworthy since the Wanano are located between the Baniwa, moving south, and the Tariana, moving north. These data support conjectures that Arawakan sibs may have mobilized under paramount chiefs for military campaigns, as well as related hypotheses that Arawakan populations were migrating throughout the Uaups region. A scholar of Baniwa ethnohistory, Silvia Vidal, reproduces the sacred/secular routes of a Baniwa culture hero that "conform to the sociopolitical and religious basis for the regional leadership of powerful Arawakan chiefs and groups within multiethnic confederacies" (2003:44; and See Robin Wright 1981). Vidal represents the territory of the Arawakan Baniwa to include the Iana, Uaups and its affluents the Papur and Tiqui, showing movements both up and down the Uaups, up the Papur, and down the Tiqui (2003:45). Numerous sibs of the Arawakan Tariana and the Baniwa are now linked by marriage to the Wanano. Of the eight in-marrying wives in the Wanano village of Yapima, three were either Tariana or Baniwa. 6 Relational Shift: Affinity and the Moral Community The strategy of marriage as treaty is not uncommon. The North American legend of Pocahontas represents her as marrying the man whose life she saved and thereby created peace. The facts have been transformed into a tale of connubial peacemaking. The use of marriage as a treaty formation is a well-known strategy among heads of European states, the Hapsburg monarchs most notably. For the Wanano, in-laws are the very groups named as enemies in oral histories and in ceremonial litanies. If we take this to be evidentiary, it strongly suggests that linguistic exogamy is one means of making peace when the alternative is violence, displacement, and revenge. For the northwest Amazon, we may construct a spectrum recognizing three primary categories of relationship: 1)fraternal, in which no wives are exchanged; 2)

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adversarial (war), in which a woman or other life (ancestral site) is taken; and 3) treaty, in which a woman is given: Fraternal= No exchange of women. War=Woman (or other lives) taken Treaty= Woman given For Eastern-Tukanoan speakers of the northwest Amazon, such as the Wanano, the concept of common descent is the only truly solidary relationship. Unlike the artifice of marriage, bonds of siblinghood are deemed "natural," not intended to be the subject of pragmatic consideration. The boundary of moral obligation within which participants accept certain values and conventions extends to groups deemed brother.7 At the other end of the spectrum are those furthest from own group with whom one has negative reciprocities: taking, not giving. Revenge is the necessary action taken by the victimized Other. The in-law relationship originates in conflict as de facto in-lawhood emerges from bride seizure. Yet marriage itself is transformative, capable of creating alliance or retaliation. When inlawhood is regarded as balanced it confers upon an alien group a non-alien status, conferred ritually and maintained over generations of wife-giving and wife-receiving. Attached to this status is the assumption of treaty, assistance of several kinds, including military, and ongoing ceremonial gift exchange of food and craft items. In the spectrum of relationships, the approved and recognized in-law stands between kin and enemy. Tukanoan myth and history both affirm in-lawhood as a dubious, ambivalent category (Chernela 1997). Compared to relations among the members of a common descent group, in-law relations are fragile. Structurally limited by the closure of restricted exchange, and historically limited by the exigencies of circumstance, the non-alien identity is fraught with contradiction. In-laws are thought to be treacherous, their treachery although expected, all the more offensive for its breach of contract. Even so, marriage shifts the moral boundaries that signify where and when and with whom violence is or is not an appropriate means of conflict-resolution. If conflict, albeit rule-governed, is the relationship between those who are unrelated, transforming Others i.e., non-kin, aliens -- into in-laws renders them closer to self and thus less menacing. If an alien woman in marriage is adequate compensation for the death of a brother, it suggests the transformation of past lives for future ones. Following the prescription of cross-cousin marriage, an in-marrying wife from one language group will produce offspring belonging to her husbands language group. If this prescription is followed in the subsequent generation, her own daughters will marry into her own language group, thereby peopling future generations for both groups. Thus marriage consolidates investment in future generations for both marrying entities. It brings intermarrying descent groups within the imaginary boundaries of the moral community by sharing stakes in future generations. Alliances formed through marriage may be used to avoid imminent violence as well as to prevent future, potential violence. In the latter sense, linguistic outmarriage constitutes a preemptive strategy a form of group insurance. Eastern

