The Attachment of the Soul to the Body

among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

Laura Rival
University of Oxford, UK

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

keywords Amazonia, Huaorani Indians, gender, uxorilocality, predation

S
ignificant developments have occurred in Amazonian anthropology
in the last ten years, not least the formulation of a new theory to ac-
count for the particular forms of animism found in Amazonia, known
as perspectivism.1 First developed as a theory to elucidate the very specific
human/animal relations found in myths, perspectivism postulates a pan-
Amazonian (and possibly pan-Amerindian) cosmological system centrally
concerned with the possibility of trans-specifi c communication between
sentient beings divided by obvious physiological discontinuities. According
to this theory, all classes of living organisms possessing a soul see themselves
as humans, and can establish or avoid communication with one another.
Sentient beings have the same dispositions, values and culture as humans,
and, from a subjective perspective, behave just like humans, that is, as persons
endowed with subjective selves. However, the ways in which one sentient

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being is seen by another depends on the point of view of both observer and
observed. For instance, in the peccary’s subjective perspective, what it eats
is just like boiled manioc, and where it rests is just like a hammock. But from
the external viewpoint of the human observer, the peccary’s food is rotting
fruit, and its resting place a muddy hole. As Viveiros de Castro (1998:478)
explains, the perspective is a point of view located in the body; it is not a
metaphor, nor any other kind of representation. Different bodies necessarily
produce different points of view.
Brazilian ‘perspectivists’ offer a new solution to the paradox of cultural
relativism, which was first addressed by Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage and
Race et Histoire.2 Their solution involves replacing the structuralist opposition
between nature and culture with Deleuze’s ‘natural relativism’ (Lima 1999b:
44). Viveiros de Castro (2002), for instance, opposes the multiculturalist/
mono-naturalist model of western scientific culture to the monoculturalist/
multinaturalist model of Amazonian thought. Like Bruno Latour and other
post-modern thinkers, he advocates the development of ‘symmetric anthro-
pology.’ Alternative constructive engagements with the Lévi-Straussian pro-
ject exist, notably in France, where Philippe Descola and his research asso-
ciates are elaborating a new theory of the perceptual body as a system of
affects. More inclined than Viveiros de Castro to analyse the interactions
between nature and culture within a monist framework, these scholars treat
animism as a relational epistemology. They follow the phenomenological
teachings of Merleau-Ponty, and produce ethnographies of embodiment
which illu-strate how culture operates the fusion of ‘sensible’ (the capacity to
think) and ‘sensitive’ (the capacity to feel) aspects in human persons. Their
studies of Amerindian ethnopsychologies are as distant from symbolic studies
of the construction of reality through emotions, as they are from inductive
studies of human cognition.3 In sum, the Franco-Brazilian dialogue around
the concept of perspectivism sets up a number of fascinating issues involving
the subjective perception of a multiplicity of objective realities.
Taking Amazonian animism (i.e. the perspectivist ontology that predi
cates the continuity of soul and the discontinuity of body) to its logical con-
clusion, French and Brazilian Amazonian anthropologists have also sought
to recast Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of asymmetric dualism in terms of the
duality of the human condition (spiritual and physical).4 Viveiros de Castro
(2003:33) proposes that the soul is a ‘given’ dimension of the person, in the
sense that it is neither created, nor the product of transformation, at least
not in the same way as the body is. This leads him to conclude that the soul,

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 3

‘the eminently alienable, because eminently alien, part of the Amazonian

person,’ is essentially ‘affinal,’ while the body is ‘consanguineal’ (Viveiros de
Castro 2003:42, n.24). He goes on to say that while the soul connects non-
kin, the body connects kin, and that the Amazonian construction of kinship
essentially concerns the fabrication and the destruction of bodies (Viveiros de
Castro 2003:42). Vilaça (2002) concurs, and proposes that the processual and
performative character of Amazonian kinship relates directly to the fact that
human bodies are slowly made and literally moulded through commensality
and shared living,5 adding that even the making of similar (i.e. consangu-
ineal) bodies depends on the internalisation of alterity. But how is the soul
connected to the body? Vilaça’s (2002:351) answer to this question is that
the soul actualises the body in another set of relations. In other words, the
soul represents the human capacity to adopt a multiplicity of bodily forms.
In Amazonia, she adds, humanity is a relative condition. Therefore, the soul
is connected to the body in the same way as the genders are related inside
the Strathernian dividual person. It follows that the relational theory of the
person (i.e. ‘dividuality’) could appropriately be imported from the Mela-
nesian into the Amazonian context, providing that dividuality be defined in
relation not to female/male, but to human/animal, dualism (Vilaça 2002:
361). Human/animal dualism, if I understand Vilaça correctly, is equivalent
to human/non-human dualism, as well as to body/soul dualism.
A recent essay by Descola (2001) echoes Vilaça’s rejection of gender
distinctions in favour of human/animal oppositions. His analysis of the
cosmology and social organisation of the Achuar attempts to show that
‘their gender categories are encompassed by a wider set of relationships’
(Descola 2001:93). In this region, he explains, gender contrasts are subsumed
by the structures of kinship, and the central difference is between humans
and non-humans, not between men and women. In addition, and due to the
fact that Amazonian cultures are cosmocentric (while Melanesian ones are
sociocentric), gender loses its sociological relevance to form part of a more
abstract and generic form of opposition between ‘prey’ and ‘predator’ (Descola
2001:103, 108). Despite all their differences, therefore, French and Brazilian
structuralists are equally keen to minimise the relevance of gender analysis.
As structuralist thinkers, they follow Lévi-Strauss’ commitment to relation-
ships, rather than to facts in the world (See also Taylor (2001:45–46). The
terms they put in relation and analyse are nothing as empirical as brothers
and sisters, parents and children, wives and husbands, or hunters and game,
but abstract ‘selves’ and ‘alters.’ The changing position of ‘self ’ relative to

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‘alter’ is dictated by underlying rules that regulate relational schemes such as

predation. Although I entirely agree with my structuralist colleagues that in
Amazonia one is not born fully human but becomes increasingly more human
through humanising contact and socialising communication with humans as
well as with non-human sentient beings, I still wish to stress the limits of an
anthropological analysis of humanity that obliterates the difference between
femaleness and maleness. Even in the Amazonian context, humanity cannot
be defined simply in contradistinction to animality. Moreover, Amazonian
perspectivism seems to me to be far more concerned with what goes on
between people and supernatural non-humans such as evil predatory spirits,
than it is with the way human beings relate to animals. Finally, we need to
recognise with Strathern (2001) that social categorisation invariably draws
on sexual imagery. In fact, it would be extremely difficult to conceptualise
social relationships in the absence of sexual imagery. Gender may not be an
immutable attribute of whole persons, but sexual difference is (Astuti 1998),
and it is from this basic difference that more abstract and vague principles
such as femaleness and maleness are extrapolated to articulate what divides
and unites, or what separates and connects, in society.
I wish here to contribute to the growing debate on the nature of bodies,
souls, and persons for native Amazonians by arguing that sex and gender
are as significant in Amazonian theories of personhood and embodiment as
they are elsewhere. More specifically, I argue that in the Huaorani context,
the soul is not attached to the body in exactly the same way in male and
female persons. I develop this argument by showing first that the absence
of elaborate gender differentiation masks subtle asymmetries, and that mar-
riage and parenting affect Huaorani men and women differently. I then explore
the transcendental and predatory soul-force pïï pïï, before examining the repre-
sentations of death found in funerary practices and mythical accounts. I end
with a discussion of duality and gender in the Huaorani context, and beyond.

