Book Reviews 385

For the epistemologies of the South, the question of authorship is complex: it

includes types of authorship that go beyond the paradigm of authorial individu-
alism privileged by epistemologies of the North … In Western modernity, the con-
cept of author implies notions such as originality, autonomy, and creativity. It is
part of the same cluster of idealist philosophies that underlie modern possessive
individualism. Such a concept of authorship has little validity in the epistemolo-
gies of the South insofar as, for them, the most relevant knowledges are either im-
memorial or generated in the social experiences of oppression and the struggles
against it. In any case, they are rarely traceable to a single individual. (pp. 53–54)

I would be eager to share conversations with a broader range of voices, rep-

resenting a wider vision of what anthropological writing means and how it
comes into being. Are there any editors or presses out there willing to take on
this critical task to build a bigger table?

References Cited
Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds.
1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa
2018 The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming Age of Epistemologies of the South.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Webster, Peter
2020 The Edited Collection: Pasts, Presents, and Futures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.

Terence S. Turner: The Fire of the Jaguar, edited by Jane Fajans. Chicago:
Hau Books, 2017, xl + 254 pp., index

THOMAS MOORE
Centro Eori de Investigación y Promoción Regional
Puerto Maldonado, Peru

The Fire of the Jaguar is destined to become an anthropological classic in a

league with Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) and Geertz’s “Deep
Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight” (1972). Turner’s widow and editor, Jane
Fajans—in her own right an accomplished anthropologist—provides the intro-
duction “Or Why Myth Matters,” in which she reveals (p. xiv) that Turner had
a habit of leaving his manuscripts unpublished while constantly tinkering with
them. Turner’s former student, David Graeber, in his foreword titled “At Long
Last,” reaffirms that tendency (p. xx). Given the quality of the texts included in
this volume, the tinkering was productive, and it was well worth the wait.
Turner did his graduate studies at Harvard as a student of David Maybury-
Lewis, a structuralist anthropologist who did research in the 1950s with the
Xerente along the Tocantins River and Xavante in eastern Mato Grosso state,
both Jê-speaking peoples. Maybury-Lewis led Harvard’s Central Brazil Project
and recruited Turner to do his fieldwork with the Jê-speaking Kayapó on the
Xingú River. Harvard anthropology has long been influenced by the perspec-
tives of sociologist Talcott Parsons, although Turner rejected the Parsonian
386 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 45, Number 2

label. In any case, his structuralist training had a lasting impact on his con-
stantly evolving thinking.
The myriad critics of structuralist methodology in anthropology stress its de-
tached, mechanical, synchronic, and reductionist character. Stanley Diamond,
in a thoughtful and provocative exercise (1993 [1974]:292–331) characterized
it as inauthentic. Emmanuelle Loyer (2018), in her meticulous and sensitive
biography of Lévi-Strauss, provides useful discussions of many of his critics
and their interaction with him. However, Turner, a well-read and intellectually
stimulated man, built upon that structuralist background to develop a much
more sophisticated, multidimensional, dynamic, and exciting approach.
Unlike Lévi-Strauss, whose field experience was limited to a few months
total among different peoples of the Brazilian interior in the late 1930s, Turner
worked with the Kayapó in two long stints in the 1960s and then visited with
them almost annually over 52 years. He learned the Kayapó language and had
lengthy discussions with them in it over the ethnographic data he presents.
Turner lived Kayapó culture as fully and intimately as any anthropologist ever
could.
Moreover, Turner’s engagement with the Kayapó included extensive po-
litical advocacy in defense of their rights. He helped the Kayapó make vid-
eos highlighting their struggles with the aggressions of the outside world and
brought his friend and village leader, known publicly as Raoni, into a global
publicity campaign in defense of the Kayapó and their territorial rights. Just
prior to one of Turner’s visits to the Kayapó in 2011, he and Fajans attended the
VII Conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
(SALSA) in Belém do Pará, Brazil, where Turner presented a group of Kayapó
ritual performers and brought attention to their campaign against the Belo
Monte dam that eventually flooded extensive areas of Kayapó territory. Such
active engagement was well articulated into Turner’s model, which he sees as
an argument that Piagetian action or Marxist praxis forms the structure of the
mind through interaction between itself and its object (p. 175).
Part 1 of the book presents an extraordinarily rich structuralist analysis of a
key myth of the Mebêngôkre Kayapó people of the Xingú River in the Brazilian
Amazon (pp. 1–146), which provided the book’s title. The myth itself (pp.
10–17) is a composite of many variants that Turner obtained in three different
communities. He played recordings of these different versions to his Kayapó
informants and discussed them until he could arrive at a consensus on the es-
sential episodes and processes. He compares it with three earlier recordings of
it by Horace Banner, Adrian Cowell, and Curt Nimuendajú, and he discusses
the differences among them as well as the analysis of a brief version of it as
a variant of a Bororo theme by Lévi-Strauss (1983:35–78). In contrast to Lévi-
Strauss, who analyzes in musical terms hundreds of myths recorded by others,
Turner brings a single myth to life in one lively and exhaustive interpretation
of it.
Before analyzing the myth, Turner provides an important chapter on the
socio-economic setting of Kayapó villages with their internal dynamics and
transitions (pp. 19–37). His previous writings on this subject (1965, 1980) pro-
vide more detail. One would like to have seen more information on the ecolog-
ical setting, with transitions between tropical forest and savanna, and of the
 Book Reviews 387

historical processes of Kayapó resistance to outside encroachments, but those

dimensions are not central to Turner’s purpose for this text. Moreover, those
dimensions of Kayapó culture and cosmology have been developed more fully
elsewhere (Bamberger 1967, 1971; Turner 1979:148–152).
Turner employs the usual structuralist binary oppositions in his analysis:
nature/culture, human/animal, child/man, vertical/horizontal, time/space,
inside/outside, raw/cooked, self/alter, subject/object, among others, but he
enriches his analysis by revealing the dynamics of the transitions between and
among these states. He demonstrates the transformational processes that val-
idate those transitions for both the Kayapó individual and his or her society.
He shows how the mythical development in the life of a boy reveals a model
not only for the socialization of a youth but also for the consolidation of Kayapó
society as a whole, through the acquisition of fire, the bow and arrow, cotton
thread, and the other attributes of their culture that differentiate them from
the other animals. Thus, this myth records the Kayapós’ “affective and social
terrors and adjustments of [their] attachments, as well as the social and cultural
stakes involved in such crises of reframing and transforming personal identity
and social relations” (p. 151).
Part 2 offers three major theoretical articles, beginning with “Beauty and the
Beast: the Fearful Symmetry of the Jaguar and Other Natural Beings in Kayapo
Ritual and Myth” (pp. 147–193). This is Turner’s 2011 Marett lecture at Exeter
College, Oxford, first published posthumously in 2017. In it, he describes how
the Kayapó equate “beauty” with the leadership qualities of a Kayapó elder,
described in a manner comparable to Clastres’s (1974) model for Amerindian
political leadership. These qualities are generosity, strong oratory skills, and the
ability to overcome internal tensions and reach consensus.
Turner then proceeds to reveal the tensions between “beautiful” and “com-
mon” status within Kayapó society, and the parallel classification of animals in
similar terms. These tensions are resolved through processes of elaborate nam-
ing and ritual drama, although there is also tension between “beauty” and “be-
serk going,” which arises when human crises are not resolved. Thus, he shows
how “beauty,” a socially constructed value, reflects effective interpersonal rela-
tions as well as the relations among humans, animals, and animal spirits.
“Cosmology, Objectification, and Animism in Indigenous Amazonia”
(pp. 173–204), previously unpublished, was a presentation before the Nordic
Network for Amerindian Studies in Copenhagen in 2008. It further develops
Turner’s interpretation of Kayapó cosmology in terms of spatial relationships
within the village settlement and the broader Xingú Valley ecosystem.
The Kayapó celebrate, and mediate, their personal development through
their life cycles, and their social transition from early or natural states to orga-
nized society through their myths and ritual ceremonies. The ritual drama as-
sociated with these rites of passage includes identification with specific animal
species by donning animal feathers, hooves, claws, and teeth in order to act out
their transitions in harmony with the animals and their spirits.
Similarly, they express their intercultural interactions by locating the tech-
nological and administrative functions of those interactions—airstrips, clinics,
schools, pharmaceutical dispensaries, soccer fields, radio and electric generator
shacks, and parking lots in a transitional area outside the central plaza of the
388 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 45, Number 2

