Iconic but anonymous: a brief case study in the photographic representation of indigenous women in Brazil

"O fato de que, em trezentos anos de convivência com centenas de tribos, menos de quarenta pessoas tenham merecido o registro de seus nomes e em geral por razões banais, ilustra bem a insignificância, para o branco, do índio enquanto ser humano. Em meados do século XVIII o próprio João Daniel, missionário e bom conhecedor da Amazônia, dizia que os índios “só pelas feições parecem gente, [mas] no viver e trabalhar se devem entender por feras”."

(Porro, Antonio. 2007. Dicionário etno-histórico da Amazônia colonial. São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, USP)

by Eduardo R. Ribeiro

Between 1990 and 1994, the Casa da Moeda do Brasil (Brazil's national mint) circulated a one thousand cruzeiro note (*) celebrating a national hero: Marshall Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958), who presided over the country's Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), the national bureau in charge of indigenous affairs. Rondon's task included building telegraph lines to connect Brazil's vast unknown West (inhabited by many uncontacted indigenous societies) to the rest of the country. In a country where the massacre of indigenous populations in the name of "progress" was still the norm, Rondon's motto, "die, if you must, but never kill an Indian" (Ribeiro 1954), gave him a mythical aura in the popular imaginary. Rondon is one of the most celebrated figures in the country's history, and his name is enshrined in a state (Rondônia), towns (Rondonópolis, etc.), streets, and neighborhoods. The banknote is part of a series featuring prominent Brazilian intelectuals (including writers Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade and Cecília Meireles, scientists Vital Brazil and Augusto Ruschi, and composer Carlos Gomes).

On its face the bill features a photograph of Rondon, flanked by a telegraph station and a map outline of Brazil. The reverse side features photographs of two Karajá Indians (with their typical circular facial tattoos) taken by SPI members during the 1950s or 1960s. The image of the Karajá is juxtaposed with a Nambikwara maloca (collective hut) and images of traditional indigenous subsistence (fish, manioc) and material culture items (a maraca and several ritxoko, popular clay figurines made by Karajá women). Thoroughly decorated with indigenous graphic motifs, the $1000 cruzeiro bill is a thing of beauty, in my admitedly-biased opinion (as a native of Central Brazil who's worked closely with the Karajá since my undergraduate years, leading to an MA and a PhD on their language).

Notoriously anonymous

Thanks to their inclusion in the currency bill, these photographs of the Karajá are among the most recognizable images of indigenous individuals in recent Brazilian history. One of the pictures (the one to the left) gained additional notoriety after being used (with alterations) on the cover of the 1996 album Roots of the internationally-aclaimed heavy metal band Sepultura, which includes collaborations with Xavante (not Karajá) singers. A 2010 magazine article, describing the cover as one of "ten greatest covers" in the history of Roadrunner Records, calls the photograph "found art." Besides signaling the band's return to their Brazilian roots, the picture had the advantage of being freely available, according to frontman Max Cavalera: "It's public domain so anybody could use it and we didn't have to pay anything."

Since they are in public domain (thanks to a government-led chain of expropriation and decontextualization), the pictures became fair game for commercial exploitation, culminating with their use on a dress modeled by actress Natalie Portman, created by Jean-Paul Gaultier (1996), a designer famous for resorting to cultural appropriation under the guise of diversity appreciation:

Although promptly recognizable, the Karajá individuals in these photos have remained nameless. That may be seen as the continuation of a tendency pointed out by Antonio Porro (2007) in the epigraph above, referring to the initial three centuries of Brazil's colonization: the fact that very few indigenous individuals had their names documented, illustrating "the insignificance, to the white man, of the Indian as a human being." In the case at hand, such anonymity is even more regrettable, as the information would be easily retrievable, if there had been political will to do so. The photos were taken at fairly recent dates by expert government employees (indigenistas) with deep familiarity with the Karajá. In addition, they were presumably obtained from the Museu do Índio, an excellent federal museum founded by Darcy Ribeiro to popularize knowledge of the country's indigenous cultures that houses a wealth of materials collected by members of the SPI (and its successor, FUNAI).

Repatriating memories

I became initially acquainted with the identity of one of the Karajá individuals portrayed in the one thousand cruzeiro bill thanks to my Karajá friend and teacher, the late Ijeseberi Karajá. With undeniable pride he explained that the young lady portrayed on the right of the bill's reverse was his aunt Jijukè (after whom he named his daughter), photographed by João Américo Peret (1926-2011), an SPI indigenista who left fond memories among the Karajá. The information was later corroborated when a book by Peret was added to the Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library (thanks to the generosity of Renato Nicolai, curator of our Coleção Nicolai): Mitos e lendas Karajá : Inã son wéra (Peret 1979). There, on page 18, one finds the iconic picture, duly identified as Didiué (a Portuguese spelling for Jijuè, which is the male-speech form of Jijuké's name).

