EMBERA (CHOCO) VILLAGE FORMATION: THE POLITICS AND MAGIC OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE DARIEN FOREST (SHAMANISM, PANAMA)
Since the conquest, the Embera Indians have retreated ever further up the rivers of the Colombian Choco and eventually into the Darien Gap of Panama, where they now turn to face the colonizers. The Gap is closing in: upriver, there's a wildlife park, downriver, the new extension of the Pan-Am h...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-1986
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Since the conquest, the Embera Indians have retreated ever further up the rivers of the Colombian Choco and eventually into the Darien Gap of Panama, where they now turn to face the colonizers. The Gap is closing in: upriver, there's a wildlife park, downriver, the new extension of the Pan-Am highway. Thus finding themselves between forest and international capital, the Embera have moved their dispersed households into more permanent, concentrated settlements. From these, they choose leaders to fight for their land and the mana of development. Fieldwork was carried out here in 1985, about 15 years after village formation began; to me, the resulting ethnography, the first in-depth study of the Embera, is an enlightening but ambivalent instance of their unavoidable encounter with the Other. I focus on the complex articulation of political economic struc- tures, where differences are ordered by gender and race, and where the contradictory pressures of economy and ecology are mediated by both cosmological schemes and offices of state. The method relies on discourse, of family, spirits, forest and labor; concrete examples of the conflicting ways in which personal and cultural history are experienced. Texts are situated within spheres of deter- mination wider than participant-observation can claim empirical charge of, but encompassed well within myth's scope. Double-vision keeps symbol and material, agency and structure in relation, as texts and social relations are interpretively and structurally analyzed. In the contradictory process of village formation, I find an active, if not always overt, resistance to colonization--a process in which control over land is shifting from women to men and from kindred to descent groups. This resistance is grounded in the unmarked sphere of women's everyday practice and ritually condensed in shamanic discourse. And indeed, I show women's hold on 'tradition' and shamans 'magical' acts provide critical counterpoint to the new male discourse of official politics and the changing structures of dominance that this discourse represents. |
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| ISBN: | 9798206031478 |