PGL: 민족지학적 관점에서의 인간 건강

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Persistence of Good Living: A’uwẽ Life Cycles and Well-Being in the Central Brazilian Cerrados

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CHAPTER  1  Social Well-Being

People, Place, and Approach

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Human Wellness in Ethnographic Perspective

This book presents results of long-term fieldwork in two principal Indigenous communities, Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá, pertaining to the A’uwẽ ethnic group (also known as Xavante or Shavante). It addresses age-related social organization that contributed to community well-being, which in turn intersected with cultural modes of using and caring for the local landscape under contemporary circumstances. The core of my approach is to explore how A’uwẽ human life cycles involved social relations, responsibilities, and events that anchored notions of how a good life should be lived against a backdrop of wholesale socio-environmental change in recent decades.

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민족지학적 관점에서 본 인간의 건강
이 책은 A'uw ẽ 민족(샤반떼 또는 샤반떼라고도 함)과 관련된 두 개의 주요 원주민 공동체인 Pimentel Barbosa와 Etêhiritipa에서 장기간의 현장 조사 결과를 제시한다. 그것은 공동체 복지에 기여한 연령 관련 사회 조직을 다루며, 이는 다시 현대 상황에서 지역 풍경을 사용하고 돌보는 문화적 방식과 교차한다. 나의 접근 방식의 핵심은 A'uw ẽ 인간의 삶의 주기가 최근 수십 년 동안의 총체적인 사회 환경 변화를 배경으로 얼마나 좋은 삶을 살아야 하는지에 대한 개념을 고정시킨 사회적 관계, 책임 및 사건을 어떻게 포함하는지 탐구하는 것이다.

A'uwẽ의 웰빙 개념에 영향을 미친 생애 주기의 주요 측면은 일련의 비공식적 연령 등급과 두 가지 공식 연령 그룹 시스템, 즉 세속적이고 다른 하나는 영적이었습니다. 생애 주기의 여러 단계에서 "좋은" 것과 "적절한" 것으로 간주되는 사회적 관계는 리더십과 영향력, 유전적 특권 소유권 및 관계의 개념에서도 분명했습니다. 연령 정체성에 대한 이러한 다양한 계산 시스템은 삶의 모든 단계에서 개인이 책임감 있고 존중하는 태도로 다른 사람들과 창의적으로 교류할 수 있는 방법에 대한 대안적이고 상호 연결된 프레임워크를 제공했습니다. 그들은 또한 사람들이 복지의 장기적인 사회 건설에 필수적인 경관 자원에 유능하게 접근하는 방법을 지향했습니다.

이 장에서 나는 먼저 민족지학적 경험이 어떻게 나를 사회적 복지와 "국가"(Butler et al. 2019)에 대한 특정한 이론적 접근으로 이끌었는지에 대해 논의한다. 두 번째 섹션에서는 이 책을 쓰기 위해 나를 준비시킨 대부분의 사람들의 고향인 피멘텔(Pimentel)과 에텐히리티파(Etênhiritipá) 공동체의 아우우(A'uwẽ)를 소개하고(최근의 공동체 분열로 인해 다른 공동체들은 몇 가지 새로운 공동체로 옮겨졌다), 지역 풍경과의 연관성에 대한 논평을 곁들인다. 세 번째 섹션에서는 이 인구를 만나고 호스트의 명시적인 노력을 통해 사회 구조에 통합되었던 초기 경험에 대해 논의하고 민족지학적 현장 조사에 대한 나의 접근 방식을 반영합니다. 마지막으로, 이 책의 나머지 부분의 목적과 구성을 제시한다.

건강과 밀접한 관련이 있는 것처럼 보이는 상식적인 개념인 웰빙은 초문화적 관점에서 정의, 자격 및 수량화하려는 시도를 거부합니다. 1 겉으로 보기에 단순한 건강의 조건에 뿌리를 둔 이 개념은 다양한 현실 상황에 적용할 수 있는지, 그 의미를 구성하는 데 있어 학문적 경계의 역할, 본질적인 차원을 포착한다고 주장하는 무수한 양적 지표를 어떻게 조화시킬 수 있는지에 대한 흥미로운 질문을 불러일으키는 이질적인 아이디어입니다. 이처럼 단순해 보이는 이 용어는 다양한 방식으로 인식될 수 있고 주류 삶의 질 측정을 넘어 지역적으로 이해되는 사회 생활을 포함한 다른 영역까지 도달할 수 있는 다양하고 종종 다양한 측면을 포함하기 때문에 부분적으로 다양한 학문적 해석을 불러일으킵니다(Manning and Fleming 2019b).

웰빙이라는 용어로 코딩된 아이디어의 별자리는 철학, 심리학, 경제학, 사회학, 역학 및 공중 보건을 포함한 다양한 분야에서 비롯됩니다. 여기에는 "주관적" 정의와 "객관적" 정의가 모두 포함되며, 이는 개인의 인식과 외부 검증 가능성에 어떻게 관여하는지에 따라 구별됩니다(Sumner 1996). 그들은 또한 쾌락적인지 유다적인지 여부에 따라 구별될 수 있으며, 전자는 행복에 가장 가깝고 후자는 완전하고 만족스럽게 살았던 삶을 나타냅니다(Deci and Ryan 2008). 복지를 정의하고 측정하기 위한 여러 연구가 진행 중이지만 부분적으로는 학문적 혼선으로 인해 결론에 도달하지 못했지만 공공 범위 내에서 자원 및 서비스에 대한 식별 가능한 링크가 있는 아이디어가 필요한 공공 정책과의 관련성 때문이기도 합니다(Diener et al. 2009).

웰빙 논의에 기여하는 모든 학문 분야는 지식을 생산하는 적절한 방법에 대한 자체 인식론적 가정을 가지고 있으며, 그 대부분은 인류학과 매우 다릅니다. 민족지학 연구의 독특한 공헌 중에는 지역 이해의 다양성을 우선시하는 강력하고 전체론적인 접근 방식이 있습니다. 민족지학적 접근은 서로 다른 문화가 웰빙에 대한 고유한 개념과 어떻게 관련되어 있는지, 그리고 다른 사람들이 이를 이해하기 위해 어떤 노력을 해야 하는지 묻습니다. 따라서 그들은 스펙트럼의 주관적, eudaimonic적, 질적 끝의 측면에 초점을 맞추는 경향이 있습니다. 또한 개인주의적 차원보다는 사회문화적 차원의 웰빙에 더 큰 관심을 보이며, 이러한 차원이 서로 중첩되고 서로 관여한다는 것을 인식한다(Six 2007). 그럼에도 불구하고 웰빙에 대한 인류학적 프레임은 상당히 다양하다.

닐 씬(Neil Thin, 2009)이 지적한 바와 같이, 일부 초기 인류학 문헌은 원주민의 웰빙에 대한 낭만적인 개념을 신석기 시대, 행복, 기쁨, 평화, 근심 걱정 없는, 단순함으로 보여주었다(Lévi-Strauss 1955; Sahlins 1968년; 토마스 1959; Turnbull 1961)을 참조한다. 그럼에도 불구하고 이러한 목가적 표현에 사로잡히지 않은 일부 현대 인류학 저술은 행복(Mathews and Izquierdo 2009b), "좋은 삶"(E. F. Fischer 2014) 및 유쾌함(Overing and Passes 2000a)과 같은 쾌락적 차원을 강조합니다. 이러한 관점은 웰빙이 긍정적인 감정 및 정서와 가장 밀접하게 연관되어 있다는 견해에서 비롯된 것으로 보인다. 예를 들어, 조안나 오버링(Joanna Overing)과 앨런 패스(Alan Passes, 2000b)가 요약했듯이, 아마존 사회는 어떻게 하면 잘, 행복하게, 평온하게, 사랑스럽게, 동정심 많게, 조화롭게 살 수 있는지에 대해 이야기하는 경향이 있다. 이러한 특징은 민족지학적으로 정확할 수 있지만, 이타주의와 역경에 대한 근접성을 통해 더 많은 복잡성을 수반하는 웰빙에 대한 문화적 개념을 지나치게 단순화할 수 있습니다. 예를 들어, 페루 아마존의 Matsigenka는 가족을 섬기고 나눔을 통해 희생함으로써 행복을 얻을 수 있다고 생각했습니다 (Izquierdo 2009). 아마조니아 외곽의 뉴 사우스 웨일즈 주 머린 브리지(Murrin Bridge)의 원주민 인구를 위한 복지의 표현은 이타심과 타인에 대한 배려가 타인에게 주는 혜택을 프레이밍함으로써 사회적 관계에 초점을 맞췄다(Heil 2009). 따라서 많은 문화적 맥락에서 웰빙의 개념은 역경을 가정하고, 이타심을 요구하며, 다른 사람들에게 혜택을 부여합니다. 이러한 공식은 개인주의가 아닌 사회적 측면에서 웰빙을 제시하며, 타인의 행복을 자신의 희생에 근거로 둔다. 사람들 사이의 연결은 웰빙에 대한 포괄적인 이해의 핵심이다(Anderson 1999).

심리학자들은 웰빙이 개인적이면서도 사회적, 문화적이라고 주장한다(Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky 2007). 마찬가지로, 공중 보건 분야에서 건강은 "단순히 질병이 없는 상태가 아니라 완전한 신체적, 정신적, 영적, 사회적 웰빙 상태"(WHO 1948)로 이해됩니다. A'uwẽ 웰빙에 대한 저의 접근 방식은 호스트와 컨설턴트가 좋은 삶을 사는 방법의 핵심으로 사회 생활의 특정 측면을 강조하는 것에 의해 강하게 영향을 받았습니다. A'uwẽ 사고를 읽으면서 개인의 웰빙을 비교하기 위한 좁은 양적 지표에서 벗어나 사회적으로 구성되고 구성된 웰빙에 대한 광범위한 해석으로 이어졌습니다. 결과적으로, 나는 행복에 대한 A'uwẽ 개념에 잠재적으로 영향을 미칠 수 있는 모든 범위의 아이디어를 탐구하려고 노력하지 않는다. 특히, 나는 신체적, 경제적, 정서적 또는 심리적 웰빙의 공식화를 강조하지 않습니다(Manning and Fleming 2019a). 또한 최근 수십 년 동안 남아메리카 저지대 원주민에 대한 인류학적 사고의 주요 초점이 되어 온 우주론적, 존재론적 도식보다는 대인 사회 관계의 웰빙에 대한 기여를 우선시합니다(M. M. J. Fischer 2018; 라모스 2012; 라이벌 2012). 이 섹션에서는 민족지학적 렌즈를 사용하여 사회적 관점에서 웰빙이라는 용어와 관련된 A'uwẽ 개념을 탐구합니다. 나는 A'uwẽ의 관점이 어떻게 나를 사회적, 환경적 웰빙에 대한 특정한 인류학적 공식화로 이끌었는지에 대해 논의하며, 이는 그들의 구체적인 사례를 이해하는 데 생산적이며 원주민의 건강과 보건에 대한 초학제적, 초문화적 논의에 기여할 수 있는 유망한 것으로 보인다.

다음 섹션에서는 작고한 A'uwẽ 양할아버지 Antônio(Ru'wẽ'warazu'ata)를 소개하는데, 그의 독특한 삶과 성격은 인류학, 공중 보건 및 기타 학문적 틀에서 웰빙을 평가하는 것과 관련된 몇 가지 딜레마와 해결책을 보여줍니다. 저는 2004년 피멘텔 바르보사에 처음 도착하자마자 안토니우를 만났고, 안토니우의 정원에서 함께 일하고, 사냥에 동행하고, 다양한 주제에 대해 대화를 나누며 시간을 보내면서 그를 알게 되었습니다.

안토니오

안토니오는 농부(그림 1), 사냥꾼, 어부, 그리고 종종 과일 수집가였으며, 남편, 아버지, 할아버지로서의 정체성과 밀접한 관련이 있었으며, 두 아내와 장모와 함께 가족을 자랑스럽게 돌보았다. 사냥감의 고기와 생선을 얻는 것은 대부분 이 작은 집안 관리인 집단의 선임 남성 구성원으로서 그의 영역이었다. 그는 단호하고 지식이 풍부한 사냥꾼이었으며, 연구 공동체에서 활과 화살을 사용하는 마지막 사냥꾼 중 한 명이었습니다.

Figure 1

Ru’wẽ’warazu’ata, or Antônio, clearing weeds in his garden plot, 2004.

