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The Unstable Condition of Humanity According to some Amazonian Indigenous Peoples

Marina Vanzolini (Brazil) Museu Nacional - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

While sociology aims to be the social science of the observer, anthropology aims to be the social science of that which is observed: either because it focuses in its description of strange and faraway societies, the viewpoint of the indigenous itself, or, when it broadens its object, to include in it the society of the observer, but trying then to extract a reference system sustained in the ethnographic experience, and that at the same time, is independent of the observer and its object of observation. (Lvi-Strauss, 2003 [1057]: 404).

If it is understood with a radicalism that may betray some beliefs of its enunciator, the definition provided by Lvi-Strauss can have profound theoretic and methodological consequences for anthropological practice: it can be understood as a statement that instead of seeking culturally varied answers to supposedly universal problems, the anthropologist should try to describe the very issues of others, that is, those sociological and philosophical matters that are relevant for its object of observation even when the latter is, as Lvi-Strauss states, part of the society of the observer. This last point is important because it clearly establishes that this way of thinking places difference, not identity, at the basis of anthropology; even when researching what he envisages as something similar to himself, the anthropologist supposes that there are differences between his own way of thinking and that of the people he studies, differences that can only be accessed by field research. Beyond assuming the difference, in fact, the method consists of allowing the difference to exist, rather than drowning it with the certainty of a common human
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identity that guarantees the universality of existential issues, to which different peoples in different places and times developed different cultural answers. Allowing the difference to exist, however, does not imply the denial of the possibility of dialogue. On the contrary, it is a bet on the possibility of co-existence with what is different in its own terms, a bet with an important political sense, then; it also aspires that the difference can bring something new to the dialogue which we know, after all, is inevitable, given that in so many cases we share the same times and spaces. The aspiration, then, is that a dialogue could bring something new to makes us think, and maybe change our own ways to see the world. This is surely not easy to achieve; but it is possible to consider anthropology as a set of techniques, maybe inefficient, maybe imperfect, to grasp the new. The aim of these comments in the opening of this presentation must be evident: what I would like to do here is to think of the life configurations of indigenous peoples of Amazonia by approaching to some existential issues lived by those peoples, rather than searching the possible solutions that they may give to those issues we position ourselves. My starting-point is the fieldwork I developed with the Aweti, an indigenous people that is part of a multiethnic social system known in ethnographic literature as upper Xingu, located in the Central Brazilian plateau. I will describe briefly the cosmos inhabited by the Aweti, focusing in a significant aspect of their life the intense occurrence of internal witchcraft within their social universe. Afterwards, I will try to relate this fact with an aspect apparently common to Amazonian cosmologies that has been diversely called perspectivism or animism: the acknowledgment of humanity, or social life, to the most diverse entities of the cosmos - animals, artifacts or natural elements. The Amerindian literature of the last decades has shown the impossibility of a strict division between the social world and the cosmological universe in Amazonian cultures. In fact, if everything that exists is, at least potentially, human, all the interactions of men with the cosmos are (or involve) social relations, and the issue of human life basically consists of controlling those

relations. My argument here is that this pretty general aspect of the Amazonian ontologies suggests that the xinguano issue over witchcraft needs to be considered in cosmological terms, as part of a broader relational regime, or rather like an expression of a worldview that bestows on human identity a broad spectrum, but, at the same time, total instability.

The other side of kinship

The Aweti are a Tupi speaking people that inhabits the sources of the Xingu River, in the southern part of Brazilian Amazonia. Divided in three villages, the Aweti amount nowadays to a total population of approximately 250 people - a reasonable number if we remember that in the fifties they were reduced to just over 30 individuals, survivors of the chickenpox and measles epidemics in the region. As their neighbors, they live mostly on fish and manioc. Along with the other xinguano peoples, the Aweti are part of an intense network of ceremonial and marriage exchanges, also characterized by the sharing of ethical and aesthetical patterns, the same code of relationships and a mythology that describes the simultaneous creation of all those tribes by the twins Sun and Moon. One important aspect of this social system is the giving up of open violence between its members, who thus define themselves as real people, in contrast to other indigenous neighbors, considered by them to be fierce peoples. As we shall see, however, these selective limits of humanity instituted by a peace contract are never totally assured. All serious mischief and decease that takes place in upper Xingu, even when caused by an accident, is considered to be the result of the actions of a sorcerer. The power to produce evil is exclusive of men who are the owners of witchcraft, that is, small invisible arrows that can either be thrown directly by the sorcerer against his victims, or tied to their bodily remains into small objects that are then hidden in the bushes, thus provoking sickness and eventually death. However, since a man never admits to possess those objects, there can never be assurance on who

