Rule of Self and Rule of Law: Governing Opacity Among the Shuar of Amazonia

ABSTRACT

Faced with the opacity of other minds, we can either confirm the impossibility of knowing or try to make other minds transparent. Among the Amazonian Shuar, two opposed regimes of intention management embody these two options. One is associated with the predatory agency of arútam, the spirit of prominent elders; the other one with the pacifying agency of the Christian God. Secret vision quests and dialogic duels generate an instability of perspectives and a rule of self, premised on the opacity of persons. By contrast, projects of state legibility, the omniscient Christian God, and the public character of biblical revelations create the conditions for the rule of law, that is, a regime of intentions in which persons are transparent and people are held accountable in public. The novelty of this mode of governing opacity bears emphasis on and contrasts with the arguments stressing continuity in Amazonian engagements with alterity.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• Amazonia
• intentions
• law
• legibility
• opacity
• transparency

Introduction

A few months into my fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Luis, a renowned Shuar leader from the Makuma area, was shot dead by his eldest son, Carlos, during a domestic quarrel. Carlos was taken into custody to the nearest prison quickly after the killing to save him from the reprisals of his paternal relatives. The killing gave way to a wake where villagers and visitors gathered for a full five days to make sense of the ill-fated event. The wake brought to the surface two opposed ways of determining guilt. In the first mode, culpability was elusive. Here, the actions that led to the death of Luis were distributed across a plurality of intentional agents, none of whom seemed to have operated entirely of their own volition or through their powers alone. In the second mode, however, the verdict should be clear: There was one culprit who had killed Luis. The intentions of the killer, at least in principle, were transparent and for everyone to see, and they were judged as immoral in the public assembly.

These two modes of treating intentions were bound to different genres of speech and different contexts. The accounts that blurred intentionality across a chain of actors emerged in private conversation, whereas the accounts that held Carlos alone accountable were advanced publicly, on the stage of the village assembly’s hall. The latter were backed up with biblical references, for instance in the prophetic speech of a pastor that struck a chord with many villagers. The pastor focused on the multiple signs through which God communicates with humanity. Paraphrasing from the Bible (Matthew 10.21), which he waved vigorously while speaking, the pastor referred to the trying times before the end of the world, a period when ‘the brother will betray his brother and the son will kill his father’. But while God commanded humans to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ it was also in God’s mighty power to help villagers forgive ‘Carlos, the ungrateful son’, ‘who’d committed the murder’.

Following the speech, bystanders repeatedly used the word ‘biblical’ to describe the extraordinary act of killing of one’s father. In the whispered conversations that villagers struck up in secluded trails and corners, however, they speculated that Carlos might have undergone a vision quest, and the power of the fierce spirit he had so acquired had enraged him to the point of driving him to kill his own father. Others suggested that to commit such a murder, Carlos, who at the time of the killing was considered a powerless and inexperienced youth, must have been acting on the orders of a much more powerful shaman. There were at least three agents involved: Carlos, arútam (the spirit of a deceased prominent elder),¹ and an enemy shaman – and possibly more. While these speculations pointed to a plurality of intentions at play, in public assemblies, most villagers concentrated the blame on Carlos, and Carlos alone. Typically the analysis here focused on his ill will to explain the gravity of the murder. Privately, villagers mobilised visionary and shamanic agency and supported a longstanding view of death as the result of aggression, often carried out by multiple parties, which calls for revenge; in public, they focused on individual and Godly agency and called for forgiveness. In the process, intentions that had so far appeared opaque were made to appear not only discernible but also concentrated on a specific individual categorised as immoral.

How can we make sense of these two ways of understanding intentions? As the wake illustrates, this is not a historical shift (from distributed to unitarian agency), but rather an alternation, bound by context and mediated by specific speech registers. The two understandings of intentions relate to different conceptions of agency, power, and mind in interpersonal relations. They represent two fundamentally opposed regimes of ‘intention management’, that is, modes of addressing the intentions of others. I will describe those regimes as the ‘rule of self’ and the ‘rule of law’: The rule of self is epitomised by the antagonistic exchanges with arútam; the rule of law is modelled on the unifying power of the Christian God as outlined in the Bible. In the former, action is predicated on forms of self-mastery or magnification that alter and conceal a person’s intentions, thereby rendering them opaque to others; in the latter it is premised on the fixing and revealing of intentions, thereby rendering them transparent to others. In both cases, mastery is the product of relations with powerful others, but the relations that are established and the kinds of power they make available are different in each case. The rule of self and the rule of law are not mutually exclusive, and they co-exist as possible modes of intention management. People tap into a common pool of resources that remains available across contexts, and no rule ever disappears from the horizon; but either may be foregrounded or backgrounded in a specific context. In the following, I will discuss both rules in turn, provide some historical background, emphasise the roles played by arútam and by God, and focus in particular on the different speech registers and contexts associated with these two modes of understanding intention. But first, I need to introduce my theoretical vocabulary, and situate my argument within this special issue and within the literature on opacity, legibility, and cosmopolitics.

Cosmopolitics of Intentions

All the contributors of this special issue share the fundamental assumption that the different ways in which we address the opacity of other minds and intentions are central to politics; they are grounded in fundamental cosmological principles and in the distribution of intentionality across the universe. As we have seen in the introductory vignette, we are dealing with different ‘cosmopolitics of intentions’, that is, different ways in which subject positions and agencies are positioned, recognised, and ‘read’ by others.

Shuar society might well be called the ‘original political society’ in Sahlins’ (2017) recent formulation: relatively ‘egalitarian’ in this world, it is nevertheless governed by powerful owners and spirits, that is, by metahumans or metapersons.² And indeed, metapersons play crucial roles in governing the behaviour of Shuar persons. But it is wrong to describe the rule of metapersons as a government with a chain of command, a quasi-bureaucracy (Sahlins 2017: 107), and a ‘rule of law’ (Sahlins 2017: 93). A ‘chain of command’ implies a series of unequivocal and unitary intentions, captured through command and obedience; but that is not how intentions and agency operate in Shuar cosmopolitics – for example, remember the excess of intentionality cited at the beginning, when ordinary people, shamans, and spirits helped to multiply the possibilities of blame for Carlos’s act and for Luis’s death. Such multiplicity of intentions is anything but a ‘rule of law’, given that the law (just like a command structure) aims to make intentions transparent and accountable.³ The law is ‘a concomitant of centralizing processes’ (Roberts 2005: 13), processes that are often associated with the sort of theory of mind that facilitates the univocal apportioning of responsibility (see introduction, this volume). Thus, instead of referring to a specific legal system or to ‘state law’, I use ‘law’ to refer to the set of assumptions whereby clear and public ascriptions create a singular and unifying rule that is applied in a stable and even manner.

The question is, what difference do different regimes of intention management make to (cosmo)politics? By regime of intention management I mean not only the intensity of intentionality attributed to the beings that populate the world and influence human action, but also the relative opacity or legibility of intentions. That is, in what ways do metahuman powers engender legibility or opacity?

I refer to legibility as the capacity of making others legible, that is, discernible, a capacity that – as we suggest in the introduction of this special issue – might render such beings more amenable to external control. The proposal of this special issue connects projects of legibility, and especially ‘state legibility’ as understood by James Scott (1998), to folk theory of mind. The premise is that legibility makes things manifest and available for decipherment, control, and individual accountability, whereas opacity often forecloses this possibility.

