MYTH AS HISTORY: A PROBLEM OF TIME, REALITY, AND OTHER MATTERS

by
Joanna Overing, London School of Economics.

In the following chapter I will argue that the Piaroa have a passion for history. To say
that a tropical forest people have an intense interest in history goes against "received
wisdom".1 Because of their attachment to their own particular customs, and because they are
understood to lack a high regard for "progress", peoples of the Amazon have been judged as
unconcerned with history and therefore as "ahistorical". When I state the contrary, I am not
referring to the sense of history the Piaroa may have acquired from their interactions with
institutions of the Venezuelan State over the last twenty five years. The Piaroa concern for
history is not a recent development which can be attributed to their moving from an
indigenous mode of existence to a modern historical one, as they increasingly become
involved in dealings with a nation state and a market economy. It is not their interactions with
industrial society that has initiated them to history. Although such contact has introduced
them to a particular history and historicity, the Piaroa before such contact were not a people
"without history". However, the direction of the judgment of whether such a people are
"historical" or "ahistorical" depends upon what is meant by history.
Clastres in Society against the State presents us with a particularly interesting
version of the "ahistorical" argument in his creation of a model of political power that is
centred upon two contrasting modes of power - the coercive and the non-coercive.2 Clastres
begins with the premise that political power among Amazonian peoples is non-coercive. He
then associates coercive political power with those societies in which political power derives
from social innovation. He says that "political power as coercion or violence is the stamp of
historical societies, that is, societies which bear within them the cause of innovation, change,

1
and historicity."3 In contrast, societies with non-coercive political power are societies without
history.4 Because his judgment includes the idea that innovation is at the root of political
coercion, it is also one with which the Piaroa would have been, in the past at least, partly in
accord. The verdict with which they would disagree would be that they are therefore not
concerned with history.
The most famous formulation of the ahistoricity of indigenous peoples is that of
Lévi-Strauss, where in The Savage Mind he makes his famous (and often misunderstood)
distinction between "hot" and "cold" societies.5 In creating this contrast, he separates those
peoples "with history" from "those without". He argues that the latter purposely subordinate
history to system and structure, and because of this subordination the societies in which they
live can be called "cold". He notes that in contrast to our own "hot" (and historical) society
which is characterised by its belief in the efficacy of progress and avid need for change, there
is an obstinate fidelity in the "cold society" to a past conceived as a timeless model, rather
than as a stage in the historical process. He asserts that "cold societies" conjoin mythic and
present day time. And thus, for them, there is a coexistence in an "atemporal regime" of
mythological and human beings, who "sail through time together...".6 Such atemporality, he
claims, is a principle which aims at the elimination of history, where humans can only be
imitators of a before world comprised of creators.7 Marx makes a similar point to that of
Lévi-Strauss when he distinguishes, in Precapitalist Economic Formations, between two
radically different visions of history in the development of social formations. He contrasts the
commitment of precapitalist societies to tradition, community and repetitive history with the
capitalist value upon progress and cumulative history. In the former case, process and
progress are subordinated to structure and continuity.
It is true that the Piaroa, and the peoples of Amazonia in general, do not usually
define human social history in terms of an evolutionary progression of stages. Both Lévi-
Strauss and Marx are correct in understanding that such peoples would not particularly value
such a scheme. In fact, there is a sort of "devolutionary" characteristic to the Piaroa version of
their history. In their history, all beings (the Piaroa included) at the end of creation time lost

many of the technological powers they once had created and acquired. In the exegesis of this
history by Piaroa ruwatu (specialist leaders), the loss of such powers had a positive effect
upon the later development of Piaroa social life. It is our historicity that tends to conjoin
social history and technological development, and goes on to identify both with "progress".
As a consequence of these particular associations which join historicity with both social and
technological progress, and which are so powerfully embedded within our own social
thought, it becomes a simple mental leap for us then to judge those who do not condone our
very specific sense of historicity (which is but a matter of our history) as belonging to static,
ahistorical societies. Having made these remarks, it should not surprise the reader that my
own conclusion is that I think it a mistake to label the peoples of the Amazon as "peoples
without history".
Whether we understand Native Americans to be concerned with history depends
entirely on whose definition of history is assumed, theirs or ours. On this question it is very
important to take a (modified) relativist stance, such as that of Vernant who argues that
different types of cultural order have their own historical practice.8 Or, as Sahlins phrases it
in Islands of History where he unfolds a distinctive Polynesian historicity - Different
cultures, different historicities!9 However, such a relativist stance does have its ramifications.
For instance, the very act of stating the possibility of variation in modes of historical
production has implications for the topic of time, and its conceptualisation. In this view, each
historicity incorporates in some form or other a notion of time specific to itself. The
historicity that Clastres and Lévi-Strauss attribute to "historical societies" carries with it our
own familiar notion of linear, progressive time. For both, and for Marx as well, the high
valuation of the linear and progressive aspects of time in modern thought has social salience.
Social time too is viewed as lineal and progressive, and thus social innovation and change is
understood to be the stuff of history. On the other hand, once it is accepted that modes of
historical production may vary, it follows that there is the possibility for particular histories to
be predicated upon different understandings of time. The importance of time as a variable
value in the creation of historicity can then be explored. Thus, before a valid judgement
about an Amazonian "historicity" can be made, intense attention must be paid to the complex
understanding by Native Americans of the relationship between history, time, and social
process. Time, as well as historicity, has its social side.

Mythology as phantom reality. Or is there such a thing as an indigenous metaphysics?

