Inhuman beings: morality and perspectivism among Muinane people (Colombian Amazon)

Abstract

–Núme … jana ?

diibo ésámaje?

–Diibo … ‘Tañaabo’ .1

–Núme … how about the jaguar's Speech?

How are his thoughts/emotions?

–He … he does not say ‘My brother'.

Like many other Amazonians, Muinane people often use perspectival imagery in discussions of relations between human beings and animals. It is a distinct possibility, within their ontology, that beings that humans perceive as animals, perceive themselves as human, and there are numerous complementary entailments to this. What is most striking about Muinane people's perspectival imagery, however, is that they use it saliently in their moral evaluations of subjectivity and action. I show that this makes perspectivism central to the everyday meaningful practices through which Muinane people achieve social life, and to their understandings of themselves. On that basis, I claim that accounts of Amerindian perspectival cosmologies should attend ethnographically to their morally evaluative potential and to their use by individuals in their discourses and other practices.

Keywords:

• Amazonia
• shamanism
• cosmology
• selfhood
• sociality

Notes

This is a rough transliteration into Colombian Spanish. However, doubled vowels represent extended vowels, and accent marks represent a high tone. The represents the IPA's and the ‘v’ represents a voiced bilabial fricative.

A Bora-speaking people of the Middle Caquetá region of the Colombian Amazon. With their neighbors the Uitoto, Andoke, Nonuya, Miraña, Bora, and Okaina they constitute the so-called People of the Center, self-defined by their consumption of tobacco in paste form.

I hasten to add that individuals' webs of symbols are never fully shared, in part because individual histories create unique associations among symbols. See Londoño Sulkin (2003) for a longer discussion of this.

Cf. Cohen (1994) and Cohen & Rapport (1995:4).

See Londoño Sulkin (2002; 2003) for greater detail on this.

Recent discussions of Amazonian understandings of embodiment and selfhood can be found in Basso (1996), Belaunde (2000; 2001), Conklin (2001a; 2001b), Descola (2001), Fisher (2001), Gow (2000; 2001), Griffiths (1998), Hugh-Jones (2001), Lagrou (1998; 2000), McCallum (2001:5), Overing & Passes (2000b), and Vilaça (2000; 2002) among others.

Muinane people do not establish a dichotomy between thoughts and emotions, and use a single term, ésámaje, for the subjective experience of these.

On perspectivism in Asia, cf. Howell (1996:133) and Pedersen (2001).

The houses in question are traditional, multifamily dwellings and ceremonial centers known as malocas in much of Spanish-speaking Amazonia.

The paradigm that places predators with humanity on one hand, and prey with animality on the other, further explains funerary cannibalism among Wari’ people. For them, dead kin must be eaten and thereby made prey and non-human, to differentiate them from the cannibals, who in eating the dead establish their predatory and therefore human character (Vilaça 2000). The alternative is for the grieving to continue seeing the dead – now an Other – as human, and to run the risk of finding themselves not to be human as a result.

I translate Muinane terms with the suffix as ‘Speeches’, though the suffix can also refer to the mouth itself or to a language (e.g., , ‘burning people’s [white people's] language’, i.e., Spanish). Speeches can include all kinds of utterances, but there are several marked uses for the term. I call a set of these ‘instrumental Speeches’: discourses produced with ritual protocol, and often deemed by Muinane people to bring about what they name by virtue of the will of the speaker (see Butler 1993:12, 13, on ‘divine performativity’). A few such powerful Speeches are (the Speech of healing), (the Speech of becoming abundant), (the Speech of maloca construction). Other important formal Speeches are the (the Speeches of apprising), myths or stories that apprise participants in myth-telling rituals of the original causes of diseases and other tribulations, and , a large collection of formulaic counsels on diet and behaviour. There are also evil Speeches: (False Speech, or Speech of obsession), (Speech of war), and others.

‘Real People’ is a deictic term, with different content in different contexts. I witnessed it being used to refer to indigenous people of the Middle Caquetá region, to indigenous people in general (as opposed to ‘white’ people), and to human beings in general, in a Western sense of the term. Animals in myths sometimes refer to themselves as, and take on the appearance of, Real People, too.

See Londoño Sulkin (2001: Part V)

On Muinane people's body-shaping practices, see Londoño Sulkin (2000; 2001; 2004).

Muinane people sometimes speak about middle-aged and older men and women as mayores or ancianos in Spanish (‘elders’ or ‘old ones’), highlighting their age and therefore axiomatically their knowledge. They do not constitute a corporate age group, however.

Alternatively, they speak of certain experiences as constituted by substances telling people things, saying things to them. The difference between these might be the positing or not of an essential Ego: if the subjectivity is radically constituted by Speeches, there is no essential Ego; however, if the Speeches merely tell the person something, then the addressee would seem to be a more essentialized Ego. This needs further attention.

