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The soul's body and its states: an Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human.

Taylor, Anne Christine. "The soul's body and its states: an Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human." Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 2.n2 (June 1996): 201(15). Academic OneFile. Thomson Gale. Vermont College of Union Institute. 9 July 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-
Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A18600770&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=vol_
m761j&version=1.0>.
Abstract:

This article begins by exploring some of the premisses concerning personhood, sociality and mortality underlying the experience and representation
of self in Jivaroan Achuar culture. Although inexplicit and seemingly contradictory, these assumptions combine to produce an intricate though
unspoken theory of what is implied in being a true, live human. Jivaroan sense of self is rooted in the progressive fusion of a generic, given bodily
form and of attributed perception of this same bodily form; the initially anonymous body image is thus progressively singularized by the memory of
the affective moods experienced in daily social interaction. Achuar selfhood is therefore susceptible to states of weakness and uncertainty,
categorized as induced illness, as well as to states of enhancement brought on by communication with a certain category of spirits. The interactive
basis of the set of representations concerning selfhood leads the author to discuss traditional anthropological ways of dealing with indigenous ideas,
and to suggest an approach more attentive to the contextualization of knowledge.

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 1996 Royal Anthropological Institute

Among the many 'things that go without saying'(1) is how very honoured I feel by your invitation to deliver this lecture. Honoured, but also, in equal
if not greater measure, horrified. First, because the occasion evokes a host of father figures, dead or alive, on whom we have all sharpened our teeth in
our youth, and whose benevolence is therefore open to doubt; secondly, because I am a French anthropologist, and in the skirmishing which is one of
the great pleasures of the long relationship between our two scientific communities, I find the stakes have suddenly been drastically raised. Thirdly,
because picking one's way through the minefield of conflicting paradigms that is today's anthropology is an inherently stressful affair.

The problem I want to consider here, one of central importance for Malinowski, is that of the relation between social environment and individual
psychology. Indeed, this lecture is a kind of response to the call he made in the introductory chapter of Argonauts to study 'what concerns man most
intimately, that is the hold which life has on him', in so far as I shall attempt here to define what is implied for an individual in being alive and
experiencing the selfhood of a socially constructed body in an Amazonian culture. Much research has been devoted recently to issues of this sort, so
much so that the body has, to a large extent, come to replace society as our discipline's major focus of analytic exploration; in fact we have been
taught, most notably by Strathern (for instance, 1992), that society is nowhere if not in the body; that is, in the sequence of sets of relations involved
in constructing and deconstructing it. This perspective deals effectively with the many difficulties raised by older sociological reifications, but it is
not easy to reconcile it with any plausible view of selfhood, in so far as it is hard to imagine that people actually experience themselves purely as a
succession of structured concatenations of bits and pieces, and it is even harder, in the absence of a minimally stable subjectivity, to account for the
relative continuity of tradition. Thus, while taking into account the importance of this work, my aim is to show how a body image is experienced
subjectively, and how a person is thereby capable of reproducing the social structures that have shaped his or her selfhood. This is, admittedly, an
absurdly broad question, but its very magnitude invites the kind of hit-and-run approach ideally suited to the format of a short lecture. As Nietzsche
usefully put it, great issues are like cold baths: one must get in and out of them as quickly as possible.

I shall take as my starting point a minor paradox implicit in the ethnography of the indigenous cultures of lowland South America. On the one hand,
anthropological accounts of these groups are replete with statements to the effect that Amazonian Indians do not believe that death can be caused by
natural causes; rather, they view it as due to malignant human agency.(2) In such a perspective, death exists only as a form of homicide, whether overt
or clandestine. This conception of mortality is thought to lie at the heart of two highly important types of social practice: namely, shamanism and
various forms of institutionalized feuding and hostility, sometimes between domestic groups, sometimes between segments of tribes, sometimes even
between tribes or ethnic entities. On the other hand, in all these groups we invariably come across one or several myths about the origin of mortality,
in which death seems to be viewed in a far more 'naturalistic' light; that is, as a feature of the way the world is and, in short, as an inescapable fact of
life.(3) This second point of view seems to imply that Amazonians do, after all, seem to conceive death as some sort of universal natural phenomenon.
The obvious 'rationality' of this belief, from our point of view, entices many anthropologists into a familiar kind of spontaneous functionalism which
leads them to explain away the vindictive view of mortality as an ideological device necessary for the continuity of major sociological institutions, the
underlying assumption being that the Indians do not believe in it as they believe in the naturalistic view of death. After all, if people are destined to
die anyway, it seems unnecessarily redundant to assume that they are always being murdered; thus, the homicidal approach to mortality tends to be
dealt with as if it were merely a cunning sociological artifice.

