Sitting quietly on a patio is a woman. She is making annatto - the red dye used to decorate the face and body during village ceremonies. Except there is no ceremony today. To her the day simply felt like an annatto-making kind of day. Her neighbour, noticing the activity on the porch, wanders over and joins her. Soon the entire village is making the red dye. It is an annatto-making contagion.
I cut my grass yesterday. It was either that or I’d soon have to machete my way to the shed. When I began there was suburban silence. When I finished, the hum of many mowers surrounded me. I walked around to my front porch to discover five neighbours were also mowing, and the sound of grass being cut echoed into the distance. It was a grass-cutting contagion.
Was the woman on her porch a leader?
Was I a leader?
Last year I disappeared into Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ethnography of the Araweté people entitled ‘From the Enemy’s Point of View’. Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist renowned for his writing about perspectivism. Those of you who have read his ethnography will know that it is not an easy read. It is the shape, and weight of a brick. And he suggests, rather than prescribes, making the reading an almost painful esoteric experience.
The Araweté are a people who lived on the banks of the Amazonian Xingu River. They had very little contact with the White Man (or awi, meaning ‘enemy’ as they call him) until the 1970s. Viveiros de Castro lived amongst the Araweté intermittently from 1981 to 1988.
To the Araweté leadership is a fluid construct. They have a term for leader: ‘tenota mo’, which means ‘he who goes in front’ or ‘he who begins’. Unlike the Western leader, the Araweté leader ‘designates a position that is both omnipresent and discrete’. Leaders are a critical part of their village, for without them, there is no movement. But the Araweté leader is ‘he who begins’ rather than ‘he who commands’; ‘he who goes in front’ rather than ‘he who stays at the centre’.
It is not a role held by one person. ‘Take me to your leader’ would be a very confusing request. Nor is ‘following’ something to be celebrated. In fact, it is something you should strive to avoid being obvious about. Their movements from one location to another illustrate this, as they move in a casual and disordered way. ‘There is a kind of embarrassment in acting like someone else, as if this [implies] they were doing something because another is’. You wouldn’t get many ‘likes’ from them on Instagram. Nor would you see a chest-beating thought leader.
You may read this and think ‘yup, fluid leadership - sounds like [insert leadership or organisational theory here]’; and it probably does. But what is interesting is that this social organisation was born in the depths of the Amazon, of a people who had lived in isolation from ‘the enemy’, way before white man began waxing lyrically about leadership in business. And yet, their notion of leadership seems strangely similar to what is being discussed a lot today.
The Araweté approach to leadership is inextricably linked to their social organisation. Described by Viveiros de Castro as ‘non-Euclidean’ (think Escher for an artistic representation of non-Euclidean spaces), there is no interior, no exterior, no centre, no boundaries, no thresholds, and no limen. ‘The unity of society is not expressed in a clear or constant manner in the ritual use of space’. The village has no centre. No designated communal space. There is no geographical middle. No hierarchy. No Boardroom, reception area, lunchroom, innovation lab ... it is, in its entirety, communal. Viveiros de Castro describes this as ‘pluri-centric’ in which ‘a public and central space is conspicuously absent. The village looks like an aggregate of small villages, a juxtaposed but isolated nuclei of houses turned inwards’.
The Araweté have a passion for exteriority. They look outward, believing they are not ‘human beings’ but rather ‘human becomings’; their destiny lying beyond this world. ‘We are in the middle’ they say. In transition. Their simplistic social organisation is dwarfed by a complex exterior cosmos. The terrestrial world being neither ego-centric, nor socio-centric, but rather it’s centre simply residing outside, in a highly complex cosmos full of many magnificent Gods with varying roles. This is where their threshold lies, between the Gods (mai) and the Araweté people (bide).
My attempts at sense-making leave me with a few questions:
Can simplistic organisational models (social or otherwise) exist without the existence of a complex exterior?
Do we forget we are ‘human becomings’, constantly in transition?
Is fluid leadership dependent upon a non-Euclidean form of organisational design?
Is the Araweté focus on a ‘curious mixture of submission to custom and a maintenance of autonomy’ something we also strive to achieve at work? How do we do the same thing as everybody else (fit in) yet still maintain our individuality?
I do not posit the Araweté way of living in the world as utopian. Far from it. Their way of life has been ravaged by loggers, miners and attacks from neighbouring Tribes. Ethnographies do not always travel well. Presentations of cross-cultural personhood, and social organisation, are often ethnographically bound. But they can play an important role in reflecting ourselves back … on ourselves. Affording us a fresh perspective … on our own perspective, of ourselves.
Image: Chiranjeeb Mitra on Unsplash
Reference: Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1992, ‘From the Enemy’s Point of View: Human and Divinity in an Amazonian Society’ The University of Chicago Press