Huaorani Men And Women Are Almost Identical ... Yet Different
For the Huaorani,6 sexual differences are naturally embodied in a way that
suggests both equivalence and complementarity. In all sexually reproducing
animals (and some plants), a female is onquiyè
onquiyè, a male onguiyè; onquiyè and
onguiyè can mate. Males have male sexual parts (onguè ), such as ‘testicule’
(onguènca)
onguènca) and ‘penis’ ( onguèngö ), while females have female sexual parts
onguènca
(öñèngä ), in particular a vulva (öñè ). Only females have internal sexual parts:
the vagina (möwoyatacuu, literally ‘wind canal’ and ‘sleep envelope’), the uterus

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 5

(huiñègancuu, literally ‘the womb, envelope, skin where children multiply’),

and the ovaries (wepèncuu, literally ‘the envelope, skin producing blood’). The
difference between male and female is further elaborated in the sociological
representation of womanhood as potential motherhood. A female person
is said to be dissimilar to a male person during her child-bearing years, and
like a male person when not involved in a conjugal relationship. Sterile
women, women who do not wish to engage in sex are all said to be ‘similar
to men.’ No stigma whatsoever is attached to their condition. Motherhood
is plainly a natural fact of womanhood. When a woman and her husband
are no longer producing children, they stop sleeping in the same hammock.
Whereas throughout married life the couple had woven the conjugal ham-
mock jointly, each spouse now weaves a separate, single-place hammock
to be tended side by side, and each makes an individual hearth on which to
cook separate meals that they share with each other, and with others. The
kinship terminology, which contains at least as many non-gendered kin terms
as gendered ones (Rival in press), provides further evidence of the general
downplaying of gender contrasts, and their reduction to naturally occurring
sexual dimorphism. There is no term for the hearth group, but there is one
for the mother and her offspring, tè huèhuè, which refers to the clump formed
by the chonta palm (Bactris gasipaes) and its shoots. This botanical image
Bactris gasipaes
evokes the numeric equivalence between hearths and married women in
the longhouse.
Ordinary Huaorani social life accords little importance to gender. Concep-
tion, birth, childcare and upbringing, either in representation or in practice,
are very similar for boys and girls. Pregnancy is understood as the fusion in
the mother’s womb of female blood (huèpe),huèpe), male semen (onguey
huèpe onguey) and im-
material soul matter (onohuoca).
onohuoca). As in many other Amazonian languages, the
onohuoca
most common word for ‘soul’ also means ‘shadow.’ 7 While bodies (baö,baö, which
baö
also means ‘flesh’ and ‘muscle’) are made non-mysteriously by androgynous
couples engaged in reciprocal exchange, souls proceed from supernatural
forces, and get secretly inserted in foetuses during pregnancy (Rival 1998).
Parents undergo the couvade for boys as for girls, and rapid growth and
autonomy are encouraged in both. Boys and girls receive names from their
grandparents, which are bestowed onto them by their mothers, and both
start wearing the cotton hip cord (cumi ) when around three of age, that is,
when they are thought old enough to walk in the forest on their own and
collect food for their own consumption, as well as gifts for their mothers and
grandmothers. Adolescent boys and girls get their ears pierced, and both

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wear balsa wood earplugs, the distinctive mark of their ethnic identity (Rival
1996a:128–29). Both spend an equal amount of time exploring the forest
with other children (the younger learning from the older), or helping their
mothers with childcare (Rival 1996a:325–27). Both hunt birds with small
blowguns made by male co-residents, fish with nets made by women, and
work in their parents’ gardens. Both chant the amotamini songs characteristic
of Huaorani lore (Rival 2002:100–101), and both actively participate in the
lively story-telling sessions that mark nanicabo togetherness at the end of
the day, before the night sets in. Adult men and women wear no additional
clothing on top of their hip cord, which men use slightly differently than
women, as they need to tuck their penises upright. From the front, men’s
and women’s hairstyles are identical; from the back, women’s hair is kept
slightly longer. Both men and women pluck their facial and pubic hair, and
both use similar painted bodily designs. And when their elders have decided
to marry them, a young man and a young woman are equally seized and
harshly forced to sit side by side in a hammock, each with one leg swiftly
tied to the other’s leg. Both, however, have the same right to refuse or to
accept an arranged marriage.
Participants in ritual, whether old or young, temporarily lose their individual
identities as kin, affines, friends or enemies; they now belong either to the men’s
or to the women’s group. In the ritual creation of men and women groups
during festivals, gender is made to appear as simple sexual dimorphism (Rival
2002:133–40), used to tame hostility and create the right conditions peace,
alliance, and marriage. Rather than the system of social inequality or asym-
metric relations of power and opportunity classically described by feminists,
we find here the use of gender to erase all other social differences, particularly
those between ‘other people’ (huarani,
huarani, i.e. potential affines) and ‘we people’
huarani
(huaomoni,
huaomoni, kin). Through the tran formative force of ritual, individuals are
huaomoni
separated in two sets of gendered reproducers who complement each other
in their reciprocal work exchange, while remaining primarily consumers of
naturally abundant food. Gender symbolism, far from expressing hostility
between the sexes, is used ritually as a means to overcome potential conflict,
transforming social division into necessary complementarity. Furthermore,
if Huaorani cosmology and rituals are saturated with sexual and other bo-
dily images, these are not used to symbolise male supremacy. Rather, they
signify the importance of organic life and fertility. Biological reproduction
is bisexual by nature and androgynous by definition (Rival 2002). Does this
ethnographic evidence validate Descola’s (2001) claim that gender is insig-