This sort of approach is surely unacceptable, as indeed any anthropologist who stops to think about it immediately recognizes, if only because
'ideology' is obviously experienced as truth and not as false consciousness. Furthermore, on empirical grounds, the Indians appear to hold the
homicidal view much more strongly than the naturalistic one. This, however, leaves us with the problem of accounting for the coexistence of two
seemingly contradictory sets of beliefs. It can of course be argued, and often is nowadays, that the requirement of logical coherence in the
representations particular to a given society is no more than an anthropological prejudice, and that accounts which present culture as a body of self-
contained, logically flawless implicit metaphysics bear absolutely no resemblance to the way people actually think and act. In fact, given the ubiquity

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of those processes of 'creolization' which many anthropologists stress in their studies, as well as the compartmentalization of mental processes that
cognitivist psychologists argue for, we should allow for, and indeed expect, contradiction.

Let me state at the outset that, in general terms, I entirely endorse the 'cognitivist' critiques of traditional anthropological views of culture, such as
those developed by Boyer (1990; 1993) or Bloch (1991; 1992; 1993) in their recent work. It is perfectly true that no people actually think the way
anthropologists seem to think they do, and that people do not refer to a mental blueprint of their culture, as one would to a text, in order to produce
non-contradictory statements and practices. At the same time, I strongly oppose the view that there is no durable systematicity in culture beyond that
which is produced by anthropological accounts, or beyond that which is locally created by the dialectics of ethnicity. The fact that culture rests to a
large extent on 'that which goes without saying' does not mean that anything goes, and that there is not some degree of integration between
compartmentalized mental models. To assert this is sheer common sense. Yet the source and precise nature of this relative coherence is not easy to
define and account for.(4) My own feeling is that it must lie to some extent in a certain property of circularity inherent in the mental models shared by
people of any given culture; in the fact, in other words, that these self-evident, discursively unelaborated conceptual clumps, which we might, for
convenience's sake, call premisses, must refer back to each other, and that it is precisely from this circular process of mutual referral that they gain
their quality of obviousness. In what follows, I will attempt to show how a unique, precise and intricate definition of person and selfhood emerges
from just such chains of circular unelaborated notions, and to understand how a complex idea comes to be developed while no one actually thinks and
expresses it. And this, of course, raises the problem of what anthropological accounts can and should describe, an issue to which I will return later.

The Jivaroan Achuar of lowland eastern Ecuador(5) offer a perfect exemplar of the implicit contradiction I mentioned above. In their view, illness and
death are, invariably, the outcome of an act inspired by deliberate homicidal intentionality, operationalized through recourse to the invisible
machinery of bewitchment caused by invisible blow darts. Furthermore, they make no sharp distinction, even lexically, between illness and death, the
difference between the two states being a matter of degree rather than of kind. This implies that both are viewed as a process, linked by a series of
metamorphoses, rather than as ontologically distinct conditions. Moreover, for them illness is a single phenomenon, whatever its symptoms, whether
psychic or somatic; there are no specific illnesses, just undifferentiated suffering.

Like most other Amazonians, however, the Achuar also tell a characteristically brief and concise myth explaining how mortality came to be as a
result of an accidental and entirely trivial act of disobedience.(6) I have no intention of elaborating on this myth, which ends with the lapidary
statement 'let there now be mortality', beyond underscoring two of its important features. First, this myth posits a massive and abrupt change from a
time of undifferentiation when there was 'only life', to a time when there was life and death; that is to say, life as we know it. But the myth says
nothing about this brutal shift and does not describe it. In other words, it focuses on a pair of polar terms rather than on the nature of the relation
between the terms. Second, by conceptualizing the origin of finiteness as the outcome of a trivial deed of transgression, the myth establishes a huge,
indeed a monstrous disproportion between cause and effect, between an act and its consequence. This property, common to many mythic accounts,
might best be explained by assuming that certain kinds of myth are in fact anti-causal propositions: in other words, they do not, as used to be thought
(not least by Malinowski), justify the world and explain how it came into being or how one should behave; rather, they describe the world as it is in a
highly problematic way, and thus make the obvious paradoxical. This is precisely why no one 'believes' in what myths say in the way one 'believes' in
the portrayal of a spirit. If this is so, what distinguishes the two perspectives on mortality is not a matter of content but of kinds of discourse: one of
them - the homicidal view - presents death as a gradual process, the extremes of which remain undefined, and its emphasis lies on exploring the nature
of the processual relationship between the unmarked poles; the other - the mythic and naturalistic one - presents sharply defined terms in a paradoxical
and therefore undefined relationship. Thus, what appeared initially as a contradiction between contents, that is to say between two different
conceptions of death, may now be viewed as a probably necessary articulation between two distinct types of representation(7) of a relation.

To understand the nature of this articulation, we must begin by taking a closer look at mortality as a mode of processual relationship; and this, in turn,
entails understanding what being alive is in Jivaroan terms. At a certain level, this is a simple matter: being alive is to be perceived, and to perceive
oneself, as a person, a notion locally covered by the term shuar. This expression refers to a multi-layered set of relations between contrastive terms:
thus, according to context, the term shuar refers to 'my bilateral kindred' as opposed to others, 'my local group' as opposed to other territorial groups,
'Achuar' as opposed to other Jivaroan tribal units, 'Jivaro' as opposed to Whites or other Indians, and so on. In short, the term functions as a
generalized 'we/they' classifier.

For our purposes, the interesting thing about this classifier is that, in given contexts, the 'we' it defines include two classes of imaginary beings. One
of these refers to spirits characterized by their normal human appearance and their entirely non-human and, indeed, inhuman, behaviour: they are
solitary, blind, do not eat, and exist in a state of permanent generalized desire. The other class includes spirits with a non-human appearance who
nevertheless behave like human beings, in so far as they use language and signs, follow moral rules and are credited with human emotions. In fact, a
large portion of Jivaroan mythology is devoted to the description of these latter creatures' acts, and entities or shuar of this sort also figure
prominently in shamanic discourse and practice as well as in garden and hunting magic. However, if these imaginary beings can in certain
circumstances be defined as persons, that is as part of the 'we' group, in other contexts they are quite different from real persons, for a number of
reasons: sometimes because they are dead, and sometimes because they are believed to be like humans only under certain conditions of interaction.
What they do share with real live humans, however, is consciousness and intentionality. These are properties which for the Achuar are not limited to
specific kinds of being, but attributable in given contexts to many different sorts of things, including inanimate ones; life, in short, is a postulated state
of mind rather than a state of matter.

It follows from this that being a real, live human implies displaying a special type of bodily appearance, practising certain types of communicative
and social behaviour, and possessing certain states of consciousness. In order to specify this combination which defines real, live humanness, we may
begin by taking a closer look at bodily appearance and explore some Achuar notions concerning the body. The salient features of the mental model
that shapes these ideas are as follows. First, and most surprisingly, the Achuar have remarkably unelaborated theories of procreation, and they have in
fact very little to say about the conception and formation of a child; questions about these matters clearly strike them as irrelevant. Further, pregnancy
and birth are not ritualized and there are no myths explicitly concerned with conception and procreation.(8) Secondly, if we examine prohibitions and

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observances linked to bodily substances and functions - a set of practices often considered of particular importance for understanding indigenous
ideas about the body's formation and the shaping of the person - some interesting properties begin to emerge. Prohibitions are most numerous and
stringently observed precisely in those practices and situations which, from the indigenous point of view, involve a process of transformation: making
a canoe, preparing curare poison, suffering from snake-bite. Thus, the relative scarcity and laxity of prohibitions attendant on pregnancy and
childbirth support the view that these processes are not seen as similar to other culturally stressed metamorphoses. In other words, and contrary to
death as viewed in certain contexts, birth is never thought to be a process of transformation, and there is therefore no parallelism between entry to,
and exit from, the state of being a real live human. It should also be stressed that, with regard to their effects, bodily substances do not form a class
separate from other, non-bodily, substances: semen, for example has the same kind of properties as curare, as snake-poison, or as the burning
sensation of red pepper; and menstrual blood is just blood, or if it has any power this comes from non-specific attributes such as the potency of red, or
that of being heavy. Finally, things posited as alive, that is to say credited with intentionality and consciousness, are all fundamentally the same in
terms of organic attributes and physiological mechanisms: a bat or a dog, or for that matter a manioc plant, are all believed to be organized in the
same way. They function according to identical biological processes, and their bodily stuff - appearance apart - is the same. If we humans are not
normally aware of this fact it is for epistemological reasons - because we do not ordinarily communicate with them - and not because these
metabolisms are ontologically distinct.

We are thus led to the conclusion that what differentiates species is essentially shape or, more accurately, appearance. As I have shown elsewhere
(Taylor 1993), from a Jivaroan point of view perceived shape refers to a set of differentiated bodily forms, particularly faces, specific to each class of
animate beings. These outward forms exist in limited numbers and are endlessly recycled, which explains why there is no natural creation, and why
birth is not viewed as a process of transformation or 'making' that adds something new to the world. Birth is reappearance, and the Achuar person thus
comes ready-made in terms of bodily features. It follows from this that the Jivaroan sense of personal identity must be rooted in a sense of singularity
of form, and not, as Western post-Freudian notions would have us believe, in a gradual realization of bodily integrity and autonomy, since Jivaroan
bodies do not possess organic specificity. Yet it would fly in the face of common sense to assume that the Achuar actually experience themselves as
purely generic singularities. Impersonal particularized shape may give the self wholeness, but it obviously cannot give it subjectivity.

