The Serpent’s Children:

Semiotics of Cultural Genesis

in Arawak and Trobriand Myth

(Originally published in American Ethnologist, edited and revised)

Lee Drummond

Center for Peripheral Studies

The people came out and shed their anaconda skins.

—Irving Goldman, Cubeo origin myth

While functionalist accounts of myth have generally yielded to structural analyses since the appearance of Lévi-Strauss’s classic essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” the relationship between myth and that analytical entity called “culture” is still unclear. The difficulty can be traced to an unfinished anthropological dialogue about what culture is or what cultures are, and how it / they can best be described. My central thesis is that anthropologists have tended to regard their subject matter—culture—as a received object of study and that they have been mistaken in this tendency. The essay proposes to regard “a culture” as generated and perpetually shifting meaning, a motivated affirmation of a system of differences. Establishing the semiotic form of two Arawakand Trobriand origin myths helps to show how anthropological theories are themselves composed. A textual criticism of one theory of myth — Malinowski’s — is combined with an analysis of two bona fide “primitive” myths. The comparison indicates that the myths provide better theory about the dynamics of cultural identity than does the theory of myth,

Anthropologists have written a great deal about myth, and this paper is intended in part to add yet a few more pages to that voluminous literature. But it also has a second purpose, one seldom developed in treatises on comparative mythology: I hope to demonstrate how a myth can contribute directly to anthropological theory. I want to claim that just as anthropological studies of myth have advanced our understanding of that phenomenon, so certain myths can provide insights into the anthropological perspective that informs theory. The thesis I develop in this essay is consequently that the myth-making mind and the anthropology-making mind have much in common at the level of fundamental symbolic processes.

The myth I examine is one told by the Arawak of northwestern Guyana about the origin of their neighbors and traditional enemies, the Carib. The Arawak say that the Carib are descended from a bestial union involving an Arawak woman and a camudi (anaconda) serpent. In analyzing the myth, I identify what I take to be statements of elemental dilemmas that issue from conflicting principles of kinship and ethnicity, filiation and alliance, inclusiveness andexclusiveness. My argument is that the Arawak, like people everywhere, would gladly be rid of the practical and conceptual embarrassment represented by an alien adversary, whose very presence contravenes their own cherished order of things, but for the simple, bitter truth that they cannot say what they are without pointing at what they are not. The dilemma is that the Arawak are at once a people apart from others and a people implicated in the most intimate fashion with the origin and present situation of the Carib. The dilemma is really the problem of cultural identity.

The essay thus focuses on formative and problematic aspects of culture. Indeed, I would stress with Wagner (1975) and Basso (1979) that culture is first of all a process of creation, a series of innovations in understanding. The principal creation or object of understanding, moreover, is the idea of a culture as a system of distinctive human characteristics that is set apart from other distinctive systems, other cultures. The Arawak myth of Carib origin speaks directly to theoretical concerns in anthropology because it reveals how a particular cultural system is inextricably tied to an evocation of the Other. The myth cannot be adequately interpreted as a derivative gloss on “intergroup relations”that were somehow established prior to its composition, since the whole problem is to know how to articulate the basic notion of “group” in the first place. The following analysis seeks to demonstrate that the concept of “a group” or “a culture” is the result of signifying processes and that those processes operate in the phenomenon we call myth. Thus, myth is neither the relic of a dead past nor the clever falsehood designed to conceal existing political arrangements;1 it is primarily a part of an ongoing process that continuously creates culture by formulating images of human identity. A semiotic of myth, initiated by Lévi-Strauss, is inevitably a semiotic of cultural genesis.

If the theoretical orientation of the article owes much to Lévi-Strauss, so does its analytical program. To approach myth as a meaningful cultural production commits one to taking it seriously, interrogating particular myths in detail and always with respect to their actual content. The Arawak myth presented below raises two kinds of questions, one quite specific and the other very general. The specific question might be posed thusly: Is there something about Arawak-Carib relations, both historical and contemporary, that makes the Arawak story of Carib origin a particularly revealing narrative? That is, does the myth have ideological significance or is it just a fanciful diversion? The general question is a topic in comparative mythology: What accounts for the prominence of serpents in the origin myths of many, often historically unrelated peoples? Without attempting an exhaustive piece of comparative analysis, I do try to situate the Arawak myth in a comparative framework and, more importantly, to argue that metaphors of generativity identified in that myth also operate in the serpent lore of widely separated societies. Since the myth and its metaphors provide the foundation for my theoretical arguments concerning the similarity between myth and the anthropology of myth, the first sections of the essayintroduce and analyze “The Serpent’s Children” in its topical and comparative aspects.

