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Postscript: Thirty-three Years On

Article · March 2015

DOI: 10.1558/jsa.v1i1.26958

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Postcript: thirty-three years on

Stephen Hugh-Jones
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK
sh116@cam.ac.uk

‘The previous paper was first published in 1982, when ethnoastronomy was still in its
infancy. It appeared in Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics,
Tony Aveni and Gary Urton’s edited proceedings of an international conference held at
the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York under the
auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. Aveni and Urton were true pioneers
who opened up a new interdisciplinary field of research that brought together
astronomers, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and others, all interested in
astronomical knowledge amongst contemporary indigenous societies, in how build-
ings, settlements and archaeological monuments were aligned with recurrent events
in the sky, and in how such alignments matched up with astronomical information
contained in ancient codices and other historical documents and in contemporary
ethnographic accounts.
To begin with, much of this interest centred on the Americas and most often with a
particular focus on Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations, but Aveni and Urton’s edited
volume (1982) extended the field to include the South American lowland regions. This
trend was then continued with Arias de Grief and Reichel’s Etnoastronomias Americanas
(1987), an edited volume that included three papers on northwest Amazonia: two on
Tukanoan speakers – the Kubeo (Correa 1987) and Tanimuka (von Hildebrand 1987) – and
one on the Arawakan-speaking Yukuna-Matapí (Reichel 1987). Since then, a number of
publications have been devoted to the astronomical knowledge of the peoples of the
northwest Amazon-Rio Negro region. In addition, important but more scattered infor-
mation can also be found embedded in many other more recent works. Here, Ñahuri and
Kumaro (2003 – on the Tukano), Romero Raffo (2003 – on the Curripaco) and Cabalzar
(2008 – on the Tuyuka) all stand out.
An especially welcome feature of works on astronomy relating to the northwest
Amazon region is that many of them have been written by indigenous authors, either in
partnership with non-indigenous co-authors or as authors in their own right who some-
times write exclusively in their own indigenous languages. Ribeiro and Kenhíri (1987 –

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doi: 10.1558/jsa.v1i1.26958 ISSN (online) 2055-3498
126 Stephen Hugh-Jones

Desana), Oliveira, Cardoso and Azevedo (2010 – Tukano and Desana) and Cabalzar and
Azevedo (2010 – Tuyuka) are all examples of co-authorship with outsiders, whilst Rojas
Sabana (1997 – Curripaco), AEITU (2005 – Tuyuka), Diakuru and Kisibi (2006 – Desana),
and AEITY and ACIMET (2008 – Tukano, Desana) are all co-authored or multi-authored
works written exclusively by indigenous experts.
This spate of works by indigenous authors is linked to programs of collaborative
research involving local experts and outsider scientists and covering fields including
astronomy, anthropology, agronomy, ecology, pisiculture and cartography. This
collaborative research forms a key component of linked programs of education and
environmental management that aim to strengthen local cultural knowledge that
integrates ecological, economic, social and ritual concerns into an overarching cos-
mological schema and which serve to guarantee the transmission of this knowledge
to future generations. The emphasis of these programs on an understanding of how
the different seasonal cycles of the human and natural worlds are integrated means
that they give pride of place to astronomical knowledge. Here, Cardoso’s (2007) thesis
provides a fascinating account of astronomical workshops organized by a professional
astronomer in connection with an ethno-education program amongst the Tukano. One
of the major outputs of these programs are different “cultural-ecological calendars”
[calendarios ecologico-culturales], circular diagrams on paper or card that show how
different cyclical phenomena are related in time. As can be seen in Figures 1 and 2,
constellations figure prominently in these calendrical diagrams as indexing seasons,
water levels and ecological phenomena.
The on-going interest in ethnoastronomy that first began in the 1970s has resulted
in Brazilian republications of several classic works with important early material relating
to northwest Amazonia. These include Começos da Arte na selva (Koch-Grünberg 2009
[1905]), a Portuguese translation of Anfänge der kunst im Urwald with drawings of stars
and constellations by Mirití-Tapuyo, Kubeo and Siusi artists; Tastevin’s (2008 [1925]) essay
on Boiassu, the great sky serpent of the Rio Negro peoples that corresponds to the
outsiders’ Scorpius; and a paper by astronomers Lima and Mendonça Figeiroa (2010)
that gives an account of the nineteenth-century contributions of Charles Frederick Hartt
and José Vieira Couto de Magalhães, both of whom studied the astronomical knowledge
of peoples of the Rio Negro.
Although neither have been republished in recent years, two further classic works
on Rio Negro astronomy deserve mention here. The first is Themistocles Pais de Souza
Brasil’s “A astronomia entre os índios”. that appeared as part of Magalhães’ “Introduc-
tion” to Rondon’s Índios do Brasil (1953). De Sousa Brasil was a military engineer who
accompanied Rondon on his visits to Amazonia. His work identifies eleven constellations
recognized by unnamed indigenous groups. In all probability, these are groups from the
northwest Amazon-Rio Negro area. The second is Silva’s A civilização indígena do Uaupés
(1962), which contains an account of the constellation cycle as understood by a Pirá-
Tapuyo informant, material on the Tukano constellation calendar and data on seasons
from the Italian missionary priest Antonio Giacone, who spent many years among
Tukanoan groups in the upper Rio Negro region.