사회 복지 - 좋은 삶의 지속성 - NCBI 책장 (nih.gov)

• [헌정]
• 약어
• 승인을
• 철자법과 동사 시제에 대한 참고 사항
• 제 1 장. 사회적 웰빙: 사람, 장소 및 접근 방식
  • 민족지학적 관점에서의 인간 건강
  • 피멘텔 바르보사(Pimentel Barbosa)와 에텐히리티파(Etênhiritipá) 공동체의 아우우(A'uwẽ)
  • 현장 조사 및 민족지학적 접근
  • 목표와 조직
• 제 2 장. 좋은 삶의 비공식적 수명 주기
  • 유아기의 물질
  • 개별화된 삶의 단계
  • 어린이와 청소년: 본을 받아야 할 때
  • 아내, 어머니, 부양자
  • 원로, 민족생물학적 지식의 수호자
• 제 3 장. 연령 체계와 사회적 관계의 형식화
  • 세속적 연령 그룹 시스템
• 제 4 장. 연공서열과 리더십
  • 정치적 화합 구축
  • 외처제 부분과 유전적 특권
  • 관련성의 개념
  • 정치 기업의 계보 연공서열
• 제 5 장. 관점에서의 연령 조직
  • 다원성, 선택의지, 이질성
  • Gê 민족학적 틀
• 제 6 장. 환경 참여의 수명 주기
  • 연령 조직 및 환경 실천
  • 이동성, 할례 및 통화화
  • 환경 보전의 A'uwẽ 개념
  • 여성 수집 여행
  • 세속적 시대 세트 낚시 탐험
  • 불을 이용한 집단 사냥
• 제 7 장. 오늘날 지역사회 복지의 차원
  • 현대적 맥락
  • 식량 안보와 호혜성
  • 정주, 의료 시설, 학교 및 전기화
  • 우정
• 포스트 스크립트
• A'UWẼ 용어집
• 노트
• 참조
• 저자 소개

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사람, 장소, 접근 방식

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민족지학적 관점에서의 인간 건강

이 책은 아우우(A'uwẽ) 종족(자반테(Xavante) 또는 샤반테(Shavante)라고도 함)과 관련된 두 개의 주요 원주민 공동체인 피멘텔 바르보사(Pimentel Barbosa)와 에텐히리티파(Etênhiritipá)에서 진행한 장기간의 현장 조사 결과를 제시한다. 그것은 지역 사회의 복지에 기여한 연령 관련 사회 조직을 다루며, 이는 다시 현대 상황에서 지역 경관을 사용하고 돌보는 문화적 방식과 교차합니다.

내 접근 방식의 핵심은 최근 수십 년 동안 대대적인 사회 환경 변화를 배경으로 좋은 삶을 사는 방법에 대한 개념을 정착시킨 사회적 관계, 책임 및 사건과 관련된 A'uwẽ 인간 생애 주기를 탐구하는 것입니다.

A'uwẽ의 웰빙 개념에 영향을 미친 생애 주기의 주요 측면은 일련의 비공식적 연령 등급과 두 가지 공식 연령 그룹 시스템, 즉 세속적이고 다른 하나는 영적이었습니다. 생애 주기의 여러 단계에서 "좋은" 것과 "적절한" 것으로 간주되는 사회적 관계는 리더십과 영향력, 유전적 특권 소유권 및 관계의 개념에서도 분명했습니다. 연령 정체성에 대한 이러한 다양한 계산 시스템은 삶의 모든 단계에서 개인이 책임감 있고 존중하는 태도로 다른 사람들과 창의적으로 교류할 수 있는 방법에 대한 대안적이고 상호 연결된 프레임워크를 제공했습니다. 그들은 또한 사람들이 복지의 장기적인 사회 건설에 필수적인 경관 자원에 유능하게 접근하는 방법을 지향했습니다.

이 장에서 나는 먼저 민족지학적 경험이 어떻게 나를 사회적 복지와 "국가"(Butler et al. 2019)에 대한 특정한 이론적 접근으로 이끌었는지에 대해 논의한다. 두 번째 섹션에서는 이 책을 쓰기 위해 나를 준비시킨 대부분의 사람들의 고향인 피멘텔(Pimentel)과 에텐히리티파(Etênhiritipá) 공동체의 아우우(A'uwẽ)를 소개하고(최근의 공동체 분열로 인해 다른 공동체들은 몇 가지 새로운 공동체로 옮겨졌다), 지역 풍경과의 연관성에 대한 논평을 곁들인다. 세 번째 섹션에서는 이 인구를 만나고 호스트의 명시적인 노력을 통해 사회 구조에 통합되었던 초기 경험에 대해 논의하고 민족지학적 현장 조사에 대한 나의 접근 방식을 반영합니다. 마지막으로, 이 책의 나머지 부분의 목적과 구성을 제시한다.

건강과 밀접한 관련이 있는 것처럼 보이는 상식적인 개념인 웰빙은 초문화적 관점에서 정의, 자격 및 수량화하려는 시도를 거부합니다.1 겉보기에 단순해 보이는 건강의 조건에 뿌리를 둔 이 개념은 다양한 현실 상황에 적용할 수 있는지, 의미를 구성하는 데 있어 학문적 경계의 역할, 본질적인 차원을 포착한다고 주장하는 무수한 양적 지표를 조화시키는 방법에 대한 흥미로운 질문을 불러일으키는 이질적인 아이디어입니다. 이처럼 단순해 보이는 이 용어는 다양한 방식으로 인식될 수 있고 주류 삶의 질 측정을 넘어 지역적으로 이해되는 사회 생활을 포함한 다른 영역까지 도달할 수 있는 다양하고 종종 다양한 측면을 포함하기 때문에 부분적으로 다양한 학문적 해석을 불러일으킵니다(Manning and Fleming 2019b).

웰빙이라는 용어로 코딩된 아이디어의 별자리는 철학, 심리학, 경제학, 사회학, 역학 및 공중 보건을 포함한 다양한 분야에서 비롯됩니다. 여기에는 "주관적" 정의와 "객관적" 정의가 모두 포함되며, 이는 개인의 인식과 외부 검증 가능성에 어떻게 관여하는지에 따라 구별됩니다(Sumner 1996). 그들은 또한 쾌락적인지 유다적인지 여부에 따라 구별될 수 있으며, 전자는 행복에 가장 가깝고 후자는 완전하고 만족스럽게 살았던 삶을 나타냅니다(Deci and Ryan 2008). 복지를 정의하고 측정하기 위한 여러 연구가 진행 중이지만 부분적으로는 학문적 혼선으로 인해 결론에 도달하지 못했지만 공공 범위 내에서 자원 및 서비스에 대한 식별 가능한 링크가 있는 아이디어가 필요한 공공 정책과의 관련성 때문이기도 합니다(Diener et al. 2009).

웰빙 논의에 기여하는 모든 학문 분야는 지식을 생산하는 적절한 방법에 대한 자체 인식론적 가정을 가지고 있으며, 그 대부분은 인류학과 매우 다릅니다. 민족지학 연구의 독특한 공헌 중에는 지역 이해의 다양성을 우선시하는 강력하고 전체론적인 접근 방식이 있습니다. 민족지학적 접근은 서로 다른 문화가 웰빙에 대한 고유한 개념과 어떻게 관련되어 있는지, 그리고 다른 사람들이 이를 이해하기 위해 어떤 노력을 해야 하는지 묻습니다. 따라서 그들은 스펙트럼의 주관적, eudaimonic적, 질적 끝의 측면에 초점을 맞추는 경향이 있습니다. 또한 개인주의적 차원보다는 사회문화적 차원의 웰빙에 더 큰 관심을 보이며, 이러한 차원이 서로 중첩되고 서로 관여한다는 것을 인식한다(Six 2007). 그럼에도 불구하고 웰빙에 대한 인류학적 프레임은 상당히 다양하다.

닐 씬(Neil Thin, 2009)이 지적한 바와 같이, 일부 초기 인류학 문헌은 원주민의 웰빙에 대한 낭만적인 개념을 신석기 시대, 행복, 기쁨, 평화, 근심 걱정 없는, 단순함으로 보여주었다(Lévi-Strauss 1955; Sahlins 1968년; 토마스 1959; Turnbull 1961)을 참조한다. 그럼에도 불구하고 이러한 목가적 표현에 사로잡히지 않은 일부 현대 인류학 저술은 행복(Mathews and Izquierdo 2009b), "좋은 삶"(E. F. Fischer 2014) 및 유쾌함(Overing and Passes 2000a)과 같은 쾌락적 차원을 강조합니다. 이러한 관점은 웰빙이 긍정적인 감정 및 정서와 가장 밀접하게 연관되어 있다는 견해에서 비롯된 것으로 보인다. 예를 들어, 조안나 오버링(Joanna Overing)과 앨런 패스(Alan Passes, 2000b)가 요약했듯이, 아마존 사회는 어떻게 하면 잘, 행복하게, 평온하게, 사랑스럽게, 동정심 많게, 조화롭게 살 수 있는지에 대해 이야기하는 경향이 있다. 이러한 특징은 민족지학적으로 정확할 수 있지만, 이타주의와 역경에 대한 근접성을 통해 더 많은 복잡성을 수반하는 웰빙에 대한 문화적 개념을 지나치게 단순화할 수 있습니다. 예를 들어, 페루 아마존의 Matsigenka는 가족을 섬기고 나눔을 통해 희생함으로써 행복을 얻을 수 있다고 생각했습니다 (Izquierdo 2009). 아마조니아 외곽의 뉴 사우스 웨일즈 주 머린 브리지(Murrin Bridge)의 원주민 인구를 위한 복지의 표현은 이타심과 타인에 대한 배려가 타인에게 주는 혜택을 프레이밍함으로써 사회적 관계에 초점을 맞췄다(Heil 2009). 따라서 많은 문화적 맥락에서 웰빙의 개념은 역경을 가정하고, 이타심을 요구하며, 다른 사람들에게 혜택을 부여합니다. 이러한 공식은 개인주의가 아닌 사회적 측면에서 웰빙을 제시하며, 타인의 행복을 자신의 희생에 근거로 둔다. 사람들 사이의 연결은 웰빙에 대한 포괄적인 이해의 핵심이다(Anderson 1999).

심리학자들은 웰빙이 개인적이면서도 사회적, 문화적이라고 주장한다(Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky 2007). 마찬가지로, 공중 보건 분야에서 건강은 "단순히 질병이 없는 상태가 아니라 완전한 신체적, 정신적, 영적, 사회적 웰빙 상태"(WHO 1948)로 이해됩니다. A'uwẽ 웰빙에 대한 저의 접근 방식은 호스트와 컨설턴트가 좋은 삶을 사는 방법의 핵심으로 사회 생활의 특정 측면을 강조하는 것에 의해 강하게 영향을 받았습니다. A'uwẽ 사고를 읽으면서 개인의 웰빙을 비교하기 위한 좁은 양적 지표에서 벗어나 사회적으로 구성되고 구성된 웰빙에 대한 광범위한 해석으로 이어졌습니다. 결과적으로, 나는 행복에 대한 A'uwẽ 개념에 잠재적으로 영향을 미칠 수 있는 모든 범위의 아이디어를 탐구하려고 노력하지 않는다. 특히, 나는 신체적, 경제적, 정서적 또는 심리적 웰빙의 공식화를 강조하지 않습니다(Manning and Fleming 2019a). 또한 최근 수십 년 동안 남아메리카 저지대 원주민에 대한 인류학적 사고의 주요 초점이 되어 온 우주론적, 존재론적 도식보다는 대인 사회 관계의 웰빙에 대한 기여를 우선시합니다(M. M. J. Fischer 2018; 라모스 2012; 라이벌 2012). 이 섹션에서는 민족지학적 렌즈를 사용하여 사회적 관점에서 웰빙이라는 용어와 관련된 A'uwẽ 개념을 탐구합니다. 나는 A'uwẽ의 관점이 어떻게 나를 사회적, 환경적 웰빙에 대한 특정한 인류학적 공식화로 이끌었는지에 대해 논의하며, 이는 그들의 구체적인 사례를 이해하는 데 생산적이며 원주민의 건강과 보건에 대한 초학제적, 초문화적 논의에 기여할 수 있는 유망한 것으로 보인다.

다음 섹션에서는 작고한 A'uwẽ 양할아버지 Antônio(Ru'wẽ'warazu'ata)를 소개하는데, 그의 독특한 삶과 성격은 인류학, 공중 보건 및 기타 학문적 틀에서 웰빙을 평가하는 것과 관련된 몇 가지 딜레마와 해결책을 보여줍니다. 저는 2004년 피멘텔 바르보사에 처음 도착하자마자 안토니우를 만났고, 안토니우의 정원에서 함께 일하고, 사냥에 동행하고, 다양한 주제에 대해 대화를 나누며 시간을 보내면서 그를 알게 되었습니다.

안토니우

안토니오는 농부(그림 1), 사냥꾼, 어부, 그리고 종종 과일 수집가였으며, 남편, 아버지, 할아버지로서의 정체성과 밀접한 관련이 있었으며, 두 아내와 장모와 함께 가족을 자랑스럽게 돌보았다. 사냥감의 고기와 생선을 얻는 것은 대부분 이 작은 집안 관리인 집단의 선임 남성 구성원으로서 그의 영역이었다. 그는 단호하고 지식이 풍부한 사냥꾼이었으며, 연구 공동체에서 활과 화살을 사용하는 마지막 사냥꾼 중 한 명이었습니다.

그림 1

2004년, 루와와라주아타(Ru'wẽ'warazu'ata) 또는 안토니오(Antônio)가 정원에서 잡초를 제거하고 있다.