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nificant in Amazonia? Only to a point. As I show below, notable gender

differences exist in Huaorani society, and they are all the more striking when
examined against the general backdrop of minimal sex role differentiation
discussed above.
Although they perform essentially undifferentiated or overlapping tasks
in their daily lives, boys and girls also acquire gender-specific techniques as
they grow and mature. Boys of five or six years of age who may have played
with clay or even made pots gradually stop doing so. They also stop digging
clay out of riverbeds while fishing. Now, instead of offering the clay to their
female kin, they simply tell them where to find it. When around twelve, boys
also stop fishing, and spend more and more time hunting and learning the
use of full-length blowpipes and spears. Just before reaching adolescence,
they learn how to make curare poison as well as their own weapons. They
now attack peccaries frontally, spear in hand, like their older male kin. Girls,
who are ritually taken by their fathers on a hunt when they menstruate for
the first time, continue to hunt with the blowpipes they borrow from their
male kin, and so do married women when their husbands happen to be away.
However, women never make weapons or curare, nor do they hunt with
spears or with arrows tipped in curare poison. As I have shown elsewhere
(Rival 1996b), hunting techniques, the choice of prey and the making of
hunting weapons at once express and help create two contrastive ways of
being a man. When slaughtering peccaries and enemies with spears, men act as
fierce warriors; when ‘blowing’ monkeys and birds with their blowpipes, they
perfect the poise and self-mastery of peacefully married fathers. The growing
complementarity between adolescent boys and pubescent girls leads to the
productive co-operation of brother-sister pairs. This special bond continues
until marriage (and often beyond), even when the brother, now a bachelor,
starts spending less and less time with his natal nanicabo (house-group).
Transactions between husbands and wives, unlike those practised with
other nanicabo co-residents, are strictly reciprocal; one gives in response to
what one receives and vice versa. Men and women know how to do, and
can do, almost every item belonging to their society’s cultural repertoire.
However, when married, they tend to specialise in certain activities. Many
activities become the regular task of one member of the conjugal pair, al-
though this implicit division of labour may vary from couple to couple, or from
one longhouse to the next. The time spent on shared tasks, however, more
or less equals the time spent on complementary tasks. Balanced reciprocity
between husbands and wives is thought in terms of joint capacity for hard

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work in marriage, and so is sororal polygygny, a common form of marriage

which reinforces the uxorious nature of the marital bond (Rival in press).
The couvade activates the mutual obligations of joint parenting and the
gender symmetry it produces. Fathers and mothers equally share in the
ritual protection of the foetus, who contains an equal quantity of female
blood and male semen. Ritual abstinence by a man on the birth of his child
corresponds to his public announcement that he is connected to the infant,
quite independently from marriage and residence. Any man who thinks he
has contributed semen may publicly claim his status of father simply by ob-
serving the restrictions and taboos associated with the couvade. However,
the couvade, far from being a father’s rite, should be understood as a rite of
co-parenthood through which both parents actively involve themselves in
the protection of their new-born, so as to ensure its fast and vigorous growth.
Equal participation in childmaking affects men and women differently, given
that post-marital residence is uxorilocal (Rival 1998). The gradual incorpora-
tion of the infant in the longhouse furthers the husband’s incorporation in his
wife’s nanicabo, progressively turning him into a consanguine. While mothers
undergo couvade restrictions as native members of the longhouse, fathers do
so as in-comers. The claim of paternity also affects the way a man relates to
his sisters, who become the potential future mothers-in-law of the child he
has chosen to father. The joint effort through which the husband-wife pair
transfers life onto a new human person remodels the configuration of both
affinal and consanguineal ties within the longhouse where a birth occurred,
and between allied longhouses. As a result, the perfect symmetry between
husband and wife, mirrored in the balanced reciprocity of brother-sister
marriage exchange, and, more generally, the ideal equivalence of male and
female, eventually deviates into asymmetrical positions (Rival in press). Uxo-
rilocality, a condition which affects all sibling relationships, results in gender
asymmetry. This asymmetry cannot be attributed to the conjugal tie per se,
or to age hierarchies among siblings. Both sororal polygyny and uxorilocality
make sisters structurally equivalent. This is perhaps why children of sisters
are considered to be ‘more the same’ than children of brothers. Although
both are, in technical terms, classificatory siblings, children of brothers are
not as identical as children of sisters because ‘they grow in separate houses
and their mothers are different’ (Rival 2002:124). Furthermore, uxorilocality
skews the couvade’s effects. In observing the couvade ritual restrictions,
husband and wife are ‘reborn’ as mother and father. But the mother/child
bond is not exactly the same as the father/child bond, in the same way that

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 9

the political consequences of life giving are not similar to those of life taking,
even if both actions require the same amount of consciousness and intentiona-
lity. Finally, uxorilocality means that women are by definition ‘of the house,’
i.e. hosts, while men, who start as guests, become hosts. Huaorani body politics
is a politics of placing
placing,, and women, whose nanicabo membership goes without
saying, play a direct and active political role. As I have argued elsewhere
(Rival 2002:144–147, and in press), uxorilocality, deeply implicated in the
politics of belonging and visiting as it is, needs to be understood within the
general deployment of strategies aimed at controlling outside imports.
To conclude this point, I would like to argue that Huaorani society should
be seen as a ‘residential society’ that works at maintaining the integrity of a
core of related females at the heart of extended families. Men are not provided
with a separate corporate men’s house (as among the Kayapo, for instance),
or with the ritual possibility of transforming the longhouse into a male-only
ceremonial centre (as it occurs among the Barasana). Men’s physical dis-
tancing from their birth group is considered essential to the male maturing
process, and necessary for their successful and gradual incorporation within
the group where they marry and procreate. It is not easy for men to reconcile
their identity as sons and married fathers. They need affinal female kin to
assist the transition from son to husband and father, and from their natal to
their conjugal nanicabo. It is thus not surprising that men continually feel a
tension between past belonging and future destination. One consequence of
uxorilocality is that men have more diffuse social networks and more extensive
visiting rights than women. Another is that groups of consanguineal, close,
and mutually dependent women are sharply separated from each other by
unbreachable physical and social boundaries. Affinal women are ‘totally others’
(huaca).
huaca). There is no mechanism by which female cross-cousins can become
huaca
co-residents or kin. Stringent restrictions on female visiting and feeding en-
sure that maximal social distance exists between potential or real sisters-in-law.
Whereas mothers and daughters and groups of sisters are closely identified,
female cross-cousins are most different. This explains why women are given
the responsibility of incorporating outsiders and visitors, as well as that of
transmitting personal names from the old to the new generation. In a society
which seems to define affinity as the domain of potential rapprochement
and similarity, one may even wonder what term should be used to qualify
the complete lack of relationship8 between these totally unrelated female
others. Without the bonds men maintain with their sisters and mothers,
self-sufficient residential units formed around consanguineal women would

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stand as unconnected forest islands. This is exactly what occurs in situa-

tions of extreme autarky, as e.g., among the ‘non-contacted’ Tagaeri group.
The argument so far presented can be recapitulated in a single phrase:
marriage and parenting affect Huaorani men and women differently. I now
need to go a step further, and see whether the body/soul dualism works dif-
ferently in men and women. In the next section, I discuss the transcendental
soul-force pïï
pïï, and the way it drives men to kill. I then examine the represen-
tations of death found in funerary practices and in mythical accounts, which,
in my view, result in gendering the body/soul interaction.