The idea of opacity is taken from the doctrine of the ‘opacity of other minds’ proposed by Robbins and Rumsey (2008). In societies in which this doctrine operates, actors take care to keep their states of mind to themselves and treat each other’s inner experiences as unknowable, or at least not subject to overt discussion. While this is true, to some extent, for Shuar society, I hasten to add two qualifications: first, it is crucial to distinguish between different occasions and contexts. If there is a general avoidance to address other people’s minds and intentions directly when speaking to the same people, Shuar readily speculate about such things in semi-private conversation. Second, we need to distinguish ‘mind’, as the bounded interiority of some being, from ‘intention’, as the propensity toward action. There is no unambiguous and direct equivalence for ‘mind’ in the Shuar language and folk psychology, whereas intentions are obviously present in all kinds of beings (as I show below).

Rather than ‘opacity of other minds’, I therefore focus on the ‘opacity of other intentions’: such opacity is an effect of the specific pathways to ‘mastery’ that people pursue, that is, the ways in which they are constituted by and through others, both human and metahuman. Building on classic Amazonian literature about magnification (Taylor 2009, 2015), ownership, and ‘familiarizing predation’ (Fausto 1999, 2008, 2012), I will show that opacity is a consequence of the accrual of predatory power. Simply put, people become opaque because they are inhabited by a multiplicity of predatory intentionalities. Predation and magnification are thus related cosmopolitics of intention and give rise to a ‘rule of self’.

This mode of action or ‘rule of self’ gives rise to a communicative ethos of political autonomy that combines suspicion and concealment – anything but legibility. The ‘rule of law’, on the contrary, fundamentally relies on the forms of state legibility produced through sedentism, government administration, and Christianity. In the public forum of the village, predatory powers are considered fraught, so the Shuar aim to subsume and contain earlier forms of magnification by mobilising the power of God. Thus, instead of promoting opacity through a charge of predatory intentionality, God, as mobilised by the Shuar, has a pacifying potential that creates the conditions for transparency.

In the following, I refer to the ‘the rule of self’ to characterise the kind of autonomous politics that takes place in relational contexts where intentions remain multiple, unstable, and fundamentally opaque. This is contrasted with ‘the rule of law’, the kind of centralising politics where notions of collective authority have gained prominence and where intentions are assumed to be decipherable, stable, and transparent, increasing the potential for control. The conclusion expounds comparatively on the moral transformations at stake in the alternation between the rule of self and rule of law. This article draws on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, between 2011 and 2018, among Shuar people living in the south-eastern Ecuadorian foothills, in the province of Morona Santiago, where I worked within a network of villages in Makuma, an area of recent evangelical missionisation.⁴

Rule of Self: Arutam and the Cultivation of Opacity

The Shuar, an Indigenous population of approximately 100,000 members, are the largest group of Aénts Chicham speakers living in the Amazonian rainforest along what is now the international border between Ecuador and Peru.⁵ Historically, Shuar social organisation had no centralised political authority linked to chiefdoms, village communities, or unilineal descent groups. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, the Shuar were semi-mobile and lived widely dispersed. Households were spread out along the banks of rivers and formed fluid bilateral kindred-groups linked by marriage alliances; such groups centred on the influence of one or two ‘great men’, typically renowned warriors (kakaram) whose authority was restricted to tactical decisions in times of open hostilities. This was a highly decentralised society: within each kin group, the household operated as a politically independent and economically self-sufficient unit of production and consumption while permanent tension and armed feuds structured relations between kindred groups.

For the Shuar, most entities possess a form of subjectivity. A certain form of general animism can be inferred from the idea that plants, animals, spirits, the dead, and some inanimate entities (by Euro-American standards) possess a common subjective element, a wakán⁶, which enables Shuar people to establish mutually intelligible communication with all such beings in very specific circumstances, for example during dreams and visions. What all these beings share with living humans is consciousness and intentionality. But although all entities possess subjectivity, not all of them have the same power and perceptive faculties, as Shuar draw distinctions according to the intentional intensity attributed to different kinds of beings. Those imbued with higher intentionality are recognised for their predatory agency, that is, as beings able to occupy the top of predatory food chains (incorporating others by occupying the position of predator or enemy and avoiding the position of prey or victim). It should be noted, however, that this is not a stable hierarchy; rather than referring to fixed classes of beings, predator and prey designate reversible positions or perspectives. In the quest for vital principles, there is an endless struggle of perspectives: from the point of view of some animals or spirits, they may be the ones who act as predators, seeing humans as their prey or enemies, and vice versa. Adding to this, until recently, Shuar social relations have involved shifting kin ties and institutionalised forms of reciprocal violence (head-hunting, vendetta feuds, and assault shamanism), which means that a sense of uncertainty and hostility prevails and that the positions of friend and foe, enemy and victim, change rapidly.

The predominant logic of Shuar sociality before sedentarisation therefore was ‘ontological predation’ (Viveiros de Castro 2011). Persons, names, and reputations are made of scarce vital resources that have to be captured from others. Predation thus underpinned the relations that Shuar established with humans and non-humans, from which they procured vital substances and principles of identity. The principle of predation was most obvious in the head-hunting ritual (Taylor 1993: 671); it is still evident today in the arútam vision complex, and motivates a series of ordinary actions, as we will see. To succeed in such a world, the Shuar (but especially men) must acquire the sort of capacities that enable them to occupy the position of predator for as long as possible. Whilst this process starts early on in childhood, especially for male persons, who are gradually socialised into the memories of enmity and revenge evoked by their elders, a defining moment occurs as they start pursuing vision quests in their adolescence and continue doing so at various moments during the life-cycle. A person can undertake vision quests to recover from periods of debilitation or strenuous activity (such as birth, illness, and war); to succeed in gardening, hunting, and other productive activities; and to manage relations successfully, whether with one’s allies or foes. Meeting an arútam in a vision gives one the strength (kakárma) necessary to accomplish all of the above; this strength also results in the enhancement or magnification of selfhood, which aligns other beings’ intentions with one’s own while keeping the latter opaque.

Ephemeral Magnification and Opacity

Arútam is the spirit of a deceased eminent elder,⁷ whom a Shuar individual can encounter by ingesting decoctions prepared with hallucinogenic plants, typically datura (Brugmansia spp., maíkiua in Shuar), ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis spp.,natem in Shuar), and tobacco (Nicotiana spp., tsaank in Shuar), and after enduring a series of deprivations and singing specific magical incantations in which the seeker addresses the spirit as ‘little father/grandfather' (apách), so as to gain the spirit’s favour. When the vision-seeker is exhausted and worn out, they are suddenly overwhelmed by strange atmospheric and acoustic phenomena – violent gusts, shimmering and thunderous weather announcing a fearful and monstrous apparition, frequently a predator, an anaconda, a galloping jaguar, a blood-drenched warrior, all beings on the high end of intentionality – that is, predatory agency. This is arútam, so the vision-seeker must step forward and touch the terrifying apparition, which subsequently disappears. After more chanting and the ingestion of plants, the seeker falls asleep, and the arútam reappears in their dreams. At this point, it manifests itself as a prominent elder – typically a mythical hero, spirit-owner, or an ancestor who reveals to the vision-seeker a unique fragment of their destiny. The Shuar refer to this event as the incorporation of an arútam spirit, which becomes a sort of ‘internal double’ (Taylor 2003: 237). The arútam quest endows the seeker with a sense of enhanced or magnified selfhood, which manifests in terms of acute self-awareness, clear speech, invincibility, and the intensification of felt hostility towards enemies. We might say that what the Shuar apprehend during the arútam vision is the perspective of an enemy, the sort of intentional intensity they so value in predatory figures. Arútam does not transmit ‘energy’ or vital ‘force’ to the seeker, as occurs in equivalent rituals in other Amazonian societies (e.g. Santos-Granero 2012), but rather a ‘heightened self-consciousness and purpose’ (Taylor 1993: 666). Instead of generic life, the arútam grants ‘life with direction or quality, life linked to a certain set of values’ (Taylor 1993: 666). These are the values of confrontation and independence, realised in antagonistic exchanges, which are central to local notions of healthy selfhood, especially for adult males.⁸