안토니오는 몇몇 젊은 아우우(A'uwẽ) 남성들이 대도시에 살면서 국내 및 국제 환경 보전 담론에 참여하면서 습득한 환경보호주의적 언어를 채택하지 않았다(Graham 2002). 안토니오는 1970년대에 인근 목장에서 일했지만, 그 외에는 지역 아우우(A'uwẽ) 공동체의 주민으로 남아 있었다. 지역 환경에 대한 그의 관심은 실질적이고 열정적이었으며, 장기적으로 지역 환경으로부터 자원을 얻는 것에 대한 그의 관심에 의해 인도되었습니다. 미래를 위해 경관을 보존하는 방법에 대한 그의 이해는 소와 단일 재배 농업 목장에 의한 대규모 침범과 할례 이전, 도중, 후에 경관에서 자원을 추출한 그의 인생 경험을 기반으로 했습니다. 그는 풍경에 대해 실용적으로 이야기했는데, 이는 장소에 대한 강한 감각을 전달했지만 애니미즘적 용어로 특성을 묘사하지 않았습니다 (Barletti 2016). 그는 호주의 일부 원주민들이 국가를 돌보는 것이라고 부르는 것에 대해 우려를 표명했으며(Fache and Moizo 2015), 친척과 지역 사회의 안녕에 필수적인 것으로 이해한 현재 제한된 영토의 무결성에 주의를 기울였습니다.

그의 정원에서 잡초를 제거하는 하루 동안 그와 함께 가자고 나를 초대한 첫 번째 사람들 중 한 명인 그는 또한 나의 특별한 관심사였던 그룹 사냥에서 그를 그림자처럼 따라다닐 수 있는 기회를 준 최초의 사냥꾼 중 한 명이었습니다(Welch 2014, 2015). 이러한 사냥을 할 때나 대화를 나누는 동안, 안토니오는 그 풍경에 대한 깊은 지식과 관심, 그리고 그 풍경의 놀라운 다양성과 식물에 대한 관심을 나에게 보여주었다. 그는 현재와 미래의 축소된 영토에서 자원을 추출하고, 이를 통해 가족에게 야생 및 재배 식품을 제공하고, 이러한 식품을 확대 가족 및 이웃과 공유하고, 인생의 가장 중요한 의식 행사 중 지정된 순간에 건강에 좋은 식품을 선물하는 것과 관련된 전통적인 가치를 유지하는 데 건강하고 보존된 경관이 필수적이라고 생각했습니다.

안토니우와 그의 아내들은 장모의 도움을 받아 14명의 난폭한 자녀들을 사랑과 자부심과 근면한 노동으로 돌보았다. 공동체 의식 생활에서 그는 소녀와 소년이 수련 성인(단호노)으로 입문하는 의식 복합체의 중요한 구성 요소인 테베(물고기) 의식(tepé'tede'wa)의 연장자이자 지도자로서 필수적인 역할을 수행했습니다(그림 2). 그는 또한 영적 의식을 치르는 동안 사후 주례자(wai'a'rada)로 봉사했으며, 이제 의식을 수행할 책임이 있는 젊은 사람들에게 조언과 비평을 제공했습니다. 그는 일련의 유전 특권의 선임 소유자였으며 가족의 이익을 위해 그리고 공동체 전체를 위해 의식적으로 은밀하게 사용했습니다. 나는 안토니오가 이 아우우 공동체의 사회적 복지의 본보기라고 생각했다.

Figure 2

Antônio weaving a ceremonial mantle in his role as elder owner of tebé (fish) ceremonies during rites of initiation into novitiate adulthood (danhono), 2006.

Antônio (and other elders who paid me special attention over the years, many of whom are now deceased) looked after me in his own individual caring ways. His concern for me as a guest in the community was not exceptional for him (it was for me) and illustrated A’uwẽ capacities for creating special affective bonds with non-A’uwẽ who show an interest in their community and well-being. Among the ways they did this was by incorporating outsiders into adoptive families, and thereby exogamous moieties (halves of society who may only marry someone from the opposite half), as well as age sets (cohorts of individuals who participate in rites of passage as groups), and thereby age set moieties (halves of society determined by the alternation of sequential age sets). Such memberships oriented outsiders socially to the whole of society and gave A’uwẽ residents a basis for approaching them properly in socially proximate or distant ways, or with culturally appropriate affinity or antagonism.

Antônio’s and others’ interest in outsiders spoke to me about their concern with their families’, communities’, and ethnic group’s welfare in a rapidly changing world of territorial circumscription, market insertion, transcultural engagement, biomedical healthcare services, and social media. By engaging outsiders like myself, these elders sought to enhance their community’s sovereignty amid upheaval in diverse realms. This sovereignty derived from building knowledge and networks beyond the community that could reinforce internal sources of resilience. As mentioned elsewhere, in many ways we are “their” anthropologists rather than the other way around (Welch and Coimbra Jr. 2014).

Antônio died after several years of major paralysis resulting from a stroke. His last years of life were filled with deep emotion, as he tried but could no longer communicate well verbally with his loved ones and friends, including me. Although his family cared for him attentively, and close friends visited regularly, his wheelchair broke repeatedly, his clothes fell into a state of disrepair, and his evident desire to be close to other people went insufficiently attended as community life continued without his usual active participation. When his wheelchair worked, he spent much of his time in front of his house, where he could see the entire community plaza and all the activities that occurred there. When his wheelchair was broken, which was often, he spent most of his days in his kitchen annex behind the house (most houses have detached thatched kitchen annexes beside or behind the main house to protect the residence from kitchen fires), where he could enjoy the company of members of his extended family household and other visitors as they came and went.

His suffering could be easily interrupted with the pleasure of a friendly visit, a warm hand on his knee, a hug, or a cathartic cry with someone close. Antônio was ill, but he was also well in so many ways. His health was poor, but his depth of feeling and connection with others was rich and full until he died. Whereas some scientific or popular formulations of well-being might characterize him as disadvantaged, I understood his degree of wellness to be very high despite his stroke sequelae. This was because his A’uwẽ relatives and peers saw him as the same loving person who abundantly contributed to his family and community with all the responsibility and care that are expected of a husband, father, grandfather, elder, and ceremonial prerogative owner. In his final years, his person was defined not exclusively by his paralysis, but also by his lifelong successes, contributions, and affections.

Traditionalism and Social Well-Being

Antônio’s example illustrates why I was led by my ethnographic data to focus on well-being as construed very openly, especially including many social aspects of wellness besides individual physical and mental health (Steckel 2016). Health is an important dimension of well-being. Yet, as Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo (2009a, 4) noted, “health and well-being may contradict one another.” Antônio no doubt suffered in his final years, but he suffered within the fullness of a life lived robustly in connection with his family, community, non-A’uwẽ friends, and local landscape.

I am not the first to call for a broad ethnographic understanding of well-being. For example, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti (2016) made a similar argument based on ethnographic research with the Ashaninka people in Peru, with particular focus on perceptions related to cosmological ontologies. Based on ethnographic work with the Matsigenka in Peru, Izquierdo (2005) sought to expand the notion of well-being to include cultural formulations of goodness and harmony, including spiritual realms, which may suffer even as biomedical measures improve. Ruth Panelli and Gail Tipa (2009) discussed Maori concepts of well-being involving sociocultural and environment dimensions integrated with spiritual elements. Because spiritual topics were closely held secrets among the A’uwẽ that cannot be shared with the public, and not having found ontological interpretations particularly ethnographically pertinent among the A’uwẽ, my contribution is to show how productive formulations of well-being can involve local social values of the kinds illustrated by Antônio’s story, such as indulging affection and suffering together.

Within A’uwẽ communities, overwhelming support existed for the maintenance of certain challenging customary rites of passage, especially those related to two age group systems closely intertwined with social and ethnic identity, as I describe in chapter 3. Thus, most A’uwẽ supported cultural traditionalism in at least some contexts, even if younger people’s attentions were not particularly directed toward the preservation of all other customs. I use the terms traditionalism and traditionalist to capture emergent A’uwẽ notions of contemporary advocacy of culture and customs considered “traditional” (wahöimanazé) within their culture (Graham 2005). I do not intend for these terms to imply religious conservatism specifically or to suggest any negative connotations such as anti-progressive thinking. Nor do I mean to suggest that culture was static, although some A’uwẽ perspectives of tradition involved ideas about an idealized past.

Multiple social configurations discussed in this book, such as those involving age sets and age groups, were important examples of culturally appropriate expressions of differentiation and rank contributing to a thoroughly plural social tapestry of contrasts between people that was fundamental to traditionalist perspectives of how a good life was lived. For example, my preinitiate male interviewees affirmed enthusiastically that their experience in the preinitiate house (hö) was unchanged from the time their male ancestors and grandparents had lived during youth with their secular age set mates under the supervision of their mentors in symbolic and social isolation from the rest of the community. They considered this continuity a source of great pride. Elder men tended to agree with these youths, asserting that the preinitiate experience, including residence in the preinitiate house under the indulgent guidance of their mentors, was a characteristically A’uwẽ format for constructing men from boys that remained unchanged through history. At other times and in other contexts, however, these same elders expressed that the preinitiate experience was now diminished and was likely of little value compared to their own era. Elder men conveyed similar ambivalence to me about the proper continuation and contemporary dilution of the spiritual age group system.

I interpreted these seemingly contradictory narratives as deriving from the simultaneous fallibility of the individuals engaged in these age group systems (especially protégés and their mentors) and the irreproachability of the social arrangements (mentorship relations derived from the intersection of formal age grades and age sets) perpetuated through the generations. Thus, the social configurations involved in mentorship remained intrinsically good (wedi) and beautiful (ĩwe), while the individuals involved in them may have fallen short of expectations. These irreproachable social arrangements are an excellent example of traditionalist values that were similarly shared by younger and older people. As I mention above, boys took great pride in asserting that their experiences in the preinitiate house were unchanged from the past. Notably, all boys opted to live with their secular age set peers away from home for up to about four years rather than stay at home, even though A’uwẽ notions of child autonomy (Idioriê 2019; Nunes 2011; Welch 2015) gave them the right to choose of their own accord. Also, female members of mentoring age sets were recently expressing new forms of agency by asserting their desire to participate in some formerly male-only secular age set ceremonies and to hold new ceremonies for female mentors and their female protégés (chapter 3). With females now participating in some such ceremonies, the enthusiasm to participate among youths of both genders was tremendous.

I understand the near universal enthusiasm to participate in age group system activities—especially diverse public ceremonies and rituals, as well as excursions into the cerrado by mentors and their protégés—as indication that these social arrangements were an expressive focus of A’uwẽ traditionalism, anchored in the interests of the entire population, including women and men of diverse ages. Furthermore, they were widely understood to represent the only proper and good way of creating men from boys, contributing substantively to notions of ethnic belonging. Thus, my ethnographic understanding is that these age group systems were examples of traditionalist social configurations amply believed to promote well-being among the population, both for those who participated publicly and those who helped prepare behind the scenes and watched.

By joining a coed secular age set and living in the all-male preinitiate house for years before advancing to novitiate adulthood, a boy was assuming his responsibility to do the internal and external work required to become a respectful and responsible adult, who provided for his family and participated appropriately in the community. By identifying with her secular age set, assisting preinitiates in thatching their shelter, holding ceremonial activities for her protégés, and participating in other ceremonies recently opened to females (figure 3), a woman was supporting her age set protégés and peers and contributing to the beauty of age set relations. By suffering with their protégés during public performances for many hours in the hot cerrado sun, coed mentors invigorated their protégés and contributed to their successful assumption of mentorship roles a decade down the line. By enduring and reciprocating the rivalry of their immediate elder age set, which belonged to the opposite age set moiety, age set peers participated in a culturally sanctioned form of antagonistic oversight that promoted their appreciation for respect and duty. In all these examples, social well-being was expressed through age group systems, persistent symbols of traditionalism amid dramatic transformations in the circumstances of life for the A’uwẽ.

Figure 3

Women participating in an age set singing performance (danho’re) in the Pimentel Barbosa community, 2011.

Age group systems were not the only example of social well-being expressed through traditionalism. Other examples included weddings (and associated wedding hunts), female knowledge regarding wild root vegetables (mostly roots and tubers), pregnancy and birthing practices, children’s play activities, men’s councils, and many more. What was unique about age group systems was the pervasive way they conditioned the human experience from childhood to old age, thereby providing social bearings for all but the youngest living individuals and, in the case of the spiritual age group system, women. Age group systems were ubiquitous aspects of daily social interaction through which meaning was constructed between individuals and groups of individuals (such as age sets and moieties).

Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective

According to John T. Haworth and Graham Hart (2007, 1), well-being

Based on my ethnographic experience with the A’uwẽ, I identify with this characterization of well-being because it focuses on process and “sense-making,” as well as interconnectedness with such factors as the environment. Antônio’s sadness at the end of his life did not negate the fullness of his lifelong experience or cancel out his degree of contentment for having raised many children, hunted and gardened to provide them with food, and passed along privileged knowledge to them. It did not undo the rich pleasure he expressed when reconnecting with those who had shared his life of generosity and goodwill. It did not betray his community’s respect for his years of ceremonial leadership and of caring for his ceremonial protégés. In these ways, Antônio exemplified several A’uwẽ ways of “well-living” and “well-dying” (McGillivray 2007, 29). He also illustrated the limitations of seeking an anthropological understanding of well-being rooted in the notion of happiness (Mathews and Izquierdo 2009a).

Based on these ethnographic observations, I seek to move beyond individualistic hedonic concepts of happiness, health, and wellness toward an understanding of A’uwẽ well-being as having involved social notions of quality and richness of community life. I focus on aspects of social life, such as age group systems, that my ethnographic research suggests many A’uwẽ understood to promote “the quality of their relationships with each other and the world, which, ideally, contribute to a deep and ensuring sense of intrinsic worth and existential certainty” (Eckersley 2011, 633).

Affiliated with social understandings of well-being is the issue of equality between individuals. For example, income, wealth, and gender disparities were shown to be key factors in determining subjective well-being in nation-states (Brulé and Suter 2019; Diener, Diener, and Diener 2009; Tesch-Römer, Motel-Klingebiel, and Tomasik 2008). Among the A’uwẽ, however, social equality was generally not expected and was not a value that contributed substantially to formulations of well-being. Within their society were clear inequities in status acquisition (see Werner 1981 for a similar account for the Mekrãgnoti subgroup of the Mebêngôkre or Kayapó). Furthermore, evidence from my research group suggests a recent emergence of differentiation in economic status and material wealth (Welch et al. 2009; Arantes et al. 2018). Indeed, despite cultural values prioritizing food reciprocity among neighbors and extended family members, contemporary A’uwẽ approached income and financial assets in a highly individualized manner, which permitted economic gaps between individuals and households, although these were hardly pronounced when compared to those present in larger and more socioeconomically diverse societies. These inequalities were anticipated by A’uwẽ social relations and were not mentioned to me as a source of unwellness.

Although other scholars have suggested that gender disparity continued among the A’uwẽ of Pimentel Barbosa (Graham 2014), gender inequality is challenging to ascertain given the imposition of non-A’uwẽ expectations of what gender equality should look like. Cultural assumptions regarding such behavioral cues as silence, averted gazes, exclusive responsibility for cooking and cleaning, and noninclusion in certain male social activities lead many non-A’uwẽ to identify male domination and female subordination. From my fragile vantage point as a non-A’uwẽ male, however, I would argue that A’uwẽ women had complementary social roles to men, being every bit as proactive and dominating in their preferred domains of influence as men were in theirs. Additionally, A’uwẽ women were actively asserting new forms of social autonomy as they became familiar with Brazilian gender norms (chapter 3). They did so with the widespread support of A’uwẽ men. Thus, as some aspects of gender differentiation had recently come to signify inequality and unwellness for A’uwẽ women, they found recourse by advocating for their own enfranchisement.

Immaterial wealth, usually in the form of social capital, has also been advanced as a key factor in the determination of well-being (Hamilton, Helliwell, and Woolcock 2016; Sixsmith and Boneham 2007). Some scholarship pointed to a complex dynamic whereby social capital is an interdependent but ultimately more stable predictor of hedonic well-being than income (Gleibs et al. 2013). Among the A’uwẽ, social capital as interpersonal networks based in trust and cooperation was not as open ended as it is in Western society. Rather, dependable social relationships were developed through such frameworks as age group organization and kinship, which provided people with largely predetermined social networks that reinforced themselves over time. Whereas age group organization was intrinsically equalizing by perpetually rotating people’s social positions, A’uwẽ formulations of kinship promoted imbalanced genealogies. Thus, some groups of real and categorical siblings may have had relatively smaller or less well-off kin networks, while others may have benefited from extensive or comparatively affluent close consanguineal kin. These contrasts were understood by the A’uwẽ to affect well-being, especially as means to acquire resources through reciprocity in times of need and as sources of support and reinforcement in political affairs.

Also closely related to well-being is the concept of resilience, which has been defined as “the process of harnessing key resources to sustain well-being” (Panter-Brick 2014, 432). Proposed as an alternative paradigm to narratives of vulnerability, structural violence, and hardship (Almedom, Brensinger, and Adam 2010; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013), resilience seeks to capture people’s capabilities to overcome adversity and oppression. Social resilience refers to the transformative process by which social groups resist and rebuild in the face of major economic or political challenges. Cultural resilience involves the ability of whole communities or cultural systems to absorb disruption, reorganize, and change while maintaining important distinguishing characteristics, such as identity (Fleming and Ledogar 2008).

Resilience is an extremely relevant framework for understanding A’uwẽ agency in the pursuit of sociocultural well-being during decades of internal colonization (processes of colonization of a country’s own people) associated with the appropriation of their territories, undermining of their sovereignty, and bureaucratization of their distinctiveness. This colonial enterprise began at least as early as the eighteenth century, when miners and cattle ranchers displaced them from their territories in the Provińcia do Maranhão and the northern portion of the Província de Goyaz. It intensified with the establishment of enduring relations with Brazilian society in the 1940s and insertion into the market economy beginning in the 1970s. Throughout these events, A’uwẽ who now reside in Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities maintained their identity, key aspects of their social system, ceremonially pertinent dimensions of their food economy, men’s spiritual practices, and many other cultural features they considered essential to who they were as a people. They did so by embracing changes that promoted their capacity to resist and adjust. For example, A’uwẽ women continued to prepare meals for their households, although they now did so most frequently with rice cooked in aluminum pots in the absence of wild root vegetables. Similarly, many men remained avid hunters in part because they replaced bows and arrows with rifles and adopted motorized transportation to transform the hunt into a single-day event compatible with contemporary work and school schedules. In the social realm, women no longer participated in traditional naming ceremonies, which they determined were disagreeable and caused unwellness, but now enthusiastically participated in formerly exclusively male age set ceremonies that reinforced their important role caring for their protégés in the secular age group system.

Among the A’uwẽ, resilience was an incomplete process that involved experimentation and continual discourse. I once asked a young adult male what features of A’uwẽ culture were important to preserving the essence of their cultural identity. He responded with this list: spiritual rituals (wai’a), proper haircuts (cut along a rigid horizontal line high above the eyebrows and ears, long in the back), plucked eyebrows and eyelashes, men’s wooden ear plugs (wedehu), cotton neckties (danho’rebzu’a), log races (uiwede), singing performances (danho’re), the men’s council (warã), hunting (aba), fishing (tepezo), palm-thatched houses (but not necessarily the traditional round construction style), and defecating in the outdoors without latrines or toilets. Soon thereafter, however, this same young man began to cut his hair in a non-A’uwẽ style and to wear stainless steel ear plugs in his ears. Only after being shamed by his elders did he return to using the A’uwẽ haircut and ear plugs he had previously identified as culturally essential. Similarly, the Etênhiritipá community experimented with replacing game meat with fish in the ceremonial distribution held at the end of the quinquennial rites of initiation into novitiate adulthood (danhono) to decrease the event’s environmental impact. The distribution of fish, however, was popularly judged nontraditional, ungratifying for recipients, and unconducive to cheerfulness. The community subsequently reverted to holding distributions of game meat.

Resilience also involved promoting community autonomy and self-sufficiency throughout a recent history of federal inputs and oversight. In practice this required cyclical rebounding in a boom-and-bust economy, including through renewed reliance on self-provisioning when financial resources were scarce (Santos et al. 1997). It also involved investment in seeking independent financial opportunities in cultural production and ecological conservation (Graham 2005). The A’uwẽ of Pimentel Barbosa also sought to leverage their independence by attentively developing relationships with an extensive network of national and international scholars (Dent 2016; Graham 2000; Welch and Coimbra Jr. 2014). Through this network, they documented and promoted their culture, investigated topics of general community concern, and established affective bonds of reciprocity with well-connected experts in diverse fields. In my experience, A’uwẽ valued these relationships as true friendships while attentively nourishing them so favors might be requested in times of need. For example, about a decade after completing my dissertation research, I received a call from a community leader requesting my assistance in volunteering to conduct a land demarcation study because the federal agency responsible for doing so, the National Indian Foundation (Fundação Nacional do Índio, or FUNAI), did not have available internal human resources. Thanks to indispensable collaboration and leadership by Ricardo Ventura Santos, Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr., and Nancy M. Flowers over the course of two to three years, we were able to attend to this request, which culminated in the legal identification of a new A’uwẽ Indigenous land (Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). I understood our service to be part of the mutual obligations developed with researchers by the A’uwẽ as part of their resilience strategy.

Wellness, well-being, living well, and good living are but a few popular academic terms for the intersection of factors that contribute to quality of life. Too often these concepts are reduced to oversimplified indicators of vital statistics, food security, socioeconomic status, developmental indices, health conditions, access to public services, happiness, psychological satisfaction, or social capital, among others (although some studies seek considerable robustness in their use of such measures, e.g., Azzopardi et al. 2018). Each of these measures may reflect an important dimension of well-being (Godoy et al. 2005), but Antônio’s example shows that quality of life is not easily reducible to any single factor or collection of numerical variables and should be understood as a complex process, incorporating the point of view (worldview) of the people of interest. Established quality of life indicators have been shown to be influenced by emic factors (those that are internal to a given culture), which standardized cross-cultural instruments do not contemplate (Jenaro et al. 2005; Schalock et al. 2005). The autonomy of Indigenous and other culturally distinct peoples to perceive well-being and its cultural determinants on their own terms and incorporating this diversity into research protocols and public policy are important steps in decolonizing healthcare (Manning and Fleming 2019a). Other limitations and biases of mainstream well-being scholarship have been addressed in reviews from public health and anthropological points of view (Carlisle and Hanlon 2008; Thin 2009).

An important endeavor to investigate cultural notions of public wealth or affluence as expressions of well-being was undertaken in the book Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-Being in Indigenous Amazonia, edited by Fernando Santos-Granero (2015a). Although my emphasis here is not on public wealth, and the A’uwẽ are only Amazonian according to inclusive definitions, it is relevant to note that my findings regarding well-being do not coincide with those of most authors of this important book. For example, Santos-Granero (2015b, 28) generalized for the region: “Well-being attains its maximum expression‎ in the sentiments of happiness, beauty, and rejoicing aroused by collective action.” Beth A. Conklin (2015) asserted for the Wari’ that collective well-being was related to the community’s abundance of food, productivity, vitality, and ability to mobilize group activities and celebrations, as well as an ethos of caring for others. Among the Kisêdjê, well-being was about collective euphoria or rejoicing (Seeger 2015). Through well-organized large ceremonies, Kisêdjê people achieved the satisfaction of euphoria and a sense of public wealth, associated with a notion of living morally well or beautifully together. Although these accounts seem to emphasize social dimensions of well-being, they did so from a hedonic angle. In other words, they emphasized collective forms of happiness. In contrast, my findings led me to emphasize social aspects of living life fully and satisfyingly, including those that did not involve pleasure.

A central aspect of my ethnographic argument is that some A’uwẽ constructions of social well-being involved certain modes of strife, opposition, and hierarchy, which were also viewed as good and proper. This point was well captured by Cesar C. Gordon, who made a similar argument for the Xikrin subgroup of the Mebêngôkre (Kayapó), among whom differentiated social forms of resource and ceremonial goods ownership contributed to ethical and aesthetic concepts about what was “a good, beautiful and correct way life” (2016, 210). This author also suggested that among the Mebêngôkre, notions of well-being entailed the maintenance of pervasive social differentiation, which was linked to ceremonial and other kinds of property. The A’uwẽ case was similar, where the expectation for “good” social relations involved age-related ranking, distinct prerogative ownerships by kin groups, and differentiated social roles in diverse aspects of ceremonial and everyday social life. Gordon also expressed reservations about the universal applicability of the equivalence of conviviality and social well-being in Amazonia, which coincides well with my approach, whereby I highlight that A’uwẽ considered certain culturally appropriate and traditional forms of differentiation and ranking to be essential to living well.

Unfortunately, I did not directly ask Antônio how he understood quality of life or how he characterized his well-being. He did make comments to me over the years that suggest ways he might have answered that question. For example, between bursts of tears during an enduring hug while sitting at the side of his deceased daughter’s body at her funerary mourning, he affirmed to me that I had earned my place in A’uwẽ life because I had suffered with the community. I had the sense he referred to the general suffering involved in living in his community with few of the comforts of city life, such as the hardship of pursuing game together without drinking water under the scorching sun in the sandpaper climate of the late dry season. I also understood him to be referring to the deeper social sufferings of community life, which in my experience included solitude and lack of privacy, along with the burdens of caring for my secular age group’s protégés, enduring numerous demanding rites of passage and other ceremonies, as well as occasional interpersonal strife. Considering the circumstances of our hug, I also believed him to be referring to the suffering of losing loved ones, as this was not the first funeral I had attended during my fieldwork.

