Vilaca Chronically Unstable Bodies
Vilaca Chronically Unstable Bodies
Vilaca Chronically Unstable Bodies
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ON AMAZONIAN CORPORALITIES
Aparecida Vilac;a
PPGAS ? Museu Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Nacional,
Based on ethnographic material relating to the Wari' (Rondonia, Brazil), this article ques?
tions some of the presuppositions concerning native conceptions of the body present in
contemporary anthropological literature by exploring a central dimension of Amazonian
-
corporality - one that has been little explored in ethnographic works on the region
its unstable and transformational character. This dimension only becomes evident when
our analysis presumes an expanded notion of humanity - first called to our attention by
authors such as Levy-Bruhl and Leenhardt - that includes not only those beings we think
of as humans, but also other subjectivities such as animals and spirits. Central to the
problem's development is a discussion of the relations between body and soul, humanity
and corporality.
Introduction
Though it only became a specific research topic from the 1970s onwards, the
human body has held a certain fascination for anthropology since its outset
for two reasons: firstly, owing to its ostensible physical features, it has been
used as a means of classifying different races; and, secondly, owing to the
impact of culture on the way the body's characteristics and potentialities are
seen, it has been assumed to be a naturally given substrate (see Lock 1993:
134; also Conklin 1996: 373). The works of the French sociological school
provide our earliest examples of truly sociological or culturalist approaches to
the body; pioneering texts include Hertz's paper (1973 [1909]) on cultural -
or, more specifically, religious ? aspects involved in the predominance of right-
handedness and Mauss's essay (1985 [1936]) on body techniques.
Rather than provide a historical resume of studies on the body,1 I wish to
recall the work of two authors, also French and both contemporaries of Mauss.
In texts largely forgotten now by anthropology, they call attention to some?
what exceptional aspects of the body that relate to its natural instability rather
than its cultural fabrication. In Lame primitive, published in 1927, Levy-Bruhl
observes: 'He [the primitive] therefore sees no difficulty in metamorphoses
which to us appear utterly incredible: beings can change their size and form
in the blink of an eye' (1996 [1927]: 8).
Leenhardt, in Do Kamo, 2, book inspired by Levy-Bruhl and dedicated to
him, makes similar observations in his description of the Canaque concept of
the human being:
Animals, plants and mythic beings have the same claim men have to being considered
kamo, if circumstances cause them to assume a certain humanity (1979 [1947]: 24).
Different bodies
Amazonia. Commenting on the same anecdote about the Piro mother and
the Peruvian teacher, Viveiros de Castro observes:
The argument that 'our bodies are different' does not express an alternative - and natu?
rally wrong - biologically theory ... or a non-standard imaginary objective biology.What
the Piro argument manifests is a non-biologicalidea of the body ... The argument affirms
that our respective 'bodies' are different, meaning that the Piro and Western conceptsof
the body are divergent, not that our 'biologies' are different. The Piro water anecdote
does not reflect anotherview of the same body, but another concept of the body, whose
underlying dissonance to its 'homonymy' with our own is, precisely, the problem (20026:
140).
a game animal, the fact that things like wind have kwere- would seem to imply
more a specific mode of acting - a way of being. So, for example, people
may say that a certain woman is quick to anger because her kwere- is like
this, just as an animal species feeds on one fruit and not another because
of its kwere-. Likewise, the wind blows strongly because the kwere- of the
wind is thus, and rain soaks everything as it passes because of its own specific
kwere-. The term kwere- primarily designates 'a set of affections or ways of
being' (Viveiros de Castro 1996: 128) rather than a physical substrate (see also
Allard 2003: 52; Surralles 2003: 37).
Kwere- comprises, therefore, a kind of body absolutely consistent with the
descriptions of bodies found in the Amazonian literature, although in some
of these works the reading of the data tends to be made back-to-front. In
these we find a substance impregnated with dispositions and affects (mindful
bodies or embodied knowledge) rather than a way of being actualized in
bodily form. This is a key point since it reveals the conceptual interference of
the Western idea of the body as the starting point which is subsequently
reworked.
