ethnos, vol. 70:2, j une 2005 (pp.

171196)
Runa Realism: Upper Amazonian
Attitudes to Nature Knowing
Eduardo O. Kohn
University of Michigan, USA
abstract Stories about the forest recounted in a Quichua-speaking Runa village
in Ecuadors Upper Amazon point to an element of ecological understandings that
is rarely studied; these are primarily about capturing and sharing the experience
of the process of knowing rather than trafcking in stabilized tokens of ecological
knowledge. Runa understanding of nature is achieved through a poetic language rich
in what philosopher Charles S. Peirce terms iconic and indexical signs. This way of
talking about forest experience is advantageous because these forms of represen-
tation can capture qualities and events in the world in ways that what Peirce terms
symbols cannot. Iconic and indexical signs mediate the world in distinctive ways.
Accordingly, this article suggests some implications that iconically and indexically
rich modes of communicating experience have for engaging with the nonhuman
realm, acquiring knowledge of the world, and establishing a certain kind of inter-
personal social intimacy.
keywords Amazonia, ecological knowledge, hunting stories, Quichua, semiotics
T
his essay is an attempt to get at local experiences of knowing nature in
the Upper Amazon, how such experiences are shared, and how a study
of local attitudes towards knowing can help us to arrive at a better
understanding of the relationship between knowledge and the world more
generally. Although several studies have documented what Amazonians know
about the complex biophysical environments they inhabit (e.g., Berlin 1992;
Irvine 1989; Moran 1993), these studies, in focusing on taxonomic classication
or techniques of resource management, say little about how people reect on
this process of knowing. Experiences of knowing, I argue, are an important
domain of ecological understandings that should be considered in tandem
with knowledge (see also Townsley 1993). I approach these experiences by

Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Group Ltd, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840500141162
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analyzing a hunting story recounted in vila, a village of about 350 Quichua
(or Quechua)-speaking Runa in Ecuadors Upper Amazon. Hunting, and other
activities that bring people into the forest, continue to be very important in
vila, and much of everyday talk is concerned with such topics.
1
Anthropologists writing about Amazonian ecological understandings
have often remarked on how so much of everyday conversation focuses on
what people did or saw or heard in the forest (e.g., Yost & Kelley 1983:206;
Rival 1996:149; Descola 1996:239). Although clearly central to local ways
of reecting on forest experience, how people talk about the forest, and how
this activity forms part of ecological engagement, has received scant atten-
tion. Perhaps this tendency to downplay linguistic phenomena associated
with ecological understandings is best exemplied by the attitude that two
anthropologists have exhibited towards language. Roy Ellen (1998:238; 1999)
and Maurice Bloch (1991) have argued that abstract descriptive language is
far removed from the challenges of acquiring the skills necessary to engage
with the world (see also Ingold 2000).
Ellen and Bloch may well be right that such language plays little part
in how vila Runa know nature, yet the language that these people use to
make sense of forest experience is of quite a different order. For the most
part its function is to simulate qualities and events of the world rather than
to describe them more abstractly or to derive conclusions from them. For
example, vila hunting stories are resolutely anti-taxonomical; in them, the
species being discussed are rarely even named. Renato Rosaldo has noted that
the hunting stories of the Philippine Ilongot exhibit the same quality. Ilongot
storytellers recount forest events in abbreviated fashion (Rosaldo 1986:108).
They certainly do not transmit some sort of general knowledge concerned
with, say, information regarding how kinds of animals and plants are named
and used. This leads Rosaldo to conclude that, the signicance Ilongot
men seek in hunting derives more from cultural notions about what makes
a story (and lived experience) compelling than from the routine subsistence
techniques usually portrayed in ethnographic realism (1986:98). That is, for
Rosaldo such stories are ultimately about people and their exploits and not
about their relation to the nonhuman (1986:97). They are, he says, stories
the Ilongots tell themselves about themselves (1986:98, 103).
By contrast, I would like to suggest that vila stories that deal with forest
experience are also about the complex relationships people take on with
their nonhuman surroundings. They are what people tell themselves about
themselves in the world. Rather than contrasting empirical knowledge with
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social meaning, and dening hunting stories as repositories of the latter
and bereft of the former, there is a more useful contrast that hunting stories
point to that between knowledge and knowing. Hunting stories do not, for
the most part, encapsulate knowledge; rather, they are simulations of the
experience of knowing.
Along this line, it is helpful to consider vila hunting stories with reference
to the system of phenomenological classication established by Charles Sanders
Peirce. According to Peirce there are three modes of being of which people
can be aware: rstness, secondness, and thirdness (cp 1.236).
2
Firstness
refers to qualities of feeling, such as the experience of colors, smells, sounds,
emotions, and psychological states (cp 1.304). Such qualities are monads (cp
1.424); we are only aware of them in their own suchness (ibid.). They can
only be a possibility (cp 1.25): mere may-bes, not necessarily realized (cp
1.304). Secondness, by contrast, refers to experiences of otherness, relation-
ality, and change how one thing affects another. Secondness, as opposed to
rstness, refers to actual events or facts. Events are brutal (cp 1.419). They
shock (cp 1.336) us out of our habitual way of imagining the way things
are. They, force us to think otherwise than we have been thinking (ibid.).
Thirdness, nally, refers to our awareness of regularities in the world what
Peirce calls habits (cp 1.409). These are predictions built from, but not re-
ducible, to qualities and events.
vila stories about the forest are concerned primarily with capturing
the experience of qualities and events and less concerned with drawing
conclusions, discovering regularities, or making general statements about
ecological relationships. In other words they attend to the experiences of
rstness and secondness to the relative neglect of experiences of thirdness
(see cp 1.549). For Peirce, all of these modalities potentiality (rstness),
actuality (secondness), and regularity (thirdness) are in the world. They
are attributes of phenomena and not just the products of our perception.
Furthermore, rstness, secondness, and thirdness, are intrinsic elements of
any phenomenon (cp 1.286, cp 6.323). No phenomenon can be composed
of just rstness, or secondness, or thirdness, even though there are certain
things or experiences in which one category predominates over the others.
For the purposes of this article I dene knowing as the experience of rst-
ness and secondness and knowledge as the experience of thirdness. Knowing
is a process, and for this reason I use the verbal form to describe this kind
of experience. Knowledge, by contrast, refers to something more stable a
habituated order and for this reason I use the nominal form. These stories,
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then, are not about knowledge per se, although listeners can derive knowledge
from these stories in much the same way that they can derive knowledge
from rst-hand experience.
In this essay, I try to make sense of the ways in which experiences of
qualities and events circulate among the Runa. Specically, I will indicate
the semiotic modalities used to capture these elements, as well as the poetic
vehicles through which they operate in vila Quichua. I then suggest some
implications that these modes of communicating experience have for en-
gaging with the nonhuman realm, acquiring knowledge of the world, and
establishing a certain kind of interpersonal social intimacy.
Nature Stories
The narrative I will present, about hunting collared peccaries (a kind of
wild pig known in vila as sahinu or lumu cuchi) told by a teenager named
Maxi to his age mate Luis, forms part of a loosely circumscribed implicit genre
(see Bauman 2000) that I will call Nature Stories.
3
By nature I simply mean,
for the purposes of this article, the realm of the forest, which, in Quichua, is
referred to as sacha. These stories are primarily about the forest, and they are
not all about hunting. What denes these as stories is that they are told about
rst person experiences and that they are recounted in intimate settings, such
as drinking parties with neighbors or around the family hearth at night.
In vila not all stories are about nature, but many are. Experiences in the
forest realm are a favorite topic of conversation and they are told by children
and adults, women and men. Such stories can be about many themes. I have
recordings that describe in minute detail a young womans observation of a
foraging doe, buck, and fawn, how a man was attacked by a giant anteater, how
the puca ahui sh (Crenicichla sp., Cichlidae) taps at submerged palm logs in
search of grubs, and how it was discovered that a mountain lion covered with
leaves a part of the carcass of a deer it had killed in order to preserve it.
Many Nature Stories are about successful and unsuccessful hunts, reecting
the fact that hunting is a very important activity in vila. Adolescent boys
and men hunt on a near daily basis. Hunting may take the form of a solitary
walk through the forest in the early morning or late afternoon, or it may
involve erecting a hunting blind near a fruiting tree or salt lick. Most hunts
occur within a few kilometers of home. Only rarely will men go on all-day
or overnight hunts to the more mountainous territory west of vila.
Like other stories, Nature Stories are a kind of performance. That is, they
constitute a special way of speaking that establishes interpretive frames that
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signal that words should be understood in particular ways (Bauman & Briggs
1990:73). More specically, listeners are encouraged to focus on how patterns
of sounds, such as word repetition, elongation, and changes in intonation
and stress, point to meanings (Jakobson 1960:368; see also Urban 1991;
Mannheim 1986). Analyzing verbal performances requires a set of conventions
for transcribing and translating speech that will do justice to the felt power
of words. I explain the notational system I am using in an endnote.
4

