Iyo - a strange turtle

Going through my fieldnotes, I came across a day in May, when I encountered a strange turte. The turtle is called Iyo, or in Venezuelan it is called Matamata. I must say I was quite surprised to see this animal. It has a hidious appearence, and looks as if its got a bad case of genital warts all over. When I returned to Hobure, I asked several people if they ate it. Some youth claimed they would, but all of the elder generation said they would not eat it. And it was never eaten, but died in captivity in our household.

It is apparently connected to the spirit, or hebu Boroboro, a spirit that is connected with measels and copper (Sarampian). The diseases affects the skin, producuing acne or other types of infections. Looking at the Iyo, it is a very obvious connection.

Iyo is a fresh water turtle with tubercle - a range of worty outgrowth on the skin. It has a flat head and flaps of skin. The two barbels on the chin is used to search for food in the murky waters in the naba.

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:)

Entering the heart of darkness

Entering and walking into the garbage heap was one of my most intense and hardest moments during fieldwork. Going into the area I was surrounded by smoke from burning garbage, but as i was walking down the hill, into the garbage area, the smoke cleared, and this is what appeared:

As I descended down into the garbage heap, the intense smell of rotten, decaying matter was the first that hit me. Standing and walking in garbage, slipping on old diapers, rotting food, refuse of body decay and all the types of human garbage that you can imagine, and then some, made me sick to my bone.

Concentrating on not throwing up, Reimundo guided me through a sea of garbage, smoke from burning garbage and the trucks that sometimes came in high speed, and did not seem to care much if they should run over someone. Sometimes we would walk into small dumps, or mini-valleys, and there the smell would be at its most intense. But then we would walk up a small hill of garbage, and the wind would bring some fresh air, making it all better. And also to take a new breath before again descending into the rotten air.

After a while, we reached the rest of Reimunds family, his sons and their wife's, and their mother. Here I was struck by the way they was working thougether as a an extended family, cooperating, while they systematically worked through the a heap of garbage.

In the picture, with their face down in the garbage is his oldest sons wife, oldest son, younger son, and his own wife.
Another part of the life at the garbage heap was the vultures and flies. For them, the garbage was a paradise.

The village outside the garbage heap

At the end of my fieldwork among the Warao, I traveled up to the city Ciudad Guyana. In my village a lot of people had told me about a garbage heap that they used to go to, right outside this city. Ciudad Guyana is a company town, founded in 1961, and has had an extremely fast population growth, and have now over a million inhabitants. Such a city produces a lot of garbage, and in the outskirts there is a area called Cambalache. In Venezuela this place is called a "red zone", indicating that the security situation is not particularly good. On my first trip out to Cambalache I had to ask three different taxi drivers to take me there, and the third one only agreed to take me if I doubled the fee.
I had heard a lot of stories about the place, and almost everyone back in the village had said I would be killed immediately if I went there. They called the garbage heap for Wabanoko - the Cemetery. Even though I know that people in the village exaggerated sometimes, they had managed to make me slightly nervous.
The taxi driver took us into an area that was by far the poorest place I had visited in urban Venezuela. I knew some warao had established a village somwhere close to the river, but I had no idea where it was. As we went further into this area, the poverty manifested itself more and more into the building. The houses where made of plastic, paper boards and roofs made of corrugated iron.
After a while the road got so bad that the taxi driver refused to drive further. I have to admit that I was reluctent to leave the car, but there was no way back now. As the car went away, I started walking further on. After a couple of hundred meters I cought my eye on some young Warao, and I started following them. They had made a camp down by the river, and it corresponded with the discripron I had gotten back home.

The young men seemed nervous and quite uneasy that I walked over to them, and they had porbably been warned about all the dangers of this place themselves. But as I started talking to them in Warao, they went from suppraise to amusement quiqly. I found out that they where from a different part of the delta, and that we had no kinship ties.
After a while they directed me to the "idamo" of the place, the headman, which name was Raimundo, right by where we were sitting. I walked up a hill, and had my first encounter with the Warao headman at Cambalache.

