The Three Boys and the Face-Skinning Ethnographer
A blend of ethnography, chronicle, and short story, this piece delves into the relationships between an ethnographer and the teenagers of a Shipibo community he has chosen as the focus of his research. His inexperience and anxiety sabotage the project—but in the end, they lead him to a historical awareness of the power dynamics between whites and Indigenous people, between North and South.
From left to right, the three boys (Omar, Walter, and Álex), photographed by the face-skinning ethnographer, in the Shipibo village of Vencedor.
Text and photos by Mono Blanco
Originally published in issue 195 of Cáñamo magazine, March 2014.
Carlos Suárez Álvarez has asked me to write about the relationship he maintained with the “Three Boys”: Omar, Walter, and Álex, neighbors from the small village of Vencedor in the Peruvian Amazon. From his point of view, the intention of my account should be to show how young Shipibo live in an indigenous community far from the city, as well as the conflictive relationships the ethnographer establishes with his informants during fieldwork. Being himself the protagonist of this story, he considers himself lacking sufficient distance to offer an objective view (although he does not like to use that word much), hence his request. I thoroughly read his field diary, spoke with him at length, and also had the opportunity to travel to Vencedor.
We both agree that the origin of the problems that hindered his position in the field from the outset may lie in a certain stereotyped idealism about indigenous communities, understandable in a tourist but unforgivable in a researcher. “Paradisiacal!” he noted in his field diary before going to bed on the second night, referring to the simple kindness of the people, the beautiful orange sunset, and the peaceful flow of the Pisqui River. “An extraordinarily enriching experience,” he anticipated what was to come.
On the morning of the third day, full of enthusiasm, he began the research and the disenchantment. The chief, a small but vigorous man in his sixties, when asked about the number of young people in the village, replied: “In this village, there are no young people, they have gone to study elsewhere because we don’t have a secondary school here.” Carlos felt a wave of discomfort. A few months earlier, during a preparatory visit, he had explained in an assembly that youth was the object of his research, and he had been encouraged to stay; no one had warned him that there were no young people. His ambitious plans were falling apart; although anger invaded him, he remained silent. After brooding over his discomfort all morning, he regained optimism at lunchtime when his host of the day (a different family fed him each day) clarified that there were indeed young people in the community, and began to enumerate them one by one.
In the following days, Carlos was relieved to find that there were young people of both sexes. However, relief gave way to sorrow when he realized that these young people did not “give a damn” about him, a colloquial expression he used to capture his frustration. In his field diary, he recorded several attempts to get close that only received monosyllabic responses diminished by overwhelming fear and a rudimentary knowledge of the Spanish language. With the young women, the relationship presented an added difficulty, the sexual one, so Carlos decided at first to focus on the “Three Boys,” who were always together, companions in their newly reached puberty.
The Three Boys, walking along the beach looking for watermelons. From right to left: Álex, Omar, and Walter.
Because he was the neighbor across the street, Walter, thirteen years old, was the object of obsessive surveillance: from the door of his house, Carlos recorded all the boy’s movements, waiting for an opportunity to join him in some everyday activity. On one occasion, they coincided at the small village store, and Carlos took the chance to ask casually if he was going to attend secondary school that year; Walter said “no,” and Carlos didn’t press further. At their second, also casual encounter in the communal hall, Carlos asked where he had gone that morning (he had seen him leave with his parents from the back of the house, carrying a machete), and Walter said he had gone to get yucca, then let out a loud fart. Carlos then showed interest in hunting and fishing, and asked Walter to take him along sometime, to which the boy agreed.
The third conversation happened a few days later; Carlos had woken up feeling frankly depressed because his research wasn’t progressing. In a show of courage, he crossed the street to his neighbors’ house, where Walter was busy cleaning his father’s shotgun, and proceeded to the following interrogation:
—Do you like hunting?
—I do.
—What do you hunt?
—Huangana (tapir), sajino (wild pig).
—What was the first thing you hunted?
—Sajino.
—Aren’t you going hunting today?
—I don’t have bullets.
—How many bullets do you take with you?
—Five, six, seven, eight...
—You have good aim.
—Yes.
—I do.
—What do you hunt?
—Huangana (tapir), sajino (wild pig).
—What was the first thing you hunted?
—Sajino.
—Aren’t you going hunting today?
—I don’t have bullets.
—How many bullets do you take with you?
—Five, six, seven, eight...
—You have good aim.
—Yes.
At that point, Carlos ran out of questions. However, the exchange had been the longest he had had with any young person in the village so far. Carlos insisted that Walter take him hunting and then went to breakfast, almost euphoric. It was a first step. The next day, he saw Walter leave with his father, carrying the shotgun. In the afternoon, he saw them return; they had caught two animals on their hunting trip. He became depressed again.
