OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse taalkunde, letterkunde en geschiedenis. Jaargang 29

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Vanessa Elisa Grotti
Incorporating the Akuriyo
Contact expeditions and interethnic relations in southern Suriname

‘Learning to live properly’, as ‘real (or proper) people’ do, is an idea which has had some resonance among anthropologists working in Lowland South America over the past three decades.¹ In Amazonia, social norm, or convention, involves both moral and aesthetic value, and enjoys a peculiar status as pertaining to the sphere of the innate, or given, which is shared with other living creatures such as animals, plants, or spirits. If social norms are given, the bodily envelope is the result of human agency, and is characterised by a particular instability and propensity to transform (Vilaça 2005). The human body is therefore the product of a lengthy nurturing process of which the ingestion of foodstuffs, ritualised physical modifications or the correct mastery of language and social behaviour represent key components (Kensinger 1995). The body, recent anthropological literature argues, is therefore not considered as given, but as something subject to changes which can in turn reflect themselves in social behaviour. Mastering a language, showing a willingness to engage in daily activities, and behaving according to social norms, are considered examples of one's stable, domesticated humanity (McCallum 2001). This socialisation has often been explored in terms of domestication, as a process through which some wild material would be tamed into a familiar being; this implies that social relations may be subject to principles of transformation; the sense of kin can be stretched to integrate people, animals, spirits with whom nurture determines relations. As such, spirits are fed by the shaman, and animals can become kin. This implies that animals hunted in or brought back from the forest become the new intermediaries of a privileged form of relationship with those who either killed them or look after them, by feeding them and bringing them up. Capture can therefore be equated with familiarisation, as Fausto explored with the idea of ‘familiarizing predation’ as a process of integration of affines, in particular through commensality (1999, 2002).

1 This article is based on my doctoral fieldwork between November 2003 and February 2005 among the Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo of Southern Suriname and French Guiana, funded by the ESRC, Trimty College, the Gates Cambridge Trust and the Smuts Memorial Fund. I am indebted to Marc Brightman and Stephen Hugh-Jones for comments on earlier drafts.

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But how can such abstract concern with flexible classification translate into an analysis of personhood and relations between people? The idea of moulding humanity out of wild material has been used to support the view that there exists in Amazonia, and in the Guianas in particular, an ideal form of egalitarianism, favouring a horizontal redistribution of power within a community, as status is never fixed and must be regularly regenerated. The importance given to nurturing processes is the result of a focus on close kin, and what is described as a particular attention given by Native Amazonian populations to social harmony and equality (Overing & Passes 2000). This view, described by some as being rather ‘surprisingly angelic’ in its portrayal of Amerindian peoples (Lorrain 2000: 293; Taylor 1996: 206) was particularly challenged by another school of Amazonianists, which, following Viveiros de Castro (1992), emphasized the predatory nature of the establishment of social relationships in Amazonia. From that point of view, the process of the making of humanity within a social group was understood by focusing on a social ontology based on shamanic predation as a relational model according to which consanguinity was determined through the management of affinity.

My intention here is to take a broader perspective on the making of persons, and test the applicability of these theories to specific historical events. I wish therefore to integrate a reflection on these nurturing processes found to be a common factor throughout Lowland South America, within a grounded context in which outside agents such as missionaries play a role. I contrast the nurturing practices between kin with a different type of nurture, which is morally more ambiguous, and perhaps, as I suggest, more coercive: that of a particular type of affine, the Other who comes from the forest, the ‘wild one’. The latter can be described as the marginal person, neither relative, nor affine, but yet potentially human.

In this article, I discuss the relationships that the Trio, who today regard themselves as riperine horticulturalists and who have led a sedentary village life around mission posts since the early 1960s, have established with the nomadic ‘wild peoples’ of the forest, with a particular reference to those of them whom they ‘contacted’ and settled three decades ago. I will analyse how the sedentarization of a group of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers illustrates the general trend in the Guianas, and arguably throughout Lowland South America, towards the nurture of an ambivalent Other in order to channel its transformative capacity. In both everyday and festive life they are hierarchically distinguished and linked to the Trio, and I will show that this relationship takes the form of a dual hierarchy: moral inferiority in the visible, social world, and predatory superiority in the invisible, ambiguous world of the forest. By contrasting witnesses' and participants' narratives of the expeditions in question, and contextualising them with field data ahout the present living conditions of these ‘contacted peoples’, I wish to develop a wider

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discussion of interethnic relations and the making of transformative historical and ecological paradigms in Amerindian communities experiencing changing living conditions.