Subjectivity, however, is primarily a matter of refraction: it takes its source in the sense one has of others' perceptions of self. And that is where we
must look for a solution to the conundrum I have just evoked - of how the experience of an impersonal, externally created body can be experienced
subjectively I believe such a solution is to be found in the web of notions pertaining to affect and memory, if by memory we mean the mental image
we form of people or things. As we all know from reading Gow's fine book (1991), memory, for Amazonian peoples, is intimately linked to kinship.
Indeed, in some sense it is kinship itself. Social relations, in this view, are the condensation and memory of the affective moods built up by daily
interaction in nurturing, sharing and working. The personal mental image one has of others as kin is moulded by this web of feeling; therefore the
image of self, in so far as it is based on the attribution of others' images of it, is necessarily suffused with the memory others have of you. It is
precisely a representation of this generically singular, yet uniquely individualized, image of the person that is denoted by the vernacular expression
wakan, a term usually translated as 'soul' and which in fact refers to the reflected image of a thing, the appearance of someone in a dream as well as
the dreamer's consciousness. Above all, it refers to the ghost of a recently deceased person, that is to say a mutilated memory, in so far as it is a
substantivization of the intersubjectivity which was once fused with the image of a bodily shape that no longer exists. The constitutive relation
between subjectivity and interpersonal ties allows us to understand why vision, language and, more generally, communication are such a vital axis in
defining selfhood, since the refracted image is to a large extent an implicit and even, at times, an explicit description of the person. The Achuar
themselves are acutely aware of this fact, as may be inferred from, amongst other evidence, the structure of their magical love songs. These are
invariably verbal descriptions, addressed to the beloved, of the state he or she is experiencing on seeing, or rather feeling, a magically induced image
of the sender.(9) In sum, the Achuar would certainly endorse Wittgenstein's claim that the body is the best image we may have of the soul, not least
for its reversibility, since it is equally obvious to them that the soul is also the best image we may have of the body as a generic personalized form.

Sociality as inherently affective memory has been described with great finesse and insight by what we, in Paris, call the English school of
Americanism. Nevertheless, our colleagues' accounts have often struck me as somewhat one-sided and indeed surprisingly angelic, for they tend to
minimize a vital component of social relations, namely hostility or vindictiveness. And while the English are very good on love, I think we French
have the advantage of them in the matter of hate.(10) Hostility is a particularly important aspect of social relations and of the psychological
configurations inherent to them, above all in a society such as that of the Jivaroans, which is structured by endemic feuding and intertribal warfare.
Learning to hate, or rather imbibing hate from the fabric of the social environment, is just as important to them as growing to love. And of course
hostility also feeds into the experience of self; it colours, just as much as love does, the texture of the body image as singularized appearance which, as
we have seen, lies at the heart of Jivaroan selfhood.

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. The integrity of one's feeling of self is vulnerable on two counts. First, it is exposed to the death of others, the
shattering of bits of that mirror on which it is dependent - an all too frequent occurrence in the course of an Achuar life, and one that provokes, as its
first reaction, intense socially directed anger. Second, it is exposed to the chronic instability of relations in a society based on loosely-knit kindred
groups, the frontiers of which constantly vary in the flux of endemic feuding and shifting alliances. Traditional life among the Jivaro thus breeds a
kind of rational, latent paranoia, since members of one's closest family may become suspected of treachery in periods of open conflict. Suspicion falls
primarily on one's affines, of course, but it may include even same-sex consanguines, such as brothers or sons.(11) This pervasive uncertainty as to the
real nature of others' feelings for oneself cannot fail to have consequences for the texture and foundations of selfhood.(12) This, I would claim, is
where illness comes in. Sickness, in Jivaroan terms, is the suffering experienced by individuals when they become overwhelmed by the ambiguity of
the social environment and thereby lose a clear sense of their identity; that is, when their perception of self is clouded by uncertainty. In fact, I would
surmise that it is the high level of anxiety generated by the extreme unpredictability of social relations inherent in Jivaroan existence that explains
why any affliction, regardless of its origin and apparently benign character, turns into a symptom of bewitchment if it lasts for more than a few days

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or even hours, and why the relatively detailed taxonomy of pathologies that Achuar informants develop in the abstract so rapidly breaks down into a
single, massive contrast between 'health' and undifferentiated suffering; that is to say, dying.(13)

It is this breakdown of clarity in perception of self, experienced as suffering and conceptualized as an intangible homicidal onslaught, that justifies
recourse to shamanic therapeutic practice. As Severi (1993) has demonstrated for the Kuna healing of madness, shamanic therapy is a form of cure
predicated on the build-up of a complex pragmatic structure wherein the shaman produces a description, generally incomprehensible to the patient, of
his communicative interaction with foreign spirits. The shaman thereby creates an analogue of the patient's state of confusion, with the crucial
difference that he, the shaman, masters this chaotic world by sight and word, and communicates with its denizens through the medium of his familiar
spirits, whereas the patient, for his part, is trapped in a state of communicative breakdown, both with himself and with others. Through this
transmutation of dumb, internal disorder into clarified, structured, explicit though incomprehensible alterity, people are eventually restored to a
normal state of self-awareness; that is, one in which self and the world can coexist at acceptable levels of ambiguity.

There is, however, another Jivaroan way of dealing with the fragility of selfhood. This is by resorting to a ritual experience which is in many ways a
mirror image of the shamanic cure. I refer here to the quest for so-called arutam visions, whereby a person may, in the course of a private ritual
involving isolation, rigorous fasting and the ingestion of large doses of hallucinogenic drugs, receive a message or vision relative to his or her future
existence. The spirit responsible for this prophecy the arutam or 'ancient thing', takes the shape of a dead Jivaro, who, after a complicated and
frightening series of metamorphoses, briefly appears in person to the seeker and addresses him or her. In the case of men, this message usually
concerns the outcome of an act of war or a revenge killing, which they then, of course, feel compelled to carry out. The arutam experience is thus
directly linked to those situations and interpersonal relationships most heavily fraught with unpredictability, and it rests on the same logic that
underlies the resort to shamanic healing. I need not add that the pragmatic structure of the interaction between seeker and spirit is just as complex as
that implied in shamanic curing, indeed in many ways more so (I refer here to the way in which the stereotyped circumstances surrounding the ritual
encounter are constitutive of the event's meaning). I will therefore limit myself to underscoring two salient features of the arutam quest.

