An American in Acre

A global “scoop” and much controversy

2008-06-03T13:42:00.008-04:00

Luciano Martins Costa (translated from the Portuguese by Matthew Meyer)

Friday’s (5/30) front-page news on all of Brazil’s biggest newspapers had already been published on the BBC’s site and the UOL webpage: the news that FUNAI [Brazil’s Indian affairs agency] had discovered, in Acre state, a village of Indians not yet contacted by the white man, and with no record of relations with other tribes. From then on, the news and some photographs crisscrossed the globe through the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies, producing a frisson that echoed throughout television news in Brazil and internationally. Along with the news, however, ran a debate about journalistic ethics and intellectual property.

There’s not much to speculate about in the case, however. What there is, is a good case for the study of information-related rights. The “scoop,” which presented to the world the discovery made by a team led by the backwoodsman José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior, belongs to Altino Machado, and was reported on his blog.

Altino posted th story on his blog and sent a more complete version to his column at the online Terra Magazine. Meirelles provided him two CDs with about 1200 photographs and gave him an interview, at the journalist’s house, recorded on the 22^nd of May. The original text was written in the presence of the backwoodsman. The next morning, on Friday the 23^rd, the text was published on the blog and Terra Magazine, in addition to the longer report, distributed a version in Spanish for its entire coverage area in Latin America, the United States, and Spain.

Criteria for ceding rights

The problem was, none of the press outlets that reproduced the story in the past week cited the source. Beyond this, there arose a parallel controversy about the ownership of the photographs. The photo journalist Gleilson Miranda, chosen to accompany the expedition, decided to sell copies of the photographs for 250 reais [about US$150] each, alleging that the rights belonged to him. Miranda is an employee of the Acre State News Agency, and he took the photographs with a camera belonging to the Acre state Secretariat of Communication, on board an Acre state government airplane on loan to the backwoodsman Meirelles on an official FUNAI mission.

To set the record straight, the head of Acre’s state Communications Office, Itaan Arruda, distributed the following statement:

“I would like to make it known that images captured by any photographic or cinematographic reporter from the Acre state press office belong to the people of Acre. They are public images. They are public property. Out of respect to the people of Acre (…) we are not permitted to profit or supplement our income using property that is not ours personally and exclusively. Further, it should be noted that use of such images should follow ceding criteria, beginning with the obvious and elementary contact with the government press office or with any agency that works in partnership with us.”

Some observations

The backwoodsman José Carlos Meirelles, who is the coordinator of the Rio Envira Enthno-environmental Protection Front, also distributed a statement declaring that “the photos used on the Blog do Altino and later used in Terra Magazine were provided by me to Mr. Altino Machado. These photos are the property of the National Indian Foundation [FUNAI], as long as the Indians photographed remain isolated, and may not be used for commercial ends and much less commercialized.”

The controversy of the rights linked to the photographs will be worked out between the Acre government, its employee, and FUNAI. Some copies circulated in the international media, credited to the Associated Press (AP), which reproduced them with precarious and unauthorized license from the photographer Gleilson Miranda.

If legislation that applies to the acquisition of other products of illegitimate origin is valid in this case, it is up to AP to explain how it can assume as its property rights whose authenticity are not confirmed at their source. Such cases are common, and derive from a certain “inattention” on the part of many editors with respect to correct credit, since an image, once online, can follow chance pathways that make determining its origins difficult. The AP bought the rights from Gleilson without checking whether he held these rights. The editors receive the photo from AP and attribute credit to it, and so on.

But there are some additional observations to be made about this story. The first is that the “scoop” was only noticed by the mainstream press, and reproduced on its websites, a week after it was published on Altino Machado’s blog. The second is that the Brazilian press “didn’t see” the original version of the story: the first version on the UOL portal stated that “the photos were released by Survival International,” a group that fights to protect isolated tribes. The BBC’s site, one of the first among the latecomers to the story, likewise claimed that “the photos were released by Survival International, which supports FUNAI’s policy on isolated peoples (…)” etc. To complete the circle, the newspaper Página 20, in Rio Branco, Acre, where the author of the “scoop” lives, wrote that “the story came to light through the BBC news agency and was featured in almost all the online papers (…).”

Far from the lenses and the eyes

The story also reached readers of Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times, El País, and many other international media giants. Afterwards, on Friday (5/30), it landed on the front pages of the Folha de São Paulo, the Estado de São Paulo, the Globo, and other papers throughout Brazil. The Folha was the only daily that did right, observing that “FUNAI took more than 1000 photos. Meirelles decided to forward the photographic material to the journalist Altino Machado, who published three photos on the Terra Magazine website. The idea was to get the attention of the Acre state government, which promised to install a lookout post in the area, which has become the target of illegal gold prospecting.”

