A World of Many Shades: documentation and troubles with designs and natural dyes in Indigenous Amazonia

ABSTRACT

The practice of collecting designs, drawings, and other graphic repertoires among Indigenous peoples in South America is quite ancient. Although many works have discussed the topic, few studies grounded in ethnographic experience reflect the very act of documenting this type of knowledge. In this article, I detail how the Bora people and I conceived and implemented a project to document graphic repertoires, natural dyes, and related knowledge. This experience will lead us to reflect on the different perspectives of my interlocutors and of the project’s funders regarding the problems that emerged. I will argue that the Bora invite us to formulate documentation practices that combine a concern for the agency of non-human beings and the impacts on local transmission networks with a genuine desire for knowledge to be recorded and stored in the long term. In short, they inspire us to stay with the trouble permanently.

KEYWORDS
Amazonia; Designs; Documentation; Knowledge

RESUMO

É bastante antiga a prática de coletar grafismos, desenhos e outros repertórios entre povos indígenas na América do Sul. Embora muitos trabalhos tenham discutido o assunto, poucos refletem, a partir de experiências etnográficas, sobre o próprio ato de documentar esse tipo de conhecimento. Neste texto, exponho em detalhes o processo ao longo do qual eu e algumas pessoas Bora concebemos e colocamos em prática um projeto de documentação de repertórios gráficos, pigmentos naturais e outros conhecimentos associados. Tal experiência nos levará a refletir sobre a diferente disposição de meus interlocutores e dos financiadores britânicos do projeto frente aos problemas que emergiram. Argumentarei, assim, que os Bora nos convidam a formular atividades de documentação que combinem a preocupação com a agência de seres não humanos e com os impactos nas redes de transmissão locais ao desejo de que os conhecimentos sejam, de fato, registrados e armazenados. Eles nos inspiram, em suma, a ficar permanentemente com o problema.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Amazônia; Grafismos; Documentação; Conhecimento

On March 14, 1936, days after returning from his first field trip to Brazil’s interior, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a letter to Marcel Mauss¹. In it, the anthropologist wrote:

“My plan to visit the Kadivéos, with whom we spent a month and a half, was partly inspired by an old note (...) published in the Journal des Américanistes, which drew attention, through the comparison of photographs, to the similarity between the body paintings of these Indians and the ceramics of Santarém². Although the Kadivéos are in full decomposition (in ten years, they will have completely disappeared), we were able to collect about four hundred drawings made directly by the Indigenous women, demonstrating an absolutely formidable level of refinement and decorative invention³.”

Two decades later, in Tristes Tropiques, the anthropologist reveals that these drawings were commissioned after some frustrated attempts to record the designs through photographs and drawings he made in his notebooks. According to Lévi-Strauss, “the women were not at all disconcerted by the blank sheets, which proves the indifference of their art to the natural architecture of the human face” (1957: 193).

On the one hand, this case helps us revisit a discussion about a practice that, although quite important between the late 19th and early 20th centuries (cf. Déléage 2015), is rarely highlighted in contemporary anthropological studies. Namely, the recurrent practice of bringing to the field papers, inks, colored pencils, and other materials and pigments so that research interlocutors provide the non-Indigenous researcher with figurative drawings, designs, and other graphic repertoires⁴. To cite just a few more recent cases in South America, requesting spontaneous or specific drawings is an essential part of the work of researchers such as Berta Ribeiro (1995), Jean Langdon (2000), Lúcia Van Velthem (e.g., Van Velthem & Linke 2010), Els Lagrou (e.g., 2013), and, more recently, the inspiring studies of Barcelos Neto (e.g., 2016, 2018). In these cases, although the motivations for collecting and documenting designs and other drawings are heterogeneous, the practice’s recurrence attests to its importance.

On the other hand, Lévi-Strauss’s mention of the Eyiguayegui (“Kadivéos”) women’s familiarity with the sheets of paper he provided highlights something that will occupy us next. Namely, the indigenous capacity to adapt and transform their graphic repertoires, as seen in both internal character experiments (for example, the formal modifications of designs across intergenerational transmissions) and in repertoires that undergo reductions or simplifications when documented at the request of a non-Indigenous demand (Vidal 2000: 157)⁵ – something similar to the intentional modification of objects destined for sale and to the negotiation of those that are typically discarded or destroyed after use⁶.

This article, therefore, is not exactly about Indigenous designs but about something that has received much less attention in anthropological works: the act of documenting them and its consequences. To do so, I start with a specific case that raises broader questions about the multiple ways in which Indigenous peoples engage with records of their graphic repertoires. More importantly, such a case opens intriguing avenues for reflection on possible relationships between these peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, and on their institutions and apparatuses. By considering these possibilities, we will also explore the perspectives of those who organize and fund documentation activities. This will ultimately lead us to examine how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people navigate the problems and ambivalences that arise during such initiatives.

To make this point more straightforward, I turn to an unusual that happened recently. In July 2023, I was spending a few weeks in Leticia, the main city of the Colombian Amazon, when a Bora woman sent me a WhatsApp message saying she wanted to talk to me in person. During our meeting, she explained that she had contacted me after hearing about a museum in France that displayed a large photo of her long-deceased grandmother at its entrance. According to her, the museum also housed many objects collected by the same person who took the photo, the anthropologist Mireille Guyot, and visitors flocked to see these collections of images and objects. She also told me she had no interest in requesting the repatriation of the objects to Colombia but wanted compensation for the use of her grandmother’s images and objects. I then told her that the story on the other side of the world, as I knew it, was a bit different. The photo she mentioned had very poor resolution, and its negative was actually at a university where I had digitized it years earlier and then shared it with some members of her family living in the Bora communities along the Igaraparaná River. Regarding the objects, I said there was indeed a small Bora collection distributed between two museums in France and Switzerland, but only a few pieces were exhibited to the public in the 1970s. Since then, as far as I knew, neither institution had been actually interested in re-exhibiting these artifacts.

