After Animism
Ethical Life on an Amazonian Frontier
Eric White
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, Montreal
August 2016
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements of the degree of Master of Arts.
© Eric White 2016
i
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
1. The Relational Lives of Yushi
13
2. Yura: The Body Eclectic
38
3. Politics in a “Singular Plurality”
60
4. Life on the Ethical Frontier
79
Conclusion
98
Bibliography
103
ii
Abstract
Indigenous Amazonians have long been held up as models of small-scale, animist societies.
Now, however, in an age where most indigenous groups have long been in contact with—and to
some degree integrated into—modern institutional structures, from Christian missions to
governmental administration to conservation NGOs, this is no longer the case. This thesis, based
on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the author in a Sharanahua community in the Purús
region of the Peruvian Amazon, explores the ongoing reinvention of traditional animism in light
of the Sharanahua’s engagement with modern social, environmental, and political projects. The
thesis argues that cultural differences normally understood as differences of belief are best
understood as a difference in ethical emphasis—not just what is, but what ought to be. The
viewpoint adopted throughout the thesis is thus an ethical one, interrogating the ethical aspects of
contemporary Sharanahua lives. As such, strong emphasis is placed on the adaptation of
traditional notions of personhood to contemporary contexts, and vice versa. Among the topics
considered in close detail are concepts of spirit and body, shamanism, political participation,
conservation politics, Christian conversion, indigeneity, the Nature/Culture divide, and recent
debates on the nature of belief. The thesis thus makes a unique contribution to studies of
contemporary Amazonia, Amazonianist anthropology, and the ethics of social and environmental
change.
L’amazoniens indigènes ont longtemps été tenue comme des modèles des sociétés animistes de
petite échelle. Maintenant, cependant, à une époque où la plupart des groupes autochtones ont
longtemps été en contact avec et dans une certaine mesure intégré dans structures
institutionnelles modernes, soit des missions chrétiennes ou l'administration gouvernementale ou
les ONG de conservation, ce ne soit plus le cas. Cette thèse, basée sur une enquête
ethnographique menée par l'auteur dans une communauté sharanahua dans la région Purús de
l'Amazonie péruvienne, explore la réinvention en cours de l'animisme traditionnel à la lumière de
l'engagement des sharanahua avec des projets sociaux, environnementaux et politiques
modernes. La thèse soutient que les différences culturelles normalement compris comme des
différences de croyance sont mieux compris comme une différence de accent éthique, pas
seulement ce qui est, mais ce qui doit être. Le point de vue adopté dans toute la thèse est donc
d'ordre éthique, interrogeant les aspects éthiques de la vie Sharanahua contemporains. En tant
que tel, l'accent est mis sur l'adaptation des notions traditionnelles de la personnalité à des
contextes contemporains, et vice versa. Parmi les sujets examinés en étroite détail sont des
concepts de l'esprit et le corps, le chamanisme, la participation politique, la politique de
conservation, la conversion chrétienne, indigénéité, la fracture Nature / Culture et des débats
récents sur la nature de la croyance. La thèse apporte ainsi une contribution unique à l'étude de
l'Amazonie contemporaine, l'anthropologie Amazonianist et l'éthique du changement social et
environnemental.
iii
Acknowledgments
A thesis two years in the making does not come together on its own. I would like to
thank the following parties for helping realize this project into being:
I am grateful to have received financial support from the McGill University Faculty of
Arts in the form of the McCall McBain Fellowship and the Graduate Excellence Award.
For his dedicated mentorship, brilliant scholarship, and many eye-opening conversations,
I thank my supervisor, Eduardo Kohn.
I wish to also thank my colleagues in the Anthropology Department, particularly those
who patiently humored my running commentary through two semesters of theory seminars—
Alicia, Haza, Federico, Nathalie, Monika, Naomi, Frances, Erica—as well as my wonderful
officemates, co-TAs, and brilliant interlocutors: Alfonso, Adam, Rine, Ian, Camilo, Mónica,
Pierre, Philippe, Evans, Raad, Kristin, et al. It’s a sincere pleasure to have been surrounded by
such curious, creative, and intelligent people for two years.
I want to thank my friend and colleague Samuel Veissière for roping me into this whole
mess, along with other messes, on other continents.
I want to thank my gracious hosts and guides in Purús: the Melendez brothers—Eduardo,
Jaime, and Oswaldo—, Oswaldo’s wife Nelida, the community of Gastabala, the field staff at
EcoPurús—Karen Lino and Alfredo Del Aguila Melendez—, and the staff of the Alto Purús
National Park and Game Reserve—Rafael Pinos, Miguel Satalaya, and Meli Cornejo. A special
thanks as well to fellow traveller and anthropologist-in-the-making, Giancarlo Rolando.
I want to thank my family for all of their support, emotional, intellectual, and otherwise.
iv
Finally, and above all, I want to thank my beautiful wife, Amanda, who first mentioned
to me the name of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on a beach in northern Brazil, little knowing that
it would send me down a three-year-long path of endless conversations about ontology,
shamanism, linguistics, and other matters of everyday life. Te amo.
v
Introduction
Having given my thesis such a portentous title, I feel some explanation is in order. What
could I mean, “after animism”? The title contains two implicit assertions: 1) that animism is a
concept and a phenomenon whose “passage” will concern us here; and 2) that there is some
connection between this “passage” and ethical life on an Amazonian frontier as I describe it.
(For now, I want to hold in suspension the question of how literally the notion of “passage” is to
be applied, hence the scare quotes.) Both of these assertions require some explanation in their
own right, after which the scope of this thesis, its objectives, presuppositions, and main
arguments, should become clear.
Animism is a fraught term, the distinct product of a colonial imaginary eager to mark off
the pale of civilization, beyond which a primitive humanity lived out lives of obscurity and
wonder. If this boundary had existed at least since the term “civilization” came into currency in
the mid-18th Century as a byword for the latest stage of human advancement (Benveniste 1971:
290), “animism” rooted this distinction in a relatively novel (and deeply positivistic) concern
with “culture.” It should come as little surprise, then, that the Victorian anthropologist E. B.
Tylor formulated early canonical definitions of both terms in his two-volume tome, Primitive
Culture (1920 [1871]). There he defines animism, quite simply, as the “doctrine of souls and
other spiritual beings in general” (1920: 23), to be systematically contrasted with the
thoroughgoing materialism favored by the scientific spirit of his age. Since then, the term has
entered wider usage as a broad label for the tendency to view the nonhuman world as populated
or even suffused with person-like spirits or, in Irving Hallowell’s memorable phrase, “otherthan-human persons” (1960). Others have proposed other definitions (Harvey 2014 provides a
useful overview), each with their own emphases, nuances, and agendas. Accordingly, I want to
1
keep at the fore the indissoluble connection between animism as an etic label and animism as an
emic phenomenon, recognizing that this connection has always been as contested as it has been
irreducible.
The phrase “after animism” thus has two relevant meanings. On the one hand, it denotes
a way of thinking about certain human (and nonhuman) communities in terms of the
characteristic beliefs and metaphysical attitudes ascribed to them, a view that comes in for
repeated critique and clarification. On the other hand, it refers to the observable decline in
traditional practices commonly associated with animism, raising profound questions about the
continuing relevance of “animism” as a heuristic for understanding groups to which the label has
been habitually applied. The “after” thus serves mainly as a framing device for considering
animism’s afterlife, so to speak, rather than as an issuing of its death certificate.
As for animism’s relationship to ethical life, here is where I reveal my own agenda. In
some ways this thesis is an extended rejoinder to a claim made by Tylor, that the lack of a
distinct discursive order dedicated to morality among what he called “primitive cultures”
constituted evidence of an ethical sense that was underdeveloped or lacking in sophistication.1
Set aside the obsolete rubric of “primitive” for a moment—what would it mean to tie the
complexity or maturity of one’s ethical reasoning to a certain way of talking about notions of
good and evil? Whence this sense that worthwhile moral standards derive, not from deliberative
reasoning itself, but, uniquely, from making such reasoning explicit in the form of rationalistic
rules, precepts, and doctrines? More to the point, on what basis could one claim any validity for
such a view?
1
As he imperiously puts it: “[T]he conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the
higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower” (1920: 427).
2
If it isn’t already obvious, I regard Tylor’s claims with deep suspicion. But at a point
when Victorian anthropology has been virtually reduced to a straw man, my aim isn’t so much to
pile on another critique of Tylor’s pronounced ethnocentrism, his doctrinaire positivism, or his
reliance on suspect field data as it is to take up a very particular challenge that I take him to have
implicitly issued. Of those non-Western peoples who traditionally have made no special effort to
delineate a specifically moral domain such that it would stand apart from the larger world of
practical activity or deliberation, to what extent are we warranted in speaking of their ethics or
values? To be more concrete: how do we derive a basis for comparison whereby a full-blown
“morality system” (Williams 1985: 174) such as that of the Judeo-Christian tradition may be said
to exhibit categorical similarities to those aspects of animist traditions—say, those of Amazonian
peoples—that we would be apt to identify as ethical in nature?
The allusions to Judeo-Christian morality and Amazonian animist traditions aren’t
entirely fortuitous, of course. In fact, it was my fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon that drew me
to think these two together and to wonder about their relationship. Once in the field, I saw that
for the Sharanahua people of Gastabala—the community that graciously hosted me during my
fieldwork—reconciling “old” or “traditional” beliefs with “new” or “modern” beliefs was less a
matter of making explicit divisions between these two vexed categories and self-consciously
reflecting on their relative merits, than it was itself a form of ethics in the making, a pragmatic
“making do” that, if it wasn’t by any means devoid of self-conscious reflection, wasn’t wholly
reliant on it either.2
2
One common way of parsing the difference between unreflective action and deliberative reflection is to distinguish
“know how” from “know that” (Ryle 1945). While recognizing the utility of that distinction in many contexts, I will
mostly avoid it here, or else cash it out as a difference in two kinds of practical activity—namely, the manipulation
of objects vs. the manipulation of symbols. Otherwise, I fear there is a danger of retrenching a heavily loaded social
distinction between “knowers” and “doers” by propping it on a more seemingly neutral but much less tractable
epistemological distinction. More to the point, and without naming names, I’ve seen how readily it can serve to
reprise a just-so story about alienated Moderns trapped in the narcissistic funhouse of their own facticity (“know
3
One of the main contentions of this thesis is that making sense of “belief,” however that
term is construed, means understanding the normative commitments—social, material,
political—of communities of believers. This means not only that, as Tanya Luhrmann has
perspicaciously noted, “belief…takes work” (2013: 389), but that it is a thoroughly relational,
interpersonal kind of work. One does not simply have beliefs, but one takes some measure of
responsibility for them and signals that responsibility to others by acting or not acting on their
basis. Where a belief expresses a particular practical commitment (i.e., a disposition to act in
some ways rather than others), it simultaneously indexes an ethical commitment to an indefinite
range of collective norms and expectations, whether implicit or explicit, that allow others (as
well as oneself) to assess the belief (its relevance and degree of conformity to norms and
expectations) and act accordingly. On this view, to speak of animist belief or Christian belief is
to speak of the kinds of commitment characteristic of those belonging to an animist or Christian
community—not just what they say or think, but what they do in so saying or thinking.3
For the Sharanahua, balancing such commitments presents unique challenges, insofar as
they identify as both indigenous and Christian. Furthermore, they, for the most part, sustain
active engagements with both the comunidades nativas—small-scale riverine communities
dedicated to a subsistence economy of manioc cultivation and hunting and fishing—as well as
with Peruvian society and its attendant institutions, structured around market economies,
extractive industries, and development initiatives ostensibly premised on ideals of sustainability
and the promotion of biological and cultural diversity. Most of the residents of Gastabala live
that”) and the prelapsarian Nonmoderns who simply dwell in the experiential flow of their practical activity (“know
how”), safe from the ugly existential predicament of Modern life. There are more and less offensive versions of this
story, but in my eyes it will always remain a fable, one I strive to always recognize and treat as such.
3
For this perspective, I am deeply indebted to the pragmatist approach of philosopher Robert Brandom, whose
“inferentialist” project “seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to features of assertings, what is claimed in terms
of claimings, what is judged by judgings, and what is believed by the role of believings (indeed, what is expressed
by expressings of it)—in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around” (2000: 4).
4
increasingly mobile lives, including regular travel to both the provincial capital of Puerto
Esperanza and beyond in search of work and educational opportunities, as well as the goods and
lifestyles such opportunities afford. A central concern of this thesis is thus to illuminate labels
such as “animist,” “traditional,” and “indigenous” in light of the practical, ethical, and social
commitments that see the communities so labeled pulled in divergent, sometimes contradictory,
directions.
The fieldwork on which this thesis is based was conducted from June to August of 2014
in the Peruvian province of Purús. I spent three weeks of that time in the provincial capital of
Puerto Esperanza, a sleepy outpost of the Peruvian state (pop. approx. 1000) serving as the
administrative hub of the 47 comunidades nativas (native communities) dotting the surrounding
waterways as well as the massive Alto Purús National Park. The rest of my fieldwork was
carried out in the community of Gastabala, some 20 km upriver from Puerto Esperanza, a whole
day’s travel in a peque-peque (dugout canoe) equipped with a five-horse motor. Without
overstating the depth of experience or expertise that one season’s fieldwork might afford, I can
say that my time with interlocutors ranging from indigenous comuneros (as the residents of the
comunidades nativas are sometimes designated) to mestizo, i.e., non-indigenous, merchants to
park administration officials to environmental NGO activists to municipal-level politicos and
bureaucrats—all categories that overlap in complex ways—gave me a unique and fairly
comprehensive view of the diversity of actors and stakeholders who formed Purús’ singular
social, political, and ecological landscape.
A second invaluable source of knowledge that fundamentally shaped this thesis is the
vast body of anthropological literature on Amazonian peoples that has sprung up over the course
of the last three or four decades. In that time, a handful of debates have strongly characterized
5
the tenor and scope of Amazonian anthropology, with its abiding emphases on myth (LéviStrauss 1967-1971, Roe 1982, Crocker 1985, Gow 2001), alterity/enmity (Clastres 2010, Erikson
1986, Viveiros de Castro 1992, Deshayes and Keifenheim 2003, Fausto 2001, Vilaça 2010),
personhood/corporality (Carneiro da Cunha 1978, Seeger, et al. 1979, Erikson 1996, McCallum
2001, Mentore 2006), conviviality (Overing and Passes 2000, Mentore 2005, Walker 2012), and
ecology (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976, Descola 1986, Hornborg 2001, Rival 2002, Balée 2013, Kohn
2013). Each of these themes are at work in this thesis, and my ultimate concern with the ethical
life of Gastabala and surrounding communities is at every point refracted through my years of
engagement with Amazonianist scholarship on such diverse matters.
Yet my own immersion in the above mentioned literature has given rise to a tension that,
without putting too fine a point on it, turns out to be strongly reflective of the tension borne of
the divergent commitments I saw at work among my indigenous interlocutors in the field. That
is, I found myself in the difficult position of having to reconcile a literature that, for all its insight
into the traditional lives (and life-worlds) of Amazonian peoples, gives surprisingly little
attention to the increasingly state- and market-oriented concerns of contemporary indigenous
actors, with my own experience in the field, where non-indigenous social and political
institutions played key roles in the day-to-day concerns of indigenous Purusinos, with profound
effects on how “tradition” and “culture” have continued to evolve and get self-consciously taken
up as reified notions in their own right. However, rather than attempt to drive a wedge between
these two paradigms, one that treats Amazonian cultures as worlds apart and another that treats
these same cultures as part of the world, I treat this gap as meriting inclusion into the very
objects and methodologies of my own research.4
4
One problem in drawing this distinction as if it were one between two symmetrical paradigms is a semantic
equivocation of what is meant by “world.” If on one (phenomenological) reading, “world” implies a shared set of
6
What does that mean? For one thing, it accounts for the somewhat unorthodox structure
of what follows. The thesis is divided roughly in two, the first two chapters being dedicated to
close analysis of two “traditional” conceptual components of personhood, yushi and yura. While
my approach to these concepts echoes the more platonic tendencies of Amazonianist
anthropology, the goal is to thoroughly “de-platonize” them by indicating their embeddedness in
distinctive practical regimes of discourse and action. I am thus less interested in arguing for or
against their reality as such, than in the practical strategies and affordances that lend them
relevance for accomplishing a diverse range of goals, both for indigenous actors and their
academic interpreters. By doing so, I set the stage for the last two chapters, wherein I work the
concepts elucidated in the first two chapters into an analysis of some very contemporary
misunderstandings that became salient to me in the course of my fieldwork. The goal in these
latter chapters is to show how the normative commitments embodied in “traditional” notions of
personhood carry effects that extend well beyond the contexts within which they’ve usually been
examined (e.g., ritual, kinship, myth, etc.). I show, furthermore, how the normative
commitments of various outsiders (mestizos, missionaries, municipal bureaucrats, conservation
officials) conceal from them the ways in which what appear to them as lapses in moral conduct
on the part of Sharanahua and other indigenous actors can be more helpfully recast as a conflict
of modes of ethical reasoning that start from incommensurate premises.
The other way in which the gap between what for the sake of argument I’ll call
proponents of “radical alterity” and proponents of “indigenism” has impacted on my research is
dispositions (affective, cognitive, inferential, etc.) in virtue of which the world is disclosed as a stage for the action
of subjects—paradigmatically, persons—the other reading of “world” is that historical context which captures the
widest and most diverse range of human-relevant phenomena. To anticipate a later point, the latter reading is born
out of a practical motivation to define the space of human concern, not to impose a set of dogma about the nature of
that space. If it implies, as some have criticized, a “mononaturalism,” then it is only insofar as the latter serves as a
contingent, regulative ideal for scientific practice(s). Thus, the world is that world which accommodates all other
conceivable “worlds” in the first sense. On the latter sense of “world” we get, as the philosopher Huw Price puts it,
“not a plurality of worlds, but a plurality of ways of world-making” (Price, et al. 2014: 54).
7
the way it underscores the starkness of the conflicting expectations—now romantic, now
pragmatic—placed on Amazonian indigenous communities. While I readily agree with those
who would view the choice between tradition and modernity as a largely false one, nonetheless
the specter of this choice continues to haunt the practical realities of indigenous life, where
political claims to self-determination are so often tied to existential/identitarian claims about
“disappearing ways of life.”5 This can lead even well intentioned allies of indigenous cultural
preservation to overdraw a representational contrast between indigenous and non-indigenous
figures. For example, take the photograph below, taken of a backdrop used in an educational
presentation made by park officials at the Alto Purús National Park headquarters:
5
The same of course holds for many non-indigenous ethnic groups. Ronald Niezen (2003) draws an important
distinction between “ethnicity” as a label identifying groups by their cultural particularities and “indigeneity” as a
label that connotes a transnational political configuration premised on the discourse of human rights. In Chapters 3
and 4, the importance of this distinction for my own work will become evident.
8
What was strange to me about this image, aside from the grossly caricatured,
homunculus-like features of the indigenous figure in the lower right-hand corner, was how it
depicted the contrasting figures of a pink-hued park guard and a be-feathered Indian tucked away
amidst a jungle menagerie, whereas in actual fact, all of park guards at the Alto Purús National
Park were themselves indigenous. I mention this perhaps extreme example just to point up how
the contrasting poles of indigenous and non-indigenous, or traditional and modern, must be
constantly bridged by indigenous subjects such that they might remain legible to a global public
gaze for whom indigeneity remains invested with the lingering tropes of noble savagery—by
turns primitivist and apocalyptic.
Thus, while I have certainly drawn considerably on scholarship that is more firmly rooted
in the “radical alterity” paradigm, I have also striven to bring this literature’s concerns with
ontologies of personhood, affect, and the sociocosmic fabric of Amazonian lifeworlds into the
more sublunary contemporary contexts that I observed in the course of my fieldwork. Ethics,
what Aristotle saw as a domain of inquiry whose central problematic was the cultivation of
“practical wisdom” or phronesis (1980), provides me with a useful analytic to accomplish this
task. First, by grasping ontologies in their ethical dimension, we are reminded that statements
about “what is” are always conditioned by normative concerns, such that models of personhood
simultaneously articulate the “ethical affordances” (Keane 2016) of interpersonal interaction.
Here, then, I will show how Sharanahua concepts of yushi and yura—roughly “mind” and
“body,” respectively—only make sense in light of more obviously normative concepts, such as
ixaraki—“living well”—or yuashi—“miserly, stingy.” Secondly, the ethical stance allows my
analysis to move more or less smoothly from the domain of “traditional” ontologies to the
9
domain of “modern” sociality by providing a pragmatic bridge from what are sometimes
(problematically) glossed as “alien concepts” (da Col and Graeber 2011: vii) to the actual
contexts within which those concepts continue to evolve.
With this heterogeneous approach, I seek to build on two recent trends in anthropology:
the “ontological turn,” with its emphasis on questions about the fundamental makeup of reality
or “the world” (Povinelli 2001; Salmond 2013; Pina-Cabral 2014; Kohn 2015; Graeber 2016),
and the equally vibrant “ethical turn,” with its more avowedly anthropocentric concern with the
very human business of applying normative judgments to human activity and deriving such
judgments therefrom (Robbins 2004; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014; Keane 2016). From the
former, I take as axiomatic that “the relation between personhood and the world is fundamental”
(Pina-Cabral 2014: 52), while, following the latter, I take that relation to be irreducibly
normative, and therefore ethical, in character, scope, and relevance.6 Accordingly, I try always
to ground ontological concerns that traffic in concepts in the pragmatic concerns of discursive
communities of concept users.
As can be seen in the chapters that follow, this move commits me to certain
disagreements with many, if not most, thinkers of the ontological turn. For one, I do not see
ontological matters of concern as being in fundamental tension with epistemological matters of
concern. For example, talk of separate “worlds” or “natures,” for all its heuristic value, should
not, to my mind, preclude the possibility of treating such talk as borne out of epistemological
differences, whether in styles of reasoning, basic premises, conceptual vocabularies, and so on.
