2021FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (3): 1244–1253
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
The ruses of Amerindian art
A reply
Carlos F A U S T O , Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
and Princeton University
Response to comments on Fausto, Carlos. 2020. Art effects: Image, agency, and ritual in Amazonia.
Translated by David Rodgers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Books often result from an initial plan and a series of
accidents that occur during the writing process. When
we finish a book, an economy of presentation seems to
tower above an economy of discovery, to the extent that
we overlook serendipities, chance discoveries, and the
choices made while writing. What remains, frozen in
time, is the object that we put a full stop to. When the
book is reviewed, it takes on a new temporality, prompting the author to relive the writing process, and ask
anew questions of composition. This is what I experienced
when reading these dense, critical, and, at the same time,
generous reviews from colleagues who urge me to reconsider paths traveled, and to imagine alternative routes.
In this reply, I will try to think with these critiques, although, in many cases, we will have to agree to disagree.
It pleases me that even where we disagree, it remains clear
that we share a number of common questions, and that
a dialogue can flourish despite our different specialties
and backgrounds. In many moments throughout the
book I abandoned my comfort zone in studies of Indigenous Amazonia, taking risks in fields that I only master
partially. Recognizing this limitation does not imply
avoiding the risk. On the contrary, my aim was to promote an interdisciplinary and interregional dialogue by
means of an ethnographic theory, which emerges from
firsthand ethnography of native Amazonian peoples
and comparative excursions at different scales.
Art effects has an uncommon structure. It is made up
of five chapters, each centered on an Amazonian ritual
artifact. These artifacts were chosen because I had at
my disposal primary data obtained during my own field
researches, and also because they enabled the discussion
of at least one of the five formal operations that I list in
the introduction (multireferentiality, recursive nesting,
duplication of the image and figure-ground oscillation,
qualitative instability, quantitative indeterminacy). The
first three chapters blend analyses of my ethnographies
of the Parakanã and the Kuikuro with a comparative effort, which is both historical-cultural and structuralist.
The final chapters, in contrast, are more ethnographic,
privileging the pragmatics of two Xinguano rituals in
which human effigies are fabricated. In the conclusion,
I propose a collation between an Amerindian regime of
images and a Christian one.
I will respond each of the reviewers, moving from the
proximate to the distant, beginning with Amazonia and
the comments by Philippe Erikson, with whom I have
had the pleasure of a decades-long conversation. Erikson
criticizes my use of “distribution maps,” by means of
which I spatially organize the occurrence of human trophies and so-called sacred flutes in Amazonia. The critique strikes at two levels: a conceptual one (we cannot
assume that the occurrence of a concept is necessarily
associated with the presence of an artifact) and an
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, volume 11, number 3, winter 2021. © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Published by The
University of Chicago Press for the Society for Ethnographic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1086/717557
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empirical one (the maps depict only different retention
rates). Although I accept the difficulties inherent to diffusionism, I do not believe that I stumble on them. On
the one hand, because the distributions presented in the
maps do not result from random retention rates, since
we have ethnographic, historical, and linguistic evidence—
that is, short-, medium-, and long-term evidence—that
points to consistent processes of diffusion over immense
ranges throughout Amazonia. On the other hand, culturalhistorical comparison is undertaken alongside a structural one. The book is built around certain material
artifacts (rather than mental artifacts—Erikson’s intellefacts), but this does not mean that I posit a univocal
relation between concepts and artifacts. Indeed, I believe
that my analyses show the opposite. The Parakanã, for
example, do not have trophies; what they do have is a
complex of ideas within which the existence of trophies
is an objective possibility. Likewise, the Tapirapé produce
an artifactual mask of the enemy, whereas for the Parakanã—as for most of the Tupi-Guarani—vocal masks
suffice. The trophy-post found a home in the Xinguano
world via the Javari effigy, which established the interplay between alterity and ancestrality that had already
been a characteristic of the Quarup ritual. This same interplay is elsewhere expressed differently: for instance,
in Upper Rio Negro ritual duality, but also in the mariwin masks of the Matis, studied by Erikson (2007).
These examples show how a structuralist comparison—
inspired by the Mythologiques and The way of the masks
(Lévi-Strauss 1982) —is not only a complement to the
historical-cultural comparison, but also a way around
some of its pitfalls.