Homicidal Rage and Asymmetric Attachment of the Soul to the Body

There is another side to the couvade, somewhat underplayed by my earlier
sociological interpretation of the Huaorani ritual, namely the fragility of the
body/soul attachment. In her analysis of the Wari’ couvade, Vilaça shows
that without the dietary restrictions associated with the rite, the baby would
lose its human form; it would revert to an animal shape. She concludes that
human bodies must be made against animality. I am not certain that the
Wari’ concern prevent very young humans from acquiring the bodily char-
acteristics of game animals is generalisable to the whole of Amazonia, except
in the much more common form of a concern to protect the vulnerable lives
of new-born babies from harmful influences. 9 However, I accept Vilaça’s
emphasis on a crucial property of the soul, that is, its power to actualise the
body, or to generate embodied dispositions. I also find her description of
the soul’s compulsive propensity to exist in and through a bodily form, that
is, attached to a particular body, helpful. Vilaça’s particular attention to the
dual relationship between body and soul can easily be reconciled with my
own focus on placing and attachment. While I stressed the potential of the
Huaorani couvade to activate the attachment of the in-marrying husband to
the wife’s nanicabo, I also noted the way in which it celebrated the parents’
real procreative powers, remarking on the fact that the couvade stands al-
most perfectly as an anti-thesis to the Christian spiritual sponsorship so
famously discussed by Gudeman (1971). I now wish to recognise fully that
the couvade is centrally concerned with the spiritual bond between parents
and child, and, more generally, the nature and fate of spiritual matter. An ade-
quate account of this aspect of the couvade requires a thorough consideration
of the male and the female person, and of their differentiated nature.
The Huaorani see themselves as victims constantly on the run, fleeing
persecution, violence, and death. Violent deaths are ‘desired’ deaths (hu-

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 11

tenongui, literally ‘causing someone to die by spearing’) caused by the

eno tenongui
homicidal furore pïï pïï. Such deaths are clearly differentiated from ‘voluntary
deaths’ (i.e. deaths in old age), and ‘unnecessary deaths’ (ononqui daicaho
hueni, literally ‘dying for no good reason of fever’). Considered to
ahuante hueni
be far more common than the two other types, violent deaths fascinate the
imagination. Violent deaths, which are invariably interpreted as the work of
human or human-like predators, triggers a bodily response in men who lost a
loved one; they become pïï, and long to spear someone to death. I witnessed
men becoming piï on several occasions. Each time, the first manifestation
of rage was directed against the man’s young children. His wife (wives) and
other co-residents had to contain him, stop him from seizing his spears and
kill in his own house. Men have to be under the influence of pïï pïï,, a mixture
of courage, fearlessness, anger and force — both moral and physical — to
make spears and use them to kill ‘true people’ (huaorani ). Pïï is raw energy
or vitality that dwells in all people alike, adults or children, men or women.
Everyone has pïï ñenga,, that is, feels the ‘energy’ or ‘life force’ which animates
the body. But only men can become pïï inte, that is, be the fit of rage itself,
a transformation which, if sustained long enough, drives them to ‘spear kill’
(tapaca hueni ) one or more victims. Once pïï takes over the killer’s body, he
no longer listens, and kills blindly. It does not matter who the victims are.
Although deeper knowledge of the Huaorani language10 is needed to
reach a full understanding of these esoteric notions, I can assert with some
confidence that pïï is not simply a culturally constructed, cathartic emotion.
Rather, it is the physical expression of the metaphysical nature of the soul.
Among the Huaorani, as in many other parts of Amazonia, the mind (the
capacity to reason, which gives agency, judgement, and intent) is fully em-
bodied, hence part of and continuous with the body in a way that the soul
(the life force) is not. Like many Amazonian Indians (see for instance McCal-
lum 1996), the Huaorani do not establish a discontinuity between body (i.e.
‘flesh,’ baö ) and mind (i.e. ‘the capacity to think’ pönenani ). Mind and body
form an experiential unit through which knowledge of the world is acquired
and action carried out. Mind and body are of a different nature from the
spiritual matter or soul, which never dies or disperses, but gets recycled and
re-incarnated whenever the body to which it is attached is destroyed. The
Huègöngui 11 Located beyond life and death, it
soul belongs to the Creator Huègöngui.
does not belong to the human realm, but makes human life possible. To live
as a human person, one must control this external force.12 Pïï Pïï, a form of rage
linked to the life force, impels a bereaved man to kill other human beings.

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Like an Ilongot (Rosaldo 1984:185), a Huaorani may speak of the desire to

fight death; but he would never say that to kill has lightened his heart. Pïï
is not born of grief, rather, it is a destructive force that de-humanises and
re-draws the boundaries of alterity.13 Pïï makes the overwhelming presence
of the supernatural manifest, and, as such, exemplifies the ‘model of asym-
metric relations of symbolic control’ (Fausto 2000:938). By taking on the
perspective of the soul, the killer lets the predatory spirit dominate his mind
and control his body. He becomes wild and other than himself, and destroys
human bodies, as well as the intimate social order of the house-group to which
he belongs. Pïï turns the killer into a being with no relatives. Pathological
killers are likely to be orphans; they are described as fierce and dreadfully
loners. No longer true humans, wild, uncontrolled, and fully disembodied
from the shared substance of their nanicaboiri
nanicaboiri, these murderers are eventually
eliminated, and no one comes to avenge their death. Most often, however,
the state of homicidal furore is temporary, and killers are re-integrated into
restructured nanicaboiri
nanicaboiri, which soon resume their ordinary life of sharing and
unity. To sum up, homicide is not presented as an exploit, an act of bravery
or the source of mystical vitality, but, rather, as an uncontrollable drive, the
unfortunate outcome of piï piï, which is beyond human control. Given their
extreme political, social and economic closure, it is not surprising that the
Huaorani perceive themselves as the perpetual victims of non-Huaorani
cannibals (Rival 2002, Chapter 2). Pïï is a necessary part of the violence that
marks Huaorani interaction with the non-Huaorani world. Homicidal rage
comes from without society, and society can do no more than mitigate the
effects of piï by containing the enemy spatially and temporally.
Huaorani ambivalence towards dreams and hallucinogenic drugs can
be understood with reference to the belief that if other-worldliness cannot
be suppressed, it must be contained. A man does not choose to become a
shaman; rather, he is chosen by a jaguar spirit who appears in his dreams
one day, adopts him, and starts calling him ‘father’ (Rival 2002:79). Whereas
fathering implies a spiritual connection to cosmic forces, Huaorani shamans
do not take an active role in controlling their spirit helpers. On the contrary,
they let spirits possess them. The powerful hallucinogenic vine locally known
as ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis muricata), which, people say, belongs to canni-
Banisteriopsis muricata
bal enemies (cohuori ), is not cultivated. However, in cases of extreme emer-
gency, such as, for instance, when a sickly child is struggling between life and
death, the vine is collected from abandoned cohuori gardens and prepared
into a beverage. If the child survives, especially if he is male, he becomes

