This article focuses on the practice of female scolding in a community of Pa'ikwené (or Palikur), a native Amazonian people (French Guyana and Brazil), in order to explore ideas about power and speech and the phenomenon of political speaking. The article takes issue with claims that politics are to be equated specifically with the formal public arena, and that political discourse is the exclusive province and prerogative both of leaders and of men, whether institutionally 'authorized' or not. It is argued, on the contrary, that the everyday speech of common villagers, in this case women, is among other things integrally political, and no more powerless in effect than the so-called 'empty' speech of Amerindian chiefs postulated by Clastres. It is further proposed that Pa'ikwené women's scolding not only embodies their own power but also regenerates symmetrical gender relations, and thus the polity itself.Much, if not most, anthropological work on the topic poses 'political language' in terms of formalized speech used by 'instituted' (Bourdieu 1991) speakers in the formal arena (Bloch 1975;.This article argues instead -apropos Deuxième Village Espérance, hereafter Espérance 2, a Pa'ikwené community in French Guyana 1 -that the everyday sphere can constitute, at least in Amazonia, a place where the verbal actions of so-called ordinary, and female, individuals have as much political effect on the process of community life as official discourses. My choice of subject is motivated by the lingering stress in ethnographic studies of 'traditional' societies on men's importance as speakers, and therefore social and political agents, which persists in eclipsing that of women despite research attesting to the contrary. 2 Beginning from the assumption that only public speech is political, it is frequently presumed that because their activities are (supposedly) limited to the domestic, or private, arena, women -even in egalitarian societies -are silenced politically, and politically silent Overing 1999;Strathern 1988). It has been shown for native Amazonia that women none the less exercise their public and (hence) political voice through such context-related formal discourses as ritual wailing and the verbal aggression of enemies (Alès 1990: 240;Briggs 1992;. There is also evidence indicating the existence of female chiefs. 3 Yet regardless of such regional data on women's public speaking and leadership, the focus remains principally on

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The article focuses on the process of naoné-nationhood-of the Palikur, a Native American people of northern Brazil and southern French Guiana, from 1500 onward. It is described how, in counteraction to colonial expansion, a corpus of preexisting clans combined with diverse other ethnic entities to create, at its height (c. 1800), a dominant regional polity, itself linked to wider cross-ethnic macropolities under a single leader. New data are offered to support the thesis that such formations, which coevally existed elsewhere in Amazonia, were not just a response to new circumstances but also the renewal of a pre-Conquest sociopolitical strategy. The article also addresses the role of leadership in historical Amerindian macropolitical systems and suggests that a chief's skills as a peacemaker were no less necessary than his skills as a warmonger.At its simplest, the word naoné, in the language of the Palikur, an Arawakan-speaking people of Brazil and French Guiana, means nation. It also signifies among other things each of the separate subgroups, or clans, that jointly comprise that nation. It is with these two senses and the relationship between the phenomena they represent that this article is concerned. Building on an earlier article (Passes 2002) and on Françoise Grenand and Pierre Grenand's important ethnohistorical work (1987) on Amapá state, North Brazil, the article discusses the creation of the Palikur nation as a bipartite formation, structured along geographical lines, before and immediately after the Conquest, and its subsequent transformation, through constant agglomeration, into a powerful political confederacy of mutually independent ''clans'' based in northern Amapá. It will be shown how, throughout the period of colonial expansionism, and in spite of the prolonged Franco-Portuguese rivalry regarding its possession, this region of marshes Ethnohistory 51:2 (spring 2004)

Para um entendimento da matemática pa'ikwené (palikur) 2 Alan PassesRESUMO: Este artigo discute um aspecto do conhecimento pa'ikwené chamado púkúha, que significa tanto "entender" quanto "contar". Ele explora a numerologia indígena e a relação próxima, não menos imaginativa do que empírica, entre a matemática e a lingüística, que nem sempre aparece em sociedades não orais como a nossa. O sistema matemático pa'ikwené é conceitualmente inventivo e lexicalmente profuso: alguns numerais têm mais de duzentas diferentes formas no uso corrente, graças a um intensivo processo de transformações de morfemas baseado no acréscimo de afixos. Portanto, uma palavra-número pode pertencer a vinte e uma classes numéricas que se relacionam a cinco diferentes categorias semânticas, que incorporam diversos estados e atributos discretos (macho/fêmea, concreto/abstrato, animado/inanimado, natural/sobrenatural), assim como idéias aritméticas e geométricas específicas.Assumindo uma abordagem antiplatônica, o artigo descreve a matemáti-ca pa'ikwené como um modo de conhecimento inato, corporificado e metafórico (Lakoff & Nuñez, 2000), que classifica e expressa o mundo em que se vive. Propõe também que os números pa'ikwené operam simultaneamente nos níveis literal e figurativo, ou seja, ambos como símbolos com significados fixos e determinados, e como imagens polissêmicas de diferentes classes de coisas que compõem o universo nativo. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Amazônia, Pa'ikwené/Palikur, conhecimento amerín-dio, etnolingüística, etnociência, etnomatemática, tipologia indígena dos números, classificação, metáfora.-246 -PASSES, A. DO UM À METAFORA... 1 é 1 e sempre 1, em qualquer língua; em inglês, claro, é "one"; em francês algo diferente. (Goody, 1977, p. 122) Joanna Overing (2003, p. 293) conta como os Piaroa, a quem seus vizinhos consideram "os intelectuais do Orinoco", apreciam o debate, particularmente sobre os aspectos metafísicos do cotidiano. Meu interesse aqui é sobre o aspecto físico da vida cotidiana, como ele se revela por meio do discurso matemático e numérico dos Pa'ikwené, o povo talvez não menos intelectual (eu gostaria de acreditar) do rio Oiapoque, no norte do Brasil/Guiana Francesa. Muito do trabalho que realizei sobre a linguagem cotidiana pa'ikwené examinou a prática incorporada e o valor sociológico de tchimap, que significa tanto "ouvir" quanto "entender" (Passes, 1998;2000;2001;2002; 2004, p. 8). Este artigo trata de outra forma de entendimento e conhecimento pa'ikwené, chamada púkúh (a). Púkúh(a), de forma semelhante, significa "entender" e também tem um segundo significado: "contar". Em Pa'ikwené (uma língua arawak), você pode usar números para descrever comportamento social, ações e estados de ser. Assim, você pode dizer de um homem retraído ou isolado que ele "um-izou" a si mesmo, Ig pahavwihwé, ou que dois indivíduos se "dois-aram" a si mesmos, Egkis piyanméhwé, ou seja, eles se casaram.Este artigo pretende lançar alguma luz sobre o fenômeno da metáfo-ra matemática na fala indígena. Será argumentado que os números ...