As I have shown elsewhere (Vilaca 2002), kin-making activities focused on
the construction and modification of bodies, so well described by American?
ist ethnologists, not only relate to the domestic group but also to this wider
universe of subjectivities including animals and spirits. The couvade and other
abstinence rituals clearly show that human bodies, subject to a continual
process of fabrication, can be attracted by other subjectivities, such as animals,
and transformed into them. Kinship processes involve an implicit dialogue
with non-human subjectivities, indicating their relationship to much wider
cosmological processes. This suggests that the fabrication of the human body
'is based on a negativity: on a negation ofthe possibilities ofthe "non-human"
body' (Viveiros de Castro 1987 [1977]: 32; also see Descola 2001: 108).
The body metamorphosized by these relations is one aspect of that which
the Wari' conceive as the soul, as we shall see below.
Humanity
In Amazonia humanity is a condition extendable to various types of beings,
while the context of its defmition is always relative. Among the Jivaroan
Achuar described by Anne-Christine Taylor, the category 'we' or 'person' is
defined in opposition to 'they' and its content is variable: it can include spirits
with a human appearance and others with a non-human appearance that
exhibit human behaviour. In other circumstances these same beings do not
fall under the 'we' category (Taylor 1996: 204; 1998: 322-3).9 Among the
Wari', the term wari\ which signifies we, people, human being, is defined pri?
marily in opposition to game animals, and more broadly contrasts with foods
in a general sense, all of which are defined as karawa. Nevertheless, the very
same animals hunted and eaten by the Wari' are also considered human, espe?
? the core
cially since they themselves can act as predators and eaters meaning
ofthe term wari'. Acting as humans and predators, they treat the Wari' as game.
In sum, while - as in the Jivaro case - the defmition of we, person, is con-
textual, in the Wari' case we can observe the potential for a complete over-
lapping of the two categories. All ? or almost all - prey animals can be people,
depending primarily on their ways of acting.
Although they see jaguars as animals, the Wari' know from their shamans
that jaguars see themselves as humans: that is, as people pursuing a full social
life and endowed with a human appearance. A similar instance among the
Carib of British Guiana, taken from Ahlbrinck's work of 1924, is cited by
Levy-Bruhl as an example of this extended notion of humanity: '[A]nimals
(just as plants and inanimate objects) live and act like humans. In the morning,
the animals go "to work," as the Indians do. The tiger, the snake and all the
other animals leave to go hunting; like the Indians, they must "look after their
family" ...' (Ahlbrinck 1924: 221 in Levy-Bruhl 1996 [1927]: 30).
While the human form is a strong indication of a human being, it may
nonetheless be deceptive.10 It is always best to distrust one's own eyes. An event
which befell some of my Wari' friends provides a perfect example. A child is
invited by her mother to take a trip to the forest. Many days go by as they
walk around and pick fruit. The child is treated normally by her mother until
one day, realizing just how long they have spent away from home, the child
starts to grow suspicious. Looking carefully, she sees a tail discreetly hidden
between her mother's legs. Struck by fear, she cries for help, summoning her
true kin and causing the jaguar to flee, leaving a trail of paw-prints in its wake.
One woman, telling me about this event, said that, after finding her, the girl's
true mother warned her to always distrust other people. Whenever she went
far from home, either with her mother or father, she should take along a brother
or sister as company (in order, I assume, to secure her point of view).11
The question of humanity is so central in Amazonia that the human/non-
human opposition (or predator/prey in the Wari' case) ends up encompassing
all others. It therefore comprises the key idiom for expressing difference in
general (see Vilaca 2000^). To pick one example, gender distinctions in Ama?
zonia tend to be conceived as human-animal or predator-prey oppositions
(Taylor 2000: 314-316; pers. com. 2004). Among the Wari', being a predator
is a central feature of being a man, and the male position is constructed in
opposition to the female. This may operate in a triangular fashion when men
act as providers of game and enemies to be eaten by women, or through direct
opposition when the relation between men and women is conceived as equiv?
alent to the relation between predator and prey (Vilaca 1996a; in press). The
Wari' may refer to the sexual act as the hunting or killing of prey, in sen-
tences such as 'did you shoot her?', 'did you kill her?'The equation between
having sex and eating is widespread throughout Amazonia, and beyond. An
event mentioned by Stephen Hugh-Jones (pers. comm. 2004) highlights this
point. One day during fieldwork among the Tukanoan-speaking Barasana, he
saw a group of brothers leaving a communal house, turning, as they left, to
speak to another who was staying behind. T am going to hunt you a tapir',
said one brother. T am going to hunt you a peccary', said another. When they
returned one of them carried on his back a foreign captive woman, tied up
in the same way as animal prey. She was put on the floor in front of his
brother, who married her. It should be clear that since gender is the outcome
of a relationship and not prior to it, the same applies to the equation between
women and prey As Taylor (2000: 316) reminds us apropos the Achuar, game
is female because it is seduced by men (see Allard 2003: 26).