Raimundo was a very hospitable guy, and as it turned out, he came from a naghbouring village, and we soon established some kin relations. He turned out to be a cousin of my mother Anusiata. And even more supprising, I had just met his father a couple of weeks erlier. After exchainging new about the village, I explained why I was there. I told him that I was interested in understanding life at the garbage heap, and that I was going to write a book about it. He agreed to take me to the garbage heap the following day.

Objects and identity: hammocks and canoes

In addition to canoes, hammock are made. The hammock are gendered objects, as is the canoe. That means that the women in the village identify with making hammocks, while men identify with canoes. Women that are acknowledged as very competent hammock makers are refered to as Moyoty, the same as men.

Connected to these art making practise are a range of stories, or myths, that refer back to their ancestors and how they managed to acquire this knowledge. A general structure in the stories is that an object, tool, or phenomenon has its origin in a human. For example, one story about the origin of threads for hammock tells of a young woman that is wakes up alone in the forest. Her family has abandoned her. She searches everywhere for her family, but she is unable to locate them. After a while she transforms herself into the Ohidu palm. Her hair is transformed into the palm leaves that the Warao extract palm fibers, her arms into the branches one can make spears for fishing, and the body into the palm stem, that the Warao can extract palm starch. All this she does so that she will make herself indispensable for the Warao.

This myth also referes over to some of the changes that has occurred during the last decades among the Warao. Earlier, palm starch was the major subsistence among the, while today they have turned to gardening. In their gardens they grow Ure, a tuber originally imported from Sri Lanka. The Cappuchin missionaries, eager to spread the gospel of God, found it hard to do the job when the Waraos where far into the forest looking for Ohidu palm. The palm often grows far from the major rivers, and the Warao turned to the forest to find their food. Gardening on the other hand, made it possible to stay all year closer to the major rivers. Today, all the people in my village had gardens, while it was very rear that anyone would make palm starch.

But, even though they did not make palm starch, this palm still have major significance. It is from this palm that they gather grubs (larva's), make small arrows to hunt birds, spears for fishing, and most importantly, fibers for making hammocks.

Fishing and gardening is probably the most important day to day activities, alongside hunting and gathering. In this society, men's and woman's worlds are separated: Men fish, woman make food; women make hammocks, men make canoes; Men build houses, woman make food. Though decision regarding village life is taken by the men, women exercise influence over their men. Especially when it comes to the dividing the food, which is a woman prerogative.

Warao, Delta and the Village

The Warao are an Amerindian group living in the Orinoco delta, Venezuela The delta area is inaccessible because the wetlands are flooded daily by the diurnal tides. The ground consists for the most part of mud and peat. In the swamps it is nearly impossible to walk because you step through the mud at all times. The myriads of rivers and channels in this area is an important means of transportation. The delta is completely flat, and during tide, most of the ground is covered by water. In these wetlands the Warao build palm thatched houses on stilts, or so called palefitos. All the households are built along the rivers edges, or Waha, side by side. A houshold usually consists of three houses, Hisabanoko (cooking place), Hanoko (hammock place) and lastly nahimanoko (menstruation place).

In between the houses there is built a walking bridge to connect all the houses. The Hisabanok, or cooking place, is located in the river. Arriving and departure in the canoe is always from here, since there are no paths going from the village. Each houshold have one or more canoes.

Most older men possess the knowledge required to build such canoes, but you also have expert canoe makers, called Moyotu.

Living traditions

The Moyoto usually also have shamanic powers, and the ability to talk with a range of spirits. Some of these spirits are thought to penetrate the body, making people sick. The shamans job is then to take out these spirits, singing to them, and offering tobacco smoke as offerings. While persuading the spirits to leave the sick persons body, the shaman massages the patiants body where the spirits entered, taking the spirit in his hand, and blowing it away into the sky. Even if the missonaries have been "working" with the Waraos for several decades, these local belife systems are stil vigerously practiced.

Blogging: an incredably self-involved activity

I was just thinking about why I suddenly got this kick on blogging. I think it is because it is all about me. I'm writing stuff that really should not concern anybody but me. Its half digested thinking, and sometimes not even that. But still I have this imagined audience, and a tingeling feeling that there might be someone out there that would have an interest in reading what I'm thinking. Strange stuff...