A detail: according to Altino Machado, the isolated tribe is threatened not by prospectors, but by illegal loggers who enter Amazonia through the Peruvian border—a fact that he reported at the same time.

Besides verifying that the press, in general, does not confirm the origins of many things it publishes, the debate involves another question, suggested by Meirelles, the backwoodsman. The photographs of the Indians presupposes a right that they may eventually exercise, if and when they decide to accept contact with the whites. Because of this, the backwoodsman has been scrambling to provide registers to assure that, in the future, this right does not continue to be ignored.

In Acre, the Indians who avoid contact with the whites and with acculturated tribes are called “invisible.” The story of the village located in the area of Xinane creek shows that, with such a lack of respect, they may do well to stay far away from the lenses and the gazes of the white man.

[Note: José Murilo Júnior offers commentary, in English, on this case and the recent Eletrobras confrontation over the Xingu hydroelectric project.]

Ayahuasca as Brazilian cultural heritage

2008-05-30T13:12:00.006-04:00

One of the most significant developments in the Brazilian ayahuasca religions over the last couple of years has been the efforts to have aspects of their practice designated as cultural heritage. At the end of 2006, several of the buildings associated with the Universal Light Christian Enlightenment Center--Alto Santo (CICLU-Alto Santo) in Rio Branco, Acre were added to the municipal and state historic registries. (Altino Machado wrote about the event on his blog dedicated to all things Acrean and Amazonian--in Portuguese.)

More recently, a group in Acre led by the congresswoman Perpétua Almeida (Brazilian Communist Party) and consisting of representatives of several of the local ayahuasca churches has sought to have the religious use of ayahuasca recognized as Brazilian cultural heritage. The group took a major step forward when they took advantage of a visit to Acre by Brazilian Culture Minister (and famous musician) Gilberto Gil to deliver a letter asking that the Brazilian National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) designate the religious use of ayahuasca as national cultural heritage. The story of the meeting, again covered by Altino Machado, was picked up in the national press by the outlets Folha de São Paulo online, G1, Gazeta do Sul, and Terra. The last of these allowed reader comments on its story. Several hundred were posted, some of them in support of the development but many, many of them by people who made light of the action (which was presented in news accounts as having been Gil's doing) as the result of a drugged mind (Gil has admitted to using marijuana) and as a disgrace to a nation with more pressing concerns.

An interesting backstory to the patrimony effort is that thus far, it has excluded the second-largest Brazilian ayahuasca church, CEFLURIS. The ayahuasca church members leading the initiative are traditionalists from the Alto Santo neighborhood in Rio Branco, from the oldest Barquinha church in that same city, and from the UDV, which is a national organization but which has worked closely with the first two groups to establish a conservative consensus about the religious use of ayahuasca. The main issue that brings these groups together is opposition to the use of marijuana in CEFLURIS, although related to this, in my opinion, a sense that the leaders of CEFLURIS are opportunists whose motives for expanding their sphere of influence are more earthly than spiritual.

Below is my own translation of the document that was submitted to Gilberto Gil on the occasion of his visit to Alto Santo, the church of the CICLU-Alto Santo group led by Dona Peregrina Gomes Serra, widow of Mestre Raimundo Irineu Serra, the founder of the Doctrine of Santo Daime. Of particular note in the document is the contention that the religious use of ayahuasca implies "an essentially harmonious relationship with nature," which strikes me as an appeal to politically popular rhetoric that is not entirely true, at least historically. At another point the exclusive language seeps through, as the document specifies that it is talking about protecting and recognizing the religious use of ayahuasca "as established by [the] founding masters" of the churches sponsoring the request.

To His Excellency,

Sir Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira
Minister of Culture of the Federative Republic of Brazil

Ayahuasca is a term of Quechuan origin that means “wine of the souls,” and refers to the tea made from the decoction of two plants native to the Amazon forest: the vine Jagube or Mariri (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the Rainha or Chacrona leaves (Psychotria viridis). This tea is the basis for the establishment of various spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples in a vast region that includes several Amazonian countries (Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, etc.), magico-cultural traditions that were formed in the great Amazon forest over the last two thousand years, at least, and which influenced even the complex societies of the Andean region, such as the Inca civilization.

More recently, in the first years of the 20^th century in the Western Amazon (the present-day states of Acre and Rondônia on the borders of Peru and Bolivia), the formation of a society based on the extraction of rubber (which, following the example of the Amazon’s indigenous people, had as a fundamental characteristic an enormous ethnic and cultural diversity) established the necessary conditions for the ancient indigenous tradition of Ayahuasca to be assimilated by Brazilians and to give birth to a new religious, cultural, and social configuration. In this way, Raimundo Irineu Serra and Daniel Pereira Mattos (both Afro-Brazilians from Maranhão descended from slaves) founded, between 1910 and 1945, a religious doctrine that re-baptized Ayahuasca with the name “Daime.” Some time later, in the 1960s, the Bahiano José Gabriel da Costa formulated another doctrine that came to call Ayahuasca “Vegetal.”

