Rock and clay were not the only surfaces on which identity was inscribed in the Oriente. As Jesuit chroniclers recorded, before the arrival of missionaries tattooing and body painting were widely practised, not just among the peoples in the mission area but also among those to the north, south, east and west of it. Several of the vessels Riester disinterred in the 1960s were engraved with a ‘face’ with what could be lines painted or tattooed on the cheeks (Fig.
2.4 shows schematic drawings of three of these).33 In the pre-Mission period altering the appearance of the body in this area would have identified it with a societal group and have been thought to make it more powerful and lift it into a zone of contact with the supernatural. The modified body was protected against malignant spirits as well as possessing some of their power through the combination of blood-letting, the pigments, the media – spittle, ash and charcoal – used to mix them or to fix the design and the designs themselves.34 The Chiquitos mission priest Julian Knogler was later to describe
30 Riester, Arqueología, p. 37 (Piso Firme, bowl); p. 91 (Puerto Rico, bowl); p. 41 (Piso Firme, bipod vessel).
31 Riester, Arqueología, pp. 54–5 (El Abasto); p. 91 (Puerto Rico).
32 Riester, Arqueología, p. 80.
33 Riester, Arqueología, p. 49.
34 R. Karsten, Civilisation of the South American Indians with Special Reference to Magic and Religion (London: Dawsons, 1968 [1926]), pp. 188–9.
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the modifications made to the bodies of indigenous peoples in his Relato,35 stating that they were evidence of the ‘strange nature’ of people of a ‘lower level of civilisation’.36 They were, rather, evidence of the cautious nature of these people, who had, over the course of time, evolved strategies they believed capable of thwarting supernatural caprice.
The only contemporaneous pictorial record of body painting practice in this area following the arrival of the Spanish is an engraving illustrating the Bavarian mercenary Ulrich Schmidl’s record of his soldiering in the region in the 16th century. This was not drawn from life by Schmidl but made later by a European artist who gave the two main protagonists a distinctly Teutonic look.
It shows extensively painted or tattooed figures in a Xaraye settlement on the upper River Paraguay apparently parleying with European soldiers (fig. 2.5).37
35 J. Knogler, S.J., Relato sobre el país y la nación de los chiquitos en las Indias occidentales o América del sud y las misiones en su territorio, redactado para un amigo [1767–72], in W. Hoffmann, Las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), pp. 121–85.
36 Knogler, Relato, pp. 140–41.
37 U. Schmidl, Viaje al río de la Plata 1534–1554, trans. by S. Lafone Quevedo (Buenos Aires:
Cabaut, 1903 [1567]) and facsimile at: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com, Ch XXXVI (no pag.).
Figure 2.5. European engraving of Xaraye people in the 16th century. (Source: U.
Schmidel, Viaje al Río de la Plata 1534–1554 (Buenos Aires: Cabaut, 1903 [1567]) and facsimile at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com, Chapter XXXVI [no pag.]).
Written accounts of the appearance of ethnic Chiquitos occur in an addendum to the 1689–99 Carta Anua of the province of Paraguay38 and a little later in the Jesuit Francisco Burgés’s 1703 Memorial.39 Burgés’s words were elaborated on by the aforementioned Fernández in his Relación historial 20 years later.40 Both chroniclers refer to lip and ear piercings but do not mention painting or tattooing. Fifty years later, after the expulsion of the Jesuits, Knogler, however, left another account:
Some anoint themselves with the earth that is around here, paying particular attention to the head so that it looks as if they are wearing a pointed helmet. Others paint stripes on their bodies using colourants extracted from roots and plants. As the paint is easy to remove, they can adorn themselves with different-coloured designs [subsequently]. The women tattoo themselves on the face with thorns with which they prick a star, a flower, a bird or an animal. They pulverise a little piece of charcoal and rub it into the outline of the design. Once the wounds have healed nothing can rub out the little black marks.41
‘Around here’ was around the mission of Santa Ana de Velasco in the north-east of the Chiquitos mission area, which Knogler founded in 1755 and many of whose inhabitants were ethnically Guaycurú while nominally Chiquito (all members of the Mission were given the identity Chiquito by the Jesuits regardless of their natal ethnicity). The Jesuit missionary-naturalist José Sánchez Labrador, who served among the Guaycurú in a different Mission, left a full description of them in his post-expulsion El Paraguay Católico, written in the 1770s. He notes that women were both painted and, from the age of puberty, tattooed – lower-class women with an organ-pipe-like design over the forehead (top image in fig. 2.4) and sometimes from the bottom lip to the chin – while the arms of upper-class women were tattooed from shoulder to wrist with ‘squares and triangles’. Fish bones were used to prick the design, which was fixed with ash or plant ink. ‘Fortitude during this strange procedure was a sign of bravery’, he records.42 He describes lines drawn over the whole body among Guaycurú men and ‘drawings, grid- and lattice-patterns principally on the face’. In earlier times, he notes, men’s bodies had been stencilled with
38 J. Matienzo, R. Tomichá, I. Combès and C. Page (eds.) (2011) Chiquitos en las Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767) (La Paz: Instituto de Misionología, Universidad Católica Boliviana), p. 21.
