The effect of hunting on primate behavior

ANTHROPOLOGY

One of my first anthropology professors, John Hamer, used to tell his students that you cannot make a person into an anthropologist; people are drawn to this field because on some level they already are anthropologists. I have thought about this idea over the years, and although I still am not sure exactly what that means for me, I do believe that it is true. I have heard anthropologists charac­ terized as philosophers of human nature, pure scientists, humanitarians, thrill­ seekers, or even as people attracted to other cultures because they already feel alienated from their own. For my part, I have to admit that my motives are somewhat selfish.

Although the idea of experiencing another culture has al­ ways been rather intimidating, it is not as frightening as the idea of having lived my life without having made an attempt to see outside of my own narrow frame of reference. These days in our field, critical self-reflection is considered by many to be as much a part of ethnography as is the study of the people themselves. Some would say this is for the better, and some would say for the worse. Although I have certainly tried to present an objective, unbiased account of the Gua; people, I recognize that I am a product of my upbringing, my historical context, and my academic genealogy. I have to admit that I dread the thought of being deconstructed and dismissed in the future as a type of bias of whatever paradigm I cannot currently see beyond. Then again, I suppose I would be quite fortunate to be considered even worthy of the attention. At the risk of sounding contrived, I will describe my research topic as coming to me in a kind of “eureka” moment. In my first semester as a graduate student at Tulane, Bill Balee showed a slide in an ecological anthropology course of a Cuaja woman breastfeeding a monkey.

I was both fascinated and horrified by the image and could not stop thinking about how these people must view nature in order to have this kind of intimate relationship with monkeys. I had been torn early on in my education as to whether to be a cultural anthropologist or a prima­ urologist, and the Cuaia seemed to present an ideal way to combine my interests. My interest had also been fertilized by my first primatology professor, Bruce Wheatley, who had lectured to us about the critically neglected understanding of the effect of hunting on primate behavior and how this influenced his early in­ interest in understanding the Balinese cultural conceptions of temple macaques.

Initially, I thought that the Cuaja must perceive nature very differently than members of Western society do. We have been described as attempting to control nature- “man against nature,” if you will. But the Cuaja relationship to mon­ keys suggested that perhaps they were nurturing nature itself by adopting this ma­ eternal role toward monkeys. On the other hand, I thought that perhaps the Cuaja were not all that different from us. Perhaps their pet monkeys were much like our pet dogs and cats, and I was simply having an ethnocentric reaction to the breast­ feeding. However, as I read what research was available on the Cuaja, the ques­tion became more complicated. Queiroz and Kipnis (1991) had done an archaeo­ logical study of an old Cuaja camp and found that monkeys were the primary game food of the Cuaja, This apparent contradiction of the predatory/protector relationship of the Cuaja and the monkeys became the central theme of my re­ search:

How can monkeys be both eaten as food and nurtured as children? FIELDWORK AMONG THE GUAJA The Guaja are Tupi-Guarani-speaking, traditional foraging people living in western Maranhao, Brazil. I spent approximately fifteen months among the Cuaja between February 1996 and August 1997. In October 1996, I returned to the United States for several months before resuming field work in January 1997. My husband, James, who is not an anthropologist, accompanied me into the field, and we lived in a room in an infirmary built for the Cuaja by the Brazilian Indian Agency, FUNAI (Fundacao Nacional do Indio). It was no more than an Introduction hut consisting of a concrete floor, plank walls, and a thatched babassu palm roof that constantly leaked. We wound up pitching our tent inside of the hut, not so much for protection from the rain, but to guard against insects; I had been ex­ tremely naive about the insect load in the area. Although we meticulously cleaned the place, we had goliath tarantulas, scorpions, locusts, biting cen­ types, and large lizards in our hut, in addition to a general infestation of cock­ roaches, gnats, and mosquitoes.

The Cuaia have falciparum malaria in their area, so mosquitoes were a serious concern. We also had ant invasions on several occasions by small black ants the Cuaja call the (Eciton sp.) that periodically swarmed our hut in masses of thousands. The tent was virtually waterproof and bugproof and seemed to work better than a hammock and mosquito nets. The tent also worked well against the tahig ants, as they simply crawled over the tent during their night invasions. Part of my daily routine included random spot checks, which involved visit­ in each of the ten Cuaja huts in the vicinity at randomly selected times during the day and recording the residents’ activities. Although I conducted these ran­ dom spot-checks throughout the research period, much of the data I collected during the first few months was unusable because I did not understand the lan­ guage well enough to really grasp their descriptions of those activities that were not obvious or familiar. But the process of the first random spot checks helped me acquire a feel for their daily routine and contributed to my learning the lan­ guage. Household size ranged from six to fourteen individuals. Most of the houses were dirt-floor huts thatched by babassu palm leaves on all sides and on the roof. However, two of the huts had wattle and daub walls, similar to those used in the house construction of many local, non-Indian Brazilians.