Sharing these sufferings brought us together through common experiences and, in that moment, specifically through mourning his daughter’s death while embracing. I also understood him to be characterizing our friendship or adoptive kinship relationship as grandfather and grandson as based in something similar to Robert D. Putnam’s (2000, 466) “thick trust,” which is a basis for the strong bonds between close people that most contribute to social well-being. Examples such as this suggest the importance of robust A’uwẽ ideas like “suffering together” for peoples’ perceptions of good living. This viewpoint brings to the forefront what is considered “‘good’ in the sense that it is meaningful and judged well by other people in accordance with social principles” (Thin 2009, 31). I agree with Thin’s assertion that people tend to make meaningful distinctions between “feeling well” and “living a good life,” the latter being of greater interest considering my ethnographic findings. Throughout my years working and sharing with A’uwẽ, the theme of producing desirable outcomes by suffering together has been recurrent, whereas I cannot recall a single instance of someone identifying their own happiness as an important value or goal. When people mentioned their own happiness or sadness, it usually was meant to express their approval or disapproval of others’ social behavior. Thus, happiness indicated gratitude for being treated well and sadness pointed to feeling negatively affected by someone’s lack of generosity or inconsideration.

I also agree with Isaac Prilleltensky and Ora Prilleltensky (2007, 57) that “contrary to preval‎ent notions that well-being is a personal issue, … it is also relational, organizational and communal.” While individuals may experience or share aspects of well-being, it is as communities and societies that they collectively construct shared notions of well-being. This is not to say that people agree on everything, but rather, they have the potential to share meaning through common experiences and viewpoints. My A’uwẽ friends were a heterogeneous group of people who also agreed on many things, among them some aspects of what contributed to good living and satisfaction in life. Many of them explicitly recognized the distinction between individual and community values and understood that their representations of social wellness were influenced by different factors when speaking as community representatives as opposed to as individual residents. These stances may have differed slightly or substantially but did not imply contradiction. As I explore throughout this book, A’uwẽ culture afforded ample flexibility for individuals to shift stances and social positions contextually without experiencing incongruence. This characteristic of A’uwẽ social life is a central component of my approach to social well-being.

A’uwẽ social arrangements, such as age group organizations and agamous and exogamous moieties, were emblematic dimensions of how A’uwẽ understood their social values and identities. Furthermore, they were key components of traditionalism in contemporary A’uwẽ society, dovetailing with A’uwẽ notions of social wellness and good living. As an A’uwẽ Indigenous health agent, who worked assisting nurses at the community primary healthcare unit, told me, “Our main health problem is that we are weak because we no longer eat a traditional diet, no longer do traditional subsistence activities, and no longer value traditional rituals, all of which strengthen us physically and spiritually. Strength and resistance are increased by enduring physical hardship with our age set peers, which puts us in contact with strengthening spirits.” The link between cultural traditionalism and well-being has been observed among Indigenous peoples elsewhere. For example, a study showed that among Aboriginal Australians, “attachment to traditional culture is found to be associated with enhanced outcomes across a range of socio-economic indicators” (Dockery 2010, 315). For the Matsigenka in Peru, “questions about general health, well-being, and happiness usually evoked stories about an idealized golden past” (Izquierdo 2005, 779). Among the A’uwẽ, social well-being depended on well-organized communities, which in turn required that individuals and families prioritized social behaviors and arrangements considered to be traditional. These arrangements did not negate individualism in A’uwẽ society. Nor did they deny the reality of internal community conflict and occasional divisions. Rather, they placed a burden on individuals to make thoughtful decisions considering traditional values for the sake of one’s own and one’s community’s well-being.

Social and Environmental Wellness

Well-being is more than an internal state of being. One’s environment may also contribute to one’s wellness, happiness, and quality of life. This environment may be social and physical surroundings, including everything from physical housing and sanitation conditions to home or community life and one’s greater urban or rural setting, including access to “natural” and cultural resources present in a local landscape (Adelson 2000). From an anthropological point of view, the kinds and dimensions of environments that may contribute to well-being differ from culture to culture and person to person. Whereas some studies emphasized social environments or ecologies, especially for their effects on child well-being (Earls and Carlson 2001), other studies emphasized how dimensions of the nonhuman landscape and ecology could affect diverse dimensions of social life quality (Laird, Wardell-Johnson, and Ragusaf 2014). Barletti provided a particularly insightful discussion of links between well-being and “place as a position from which to produce knowledge of the world and experience it” (2016, 44), which resonates well with A’uwẽ notions of ties between the local cerrado landscape and wellness. As Antônio illustrated, the well-being of his family and community was intimately related to his ability to access, furnish, and conserve local landscape resources such as game meat and fish.

The cerrado tropical savanna ecological landscape is not the only kind of environment one might address when discussing A’uwẽ well-being, but it is an often-overlooked dimension that was borne out in my research as central to well-being for many individuals and for communities more generally. Not only was the environment, understood as an anthropogenic landscape, a topic of frequent discussion regarding self-provisioning and sustainable resource use, but it was also considered a key link in communities’ abilities to meet social needs for gifts of collected, hunted, or cultivated foods on certain ceremonial occasions, which were some of life’s most important events. Game meat was given by grooms to brides’ households to formalize their weddings. Collected wild root vegetables and maize (Zea mays) loaves were given by spiritual initiates to their spiritual singers, mentors who guided them in spiritual matters, during spiritual ceremonies. Furthermore, self-provisioning remained an important option for women and men to provide for their immediate families, support their parents-in-law, and engage in reciprocity with their extended families and neighbors. The link between environment, subsistence, and well-being among the A’uwẽ recalls the North American Cree, among whom well-being was less associated with health and disease and more closely aligned with the presence of game animals, food sovereignty, and maintenance of traditional values, including religious practices and native language use (Adelson 2000). In another example, Christopher Wolsko and colleagues (2006, 353) reported that “many participants expressed that this subsistence lifestyle is at the core of wellness for Yup’ik people [of southwestern Alaska], frequently referring to it as ‘the lifestyle’ or ‘the way of life.’”

Previous literature on the connection between well-being and the environment has focused on several themes that I do not prioritize specifically for the A’uwẽ for being outside the scope of this book or discordant with A’uwẽ ways of engaging the environment. Some studies emphasized the role of environmental services, resources, and biodiversity on the economic quality or health of individuals’ lives (e.g., Alfonso, Zorondo-Rodríguez, and Simonetti 2017; Dasgupta 2001; Ringold et al. 2013). Others pointed to a correspondence between climate change or degradation of local ecosystems and poor living and sanitation conditions, leading to poor human health (e.g., Billiot and Mitchell 2019; Green and Minchin 2014; Silva et al. 2005). Another line of research addressed connection to “nature” as a positive factor for the well-being of urban residents (e.g., Bell et al. 2018; Bieling et al. 2014; Dallimer et al. 2012; Luck et al. 2011; Russell et al. 2013; Watson 2013; White et al. 2019; Wolf et al. 2017). An especially productive line of reasoning was a proposed association between traditional ethnobiological and ethnomedicinal knowledge and wellness or well-being, which has been documented among diverse Indigenous, traditional, and local groups (Bignante 2015; Flint et al. 2011; Johnson 2017; Wolsko et al. 2006).

I find several other approaches to the well-being/environment nexus more useful for the A’uwẽ case. For example, Chantelle Richmond and co-authors (2005) identified reduced access to traditional territorial resources as one of three main factors affecting well-being among ‘Namgis First Nation people. Studies of Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Torres Strait Islanders have focused on the complex relationships between people and “country,” a notion that encompasses constructive and destructive aspects, including physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of landscape and health (Butler et al. 2019). Panelli and Tipa advocated for drawing on Indigenous perspectives to expand on the notion of foodscapes to better incorporate Indigenous perspectives of food as a nexus of diverse dimensions (“spiritual, physical, social, material, cultural, economic and political relationships”) that contribute to “being alive well” (2009, 458). Other scholars argued for similarly integrative approaches (e.g., Sangha et al. 2015), including Burnette, Clark, and Rodning (2018, 369), who addressed “how subsistence living may contribute to well-being and resilience by promoting physical exercise, a healthy diet, and psychological health.” In the A’uwẽ case, I would add to that list healthy social relations. My approach is consistent with the findings of Wolsko et al. (2006, 345), who found that for the Yup’ik, notions of wellness “emphasized the importance of living a traditional lifestyle, seeking creative solutions to manage drastic cultural change, and fostering connection within the communities and the native landscape.”

My approach to well-being is different from but allied with the Indigenous concept of “living well” (in Portuguese, o bem viver) that appeared in public discourse in Latin America in the late 1990s and has become especially popularized in Brazil since being discussed in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro (Vanhulst and Beling 2013). One formulation of the concept was constructed on the Quechua notion of sumak kawsay (beautiful life), and partially incorporated into the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador as “Rights of Nature” (Acosta 2018). Like my own approach to well-being, this notion of living well is integrative in that it encompasses multiple dimensions of well-being, such as cultural identity, social life, and sustainable use of the environment. It differs from my theoretical orientation because it is intended to operate as a map for antiestablishment political action to achieve a decolonialized Indigenous form of noncommodified development after centuries of injustice and subjugation under capitalist globalism (Peredo 2019). Although I identify with some aspirational aspects of this multicultural and pluralistic philosophy for change, it transcends the objectives of this book, which are to identify how the A’uwẽ promoted well-being in everyday social life. In other words, my objectives here are ethnographic, not activist as embodied by the living well political agenda.

Considering social well-being as a process also suggests the importance of autonomy and sovereignty for making informed decisions in contexts of change, such as the A’uwẽ presently found themselves. The processes of change affecting the A’uwẽ were external, internal, and interconnected. They were rooted in deep to shallow time frames, operated from the most global to local scales, and recognized explicitly by adult A’uwẽ. Externally motivated changes that had occurred within the lifetimes of the women and men I met during my research ranged from the approximation of Brazilian national society; sedentarization and monetarization of communities; and inclusion in regional and global networks of scholars, service providers, artists, and friends. This incomplete list illustrates how change was ubiquitous, and its relationship to well-being was ambiguous. For example, many elders lamented the loss of their former mobility as trekkers but celebrated their ability to have many healthy children and grandchildren because of local access to basic healthcare services and a sedentary lifestyle.

Contemporary lifestyle changes (formal schooling, digital technologies, bilingualism, monetary income, biomedicine, etc.) may be read by some as improvements mitigating against unwellness. At the same time, maintenance of social and environmental traditionalism may be interpreted as a source of ethnobiological resilience and strength, and therefore a source of wellness. From an anthropological point of view, just as suffering does not contradict well-being, neither does environmental change, for it is often precisely when conservation is needed that communities rally to preserve it (Holt 2005). Furthermore, efforts to restore environmental autonomy and sovereignty can contribute positively to well-being by improving the social conditions of life.

Antônio demonstrated the irreducibility and ambiguous nature of well-being when individual health and the social experience of wellness might be at odds with one another (Mathews and Izquierdo 2009a). He also illustrated the intimate relationship between social dimensions of well-being and an environment undergoing transformation (Dasgupta 2001). The age group systems, with oppositional and hierarchical as well as fraternal and collective aspects, illustrate how social well-being was coconstructed by multiple segments of society that tended to prioritize traditionalism as expressed through certain conventional social roles and arrangements upheld as correct, beautiful, and respectful ways of living. Thus, from A’uwẽ perspectives, social relations of hierarchy and difference were integral to equality and collectivity, and all contributed through individual agency to social dimensions of wellness among community members. This local configuration of Indigenous perspectives regarding good living illustrates the processual aspect of collective social well-being, as individuals engaged one another and through their interactions constructed and reinforced shared notions of wellness.

My reading of A’uwẽ understandings of well-being directed me toward an analytical framework of social wellness as a heterogeneous process constructed by communities through shared understandings of forms of interpersonal and human-environmental relations, potentially involving both pleasure and strife, considered good and appropriate, being understood to accrue benefits for individuals, communities, and environments. This approach has the potential to rebalance debates about transcultural well-being indicators by redirecting attention to internal or emic societal contexts within and through which experiences of wellness and unwellness occur. This need has been well established for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and similar principles likely apply to Indigenous and other traditional peoples elsewhere (Butler et al. 2019). It also has the potential to support community initiatives to increase well-being by strengthening its local cultural determinants, such as the social role of elders in an Indigenous community in Australia (Busija et al. 2020).

Underlying the ethnographic stories told earlier in this chapter is the reality that not all youths shared with their elders identical ideas about what behaviors were socially desirable and thereby contributed to living a good life. Younger women no longer abided being struck on their legs with wooden rods by their male mentors to test their strength. Younger contemporary fathers-in-law often invited their sons-in-law to disregard long-established A’uwẽ conventions of expressing respect through avoidance behavior. Youths tended to prefer to purchase store-bought foods rather than grow, collect, hunt, and fish local foods that were preferred by many elders as important to a healthful diet and most valued as gifts of reciprocity between relatives and neighbors. Nevertheless, certain cultural events anchored almost everyone’s perspectives regarding traditionalism and its linkages to well-being.