To the contrary, it would seem impossible to make head or tail of any ontological claim were the
6
Of course, there is a perfectly reasonable sense in which the relation between personhood and the world may be
treated as an objective fact of an entirely material-causal, rather than ethical, nature. When I say that I take the
relation to be irreducibly ethical, I mean that for my own explanatory purposes, I regard it as such, not that I rule out
the possibility or even the sufficiency of alternative accounts within which the ethical dimension might be profitably
“deflated.”
10
meaning of that claim not somehow grounded in the epistemological particularities
characterizing the discursive community within which the claim could be regarded as having
pragmatic force. Thus, on the question of whether and to what extent ontologies may be thought
of as enjoying an a priori status, I opt for a somewhat oblique approach, emphasizing the
importance of the epistemological route by which we can come to entertain that question in the
first place. In the end, my interest lies more in how to account for the relevance of ontology than
in the goodness of ontological claims as such.
What follows, then, lies at the fertile intersection of philosophy and anthropology, though
if we concede Tim Ingold’s point that anthropology is “philosophy with the people in” (1994:
xvii), perhaps such a claim will seem redundant. What I mean to say is that I spend a fair
amount of time, particularly in the first two chapters, entertaining arguments that sometimes take
me far afield of my ethnographic starting points. Nonetheless, at all points I try to make it
apparent that such arguments, for all their convolutions and abstractions, arise out of and
illuminate practical problems relating to the ethical attitudes habitually taken by my diverse cast
of interlocutors in the field, both indigenous and non-indigenous.
I’ll leave off here with a short note about the scope of my project and its limitations. Of
conspicuous absence in the entire thesis are the voices of the many indigenous women that make
such vital contributions to life in the comunidades nativas. I’ve not included them here for the
simple (if only partially excusable) reason that my communications with them were much more
severely restricted by language and cultural barriers than those I had with their male
counterparts. For those interested in a more thorough account of gender in indigenous
communities of Purús and environs, I direct them to the insuperable monograph Gender and
Sociality in Amazonia (2001) by Cecilia McCallum. On a related note, my understanding of the
11
Sharanahua language made great strides during my time in Gastabala, but it would be sheer
hubris to imagine that I had attained anything more than a rudimentary grasp of its subtleties
during this time. For that reason, where I had initially hoped to include more in-depth
conversational data to ground my analysis, in the end I have had to resort extensively to the prior
work done by others on the language, while what direct speech is given here is almost entirely
from Spanish rather than speech en idioma, as indigenous Purusinos describe speaking in their
native tongues. That said, I was fortunate to count on the eager participation of my Sharanahua
hosts and their clarification on many linguistic and semantic matters, where it is not
acknowledged in the text, should be taken for granted. Any errors, of course, are my own.
12
1. The Relational Lives of Yushi
When I first asked Oswaldo about yushi, he put forward two definitions, corresponding to
two distinct entities. One was that yushi were anthropophagic demons that roamed the forests at
night, prowling for wayward hunters. The other definition, according to Oswaldo unrelated to
the first, was that yushi was the Sharanahua word for “soul.” Since I wanted to know more about
this second gloss, I asked about the seemingly related use of yushi to translate the word
“photograph.” He explained that, yes, yushi could also be a photograph because Es su alma de la
persona [sic]—“It’s the person’s soul.” He went on, “For example, if I see my wife—not my
wife I have now, my wife from before who died—or I dream of her, and I can see her”—he
widened his eyes, evoking the distance traversed by memory—“it’s exactly [igual] like her,
exactly, and I remember her, I see her, and, puuucha, it makes me want to cry. Sometimes I do
cry.” He cast his eyes down at the floor: Eso es su yushi de ella, su alma. “That’s her yushi, her
soul.”
Yushi are spiritual entities that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time
investigating the ethnographic record on animism. Like the “spirits” of many other linguistic
groups to whom animist beliefs or ontologies have been imputed, yushi can mean both “spirit”
and “shadow, photograph, image” (Deleage 2009: 35). In a line of reasoning that can be traced
back to E.B. Tylor, the anthropologist who brought animism into the disciplinary parlance, this
widespread polysemy is often taken to owe itself to a particular way of reasoning about
perceptual experience.7 While few would uphold the details of Tylor’s explanation today,
animist notions such as yushi continue to be treated, whether in the mode of belief or ontology,
as a kind of explanatory principle, strangely removed from the emotional and ethical life of
7
As Tylor put it, “the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious inference that every
man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom … The second step…is merely to combine the
life and the phantom” (428).
13
actual people committed to the reality of spiritual beings. Yet what struck me in my discussions
with Oswaldo and other Sharanahua with whom I stayed was the emotional urgency that often
quickly surfaced when the topic of yushi was brought up.
Keeping in mind the Sharanahuas’ ethical ideal of ixaraki—“living well/beautifully”—I
would like to explore the notion of yushi in a way that puts its ethical value at the fore. Rather
than taking yushi as an explanatory principle, I want to examine yushi as the expression of a
certain way of being in the world, one in which feeling-laden relations are constitutive of the
lived body, making one’s “image” ontologically inseparable from the self it represents. I thus
argue that the continued relevance of yushi to Sharanahua lives turns not on their commanding
place within a timeless cosmology, but on the way that they condense a number of interpersonal,
perceptual, and ecological relations into a single, powerful meta-image of a self that is
continually transformed by its relationships to human and nonhuman significant others (Haraway
2003), and in ways that often exceed its own control. Such are the conditions of possibility and
practical constraints of ixaraki.
Yushi and Wellbeing
While I was staying in Gastabala, Andrés, Oswaldo’s six-year-old son, would have
episodes of shouting and thrashing about in his sleep on an almost nightly basis. Though he
himself would have no recollection of these episodes the following morning, Oswaldo and his
wife Nila were concerned. What was causing these night terrors? They didn’t know. Interfering
yushi were one possible explanation. They would consult with Mario, an elder with some
knowledge of shamanic healing techniques, and later Mario would sing a keshuiti, or curing
song, that would guide him in an effort to dispel the malingering spirits that were afflicting
14
Andrés.
In the shamanic medical model, yushi are the body’s invisible messengers, and also its
sentinels. In states such as sleep, inebriation, and sickness—liminal states that stray into the
penumbral region between life and death—yushi are said to wander freely, but in order to do so
they must leave their post, so to speak. This leaves the body open to attacks and interference
from foreign yushi. The job of the shaman is largely concerned with expelling these yushi from
the body of the afflicted patient. Taking ayahuasca and singing chants known as rabi help the
shaman transform himself in ways that allow him to properly track the offending yushi, lure it
out of hiding, and banish it from the patient.8
In the past, Andrés condition might have been attributed to the malign influences of
powerful enemies, possibly from within Gastabala, though more likely from a nearby community
with whom pre-existing tensions might provide a basis for suspicions of sorcery. Nowadays,
sorcery is widely regarded as an unfortunate feature of a mostly forgotten past. Those who are
old enough to remember times when sorcery presented a real threat are reluctant to discuss it,
partly from the heavy stigma associated with their pre-Christian cultural past, partly so as to
refrain from stirring up old (and possibly new) animosities.
The ideal of ixaraki reflects this concern to maintain good relations, and it is often
articulated as a desire to live free of conflicts with others.9 On the shamanic model of health, this
collective moral imperative is directly related to the physical health of individuals. Interpersonal
and intercommunal tensions can give direct rise to illness, even unintentionally, since yushi, qua
8
That the language here mirrors that used to describe a hunt is no coincidence. Indeed, the word that describes the
curing songs, keshuiti, comes from a nominalized form of the verb keshuiki, a word that in the transitive form means
“to care for, protect, watch over” but that in the intransitive form means “to lurk, hide out and wait for animals”
(Scott 2004: 25).
9
See Walker 2015 for an in-depth discussion of a similar principle among the Urina people living just north of the
Sharanahua.
15
emissaries of the body, are never entirely under one’s control. Well being, in a very important
sense, is thus as much about the social body as it is about the individual, physical one.10
In a Western medical context, such cultural and interpersonal concerns would fall
squarely under the rubric of “mental health,” reflecting a dualist ontology at the heart of medical
practice that has historically viewed certain maladies as being primarily “in the head” while
others are mainly “in the body.”11 Much of what I’m attempting to do here is to show how this
dualist tendency fundamentally misunderstands how a category like yushi upsets this distinction,
shifting the focus from the mind and body of the individual to her relations, staged as
transformative encounters with an indefinite number of human and nonhuman others. The
contents and form of the rabi chants, sung in order to deliberately invoke yushi, illustrate this
principle well.
The rabi
Rabi are chants that are collectively sung during the mareación—inebriation—brought on
by ayahuasca consumption. According to Janet Siskind (1973), the word rabi “means change or
transformation” (130), while Marie Scott (2004) glosses the phrase rabi huai as meaning “to
make a representation of a person or thing” (59). The slight divergence between these
interpretations—“transformation,” on the one hand, “representation,” on the other—sets up an
interesting tension that goes to the heart of debates over the ontological and epistemological
status of supernatural entities such as yushi. A close reading of the textual contents of the rabi
reveals a semiotic sophistication that can help us clarify what is at stake in these debates and how
they might relate to the notion of yushi familiar to Sharanahua, most of whom, at least as of
10
This connection between the collective and individual body is reinforced by the fact that both go by the same
term, yura, a polysemic category I will return to in more depth in the next chapter.
11
For a careful investigation of Western medical ontologies, cf. Mol 2002; Jensen 2010.
16
2015, do not participate in ayahuasca ceremonies and in any case report little to no knowledge of
the rabi’s contents.
My own encounter with the rabi was in a context that it brings me a measure of mixed
feelings to recall, since it reprised a cliché that by now is so worn as to give off the air of an
outright anachronism. Mario, an easygoing sexagenarian and one of the last living repositories
of the rabi and the keshuiti curing songs, played the role of the obliging native authority on
rather obscure ritual arcana, while I would play the researcher who faithfully recorded his
singing and commentaries with the idea of shaping them into some representative projection of
Sharanahua thought. Mario had been through this before with other visitors, and by all
appearances was happy to do it. Still, it did not sit especially well with me that he seemed to
regard our taking ayahuasca as a routine, almost perfunctory part of the pomp that usually
attended visits from outsiders, rare though they were. It certainly deflated some of the romance I
might have attached to my work. And on balance, that was probably a good thing, a reminder
that any researcher using informants to get a peek at “savage thought” (Levi-Strauss 1962) in
some pristine state would first have to reckon with the reflexive protocols that framed their
encounter.
I say this only to underline the important caveat that the text of the rabi I give here, while
rich with significance, can hardly stand as an exemplar of Sharanahua thought and should serve
more as a point of reference than an exhaustive map. Nevertheless, by paying close heed to the
semiotic complexities of the chant, we can piece together one working template of yushi, since in
an important sense, it is yushi who form the locus of ayahuasca visions. In turn, the rabi, by
simultaneously describing and staging an encounter with yushi, constitute a powerful resource
for understanding the ontological and epistemological peculiarities of yushi in general. Later, I
17
will argue that such peculiarities attend the notion of “images” more broadly, not just in the
minds of (some) Sharanahua, but also in many non-reductive strands of Western thought, where
“image” has often been treated as a penumbral category between mind and matter.
First, I’ll begin with an excerpt taken from a rabi sung by Mario in November 200112:
1 awen ifu shinadi
2 //awen ifu shinaxun//
3 kedewawen shinama
4 ea shinamakea
5 shinamakeainu
6 udu nai futudi
7 kede fake putedi
8 //afume setexun//
9 uwi awen pakedi
10 eki uwi awedi
11 ari mana arikai
12 ifufu ea dima
13 //ea dimakea
14 ea dimakeainun//
15 ari mana dakixun
16 duku uwi putadi
17 uwi putakedi
18 //ifufuyasxun//
19 //kede ifufuyaxun//
their owners thought
their owners had thought
the designs made [me] think
they made me think in circles13
made me think in circles
from the sky, up there, they descended
the little designs widened
they issued forth one after another
their words[/voices] came descending
their words came to me
I’m going again up above
the owners have made me ascend
they’ve made me ascend, crossing over
they’ve made me ascend, crossing over
ascending to the other side
they threw their words into us
they threw their words in a circular movement
the owners’ words [too]
the owners’ designs [too]
To grasp the semiotic intricacies in play in this excerpt, it is useful to address it terms of
three distinct referential levels, each corresponding to its own respective set of relations between
the singer’s role, the discursive “I”, and the epistemic frame evoked. To arrive at these
distinctions, I’ve combined insights from the work of Pierre Deleage, who has made a close
study of the epistemologies involved in ayahuasca songs and related shamanic curing rites, and
12
The excerpt has been adapted and translated from Pierre Deleage (2005b: 40), who recorded, transcribed, and
translated the rabi into French with the close assistance of Jaime Del Aguila Melendez, a Sharanahua collaborator. I
have altered the spelling of the original to conform to the current Sharanahua alphabet as it was normalized in 2013.
The double slashes (//) indicate repetition.
13
Deleage translates this as “they made me think, whirling about [ils m’ont fait penser en tournoyant]” (2005b: 40),
glossing the verbal suffix –ake– as “in circles,” though an equally plausible alternative gloss of the suffix as
“crossing to the other side” (Faust 2004: 136), would yield a meaning closer to “they made me think, crossing to the
other side.” Both glosses seem permissible in context.
18
those of a well-known work by linguistic anthropologist Greg Urban, “The ‘I’ of Discourse”
(1989). (See Table 1.)
Of the three levels, the first two are the easiest to explain. The first relates the epistemic
frame that Deleage calls “ostensive,” which is perhaps most easily imagined by thinking about
the semantic scope of spatial and temporal deictics such as “here,” “there,” “now,” “then,” etc. as
centered in the actual, non-diegetic14 interactive frame of the speaker and audience. The
ostensive frame corresponds with what Urban calls the “indexical referential ‘I.’” This is the “I”
whose metalinguistic function is to relate the actual speaker to the grammatical subject indicated
by use of the pronoun “I.” (See Jakobson 1957 and Beneveniste 1971a; 1971b; 1971c.) The
singer’s role that relates to this “I” is that of a narrator actively describing a sequence.
The second, “deeper” level attending the rabi involves what Deleage calls the
“deferential” epistemic frame. This frame, common to myth narratives, reported speech, and
theatrical performance, is invoked where the truth-value of speech content is deferred to the
authority of someone who isn’t (necessarily) the speaker. Deleage points out that knowledge
gained through a deferential frame is less subject to modification than ostensive knowledge
(2005a: 230) and in the case of myth is regarded as kind of ideal limit to inquiry, indicated by the
reportative refrain, “That’s what the elders[/ancestors] say” (ibid.: 112, my translation).15
The deferential frame deploys what Urban calls the “theatrical ‘I’” by a two-step process.
14
Diegesis, which refers to those elements internal to a narrative or reportative frame, may be contrasted here, as it
is in Aristotle’s Poetics, with mimesis, or direct imitation. The latter has already received much attention in
discussions of magic and shamanism, starting with James Frazer’s notion of “sympathetic magic” (1922) on up to
contemporary works, such as, e.g., Taussig (1993) and Willerslev (2007). What seems less noticed is how effective
mimesis often relies on the skillful use of diegesis, and vice versa.
15
As with many other languages that regularly employ grammatical evidentials, correct speech in Sharanahua
entails marking truth claims with “modal deictics” (Hanks 1990) that give the addressee specific information
relating to the source and veracity of the claim being put forth. Thus, whereas English speakers regularly express
the truth-value of statements in apodictic, apparently objective terms, Sharanahua are more likely, even in Spanish,
to trace any particular truth claim to its epistemic source. Cf. Aikhenvald 2007: 248-278, for an overview of similar
cases in other Amazonian languages.
19
The first step is to treat the “I” in a phrase like “I’m going again up above” (line 11 supra) as
referring some past utterer made virtually present through direct quotation. Then, in an act of
epistemic erasure common in creative performances, the diegetic frame is stricken from the
purview of both speaker and audience, giving way to a mimetic space of transformation. That is,
the singer may now be identified as the protagonist of the sung sequence.
Now something very strange is afoot. The attentive reader will have already noted that
the action of the rabi takes place mostly in the past tense. In fact, the sequence rarely veers from
employing the verbal suffix –di, which marks the distant past. The sudden jolt into the present
tense in line 11, followed by the use of completive aspect in lines 12-14, seems to deliberately
confuse the temporal frame of the entire sequence, as if remembered experiences were merging
with actual experience. This confusion of temporal frames is only reinforced by references to
“designs” (kede, lines 3 and 7), which may refer both to the geometrically painted bodies of
spirits and the colorful, symmetrical forms that typically overlay the visions of the
singer/ayahuasca-drinker. Add to this the fact, attested by Mario, that the “words” (uwi, also
“voice,” lines 9-10 and 16-18) referred to in the rabi are the words of the rabi itself, and the
reader will soon realize that a disorienting doubling effect is deliberately conflating the grounds
of reference proper to the diegetic and non-diegetic discursive spaces in play, and so giving way
to a third, more paradoxical epistemic frame.
Indeed, this is what Deleage calls the “shamanic” frame. By directly indexing events and
referents that, strictly speaking, belong to the referential universe of myth, it exhibits both
ostensive and deferential characteristics, leaving the listener above all with a sense of the frames’
undecidability vis-à-vis one another. The singer narrates supernatural events, such as ascending
to the plane of the ifu (line 15), the “owners” who exercise the power of their designs and words
20
over the singer, of which s/he is the subject, and possibly the agent.
In Deleage’s analysis, this paradox provides evidence of the singer’s transformation into
a yushi, the only being capable of straddling the disparate ontological domains that coincide in
the rabi. This accords nicely with Urban’s notion of a “projective ‘I,’” the “I” of trance and
possession, wherein the speaker is made to coincide with a “nonordinary self” (1989: 31).
Through a powerful evocation of what Urban calls the “iconic otherness” (46) of such
nonordinary selves—here, the singer’s uncanny resemblance to yushi staged by means of a
highly salient, stereotyped linguistic performance, intense affective absorption, and the
consumption of ayahuasca—the singer achieves a “maximal identification” with a supernatural
being. It is impossible to say definitively at what point the transformation takes place, and the
rabi’s strange blurring of temporalities suggests that this question may have no straightforward
answer. The paradox is in some sense irreducible.
Singer’s role
Narrator
Protagonist
Owner/Yushi
Discursive “I”
Indexical referential
Theatrical
Projective
Epistemic frame
Ostensive
Deferential
Shamanic
Table 1. Three referential planes showing relations among Singer’s Role, Discursive "I", and Epistemic Frame
This combined analysis tells us something important about yushi: not only are they
“transformational being[s] par excellence” (Deleage 2009: 230), but just as importantly, they are
relational beings. That is, they bring disparate times, places, and actors into contact with one
another that would otherwise remain separate. In doing so, they provoke transformations, often
experienced as an intense alteration of affect, whether by way of emotion, sickness, or visions—
sometimes all three. Indeed, the rabi are sung in order to facilitate such transformations, as well
as to channel them toward productive outcomes, or at least ward off the potentially terrifying
21
encounters that ayahuasca often exposes one to.16
Yushi: Representation or transformation?
As much as their analyses align on the crucial points, there is a tension between Urban’s
and Deleage’s explanations. I want to examine it now, because it bears analogy to the tension I
alluded to earlier between “representation” and “transformation.” Urban views the efficacy of
the projective “I” of certain kinds of ritual discourse as owing in large part to a “metapragmatic
awareness” (48) shared by ritual participants whereby what is being staged in incantatory rituals
such as the singing of rabi is nothing less than culture itself. In other words, if culture is the
reflexive process of instituting and ratifying a shared referential world—of (re)establishing a
“metaphysical community,” as Urban (1996) will phrase it elsewhere—then performances such
as rabi that deploy the projective “I” are among the most important vehicles for grounding that
process in an embodied, material, emotionally immediate context. Indeed, absent such
grounding, it’s hard to imagine how there would be any culture at all.
Deleage’s own analysis agrees with Urban’s on a number of substantial points, but it
diverges insofar as he (Deleage) invokes the ontological basis for the rabi as an important
explanatory factor in its own right. In this case, then, it is not that yushi serve to symbolize latent
cultural processes, a kind of metaphor, but that yushi are, like the paradoxes that attend them,
ontologically irreducible. As Deleage puts it: “[The yushi] is an entity susceptible to becoming
whichever ontological category…one animal, then another; it can take an anthropomorphic
appearance, etc. Yushi, in addition to being an ontological category, are, if you wish, a metacategory” (2009: 85, my translation). It is as if, on Deleage’s account, the reality of yushi
16
As Mario told me, he would often urge the younger ayahuasca partakers to learn the rabi precisely in order to
being overtaken by fear.
22
explains the power of ayahuasca to alter one’s perceptual, cognitive, and bodily states, and not,
as a naturalist argument would have it, the other way around. This explanation seems to be
echoed by Graham Townsley, who writes of the closely related Yaminahua that “For [them], it is
the reality of yoshi which transforms relationships that for us are ones of metaphor and analogy
between unrelated domains into substantive connections which can be worked upon to actually
transform the state of things” (1993: 453). Knowing, transforming: it amounts to the same
thing.17
The question here is whether yushi and the reality of which they form an integral part are
socially constructed or radically given. There is a somewhat recent trend in anthropological
thinking that seeks to drive a wedge between these two positions, stating their opposition in the
starkest terms possible in order to engage in polemics over the political import of claims like
those made by Urban and Deleage. Since much of the ethnographic basis for this debate comes
from Amazonian myths and rituals, I’d like to make a slight detour down this branch of
anthropological theory before returning to the very important question of how this debate relates
to the animist ethics that yushi play a central role in.
Amerindian Perspectivism and Multinaturalism: The Controversy
That I would consider the issue of representation vs. transformation an issue worthy of
ethnographic attention at all is largely due to the emphasis that it has already been given by the
influential Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, across multiple theoretical
engagements with Amazonian myth and anthropological thought. (Though, as he might be apt to
point out, we could as easily say “Amazonian thought” and “anthropological myth.”)
17
It does seem important here, however, to point out that Deleage is analyzing a scenario in which ayahuasca
inebriation plays a crucial and, to my mind, understudied role in providing the same “reality enhancement” that in
Urban’s example is accomplished by a “de-quotative” diegetic framing alone.
23
The centerpiece of Viveiros de Castro’s conceptual edifice is a theory, derived from
myths, songs, and ethnographic accounts of indigenous peoples of the Americas, called
“Amerindian perspectivism.” Briefly, perspectivism refers to the purportedly widespread
tendency among Amerindian peoples to view relationships among animate beings as belonging
to the same relational matrix, but modulated according to the specific bodily “point of view”
occupied by the subject, similar to kinship designations. Thus, just as my sister (“prohibited”
affine) is my mother’s brother’s niece (“ideal” affine),18 what for me, as a human, is blood (vital
substance), a jaguar sees as manioc beer (nutritive substance). The crucial difference that
prevents the analogy from being totally exact is that where kinship designations are modulated
from within the same collective—thus publicly available—the human-jaguar perspectival dyad
spans different collectives, requiring more esoteric means of “translation” from one perspective
to another.19 As Viveiros de Castro elaborates, in the latter case, “[h]umanity is in the position of
the common denominator, the reflexive mode of the collective” (2015: 21). That is, all animate
beings see themselves as human (Viveiros de Castro 2012: 47).
For Viveiros de Castro, perspectivism’s implications reveal an important contradiction
between Amerindian thought—to which we could well add other examples of “animist” thought
among indigenous groups throughout the world (Willerslev 2007, Pedersen 2001, Bird-David
1999, Howell 1996)—and the way it is taken up by anthropological analysis. Since
perspectivism entails that worlds co-vary with the embodied subjectivities that experience
them,20 and that these subjectivities are uniform within collectives (whether reckoned by
ethnicity or species) but radically divergent from one collective to another, then to speak of
18
Though I’m giving this generic example purely for argument’s sake, it also happens to be one of the “elementary
structures” of kinship as discerned by Lévi-Strauss (1969), and one that tends to crop up in ethnographies of
Lowland South America (Kaplan 1975; Rivière 1969).
19
For more on this, cf. Hanks and Severi (2014) as well as Viveiros de Castro (2004).
20
Not unlike the Umwelten of pioneering biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll (1992).
24
“cultures” and “worldviews” as if these could be meaningfully opposed to a monolithic “nature”
or “the world” is to suppress the radical import of Amerindian thought. For on perspectivist
principles, it isn’t that a diversity of cultures converges on a single shared reality, but that
realities diverge on the basis of a multiplicity of natures, with the sole proviso that every being
perceives itself as human. In Viveiros de Castro’s lapidary formula: “One single ‘culture,’
multiple ‘natures’” (1998: 478). In place of an epistemological multiculturalism, then, he posits
an ontological “multinaturalism” (477).
What seems to be at stake here is the validity of claims that would have to be true in
order for the stories and ritual discourse of Amerindian peoples to be consistent with the
anthropologist’s theoretical assumptions. The methodological gambit of Viveiros de Castro and
the “ontological turn” that he has spearheaded is that taking one’s informants seriously entails
allowing the most literal reading of the informant’s assertions to undermine the ethnographer’s
ontological presuppositions, rather than trying to square such assertions with “our”
presuppositions by reducing them to discursive effects or symbolic manipulations at best,
epistemic errors at worst.21 To Viveiros de Castro, the focus of anthropologists like Urban on
contextualizing informants’ speech and actions according to logically prior linguistic, semiotic,
or cognitive (in short, natural) principles actually disfigures what it purports to explain by
ignoring the “equivocation” inherent in any act of ethnographic “translation,” broadly understood
(Viveiros de Castro 2004).
21
By “literal reading,” I mean the one that makes the most room for taking an informant’s claim to be a
straightforward, realist factual report. “Twins are birds,” for instance, as being literally true, but where the terms
involved in that claim (“twins,” “birds”) sharply diverge with “our” assumptions about their underlying nature. The
premise of such an approach is that we can best read radical difference into “their” statements by grounding that
difference in an irreducible ontological impasse rather than by grounding it in a difference of interpretation, where it
can still be assimilated to a naturalist account. Note, however, that the core question remains the same: “What do
they mean?” It’s at least very unclear how Viveiros de Castro’s ontological approach might allow us to dispense
with the usual hermeneutic concerns, unless we take it on faith that only the most radical alterity will save our
interpretations from the evils of a kind of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1977). The latter claim is, I would venture,
an indispensible conviction guiding Viveiros de Castro’s approach.
25
Shifting the terms of debate
Given the number of conceptual balls in the air at this point in the discussion, it seems
reasonable to raise a clarifying question that often comes up in these debates: What importance,
if any, does any of this have for actually existing Amerindian peoples?
This is a tricky question, and to answer it I would pose another question that Viveiros de
Castro conveniently refrains from posing in his own work. Is there such a thing as an
Amerindian subject such that it could stand for an entire population’s way of thinking (or being)?
Is there even a Sharanahua subject for that matter?
The problem here is that advancing claims about the nature of, say, Sharanahua thought
immediately leaves us with the question of how to deal with the Sharanahua who don’t evince a
particularly “perspectivist” interpretive framework as far as anyone can discern. Whether we
treat traditional discourse as evidence of an ontology or an epistemology, we run the risk of
“narrow[ing] the areas of legitimate concern” (Bessire and Bond 2014: 441) when we make that
discourse emblematic of a kind of ethnically defined alterity, an “in itself” beyond the reach of
outsiders yet somehow plainly accessible to those born into communities where such discourse
may (or may not!) still enjoy widely assented legitimacy and authority.
Note, too, how the persuasiveness of Viveiros de Castro’s argument depends on his
readers strongly buying into his portrayal of the opposition of social constructivism to the
assertions of Amerindian myth—i.e., an “anthropological discourse on [their] discourse” and an
“[Amerindian] discourse on the real” (Viveiros De Castro 2004: 11). These may be divergent
discourses, but are they necessarily as opposed as Viveiros de Castro would like us to believe?
And if we say that yushi are socially constructed, does that commit us to saying that they are not
26
real?
Perhaps this line of inquiry can be sharpened by asking a more empirically grounded
question: what is it that Oswaldo wanted to call my attention to when he explained the concept of
yushi to me?
From listening to Oswaldo’s and others’ explanations of yushi, a limited number of
leitmotifs can be specified. First, yushi are discussed in the context of unexpected encounters.
Second, these encounters most frequently occur under circumstances that could be broadly
described as affectively charged: those involving dream states, some form of inebriation, the
aftermath of a tragic event, or even just the fact of being alone and isolated. Lastly, and perhaps
most importantly, the yushi frequently took the form of friends and family from whom one was
separated by distance or, as in many cases, by death.
Once I asked Oswaldo directly why he thought it was that yushi covered the meaning of
both “soul” and “photograph.” His response was straightforward: “you see [that person’s] photo,
and it’s like the person is with you.” That is, a person’s photograph affects you in the same way,
if not to the same degree, as encountering that person in the flesh. This may seem a rather
obvious connection to make, but what surprised me was just how solemnly it was remarked upon
by so many of my Sharanahua acquaintances. When speaking of absent loved ones, many of
those in Gastabala were prone to unabashed displays of emotion, especially sadness, which is
closely associated with solitude and silence. For example, the Sharanahua word pusikiba means
both “sad” and “silent,” while the verb shinaki can mean “to lament” as well as “to think” or “to
remember” (Scott 2004: 65). A further illustration of this principle was that one of the most
frequent laments I heard while in Gastabala was about the melancholy burden of living in such a
small village so far from various friends and loved ones. On more than one occasion I remarked
27
on the silence that prevailed on many a stiflingly hot afternoon, to which my interlocutor would
reliably respond: “Yes, it’s sad, isn’t it?”
While this form of nostalgic melancholy is by no means unique to the Sharanahua, the
fact that it is so prominently associated with a single lexeme that denotes “soul,” “spirit,”
“reflection,” “shadow,” and “photograph” tells us something vital about yushi qua relational
beings. If my account is correct, what unites these terms is not, as Tylor had it, a hasty
“association of ideas” (1929: 116) that would result in “mistaking an ideal connection for a real
connection” (ibid.), but a highly salient association of affective experiences that are not just real
but, at least explanatorily, primary.22
Yushi thus gives expression to an existential paradox of profound significance—namely,
that one’s living form, one’s image, is both inalienable and yet somehow detachable from the
immediate perspective housed within that form, as when I regard myself in a mirror, or someone
far away receives me in a dream visitation.23 One continually affects and is affected by others,
and what makes this so is that one’s yushi is simultaneously both of the world and apart from it
in the minimal sense that it is that to and for which the world is disclosed, the origo of any
possible experience. (When talking about yushi as the seat of experience, Sharanahua sometimes
employ the term feruyushi—literally, “eye spirit.”) As an image, then, yushi is closely related to
that other species of image that has been so central to modern thought: the self.
Yushihood and Selfhood
22
In other words, what Tylor attributes to a faulty causal model is better understood as an ethical model that gives
explanatory priority to moral actors over causal agents. Just as with the oft-cited Azande informant’s explanation of
collapsing granaries made famous by Evans-Pritchard (1937), even once all of the material facts are accounted for,
appeal must be made to a moral order of explanation that gives those facts any relevance for human affairs. It bears
noting that the same might be said for the style of reasoning that animates Western jurisprudence, mutatis mutandis.
23
George Herbert Mead made a similar point in his (1934) discussion of the I and the me.
28
Let me return to a point I brought up a while back that may now be addressed in more
detail. Earlier I said that many of the ontological and epistemological peculiarities that attend
yushi also tend to crop up in discussions of “images” in general. That is, it isn’t immediately
evident whether we should regard images as of the mind or as real in some more mindindependent sense—that is, as mere representations or as entities of the same ontological order as
rabbits, lasers, tables, and cyclones—in short, as things. As Tylor points out in his discussion of
animism, this problem has been with the West since the pre-Socratics. Turning to what he calls
Democritus’ strikingly animist “theory of thought,” he writes: “He explained the fact of
perception by declaring that things are always throwing off images (είδωλα) of themselves,
which images, assimilating to themselves the surrounding air, enter a recipient soul, and are thus
perceived” (1920 [1871]: 497). And of the Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius: “[He] actually
makes the theory of film-like images of things (simulacra, membranae) account both for the
apparitions which come to men in dreams, and the images which impress their minds in
thinking” (498).
Tylor is holding these thinkers up as examples that show how scandalously close animist
thought is to the roots of the Western history of ideas, a problematic legacy (for him) that lives
on in the form of all the ways contemporary Westerners are apt to reify ideas and personify
things. Tylor often writes as if the “doctrine of the soul” (501) were no more than a kind of
vestigial appendage on the corpus of modern thought, one that it would be no loss for rational
minds to have done with altogether.
And yet the history of modern ideas is riddled with examples of those who rejected the
reductive materialism that Tylor upholds, starting with the strict Cartesian division of body (res
extensa) and mind (res cogitans) on which it was based. To take just one of the more salient
29
examples, Henri Bergson, in his opus Matter and Memory, speaks of “images” in a way that is
surprisingly congruent with the ambiguities that surround yushi. Placing bodily experience and
the lived world on an equal footing, he defines images as “a certain existence…placed halfway
between the ‘thing’ and its ‘representation’” (Bergson 1999 [1939]: 9) and notes that the body
itself is an image.24 And alongside Bergson, we could place a number of other scientifically
minded contemporaries whose focus on process and becoming would lead them to a distrust of
the Cartesian rush to resolve the world into ontologically distinct mental stuff and material stuff,
from logicians and mathematicians such as C.S. Peirce (1955) and Alfred North Whitehead
(1922) to psychologists and physicists such as William James (1912), Gustav Fechner (1901) and
Ernst Mach (1897), to name just a few. Whether addressing the concept of signs, the
phenomenal self, images, or sensations, these thinkers, and others like them, turned to the
problems of change, experience, and self-organization—in sum, problems of relations—in order
to challenge the Cartesian pieties of their day.
It would be well beyond the scope of this discussion to enter into much detail regarding
the specifics of each of the mentioned philosophers’ works, but I do want to highlight one
important distinction that underlies all of them because I think it has much to do with the reason
that yushi function the way they do, both in speech and action. Namely, I’m referring to the
distinction between the virtual/potential and the actual.25
24
This observation need not betoken any special affinity between Amazonian and early 20th century French thought.
Rather, it shows how easily presupposed was the ontological gap between things and their representations that
underlay Western thought at the time of Bergson’s then daring philosophical gambit. Needless to say, Amazonians
did not experience the historical circumstances (cf. Foucault 1971) that had produced this gap to begin with, and so
had no reason to overturn it by means of specially defined concepts.
25
I group “virtual” and “potential” together here because, while there is a technical distinction between the two that
concerns their respective relations to actuality (cf. Peirce Collected Papers 6.372, Deleuze 1994: 215, and DeLanda
2002), that distinction tends to collapse in discussions that apply these concepts to concrete examples. Thus,
Viveiros de Castro, for instance, will speak of “potential affines” as well as “virtual affinity” (2015).
30
The importance of this distinction can largely be traced back to the work of Aristotle,
where it plays a crucial role in his discussion of the soul (psyche) and the body in De Anima.
Contrary to what one might expect, it is not the soul that occupies the pole of “potentiality,” but
the body. The soul, by contrast, is the actuality of the body’s potential states, the real-time
organization of the body-as-agent. Aristotle clarifies this by making a strict analogy to the
relation between form and matter, such that SOUL : FORM :: BODY : MATTER. In more
contemporary terms, we might say that the soul is the realization of the body’s affects, its
capacities to engage with a world that in turn comprises an open set of what the ecological
psychologist James Gibson called “affordances” (1979)—those features of the world by virtue of
which a living organism perceives, orders, and acts on its environment.
What is important to underline here is the irreducible relation between the soul and the
body. Rather than being founded on an ontological disjunction, as in Descartes’ analysis, the
relation of soul to body expresses a vital dialectic, a reflection of life in a universe where a
virtual (yet real) future becomes actualized in material events that in turn engender their own
divergent futures.26 In such a world, to be animate means, fundamentally, to engage in purposive
behavior, to simultaneously inhabit a virtual space of capacities, models, and possibilities and an
actual space of events, actions, and outcomes. C. S. Peirce has memorably referred to this as
“being in futuro” (CP 2.86, quoted in Kohn 2013: 23).
This view of living systems illustrates the fundamental recursivity of living forms,
whether organismal, psychological, or ecological. That is, any description of action or change in
a living agent must include some kind of hysteresis or “feedback” loop whereby that agent may
assimilate the data of past experiences in order to modify its present environment according to
26
This is the dialectic described by medieval scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, a thinker whose work would exert
a profound influence on philosophers as disparate as logician and semiotician C. S. Peirce and post-structuralist
continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
31
the relatively stable principles of its own self-organization. The theoretical implications of this
insight has been developed in various directions by researchers—such as Gregory Bateson
(1972), René Thom (1975), Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (1979), Terrence Deacon
(1998, 2006), and Evan Thompson (2004)—whose work at the intersection of empirical science
and speculative philosophy has been key in situating the human experience within a larger set of
relationships between dynamical systems at whatever spatiotemporal scale.
What these thinkers emphasize is that life, and the selfhood it implies, consists in a kind
of functional reflexivity: the self as a set of relations, as opposed to the self as a kind of
“homunculus” (Dennett 1991). I call this the “sociocentric” conception of the self, to be
contrasted with the “idiocentric” conception of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. That is, selves, these
thinkers tell us, are selves not in virtue of a primordial ontological principle of identity, but as the
outcome of an emergent process of social and phenomenal interaction.
My assertion here is that this sociocentric self is a kind of “image” in the same way that
yushi are images. The self is not an image of some underlying or prior substance, but rather a
bundle of interactional capacities, a functional foil to the lived world, whose consistency through
time is guaranteed by its pragmatic function as an essential ordering principle for social,
symbolic, and especially ethical life. In one sense, the self is its own image; it can refer to prior
and posterior, actual and virtual, instantiations of itself, but it bears no fixed, essential relation to
any material object outside of that object’s being enrolled in a semiotic matrix of concepts, roles,
norms, habits, inferences, and practices. This is what I alluded to above by declaring yushi to be
a kind of “meta-image,” since it is an image that gains its expressive force in virtue of the
relations that obtain among all of its iterations.27
27
To anticipate the rest of my argument a bit, if these beings are “images,” then it is the Bergsonian sense in which
one’s own body may be counted an image, and a kind of meta-image at that, since it is the image that, like the
32
Two things. First, if we buy this account, that indicates something very surprising about
the three levels of “I” (indexical-referential, theatrical, projective) in play in the rabi. Where
common sense would have us imagine that the indexical-referential “I” grounds both the
theatrical and projective I’s that seem to be parasitical on it, in point of fact, there can be no
indexical-referential “I” without its theoretical and projective iterations. Projectivity (if you’ll
the coinage)—the capacity to identify the actual speaker with a virtual one—is part and parcel of
the indexical-referential operations of “I”, since what is designated by such operations is not the
physical speaker so much as the pragmatically relevant speaker: the one that intends outcomes,
harbors motives and memories, expresses joys and sorrows.28 This speaker, like the sociocentric
self that s/he represents, is a being that across its various iterations bridges virtuality and
actuality by creative (iconic-indexical) acts that continuously update the relevant context within
which it is possible to make appropriate inferences and responses to his/her communicative acts.
Thus, echoing Jacques Derrida’s main point about writing and communication in Limited Inc
(1991), we could say that it is the iterability of the self, rather than its denotative value, that is its
paradigmatic semiotic feature.
Second, despite initial appearances, I think this causes more problems for Viveiros de
Castro than it does for Urban. Representation and metaphor are more flexible, accommodating
concepts than Viveiros de Castro wants to allow. One can even cogently talk about
representations without subscribing to the core tenets of “representationalism”—a school of
thought that holds that consciousness (and by extension, language) copies the external world (or
metalinguistic “I” of discourse or the metahuman viewpoint of Amerindian perspectivism, serves as a reflexive pivot
for the appearance of images as such.
28
But of course we totally miss the point if we start by imagining a speaker naturally endowed with intentions,
motives, memories, etc. that are then expressed. My point is rather that it is only in virtue of expressive acts that
social creatures experience themselves (and others) as intentional actors.
33
“states of affairs”) via internal representations, leading to a focus on notions like “truth value,”
“facts,” and “correspondence.” (Foucault 1971 gives a strong historical overview of the
sociohistorical milieu within which this way of thinking about human knowledge became
ascendant within Western intellectual disciplines.) For Viveiros de Castro, the traditional
relationship between Nature and Culture within anthropology is one in which the latter
represents the former in the manner sketched out by representationalist theories.
The problem is that Viveiros de Castro seems to take a core representationalist
presupposition at face value—viz., that the reality (in a strong metaphysical sense) of the
representatum is what is at issue in debates over the relative constructedness or givenness of
culturally specific discourses and concepts. That is, we can either be constructivists or realists
about, say, yushi—and “taking seriously” (Henare, Wastell, and Holbraad 2007: 8) other worlds
requires that we be the latter. Since for Viveiros de Castro the constructivist position depends on
subordinating the prima facie truth value of mythic narrative to the explanatory ends of
producing a naturalist theory of culture, to counter what he views as kind of explanatory (and
political) overreach, he tends to treat mythic narrative on the model of an ipse dixit, a “discourse
on the real” (2004: 11), with the presumption that doing so will put a strong check on the
presumptuousness of naturalist explanations of cultural practices.
But I think the problem can be stated another way, not by arguing against the reality of
constructed entities, but by maintaining that realist attitudes toward natural (or supernatural)
entities must still answer to the contingencies of what the philosopher Richard Brandom calls
“the game of giving and asking for reasons” (2000: passim.). This doesn’t mean that anything at
all might play the role of a (super)natural given within such a game, but that we can only make
sense of the givenness of natural entities like rocks and stars and weather to the extent that they
34
constitute the background expectations against which we account for our actions. (Note that
“we” here only refers to anyone who might give such an account: minimally, a speaker.) Even
more importantly, this places no restriction on the number and variety of such games that might
be relevant to our daily lives as social actors.
So when, in his book Metaphysical Community, Urban insists that “[u]nlike the Serra
Geral mountain range or jaguars or araucaria pines, the organization of society is not a thing that
is out there, waiting to be understood” (1996: 65), he is drawing a distinction that is highly
relevant to the project of creating a naturalist account of culture, in this case of Shokleng culture.
But he is not saying that this is the only, or even most important, distinction that one could draw.
It isn’t clear that there is even any disagreement between Urban’s naturalist account and the
account that emerges from reading across Shokleng myth narratives and drawing broad realist
conclusions on that basis, a characteristically Western response to cosmogonic stories.29 In the
last account, we might just say that Urban and Shokleng storytellers are playing different games
with different stakes. That the naturalist account carries more weight within hegemonic
institutions is clearly an important political issue, but it’s hard to see what’s added by making it a
metaphysical issue to boot.
That said, Urban’s emphasis on natural entities as being “out there” while sociocultural
ones are “in here” could easily mislead us into making just the kind of radical ontological divide
between Nature and Culture that underlies representationalist thinking within anthropology.
However, I don’t think that Urban’s claims necessitate an ontological reading, since we can
easily tell a more functionalist story about the roles of Nature and Culture within anthropological
explanations, and yet remain agnostic about the metaphysical import of that story. Similarly, I
29
As Isabelle Stengers trenchantly insists: “those who are categorized as animists have no word for ‘really,’ for
insisting that they are right and others are victims of illusions” (2012).
35
propose that we derive our conclusions about the nature of the self, and more particularly yushi,
not from the authority of this or that official, traditional, or scientific discourse, by fiat, but from
a careful account of what people do when they invoke those concepts.30
Conclusion
As I conclude this chapter, it’s important to note that this abstract, somewhat formal
discussion of selfhood does not give us the whole story when it comes to yushi. I do think that a
sociocentric self provides a more sound basis for thinking about yushi than the idiocentric
individual at the center of distinctively (though not exclusively) Western models of personhood
(cf. Dumont 1980). By focusing on the interactional, semiotic dynamics within which this self
emerges (and which my analysis of the rabi exemplifies) I also think we stand to get a better
understanding of how the concept of yushi is usefully adapted to the evolving context of
everyday Sharanahua life. Additionally, I think that a pragmatically oriented account is more
responsive to the shifting meanings of ixaraki for Sharanahua subjects than the rather more
monadic, ontologically oriented approach advocated by Viveiros de Castro.
Nonetheless, yushi definitively do things that naturalistic selves do not. For instance,
though “images,” their manipulation can affect the person whose image they bear in ways that
would be plainly impossible on a naturalistic model. Furthermore, their apparition is thought to
have a direct causal connection to the person: the yushi who appears in a dream is the person in
all but bodily presence. So I do not want to deny the ways in which yushi, as invoked by
30
It might be objected that producing such an account with any reliability is precisely what Viveiros de Castro is
pessimistic about, since one will inevitably do so on the basis of ontological presuppositions that may not hold for
the world of the actors so described. However, such skepticism threatens to cross the line from useful reservations
about the “indeterminacy of translation” (Quine 1960) into the specter of a difference so total as to be simply
uncognizable. That said, I do not mean to imply that Viveiros de Castro’s skepticism is without grounds or merit.
Indeed, his intellectual ally Elizabeth Povinelli (2001) gives a pointed rebuttal to the pragmatist approach I rely on
here, though for lack of space I will not be able to address her critique.
36
Sharanahua speakers, present problems for naturalistic explanations that, say, the dramaturgical
self described by sociologist Ervin Goffman (1967), does not. Nonetheless, it is at least unclear
to what extent such divergences from a naturalistic model call for a uniquely Sharanahua or
Amazonian theory of the person. For all of the Sharanahua I spoke to, the notion of yushi grades
imperceptibly into a Christian concept of “soul” (alma), which in turn continues to provide so
much of the basis for “our” folk psychological reasoning about selfhood that hard and fast
distinctions are made at the theorist’s own peril. (In Chapter 4, I take this point up at greater
length.)
But it is also not my purpose to assimilate yushi to the largely naturalistic models I’ve
alluded to in the previous section. Rather, I am interested in the ways that yushi encourage and
constrain certain kinds of ethical action by emphasizing the latent connection between
interpersonal relations, our inner emotional life, and the physical expression of that emotional
life in idioms of corporeal well-being.
This chapter’s long detour into sociocentric theories of selfhood was offered as a way to
point up the contrasts between different ways that we might talk about yushi in relation to
personhood. However, I have still left untouched a crucial component of personhood that in
everyday parlance enjoys even more currency than yushi—namely, yura, a concept that can be
variously translated as person, body, and people. I now turn to yura.
37
2. Yura: The Body Eclectic
Fieldwork can often come to resemble a kind of therapy for the ethnographer. Let me
give an example.
I was talking—as one does under the disciplinary expectations that constituted so much
of the peculiar baggage I had brought with me to Gastabala—with Oswaldo about yushi, plying
him for information, teasing out details that would open like timeless gates onto...what exactly?
I was not so naïve as to expect to receive some piece of occult knowledge, but neither was I so
astringent in my commitments to whatever passed for common sense back home that I could
totally write off the possibility of an immediate encounter with something well beyond the pale
of reason. Indeed, that was my abiding hope. To hear secrets, to gain access—whether to the
“imponderabilia of everyday life” (Malinowski 1922: 24), mental models, habitus, cognitive
schema, semiotic ideology, the list goes on, but in short, a “what-it-is-like,” in the vein of
Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974). This was the dramatic
inheritance of my discipline, and whether you embraced it with wide-eyed credulity or regarded
it askance from a more sophisticated height, you couldn’t banish it entirely from your mind.
Well, I couldn’t.
In any case, I asked Oswaldo for a rundown of the kinds of nonhuman yushi known to
inhabit the forest. I asked about animals and their respective yushi. Did tapirs have yushi? Do
chickens have yushi? Snakes? Fish?
Oswaldo patiently supplied answers, though I noticed by the tone of his delivery that any
interest in this matter was more academic than personal. Sometimes he balked, only answering
to avoid disappointing someone who’d traveled so far to ask about such obscure matters. At
38
some point, he admitted, “You know who you should talk to? Talk to Mariano. He knows more
about these things.”
Animism had come to be associated in my mind with conceptual framing devices—say,
“shared interiority” or “ecology of selves”—that had primed me to look for continuities between
the classical objects of anthropological concern and a political ecology still very much in the
making. I hadn’t considered, or at least hadn’t sufficiently considered, that such continuities
might only emerge within the contested, reflexive space of an encounter powerfully shaped by
nested histories of conquest, conversion, and interpellation into far-reaching institutional
networks in which I too was very much implicated. Within that encounter, a stray word or
gesture might signal a sharp discontinuity that wasn’t reducible to a simple loss of culture, land,
or livelihood, since these losses already formed part of a politicized space of possibilities within
which the comuneros of Gastabala and nearby communities were constantly trying out
stratagems, forming and dissolving alliances, and jockeying for material advantage, much as
their forebears had. More than a social or natural fact, “loss of culture” was a possible move
within a mercurial, sometimes fickle game that drew on time-tested, even “traditional” practices
while redeploying them according to emergent ideologies conditioned by decades of
modernizing campaigns, from evangelical missionizing to state development initiatives to NGO
advocacy. The very notion of a cultural before and after, of a demarcating cultural caesura,
played such a central role in this game that to miss its layered significance was to miss
everything.
So when Oswaldo, in his unfailingly polite way, gave me to understand that the whole
question of yushi in nonhumans had so little practical bearing on his life that I was better off
talking to the only specialist of an epistemic tradition with few practitioners and no direct
39
successors, I was forced to reassess the significance of animism as I had been trained to conceive
it. I had thought of it, at the least, as a mark of alterity, a kind of cultural shibboleth that marked
out “nonmodern thought” and distinguished it from the “modern thought” I had been steeped in
throughout my own intellectual and social formation. But Oswaldo’s relationship to animism,
far from conforming to any neat division between tradition and modernity, seemed betray a more
complicated intersection of identities, aesthetics, and life-worlds.
There was something therapeutic about this moment. It did nothing to advance my
preconceived academic agenda, and in some ways undermined the seriousness of purpose with
which I had pursued my original line of questioning. But it cast my inquiry in a new light. I
needed to understand not just how animist thought persisted (if that is even the appropriate term)
within modernity, but also how modern anthropological inquiry had brought forth the image of
the animist as its dramatic foil. As opposed to the purists’ operation of cutting away the
distorting influence of modern incursions, whether in the form of Christianity, science, or
capitalism, I would engage with local understandings of personhood as ongoing negotiations
amidst conflicting pressures to be both traditional and modern. I would aim less to theorize
across the ontological differences between an “us” and a “them,” and look more to the particular
assemblages of subject positions, identities, ideologies, alliances, and actions through which
various we’s and they’s emerge, however ephemeral or entrenched they may seem at first blush.
As it turns out, the Sharanahua term yura neatly captures the complex interplay of
elements that allow us to understand how a particular kind of actor comes to be associated with a
particular (open) set of ethical affordances—ways in which a person or object invites or demands
a particular ethical stance or course of action (Keane 2016). Yura are persons, bodies, and social
collectivities, the latter especially in phrases such as yura shuku—“tribe, ethnic group”—and
40
duku yura—“kinship, community.” Such polysemy suggests that these three concepts—person,
body, and social collective—are, if not exactly coextensive, at least significantly overlapping
semantic and pragmatic domains.
In this chapter, I want to sketch out the deployment of the notion of yura in order to
explore the distinctive way that this concept contributes to the notion of a shared social realm
whose fostering is at the heart of ixaraki, as introduced in the previous chapter. Yura has been
frequently seen as a complementary concept to yushi, both concepts comprising the key
components of Sharanahua personhood (Townsley 1988, 1993; Deleage 2009). However, as the
semantic scope of term implies, yura also refers to the community of one’s kin and peers,
conceived in the corporeal idiom of shared affects. Thus, related practices of commensality,
property, marriage, group labor and recreation, language, and community politics all reflect and
contribute to the understanding of yura as a simultaneously bodily and social, personal and
interpersonal phenomenon.
If in the previous chapter I used the theory of “Amerindian perspectivism” as a reference
point for exploring the notion of yushi as it related to ixaraki, or “living well/beautifully,” in this
chapter I want to take up a different theory of animist ontology and relate it to the Sharanahua
notion of yura, the body/person. That theory is the late structuralist approach taken by Philippe
Descola in Beyond Nature and Culture (2013), in which he lays out four ontologies—animism,
naturalism, totemism, and analogism—derived from different combinations of two basic
elements—“interiority” and “physicality.” Although I will ultimately diverge on important
points from Descola’s basic argument, his schematic framing of the concept of animism provides
a particularly clear scaffold from which to work toward more difficult points.
41
Animism vs Naturalism via Descola’s Ontologies and Sellars’ Images
Descola’s argument comes out of the same structuralist tradition that bears such a strong
influence on Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivist take on animist thought. Viveiros de Castro has
even characterized Descola’s work as corresponding to the earlier “republican” (2015: 164)
phase of Levi-Strauss’ oeuvre, while the more radically metaphysical approach favored by
Viveiros de Castro owes more to the later Levi-Strauss, of the Mythologiques (1967-1971) and
after. Yet both theories take up a fundamental binary in their mentor’s work—namely,
Nature/Culture—and elaborate it into an exhaustive, elegant, and mind-bending theory of the
diverse ontologies at the basis of broad cultural differences.
In many ways, Descola’s is the easier theory to exposit, not least because it lacks the
recursivity at the core of dense perspectivist statements such as “Animism…expresses the logical
equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves”
(Viveiros de Castro 2012: 56). Instead, Descola’s theory is based on a taking the twin
“prepredicative” features of human experience—“interiority” and “physicality”—and from them
producing a fourfold square, each quadrant of which provides a concise formula of one of four
ontologies, as follows:
Similar interiorities
Dissimilar physicalities
Dissimilar interiorities
Similar physicalities
Animism
Totemism
Naturalism
Analogism
Similar interiorities
Similar physicalities
Dissimilar interiorities
Dissimilar physicalities
Table 2: The four ontologies according to Philippe Descola (2013)
Here I will only be concerned with the left half of the above figure, the half which
concerns animism and naturalism. Sahlins (2015) gives good reason to subordinate the right half
of the square to the field of animism itself, despite the loss of symmetry that results. He writes
that totemism, analogism, and animism “are not equipollent ontologies, inasmuch as humanity is
42
the common ground of being in totemism and analogism as it is in animism proper” (2015: 281).
Sahlins thus invites us to see totemism and analogism as distinctive sub-types of animism—or
“communal animism” in Sahlins’ terms. In essence, I agree with his argument there, and for
reasons that Tylor himself pointed out, concluding: “The divisions which have separated the
great religions of the world…are for the most part superficial in comparison with the deepest of
all religious systems, that which divides Animism from Materialism” (1920: 502). Simply put,
the divide, admittedly internal to modernity’s self-conception (Latour, 2004; 2016), is between a
volitional human realm and a mechanistic (if radically indeterminate) nonhuman realm.
Perhaps the most precise description of this divide is to be found in philosopher Wilfrid
Sellars’ “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” where he distinguishes the “manifest
image” from the “scientific image.” Briefly, the manifest image is “the framework in terms of
which…man first encountered himself” (1963: 6), while the scientific image is a causal model
“which postulates imperceptible objects and events for the purpose of explaining correlations
among perceptibles” (19). Whether we take these images to be rival explanatory modalities or,
more substantively, distinct ontologies, they constitute the two incommensurable registers
according to which we humans reckon with the activity of the world around us as well as our
activity within it. When we seek to understand the difference between animism and
naturalism—in the anthropological context, some kind of “them” and some kind of “us”—it is
useful to keep these contrasting registers in mind.
Yet if we look at Descola’s distinction between animism and naturalism, we can see that
he parses the relevant distinction via another binary—namely, interiority and physicality.
Animism is “the attribution by humans to nonhumans of an interiority identical to one’s own”
(2013: 129), whereas what differentiates beings is their physicality—their bodies. Naturalists, on
43
the other hand, take the inverse stance, positing a universal biological substrate (DNA,
ultimately), while attributing distinct and unique interiorities to different beings: it is like
something to be a bat in a way that radically differs from what it is like to be you or me. This is
so much the case that the interior life of humans has its own special rubric, “consciousness,”
which we extend to nonhumans only with extreme trepidation. Animists, by contrast, have no
such reservations about counting various nonhumans, from monkeys to fish to trees to
mountains, among their own number, peers in a relational economy of affective ties and bodily
exchanges.
For Descola, these contrasting ontologies amount to differing “elementary schemas”
(2013: 86). These schemas are characterized as being “nonpropositional” and “nonreflective”
(ibid.). They do not rise above the threshold of conscious reflection, but instead structure that
reflection at a constitutive level.31 Readers of Levi-Strauss should have no difficulty seeing the
imprint of his legacy, especially its intense focus on “structures.” Indeed, such encompassing
structuring principles have long been a holy grail of sorts for a certain kind of comparative
anthropology bent on describing the very fabric of human life onto which cultures are
embroidered and out of which their threads are spun.
Thus, although such schemas are often described as “cognitive” or “mental,” they should
not be conflated with psychological phenomena, such as thoughts or perceptions, nor with
symbolic ensembles, such as beliefs or rules. Indeed, one of the moves in Descola’s overall
argument that most ties him to other proponents of the broader ontological turn is his rejection of
the idea that animism amounts to a set of beliefs, since this would mire his analysis in the very
31
Although this claim might seem uncontroversial, recent work by the philosopher Jason Stanley (2011) on “knowhow” points up many difficulties in separating practical knowledge from propositionality that Descola’s argument
does not consider. For one thing, Stanley’s work gives us good reason to resist conflating the “nonreflective” with
the “nonpropositional.”
44
Nature/Culture distinction that his argument seeks to overturn, or at least considerably
complicate.
So if mental schemas aren’t reducible to beliefs or rules, what are they? Furthermore,
why does this distinction matter? If we take Sellars’ notion of “image” to be roughly
synonymous with a “schema,” then we can take his own description of its relation to “belief” as a
useful starting point. He lays out this distinction with characteristic precision, taking a clearly
animist paradigm as his case study—presented here with a caveat about the woefully outdated
language:
The point I now wish to make is that although this gradual de-personalization of the
original image is a familiar idea, it is radically misunderstood, if it is assimilated to the
gradual abandonment of a superstitious belief. A primitive man did not believe that the
tree in front of him was a person, in the sense that he thought of it both as a tree and as a
person, as I might think that this brick in front of me is a doorstop. If this were so, then
when he abandoned the idea that trees were persons, his concept of a tree could remain
unchanged, although his beliefs about trees would be changed. The truth is, rather, that
originally to be a tree was a way of being a person, as, to use a close analogy, to be a
woman is a way of being a person, or to be a triangle is a way of being a plane figure.
That a woman is a person is not something that one can be said to believe; though there’s
enough historical bounce to this example to make it worth-while to use the different
example that one cannot be said to believe that a triangle is a plane figure. When
primitive man ceased to think of what we called trees as persons, the change was more
radical than a change in belief; it was a change in category. (1963: 10)
I cite this passage in its entirety because it puts into play a number of assertions that are
highly relevant to any broader discussion of animism. First, there is the assertion that to class a
characteristically animist principle that “trees are persons” as a kind of belief (i.e., in
“personhood” as a predicate of “treehood”) would grossly misconstrue the nature and function of
such principles. “Tree” and “person” are not separate, discrete concepts that are then brought
together in thought, but reciprocally defining categories whose interrelationship radically
conditions how one or the other may be present to thought and action. Thus, the behavior of
45
trees reveal to us something about what it is to be a person, just as the behavior of our fellow
humans reveals something about what it is to be person.
Second, there is an implicit assertion about what the condition of personhood consists in.
As Sellars astutely points out, the relevant concept “person” refers back to how one encounters
oneself in the world, as both the origin of one’s own spontaneous activity and the effective
horizon of one’s own experience. What is important to emphasize here, though, is that just as
being a tree (or a human) is a way of being a person, so being a person is the paradigmatic
ground from which and lens through which any entity encounters the world. Thus “person” is
ultimately a way of characterizing the world’s activity, one which radically links it to a set of
appropriate ethical dispositions one might take toward the world. Events do not transpire but
that somebody acts to make it so: this is the fundamental operating principle that both motivates
ethical action and provides an inferential template for interpreting and responding to the world as
it unfolds.
Finally, by telling a story of human social development as the gradual depersonalization
of objects (or, perhaps more trenchantly, the gradual objectification of persons), Sellars brings
out a fundamental tension between blind chance and volitional action that animates and gives
scope to one’s ethical choices. Indeed, the tendency toward depersonalization that gives rise to
the scientific image (here a synonym for naturalism) could be viewed as a cataloguing of the
ways that the world is beyond our control and so beyond the scope of our ethical concern. To
investigate and describe the world in this way requires a bracketing of the person as a unit of
reckoning, replacing it with the profoundly amoral operation of hierarchically nested forces,
probabilities, and objects. For this reason, Sellars makes a point of quashing the view that the
manifest and scientific images are at odds with one another or even logically opposed.
46
This brings to mind a fundamental problem with Descola’s, and to some extent Viveiros
de Castro’s, late-structuralist approach to the problem of what we might call “elementary
givens”: namely, by casting Animism and Naturalism as formal inversions of one another, it
implies a symmetry between “ontologies” that makes of them comparable and competing
schemas. I doubt that this is so, something that is much easier to see once we look at the kind of
practical commitments that attend the different ontologies laid out by Descola. I do not only
wonder whether animism and naturalism should be parsed in terms of interiorities and
physicalities, but I wonder if even in these terms Descola’s fourfold schematic can be upheld at
all.
For one thing, Descola’s view of naturalism, “same physicality, different interiorities,” is
one that is being effectively overturned by the sciences themselves. One need only look to the
emergentist view of the self that I alluded to briefly in the previous chapter to see how this is so.
The self, on this view, arises from and is directly dependent—“supervenient,” in the technical
parlance—on the dynamic self-organization of living processes. But it is not an entity that
permits itself to be neatly prized from its physical correlates, anymore than one could separate
the sense of an utterance from its practical effects. In both cases the mutual relationship between
the terms being compared (self/body, sense/practical effects) is not incidental to each term’s
being, but is constitutive of it. Which is to say: there is an important analytical distinction, but
there is no reason to parlay it into an ontological distinction as well, especially not on naturalist
principles. Indeed, on such principles, going back to Aristotle’s view of souls and bodies,
interiorities are physicalities, and vice versa. The difference between the two is analytical, and
so intrinsically tied to the inferential framework within which one or the other gains relevance.
47
To see how this is so, let’s take up Aristotle’s fourfold model of causality. This includes:
1) material causes—“that out of which”; 2) formal causes—“the form”; 3) efficient causes—“the
primary source of change or rest”; and 4) final causes—“that for the sake of which a thing is
done” (Falcon 2015). To illustrate with an example, let’s consider the switching on of a light
switch and ask the question, “Why is the light on?” On a material explanation, it would be
because the wiring, switch, light bulb, etc. provides the material conditions for the light to come
on. On a formal explanation, it might be because the organization of the aforementioned
material elements functionally corresponds to the task of illuminating an interior space. On an
efficient causal explanation, it is due to the flipping of the switch. Finally, on a final causal
account, the answer might be “Because it was dark and I wanted to read.”
Now, with regard to Descola’s argument about interiorities and physicalities, my point
here is that what we take those terms to mean turns significantly on what we understand those
terms to be for. Thus, we generally invoke interiorities in the service of final and formal
accounts, while physicalities are called upon in material and efficient accounts. “Interiority” and
“physicality,” then, are to an important extent artifacts of an explanatory process, ones whose
relative discreteness or distinctness is simply irrelevant outside of such a process. Taken in this
way, naturalism makes no hard and fast claims about interiorities or physicalities, it merely holds
in principle the decomposability of any dynamical system, whether an ecosystem, a social actor,
or unicellular life, into its constituent processes. Thus, interiorities may very well turn out to be
physicalities, but then physicalities might turn out to be something whose nature we eventually
discover to have been hitherto grossly misunderstood.32 The very distinction between them
32
This, for instance, is the contention of the philosopher Galen Strawson, who writes: “The fact is that we have no
good reason to think that we know anything about the nature of the physical world (as revealed by physics, say) that
gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental or experiential phenomena are physical phenomena,
48
might turn out to make sense only where one has the option of adopting the manifest image over
against the scientific image. A more dramatic way of putting this is to say that in a purely
naturalist world, there might be no final causes, no interiorities, except as effective social
conceits. And yet the label “effective social conceits” might yet conceal a more complex role in
our explanations than we might have suspected if we imagined that such an anodyne phrase
might count as an unequivocal win for the committed materialist. It’s beyond the scope of this
thesis to get any deeper into the matter here, but suffice it to say that Descola’s proposal to view
naturalism as a conceptual commitment to fundamentally similar physicalities and fundamentally
dissimilar interiorities founders on contradictions that are very much at issue among naturalists
themselves.