During the first seven months, I was involved in two other structured re­ search activities: focal animal samples of the monkeys and plant collecting. Ob­ training focal animal samples involved observing pet monkeys in and around the Cuaja households. In addition to gathering information about human-monkey interactions, this gave me an opportunity to observe many of the daily activities of the °Guaja. Collecting the plant samples involved going into the forest, usu­ ally with two informants at a time, to identify and gather plants. Usually, the two would be a husband and wife team or two siblings. I marked the plants they identified and returned later to collect samples. When the foliage was located high in the canopy, sometimes the Cuaja would be able to climb the trees and retrieve a sample. When it was out of reach of the Cuaja, the method for re­ retrieval that worked best involved a limb saw. James used a bow and arrow to shoot a length of string over a desired branch, which we would use to pull up a limb saw. Then pulled back and forth on ropes attached to either side of the limb saw to remove the sample. Plant samples from the first part of the research period were shipped to the Museu Goeldi in Belern to be dried. On our return to the field, James con­ structured a plant drying oven that could be used over the hearth in our hut. We used a grill for the base of the oven, and the sides and top were metal sheets with temperature gauges on the tops and bottoms to monitor the heat level.

We collected charcoal-like remains from our campfires as fuel so that we could keep a low, slow heat going to dry the plants. During the second half of the research period, in addition to continuing with the random spot checks and the plant collections, I began weighing ani­ mals killed for food and conducting structured interviews with the Cuaja. In­ formants were generally cooperative about bringing fish, birds, and game to be weighed in order to assess the relative importance of primates in the diet. By this part of the research, my language skills were sufficiently developed to begin conducting structured interviews in the Guaja language. I worked with pairs of informants and asked specific questions regarding kinship, religion, and other aspects of their culture. Although the structured research activities were important to the research, most of my information about the Guaja cul­ ture came from my interactions with them on a day-to-day basis, that is, through participant observation. My husband, James, had many roles in the field. I benefited enormously from his being there and my having, essentially, a full-time partner to help. In practical terms, he took care of the bulk of our chores for daily survival, which gave me more time to focus on research. His relationships with the Cuaja were much more relaxed than mine. My interactions were oriented towards my research goals, while he could be more natural and casual. His friendships with the men were particularly beneficial in providing many insights that I might not have otherwise gained. Probably most important, his presence helped ease the cultural shock I felt while living with the Cuaja. Sharing the experience with him made all aspects of the fieldwork much easier and much more enjoyable.

The Cuaja are in transition from their traditional foraging lifestyle to a more settled existence. My ability to work among them the way that I did was facili­ stated by the rapid changes that have occurred in their way of life over approxi­ mately the last twenty years. I was not the first anthropologist to work among the Cuaja, but they have had less contact than most contemporary indigenous peo­ plus due to their nomadic habits. Some Cuaja has now been in contact with personnel from the Brazilian Indian Agency for much of their adult lives. How­ ever, some had their first contact only a few months before my arrival, and per­ haps as many as one-third of them still remain isolated from non-Indians. Ironi­ cally, the very train that brought me within several hours of hiking and boating Introduction XVII to the Caru reserve, where I worked, is largely responsible for the rapid changes that are now occurring. Construction began on the Carajas railroad in 1985; it runs from the coast of Sao Luis to the interior where iron is mined. Although no mining is currently taking place in the Cuaja area, the train runs through the middle of traditional Cuaja territory, and in its wake, it has brought illegal inva­sions, development, and disease. I know of no other way to describe the effect that this has had on the Cuaja than to say that it has been devastating.

