Ethnos

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

In praise of the everyday: Trust and the art of

social living in an Amazonian community

Joanna Overing

To cite this article: Joanna Overing (2003) In praise of the everyday: Trust and
the art of social living in an Amazonian community, Ethnos, 68:3, 293-316, DOI:
10.1080/0014184032000134469

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0014184032000134469

Published online: 18 Jun 2010.

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 In Praise of the Everyday 293 294 joanna overing

In Praise of the Everyday:

Trust and the Art of Social Living
in an Amazonian Community
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Joanna Overing
University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

abstract The article states the high evaluation that an Amazonian people, the
Piaroa, place upon the artful skills of everyday existence. It is argued that their emphasis
upon the creativity of daily practice is forthcoming from a powerful and egalitarian
social philosophy. The difficulties of translating such a philosophy, where the human
self is contextualised within a wider cosmic setting, are raised. The aim of translation
would be to enable us to engage in dialogue with the Piaroa about common concerns
(upon the relation of the individual to the collectivity, for instance, or upon the idea
of freedom, or the question of the relation of customs to rational decision making).
These are a people who overtly shun the idea of a social rule, yet strongly value
sociality, their own customs, and the mutuality of the ties of community. At the same
time they demonstrate even more forcefully an obstinate individualism. A major
puzzle to be discussed is the notion that personal autonomy is understood as a so-
cial capacity, and a cultural one as well: the volitional I, the social relation, and the
cultural artifice are an associated set of values. The centrality of the notions of reflective
reason and personal trust to this particular egalitarian ethics will be discussed.

keywords Amazonia, generative cultures, egalitarian ethics, aesthetics, cosmology

Woman with her child, both dressed in their beads of life. Note the elegance of the female loincloth.

A
s an anthropologist (rather than, say, a philosopher) my aim is to
understand and disclose other peoples visions of the world parti-
cularly those of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian Rain Forest.
The local version that for many years I have been attempting to understand
belongs to the Piaroa, a forest people who dwell along tributaries of the Ori-
noco in Venezuela. For the most part they live through their practices of gard-
ening, fishing, hunting and gathering. They are referred to by their neighbours
as the intellectuals of the Orinoco, and indeed they do have a love for intellectual
debate, particularly over metaphysical aspects of everyday life. They are also
one of the most peaceful of Amazonian peoples. To better understand their
treasured peace,1 and as well their egalitarian and informal ways, my recent
focus has been upon the high evaluation that the Piaroa place upon matters
of daily existence, where the emphasis is upon everyday creativity. Indeed,
most of their artistic production belongs to the domain of the everyday. The
beauty and tidiness of the implements they make for daily use, the attention
they pay to form and design, are striking. These beautiful artifacts and tools
serve to exemplify their work of beautifying as many aspects of everyday ex-

ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316) ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, on behalf of the National Museum of Ethnography
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/0014184032000134469
 In Praise of the Everyday 295 296 joanna overing

istence as possible.2 Because their major concerns relate directly to the artful
skills of daily life, the Piaroa endow activities that we might see as merely
humdrum (preparing a meal, weeding a garden, making a basket, feeding a
baby) with significance far beyond any that we might consider. The artful
everyday of the Piaroa is linked to a principle of trust, for it is only through
the creation of trust that the artful everyday of this egalitarian people can be
constructed. To contextualise the significance of the topic of trust, I wish ini-
tially to speak about certain writings in moral philosophy that have consider-
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able relevance to our anthropological studies in Amazonia.

Feminist Moral Philosophy: The Care/Trust

Perspective, and its Significance for Social Anthropology
Care is the new buzzword of feminist moral philosophy. It is from the
care rather than the justice perspective (the concern of much modern moral
philosophy), that the philosopher, Annette Baier, has been exploring the prin-
ciple of appropriate trust and distrust. In her book of essays, entitled Moral
Prejudices (1995), she argues for the focus upon trust as one answer of a
philosophical counterculture 3 to the overly coercive models of morality pre-
valent in contemporary moral philosophy. It seems that in its theorising, moral
philosophy, as traditional anthropology, has more easily understood the rule-
bound arena of jural behaviour, than the informal, non-proscriptive moral
instances in which most of us are normally engaged in our everyday activities.
It ignores, for instance, the trust involved in the proper care of the young.
Baier, in calling for a moral theory that also treats the complex ways in which
appropriate trust structures our daily moral relations, provides us with a focus
that is particularly apt in the understanding of Sahlins (1987) category of
performative structures, or Ingolds (1986:227) communities of nurture, and case for civil society. The contract also is premised upon a very cool relationship
what I will label in this paper as the generative cultures of Amazonia. In all
these cases, the emphasis in social life is more upon the informal and the
intimate, than upon the rule and its obedience. Here, the appropriate trusting
relationship belongs more or less to the domain of the intimate, rather than
to coercive law or contract, the areas which contemporary moral philosophy
tends to stress.
Baier notes (1995:45) that the influential (male) moral theorists of the
modern era have understood obligation as the key moral concept. With this fo-
cus the central questions revolve around such problems as what justifies treating
a person as obliged or morally bound to do something, or who should deprive
whom of what freedom? In other words, what (in a just society) is the justifica-
Storage baskets made by men, incorporating hallucinogenic designs depicting the patchs of the words
of the shamanic chants.
tion of coercion? of forcing a person to act in a particular way? The concept
of obligation becomes thereby linked to the idea of punishment and the justi-
fied limitation of freedom, with little attention being paid to the notion of
trust and the virtues.4 It assumes the necessity of people or institutions with
extraordinarily coercive powers, an important paradox attached to the modern
notion of freedom. Baier argues that a large part of the problem is the type of
case that moral theorists choose as example. For instance, they (if contractar-
ians) use contractual obligation as the model of obligations, which is the apt
where only minimal trust is placed on the obliging person, and for whom
considerable punitive power is required (1995:13, 116). As Baier notes (1995:
13), in concentrating on obligations, rather than virtues, modern moral theo-
rists have chosen to look at the cases where more trust is placed in enforcers of
obligations than is placed in ordinary moral agents, the bearers of the obliga-
tions. Such a notion of (improper) trust, she argues, where the upholding of
morality depends upon the trusting of others to coerce, distorts our moral
vision to suppose that all obligations conform to what in fact is an abnormally
coercive model. Her rhetoric is strong. She states that if this type of coercive
structure of morality is regarded as the backbone of our moral gaze, then un-
doubtedly life will be nasty, emotionally poor, and worse than brutish (1995:14).