So much for naturalism. Taking up animism—“same interiority, different physicality”—
we get into similar problems, insofar as “interiority” and “physicality” as terms of art turn out to
be similarly ill suited to the practical operations that animism motivates. In the last chapter, I
addressed the notion of yushi at length, finding that it bore striking parallels to a sociocentric
conception of the self arrived at even through naturalist inquiry. The thrust of the sociocentric
approach to the self/soul/yushi, whether its causal basis is natural or supernatural, is that it
renders “interiority” and “physicality” as dynamic variables, contingent factors within an
emergent social process, rather than constants around which to organize a comparative approach
to ontologies. This is only more true in dealing with yushi and yura, since while it is true that
yushi are “ubiquitous” (Siskind 1973: 135), they also bear the particular likenesses of the
bodies/persons to whom they attach. The yushi have their own bodies, producing a complicated
strictly on a par with the phenomena of extension and electricity as characterized by physics” (1999: 121). Note the
nonreductionist implications of Strawson’s choice of words: “strictly on a par with” and not “reducible to.”
49
state of affairs by no means unique to the Sharanahua among Amazonians.33 Yura, as a term
that, by semantically linking bodies, persons, and social collective, reinforces the notion of the
person as a socially produced entity, offers an even more complex weaving together of
interiorities and physicalities, insides and outsides. I now turn to yura in more depth.
Yura in Myth
I would like to start my discussion of yura by taking a look at a Sharanahua myth that
illustrates some of the key principles of the concept:
The Spider Monkey Took Him Away
They say that long ago a man went into the forest with his sons. He heard a
spider-monkey and he tracked down, shooting off arrow after arrow, but with
every shot, the spider-monkey managed to escape. He wounded the monkey
once, but it didn’t die. So the man said to his son: “Son, we’re going to stay here
in the forest. We’ll make a shelter for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll kill the spider
monkey and return home.” They went to sleep and, in the course of the night,
unbeknownst to his father, the young boy was kidnapped by the spider-monkey.
The next day, the man awoke. “Son, son, where are you?” “Up here! I’m in the
tree, father. The spider-monkey brought me here.” The father had to return
home. He recounted everything to the boy’s mother. She cried.
A long time after that, the man went out to his garden. As he was working, he
heard a voice behind him: “Father, father.” “Who’s calling me ‘father’? I don’t
have any children—not anymore. The spider-monkey took away my only son.”
“I am your son.” The father turned around, saw his son and took him in his arms,
crying all the while. “Father, I’m going to take you to meet my children.” The
son took a leave and squeezed its sap into the eyes of his father. In the place of
the trees that had lined his garden, the father saw a footpath. They arrived at his
son’s house. “Here are my children.” They were all black, like spider-monkeys.
The father also saw a large spider-monkey with a smaller monkey, and together
they were preparing tobacco to smoke. They refused to speak to the man. The
old man returned home and told his wife everything that had happened.
(Deleage 2005b: 532-33, my translation)
33
For a comparison to the case of the Achuar, see Anne-Christine Taylor’s appropriately titled article, “The Soul’s
Body and Its States” (1996).
50
Lévi-Strauss once said that myths were “stor[ies] about the time when humans and
animals did not yet distinguish themselves from each other” (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1988: 193).
In this sense, such myths are strongly illustrative of a core feature of animist thought and
expression: sociality as a domain that encompasses both human and (anthropomorphized)
nonhuman communities. “The Spider-Monkey Took Him Away” thus constitutes a typical
example of the genre. Spider-monkeys are matter-of-factly presented as possessing a social life
that is strictly homologous with human life: they have their footpaths, their houses, their tobacco,
and, most importantly, their kin relations. That said, much of the story’s dramatic thrust hinges
on poignant contrasts between human and animal life, expressed by way of the body.
Let’s consider how the body and its transformations motivates the narrative itself. First,
we have the man and his son, both clearly human, who pursue a spider-monkey in order to kill
and eat it. Now, it is quite normal for the Sharanahua to eat monkeys, and the suggestion that
monkeys have a more anthropomorphic shape than, say, a tapir is treated more as a curiosity than
a source of deep disquiet. So at the story’s opening, we can comfortably class the man and his
son as human—udi kuin, or “real people”—as opposed to the spider-monkey that the man
succeeds in wounding. But then the spider-monkey turns the tables. He kidnaps the boy, an
occurrence that mirrors the very human phenomenon, widely documented though long fallen into
desuetude, of kidnapping children during raids of rival communities.
At this point, a Sharanahua listener would probably presume that the son had himself
been turned into a spider-monkey. In other tales this is made more explicit. In a story where a
man is kidnapped by peccaries, for instance, he is later described as being covered in coarse fur,
a direct result of his capture. So outwardly the son of our protagonist would have taken on all of
the physical characteristics of a spider-monkey, yet inwardly would have continued to regard
51
himself as human. Indeed, he presumably retains enough of his earlier identity that his father
immediately recognizes his voice years later. However, the wider point here is that bodies are
expected to reflect social belonging.
Yet, as the son’s bodily transformation illustrates, not only do individual bodies reflect
the social bodies to which they belong, but it is socially meaningful activity which produces the
body itself: food-sharing among kin, linguistic interaction, and symbolic designs drawn upon the
body at crucial junctures are all among the traditional means by which, in the past, Sharanahua
bodies were shaped in their development as udi koin.34 Terence Turner (1980) has referred to
this as the “social skin,” and I believe it is the conceptual core of the notion of yura.
Whence the business of the leaf squeezed into the protagonist’s eyes. Most likely it
represents a hallucinogen of some sort, focusing on the eyes to underscore the main function of
such substances according to many Amazonian groups: to see (cf. Chaumeil 1983; Deleage
2009). In the case at hand, it allows the protagonist to see his grandchildren as persons (though
perhaps not udi koin) albeit with a distinctive vestige of their animal form: their black (the jet
black of spider-monkey fur) skin.
There is a lingering question as to whether the effects of the leaf have induced a bodily
transformation in the protagonist so that he too might be seen from, say, his wife’s perspective at
that moment as some kind of simian or another. Alternatively, it might be that only his powers
of vision have changed, though his body remained thoroughly human. The story doesn’t provide
us with the information to decide one way or another, and I think we need to at least entertain the
possibility that, given the “mythologic” (sensu Lévi-Strauss) on display, both alternatives may be
34
Though ritual designs do receive some attention from Deleage (2009: 134), a more detailed account of bodily rites
of nearby Panoan groups can be drawn from Erikson 1996, McCallum 2001, Lagrou 2011, Cesarino 2013, and
Kensinger 1995. By their own account, the Sharanahua once practiced similar rites, and continue to do so, albeit in
a much more limited form.
52
true. Moreover, we might conclude that all of the figures in mythic narratives—generally
regarded as yushifu, or “ancestral spirits”—by sole virtue of their status as a kind of yushi need
not meet the normal requirement of adhering to any predicates whatsoever. In the words of one
Yaminahua shaman: “You never really know yoshi — they are like something you recognize and
at the same time they are different — like when I see Jaguar — there is something about him like
a jaguar, but perhaps something like a man too — and he changes ...” (Townsley 1993: 453).
In fact, if one treats the oppositions in play throughout the narrative—human vs. animal,
village vs. forest, yushi vs. yura—as strictly mutually exclusive, then the story poses basic
problems of consistency. If, however, the problematique of the story is precisely the slippage
between these categories, and so the slippage between one’s belonging to this or that social
category, then the antinomies presented by the narrative appear not so much as inconsistencies as
dramatizations of a persistent existential dilemma: your meal today may be your grandchildren
tomorrow. Or, in a phrase very much in the vein of observations made by Viveiros de Castro
(1992) and his former students (Faust 2001; Vilaça 2010): today’s enemies might be tomorrow’s
allies, and vice versa. The difference, after all, is really a matter of perspective.
Yura in Life
I’ve made a conscious decision here to focus on yura as the corporeal aspect of
personhood, and in this respect the concept has been explored at length elsewhere (Townsley
1988: 106-120), but in colloquial usage, yura is more likely to refer to persons themselves. In
fact, yura is an exclusively human attribute. The bodies of animals are given another word,
kaya, which also serves as the word for the human torso. Such a distinction would seem to
accord with Descola’s claim that within an animist framework, bodies provide the sufficient
53
criteria for distinguishing one kind of actor from another, while “spirit” is a universally shared
property. But what is a body, really? And if yura qualifies as one, what does this do to our
understanding of Descola’s claim?
Descola, like Viveiros de Castro, has been careful to point out that “body” in the context
of animist thought bears little resemblance to “body” in the strictly materialist sense—for
instance, the bodies of Newtonian mechanics that occupy a certain amount of mass and volume,
but remain entirely at the mercy of external forces. “Body” in the animist sense refers not to
material underpinnings (thus not to biology either) but, on the contrary, to a kind of “carnal
envelope” (Descola 2013: 213) endowed with intrinsic capacities. “Bundle of affects” and
“ethogram” are the labels used by Viveiros de Castro and Descola to convey an animist
conception of the body that comes into the world always-already entangled in relationships.
These latter include not only the blood relationships transmitted by way of descent, but more
importantly, social relationships formed by way of alliance. In other words, the body is not
given. It is made.
It is easier to see how this is so when one starts form the definition of yura as a
“collective body” of sorts, what it is tempting call kinship, with the caveat that “kinship” should
be divorced from the notion of “genealogy” that so often accompanies it in Euro-American
cultures (Schneider 1980; Strathern 1992). Indeed, the formation of social bonds, as through
gifts, favors, and shared experiences, are as fundamental to the yura-qua-collectivity as
bloodlines and lineages, if not more so. The modern tendency to view the biological body as
rooted in a surer ontology of physical processes (cf. Mol 2002) than that of the social body—
really a set of ideas about the body—finds itself utterly thwarted in the face of an apparent
54
willingness among many groups, the Sharanahua being on of them, to view the body itself—its
very composition—as inseparable from the social field within which it takes form and develops.
One common way of reinforcing the identification of bodily substance with social
belonging is the sharing of food. During my entire stay in Gastabala, I had the distinct privilege
of being a guest of honor at nearly every household, which meant that if I happened to be
strolling around the village, I’d often be addressed with cries of Nun piinun!—“Let’s eat!”
Generally I would find the household’s residents and their immediate neighbors—that is to say,
their closest kin—already arrayed around a few platters of freshly caught ipu (Pseudorinelepis
genibarbis; carachama in Spanish) or yuba (Prochilodus nigricans; boquichico)—common
species of fish—served in broth and topped with wild cilantro. For my part, I would bring gifts
of anything from shotgun shells to candies to bags of salt (vital for the preservation of meat).
When Oswaldo learned that I would be eating at this or that neighbor’s house, he would
sometimes insist that I bring a portion of what his wife, Nila, had prepared. That way, there
would be no misconceptions about whether he was living up to his obligations as a host and as a
Gastabalan by not allowing his charge (me) to place any undue burden on others.
As Jorge, a tall, cheery exemplar of the Sharanahuas’ reputation as the region’s
“friendliest” ethnicity,35 would tell me: “For the Sharanahua, sharing food is the most important
thing.” In a world where generosity and miserliness (the oft-maligned yuashi) represent the
extreme poles of moral behavior, this was an endorsement, and in the strongest terms, of the
Sharanahuas’ moral integrity. The highest expression of this ethical ideal is in allowing one’s
body, whether by way of the fruits of its labors or by the substances it ingests, to be shared with
others. The poetic justice that meat, the flesh of another being, served as the ideal vehicle for
35
The actual term I heard used (by mestizos) was tratable, a term that can be translated as “friendly” or “sociable”
but also insidiously echoes the meaning of its most direct English cognate, “tractable.”
55
expressing the bond between yura—bodies/persons—and hence their subsumption into the larger
yura shuku—the collective body—was not lost on my interlocutors, who knew well from myths
as well as from the forest itself that ethics (hence politics) is always haunted by the question of
who eats and who doesn’t, with whom one eats as much as who is eaten.
Focusing on commensality as a vehicle for strengthening ties between community
members might seem to evoke the Durkheimian view of “social solidarity” as the driver and
telos of social dynamics, but yura complicates this theoretical account by grounding it, not in a
conscience collective, but in a corps collective. The very possibility of yura as a simultaneously
social and corporeal fact short-circuits the a priori split between society and nature that allows
Durkheim’s reading to have any purchase on reality. Rather, yura’s conceptual remit suggests
that if we want to articulate something like a Sharanahua ethics (say, by way of ixaraki), yura
will have to be logically prior to our discipline’s favored analytical tropes: society, symbols,
representation, agency, ontology, even the body itself.36
Conclusion: Something like a Sharanahua Ethics
I should make clear that I regard my insistence on viewing animism as an ethical attitude,
one that ixaraki encapsulates, as in itself an ethical move. By doing so, I encourage an
anthropology that is forthright about its “world-making” methodologies, those that draw on
disparate data and find some way to make them hang together, at least as an academic artifact.
This is not part of an effort to be more ethical, nor more transparent. At best, it is an attempt to
get a clearer view of the stakes of talking about yushi, yura, and ixaraki at all—getting at why
36
I make no claim to originality with this insight, variations of which have been at the root of many an illustrious
career in anthropology. See, for instance, Wagner 1975, 1986, 2001; Strathern 1980; 1988.
56
such concepts might matter not just for their primary users, but in general. And if ixaraki
matters, it is first because people matter, and in a very particular way.
First, for the sake of argument, I’m going to hazard a provisional definition of
personhood. “Personhood” is here defined as a conceptual shorthand for all of the practical
attitudes that we take towards those who, to the extent that they respond meaningfully to the
world, are like us, so that to take an entity for a person is to be able to imagine that entity
acknowledging the intent of our actions and responding in kind. One important corollary of this
definition, then, is that persons are not statically defined and discretely bounded constructs, but
enjoy membership within this general class to varying and extremely context-related degrees.
Note that I say “context-related” and not “context-dependent.” This is because I
recognize that social context has a performative dimension that expresses social contents even as
it partially determines them. Thus, the category of “persons” and the actual persons who
instance that category provide each other with mutual constraints and conditions of possibility.
Whatever we may think of persons, or who is or isn’t one, we would surely have to recognize
that our reflections always begin in medias res, with some notion of personhood already
operative in our pre-reflective beliefs about what it (personhood) consists of.37
Yura can help us get an analytical grip on how this is so. Since yura places corporality
and sociality on equal conceptual footing, it implies that, as against the usual analytical divide
that places material conditions prior to social conditions, social life is part and parcel of material
life. Bodies are made, just as persons are made, and both are the emergent outcome of the
ongoing negotiations of one’s relations, both to those within one’s group (yura) and those
outside of it.
37
I take this latter prerequisite of reflecting on personhood as a logical entailment of being that which one intends to
reflect on, meaning that our practical dispositions are always already informed by the very notion we are at pains to
make explicit.
57
Taking up a similar view of animism, Nurit Bird-David (1999) coins the term “relational
epistemology” to highlight the extent to which animism draws attention to the ways in which
entities are both caught up in and constituted by their relations to other entities. She writes:
“Against materialistic framing of the environment as discrete things stands relationally framing
the environment as nested relatednesses” (1999: 78).
Ultimately, Bird-David grounds this framing in basic human “socially biased cognitive
skills” (ibid.). In other words, we animate the world because our interactions with the beings
that populate it are so vastly underdetermined by predictable forces, so treating those beings as
social actors gives us a more dynamic grip on the relationship between their behavior and our
own. But as I’ve been arguing throughout this thesis, I think this way of accounting for animism
is missing a key ingredient that an ethical viewpoint provides—namely the urgency of inhabiting
the world in this way.
If, as Sahlins said, “humanity is the common ground of being” for all the varieties of
animism, then it should be noted that put this way, it makes an ontological principle of what
might be treated with equal plausibility as an ethical precept.38 But I think that we should at least
make ample room for the thesis that when it comes to what Sahlins elsewhere called “mutuality
of being” (2011), common ground is as much a regulative ideal as it is a posited starting point.
(As Clifford Geertz might have put it, it is both “model of” and “model for” [1973: 93].) Indeed,
there is always a tension between these two alternatives, one that is played out in the ethical
domain. Terms like ixaraki and yura provide a useful idiom for conceptualizing the drama that
results from this tension as various actors navigate the complexities of belonging, being, and
38
Another way of putting this would be to say that whether humanity is the common ground of being or whether it
merely ought to be makes little practical difference where dogmatically ratified precepts are concerned: “In the
beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Divine authority surpasses the
distinction between natural regularity and social norm: the law, simply put, is all there is.
58
becoming. In the next chapter, we turn to the contemporary situation in Purús to see how this
drama gets staged at the political level.
59
3. Politics in a “Singular Plurality”
As in the fieldwork of so many anthropologists, my original plans were waylaid by
unforeseen events. It started with the day of my arrival. Having finally procured last-minute
passage on a five-seater flight into Puerto Esperanza, and even that only after having worked
various contacts with inside connections and paid twice the list price of a ticket, I landed on a
sweltering late-June afternoon. After waiting on the tarmac for a liaison who never materialized,
I walked into town, where I found lodging in small set of rooms at the back of a family-run
restaurant, general store, and ticketing office for the very airline I’d come in on. (As in many
provincial towns, enterprising families tended to run several concerns out of the same storefront.
All were rumored to be ruthless cheats and misers. Yuashi city.)
The proprietor’s daughter showed me to my room, a homely concrete cubicle with a lowslung twin bed in one corner and a listing shelving unit on the opposite wall. Just outside the
adjoining bathroom, a gas generator rattled itself to pieces. I dropped my backpack onto the bed
and a waft of stale diesel thickened in my nose and lungs, forcing me to politely stifle a cough.
Music blared next door at a reckless volume, bright and chintzy.
Política, the proprieter’s daughter informed me.
As I was unpacking my things, a knock came at the door. It was not my liaison, Jaime,
but a go-between who sent along Jaime’s regrets, and told me he would be around next door later
in the evening.
Evening came. Next door turned out to be the campaign headquarters of the Otorongo
(Jaguar) Party, a newly formed coalition of mostly indigenous constituents who were backing
one Domingo “Dominguillo” Ríos for mayor. His round, unprepossessing face was emblazoned
on a billboard outside, next to the rather more attractive clipart portrait of a jaguar staring out
60
from a white background with inscrutable intensity. That explained the song that had been
playing on repeat since my arrival, a deliriously upbeat encomium to Dominguillo’s seemingly
limitless powers to right the wrongs, boost the fortunes, and champion the cause of every man,
woman, and child in Purús. I did not know it yet, but I would hear that song, a jingle really, at
least a couple hundred times over the next couple of months.
When I made my way over, a throng of families hanging out near the entrance received
me with diffident glances. The municipal generators had come on and the high-contrast glare of
sodium streetlights deepened the sternness of the expressions I saw directed at me. The children
looked especially apprehensive as they absentmindedly fussed over a younger sibling or tugged
at their mother’s shirt. I tried to assuage them with a low-key smile. It didn’t help.
Finally a middle-aged man greeted me with a practiced grin and an extended hand, as if
making an official gesture to smooth over my awkward entrance. He introduced himself and
asked if he could be of any help. I told him that I was looking for Jaime, and he told me that
Jaime had been there earlier, but had gone back home, likely for the night. He called on some
onlookers for confirmation. Soon a small crack team had formed and tasked themselves with
tracking down my guy, who was just here they could all confirm, he couldn’t be far off. They
made a phone call—no answer. A runner, maybe fourteen or fifteen, was sent off in search the
elusive Jaime. Someone offered me a warm beer and told me to stick around while they worked
it out.
And so it was that I would get my first shot at explaining myself to uninitiated ears, why
a lone gringo had suddenly shown up under the official auspices of a university from some farflung corner of Gringolandia called Canadá, and with vaguely scientific intentions. After some
discussion of these matters, it was widely agreed that I was some kind of lingüista—a linguist—
61
“anthropologist” being something close enough, in any case. Several times I was asked if I knew
this or that researcher, a fellow gringo linguist, or maybe a biologist, and trying to be agreeable, I
would reply that I knew their work, not wanting to come off as strident by pointing out the
dramatic difference between the linguist-missionaries who ultimately wanted to save their souls
and the academic researchers who wanted nothing more than to reap their data.
Jaime never appeared that night, but my hosts were pleased with the high-mindedness of
my endeavor, whatever it was. Plus I had been buying rounds. Soon the conversation took a
grandiose turn. They talked of the Otorongo Party’s projects. Not projects—something like
visions, divinations. I went out on a limb and offered to be of service to them in whatever
capacity I might be able to fulfill, which admittedly wasn’t much, but they speculated that I
might help them “bring back the NGOs,” who since a flurry of activity around the founding of
the Alto Purús National Park a decade back had become increasingly scarce.
One of the men in our important huddle held up a swaying hand to take the floor, then
piped up: “We want deeds, not words.” He looked at the others, then at me. I don’t remember
how I responded, only that I couldn’t bring myself to spell out the plain truth: that my training,
my intellectual efforts, my whole professional milieu were primarily aimed at the production of
one thing, and it wasn’t deeds. It was words.
In response, I made an ambiguous gesture with my head, neither shake nor nod.
* * *
The mayoral campaigns would occupy a central place in many of the daily goings on
among Purusinos over the entire course of my fieldwork. I’d arrived only a few weeks before
election day, and stakes were especially high after the previous year’s results had been annulled
62
following demonstrations at the airport that resulted in a extended hiatus of any flights into or out
of Puerto Esperanza.
“We stopped receiving shipments,” a municipal administrator told me. “We even ran out
of toilet paper.”
Even once the results had come in, about halfway into my fieldwork, política would
continue to reverberate as the current jefe of Gastabala, Luís, began to call in favors from the
newly elected mayor and a breakaway faction headed up by the former jefe, Gustavo, made
preparations to found a community of their own further downriver. It was often hard to tell
where política ended and more intimate forms of communal and familial life began.
To talk about política in Purús is to return over and over to two overriding themes: the
region’s natural and cultural diversity, on the one hand, and its economic and political isolation,
on the other. Rightly or wrongly, these themes are popularly supposed to be in fundamental
competition with one another, such that one’s attention to, say, forest conservation is often read
as signaling one’s ignorance of or lack of interest in ameliorating the self-evident poverty of the
majority of Purusinos. For the most part, this division remains latent, even in most political
discussions, where the topic most often turns on the deeds and misdeeds of various dramatis
personae, rather than the issues as such.