is or not an owner of witchcraft. Witchcraft arrows were created by the mythological twins Sun and Moon to be then transferred to humans and to a few animals: the big deer, the bat and the brown howling monkey. Even though the Aweti are in many cases involved in sorcery sent by animals, these are never the most serious; human witchcraft, on the other hand, is characterized by an exceptional strength and persistence. Bad intentioned human actions are, in summary, the main cause of suffering for the Aweti and their neighbors. Beyond this, rather than coming from enemies or unknown peoples, witchcraft in the upper Xingu always comes from someone close to the victim: generally, it is sent by a man that belongs to its same local group, or maybe by a not too distant kin that lives in a neighboring village - a rather uncommon feature for other Amazonian societies. In absolutely all the cases of witchcraft I have heard of, those occurred amongst the Aweti and others that we heard of in the village, the sorcerer was a member of the xinguano community. The necessary nearness between the sorcerer and his victim is partly related to the techniques involved. The most common form of sorcery, the tying of witchcraft arrows to bodily remains of the victim implies a physical closeness between the sorcerer and the person he wishes to reach, enabling the first to have access to the raw material for the curse. We should also notice that the objects used by the sorcerer in the tying are not only parts of the body of the victim, but key elements in the process of constitution of a person, in its connections with its relatives: the food produced by those who live in the same house, goods shared between intimate kin for the payment of a shamanic cure, body ornaments made by parents to their children etc. By using food remains and stolen objects, the sorcerer perverts, in this way, the process of making kin relations. To understand this we must consider that kinship for these Amazonian peoples has little to do with genealogy, and a lot to do with the history of a sustained effort to create identity through the sharing of food and other mutual care people have towards each other. A history that leaves behind many losses: raw material for the sorcerer.

Still more significantly, the fact that sorcery must occur against close kin is intimately related to the reason that explains, from the Aweti perspective, why people do witchcraft against one another: with the exception of love magic, witchcraft is always understood as some kind of revenge moved by jealousy or envy, feelings produced by the frictions of the daily life between those that should ideally share more than what they really can. Nobody manages to be a good relative equally to all that expect to be treated as such. The effect of this dynamics of the feelings is, forcibly, for human groups to become quite unstable. In this way, xinguano witchcraft would work to a lesser extent as an invisible war weapon to be used between enemies, as it seems to be the case in some Amazonian societies, and look more as a deleuze-guattarian war machine, permanently inhibiting the stability of the social world. As I was once told by an Aweti woman, who finally had to move out along with her husband, children and parents in law as the result of tensions with other families in her village: Its because of witchcraft that people dont manage to live together. Thats why they end up living in small villages. I will now move on to a brief description of the Xinguano shamanic system, which has enormous resemblance with other Amazon systems, and consists, alongside the rituals, the main method for the controlled relationship with the nonhuman beings of the cosmos or, better, with different beings of the cosmos in their human forms. What I intend to demonstrate is that both witchcraft and shamanism constitute a cosmological dynamics characterized by the instability of the human condition, which might also be termed as the instability of the identity relationship.

Sorcery and shamanism: a relationship amongst relationships

Picking up an extract from a famous interview that Lvi-Strauss did to Didier Eribon, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro remembers the simple but precise

definition of myth given by the French anthropologist: a myth is a story of a time in which men and animal communicated. It is necessary to analyze in depth that definition, however, as shows Viveiros de Castro, because the myths time is never surpassed, but remains as a latent communication potencial between species the current humans and the humans of the past that can be actualized at any moment. As an elderly Aweti man told me, willing to narrate what he called stories of the old people: everything that exists has a story. This means that everything is the result of a transformation, generally thought in the way of the transformation of a human in either an object or an animal. But it is necessary to understand that human in such cosmologies characterizes a power to act as a social subject in a relationship rather than appearance or essence. Thus, the Aweti say that a jaguar is human when it reacts socially before a human, generally implying the adoption of a human figure: the jaguar found in the bushes during the day visits the person in his/her dreams, as a human figure, for example. It is worth highlighting that the appearance is not always a defining criterion, as many of the spirits that inhabit the bushes and waters surrounding the Aweti villages take bizarre shapes, being nevertheless characterized as humans when there is a will to emphasize their capacity to act over humans, generally by provoking their illness. Because everything has (at least potentially) a story in the indigenous cosmos, everything can be related to the current humans under a subjective condition, that is, becoming an other subject for the human. The capacity of all objects and beings to become human, as put forward by the myth, is, therefore, a potential to relate to the human as an equal, by identifying, in that sense, with the current humans, and further, by becoming an agent over them. It is therefore evident that the humanity of objects, animals or spirits is not defined in terms of their nature or essence, but rather in relational terms the indigenous problem is not to know whether the animals were or are human per se, but rather to know that they once were humans for us, and that they can become so again. Obviously, identical logic affects the humanity of the humans, which can only be humanity for themselves and