Over the past few years, I have heard many stories like these. For example, I heard that Jurg Gasché, a recently deceased anthropologist, had a cinema in Europe where he charged admission to see a film he made in 1974, as a rather amateurish initiative. I also heard that his former interlocutors had fallen ill after donating (or selling, depending on the story) large nomination slit drums (usually 5 to 10 meters long) that had been taken from the villages by boat, plane, or even helicopter (depending on who tells the story as well). Lastly, I heard that some researchers who still work with the People of the Center bought land, houses, and apartments with money they supposedly earned from selling books based on their interlocutors’ narratives. However, I also repeatedly heard that these same researchers were and are vital allies in the political struggles of the People of the Center, besides being people for whom the relations of friendship they carry with these communities are described with much care and affection.

Ambivalences like these have also been common in my work. I understand that they say a lot, not about the researchers or their interlocutors individually, but about an Indigenous disposition toward producing and storing certain types of records related to their corpus of knowledge. Furthermore, these ambivalences highlight an Indigenous insistence on continually seeking ways to make and remake relations, even when relations are fraught with impasses and controversies. In short, my argument here is that ethnographic reflections on documentation activities (in our case, graphic repertoires and associated knowledge) are opportunities for non-Indigenous institutions and researchers to experiment with approaches that treat problems (rather than the persistent search for their dissolution) as a valuable source of inspiration. Let us proceed to explore the development of this project among the Bora.

MANY FORMS, MANY COLORS

The Bora are an Indigenous people living along the lower courses of the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers in Western Amazonia. Along with the Murui-Muina, the Muinane, the Ocaina, the Andoque, the Nonuya, and the Miranha, they are part of a regional system that identifies itself in Spanish as Gente de Centro (People of the Center) (Echeverri 2022). Currently, there are approximately eight hundred Bora people in Colombia, but only about two hundred live in communities they recognize as part of their “traditional territory” along the middle Igaraparaná River.

In the early 20th century, the Bora faced an unprecedented crisis in their recent history. Between the 1890s and 1930s, the rubber extraction company Casa Arana exploited, tortured, enslaved, murdered, and forcibly displaced tens of thousands of people in the region (Taussig 1987), causing a demographic decline of at least ninety percent among the Bora in Colombia (Lucas 2019). After this period, throughout the 20th century, the Bora were Christianized by Spanish priests and integrated into extensive networks of illegal trade of animal skins and cocaine derivatives. In recent decades, although the demarcation of the Predio Putumayo Indigenous Reserve and the constitutional guarantee of rights have ensured a more peaceful life, the presence of military forces, autonomous guerrilla groups, and international cocaine manufacturing and trafficking cartels remains frequent.

Then, in the last century, it is highly likely that colonial violence and the consequent demographic decline played a crucial role in slowing down more extensive movements and exchanges. We can presume this because, among the current Bora, the organization into patrilineal clans, the centrality of birth order, and the contrast between exchange rituals and initiation-nomination rituals seem, to some extent, to be transformations of elements also found among peoples of the Upper Rio Negro and the Vaupés basin – generally described as autonomous local systems. Among the Bora, as among these northern neighbors, designs are a fundamental part of ritual life. Thus, during rituals, it is common for designs to be made on supports such as masks, slit drums, body ornaments, rattles, gourds, clay pots, communal houses, and human bodies and faces. They can be made with pigments (mostly vegetal) or, in some cases, incised with the help of a metal instrument (such as nails) or a rodent’s teeth (especially from lowland paca, Cuniculus paca).

In 2020, I was already well acquainted with some of these graphics. In addition to conducting my doctoral research among the Bora communities of the Igaraparaná River, I had been engaged, along with interlocutors and local researchers, in projects of documentation and digital return of museum and archive collections. These earlier initiatives, however, focused on long-term historical narratives and the return of photographs and ritual songs. Even so, it was in this context that we noticed a steady decline in familiarity with the graphic repertoires, the preparation of pigments and supports, and the various forms of knowledge that, more than merely being associated with these elements, are intrinsically part of their constitution.

Until relatively recently, graphic repertoires were the prerogative of women who received ‘beautiful’ names (ímí) given exclusively to prestigious or ‘noble’ people (miamúnaa). In each communal house, the designs transmitted with these names during collective nomination rituals were handed to the chief’s eldest daughter by her eldest paternal aunt. The last woman to participate in this type of transmission passed away about twenty years ago. The repertoires she mastered were learned by several other women living around her (such as one of her daughters-in-law), but in a much more dispersed manner. This dispersion has become generalized over the last few decades. Thus, even though there are no longer specialist women as in the past, it is common for older women to know one or two designs independently.

Regarding natural dyes, although there has been recent interest among some women in the subject, it stems from the demand of the national and local craft market, which values bags and baskets whose vegetable fibers have not been dyed with industrial pigments. This movement, which generated a series of interesting experiments, was not accompanied by a significant effort to recover the pigments used to dye other supports, such as wood, ceramics, gourds, and bodies. Finally, while it is difficult to find people who are well-versed in the names of specific designs or the locations of raw materials for making certain pigments, it has been even more challenging to find those who know the mythical narratives, shamanic spells, ritual songs, and medicinal and cosmetic uses associated with the designs and natural dyes.

In this context, my interlocutors and I thought it would be interesting to develop a project to document the names, forms, and execution of graphic repertoires; the raw materials and technology involved in the manufacture of natural pigments; and the knowledge that accompanies them. The idea was to start with the designs – which were, to some extent, our initial motivation – and build a broad corpus of records. So, in early 2020, using traditional supports or high-weight paper, we visited some communities and invited people to create as many designs as they could from their repertoires.

