1993 was the last year that I visited the Amazon Territory – now Amazon State – of Venezuela. I would have gone several more times if I had known what would happen to that unhappy country, but that is a regret I can live with. Perhaps it was for the best, anyway, for the capital city of that territory, Puerto Ayacucho, was already undergoing massive expansion. When I first went there in 1987, it had been a small town of a few thousand, inhabited by people from neighboring tribes of Indians who happened to like town life. Nearly everyone then still had a garden in the back yard (and nearly everyone had a back yard) and nearly all fished in the adjacent Orinoco River along the numerous raudales, or rapids that made the government set up a modern town here in the first place - as it was at the farthest point where one could navigate from the mouth of the river in even a small canoe. From there, all cargo had to be unloaded and then re-loaded on other boats for further ventures into the true wilderness – the upper Orinoco and the Ventuari and all those other tributaries that carried one into the heart of darkness.
I never stayed long in that town, but rather would take the bush planes into that heart of darkness, flying over the “green hell” that so many have tried and failed to penetrate, to get at my “red gold” – the less acculturated Native Americans of the interior. By 1993, little had changed in the interior, but the government had spent a lot of money and effort re-locating thousands of its poor to Puerto Ayacucho. This was done both to secure the territory from the drug-running revolutionaries on the Columbian side of the river, and to diminish the numbers of those most likely to riot in the population centers towards the coast. The result was an unhappy one for the town – now city – as most of those numbers came to live in government housing with little or few means for supporting themselves. By 1993, the town was uglier and much more dangerous. I was told that it only got worse over the following years.
Still, the heart of the territory as well as its capital was its indigenous people. Criollos – those generally of mixed race with a government-sponsored education (the vast majority of Venezuelans to the north) – ran much of its government, but everyone else was indio. That was why we – my fieldwork partner in anthropology and I – were there. Which is why the reaction of a friend of ours from the interior, Benjamin, to a certain social situation was so curious.
We were in Puerto Ayacucho buying food and trade items and gifts before our flight into “Mapana”, a tiny town 120 miles into the tropical forest from which we would travel into the smaller, isolated Indian villages by foot or canoe. Unlike in the recent past, the streets of Puerto Ayacucho were crowded with new people, some of them Europeans on a quest for wilderness, and we bumped along the sidewalks to check into stores or bargain with outdoor itinerants just as we would in the larger cities. In a few days we found ourselves with our goods in Mapana, visiting some people we had met up-river who had moved into the town, before setting off upriver ourselves. The matriarch of the bunch, a large woman who spoke her mind, was at first stand-offish to us. That did not last long.
“Why did you not say hello to Benjamin when you saw him in Puerto Ayacucho? He says it’s because he’s Indian and you did not want to be embarrassed by him in front of other Europeans.” She stood silently then, waiting for whatever feeble defense we might offer.
We were astounded and told her so. We had not seen him and if we had, would have acknowledged him gratefully – we were there for the Indians, after all, not for the approval of “blancos.”
She seemed to accept our account, but Benjamin himself was harder to convince when we saw him in the street (one of two streets) of Mapana a day later. “Benjamin,” I said with total sincerity, “how can you think that of us? We don’t care about that shit. If we had seen you, we would have been happy to talk with you or whatever. Why didn’t YOU say hello to US?”
He grumbled and hemmed and, after a while relented, but he would keep a certain chip on his shoulder. Weeks later we believed that we had figured it out as we swung in our hammocks far upriver. Benjamin had been the inevitable victim of his education.
He was one of the few true indios of the interior who had gotten a real education, one that went beyond the simple ‘three r’s.” He had gotten his license as a teacher, and was the pride of Mapana – a man who knew the secrets of the big, powerful world of the exterior. But in his education, he had learned that Indians had been mistreated historically and were still considered less than equal. Given his moderate economic as a school teacher, he understood his own position in the hierarchy of wealth and thought he understood exactly why he and his brothers were so poor. It was because of white, or criollo, prejudice. At the same time, he was taught (often by people like us) to be proud of his heritage and of the self-sufficiency of his rural relatives. This gave him an understandable complex, where he felt both inferior and superior, based on the knowledge and wisdom not of his people, but of those very outsiders who were teaching him how bad they were. And in that, he looked for and expected those “white” people – the whiter the worse – to think of him as a toy, a puppet, as something other than a full human. In that, they would – of course – avoid him on the street when in the presence of other “blancos.”
