Burst of Breath

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Overture 1

Jonathan D. Hill and Jean-Pierre Chaumeil

f i r s t mo v e m e n t :Natural Sounds, Wind Instruments, and Social Communication

1 . Speaking Tubes: The Sonorous Language of Yagua Flutes 49Jean-Pierre Chaumeil

2 . Leonardo, the Flute: On the Sexual Life of Sacred Flutes amongthe Xinguano Indians 69

Rafael Jos de Menezes Bastos3 . Soundscaping the World: The Cultural Poetics of Power and

Meaning in Wakunai Flute Music 93Jonathan Hill

4 . Hearing without Seeing: Sacred Flutes as the Medium for anAvowed Secret in Curripaco Masculine Ritual 123Nicolas Journet

5 . Flutes in the Warime : Musical Voices in the Piaroa World 147Alexander Mansutti Rodrguez

6 . Desire in Music: Soul-Speaking and the Power of Secrecy 171Marcelo Fiorini

s e c o n d mo v e m e n t :Musical Transpositions of Social Relations

7. Archetypal Agents of Afnity: Sacred Musical

Instruments in the Guianas? 201Marc Brightman

Copyrighted Material

Burst of BreathIndigenous Ritual Wind Instruments

in Lowland South AmericaEdited by Jonathan D. Hill and Jean-Pierre Chaumeil

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8 . From Flutes to Boom Boxes: Musical Symbolismand Change among the Waiwai of Southern Guyana 219Stephanie W. Alemn

9 . From Musical Poetics to Deep Language: The Ritual of theWauja Sacred Flutes 239Accio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade

10 . The Ritual of Iamurikuma and the Kawok Flutes 257Maria Ignez Cruz Mello

11 . Spirits, Ritual Staging, and the Transformative Power of Music in the Upper Xingu Region 277Ulrike Prinz

12 . An Inca Instrument at a Nawa Feast: Marubo Flutes andAlterity in Amazonian Context 301

Javier Ruedas

13 . Arawakan Flute Cults of Lowland South America:The Domestication of Predation and the Production of Agentivity 325Robin Wright

coda :Historical and Comparative Perspectives

14 . Sacred Musical Instruments in Museums: Are TheySacred? 357Claudia Augustat

15 . Mystery Instruments 371 Jean-Michel Beaudet

Contributors 395Index 401




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Overture

jona than d . h i l l and jean-pie r re chaumei l

This book aims to produce a broadly comparative study of ritualwind instruments (utes, trumpets, clarinets, and bullroarers) thatare subject to strict visual and tactile (but not auditory) prohibi-tions and that are found among indigenous peoples in many ar-eas of Lowland South America. The type of prohibition can varyfrom one group to another but primarily affects certain catego-ries of persons more than others, which is why these wind instru-ments are often described, however inadequately, as sacred orsecret instruments. Although there have been intensive stud-ies of this kind of instrument and their music, understood as rit-ual objects and voices that condense a myriad of different rela-tions in specic contexts, there have been no attempts to bringthese isolated studies together into a more global, comparativeperspective that goes beyond more documented areas, such as

northwestern Amazonia and the Upper Xingu region and thatintegrates a diversity of approaches from anthropology, ethno-musicology, ethnolinguistics, and museum studies. Here we haveassembled recent and ongoing research in these elds from a va-riety of ethnographic contexts (northwestern Amazonian, UpperXingu, Guianas, Orinoco, Mato Grosso, and others) where wend sacred wind instruments played in pairs or trios.

The chapters are organized into two sections. Part 1 , NaturalSounds, Wind Instruments, and Social Communication, contains




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2 hi l l and chaumei l

six essays that explore the complex ways in which ritual wind in-struments are used to introduce natural sounds into human socialcontexts and to cross the boundary between verbal and nonverbal

communication. The interplay of lexicality and musicality in theplaying of sacred wind instruments is often regarded as a privi-leged means for human communication with, or impersonationsof, mythic beings, such as the spirit-owners of forest animals,sh, birds, and plants. Part 1 explores the highly diverse ways inwhich indigenous South American peoples (Yagua of Peru, Ka-mayur of Brazil, Wakunai of Venezuela, Curripaco of Colom-

bia, Piaroa of Venezuela, and Nambikwara of Brazil) have devel-oped these interminglings of musical sound and verbal form andmeaning to construct unique cultural poetics of ritual power. Atthe same time, the essays demonstrate how these culturally spe-cic ways of integrating sounds and meanings are closely associ-ated with animals, birds, sh, and other natural species. Flutes,trumpets, and other wind instruments are often named after nat-

ural species, and their sounds are said to be directly connected tothe eating, mating, and other behaviors of animals.

