As the Euromamo visiting party reached the edge of the village, a group of Soumamo came out to meet them, dressed in nice fiber plant clothes. They smiled broadly, waved their arms, and shouted a hearty welcome. The women seemed particularly happy to see the visitors.
“It looks like this will be a congenial meeting,” observed Rick.
“Very congenial,” replied John. “Intermarriage builds bonds, as you will see.”
“Who will translate?”
“No one. Close contact over the years has solved most of our communication problems. We’ll talk in English mainly with some Soumamo words interspersed. Almost everyone is bilingual, although the Soumamo do speak English with a distinctive accent.”
“Do you have any problems with the Soumamo?” asked Rick.
“They’re minor these days but, right now, you may be a problem,” he said with a faint smile.
“Me?” asked Rick. “I didn’t mean to cause concern.”
“It’s not your fault. You see, the Soumamo tend to be suspicious of outsiders, especially if the outsiders have customs or opinions that are foreign to them. You will be regarded as an outsider at the beginning, but the Leader will vouch for you and that’ll encourage them to accept you. With that said, I recommend that you avoid commenting on politics or religion. They’re minefields in civil conversation.”
The Soumamo greeted every Euromamo by name and patted them on the outsides of their arms. The man who seemed to be the leader of the Soumamo noticed Rick, causing his brow to furrow.
“I don’t think I know you,” he said in accented English as he gestured toward Rick with his hands.
He looked toward the Leader, obviously wanting more information.
“This is Rick,” said the Leader, smiling. “He’s come from outside society and is living with us for a spell. As we’ve gotten to know him, he’s become like family to us. When you get to know him, we think that he’ll become like family to you, too.”
The Leader motioned to Rick to step forward to greet the Soumamo leader, who looked him over one last time.
“So…like family. Then he’s good with us. I’m sure we’ll like getting to know you,” the Soumamo leader grunted at Rick. “You’ve a nice head. No cockamamie ideas inside, I hope,” he said with a jovial smile as he clapped Rick on the outsides of his arms.
After the greeting, Rick returned to his spot and asked John quietly, “So he’s the Soumamo leader?”
“The Soumamo have numerous leaders. He’s the head of the most prominent family in this area and controls the fiber plants that his family produces. He and the other Soumamo family heads are referred to as Large Fathers, and together they hold social and economic power. There’s no government above the Large Fathers. The closest they have to government is when the Large Fathers get together and discuss issues affecting the whole group, such as warfare.”
“Do Soumamo women own the group’s property like they do among the Euromamo?”
“Oh, no. Allowing women to own the society’s property—and have the power and status that goes along with that—would be shocking to the Soumamo. Men run this society.”
He paused.
“Of course, the Soumamo men often remind us, with a smile, that their women exercise considerable influence behind the scenes.”
The members of the two groups continued to smile, chat, and gesture while they strolled to the heart of the small cluster of huts that was their village. There, awaiting them, was a larger group of Soumamo who had come from surrounding villages. Everyone gathered around four twenty-foot-long tables. The children gathered around two smaller tables nearby. On the tables were arrayed bowls and trays of wonderful smelling food that also looked delicious: barbecued peccaries and monkeys, fat brazed eels, fish filets, and a wide assortment of vegetables and fruits, many of which Rick did not recognize. Hot bread, fresh from the oven, steamed in baskets. This was a true feast, sumptuous in every regard. It had doubtless taken great effort to gather and cook it.
When everyone had found a place around the tables, the Large Father stood and formally greeted his guests in a strong resonant voice, “Welcome, dear friends and neighbors, the Euromamo. It’s always a special treat for us when you come to visit because we get to see so many of our kinfolk who have married into your group and their children, and you get to see your kinfolk who live with us. It seems that so much happens in between our meetings that we always have a lot of catching up to do. As you can see, our lovely womenfolk and their daughters have fixed some mighty tempting dishes for us so, without further ado, I’ll stop my yapping so we can get to eating.”
“Is the Leader going to speak?” Rick asked quietly.
“No, not now. Her remarks will come at the end of the meal when she thanks the Soumamo for their hospitality,” replied John.
“Although the Soumamo are outgoing, there’s a formality to the gathering, isn’t there?”
“Yes, quite a bit. The Soumamo have certain rules for social behavior and like to adhere to them in these meetings. They also judge themselves and others by their adherence to their rules. Before we learned them, they used to sneer at us privately for our crudeness of manners, such as our direct way of speaking. In their minds, we were too concerned with economic improvement and not enough concerned with social graces.”
“Before we start eating,” the Large Father added, “I ask our religious leader, the Pontificator, to offer a few words of prayer.”
The Pontificator, though corpulent, was very neatly dressed in fiber cloth. He rose slowly and grunted to clear his throat.
“Let us take a moment to thank the Great Spirit for his blessing of the food before us and for his goodness to us. Please bow your heads.”
The Soumamo closed their eyes and became very quiet. The Euromamo also became quiet but Rick noticed that most of them did not close their eyes.