See Overing and Passes (2000b) on Amazonian understandings of sociality and ‘the good life’.

There are exceptions in the West, however: demonic possessions requiring exorcisms, and legal arguments of ‘temporary insanity’, among others.

Cf. Santos-Granero's (1991:41) description of the Amuesha's (Peruvian Amazon) Hobbesian view of human nature, in which ‘without the limitations imposed by social organisation actions tend towards evil.’

People remember their experiences, because there is experiential continuity between the counterfeit self and the real one. This continuity does not puzzle Muinane people, as it might a cognitive anthropologist. The key to this lies in the body: selves can have false Speeches, but I never heard of them having false bodies. It is the body that provides phenomenological continuity: all the Speeches that go through a body are remembered.

Griffiths claims that in some of the accounts of Uitoto people – who intermarry frequently with Muinane – animals have malocas, food plants, and elders who provide counsel; in daily conversation and formal discourse, however, animals are defined by their antisocial, non-human qualities rather than by parallels with humanity (1998:71–73).

On the degradation of faunal races or the separation of immoral animality from humanity, and on animal threats, see Griffiths (1998:55–58, 221), Overing (1990: 608, 613), Reichel-Dolmatoff (1997:112) and Viveiros de Castro (1998:472).

In Spanish, El tabaco de los animals no tiene sentido. (Muinane people speak of animal tobacco both in the plural and in the singular.)

The Muinane language distinguishes between knowing how to accomplish certain tasks (gájahi), and knowing the distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable, proper and improper, moral and immoral . Animals ‘know’ in the first sense, but not in the second one. The term is also understood to be synonymous to ésafetehi, to remember. This constitutes a convergence with Gow's (1991; 2001; 2000) emphasis on the role of memory – in particular the memory of past care – in the establishment of proper kin relationships among the Piro. On memory, see as well A.C. Taylor (1996:206).

Different beings' jágába, which my informants translated into Spanish as aliento (breath) or atmósfera (air, atmosphere, environment), generate subjectivities in the same way Speeches do.

I refer to this anecdote in Londoño Sulkin (2003:179) as well.

This supports Viveiros de Castro's (1998) point that it is the body that provides the point of view; bodies of others of the same species cannot but be perceived as humans. However, the warped subjectivity of the jaguar motivates it to destroy others of its own kind – whatever body-kind that subjectivity happens to be ‘speaking through’. Cf. Taylor (1996:205, 206) and Conklin (2001a:188).

On understandings of hatred, jealousy, wrath, loss of self control, and murder among Amazonian peoples, see Santos Granero (1991:220–222) and Belaunde (1992; 2000).

This possibility is not entirely absent from Viveiros de Castro's discussion (1998: 483).

The ethnographies of Griffiths (1998:16) and Echeverri (1997:310) converge with my appreciation here. The Miraña, however, would appear to be more willing to interact 'sociably’ with animals in rituals (D. Karadimas, personal communication).

For similar accounts of non-reciprocity with game in Amazonia, see Descola (Descola & Pálsson 1996) and Vilaca (1992:76).

Viveiros de Castro writes that in Amerindian cosmologies, ‘the animal is the extra-human prototype of the Other, maintaining privileged relations with other prototypical figures of alterity, such as affines’ (1998:472). For converging descriptions, see Århem (1996:186), Descola (1994:215, 270, 324), Vilaça (1992:76), and Overing Kaplan (cited in Vilaça 1992:121). See as well Reichel-Dolmatoff (1996:92) and Pineda Camacho (1982:35–39).

I met several men who deemed their wives' fathers and brothers to be immoral characters willing to kill their sons-and-brothers-in-law and even their daughters and grandchildren. They found, however, that that was not how Real People, real affines, were supposed to behave.

See Descola (1994:270) and Århem (1996).

Overing and Passes (2000a) make this point strongly.

The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa (1987:130) describes a similar gleeful reaction by forest demons of the Peruvian Machiguenga to explosions of antisocial anger on the part of humans. Among the Piaroa, animals themselves lack intentionality; it is the ‘grandfathers of disease’ who vengefully cause the animals to send the diseases, for reasons similar to those given by Muinane people (Overing 1985a: 266, 267; 1990:608). See as well Viveiros de Castro (1998:471).

On evaluations of misbehavior in terms of animality, see Kensinger (1995: 69) and Lagrou (1998:28) on the Cashinahua, and Descola (1994:91, 96, 97) on the Achuar.

I discuss one such event in Londoño Sulkin (1998:51) and Londoño Sulkin (2000:176).

See Overing's (1985b) critique of the penchant in anthropology for treating non-western metaphysics as ‘metaphorical’.

On the Makuna's positing of an ontological equality between the different species, see Århem (1996:191); I would also note, however, that the Makuna deem the human species unique in carrying out food shamanism, a vital moral responsibility. See as well Howell (1996:133) on the relative moral equality of humans and other species among the Malaysian Chewong.