In talking about the forest, the Runa use different semiotic modalities to
communicate experience. My analysis of these modalities is based on Peirces
system of sign classication. For Peirce a sign is, something which stands
to somebody, for something in some respect or capacity (cp 2.228). I will
refer only to three broad kinds of signs: (1) an icon that refers to its object by
sharing a likeness with it (e.g., a painted portrait); (2) an index that refers to
an object by means of being affected by it (e.g., a weathercock); and, (3) a
symbol that refers to its object by means of convention (e.g., the word dog)
(cp 2.2479). By calling something an icon, index, or symbol I am employing
shorthand; these terms more accurately refer to the ways in which something
stands for an object and how this, in turn, is interpreted. In calling something
an icon, index, or symbol, I wish to allude to the semiotic modality that is
emphasized. Most signs used by people exhibit mixtures of iconic, indexical,
and symbolic characteristics. For example, a photograph is iconic in the way
it captures a likeness of the object it represents but it also has indexical prop-
erties in so far as it is produced by the ways in which the chemicals in lm
are affected by light emanating from or reected by the object (cp 2.265).
Photographs may come to be associated with other signs and in this way
they can acquire conventional, or symbolic, meanings as well.
Hunting Peccaries
Maxi and his parents were attending a drinking party at Luis parents
house that was well into its second evening when I recorded the story about
hunting peccaries.
5
Luis, Maxi, and I were alone in Luis cramped room as
Maxi told Luis a series of stories about his rst attempts at hunting. These
included many candid admissions of some of the embarrassing blunders of
a novice. However, they were mainly characterized by Maxis efforts to use
language creatively in order to transmit personal forest experiences. As such,
this way of talking is an important element of Runa ways of knowing nature
and in this respect it is typical of many other Nature Stories told by adults,
even though these tend to focus less on missteps.
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Maxi begins his story by switching to a hushed tone to say:
alilla shamuni
slowly, Im coming
He pronounces the word alilla quietly and carefully and drags out the vowel
i. Performed in such a way, this word captures iconically in its elongation
and hushed tone the challenge of moving slowly, quietly, cautiously, and
attentively through the forest.
Maxi then stopped by the base of a tree where he just stood
naita shayani caspi siqu-
Im standing forever at the base of a tree
LA: hm
MA: mhm