From Wajarikure² to Akuriyo, naming the ‘wild people’

The Akuriyo, as they are now known, were made up of several families of hunter-gatherers who had intentionally avoided developing bonds with neighbouring Amerindian and Maroon communities from the Maroni river system until the expeditions of the late 1960s. This avoidance in turn was reciprocated by Wayana, Trio, Ndjuka and Boni villagers who, when going deep into the forest and around unknown creeks to hunt, would always be on their guard for signs of the presence of ‘wild peoples’ to whom were attributed ‘fierceness’ (ëire) and ambiguous spirit power. Sightings of ‘wild people’ are today still the object of gossip, but were even more so before any of the Akuriyo were engaged with socially. Throughout the 1960s, with the development of French and Surinamese geological and geographical surveys in the border area of French Guiana, Suriname and Brazil, occasional incidents became the object of fantastic accounts (Cognat & Massot 1977).

Both early expedition narratives (Alhbrink 1956; Coudreau 1891, 1893; Crevaux 1879) and contemporary sources (Chapuis & Rivière 2003; Koelewijn & Rivière 1987; Magaña 1982 (in Jara 1990)) use several names when referring to nomadic forest peoples of the region: Wama, Acurias, Oyaricoulets, to name only the most recurrent ones.³ It is difficult to assess to what extent these names can be taken as reliable references to particular corresponding peoples. While earlier sources might refer to actual peoples who at that time were known by or gave themselves these names,⁴ later accounts or myths collected after the sedentarization of the early 1970s appear to have adapted to the recent historical events. My field experience suggests that in both Tëpu and Antecume Pata, the Akuriyo were known as wajarikure before contact and that they were given the name Akuriyo as the result of one of the early and rather limited conversations the expedition members had with the peoples they had just contacted. Some of the people in question who live in Tëpu today do call themselves Akuriyo, and it is also the generic term with which they are addressed and referred to by Trio or Wayana villa-

2 All words in italic are in Trio unless stated otherwise.

3 ‘Oyaricoulets’ has often been translated as ‘long ears’ (Cognat & Massot 1977); earlier sources mention ‘wild peoples’ with large ears, for instance: when on the Maroni, Harcourt (17th C) heard of Indians with pierced ears, cheeks, nostrils and lower lips who are said to be ‘of strength and stature far exceeding other Indians, having Bowes and Arrowes foure times as bigge: what the Indians also report of the greatnesse of their eares’ (Harris 1928: 86).

4 The name Akuriyo was among those variously used to refer to wild peoples since the earliest European accounts: in the 15^th century John Ley was told of people called ‘Acurio’ living in the mountains at the headwaters of the Maroni river (Lorimer 1994).

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gers. Within the general category of Akuriyo, there are self-denominated sub-groups, namely: Turaekare, Akuriekare and Pëinjekeekare, and the word Akuriyo comes from the sccond of these.⁵

However, wajarikure is still the name given by Carib-speaking communities of the Guianese interior as well as the coast, such as the Kali'na, to the reputedly murderous peoples from the forest whose spirit power puts them beyond the fringes of humanity, intermingling in substance with cannibalistic spirits (Chapuis 2003). On several occasions senior Kali'na from the sea-fishing village of Awala in French Guiana, who live about 700 km away from the forest in which the wajarikure are said to live, described to me how these pale, hairy beings would hide and shoot poisoned arrows at unsuspecting hunters as if the latter were prey.

Whereas in the past the name ‘Akuriyo’ was occasionally attributed to forest people, it has only become established as the identity of a particular group of people since they have been a constant presence in Trio village life. Today, the Trio say that, ‘before’, the Akuriyo used to be wajarikure, and that their peculiar physical atrributes confirm or maintain their ‘wildness’ even though their daily practices have changed since their sedentarization. When after a few years in Tëpu, the first Akuriyo man decided to pluck his facial hair (including his eyebrows) the way the Trio did, it was considered by the villagers as a breakthrough in his humanising process (Kloos 1977b).⁶ As their physical appearance (their ‘clothes’ in shamanic terminology) changed, they became more like ‘proper’ human beings. To the Wayana, Trio and Kali'na who describe themselves as having learnt to live together in peace, the ‘wild’ Indians represent the past, when they themselves mastered the various forms of spirit knowledge of the forest, which they, to differing degrees, gave away in order to live a peaceful, but sedentary life.