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 13

susceptible to dream visits by mystical jaguars. Jaguars do not visit sur-

vivors before these have reached full maturity. The kin of such unfortunate
men do everything in their power to abort his shamanic career. Wives and
children surround the men with care, waking them up if they start dreaming
about jaguars. If, despite all efforts, a man becomes possessed, his relatives
try to control the mystical presence through jokes, mockery and laughter.
Although this idea may seem paradoxical at first, the fact that the proper
death for a man is to die as the victim of a violent assault is also a way of
resisting the enemy’s perspective, and of containing its power. Tales of warfare
are tales of men who, attacked by their enemies, succumb under a flight of
spears. Such tales focus on the suffering inflicted on the speared body, which
culminates in the excruciating pain and slow death. Speared victims are not
finished off, but abandoned on the forest floor by their runaway attackers.
As soon as they receive the news, relatives and co-residents travel through
the forest, until they find the victim’s body, which the men bury, while the
women wail. In the long conversations I had with informants on this subject,
they always stressed that moribunds were buried out of compassion, to put
suffering. Buried alive by kin, dying warriors die by suffoca-
an end to their suffering
tion. The ‘body-soul’ (onohuoca)
onohuoca) of a dead warrior does not go back to its
onohuoca
birthplace, but stays in the grave, thus attaching him fully and permanently
to his wife’s homeland. Such burial places are vividly remembered. People
also tell stories of dying men buried alive with a child so that ‘the father does
not leave the land alone,’ so that ‘he does not feel lonely in the afterworld.’
For a man to be ‘spear-killed’ in this fashion is the most human death. These
stories express the victim’s perspective for, I wish to argue, Huaorani lore
values the killed, not the killer.
Whereas a man dies a good death when speared by his enemy and buried
alive by his kin, a woman too old to go on living should ideally let herself
starve to death, and perish within a deserted house falling into decay. Women
are thought to live longer than men. Wives often survive their husbands in
widowhood for many years. The senses of an old widow become eventually
so diminished that she looses the elementary capacity of feeding herself.
Not unlike young bachelors who have passed the age of sharing a hammock
with their younger siblings, ageing widows are sheltered in a small hut built
next to the longhouse, where they gradually start imagining that long-dead
kin communicate with them, and feed them. These hallucinatory exchanges
result in their refusing the real food offered by their living kin. When the
nanicabo of a delirious elderly woman decides to move away and build a

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new longhouse in a distant forest clearing, she is eventually left to die. After
some months, a group of kinsmen (including the sons of the defunct) comes
back to the deserted dwelling site. The woman’s remains and those of the
dilapidated longhouse are burnt down. Once cleansed by fire, the former
dwelling site becomes a fertile burial place, a grove to which new generations
seasonally trek, in search of natural abundance. Its origin blurs with that of
similar ancient dwelling sites now used as palm groves, where endogamous
clusters converge every year during the fruiting season. For several weeks,
palm fruit are collected and prepared into drinks, for both ordinary and
ceremonial consumption (Rival 1993). Potsherds and broken stone axes
are proudly collected from shallow digs, and preciously kept by women as
evidence that ‘our grandmothers lived in this place.’ What fascinates me
most in this ethnography of death is the clear contrast it offers between a
woman’s fate (letting oneself die while thinking about dead kin) and a man’s
(speared to death by men under the influence of cosmic rage, who cannot
see kin as kin).14
When I asked Cahuitipe Baihua in July 1997 to explain to me what souls
were for the Huaorani, he replied by telling me a myth about ‘Huègöngui,
Huègöngui, our
Huègöngui
God, or meme (grandfather) the Creator, and his wife ñëñë (grandmother),
who live at the end of the world in a big house with their grandchildren.’ Soul
and cosmology are mutually implicated for Cahuitipe, and this myth the best
answer to my question. In this myth, Huègöngui is killed repeatedly by his
grandchildren who operate under various animal guises. First they throw him
in a blazing fire; later they devour him under water. But each time Huègöngui
is killed, his wife Ñëñë ‘rebirths’ him. She gathers her husband’s ashes and
follows exactly the same procedures as male hunters when preparing the
curare poison.15 In each episode, Huègöngui’s violent death is followed by
the apparition of new plant and animal species. And each time, Huègöngui
gets reborn as a slightly older baby.
This myth about the murderous intentions of the Creator’s three grand-
children and the resuscitating skills of his wife explores the interplay between
the genders and the predatory forces that shape the universe. Fully aware of
the dangers of (over-) interpretation, I still feel that the myth develops the
idea that gender complementarity in reproduction frees the human potential,
and allows society to assert itself against the inhumanity of predation and
violent death. We find here the cosmological elaboration of a muted repre-
sentation of society, with, at its core, the reproductive wife and her taming
creativity. Of course, the true movers in the story are the grandchildren, who,

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 15

acting under the guise of river otters, woodpeckers, or mosquitoes, transform

themselves in order to destroy their grandfather’s body. And Huègöngui is
the master Creator; his sacrificed body engenders new forms of life — both
vegetal and animal. However, none of this could effectively happen without
the agency of ÑëñëÑëñë, who begets Huègöngui through a fi ltering operation
which reverses the (over) cooking process that destroyed his life in the first
place. It is as surrogate mother to her husband that she reveals her creative
power. Ñëñë is the centre of the longhouse, she propagates life, nurtures it,
and transforms her descendants into real people, thanks to her essential
humaneness. By articulating ‘the uterine logic of the house’ (Lea 1995:218),
the myth clearly emphasises the wife/grandmother’s creative capacity to
make kin, while reiterating the message that if men are potential hostages
to the predatory souls of others, women are fundamentally associated with
the mother’s mother life-place, the source of all regeneration.
In the concluding chapter of Trekking through History (Rival 2002), I ar-
gued that the Huaorani hold two contrastive models of nature. Rather
than imagining the trophic chain as continuous, ranked and hierarchically
encompassing, with mankind and other great predators competing at the
top, they have identified two modes of inter-species feeding: predation and
symbiotic mutualism (or natural abundance). The prey–predator relation
represents a unilateral form of feeding: individuals from one species feed on
individuals of a less powerful species. The Huaorani see themselves as the less
powerful species, i.e. the prey, while their powerful tribal neighbours (as well
as evil spirits) are seen as cannibalistic predators. It is in the nature of these
non-Huaorani enemy predators to reproduce by continuously snatching the
creativity, vitality and life-force of ‘the true people’ (huaorani ), who can do
no more than elude contact with their violent attackers. The aggressive rela-
tionship between predator and prey leads to extreme hostility and separation.
However, large sections of the natural world depend on feeding relations
devoid of aggression. If predation leads potentially to human extermination,
naturally abundant plant life secures human reproductive power. The mu-
tually beneficial symbiotic relations that exist between fruiting plants and
non-carnivorous animal species are particularly valued. These associations
across the fauna/flora divide are seen as creating the right conditions for the
biological reproduction of varied forms of life. By choice, Huaorani people
replenish themselves in association with trees and a few tree-dwelling species
in a forest environment which gives in profusion without asking anything
in return. The life-sustaining relationship between people and forest plants