Another issue noted by Erikson concerns my ethnographic coverage. I believe that most of the data I analyze does, in fact, come from Brazilian Amazonia, which
represents some 60 percent of the total area of Amazonia. The focus on this area is not only a matter of scale,
but also the result of my own personal experience of research, as well as that of my students. Nonetheless, I muster a considerable number of works on Indigenous people living in the other eight “Amazonian countries,” so
that, to me, the issue seems to concern less national frontiers than cultural-historical areas. Thus, for instance, the
transborder people of the Upper Rio Negro are better
represented in the book than the Panoan-speaking peoples of southwestern Amazonia. From a linguistic perspective, as Erikson notes, there is a predominance of people
speaking languages from the Tupi, Karib, and Arawak families, which are, precisely, the most important linguistic
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groupings in the pluriethnic and multilinguistic constellation of the Upper Xingu—the main focus of the book.
It would have been interesting to incorporate the Gê
and the Bororo into my discussion, but this would have
made my task much more difficult, considering the dizzying complexity of the sociology and ritual life of these
peoples. Erikson suggestively refers to the kô?khre logs
of the Canela. I recently re-watched The Dead and the
Others (Salaviza and Messora 2018), a beautiful film that
depicts the last stage of the Krahô funerary cycle, when
the kinspeople of the deceased cry over the ritual log
and thereby mark his or her definitive dissociation from
the living. The ritual no doubt recalls the Xinguano Quarup, and could indeed have been invoked for comparative
purposes. I also note a further limitation of my ethnographic scope, which Erikson, with his characteristic elegance, refrained from mentioning: the sparse discussion
of Panoan-speaking peoples and their ethnographers (including the commentator). One of the reasons for this,
as Fortis notices, is the little emphasis given to body painting and ornamentation in Art effects, themes which are
ubiquitous in the excellent ethnographies of the Panoans
of southwestern Amazonia (Lagrou 2007; Erikson 1996).
Finally, I would argue that Map 2 correctly represents
the areas in which human trophies were taken in Amazonia during the last two centuries. In all the cases depicted, the practice was embedded in a larger ritual
complex, normally of a multiethnic and multilocal character. Scant evidence of trophy hunting, as we find in the
Guianas or the Upper Rio Negro, is therefore insufficient
for inclusion. In chapter 1, for instance, I refer to the
waaru flute, which the Koripako made from the femur
of an enemy. This instance notwithstanding, I do not
consider the Upper Rio Negro to be a “trophy area” precisely because of the absence of a major ritual complex
centered on these artifacts. The Bolivian lowlands, which
Erikson mentions, likewise do not meet my criteria. The
case of the colonial Mojo, studied by Hirtzel, is a good example of this: first, because the privileged objects of capture were jaguar crania; second, because the ritual does
not seem to have been part of a wider multiethnic complex. The Mojo example is suggestive for another reason:
the ritual involved a dead jaguar, a jaguar slayer, and a
jaguar-shaman, all interlinked in a process of ritual conversion mediated by a jaguar skull. It all took place, literally, sub specie jaguaritatis. It is hence not surprising that
missionaries interpreted the ritual as a practice through
which “the Mojos honored a (false) god: the jaguar-god
(actually the devil)” (Hirtzel 2016: 229).
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Paolo Fortis offers challenging suggestions and critiques, stemming from his long-term reflections on art
among the Guna of Panama. His comments are inspired by the edited volume that he has just published
with Susanne Küchler (2021), in which the temporal
dimension of images and artifacts take the foreground.
As I see it, we share the aim of tensioning the language
of aesthetics and of the history of art so as to open
space for another tradition—let us call it “Amerindian”—
which owes little or nothing to the foundational concepts of a Western metaphysics. Hence our shared effort
at dodging an obsession with identity, in submitting the
interior and exterior to a complex topology, multiplying
referents, as well as rethinking the ontological fracture
between original and copy.