unaita shay-
Im standing forever

huasha
and so on

naita shayani
Im standing forever
LA: hm
MA: mhm
unaita shaya-
forever I stand

caspi siquipi a
by the tree base, already
shu urata shayani
Im standing an hour
LA: chi
there
MA: [inaudible]
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LA: hm
MA: shayarni shayarn-
Im standing and standing
LA: mhm
MA: unaita a shayarcn-
forever I stood
Maxi uses three iconic signs to relate his experience of interminable waiting.
Multiple repetitions (nine times in half a minute) of the verb to stand (shayana)
convey monotony. As Terrence Deacon has pointed out (1997:7477), iconic
interpretation can be thought of as the result of a failure to perceive novelty.
For example, when someone new to the rain forest says that she sees only
green, she is remarking on her failure to recognize the various indices that
would further specify elements of its biological complexity; each item of
vegetation is simply a likeness of the next (green, green, green...) and none
is further specied by indices that would enable her to differentiate it from
any other. Maxis repetition of the verb to stand plays on this property of
icons. Forest activity is reduced to standing, standing, standing, and nothing
punctuates this monotony. The second way in which Maxi iconically conveys
his experience of waiting is by drawing out the nal vowels in the word forever
(unaita, pronounced by Maxi as unaita) to create a parallel between the
lengthened sounds and the duration of his wait. Finally, he signals boredom
by speaking very slowly, taking long pauses between each phrase.
Growing tired of waiting Maxi went down into a ravine to look around
MA: u- uraicu huasha
after going d- down

(more loudly)
mana quita a
[it] wasnt wild [i.e., it wasnt skittish like a wild animal]
(indicating with his head)
casna shinamanda
it was like just like from

canba ya-
your fa-
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cangunapa yayapa cuartu tup
[the distance across] the length of your fathers room
LA: mhm
MA: shay
it stood
shay -rarca
and just sto od there
LA: hm
MA: pa- shayarcn-
wow, I [too just] stood

(somewhat more quietly)
imana tucusha yarcani
whats gonna happen to me? I thought
LM: hm