Before their sedentarization, the Akuriyo lived in and around a remote area covering about 10,000 km², situated between the headwaters of the Uremari in the East and the creeks of the Oranje mountain range in the West, in southeastern Suriname. Today, most of the remaining Akuriyo live in the Trio village of Tëpu, on the upper Tapanahoni. They were tracked, displaced from their settlements and sedentarized in 1970-71, after a first contact in 1968. These expeditions were organised at the instigation and with the financial and logistical backing of several American Baptist missions working with the Unevangelized Fields Mission. This organisation, which specialised in the evangelisation of remote peoples,

5 Kare can be translated as ‘people’, equivalent to the Trio jana. Grupioni (2005) includes the Akuriyo as a Trio itïpï, which is curious considering the history of avoidance between the two groups and the extreme rarity of intermarriage even in mixed villages.

6 The pairing of body hair and potential wildness is found among both Trio. A proper person, in their view, is one who, since birth, has been moulded into kin, as a baby at birth can potentially grow into something else, a monkey in particular: the Trio word for a mother's upbringing of a child means ‘to undo the spider monkey’ (arimika).

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was charged by the umbrella group West Indies Mission, to supervise the sedentarization process of the indigenous communities living in the Surinamese interior from the early 1950s onwards. It coordinated the provision of health care and education, in partnership with, respectively for these two domains, Medische Zending and the Dutch Reformed Church.

The uses of the idea of nurture

The contact, nurture and ‘education’ of forest peoples by riverine villagers have been described in various parts of Lowland South America and elsewhere. Keifenheim gives an account of contact expeditions involving the Kashinawa in western Amazonia (1997); these expeditions were apparently organised without outside support. Asymmetrical trade relationships exist in northwestern Amazonia between Tukanoans, who are garden people, and the nomadic Maku.⁷ Historical records of early explorers in eastern Bolivia describe a people called the Yuki, who used to rely on captured enemies turned into slaves as intermediary hunters.⁸ This type of relationship can also be found outside Lowland South America, and may reflect the often difficult relationship between hunter-gatherers in general and agriculturalists (Lee & Daly 1999). An example is the unequal relationship established between the Efe (Grinker 1994) and Aka Pygmies (Bahuchet & Guillaume 1982) of Congo and the neighbouring Lese Bantu villagers. These cases involve unstable trading partnerships between ‘civilising’ villagers, and ‘wild’ forest peoples, whom the former tend to fear and despise.

Within the Amazonian context, of particular interest to us is the case of the Waiwai, who live in Southern Guyana and across the border in Brazil. Howard (2001) has studied the dynamic absorption by the Waiwai of the ‘unseen tribes’ of the forest in order to reinstate and regenerate their own identity as a group, a practice which, although it appears to have been a constant feature of Waiwai sociality, was at least amplified considerably by missionary intervention. The case of the Trio is geographically and historically related to that of the Waiwai. The latter were the first mission ground for Claude Leavitt who later moved east into Suriname to evangelise the Trio (Dowdy 1963). Senior villagers of Tëpu remember clearly how Koroni, as he was known, came to them with the Bible and some Waiwai Christians who taught them about God.

Two generations later, the Waiwai are still respected by the Trio as a reliable source of knowledge and embedded expertise: their tëpitë, or forest gardens, are said to be bigger than their own, and they are rumoured capable of cultivating more varieties of manioc, bananas and sweet potatoes. They know how to build proper communal houses, and

7 Hugh-Jones, personal communication.

8 Viveiros de Castro, personal communication. This appears still to be the case today (Jabin, personal communication).

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are invited to supervise the construction of each new one by the leaders of Tëpu when the need arises. When talking about the Waiwai, the Trio often use the adjective kurano, which refers not only to aesthetic beauty but also to a sense of inner contentment and social balance, and signifies a relation established between aesthetic beauty and inherent goodness. By extension, these various descriptive forms imply that the Waiwai have achieved a higher skill or higher rate of success in enhancing the productivity of the foods and materials they grow and extract. The Trio's admiration appears to be inspired by what they regard as the Waiwai's capacity to control the esoteric and the physical worlds, in other words, the unseen and the seen, to serve their needs. The Waiwai were the ones who brought the Trio Christianity and the corresponding bonds with an apparently unlimited source of power and goods: that of the missionaries. In this regard, for the Trio, the Waiwai are the opposite of the Akuriyo, who two generations after sedentarization, are still relatively unskilled at managing a garden, cooking bread and making beer, three essential features of a socialising human. And as the Trio were and still are taught by the Waiwai how to live better, the Trio in turn reproduce the same humanising process on the Akuriyo. One of my main informants would repeatedly tell me: ‘We went to the Akuriyo because they did not know about God or about gardens; they did not know how to live properly’.