The whole world is full of that kind of twisted knowledge now, creating a whole lot of unhappy people. I do not have to enumerate. My point here is to say that Benjamin was clearly wrong about us, at least as far as our social interests were concerned, but that was of no importance. His pride had been both attacked and groomed so as to expect –and even thirst for – the rejection he thought we had given him. It fed his anger, his insecurity, and his native pride all at once. Not a good feeling, but one that gave the all-important sense of centrality and purpose to his self.
I would like to “tut-tut” over this incident and shake my head in paternalistic sorrow, but that would be delusion. Benjamin’s complex is also our own. On this day or hereabouts in Venezuela, those who still have some food are celebrating El Dia de los Tres Magos, or the Day of the Three Wise Men, which the Catholic Church calls the Feast of the Epiphany. It commemorates the well-known story of the three kings from the east who followed the star, and specifically, the day when they arrived at the manger to honor Christ. Previously, they had gone to Jerusalem to speak with King Herod, who bade them to find this new “king” and return to tell him where he was, so that he, too, could honor him. But that night, the magos were visited in a dream by an angel who told them to avoid Herod at all costs, for Herod was jealous of Jesus as the “King of the Jews” and would have him killed. When the wise men left Israel by a hidden route, Herod had all the male babies of Bethlehem slaughtered, so that he might remain king. This was not the first murder that he had committed to keep his crown, for he had also killed a wife and two sons for the same reason.
Herod was a very insecure man. So was Benjamin. So am I, and so are most of us. We learn quickly that we are not the best at everything, and so do not get all the praise. We would like to get all the praise. We would like to be the one and only king. As children we might be openly jealous of those others, but as adults we learn to cover this up with reason, ideology and excuses. Still, it all comes down to maintaining the self as King. The allegory of the Christ story is that Jesus did not come here to become king of the world that makes up our ego, which is what the Jews had long expected. Rather, the shift was made towards a far deeper, eternal world where spirit rules, and where there is more than enough of everything for everyone. All praise is for the eternal spirit, which in the end is all of us. Here, the roots of our sibling rivalry are finally dug up, or just ignored.
To many, it sounds like pie in the sky, but that’s only a child’s idea. The Kingdom of Heaven is already with us, as the Gospels repeatedly say. Spirit rules even here. We will not see it as long as we wish to remain kings of the shifting sands of our flattened world, where all power comes and goes with receding history. Where is Herod now? And who is Benjamin to me now but a memory, and we perhaps far less than that to him?
I never stayed long in that town, but rather would take the bush planes into that heart of darkness, flying over the “green hell” that so many have tried and failed to penetrate, to get at my “red gold” – the less acculturated Native Americans of the interior. By 1993, little had changed in the interior, but the government had spent a lot of money and effort re-locating thousands of its poor to Puerto Ayacucho. This was done both to secure the territory from the drug-running revolutionaries on the Columbian side of the river, and to diminish the numbers of those most likely to riot in the population centers towards the coast. The result was an unhappy one for the town – now city – as most of those numbers came to live in government housing with little or few means for supporting themselves. By 1993, the town was uglier and much more dangerous. I was told that it only got worse over the following years.
Still, the heart of the territory as well as its capital was its indigenous people. Criollos – those generally of mixed race with a government-sponsored education (the vast majority of Venezuelans to the north) – ran much of its government, but everyone else was indio. That was why we – my fieldwork partner in anthropology and I – were there. Which is why the reaction of a friend of ours from the interior, Benjamin, to a certain social situation was so curious.
We were in Puerto Ayacucho buying food and trade items and gifts before our flight into “Mapana”, a tiny town 120 miles into the tropical forest from which we would travel into the smaller, isolated Indian villages by foot or canoe. Unlike in the recent past, the streets of Puerto Ayacucho were crowded with new people, some of them Europeans on a quest for wilderness, and we bumped along the sidewalks to check into stores or bargain with outdoor itinerants just as we would in the larger cities. In a few days we found ourselves with our goods in Mapana, visiting some people we had met up-river who had moved into the town, before setting off upriver ourselves. The matriarch of the bunch, a large woman who spoke her mind, was at first stand-offish to us. That did not last long.