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 In Praise of the Everyday 297
Baier, speaking from a western feminists perspective, understands the con-
cern for care and trust to be largely a matter of gender, of interest to females
but not males. In other words, for her, the genders have different moral out-
looks: while contemporary men tend to phrase morality in terms of obligation,
contract, and justice (a reflection of their own concern with personal auto-
nomy and independence), women are more communitarian in view, being
most concerned with a morality relevant to the bringing up of children, en-
gendering of love, care, trust, and co-operation.5
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As anthropologists, we may well question the cross-cultural relevance of
the western case, where males and females appear to be opposed in moral
outlook. I would argue that antagonism about matters of morality is not ne-
cessarily typical of gender relations in Amazonia. This is because a primary
moral concern expressed by many Amazonian peoples pertains to the care
of children, and to trust in relations of interdependency related to such care.6
For the Piaroa, the values of care and trust are relevant equally to the judge-
ment of actions of both men and women (Overing 1989a; 1989b; 2000), for
they relate in general to notions about living an acceptable type of human life
on earth. At the same time, the right to personal autonomy is likewise an
ungendered value. In other words the western tendency to see communi-
tarian values to be on the side of the female, and the value of freedom to be
basically a male perspective, ill fits the Piaroa case. The basic point is that a
dominant strand in western moral theory, from which anthropology is not
totally exempt, excludes domesticity and the everyday relations of the ordi-
nary moral agent (see Overing & Passes 2000:130), which is what Amazon-
ian sociality is often about.
The Anthropological Lack
of Regard for Domesticity and the Everyday
To understand other people, anthropologists must dwell as much upon
their own perspectives as those divergent to them. Our view is perspectival,
and at the very minimum our own ways provide a valuable means for com-
parative understanding. In the case of the Amazonia, we need to pay atten-
tion to our own lack of regard for the ordinary skills of life. We read in our
texts that proper anthropological attention should be focused upon grand
structures: our task is to discover the underlying logic of the mind, of kinship,
or even of artistic creations. With such an emphasis, the practices and expres-
sions of everyday life are seen as relatively unimportant contingencies. To
make things worse, the Western urbane academic tends to view everyday
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
298 joanna overing
matters as tedious: there are the dishes to be cleaned, the children to feed,
the shelves to be dusted. We are disdainful of these matters, which should be
tended to as quickly as possible, or even better by others!
We regard the everyday as unremarkable, and long to know about the
remarkable the shamanic journey, the hunting with blowguns and curare.
The allure of the exotic bewitches us. As a result we can be poor observers of
lived daily life. The problem is all the more compelling when the setting for
such a life is the jungle about which we also know little: we are clumsy moving
around in the forest, and we do not know how to see it.7 We do not have the
practical skills for making it intelligible. In Amazonia the everyday business
of feeding, tending and cleaning, by us so facilely assumed to be both boring
and simple, is in fact not so very simple, nor is it boring.8 There are, indeed,
ways in which indigenous peoples, philosophically speaking, can be inter-
esting about matters of everyday concern.
The stress the Piaroa put upon the everyday and its activities is not triv-
ial, but rather the product of a powerful and highly egalitarian social philo-
sophy. These are a people, typically Amazonian, who overtly shun the idea
of a social rule, yet strongly value sociality, their own customs, and the mu-
tuality of the ties of community life while at the same time demonstrating
a staunch regard for personal autonomy. Such peoples can offend anthro-
pological sensibilities on a number of fronts. The trick is to provide a translation
that enables us to engage with indigenous peoples ideas, and even to argue
with them on common concerns, on freedom, for instance, or on the relation
of customs to rational decision making. However, our own perspectives can
intrude upon our abilities to create such engagement. We ask, how can people
link social mutuality with an insistent individualism? How does a love for
personal autonomy make a fit with an affection for customs? How does a
paucity of social elaboration of the structural sort fit with a richness of meta-
physical talk? These are some of the questions we must explore.
The Cosmic and the Everyday
I shall first speak of the cosmological embeddedness of the everyday. The
Piaroa say that their own position in the world is to dwell beneath their own
sky of the domesticated. An egalitarian people, they speak little of statuses
and roles when talking about their social life. What they do talk of are the
skills for social living, the many capabilities for living a harmonious, domesti-
cated life in concert with others and the dangers of not using them. This
emphasis upon skills is critical, for it is their perspective that they live as they
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 299
live because of what they do. They hunt, garden, make blowguns, weave cot-
ton, and build houses. They transform animals and plants into edible food.
They also marry, have children, and care for them within a community of
relationships. For the Piaroa these are the capabilities that allow for a human
existence on this earth (Overing 1993a) they are what human life is about.
Does all this sound prosaic? It becomes less so when one realises that in
Piaroa metaphysics there are no powers for human existence in their earthly
world until they are brought in from outside their own sky of the domesti-
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cated. Most capabilities for living a human existence on earth were enclosed
at the end of their mythic time within crystal boxes now owned by the cele-
stial Tianawa gods, who protect the world from the excessive use of the power-
ful forces they guard, which were misused in mythic time. Thus with regard
to the source of human capacities, the Piaroa view is radically externalist: the
forces for selfhood are in the most part dangerous, and have their origin ex-
ternal to the self. As such they have significance within the wider cosmic
order. This is in contrast to the modern Western notion of self, which is radi-
cally interiorised from the start, with consciousness and reason conceived in
large part as autochthonous to the mind itself. There is no biological bed-
rock to Piaroa theory, and this would include their life of the senses and desire.9
Piaroa ideas about the everyday relate to a discourse that posits many other
worlds than that of human jungle existence: the myriad of significant others
