Museum abstract

In connection with the upcoming America exhibition I'm writing a text. Need to give in some objects as well. It was harder to write the text than I had thought. This is what I have so far:

The Warao are an Amerindian group living in the Orinoco delta, Venezuela. The Orinoco Delta is large, about 40 s.Km., where 30 thousand Warao live in and around, making it one of the larges low-land indigenous groups of Latin-America. Though one usually refer to the delta people as Warao, there are large ethnic differences among the ethnic groups living there. Influences from the Carib and Arawak Indians are still to be found in the area. In addition relatively new ethnic groups that the Warao call Hotarao, consisting of Creoles (Venezuelans), tourist, missionaries and visiting anthropologist, all affect the Warao and their way of life.

The triangular Orinoco Delta is divided by several rivers branching off the large Orinoco River. A large part of the delta is inaccessible because of the diurnal tides, especially in the littoral zone. The ground consists for the most part of mud and peat. Walking about in these swamps is arduous and hard work; Arduous because of snakes and scorpions, hard work because you step through the mud, making it difficult to walk.

With the extensive system of rivers and channels, the diurnal tides, rain season and the yearly flooding of the Orinoco River, the Warao environment has been referred to as aquatic. The Warao themselves often conceptualize themselves living on a disk floating on a great sea. In this part of the world the rivers and channels make out important means of transportation for the Warao. With their dugout canoes they can easily access the gardens, go fishing, hunt or gather foodstuff in the woods.

In these wetlands the Warao build thatched palm houses on stilts, or so called palefitos, in Spanish. The households are lined along the river. A typical household consists of three houses. Hisabanok which is the “eating place”, hanoko which is the “hammock place” and Naibomanoko which is the “menstruation place”. All of the houses are in the river when it is high tide, and the kitchen, hisabanoko, is furthest out into the river.

In the hisabanok the food is prepared and eaten, though it often also functions as a place for social gatherings. Arriving with ure (tuber) from the garden, fish, game or other edible foodstuff, it is first loaded here. There is a hoisi, walkway, from the hanoko to the hisabanoko, which also functions as a pier for the canoes, and goes further out into the river. The piers stick out from the households into the deeper part of the river, so that you can leave even when it is low tide.

While men have primary responsibility for building houses, hunting and fishing, the women are responsible for harvesting Ure/tubers (the staple food) from the gardens, and cooking food. The typical meal is fish and Ure, cooked in a pot for about one hour. It is also the wife’s responsibility to distribute the food to the household members. This type of power, in a place where food is often scarce, is significant. So, even though men make decisions in the public sphere, women are able to influence the men’s decisions through such informal channels.

The Ohidu palm is another resource. This palm was once the staple food. The Ohidu palm has many uses and provides the Warao with moho, a delicious caterpillars, harpoons for fishing, arrows for bird hunting, and most important, plant fibres to make hammocks. And this points over to the second house, the hanoko. Ha means hammock in Warao and hanoko where one. A Hanoko can be built for as few as two people, or for twenty. The hanokoarotu, the owner of the house, and his wife are the two central members, which also make the majority of the decisions concerning the household.

Furthest from the river, towards the forest, is the menstruation hut, naibomanoko. Here women are confined during their menstruation period. In this period they are given leave from most of their daily chores and are thought to be especially weak. In general, Warao conceive of any blood loss to weaken the human being. Menstrual blood is also perceived as polluting for shamans. The shamans are responsible for the interaction among humans and spirits, but if the spirits smell blood, they can attack humans, and especially the shamans.

Living traditions: Objects and identity
A contemporary analysis of an Amerindian community needs to take into account global changes. With the production of cheap technology, electronic media has been made available to the Warao. Today you are hard pressed to find a Warao community that does not have radios, TV’s and DVD’s. Small electronic generators run the media show, while the Warao watch movies and discuss events far beyond their villages.

An ordinary event to observe in a village today is a woman weaving a hammock, while a group of people are watching a movie. For an outsider coming to this remote place of the world, hoping to experience another way of life, but finding that Indians today have the same TV that he has in his own living room, might come as a surprise, even a disappointment. But the material culture of the Warao is still very much the same it always has been.

In these wetlands the dugout is still a fundamental part of Warao lifestyle. Almost all elderly Warao men know how to build a dugout, and these skills are still brought over from the elder to the young. The skilled crafts men and women are called moyotu, especially in regards to men that are skilled in making dugout and women that are skilled in making hammocks.

Though artefacts like the canoes and hammocks are heavily gendered into male and female spheres, there are cases where one finds alternative gender patterns. Among the Warao we find the “third gender”, the tidawena, meaning twisted woman, who are homosexuals or transvestites. Tidawena takes pride in being good at making hammocks instead of canoes. Identifying themselves with female skills, and distancing themselves from male skills, they underline gendered aspects of hammocks and canoes.

Global connections and urban centres
Amerindians, especially in the Amazonian region, is often portrayed as isolated. News-media and National Geographic type of TV Channel tend to weigh the exotic and solitary life these communities live. But the truth seems to be more complex. Today many Amerindians live their lives on the margins of globalization, connected to different forms of lifestyles though government officials, missionaries, but also tourists and anthropologist.

To understand village life, one also has to understand the different forms of engagement that the Warao have outside their villages. Today Warao travel to surrounding cities, some finding work as beggars or as transporters, moving heavy loads. Many migrate back and forth between the city and their village.

The Warao often experience extensive discrimination in urban areas. They seldom get jobs and are generally treated badly (They belong in the forest, or “no son seres humanos”). But they have adopted a range of strategies to acquire different types of industrialized goods.

In a garage dump outside of Ciudad Guyana, a large city further up the Orinoco River, many Warao travel to gather goods. Foraging through the garbage, searching for stuff; clothes, knives, pots, pans, shoes, metals – all industrialized goods the Warao lack money to buy. People either gather with some friends or family members. The clothes are brought back to the village, and the aluminium is sold for a dollar pr kg. Other valuable stuff is cassette recorders, radios, and other electronic gadgets, all brought back to the village to be experimented with and redistributed among family and friends.

Another strategy is directed towards the tourist industry. In their attempts to serve this “costumer group” the traditional handicraft has been miniaturized to fit into the tourists’ backpacks and suitcases. A ordinary aru huba, made to extract yuruma of the bitter manioc, is usually six feet long. Now they can be made as small as one feet. The same with the uhu, made for collecting palm starch. It used to be big, but is now small.

All this points to a range of changes in the warao way of life. With changing material conditions, the Warao condition is altered. But this alteration is not “to become modern”, but rather an alteration on what it means to be Warao today. The new technology among the Warao is first and foremost about exploring new ways of being Warao. How this new way of being in the world turns out is still a matter under investigation.

(But still, life goes on very much the same it always have in the delta, with its peculiar rhythm of life; out doing daily chores before the sun rises, making hammocks, fishing, gardening, building and maintaining houses, telling stories, fighting with the neighbour and enjoying the company of friends and family.)

Guess I still have some work in front of me:)