Dolphins and other lovers

The Andoque of the Amazon know what we have forgotten: the forest’s most beautiful creatures are also its most dangerous

by Eliran Arazi  BIO

Illustration by Clayton Junior

is a visiting scholar at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK.

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

‘A nasty one, the dolphin,’ Derode grumbled when he returned home, trading the humid heat of an Amazonian afternoon for the cool, sheltered interior. Inside, his wife Rosa and I shot hungry looks at his empty hands. Once again, the Caquetá River surrendered no fish. I was only two weeks into my fieldwork with the Andoque people in southern Colombia, and my eyes zigzagged in confusion between the two septuagenarian spouses. What did a dolphin have to do with anything? Rosa explained: ‘Derode had left baits by the river, and it seems a dolphin had stolen the fish that had gotten hooked in them.’

The fishing had been poor ever since my arrival, and as Rosa cooked lunch from the rice and lentils I had brought from the city – the ‘White People’s Food’ – she reminisced with her husband about times when the river had been generous. She recalled how her grandfather had once hauled in an almost legendary catch by throwing poisonous plants into the shallow stream and asphyxiating the fish in great numbers. Among this enormous catch was a dolphin. Of course, she added, as if it needed no explanation, her grandfather did not eat it.

‘Why not eat the dolphin?’ I asked. The Andoque were accomplished hunters and fishermen, and there was almost no walking, swimming, crawling or flying creature that they wouldn’t relish, if they could catch it.

‘Because dolphins are people,’ Rosa said, matter-of-factly. ‘Besides, their meat smells terrible.’

Dolphins were not simply people, she went on, they were bad people, shapeshifters. Her father had once warned her never to accept the advances of unknown men while bathing at the river. As handsome as they may seem, he had said, they may be dolphins in disguise. Those reckless enough to fall for their charms would soon grow feverish, drift into madness and hallucinations, and ultimately die. No cure would save them.

Look what happened upriver, Rosa said. She then told a story about a strikingly handsome man and a stunning woman who walked into a riverside bar in some village one night. Both were impeccably dressed in white clothes, with fancy accessories, such as a belt, a watch and a hat. The man ordered drink after drink, while the woman remained quiet and abstained. The bar owner sensed something strange about them, though he couldn’t say what. The other clients were enchanted: the men drawn to the woman’s grace, the women to the man’s charm. Then, at some point late in the night, the couple disappeared. The last place they were seen was down by the riverbank. At dawn, villagers returned to the spot, and found the visitors’ elegant accessories scattered on the ground. Only now, those items had transformed: the belt had become an electric eel, the watch a crab. Gazing at the stingray that had previously been a hat, the villagers finally understood. It had been needed to cover a blowhole. The visitors were dolphins in human form, on the hunt for unwitting prey.

‘Such are dolphins,’ Rosa concluded.

I tried to lighten the mood. ‘Where I come from,’ I said, ‘dolphins perform tricks in aquatic circuses.’

Rosa was unimpressed.

‘You’re talking about sea dolphins. Those may be different. But river dolphins here are evil.’

When I laughed and, perhaps insensitively, mentioned a newspaper story I’d once read about a woman who had married a dolphin, Rosa’s face twisted in disgust, as if she might be sick. She changed the subject.

What initially drew me to Amazonia was the tendency of its Indigenous inhabitants to consider the forest and river where they lived as a delicate society populated by beings similar, in crucial respects, to humans. An ecology of persons. This is what led me to Andoque territory in 2018, and why I spent more than a year living with families like Rosa’s. I had set out as an anthropologist seeking to study their notions of power, and how this power is bound up with nonhuman persons – like dolphins. For the Andoque, these beings may wear the bodies of trees, plants, animals and insects, but they have wishes, thoughts, fears and cultural customs like humans do. What would power look like in such a world, I wondered. A deeper interest lay hidden within the word ‘power’ – hidden, back then, even from myself. I longed for a first-hand encounter with something truly powerful: the dangerous web of life and death that makes up the forest; the intricate wisdom of a people attuned to it. I wanted to bask in that power. I wanted to admire it, decipher it, crash against it.