But there is one issue that quickly brings matters to a head, and that is the highway.
Proposed to run through currently protected lands to its terminus at the city of Iñapari, the
highway would dramatically scale up commercial and extractive activity in Purús, bringing with
it a host of drastic cultural changes, not all of them welcome. For some, it is the only escape
route from an unfairly imposed state of economic and social stagnation. For others, it spells the
63
end of the natural and cultural diversity endemic to the region, to be replaced by scorched-earth
extractivism.
Of course, discussions about “the highway” quickly reveal themselves to be debates over
profound existential matters, such as social inclusion, material betterment, community and
individual autonomy, land tenure, loss of tradition, dramatic shifts in livelihood, as well as the
shadings of power and status that attend different framings of these matters. Does
conservationism represent “our” values, or does it represent the imposition of outsiders? When
does it make sense to think of “us” as duku yura, Sharanahua, indigenous, Purusino, Peruvian,
South American, or humans in general? Finally, what is owed to those who are not “us”?
In this chapter, I want to show how we can illuminate the political dilemmas of presentday Purús by reference to the concepts explored in previous chapters. Notions such as yura,
yushi, and ixaraki prompt us to take a view of matters that aligns analysis with ethical values
distinctive of Sharanahua actors in ways that are less easily captured (if at all) by a political
economy analysis, and so add a welcome layer of description to the discussion.
The Problem of Corruption
One thing that I noticed as soon as I began paying attention to the municipal elections is
that although there were four distinct parties running—Otorongo, Cacau, K (Ka), and Pala
(Shovel)—they were all running on the same platform. I don’t mean this hyperbolically. They
literally promoted the exact same litany of fronts on which they would deliver significant results:
jobs, progress, development, education, technology, health, ecology, social support (apoyo
social), and sports. Not only that, but each of the four candidates placed great emphasis on his
64
Purusino roots and offered promises of significant changes. Even the incumbent candidate, of
the Cacau party, ran the dubious slogan: Cambio Ucayalino (“Ucayalian Change”).
Of course, this did not mean that the candidacies were all identical, or that voting for one
over the other would make no difference. It was just that instead of fault lines drawn between
candidates along ideological or policymaking lines, the distinctions were rather more directly
thought of in terms of networks of patronage and tribute, of who would be the protagonists of the
various “projects” (proyectos) proposed by each candidate—in short, of alliances.
Within this configuration, campaigning amounted to the strategic distribution of favors,
promises, and goods (as well as rumors, innuendo, and propaganda). This meant envoys sent
downriver to distribute víveres (staples such as rice, cooking oil, and salt), soccer jerseys
emblazoned with the candidate’s name (which provided an easily referenced visual account of
past campaigns), official-sounding titles, plane tickets, and most importantly, gasoline. To call it
transactional politics would be too easy. It was not about simple quid pro quos, nor vote buying
per se. Instead, it is better to see it as something like what Marshall Sahlins called “generalized
reciprocity” (1972), in which reciprocation for gifts is treated more as a general ideal rather than
a fastidiously enforced rule: “The material side of the transaction is repressed by the social:
reckoning of debts outstanding cannot be overt and is typically left out of account” (1972: 194).
But of course not everyone saw it that way. I’m reminded of a lunch I had with a group
of bureaucrats in Puerto Esperanza: an army official, a teacher, a municipal bureaucrat, and an
office worker at the local health center. They all came from other, more connected parts of Peru.
The conversation was like a scene out of a Graham Greene novel, colonial administrators
warding off boredom by giving vent to their collective disdain. What was broken, who owed
money, the outrageous prices, the heat and the flies, the backwardness of the locals in their fitful
65
march toward acceptability. They calculated the days until their next furlough, and further down
the line, possible reassignment to…well, anywhere else.
The elections would come up only obliquely. Allegiances at the table were divided on
the matter and liable to disrupt the tone of camaraderie-in-exile that generally prevailed. But the
bureaucrat wanted to make clear how absurd the whole matter was. She explained to me, the
only outsider at the table, the depths of treachery to which the comunidades had sunk. Some of
them would welcome a campaign envoy, accept their gifts, pledge their support, and, sure
enough, do the very same with the next envoy from a different party to arrive. It was widely
assented that the Kulina were the worst in this regard: capricious, stubborn, and hostile. A
problem case. Was it any wonder that they lagged so far behind the Sharanahua, Cashinahua, or
Yine? The table solemnly nodded along.
When I said that I might do the same if I were in their shoes, my interlocutor laughed
nervously, taking my comment to be a willfully perverse joke.
But, then, I had read my Sahlins, and I knew that strict “balanced reciprocity”—the
immediate discharging of debts by direct exchange—was less common than many might assume.
And I knew that there was nothing deceitful or insidious in this. On the contrary, thinking that
durable bonds of mutual trust and support could be conjured into being with a simple lavishing
of gifts was naïve at best, but at worst it betrayed a mercenary readiness to offer up allegiance to
the highest bidder. And what could be less trustworthy than that?
So where my interlocutor saw a lack of principles, I was inclined to see a healthy
skepticism toward the fixity of abstract norms of conduct as against the fluid realities of shifting
interests, alliances, and material conditions. Which is not to endorse the view that a willingness
on the part of native communities to offer simultaneous support to candidates in contest with one
66
another was prima facie evidence of bad faith or moral laxity. On the contrary, thinking the
problem by way of concepts of yura and ixaraki helps us see that acts of exchange need not
come under the strict balance-sheet logic that characterizes commodity exchange in order to
evince a coherent, stable set of principles about the ethical significance of such acts.
“Meat for Sex”
The problem pointed out by my tablemates, what they saw as the deliberate flouting of
the responsibilities of parties to transactional activity, harkens back to a debate once current
within amazonianist circles. It had long been observed that talk of both food and sex was
strikingly preponderant within the day-to-day discourse of various Amazonian peoples (Gow
1989: 567), and various attempts were made over the decades to resolve such talk into a
satisfying, systematic account of the relationship between the two. One of the more prominent
of these came out of Janet Siskind’s work on the Sharanahua, in an article entitled “The hunting
economy of sex” (1973b), in which she put forth the thesis that the Sharanahuas’ subsistence
economy was structured by a gendered division of labor in which men bring home forest game
and women reciprocate through sexual favors.
For a time this seemed plausible, as the metaphorical equivalence between food and sex
was given expression through a number of rituals and jokes that Siskind had carefully
documented. But as Peter Gow would later point out, Siskind’s analysis rested on a questionable
assumption: “men give game to women in return for sex because men are the proprietors of game
and women are the proprietors of their sexuality” (1989: 568). For Gow, this assumption in turn
invoked a logic of commodity exchange quite foreign to Amazonian modes of reciprocity.
Gow offers an alternative explanation that refutes this logic:
67
These economies do not operate around the formulation of particular subjects as
proprietors of particular goods and by extension the exchanges founded upon such
proprietorship, nor around the gift exchange idioms of ‘bridewealth societies’, but
rather they function through the relations established between people by means of
their different bodies and corporeal desires. The idiom is not proprietorial since
people are not seen as subjects who possess their bodies or labour power. The
idioms are rather those of corporeal identity and integrity and how these are
produced or destroyed through social relations (ibid.: 580).
In other words, we should not think about relations of exchange as being preceded by an
altogether distinct, discrete domain of social relations in which fully constituted individuals may
electively enter into or else break off strictly transactional relations with “outside” parties.
Rather, since bodies are themselves an emergent outcome of social, perforce economic, relations,
acts of exchange cannot be treated as fundamentally external to the affective economy by which
persons, or more aptly, yura, are produced. So Gow: “Relations of marriage between men and
women, based on mutual demand for food and sexual gratification, are the central productive
relations, but they are both created from and create in turn relations of caring between kin”
(ibid.).
Clientelism and generalized reciprocity
“Living well,” in accordance with the guiding ideal of ixaraki, brings out the ethical
urgency of treating exchange relations in this way. As against the prioritizing of the
contractualist virtues of fastidiousness, solvency, and parsimony, ixaraki enjoins us to rethink
economies in the messier, more intimate idiom of kinship (cf. Strathern 1985), of mutuality of
being. In turn, this means thinking and acting on deliberately imprecise timetables, with more
emphasis on the quality of the bond formed in virtue of ongoing exchanges than on the specific
dividends that bond might pay. What can come to look like a lack of temporal order, a laxity
68
regarding one’s duties, then, also provides the necessary leeway for long-term diplomacy in a
world where best laid plans have a mysterious habit of coming to naught.
The label of “clientelism” seems to apply here, and, indeed, the somewhat related concept
of asistencialismo, or welfare, was often invoked (with express dismay) by mestizos as a reason
for the evident corruption of indigenous communities. My tablemates certainly saw things this
way. And I don’t doubt that they were responding reasonably to a clear problem—namely, open
vote buying and influence peddling, and the fostering of self-reinforcing cycles of dependency.
(Though, oddly, their concern seemed to be with the maddening inconsistency of the
comunidades’ venality rather than with the political parties’ unvarnished exploitation of social
and economic inequalities.) After all, these were the very forces that seemed to actively disrupt
solidarity among indigenous communities, even causing irreparable fractures within those
communities.
My point, rather, is to rebut the view that the indigenous actors had acted cynically or that
their acceptance of gifts from candidates amounted to clear evidence of their corruption by
modern social forces. What from one point of view looks like instrumental clientelism, from
another is the messy, protracted business of creating “kin” by courting potential “affines.” That
is, of creating relationships of mutual care out of existing relations characterized by mutual
circumspection, if not outright distrust. And unlike instrumental clientelism, there never arrives
a point at which one can simply “cash out.” Even thinking about relationships in instrumental
terms is rejected so forcefully as to evoke horror at the very possibility.39
39
Of course, Amazonians are hardly unique in this regard, as even in the most liberal cultures instrumentalism in
personal relationships is regarded as immoral behavior. The salient difference is that liberal cultures have long
endorsed a contractualist ideology that has served to abstract property relations from interpersonal ones, giving a
“neutral” veneer to forms of transaction and exploitation that would be plainly unacceptable between friends or
family.
69
This one reason why the figure of the yuashi is so universally loathed. To be yuashi is to
arrogate to oneself the unique privilege of participating in community life at one’s whim, retiring
from one’s relationships as soon as they grow inconvenient. Expressed in the corporeal idiom of
yura, this is tantamount to rejecting one’s raison d’être. Thus, it is not so much a breach of
moral conduct as it is an almost unthinkable perversion of human (yura) nature.
Now, when I describe visiting campaign envoys as potential “affines,” I mean this in a
very particular sense. As has been noted by numerous other ethnographers, ritual life among
many Amazonian groups is marked by “assimilation of otherness, or more precisely as the
constitution of the social self through this assimilation” (Calavia Sáez 2004: 167). On the
principles of these rituals, there is a kind of power associated with engaging in relations with
outsiders that goes well beyond the social opportunism that one might ascribe to indigenous
actors pledging support to a political candidate who has just bestowed them with numerous gifts.
Writing on the Yaminawa, a Pano group living in close vicinity to the Sharanahua, Oscar Calavia
Sáez writes:
The ‘visit’ or performance of the ‘others’, not only here but in many other
examples from the Lowlands, defines a society whose nexus is not provided by
corporate groups or explicit rules of belonging or exchange (Howard 1993);
society is produced by the consumption of otherness, in forms that range from
actual or symbolic cannibalism to the capture of prisoners, names, songs, or
virtual pets (Fausto 2001;Vilaça 1992). Importantly, none of these cases can be
reduced to a dialectical deduction of the self based on the other. Instead, what
characterizes them is the notion that, in one way or another, the enemy is
immanent to the self (Viveiros de Castro 2002: chap. 4), and that the ritual
institutes or updates this immanence (ibid.: 167).
Such is the inheritance of long histories of exogamy, ritual adoptions, panregional onomastic
borrowings (McCallum 1989), and ethnogenesis (Hornborg 2005) that has led the anthropologist
Philippe Erikson to refer to Pano peoples in the aggregate as a “singular plurality” (Erikson
70
1992) and a nébuleuse compacte or “dense nebula” (Erikson 1993).40 As Calavia Sáez points out
for the Yaminawa, even apparently negative evidence of ritual or traditional knowledge can be
construed as positive evidence of the continuing relevance of this logic of “constitutive alterity”
(Erikson 2003: 130).
When one considers, then, that mestizos are, in Sharanahua and other Pano languages,
accorded the generic rubric of nahua or “foreigner/outsider,” it becomes all the more
understandable that local politics could take no other form than transactional politics. The
confusion starts where some adopt an attitude of generalized reciprocity where others adopt
expectations of a balanced quid pro quo. “Corruption”—whether in the form of vote buying or
acculturation to the vices of modernity—is a red herring.41 What we have here is a deeper
equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004), a mutual misunderstanding about the nature of the
mutual misunderstanding.
Singular Pluralities athwart the State
If Amazonianist anthropology could be said to have a central problematic, a strong
candidate would be the question of hierarchy. In early ethnographic analyses, Amazonian
societies were long defined by what they lacked: stateless, “acephalic,” struggling against
scarcities of technology and nutrition—what Anne-Christine Taylor has called an “accumulation
of negativities” (1996: 622). However, the reaction to this early, hasty consensus has been sharp
and sustained. Ever since the seminal work by Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (1987),
40
Summarizing this view of Pano peoples, Erikson writes: “The Pano region thus displays a baffling contrast
between its manifest unity at the global level, on the one hand, and the extreme atomization that characterizes it at
the local scale, on the other” (1993: 51, my translation).
41
This is not to say that corruption is not a pressing issue, but that it is used to conflate instances of misprision of
political office (in the form of diversion of funds, personal enrichment of political officials, or nepotism) with the
more abstract issue of modernity as a corrupting influence on indigenous peoples, widely taken to be evidenced by
the transactional politics endemic to the region.
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the tendency has been to reclaim the positivity of Amazonian alterity by showing that it is not
that Amazonians lack the social and material conditions of modern state societies, but that they
operate by social logics that run counter to the underlying logic—individualist, liberal, scient-ist,
statist—that serve to prop up the maintenance of modern institutions. This fixation on alterity
has in turn provided the basis for the deconstruction of some of anthropology’s most
fundamental working concepts, from society to kinship to magic (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2001
and Brown 1986: 162-178). Thus did Amazonians come increasingly to resemble an inverted,
rather than a privative, version of “the West.”42
Regardless of the validity of the view of traditional Amazonian societies as “against the
State,” it is now the case that contemporary indigenous communities such as those of Purús are
not just in contact with the State, but have taken on some of its functions and its logics of
operation—in a word, “governmentality” (Foucault 2007 [1979]). Anthropologists confronting
this contemporary state of affairs can no longer afford to traffic solely in traditional categories
without at least acknowledging what Shane Greene has referred as “customizing indigeneity”
(2009), by which term he designates the way in which custom qua collective habit can be a
vehicle for both the perpetuation and the transformation of social configurations, in the process
revealing much about the gradients of power that effectively orient the outcomes of processes of
social change: “Projects of customization not only creatively redefine forms of practice and
value but also reveal which modes of practice and realms of value are dominant in these
articulated spaces of confrontation between one custom and the next” (2009: 16).
As the foregoing analysis has shown, much is gained by reexamining the tension between
tradition and modernity, not as one of diametric opposition, but as complementary viewpoints on
emerging modes of sociality. But it is difficult to decide exactly how to go about this, for if on
42
For a strong critique of this view, see Alcida Rita Ramos’ “Pulp Fictions of Indigenism” (2003).
72
the traditional view of indigenous Amazonians, otherness connotes a kind of sovereign (and
potentially dangerous) power, the “others” of contemporary social theory are often precisely
those whose position at the margin of a dominant social order calls for an ethics of carefully
managed assimilation (including by way of “isolation”), which sometimes veers into outright
paternalism.
So without making indigenous actors into unwitting anarchists in polar opposition to the
State, there is an important point to be made about the impasse that the politics and ethics of
alterity underlying the “singular plurality” of Pano peoples presents for the essentially
assimilationist project of statehood. This would go a long way to contextualizing the
misunderstandings that give rise to ungenerous mestizo views of indigenous Purusinos as
unreliable and corrupted by asistencialismo, while for their part many indigenous Purusinos are
quick to describe mestizos as stingy, calculating, and warped by mercenary sensibilities.43 What
we have here are logics that are not so much in opposition to one another as they are orthogonal
to one another, and, it should be said, fundamentally geared toward different social and material
conditions.
Of course, conditions are always changing, punctuated by dramatic shifts accompanying
specific events. While functionalist accounts of sociocultural formations, whether of the
structural-functionalist (Malinowski 1944, Radcliffe-Brown 1952), evolutionist (Steward 1955,
Sahlins, et al. 1960), or ecological stripe (Rappaport 1967; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976), have fallen
into ill repute among present-day sociocultural anthropologists, there is still an important case to
be made for the functional correspondence of social formations (and their underlying logics) to a
given set of material, historical, and cultural circumstances. One need not be a vulgar
43
As it was put to me: El mestizo te vende todo, no te regala nada—A mestizo will sell you everything; he won’t
give you anything [for free].
73
reductionist to see how the dramatic shift from the life of what Sharanahua now refer to by the
vulgar epithet calatos, or “naked persons,” a life that turns on kin relations and hunter-gatherer
livelihoods, to one of managed assimilation to life as a citizen of the Peruvian state, could be
helpfully illuminated by thinking about the functional differences between these contrasting
social arrangements, whether construed as Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft (Tönnies 2001 [1887]),
mechanical vs organic solidarity (Durkheim 1964 [1893]), traditional vs modern, tribal vs statist,
small-scale vs large-scale, etc.44
All of which is to say that “traditional” concepts like yura, yushi, or even ixaraki tend to
lay a retrospective emphasis on those aspects of social configurations that were highly relevant
as those concepts came into widespread use. Indeed, the only reason that structuralfunctionalism was able to appear as convincing as it did (for a time) was that traditional social
formations instituted through patterned, normative behavior had a relatively durable, stable form
that permitted speculating about these formations in (what was later seen as) an unduly reifying
way. But from the beginning of the anthropological enterprise, this was always something of a
salvage operation, reflecting an idealization that was always bound to be more contested, and
less stable, than its modeling as a holistic, unified set of rules or norms would lead us to believe.
Thus, while I have been at pains to show how yura and yushi arise from what we might
call “traditional” concerns reflecting a politics strongly attuned to alterity, alliance, and
generalized reciprocity, it’s important to note that these very concepts present a surprising
malleability when applied in contemporary contexts. Certainly no Sharanahua would say that
there was anything especially traditional about the notion of yushi, and they don’t find it a
corruption of the “original” meaning that it now denotes the Christian soul as much as the spirits
44
In listing these sets of oppositions, I do not mean to imply their equivalence. To the contrary, I hold that none of
these should stand as the opposition to which all others may be usefully reduced. Rather, each of these provides an
emphasis that may serve, and has often served in the past, as a supplement to the others.
74
that inhabit the forest. Indeed, paradoxically, the “outward facing” (Calavia Sáez 2004) nature
of ethical and social life among the Sharanahua and nearby indigenous groups means that
apparent incursions or impositions of modernity are often rather embraced as powerful means of
self-transformation and cultural renovation.
As one might imagine, this leads to deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the new
opportunities that assimilation affords.45 On the one hand, openness to foreign influence is an
important value both intrinsically and instrumentally. What gave the Sharanahua shaman
impetus to seek out alliances with potentially treacherous yushi is not so different from what
motivates the present-day Sharanahua comunero/a to align him- or herself with foreign NGOs or
state-level bureaucracies. Both are understood as an expansion of one’s capacities in ways that
promote the resilience of a yura in attunement with the world even as that yura is exposed to
ultimately inscrutable risks.46
On the other hand, the Sharanahua recognize the importance of defending specifically
indigenous interests and values. But there need not be any contradiction here, as soon as we
recognize that the effective avenue for defending those interests consists in reaching out to global
networks of likeminded activists. In other words, the struggle for autonomy at the top of the
agenda of organizations like FECONAPU (Federación de Comunidades Nativas de Purús) isn’t
born of a conservative impulse to retreat back into tradition, but rather of an effort to realize new
possibilities via the very logic of constitutive alterity that long infused traditions with the vitality
that made them relevant to everyday life. This effort reflects the recognition of indigenous life
45
Here I have in mind the specifically ethical affordances that Webb Keane writes about: “any aspects of people’s
experiences and perceptions that they might draw on in the process of making ethical evaluations and decisions,
whether consciously or not” (2016: 27).
46
If it is within yura that such capacities are realized, then it is only by way of yushi, those quintessential virtual
others, that those capacities are brought into the field of relevance. One thinks here of such disparate examples as
plant spirits arising in visions, the potential affines of neighboring communities, or the candidates for political office
running on platforms of yet-unrealized directives.
75
as a dynamic, open-ended negotiation with the non-indigenous world (Green’s “customization”)
that struggles to assert its contemporary relevance on a world stage where even well-meaning
allies sometimes consign it to a set of comfortable, essentialized tropes.47
Conclusion
Having begun by discussing the highway, it seems proper to end this discussion by
turning to the issue of the no contactados, those indigenous groups—collectively labeled as
“Mascho-Piro,” though comprising several distinct ethnicities—living further upriver, near the
Purús’ headwaters, in parts of the forest officially designated as a Zona de Aislamiento
Voluntario—a Voluntary Isolation Zone. In many ways, discussion of the no contactados
provides a strange analogy to debates over the highway. Should they be left alone? Should they
be helped? How do we respect their autonomy?
In Gastabala, as elsewhere, the topic of the no contactados, more commonly referred to
as los mashco, caused visible discomfort among my indigenous interlocutors. For one thing,
they were afraid of the Mashco-Piro. Laureano, the next village upriver from Gastabala had
moved downriver to be closer to the other villages, largely out of fear of attack from the MaschoPiro, who in recent years had been coming into more and more frequent contact with Purusinos,
to sometimes tragic results.