who have their homes in these other worlds (and times) provides a backdrop
against which all considerations and evaluations about living an earthly human
life are made. Within this agency-filled universe of many worlds, the personal
skills for daily living which the Piaroa so value for their own existence have
a very long history that tells of the traumas of original creation, and the dangers
emerging from it. It is because of the violations of creation time history (such
as the practices of incest, murder, treachery) that living today within the safety
of their own sky of the domesticated is considered so important to the achieve-
ment of everyday life. In due course I shall provide more detail on this relation
of the cosmological with the everyday.
The Community of Similars
There is an emphasis in Piaroa village life upon achieving what we might
translate as a community of similars. In contrast to the richness of cosmo-
logical talk, there is a lexical paucity to their language of social structure. They
have very few means, aside from kinship terms, for marking sociological differ-
ence. There are therefore few differentiations to become grist for the anthro-
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
300 joanna overing
pological mill. As a result, power rarely carries with it the weight of what we
might call a collectivity. Instead power tends to be a personal matter, or as
the Piaroa explain it, human power refers to the potency of the individual
being. Thus, collectivity as envisioned in western theory as a coercive force
is not their understanding of community.10 To understand better this difference
the distinction must be made between collectivity as it might be expressed
through social structural imperatives (through roles, statuses and juridical
rules) and the collective as an attachment to a specific cultural and social way
of being. The social, in its more positive sense as expressed through shared
daily actions and interaction of a personal sort, is understood, probably by
many peoples of the Amazon, as a powerful means through which people
can actively work against the development of relations of coercion.
In accord with this more positive view of the social, as shared ways of
doing things, indigenous peoples can be quite explicit in expressing the prin-
ciple of community homogeneity.11 Certainly for the Piaroa, the idea is that
those who in the first instance are dangerously different in kind (e.g. as in-
laws) become of a kind through the process of living together. Thus, over
time a husband and wife become similar in kind. As we shall see, the reason
for members of a community becoming increasingly similar to one another
is that the mutuality of living together creates a certain sort of material
homogeneity. This is the aim of community life, to achieve a safe, yet fertile,
community of similars .
We still have the question of how the individual self in these stridently in-
dividualistic cultures relates to a valued community of similars. To under-
stand indigenous concerns, we must ask the more cosmological question of
What is that potency of the human self, its agency, that allows one to act in
a specifically human way? As we shall see, from the Piaroa point of view, it
is through the skills of its members for personal autonomy that the community
of similars is created. Each person is ultimately responsible for mastering
within the self the capabilities that allow for a human type of social and ma-
terial existence.
The Practice of Generative Cultures
If a young unmarried man among the Piaroa should give his hunt to a young
unmarried woman (who is not his sister), and she then prepares and cooks it,
and presents it to him to eat, they are thereby married. Through this informal
process he has displayed to her his skills of the hunt, and she to him her skills
for transforming food to edible form. No other ceremony marks the marriage
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 301
event. Blink, and you miss a ritual among the Piaroa, a people for whom most
ritual activities are carried out casually as part of everyday activity. The most
normal looking procedures in daily life could deeply signify.
It is significant that ritual among the Piaroa tends to be focused upon the
practice itself. Note that the young couple initiate their marriage relation by
sharing their respective skills with one another, he with the hunt, she with
transforming his hunt to edible form. Through mutual choice and I presume
desire, they engage in the productive actions most stressed in the marital state,
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those attached to the art of feeding.12 It is through the sharing of their skills
for the culinary arts that the young man and woman legitimise their relationship.
In the ritual of marriage, it is not a status that is achieved that is important
(that of marriage), but the practice of being married. Similarly, when a young
man through initiation receives his abilities to hunt, what is applauded is his
practice of hunting, and not that he has achieved the status of hunter, a status
for which there is no category in Piaroa language that I am aware. Hunting,
gardening, cooking do not adhere so much to statuses, as to activities carried
out by intentional, practised agents.
It would be superfluous for an outside official to pronounce the legitimacy
of their wedded state, for in the end, no matter the nagging and planning of
close kinsmen to bring about the contrary, such decisions in the end remain
highly personal to the couple.13 As holds true for most Piaroa adult relation-
ships, marriage relations are premised upon a balancing of mutual intention,
and therefore created (and continued) through the respective, reflected upon,
practice of the participants. A strategy used by the Piaroa is how the cate-
gories of their kinship terminology are applied to aid and abet their emphasis
upon the authority of personal choice. For instance, a young man might trace
through his father his relationship to a young woman as marriageable, but if
he has no interest in marrying her, he will reclassify her within the category
of sister by tracing his relation to her through his mother. It takes two, how-
ever, to recreate a relationship, and the young man must wait to see if the
young woman will return his brotherly actions with sisterly ones. Like all beings who can acquire these specific powers for creation that are engender-
creations, its object has the agency to be, or not to be, compliable.14
Marshall Sahlins (1987:xixiii), has distinguished between two very differ-
ent sorts of social emphases, which he labels the prescriptive and the perform-
ative. Peoples who stress the prescriptive (well known to the social sciences)
are attached to social form and institutional rule, while those appreciative of
the performative place priority upon practice. With those attracted to the
performative, it is action that declares identity and enmity, the gift that makes
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
302 joanna overing
the friend, the sharing that creates the kinship. In other words, the appropriate
act creates the relation, and not the other way around. There is also the matter
of affect. With priority given to the performative, important aspects of social
relationships are negotiable, to become constructed by choice, desire, and
interest (ibid.). For instance, a Piaroa man and his sisters son enjoy each others
company, and often hunt together; the relationship is so affectionately close
that the man addresses his teenage nephew, not as son-in-law, but as son,
who reciprocates by placing his potential father-in-law into the category of
father. Such social linkage is difficult to formulate in institutional terms: an
illustration of the fact that the social life of a community of similars is some-
thing that is created daily through the specificity of the actions and affective
life of each of its members.
However, in place of Sahlins rather dramaturgical notion of the performa-
tive, I would prefer to use the phrase generative to encapsulate the Ama-
zonian stress upon modes of fecundity.15 The cosmological discourse of the
Piaroa is in the main about fecundity, for it dwells upon the individual powers
for life creation and destruction of the mighty creator gods. Likewise, their
discourse about the everyday skills of people is about their own generative
capacities for acting in this world. It probably can be argued with cogency
that Amazonian sociality in general is more about the issues of fecundity than
those of status, role, and property. Thus the concept of generative captures
the indigenous stress upon the fundamental relation of everyday skills and
practice to the social process (as opposed to the relation of the dramatic ritual,
such as I pronounce you man and wife, to a social structure).
Certainly for the Piaroa, to be social is to be fertile in a specifically cultural
way, and they understand the practices of living together to be generative of
members of a community becoming of a kind. Human power (or perhaps
better said, Piaroa power) is distinctive in that it is comprised of those specific
generative skills that allow the individual to act materially in the world in a
particular way.16 It is because of cosmological history that it is only human
ing of a fertile communal life. We shall now look more closely at just what
these capabilities are that humans alone can acquire.
Custom and the Fertility of the Life of Thoughts
The Piaroa privilege their own existence in the universe because with re-
spect to earthly life it is unique to humans to be able to conjoin thought, and
their particular skills for action, with a life of desires. It is because human
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 303
beings can individually acquire from the Tianawa gods both a life of thoughts
(takwar) and a life of the senses (kaekwae) that a distinctively human cre-
ativity on earth is possible. Cosmologically speaking, these are the two avail-
able modes of being that exemplify distinct aspects of power upon which the
Piaroa endlessly play. Their stress, in distinguishing types of life, is not so
much upon form or appearance (it is we who talk about life forms), but upon
activities, for example characteristic eating or killing skills. The emphasis is
upon what the being does, and how it is done. For instance, the monstrous
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spirit Master of the Jungle, who is the protector of all forest inhabitants, exe-
cutes his duties as a pure sensual force: it is through physical force and the
power of might that he is able to carry out his work of soldiering (Overing
1996b). The Piaroa are dependent upon both their life of the senses and their
life of thoughts to achieve their own particular way of being. Humans, without
their sensual capabilities, could not act in an earthly human way, for they
could not marry or act in concert. They could not eat in a human way. The
human cognitive agent of earthly space must also be an actor.17 Nonetheless,
it is the life of the intellect that the Piaroa understand as most significant to
the achievement of these practices; for it is through their life of thoughts
that they have their particular skills, and also the ability to reflect upon, and
thus direct them.
Both the life of the senses and life of thoughts become interiorised to
form a beautiful, and highly private, internally designed self. Together, they
provide an encased beautification in the form of what the Piaroa call their
beads of life. The beads are literally called the beads of the life of the senses
(kaekwaewa reu). Thus labelled, they designate those forces that allow a per-
son to breathe, to eat and to drink, to have sex, and in general to live a physical
life of impulses and desires. This is somewhat surprising, given the Piaroa
stress upon the importance of their life of thoughts for the achievement of
their material existence. The explanation is that it is the casing of the beads
itself that endows the person with a life of the senses. The casing is said to
be made from a special granite formed by the outcroppings of the faeces of
the subterranean supreme deity, who is the source of all power on earth. Each
child at birth receives its first internal string of beads of life (their casings)
from the crystal boxes of the Tianawa gods. In later ritual, the person receives
from these same gods the forces for his/her life of thoughts, which the offici-
ating shaman carefully places within the casings already resident in the person.
Thus, the fossilised faeces of the supreme deity, which endows the potency
for the life of the senses, encapsulates and contains the forces of thought. As
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
304 joanna overing
one Piaroa phrased it, intelligence resides within the beads. The imagery of
beads of life also states the attached relationship of the life of the senses
and the life of thoughts. It is because they are endowed with their beads of
life that the Piaroa can live their physical life of the senses in a distinctly
human way, which means that their (wild) life of desires can be mastered by
their life of thoughts. For them, action, thought and affect must be consti-
tutive of each other.
The Piaroa did not always master their actions through their thoughts.
Early on during the mighty period of creation, their desires were controlled,
not by their life of thoughts, but disastrously by their life of the senses, centred
within a peculiar set of bodily parts their brilliant and shiny blue anuses
and genitals. A mythic vignette relates how this process was reversed on the
day these naughty parts lost their colourful sheen. This happened when the
Piaroa acquired the knowledge of the dangers of incest. As the story goes, an
instance of incest erupted into an eternal and disruptive quarrel between two
creator gods. With the onset of this quarrel, the Piaroa for the first time be-
came aware of the social dangers of incest, and it was at that moment, upon
attaining social consciousness, that they lost these colourful parts. Thereafter
they were able to master their sexuality through intellectual reflection. The
aspect of each persons life of thoughts that allows for such personal reflection
is referred to as takwakomenae (see below).
In contrast, the sexuality of the creator gods (not to be confused with the
present-day Tianawa gods) was always dominated by their life of desires. The
mighty powers sufficiently great for mythic creation were too monstrous for
the gods to handle through reason, and thus there was both a perversity and
a madness to most creation of a mythic sort. Mythic fertility was frequently
associated with defecation, or with the expelling of other products of waste
from the various orifices of the body. Vomit, excrement, and blood all had
fertilising powers akin to semen. However the issue from godly sexuality was
often not normal, but ghastly (taking the form of types of disease, from which
the Piaroa today suffer). The lesson of mythic events, repeated time and again,
is that it is only through moderate fecundity that a person can be empowered
to marry and to create children, and to create enduring kinship relations. Hu-
man fecundity must be mastered through reflective thought (takwakomenae),
a contrast with the potent but monstrous fertility of creator gods. However,
it is more than the life of the desires that reflective thought must master.18
The socially reflective capabilities of takwakomenae are but one aspect of
each persons life of thoughts. The second is takwanya. Takwanya is the closest
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 305
word in Piaroa language approaching our notion of tradition or custom. own way, but this is not to be confused with the egoism of a familiar brand
Thus a persons life of thoughts includes two distinct, but interlinked forces:
the skills for reflective thought and the capabilities for cultural practice. Both
come from the crystal boxes of the gods. It is through takwanya that one
knows the forest, and the habits and the history of all its inhabitants, both
plants and animals. However, takwanya most importantly refers to those active,
powerful forces of the self forthcoming from the life of thoughts that allow a
people to have the skills to act upon the world, transforming it for use in
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their own particular way. Custom (takwanya) for the Piaroa specifically refers
to particular ways of doing things, to activities and practices in the world.
White people have the takwanya to build aeroplanes and high-rise apartment
buildings. The Piaroa hunt, garden, and make blowguns.
To give takwanya an indigenous reading, the concept can best be under-
stood to cover those forces of the life of thoughts that empower a person
with fertility. When mastered through reflective thought, they are the powers
that enable a person to create, be productive, and in general have effect upon
the world in a Piaroa way. Takwanya includes capabilities for language, the
means for acquiring and processing food; it includes the skills for giving birth,
for gardening, hunting, for ritual, and the making of tools. Like babies, tools
and objects are created through the fecund forces of thought.19
All these practices are linguistically classed together as capabilities of the
life of thoughts. A man can say that through the means of thought (chakwanae) tered by the individuals life of thoughts, to be directed by both takwakomenae
I sing and thus can cure disease; or, through the means of my thoughts I can
make a blowgun, or build a house or fishing trap. A woman can say that it is
through the means of her thoughts (chakwahunae) that she makes her garden,
or gives birth. The product of each creation is said to be a thought (akwa)
of its creator, a manifestation of that persons takwanya. Moreover, in Piaroa
vocabulary, to cure, to make, to transform, and to create all have the same root.20
Expressions of Selfhood
Although the forces of takwanya are distinct from reflective consciousness
(takwakomenae), it is imperative that they go hand in hand: indeed reflective
thought (takwakomenae) must be the master of not only the life of the senses,
but also of the powerful forces of takwanya, which become beautified by such
domestication. It is of some significance that the Piaroa express selfhood
through direct reference to their capacities for reflective thought, rather than
to their powers of takwanya.
Piaroa individuals place high value on being able to live ones life in ones
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
306 joanna overing
of western individualism. The puzzle perhaps for us is that in the Piaroa view
personal autonomy is a social capacity, and also a cultural one: the (human) con-
scious I is also the social and cultural I else it would not be human! What
is then the relation between the conscious, independent subject and his or
her valued social relations? What is the relation of the conscious agent and
valued cultural ways of doing things? Such an associated set of values the
volitional I, the social relation, the cultural artifice is confusing for those of
us who tend firmly to separate the three in our own theories of mind (whether
formulated through common sense or more rigorous philosophical methods).
Theirs, however, is a particular theory of interdependency that posits personal
autonomy as the starting point of the social and as such necessarily expres-
sible through the cultural device.
In large part this is because the Piaroa do not tend to oppose, in the way
we do, thinking and acting. We cannot use our gloss of mind and body to
capture their way of understanding this distinction. They, in fact, have no
term for body. Rather, what we would call body is complexly divided into
its functional elements, as clusters of muscles or generative parts. Basically
the body is regarded as a tool, or a cluster of tools to be used for reproductory
endeavours, for eating, for physical effort in creating. It is a condition of living
an earthly human life for these tools - of muscle, flesh, and bone to be mas-
and takwanya acting in concert. We can well wonder about the philosophical
implications of having no concept of body or corporeality, at least in the way
we think of such things. What the Piaroa do sharply distinguish is thinking
and desiring. For personal autonomy to be social, raw desire must be subject
first and foremost to reflective thought, which for the Piaroa is also a cultural
as well as personal capacity.
The Piaroa express selfhood through the concept of takwakomenae, which
I have spoken of as reflective thought. However, depending upon context,
the concept can be variously translated as such capacities as consciousness,
comprehension, intentionality, volition, and responsibility. Takwakomenae liter-
ally means my thoughts standing up, the idea being that through personal
will a person is intentionally using his or her forces of thought. It expresses as
well the personal mastery of emotions, or the life of the desires, which are
considered wild until so mastered. The expression chakwakomenae!, 21 is often
used in daily interchange as an emphatic statement of personal autonomy or
purpose, a proclamation of ones individuality as human actor a claim to
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday
ones own consciousness, intentionality, or volition. Its meaning is contextual,
though it usually declares that this or that is the persons own way of doing
things, with the stress being upon the highly valued personal choice.
As well as will, takwakomenae can also specify comprehension, or respon-
sibility, guilt, and fault. Again, only context can lead the listener to the proper
understanding. Will is attributed to others as well as to self, and often enough
in such cases the connotation is a negative one, with fault or guilt assigned to
a particular man or womans lack of thought. There is an important further am-
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biguity in the use of chakwakomenae. It was explained to me that the expression
may have the meaning of either myself or my customs. Thus chakwakomenae
can be variously translated as I do it because it is my will, because I want to,
because it is my manner or equally, I do it because it is the custom of my
people. The stress in the first is upon a persons own particular way of doing
something, while the second is upon using that persons distinctive cultural ways.
Such ambiguity takes us to the heart of takwakomenae as a notion, and thus
to what we might classify as the Piaroas specific version of self: while the
emphasis is upon individual agency, there is always an interplay between an
autonomous self and the use of a set of powerful and culturally specific skills.
The expression of takwakomenae could display the tension between the two,
to express the notion that what is customary must be mastered by personal will.
It should be noted that the relation of a person to a community of relations
can also be very dangerous for either self or others.
The Creation of Life and the Transference of Powers,
or the Fertility of Thoughts and its Dangerous Residues
The Piaroa explain that there are a number of factors, acts, and events
contributing to the on-going creation or transformation of the life forces of
a person. For instance, the act of endowing knowledge is a reproductory act:
it is work that gives life. Thus the acquisition of life is not a mere physical
process, established once and for all through the means of acts of sexual inter-
course. Each person gradually receives over his or her lifetime additional as-
pects of selfhood which come to comprise their powerful life of thoughts.
This is why the old are considered to be stronger than the young: they have
over time accumulated more interior forces of selfhood to combat danger.
As the theory goes, the life of thoughts affects the life of the senses, and as
already observed these two aspects of self are connected. Thus those in middle
age, male and female alike, are thought to be physically healthier than those
who are younger because of their more powerful life of thoughts. They there-
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
307 308 joanna overing
fore can often with impunity ignore food taboos, a lapse that would make an
adolescent ill. In sum, knowledge and capabilities can not be separated from
what it means to be human, alive, and healthy.
People who live together are also continuously involved in a process of
mutual creation through a principle relating to the transference of creative
powers. By definition, all the work that a person does contributes to the en-
dowment of life of those who are members of the same community. Through
the proximity of working and eating together, sharing and caring for one an-
other in daily activities, members of a community become mutually involved
in each others creation. Better stated, all work has a reproductive effect upon
those in daily close contact with one another. The food one eats is usually as
much a result of the efforts of others as of oneself, and as such a product of
their thoughts as well as ones own. Thus when eating the food produced or
processed or hunted by another, a person incorporates into his or her own self
the personal powers of the producers life of thoughts. People are surrounded
in daily life by the powerful products of thoughts created by others. This is
the process that leads in time to the creation of a community of similars.
There is, however, danger to such transference of powers, for generative
powers can be damaging. A potentially hazardous means of transference is
through bodily excretions. All bodily excretions are understood to be particul-
arly potent, and often unmastered manifestations of a persons fertility. They
have the potency to impregnate others with disease, not life. It was through
bleeding, urinating, and defecating that perverse and dangerous creations oc-
curred in mythic time. Excretions, such as sweat, are best thought of as residues
of takwanya, or forces of thought that a person has not been able to domesti-
cate, and which must be sloughed off for the persons own safety and fertility.
A woman by menstruating (who is understood to be shedding her own un-
mastered forces) becomes powerfully cleansed, and therefore properly fertile.
A shaman acquires his transformational powers through self-inflicted rites of
menstruation when he forces a stingray spine through his tongue, thereby rid-
ding himself of all the unmastered fertility that he has accumulated from those
with whom he lives. Because of the greatness of the shamans life of thoughts,
his own sweat and urine can especially be harmful to those around him.
Each person has the responsibility to protect kinsmen as much as possible
from the dangers of their own bodily excretions. When dealing with the very
young or the vulnerable, an adult has to be exceedingly careful of what he or
she eats. As a result, food taboos are as likely to be followed as much for the
protection of others, as for the benefit to self. With a very young child, parents
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 309
must not eat the flesh of large animals, for it is likewise the case that large
animals can pass on disease to humans, (impregnating them) through their
excretions, which are the manifestations of their own perverse fertility, or
undomesticated thoughts. The Piaroa will not consume the blood of animals
because of its disease giving powers for impregnation. One way the Piaroa
think about the disease process is as a perverse, life-damaging pregnancy.
We may well ask, why is takwanya in its unmastered form, so dangerous?
The Piaroa notion of human power entails a theory of materiality that places
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the capabilities for having effect in this world within the domain of thoughts.
Idealistic as such an idea might sound, the beautiful forces of takwanya that
come from the crystal boxes of the gods those creative and fertile skills for
hunting, fishing, gardening, for curing and for ritual, and for the having of
children are also in origin the powerful forces for predation and cannibal-
ism, the Amazonian concern par excellence. To eat is to kill, and to kill is at
once both to impregnate and be impregnated. The process is circular, in this
killing and regenerating.22 The Piaroa stress is upon how to enter into this
cycle with as much safety as possible, for instance without devouring (or be-
ing devoured by) those you most need. How to attain an existence of civilised
predation/fecundity is the question. Civilised predation requires first of all
civilised procreation (when a man does not perversely impregnate his sister),
and secondly the everyday use of the culinary arts (when food is eaten cooked
and not raw). A human sort of living is possible only when the violent and
ugly forces of creation taken from the crystal boxes of the Tianawa gods are
beautified and domesticated through the individual human will. This is why
the Piaroa place so much emphasis upon the artful everyday, for it is through
