Dugout Canoes in Bahia: An essay in ergology

• Autor(a) principal: Pina-Cabral, Joao
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Chan, Mónica
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/47872
• topic: Ergology; Canoes; Carpentry; Environment; Mangroves; Bahia (Brazil); Gender relations; Personhood; Slavery

This is a book about one of the more useful, durable and elegant tools that I have ever encountered: the dugout canoe. In Bahia, these are preferentially made of an indigenous type of mimosa tree that has only survived because its shade served as excellent protection for cocoa bushes. Now that cocoa prices have fallen and landowners are turning over their lands to raising cattle, the environmental disaster resulting from the clearing of the original forests cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, vinhático wood is so resistant that dugout canoes will be floating in the coastal mangroves of Bahia for nearly a century after the last tree has been felled in the hillsides to the interior. The romantic aspect of this craft charmed me as soon as I arrived in Bahia in 2004. On the one hand, they seemed primitive; on the other, they were irreplaceable for the transport of things and people in the quiet, dark waters of the mangroves. For the fishermen and their women, dugout canoes transformed into a vast nursery what would otherwise be an environment inimical to human occupation. They are fast, especially when rigged with sails; they are safe, because they will always float even when riddled with holes; they are solid, as the many submerged logs in the mangroves hardly damage them; they withstand infinite repair. In turn, they need to be looked after: they have to be taken out of the water regularly to dry and they have to be repaired every five to ten years by a canoe carpenter. These carpenters and the work they carry out with great simplicity – oblivious of the fact that they are indeed master sculptors – were the main impetus for writing this book. The photographs that my wife Mónica Chan took during my long conversations with them eventually suggested the shape the book would take. A vision of the world inhabited by these carpenters and their fellow fishermen began to emerge from my growing familiarity with their lives and their families. It is a world of people who consider 8 themselves to be “weak”, in the sense of being unprotected when faced with the force of those who control the land, the waters, the markets, and the government. I learnt that, for them, canoes and fishing constituted a reserve of dignity and autonomy. In fact, as a foreigner, something important was initially obscure to me: the imminence of captivity. Eventually, I came to understand the reason why scholars who studied the peasant populations of Northeastern Brazil (Otávio Velho or Klass Woortmann, for example) so strongly stressed that the lives of the “weak” were constantly moulded by the possibility of loss of life and freedom at the hands of the “strong.” As time passed, I understood that fishing was in fact a palliative measure (quebra-galho, as Seu Otávio put it), a margin for the negotiation of dignity. As soon as I started to add up their earnings, it became clear that, in our contemporary consumer society, there is no permanent way for the “weak” to escape deprivation and salaried urban work (the misery of captivity, as they put it). Mangroves, canoes and fishing provide reserves of freedom within a world where capital pulls in one direction and work in the contrary direction and where you cannot ever compensate with work for a lack of capital. Then, I asked: in the end, who is it that provides this palliative measure? Who is it that permits the weak to procrastinate the inevitable indignity of servile work? The answer dawned slowly, for it was rather unexpected: it is the Brazilian state, to the extent that it does not allow the expropriation by the “strong” of the mangrove, the rivers, most of the beaches and most of the sea. These are the doors to freedom that make fishing and mollusc gathering possible. Furthermore, although the state (with the corruption that inevitably accompanies it) validates the expropriation of the poor by the rich, the same state also makes available a series of services that considerably moderate the servitude of the poor in Brazil: the fishing syndicate, the national health institute, the Misericórdia system, the poverty subsidies, etc. In this balance, police, politics, courts, schools and churches are all swords that cut both ways, as they simultaneously protect the “weak” and validate the “strong.” The book has a male point of view. Even if a woman took most of the photos, and even if most men who have a mother, a wife or a daughter participate in the conditions of femininity, the fact is that canoes are a man’s thing and a book about canoes will necessarily be a book about a masculine world. As it happens, this turns out to be one of the unavoidable aspects of the ethnographic method: as I focus on one field, I necessarily obscure all others. And so we reach the Postscript, where I try to capture in very general terms some thoughts about ethnography and, in particular, the study of the tools with which people mediate their relation to the world: ergology. I was inspired in this by the thinking of some philosophers (in particular Donald Davidson) as well as by my own schooling in social anthropology, but I was also inevitably inspired by Portugal’s ethnological tradition. At each turn, I was reminded of Jorge Dias’ ploughs, Veiga de Oliveira’s water mills, Benjamim Enes Pereira’s masks, and Ruy Cinatti’s Timorese houses. I have always believed in the possibility of infusing ergology with new life by using the new means now available to us. This book is a contribution towards the renewal of that tradition.