Yet I would not claim, as Fortis does, that the relationship between prototype and image is the main theme
of Art effects. I consider it to be part of a set of questions
that must be addressed if we are to explore the limits of
our language and to displace foundational concepts of
our intellectual tradition. This is what I tried to do in
each of the chapters, concluding the fifth with a discussion of Xinguano mimesis, in which the idea of replication stands out. This discussion actually begins in the
very first chapter, where I deal with mimetic duplication
and shadowing, and, following Lagrou’s (2007) suggestions, point toward an Amerindian logic of twinness,
wherein twins are “replicas” at once similar and different
from one another (Lévi-Strauss 1991). In chapter 5 I seek
to understand Indigenous notions of the soul-doubleimage as being less an animistic interiority than a fold
of the body. I took my inspiration here from Pedro Pitarch
(who follows Deleuze [1988]), approximating the notion
of the replica to that of the fold (pli in French) with which
it shares a common root. Pitarch employs this figure to
conceptualize the duality of Mesoamerican indigenous
worlds. The textile operation of the fold would allow both
the separation and articulation “of the two domains into
which the indigenous cosmos is divided: the solar state,
extensive and discrete, which humans and other ordinary
beings inhabit, and the intensive, virtual state where spirits
dwell” (2021: XX). The double is thus a replica in another
frequency, which allows us to think of the duplication of
the person as an unfolding of a body into multiple intensive selves-others (as I argue for the Kuikuro case).
In what pertains to the notion of the “asymptote,” I
initially used it to avoid falling into the pendular movement between presence and representation, which has
marked bloody episodes in the history of Christianity
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and defined hierarchical differences in the colonial process. It is not enough, as current trends seem to prefer,
to replace representation with presence, swimming
against the currents of the Reformation. I rather prefer
to make room for the “teacher’s smirk” of the ethnographic vignette with which I open the book, rendering
presence an uncertain certainty, an impossible possibility, an infinite movement. Hence the image of the asymptote, which approximates to, yet remains still infinitesimally far from, the line. To put it otherwise, I could
have had recourse to Vernant’s (2007) notion of “presentification,” taking it to be “a process and a tension for
mobilizing an expected, but never assured, presence”
(Baschet 2013: introduction, L’image entre imagination
et prototype, §6). Even if not assured, however, presentification often implies a risk, since, as Pitarch writes,
“the image may become so powerful that part of the ritual task consists of controlling it”—a theme I deal with
in my analysis of Xinguano rituals.
Fortis suggests that we consider the problem of presence by way of the chromatic approximation between
prototype and replica, a point I touch upon, if timidly,
when I refer to “a chromatic scale of levels of existentiality” (p. 258). In two recent works on “variation in small
intervals” and the production of a “quasi-continuum”
(Fausto 2019, in press), I return to the issue of chromaticism. I stress the procedures of repetition, parallelism,
and variation with minimal difference, applying them
to Amerindian verbal-musical arts (Fausto, Franchetto,
and Montagnani 2011) but widening their scope to a
general Amazonian aesthetic of the production of life. I
furthermore show that variation at small intervals produces a certain temporality, which, referring specifically
to ritual, Lévi-Strauss (1971: 602) characterized as being a
“slow motion.” Historical changes emerge as the accumulated effect of a way of repeating under variation and varying under repetition, giving off an impression of stasis.
There may be a bridge here with themes that Fortis has developed in his own work, although, if I understand him
correctly, my approach would be an example of “external”
time, while his aim is to explore, first and foremost, the articulation of this temporality with an “internal” time—one
which emerges from the images and artifacts themselves.
But are not repetition (sensu Deleuze) or variation at small
intervals (sensu Lévi-Strauss) the common aesthetic principles through which both the internal and external temporality of Amerindian rituals are constituted?
Fortis criticizes the image of the asymptote for purportedly preserving a rigid prototype-replica dualism
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which must be overcome. He proposes to replace it
with the idiom of frequency and repetition—or, more
precisely, of the dynamic modulation of frequencies
which travel in undulatory movements within a spacetime with artifacts and images functioning as stoppages.
I am not sure I have fully understood Fortis’s model, and
would need to study it with greater care. Nonetheless,
it appears to me that we agree in interpreting the Quarup as a ritual that engages different temporal layers:
(a) the biographical time of the dead chief who is ready
to be forgotten; (b) intergenerational time, produced by
aligning generations of chiefs, which allows for a name to
be planted in the ground of collective memory; and, finally, (c) a deep time, which, reaching back to mythical
origins, launches itself into the future as the image of a
permanent project of collective existence. These different
temporalities are articulated around an artifact-post, the
Quarup effigy, which serves as a material axis for the
work of memory and forgetting.