First, it centres on the ritual framing of the normal interactions on which subjectivity is built, as perceived by the Jivaroans. Thus, when the Achuar
speak of the arutam's message as a kind of 'soul' which will become henceforth a part of themselves, they are evoking a reification, projected into the
future, of an image of self rooted in a special kind of intersubjective relation, that between themselves - more accurately a modified state of their
consciousness - and the arutam. This hypostasis is modelled on the introjection of an attributed image of self that underlies normal states of
subjectivity; thus, just as the wakan - the body's soul - briefly survives the recently deceased as a substantivization of the memory that surviving kin
hold of it, so the arutam vision he or she has received encapsulates the spirit's description, or image, of their future selves. The wakan, in short, is a
reification of attributed memory, while the arutam 'soul' is a reification of projected selfhood. Paradoxically, this is in fact all that ultimately remains
of people, in the guise of the 'ancient thing' or arutam they in turn eventually become. In other words, the arutam ritual is not linked to an elaborate
cosmology or ontological theory. It is based on the same perception of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that informs the notion of wakan, and its
specific meanings are rooted in the ritual construction of a particular context of interaction, rather than on an elaboration of content. In the second
place, the effect or result of the arutam quest springs from an event of hypercommunication, a kind of saturation of certainty and unambiguous
meaning. Yet this glimpse of a destiny cleansed of unpredictability must remain indescribable, in so far as it is strictly prohibited to speak about the
message received from the arutam. Were one to do so, one would immediately lose the benefit of the vision, indeed the vision or message itself as a
kind of soul-stuff where by the sense of self is fortified. And that, after all, is the prime motivation for undergoing the mystical experience, as well as
its final outcome: the acquisition of invulnerability, made manifest by forcefulness of speech and manner, face painting of a certain kind, and
heightened anger; that is to say, intensified homicidal drive.(14) In sum, just as illness leads to a loss of the capacity to communicate except through
the mute language of symptoms, the state of super well-being brought on by the encounter with an arutam implies a suspension of linguistic exchange
and the manifestation of an array of indirect signs or 'symptoms' expressing a condition of enhanced selfhood.

Thus, if we compare the two kinds of ritual experience I have briefly evoked, the shamanic cure and the arutam quest, we have on the one hand a
mediated description of mastered chaos through which an individual may rid himself of the suffering occasioned by overwhelming ambiguity and the
erosion of selfhood it entails, and on the other hand a mediated secret vision or 'hearing' of absolute certainty, which dramatically intensifies the force
of selfhood. I speak advisedly of mediation in the case of the arutam quest because, even though the seeker is alone during the ritual, it is not the
seeker himself who receives the message of the apparition but rather his wakan, his body's soul, the whole point of the drugs and fasting being to
induce a state of dissociated consciousness. So, in fact, the structure underlying the situation of communication in both cases is similar. In the curing
session, the patient is 'as dead', entirely passive while the shaman gradually identifies himself with the components of disorder, figured as foreign
creatures and languages, and so orders them as he describes them. In the arutam ritual, the seeker is also figuratively dead (during his period of
isolation his kin must avoid evoking his image, just as they would avoid thinking about a recently deceased person), so that his 'soul', his de-
intentionalized consciousness, may gradually become similar to the truly dead person who will eventually appear to him; and this interaction with an
entity which is structurally just as 'outside' society as are the foreigners encountered by the shaman begets absolute clarity, not just a healing - which
is really a return to the self - but rather an enhancement of the self or state of hyper-selfhood.

Let me now sum up this sketchy description of Jivaroan notions about the person and the experience of self they imply. I began by showing that the
person is defined negatively, 'en creux', as it were, by the intersection of a certain number of inexplicit assumptions concerning animation (viewed as
imputed subjectivity), sociality (viewed as ordered communication and therefore implicit in the indigenous notion of animation), and finally shape,
ordered surface, that principle of speciation dividing an otherwise generalized physiological model or matter. I went on to show that the surface
proper to humans as a class of beings - that is to say, their appearance - is conceived of as being drawn from a finite stock of recyclable distinctive
forms. Hence, the Jivaroan sense of self is predicated on the fusion of a singular though generic body image and other people's emotionally-laden
perception of this body image, whereby it comes to be experienced as uniquely personal. I then argued that because selfhood is textured by
intersubjectivity, because intersubjectivity is itself created in the context of social relations, and because social relations among the Jivaro involve
shifting kin ties and institutionalized forms of reciprocal violence - because, in short, they live in a world permeated by uncertainty and hostility - the
Achuar's sense of self is highly vulnerable. It therefore alternates between states of uncertainty, erosion and breakdown, on the one hand, experienced

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as murderous, undifferentiated suffering which calls for shamanic healing, and, on the other hand, states of enhancement brought on by a mystical
experience of certainty.

