Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia

Abstract

Recent studies of millenarian movements in tribal societies have tended to interpret them as expressions of resistance to colonial or neocolonial domination. Through a comparison of five case studies of indigenous millenarianism drawn from the history of lowland South America, this essay identifies aspects of utopian renewal that reflect internal political processes and contradictions independent of, and probably predating, native encounters with Europeans. Upon close inspection, the term resistance proves inadequate to the task of illuminating the dialectical processes by which native peoples define themselves in relation to other societies, indigenous and otherwise. Thus the Tukuna told me that forty or fifty years ago the prophecies of a girl in Peruvian territory resulted in a gathering of Indians from both Peru and Brazil. One day Neobrazilians [non-Indian settlers] surrounded the assembly and attacked it with firearms, killed some Indians, thrashed the rest, and carried off the girl prophetess to an unknown fate. -Curt Nimuendajui, The Tukuna The experiments in social change that anthropologists classify as crisis cults, revitalization movements, or millenarian episodes have played a conspicuous role in the history of aboriginal South America.' Observers have long been struck by the singularity of millenarian movements, evident in their divergence from everyday practice and their fusion of such apparently opposed qualities as spirituality and materialism, egalitarianism and apotheosis. As a result, descriptions of millenarian episodes draw on a vocabulary of detonation (explosion, outburst, eruption) that Ethnohistory 38:4 (Fall I99I). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-I801/9I/$1.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 07:31:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Utopian Renewal in marks them as dramatic breaks with a history otherwise assumed to be stable (Schwartz I976: 7). Contemporary inquiry into millenarian movements has shifted toward the recognition that each is shaped by deep cultural currents that transcend the particulars of a specific historical moment. In their analysis of a series of millenarian movements in the northwestern Amazon, for instance, Wright and Hill (I986) note both the movements' innovative features and their continuity with indigenous ritual practice. More specifically, Wright and Hill argue that millenarianism uses myth as an idiom for the expression of resistance to Western political domination. Their analysis exemplifies the importance that the concept of resistance has assumed in interpretations of utopian renewal put forward in the past decade.2 In the present essay I intend to develop some of the strengths of this approach while calling attention to its limitations and logical pitfalls. With Abu-Lughod (I990), I share the view that the term resistance can cloud the subtleties and contradictions of power when used unreflectively. Indeed, a case could be made that resistance is nothing more than the obverse of acculturation, a once-fashionable concept that we now regard as too blunt an instrument to dissect the nuances of intercultural exchange. In studies of Amazonian ethnohistory, resistance is usually invoked to label the struggle of Indians for autonomy in the face of state control. Nevertheless, indigenous societies are not without their own inner fields of conflict and points of internal resistance. Because millenarian movements advocate a radical change in the distribution of power, status, and wealth (Scott 1985: 333), they may threaten the indigenous status quo as much as they challenge the power of outsiders. I pursue this line of inquiry through a comparative analysis of several millenarian movements chosen for the richness of their documentation and the degree to which they represent the diversity of indigenous responses at various places and historical moments. Comparative surveys are, of course, risky enterprises. To undertake them successfully one must weigh the desire to assess as much as possible against the problems that arise with an overambitious scope. By limiting my investigation to indigenous populations of the Amazon basin and adjacent lowland regions (henceforth referred to simply as Amazonia for economy of expression), I seek a balance of breadth and depth. Such a focus offers the additional advantage of filling a significant gap in the English-language literature, from which cross-cultural surveys of Amazonian crisis cults are conspicuously absent.3 The direction of my analysis is as follows. I first review recent developments in the study of New World, and especially Amazonian, prehistory that cast doubt on the assertion that millenarian movements can be attrib389 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 07:31:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms