How likely do the Yacuruna in Amazonian Myths Represent Europeans?
1)Europeans generally are more hairy then Native Americans. In myths, the Yacuruna sometimes disguise themselves as hairy people.
2)The Yacuruna come from the sea like European sailors did.
3) Similar to the Yacuruna, MAYBE Europeans have been worshipped as gods by the Amazonian people.
4)When a Yacuruna and an indigenous Amazonian reproduce the child would sometimes become more Yacuruna. Similarly, Castizos(75% European and 25% Native American) are sometimes as privileged as just pure Europeans.
One of the main points of religion is survival heuristics thus supporting this theory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacuruna#:~:text=The%20Yacuruna%20are%20a%20mythical,runa%20(%22man%22).
References
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Beyer, Stephan (2009). Singing to the Plants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. pp. 318–321. ISBN 978-0-8263-4730-5.
Luna, L.E. "Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the mestizo population of the Peruvian Amazon". Stockhold Studies in Comparative Religion. 27.
Pantone, Dan James. "Iquitos News and Travel Guide". Iquitos Legend: Yacuruna. Retrieved 30 August 2021.
Tindall, Robert (2008). The jaguar that roams the mind. Rochester, VT: Park Street. pp. 210–211. ISBN 978-1594772542.
Bear, J. (2000). Amazon magic: The life story of ayahuasquero and shaman don Agustin Rivas Vasquez. Taos, New Mexico: Calibri. p. 140. ISBN 978-0967425504.
"In 1876, Oscar Peschel wrote that North Asiatic Mongols, Native Americans, Malays, Hottentots and Bushmen have little to no body hair, while Semitic peoples, Indo-Europeans, and Southern Europeans (especially the Portuguese and Spanish) have extensive body hair.[13]"(Wikipedia)
13(ultimate source):
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501969
The Yacuruna is described as being hairy with a backward-facing head and deformed feet.[2]
Ultimate source:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/131929362/Luna-Vegetalismo-Shamanism-Among-the-Mestizo-Population-of-the-Peruvian-Amazon
It is unclear to me how the arguments and references you provide could be considered to support the notion that Yacaruna stories derive from colonial encounters with Europeans. I also feel that anthropologists', and others', characterization of traditional folks' oral literature as "myth" is a mischaracterization of their knowledge of the workings of the empirical world. I think a lot of it stems from not learning the local language, and thinking that literary metaphors are reflective of imperfect Indigenous understanding of the world. In my 30 months working with savanna hunter-gatherers in Venezuela (only in their language as they are monolingual and speak practically no Spanish) they have accurately explained evapotranspiration, archaeological artifacts as evidence of ancestral occupations of the area, endless details about animal behavior, plant physiology, weather, geomorpholgy, etc. Where they do not have germ theory, instrumentation that we have to measure events beyond our corporeal senses, they still make logical cause & effect arguments that are couched in metaphors, not "mythology".
Rusty Greaves Dear Doctor, Professor, and Director Greaves,
I am honored to have caught your attention. Perhaps the ultimate way to conclude this discussion is by interviewing the tribes.
Interview is not as straightforward as many folks think. When I have asked "why do you do this" or "tell me about this" questions, I often got responses that simply said "because that is what we do!" or their description of something I have asked about is from an insider perspective and does not address my "why" question. Essentially, I look like an adult with a beard or now white hair, but I was asking a child's question. The answer was what would be said to a child: "because!". It often took 1.5 years to get a volunteered response that was the answer to what I had been asking for 18-24 months.
Rusty Greaves Dear Doctor, Professor, and Director Greaves,
Religion is often survival heuristics for populations, thus,maybe at least for some Amazonians the Yacaruna represented Europeans. Since colonialism is marked with brutality then logically the Yacaruna may have represented Europeans.
I'm rarely on here but in addition to what Rusty has said regarding "myth," forager's factual knowledge about the world, and issues regarding interviews, you may be interested in looking at Scalise Sugiyama's Talking Stories OER (open educational resource) https://talkingstories.uoregon.edu/ and the journal publications upon which the OER is based https://blogs.uoregon.edu/humananimallab/publications/
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