More important than their designation of new names, however, was the action of these three founding masters—Irineu, Daniel, and Gabriel—in establishing the doctrinal basis of a new religious tradition, syncretically Brazilian and typically Amazonian, which made possible the formation of communities organized around the ritual use of Ayahuasca, and which came to play an important role (politically, socially, and culturally) in the very formation of Brazilian society in the Western Amazon.

The spiritual knowledge of these doctrines has been handed down from generation to generation and maintained by diverse cultural traditions through a characteristically Amazonian religious syncretism, which entails an essentially harmonious relationship with nature and which establishes a sentiment of identity and of continuity, thereby guaranteeing respect for ethnic and cultural diversity and for human creativity.

In this way the Doctrines of Daime/Vegetal, as established by their founding masters, became inseparable parts of Brazilian society, thus enabling their recognition as cultural patrimony of our nation.

Based on the information presented above we can affirm that the ritual use of Ayahuasca in religious doctrines fulfills the requirements for characterization as immaterial patrimony, considered as “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and techniques that communities or groups recognize as an integral part of their cultural patrimony.”

In accordance with the specifications of Resolution No. 1 of August 3^rd, 2006, issued by the President of the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Patrimony (IPHAN), the designated representatives of Cultural Foundations of the State of Acre and of the Municipality of Rio Branco, through dialogue with the religious centers that make up the three foundational trunks of the contemporary Ayahuasca doctrines, hereby solicit of the Minister of Culture that he, through IPHAN, begin the process of recognition of the use of Ayahuasca in religious rituals as Immaterial Patrimony of the Brazilian Culture.

Rio Branco, April 30, 2008.

Daniel (Zen) Santana de Queiroz
President of the Elias Mansour Foundation
State of Acre

Marcos Vinicius Neves
Director-president of the Garibaldi Brasil Foundation
Municipality of Rio Branco

Peregrina Gomes Serra
Universal Light Christian Illumination Center-CICLU–Alto Santo

Francisco Hipólito de Araújo Neto
“House of Jesus—Fount of Light” Spiritist Center and Prayer Worship

José Roberto da Silva Barbosa
Union of the Vegetal Beneficent Spiritist Center-UDV

Jair Araújo Facundes
Universal Light Christian Illumination Center-CICLU

No Water

2007-06-29T16:15:00.000-04:00

Here in Rio Branco the dry season, which lasts from about May to November, brings with it a scarcity of water. I know what you're thinking: how can you lack for water in the Amazon? After all, the river Acre gets visibly lower, but nothing close to dry. What gives?

The guy holding the ladder, who operates one of the many trucks known as "pipas," or pipes, which ply the streets of Rio Branco, explained to me that when the river gets below the level of the city's stationary water pumps the water authorities have to rely on floating pumps that have much smaller capacity.

This sounded much more authoritative than anything else I'd heard.

What we still weren't sure about was why our neighbors' tanks, visible behind ours, had been overflowing the day before this picture was taken, while our taps were dry as a bone for three days. (We were reduced to taking sponge baths with bottled water in a basin.) It may have had to do with the height of our tanks. This provides nice water pressure in the house, but that matters little when you have no water.

We were growing frustrated, so we'd spent the morning trying to get a truck to come out. The only number I had just rang and rang, and a friend of a friend who operates a truck was leasing it to the government. On my way home, though, I saw one of the pipas backing up on the street just around the corner, and asked him to come over when they were done.

It wasn't clear how they were going to get the water into our tanks, but I figured they must have some technique...little did I know! The guy on top of the ladder held himself in place while the other went and got the hose. The first guy held in between his feet while it filled the tanks. By the time he had to come down his feet had fallen asleep.

The cost? About fifteen dollars for two thousand liters. And it doesn't have the sulphur smell of the city's processed water.

Street life

2007-05-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

Most days a group of haggard guys gathers on the corner of our street, either against the wall of the Catholic church or right across the way, as in this photo.

They are inveterate devotees of cachaça, the Brazilian 'firewater' distilled from sugar cane pressings. Judging from the leavings to be found along the wall, their favorite brand is "Caninha da Roça," or "Little Cane of the Field," which comes in a squat plastic bottle and costs probably a dollar for a half liter.

Often they are much more closely huddled than in this photo, and sometimes I imagine they are telling cool stories as they squat together in the dirt. But I can't romanticize the passed out, half-naked bodies we often see lying in the shade of this tree or another one just up from it. Grace, when she was first learning about death, would ask if the guys were dead. No, we'd say, they're passed out because they drank too much alcohol.