Despite the cessation of feuding and head-hunting expeditions, arútam visions and metaphors of invincibility at war continue to strengthen and prepare men to confront everyday political scuffles. Marco,⁹ my host father, for instance, recalled a vision quest in which the elder who guided him transmitted strength to him by naming the spirits (wakán) of all his political enemies and singing them away through magical incantations (ánent) so that his rivals could not easily outdo him through defamation and conspiracy. Just like with the great warriors of the past, Marco’s acquisition of arútam triggers a process of magnification: the enhancement of one’s capacities to seduce, persuade, fight, and outdo, projected onto a future self.

Magnification is ‘rooted in the capacity to align the affective dispositions and intentions of other individuals to one’s own’ (Taylor 2015: 144). The production of this enhanced selfhood depends on the incorporation of alterity through mastery or ownership; the self as master ‘is a magnified Self without being an “I” identical to itself’ (Costa & Fausto 2019: 217). This ‘alterating configuration’ in turn helps to explain why the kind of power that results from magnification is fundamentally ambivalent and decentring, and promotes dispersion rather than concentration. These characteristics bear on the argument of this paper: they help us explain why what I have called a ‘rule of self’, which prevents the hierarchisation of power and perspectives, results from specific relations with metahumans, and why this kind of magnification promotes opacity.

After a vision quest, the person is charged with an overwhelming desire to kill, and in the past, a successful kakaram (warrior) might have killed dozens of people. Participating in war was of course a way of magnifying the self by broadening one’s circle of allies. But such alliances were not only highly unstable in a society structured by endemic feuding and intertribal warring, but magnification through war was by nature ephemeral: the more enemies a man made, the more exposed he and his family became to being killed, whether through physical homicide or shamanic attacks. Moreover, every time men engaged in killing, they would lose their arútam.¹⁰ So, while individuals could acquire an arútam, they did not ‘own’ it permanently. The Shuar also observed that after inhabiting the same body for more than a few years, the arútam spirit becomes restless and leaves to be acquired by someone else (Harner 1972: 141). Sooner or later a warrior would lose all of his arútam and eventually die. The Shuar thus have depended on a power that circulates: while anyone could harness it, no one can ‘control it absolutely or permanently’ (Rubenstein 2012: 49). What can we say about the regime of intentions that underlie it – that is, the forms of opacity or legibility that ensue from it?

The process of magnification through alteration results in a paradox. Arútam creates a boost of self-awareness and confidence in the seeker, a form of power that Shuar characterise as having the quality of clarity or granting ‘clear effects' on their lives (paantmamu), both in the sense of clearing up or resolving and of highlighting or evidencing, and which manifests both visually (clarity of sight) and verbally (the clarity of speech). Shuar often qualify this clarity as ‘true’ (nekás) (see also Harner 1972; and Rubenstein 2012: 46). But here is the paradox: once acquired, this power does not make the seeker any more legible to others; rather, it makes him powerful by rendering him opaque.

To begin with, the encounter with the arútam remains invisible to others. No one other than the seeker experiences the arútam. Of course, there are explicit pragmatic cues that alert others to the fact that the seeker has acquired an arútam: he will exhibit a surge in confidence and potency which manifest in the first instance in the persuasiveness and forcefulness of his speech (what Shuar call clear speech, paan chicham). The Shuar call the person who manifests such skills and powers wáimiaku, the one who has seen,¹¹ though no one can be sure whether someone else has encountered an arútam. In political scuffles, men often challenge one another by playing on this uncertainty: for example, one man asked an inter-village assembly that included his political enemies, ‘Do they [i.e., my critics or accusers] know whether I have gone to the waterfall?’ Waterfalls are typically where the Shuar go to encounter an arútam spirit. Thus, by alluding to the possibility that they are men of vision, speakers seek to draw attention to the clarity and truthfulness of their words while instilling caution or even fear in their enemies.

Until recently, and even now in moments of tension evocative of war, the Aénts Chicham wore unique red face-paint said to depict the facial designs of the arútam encountered in the vision.¹² These paintings may be seen as a mask that reflects the bodily transformation of the seeker during their interaction with the arútam, and speaks for the latter’s power. Yet the message revealed to the seeker must not be alluded to discursively lest the seeker loses the ability to accomplish their destiny. We are therefore confronted with an experience that leaves traces and must be shown (even boasted about) through a series of marked bodily and behavioural cues, yet that is simultaneously verbally concealed or suppressed.

The arútam vision in fact enables opacity in Shuar relations. Relations with immediate kin are marked by mutuality and intimacy – people tend to each other’s needs and emotions through sharing, feeding, and taking care of one another. Folded into webs of mutuality, the internal states of others are neither mysterious nor explicit objects of reflection. The arútam vision, however, creates a hiatus in everyday perception by introducing difference into a space of similarity. As Taylor puts it, once the seeker ‘has incorporated the position of the enemy, his own “insidedness” is now veiled to the gaze of his familiars, thereby freeing the individual from the power of others to see into his subjectivity and change it against his will’ (2002: 464). Thus the person escapes ‘the mire of transparency and mutual dependency’ of familiar relations (Taylor 2002: 464). So, the very process whereby a person gains power – self-awareness, confidence, and therefore social prominence – contributes to making their intentions opaque to others. Blanca, a healer from a border town to the South of the province who suffered from routine mistreatment and hostility from her husband, recalled to me how after undergoing a vision quest, she returned home calmly and confronted her husband without fearing reprisals. ‘You cannot harm me’, she told him, confident that he could no longer dissuade her from nor interfere with her plans to train as a healer.¹³

An important clarification is necessary here. Becoming opaque does not mean becoming immune to the possibility that others will eventually see through or act on this person against their will. People always fear attacks from invisible agents, and so many bad things that happen are understood to be the result of the evil intentions of spirits, shamans, and enemies (as was the patricide of Luis mentioned at the beginning). Given this hostile environment, in which it is always possible that one’s intentions could be captured by enemies, a way to make oneself temporarily invulnerable is to acquire the superior strength of arútam: in this way, others cannot overpower one’s intentions, and – importantly for our purposes – others cannot ‘see’ one’s intentions. Through a vision, it is possible to acquire the sight of a powerful arútam, and to take its perspective: by internalising the point of view of a fierce spirit, the vision-seeker sees others in the way the arútam sees them, that is, as its prey. Magnification in this way means the incorporation of others, including their intentions.