This leads me to the heart of my argument. In analytic terms, a person or self is not a thing, a specific essence shaped by an explicit or implicit theory,
or in other words, an indigenous concept. Being a live human person is not a state defined as such - there is no canonical discourse about 'the person',
and nobody will ever state 'this is our idea of what a man or a woman is' - yet it is nonetheless precisely circumscribed by the articulation of a set of
non-explicit premisses. Being a person is thus an array or cline of relational configurations, a set of links in a chain of metamorphoses simultaneously
open and bounded. The chain is open because death itself is an endless process, as is the shift from 'we' to 'they', from Jivaro to foreigner; it is
bounded, nevertheless, because being a live self can be defined only by contrast to either a state of being less than alive, in illness, or a state of being
more than alive, through the acquisition of arutam. And this is why we find both the stark problematic oppositions set up in mythic narratives - life
versus death - and, in ritual and in other fields of practice, life and death as a continuous process. This is the key to the paradox I started out with,
concerning the coexistence of two seemingly contradictory notions of death. These are not, in fact, two distinct compartmentalized conceptions of
mortality, one naturalistic, the other persecutory, but rather two mutually implicated perspectives, one focusing on the terms rather than on their
relation, the other focusing on the relation while bracketing the terms. Further, the actualization of the different occasions in which a notion of the self
is evoked forms a chain: the arutam quest leads to killing, aggression and suspicion, which is the cause of sickness and disorientation, which in turn
requires either shamanic healing or further arutam quests, and so on. This means that the different types of relationships and self-creations discussed
here are not only related structurally, but also practically.

The approach to the question of personhood outlined above has some wider implications which I would, by way of conclusion, draw to your
attention. Most Jivarologists, myself included, have tended to consider the arutam complex, because it is intellectually spectacular, and also because
of its esoteric aspects, as the heart of Jivaroan culture, the very basis of its identity for Indians and ethnographers alike. And yet, while it is true that
until recently the vast majority of Achuar men had experienced arutam encounters, it is equally true that these mystical quests only concern an
extreme state of Jivaroan personhood, not 'Jivaroanness' as such, and most informants would state that one could live a normal Jivaroan life, and be a
Jivaro (though admittedly a second-rate one) without ever experiencing an arutam encounter. Thus, by positing that the arutam complex lies at the
heart, rather than on the boundaries, of Achuar culture, we have misrepresented not only the arutam complex itself but Jivaroan culture in general.
Nor is this optical skewing a particularity of Jivarology. I suspect that a great many of our ethnographic accounts are in fact based on a similar
conflation between 'culture' and 'extreme states'. For example, any account that purports to characterize the symbolic culture of this or that society by
generalizing conceptions deduced from any kind of specialized discourse can only be wrong: wrong because it is blind to the importance of practice
and contextualization, and assumes that culture is a system of language and thought shared, with due allowance for sex and generation, by all.
Semantic premisses may indeed be shared by all, but pragmatics most certainly are not: in so far as the conditions of use determine how these
premisses are elaborated, expressed and experienced, it is surely unsustainable to claim that a given representation is common to 'the society' if its
meaning is in fact rooted in situations of interaction and forms of contextualization which are not at all collective.

My second point derives in a sense from the former. If my account of the Achuar person and selfhood as a repertoire of different states of being has
more than local validity, then we will have to review our approach to the problem of acculturation. In particular, we must cease to think of
acculturation as a gradual erosion and consequent reworking of the central beliefs of a culture. Among the Achuar, acculturation has in fact always
been there, at the very core or 'middle ground' of the cultural system: it is not a matter of loss so much as the feeling of being no longer compelled to
define the self by experiencing the whole range of states that it normally implies. Acculturation begins in a condition of being locked into a state of
undefined or unmarked normality by no longer engaging in the situations of interaction characteristic of the extreme states; thus an acculturated, or
potentially acculturated, Jivaro is simply an ordinary being, what the Achuar themselves aptly call a nangami shuar, a 'just-so person', the kind of
individual who can move in and out of his and other cultures with ease, provided he remains in their middle grounds or 'zero states'.

