Charles L. Briggs has been carrying out research in the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela since the mid-1980s. Throughout this time he has developed a politically committed folkloristic enterprise with a focus on the recording and analysis of the expressive traditions of the Warao, an indigenous group that lives in the marshlands and surrounding areas. Poéticas de vida en espacios de muerte (Poetics of Life in Spaces of Death), published in Ecuador in 2008, an outcome of Briggs’ more than twenty years of work, is a theoretically sound book, informed as the author acknowledges by both native and academic conceptual notions. It sheds light on the interrelationship between expressive culture and sociohistorical contexts through a thorough study of an array of indigenous genres in their performance context.
In the introduction, Briggs gives a striking portrait of the living conditions of the Delta’s indigenous populations; economic exploitation, political subordination, lack of access to basic services, and preventable diseases are the tangible consequences of over 500 years of colonialism. One of the utmost expressions of such a state of affairs was the cholera epidemic that in 1992–93 killed 500 Warao people. This situation, showing the disregard, to say the least, of state policies towards the indigenous groups, speaks for itself. However, Briggs argues that those facts are only one part of the picture. He criticizes the work of earlier anthropologists who have rendered the indigenous discourses about the state invisible, as if the Warao were incapable of making their own reflections on their social situation. He thus draws attention to the fact that the Warao Indians do speak for themselves. They have been in dialogue—albeit on unequal terms, still a dialogue—with colonizers, missionaries, politicians, businessmen, and anthropologists, to name the most conspicuous ones. Therefore, they speak very convincingly when they engage in the performance of verbal art expressions. In this process, which involves the deployment of poetic resources, they elaborate on their living conditions and are consequently able to resist oppression.
Briggs recorded and analyzed a wide range of Warao traditional genres: curing songs, ritual wailing, gossip narratives. He also addressed the narratives that circulate widely among the Warao and tell alternative stories to the ones told about them by the media and the state bureaucracy. These expressive forms both index the situations of structural violence in which the indigenous populations find themselves and shape artful descriptions of them.
This book, which the author describes as “an ethnography of how power and culture are created and contested,” can be read as having different but converging themes. One of them starts with the study of the performance of traditional genres and goes on to address wider social and political issues. In this respect, the analysis of the performance of certain genres, like shamanic songs in different instances—visits, rituals, festivals—as “processes of decontextualization and recontextualization,” allows for a comprehensive and historicized understanding of Warao culture. Thus, in one of the chapters (chapter 4, “Comunicabilidad y poética en el mito Warao y la canción shamánica”), Briggs deals with mythical narratives and shamanic songs in the context of the community. In a later chapter (chapter 7, “La política de la autoridad discursiva en la investigación sobre la invención de la tradición”), he goes on to elaborate on the performance of songs and dances in festivals that take place in sites removed from the community. In those venues traditional expressions are performed for non-indigenous audiences as components of the multiplicity of cultures that compose the nation-state. Having analyzed sensitively the meaning of Warao creative expressions in their original context, Briggs can later knowledgeably address the politics of culture involved in such renderings, where songs and dances are calibrated to represent the indigenous “difference” within the limits of the regimentation of the nation-state institutions. Hence he discusses the notions implicit in the idea of the “invention of tradition” and their consequences. Such discussions are relevant not only for the Warao but for all the groups whose traditions are “invented” by cultural activists and/or deconstructed by non-native academics.
The differential access to power based on gender within the Warao community is also contested. In chapter 5 (“Sentimientos personales y voces polifónicas en el lamento ritual de las mujeres Warao: Música y poética en un discurso crítico y colectivo”), Briggs observes that when women compose and perform lament songs, following the death of a relative, they intertextually reframe earlier discourse and are able to question the authority of men.
Another theme of the book is Briggs’ own personal and academic journeys. In them, his intellectual pursuits fuse with his political concern for the well-being of the populations he studies. His understanding that global macro policies have an important bearing on the life of small, isolated communities and his personal life are entwined to provide a narrative of the process through which he reached an insightful perception of the Warao complex sociocultural life. All these elements, present throughout the volume, are very clearly summarized in chapter 8 (“Teorías de la conspiración: Ciencia, escala y economía política en las narrativas de los tiempos del cólera”).
The publishing of Briggs’ works in book form in Spanish and in Latin America is another instance of the conceptual framing present in each of the chapters: the circulation of discourse and its reframing in different contexts as a constituent element of social dynamics, and language in action as a product and at the same time a producer of language ideologies. The volume presents Warao discourse analyzed and recontextualized in the work of a gringo ethnographer—as Briggs calls himself—to be read in the official language of the Venezuelan nation-state.
One of this book’s key concepts is performativity, the capability of discourse not only to represent, but to create new realities. Poética de vida en espacios de muerte, a brilliant example of language in action, puts forward a well-documented and well-analyzed study. It is an ethnographic account that acknowledges not only the oppression but also the resistance accomplished through resort to the agentive power brought about by the performance of poetic expressions. In its appeal to a wide and eclectic audience of Warao people, other indigenous populations, criollos, scholars, and maybe even state administrators, this book raises challenging questions that herald sharp, promising rejoinders.
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[Review length: 1037 words • Review posted on October 13, 2009]