The general theme of seeing versus hearing cuts across theentire spectrum of naturalized, lexicalized musical sounds and isprevalent throughout Lowland South America. In many cases,women and uninitiated children are forbidden to see ritual utesand other aerophones yet are allowed or even required to hear the

music of these instruments and are in some cases even expectedto converse with them. Keeping instruments out of women andchildrens sight but not their hearing also allows male ute play-ers to use the sounds of their instruments to disguise their voices,the sounds of which would easily allow women to identify themen who made it.

The essays in part 2 , Musical Transpositions of Social Rela-

tions, explore some of the ways in which ritual wind instrumentsand their music enter into local denitions and negotiations of




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Overture 3

relations between men and women, kin and afne, and insidersand outsiders. Starting with case studies among the Trio, Way-ana, and Waiwai of Guiana, a comparative sociological perspec-tive emerges through three studies of ritual ute music and wom-ens ritual singing among the Wauja and Mehinku in the Upper

Xingu region of Brazil; the Marubo of Brazil; and four Arawak-speaking groups in widely separate regions of Brazil. The playingof aerophones in ritual and secular contexts is frequently associ-ated with shamanic powers of curing and purication; relationsbetween mythic ancestors and their human descendants, both liv-ing and dead; and relations between kin and afnes. Althoughfor the most part ritual utes and other aerophones are used to

evoke concepts of stability and continuity through celebrating nat-ural and social processes of rejuvenation, the adoption of Inca

map 1 . Indigenous communities in Lowland South America covered.




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utes among the Marubo serves as a foil of otherness that in-directly denes true or authentic Marubo cultural practices.

We conclude with a short section, or Coda: Historical and

Comparative Perspectives, consisting of two essays, a study of sacred wind instruments in a European museum and a commen-tary on the ethnographically based studies in parts 1 and 2 . Whathappens to the meaning of ritual wind instruments that have beenremoved from an indigenous social milieu and placed in muse-ums? Although such preservation of sacred artifacts could be un-derstood as a simple process of alienating them from their orig-

inal meanings, the study of sacred instruments collected in thenorthwest Amazon by early twentieth-century German ethnol-ogists and placed in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, dem-onstrates a more complicated process in which sacred meaningsare still highly salient.

Several generations of anthropological researchers in LowlandSouth America have reported on the importance of wind instru-

ments and their music in collective rituals and ceremonies. Yetonly in the last thirty or so years have anthropologists trainedas ethnomusicologists gone into the eld with the specic goalsof recording indigenous music and understanding how the pro-duction of musical sounds is situated in peoples everyday socialand economic activities, their forms of political organization andhistory, and their ways of conceptualizing nature and cosmos. A

1993 overview of the ethnomusicology of Amazonia concludedthat substantial works on the topic can be counted on the n-gers of one hand (Beaudet 1993 : 527 , our translation) and in-cluded two studies of vocal music among G-speaking peoples(Seeger 1987 ; Aytai 1985 ), one survey of Nambikwara music (Hal-mos 1979 ), and two works on music of the Tup-speaking Kama-yur (Menezes Bastos 1978 , 1989 ). By 2000 , this list had grown

to include major new studies of music among the Warao (Olsen1996 ), Arawak-speaking Wakunai (Hill 1993 ), and Tup-speak-





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ing Waypi (Beaudet 1997 ). In addition to this growing numberof book-length studies, an increasingly rich literature on specicgenres of indigenous Amazonian music began to appear in scat-

tered journals and edited volumes (Avery 1977 ; Beaudet 1989 ,1992 , 1999 ; Canzio 1992 ; Chaumeil 1993 ; Graham 1986 ; Hill1979 , 1986 , 1987 , 1994 ; Menezes Bastos 1995 , 1999 ; Seeger1979 , 1991 ). Building on this new generation of ethnomusico-logical research in specic localities, Burst of Breath lls a majorgap in existing literature by advancing a comparative perspectiveon the widespread uses of aerophones across widely dispersed re-

gions of Lowland South America.