We soon understood, mainly through conversations with older people, that drawn or incised designs are almost always formed by a combination of three named minimum elements (‘base motifs’ (Déléage, 2007) or ‘core templates’ (Gow, 1999)), whose identification and variations can be subtle for those unfamiliar with them⁷. These elements together form composite motifs that, except for some facial paintings, are not named. Although people say that these compositions ideally should not vary, we observed in the field that it was not a significant problem for a design to undergo some variations or improvisations derived from each woman’s ‘style differences’ (Vidal, 2000: 176). In fact, we understood that, from the Bora perspective, what guarantees the authenticity of a graphic repertoire is more its origin than its form. In other words, designs taught or transmitted by knowledgeable women are more valuable than a faithful reproduction of their forms. Some of the specialists told us (privately but directly) that they feel free to invent or improvise parts of their repertoires.

This finding raised important questions about documentation. In other words, if recording the forms of the repertoires was neither the most important task nor a guarantee of the designs’ continued existence in the future, where should we direct our attention? Reflecting on this problem, two points stood out: the technology and gestures involved in the production (and improvisation) of designs and pigments, and the paths of their transmission. Thus, first, we produced a series of photos and videos that help to understand and know in detail the search for raw materials in fields, floodplains, secondary forests, and upland areas, their processing, and the making of supports, tools, and pigments. What stood out in this process was the alchemy involved in the substitution, abandonment, and invention of substances – and, more specifically, how they followed a similar path to experimentation with the techniques and content of the graphic repertoires. The videos, full of conversations about these adaptations, and the close-up and sequential photos of the gestures provide examples of each documented person’s production and improvisation style. These records contain, in short, an important part of what should be learned beyond the form of the designs or the correct mixture of substances for making pigments.

Image 1
Photos 1 to 3: Julia Chaigua making a model gourd decorated with graphics using metal tools (a machete, spoon, and nail); Photo 4: Paca jawbone formerly used as a tool; Photo 5: Gourds drying in the sun.

The second point that caught our attention was the need to document the learning paths behind the designs, so we sought to understand who each person had learned the repertoire they mastered from. These conversations led us to consider the possibility of documenting other designs initially outside our radar, especially those found in baskets and other weaving artifacts, as well as in the thatching of communal houses. Our attention to these graphics arose mainly from the perception that the terms in Bora used to talk about the drawings were also applied to these graphic expressions.

Image 2
Two patterns made by Omer Teteye in March 2024 for roof thatching. Currently, very few people master the techniques of a broad repertoire of weavings.

This is the case, for example, with the word oonóva, which designates both drawings in general (for example, those made on paper by a child at school or those carried on a jaguar’s skin) and the act of drawing on any support, such as the human body. The action of painting, although it can also be described by the same word, is usually designated by the word catunu, derived from cáátu, which designates the mixture of two or more types of leaves and occasionally roots (a pigment and a fixer) used to dye bodies, faces, and hair with a dark indigo blue. Unlike other Amerindian languages, for which there is a correspondence between the words for “drawing” and “writing” (e.g., Déléage, 2007: 99), among the Bora, catunu and cáátuú respectively designate the action of writing and the writing or letter of someone.

At the project’s conception, when we thought about natural dyes, the initial list we had was quite incomplete. However, in the first meetings with knowledgeable women, a variety of natural pigments and distinct ways of preparing and combining them began to be mentioned. Thus far, we have been able to identify twenty-five different types of pigments produced from forest materials, most of them vegetal. Among the leaves, tree barks, and clays used to dye woods, human bodies, and vegetable fibers, we also discovered that many of them had cosmetic properties (such as the treatment and beautification of teeth and hair), and others had healing properties (especially for skin diseases and respiratory problems).

Image 3
Margarida Evachiu preparing the pigment córova.

Image 4
Lucia Umire preparing the cosmetic pigment pécojuhe

Image 5
Enrique Teteye collecting bark from the arudiñehe tree to prepare the homonymous pigment.

Unlike designs, pigments do not face many restrictions on the preparation or dissemination of the techniques and materials involved. For example, whenever I asked the interlocutors of this project whether it was a problem to photograph in detail samples of plants used to prepare the paints (fearing, in short, the dissemination of botanical knowledge they might prefer to keep private), the answer I received was that this information was not restricted because they did not consider it to be “properly Bora” knowledge, therefore accessible to anyone who wanted to learn. However, some restrictions applied to other knowledge associated with pigments. This is the case with those that, with aesthetic and healing properties, are associated with shamanic spells.

In these cases, as with other medicinal plants, a specialist, holding the substance in their hands or in a container, performs nearly inaudible enchantments over it, after which it gains new healing, prophylactic, or cosmetic properties⁸. My interlocutors believe that this type of content, despite being mastered by very few people, should not be recorded and, even less, freely disseminated. According to them, the risk of illness (for both those who record and those who are recorded) and the irreversible transformation of transmission networks (since this content should be learned through payment in goods or work) make recording undesirable. Since I started working with the Bora communities, the prohibition on recording this kind of verbal art has been an agreement that, although discussed and reviewed periodically, has never changed. Other knowledge associated with designs and natural pigments has also faced difficulties in being recorded, but for other reasons.

One of our goals during fieldwork was to collect, primarily from older people, narratives about the origin of the designs. To our surprise, when we sat down to talk with these people, we repeatedly heard that they could not find any stories in their repertoire of narratives explaining how the designs first appeared in the human world. When asked whether there was a narrative linking the anaconda to the origin of the designs (as this is a fairly generalized mythical motif in the Amazon), we had no success either.