Sahlins in discussing the "heroic history" of Polynesians argues for its specific
historicity.10 He notes that it is specific in part because it is formulated through a cosmology
that is particular to Polynesian culture. It is through Polynesian mythology than an outsider
can gain access to this cosmology, for myth is the genre through which the indigenous
cosmology is unfolded. It is through myth that postulates about the universe are expressed
and explained. The mythic cycles deal with basic metaphysical questions about the history
and development of the kinds of things or beings there are in the world, and also their modes
of being and relationships. Polynesian historicity is made further specific by being attached to
a social theory that is distinctive to the Polynesian way of life. Hence, Sahlins demonstrates
for Polynesians11 that both mythology/ cosmology and social theory can be constitutive of a
particular mode of historicity. A similar case can be made for what I shall refer to in the next
chapter as the Piaroa "fallible gods history". That their gods are fallible, rather than heroic,
fits well with the more egalitarian ethos of Amazonia when compared with the notion of
hierarchy which is part and parcel of Polynesian social theory.
Sahlins' discussion of Polynesian historicity is, in the most positive sense, a radical
one. This is because there are strong prejudices within anthropology that can make it difficult
for us to recognise both the historicity of myth and the social theory and practice constitutive
of it. For example, our assumption has been that myth is to be contrasted with history.
History, in our world view, tells of true events that take a linear and progressive course,
whereas the events of mythology are but phantom realities which are assumed to have little
relevance to any real world of action and experience. Our own notions of reality have tended
to provide the yardstick by which to examine the contents of myth, and it is for this reason
that so much of the general discussion about myth has revolved around issues that would
otherwise be inexplicable. Thus, mythic events have also been counterpoised not only to
history, but also to modern scientific findings about physical properties of the universe.
Basically the confusion is that theories of existence that are by and large social theories of
existence are being contrasted with theories about the physical universe that are asocial in
both scope and intent. It is not in the least surprising that the mythic event, when stripped of
its social, moral, and historical significance, is found to be lacking. But I dare say that it is not
paucity that is the "problem" with myth, but its excess.
A prejudice against mythology is especially evident in the writings of Lévi-Strauss
who otherwise writes so masterfully in his volumes of Mythologiques about its structure.
Although Lévi-Strauss sees a continuity in the two endeavours of history and mythology, he
should not be understood as also saying that the content of mythology should be taken
seriously, by either us or the indigenous peoples. In fact, he professes no great confidence in
the writing of Western history, and he stresses its inevitable creation of fictions.12 But if the
content of (Western) history comes out badly in Lévi-Strauss' scheme of things, he is even
more unflattering about the possible merits of mythology. In the closing chapter of The
Naked Man, he concludes that "we have to resign ourselves to the fact that the myths tell us
nothing instructive about the order of the world, the nature of reality or the origin and destiny
of mankind".13 From a perspective different from that of Lévi-Strauss, the dilemma might be
rephrased to question just what it is, precisely, that we wish to include in the real world?
However, for Lévi-Strauss, who is more certain about such matters, the real world is that
which is disclosed through the scientific endeavour. Thus, for him, the events unfolded in
mythology are, with respect to this scientifically exposed real world, irrational and false, and
thus comparable "only to minor, lesser history: that of the dimmest chroniclers".14
The history that Lévi-Strauss has judged as minimal knowledge, the Piaroa would
interpret as replete with knowledge. How, then, do we handle such strong contradictions in
judgments between the western investigator and the indigenous peoples? To what extent and
in what ways can we take the Piaroa seriously in their conclusions about the validity of their
own knowledge system? Basically, what Lévi-Strauss is saying is that with respect to
mythology, at least, we should not take the indigenous judgment at all seriously. His
argument is based upon his assumption that mythology has no relevance to that reality which
is known and charted by the natural sciences and by our philosophers of science. Yet there is
little reason why we should expect it to do so, since we could not but agree that in indigenous
metaphysics many of the basic propositions about modes of being in the world are at variance
with many of the those that modern biologists or physicists would assume.
From the scientist's point of view indigenous postulates about reality would be
fantasmogorical. For instance, the Piaroa proposition that animals live as humans in their
primordial homes of mythic time beneath the earth would probably jar the scientific
sensibility. So too would be the idea that their powerful leaders (the ruwatu) can walk in the
"before time" of the mythic past, or that monstrous spirit ogres dressed in conquistador
armour were created in mythic time to guard today the resources of the jungle. These
postulates about reality are not commensurable with scientific theories of the real. Be that as
it may, the implication of Lévi-Strauss' statements about the nature of reality is that it is
singular: there is only one reality, and it is science alone that can unfold it. Because the world
as presented through the mythic cycles is fantastic by the canons of that reality, indigenous
peoples in their mythology have got it wrong. Since many of their reality postulates are
unfolded through the exegesis of myth, the implication is, then, that one cannot properly
speak of an indigenous metaphysics.

The unitary view of reality: the materialist predicament.

Such a unitary view of reality is similar to that stated overtly by Gell in his recent
discussion of the metaphysics of time in his monograph, The Anthropology of Time. There,
he asserts15 that linear, progressive time is universally the only mode of experiencing time,
and so it also seems of expressing it. He argues against the cultural relativism of Durkheim
and Lévi-Bruhl, and such anthropologists as Leach, Lévi-Strauss and R. Barnes, when they
state in their discussions of what Gell refers to as "non-technological" cultures that the
members of them have their own distinct notions of time - such as cyclical, synchronous, or
inverting time.16 It is Gell's contention that in so doing, these writers have implied that "non-
technological" peoples have managed to create metaphysical postulates that may be
generally applicable, alongside and thus as valid as our own. He accuses Durkheim, and
other such cultural relativists as therefore dabbling in metaphysics themselves, which is not
the job of the social theorist. His own position is that metaphysics should remain in the hands
of Western philosophers and metaphysicians; and anthropologists, when discussing
difference, should stick to describing the "contingent beliefs" of the indigenous peoples, that
is, those that would have no affect upon universally valid linear time, nor upon any other
categories of a modern materialist metaphysics. 17 To do otherwise is to be wrong; it would
be to imply that another metaphysics is possible.
Thus, Gell distinguishes between the invalid "systems of contingent beliefs" held by
ethnographic subjects and the valid, "rationally argued metaphysical theses" of Western
philosophers, "such as those defended by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason".18 With
regard to this distinction, Gell argues that beliefs that are culturally relative are contingent
upon more general beliefs that have the characteristic of being universally true for human
experiencing of the world. Since, according to Gell, contingent beliefs about the world are in
themselves, invalid, they also make no contribution to our (correct) understanding of truth,
necessity, logic, time.19 He contends further that such contingent beliefs are in fact
"expressed, understood and acted upon, in the light of uniform, but implicit, logico-
metaphysical premises, and only in the light of these premises".20 For Gell, time, for
instance, is "entirely unitary from culture to culture".21 Thus he argues that there is only one
valid metaphysics of time, and it is absolute, and therefore universally followed - if only
implicitly or subconsciously. It would appear that it is Gell's conclusion that the job of
metaphysics is to declare truths about the world: there can be "true metaphysical systems",
but no false ones. Those deemed false (from the scientific viewpoint) would not be
metaphysical, but contingent.
Gell asserts further that it is the job of the anthropologist to tell the native who holds
to a false postulate that he or she is wrong. He says that "the ethnographic subject's map of
the world can only be evaluated (seen for what it is) in the light of the world to which it is
supposed to refer, which is the real world, not an imaginary world which would be real were
the ethnographic subject's map true".22 Yams cannot dance at night, butterflies are not
sorcerers. And time has a natural, linear flow which cannot be tampered with: it cannot be
collapsed through ritual nor move both backwards and forwards. Gell concludes that it would
be "merely patronising" for the outside observer not to criticise the illusions of the
ethnographic subject. The outside observer, he continues, has "possession of codified
knowledge [about the real world] amassed through objective research strategies" that are
"inaccessible" to native subjects who "simply operate cultural premises practically." The
outside observer, unlike the native, is thus in the position to provide a rational critique, based
upon the findings of science, of these cultural premises.
Gell is a dialectician for a unitary account of existence, and as such he is also
promoting the popular philosophy of materialism. It should be noted that materialism, as
would also hold true for any other metaphysical system, states first principles about the
character of the world that have prescriptive force. A part of the materialist's credo is the
belief in the omnicompetence of the natural sciences. As Partridge explains23, the materialist
sees the world as a vast mechanism, and understands whatever happens as the result of
natural causes. All other phenomena, such as those characterising psychological, social,
religious, or moral life, must be assessed and understood on this basis.
Once again we become faced with that great divide in western theory, that between
nature and culture. In this case, nature is understood as objective, mechanical, unitary, while
tradition (because of its subjectivity and diversity) is unnatural, and therefore unreal. Such a
materialist world view creates real problems indeed for the project of anthropology. As
Shweder notes when he makes the plea for a "post-Nietzschean anthropology", our subject
matter has unfortunately taken on the attributes of phantom reality.24 Shweder phrases the
dilemma as one where culture, tradition, and society have become understood as imaginary,
and therefore as having null reference to any real world. He notes that one route (among
many) that has been taken by anthropologists to escape the materialist predicament has been
to reduce the cultural to the "hard" facts of the natural.25 This in effect is the path that Gell
has taken. With this solution, we have the assumption that demons and gods have no relation
to reality, while, for instance, laws of thought (which are of nature) are real. It should not be
unexpected, then, that there is almost always a divergence between the materialist's
assessment of the facts and those made by people practising the particular religion or
following the specific moral creed.
 To reduce culture to external constraints - or, from another point of view (which
amounts to the same thing) to the imaginary - begs the question of how we should interpret
the statements of others that express their strong conviction, not only in the existence of gods
and demons, but also in the efficacy of these beings. People tend to remain firmly
unconvinced that their reality postulates are illusory or merely manifestations of false
consciousness.26 Instead they regard such postulates (e.g. fathers-in-law, if angry, may
transform into jaguar in order to attack their son-in-law) not only as illuminating of
experience, but also as a form of knowledge about the world. It is on this point especially that
the materialist stance works against the anthropological task of understanding the judgement
of knowledge made by others who patently hold to different premises from the materialists
about existence in the world.

