"Becoming Funai"

A Kanamari Transformation

Luiz Costa

The Kanamari, a Katukina-speaking people from the western edge of Brazilian Amazonia, say that they are becoming Funai. Funai is the acronym of the Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indian Foundation), the Brazilian government agency responsible for the tutelage of indigenous people in the country. "We are becoming Funai" (Funai-pa adik [anin] tyo; Port: estamos virando Funai) is a statement that the Kanamari make in a variety of settings: when explaining to the anthropologist the historical events that brought them to their present predicament, when contrasting the past to the present in discussions among themselves, or when speaking to government agents about their current projects and hopes for the future. "Becoming Funai" marks a quality of the "present" (bati in Kanamari) or "recent times" (bati nahan ti). But becoming Funai is not restricted to discourse. Some Kanamari have effectively sought and obtained employment in the agency, others have tattooed the word "Funai," or some word or insignia associated with the agency or the federal government, on their arms or chests (see figure 1.1).

Quite a few Kanamari wear clothing or caps displaying Funai crests, regardless of whether or not they have worked for the agency. One village had a large sign by the riverfront with the words "Funai Community" written in capital letters for all who approached the village to see. In most Kanamari villages, people have stopped working in their gardens or procuring food on Sunday because (as they say) "Funai does not work on Sundays." Many Kanamari are named after employees of the agency who have passed through their villages, and a few are named after a rankthat they associate with the agency's hierarchy (e.g., "General" or "Capita," a shortened form for capitão, "captain") or after one of the acronyms of agencies that the Kanamari associate with Funai (e.g., "SUCAM," the "Superintendence for Public Health Campaigns").

"We are becoming Funai" is a common utterance, but it is not equally common for all Kanamari. It is more usually stated by men than by women, by young and mature men than by children or the elderly, and by those who have effectively obtained employment in government agencies or who intend to do so than by those who do not seek out such employment. In the Kanamari language, the phrase is constructed through the verbalizer suffix -pa, which indicates a present continuous aspect, a process of becoming and not the result or conclusion of the becoming (see Costa 2012:102). Becoming Funai by no means implies thatthe person who says it considers the Kanamari to have become Funai, only that they are on a trajectory that has that result as a desired outcome. Although the Kanamari may say of individuals that they "are Funai" (Funai anin) by virtue of their employment in the agency, I have never heard a Kanamari use a grammatical construct that implies that all of them are already Funai, and that they are no longer a part of an ongoing transformation.

The Kanamari also say that Funai is their chief. When speaking in Portuguese they often call Funai "our chief" (nosso chefe), but also nosso cacique or nosso tuxaua. Cacique and tuxaua are, respectively, words of Arawakan and Tupian origin that have been in circulation since colonial times and were adopted by both federal agencies and Amerindian peoples as part of the language of interethnic contact in Brazil. The same words — chefe, tuxaua, and cacique — are used by the Kanamari to refer to contemporary village chiefs, who are usually men who are the heads of localized kindred groups. Contemporary village chiefs seem to blend certain features of traditional styles of chieftainship, based on genealogy and coresidence, and more modern intermediary spokesperson positions that involve dealings with government and nongovernmental institutions (see Calavia Sáez 2010; Virtanen 2009). If we restrict analysis to how the Kanamari speak of chiefs when they use the Portuguese language, then Funai appears to be a more encompassing analogue of local chiefs, a sort of intervillage cacique of the Kanamari who, instead of being a native chief acting as a spokesperson in relations with non-native state agents, is a government agency that has been rendered a native chief.

While this analysis would be accurate, to a point, when we turn our attention to how Funai is discussed in the Kanamari language we can see a clear distinction between Funai, on the one hand, and village chefes, caciques, and tuxauas, on the other. In their own idiom, the Kanamari always refer to Funai as -warah, a term that has multiple meanings, one of which is to designate the traditional native chiefs of villages and multivillage agglomerations that I call subgroups. Hence both village and subgroup chiefs were traditionally called -warah, while today village chiefs are always called by foreign loan words, regardless of which language is spoken. In the hierarchy of chieftaincy, then, the term -warah is used exclusively to refer to Funai, which, as chief to all of the Kanamari, is equivalent to an inflated subgroup chief rather than a versatile village chief. Funai is the only contemporary analogue of the ancient subgroup chiefs, since there are no other figures that are approximated to subgroup chiefs as these existed prior to Kanamari submission to state tutelage. It is as if the presence of Funai among the Kanamari has fissioned a native concept that formerly...