In the early 1980s, the Kuna Indians of Panama became the first indigenous group in Latin America to mark off a large chunk of virgin rainforest – about 60 000 hectares – and set it aside as a nature reserve. In 1983, with funding from various international agencies, the Kuna launched the Proyecto de Estudio para el Manejo de Areas Silvestres de Kuna Yala (PEMASKY – The Study Project for the Management of the Forested Area of the Kuna Territory). The project to set up Kuna Park was widely applauded by conservation groups. To many, the most intriguing aspect of the endeavour was the attempt to bring together traditional Kuna and Western scientific knowledge.
The Kuna organised and managed the project themselves, after initial assistance from outside advisers brought in on a contract basis. The park’s administration centre was built at Nusagandi, located at the point where the El Llano-Carti road cuts across the continental divide and begins its descent to the Atlantic coast (see Map). The indigenous staff soon grew to 17 people, including six park guards and seven members of a research team. The Kuna researchers regarded the traditional elders as great conservationists. Many of the concepts put forward by modern conservationists, they said, were not new – the elders already understood concepts such as ecosystem and biosphere.
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The idea of a park came from the Kuna belief in ‘spirit sanctuaries’, places where spiritual animals, plants or ‘demons’ reside. This belief, along with associated beliefs in a spiritual dimension in all living things, forms the philosophical basis of the Kuna ‘conservationist ethic’ , and is the basis of the Kuna Park project. Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, the research team at Kuna Park did not absorb much of the old view of the cosmos, and the elders did not take much interest in Western biology. The reasons for this failure lie in the changing nature of Kuna society.
The largest group of Kuna live in the Comarca of Kuna Yala (meaning ‘Kuna territory’), a strip of jungle 200 kilometres long which extends along the Atlantic coast from the region of Carti in the west to just short of the Colombian border. The Comarca, a semi-autonomous state, comprises a thick band of rainforest stretching from the ridge of the continental divide down to the coast, as well as an area running a mile or so out to sea which includes more than 300 tiny coral islands. More than 40 of the islands, along with 12 mainland villages, accommodate a population of between 40 000 and 50 000. The villages are situated near the shore for easy access to the mainland, where agriculture is practised and where people can obtain fresh water, firewood, building materials and other necessities.
The Kuna’s geographical isolation has enabled them to maintain an exceptional measure of political and cultural autonomy. The only non-Indians living in Kuna Yala are a handful of schoolteachers, Colombian traders and religious missionaries. In this environment, the Kuna political system – embodied in the ‘gathering’ – has remained intact. The gathering sessions are held nightly in most Kuna communities. They are presided over by a governing body consisting of at least three chiefs, a handful of their official interpreters, and village elders and politically active younger men. Village business is discussed and resolved here, people are lectured on morality, and the Kuna world-view is taught.
Much of the teaching at the gatherings is through long narrative chants belonging to a tradition called ‘the way of the Great Father’, which chronicles the collective history of the Kuna people and depicts the workings of the cosmos. The chants are basic texts in history, morality, natural science and civic behaviour; and they are supplemented with discussions by the ‘interpreters’ that relate their content to the problems of the contemporary world.
The Kuna learn about the natural world by listening to the historical chants, by participating in ritual ceremonies such as female puberty rites, curing ceremonies, burial chants and village exorcisms, and by discussing informally the spirit world and its inhabitants. The chants describe real places in the jungle and along the coastal estuaries; they describe the appearance and behaviour of animals, the germination and growth cycle of plants, and other natural phenomena. They have meaning because the listeners have experience of the nature they describe. The elders consider that this world-view, as it is expressed in the sacred lore, makes up the ‘soul’ of their identity as Kuna.
Over the past few decades, the Kuna view of the world has been greatly eroded by Western education, so that the Comarca is now a patchwork of communities, some highly Westernised and some staunchly traditional. The systematic incursion of non-Kuna culture began in earnest in 1904, when the community of Nargana, east of Carti, elected a Westernised Kuna named Charly Robinson to the position of First Chief. Robinson had been raised by an English family on the Colombian island of Providencia, and when he reached adulthood he returned to the island of his birth with the aim of ‘civilising’ his people. In the following years, community schools providing Western education grew in number in a slowly expanding circle from the Nargana epicentre, despite strong opposition from some nearby villages. By the 1960s, schools had been built in nearly every community in the region.