What do we do about the really made up? Two views.

Taussig, in the opening chapter of his work, Mimesis and Alterity, asks rather
whimsically, why is it that what seems most important in life is made up and is neither more
nor less "a social construction"?27 He continues: "would that it would, would that it could,
come clean, this true real. I so badly want ...that complicity with the nature of nature. But the
more I want it, the more I realise it's not for me. Nor for you either."28 Thus he decides to
consider the social power of make-believe, or the reality of the really made-up through which
we all cannot help but live our lives.29 Taussig thereby takes a stance with regard to a crucial
debate within anthropology.
From its inception, much of anthropological debate has been an attempt to deal with
the dilemma of how to interpret people's insistence that gods, demons, and spirits do exist.
However, as of yet there is little sign of any meeting of minds over the treatment of these
"phantom reality posits", as Shweder ironically refers to them. If anything, the debate has
tended to rigidify into two polarised and uncompromising stances by becoming increasingly
framed in terms of extreme positions of universalism and cultural relativism. For instance,
Shweder's solution is for anthropologists to shed an outmoded idea of one uniform reality,
and to accept the co-existence of "multiple objective worlds". In other words, the gods of the
native are as real as the truths of the physicist.30 A good example of the opposite conviction
is that stated by Gell, who understands the anthropologist to be in the business of the "critique
of culture".31 Strongly dismissive of the native view, he accepts as really real the truths of the
physicist only.
We seem to be back to square one. We have the choice of saying either 1) that the
ethnographic subject, while fully capable of practical action, is incapable of philosophical
reasoning and of developing cultural premises that are correct about the world, or 2) that
local metaphysical postulates about reality (e.g. gods exist) are to be interpreted in the same
light as those of physics: both are partial and somewhat imaginary projections, and thus there
is no reason to accept one as less true of reality than the other.
We would not be in such a ridiculous double bind if philosophy had not from the 17th
century on conducted an outright expulsion from philosophy of all practical concerns, and
along with them the particular, the local, and the timely. Custom, tradition, society, words,
song, and ritual - all are to be viewed with mistrust, and indeed illusory in contrast to the real,
objective world of physical nature. The human world is judged to be unreal. This is the
predicament from which Taussig is attempting to extricate himself. Shweder is quite right to
complain that the subject matter of anthropology, as too often it is conceived, is comprised of
other people's phantom reality posits. Anyone who holds, even modestly, to a modernist
perspective cannot respect diversity and multiplicity: it is all social construction, the
invention of tradition, and therefore unreal.
Gell, in his deliberately immodest rejections of multiplicity is following what,
according to Toulmin,32 has been a customary theme within modern philosophy since the
writings of Descartes. This theme states the irrelevance of ethnography and history to truly
philosophical inquiry. The common claim has been that problems that are actually
philosophic must be stated in terms that are independent of any historical or concrete
situation. In other words, questions of epistemology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics
must be kept out of the reach of contextual analysis, where, for instance, the experiences of
this or that culture might be expected to make a difference. This is Gell's position when he
admonishes his anthropological colleagues for dabbling in metaphysics. Of course he,
himself, is conspicuously indulging in metaphysics by taking the strong position that he does.
My view is that by making obvious his own metaphysical stance he is taking an admirable
step, since too often anthropologists do not make their own contingent metaphysical
postulates clear. For the sake of such a clarity, I hope also in the course of this discussion to
make my own assumptions or reflections about such issues explicit by, for instance,
explaining why I feel comfortable in talking about an indigenous metaphysics - or ontology
and cosmology.33

The expulsion from philosophy of the timely, the local, and the practical.
Toulmin, in his recent book, Cosmopolis, makes the contrast between 16th and 17th
century philosophical commitments. In so doing he says much that is relevant about both past
and present attitudes toward the relation between the two endeavours of ethnography and
philosophy. Toulmin also argues that the accomplishments of the 16th century humanists in
understanding human life and motives were sufficiently revolutionary as to place them
alongside the more theoretical achievements of the following century as responsible for the
development of modernism. Thus he claims we have the creation of two strands of
modernism, the humanist and the rationalist. While there was no need for them to develop as
contradictory strands within European thought, they did do so. This was because of the
radical narrowing of scope and decontextualising that occurred in much of 17th century
philosophy - which Toulmin understands as more of a defensive counter-Renaissance move
than a revolutionary one.34
It is clear that present debates within anthropology are not new ones. In the context of
the discussion at hand, the relatively pluralist stance of Taussig and Shweder align well with
the intellectual mood of 16th century humanism, while that of Lévi-Strauss and Gell are in
accord with the more unitary vision of the 17th century. Toward the beginning of the 17th
century there was a strong intellectual shift from the intellectual modesty of the humanists to
the 17th century commitment to a Quest for Certainty.35 Because of the relevance of this
shift to on-going debate within anthropology which basically has to do with disagreements
over the evaluation, and therefore understanding and communication of indigenous
knowledge, it is apropos to describe briefly Toulmin's version of these epochs vis-a-vis the
history of ideas.
Toulmin tells us that in the l6th century, where the attitude was that "nothing human
is foreign", ethnography was grist for the mill in philosophical debate. The speculative and
theoretical streak of the Renaissance scholars went, as Toulmin notes, "hand in hand with a
taste for the variety of concrete experience".36 For instance, Montaigne argued that it was
best to concentrate upon accumulating a rich experience of, and perspective on, both the
natural and the human world, and in the meantime to suspend judgments relating to matters
of general theory. Thus the reaction of many lay humanists such as Montaigne to the reports
of European explorers was to include the discoveries of new populations within the general
pool of testimony about human life in such a way that the framework of understanding could
possibly accommodate ethnographic data. According to Toulmin, their respect for the rational
possibilities of human experience as experienced through concrete examples of it was a chief
merit of the Renaissance humanists.37 Their respect for concrete diversity had its
implications for the possibilities of the creation of abstract theory. In the project of theory
building, these l6th century followers of classical skepticism placed limits on the generalising
possibilities of appeals to experience, which they saw as possibly an unlimited matter. For
this reason they accepted in a spirit of tolerance the existence of a diversity of views about
both human affairs and the natural world. For them, the particular philosophical position
lends itself to neither proof nor to refutation.38
In the l7th century, many of the more emancipatory humanist insights and concerns
were dismissed. For instance, both ethnography and history tended to lose their value. In
Discourse on Method, Descartes confesses to a youthful fascination for ethnography and
history, but this was an interest he explains that he managed to overcome. His move, counter
to Renaissance thought, was to devalue traditional ideas in favour of cultural universals,
whose status as such would be known by their "clarity and distinctness" for all reflective
thinkers.39 The tolerance and pluralism typical of the humane Renaissance values (as
evidenced for instance in the writings of Montaigne) where it was expected that through
reasoned discussion individuals could at the least come to a civilized agreement to differ,
became in the l7th century an unacceptable intellectual option.40 In the 17th century quest
for certainty, pluralism and multiplicity became devalued absolutely. European intellectual
thought became increasing transformed from being characterised by an interest in "local,
timely, practical issues" to a focus that was exclusively "general, timeless, and
theoretical".41
Toulmin ties the outright expulsion from philosophy of all practical concerns to the
escalation during the 17th century of social and political unrest. He notes that according to
recent work on the economic and social history of the early 17th century, the years after 1610
were typified by social disorder and retreat. In such a climate of extreme unrest, a quest for
certainty became the political expedient. In the early 17th century the religious confrontation
between Protestants and Catholics became highly politicised and therefore escalated in
Europe, to result in the brutal violence of the Thirty Years' War. To a certain extent, the
humanists' readiness to live with uncertainty, ambiguity, and difference of opinion was
thought to have had its fair share of responsibility for the development of the unrest. Given
the turmoil of the time, "philosophical skepticism became less, and certainty more,
attractive".42 According to Toulmin the reasoning went something like this: "if uncertainty,
ambiguity, and the acceptance of pluralism led, in practice, only to an intensification of the
religious war, the time had come to discover some rational method for demonstrating the
essential correctness or incorrectness of philosophic, scientific, or theological doctrines".43
Philosophers came to disclaim the relevance to their theory construction of any kind of
practical knowledge which by its nature would be contextual. Thus they discarded the oral,
the particular, the local, and the timely. As Toulmin notes, "abstract axioms were in,
concrete diversity was out."44
Even ethics became abstracted from its concrete circumstance. In the Renaissance,
philosophers handled moral issues by using case analyses. The understanding was that sound
moral judgement was predicated upon a respect for the detailed circumstances of specific
types of cases. However, after the 1650s, the Cambridge Platonists, for instance, made ethics
a domain for general abstract theory, "divorced from concrete problems of moral practice".45
What is remarkable, from the anthropological point of view, is that modern moral philosophy
has tended to continue to be concerned with timeless and universal principles of ethical
theory, the assumption being that the Good and the Just, as Mind and Matter, conform to
principles that can be generally stated.46 To do otherwise would negate its status as
philosophy, which by definition had become a decontextualised programme, where problems
must be stated as true for any context or historical situation.
Despite the adherence of moral philosophy to the goal of limiting its concern to the
universal, its status is that of a lesser, or less rational field of study than the philosophy of
science. This is because 17th century scientists had limited the very notion of "rationality" to
theoretical arguments that achieve a quasi-mathematical certainty (and it is probably for this
reason that Gell in his discussion of time restricts "metaphysical" discussion of the topic to
the "rational", and therefore formal, arguments of modern philosophy). Thus for the
philosophical dogmatist, theoretical physics was a field for rational study and debate, while
ethics, the social, and law were not. This was the transformation in Modern philosophy: to
deny the Renaissance understanding that epistemology involves not just intellectual, but also
moral issues.47 If modern science divorced fact from value, so too did modern philosophy. In
most respects, philosophy also drove out from the repertoire of its concerns many aspects of
what it means to be alive and human - and as human, social, cultural, beings.

