The attachment of the soul to the body among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

Abstract

Despite their general acceptance of pacific coexistence and village life, the Huaorani are still living in a social world structured by the continuous efforts they need to deploy to contain homicidal rage and to mitigate the ravages of violent death. Death is generally interpreted as having been caused by some raptorial agency which may in turn drive men to kill blindly. This article shows that it is because men are particularly susceptible to the predatory call of supernature that society works at embedding them within matrifocal house-groups. I discuss death and the desire to kill in relation to cultural constructions of sex and gender, especially in the context of funerary rites. Huaorani perspectivism, which articulates the point of view of the prey, not of the predator, associates the soul, maleness and conquering predation, to which it opposes the body, femaleness and resisting victimhood.

Keywords:

• Amazonia
• Huaorani Indians
• gender
• uxorilocality
• predation

Notes

1. ‘Perspectivism’ started as a dialogue between Viveiros de Castro (1996) and Lima (1996). The translation of Viveiros de Castro’s article into English and its publication in jrai in 1998 led to a much wider use of the concept, even outside Amazonian anthropology (see for instance Willerslev 2004). In recent years, various Brazilian anthropologists have continued to develop the theory of perspectivism, especially Lima (1999a, 1999b), Vilaça (1996, 2002), and Fausto (2000). Viveiros de Castro (2002) has himself recently rethought the implications of perspectivism for cultural theory, by elaborating them further in relation to the work of Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern.

2. Lima (1999a:115) refers twice to Lévi-Strauss to illustrate the reciprocity of perspectives between culture and nature: ‘[T]o be animal is first of all to believe in human nature’ and ‘[M]an and the world confront each other face to face as subjects and objects at the same time.’

3. See among others Descola (1996), Taylor (1996), Héritier & Xanthakou (2004), Surrallés (2003), and Kohn (2002).

4. In a seminar he gave in Oxford in November 2004, Descola expressed this ontological dualism in terms of ‘physicality’ and ‘interiority.’ Lima agrees that perspectivism is linked to the notion of soul, but, in her view, the soul ‘represents only a point of support for a specific theory of the relationship between points of view which are at one and the same time analogous and locally determined as asymmetric. This theory expresses less a notion of a general humanity of all beings than a certain dualism’ (Lima 1999b:50). The dualism she has in mind is that between life (reality of the subject) and dream (reality of the soul). Faithful to Deleuze, she also links dualism to the absence of a point of view of the whole, and treats the whole as one part alongside other parts.

5. See Rival (2002, Chapter 5, and in press) for the similar view that consubstantiality is not distinguishable from sociability, or the process by which kin are continuously fabricated as shared substance. The concept of conviviality (Overing & Passes 2000) develops a similar idea.

6. The Huaorani are approximately 1,800 today (they were around 600 when first contacted in the early 1960s). Hunters, gatherers, sporadic gardeners, and now occasional oil workers, they live in 27 communities dispersed within a vast, legally titled territory located between the Rivers Napo and Curaray. Fieldwork among the Huaorani (33 months over a period of ten years, from 1989 to 1999) was initially supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant #gr5146), with additional funding from the Linnean Society of London.

7. A young evangelical schoolteacher told me that the soul is like the water in the river, or your body’s shadow. You can see it, but you cannot seize it; try to hold it, and it will run through your fingers. Many external parts of the body (finger, knee, arm, leg, foot, shoulder and so forth) derive from ono (river). Mind is not a substantive, but a verb: either nano pöneno (literally, ‘he thinks well,’ that is, more generally and abstractly, ‘to think rightfully’) or pönenani (literally, ‘they all think well,’ that is, ‘they have the capacity to think’). McCallum (1999:448–450) mentions a multiplicity of souls among the Cashinahua (huni kuin). The body soul (yuda yuxin), linked to the shadow, ‘encases the body like an outer skin’ (McCallum 1999: 448). It is contrasted with the true soul, or eye soul (yuxin kuin). I suspect that the Huaorani too believe in more than one soul, but I could not find a well-established doctrine about it. More targeted fieldwork may bring new evidence, or may not, as the Huaorani are extremely elusive when it comes to esoteric matters.