Soon, Omer Teteye, the closest Indigenous research partner on this trip, and I decided to investigate another possible path: the ritual songs. We sat down with the same knowledgeable people and recorded as many songs as they could remember, aiming to document those that mentioned designs and pigments. Most of these songs describe how humans copied their designs from the bodies of animals in mythical times. One of these songs, for example, says:

The Butterfly-of-Blooming is on the cotton tree of the White Heron’s daughter. / She memorizes its design. / [With this design] the White Heron’s daughter adorns her grandfather, the nomination slit drum⁹.

During the recording session, many songs like this were recalled. Although different in many respects, they were united by a common thread. Almost all mentioned that the graphic patterns were copied, imitated, or learned from animals (or, in many cases, from specific parts of their bodies). For this reason, in conversations with our interlocutors, it soon became clear that, as in various other cases in the Lowlands of South America, designs (and consequently songs about them) are especially effective in creating conditions for the presence of animals. Comparing literature and field data, we know that this presence, however, is of a very special kind: although it is common for named designs to refer to animals (for example, the anaconda, the tortoiseshell, or the scales of a certain fish), the designs are not representations of the beings to which they refer.

Déléage (2007), starting with the Sharanawa case, suggests that because the names of the designs are mnemonic devices conceived afterward, they strengthen the argument that the designs cannot be read as figurations or representations of the animals. Similarly, Gow (1999) asserts that the designs among the Piro are “non-representational.” For the author, since Piro designs are not “visual codes” to be interpreted, they refer only to other designs. If we accept this argument, in what terms could we describe the relationship between designs and animals in the Bora case and beyond?

Thinking about the Upper Xingu Indigenous peoples, Barcelos Neto (2020) presents the case of instruments (such as slit drums and bullroarers) that, by serving as supports for the designs, compose with them a set that marks the identity of those beings the author calls “animal-spirits.” These beings, whose composition and agency far transcend the animal species as understood by modern science, find in these adorned instruments one of their (virtually multiple) “artefactual bodies.” Thus, for example, the slit drums and their designs do not represent the anaconda animal-spirit. Instead, they are one of its possible transformations. Ultimately, this type of anti-representational composition, in which an artefactual body is made from the junction of supports and designs, would indicate an indexical relationship in which the association between the artefactual body and its prototype (the animal-spirit) is, above all, suggestive.

If we turn to the Pano-speaking peoples, such suggestibility would be related, at least in part, to the proliferation of objects and images characterised by their remarkable ability to synthesize the prototypes or animal-spirits to which they refer (Lagrou, 2009: 37). There, as also seems to be the case with the Bora, the relationship between designs and animals would, in short, be part of a “suggested visual experience” capable of managing and directing the viewer’s gaze (ibid., 2013) – and, therefore, capable of activating a series of dangers. In this sense, if graphic repertoires are human imitations of animal designs, they are never (nor can they be) perfect or complete copies. Or, in other words, if drawings and paintings generally index, besides the presence of animal-spirits, their capacities and identities (as is the case, for example, with masks among the Magüta (Tikuna) and others (Goulard, 2001, Fausto, 2020)), the ideal is for the designs to exist temporarily and, at most, to indicate (without ever explicitly revealing) the paths of the transformations that those who see them may undergo.

Thus, documenting the designs in images and sounds and permanently storing records of their forms, songs, and names is a much less trivial issue than it may seem at first glance. Moreover, it becomes inevitable to ask whether and how documenting knowledges about graphic repertoires in papers, photos, and videos changes the existence and permanence of these very paths of transformation, since they would become continuously accessible and, in many cases, detached from the people and ritual situations they usually inhabit. In the Bora case, this fact also raises an additional concern for my interlocutors.

AMBIVALENCES AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOME PROBLEMS

The field research on this text lasted a little over a month of uninterrupted work and was marked by a latent conflict whose contours became clearer over the weeks. This conflict, in a way, has a direct relationship to the content of the songs mentioned above.

While some people were very interested in the project and defended the importance of the records we were making, others raised, in private conversations among themselves and with me, questions about the project’s potential risks. This second group, despite mostly endorsing the need to document the graphic repertoires, was especially concerned with two issues. First, they found it troubling that designs and other knowledge traditionally mastered by only a few and transmitted through ritual relations or payments could be accessed without restrictions by other Bora (especially those who do not live in the implicated communities) in online archives or on electronic devices such as pen drives and memory cards. Second, they were concerned about the possibility that the people who shared their knowledge would not be continuously rewarded – since the content would circulate very often and for a long time – or that they would put themselves in vulnerable positions.

The project, like any initiative of this kind in the region, involved modest payments to people who gave interviews or shared their knowledge for recording purposes. As is also usually the case in such situations, rumors about the participants (whether they are earning more than they say, whether they really master what they claim to know, whether they give opportunities for others to participate, etc.) were equally frequent. This usually happens even when people are appointed by consensus in collective meetings, and such conflicts are quite often absorbed into broader political disputes. Although this is a very interesting topic, reflecting on its origins and intricacies goes beyond the limits of this article. The problem specific to this project, which worries some participants the most, is associated with the origin of the designs in very old relations between humans and animals.

We already know about the intrinsic relationship between designs and animal-spirits. Thus, the graphics that adorn objects and bodies among the Bora were not invented by the Butterfly-of-Blooming, the Anaconda, or the Woodpecker. Instead, they are one of their possible transformations (or one of their artefactual bodies) that, especially during ritual moments, may index their presence and capabilities. Therefore, although knowledgeable women are the ones who best know how to imitate the graphic patterns of animals, they are not the true and original owners of the drawings. Thus, executing designs always involves appropriating others’ knowledge and bringing forth not only the possibility of the presence of animal-spirits but also a relationship of use in which those who benefit from the designs (namely, humans) are not their owners.