becomes, for that reason, unstable (for themselves also, evidently). To perceive animals and other forest beings as if they were people, seeing them under a human form, implies that a human is dying for its relatives and becoming human for other kinds of people. This is what means to be ill in an Amazonian world. Illness represents, precisely, an identification process between humans and spirits: the latter attack humans with small invisible arrows, similar to those of the sorcerer. The the penetration of the small arrows of the spirits in the human body causes the division of the human in a body and a double that goes to live amongst the nonhuman that attacked him, embracing them as relatives. Xinguanoan shamanism is an activity exclusively directed for the cure of diseases, either provoked by the attack of spirits or the ones caused by the action of human sorcerers. By establishing a partial identification relationship with a spirit the shaman acquires the ability to watch and listen better than ordinary humans, identifying the cause for the misfortune of his patient. He also acquires the capacity to suction the arrows sent by the spirits, bringing the patient back to normal life. In the process of his initiation a xinguano shaman must eat the minute arrows of the spirits blown to him by a shamanic initiator, and keep them carefully guarded within his body, respecting a series of taboos whose violation would cause the loss of such objects. Far from representing the sole loss of the shamans healing capacity, the loss of the spirits arrows can provoke illness or even the death of the shaman. This means that the shaman begins to be internally formed by the spirits he allied with. The establishment of the auxiliary spirits in the interior of the shamans body through the arrows produces an identity between the human and the nonhuman. In fact, the relationship is usually considered a type of kinship between the shaman and his auxiliary, many times described as a relative. Nevertheless, the identity between the shaman and his auxiliary spirit is only partial. An important aspect of Xinguano shamanism, for example, is that the cure should always be paid

for, even in the event that a grandfather heals his grandson, or a man cures his brother. The cures are generally very expensive and payment is always painful for the Aweti, who however recognize the need to compensate the shaman, and also the auxiliary spirit, for the work done. Once payment has been fulfilled, the shaman whispers some phrases offering the received object to the spirit that helped him, since it could otherwise provoke the masters own illness. This expresses the limit of the identity between the human and his nonhuman assistant who must entertain an only partial identity based in exchange. More than that, Xinguano shamanism involves the risk widely noted in the Amazon literature - , of an absolute identification with the spirits, in such a way that the shamans become incapable to recognize their own human relatives. It is a danger to which any person would be exposed identification with the spirits starts the illness process but it specially affects the shamans, due to the intensity and frequency of the relationship they keep with the nonhuman beings. Therefore, the most powerful is the shaman, the higher the risk: the Aweti tell, for instance, the story of a renowned shaman that, when he smoked his cigar, would behave like a jaguar, fully possessed, frightening his own kin and other villagers. Therefore, even though the spirits are a kind of relative for the shaman, the contact with them always involves some risk: either as a result of the breaking up of the relationship, when the spirit threatens to attack his associated shaman, or by excess of identity, when the shaman suffers a definite alteration of his perceptions, and thus an alteration of his being. In short, the shamanism of indigenous Amazonian peoples can be seen as a method of controlled manipulation of a background identity or mythical participation that intertwines humans and nonhumans, providing them all the potential for subjectivity but also, inversely, a potential for des-subjectivity, or alteration. If witchcraft is the negative side of kinship, shamanism can be seen as the positive management of that potential subjectivity that relates humans and nonhumans or, better, humans and other kinds of humans. In both circumstances the creation or

actualization of identity generates risk and instability. When the Aweti say that sorcerers are not people and we must remember that they are talking about relatives that are pretty close to them it should not be interpreted in a metaphorical way. Because, to be people, for them, means much more and much less than to belong to a biological species as stated by our concept of humanity. In a sense, then, any Xinguano witchcraft comes from animals: people that behave as alters to us. But witchcraft is never unmistakably nonhuman, because sorcerers are always relatives that, as a result of the very same witchcraft act, differentiate themselves or un-relate - that is precisely what constitutes the horror of witchcraft. Similarly, spirits are never unmistakably not-relatives, for they are always potential subjects, that is, equals. It is worth now picking up on an aspect that I have so far left aside in my own interpretation of Xinguano witchcraft: the fact that some animals also possess witchcraft arrows with which they can attack humans. Thus, even though only witchcraft sent by an equal can be lethal and constitutes the main concern for Xinguanos, we see that indigenous thinking does not allow a radical physical, moral or aesthetic division between human and nonhuman. That image of what means to be human is embedded, as we know, in lifestyles that are very different to our own. In their relationship with what we call nature, American indigenous peoples practice what we could describe as a profound ecology that perceives the environment not as a passive object for either domination or preservation, but rather as a real subject (or a heterogeneous collective of subjects). Their way of inhabiting the world has environmental consequences that should make us think in times of global crisis. In respect of human relations, a profound mistrust towards maybe close others undoubtedly provokes great distress, as is the terrible fear for witchcraft, or jealousy, and responds for the centrifugal vertigo that prevents the stabilization of long lasting political structures in this universe; however, this instability also prevents the stabilization of relations of power, and goes along with a very non hierarchical form of community life.

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Far from enlarging here the enormous political gap that already divides us from these peoples by stating that any cultural distinction between Us and Them is insurmountable, to perceive (or imagine) the existence of other types of relationships towards selves and others, might help us to reinvent our own ways to relate with our world.

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____________________. 2002. Xamanismo e sacrifcio. In: A Inconstncia da Alma Selvagem. So Paulo: Cosac & Naify. pp 457-472. ____________________. 2006. A Floresta de Cristal: Notas sobre a Ontologia dos Espritos Amaznicos. Cadernos de Campo 14/15: 319-338. Whitehead, N. L. & Wright, R. (ed.). 2004. In Darkness and Secrecy. The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Dark Shamanism in Amazonia. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 327 p.

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