Street vendors

2007-05-08T20:54:00.000-04:00

Gum and sweets occupy a different semantic space in Brazilian culture than they do in American culture, as might be expected. Just to give one example, Halls, which seem to me as a native informant of American culture to be mainly things we grudgingly buy when sick because we want to breathe, in Brazil are basically breath freshener/candies. There are many flavors that don't even have menthol.

The girl in the photo seems to be pointing to the Dori raisin or peanut snack (the yellow package), or possibly the Freshen-Up gum next to it. That would be a surprising choice, though, since it seems to be marketed more to adults who are worried about their breath (the refreshing gel center sets the germs running, I guess).

The number of small vendors like this in Rio Branco is very large. Most corners have someone selling little mouth-toys like these, sometimes cigarettes. Their carts close neatly up and uniformly have wheels to take them away; some are even built around a bicycle so they can be ridden away.

Surely some are registered, but the size of the informal economy is also very large. Most Sundays, for example, some lady takes over the bus stop we use most often to sell her baked goods and coffee to passers-by. And on any given night, between here and the park down the hill we'll encounter three or four folks selling sidewalk bbq skewers for fifty cents or a dollar, cooking them often in converted auto wheels. I am sure none of these folks have permits.

And enforcement of licensing is sparse. Heck, some guy who built a 15-foot brick smokestack in the middle of the sidewalk had it there for a few months before the city made him tear it down.

Self-esteem

2007-05-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

Brazil, like the United States, is full of discourses of equal opportunity and affirmation of diversity. Only the buzzwords are different: "inclusão" for one.

One of the major goals of now ex-governor Jorge Viana's "Government of the Forest" was to get Acreans to feel pride in being from the state, to turn the tables on the feelings of inferiority imagined to reside in the hearts of riverine peoples, rubber tappers, and city slum dwellers alike. For some critics this is a knock against Viana, whose actions are occasionally dismissed as mainly cosmetic.

But who knows the deeper effects of a t-shirt?

Now, I'm not saying these are government issue, but I think of this campaign to boost Acrean self-esteem when I see these shirts, and I know that the government did put out a t-shirt toward the end of the year, when Viana left office. The shirt said, like these, "Acre" on the front, but it also had an indigenous feather-crown radiating from the collar out. It turned out to be highly sought after, mainly because only the well-connected got one.

Anyway, it is basically impossible to go anywhere in Acre, or at least in Rio Branco, without running into multiple wearers of shirts like these. The ones in the photo in fact are Evangelical spin-offs of the trend: under the state's name is written "Aqui Cristo Reina Eternamente," making "ACRE" an acronym for "Here Christ Reigns Eternally." Acre is, in fact, one of the states where Protestant churches have made the most inroads in the 'battle for souls' with the Catholic Church; perhaps as many as one-quarter of its residents are "crente."

Regional Tobacco

2007-05-06T21:07:00.000-04:00

In Acre the most desirable tobacco seems to be that grown in the Juruá river basin. The two main basins, belonging to the Purus and Juruá rivers, have long divided Acre geographically, socially, and culturally, because of the difficulty of travel perpendicular to the flow of water.

This tobacco is not from Juruá, it's from Sena Madureira, a town that is in the middle of the state's long SE-NW axis, towards the end of the paved part of the highway, planned for decades, that is to link the two basins.

The tobacco is wrapped, after a short treatment, into these staves with strips of bark. Tobacco in this form costs, if I remember right, about 30 dollars per staff. I bought a 14-inch piece the day I took this photo, and I don't think I'll finish it in the next two years at the rate I smoke. This piece cost about 4 dollars. The tobacco is densely packed in its wrapper, and the usual way of removing it is slicing off little bits from the end of the staff with a knife (I use a cheese grater).

I was once shown the proper way to prepare this kind of tobacco by Altino, Acrean blogger and roll-your-own smoker extraordinaire. He would even put it in a pan to heat it up on the stove and "open the flavor," before fluffing it up until it was nice little ribbons hanging together like shredded wheat.

Altino, when he rolls it, also likes the lick the paper he rolls it in before most of it has been used up, so the extra can be torn off.

Mar sometimes says it smells like cigar smoke.

I asked this guy if he had any Juruá tobacco, but he said it's too expensive to bring it from there.

Ah, but I would have bought some!

The Municipal Market

2006-12-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

This is the market where we like to do our shopping. Its official name is the Elias Mansour Municipal Market, but some people call it the "Colonists' Market" because the "colonists"--migrants from other regions settled in the Acrean countryside under government agriculture programs--come into town to sell their produce there.

Most vendors have pretty much the same stuff in the veggie section: lettuce, manioc (you can see it at bottom right), green onions (which usually come with a few sprigs of cilantro attached), mild peppers, sometimes onions, chayote, and a Brazilian veggie called maxixe (mah-shee-shee).