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is characterised by great generosity. It is in the nature of fruiting trees and

other forest plants to give food continuously to animals and humans without
asking anything in return. In the same way, past people ‘made the forest
grow’ while they lived in it. Both the forest and society are regenerated th-
rough the business of ordinary life, without need for accumulation, surplus,
or stealing. The forest, which stands as the historical record of past human
activities, is inseparable from those who have lived in it, and with it. The
naturalisation of the diachronic relation between past and present people is
prolonged in the ritual association between guests and birds, and hosts and
fruiting trees. In this particular representation of the phytogenetic process,
the power to generate vitality is associated with spontaneous vegetal growth
(Rival 2002, Chapter 6). Powerful entities such as Sun, who sends his son
to share civilisation with ‘the true people’ (Rival 1996b), is also a source of
natural abund-ance. Thanks to such acts of pure and natural generosity, the
true people can survive and reproduce without depending on the violent
acquisition of external powers. In their ecological awareness, the true people
are able to distinguish the energy that flows at various levels of biological
organisation, without privileging killing and destruction over growth and
peace as a source of creative power. Human beings are not abstracted from
the matrix of their relations with other living organisms (Feely-Harnick
1999:217). Through the life-cycles of their house-groups, and the deaths of
their women, the true people tap telluric energy, a form of enduring energy
that uses itself over and over again, and make life out of what dies. They are
a part of the slow biotic process that fertilises and leads to maturation and
fruiting. True, they also depend on the transfer of life energy (pïï
pïï ) from the
cosmos into their souls. And this is perhaps why killing and destruction fare
much higher in people’s memory than growth and peace. People are by far
more expansive on the subject of war than on the subject of peace, as if peace
was meant to be experienced rather than discoursed upon. It is as if people,
while having a lucid understanding of how their destruction is productive for
their enemies, were unable to grasp their own sustained reproductive power
with the same explicitness. Taking their inner force and power for granted,
they find it hard to represent the lived reproductive work of familiarising and
kin-making. Neither denying, nor devaluing their own creative power, which
gets prolonged and objectified beyond death in the natural abundance of the
forest, they simply distinguish two natural processes, predation and natural
abundance, one which they make their own, the other which they reject as
belonging to their enemy.

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 17

Although these two modes of naturalisation need not be interpreted as

corresponding to a male and a female perspective on society (Hugh Jones
1995), they do overlap with gender differences. Men and women, who share
the same cultural identity, are equally vulnerable to predation; but men can
turn into enemies of their own people in ways that are not available to women.
And if men and women jointly partake in the forest’s natural abundance, it
is first and foremost through a woman’s death, which involves her willed
assimilation to the earthly process of decay and plant growth, and which
mirrors her will to procreate (Rival 1998), that society’s continuity is secured.
Crocker said a long time ago that the Bororo universe expresses two princi-
ples of organisation, the inequality of like items related asymmetrically, and
the equality of unlike items related symmetrically, adding that ‘the idiom of
Bororo social organisation goes beyond the social facts of descent and af-
finity. The units involved are not groups of persons contrasted on the basis
of differential descent, but rather categories of social states of being opposed
through differences in kind’ (Crocker 1969:50). The Huaorani express the
contradictory nature of their social models in terms of a similar complemen-
tary opposition between femaleness as more ‘plant like’ than maleness, and
maleness as more ‘animal like’ than femaleness.

Sex, Body and Soul in the Amazonian Context

On the basis of the ethnographic evidence so far discussed, I wish to argue
that Huaorani men are different from Huaorani women, even if the source
of this difference is not entirely clear. Of course, men and women have dif-
ferent reproductive organs, but they share this physiological particularity
with all sexually dimorphic species. As I tried to show in the first part of this
paper, that men and women are endowed with complementary reproductive
capacities is of little import. If this bodily difference matters at all, it is more
as a category separator that sets apart embodied sentient beings who can
reproduce sexually from transient spirits whose temporary attachment to
bodies precludes such possibility. Gender distinctions are very little marked
and, on the whole, irrelevant in daily life. Men and women act and interact
as highly autonomous individual persons, who share a great deal in com-
mon, and are basically identical. We are far here from the Melanesian model
of personhood, which constructs men and women as essentially similar in
their androgynous make-up, and which traces gender difference within
sexed bodies, rather than between them (Busby 1997). As I have tried to
show, men’s and women’s roles in the creation of their children are not used

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to draw a distinction between male and female substances, but, rather, to

define gender first and foremost on the basis of the reciprocal dependence
that obtains in conjugality.
Biology is culturally interpreted so as to emphasise the fact that men
do not relate to their offspring in exactly the same way as women do. As
we saw in the first part of this essay, while a man cannot transform himself
into a woman, a woman is considered to be physically equivalent to a man
prior to, and passed, her child-bearing phase. This is why the physiological
changes occurring in human bodies, particularly in women’s bodies, are as
significant as the transformability that exists between humans and animals
(each possessing the symbolic capacity to assume the other’s form). Native
Amazonians recognise and value the female body’s propensity to produce
human bodies. On this basis, I depart from Vilaça’s interpretation of ‘kin-
making,’ which confuses the male desire for kinship with the mythically
expressed — and blurred — desire of animals and spirits to embody them-
selves.16 We must therefore acknowledge that the process of ‘making kin’ is
highly gendered. Women, whose bodies are ‘naturally’ linked to hearths and
to the transformational work of cooking, are both containers and makers of
containers. Men, whose souls are ‘naturally’ prone to disembodiment and
association with irresistible cosmic predatory forces, are makers and users of
piercing instruments which cause body/soul dissociation. Women’s wombs
have the power to ‘intercept’ babies, which are then nurtured with great
care and pleasure by both men and women. Sexual reproduction, and, more
generally, biological reproduction, far from being devalued, is celebrated. We
are dealing here with a society that fully accepts the creative body power of
its own people, and does not rely on abducting the women and stealing or
adopting the children of other groups.
In this society, the alterity internal to consanguinity 17 is fundamentally
linked to the duality of human nature. Human persons contain a body ‘and
something “other” to it’ (Lambek 1998:107), i.e. a soul. Although our know-
ledge of bodies, souls and spirits in Amazonia is incipient, we know that
Amazonian cultures (Descola 1993:260), like many cultures around the world
(Lambek & Strathern 1998), conceptualise spirits and bodies as independent
modes of being, which occupy different ontological planes. And although my
knowledge of the ‘Huaorani soul’ is not complete, I hope to have provided
enough evidence to support the thesis that the main difference between men
and women relates to the way in which their souls are attached to their bodies.
This complex idea becomes clearer when the making and the destruction