Indigenous Ritual Wind Instrumentsin the History of Western Imagination

Carrying out research on the ritual role of wind instruments inLowland South America inevitably implies an interest in the ideasand representations found in the accounts by the rst European

observers. We know, in fact, to what extent these instrumentsof the shadows, as C. Lvi-Strauss ( 1966 ) termed that group of instruments played mostly at night, inuenced the rst chroni-clers of the conquest as well as later eyewitnesses in their viewsof American Indian religion. In the course of history, there weremany interpretations of such ceremonies. They have captured theattention of travelers and missionaries alike since the seventeenth

century and, more recently, that of ethnographers. The rst de-scriptions saw these rituals as a religion of the devil or a falsereligion at the service of evil forcesan appraisal destined to dis-credit at once the indigenous beliefs in view of the nascent evan-gelizing project. 1 The name Yurupar ( jurupari ) has often beengiven to these rituals, since they were already known in manyparts of Amazonia as Yurupar feasts during colonial times.

The term refers to a mythical heros name of Tup-Guaran tradi-tion and was adopted by the rst missionaries, who rendered its

Overture 5




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meaning as the devil in the Catholic religion. Thus any ritu-als using wind instruments prohibited to women were systemat-ically described in the literature as Yurupar feasts or feasts

of the devil.We owe to the Jesuit Samuel Fritz the rst precise accounts of

the existence of such ritual performances in the Amazon at theend of the seventeenth century, namely, the ritual of Guaricayaamong the Yurimaguas. In Fritzs accounts of these rituals, we ndthe main characteristics that, beginning in the nineteenth century,were reported in the Yurupar feasts of the northwest Amazon:secret utes, visual prohibition for women, ritual agellation, etc.(Porro 1996 , 137 41 ). Let us read what the missionary wrote:

Remarkable is the fact, that I at this time found out in this villageof the Jurimaguas, which is that in a revelry that they were mak-ing, I, from the ranch where I was lying, heard a ute played, thatcaused me so great terror, that I could not endure its sound. Whenthey left off playing that ute I asked what it meant, and they an-

swered me, that they were playing in this manner, to Guaricaya, thatwas the Devil, who from the time of their ancestors came in visibleform, and took up his abode in their villages; and they always madehim a house apart from the village within the forest, and there theybrought him drink and the sick that he might cure them. Finally en-quiring with what kind of face and form he came, the chief, namedMativa, answered: Father I could not describe it, only that it is hor-

rible, and when he comes all the women with their little ones ee,only the grown-up men remain, and then the Devil takes a whip thatfor this purpose we keep provided with a leather lash made of thehide of a Sea-Cow, and he ogs us on the breast until much blood isdrawn. (Edmundson 1922 : 61 )

This description emphasizes an element that we encounter to-day in many Amazonian cultures: the curative power of the utes

(see the Wauja, this volume). This fact suggests a direct and an-cient relationship between shamanism and the ute rituals, whose





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breath or music (or the simple act of seeing them) had the powerto cure certain illnesses. Among the contemporary Kalapalo, it issaid that many people (including some women) have been cured

of serious illnesses by the sacred utes:In the Kalapalo village, several individuals are designated kagutu oto ,by virtue of having been cured by the playing of trumpets during asevere illness. These persons are responsible for announcing whenthe trumpets are to be played, seeing that there are men to play them,keeping the kuakutu (trumpets) in repair, making payment to bothplayers and specialists, and storing the trumpets in their houses when

they cannot be played. (Basso 1973 : 61 )

Among the Bakairi, in contrast, the sacred utes aid shamansin contacting their own helper spirits: The spirit that then ap-peared to him [a shaman apprentice] instructed him how to makea ute which he kept in the sacred utes house, and gave him aspecial tune by which he could always call his spirit helper. Thenovice had then to prove himself by curing some sick person orby nding lost property. If he were successful he became a recog-nized shaman (Oberg 1953 : 75 ).

In the rst half of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit Jos Gu-milla wrote about the sacred ute rituals. He related it this timeto the funerals held by the Saliva of the Orinoco basin. His tes-timony is remarkable because it establishes the relationship be-tween the utes and the treatment dispensed toward the dead and

because of his precision in describing the instruments, of which heleft us a curious graphic representation (Gumilla 1758 : 303 10 ,and plate facing page 303 ; Mansutti Rodrguez 2006 : 11 12 ). In1782 , another missionary, Jesuit Felipe Salvador Gilij, connectedthe ute ritual among the Maypure with a kind of cult to the ser-pents (Gilij 1987 : 234 38 ), although later sources talk about acult toward plants. Alexander von Humboldt, the rst scientist

to travel to the Arawak region of the Upper Orinoco, describedthe use of the botuto trumpets as part of the ritual of propitiating