Behind where I stood to take this photo there is a fruit area, where you can usually find bananas, papaya, pineapples, avocados, and more exotic fruits like cupuassu and breadfruit. There is also another area through passages to the left where meat and fish are sold. Very fresh. Sometimes you see the vendors whacking the fish on the head to stop them flopping.

You don't tend to see people saying their veggies are organic or anything, and I really doubt that they are. But it's fresh and pretty cheap: a head of lettuce is about 5o cents, and really good river fish is about three bucks a pound.

The market looks a lot cleaner and nicer than it did on my last visit, in 2003. It got a makeover as part of the current government's vast project to beautify public spaces to increase the "self-esteem" of Acreans.

We don't get down to the market as much as we'd like--it's about four miles from our house. Fortunately, it's located right next to the central city bus terminal, so sometimes I stop by there when I'm downtown, load up on stuff, and ride the bus home.

Our daily bread

2006-10-31T00:19:00.000-05:00

This is the bakery where I buy bread most mornings. I hop on my trusty, rusty cruiser, often with Grace as my co-pilot in her little saddle, and pedal up to the mouth of our street. Then it's past the feed store, the general store, and two butcher shops. Just as the hill starts to get steep, there is: "Mais que delicia," More than delicious, a little hole in the wall with a yellow storefront.

Our main interest is the so-called "manual bread" that the fellow with the helmet is grabbing out of the bin on the right. You can look through that window into the kitchen, and they slide the bread through from the other side. If you are lucky you get it right when it comes out, and it heats up your leg as you pedal home. Sometimes we buy other stuff, too: little chocolate cakes, sweetbreads of various kinds, sliced "form bread" as they call sandwich bread here. Sometimes in the evening they have pizzas, too.

It's all pretty cheap: the manual breads are 25 Brazilian cents per, about 10 cents each; a loaf of bread costs a little more than a buck. Sometimes in the evening they have pizzas, too, which you can take home and bake, for 3 or 4 bucks.

"Three Men In Conflict": Brazilian movie titles

2006-10-23T19:58:00.000-04:00

I have a candidate for worst title in translation of any film, ever. This is the Brazilian version of the classic Clint Eastwood western, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Its title in Portuguese is "Tres Homens em Conflito," or "Three Men in Conflict."

The Portuguese title has the virtue of being somewhat descriptive, since the movie is in fact about three men in conflict. But it has none of the poetic value of the original title, which manages to be both allusive and descriptive at the same time. (I confess it was years before I understood that the title really does label the three main characters--duh!)

And why not? The film could have perfectly well been called, "O Bom, O Mau e o Feio," which, for all my knowledge of Portuguese, would have translated faithfully the original title in every way. I think the answer has more to do with a harsh evaluation of the filmgoing public on the part of the people who make these decisions: that Brazilians need the title to tell them (or at least to seem to tell them) what the film is about.

Such is my working hypothesis, at least. At the establishment where this (pirated) movie was purchased, they also had "Brokeback Mountain." This title, which has by now become shorthand for jocular comments on male homosexuality in the US, seems devoid of descriptive content at first blush. So how did the Brazilian market render it? "The Secret of Brokeback Mountain." Ugh.

Aesthetic problems aside, the difficulty remains that such a title gives only the appearance of description. How do I know that it's not a kid's movie about rats involved in government experiments? (Remember "The Secret of NIMH")? I don't know what the secret is, just that there is a secret. Ah, so it's not some boring documentary about some mountain, there is something mysterious and intriguing going on at the mountain. And that's supposed to entice me, as a Brazilian film viewer? I don't get it.

Of course, "Three Men in Conflict" may have transmogrified for Brazilian film enthusiasts into much more than an achingly bland movie name. By now, it may have come to signify a high point of the spaghetti western--the "bangue-bangue" genre--, to evoke, by its mere mention, the silent cool of Clint Eastwood as the "Man With No Name," the eerie echo of Ennio Morricone's theme, and some foreign grandeur of the open American West.

Maybe.

Bureaucracy, Brazilian Style

2006-09-25T16:02:00.000-04:00

Brazilians love bureaucracy. They won't admit it, of course--they're much more likely to curse than to praise locales, like the one pictured here, known as cartorios. The cartorio is the rough equivalent of the notary public. But when was the last time you had to wait for an hour to get something notarized? When was the last time you had to get something notarized, period? Most of us rarely have to do so, and when we do, like I had to do not that long ago with a request for an inquiry into my criminal history for my visa, it is a quick matter of popping into our bank or visiting that coworker who has a notary commission.

