The Leader as Servant

The Leader as Servant ... among the Indians of the Americas

pp. 19-37 chieftainship

p.	*tribe*	*chief*
22	Urubu	"It is the business of a chief to be generous and to give what is asked of him. ... you can always tell the chief because he has the fewest possessions and wears the shabbiest ornaments. He has had to give away everything else."
	Nambicuara	"Generosity plays a fundamental role in determining the degree of popularity a new chief will enjoy".
23	Guiana; upper Xingu	"Greed and power are incompatible; to be a chief it is necessary to be generous."
31	South America	"it is the leader who works the hardest."

pp.64-82 population

p.	*population*	*location*	*date*
75	12 thousnd	Maranhao i.	early 17^th century
77	25 million	Anahuac	1519
	10 million	Inca empire	1530
	1.5 million	Warani` (Guarani)	early 17^th century
82	80 or 100 million	the Americas	prae-Columbian

{Actually, when the Spaniards (of Pizarro) reached Peru, the population was already in drastic decline, due to smallpox. The population of the Inca empire in 1519 must have exceeded 25 million. Thus, the population of the Americas in 1519 must have far exceeded 100 million.}

pp. 109-116 a C^ulupi (in southern Paraguayan Chaco) myth

p.	*successively encountered by a to^oie>e’h (‘shaman’)*
109	pumpkins
110	anda>i [Cucurbita moschata (p. 127, n. 2)]
111	bees
112	tortoise
	skunk
113	tobacco
	women for copulation
114	*"Faiho>ai, the spirit of charcoal"*
	*"Op>etsukfai, the spirit of the cactus."*
	algarrobo (thorny fruit-tree) [employed by him to seduce his own kinswoman (p. 115)]
116	caraguata (spiny bush) [employed by another kinswoman of his to punish him for attempting to rape her]

pp. 117-119 another C^ulupi myth

p.	*adventure of the leopard-god (resusucitated after eacg episode by the ts>a-ts>i bird)*
	*enticed by __*	*to enter __*
117	chameleon	ember field
118	buck	cactus field
	lizard	climb tree-branches
119	bird	space by leaping between criss-crossing-moving [like giant scissors] tree-branches
	vulture	*sky by soaring beeswax wings : cf. "candle" [for beeswax] of day Cib (BChBCh, p. 117 = MS p. 61 C), depicted as a vulture in CD – CMM, p. 66)*
	skunk	"was left blinded" {cf. Hopi skunk-god as glaringly bright sun, according to BH}

BChBCh = Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, XIII. http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/maya/cbc/cbc18.htm

CD = Codex Dresdensis.

CMM = Ernst Wilhelm Fo:rstemann (tr. by Wesselhoeft & Parker) : Commentary on the Maya Manuscript in the Royal ... . Cambridge, 1906.

BH = Frank Waters : Book of the Hopi.

indigenous context of C^ulupi myths

p.	*context*
109	"These narratives, going from the mock-heroic to the ribald," induce laughter in the native audience : "the smiles at the beginning become chortles that are barely stifled, then shameless peals of laughter burst out, and finally it is all howls of joy."
125	"blinding the shaman, is ... one of the moments of the voyage to the Sun : the passage through the darkness where one does not see anything." "this myth is a burlesque parody of the voyage to the Sun, ... the obstacles that the true shaman is able to surmount : the dance in the thorns, the branches that criss-cross, the skunk that plunges the jaguar into darkness, and, finally, the Icarian flight towards the Sun in the company of the vulture."

pp. 142-147 Warani` (Guarani) pilosophy

p.	*philosophy*
145	"One in everything is corruptible. ... Whatever ... develops only in order to perish, will be called One. ... The One : the anchorage of death. Death : the fate of what is one."
146	"In the land of the not-One, where misfortune is abolished, maize grows all by itself; the arrow brings back the game to those who no longer need to hunt ... . Evil is the One. Good ... is the dual, both the one and its other ... . Ywy mara-ey:, the destination ..., shelters ... human gods".

Pierre Clastres (trranslated from the French by Robert Hurley) : Society Against the State. Urizen Books, NY, 1977.