At no point in my account have I claimed to present an indigenous theory, or even to spell out a set of implicit or unconscious collective
representations about the person, about life or about death; I have simply followed a few of the links between clumps of 'things that go without
saying'. Yet even my superficial presentation of this chain of relations has, I trust, been sufficient to evoke the stylistic uniqueness of Jivaroan culture.
Taken separately, bits of the conceptual schemes on which it is founded can be found floating all across Amazonia; equally, the cognitive
mechanisms and, more specifically, the logical structures underlying the pragmatics of Achuar culture can also be found all over Amazonia, and
indeed far beyond. The particularity of Achuar culture must therefore be rooted in the establishment of a certain kind of logical circularity between
these cognitive and notional bits and pieces. This is a commonsensical view, and hence a very lame conclusion, but it need not be for all that a down-
beat one. It allows us, in particular, to circumvent that situation akin to the physicists' uncertainty principle, whereby if we concentrate on cognitive
mechanisms we miss out on culture, and if we describe culture in the traditional manner we fly in the face of what cognitive research has taught us
about the workings of the mind. Cognitive mechanisms as such are not our province as anthropologists, first because, ultimately, they are probably
invariant, and secondly because the experimental protocols now being used in cognitive psychology are virtually impossible to reproduce in normal
field conditions. But then neither is culture as we used to see it. Obviously we cannot go on saying 'the Achuar think that ...', because the content of
thought we then usually go on to describe is not in fact what they actually think. And yet we must, in some sense, go on saying precisely that, and
this is really the good news. For if our aim is to gain, and share with our readers, an insight into the thoughts and experiences of people whose
assumptions and lifestyles are different from ours, we can only do so, surely, by spelling out and explicating the large part of culture that 'goes
without saying', that escapes indigenous conceptualization because it is embedded in, and acquired through, practice rather than discourse. Certainly,
the version of culture we are thus led to produce does not in any sense mirror our informants' experiential and mental universe, but I do not see how
we could even imagine this universe unless we invent for ourselves and our readers a kind of discursive 'stand-in' for a culture we have not been
socialized in, and thereby give ourselves the means of empathizing to some degree with the lives and thoughts of the people we are studying. We
must, in other words, treat the net of often inexplicit and unelaborate assumptions that is constitutive of culture as if it were a metaphysics, because
this fictional construct is of necessity our essential, indeed our only, procedure for bringing to light and verifying the necessary circularity of the
combination of premisses found in any given culture, as well as our only way of allowing for the exercise of that 'analogical introspection' that lies at
the heart of our discipline. And this means that we can go on happily working away at our socio-cosmological monographs, provided we respect two

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sets of conditions. First, we have to pay much closer attention than previously to the contextual aspects of discourse and communication, cease
assuming that culture is a collective text, and be more realistic in our description of who thinks what and how in which circumstances. Second, we
should accept that our ethnographic accounts are elaborate thought experiments rather than accurate renditions of indigenous systems of thought, and
view them as a conceptual tool inherent to the practice and writing of anthropology. Cumbersome this tool may be; yet if we take into account the
complexity of the phenomena that, by common consent, anthropology is supposed to deal with, our monographs must rate as highly economical
instruments (in every sense of the term) and the disproportion between our means - an elaborate controlled fiction with no pretence at realistic
description of mental phenomena - and our ends - the discovery and verification of the nature of the links between mental models - is not as large as
might seem at first glance.

The shift of perspective I have suggested is not much to ask for, and it implies no major overhaul of object or method. Yet it does seem to offer
anthropology some kind of future as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit, which is surely more than can be said either for the bland objectivism we have
long practised, or for the self-destruct vehicle devised by the more zealous militants of post-modernism. Moreover, the sort of minor displacement of
point of view I am advocating is entirely typical of our discipline's intellectual tradition; indeed the occurrence of such slight and often unnoticed
shifts is precisely what makes anthropology appear to outsiders as the endless rehashing of the same problems, while its practitioners feel it is
constantly progressing. Thus, I would like to think that the banality of my conclusion is proof of sorts that the approach I am arguing for is not
entirely alien to that great canon so signally shaped and illustrated by the scientist whose memory we honour today.

NOTES

1 The expression refers to a paper by M. Bloch published in Kuper 1992, under the title 'What goes without saying. The conceptualization of
Zafimaniry society'. Throughout this lecture, I will often refer implicitly to the hypotheses presented in that contribution. I would like to thank Bloch
for his illuminating comments on an earlier draft of this work, and for his help in preparing this paper for publication.

2 This is a crude simplification. It would be more accurate to say that the intentionally evil agency that causes death is usually anthropomorphized,
but not necessarily human. For illustrations of the view of strictly human agency, see for example Capistrano de Abreu (1941: 140-1) on the
Cashinahua, and Harner (1972: 152-3) and Descola (1994: 257-70) on the Jivaroan Shuar and Achuar. Among the Piaroa, the agent may be a divinity,
an animal or a foreign sorcerer (Orering 1985), among the Yagua, it may be human or vegetal (Chaumeil 1983: 264-311); among the Guajiro (Perrin
1992: 209-12) and the Tukano (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 80-6), it may be animal (qua animal or under the guise of the Master of animals).