“Why did you not say hello to Benjamin when you saw him in Puerto Ayacucho? He says it’s because he’s Indian and you did not want to be embarrassed by him in front of other Europeans.” She stood silently then, waiting for whatever feeble defense we might offer.
We were astounded and told her so. We had not seen him and if we had, would have acknowledged him gratefully – we were there for the Indians, after all, not for the approval of “blancos.”
She seemed to accept our account, but Benjamin himself was harder to convince when we saw him in the street (one of two streets) of Mapana a day later. “Benjamin,” I said with total sincerity, “how can you think that of us? We don’t care about that shit. If we had seen you, we would have been happy to talk with you or whatever. Why didn’t YOU say hello to US?”
He grumbled and hemmed and, after a while relented, but he would keep a certain chip on his shoulder. Weeks later we believed that we had figured it out as we swung in our hammocks far upriver. Benjamin had been the inevitable victim of his education.
He was one of the few true indios of the interior who had gotten a real education, one that went beyond the simple ‘three r’s.” He had gotten his license as a teacher, and was the pride of Mapana – a man who knew the secrets of the big, powerful world of the exterior. But in his education, he had learned that Indians had been mistreated historically and were still considered less than equal. Given his moderate economic as a school teacher, he understood his own position in the hierarchy of wealth and thought he understood exactly why he and his brothers were so poor. It was because of white, or criollo, prejudice. At the same time, he was taught (often by people like us) to be proud of his heritage and of the self-sufficiency of his rural relatives. This gave him an understandable complex, where he felt both inferior and superior, based on the knowledge and wisdom not of his people, but of those very outsiders who were teaching him how bad they were. And in that, he looked for and expected those “white” people – the whiter the worse – to think of him as a toy, a puppet, as something other than a full human. In that, they would – of course – avoid him on the street when in the presence of other “blancos.”
The whole world is full of that kind of twisted knowledge now, creating a whole lot of unhappy people. I do not have to enumerate. My point here is to say that Benjamin was clearly wrong about us, at least as far as our social interests were concerned, but that was of no importance. His pride had been both attacked and groomed so as to expect –and even thirst for – the rejection he thought we had given him. It fed his anger, his insecurity, and his native pride all at once. Not a good feeling, but one that gave the all-important sense of centrality and purpose to his self.
I would like to “tut-tut” over this incident and shake my head in paternalistic sorrow, but that would be delusion. Benjamin’s complex is also our own. On this day or hereabouts in Venezuela, those who still have some food are celebrating El Dia de los Tres Magos, or the Day of the Three Wise Men, which the Catholic Church calls the Feast of the Epiphany. It commemorates the well-known story of the three kings from the east who followed the star, and specifically, the day when they arrived at the manger to honor Christ. Previously, they had gone to Jerusalem to speak with King Herod, who bade them to find this new “king” and return to tell him where he was, so that he, too, could honor him. But that night, the magos were visited in a dream by an angel who told them to avoid Herod at all costs, for Herod was jealous of Jesus as the “King of the Jews” and would have him killed. When the wise men left Israel by a hidden route, Herod had all the male babies of Bethlehem slaughtered, so that he might remain king. This was not the first murder that he had committed to keep his crown, for he had also killed a wife and two sons for the same reason.
Herod was a very insecure man. So was Benjamin. So am I, and so are most of us. We learn quickly that we are not the best at everything, and so do not get all the praise. We would like to get all the praise. We would like to be the one and only king. As children we might be openly jealous of those others, but as adults we learn to cover this up with reason, ideology and excuses. Still, it all comes down to maintaining the self as King. The allegory of the Christ story is that Jesus did not come here to become king of the world that makes up our ego, which is what the Jews had long expected. Rather, the shift was made towards a far deeper, eternal world where spirit rules, and where there is more than enough of everything for everyone. All praise is for the eternal spirit, which in the end is all of us. Here, the roots of our sibling rivalry are finally dug up, or just ignored.
To many, it sounds like pie in the sky, but that’s only a child’s idea. The Kingdom of Heaven is already with us, as the Gospels repeatedly say. Spirit rules even here. We will not see it as long as we wish to remain kings of the shifting sands of our flattened world, where all power comes and goes with receding history. Where is Herod now? And who is Benjamin to me now but a memory, and we perhaps far less than that to him?
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