the mastery of the daily practice of eating and preparing for eating within a
community of similars that civilised life is made possible.
A Matter of Trust: Reflective Thought and the Art of Social Living
In conclusion I wish to talk again about the relation of the Piaroa version
of the art of social living to a principle of trust.
The Piaroa are one of many peoples of the Amazon Basin whose social
stress is upon the achievement of a certain quality of life that can be enjoyed
through the everyday practices of community life. For them, the paramount
social endeavour is the attainment of high morale in community relations.
This is an end in itself. The political goal relates to the achievement of harmony
in the daily productive and commensal relations of community life. Here,
the emphasis is not upon the grandeur of the institution, but upon sets of
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
310 joanna overing
informal personal relationships through which intimate relations of trust can
be created. The health and the prosperity of a community, particularly as it
pertains to the care and well-being of its children, are understood to be con-
tingent upon the success of its members in establishing such personal and
interdependent relations of trust.
Trust is crucially related to the sociality that the Piaroa so value, for they
are hardly naive about the capacities of human beings for doing damage to
one another, and it is for this reason that they give sovereignty in social matters
to the intentional, choice-making individual, and not the institution, nor the
collectivity. The person has power, and not the institution. Power ever person-
alised makes self-aggrandisement of any significance very difficult to achieve
(and the Piaroa are ever watchful for such signs): the would-be tyrant has no
institutionalised set of laws and regulations, or sets of enduring statuses and
roles, through which to grow and stabilise power.
The Piaroa notion of living under their own sky of the domesticated de-
picts well the means through which they decentre social power: they domesti-
cate power by personalising it and providing the individual actor, and not
the group, with the responsibility for this domestication. As a result power
always becomes a matter of personal trust or distrust. And thus, community
life becomes deeply dependent upon the creation of individual trusting rela-
tionships. As already discussed, the health of each member of the community
is dependent upon the artful skills of other people performing the everyday
tasks of providing food and further tasks. What is more, a good deal of social
energy is directed toward creating new morally competent beings with the
personal capabilities for living harmoniously (artfully) with others: the young
must learn how to trust, and how to become trustworthy. To be worthy of
trust, they must learn the everyday skills for the culinary arts within the jungle
setting, as well as those for living a tranquil social life. To become accomp-
lished in any of these skills the child must learn to master his or her life of
thoughts, and thereby domesticate personal power. Above all, children are
taught to use reflective thought (takwakomenae) to direct their actions. Both
knowledge and action are considered by others untrustworthy (not beautiful)
if judged to be enacted without the help of reflective thought.
It is at this point that we are able to disclose the significance of the distinctly
Piaroa version of the self for the creation of a particular sort of egalitarian
process which contrasts with our own. For the sake of their egalitarian ethic,
it is politically necessary for the Piaroa to conjoin the conscious, intentional
I with skills for both social and customary action. Their insistence upon per-
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 311
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Children at play, depicting the freedom and informality of their life.
sonal autonomy, their high evaluation of the social, and their affection for
custom are not conflicting values, or rather they only appear to be from the
point of view of the dominant strand of our own individualism that states the
superiority of the disengaged ego. The Piaroa individual is by definition a
social and cultural being. It is partly because they do away with the weight of
institutional solidity that they have no need to long for the freedom that dis-
engagement might endow. By refusing the imperatives of institutional law,
they can properly socialise personal power, and link it to customary action
without neutralising the autonomous I. At the same time, by personalising
power, they can further inhibit the development of the institution, and the
hierarchical arrangements through which it flourishes. Given their highly re-
alistic view of the negative, coercive, and indeed absurd, side of power, the
Piaroa have quite rightly decided that the weighty institution would be far
too dangerous for them as a means through which dangerous power could
be harnessed and channelled. As a result they are free to focus more upon
the productive and generative side of power, and not just its coercive face.
The anthropological problem is that we have equated the vision of collec-
tivity as a coercive force with the notion of the social itself. Society becomes
by definition the prescriptive order, and the institutions of hierarchy through
which the rules of this ordered whole are played out. There are, however,
many peoples who view collectivity and the sociality it engenders in other
terms (see Overing & Passes 2000). The informal Piaroa have on purpose few
mechanisms at hand for the building of such hierarchy. Yet, as I have already
remarked, the Piaroa highly value their ability to be social. Such peoples become,
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
312 joanna overing
as Marshall Sahlins phrases the problem, monuments to the failure of the
anthropological imagination and beyond that to the limitations of Western
social thought (Sahlins 1987:26).
The way out of the bind is to recognise that our theoretical constructs are
to a certain extent local ones, and therefore certainly relevant to us. Derived
from our own experience and history, they are therefore only more or less
applicable to the histories and experiences of other peoples and we cannot
predict the overlap. This does not mean, in my opinion, that we should deny
individualism or collectivity to the Piaroa or to the Trio or the Arawat. To
do so would imply that we have been culturally unique in expressing a con-
cern over the issue of the relation of the individual to the social that it is
only we who have thought about such complexities and who have therefore
developed the social theory to think about this relationship.
The stress in the Piaroa theory of selfhood is upon the self-conscious, choos-
ing, interpreting moral agent. Consciousness precedes the acceptance (or re-
jection) of the specific cultural and social way of doing things (takwakomenae
is taught before takwanya), but once accepted its use must be continually
monitored by the acting, reflecting moral agent. The responsible, reflective
I from the start is a social I: ones own autonomy is dependent upon the
autonomy of others and vice versa. Personal power works in Piaroa society