Although today’s teachers in the more traditional communities are still battling with community elders, the effect of Western education in most of the Comarca has significantly changed the world-view of the majority. In at least 50 per cent of the communities children have to attend classes up to the sixth grade – a time when, under the old system, they would have been with their fathers learning how to farm, hunt, gather firewood and other traditional skills. The schools do not encourage students to do manual work and when classes are finished in the early afternoon the young people tend to roam about the islands, playing basketball, chatting, or more occasionally, studying. In the most Westernised communities, the young people regard the traditional skills and the experience of the elders as largely irrelevant.
Cultural roots
Where Western education has made the strongest inroads, it has fragmented the Kuna’s cultural identity, making them more like the rest of the Panamanians. For years, students were educated in Spanish and told that the Kuna language is a lowly ‘dialect’. They were also taught that education would prepare them for a life considerably more ‘civilised’ than that of their parents, who were simple farmers. Traditional history and ritual were held up as no more than primitive superstitions. The more remote communities have so far escaped this rejection of Kuna culture, but Western education is encroaching on them, too. Older men accuse the young people of not being ‘genuine Kuna’ because they have no understanding or knowledge of traditional history and ritual, and they have no sense of what or who is ‘important’ in the traditional scheme of things.
Not all the effects of education have been bad; it has brought benefits at the national level. There are Kuna lawyers, doctors, agronomists, biologists, sociologists, economists and anthropologists who have attended universities in Europe, the United States and Mexico, as well as in Panama. All this expertise, combined with an innate ability to organise, has helped the Kuna to take part successfully in Panamanian politics.
Since the early 1970s, many younger Kuna, especially those with high school or university level education, have been trying to rediscover their cultural roots. This cultural revival has led to people giving Kuna names to babies (instead of Spanish and English names, which had been the custom for years), drafting official village legislation to make participation in select rituals mandatory, erecting special buildings for ritual purposes, and introducing traditional history into the school curriculum. Projects have involved participants in taping and transcribing ritual chants and preparing paintings and drawings that depict mythological themes. In Panama City and on several of the larger islands, Kuna youths have established a number of centros dedicated to the study of Kuna culture, and some members are learning the more esoteric traditions.
The PEMASKY project was conceived as a receptacle in which the old culture could be mixed with Western science to create a synthesis. Since the project’s beginning, its personnel have been key members in the Centro de Investigaciones Kunas (CIK), a small research group investigating Kuna culture which is staffed mainly by Kuna social scientists. In the first half of the 1980s, the CIK started several community studies, including research into village hunting and traditional agroforestry systems. The participants discussed how to coordinate traditional knowledge of the animal kingdom with the knowledge of zoologists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. It also seemed natural to compare Kuna ethnobotany with Western scientific botany. There were plans to bring Kuna ritual specialists to the park so that they could identify and label plants, and there was talk of seminars and courses in traditional knowledge.
Unfortunately, very little was achieved. No one on the PEMASKY staff managed to collect texts of chants or stories relating to nature, or develop a scheme to bring traditional specialists to the park to accompany members of the technical team. A short foray into the study of traditional agroforestry systems soon fizzled out. In 1987, work was begun at the park’s centre at Nusagandi on a small botanical garden of bushes and trees labelled with Kuna and scientific names, but this effort was also abandoned after a short time.
Over the past 15 years nearly all the projects which PEMASKY and other centros have initiated to tape and transcribe oral histories and produce books and pamphlets have failed. The attempts by some community leaders to reintroduce the yearly round of festivals and rituals by making participation mandatory have also failed. Where tradition remains strong, people see no need to preserve esoteric knowledge: the people simply practise their culture. Where tradition has been weakened, there is little impetus to revive it.
In the most Westernised communities, as well as in Panama City, some young Kuna have attempted to revive the old knowledge through poetry and plays. While these works contain bits of the oral traditions, their structure and emotional tenor are decidedly Western. The chants of the traditional gathering sessions are full of intricate and highly colourful metaphors and images, and are marked by a characteristic stoic cadence. By contrast, the new plays and poetry handle traditional content superficially, indicate a distant relationship to the jungle (although it is invariably a central theme), and introduce themes and emotions that belong more to the wider Panamanian culture. For example, youthful love between the sexes is often expressed in a florid romanticism that has no place in traditional Kuna culture. However well done these pieces may be – and the plays are generally popular among both Kuna and non-Kuna in Panama City – they have little resemblance to the old traditions.