Not in Brazil. Here you have to visit the cartorio anytime you sign a contract, get married, even apply for a phone line. You have to get a stamp certifying your signature is like the one they have on file for you, or have your documents officially authenticated by comparing your photocopies to the originals. In order to register with the Federal Police, I was required to photocopy and authenticate every page of all four of our passports--even the blank pages! The woman who helped me at the desk sloughed off the authentication job to some pimply teenager. When he returned about twenty minutes later she seemed to think it was too quick: did he REALLY look it over closely, she asked? It's VERY serious, she told some other people waiting...a colleague got fired for playing it too fast and loose. Well, I'm impressed: it took me a whole morning just to go to the bank (a topic for another post) to pay our furner taxes, and to get our passport photocopies authenticated.

For the average Brazilian the cartorio is a hassle. So what do I mean when I say that they love bureaucracy? I think it has to do with a sense that "they" are making sure everything is done properly, that things really "count" in a way that is assured by the sweaty moments spent waiting in the cartorio, by the handsome stickers pasted on the documents and the authoritative whack! of the rubber stamp descending over it all.

Am I reading too much into it? Don't think so, but I'd have to think more closely about the meaning of the Japanese cartoons, visible on the TV in the background, that entertain those waiting for their encounter with officialdom.

It's Official!

2006-09-10T12:12:00.000-04:00

RIO BRANCO, ACRE, BRAZIL--September 10, 2006

In a ceremony at the Governor's palace in downtown Rio Branco last Wednesday, September 5th--the Day of Amazonia--the original Daimista center CICLU-Alto Santo and some of the historical buildings around it were officially declared part of the city's and the state's historical patrimony.

The action, which came as a result of an official request by Peregrina Gomes Serra, the widow of Santo Daime founder Raimundo Irineu Serra and the church's current leader, reaffirmed the commitment of the municipal and state governments to value the region's historical and cultural heritage. The valorization of popular movements and of the knowledge of the "forest peoples" has been a key feature of the Workers' Party administrations at both levels of government.

This partnership between the state and the region's leading religious phenomenon was symbolized in a story told by Antonio Alves, a local journalist, activist, and Alto Santo member, about aid rendered by Irineu Serra and a group of men from Alto Santo to WWII-era governor Jose Guiomard dos Santos. Guiomard dos Santos asked for help cleaning up the banks of the river Acre, clearing brush and removing trash, and Irineu Serra and his men worked a whole day to complete the task, then asked for nothing more than a ride up the hill to the mouth of the highway to Alto Santo. Once again, according to Alves, the state and the church were entering into a healthy relationship of mutual respect.

Signing the official documents and taking their turns at the microphone were Governor Jorge Viana and Rio Branco Mayor Raimundo Angelim. Viana spoke of his family's close ties to Irineu Serra, and of the need for diverse sectors to unite in protection of the Amazon (this is a major theme of the PT's platform this election season, which culminates October 1st in general elections at all levels of government).

Also present at the ceremony were Peregrina Gomes Serra, who had a special place in a chair up front along with several members of historically related churches in the same neighborhood as Alto Santo. These included Jair Facundes, a federal judge in Rio Branco; Cosmo Lima de Souza, a promotor of justice for the state of Acre; and Arthur Leite, municipal secretary of the environment for Rio Branco. In the audience were other important figures in the history of Santo Daime, including Joao Rodrigues Facundes, a contemporary of Irineu Serra and leader of the Centro da Rainha da Floresta; Ladislau, leader of CICLUJUR, also located near Alto Santo; and Francisco Hipolito Araujo, current head of the original Barquinha center in Rio Branco.

Joaquin Phoenix in Acre

2006-06-29T13:40:00.000-04:00

Acrean blogger Altino Machado writes here about a planned visit in August by Joaquin Phoenix, best actor nominee in last year's Oscars and Golden Globe winner for his portrayal of Johnny Cash.

Here's my translation:

“The American actor Joaquin Phoenix will spend the 14th and 15th of August in the company of the Yawanawá, on the Indigenous Lands of the Rio Gregório, in Tarauacá (Acre), in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon.

He was one of the supporters of the production of the film Yawa – Story of the Yawanawa.

The environmental activist Heart Phoenix, the actor’s mother, met the Yawanawá leaders in 2004, at the documentary’s premiere in San Francisco.

The Phoenix family was introduced to the tribe by the Canadian Joshua Sage [Thome], who directed Yawa in partnership with the Yawanawá.”

As Machado says, Phoenix helped bankroll the production of the 1-hour documentary Yawa: Story of the Yawanawa (see website here), although it's not clear how that happened if he connected with the production group at the film's debut, as Machado writes.

The film, which I have yet to see, apparently documents the first Yawanawa cultural festival called "Yawa," held in 2002. The festival, according to a statement by a couple of Yawanawa published earlier in Machado's blog, "was a rebirth and a rediscovery as a people with a culture, an identity, and a spirituality alive in the 21st century."

The above-linked site to the film is replete with exotic discourse: emphasizing the physical remoteness of the group helps create them as an extreme other, apart from everything we know--and indeed, a photo caption describes the film crew's arrival as "like entering another world."