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 19

of the human body are examined comparatively. As pointed out by Rivière

(1974), the couvade concerns the creation of both the body and the soul. The
Huaorani couvade, as I see it today, is not concerned with the fact that the
infant’s soul is insufficiently detached from his mother’s and father’s souls.
Rather, the danger is that the infant’s soul, like all soul matter, comes from,
and belongs to, the cosmic world. Consequently, it is not sufficiently con-
tained inside the nascent and unfinished human body. It is the attachment of
the soul to the body that the couvade restrictions aim to protect and secure.
As infants grow into boys and girls, and as boys and girls grow into men
and women, the body/soul interaction gets increasingly gendered. While the
propensity of the soul to detach itself from the body is more pronounced in
men, the person’s fixed (soul) and processual (body) features form a more
unitary whole in women. This is why men can become pïï pïï, while women
merely have pïïpïï, like everything else that lives. This is also why men and
women die differently. Not only do men feel a contrary attachment to the
house where they were born and to the one where they will procreate, but
their spiritual connections to predatory forces makes it difficult for them to
feel attached to a human family at all.18 Men, whose unmediated relation to
the life force of the soul renders their attempts to control contact or com-
munication with the cosmic world unavailing, are more fearless, and more
capable of violence than women. Consequently, men’s continued humanity
crucially depends on their successful incorporation as in-marrying husbands
within matrifocal house-groups structured through inchoate, yet real, lines
of reproducing mothers and daughters. A man’s mothers and sisters cannot
protect him from the cosmic pull as efficiently as his wife or wives, mother-in-
law, and sisters-in-law. The daily social work performed by these women (i.e.
a man’s de-affinalised cross-sex kin) counters the powerful forces that dictate
that human lives must be lost for life to be perpetuated. Said differently, it is
because pïï can take over a man’s body that he needs to immerse his body
and soul in his uxorilocal condition, protected by the corporal strength of
unbroken consanguineal ties between women to whom he is not related by
birth. Whereas affinity represents the outer movement of asymmetric relations
with the cosmos, cosmic energy, and the enemy, uxorilocality represents the
inner construction of cognatic kinship and sociality. The ‘uxorilocal inflection’
of this Amazonian society has, therefore, a clear cosmic dimension, as the
myth about Huègöngui and his wife illustrates.
To conclude, I have tried to show that whereas femaleness correlates with
the earthly process of creating bodies and making kin, maleness corresponds

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to the cosmic condition of being more soul than body. Huaorani perspectiv-
ism, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Rival 2002), must be understood
from the viewpoint of the prey, not of the predator, draws a strong correla-
tion between soul, maleness and conquering predation, to which it opposes
body, femaleness, and resisting victimhood. On grappling with my previous
work, the work of fellow Amazonianists, and emergent ideas, I have become
increasingly aware of the importance of the contrast between life giving and
life taking. If nothing specific in the nature of men and women is invoked to
bar them from doing most of what the other sex does, and if both are fully
involved in giving and maintaining life, only men kill humans, as Descola
(2001:101) himself acknowledges.19 And, I wish to argue, if a violent death
must cause another violent death in this part of the world, this has less to do
with ‘homosubstitution’ (Descola 2001:110) than it does with the fact that
body and soul are radically different20 parts of the person.
Descola’s ethnographic research on the Achuar has demonstrated with
mastery that while Amazonian women consanguinize the world, men affin-
alize it. Far from disputing this thesis, which has proven seminal for the deve-
lopment of comparative ethnology in lowland South America, my intention
here has simply been to go a step further, and find what it is in men that
turns them into a predatory force, and what it is in women that gives them
such domesticatory powers. I agree with Descola that Amazonian gender
categories, in contrast with Melanesian constructions of personhood and
community, are not primarily based on bodily fluids linked to sexuality and
the reproductive process.21 Native Amazonian men, whose manhood is not
under threat, do not fear female pollution. Like Descola, I see Amazonian
gender categories as intrinsically enmeshed in consanguinity and affinity. But
the fact that they do not exist independently from wider social oppositions
does not necessarily mean that they are insignificant, for how could con-
sanguinity and affinity be conceptualised without reference to real men and
women, or to groups of men and women? As we know, it is impossible to
talk about gender without talking about kinship, and vice versa (Collier & Ya-
nagisako 1987). In Amazonia, gender groups are not associated with the
ingestion or emission of natural bodily substances, but they do exist, particu-
larly during rituals. For Descola, gender does not count in Amazonia because
‘Amazonian cultures are cosmocentric rather than sociocentric. They grant
less centrality to the ritual and political reproduction of the human social
order — including the domination of men over women — than to the conti-
nuous efficiency of their relations with the multiple actors of the universe’

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 21

(Descola 2001:108). ‘The essential contrast,’ he continues, ‘is between human

and nonhuman rather than between human (males) and human (females)’
(Descola 2001:108). The problem I see with Descola’s analysis is that he
conflates animals and nonhumans. For the Huaorani, the essential contrast
is between human body and cosmic life force or soul, or, in other words,
between the human and the nonhuman part of the person.
In my view, the Melanesian and the Amazonian person are fundament-
ally different, not because the Melanesians substitute a human life for wealth
created through human labour (heterosubstitution) whereas the Amazonians
can only respond to human loss by sacrificing a human life (homosubstitution),
but because the Melanesian person’s soul comes from its ancestors (Strathern
& Stewart 1998). In Amazonia, where there are no ancestors (Erikson 2004),
the soul cannot be inherited from dead relatives. In both regions, therefore,
we need to examine not only the composition of the biological body, but
also the dual nature of the human person, and the attachment of the soul to
the body. The fact that bodies offer potentials for realising consanguinity or
affinity implies that sexual asymmetry must be significant in both Amazonia
and Melanesia, although the dialectical relationship between what is biolo-
gically given and what is culturally constructed works very differently in the
two regions. Amongst the Huaorani, and, I suspect, more widely throughout
Amazonia, sexual asymmetry entails the cleavage of male identity. Not only
do we find that men and women relate differently to the supernatural force
that makes life possible, but we also find that men embody two contrastive
styles of malehood (Rival 1996b), one which allows them to participate in
the creation and maintenance of human communities, and one which enables
them to defend these communities against the transformational world of
cosmic predation. The Huaorani’s long history of survival through physical
separateness and ‘generalised revenge’ 22 relates directly to this gendered arti-
culation of self and cosmos (Rival 2002, Chapter 3). In Amazonia, as elsewhere,
gender has once more proven good to think society.23