Overture 7




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fruits. According to him, the shamans would often play the sa-cred instruments under palm trees to secure their fertility (Hum-boldt 1822 : 336 39 ). Humboldt also saw the cult of the botuto

as the locus for a possible political transformation of these soci-eties toward hierarchical or more complex models. Humboldtsstudy of the Arawak ritual utes is important in that it initiatedstudies in the eld. As it is well known, Humboldt was acknowl-edged as the most inuential scientist of his time. His works werelong considered one of the main sources of scientic knowledgeon South America. They were also thought to have had a greatimpact on the development of modern anthropology, at least inNorth America, in the early twentieth century. Humboldts pioneer-ing work inspired a series of investigators of Amazonia through-out the nineteenth century, especially the German naturalists CarlFriedrich von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix, and later theGerman ethnologists Karl von den Steinen, Paul Ehrenreich, MaxSchmidt, Konrad Theodor Preuss, Theodor Koch-Grnberg, andCurt Nimuendajall of whom followed Humboldts steps in be-coming interested in indigenous music and ritual.

The rst reference to the cult of the Yurupar as such comesfrom the writings of Alfred Russell Wallace, who traveled on theVaups River in 1850 and 1852 and witnessed the ritual (Wallace1853 ). After his testimony, the description of this cult on the partof travelers, missionaries, and ethnographers that explored thisregion became commonplace (Hugh-Jones 1979 : 4 5 ; Orjuela1983 : 45 69 ). Koch-Grnberg ( 1909 10 ), in particular, becamenotable in this eld when he undertook several trips to Amazo-nia between the years 1898 and 1924 that allowed him to wit-ness several Yurupar ceremonies. The recordings of ute musicand songs that he made during these trips are the earliest soundrecordings from the region. 2

During this same period, the outpouring of scientic interest

in sacred wind instruments from Amazonia and other regions of the American tropics spilled over into western literature and pop-





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ular culture. Oscar Wilde, for example, included a very detailedlisting of indigenous musical instruments from Latin America inhis novel The Picture of Dorian Grey .

He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instru-ments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations oramong the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Westerncivilizations, and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysteri-ous juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not allowedto look at, and that even youths may not see till they have been sub-jected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the Peruvians

that have the shrill cries of birds, and utes of human bones such asAlfonso de Ovalle heard in Chili, and the sonorous green jaspers thatare found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. Hehad painted gourds lled with pebbles that rattled when they wereshaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performerdoes not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day

long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of threeleagues. ( 1926 : 200 201 )

Despite the exoticism and romanticism in Wildes literary ac-count of Latin American musical instruments, his list demon-strated a relatively precise knowledge of these artifacts and theirsocial and geographic origins.

Many interpretations of these musical instruments and the cer-

emonies in which they are played have since been put forth, eachone evidently answering to the pressing questions and views com-mon to the times when they were raised, without nonetheless ex-hausting the theme of the ute rituals. People have seen this rit-ual as a cult of the ancestors (Goldman 1963 ), albeit suspectinga certain Andean inuence, as well as a rite of passage relatedto the context of an initiation into a secret mens cult (Hugh-

Jones 1979 : 7 ), or simply as a ritual of masculine domination as-sociated in one way or another with the institution of the mens

Overture 9




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house (Schaden 1959 : 149 63 ). Rejecting all these theses, Reichel-Dolmatoff ( 1989 ) proposed his version of the Yurupar as a riteoriented rst and foremost toward the promulgation of exogamy.

Recently, the rst native ethnographic account of the distinct typesof the dabacuri ute rituals belonging to the Desana were pub-lished by two Desana authors, an accomplishment that entails,without a doubt, the most comprehensive and detailed study of the ute rituals among the Desana (Diakuru and Kisibi 2006 ).

Nowadays, the tendency is not to consider the ute rituals as acult of the ancestors or as a symbol of masculine domination, butmore as a ritual of growth and fertility that associates both mas-culine and feminine elements. But more than any other culturalmanifestation, the ute rituals could not be extricated enoughfrom the dominant paradigms or prejudices that marked all thedistinct historical times, from its denition as a religion of thedevil until the more recent interpretations about fertility. In spiteof the lack of agreement, it seems there is at least a point of con-sensus among authors concerning the hypothesis of the Arawak

as the center and main axis of diffusion of the sacred ute cere-monials in Lowland South America.We should remind ourselves that in South Americanist stud-

ies, the theme of secret utes and associated rituals has played animportant role in the great classications by cultural areas in the1950 s, as in the case of the Handbook of South American Indians (1946 50 ). In the model adopted by the editor of the Handbook ,

Julian Steward, the demarcation between the so-called north-west Amazonian tribes and the Montaa tribes follows in a cer-tain way the line marking the presence of this presumed cult of the sacred utes.