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Tukanoans, such as the Wanano, lack supralocal military organizations with which to defend their borders. Instead, they pay for peace with women. Marriage -- loose, egalitarian affinities -- rather than internal consolidation -- is their overriding strategy. From this proposition, we may generalize a relationship between social distance, marriage, violence, and revenge, constructing the following heuristic: ceremony and marriage may be used to close a significant expanse of social distance and pacify an avenger. This creates an intermediate zone of conditional morality in which a conditional balance is achieved. If that balance is breached, relations return to violence, and retaliation is the appropriate, morally prescribed response. Insofar as persons stand for political entities in this exogamous context, and marriages carry the potential for political linkage, marriage constitutes a strategy for intergroup alliance. This, in turn, is related to both land and persons, since the two are inextricable. Both ritual speech and informal accounts reference the displacement of one local descent group by another. The accounts I gathered point to violent displacement and continuing contest at sites of greatest strategic or symbolic relevance. These include locations at impassable waterfalls, confluences of rivers, and sites packed with supernatural power and signification. These reports also suggest raiding by confederacies of Baniwa sibs and allies throughout the Uaups River and its affluents the Querar, Papur, and Tiqui. If Arawakan expansion has been acompanied by full integration into the Tukanoan social universe, as would appear to be the case today, this came about, we argue in this paper, through intermarriage, one alternative to vengeance. Discussion and Conclusion The argument presented here is that two types of predation -- one involving territory, the other involving women are transformations of one another. This works in two ways: the first negative, in which a woman is taken and the victimized group takes revenge; here, only future lives can compensate past deaths. In the second, given a positive value, a war in progress is halted by the giving of a woman. The second illustrates the transformative and complementary nature of the territory/marriage dyad in which compensation for one of the two can be made with the other. Predation on territory can presumably be avoided by alliance formation through the giving of a wife. This appears to be the Wanano strategy. Through several mechanisms discussed in this essay wife exchange and gift-giving among them enemies are transformed into allies. These mediations illustrate several important phenomena: 1) that violence is but one form of social exchange; 2) that the principles of balance and reciprocity govern all exchanges; and 3) that ceremonial reification and exchange of women may bring new groups within the moral boundaries, shifting them from full outsiders to partial insiders. In considering the set of equivalences that determine whether balances are met, the paper addresses the necessary criteria of retaliation and the determinants of revenge. At the basis of a Tukanoan social economy is the notion of an eternal scoreboard marking life and death, birth and mortality. Victim and avenger are parties in a single mode of exchange, a retaliatory dialogue between families who trade in lives. Principles of reciprocity link predator and prey, as killing is justified

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as a means of rectifying an imbalance, inherited and requiring correction. Imbalance may result in death, with ample evidence of misfortune interpreted as retribution. Only equity is capable of producing and maintaining peace. Equity, as we have said, is created through two means: retaliation and treaty. Thus relations of enmity, of hatred and hostility, presume and tell of their opposite the positive in-law relation made through the agency of women exchanged by men and the future generations produced by the alliance. The case of the Northwest Amazon suggests that at least one political formation may be associated with linguistic exogamy: diffuse organization, weak leadership, and incorporation through expanded affinity. Reciprocities of violence are ritualized. Forms of war contain -- in two senses -- peace. This mirroring of relationships generates and regulates violence between human groups, creating rules of negative reciprocity that become the forms of positive interactions, peaceful associations. The key to this transformation of negative into positive reciprocities is the idea of an equivalence between different species of actions the giving of a wife, the taking of a life. The idea of an equivalence between disparate actions crosses the law of mimesis according to which one treats as friends those who treat one as friends, as enemies those who treat one as enemies, and life can be paid for only in life. The notion of equivalence between different actions and of mimesis together provide the rules for connecting events, enacting, remembering, and recording history. The notion of violence as asymmetry, involving the disruption of a symmetry or balance, is explicit in our examples. In them we find that anti-social relations of violence, of kill and/or be killed, are governed and justified by rules of reciprocity that presume peace in an image of balance or equality. The fundamental opposition between a wife freely given and a wife forcibly taken is the balance between social contract and war. Marriage is both the product of war and the management of conflict. A woman taken is war; a woman given is treaty. War and marriage are transformations of one another, part of a continuum of cultural practices that are touched off situationally as in-laws are feasted, guested, and raided; raided, guested, and feasted. Endnotes 1 Despite ongoing contact and a deliberate maintenance of distinct linguistic varieties characterized by separations that exceed those of the Romance group, models of ethnic pluralism do not accurately describe the Eastern Tukanoan case. A number of factors, including a correspondence between linguistic performance and group membership, loyalty to the language of one's descent group, and marriage across language groups, serve to establish a single speech community in which numerous codes interact according to shared norms and beliefs. 2 The Kubeo (Cubeo) (Goldman 1963), Makuna (?rhem 1981, 1998), and Arapao (Chernela 1988, 1989) are exceptions to the pattern of linguistic exogamy. 3 The figure of 14,000 is based upon the 1987 reported census figure of 14,164, compiled by the Centro Ecumenico de Documentao e Informao (CEDI), Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. It exceeds by 5,000, the estimates of Sorensen (1967) and Jackson (1976).