A diversity of right and conflicting versions.

Within the natural sciences of today, argument and debate over appropriate models of
reality are alive and well. As Toulmin phrases it, "modernity" in the natural sciences, as
developed from the rigid rationalism and the unitary vision of nature that was promoted by
the influential l7th century scientists and philosophers, is "over and done with".48 What Kant
understood to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science in general turned out
after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics.49 In the
natural sciences, the development of its methods has always been tied to practice and the
solving of problems. Thus, as Toulmin reminds us,50 there has been a continued evolution of
modern ideas and methods within the natural sciences that has bred new generations of ideas
about scientific method that can escape the criticisms that are fatal to the highly narrow
visions of the l7th century scientists about methods, which were inextricably tied to their
quest for absolute certainty. Shweder emphasises the point that in science today there is no
cause for alarm that reality-finding science has many aspects of its agenda that are
inextricably subjective or discretionary.51
An influential sector of philosophy has followed suit, and thus development in
analytic philosophy, based upon the observation of the practice of science, has succeeded in
establishing that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles - outside
purely formal enquiries - except relative to a particular set of assumptions.52
While Kant assumed one fixed conceptual framework that every rational mind must adopt,
many of what Shweder refers to as "postpositivist" philosophers53 knowledge is theory
dependent. For such "hardheaded" philosophers of science such as Wittgenstein, Quine,
Nelson Goodman, I. Lakatos, Mary Hesse, and Paul Feyerabend, the idea of one objective
reality, or one unitary theory of reality to which all other theories can be reduced, no longer
makes any sense. The idea that the objective world is capable of being represented
completely if represented from any one point of view would not be countenanced by such
philosophers of science. They accept a plurality of knowledges, any one of which is able only
to provide a partial view, and thus the physicist can quite happily to suit his purposes move
between "a world of waves" and "a world of particles".54 Secondly, they accept the notion
that all theories of reality are to a certain extent acts of imaginative projection.55 In short, an
interpretative element has long been incorporated into philosophical conceptions of
objectivity-seeking science, as evidenced for instance in philosophical writings on the critical
use of metaphor in the natural sciences.56
What is more, there is no need to expect that the stance of metaphysical pluralism
would result in either "sloppy relativism" or "philosophical confusion", as those of a more
unitary persuasion might be apt to claim in their own defense. First of all, metaphysics is a
celebratively (or notoriously, depending upon point of view) speculative endeavour, whether
"in the hands of" the Western philosopher or the indigenous cosmologist. Metaphysical
postulates are neither a priori nor empirically based. Rather, they must be argued with
rhetorical and/or logical force; they clarify and illuminate, but much as a literary argument it
is never possible to reach an apparent end - except within the version of the world as
presented. There is no absolutely neutral data to which we can appeal through which to attack
or support any given metaphysical theory.57 As Partridge notes,58 almost everything in
metaphysics is controversial, and it is therefore not surprising that our own Western
metaphysics comes is so many different colours and hues: as realism, irrealism, idealism,
materialism, naturalism, rationalism, relativism, essentialism, nominalism, and so forth. As
both Wittgenstein and Goodman have noted,59 there are diverse languages or theories (of
science, of psychology, of the arts, of morality) through which we experience the world, and
it is absurd to think that we could reduce them all to one (e.g. Newtonian physics) in order to
provide the ultimate description of the world. As Goodman says of his own argument in
Ways of Worldmaking, "the movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to
a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making".60
In short, within our own philosophical heritage, there is hardly only one metaphysics,
and especially of the fascinating and complicated topic of time. It is an area of thought where
one theory quickly supersedes the next. At the present, our most brilliant physicist
cosmologists are generating theories, such as the "ripple" theory of time, that appear in
general postulate closer to an Amazonian theory of multiple worlds than to the unitary
accounts of the materialist. Accordingly, in this recent theory, we have parent and children
universes, each dwelling within their own respective time zones, occasionally bumping into
each other - causing general havoc, and perhaps creative splendour. (citation)
While science and philosophy have long outgrown the narrow commitment to the
quest for certainty as it was developed through the uncompromising rationalism of 17th
century philosophers and scientists, the conception that anthropologists have of both the
methods of science and the philosophy of science is often well out of date. To hold an
outmoded idea of the practice of science is not unusual for either the critics or the advocates
of scientific methodology.61 There is the continued desire on the part of many
anthropologists to attain the positivist ideal, that is, to achieve what they believe to be real
status within the scientific community by being capable of unfolding the really real - just as a
scientist is able to do.62 Because of the strong positivist thread within anthropology,
anthropologists continue to seek the true real in order to gain that complicity with nature they
so desire. This leads many of them to be deeply suspicious of the subject matter that they are
studying, which is at the same time the very topic that is distinctive of anthropology -
tradition. Our subject matter becomes explained away as consisting of "imaginary reality
posits", or as (unnatural) contingent beliefs. It is because of this irony that Shweder finds it
necessary to argue for the development of a "post-positivist", "post-Nietzschean"
anthropology, one which will thereby be more in tune with present day practice and theory in
science.63

A return to the particular, the local, and the timely.

