Matthew's Journal Archive
June 5th: Sao Paulo
I am in a small complex that seems to be sponsored by a Chamber of Commerce-type organization. They have a library and a bunch of other services that I haven't really checked out, since I went straight for the internet. It's a pretty slow connection, but one hour only costs 3 reais, which is about $1.20. Two cents a minute, not bad.
So, the night I arrived, the 3rd, I caught a taxi to the youth
hostel. It was all the way on the other side of Sao Paulo, and the taxi cost almost 30 bucks. By contrast, when I left the hostel the next day, I was able to ride the metro to the main bus station, Tiete, for about sixty cents, then catch an express bus to the airport that cost about six dollars. The hostel was great, you know the atmosphere: everyone travelling, many foreigners, a general sense of camaraderie and safety that negates the insecure feeling of travelling alone in a big city. The most important thing was that I
could lock up my stuff and go exploring. I caught the subway to the Avenida Paulista, which is the center of the Brazilian financial universe. (I managed to buy some generic cipro there, six 500 mg pills for 25 reais, about ten bucks.) I detoured off the avenue into a posh neighborhood of gated villa clusters, and saw the biggest "club" I ever saw, the venerable Clube Paulistano. It was a giant complex surrounded by high walls covered with climbing plants. Inside I could hear people playing tennis and talking and swimming. The thing covered about two blocks, very impressive. Later I went back to the avenue and checked out the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, where a ton of schoolkids and citizens in general thronged for the new exhibition of Renoir works--sketches, studies, paintings. There
were a couple very dreamy canvasses in that classic impress-ionist style that I liked, but I got through the whole thing in about 15 minutes. I had a much better time on the other floors seeing the permanent exhibits. They have some other famous impressionists--
Manet, Monet, for example, but my favorites were Hieronymus Bosch's 1500 painting, The Temptations of St. Anthony, Van Gogh's Stroll at Dusk (I might have the titles wrong, as much to my consternation they were given all in Portuguese) and some really neat 17th-18th century giant tapestries depicting the flora and fauna of the "New World." On another floor they had a lot of Brazilian art, including many recent photographs of Sao Paulo and regions in the country's northeast. It was strange to leave the museum and be confronted by the dirt, noise, rubble and grafitti of the city. It is quite like Mexico City in that
respect.
The flight north to Rio Branco was rather long and uneventful. I had an exit row with plenty of room to stretch out, but there were three stops before Rio Branco so I couldn't get much sleep, though I was very tired. I wished it was daytime so I could see more than just occasional lights here and there on the ground, surrounded by immensities of black.
Arriving in Rio Branco at last, it was nearly 2 AM local time, which I think is actually an hour behind East Coast time. The humidity and temperature reminded me of Charlottesville in August, and today I know that it's worse! It's only 9:15 AM, and already almost 80 it seems, and very humid. A man on the plane who travels on business a lot in the region recommended a nice, simple hotel for me. It's called the "Triangulo"and features a nice BBQ area which can be totally enclosed in glass for air conditioning. The room is pretty rudimentary, but relatively recently constructed and clean, and has an air conditioner. The best is, it's only ten dollars a night.
On the taxi ride into town the driver asked me if I was in New York on 9/11, if I had any relatives who died. It seemed weird to zoom along a tropical highway talking about Osama bin Laden with this Brazilian guy who's probably never left this region. The conversation shifted to my travel plans, and when I said I was going to Boca do Acre he asked if I came to check out the Santo Daime. Obviously he knew of it, so I tried to find out what "local opinion" was of this "cult." He didn't have much interesting to say on the topic, but when I asked him directly if people thought it was bad or weird, he denied it, saying that it was "famous" (and therefore good?) because it brings foreigners here. (He also tried to convince me to call him
up today to go and visit the old homes of the church, which are near the city of Rio Branco, but since the cab ride from the airport was about 15 bucks, I think I'll pass!) He himself said he had no experience with the church, and had only dropped people off there in the past.
