The Amazonian Puzzle: Ethnic Positionings and Social Mobilizations

By Véronique Boyer

In the Brazilian Amazon region, cultural “mixture” is expressed in the interaction of city and hinterland, of Indigenous and Black, of religiosity and politics. By examining the multiple cultural and ethnic threads that traverse this landscape, The Amazonian Puzzle sets out to show how the category of caboclo (a powerful spiritual entity to some, and to others a despised peasant of mixed ancestry) reveals deep currents of ethnic recompositions, religious interpenetration, and social hierarchy. These Amazonian dynamics are explored through the lens of ethnography, sociology, and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805393740

Véronique Boyer

Véronique Boyer is an anthropologist, a research director at the CNRS, and a member of the American Worlds Laboratory. She has been conducting research in the Brazilian Amazon for over 30 years. She is the author of Expansion évangélique et migrations : la renaissance des perdants (Karthala, 2009).

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The Amazonian Puzzle

THE AMAZONIAN PUZZLE

Ethnic Positionings and Social Mobilizations

Véronique Boyer

Translated by Precious Brown

First published in 2024 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2024 Véronique Boyer

© CNRS Éditions, Paris, 2022

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boyer-Araújo, Véronique, 1960- author. | Brown, Precious, translator.

Title: The Amazonian puzzle: ethnic positionings and social mobilizations / Véronique Boyer; translated by Precious Brown.

Other titles: Puzzle amazonien. English | Ethnic positionings and social mobilizations

Description: New York: Berghahn, 2024. | Original title: Le puzzle amazonien: positionnements ethniques et mobilisations sociales. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023018548 (print) | LCCN 2023018549 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390909 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390916 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Caboclos (Brazilian people)—Brazil—Amazonas—Ethnic identity. | Amazonas (Brazil)—Ethnic relations. | Race—Social aspects—Brazil—Amazonas. | Race—Political aspects—Brazil—Amazonas. | Group identity—Brazil—Amazonas. | Spirit possession—Brazil—Amazonas.

Classification: LCC F2659.C32 B6813 2024 (print) | LCC F2659.C32 (ebook) | DDC 305.800981/13—dc23/eng/20230524

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018548

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018549

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-090-9 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-374-0 epub

ISBN 978-1-80539-091-6 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390909

Contents

Foreword by Peter Wade

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same Mixture

Chapter 2. Personal Experiences in the Service of Collective Projects

Chapter 3. Local Populations as Caboclos: The Difficult Naming of a Social Formation

Chapter 4. The Caboclo, a Protean Notion: Traditional Populations versus Invisible Beings

Chapter 5. The Implicit Nature of the Caboclo: Or How to Conceive the Mixture

Chapter 6. The Mixture and Its Matrices: Race through the Prism of Culture

Conclusion

References

Index

Foreword

Peter Wade

This book is many things—an ethnographic account of a locality in northern Brazil, an examination of the relationship between religion and politics, a critique of multiculturalist and identity politics, an account of social mobilization. Given my own interests, I take it as also being an intriguing and insightful exploration of ideas about (race) mixture—commonly called mestizaje in Spanish and mestiçagem or miscigenação in Portuguese. To achieve this, Véronique Boyer has used material drawn from her extensive ethnographic experience with Brazilian people often labeled by others as caboclos, who live around the lower reaches of the Amazon river. A caboclo is, in simplified terms, a person who has mixed European and native American Indigenous ancestry—with perhaps a substantial element of African ancestry to boot.

Right at the end of her book, in a search for possible comparative frames of reference for her exploration—Amazonianist anthropology? Afro-Latin American studies? Peasant studies?—Boyer asks whether the literature on mestizaje/mestiçagem could form such a frame, looking briefly at the work of Marisol de la Cadena on Indigenous mestizos in Peru and at an article I wrote in 2005. She highlights the difference and particularity of the Brazilian caboclos in relation to these two contributions and, as far as I can tell, she remains agnostic about the value of this specific comparative framing. However, I think that her book works to brilliantly enrich existing approaches to conceptualizing mixture in Latin America, mostly, as she says, by focusing on the identification of local categories of thought concerning what produces identity but also otherness, and the processes that they underlie.