Elders and youths
Why have the attempts to revive the traditional rituals and oral histories failed? One reason is that these efforts have been complicated by the absence of a standard alphabet for Kuna, an unwritten language. In 1975, a linguist from the Ministry of Education tried to organise a group of young teachers in the school at Ustuppu (the most populated of the Kuna islands) with the aim of developing a bilingual bicultural program for Kuna Yala. This effort lasted less than a week: the elders and the young people argued over the sacred character of the traditions as well as the orthography. In the end, the elders voted to have the linguist removed from the island. Clearly, the inability of the Kuna to agree upon an official alphabet involves much more than mechanical linguistic considerations. While the young people regard the traditional histories and curing chants more as curious folklore than as practical knowledge, Kuna elders treat the oral histories as living documents that describe, elaborate upon, and interpret the world in which they participate.
The young do not want to listen to hours of chants to learn the traditions. They are even less willing to learn the curing chants – which contain the most secret and profound knowledge – because these are performed in a ritual language that is unintelligible to the uninitiated. Instead, they want to read about the traditional histories and theories of how the universe functions in abridged form. They believe that the chants will tell them about what it means to be a genuine Kuna, but the chants hold little meaning for them beyond this. They are not interested in becoming ritual specialists, nor are they anxious to become chanters in the gathering hall. Traditional knowledge holds a different meaning for the elders and the youths.
Also, to understand traditional views of the world a Kuna youth must have a thorough knowledge of the jungle: how to identify plants and animals, how animals behave, how rivers and the jungle change during the yearly cycle, and where spirits live. Without this knowledge the chants are almost meaningless. On their own, the young people would not be able to find the medicines and materials traditionally needed for a variety of domestic tasks. Nor would they be able to identify animals, much less hunt them. As a result, any attempt to recover the past purely through the study of ritual knowledge is futile.
Even young people interested in relearning the oral traditions often see no value in what they are doing beyond what they can gain from it personally, and this is limited. Years ago, ritual specialists never expected money for their services – the special status given to them in the community was reward enough. This prestige value has since declined and most specialists now charge modest fees for their services, in line with the cash economy that now pervades the region. As ritual professions bestow neither prestige nor significant amounts of money, there is little incentive to enter them.
In addition, demographic patterns have altered so much over the past 50 years that people no longer have the time to become ritual specialists or even to participate in ritual events such as the puberty and mass exorcism ceremonies. In the 1930s, many Kuna households contained over 20 to 25 people and had five or six adult men providing for their subsistence needs. The labour force was large and well-organised around household needs, and food was abundant and varied. Because of this and because money was not needed to buy food, it was possible for nearly every household to support one or more ritual specialists, and there was always time to participate in ceremonies and festivals.
Today, many young men have moved to the urban centres of Panama, reducing households to as few as five people. It is common to find a single man – often over the age of 50 – serving as the sole provider of the wide selection of staple products from the jungle. In many communities fewer than half the men of working age are involved in agriculture, and although some cash generally filters back to the community from relatives working in Panama City or Colon, obtaining food is a constant problem. It is no longer realistic to allow potential providers to spend long periods learning rituals or gathering medicines in far-off corners of the jungle. Even participation in the ceremonies, some of which last for up to eight days, is considered too time-consuming.
The members of PEMASKY’s research team have additional problems of their own. The park project is spread over three geographically and culturally separate worlds: Panama City, where the project’s main office is located; the Nusagandi site, perched in quiet isolation on the crest of the Continental Divide; and the island communities of Kuna Yala. Travel between the three sites is difficult and time-consuming, so the researchers have ended up spending most of their time in Panama City, where their families live. Because of this, they have been unable to make way in their efforts to learn traditional histories in the gathering sessions of the elders.
The Kuna stand at a crucial transitional stage in their cultural evolution. Non-Kuna influences have reached nearly everyone. Many observers have noted the remarkable way in which the Kuna have adapted and retained their identity in a changing world, and have spoken of their vitality and instinct for survival. It may well be that the Kuna will manage to preserve their social, political and economic autonomy for some time to come, and they will endure as a group. But they may emerge with a social system that renders much of the old-world-view anachronistic and irrelevant. The old traditions are so intimately bound up with the old way of life, that as that way of life changes, so must the belief system that explains it and gives it symbolic importance. A new synthesis will surely emerge. But the core of the Kunas’ rich expressive culture, encompassing the collective history of the tribe and a complex of beliefs relating to the way in which the universe operates, can only be retained in a traditional setting. This is disappearing rapidly.
One crucial question relating directly to the work at Nusagandi remains: if the traditional belief system disappears from their culture, will the Kuna continue to treat the Earth and all of its creatures with the same respect? If the Kuna take on board the new ecological ethic of the Western scientific tradition, will it be able to supplant the traditional beliefs and perform anything approaching the same function?