Today I want to explore the city a little bit, see if I can find a map. There is a university here, and maybe it's my duty to go there, even though they don't seem to have an anthropology department, or even a sociology one for that matter. I plan to buy a bus ticket for tomorrow to Boca do Acre, which is about 240 km from here, and according to the taxi driver takes about 2 1/2 or 3 hours on a dirt road to reach. I don't know about you, but 100 km an hour sounds pretty fast to me for a bus to travel on a dirt road. In any case, tomorrow I will go there, and Friday I will meet Thiago, the person who is supposed to meet me and take me to Mapia by boat.
I only slept about 3 hours last night, but right now I'm too excited to be really sleepy. My health has been good, and my teeth feel fine.
Once in Mapia I hope to be able to post occasional messages, as I know that Thiago has Internet access. Best wishes to all.
June 6th, Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil
Yesterday was an interesting one. I met an American while walking the streets, looking for a place that sells maps of the city (apparently none can be found). The guy studies environment and agroforestry at University of Florida, where I almost went, although he did a masters in anthropology. We sat in the shade of a plaza and drank cold Brazilian beer for a couple hours, talking it up. U Fl is so entrenched in this area that they have a house they rent in Rio Branco, and apparently a number of local government officials are alumni. As we sat there, a scruffy hippy guy in a tam approached us, looking like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. He wanted to sell us pot (we declined, of course). We did have a nice conversation later about Santo Daime, and I was able to suss out some of the politics of the local branches of the church from him. It was
like a real ethnographic interview (I obtained informed consent, of course).
This morning I went to visit the Museu da Borracha, the Museum of Rubber. There they had a room devoted to local Indians, including basketry and pottery, as well as feather headdresses and hallucinogenic powder-snuffing paraphernalia. Another room was devoted to a mock-up of an old-time rubber camp, with all the tools used in the extraction process (they cut the tree and let the raw latex drip into cups). It also had giant balls of rubber, smoked over a fire and stamped. Really cool. In another room there was a display of objects associated with the Santo Daime church: rattles, the special patriarchal cross they use, the outfits they wear, even a bottle of Daime and samples of its component plants. Super cool. A very nice woman showed me around and explained things to me, even before I told her I was an anthropologist. That admission may be what got me access to the newspaper and book holdings upstairs, which date back to the 1930s. Acre seems to be kind of like California in the sense that it was formed in the rubber boom, just as our native state
really took off with the gold rush. Its also like Texas in that it was an independent state for awhile, and takes some pride in that history. This year Acre is celebrating its 100th birthday.
In just a couple of hours Im going to take a bus to Boca do Acre, a small town of about 20,000, and from there I will head to Mapi tomorrow. Originally I planned to spend almost all my time there, but now I am thinking that I would like to explore other communities, possibly one to the west of there on the the Rio Juru, where the church is active. I also plan to return here to Rio Branco to explore the current incarnations of the communities that spawned the church in the mid 1900s, which are very nearby. I also want to get a better sense of the region as a whole, and find out what other kinds of documentary resources are available besides the rubber museum. Well see how it goes.
Thanks to all who left messages in the guestbook: I appreciate your thoughts and your support.
June 8th, Mapia, Amazonas
Hello all,
Matt phoned this morning at 8:00 (7am Mapia time). He made it to the community in Mapia last night and is staying at the local hotel. His voice was incredibly clear, vibrant and excited; however, he sounded like Howard Cossell, enunciating every syllable so that I was sure to hear his every word. “You would love all the strong women that live here. Everyone is awake and watching the football game (Brazil vs. China). Today, I am going to try to find a place to stay with a family where I can work instead of pay for lodging. There is so much to tell, too much to say over the phone, especially since I don’t know how much this is costing. I don’t know when I will have access to the internet, just know I love you and I will be in touch when I can.