The Myth

A number of myths from the northwest Amazon and the Guianas assign to the serpent a critical role in human or tribal origins (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:24-33; Goldman 1963: 107-112; Fock 1963:42-45; Roth 1915:143-144; Brett 1868:388-393; Taylor 1977: 116-117). In each case the serpent is the water boa constrictor, or anaconda (Eunectes murinus). Amazonian myths represent the anaconda as a demiurge which emanates from chthonic waters and carries within itself the ancestors of future tribes, who are vomited forth to occupy the earth. In contrast, Guianese myths introduce the anaconda to a world already occupied by people and give it the character of sexual aggressor and destroyer of a tentative moral order. It disrupts and redefines a primordial human presence in the world.

The variants I have recorded among Arawak of the Pomeroon River, Guyana, are all very much part of the Guianas complex. The version I present here, however, is richer in detail and embraces a wider range of events than any published by Brett, Roth, Fock, or Taylor.2 And this is true despite the fact that, except for brief passages in Arawak, the myth was told to me in Guyanese Creole English, the language of choice for nearly all Guyanese Arawak. In reproducing the narrative here, I have attempted to preserve the Creole text while altering verb tense markers and pronouns to conform with standard English usage. Thus, “she kept on with her waywardness” in the edited text is “she keep on with she own waywardness” in the original narration.

The Serpent’s Children

There was an Arawak man, having children —sons and daughters. One of the daughters, the youngest daughter, was very unruly. So the father always talked to her, saying, “You musn’t do that You’re disgracing my home.” But she wouldn’t hear. She wouldn’t listen to her father or take his advice. She kept on with her waywardness.

Then her brothers spoke to her, saying, “Look, you are our youngest sister and we love you. But the things you are doing, the waywardness you are going on with, we don’t agree with. You are bringing disgrace upon our father’s home.”

When her brothers spoke to her in that way she got vexed. She said, “Alright, I’m going to leave home —before I spoil you all with my wickedness.” And she did leave, and built herself a little place tucked away in a clearing. She’s left home now.

Time went by. One day the brothers were hunting in the forest and happened to see their sister. They watched her, not going out where she could see them. They saw their sister go to the edge of a pond, where she began to sing: burututu cambureru, burututu cambureru, burututucambureru (Come out, snake). A camudi (anaconda) came out of the water and began to have sex with the woman. In those days Indian people talked like that —animals turned to human beings. They (the serpent and the woman) had their time, then the camudi went back into the water.

“So!” the brothers said, “You are doing this! Well, you are a dirty woman. We’re going to teach you a good lesson.” They went back home and told their father what happened. They told him they were going back to punish their sister because she was still in the forest with that nastiness. And they left. After a day the brothers arrived back at the forest pond. They sang the song to call the snake. The camudisurfaced by the bank, and when it appeared one of the brothers chopped off its head. The body of the camudi sank back into the pond.

Later the woman returned to the pond. She started to sing her song, but the camudi couldn’t come! She sang again! She sang three times but nothing happened. So she began to think something was wrong, that her lover was sick. Then she saw its head lying on the bank. She said, “Well! Must be my brothers that did this to me.” Her family found out her secret again.

She pulled this thing up now, fought with this camudi to pull it onto the land. She won’t let it rot in that pond, for it is just there that she is drinking the water, too. It’s a water pond. So she pulled up the camudi and she picked all kinds of leaves and covered its carcass with them.

That’s the reason why today the herbs are the best thing you can get to do good medicine. Every herb has its own use. So when anything is wrong —internal or external—you drink them. And so the herbs have come to have their power, because they were used by that woman.

Then after a while isayuhu (worms) began to grow in the rotting camudi meat. At first there were many, but all but two died. And the two that survived changed as they grew, until they turned into people.

So then there were two that lived. And that woman, she did not think of her brothers and sisters or of her parents. She didn’t keep them in mind. She just said, “Well. You’re growing to be men. And from the meat.”

They turned into young men right away, and spent much of their time practicing with bow and arrow. And as their skill improved, the woman instilled in them the idea that they had one purpose in life: to kill.

She told them, “You two have to take revenge on your grandparents, because they are very bad people. It is because of them that we have to live in this deep forest, in this one little clearing.”