I find myself in agreement with Pitarch’s review, and
with his valuable Mesoamerican comparative insights.
Indeed, my work follows a consolidated tendency in regional ethnology that puts the body at center stage. It is
not by chance that Art effects opens with the body as
artifact. I do not, however, take the body as a monolithic
totality, but as a set of components that extend beyond
biological limits: the skin which unfolds as clothing, covering, mask; internal tubes which are exteriorized as
aerophones; doubles, which are unfolded folds, replicas
of a body without a unique interiority. Pitarch is right
to refer to “corporeal objects”: the artifacts I am concerned with are bodies, and much like bodies possess an
artifactual and composite anatomy, constantly crossing
the frontiers between person and thing, as well as that between human and nonhuman (Barcelos Neto 2008; Velthem 2003).
Pitarch draws attention to the importance of different sensible codes which, at times, mark distinct ontologies. Unfortunately, I did not much develop this feature
in the book, which concentrates on vision (and, less, on
hearing), without exploring the synesthesia that is characteristic of ritual events. This point may be linked to
Erikson’s observation that Art effects has an artifactual
bias, evading what he calls “immaterial soul stuff.” In my
eagerness to avoid a stark opposition between the material
and the immaterial in Amazonia, I perhaps emphasized
too much the “more material” aspects of concepts such
as body, soul, double, image, shadow, etc. Be that as it
may, in order to account for both ritual synesthesia and vi-
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sionary and oneiric experiences, I would have had to tap
into a much more fine-grained ethnographic resolution,
producing phenomenologically denser descriptions, which
might have proven to be incompatible with the book’s
comparative scope.
This comparative scope derives from my interest in
apprehending Amerindian modes of complexifying
images, which, as Pitarch observes, do not seek “unity
and identity” but rather to “systematically multiply and
alter.”1 I thus sought to avoid the privilege we usually accord to interiority, whether as the locus of an immortal
soul, an individual essence, or the core of personality. I
strove to dissolve it by emphasizing the surface and the
topological operations that make interior and exterior
into uncertain spaces. This is also part of my push to
complexify the body-soul dualism that still underscores
our more robust models. It explains why I appropriated
the concept of the fold, taking Mesoamerican wrappings
as my guiding image. In this context, what is wrapped is
less important than the textile surface and how it folds
and unfolds. Folds have a front and a back, but what they
lack is, precisely, a center; when they do contain something, this is a multiple collection of objects and bodily
fragments (Pitarch 2018: 141). Similarly, the Kuikuro
person who unfolds in each pathological event cannot
be reduced to two components—one interior and the other
exterior, one a soul and the other a body—for she is constituted by the multiplicity of images-doubles that index
relations acquired through life, particularly those with
spirit owners of rituals. The dual is a reduction of the
multiple, rather than the multiple an extrapolation from
the dual.
I now turn to the comments by Caroline van Eck
and Caroline Bynum, who were extraordinarily generous in critically addressing my uses (and abuses) of the
history of art and medieval history. In different ways,
both authors express dissatisfaction with the book’s
1. The coincidence between my approach and that of
Johannes Neurath is no accident. We were both deeply
influenced by the work of Carlo Severi, and we have
had opportunities to exchange ideas in France and Mexico. Had I ventured into the Mesoamerican world, Neurath would certainly have been one of my main interlocutors. Incidentally, Erikson observes that I do not refer to
Severi’s L’objet-personne (2017), but I take the opportunity to note that I use many of the articles that were later
collected in that volume but opted to retain the original
references.
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conclusion, where I compare my analysis of Amerindian
data with certain elements of the Christian imagery.
Part of their critique revolves around my choice to
compare the Amerindian case with certain Christian
images (and not others) and my reliance on a certain
intellectual tradition (and not others).
In van Eck’s view, instead of privileging Freedberg
(and Belting), I should have trodden the path cleared
by Warburg (and Schlosser) almost a century ago.2 Indeed, these are alternative paths and I need to make the
reasons behind my choice explicit. Freedberg is, no
doubt, a central author in my discussion on the agency
of images in the history of Western art. It could not be
otherwise, since, as van Eck notes on her review, The
power of images (1989) “put the problem of the animation and agency of images back on the art-historical
agenda, after fifty years of neglect.” It is my understanding that Hans Belting’s Likeness and presence (1994) merits the same claim, and that is why I highlight both
equally in my book. I note, however, that my main inspiration is W. J. T. Mitchell (2005); Belting and Freedberg
mostly provide historical sources (for the wealth of the
data they engage), as well serve as majestic examples of
how the reawakened problem of the living presence has
been pondered through iconicism and verisimilitude.
There remains yet another reason for including Freedberg as a central reference. As I understand it, Alfred Gell
wrote Art and agency (1998) as an extra-Western (and
Duchampian) reply to Freedberg.3 It is no accident that
he not only discards the symbol from his theory of art,
but also subsumes the icon to the index (that is, to the
material entity that motivates abductive inferences).
Along with Gell’s notion of the “abduction of agency,”
I also mobilize Carlo Severi’s (2004) notion of “capturing
imagination,” since both allow us to grasp the cognitive
operation by means of which indexes (and icons) trigger
an imaginative projection in which uncertainty is a constitutive element. Both Gell and Severi propose a universal theory of the attribution of agency to certain objects.
2. I limit myself to Warburg, since I am completely unfamiliar with the work of Schlosser.
3. I consulted Alfred Gell’s personal library, searching for
marginalia in his copy of The power of images (it seems
that he never read Belting). Simeran Gell, whom I thank
for her warm hospitality, explained, to my disappointment, that he never wrote in his books because he respected them too much.
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In contrast, I seek only to understand the formal and ritual mechanisms that, within a certain tradition, capture
imagination. I thus disagree with van Eck that my aim
would be to resolve the question of the attribution of life
and personhood to artifacts by means of the reconstruction of the ontology of the Indigenous societies of Amazonia. On the contrary, my aim is to “unpack what ‘ontologies’ comprise” (Lloyd 2012: 39), highlighting aesthetic
form and rituality so as to illuminate the originality of a
tradition that I call, for lack of a better word, “Amerindian.”
Van Eck seems less dissatisfied with my analyses
of Amazonian ethnography than with the fact that I
compare them to a certain (hegemonic?) interpretation
of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the history of art.
She suggests that I should draw inspiration from Warburg so as to reflect globally on the attribution of agency
to artifacts across all human societies. However, as I
have already observed, this is not my aim. I adopt the
theories of Gell and Severi, because, although they
are universalizing, they do not fall back on a certain
psychologism, as Warburg and Freedberg are wont to
do, which sees the living presence as a response to fear
and anguish, or desire and repression. I sense a whiff of
nineteenth-century theories of “primitive” religion here.
To be sure, it would be fruitful to explore other facets of
Warburg’s thought—an author who has been rediscovered by many in the last decades, including by Severi
(2003). However, this endeavor would not provide the
necessary counterpoint to my construction of the “Amerindian singularity.”
In relation to Bynum—whose work has already held
me in awe for many years—it seems as if our disagreements concern, most of all, diverse conceptions of comparison which lead down divergent paths. In the introduction to my book, I state the limits of my comparative
method, particularly in what concerns the comparison
of the two great traditions that I termed “Amerindian”
and “Christian.” Even accepting its limitations, I adopted
a binary license because it enables “an argument to take
off in one direction by rendering another (direction of
argument) also present” (Strathern 2011: 91). I thereby
sought to make explicit to readers what often remains
implicit in much of the anthropological literature: what
is the fiction of the West against which we compare
our ethnographic constructs? The answer to this question is itself a fiction, which may be more or less persuasive (Strathern 1987), insofar as it expresses some truth. I
am thus happy that, despite their disagreements, both
Bynum andvanEckobservethatIarriveatsomeconvincing
results.
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Bynum characterizes my binary comparison as an
example of “soft comparison.” In line with what I just
said, I see it rather as a “hard fiction,” capable of illuminating through contrasts, elements that distinguish the
traditions under analysis. After all, as Baschet claims,
“comparativism is at the same time an experimental
process which acts like a contrast lamp, allowing to better see the proper features of the object analyzed”
(2016: 231). Faced with a choice, that was the lamp I
lit. I did not, however, light it directly, but rather
invertedly—and, curiously, no one picked up on this.