This experience induces a fundamental instability of perspectives which creates innumerable possibilities for misrecognition and deception. As in other Amazonian contexts, Shuar are suspicious of the appearances that meet their eyes, for people are never just how they look,¹⁴ which is another way of saying that their intentions are opaque. Shuar represent the process of developing self-awareness as taking place in the heart (enentai), the centre of individuality where one’s self-reflexivity, intentions, emotions, and the ability to act appropriately reside. Knowledge of the heart is intimately connected to the idiosyncratic make-up or personality of a person, whose heart arútam is said to rearrange in the course of visions. Like visions, the thoughts, intentions, and motivations (enentaimtairi) of a person sit in the heart and are thought to be ultimately known and communicable only by that person (see also Hendricks 1988: 220; Mader 1999: 427). On multiple occasions, people told me that it was impossible to know what others really thought, or what their hearts wanted, for they were not only difficult to read and predict, but also prone to external attack, which could cause erratic behaviour. ‘We are not all the same’ is an expression my informants used often to explain that everyone was different, no one’s heart was like any other. Besides, it would be intrusive for anyone to speak about, or worse, enquire about, their fellows’ inner thoughts in their presence.

Uncertainty and suspicion manifest themselves in the speech registers that Shuar pursue through ceremonial dialogues, which are highly valued ritualised agonistic interactions between two men (and typically only men). Speaking clearly in this dialogic context has to do with being able to express oneself in an assertive manner by effectively embodying the visual aesthetics and etiquette of dialogic discourse: the bodily posture and pathos, the facial painting adorning the speaker’s face which bespeaks his power, the stereotypical alternations and silences and the shouts that govern these exchanges. As Hendricks writes, these exchanges ‘provide participants with an opportunity to display personal power, aggressivity, knowledge and skill, while at the same time preventing open conflict by acknowledging the power of one’s opponent’ (1993: 87–88). In effect, much of Shuar speech centres around explicit calls for mutual recognition, which is demonstrated not through specific content – of which there is very little – but rather through respect for the rules of social interaction (Crépeau 1993: 93; Rubenstein 2012: 57; Surrallés 2003).¹⁵ This kind of recognition is predicated on the fact that the real intentions of the other remain opaque. Mistrust rather than trust is the precondition of this high moment of sociality, and despite speakers’ rhetorical virtuosity, every gesture can be mis-interpreted or mis-recognised. Even at the peak of dialogic encounters, Shuar can only hope to manage, that is, tame, but never foreclose the risk that others entail in their lives.

This explains why Shuar readily attribute harm to others’ nefarious intentions even if they claim not to know what others are up to. The Shuar social world is saturated with intentionality, and almost any event of significance (especially if injurious) is attributed to others’ hostility. Agency of all kinds is always potentially lurking behind misfortune, sickness, or death. This is a strong corrective against the possible misunderstanding that the opacity of other minds entails a decrease of intentionality: to the contrary, in the Shuar case, there is too much of it, and it is all the more emphasised because one can never be certain about the sort of powers others carry with them (see also Groark 2013 for the Tzotzil Maya, and Robbins 2011; Throop 2008: 418 for comparable cases in the Pacific).

The ‘rule of self’ that responds to the ubiquity of intentionality by magnifying the self and preying on others intentions, is confirmed by the limit case of shamanism: shamans (uwishin) have arguably the most developed technologies for accessing and manipulating that which remains invisible, including other people’s intentions. While shamans share the predatory stance gained by arútam-enhanced persons, they pursue a different path towards magnification, following a process of ‘familiarizing predation’ (Fausto 2012).

Familiarisation is the process whereby alterity is turned into sociality, so prey is turned into a familiar: generally, another being (possibly non-human) is given the role of adopted child. Shuar shamans develop special intimate relationships with powerful non-human third parties – helper spirits – often without even their relatives realising it (Deshoulliere 2019: 17). Thanks to these relations, shamans’ bodies incorporate pathogenic ‘darts’ called tsentsak. Shamanic helper spirits are conceptualised as the adopted children (or at times, affinal allies and/or friends) of shamans, and figure as the shamans’ eyes, guiding the mystical darts with which they inflict illness (Rubenstein 2012: 48; Taylor 2014: 99). Shamans thus develop the power of seeing, while their powers and ways of operating often remain invisible to others. For instance, shamans have exclusive first-hand knowledge (and control over) the darts ‘secretly accumulated in their bodies, whose exact nature escapes the gaze of others’ (Deshoulliere 2019: 17, my translation).¹⁶ Shamans can also diagnose the origin of the harmful darts they see in the body of patients and can therefore denounce (occasionally by name) the enemy shaman responsible for a death or affliction.¹⁷

But at the same time, shamanism is shrouded in secrecy. They act concealed from public view, acquire their powers in faraway locales, and their power defies ordinary control. To make matters worse, anyone can be a shaman without others knowing about it. The shamanic ability to traffic invisible powers while remaining opaque to others is thus also part of the rule of self, and for this reason, shamanic power among the Shuar is not susceptible to hierarchisation: shamans remain susceptible to physical murder and the invisible attacks of others (Descola & Lory 1982: 92). Furthermore, as in other parts of Amazonia, the Shuar shaman is ‘a multiple being, a micropopulation of shamanic agencies sheltering within a body: hence neither are his “intentions” exclusively “his,” nor can he ever be certain of his own intentions’ (Rodgers 2002: 121 cited in Fausto 2008: 343). In other words, in shamanism too we see a different form of mastery or magnification whereby power manifests through opacity, even in its closest attempt at establishing legibility.

Rather than a ‘rule of law’, the forms of power that Shuar pursue through their engagements with metahuman others engender a ‘rule of self’. By this I mean that power emerges here from aligning oneself with others’ intentions in an unceasing struggle to overpower them. These modes of ‘intention management’, of engaging others’ intentions, defy legibility, and they don’t allow for the emergence and stabilisation of one privileged perspective. At the interpersonal level, this regime of power engenders intentional opacity and promotes a highly independent and confrontational kind of subjectivity.

In what follows, I show how aspects of this regime of power and intention management take on new meanings in contexts where Shuar have been experimenting with state legibility, in conjunction with different metahuman powers. This occurred under the combined impact of sedentarisation, state integration, and partial Christian conversion, changes which have eventually led Shuar to produce a ‘rule of law’, including relations of command and obedience, in their midst.

Rule of Law: God and State Legibility

At least since the 1960s, Shuar have lived in villages called centros, which literally means centres. These are administrative and legal entities recognised by the Ecuadorian government. Permanent gathering in centros has led to the gradual decline of reciprocal violence, as Shuar have found themselves living in close proximity with more people than they used to in the past, including distant relatives or even non-kin. At the same time, since land is now collectively titled to prevent settler encroachment, Shuar can no longer relocate to other villages freely when internal conflict escalates, as would have been the case prior to permanent sedentarisation. Sedentarisation was the end result of a century of settler encroachment and state-led colonisation pursued through missionisation. Lacking resources either to sponsor large-scale colonisation or to develop infrastructural links that connected the Amazon to the rest of the country, the Ecuadorian government relied on the work of missionaries to gain control over the region and subdue its native populations. Two missions were principally involved in this process among Shuar: the Catholic mission of the Salesian Order, who sent missionaries mainly from Italy, and an Evangelical mission from the US, the Gospel Missionary Union, which later changed its name to Avant Ministries (AM).¹⁸

Already in 1945, the Evangelical AM mission had established a mission post in Makuma, the area where I conducted most of my fieldwork. The main objective of Evangelical missionaries has been to propagate the gospel and support the development of strong native churches and communities that can work autonomously after their departure. In their view, this work necessitated that forest-dwelling tribes abandon the ‘savage’ ways of life that keep them hostage to the devil,¹⁹ while true conversion can only happen if native hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit and Jesus’s saving power. This is why preaching the gospel and translating the Bible into the vernacular play such an important role in paving the way to the eternal salvation that missionaries wish to proclaim.