The contact and incorporation of the Akuriyo

In Tëpu, the Akuriyo represent a handful of families and childless couples spread throughout the village. While most houses in the village are on stilts and, for some privileged ones, have corrugated iron roofs, the houses the Akuriyo live in are small huts with thatched roofs and rough wooden planks as walls. They are located for the most part near the margins of the clearings, where arrow cane, bushes and fruit trees grow, an area referred to by the Trio as wïrïpëtao, meaning the bushy, uneven area between the village proper (pata) and the forest (itu) (Rivière 1981). This is the area in which rubbish is dumped, including leftover bones or body parts of game and other products of the forest, which may attract the spirits of their former animal selves. For this reason, the wïrïpëtao, a liminal zone between the place of the village and non-place of the forest, is associated with spirits. Apart from one family, which has its own small rudimentary cookhouse, the Akuriyo rarely manage their own households as autonomous units, but use the cooking space of neighbouring Trio families. The absence of a cookhouse is a determining and revealing fact: game and fish, as well as garden yields, cannot be processed autonomously by the Akuriyo, but are de facto managed and redistributed by Trio, who by doing so secure themselves with a constant source of foods (the Akuriyo are outstanding hunters, better than the Trio).

This dependence is in turn justified by an appeal to the ongoing inca-

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pacity of the Akuriyo to be in charge of their own cookhouse. Stories of their failures abound and are centred on their poor cooking and eating practices: for example, it is said that an Akuriyo man died because he drank some beer his wife had made, which was still poisonous because she had not processed the manioc correctly.⁹ The best joke the Trio think they have about the Akuriyo and which would invariably provoke hoots of laughter is as follows: when the Trio first encountered the Akuriyo they handed them some manioc bread for them to eat. An Akuriyo man, perplexed, not knowing what it was, took the bread, put it on the floor, and sat on it.¹⁰ Other signs of social marginality are to be found in everyday practices highly regarded by the Trio as a sign of humanity: those involved in bodily hygiene. Elderly Akuriyo do not go to the river to bathe and enjoy a good swim before meals in the morning and evening, but rather wash near their house with a gourd dipped in their water container. The Trio complain of the stench the Akuriyo reputedly give off because of their poor hygiene; smell is a strong marker of health and social propriety, and considered to be polluting when inhaled.

Marginal yet closely supervised, each Akuriyo household is situated next to that of a prominent Trio family, in general one of which a senior member plays a predominant role in the village. But this does not in itself explain why some households ‘own’ (entume) Akuriyo and some do not. The senior villagers whose house is in charge of an Akuriyo family are those who took part in the expeditions to contact the ‘wild people’ front the forest. Upon arrival in Tëpu in 1970 and 1971, these Akuriyo families were ‘divided up’ between their captors, and ended up forming a subservient class of people whose obligations of service and need for education eventually were, passed on to their children.¹¹ Thirty years on, they remain subservient as their difference and inferiority are perpetuated by the idea that the Trio and Wayana have a monopoly on a human, ‘proper’ perspective.

9 Bitter manioc (Manihot esculenta) (T: wii), is the main staple food among a large number of Amerindian peoples. It is used for a wide range of products: beer, bread, farine, etc. The lengthy preparation of bitter manioc centres on a detoxification process in order to remove the cyanide acid from the root.

10 Manioc bread (uru, but also often referred to metonymically by the root's name wii) looks like a very large hard biscuit of about 1 m50 in diameter (the older the harder), which, when used, is broken into pieces and softened by being soaked in pepperpot juice during a meal, or simply dipped in water to be eaten as a snack.

11 Cf. Kloos 1977a who, while acknowledging that the Akuriyo had suffered physically and mentally from their sedentarization, and were being treated slightly heavy-handedly by the Trio, predicted they would integrate with the Trio within one generation.