Gell believes that ethnography has no value for philosophy in the solving of its
problems. He states that anthropologists should not, no matter how unwittingly, engage in
metaphysical speculation. The issues he raises are serious ones and therefore perhaps need to
be (yet once again) aired in continuous discussion; for if he is correct many of us have been
very wrongheaded in our descriptions of indigenous cosmologies and metaphysics, and of
indigenous understandings of time, space, and other such conceptual matters. Yet the
question remains of how seriously we should take his scolding, since both within and without
anthropology many would disagree with his ban upon context? For instance the
anthropologist, Witherspoon, is perfectly comfortable in suggesting that "the Navajo have
something significant to contribute to the philosophical study of language and art and to our
understanding of the relationship between mental and physical phenomena".64 In
philosophy, Charles Taylor describes his project in Philosophical Papers65 as "philosophical
anthropology", while Toulmin, also a philosopher of note, observes that now in the late 20th
century, we no longer believe that the studies of ethnography and history "can teach us
nothing of intellectual importance about, for instance human nature"66. He goes on to say that
there are few branches of philosophy where we can afford to turn a blind eye to their
insights.67
Also in a philosophical endeavour, Alistair MacIntyre, devotes his entire book,
Against Virtue68 to the task of showing the importance of contextualising philosophical
problems within both cultural and historical context. He places particular, but not exclusive,
emphasis upon moral philosophy, and understands the 18th and 19th centuries, with its stress
upon law-like generalisations and decontextualisation, to be centuries of "a peculiar kind of
darkness" with regard to the modern development of social theory.69 MacIntyre appeals to
anthropology and history to stimulate in philosophy the diverse ways in which moral
problems are actually discussed and dealt with in this or that cultural and historical context.70
"Morality", he notes, "which is no particular society's morality is to be found nowhere".71 His
claims against universality and his defense of contextualisation goes further than the
boundaries of moral philosophy to extend as well to the powerful arguments about truth and
rationality that are favoured by analytic philosophers, which he maintains can likewise be
justified only within the context of a particular genre of historical inquiry. To quote from
MacIntyre, a statement which summarises well his position:

Just as what Kant took to be the principles and

presuppositions of natural science as such turned out
after all to be the principles and presuppositions
specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to
be the principles and presuppositions of one highly
specific morality, a secularized version of Prot-
estantism which furnished modern liberal individualism
with one of its founding charters.72

Can philosophy address ethnographic questions?

Although there is a clear return within philosophy of a concern with the timely, the
particular, and the local, anthropology has also a responsibility to deal with the significance
of context to issues that have until recently been understood, at least within philosophy, to be
within the hegemony of philosophy. This would do with weighty questions, such as theories
of mind, matter, space, time, and even morality. It is the anthropologist, and not the
philosopher, or even the political theorist, who in the ordinary course of study, explores
multiplicity, diversity, and context with respect to such issues. Until recently, with the
writings of such philosophers as Charles Taylor and Alistair MacIntyre, modern philosophy -
for historical reasons - has been disdainful of ethnographic detail and case studies, or if
interested relatively unknowledgeable of them. Those who have debated in recent years upon
"the rationality issue" might take a bow to ethnographic authority by citing Evans-Pritchard's
renowned work upon the witchcraft of the Azande. However, ethnographic writings are not
widely cited by philosophers, and statements made by non-Western people upon their world
or upon their systems of morality do not loom large in philosophical texts. It is the
anthropologist who strives to understand non-Western postulates about reality and the
contextual aspects of law, politics, morality, and the social. As I have argued elsewhere,73
most of the ethnographer's facts are explicitly tied to context and values.
Unlike a Renaissance humanist, such as Montaigne, the Modern philosopher is not yet
interested in the type and depth of diversity that the ethnographic store of literature could
provide as grist for philosophical debate. Nor would most philosophers be interested in the
topics covered by many of the indigenous postulates about reality, which are as focused upon
issues of political, social, and moral pertinence as upon the physical attributes of the world.
Thus I think it unrealistic for Gell to order anthropologists out of the business of
metaphysical debate, and unfair of him to deny peoples from other cultures their particular
metaphysics. When philosophers begin to debate the implications of ethnographic
descriptions (paying attention to the whole, and not simply bits and pieces), such as provided
by Witherspoon in his splendid account of Navaho metaphysics in his work, Language and
Art in the Navajo Universe74, it is then that such assessments might begin to be reasonably
argued. In the meantime, it is the anthropologist who must do his or her best in describing
what other people say about the world, and how they act in it. For instance in many contexts
of everyday talk among the Piaroa, time is not prevalently of the linear, progressive sort. At
the very least, it is our job to note the possible relevance that such aspects of non-Western
metaphysics and practice might have to the interests of our own philosophers. Although there
is a return within philosophy to a concern with the practical, it will probably be largely
through such deliberate efforts on our part that philosophical questions become reformulated
so as to incorporate the ethnographic case.

The reality of the really made-up.