Although this is very similar to what happens among other Amerindian peoples (e.g., Gallois, 2012: 30-31), the Bora case has a peculiarity. In short, while asymmetrical relations between humans and animals among many Amerindian peoples (for example, those between shamans and auxiliary spirits or between women and pets) are marked by the former’s care and familiarization of the latter (Fausto, 2008), among the Bora, such asymmetry takes other contours. Defining these relations with a vocabulary typical of tropical Americanism, we could say that while the animals seek to attack and prey on humans at all costs (even if eventually through human action), the latter concentrate their efforts on maintaining safe relations with the former (Londoño Sulkin, 2005, 2012), often through the delicate and potentially transitory fixation of humans in the position of the chief of the animals (Lucas, 2021). Although there are similarities between this description and some of those for the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous peoples (e.g., Barreto (2013: 14) on wai-mahsã among the Tukano), the Bora perception that these modes of relation are relatively recent is noteworthy. Following my interlocutors’ discourses, these new modes of relation are tributary to a process I should define as the “historical project” conceived and implemented by the Bora themselves throughout the 20th century. Among others, this process involved shifting some of the old relationships of enmity and captivity experienced by the Bora and their neighbors toward the world of relations with the animals (Lucas, 2019).

Thus, sharing knowledge about designs in a less traditional and much broader way than in the past could, according to my interlocutors, leave those who master such repertoires even more vulnerable to violent attacks by animal-spirits and, therefore, potentially ill. As a result, although the need to recover, record, and strengthen knowledge about designs is almost unanimous, the process is far from risk-free.

At the end of our first fieldwork, we organized two large evaluative meetings. The idea was to talk with the whole community during a daytime encounter in the communal house and then gather authorities and knowledgeable people in the mambeadero, the nightly male meeting that occurs daily and is activated whenever discussions held in broader meetings need to be consolidated (Echeverri and Pereira, 2005). Both meetings were extraordinary opportunities for us to engage in collective dialogue about the conversations and questions that had been developing more privately throughout the project. However, there was something quite objective that needed to be decided: the conditions for access to the material collected by the project.

As the mediator between the project’s funders and the communities, I explained from the beginning that the information was intended to be part of an online open-access database. This was one of the most important conditions set by the project’s sponsor, the Arcadia Fund. The information returned strongly in this final debate. In summary, the people present had not reached a final conclusion about the access modalities that seemed most appropriate for the graphic repertoires and certain types of knowledge, such as ritual songs. Thus, although there was general agreement that knowledge about natural dyes could be disseminated without restrictions, there were still many doubts about what to do with knowledge transmitted through more restricted networks or that could put people in positions of potential vulnerability.

I soon realized that the conversation was heading toward the same arguments and problems we faced in 2017 during a project aimed at the return of sound recordings. At that time, after analyzing material recorded in the 1960s by Franco-Swiss anthropologist Mireille Guyot and identifying dozens of ritual songs and some sensitive knowledge, my interlocutors concluded that the possibility of other Bora who do not live permanently in the communities accessing those data justified completely restricting access (Lucas, 2020). In this case, my interlocutors feared that some knowledgeable people and their families would not be properly rewarded, would be vulnerable to attacks, or that knowledge transmission networks would be progressively affected to the point of threatening the very efficacy and existence of the ritual songs. Although non-Indigenous people’s access to the material was also not well regarded, what seemed to worry them most was Bora access.

In our early conversations about the graphic repertoires, such arguments had not yet emerged. On the contrary, the considerations that preceded the project’s implementation focused on the fact that this was an endangered corpus of knowledge that urgently needed to be documented. This apparent shift in stance and the growing alignment between graphic and musical repertoires seem very interesting to think about my interlocutors’ attitudes toward documentation practices more generally. Before we return to this point, it is worth bringing an important set of actors into the conversation: those who fund the documentation.

WHO PAYS THE BILL? FOR WHOM IS THE DOCUMENTATION MADE?

The conception of this project was partly motivated by the existence of the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), a research funding program based at The British Museum. According to the program’s institutional communication online in 2023, which funded nearly a hundred projects by then, its goal is to support “knowledge holders, professionals, and academics by providing grants to conduct new research on critically endangered material knowledge worldwide, especially in understudied areas where local funding opportunities are limited.”¹⁰

It seemed evident to us that there was a convergence between the Bora’s concerns about the decreasing number of people mastering the knowledges involving the graphic repertoires and the existence of a documentation program aimed precisely at knowledge deemed “critically endangered” by both their communities of origin and non-Indigenous specialists. However, it soon became clear that the compatibility of expectations had its limits. In short, the expectations diverged drastically when we focused on understanding the role and purpose of documentation from the perspectives of the Bora and the program.

Although based at The British Museum, the EMKP is funded by the Arcadia Fund, an entity founded in 2001 by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, both researchers and university professors with notable specialization in the history of science. One of the largest philanthropic organizations in the UK, the Arcadia Fund is estimated to have donated over $1 billion to support projects that digitize fragile archives and manuscripts and document and research archaeological sites and monuments (especially in the Near East and Asia), landscapes and ecosystems affected by the climate crisis, and communities whose languages and material knowledge are disappearing.

