The werewolf in between indians and whites: the work of the imagination in Grão-Pará at the end of the eighteenth century

Abstract

The understanding of the Amazon's colonial period as the secure imposition of Portuguese control on powerless and scattered Indian peoples is misleading. The representation obscures Indian acts of resistance, the efforts of thousands of colonists to adapt and the emergence of a mestiço population, as well as the local negotiations between these heterogeneous groups. Little research has been conducted on the popular culture or religion in the Amazon durin g this time despite the existence of various sources. Developing arguments made elsewhere in Brazil, and using documents from the State archive of Pará, Brazil, this article reveals something of the popular culture which appeared as the diverse traditions converged. It was a way of life impregnated with complex negotiations and tense congregations of beliefs and practices that would eventually lead to a region wide, mass participation rebellion in the 1830s. The focus of the text is a legal action brought by a Brazilian born town official in 1793 accused of being werewolf and scaring Indians and whites in the Lower Amazon. What was the significance of the werewolf and what work was the figure doing locally? By reconstructing aspects of this colonial world, my argument is that the Portuguese derived figure of the werewolf acted as a bridging concept to similar transformative beings in the Amerindian world. I suggest the bridges made by the diverse kinds of people represent an imaginative frontier and was the localised form in which whites, mestiços and Indians came to relate each other.