I do not only compare dissimilarities, but also enquire
into dissimilar similarities (Bynum 2020). I thereby ask
what is the place of, on the one hand, zoomorphism,
metamorphosis, and monstrosity in Christian art, and,
on the other, of anthropomorphic figurations in Amerindian pre-Columbian ceramics.4 This double movement in reverse relativizes the monolithic opposition
of the terms of the binary comparison, pointing to the
diversity that exists within each of the traditions. Moreover, it seeks to show that, even where we find an air of
familiarity, it is possible and necessary to recognize significant differences. Unlike Bynum, who searches for
“deeper similitudes” that lie beyond “appearances” (ibid:
220), my focus is on difference rather than likeness.
The sections of the conclusion in which I carry out
this inverted binary comparison follow from the contrast between the “masters of truth” and the “masters
of deceit,” by way of which I bring to the fore the
pan-Amerindian figure of the Trickster. I propose that
the creative transformability of these demiurges is intimately linked to an Amerindian aesthetics, in stark
contrast to the hegemonic figuration of the divine in
Christianity. It is in this context that I discuss Genesis
1:26, the biblical verse that enunciates, at once, the first
similitude (that between God and Man) and the dominium of humanity over the rest of creation. In the
Judeo-Christian world, anthropomorphism emerges together with anthropocentrism. These are, precisely,
my targets in the conclusion, since I aim not only to
overcome anthropocentrism—something which the
new animism of the 1990s and multispecies anthropology have already achieved—but to also put anthropomorphism into question. Art effects can be read as a
4. I will not discuss this concluding excursion to archaeology, since none of the reviewers commented on it. However, I take the opportunity to note that I see it as a first
sketch, still in need of a tighter discussion based on more
data.
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contribution to a movement that seeks to relativize, if
not in fact demote, the specter of human exceptionalism which has caused increasing embarrassment in
these times of profound ecological crisis.5 In this sense,
the book aims less at conceptualizing “the arts of societies against the state,” as Fortis suggests, than at contemplating an aesthetics where humanity is not the
magnetic core of existence.6
Bynum considers that my recourse to Genesis 1:26 is
problematic, pointing to important nuances in the interpretation of the notion of similitude through history.
I am well aware of the fact that the similarity between
God and Man has been mostly interpreted as being of
the soul rather than the body, more of an ethical and
ontological matter than a figurative and representational one. This, at least, among theologians who have
dwelt on the matter of the imago Dei throughout the
centuries, since, as Baschet observes, “in other contexts,
the bodily interpretation of the relation between the
image of man and God may take on greater importance” (2016: 327). Consider, for example, the somatophormic representation of the soul that became dominant in the Late Middle Ages. As Baschet (2016: 161–64)
shows, other forms of figuration existed, but the one
that prevailed was an image of the soul as a body, sometimes winged, but unambiguously human. In other
words, a strong anthropomorphic attractor operated
even in contexts where sophisticated theologians interpreted similitude as being ethical-moral rather than figurative. Images maintained a relative autonomy vis-à-vis
doctrine, at times converging with, at times diverging
from, theological discussions.7
5. Today, Genesis 1:26 also causes some embarrassment to
the Church and contemporary theologians. For two recent discussions, see Meyer 2018 and Horan 2019.
6. Pre-Columbian American states are not—to paraphrase
Laurie Anderson (1986)—a “virus from outer-space.”
When we think of the Indigenous Americas, we cannot
ignore the fact that the continent saw a number of state
formations emerge before the European invasion. Moreover, if we accept Maffie’s (2014) interpretation of Aztec
metaphysics, we also have to accept that “transformation
and relational ontologies” are not a specificity of stateless
societies.
7. Somatomorphic representation furthermore seems to find
parallels in the Augustinian conception of the soul as sharing a “similitude of body” (similitudo corporis) (Baschet
2016: 162).
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Besides, there have always been alternative interpretations of the imago Dei, not only in regard to likeness
(demût), but also image (selem). Gabrielle Thomas, for
instance, reinterprets Gregory of Nazianzus’s works,
showing that he did not only identify the divine image
with the rational soul, but also depicted it “quite literally, as a kind of visible icon” (2019a: 180). I am not
suggesting that an embodied interpretation was already
and necessarily inscribed in Genesis 1:26. What was already there is a paradoxical relation between visibility
and invisibility, which would be redefined by the Incarnation, when humans would become “living icons” of
Christ, and Christ the “identical icon” of God (Thomas
2019b: chapter 2). Finally, I approach Genesis 1:26 as an
etiological myth much as Lévi-Strauss approached the
sagas of twins in the Americas. But while Lévi-Strauss
needed to render these stories familiar to his readers, I
had to make our own mythology strange to us. What
happens when we denaturalize the imago Dei, when we
take it as a somewhat bizarre and unconventional idea?