But in many ways, my interlocutors’ disquiet had more to do with what the Mascho-Piro
represented: a kind of vestige of their own ancestral history, by turns pitiable, admirable, and
uncanny. For what it meant to be a “calato” in the 21st Century, at least to my Sharanahua
interlocutors, was to be a living anachronism, cut off from the world, however naively
47
For examples of such in the realm of eco-politics, see Conklin and Graham 1995 and Conklin 1997. Carneiro da
Cunha 2009 provides and excellent discussion of sorting out the differences between culture qua ongoing
assemblage of norms, beliefs, and practices and “culture” as the symbolic inheritance of a particular people.
76
conceived.48 In this way, the Mashco-Piros’ fate could appear even somewhat cruel, as they
continued to eke out a life on the run as once-plentiful game became ever more scarce, and
violent confrontation with hostile outsiders became ever more difficult to avoid. Meanwhile, the
entire indigenous population of Purús had been long since converted to Christianity,49 and so to
varying extents they had internalized a set of rehearsed clichés, originally disseminated by North
American missionaries, about life in the forest as one of unnecessary violence and cruelty.
(More on this in the next chapter). As Christians, then, many Sharanahua I talked to felt
compelled to humanely shepherd their estranged neighbors into the fold of civilización, albeit
some more fervently than others. Indeed, a group of Yine people from the faraway Upper
Urubamba region had been brought to Purús by missionaries and founded an extremely isolated
community two to three days’ travel upriver for the sole purpose of evangelizing the MaschoPiro on their eventual exit from the forest—a plausible outcome if trends continue.
At the same time, indigenous Purusinos are acutely aware that the no contactados’
vulnerabilities—both social and immunological—present a severe obstacle to any easy solutions.
They know this, because they feel under similar threat themselves. One of the main reasons for
opposing the construction of the highway given to me by the vice-president of FECONAPU was
precisely that the comunidades nativas of Purús were not prepared for the rapid influx of
powerful economic interests that would almost surely follow. And just as there are those who
believe that not reaching out to the Mashco-Piro amounts to the gross negligence of a moral
duty, so is there a vocal faction, largely led by an Italian priest who oversees the only “mass
media” (print and radio) to speak of in Purús, who views opposition to the highway as actively
48
See Michael and Beier 2003 for a comprehensive survey of indigenous Purusinos’ attitudes toward the
uncontacted peoples within what is now the Alto Purús National Park.
49
Though what “conversion” means in this case is far from settled. For discussions of Christian conversion among
Amazonian peoples, see Vilaça 2015 and Vilaça and Wright 2009. I take up the point in greater depth in the next
chapter.
77
abetting the immiseration of Purús’ indigenous communities by powerful, opportunistic agents,
among whom they eagerly include all national park administration and conservation NGOs.
Surely there are agendas at work in these two debates that aren’t captured by considering
them as analogous cases, but I only know those agendas by way of rumors and innuendo. And
that is befitting of the nature of the Purusino politics. Overwhelmingly reliant on word of mouth,
the traffic of information tends to be evaluated more on the authority and social standing of the
messenger than on the content of the message itself. I often got the impression that the stand one
took on the issue of the highway (or the Mascho-Piro preserve or the NGOs) was read primarily,
especially among indigenous Pursinos, as an index of social belonging, rather than as an index of
one’s commitments to a certain set of ideas or principles. For unlike the liberal commitment to
the primacy of argument, debate, and probity, an ethics and a politics more immediately
conditioned by a practical attunement to constitutive alterity yields a dramatically different
emphasis: not fixed ideas, but contingent social relations; not apodictic truth, but epistemic
(perforce social) authority; not a movement from dissensus to consensus via reasoned argument,
but a movement from consensus to social fracture mediated by one’s yura—affectively charged
relations. Ixaraki, “living well,” then, has the flavor of a collective improvisation, a bricolage as
Lévi-Strauss (1962) termed it, in which the final destination carries less interest than the
(relational) means of getting there.
78
4. Life on the Ethical Frontier
Few other domains of political debate have such high existential stakes as environmental
politics in the age of anthropogenic climate change. Always implicated in questions of whether
or not to conserve a given species or biome (such as tropical forest) are vital concerns over the
scope of “our” responsibilities, whether to peripheral human populations, nonhuman others,
future generations, or any (virtual) others that might lie beyond the shifting pale of “our” agency
(therefore “our” culpability). But what is the “we” in question here? And who are its others?
On the most literal reading, “we” are simply the discussants of the practical matter at hand,
though where the scope of that matter is (purportedly) global, the immediate parties to discussion
understand themselves to be speaking on behalf of a similarly global set of peers. “We” are the
agents of history, “humanity” in a heavily qualified sense.
But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, global warming forces us to think
about humanity simultaneously in two contradictory registers: “as a geophysical force and as a
political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces
of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual
human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and
species, and of human societies” (2012: 14). The critique of human history that treats humanity
as a mode of historical agency is familiar to Western scholars since at least Hegel. The
pragmatic force of this critique depends crucially on seeing humans as both capable of and
responsible for their dominion over others, both human and nonhuman. To humanity as a
geophysical force, on the other hand, no such critique can apply. Why? Simply put, because on
this latter view, humanity is apprehended in its purely causal dimension, outside of the normative
categories of personhood. It is a radically de-animated humanity, one that behaves but does not
79
act in any morally relevant sense, and so cannot be held responsible for its actions, in the same
way that one who is non compos mentis cannot be held responsible for theirs. On the geological
scale, humanity, rather than an agent who acts, is an event that happens.
And yet we know that coordinated action can produce more or less determinate effects.
In any case, the “we” of climate change discourse (as of any other discourse) is irreducibly that
of a subject, a first-person deictic that radically frames the world in terms of how it may be acted
upon, paradigmatically by persons. The challenge, then, seems to be clear, at least in its general
outline: how to subordinate human activity (qua causal force) to human design, a privileged form
of knowledge production that surveys (and surveils) humans as a global aggregate and draws
powerful conclusions about how best to bring the effects of that aggregate’s behavior into
alignment with values thought to define the viability of human life as such.50 However the
challenge is met, it must likewise reckon with humans as a curious admixture of reflective reason
and “blind” force. Thus, in order to enroll actual persons as willing participants in schemes to
combat or shape climate change, first the executors of such schemes must instill this particular
attitude to humanity as a stance that individual actors might come to adopt toward themselves.
In this final chapter, I want to explore some of the ways that indigenous participation in
conservation programs is enjoined by way of reinforcing this dualist attitude towards humanity,
on the one hand, and towards the self, on the other. In the case of Purús, I view this approach as
being in clear continuity with the reformist work of Christian missionaries, who sought, with
widely varying degrees of success, to radically transform behaviors and habits that they regarded
as profligate, indulgent, and short-sighted into ones that laid a strong emphasis on long-term
50
This is what Michel Foucault famously termed “biopolitics”: “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to
rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings
forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race” (2008 [1978]: 317). Though he himself did
not extend the concept to cover ecopolitics, it is not hard to see how the latter, in a world of planetary-scale human
coordination, would follow from biopolitics more broadly.
80
projects, individual retentiveness, and the application of abstract, fixed standards of propriety—
the very habits, incidentally, that would quickly earn one a reputation as a first-class yuashi. I
want to examine this radical reformist tendency as a move to abstract the categories of yushi and
yura from a relational ethics whose regulative ideal is ixaraki and to redefine them in explicit
relation to what philosopher Bernard Williams calls “the morality system” (1985: 174), a
peculiar metaethical view that evaluates human action according to its conformity with a
doctrinal set of ethical principles held to guarantee goodness irrespective of immediate context.
In the process, this movement fosters systematic shifts in the semiotic ideologies according to
which human action is thought to bear on both the nonhuman world and on various human
others, with a general trend toward the assimilation of individual intentions and motives to an
institutionalized, apparently neutral set of moral criteria. Thus, even as anthropogenic changes in
local and global ecologies would seem to unsettle any easy divisions between nature and culture
or human and nonhuman, emerging modes of “environmental subjectivity” (Agrawal 2005: 162)
double down on those divisions by reinscribing them within the heart of human activity itself.51
The implications of that reinscription take the form of a paradox: the more that collective human
activity can be plausibly treated as an impersonal geophysical force beyond moral reckoning, the
51
Keeping this analytical division in mind can help us get a grip on how environmental actors’ interests,
subjectivities, and practices coevolve within the framework of what Agrawal, drawing on Foucault’s notion of
governmentality, calls “environmentality”: “a framework of understanding in which technologies of self and power
are involved in the creation of new subjects concerned about the environment” (2005: 166). I thus share his broadly
pragmatist approach, guided by the premise that “[u]nder changing social conditions and institutions, identity
categories as guides to a person’s interests make sense only to the extent that they prevent, facilitate, or compel
practice” (ibid.). But where Agrawal is concerned to show how spontaneous action often precedes the beliefs that
might then be developed in order to justify that action in a post hoc fashion, I want to emphasize belief itself as an
order of real-time practical commitments, operative below the threshold of explicit reflection, which need not
involve the “inferential closure” (Brandom 2000: 174) applied to specifically systematic beliefs of the kind Agrawal
seems to be referring to. On my view, then, the issue has less to do with how one tailors belief to action, than with
the metapragmatic strategies one takes up to bring the implicit commitments motivating even nondeliberative action
into explicit alignment with one’s commitments to a more deliberative order of ethical reasoning, should the need
for that level of inferential closure arise. Where we want to lay emphasis on the normative dimension of such
strategies, it makes sense to speak of semiotic ideology, those shared strategies of alignment that allow disparate
actors to more or less reliably arrive at agreements about how X may be taken to imply, entail, or stand for Y and
thus coordinate their actions appropriately.
81
more human actors are entreated to take individual responsibility for the effects of that activity at
spatiotemporal scales that far outstrip the interpersonal context within which the very notion of
responsibility paradigmatically applies.
The Virtues of Conservation
One of the best venues for seeing this paradox play out was in the meetings convened by
park officials to review strategies—in the form of detailed planes de manejo, or management
plans—for the sustainable exploitation of forest resources with indigenous locals who were seen
as the primary beneficiaries of those strategies.52 One such meeting concerned a section of the
Communal Reserve known as La Novia and the ongoing problems there with poaching,
overhunting, and vandalism. Like the other parts of the Communal Reserve, La Novia served as
a buffer zone between the collectively titled lands of the comunidades and the protected lands
comprising the Alto Purús National Park proper. The reserve was freely accessible to indigenous
Purusinos for non-commercial hunting and fishing activities, on the sole condition that each
entrant to the reserve leave a record of the time and date of his or her entry and exit, as well as a
minimal catalogue of the number and species of any animals killed or captured during his or her
visit. It was on the basis of data collected from these records that officials made their
presentation in the well-appointed auditorium at park headquarters to an audience of some
twenty-five locals, all of them men, and all, but for one or two mestizos, indigenous.
Through the course of the presentation, projected onto a large white screen and replete
with authoritative graphs, maps, and field images, I noticed how the presenter’s tone gradually
52
The director of the Communal Reserve often took pains to point out that the reserve, though held in trust by the
state, should be thought of by locals as belonging to them. One of the implications of this point was that a feeling of
“ownership” would automatically entail a sense of propriety, though in practice the intended effect never seem to
quite take hold.
82
shifted from dispassionate exposition to thinly disguised frustration and finally to open dismay.
If the first slides presented a dry overview of the geographical and ecological context, they soon
gave way to slide after slide of damning evidence of malfeasance on the part of local hunters:
loose trash, damage to park facilities, the body of a dead jaguar. Finally, the manager of the
reserve commented with exasperation that the “violent acts” against park facilities had been
occurring because there was “a latent unease [un malestar atrás] on the part of the very
beneficiaries of the reserve,” concluding, “They have to be more honest [with us].”
One slide in particular caught my attention. It showed a bar graph indicating the number
of animals declared, grouped by ethnicity: Sharanahua, Cashinahua (Huni Kuin), Mastanahua,
Kulina (Mari Ha), Amahuaca, and mestizo. The presenter noted the surprising absence of
declared kills from the Kulina. He then passed back to photos showing hunters discovered by
park officials to have entered the reserve without registering with officials. One of the audience
members identified them as Kulina, the rest nodding in solemn agreement. With that the
presenter asked, for good rhetorical measure: “And who isn’t here at this meeting?” The answer
was muttered in broken unison: Kulina.
By framing the conflict in this way, the presenter skillfully managed to convey his
disappointment with the audience while eliciting from them, in classic Socratic fashion, an
explanation that outsourced the brunt of the blame to an absent party, thus avoiding the
appearance of a direct confrontation. The indigenous members of the audience, for their part,
were able to maintain face while acknowledging the gravity of the problem and the need to
increase efforts to combat it.
I was a bit surprised (and disturbed) that the park officials would make public
comparisons on the basis of ethnicity, but it made a bit more sense when I thought about their
83
general approach to instilling a sense of stewardship over the Communal Reserve. They seemed
to understand their mission as largely pedagogical—shaping locals into the kind of subject
adequate to the task of conservation. Beyond communicating the relevant facts about the forest,
the resilience of key species, the effects of contamination of waterways, and so on, they needed
to impress on the comunidades the values that went hand in hand with conservationism as an
ethos. Accordingly, entire ethnic communities could be assigned profiles of moral traits, and
indeed were regularly spoken of in this way (who was more friendly, who more outgoing, who
tended to lie, who lacked motivation, etc.). The Kulina’s failings, as arguably the most
marginalized ethnicity in Purús,53 could serve as a cautionary tale, a way of tying their failure to
follow conservationist protocols to their supposed character flaws (caginess, dishonesty, lack of
discipline) and so to the lamentable material conditions in which they lived.
At another meeting, I saw this virtue-based approach conveyed more clearly. It was
billed as a “training workshop on forest regulation [normatividad forestal] and sylvan fauna,”
and co-sponsored by two governmental environmental bodies, SERNANP (Servicio Nacional de
Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado) and SERFOR (Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna
Silvestre). Near the outset of the presentation, the presenter, a SERNANP official, explained the
mentality behind forest regulation by way of a domestic analogy. He likened the forest to a
home, one which was shared by human and nonhuman residents. He then proceeded to
enumerate the “norms of cohabitation” (normas de convivencia): Punctuality, Respect,
Responsibility, Honor (Honrados), and Cleanliness (Mantiene el ambiente limpio). These
53
The precariousness of Kulina villages was common knowledge, and is even remarked upon with concern in
FECONAPU’s 2004 Plan de Desarrollo Integral de los Pueblos Indígenas de Alto Purús. Beyond that, Kulina were
evidently underrepresented in terms of institutional participation. One Kulina man, heavily involved with the
evangelical missionaries, told me in conversation that he felt that Kulina were actively disenfranchised by
indigenous leadership heavily composed of Sharanahua and Cashinahua who treated the Kulina as inferior because
they weren’t “professionalized” (profesionalizados).
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virtues were used to frame subsequent discussions that dealt in more technical detail with the
implementation of forestry management strategies for the sustainable exploitation of resources,
above all the valuable mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) whose export remains the sole basis
for the dwindling extractive economy of Purús.
In both of the presentations sketched out here, the competent implementation of the
technical aspects of forestry management were directly tied to the moral character of the
indigenous populations charged with carrying them out, and this in conformity with moral
criteria that were presented as self-evident, precluding any discussion of their relevance to life in
the comunidades nativas. Insofar as specifically indigenous ethnic identities were referred to at
all, it was to emphasize the intrinsic connection between these identities and the forest, and that
connection was presumed sufficient to motivate indigenous actors to adopt the norms and habits
of a conservationist ethos that viewed the forest in the rationalized, quasi-actuarial discourse
proper to what sociologist Ulrich Beck called a “risk society” (1992)—i.e., a discourse that takes
carefully calculated stock of the present with a view toward managing the future. If the
indigenous locals were being shaped into moral agents of conservation, by the same stroke the
forest was being made into their acquiescent patient.
Converting Worlds
Of the many memorable moments I spent accompanying locals from Gastabala on
hunting trips, there is one that stands out with particular vividness. At midday, I had gone
upriver with Oswaldo’s brother-in-law, Camacho, Oswaldo’s six-year-old son, Andrés, and his
slightly older cousin, Pedro, in search of turtles—or, with luck, a capybara. In the event,
Camacho managed to shoot two turtles—a respectable haul, given that we had only brought
85
along three shotgun shells. The turtles lay belly-up on the bottom of the boat, lifeless.
Nevertheless, one of the turtles, who had apparently been well into pregnancy, began laying her
eggs, presumably by reflex, as she had been neatly pierced through the head by a shotgun pellet.
Her tail slowly swayed from side to side, eventually stiffening as an egg emerged and fell to the
bottom of the boat, at which point the tail set again to swaying as the next egg inched its way to
daylight. This went on for five minutes or so, to the evident delight of Andrés, who was
overcome by a fresh bout of giggling each time an egg fell from the dying turtle and into his
awaiting hands. When he saw me observing the turtle, he turned to me and, with a broad grin,
swayed his index finger side to side with the same languid rhythm as the turtle’s tail. He shouted
to me, and over the roar of the outboard motor I could just make out what he’d said: Es su yushi.
That’s her soul.
What struck me was that he’d chosen the Sharanahua term yushi over the equally
available Spanish term alma. At the time, I was eager to take Andrés’ utterance as evidence not
just of animist thinking, for which alma would have sufficed, but of the continuing relevance of
traditional Sharanahua ontology, in all its perspectivist glory. Now I’m less sure, not because
I’m pessimistic about the vitality of a distinctly Sharanahua identity or culture, but because to
take yushi as tokening a different ontology from that tokened by the term alma seems to impose
an unwarranted distinction between the two concepts as Andrés would have understood them.
Moreover, that distinction would imply a larger distinction between Sharanahua and Christian
ontologies that, while perhaps a useful heuristic for making sense of conversion as a
sociohistorical process, utterly fails to account for the fact that, in actuality, the Sharanahua are
Christian. But what implications did that fact have for the forest, which had always been known
to be full of yushi? Moreover, how did the dramatic practical changes wrought by decades of
86
ongoing evangelization and integration into the Peruvian state affect the Sharanahua’s
relationships to yushi, to the forest, to nonhumans in general?
The religious conversion of a people entails the conversion of their lived world, including
their ontology, social organization, and everyday mores, but conversion does not, generally
speaking, occur wholesale. There are always early adopters and stubborn holdouts, some more
and some less involved in the new possibilities opened up by missionary outsiders. These are
practical matters that should always ground our consideration of the doctrinal or doxastic
differences between the two orders of “traditional” Sharanahua life and Christian life, as well as
their respective panoplies of customs, symbols, rules, hierarchies, and bodily techniques.
As a matter of doxa, I have made some claims about the ethical import of yushi and yura
as key components of personhood, showing it to be a model of the self suffused with, and in
some ways constituted by, relations. At the same time, as a matter of doxa, Christianity proposes
a dramatically different model of personhood with different ethical import, starting with the
notion of spirit in conflict with the body:
For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary
to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do
whatever you want. (New International Version, Galatians 5:17)
In principle then, the Christian “spirit” and the Sharanahua yushi start from radically
differing premises about the scope and nature of personhood. However, to reduce this
contradiction to a matter of conflicting beliefs would seem a difficult view to uphold, since the
very category of “belief” is imbued with so many practical commitments impinging on so many
aspects of the lived experience as to make “belief” as a consistent analytic all but unworkable
across the contexts within which “spirit” and yushi play their respective roles as heuristics
87
orienting appropriate practical activity.54 These are not so much ideas to be entertained in
theory, but markers of ethical attitudes whose respective affordances and attendant semiotic
ideologies have profoundly different implications for how a given actor is expected to make their
way in the world.
So what would it mean to say now that yushi means “spirit” (alma, soul)? To answer that
question, we should first acknowledge that not only is there a kind of “equivocation” at work in
the task of translating from one ontological/semantic field (say, Sharanahua tradition) to another
(Christian doctrine), but that “equivocation” is always already at work within these two fields,
insofar as different actors will inevitably hold differing conceptions of these terms reflecting the
differences in their practical orientations toward the world. Univocity, especially in the matter of
terms as potentially esoteric as yushi or “spirit,” is always going to be more a useful fiction than
a matter of determinate fact.
In that light, conversion is never a simple matter of the convergence of one set of
concepts, attitudes, and practices onto another, but an ongoing negotiation that is deeply
conditioned by the practical exigencies faced by any given actor or set of actors. What we need,
then, is some appreciation for how the immediate social context of a young Sharanahua boy like
Andrés, a consumer of popular Peruvian culture educated by mestizo hispanophones employed
by the state, and whose slightly older peers look forward to military service and/or the formal
vocational regimes grouped under the broad rubric of profesionalización—how this context sets
his understanding of notions like yushi and alma apart from those of his chata (maternal great
uncle) Mariano, who retains vivid memories of his own pre-Christian past, when he aspired to
the status of retebitsabisi (warrior/hunter), a predator par excellence, only to be “pacified” (cf.
54
Indeed, the Sharanahua word for “belief,” ikuinki, has as its primary definition “to carry in one’s arms” (Scott
2004: 37), which suggests an epistemology at some remove from the notion of “belief” as an essentially doctrinal
attitude cashed out in terms of the propositions one endorses.
88
Vilaça 2009) by a missionary apparatus that gave him not just medicine, clothing, and
manufactured goods, but an entire ideology that enjoined him above all to give up killing and
dedicate himself to the patient cultivation of an inner spiritual life removed from his worldly
activity. What we need is not so much talk of “worlds,” but “ways of world-making”—giving
analytical priority to the contingent, ever-shifting praxis of describing, evaluating, and
transforming the world over any consideration of the world in itself.
Purifying Nature
What Christian missionaries brought was modernity, a battery of beliefs, practices, and
institutions whose unfolding in Purús was not unlike that of other parts of the world where
missionaries carried out their work (Keane 2007, Robbins 2004, Vilaça and Wright 2009).