The most difficult part of the research was learning the Cuaja language. No formal studies had been done of their language, and only a few of them knew any Portuguese. Those who spoke some Portuguese used a pidgin Portuguese­ Cuaja. Their pidgin typically involved substituting Portuguese terms that are easily glossed into Cuaja, such as peixe (“pira”) for fish and guarana (“wan”) for howler.’ So their pidgin is fundamentally Cuaja. I suspect that anthropologists often have the experience of finding them­ selves studied by the people they are studying. This was even more apparent for me with the Cuaja who had not long been in contact. Shortly after we arrived, we met the group who had come into contact only a few months earlier. One young man named Takwarichi’a listened intently as James and I spoke to each other in English. I attempted to say a few words in Cuaja to him, and he re­ responded by saying politely to me, “Zzzzuh, zzzzuh, zzzzuh.” This meant two things. First, my early attempts at the Cuaja language were obviously completely unintelligible to him. Secondly, he was hearing in our language the /zl phoneme that was not present in his own. Apparently, he thought we commu­nicated by making this meaningless buzzing sound, and so he did his best to replicate it and try to make contact. On another occasion, still, early in the fieldwork, I was visiting a Cuaja hut and making observations of their pet monkeys. A group of women was cooking and chatting to one another, and I attempted to join in the conversation. I do not re­ member the topic, but I managed to put together a sentence with some semblance of grammar. Immediately, one of the women shushed everyone around her and stared at me in amazement, encouraging me to speak again. I do not know exactly what she was thinking, but it seemed to me that it was probably the first time she considered the possibility that I could actually be an intelligent form oflife. When I first went to Brazil, I had basic conversational skills in Portuguese. I first began learning Cuaja from several of the younger men who knew some Portuguese. Initially, I also learned some of the basic Cuaja vocabularies from in­ teractions with the children. They enjoyed playing a game with me that in­ volved pointing to an that I was then supposed to try to name in Cuaja while they tried to name it in Portuguese. The hardest people to learn to communi­ cate with were the older women, none of whom knew any Portuguese. I even tually possessed sufficient language skills to understand the expression of in­ digenous concepts, but I never became fluent in Cuaja, A few months after arriving, I learned that the Cuaja were being exposed to my society by more than my presence. One afternoon, a young girl named Iawowicika walked by my hut singing a reggae tune in nearly perfect English: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” I rushed towards her with what I am sure was a crazed look on my face asking her to sing it again. Not surprisingly, my reaction scared her. I brought James over and convinced her to sing it to him, in part to prove to myselfthat I had not imagined it in some malarial haze. She explained, “televisao.” We did not know it at the time, but the FUNAI workers at the post, about a mile away, had recently installed a satellite dish, and some of the Cuaja were travelling there at night to watch. The “bad boys” song is from an American television show called COPS that had been dubbed, except for the theme song, into Por­ tuguese. Although the words had no meaning to her, Iawowicika was able to mimic the sounds. Shortly thereafter, the children began playing a game called they called “policfa.” The child in the role of the police officer would chase other children and knock them down. Needless to say, I was very disappointed that the Cuaja were exposed to my own society in this way. I tried to explain that the police were the good guys, but this made no sense given what they saw on the show, which was the police chas­ ing people, wrestling them to the ground, and apparently kidnapping them. An­ other game developed shortly afterwards called, kamara (non-Cuaja Indians), which resulted from watching old Westerns. The children would fight each other riding sticks which were make-believe tapi’ira (tapirs, a distant relative of the horse). Next came the martial artslkarate-kicking game. The imitation of television violence was extremely disturbing. Currently in American society, there is much debate regarding the extent to which exposing children to televi­ sion violence encourages subsequent violent behavior. The Cuajri, like many hunter-gatherers, avoid physical conflict within the group. It is not completely absent, but it is rare. Interpersonal conflicts are dealt with primarily through joking and teasing each other. Typically, if a conflict cannot be resolved, it is avoided by simply moving away from each other into the forest. Although I did not study this behavior of the children in any controlled way, it appeared to be a clear indictment of the effects of television violence. The material culture that we brought with us to the camp also influenced the Cuaja in a way we had not anticipated. James and I were quite dismayed to find that an activity we thought was harmless was having a revitalization­ movement effect among them. Our friends and relatives sent us care packages that included recent magazines; the Cuaja children were fascinated with the pictures, and we frequently let them look through them. The adults seemed to Introduction take less of an interest, but did flip through them from time to time. The one ex­ ception to this was one very old Cuaja woman, Merekechi’a, who repeatedly came over to look at a Time magazine picture of England’s former prime minis­ ter, John Major. She said that he was parahei (beautiful) and wanted to know who he was. I told her that he was a grandfather, which was the closest transla­ tion I could think of that would make any sense in their acephalous society. I have wondered what made John Major stand out as beautiful among all the other faces she saw in the magazine. While we were there, a photographer and writer visited the Cuaja briefly for a feature insert in the Sao Luis newspaper. On one of our supply trips, we brought back a number of the inserts and gave them to the Cuaja. Over a period of weeks, the adult men began to “read” these inserts. They stared at the pic­ tures and chanted random Portuguese words and numbers. This was then gen­ eralized to all reading materials, and adults would come over, pick up a book or magazine, chant in Portuguese for several minutes, and then leave. I observed this for a while before I decided asked them to explain what they were doing. The reply was that they were doing the same thing we were doing: looking into the books to find answers, as they had seen us do many times, such as when looking up a word in our Portuguese dictionary. “Reading” became a form of divination practiced by some of the adult men. Some of the men had the ability to “read,” while others were said to not be able to understand. One individual was deciding when adolescents were ready to make their first spiritual trancing journey to their sacred sky home by looking into the books and magazines. The ritualization of Western media had actually begun before the arrival of the television and our books and magazines. Soon after we arrived, I observed adult men chanting Portuguese numbers or words while standing alone in the middle of the village or while walking down the trail. Initially I thought this was some type of ceremonial boasting. But eventually, James recognized that this peculiar form of speech for them sounded like the speech patterns of Brazilian radio and television broadcasters. We questioned the Cuaja specifically on this, and it was indeed the case. Although somewhat reluctant to admit it, the men said that they were trying to send their voices to other parts of the forest, like a radio. Explain what is the interesting provocative, dubious, inspirational, or flat-out wrong. In other words, as you read, note which parts of the material really make you respond in some way. Make a really insteristing question