Given the historical connection of the Yawanawa with practices like drinking ayahuasca and using the exudate of the frog Phyllomedusa bicolor, one cannot help wondering, perhaps uncharitably, if the filmmakers (who are from British Columbia, Canada's cannabis capital, after all) were drawn to the Yawanawa partly for this reason. Will Joaquin Phoenix also drink uni with the Yawanawa? I suppose that's mainly his (and their) business.

But the thought reminds me of Sting, another famous person who sought both spiritual insight and humanitarian intervention in the Amazon. As he learned after some of the Kayapo whom he was helping were denounced for selling natural resources on Indian lands to enhance their lifestyles, things are more complicated than they may appear. One does not learn, for example, on the Yawa website, that the group has been in steady contact with non-Indians for over a century, nor that the festival the film documents is anything but a static repetition of an ancient an unaltered tradition. In fact, one of the current Yawanawa leaders speaks decent English and is married to a Mexican anthropologist trained in the United States.

Nothing wrong with any of that, of course--it's a sign of the power of the nostalgia for the primitive that revealing such things easily takes on shades of expose. But it's important to see beyond our own longings for authenticity and to understand the role of history in the revitalizations taking place among indigenous peoples, and the ways that the taken-for-granted boundaries of "race" and ethnicity, country and town, tradition and modernity, are blurred by those projects. And like I said, I haven't seen the film yet.

Acre and Environmentalism III: Local politics and Florestania

2006-06-09T07:51:00.000-04:00

The Folha Pagina 20, perhaps Rio Branco's most liberal paper, and a strong supporter of the PT government, recently ran the following editorial on "Florestania," penned by a history professor at the Federal University of Acre.

The author clubs his targets over the head with the intellectual authority of British social and literary critic
Raymond Williams. Interestingly, the targets of the editorial's vitriol are not wealthy ranchers nakedly opposed to the interests of the poor, but members of the Socialist People's Party (PPS).

The text well exemplifies a tendency to present Florestania as a post-modern ideology, breaking down old dichotomies, upsetting traditional hierarchies, and reversing the system of values that make the "Forest Peoples" peripheral impediments to progress.

Here is my translation:

Sérgio Roberto Gomes de Souza *

Florestania and citizenship are not antagonistic terms

In the propaganda of the PPS (Popular Socialist Party) appearing frequently in the media, candidate Márcio Bittar talks about the proposal to construct a “citizen government,” a term that seems to me, at least at first, to try to establish a point of distinction from the political project of the Popular Front of Acre (FPA), led by Governor Jorge Viana and by Vice-Governor Binho Marques, known as “Florestania.”

In the opposition candidate’s speeches there is a perceptible belief in an imaginary border separating the forest from the city, not taking into consideration the daily exchanges of experience that make a dichotomy between these spaces impracticable.

The problem in question is one of conception, and therefore quite complex. From the PPS candidate’s discourse, also reproduced by politicians such as Narciso Mendes and Luís Calixto, I think it is important to consider the reflections developed in the works of Raymond Williams. The book “The Country and the City” comes to mind, in which the author, working from various sources, approaches the country and the city as locales of realizations of human experience. Thinking in this way, it is possible to visualize the country and the city beyond the old dichotomy of the rural versus the urban, of the bucolic against the frenetic. The central element is human experience, culture, ways of life: “The life of the country and the city is mobile and present: it moves through time, through the history of a family and of a people; it moves in feelings and ideas, through a web of relationships and decisions.” For Williams, the important thing is not to keep representing the country and the city through superficial comparisons.

The proposal of the PPS to use the term “Citizen,” in opposition to the term “Florestania” [vs. cidadania, citizenship], betrays a prejudiced gaze and seeks to constitute a pseudo-antagonism between the country and the city which configures the image of the country as an “image of the past, and the common image of the city, an image of the future.”

In the political project of the PPS the city appears as a kind of space of realizations and the forest as a place of limitation. This discourse, according to Durval Muniz, seeks to create stereotypes and has as its principal characteristics assertiveness, arrogance, and repetitiveness. In this way a language is created that leads to an uncritical stability. The sure and self-sufficient voice seems to give the right to say what the other is in a few words. Thus, for Durval Muniz, the stereotype “is born of a characterization of the foreign group in which multiplicities and individual differences are erased in the name of individual similarities.”

Since the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, this preconceived discourse has sought to characterize the spaces of the country and of the forests and of the knowledges and doings of its populations as “illegitimate.” This perspective contributed, through the years, to the negation of sociocultural diversity and to the legitimization of expropriation of land, to land claims fraud, and actions of extreme violence toward Indians, rubber tappers, Brazil nut gatherers, subsistence farmers and other inhabitants of these spaces.