To encourage a village-based way of life, Protestant missionaries promoted a strategy of community development centred on cattle cooperatives. The cooperatives were the first supra-local organisations with hierarchical structures, clear and scripted administration, and jurisdiction over specific territories. These cooperatives subsequently paved the way for the creation of ethnic federations formed around the 1960s, through which Shuar mediated relations with the state, for example by acquiring collective land titles, even while legitimising juridical and hierarchical relations within their territory. Shuar integration within the state thus took place through a reorganisation of socio-economic and spatial relations (Buitron 2016, 2020; Rubenstein 2001). Partly in response to settlers, officials, and missionaries, and later out of their own volition, Shuar have attached increasing importance to notions of political unity and collective authority. These processes are part and parcel of various projects of state legibility: sedentarisation, agriculture, permanent surname registration, schooling, and the cash economy all have made Shuar sociality to some extent ‘legible’ in Scott’s (1998) sense.

State legibility was not just an outside imposition, but has also been actively pursued by the Shuar themselves. According to Shuar accounts, the prospect of temporary peace and increased access to manufactured goods was the original incentive to settle around the missions (Buitron 2016: 66-72; see also Taylor 1981: 651). With time, the need to defend Indigenous territory from settler encroachment and the possibility of accessing schooling and state resources encouraged Shuar to settle in villages. In native villages, Shuar have created supra-familial forums such as public assemblies, school meetings, and church services, in which people gather to discuss all sorts of issues as a collectivity. Since villages were modelled after mission-led cattle cooperatives, and mission-trained Shuar teachers and political leaders have been centrally involved in recasting the terms of coexistence in sedentary life, it makes sense that understandings of Godly power have contributed some of the intellectual scaffolding for the kind of collective authority that Shuar presently pursue in villages.²⁰ I have dealt with different aspects of village formation elsewhere (Buitron 2016, 2020), and here I will focus specifically on how Shuar have mobilised the Christian God, the Bible, and the public assembly, to produce a novel regime of intention management premised on the possibility of submission to a super-owner that would subsume previous relations of mastery-ownership.

Submission and Legibility

The community of those who call themselves ‘people of God’ (Yus Shuar) is in fact a small and relatively unstable community. Christians come and go, step in and out of ‘God’s path’ with frequency. To call themselves Christian, a person must break with everyday life in at least three important ways: by halting all dealings with arútam, by shunning shamanism and vindictive self-defence, and by quitting fermented manioc beer.²¹ Observing these abstentions is difficult, as most Shuar admit in private. But even if Christianity involves more renunciation than most people can cope with, Christianity is alive and well in Makuma: its success can be judged by the extent to which Christian premises are now creatively interwoven with Shuar understandings of power and everyday morality. In addition to this, the people of God, but occasionally non-Christian villagers as well, participate in weekly church services, periodic Bible translation seminars, Bible reading, and prayer groups. Thanks to this translating team, now almost every household owns a Bible in Shuar and a hymnal to consult privately – the Bible being the only book the Shuar of Makuma take pains to preserve in good state and read of their own will.²²

From very early on, missionaries condemned vision quests, identifying arútam as the devil, and Evangelical Shuar often contrast arútam’s devilish and inferior power with the supreme goodness of God.²³ An oscillating Christian and arútam-seeker, my host father Marco described the difference between arútam and God thus: ‘So God is above. Then there are other powers, like arútam. Arútam is like a god over many gods, like Tsunki and Nunkui, powerful but not omnipotent like God. Arútam is a local god.’

Arútam, like Tsunki, the River spirits, and Nunkui, the garden spirits, are local and thus inferior to God. By its shape-shifting nature, arútam can never reach the general and abstract bounty of God: ‘Arútam only speaks about itself’, ‘Arútam only gave us war and vengeance’, Shuar like to say. The problem is not only that both arútam and shamanic auxiliary spirits grant amoral power, both to thrive and to harm, but that these forms of magnification imply a change of perspective, since both mean that magnified persons may see even their relatives and allies as prey, rather than as kin, allies and co-villagers. God, by contrast, is schematically conceptualised as a stable fatherly figure – both caring and obedience-seeking, but basically enabling of good in his children. The power of God is always moral and good, and therefore cannot be put to detrimental ends.²⁴ Rather than predicated on a predatory relation whereby prey and predator remain reversible and in unstable positions, God takes on the role of permanent protector.

The relationship with God mirrors the magnification of self and familiarisation of prey pursued by the shamans, however with a pacifying effect. If predation is premised on a form of differentiating antagonism that prevents assimilation, familiarising predation is built on a process of identification, in which ‘each term is poised to subsume the other, instead of being opposed to it’ (Taylor 2014: 100). Relations with God follow this latter pattern, but the results are fundamentally different: God-pacified persons are not constituted by cultivating the predator stance but, on the contrary, that of the familiarised prey.²⁵ Another difference is that among the Shuar, shamanic familiarisation never reached a stable apex whereby they could subsume multiple owners in a pyramidal manner, as would be expected in systems of spatial or temporal territorialisation (Fausto 2008: 344). Instead, God is understood to subsume other relations of ownership. In this sense, what the Shuar create with God resembles more a relationship of permanent protection which ‘implies the non-reversible domination of the protector over the one who benefits from that protection' (Descola 2012: 461). In prayers, the Shuar address and evoke God through the affective term ‘little father/grandfather' (apách). As mentioned above, the same term is used to elicit pity from arútam so that the spirit will manifest to the seeker. But the difference lies in the emotional and structural character of the relationship – the relation established with arútam is one of differentiating defiance, whereas that with God is one of identifying submission.

The relationship with God is highly inegalitarian: as Shuar often point out, they are God’s children. This relationship is not free of anxiety, for unlike the parent–child relation, in this kind of care, the terms never switch over the course of time, so Shuar can never reciprocate the care of God. Indeed, Shuar marvel at and are perplexed by the enigma that, unlike other master/owners, God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, yet remains invisible to the Shuar, especially to those who do not accept the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Precisely on the basis of this irreversibility, God can subsume and pacify all known masters/owners. Just like a protector is sometimes protected by someone more powerful, forming a hierarchical chain of dyadic links of clientship, the Shuar envision God as a kind of super-owner, topping the hierarchy of master/owner spirits. This much is made clear in manifold stories Shuar tell about the subordination of other master spirits to divine power, whether these came from the Indigenous or Christian pantheon. One story they relish is that of ‘the fallen angel’ Lucifer, who lost the protection of God and was condemned to leave: since then, he preys on humans, luring them away from God’s herd. God also oversees a chain of celestial angels who, as a Shuar woman explained to me, ‘watch every human being and know their intentions and behaviour’. But, ‘even without the angels’ help’, another friend added, ‘God knows what you will do today and tomorrow.’²⁶

Nothing can be hidden from God, so his protection is tantamount to submitting ‘to a state of infantile transparency’, as Taylor cogently puts it (2002: 464). The only reason this is desirable is because such relations with God are conducive to peaceful and transparent sociality. As a villager put it to me, ‘When someone knows how to live well, they settle for good, among their fellows, for they have nothing to hide, no evil thought or desire for problems.’ Shuar say that God, with his infinite love and compassion, teaches them ‘patience, forgiveness, and resistance to rage’.²⁷ This desire for peacefulness and transparency has gained prominence, as individuals cannot easily shift allegiances through constant relocation given that the only way people gain access to land is through village membership. Thus, accusations that would otherwise target distant others living elsewhere, are inevitably absorbed among coresidents within the village community, forcing antagonising individuals and kin groups to find ways to coexist with their enemies. The emphasis on peacefulness is not unlike the Guarani case described by Fausto (2007: 93), where familiarising predation as a hegemonic relational scheme that historically transformed into love, is a new basis of relational power. As Fausto observes, the Christian message of universal love, peace, and brotherhood makes inroads in Indigenous sociality when ‘predation of the outside’ risks becoming ‘the measure for relations on the inside’, thereby endangering social reproduction (Fausto 2007: 93–94).