3 A sample of these myths is analysed by Levi-Strauss (1967).

4 Two points are at issue here. The first is the problem of the integration of mental models. Among anthropologists, discussion of this question, in so
far as it exists, has mainly centred on the way domain-specific cognition might, through the capacity for meta-representation, be culturally elaborated
(Atran 1993 [following Sperber 1990]; Bloch 1993; Sperber 1993). As Bloch points out, this theme, which is obviously of vital interest to
anthropologists, is still very little explored. The second point is the question of the unity of a given culture. 'Cognitivist' anthropologists who, in the
name of psychological realism, refuse to consider culture as the manifestation of an underlying shared script or, a fortiori, as the expression of
unconscious structures, find it very difficult to account for this aspect of their object of study. They tend to sidestep the problem by claiming that
coherence or systematicity is simply an artefact of ethnography, or even that the very notion of culture is meaningless. Culture may be little more
than 'a second rate orchestra playing a half remembered tune' without the benefit of a conductor (Lawson 1993: 206), yet we must still explain how
and why everyone remembers the same tune, however inaccurately, and why the level of cacophony in any given 'culture' is in fact surprisingly low.

5 This lecture is based on data collected by P. Descola and myself during 26 months of fieldwork between 1976 and 1979 and in 1984 and 1992. It
also draws, of course, on the extensive literature concerning the Jivaro, particularly on the work of Brown (1985), Harner (1972), Karsten (1935) and
Pellizzarro (1978; 1980).

6 For some published versions of this myth as it is told among the Shuar of Ecuador, see Pellizzarro 1980.

7 Implicit in this formulation is the idea that the difference between mythical and ritual discourse is inherent in their respective meaning; i.e, part of
the sense of a mythical narrative derives from the fact that it is implicitly contrasted to a ritual pronouncement, and vice-versa. Although it is
perfectly legitimate to isolate such bodies of discourse for analytic purposes, at some point their interconnexion, even if it appears to be purely
negative, must be taken into account.

8 With the exception of a body of myths relating to a switch from lethal caesarian to 'natural' childbirth. These myths are common at least to the
Shuar, Achuar and Aguaruna. According to these narratives, the birth of a child used in illo tempore to imply the mother's death, since babies could
only be delivered by cunning open their mothers' bellies. Rats eventually took pity on women, and struck a deal with them whereby they taught them
to give birth normally in exchange for a share of their peanut harvest (see Pellizzarro 1980 for some Shuar versions of this myth).

9 These songs belong to a class of utterances named anent, a kind of soul-speech that transcends normal channels of communication. A brief example
of one such invocation, silently addressed by a woman to her absent husband:

'Go flock to my little father's heart/ make him return to me crying pitifully/ go flock to his thoughts (and make him cry) 'why does this feeling come to
me?'/ fly to his thoughts and make him awaken in tears/ (saying) 'why do I awaken thus?/ Oh, she's angry at me/ she is going to leave me!'/ make him
awaken with this thought/ crying, crying, go flock to him/ my little wakan, go flock to him' (my translation; the vernacular version, along with
linguistic data, may be read in Taylor & Chau 1983: 118-119).

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10 The irenic perspective of some of the British Americanists is linked to their emphasis on morality, i.e. normative values of sociality, as expressed
by their informants and embodied in their practice; see for example Belaunde 1992; Gow 1991; McCallum 1989; Santos Granero 1991. By contrast,
French Americanists, who generally adhere to a structural-Durkheimian approach, attempt to build up a model of observed social relations
highlighting the 'constructive' (in the sociological sense) aspect of conflict. For examples of this, see Albert 1985; Clastres 1972; Carneiro da Cunha
& Viveiros de Castro 1985; Combes & Saignes 1991; Erikson 1986 (two are French only by intellectual filiation).

11 Virtually the only close kinsperson always to escape suspicion is one's mother. However, one should not imagine that family life among the Jivaro
is persistently conflict-ridden and fraught with uncertainty. In normal circumstances, relations among members of a household or local group are
easy-going and often tender. Still, no one is surprised or particularly indignant - as opposed to angry - when close members of a same family fall out
and become involved in a feud. In such cases the group splits and one or the other party joins a different territorial unit.

12 I think it also goes some way to explain the importance in this culture of forms of magical discourse, such as the anent, meant to shape or modify
others' affects.

13 The Achuar distinguish and name a variety of illnesses. Some - usually epidemic pathologies - are labelled as 'white sickness', others are
considered 'endogenous' and are initially dealt with by resorting to plant medicine or to domestic forms of 'magical' curing. These afflictions are
thought of as 'accidental' only in the sense that the agent responsible for inflicting them may have done so involuntarily, but of course the
unintentionality of this imputed intentionality is inherently suspect; if an illness lingers or worsens suspicion soon fades into the certainty of
deliberate mischief. Judgements concerning the 'health status' of individuals or indeed whole communities are thus highly dependent on the perceived
shape of social relations: in times of imminent or open conflict, not only do people tend to become unusually prone to sickness, but their illness,
whatever its taxonomic status, is immediately attributed to shamanic aggression.

14 This is true of men only. Women do not systematically seek to encounter arutam, and they experience them more rarely than men. The hidden
'strength' (kakarma-) - rather than anger - they gain thereby is generally described in terms of a longer life and greater well-being, privileged relations
to the entities that control the appropriated fertility of garden plants, domestic animals and humans, and secure affective relations to kin. It is also
worth noting that female arutam encounters occur in women's gardens, rather than in the forest, and that they seem to happen only in times of acute
emotional crises.

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Thomson Gale Document Number:A18600770

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