MA: (more loudly)
unaita yuyarish- shayani mana ishtaitayasca
I stood there forever, thinking to myself, it wont allow itself to be shot (?)
LA: hm
MA: yuyar- shayani
I stood, thinking [like that]
LA: hm
MA: (quietly)
nailla car-
it was an -ternity
(somewhat more loudly and with an exaggerated aspiration [
h
] that follows the rst vowel
and signals an intense burst of activity)
a
h
shca
[but then suddenly] lots
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(with rising intonation)
shamunn
come
LA: ya
MA: mhm
(in rapid clipped succession)
huahuata nipi ichillata nipi
young ones, small ones!
Despite being one of the most species-rich ecosystems in the world, the Up-
per Amazonian forests often seem empty (see Sinclair & Wasson 1923:209);
animal activity is temporally and spatially clumped. Maxi vividly captures
how the forest silence is punctuated by sudden bursts of activity. Interestingly,
however, he does not equate his rst contact with one of the pigs as a signal
of a change in activity level. In this rst encounter, the pace of the narrative
is still very slow Maxi continues to take long pauses between phrases.
Neither he nor the pig move. The animal is obstructed and Maxi is not able
to shoot at it. It is only when describing how the rest of the herd catches up
that Maxi clearly marks a distinction between the frustrating stasis of waiting
and the current frenzied activity.
One way that Maxi gets at this sense of the sudden changes in the forest
is by establishing a series of contrasts in linguistic form that are iconic of
contrasts at the semantic level. For example, he employs an unusual stress
pattern. In Quichua stress is normally placed on the penultimate syllable.
Stress patterns that deviate from this norm can therefore signal a change at
the semantic level. The stress of the rst word of the phrase nailla car- (it
was an ternity) is highly unusual. It provides a contrast to the way that, in
the next phrase, the last syllable of the nal word is stressed instead of the
expected penultimate one: a
h
shca shamunn ([but then suddenly] lots
come). This contrast in stress further highlights the sudden change in activity
level conveyed semantically by these phrases.
There is also a contrast in sound quality and prosody between the rst
phrase and the phrase that follows. Maxi says the rst phrase, nailla car-,
quietly, with his voice trailing off; he even suppresses the third person past
tense sufx rca in the last word (the complete word would be carca). This
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seems to recreate his feeling of monotony. Maxi then surprises Luis by ut-
tering loudly and with a rise in intonation, a
h
shca shamunn.
These two sets of contrasts in stress and in sound quality are indicators
of a change in activity level such that the sonic change is an image of the
change that occurs in the forest. In this way they convey the occurrence of
an unexpected event; things in the forest are no longer the same.
Maxi also stops the stressed rst syllable of the word nailla. By doing so,
he seems to be alluding to his sense of frustration with waiting. He contrasts
this with shamunn in the second phrase to describe the sudden presence
of the peccaries. Here, however, there is no hint of hesitation.
What Maxi had been anticipating as he waited and waited was nally
happening; he was suddenly dangerously close to a frenzied herd of wild
pigs: huahuata nipi ichillata nipi (young ones, small ones!). Interestingly,
Maxi never names the animals in question. In the aforementioned work on
Ilongot hunting stories Rosaldo notes that many environmental details that
serve as context for the narratives unfolding are omitted. This, he explains,
is because members of small-scale societies have so much overlap in their
life experiences that certain kinds of knowledge can simply be assumed
(1986:107). However, hunting stories, I claim, do not only rely on the use
of the telegraphic form (ibid.) that ensues from this circumstance because,
as Rosaldo implies (1986:108), they deem ecological information to be an
unimportant backdrop. Rather, such condensed style is used, in vila at least,
because it can also better capture the processes by which the narrator came
to experience things in the forest.
It is this experience of knowing that Maxi is attempting to share. He never
tells Luis that the event he recounts concerns peccaries because Luis is famil-
iar with the behavior of these animals and can glean that information from
subtle clues such as how Maxi describes their movements along the forest
oor in mixed groups of young and old and the fear however unfounded,
for collared peccaries rarely attack people these inspired in Maxi. Such
omissions, however, do not mean that all knowledge is irrelevant to the story.
Rather, Maxi allows Luis to participate in the simulation of forest experience
so that Luis can arrive at his own understandings of the habits of the world.
Ellipsis, then, is not only used because shared knowledge exists; it is also a
vehicle through which knowledge can eventually be produced.
Maxi never says he was surprised by the sudden burst of activity. In-
stead, he surprises; by changing his style of speaking to loudly say a
h
shca
shamunn ([but then suddenly] lots come) he conveys the experience of
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this sensation by eliciting surprise in Luis. This is indexical; he is causing
Maxi to have an emotion. It is also iconic; it is the same emotion Maxi ex-
perienced in the forest.
For Maxi, the experience of burrowing pigs dispersing in every possible
direction around him was positively frightening
pa-
wow
micngarahuanun yarcani
theyre gonna eat me, I thought
(provoking both to laugh)
In order to escape, he climbed a tree. Because it was raining, the pigs didnt
notice him:
mana riparanurca
they didnt notice
(said quietly)
cuy cuy
when cuy cuy
sicapica
I climbed
LA: mhm
MA: tamiaca tsa
the rain [was coming down] tsa
chiraicu mana riparanurca
thats why they didnt notice
Tsa is an ideophone. That is, it is a word that conveys meaning through its
sound qualities (Tedlock 2000:118). Words like tsa in Quichua form part of
a large subclass of ideophones known as sound-symbolic adverbs. As Janis
Nuckolls (1996) has amply shown, these form an essential part of lowland
Quichua. Quichua sound-symbolic adverbs are a kind of lexicalized ono-
matopoeia that vividly and precisely represent the grammatical category of
aspect. In other words, they describe the way in which an action unfolds and
its relative durativity (Nuckolls 1996:67).
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Like the other sound-symbolic adverbs in lowland Quichua, tsa achieves
its meaning in large part through its iconic qualities rooted in sound. In the
example above it refers to how raindrops are dispersed in the air. It is iconic
because the mouth, beginning in a closed position, is opened ever wider to
produce the sound and this act imitates the visual image of a spray of raindrops.
Maxi uses another sound-symbolic adverb cuy cuy to describe how
he climbed the tree. This adverb is quite commonly used in vila. It imitates
how a person or animal moves purposefully through the landscape and, by
doing so, unavoidably makes some noise. Maxi remained undetected because
the sound tsa, made by the light rain as it fell, blanketed out the inevitable
sounds that Maxi made as he climbed the tree.
As Maxi shimmies up the tree one of the peccaries comes into clear view.
Rather than referring to this animal by name, Maxi instead faithfully recreates
the image that he saw
sicabas
and as I climbed
(said with intensity and with rising intonation)
tunllatallta siqurucu nini
a big old rump, I tell you