An important aspect of how relations with pre-existent masters/owners are subsumed in a vertical cosmology is the new medium available to engage with God. Relations with arútam and other master spirits hinge on personal visions and dreams, whereas God speaks to Christian Shuar through the Bible.²⁸ For instance, drawing on the view that visions grant clarity, the Shuar say that good pastors speak truly and clearly – that is, from the heart – because their speech is inspired by the Bible, a text associated with the written tradition, in a world where power increasingly lies with the mastery of literacy, inscription, and textual knowledge. I often marvelled at the precision with which Shuar cared to recall the onset of writing; if God once communicated with the prophets and other celestial servants through visions, now God speaks to humans via the Bible, which is ‘God’s word alive’. By reading it, Shuar let the Holy Spirit inhabit and change their hearts.

Similarly, God is said to shape people’s hearts, most importantly by opening them. These expressions are reminiscent of a traditional emphasis on seeing clearly and speaking clearly, the faculties gained through vision quests and connected to the heart of the person. But there is a slippage here, for God-induced clarity does not result in the kind of ‘masking’ that shows a secret even while rendering the vision-seeker opaque. Rather, it works by cancelling out the marks of predatory power that create opacity. Visionary truth can only be known by its holder and remains secret. Inverting this premise, Shuar now often say that ‘only God knows’ (yusak nekawai). And since this truth is revealed in the Bible and can be known by everyone who follows God, the truth about the self and the truth about others is publicly available. On many occasions, friends explained that when people say that they don’t lie, they don’t commit adultery, or they don’t engage in shamanism, they are probably lying, because the Bible itself says that men are liars, lustful, and sorcerers – that is, sinners. For this reason, humans must pray to God to pacify them by opening their hearts²⁹ (enentai ura-k), so they can avoid harbouring ill thoughts that would invite accusations from others. Human intentions are naked to God’s sight, so it is immoral to try and hide them. Shuar make this clear when they say that they have to rid themselves of the altering perspectives occupying them, such as those of lesser (devilish) spirits: arútam or shamanic powers.

This sense of identity and stability sought through God is often remarked on through the image of imprinting God’s knowledge – which has the stability of writing – into people’s hearts. ³⁰ But more important here is the fact that the viewpoint that God imposes on Shuar persons is no longer reversible, as were relations with arútam and other arútam-enhanced selves. Rather, the shaping of hearts occurs in a specific direction: from God to humans only. Therefore, while recruiting earlier understandings of knowledge of the heart, it is the idea of an omniscient God, one who already (and always) knows all about others, which creates the conditions for transparency.

The power of the Christian God cannot be separated from the circumstances in which it appeared: Christian proselytism, sedentism, and village statecraft (mentioned earlier), but also the public assembly, the Bible, and writing. All of these further reinforced the idea that there is one truth, and that stabilising the source of intentions in the public domain is not only possible but also good and necessary. These assumptions are often embodied in village assemblies, which are meetings in which villagers gather to discuss collective issues, from economic projects, to elections, to the preparations for a feast. But the most urgent issue they discuss in assemblies are sensitive situations that potentially affect everyone in the community because of their high-escalation potential, such as for example the wake that opened this article.

In assemblies, Shuar villagers strive to create a register of communication that demands accountability from speakers (Buitron & Deshoulliere, n.d.). Villagers achieve this both spatially – by the simple fact of becoming all simultaneously co-present (and visible to each other) – and linguistically, by making individual speech acts available to everyone. This is, in fact, the only way speech acts acquire ‘public’ status in a Shuar village. In principle everyone can speak in an assembly, and everyone present can listen to others at the same time. In this sense, assembly speechmaking contrasts with everyday talk in which close relatives speak ‘among themselves’ in the privacy of their homes, on secluded trails, or in the house of a shaman. Assembly speech also contrasts with the ceremonial dialogues described earlier, where Shuar men address one person only in dyadic exchanges. Both in dyadic ceremonial exchanges and in the public assemblies there is significant formal discourse, but in the latter, there is more ordinary language and villagers place emphasis on peacefulness, submission to authority, and transparency. Together, these emphases create the basis for the rule of law, a political framework that contrasts with the rule of self that is premised on predation, autonomy, and opacity. To illustrate how the rule of law sustains a different regime of intention management centred on transparency, let me return to the case of Carlos with which I began.

In private conversations that happened during the wake, villagers were less eager to establish definitively which, among the multiple movers in play, produced the killing; by contrast, when they spoke publicly in the assembly hall, they recruited this information to point to Carlos’s unique blame. Regardless of what had empowered Carlos to kill his father, he was guilty for trafficking with such devilish forces.³¹ Though most speakers avoided mentioning his name, they lamented the situation using the shorthand of the ‘ungrateful son’ that the pastor had volunteered, to express the immorality of the patricide and its sinful character which was offensive to and incompatible with God’s word. This position was primarily endorsed by adult men in positions of authority: schoolteachers, political leaders, and pastors, who used the occasion to condemn everything that contravened good living in the community: basically all forms of hidden activity, rumours, or ‘bad talk’, which, like shamanic attacks, operate secretly and lack traceable authors. All such acts, they implied, were committed by ill-hearted people who had deliberately sought Satan (a few people said arútam directly), and had been derailed by him.

In such situations, regardless of whether someone is following God’s path or not, most Shuar in Makuma mobilise a dualistic reconfiguration of metahuman power, equating moral good with the superior power of God while demonising arútam and shamanic powers.³² This is key to the pacification of local forms of power, and the introduction of an ideological and temporal divide between past interpersonal predation and present interpersonal peace. But this dualistic reconfiguration does not stop Shuar from seeking arútam visions or enlisting the help of shamans in critical moments. In fact, most Shuar, except for the most fervent pastors, do so routinely, just as they step in and out of God’s path several times even in short spans of time. During the time of my research, for instance, my host father Marco alternated between a keen desire to procure arútam power, combined with moments of illness and trouble where he sorely sought the help of shamans, and vivid and repentant ‘returns’ to God’s path, punctuated by eager Bible reading and service attendance. Though the former overlapped with his office as president of the local Indigenous federation, a position characterised by sustained conflict with political enemies, the latter periods were associated with moments of less political notability when he pursued domestic calm and prosperity. In everyday political life, however, Marco resourcefully combined both kinds of rule: at home, he inculcated in his children the importance of attaining good visions and frequently took them to be seen by shamans, whilst in village assemblies, he often condemned the predatory dimension of both visions and shamanism, encouraging others, including his own children, to be peaceful and disciplined by obeying God’s word. This is not a simple case of face-keeping at the village level, but rather a genuine coexistence of ‘rules’, which may or not conflict at a personal level.

There is an implicit affinity between submitting to God’s pacifying power and becoming liable to others – that is, accepting collective authority. At a formal level, the modality of public speech is modelled on the preaching style that pastors employ with their congregants by appealing to a third party; whether this is God, the community, or both, depending on context. To speak about community bylaws, for example, villagers invoke ‘the law’ or ‘the mandate’, which tellingly is rendered in Shuar as ‘the word sent for obedience’ (umiktin chicham akupkamu), an expression that refers to divine commandments and collective decrees.