For example, the excitement of weddings motivated even those youths who were most repelled by the idea of hunting to enthusiastically participate in large group hunting expeditions undertaken to acquire ample quantities of game meat for grooms to deliver as presents to the doorsteps of their parents-in-laws’ houses. They thereby learned hunting techniques and gained the capacity to provide sustenance for their families. Even young agnostics regarding A’uwẽ spirituality participated in every spiritual ritual, a challenging task, to lend their peers support and solidarity. With time, and their advancement through the spiritual ranks, they tended to become believers in powerful spirits that inhabited the cerrado and to gain capacities to heal their family members of disease and injury. Rites of passage into novitiate adulthood were festive occasions in which the entire population participated in one way or another, including procuring and provisioning ceremonial gifts of sacred collected, hunted, and cultivated foods. They were occasions for previously unruly children to demonstrate respect for elders and commitment to their secular age set and age set moiety. These youths assumed such responsibilities with solemnity and dedication, striving to demonstrate to the community their intentions to be good daughters and sons, mentors, children-in-law, spouses, and parents. In each of these examples, the appeal of participating in certain community social events brought youths into closer alignment with their elders in their perspectives of how to live well. Although what A’uwẽ understood to be traditional may have changed through time, certain social expressions of traditionalism unified otherwise disparate points of view and brought people together in their understandings of well-being, laying the groundwork for resiliency.

In this section, I have sought to provide an ethnographic justification for a broader understanding of social aspects of well-being than is usually evident in mainstream multidisciplinary well-being literature. My argument addresses only a slice of the diverse considerations involved in a comprehensive treatment of well-being, which also include physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions, among others. Besides physical health, social configurations and relations, along with their linkages to the environment, were dimensions that my A’uwẽ family, friends, consultants, and interlocutors emphasized the most in their conversations with me, making them ethnographically salient dimensions in my research. They also stood out as the aspects of well-being that most reflected A’uwẽ emphasis on participation in local community, which was central to how they understood identity.

This framework requires that well-being be considered holistically within socioculturally distinct settings and encourages recognition of peoples’ autonomy to understand health and well-being on their own terms and in relation to culturally relevant dimensions, including social life and local landscapes. It reinforces long-established but rarely adequately attended policy viewpoints that health involves diverse dimensions of well-being, including social wellness (WHO 1948). Academic and policy attention to this perspective of well-being will contribute to an alignment with diverse local sociocultural realities, opening of space for two-way intercultural dialogue, and thereby also to decolonialization of science and healthcare. A broad understanding of social well-being may also have concrete health effects in diverse transcultural contexts, beyond Indigenous and culturally distinct peoples illustrated by the A’uwẽ case. For many localized and virtual communities affected by adverse health events, such as COVID-19, forced migration, natural disaster, and economic crisis, restoring well-being requires more complex and holistic understandings of wellness to address nonphysical sequelae, including restoring community well-being.

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The A’uwẽ of Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá Communities

A Cerrado People

Today, A’uwẽ are mostly residents of ten Indigenous lands (federally owned tracts possessed in usufruct by Indigenous peoples) recognized in Brazil, with a relatively small contingent residing in nearby towns and cities. With an overall population of approximately twenty-two thousand, they are among the ten largest ethnic groups in Brazil. Their lands are dispersed over a relatively large area in eastern Mato Grosso state in Central Brazil. The Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land (328,966 ha), home to the communities in which I conducted my research for this book, was situated along the Serra do Roncador (Snorer Mountains), bordering the Rio das Mortes (River of Deaths) within the Araguaia watershed, which drains into the Atlantic Ocean via the Tocantins River, with a small portion in the eastern edge of the Xingu River Basin, which drains into the Amazon River. I conducted my main research for this book in two local communities, Pimentel Barbosa (established in 1969) and Etênhiritipá (which divided from Pimentel Barbosa in 2006 and settled just a half kilometer away). I also maintained close relationships with three smaller communities that had separated from Pimentel in recent years, Paraiśo, Santa Vitória, and Sõrepré, as well as a new unnamed community that was in the process of splitting from Etênhiritipá as I finished writing this book.

The cerrado ecoregion, or biome, is a highly threatened tropical savanna bio-diversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000; Oliveira and Marquis 2002; Ratter, Ribeiro, and Bridgewater 1997; Strassburg et al. 2017) covering more than two million hectares, approximately 24 percent of the total area of Brazil, mainly in the Central Brazilian Plateau. According to one estimate, of the approximately 10,000 plant species identified in the cerrado, about 4,400 were endemic (Klink and Machado 2005). This high level of endemism is partly attributable to several key ecological features of the cerrado. For example, fire proneness, seasonal dryness, and low soil fertility contributed to unique evolutionary adaptations, including a flora with more belowground than aerial biomass, an “upside-down forest” (Castro and Kauffman 1998).

The agricultural potential of the cerrado and its positive economic benefits for Brazil have been widely publicized for decades, at least since the mid-1970s (Abelson and Rowe 1987; Ferri 1976). By 2020, 45 percent of the cerrado ecoregion had been converted to human land use, of which 98 percent was under agribusiness management (MapBiomas 2021). Recent land conversion to soybean and sugarcane biofuel production in the cerrado resulted in large carbon imbalances (net carbon production) estimated to require seventeen to thirty-seven years to restore equilibrium (Fargione et al. 2008). In lieu of buffering the Amazon from further expansion of agricultural commodities and biofuels, in coming years, the cerrado region is prone to increasing pressures with associated climatic impacts (Davidson et al. 2012; Georgescu et al. 2013) and escalation of conflicts between agribusiness and Indigenous interests (Garfield 2001; Graham, Palmer, and Waiásse 2009; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013).

According to a recent application of Köppen’s climate classification (Alvares et al. 2013), the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land was in the tropical zone, with a dry winter, average temperatures greater than 24°C, and annual rainfall of 2,200 to 2,500 mm. Virtually all the rain fell during the wet season, typically from October/November to April/May. The cerrados are fire prone, and many of their endemic plants are adapted biologically and ecologically to periodic burning (Coutinho 1990; Ledru 2002; Ramos-Neto and Pivello 2000). Cerrado vegetation types, or “cerrados,” are highly physiognomically and structurally varied, ranging from open to scrubby grasslands and woodlands to tall moist and dry forests (Eiten 1975; Oliveira and Marquis 2002; Oliveira-Filho and Ratter 2002; Ratter et al. 1973; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). Despite the particularities of these sometimes highly divergent vegetation classes, the variation between them is “completely continuous in the sense that stands can be found in any region which may be ranged in a series from arboreal, through all grades of scrub and structural savanna, to (usually) pure grassland of the cerrado type” (Eiten 1972, 231). The cerrado shares a great deal in common with Amazon rainforest landscapes both botanically and zoologically, although its ecological processes are unique because of high seasonality, high belowground biomass, and pronounced fire proneness and adaptation (Castro and Kauffman 1998; Miranda, Bustamante, and Miranda 2002).

The A’uwẽ considered themselves a quintessentially cerrado people. Apart from references in oral histories to a very early coastal occupation, documentary and oral history evidence indicate that A’uwẽ have long lived, circulated, and migrated within this distinctive tropical savanna landscape (figure 4). They considered it to be their ancestral homeland. Even today, after considerable migration and dislocation in the twentieth century, all A’uwẽ communities are in cerrado regions. The historical mobility of the A’uwẽ people throughout considerable ranges of cerrado landscape in eighteenth-century Provińcia do Maranhão and Provińcia de Goyaz, as well as, later, Mato Grosso state (Baldus 1948; Freire 1951; Lopes da Silva 1992, 1999; Nimuendajú 2017; Ravagnani 1991), is especially striking because it was accomplished primarily on foot.2 Although the region has some large and navigable rivers, A’uwẽ watercraft in the immediate precontact era in the Rio das Mortes region included floating logs and timber rafts but not canoes (Pohl 1837; Szaffka 1942). Contemporary A’uwẽ discourses regarding the value of extensive foot travel for health and well-being demonstrated that A’uwẽ values remained linked to the cerrado landscape.

Figure 4

Typical cerrado landscape in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, 2005.

Through their deep history as a cerrado people and their historical connection to the territories they had occupied since the early nineteenth century, when they were squeezed westward by encroaching non-Indigenous settlers, the people of Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá understood themselves to be of the cerrado spiritually and physically. Thus, one may speak about the human dimensions of environmental conservation in the sense that people were connected in myriad ways to local ecological integrity or functioning and territorial access, including political territorial rights. Human well-being depended in part on environmental well-being, which might be framed in terms of access to and conservation of landscape resources, biodiversity, and land cover within traditional territories. These dimensions contributed to the A’uwẽ’s ability to provide for their basic human needs, such as food and shelter, sociocultural needs to perform certain ceremonies and rituals, and identity needs to engage in environmental activities or practices that contributed to their sense of ethnic uniqueness. A’uwẽ oral histories of migrations and community divisions contributed to a contemporary sense of place that factored into links between ecological landscape and community well-being. I explore some of these dynamics in the following pages, with a brief sketch of the two main communities I have lived in, visited, and studied over the years.

Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá

Along the banks of the Pimentel Barbosa River (or Riozinho, “Little River”), a tributary to the Rio das Mortes that feeds the Araguaia basin in Central Brazil, sat two adjacent arced, or semicircular, A’uwẽ communities with a total population of nearly a thousand people. When I first visited in 2004, this population resided in a single local community with two names. The A’uwẽ name Etênhiritipá signified the ancestral place where the community was located (and had been used at different times over generations as a residential community site and as a trekking camp). The community was also designated Pimentel Barbosa by non-A’uwẽ in memory of indigenist and federal employee Inspector Genésio Pimentel Barbosa, who was killed in 1941 during an A’uwẽ “pacification” effort undertaken by the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, SPI) (L. Souza 1953). Each of the two place names spoke to a different dimension of that community’s shared deep history—the first to its immemorial association with the Central Brazilian cerrado ecoregion and the second to its more recent but enduring and sometimes mortal relationship with Brazilian national society (a mortality that continues today through conflicts with local landowners and government negligence in attending to Indigenous needs, as in the recent case of a botched SARS-CoV-2 intervention that inadequately prevented and treated cases of COVID-19 among Indigenous populations in Brazil).

In 2004, all residents who would split into two communities in 2006 (and later, into five, possibly six by the time this book goes to press) walked out the doors of their houses into the same central plaza (in a well-arranged community, A’uwẽ houses always form a round horseshoe or semicircle with their doors facing the center of the groomed plaza and the gap leading to the bank of a nearby river), with its shared view of a picturesque red stratified mesa. At that time, within the unity of their mutual past were also seeds of internal sociopolitical strife, some genealogically ancient and some newly forming, which ultimately resulted in the community’s division two years later. In addition, innumerable formal and informal associations by A’uwẽ conventions united and separated different configurations of people in different ways, in different contexts, and at different times. In 2006, escalation of internal political conflict prompted just under half of the community residents to relocate to a new site a short walk away. That division resulted in the two adjacent communities having conflicting claims to the ancestral place name Etênhiritipá, with all its historical and moral authority, which previously applied to the locale now occupied by both communities.

Today, as one approaches from the southwest by the unpaved road that connects to interstate highway BR-158, the first community to come into view is the more recent of the two (figure 5). It was called Etênhiritipá by its residents, a name that was formalized through recognition by FUNAI and other governmental agencies despite it being contested by the neighboring community. The older community was located a short stretch farther along the dirt road, on the other side of a small cluster of buildings called the post, which included a schoolhouse and a primary healthcare unit. It was more commonly known by its non-A’uwẽ designation, Pimentel Barbosa, although elder residents insisted it also had historical claim to the name Etênhiritipá.

Figure 5

Aerial image of Pimentel (left) and Etênhiritipá (right) communities.

After fifteen years of separation, the two communities had their own identities and histories. They also shared many things in common. They both considered themselves the ancestral community of what had become nineteen distinct communities within the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, which had a total population of approximately 2,600 in 2022 (including a twentieth community that immigrated in 1985 from another Indigenous land). When the community’s namesake, Inspector Pimentel Barbosa, was killed in 1941, ancestors and some of the oldest living members of both contemporary communities composed a single historical community residing at Arobonhipo’opá, located just within the northwest boundary of the present-day Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land (Lopes da Silva 1992; Sereburã et al. 1998; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). Residents of both communities shared oral histories about their previous migrations westward from the far side of the Araguaia River to Wedezé and then to Sõrepré communities.3 Even after their 2006 division, the two communities shared the pride of an oral history that identified them as the original People (A’uwẽ), descendants of the “first creators” (höimana’u’ö), creators of non-Indigenous (white) people (warazu), heirs to the cultural pride of the late precontact “mother community” Sõrepré, and architects of peaceful contact with the Brazilian government (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; Graham 1995; Lopes da Silva 1992; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). The narrative of this book takes place at the sociospatial juncture of those houses, that plaza, and the trails, gardens, savannas and forests, communities, and towns that surrounded them.