Although the identity of the other individual on the reverse of the one thousand cruzeiro bill seems to remain unknown, the discovery of the photograph's original version helps clarify some common misunderstandings resulting from its gradual decontextualization ("discovery" here being a rather relative term, as the picture has been publicly available for a while). The original picture is available online as part of the digitized collections of famed Brazilian anthropologist Berta Ribeiro (1924-1997), who probably obtained it from the Museu do Índio collections, where it's attributed to Mário Simões (another SPI indigenista familiar with Karajá culture) or Nilo Velloso. The original shows a Karajá woman apparently breastfeeding a baby, the latter wearing a dexi bracelet, its hand resting on the mother's breast. The currency bill, on the other hand, shows a rather cropped version, erasing the baby—and the subject's gender: the picture is often mistaken to be that of a male, as the Casa da Moeda's own website describes the individuals as a Karajá "couple," a mistake that's been reproduced in social and popular media. Wikipedia describes her as "an indigenous man of the Karajá tribe," while through no fault of their own Sepultura fans usually refer to her as "the guy from the cover of Roots."

By describing how a case of seemingly benign homage may evolve into an obvious example of cultural erasure and appropriation, I hope this article contributes to shed some light on the social responsibilities involved in the guardianship of indigenous knowledge. When discussing cultural repatriation, much emphasis tends to be placed on the return of material artifacts, but memory repatriation is even more urgent. As indigenous elders pass away, the link between the materials deposited in research institutions and the communities where they originated tends to disappear. Particularly in the case of Brazilian ethnography, much of the photographic collections tend to lack adequate contextualization. Since much of such documentation was produced by government indigenistas in the second half of last century, as illustrated by the photographs discussed in this article, time is of the essence to promote cooperation between institutional and community guardians to provide collections with accurate context while returning a wealth of knowledge back to their legitimate owners. For that, digital collections may play an essential role, as long as they provide for unencumbered public input and promote active participation from indigenous communities.

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Published originally on March 9th, 2024. Preliminary version.

These notes started as a Tumblr post, in Portuguese.

(*) The cruzeiro was replaced by the real as Brazil's currency in 1994.

William Lipkind portrayed

Although William Lipkind, the anthropologist, may be photographically elusive, Bill Lipkind, the Martha Vineyard's vacationeer, is rather well known in art circles.

by Eduardo R. Ribeiro

William Lipkind (1904-1974), an American anthropologist who did fieldwork among the Karajá, Javaé, Tapirapé, and Kaiapó between 1938 and 1939, passed away on this date (October 1, 1974), 50 years ago. Lipkind was part of the group of Columbia University graduate students who came to Brazil under the auspices of the Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), which included noted Brazilianist Charles Wagley (well known for his work among the Tapirapé, the Tenetehara, and regional populations in Pará, Brazilian Amazon). In 1944 he obtained a Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Winnebago language (Nebraska, USA), under the mentorship of Frans Boaz, based on fieldwork conducted in 1936 (therefore, years before his work in Brazil).

Lipkind had hoped to obtain a job at the Museu Nacional, teaching linguistics to Brazilian students, but those intentions were not welcomed by the Museu's director, Heloísa Torres (cf. Correia & Mello 2008). His anthropological career being cut short, he would go on to cultivate an award-winning career as a writer of children's books. Although his work in Brazil resulted in only a couple of published papers (1940, 1948) on the Karajá (a Macro-Jê group on the Araguaia River, Central Brazil, on whose language I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation), Lipkind was adept at collecting ethnographic artifacts (producing an impressive collection for the Museu Nacional; cf. Lima Filho 2017), in addition to anthropological and linguistic data now housed at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. As his dissertation demonstrates, Lipkind was likely the most linguistically-oriented among his Columbia colleagues sent to Brazil.

Lipkind preceded Wagley in the Araguaia region and helped establish the grounds for the latter's fieldwork. Both traveled together during Wagley's first introduction to the Tapirapé (cf. Reis 2023:183; see also Wagley 1988), in 1939. That is why, when looking for a picture to illustrate William Lipkind's author page in the Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library, I wasn't surprised to find, among Wagley's materials at the University of Florida's Digital Collections, an image titled (typo and all) "William Lipkin [sic] - graduate student from Columbia University, studying Caraja Indians (Photograph 79)." In the picture, Lipkind sits at a typewritter on a desk made of wooden crates (a picture that, albeit posed, manages to capture some of the ruggedness of the Brazilian backwoods back then):

Photograph 79: The plot thickens

The Charles Wagley collection at the UFDC website is a treasure trove of photographs, sound recordings, field notes and other writings, superbly digitized and fairly well contextualized. The website is very stable, avoiding link rot even when the collections have been restructured. Given the collections' high level of reliability, I was surprised to see a post on the "Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists" blog calling into question the identification of the picture, citing the Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library's Flickr account:

This photo appears to be of Lipkind, via Flickr, where the Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú claims this is from the Wagley papers, but the online Wagley papers do not have the photo so… I’d like to see more on the provenance fo the photo.