concentric village physical structure. Thus, the constituents of the cosmos ac-
quire objective reality and integration into the cosmological structure that can
be de-objectivized by their destruction or death.
“The Crisis of Late Structuralism: Perspectivism and Animism. Rethinking
Culture, Nature, Spirit, and Bodiliness” (Turner 2009:205–243) is a reflection
on the state of structuralist and “post-structuralist” approaches, marking the
passage of Lévi-Strauss. This article develops the elements that were central
to Lévi-Straus’s approach and, according to Turner’s analysis began to decline
in acceptance in the context of the 1968 uprisings in Paris. Turner makes clear
his debt to, as well as his distance from the Lévi-Straussian model and subse-
quent variations on it, including animism and perspectivism. While recogniz-
ing their positive contributions, Turner takes apart the contemporary version of
animism (Bird-David 1999; Descola 2013 [2005]) and especially perspectivism
(Viveiros de Castro 1998), revealing their limitations that leave them still tied to
the essential Lévi-Straussian model.
As a complete work, combining texts from various stages of Turner’s career,
The Fire of the Jaguar provides both a highly authentic rendition of Kayapó cos-
mology and culture, and a major theoretical contribution. Turner has brought
structural analysis to its climax. There is no place else it can go. Inevitably, an-
thropology will now evolve into new and different paradigms.
The book is beautifully presented in highly readable form. One of its many
virtues is the bibliography, which avoids the British form of reference citation
that reduces author’s names to mere initials, and provides full references. Thus,
it respects the authors’ identities as persons with names and facilitates the read-
ers’ efforts to track down original sources. One hopes that Fajans will continue
to edit and make publicly available any still unpublished manuscripts that re-
main in Terry’s closet.

References Cited
Bamberger, Joan
1967 Environment and Cultural Classification: A Study of the Northern Kayapó. Ph.D.
dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
Bamberger, Joan
1971 “The Adequacy of Kayapó Ecological Adjustment.” In Verhandlungen des
XXVIII Internationalen Amerikanisten -kongresses (Munich), 3, pp. 373–380. Munich.
Bird-David, Nurit
1999 “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational
Epistemology.” Special issue “Culture—a Second Chance.” Current Anthropology
40(S1):S67–S91. Accessed May 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.10086/
200061
Clastres, Pierre
1974 La Société contre L’état [Society Against the State]. Paris: Minuit Editions.
Descola, Philippe
2013 [2005] Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Diamond, Stanley
1993 [1974] “The Inauthenticity of Anthropology: the Myth of Structuralism.” In
Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Books.
Geertz, Clifford
1972 “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight.” Daedalus 101:1–37.
 Book Reviews 389

Leach, Edmund R.
1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1983 [1964] The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Loyer, Emmanuelle
2018 [2015] Lévi-Strauss: A Biography. Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and
Jonathan Magidoff. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Turner, Terence S.
1965 Social Structure and Political Organization among the Northern Kayapó. Ph.D. dis-
sertation, Cambridge, MA: Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
Turner, Terence S.
1979 “The Gê and Bororo Societies as Dialectical Systems. A General Model.” In
Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil, edited by David Maybury-
Lewis, pp. 147–178. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turner, Terence S.
1980 “The Social Skin.” In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities
Superfluous to Survival, edited by Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 179–217.
London: Temple Smith.
Turner, Terence S.
2009 “The Crisis of Late Structuralism: Perspectivism and Animism. Rethinking
Culture, Nature, Spirit, and Bodiliness.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology
of Lowland South America 7(1): Article 1. Accessed April 30, 2020. https://digitalcom
mons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol7/iss1/1
Turner, Terence S.
2017 “Beauty and the Beast: Humanity, Animality, and Animism in the Thought
of an Amazonian People.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2):51–70. Chicago.
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau7.2.008
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo B.
1998 “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 4(3), 469–488. Accessed April 30, 2020. http://www.jstor.
org/stable/3034157

Stuart Kirsch. Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2018. 328 pp., illustrations, maps, notes,
references, index.

ALISSE WATERSTON
Department of Anthropology 
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
524 West 59th Street
New York, NY 10019

Stuart Kirsch, who has been researching and writing on the Pacific for de-
cades, describes in his latest book, Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text,
a defining moment during his early fieldwork. The setting was the rain forest
near the Ok Tedi River on the Papua New Guinea side of the border with West
Papua, Indonesia. The situation was a male initiation ceremony, and most of
the participants were refugees, displaced by the Indonesian occupation of their
territory. Imagine the moment: a thunderstorm pounding on a palm frond roof,
the men taking shelter there, when two of the refugees confronted the anthro-
pologist. What did he intend to do with what he learned about them? Would he use it to