Instrumentarium Amazonia

Before entering into a more detailed consideration of the reli-gious and other meanings of ritual wind instruments and their

music, we begin with a brief summary of the instruments them-selves. Following the lead of Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbos-





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tel (1914 ), musical instruments can be classied into four broadfamilies according to the manner in which they produce sound.Membranophones, or drums and related instruments, create sound

through vibration of a membrane caused by striking or rubbing.Cordophones are stringed instruments on which sounds are pro-duced through striking, rubbing, or plucking a stretched cord.Idiophones, such as rattles and log drums, produce sound bystriking or rubbing solid materials without the use of strings ormembranes placed under tension. Aerophones are wind instru-ments in which sound is produced by the passage of a stream of air across the edge of an orice or through a valve.

A complete survey of indigenous South American musical in-struments is provided in Musical and Other Sound Instruments of the South American Indians: A Comparative Ethnological Study ,by Karl Izikowitz. It is immediately clear that aerophones and id-iophones are the two families of instruments most highly devel-oped among indigenous South American peoples. As for cordo-phones, Izikowitz ( 1970 : 201 206 ) lists only simple musical bowsfrom Patagonia and eastern Peru and some violins introducedamong the Warao, lowland Quechua, and a few other groups bymissionaries during the colonial period. However, it appears thatthe geographic distribution of musical bows and European violinsis somewhat broader than Izikowitz believed and extends acrossan arc from southern Bolivia, where the Weenhayek use musicalbows and the Guaran play violins, and as far north as the Shuar

of eastern Ecuador (Beaudet, personal communication, 2007 ).3Likewise, membranophones are relatively scarce in South Amer-ica, and The great majority of them are nothing but copies of European military drums (Izikowitz 1970 : 165 ). Percussive orstruck idiophones, however, are much more numerous and welldeveloped in South America and include many kinds of woodendrums, jingle and hollow rattles, and stamping tubes (Izikowitz

1970 : 7 160 ). Aerophones, or wind instruments, are still morenumerous and diversied than the percussive idiophones and

Overture 11




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include many kinds of valve instruments (trumpets and clarinets)and an even larger variety of utes (Izikowitz 1970 : 207 410 ).

The family of aerophones breaks down into three broad groups,

called free aerophones,4

valve instruments, and utes. Our pri-mary interest is in exploring wind instruments through which astream of air is directed into a closed space and made to vibrateeither through a valve (clarinets and trumpets) or by splitting theair column against the edge of an orice (utes). The case studiesinclude examples of most of the major kinds of valve instrumentsand utes listed in Izikowitzs typology: simple and complextrumpets, clarinets without stops, utes without airducts (bothwith and without stops), and duct utes (with and without stops).

The most common form of valve instrument in Lowland SouthAmerica is the trumpet, or a hollow, often tubular resonator witha relatively large aperture into which the lips are tightly com-pressed and a stream of air causes the lips to vibrate in a valve-likemanner. Simple trumpets, or single tubes lacking separate mouth-pieces, include the bark trumpets found mainly north of the Ama-

zon River and made by wrapping bark spirally into cone-shapedresonators held together by a framework of sticks attached to theoutside of the resonators. In Burst of Breath , we nd these barktrumpets among the Wakunai/Curripaco/Baniwa of the UpperRio Negro region (see essays by Hill, Journet, and Wright), theYagua (see Chaumeil), and Apurin (Ipurin) (see Wright and Au-gustat). Complex trumpets, or ones in which a separate mouth-piece or embouchure is attached to a tubular resonator, are rep-resented by surub (catsh) trumpets of the Wakunai/Baniwa/ Curripaco. In these unique trumpets, a woven basketry tube iscovered with melted resin and then attached to a separate mouth-piece (see Hill). Other complex trumpets are the Piaroa trumpetsusing clay vessels as resonators (see Mansutti Rodrguez) androarers, speaking tubes or megaphones used in rituals amongthe Yagua (see Chaumeil) and Wayana (see Brightman). Figure 1

shows the geographic distribution of complex trumpets in Low-land South America.





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Burst of Breath

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