One of the fund’s characteristics is to encourage funded projects to use technologies such as 3D modeling and virtual reality in their documentation activities. This recommendation, which reflects how the funders understand that information can or should be publicized, is directly linked to what is probably the entity’s most fundamental value: the production and sharing of data available under open-access licenses¹¹. In 2023, this was clear on Arcadia’s website in statements like:

“Our goal is to enhance access to human knowledge. Our grants help make information free for anyone, anywhere to access and use, now and in the future. (...) Access to knowledge is a fundamental human right.”¹²

When we analyze the writings of Open Access activist and Arcadia Fund founder Peter Baldwin (e.g., 2023), it soon becomes evident that the paradigm he mobilizes centers on the production of knowledge in academic environments, especially those that can be classified as scientific discoveries of public interest. Thus, Baldwin criticizes the paid publication industry, the restricted-access libraries, and, more generally, any legal impediments to the unrestricted dissemination of knowledge (ibid.: 323). In a nutshell, the opposite of Open Access and the unrestricted circulation of information seems to be, for him, Copyright, a stance summarized in the figure of the scholar or university professor who, despite being paid with public funds, considers themselves the sole owner of their ideas and, therefore, believes they have total control over the dissemination of their discoveries. For Baldwin, the generalization of Open Access would be an alternative and a unique opportunity brought by the digital age. From such generalization, it would be possible to take the opposite path of Copyright and, by eliminating the legal constraints that still prevent the unrestricted circulation of as much information as possible, pave the way for the construction of a “modern Alexandria.” In his own words:

“From the Ptolemies on, humans have dreamed of an Alexandrian library housing all we know, a single unified source of all information, enlightenment’s abode.” (ibid.: 1).

It is not difficult to see that Baldwin’s positions, with which we may partially agree, directly influence the organization he founded. One influence, suggested by the mention of a digital Alexandria as the “abode of enlightenment,” is clear: his Enlightenment-inspired proposal to produce, record, and freely disseminate all kinds of knowledge for the sake of humanity. We can infer that, although he does not clearly define it, this humanity encompasses the indistinct set of human beings inhabiting the planet. The second influence, which derives directly from the first, concerns the urgent need to preserve all knowledge that is being lost, because otherwise it will soon be unavailable to this same humanity. We might wonder how far this concern is from the young Lévi-Strauss’s perception, mentioned at the opening of this text, of the supposed and eminent state of “full decomposition” of the Eyiguayegui and the importance of recording their designs. The comparison between this reasoning and the Bora experience of documenting their graphic repertoire also raises the obvious question: what happens in the encounter between two considerably different ways of thinking about recording Indigenous knowledge? That said, we cannot say that this type of concern is completely absent from the EMKP and Arcadia Fund guidelines.

Without delving deeply into the discussion, the program instructs funded projects to observe two guiding principles for managing data produced in research contexts: the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (based on the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of digital archives) and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (based on the principles of Indigenous sovereignty over data produced in their communities, collective benefit, responsibility, and ethics)¹³. Historically, the emergence of this second set of principles derives directly from the understanding that the first, aligned with the Open Science movements that have been increasingly spreading in the academic community, does not account for the specificities involved in data management in Indigenous contexts.

Considering these guidelines, the instruction we received from the British program managers regarding the issues that arose during the documentation of the Bora graphic repertoires was straightforward: it was sufficient not to deposit anything considered “culturally sensitive” in the program’s database, excluding any information that, from the Bora’s point of view, could not be disseminated in an Open Access format and under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license. This license, on the one hand, recognizes Indigenous communities as the holders of intellectual property rights over the records and does not allow commercialization. On the other hand, it allows free copying, redistribution, and adaptation (remixing, transforming, expanding) of the material as long as the same license is maintained. At this moment, my interlocutors are not satisfied with this option.

Roughly speaking, Bora’s demand is that their knowledge be documented and stored in well-structured databases so that such archives can last much longer than the records they make for more immediate use. They think here of the ritual songs, videos, and photos that circulate via messaging and Bluetooth apps and social media (mainly ShareIt, WhatsApp, and Facebook) but quickly disappear when electronic devices, SIM cards, and personal profiles are lost, damaged, or abandoned. Thus, for my interlocutors, the files generated in this project should be deposited in the program’s databases and be accessible in the long term only to people (especially other Bora) who receive authorization for access, according to criteria collectively agreed upon in conversations that mainly involve clan chiefs and knowledgeable women. As we see, such a demand does not involve extinguishing documentation in certain “problematic” cases but rather mobilizing and experimenting with other ways of storing and circulating the recorded knowledge. On the one hand, this is a clear invitation to establish a more lasting relationship between communities and the institutions that maintain their archives, as access authorization would depend on maintaining a continuous communication channel between the two parties. On the other hand, this stance highlights a radical difference. Apparently, the Arcadia Fund and the Bora communities would answer differently the question, “After all, who is the documentation for?”

We can infer that the initiative’s idealizers would answer the question by saying that the primary beneficiary of documenting “at-risk” knowledge worldwide would be “humanity,” a homogeneous mass that includes all human beings who exist or will exist, without distinction¹⁴. Or, in the words of Krenak (2019), this “blender” or this “plastered idea of homogeneous humanity” that separates human beings conceptually from the rest of the Earth. In this perspective, if the Bora people can access their recorded information in the future, this will be a positive side effect of the initiative, not its main goal. It is not difficult to imagine that, for my interlocutors, their interests in documentation go in the exact opposite direction, and this is for at least two reasons.

First, it makes very little sense to them that a documentation project is conceived with the añúmúnaa, the non-Indigenous, or the sons of the Demiurge-of-the-Axe (Uwaje Niimúhe) in mind. In this sense, there is often distrust that the añúmúnaa (“the whites” or, literally, “those who shoot” or “those who burn”), by completely ignoring the meanings and possible uses of the documented knowledge, are interested in the records for personal advantages or obscure economic interests that they insist on hiding from Indigenous communities. In other words, although the idea that documentation initiatives can attract non-Indigenous partners and allies occasionally emerges, my interlocutors have no doubt that they themselves should be the primary and legitimate interested parties when it comes to documenting their knowledge. Thus, if non-Indigenous people have access to the records, this will only be a side effect that is, most of the time, somewhat suspicious.