From brideservice to transformability: the Akuriyo today

In her study of the socialising processes the Waiwai make their ‘contacted peoples’ undergo, Howard distinguishes three levels of social inreraction through which education and ultimately integration are achieved: first a

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prestation of foodstuffs, then of spouses through marital exchange of sisters and later cross-cousins, and finally of knowledge, mainly through the apprenticeship of the Waiwai language, the making of gardens and the Bible (2001). The outsider is thus gradually humanised, first by transforming his body through the ingestion of the quintessential civilising food, manioc, then by integrating him through kin ties, and teaching what Howard argues are the most ‘civilising’ and the most highly regarded aspects of Waiwai identity: language and Christian practice. The case of the Trio contains both similarities and differences with this scheme. When the Akuriyo were contacted, they too were handed manioc bread together with other garden products. They were also told about the Christian God by the Trio. When they were brought to the Trio village of Tëpu, they were gradually taught about the making of gardens and the processing of its products. They were given the front benches in church and supervised in their attendance at services to ensure they would learn about becoming Christians (Kloos 1977a).

In his ethnohistorical study of trading networks, Mansutti (1986) has shown that one of the most important trade ‘items’ across large areas of the Guiana region for a long period was people: men who occupied an ambiguous status somewhere between sons-in-law and slaves or servants. In this light the Akuriyo case may not be as much of an anomaly as it may at first sight appear (cf. also Santos-Granero 2009). The work which the Akuriyo perform for their Trio guardians is indeed similar to that performed by men for their wife's father, and this brideservice is the only institutionalised form of subservience among the Trio or Wayana. It is thus arguable that the Akuriyo owe to their Trio tutors what may be called brideservice without a bride (cf. Hugh-Jones, n.d.): even though absorption of distant people through marriage appears in mythical and historical narratives, in this case the exchange of spouses has very rarely occurred. Two generations later, the Akuriyo remain socially and morally distinct: their knowledge of the Trio language and of the Bible is said to be poor, their gardening skills are regarded as inferior, and their status of social integration has remained little better than it was in the early 1970s. Even if it is inaccurate to compare the Akuriyo to sons-in-law, it is no more useful to compare them to children. They have not become Trio in the same way as an adopted Wayana child does: even though by the time of their relocation all Akuriyo children had lost at least one of their parents, they were not adopted into Trio families. Given the current relatively high number of exogamous alliances between Trio, Wayana, Apalai and Wayãpi (all garden people) in the area, and Guianese Amerindians' relative flexibility as to self-denomination, this fixed marginality imposed on the Akuriyo stands out as an exceptional case. The service I refer to as brideservice without a bride is difficult to quantify and does not appear clearly to an outside observer at first. It is discreet, but resilient. It can be

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regarded as twofold: occasional service for the village as a whole during feasts, or specific services for the Trio family which educates the Akuriyo household in question during daily village life.

Incorporation: taming the power of fierceness

One of my informants was the last Akuriyo to have been brought out of the forest to Tëpu. He is a very quiet, gentle man married to another Akuriyo, and is the father of a girl of fourteen. When there is a drinking party in the communal house next to where he lives, he can be seen carrying benches and tables into it for the occasion. His extreme reserve would make him a quiet, inconspicuous character barely noticeable in the village, if it were not for his outstanding skill as a hunter and gatherer, and his knowledge of the forest. He is one of the rare Akuriyo to own a gun and is regularly solicited by the Trio to join them on hunting expeditions which are organised throughout the year, and particularly in December. During these occasions, my informant, along with the other Akuriyo, is openly relied upon as a good source of game. The Akuriyo all know how to hunt well and are often said by the Trio never to miss a shot, something which the Trio cannot claim for themselves as confidently as in the past. A Trio hunter will admit today that his arms fail him: he can no longer mark them or chant spirit songs to strengthen them and clear his eyes. He is a Christian and cannot be seen to call on spirit power other than that of Jesus, especially since the missionaries' severe banning of any form of ritual scarification (cutting of the skin being prohibited in the book of Leviticus) and modification of the bodily envelope in order to enhance hunting skills.

In this respect, an Akuriyo is different, as my Trio host once told me; he added, miming with his upper body the action of shooting an arrow, that an Akuriyo knows. He did not just imply that an Akuriyo knows the forest, but that his body knows; his body matter is somehow more connected to the forest. His strength is intrinsic to him, a quality that Trio nurturing techniques have not yet subdued, and his body knows how to hunt. As Vilaça (2005) pointed out about the Warí's conception of the body in Amazonia, this shamanic strength is connected to an excess of humanity rather than a lack of it, an ability to transform that is only achieved by highly trained individuals such as shamans and, I suggest, fierce ‘wild people’. So an Akuriyo hunter never misses his prey, and during village celebrations his skill is put at the service of the entire village, to which he hands his game over through the intermediary of a Trio household which will then prepare it and redistribute it. It is tempting to see in this relationship a paradox of bodily strength and social weakness, and I will now explore this idea further.

