DRAFT
COSMOLOGY, OBJECTIFICATION AND ANIMISM IN INDIGENOUS
AMAZONIA
Terence Turner
University of Chicago (Emeritus) and Cornell University (Retired)
Keynote address presented to the inaugural meeting of the Nordic Network for
Amerindian Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 9, 2008
I would like to begin by thanking the Nordic Network for Amerindian
Studies for the honor of inviting me to address this conference.
Cosmology as anthropological subject
The theme of this conference—cosmology—could hardly be more
ambitious, or more apt as a topic for anthropological discussion, since like
anthropology it is a subject which includes all other subjects. It is also
timely as a topic for discussion on the occasion of this organized attempt to
heighten communication among anthropologists and other scholars of
Amerindian cultures in this region, for whom issues integrally associated
with cosmology, such as the place of humans and their cultures in relation to
animals and other beings belonging to the same cosmic order, the relation
between ontological concepts of the origin and nature of the world and
epistemological perspectives on it that constitute the cultural forms of
subjectivity, or the relation between cosmological ideas and forms of ritual
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activity such as shamanism or communal rites of passage, have long been
and continue to be at the forefront of interest.
Cosmos as totality: hierarchy, synechdoche, and sociocentric perspective
The term “cosmology” as used in anthropology generally refers to a
culture’s conception of the world as an ordered whole, and thus as the
framework of its notion of reality in the broadest and most inclusive sense.
An implication of the conception of the world-order or cosmos as the whole
or totality that both contains and embodies the structure of reality is that its
form is recapitulated in its parts. The “cosmos” as a whole, in other words, is
internally related to its constituent units as macrocosm and microcosm.
Anthropologists and religious students of indigenous cosmologies often
tend to overlook their raison d’etre as both pragmatic and conceptual
approaches to reality, and that they are equally concerned with the
microcosmic and the macrocosmic levels of being: the nature of the
minimal units as much as the total framework of the system as a whole.
Analysis of a cosmological system must therefore seek to demonstrate the
ways the form and character of the totality as a pattern of activity in spacetime is reproduced in the form and content of its principal parts.
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Cosmologies thus tend to assume the form of recursive hierarchies or
synechdoches, in which the parts replicate the form of the whole to which
they are attached.12 Not all parts can do so, of course, but those that do,
which thus retain the features of microcosms of the cosmic whole, constitute
“units” of the cosmic order. Implicit in this hierarchical order of relations of
encompassment is a transitive flow of power or determining force from the
encompassing to the encompassed, or in other words the form of the cosmos
as a totality to the levels and units it contains. This is reinforced in many
cases by the mythical charter of elements of the encompassing framework of
the system, as temporally prior to its contents, comprising the first parts of
the cosmos to emerge or be created at the beginning of time. There is
nevertheless an implicit ambiguity in this order of causal priority, in which
the highest level of the system appears to create or control its lower-level
units. That the latter embody the same form as the cosmos as a whole
suggests the possibility that the causal arrow might in fact fly in the other
direction, so that the cosmos as a whole might be understood with equal
logical consistency as a projection of the structure of its smallest unit.
For a fuller discussion of the notion of “recursive hierarchy”, the principle that social
and cosmological structures may be constructed by replications of the same structure at
successive levels of inclusiveness, with specific attention to its use in South American
social and cosmological systems, see Turner 1997a. On synechdoche as a form of social
and cultural structure see Turner 1999. 2006.
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This very possibility seems in fact to be suggested by a second
common feature of indigenous and Pre-Copernican cosmologies in general:
that they tend to represent human society, or the sector of the cosmos it
occupies, as the focus or central point of the cosmic order. This human
sociocentrism effectively makes the subjective perspective of human society
on the encompassing world appear as an objective ontological feature of
that world, while at the same time representing it as determined by the
encompassing hierarchical architecture that appears as its primary
ontological feature.
This has conceptual consequences that manifest themselves as
common features of indigenous cosmological systems. One of these is the
tendency to project (unconsciously) the forms of human social order as the
forms or organizing principles of cosmic order. A second consequence is the
tendency to fuse ontological and epistemological categories. The same
schemas, in other words, tend to serve as both ontological concepts of
objective reality and epistemological categories of perspective on that
reality: in sum, at once as the basic subjective and objective forms of
cultural and social consciousness. Indigenous cosmologies thus envision the
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phenomena comprising objective reality, including what we might classify
as natural and inanimate entities, through the epistemological filter of
patterns of human social activity. At this point we return to the problem of
the logical indeterminacy of the relative causal priority of the higher and
lower levels of the cosmic hierarchy noted above. The question is whether
cosmology in the sense that we have been discussing it may be understood
as a form of alienated social consciousness, even perhaps a sort of fetishism.
(Turner 1997b/2000). This is a question to which I shall return in the
conclusion of this paper.
Suspending for the moment this question of alienation, the point is
that indigenous cosmology as a form of social consciousness must be
understood as both an objective (ontological) and subjective
(epistemological) construct, in which the latter is unselfconsciously
projected as the former by virtue of the location of the vantage point of
subjective perspective as the center of the objective order of the cosmos.
World-view and cosmology: subjective and objective perspectives
As systems of subjective perspectives, however unconscious they may
be of their subjectivity, indigenous cosmologies share some of the properties
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of what some anthropologists and philosophers have called “world view”,
or how cultures formulate the subjective cognitive and affective perspectives
of their members on the world. (Dilthey 1957; Kearney 1984) Accounts of
world view typically focus on the subjective perspectives of cultural persons
on the social and natural world more than on notions of the objective
structure of the cosmos, while students of cosmological systems reverse
these priorities, as a rule remaining relatively unconcerned with issues of
subjective perspective. It is nevertheless obvious that analyses of
cosmologies could take more systematic account of the way cosmological
systems may serve as frameworks of systems of subjective perspectives.
Each level and unit within a cosmological structure may potentially serve as
a subject position, and thus contribute to the formation of epistemological
perspectives of subjects occupying, or identified with, that position within
the cosmic system (what may count as a “subject” is an ethnographic and
theoretical question which requires further discussion, but we may anticipate
here to the extent of noting that subjects may, and regularly do, occupy a
number of distinct subject positions over time and in different situations,
and hold different perspectives toward themselves or either within the same
unit or across different ones).
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The potential overlap between conceptions of cosmology and world
view serves to highlight the pertinence of some of Kearney’s critical
observations about anthropological studies of world view to analyses of
cosmology. Kearney acutely recognizes how the idealist bias of most
anthropological discussions of world view have limited and distorted the
scope and content of their treatments of the subject. As he says,
Cognitive anthropology has been idealist in conception and
therefore has not employed … interactionist methods … [This has led
to a focus on] only one or two modalities or relationships at a time. In
contrast to these mid- and low-level examinations of isolated
modalities, world-view study entails concern with the formation,
mutual influence, and significance for behavior of multiple and higher
level cognitive structures. A world view is, from this approach, an
integrated combination of concepts, typical of a particular society,
having to do with the nature of things... [comprising] a set of
hierarchical processes which at one end have to do with the physical
reception of information from the environment and, at the other end,
with the highest abstraction of these primary sensations. At every
level the organization of these cognitive structures depends on their
previous state, which is as much a given as is the sensory information.