The shy, sturdy Álex and the talkative Omar went almost every day to work at the communal sawmill. When Carlos encountered them in the community, Álex hid behind Omar, who took care of answering questions briefly, each time tinged with more anxiety. Carlos literally transcribed several of these “conversations,” which lack any ethnographic interest.
Walter, at thirteen years old, carrying planks at the communal sawmill.
Carlos tells me that he would have considered that first stay in Vencedor a failure if it hadn’t been for one morning when he saw Omar pass in front of his house, loaded with fishing gear, walking toward the port. He asked if he could accompany him, and Omar referred him to his older brother, Darwin, who did not object. The three of them settled into the hollowed-out log canoe and headed downstream toward the cocha (lake). Omar spoke to Carlos spontaneously: he pointed out trees, birds, animals, and constantly suggested, “Take a photo, Carlos, take a photo,” which Carlos, pleased and gratified, did. Omar’s role was to handle the motor, while his brother Darwin cast the net with Olympic-like flair — a circular net weighing eight kilos that required powerful muscles. Only two years separated the brothers (14 and 16), but Darwin already held the social status of an adult, not because of his age or musculature.
“Among the Shipibos,” Carlos explains, “one becomes a young man at puberty and transitions to adulthood when, fully physically developed and having acquired certain skills in fishing, hunting, and building, he establishes a marital union and has offspring. In fact, those who neither marry nor have children are never considered adults, even if they are fifty years old. And Darwin already had his wife and little daughter and was capable of fishing and hunting for them. In fact, I felt that he, as an adult, related to me as if I were young, since after all, I was still a student and had no family, despite being twice his age.”
*****************
A few months later, when he arrived in Vencedor for the second time, Carlos realized something so obvious that he found it incomprehensible not to have understood it during his first stay. “I was so obsessed,” he recalls, “with being taken hunting, which for me was the ultimate expression of male activity, that I paid no attention to the fact that in Vencedor the male activity of those young men was the communal sawmill. That happened because I arrived imbued with ethnographic readings that said nothing about work in the sawmill, only about supposedly traditional activities.”
In this discovery one can glimpse the beginning of Carlos’s maturation as an ethnographer: he freed himself from preconceived ideas and understood the changing nature of any human society. Moreover, the communal sawmill gave him an additional advantage with respect to his young informants because he didn’t have to ask their permission or wait for them to take him; it was a place near the village where he could go alone on foot, and the boys could not escape; he could observe them freely. And so he did. His decision bore the first fruits.
In the foreground, Álex, one of the three boys, working at the communal sawmill.
Except for the dangerous work of sawing the planks, Álex the shy, stocky one, Omar the talkative, and Walter the elusive neighbor performed the same tasks as any adult in the village. The most common job was carrying bolaina logs on their backs from where they had been felled to the tractor trailer, and then from the trailer to the feet of the saws. Their muscles were still strengthening; in a couple of years, they could compete with the adults and carry pieces weighing one hundred and fifty kilos. Carlos laughed at the time when Walter was unable to carry a medium-thick log. Atilio, the tractor driver, mocked him: “This boy not strong. Too much…,” he said while making the gesture of masturbation. “Too much wanking.”
At the sawmill, Carlos also met Moisés, fourteen years old, who, originally from another village, had arrived a few months earlier to work with wood and save some money to cover the upcoming school year's expenses. Something similar had been done by fifteen-year-old Juan Luis, but he was not saving money to study — he wanted to go on a trip to Iquitos. “From the moment they reach puberty,” Carlos reflects, “these boys can live independently if they want; not even their parents can impose decisions on them; there is a deep respect for personal freedom.”
One day he was especially lucky. The motor that powered the saw broke down, and the Three Boys were assigned the task of clearing the path used by the tractor from the sawmill to the village. Under the driver’s coordination, the young men set to work removing any roots slightly protruding from the ground, cutting them with axe or machete blows. Carlos took photos, caught up in the joy with which the boys worked, admiring their skill and ability—until the elusive neighbor Walter accidentally let go of the axe, which flew to the feet of the startled ethnographer.
When they finished this work, since the motor was still broken, the boys went off in an unknown direction. Carlos timidly asked where they were going; Omar, from afar, sang back: “We’re going to the beach, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!” After hesitating for a moment, although they didn’t invite him, Carlos joined them and was glad he did because when he caught up, Omar said, “Let’s go now, Carlos, we’re going to eat watermelon.” They reached the white sandy beach of the Pisqui River. “Beautiful, isn’t it, Carlos?” admired Omar, looking at the landscape. They walked upriver to Walter’s chagra (plantation), where they looked for ripe watermelons. Then they retraced their steps and sheltered from the intense sun among the wild cane, where the temperature was cool. Walter cut a couple of banana leaves, put the watermelons on them, and began to cut and share. What followed was a symphony of big gulps, bites, sucking sounds, and exclamations of pleasure: “Very good,” “Really good,” “Ripe,” “Very ripe”… and a series of joyful celebrations. After the feast, they returned to the sawmill, where work had already resumed.