A gratifying quality of the cerrado on the eastern flanks of the Serra do Roncador, where the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land is located, is that its often low and scrubby vegetation allows many opportunities for panoramic views of the many low hills, ridges, and valleys that punctuate the landscape. The two communities, Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá, commanded impressive vistas that afforded residents continual visual reference to the surrounding landscape, with its abundant history, natural resources, and spiritual beings. Beyond the perimeters and gardens of those two communities, this landscape also contained other A’uwẽ communities and an irreparably complicated history derived from intrusion and displacement by non-Indigenous society, with its agri-businesses, roads, prisons, cities, governmental bodies, financial institutions, supermarkets, and so much more. Whereas in the 1970s the Pimentel Barbosa community was sandwiched in a small plot between multiple cattle ranches of non-Indigenous ownership (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; Graham 1995), today its Indigenous land is an island of primary and recuperating cerrado vegetation flanked by cattle ranches and monoculture farms, producing mainly soy, corn, and cotton, that threaten the region’s ecological integrity (Welch, Brondízio, et al. 2013). These encroachments were not, however, visually apparent from within the communities. What was visible was the stunning surrounding topography, which bared few obvious marks of non-Indigenous activities, and the tidy arcs of houses that lined the perimeter of each community’s meticulously weeded plaza. This history of circumscription and ecological change is a central backdrop to the social dynamics discussed in this book, because it was accompanied by generational changes in how people related to one another and the environment.

These histories of union and differentiation accompanied by sometimes ambivalent perspectives of persistence and transformation illustrate an encompassing pattern of sociocultural resilience amid staggering environmental transformations in recent centuries. Historical evidence suggests that the changes A’uwẽ experienced from eighteenth-century colonial conflict and displacement under the Portuguese Empire to twentieth-century tutelage and market insertion under the Brazilian government were encompassing. Thus, the apparent contemporary endurance of A’uwẽ age organization suggested it was linked to resilience and cultural values, including ethnic identity, cultural pride, and social well-being. A’uwẽ connection to place indicated that these perspectives and processes involved links among environment, social life, and wellness.

Prominent among the social dimensions that helped shape environmental access and conservation, as well as, more broadly, contributed to community well-being, were formulations of the human life cycle, which I explore in detail in the next two chapters. These included multiple systems of age grades, the stages of life through which all people pass during a lifetime, some of which operated in conjunction with age cohorts, usually called age sets. These age systems were consciously and conspicuously appreciated by A’uwẽ of Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities as essential aspects of social life, wellness, and ethnic identity. They were also central to how people engaged the cerrado landscape because they prominently shaped the social relations of resource access and conservation.

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Fieldwork and Ethnographic Approaches

Introductions

In May 2004, I accompanied my colleague Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr. to the Pimentel Barbosa community to discuss the possibility of conducting doctoral fieldwork regarding the nexus of age organization and environmental engagement. This was before the Etênhiritipá community split from the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2006. Thus, it then had a population of 535 people, which made it the largest local community within the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. By A’uwẽ custom, propositions to undertake research, such as my own, were usually presented in the morning or evening men’s council (warã) so that they might be discussed in public, and a decision reached collectively, though a special kind of consensus. Although women did not participate directly in these meetings, they had other means of expressing their opinions, and men’s council decisions were understood in A’uwẽ culture to express the will of the community (see chapter 4; Graham 1995). Unfortunately, I was unable to schedule my presentation in the men’s council immediately after arriving. The council meetings on the evening we arrived and the following morning were not held because the community’s men held a spiritual ritual (wai’a) from late afternoon through the following morning. The next day, the evening council was again not held because the men were resting from the spiritual ritual. Not until the third day of my visit was Coimbra able to introduce me to Chief Tsuptó Buprewên Wa’iri Xavante and request an audience for me to present my research proposal at the men’s council. Doing so was an experience for which I was little prepared.

I spoke in Portuguese, or my broken version of it, and Tsuptó translated for the others, most of whom were monolingual A’uwẽ speakers (since 2004 many more A’uwẽ women and men have become bilingual in A’uwẽ and Portuguese). Tsuptó allowed me to conclude my entire presentation before translating it from start to finish from memory. Afterward, multiple people stood to deliver speeches responding to my proposal while many others chattered simultaneously. Then the chief and vice-chief of the community, Tsuptó and Paulo Supreteprã Xavante, delivered particularly long speeches, and several follow-up questions were posed to me. Finally, a very elderly man, Sereburã, stood and delivered a speech of his own. Gradually, the background voices diminished somewhat, until just two people continued to speak at the same time as Sereburã. The three simultaneous speakers punctuated their deliveries with mutual affirmations, demonstrating that they were listening to one another as they spoke, consistent with Graham’s (1995) account of A’uwẽ multivocal speech. When Sereburã sat down, the conversations ended. Tsuptó summarized for me that Sereburã and the elders had accepted my proposal, and he, as chief, would take whatever logistical steps were necessary to formalize that authorization. My nerves immediately settled with this encouraging news, and over the next few days, I began to engage with people in much more personable ways than was possible before they knew who I was and why I was there.

Social Incorporation and Ethnographic Perspectives

Approval of my project in the men’s council immediately propelled me to a kind of celebrity status in the community, with many people competing for my time and attention through the kind desire to make sure I was well situated and, as I came to know later, in the hope that I (with my exogenous resources) would choose them as my adoptive family. Men of all ages went to great trouble to include me in their activities. Valdo, who later became my adoptive father (ĩmama), took me hunting on foot along a nearby creek lined with gallery forest. Preinitiates and their mentors invited me to visit the preinitiate house. Antônio, who later became my adoptive grandfather (ĩ’rada), took me to work with him in his garden, some eight kilometers from the community. I was also invited to participate in a spiritual ritual (wai’a) like the one that was being held the day I arrived in the community.

On the morning of this ritual, I was invited to a forest clearing, where men seated in a circle were repeatedly singing a song. While there, Valdo offered to prepare my accoutrements for the ritual. Flattered by the kind gesture, I readily agreed. At the time, I was ignorant that because fathers often prepare their sons’ ritual ornaments, my acceptance of Valdo’s offer marked him as my adoptive father (figure 6). That afternoon, I was asked if I would like to paint my body for the ritual with my older brother somewhere in the forest or meet my younger brother to paint with him in the forest clearing. Meeting at the clearing sounded simpler, so I agreed to paint with my younger brother. I did not realize at the time that those two brothers belonged to different spiritual age grades, and my choice to paint with my younger brother installed me in his group of spiritual initiates, approximately fifteen years behind my older brother’s group of guards in the spiritual age grade progression. That inadvertent decision led me to have many years of firsthand experience of the youngest tier of the spiritual hierarchy and set me on course to complete the spiritual life cycle when I am approximately eighty-one, much older than is usual for A’uwẽ participants.

Figure 6

Photo of the author (left) with adoptive father Valdo Pari’õwá (middle) and brother Lazinho Sõwa’õ (right).

After Valdo and his son painted me, tied special cords on my ankles and wrists, and bound a feathered cotton necktie around my neck, I was instructed to stand in a line of boys and young men at the upper margin of the forest clearing so our participation in the ritual could begin. After this phase of the spiritual ritual in the forest clearing had concluded, I was selected for inclusion in a small group of eight of the eldest initiates who were charged with singing and dancing around the community all night long. We were each handed a sacred cane arrow (ti’ipê) with a stripe of deep red pigment at its point and a fluff of raptor down feathers at its base. I was solemnly instructed to carry my arrow until sunrise, caring for it as though it were my own infant, never letting it touch the ground. Once again, I was ignorant that my inclusion in that group of eight at that phase of the ritual calendar distinguished me as an elder member (ipredumrini) of the initiate spiritual age grade and, simultaneously, as a member of the secular novitiate adult age grade (dahí’wa or ’ritei’wa) and êtẽpa age set, whose members were mostly in their late teens (despite my age at the time, which was thirty-six). Fulfilling my ritual obligations that night without sleep or source of warmth was a challenge. Yet, the welcoming companionship of the seven other novitiate adult men chosen for the same task ensured my success. It also gave me an initial opportunity to experience what it meant to share in the camaraderie of age set membership.

Limitations and Insights

I returned to Pimentel Barbosa in November 2004 to begin fieldwork. Except for several short absences, I spent the next twelve months living in the only single-occupant house (’ri) in the community (figure 7), which functioned as an annex to Valdo and his wife Aparecida’s house. My neighbor on the other side was Vice-Chief Paulo, who also offered me tremendous support with my research. His son Vinićius Supreteprã, also a member of my secular age set, was a constant companion and eager assistant. Valdo’s entire family incorporated me into their lives, caring for my house as an extension of their own. His sons Denoque and Eugênio, the former of whom was a member of my secular age set, took great pains to include me in their affairs and provide me with continuous and much appreciated companionship. Since that first year of fieldwork, I have had the good fortune to continue visiting the community in numerous research capacities and to participate in ceremonial activities about once or twice per year. Over the years, I have visited the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land about thirty-five times. I also have had the luxury of being able to maintain regular contact with members of the community, initially using the intermittently serviceable public telephone located in the post and later using voice and video messaging services installed on peoples’ smartphones and connected via unstable Wi-Fi in the schoolhouses.

Figure 7

Photo of the author’s house under construction on the east side of the Pimentel Barbosa community, 2004.

My ethnographic approach was highly influenced by how I was received by the A’uwẽ at the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2004. I was incorporated into A’uwẽ society as a member of an exogamous moiety, a secular age set and associated age set moiety, and a spiritual age set and associated age set moiety. I was also incorporated into the community kinship system via my adoptive A’uwẽ parents. These insertions created for me a network of family and friends, as well as a series of social positions that both limited and expanded my access to certain aspects of society. For example, male members of the êtẽpa age set remain some of my closest friends today. Not only did they generously incorporate me into their ceremonial and social activities when I first arrived in the community, but they continued to be among the most dedicated of my A’uwẽ interlocutors and essential community contacts. Today, usually male members of the êtẽpa age set send regular messages and occasionally call me to the community to participate with them in important ceremonies.

In contrast, I have always had a comparatively hard time directly accessing women’s perspectives and activities. Many of the prominent anthropological scholars of A’uwẽ society have been women. They include Regina A. P. Müller (1976), who wrote about body painting and visual arts; Claudia Menezes (1999), who examined the impacts of four decades of Salesian missionary intervention in A’uwẽ communities; Nancy M. Flowers (1983), who studied human ecology and changing economic systems; Aracy Lopes da Silva (1986), who addressed naming practices and formal friendship; Laura R. Graham (1995), who initially focused on the anthropological linguistics of men’s ceremonial performances; and Angela Nunes (2002, 2011), who studied A’uwẽ children from an anthropological perspective. Two of these women, Flowers and Graham, conducted their principal fieldwork at the Pimentel Barbosa community, the same community that David Maybury-Lewis studied in the 1950s, when it was located at Wedezé, near São Domingos, and which I studied since the 2000s. Ironically, despite these exceptional contributions by women, most anthropological literature about the A’uwẽ, including that produced by these female scholars, is dominated by accounts of male aspects of society. Of the female scholars listed above, only Lopes da Silva dedicated substantial ethnographic attention to females, although Graham (2014) has also published on gender differences.4

This gender limitation has been experienced by all female and male ethnographers of A’uwẽ society with whom I have discussed the issue. In my experience, it was partly due to the prominent role men played in engaging with non-A’uwẽ visitors and the relative reticence expressed by women in the presence of new outsiders, which resulted in researchers’ time and resources being dominated by men rather than by women. It was also the result of men’s greater facility in spoken Portuguese, especially prior to the 2010s, when girls and women gained greater access to formal education with female A’uwẽ teachers. Additionally, certain male members of A’uwẽ society were rightful holders of the title “owners of non-Indigenous people” (warazu’tede’wa), which gave them the prerogative to act as ambassadors to anthropologists and other visitors. More generally, I also found men to consider outsiders of both genders to be male political business. At Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá, however, this seemed to be changing in recent years. I have observed an emergent but explicit effort of A’uwẽ women to seek the attention of ethnographers, documentary filmmakers (Flória 2009), and other researchers, so that the female dimensions of A’uwẽ life would also be communicated to the public.

My limitation to accessing women’s perspectives was also due to my maleness, which situated me among A’uwẽ males rather than females in most social contexts. I engaged socially with women comparatively infrequently and usually, by their preference, as a novitiate adult man with a host of associated gender and age expectations. In other words, it was difficult to shed my gender and age social identities even for the sake of ethnographic work. Throughout this book, I recount various episodes of interactions with women, although they were often characterized by distant rather than close social dynamics. For example, my status from 2004 to 2006 as a novitiate adult created the preference that I remain in seclusion at home, as was expected of all male members of this age grade. Some community members lightheartedly discouraged me from visiting their households during the daytime. Despite recognizing that it was necessary for my research, certain women outside my adoptive household registered their disapproval of my regular visits during daylight and in full view of other households in antagonistic but humorous ways. For example, during one visit a woman held a urinating infant over my head. Other women splashed wet rice on the back of my neck and threw a watermelon rind at me. Still another shouted the accusation that I have the head of a tapir (Tapirus terrestris). The inappropriateness of novitiate men visiting other people’s houses exemplified the diverse age-related configurations of social behavior that contributed to notions of social well-being in A’uwẽ society, which in this case were reinforced by antagonistic joking relations.