[H]umanity, and thus a division between humans and others, is not the principal onto?
logical axis. I do not think that the difference between 'spirit' and 'animal' or 'human'
has been the archetype for perspectival traffic in the Amazonian sense. Rather, it is persons
who offer perspectives on one another. By this I mean that the significant lines are inter?
nal, between human beings as distinctive social entities, that is, between types or kinds,
distinguished by their relationships with one another. That is why gender, as a means
of reification, giving a form to persons, has figured so prominently in Melanesian
anthropology (1999: 252-3).
The Wari' define as human or potentially human all beings possessing jam-,
a term which I have translated elsewhere as soul or spirit. However, unlike
other Amazonian peoples, they do not conceive any necessary relation
between jam- and a vital principle. There are living beings without jam-,
such as spider monkeys, for example, who lost it after they had stolen some
Wari' women (see Vilaca 1992).We could say that no living being, when acting
in an ordinary manner, has jam-. For the Wari', jam- implies the capacity to
jamu, a verb which means to transform, especially in the sense of an extra-
ordinary action. Hence, when people say that a particular animal jamu-ed,
they mean it acted as a human, shooting and killing a Wari' (an event which
appears to Wari' eyes as the victim's sickening and death). Similarly, the shaman
jamu-s when he acts together with his animal partners, perceiving them and
being perceived by them as a similar.13 Jamu therefore indicates a capacity to
change affection and to adopt other habits, thus enabling the person to be
perceived as a similar by other types of beings.14 This focus on a metamor-
phic capacity as a central feature of humanity is not exclusive to the Wari'.
Indeed, Ingold makes a similar observation concerning the Ojibwa: '[T]his
capacity of metamorphosis is one of the key aspects of being a person' (2000:
91). The Wari' soul, like the Melanesian mana or imunu, is 'a quality or a set
of qualities, rather than a thing' (Williams 1923: 362-63, cited in Levy-Bruhl
1996 [1927]: 5).
It seems evident that we cannot speak of the body without speaking of the
soul, as various Amazonianists have shown (see Conklin 1996: 375). However,
the reason, at least for the Wari' with whom I have been working, seems to
be not that the soul gives this body feelings, thoughts, and consciousness, but
that it gives it instahility. This is conceived as a capacity typical to humanity
shadow implies that the soul is actualized as a body in another world, very
often conceived as a world in negative, exactly like that of the shadow. The
Wari', as well as a number of other peoples, say the world ofthe spirits expe?
riences night when it is day in the world of the living, and vice versa. This
suggests that the light/dark contrast involved in the perception of the body
and its shadow may in fact help us to understand the body/soul relation. This
brings us to Viveiros de Castro s suggestion (2002a: 419-20; 444) that we can
take the relation between soul and body as analogous to the relation between
figure and ground explored in Gestalt studies. The author notes that this per?
spectival reversal is central to Amazonian thought, reminding us of Guss's
analysis of Yekuana basketry (Guss 1989), where figure/ground reversal, in
light/dark form, is highly elaborated as it is in various textile and body paint?
ing patterns. It is worth exploring this point further.
Wari' shamans say that during their process of initiation their eyes become
strange. Walking in the forest, they see a peccary. Suddenly it transforms into
a deer, then into an agouti, then into a paca. They explain that this oscilla-
tion is due to the fact these animals are all human and hence similar to each
other. The shaman sees the soul of the animal, which turns him into a lousy
hunter, since by seeing the animal as a person he finds himself unable to kill
it. The reverse also occurs: the shaman may see a fellow Wari' as animal prey
and kill him. The Wari' say that various people killed in jaguar attacks were
actually killed by shamans; what the victims saw as a jaguar was actually the
shaman's soul. Hence animal or human appearance depends primarily on the
eyes of the person who is looking. Naming the appearance's body or soul
depends on the way in which the observer perceives its activity: when ordi?
nary, it is said to be a body; when extraordinary (involving what appears from
his/her point of view as transformation), it is called soul.
This perspectival oscillation is not limited to shamans. It may befall any
person and is taken as a constant risk by the Wari' and other Amazonian
peoples. A hunter in the forest meets someone and goes to his or her house,
discovering only later that he or she is not a similar, but an animal, a spirit,
or someone who has died. Very often this fact is betrayed by observing some
in the form ? as in the of the
peculiarity person's story jaguar kidnapping
above ? or, more frequently, by suddenly perceiving the strange habits of this
person and his or her companions, who may eat worms, claiming they are
animal meat, or sleep in trees, claiming they are lying in hammocks, and so
on. Perceiving this bizarre behaviour, the hunter finds a way of escaping and
returns home. However, if he is capable of seeing the people as perfect simi-
lars and perceiving their habits as analogous to his own, he will have been
them ? he has turned into their similar. Should he now
captured by meaning
wish to return home, he will no longer be recognized by his own people but
will be taken for an animal, a dead person, or a spirit. Here commensality
plays a central role, not simply because the same food makes similar bodies
but because being able to share food is an important sign of perspectival iden?
tity. Those who eat together are above all confirming that they share like
points of view, which is the opposite to what happens with those who eat
each other.
This becomes clear in Wari' funerary cannibalism, where affines and con-
sanguines are differentiated by the inability of the latter to eat one of their
dead, whom they do not see as a corpse, associated by the Wari' with animal
- as kin. The essential function of affmes eating the corpse
prey, but as people
in the ritual is to impose their point of view on the dead person's kin, forcing
them to recognize the person's death and thereby differentiate themselves from
the deceased via a predator-prey opposition, equivalent for the Wari' to the
opposition between the living and the dead. Wari' funerary cannibalism is pri?
marily a question of acquiring or imposing a point of view, a perspective. A
dead person's consanguines can only adopt this some time later: this occurs
in a ritual marking the end of mourning, when the consanguines mourn over
roasted animal prey as if it was their dead relative, and, together with the
affmes who ate the corpse, eat the prey (which, the affmes call explicitly
'corpse'). Here there is no idea of a substance, memory, affect, or capacity of
the deceased to be incorporated by the eaters - a situation that equally applies
to warfare cannibalism, when the victim is eaten so as to mark his or her
animal (non-human) nature. The one who eats constitutes him/herself as
human (see Vilaca 2000^).
In an article on the Juruna concept of body, Lima raises a series of inter?
esting points and states that the soul is the body seen from another perspec?
tive. In her words: Tf a spirit sees me, it only sees an aspect of myself that I
am unable to see: my soul, which represents my whole body for it, my whole
person ... Body and soul ... are relations or positions, or indeed perspectives'
(2002: 12). Precisely the same point can be made in relation to the Wari' with
the detail that, from ego's point of view, her own soul - invisible to herself
- is also conceived as a quality that, in contrast to the body, identifies it with
all other subjects. This quality is connected to a specific property of bodily
transformation ? the to new as a means
namely capacity adopt appearances
of acting within new relationships. From the point of view of others, however,
the person's soul is an actualization of a body which these other people see
in a specific manner, radically distinct (if they are another kind of people)
from the way in which the person sees herself.
On objects
The multiplicity of perspectives does not affect only what people conceive as
persons, but also 'non-persons like rocks, water, air or smoke, which appear
to possess an existence of their own, a nature irreducible and indifferent to
relations' (Lima 2002: 13).
As Viveiros de Castro comments in relation to Casevitz's analysis of Mat-
siguenga cosmology, 'what seems to be happening in Amerindian perspec?