“Great Spirit, we gather today with our dear friends, the Euromamo, to celebrate our ties with them. On this happy occasion, we want to give thanks to you for the food you’ve provided for our nourishment and for the goodness you bestow on us daily as we strive to worship you better and to live our lives in righteousness and devotion. Amen.”
John whispered to Rick, “As you may have gathered, the Soumamo are more religious than we are.”
“So with our thanks done,” said the Large Father, “let’s do some serious eating before this gets cold.”
As Rick started to sit, John caught his elbow to restrain him. All the men remained standing until the women were seated, then the men sat. After everyone was settled, the conversation resumed at full volume while the diners spooned out the food from the bowls and passed them along. As they emptied the serving dishes, attendants standing near the tables removed them and placed full dishes in their place. The attendants didn’t participate in the small talk that occupied the table. In eating, Rick followed his usual rule of sampling freely but wouldn’t inquire about what he’d eaten until the following day…after he’d digested the meal. The monkey pieces, Rick recognized from having eaten them before. These had been fried in animal fat and tasted wonderful. As he chewed a piece, he almost forgot he was eating a biological cousin.
“Not very good for the vascular system,” Rick commented quietly to John.
“Right, but they’re very tasty. Why don’t you enjoy the meal and worry about your vascular system tomorrow?” counseled John.
“I’ll do that,” said Rick, smiling broadly as he stuffed another piece in his mouth.
“That dish is not as strange as you may think,” pointing to a large platter. “That’s rock-salmon and very good. Catfish, I think, you call it…well, it’s a relative of the catfish. Have some. After all, we want to be good guests, don’t we?” said John, smiling as he took some with a whitish sauce. “There are butter beans, jacket potatoes, beet roots, and maize cakes. Those black eye beans are delicious and a particular favorite of the Soumamo. The treacle in that pitcher is tasty on them, I’ve found.”
“Some of this looks strangely familiar,” mused Rick. “Like I ate growing up.”
“Usually, there’s several peccary joints. Yes, over there on that platter,” John said, pointing.As Rick sampled more of the dishes, they all were delicious, but he especially liked the fried ones. He tried to overhear as much of the surrounding conversations as he could. They talked a lot about kin, with the Soumamo inquiring about everyone they knew who lived among the Euromamo. The Soumamo not only asked about names and activities, but also delved into the kinship relationships between the villages. It seemed like everyone was a cousin, or a cousin of a nephew of whoever they were talking about, or related in some other way by kinship or by marriage. The Soumamo were particularly adept at working through the intricate relationships and describing them accurately. For their part, the Euromamo reciprocated with inquiries as best they could.
“Now isn’t that a joy to hear about what James is doing,” one Soumamo woman gushed to the Euromamo woman sitting next to her. “First cousin once removed, I think he is to you. Anyway, I always knew that young man was going to do wonderful things, just like his daddy did. Of course, in all fairness, I don’t want to overlook his lovely mother. You know, she was related to me through my grandfather. Her grandfather and mine were brothers, Soumamo, of course. Her grandfather married into the Euromamo and then had a big family. Six kids, in all. Well, one of them, the second daughter, married Phillip, his name was and, as you may already know, she’s the grandmother of the young man, James, so he’s got a little Soumamo in him to be sure,” she beamed proudly. “I’m glad he’s turning out to be a good Euromamo these days.”
Before Rick could work through the relationships, the Soumamo woman turned to him across the table with a beaming smile, “Rick, you don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you? Now, what brought you so deep into the rain forest?”
“I am an anthropologist. I’m living with the Euromamo while I do my research.”
“I’ll be. I’m not sure I know exactly what that is, but I do know that you’re in good hands with the Euromamo. They’re good at taking care of themselves and sharing what they know,” she commented cheerily. “You’ll have a nice stay with them, I’m sure.”
“That’s good to hear.”
After a brief pause, she continued, “That must have been some adventure getting up the river, I’ll bet. Did you come all the way up here because you have kinfolks among the Euromamo? You know, they’re always going to the coast.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have any kin among the Euromamo,” said Rick, “although they’ve been so friendly to me that I feel like kin by now,” echoing the Leader’s earlier comments about him and hoping it would strike a responsive chord in the Soumamo woman.
“Well, I’ll bet you do!” said the woman. “The Euromamo are such nice folks.”
“The Soumamo have a lot of Euromamo relatives that have come here today?” asked Rick, trying to make small talk.
“Lordy, yes,” she said.
She then proceeded to go around the table, discussing each one in her musical voice, smiling, explaining how she or some other Soumamo was related, adding personal details all the while. With a few of them, she had to pause to think about the relationships but ultimately got them right to her satisfaction. Rick listened politely, smiling and nodding as she went along. It was pleasant, even charming.
As the last dish of the meal, the attendants brought out a sweet dessert pie covered with Brazil nuts, which was absolutely delicious. Rick had never imagined that such a dish could exist in the rain forest. While everyone was finishing dessert, the Leader stood and graciously thanked the Large Father for the warm hospitality the Soumamo had extended, giving special thanks to the women who had prepared the food. She added that the Euromamo looked forward to returning the hospitality when the Soumamo would visit them next year.