only because of the general practice of extending autonomy as a prerogative
of the other.23 Within these non-contractual societies, the only contract is this
imperative, which in fact can only be backed by personal judgements of trust.
It now may be clear why the idea is rather widespread among Amazonian
peoples that ideal sociality is best achieved through a community of similars.
The stress in this vision of a collectivity of singular similarities is upon achieving
personal relations sufficiently engendering of intimacy and identity in pur-
pose so that trust, not competition, becomes the hallmark of everyday rela-
tions. Such identity does not impinge upon free will; to the contrary, it is
through the wilful, artful mastery of the skills for intimate living that a person
gains the autonomy to live an adult life. In this particular Amazonian image
of the social, the more a people are able through free choice to come to agree-
ment in their ways of doing things intimately, the more likely that they will
be able to rely upon a principle of trust in their generative practices of everyday
living. In other words, they can become free in everyday life from the necessity
of having to rely upon the more coercive and personally destructive aspects
of power as might be expressed through avaricious and predatory competition,
or the tyranny of rules and regulations of law.
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
 In Praise of the Everyday 313
Acknowledgment
This text is based on my inaugural lecture for the Chair in Social Anthropology,
the style of the piece takes into account the fact that my audience was both
multi-disciplinary and from the community. Although I have incorporated a few
anthropological additions, the presentation remains for the most part as it was
delivered. For their comments on an earlier draft of this piece I am grateful to
David McKnight, Alan Passes, and Peter Rivire. A Portuguese version of the
text has appeared in the journal Mana 5/1, April 1999 under the title Elogio do
cotidiano: a confiana e a arte da vida social em uma comunidade amaznia.
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Notes
1. According to Paul Oldham, who is involved in on-going fieldwork with the Piaroa
(See Oldham 1996), the treasured peace is now being disrupted in the form of
sorcery warfare between leaders, in the wake of their attempts to create organ-
isational structures to deal with the nation state. Thus far, it appears that their
peaceful ways, based upon the informal structures about which I am concerned
in this paper, will have difficulty surviving the introduction of more formally
structured organisation.
2. It is only in recent years that Amazonian specialists have recognised the crucial
importance of linking artful production to social organisation. As a splendid
example see David M. Guss (1989) To Weave and to Sing, who provides us with a
satisfyingly full discussion of the relation of art, symbol, and narrative to the
everyday life of the Yekuana of Venezuela. It is also relevant to remark that most
Piaroa artistic production belongs to the domain of the everyday (See Overing
1996a).
3. As belonging to a growing philosophical counterculture, she includes such people
as Carol Gilligan (1982), Alasdair MacIntyre (1980), Michael Stocker (1976a,
1976b), Lawrence Blum (1980), Michael Slote (1983), Claudia Card 1994, 1995,
Alison Jagger (1983), Susan Wolf (1982). See Baier 1995:1819.
4. Baier 1995:1314. But see MacIntyres After Virtue (1980), where he expresses
his nostalgia for a virtues-centred ethics.
5. See Baier 1995:323, and also Gilligan 1982.
6. See Gow (1989, 1991) on the Piro of Peru; Belaunde (1992, 1994) on the Airo
Pai of Peru, McCallum (1989, 1994) on the Cashinahua of Brazil.
7. As the Norwegian philosopher, Jacob Mele, notes 1988:95, we are poor observers
of whatever activities we are not ourselves familiar with as agents. A lot of anthro-
pology (and not just philosophy, about which he speaks) is about not seeing
and not knowing that we are not seeing (Mele 1988:89.).
8. Among the Achuar, garden plants are understood to be bloodthirsty vampire
cannibals (Descola, 1996: Chapt. 6). But here I am guilty of exoticising, and that
is not my point.
9. There is, however, a cultural relativism to indigenous theory that focuses upon
variation in capacities for action and asserts that each type or kind of being lives
according to its own specific (and other-worldly acquired) set of activities and
habits. Viveiros de Castro has recently (1996:127ff ) classified this Amazonian
stress upon distinctive action as a form of multinaturalism. On my part, I would
see it as an aspect of indigenous multiculturalism. I dare say this will continue
ethnos, vol. 68:3, sept. 2003 (pp. 293316)
314 joanna overing
to be an on-going debate among Amazonian specialists which has to do with
the controversy over the relevance of our own conceptual division between na-
ture and culture to indigenous thought.
10. Also see, for example, Lvi-Strauss (1967) on the Nambikwara, Goldman (1963)
on the Cubeo, Thomas (1982) on the Pemon, Viveiros de Castro (1992) on the
Arawat, Overing (1993b) on the Piaroa, Ellis (1996) on the Tsimane. Even among
the more bellicose Achuar (see Descola 1994, 1996) and Yanomami (see Lizot
1985), relations of coercion appear to be personal ones.
11. For example see Henley 1982 on the Panare. Also see Overing 1993a for additional
ethnography on this topic.
12. There is increasing attention being paid to the art of feeding in the ethnographies
of Amazonian peoples. See for instance Gow (1989) and Belaunde (1994).
13. See, however, Overing Kaplan (1975) on the political aspects of marriage arrange-
ments among the Piaroa. The proper marriage is one where everyone agrees,
the bride and groom, and also the parents of both of them. Nevertheless, the
principle certainly normally asserted is that no bride and groom can be forced
to comply to parental desires, and often enough the decision remains with the
bride and groom alone.
14. See Overing 1992 on the agency of tools.
15. See, for example, the literature on the North West Amazon: S. Hugh-Jones (1979),
C. Hugh-Jones (1979), and the recent Ms. by Kaj rhem, The cosmic food web.
Also see S-E Isacsson (1993) on the Ember of the Colombian Choc.
16. See Overing 1993a for a different sort of discussion on this matter.
17. The Piaroa insisted that the Tianawa gods were also human beings. These gods,
who cannot act in the sensual sense, are not of earthly space.
18. See Overing 1985 for an earlier, but fuller, discussion of the Piaroa theory of mind.
19. The concluding ritual of each ceremony involved in the acquiring of takwanya
confers fertility as well to both gardens and the jungle surrounds.
20. One can say, I cure (t aditusae) this woman; I make (t aditusae) this blowgun
or loincloth.
21. First person singular.
22. As another splendid example, see the discussion of Isacsson (1993: Chapters 21
& 34) on the symbolism of the sexual hunting and the pregnant hunter among
the Ember of Colombia.
23. See D. Thomas (1982), who was the first to make this important observation
about an Amazonian people. In his case, it was about the Pemon, neighbours of
the Piaroa.
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