Yes, we ‘claimed’ so because that’s exactly the information provided in the collection’s website. It seems the "Highly Accurate" blogger lacked due diligence, as the original links are still online (and not that hard to find). For the sake of further link stability, and ease of access, we’ve also saved them via Wayback Machine.

Photograph 79 is part of a series (numbered 1-186) documenting Wagley’s first trip to Brazil, from his arrival in Rio de Janeiro to his initial work among the Tapirapé. Three other pictures later in the series seem to portray the same individual (albeit not as clearly): photograph 90 in a section titled “Traveling on Rio Tapirape (Photographs 86-97);” and photographs 119 and 121 in a section titled “The anthropologist at work (Photographs 119-121)” (photograph 120 is obviously of Valentim Gomes among the Tapirapé). Compare the individual in these pictures with the one in Photograph 79:

Searching for further corroboration for the identification of the picture as being that of William Lipkind, I came across a possible plot twist. Ribeiro et al. (p. 284-285, in Leitão (org.) 2017) identify the gentleman at the typewriter as renowned Brazilian writer Dalcídio Jurandir, who assisted Wagley during the latter’s work on public health in Gurupá, Pará (for confirmed portraits of Jurandir, click here). However, despite some slight resemblance between both men, the fact that the picture is part of a series documenting Wagley’s early work with the Tapirapé (when his colaboration with Jurandir had not started yet) seems to corroborate its identification as provided by the UFDC website.

Bill Lipkind and Aaron Siskind

Another picture of William Lipkind that has appeared recently in the anthropological literature, published by Lima Filho (2017), shows him decades after his work in Central Brazil, alongside his wife, Maria Cimino, artist Alice Yamin and her husband Leo Yamin, and photographer Aaron Siskind. The picture is part of Alice Yamin's papers at the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art:

This picture helps shed light on a facet of Lipkind's life that seems to be little-known among anthropologists. Along with famed photographer Aaron Siskind, he was part of a close-knit group of friends who would spend their summers at the Yamin's house in Martha's Vineyard. "Bill" (as Lipkind was called among friends--he would author his children's books as "Will") was a recurrent subject of Siskind's photography, dating back to the 1930s, when Siskind had just acquired his first camera. Among Siskind's works at the Eastman Museum there are two pictures from 1935 portraying Lipkind in full frontal nude. Lipkind is also represented in a later, more abstract fase of Siskind's photography, in a 1960 series of photos titled "Physical Portraits of William Lipkind," including works such as Bill Lipkind 5, Bill Lipkind 10, Bill Lipkind 20, Bill Lipkind 22, Bill Lipkind 32, and Bill Lipkind 33.

Now that we have a better idea of what Lipkind looked like, we can revisit the Yamin picture above. As it turns out, Lima Filho (2017) misidentifies Lipkind as the male sitting to the left, who is actually the photographer Aaron Siskind. Leo Yamin is the one standing. Lipkind is in fact the male sitting at the right, in a striped shirt. Compare this picture with Bill Lipkind 32 (1960) below. Lima Filho also seems to misidentify (as ‘Washington, USA’) the place where the photo was taken: the letters “M.V.” in the back of the photograph clearly refer to Martha’s Vineyard, the group’s usual summer rendezvous.

Thus, although pictures of William Lipkind doing fieldwork as an anthropologist may not be as ubiquitous, Aaron Siskind's personal, fairly intimate portraits of his friend Bill Lipkind are rather prominent, having graced the walls of prestigious art museums. 

Besides hopefully connecting two facets of William Lipkind's life that are often appreciated in isolation (by anthropologists, on the one hand, and art lovers, on the other), this brief sojourn served to awaken my curiosity as a linguist. Since he was the first academically-trained linguist to work on the Karajá language, his data at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives may, in addition to their intrinsic historiographic value, provide valuable insights into possible cultural and linguistic change.

Sources

I've created a Tumblr blog to share the sources on William Lipkind's life that I've gathered while researching Photograph 79, including pictures, posts on his children's books, and a radio program episode, a mini-lecture on "Human Nature" he did for New York Public Radio, in which he briefly mentions his experiences among the Karajá. Visit https://williamlipkind.tumblr.com/