And they replied, “But yes.” They practiced with bow and arrow constantly then and became real marksmen. And that is the reason these Carib like to fight, you know? They like to fight.

But then one of the Carib went and married an Arawak girl. He came out of that forest and married an Arawak girl. And an Arawak boy then married a Carib girl.3

Well, these families then started fighting. The Arawak man killed the Carib girl and the Carib man killed the Arawak girl. And so the bad feelings between Arawak and Carib came about.

The trouble that started there led to a big war. The fighting was going on, but the Arawak were doing badly. The Arawak are not a warlike people, you know? They are not warlike at all. But the Carib, they are a warlike people. And they were plentiful, many more than the Arawak. The Arawak have always been a scant people. So they went to two other nations for help—the Akawaio and Warrau. These three nations said, “We’re going to finish those Carib.” Akawaio, Warrau, and Arawak. The three nations against the Carib.

For all that, the Carib were still going ahead, flogging the others. And the others started to worry, saying “Well, we’re going to lose this thing, They’re going to kill us off.”

Then the Akawaio man said, “Well, I’m going to turn kenaima. Yes, and the kenaima can bear a lot of privation. They can travel in the night and a lot of other things. They know a lot of science. They can turn to anything! Bat, cockroach, lizard, monkey, deer, tiger (jaguar). Tiger is the main secret thing they can do. And these kenaima have their own weapon. They can push out your belly. But they have to bear privation, to bear hunger. They have to eat raw meat, rotten wood, anything, they have to learn that. You can chop a kenaima [with a machete], but he’s not going to cry out, you know? Only whistle. Wheeeeeee. Yes, but he can’t cry out. That is the vow they make —no matter what happens, you can’t cry out.

So the kenaima start to fight the Carib now. And the kenaima were going far into the deep forest where the Carib lived. You know, those old-time people used to live all about in the forest. Far, not like today! Today everybody lives on the riverside and the back-dam and so on. The kenaima found where the Carib were living and poisoned their water pond with haiari (a fish poison). Dropped the haiari poison in the water. That killed a lot of them. And the kenaima also turned tiger against the Carib. Turned tiger and broke their necks, found them in their gardens and killed them. So the kenaima did. Kenaima is different from the Arawak and Warrau!

The kenaima were really pushing the Carib back now. Pushing them up into the riverhead. then back down another river. The Arawak and kenaima were pushing the Carib back.

And the war is hot now, you know? The Carib retreat, but though they retreat they can’t stop what’s happening to them. It looks like they’re going to be wiped out entirely. And it went on like that until there were only two Carib left alive, a boy and a girl. And they were two, a brother and a sister. Just like how it began!

Some Arawak people took the boy and his sister in and raised them. But after they got big they still remembered the war and what happened to their own people. So one night they ran away. Nobody knows where they went. They went and lived far from the Arawak.

Today, then, it is not from the worm as before that the Carib derive, but from a sister and brother tribe! A sister and brother married each other.

And the Carib are still more plentiful than the Arawak.

…………………………………………………….

Ethnographic Context

The first myth I heard in the Arawak village that was to become my home for more than a year was a variant of “The Serpent’s Children.” And, curiously, the last myth I put on tape during my residence there is the version presented above, an unsolicited narration that unfolded in the midst of a final visit with the three best storytellers in the village. I do not mention these facts to evoke a sense of nostalgia or bathe my discussion of the myth in the warm glow of subjective experience. Rather, I think it important to indicate something about the circumstances of “data collection,” for the fact that particular data were presented at a particular time and in a particular way —and that they were perceived as data at all —is often the most revealing feature of ethnographic research.4

I was clearly predisposed to hear a living Arawak narrate “The Serpent’s Children.” Perhaps because of that, the actual telling came as an exciting surprise. I had only been in the village a few days and had just that evening been introduced to the “old head” who was the acknowledged local expert on traditional lore. Sitting in his home as the light quickly dwindled outside, rapport did not come. We spoke, haltingly, of incidentals. Before I could make my exit, however, a young East Indian teacher from the coastlands arrived. He was a lodger in the old man’s home and had returned for the night. The two of us fell into a morelively conversation about his school and the community. We were discussing the behavior of Arawak and Carib schoolchildren and the latter’s absenteeism when the old man, who had been listening quietly, spoke up. “Ah, the Carib. We Arawak call them ‘the worm people’. They got a story about that.” And he gave us a brief version of “The Serpent’s Children.”