Maxi marks the visual salience of the peccarys hindquarters by a process of
reduplication, whereby the emphatic sufx llata is repeated. By doing so
he is able to faithfully reproduce exactly what came across his eld of vision.
If he would have said to Luis, then I saw a pig, or something to the effect,
he would be alluding to a vantage-free image. Instead, by saying, a big old
rump, Maxi invites Luis to entertain the animal from his exact point of view
and this fosters a sense of intimacy because it allows Luis to share Maxis
perspective. I will elaborate on this observation in the Discussion.
Maxi then shot at the peccary
chita
at that
(with intensity)
tya
e
illaparc-
I red
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The adverb tya is not an idiosyncratic imitation. It tells Luis precise infor-
mation. Not only does it tell him the gun was red (indeed, the verb to re
illapana is redundant in this case and it is often omitted altogether when
tya is used), it also tells him that the powder exploded successfully propel-
ling an expanding mass of lead shot. This again is sound-symbolic according
to the same principle as tsa. Tya, made with the mouth opening larger and
larger, imitates the way in which shot originates inside the gun barrel and
then spreads out in an ever-widening arc as it is discharged.
The handmade muzzle-loading shotgun used by Maxi is based on early
19th-century technology and is notoriously unreliable. Because of the humid-
ity, percussion caps often fail to explode and the powder does not always
ignite fully. In addition, the hammer and barrel are often damaged by rust.
Some men in vila contrast the adverb tya with tey which would be softly
pronounced without vowel elongation. They use this latter adverb to de-
scribe the misring of this kind of gun. In this second adverb the mouth does
not open widely. This imitates the sound made by a cap that explodes but
fails to ignite sufcient powder to propel the shot out of the barrel. If, in the
context of this account, Maxi had used this term, Luis would have known
that the gun failed to re properly. In other moments of his conversation
with Luis, Maxi contrasts tya with tas and ta. These latter terms are iconic
of the sound of the hammer striking the cap insufciently hard to ignite it.
Like tey, and unlike tya, the expansion of the mouth and the ensuing sound
that is produced is stopped in these imitations. The tya/tey contrast is a
good example of magnitude sound iconicity (Sapir 1951 [1929]; see Nuckolls
1999:229233 for a review and discussion) a propensity in many languages
to associate low back vowels with larger objects and mid and high front
vowels with smaller ones.
The word e imitates the distinctive sound that peccaries make when
they are wounded. Because it follows immediately after the word tya, Luis
knows the animal was hit by the shot. The two adverbs, tya and e, when
heard in succession, conjure an image of a near instantaneous chain reaction;
the moment the shot exploded from the gun, the animal was hit. This is an
icon of an event, an image of secondness. It indicates the brutal shock of
change how in an instant a shot hits an animal.
Maxi then simulates the frenzy of activity as the wounded peccary fran-
tically tries to escape into a stream
(with increased laryngeal tension)
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cuhu hua hua hua hua
yac- yaculla
right there in the stream
ptspou rumagri-
ptspou it fell in
People in vila identify cuhu hua hua hua hua as the vocalizations of a
terried wounded animal. Ptspou (often simply, tsupu) is a sound-sym-
bolic adverb that iconically imitates the process of an object penetrating
and then submerging under water (Nuckolls 1996:159). Maxis use of two
exaggerated stops in his performance of ptspou breaks up the syllables
of this adverb. This seems to separate the moment of contact from the pro-
cess of movement in water. In this way they function in a manner similar to
a slow motion shot in cinema (Nuckolls 1996:104, 178179). This sense of
slow motion is compounded by vowel elongation. Slowing down the action
in this way invites Luis to savor the details of this event and also alludes to
a dramatic nality. This might not have been possible if Maxi were to have
continued along the feverish pace that he had built up when he was describing
how he red at the peccary.
The drama, however, is ultimately couched in irony
(rapidly, as an aside)
uca
and me
upaca huaungami yuyani
foolishly, its gonna die, Im thinking
LA: (laughing a little)
ah
MA: (surprised)
chi
when
(with rising intonation)
calpagripim
it suddenly ran off

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uh
damn
snta
like that
(with rising intonation)
calpasa rin
running it went
Once again, the pig shocked Maxi out of his habitual assumptions. Maxi as-
sumed it was dead; instead, it ran off. This is another instance of secondness.
This last sequence functions as something Paul Friedrich calls a modal trope
(1991:3032). That is, it is a gure that provides a frame which affects the mood
of the entire narrative; by means of this last image, a narrative of what seems
to be a successful hunt is framed within one that points to it, ultimately, as a
failure. This image is a testament to the unpredictability of the nonhuman,
the sense of its otherness, and agency. The contradiction created by this
frame produces a feeling of humorous, ironic, and even tragic incongruity.
It forces us to recognize that there is a striking difference between how we
would like events to be and how they actually unfold.
In this nal portion of the story Maxi returns to a narrative mode. This
serves additionally as another kind of frame. It brackets off his previous simu-
lation and signals that the story is ending. He tracked the wounded animal for
a bit but was never able to nd it. Days later other hunters, men who Maxi
referred to as sacha puri ru- literally, forest-walkers, that is, hunters more
experienced than he found the rotting carcass in a nearby fallow.
Discussion
Maxis story is primarily about the categories of experience that Peirce
calls rstness (qualities) and secondness (events). I call the conjunction of
these knowing. In terms of qualities the story is about sounds, movements,
emotions, textures of contact, and stasis (a non-event). In terms of events it
is about unexpected changes: the sudden appearance of a herd of peccaries,
the moment that a pig is shot, and how a seemingly dead peccary suddenly
revives. Maxi captures and shares his experience of knowing by means of
language that is richly iconic and indexical.
It would be wrong to establish a one-to-one correspondence between icons,
indices, and symbols, on the one hand, and rstness, secondness, and third-
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eduardo o. kohn
ness, on the other. For Peirce, all phenomena that involve mediation exhibit
thirdness. Accordingly, all signs exhibit thirdness because they serve as a third
term that mediates between something and some sort of someone in some
way. Furthermore, for Peirce, all thought, and, indeed, all our experiences,
are intrinsically mediated by signs. There is no bodily, inner, or other kind of
experience that is somehow non-semiotic. Through sign processes, we can
accentuate one modality at the expense of another and this is what occurs in
vila hunting stories. Although all signs are intrinsically triadic, in that they
all mediate or represent, different kinds of signs exhibit different degrees of
thirdness. Icons, as thirds, are relative rsts in that they mediate by means of
the fact that they possess the same qualities as their objects. Indices, as thirds,
are relative seconds because they mediate by being affected by their objects.
Symbols, as thirds, by contrast, are relative thirds because they mediate by
means of a convention that is, by a kind of regularity or habit.
One of the most striking ways in which Maxi simulates qualities and
events is through the use of a well-developed set of ideophones known as
sound-symbolic adverbs. Ideophones are unusual kinds of words. They lack
verbal and nominal markers and are not parts of speech, like other words,
but complete utterances in and of themselves (Kilian-Hatz 2001:156). They
capture qualities in the Peircian sense: they denote a special aspect of the
event that can be experienced by the senses: [] how an event is heard,
seen, touched, smelled and felt psychologically (2001:157). In keeping with
their properties as qualities, they are never negated and are rarely found in
negated sentences (2001:158). The fact that they lack tense markers makes
them stand out of time (as potentials). Because they are not parts of speech,
they cannot be acted on; they just are. In other words, there is something
monadic about ideophones and this is in keeping with their ability to capture
the experience of rstness. Yet, ideophones can also capture secondness. One
way is by stringing two together (e.g., tya e, to imitate how the peccary
was hit by a shot). The importance of ideophones in vila Nature Stories
should not be underestimated. For example, over a period of a couple of
days I heard a man recount several versions of a story about a recent forest
experience. On one occasion he performed an extremely compressed version
of the story to his brother who had paused briey outside of his house on
his way elsewhere. This version was stripped of almost everything but the
sound-symbolic adverbs.
6