39 F. Burgés, S.J., Memorial al rey nuestro señor en su real, y supremo consejo de las Indias sobre las noticias de las misiones de los indios llamados chiquitos [1703], in R. Tomichá Charupá O.F.M.
Conv (ed.), Francisco Burgés y las Misiones de Chiquitos: El Memorial de 1703 y documentos complementarios (Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2008), p. 91.
40 Fernández, Relación historial, p. 37.
41 Knogler, Relato, p. 140.
42 J. Sánchez Labrador, S.J., El Paraguay Católico, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Coni Hermanos, 1910 [c.1770]), pp. 285–6.
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‘stars’ and ‘suns’ over previous painting in ‘colours and black’.43 These ‘stars’ and
‘suns’, like Knogler’s ‘flower’, ‘bird’ and ‘animal’, are a European interpretation of motifs which would have carried a different meaning to those on whose skin they were marked.
The missionised Guaycurú ‘Chiquitos’ were the forebears of the Caduveo [modern spelling: Kadiwéu] on the east side of the upper River Paraguay whose body-marking practice was documented by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1930s, when tattooing had been replaced by painting. He noted that old women equipped with a bamboo spatula dipped in the ‘juice of the genipapo’44 improvised freehand scrolls and arabesques, spirals, Ss, crosses and Greek-key patterns on the faces of young women, which were halved and sometimes quartered by vertical and horizontal lines.45 To avoid the expense of 1930s photography, Lévi-Strauss asked the painters to draw on sheets of paper the designs they would normally put on a face, the success of this exercise
43 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay, p. 285.
44 C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. by J. and D. Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973 [1955]), p. 187. The ink was made from the fruit of Genipa americana, family Rubiaceae.
45 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 193–5.
Figure 2.6. Drawing of a painted or tattooed Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman by Guido Boggiani in 1892 (right); and a drawing on paper made by a Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman in the 1930s for Claude Lévi-Strauss (left). (Source: C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by J. and D. Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973 [1955]), photograph between pp. 224 and 225).
indicating to him that the marks were not dependent on ‘the natural contours of the human face’46 (fig. 2.6, right).
Far to the south of the mission to the Chiquitos Martín Dobrizhoeffer, in the Jesuit mission to the Abipones in the (now Argentinian) southern Chaco in the mid 18th century, recorded elaborate tattooing practice among the Abipones:
They mark their faces in various ways, some of which are common to both sexes, others peculiar to women. They prick the skin with a sharp thorn and scatter fresh ashes on the wound. They all wear the form of a cross, impressed on their foreheads and two small lines at the corner of each eye extending towards the ears, besides four transverse lines at the root of the nose between the eyebrows as a national mark.47
To the south-east of the mission’s catchment area were the people now known as the Ayoréode, the Zamucos of the 18th century, condemned in the Anuas for their resistance to evangelisation, but persisting until the 20th century in marking the body with soot and with pigment from a red rock called kuredé, scraping the stone with another to grind off grit, which was moistened with saliva.48