According to Webb Keane, modernity conveys a moral narrative whose main theme was that
progress is “perhaps above all, about human emancipation and self-mastery” (Keane 2007: 6). In
its specifically Protestant guise, “the narrative tends…to link moral progress to practices of
detachment from and reevaluation of materiality” (ibid.). It is not just that Spirit is in conflict
with the flesh, but that it should triumph over it.
Bruno Latour calls this work of detachment from materiality “purification,” which he
defines more specifically as the “creation of two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of
human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (1993: 11-12). Moreover,
purification casts the human/nonhuman distinction as strictly analogous to a number of other
distinctions with strong ethical implications, such as subject/object, agent/patient, culture/nature,
sacred/profane, spirit/flesh, etc. Thus the stage is set for the modernity’s moral narrative to
89
unfold as the story of how humans liberate themselves by overcoming, subduing, or otherwise
controlling the nonhuman world.
Rethought along these lines, yushi and yura, made spirit and flesh, lend themselves to a
very different project than the ongoing negotiation of relations to others (which are in turn
constitutive of the self who negotiates) according to the ethical ideal of ixaraki.55 Purification
radically reconfigures this project by neatly reducing the messy business of “becoming” (a
person, a body, a collective) into two stable orders of being, one essentially active, the other
essentially passive.
This has two important effects on how a Sharanahua environmental subject might think
about their practical relation to the environment. Firstly, it replaces the distinctly ethical problem
of maintaining appropriate dialogical relations to nonhuman others with the much more technical
problem of discovering, analyzing, and then leveraging the formal constraints under which
nonhumans predictably operate. Secondly, insofar as it encourages humans to conceive of
themselves in similarly dual terms (spirit and flesh), it allows for the creation of a moral order,
formulated as a stable set of rules or laws, that predictably guide the subject toward virtuous
action, and so their liberation, by taming that part of themselves that acts “blindly,” as it were.
Thus are two orders of reasoning—scientific and moral—brought under the same umbrella of
universal, discoverable laws whose operations are, however, often concealed from us, owing to
our essential alienation from the nonhuman world, the sole subjects in a world of silent (but
ultimately legible) objects.56
55
In this way, traditional Sharanahua ethical thinking resembles that of the ancient Greeks, which, as Bernard
Williams points out “in many of its basic structures and, above all, in its inability to separate questions of how one
should relate to others and to society from questions of what life it is worth one’s while leading and of what one
basically wants, represents one of the very few sets of ideas which can help now to put moral thought in honest
touch with reality” (2006: 44–5, quoted in Laidlaw 2014: 115).
56
It was Francis Bacon who formulated this view in perhaps its most explicit form, stating that there were “two
books or volumes to study if we will be secured from error; first the Scriptures revealing the will of God, and the
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In the case of the Sharanahua and other Amazonians, we might think of conversion as the
shift from a semiotic ideology that privileges relational categories subject to the contingencies of
social belonging to one that favors fixed categories directly inscribed (as laws) in nature itself—a
category encompassing both physical and moral phenomena.57 Moreover, in the case of the
Sharanahua at Gastabala, who lived side by side with evangelical American missionaries for
several decades starting in the early sixties while aiding them in the translation of the Bible into
Sharanahua, this shift was further driven by a material and practical focus on the word of God as
literally manifested in the medium of a book whose private study and public discussion was
presented as an essential activity to the cultivation of proper ethical attitudes and behaviors.
Moreover, this activity came with strong material incentives, as promising students were given
opportunities to study free of charge at the Summer Institute for Linguistics’ educational
facilities in the distant city of Pucallpa, leading in turn to new professional opportunities. One’s
moral development was thus directly tied to one’s adaptation to the novel ethical affordances of a
world in which the study of books (along with bodily dispositions required to do so) emerged as
a gateway to previously unimagined forms of power and autonomy.
One can debate endlessly about how much this conversion process succeeded in radically
reshaping indigenous acolytes. Indeed, it isn’t that difficult to note the ways in which many, if
not most, Sharanahua diverge from Christian doctrine, especially vis-à-vis the ascetic practices
of self-denial, marital fidelity, and strict adherence to fixed rules of conduct. (Though, for that
matter, so do many non-indigenous Christians.) Thus, there is no reason to believe that the
creatures expressing his power; for that latter book will certify us that nothing which the first teacheth shall be
thought impossible” (The Works of Francis Bacon 1968: 3.221).
57
Ellen Basso, in her brilliant book-length study of deception among the Kalapalo captures this distinction quite
well. She writes: “There is a sense in these stories [i.e., Kalapalo myths] of reality developed through paradox and
contradiction, an emphasis on transiency and multiple identities and powers, that suggests a skeptical view of a fixed
and invariant sensory universe, one that differs markedly from our own concern to keep separate genuineness,
naturalness, normality, honesty, and the morally good on the one hand, and deception, falsehood, paradox, and evil
on the other.” (Basso 1987: 2)
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Sharanahua simply abandoned all prior notions or attitudes with the arrival of Christianity, and
many good reasons to believe that they retained a healthy skepticism about the teachings of
missionaries who were, after all, often viewed as having strong yuashi tendencies. Nevertheless,
it would be hard to overstate how dramatically the ethical landscape had changed with the
introduction of Christianity, not as a mere belief system, but as a social, political, and technical
apparatus that created a wide array of new opportunities even as it foreclosed others.58
The Forest, De-animated
So does that mean that the Sharanahua’s forest is no longer animate, i.e., filled with
nonhuman persons? As I mentioned at the start of Chapter 2, Oswaldo was still able to tell me,
albeit without much certainty, which animals had yushi and which didn’t. However, when I
talked to younger Sharanahua, they told me at point blank: “I don’t know.” But here we need to
be cautious in deciding the issue one way or another. It is safe to say that the complex of
shamanic practices within which nonhuman yushi play such a prominent role is now in abeyance,
if not total decline. Meanwhile the set of practices encouraged by institutional actors such as
missionary organizations, state bureaucracies, and conservation NGOs brackets out the ethical
agency of nonhumans, even where it recognizes—and, indeed, emphasizes—their moral worth in
relation to human actors. Traditional regimes of practice centered what Philippe Descola calls
the “reversible relations” of predation, exchange, and gift thus give way to practices oriented by
the “irreversible relations” of protection, production, and transmission (Descola 2013: 540).59
58
This much was brought home to me in a particularly poignant exchange I had with Oswaldo in which he divulged
to me that he had simply forgotten the many songs, stories, and ritual practices of his early youth. When I asked him
why that was, he told me frankly, “I went away to school [with the missionaries in Pucallpa].” It was a telling
example of how questions of belief are inseparable from the practical conditions that allow them to be maintained as
relevant.
59
Indeed, such modes of relation take a central place in Descola’s own account of ontological change: “Certain
ways of treating “others” that are present in a minor form in one mode of identification sometimes come to play a
92
And yet in spite of these facts, many Sharanahua still hear the whistle of yushi roaming the forest
at night, though increasingly these are likened to “demons” rather than regarded as having any
affinity with the notion of yushi qua component of personhood.60 In principle, then, it might be
premature to declare the forest devoid of nonhuman persons, conceived as moral agents. I’ll
simply limit myself to observing that their (the yushi’s) relevance to everyday life has become
increasingly attenuated by shifting ethical priorities.
But the question of the animacy (or agency) of the forest, taken in the abstract, seems
almost academic in light of more measurable, frightening trends affecting the forest’s vitality.
Peccaries, once a bountiful source of meat, have become all but locally extinct in Purús within
the last decade (FECONAPU 2004). Other fauna, like the giant river otter, are a distant memory,
unknown to younger generations, and various species of turtles and fish are becoming
increasingly scarce (ibid.). Subsistence hunting is well into a vicious cycle of diminishing
returns, necessitating longer forays into the forest and imposing high opportunity costs, to the
point that passing these skills onto the youngest Sharanahua poses serious practical hurdles.
Under such Malthusian conditions, ethical engagement with the forest takes on an increasingly
utilitarian cast, while the maintenance of good relations with nonhuman others conceived as
social collectivities with a distinct ethical claim on the forest fades in practical relevance. The
forest is changing, and as the deleterious effects of human activity become more and more
more predominant role that soon renders them incompatible with the ontological regime in which they have
developed; and this makes it necessary to alter that ontological regime or transfer to another mode of identification
that is better suited to a different way of treating others” (2013: 624).
60
In her fascinating discussion of the conversion by evangelical Protestant missionaries of the Wari people,
Aparecida Vilaça observes a similar trend, noting that with conversion to Christianity “the Wari’ are able to
experience a completely new world – that is, a new nature – although not a new culture. In this new world, animals
are no longer humans, and affines are consanguines. As a result, predation, which previously took place in two
directions, becomes a capacity exclusive to the Wari’ and directed towards the exterior only, with the suppression of
the internal aggressions associated with affinity” (2009: 163).
93
apparent, so does modernity’s self-fulfilling prophecy of human subjects taking dominion over
the nonhuman world seem more forceful, more real.
One very reasonable response to this alarming state of affairs might say that it is only
natural that relations with nonhumans would shift toward those of protection, production, and
transmission precisely because it is now so obvious that nonhumans are no longer in any position
to be treated as occupying an ecological position symmetrical with our own. At this point, the
hierarchies of power that impinge on the world’s activity are sufficiently entrenched to be
regarded as given preconditions for the realization of our projects at any scale, especially the
biopolitical projects of global development initiatives. This is certainly the view shared by the
majority of professional conservationists, who by and large work firmly within institutional (and
especially state) structures. It is also the view of the park officials working in Purús to preserve
and protect the nonhumans placed under their guardianship. Against this backdrop, perhaps it
should be unsurprising that their work might simultaneously entail the preservation and
promotion of a moral order adequate to the institutional orders they inhabit—normas de
convivencia.
By the same token, we need to understand how what the park officials register as a mere
failure to conform to these norms might be given a more generous (or in any case more
adequate) reading. It seems we have circled back on the same old dilemma that has plagued
Amazonian peoples since they were made into an object of moral concern for occupying
outsiders—namely, indigenous actors’ supposed moral lassitude. I leave for others to work out
the precise practical implications of this dilemma for the present historical moment, including
whatever measures might lead to its “resolution” (surely a vexed aim by any ethical standards),
but limit myself here to indicating the difficulties raised by reframing the axiological friction
94
between conservationist ethics and a “traditional” Amazonian ethics as a specifically ontological
impasse. For if it is the case that the conversion to Christianity, and modernity with it, has
contributed to the “purification” of nature, thus its reconfiguration as a moral patient, it is also
the case that a modern biopolitics of conservation provides many of the technologies and
conceptual tools for protecting key nonhuman species against extinction, an ontological disaster
by anyone’s reckoning. Given the wide variation in ontological commitments undertaken by
diverse indigenous actors, it seems at least imprudent for anthropologists to erect ontological
divides between indigenous “worlds” and “the world” conceived as a contestable, transhistorical
heuristic for a conservationist ethos committed to addressing catastrophic planetary change—
much, if not most, of it of anthropogenic origin.
Perhaps this is just to say that the ethical/existential status of yushi is contestable in ways
that the ethical/existential status of peccaries, trees, and other natural entities (in the naturalist’s
sense of the term) isn’t. Admittedly, recognizing this difference tells us little about the relative
value that should be accorded to (what I’ll provisionally call) cultural and natural entities,
respectively, but it does help clarify the stakes for ethical action without bogging us down in
metaphysical cross-talk. For while there is inevitably an equivocation inherent in translating
ontological claims with regard to spirits and the theories of personhood they imply, the event of a
species’ extinction—its total disappearance as a significant other—is a far less equivocal matter.
Conclusion
And yet the ethical ideal of ixaraki, along with other varieties of buen vivir or “living
well” (Gudynas 2011), carries with it a deeply instructive lesson. The Anthropocene—as some
have labeled the current geological epoch of anthropogenic climate change (Crutzen 2002)—has
95
been argued to present modernity’s narrative of human emancipation from nature with an
insoluble paradox. Since human activity at the global scale makes large-scale natural processes
more volatile (i.e., less predictable), the more humans “emancipate” themselves the more they
are revealed to be ineluctably embedded in that from which they strive to be emancipated. Thus,
the Promethean drive to subdue natural forces leaves us in the position of continually reacting to
those forces, scrambling to curtail their worst effects. Indeed, if we follow Chakrabarty in
recognizing humanity as one of the geophysical forces it seeks to control, we see how deep the
paradox goes: our very activity, taken as the sum total of its effects, outstrips our capacity to
bring it under rational control. Moreover, our attempts at rational control carry with them an
irrational remainder whose unintended effects often amplify the difficulties that they set out to
resolve. Human emancipation through self-mastery is thus revealed to be an incoherent project,
since we can hardly liberate ourselves from our own activity.
In the field, I often had the impression that many of the Sharanahua harbored a certain
fatalism about the development projects into which they were enrolled as primary actors. The
idea that the forest was something that could be managed seemed to conflict with the prevailing
mood of everyday life attested to in countless conversations about one’s luck—butsa, also “true,
correct” (Scott 2004: 46)—or lack thereof in various vital daily activities. In retrospect, this may
have been less about their pessimism about “best laid plans” than a more fundamental skepticism
about the quasi-transcendent notion of self-mastery on which those plans were premised.
Indeed, the myths that still circulated among them repeatedly underlined the ways in which a
protagonist’s actions provoked transformative effects well beyond the scope of his or her control.
In a world characterized by “constitutive alterity,” self-mastery doesn’t just seem delusional, but
even dangerous, insofar as it might lead us to value the wrong things. The ever-present
96
possibility of falling into yuashi-like behavior is a constant reminder that a misplaced concern to
emancipate oneself from one’s relations is unlikely to lead to anything but alienation from the
yura on which one, after all, depends for survival.
So if Chakrabarty’s dichotomy is a globalized update on the old opposition of spirit and
flesh, then ixaraki sketches a way beyond this dichotomy without requiring its outright rejection.
Where one manages to see that humanity qua political/ethical agent and humanity qua
geophysical force are obverse sides of the same coin, each pervaded with the same constitutive
alterity that attends the person comprising yushi and yura, room can be made for a way forward
that abandons, if only partially, egocentric ideals of self-mastery for sociocentric ideals of mutual
accommodation. This hardly solves any problems, but at the least it saves us from going down
the path of an ever-widening gyre of hubristic action and panicked reaction.
Again, the choice is not one between the dynamic sociocentrism of ixaraki and the
reassuring utilitarianism of conservationist ethics. As the Sharanahua and other indigenous
groups have repeatedly shown, the way forward lies rather in forging novel ethical visions and
novel identities that flexibly accommodate animism and naturalism, self and other, human and
nonhuman, past and future, virtual and actual, yushi and yura. Like humanity at large, as the
Sharanahua consider the natural frontiers that surround them, ethical frontiers proliferate and
beckon.
97
Conclusion
We’d just come back from a short fishing run—Oswaldo, Pixiba, and I—and now we
were gathering our haul to bring it back to the village a ways up the sandy bluff. To make the
trip more manageable, we strung them together using a palm frond, threading its fibrous leaves
through the gills of each fish to make a garland of sorts. As I picked a fish up from the bottom of
the boat, Oswaldo stopped me short.
“Just leave it.”
He proceeded to explain that this particular species of fish, the lisa, was known to cause
women to become skinny, a trait associated with old women past their prime. “The women
won’t eat it,” he said, so I threw it into the river without further discussion.
Later, as we were drinking some after-dinner masato, Pixiba mentioned the lisa with a
barely checked grin. “Before I came here,” he told me, “I’d never heard of that thing about the
women getting skinny. Es una creencia de ellos.” It’s a belief of theirs.
Oswaldo smiled bashfully and nodded in confirmation.
Pixiba went on: “But me, I’m Tikuna. We also have our beliefs, just like they do here.”
Oswaldo chimed in: “Yes, every community has its beliefs.”
Pixiba enumerated some of illustrative examples from his own community, then he came
to some of the novel beliefs he encountered on arriving in Gastabala. “For example,” he said, “if
you hear the call of a bird—it’s a kind of eagle…”
Oswaldo offered the name in Sharanahua.
“That’s it. If you hear its call, that means someone will die.”
With that Oswaldo’s eyes widened a bit as he held up a hand in protest: “Yeah, but that
one’s true.”
98
***
“Belief” has often been treated as auxiliary category in the order of being, an accessory to
what is. One entertains beliefs; one endorses them. Beliefs do not, as a rule, constitute our
being, so much as they adorn them. In this thesis, I have given good reason to reconsider this
explanatory sequence. Beliefs are not just statements about the world; they comprise our
commitments to the world. As such, they inhere not just in our statements or in our theories, but
crucially, in our dispositions, our practices, and our relations with others. And just as our
relations constitute the processes of selfhood, so our beliefs are strongly implicated in even the
most fundamental aspects of our experience: how we relate to the world, how we relate to
ourselves—but also what the world is, who we are, and by the same token, who our significant
others are. In the end, it is hard to say whether we choose our beliefs, or whether they choose us.
This might seem to open the door to an unduly deterministic view of human action, one
in which humans are reduced to vehicles for the expression of some ideal order—culture,
structure, habitus, memes, etc. But in recognizing the ways in which our relations define us, we
need not lose ourselves as the locus of experience and action. Indeed, as the examples given in
this thesis show, recognizing our relations, and the obligations and commitments attendant on
them, enriches our interactional possibilities, even as it constrains those possibilities. This is
perhaps the central paradox of the relational view of selfhood and commitments thereby entailed.
What constrains us is simultaneously what provides conditions of possibility for our engagement
with the world, our very capacity to have any experience whatsoever. For the “ethical stance”
taken throughout this thesis, this paradox is not a bug, but a feature of relational ethics—a metaaffordance, if you will.
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes the following:
99
‘Freedom’ is not simply the opposite of deterministic causal necessity…I am
determined by causes (be it brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of
freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability
retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me. ‘Ethics,’ at its
most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility. (Zizek 2006:
203)
We could say that when Oswaldo corrected the view that the birdcall’s omen was a
(mere) belief, he was exercising the kind of choice that Zizek alludes to. But in what sense? I
want to suggest that the choice in question in an important sense precedes Oswaldo’s individual
endorsement of it. I think we have some difficulty here because our commitments to
individualism and liberalism make it difficult to talk about choice in any meaningful way outside
of the scope of individual choices. And indeed it places considerable strain on the very concept
of “choice” to consider the ways in which the ethical norms of any community are collectively
“chosen”—actively acquired, maintained, transmitted, and adapted to changing conditions. We
restrict choice to that which is “freely assumed” by individual actors, but then lack the proper
language to talk about the ways in which authority structures and the social conditions that
underwrite them are also “freely assumed”—embraced not as a result of careful deliberation, but
as an uncritical affirmation of our very selves: our values, our relations, and our basic
commitments.
And perhaps freedom is a red herring. If we look at Sharanahua myth, the stories seem to
poke fun at the idea of freedom. The protagonists are constantly making disastrous choices on
the basis of woefully limited information. A seductive woman turns out to be an anaconda. A
boy becomes a monkey, and his own father fails at first to recognize him. Yushi constantly trade
one appearance for another, with no one appearance serving as the basis for the others. We are
obliged to respond in kind, as the structure of the rabi songs from Chapter 1 illustrate. Caprice,
100
not control—these stories suggest—lies at the basis of our spiritual constitution. Under such
conditions, what sense does it make to fret over our freedom or relative lack thereof?
***
Within the space of this thesis, I have tried to convey the interrelations between ethics,
personhood, and the changing conditions that have affected the Sharanahua and other indigenous
communities of Purús over the past century or so. From the traditional concepts of yushi and
yura to the contemporary contexts of party politics and global conservationism, I have worked to
make apparent the contradictions that underlie much of everyday life for present-day
Sharanahua, and the creative ways that they avail themselves of the novel ethical affordances
that those contradictions present. To the extent that I’ve been successful, I hope the reader will
take away the following insights:
1.
Animism, like naturalism, is an ethical attitude—a set of assumptions about
how the world should be—as much as it is an ontology—a set of assumptions
about how the world is.
2.
Spirits, persons, and selves are simultaneously virtual and actual. That is, they
exist in a living, relational space of affordances, capacities, affects, and signs
by means of which they dynamically interact with the world.
3.
As illustrated by the examples of yushi—spirit—and yura—body, person,
community—the traditional principles of Sharanahua personhood encourage a
disposition to view ethical life in thoroughly relational terms, through the lens
101
of “constitutive alterity.” The person, in both body and spirit, is imagined as a
kind of dynamic composite of virtual others.
4.
In contemporary life, the Sharanahua must engage in the ongoing negotiation of
the ethical attitudes entailed by the traditional view with the more
individualistic ethics encouraged by Christianity and its successor, secular
liberalism. They do so by way of a diverse array of reflexive strategies that
present a surprising continuation with traditional modes of relating, even as
“traditional culture” becomes a social and political tool in its own right.
5.
Conservationism and regional party politics operate on premises that
sometimes find themselves at variance with the ethical assumptions put in play
by the indigenous stakeholders, owing largely to a tendency for modern
institutions to frame their modus operandi in terms of abstract principles and
long-term projects rather than in terms of concrete relationships and competing
interests.
I do not pretend to have exhausted these themes, of course. Further research would be
welcome in particular on the linguistic front. Conversational analysis demonstrating, for
instance, strategic code-switching, footing (Goffman 1981), sound symbolism, and so on, would
give a more concrete picture of the precise junctures at which the links between ethics,
personhood, ontology, and politics become salient, thus indexing many of the social and
philosophical undercurrents explored at length here.
102
Above all, I would like the reader to come away with a portrait of the Sharanahua and
neighboring indigenous communities that, if it is less romantic than commonly peddled tropes
would lead one to expect, remains faithful to the practical realities that they must contend with.
May this thesis serve as a testament to their intelligence, resourcefulness, warmth, and humor.
Ixarawe. Live well.
103
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