On the other hand, the idea that there is a humanity that encompasses all human beings but excludes other actors makes equally little sense to my interlocutors. Although, as we have seen, the Bora and other People of the Center outline a clear asymmetry between themselves and the animal-spirits (Londoño Sulkin, 2005), this difference does not deprive the latter of their ability to act in the world. This is clear in the fear that documentation should trigger a series of attacks by these animal-spirits against those whose knowledge is recorded and circulated under the new regimes that emerge with the production of digital archives. Therefore, any documentation initiative that disregards the animal-spirits in favor of an exclusive and exclusivist notion of humanity becomes unreasonable and hazardous.

Thus, we understand that documentation initiatives that record in favor of humanity in an Enlightenment sense are quite different from those that prioritize Indigenous people, their communities of origin, and, of course, the agency of animal spirits. We can assume that one of the main consequences of adopting such conceptually distant approaches should be the ways in which the records will be mobilized in the future: as books piled up in an Alexandrian library or pieces of a universal museum, or, instead, as lived knowledge that can be used and transformed by the people involved in the records and who, contrary to early 20th-century anthropology’s predictions, are far from disappearing¹⁵.

DOCUMENTATION TROUBLES

The project on designs and natural dyes is ongoing, and it is likely that other developments or new projects will arise from this initiative, which itself is tributary to previous documentation activities. However, one point is already very clear to me and my interlocutors: the importance of respecting Indigenous perspectives and decisions regarding documented knowledge and its potential uses and destinations. Naturally, this stance emerges only when the communities of origin (and not “humanity”) are the primary recipients of the records. However, it is fallacious to think that such care or reflexivity about the conditions of knowledge circulation is a Bora exceptionalism.

As Harrison (1995) argues, organizations or institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge always operate between two divergent regimes or forces: the restriction of access and the free circulation. If this is certainly the case for collectives such as clans, age classes, and men and women in Indigenous Amazonia and other non-Western contexts, the same reasoning can also be applied, for example, to the production of science in universities, the art market, military organizations, and the holders of software and patents. Thus, what is interesting here is to direct our attention not to the contrast between the restriction and proliferation of knowledge but to the forms that the management or handling of these forces can take in different situations.

Among the Bora, as Gow argues for the Piro, I suspect that part of such management involves ensuring that knowledge of the designs cannot be “detached” from those who learn and teach it¹⁶. So it only exists and survives “in the heads of the women who know how to paint with designs” (Gow, 1999: 242), becoming, ultimately, knowledge that is more “known” than properly “remembered”. In other words, keeping relationships active in the lived world, rather than perpetuating or replicating their invariable forms, seems to mark a certain dynamism and openness that also appears in how ideas about the project itself have been transforming over time among the Bora.

These changes have made clear something essential, namely that Indigenous considerations and decisions about documentation practices are never settled. On the contrary, they allow us to see in action, here and now, Indigenous experiments in which new issues are thought through and rethought creatively – and often, like the designs, improvisationally. In short, if, for non-Indigenous researchers, documentation is a constantly transforming subject, given both the introduction of new storage and data recording technologies and the conceptual discussions in anthropology, museology, and heritage studies, why should it be different for Indigenous peoples? Furthermore, these transformations have also brought to light a complex dynamic between personal and collective knowledge and opinions, as some of the discussions we had involved, on the one hand, women who did not want to share their entire graphic repertoire and, on the other, people who accused them (albeit subtly) of hoarding knowledge that, although mastered by them, was of collective interest and would be lost with their death.

Given this multiplicity of issues, I am left, for now, with a point that the Bora have prompted me to reflect on since the start of this project. Donna Haraway, when thinking about reactions to the contemporary climate crisis, identifies two main Euro-American responses, both equally bad: the first, loaded with naïve hope, imagines that technology, scientific advancement, or some divine order will somehow solve the trouble once and for all; the second, completely pessimistic and hopeless, assumes that there is nothing to be done about the trouble and that it is better to accept the apocalyptic fate. This opposition (or these two reactions to the problem) can easily be applied to the attitudes of many memory institutions and non-Indigenous researchers.

On one side, we have those who assume that an unprecedented theory, a new vocabulary, a “truly collaborative” approach, an innovative database, or 3D and virtual reality technologies, the construction of new buildings and new exhibitions, in short, that some or several of these initiatives will be sufficient to end the trouble, to finally appease, now and once and for all, the tensions between Indigenous peoples involved with specific collections and archives and the institutions that maintain them. All the better for this group if this process is accompanied by the storage of new culturally diverse information that enriches the modern Library of Alexandria, whose existence would be possible today thanks to the accumulation of digital technologies and financial support.

On the other side, we also find the pessimists, who see no solution to the trouble and believe that museums (especially those known as “ethnographic”) are incorrigible colonial institutions and that, in many cases, it would be better if they ceased to exist altogether. For this group, the most viable solution is to stop creating new collections of objects or archives (for example, simply not documenting any knowledge that might be subject to discussion or controversy) or, at the limit, to accept the existence of such collections only in “museums of the Self” (Taylor, 2020), where concerns with external self-representation often encompass the possibilities of more internal knowledge transmission.

By bringing to light the troubles posed by this and other projects of physical and digital object documentation and collection (like those mentioned at the beginning), it seems to me that the Bora and other Indigenous peoples, instead of fixing themselves on one of these options and thus finding solutions in hope or lack thereof, choose to stay with the trouble. Hence, they do not shy away from thinking about how documentation is a condition for the permanence of knowledge that is disappearing, while also raising many questions about its potentially harmful consequences.