My interest in different modalities of communication harkens back to
early anthropological debates about different ways of thinking. According
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to Lucien Lvy-Bruhl (1985 [1910]) primitives do not think in terms of
genuine representations but rather they experience a mystical contact
with objects: the primitive actually has an image of the object in his mind,
and thinks it real [and] that [] some denite inuence emanates from it,
or is exercised upon it (1985 [1910]:3738; see also Frazer 1994 [1890]:26).
In other words, according to Lvy-Bruhl, primitives reason via iconic and
indexical relations, which permit an experience of the materiality of things,
whereas moderns reason via more abstract categories. Lvy-Bruhl was
surely wrong to assume that nonliterate or nonmodern people are incap-
able of abstract thought; vila Nature Stories are not something less than
symbolic, even if they make use of nonsymbolic communicative modalities.
Furthermore, the vila Runa reason abstractly about many things including
ecological issues. Lvy-Bruhl, however, was correct to recognize different
forms of representing the world. Nevertheless, people are not locked into
one form of representation or another, rather they make choices about how
to represent the world.
What, then, is the advantage of choosing to tell a story via iconic and
indexical semiotic modalities? Different semiotic modalities have different
representational properties, and these may provide a clue as to why some
are favored over others in particular contexts. Icons and indices can capture
the properties of things in a way that symbols cannot. An icon shares quali-
ties with the object it represents. Therefore, it has the capacity of revealing
unexpected truth: by direct observation of it other truths concerning its
object can be discovered (cp 2.279). Peirce gives as an example an algebraic
formula: because one side is equivalent (i.e., iconic) of the other one can learn
more about the other by considering it. Icons are able to suggest, in a very
precise way, new aspects of supposed states of things (cp 2.281) by ampli-
fying certain qualities to the neglect of others. This is possible because signs
stand for certain properties of their objects and not the object in its totality.
They stand for objects, not in all respects but in reference to a sort of idea
(cp 2.228). Furthermore, among the kinds of signs, icons are also unique in
that they are the only way of directly communicating an idea (cp 2.278).
This does not mean that they have a direct connection to objects. Rather,
they communicate what they are by just being what they are.
Indices, by contrast, do have a material connection to the objects they
represent. Instead of sharing qualities with their objects, they are impacted
by them. A weathercock is affected by the wind and by virtue of this it not
only signals to us its direction but also connects us to the wind.
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eduardo o. kohn
Symbols, nally, have a very different method of reference. They neither
embody qualities of objects, as do icons, nor are they connected to objects, as
are indices. Rather, symbols refer to objects by means of the ways in which
they are connected to other symbols in the referential system in which they
are embedded. Symbols grow (cp 2.302); that is, their meanings can change
as their symbolic contexts redene them.
The world has a greater effect on icons and indices than it does on symbols.
It is not that icons and indices capture what the world is really like. Rather,
icons and indices are more susceptible to the qualities and events of the world.
Symbols, by contrast, by virtue of the fact that their mode of reference is sys-
tem internal, have a greater stability and coherence. They are more resistant
to the world and accordingly they are also less constrained by it.
Another advantage of iconic and indexical forms of communication is
that they t well with the semiotic structures inherent to the biotic world.
The pioneer in animal ethology Jakob von Uexkll (1982 [1940]) developed
a line of biological inquiry based on the recognition of organisms as per-
ceiving and interpreting subjects, rather than as objects, and he sought to
show how ecological and coevolutionary relationships stem from how these
disparate and mutually perceiving selves interpret each others actions. Fol-
lowing in this direction, Terrence Deacon (2003) has recently argued that
what differentiates life from non-life is that life forms capture information
about the world. Life, then, marks what Howard Pattee (in Deacon 2003)
calls an epistemic cut; it signals the emergence of aboutness relationships
of semiosis in the world. This is visible, for example, in the way in which
the ciliated surface of a paramecium has evolved to represent and thereby
respond to obstacles. The semiotic systems that are associated with most
life forms are not symbolic (a form of signication that is primarily human),
but rather iconic and indexical. A major challenge for the Runa and other
people whose livelihoods depend in large part on hunting and foraging in
species-rich tropical environments is to learn how to penetrate the intricate
semiotic webs that link species in these complex ecosystems. Although the
Runa do, in fact, often attribute symbolic characteristics to elements of the
forest ecosystem (see Kohn 2002), speaking about them nonsymbolically is
advantageous because this iconically captures the semiotic properties inherent
to the nonhuman world.
There are two important effects of this recreation of experience via iconi-
city and indexicality. The rst concerns knowledge, the second, sociability.
Communicating in such a way as to simulate the experience of knowing in the
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listener has distinct advantages over a more symbolically laden description.
Icons provide direct experience with the forms of things. One can repeatedly
consult a mental image and derive new knowledge from it. If Maxis story
were to present conclusions, instead of the ingredients that can contribute to
possible conclusions, there would be a great reduction of information. This
is one important reason why, I suggest, Nature Stories are about knowing
and only indirectly about knowledge.
Regarding the social, this ability to transmit experience through icons and
indices means that these experiences become shared in a very intimate way.
Through poetic techniques involving icons and indices, personal experiences
can be re-experienced by others (Wagner 1991:37; Daniel 1994:239). Several
authors have noted that iconic language, such as ideophones, fosters social
intimacy due to this ability to create a shared world of experience (Gell 1995;
Nuckolls 1996:13; Kilian-Hatz 2001:156).
7