tivism is that substances named by substantives like "fish", "snake", "hammock"
or "canoe" are somehow used as if they were relational pointers' (1998k 51;
see also 2002d: 382-7). They can be compared to kinship terms: 'You are a
father only because there is another person whose father you are: fatherhood
is a relation ... something would be "fish" only by virtue of someone else
whose fish it is' (1998k 51). Hence propositions such as 'people are monkeys
to jaguars', examples of which abound in Amazonian ethnographies, are 'of
the same nature as a proposition such as: "my uncle is grandfather to my son"'
(Lima 2002: 15). So, 'if I am alive, a peacock bass is a fish; if I am dead, a
Let us return to the theme of the body's instability comprising one of its core
features. In a fascinating article on the Achuar person, Taylor, taking the
context of domestic relations as her initial reference point, observes that sub-
jectivity is 'primarily a matter of refraction; it takes its source in the sense one
has of others' perceptions of self' (1996: 206).18 She goes on to argue that 'if
selfhood as person is a state, it is also by nature a highly unstable one, in so
far as one's inner landscape is shaped by the understanding one has of others'
perceptions of oneself (1996: 207); 'selfhood is textured by intersubjectivity'
(1996: 209). If so, any external imbalance, from death to squabbles, makes the
person vulnerable. This vulnerability frequently translates as illness.
It should be clear, then, that the instability that I have been examining here
is not merely an outcome of extraordinary encounters in the forest but an
intrinsic aspect of the internal relations of the local group or society. Depend-
ing on the other's image of oneself for one's own self-image inevitably pro?
duces a high degree of vulnerability. Taylor suggests that we must look
to understand the means by which one acquires 'a minimally stable sub-
jectivity' (1996: 202), which is an equilibrium necessary, if not for physical
survival, then at least for the reproduction of society. For Taylor this stabiliza-
tion is achieved by means of kinship relations; these allow the construction
of stable self-images in surrounding entities through memories of acts of care
and affection.
Another way of minimizing the extreme anxiety generated by this vulner?
ability is through an encounter with an ancestral spirit, arutam, which offers
the person the image of his or her own future. This leads us back to the typi?
cally Amazonian (or Amerindian, as suggested by Levi-Strauss 1991) dynamic
towards alterity (or alteration) as a way of experiencing the other's point of
view of the self. In fact, according to Taylor, the capacity acquired during the
encounter with the arutam 'hinges on a shift of perspectives: by internalizing
the point of view of the fierce ghost, the mystic is henceforth able to see all
other humans, including his familiars, through the eyes of an enemy' (2002:
464). Likewise, Wari' shamans adopt the point of view of animals to enable
others to acquire an indirect experience of alteration, just as, among some
Tupi-speaking groups such as the Arawete and Parakana, warriors adopt the
enemy s point of view (Fausto 2001; Viveiros de Castro 1986). We can also
comprehend the widespread and well-document ed interest in experiencing
the Westerners' point of view in similar fashion. As Lima says of the Juruna,
their world is a 'type of world in which true knowledge is conditioned not
by the removal of the subject but by its appropriation of a position among
the many existing out there' (2002: 17).
Hence the vulnerability generated by the instability of bodies is resolved in
two ways. The first of these involves the neutralization of the potential for
transformation by means of kin-making as well as through healing and
[A]lien perspectives are not, in theory, less true than the human perspective ... however,
this does not mean they are equivalent or symmetrical, as they appear to us when we
reduce this cosmology to a known world. Given that this is above all a lived world, and
given that human existence here appears primarily as a human struggle, the relation
between two or more perspectives is necessarily asymmetric. Or in other words, one
perspective effectively imposes itself on the other as a perspective with a superior truth
value. Hence, this implies a hierarchy that is only ever defmed a posteriori (2002: 19).
Conclusion
I began this article by pointing out the asymmetry in the dialogue between
the anthropological literature on the body, developed from the 1970s onwards,
and the literature on indigenous groups of lowland South America dealing
with the same theme. I was surprised that the authors specifically discussing
the body have ignored the Americanist texts produced over the last few
decades (many of them in English, our 'lingua franca') that highlight the cen?
trality of the notion of the body in the economy of indigenous thought. The
Amazonian data present in these ethnographies provide perfect illustrations of
the 'mindful bodies' so widely evoked by these authors, especially since these
same concepts have been broadly used by Amazonianists looking to engage
with this literature in texts directly focused on the theme of the body.
However, there is an important difference in the analyses undertaken by
these two sets of texts. The literature of a generalizing kind (with no nega?
tive connotation intended) manifests a tendency towards universalization,
looking to demonstrate how our own (Euro-American) bodies are, or should
be, like those of about kind of native ? that is, equally 'mindful'
just every
and relational. The Amazonian literature, on the other hand, tends to accen-
tuate precisely the difference between bodies. This is not simply a question of
distinct discursive strategies since the authors show that we are faced with dis?
tinct concepts and that this is the perspective adopted by indigenous peoples
(and not only Amazonian groups, as the example of the Canaque chief tells
us) who insist on locating the difference between beings in their bodies.