But the world of the Andoque had been battered long before I arrived. Far from the postcard ‘isolated tribe’, they place relations with whites at the centre of their culture. ‘Whites’ is a term that, for them, refers not to skin colour but simply to anyone external to the forest and its ways. These outsiders are closely linked in Andoque mythology with the Caquetá river mouth, as it was from there, where the water meets the main Amazon River, that European merchants first arrived as early as the 17th century.

With almost no one speaking their native language, many Andoque sometimes doubt how Indigenous they still are

The Andoque, I was told, traded slaves with whites in exchange for coveted metal tools. By the turn of the 20th century, they began acquiring these tools in exchange for vegetal rubber. But that opportunity turned into a nightmare when the Peruvian Casa Arana company overtook the region. For the sake of a booming automobile industry thirsty for rubber, the Andoque were enslaved, suffering indescribable atrocities and massacres. From around 10,000 people in 1908, they dwindled to a few dozen survivors by the mid-1930s, when they rebuilt their maloca – a large residential and ceremonial house for hosting ritual dances – and healed the wounds of their ancestral territory. In their own words, they became human once more.

They also resumed rubber extraction under more humane conditions and, in the years that followed, took part in each economic boom that swept through the region. They hunted for animal pelts, worked in the commercial fishing industry, and tried gold-mining. Today, their world has become entangled with that of whites. The Andoque live alongside settlers and other outsiders, occasionally travel to Bogotá, and have become vulnerable to price fluctuations caused by wars in countries far, far away. They currently number around 260 individuals, and Colombia recognises their ancestral territory as an Indigenous reserve. However, with almost no one but the elders speaking their native language, many Andoque sometimes doubt how Indigenous they still are.

The word for ‘dolphin’ in the Andoque language – ama̰na̰ – is not Andoque at all. It is a loan from the Tupí-Guaraní language, whose speakers served as middlemen in the slave trade with whites (and, like the Andoque, were sometimes enslaved themselves). Ama̰na̰ appears virtually unchanged across the region’s several language families, which are otherwise markedly different from one another. It attests to the relative recency of the dolphins’ flirtation with the Andoque, who were originally inland hunters and ventured along the main rivers of the Amazon only when trade intensified during the 19th century. In the process, they borrowed a Tupí-Guaraní word to refer to the strange creature they encountered in those rivers: playful and intelligent, resurfacing for air like a human living underwater.

Known to biologists as Inia geoffrensis, these river dolphins have been around for at least 10 million years. They date back to a time when the sea that had once covered the northern part of South America receded and the saltwater dolphins who remained in the rivers adapted to freshwater environments. Today, the pink skin of river dolphins makes them an attraction to tourists. Their large bodies and high food intake, on the other hand, make them especially vulnerable during the increasingly frequent drought periods when fish become scarce as rivers dry out and water temperatures rise.

The men would sit with me for sessions of conversation called mambeadero that stretched from the afternoon deep into the night

I had known practically nothing about river dolphins before starting my research but, a few months into my fieldwork, dolphin talk kept popping up during conversations with the families I lived with. As in Rosa’s stories, they were always evil, but this wickedness was never explained.

My days of fieldwork found their rhythm in hunting, fishing and tending gardens. These were tasks I tried to assist with, though I was often more of a burden to my hosts. I found solace in the preparation of coca powder, a stimulant now referred to as mambe to distinguish it from the illicit version – the white one. You pick the leaves, toast them, pulverise them, add some ashes, and filter the mixture. This fine green powder is believed to carry the spirit of an ancestor and to open channels of communication with the dueños of the forest – the guardian spirits of animals, from whom permission to hunt must be sought to avoid retribution. This almost daily work earned me the trust of the men, who would sit with me for long sessions of conversation called mambeadero that stretched from the afternoon deep into the night, with lighter topics such as gossip and politics gradually giving way to mythology. But when I asked about the enigmatic dolphin during these gatherings, the man presiding the session would frown at me: ‘Dolphins do not enter my mambeadero!’

My curiosity grew stronger. If dolphins did not enter Andoque mambeaderos, I thought, perhaps I needed to enter their domain myself.

Nearly every week, I joined my hosts on boat trips to the nearby settler village to sell local produce. On one of these trips, four months into fieldwork, I was going back home with my friend Miller after his unsuccessful attempt to sell the meat of a wild boar. It was on that late........

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