Thinking more specically about native South America, such stories would
be another form of cultivating an intimate sense of community that Joanna
Overing and Alan Passes (2000) have called conviviality; by means of richly
iconic language subjective experience can circulate beyond individuals in
such a way that the boundaries that usually separate individuals begin to
dissolve. Social intimacy, fostered by sharing the same experience, would
also be an important foundation for a near pan-Amazonian cosmological
system, referred to as perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Stolze Lima
1999; Kohn 2002), that is concerned with the possibilities and challenges
of seeing the world from the points of view of other of beings be they
people, animals, or spirits. Nature Stories, such as the one Maxi recounted,
create a simulation of personal experience that allows listeners to adopt the
narrators point of view. An example of this is Maxis invitation to see the
peccary as a big rump, and thereby faithfully describing the animal from
his situated vantagepoint.
8
Social intimacy, then, cannot be divorced from the world in which it occurs.
Intersubjectivity the ways in which subjectivities are mutually constructed
is partially constituted in the world. To this effect John DuBois, in his work
on stance, has argued that intersubjectivity is the product of a triadic rela-
tion. According to him, the dyadic I-you relationship is not enough to create
intersubjectivity. Rather, intersubjectivity emerges as an I and a you mutually
align their stances toward an object (DuBois 2003). Because icons capture
qualities of objects and indices connect people to objects, these modalities
can contribute to the formation of intersubjective relations.
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Environmental and social factors may explain why iconic and indexical
language is so well developed in places like vila. Although the dialects of
Quichua spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon are very closely related to those
spoken in the nearby nonforested highlands to the west, only the former
have a well-developed sound-symbolic system. Alfred Gell (1995), drawing
on his work in New Guinea, has suggested that sound-based iconicity is
advantageous in heavily forested environments because dense vegetation
makes sound a much more reliable sense than vision. Because the dominant
sensory modality is aural, iconicity emerges between the spoken word and
the sonic properties of the world (see also Feld 1982).
Community size and the relatively egalitarian nature of life in vila may
also inuence this kind of speech. Richly iconic and indexical language is
dependent on the fact that people share the same experiences and background
knowledge because icons and indices do not provide their own interpretive
contexts. Symbols, by contrast, are dependent for their meanings upon the
larger systems of reference in which they are embedded and the formal re-
lational properties of these systems permit a greater degree of independence
from the world (Deacon 1997).
Although environmental and social factors may well encourage the use
of iconic and indexical language, they do not determine its existence. For
example, many Asian languages spoken in very literate and urbanized so-
cieties have highly developed ideophone systems (Nuckolls 1999:243).
Nevertheless, changing circumstances may lead to a decrease in the use of
ideophones. For example, Nuckolls (1996:131134) has noted that Quichua
speakers from a community of the Pastaza region of Amazonian Ecuador,
which is characterized by a relatively high degree of Quichua literacy, use
less sound-symbolic adverbs than those from a nearby village where there is
less literacy. Social and environmental factors alone can never fully explain
the use of iconicity and indexicality because all languages make use of these
semiotic modalities. Indeed, these seem to be crucial ingredients which en-
able language to provide resonance with the social and physical world.
What might life be like without this social and physical grounding made
possible by these semiotic modalities? Constructing Panic (Capps & Ochs 1995),
a remarkable book about how Meg, an American agoraphobic, narrates her
experience of panic, provides some clues. Meg is continuously constructing
hypothetical narratives:
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Sometimes I get to the end of the day and feel exhausted by all of the what if that
had happened and what if this happens. And then I realize that Ive been sitting
on the sofa that its just me and my own thoughts driving me crazy (1995:25).
She is desperate to experience the reality that she attributes to normal
people (1995:25) and feels severed from an awareness of herself and her
environment as familiar and knowable (p. 31). In contrast to Maxis story,
Megs storytelling is quite poor in iconicity and indexicality. She cannot
share her thoughts imagistically with others because other people reject
her view of the world; she is conscious that her experience does not mesh
with what happened (p. 24) and, because she cannot align her stance with
those of others she is thus isolated from this particular strategy for cultivat-
ing intersubjectivity. Furthermore, her narratives lack indexical grounding
in a specic place. For example, she often uses the construction, here I am
to express her existential predicament, but a crucial element is missing, she
is telling her interlocutors that she exists, but not where in particular she is
located (p. 64). The title, Constructing Panic, refers to how Meg constructs
her experience of panic through storytelling the assumption of the authors
being that the stories people tell construct who they are and how they view
the world (p. 8). But the books title is also revealing of her problems in a
deeper sense. It is precisely this constructive property of symbolic thought
that makes anxiety possible. Symbols, as opposed to icons and indices, are
much less constrained by the world. This is what allows us to create endless
alternative possible realities that, in cases like that of Meg, can become pa-
ralyzingly frightening. By contrast, icons and indices, because they are more
susceptible to the world, keep this symbolic propensity to create hypothetical
worlds in check.
Icons and indices are not, ultimately, able to provide some unmediated
purchase on what Capps and Ochs (1996:22) critically characterize as objec-
tive normative reality; all signs involve mediation. But icons and indices are
in the world; they do not form a separate domain of semiotic representation