The central issue discussed in this article is internal to tropical American-
ism, although it refers to the categories used to think the body borrowed from
the generalizing literature (itself heavily influenced by Merleau-Ponty s phe-
nomenology and Bourdieu's theory of practice). I have tried to show that the
works on Amazonian groups, closely in tune with this literature, tend to
emphasize the processes of making bodies, without giving due importance to
the processes of transformation described in this text. I suggest that this is
perhaps because they challenge the understanding of the body founded on a
biological substrate underlying these analyses. I am not referring to genetic
concepts; indeed, these works emphatically demonstrate that substances trans-
mitted through conception are less important than or at most equally impor?
tant to those acquired and exchanged through social practice, thus asserting
that the body is not given at birth but made throughout life. What I refer to
here as a biological notion of the body relates above all to its proximity to a
notion of humanity defmed by the biological concept of species rather than
the indigenous concept of the human. Hence although the idea of a body
under continual fabrication contains in itself the notion of transformation,
when this dimension is explored the ethnographic focus is generally restricted
to the universe of those we conceive as humans.
Here we have seen that an appreciation of the indigenous point of view
on humanity ? which ceases to be a a to be
category in becoming position
- a radically dif?
occupied alternately by different types of beings produces
ferent analysis in which processes of transformation become pre-eminent and
where the instability of the body and the impossibility of its totalization
emerge as central dimensions.
NOTES
Preliminary versions of this article were presented at the Department of Social Anthropol?
ogy ofthe University of Cambridge (UK), the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (Paris), the Department of Social Anthropology ofthe University of St Andrews (UK)
and the London School of Economics (Latin American Seminars). I am grateful for the com?
ments received from Stephen Hugh-Jones, Marilyn Strathern, Peter Riviere, Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro, Carlos Fausto, Philippe Descola, Anne-Christine Taylor, Peter Gow, Isabella Lepri,
David Rodgers, and Oiara Bonilla. I also thank the anonymous fRAI readers for their helpful
comments and suggestions. Fieldwork among the Wari' was carried out with the support of
the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and Financiadora de Estudos e
Projetos (Finep).This article was translated into English by David Rodgers.
11 refer specifically to sociological studies. For a review of this literature, see Frank (1990;
1993), Lock & Scheper-Hughes (1987), and especially Lock (1993: 135), who also mentions
classical anthropological works on body symbolism such as those of Mary Douglas (1970). Also
see Conklin and Morgan (1996); Csordas (1994; 1999); Le Breton (1995); Synnot (1993).
2 In the words of
Anne-Christine Taylor, 'the different ways of treating the body appear as
the main tool of indigenous sociology' (1998: 317).
3 For further
developments of this idea, see Vilaca (20006; 2000c) in relation to the Wari'.
The few Amazonian texts most often quoted in these influential works on the body (e.g.
Csordas 1994; Frank 1990; Lock 1993; Lock & Scheper-Hughes 1987) are Gregor (1985),
Christine Hugh-Jones (1979), andTerence Turner (1980; 1995). Lock & Scheper-Hughes (1987)
also cite Maybury-Lewis (1967) and Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971). Some information on the
Bororo and the Yanomami is also included, but with no precise references. Andrew Strathern's
book Body thoughts (1999) does not mention a single Amazonian work.
5A volume of the periodical Medical Anthropology Quarterlyfrom 1996 (10: 3) containing
several articles on the theme of health, sickness, the body, and personhood in Amazonia is a
good example of the discussions about the body in Americanist anthropology over the last few
decades.
6The Cashinahua
studied by Kensinger (1995) and McCallum (1989; 1996; 2001), among
other ethnologists, comprise, I think, one of the clearest examples of what the general litera?
ture on the body refers to as 'embodied knowledge'.
See Vilaca (\996a; 20006) for an analysis of the relationship between the Wari' and non-
Indians, conceived by the Wari' as different kinds of peoples due to their possession of differ?
ent bodies. See also Vilaca (19966; 1997; 2003); and see Kelly Luciani (2003) for the Yanomami
case.
8 For further
information on the Wari' body, see Conklin (1996; 2001); Conklin & Morgan
(1996).