In my experience, studies of Latin American racial formations have generally dealt with mixture in two ways. First, it is described as ongoing processes of biological and cultural interaction between people of European, African, and Indigenous origins, which began five hundred years ago and gave rise to new generations of people seen as different from those original categories and generically known as mestizos in Spanish or mestiços in Portuguese. Second, it is analyzed as a nation-building ideology, driven by elites, which proposes that the emergence of a distinctive nation is grounded on those processes of interaction. In this ideological version, mixture is hierarchized into a process of social evolutionary progress in which African and Indigenous ancestries and heritages, deemed inferior, are incorporated into a modernizing and homogenizing mestizo body that is predominantly shaped by—and ideally moving ever closer to—European whiteness, deemed superior.

However, historians and social scientists have noted that traces of African Blackness and Indigeneity remain in these nation-building narratives, despite their apparent drive toward homogeneity. Elite nationalism has often made room for these traces in ideologies and policies of indigenismo and, to a lesser extent, negrismo, which recognize and even venerate Black and Indigenous heritages, but almost always in the past tense or in highly patronizing and limited ways that confine such heritages and their human bearers—actual Black and Indigenous peoples—to stereotyped and stagnant spaces, often portrayed as destined to disappear with the march of progressive mixture. Ideologies of mixture are thus generally seen in these analyses as masks or veneers that ostensibly include everyone as a potential mestizo, but in practice exclude Black and Indigenous peoples and histories, while also demeaning and discriminating against those mestizos whose bodies or behaviors show too clearly the proximity of their Black and Indigenous origins.

The turn toward multiculturalist policies that swept Latin America from the late 1980s onward, recognizing and entitling Black and Indigenous communities in varied and uneven ways, was heralded by some people—spanning a range of political and class positions—as a radical break with homogenizing ideologies of mixture. With time, and as material conditions remained the same or became (often violently) worse for these communities, such optimism seemed unwise and analyses began to highlight the evident continuities that linked multiculturalism and ideologies of mixture in terms of the limited spaces afforded to Blackness and Indigeneity.

Meanwhile, also from the 1980s, other analyses began to propose different approaches to mixture, rearticulating it as a process that could challenge homogenization based on racist hierarchies. The proposal started from the fact that some nationalist versions of mixture, albeit themselves racist, were pitted against the global hierarchies of race of the early twentieth century that depicted mixture as degenerative and Latin America as therefore destined to inferiority. This starting point was now aligned with postmodern concepts of hybridity as a positive resource for challenging fixed hierarchies and categories, giving rise to the idea of mixture from below—that is, framed by Indigenous, Black, and dark-skinned mestizo people—as disruptive of hegemonic narratives of mixture. Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza is an early (and largely autobiographical) example of a mestizo figure who embraces their Indigenous origins, alongside Western elements (Anzaldúa 1987). Later, De la Cadena (2000) described indigenous mestizos as people who identify as mestizos but do not see themselves as non-Indigenous, thus disrupting hegemonic versions of mestizaje that define mestizo and Indigenous as mutually exclusive categories. It is worth noting that in both cases—and also in relation to hybridity in general—there were ongoing debates about the extent to which ideas of mixture could escape the confines of the original categories that gave rise to the mixture, and thus, at least implicitly, the racial hierarchies in which those origins were still located.

In the article that Boyer cites at the end of this book (Wade 2005), I took up this theme and tried to explore mixture in terms of everyday experience and categories: how did mixed people see their own mixture? On the basis of ethnographic evidence, I proposed a mosaic model of the mestizo person, in which racialized elements coexisted, rather than being fused or melted together and thus losing their particularity. Mestizo people identified specific organs of their body (real, such as the heart, or abstract, such as the soul) and specific tastes and predilections as being negro (Black). I drew in part on the religious practices surrounding the figure of María Lionza in Venezuela, as reported by Barbara Placido. Like the religious practices Boyer documents in this book, ritual specialists of this cult are possessed by spirit entities, some of which are racially coded as Black or Indigenous. According to Placido (1998: 35–36), ‘Black’, ‘Indian’ and ‘White’ are composite parts of the person; however in the cult of María Lionza these different elements should not merge, people should keep them distinct. The people Placido talked to recognized the possibility of a fused mestizo person, in whom the original roots had melded together, but they saw this homogenized mestizo as grey, colorless, and lifeless. In contrast, true Venezuelans had a composite, mosaic-like character that retained the racialized roots as distinct components, lending color, potency, and vitality to the person and allowing them to interact fruitfully with the spirit world.