and this is why they are more grounding. That Runa Nature Stories rely on
iconic and indexical modalities of communication is not unique; all human
language involves such nonsymbolic properties (Hinton et al. 1994:12). The
Runa case merely amplies these properties and thus makes them more
readily apparent.
For the Runa, the word, participates in the nature of the thing as Bronislaw
Malinowski (1956:322) said of the Trobriand islanders (see also Nuckolls
1996:122). Malinowski (1956:326) characterized this belief as an old realist
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eduardo o. kohn
fallacy. Yet, this view may not be so fallacious; there is a materiality to
semiotic processes icons can capture qualities and indices connect (see
also Keane 2003). Semiosis takes place within the world and not at a level
detached from it. As the ecological anthropologist Tim Ingold has written,
the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building
but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view
in it (Ingold 2000:42, emphasis in the original).
A focus on knowing, and its poetic simulation, certainly points to peoples
sense of resonance with the nonhuman (Ingold 1996:40). But it also gestures
to a vision of realism that goes beyond some notion of romantic harmony with
the world. Maxis story is also about interminable waiting, terried surprise,
and, ultimately, bafement. In other words, his story captures not only his
sense of engagement but also his feelings of detachment from the forest realm.
And this is why it is so important that an Anthropology of Knowledge take
Runa realism with its focus on knowing into account. Maxis attempts to
know, that is, his efforts to capture the experience of knowing as well as his
desire to make some sense of it, are motivated by his feeling that the world
is partially, but never completely, beyond his comprehension. His sense
of bewilderment, occasioned by the supposedly-dead peccary suddenly
jumping up and running off, speaks to what Donna Haraway calls, a sense
of the worlds independent sense of humor (Haraway 1991:199). It is in such
moments of brutal shock that the world makes itself manifest. And it is with
awareness about these moments of uncertainty, and also of possibility, that
the struggle to know takes place.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Maxi Ajn and the late Luis Ajn. Luis was a very kind person
and very generous with me. He died tragically during the period of my dissertation
research in vila. Field research was supported by a National Science Foundation
graduate fellowship, and grants from the Fulbright-Hays Commision, and the
Wenner-Gren Foundation. I wish to acknowledge a School of American Research
predoctoral fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation postdoctoral fellow-
ship for supporting writing. I thank Anne-Christine Taylor for her invitation to
participate in the panel Mind, Affect, and the Image of the Self in American
Indian Societies at the 49th International Congress of Americanists in Quito
where I presented a preliminary draft of this article. I also thank Terry Turner
for his encouraging comments following a presentation of a subsequent draft at
the Indigenous Amazonia at the Millennium conference at Tulane University.
I also thank Dominic Boyer, Chris Garces, Rob Hamrick, Frank Salomon, and
Kimbra Smith, as well as Don Kulick and two anonymous Ethnos reviewers for
comments on drafts of this article. I also wish to thank Janis Nuckolls for several
193 Runa Realism
ethnos, vol. 70:2, j une 2005 (pp. 171196)
productive exchanges. Finally, I thank Terry Deacon for many illuminating
conversations about the material I have discussed.
Notes
1. See Kohn (2002) for a more detailed discussion of the vila Runa and their eco-
logical understandings and engagements.
2. I follow here the established form of citation for Peirce scholars. CP stands for
the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce 1931). Numbers before the
decimal point refer to sections and those after the decimal refer to paragraphs.
3. vila Quichua, like many other dialects of Quechua (see Mannheim 1986) does
not have an elaborate metalanguage; one result of this is that it has no labels for
speech genres.
4. I have adopted from Orr and Wrisley (1981) a practical orthography based on
Spanish. The following elements are adapted from Tedlock (1983:20). Line breaks
indicate a short pause usually not as long as a breath. Maxi usually pauses for
a breath when Luis interjects. Longer pauses, of at least two seconds, are indi-
cated by a dot (). vila speakers often suppress sufxes or other word portions.
A dash (-) indicates that word parts are missing. Stress in Quichua is usually
on the penultimate syllable. In cases where this differs, stress is marked by an
accent (). This often happens when word portions are suppressed. Under these
circumstances, the stress remains as if the entire word were being pronounced. I
use an en dash () to indicate where the vowels of a word have been drawn out.
I use a 2-en dash () to indicate an even greater elongation. Such elongation is
done for poetic effect and is rarely the standard way of pronouncing the word.
An apostrophe () indicates an exaggerated stop for poetic effect. When possible
and appropriate, I try to give a sense of how such stops, vowel elongations, and
suppressed word parts affect speech style by incorporating them in the English
version as well. I leave untranslated phatic interjections such as ye or ya, from
yanga, similar to no way, and hm or mhm, similar to the English equivalents.
5. I knew Maxi and Luis quite well, having stayed for extended periods with their
families on several occasions. They felt quite comfortable with me and my tape
recorder and my presence that evening was acknowledged but not particularly
salient in the conversation. In Erving Goffmans terms my participation status
was that of a bystander (1983:132).
6. Unfortunately, I was unable to record this (cf. Kilian-Hatz 2001:157 for an ex-
ample of a similar phenomenon in a hunting story in the Baka language).
7. There are other ways of creating social intimacy through storytelling. Don
Kulick (1992:236) writes of how the Gapun of Papua New Guinea immediately
repeat back to the narrator stories they have heard. This too is a form of creating
intimacy through iconicity.
8. In keeping with Amazonian interest in perspectivism, many Nature Stories in
vila are also concerned with imagining the world from the points of view of
animals (see Kohn 2002 for several examples).
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