 Gell is correct in insisting that we must be careful about what we say are the
implications for the people themselves of their own statements, and in particular about the
relation of statements to the experiencing of the world. Do their statements make a
difference, or not, in how they actually experience the world? If so, in what respect? These
are slippery question if there ever were any. However such a dictum on caution holds true for
both so-called "cultural relativists" and those of a more unitary view - such as Gell. For
instance, it would be wrong to assume a priori that when people make statements about the
world that do not agree with the reality postulates of a Kantian metaphysician, or of a modern
physicist or biologist, that there is no correlation between such statements and their
experiencing of the world in everyday life.
We can take as one example the question of the relation of some of the Piaroa
postulates about reality with their experiencing of reality. The Piaroa stated (as reality
postulate 1) that animals were\are human in the "before time" of mythic events. They also
said (as reality postulate 2) that animals populate their jungle home of today only because
their ruwatu (shaman specialists) transform humans of "before time" (who now live with
their primordial parents beneath the earth) into animal form and then transfer them to above
earth jungle space. The eating of animals is therefore considered to be a cannibalistic act, and
the Piaroa would not eat game that had not again been transformed, this time from animal to
vegetable form (reality postulate 3), by the ruwatu. The ruwatu accomplished each
transformation, of humans to animals, and animals to vegetables, through their nightly
chanting ritual. I was told by Piaroa, not without a certain wry humour, that they were
therefore vegetarians. Indeed, their generic word for food is "vegetable food" (kwawa).
Finally (as reality postulate 4), they insisted that they would become ill if they ate game that
had not been transformed to potato.
What can the anthropologist say about the relation between such postulates and the
Piaroa experiencing of the world? First of all, we cannot assume that there is no
relationship. No matter how much we might believe that the Piaroa experience the world in
the same way we do, and I believe they do share an enormous amount of experience with us,
we can not move from such an assumption to say that the Piaroa do not believe what they are
saying. How then do we distinguish between what they say they experience and what they do
not experience, even if they say they do? For example, when a Piaroa says that he or she is
really eating a potato (or, on another level, a human being) when what it looks and tastes
like to me is being eaten is a piece of wild peccary meat? What does experiencing mean? In
what ways do the physical and the conceptual conjoin? This is not a puzzle that I can answer.
What I, as anthropologist, have the responsibility for showing is how the postulates
that I have listed (which the Piaroa I knew stated constantly and in many ways as truths about
the world) were related to particular Piaroa actions in everyday life. To reiterate, the four
postulates were: 1) the animals we see in the jungle were, and still are, human beings in the
"before time" of mythic events, 2) animals can populate the jungle only if the ruwang brings
them up from their human homes beneath the earth and transforms them into their animal
form, 3) the animals are then once again transformed by the ruwang, before the members of
his community eat them, into vegetable form, and 4) to eat meat that is untransformed into
vegetable would make the Piaroa ill. The ways in which these four postulates were joined to
everyday practice were surprising in number: they were linked to the scheduling of the Piaroa
daily activities, their hunting and consumption patterns, their practice in trading, their
grammatical constructions, their explanations of disease, their political life, their norms of
ownership, and innumerable other areas of the everyday, including daily ritual. In
demonstrating such linkage, I am also showing how such postulates did in fact have a
concrete relation to Piaroa practice, and through it to their experiencing of reality. Moreover,
in the community in which I lived, people spent a good deal of daily existence acting in
accordance with these postulates. Many of the chapters of this book give evidence of such
practice, and thus I shall only provide at this point certain obvious examples that have
reference to the planning of, and preparation for, both the hunt and the consumption of
animals.
Each night, the ruwang leader conducted lengthy ritual to transform dangerous
animal flesh of the hunt into safer vegetable food; all the men of his community joined him
to act as a united chorus to his many hours of chanting. The ritual was conducted within the
communal house, and thus the women and children would often hear at least 2 hours of the
chanting before they fell asleep. Every morning all members of the community drank the
water or honey into which the ruwang had periodically during his nightly ritual blown the
protective words of his chant. When animals were sighted in the jungle, they would not be
hunted if the ritual for that specific animal had not been performed. Only after the ruwang
had chanted to protect the members of his community against the dangers of the particular
animal, and they had drunk his words, would it be hunted. Usually, the ruwang was careful
to plan his ritual so as to anticipate successfully the seasonal availability of specific species in
the jungle, but this could not always be the case. For instance, once while I was visiting the
Piaroa, children wandering in the jungle unexpectedly came upon some armadillos, but a
hunting expedition was sent for the armadillos only after the ruwang had first spent several
nights chanting the appropriate ritual that would enable the members of his community to eat
armadillo without danger. Sometimes preceding the hunt, the appropriate ritualized water and
honey was available in another community, and could therefore be acquired from its ritual
specialist.
What is important to note from these few examples of action related to the Piaroa
reality postulates about the transformational processes involved in the eating of game is that
we are dealing with important daily (or nightly) practice, and thus also with the
organisation of time, around which Piaroa social life was centred. Within this context, the
anthropologist can note an obvious linkage between the postulates about reality that the
Piaroa make (ones that are clearly strange to our own metaphysics) and their experiencing of
everyday reality. In other words, practice is an important aspect of experiencing about which
the anthropologist can communicate.
Practice includes ritual, which in this case is not a sometimes occurrence but normally
happens for many hours every night. From the Piaroa point of view such ritual is practical
activity which has practical results. Thus to make a sharp separation of ritual from everyday
time and behaviour, and to impose a sacred/profane dichotomy upon the Piaroa experiencing
of the world would be distorting of their practice. To take but one example, hunting in Piaroa
practice is not merely a matter of going into the jungle and killing an animal. To the contrary,
hunting is a process that requires skills that go beyond the use of the blowgun or the setting
of traps. It just as importantly requires the ritual work of the ruwang, who places humans
that he has transformed into animals in the jungle to become the prey of the blowgun hunter.
Also through daily and lengthy ritual, the ruwang transforms the animal flesh into vegetable,
thereby increasing its safe edibility for the members of his community. Through such ritual
practice, the ruwang is recognised as a powerful hunter, and in his role of ritual practitioner
he is said to be the most knowledgeable hunter of the community. The anthropologist too
often wants to distinguish ritual practice from everyday practice, ritual time from everyday
time, while in Piaroa practice the two are constitutive of one another. What occurs at night in
ritual has strong bearing upon what is done during the day in the jungle.
Similarly, everyday practice among the Piaroa also includes the act itself of stating
cosmological postulates about the world, which can be conjoined with the fact that Piaroa
daily practice is constitutive of a specific metaphysics, which includes a particular
metaphysics of time. Although these comments should be apparent, it is nevertheless often
forgotten, particularly in discussions where the thrust is to separate the illusory from the
really real social practice (as too often is the case when the topic is ritual speech), that the
speaking of words is a form of practice, and thus words themselves are always an aspect of
social reality and therefore experience. In sum, we can legitimately speak of the relation of
words to experience in the world. Words have more than propositional force; they do more
than say something true (or false) about reality. Words have affect upon practice in the world
whether they are in congruence with our own propositions about the world, or not. The really
made up is also real, and has therefore real effect upon actions in the world.

Can evaluative worlds be judged from the perspective of an objective one?