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Perception and world view are thus products of reality, mind, action,
and history. (Kearney 1984:46-47)
Schemata (forms of consciousness and material activity) as units
Drawing on the work of cognitive psychologists such as Neisser
critical to the established empiricist-positivist information-processing
approach, Kearney proposes that the basic units of structures of cultural
consciousness of reality at all levels should be conceived as ”interactive
schemata, which act in an anticipatory capacity to determine the selection of
new information and the manner of its incorporation into these schemata,
which in turn become altered in the process.” (Kearney 1984:45;
[Neisser1976:54]) Kearney’s move to a notion of schema (plural: schemata)
as the form of the units of a world view conceived as made up of interactive
relations at both conceptual and pragmatic levels applies equally to studies
of cosmology, as I shall argue in what follows. As Kearney remarks,
however, concepts of schemata developed in philosophy and psychology are
too limited in scale and scope to be applied directly to studies of social and
cultural systems. He points out that cognitive psychological conceptions of
schemata are necessarily formulated at the level of the individual. Cognitive
anthropology has tended to follow the lead of cognitive psychology in this
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respect, focusing on individual schemas or pairs of schemata conceived in
abstraction from the more complex systems in which they are
ethnographically encountered.
Schemata as encompassing structures: the vertical integration of
cosmology and society
Kearney’s suggestion that ‘world views’ consist of schemata,
interconnected to form “multiple and higher level cognitive structures”,
implies that schemata are not merely to be understood as the units of world
views or cosmological structures, but equally as constituting the higher level
structures themselves. Given that cosmological systems typically comprise
hierarchies of levels including collective cultural patterns, social structures,
and the schemata of individual consciousness, it is clear that analyzing
cosmologies in terms of schemata leads directly to conceptualizing them as
“vertically integrated” structures coordinating the interaction among the
cultural, sociological and psychological levels of the fundamental forms of
material and subjective activity embodied in the schemata comprising the
structure of the cosmos. Within these vertically ordered constructs, causal
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arrows point in both directions. Schemata that define the identity of social
persons and bodies, as well as familial and kinship relations, themselves
constitute integral components of the ‘higher level cognitive structures’
comprising world views and cosmologies. Such ‘higher level structures”
must stand in hierarchical relationships of inclusion and interaction with
their counterparts at the ‘lower level’ of the individual actor, but the latter
engages with situations and conditions of action that may compel
accommodations in received schematic forms of action that compel changes
at higher levels.
An anthropological perspective on schemata as units of social and
cultural systems such as world views or cosmologies thus leads to an
emphasis on the importance of relations among schemata as constituents of
more complex schematic structures. One way it does this is to emphasize
the potential ability of schemata to include one another, and thus to form
hierarchical systems of levels, comprising relatively more general and
inclusive as contrasted to relatively more specific and included versions of
the same forms of activity. Whole productive or developmental processes,
for example, may become represented as master schemas, including more
specific schematized representations of particular activities or developmental
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transformations. The higher-level, more general forms of developmental
schemas in such cases may correspond to collective social processes or
developmental cycles, such as whole ball games, life cycles, or political
campaigns, while the more specific, included schemata, such as particular
plays, age transitions, or speeches may embody in microcosm the same
relational forms comprised by the more inclusive processes or collective
actions of which they form part. The same applies to the relation between
the cosmos as an encompassing, vertically integrated meta-schema and the
lower-level activities and entities that constitute its units. Cosmology is the
representation of the processes of vertical and horizontal integration of
schemata that (re-)produce the cosmos.
Cosmologies as systems in motion
If the relations that constitute the formal elements of cosmological
systems are schemata, the forms of activities and processes, then it follows
that the systems they comprise, up to and including the level of the cosmos
as a whole, are systems in motion in space and time. Cosmological
systems as wholes and their constituent units at all levels, in other words, are
active entities, undergoing more or less constant processes of interaction,
development, and change, They consist not merely of relations among their
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constituent units but of transformations of those units, and in important
cases, of more or less extended series of successive and interdependent
transformations. Nor, it is important to emphasize, are these relations,
transformations and processes merely ideal constructs like the models often
constructed of them by anthropologists of idealistic persuasions. Indigenous
cosmologies, on the contrary, are produced and represented by their creators
as accounts of material activities that have objective consequences as well as
subjective intentions, ideal significations and symbolic associations. The
forms of the relations comprising cosmological systems must therefore be
understood and analyzed not merely in idealist terms as abstract conceptual
patterns, analogous to semiotic fields of signification or symbolic
classifications, but as the schemata of material activities engaged in the
material production of objective cosmic reality. The content of these
schematic forms consists of the material activities themselves.
The cosmic reality ordered in this way is dynamic: it is not a
synchronic order, analogous to a semiotic field of signification or
classification comprised of conceptual values abstracted from their
pragmatic or material relations, but a continuous process of reproducing its
own structure. It follows, then, from the cosmological principle of the formal
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identity of whole and part, that the minimal units of cosmological structures
must consist, not of inert synchronic categories, conceptual classes, symbols
or semiotic signs but of diachronic patterns of activity in real space-time,
that have both a material and an ideal form. Here we converge with
Kearney’s insight into the nature of the units of world-view and our parallel
development of the same approach to the units and higher-level forms of
cosmology: in both cases, we saw, the units are schemata, objective forms of
activities that are also subjective forms of representation and consciousness
of those activities, that can thus serve to orient their own expression in
performance, development and replication. I put this point in the language of
anthropological theory, but in the eyes of those who create and believe in
cosmological systems, the same point tends to assume a spiritual form.
Schemata as the spirits of forms
As patterns of activity associated with the form of an entity that
inspire and guide the actions that maintain or (re-)produce that form, the
schemas embodied in the forms of entities appear to function as intentional
dispositions to exist and act in the ways prefigured by their forms.
Indigenous cosmologies like that of the Kayapo express this intentional
property as the idea that the forms of things, whether they be humans,
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animals, plants, ghosts or inanimate objects like celestial bodies, are at once
their forms and their spirits. Note that in this cosmological perspective there
is nothing uniquely human about “spirit”. Rather, any entity or unit, at any
level of the cosmic hierarchy of being up to and including the cosmos as a
whole, may possess “spirit” or be infused with spirituality by virtue of the
intentional self-orientation embodied in its own schematic form. This
cosmological idea of the forms of things as schemas imbued with spirit , I
would suggest, is the basis of “animism”, the notion that all living things
and some dead or inanimate entities share a common quality of intentional
subjectivity inherent in their material forms. As noted above, this common
spirituality of things is not an anthropocentric notion, and owes nothing to
human culture, or even to life (although it is usually associated with living
forms): rather, it is best understood as an inherent property of the forms of
things, which may also inhere in inanimate entities or spirits of the dead.
Cosmic structure: balancing transformation and invariance
The term, “structure” is often used loosely by anthropologists, such as
myself in the foregoing pages, as a synonym for “form”. The two terms,
however, have distinct meanings, which are critically relevant to different
aspects of cosmological systems. “Form” has already been dealt with as
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connoting, in the context of this discussion, concepts of schema and spirit.
“Structure” must from this point on also be understood in its technical sense
as a way of coordinating transformations of the relations comprising a
system so that they conserve some invariant relation among themselves: in
other words, so that they remain within the boundary of the system.
Structure is thus both an external limit and an internal constant governing
the variability of a system. A simple form of such a principle of
conservation is the reversibility of transformations: the ability to implement
a transformation and then an opposite transformation that reverses or
neutralizes the effect of the first so as to return the system to its original
condition, its constituent relations conforming to the same principle as they
did before, so that the validity of that principle is conserved. There are other
simple logical types of transformation (reciprocal, corollary, identity), which
may be applied in appropriate combinations to produce analogous structural
effects, but for simplicity’s sake and because of ethnographic considerations
that will become evident, I shall restrict my discussion to the case of
reversibility.