The Trio who took part in the contact expeditions were quite open about it when I raised the topic. They would remember the days of their

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trips into the forest as exciting times, when they were at the peak of their maturity and physical strength. Talking of the past often made them nostalgic: they would associate those events with the time during which they could still be successful hunters and support their families. This association between their success as hunters and their capture of the Akuriyo is often made and supports an interpretation of the contact imagined as a capture of enemies who were brought back as prisoners to the village of their captors. As such, they were regarded as being individually tied to the Trio household of the man who seized them.

Like a hunter's prey, the Akuriyo, who were external, marginal people, were brought into the village following a collective expedition, divided between households, and eventually dispersed like the parts of a dismembered animal around different influential parts of the village. The Akuriyo were divided up and distributed along the various Trio kinship networks and paths of reciprocity which constitute the social body of the village. Contrary to what has been suggested for comparable cases elsewhere (Fausto 1999; Vilaça 1999), these captured peoples were not gradually integrared, ‘familiarised’ within their new host community; instead they were merely incorporated by means of this process of distribution. In theory, the Akuriyo were absorbed through education as affines, but in practice, they were maintained as distant, marginal people, owing a form of service, but regarded as Others.

This tension between an ideal of integration and a practice of non-integration of the Akuriyo, is salient within Trio discourse itself. When recalling the events of the contact in which he took an active part, my Trio host and informant repeatedly brought forward the idea that he went to save the Akuriyo, not because of illnesses, nor starvation (as missionaries such as Robert Hawkins hinted, see Howard 2001, Maf Lifelink 2003), but because they were not humans, and had to be taught to live properly. The arguments for this were that the Akuriyo did not have gardens, or manioc bread. Together with the lack of this main staple, Trio descriptions of life in the forest underline improper eating practices: the Akuriyo almost exclusively lived off meat, and roasted it, often badly, leaving blood in it, instead of boiling it. This equates them with spirit beings from the forest which live off raw meat and drink blood. They were described and considered to be the likes of jaguars, one of the favourite transformative states taken by shamans when on the hunt for human soul-matter.¹²

These ‘wild people’ were still considered dangerous until they were fully subdued. Ultimately, this outside, distant group of ‘other people’ can be seen as representing a channelling device connecting the village to

12 This association is one found in other parts of Amazonia, such as among the Araweté (Viveiros de Castro 1992), the Wari (Vilaça 1992) or the Achuar (Descola 1986).

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the external domain of the forest, which in turn is internalised through the consumption of its game and fruits. As additional hunting tools, the Akuriyo become extensions of the Trio bodies. They are tools which, under the reciprocal relationship of humanising apprenticeship they undergo, pay their educators by enhancing the latter's hunting efficiency. This association of an Akuriyo as a part of a Trio person involves a relation, which is similar in some respects to the one reported by other tropical Americanists between the hunter and his dog (Fausto 2002), and by extension, between people and the pets they bring up (Howard 2001).

A pet to familiarize or a people to control?

The relations established between humans and their pets has captured the imagination of Amazonianists in recent years, both from a symbolic point of view in terms of the capture and integration of affines (Fausto 1999) or their taming into becoming part of a regenerated collective identity (Howard 2001), and in a structural analysis of how Amerindians relate to the animals they hunt and eat (Descola 1998; Erikson 1996; Hugh-Jones 1996). The pets in question are either the small offspring of a female killed to be consumed (various species of monkeys, tapirs, armadillos, or peccaries), birds caught in the wild to be tamed to speak and sing for entertainment or for sale (parrots, parakeets, twa-twa), animals not captured but harvested from the forest and transformed through a civilising diet into safe and edible substances (snails, tortoises), or animals introduced by outsiders for utilitarian purposes and re-appropriated by the villagers (dogs, cats, and chickens). The available lirerature on the subject however, does not seem to draw particular attention to the various indigenous classificatory distinctions, and the corresponding different social relations established between the different types of pets. For instance, the term of address, the relationship to and the type of education given to a dog, differs from those of a talking parrot, or a cat. The way these living beings are regarded, interacted with, their use and purpose, the person in charge of their education and tutelage, their classification as providers of foods, foods themselves, their potential powers and capacities are essential elements in the establishment of a particular set of codes for social interaction.