8. Or of familiarisation to use Fausto’s (2000) terminology. Contrary to what occurs among the Achuar, Huaorani women affines never behave toward each other as classificatory sisters (Descola 2001:96).

9. The notion that babies are not yet fully human and need protection from animals, evil spirits, or other environmental influences is found in many parts of the world.

10. The Huaorani, an isolate, is not attached to any phylum. To this day, there is no dictionary or definite grammar of the language.

11. See below the creation myth involving Huègöngui. For Christian Huaorani, God, Jesus, and Huègöngui are one and the same Creator Spirit. Jesus determines the sex of human and animal foetuses, but not of plants, which are generally asexual. While some informants say that the Creator inserts the soul (onohuoca, alma) into the foetus’ head (ocamo), others say that it is inserted into the heart (mimo). The foetus in the mother’s womb develops as follows: first the head, then the heart, then the face, then the liver, then the guts, and finally the limbs.

12. Compare with Overing (1993:198, 202). The Huaorani, who do not see themselves as predators, do not understand the life process to be entirely predatory.

13. More than an emotion, and like the Aro Pai’s anger, pïï ‘is a transformational force that lies at the core of [native understandings] of human nature and death’ (Belaunde 2000:218). It is remarkable that the Aro Pai word for spirits, ‘huati’ (Belaunde 2000:215), is also the word that Huaorani warriors shout while ‘spearkilling’ the enemy. A Western Tukanoan group, the Aro Pai are probably the descendants of the Huaorani’s traditional enemies on the north side of the Napo river (Rival 2002, Chapter 2). See also Fisher (2001:120–122) for a discussion of the Kayapo contrast between male fierceness and female tameness.

14. Compare with McCallum’s (1999:461–462) interpretation of the Cashinahua case.

15. They scrape the oonta vine (Curarea tecunarum) onto mö leaves rolled into a funnel. They place the funnel above a small clay pot they call caanta, slowly run a small quantity of water over it, and place the pot filled with the black liquid over the hearth’s embers for several hours. Intrinsically feminine, mö leaves are symbolically associated with the womb’s blood lining. They are collected by women to line the inner roof of the longhouse, rendering it perfectly impermeable and hermetically closed.

16. This omission is all the more puzzling in that she herself acknowledges the incompatibility between fertile women and shamanism, and accepts that a father making a child, hence acting symbolically as a mother, is ‘in a position of antihunter[ s], anti-warrior[s], and anti-shaman[s]’ (Vilaça 2002:360).

17. (Vilaça 2002). Also defined as ‘meta-affinity’ (Descola 2001:95), that is, a fundamentally asocial and cosmic form of (potential) affinity (Viveiros de Castro 2002, Fausto 2000).

18. Hence giving rise to new gender asymmetries, caused by the fact that men are ‘extractable from their natal kin’ (to use Strathern’s [1988:228] expression, although she uses it to talk about women marrying virilocally). One may even wonder whether the uxorial husband is extractable from his natal kin by virtue of being owed to predatory cosmic forces.

19. He goes on to say that the violence of Shuar and Achuar married men against their wives is tempered by brideservice and polygyny (Descola 2001:99–100).

20. Or, in Lambek’s (1998:110) term, ‘incommensurable.’

21. But see Conklin (2001), who shows that the Wari’ heavily use sexual imagery representing female reproductive powers as intrinsic and male reproductive powers as intentionally constructed. She argues that ritual male transcendence over the biological forces of death and degeneration is constituted on the basis of the contrast between women’s blood and warriors’ blood.

22. Beth Conklin has also found that there are two facets to manhood among the Wari’, killing and nurture, which are both necessary to their survival. She relates the bioproductive effects of killing and caring to the actual biodynamics of population welfare in Amazonian societies which practise generalised revenge as a means to protect themselves against the threat of annihilation caused by either epidemics or slave raiding (personal communication, 12 June 2005).

23. ‘[l]e genre est bon pour penser la société (Bellier 1993:523). See also McCallum (2001).