To the extent that a cosmology constitutes a structure, then, we may
be able to say that it consists of reversible schemata of transformational
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activity. The relations or activities that constitute the content of these
schemata, then, depend for the exercise of their capacity for transformational
activity on coordination with other schemata that form parts of the same
structure. This form of coordination is a schema; structure is thus itself a
schema, specifically the schema of the constant relationship among aspects
or properties of a form undergoing transformation. It is thus the
quintessential property of form that is conceived in the indigenous
cosmological systems that we shall be discussing as the “spirit” of the form
or entity.
KAYAPO COSMOLOGY: A CASE STUDY
What I now propose is to try to put some ethnographic flesh on these
abstract theoretical bones, to investigate how these general propositions
about the properties of cosmological systems may apply to the cosmology of
the indigenous Amazonian people I know best, the Mebengokre Kayapo of
Central Brazil. (Figure 1, Figure 2). and make a few tentative suggestions
about more general features of Amazonian systems. Although my analysis
will be grounded in a specific case, however, I believe that it has general
implications for the understanding of many indigenous Amazonian and
Amerindian systems. I recognize, however, that there are important
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differences among the cosmological ideas of Amazonian and other
Amerindian societies, that arise in conjunction with their differing social
systems—as the ideas set forth in this introduction would predict. Our
understanding of these systems of social consciousness must proceed in
concert with analyses of the varying social systems in which they have
taken shape.
The Kayapo cosmos
Following the general principles outlined in the introduction, I propose to
approach the analysis of the Kayapo cosmological system through an
account of Kayapo schemas of the production, dissolution and replication of
the forms of social things. The Kayapo possess a mythical account of the
origin of the cosmos as a spatio-temporal continuum. It does presuppose the
existence of a timeless and unstructured space as the raw material for the
creation of space-time, but then so does the Biblical myth of Genesis
presuppose the existence of the waters of the ocean and the spirit of God
moving about over them. In the Kayapo myth, a primordial tapir (a
reasonable stand-in for Jehovah) moves about over the land, gnawing down
the trees that held up the disc of the sky, so that its edges fell to earth,
creating the dome of the sky we see today. I shall return to this myth in a
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moment. The Kayapo conception of the world, however, can best be
understood not by starting from the myths of the creation of cosmic spacetime, but from the actual source and model of Kayapo cosmological ideas,
namely the Kayapo social universe as embodied by the village community
and its surrounding region
The village as cosmogram: the two dimensions of space-time
The Kayapo, like other Central Brazilian peoples, are well known for
their large, geometrically laid out villages. (Figure 3) The Kayapo social
community is laid out as a cosmogram, so that the Kayapo conception of the
world as a circular disc divided into concentric zones can be most easily
grasped from the spatial form of the village itself. A circle of matriuxorilocal
extended-family households surrounds the open central plaza, which is the
locus of communal social, political and ceremonial activities. In the middle
of the plaza stands the men’s house, called /ngà/, “center”. It is also the midpoint or center of men’s lives, as they move out of their natal houses,
formally separating from their childish relations to their fathers and mothers,
to take up residence as batchelors in the /ngà/, and several years later, upon
impregnating the woman whom they have been courting, and thus becoming
fathers in their own right, take up residence in their wives’ houses.
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Immediately beyond the circle of houses is a zone perhaps two
hundred meters wide called /a-tuk/, the "black" or "dead" ground. This is a
transitional zone between the social space of the village and the asocial
domain of the savannah and forest beyond. In this zone are located the
cemetery and various ritual seclusion sites used by those undergoing rites of
passage, as well as middens of trash from the houses. It is also an area
frequented by lovers pursuing extra-marital affairs, often referred to as
“behind the house” liaisons (/kikre bu’ã/). This zone is cross-cut by paths
leading to water sources, swidden gardens and sites of hunting, fishing and
foraging activities in the forest and savanna. There are thus continual
activities of coming and going that pass in both directions through this zone,
the more important of them having the character of reversible
transformations between the central village and the peripheral zone of
nature. The zone containing these natural areas extends, as far as the
conceptual scheme is concerned, to the outer limits of space-time.
Horizontal space is thus organized as a concentric series of zones. (Figure
4). All of these zones constitute points or stages of reversible activities and
processes of entering and leaving social space, or socialization and
desocialization, as I shall explain. The concentric form of the world is thus
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not a purely spatial but a spatio-temporal form: a concentric dimension of
social space-time.
The beginning of cosmic space-time: An origin myth
Let us now return to the cosmic origin myth. As we have seen, the
circular form of village space replicates in microcosm the macrocosmic form
of cosmic space-time, conceived as a circular, concentrically divided flat
disc. As I mentioned above, the outer limits of this disc are constituted by
the dome of the sky, whose edges rest directly on the earth around the
circumference of the terrestrial disc. The sky originally consisted of another
flat disc parallel to the earth. Its edges rested upon giant trees, but they were
forced to fall to the earth when the trees were gnawed through by a giant
tapir. The cosmos then assumed the form of a dome resting on its edges on
the outer circumference of the disc of the earth. (Figure 4)
This direct contact of the celestial and terrestrial discs made possible
the passage of the sun from the one to the other, and its return under the
earth to repeat the same journey at its starting point the following day. The
tapir’s action thus brought about the diurnal movement of the sun from the
point where it comes up from beneath the eastern edge of the terrestrial disc,
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follows its path along the dome of the sky to its highest point at mid-day,
and descends to the point at its western edge where it “hides itself” by going
down under the earth again. The Kayapo liken this linear diurnal movement
to the growth of a plant from “root” (/kratch/) to “tip” (/‘ênhôt/). They call
the place in the east where the sun rises the “root” of the sky (kàykwa
kratch/) and the point in the west where it sets the “tip” of the sky” or “the
upper sky” (/kàykwa ‘ênhôt/). These are the only Kayapo cardinal points:
north and south are not lexically differentiated, but are called merely “the
edge of the sky” (/kàykwa nhirê), referring to the sides or edges of the sun’s
path from east to west. The journey of the sun along its path across the
middle of the celestial dome is thus conceived as creating a vertical
dimension of space-time, linear rather than concentric, unidirectional with a
beginning and an end, but continually replicable.
Notice that the diurnal journey itself is divided into two equal halves which
reverse each other: the morning phase of the rise to the zenith, the midpoint
of the journey (high noon), and the afternoon/evening phase of decline to the
setting, but does not yet contain within this form the necessary element
capable of producing its own replication.
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The tapir’s creation of the dome of the sky by causing its edges to fall
to rest on the terrestrial disc did not of itself bring into being the articulation
of the latter into the concentric zones that now constitute its reversible
spatio-temporal structure. This concentric articulation of the horizontal
dimension of cosmic space-time only comes into existence with the
establishment of a differentiated human domain, the village, which serves as
its central point of reference, as it also does for the vertical dimension, being
located directly beneath the midpoint of the sun’s path, the exact center of
the celestial dome. The tapir’s creative act likewise did not fully activate the
link it created between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of space-time
that allowed the sun’s journey along the linear/vertical dimension to become
fully reversible and self-replicating. This active link is provided by the social
schema of the movement of men as husband-fathers from the central men’s
house to the end of their linear spatio-temporal life-paths as residents of their
wives’ houses. This move is only made possible by the men’s consummation
of their marriages by producing children, thus reproducing the father-son
relationship that formed the starting point of their original journeys from
their parents’ houses to the men’s house. It is this that now produces the
replication of that movement by the next generation, making the end-point
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of the men’s journey the starting point of a replication of that journey by
their sons: a symbolic reversal.
Linear movement in space-time is thus made to produce its own
reversal in a way that simultaneously brings about its formal replication.
This also brings the linear/vertical dimension into structural coordination
with the concentric/horizontal dimension of space-time. The series of
concentric spatial zones into which the terrestrial disc becomes divided in
relation to the human village community embodies consecutive stages or
levels of this reversible transformational process, comprising both the
formation and dissolution of human social identity. Socializing processes
move from the periphery toward the center; desocializing processes move in
the opposite direction. The two dimensions share a common boundary and
both are now are made reversible within the same span, thus completing
their relation as components of a common structure.
The concentric zones of space-time as levels of a hierarchy of natural and
social processes
The ring of houses that constitutes the outward form of the village
constitutes the boundary of the fully social and cultural space centered on
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the village plaza with its central men’s house. The matri-uxorilocal
extended-family households comprising the segments of this circle are
themselves internally organized in formally concentric terms, with
monogamous nuclear family units as their central focus, surrounded by a
penumbra of extended family relations comprised of grandparents and
grandchildren, cross-sex parental siblings and affines (maternal uncles as
adults and paternal aunts and uncles are not residential members of the
household but continue to form part of the extended family for which the
household serves as a focus). (Figure 5) The nuclear families of procreation
that constitute the focal units of this household structure, comprising the
sexual relationship between husband and wife and the relations of filiation
between parents and children to which they give rise, are considered to
consist of relatively “natural” or animal-like links of biological
procreation. Fully social identity, embodied by names and ritual “valuables”
or /nêkrêtch/, is conferred only by more peripheral extended family
relations such as grandparents, maternal uncles and paternal aunts.
The household, in short, is a transformational structure, in which the
unsocialized, “natural” products of its minimal nuclear family units, the
children, receive socializing inputs of tokens of social identity (names and
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“valuables”) from peripheral extended family relations, their uncles, aunts
and grandparents. These concentric socializing inputs, combined with the
linear process of the growth of the children, lead in turn to the dispersion of
the nuclear families, thus continually. The successive, concentrically
reversible processes of formation and dispersion of nuclear families act as
the beginning- and end-points of linear series of transformations, which
propel socialized adult persons into the formation of new families of
procreation in the households in which they pass their maturity, where they
assume the statuses of name-givers, parents-in-law and household heads,
thus replicating the process.
A man must move from his natal household to take up residence in the
men’s house, where he resides until he marries and can move on to his
wife’s and wife’s mother’s house. These moves coincide with successive
promotions through the age grade and age set system from boys to
batchelors to young husbands, fathers and sons-in-law, and on to the higher
statuses of fathers-in-law, grandfathers and extended-family household
heads. Women go through a similar series of transformations of family
status and membership in the women’s system of communal ageassociations, with the major difference that they remain resident in the
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households into which they were born. (Turner 1979b) Both the women’s
and men’s transformations in social age, family status and collective group
membership are effected by successive rites of passage into progressively
more fully socialized personal status-identities.
Central plaza, men’s house, and the communal ceremonial system as
meta-transformational zone
The complex series of communal ceremonies required for the
transformations of personal status and family relations also serve as rituals
of recruitment to the men’s age sets associated with the men’s house and the
women’s associations, which are formally associated with the men’s house
as “wives of the men’s house.” It is these associations that carry out the
communal ceremonies.
These ceremonies take place primarily in the
central plaza within the ring of houses, but they include reversible
movements between the plaza and ritual withdrawals to the transitional /atuk/ zone beyond the houses.
The men’s house thus serves as the focus of a cluster of collective
male and female associations that replicates the form of the relations among
the members of a household on the plaza periphery. These communal
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ceremonies of name-bestowing and initiation, constitute the recruitment
relations of the collective male and female age sets and ceremonial
associations that comprise the communal level of social structure. This
means that the collective institutional structure of village society not only
replicates the forms of extended family and household relations, but
pragmatically reproduces them through its activities, which in turn
reproduce its own structure by continually re-recruiting new members of the
communal associations.
What is involved here, however, is not a simple replication of forms.
The communal associations and men’s house represent a different order of
scale from that of the family and household. This increment of scale and
inclusiveness constitutes a higher structural level than that comprised by the
interpersonal relations of an individual family unit. The structure of relations
among the communal associations comprising the men’s house complex
consist rather of generalized and uniformly replicable schemas, analogous in
form to the pattern of extended family household relations but which
directly constitute the social totality (the village as a whole) while at the
same time coordinating the reproduction of the structure of relations in the
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segmentary household units as a generalized pattern identically replicated
by all segments.
The communal institutions and ceremonies identified with the central
zone of social space thus constitute a higher -level meta-structure composed
of generalized normative forms of the same basic set of transformational
schemas of family relations and personal identity they pragmatically serve
to coordinate at the level of each household unit. The circular space of the
village and its immediately surrounding region is thus formed as a
microcosmic replication of the macrocosmic structure of space-time as a
pattern of reversible transformational processes, with the result that the
segmentary units of the village replicate its structure in microcosm. The
system of human social relations comprising the zone of social space thus
assumes the form of a recursive hierarchy of transformational processes of
cosmic space-time. (Turner 1979a, 1979b, 2002)
Social person and social body as microcosms
The cosmic structure is manifested not only in the forms of celestial
and terrestrial space-time and the articulation of the segments of human
28
social organization in the layout of villages, but also in the construction of
social persons and bodies. In Kayapo society, the person is constructed
through social appropriations of the physical transformations and powers of
the body over the whole life cycle, beginning with birth and infancy,
continuing through the development of muscular strength and coordination,
the senses and understanding, sexuality and reproduction, aging, and ending
with death and decomposition of the body in the grave, and the temporary
survival of the spirit as a ghost in the outermost zone of asocial, “natural”
space-time. (Turner 1980, 1985)
All of these aspects and developmental transitions are marked and
given social meaning by a series of rites of passage, which confer
communally recognized items and styles of bodily adornment. The
development of these natural capacities is symbolically marked, channeled
and publicly communicated by standardized forms of decoration and
adornment of the surface of the body. These serve as badges of identity,
attesting to the wearer’s attainment of a specific category of social age,
which from the onset of adolescence is accompanied by recruitment to a
series of communal age sets and associations.
29
These forms of bodily adornment, in association with the aspects of
bodiliness and social identity they represent, comprise a coherent semiotic
system which divides the body into zones analogous to those of cosmic and
village space-time, according the same two dimensions of cosmological
structure. (Figure 8) A vertical axis of irreversible linear development
corresponds in spatial terms to the vertical posture of the body, and in
temporal terms to the growth of the body from “root” or foot to “tip” or
head. The body is also divided concentrically between a central inner space
and a peripheral zone of external interpenetration with social
space.(Turner1980, 1995; Figure 5). A brief summary of the patterns of
everyday secular body painting and the contrasting system of ceremonial
body decoration may suffice to bring out the main features of this complex
code for the construction of social persons.
The Kayapo idea of the social development of the person emphasizes
the progressive transformation of the internal strength and energy located
in the central trunk of the body into relations with the external social and
natural world, through mobility and manual dexterity focused in the feet and
hands, and the senses of sight, hearing, smelling and tasting, located in the
head. These transformational processes are represented and channeled by
30
the basic color scheme of body painting, which consists of black for the
chest, abdomen upper arms and thighs, and red for the feet and lower legs,
hands and lower arms, and red for the eyes, nose and sometimes the mouth,
(Figure 6. Figure 7) Black, the word (/tuk/) for which also means “death”,
and which as we have seen is also applied to the transitional zone between
the village and “natural” zone of the forest, is the appropriate color for the
internal or central part of the body, the source of its strength and lifeenergies, which must be transformed in order to be channeled into socialized
forms of activity and identity through which the embodied person engages
with external social space by way of the extremities of the body. Red
(/kamrek/) is the appropriate color for the parts of the body which directly
interact with external social space, because it connotes vitality, life and overt
expression. (Figure 11, 12, 13,14)
There is an important point to be made here about the relativity of
structural perspectives. The individual body, with its blackened central area
containing transformational processes and unsocialized “natural” powers,
like the individual household with its central nuclear family units with their
“natural” biological relations, appear to invert the form of the concentric
spatio-temporal order of the higher levels of cosmic space-time: those of the
31
village and cosmos as a whole. In the cases of the body and the domestic
household, the center comprises the “natural” zone, and the periphery
consists of transformed, “socialized” relations and forms of activity. In the
case of the village and the macrocosm, by contrast, the center is the zone of
human sociality while the peripheral region is the zone of raw, unsocialized
nature. The concentric form of the dimension is constant, but the structural
values of its contrastive poles are inverted, because the direction of the
transformational processes that mediate between its contrastive central and
peripheral parts are reversed. This in turn is the result of the contrast
between the relation of the subject’s position to the spatio-temporal focus of
sociality.
When the vantage point of the subject is his or her own individual
body or nuclear family within an extended-family household, her or his
central vantage point is related as a relatively peripheral, unsocialized
element of the social totality constituted by village social space. When his or
her perspective is centered in the village plaza or men’s house in contrast to
the peripheral houses, ‘black” zone or peripheral natural zone of forest and
savanna, the center that forms his/her vantage point appears as the zone of
sociality and the periphery the space of natural processes and “black”
32
desocializing transformations. This pattern of inversions of perspective
exemplifies the way that approaching cosmological and social structures as
systems of transformational schemas can clarify and account for
transformations of representational patterns and subjective perspective that
form integral parts of the internal structure of such systems, rather than
operating only at the level of external relations between systems as wholes.
Ceremonial costume: feathers, hooves, claws and teeth.
For communal ceremonies, most of which are rites of passage of one
sort or another, people adorn their bodies in ways different both in form and
meaning from their normal secular forms of bodily presentation. They
make prominent use of feathers for headdresses, feather capes, bunches of
feathers fastened to their elbows, necklaces, and small breast plumage stuck
over the whole central area of the body (that area normally painted black in
the secular, quotidian style). (Figure 15, Figure 16)They also use noisemaking belts and anklets of tapir hooves, and necklaces of jaguar claws or
wild pig teeth: in short, they try to present themselves as animals, or rather
as hybrid animal-human beings, analogous to the ancestral human and
animal forms of the mythical age before the differentiation of animals and
human society. (Figure 17) There is no space here to describe these
33
costumes, or the ceremonies themselves, in the detail they deserve. In
general terms, however, it can be said that in the adornment of their bodies
for participation in the ritual transformation and reproduction of social
relations, the Kayapo symbolically return to the undifferentiated mythical
state in which animals and humans were much alike, before either developed
into their present forms as social humans or fully natural animals. They then
collectively enact the appropriation and transformation of their ancestral
animal or avian powers into contemporary social and cultural form, as a
framework for the transformation of the relatively undeveloped social forms
of the boy or girl initiands or baptisands into new and more socially
developed forms and identities. (Turner 1991)
These transformations typically entail choreographic formations and
movements that combine concentric movements (e.g., repeatedly circling the
central plaza, while special rites are performed by selected officiants at its
central point, or performing successive repetitions of the ceremony at
successive locations, beginning far out in the forest and moving in to sites
progressively nearer to the village, such as the transitional /a-tuk/ zone, and
finishing up in the central plaza) and linear sequences of rites representing
and inculcating irreversible transformations in the status and identity of the
34
initiands. (Figure 15, Figure 16) The ceremonies themselves, in short, are
organized as symbolic cosmograms embodying the complementary
concentric and linear dimensions of space-time that operate at all levels of
cosmic structure, including the transition from the mythical time of equal
coexistence with animals to the contemporary age of differentiation between
human culture and animal nature. The socializing transformations which
they enact invariably involve transformations of the forms of bodily
appearance of those undergoing and performing the ceremony that
themselves embody the same cosmic pattern.
Cosmological consciousness in the age of inter-ethnic coexistence
The traditional cosmological vision continues to serve as the
framework of Kayapo social consciousness in the contemporary era of interethnic relations with Brazil and the world system. The successful Kayapo
efforts to defend and reclaim their original territory have enabled them to
retain control reserves covering close to 150,000 square kilometers, with 23
villages and a population of slightly over 7,000 people. They have prevented
occupation of their lands by members of the national population and avoided
extensive deforestation by loggers. Kayapo villages thus remain socially
autonomous units surrounded by natural areas of forest and/or savanna. They
35
continue to orient themselves and their communities according to the two
cardinal points of the root and tip of the sky, with the men’s house at the
center of the village plaza conceived as the center of a series of concentric
zones of decreasing levels of socialization, directly beneath the apex of the
dome of the sky. An adaptation of the traditional cosmological pattern
arising from contact with the national culture is the location of
technological and administrative functions involved in interaction with the
Brazilians, such as airstrips, clinics, pharmaceutical dispensaries,. Football
pitches, radio and electric generator shacks, schools, and garages and
parking areas for motor vehicles, in the “black” transitional zone outside the
ring of houses defining the boundary of the village proper. This is indeed a
zone of interethnic transformational processes that now mediate between the
Kayapo community and national Brazilian society.Their location in the /atuk/ zone is thus completely appropriate in traditional cosmological terms.
(Figure 17)
This macrocosmic adjustment of village-level space-time has been
coupled with a parallel adjustment in the treatment of the traditional pattern
of bodily adornment.zone. of the surface of the body as a mediator between
the Kayapo social person and the external space of interaction with Brazilian
36
society. Persons of both genders have supplemented their traditional
repertoire of bodily decoration with token items of Brazilian clothing to
cover the parts of their bodies that Brazilian standards of etiquette require to
be concealed for normal social interaction to become possible. Men now
tend to wear shorts and women one-piece dresses, but both sexes continue to
wear body beneath their clothes and use traditional bodily ornaments,
including headdresses, Kayapo-style necklaces and bracelets, and coiffure
on the exposed parts of their bodies. (Figure 18) The Brazilian clothing thus
constitutes a transformational zone around the central region of their
Kayapo—decorated bodies, channeling their cultural agency into alien
Brazilian social forms where appropriate, while leaving their painted
extremities and traditionally coiffed heads to protrude directly into external
interaction space as themselves. At both the level of the village and that of
the individual body, therefore, an inner Kayapo core persists, with a
transformational zone containing intercultural transformational elements
mediating between it and a concentrically surrounding outer zone of alien
sociality. (Figure 18, Figure 19)
These relatively minor changes in the traditional forms of bodily
adornment may be only the beginnings of a more profound process of
37
cultural change. Already there are signs that Kayapo body painting is
becoming more and more dissociated from its roots in traditional
perspectives on personhood and cosmological space-time, and finding new
and unpredictable spatio-temporal zones to mediate. (Figures 29 and 21)
The most flamboyant items of Kayapo ceremonial costume , particularly the
magnificent feather capes whose metaphorical role is to enable Kayapo
ritual dancers to “fly” (the Kayapo term for “to dance”) are also being put to
new and previously unimaginable uses in the contemporary global system
(Figure 22)
Form and content
I have thus far been attempting to present data to support my
hypothesis that the structure and principal units of Kayapo cosmology
consist of the forms or schemata of the activities by which the Kayapo
create their own forms as social persons , and in so doing also create their
social community and their world (ina word, their cosmos),that produce
and dissolve the constituent units of Kayapo society. From the data we
have considered, we may now be able to derive a second, more general
hypothesis: this is that Kayapo cosmology and, I suggest, many other
Amerindian cosmological systems are founded on the fundamental principle
38
that the forms of things immanently contain the agency or power to produce
themselves, through the transformation of their own contents. The forms of
things, in other words, are actually embodied processes of formation, or the
potential capacity for them. They contain the agency or force that drives the
content of things to assume the specific characteristics and behavioral
patterns proper to their species or kind. This proposition holds, in principle,
for the cosmos as a whole and all its constituent units, including humans and
their social groupings, animals and plants, and non-living beings such as
celestial bodies like the sun and moon. It applies primarily to humans and
higher animals, birds and fish, but the forms of lower animals, plants and
major celestial bodies, which also undergo developmental processes, partake
in principle of the same dynamic quality.
The spatio-temporal pattern of all such developmental processes has
its own proper form, which is the bi-dimensional pattern of linear and
concentric dimensions we have described. In this pattern, the entity in
question occupies the central position as active subject, with the external
others or circumstances to which it relates located on the encompassing
periphery. The development of the specific forms of things, in other words,
is an immanent property of those forms. This proposition exemplifies a
39
fundamental principle of cosmological thought: the schematic pattern of the
cosmos as a whole, considered as a self-replicating process, is reproduced in
each of its constituent units. The self-generation of form is thus an essential
aspect of cosmic space-time. It is the basic developmental force which
compels the content or material essence of things to assume the aspects
required by their relations to the rest of the system—the cosmos—of which
they form part. Forms, in other words, are not to be understood as mere
“envelopes” without functional internal relations to their contents.
Form and “spirit; “Animism”
The cosmos as conceived by indigenous Amazonians is made up of
beings or entities engaged in processes of self-production through the
assumption of specific objective forms, followed by the dissolution of these
forms into relatively formless matter, on the one hand, and relatively
evanescent immaterial spiritual form, on the other. This process, whereby
the relatively unformed content of a being or thing takes on the form
appropriate to its kind, its habitus of affects and activities and its relations to
other beings in the cosmic order of things, is simultaneously the expression
of a schema or form of the activity in question that is an immanent part of
the thing itself. Such schemas with their orientations to the production of
40
specific forms act as embodied intentions, and thus as the analogs, if not the
conscious equivalents, of subjective purposes.
The forms of things, in this view, are the guiding patterns of purposive
activity that cause their objective physical contents to take on the form in
question. They embody in this sense the spiritual force or subjective agency
of the entity, that which makes it what it is. In the case of animate beings,
their objective forms are thus conceived to be the products or manifestations
of a subjective power of intentional action. An example of this is the
Kayapo term /karon/ which is used equally to mean “image,” “form”,
“shadow” or the spirit, soul, or ghost of a person or other entity. Although
humans are thought of as the spirit (/karon/)-possessing beings par
excellence, mammals, birds, fish and many trees, vines and other plants are
also thought to possess spirit-forms and associated subjective powers.
This, I suggest, is the basic notion behind the so-called “animism”
common to most if not all indigenous peoples of the Amazon. (Bird-David
1999; Descola 1996, Viveiros de Castro xxxx) Amazonian animism, in other
words, is grounded in what I have been describing here as the spiritual
connotations of form. In terms of this conception, the form of an entity
41
appears, from the perspective of the process by which it is produced, not
only as the final product of the process but as its guiding principle and
animating force. In these respects the form of the entity acts as—or in
pragmatic terms, is—its spirit.
The synthesis of form (or spirit) and content (or body) that
constitutes a living being, and even some inanimate beings like the sun and
moon, in this view, can only be constructed and maintained by the exercise
of subjective agency. It is therefore unstable and susceptible to disruption
and eventual dissolution as the subject loses its energy and power, either
temporarily, as in illness or shock induced by extreme fright, or
permanently, as in the death of the person or organism. This spiritual force
or formative aspect may thus under extreme conditions become separated
from the bodily or material content of the form, but it cannot exist
independently for long without it. Death brings the permanent separation of
spirit-form from body-content, and thus dissolves the synthesis of form and
content that is the basis of the objective existence of the organism. The
fission of the synthetic unity of spirit and body results in the further
decomposition and ultimate disappearance of its separated parts. The /karon/
or spirit-form, continues to live on after the death of the body as a ghost, but
42
gradually loses its human character, becoming an animal-like being in the
forest and eventually dissolving completely The material content (/in/, flesh
or body), undergoes a parallel transformational process from living body to
blackened mass of rotting flesh, finishing as a disarticulated jumble of white
bones.
Reality, objectification, reversal, the life and death of things, and the death
of death
The essential concern of cosmology is with reality: not merely forms
and spirits of things in the abstract, but the process through which they
become objective realities. Objectification is an intrinsically relational
process. Things become objectified in relation to other things, and their
forms embody the specific forms of these relations. Objectification in this
relational sense is an essential aspect of the transformation of content into
form. It is that aspect of the process that consists of its interaction with other
entities, the way its formation is affected by and in turn affects those entities.
Objectivity in this form-mediated, relational sense, is reality for
cosmological purposes. The objective form or external appearance of a thing
is the mediating link between its content or inner essence and its objectified
or “realized” relations to the other parts of the world to which it belongs.
43
Just as the objective form of a being or thing constitutes a specific set of
relations between it and the system of which it is a part, it also embodies or
implies a specific subject position or perspective in relation to the rest of the
system, together with the power to interact with it.
As this implies, the forms of activity that constitute the ontological
process of objectification also serve as the epistemological categories which
define the perspective of the objectified person or being toward the world.
Objectification, as a combined ideal and material activity, thus necessarily
involves subjectification, or the construction of subjectivity. The identity of
epistemological and ontological categories, and of objective and subjective
perspectives, are logical corollaries of the egocentric and sociocentric
structure of Kayapo cosmology, in which human society is the center and
perspectival vantage point of the cosmos, and the social person is
constructed as a microcosmic replica of this central social zone of spacetime.
As the transformational process through which the constituent units of
the cosmos take on objective reality, and simultaneously become integrated
into the cosmological structure, objectification is necessarily subject to the
fundamental structural constraint of reversibility. In Kayapo belief and
44
practice, therefore, the activities of objectification by which entities and
relations, whether social or relatively ”natural” aspects of the human lifeworld such as individual bodies and nuclear families, are produced
(objectified) as material and ideal realities must inevitably be reversed by
processes of deobjectification: the destruction and dissolution of the
objectified forms of the cultural identities and material being of social bodies
and persons. Mortuary practices, focused in the transitional /a-tuk/ zone
outside of the social space of the village defined by the circle of houses,
provide the paradigmatic case. (Turner n.d.).
Kayapo graves enact this process of formal dissolution by
deobjectifying themselves. Graves are dug as circular pits, in which the
corpse, as we saw earlier, is placed in a flexed position. The pit is then
roofed over with logs and mats. (Figure 23, Figure 24) The earth from the pit
is then heaped on the mats, creating a rounded tumulus. Many of the
deceased's possessions are broken, their forms thus deliberately destroyed to
share in the dissolution of the social and physical form of their owner, and
thrown into the grave or on top of the grave mound. Wives and female
relatives chop their heads with machetes, symbolically damaging their own
forms in sympathetic identification with the deceased. (Figure 25) Both male
45
and female relations cut off their hair, and tufts of the shorn hair of
mourning relatives are fastened to poles stuck in the ground beside the
mound or thrown directly onto it, along with the leaf headbands used by the
performers of the death dance if the deceased possessed "beautiful" names.
For a few months following the burial, the close relatives of the
deceased may visit the grave site, removing any weeds that spring up on or
beside the tumulus. (Figure 26) With time, however, the mats on which the
tumulus rests decompose, and the earth from the tumulus filters down
between the logs into the grave pit. Eventually the tumulus vanishes, the
logs also rot, and the grave levels itself with the surrounding earth,
objectively sharing its owner's objective dissolution. The grave is the
objective aspect of death, the material form of the end and dissolution of
personal existence, but it also becomes the process of its own
deobjectification—the death, as it were, of death. As such, it becomes the
instrument through which the dissolution of death is turned against death
itself, dissolving and deobjectifying its own social form, so far as the
relations of the dead person are concerned. As this process is going on in
the cemetery, the spirit-form of the deceased separates itself from the
decomposing body in the grave and wanders into the forest, becoming an
46
animal-like being, a white ghost which survives for a while in the company
of other ghosts, dancing and singing in the village of ghosts, until its ghostly
form also finally dissolves into nothing.
For the Kayapo, in sum, the existence of things, including people,
consists of correlated processes of objectification and deobjectification, not
merely the life but also the death of things and persons. In both processes, it
is crucial to recognize that form and content behave not merely as
descriptive categories but active principles: material forces or powers that
drive the developmental processes of which the cosmos on all its levels
consists. As powers, they complement and reinforce each other in processes
of objectification, but are unable permanently to sustain their synthetic unity,
which weakens and ultimately disintegrates. Such episodes of
deobjectification may be temporary, as in illness or shamanic activities, or
terminal, as in death.
Nature, animals and the mythical foundations of human culture
The Kayapo think of their own bodies as hybrid combinations of
natural animal qualities and acquired attributes of social identity, the former
exemplified by the internal physical processes located in the central trunk of
47
the body, that become transformed and directed into socially formed
activities of various kinds. The “natural” animal faculties and powers of
human bodies, as well as the wild faunal and floral resources of the
surrounding forest and rivers, are sources of the life energy and sensory
faculties which the social world needs and appropriates to transform and
sustain itself, and constantly assimilates into itself. “Nature”, in other
words, is an integral component of social bodies and thus of social persons,
and natural forces and aspects of being (things that exist of themselves
independently of human social activity) thus constitute essential components
of social space-time and ”culture”, as well as the peripheral zones of forest
and savanna.
In considering the way Kayapo cosmology sets the terms of the
conceptual as well as pragmatic relation of “nature”, as a category of beings
that produce their own forms of objective and subjective being, and
“culture”, defined as consisting of the forms of consciousness and pragmatic
activity produced by human society, it must be remembered that the
structure of human society itself incorporates fundamental “natural” forms
of space-time, agency, and powers inherent in the animal content of human
bodiliness and reproductivity. Human culture is thus conceived more as an
incremental development of these natural elements, a “super-nature”, as it
48
were, than a qualitatively distinct order of existence opposed to “nature” as
mutually external elements of a binary contrast with an excluded middle.
As beings with a specific form and spirit-identity shared with the
other members of their species, humans and animals of the various animal
species stand in a common spiritual relation to the world. All are similarly
occupied with the form-giving, spirit-directed process of objectifying
themselves, a process whose generic form and content of functional
activities (i.e., hunting, foraging, eating, drinking, finding shelter, mating
and reproducing) is essentially identical for all embodied spirit-beings
regardless of the particular differences in the content of the activities
comprising the process entailed by their specific differences of form.
Indigenous people express this identity by saying that animals are people
too, a “person” being defined as any spirit being in the sense just defined.
Humans do not, in this view, have a monopoly on personhood, any more
than they do form or spirit. Beings of different species can thus identify their
concretely different activities on the basis of their functional equivalence in
the shared perspective of their common engagement in the fulfillment of the
needs of sustaining their spirit-forms. An anteater lunching on an ant hill and
a human lunching on a sandwich can thus regard themselves as engaged in
49
the same functional activity, lunching. The human might express this sense
of equivalence metaphorically by saying that the anteater is eating his
sandwich, and the anteater might express the same perception by thinking of
the human as licking up his ants. In the Kayapo cosmological perspective,
there is no basis for privileging the human’s over the anteater’s way of
expressing the functional identity of their activities.
In a similar vein, the Kayapo think of other species as having their
own forms of such human artifacts or activities as houses, songs and
ceremonies, and even for some purposes (such as shamanic communication)
language, although the actual forms taken by these activities are very
different from their human equivalents. The essential principle is the animist
belief in pan-spiritism as a ground of essential identity of humans and
animals. The belief in such a generic identity of spirit, however, does not
imply that the Kayapo make no distinction between animal nature and
human culture, or that they imagine that animals identify themselves as
modern, cultural humans like themselves.
There is a widespread Amazonian myth, which the Kayapo also
possess, that describes an original Edenic state in which the ancestral forms
50
of animals, as they then were, identified themselves with humans, and
shared human ways as they then were. According to the myth, animals could
speak and understand human language, and shared certain rudimentary
“cultural” forms with humans, such as bows and arrows or cooking fire,
whereas humans had not yet developed the distinctive forms of
contemporary human culture and society. Humans, however, did not
completely identify themselves as animals, and played a number of meanspirited tricks on the naively trusting animals, which ultimately led to the
breakup of the primordial solidarity among the species.
In interpreting this myth, it is important to recognize that the protohumans and proto-animals described by the myth are not represented as
identical with the contemporary forms of either humans or animals. The
point of the myth is precisely to explain how humans became fully human,
and therefore different both from their ancestral mythical prototypes and
from animals, by developing fully human culture, and how this conversely
led to the animals’ loss of the quasi-human qualities they originally
possessed, such as language and fire, so that they became like the nonhuman-like animals the Kayapo know today. The essential point of these
myths, in other words, is not to assert a primal identity between humans and
51
animals (or culture and nature) that somehow persists to the present day, but
to explain why the original identity of ancestral humans and animals was
destroyed by the humans’ development of culture and consequent
differentiation from animals, and most importantly, how the possession of
culture makes contemporary humans different from their mythical ancestors.
This fundamental point is succinctly made in the myths that tell of the
differentiation of humans from animals and the origin of human culture. The
most well-known of these is the story of the origin of cooking fire and its
appropriation by humans. It tells how before humans possessed fire, fire
existed in nature, first as the sun in the sky and then as a jatoba tree set
ablaze by lightning, that was being used by a jaguar couple with human-like
attributes to cook the meat of the game killed by the male jaguar with his
bow and arrow. The jaguars had only found the fire ignited by the lightning;
they could not make fire themselves, nor add other pieces of wood to their
single burning log to make a human fire. Nor, significantly, could they
reproduce their own kind—they had no offspring of their own, and there
were no other jaguar houses, no jaguar village, only the single hut of the one
jaguar couple. Only when the jaguars adopted a human boy and nurtured
him so that he grew into a man, thus replicating the status of adult male
52
hunter of which the male jaguar had served as his model, did it become
possible for the young man to break off a bit of the fire (thus for the first
time replicating the form of a unique prototype by using fire to make fire).
This deed created the essentially cultural form of classification, where the
form of the prototype that is replicated becomes the general definition of the
class and the replicated instances the members of the class. The young man
then returned with his replicated instance of fire to the human village. There
he explained to the adult men and women of the village the use of fire and
how it could be made to reproduce itself without limitation from the single
fire of the jaguar. He led the men back to the jaguar’s hut and all the men
together brought it back to their village, where they set the fire log down by
the men’s house in the center of the village plaza. Then all the women came
from their houses around the periphery of the plaza and took pieces of the
burning log back to light cooking fires of their own, which they proceeded to
nourish and rekindle with more pieces of wood.
This was the moment that human culture was born. The essential
component was not simply cooking—a single transformational process,
which itself is a natural phenomenon that the jaguars were able to use,
albeit in a restricted, sub-human manner, with only a single fire consisting of
53
a single log. The key move was the reflexive step of using the fire to
produce itself: in other words, using the transformational process to
transform itself into an open-ended, infinite series of uniform replications of
itself. This, as we have seen, is precisely the meaning of the cosmological
contrast between the concentric zone of space-time comprising the ring of
households surrounding the village plaza and the central zone occupied by
the men’s house.
The structure of transformations embodied in the articulation of
cosmological space-time, and in microcosm in the layout of the village, in
sum, is identical with that laid out in the fire myth’s narrative of the
differentiation of human culture from animal nature. The cosmological
frame of this mythical process helps to clarify not only the differences but
the continuities between animal and human nature. Animals, like humans,
develop their own forms, and thus their own spirits, through their own
growth processes. Humans have no monopoly on “spirit”, and many of their
characteristic ways of behaving—their species-specific “habitus”— are
functionally analogous to animal behaviors. The Kayapo are acutely aware
of these commonalities between their own ways of acting and feeling and
those of animals, but also of their differences. They readily think of animals
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with their mates and offspring in their dens as living in their own “houses”
with their own “families”; but they do not imagine that animals have their
own men’s houses.
Cosmology as ideology
I have sought to show that the Kayapo vision of the order of the
cosmos is no mere pattern of symbolic oppositions or synchronic semiotic
structure, but the schematic form of the process of producing and
reproducing the social world, including the actors and groups of which it is
composed. As a (re-)productive process which is itself its own ultimate
product, its structure is embodied in the entities that produce it and are in
turn produced by it. All levels of social organization, from the community as
a whole to its individual members, are thus conceived as formed through the
same process, which is in turn conceived as instantiating the encompassing
form of the natural universe. This form itself is therefore seen as selfexisting, prior to human social activity and its collective framework of social
organization, (created, in fact, by a mythical tapir before the appearance of
humans) even as it constitutes the encompassing framework of that
organization.i
55
Kayapo cosmology, in these terms, appears to constitute an alienated
form of social consciousness. The essence of the fetishistic inversion of
consciousness is that the existence and structure of society is seen as a
"natural" (cosmic) pattern rather than as producing that pattern, including the
form of its own productive activity. As social consciousness, this results in a
view of society as an ahistorical form, a natural part of the cosmological
order rather than a product of the activity of human agents. Social activity as
such is understood as limited to the reproduction of a received, socially
uncreated pattern.
Kayapo myth and ritual appear at first glance to represent striking
examples of such inversions of social consciousness. Ceremonial
performance implicitly involves a shift of subjective perspective from the
everyday perspective of contemporary humans in secular social contexts to
the perspectives of monstrous quasi-human, quasi-animal beings such as
those of the mythical past, in order to reenact the drama of the creation of
fully human society and personal identities such as their own. This shift is
explicitly represented in the forms of ceremonial bodily adornment that have
been described, and also in the animal- or bird-like movements of the
dancers and the lyrics of the songs they sing to accompany them, which
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describe the actions, habits and feelings of animals or birds but are
frequently framed in the grammatical first person.
We note here, in passing, that this ceremonial perspective corresponds
more or less closely to Viveiros de Castro’s idea of the actual perspective of
humans and animals in contemporary social time, that he conceives as
directly continuing from the view of one another they held in mythical times,
when the relative undifferentiation of humans and animals took the form of
both animals’ and humans’ conception of animals as “humans”, meaning
modern-style, fully cultural humans. (cf. Viveiros de Catro 1998; xxxx) I
have given my reasons for disagreeing with this characterization. Here,
however, I want to emphasize my basic disagreement with “perspectivism”,
which is that it conceives perspectives as singular and fixed, located only at
the level of external relations between species or systems (such as human
society in general and animals in general) rather than as integral parts of the
internal processes of systems, shifting and transforming with changes in the
context of subject positions. The whole point of Kayapo ceremonial activity
as I have described it is precisely the dramatization of a shift in perspectives,
from one of relative identity between proto-humans and proto-animals to
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differentiation between their respective contemporary descendants, fully
socialized humans in contrast to dehumanized animals.
The Kayapo, at any rate, are fully conscious of constructing
themselves and their society through their ritual dramas of socialization. The
whole point of the ceremonies is to reenact, as a process with actual
contemporary effect, the transformation from proto-social, still animal-like
identities or subject positions to the identities and perspective of fully
socialized contemporary humans. They perform the ceremonies that recreate
the forms of social relations and personal identity, taking the alienated forms
of animals or primal undifferentiated animal and human beings in order to
do so, to be sure, but they do so of their own will in collective social actions
under their own control, for purposes and values that they consciously
choose. Moreover, their conception of the cosmic forms of their ritual and
secular actions alike are logically articulated as general notions of reversible
structures of linear and concentrically organized schemas that, whatever
their mythical derivations, actually serve them as generic ontological
concepts and epistemological categories applicable to phenomena of the
physical world as well as sociological forms in contexts where they become
framed as the forms of self-conscious subjective activities and perspectives.
58
Here we arrive at a fundamental paradox of Kayapo and other
Amazonian indigenous peoples’ cosmology considered as a form of social
consciousness. The question is, why, as the Kayapo collectively organize
themselves to reproduce the forms of their social order, transform their
social identities and the membership of their social groupings, and thus
assume the unalienated role of producers of themselves and their social
world, why do they nevertheless feel obliged to assume the character of
asocial, quasi-natural monsters, dancing around the village plaza covered
with feathers, leaves from the forest, and animal claws, hooves and teeth, all
this in order to reenact the drama of their own transformation and that of
society as a whole from raw natural content to self-cooking social form?
One possible answer is that they have not been able to conceive of the
development of contemporary social and cultural forms of humanity as the
historical products of social human beings like themselves, and therefore
attribute their creation to quasi-human, partly animal-like beings, like those
whom they impersonate in their rituals in order to appropriate and socialize
their creative powers.
59
The projection of the structure of society as the structure of the natural
cosmos implies the naturalization of that structure, but the continual
reproduction of that creation of that structure by collective social action in
the great communal ceremonies implies a socialization of consciousness of
the human capacity to produce the forms of society, including those of the
individual social actors who perform the ceremonies, excluding only the
forms of social space-time, and the processes of objectification and
deobjectification that have been reviewed in the preceding account. This
appears to present the paradox of an unalienated reproduction of an alienated
structure. Are other Amerindian cosmologies, and perhaps those of other
peoples, founded upon variants of this same paradox? If so, can we learn
from them to temper our own concepts of alienation and fetishism, and
recognize as did Marx himself at certain points, that formations of social
consciousness may be complex mixtures of alienated and unalienated forms
of praxis and consciousness, the two coexisting for many purposes in noncontradictory ways, and varying widely in the relative degrees to which
either dominates in determined contexts.
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