Boyer takes this approach and develops it powerfully and in great and compelling ethnographic detail into an account of a native ontology. She produces a fully rounded account of non-fusional mixture, based in part on characteristically Indigenous Amazonian concepts of transformation in which people can alter their bodies, acquiring new aspects (through embodied work) and moving between them at will. From a Durkheimian point of view, it is to be expected that local concepts of the spirit world reflect and inform such views of the caboclo person of the visible world: the caboclo spirits that inhabit the invisible world and possess human mediums are also able to move between different forms and embody diverse aspects. There has been a lot of anthropological literature on these kinds of possession religions in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America; Placido aside, I think Boyer is one of the first to show how an anthropological approach to such religious concepts and practices can help us understand local ideas about mixture in people.

Some of the literature on possession religions inquires into the political dimensions of these practices. Lindsay Hale, for example, explores the figure of the preto-velho (the old Black person, male or female, who represents enslavement) whom mediums embody in Umbanda ritual centers in Rio de Janeiro. He finds that the political meanings attached to this figure are not univocal—individual pretos-velhos have personal histories that bespeak resistance but also passivity (Hale 1997). Boyer also gives us an account of the relationship between religion and politics, but in a very different way. Rather than inquiring into the political dimensions of spirit caboclos, she shows us how the whole spirit world provides clues to the way people think about themselves as the products of mixture. And this in itself has political aspects.

A starting point for grasping these aspects is the ethnographic fact that acts as the key spur for Boyer’s approach. The people she talked to spoke of themselves as being able to choose to be Indigenous or Quilombola (strictly speaking, the descendants of a quilombo or maroon settlement, but in effect, Black), or even both at the same time, and to be able to switch between these identities by choice (although they knew that it took substantial work to be recognized as one or the other by the powers that be). This, as she recognizes, had been noted by previous anthropologists, such as José Mauricio Andion Arruti and Jan Hoffman French—and, I would add, a former Ph.D. student of mine, Joceny Pinheiro.

But Boyer takes this ethnographic fact and develops it into an integrated account of a local theory of ontology. And on the basis of this, she is able to generate insights that have very important political dimensions. To grasp these dimensions, we need to first understand the way that Blackness and Indigeneity have figured first in colonial social orders, then in postcolonial nationalist narratives of mixture, and finally in history and social science (for a full account, see Wade 2018). Briefly, in colonial regimes, Black and Indigenous peoples were placed in different classificatory positions in terms of governance: for example, the conceptual starting point for the former was slave, while for the latter it was often vassal or tribute-paying subject. Quite often, Black and Indigenous peoples were set against each other in a strategy of divide and rule. In the postcolonial republics, the conceptual and political division between Black and Indigenous remained, with the latter being seen as culturally more Other than the former, and ideologies and policies of indigenismo carrying much more institutional weight than was the case for negrismo. Academic research in the twentieth century more or less followed these lines of fracture, with, for example, anthropology focusing on Indigenous peoples, while Black people fell within the purview of sociology. Multiculturalist reforms from the 1990s onward tended to reinforce such differences, creating separate policies and legislative channels for Indigenous and Black (or Afrodescendant) communities.

Recent research has tried to supersede these divides of colonial origin. Historiography has shown that, in practice, colonial governors could not keep Indigenous and Black communities as fully apart as they would have liked: Indigenous and Black people interacted and mixed, sometimes giving rise to whole regions where the population was predominantly zambo (to use the colonial term for the Indigenous-Black mestizo whose presence was deemed particularly undesirable). Significantly, the area of Brazil where Boyer did her research seems to have been one such region, despite the fact that the term caboclo does not nominally refer to African ancestry. In general, Brazil figures as a country where, in particular regions, the Black–Indigenous divide was less clearly demarcated than in other areas of Latin America, especially those where there was a large, sedentary Indigenous population (see Chapter 3 of this book). For example, although Indigenous slavery was outlawed in Brazil in 1570, the law allowed captives of a just war to be enslaved, such that Indigenous people were enslaved in large numbers in some areas, continuing into the nineteenth century.