My hunch was that this estrangement would shed light
on the originality of Amerindian imagistic traditions.
Since one of my aims is to destabilize Christian anthropomorphism, I needed to show how it flourished
even where it appeared to be less evident—which allowed me to envisage a secular echo to our origin myth.8
My discussion of the Eucharist is a step in this direction.
To make my point, I needed to relativize Bynum’s emphasis on the nonanthropomorphic character of the
Eucharist by investigating the substantive analogy between bread-flesh and blood-wine in transubstantiation,
as well as the iconographic and visionary motifs associated with it.9 The clearly anthropomorphic character of
these motifs adds weight to the idea that the projection
of the divine sub specie humanitatis was pervasive and
dominant in the medieval imaginary. Furthermore, if the
Eucharistic sacrament brought a “surplus of presence,” this
would have resulted, according to Belting, in an “imagistic
reaction”: “this supplement of reality being granted to the
Eucharist, the images would intend to compensate it by
their realism (2007: 125).10 In other words, divine presence, anthropomorphism, and realism, seem to have fed
back into each other, even where iconicism gave way to
materiality as a trigger for presence.
Bynum laments that Art effects ignores saintly relics,
which are undeniably important in Western Christianity. Whereas the iconoclastic controversy in the East focused on the icon, in the West it concerned, first and
foremost, relics (Belting 1994: 298). Originally, I had
intended writing a section about relics, but the book
was already too long (and my breath too short). My idea
was to compare Amerindian warfare trophies with saintly
relics, and revisit certain episodes in colonial history that
illustrate equivocal compatibilities in interpretations of
the bones of the dead (Fausto 2002; Castelnau-L’Estoile
2009). In order to weave this comparison, however, I
would have needed to evoke yet another tricky generalization, opposing a magical-animistic ontology (common
to Amerindians and medieval Europeans) to a naturalist ontology (unique to modern Europeans)—the latter
with its sharp separation of subject from object, animate
from animate, person from thing.
Furthermore, by including saintly relics in my discussion, I would possibly just reiterate what I had already written about the “relic of relics.” After all, when
a new statuary tradition emerged in Western Christianity, most reliquaries became painted, engraved, and
sculpted with anthropomorphic figurations. As Belting
suggests, “in medieval imagination images and relics were
never two distinct realities” (1994: 301–302). This can be
glimpsed in the photographs of reliquaries selected by
Freedberg (1989: 93) and Belting (1994: 306–307), but
also by Bynum (2020: 18–19), to illustrate their books.
Since, as we know, reliquaries contained diverse materials and were fabricated in different forms and shapes,
why select such realistic and anthropomorphic examples
to illustrate them?
Bynum perceives a disequilibrium between my focus
on artifacts in analyzing Amerindian art and on images
when comparing them to the Christian tradition. I here
8. I am aware that a proper incursion into this theme would
demand a consideration of the monumental statuary of
ancient Greece (Vernant 2007: 555) and imperial Rome
(Belting 1994: 102).
10. See also Baschet: “Now, with the reversal of the Eucharistic doctrine occurring in the middle of the eleventh
century, one is forced to think of a simultaneous rise of
effective images and of the Eucharist, as elements of an
ecclesial system subject to the accentuation of priestly
power. It would then remain to specify how these objects
are both involved in the same system (with the relics) and
differentiated” (2013: introduction, note 43).
9. As Bynum admits, “to emphasize the non-anthropomorphism of consecrated bread and wine is not to argue that
there are no anthropomorphic elements in devotion to
the Eucharistic species” (2013: 12).