It is because of the prejudiced views of the PPS candidate and his allies toward the traditional populations that live in the country and in the forests that the term “Florestania” is greatly misinterpreted. From the perspective of the Popular Front, Florestania means the valorization of sociocultural diversity, [it means] a perspective on economic development that dialogues with multiple traditions, with the multiple forms of living that we have in our state; it means a de-concentration of income, creation of jobs, access to quality public education for all, independent of borders between the country and the city. Florestania means, fundamentally, the valorization of the men and women of Acre.

But, then again, to expect Bittar, Narciso, and Calixto to have the integrity and political grandeur to dialogue with the term “Florestania” is asking too much…

* Professor in the Department of History at UFAC [Federal University of Acre], master’s in Brazilian History from the Federal University of Pernambuco.

Acre and environmentalism II: Sometimes a tree is just a tree

2006-06-06T23:50:00.000-04:00

Antônio "Toinho" Alves has been one of the principal articulators of Acre's "Forest Government" philosophy, elaborating (if not actually coining) the neologism "Florestania" and creating the tree logo I pasted in the last post. (A Portuguese text of Alves discussing the concept of Florestania is here.) Today, Alves posted this "old" text on his blog, Espírito da Coisa, explaining that it was originally written as a deposition for use in politically motivated suits. (Yes, people in Acre actually sued over the tree.)

That Tree

In the beginning of 1999, when we took over the governorship of the state, we started to discuss the visual agenda of the government: slogan, brand, etc. Every government does this, creates a brand to characterize its purpose, to mark the basic character of its tenure. If there is no abuse, if the official symbols of the state are not disrespected, I don’t see any problem.

In our case, it was necessary to symbolize a new orientation for Acre, a change of direction for the economy, politics, and society. Besides the complete dismantling of the public administration, of organized crime, of “sucateamento,” of corruption, etc., there was a completely inadequate direction to the economy that affected the state’s identity itself. The forest was considered an impediment and the communities within it were treated with disdain. The slogan, created by Binho [Arnóbio Marques, the Liberal Front’s candidate in the current governor’s race], tried to invert this mentality and reestablish an Acrean identity. The government pointed toward a new direction, where the state would reencounter its true nature, valorizing its history and its environmental patrimony. Correctly used, this slogan would have an educational, didactic effect, and impact positively the recuperation of the Acrean people’s self-esteem.

We needed, therefore, a visual brand. We tried various proposals suggested by designers and publicists. We eventually held a kind of informal contest, asking the main designers and publicists in Rio Branco to submit their proposals for the government’s visual brand. Several of them did it, free, just to help out. But the proposals were very limited, they only captured partial aspects of the government’s action, like social programs or general concepts of democracy and participation, but they didn’t communicate the valorization of history and of Acrean identity that we wanted.

Then I remembered a drawing that I’d made a year before that might work. A tree, with simple lines, as if drawn by a child. I remember that a colleague looked at the drawing and said, “but that’s simplistic.” I replied, “it’s not simplistic, it’s simple.” The idea was exactly this: to have a simple, basic symbol, with which everyone could identify. The tree is a symbol of life around the world. But it is, at the same time, a quite regional symbol.

I am disgusted by some foolishness that politicians have been saying about this drawing. There are people who see the shape of a “13” [the Workers Party official numerical designation], with the tree trunk being the 1 and the boughs the 3. There are others who say that the tree represents Jorge Viana, who is a forestry engineer. I understand that politicians, when they are in opposition, do anything they can to find fault with those in the government. But certain associations of ideas, frankly, are ridiculous. I consider myself personally offended, as a profession, when I hear and read such foolishness.

Another thing I don’t understand is calling that little tree a “castanheira” [Brazil nut tree]. It was never a castanheira, it doesn’t even look like it. When I was experimenting with the brand, I actually drew some castanheiras, which have, in fact, a very strong symbolism. But in the Juruá valley there are no castanheiras, and this would leave half of the state out of the symbol. I also tried putting some scratches on the tree trunk to make it a seringueira [rubber tree]. But that made it really restricted and characterized a very restricted economic prospect. So the tree is just a tree. Symbol of a general orientation, a very regional government proposal, very Acrean. To see in it something beyond this is to look for horns on a horse’s head.

Acre and environmentalism I

2006-06-06T11:31:00.000-04:00

Acre's recent history has been marked by a concern with environmental issues.

Over the past two decades, the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) has gone from zero to hero in Acre, especially in the person of current governor Jorge Viana. Viana, now serving his second 4-year term as the state's governor, was previously mayor of the capital, Rio Branco. His administration has been known as the "Government of the Forest," a phrase which, depending on your political inclinations, is either an affirmation of Acre's need for sustainable policy or a ploy designed to capitalize on the international attention lavished on the state after rubber tapper and labor activist Chico Mendes was gunned down in 1988.

Over the next few posts I will look at a few of the ways that environmentalism has become a moving force in the Acrean political scene.