9 See Descola
(2001: 106) and Leenhardt (1979 [1947]: 26) for a very similar presentation of
the Canaque concept of person, kamo.
10
Writing on the Jivaroan Achuar, Taylor (1996: 317) concludes that the human form is no
guarantee of humanity. See also Taylor (1998: 317; 2002: 462-4). Leenhardt (1979 [1947]: 27)
mentions the same phenomena among the Canaque, remarking on the uncertainty about what
kind of person is actually next to you.
11See note 19
below. Moraes (2004) reports a very similar event from the Alto Xingu, where
two brothers were kidnapped by the deer spirit who pretended to be their cousin.
12As Descola demonstrates in his
article, the evidence suggests that, in contrast to Gregor
andTuzin's proposal (2001), what counts as 'gender' in Melanesia need not necessarily be trans?
lated as 'gender' in Amazonia. The systematic comparison between the two regions, which
has proven to be highly productive, primarily implies a search for something close to what
Leenhardt (1979 [1947]) called 'deep translation'. Also see Stephen Hugh-Jones (2001) for an
interesting comparative exercise between 'Melanesia' and the Barasana of the Alto Rio
Negro, a region where the concept of gender seems to have a different implication to that of
most of Amazonia, and Marilyn Strathern (1999; 2002), as examples of how an anthropologi?
cal comparison between the two regions might appear.
13Jam-is also the way people act in dreams whose model is the shamanic dream. Shamans
apart, the Wari' usually say that they do not dream. While asleep, people are susceptible to
having their jam- captured by a witch wishing to kill them, or by an animal or dead spirit,
with whom they will live. Also see Fausto (2001) on dreams among the Parakana.
14The Barasana
say that when a person picks up a baby animal to raise it as a pet, he or she
must first east certain spells in order to change the animal's soul (usu) so that it will be able
to live among humans. They say that they make them eat words (S. Hugh-Jones, pers. comm.
2004).
15See Viveiros de Castro
(2000; 2001; 2002a: 444) on the Amazonian dividual. On the spe?
cific conception of fractals,see Viveiros de Castro (2002a: 439-40). See also Kelly Luciani (2001)
for the same type of comparisons and for an exploration of the notion of fractality in
Amazonia.
16See Da Matta
(1976: 86) on the Apinaye, and Huxley (1980: 212-13) on the Urubu. .
17Viveiros de Castro differentiates 'between a
concept of soul as a representationof the body
and another concept of soul which does not designate a mere image of the body, but the other
of the body. Both these ideas exist and co-exist in indigenous cosmologies' (2000: 28, n. 38,
original emphasis).
18For a further elaboration of these
ideas, see also Taylor (2002: 462-4).
191 thank one of the journal s anonymous readers for prompting me to clarify this point. It
seems tempting to say that rather than being a false mother this jaguar is an ideal mother, since
she dedicates herself so much to the child that she forgets the other children. It is because she
acted as a hyper-mother that the jaguar was identified as such, which permits us to think that
the jaguar is the default state of mothers.
20Csordas underlines this
point by saying that 'the most fruitful definition of the real is that
... of an indefinite series of perspectival views, none of which exhausts the given objects ...
This perspective does not deny that objects are given; as I have emphasized throughout this
essay, the body is in the world from the start' (1990: 38).
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Resume
Sur la base d'un materiel ethnographique recueilli chez les Wari' (Rondonia, Bresil), cet article
remet en question quelques-uns des presupposes de la litterature anthropologique contem-
poraine concernant les conceptions indigenes du corps, en etudiant une composante essen-
tielle de la corporalite des peuples amazoniens, peu evoquee dans les etudes ethnographiques
de l'Amazonie : son caractere instable et transformationnel. Cette dimension n'apparait que
lorsque l'analyse suppose un elargissement de la notion d'humanite (signalee pour la pre-
miere fois a notre attention par Levy-Bruhl et Leenhardt, entre autres) qui inclurait non
seulement les etres que nous considerons comme humains, mais aussi d'autres entites sub-
jectives telles que les animaux et les esprits. L'elaboration de cette problematique est centree
sur la discussion des relations entre le corps et Fame, entre humanite et corporalite.
?
Programade Pbs-Graduacaoem Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional UFRf Quinta da Boa Vista
-
s/n?, Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brazil, 20940-040. [email protected]