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

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of perspectivism for cultural theory, by elaborating them further in relation to

the work of Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern.
2. Lima (1999a:115) refers twice to Lévi-Strauss to illustrate the reciprocity of
perspectives between culture and nature: ‘[T]o be animal is first of all to believe
in human nature’ and ‘[M]an and the world confront each other face to face as
subjects and objects at the same time.’
3. See among others Descola (1996), Taylor (1996), Héritier & Xanthakou (2004),
Surrallés (2003), and Kohn (2002).
4. In a seminar he gave in Oxford in November 2004, Descola expressed this on-
tological dualism in terms of ‘physicality’ and ‘interiority.’ Lima agrees that per-
spectivism is linked to the notion of soul, but, in her view, the soul ‘represents
only a point of support for a specific theory of the relationship between points
of view which are at one and the same time analogous and locally determined
as asymmetric. And this theory expresses less a notion of a general humanity of
all beings than a certain dualism’ (Lima 2000:8). The dualism she has in mind is
that between life (reality of the subject) and dream (reality of the soul). Faithful
to Deleuze, she also links dualism to the absence of a point of view of the whole,
and treats the whole as one part alongside other parts.
5. See Rival (2002, Chapter 5, and in press) for the similar view that consubstantiality
is not distinguishable from sociability, or the process by which kin are contin-
uously fabricated as shared substance. The concept of conviviality (Overing &
Passes 2000) develops a similar idea.
7. The Huaorani are approximately 1,800 today (they were around 600 when first
contacted in the early 1960s). Hunters, gatherers, sporadic gardeners, and now
occasional oil workers, they live in 27 communities dispersed within a vast, legally
titled territory located between the Rivers Napo and Curaray. Fieldwork among the
Huaorani (33 months over a period of ten years, from 1989 to 1999) was initially
supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant
#gr5146), with additional funding from the Linnean Society of London.
8. A young evangelical schoolteacher told me that the soul is like the water in the
river, or your body’s shadow. You can see it, but you cannot seize it; try to hold
it, and it will run through your fingers. Many external parts of the body (finger,
knee, arm, leg, foot, shoulder and so forth) derive from ono (river). Mind is not a
substantive, but a verb: either nano pöneno (literally, ‘he thinks well,’ that is, more
generally and abstractly, ‘to think rightfully’) or pönenani (literally, ‘they all think
well,’ that is, ‘they have the capacity to think’). McCallum (1999:448–450) mentions
a multiplicity of souls among the Cashinahua (huni huni kuin ). The body soul ((yuda
kuin). yuda
yuxin), linked to the shadow, ‘encases the body like an outer skin’ (McCallum 1999:-
yuxin
448). It is contrasted with the true soul, or eye soul ((yuxin
yuxin kuin ). I suspect that the
kuin).
Huaorani too believe in more than one soul. But I could not find a well-established
doctrine about it. More targeted fieldwork may bring new evidence, or may not,
as the Huaorani are extremely elusive when it comes to esoteric matters.
9. Or of familiarisation to use Fausto’s (2000) terminology. Contrary to what occurs
among the Achuar, Huaorani women affines never behave toward each other as
classificatory sisters (Descola 2001:96).
10. The notion that babies are not fully human yet and need protection from animals, evil
spirits, or other environmental influences is found in many parts of the world.

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Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani 23

11. The Huaorani, an isolate, is not attached to any phylum. To this day, there is no
dictionary or definite grammar of the language.
12. See below the creation myth involving Huègöngui
Huègöngui. For Christian Huaorani, God,
Jesus, and Huègöngui are one and the same Creator Spirit. Jesus determines the
sex of human and animal foetuses, but not of plants, which are generally asexual.
While some informants say that the Creator inserts the soul (onohuoca, alma) in
onohuoca, alma
the foetus’ head (ocamo),
ocamo), others say that it is inserted in the heart (mimo
ocamo mimo). The
foetus in the mother’s womb develops as follows: first the head, then the heart,
then the face, then the liver, then the guts, and finally the limbs.
13. Compare with Overing (1993:198, 202). The Huaorani who do not see themselves
as predators do not understand the life process to be entirely predatory.
14. More than an emotion, and like the Aro Pai’s anger, pïï ‘is a transformational
force that lies at the core of [native understandings] of human nature and death’
(Belaunde 2000:218). It is remarkable that the Aro Pai word for spirits, ‘huati’
(Belaunde 2000:215), is also the word that Huaorani warriors shout while ’spear-
killing’ the enemy. A Western Tukanoan group, the Aro Pai are probably the
descendants of the Huaorani’s traditional enemies on the north side of the Napo
river (Rival 2002, Chapter 2). See also Fisher (2001:120–122) for a discussion of
the Kayapo contrast between male fierceness and female tameness.
15. Compare with McCallum’s (1999:461–462) interpretation of the Cashinahua case.
16. They scrape the oonta vine (Curarea tecunarum) onto mö leaves rolled into a fun-
nel. They place the funnel above a small clay pot they call caanta, slowly run
a small quantity of water over it, and place the pot filled with the black liquid
over the hearth’s embers for several hours. Mö leaves are intrinsically feminine.
They are collected by women to line the inner roof of the longhouse, rendering
it perfectly impermeable and hermetically closed.
17. This omission is all the more puzzling that she herself acknowledges the incom-
patibility between fertile women and shamanism, and accepts that a father making
a child, hence acting symbolically as a mother, is ‘in a position of anti-hunter[s],
anti-warrior[s], and anti-shaman[s]’ (Vilaça 2002:360).
18. (Vilaça 2002). Also defined as ‘meta-affinity’ (Descola 2001:95), that is, a funda-
mentally asocial and cosmic form of (potential) affinity (Viveiros de Castro 2002,
Fausto 2000).
19. Hence giving rise to new gender asymmetries, caused by the fact that men are
‘extractable from their natal kin’ (to use Strathern’s [1988:228] expression,
although she uses it to talk about women marrying virilocally). One may even
wonder whether the uxorial husband is extractable from his natal kin by virtue
of being owed to predatory cosmic forces.
20. Descola also acknowledges that the violence of Shuar and Achuar married
men against their wives is tempered by brideservice and polygyny (Descola
2001:99–100).
21. Or, in Lambek’s (1998:110) term, ‘incommensurable.’
22. But see Conklin (2001), who shows that the Wari’ heavily use sexual imagery
representing female reproductive powers as intrinsic and male reproductive
powers as intentionally constructed. She argues that ritual male transcendence
over the biological forces of death and degeneration is constituted on the basis
of the contrast between women’s blood and warriors’ blood.

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23. Beth Conklin has also found that there are two facets to manhood among the
Wari’, killing and nurture, which are both necessary to their survival. She rela-
tes the bioproductive effects of killing and caring to the actual biodynamics of
population welfare in Amazonian societies which practise generalised revenge
as a means to protect themselves against the threat of annihilation caused by
either epidemics or slave raiding (personal communication, 12 June 2005).
24. ‘[l]e genre est bon pour penser la société (Bellier 1993:523). See also McCallum
(2001).

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