In village forums, Shuar are thus at pains to emphasise their good intentions and their willingness to clarify and disclose their thoughts through ‘clear speech’. Yet, clear speech is no longer an assertion of power through mastery of the code, as in ceremonial dialogues. Rather, it is speech in which the intentions and thoughts (enentaimtiri) of the speakers may be publicly denounced and become accountable to an audience, the community of members or congregants. The aim is ultimately to achieve some form of verdict, a resolution that reduces uncertainty and the opacity of intentions so as to forestall conflict. Villagers typically do this by producing written statements that give solidity to the realignment of perspectives that public speech enables. Through these documents, villagers seek to fix individuals’ intentions and words to a collective statement, so they can hold their deeds accountable in the future. As villagers point out, if someone attempts to defy the decision of the assembly, for example by enlisting the help of a private shaman to seek revenge, they can accuse him/her of breaking his/her word at the next assembly, by making use of this document.

Modelled on the Bible, as bearer of God’s word, the use of official documents becomes a criterion to evaluate and expect others to abide by some form of public accountability based on their declared intentions. This stands in contrast with the little credence Shuar ordinarily give to what people say they will do, for everyone accepts that people are not only erratic but that they have good reasons to conceal their real intentions. These developments in the assembly context point to a temporary pause to the ‘rule of self’ as villagers attempt to make each other legible in order to establish accountability through appeals to a higher authority – God or the Community.

Conclusion

Among the Shuar, the quest for power in the form of independence and confrontation has relied on the cultivation of relations with the combative yet unstable spirit of arútam, which people meet in visions that transform them. Arútam does not create stable authority, though it is wholly implicated in the constitution of a particular kind of predatory selfhood and a communicative ethos of suspicion: a ‘rule of self’. Here, combat and transformation imply reversibility and are premised on antagonism rather than submission and obedience. Given that predatory attacks are always threatening, the rule of self is preventive war: to magnify one’s self through visions, so as to prey on others, and align their intentions with one’s own (before they do the same to the attacker). In this regime of intention management, it is impossible to pin down or reveal intentions so as to stabilise knowledge of others or the world. Opacity is cultivated in interpersonal interactions, and ceremonial dialogues create common ground and carefully avoid addressing intentions directly. In this political regime, people do not try to fix their own or other intentions or reveal their sources of power to respond to them. Consequently, responses range from gossip to departure and vengeance. Lacking an external authoritative gaze that pacifies predatory agency in the world, nothing can guarantee or even demand openness in the expression of intentions and the search for final truths.

With the introduction of the Christian omniscient God, and in conjunction with an internally driven process of state legibility, it has become possible to conceive of non-equivalence between human and divine agency. God becomes an external source of authority and knowledge about the world, including the intentions of others. Villagers now rely on this source of authority to pacify predatory agency, stabilise each other’s intentions, and make each other legible in public performances of accountability. This is the basis of decontextualised morality that enables relations of command-obedience reminiscent of state-subject relations, a far cry from the context-based, short-lived agreements Shuar could reach in dyadic encounters, whether in vision quests or ceremonial dialogues.

The reversible relations through which the Shuar have long pursued magnification do not afford the kind of stability, centralisation, and unification of views necessary to create state legibility. Social legibility instead occurs through the arútam, the unstable perspective of an enemy figure, as well as through the powerful yet ultimately contestable sight of shamans. If anything, these forms of legibility contribute to generating an instability of perspectives which imbues persons with a fundamental opacity, fostering uncertainty and suspicion but also significant autonomy. In this regime of power, opacity is the engine of real existing egalitarianism, or what I have called the rule of self. For the same reason, pre-existent master/owners are not able to create anything like legal or judiciary systems capable of centralising the public apportioning of responsibility and enforcing collective judgements, all of which Shuar now experiment with in village public forums by modelling collective power on God as a super-owner.

While Shuar seek to enhance their predatory agency in their engagement with pre-existent master/owners, they also now identify themselves with the position of pacified prey in relation to God. For the Shuar, the attraction of this lies in their temporary liberation from predation. In the rule of self, relations are inevitably entangled with arútam, leading to a kind of interiority and a regime of intention management in which opacity acquires primary value. The supremacy of God, on the contrary, results in the supplanting of predatory agency, leading to another regime of intentions in which transparency first becomes a possibility, and increasingly a requirement. Rule of self and rule of law thus present two fundamentally opposed modes of governing opacity. Oscillating between these rules, the Shuar are able to keep in check the extremes of each: taming predation while averting total self-negation.

Most fundamentally, the rule of law is different from the rule of self because the former is backed up by one overarching metahuman, who is father and shepherd and second to none, whereas in the multiplicity that defines the rule of self, no one can ever attain permanent superiority, not even shamans or metahumans. Underwritten by the Christian God, the rule of law comes with different power relations and a new way of imagining and managing intentions. The novelty of this new regime can only be understood in contrast with the continuities, specifically in the politics of alterity. In fact, most anthropological studies of Christian conversion in this part of the world have emphasised precisely these continuities (e.g. Grotti 2009; Vilaça 2009, 2015): when Amazonians adopt the Christian God, they are building on pre-existent schemas for dealing with alterity (for instance, to do with animals, spirits, enemies, and affines.). Magnification and familiarising predation are such schemas, which the Shuar mobilise in their encounter with the Christian God. According to these earlier schemas, God became a super-owner, and in the process also transformed the premises of the same schemas. The case of Shuar intention management thus qualifies the emphasis on continuity in earlier studies of Amazonian Christianity; or rather, it demonstrates discontinuity at another level of analysis. The Christian God that appears in the Bible and in the public assembly stands for a different regime of intention management and a newfound desire for stability and transparency.

Acknowledgements

I warmly thank all participants in the workshop ‘State and Mind Legibility’ organised at LSE in June 2019 for their helpful comments on a first draft of this paper. I am also immensely grateful to Hans Steinmüller and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback on this paper, and to Grégory Deshoulliere for his usual enthusiasm and willingness to let me bounce ideas off him about all things Aénts Chicham. Hallie Wells offered an inquisitive eye during the final stretch, and for this I am thankful. Of course, responsibility for errors and interpretations is solely mine. The research in this article draws on several periods of fieldwork in Ecuador made possible by various LSE research grants and Legs Bernard Lelong scholarships (CNRS). My warmest gratitude goes to my Shuar friends and hosts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was generously supported by the European Research Council [grant agreement No 715725] and the Leverhulme Trust [grant number ECF-2020-402].

Notes

1 Arútam is not a single entity or unitary source of power but rather designates the form of appearance and sorts of power of deceased prominent elders. More about arútam below.

2 Sahlins defines metahuman powers or metapersons as ‘divinities, ancestors, species-masters, and other persons with life-and-death powers over the human population’ (2017: 91).

3 Although this is not always the case and has changed historically; for a discussion of the shift to an intentional conception of criminal responsibility in England and its connection to the development of the nation state (Lacey 2001).

4 I also rely on comparative data from the neighbouring Achuar given the remarkable sociocultural similarities among neighbouring Aénts Chicham groups.

5 Here I follow the new convention using ‘Aénts Chicham’ to refer to the linguistic family, which also includes the Achuar, Awajun, Shiwiar, and Wampis. The group was previously known as ‘Jivaroan’, a term that has pejorative connotations for members of the same Indigenous groups (see Deshoullière & Utitiaj 2019). Traditionally, the literature also recognised the Candoa (Candoshi and Shapra) as part of the Jivaroan cultural conglomerate even if they are linguistically distant from the Aénts Chicham proper.