Walter, looking for watermelon in the family plantation.
"I thought that from that moment on they would let me a little more into their lives, and above all, that they would take me hunting, which was what I considered most important, but it didn’t happen," says Carlos. In the following weeks he saw them leaving for or returning from hunting several times. Omar hunted two peccaries and Carlos only found out, to his dismay, when he saw him stretching out the skins on a frame, in order to dry them for sale. Though inwardly he felt disappointed, he kept a good face with them and suggested, without pressuring, that it was very important they take him hunting. But as there was no progress, he decided to change his strategy: he would be direct. He ran into Walter the neighbor and Álex the beefy one and approached them frankly: "It’s very important for my work that I go into the forest. I want to go with you when you go hunting or fishing, let me know the day before and I’ll go. I’m doing a project and I need your help. Please help me." The two members of the Amazonian Youth Power Trio at first shared a nervous laugh, but at their interlocutor’s seriousness they stopped laughing.
"I thought I had won them over," Carlos recalls, "until two days later I found out they had gone hunting again, without me." Carlos expressed his frustration to the adults on several occasions, hoping they might intercede on his behalf, but even that had no effect. He realized it was a matter being talked about among the neighbors when one morning, a neighbor woman told him a man had been killed in a nearby village. "They peeled off his face," she clarified. A little later the same woman asked if the boys didn’t want to take him hunting. "No, they won’t take me, why do you ask?" said Carlos. "The other day the boys were laughing..." "Laughing?" "Yes. They’re scared. They say if they take you to the forest, you’ll peel off their faces."
The Face-Skinner, a dreadful being who travels the rivers of the jungle in modern vessels and abducts locals to carry out strange scientific experiments on their bodies, which he then abandons on a riverbank, without organs, bearing his terrifying signature: no skin on the face. According to Antonio de Herrera, chief chronicler of the Indies, the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century killed Indians to extract their body fat and apply it as a remedy to the sores caused by syphilis. And this turned into a myth to convey the extraordinary evil of the Spaniards through the ages, from parents to children. "I wasn’t just an old man in the boys’ eyes, nor simply a white man," explains Carlos, "but on top of that I was a potential Face-Skinner, and they were terrified of me. That discovery completely changed the meaning of everything that had happened up to that point. Eureka!, I told myself."
*****************
Two of the Three Boys changed the sawmill for the school.
On his third and final stay in Vencedor, Carlos’s anxiety vanished. Having taken stock of the ethnographic material gathered during previous visits, he felt satisfied. “I took that last month very calmly.” A new development in the village allowed for an unexpected closeness with two of the Three Boys. Thanks to international cooperation funds, a secondary school had been opened in the small community, and both Omar the talkative and Álex the brawny were attending. The school offered several very interesting elements for analysis. The first was that it created a space shared by both sexes, something nonexistent outside of class, where boys and girls rarely engaged in any joint activity due to their distinct gender roles. The teacher (a mestiza, from the city) strongly insisted on the idea of gender equality without realizing that its implementation in a place like Vencedor meant a radical transformation, whose consequences would require detailed analysis that will not take place here. Secondly, Carlos noticed a very different attitude in the boys compared to how they behaved in the sawmill or while fishing, where their demeanor bordered on adulthood. At school, they became childish. “The school system delays people’s maturity,” Carlos concluded. “School institutions are based on hierarchy, on paternalism, and they shape passive or obedient characters.”
At this point, Carlos considered his research finished, and in the final days he devoted himself to talking with the elders about youth in the past (so different). In the afternoons he played football: over the last year, the boys had gone from playing on the small field with other children to sharing the big field with the adults, and they were now confident enough to tease Carlos about his poor aim or clumsiness as a goalie.
One afternoon, the unthinkable happened: Carlos was visited by Omar the talkative and Álex the brawny. They sat with him in the kitchen and spent a good while chatting about this and that. Álex wore white plastic sunglasses and sang a trendy cumbia uninhibitedly. Carlos asked about Walter, whom he hadn’t seen lately, and they explained he was working at a mestizo sawmill. “I don’t think he wants to study,” said Omar, “but I do, to be like you.” “That confession surprised and touched me. Turns out I became a role model for them after all!” says Carlos. But an even bigger surprise awaited. Omar, after telling him he had recently killed a peccary, lamented that he wanted to go hunting again but had no bullets. “I do,” Carlos immediately jumped in, and added, “Whenever you want, let’s go.”
Sure enough, on the verge of his departure, Carlos went hunting with Omar. But that is another story and shall be told another time…