The Large Father responded, “I know that’ll be fun. We’ll be there.”
With that, the diners began to stand up, all the while continuing to chat with one another. The Great Father and the Leader had been talking constantly and Rick suspected they had discussed many things. After a few minutes, they moseyed away from the table together, still conversing. The other diners did the same, walking off in small groups with those who sat nearby them at the meal.
“The talking doesn’t seem to end,” commented Rick.
“It’s incessant,” said John. “We’ll be here a while yet. This is the portion of the meeting when we hope to get some substantive matters discussed with the Soumamo, especially between the Leader and the Large Father.”
Rick discretely listened in on some of the other conversations, but he got the sense that they were mainly conversations among close friends and family so he moved quietly to the periphery out of respect for their privacy. One Soumamo woman saw him standing alone and came over to engage him in small talk, which she dotted here and there with references to cousins. In response to a general question from Rick on kinship, she described a system that Rick recognized as preferential marriage to cross-cousins. Interestingly, she said there were fewer preferential marriage rules now than there were in the old days although, she assured him, everyone still knows who their cross-cousins are.
“In the old days, the transportation was so bad,” she explained, “I mean, you had to marry somebody and cousins seem to be the only ones around.”
Finally, the two groups had talked themselves out and the Euromamo began to gather for the return trip. When everyone was assembled, there was a final round of chatting before they left. It was as if the Soumamo were, as a last act of graciousness, dragging the meeting out as a way of saying they had enjoyed their visit. The pace of the walk back was leisurely, in large part because of the quantity of food they’d eaten. Rick made a point to walk near the Leader so he could engage her in conversation and learn about what had transpired between her and the Large Father.
“You and your host seemed to talk a lot,” Rick observed, inviting a response.
“We said a lot of words, you’re right,” the Leader replied. “Some of it was productive, but other parts weren’t.”
“The Large Father seemed so outgoing and hospitable. I expected the two of you would have a free exchange of ideas.”
“Yes, the Large Father and the Soumamo villagers are always hospitable, more so than any other group we visit.”
“Yet you seem to be unsatisfied with the discussions. Were there problems?” asked Rick.
“Not many, I have to admit. It’s more a matter of our different approaches to the future. Our economies have become so intertwined that if the Soumamo prospered more, we would prosper more, too. It’s not that they’re impoverished, of course. They live well compared to almost all other groups in the rain forest. The problem is they insist on focusing their economic efforts on growing more and more fiber plants. It’d be beneficial to us and them if they diversified their economy.”
“The Soumamo produce a lot of fiber and you buy a lot of fiber,” said Rick. “That sounds like a good economic relationship for both of you.”
“Yes, viewed narrowly, it is, but a lot of the value of their crop ends up in our hands when we sell them finished products. It would be better for both our societies if the Soumamo made their own agricultural tools, for example, rather than buying them from us. After they satisfied their own needs, they could trade the extra agricultural tools they made with neighboring groups. They might even get into processing their fibers into finished products. They could make and trade ceramic pots, baskets, and leather goods, as other examples.”
“If they became diversified with pots, they would compete with your pot-makers and take away some of your business, wouldn’t they?”
“Not really. Both of us would have more pots and they’d have a stronger, more prosperous economy so they’d be able to buy more of the other things we make. Our economies would feed off each another, resulting in higher levels of prosperity for both groups. Our soci
eties are so intertwined that we don’t fear the competition. As it is, we share our inventions with them but they don’t produce an equivalent number of inventions to share with us. They aren’t very interested in making finished products or discovering new ones.”
“I see. I take it that you’ve discussed this with them.”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t they do it?”
“To put it simply, they love growing fiber plant. The Large Fathers are big fiber plant growers and they dominate the small villages where they live. Over time, their lifestyle—centered on growing fiber plants—has become the lifestyle to which all Soumamo aspire. Although there’s not much central authority, the Large Fathers have effective power and they set the cultural values.”
“Hopefully their attitudes will change over time,” said Rick.
“Perhaps, but the Soumamo attachment to fiber plant growing and agriculture runs deep. They’ve pursued it fervently for over two centuries.”
“At least your relations with them are peaceful.”
“They are now but, over a century ago, we had a major war with the Soumamo over their fiber plant cultivation. Not a paint dart battle, mind you, but a big, violent war.”
“A war over growing a plant? How did that happen?”
“It was the biggest war that we have ever had with any group and a great tragedy for both of us. At least some good came out of it as it was the main inspiration for establishing the Rules of Warfare to resolve differences through paint dart battles.”
“Tell me more about the war.”
“The Soumamo are somewhat more warlike than we are. During their wars with other groups, they had a very bad practice of capturing opposing warriors and villagers and making them labor to grow their fiber plants. Admittedly, there were many small fiber plant growers among the Soumamo who didn’t use forced labor, but all of the larger growers did and they ran the society.”
“The captured warriors were prisoners of war, weren’t they?” asked Rick.
The Blue Disc Page 33