There is one added caution for the unitary view, where the desire is ultimately to
overcome diversity through the positing of universals of experience: it is very difficult to
make any kind of a legitimate fit between the postulates of a unitary, objective world and
those of an indigenous, South American, multiple world cosmos. First of all, the indigenous,
multiple world universe is comprised of evaluative worlds, while our one objective world is
not. Evaluative worlds cannot be understood (certainly in indigenous terms) through the
postulates of our objective world, which are in intent, at least, "value free". Thus the
evaluative world cannot be reduced to the objective one.
I would go so far as to say that almost none of the postulates of evaluative world
theory can be reduced to postulates about one unitary, objective, world. For instance, while it
is true that almost anyone in the world would recognise and experience the cycle of night and
day, it is quite another matter to accept our reality postulates about the movement of planets
as the really real postulates, or the only ones, that are capable of explaining the alternation of
night and day. This is not to say that indigenous peoples cannot with ease incorporate some
of the objective world postulates into their scheme of things. For instance, the Piaroa were
happy to accept the role of antibiotics in the cure of whooping cough. But such acceptance
was partial. In accordance with their knowledge there can be no direct relation between dying
of whooping cough and the lack of availability of antibiotics. This is because in their logic of
the disease and death process, children could not die of whooping cough, for all deaths were
caused by sorcery. It was forcefully explained to me that while whooping cough could make
a child vulnerable to the effects of sorcery, whooping cough itself as a disease process could
not kill. The powers of malevolent thoughts kill, not the powers of illness.
Because they do not consider the human world to be a part of a natural world, the
Piaroa cannot accept the idea that whooping cough is a real cause of death. In both our own
folk and scientific view of things we tend to understand existence as a natural process, or as
M. Strathern phrases it speaking specifically of English consideration, "life [as death] is
regarded as a condition of the natural body".75 Life for the Piaroa is not a "natural" process,
and nor is death. In Piaroa understanding, human capabilities for life on this earth is
attributed to the actions of both gods and people (as discussed in the previous chapter), and
the decisive cause of death is human sorcerer action alone.
In a related fashion, the Piaroa do not view time as a natural process that moves
lineally and progressively. Sometimes time moves lineally, and sometimes it does not. In
Piaroa metaphysics (and therefore historicity), time has a context, and because of the
contextual nature of time, the understanding that it moves lineally sometimes and sometimes
not is not contradictory. Nor is time necessarily progressive. As M. Strathern has noted,76
time in our folk understanding flows forward, while in Piaroa theory it can also leapfrog the
flow of events, or events which, lineally speaking, are of different periods of history can
merge. Time can have a kaleidoscopic quality, fragment and reunite in new patterns. The
future can even alter past happenings. Again, there is no contradiction here since there is no
"natural world" to offend.
For instance, death in Piaroa understanding is not entirely a lineal process. The dead
are not of the past, as memory might tell it, for from the point of view of living, earthly
people, the dead dwell in the present. As eternally present beings, albeit normally living in
abodes outside the human, earthly ones, the dead can enter (disastrously) into earthly
activities. Our dead, on the other hand, are more firmly of the past, for they are naturally
dead. They also are usually of older age than we. We reckon how old they might be if they
still lived, perhaps a century, or a century and a half.77 The Piaroa dead do not age, but stay
eternally very young, each transformed as such when his or her soul takes permanent
residence outside the body. Ancestral they may be in the lineal sense of the term, but these
youthful ancestors can have no legitimate power over the living.
In our lineal theory of time, cause follows the flow of time forward, and thus it is
stressed that cause precedes effect. There is the idea that that which precedes has power over
that which follows. The social corollary of such a postulate would be that parents have power
over children,78 or elders over the young. A hierarchical principle is easily conjoined with the
seemingly naturalness of our postulate of lineal, progressive, time - one has power over the
one who follows (and we talk about leaders and followers).79 The older naturally takes
precedence over and influences the younger. In Amazonia the institutionalisation of such a
principle is not pervasive. It is not so usual to find an institution approaching anything like a
council of elders which has decision-making powers over those of younger age. Also, the
principle that it is "natural" for parents to have power over their children is often not in
evidence. In many of the ethnographies upon Amazonian peoples, writers stress to the
contrary how little power and direct control parents exert over their children.80 One reason
for such lack of concern with the empowerment of parents, of the old over the young, is that
Amazonian peoples have ideas that are different from ours about the relationship of time to
relations of power. The fact that lineal time does not take precedence in their theories about
reality allows for it not to be taken for granted as so overwhelmingly pertinent to their social
theory and practice.
The progressive element in our prevailing theory of time has acquired another twist,
still hierarchically conceived, which is the idea that the passage of time has accumulative
effect. Thus there is also the notion that what comes later can be understood to be better.
Such a belief in the empowerment that progressive, linear time endows has had implications
for political theory: we have the idea that it is natural for Nation States to become bigger and
for civilizations to become better. According to colonialist creed, the large and mighty are
labelled as the more advanced, not only in technology, but also in time; in political discourse
they thereby have the moral right, on the grounds of such advancement in time, to have
power over the small, those by definition of the backward past. The smaller have not taken
advantage of the accumulation of time, and thus dwell "in past times".
The point of this discussion is the observation that notions of time, being tied in one
way or another to understandings of causation, become implicated in a people's notions about
power. It also affects their understanding of history, and interpretation of historical events.
We might think of our notion of lineal, progressive time as an abstract principle that reflects
reality as it really is. We might assume that it is value free, but certainly in the hands of
politicians, social theorists, and laymen alike, it is not. Moreover, specific theories of time
vary in their specific applicability for this or that social and political construction. Some
theories of time (for example, of a unitary linear and progressive time) are highly amenable
to the creation of hierarchical structures, while others are more easily integrated with
egalitarian structures, such as the contextual theory of time formulated by the Piaroa.
There is a further lesson here, and it is as follows. Those who hold to the postulates of
an evaluative, multiple world, universe would refuse to adhere in their fullness to the
postulates of a unitary, objective, universe because, if for no other reason, they would always
be sceptical about most objective world postulates having to do with causation. This would
be true whether we were talking about the necessary and sufficient reasons for death or for
the movements of the moon and stars - or, for that matter, the direction of time. All postulates
about reality in an evaluative universe, including those about physical reality, are tied
explicitly to a moral universe (e.g. personal malevolence causes all deaths), while those of
the scientist's objective world are not. It is normal among the tropical forest peoples of the
Amazon for postulates about physical reality to be constitutive of other postulates which are
social, moral, and political in scope. This is in contrast to the normal modern Western
scientist who understands the facts he or she deals with as autonomous from value, a trait
inherited from the 17th and 18thc programme for science when it was decided that all reality
could be explained through natural law. The scientist in his or her work still usually ignores
factors that are social, political and moral in sense, while the indigenous postulates cannot be
decontextualised. Thus, a main concern in anthropology is the power of actors' thinking as
social and moral beings, and not as physicists.
The fact that indigenous postulates about reality are (consciously) not
decontextualised from social, political, and moral concerns, and thus from everyday practice,
is not a trivial matter. A Piaroa theorist making a statement about physical reality is not
making the same sort of statement as a Western scientist (at least, when on the job) would
make. For instance a Piaroa ruwang explained to me that a curiously eroded, steep-sided
mountain not too distant from his home was a transformation of the Piaroa creator god's
original tree of life, the fruit of which had been filled with the disease of paranoia. The
metamorphosis from tree to mountain at the end of mythic time served to neutralize some of
the dangers of paranoia by containing their force from the original tree of life within the
mountain's solid mass. In contrast, the geologist, to explain the origin of this Guianese
sandstone formation, would write of ancient desert conditions and the effect of wind
storms.81 While the statements of explanation certainly vary, it cannot be determined that
one is right and the other wrong (better or worse) according to the same standards of
judgment. The two statements are incommensurable in the sense that one cannot be reduced
to the other and thereby judged by the same set of standards. This is Nelson Goodman's point
when he contrasts what he argues to be the equally rigorous, but different, standards of
judgment appropriate to the arts with those appropriate to the scientific endeavour.82
To recognise the incommensurability of standards of judgment is not the same thing
as saying that it is impossible for the scientist and the Piaroa specialist to understand each
other. Rather it is to emphasise the fact that the geologist is interested in providing a natural
explanation for physical phenomena, while the indigenous specialist is not. Their intent is
therefore different. The ruwang's statements, which are contectualised within the framework
of the practical business of curing and protecting, must also coincide with the processes of an
evaluative cosmos, and its history. When the ruwang must cure a case of paranoia, the
complex, historical origins of this disease in mythic time are of greater concern to him than
the physicality of mountainness. Thus, in his telling of the event, an important reason for the
tree of life to be transformed into a mountain was because its malignant powers were driving
too many of the inhabitants of mythic time crazy with the disease of paranoia. Natural origins
were not the ruwang's concern, while moral and social ones were. In Piaroa historicity the
historical process always incorporates mythic events. As the following chapters will
illustrate, mythic time in Piaroa historicity is not time that is past (done and over with); it is in
a sense omnipresent, having continual effect upon the present. Also, because the gods and
other beings of mythic time have eternally the agency to act upon present day time, the effect
of mythic time upon the present is as unpredictable as the particular intentionalities of the
particular mythical agents. Thus Piaroa historicity can not assume a bedrock of lineal
happenings.
A critique of the postulates about reality associated with this particular example of
Amazonian historicity from the point of view of a Kantian universe, one obeying universal
and natural law, would be, if not politically absurd, then certainly logically inappropriate. As
MacIntyre has argued, the superiority of the Newtonian universe belongs to a specific history
that is typified by a particular set of problem solving interests. 83 These interests are largely
not those of Amazonian peoples, who have a separate history. It is in part because the
interests of the Newtonian physicist and the Amazonian specialist are different that their
focus upon the content of their universes differ. In the former the universe is filled with
matter, while in the latter it is comprised of agency, often personalized in intent and action. In
the Piaroa case, the reality of humans as social, moral beings is constitutive of the ruwang's
postulates about reality. To judge a ruwang wrong about his statements about physical reality
would be to strip such postulates of their social, moral, and political value, but to do so would
be nonsensical since that is what they are saliently about. Thus we cannot judge a ruwang
wrong about his postulates about the world without at the same time judging him wrong
about his theories about the reality of humans as social, moral beings. Any such judgment
would, then, be an evaluative, and not an objective one.
The fact is that local metaphysical postulates about reality (e.g. sorcerers exist, as do
gods; time does not only flow in a linear fashion) should not be interpreted in the same light
and in accordance with the same standards as those of physics. Since they are
incommensurable, have distinct concerns, and belong to separate histories, they require
different standards of judgment. On the other hand, there is no reason not to agree with
Shweder who argues that one set of postulates is just as true of reality as the other. However,
the expertise associated with each set deals in the main with differing aspects of reality. The
one, as Horton has cogently argued for "tribal" Africa,84 is focused upon the contextualised
reality of the human world of interpersonal relationships,85 while the concern of the other is a
physical reality totally decontextualised from the personal and a good many other aspects of
being human. Finally, as Weber noted long ago, any attempt to reduce the rationality of the
unitary objective view to the evaluative - and vice versa - can only result in a mutuality of
judgment, that of madness.
1
.Contrast with J. Hill (ed.) 1988, where the
concern is with exploring the historicity of
Amazonian peoples. However the focus is in the main
upon indigenous responses to modern historical
processes, and thus to social change experienced and
expressed by indigenous peoples as they become
increasingly incorporated into the market economy
and the nation state.
2
. Clastres 1977:16.
3
.Clastres, ibid, his italics.
4
.Clastres, ibid.
5
.Levi-Strauss 1966:233; also see Levi-Strauss 1960.
6
.Levi-Strauss 1966:233.
7
.ibid:236.
8
. See Vernant 1982 (1962).
9
.Sahlins 1985:x.
0
0.Sahlins 1985:Chapter 2.
1
1.Sahlins , Chapter 2 ("The anthropology of
history"), 1988.
2
2.Lévi-Strauss 1966:242-3ck.
3
3.Lévi-Strauss 1981:639.