June 11th, Mapia
"It has been less than a week since I arrived here in Mapi, but it seems like a long time. I have been in the hotel until now, but it looks like today I finally arranged another place to stay. I also went today to the reception,where they receive and screen visitors. Both here and in Boca do Acre at the hotel I had to fill out a sheet and have a conversation about my intentions in coming. They clearly have some concern about people coming here and having personal or psychological problems that are difficult to deal with. I think that I passed their test as it were, and was warmly received.I have been trying to walk around the village a bit more, its pretty spread out. There is a part right in the middle, where people usually arrive on the igarap and where the stores are. They have had a general store and a couple other regular businesses for about five years. Only within the last year or so have they had generators and electric lights, which please the locals but probably not so much the visitors. Away from the center there are lots of houses here and there is clearings in the forest. I am thinking of using my compass to try to make a decent map of the main routes. It seems like a good,anthro- pological thing to do. In the hotel where Ive been staying there is a nice woman who lives in Tabatinga, up the Amazon from naus. She is not fardada, or initiated in the church, but she knows a lot of things and likes to chat. Her son is the owner of the hotel. As there are several important trabalhos, or works coming up, everyone is gearing up and more visitors are arriving. I have met two Germans, one older and one a young, rather crazy and disrespectful traveller. It is interesting to hear about their motivations for coming. The woman in the reception clearly wants me to have a good and useful experience, even expressing that for her, she didn't think I should hang out with a lot of english speakers. I agreed that I should really get to know the community, but I told her that I wanted to have different experiences to get a wider perspective. There are many people here from Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries. It is kind of open in a certain way. Its weird, though, to be here and walk around in the forest, to see that it is really like a little rural town, and then to think of the trip to get here and how isolated it really is in a certain way. I can imagine us living here for a year and liking it very much. Like I said, I think you would really like some of the women here. They have classes about the Medicine of the Forest, where you can learn use of herbs and roots and things from a woman who learned, apparently, from some Indians.
Thiago showed me that he has American Beauty on CD, so I asked
him to put it on. Hearing it makes me feel a little more at home. Overall, things have been good, but of course there are times when I long for the familiarity of home. Last night I walked to another hostel with the older German guy(Wolfgang, of all things), and when we left I saw some mushrooms growing in a cow patty that turned blue when I broke the stems. (We didn't eat them, but I was excited.) The sky at night here is so beautiful, the Milky Way looks like a cloud in the sky! Also the birds of the forest make really neat calls; yesterday there were two birds singing, one that sounded like he was cat-calling like a construction worker, and the other would blow three rising tones, and the sounds seemed to mesh like the birds were listening to each other, and playing together. We discovered the other night, looking at the calendar here in Thiagos house, that the full moon falls on the night of the St. John trabalho, which is the 23rd-24th overnight. That and the St. Anthony work on the 12th are some of the most important of the year. The St. Anthony will be a really big deal this time, too, because the man who wrote that Portuguese book I have, Bena Padrinho, has just died, and is apparently being brought here. There is also going to be a regular official trabalho on the 15th. These are held every 15th and 30th. In July, the widow of Padrinho Sebastio has her birthday, a bit before yoursmaybe as close as the 8th. I am planning to stay about a month here, then spend 10 days or two weeks here and in Boca do Acre. I dont think I will be able to go to Juru, that other river where I told you Padrinho Alfredo is establishing a new community (turns out its his birthplace), because you have to fly to Cruzeiro do Sul, apparently, then float down the river. Late yesterday and early this morning, I went to the casa do feitio, the house of production (I cant think of a better translation just now). There, you have an area where you sit on a little wooden seat, a trunk of wood, and clean the jagube, the vine, scraping it with a knife. From there you take it to the pounding room. That is very special, it has a separate entrance, and the young men who pound the vine there sit in two rows facing each other, raising the hammer high and hitting it simultaneously on the block. This sets the time, and they sing hymns, like work songs. There was one quite charis-matic and strong fellow there, a teacher of capoeira, who really made the hymns hit home. I pounded for a while, but the mallets they use are heavy hard wood, and they give you blisters quickly if you dont have calluses. I must get going, as I have to still move my things to the new place, which is near Thiagos house but far from the village center.
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