Space and Society in Central Brazil by Elizabeth Ewart

Author:Elizabeth Ewart [Ewart, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781000181715
Google: akQHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-27T05:01:51+00:00

Living in a single village in the Xingú, the Panará quickly became familiar with the politics of the Park. From other groups, they learned how to deal with outsiders, such as FUNAI officials, NGO representatives, and health care personnel. They started having more contacts with white people, and apart from integrating the difference between hipe and sotangka, they also began to differentiate between various types of white people. The panará origin myth of hipe (which introduces this chapter) states that hipe were made by a Panará woman who was pregnant with a snake rather than a real baby. This myth is now told as the origin of a very particular kind of hipe, namely, the kind that comes from a very long way away across a huge expanse of water and stays for protracted periods with the Panará. This kind of hipe lives with Panará, learns their language, and brings goods to the village. Three anthropologists—two British, one North American—have stayed with the Panará, and their reason for doing so is explained by the fact of their having been originally Panará themselves. This kind of hipe is often associated with índio americano with whom the Panará became familiar, firstly through a visit of a native North American man years ago in the Xingú, and secondly through the repeated viewing of the film Dances with Wolves.

Another kind of hipe, called hipe mpe (real hipe), lives closer to the Panará in the surrounding towns, in Brasilia, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro. This kind of hipe is considered to be more frightening (sumpa) than índio Americano, though he also has a greater potential as a source of desired goods. Hipe mpe might come to the village but never stay long, do not know how to speak Panará, and always sleep in the neighboring FUNAI post, never in the village itself. NGO workers, medical personnel, FUNAI representatives, timber bosses, ranchers, and the population of the whole of Brazil fall into this category. Encounters with timber bosses and ranchers have shown the Panará that this kind of hipe is dangerous, and it is this kind of hipe that Panará men sometimes talk about going to fight.

However, it is also this kind of real hipe who may provide unprecedented amounts of desired things. FUNAI were the first to bring guns, ammunition, and apparently limitless supplies of other desired goods, though this source has recently dried up almost completely, and FUNAI is today referred to as soft (pepeti) precisely because of their shortcomings in providing hipe things. NGOs have on occasion been good suppliers, and timber bosses are all too happy to send planeloads of things in return for agreements that nobody can control. In the following conversation, Sokriti, a man in his late forties, was explaining to me that despite all the talk about going to fight hipe (at a time of intensified unwanted and illegal logging activities in the area), it was not my kind of hipe who was at risk:

“Kâranpô, it is not you.

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