Mac Chapin has been working with the Kuna since 1967 and has published a book about Kuna mythology, Pab Igala. He is currently programme director of Cultural Survival, Cambridge, Mass. A longer version of the above article will shortly appear in a book on culture and development edited by Charles Kleymeyer with sponsorship from the Inter-American Foundation.
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The world of substance and the world of spirit
According to Kuna tradition, the Earth is the body of the Great Mother. The Great Father joined in sexual union with the Great Mother and she gave birth to all the plants, animals and humans. Everything at this time was pure spirit, including these ‘children’, who were given names and informed of their duties. The medicinal plants were advised about their role in curing illness; certain animals were told they were to be used by the Kuna as food; and a number of hardwood trees were given instructions for their use as construction materials in house building. The Great Mother also gave birth to Muu, so she could carry on the Mother’s task of animal and human reproduction, and a spirit couple, who were given the task of reproducing the Earth’s plants.
The world was a paradise. There was no misery, no suffering, no illness. There were no noxious insects, nor were there poisonous animals. The spirits causing illness were absent from the Earth, and death was unknown.
It was into this utopian setting that the first humans – a man named Piler and his wife, Pursobi – made their appearance. They produced five sons, each of whom was a powerful shaman, who sired a host of children called ‘animal-men’. These animal-men were not animals themselves, but possessed physical and behaviourial traits that linked them with particular animals in the forest. Among those who came into being at this time were Tapir-man, Jaguar-man, Manatee-man, Agouti-man, Spiny anteater-man, Snake-man and Wasp-man. One of the sons of Piler and Pursobi was the father of a series of virulent spirits that caused a host of ills, including paralysis, tumours and boils, so-called ‘rotten’ vomiting and ‘yellow sickness’. Another of the sons was the father of cold and violent winds.
As the animal-men spread across the Earth, corruption became prevalent. The animal-men often staged drunken feasts where they brawled and caused havoc with their chaotic magic. Tapir-man delighted in crazed wrestling matches with Manatee-man, during which they would plunge through the walls of houses and snap trees in half.
The corruption brought about a fundamental change. Thorns appeared, and edible plants became more niggardly with their fruits. The animals of the jungle were transformed into wild and dangerous beasts. Rivers became violent torrents during the rainy season, and the Sun’s rays burned the skin.
Nature, in general, shifted from its benign and protective stance to become unpredictable and treacherous. It was then that the spiritual essence of the Earth became overlaid with material substance.
The Great Father, growing concerned, sent successive waves of ‘good men’ with instructions to counsel the wrong-doers and bring them back to the moral path. One of these was Tad Ibe (the Sun), who was the first great hero of Kuna culture. Tad Ibe and his siblings (the stars) set about learning the curing chants and medicines, and with this knowledge they weakened the power of the evil spirits. After having spent their lives fighting evil, Tad Ibe and his siblings retired to the heavens, and the history of the Earth continued to unfold.
According to the Kuna, the world has a dual nature – spirit and substance. The world of spirit surrounds and resides inside every material thing, giving it its vital force. Human beings, plants, animals, rocks, rivers and villages all have invisible ‘souls’ which are spiritual copies of the physical body.
The spirit realm constantly breaks into the lives of the Kuna as they go about their daily routine. Spirits periodically attack the weak and defenceless, causing illness, deformity and death. But on balance, life is relatively benign for those who behave themselves in moral fashion. The spirits generally respect those who follow the rules, which are recorded in and reinforced by the Kuna tradition.
Similarly, the Kuna are required to respect the ‘spirit sanctuaries’ where spirits dwell. These sanctuaries are often situated on choice agricultural land, but may not be cleared of their natural vegetation. If they are violated, the spirits rise up in rage and unleash epidemics and pestilence on the community. According to Kuna tradition, communities of spirits live in the hills and mountains on the mainland, in ‘whirlpools’ below the surface of the ocean, lakes, rivers and swamps, and in clouds floating through the sky. The mainland domains are ‘corrals’ full of terrestrial animals; whenever the numbers of certain species become depleted in the jungle, their ‘guardians’ replenish the supply by releasing a fresh supply from the corrals. In the same way, when the rivers flood and the seas become unruly, new supplies of fish, turtles and marine creatures are expelled from the whirlpools of the Earth’s waters. The project to set up the Kuna Park was a development of the concept of spirit sanctuaries.
The crucial thread running through this Kuna ‘conservationist ethic’ is respect for the Earth and the need for humankind to care for the natural endowment that has been placed on the Earth for its benefit.