In the social sciences, the impulse to bring Black and Indigenous peoples into the same analytic frame—as I, following scholars such as Norman Whitten, tried to do in my book Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997; published in a second edition in 2010)—was especially relevant in the light of the multiculturalist reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. These policies reinforced existing—and created powerful new—avenues for the institutionalization of lived experience into political identities, with all the bureaucratic weight and boundaries that follow from attaching rights and material resources to identities. As a result, social scientists found themselves obliged to explore the ways that these processes were playing out and whether they were happening differently for Black and Indigenous peoples. This was given a sharp edge by the fact that anthropologists were often called upon by the state (especially in Brazil) to testify as to the authenticity of identity claims. One finding that emerged was that, in some areas, people with a common history and heritage were choosing whether to pursue an Indigenous or a Black route to land rights. They were thus also choosing to identify as one or the other in a legislative context that assumed Black and Indigenous were mutually exclusive identities and were both historical givens. In Brazil, at least, policy did adapt to recognize that such identities could be emergent rather than pre-given, but emergence was still tied in some way to ideas of the recovery of a real identity, which had been forgotten or covered over. The effect of this was that communities that chose to pursue a land rights claim on the basis on being Indigenous or Quilombola, when they had not self-identified or been identified as such until land rights became possible, were often accused by third parties, who had a vested interest in denying them land rights, of fraud and of cynically constructing an identity for the purpose of gaining rights.

The non-fusional and transformational conception of mixture provides a convincing riposte to accusations of this kind. People in the north of Brazil who are labeled caboclo and see themselves as mixed were always already both Black and Indigenous, because these elements coexisted within their bodies and in their histories and memories, as well as in the spirit world they communicate with. This also helps to explain the seemingly contingent events that provoke a move by a given community down the route toward Quilombola rather than Indigenous status or vice versa. Boyer (and French) show that this is often the result of the intervention of a specific person—a priest, a teacher, an activist—who uses some local memories or historical facts as a basis that mobilizes the community to move in one direction rather than another. For an observer thinking in terms of fraud, this is grist to the mill. For local people, it is simply one transformational facet of their existence, which can metamorphose into a different facet.

In short, while Boyer seems uncertain about locating her book in the existing field of studies of mixture, mestizaje/mestiçagem, and so on, in Latin America, I am convinced that it has a great deal to offer to scholars of these matters. The question of what mixed people—mestizos, mestiços, caboclos—think about themselves is a rich vein of inquiry to which this book is a marvelous contribution.

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism and Race in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2017) and Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America (edited with Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Pittsburgh University Press, 2022). He has codirected a project on Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age (2017–19), is directing a project on Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (2020–23), and is coinvestigator on a project titled Comics and Race in Latin America (2021–24).

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hale, Lindsay L. 1997. Preto Velho: Resistance, Redemption, and Engendered Representations of Slavery in a Brazilian Possession-Trance Religion. American Ethnologist 24(2): 392–414.

Placido, Barbara. 1998. Spirits of the Nation: Identity and Legitimacy in the Cults of María Lionza and Simón Bolívar. Ph.D. thesis. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.

Wade, Peter. 2005. Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience. Journal of Latin American Studies 37: 239–57.

———. 2010. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edn. London: Pluto Press.

———. 2018. Afro-Indigenous Interactions, Relations, and Comparisons. In Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, ed. George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente, 92–129. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgments

This work received funding from the Tepsis Laboratory of Excellence (ANR-11-LABX-0067) and the Program Investissements d’Avenir. It also received support from the Center of Research on Colonial and Contemporary Brazil (CRBC/EHESS). Finally, I warmly thank Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet for her careful and extremely attentive revision of the translation. Her work was indispensable for the published version of this book.

Introduction

In 1997, I was talking to a dirigente (local religious leader) of the Assembly of God in a hamlet a few hours by boat from