Additionally, a great portion of my time was consumed by my culturally appropriate participation in male activities, such as council meetings, spiritual rituals, hunting and fishing excursions, and secular age set socialization. These being the activities that were expected of me as a novitiate and mature adult man, I was constrained from spending comparable amounts of time in female social settings. My experience as a male fieldworker of certain social statuses in A’uwẽ social organization led me to garner a more detailed and personal understanding of male life than I was able to attain of female life.

I have had closer relationships with women, especially my adoptive mother, grandmothers, and aunts, although my richest data regarding women’s points of view were gained through recorded interviews with bilingual translators. Such formal interviews permitted us some room to set aside our usual gender and other socially distancing relations to discuss a specific topic in greater depth than was possible in casual conversation.

As mentioned briefly above, a barrier for non-A’uwẽ researchers conducting ethnographic research with A’uwẽ women was that most women tended to be less bilingual than men in these communities, although this difference has reduced slightly over the last decade, as some younger women now (often reluctantly) speak or understand beginning- to intermediate-level Portuguese. Furthermore, even though at least two women in the Pimentel Barbosa community are now fully bilingual, they have thus far been unenthusiastic about collaborating as translators, partly due to lack of experience and partly because I am a man. In Paraiśo, a community that split from Pimentel Barbosa in 2012, girls studied in town at the municipal primary school that served the general public, resulting in their total fluency in Portuguese at young ages. At Pimentel Barbosa, many middle-aged and elder men who had studied in regional cities or worked on local ranches when they were younger spoke Portuguese. Also, many of my male êtẽpa age set peers spoke Portuguese fluently or proficiently. Male members of other younger age sets who had opportunities to live in town, even for short periods, also tended to speak Portuguese with near fluency. This scenario encouraged the use of men as research consultants or as intermediaries during communication with women, although this limitation is likely to change over the next decade (cf. Graham 1990). In my case, my rudimentary ability to speak A’uwẽ was inadequate for conducting in-depth interviews on nuanced subjects, such as age organization, without the aid of a translator. The sum effect of these factors for me and, I suspect, for many ethnographers who had preceded me, was that female experiences tended to be accessed less frequently and indirectly via men, which rendered women’s perspectives less visible.

Rather than considering these social associations a hinderance to my ethnographic work, I understand them to have been essential to my ability to understand certain viewpoints and frames of reference. As Steve Herbert (2000, 559) wrote, “it is only through the interrogation of one’s subjective experience within a milieu, and the subjective reactions it engenders, that one can glean the meaning structures that motivate everyday agency.” In at least one sense, my social position may have provided me with unusual access to certain aspects of female life, since being a “young” novitiate adult male when I began fieldwork provided me with knowledge of how women of diverse social statuses related to men of my particular age status. Additionally, the multidimensional nature of A’uwẽ social relations caused me to share many aspects of identity with some of the women I discuss in subsequent chapters. For example, although I did not share their femaleness, I did share with some females such qualities as age set and age grade membership, exogamous moiety, household residence, sibling-hood, and status as siblings-in-law. Also, entering the community as a novitiate adult gave me the opportunity to participate in transformations of activities and relationships as my age groups grew older over the course of the last eighteen years. Whereas I was once junior to many members of the community in various social configurations, I have had the experience of becoming gradually more senior and assuming social positions with increasing responsibilities.

Throughout this book, I explore A’uwẽ age organization, well-being, and environmental engagement from a vantage point informed by the ethnographic perspectives these experiences afforded me. Consequently, some aspects of the book have an evident male bias. Nevertheless, I endeavor to present female topics and perspectives in as balanced a manner as possible based on sound ethnographic evidence available to me.

I am very aware of being an outsider to the group I studied and write about in this book. In many ways, I represent the colonial legacy that decimated their population in the early to mid-1900s; encouraged them to adopt deleterious foodways and personal habits, such as smoking; reduced their available territory to a small fraction of its traditional proportions in the 1970s; and later pressured them with government policies and interventions that were often counterproductive to their goals of improving health and well-being. I was born in Northern California in a region traditionally occupied by the Coast Miwok and did my postgraduate studies at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park under adviser David Peri, a Bodega Miwok professor, and at Tulane University in New Orleans under adviser William Balée, a long-term specialist in Brazilian Indigenous ethnography and ethnobiology. Recently naturalized as a Brazilian citizen, I work for the Brazilian Ministry of Health and live in Rio de Janeiro in a neighborhood thought to have been historically occupied by the Tamoios many centuries ago. My employment symbolically approximates me even more to the national society and government that were responsible for bringing about radical changes in A’uwẽ social life, cultural practices, and economic dynamics over the course of the last half century.

At the same time, I believe the A’uwẽ saw my inclusion in their kinship and age organization, as well as my participation in the activities, rituals, and friendships these associations entailed, as a means of creating an affective bond with me that enabled and motivated me to publish faithfully about my experiences and observations. Perhaps part of their enthusiasm for incorporating me in their affairs so intimately derived from their positive regard for other anthropologists from the United States, especially Nancy M. Flowers and Laura R. Graham, whom they consider to be close friends and rigorous ethnographic conduits to the public. It also had to do with their deep faith in Brazilian anthropologist and biologist Carlos Coimbra Jr., who introduced me to the community, as scholar and friend. These associations were with outsiders who could be trusted with their guarded knowledge and who communicated effectively with the public about their affairs at a time (which is changing today) that community members lacked adequate literacy skills and academic training to do so themselves. Unlike when I first arrived in 2004, numerous A’uwẽ young adults from Pimentel Barbosa, Etênhiritipá, and other communities have already earned or are now obtaining university degrees, increasing the probability that unmediated A’uwẽ ethnographic authorship will become a reality soon. These circumstances do not erase the dangers of my publishing about a society that has suffered so much as victims of colonial legacy, to which I am inextricably linked through my personal identity as a non-Indigenous Brazilian American, an anthropologist, and an employee of the Brazilian federal government. I strive to mitigate this problem by being as faithful to my experience as possible and explicitly identifying inherent deficiencies and strengths resulting from my personal forms of engagement with the residents of these two communities.

Go to:

Objectives and Organization

This book is primarily an ethnographic exploration of certain dimensions of social well-being in everyday A’uwẽ experience at the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities. I draw on my experiences, observations, and peoples’ representations of their social lives while recognizing my relationship to them. I strive for the most honest representation possible of what it meant to the people I worked with to be well socially. I found age organization to be a fundamental component of social well-being, and cerrado use and stewardship to be key dimensions of age organization and well-being. Thus, my secondary focus is on how people interacted with the local cerrado landscape in ways that contributed to social life and well-being.

A’uwẽ concepts of some age constructions they considered central to community wellness had aesthetically pleasing abstract components involving cyclical hierarchies that generate perpetual symmetries through highly regular rites of passage (quinquennial and quindecennial) for cohorts of youths. In addition to living according to these persistent traditionalist age formulations despite undergoing such dramatic social, economic, and environmental transformation over the last seventy-five years, A’uwẽ enjoyed speaking about them as models, as though their ideal expressions were almost geometric in nature. For many A’uwẽ, some proper social relations based on age that contributed to social well-being were pleasingly embraced as favorable means to enjoy camaraderie, prepare for the future, care for others, and remember the past. The age-based social formulations that A’uwẽ understood to promote community wellness are the primary focus of this book.

Social well-being also involved accessing wild resources and caring for the landscape, because many cherished activities that involved overt performance of age relations required foods, accoutrements, and substances that came from the cerrado. Sacred foods including wild root vegetables, maize (nozö) loaves, bread made from macaúba palm (Acrocomia aculeata) fruit pulp, and game meat were presented as ceremonial gifts to express respect and gratitude toward others at some of life’s most important moments (Welch 2022a). Bodily ornamentation and grooming, fabrication of ceremonial objects, and formulating healthful remedies were essential to proper participation in social and ceremonial activities, in which most potential participants continued to partake enthusiastically. These foods and materials were derived from the cerrado, could only be accessed through intimate familiarity with the local landscape, and required caretaking to ensure their ongoing availability during an era of territorial circumscription and deforestation outside the Indigenous land. Using and caring for these cerrado resources were key components of good social living, although not all resources or self-provisioning activities enjoyed the same levels of interest among contemporary A’uwẽ. Current forms of environmental engagement involving accessing and caring for cerrado resources are a secondary theme in this book, addressed most thoroughly in chapter 6.

In the next chapter, I explore basic informal features of A’uwẽ age constructions that contributed to social well-being. These include the substance of infancy and consanguinity, as well as the informal life cycle. Informal age grades were the stages all people passed through on their journeys from the fetal stage through old age, being based on individualistic criteria associated with conception, growth, marriage, reproduction, and aging. Each of these stages of life was associated with its own patterns and expectations of behavior thought to contribute to social wellness and productive relationships with the environment. Informal age grades were not the only encompassing system for reckoning A’uwẽ life cycles and their associated implications for social and community well-being. Other systems are addressed in subsequent chapters. The informal age grades discussed in chapter 2 set the stage for discussing how their coexistence with other systems of age organization contributed to a plural social landscape of similarity and difference.

The formal secular age group system and the men’s spiritual age group system are the focus of chapter 3. Females and males participated in the camaraderie of the formal secular age group system, which integrated age sets, age grades, and age set moieties with no overt spiritual purpose from the A’uwẽ perspective. The men’s formal spiritual age group system, which also involved age sets, age grades, and age set moieties, was a secret society that promoted spiritual strength. The focus of this chapter is to communicate how these dimensions of human life cycles were understood among A’uwẽ and to comment on how these age statuses contributed to social well-being and environmental practice at different phases of life.

Next, in chapter 4, I discuss additional dimensions of age differentiation that also contributed to social well-being, including leadership, political influence, heritable prerogatives, political factionalism, notions of relatedness, and genealogical seniority. Many of these factors influenced how individuals, kin, and communities related to one another in ways that had the potential to avert conflict, discord, and even community divisions. When these forms of strife did occur, these factors provided resources for mitigating their impact and restoring good will.

In chapter 5, I reflect on the informal and formal age systems presented in chapters 2 and 3 and the age hierarchies discussed in chapter 4 to argue that the plurality of age organization in A’uwẽ society was associated with a particular social worldview, which included understanding of apparently contradictory pairs (for example, collectivity/individuality, symmetry/asymmetry, equality/inequality, and inclusion/exclusion) as congruent and mutually constitutive. Finally, I argue for the pervasiveness of heterarchy and contingency in A’uwẽ age organization. I then place my findings regarding A’uwẽ age organization in the context of previous literature regarding linguistically related Indigenous groups in Central Brazil, emphasizing how they relate to popular themes such as dual social organization.

In chapter 6, I return to the topic of environmental engagement, drawing together threads from previous chapters to discuss life cycles of interaction with the cerrado. I recall how different generations of A’uwẽ have had very different life experiences, ranging from being raised in the cerrado before ranchers developed their traditional territory to contemporary youths who preferred eating food from supermarkets. I discuss the transition from trekking and mobility to circumscription and sedentism to highlight how major environmental transformations affected different generations of A’uwẽ in dissimilar ways. After discussing A’uwẽ notions of environmental conservation, I explore three case studies illustrating the intersection of age organization and environmental engagement. These are women’s collecting expeditions, age set fishing expeditions, and group hunting with fire. I argue that age identity and age organization were basic features in the tapestry of how the population interacted with the environment while grappling with ever-changing ecological, socioeconomic, and regional development circumstances.

In the final chapter, I explore social well-being in contemporary A’uwẽ society. I address three illustrative topics that help identify the complexities of A’uwẽ well-being and agency in recent times. The first of these is food security and reciprocity, which suggests that government assistance programs did little to mitigate food insecurity, while traditionalist forms of food sharing effectively reduced the frequency with which households suffered from the most severe form of food insecurity—not eating. The second topic is sedentism, primary healthcare units, schoolhouses, and electrification, which I address from the point of view that these governmental services fixed communities in place, with a mixture of results ranging from perceptions of increased to decreased wellness in diverse dimensions of life. The third is camaraderie, a privileged social bond that emerged through the relationship between mentors and their protégés, with its focus in the preinitiate house but lasting a lifetime. I argue that this form of camaraderie was a unique product of the secular age group system, which deserves special attention as a social anchor that permitted dimensions of traditionalism and well-being to persist under circumstances of extreme social and environmental change.

© 2023 by The Arizona Board of Regents.

All rights reserved. Published 2023

The text of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust.

Monographs, or book chapters, which are outputs of Wellcome Trust funding have been made freely available as part of the Wellcome Trust's open access policy

Bookshelf ID: NBK593233

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