Is there a way to talk about making culture without making enemies?

Conclusion

We are seeing the beginnings of a process of folkloricization of various Tukanoan cultural traits. Perhaps in the future we shall see the commoditization of them. Elsewhere in the hemisphere various interest groups, including indigenous groups themselves, package and promote “Indianness.” The cultural forms that are retained from earlier traditions can therefore totally change in meaning. This poses problems when we talk about cultures using an organic model, because we find we cannot describe these processes in other than negative language. Both anthropologists and pro-Indian activists at times find it academically and/or politically expedient to talk of culture as enduring over time: while changing, these cultures are nonetheless seen as remaining the same in some fundamental ways. But when, as is beginning to occur in the Tukanoan case, traits are retained, cast aside or redefined as part of a self-conscious awareness and promotion of a particular kind of Indian identity as a political strategy, the meaning of these traits has often radically changed. We cannot use a quasi-biological model to account for these similarities over time.

Since resemblances between earlier forms of Tukanoan culture and later forms may be superficial, conceiving of a culture in terms of traits that persist over time can be misleading. We need to think of culture change over relatively short periods of time in a more dynamic fashion, rather than as either the “same” or “syncretized” or “lost.” We need to see Tukanoans and others as creating and improvising, rather than possessing, culture. And we need to create and invent models and metaphors that analyze this process in nonderogatory terms.

Some of the ways in which Tukanoans, over the last twenty years, in some respects have come to represent “authentic” Indians who possess moral superiority have been described. However, Tukanoan culture, like Indian culture in general, will also continue to be seen pejoratively — as backward, foreign, “savage.” Tukanoans will respond to these contradictory and ambivalent evaluations and will dialogically derive new self-representations in creative, unforeseen ways. Outsiders will not necessarily be privy to the process of creating these new meanings and may misinterpret some aspects of the new Tukanoan self-representations because they will sometimes be encountering only thetok masta version of the culture Tukanoans are inventing, the part for public consumption. But because these outsiders —priests, highland Indians, anthropologists, etc. —have their own axes to grind about which cultural forms should be valorized and which are better left where they fell by the wayside, and because interactions between Tukanoans and these outsiders occur in conditions of asymmetrical power relations, these outsiders will have played an important role in the creation of any new representations of Tukanoan identity. Our analytical language makes it difficult to describe these processes without using negative, valueladen words, even when we especially wish to sound as neutral, descriptive, and objective as possible.

In Colombia, discussion of Indian culture and identity occurs daily. Present-day Indians are becoming part of Colombia's national heritage, just as the historical Andean Indian groups have been for decades. But the pre-Colombian Indians are dead and have no say in determining how their culture and identity are fashioned by the dominant ideology. Tukanoans, on the other hand, and other living Indians, assume an active role in this process. Regardless of the motives of those in the metropole — to somewhat paradoxically create unifying symbols of pluralism, avoid guerrilla-Indian alliances, promote tourism, win votes —Tukanoans and non-Tukanoans are locked together in this ongoing act of creation. We are witnessing the beginnings of a self-conscious indigenism, wherein Tukanoans' vision of themselves as Indian is generated out of their fundamental embeddedness in the larger society. Tukanoans in Mitú witnessed bare-breasted Tukanoan women dancing in a celebration of Mitú's fiftieth anniversary in 1986, even though women have covered their breasts in ceremonies and everyday life for a number of years. Or they can visit a cultural center in Mitú whose goal in part is to recreate the traditional longhouse and the artifacts it contains. The structure and the artifacts are to some extent “authentic,” but the notion of a longhouse built for this purpose is utterly foreign. Tukanoans also see artifacts on the walls of rooms in the Prefecture and other public buildings in Mitú, and they themselves manufacture replicas for sale to tourists. Insofar as Tukanoans — rather than Catholic missionaries — come to control these activities, they will be validating their past with a form appropriated from the dominant culture. As such, the meaning of the architecture, the artisanal skills, the dances, etc., will have radically changed. Tukanoans are appropriating new, politicized and folkloricized frameworks, such as CRIVA's newspaper and the culture center, as a means of expressing their cultural identity.

Hence, we can see Tukanoans beginning the process of coming to see themselves as “having” a culture. They are learning how to think of themselves in this fashion with input from both whites and other Indians. Newly introduced notions of Tukanoan culture, such as the Mitú cultural center, are perhaps a very preliminary example of Handler's discussion of how nationalist ideologies prove the existence of the nation through possession of a culture.

This essay is about how the meaning of Tukanoan culture and identity is constantly being rethought, reshaped, and negotiated. Meaning is often spoken of in anthropology in overly static terms. For example, Geertz speaks of cultural man as “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” As Mattingly notes, this is an image of meaning as something contained and held. Pidgin-creole languages offer a useful way, similar to Bakhtin's notion of dialogics, to see culture and identity as something in flux, something negotiated and grasped for, as opposed to acquired and possessed.

Tukanoans are beginning to formulate self-representations in a process similar to other Indians elsewhere on the two continents. This process, of course, happens in non-Indian contexts, as well. The ambivalence towards Tukanoans as representatives of tropical-forest Indians is analogous to how Bedouin symbols are used in the Jordan valley or images of traditional villagers in Japan. What we need is a more creative language that neither overly romanticizes nor denigrates this process. This essay has suggested looking at pidgin-creole studies for inspiration. Pidgin-creoles were earlier seen as “barbarous dialects,” disdained by laymen and linguists alike. Only recently have linguists begun to speak of this stepchild as a potential Cinderella for linguistic theory. The study of “inauthentic,” “public,” “created” culture is now being upgraded, if the amount of articles and books is any indication. Perhaps analogous to the contributions pidgin-creoles have made to linguistic theory, we may see an equivalent contribution to anthropological theories about culture from understanding “inauthentic” cultural forms like the Tukanoan examples discussed in this essay. If we are forced to find new ways to talk about situations like the one emerging among Tukanoans, we may find our theory and method much enhanced.