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The figure of 150,000 square kilometers is the sum of 90,000 km2 reported by Jackson (1976) for the Colombian Vaups, and 60,070 km2 reported by the Centro Ecumenico de Documentao e Informao (CEDI), Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, for the Brazilian Uaups. 5 Oral histories were collected among members of the Wanano, Piratapuyo, and Arapao Tukanoans between 1978 and 1980. 6 The degree of assimilation by these intermarrying sibs is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Tukano has replaced Tariana as a language in all but one Tariana sib. 7 Marriage is not permitted within the phratry, an extended brotherhood of several language groups. It is interesting to note that Wanano oral histories do not recount conflicts among language groups of the same phratry nor do they report aiding another group on the basis of socially-constructed brotherhood ties. Bibliography Arhem, Kaj. 1981. Makuna Social Organization, Uppsala, Sweden. Arhem, Kaj. 1989. "The Maku, The Makuna, and the Guiana System: Transformations of Social Structure in Northern Lowland South America," Ethnos (1-2)5-22. Chernela, Janet M. 2003. "Language Ideology and Womens Speech: Talking Community in the Northwest Amazon." American Anthropologist 105(4)794-806 Chernela, Janet M. 2001. "Piercing Distinctions: Making and Re-making the Social Contract in the Northwest Amazon." In Beyond the Visible and the Material: the Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Riviere. Neil Whitehead and Laura Rival, eds. Oxford UK: Oxford University. Pp 177-196 Chernela, Janet M. 1997. "Ideal Speech Moments: A Woman's Narrative Performance in the Northwest Amazon. Feminist Studies 23(1)73-96. Chernela, Janet M. 1993. The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chernela, Janet M. 1989. "Marriage, Language, and History Among Eastern Speaking Peoples of the Northwest Amazon," Latin American Anthropology Review, 1(2):36-42 Chernela, Janet M. 1987."Endangered Ideologies: Tukano Fishing Taboos," Cultural Survival Quarterly 11(2)50-52. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldman, Irving. 1963. The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon, Illinois Studies in Anthropology, No. 2, University of Illinois Press. Hugh-Jones, Christine. 1979. From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge University Press. Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1979. The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Jean E. 1972. Marriage and Linguistic Identity among the Bar Indians of the Vaups, Colombia. Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University.

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Jackson, Jean E. 1974. "Language Identity of the Colombia Vaups, Indians," in R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Jean E. 1976 "Vaups, Marriage: A Network System in an Undifferentiated Lowland Area of South America," in Regional Analysis, Vol. II: Social Systems, ed. C. Smith, pp. 65-93, New York. Jackson, Jean E. 1977. "Bara Zero-generation Terminology and Marriage Ethnology 16(1):83-104 Jackson, Jean E. 1983. The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 1971. Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians. University of Chicago. Originally published 1968 as Desana, Simbolismo de los Indios Tucano del Vaups, Bogot, Universidad de los Andes. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 1979. "Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: A View From the Rainforest," Man 2(3):207-318. Sorensen, Arthur P., Jr. 1967. "Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon," American Anthropologist, Vol. 69, pp. 670-684. Sorensen, Arthur P., Jr. 1969. The Morphology of Tukano, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Turner, Victor. 1968. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vidal, Silvia. 2003. The Arawak-Speaking Groups of Northwestern Amazonia: Amerindian Cartography as a Way of Preserving and Interpreting the Past. In Histories and Historicities in Amazonia, Neil L. Whitehead, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pp 33-58. Waltz, Nathan and Carolyn. n.d. "The Uanano, ms., Summer Institute of Linguistics, Bogota. Wright, Robin. 1981. History and Religion of the Baniwa Peoples of the Upper Rio Negro Valley, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.

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