4
4.ibid:242-3.
5
5.See Gell 1992. See especially, pages 54-56.
6
6.See Gell 1992:chapters 1,3,4,5.
7
7.17.Gell, ibid,55.
8
8.Gell, ibid:55.
9
9.Gell, ibid:56.
0
0.Gell, ibid, my italics.
1
1.Gell 1992, see, for instance, p.54.
2
2.Gell ibid:324.
3
3.Partridge, 1967:303.
4
4.Shweder 1991:52-56.
5
5.Shweder, ibid:56.
6
6.Also see Shweder ibid:58, for a similar
discussion.
7
7.Taussig 1993:xv.
8
8.Taussig,ibid:xvii.
9
9.Taussig ibid:ix.
0
0.Shweder 1991:68-9.
1
1.Gell 1992:324-5.
2
2.Toulmin 1992:33 - 44.
3
3.See for example Overing 1985a, l986 where I also
argue the case.
4
4.Toulmin 1991:17-20.
5
5.Toulmin ibid:36-44.
6
6.Toulmin 1992:27.
7
7.Toulmin 1992:27-28.
8
8.Toulmin 1992:29-30. Also see, for example,
Montaigne, Of Exper ience.
9
9.See Toulmin 1992:32-33;189.
0
0.Toulmin 1992:55.
1
1.Toulmin, ibid:36, his italics.
2
2.Toulmin, ibid:71, his italics.
3
3.Toulmin, ibid:55, his italics.
4
4.Toulmin, ibid:33, his italics.
5
5.Toulmin, ibid:31-32.
6
6.Toulmin,ibid.
7
7.See Toulmin ibid:41.
8
8.Toulmin 1991:10.
9
9.See, for instance, MacIntyre's discussion
(1985:266) on the context dependent nature of theory
in both physics and moral philosophy.
0
0. Toulmin 1992:10-11.
1
1.Shweder 1991:66
2
2.Richard Rorty notes in Conseque nces of
Pragmatism (1982:215-16) that across American
departments of philosophy there are today in the
central areas of analytic philosophy - epistemology,
philosophy of language and metaphysics - "as many
paradigms as there are major philosophy
departments". In contrast to the agreed upon logical
positivist program of 1960, there is nowadays little
consensus in America about the problems and methods
of philosophy.
3
3.Shweder 1991:59.
4
4.See N. Goodman, 1984:278, in "Notes on the well-
made world".
5
5.Also see Shweder ibid:59-69, where most of his
points are similar to my own. I am also in strong
agreement with most of what he says about the
significance, and importance, of recent philosophy
to anthropology.
6
6. See, for example, Black (1962), Ricoeur (1968),
Goodman (1968), Feyerabend (1975), P. de Man
(1978),Kuhn (1979), on the topic of metaphor and
scientific inquiry.
7
7.On the above points see, for example, Partridge's
article on "The Nature of Metaphysics", 1967. These
would also be the stance of most "postpositivist"
philosophers as Nelson Goodman, Mary Hesse, Stephen
Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend, and many others.
8
8.Partridge, ibid.
9
9.See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 1978.
0
0.Goodman 1978:x.
1
1.See M. Hesse who in her article "In defense of
Objectivity" (1972) tried to inform critics of
science that their conception of it was about a
century out of date! She points out that the
description in physics of real-world essences has
been neither cumulative nor convergent. For
instance, theories of the atom oscillate between
continuity and discontinuity, field conceptions and
particle conceptions, "and even speculatively among
different typologies of space" (p.282).
2
2.The strongest statements of such an ideal that I
am aware of are those made by Lévi-Strauss in his
conclusion to The Naked Man (1971) and by Gell in
The Anthropolo gy of Time (1992).
3
3.See Shweder's discussion in his essay entitled
"Post-Nietzschean anthropology: the idea of multiple
objective worlds", Chapter 1, 1991.
4
4. Witherspoon 1977:12.
5
5.C. Taylor, 1985.
6
6.Toulmin, 1990:188.
7
7.Toulmin, ibid:189.
8
8.MacInyre, 1985.
9
9.MacIntyre ibid:92.
0
0.Also see Toulmin, ibid:1889, for a similar
discussion of the need to incorporate within moral
philosophy the particular case studies forthcoming
from history and ethnography.
1
1.MacIntyre 1985:265-66.
2
2.MacIntyre ibid:266.
3
3.Overing 1985a.
4
4.G. Witherspoon, 1977.
5
5.Strathern 1992:66.
6
6.M. Strathern 1992:67.
7
7.Again, see M. Strathern's interesting discussion
of English folk beliefs about time and the
significance of aging. She stresses the correlation
in such beliefs between ideas about the world and
ideas about people.
8
8.See M. Strathern, ibi d, who describes such a
principle as highly pertinent to the English way of
understanding kinship relationships.
9
9. The ethnographic data on the manner in which the
relation between leaders and members of their
communities is expressed is interestingly different.
Belaunde, Levi-Strauss. The Piaroa word Ruwang.
0
0.See Gow on the Bajo Urubamba, Lizot on the
Yanomami,etc.
1
1.See Grelier 1957:55-56, 102.
2
2.Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking , 1978.
3
3.See MacIntyre's discussion (1985:267-269) where
he argues for the relevance of the social and
historical context of judgment, and against the
notion of general timeless standards. He suggests
for example that Newtonian physics can be judged as
rationally superior only within the historical
context of its being able to solve specific
scientific problems that Galilean and Aristotelian
predecessors -in the interes t of their own
program - could not do.
4
4.Horton 19 ; also see Overing 1985b.
5
5.This is nitpicking, but in Piaroa understanding
both sorcerers and gods are within the human
category.