In the context of the relationship the Trio have with the Akuriyo, a conceivable analogy could be drawn between the latter and dogs. Both are used for hunting, both are ‘educated’, and expected to be subservient and submissive, both carry around the village an air of conspicuous self-effacement, with a lowered neck and eyes riveted to the floor. Both are spatially located on the margins of the village, dogs' platforms and Akuriyo's houses are the only residential units which are not turned inwards towards the communal centre of the village grounds but remain by the bushy, uneven area delimiting the village proper (pata) from the

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forest (itu) referred to as place of spirit-matter (wïrïpëtao). And as the Trio encourage the Akuriyo to ‘transform’ their bodily appearance by adopting their style, a dog is similarly moulded and tamed into a humanised being. However, while dogs and Akuriyo can both constitute a source of income, and the labour of both is used to hunt game as a source of cash, the analogy between the two can hardly be stretched further: a dog can be sold. A dog is an object of human moulding, the result of a lengthy process of transformation; it is literal kin, the extension of the hunter's body, and is fed by his mother like himself. But the Akuriyo is a ‘wild Indian’ undergoing a never-ending process of becoming human; he is not referred to by any classificatory term, is never physically moulded (although he imitates Trio styles of dress), and is maintained out of the domestic circle, except for the occasional sharing of a communal meal.

From a Trio point of view, an Akuriyo is not a pet, but a marginal, non-marriageable Other, who requires attention towards his/her education, but is also a source of lucrative goods and services, and an ‘object’ of prestige for his owner; but more that the political and economic aspects, the position of the Akuriyo is about creatively artracting and channelling the influence of transformability. The active symbolic negotiation and social appropriation of the Akuriyo by the Trio as a new category of marginal person, who is treated like a son-in-law, nurtured like a pet, but never integrated as kin, demonstrates the limitations of abstract models based on essentialised conceptualisations of Amazonian cosmology. The nurture of the Other does not only serve to turn others into kin, but can also be used to preserve certain forms of alterity: transformative processes of the making of kinship can be defined and delimited in order to achieve the encompassment of alterity and spirit power.

Conclusion

Bodily strength or instability may, paradoxically, be connected to an excess of humanity rather than a lack of it, an ability to transform that is only achieved by highly trained individuals such as shamans and fierce ‘wild people’. The Akuriyo thus cannot be strictly understood as subordinates; their powerful capacities come into their own as soon as they leave the socialised space of the village clearing to enter the other world of the forest. Strong, fierce, transformable, their multifarious state as hybrids reflects the ambiguous perception the Trio and Wayana in turn have of their own historical process, as deeply marked within their bodies. The Akuriyo never lose their wildness although it is subdued by their constant childlike submission to nurturing processes. Children too are transformable, their souls being regarded as not yet firmly anchored to their bodies, but are vulnerable because of their inability to control this unstable state. The Akuriyo cannot control their transformability either in a social environment, which is why they need to be controlled by

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fully social guardians, but in the forest environment this quality becomes an advantage.

In Lowland South American ethnography, the body is often shown to be a place of incessant modification, yet little has been said about differences among Amerindian bodies in a context of sedentarization. Whereas all bodies are constantly subjected to nurturing techniques, some are attributed different levels of socialization, characterised by varying propensities to transform. The Akuriyo represent for the Trio a further abundance of people to control, a privileged source of game, a display of the Trio's own extended influence, and a way of benefiting from sources of shamanic power to which they as Christians no longer have direct access. For Amerindians living in a historical context of sedentarization and evangelization, the transformability of ‘wild people’ can thus become a strategic tool in their sustained management of the social, ecological and cosmological networks to which they belong.

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Vanessa Elisa Grotti received her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2007. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Nurturing the Other: wellbeing, social body and transformability in northeastern Amazonia is a study of change and social transformation among the Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo of southern Suriname and French Guiana. She is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at ISCA, studying the relations between Trio and Wayana Amerindians and the health care systems in Suriname and French Guiana. She has also been Research Fellow at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (EHESS-Collège de France, Paris) and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is the author of several articles analysing conversion to Christianity, corporeality, human non-human relations and beer consumption and production among Carib-speaking populations of northern Amazonia.