Dancing Against the End of the World

What Kamiko taught was neither a rejection of Christianity nor an acceptance of it. He preached before a cross, spoke of salvation and of a coming destruction by fire, and used the language of sin and penance the missions had brought upriver. He also required the dances and the chants of Baniwa initiation, held through the night and repeated for days, and made those the means of surviving what was coming. The two things were not in tension for him or for the thousands who came.

Around that centre he laid down a discipline: fasting, ceremonial song, and above all the refusal of social and economic relations with the white traders and officials of the region. That last requirement is what made the movement legible to the authorities as revolt, because the upper Rio Negro economy ran on debt and on labour extracted from exactly those communities, and a religious obligation not to deal with traders was, in effect, a general strike. Brazilian and Venezuelan officials responded accordingly. The gatherings on the Içana were broken up, participants were pursued, and Kamiko himself was hunted for a period. He was not caught in any final sense and went on being a religious authority in the region for decades, dying in 1903.