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 Postcript: thirty-three years on 127

Figure 1. Calendar showing correlation between constellations (red periphery), the periods of heavy
rain and high water that bear their names (green inner periphery), the spawning of different fish species
(centre) and the nuptial flights of termites on which the fish feed (outer band). Tuyuka indians, Rio Tiquié,
Brazil (Aloisio Cabalzar / ISA, with permission).

This postscript is intended simply as an update on what has been published since
my own article first appeared, and not as a full literature review. However, it is worth
noting that whilst the focus of my paper was on the cosmology of the Barasana and their
immediate neighbours living in the Pirá-Paraná region of Colombia, what has emerged
in the literature since then is that all the peoples living in the northwest Amazon-Rio
Negro region share a common overall pattern of astronomical knowledge. Despite
extreme linguistic diversity, the Tukanoan- and Arawakan-speakers and the groups of
nomadic “Makú” speaking different isolated languages all recognize much the same
significant stars and constellations and share a common understanding of how these fit

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128 Stephen Hugh-Jones

Figure 2. Calendar showing the flowering seasons of different wild and cultivated tree and palm species
producing edible fruit with seasons (outer ring, red) named after constellations. Tuyuka indians, Rio Tiquié,
Brazil (Aloisio Cabalzar / ISA, with permission).

with sidereal, solar, lunar and ecological cycles. This point is well brought out in Epps and
Oliveira’s (2013) wide and useful survey of astronomical knowledge in the region.
Epps and Oliveira’s survey also reveals that the star-lore of the Rio Negro Arawakan
speakers is similar to that of their Tukanoan neighbours but differs quite markedly from
that of Arawakan speakers elsewhere in Amazonia. This suggests that the Rio Negro
Arawakans’ star-lore probably has Tukanoan origins. Epps and Oliveira also draw atten-
tion to the relative lack of interest in astronomy displayed by the nomadic “Makú” groups.
They suggest that this may relate both to these peoples’ preference for hunting and

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 Postcript: thirty-three years on 129

gathering over agriculture and to the restricted view under the enclosed forest canopy
that this preference entails.
In relation to the common overall pattern of astronomical knowledge shared by
northwest Amazonian peoples, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s (1982) account of a hexagonal
arrangement of significant stars amongst the Desana, an arrangement correlated with
analogous structures in architecture, shamanic crystals, brain architecture and other
phenomena, seems anomalous. Hexagonal structures of this kind do not seem to figure
in other, more recent accounts of Desana star lore, including those by Desana experts.1
The other point to note is that what emerges from these different publications is
an unusual degree of interest in astronomical phenomena amongst the populations
of northwest Amazonia, an interest that goes hand-in-hand with an elaborate and
sophisticated astronomical tradition. Astronomical knowledge is mostly codified orally
in a rich and complex mythological tradition. Here much remains to be explored, most
notably with respect to stories that relate to the movements of Venus and other planets.
Astronomical knowledge is also encoded visually in drawings and diagrams engraved as
petroglyphs on rocks, drawn in the sand, woven into basketry, and painted on ceramics,
bark-cloth, house fronts and other supports. The drawings that are produced on paper in
connection with programs of education and resource management represent a modern
transformation of this much older tradition.
The elaboration and sophistication of this northwest Amazonian astronomical tradi-
tion appears to have few parallels elsewhere in lowland South America. Alongside their
unusually esoteric, priestly oral traditions, an elaborate astronomical knowledge would
seem to be a further pointer towards the link, originally suggested by Lévi-Strauss (1973,
272), between the inhabitants of the upper Rio Negro and the more complex archaeo-
logical civilizations of the middle Amazon region.

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