However, if they were not pleased to live and think with these troubles, they could decide to ban or halt any such initiative or deny the implementation of new projects. What happens in practice, however, is precisely the opposite. As at the last work evaluation meeting, it is more common for them to express enthusiasm for conducting such projects and to list others that could equally be developed by new people and partner institutions, recalling with admiration the benefits of previous initiatives, which, like those of Mireille Guyot and Jurg Gasché, are, in other contexts, targets of fierce criticism.

Throughout the documentation process and the debate about it that I described here, it was interesting to see several young and older women become interested in the topic for the first time, join the discussions, and share their opinions. Many made an effort to recall designs or how to make natural dyes. Others took time out of their daily routines, without my presence, to prepare gourds and drawings, while others noted that they had found certain pigments on the way to their gardens and then tried to prepare them, even if sometimes without success. Bringing back to the agenda “hidden” knowledge (Barcelos Neto, 2005: 93) may indeed be the most important result of such projects. However, in response to non-Indigenous people’s concerns, Indigenous ideas about these types of initiatives always do more. In our case, they show that staying with the trouble and living with it can be a kind of invitation.

Although I am thinking in a context and from theoretical and thematic perspectives somewhat distant from those presented by Haraway, her argument seems especially aligned with the Bora proposition-invitation: “staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations” (2016: 4). For the author, many of these collaborations and combinations involve “thinking-with” other beings, whether human or not. As we already know, this is also the case for the Bora. It happens, for example, when my interlocutors consider it essential to document designs by recording them on paper, in photographs, and in videos, which makes animal-spirits present in an unusual way and prompts them to manage new, dangerous, and partially unknown relationships. It also happens in the interest they express in “thinking-with” museums and other institutions that store their collections, even if this often means a complicated encounter with people and institutions that ignore their own conceptions of ideas like “humanity” or “knowledge.” Even so, the Bora involved in this project seem to choose to stay with the trouble, insist on it, get used to it like one who hospitably welcomes an unwanted visitor, weave from it new and unexpected collaborations, and continue until the trouble does not disappear but becomes something else.

FUNDING:

Endangered Material Knowledge Programme/The British Museum & University of São Paulo

¹

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the EMKP Five-Year Anniversary Workshop in London and at the Fourteenth Biennial Conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) in Leticia, Colombia.

²

The article to which Lévi-Strauss refers is most likely Hébert (1907). I am grateful to Philippe Erikson for locating the reference.

³

Letter deposited in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, box NAF 28150 (181).

⁴

Several studies pioneered the analysis of graphic repertoires produced through this approach. In South America, Von den Steinen's (1940) theory on the origins of figurative representation, developed from drawings collected during fieldwork and engaging with proposals advanced by contemporary cultural anthropologists, is particularly noteworthy. Beyond the Americas and somewhat later in time, see, for example, Thérèse Rivière's survey in eastern Algeria (Coquet, 2009) and Nancy Munn's (1973) ethnography among the Walbiri of Central Australia, which employed drawings made on sand and paper to document mythology and cosmology.

⁵

Although they are not the focus of this article, it is also worth noting that these capacities have informed a wide range of more recent experimental practices among contemporary Indigenous artists throughout South America.

⁶

On this point, see, for example, Barcelos Neto (2006) and René Fuerst's observations (Françozo, 2017) on Indigenous production of modified artifacts and collecting practices in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1970s.

⁷

Tóóhcómune: a square-edged spiral; tetsióju, a zigzag motif; and lluúllumu, a dotted pattern.

⁸

The association between pigments and healing therapies is also found among other Indigenous peoples (e.g., Vidal, 2000:170, for the Kayapó; and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Von den Steinen, 1940:438–439, for the Bororo). An examination of origin narratives and ritual songs likewise reveals numerous references to specific plants that link these narratives and songs to what I later describe in this article as "animal-spirits." This is the case, for example, with the córova seed (used to produce the pigment of the same name, shown in Figure 2) and with the demiurge associated with the leaves used to construct the roofs of communal houses, whose woven designs are named after parts of its body (see Figure 2). In both instances, as with other "animal-spirits," humans fear attacks from these beings.

⁹

Song recorded in October 2022 with Benito Teteye and Enrique Teteye. Translated into Spanish by Jorge Kuguao and subsequently into Portuguese by me.

¹⁰

Available at https://www.emkp.org/programme/. Accessed December 2023.

¹¹

I believe other aspects of the program also warrant future critical reflection. These include the absence of a collective consultation protocol (the program requires only that individuals whose images, voices, or knowledge are documented sign an individual consent form); the lack of remuneration for non-Indigenous researchers on project teams and the inability to allocate funds for services such as photo and video editing and post-production, which limits the participation of researchers without permanent academic positions; and, finally, the five-year delay before the funding foundation agreed that part of the budget could be allocated to institutional overheads. In the Global South, such overheads are often a prerequisite for implementing externally funded projects, as the public institutions with which principal investigators are affiliated frequently lack the administrative infrastructure needed to support them.

¹²

Available at http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk. Accessed December 2023.

¹³

Complete information on both sets of principles is available at https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/ and https://www.gida-global.org/care. Accessed December 2023.

¹⁴

In this respect, the underlying logic is not far removed from that informing repositories such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

¹⁵

According to the 2022 Brazilian Census, the number of people identifying as Indigenous in Brazil increased by 88.82% over the previous twelve years. See https://www.gov.br/funai/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/2023/dados-do-censo-2022-revelam-que-o-brasil-tem-1-7-milhao-de-indigenas. Accessed December 2023.

¹⁶

I have made a similar argument elsewhere (Lucas, in press), drawing on James Leach's (2004) reflections on different modes of creativity.

DATA AVAILABILITY:

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

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Chief-Editor:

Guilherme Moura Fagundes

Associated Editor:

Marta Rosa Amoroso

Associated Editor:

Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Oct 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  02 Jan 2024
• Accepted
  17 May 2024