6 Though usually translated as ‘soul’, the wakán in fact refers to a reflected image of someone and corresponds to the shared perception shaped through visual interaction (everyday reciprocal gazes and the gaze of an arútam) (Taylor 1996, 2002). This means that the wakán is ‘formed by the other’s perspective’ rather than being a generalised, inner, spiritual component opposed to and detached from the body (Taylor & Viveiros de Castro 2007: 159).

7 The arútam vision complex is the best-studied phenomenon in Aénts Chicham ethnology, so this is a necessarily selective account focused on opacity; for eminent accounts, see (Harner 1972: 135–152; Mader 1999: 155–196; Mader & Gippelhauser 2000; Rubenstein 2012; Taylor 1996).

8 Cf. Brown (1987: 158–159), Taylor (2007: 147), Taylor (2014: 97), and see Taylor (2018) for a general outline of Aénts Chicham individualism. For recent discussions of Shuar autonomy, see Rubenstein (2012) and Buitron (2020).

9 All personal names in this article are pseudonyms.

10 Shuar say that on the eve of a raid, warriors revealed their arútam to one another, thereby losing its power and forcing them to seek new arútam in the future.

11 Other expressions are imiaru (someone who has had vision) and kanaru (dreamer). The differences are subtle: a wáimiaku might also obtain a vision unexpectedly; we might say that a vision happens to the person. The expression emphasises the personal transformations of the vision-seeker. Kanaru draws attention to visions that happen in dreams, which are experienced in similar ways to psychotropically induced visions. Imiaru is someone who has gone to the waterfall expressly to pursue a vision and has seen their future.

12 As reported by Surrallés (2009: 260) who worked among the Peruvian Candoshi, and see Taylor (2003: 239–241), who offers a remarkable interpretation of how through facial paintings the Aénts Chicham construe both personal uniqueness and a peculiar form of collective memory. Worn like this, Taylor proposes, these paintings constitute a kind of ‘exhibited secret’ (Taylor 2003: 241).

13 Whilst Blanca’s decision to become a healer (curandera, a covert way in which some women refer to their pursuit of a shamanistic career) is not common among women, her experience of strength and even liberation after undergoing a vision quest is widespread. Though less spoken about, women routinely seek visions, and occasionally experience them as ways to strengthening themselves within or even loosening the grip of intimate, and potentially oppressive relations. Although Blanca narrated her experience as a classic arútam quest path, the outcome – the fact that her husband could no longer harm her (i.e. Blanca no longer saw herself as prey in the relation) – might also be attributed to her pursuit of a shamanistic path. Trainee shamans acquire their powers during visions induced by the repeated ingestion of ayahuasca and tobacco; however, these powers are considered exogenous in kind and the relations they establish with helper spirits are also different to those vision seekers establish with arútam spirits (Deshoulliere & Buitron 2019: 207; Taylor 2014: 99)

14 An outcome of the multiplicity and partiality of forever changing perspectives; for equivalent Amazonian accounts, see Rivière (1994: 257), Surrallés (2003: 786), Vilaça (2005).

15 Surrallés (2003) writes compellingly about the primacy of perception and the emotional dimension of these dialogues, an important way in which speakers create meaning and establish mutual recognition without relying on intentions.

16 However, in recent decades a collective of shamans has emerged with the ability to inspect the powers and ‘see inside’ the bodies of other shamans. For this shift in shamanic legibility and the transformations of power it entails, see Deshoulliere (2017, 2019) and Buitron and Deshoulliere (n.d.).

17 It should be clear that healing and harmful acts are distinguished simply from the point of view of patient or victim: a shaman may be a therapist for his relatives and allies and a potential aggressor for his enemies.

18 For focused studies of Catholic proselytism among the Shuar and Achuar, see Gnerre (2008), Meiser (2015), and Rubenstein (2001). For studies of Protestant Christianity among the Shuar, see Buitron (2016: 52–91), Belzner (1985), Cova (2014) and Taylor (1981).

19 ‘The horror’ of feuding and the deceit of sorcery (Drown and Drown 2002: 20–25).

20 For instance, throughout the 1960s until 1980s, Shuar bilingual teachers trained by AM in cooperation with the Summer Institute of Linguistics were expected not only to teach in newly-built schools but also to perform as spiritual leaders of the community (Eldon Yoder, AM missionary, personal communication, 2014).

21 Associated with drunkenness and feasting which are conducive to sexual misconduct and interpersonal problems; in fact Christians notably signal their allegiance to God’s path by quitting dancing and inebriation.

22 Other print material (except village administrative documents) is typically left to gather dust on school shelves and occasionally serves as toilet paper. An important exception is the textual material written and collected by schoolteachers and burgeoning Shuar writers (Buitron and Deshoulliere 2019 and Deshoulliere and Buitron 2019).

23 Unlike Catholic Shuar who identify arútam with the Christian God.

24 Although Shuar sometimes indirectly mobilise God for vengeful means by invoking divine punishment, rather than forgive or forget an enemy’s harm, they would delegate the meting-out of justice to the afterlife (see also Priest 2003: 99).

25 This is one possibility in relation to God (Cf. Fausto 2007: 93, for the Guarani) but there are cases where God helps stabilise converts into the predatory position (e.g, Vilaça 2011: 253 for the Wari’).

26 See Vilaça (2011: 254; 2015: 13) for the Wari’ perspective on Lucifer’s departure from the care of God.

27 Casey High (2016: 275, 281) similarly describes how for the Waorani (from Ecuadorian Amazonia, missionized by the Protestant Summer Institute of Linguistics), Christian teachings assume wider relevance even among non-Christian youngsters in relation to the ideal of living peacefully in sedentary communities. That is, they see a comfortable fit between Christian values and solutions to problems in the village even if Christianity is an ‘ever-less-relevant mode of identification’.

28 Occasionally, however, Christian characters and revelations can also intrude on visionary quests, although this happens most frequently among the Catholic Shuar (see Mader 1999). This reflects the different theological stances of the Protestant and Catholic missions: the former premised on purism and the latter premised on syncretism and inculturation. For more on this, see Buitron (2016: 235–240) and Taylor (1981).

29 See Robbins et al. (2014) for a comparative perspective on the importance of interiority in conversion.

30 In Shuar sermons, prayers usually ask for words to act and be remembered in the heart: ‘just as God’s word is written, so may his words be printed on our hearts’. Or, ‘when I obey God, my heart is happy’, or ‘in my heart God speaks clearly’.

31 Robert Priest (2003: 100) points to an interesting trajectory among Christianised Awajun, also part of the Chicham linguistic family, who discover the self as a guilty sinner while rejecting a pre-existent retaliatory ethic. He argues that this is part of a wider narrative of the good life, ‘against which specific actions and patterns are discovered to be sinfully problematic’. He thus sees a shift in where accusation is directed: from others and towards the self and from misfortune to one’s own moral failure. While I concur the Shuar have found a new locus of accusation – the self –, they also mobilise this locus outwardly, following a pre-existent logic of moral accusation. For all the talk of collective peace and forgiveness, when seen from the perspective of the accused, assemblies do not entirely escape a retaliatory logic, but possibly transform interpersonal vengeance into collective punishment.

32 Which maps onto a dualistic configuration of arútam: eradication of predatory elements and recapture of domestic prosperity, now reconceptualised as God gifts (see also Mader 1999: 221–222).