1251
follow Bynum’s own suggestion that, when comparing
different cultures, comparing like with like is not always
the most fruitful alternative. However, I should clarify
that the Indigenous artifacts I analyze are images, just
as Christian images are also artifacts (the image of a
saint, for example, refers to a tridimensional figure). I
use “image” in a broad sense, close to the meaning of
“image-object” in Baschet (2013). The title of the book
seeks to express this fact; it is more than a “clever pun”
as Erikson would have it. In Art effects, art and artifact
go together, indistinctly, like the hunting traps analyzed
by Gell in “Vogel’s net” (1999). Moreover, the word “art”
in the title does not point to an Amerindian concept of
“art,” but to the formal mechanisms of complexification
of object-images that I explore. As I indicate, I do not
suppose these mechanisms to be exclusive to Amerindians; what is characteristic of them is that they are combined from a nonanthropomorphic matrix.
To close this already long reply, I return to the
place of hybridity, zoomorphism, and monstrosity in
Christian iconography. These motifs gain systematic
expression from the twelfth century onwards with the
consolidation of a Christian demonology, but always
occupying minor spaces: at the margins of enlightened
manuscripts, on the side doors of a church, on less visible panels. Although marginal, the depiction of metamorphosis laid the groundwork for the practical interpretation of the Amerindian aesthetic-ritual tradition,
centuries later, as a “thing of the devil” that had to be
condemned, attacked, and suppressed. There was a partial connection (Strathern 2004) between how Westerners and Amerindians figured transformation: they were
not the same, and yet they were not entirely different
(Gell 1999: 206). Within the structure of equivocation,
there were enough compatibilities for Indigenous ritual
artifacts to be interpreted by invaders as expressions of
the devil.
As Gruzinski (1990) shows, the very first acts of the
conquest already featured a “war of images,” the opening episode of which is the Spanish perplexity at the famous zemi of the Taino in the Antilles: what, after all,
were those figures that combined human and animal
features, that could contain bones of the ancestors and
were fabricated out of heterolytic materials?11 Gruzinski
(1990: 71) indicates that the invaders’ perplexity resulted
11. As far as I know, the zemi were never associated with
saintly relics, perhaps because of their “monstrous” form.
THE RUSES
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ART
from the way the European gaze had been educated,
privileging the anthropomorphic and the figurative.12
This perplexity did not leave the invaders paralyzed;
on the contrary, it immediately set them on an imagistic
battle. In the campaign which would result in the conquest of Mexico, Spaniards carried with them an “arsenal of engraved, painted, and sculpted images” which
they would distribute as they advanced on Indigenous
territories (ibid.: 59). The conquest was saturated with
object-images.13
In contrast, Indigenous audiovisual expressions that
evaded the world of Christian missions and colonial
administration continued to be made sub specie jaguaritatis. Confronted with the instability of the human position in Amerindian arts, the invaders tended to take a
shortcut, labeling indigenous object-images as “demoniacal”—a qualification that applied to rituals, music,
images and artifacts that crossed the frontiers of the
human and nonhuman. As early as the first decades
of the sixteenth century, Gonçalo Fernández Oviedo,
chronicler and mayor of São Domingos, assimilated
the zemi to images of the devil, with their “numerous
heads, numerous things, with misshaped and frightful
canines . . . the inflamed eyes of the dragon and the
fierce serpent” ([1547] quoted in Gruzinski 1990: 40).
The association between indistinctiveness, categorial
instability, and devilish qualities became a common
trope in the interpretation of Amerindian iconographies and verbal-musical art from colonial times to
the present. To brush the imagistic violence of the past
against the grain (Benjamin 2007: 257), I decided, in
Art effects, to estrange our anthropomorphic, mimetic,
and figurative tradition, in the hope that, free from a
12. The author also claims that: “On discovering painted or
engraved images, the Indians could not but be shocked
at such an exotic and hermetical set of iconographic
conventions. It would be difficult to enumerate them
all, but, first, there was the incontestable anthropomorphism or the predominance of the human form, which,
since Giotto, came to be the instrument for figurative
thought in Western art. Anthropomorphism postulates
a representation overtaken by the notion of incarnation
and individuality” (Gruzinski 1990: 114).
13. Even where these were scanty, they had a strategic function. Bailey claims that the first painting to arrive at the
Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay was an image of the Virgin Mary, which the future martyr Roque González “carried with him from village to village” (2001: 163).
Carlos FAUSTO
certain education of the gaze, we might experience the
ruses of Amerindian art in all its originality.
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Carlos FAUSTO is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Program of Social Anthropology of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and Global Scholar at Princeton University.
Carlos Fausto
cfausto63@gmail.com